I kind of fell out with MMOs for a bit. Back in December I had a million new single player games from the Steam Sale taking up my leisure time. In January I just kind of lost the urge to play games, and instead I spent most of my hobby time trying to cook the perfect chili. (FYI: No beans, lots of home-roasted chili peppers.) I think that happens often in long-term hobbies though, and I figured the urge to play games would return when it was ready.

Boy, was I ever right. I now find myself involved to some degree with three different MMOs at the same time!

Before Christmas I hit 60, the new level cap, in RIFT, and I was sort of feeling directionless. Fortunately around then I also joined the RIFT chapter of AIE, and those good folks recently started organizing retro raids of “Chocolate RIFT” content that most of us had never seen in its prime. My love of group content is no secret, but even I was surprised by how revitalizing it was to spend two hours running around killing dudes with 19 other pleasant people on Ventrilo. The bosses weren’t hard, but doing something that vaguely resembled raiding put a spring in my virtual step.

I’ve logged on RIFT regularly since then, my interest in character development renewed. I’m also looking for more large group event opportunities, as clearly that’s where my heart lies in a “main MMO”.

But as I wrote about earlier this week, not every day is right for engaging content. Sometimes you just wanna run around and kill some junk, and for those times there’s World of Warcraft. Liore (the original Liore!) is up to level 87, and currently.. defending turnips from evil rabbits, as far as I can tell. The quests in Pandaria are occasionally less than epic in scope.

Surprise, war is bad! A Sha thingy.

I enjoyed the Jade Forest plotline, in the first expansion zone, although I think it highlighted one of the problems with standard MMO questing which is that we’re really just helpless bystanders in the story. I knew right away that creating armies of monkey dudes and fish people to fight each other would cause nothing but problems, but no one asked me! There also seem to be more cut scenes so far in Pandaria questing than in previous expansions, and again I feel like it’s just wresting control of my own character from me for the most part. (It ain’t no Wrathgate.)

What the heck, Blizz?

My loose WoW plans are to “12433″ my way to level 90 whenever I get the fancy to play. I have no idea what will happen then, but I’m not worrying about it either.

BUTTS

MMO producers and business people, if you’ve ever wondered about the true power of social ties when it comes to getting people to play your game, ponder this: I, Liore, renowned hater of catgirls in tiny skirts, downloaded and occasionally play TERA entirely because an awesome friend is enthusiastic about it and I want to hang out with them. The power of peers, ladies and gentlemen! The game went free-to-play a couple of days ago, so in my defense at least I’m not paying for it.

TERA, if you’re not already familiar with it, was likely based on the stolen codebase of Lineage 3, which means it’s strong in the tradition of grindy Asian MMOs. It is also ludicrously obsessed with sexualizing the female figure. My goat-lady started out in a skirt with NO BACK. Look design people, if I wanted to stare at lady ass every moment of my gaming I would put a mirror on my chair.

Aw yeah statue booty

The mildly concerning “little girl” race aside, truth be told the male gaze in TERA’s design is so over the top that I find it hard to take seriously or offensively. I mean look, even their fountains are suggestive! It’s pretty hysterical, if eye-rolling.

The gameplay thus far (at my advanced age of level 5) is.. grindy! I have a Sorcerer (mage) who shoots things with spells. The much vaunted “action combat” is essentially circle-strafing although it certainly requires more movement than the average “hotbar” driven MMO.

But hey, as I said before the player company is great, and that is what counts in any MMO.

Note: Flu and work are kickin’ my ass again this week, so I probably won’t be around much for a bit.

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In general, I try to lead my life as a mature, intellectual-ish adult. I am in the habit of cooking good healthy dinners every day with lots of vegetables. I gave up on commercial television a few years ago and filled those hours with what I felt were more worthy, engaging pursuits. I like to play video games with interesting narratives or challenging gameplay.

There are some days though when I’m tired and rushed and stressed out, and I just curl up on the couch with a pint of ice cream for dinner and an episode of America’s Next Top Model. These, I have learned, are also the days when I play WoW. World of Warcraft is a junk food MMO.

Certainly part of it is that I’m not in a guild in WoW so I don’t have any overhead of social obligation. But also it’s really undeniable at this point that WoW is much, much easier to pick up than other MMOs. The gameplay is smooth and any bumps in the UI have long been sorted out, but there’s also very little to worry about while playing. If we compare the lowbie leveling experience, which arguably is the least taxing part of modern MMOs, WoW requires the least amount of thought.

When I level in SWTOR, I’m listening to dialog and thinking about which choice best represents the story I want to play. When I level in RIFT, I have an endless number of decisions to make about what soul tree to use and how certain spells and abilities can work together. When I level in The Secret World (as much as one “levels”) the content is quite challenging and often requires a plan. Even single player games require a certain amount of personal involvement and energy expenditure.

I have now leveled from 1-10 as a panda and 85-87 as Shadow Liore, and I am struck by how simple WoW is in comparison. There are no more character builds, only a handful of choices that were designed to be more fun than effective. The new quests are overwhelmingly “kill 10 of x”, and often not even dressed up to be something else. Pick up quest, look at the map to see where the mobs are, hit “12433″ 10-15 times until done. I level in WoW while watching cooking shows (I am a Top Chef fanatic) on the other monitor, and I honestly cannot even fathom how someone could level without an additional distraction.

(Which is probably the point. Seriously playing WoW seems to require adding your own “nutritional value”, to poorly carry on my own metaphor, whether it’s strong social ties or hardcore raiding or guild wrangling or watching TV or whatever. There’s very little to think about in the basic gameplay itself.)

But what about once I hit level 90? I don’t see why it still won’t be junk food. Dailies (if I do them, which I probably won’t because dailies generally irritate me) are just more kill quests. LFR is group content with a bunch of individuals who will never see each other again and don’t really care anyway. I will share the healing or DPS burden with 4-19 other people, and if we wipe we’ll just get a 5% output buff, up to 10 wipes and 50%. 50% output increase! That sounds like a great time to turn on a cooking show.

It probably sounds like I’m insulting WoW, but I really don’t mean it that way. In a market with a myriad of options, there’s nothing wrong with being the simple, comforting game. If you look at my Raptr profile, in fact, you’ll see that I’ve played a great deal of WoW in the last couple of weeks! There are absolutely times for everyone when life is kicking their butt and they just want to sit down and play a game and hit “12433″ a few times without really having to think about anything.

I just think that, much like eating too much junk food, it’s a good idea to get some fibre in your gaming diet, too.

As some of you may personally remember, back in the summer of 2010 Blizzard tried to switch their World of Warcraft forums over to a “Real ID” system, where accounts would get tied to real, actual names that we players would use as our sole identifier. There was a huge backlash that eventually derailed the plan, but as I recall a fair percentage of the media coverage didn’t see the problem with crossing the streams between players’ real life and their orc.

Take, as an example, this quotation from a pretty dumbass article in TechCrunch about the whole thing:

Do you really think [the internet] is going to get away with harassing people who post on the new forums, a common complaint I’ve seen? “Now people will annoy me in real life!” That sounds like a one-way ticket to a lawsuit, courtesy of Activision Blizzard. Just because your name is “out there” doesn’t mean people are allowed to threaten you. Surely you recognize this?

Let’s fast forward just over two years, shall we?

“In Colleen’s online fantasy world, she gets away with crude, vicious and violent comments like the ones below. Maine needs a State Senator that lives in the real world, not in Colleen’s fantasy world.”

Oh yeah, dumbass article writers, no one would ever get harassed in real life because their real name was associated with a WoW character. I bet the Blizzard Activision law team is just raring to go on this one, too.

Of course Ms. Lachowicz chose to not remain a completely anonymous player (not that that means she deserves this nonsense), but isn’t it fortunate that the rest of us weren’t forced to make the same choice? Hindsight is 20/20, as they say, and occasionally extremely satisfying.

Earlier this week Psychochild commented on a post that WoW was for all intents and purposes my ex, and that I was “lingering on a now broken long-term relationship that still tugs at your heart.” It’s a lovely analogy, and perfectly on point for me. WoW is that ex that I’m probably better off without but I’ll always miss what we had in the good days.

That being said, I heard that my ex had come back to town promising that things would be totally different now. They’ve changed and cleaned up their act, apparently, and maybe I would, you know, just wanna meet up for coffee or something, catch up on the old times… And that’s how I found myself in Pandaria last night.

The last time I had one of these dalliances was almost a year ago, and I simply logged off one day and never really felt the urge to get back on. When I logged in again yesterday.. oof, everything is a mess. My bags were full of junk and half-finished projects, the questlog stuffed with random things. Of course all the talent trees changed as well as the way specs are managed. My UI was borked. It was a little overwhelming.

However, Blizzard has added some pretty handy features for new and returning players, like the “What’s Changed” tab in the spec window, or the explanation of core skills in the spellbook. I respecced for Shadow last night since I plan to be questing, and despite the fact that I haven’t played Shadow probably since I levelled in Cataclysm (maybe before?) I was toodling right along in no time.

I’m not sure when they changed the combat style, but Shadow is pretty fun right now. I have a set 3 spells I open with, and then it’s basically mind flaying until any of a number of lovely procs happen. Multiple procs make for some pretty impressive-feeling burst damage, and the whole thing is quite satisfying at least during the short amount of time that I played. The new talent system is slightly confusing because at least half the choices just seemed to be fun, borderline cosmetic stuff while the other half had serious impact on how I played, but at least it’s easy to set up.

Pandaria itself is beautiful. I’m only at level 85.3 or something right now, but so far despite all the positive response I’m kind of meh on the questing. I’ve already seen a number of “Kill 10 X” quests, which are just underwhelming. For now the fun of proc-based burst damage is keeping me entertained while I tear through the land, but I’m hoping it picks up a bit.

Pet battles, on the other hand, are dangerous and I’m glad that WoW isn’t my main game because I am pretty sure I’d feel obligated to grind out a perfect team. Having never played Pokemon before I was really not sure how they would add any depth to the pet combat system, but it’s a lot of mixing and matching strengths and weaknesses and searching out new strong pets. It’s also really, really fun and I’ve already spent some time this morning looking over lists of blue-quality pets that I own to figure out a team.

Outside of the new Pandaria assets, the art in WoW is really really looking old. I feel like it’s “aged” years in only months thanks to comparisons to RIFT and Guild Wars 2 and other newish titles. There are litle things I think of as staples now that I really missed last night, like a “sell all junk” button or “open all mail”. Also, as someone who hasn’t played in a while I’m not sure I like flying mounts anymore. They just feel.. awkward. Invasive? I’m not sure.

For years I played other MMOs thinking that I wasn’t playing “for real” because of WoW, so it was a weird sensation to feel the reverse. Pandaria is beautiful and I think I can see why folks have been giving it such good reviews thus far. I’m likely going to keep playing it on a casual basis until Liore hits level 90 (I’d like to try healing some of the new instances), but I’m in a relationship with Telara now. If anything, seeing my “ex” again last night just drove that point home for me, and I’m okay with that.

PODCAST NOTE: Hey, where’s episode 8? I was sick and out of town for a bit, so the next episode of the Cat Context Podcast will be delayed a week. But in return you’ll get 3 episodes over 3 weeks!

August 20 – Dungeon Defenders, Day Z, other stuff.
August 27 – We’re talkin’ about the first 24 hours of Guild Wars 2!
September 1 – EPISODE 10 LIVE FROM PAX!! Time and guests coming soon.

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I have given Blizzard a lot of crap over the years about World of Warcraft and some of their design and business decisions, to the point where I occasionally wonder how I spent so many years in the game in the first place. That attitude isn’t really fair, though — WoW may no longer be a game I enjoy, and Blizzard may have repeatedly proven themselves to be clueless on social justice matters, but the fact is there are reasons their game was such a huge success in the first place and it wasn’t entirely because of great market timing.

I was talking with someone the other day about RIFT, as I’m wont to do, and a very familiar topic came up. “I like RIFT a lot,” they said, “but the combat just isn’t as smooth as WoW.” And indeed, they are absolutely correct. I have played a number of MMOs at this point, live or in beta, and I have yet to find one where the combat is as fluid and responsive as that in WoW. Even if you’re not a fan of “hotkey combat”, you have to admit that the actual technology behind the fighting is pretty tight.

SWTOR initially went with tying together animations and skill timing and while I think it contributed to making combat look more action packed on the screen it also messed with responsiveness. Trion built RIFT for quick and easy patching, and while they have far surpassed WoW in that area the game does suffer from some performance issues. Everquest II, The Secret World, Guild Wars 2 — same thing, although to be fair I’ve only played the latter two in beta tests.

As a healer, I know that a half second delay between pressing a button and my character performing an action can lead to chaos and death, and quite honestly there is NOTHING more frustrating than having a tank die due to jerky combat. I can say without hesitation that WoW is the only game I’ve played up to this point that I felt 100% certain that my spell would hit exactly when I expected it to based on my input.

I’m not saying that any of those other games are bad or poorly made. I certainly have almost no idea of what goes into the development of a major piece of online software, and I assume it’s a pretty elaborate process. But credit to Blizzard where it’s due: despite a notoriously awkward launch back in 2005, I have yet to ever play an MMO that ran as smoothly or was as responsive to my controls as WoW.

Hey look, Herding Cats got its very own domain! If you have a blogroll link or bookmark, I’d appreciate it if you could update it to the new URL: lioreblog.com. Thanks a lot.

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Warning: ME3 spoilers

Okay fine, I didn’t want to write about the Ji Firepaw debacle because other people have already written about it extensively and I bet y’all can guess what I think anyway. However, a few recent posts about the issue caught my eye. It seems the current popular argument against Blizzard changing Ji’s dialogue is that there is a place for -isms and making people uncomfortable in the name of characterization. Removing that element, folks say, creates a world of drab boring fiction. At its core, the argument is a defense of art.

So, here’s a story. Some time ago there was a highly anticipated game with what many people felt was a very disappointing conclusion. Eventually so many people were outraged by the ending that they rose up into internet mobs. The game developers in turn defended their game and its ending. “This is our story,” the company said, “and we hope you will all evaluate it on its artistic merit.”

“What!? Art schmart!” cried out the angry players. “It’s a damn game that I paid for so go make me an ending where my FemShep adopts a krogan baby and lives happily ever after with Garrus.” (Or, um, something like that.)

I am of course talking about the Mass Effect 3 ending outrage. It seems that gamers themselves aren’t sure of the relationship between video games and art. So why, in the general arguments on the internet, is Mass Effect 3 considered a consumer good that can be changed to meet the demands of the audience while the lines of Ji Firepaw, level 3 questgiver, should be protected as artistic expression? Hmm?

I’m pretty sure you can guess the answer to that on your own. Look, my fellow gamers, I think many of us would like some aspect of games to be accepted as art, much like with books or movies. But to do that you can’t just wave the art flag when it’s convenient and opt out of thinking about the difficult stuff.

If Ji Firepaw’s old greeting is a work of characterization worthy of protection, then so is Shepard blowing up the galaxy.