Decoding Dragons

SWTOR Thoughts

Firstly, Happy New Year! I hope you had a good holiday season.

I have been playing SWTOR, after something of a struggle to get my videocard drivers to stay installed correctly. Warcraft is also installed, but it feels like I’m still a tad burned out with that game. The next target to download is Rift, and then LOTRO to complete my MMO stable. Although when I will get time to play them all, I have no idea. Pewter has moved from the world of Apple to the world of Windows 7, and wow has it changed since I last gamed on a PC. After approximately 6 years as a mac user, the level of pretty is extremely impressive in it’s own right.

Before I begin my long ramble on SWTOR, I must own up to not really being a Star Wars fan. I enjoyed the movies, I appreciate how embedded they are in general scifi culture (and general pop culture) and that’s about it. Yet Bioware continue, time and time again, to draw me into the worlds and the lore that I have been dumped in. Moments feel epic and iconic, such as the forging of a lightsaber, or the first time my Bounty Hunter uses her off-hand explodey thing.

George Lucas could learn a thing or two about dialogue and storytelling from Bioware. Seriously.

Engaging worlds

Each planet so far has been visually distinct. It would be very easy for each spacey-urban city to feel very similar, but even when using shared art assets, each area that I have had the chance to run through has been breath-taking in both detail and scope. Extremely linear, in many ways, but the feeling of space through the use of far-distance and painted sky domes has lead to some truly stunning vistas. Other details include the snatches of conversation from local NPCs, the variety of fauna, the way a cloak ripples differently when you strafe, and a hundred other animated details.

Sacrifices must be made

There has been a lot of talk in the MMO-sphere about whether Bioware has bitten off more than it can chew with the class quests/dialogue. With the appeal of the game apparently resting so heavily on this aspect – what happens when even the slowpokes like me have hit 50? Will the raiding be good enough to keep interest? With story being so important, the addition of new ‘dailies’ and a couple of new Flashpoints is unlikely to keep players interested in that story interested. That said, Bioware have a pretty good record with interesting DLC in their single player games, but what remains to be seen is whether they can keep that up a pace.

So what is sacrificed? Any innovation in the talent trees. My two characters that have made it to Advanced class status are my Sith Warrior, now a marauder, and my Jedi Consular who went the route of sage. It was rather awesome to make it to the fleet, newly equipped with my shiny new lightsaber, but then such a let down to look at the talent trees for the first time. While the rest of the game had been relatively ‘mmo-noob’ friendly, the talent trees gave me flashbacks to 2007. They’re big, unweildy, and uninspiring. After the improved newbie experience that World of Warcraft has laid on, and the flexibility of Rift, the introductions to the talents and talent trees feel like the designers are making a lot of assumptions about the knowledge level of their players. It’s nice not to be patronised, but the trees feel both unfocused and set in stone. I’m sure it is possible to respec, but I felt almost scared to commit to talent choices in case I made the wrong choice. Yes, I’m a whining whiner.

Combat is a funny beast. Damage feels inconsistent. One minute I’m slicing through mobs at a great rate of knots, the next I’m flailing uselessly at the same mob type, whittling it’s health down slowly. I think this is because of my dreaded rural broadband rather than any specific failure on balancing. The global cooldown system feels a bit odd, frankly, and results in combat feeling slow and distant. This is odd, because you’d expect the lack of auto-attack to make combat feel more immediate. That said I’m still low level, so I need more time to work out the best spell priorities for each character, which will probably help.

Primed for a future patch?

My friends over at The Drunk Tank made a comment that space combat feels unfinished. Could we see Bioware spending more resources on it during a future major patch? I would like to think so, but I’m not sure they should have put it in at all in the meantime if it was just a stop gap.

I like the UI, but more customisability should be in the pipeline or things could get very irritating. The maps are pretty excellent and clear, with quest tracking handled well. Things like Lightsaber Forms (e.g. Marauder) should be switched to stance/form style buttons like Warcraft druids. I find the stylistic look of the UI lovely overall and most necessary information is well presented. I have not ventured into the AH yet, and by all accounts that is rather horrific. After the auction house mods in Warcraft, the primitive Auction houses of SWTOR and Rift are extremely tiring and backwards. Unfortunately the developers are competing against addon creators for other games, not just their professional competitors. Warcraft is incredibly good at learning from addon developers, if occasionally a tad slow. Bioware would do well to study not only the UIs of competitors, but the player created UIs for those competitors.

In my next post I plan to explore Jedi and Sith philosophy and sexuality. As you do.

SWTOR Thoughts was published on January 3rd, 2012, with the tags , , , , , , , , , under the Star Wars: The Old Republic category. There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

Bioware: Romances in DA2 are for everyone

It’s not often a gaming company responds to criticism in such an awesome and heartwarming way. For every ‘embrace your inner-geek’ speech  la Metzen there is a casual dismissal of concerns (again, a’la Metzen.) For Blizzard to remove Real ID from the forums took the impassioned responses of thousands upon thousands of users, for example. Their track record is not brilliant.

So when a game company posts something like the following on their forums, I sit up and take notice. I’ve never played a Bioware game properly, but right now I’m considering shelling out for several simply because I want to give my money to a game company that doesn’t dismiss the concerns of fans who want more from their games than adolescent fantasies and objectification.

To the issue: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again– perhaps a bit more eloquently, since it’s apparently of dire concern to some.

The romances in the game are not for “the straight male gamer”. They’re for everyone. We have a lot of fans, many of whom are neither straight nor male, and they deserve no less attention. We have good numbers, after all, on the number of people who actually used similar sorts of content in DAO and thus don’t need to resort to anecdotal evidence to support our idea that their numbers are not insignificant… and that’s ignoring the idea that they don’t have just as much right to play the kind of game they wish as anyone else. The “rights” of anyone with regards to a game are murky at best, but anyone who takes that stance must apply it equally to both the minority as well as the majority. The majority has no inherent “right” to get more options than anyone else.

More than that, I would question anyone deciding they speak for “the straight male gamer” just as much as someone claiming they speak for “all RPG fans”, “all female fans” or even “all gay fans”. You don’t. If you wish to express your personal desires, then do so. I have no doubt that any opinion expressed on these forums is shared by many others, but since none of them have elected a spokesperson you’re better off not trying to be one. If your attempt is to convince BioWare developers, I can tell you that you do in fact make your opinion less convincing by doing so.

And if there is any doubt why such an opinion might be met with hostility, it has to do with privilege. You can write it off as “political correctness” if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.

The truth is that making a romance available for both genders is far less costly than creating an entirely new one. Does it create some issues of implementation? Sure– but anything you try on this front is going to have its issues, and inevitably you’ll always leave someone out in the cold. In this case, are all straight males left out in the cold? Not at all. There are romances available for them just the same as anyone else. Not all straight males require that their content be exclusive, after all, and you can see that even on this thread.

Would I do it again? I don’t know. I doubt I would have Anders make the first move again– at the time, I thought that requiring all romances to have Hawke initiate everything was the unrealistic part. Even if someone decides that this makes everyone “unrealistically” bisexual, however, or they can’t handle the idea that the character might be bisexual if they were another PC… I don’t see that as a big concern, to be honest. Romances are never one-size-fits-all, and even for those who don’t mind the sexuality issue there’s no guarantee they’ll find a character they even want to romance. That’s why romances are optional content. It’s such a personal issue that we’ll never be able to please everyone. The very best we can do is give everyone a little bit of choice, and that’s what we tried here.

And the person who says that the only way to please them is to restrict options for others is, if you ask me, the one who deserves it least. And that’s my opinion, expressed as politely as possible.

In a wall of text. Sorry about that. /images/forum/emoticons/smile.png

And I’m sorry if someone didn’t get everything they wanted out of the romances– as I always am. I wish we could do the ideal where there’s something for every desire and opinion, but as usual we make do.

- David Gaider – Lead Writer Dragon Age 2/Dragon Age Origins

Source (and OP) via Phyrra

This is a start. It’s a long road, and I doubt it will ever be 100% in my life time, but it’s amazing to see such common sense as the official line from a developer, and such a successful one to boot. I keep my fingers crossed that this will ripple out. I’m under no illusions that this will change the minds of the vast majority of the gaming industry, but if there is even one small corner where this attitude prevails, my day just got a bit brighter.

Bioware: Romances in DA2 are for everyone was published on March 23rd, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , , , , under the Analysis, Games category. There are currently 8 comments on this article so far.