Posts tagged Beta Testing
Guild Wars 2–What I Lament The Most #GW2
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I’ve spent the weekend in Guild Wars 2, and I’ve seen a lot of people talking about a lot of the same things: overflow, learning skills, grouping (or the removal of the need), etc. By and large, I agree with a lot of the consensus on these points, but the one thing I haven’t seen anyone talking about is how Guild Wars 2 could easily put the RPG back in MMORPG.
The environments in the game are beautiful. Not TERA beautiful, but knock you on your ass beautiful for two reasons. First, they are graphically attractive, which in and of itself should make anyone “oooh” and “ahhh” whenever they turn a corner for the first time. The second is that the world design is about showing you the world, not hiding the places you can’t reach by making buildings overly tall or smack-dab together.
During my personal story, I was asked to go in the Salma District, the home of the humans in Divinity’s Reach. As with other locations in the world, there were points of interest to visit and unlock, and the one closest to the district entrance was an orphanage.
I entered the gate, and found myself in a small courtyard. To the right was a children’s see-saw, carved as a friendly dragon, and painted in a non-threatening, carnival style. Inside the building, I found two small rocking horses, carved in the shape of tiny boars. There was a classroom filled with bookcases and two pot-bellied stoves like schoolhouses of the 1800s. In a back room, there was a stick-puppet theater.
Now, a lot of people will have to visit this place because it’s a point of interest, and because it factors into a personal storyline, but when I found these elements, I felt sad. The intro to the game tells us that humanity has been herded into Kryta as their enemies have pushed them back over hundreds of years. With Divinity’s Reach being the only human city left, there’s the looming specter of catastrophe hanging over the remnants of the human race: they’re overwhelmed, and as a species, their days are numbered. We, as human heroes, fight on, but if legions of humans couldn’t stem the tide over the centuries, what chance do we have.
But here in this orphanage, that doom doesn’t exists. The toys are crafted to make the children happy, with friendly designs and bright colors. The trials that the heroes endure aren’t relevant here, except that as heroes, these are the people we’re fighting for.
Guild Wars 2 offers so many locations for role-playing that I am sad to think that a lot of the environment was lovingly crafted, but will end up unfairly abandoned. People may visit these locations once, but never again because there’s no loot to be had or anything to kill. People just aren’t in a role-playing mood in MMOs these days, which is a tragedy because this is the game for role-players.
Now, if NCSoft would consider a player-made story tool, I can die happy.
Guild Wars 2–Introduction
3I’ll try not to overdo it with the Guild Wars 2 posts, but I am obliged to post some things about my beta experience.
I started with a human hunter. I am a hunter aficionado, and although it’s “against the rules of beta” to roll a favored character, I had a hunter in Guild Wars, so I went with what I (kind of) knew.
I’m a bit torn with this game. I have to say, I love it to death already, but there are some issues, and not all of them can be attributed to “beta”. If we’re talking “classic beta”, then we should be experiencing bugs and reporting them. If we’re talking “modern beta”, then this is a PR period. Instead, we seem to be somewhere in between. Yes, there were bugs, like the unresponsive skill point challenge vendor in one town who refused to get his lazy ass off the ground. But anyone familiar with the beta experience will know about the overflow mechanic, and it’s issues. Overflow is fantastic, but the issues that people have with it are not bugs; they are either design decisions, or design oversights. We’re talking features here, and to me, bringing system shortcomings to the developer’s attention is not the purpose of the beta. Maybe we’re in “post-modern beta”, where the furniture is still being re-arranged on the day we move in. As an industry outsider, I don’t know. I suspect that NCSoft got more then enough feedback that they’ll take care of it to our satisfaction, because they rest of the game is a weathervane pointing in the right direction.
Another real question I have is how the game is viewed by the players. I’m not going to wave my arms and proclaim the Second Coming. It’s a video game. It’s well done, and people like it. But it is…different enough. I have spoken with a few people, and have played with a few, and the majority of them are MMO vets. This is not a cookie-cutter game, yet I have seen other sources where people are asking for more familiar systems that they have gotten used to in other games. Accessibility is great, but I feel that many MMO players are going to be scratching their heads at “what do I do now?” or “how does this work?” or, if we’re really unlucky, “why doesn’t this work like it does in Game X?”
Guild Wars 2 is trying to be just a little bit beyond what we see in most MMOs, which is minor tweaks to standard systems. There is the art style, which is very watercolor-esque for both the landscape and even the UI. You don’t have to visit a trainer to get skills; you unlock them in sequence by using existing skills, and combat abilities are weapons based. You will unlock them all in a very short time. There is no quest journal aside from your personal story, everything is public-quest, and no one is holding your hand, pointing the next area for you to visit. Your goal is to step foot outside the city, and just do it. People will freak out over this. When you step back, it’s not a huge departure from base MMO mechanics, but it has enough difference that after years and years of 20 hot-bars with customizable skill selections, a “golden path” of quests designed to move us from area to area, and reliance upon skill vendors and even server queues, Guild Wars 2 is just different enough to make it different enough.
Now comes the question: will it be “different enough” to satisfy those who have complained up one side of the Internet and down the other that we need something different? Or will the differences be just a bit too different for them to grasp without exasperation, forcing them to throw in the towel because they have to re-learn significant chunks of their MMO knowledge?
The Real, Real, Last Hurrah For SWTOR
4For a video of the space combat…and some sexy spoilers of Bioware’s unique brand of “adult content”…check out my recorded Livestream.
I was fortunate enough to get an invite to a smaller beta weekend, the last, last public event of the testing period. The game opens for “early access” for pre-orders in 10 days (or so), and it’s been announced that anyone with a recent beta client can just patch it up to retail. I’m pleased, because I’m sure there’s a Comcast sniper on a neighbor’s rooftop, waiting for me to walk in front of a window.
This weekend, I completed the third part of the Trooper’s story on Coruscant (level 16), and at the end, I was given my starship. This was really the reason why I wanted to get in on the action this weekend, because I wanted to see how it worked as a mode of transport, and also how the space combat worked out. I was unsure how to get my companions doing their thing while on-board, but realized that it’s mostly a downtime scenario which allows you to send them out to collect or craft without having to worry about needing them back in time to watch your ass should combat arise. Plus, when out in the field, your companions back on the ship can be sent out or be made to craft stuff, even as you’re in combat:
Droid: “Yeah, L.T. I need something to do…”
Me: “Christ! We’re under heavy fire here, can it wait a while?!”
Droid: “Uh, sure… I guess. I’m still getting paid, though. Right?”
The space combat is a decent diversion. I’m going to go out on a limb and equate it with the rifts in Rift from a psychological standpoint. Both exist to break up the monotony of running everywhere, and give the players another way to earn XP. You can switch between ground-pounding and flying the unfriendly skies pretty easily (if you’re in your ship), so heading back to your ship after a hard day’s work will afford you the greatest opportunity for activities the next time you log in. I admit, though, I didn’t RTFM, so I was flying around with no clue about what I needed to do or how to do it. I failed one mission twice because I didn’t know what objectives I needed, or how to use my missiles (Right mouse button, of course). Also, I picked up some upgrades for the ship, and when ON the ship, right clicking them made them vanish…but I got no confirmation that anything happened. Ah well.
I am still impressed with “story as a vehicle” for getting me to “do stuff”. I artificially cut myself off at a decent point in the story. I admit: it was hard because I don’t really have a plan to play a Trooper in release, so I knew I wouldn’t “spoil” anything by experiencing the story here. But I realized that even though I might not go Trooper, I will be asked to tackle the 75% of the Coruscant missions that I have done, and which are non-class-specific. The further I progress as a Trooper, the more tempted I’ll be to pick up those side-missions, only to have to tackle them again in release. I’m usually not a fan of re-doing content, which is why I’m not an alt-aholic, and is something that I suspect SWTOR is going to break me of.
I do have one spoiler, so highlight the rest of text if you want to see it (it’s Trooper specific, so if you don’t plan on playing a Trooper, spoil away!)
One good thing about relying on the story is that Bioware has made connections between you and NPCs which reaches across time. When I had to bring down the Black Sun cartel, I was put in touch with an undercover operative named Jaxo. During the conversations, I had a chance to [Flirt], so I did, but I eventually walked away to the next mission.
The first mission off Coruscant had me rescuing a kidnapped Senator from a space station, and my local contact was Jaxo. Once again, I used the flirty options, and at the end, she invited me to “visit” her at her place back in the Black Sun territories sometime soon.
So I did. And we did. Sadly, there’s no achievement for “Intergalactic Booty Call”.
If you watch the Livestream, forward to 59:40 to get a taste of how Bioware handles this kind of thing 
Yeah. Another SWTOR Post
9Happy Monday and other oxymorons on this, the day after the last beta hurrah for Star Wars: The Old Republic. I spent a lot more time in the game this weekend than I had previously, and after having learned a lot of things, felt that I had a better handle on the game and how I might feel about it later on.
The Overlooked
I’m still avoiding the Jedi Consular, since that’s what I’ve decided to play in release. This time, I went with the Republic Trooper, a class which I don’t think receives it’s due. In a universe like Star Wars, the sexy archetypes are the Jedi, the Smuggler, and the Bounty Hunter. The Troopers are cannon fodder and once you get to the “modern” movie timeline, they’re clones, cheap, and expendable. No one wants to be a cookie-cutter character in an MMO, right?
*cough*
I admit, I picked the Trooper because I knew I wouldn’t be playing one in release, but having played this class, and the Empire’s bastard class, the Imperial Agent, and now having been impressed with both, all bets are off.
Party Train
I met up with Mindstrike who was playing a Smuggler while we were on Ord Mantell. We had several generic missions in common, but we finally got to experience cases of tagging along to someone else’s story mission, and the shared social missions. We had a bit of confusion at first about who could see what, who could participate in what conversations, and what was going on when one person was having a conversation that the other couldn’t see. We found that if you’re both taking a generic mission for the first time, you can both participate in the conversation. If you’re past another person’s green door, you can SEE their cinematic and hear their conversation, but you can’t do anything. If you have already done a generic mission or are ineligible to receive it, you just around like a doofus until your party is done with their conversation.
Playing with two people is great; playing with two people who each have a companion is awesome. It’s like a wrecking ball swinging through content. To some, that may sound like the End Of The World As We Know It, but as I’ve said before, I’m all about the progress and, in this case, the story.
About That Story…
I enjoyed the Trooper storyline. You’re the newest recruit in Havoc Squad, a special forces unit currently assigned to Ord Mantell in order to assist in the battle against a separatist movement. That’s all I’ll say about that. Spoilers, etc. As a class, the Trooper has as much subtlety as a battering ram. Sticky grenades, rockets, full auto, and armor-piercing buffs make for a formidable opponent, and that’s before you pick up your first companion. I died only three times which was more due to my overconfidence than it was to the performance of the class.
I ended the weekend at level 14, having completed some arcs on Coruscant which were supporting the Trooper plot. Normally, once you leave the training-wheel zones, you’d start getting off the beaten path of any overarching storyline, but I never felt more then one mission away from the Trooper’s narrative. For me, this is important because side-quests can be distracting to the point where the main story thread is lost in the haze of having to find someone’s lost heirloom or to clear a crime syndicate out of the lower levels of the city. Thanks to constant reminders for the why to your actions ties back into the main story. For me, this is critical to my potential long-term success with SWTOR.
My Potential For Long-Term Success With SWTOR.
It’s hard to say after only a weekend what the future holds for my investment in this game. I thought Rift would be the one game I’d stick with, but I lagged behind the general population (again) and found myself alone without support in a game that requires you to have support for the main selling point of the game – the rifts. Once that reality set in, and I reached that magic level decade of the 30’s, my interest in the game dropped like a stone attached to an anvil locked in a safe dropped from a cargo plane.
Right now, the story propels me in SWTOR. Having to kill X number of Y because my quest tracker says so is pure theme park MMO, but the fact that I can do it without much upset says a few things to me:
- Combat is a speed-bump in SWTOR. It’s necessary only because…
- …It’s all about the story.
I really hate to burst people’s bubble, but if you’re looking to SWTOR because you want another loot-whore, end-game hump-fest, or if you deride it because of the same, then the reality of the game totally went over your head. Like a novel, there’s the reader’s interpretation, and the author’s purpose, and the two may not align. If you want to run this game like a min-maxing, l2p-your-class, “win” at MMO game, then that’s fine, but I believe that the authors of this game really intended for you to put that artificial crap on the shelf and to treat the game as an interactive story. A story with pictures, so those with the World of Warcraft mentality don’t have to strain themselves to keep up.
I’m cautiously optimistic about my chances of progressing through this game for the reasons stated above, as well as an all-important third reason: so far, nothing has stood in my way. With Rift, I felt abandoned and unable to progress. With EQ2, WoW, and LotrO eventually left me with a treadmill feeling because there was no overarching reason; everything was a one-off mission that needed to be completed and didn’t have ongoing consequence* later in the game. With SWTOR, I made it to level 14 in two days. That’s more then 1/5th of the way to the cap which for me is huge. I totally credit the story as the vehicle for my interest. I’m hoping that this will continue to propel me through the game to the cap (finally).
It’s Like Duct Tape
Now, like the duct tape and the Force, there’s a dark side to all this light side. I’m not a fan of pointing out issues just to counter to ebullient praise, but I’m also not ignorant of issues; I just usually choose to rise above them in order to find the enjoyment that’s there. Unless there’s a show stopping issue, which is rare, I can live with anything else that the game throws me, even if there’s something that throws me.
That being said, my one gripe with SWTOR is that I was really expecting more polish on this sucker. And here’s a caveat! I know that many times the “beta” version we play is potentially several months old in the build cycle. I also know that it’s beta, still, even this close to launch. There’s a good chance that when things get pulled together, things will get ironed out. There’s also the chance that things won’t get ironed out.
Some of the gripes (which are by no means ground-breaking for me) include weird-isms like shooting with no weapons in hand, having to listen to other people’s companion’s one-liners all the time, and the delay between alien dialog subtitles synced with voice-overs, and the ability to select my conversation option. Again, none of these are really game breakers for me, but I know there are some “quality Nazis” out there who still equate “release” with “flawless” and who will use things like this to fuel their personal campaigns against the game.
While I totally understand that working on a game of this magnitude is beyond the scope of one mortal’s comprehension (despite the fact that many lesser-mortals claim to have their finger on the pulse of these things), I’m disappointed to see things like this in such a high profile title from a high profile studio this close to release because I know that in some quarters the game will suffer from it in the court of popular opinion. The game will still go on to be a huge success (by actual standards, not the usual self-important forum-troll standards), but I’d really love to see it clear hurdles easily in all areas, and not just because of it’s IP, features, or name brand developer.
While I hope these kinds of things are ironed out quickly, they won’t stop me from enjoying the game come release time.
And Now, Some Spoilers!
[To see these, highlight text from here to the end of the post!]
I wanted to put that in there because there’s some things that continue to impress, and some deal with spoiler content.
One of the missions for the Trooper story is to cut a supply line based in the criminal underground in Coruscant. The supply in this case is a shipment of advanced battle droids that you need to destroy, eventually bringing you face to face with the droid supplier. He boasts that he’s also augmented several humans with undetectable cybernetic parts, and plans on unleashing these unsuspecting time-bombs on the general population. You’re ordered to kill these citizens on the off chance that this scumbag is telling the truth, but as you can imagine, you have a choice to kill or not to kill. I chose not to kill.
Later, I received an email from an NPC which told me that while the rumors of potential cyberizing were found to be accurate, those people I released – who were supposedly altered – showed no signs of having this lethal technology.
From an emotional investment standpoint this is an interesting twist. During the mission, I found that my companion didn’t react favorably to my initial acceptance of the kill order, so I switched at the last minute to let the subjects go. I thought I was done with that, but the decision was brought back to my attention in a good way when I was informed that I had made a humane and correct decision, despite earning an earful from my CO for going against her orders. This bridging of time for what might have just been another step in the progression of the story made me smile because it supported my non-lethal decision, and because I thought that it could have easily have gone the other way. It also supports the idea that the story isn’t something that goes in one eye and out the other, like other MMOs.
Star Wars: The Old Republic
6The NDA is down. Let the vomiting of details commence!
[Insert Scrolling Exposition Text Here]
I need to say that I started my SWTOR experience after coming off a few hours of Skyrim. That’s a tough act to follow for any game, especially if that game is A) another RPG, and B) and MMO which has been often criticized for it’s safe design decisions. I admit that my initial impression was colored by Skyrim, which is both fair and unfair. Fair, because Skyrim sets a high bar for all games, but unfair because one’s a single player game which can have the room to breath, and the other is an MMO which really does have to cater to a wide audience. The Star Wars IP really doesn’t do it for me; I’m a casual fan, but could take it or leave it beyond eps IV, V and VI.
I have also been on an anti-MMO bender lately, as previous posts can attest to. I was going in with several strikes against SWTOR already, and the only real reason I hadn’t cancelled my pre-order at that point was because I know my friends are planning on playing.
In A Galaxy Far, Far Away (And Packed To The Gills With Testers)
My first misguided decision was to create the class I wanted to play: Jedi Consular. I don’t care for the “Jedi” part; I’ve taken an unusual shine to the healer class since Rift, so I decided this was to be my class in release. But I wasn’t feeling it, for the reasons stated above. I also realized that I shouldn’t play the class now that I want to play later, so I quit out and created an Imperial Agent. I consider this to have been a Good Move ™.
The Agent was fun. The cover mechanic worked pretty well, although it’s kind of gimmicky. Normally you’d just stand there and shoot like a total dork, but at least with cover, you get the feeling that the usual MMO unwillingness to, you know, avoid getting shot at is mitigated by the fact that you’ve decided to take cover this time. I wasn’t sure how to use the Agent at first, but found that while in cover, your abilities in the hot bar change. I guess this is kind of like a stance change. A lot of the Agent’s abilities revolve around shooting and blowing things up,which is great fun. After I found the right ability rotation (a curse of MMOs, natch), I was gunning down and exploding targets really good-like. Thanks to Rift, I even stopped several times to lob grenades at mobs under fire by other players before running on my way. I‘m a real fucking nice guy like that.
Visualize…
I don’t really follow the greater Star Wars canon, so I’m not going to get all geeky over nods to the universe to be found in the game. I liked the visuals, though. I thought they were properly immersive. In the Hutt palace where you spend most of your time as an Agent, you often pass through the cantina which had the same kind of surreal music you hear in Star Wars cantina when Luke and Ben hire Han: it’s kinda goofy, but in an alien way, so you nod and say “OK. I can get on board with that”. And, Twi’lek pole-dancers.
Hutta is kind of a crappy place, with a lot of swamps, some slave labor, and a kind of shanty-town feel despite being high-tech. That’s one aspect of Star Wars that I do like: how high technology can exist in such a run-down and totally crappy configuration that implies that the people living there don’t care that they have hover-bikes. It’s old hat to them, and they just shrug it off.
Jedi Mind Tricks
So after a while, I found that I wanted to go back and play, partly because I felt obligated as a tester, but partly because the more I played, the further I progressed in the Agent’s beginner story arc. And I was enjoying that aspect. The voice-over is crucial to this. It is as you would expect if you’ve played Mass Effect or other BioWare conversation dial games. If that doesn’t light your fire, well…turn back now.
Sitting here now, writing this almost a week after the testing experience, I can say with certainty that the into to the Imperial Agent story arc will stay with me for a long, long time. There’s only a handful of quests from any RPG or MMO that I can say that about, so I consider that to be a special kind of litmus test in regards to the worth of a game for me. Without getting spoilery, I can say that being a total dickwad, purposefully picking the decisions to maximize the Dark Side points, lead to a very sharp contrast when the situations got serious, but it was the divide between being an asshole and the hard decisions – and sometimes regret of making a particular decision – that put a pin in the whole intro for me. I don’t have any official plans to play Sith in release, but if the opportunity arises, I am so going to be an Agent all over again…and will probably be as big of an asshole as I was the first time around.
Bonus Content (Extra Stuff On The DVD)
One thing that also added to the enjoyment was the attainment of my first minion. She rolls into the…role…naturally as part of the story, which I thought was smooth. She kicked butt, but wasn’t a deus ex machina or anything. I had a bit of a stumble trying to figure out how to give her gear and to manage her effectively at first. After I left Hutta, though, I was able to use the companion system to send her to sell my junk items, and, once I got her her companion skill (Underworld Connections) I sent her away on her first solo mission. It works like the pet in Torchlight, where they go away for a set amount of time that, in this case, varies based on the implied complexity of the task (and the expense of shipping them out, and the level of the reward). I like the idea that you can do these things with them while you’re just bumping around the quest hubs or waiting on other players to get their act together.
But if you strip out the conversation system, the story, the companions and some of the other fluff that BioWare has added, you have a basic, old school theme-park MMO. That’s pretty damning for some, and it was for me up until I became invested in the story. I really don’t want another wall of text MMO where I really only read the objectives and compare rewards and never consider what the narrative reason is behind my task. It’s kind of a “thing” that’s been missing from MMOs: a real mechanism that nails the unappreciated aspect of lore and story to the player’s forehead so that he can’t ignore it, or can’t just read the objectives before robotically plowing his way through to get the reward. I really started to care about what I was doing, and how it was affecting the story, and yeah, at some point I stopped being a dick and started earing Light Side points because there were characters I didn’t want to betray (the one that mattered the most to me was handled badly by me, and I still regret the decision I made to that end). If it weren’t for the stories, and the way that they’re executed, I would have backed out on my order by now.
So some people are going to love it. Some people will absolutely hate it because it doesn’t deviate enough from the themepark MMO design. Some people will be on the fence and will probably buy it and give it a shot for the free 30 days of play time (strangely, I just questioned whether there would be a free 30 days…don’t know why…) and will make their decision in that time. It’s a polarizing game, which is good and bad because regardless of how you personally feel, it is doing some things to move the ball down the field which can only mean a march of progress for the genre that hasn’t really progressed by leaps and bounds over the past few years. We had this kind of minor shift with Warhammer Online’s public groups, the introduction of LFG tools, and other features that we now take for granted. I do hope that future MMOs integrate deeper conversation mechanisms, because I think then they can start to really tell the stories that they’ve been trying to tell all these years, and make more people take note of them.
One burr in my bonnet, though: I realize that the Hutt are intergalactic gangsters, but was it really necessary to give some of their minions those stereotypical “wiseguy” accents? I felt the only thing missing were the gold chains, bad Hawaiian shirts, and copious chest-hair.
