Escape Hatch

Quick Response to Gevlon re: WoW's market

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:08:00 +0000

I'm going to leave the rest of Gevlon's post on feminism alone because it would take forever to talk about, but I do want to address one point he made that I think is patently false:

Now the game design being sexist seems a different issue but it's not. The game is exactly what its audience wants it to be. Blizzard is an ethic-less company, responding only to market factors. If the audience is a bunch of morons who jerk off watching cybering blood elf girls, then the blood elves are designed to be sexy. Anything else would be bad business.

The problem with this idea is that the demographic he's talking about is only part of the game's audience.

There is no comprehensive research about female MMO/WoW players. The BBC did a survey that estimates that 40% of EQ2 players are female. Nick Yee used data from WarcraftRealms that showed only 16% females, but that's only people who gave their gender on that fansite, so it's surely an under-representation.

Even if you think the BBC's estimate is high, Blizzard's chosen imagery still turns off millions of potential players (not just females, but also males who don't like this art style). The current state of the game is bad business.

But if they are an ethic-less company that only responds to market factors, why would they do this? Because their art choices are driven by their own preconceived notions, not market factors.

Blizzard is a boys' club. Guess how many female artists, out of at least 16, worked on Starcraft 2, according to the behind the scenes DVD? One.

Blizzard's elite art team, responsible for most of their concept art? Zero females. In fact, it's called Sons of the Storm.

Remember that photo of the entire community relations team that came out a while ago (y'know, where Netheara became a sex object for thousands of frustrated internet teenagers by daring to allow her photo to be taken?). There were 2 women in that crown of 2 dozen.

So a bunch of boys make a game. Of course the art will cater to boys, because that's what they think looks cool. I'd also argue that a lot of socially insecure guys end up devoting their lives to video games to the point that they work at (arguably) the top developer in the world. We could go on and on all day about why there are so few women involved, and I'm going to sidestep that issue for now. What I will say is that it's hard to put out something females would like if you don't have a single female on the team.

They have no proof that their portrayal of gender "sells" or doesn't. The game might sell just as well or better if they had more variety. They aren't responding to market forces in this case. It just doesn't occur to them how unappealing some of the art in this game is to a huge chunk of their potential audience, because to them, half-naked buxom women and burly, inadequacy-soothing men have "concentrated coolness".

If they really wanted to improve business, they would give a wider range of options. And in a lot of ways, they have (dwarf and troll females, gnomes, goblins), but those options are poorly represented by NPCs and especially by major lore figures. There's absolutely no need to get rid of the impossibly-burly males and buxom chain mail bikini babes that appeal to the insecure boy market. Don't take anything away from them. Instead, add more variety to appeal to a bigger audience and bring in even more money. How about a dwarf female faction leader in heavy armor, built like a tank? Or a trim and cut human dude in nothing but a chain loincloth (and a bow tie) as a faction leader (just to make it even given sylvanas's outfit, after all)? Why are the worgen led by some old guy when they could have a young topless male werewolf with washboard abs (talk about a ready-made audience!)?

As it stands, Blizzard is failing to be an ethic-less company responding to market forces, at least when it comes to their representations of gender.

A few posts you should read

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:20:00 +0000

I swore to myself I wouldn't talk about politically divisive issues on my wow blog. When I read a gaming blog or listen to a gaming podcast, I'm there for gaming discussion, not political discussion. I have very strong and entrenched political opinions, and I've abandoned more than one entertainment source completely because someone decided to run their mouth with a stupid political opinion.

But you know what? I'm just going to come out and say that I support feminism, and if you don't like it then please let the door hit you repeatedly in the ass on the way out.

I bring this up because the debate sparked up in the wow blogging community again (as it does every few months) and I wanted to draw attention to some posts on the subject that I think are exceedingly worthwhile reads. Nevermind that these other people probably have more readers than me. :P

First, Larisa serves as an entry point into the debate with her pragmatic way of enjoying entertainment despite stereotyping.

This led me to Pewter's post about how WoW is a game made by men for a male audience (even though a ton of the audience is female).

And finally to some ladystats to know and think about from Paperclipchains.

I'm sure there's a ton of other great work out there on the subject, but these are just the things I ran across today that I wanted to draw more attention to.

P.S. I'm pretty much on blogging hiatus indefinitely (thank you, RL). Maybe I'll drop a small post like this from time to time. I hope you'll keep me in your readers. I also want to thank the wow blogging community, all my commenters, and the bloggers that made this such a welcoming, interesting, and creative place. Especially Ixo, Larisa, and Spinks.

Starcraft 2 Single-Player Impressions

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 14:33:00 +0000

Short version: Blizzard continues to release games when they are ready.

Long version: OK, I'm not the most impartial reviewer here. I was predisposed to absolutely love this game after how much fun I had with both the single- and multi-player parts of the original Starcraft, as well as every installment of the Warcraft RTS games. And guess what? I absolutely love it. I love it so much that I wish I could italicize that last sentence twice.

More after the jump.

I've only completed the first 5 missions, so keep that in mind as you read.

The story is primarily moved along by cutscenes rendered in a sort of in-between engine: fully 3-D world and models (reminded me of Mass Effect 2) that aren't as good as a CGI cut-scene but quite a bit better than just zooming in on the overhead RTS graphics. Once the cutscenes are over, you can't walk around freely in the world, though - it plays like a point-and-click adventure game. This is actually a blessing, because it eliminates the extra, unnecessary steps of walking between areas or even moving around a 3-D world to click on each object.

According to videogame luminary Sid Meier, "A game is a series of interesting choices." Starcraft 2 strips away everything else and delivers concentrated game without the usual filler.

That's a hallmark of the SC2 single-player mode: needless complications are removed. I'm sure there was a version of the between-mission areas where you walked around, but it was scrapped because walking around didn't add anything. Instead, you travel between areas by simply clicking an ever-present menu at the bottom of the screen. Then you'll just appear on the bridge, or in the cantina (complete with holographic nude Night Elf and fully playable "Lost Viking" shoot-em-up arcade machine), or wherevert. You can interact with the environment as little as you want. The game will highlight objects of interest with new content, such as characters with dialogue you haven't seen yet or a TV with a new report, so you don't have to waste any time clicking around looking for new stuff.

Speaking of televisions, Blizzard went out of their way to add optional content throughout these areas. You don't need to click on the characters or the TVs to progress the story, but if you do, you'll be treated to high-production-value, fully-voice-acted, and amusingly-scripted news reports deepening the storyline of our hero Jim Raynor being painted as a terrorist by the douchey Emporer Mengsk (I swear that name must translate as "douche" in Terran). In a humorous running gag, the news anchor continually interrupts the correspondent trying to give him facts, and then recaps every story with a spin about how evil Raynor is. It's a little optional detail that goes a very long way to building the world and making the game feel more fun.

The streamlining carries over into the single-player progression system as well. You get your choice of missions from a star map where all you have to do is click a planet and you launch the mission, which gives you all the benefits of Mass Effect 2's nonlinear planet-hopping without having to waste time tediously flying the ship every step of the way. Each mission unlocks a new unit for your army that you can then use in all future missions and upgrade in between missions. The upgrade system is simple and intuitive, with each unit having 2 upgrades with varying costs. Each mission you complete gives you a certain amount of cash, and you can then spend that cash as you wish on upgrades and mercenaries (uber-units with limited supply-per-mission).

The key thing about the upgrade system is that you can freely choose which upgrades you want to buy, but you will never have enough money to buy them all. Despite its simplicity, it gives you interesting choices to make that you can tailor to your playstyle and influence how you use your army. The system is easy to understand, but can actually lead to a different experience for every player and every playthrough.

The missions themselves are classic Starcraft gameplay. The first two are really throw-aways meant to ease new players into the game, but then it quickly moves into a base defense mission and then a fun and memorable mission where you must escort waves of civilians to a starport while zerg are falling from the sky and popping up from underground all along the route. You can defend certain entrance points, but you also need to have some roving teams to deal with zerg ambushes along the road.

Each mission also includes optional goals. Aside from the side quests the game overtly issues, there are also resource caches hidden throughout the maps as well as zerg and protoss objects that give you research points with each race. As you gather research points, you unlock yet another upgrade tree, Research. Each tier of the tree offers two mutually exclusive options. Again, the game gives you very simple choices, but they are impactful and engaging. They are also fully optional. Even more replay value comes from achievements linked to each mission that add extra challenges, such as completing the mission in a certain time limit on hard mode or destroying enemy bases on missions where that is not the objective.

--------------------------------------

Throughout the design of the single-player campaign, Blizzard managed to make everything simple and easy to understand while still offering interesting choices that make up the core of a satisfying game. The game is nothing but wheat, and there is no chaff to be found. Bravo. It's a testament to how complexity does not necessarily equal depth or fun. Interesting and meaningful choices give you those things, and there's absolutely no reason those choices need to be obscured just to achieve an appearance of complication. A simple and elegant way of offering interesting choices is actually a better way.

Sight unseen, you'd think that more freedom would obviously be a good thing. But in SC2's single-player mode, Blizzard cleverly pruned out the aspects of freedom that don't really add to the game, and instead focused on delivering content and interesting choices to you in the least wasteful way possible. Every moment is spent making interesting decisions or being entertained, and none of it is spent trying to figure out complicated systems or wandering down 3-D hallways trying to find which door leads to the armory.

It's a brave choice, and one I think some reviewers will lament. But I, for one, love tossing all the rinds and only getting the juice. The sweet, sweet interstellar cowboy juice.

....wait, ewwwwwwww

Death Knights in Cataclysm: what will change?

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:24:00 +0000

Well, we've finally gotten the big talent tree revamp we've all been waiting for. It's obvious that the Death Knight trees are far from finished, but we are starting to see themes forming, and getting some idea of what will change. A lot remains to be implemented and seen, so it's hard to judge these too deeply.

Overall:

New rune cooldown system: this one was announced a while ago. Simply put, runes of each color refresh one at a time. You essentially get half as many runes during ongoing fighting, but if you are inactive for a bit you can start out with all 6. Each of the 3 colors is basically its own energy bar. The damage and runic power generation of the abilities and talents has been doubled across the board to compensate. In theory, you should have more free GCDs since waiting a second to use a rune won't lead to a large dps loss down the road as future recharges are delayed.
Runic Empowerment: Until recently this was a first-tire frost talent, but is now baseline for all DKs. When you use a runic power ability like Frost Strike or Death Coil, you have a 45% chance of refreshing a random rune. That's a lot of free runes. This adds an element of randomness to all rotations. I'm worried that it will undercut the new rune cooldown system because you'll feel pressured to always have at least one full rune of each color on cooldown in case this procs.
Each spec gets its version of death runes right off the bat, as well as a key ability (heart strike, frost strike, perma-ghoul).
Anti-magic shell no longer generates runic power off of damage by default. This does remove a measure of skill from the class (timing AMS to optimize free RP), but hopefully new abilities will make up for it.

Blood:

Now a pure tanking tree, and the only tanking option. Our own Prot tree!
Blood presence is now the tanking presence, having the same effect as the current frost presence
We just pile on the cooldowns: IBF, AMS, Vampiric Blood, Bone Shield, Rune Tap, and Will of the Necropolis all in one tree! Also, WoN now procs a free Rune Tap heal and refreshes the ability's cooldown, adding an active element to save yourself when low on health. We clearly have more cooldowns than other classes, and it will be very interesting to see how hard this is to balance.
Block equivalent: in Wrath, Death Knights have been at a disadvantage for smaller-scale fights because of a lack of a block-style mechanic (druids can proc a mini-shield on crits). There was mention of a block equivalent a while back, where we would have a chance to auto-heal for a percentage of the damage we take. That appears to have been scrapped, as it does not appear in the current talent trees. I still hope it makes a comeback.
Innate crit immunity: say goodbye to defense rating, the most annoying stat ever in the game! It was confusing and served as an unecessarily stark barrier-to-entry, and required too much outside research to even begin to understand. Good riddance. Now we get PvE crit immunity from Blood talents, just like other tank specs. Hurrah!
Attack Power Debuff: just like with Block, DKs were the only tanking class with no attack power debuff they could apply to enemies (Demoralizing Shout, etc.). That's finally changing, as talents in the new blood tree give Blood Boil the ability to apply that debuff, making it into a damaging Demo Shout. Another great call by Blizzard, it's a necessary tanking tool that we went without for too long.
Dancing Rune Weapon: now you can parry for two! In a great leap in the realm of MAKING SENSE, having a second weapon flying around in front of you gives you a sizeble bonus to your chance to parry. But wait . . . is that another tanking cooldown? OK, guys, this is getting a bit ridiculous. 6 cooldowns? That's a lot of runes and runic power being devoted to survivability (even though IBF can be talented to be free!). Hopefully that won't cripple our threat.
Sub-specs can only go 10 points into another tree at most. This leaves you with very few attractive talents currently within reach for tanking. You're basically picking between a reduced DnD cooldown and a fear immunity.

Frost:

With blood presence taking over tanking duties, frost presence now boosts damage and runic power generation (sorry, no more self-healing)
Pillar of HOLY SHIT (aka Pillar of Frost): I'll just link the tooltip for you:"Calls upon the power of Frost to increase the Death Knight's Strength by 20%. Icy crystals hang heavy upon the Death Knight's body, providing immunity against external movement such as knockbacks. Lasts 20 sec." Notice anything . . . missing? Like, say a cooldown?!? It used to be at 1 minute, maybe wowhead isn't displaying it. 33% uptime is still pretty good - but where will we get the spare frost rune?
You can now choose between a dual-wield talent and a 2-hander talent. This is quite a relief, as I'd love to have a 2-hander spec without a pet.
Frost DKs now get the 4% increased damage debuff for raids that was previously limited to combat rogues and arms warriors.
On a Pale Horse was moved to early Frost. I find myself constantly wishing I could fit this mount-speed talent into my builds on live. I hope Blizzard follows through on the promise to leave you points for optional talents so I can pick this up.
The top tiers of unholy have little worth subspeccing into, so you'll end up putting the majority of your extra points in blood in the current build.

Unholy:

The biggest change to unholy is the loss of Bone Shield. Most players underestimate this talent's current impact in raids. Taking 20% less damage at all times is huge. It prevents some insta-gibs (hello Mauradin cleaving me as I run past him on heroic gunship), reduces healer panic from big aoes, and makes you all-around the most survivable dps in any raid. Get lucky enough to be the first Mark on heroic Saurfang and laugh all the way to your purples. This would be even more important in the new Cataclsym healing environment, so it was placed 11 points into the blood tree to prevent non-tanks from getting it.
The damage buff Hysteria was removed from Blood and replaced with a similar cooldown called Unholy Frenzy in the blood tree. Sudden Doom also got moved from blood to give unholy free death coil procs.
Ghoul Frenzy keeps getting buffed in the beta builds. It's more afforable with the new talent philosophy, but it remains to be seen if 1 unholy rune will ever be worth it, especially now that:
Scourge Strike costs 1 unholy rune, instead of 1 frost + 1 unholy. Obliterate and Death Strike, the other FU abilities, remain unchanged. Blizzard will presumably be introducing some use for the extra frost runes, as they can't possibly expect us to just cast extra Icy Touches, especially given the ludicrously long disease durations we get from epidemic.
The likely solution to the frost rune problem is the new Festering Strike, which further extends disease durations and is the first 1 Blood + 1 Frost ability. I don't see the other trees getting use out of this when they could cast Obliterate or Heart Strike.

Problems:
These builds are clearly still early and in flux. Some of the priority things for Blizz to work on:

Top-tier talents are lackluster in Frost and Unholy, especially for sub-speccing. At least Improved Icy Touch, Icy Reach, and Vicious Strikes should be both reworked and shuffled.
Ghoul Frenzy should either have its rune cost removed, or be reworked to be a desirable cooldown. Maybe reduce it's duration to 30 seconds, double it's damage effect, and give it a 2 minute cooldown.
Frost needs its "required" dps talents to be reduced in number. Dual-wielders can only afford 1 optional utility point, while 2-hander-wielders can technically afford 4, but are forced to put two of those into Icy Reach and the other 2 into tier 2. The whole tree really needs rearrange-in'.
Can you tone down the cooldowns in Blood just a little bit? And are you sure threat won't be an issue with all those resources going to staying alive?
Festering Strike will have to be implemented very carefully. Not only will it have to do more damage than an Icy Touch + Scourge Strike (remember, unholy gets Reaping automatically, so blood runes become death runes after being used for blood strikes), but it will also need a way to deal with the fact that you aren't going to be using the blood rune for a blood strike, and thus won't be getting a death rune later. In the same patch, Festering Strike was added to Reaping, meaning that the Unholy rotation currently looks like SS > SS > FS > FS > SSx6 or something (I'm not really accounting for the new rune recharge mechanics there because I haven't tried them).

Any further evaluation will have to wait until I can actually get into beta and find out the real consequences of the new talents, the new rune cooldown system, and haste's effect on rune refresh speeds.

Starcraft 2 releasing

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:25:00 +0000

Yeah, I haven't been around in a while. Got real life stuff, blah blah blah. I'm not gone, and I'll be back, just need a blogging break.

Despite that, it's hard to contain my excitement today. Starcraft 2 is finally releasing, after more than a decade of waiting. It was far and away my favorite PC game until WoW came out, and my favorite non-Nintendo video game until the HD era as well. It introduced me to the RTS genre, which is a perfect fit for my tastes but I had never seen before. I love Sci-fi and I found the campaign mode revelatory because of how it merged storytelling with the gameplay. SC so perfectly crystallized what makes a game great for me - and specifically to my personality - that it will always hold a place in my personal pantheon of great video games. I bonded with lifelong friends over it, even.

So I'm quite relieved that Real ID isn't overstepping and I can play, with a clear conscience, this game I've been waiting for. My amazon preorder has already shipped, and I'm spending today drooling in jealousy at the countries that, due to the vagaries of time zones, exist in the future and can already play.

My life for Aiur!

Facepalm

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:59:00 +0000

OK, at this point, you just have to laugh.

Blizzard Does Listen To You

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:16:00 +0000

Honestly, I'm pleasantly surprised: Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime just announced that Real ID will no longer be required to post on the SC2 and WoW forums. They are responding to (an unprecedented level of) player feedback and concerns and rescinding Tuesday's announcement. We can all breathe a sigh of relief: we get to continue using the forums without having to risk the dangers of exposing our real names.

I am both overjoyed and relieved. It took them longer than I'd like to figure it out and make a statement, but you have to give them credit for doing the right thing, listening to the players, and even having the Big Man himself sign the statement.

I'm still worried about privacy, and the direction of Real ID. I'm still worried that my game about killing internet dragons will be transmorphed into an intrusive social network. Hell, the fact remains that even if they went back on it, Blizzard still claimed Real ID was "only for people you know and trust" while planning to give out your real name to anyone with an internet connection if you used the forums.

But Blizzard deserves credit and some positive press. And I've re-preordered SC2 and will not be allowing my WoW account to lapse.

I am so glad that I no longer have to choose between my principles and my games. At least for now.

Thank you, Blizzard.

Who is Activision/Blizzard's Customer Base

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:18:00 +0000

Traditionally, the customer for a video game company (publisher or developer) has always been the gamer. Or, to avoid categorization, anyone who purchases a game to play it. As a moneymaking venture, gaming companies focused on eliciting as many purchases as possible. This motivated the developers to provide games and features that the most gaming customers would be interested in paying for.

Ask the average person on the street, and it's likely they think of television the same way: that the customer of the television industry is the viewer. You would think, then, that this would motivate television companies to make decisions in the interest of the viewer, because their primary goal would be to make the viewer happy.

And yet, Firefly gets canceled, great shows get underpromoted into obscurity, and we're inundated with reality shows that everyone claims to hate yet everyone seems to watch. [I believe they watch mostly because they want to watch TV and that's what happens to be on, and because it's something they can talk to coworkers and strangers about as a shared point of experience, much like sports; but the reasoning doesn't really matter to the point I'm trying to make here]

So why doesn't television cater to the audience in the way you'd predict if the viewers were the network's customers?

Because the television network's customer is not the viewer. The network's customer is the advertiser.

NBC is not in the business of providing television programming to viewers. It is in the business of providing eyes to advertisers. Every decision is not made based on providing quality programming in a way viewers want to see it. Decisions are instead made based on the most cost-effective ways to get advertisers to pay top-dollar for ad space. That just so happens to lead to television striving to attract viewers, which often leads to the network acting in the viewers' interest; but such actions are coincidental. They are simply a side effect of serving advertisers.

There's no need to demonize the networks over this, but it's important to be aware of it so we have realistic expectations. Television networks do not consider you to be a customer, so don't be surprised when they routinely act in ways that seem unfathomable to you as a viewer. If they lose 10% of viewers over intrusive product placements or longer commercial breaks, they'll do it if it increases the other ad revenue by 11%. They'd never do it if viewers were the customers.

So what does this have to do with video games, and Activision/Blizzard's expansion of Real ID? I'm glad you asked.

Actiblizz's recent actions seem unfathomable. They are going against the wishes of the vast majority of their players. They are startlingly unresponsive to criticism from the customerbase on the Battle.net and Real ID issues. They are taking actions that are clearly contrary to the best interests of their players, and are going out of their way to avoid explaining them (except through the ocassional half-truth like "cleaning the forums"). People are canceling WoW accounts and SC2 preorders left and right over something that seems so easily avoidable or fixable. Don't they care about losing so many customers?

You have probably guessed where I'm going with this by now: we, the players, are no longer the World of Warcraft's customerbase. Advertisers are.

It's pretty clear from this interview and other statements about Real ID about how they "have been planning this change for a very long time" that Real ID is the lynchpin in an effort to leverage an untapped asset that Actiblizz has more of than any other company out there except Facebook: our personal information.

Facebook makes its revenue from advertisers by using our personal information to help them target us more accurately, and by using our social connections to lubricate the spread of marketing messages. Activision has done the math, looked at their potential to help advertisers target 12 million people, and decided that, come hell or high water, the potential loss in subscription revenue will be dwarfed by the potential gain in ad revenue along with the other benefits to emulating the Facebook business model with a near-captive mob of players to be tapped.

Blizzard once had a reputation for making games for the players. They were known for scrapping sub-par products rather than releasing them for a quick buck. They were known for being more player-friendly than any gaming company outside of Valve. But to Actiblizz, we are no longer the customer. We are an asset to be monetized . . . stock in a warehouse . . . entries in a quarterly earnings spreadsheet. We are now Actiblizzard's product, to be sold to advertisers for more than our subscription is worth. This is, ironically, our reward for making the game so popular.

Actiblizzard has signed a contract with Facebook. They are committed to this course of action, no matter what we say. And no matter how many of us quit, it's most likely going to be a profitable move for them.

From this point forward, Blizzard's reputation is done. We can stop expecting them to treat us like customers. Advertisers are their primary customers now.

I wonder if Actiblizzard treats them as well as the old, dead Blizzard used to treat us?

Real names on the WoW forums.

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:18:00 +0000

I cannot comment on this right now because I feel too betrayed and angry to be rational. Just thought you might like to know that anyone who wants to keep their real name private can't use any Blizzard forum anymore, including WoW and SC2 forums.

http://bit.ly/9ZfjeD

Fuck you, Blizzard.

UPDATE: some comments added. This is what I posted in the thread under one of my alts (gotta savor the anonymity while I have it):

This is a terrible idea, Blizzard. I know that you're going to go through with it no matter what we say, but hey, I gotta try. I love this game and I had a lot of respect and loyalty to your company, and that is all gone now with the advent of Real ID and it's expansion to other parts of the WoW experience. How long until giving out my personal information is no longer optional for simply playing the game?

You say that you're trying to improve the level of discourse on the forums. Do you realize that what you are doing is driving out every intelligent adult?

Any grown-up with a career outside the games industry? No longer posting on the forums, because it will hurt their career for their boss and peers to know they play WoW. Gaming is not understood by the masses, especially the career-minded.

Anyone mature enough to have a healthy sense of how to protect themselves online? No longer posting on your forums.

Any female who has ever been stalked (ie almost every female)? No longer posting on the forums.

Any female who has ever been ignored or disrespected simply for being female, but found herself finally treated as an equal in WoW because her gender was hidden? No longer posting on the forums.

What's left? Teenage boys who don't have enough career aspirations to want to keep their gaming a secret. The dumbest, most immature, most dead-end teenage boys.

That's the forum culture you are building. Good job thinking that one through.

UPDATE 2: You can post a complaint to the ESRB here:

https://www.esrb.org/about/contact.jsp

I'm all for parents supervising the gaming activities of their children. It is in no way the game company's responsibility to protect children. BUT the ESRB has taken that goal upon themselves to help inform parents. And a "TEEN" rating is not high enough when the game is giving out your personal information on the net. No minor, including 17 year olds, should be allowed to purchase this game without the presence of a responsible adult who is well-informed about the parental controls available to them. No minor should be able to choose to give out their personal information this way.

Here is the content of my complaint to the ESRB (limited to 500 characters, excuse the grammar):

Filing a formal complaint about Blizzard's announcement today that their forums will display your real first and last name.

It poses a security and privacy risk, especially for minors. Please raise the rating for all Blizzard games to at least what you would give Grand Theft Auto (preferably Adults Only).

Giving out personal information is more dangerous today than letting a child see the content in GTA.

The move also shows a startling disregard for privacy that you should keep an eye on.

Cataclysm Talent Tree "Bloat"

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:35:00 +0000

Blizzard's stated goal in revamping the talent trees for Cataclysm and adding the Mastery aspect has been to remove a lot of the "required" talents from the trees and leave players with some options for utility talents. They know they can't eliminate "cookie cutter" specs, but what they want is for those specs to include the sentence "spend the last 5-10 points anywhere you want".

So far, they are failing.

The Cataclysm NDA lifted with the beginning of closed beta this week, and we've all gotten open access to the talent trees in the current beta build. They are all obviously under heavy progress and subject to great change, but we can see that they've already done substantial work on some trees, and so far I'm disappointed, especially with the Death Knight talent trees.

You can play with the talent calculator here: http://www.wowtal.com/#

You may want to open it up just to follow along, since I'll be naming talents but don't know of a way to link tooltips for them that are up-to-date with the latest Cata beta build.

Try building a frost death knight dps spec, taking only talents that give a direct DPS boost. Not only can you do that quite easily, but you can't even afford the one point in Hungering Cold without a dps hit! The other two trees present similar conundrums, as do the current warrior trees and many others.

When people complain about "bloat" on the forums, the devs have been known to respond with "Just because you can't get everything you want doesn't mean the tree is bloated." That statement is true on its face, but unfortunately isn't true in practice right now. Most trees are actually bloated because there are so many dps talents (or healing, or mitigation) that you can't take a single utility talent. None of these trees leave the player with a choice between utility talents. Elitist Jerks will not be advising these classes to "put those last 5-10 points anywhere you want". Instead, the cookie-cutter specs will be as rigid as ever.

This is fairly easy to rectify by removing some dps/healing/mitigation talents and adding more utility talents.

In the case of the death knight frost tree, it's a bit more complicated. All of the pure dps talents there also effect the playstyle of the tree, causing them to favor Obliterate or make sure Frost Fever is applied.

Start by cutting down a few of the talents that cost a lot of points. Black Ice, Icy Talons, and Killing Machine are good candidates to become 3-pointers: just pick 2 of them. Then, consolidate a few talents. Drop the 4% strength from Brittle Bones and merge it with Glacier Rot as a 2-point talent. I just freed up 7 points, which is smack dab in between 5 and 10. I may have made a few of the individual talent points you'd spend overpowered, but I simultaneously made a few other talent points you'd need to spend in utility talents to get down the tree give you zero dps, plus I took 4% strength out of the tree.

Despite the bloat in many trees, one great victory has been the rogue trees. A class traditionally ruled by spreadsheets more than any other, rogues will now actually be able to take utility talents without gimping their DPS. Just try to build a combat rogue spec with pure dps talents. It can't be done. Instead, I get to reduce the cooldown on evasion and make sprint break snares. Awesome!

Hopefully Blizzard will use that tree as an example as they continue to work on the other trees.

APB Review

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:26:00 +0000

If you are an MMO gamer, don't be fooled by the persistence of the world in Realtime World's new online GTA-clone All Points Bulletin (APB). It's not for you. I'd argue that it's not even an MMO. It's a shooter with driving and great customization options that just so happens to take place in a single persistent world instead of the usual structure of separate servers for each match.

The core gameplay consists of receiving a mission that gives you an objective and some opponents and sets you loose in the city. Each mission is more like a miniature Warsong Gulch match than a warcraft-style "quest" - though sometimes you will be Fed Ex-ing an item from one place to another - sometimes in an actual delivery truck, even. Nonetheless, such quest-like mechanics end up bearing more resemblance to capture-the-flag than deliver-the-parcel.

If you can accept the analogy: APB is like Halo or Call of Duty if you got to hang out in the map between matches instead of going to a "find a match" menu. Except it plays exactly like Grand Theft Auto, with very basic first-person shooting and challenging and sometimes wonky driving.

Any reports you've heard that the shooting or driving is "bad" are greatly exaggerated. They certainly are simplistic, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The shooting is serviceable, and the driving is actually quite good if you spend enough time with it to realize that not every car handles like crap, and you have access to nice cars from the beginning if you simply steal/commandeer them when you see one nearby. The game actually gives you a nice little voiced video tutorial explaining how to use the handbrake, which is the key to driving in APB. Once you master the handbrake, driving gets a lot more fun. I think I can safely liken most harsh criticism of the driving to hating on Mario Kart before you learn to power slide. Just because you sucked at it doesn't make it bad.

That said, the shooting and driving aren't extraordinary or groundbreaking either, and they make up the entirety of the gameplay.

So don't play APB if you are looking for an MMO, and don't play APB if you are looking for a top-tier shooting experience. Do play APB if you like GTA and arcadey third-person shooting and driving, and the ocassional bit of utter chaos. Especially do play APB if you like customization and have an artistic side.

One of the best selling points in the game is the nearly unlimited avatar customization. It starts with the body, offering advanced sliders for everything from weight to eye tilt to ear size to body hair. Then, you can get new pieces of clothing and accessories and customize them heavily for color and texture, and even add symbols and art to them. You can use an in-game photoshop-like system to create your own symbols and art and use them as tatoos, as part of clothes, or even as car decals. You can compose your own music, repaint your car, and make your own art. Then you can sell it to other people who are less artistically-inclined.

At least, that's the idea. We'll have to wait and see how the customization market develops as the game matures. In beta, everyone is low level, picking from the same small set of options and itching to get into gunfights. There is no telling where it will go, but the tools are there. They are far from perfect and in some ways hard to use (especially when trying to place a piece of art at a certain angle), but they are there.

What appeals to me personally about the game is the opportunity to express myself artistically through my avatar, and play some fast-paced arcade-y driving and shooting. Unfortunately, the game already feels a bit repetitive only a few hours in; I find myself doing the same type of mission over and over. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as the missions are fun. It's just like how I might queue up for Arathi Basin 4 times in a row or play TF2 on the same 3 maps for hours. But APB, while deriving a lot of its fun from its simplicity, just isn't deep enough to compete with those games for long-term interest. It hurts APB greatly that there are no character classes, so everyone plays the same and even starts with the same gun. I have enjoyed playing APB at stretches of a few hours at a time, but I always eventually get bored and decide to log out. This is in stark contrast to games like Mass Effect 2, WoW, or League of Legends, where I sometimes I have to tear myself away from the desire to play many hours into a session and way after my bedtime.

Boiled down, APB is an arcade shooter that has been tweaked enough to be marketed as the GTA MMO. I've enjoyed my few hours with it, but I find it hard to recommend a full-price purchase to anyone but the most interested in that type of game and the groundbreaking level of customization and artistic expression available within.

It's also a shame for Realtime Worlds that better games are on ridiculously-cheap sale on Steam the same week that their game releases at full price.

Interview Reveals that RealID is a Scam

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:30:00 +0000

Can't believe it took me nearly 2 months for me to come across this interview. In USA Today!

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/05/blizzard-and-facebooks-friendly-social-networking-deal-launches-with-starcraft-ii-/1

Holy crap. Blizzard's plans for Real ID are beyond what I even imagined.

So back at Blizzcon, Blizz announced that they were going to be using Battle.net to add cross game/faction/server communication. This sounded great. It would let me ask a friend logged into WoW if they wanted to come play some Starcraft . . . in the form of a whisper to their character! Yay!

Oh wait. Now it turns out that they weren't adding cross game/server chat as a benefit to the players. It's simply bait to create their own social network to get a piece of the Facebook revenue pie.

Hundreds of pages have been posted on the WoW official forums asking for the ability to use Real ID's desirable functionality with aliases (like Xbox gamertag or Steam username) and without giving out email addresses. These threads have been ignored in a way unprecedented by Blizzard's response to any previous issue. Never have they been this silent. Never.

This USA Today interview reveals why.

Highlights:

"Go back to the previous Battle.net, Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and Steam and other different networks in the context of gaming services. they are all kind of anonymous. That whole veil of anonymity has been an important part of the design. There are those who feel like I want to go escape and create this parallel identity to myself on a gaming network and I don't want anyone to know who I am in real life. What we have seen in recent years is that veil of anonymity has been cast aside largely. Culturally, I think we have become more and more accepting of social networking in the context of your real identity and Facebook, of course as the leader in the space, has led this charge. We're now at something five years ago I don't think any of us would maybe necessarily be comfortable with. We all now have our own Facebook pages and we have got a lot of our information on there. We've got our real names and pictures of ourselves on there and so forth."

I love that veil of anonymity. I don't understand where they get this idea that we are all now accepting of casting aside our anonymity on the internet. Did they get that idea from all the recent Facebook privacy lawsuits and uproar? Or all the reports about people losing their jobs because their employer checked Facebook? Do I want my boss to know I play WoW at all? NO. It would, in fact, greatly hurt my career. Which means I can NEVER use Real ID, because I can't have my real name associated with WoW in any way.

And you know what one of the cool things about having "a lot of information on [Facebook]"? It's that (until recently) we could make that information as private as we wanted. They seemed to have missed that aspect of it.

Here's the most hilarious quote:

Do you expect any push back from diehard Blizzard fans from the Facebook features? We don't anticipate any.

And here's the most terrifying quote:

Here at Blizzard we have seen the social networks as an inspiration to us to really think about what the next stage of the online gaming space will look like. What if we gave people the option to display themselves by their real name and create a social network of real-life friends connecting that Blizzard community based on their real names? So what we are doing is we are introducing this feature called Real ID, an optional layer of identity on top of the standard character level of identity you would have on any game service.

It turns out the entire point is to NOT have a gamertag-like alias. The entire point of the service is to use this real name "layer of identity" different from what's used on other gaming services. Y'know, services that have been wildly successful and acclaimed as opposed to your widely panned system - but hey, those other guys aren't making Facebook money, now are they?

I think it's quite telling that Blizzard won't just come out and say this in response to the forum posts asking for aliases. Talk about selling your playerbase out.

"Step one in our relationship is to have this Friends Importation,"

This is just step one in their relationship with Facebook. Oy. I wonder how deep down the Facebook rabbithole this goes? How closely have they been working with them?

"We are actually fully integrating with the Facebook team."

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

OK, that kind of shit just plain does not happen between two companies of this size unless a deal is in place. Consider a contract with Facebook, of some type, confirmed.

And I don't even own tin foil, let alone a hat made of it. Sorry, haters.

Scott Jennings is absolutely right about RealID

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:06:00 +0000

Read about it here. And do not use RealID. This thing needs to look like a gigantic waste of money on the next ActiBlizzard balance sheet.

New Post at VTW: Mass Effect 2 vs. Final Fantasy 13 Deathmatch!

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:57:00 +0000

One ring. One cage. Final Fantasy 13. Mass Effect 2. A metal chair.

FIGHT!!!

How To Keep Raid Tiers From Being Skipped

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:27:00 +0000

If you are a new raider who hit level 80 some point after ToC came out, it's possible you have never seen Naxxramas (beyond weeklies, at least). Ulduar is the best raid instance WoW has ever had, but despite the Accessibility Doctrine, very few people have seen Yogg-Saron. This isn't because those instances are too hard, or because those people don't want to see lore. It's simply because the rewards in those two instances are completely obsolete. Heroic 5-mans give tokens that will buy you gear that blows the drops from those raids out of the water, and some 5-mans even drop gear on par with ToC 10 itself. There's no efficient way to advance your character in the old instances, so very few people do them.

Blizzard could fix this right now while giving players an entry-level raid experience to learn from before going into "real" raids.

Have bosses in "obsolete" raids drop a ton of emblems.

Make it so raiding Naxx is a more efficient way to get emblems (currently, Triumph Emblems) than heroics. The earlier bosses should drop fewer emblems than the later bosses, so going deep into the instance would feel rewarding. Maybe have the final boss also drop a Frost Emblem on top of the Triumphs. This will be even easier to balance in Cata with the move from emblems to points.

And it fits in very neatly with Blizzard's current design philosophy because you can only do it once a week. Instead of having to log in every day to do a heroic, I can get similar emblems from spending two hours at a stretch on one night doing Naxx.

Combine that with the upcoming weekly cap on emblems that forces you to choose how you want to earn them, and it's even better.

For this system, an "obsolete" instance is one that drops gear a tier behind the current lowest level emblem. So using Wrath as an example, Naxx would have gone in the Dungeon Finder with inflated emblem rewards in the same patch that released ToC.

The best way to do this would be to put the older instances into the Dungeon Finder. There are obviously major challenges with putting together, say, an ICC 25 group in the DF. But with content as easy as Naxxramas, it's easily justifiable, especially with the new raid lockout system that let's you have more flexibility. Just have it use the same minimum gear requirements as ToC 5 or the ICC 5 instances so you don't end up with an entire group in just greens expecting to be carried. At the same time, I anticipate most of the people queueing for these will be on the low end of the gear scale, perhaps even being able to use a few "obsolete" drops from the raid in a few slots.

Seeing how Blizzard plans to automatically scale point acquisition as new raids are released (meaning that, for instance, when Tier 13 comes out, Tier 12 raids will go from "frost emblems" to "triumph emblems"), it worries me that we'll see the same abandonment of the early tiers that we saw late in Wrath. And that would be a shame. Giving players a reason to visit obsolete raid instances as an efficient way to advance their character would have a myriad of benefits, from breaking up the monotony of running the same raids over and over, to giving new raiders and new alts an appropriate training ground for raiding, to simply preventing good instances from becoming ghost towns.

I hope they think of it too.

The plot thickens....

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:03:00 +0000

Paladins Officially Overpowered, Blizzard to Kill 25s.

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:02:00 +0000

A highlight from Ghostcrawler's interview at Eurogamer:

Eurogamer: Is there a particular class that you thought needed an overhaul more than the others?

Greg Street (Ghostcrawler): I think the Paladin is one I'd say probably needs some of the most work, it got a lot of work in Lich King but it's still not quite there. Each individual role, the damage, healing and tanking all have problems, in some cases they're over-powered but a little simplistic in other cases, so we definitely want to address that. Without changing - you know, it's a very popular class, I think it's our most popular class at the moment, so we don't want to make it unrecognisable either.

Told ya!

And it turns out they actually are killing 25s:*

The amount of gear in the 25 person raids will be roughly equivalent on per-person basis to the 10 person raids. One thing to keep in mind it that we don't plan to allow players to upshift from 10s to 25s, only downshift from 25s to 10s on a given week.

The statements beforehand said that 25person would have more gear per person than 10s, so I wonder if "roughly equivalent" indicates a change in plans, or just not wanting to commit yet to either "exactly the same" or "more".

The number 6 per boss was being mentioned I believe, so slightly more I guess, but anything can change in testing so I wouldn't say that it is set in stone. But we all know you guys won't call us out if anything changes during a beta, right?

So basically there will be no real incentive (gear-wise at least) to run 25 man raids.

There are rewards like badges/gold for the additional coordination involved, but we are trying to avoid having gear be the reason that one style is better than the other.

What a shame. Still, the proposed system is better than the current raiding system, IMO.

*Saying they are killing 25s is hyperbole. More emblems really will be a strong draw, especially if the difference is very large. I expect many people will still do 25s, and with the raid ID improvements I expect my guild will farm early bosses on tuesdays with our 25-man alliance then do progression in our 10-man group using the same instance ID later in the week, for instance. But giving more loot per person was the key to keeping a balance, and now that that's gone, 25s are going to be hurt much more badly than I had anticipated.

The overall system is still an improvement in my eyes.

APB "beta" Preview

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:04:00 +0000

I preordered All Points Bulletin, the new Grand Theft MMO from Realtime Worlds. The preorder comes with 2 chances to play the game ahead of release: the "key to the city beta" (read: a taste of the finished game so you can hype it to your friends) and an early start a few days before its release on June 29th North America and July 1 in Europe. I played the PC version that I ordered through Steam.

First of all, there were still some technical issues with the download and launch of the game. I'd recommend a boxed copy, which is the opposite of my usual stance. You download the APB Launcher through Steam, but starting the game through Steam fails to open the launcher, requiring that you hunt down the file in a different folder directory. Once the launcher starts, you are in for a (at best) 8 hour download of a 7 gig game. The APB and Steam forums were both overrun with threads complaining about the download speed. Then, once I let it download overnight and finished the installation, I still couldn't run the game from Steam, and had to hunt down the new launcher in yet another different directory.

I forgot most of that once I started the game.

More after the jump.

It is pretty, and reeks of high production values. After bad experiences with similar games on my decent PC, I was pleasantly surprised at how well the game ran even at passable graphics settings, at least in the tutorial, which was the only part I had time to complete. Loading screens were a little long, but even those were full of animation and colorful art. The game kind of looks like an 80s fashion designer spilled paint on a 2000s comic book artist's work.

I had been led to believe by previews that the game had a lot of customization for the look of your character, and the concept art of awesome-looking avatars was one of the selling points of the game for me. Unfortunately, you start in a standard outfit, depending on whether you decide to join the Enforcer or Criminal faction (and the criminals start in an UGLY neon-green baseball cap. Ugh). I presume further customization is all unlockable. The backstory, explained in quality voice-acted cutscenes, is that crime got so bad in the fictional city of San Paro that the government essentially deputized the citizens. So now anyone who isn't a criminal is either a cop or a hapless pedestrian waiting for me to "accidentally" run them over.

The character-creation can be done simply, with a few options for muscularity and a series of randomized face/hair/scar combos to flip through. You can also enter advanced mode, which is not kidding about being advanced, including such options as "eye tilt" and separate sliders for "frown" and "smile".

You load into a tutorial zone and immediately get offered a mission over your cell phone. The UI is quite streamlined, and you never have to physically go to the quest giver to get missions. A message simply pops up at the top of the screen telling you a quest is on offer, and you hit Y or N to accept or reject it. Then a waypoint will appear in the environment with a number over it representing its distance from your current location. Just run/drive toward that waypoint, hit F, and you're done (unless another waypoint pops up - some quests include a few objectives in sequence). The missions had variations in set dressings - erasing graffiti, defusing a bomb, breaking down a door to a criminal stronghold and collecting bomb materials - but all amounted to identical gameplay: drive to the waypoint, hit F, wait a few seconds, done. Mind you, this was just the tutorial.

The game plays just like Grand Theft Auto. It's a 3rd-person shooter, and there are no action bars or skills, just weapons and shooting. Driving is very similar too. It's intuitive, but it can be tough to avoid pedestrians until you get the hang of it (hint: learn to use the handbrake). In a nice touch, some of them yell at you in Spanish. There's even a brief tutorial cinematic of how to play the game, and when it shows you "commandeering" a car, you can actually hear the owner yell "What the fuck?" as you toss them bodily from the vehicle.

The sound design is one of the standout features I've been exposed to so far, with great voicing of pedestrians and interesting music playing from the radios of cars. There are some nice details, like being able to hear your own muffled car radio as you approach your car (helped me figure out which one was mine as new players spawned Enforcer vehicles and left them all over the map).

I didn't get time to delve into the game proper, so a lot of the systems remain a mystery to me. The tutorial tried to explain how I can amass levels and cash to advance my character, and I could gain reputation with questgivers to unlock more options in their built-in shops to buy weapons and such. One interesting mechanic I did get to try was "pledging" to a particular questgiver. If you pledge, limit yourself to only taking quests from that NPC until you break the pledge, but in exchange you gain rep with that NPC more quickly.

So far, APB has left a good impression with me. If it keeps it up, I'll be glad I bought it. The pay-per-hour pricing model is interesting, to say the least, but it seems like a decent deal. You get infinite time in the "social" district, which I get the impression includes no questing, but shops and customization tools as well as chat. You also get 50 hours of gameplay proper just for purchasing the game, which for me is much more time than I spend on most full-priced games or even the other MMOs I've purchased (sorry Aion and Champions!) As long as that gameplay turns out to be good, I'll consider it a bargain.

I got to play the game back at PAX East, and I enjoyed the more advanced district PvP gameplay I was exposed to. Each sector of the city would essentially become a locked-in arena for a certain number of players, matched based on advancement and skill (for instance, for every high-level criminal, there might be 3 low-level enforcers in the zone). When more players are needed for a zone, an "APB" goes out to certain active players whom the game thinks would make a good match-up for the battle. Objectives would pop up on the map for every player, and you'd all be in competition to reach it first. In the example I played, criminals were racing to "tag" a certain wall with graffiti, while enforcers were trying to get there in time to stop them. This led to what seemed to be pretty standard gunfighting, though I didn't get enough time with the game to really form impressions.

We'll see what I think once I make my way into the game proper. Hopefully I'll be able to get a cool outfit soon!

Blizzard's Cataclysm Press Tour

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:02:00 +0000

Summary: They realized there was no way they'd finish everything in time for a Xmas release, so they cut out most of the new features.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/1790-World-of-Warcraft-Cataclysm-Press-Tour

Personally, I'm glad to see Path of the Titans go (just another grind per alt imo) as well as guild talents (no way they'd be balanced, everyone would just take the same ones anyway).

Very nice to see that 25-man raids can be split up if you don't have enough people the second day, and that raid IDs will be more flexible and interchangeable. Great changes.

I cannot wait to raid the elemental planes.

The Lost Finale

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:12:00 +0000

If you haven't watched the Lost series finale that aired yesterday, stop reading now.

After the jump is spoilerland.

On it's own, as 2.5 hours of thrilling and emotional television, the finale was excellent.

As a caring sendoff for the characters and their stories, it was great.

As an explanation for 6 years of craziness and mystery, the finale left a lot to be desired.

Here's what I was able to piece together about the plot:

On the island, Jack and Flocke bring Desmond to McGuffin's Cave of Pretty Lights. Desmond's unique resistance to electromagnetism appears to be the sole reason he's so important, as he's the only one who can uncork the core of the island and turn off the light without being fried/turned into a smoke monster. No explanation is given about what the light is, but it definitely provided the source for the "island magic" that gave the Smoke Monster his powers. He can now be killed. This leads to an incredibly epic and satisfying fight (can I please have that shot of Jack's furious leaping punch as my computer desktop?), the death of Smokey, and the mortal wounding of Jack. Jack goes on to pass immortal island stewardship to Hurley, recork the island, and - his purpose completed and humanity saved - die in the exact spot where he first woke up on the island, giving the show the perfect final shot: his eye closing. Meanwhile, everyone else who is still alive, most notably Kate, Claire, and Sawyer, escape the island on the Ajira plane.

While we're watching this, we're also getting flashes of the Sideways world, which many had guessed was an alternate timeline created by the hydrogen bomb detonation at the end of Season 5. This was a brilliant, brilliant misdirection and an even more brilliant narrative device. It allowed the writers to give each character the type of loving send-off they deserved without disrupting the meaning of any of their deaths on the island. In uniformly beautiful and heart-tugging scenes, the characters remember their lives on the island and gather for a funeral. Ostensibly, the funeral is for Jack's father Christian. In reality, the funeral is for themselves: they're already dead! Dun dun DUNNNNNN!

It turns out that the entire flash-sideways universe was a part of the afterlife, a place their souls had created to allow them to come together, work out a few final hang-ups, and let go of their mortal lives.

I don't think it was a cop-out in any way, and in fact was the opposite of a cop-out. By confirming beyond a doubt that the island and its events were real, and that each of the deaths was an actual death that meant something, the writers really own up to the story. (and if you think that the island itself was purgatory and they all died in the original plane crash, I'm sorry, but you're obviously wrong, for about a million reasons)

Imagine how big a cop-out it would have been if SidewaysLand was actually a parallel timeline, and all of the characters were somehow able to escape the island timeline and go there so they could live happily ever after (an outcome which Desmond seemed to be banking on right up until he popped the cork)?

The character-driven part of the finale was a rousing success. All of the characters got beautiful, heart-rending moments that made many of us stop caring about whether we got all the answers. Sawyer and Juliette "going dutch", Locke forgiving Ben, and even Jin's beaming smile upon seeing his friend Sawyer again for the first time (yes, I rate that as one of the top 3 emotional moment of the episode, even above Jin/Sun) were so emotionally satisfying that I think the characters got one of the best send-offs in TV history.

But that leaves us with where the finale fails - and fails hard. The real cop-out was in how the writers chose to explain - or not to explain - the island's mysteries.

The series had always hinted at the underlying systems and their explanations. There was always promise that the clues we were being fed led to something.

It turned out that the sci-fi and fantasy aspects of the show were nothing but a backdrop and device to get the characters to do cool and interesting things. That worked out great, but giving so little care the mythology was a disservice to all of the fans who had latched on to that mythology and devoted a lot of time and interest to trying to figure out the island.

The explanations the writers did give were enough for the narrative to work. A lot of crucial questions were answered (sort of), but many of those were simply steps back to new questions that no one could reasonably answer. The writers basically said: "you want to know why Alpert doesn't age? Well it's because Jacob has magic. How does he get this magic? Well, we aren't going to explain exactly how it works, but we'll tell you it comes from this magical cave full of light. What's in the cave? A stone radiating light while plugging a hole full of lava. What is the light, the stone and the lava? Well none of the characters can reasonably be expected to know that, so that's all you get!" We find out that the island is important for some supernatural reason, and that the Losties have to protect it, but we never find out exactly what it is that they are protecting (though we get enough hints to make our own conclusions). These big questions are answered well enough to be passable for the story, but not satisfying to those who were puzzling over the mythology.

What really pissed me off were the "clues" that the creators of Lost dropped (carelessly) in the previous seasons, before they themselves had bothered to figure out the answers that fans were spending hours trying to suss out. Things that seemingly got thrown out as unimportant because they didn't fit the vision the creators had of what would finally happen. Why was Walt special? Who was doing the food drops? Where did the four-toed statue come from? It feels disrespectful to the audience to give them what appear to be crucial clues, but are really just crap they threw out there to be "mysterious" and toss by the wayside once they no longer fit where the writers wanted to take the story.

It felt like a bait and switch. They put a puzzle in front of us that had no answer because they wanted us to feel puzzled. Fine as a narrative device, but a disservice to the fans nonetheless.

Many fans spent hours coming up with complex sets of rules that explained what was happening on the island. Though the show alluded to rules (when Ben's daughter dies, when discussing Jacob and his brother), it never delivered them in the end. There was never any grand plan, and everything really was made up as the writers went along. The show would have been a lot better if they had figured out the ending ahead of time, and built the series with a bit more focus, instead of littering it with broken pieces of old ideas as they went. It betrayed the faith the fans put in them, and it seems insulting that the people paid to write the show couldn't be bothered to come up with something as interesting as what these random internet people had done with the mythology.

Instead, Lost's creators stuck to their strengths and focused on characters and emotions. And though I'm disappointed by the seemingly haphazard handling of the mythology, in the end I have to agree that they made the right call, and the finale worked on the most important levels. Vanity Fair's writer makes this point in a slightly different way in one of the best next-day thoughts on the finale out there.

The writers may have made the right choice for the characters by avoiding a "Midi-chlorion" moment that ruins the magic by overexplaining it. But the bottom line is that they shouldn't have dug themselves such a big hole in the first place, then asked us to jump down it only to find nothing but an unexplained, vaguely magical light and our own mortality.

Lost worked like the best science fiction and fantasy is supposed to: it used circumstances that couldn't exist in real life to explore the human condition from a new angle. The backdrop of the island and its mythology allowed grand, riveting, and emotional stories to be told that couldn't be told otherwise. It was an end in itself, and from that perspective, it didn't need any explanation at all.

Interesting Link About Girl Gamers

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:58:00 +0000

As a bit of supporting evidence for "This is Why Girls Don't Talk To You":

70% of women playing online games choose male avatars and pretend to be male to avoid sexism.

This is all our fault, guys. Stop it.

Hatch at VTW: Starcraft 2 Beta Tales

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Fri, 21 May 2010 21:03:00 +0000

You can find my thoughts on the Starcraft 2 Beta in my weekly column at VTW Productions by clicking this sentence using that plastic object under your hand.

Female Worgen Models Revealed

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:26:00 +0000

The female worgen models officially previewed at the Escapist (nice name) look pretty good!

But I'm glad these are still a work in progress. I'm actually happy with the general idea, but the hips/waist/pelvis look wrong. Kind of fragile. Like, they need some shatter-proofing. Bulk em up a bit. Their faces also need work. I'd recommend giving them more jaw and just generally making the head a and mouth a bit bigger. We'd have to see them with hair. They look too much like does rather than wolves. I know they need to be feminine, but that doesn' t mean you have to change them to another species!

I love the lanky, languid feel, and the bit of graceful savagery to their apparent animations. I'm glad the devs avoided the temptation to over-feminize their limbs, instead making their arms long and their hands and feet large. They really do look like Worgen, isntead of a furry reskinned Draenei female like I expected. Then, just when I think they've made a step forward, I notice that not even plate armor covers their midriff. Vulnerable underbellies are usually a good place for armor, ladies.

I especially want to point out the apparent ear animations as shown in the stills, which are a nice touch, and really bring the model to life.

And their shoulders are a good size! Some of the WoW models have a lot of wasted potential because the shoulders are too small.

Overall, it' s looking promising.

My Weekly Column at VTW Productions: Why RealID is a Real Bad IDea

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:02:00 +0000

Extra! Extra! Read all about it here!

Jewelcrafting Win!

noreply@blogger.com (Hatch) — Wed, 12 May 2010 18:13:00 +0000

"Jewelcrafters will have some fun new (and potentially lucrative) vanity items, including fist weapons, rhinestone sunglasses, monocles, and stardust (sprinkle on players for entertainment)."

-Blizzard

Win.