Actually talking about the game…

I know it’s been a while (but I also know that no one reads this blog!), but my ISP has been giving me problems. It took a few days, but we seem to be back online and doin’ fine.

Something to note: in order to facilitate a “new” experience with this MMO, I have decided that I will not read any news, spoilers, patch notes, etc about the game until I have familiarized myself with it. What this means for me is that I get my wish and every aspect of the game–good or bad–is new to me. Everything is unexpected because I haven’t allowed myself to see what to expect. What this means for any reader of this blog (and I don’t believe those exist yet) is that most of the info here is not new to you if you’ve been reading anything about the game. Or playing it for a while. Again, I didn’t want to start another resource of news, tips, datacron locations, et al. I started this as a way for me to chronicle my discoveries of a new MMO, since I’ve only explored one other before.

First of all, the acted, narrative quests are extremely interesting to me. WoW does give narrative elements to its quests–phrases like “Mankrik’s Wife” and “Van Cleef” have meaning to a player who has followed the quests and the lore. And those stories are great, by the way! I’m not trying to take away from them. It’s just that the narrative element of the game is not what hooked me onto WoW. I was hooked when I could play with others. That was it. I was terrible at First Person Shooters, couldn’t hang with Real Time Strategy, and wasn’t a fan of online poker, so playing a game with other people was such a novel concept that I had to try it, and loved it. But the story that’s presented in game–which, again, can be great–is not actually a huge part of the player experience like it is in SWTOR. The WoW, you have to put in extra effort to experience the story (you have to read the lore part of the quest). In SWTOR, you have to put extra effort into not experiencing the story (by hitting the spacebar to skip). This is something that more traditional or single-player RPGs do well, and I was pleasantly surprised to see it in an MMO.

I also think that the combination of classes at the advanced level is interesting. I’m a fan of having choices be extremely consequential. This does not happen in WoW–you can change your character’s sex, name, server, XP status, and/or spec almost on-the-fly. All choices can, with a little gold or US$, be changed. SWTOR might end up letting us change appearance or names, but it certainly doesn’t cater well to people who want to change combat roles. For example, my little Sith Inquisitor chose to go sorcerer. He will never, ever, ever get to tank because he did not choose to go Juggernaut. And he can’t. It’s permanent (for now, anyway). There is even a warning from the trainer that the player should be careful because the decision matters and it is irreversible.

So, I thought that this combination of rigid class structure and immersive gameplay could actually bite back with some negative consequences. For example, if I wanted to try my hand at tanking, and I really wanted to try that doulble-bladed light saber (which is enough incentive for me, by the way, because I’m shallow and immature). I’d have to roll at least 10 more levels of Inquisitor before there could be any branch off. I’m unsure, since I have yet to try a Juggernaut, but it’s a possibility. Because the entire game is phased, all Inquisitors go through the same phases for the same quests. I mean, you could pick different options, I guess, but it’d be replay. When my Imperial Agent got to Dromund Kaas, though, I was pleasantly surprised at how different his story was–his actual quests were different, even when he had quest objectives that were exactly the same as my Inquisitor’s. I was making all new choices and experiencing a whole different feel for the Empire on that character even while being on the same planet and interacting with some of the same people.

If I compare this to WoW, I’d have to say that there are plusses and minuses. First of all, in WoW, if you’re in a certain zone, you’ll be doing the exact same quests that everyone else in that zone does. There is no deviation. These quests can be very simple and boring–”We’ve got too many boars in the area. Kill 10.”–to very involved– but all players experience the same thing. But, not all players go through all zones. The WoW world is so much bigger than SWTOR’s, and that means that you have a choice of questing zones to bring your level 20 to level 25. In SWTOR, though, all 25s are in the same zone. So, if I were playing WoW and I had a feral druid who was pve and pvp specced, and I didn’t want to mess with him, but I wanted to roll a moonkin, then I could just roll a different species. Same faction, same guild, but a different experience lore-wise. This is currently not possible in TOR. But the other side of that is that if I wanted another Night Elf, no matter what class, then I’d be doing the exact same quests that my druid did. No change there.

I gotta say that TOR’s method wins for me because I was absolutely amazed that my Agent was seeing so much different content throughout a familiar quest hub. And that’s really what it boils down to–my Agent wasn’t seeing new environments or enemies, but he was seeing a completely different story. And stories are what do it for me. If storied gameplay is what you’re after, TOR is the better choice by far.

EDIT: One more thing–flying stingrays.

2012
01/16
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SWTOR on the iMac, Part II

After my previous misadventures trying to get Windows to run well enough on my Mac so that I could play SWTOR, I finally got Boot Camp installed. Of course, this meant that I had to get Windows installed. Again. There are a few ways to do that through Boot Camp, and I desperately wanted to choose the method that is grayed out in the following picture:

I no can has gray box?

For some reason, the shiny new HP 8GB flash drive that my sweet mother bought me for Xmas–and which would be perfect for this type of exercise–was not being recognized by my Mac. I inserted it. I made sure it was inserted properly. I removed it. I re-inserted it. Nothing. No recognition whatsoever. Well, I went to the forums to see if anyone else had this problem, and almost everyone who uses HP flash drives with their Macs experience this. They are fishy at best when trying to make them operate on Mac OSX.

I didn’t just have Mac OSX, though. I now had a Parallels window running Windows 7, so I tried that, and Windows recognized it. It was the easiest thing in the world to drag and drop the ISO from my Mac desktop to that Parallel window, which had the flash drive open, ready and waiting to receive its new data. It took about 10 minutes for the ISO to copy, so I waited, and then booted up Boot Camp again. Guess what I saw?

Yep. The exact same thing.

You have to understand: Getting me online and playing this game was akin to some dope-fiend desperately searching for a way to score. It wasn’t necessarily that the game was so good in the first 3 levels of choppy, laggy playing that I couldn’t live without it. It was more like the deep, obsessive need to accomplish my mission: get SWTOR running smoothly. The game had kind of become ancillary to the need to just finish what I had freaking started. And that would be great if that need had provided some sort of calming, rational clarity or technological insight. Instead, it got in my way by making me a bumbling fool who couldn’t be bothered to stop and think about why that box might still be gray.

The HP flash drive couldn’t be read by the computer while it was empty. Why in the world would it be available for use now that it wasn’t empty. What had changed? Was the ISO just going to magically make the flash drive visible to the computer. Should I have gone on to those forums and told them that I could solve their problems with a mere $119 dollar OS file (that I paid $200 for, remember?) and about 2 hours?

So, I burned the ISO onto a disk. It took 5 minutes and worked like a charm. The dreaded box went from gray to blue and Boot Camp ran its magic. I booted my computer into Windows 7, inserted the game disks and began that 75 minute installation process. Again. I didn’t want to disturb the Intel processor any more than necessary, so that the installation would be as smooth as possible, so I didn’t touch any other program that might take RAM or processing speed (and I don’t even know if that would matter, to tell you the truth–I’m a Mac guy for a reason, you see).

I should have opened some other program–preferably one that used the internet. Because now my Windows machine could not hook up into the internet. The cables were all there. I rebooted into OSX mode and, sure enough, the internet worked fine for that side of the fence. But Windows didn’t want to cooperate. I know enough about computers to figure out that I probably needed some drivers updated to make sure my OS could properly interface with hardware, namely internet-providing hardware. But I couldn’t search the internet and download those drivers unless I could get onto the internet. It was a complete Catch-22.

I still had that OSX side, though, so I hopped back on (noticing that, strangely, the HP flash drive was registering there for some reason) so I could scour the dregs of Google in order to find those drivers. I found a site that hosted Windows 7 network drivers, and used my now-available flash drive to download them. Reboot to Windows. They don’t have an installer. Just the files. Reboot to Mac. Google again. Find one from the Intel site (I have an Intel processor, so it should work, right?). Reboot to Windows. Doesn’t work.

I’ll spare you the boredom and skip ahead. If you take another look at the above pictures, you’ll notice that the first option isn’t the only one that needed to be checked. There is a gray box in the middle that will download “Apple Support” software. I hadn’t checked that box because I had thought (if you can call that thinking), “I don’t want to download additional software! That’s just Apple trying to weasel its way into my Windows OS!”

Yeah, it’s not. It’s Apple trying to make its components work for that OS. I reran Boot Camp with the window looking like this:

And everything installed, rebooted automatically to Windows, and I was on the internet!

Success!

Moral of the story: Don’t let me near your computers.

2012
01/09
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SWTOR on the iMac, Part I

Anyone who’s known me for any real amount of time knows that I love Apple computers. I remember my first one fondly: an Apple IIGS, which was basically a word processor/Oregon Trail machine. I used it in my teens to write terrible short stories that I shared with my friends with wild abandon then, while I would cover my face with shame today if they were ever unearthed. Thank the gods there was no internet readily available to me back then, since, in my pigheaded arrogance, I would have posted those stories somewhere and they would still be haunting me to this day.

My father got a Power Mac when I was young, and it could play games, but frankly, I was way too interested in books, girls, band, learning to drive and my SNES to be interested in whatever games I could get on there. Besides, my father, an English professor at the local university, told me that his computer was for work, not games. So, I grew up in a household where computers were not for gaming. And I didn’t need his crummy old Power Mac because I had Final Fantasy III/VI on the SNES, and that game had hooks in it. It boggled my mind that a game could be so large. I mean, my previous games had been all platformers of the Super Mario or Sonic varieties, not sprawling narratives spliced with humor, satire, tragedy and romance. Think about it: what can Princess Toadstool (her original name) ever do to compete with Celes?? She can’t, that’s what. And saving robotic animals from Dr. Robotnik doesn’t hold a candle, either.

And then Final Fantasy VII came out on the Playstation. It was one of the reasons I started working in high school–so I could save up for a Playstation and play Final Fantasy VII, the best iteration of the Final Fantasy series to ever grace America’s shores. I could go on about Aeris, the hopeless insanity of Sephiroth and the grim anti-hero Cloud, but I won’t because if you have not played that game, you are missing out on a great narrative and you will find no spoilers here. It would be grand theft to steal those discovery moments from you.

If you can’t tell, I love long, involved, narrative video games, and for owners of Macintosh computers, the pickings are pretty thin for substantive gaming of that caliber.

Fast forward to 2006. I’m freshly home from a year-long stint in Afghanistan, courtesy Uncle Sam; I’ve got some money in the account and a very reasonable excuse to blow a bunch of money on the slick new iMacs that just came out: I’m a university student again. And, right around the time I’m deciding to buy the Mac, I’ve also discovered something called the MMORPG called World of Warcraft. It was that RPG at the end that did it: I was convinced that I would not only get to experience substantive narrative gameplay, but also be able to share those experiences with other people.

Now, I’m not going to use this space to discuss the positives and negatives of Warcraft’s narrative elements, but I did want to emphasize that the game set me up to be interested in MMOs for years to come, and it was available on Apple computers! I was spoiled rotten.

So, here comes SWTOR, right when my interest in WoW is fading, but it is for Windows only?!?! How could this be? Did Bioware not understand that it had a huge Apple customer base? Let’s face it: Apple’s fan/consumer base was becoming more cultish by the day! But they didn’t have the remedy for me. No Mac client. And, I knew that, if I truly wanted to see if SWTOR was going to add narrative elements to MMO gameplay (which is exactly what I wanted from a game, at least for a while), I was going to have to crap or get off the pot. I needed a way to get Windows on my computer.

First of all, let me be bluntly honest about myself: I’m dumb. Not only did I not realize that my shiny, new 2011 iMac already had Boot Camp on it, but when my friend who uses iMacs at work told me to check for it on my computer, I needlessly dismissed his advice. It’s on there, people. It’s included in the price you paid for your OS. Instead, I spent US$80 on a program called Parallels, which probably would have ended up being a fine program if all I wanted to do was use Windows’ word processor or spreadsheet programs. But gaming is a different story.

Anyway, on the Parallels site, I paid my US$80 and, at the checkout page, Parallels reminded me that I did not own a legal copy of Windows 7, and suggested that I buy from them. In my rabid pursuit of SWTOR–the visceral, uber-capitalist thirst I felt that told my mind and body that I simply would not be happy unless I was playing that game–I bought Windows 7 from that company.

For US$200.

Now that I’ve calmed down a bit, I understand that $200 is more than any sane person pays for the Home Edition of Windows 7. But, as Vonnegut would have penned, so it goes. And it did go: I downloaded and installed Windows 7 on my Mac’s hard drive, which took a little more than an hour. Then, I used the new Parallels program to open Windows, insert my newly-purchased copy of SWTOR disc, and begin that installation process, which also took more than an hour. And, of course, when it finally finished downloading and I tried to log in for the first time, there were patches and updates to download and install.

When it was all finished, I started it, and the cinematics looked great (they always do, though), which gave me false hope. I hacked away at the first 5 or so levels of gameplay, but it was so choppy. It wasn’t lag, because the connection was fine. It was as if I was back on the Power Mac, trying to play a game that required far more RAM, a better graphics card, or a faster processor than the computer had. Parallels would not work for me, but the game most certainly did. The introduction was leaps and bounds beyond what I expected. Instead of being met with a “Hey, there, we have too many droids in the area, so kill 10 of them” quest, I started a huge narrative story line that, 20 levels later, I’m still unraveling. It was everything I was looking for, but the laggish gameplay was stopping me. So that’s when I took my friend’s advice and did some investigating for Boot Camp. And, of course, I deserved a /facepalm. There it was. All I had to do was a Spotlight search.

Next time: Continued adventures in Boot Camp!

2012
01/06
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A Beginner’s Guide to the Beginning TOR Player

Hello, Blogosphere! My name is Ieonard (yes, that’s an I at the beginning of that name, not a lower-case L), and I can tell you with absolute honesty that I’ve been getting a bit bored with a little game called World of Warcraft. So, I’ve decided to chronicle my experiences with a new game, Star Wars, The Old Republic.

First of all, I am not what any serious gamer would call a serious gamer. I’m not a hardcore raider on WoW, and I don’t spend my days busting headshots on whatever FPS is popular right now. For years, I pretty much just played WoW. I leveled slowly and, looking back, am quite embarrassed at how noobish I was at the start. For example: I had no idea what it meant when an enemy character had skull instead of a number with regards to their level. Okay, that’s a pretty stupid mistake to make–skulls are generally assumed to mean “death” or “poison” or, in the very least, “don’t touch me.” But I had never before experienced anything like an MMO. I assumed it was going to be kind of like Final Fantasy, but you’d get to talk to people.

My wife and I both started Night Elves, she a hunter and I a druid. I want to emphasize that we were two grown adults who had played every Legend of Zelda game to date, Secret of Mana, Dragon Quest, Metroid, Smash Brothers, every Kart game out there, Mario games of many flavors (platforms, 3D, RPG, Paper), Final Fantasy, Earthworm Jim, etc. ad nauseum. What I mean is, we weren’t new to gaming. And yet, here we were in a dark, purple forest with heavy, seductive, mysterious violin music playing in the background, moonlight twinkling between the thick overhead canopy … and we could not for the life of us figure out how to talk in the General channel. We tried everything. “Try typing General… No?” “No, how about yelling? No, that’s red.”

We spent over an hour before we figured it out.

The console games we played had very limited player interaction. You went through the questline(s) and, if needed, chose your selection with the D-pad and then hit whatever the bottom button was on the controller. A, X, whatever. That was it. When did the slash ever come into console gaming? And a number pad? Forget it! I was used to ABXY!

Anyway, that’s an illustration of how much there is to learn with an MMO, or with computer games in general. They are different than console gaming. Add to that the reality of having other people constantly around you in order to help–or to judge, mock and abuse–you, and any console game experience you had was going to be nominally helpful at best.

But we did get the hang of it. We partnered up with my wife’s brother and his wife. That was what hooked me. We lived hours apart and hadn’t spent any real time together the whole time my wife and I had been dating or married (4 years at that point), but then that changed. We were communicating with them every day! Because my brother-in-law is so much older than my wife, they were close like family but not like friends. WoW changed that. They were talking every day and–this is important–they had a common interest on which to talk. Every day. You never ran out of things to talk about. The world was huge, and if you went out and explored it, you’d have stories to tell when everyone got together. A swamp? Dragons? An instance?! What is that?

About six months after we started, we were all level 70 and working our way through that reputation grind so we could get keyed and start doing heroics. We were talking the lingo and thought we were pretty hot stuff. We had started a casual guild and met a ton of friendly people. We figured out what a tank was! My brother in law’s paladin, Tahl, became one! And my druid, Willem, was usually on healing duty. Long story short (and that grind to 70 was long), we had some toons up to 70, had cleared some heroic dungeons and we wanted to go into the first 10 man raid, Karazhan. We loaded up on pots, flasks, feasts, and all manner of consumable.

We didn’t make it past the first (and let me tell you, easy) boss. It was a long night. We’ve come a long way since then, going all the way through Icecrown in the next expansion and integrating with a large superguild while still maintaining autonomy over the various 10 mans.

But something about WoW just isn’t holding my interest anymore. Maybe it’s the quest grind. Maybe it’s the ridiculously easy Looking For Raid content that cheats you out of having that newly-discovered feel for bosses. By the time you get to a boss, everyone’s already seen it before. You’re not figuring anything out; you’re just practicing the dance with new partners. The sense of discovery is gone. WoW has done to raiding what McDonald’s did to burgers–it’s fast food now. It’s Wal-WoW. It’s not the same, and so my eyes started to wander.

That’s how I got to be on TOR. I’ve been solo questing so far. I have a few of my WoW guildies on my server, but they have been busy at work or school with the new year (while I’m still on break for another week :P ), so I don’t see them on much. But the thing is, the quests on TOR are so ridiculously deep and interesting, solo questing is a blast. Now, I can see that the sheer amount of time the quest conversations take will be annoying for people who want to roll alts, but that concern is for the future. And who knows, maybe there’s a way to make them faster that my noob mind hasn’t figured out yet.

That sense of not knowing every corner of the game is what’s exciting to me, though. I mean, I actually have new things to discover! And that is what I’ll try to do in this blog–discover things. And write about them.

2012
01/04
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