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That’s Why the Lady is a Bloke

10 Dec

I’m not a  girl, but I play one in an mmo.

This is something that divides crowds.  Some people agree with me and haveno problems playing the opposite gender, others think that it is, at best, weird, and at worst, satanic.

First let me give you a history lesson.  Just over five years ago, I happened upon a game called Everquest II.  Before this my housemate had introduced me to Star Wars Galaxies.  I could see the attraction, but it wasn’t really for me.  However, when he came home with SOE’s latest game EQII, I thought where’s the harm in having a little go.

I was hooked.  I had never owned a pc before, but burned through all my money having a gaming uber maching built.  I bought the collector’s edition because I’m a sucker for a fancy box and maps, and I was off adventuring in Norrath.  The other huge event that occurred then was the birth of my daughter, Faith.  What better way to celebrate that to name my alt after her.  All the obvious spellings were taken by then, so Phaith the Templar was created.

Rewind back even further to the SNES days.  Ah simpler times.  We all had the luxury of piling into someone’s house for a marathon Street Fighter 2 session.  I never cared for the big lummoxy fighters so favoured by my friends, I’ve always loved the fast characters, so my expertise with Chun Li began.  I was described as being good at the game by by best friend’s cousin.  My best friend replied, “Yeah, but only with Chun Li.”  True, true, but I’ve no regrets.

Fast forward and you get Lara Croft.  Who is better Lara or Indiana?  Erm, no brainer.  Remember Mercenaries and it’s stupid mohawked oaf?  Well, I played him for all of three minutes before grinding my teeth to dust.  Enter a restart with Jennifer as my character.

The list goes on of annoying male leads in games so after a while, I’d just default to the girls.  No problem there right?

But then you get to mmos.  For the first couple of years I played solo pretty much all the time.  That’s what videogames are right?  A solo activity.  Obviously I was missing out on a whole world of experiences, but I felt stupid having to explain to my new guildmates that I’m not female in real life.  It’s becoming more expected now that girl avatars have guys behind the keyboard, but it also has the stigma of perversion.

I have female main characters in 2 mmos.  I’ve been playing these gals for years now, they are characters in their own right.  While the option is there for gender reassignment, they wouldn’t feel like the same characters I build up from lowly level 1s.  Plus one is named after my daughter don’t forget.

I guess what I’m saying is that not everyone who plays a different gender in a game is weird.  I’m not a deviant in mmos, but if I play one in real life, that’s my business.

Guild Selection

27 Apr

During my time in mmos I’ve joined many guilds.  This is no surprise to most of you as I imagine you have all done the same thing.  I used to scour the forums and guild sites to find the right one for me.  One of my criteria was size, shallow I know.  The bigger the better.  More players means more people to play with, right? More chance of a group; more chance of making friends.  I wouldn’t automatically pick a guild because it was the biggest, but if it came down to a choice of guilds which sounded good, I’d go for numbers every time.

I was on the lookout for a new guild on the Runnyeye server in ‘EQII’ and stopped myself from doing the same thing again.  I thought about my guild on WoW which isn’t massive at all.  But it was founded by friends I had made when I ran a guild on our old server.  One of which was a real life friend I’d recruited.  I thought of how good it feels that  everyone says hi when you log on.  It may only be several people saying hi or grats, but in larger guilds I’ve found that it’s a mere handful of people who do that anyway.  The rest are there to make up numbers, a bit like npcs really.

I’ve done a complete turnaround on what to look for in a guild.  The one I joined on runnyeye warned me that they weren’t the biggest or most active at endgame.  That they do run dungeons when they get a chance but raiding may be a long way off yet.  What they didn’t realize was that the more things they apologized for, the more they were selling it to me.

I don’t know everyone in the guild, but they all say hi when I log on, and that beats numbers every time.

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Play Morality

15 Mar

Once again, I’ve been playing a lot of Fallout 3.  I just finished the expansion, ‘The Pitt’ and once again I was blown away.  At one point, however, I almost reset my game back to a previous save point.  I made a decision I thought was the wrong one.

I won’t spoil the plot for anyone who hasn’t played it yet; I’ll try to keep it vague.  I was asked to help some poor oppressed types, and of course, being the goody-goody type, I accepted.  Once I came face to face with the big bad tyrant, I tried to play the diplomat and find a peaceful solution.  Remembering the quest with the vampires, I thought this would be a safe bet.

The villain of the piece claims to be working toward a better future for everyone, and a little hardship now is a small price to pay.  I was convinced and assumed I could talk my downtrodden friends to see things the same way.  This didn’t go as planned and they reacted rather badly, leaving me no choice but to shoot some shush into a few people.

I didn’t really like this outcome, but I stopped myself from resetting the game and decided that I would live with the consequences of my actions.  Real life doesn’t have any tap-backs, so I’d follow that rule in-game.  I also followed my conscience and moral compass.  I think in real life, I’d agree with the ‘bad’ guys in this instance.  Long term good sometimes means hard times now.  Though I did feel guilty for betraying the poor wretches I promised I’d help.  Once again, Fallout 3 offers something with moral ambiguity, with enough grey areas to give a few HBO shows a run for their money.

In mmos the game saves as you go along, just as in real life, there are no tap-backs, all decisions are final.  Or are they?  Well, not really.  If you fail a quest, there are no consequences beside occasionally backtracking to pick it up again.  If you upset somebody, you only need to grind for a while and you will be good buddies once more.

Will there ever be an mmo with meaningful consequences for your actions?  Will we get npcs who are just like regular people, with morals and motivations that aren’t two dimensional?  I don’t know if such a game would be successful, but I know I’d like to inhabit a virtual world where I had to live with my decisions for the whole of my character’s life.  Maybe the Fallout mmo (should it ever get out of it’s legal tangle) will be the one.  I don’t know.  But I do know that single player games are reaching a maturity in content and theme that mmos aren’t even attempting.  I love my online games, but there’s a lot of growing up to do.

The Quest for Quests I Care About

13 Mar

Something amazing happened.  During an evening in playing games I accepted a quest.  The basic premise was a simple one involving a missing sibling, it was enough to grab me and make me pay attention to what was being said.  Further down the line I found the boy’s home, but he had been kidnapped so off I went into the lion’s den to face his abductors.  Going in alone, I was actually apprehensive and even a little afraid.  Nobody attacked me, but there was an overpowering air of menace.  I ended up brokering a deal with the leader of the kidnappers and the nearby town where the boy was from and peace was restored.  The quest was one of the best I’ve ever undertaken.  I was gripped, I was entertained, I was playing Fallout 3.

Some of you may know the quest I mean.  The boy isn’t truly kidnapped, he’s being held by vampires, or at least humans who have become blood drinkers.  You can take different routes to wildly different conclusions for this task.  You could go in guns blazing and drag the boy out, or play at being a diplomat.

My reward for taking the pacifist’s route led me to striking a bargain with the vampire gang and they agreed to protect the nearby town in exchange for blood.  I also was taught the skill of gaining health from guzzling bloodpacks.

The whole thing made me wish for something similar in the mmos I play.  It struck me that I very rarely pay attention to the quest text these days.  There are just too many pages of text for me to care about them; killing 10 rats is the same as killing 10 fearsome beasties at level cap.  I know I have to shoulder some of the blame by fast forwarding and pressing accept, but I’m not alone.

Why not have fewer quests?  Quests that take longer to perform and have better plots.  Sure, there is no shortage of lengthy quest chains and ones with hefty doses of lore, but these tend to get lost in the mix as they also include stages involving “kill 10…” at which point I’ll just switch off

I occasionally go back to play a bit of LoTRO.  I really like the system they have.  The important quests are clearly marked as part of the ongoing story, and between these there are the “fluff” missions to do during the grind.  The story quests aren’t necessarily better than the others, but they are dripping with lore and worth paying attention to.

I may be a fool with a fool’s dream, but I’d love to see an mmo run with this and freely admit that there is a trash quest category.  Quests that only exist to level you up or get you some cash and rep.  On top of these would be the important quests, the great quests.  Maybe in a monthly update there could be a new questline added, with full voice acting, a meaty story and absolutely no harvesting of 10 pirate earrings or monkey kidneys.  Imagine how exciting it would be to pick up a quest and know that this is the one the designers spent the most time on and poured all their best ideas into.  And the reward for completing your task?  Not cash.  Not rep.  Not even a purple item.  Something really new for your character like the ability to drink blood, a psychic power, hell, even just have npcs cheering me and some ticker tape following me for a week would be nice.

Thanks to Bethesda for giving me one of the greatest game experiences of my life, but also curse them for making me see that the quests I’ve been grinding away at all these years are lacking in something.  The word quest suggests something epic.  After a quest, there should be changes, nothing should ever be the same again.  In mmos I realise that the world has to stay constant up to a point, but is it too much to ask for a meaningful change for our characters?

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