The Most Exciting Game Announcement Ever

I, Boat, do solemnly swear that the most excited I have ever been for any game announcement ever was for the X-COM : Enemy Unknown announcement.  The first time I saw the screenshots I swear I got a little lightheaded, for just a second.

Then I was thinking about other ancient franchises that I 1) respected, 2)still respect, and 3) haven't been revisited lately.

There's only three left : X-COM, Pinball Construction Set, and Dungeon Keeper.  And X-COM was my favorite.

If I compared my 20 favorite games now to my 20 favorite games of 1999 I think there would only be three, maybe four games on both lists.  That's really weird.

Done with TOR, Thoughts on TOR, also Murder She Wrote

• I played for about three weeks, which is a week or two shorter than I thought I would.  More on why I quit later...
  
• The Old Republic is the best MMORPG ever made.  That's ... not as impressive as it sounds.  It's the best in the same way that the fastest man alive ran the hundred meters .02 seconds faster than anyone else.
  
• The so-called "Fourth Pillar" -- story, was ... OK, I guess.   What I really liked was the voice acting.
  
• I found the moral choices occasionally irritating, like in previous BioWare games.  A half-dozen times I feel like their "good" (light-side) choices favor sentimentality over actual morality.
  
  Since I don't want to spoil (or explain) the Trooper story, I'll instead refer obliquely to the final choice in Mass Effect 2, which has similar issues.  The last choice in Mass Effect 2 is between a morally distasteful option (though I wouldn't call it evil), and a morally "clean" option.  However, on closer examination, the morally icky choice might save millions or billions of lives, clearly outweighing any distastefulness ... unless you are BioWare, where I guess respect for the dead is more important than the lives of the living.
  
  The folks at BioWare should watch more Murder She Wrote.  I didn't realize until I watched it again as an older adult, but in the show Jessica Fletcher is frequently placed in morally awkward (and difficult) situations, yet she always handles them impeccably.  She would be a better Jedi than any that BioWare have constructed.
  
• Every other major non-story system in the game is as-good or marginally better than the equivalent system in WoW (now the second best MMORPG ever made).  I realize you can't radically improve every system in a new MMORPG, but it would be nice if, say, combat had enjoyed the same radical upgrade that story had, since combat is omnipresent.  Instead combat is improved over WoW, but not greatly.
  
• Space Combat is essentially a flash game -- an immensely enjoyable flash game.
  
• The brand-newish elements that TOR added -- ships and companions -- are first-rate, I think.
  
• You get great, usable gear all the time.  You can travel almost anywhere very quickly.  There are items (holochrons) that you can find that give permanent stat boosts.  TOR often thinks it is a single-player game, and I find that incredibly endearing.
  
• I would say the crafting is dramatically improved over WoW, but I have one major quibble, at least with Cybertech.  In Cybertech, every three levels you get four new upgrade recipes with two researchable upgrades each.  However, it's unusual to actually discover both upgrades before you get those three levels -- often it takes a massive effort just to unlock the first of the two, which is disappointing.
  
• The reason I quit is the same reason I've mostly sworn off MMORPG's -- the combat.  If an MMORPG is built around combat (and most of them are) then combat is the most important thing, and it must be thrilling.  Solo combat in TOR is actually fairly variable, which was rarely true in WoW.  But much improved is not improved enough.  MMORPG-style target-and-hotkey combat is limited, and, if anyone is paying attention, never imitated by any single-player game -- the same single-player games that copy everything imaginable from MMORPG's and each other.
  
  Ultimately, in MMORPG's, you get very good at combat by doing things like jamming keys, and running spreadsheets, and reading forums, and carefully monitoring skill rotations and cooldowns and procs, and watching youtube videos, and just playing forever so you can hit max level.  In the games I prefer, like action games, or shooters, or pinball, you get better by playing -- and playing them is immensely fun.
  
  There is no end to the MMORPG blogs that frequently ridicule people who are bad at MMORPG's.  As I've said before, the people who are bad at MMORPG's are the only sane ones.  Their mistake is treating MMORPG's like any normal, fun game -- you play the game, and you get better at it.  Being good in modern MMORPG's requires avoiding fun, which is insane.  And I have no interest in insanity.

Boat on Twitter

Once I get to ten followers I promise : Alcoholism.

@Boatorious

TOR, Horrible and Stressful

My companion character in TOR keeps saying he's never been in the Senate Tower right after we leave the Senate Tower.  Now he wants to talk to me.

I'm worried he's going to tell me he has early-onset dementia.

Have I Mentioned that TOR is Horrible?

So, on Tuesday I received my retail code, and, like every other dutiful idiot, promptly entered it in my TOR account on the website.  Today I try to log in to queue before I go for a walk and instead receive a message -- there's No Active Subscription on my account.

I go to my email, and while looking for my retail code again I see a bunch of receipt emails for Steam games.  I have a bunch of Steam games -- 66, actually  Do you know how many of those games required me to check my email for a code, not twice, but even once?  Do you know how many of those 66 games, after I entered the code, told me I didn't have the code and made me go to their website and wait in a queue?  Zero.  Zero Steam games have ever done anything besides just work after I bought them.  No copying codes out of emails to paste into broken websites.  Can you imagine?

Origin is such a ****ing disaster.  Same goes for TOR.

TOR : Still Horrible

Night Two of TOR:

1) Queue for server, position 936
2) Wait 50 minutes
3) Play for three minutes
4) Machine hard locks
5) Reboot
6) Queue for server, position 435

Thank goodness I stayed up a little late to play some TOR!  It was well worth my time.

First Impression of TOR : It's Horrible

So last night, with my computer newly upgraded, I decided to pre-order The Old Republic and check it out, since (as I've heard) the early access to the game had started.

If TOR were sold by Steam or by Blizzard there would only be around three button presses (and some loading time) between me and playing a game.  EA has been constantly talking up Origin, even withholding Battlefield 3 (likely their biggest release of the year) from Steam, their biggest competitor.  It's clearly their big new corporate initiative, so I imagined some similar level of polish.  Oh no.  What I got was a convoluted eleven step process :

1. Retrieve Origin password, I don't remember it because I never use it
2. Log in -- on a different page.
3. Try to navigate back to the TOR pre-order page, but can't find it.  I don't see it on the front page of origin either (!).  Finally I have to search for it, and find it.
4. Pre-order TOR.
5. Now there should be a button on that page, that downloads Origin (that would download the game).  Nope.  Check your email.
6. Email has a code, you enter it at the TOR website.
7. Can't log onto the TOR website, account is separate from Origin.  Have to reset that password too.
8. Enter the code on the TOR website.  Nothing happens or downloads.
9. So I find the download link for Origin on EA's website.  Run it and TOR shows up in Origin, but I can't download it in Origin.
10. Search around on the internet (EA's help site is "down for maintenance").  I need to download the client from a link on the TOR website, not through Origin.  So I do that.
11. Game client loads, so I'm ready to log in and play, right?  Evidently not.  As a Sane Person, I thought that if I had "Early Access", and "Early Access" has begun, then I would be able to play.  Of course that's not the case.  "Early Access" is actually a series of rolling first-preordered/first-served invites.  So as a "last-preordered" sort of guy I'll surely tuck into TOR at least several minutes before it officially launches.

Horrible.