DRMless is Worth More

I usually don’t play old games. I admit that I ‘m a shallow gamer. Once I know there’s a better looking version of a game out, I just don’t enjoy playing the old one as much, even when the I prefer the style/mechanics of an older version.

As a result, I’ve never bought anything from Good Old Games until this week. I preordered Witcher 2 through GOG.com, even though I bought the original Witcher through Steam. I was planning to get the sequel through Steam when it went on sale eventually, but then I read that it wasn’t going to have any DRM on it through GOG. To me, that’s worth paying full price and not waiting on some crazy Steam sale.

Now I just need to actually finish the first one.

Duty Roster Sneak Peek

Cryptic developer Heretic posted a sneak peek of the work-in-progress Duty Officer interface today on the forums today.

Obviously the interface could still change quite a bit before Season 4 launches, but it does give you an idea of how Duty Officers fit into the game mechanics. There are limited positions to fill within each department, and each officer assigned adds certain passive bonuses. The traits, shown as icons in the list and detailed on the personnel file, are new to me. I wonder if those are intended as flavor text or possible have something to do with what kinds of missions you can send them on.

Season 4 looks like it’ll be amazing, since not only will I have another subsystem to play with in the game, but there’s a (much needed) revamp to ground combat, and some really cool new environments coming based on images Dan Stahl has been tweeting.

Vistas of Telara: Droughtlands

I didn’t start doing panoramic screenshots until after I’d finished questing in the Droughtlands. A story quest I was following sent me back to Harlan’s Lament, though and I took the opportunity to get a nice shot of Lantern Hook and Shimmersand’s Flatyard.

(click on the image for a full-size version)

Grab Bag

Today was an oddly busy news day for a Friday.

Champions Online

I’ve been wondering for weeks now if Poz was still running the Champions Team over at Cryptic. He hadn’t posted on the forums in weeks and the level of communication from the team had really deteriorated. So, I wasn’t surprised by this announcement that Poz hitting the pause button. The thing that’s odd about the news is it’s half written like Poz is on vacation and half like he’s left the company. Rob Overmeyer is taking over, which is also not a surprise since he did the excellent follow-up Ask Cryptic for April.

Besides the (possibly temporary) change in management, Cryptic also posted a new Costumes and Concepts page. The Champions team is going to use this page to give players a peak at upcoming costume designs and get feedback. I really like this idea and hope they keep it up to date. Costumes are a major part of the superhero genre, and the more Cryptic can add to the game the better. Plus. it opens more lines of communication between the development team and the players, and I’m all for increased communication.

Star Trek Online

The other half of Cryptic’s been busy too.

The Breen Featured Episode rerun is underway and offers players who missed out the first time a chance to get the Breen Bridge Officer. The team’s also added a new equipment set, so player’s who’ve already been through the FE have some incentive to go back. I really like the idea of reruns while we’re waiting on Season 4 to come out, of course I’d like new FE’s better but this will help pass the time a bit.

Besides the reruns, Cryptic released a massive Ask Cryptic for May. Fifty good questions and nice detailed answers by Executive Producer Dan Stahl. Here’s some of the highlights, although you should still go read it yourself:

  • Some big new Borg-related coming, including a revamp similar to what the Romulans got.
  • Rare particle traces are getting their own icons. I know this sounds minor, but when I return to Spacedock and I have a row of rare traces in my inventory, it is so slow to hover over each to figure out which one stacks where.
  • Season 5 will focus on End Game and Fleets.
  • Featured Episode series 4 doesn’t have a release date yet. Stahl is talking like they want to make sure they’re setup for a consistent FE schedule with two weeks between each before series 4 comes out.
  • Despite the possible delay in FE4, Dan said, “The next”content release may not be a feature episode, but something bigger.” So maybe we’ll may see some type of expansion similar to the Season 2: Ancient Enemies?

One other thing I wanted to mention. It feels like the team has a big content change coming related to the Borg. Stahl mentioned that they were getting a graphical and mechanic overall like the Romulans got in FE3. He also mentioned that the Undine would be back but not before the Borg “make their move” which he hinted could happen before FE4. Lastly, Stahl answered a question about the Gorn Rebellion by mentioning it depends on whether or not their homeworld get’s assimilated.

I also feel like I should mention that Cryptic announced the winning design for the Enterprise-F. Apparently there was some voting done by the community a while back and the fan-favorite isn’t even on the Runners Up list. This of course has resulted in a fifty (when I wrote this) page thread full of nerd rage, trolling, and pleas for sanity. I don’t recommend reading them, except to check out Stahl’s follow up posts here, here, and here. Personally, I like the winning design more than the one some of the community is upset about.

Rift

Finally, I wanted to highlight a post on the forums by Producer Scott Hartsman regarding character names on RP servers. I generally don’t look at the Rift forums outside of the dev tracker, so I’m not informed at all on the “excitement” Scott’s referring to. I’m inferring from his post though, that there’s been some kind of drama over character names. Which doesn’t surprise me much. Were the server not marked as RP in the launcher, I’d have no idea based on the high number of immersion jarring character names I see running around. I try to keep an open mind about it, but I’m pleased to see Trion talking about clarifying what the naming policy is on RP servers. I’ll be even more pleased (and a little shocked) if they’re enforced.

I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This

So I was reading through my RSS feeds yesterday and caught this bit from Destructoid which reported that Mass Effect 3 was delayed until Q1 2012. I wasn’t happy about it but I figured if Bioware needs more time to make a quality game, then I’d just have to show some patience. Then I ran across this Gamasutra article which went into some more detail behind the delay.

“This franchise is a personal favorite of mine,” said EA CEO John Riccitiello of the BioWare-developed conclusion to the epic sci-fi trilogy.

“One of the things the team up at Edmonton has done is…essentially adjust some of the gameplay mechanics and some of the features, which you’ll see at E3, that can…essentially address a far larger market opportunity [than Mass Effect 1 or2].”

According to EA’s Frank Gibeau, the now-delayed game’s E3 presence will reveal “some feature innovation and some new ways to play.”

Nothing about that sounds good to me. It sounds like EA is getting a bit more hands-on with the franchise and I don’t expect that to turn out well. Hopefully, I’m blowing this out of proportion. If so, I’ll be very happy about being wrong.

Star Wars Day

Today is Star Wars Day (think about the date).

Regardless of my love for the Mass Effect universe, Star Trek, or the ‘Verse of Firefly, Star Wars will always have a special place in my heart. Watching Star Wars on television in the early 80’s is the earliest memory I have of experiencing science-fiction in any medium.

Despite all of the stuff that’s happened with the franchise over the years, and by that I mean I’ve purged from my memory anything that happened in theaters after 1983, to me it’s the original 1977 movie poster that is the iconic symbol for the series.

May the Force be with you, and go check out some of the fun with wordplay on Twitter today.

Alting

While I haven’t given up on finishing all of the story quests with my Mage, Kae, I did need to take a break since I’ve gotten into a part that requires high-end gear which I don’t have yet and I was starting to feel a little bored with logging in to do dailies and then look around for dungeon instances. So I decided to work on my stable of alts.

Once I got all three out of the starter instance, I then went back and started working on getting each one to twenty. For right now, at least, I’m trying to keep all three within a few levels of one another. This is partly so I can keep all of the content straight and partly so I don’t pick a favorite and let the others languish.

Rotating through three different Callings is interesting, especially since I have two roles setup on the Rogue, so it’s more like playing four different classes. The Rogue seems to chew through content much faster, followed by the Cleric and then the Warrior. Still, the Warrior is a lot of fun to play, the sound effects when swinging a two-handed hammer are very satisfying.

Right now, playing alts is keeping me motivated to login every night and keeping the game fun. I would like to get all three to 50, but I’m not quite ready to make that a goal. I’ve never level capped more than one character in a game, because I’m usually so attached to my main that I don’t spend the time on alts. While I still consider Kae my main, I’m not sure that I’m as attached to him as I am my main’s in other games. Maybe it’s the role/soul system? Since I can switch the style of play at the touch of a button, there’s a part of the character’s identity that’s more fluid in Rift than it is in other games.

Unlike GC, I’m looking forward to getting my alts into Stonefield. Freemarch is nice but I find it a bit bland as far as the landscape goes.

Weekend-ended

Like most every weekend this last one was too short. Friday after work I had great plans for taking advantage of the double reward weekend in STO to get my tactical and engineering alts promoted and finally start checking out some of the user-made missions that I’ve been hearing good things about. I was also going to fire up the Xbox and play through the last piece of Mass Effect DLC, spend some time on my alts in Rift, and buy/download Portal 2.

Instead, I did yard work because Saturday was the first day that it didn’t rain heavily in a week. After mowing, weeding, two trips to Home Depot, and fixing some landscaping in the front yard, I really wasn’t up to playing much on Saturday night.

Sunday, I was able to get in a couple of hours on Rift and a bit of work on a building project in Minecraft, so the weekend wasn’t a total loss, but it wasn’t quite a productive gaming-wise as I’d hoped.

There’s always next weekend, right?

I Don’t Understand

After doing a few dailies with my Mage, I decided to take a break from level 50 and switch to my Cleric alt, Kaeji. He was only level 8 and fresh out of the time machine from the desolate future.

While I was running about in Freemarch, I noticed a conversation going on in zone chat. Someone was asking what RP stood for, and that led into some talk about whether or not it was polite to RP outside of private channels. Keep in mind, this is on Faeblight which is a PvE RP server. Let me repeat that: an RP server.

I don’t roll on a PvP server and complain about ganking. That’s kind of the point of rolling on that server type. Why oh why do people roll characters on RP servers (of which there aren’t many) and then complain about RP happening in public channels?

Of course the fellow who was asking about RP obviously didn’t know what he was getting into. But one of the other people who chimed in referred to public RP as exhibitionism, and he seemed to know enough about MMO’s to know better than to role on an RP server and not expect to see some. Why he decided to make his home on Faeblight, I’ll never understand.

Serendipity and Otomata

Some days I loathe the internet and some days I love it. Today I am in love.

I’d intended to post about my weekend in Rift and catch you all up on my Mage’s life after 50 and my Rogue, Warrior, and Cleric alts (well I’d already rolled them and since they all had River of Souls goodies bags waiting the the mail…). That will have to wait until tomorrow though, because I ran across something cool I wanted to share.

I was catching up on my RSS feeds before writing this evening’s post and saw a mention of something called Otomata in today’s Real Life comic. Batuhan Bozkurt described his work as “a generative sequencer that uses cellular automation logic to generate sound events”.

I’m enough of a programmer to think that’s pretty cool but only half understand what he’s talking about. Regardless, it’s very cool and entertaining as well as impressive how musical even the most random starting states are. If you come up with any cool pieces leave me a link in the comments. Here’s a simple one I did.