My Other Life : SW:TOR

Yesterday, when I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, I was struck by a mild irony. I'd just finished a post noting the blog's drift from fantasy to science fiction, quoting this game as proof, and what did I find myself doing? Placing runes on an altar in a dungeon to summon a demon.

And it didn't end there. In an entirely unrelated sequence of missions that took up much of the afternoon and evening I engaged in a series of ritual initiations so I could join a quasi-mystical cult, after which I delved deep into a vast mausoleum on a mission to seal tombs to keep ancient, dark spirits from rising.

Okay, I was killing the possessed minions with a rifle and sealing the crypt doors with a welding torch but that's hardly Science Fiction either. Action-adventure, maybe. More Indiana Jones than Han Solo.

I shouldn't really be surprised. TOR is "WoW in space", after all. And some old-school S.F. fans I know (and I know a few) would scoff at the Star Wars franchise being labelled "Science Fiction" in the first place. Even so, I found it disconcerting.

I was playing my second character, a Sniper, the ranged offshoot of the Imperial Agent class. I picked Agent because everyone seems to think it has the best story and Sniper because I'd read it had overwhelming AoE potential.

Those promises have, so far, been borne out in play. "Suppressive Fire", which is apparently the least-efficient AE, clears gangs of mobs faster than the Scoundrel can stealth past them. The only thing that slows me down is picking up all the loot.

I went with Engineering for the advanced spec. According to Dulfy's guide it's "the most challenging of the three Sniper specs", "very controversial" and "the hardest" - but only for PvP. Since I don't plan on doing much PvP that doesn't matter.

Another guide I like, VULKK.com, says the "recommendation for leveling would be either Marksmanship or Engineering. The former is better for target swapping, the latter excels at AoE". It was AoE I wanted so Engineering it was.

The disadvantage of the Sniper is that it has to use "Cover" for pretty much everything. Cover is a really irritating mechanic that I have rarely had to deal with in almost forty years of gaming. I know what it is but I can't recall playing a game that uses it. I've been lucky.

In TOR, the concept of "cover" is so attenuated it barely counts and yet I still find it annoying. If you boil away the flavor, what it mostly means is having to press an extra key every time you attack. Added to that there's not having your icons where you put them because a special cover bar replaces the regular one. The final indignity being stalked by a stupid green ghost that shows you where you can hide, mostly in some really stupid place you'd never pick in a million years and that's going to get you killed.

Or it would if you weren't so insanely OP, because those are the penalties you incur for being incredibly powerful in solo play. And I barely have any of the good skills yet. I can stand a few extra key presses to play a class that effectively one-shots three-spawns before they can even react.

I'm very happy with the class mechanics, even allowing for cover. I'm also increasingly interested in the story.

I haven't read any spoilers or walkthroughs but I have done a few searches on "best story". Agent is always in the top three; often first. The characters are stock and the writing and voice acting are at best solid but the plot is twisty, turny and unpredictable, which suits me.

Paradoxically, given my stated dislike of having to make "meaningful choices", I'm begining to chafe against the looseness of the bonds in TOR's faction system. I still can't always reliably predict whether an option will give Light or Dark faction, let alone whether my Companion will approve or disapprove. That's good.  In theory I wholeheartedly approve of the ambiguity. Since I learned that it really makes no difference to gameplay either way, though, I've started to wish that it would.

It's probably just as well it doesn't because, predictably, I find it all but impossible to make any response that makes me feel I'm not being polite, let alone take the ones that are clearly "evil". The way I'm heading, I'm going to end up playing Mary Poppins of the Stasi, floating in on my invisible umbrella, solving everyone's problems with a stern look, a few choice words of wisdom and a great deal of gunfire. Apparently that's a perfectly acceptable career choice in the modern-day (Evil) Empire.

So far walking the Imperial path hasn't been quite as uncomfortable as I expected. There have been a couple of "are you sure you want to play this game any more?" moments but nothing genuinely terminal.

I do find the casual, genre tone in TOR makes the nasty stuff more disturbing and less acceptable than the significantly darker, nastier material in The Secret World. I think it's because I never felt, while playing as a Templar, that I was expected to be complicit in abhorrent behavior. It might have been different if I'd gone with Illuminati.

There is some of that in TOR, although I'd have to say there's some in most MMORPGs. I usually play characters who oppose it, though. Or just ignore it by not engaging with the story at all. Playing Empire side in TOR seems to obligate a certain degree of complicity. I'm curious to see how long I can tolerate it.

There are no such problems with the locations. I started on Hutta, which was even more yellow than Taris, something I would not have believed possible. I like the Hutt. Well, I don't like them; they're repulsive. But they all remind me of Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, which helps a lot.

Hutta seemed to pass quite quickly, unlike the Imperial capital,  Dromund Kaas, where I feel like I've spent just short of forever. I realised I might have been there too long when I noticed that some of the mobs had already gone gray before I'd even made it out of the first area.

Level scaling in TOR is strange. I got annoyed by doing missions where all the mobs were giving me no experience so I went and looked up how it works but I still don't get it.

On the Republic side I can go back to Ord Mantell at 50 and get good xp killing Level 8 mobs but as an Imperial Agent, doing at-level missions at 17 with no level scaling in effect, the mobs I'm being asked to kill are too low to give XP. I'm willing to bet that if I come back in twenty levels and do those missions again I'll get the XP I couldn't get the first time around. That can't be ideal.

If you have to hang around, there are worse places. Hutta is acid yellow but Dromund Kaas is Kind of Blue. Or the city is, at least. There's a bizarre, rainy, round midnight, New York noir feel to the place. The New York of Man in the High Castle, that is.

I bought a Stronghold at the first opportunity (which messed up my "Have you ever thought of buying a stronghold?" mission) and the cinematic sets the tone perfectly. The moody shots on the rainswept balcony make me want to earn enough credits just to open that room before my subscription lapses.

Dromund Kaas took a while to get going. Like Taris, there are altogether too many circuitous paths to make cross-country travel a walk in the park. I seemed to be spending even longer than usual trail-finding, often ending up in a dead end or back where I started.

In time, though, the story opened out and I spent most of Sunday playing. I topped out at Level 21 with the Revan storyline on Dromund Kaas complete and my class storyline paused at what looked to be a crucial moment.

The whole thing would have gone a lot faster and more smoothly if it hadn't been so damned busy. The Empire seems to be a much more popular choice than The Republic. Dromund Kaas was positively heaving with people, which would have been great if it wasn't for another of TOR's old-school mechanics.

I don't think I've been KS'd this often since Ruins of Kunark. Over and over I found myself in the same area doing the same mission as two or three other people. No-one invited anyone to group (not that I can complain about that: I didn't either). We just all ran around leap-frogging each other, trying to kill the mobs or click on the things before someone else got there first.

There was one time when I literally could have joined a line to kill a boss for a Mission, something I last remember doing in the original Rift tutorial. I opted to go and do another mission instead. When I came back the boss was up but before I could attack him some crazed Sith leapt over my head with two elites chasing him and started to hack away at the boss with his Lightsaber. At least you get credit for the kill if you do enough damage, or so I discovered by going flat out with everything I had.

I guess this is evidence that the game is doing not too badly, population-wise. I'm playing on a North American server, too, so I'm not even seeing it at its busiest. Thank god!

I don't have a spaceship yet, nor the slightest suggestion that I'm likely to get one. The Smuggler story turns on getting your stolen starship back to the extent that, when it happened, I felt like I'd finished the whole thing. By contrast, and at about the same level, it seems as though the Agent storyline has barely started.

As must be obvious by now, I'm very much enjoying myself so far. I'm keeping my hand in on other MMORPGs but there's a good chance TOR will be my main game for a while. If I have any doubts they come, perhaps surprisingly (although perhaps not) from the stories.

Not the quality so much as the quantity. At times playing TOR can feel more like watching a TV show or reading a book than playing an MMORPG. You can sidestep that for a while by exploring or grinding mobs or running Heroics but the story is always going to suck you back in eventually. Like quicksand.

For now, that's okay. But I find the thought of six more class stories, not to mention the planaetary arcs and the story-heavy expansions to come, more daunting than encouraging. Looking at the Smuggler story, for example, I'm Level 51 and I haven't even got to the end of Chapter One. At this rate it would take me most of the year, playing all the time, to finish even the original class stories.

When I finished playing yesterday I told Mrs Bhagpuss I'd had to stop because my brain hurt. I wasn't tired in the way I often get in games from concentrating on the mechanics. I was reeling from too much storytelling.

I have never felt like that after a long session playing an MMORPG, not even story-heavy TSW. It's the enervating-yet-overfull sensation I associate with binge-watching tv or staying up too late to finish a novel, not with the supposedly relaxing pastime of playing games.

I think the truth is that I'm going to have to pace myself. At the rate I'm going I will burn out before I get to see the end of anyone's story. Also, when I return to work, as I will next week, I'm just not going to have the time to play the way I have been.

That's okay, though. I don't think TOR is going anywhere. I'll take my time.

Modern Art Makes Me... : Occupy White Walls

The past few weeks on this blog have seen an unexpected lurch away from fantasy towards Science Fiction: Star Wars: The Old Republic, Star Citizen, City of Heroes. Superheroes are almost always SciFi even if they're almost never S.F. You may need to be a certain age...

Occupy White Walls isn't S.F. but it is. It's the "avatars". The wireframe models, with their masks for faces, evoke androids or robots. Especially, disturbingly, cybernauts or cybermen.

Then there's D.A.I.S.Y. . DAISY (and no, I am not going to punctuate her name every time, even though it is supposedly an acronym for Discover Art Intended Specifically for You, which sounds like a retrofit if ever I heard one) is an A.I. Not an NPC pretending; an actual, working Artificial Intelligence. You could argue that A.I.s are science fact these days, not science fiction, but I wouldn't.

Developers StikiPixels attempted to explain Daisy in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun last summer. Supposedly she "sees the art you “bought”, then tries to understand the piece by “looking at it” and comparing it to every other art piece you have liked to build a profile".

When OWW was in beta (possibly alpha) DAISY seemed to do just that but since contemporary artists have been allowed to submit works to the database I have to say she seems confused. When I went looking for new acquisitions this morning she seemed determined to push me towards images I found actively dislikeable.

According to the interview, this is supposed to represent neutrality or agnosticism: 

"This is actually one of the places the AI can shine, as opposed to a human curator – D.A.I.S.Y. is completely agnostic and only driven by what it thinks (and doubts) an individual player would like...Let’s say that the 9th work is a painting by an emerging artist, but the 10th artwork is a Van Gogh, a human curator will choose Van Gogh instead of the unknown artist because that’s human nature (we are obsessed with fame), but not D.A.I.S.Y."

Which is fine, except that Van Gogh is famous because of his talent. (Okay, and his tendency towards self-mutilation, I'll give you that). Emerging artists are, by definition, not yet fully formed. I'll wait 'til they're baked. Until then, feed me the good stuff, DAISY.

The reason I fired up OWW this morning (it's been a while since I last "played")  was the email I received telling me about a new, major update, Cambrian Explosion. The highlights include two new vendors in The Plaza (I didn't even know there was a Plaza), Portals, a way to get paid for inspiring other players, some really excellent camera options and a totally new tutorial.

This takes the game to version 3.0, which sounds quite high for still not being launched.  OWW remains in Early Access on Steam, where it has an enviable Very Positive rating. It comes from only around 330 reviews, though, and StikiPixels are concerned that word still isn't getting out.

That's why they've created the new "Love" page, which I found linked in the email. They're asking players to review the game on Steam and talk it up on social media (which they helpfully list as "Youtube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Imgur, 9gag, Instagram, Tumblr, hell you can even post it to MySpace!", which makes me wonder what Blogger, Wordpress and LiveJournal could have done to upset them). They'd also like everyone to

"Email, tweet, send a carrier pigeon to every single writer and streamer you know. It might be the difference between being written about or not. For OWW, as a small online indie game, word of mouth can make a huge difference."

This is me doing my bit. I don't know any streamers but I'm tipping MassivelyOP, although I'm sure they've already seen the press release. Still, nudge nudge, eh?

I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think OWW was an exciting project and a fun "game". There are things about it I'm not crazy about - the quality of the contemporary submissions for one, the awkwardness of the UI for another, the really terrible name they've lumbered themselves with - but there's nothing else like it and I'm certain a lot of people would get plenty out of OWW if only they knew it existed or took the time to give it a try. 

I logged in this morning just to take some screenshots and ended up extending my gallery, buying some more art and fiddling about for an hour and a half. The new free-floating camera option is fantastic for screenshots, or it would be if FRAPS didn't crash the game all the time. There is a warning about that and they do suggest an alternative but I just gritted my teeth and re-booted when it happened.

As I've said before, as a building game for people who can't build, it's ahead of most others I've tried. Coming back to my small gallery after several months I was surprised how coherent and convincing it looked (architecturaly that is - the curation not so much...). That's the opposite of what generally happens when I return to things I've built after a long layoff.

I am at the point where fiddling with what I've got is going to make it worse. I should work on the content not the infrastructure because right now it's just a bunch of random pictures slapped on some walls. I probably should start a new build somewhere else, with an actual plan, I guess.

I also ought to travel around and look at some other people's galleries. I have yet to try that and it's kind of the point of having the thing be an MMO rather than an offline toy. There is the perennial problem of building games, as exemplified in Landmark, where seeing how astoundingly talented other people are can be demotivating. Never really affects me that way, if I'm honest. I'm too solipsistic to feel threatened by my own shortcomings.

Anyway, I've checked in, seen something of the new build and done my bit to drum up interest. That's enough creativity for now. Back to the killing fields!

Something In The Air: Star Citizen

I've always been fond of mass transit systems in MMORPGs. I think the first I ever saw was the underground train line in NeoSteam. As I recall, that one was nothing more than a loading screen but it still impressed me enough that I remember it even now.

The best-known is probably the Deeprun Tram that runs between Stormwind and Ironforge in World of Warcraft. That's a proper train (it really isn't a tram, whatever the gnomes say). It travels through a tunnel and gives you a good sensation of movement before pulling up in another station in a different city.

The metro in Lorville is like that only more so. The station serving Teasa Spaceport is clean, well-lit and orderly, as it should be considering the extraordinary number of heavily armed guards Hurston Dynamics employs. Digital boards announce arrivals and departures and everywhere civic posters and murals exhort responsible behavior with a scarcely concealed "or else".

As an introduction to the prevailing corporate culture it's worrisome. Hurston is a private planet, owned by a corporation of some kind. There's a quasi-military air to the place that smacks of despotism.

I wanted to keep moving. It felt like a bad place to loiter. I was feeling very conspicuous in my spacesuit. Everyone around me was breathing normally so I took it off.

As Pete mentioned in the comments, the street signs in Star Citizen  tell you, accurately, where to go. I followed them. Soon I was standing on the platform, waiting for a train.

A digital timer ticked down, indicating when the next was due. I'd picked the Commerce Line, which goes to Leavesden by way of Central. I figured there might be a shopping mall. I never found out. Something bad happened.

As the train arrived I heard myself start to cough. I stepped into the carriage and turned around to watch the view out of the window but as the doors began to close I coughed again. I think some warnings may have popped up but I didn't have time to read them. I keeled over and the screen went black.

I woke up confused. I had no idea where I was. In some kind of room. Hospital, maybe?

I sat up. I was lying on a bed, fully dressed. Around me I could see all kinds of things - a chair, a screen, something that looked like a refrigerator. There were bottles and books and utensils scattered around as though someone lived here. Someone none too tidy.

Out of bed I wandered around, picking things up and failing to put things down. Star Citizen seems a long way from simulating realistic interactions with objects, yet. After a while it dawned on me who lived there: I did.

Reconstructing what happened later, when I had a little more information, I realised I had, in game terms, "died" in the train carriage. That coughing fit wasn't ambient soundscaping; I was choking to death.

There are warnings all over Lorville, advising citizens to "wear respiratory protection". They aren't just flavor. I remember reading something about Hurston on my mobiGlas before I flew there. It said the planet was heavily polluted. Seems they weren't kidding.

Just as, when you die in space near Olisar, you wake up in your pod, in Lorville you wake up in your Hab. I didn't know I had a Hab but it seems I do. It's a big step up from the pod, with good headroom, a full-length bed and room to swing a cat. Not that I have a cat. No pets in space, not that I've seen.

Once I understood where I was, naturally I wanted to leave. I opened the door and stepped into somewhere very different from the Lorville I thought I knew.

My Hab was one of many on a filthy, litter-strewn corridor.  Outside my door was a pile of junk: a plastic crate, a broken monitor, a yellow mop. Trash lay everywhere, piled in corners or against the walls. The air was filled with a miasma of dust.

From the window at the end of the corridor I could see Teasa Spaceport. Recalling how I'd never been able to find my pod on Olisar after I left it, I made a note of my Hab number: C2. Then I set off to explore.

The Habs are in the Workers District. Conditions there are a very far cry indeed from the austere sterility of the Spaceport and the station. Everything is worn, used, uncared for. Torn posters and graffitti mar the walls.

People stand around, or sit, looking bored, defeated, lost. In rec rooms off-duty workers play pool, drink or just stare aimlessly ahead. One massive digital display stutters and cracks with static. No-one pays it any mind.

In the smarter part of town I saw wall commercials offering jobs. I guess this is where you get to live if you take one. Or, as I've discovered, even if you don't.

Like everything I've seen on Hurston so far it's convincing, authentic and depressing. If this is the future I'll pass, thanks. Or maybe I won't. I wouldn't want to live here but what was it the man said? Cheap holidays in other people's misery.

Wandering the hallways taking snapshots of the locals, eventually I came upon signs for the metro, which was when I demonstrated that I learn nothing from experience. Not the first time, anyway.

I was waiting for the train when I finally remembered the signs I'd seen about the condition of the air.
The train pulled up, I got on and began to cough. History repeating. I don't know if it was co-incidence, whether I'd been exposed for the same length of time, or whether the arrival of the train triggered a response. I knew what was going to happen, though.

My brilliant idea to stop myself from waking up in my Hab again was to grab for my mobiGlas and try to stuff myself into my undersuit before I coughed myself to death. Predictably, as the train moved off and I frenziedly issued commands, everything slowed to a slideshow and the game crashed.

I can't remember where I was when I got back in. It was either on the platform or the train. I also wasn't in my spacesuit but I wasn't choking and I wasn't back in the Hab so at least I hadn't died. 

I rode the train to the Business District and got out. It was just another part of the city but it could have been a different world. Golden statues thirty meters tall, pristine, shining surfaces, smartly-dressed men in suits. There were even plants.

No air quality monitors, though. Not needed. No exhortations, no veiled threats glaring from the walls, only motivational quotations from the Founders. Everything was rich and pure. But mostly rich. 

It was worse than the workers' slums. Far worse. I'd seen enough of Lorville to know I'd never want to live there.

Too tired to train it back to my Hab I settled on a seat in the atrium and stared out of the vast plexiglass windows at the skyline. Somewhere out there, beyond the city, I'd heard there was a real world.

Maybe I'd find it. I'd come this far, after all. Why stop now?

Four Stars Out Of Five (Such An Easy Flight) : Star Citizen

Sometimes you just have to admit you were wrong. I said yesterday that Star Citizen didn't interest me. It didn't. Now it does.

All the reasons I gave in the opening paragraphs of yesterday's post stand. I don't like space sims. I don't like complex vehicle controls. I don't want to build a trade empire. All those justified reservations burned away on the journey from Olisar to Lorville.

Immersion is a buzzword we toss around all the time, here in the MMORPG community. In recent years it's slipped its genre moorings, drifted into the mainstream. No-one entirely knows what it means but the one constant everyone agrees on is this: you know it when you feel it.

I felt it, flying free in Star Citizen. Immersed in the complexity of the project, the minutiae of the settings, the aesthetics, the detail, the solidity. Without any doubt, this is a brave attempt at the thing we used to say we wanted: a virtual world.

Or, to be more precise, a virtual universe, because if Chris Roberts has one overriding charactersistic it has to be not knowing when to stop. You can only wonder what Roberts Space Industries could have done if they'd restricted themselves to the construction of a single planetary future instead of trying to build a galaxy.

Picking up where I left off yesterday, as the lengthy exchange between myself and Pete in the comments suggests, I had wanderlust and I meant to sate it. The Olisar space station was impressive but I knew there was so much more to see.

I may not have been following Star Citizen closely but I have bloggers in my feed who write about it often. Alysianah of Mystic Worlds has made a second career out of reporting SC's progress. Scopique at Levelcapped writes about playing the game as though it were already live. From them and others I'd learned that SC has explorable cities and planets. I wanted to see some.

The problem was how to get there. Star Citizen has game but is sim. You don't just open a map and click an icon to be insta-magicked where you want to go.

Except you kind of do. That's sort of how the Starmap works, only first you have to get your ship moved to the launch pad, find it on foot, work out how to get inside (a lot harder than you might imagine), bring all the systems online, manually lift off and position yourself in space. Then you can click on a map, select a target, set a route and travel.

That simple. Yeah, right. I went through four of my five ships trying. The first time I ended up in the passenger seat and couldn't reach the controls. I gave up on that one. The next two made it into space but the Quantum Drive defeated me. I could spool but it wouldn't engage. The game crashed on me while I was trying to figure out the controls, probably because I have half the recommended available ram and far too much going on at once.

Each time I re-started I tried a new ship. Just getting inside the fourth, the big cargo hauler/fighter, Cutlass Black, stumped me for a while. The side doors opened easily enough but I couldn't clamber or jump high enough to get in. Eventually I gave up and went to YouTube, where I watched someone open a massive rear ramp that I'd somehow completely failed to see.

By this time I'd also watched the video Pete linked in the comments and I thought I knew what I'd been doing wrong with the Quantum Drive. I hadn't been aligning with the target correctly so the navigation computer could calibrate the route. Working out how to do that took a while, much of it with my ship spinning drunkenly as I tried to spot the right icon on the HUD.

It turned out to be a small yellow circle that looked nothing like anything in any of the videos I'd watched. Alphas, huh? I successfully aligned and calibrated, spooled up and held "B" to engage the Quantum Drive. And it worked!

I was trying to get to a planet called Hurston because I vaguely remembered one of the most recently-added cities, Lorville, was there. I wanted to walk around a proper city, not just a spaceport.

Hurston is a long way from Olisar Space Station. It took me a good while to find it on the star map but travelling there took a lot longer. Fifteen minutes, maybe, during which time all I could do was sit in the pilot seat and watch quantum colors blur past. I guess I could have fiddled with my mobiGlas or tabbed out but I was petrified of crashing the game so I just sat and waited.

The ship came out of Quantum space in orbit around Hurston. I opened the star map again, found Lorville on the surface, set the route, aligned, calibrated, spooled and let the drive take me around the curvature in a few seconds. And that was all the help I was going to get.

Somehow I had to fly down to the surface, find the city and land without crashing. Big ask. I put my foot down on the accelerator (aka spinning the mouse wheel) and took her in.

To say my approach was cautious would be to undersell the entire concept of caution. Think Reginald Molehusband reverse parking. I didn't care how long it took, I just wanted to get down in one piece. I couldn't see anything that looked like a city so I aimed for a road, figuring all roads would lead to Lorville.

To my astonishment and fist-pumping delight I got the Cutlass down onto the red desert sand in one piece. I opened the door, checking first I was wearing my undersuit, and stepped out.

The sun was setting because I always arrive everywhere at night. I looked around. There were buildings in the distance so I started to jog towards them. It took me a while and when I got there I found nothing but some deserted industrial caissons and towers. No sign of life. Definitely no city.

The sun was almost down. I looked back to my ship. A handy indicator on the HUD told me it was around 300m away. Jogging that far had taken me almost exactly the same time as it would take me to jog it in real life.

I figured if I couldn't see Lorville from where I was there was no chance of getting there on foot before my air supply ran out. Although maybe the atmosphere was breathable. I wasn't about to test it by taking my helmet off. I jogged back to the Cutlass and climbed in.

After consulting the starmap on my mobiGlas I had a distance and direction for Lorville. 37 kilometers. Good thing I didn't try to walk it. I got the ship off the ground and headed for the city.

Oh, boy! If I'd had a hairy old time of it trying to get from orbit to surface it was a stroll to the corner store compared to what came next. The Cutlass Black is not designed for low altitude, in-atmosphere travel.

I spent as much time upside down as the right way up. The computer thought I wanted to use the Quantum Drive and kept telling me I was too close to do that but I was just using the marker to navigate so I ignored it. I kept the ship at around 3000m above the surface, low enough to navigate by sight but high enough not to hit anything. Unless I ran into a mountain.

After ten or fifteen minutes of veering and yawing the desert began to turn industrial. I flew over yards and factories and refineries. Then the lights of skyscrapers filled the viewfield, green and purple and red. I gained a little height and slowed to a crawl. Now what?

I'd landed successfully in the desert so I thought I'd look for a big, flat space in the city. A park, a parking lot, a rooftop. And I could see plenty of options, only every time I came down to skyscraper level I got a "Restricted Area" warning. If I kept going the screen filled with orange hexes, then went orange altogether.

I tried that a few times and pulled back at the last moment. As I learned later I was seconds away from being fried by the city's defence grid. Microseconds, according to some. I come out in a sweat thinking about how close I came.

By this time, though, I had seen some huge signs for the Teasa Spaceport. I figured that must be where I was meant to land but every time I approached I got the same  "Restricted" warnings. My mobiGlas wasn't telling me anything so I went to Google.

Ten minutes later I knew all about requesting permission to land from the local authorities. I opened the comms channel and got my slot. Problem was, I couldn't see anything to tell me where it was. All I had was a distance counter measured in meters on the dashboard display.


So I used that. Like using a /loc to navigate in EverQuest, I trial-and-errored my way across the city, hanging just above the defence grid so I could try to get a visual on my landing pad. I was four kilometers away when I started. I'd watched a video that suggested it would be highlighted in green and eventually, when I came within less than 500m of my target, I saw it.

The landing pad looked miniscule, barely bigger than the ship. Also, as I got closer I could see it was down a hole. I despaired of being able to thread that needle but I figured if I crashed at least I might wake up in Lorville rather than back in my pod on Olisar. Anyway, what else was I going to do?

With even greater astonishment than when I successfully landed in the desert, I manoeuvered the Cutlass into place. I had the landing gear down and the wheels were all but on the ground when a voice warning sounded, telling me my landing space had been "re-allocated to another customer". You what now?!

I paniced. I swore and cursed but it was too late to do anything but land. Stuff the other guy, whoever he was. I'll take the fine or whatever. Once I'm down, I'm down. They aren't going to shoot me for a parking violation, are they? Are they??

They didn't. The ship touched down safely and I got another loud, insistent warning, telling me it was going to be moved into store and I shouldn't be inside when that happened. 

I was still trying to get the door open and scramble out when the game took back control. There was a brief loading screen and then I was standing in the landing bay. Not dead! Alive in Lorville! I'd done it.

The sense of satisfaction (and relief) was immense. I had no idea how long the whole thing had taken because I'd completely lost track of time. In fact, apart from when I'd had to go research mechanics on the web, I'd forgotten I was playing a game. I was just there, in my ship, trying to stay alive and get to my destination in one piece.

I collected my thoughts, looked around, noted the significant presence of armed guards in battle suits, and decided to make myself scarce. I found the sign for the rapid transit system and made my way down the echoing corridors to the metro station.

What happened next? Well, that's a tale for another day.

Floating In A Most Peculiar Way : Star Citizen

Star Citizen does not interest me. Not the simulation, not the game, not the financials. Okay, the drama is mildly amusing, I'll give Chris Roberts that.

Despite having been a Science Fiction fan for five decades I have no affection for spaceflight sims. I never played any of Chris Roberts other games. I tried Elite in the 1980s and hated it. I thought it would be exciting, exhillarating, evocative and thrilling. It was none of those things.

I tried other space sims. They were as bad or worse. They all appeared to have beeen made by people who loved spreadsheets for people who really loved spreadsheets. Worse, they were made for people who live to do things by hand that software does a trillion times better. A more egregious mismatch between concept and execution would be difficult to conceive.

The core problem with space sims is that they have nothing to do with space other than using it as a backdrop. "Space" sims are really a combination of vehicle sims and trading emulators. I'm not crazy about simulators of any kind but vehicle sims are the worst. I do not want to learn all those controls. If there's a vehicle in a game I want to press one button and have it take me where I want to go. At a push I might steer but that's it.

As for trading, I don't mind a dabble, now and again, but I do not want to make a career out of it. I want to be entertained, not stupefied.

Suits you, Madam.

As far as I can gather, the basic gameplay loop in most space sims consists of  first learning to operate imaginary vehicles, most of which seem to function like analog-era airplanes, then using your acquired "skills" to make an imaginary fortune, either by running a mind-numbingly repetetive mining operation or an equally tedious import/export business.

The idea that any of this happens in space is irrelevant. The whole thing could as easily involve container ships or trucks. Okay, there might be guns and pirates and explosions because these are video games, after all. It's just more backdrop, though. In the end all that matters is learning those keybinds and parsing those spreadsheets.

With all that in mind - absolutely no interest in Star Citizen and a longstanding antipathy for the genre it represents - naturally, the moment I happened to hear there was a week-long "Free Fly" I immediately dropped everything, made an account and downloaded the game.

It's not about enjoying yourself, is it? Sometimes you have to do these things. For science.

I won't go over the registration and installation process other than to say it was easy and efficient. The final footprint came to 48GB and I went to bed while it was downloading.

There's really not much I can say about this that isn't going to get me into trouble...

This morning I logged in and made a character. Female avatars have just been added so I made a Spacewoman. Gender differentiation is clearly a work in process, something pointed up by the choice in hairdos: all the styles for women were modelled by men.

The final result looked androgynous but it turned out to be something of a moot point because Star Citizen plays by default in first person and even in third person view (F4 to toggle) I couldn't turn the camera to see myself from the front. Doesn't really matter what you look like if you can't see yourself.

I woke up in a prison cell EZHab pod. There are real-life hotels like this. Don't stay in one if you have claustrophobia. Or a morbid fear of waking up with concussion.

I pottered around in my pod for a while, using "F" on everything. I picked up stuff. I dropped stuff. I picked it up again and put it back where I found it. I felt like I was playing a point-and-click adventure. This would make a good engine for one.

Take washcloth. Use washcloth on mug.

The controls were intuitive. WASD to move, F to interact. Didn't really need much else. I looked at the keybind menu, laid out on a virtual keyboard, presumably so you can print it out and stick it to your monitor like we did in 1987. I pressed F on the door and stepped outside.

The space station is very well done. The scaling is perfect, something that almost never happens in MMORPGs. The detail is good, too. I was disappointed I couldn't interact with the vending machines, especially since the introductory pamphlet I found in my pod suggested I would be able to feed myself at Big Benny's. Grab Eat!

I explored all the corridors. I went in the shops. I thought about buying a gun but I checked and I already had one so I saved my money. I stared out of the giant windows at the spinning wheels and the striped planet. I thought about when I went to see 2001: A Space Oddyssey in 1968, the year it was released, when I was ten years old, and how every space game since either looks like that or like Blade Runner. Or both.

After about half an hour I found the airlock and worked out how to use it. There was a warning, telling me to be sure I had an undersuit and a helmet. I checked my mobiGlas. Sorted.

I stepped outside. Then I got back in the airlock. Not much to see and I was worried I might fall off the edge. Ironic foreshadowing, much?

Without any great difficulty, I found the terminal where you can call valet parking and have them bring your ship around to the front. I had a choice of five ships. I must be pretty darned successful. Knowing my complete and utter incompetence when it comes to controlling imaginary vehicles I picked the one that looked like it would be the slowest and most sedate, the Aegis Avenger Titan.

The screen told me which Bay to go to so I went and there was my ship. I opened the rear cargo door and walked up the ramp. I couldn't figure out how to shut the door behind me so I left it open. There was another door, which went to the pilot's cabin. I clicked on the flight chair and scanned the controls.

They were surprsingly simple. I switched on the engine, hit the space bar (appropriately) and the ship lifted off. At this point in any space game I usually spin out of control, start to feel nauseous and log out.

Remember this door. You're going to need it later.

That didn't happen. In fact, Star Citizen wins a lot of points from me for what actually came next, which was that I had an adventure. A stupid, dumb, idiotic adventure, created wholly by my own ineptitude and appalling decision-making, yes, but kudos to the game for allowing the whole nightmare pantomime to play out in real time.

I had the ship roughly under control but I had no clue where to take it or what to do next. In a moment of inspiration I started fiddling with the buttons on the dashboard. And I shot myself into space.

It wasn't like I hit the Emergency Eject. I had to select and choose the option. I sort of knew it was a bad idea but it seemed like it might be something to do.

Are you sure you closed the trunk properly? I can hear a knocking sound.

When you're floating in space, fifty meters from a slowly spinning spacecraft, you get to re-evaluate your decision-making skills at leisure. My first thought was "I'm really glad I never shut that cargo bay door". Sometimes it pays to be careless.

Unfortunately, although the ship was turning on its axis quite sedately, it was still spinning too fast for me. I made a few attempts to get through the door but after the ship caught me a good clump, setting off damage warnings and spattering blood across the inside of my helmet, I decided to try something else.

I could see the space station in the distance. I had some form of propulsion in the suit. I figured I could aim for it, find an airlock and get back inside.

Five minutes later the station looked exactly the same. I wasn't even sure I was moving but when I turned to look for my ship it was so small I could hardly see it. If there's one thing Star Citizen nails it's scale.

Objects may be closer than they appear. Or farther away. A lot farther.

I checked my oxygen. It looked fine. I pressed down harder on W and kept going. After another five minutes I could tell I was getting closer but I still had a long way to go. Another fifteen or twenty minutes and my suit began giving me "Oxygen Low" warnings.

I wasn't too worried. There was a timer that told me I had 29 minutes left and by now I was close. The huge station filled my view. I scanned it for doors. Couldn't see any. Carefully I eased down to land on a flat surface, which is when I found that artificial gravity in Star Citizen is a local affair. No walking outside of designated areas.

With the timer ticking down I searched with mounting anxiety for any sign of a way in. I couldn't find one. There were places where I could see corridors inside the structure but no airlocks. Twenty minutes of air left and I was starting to panic.

Then I had an idea. As I was approaching the station I'd seen a spaceship launch and fly away. It must have come from the launch pad where I'd found my own ship, or somewhere very similar. There would be airlocks there. Wouldn't there?

Open the pod bay doors, HAL, I'm coming in!

I stopped searching and started watching. The clock kept ticking. Then I saw it. A small craft spinning up and away from ahead and to the left. I fixed the spot in my mind's eye and started my jets.

In no more than a couple of minutes I came in sight of a familiar flat surface: a launch pad. In the end it wasn't Hollywood close. I had about fourteen minutes of oxygen left when I opened the airlock and stumbled to safety. It was close enough for me, though, that's for sure.

I found the whole experience highly instructive. The trademark Star Citizen "realism", which is what Chris Roberts is shooting for and what many of his staunchest supporters are counting on, is recognizeably present already. It may not be worth $300m but it's not nothing.

I have no clue what happens if your character dies in SC. Maybe you just wake up in the Med Bay, maybe it's permadeath. I do know, though, that even playing a character I had just made, in a limited-time demo, I felt the pressure of the situation. If it had been my regular character in a live game I'd have needed a stiff drink and a lie down.

What, you never took a "Can't believe I did that!" selfie?

That degree of immersion isn't my thing any more but it was once. I can see why people are holding on to such hope for this project. Whether they'll ever get what they're hoping for is another matter but I can't help feeling it would be nice if they did.

Once I was safe in station I tabbed out and read up on how to fly a ship. Also how to land on a planet. There's most of a week left. I'd like to get my feet on solid ground and explore on foot. We'll see how that goes.

Whatever happens, I guarantee I will not be doing any more unscheduled EVAs. One adventure like that was plenty.

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!