Age of Conan doesn't want your kind here

So, I'm not much into MMORPGs and wasn't eagerly awaiting the Age of Conan release, but I tend to keep up with news. I read interviews early on claiming that they were updating the conan-setting to make it a little more female inclusive, so women too could wander around in tiger skins swinging huge swords. Cool, thinks I.

Reading some of the launch reports, they mention that the newbie character proceeding through the plot will have women falling all over him.

"Several quests involve the local house of prostitution and its illustrious madam, and her tart dialogue leaves little to the imagination. Even the newly freed Casilda offers you her questionable services, so between that aspect and plenty of salty writing, it's obvious that Age of Conan earned its M rating."

Hrm, I think. I wonder how that works with female players?

Apparently not very well. While the AoC forums won't even let you in to read player impressions without a cd-key, a little google-caching was enough to let me read some threads. Sure enough, a female player was complaining that she'd started the game and was constantly being offered sexual services by female NPCs and ignored by male ones. Her objection, she specified, was not an anti-lesbian stance, but that the characters seemed to react to her entirely as a man, not as a woman. It felt like the plot writers had completely forgotten female players.

Depressingly, the thread is full of people saying charming things like "if you don't like it, go back to the kitchen" and "Conan is a sexist world, it would be a disgrace to the author to be inclusive!" and "if you care about something minor like that you must be a RL bitch" and "I was really hoping morons like you wouldn't play this game".

Then, of course, there was the quite serious, non-ironic "If the game has to cater to WOMEN, then someone might ask it to cater to HOMOSEXUALS, and WHERE WOULD IT END???"

I dunno... with a game that doesn't suck, maybe?

penny arcade game

I poked a bit at the demo last night. Not much, because I was very very sleepy and the demo won't let you save, so any progress I made would be wasted anyway. It's cute, but the bits I like most are the 2d stuff, and the actual 3d gameplay is a lot less interesting. (Also, the way the 3d character breathes/sways while voiceover goes on annoys me.) I'm a little confused by the combat, as one of the first combat sessions said something about blocking attacks when a bar flashes, but I never see anything flash. And, of course, the pathfinding often leaves the character standing in confusion unable to navigate around obstacles.

Here is my character design - I do like the way it came out.



Will I be buying? Dunno. Probably not at the moment, I have other demands on my time.

There is some huffing in some corners about the copy-protection. Am I bothered? No. Why? Because it's a downloadable game. I get really pissy about buying a CD and being told I can't reinstall it or sell it. With a downloadable, I thoroughly understand the desire to keep an eye on an install code and disable it if suddenly there are 1000 users a week trying to use it. From what I understand, that is the intent, rather than 'you can install once and then never again!!'

Anyway, it would be hypocritical of me to complain now, as I've bought a variety of small downloadable games that operate under similar principles and where I may eventually need to contact support if I keep reinstalling them. I do get annoyed with companies who say that you get X installs and that's it, but not so much with the "just ask, we're just keeping an eye on it" variety.

british government thinks they can control the internet

Guys, there's a reason there aren't ratings on video/game downloads.

ANYONE CAN MAKE ONE.

Unless you turn off the internet and allow through only carefully screened content, you can't do that.

go while you go

I originally misread this article as being about a game in which you skiied down mountains desperately looking for a toilet (and, i suppose, explode if you can't find one in time.)

That's not quite what they meant by combining skiing and peeing...

(although after the wii game Think Geek had for april fool's, I'm dubious about this until there are pictures!)

these holes three are not for thee

Somewhat more common in novels than in RPGs, but... A lot of times, there is a Prophecy. Now, obviously, you have to accept a certain sort of magic in the world for there to be prophecies at all, but you really have to wonder about the gods in books where prophecies exist only in very bad rhyming verse. Sometimes even the characters in the book admit that the rhyme sucks (signal from fred!) but the question of WHY it's rhyming is rarely addressed.

Surely, if the ancient gods wanted to give you a poem, they could make it a poem that didn't suck. Divine powers and all that.

Now, there would be reason within a game world for someone to turn a non-rhyming prophecy into a rhyming one, or particularly into a song. It's easier to pass down the oral tradition that way. Which can be handy in fantasy-medieval communities where literacy isn't all that common.

It would be nice to see a plot in which the characters had to track down the original source of a prophecy and find out just how distorted it had gotten over time through the license of bards...

games are just like comics!

Everything tastes better with a monkey!

Cutscene Stupids (and what games could do instead)

So, a typical Cutscene Stupid:

You're playing a Rogue-type. You're sneaking around in stealth mode so that no enemies can get the drop on you. You enter a new room.

Suddenly control is taken away from you. The game turns off your stealth and marches you blithely forward into the center of the room. A bunch of enemies come out and surround you. There is a long, non-interactive conversation where the villains posture about how great they are and you click through in frustration, not paying much attention, just wanting to get back to your character.

Finally, control is given back to you and you begin a boss fight, annoyed.

How can it be done better?

***

First possibility, making the pre-fight dialog not a cutscene. Imagine the scene like this instead:

You sneak into a room full of pillars with an altar at the far end. As you approach the altar, you step into some sort of sensor or trap and you are detected. The doors to the room slam shut, blocking escape. The Villain appears in front of you, laughs, and starts talking.

Every time he speaks, you have the option to reply (possibly in multiple ways) or to say, effectively, "#*)% you" and start the fight right away. However, when that dialog box comes up, you can still move your character - on a timer. If you move too far away from the villain or if you fail to answer for more than X seconds, the fight starts immediately. But if you're careful, you can take a few steps, answer, take a few steps, answer - all the while moving yourself to a more advantageous position.

So you carefully back away, looking frantically to both sides as you try to keep the conversation going, looking for an exit, something you can use... finally, you're just far enough, and you jump to the side, dodging behind a pillar. The villain roars in outrage and combat begins - but you're out of Line Of Sight and can engage stealth again! The villain's first shot splats harmlessly against the pillar you're taking cover behind!

This is much more cinematic and makes the villain dialog less pointless - if you have to reload and go through the 'cutscene' again, it's not a total waste of your time, because it's actually part of the fight.

***

Second possibility, intertwining dialog and combat. Talking can be an actual combat tactic. Asking the villain questions, insulting him, relaying information to him to try and change his mind about things - all of these could serve to either DISTRACT the enemy, allowing you to get in a better hit, or PERSUADE the enemy and actually end the fight via diplomacy. Fighting diplomacy. You may have to fight to keep yourself alive long enough to make him listen to you!

Again, this is more cinematic. Hero and villain in movie are likely to be talking WHILE hitting each other with swords, rather than only before and after.