The same kind of thing happened with First Person Shooters. Once Doom was released, every gun-first 3D game was called a “Doom Clone” right up until Halflife proved that you could do a “Doom Clone” – on the Doom Engine, even (Well, Quake 2) and still be an entirely different game.

So, The Secret World, then.

I’ve preordered TSW. I’m buying it either way, and part of the reward for buying it either way is an automatic invite into the open Beta weekends. In noted contrast to every other Open Beta event I’ve ever been in, the number of server issues I have encountered right now has been Zero. The number of client bugs has been Almost Zero, and everything that’s not been there has been due to being Not Finished or Not Unlocked for the beta. That starts at Chargen. As a limitation of the beta you can only start with the Templars in London, and the character creation options are limited. I’m dearly hoping that extends beyond the clothes and hairstyles and into the fact that there is only two body-types available, male or female. So, I put together my first character named, as is traditional, Calique, and entered the world:

Happy, isn’t she?

Anyway, with that I run though the intro sequence, in which I know a young lady who swallows a fly. I don’t know why she swallows a fly, perhaps she’ll generate magical powers that almost destroy her but she eventually overcomes. The sequence – in game, with you avatar, is actually Good, for all it’s a non-interactive cut-scene. Your character does not go “Aha! I am a hero, I shall change the world!” she’s recruited. There are lots of you, you are part of an army. And then you’re sent to London to begin your training.

London… looks like London. It’s a bit grimy, a bit of a maze, redbrick against Victorian grandeur. To the point where it’s almost a London theme park, it looks Right. The hub has pubs, parks, markets and lots of strange people, and the quest-line that takes you up to the Templars fills in back-story and lore, more so if you wander off the beaten path for a while. Part of this involves a flashback/altworld interactive cutscene which presents you with a combat scenario to introduce to to how a mid-range character feels, and how the combat works.

Combat Wombat

Combat is open-weapon limit-selection action-based local cooldown, position and direction sensitive, with no mana and a charge/release mechanic.

It *looks* like a standard issue WoW-clone hot-key toolbox, but sentence has a lot of buzzwords in it, so one by one.

Open Weapon

The Secret World has no classes. Instead, there are Three classes of weapon (Ranged/Melee/Magic) each with three specialisations within them (Magic has Elemental, Chaos, Blood; Ranged has Assault Rifles, Pistols, Shotguns). You can put Ability Points into any of these you like and get skills that requre/use them. Putting points into one section (each specialisation has two sections, like “Offence and Defence”) and you can open up more specialised and interesting skills (Locked in the beta). So here, I’ve put most of my points into Magical/Elementalism, and quite a few into Melee/Blades, so I can wield fire and swords, and this makes me happy:

Limited Selection

… But you can only have 14 skills available at one time, 7 Active Skills (Swing sword! Spin with sword! Magic Missile!) and 7 passive (Auto-critical-hit every seven strikes, better at avoiding zombie sick, cry at sad movies). These can’t be changed in combat, but can at any other time. It does not take long before you start needing to swap things out.

action-based

Point in right direction, press number key.

local cooldown

No global cooldown, you can fire off attacks as soon as you’ve cast the previous one, but some effects can only be cast every so often. Healing items share a cooldown, but what that cooldown is depends on which one you use.

position sensitive

Don’t stand in the fire. Some enemies will telegraph a forthcoming Area of Effect attack, with a characteristic and predictable animation on the floor as to its range. This is a good time to relocate.

direction sensitive

You can’t attack people with normal attacks while they’re standing behind you.

no-mana

There’s no Mana or secondary power system…

charge/release mechanic

…but generally basic attacks charge up a resource shared across the power-pool (Elemental power, or blade power) which is then used to boost other powers. Big effects may require some of this resource. For example, the basic “Curse” elemental power charges one Resource per use, another power does an extra boost of damage for every resource it can get, and the big Thor’s Hammer effect requires the maximum – 5 – resources available to it; but Blade resources aren’t shared with Elemental resources.

Gear

Taking a cue from City of Heroes, Gear doesn’t change your character’s wardrobe at all. You have seven slots (Finger, Neck, Wrist, Luck, Waist, Occult, Head) to put talismans on which boost your stats, and separately you can buy new clothes. This does appear to be the only way to increase your stats. There’s no levelling, and after … Raptr does say 11 hours, but I suspect it is lying … the health of my unequipped character is twenty whole HP above a brand new one (1500 to 1520). Some gear does require you to have put Character Points into the ability to wear higher level talismans.

Progression

Along with Ability Points as detailed above, you also occasionally acquire Skill Points, and these can be spent to boost your ability with weapons or use higher quality talismans. The game is not stingy with either AP or SP, which is fine because after a while you will need to bank them.

Storytelling & Questing

So far, so standard. The combat mechanics are pretty much a greatest hits of modern MMO design, and while the classless design is great, it does make things a bit more confusing. The revolution here is supposed to be in the Story, and so to it.

You are, of course, given Quests. There are people in the world who need stuff done, and they would like you to do it. The major one of these people is your employer – The Templars, in this case – and so they’ve sent you to Kingsmouth, New England, to find out what the fuck is going on.

The setting of TSW is very much in the “Everything Is True” camp, with a line towards HP Lovercraft’s writings. For example, the chip shop in TSW’s London:

And then also:

The stories are interesting, is the first thing. The quest-lines themselves are interesting, the people are well-written even when they aren’t well voice-acted, and the capture of a failing small town is done very well.

Questing itself is different, although the actions are similar. The traditional Quest Hub isn’t here, although the trappings may be. Quests are divided into types, with your overarching Story missions as one, Action missions, Sabotage missions, Collection missions and Investigation missions, and you can only take one of each, except Collection (where you can have three) and some missions seem to count as the slot for each other…

It’s telling that after many hours of playing, I’m still not entirely able to predict whether a mission is going to “pause” another one. You can’t drop missions, but if you try to take another Action mission, for example, you’re given the option of putting the previous one on pause. They can be resumed from the sub-section you last completed by talking to the original quest giver. In theory, this means that you pick a quest-line from your first location, and following that (which will have various subsections, which generally won’t require trekking back to the hub) will take you though some stuff, and then you’ll get to the end of the quest line and end up having defeated/learned something, and be conveniently next to a new NPC with a new line. Eventually you might get back to the hub though a few more NPCs, and get the opportunity to pick up the next line from the original NPC, or maybe a new one. Less like a hub, more like a Spirograph.

Along the way you might find see an object on the floor with a blue quest icon on it (Collection), and you can pick that up and it will take you out of your way for a bit.

The quests themselves vary too, from standard issue defeat-twelve-zombies, to position-based puzzles avoiding security cameras, to searching around for objects that look like X. Then there are the Investigation quests, which not only rely on parsing in-world information and following map locations, and sometimes just strange stuff. For example (And this is a spoiler for A Secret World Kingsmouth quest line, although I’ve redacted some of the details. If you want to avoid spoilers, don’t read the blockquote):

At one point a little old lady with a shotgun talks to you about a serial killer back in 2002, after a long hot summer. The person who was arrested for it never fit the crime, really, and in light of recent events could it be an example of Weird Shit? So, off we jolly-well, “Investigate the murders. Newspapers might have some clues”

That’s it. You don’t have any newspapers, and none of the ones scattered around the world seem clickable (and wouldn’t be from ten years ago, anyway). What next?

So, I bought up the map. My guess was that the Town Hall might have some records, and sure enough once I’d fought though the zombies to get there, the records department had a drawer for every quarter since the late 70s. Hmm. She’d said 2002, long hot summer. Q3 2002 hit gold-dust. A newspaper clipping about a man who’d been arrested for killing three girls. Their names had been redacted, but his hadn’t. Find more information. Hang on, didn’t the police station have a computer in it?

It did, which told the tale of this guy who had been arrested, had confessed and said there was more to it, but refused to put the full confession in writing (“You’ll have to ask my ghost!”) and had commited suicide in the cell that night. Investigate the cell.

The cell is locked, and I can’t see anything. I can’t find a grave with his name on it either. Plus, logically his ghost would still be in the cell. I have to hope that my character gets paid very well for what she’s about to do. I go and find a really big zombie.

Death in the Secret World is a corpse run. Your body is over there, the res point is over here. The difference is that the Secret World is different in death. You can see things you couldn’t see before. There’s a bridge that used to be used as a hangman’s span, and if you’re dead when you go over it you can see people hanging from the rafters as a spirit of darkness stalks the night. In the living world there’s none of that, but in the world of death the cell door is open, and the man is inside, gazing at a wall. He won’t speak – he’s dead, after all – but if you look at the wall he gazes on, there’s an obscure poem about white ravens leading to sorrow. Outside the police station in death there were no people, but there was a white raven. When I approach it, it flies away, and when I follow it I find a line of ravens. When I approach them, they say a line from they each say a line from “One for Sorrow” (The nursery rhyme, not the Steps song) and if remember the poem from the wall (which is helpfully in my quest log) it has a number of references to that poem. If I click on the Ravens in the order they appear in the poem, they vanish and a voice asks if I’m “Looking for Jack?”.

When I approach the source of the voice, there’s a pop and I’m alive again, and also alive again is a giant monster, ten times harder than I am, which fortunately runs away.

So yeah. Actual puzzles that involve you being dead. I liked this.

(I had tripped over the ravens before, while I was corpse running, and so I had a clue that things might work like that)

Okay, end spoilers.

The system mixing this universe with the game one works well. The game has a built-in web-browser for looking up clues, although I worry about how long that kind of thing will work until “Secret World Quest Guide” is the first hit for them.

Harder is that until you start working in that way, letting quest lines lead you around the zone, treating it like an old-style quest hub is directly detrimental to your experience. Also, it’s very easy to lose your thread, and the lack of any kind of levelling system means you can’t tell if a quest marked “Hard” is merely just above your skillset, or going to whamp your arse repeatedly.

(2 Factor Authentication is the same kind of thing some banks use, where you get a keyfob thing and type in a number as well as your username and password, so even if you have the password you also need to have stolen the physical object).

Paypal have had a similar system for years, and every time I mention that I use it people say “I didn’t know you could do that!”, so, some instructions:

Paypal uses SMS messages for the second factor. This is better than an app-based solution because it continues to work even if you’ve had to wipe or replace your phone.

1. Go to Paypal.com and log in
2. Hover over “Profile” (Far right of “Overview” in the gray secondary tab bar)
3. Click on “My Account Settings”
4. Click “Update” next to Security key
5. Click “Get Security Key”
6. “Register your Mobile Phone”
7. Follow the instructions.

And there. Now every time you log into your paypal account you’ll get an SMS message with a six digit code that you need to plug into the site. You can bypass this a few times if you don’t get the message, or don’t have your phone.

It’s not perfect, but it’s better than username/password.

(I know paypal are occasionally incompetent to the point of actual evil, but if you do use them, there’s no reason not to try to keep your account secure.)

Batman Begins rebooted the bombastic batman movies into a darker, quieter, more serious and far better series. Superman attempted to redo that series into a high-contrast heroic fantasy, and failed.

Iron Man made a similar attempt to be a bright action movie, and (IMO) did it very well. The other Marvel movies so far have been mostly good to great, but the most important two of them I think are Iron Man 2, and Avengers Assemble.

The Spiderman series is interesting of itself, but never really got over its own origin story. Hero movies have this weird obsession with the creation of the hero, and the first two Spiderman stories seemed to focus on the idea of becoming a hero, and when they got to the the point where he was fighting the evil of the week more than his own head, the film collapsed like an over-observed soufflé. Fantastic Four 2 did the same thing, to an extent.

Iron Man 2 started with Stark being Iron Man already. Being known for that, and already having the suit and the confidence, he went though the Wheel of Plot (Setup, Defeat, Man-Up, Win, Return to the world, Having learnt something) without needing to define the character at the start.

Avengers has two advantages to being an Origin Story. The first is that it doesn’t have to set up or introduce most of the main characters, but the second – and I think unique in Hero movies – it doesn’t need to set up the villain either. Tom Higgleson’s Loki from Thor was a strong and complicated character, and survived the denouncement at the end of his own movie. He’s even more awesome here than he was in Thor, which is a neat trick, and it gives me hope that the shooting-gallery of comic villains can work in a movie context, and that Marvel Studios is actually capable of producing comic book movies without rebooting into a new Origin Arc because a new writer/director wants to put his/her handprints into that set of concrete.

The writing is Whedonesque (obviously) and the characters stay true to their original movie characterisation while sifting slightly into the more quickfire style. It does a good job of setting up the strengths and weaknesses of all the main players both as heroes and as people, and actually pulls off all these massive characters working well as a team without losing the self-reliance from their own movies.

The action sequences range from slightly by-the-numbers though to absolute awesome, and there are crowning moments of awesome for everyone, even the complicated villain. Samuel L Jackson is recursive, given that he’s playing a character based on him, so he’s quite good. It’s good to see Colby Smoulders doing something other than HIMYM.

You need to know about Iron Man, you should probably have seen Captain America, but you probably need to have seen Thor before you watch Avengers. It does stand alone, but the story follows on from Cap and a lot of the characters will make more sense if you’ve seen Thor.

There’s one post-credits sequence halfway though (After the animated credits, before the white-on-black roll) but nothing at the end.

Late into the night the stage was host to several bands, ranging from a somewhat lonely singer/songwriter though to the semifamous and quite good Kassidy. The building being a great concrete barn of a place, the acoustics left something to be desired, but the bands were quite good and the sound did the best they could in the space, I think. As it filled up, the echoing chasm effect wore off.

To some extent the music and sound-checks drove the shop situation worse. For whatever reason – I assume ease of stock-checking – the order-for-later-delivery bulk-beer shop was running orders by taking them down, finding all the stuff, filling and addressing the boxes there and then, and then sending them off for later postage. This meant that every order took ages, and with only five or six people taking the orders on thirty feet of counterspace, queues to place orders went though a joke into epic failure. The two hours it took to actually get my order though are the least fun I’ve ever had whilst at a festival celebrating decent beer.

The bars too suffered a little from having vast amount of queuing space to limited serving spots, and could have done with more pumps, but the token system (Since they weren’t licensed for a cash bar, you had to buy tokens worth 1 or 1/2 pint, depending on the beer) sped up the ordering process (because change is annoying and fiddly). It’s hard to complain too much when pints of BrewDog’s as yet unnamed Pale Ale are going for a couple of quid a pint, as are their more famous 5am Saint and Punk IPA brews. So good beer, served at a high quality. Queues got a little silly during some periods, but that’s not really avoidable completely when you have 1500 beer fans and two bars.

I missed the actual AGM bit because of queuing for the shop, but the reports I heard were all very positive. The second London Brewdog has a site (in Shoreditch), they hope to start issuing dividends soon, the new brewery provides an 8-fold increase in yield for them, although they’re going to need to spend a few months after it comes up doing quality and consistancy control on beers previously created at the old factory. 66% of their output goes overseas, they’re looking at international bars, Sweden likes BrewDog.

Then on to the aforementioned music and more beer. I managed to track most of what I was drinking on Untappd (Where I am “Aquarion”), and probably need to play with some of the Stone breweries beers, as the ones I’ve tried I’ve liked a lot.

Aberdeen is nice enough, though how the exhibition centre managed to get two different Holiday Inns built next to it beggers belief a bit (and nobody warned either of the massive influx for this weekend, something they didn’t cope with perfectly).

When I booked the train back, I knew I was going to consider 9:30 the next morning too early, but I can only imagine past-me was attempting to get some kind of vengence. It worked. I am quite tired.

My excuse for wandering North is that I am invited to the AGM for BrewDog, but mostly it’s because I haven’t done the travel thing for a while.

As much as I love my girlfriend and my family, I love the feeling of traveling on my own. From wondering around the temples of Bangkok, to joining up the islands around underground stations that formed my initial mental map of London. Taking a train up to Glasgow and trying not to listen to the politics and personal problems of the people on the table around me. (“The hotel was very clean, wasn’t it? Very clean, and the showers were immaculate! So very clean” “I thought she wanted me to vote that way, but now there’s all this stuff when I thought we should just abstain, but just by trying to do what I thought she wanted, it’s suddenly become this huge thing!” “Do you think his wife knows about her?” “I’ve heard she does, and is fine so long as he doesn’t drag it home behind him, which is … short sighted”)

So you get days like today, when I got back from a wonderful evening of tea and geekery at somewhere around 3am to get up at 6 to catch a 7:30 train to Aberdeen, and I’m hurtling though the scottish countryside (Actually, right now we’ve pulled into Perth station, which is one of the single most stationy stations I’ve ever seen) towards a place I’ve never been before.

True, I won’t see much of it. I’ll see a convention centre and a hotel, maybe a couple of taxies and the view from them, but still, new places, new things, before an equally early train tomorrow morning takes me back. (Relatedly, I can understand why peak travel happens during the week, although the price hike is a little enthusiastic, but trying to get people to travel before 8am on a Saturday? Do these people have no souls? I mean, I can blame past-me for booking such stupid tickets, but I was driven to it by the madness of the railways. I booked because if I hadn’t booked, the cost of on-the-spot train tickets for this week would have booked me flights to New York).

So, an update, then. At work, I’m working on the Next Big Thing for Work, which will have absolutely no impact on the tech industry at all, and because of the inward-facing nature of same will be worth not much.

Home-wise I’m working on The Book, which continues… well, crap, really. The story is there, and the writing is as not bad as is reasonable, but it turns out the actual story is far too slow to actually get moving, let alone get to anything that will hook the reader. The writing continues apace, and by this method the pace will be fixed, we hope.

Also, Lifestream, and more specifically the current incarnation of NicholasAvenell dot com. The actual display of which isn’t anything revolutionary, but I’m having fun writing the grid system it all runs under.

PiracyInc continues as well, with a new Combat system that I really should have worked out ages ago, but may end up being rewritten (again) into a language I know, because learning at the same time as doing does not appear to be producing the results I need it too. Right now the economics system works fine without any player input, so now all I need is added pirates.

So most of what I’m doing is entirely invisible to the public eye.

The only actual visible thing I’m producing right now is a series of parodies/satire on UK Larp systems, and the idea of the “perfect system”, which isn’t really interesting to my current readership who aren’t already involved, I think. It’s an interesting vector for creative writing. More interesting, to me, is the aspect of user feedback that centralising on Facebook provides. The frictionless UI that supplying a “Like” provides appears to increase user feedback, or at least enough positive feedback to avoid the “I’m shouting into a black hole” feeling that I’ve found posting anything on the internet tends to engender. This, I predict, will last until something I’ve invested actual mental effort into results in significantly less interaction than previous throw-away jokes, at which point the frictionless interaction will turn into a more friction-focused stick with which half my ego uses to beat the other half. The problem with being a feedback junkie is that the comedown is rough.

Also, the highs are hard to come by.

So, tomorrow work, and then on Thursday up to sunny Glasgow, Saturday the Brewdog AGM, Sunday Glasgow again, and Monday the long trek home. It’s entirely possible you’re in for a great deal more introspection over the next few days, for which I can only apologise.

Since I have to get up in seven hours, I should probably take my leave of this pub.

The CD insert for Diablo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Diablo 3 is … Diablo 2++. No revolutions in gameplay, no “wow” moments, really. I mean, the previous game *was* great, and this is just as click-addictive as the last one. The fighting is satisfying and explodey, the bosses are tough but beatable. The loot is shiny and sparkling, and the story hackneyed and overwrought.

There is stuff that’s new. The upgrade trees are cleaner, and the interface is nicer, but these are tweaks. Evolutions. You are occasionally joined by followers, and they’re okay. You are rewarded by achievements for doing cool stuff (like crushing enemies by dropping a chandelier on them). But the game, the mechanics, the progress, the fundamental game below the newer graphics and shiny world is still Diablo.

Cover art from Diablo II, a game designed by Stieg Hedlund (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since Diablo 2 ARPGs have happened. Dungeon Siege has gone though a game and two sequels, bringing with it party combat, pack horses, using percentages of health kits, buttons to highlight and collect all nearby loot. Torchlight came with it’s visceral combat and “sell my useless crap without taking me away from the fun bit” button, and the pets.

It’s odd. It’s a great game, and once I started working it didn’t even occur for me to leave my seat for the three hours or so I spent going though the beta. Addictive and a gameplay that’s so smooth as to be entirely frictionless. For a sequel to a game that’s so very loved, it’s possibly close to perfect. More of the same, but better.

Which is why I’m not sure if my… disappointment in it not being revolutionary is a sensible reaction.

Diablo III (Photo credit: Kimli)

Photo by ostephy on Morguefiles.

The system is Maelstrom, UK fest larp. Summer event. The event hosts had chosen to host the festival on land which contained a palisade, and the event organisers (OOC) had agreed to physrep it, so the field is dominated by this giant wooden wall, complete with guarded gate. They camped inside, I was camped outside.

Now, Maelstrom is almost entirely player driven. Massive wars in uptime will happen if two sides are brought to war, monsters only happen if people summon them. There are good guys and Bad Guys, but they’re (almost) all players, and that night some of the most long-running, long hidden Bad Guys came back with an army of summoned undead behind them. Rumour, like a barking dog, ran before them of their plan to attack that night.
The hosts weren’t massively popular, and they were soon… evicted from their nice safe defendable area, and most of the characters (Somewhere around 700? ish?) decamped behind the palisade for the evening. Fires were lit, songs were sung, the clouds gathered in, night fell, and then the storm came.

The storm was awesome in the non-internet sense. Worthy of Awe. Great cracking forks of lightning shattered the darkness, the clouds above us rumbled like the march of gods. Black clouds lurked above the campsite…

…but no rain fell.

The oppressive humidity of an unbroken thunderstorm lay heavy upon the site, ominous and foreboding a doom that was certain. The undead were sighted from the gates, and by gunpowder and swordpoint driven back into hell. It was only temporary – they would rise again, of course – but their presence was proven.

A cry came from behind me, “The shrines are falling” and I ducked into a nearby tent to check. The shrines of my goddess – The Weaver, of free thinking and careful action – bestowed calm and enlightenment on those within, but this one’s effect was shattered. Someone had cast a spell to blight this land, to make it easier to raise the fallen bodies of our comrades as weapons against us.

I am Detail Marshall, priest of the Weaver, my shrine is on the outside of that wall, and within it lies the body of my friend Tac, who was murdered and whose funeral I hosted hours before. I couldn’t let him rise again. I had to reconsecrate my shrine.

Beside the gate an argument was breaking out. Friends of mine wanted to get out to check to see that all the camps were evacuated, that nobody was trapped outside in this. I explained what I needed to do, that unless this was done Tac was certain to rise up undead, and – Weaver bless them – they joined me, and the gate guards relented.

The gates shut behind us firmly, emphasised by the sudden clap of thunder the crack of doom, that lit up the field before us. Never had my camp seen so very far away.
For a dark and stormy night, we could see well. Shifting gaps in the clouds let the full moon shine though, and though the thunder around us shook the world we could see the course before us. We ran.

Something followed.

A sword was pressed into my hand and I waved it without skill as the approaching forms shambled closer, but before they reached us a shout from my left and “Mister Marshall, you seem to need some assistance”… one of my flock, leading a patrol in the dark. They saw off the creatures of darkness and guarded us while I stepped into the shrine.

I chanted and represented the space to my lady, asked for her blessing upon it, and I don’t think it has ever taken so long for my prayers to be answered. Occasional clashes outside told me that the world was still dangerous, but eventually the oppression around me lifted, my thoughts became lighter, and the shrine was consecrated again.

The storm crashed around us as we hurried back to the camp, only hoping that the spell would not be repeated. We huddled within the walls around our fires, the dry storm lit the sky around us,

and the night wasn’t over yet.