MMUh huh 2 of 2

I said something once about splitting the aspects of storytelling into the story and the telling, and the importance of being proficient in both if you want a successful tale.

This applies to MMOs as well.

There. That's my figurative language opener for this chat. Why am I being brief?
BECAUSE THIS IS SERIOUS SHIT, MOTHER FUCKER. LETS TALK ABOUT SOME GOD DAMNED VIDYAGAMES AND HOW THEY WORK.
Buckle your fucking gamerhat on and lets talk some shop.

Specifically, lets talk MMORPGs, or "muh-morp-guhs", as they're known in the gritty back alleys of Glasgow, where they were invented.

We had a chat about The Secret World, after I spent a day playing it.
I only had a day, see. The trial was for a full 24 hour period and no further, which meant if I wanted to actually analyze the gameplay I had to go straight China in my endeavors.

This took some planning on my part, and some early research so I didn't spend A) a full hour staring in paralyzed indecision at the character creation screen, and B) another hour learning how to mine for fish.
So I actually entered the game knowing full well that I was Dragon4Lyfe, givemeagunletsgo.

It felt strange to flex my MMO muscles (mmuscles?). Strange but ultimately familiar.

See, that's the unpleasant current state of affairs in the MMO world. There are certain unavoidable tropes that you just have to deal with in order to build yourself a functioning game system that has a chance to compete with WoW.

That is exactly what it boils down to. WoW has been chugging along for eight years now. It is king.
It is, for better or worse, the metric that all new MMOs are going to be compared against.

Take TOR, for example. I was able to participate in an Old Republic beta test, actually, because why the fuck not. We all love Bioware, we all love lightsabers, how could this not be delicious?

...It was pretty delicious. But it was undeniably WoW. It was WoW with lightsabers.
Oh, it's got a pretty LucasArts sheen on its universe, and Bioware made a few excellent updates considering its main competition was eight years old and rickety, but if you take off the hood and look at the guts you will find that they belong to Blizzard.

I instinctively knew the keybindings. They were unchanged. The same hotkeys opened your bags, your map, your character sheet, your spell book, in both games.
The item ranking system was the goddamn same! I knew I got a better item because it followed greenbluepurple value system!
Shit was eerily familiar, except I was a twi'lek with a lightsaber.
And honestly, that was almost enough for me. Don't ever underestimate how satisfying it is to have the draw weapons button (and yes, it was the same as in WoW) let you whip out a double bladed lightsaber.

Now, TOR had one big thing it hung its hat on - the Bioware specialty, the voice acting and the decision wheel. This was pretty neat because it let you build a little more actual character disposition in-game, as opposed to in-head.
Even your own character had a voice actor! This is a big fucking deal! Giving each MMO character a voice? Being able to hear your character actually act out the script you give them? Very interesting.
Also very damning, because it effectively pigeonholes you into the number of available dialogue options. And even Bioware couldn't really save the hackneyed LIGHTSIDEDARKSIDE personality aspect, because....well, because it's a retarded system in the first place. You pretty much either save the wounded and heal them, or electrocute the shit out of them. A bit bivalent for my tastes.

But I didn't just play TOR. I just played TSW. That's actually the first time I've legitimized The Secret World as an MMO - the graduation ceremony is when people start using an acronym instead of the actual name. The word "wow" in conversation has had two meanings for eight goddamn years.

How is it as a game?

Well, for a start, it's quite pretty. And it ought to be, at this point. Some of the graphics were a bit cheap in the sense that "oh hey you bastards that's just a 2D skin!" but overall it carries itself well in that department.

More importantly, the UI and game mechanic system were newish enough to be less than reflexively familiar to me. I liked that! I didn't know what buttons did what, or how to take my pants off and dance on the nearest mailbox. (I later learned that this game has a Phantasy-Star-Online level compendium of physical emotes you can do, which I fucking love. You can make your character do a cartwheel, or actually perform a rude gesture, or do jazzhands. Things like this, while small, are incredibly effective in increasing the immersion level. During my short stint in Diablo 3, I found that dungeon crawls with friends were infinitely more enjoyable when you got used to using the voice-emotes to talk to each other. It didn't hurt that I was Princess Fucking Azula at the time.)

The initial quest line for new Dragons was interesting while being basic and lets face it, its a fucking MMO, it's going to have to walk you through the paces of THIS is your INVENTORY, THIS is your CHATBOX. But it managed to do it in its own special way and I thank them for it.

You don't have a delineated class in The Secret World. And, like EVE, you can presumably - given enough time - train every single skill in the goddamn game.
This is fucking huge. A mutable character allows for much longer per-character satisfaction and joy. It ensures that a greater percent of the playerbase is going to have a fluid game experience, and a broader slice of the game itself.
You basically just pick which areas you want to invest points in, and attempt to build a functional role for yourself. The basic MMO roles exist, but more along the lines of conceded necessary afterthoughts. You don't go "tank", you go "damage-taking-capable threat-generator".

"Classes" are more determined by weapon specialization. You generally pick two, since you can equip two, and the base questline basically tells you "hey, fuck, pick one of these and run with it".
It's three groups of three - three gun weapons, three melee weapons, three schools of magic.
Then, each one of those specializations contains two "trees", but they aren't really trees in the given (again, archetypal) WoW fashion. It's more like a...food web? It's actually a giant, shifting, tiered monstrosity called the "Ability Wheel", comprised of chambers of 7 or 12 active/passive skills grouped by flavor. It's complex and I'm totally okay with that.
I'm a firm believer in the concept that everyone should be able to do anything in an MMO, given enough skill and knowledge. They allow this. Pretty much every role is capable of laying down solid damage while performing either support buffs or healing functions.
I mean fuck, I took Pistols and I eventually got the ability to heal-over-time thanks to my little technomagic drone hovering over my shoulder. Or heal everyone in my group if I still had combat resources left over.

The combat resource system is the....entire combat system, in TSW.
Basically it's the rogue combo point system from WoW, split into two different things.
If you're melee/magic, you build them on yourself using certain resource-generating skills. Then, you spend them on other resource-consuming skills that scale based on the amount you've got.
....It is exactly like the rouge combo point system. There are builders and finishers and that's all you goddamn do.
If you're ranged, the combo points build on individual targets, meaning you can have 5 on one and 3 on the other simultaneously, but if they die you're shit out of combo points now. It does allow for a certain amount of combat flexibility but overall it was disappointingly simple compared to the mad wizardry Blizzard got up to in their later years. During my time as a Paladin I saw a pretty wild amount of combat-mechanic change, so maybe I'm spoiled. Give me some more resources to manage, is what I'm saying!
The stat allocation system is pretty dang simplified as well - you've basically got health, "attack rating" which affects all abilities, and hit and crit stats. That's about it. Weapon/gear rankings are from 1-10 and you have to have allocated certain level-tiered points into specific specializations to equip them. So you are shoehorned into a weapon spec, at least to a certain point. You can't just suddenly switch to shtoguns because you found a fucking badass shotgun inside of a ghostbear or something, unless you've been simultaneously building your shotgun skills. And that is a dramatic amount of resources required.

The only thing stopping you from eventually becoming a dark, all powerful god, and ensuring permanent imbalance based on disproportionate distribution of power stemming from a direct translation of skills-amassed and time-put-in (I'm looking at you, EVE Online) is the fact that you can only ever have 7 active skills (read: hotbar) and 7 passive skills at any given time.

Out of 525 skills.

HOW GREAT IS THAT.

Sure, they provide a dozen templates to choose from, essentially telling you which skills to take in order to achieve various "builds" (i.e. "go blood magic/pistols if you want to fuck shit up from mid-range and heal your friends at the same time!), but I have no doubt at all that end-gamers will start to alchemize some seriously insane combinations.

What I'm saying is, there is a potential here for theorycrafting that far exceeds the generic class spec/spell rotation found in classic MMOs. Whether it has the actual guts/depth to accomplish it is another story and fuck, I only played for a day.

Oh, and the crafting is Minecraft.

You fucking heard me. You want an assault rifle? Put metal into a roughly assault-rifle-shaped configuration on the crafting grid.
So it's innovative, but simultaneously overly simplified for my tastes. In a game where gear isn't as fanatically tiered and valued as classic MMOs, crafting as a legit game mechanic/reason to play loses some value. I was never a crafting maniac to begin with, though, so don't take my word as law in that regard.

All in all, it was fun. It was refreshingly innovative in enough ways that I was sucked right in for a day, and hitting basic Pistol Mastery felt like an accomplishment.
The story is engaging, the telling is a bit simple in places but still deeply satisfying.

Like I said, pity it's an MMO. Because no matter how deep you are in the bowels of a demon-infested decommissioned Soviet submarine off the coast of Norway, there's always going to be some fucker incessantly jumping around your character in a circle asking you to "gibe money plz? lolol I report you".
Admittedly, since the game was relatively fresh, adult, and cerebral, I didn't encounter anything so repellant as the generic MMO playerbase but rest assured. They will come. And they will come as a horde, as an unstoppable infestation.
Because they are the people who play these games.

Oh, also, it costs real people money per month!

NEW THINGS NEW THINGS NEW THINGS

MMOhno, uh oh. 1 of 2.

So.

Vacillate.
Spin the chamber, revolve, move to the next topic.
We've covered Raving, Insults, and Music.

The only thing left is Videogames before the cycle completes itself.

With that in mind, look! Look at this thing.
Who is this mysterious woman?

Well.
Let me tell you about The Secret World, by which I mean that will be my topic starter and we will get horribly sidetracked into grander, more grossly cerebral vidyagame concepts while I gesture wildly and shred napkins while muttering to myself.
But first, ambiance. Play this while I talk to you about this videogame world, because it is literally the most perfectly fitting backdrop I can find.

It's okay, load it up. She can wait.
Okay. Okay. The Secret World is a full on, very recent MMORPG. A friend of mine bought it on a whim, because apparently that's something you do when you're jobsearching and you have disposable income. I can't imagine dropping 50 bucks on a potential source of entertainment, much less a goddamn MMO you have to pay monthly subscription fees to.

However, I trust this persons judgement in the field of videogames. I have strong faith in this man, as a connoisseur. So when he told me how much actual fun he was having playing a new, underground MMO (of which there are many - many, and shitty, and poorly fleshed out, and they are in general the bane of the vidya game world. Here be neckbeards) I had to listen unbelievingly and do some furious research.

So.


The Secret World is set in a contemporary universe, and it is an unabashed plunder and pillage of every single aspect of any mythology you think would make for a fun game experience. In the words of the games creators, "every myth is true".
Everything.
And, unlike the FFXI guys who just raped ancient myth and named everything Tiamat and Aspidochelone (that'd be the giant island-turtle. why, what did you do as a kid?), The Secret World puts a greater emphasis on more modern conspiracy theories and fringe belief systems.

After a day of playing, we found a single sentence to sum the world up: "It's basically the Hellboy universe. No, like, the comic book version. If it would make for a killer dungeon, Hitler's lizardmen-filled hollow Earth secret base would totally exist.......Okay, it probably exists. That's probably a thing that we'll have to go see. Now let's go join up with the Wandering Jew and fight some psionic mutants in Argentina."

It is modern day, and magic is real, and werewolves live in the alleyways of Ealdswick, London. The Hollow Earth theory is true, the Kraken is real, and laughably misguided Wiccan practices might actually work if you cut yourself with the right knife under the right moon.
That crazy bag lady out on the street might be a high-energy physicist cum amateur street shaman who found out how to travel dimensions using nothing but a piece of chalk and a blank wall.

In The Secret World, the Illuminati are real. The Templars are real. You can shoot lightning if you channel the spirit of electronics through a totem built out of an old iPod usb cable. Then again, you could just shoot your target in the head with a fucking shotgun because, as it turns out, righteous swords of fire are in short supply against the forces of darkness. (Not that you couldn't get your hands on one, eventually. For the right price, information, or favor.)
Everything is real, and it's probably trying to kill you, eat your soul energy, and assume your form so it can go unnoticed until it eats your neighbors too.
The real life, the real world, is in a constant state of chaotic upheaval and conflict, and the grand majority has absolutely no clue what's going on.
I'm waxing poetic, aren't I. I'm droning.
Fine, fine.
I can tell when I'm boring someone.
Stop being so theatrical.

The point is, story-wise, the game is neat enough that I was dragged in. Willingly.
So after a night spend tearing a 10gb-sized hole in internet-space (also known as downloading), I activated my 24-hour trial account and immediately spent an hour staring at the character creation screen.

Character creation....mother of god. One of my many only weaknesses.
In the end, I had to accept that I had no idea what direction I was taking this character, and my complete lack of understanding of the universe I was about to descend into gave me no concepts to armor myself against or shape myself around.

HA HA Just kidding, I googled the fuck out of my options and did some research.

Was I willing to be Illuminati? Did I care about wealth, power, information control, being the hand that guides events? Based in America? Wearing immaculate suits, kevlar vests and gas masks? Subterfuge, bribery, control control control?

Was I going to be Templar? Would I stand as one of many as a bastion against the forces of destruction? Would I forge my willpower like a rod of steel, and smith it into a mighty weapon in this eternal war? Would I embody justice, as I defined it? London based? Sacerdotal in doctrine (yeah, google that one, fuckers), with clean lines and no small hint of decidedly "Inquisition" fashion? Ornate weaponry? Shiny, shiny guns? Strength and honor?

Neither, of course.



I was immediately drawn to the smallest, least overtly influential, most secretive of the triad.
Dragon.
Not the Dragon, not the Order of the Dragon. Just Dragon.
Based in Seoul....currently.
Amorphous. Subtle. Vacillatory.
Pairing Asian philosophy with bleeding edge analytical research. Finding purpose, finding reason behind everything, Tracing the roots of the storm all the way back to the wings of the butterfly, then finding out what caused that butterfly to flap in the first place.
Chaos theory? Why stop at theory?
Dragon conducts empirical research into the nature of dynamic interaction, treating the entire multiverse as a connected system.

Fuck power, fuck control. I want to know how the universe works, and then I want to shake the shit out of it.

I want to be a butterfly.

I want to be the butterfly.






So I made my character and all the headstory and fictional background history just fell fell fell into place because stories, man, that's what drives an MMO at least half the way.

The other half, of course, is gameplay mechanics. We'll be discussing that aspect in the second half.
But for now, Raven "Haraam" Seldon is going to go strap her dual antique pistols up, shrug on her chaos magic focus, and wear suspenders and a duster coat like the fucking gunslinging lunatic mathematical physics grad student who's recently had a (third)eye opening experience with the inchoate that she is.

Pity it's an MMO.

Just Kidding

I Hate It Here

I live within spitting distance of the bars, here in Arcata.
I know this because dozens journey nightly, from the bars to my apartment, just to spit.

The bars here are an interesting phenomenon - every shop is so desperate to be cloistered within our one public square, our "plaza", that we've ended up with all four bars and a liquor store all lined up in a row like criminal suspects.
You could roll out one bar directly into the other, if you were so inclined. Apparently it's a popular past time. I cannot confirm - I've been in precisely one of these bars once.
Apparently the bars have different cliques, attract different regulars. We have a "sports bar" and a "lumberjack bar" and a "we also serve food here bar" and what I can only assume is a "we all live here bar".

It doesn't make much of a difference to me. They're all exactly one block away.

Which means I - and everyone else in my apartment past the hour of wheneverbarsopen - have been subjected to whatever effluent happens to roll in our direction, for the past year.

Hearing snippets of drunks conversing, shouting, screaming, spitting, laughing, fighting, crying.

It's all exactly the same, one night from the next. The dregs of our town stream past our windows. Sometimes they stop to have a chat or a smoke directly beneath them. Sometimes they sit in their cars and play the radio. Sometimes they get arrested.
Whatever they do, they do it with gusto. You have to admire them for that.

It's been an experience. An education.

Everyone is the same when they're drunk. It is the great equalizer.
Every single person sounds the same.
All the posturing, all the bluster and shouting of a drunken fight, sounds identical to the one that happened last night, the night before that, last week, last month. Between two other, identical strangers with equally pointless lives.
The same braying, ignorant guffaws have come out of a thousand drunk face holes attached to the front of a thousand different drunk heads.

Everyone attempting to reason with the cops sounds the same.

I have heard all the jokes. I have heard all the threats. They are all the same.

Everyone is the same. And the common denominator, it is low.

There are probably a half dozen trains of thought available to choose from.
The insults, the words....they are all the same. They sound the same. It's like all men and woman get handed a specific drunk voice when they enter a bar, like a party favor. Here is your hat. Here is your noisemaker. Put it in your larynx.

Even the syntax, the timing and the phrasing.
It is as if we all learned how to posture from movies, or from watching the guy last night.

I haven't heard anything original in a year.

It is enough to make you never want to be drunk again, and that's a genuine shame.
To see the potential for the magic truth-and-beauty-unlocker drug that is ethanol get squandered nightly by scum.
To see what these people have bubbling inside them make its way to the surface, ejected as steaming anger or barely concealed lust or, most often, as stunning ignorance in the form of words.

Or vomit. Always a classic.

This experience, if you haven't guessed, is often trying. Whether it happens early in the night, when you're still idly sitting around, or if you're actively dropping into sleep before the first round of "FUCK YOU"s begin....

Remember mosquitoes? As a child? How awful and jarring a tiny noise could be, even if it was faint and in some other corner of the room? How once you heard it for the first time, you were hyper aware of its continued existence?

This is the gist of it. It doesn't have to happen every night. There may be a week, perhaps when the rain washes all the stupid away, chases it into more private locations where the really terrible potentiality can be unlocked, when nothing happens that I can hear.
Or it's something harmless like hearing a fellow male awkwardly put the moves on a pliable lady.


It may be that that's the worst part, the inevitability of it all. The knowledge that this isn't going to stop any time soon.

People will always be the very worst you can imagine. They will always get drunk at bars, because that is what they know to do. It is what they were taught.

People will always act the way they were taught, and the people who taught them were useless shells of human potential. How can we expect any better of them, when those who came before them were just as meaningless.

Those who came before them, just the night before.

It's the unbearable sameness of it. I want to sit, with a sniper rifle tape recorder, and play back the sounds these people make to them. To their doppelgangers the next day. If there was a way to crush it into them, to force them to reach an understanding of themselves, surely the only course of action it would be rational for them to take would be mass and immediate self annihilation.

Right? Right?

There has to be a way to get them to kill themselves.

I can't possibly do all of them myself.