Fallen Earth beta quick impressions

I made it into the Fallen Earth beta shortly before it closed and am finally posting my impressions of the short time I spent in the game.

• The tutorial intro sets up the story well, but the high-end weapons and armor disappear once the game starts, which is a bit of a disappointment.
• Mounts seem only to have a cash requirement, and it's low. Since there is no level minimum they can be purchased early. I got a mount easily at level 4 without really knowing what I was doing, and saw level 2 characters with mounts.
• Combat is not smooth. It feels laggy, either due to server issues or unoptimized graphics in the client. This is a major issue due to the FPS nature of combat with the need to aim.
• Jumping: are physics used at all? The way jumping works it seems like there are no physics in the game.
  
• The game has two modes: normal and Aim mode. You can't really fight in normal mode, and you have no mouse cursor in Aim mode, so while in that mode you can only interact with objects by aiming at them and clicking. In normal mode the camera is usually third-person, and first-person is best for combat in Aim mode (although the camera can be adjusted to be one or the other at any time). Transitioning between normal and Aim mode requires a keypress; the camera can be set to autoswitch at the same time between third- and first-person. As someone who hates all things modal in user interfaces, I found the need to switch modes inconvenient and clumsy. The modal interface was my main dislike in the game.
• With six weapon slots added to what appear to be numerous combat abilities, it looks like high level characters will have overflowing action bars and hotkey assignment issues.
  
• As a whole quests offer nothing new. One quest supplied a bunch of NPC companions for a squad fight. There seemed to be too many timed quests at the starting quest hub which were a pain to do before getting a mount. Solo questlines can culiminate in group quests which block progress until you can find a group.
• Crafting seems deep and interesting. My impression was that almost every useful item in the game can be crafted. The crafting interface and mechanic is good: multiple items can be queued up and crafting takes place simultaneously while you do other things. This is necessary because the times to craft items are much longer than in MMOs where you must remain stationary while crafting. Crafting is also useful, I was able to craft items for my character that were upgrades.
  
• Resource gathering is easy to level once appropriate nodes are found. This was a bit of an issue in the starting area as the non-crafting quests lead to areas with resources nodes that are too high for new characters to harvest. There are numerous low-level nodes for new characters, but they were concentrated in just a couple of areas which were away from the locations used by the standard quest lines.
• Abilities are skill-based, one assigns points to abilities. Experience seems to be gained from using any ability, including crafting and harvesting.
  
• The world is large. Getting a mount as soon as possible is a must.
• Away from roads the world is fairly empty. Once I had a mount I immediately headed out into the wilderness to explore a bit of the game world. It was mostly empty, with only the occasional mobs to avoid or nodes to harvest.
• The graphics are in need of tuning, some towns would kill the framerate. They're also a bit drab. It's the desert, yet not sunny due to a dull gray overcast.
• The implementation of the post-apocalyptic scenario in the sparsely-populated desert makes far less sense than Fallout 3's metro-D.C. setting. For example, there are the remains of a monorail system which meanders around the desert like an amusement park ride instead of running in relatively straight shots between (the ruins of) population centers. Remains of railroad lines terminated for no apparent reason. As a result I found Fallen Earth's game world far less believable than Fallout 3's.
• With just one server the beta was very active. You'd run into lots of other players in the world, and there was so much chat traffic it was a problem; the random chitchat would obscure real discussion of the game.
• The support for Fallen Earth seems decent. Patches seem frequent and GMs are available, although one of the GMs I chatted with couldn't tell me the meaning of one of the symbols on the minimap, or even how to find the key (it's in the filtering function of the main map.)

While it's nice to see new MMO ideas from an independent company, in my case the cons outweighed the pros, so instead of jumping into Fallen Earth at release I'll sit back to see if the cons are addressed.

Pros: Crafting; ability system; XP and skill-based leveling; cheap mounts; not another fantasy scenario
Cons: modal UI; jerky, unresponsive combat; quests

The Sims 3: Pre-made Sims Explained

I picked up The Sims 3 recently, and not long after I started playing I found myself asking a FAQ: how does one get a Sim from the Library back into Create a Sim?

It turns out not to be that hard, but the relationship among the game components and the various storage sites for Sims is hard to understand at first. To clarify, I made this graph to show how Sims can be moved around the various parts of The Sims 3 (click for full-size image):


To get a Sim from the Library into Create a Sim without using a mod:

1. Put a copy of the Sim into a house, play the game as that Sim.
2. Click on a dresser and select Plan Outfit. This enters Create a Sim in single Sim mode.
3. In Create a Sim, click Save Sim to Bin.

The Sim will now appear in the Pre-made Sims list (AKA the Bin).

The Bin stores single Pre-made Sims. Towns, the Library, and the Clipboard in Edit Town mode all store households of Sims. The Clipboard is temporary storage; apparently Sims stored only there can be lost if not saved elsewhere before quitting Edit Town mode.

The worst quest in WoW?

Topless Robot has The 10 Most Legitimate Gripes Players Have About World of Warcraft.

I have to chuckle at the memory of one of the worst quests in WoW because it offers a deadly combination of two of the gripes: nonsensically low drop rates and Murlocs. Called The Star, the Hand and the Heart, it's available to both factions; Alliance picks it up in Badlands. It involves travel to three widely-separated locations on two continents. But here's the clincher -- on an island off the coast of Dustwallow Marsh, one must grind Murlocs for a low drop rate item called Enchanted Sea Kelp. This can take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours! The comments on this item are a hoot; my favorite:

This part of the chain can take hours and hours of mindless grinding. The droprate is so low that you can even outlevel the quest before this actually drops.

On Murlocs!

Guild Wars product confusion

In a comment at Syp's When Is It Too Late To Begin A MMO?, Brian 'Psychochild' Green mentions that the complex Guild Wars product line leads to confusion:

With so many expansions, I’m not sure what to buy, exactly.

I ran into this myself. No wonder:

...NCSoft published at least two dozen different editions of Guild Wars...

After examining GuildWiki and the NCsoft Store I decided to get them all, which means buying Guild Wars: The Complete Collection, but it's a Europe-only product and the best one can do in North America is Guild Wars Trilogy, purchasing Eye of the North separately.

In contrast, Firaxis has always done this well. It's now offering Sid Meier's Civilization IV: The Complete Edition which bundles everything: Civilization IV and the expansions Warlords amd Beyond the Sword, along with Civilization IV: Colonization.

Did WoW contribute to the demise of Ensemble Studios?

Like many, I was shocked when Microsoft announced the closure of Ensemble Studios. But I began to understand when Dusty Monk blogged about the effect World of Warcraft had on the folks at Ensemble Studios (Lessons from Titan – 2 Years on a cancelled MMO):

In 2005, pretty much all of Ensemble Studios was enthralled with World of Warcraft. We all were playing it pretty much every night. We were talking about it all day. And we were, to a man, convinced we could build that game and more. And therein lay the key. We wanted to build that game.

Microsoft has devoted most of its gaming efforts of late to the console market, and on PC, it has canceled or sold off its MMO projects. Apparently it wasn't good for Ensemble to be enamored of a type of project with little appeal to its owner, Microsoft.

I ran across this back in April or so, but Syp's recent item about NCsoft's modest goal for Aion to be the number two MMO after WoW prompted me to post this. Like Microsoft in the 1990s, WoW is the 900 pound gorilla whose MMO market share has attracted numerous competitors who haven't succeeded in grabbing its share. Unlike Microsoft, though, Blizzard hasn't used underhanded tactics, and has thus far maintained its share legitimately.

The example of Ensemble Studios may prove that NCsoft has the correct goal for Aion.

Wallace & Gromit: A great series marred by horrid controls on the PC

Telltale's Wallace & Gromit series is great but for one thing: the controls.

It's shocking that Telltale made a point and click adventure game where you can't point and click. That's right, on PC, you have to steer your character around using the keyboard!

Another issue is the flakiness of the brackets that show up when mousing over an interactable object; sometimes the brackets show, and sometimes they don't. They're a bit slow to pop up which means you can miss an important object entirely if you move the cursor too fast. Finally, the area that triggers the display of the brackets is sometimes just a portion of the area they enclose.

And finally, Wallace & Gromit suffers from the constrained camera that plagues all of Telltale's releases to date. All camera positions and angles are preset; you have no control over the camera or when cameras change. This interferes with exploring and understanding the game environment, and the sudden camera switches can be frustrating. Games aren't television, and Telltale should stop trying to make them like television. At the very least, allow a free camera option for more advanced players.

But don't let these issues stop you from enjoying this delightful series, particularly anyone who is a fan of adventure games or Wallace & Gromit.

[Image © Telltale Games. Used without permission.]

Empire: Total War quick take

I picked Empire: Total War up recently and while slowly working through the Road to Independence campaign got to my first sea battle. Some quick reactions to sea combat:

1. What is up with the controls? They're terrible! When you order a ship to turn you can barely see the turn indicator unless you are zoomed in close. At one point I had two ships grouped and instructed them to turn right, but they both turned left.

2. I won the battle but elected to hunt down the routing French sloop to practice a bit more. The damaged sloop could make speed while sailing directly into the wind! It should not have had headway at all. My sloop had to tack, of course, and with sails at battle level could not keep up, needing full sail to stay with the routing French sloop.

3. I was appalled when I saw and heard the tutorial instructions that spoke of "zig-zagging" instead of tacking. However, now that I've seen that the sailing simulation is crap I understand why the term wasn't used.

This title is my first exposure to this series. I bought it because of the high metacritic score and good reviews. It's not a bad game, but so far I don't feel it's living up to the scores and reviews.

Except for the graphics (which are of course dated now) Rise of Nations is still unmatched in the category of historical RTS games. In particular, the UI and controls (both land and sea) in RoN are far superior to E:TW.

[This was also posted to GameFAQs.]