Looking for a new game to enjoy while still on summer break, I selected Mass Effect, about which I had heard many good things.  It’s a Bioware game, and I have always loved their games.  I did worry a bit that as an “action RPG” it might not be up my alley (I am not a huge fan of action games that are based solely on reflexes).  However, again, it’s Bioware, and I trust them… I know they are good at making RPGs, and they have never let me down before.  I played the game for about 10 hours over the course of four days, which says something right away.  Most other Bioware games had me so addicted that I’d easily play twice that much in an equivalent period.  I played 50 hours of KOTOR in the first week I owned it, for instance (over a holiday vacation).  This game, however, ended up frustrating and annoying me to the point that, after 10 hours, I gave up and installed a different game. I have not gone back to it in the two weeks since, and probalby won’t for the foreseeable future.  This of course means that my review is based on experiencing probably less than 10% of the actual game content, but I still stand by the comments I make here.  I don’t believe that any further game play would change any of my opinions, as they are based, not on the content, but on the fundamental game system, which I found that I did not like very much.

Graphics 9/10
The graphics of Mass Effect are quite good.  Character design is realistic and top notch, and you won’t find much better visuals in any game on the market.  Special effects look good, and the models are well designed. There’s not much to say here other than that the graphics are excellent, with one tiny little complaint — the lighting is a bit too dark by default.  I had to keep inching the gamma up and up to get the lighting right, and even then it was never quite right… Eventually I hit a point where any more gamma would saturate out the colors and kill the contrast, but the images were still a bit too dark. This happens a lot on your space ship, which is supposed to be moody and dark, of course — but still, it needs to be bright enough and contrasty enough that I can see the facial expressions on the characters.  Otherwise, why use up all that CPU energy to generate facial contortions that I can’t see clearly in the first place?  However, other than this minor issue, the graphics in this game are quite good.

Character Design/Development - 8/10
I like the basic way they have the character design set up.  There are classes, and each class gets access to certain types of weapon, certain armor, and certain “class skills”.  Not all skills can be learned by a given class, which some might see as restrictive (to be honest, I do). However, this is counter-balanced by the fact that there are more possible skills to learn than skill points to allocate.  Indeed after the early levels you only get 2 skill points per level, even though you will often want to allocate as many as half a dozen at the same time — which means you have to be very careful what to specialize in.  I also like that they allow you (for once) to pick your background from amongst a few choices (though these are still relatively narrow in range) and to pick your gender and so forth.  This is great stuff.  I only wish they had gone all the way and just given you the whole list of skills, and skill points, and let you specialize in whatever you wanted.  Realistically they give you enough choices with the classes and hybrid classes that you can almost do this anyway, so it is a good character creation system.  This seciton would get 10/10 if it were not for the limited looks of the characters.  They give you a lot of sliders to play with, but to be honest the sliders don’t seem to do a whole lot. And for the female models, I utterly despised almost every hairstyle they presented me with.  What is it with Bioware and hair?  I don’t think I have yet played a Bioware game where it was possible for a female character to have hair that came down past the top of the shoulders. When this happened in Neverwinter Nights I let it slide, since it was one of the first “3D” type RPGs I had seen. But this is 2008, people… there are dozens of games on the market with long hair possible, from the Sims to most MMORPGs.  Why can’t they put in some long hair options with this game?  The other problem with the look is typical of most loot-based RPGs, of which this is definitely one — the look of my character is determined by what has good stats, not by what looks good on her. This is always frustrating to me.  So, these guys get a 9/10 for stat customization, and 7/10 for look customization, which I’ll average out to net them an 8.

Game system - 6/10
The game system of a CRPG is the equivalent of a table-top game’s combat and adventuring (as opposed to charcter design) rules.  This is things like how to-hit is resolved, how damage works, and the like.  There are some things that I like about the system, such as how sniping works, which I found to be relatively cool.  On the other hand, I found the pace of battle to be just too fast.  Things (including you!) die in a couple of hits, which means that most combat is “bang-bang-you’re dead”.  They give you all sorts of potentially interesting tactical control choices, such as moving your team into cover, crouching behind crates to fire from cover, throwing and detonating grenades at the enemy’s hidden position, and the like.  This all sounds great, and I guess if you have the reflexes of the Amazing Spider-man you would be able to enjoy it all.  Unfortunately, at least with my reflexes, which are not Spidey level, though they also aren’t Grandpa level, things happened way too fast for any of this to matter.  By the time you get your team into cover, if you’re taking fire, they’re dead.  By the time you maneuver into grenade position and toss it and detonate it, you could’ve just sniped the guy.  Combat happens in a whirl of chaos and rapid-fire damage that really does not leave sufficient time to make tactical decisions.  Now, it is true that the game can be paused, but I for one get tired of constantly pausing and re-pausing the game to make tactical decisions and give orders.  Also, I am not a fan of “your reflexes matter more than your character’s stats” sorts of games, and this one is teetering on the brink of that boderline.  It’s not all the way over into the realm of pure action, but it’s barely on the RPG side of the line.  Your stats do supposedly help with accuracy, which probably means how close your crosshairs have to be to the center of the target in order to score a hit, and that kind of thing, and they do help with damage mitigation. But do not be fooled here — more of your success will depend on your own personal reflexes than on the stats listed on the character sheet.  I know many players will prefer this, but as an RPG purist, I do not like it, and I prefer games that let me lock a target and tell the character to use his stats and abilities to defeat that target.  The system is therefore a little to action oriented for me.  Nevertheless, some of this could have been mitigated by the interface, which instead is clunky and, in my opinion, hard to use.

The game system doesn’t include just combat, however, and about half of it is conversation and investigation.  This end of the game is quite well done, as it is in most Bioware offerings.  The combat itself may be hyperactive, but it is punctuated by long periods of thinking and dialogue. You get charm and intimidate skills that will open up conversation options for you, allowing you to get more done without having to fight all the time.  This part saves the game system, in my view, for without it I would have rated it much lower.

Role-Playing - 10/10
For a single-player computer RPG, you will not find one that has a more sophisticated and interesting role-playing element.  You get to make all the important choices for your character. Their conversation interface is quite nice — a modification of the old system Bioware used to use. The old way, you would be presented with numbered options showing exactly the text your character will speak.  In Mass Effect, instead, you are given a circular “dial” where a very few words summarize what you will say, and then the character asks the question in a more verbose manner.  For example, an option might be “ask about job”, and when you select it, your character would say something like, “So what do you do on this space station, anyway?”  I like this better than the old system, because it allows you to be entertained by both your character’s statements, and the NPCs’ statements, since you don’t know exactly what the words will be.  Also, there is far less “text clutter” on the screen this way, and the game plays much more like a movie than the older Bioware games did.  Clearly, as with any CRPG, you’ll mainly be following a pre-set path, but you do have choices all along the way, and those choices affect how your character is seen by others.  They have two progress bars similar to the “light” and “dark” side bars in KOTOR, called here “Paragon” and “Renegade”, and the game will track your decisions and score you in each area.  Making choices that are illegal or morally questionable will raise your “renegade” score, whereas making choices that are ethical and legal will raise your “paragon” score.  Thus, you get to choose whether your character is a rule-follower, rule-breaker, or somewhere in between, and the game adjusts as you  make these decisions.  Once again Bioware has created a game with excellent roleplay potential for something that is a solo game.  Nobody does it any better than these guys, and that’s still true today.

Performance 3/10
On my system, which is a 3 year old former top-of-the-line gaming rig, the performance of this game is abysmal.  I’ve got 2 GB of RAM, a 3.2 GHz single-core processor, and a 256 MB GeForce 7800 GS graphics card.  This system has run every other game I’ve played as smooth as silk except for Vanguard at launch, but Vanguard at launch was a slug with memory leaks that caused trouble no matter what system one had.  I have never had any issues with the system before, but with Mass Effect, I felt like I was back trying to play Star Wars Galaxies with 256 MB of RAM and a 32 MB graphics card.  It’s quite clear that the graphics are over-done on this game.  Sure, all those polygons make the terrain and characters look incredible, but they also chew up resources like a squirrel chewing up a cache of acorns.  The result is sporadically choppy game play.  Often, all I needed to do was engage the map, and when I returned to normal view, the game would freeze for between 1 and 45 seconds.  The first time this happened I thought I’d had a crash, but luckily I was patient enough to wait it out, and the game resumed.  This might not be so bad except short 0.5-1 second freezes happen during combat, which usually means that you’re dead and have to re-load.

But all of that would have been relatively minor without the incredibly horrible, ultra-frequent “Loading” messages.  At points just walking along a corridor from one level to another causes repeated “Loading” messages that freeze the game for upwards of 30 seconds.  I can understand loading as I go from level 1 to level 2, but loading twice more in between levels 1 and 2, when all I’m doing is walking along a corridor, is incomprehensible.  And then there are the elevators… take an elevator to another level in most games, and you just get a “loading” screen and teleport to that level. But oh no, not in Mass Effect. We must be ultra-realistic here, so you get onto the elveator and have to stare at your party for a good minute while the elevator travels to the next level in a very accurate simulation of a real-time elevator ride.  You’ll get the loading message when you get onto the elevator, then you will listen to some radio music or news (which sometimes gives you a mission, to be fair), and then you’ll get another loading screen when you want to get off.  The clear impression is that I had to wait for a full load screen just to watch a 30 second conversation between my NPC followers or listen to a 30 second news report.  Surely this type of information could be conveyed by other means without forcing me to wait through 2-3 load screens.  Often just walking from one end of a level to another — even when the entire level is visible on your screen — will force a load, or even several loads.  Whether this would improve on a machine with more than 2 GB of RAM, I don’t know — perhaps. But can Bioware seriously expect their average customer to have that much better a system than mine is?  My hardware is not all that out of date, and how many people (even gamers) have more than 2 GB of RAM at this point? Surely not the majority.

I’ve gotten about 10 hours of gameplay in to this point, and I would estimate that at least one hour of it (i.e., 10% of it) has been sitting through either the “leave the map” screen freeze or (the bulk of it) through “Loading” messages.  This combined with the other choppy performance (which has caused at least a couple of deaths) has been frustrating enough to make me stop playing the game.  I’m planning on soon getting a new, faster, better PC, and I might just wait until I get it to play the rest of Mass Effect — rather than having to suffer through abysmal gameplay.  Of course, if I get the better machine and the game still won’t play right, then I’ll come back and turn this rating into a 1.

Sound 8/10
The music is excellent, and the voices are, as usual in a Bioware game, well acted.  I was thrilled to find that they finally gave the main character (your character) a voice as well this time — in the past,your character was the only silent one, which seemed odd to me.  However, there is some sort of a problem with the way voices are done out of conversations.  When you just click on someone and they emit a one-liner without starting the conversation interface, you can hear that they’re saying something, but not what it is.  I’ve tried both hardware and software sound and neither one seems to improve the situation.  This would not be too bad, except that sometimes as you finish a conversation, it will exit you out of the conversation “zoom” window, and the last line of the converstaion spoken by the NPC will be drowned out.  If this contains important quest information, you’ve got a problem.  I’m not sure why it did this, and again it may be just my system, but I marked them down for this problem.

User Interface - 5/10
I’m going to be honest. I am not a fan of the “you have to press keys to execute special moves” style that games seem to be moving to these days. I much prefer the old style where I could use the mouse to hover over and click on a hot-bar item.  Mass Effect seems to be trying to pretend to be part first-person shooter, and those require button presses rather than mouse-over-clicks, and so that’s what you get in the game.  I am glad that Bioware as usual provided a “pause” feature, so that I can pause it and look up at the hotbar and get my finger over the key to press the right one (if I have to do that in real time, I’m dead, in any game I’ve ever tried that requires it, which is probably why I hate it so much).  However, this has the undesirable effect of breaking up the combat.  I fail to see the point of all this super-fast action-jaction when I have to keep stopping it to assign commands to my team mates or to figure out what button to push.  I find a game that just lets me click buttons to be much more seamless, because I don’t have to keep stopping it.  It seems to me that a simple expedient like leaving the bottons/interface up and using the SWG method of pressing a key, like CTRL, to activate the mouse cursor (and stop turning your aim around) would have worked here.  I could have hit CTRL, clicked special move, hit CTRL again, and gone back to shooting stuff — all without needed to pause the action.  The way it is just seems to be the worst, rather than the best, of both worlds.  I really think developers need to make a choice here: if you want an action game, the controls need to be simple enough that I don’t have to click 20 different keys or keep pausing the game to deal with the interface.  Make it simple and fast.  If you want a complex game that requires some thought and has more RPG elements, then stop trying to make it an action game! This whole “action RPG” genre just really does not work well, in my book.

Another major issue I had was with the Mako, the stupid ATV that you drive around outside.  This was supposed to be a big selling point for the game, but after trying it for a little while, I completely hated it.  One of the things I do with WASD games is that I use W to “drive forward” and the mouse to turn my character. This is how I like to play them.  I have a very hard time controlling where I want to go if I can only turn using the A-D keys.  This game, like Half-Life 2 before it, has unhappily decided that, although you can control your character with mouse turning and W as a “drive forward” key, you can’t control your vehicle that way.  Instead, turning the mouse turns your gun, and you can only turn the vehicle with A-D.  This unfortunately forces me to turn the vehicle with my left hand, and I am just not good at all with my left hand — even more so than most right-handed people.  My left hand is good at holding “W” while my right hand does the work, and that’s about it.  Trying to control a fast-moving vehicle with my left hand only is pretty much a non-starter for me.  Yes I can cope, and fight my way through by doing quicksaves, dying a lot, and making incremental progress, but I don’t find that to be any fun.  I confess I’m not sure how else they could’ve designed the interface, since you do have to be able to aim the gun as well, but I just find myself not having fun at all with the ATV.  After getting killed in it right away a few times and forced to go through several loading screens each time, I finally gave up the whole game as not being fun enough to proceed. One reason is that I know the Mako and the ATV sections are a huge part of the game (it was one of its big selling points). So it’s not like this will be a 10 minute section of the game and never repeated - I’m going to have to deal with this for many hours.  No thanks.

Fun - 6/10
There’s no doubt that Mass Effect has the skeleton of a good game here. Unfortunately, when I combine the frustrations of the interface with the intolerably bad performance (at least on my system), I have not, after my first 10 hours of play, found it to be all that much fun.  There are an incredible number of “time sink” elements to the game that I find frankly shocking in a Bioware offering — they’re usually really good about not wasting my time.  But things like having to walk all the way through a space port (with the requisite 4-5 load screens each way) for several minutes just to go back to the ship so I can change squad menbers, ended up killing what little fun I was having.  I mean, who the hell puts time-sinkish elements like fetch and carry quests into a damn single player game? And yet this is what they did, repeatedly (”Take 5 minutes to here, talk to this guy for 30 seconds, then come all the way back” — wasting 10 minutes of my time to click one conversation option).  I think the problem is partly caused by how big and amazing they tried to make their physical world elements, like the Citadel.  If they’d made things more on the scale of KOTOR, the performance would not have suffered, we wouldn’t have seen load screens every 30 seconds, and even “fetch and carry” quests would have been less annoying.  As the game stands, however, a lot of poor design decisions have led to a game that is fun enough when one is actually playing it, but forces one through too much “overhead time” in between short bursts of the fun.

Overall - 7.1/10
When you average all the scores, we end up with a C- for this game — 7.1 out of 10.  This is probably the lowest I’d have rated any of Bioware’s games, if I’d been running this blog and writing reviews while playing them.  I consider NWN, KOTOR, and Jade Empire to be “must play” games.  With all the performance and UI issues that frustrated me in Mass Effect, I just can’t say the same thing about it.  This isn’t a terrible game, but it’s not really worth my play time at this point, and I would not recommend it.  Personally, I’d say you’re better off finding a copy of KOTOR or Jade Empire than playing this one.

I was on GuildPortal just now and clicked a link on their page, and after a few clicks found this, which is billed as a “Killer Guide” to help you unlock the secrets of City of Heroes.  What they offer to teach you (for a fee), made me literally laugh loud enough that I had to shut my office door.   I’m going to run down how silly what they are offering really is from the standpoint of someone who has played COH on and off (mostly on) since Beta.  I hope after reading this that no one will ever pay them money for this ridiculous “guide.” It’s not worth it.

Here’s their opening outline:

Highlights of the City of Heroes Guide:

* Secret leveling locations from 1 to 50
* How to make more influence than you could ever spend
* Character creation guide for new and advanced players
* The hidden mechanics of the combat system
* Efficient tactics against every type of villain
* Powersets in detail
* Cutting-edge soloing strategies
* How to play a grouped character. Flawless.

I went down the list and just laughed at each and every one of these things:

Secret leveling locations from 1 to 50

There are no secrets to leveling in COH. You go to your contacts, take your missions, do your story arcs.  That’s pretty much the fastest and most efficient way to level.  People who think they are leveling faster by getting a group and doing street missions in a hazard area are kidding themselves.  Street defeats cause more debt (which slows you down), happen more frequently (because they’re not the controlled environment of the mission) and do not provide “mission completion” and “story arc completion” bonuses.  Also, avoiding or out-leveling the missions hoses you for badges, including those that give you the important +hp and +end accolades and such.  On the other hand if you just play the game properly, as it was meant to be played, you’ll get the mission badges, get the story arc and mission bonuses, have less debt, and probably (for 99% of people) have a lot more fun.  Plus if you assemble and appropriate team and use appropriate mission difficulty scale for your team, you will gain more XP/min inside the mission than you would on the street anyway, because all mobs will be the level you seek to fight. So, you don’t need “leveling locations” — but even if you did, what is with this “secret” bullshit?  Every zone in COH is has its entrance labeled and is labeled on the map.  Hazard zones are TOLD to you by your contacts. Which of these is “secret”??

How to make more influence than you could ever spend

Every character I have over level 40 has more influence than she can spend (I say “she” because my highest male was 20-something, heheh). All I did to accomplish this was play the freaking game as normal.  There is no secret to having more influence than you need. It may seem that way at 20th level (or it used to before Wentworth’s came along, now even that’s not true anymore), but by 35th you’re OK and by 40th you have more influence than you know what to do with. That’s because it starts taking millions of XP to level and you only need a couple mil every 5 levels to fully spec with SOs.  If you are spending say 3 mil every 5 levels to buy and gaining 10 mil every 5, there’s no wonder you end up with more influence than you need.  So it seems all they have to do here is say, “Play the game, and eventually you will have more influence than you can ever spend.” Again, LOL.

Character creation guide for new and advanced players

There are dozens of these, all done VERY well, on the COH boards and elsewhere. I’m sure theirs are probably just cribbed from these anyway, so why would you PAY for this?

The hidden mechanics of the combat system

I have played this game since beta. It’s incredibly simple. WHAT hidden mechanics could they possibly be talking about? I tried to think what they might put in here but all I keep doing is laughing at them. In a really complex game, this sentence might have meaning but for COH, it doesn’t even make sense.  It’s one of the simplest and most straight-forward combat systems out there — there are no “hidden mechanics.”  What are they going to tell people, things like “Watch out, the Devouring Earth mez”??

Efficient tactics against every type of villain

Again I laugh. Efficient tactics against every type of villain? Hahahahahahahahaha!  There’s only one efficient tactic in COH. Do damage. Period.  Really, that’s all there is to the game.  It’s why my scrappers go through missions 2-3x faster than my tankers… not because the “tactics” are different, or the villains are different, or any of that, but because the scrappers do more damage.

OK yes, I’m sure they can tell you things like “take out Rikti Guardians first so they don’t shield buff the drones and make them hard to hit” which is true and is technically a “tactic.” But come on.  One mission against Rikti would teach you that. You don’t need a manual for it. Everyone I know targets Guardians and Comm Officers first and takes them out of action before they put too much “value add” into the spawn.  Do people need to pay someone to tell them that? Hahahahah.

Powersets in detail

Again, potentially useful but also freely available in abundance on the web. Nobody needs to pay for this.  Also, now that the info. is available in the game, this is really not necessary.  (Yes, I realize this ad is probably older than the last update.)

Cutting-edge soloing strategies

Again, Cutting Edge soloing strategies?  This implies that soloing strategies are dynamic and ever changing. If so, that’s news to me. I play my tanker solo pretty much the way I’ve played all tankers solo since Beta.  I play my scrappers solo pretty much the way I’ve always played scrappers solo.  I will grant that there have been some mild changes to controller and blaster and defender soloing over the years, but none of them are so recent and so earth-shattering that solo game play is dramatically different. So what on earth do they know that I don’t, that’s new, recent, and nobody else knows about, to make them cutting-edge? I almost want to buy it to see what they say, but I know I’m going to laugh. It’s going to be stuff like how to single pull out of a 3-NPC spawn. Hahahaha.

How to play a grouped character. Flawless.

I assume they mean how to flawlessly play a grouped character. Again, I’m not sure what they can possibly say that would be worth money.  COH is simple. There’s not much to it.  In fact, I like it because it’s simple. I play it when I am mentally tired from doing something else mentally strenuous (an RTS game, writing, work, etc), because in COH I can turn my brain off. It’s appallingly simple to play both on groups and solo… so what could they possibly teach people here? That tankers are supposed to taunt?

Again, I have not purchased the guide, but as a veteran COH player, I have never needed any of their “secrets” to attain exactly what they say the secrets will let you attain. And this is not because I am some sort of brilliant player — rather, it’s because COH, as a game, is exceedingly simple to learn, and there really is no trick to it.  Just play the game as normal and do your missions, and all will fall into place for you.  Indeed, whatever other flaws COH may have, this one aspect of it is why it’s such a solid game.

The list of MMORPGs I have played over the years since starting SWG in 2003 is a relatively substantial one. SWG through the CU (but not NGE), City of Heroes, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings (Beta only), Saga of Ryzom, Vanguard, and most recently World of Warcraft. The game I’ve played the longest (with periodic interruptions of months to as much as a year) is City of Heroes (I just hit my 36 month vet reward on that game, which is roughly 52 months old). The most recent one I tried was WOW.

My time in WOW did not last very long. It was fun for the first 10 levels or so, and then turned into a very boring, slow, tedious grind. But it wasn’t the combat grind, or the auction house grind, or the crafting grind that finally did WOW in for me. No, what killed WOW for me was spending nearly an hour just traveling from one place to another to turn in a quest, and then back again. In short, what murdered WOW for me was TRAVEL TIME.

Now, Travel Time in WOW is really not beyond the pale compared to other MMORPGs. One strange element to the game is that there is no sprint or burst run, which I find exceedingly odd. Most charactes move at a rate that could be characterized as a “fast walk,” and even mounts only move you as fast as what COH would call a “sprint.”  It will take you many minutes, even mounted, to get from point A to point B… usually through an area full of grey cons that holds not one feature of current (i.e., your level) interest. The monotony and tediousness of WOW travel is, I would say, typical of MMORPGs rather than unusual, and they do provide “flying mount” points to allowyou to move from point A to B more rapidly… but it’s not instantaneous, and flying a long distance with bats = time to go use the powder room or have a snack (it takes many minutes, though of course is much faster than running).

The problem WOW had, at least from my end, was that at the same time as I was playing it, I was still playing COH… and I am a long-time vet of COH. Starting at 14th level in COH, your character can (and mine always do) get a “travel power.” These include Flight, which is slow but essentially risk-free; SuperJump which is much faster but entails risk (each time you “touch down” in a zone your level or higher there is a chance you might land next to some aggro spawns — though it’s not hard to avoid them); Superspeed, which is a very fast travel mode but has no vertical ability, annoying in the zones with high vertical relief, of which there are many; and Teleport, which is the fastest mode and just as safe as flying (if you teleport up in the air) but annoying in that it requires constant clicking. The slowest of these travel modes, flight, will move you roughly as fast as the fastest possible travel mode in WOW (flying transport mounts).

In general, I select SuperJump as my travel power… it has no annoying features (like being unable to scale vertical surfaces), it’s quite fast (equivalent to roughly 70 mph), and it’s a lot of fun to hop around from roof to roof. The speed and convenience of SuperJump has a huge impact on my gameplay. From the point where I receive a mission, it’s usually less than a minute to get to the mission door and start the mission. Contrast this with over an hour a few times in WOW. In short, once you get to 14th level, the amount of “travel time sink” you are faced with is minimal — nearly non-existent. By 30th level, when your SuperJump power has gotten faster, you can jump longer and higher between “touch downs”, and you have probably enhanced it with a Jump enhancer to make it even better, you are zooming around the COH zones and getting to missions really quickly. Add to that the “cell phone” feature once you do a few missions for a contact, and you can literally spend an hour in COH doing 3 20-minute missions, with only seconds of down-time between them, if you so choose.

And of course, when I am in the mood for missions rather than travel, I do indeed so choose.

Now, it is often objected by folks who either like travel itself, or at least like the “realism” that travel brings to a game, that not having long-term travel can hinder certain elements of the game. For example, rapid-fire travel makes the world feel smaller. I don’t find this to be the case in COH, but part of that is due to the fact that the world is limited to a huge city. Still, the city does not feel small… it’s clearly as large as all 5 buroughs of NYC put together. Some of the zones can be many miles across (Independence Port is 2.5 miles long and over a mile wide, for instance). And yet, travel between zones is instantaneous (on the metro), and travel within a zone is very quick (with Flight, Superspeed, etc). I think the reason the city in COH feels large is because (a) the zones are large, and you still have to travel through them… the sense that you are moving FAST, helps you feel like you are also moving a LONG DISTANCE, and (b) there are lots of zones (30 or so), which makes you realize how huge the city really is once you get a feel for it.  I think COH has hit on the right balance of travel options to give players a good feel for the city size, while still minimizing the amount of time wasted in mindless (and not-fun) travel.

A second issue with speedy travel powers is that players might tend not to explore. There are often “Easter eggs” hidden in the landscape, and if you can just fly over it in 2 minutes, will you ever find them? In my experience this is not an issue in COH. Indeed, COH has 122 “exploration badges” that can be located. Many of these are in places that have no obvious physical features — instead being something like a normal-looking rooftop that just so happens to be the sight of a battle years ago between Statesman and Lord Recluse. There may be no graphical feature to distinguish it, but if you land on the roof or touch it in the right spot, you get a badge. Not only have the players found all 122 of these badges collectively, but many players have earned them all. My main character, Comet Flare, has has SuperJump since level 14, and yet, so far, she has 89 exploration badges to date… and most of the remaining ones are in zones that she is not a high enough level to explore safely yet. And Comet is by no means one of the highest badge collectors on my SuperGroup (guild), let alone my server. Indeed whole websites have sprung up like “badge-hunter.com” to take care of this for players and help them keep track of what badges they have earned, and which ones are left to earn. The history badges (of which Comet has 15 out of 17, again missing ones she is not a high enough level for yet), also require you to find specific spots in the city, and this time to click on plaques that bring up a popup window telling you some little tidbit about the history of the COH world.

What I have found from this experience is that far from discouraging players, including myself, from finding the “Easter eggs” in the world, giving me a convenient means of travel has given me a reason to look for them. Because the REST of my time is not being wasted on travel, I have time to just hop around the city (or fly around it, or teleport around it) looking for interesting spots. And I would say I have found just about every cool spot in just about ever zone in COH (Fraktal, my main, has found more spots, as a level 50, but I wasn’t using badge hunter when I played her, and badges hadn’t been implemented yet when she found some of the spots).

In the end, one thing I have definitely concluded from my joint WOW-COH experience is that I can no longer stomach the slow, plodding forms of travel most MMORPGs force upon their players. COH has spoiled me, by showing me that not only can travel be fun and quick in a game, but the things that people generally claim travel would ruin, have not been ruined in COH, but been enhanced. The world does not seems mall. The Easter eggs are still found by many players (indeed, finding them is a hobby to most of us). And I have not missed out on one drop of content. On the contrary, I have experienced it ALL, because I can get right to it without having to waste any time.

I don’t think I’ll be able to play any future MMORPGs unless they are at least as good with travel as COH is. I am hoping Champions Online will be… but I’m not sure if any other game will.

The incompetence of the Microsoft Corporation never ceases to amaze me.

I use Windows XP, because Vista after all this time is still not really “there” yet as an operating system (though it’s getting closer). Also, I have an older machine so I’d rather not over-stress it with the resource hog that is Vista. Furthermore, because Windows XP has horrible security, I have had to add my own scanners and sweepers, including Webroot Spysweeper to catch ad-ware and spyware, and ZoneAlarm Pro, which I use as my firewall (it’s far superior to “Windows Firewall,” the default, utterly useless security program that comes with Microsoft’s Windows XP system).

This week, because I had it set up to automatically find out about updates, download, and install them, WIndows XP automatically downloaded the latest security update for Windows, hotfix KB951748. This hotfix required a reboot, so what happened (as the default behavior of the system) was that on Tuesday night, as I went to shut down the machine, it notified me that new updates were installing, and I allowed it to do so. From that point on, I was utterly unable to get onto the internet.

Thank you very much Microsoft!

The first day, I thought it was some problem with BellSouth. I didn’t have a lot of time to get onto the net anyway that night, so I just ignored it and assumed that (as usually happens) by the next day the problem would resolve. When it did not, I finally called BellSouth’s customer support line, and their technician immediately told me that the hotfix was probably to blame, “especially if I used ZoneAlarm.” Her solution was to use System Restore to restore to an earlier system configuration, and just make sure not to re-install that hotfix.

Now, here is where the problem comes in. I set the system restore back a few days, to before the hotfix had been downloaded, but I knew that Windows was set to auto-update. So the instant it came up, I went into the security menu and told it to ask me before downloading or installing updates. Note the emphasis. It has to ask me before it can either download or install, right?

And here is why I hate Microsoft. Within minutes, Windows XP notified me of 4 updates pending, including this hotfix, and asked if I wanted to download them. I said “NO” to all of them (by un-checking them). Windows then, in response to me telling it NOT to download those hotfixes and patches, promptly proceeded to download them anyway. And then, even though I had it set to ask before installing any hotfixes, it automatically, without asking, installed the hotfix. This, of course, meant that I once again lost internet access!

Thank you very much Microsoft!

Once I realized what was happening, I went into the security menu once again, and completely turned off all updates. Windows XP, of course, yelled at me and inserted a red shield with an “X” into my system tray that would not go away, because it thought this was inadvisable. Meanwhile, I then went and, by hand, un-installed the four updates that had been installed without my permission by Windows after I told it that it needed my permission to do such a thing. Once those were gone, and Windows XP could no longer perform any updates whatsoever (and I had rebooted), I was again able to get onto the internet.

At this point I recalled that ZoneAlarm had bugged me recently about an update, which I had at the time ignored, and it struck me that they, being a competent company (unlike Microsoft Corporation) might have figured out a  fix for this. So I went to their website, and immediately found that they had a solution. The fix was in the new update, so I was able to download that update to ZoneAlarm. I then turned automatic updates back on, let Windows XP update itself (and once more kill my internet connection via its new clash with ZoneAlarm), and then I updated ZoneAlarm and all was well.

Now, it’s really not the loss of internet via the clash with ZoneAlarm that bothers me. Microsoft can’t know what will clash with every software package out there, and clearly something had changed in Windows XP that was not agreeing with ZoneAlarm. This is made clear by the fact that people were reporting that turning off ZoneAlarm or even lowering its security was a temporary fix to the problem. I can’t even say I expected Microsoft to have bothered about this, since ZoneAlarm is not the only other security program their system interacts with. This was ZoneAlarm’s problem to fix.

However, what I do blame them for is the fact that, after I had specifically told Windows “Do not download updates unless I tell you,” and then told it “Do not download this hotfix,” Windows proceeded to ignore my instructions and do exactly what it damn well pleased. And on top of that, even though I had issued the instruction “Do not install downloaded updates without my say-so,” Windows again ignored that instruction and did just what it wanted. What is the point of having these checkable options if Windows XP is just going to ignore them? This is an excellent example of incompetent programming at its worst. It is utterly typical of the Microsoft Corporation… to include a bunch of options for the user, none of which actually work as advertised. And I’m quite sure their answer to my problem, should I call them up and complain, would be to stop using third-party security suites and just use theirs.

Of course, that would miss the point that this is not about ZoneAlarm at all. Whatever security suite I am using, if I, as the owner of the computer, want to verify every single download before Windows executes it, and I tell it “no” to one of the downloads, then Windows XP needs to obey those instructions.

And Bill Gates wonders why so many people prefer Linux…

After many years of playing other games (SWG, COH, Vanguard, GW), I finally in March or so, decided to try out World of Warcraft. I got the trial, which went well enough that I bought the game and expansion (Burning Crusade) in a single boxed set. One of my oldest and dearest friends plays WOW, and after some months of trying to convince him to at least try some other game without success, I decided to try joining him in WOW. Below I will post my review of the game to this point.

I will state up front, and this is a huge caveat, that I have only gotten one character past level 20 (and one is just at 20), and even that one is only 25. I have not grouped up much, because my friends in game are all level 70. I have not raided, not done any PVP, and only done a couple of dungeon instances. So, my experience is mostly soloing in the wide world, doing quests as given for my level by the quest-givers, except for those that require groups (since I haven’t grouped much). I personally don’t enjoy “pickup groups”, so I don’t do them. Keep these facts in mind as you read my review, and it’ll be a fair one as far as it goes.

Graphics 8/10
The graphics are reasonably good in WOW. They are certainly nothing spectacular, but given the hardware (low) requirements, they are better than I would have expected. There is a definite “style” to it — most features are greatly exagerated rather than being realistic as they would be in a game like Vanguard. For example, if one stands on the steps of some of the blood elf buildings, the “banister” (which is normally designed to be used as a support for walking up stairs, and therefore in a realistic game would be approximately waist high) is well over the tallest character’s head. I have seen characters with weapons that (to scale) appear to be about 12 feet long and 6 feet wide. Such weapons are clearly unrealistic, but they fit within the style of the game. I will admit that this unrealistic/exaggerated stile is not really to my taste, but it doesn’t come into play frequently enough to bother me all that much. Graphical elements such as spell and visual effects are reasonably well done, again, within the scope of the game’s hardware requirements. Graphically and SFX-wise, this game is certainly no City of Heroes (which came out the same year, incidentally)… but it’s quite good even by today’s (4+ year later) standards.

Character Design/Development - 5/10
Character design is really where WOW falls down on its face rather badly. Visually, all characters of a given race and gender are basically identical except for some minor variations in hair style or color. For example, one tauren is more or less indistinguishable from another, especially once they have all their gear and armor on. This is in contrast to other games, just as old if not older, such as Star Wars Galaxies, where you could control every detail of your character’s face and body, or City of Heroes, where you don’t have that sort of fine control but, for example, there are something like 100 different facial styles to choose from. In WOW once you choose your race and class, you are going look the same as any other character of the same race/class (wear the same kind of armor, have the same appearance, and so on). And so, appearance-wise, all characters of a given type are nearly the same.

Another important element to character design, however, is the statistical or “game mechanic” side, and WOW suffers here as well. For a given class, your entire character progression for stats, as well as for all skills and spells, is pre-determined. When you level up, stat increases are automatic. Skills unlock every 2 levels, and the unlocks are the same for everyone. As there is no limit (outside of being unable to afford them, which I’ve not yet seen happen to level 25) to how many skills you can learn at a given level (of those that have unlocked), there is no reason not to learn them, which is the only semblance of freedom that one has. In other words, let’s say at level 10, the skill “Holy Warrior” (made up as an example) unlocks for your paladin. It unlocks for every paladin at that level, and other than you trying to be silly, there’s no reason not to take it (it’s cheap to buy, and even if you don’t use it, it does not harm you to possess the skill).

The only real way that any variety at all can be introduced into a character is via the “Talent” system. This seems wide-open at first, with each class able to choose talents from three different specializations. For example, Paladins can choose from the “Holy” specialization, which is about healing people and fighting undead, or the “Protection” specialization, which is shields and auras and such for tanking, or the “Retribution” specialization, which is all about doing damage (in COH we’d call it “scranking”). You get 1 point per level to level 70, or about 61 total points, so there seems to be some freedom here. However, if you look carefully at the talent progression and how one buys them and how they unlock other talents, you will quickly realize that for most classes and most play styles, the only real option here is to choose one and pour all, or most, of your talents into it. For example, for soloing, most people recommend a build that puts 48 or more points into Retribution, which allows you to buy almost all of the Retribution tree, and leaves no room to do more than mildly dabble in the other trees. Building a “20/20/20″ Paladin, while allowed in the game, really wouldn’t be very effective in the upper level game, so although it’s possible, no one does it.

The talent system is the real savior for WOW in this category, at least as far as it goes. If this were not here, all characters of a given race/class would be 100% identical. As it is, they’re about 75% the same anyway… but at least that’s an improvement. I’d give WOW a 1/10 in this category if not for talents. As it is, I think even 4/10 is pushing it.

Game system 6/10
WOW’s game system is one of the harder ones to rate. By “game system,” I mean things like how combat works in terms of tactics, button clicks, grouping mechanics, and the like, as well as how things like quests, mining, skinning, crafting, and the economy work. In terms of actual performance, WOW’s game system is bug free and rock solid. On the other hand, it’s not very interesting or engaging, at least to me. WOW seems to be built around the common, but really frustrating (to me) game design philosophy that “work = fun”. I think the problem here is the simplicity of the game engine. For example, combat is exceedingly simple and dull in WOW. You pretty much pick one guy about your level, and fight him one on one, mostly letting your character auto-attack, while throwing a “special” (skill, spell, talent) in every once in a while. For example, as my paladin, I start a seal on the target that makes him take double holy damage, then put a seal on myself that adds holy damage to my attacks. That takes 3 button presses. Then I sit there and watch my character auto-attack while I do nothing until the target dies. If I happen to get into trouble for some reason, I have 2 possible buttons I can click (realistically) — the Stun attack, which I can do once a minute, or the “break seal” move which will cancel the holy damage buff and do instant holy damage (lots of it) to the target. Then I can re-up the seal or something. There are some other skills and moves available, though not many, but there’s no reason to use any of them, as they all result in an overall decrease in DPS (which is the only thing that matters in a straight one-on-one combat). This is fun for about 30 minutes, and then becomes boring.

Similarly, quests are mind-numbingly monotonous in most cases. When they tell you to “go collect 10 bear paws”, you might thing “Well, 10 bears, no big deal.” But you’d be wrong… a given bear only drops a “paw” (despite the fact that most bears have four of them while alive) maybe 10% of the time. So “Bring me 10 bear paws” really means “kill 100 bears.” As each one takes roughly a minute to find, kill, etc, this is a good hour and a half long quest, at least if one does it solo. Also, the drop rates are low enough with some of these that a few times I’ve not been sure I was killing the right thing, because the quest item didn’t drop until I had nailed 8 or 10 of them. The very first time this happened I actually abandoned the quest thinking I was either wrong about the target, or bugged (the second day I think, so at a low level). I figured it out by luck shortly thereafter, where I was asked to get harpy claws or something, the FIRST guy dropped a claw, and then 10 or 12 in a row didn’t, then another dropped… and I finally realized that there must be a 5-25% chance (varying by mob/quest) of getting the needed drop… I then of course went back, picked up the abandoned quest, and started that one over.

By the same token, mining, skinning, and especially crafting are all insanely tedious. I spent several hours one time collecting copper to do crafting with, which let me make a small number of craftable items, none of which could be sold at auction, or used by me (I was too high a level to bother with them)… so it’s just grinding throw-away stuff. The skill-up process for crafting and gathering is so entirely boring and objectionable (and only soloable), that I just gave up on it entirely after a few weeks. Only Vanguard’s system is worse (and not by much). Skinning is not too horrible but all the other gathering professions are an exercise in tedium.

Finally, the main feature of WOW that most people seem to like is the “instance.” The problem here is that instances require a level range and group size, and if you don’t have that, you’re stuck. One can, of course, sit there in global chat for an hour shouting “LFG!” but as I refuse to waste my time doing that, I’m mostly left unable to do dungeons. I joined a guild of a friend of mine, but they are all level 70, and of course, there is no “sidekick” feature in WOW the way there is in City of Heroes (after 4 years you’d think they’d notice this excellent system and copy it, as they’ve copied most of their other systems from other games). This means of course, that I can’t realistically play through an instance with them. Oh sure, they can come into a low level instance and wipe the whole map for me so I can get a quest done, but I don’t see much of a point to doing that. By refusing to let instances scale the way theys do (to party size and even level within tolerances) in COH, WOW has made it so I basically can’t do instances. On the other hand, even if I did them, the ones I’ve been in have seemed like little more than collections of enemy gangs tougher than, but otherwise not much different from, the ones you’d find on the outside. The bad guys are “elites” inside the dungeon, so that means you can’t solo them (unless you’re way above their level), and have to be in a group against them. I’m sure when in a 5-man team in an instanced dungeon, the combat is much more interesting thant it would be solo. But outside of this one feature, the rest of the game system is an exercise in tedium. I won’t even mention how you can’t get a mount until level 40, and even when you do, travel time is still a huge time sink.

In the end I don’t consider the WOW game system to be anything special. It’s mostly a bunch of grinding, and I don’t see any real innovation here. Combat is slow and plodding compared to games like COH or the launch version of SWG.

Role-Playing - N/R
I can’t rate roleplaying in WOW, mostly because I am not on a roleplaying server. This probably would surprise most people, but the problem is that a good friend of mine (and several “friends-in-law” — i.e., his friends, who have now become friends of mine by association in other games) is on a non-RP server, in a non-RP guild. I’d much rather try my hand at RPing, although to be honest I don’t really find the WOW world all that interersting to RP about. But in any case, since I have not tried it, I cannot rate it. I did hop onto an RP server for a while at one point just to see, and although I saw lots of folks around, nobody seemed to be RPing… but it’s not a big enough sampling for me to say for sure.

Performance 10/10
WOW is one of the best-performing games I have seen. My system is way more powerful than it needs, and even COH doesn’t lag on my system (and COH is a major performance hog), but even given that, WOW is excellent with performance. Lag is rarely evident even with lots of players, NPCs, and PVP going on, and I can easily multi-task with WOW running plus a virus scan going on and so forth.

Sound 9/10
Sound and music are quite good in WOW. Their sound effects for spells are good, and when they bother to put a voice-over into the game (which is not very often) the voices are usually well done. Animals sound realistic, monsters sound monsterish, weapons and spell effects sound good. The music is quite nice and I like how each area’s “theme” is enhanced by having the music match it. This is one of WOW’s better features.

User Interface - 5/10
The WOW interface is hard to rate, mainly because it can be modified (”modded”) and the popularity of the game has led to thousands of “modders” with different add-ons to the game. When played “vanilla,” without any mods at all, the user interface, to be blunt, sucks eggs. In fact I would say that WOW, for all the trillions of dollars and billions of users (hyperbole) they have, has the worst user interface I’ve ever seen in any MMORPG — and that’s saying something, given the incompetent manner in which the Vanguard UI was programmed. WOW’s is not, of course, buggy like Vanguard’s, but it’s entirely feature-less. Even simple, basic functions like being able to use the mouse to move elements of the UI around, such as moving your hotbar or your character skills screen, are not avaiable in the distributed version of the game.

The lack of waypoints or any meaningful way to track and organize quests is also rather surprising, again given the age of the game, and the amount of money they have to throw at it if they so desired. Here again, perhaps they wanted to leave this to the modding community, but this seems like it is something that is required for minimal in-game functionality. The idea that they can expect you to remember where “Jacob Runesword” is perhaps days after you were given the quest, is just preposterous. This is something the game should have done at least at the base level. COH, for example, has a very primitive Waypointing system, but it’s enough to find where you’re going and find your way back.

Now, the flip side of all this is that, along with a very basic (almost ameteurish) interface, they provided users with the ability to modify it, as I said above. And a lot of users have come along and taken care of most of these issues. TomTom + Lightheaded deals with quest and NPC tracking very effectively. Cartographer lets you add map notes. Auctioneer lets you scan and track the economy. There are other mods that I haven’t installed yet for tracking tradeskills and so forth. Many of these things are what I would consider “base” functionality, and the fact that, again, even the mess that is Vanguard managed to do most of these things even at its questionable launch, let alone now, makes me wonder why WOW did not bother to include some of these things. A friend suggested that the very moddability is why WOW did not include them, and perhaps that’s the case…. But the idea that every time a damn patch is uploaded for the main game, I have to go to three different websites and track down about 12 different add-ons just to give the game the same functionality that Vanguard, COH, SWG, and GW all had up front, is not a point in WOW’s favor.

Almost all the points here come from the fact that it is moddable, and that the modders have done a sweet job on covering all the holes left by the WOW development team. If I were to rate the vanialla UI as it comes out of the box, frankly I’d give ‘em a 0.

Community - 7/10
The WOW community is huge and hard to rate. Many people have accused it of being a more immature community, but I’m not sure if I concur. There certainly is a huge amount of immature behavior on the WOW forums (both official and unofficial). On the other hand, all those modders out there who make, maintain, and offer for free all of those excellent mods like Auctioneer, Lightheaded, TomTom, Cartographer, TitanPanel, and so forth, are members of the community who are constructive, helpful, and doing these things out of the goodness of their hearts. Overall I’d say the WOW community is about average.

Fun - 5/10
My biggest problem with WOW is that it is just plain not very much fun. A friend of mine who tried WOW for the free month and then re-upped several times hoping it would be better each time put it well, saying, “Anytime I went back previously, it wasn’t a day or so before I started getting the feeling that the whole thing is one magnificently-produced timesink and not immediately fun enough for me to keep playing.” This is pretty much how I feel about WOW. It’s a nicely produced (other than the UI) game that is lovingly crafted to be a very high quality time sink, but not to be actually any fun. Oh, I’m sure the developers think it’s fun, and lots of players think it’s fun… but I really don’t.

I do recognize that what many people consider to be the “best parts of WOW” — Raids, PvP tournaments, and 5-man dungeon instances, are things I haven’t done much (or at all)… Though of course, other than the 5-man instances, those things really are not available to me until I hit level 70 anyway. The unfortunate decision was made long ago in WOW that basically “the real fun begins at level cap”, and most people just “grind” through levels 1-69 to get to the fun. I’m not a fan of doing “work” to get to the fun, and as a result, I’m probably not going to be long for WOW at this point.

One might ask why I play it at all… the answer is my friends (mentioned above). It’s worth a tedious game a few hours a week to interact with them. At one point I entertained the notion of one day hitting level 70 and playing with them, but it’s quite clear that I don’t have the stomach to do all the insane grinding that WOW requires in order to get to 70 (and by the time I get there, level cap will be raised to 80!).

Overall - 7/10
World of Warcraft is an “OK” game for an MMORPG… It does what most of the others do, and does those things without bugs, though also without a lot of extra bells and whistles (e.g., lame character creation, lame UI). It’s far too much work and too little fun for my taste, but milage will vary according to what people like. I know lots of people who are utterly addicted to it (whereas I have to force myself to log in a few hours a week in the hopes of interacting with one of my dearest friends — and would not log in at all but for him).