The Broadsword Retirement Home For Old MMORPGs Is Pleased To Welcome A New Resident: SW:tOR

Without a doubt, the mmorpg-specific news of the week has to be the shock announcement that BioWare is handing Star Wars : the Old Republic off to Broadsword, the independent (Or is it?) studio tasked with caretaking the elderly Dark Age of Camelot and ancient Ultima Online, titles the conglomerate acquired when it subsumed first Origin in 1992 and later Mythic Entertainnment in 2006. The story has been very widely reported but this summary at Gameworld Observer is one of the clearest I've seen.

I first read the news at MassivelyOP, where the reaction in the comment thread was both less astonished and more positive than I'd have expected. It probably says as much about how badly BioWare has been judged to have handled the game over the years as it says anything good about Broadsword, although, as I commented in response to Shintar's concerned post on the news, MOP commenters do seem to have a particular blind spot when it comes to certain aging titles, Star Wars Galaxies being the most obvious, with DAOC and UO coming up strongly behind.

It seems unlikely that many of those commenters have actually played a title curated by Broadsword in recent years. Or ever. I'm not sure what the current populations of DAOC and UO look like but I think it's fair to say they'll be small and composed almost entirely of a veteran hardcore who don't get out much - to visit other mmorpgs, I mean.

Someone who has played one of the games extensively is Yeebo, creator of Yeebo's DAOC Guides, who dropped into Shintar's comment thread to share his experiences. No doubt he'll post on the topic himself at some point so I won't pre-empt his analysis of the situation, other than to say the evidence he's already presented looks pretty damning.

I already had my own, largely uninformed, opinions on the efficacy of Broadsword's tenure as a curator of slumbering giants but Shintar's reply to my comment added some much-needed texture to the conversation from an SW:tOR-specific perspective. Even though I've played the game and follow several bloggers who've written quite extensively about it over the years, I wasn't aware quite how "severely unloved" some of the devs working on it had been feeling. 

I knew that the game had been under-resourced and under-developed for years. I've commented more than once on the irony of a TripleA+ global IP like Star Wars having nothing more on its mmorpg record than two under-performers like the cancelled SWG and the commercially-disappointing SW:tOR but I was under the impression the latter was at least rubbing along, doing alright in a not quite top flight sort of way. It's in Tipa's Tier 3 of Google Trends MMOs alongside Guild Wars 2, after all, and I keep reading about how well GW2 is doing these days.

According to both Shintar and Pallais, a regular commenter at Going Commando and a regular SW:tOR player, too, the revenue SW:tOR generates has been used  "to pay the bills so the "main" development team could faff around for years not shipping anything.", making SW:tOR BioWare's "milk cow". On this basis, it's easy to see why the 40+ developers making the cut to move across to Broadsword might see the change as both an improvement and an opportunity.

It's a very curious situation all round. By most counts I've seen, the current Broadsword set-up has around a dozen developers in total to cover both existing titles. The arrival, whether physically if they're asked to re-locate or more likely virtually, if they stay where they are, of another 40+ employees is bound to have a seismic effect not just on the activities and status of the company but also on its culture.

It reminds me weirdly of the recent events involving EG7 and Daybreak Games, where the newly-acquired properties and personnel in short order seemed to consume their host and set about remaking the business in their own image. I'm not saying we're going to turn round in few months and find the CEO of Broadsword is someone from the SW:tOR dev team but I do think that, unless the properties are kept wholly inside their respective silos, there's almost bound to be some bleed-over.

My immediate reaction was that it couldn't rationally be regarded as a positive development for the game, its players or the developers currently working on it. Broadsword is nominally a private company but the entirety of its business would seem to be maintaining two (Now three.) mmorpgs owned by EA, in which the gaming giant has long lost interest. 

I'm finding it a little tricky to figure out exactly what Broadsword's status is. Some sources describe it as a "private company" but LinkedIn lists it as "public". I asked Bard, who told me "Broadsword Online Games is not independently owned. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Electronic Arts (EA)."  Bing agreed that Broadsword "is not independently owned", describing it instead as "a third-party studio".

Whatever the corporate structure, it's pretty clear that Broadsword is an mmorpg retirement home. It's also one evidently dependent on a single client - EA - for games to look after. If it's not part of EA, it might as well be.

Clearly it's better for SW:tOR to be sent into retirement than into the sunset but I'm not sure the game's players were expecting either just now. That many of them seem to be unfazed by or even quite pleased with the idea suggests just how far expectations must have fallen. As for the developers, it does appear that those who don't get the boot themselves will probably just be glad to have BioWare's boot off their neck.

As a player of very old, niche and/or underpopulated mmorpgs, I can attest that maintenance mode isn't always a bad deal. If a game already has plenty of content, all it really needs is someone to keep the lights on and change the fuses when they blow. The hardcore players who stick with the games they love long after everyone else has moved on are usually quite capable of making their own entertainment.

Games like that usually have a skeleton crew operating them, like the half-dozen each at DAOC or UO. A team of forty may be half what SW:tOR used to have but if those forty are freed from the fetters of an actively-hostile management, it's not unrealistic to imagine them becoming more productive overall. It might be an unpopular opinion but I'd say that, from a player's perspective, something of the kind did happen to the two EverQuest games under Darkpaw, when it was siloed from Daybreak - and things had already improved there under DBG compared to late SOE.

Thoughts like these may make the prospects seem cheerier but there's a big difference between SW:tOR and either the games Broadsword already runs or the Daybreak stable. In fact, there's an instructive comparison to be drawn between EQII specifically and SW:tOR.

One of the largely-forgotten selling points of EQII when it originally launched back in 2004 was that it claimed to be the first fully-voiced MMORPG. That record is "officially" held by SW:tOR, as verified by the self-regulating Guiness Book of Records but other equally authorative sources with longer memories remember it diferently. Much of the hype of the time revolved around the large number of voice actors employed, the hours of dialog they'd recorded and the big names (Christopher Lee and Helen Slater) SOE had hired to voice the two opposing faction leaders.

After EQII failed to emulate its predecessor's impressive sales curve, one of the first things to be dropped was all that expensive voice acting. For most of the life of the game we've gotten by with some voiced set-pieces in major storylines and a lot of reading. 

And it's been great. Better, in fact, than the original plan which, if I'm honest, I found pretty irritating even when it was a novelty. I don't really like voice acting in mmorpgs all that much. It slows things down and it's often distracting. I hardly ever turn off the music or the sound in games but I often turn off the voices.

I suspect SW:tOR players take the voice-acting in their game a bit more seriously. They also expect a lot of story, that being the fourth pillar on which the game was so famously built. How Broadsword will manage those expectations with their reduced team and without the safety-net of a giant corporation behind them might be interesting to watch. From the outside.

Will SW:tOR begin to bloom again and go on to flourish under the gentler guiding hand and more supportive environment at Broadsword? Or will financial concerns and restraints replace the cultural chill that supposedly froze out innovation and creativity under BioWare, leaving the game no better off and perhaps even worse than before?

Will the devs who move across even stay with SW:tOR? I wonder if there's anything about that in the agreement? Will Broadsword be constrained to maintain their new ward with exact same level of resources they were handed or will they be free to re-assign some to the other games under their control? Could SW:tOR's losses become DAOC and UOs gains?

Well, don't look at me. I don't know. I'm going to be sitting over here in the cheap seats, munching on my popcorn. This one's going to run and run, I'll bet.

One thing I will say about it is that it's revived my own interest in giving the game another run. I think I'll wait until the ink's dry on the deal, then I might either wake up my old character or start a new one. I won't be staying long, I'm sure, but it seems like it would be a good time to pay a visit and take a look around the game's new home.

Whether looky-loos like me, coming in, will balance out disgruntled vets heading out the door the other way remains to be seen.

Fifty And Rising : SW:TOR

This morning I dinged 50 on my first (only) character in Star Wars: The Old Republic. I installed TOR on April 18th, just under two weeks ago. I've played at least one session every day since then. More than one, most days. My played time shows I've been logged in for just over thirty-four hours.

That's a reasonably accurate count. I made a concerted effort not to leave the game running in the background while I did other things. I also tried to keep looking stuff up to a minimum while I was playing. The total may include a non-trivial amount of fiddling, wool-gathering or dithering but that's just how I roll. Or don't.

I think it's fair to say I have been surprised by how much I've enjoyed myself. I always thought I'd find something in TOR to interest me but I wasn't expecting everything to feel so familiar, so comfortable. Cozy, even.

Even though there were plenty of jibes back at launch about TOR being nothing more than "WoW in Space", I still hadn't realized just what a traditional MMORPG BioWare had made. I'm fairly sure they wanted to keep it quiet, for reasons already well-discussed.

Contrary to most MMOs, gear seems to get better-looking as you level.

TOR, as has been pointed out, is not what you'd call a challenging game these days. Certainly not down in the shallow end, where the Free to Play crowd paddles, although Shintar's recent detailed, amusing and illuminating post on end-game pugging suggests the slacker's paradise doesn't last forever. In that sense, the similarities with World of Warcraft probably go even deeper than I'd realized.

The journey to the original level cap of 50, still the glass ceiling for F2P, turned out to be both a tad slower and a frisson less trivial than I originally imagined. Leveling for freeloaders hits a noticeable speed bump at 20 and by the mid-30s I began to feel that, where leveling was concerned, the choices I was making weren't quite as meaningless as they seemed.

I'd decided in typical bloody-minded fashion to play TOR as if it was a Diku-MUD circa 2004, which in many ways it is. In that attempt to be as awkward as possible, I'd been trying to clear every Mission and open every discoverable map-hex on each planet before moving on.

Which is ironic, since I've never played an MMORPG like that in my life. Usually, I can barely manage to stay in the starter zone long enough to learn the UI before haring off into the great unknown. It was only because the game itself was constantly telling me I'd finished the planet I was on and I ought to get moving that I wanted to dig my heels in and stay.

Leveling strictly on available solo Missions and mob kills would have been fine but had I stuck with that plan I'd probably be writing my Ding 50! post some time next week. Especially if I hadn't subscribed until 50, as I also intended.

By the early 30s I'd realized the big xp was coming from Heroic (2+) Missions, not just because of the reward xp or because the mobs in heroic areas give vastly more xp per kill, but because you get instant transport to the Mission site from anywhere you happen to be.

That means you can go to a Heroic Mission Terminal, jam up on every Mission you can fit in your journal, then chain-run them until your eyes bleed. With TOR's level-scaling, which isn't any more accurate than any other level-scaling I've ever used, if you pick Heroic Missions from earlier planets they become close to trivial to complete, yet they give much the same xp as ones your own level. Actually, although I need to test it to be sure, it seemed to me the lower level mobs sometimes gave better xp than the higher ones.

It's not a sprint, it's a marathon

Even better, there's no running back to do hand-ins. Your rewards are delivered to you insta-magically on completion of the Mission. You don't even need to stop to clear your bags - your Companion can run to a vendor and sell your junk items for you. I only found that out from a tip on the log-in screen when I was already in the 40s. I wish they'd mentioned it in the tutorial. Would have saved me a few hours.

All in all, Heroic Missions make for first-class solo content, with the cherry-topping on the Heroic XP cake being the item rewards. They're hugely better than almost everything you get from regular Missions or as drops. I was upgrading something after nearly every run.

You also have to pay at least a modicum of attention. I did die a handful of times, carelessly pulling a bunch of elites and having to watch as my companion took the fall for my carelessness. And as we all know, if you let the healer die, it's your turn next.

My first fifty levels have been a mix of exploration (I spent over an hour last night just running through Alderaan's unfeasibly vast snowfields, taking screenshots and gawping), questing and running instances. It's been a very good mix, entertaining and satisfying. I'm looking forward to doing the same again on my next character, whoever that turns out to be.

Whatever misgivings I had about the graphics are long-forgotten. Even Ord Mantell looks good now.

One thing that's very striking compared to other MMORPGs where I've hit max level (ok, not current max level but still...) is how many core features of the game I have yet to engage with at all. I jotted down the most obvious ones:

• Legacies : the xp comes in but I've done nothing about naming my Legacy, so as far as I can tell it's entirely notional.

• Disciplines: I've looked, but I felt I didn't have enough information to choose so I left it at that. I would guess, had I picked one at Level 10 as I was supposed to, leveling might have gone noticeably faster.

• Operations: I looked at the Mission Terminal once. Then I walked away.

• Warzones: Not sure why I haven't tried these yet. In most MMORPGs that have battleground PvP I'm in there as soon as the gates open.

• Quick Travel: I've been clicking on the Quick Travel Point machines since I first saw one, which was most likely back on Ord Mantell. They never seemed to do anything and for a long time I thought they must be a legacy system that wasn't in use any more, probably related to opening the Taxi stations. When I finally did work out what they were for, I was in my 40s and I was so used to running everywhere I just carried on. I guess I'll use Quick Travel eventually but honestly, although it sometimes sounds as though I'm complaining about all the running, I'm actually enjoying it too much to want to take short cuts.

• Speeders: I got the license. Haven't bought a speeder. See Quick Travel.

• Extra Hotbars:  They came with the subscription but I haven't used them. I need to sort out all my skills and work out what they do first. And decide on a Discipline because that will be a whole load more icons to fit somewhere. Up to now, though, two hotbars have been more than adequate.

• Collections: Apparently this is a thing. I have a tab for it. That's all I know.

• Crew Skills: I took some. That's as far as I've got. Ok, I've done some gathering and clogged up some bank slots with stuff I don't know what to do with. Does that count?

• The Codex: I keep getting pop-ups that tell me something has been added to my Codex. I haven't tried to find it.

• Achievements: See Codex.

In the wise words of Donald Rumsfeld, these are my known unknowns. I'm sure there are plenty of unknown unknowns lying in wait for me further down the line.

I ran through scenery like this for much of yesterday evening. Didn't do a lot other than take screenshots. Didn't need to.

And then there are the things I have played around with but don't fully (or even slightly) understand, like the Outfit Designer, or Space Missions or my Starship. Also I have no idea how far along in my Class Story I am: the Chapter tab only goes to expansion content as far as I can see.

When I hit 50 in Rift or 80 in Guild Wars 2 for the first time, neither of which took an awful lot longer than this has, I felt I had a much better grasp of what I was doing than I do in TOR. Whether that's the accelerated leveling speed (two weeks is still fast, even if I thought it would be faster) or the compexity of a mature MMORPG as compared to one that's just launched I'm not sure. Both, probably.

Not really knowing what I'm doing isn't hurting my enjoyment, though. If anything it's adding to it. I'm keen to carry on and dig deeper. I haven't quite decided whether to crack on with my Smuggler, finish her Class story and explore the rest of the core planets or to roll someone new and start over.

Probably both, I'd guess. Fun times ahead!

SW:TOR First Impressions: Story, Narrative and Choice

Coming in to Star Wars: The Old Republic cold, there was one thing I thought I knew: it was going to be all about the story. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the concept of Story as the Fourth Pillar was an overriding principle of BioWare's master plan for their first (and so far only) MMORPG.

That shouldn't have surprised anyone. BioWare's reputation, which at that time was both considerable and largely unsullied, was built on an assured ability to provide branching narratives with meaningful choices. By the time TOR launched in 2011, BioWare had already published, among others, the Baldur's Gate series, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect 1 and 2 and Dragon Age 1 and 2, all of which used some variation of the choice wheel and/or companion system.

I played and finished both Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 at launch. I also played Neverwinter Nights, although I didn't complete the single player storyline, instead becoming all but addicted to tinkering with the Aurora world-building toolset that shipped with it.

I skipped the Mass Effect games (more accurately I didn't even realise they existed) but when Dragon Age: Origins arrived in 2009, I bought and played it immediately. DA:O marked my personal falling out of love with BioWare, not because it was a bad game but because ten years of MMORPG gameplay suddenly made the level of nitpicking detail and emotional micromanagement of NPCs seem not just purposeless but infuriating.

By the time SW:TOR launched a couple of years later, in the midst of a furious debate over the relevance or otherwise of Story to the MMORPG genre, I was already of the firm opinion that I wanted none of it. It wasn't just that the I.P. and setting did nothing for me, it was that I'd had enough - more than enough - of the kind of spurious, artifical "choice" I'd rejected in Dragon Age.

Don't try to read anything into the body language. They don't have any.

Very little that I've read over the years since then has threatened to change that fixed opinion. I've seen enough posts where bloggers discuss their character's relationship, romantic or otherwise, with various Companions to give me the heebie-jeebies. I've scanned accounts of supposed moral dilemmas that have made my eyes roll. I've pondered on the infantile duality of Light vs Dark, although not for long. Life's too short for made-up problems.

When I decided I'd give TOR a run the one thing over and above all else that I expected to have difficulty dealing with was The Story. I was well aware that, following the commercial failure of the game as a full MMORPG, it had been re-made and remodelled into a spurious online single-player campaign. In effect it had become the third entry in the Knights of the Old Empire series, games produced by BioWare and published by LucasArts, the first of which I own but have never played.

It would be overstating the case to claim I was dreading engagement with TOR's narrative but I very definitely wasn't looking forward to it. I expected that, at best, the chore of dealing with NPCs and their trite dilemmas, while simultaneously massaging the emotions of my toddler-like companions would feel rote and tedious.

Much more likely, I imagined, it would annoy the living hell out of me.  Even if TOR had other small pleasures, I half-expected The Story would overwhelm and ruin them, driving me to the point where I'd just up and quit. That's what happened with Dragon Age, after all.

With that background and baggage in mind, I am both surprised and delighted to say that, thus far, I have found TOR's storytelling to be engaging, entertaining and mostly not annoying at all.

I seem to run into a disproportionate amount of brother/sister combos.

The narrative itself is pulpy, which is wholly approppriate, but also sprightly and fresh, like an old, comfortable sweater clean out of the drier. The writing is crisp, uncomplicated and clean. There's a very welcome absence of florid description and unecessary adjectives. Most NPCs speak in plain, declarative sentences. Everyone sticks to the point.

If the greatest strength of the writing is that it doesn't get in the way, much the same can be said of the voice acting. In nearly twenty hours I have yet to hear a single dodgy accent, an oviously incorrect line reading or the least hint of hysteria. Every performance has been dialled back and the game benefits enormously from that restraint.

If the Gold Standard for both dialog and voicework in MMORPGs rests with The Secret World, which it does, then SW:TOR is solid Silver. The quality benchmark exceeds workmanlike and rests comfortably at professional.

TOR may not have the unintentional joys of the insane translations in Twin Saga or Dragon Nest, or the quirky, companionable, friendly familiarity of EverQuest 2, but instead it offers a reassuring, steady hand on the tiller that instills confidence. While playing I have that safe feeling that comes when you put yourself in the hands of people who patently know what they're about.

So much for the content. How about those mechanics? In Dragon Age (and even, if I'm honest, in Baldur's Gate), it wasn't so much the writing that raised my hackles, it was the endless preening and posturing of the characters.

Frankly, I'm surprised Corso didn't up and walk out on me the moment I put on that hat. The hat is getting its own post soon.

I got so tired of managing the mismatched expectations of my raggle-taggle bands back then. I'd spend hours trying to Do The Right Thing only to have one of them storm off in a hissy fit because of something I'd said. I was dreading those post-battle debriefings, where everyone gathers around the fire (or the syn-coff dispenser) and rubbishes everyone else.

And guess what? There's none of that! I get constant updates on whether Corso Riggs "approves" or "disapproves" of what I've said or done but so far he keeps his opinions on my performance to himself. I'm starting to get a rough idea what he does or doesn't like and generally it's there or thereabouts in line with what I was planning on doing anyway. I don't yet feel like I have to manage his emotions to keep him onside. I can just observe them, which is fine.

Whether this is "Early Days Syndrome" and later in the game, as I acquire a mulltiplicity of companions, the dreaded emotional micromanagement will make itself known, I can't say. For now, though, Corso is effectively my MMORPG "pet" or "henchman" or "mercenary". He does what I tell him and doesn't argue about it. Long may that continue!

Despite monitoring my choices for moral turpitude, Corso loves a bribe. This is something I've always found an odd trope in RPGs. It's not unique to BioWare; Project: Gorgon makes extensive use of the mechanic, whereby giving NPCs presents makes them like or respect you more. Why or how this works is never explained.

It's understandable that you might go up in an NPC's estimation if you hand over something useful or valuable. That's being a good employer or a good friend. Why anyone should like you more because you gave them the carapace of a beetle you found on a random monster is beyond me.

When there's an option that looks like it's going to give me lore I always take it. I have no idea what that implies on the Dark/Light scale.

There's even a description on each item telling you in advance how much a given companion will like the object in question. Of all the obviously gamelike mechanics in TOR, this is perhaps the most blatant. You could make a spreadsheet. I'm sure someone has.

Much, much better is the Conversation Wheel. Color me impressed.

I've seen countless iterations of the mechanic. In MMORPGs, where choices are rarely allowed to be meaningful for eminently practical reasons, the goal is usually "flavor". In that context you might expect to choose between "Polite", "Funny"  and "Rude", allowing you to create a head canon version of your character without changing anything that actually happens in the game.

TOR, being an MMORPG, is also limited in how much impact your choices can have on the world. Most of the tension is going to rely on how they might impact your character. I was expecting that to be predictable. From what I've seen so far, it's not.

I began with the intention of keeping my Scoundrel as close as possible to true neutral but it became apparent all too quickly that there were going to be serious problems with that. In theory, I should have been able to play off Light and Dark choices to steer a middle course. I probably could still do that, if I could stand it. Which I can't.

Instead,I've been picking the options that feel natural. In character, you could say. Even that's harder than you'd imagine.

Almost all conversations have three responses. I expected those to represent Light, Dark and Neutral. That doesn't seem to be the case. What's more, even if it is, I can't reliably tell in advance which is which.

A very rare binary choice. And even that didn't turn out how I expected.

The Dark choice is often plain because it's also very rude. But sometimes it isn't. I have a significant Dark minor chord rumbling beneath  my underlying Light melody because I have taken several options, which I was sure were Neutral, which turned out to give Dark points. Also, since the one, defining character trait I gave my Scoundrel was that she wouldn't do anything pro bono, it turns out asking about money all the time isn't great for your soul. Who knew?

Conversely, I began to pull strongly towards the Light just from taking what I thought were Neutral options long before I finally threw up my hands and accepted my Scoundrel was more Calamity Jane than Bonnie Parker. And so many of the options just seem too harsh. I find myself drifting towards the light even when I'm trying to hide in the shadows. I'm just too good for this world.

The happy confusion is enhanced by a couple of very simple functions of the system itself. The category of choice is largely independent of the order in which the options appear. The Dark choice does appear at the bottom more often than not, but by no means always. You can't allow yourself to drift into a pattern of always clicking #3 or you will come unstuck.

Much more subtly, the options from which you choose are mere approximations of what your character will say. There's no space on the wheel for long dialog entires and while my Scoundrel is on the terse side, she doesn't speak in fragments. I am frequently suprised by what she actually says after I press the button that hints at what it's going to be.

I love this. It makes the whole process entertaining, amusing and alive. It also adds a frisson of risk that I find refreshing. I always think about what the written response might mean and I always try to pick the one that's going to take me where I want to go but I don't always get it right. I can imagine some people finding that infuriating but I like it a lot.

Here's where I have trouble. I want to talk about pay because that's my motivation but I hate not knowing what's going on.

It does have the effect of turning "my" character something other than the typical MMORPG player's avatar. After spending twenty hours together I feel a strong affection for her but it's the kind of emotion I'd feel for a character in a book or a movie I was enjoying, rather than a character I'd created or a facet of myself. I want to see what she's going to do next but I don't necessarily feel I'm in complete control of what that might be.

And that's fine. Actually, it's more than fine but it's also weird. I find myself talking out to loud to my character as I play, not something I am prone to doing in other MMOs. I also talk to Corso. It's almost as though the three of us are engaged in some kind of dramatic production, possibly with an invisible audience. Perhaps I ought to think about livestreaming...

Thus far, then, I am both much happier and considerably more impressed by TOR's storytelling than I imagined I would be. The mechanics work much more effectively than I expected, the writing and voicework are solid if unexceptional and the storylines are of a standard approrporiate to the source material.

Contrary to some things I have read, I am also finding the non-narrative missions to be well worth doing, not just for the extra XP but for the interesting side stories they tell. Some of them have been more interesting than the main plot, or at least more emotionally affecting. It's always the little stuff, isn't it?

Whether I'd want to go through all eight Class stories is another matter. That might be altogether too much of a good thing. For now, though, I'm enjoying the ride to fifty, seeing the sights and hearing the tales as I go. I'm in no hurry to get there, either. I think I'll just carry on as I am, poking my nose into other peoples' business and seeing what turns up.

So long as I keep getting paid, of course.

Money Is The Anthem

BioWare's Anthem is The Big New Thing. There seems to be absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind about that.

I foresee finding myself in a very familiar position: reading thousands of words about a video game I have no interest whatsoever in playing. I predict there will be a torrent of posts, varying from the gushing to the gutted. Some will skate across the surface on a wave of feels; others will dive into the depths, dragging up a deadweight of extraordinary detail.

After a couple of weeks the torrent will turn to a stream then a trickle. In six weeks only a couple of die-hards will be left, working the pump-handle for those last few drops. Everyone else will either have moved on to the Next Big New Thing, if there is one, or back to an Old Favorite. Either that or they'll be posting about how bored they are and why doesn't anyone make any good games any more?

The game's not even out yet and already the dam is breached. There are leaks springing up all over the place. I've already heard plenty about the Demo Weekend and its issues. Isey and Gevlon had a sparky little interchange about that.

The post that prompted me to join in, however, was Alli Rense's compelling anti-Anthem rant at The Parent Trope, unequivocally entitled Anthem? No Thank You. Alli isn't just uninterested in playing the game, like me; she sees it as an active threat to the future of the kind of games she enjoys. Very specifically she imagines that if Anthem is successful it will lead to future BioWare games following the Anthem model and abandoning the narrative RPG format on which they built their brand.

She's probably right, too, although she doesn't speculate on what might become of BioWare if Anthem isn't successful. Hard to imagine that would have a positive outcome for the company or its future projects - if any.

I don't have any emotional attachment to BioWare, either past or present. They made one game I really liked - Baldur's Gate - and one I quite liked - Baldur's Gate 2. That was twenty years ago. Since then they've made nothing I care about at all.

I did try the first Dragon Age and found that, while it had a powerful impact at first, it very rapidly became tedious, repetitive and obvious. I played DA intensely for about a week and then one day I couldn't stand the thought of ever playing it again.

It was a useful learning experience. The most important thing I learned was that I really, really hate the "Companion" mechanic, where the player character is expected to schmooze, romance or otherwise jolly along various NPCs, either by buttering them up with flattery or giving them gifts.

Who ever thought this was a good idea? And how old were they? Six? Will you be my best friend if I give you my Action Figure?  No, cos I can't be your friend any more, cos you like Jimmy and Jimmy's bad! Geez. Give me a break.

That experience beyond anything else is why I have yet to even download Star Wars: the Old Republic. The mere thought of having to deal with managing the imaginary emotions of a bunch of virtual pre-schoolers in battle-armor gives me the heebie-jeebies.

The other lesson I learned from Dragon Age is that I really can't take any more Generic Fantasy Plots (or Generic Science Fiction Plots for that matter). I can stomach them as background in MMORPGs, where all narrative is set dressing for the main performance - building my character - and I can get on board when  narrative provides atmosphere for enjoyable mechanics, as in the two Baldur's Gate games or Pillars of Eternity, but the last time I encountered a plot in a video game that I found as immersive or compelling as a good novel or movie...well, if it ever happens, I'll let you know.

When Alli says "I think video games are the best way we have to tell a story. Better than TV, film, and even books. Because they’re the most immersive, they have the biggest impact." I imagine she speaks for quite a few people who might be reading this. Even I would say that the medium has the potential to compete on equal terms with established narrative forms.

It's potential that's gone largely unfulfilled for decades, though, primarily because of the mechanics involved. I have a big issue with all video game mechanics when it comes to storytelling. Video games are clunky. They persistently pull you out of the moment to fight things or solve puzzles or click through dialog trees. It's the equivalent of trying to watch a movie with someone sitting next to you going "Who's that guy? Wasn't he in that movie we saw last week? Are you sure you switched the lights off when we parked? Can you hold my Coke, I want to get a mint out my pocket...no, wait, your pocket. You had the mints, didn't you?"

The ones that do it the least and which probably make the best stab at telling an uninterrupted narrative come from the sub-genre often somewhat derisively labelled "Walking Simulators" but what those mostly seem to me to be doing is trying to edge as close as possible to being movies. One of the main criticisms often levelled at them is that they aren't really video games at all.

We do all make some sweeping assumptions at times, about what a video game can or can't be - or should or shouldn't be. At one point, in a piece that has enough comment hooks to hang a dozen blog posts on, Alli asks "Aren’t video games supposed to be an introverted hobby?".

Are they? I don't know. They certainly have had that image at times, particularly in the eyes of worried parents or politicians in search of a headline. I did think the image of video games as the exclusive province of the socially maladjusted was behind us but it does recur disturbingly regularly, even now.

Getting back to Anthem itself, while I don't feel as disturbed by the prospect of its success as Alli, I do see it as not so much a straw in the wind but a bloody great haystack in a hurricane barrelling towards the traditional MMORPG. Belghast said something very revealing in his recent post on returning to FFXIV: "I am trying to get back into playing an MMORPG again…  but it just feels weird considering how much of the Destiny style MMO Lite I have been playing of late."

Pete S in reply to Belghast clarified that feeling with some solid reasoning: "I’m really struggling to engage for that same “been playing quasi-MMOs too much” reason. I just feel like the time-invest:reward ratio is off now."

Pacing in MMORPGs is something many of us have been talking about and around for years. People have argued that leveling is too fast, too slow, too uneven; gear ladders have been both too long and too short. The genre suffered years of post-WoW speeding up that then slewed into a "Slow MMO" car-crash that threatened to bring the entire crowdfunding process into disrepute.

While all that was going on deep in The Niche, the hinterlands were filling up with somewhat successful hybrids like Destiny and The Division and bona-fide hits and mega-hits like PUBG and Fortnite. If the last five years have told us anything, it's that there's a huge market for Massive Online Games - provided you don't add those fatal three missing letters.

So I can see why Alli is worried. The current trend in large-scale online games, supported by sales, would seem to have little to do with either narrative storytelling or traditional rpg character-building. What's more, I would contend that, with Destiny, Warframe and now Anthem all choosing to house the player character in form-fitting, personality-occluding body armor, the current version of "character building" has closer affinities to driving games than to any imagined ancestry in Dungeons and Dragons.

Beyond any other reason, that was why I lost interest so fast in Warframe and it's very high on the list of things that put me off trying Anthem: I don't mind my character owning and driving a vehicle but I draw the line at them being one. But no-one cares what I think because not every game has to be for me.

Anthem will be a success. Possibly not as big a success as it needs to be but there or thereabouts. The trend of narrative-light, combat-heavy, fast-paced MMOs set in open worlds or open maps, using or at least including Battle Royale and Survival mechanics is going to be with us for a good while yet.

Will that trend prejudice the production of other types of video game? Of course it will. That's what bandwagons do - roll over everything else. Will there be anything left for the rest of us? Of course there will. Whether we'll want it when we get it, though, that's another story...

Did I Say That Out Loud?

I was flicking through my Feedly this evening when I came across a piece on Pitchfork that for once seemed to be about someone I'd already heard of. Naturally, it wasn't a musician.You could say it wasn't even a real person, although we all know reality is a lie.

Back in the mid-90s, just before I discovered MMOs and thereby lost my fingernail grip on popular culture, at least for a while, I used to watch a quirky animated t.v, show called Daria. You may have heard of it. Apparently it was kind of a big deal. Not that we knew.

As I recall it was on Channel Four, possibly on a Sunday afternoon. I didn't watch it a whole lot but I liked it well enough. I particularly enjoyed the flat, deadpan delivery of the lead character, Daria Morgendoffer.

Around the same time the show was running, I was beginning to get back into video gaming after a few years' break. In 1997, I think it must have been, I'd bought a PC with my redundancy money, ostensibly with the intention of writing a novel. That never really panned out but inevitably some games got bought and among them was the original Baldur's Gate.

I'd scarcely begun playing before I discovered it was possible to swap both the character portraits and the characters' voices for custom versions. After a few experiments with making my own I took a look at some of the many versions floating about online and there I came across one that replaced the player character's entire repertoire of sayings and exclamations with lines from Daria. That's how I came to play through the whole of  Baldur's Gate as "a smart, snarky, sensitive teenage girl", to quote the Daria wiki.

This is also, surely, one of the primary reasons the first Baldur's Gate remains the only BioWare RPG I have ever - unequivocally - loved. The sardonic tone of these short clips (voice-acted by Tracy Grandstaff with admirable lack of affect) brought an astringency to the fantasy setting that undercut the sometimes ponderous self-importance of the narrative. Plus it made me laugh. Every time.

They say that once something's on the internet it'll be there until the heat death of the universe but if the original soundset I downloaded is still around then my google-fu isn't good enough to find it. I believe this clip features one of the soundbites it used. I'm sure I remember hearing my bard saying "I'm the Misery Chick" about ten thousand times over the course of the campaign.

All of which brings me to my point (and yes, I do have one, thanks). Earlier in the day I made a new Square Enix account and patched up FFXIV to take advantage of the new, improved endless free trial. No doubt I'll get around to posting about that in due course but for now I just want to mention the character voice samples.

In common with almost all Eastern MMOs, FFXIV offers you a choice of voices for your characters. You can have all kinds of squealing, grunting, yelping, groaning or giggling. The range runs the usual gamut from hysteria to...well, more hysteria. If you want anything more nuanced, though, well you're kinda outta luck as Lana Del Rey might say (Now there's an idea...Lana as the voice of your Miqo'te. That's a cash shop killer if ever I heard of one. I'll give you that one for free, Square, just make it happen).

Actually, it's not even fair to pick on Eastern MMOs. I've been playing a lot of LotRO of late and my Dwarf there can't go two seconds in a fight without growling or yelling "yaaarghh!" like a drunken pirate. It's really quite distracting.

GW2 has a seldom-mentioned function that allows you to replace any or all of the in-game music files with your own selections culled from your no doubt extensive and eclectic library of math rock and hair metal. If that can be a thing then why not voices?

I'm guessing that just about all MMO sound files are client-based, even when the character spouting the nonsense isn't my own. When I hear some passing mesmer boasting how she can run faster than a centaur, presumably that's the game triggering a sample that's already installed on my PC, so why couldn't it trigger a sample of my choice instead?

There doesn't seem to me to be any technical reason this couldn't be a standard add-on for games that allow such things. Maybe it is and I just haven't noticed. Oh boy, I hope so!

If not then someone better get right on it. I don't even mind if I have to cull and compile my own samples. I'm hearing voices already...