Finished both Dead Space and Fallout 3 within 48 hours of one another-both games represent in the own way the best and worst of the artform.
Dead Space left me (after a ginormous boss battle and an ending stolen from FEAR and a gazillion japanese horror films)with more questions than answers and feeling empty. Either purposefully or as an accident of omission the game never digs deeper than the surface regarding the plot and the character's relationships therein. Character setup early are eventually killed off arbitrarily, while the fates of other characters are foreshadowed so blatantly that the final reveal is more of a "meh" than a "doh!".
Having created such a beautifully rendered world as well as innovated in terms of the user interface it feels as if the story was left behind, where it had the potential to be something extraordinary as well. Worth renting.
Fallout 3 is entirely a game made of the journey not the destination. The final mission and the lead up to it is so abrupt you don't realize the game is about to end until it does. This is hampered by a late game character that is introduced as a deus-ex-machina solution to an earlier problem but then unable to be used in the same situation within the endgame. The emotional commitment made to building this character as it travels through the wasteland encountering some remarkably creative and unique situations is given short shrift in the resolution. While the mechanics of the plot ends, the emotional payoff is absent and there is no satisfying resolution to your character's story. Fallout 3 is in essence all foreplay and no climax.
Started and quit World of Warcraft last night after about 20 minutes of killing little fluffy animals. Don't get it, the essence of the game appears to be grinding. Was that ever fun?
Showing posts with label World of Warcraft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label World of Warcraft. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Rage of Conan
Finally seduced into the world of Massively-Multiplayer Online games, which use a subscription based model of monthly payments, I settled on the “M” rated actioner. Conan has long been a favorite character of mine and the initial previews and reviews of the game were generally positive. I liked that the initial levels of the game would in fact be single player, giving the player an opportunity to get comfortable with the control and gameplay before throwing them into the online world.
Throughout the initial offline aspect of the game I was hooked and delighted-unlike the more stylized but attractive World of Warcraft AOC is a deeply textured and beautiful looking game. The real-time combat takes some getting used but once combos are mastered, there is a singular joy in finishing a foe with a fatality, a scripted kill sequence that can result in decapitations among other bloody delights. By taking the standard sword and sorcery play and embedding it into a harsh graphically violent world, it lives up to the expectation of the Conan brand. Online, the bread and butter of the game, is where the trouble began.
Once finished the single-player aspect of the game, online is the only alternative as several massive worlds are opened up to the player. I immediately suffered massive game stopping lag on a constant basis. Strangely enough it was very similar to the delays and issues I would have with p2p downloads using my cable provider Shaw. Shaw is well known, as is Rogers cable, for their extremely invasive throttling and packet inspection methods in order to free up bandwidth for their cable, VOD and VOIP services.
Several weeks of contact with both Shaw’s tech support as well as the game publisher Funcom were unable to rectify the problem, and I cancelled my account, disappointed.
In the middle of this I also started the switch from cable to my preferred DSL reseller Teksavvy. As I use them in Ontario and have been very pleased I was extremely disappointed about the 3 week odyssey to setup internet on my phone line. True to form, Telus did as Shaw, Rogers and Bell have done before, and screwed up the install. Only by checking my own phone line with a multimeter at both the jack and the patch board in the building’s utility room was I able to finally get a Telus tech out to the building. Once there it was clear that Telus had provided faulty information to Teksavvy about my DSL line, and the service was being sent to the wrong unit. Within an hour it was all corrected and I finally logged into my new internet.
During these events I made it clear to all involved that the latency issue with AOC, in my mind, was very much due to the throttling practices of my ISP. I measured throughput during gameplay and my speed’s never reached higher than 6 kb/s, far below what it would take to keep my client software in sync with the server generated world. Neither Shaw nor Funcom would address this issue.
As a test I initiated a bittorrent download on my new DSL line and was delighted to see speeds between 5 and 10 times faster than the throttled cable. Invigorated I reactivated AOC and re-entered the game world, wondering if I would continue to lag out.
Then I played for 3 hours without a hiccup. It’s clear that throttling is the single source of the issues I experienced with the game and this poses a larger question. Creating and maintaining an MMO is a hugely expensive undertaking. In a world where Net Neutrality is becoming more of an issue, the very fact of throttling could be the thing that prevents a game from reaching sustainability much less success. This leaves the developer, publisher and customer at the mercy of their ISP, which is absolutely unacceptable.
Happily I have leveled up from 24 to 32 in the last week
Throughout the initial offline aspect of the game I was hooked and delighted-unlike the more stylized but attractive World of Warcraft AOC is a deeply textured and beautiful looking game. The real-time combat takes some getting used but once combos are mastered, there is a singular joy in finishing a foe with a fatality, a scripted kill sequence that can result in decapitations among other bloody delights. By taking the standard sword and sorcery play and embedding it into a harsh graphically violent world, it lives up to the expectation of the Conan brand. Online, the bread and butter of the game, is where the trouble began.
Once finished the single-player aspect of the game, online is the only alternative as several massive worlds are opened up to the player. I immediately suffered massive game stopping lag on a constant basis. Strangely enough it was very similar to the delays and issues I would have with p2p downloads using my cable provider Shaw. Shaw is well known, as is Rogers cable, for their extremely invasive throttling and packet inspection methods in order to free up bandwidth for their cable, VOD and VOIP services.
Several weeks of contact with both Shaw’s tech support as well as the game publisher Funcom were unable to rectify the problem, and I cancelled my account, disappointed.
In the middle of this I also started the switch from cable to my preferred DSL reseller Teksavvy. As I use them in Ontario and have been very pleased I was extremely disappointed about the 3 week odyssey to setup internet on my phone line. True to form, Telus did as Shaw, Rogers and Bell have done before, and screwed up the install. Only by checking my own phone line with a multimeter at both the jack and the patch board in the building’s utility room was I able to finally get a Telus tech out to the building. Once there it was clear that Telus had provided faulty information to Teksavvy about my DSL line, and the service was being sent to the wrong unit. Within an hour it was all corrected and I finally logged into my new internet.
During these events I made it clear to all involved that the latency issue with AOC, in my mind, was very much due to the throttling practices of my ISP. I measured throughput during gameplay and my speed’s never reached higher than 6 kb/s, far below what it would take to keep my client software in sync with the server generated world. Neither Shaw nor Funcom would address this issue.
As a test I initiated a bittorrent download on my new DSL line and was delighted to see speeds between 5 and 10 times faster than the throttled cable. Invigorated I reactivated AOC and re-entered the game world, wondering if I would continue to lag out.
Then I played for 3 hours without a hiccup. It’s clear that throttling is the single source of the issues I experienced with the game and this poses a larger question. Creating and maintaining an MMO is a hugely expensive undertaking. In a world where Net Neutrality is becoming more of an issue, the very fact of throttling could be the thing that prevents a game from reaching sustainability much less success. This leaves the developer, publisher and customer at the mercy of their ISP, which is absolutely unacceptable.
Happily I have leveled up from 24 to 32 in the last week
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