Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

A recent  post on Tobold's Blog got me thinking about the number of games I play and whether I like to flit between games or spend a lot of time in one game. The truth is I get far more satisfaction from investing a lot of time in one game than from flitting between games and never the less I still do flit. Sometimes flitting is an inevitable consequence of a game not appealing to me as much as I thought it would. If I move on from a game because I am no longer enjoying it then I don't feel particularly bad about it. Sometimes however I just get distracted by something else and temporarily take a break from a game I fully intend to come back to. Unfortunately these days there is such an overwhelming choice of games to play (often at very little cost)  that such temporary breaks almost inevitably become permanent. This ever growing list of  unfinished titles that I intend to get back to some day is a source of frustration for me. To illustrate the above with examples ...

... comes an unexpurgated stream of excrementally puerile drivel, at least it would so appear in games. My Guild Wars appetite has not been sated by completion of the Nightfall campaign but I don't really feel like going over the same missions again in hard mode or in pursuit of skills or titles. Therefore I have instead started a brand new assassin character in Factions. After a brief tutorial I was set loose in the starter town of Shing Jea Monastery. Having spent the last few weeks in the sparsely populated end game regions of the Nighfall campaign it was at first heartening to see a lively stream of banter in the local chat channel. Heartening at least until I made the mistake of trying to read some of that lively banter and discovered just how nauseatingly puerile that banter was. The general timbre of the conversation may be judged from the topics covered in a the few brief minutes that I observed. The most commonly applied epithet was to call someone or something "gay...

The title is a quote attributed to game designers in an intriguing article by John Davison of Game Pro . The article itself has some interesting points to make about the future of game design and is well worth a read but some of the things I took out of it are: The fact that game designers are now measuring players actions in game with embedded tools. The fact that the results of these measurements is that only a small minority of hard core players (less than 5% is suggested) play a game as intended through to completion. More than 90% of players just play for four or five hours and prefer to just "dick around" rather than follow the prescribed structure of the game.

I'm not up for a long blog post but I thought I should mark Throg's completion of Volume 1 of the Epic quest. Book 15 Chapter 12 brings Vol 1 to a close and finally wraps up the tragic tale of Laerdan and his daughter. Most of book 15 is a bit tedious consisting mainly of riding up and down the high moor on various errand quests but the final chapter is a doo hickey. Its is a roller coaster ride of excellent instance design that keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole way through. Throg went in with a Kin group equipped with Ventrillo and we still wiped twice on the first boss. Getting our strategy right and killing him was just the beginning though - you begin a dangerous trawl through corridors and rooms filled with challenging encounters and we were on the edge of our seat for the full hour or so that it took us to work out way to the final boss. Terrific stuff. Nice rewards too - a useful piece of armour, a new title that for once actually means something, a few novel...

Tobold's I'm taking a break from World of Warcraft post today got me thinking again about why can an MMO not have an end of game. Please note that end of game is very different from end-game. End-game is a device to try and keep you subscribed forever. End of game is a mechanism to allow you to leave the game with some feeling of completion. This is a similar line of thinking to that which inspired my thinking about perma-death . I wrote my thoughts in a comment to Tobolds post but I am going to be lazy and copy them here for my own records: Why do we even have to justify our decision to stop playing a game for a while. Moving on is an entirely healthy phenomenon in my opinion and yet there seems to be a suggestion of treachery about it. It is no reflection on the quality of a game or its community that you have gotten bored and want to do something else for a while. Perhaps this is a fatal flaw in the current mmo business model. If Blizzard or Turbine or CCP's business m...

 Back in 2012 the brooding world of Dark Souls consumed me for several weeks . I bounced off several other FromSoft games but Elden Ring's more accessible approach  has sucked me back into the Souls world once again. I now have now spent over 200 hours in the game and it has become a compulsion. At this stage I am strongly considering taking a break.  Elden ring has taught me something about myself and about the way I approach games. I play very very slowly. How Long to Beat  suggests that the main storyline takes about 55 hours and that 100% completion takes around 130. After 200 hours my level 65 character is less than half way through the game (currently in Redmayne Castle preparing to take down Starscourge Radahn). When I realised how slowly I was progressing compared to others I initially blamed it on my lack of skill however on reflection I think it has more to do with the way I prefer to play. To give an example from yesterday: I spent four hours overcoming a ...

"You want me to deliver 8000m3 of gewgaws to the low security system of Ingunn, known hideout of murderers, thieves and other undesirables? You do realise that I will need to bring my industrial ship to fit all that junk? The big slow one with paper thin armour and a massive target symbol painted on the side. Have you considered that the miserable 175,0000 isk you are offering me for this mission won't even pay for a replacement clone following my inevitable podding in that cesspit." You need to run 16 regular missions to get an important storyline mission that, usually, offers better rewards and a significant increase in faction standings. So after 16 combat missions I get my first level 4 storyline mission:a crappy delivery mission to low sec. Random numbers suck sometimes. By every logical reason I should have declined this mission. Bringing a slow industrial into pirate infested low security space is just asking to come home in a pod and the standings loss I was ...

Yesterday was Lotro Europe Patch day. Almost every previous patch day has resulted in extended downtime so I didn't expect that Throg would go adventuring last night. I was pleasantly surprised therefore when I managed to log in at 7pm (GMT) for an evening of trouble free gaming. Well done Code masters - it looks like you are finally getting your act together on the Lotro front. The Patch notes are here . To be honest the only thing that caught my attention is something which hasn't been fixed. It is under Known Issues: "When in a fellowship, you may not receive credit for the completion of an instance quest unless you yourself speak to the NPC which starts the instance. In light of this, when fellowships plan to run an instanced quest, members who wish to receive credit for the quest should not use the "Travel Now" option. Players should decline this option and instead, speak to the NPC themselves to enter the instance and join their fellows. A change to the Tra...

 Steam says I have played Elden Ring for 77 hours since installing the game 23 days ago. Some of that is undoubtedly idle time but I have probably clocked at least 50 hours of actual playtime and I am still very much a beginner.  Elden Ring is the 2022 mega hit game from From Software, creator of the hugely influential Demon souls / Dark Souls series. These games are notoriously hard core and make a virtue out of not hand holding players. Elden Ring remains true to the souls formula but in a bigger bolder and more accessible format. Elden Ring has been rewarded with huge sales and multiple critical accolades including several "Game of the Year" titles.  More accessible is a relative term. Unlike previous souls games Elden Ring does have a tutorial (if you can find it by jumping off a cliff) but it only teaches the very basics of melee combat. Most of the games many many complex systems are left for the player to figure out by themselves including things as fundamental as ...

I love finishing things. In single player games there is generally a final boss to be overcome and no matter how cheesy the closing cut-scene I find I can walk away with a warm glow knowing that I have completed the game. Mmorpgs are unfinished by design. There is no end of game. Nevertheless a certain completionist satisfaction can still be had from finished various subgoals of which there are many. Complete a certain quest arc, complete a certain reputation grind, complete a certain armour set, complete a certain deed or collection. Completing things was pretty much the theme of my weekend in Lotro. On Friday night I had the help of a kinship group to complete the quests in Volume II book 6 . In this book the hard pressed dwarven expeditionary forcein Moria were forced to ask for Eleven help to suppress the evil that has taken over the once great dwarven stronghold. With considerable effort on Throg's part the elves of Lothlorien agreed to help not because of any love of dwar...