DragonAge:Origins First Impressions

Big questions are generated in one’s mind when a sequel to a classic is made. If this was a review from a gaming website I would pontificate my opening sentence into a run on of analogies and big questions. Instead I’ll just pretend for a moment that I was Tycho.

Dragon Age: Origins; the named sequel to the famous Baldur’s Gate series. A series which spanned a number of games, from the party mode story telling in all of the PC versions, to the button mashing festival on the PS2, Xbox, and even the GameCube.

This time, the same game has been released for the PC as well as the Xbox360 and PS3. Past incarnations of Baldur’s Gate titles have always played differently on the PC than on other gaming platforms. The PS2 and Xbox games Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and its sequel BG: DA2, were both single hero dungeon romps. In other words, you only ever controlled one character, ever.

The PC versions of Baldur’s Gate all involved party control. Yes, you had your main character, but then you had all these supporting people you could choose from to fill out your party and bring new skills to the table. It made for a more tactical game.

It plays faster than the old PC versions, which may or may not please players, and it plays slower than the old console versions… which again may or may not please players. The controls take a little getting used to, especially if you were expecting one extreme or the other, because it just kind of settles in the middle. You can play the game with party members doing nothing but throwing support as you go on a rampage, or you can play the game and pause as often as you like, the difficulty menu explains it pretty clearly. Easy and Normal mode are more like the old console versions, while the difficult and whatever the last one was named settings, the description tells you that you will want to pause the game a lot.

Enough of its past though, Dragon Age: Origins is a brand new game. Origins is based in a "new" fantasy world, though it is still filled with elves, dwarves, humans, trolls, and orcs. For the first time the elves aren’t really powerful, and instead it’s just dwarves and humans as the politically strong races. Not exactly the awesome new world as was suggested… but as far as generic fantasy worlds with a mild twist go, it’s a fun world. Some people are actually calling out todays fantasy worlds as nothing more than rehash, and from a look at Origins, they'd be right.

Role playing different kinds of characters can extend the life of the game greatly, and I suggest that you do the following. Read the description of your race, class, and starting area, and then before actually starting the game come up with an outline of how you want your character to behave: mean or nice, likes or dislikes other races, interested in love or not, likes men or women, all of the basics. If you’ve played through the game before than you can further flesh out your character before starting, but if you haven’t then don’t try to stretch yourself just yet, because you discover a lot during your Origin Story. I strongly suggest you come up with an outline for your character first, because while how you react is tested almost constantly, it can feel like a letdown when you give in just to get an easy reward, cursing your weak will later which you exchanged for shiny loot.

There are six total Origin Stories and they are one of the best fleshed concepts that Bioware has pulled off. Each of them lasts about 3 hours of game play. These six stories are crafted in order to give your character a particular outlook on the world. They can influence if your character likes the church, or other races, or even their own race. The Human Noble story is the best crafted of the ones I have completed, because it takes you along for the ride without forcing options at you. Some of the other stories, especially the Daelish Elf one, feel extremely forced and can easily ruin any sort of immiscibility you have with the game. I suggest if you want to play a good character, play the Human Noble storyline, and if you want to play a bad character, play the City Elf storyline, and go from there.

Unfortunately this forced storytelling method rears its ugly head throughout the game, destroying any sense of immersion at key points in the storyline. One second a companion will be saying “I’m tired of waiting, let’s go do this,” and the very next scene he will say “I don’t like where this is going, we should do this.” Complete destruction of immersion. It’s also really painful trying to play an evil character. The game just does not want to let it happen. Even the evil characters in your party will get mad at you if you act “too evil”. It’s very sad.

Despite all this, it’s still an incredible story and fun to play through as different personalities. If you want to play a personality besides “neutral good lover of all”, then expect the story to piss you off at points, not giving you the proper options to do what you want. Nothing is more annoying than having someone call you a dirty slave worthy city elf not fit to be in their eyesight and then having the game not give you the option to gut them. The fact that the game can make you feel such emotions though, even if at the game itself more than the characters in the game, shows how well crafted it is, drawing you in and making you feel attached to your character.

The game is rumored to last over 100 hours even if you don’t do all of the side quests. So it is a huge game, and having the ability to play through it with multiple personalities can only extend the enjoyment. Honestly though, most people playing this game aren’t going to be big into role-playing, and will probably only end up with two personalities, good to see what good does, and as evil as possible. What’s that? Sounds like KoTOR? If you are into role-playing, this game can provide a solid 6 or more adventures. I don’t consider the male/female option of playing through as a real character changer.

The much hyped Mass Effect style conversation system falls flat, as previously mentioned. More errors involve cut and paste conversation, where it doesn’t matter what you say, the end result is the same. This creates a confusing illusion that what you say doesn’t have any effect on the conversations, when in reality it just rarely has a real effect on the conversation. The further into the game you play though, the more your conversation choices make an immediate difference.

The biggest problem with the conversation system is that you don’t always know what you’re saying. By this I mean that you think you’re saying one thing, you read the line and go yeah, I would say something like that, but then the person you’re speaking to responds in a totally unexpected manner, and all of a sudden you realize that what you chose to say could be stated with a different tone and mean something completely different. It’s reminiscent of those terrible point and click puzzles, or “logic” flash games, where the answer is only visible if you are the creator, not because you’re supposed to solve anything.

Those are the two most frustrating things wrong with Dragon Age. The conversation system not providing enough information on how you are saying something and the lack of choices to react as your character would. You might say “it’s impossible to provide all the possible reactions”, but that’s not true. There are six origins, each one makes you feel a certain way about the world, and it shouldn’t be a surprise when a blood thirsty city elf who hates humans by DESIGN wants to kill or confront anyone who insults them. Acceptance, Ignorance, Confrontation. Three results, all you need, I’m sure somebody wrote a book on it 30 years ago. Giving two identical options of acceptance is just bad design.

Well, those are my first impressions of Dragon Age: Origins. I plan on playing some more of it in the near future, and I’ll probably have some closing impressions as well. It is a good game, despite my obvious problem with the conversation system, and I suggest that anybody who has played the original PC Baldur’s Gates buy it. If you want nonstop action, you could get it but you’d probably be happier with Modern Warfare 2. If you’re a fan of Western fantasy RPG’s, then this is a staple game that you will enjoy.

Aion "Actually it's not me, it's you."

Aion is a beautiful game, probably the most beautiful MMO out on the market. But just like an obnoxious girl, you have to balance out her sexual appeal to how willing you are to stand for her bullshit.

Aion. I love crafting in your game. It is a solid experience with a continual churning of mini rewards that make me feel like my time is well spent in upgrading my character. I love all the quirks and polish snuck into the world itself like hidden Easter eggs just waiting to be found. Every zone, many of the quests, NPC names, have little parts to them that can make you chuckle if you take the time. I love your ridiculous graphics that make my PC feel like it’s running a marathon, you are so beautiful. It feels like watching those old-school high-rendered next-gen top quality video game commercials, but this time the game play actually looks that way. I love how many different monsters you have in the world. I love how PvP is not an option, but a way of life.

All of that just isn’t enough compared to your bad side.

My video card is up to date, I have a dual core processor, sure I’m not as buff as I used to be a couple years ago, but you didn’t even know me back then! Aion is intended to work with PC’s like mine, but due to coding complications, or Something, the game has a major problem with dual core processors. Many players actually got better results by turning off one of their processors.

The problems range from frame rate spikes to rubber banding, which is basically the same thing as rollback lag, to just not working at all. These aren’t isolated incidents, many players have had to deal with these problems, and NCSoft suffers from a sever lack of support. Make that a lack of any support. They offer a forum where players can talk to each other about problems, but no one from their company actually chimes in with any assistance. Maybe that’s better than being told to delete your WTF folder for everything from lag to lost loot… but not really.

Now, there’s nothing worse than going out with your significant other, or maybe just someone you hope will be, and discovering bugs hopping off of them onto you and biting you. Okay, so that example is a bit extreme, but gold spammers and bots in Aion are just as invasive, if not as disgusting. You cannot enter a city without seeing a gold seller sitting somewhere, and you won’t go a single game session without having your chat box filled with at least a couple gold spammers.

The problem with bots and gold spammers further highlights the disconnect between the developers/community leaders and the players. In the most recent patch, players couldn’t even block gold spammers anymore, which means that their chat boxes were filled with gold spam endlessly. I hope NCSoft put the block functionality back into their game, and that it was just a bug, but launching with such an error really does make the game unplayable. There was a recent article somewhere, if someone else remembers where please put a link in the comments, which discussed how MMO companies typically take one of two stances: either an open community forum with developers or a closed one. NCSoft definitely takes the closed version; it was even mentioned in the article that way. It is a major turn off when you have a problem and you have no idea how to go about fixing it, and neither does anybody else, because it’s not your fault, it’s the games fault.

Other gripes with Aion are that some of the classes suck at soloing. Templars for example can’t solo worth a damn. If you want to solo, either take a high damage class or a healing class… oh wait, that’s actually everyone except Templars. So just don’t roll a Templar. Yet NCSoft is probably wondering why there is a tank shortage…

The final stake through my heart? The grind. I don’t mind grinding, I don’t mind getting my hands dirty, putting in my time, scraping together the pieces in order to foster the growth of something fantastic. But Aion asks too much. The level cap should have been 30, not 50, because once you pass level 30, the experience needed to get from one level to the next is exorbitant, and it only gets work. Going from level 49 to 50 takes over 1 billion experience points. Someone did the math; it’s the same amount of XP you would need to get from level 1 to 45. A game that requires some grinding is okay as long as you’re enjoying yourself. A game that promotes bots to grind because there’s no way a human being in their right mind could sit through that much time is not a game you want to be around. Even if she makes the best damn cookies in the world.

And by the way, it's also a terrible sign when the company is already churning out another MMO that looks so similar to the one you were just playing. This guy at Massively.com is already talking about it, Blade And Soul, and honestly I can't blame her. Though I will disagree. Blade and Soul will be great for 2 months and then fail. If you want an MMO from NCSoft, stick with Guild Wars 2.

Shadowmourne Released

344... +400 strength stacking...

Just the 344 DPS, with an almost 1600 top end damage, is incredible. I don't think even one of these will be seen on live servers for at least 5 months, especially with the new gated system for releasing wings of ICC, but when someone does get one, this is going to be nasty in PvP. The 10 stack reward of a 2k damage effect is meaningless really, but the strength bonus, if it actually stacks up to 400 is a huge boost. That's basically a ~900 AP bonus.

If the Soul Fragment things do stack, giving +40 strength each, then you're looking at about +200 strength on average, minus a little for the downtime of 0 strength and 40 strength, plus the top end wouldn't actually exist, so it's more of a scale between 0 and 360, which gives an average of +180 strength. Still greater than any trinket or set bonus I think, not to mention in addition to them.

If I got this, I would purposefully take out my other JC only +str gems and slot them all into this weapon, just to make it even more OP than it already is.

No Longer a Correspondent

Well, it looks like MMORPG.com has finally shut the doors on their correspondent program. No word on why exactly, but I'm honestly not that surprised. Keeping track of so many different writers, many who probably only wrote a couple articles and then left, was probably too big of a headache compared to the return value. It appears they also hired a good number of additional staff to handle all of their important news issues, so they should be good for the future. It was a very enjoyable experience, and I'm glad I was able to participate in it. Getting paid to write, even if it's a negligible amount, felt really good. It looks like I'll have more time to spend updating this blog now though.

I'll go ahead and update today with the last article I wrote for MMORPG.com. I naturally would never repost something elsewhere that I've written for someone, but my last article was pulled due to a misunderstanding on its content. "Promoting cheating" was the reason, though they're also shutting down the program so that would have been reason enough for me. If you ever want to read my old articles they can be found here, though you'll have to sift through to find articles written by Robert Duckworth, the websites search feature can't seem to narrow it down any further.

My last article in its submission form... honestly barely different from its final form.

Swing Timers and Animation Cancelling

Whenever you do anything with your avatar in an MMO you get visual feedback. If you press the forward button then your character starts moving forward, if you use a special attack then you get to see some flashy lights. Those are all animations. Some things you do with your avatar will cause an animation that locks your character into place, essentially removing control of your character from you until the animation has been completed. For example, in Aion if a Ranger uses their Stunning Shot, they are locked in one place until the approximately 1 second animation has been completed, losing all control over their character, they cannot even cancel the shot if they want to by moving. Animation cancelling helps fix this, and is done by revoking the games process which locks your character into an animation sequence. The action continues anyway, but the player is allowed to maintain control over their character. So going back to the Ranger example, they would be able to shoot the Stunning Shot faster by cutting down or completely eliminating the animation before the shot is fired.

This is not something new with Aion; it has been around for a long time in video games. Some players consider the concept to be cheating, while others consider it just another aspect of a player’s grasp of skill over a game. It can definitely feel like someone is cheating if they are using it against you and you do not know how to respond. Whether or not it is considered cheating seems to depend on the community that surrounds it. A factor is how easy it is to successfully cancel an animation, the easier it is to do the more acceptable the practice appears to become. WoW, as must almost always be mentioned when discussing MMO’s, actually does not have any animation cancelling. Character avatars in WoW are never locked into an animation for anything, and it makes the game feel incredibly smooth. WoW used to have another issue though that is sort of like animation cancelling, but is more related to swing timers, which will be discussed first. (Img#1 – Lovely View)

My personal experiences in Aion have mainly been restricted to a Ranger and a Templar so far, so those are the two classes I am going to use in my explanations. The Templar does not have the same amount of animation canceling that the Ranger has, but they do involve the important concept of swing timers. Each weapon has an attack speed associated with it, depending on what type of weapon it is. A Templars Great Sword for example has an attack speed of 2.4 seconds. This means that every 2.4 seconds, the Templar will swing their weapon for a normal auto attack.

The issue here is that when a player uses a special attack, it will delay their swing timer. So if I press a special attack on my Templar 2.3 seconds after their last auto attack, I will not get another auto attack until the animation for my special attack has finished, plus a little bit of extra time even. It actually lowers your damage if you hit special attacks back to back, because you never give your avatar time to get any of their auto attacks in. Normally you would think that special attacks would hit for more damage than auto attacks, and they may at some of the higher levels, but when you take into account a weapons extra hit chance, the auto attacks often hit for more than the special attacks. Great Swords are classified as a “Very slow 3 hit weapon”. This means that for every auto attack done by a Great Sword, you have a chance to hit your target 3 times instead of just once, while special attacks only ever hit their target once.

Auto attack animations, unlike special attack animations, do not restrict your character from using new abilities. In order to maximize your damage, you have to press your special attack right after the auto attack animation starts. You will deal your full auto attack damage, plus your special attack damage, and while going through your special attack animation which you are locked into, your auto attack timer is counting down, coming off the timer shortly after you finish your special attack. Doing nothing but chaining all your available attacks one after the other hurts your damage output by a lot, making solo leveling almost impossible if you do this, and of course not bringing your full potential to a group either.

One thing of note is that because you have over written your auto attack animation, your auto attack damage is applied instantly rather than after the animation. So using your special attacks this ways also lets you spike damage closer together, instead of having it laid out evenly. (Img#2 – Auto Swing)

The Rangers auto attacks work the same way as the Templars, though Rangers deal a lot more damage with their special attacks than they do with their auto attacks. In a PvE setting the ranger will want to do the same thing a Templar does, waiting until right after their auto attack animation starts before using a special attack. In PvP though, Rangers will want to do something different. If someone is chasing you, you typically cannot afford to stop and stand there, letting them close the distance to you while you charge up a 1 second special attack. The solution: cast your shots instantly by canceling the 1 second cast time animation. This is also very good practice for solo questing. Rather than use a trap on every mob, or constantly switching back and forth between melee and ranged attacks, you can kite them and still deal special attack damage.

The process to get instant cast shots out of a ranger sounds a little complex, but actually doing it in game will show that it is not that hard to pull off. The first thing you have to do is make sure that your auto attack timer is fully charged. If you have your attack turned on, then your auto attack is turned on, and the timer will recharge itself no matter what direction you’re facing or if you’re in range of your target or not. So as a Ranger, make sure that your auto attack is turned on, but is charged, so it has not fired in the last few seconds. The only way to really accomplish this is to have your avatar turned away from your target.

Next, you will want to jump. If all you do is face away, charge your auto attack, and then press your special attack, you will turn around and go through the same 1 second cast. So you are jumping, and starting at right before you land, up to right after you land, is the time where you want to hit your special attack button. You also want to make sure that when you are landing your target is in your frontal cone of vision, so you want to go from facing away from them to facing towards them. I have noticed that sometimes if you spam your special attack that it will push you into the cast animation, whereas if you just press it once or twice you will get an instant shot. And that is really all there is to it. Instead of taking over a second of cast time to fire off a supposed zero cast time instant shot, you take less than a quarter of a second before you can start moving again in whatever direction you please.

You will not get your auto attack shot out of this because you are resetting the auto attack timer by shooting your special attack. For Rangers, this is not that important anyway since auto shots do so little damage when compared to special attacks. Also, while your character is not going through the animation for their casted shot, they are frozen from committing any new special attacks until the animation timer that they cancelled would have finished. But instead of firing the special attack at the end of the animation, it is fired instantly and you maintain full control of your characters movement throughout the time where normally you would be stuck in one place. (Img#3 – 15% Cast Time Perhaps)

A few of the other classes probably share the same issues with auto attacks that the Templar and Ranger do. The Gladiator for example I can imagine. I do not see any of the caster classes having to deal with these issues because if they move they cancel their spell casts. Rangers cannot cancel their attack animations by moving, and neither can melee classes. Spell casters may have their own form of animation cancelling but I do not have any experience with it if they do. I have seen an in game advertisement by a player from a private store selling a type of food that transforms you into something else, claiming it cuts down on casting animations by 15%, and thus increasing your casting speed by 15%, but they were AFK so I never got a real answer.

I have noticed a general acceptance of animation cancelling for Rangers. NCSoft has done nothing to stop it from happening for 10 months, and it does not appear to make Rangers over powered. Instead it looks as if it is an intended feature of the class. Forced animations are one of the sad side effects of pushing a game to look better rather than play better, often leading to that annoying clunky feeling. Cutting down on lengthy character animations, as well as the concept of global cool downs between activating abilities, are the two main methods I have seen over the years used to combat this issue.

- Averice

DJ Hero *Preview*

DJ Hero - Saving the world 2 mixed beats at a time.

The villain has stolen your princess and she’s locked in the castle! It’s up to you and your trusty record scratching box thing, to perform a grueling series of events involving the mastery of timing, pressing, scratching, sliding, holding, and bobbing your head along to the beat. You finally have made it to the end of your journey! Only to have some little guy tell you that you wasted all your time. But then, it’s all about the journey, isn’t it?

No, that storyline has nothing at all to do with DJ Hero’s storyline. You can pretend if you want though, since DJ Hero doesn’t actually have a storyline as far as I could tell. Maybe it did, I only spent one hour with the thing, and it was a demo copy so I only had access to a single 3 set of songs. Supposedly that’s how it works, just like DDR used to do it.

Again, I only spent about 1 hour with this game, so if you think this review just doesn’t cover all there is to the game, there’s the reason. That said, I feel that 1 hour is all the time needed for a game like this. There is no growth in this game. There is no character development or plot line, there’s no unlocking of cool new abilities to blast your foes with. All of the growth will come from the player themselves as they gain skill at using the turntable. It’s essentially Guitar Hero with a turn table instead of a guitar. Well, instead of 5 buttons you get 3 buttons, a slider, and a little disc to turn. That slider is actually the most difficult part.

Like other games of its ilk, DJ Hero is no pushover once you get to the harder difficulty levels. You will feel like you are actually accomplishing something that takes skill, and so even if you’re not actually learning anything worthwhile, the game still works. The whole experience was rather empty, but if you like this kind of music and you don’t mind the $90 price tag, and you like the Guitar Hero style of game, then there is zero reason not to buy this.

Oh right, add to that list: if you don’t mind playing by yourself. DJ Hero is a single player game through and through. Supposedly a friend can come over with their own $90 turn table and plug it in and you guys can compare your scores in person rather than online, but… that’s about it. Whenever something like this comes up with a game all I can think of is Four Swords Zelda for the GameCube. You’ll be happy its single player though once you realize just how silly you look getting all into scratching on the little plastic record.

The mixed beats are of high quality, most of them made specifically for this game by real DJ’s. It is a little disappointing that the maximum number of mixed beats is only ever two songs. They could have really spiced things up and made some real 20 minute sets with over 10 different tracks at once, but for some reason they felt to take that out and leave you with bite sized chunks of minimalist mixing. The game pauses between each mixed song in a set, tallying your score up for you, letting you know how you did, before starting the next song. If you feel like a DJ when you play this game, then you might want to find out what DJ’s actually do.

The lack of creativity from the player is also apparent. Now maybe I missed something about having a free style icon letting you know when you can scratch to your heart’s content, but even if that is in the game it doesn’t make up for zero player mixing. All of the songs are premixed, it’s actually hard to play them in the game until you’ve played it a few times and know how different parts are going to sound because the beat will randomly change and you’ll be stuck wondering why you just missed a series of notes. Since you can’t actually hear the beat anymore once you miss the first note, and the beat changes as you hit that first note, you can’t use the audio to help you DJ. You end up being forced to spend way too much of your attention on watching the timing of the track on the screen, and not enough on enjoying the music you’re playing. In other words, the game can feel more like work than play, which honestly is a non issue in Guitar Hero, unless maybe you’re playing the drums. But even then, at least the beat is constant; you got that working for you. DJ Hero says no.

If you do get this game, the first thing you need to do is set up a comfortable place to play it. Then you need to set up a massive sound system, subwoofer if you can, and blast the neighborhood. It really is important to play comfortably and at the right height, because otherwise you’ll end up getting blisters on your scratching hand. Actually, you should go out and invest in a special DJ Glove. Then you can DJ Hero whenever you feel like it no matter where you are.

Final hits? Solid beat game. New style of music and a new way to play it. Niche marketing to the near extreme. If you liked playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band when you were by yourself, but like this kind of music more than rock and roll, you’ll like this game.