Samuel_Tow

You know, when my mother and father were getting divorced, there was a time when my mother would yell at me for random things, when what she was really pissed off about was me not hating my father and yelling at him, while my father at the same time would intermittently get pissed off at me for supporting my mother in her coping with her grief by unloadin on him. I'll let bygones be bygones and say that this is not a nice position to be put in, and I'll ask anyone on both sides of the "barricade" to stop chastising each other and simply respect people's judgement and desires. The last thing we need is a "with me or against me" attitude.

So the OP is having fun in Guild Wars 2 and is man enough to admit this, rather than showing up to CoH rallies while Alt-Tabbing to GW2. I can respect that, and I'm happy he's found a way to deal with the problem, even if it's not a way that might agree with. As I've said many times, I don't feel the need to "punish" NCsoft or anyone who associates with them. My aim is to support the developers and the community, and finding other games they want to play or other jobs with NCsoft is what it takes, then I'll support them, because I respect the people.

Now, that doesn't mean we should all just jump ship and wash our hands, not in the slightest. There's still more we can do and more we can contribute. But I don't want to turn the forums into a hostile place where divergent thought is trolled. If people like Guild Wars 2, they shouldn't feel ostracised. If people like Lineage II or Aion, they shouldn't feel unwelcome. No-one has a "duty" to City of Heroes or Paragon Studios. We are all here by choice, because we want to do something about it or even just because we really liked the game. That, to me, is reason enough to be welcome. And being a welcoming, open community that was tolerant of others is something we're supposed to take pride in.

It helps no-one to lash out.

Feeding $1 to a machine and getting $2 is an obvious mechanical malfunction. But when you start talking about "crafting expensive items using cheap supplies," how is that an unambiguous exploit? Generally, you don't want to have your players constantly worries about doing "too well" because the rules of what's an exploit and what's good planning aren't defined. You can't just ban people when what they were doing was never outed as an exploit.

City of Heroes, I think, handled it best. When people started doing something unintended, the developers patched the game so it became impossible. The only time bans and repossessions were ever carried out was when the development team straight-up warned us what not to do, and people did it anyway. THAT is grounds for penalty action, but because someone found he could herd 100 wolves in a dumpster due to poor collision detection and lack of ranged attacks, and then nuke them all for fast profit? That's not grounds for banning, it's a player being smarter than the developers who designed the encounter and finding a way to run it in an unexpected way.

You don't offer people a broken game that offers hugely disproportionate profits with seemingly no oversight and then ban them when they can't resist. That's called "entrapment" and it's not a nice policy for a game studio to adhere to. If a certain game mechanic is problematic, then hot-patch it in, or at the very least warn people not to do it BEFORE you start handing out bans.

Bad analogy, partially. I'm aware of how the story ends, I just feel very true to the "I will not eat them on a boat, in a coat or with a goat!" part... Though that may have been an episode of Johnny Bravo I'm quoting. Basically, certain things I simply will not like regardless of how well they're presented because certain things I simply don't like.

To each his own. I rather enjoy platforming games, both 2D and 3D, provided they have decent controls and decent camera. I like the old Tomb Raider series for its, um... "Realistic?" climbing physics, and I like games like Gex: Enter the Geko for its more arcade-style jumping puzzles. I even enjoy some of the climbing challenges in Guild Wars 2, I just think more care could have been taken to make these more than just abusing collision detection.

This I agree with, and it's a pet peeve of mine not just for Guild Wars 2, but because it's becoming a general MMO trend. I don't like "shared" storage, at least not as a default option, because I like to see my various characters as different people who often have nothing to do with each other and sometimes even hate each other's guts. To me, this is the meta-game encroaching on my sense of immersion, because it's the idea that... Well, it's me - the player - crafting and baking and inventory-managing and I'm pulling MY resources together.

I don't like that. I prefer to see each of my characters as an individual person with his own "stuff" that he has to earn or find on his own. Sure, I don't mind sharing resources when I need them, I just don't want this to be the default stance. I HATED that Diablo 3 does this, with the chest being cross-character. It just ends up making me feel like a player in control of a "toon," rather than being immersed in the environment. That, along with:

Vendor trash... Those are things I really wish MMOs would move past already. They are too focused on the meta-game stuff that strips the player of his online identity and make-pretend story and reduces him to just that - a player. I, for one, play games as escapism, to get away from ordinary life and feel like someone I'm not, but when a game basically puts an elbow through the fourth wall and says "OK, now for your character to proceed, YOU have to do such and such," I'm just yanked out of the experience.

To me, it seems like MMOs often forget the other half of their genre name - RPG. Too much of what they do is busywork for the PLAYER that doesn't always make sense for the character to do, or when it does, it constitutes just busywork. I don't know if this is because "community" has such a high value in your typical MMO, but far too many of them ruin any sort of immersion or RP by revolving around the meta-game aspects of the experience.

That, actually, is also why I dislike "quests" in most MMOs - they rarely have any immersion or story significance. They're just meta-game tasks to keep people occupied, and they don't have to be. You CAN wrap stories around them, City of Heroes has proven this repeatedly. The simple task of putting a cape on your character got a three-part story to justify it, that drew on multiple source of long-term lore. To me, MMOs these days are focusing too much on mechanics and too little on presentation. I mean, think about it for a moment: You've watched Guild Wars 2 trailers. We all have. But what did they advertise?

*Realm vs. Realm PvP
*"Fight to survive" mechanics
*Weapons skills and weapon-switching
*Customizable classes
*Open-world missions

OK, that's all fine and good, but... What are we fighting for? Where does the game take place? What is the political system? What is the history of the region? All of these things ARE actually in the game, but you wouldn't know the developers even considered them because they don't show up in any of the trailers, at least not that I've seen. Guild Wars 2 has a good story from what I've seen. It's just a shame it was never marketed AS a good story, and the reason for this is it was marketed for being an MMO far more than it should have.

It's the old Crime Craft problem. "Our game has PvP and crafting and an auction house and loot and raids." Um, great, but what is your game ABOUT? "Err... PvP and crafting and an auction house and loot and raids." Yes, but is it fantasy or sci-fi or... "Does it matter? PvP and crafting and an auction house and loot and raids!" A game should be more than the sum of its systems. And though Guild Wars 2 IS more than that, you wouldn't know that from how it was promoted, and that's probably my least favourite side of the MMO market right now. It's all mechanics and no artistry, and when there IS artistry, it's set aside to talk about mechanics some more. If there's enough time, maybe we can talk about how pretty the forest looks.

Would that it applied to him asking me to come speak with him once when we first meet. Instead, he's like an impatient child. "Hey! Come speak with me! Hey! Hey! Come speak with me! Hey! I'm over here! Come speak with me! Hey! Listen! Hey! Listen!" For crap's sake, man! Shut up! I'm already speaking with you, I just need more than a nanosecond to read through your cheesy dialogue!

Well... That's actually very good news. These guys are doing logical things and implementing QOL changes on the fast track. Most development studios don't do that. Well, now that makes me even less gung-ho with the whole idea that ArenaNet are somehow guilty by association and must be tanked. These guys do good work. Even if I don't like their product, I can appreciate their eye for quality.

Someone described the game as I've heard the Queen Mary being compared to the Normandie: "evolutionary vs. revolutionary." When City of Heroes first launched, it was a pretty revolutionary game, with side-kicking, instances, and later global chat and so on. That's what made it a great game. Guild Wars 2 seems to me bore evolutionary, taking flawed designs and making them better, taking bad designs and making them good. That's what makes it a great game, as well, just in a different way.

For as much as people troll me about it, I don't hate Guild Wars 2. What I said - and what I stand by - is that it has nothing which interests me, because it's simply not the kind of game I want to play. That's not a dig against the game, it's a simple matter of preference and an explanation why I'm not buying the game despite not being gung-ho about the whole boycott thing.

I do, and for a few reasons. Rooting enforces a certain element of strategy and judgement on combat, because if you miss, the game asks you to commit more than just the cost of the attack. You waste time and opportunity, as well as leaving yourself vulnerable. Moreover, it means that attack animations can be better because they can involve the whole body, rather than just the torso. Champions tries to skirt around this by having your combat movement just be you sliding around in full-body attack animation, but that just looks bad. And I lost track of how many times I fired my guns sideways of where my character was pointing them.

A large reason for why I don't like Guild Wars 2 is I just don't like how combat looks. Attacks are fast and spastic and there's too much strafing around. Now, obviously, trading punches isn't realistic in terms of combat, but at least the animations themselves can look good. But seeing people circle-strafing while swinging swords just kickbans me out of my sense of immersion.

Tera, for instance, has combat rooting. On everything. Even firing a bow. Yes, it's more restrictive and slower-paced, but I actually like slow-paced battles that give me time to think. They let me time my blocks, plan my counter-attacks and, most importantly, they let me dodge out of the way of an attack and beat on an enemy as he's recovering from his animation.

To me, rooting combat just looks and feels better. I don't need ultimate bunny-hopping freedom, and I'm not a fan of fast-flying shooters like Unreal or Tribes. I prefer slower, more restrictive combat systems that don't rely fast, repetitive actions because it's both too fast for me to see and too fast for me to actually do it. Again, try World of Tanks and you'll see what I mean about "slow, plodding combat."

But yes, I like combat rooting, and highly dislike games that think removing it makes the game better. If you HAVE to have running attacks, go the route of Oni and have separate attacks for when you're running.

Black Talon is designed to teach you blocking, so everything he does takes a ton of damage off you. He's still way too tough for a tutorial enemy, I agree, but I don't think he has any attacks aside from his charge-ups. As far as I remember, he has three or four. There's that ground-targeted AoE that you're supposed to walk out of, there's the hold you're supposed to block, I think, and the missile swarm that does 3/4 of your health in damage if you don't block it. And he likes to fire the missile swarm immediately after the hold so you CAN'T block.

That, and Defender is crap about dealing with the reinforcements. My guess is they're what's killing you the majority of the time. That was my problem, at least.

I still wish you could use items directly from your storage when crafting, personally. Having to take them out just seems like an unnecessary intermediary step. Nevertheless, that's a very good system which I welcome heartily. One of my BIGGEST problem with inventory management nonsense busy work is... Well, the inventory management. I have to carry too much crafting crap if I want to craft, and it always clutters up my inventory. It's like the original Diablo having money occupy an inventory slot and limiting each stack to 5000. I ended up spraying money piles all over Tristram just so I had room in my backpack for the vendor trash I was picking up.

Guild Wars solves this problem entirely by more or less eliminating clutter from the ground up. Yes, gear still clutters up, that's to be expected. It's how gear-driven games are. But if I don't have to carry all the flowers and sticks of wood pig penises and whatever else random assortment of trinkets I need to craft with, then that's one BIG problem solved.

As I said, Guild Wars is innovative on the technical level, and quite a bit so. The only reason I have a problem with it is I wish it channelled its innovation towards reworking age-old MMO concepts entirely, rather than just giving them better support systems. Because, at the end of the day, that games is a very polished, very refined classic EverQuest style MMO. It has all the basics, they just work a lot better than they ever have. The trouble is that I just never liked the basics to begin with. It's a "green eggs and ham" thing - as appealing as you make them - and they are appealing - I still don't like green eggs and ham.

Mind you, I'm not saying other RPGs are "better." The only reason I like Tera over Guild Wars 2 is because I plain like the combat in Tera more, plus the animations are slower and more fluent. Plus, I like combat rooting and will always chafe at games that remove it. It makes things feel too "floaty." But the exact same problems I have with Guild Wars 2, I have with Tera ten-fold because it's still a Korean Grindfest MMO.

OK, time to bring up my stock response to this, it seems.

You weren't replying to me but I replied to your post. So? There's no rule that says I can only reply to people who are replying to me. I see someone who has said something which seems relevant to something else I want to say, so I quote it and go from there. If it feels like what I said didn't cover what you were trying to say, then it probably wasn't. Just because I quoted your post doesn't mean I was specifically replying to you. Unless I address you by name, I'm usually not talking to any person in particular. I'm making a point and using what people say as jumping-on point.

You've made it a point to insult me, repeatedly now, and for what? What do you gain out of this? I have no idea what you're even asking me. "Which game have you been talking about?" What? What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Could you please stop it with the personal attacks and actually address at least one of the points I'm making?

If you have problems with my arguments, address them, offer counter-arguments and I will politely indulge you in an argument. I can't promise I'll agree, but I can promise I'll explain why either way. This shouldn't be as hard as you're making it. If your problem is with me personally, then you can feel free to go to hell, because this is the last personal attack I'm going to respond to. If you can't police your own behaviour enough to behave, then I want nothing to do with you.

There's nothing at all wrong with third-person platformers. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a massively successful game pretty much on the strength of its climbing and jumping puzzles.

That said, I don't think Guild Wars used those puzzles in the best way. What I mean by this if that'll be a major part of the game - and it looks like it is - I'd have expected there to be special mechanics involved with it. At the very least, I'd have expected mantling of some sort. The completely repugnant Unreal 2 had it. Commander Keen had it. It just makes climbing and jumping puzzles a tad more forgiving and a tad less annoying.

Instead, what the game got was something a little too reminiscent of 90s FPS games. What I mean by this is... OK, a friend of mine was trying to climb a number of tall things, and every time he failed to find a way up, I'd quickly point to a thin ledge he could walk on, or a protruding rock he could step on, or any of the other number of things I picked up from games like Sin, the old Half-Life, the various Quake games and so on. Because your collision box is a BOX, you can stand on a ledge a micron wide, because any space is space enough for your collision box to technically stand "on." Sure, City of Heroes does have this to certain extent, but there are no jumping puzzles in the game built around that.

To me, platforming in Guild Wars 2 - and I tried a lot of it - is kind of like plaforming in Rune, in the sense that it works just fine and is perfectly serviceable, but seems to operate more on glitchy terrain and very stiff controls than actual climbing mechanics. It makes me feel I'm exploiting terrain and climbing over background details, rather than using an intended way to go up. It reminds me, in actual fact, of Half-Life and climbing walls with sticky mines. That was fun.

Not necessarily. Yes, that would be true if you were making an actual realistic survival game in the vein of Deus (in that game, I've died from infection, food poisoning, insomnia, cold and I forget what else), but that doesn't have to be the case. For instance, one of the "personal stories" I've written for one of my characters - the Steel Rook - has been a survival story. In this story, he ends up marooned on a cold alien planet with nothing but a broken suit of power armour that doesn't work and his "nano-forge," with which he can forage basic chemical elements and reconstruct them into new materials. And if you think that's random, I didn't come up with this idea. I stole it from Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising.

Why I bring this up is the story, as I told it, revolved around the Rook first surviving the cold and atmosphere, but then eventually building bases of operations staffed with automatons and eventually basically colonising the planet by himself. It was, technically speaking, a story of survival, but outside of the very beginning of it, it was not "realistic" survival. He didn't have to worry about food or water - those could be produced. Instead, he had to worry about about titanic predators, spectral apparitions, migrating giant insects, absolute zero temperatures and so forth. These were sci-fi challenges approached with sci-fi tools, but I still consider them to have taken place in the "wilderness" for my own two rules: He was trapped on that planet with NO way to return until he could build a MASSIVE inter-dimensional portal which consumed vast amounts of resources and power, and there were no other humans on the planet until the very end and the final portal opening.

Basically what I'm saying is you can have wilderness without necessarily turning it into an extreme survival game. As with MineCraft and the SWG examples, it's sufficient (to me) that basic mechanics can be achieved with the need for static NPCs for wilderness to "work."

I meant to comment on that, actually. MineCraft is a good example of both wilderness and of wilderness turned into a developed area. Believe it or not, I actually liked the game a LOT more when it wasn't much of an RPG, before we needed food and there were NPC villages and such. What I will praise MineCraft on is how it made me fear the night. During the day, it was all sunshine and butterflies as I was free to go outside and forage, but I'd lie if I said I didn't spend nights in a cold, dark cave having walled myself in with no torches left, praying for daylight. Similar to Castle Story, actually. It is, in fact, a lot like what I just described about the Steel Rook, just more... Blocky.

But at the same time, I have a problem with MineCraft, and it's a big one - the game has no point. It's not a "game" so much as it's a sandbox level editor and, surprise-surprise, I tend to play it in "creative" mode more than anything else. Because it's still a massive grind and it still anchors you down to a "town" of your own making if you want to construct anything bigger. Limited inventory and stationary constructions aid to that. To me, a game simply needs to have a point, or at least some system with which to create and track objectives without having to pretend they exist.

To me, a game in a similar vein that still had a point was The Settlers II - Veni, Vidi, Vici. I played that as a kid, and most of the time I played it without competition, just my settlers expanding their territory. You start out with a central building in an uninhabited land, and everything you do sprawls out from that building, but the game still ultimately has a point. The basic point was, regrettably, combat. The whole infrastructure is designed around either creating intermediate tools or good with which to mine and forge, or around the production of weapons, beer and gold with which to train and upgrade soldiers.

If we ever want to see an MMO that revolves around solitude in the wilderness, it has to have a point of some sort. That doesn't have to mean combat, but it should offer progress of some kind that people don't have to track on their own. It's why I suggested exploring a distant land for artefacts of a lost civilization in an attempt to piece its past together. An MMO like this wouldn't technically even need to be about combat at all. It could be all about, say, Prince of Persia style climbing, or solving puzzles, or beating mini-games, or building for stats and skills that revolve around solving problems other than combat.

The biggest thing to remember, though, is that while an MMO might be a sandbox, strictly speaking, it is also a game, and it's very important to remember this.

Oh, I'm not defending forced teaming at all. If I had a say, no game would ever REQUIRE you to team if you didn't want to, even if it has to resort to using bots ala Left 4 Dead. However, I've had this argument many times before, and it's one that cannot be "won." Some people are convinced it's not an MMO if it doesn't have forced teaming and some developers are convinced it's not a successful game unless force people in the same 3D space with all grace and dignity of trying to mate Chocobos. Basically, at this point, I simply accept it and try to work around it instead of trying to challenge it. I'd like nothing better than an MMO which can be played entirely by myself unless I go out of my way to look for company, but that's unlikely to happen.

You don't even have to give the player a linear path at all. Look at how City of Heroes does it - the game's lore (at least from 2004) is all interconnected, but the player isn't expected to run it in order. That's because the lore doesn't tell a "story," so much as it defines a setting, and every arc you run adds a chunk to the setting. Not the next chunk or the previous one, but A chunk somewhere across. There are "opportunities" dotted around the overworld, and the game encourages you to seek them out and capitalise on them.

At least, I want to see MMOs break from their rigid system of static supply lines. Yes, practical hubs also develop into social hubs since people are there on business anyway, but to me the right approach is "global communication" rather than meeting spots. Both City of Heroes and Champions Online did it well by moving the bulk of social mingling to global channels where players can "hang out" and chat, such that the game doesn't need to squeeze people through social hubs in order to force it. If you want to be sociable, the channel is a mouse click away, but if you don't want to be, you're not forced into a crowded area to jostle other people.

That's a double benefit, as well, because global chatting is "out of character," generally speaking, so having global chat in a game about solitude would not - at least not to me personally - ruin the atmosphere. Sure, you'd have people chatting constantly but you can always silence that, and it's not too unlike leaving the TV to blare on in the background - it's not part of the "game" game, so it doesn't matter.

I actually think that moving away from the need for people to run across each other physically will do MMOs good. I know there's a need to have people "meet" in at least some way, but migrating this to omni-present, out-of-continuity player-to-player chat frees up gameplay to experiment with themes of solitude, entrapment and distance. So what if you can't make it to Coruscant? If you can still meet people over chat and they can "teleport" to your location temporarily, then isn't this just as good? You still have a way to "mingle," but at the same time actually meeting people in person becomes meaningful, as well, because... It's a rare event. You keep hearing other people, but if you rarely see them, it matters.

I remember that one time I met that one other person in the Shard. We didn't say much to each other, other than to express surprise that another person was even there, but the encounter was much more remarkable than all the deadbeat heroes I'd passed in the streets on my way to the FBZ portal. When encounters are rare, they begin to matter and, to me at least, they begin to set the stage for social interaction. When an encounter is special, the least you can do is say hi, which nobody does when you pass another player in a crowded city.

To be fair, for as big as the zone is, that's not as big of a problem. Prior to Afterburner, fly was so slow that I just never felt it to be a good way to travel around the shard. The distances are just too large. Consider that neither Jumping nor Speed work there, either, and you are kind of "on foot" even with travel powers. But I do agree. Back in the day when I was suggesting "travel missions," I suggested disabling travel powers and asking people to visit several waypoints scattered across a huge map. To me and, from what I can gather - to you, the problem comes down to the fact that if you can fly over terrain obstacles and enemies, then the "trip" doesn't really matter. A journey through the wilderness is only ever meaningful if you're forced to interact with said wilderness. If you're not, then it's just an interchangeable backdrop because... Does it really matter what it is that you fly over?

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On SWG: I didn't know who to quote on saying what, so let me share some basic thoughts.

I like what's being described so far. I like the idea of player-made cities and I like the idea of vast, spanning wilderness, with self-sufficient characters who can take their supply infrastructure with them and go backpacking. That's more or less exactly what I meant, and thank you for sharing. I wish more MMOs did this, and not just for some characters who took some perks, but foe everyone. I honestly want to see an MMO where player characters are not tied down to static resources of any kind. I imagine it would have a much different, much more liberating atmosphere.

Well, the same reason we don't call train station or road tunnels "portals" even though that's what they are. The Shadow Shard has quite an expansive range of lore, and the Horta vines are part of it. Rumour has it that these aren't just invisible portals, but rather that there is a single, huge Horta plant that grows in extra-dimensional space.

Now, granted, the lore of the Shard is very badly delivered, meaning you basically have to hunt down tidbits on Wikis and what developers have said and deleted scenes and such. But bad presentation doesn't mean the story itself is bad. In fact, that's one of my biggest question about the upcoming developer info-dump - I'd like to know more about the Shard. What is the Horta vine? What is the Kora fruit and why do the Soldiers of Rularuu keep guarding and gathering it if they don't eat it? What's at the bottom of the world? Why are the "Citizens of Paragon" and why do they call themselves that if they're native to the Shard? Was the world whole before Lanaru's madness broke it? That sort of thing.

Now, if you just plain don't care, that's fine. But the zone has potential to be a lot more interesting than it is.

Do you mean as a visual effect? Because that would be awesome, and would keenly solve any and all desire I have for energy punches. Let me be more specific: Can I pick something from Fire that will make, say, my Might punches have a fire effect on them?

I actually wanted to expand on my previous post on my way home from work, and this is the perfect "hook" for it, as you're referring to what I wanted to talk about.

I think a lot of my problem isn't with the scope of options presented, so much as what the game makes of our choices. Game designers all too often make a very basic mistake in assumption that I see repeated on online forums the world over: "You did this, therefore you must feel that." When a game gives you a choice, it tries to assume WHY you made that choice based on what your choice was, and this is a really bad armchair psychology approach to a problem which doesn't need to be as complicated.

The large number of beggars on my way home provides me with an apt example. Say your character runs across a beggar cross-legged on the ground who looks up and says "Please, spare a penny for a poor soul!" The game gives you the following three options:

1. Give a penny to the poor soul.
2. Ignore him and keep walking.
3. Kick the beggar.

For the sake of simplicity, let's say that option 2 is "neutral" and has no consequences. Options 1 and 3, however, do. A BAD way to go about this would be to assume that "1. The player chose to help so the character must be a good guy" and "3. The player chose to be a dick, so the character must be evil." Let's see, what did Lex Luthor have to say on the subject... WROOONG! That's now what you should assume about the character, because that's a massive leap of logic. But if that's not it, then what CAN we assume? Well...

You assume nothing more than what happened. If the player picked option 1, than all you can assume about the player is he helped a beggar. That's it. If you want to have that option mean something later, you don't assume that the player is kind and gentle and would do it again. Instead, have the beggar show up, all nice and tidy and say something like "You were the only person who stopped by that day and your money helped me buy food to survive. Now I'm back on my feet and I want to repay the favour!" You don't know why the character did it, but you don't build on why the character did. You don't build on the WHY, you build on the WHAT. Or say the player picked option 3. Then have someone show up and attack the player, saying: "Hey, you're the one who kicked my friend! He had a broken rib and you put him in a hospital! Now I'll put you in the morgue!" Again, we don't know why, and we don't care why. We know what happened and we work off of that.

It's bad writing to assume motivation based on reverse-analysing actions, and it really isn't needed. Consider real life, for example. When you do something good or something bad, it doesn't change who you are. The only thing which changes is what people know you for. You could be known as the guy who helps the poor, or you could be known as the bigot who hates beggars. That doesn't mean you ARE a bigot or a saint, it just means that that's how people know you, and people will react based on what they know. That's why I don't like being asked to choose what my character wants when the game is asking loaded questions in an attempt to guesstimate who my character is. That's why it's considerably better to ask me for choices on what to DO and then saddle me with consequences for my actions, not with alignment for my personality.

I can think of no better example than the Dean/Leonard arc (notice how often that one comes up?) when you're asked to save your clone. The game doesn't ask you how you feel about it, it just gives you an option - save the clone, kill it or leave it to die. If you save the clone, the game doesn't assume you're turning over a new leaf and it doesn't assume you're just protecting your assets. No, if you chose to save the clone, it shows up to ASK you why you did it. And even then, your choices are ambiguous. You can say you did it to be nice, you can say you did it for no reason, or you can say you did it because you need a minion. And even THEN, the clone asks "Are you sure?" and you can change your mind. To me this is just brilliant.

Say you saved the clone to serve you but you're not a total dick. When you tell the clone that you expect loyalty, it tells you that, no, that won't happen and you'll have to kill it. You are then given the option of being a TOTAL dick and killing it, or backing up and saying that, OK, you can go. So you're only half-dick, in that you're not a nice guy, but you wouldn't kill the clone just to prove a point. Or it doesn't even have to mean that. Maybe you didn't want a fight, maybe you were scared, maybe you had a change of heart, or maybe you have an evil plan. The point is, the game gives you options to act, and the has the world react to your actions, but at no point in the exchange does it try to assume WHY you made the choices you did.

The whole reason I bring this up is that this framework gives a lot more freedom than the "personal story" one, because it allows you to pick the action that best fits your character and then back-fill the motivation on your own. Why did Cedric save the clone, but then kill it later? Well, the game doesn't say, but I know Cedric best of all (I created him) and he's fiercely authoritarian. He would save the clone because the clone cost time and money to produce. It's an asset. But Cedric does not tolerate disobedience. When the clone questions his order, he has broken the law, and is now dead in the eyes of Lord Cedric. He has to be punished for his disobedience.

But all of that is just fluff writing I put into the story, because the game mechanics left a huge blank spot for me to fill in. They told me what happened, but because they didn't tell me WHY it happen, I was put into a position to rationalise and justify the actions. That, to me, is what choice in a game should be. Ask me to act, but don't tell me why I acted.

Nuclear Toast had something quite interesting to say on a similar subject. I complained that I don't like Fantasy RPGs which define my race for me when I'd rather define it on my own, and his reasoning was: "Well, some people like the game defining their race for them so they fit in the world better." That's true, and it's also relevant. I don't like the cutscenes because they're character-railroading to my sensibilities, but I'm not trying to say people who like being able to partially influence an otherwise linear story (say, like in Mass Effect) are somehow wrong and should be ashamed of myself. It's limiting, and quite so, but not everyone shoots for maximum customization. As I said, Guild Wars 2 just isn't for me, so what made it from the prequel to the sequel is probably what the fans liked. It's just not something that'll win me over as a fan.

What you described is some of the game's worst hack writing, and something I've been complaining about for eight years, just about. As it was originally written, City of Heroes was a CATASTROPHE. It assumed all we ever wanted was to be someone's hired goons, that we're psychotic, immoral and malicious and so on and so forth. There are so many instances of "you think," "you feel" and "you want" in those early mission texts it makes the prickles on the back of my neck stand up. And unlike my villain Tyler, I actually HAVE prickles on my neck. And hair to slick back. And knuckles that crack. Newer writing, though, is so much better...

...OK, it's not better at all. It's just as bad, but in different ways. Conversations are another thing I've criticised fiercely, because I honestly hate how they were done. I have never felt dumber than running through Dr. Graves' arc, and having to go through dialogue that makes me act like a valley girl running on paint fumes and laughing gas. Good GOD that's bad! I have argued, and repeatedly, that dialogues follow the Avatar's pattern of name/job/bye, by which I mean that dialogue options be descriptive in what I said, but don't include the specific wording of HOW I said it. If, for instance, I need to agree to help a person with a mission, my dialogue option should simply say "Agree to help." not "Golly-gosh, Mr. Crimso! I reckon y'all got my help!" Both may say the same thing, but one is MUCH more generally-applicable than the other.

And no, I haven't gotten used to the many, MANY writing flubs in City of Heroes. Part of my apology to Positron and crew was for how harsh I have been in criticising the game's writing, but even so I still hold that writing in our game was far too specific. I'm by far not saying that City of Heroes as a whole is an example of how open-ended characters should be accommodated. It's not - it's terrible in places, in fact. But what I AM saying is that certain instances of City of Heroes show a very good way to do this that I wish other games would embrace.

See, this I can't argue with, not with the heart of your argument. The reason I put "people" in quotes is because I know none of us can speak for all people. I just meant to say that voice overs and cutscenes themselves aren't the one-stop-shot solution to immersion, and very often what people want out of a game isn't for the game to cater to them, but rather for the game to not EXCLUDE them. This is a very important distinction to make.

Historically, one of the things I've been accused of the most is wanting the game to be written to suit my own stories and then being told it's impossible. That's not the point, nor was it ever. The game CAN'T cater to everybody. That's a scientific fact. It can try to cater to as many as possible by making either broadly-defined stories or including multiple choices, but it can never please everyone. That's why I feel the games need to stop trying to "cater" to people and simply leave character interpretation open for players to fill in the blanks.

More specifically - don't ask me to choose what I did when I got drunk and let me choose between losing a fight, passing out or losing an heirloom. Just don't bring it up. I know you then can't tell a story about it, but that's fine. I can tell that story, myself. You just need to give me the tools. Because if you try to define a story rigidly, then you're not really passing me through character CREATION, you're passing me through character SELECTION, and I really don't like any of the options. What if I wanted to play a Norn runt who has an inferiority complex and is really sensitive about his weight? What if I wanted to play an Asura bruiser who don't care 'bout them sciences and just wants to break with tradition and be a bounty hunter?

Who would do that? Well, I have a character like that - Leningrad. He started life as a high elf, living in a society of high culture, high society and high eyebrows, but he was dissatisfied with it. He was not high-born, so he could never attain a rank, and thus the man turned to more socialist ideas, trying to earn rights for the lower classes in a society with rigid hierarchy, shunning magic in favour of engineering and so on. Eventually, he left his society by building a time/space machine and translocating himself to the Soviet Union circa 1944. There, his socialist ideals found fertile ground, and even after the demise of communism, Leningrad still searches for a way to bring forth communist ideology without falling into the trap of a totalitarian society.

That's not what an elf does or how an elf behaves, and that's WHY I like the idea. Bit if a game had exactly three paths to choose per side, do you honestly think "communism" would be one of the paths elves get? That sort of thing. When I'm free to fill in the blanks, I can let my imagination go and make the ludicrous seem plausible. When I'm constraint to choices, I pick the ones I hate the least and never replay.

A Horta Vine is some kind of mysterious energy plant that provides the "manual" form of transportation around the shard. You enter in one end and show up on another end in another zone. It's how you chase the Rulu-Shin in SSA2, those transparent funnels.

This reminds me of something else - I've always wanted to see "travel" missions. I don't mean "go talk to" missions, I mean literally travelling from one place to another, over long distances. Consider most adventure cartoons and what their central plot tends to be - get to some place. Hell, the bulk of Avatar: The Last Airbender saw the protagonists camping outdoors, foraging for food and basically travelling.

One things I think contemporary MMOs have kind of killed is travelling as an aspect of adventure. With fast travel powers, small zones and instant gratification, we've turned the act of getting to places into a chore that we only want to make take less and less time. But consider, for instance, deciding to drive from Los Angelis to New York. That's not so much "travel" as it's a road trip, because it's a big, long undertaking. Sure, it's not quite taking you through the wilderness, but it's an instance where the trip itself is the activity, rather than the barrier before the activity. I feel MMOs can benefit from this.

Technically, shurikens aren't part of Claws specifically. They're a "shared" power that gets unlocked by any Martial Arts power from any of the subsets. That's quite ingenious, actually. It's like if, say, I could unlock Golden Dragonfly if I took enough powers from Martial Arts and Street Justice. It removes the need to have, say, a zillion versions of Build Up like we have here, since powers can be shared between sets.

In fact, from what I've seen, there are about as many shared powers in Martial Arts as there are specific ones.

You have to consider one other thing - City of Heroes has "trained" us what to expect, but what it has trained us to expect isn't always a good idea. Like you, I too started out wanting energy melee powersets... But then I remembered WHY I started using Energy Melee to begin with - because I wanted an energy-using character who wasn't squishy. That's why my Princess Inna is Energy/Will, a reroll from an Energy/Energy Blaster. Champions' considerably different system is kind of helping me think outside the box, and the more I think about it... The more I realise that elemental and energy melee sets don't make sense TO ME. Hear me out.

For years, I complained how "punching with darkness" is goofy when you stop to think about it, yet I kept doing it because... What else was I gonna' do? But if I had options? Well, Inna wouldn't be punching with energy, because that's not how I envisioned her back in 2007 when I first made her. She'd be shooting energy and be very hard to kill. When you start being able to mix ranged sets with defences, the "glowing fists" powersets start to lose their appeal, at least to me. And I can always pick punching attacks from other sets to make do. The fists won't glow, but they'll still be punching attacks.

Probably both. I don't have a lot of work to do at my job right now (hence the posting), but I have 15 people having a loud conversation behind me my thoughts aren't coming across very well Allow me to try and clarify by going off what you've said.

You're right, such environments can exist in an MMO, but what I meant is slightly sideways of "exist." I mean that most MMOs don't build to capitalise on this. The way the infrastructure of... Every MMO I've ever seen is constructed ties people down to specific locations in the environment - usually cities but not always - and this both creates pockets of "civilization" and public gathering spots. You can, as I used to do, just stray from the path and look for those wilderness locations. The experience is usually very rewarding to the kind of person who'd seek it out, but it goes against the intended design of the game.

As you yourself admit, going on your treks was fun, but ultimately pointless from a game progression perspective. When I asked if wilderness could exist in an MMO, I meant to ask if it can exist in such a way as it's part of the game. Can an MMO really exist where that's at least one possible path of progression?

To a large extent, that's how I see the City of Heroes Incarnate game, bizarrely enough. My inventory has no limit on Incarnate salvage and components and any "crafting" I do is done through a menu which I can access at any time. It really gives me the feeling of a self-sufficient, independent character because an Incarnate is really not tied down to any one place. As the source of great power, the Incarnate himself is his entire support structure. It helps create a sense of not just independence but also freedom. I don't NEED NPCs to help me and supply me, and if you warped me to an alternate dimension Earth with no human civilization on it, I could still survive, progress and thrive. That's the kind of gameplay which seems... Missing from most MMOs.

Maybe for a reason? I know a lot of older MMOs were deathly afraid of making people "independent" because they were supposed to team, so all characters were handicapped to need others. I mean, why would people team if they weren't FORCED to? I think it's partly this logic and partly the classic D&D design that makes people dependent on others. It's intended to create a faux society where specialists can exists, plying their trade and supplying other specialists, while being supplied by others still. It's how a SWG non-combat crafter can exist, for instance - he'd buy stuff from fighters and sell to them.

That actually is a good question: How would a "wilderness survival" game look and work? I don't think we'd need to toss out all the basics and start from scratch. I still think we can work with "quests" and the other standbys, but we'd have to consider how they work and what they represent. You couldn't get quests from NPCs, obviously, but I also wouldn't want to get quests from specific locations, either. In the spirit of making players independent, why not make those quests player-given, as well? A simple quest would be "I'm hungry. I should kill a board, build a fire, cook the meat and eat it!"

That's rather simplistic, though. In the "story" sense of quest, I have to wonder how that would work. Most games and movies which take place in the wilderness either have framing plots that exist outside of the actual survival, or otherwise they lack plots and just deal with the theme of survival itself, such as Cast Away. How can you create a plot in a game with ostensibly no other people around? Mostly, what we consider a "story" requires characters to drive it beyond just the protagonist, so what to do...

Well, my first instinct is to crib from The Neverhood which, despite being a comedy game, still depicted a world with nobody in it and worked on a relatively quiet atmosphere of trying to figure out what left the world in the state it's in. If we wanted drama and action, though, another game we could crib from would be Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason. In the very broadest of terms, this is a game about exploring a derelict, frozen Russian icebreaker near the North Pole while replaying the last few minutes of life of various crew members. So, a game like this could take the approach of being stuck in a strange environment which seems to have a LOT of history, but which is currently inert and derelict, and then task the player to find and replay certain historic moments in an effort to piece the past together.

This could even prove a decent duality between basic survival and more fantastical combat. You could have the "real" world be all about survival and puzzle-solving without any real combat since... There'd be nothing left to fight. You could then give the player a "virtual" combat persona to use for whatever the framing device is for reliving past events. I'd imagine it being something akin to Gex: Enter the Geko

But I think all of this is just random contemplation, as I don't think the BIGGEST problem can be solved. MMOs are social games, and releasing lots of people to run around a persistent world and trip over each other would ruin the sense of solitude and discovery. That's actually one problem I have with Guild Wars 2 - there are too many people running around, giving me the sense of being just a face in the crowd. I suppose you could just log everyone in a random place along a huge world after character creation That might be fun - make finding people a question of looking for them physically, rather than logging into a crowded public space. Or I guess we can make this fully instanced.

I guess [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_%282012_video_game%29] has a pretty good approach to this. I haven't played the game as it's a PS3 exclusive and I don't own one, but I have heard quite a bit about it. As I understand, "multiplayer" is seamless, in the sense that people can randomly pop up in each other's games, and then choose whether they want to interact or ignore each other. As I understand it, there's also no chat system, just a series of song notes that people can choose how to interpret. It represents a kind of interesting cooperation that's still very social, but in a way that's different from contemporary "socialisation."

But the actual problem is that... Well, MMOs are built on community. You need chatting and teaming and raids, you need a player-run economy, you need that interaction to be rammed down people's throats because because. I may not like it, but I'm apparently the only one. I really don't foresee a game like this working as an MMO, because such an MMO cannot have an economy, it cannot have team-only instances and it probably won't develop much of a community - that would work against the atmosphere.

I don't know, just sharing my thoughts as they come up.

This is actually a good example. I haven't played SWG, so could you possibly share some more information on the subject? Stories, explanations, anecdotes, anything you have to give more context to the situation to an outsider looking in would be appreciated.

No, you can't. You're simply blinded by your bias against me. Look at what I quoted. "I'm sure someone will post to say..." So I posted and said. I could have just made it a joke post by saying "I'm not interested in PvP" and left it at that, but I enjoy making even my joke posts have meaning. Please look up from your myopia for a moment and understand that I have nothing against Guild Wars 2 as a game, beyond that it's not my thing. If you can't discuss MMO concepts without taking it as an attack to the game, then please just stop responding to me. Mudslinging putdowns are unproductive because... What, exactly, do you think you're achieving by continually accusing me of whatever is convenient to you at the time? If you feel like you're never going to agree with what I'm saying, then simply start ignoring me. Because if you keep doing this, I'll ignore you, as what you're doing is completely pointless and goes nowhere every time. I try to argue MMO mechanics, you try to argue me. Pointless.

And what does "insulting the title" mean? The title of what? What insults are you even talking about? Can you quote me where I "injected insults?" What are you even talking about? Why must you turn a discussion into a personal vendetta against me?

You can actually change this, I believe. There ought to be a "neutral" and a "heroic" stance as alternatives to the horrid, grating "vixen" stance.