What to do....

So, what do you do when your wife has had surgery for breast cancer, your mother-in-law has had a heart attack, the game you like to play is full of douche bags and you've got burned to a crisp by the sun?

Well, you play snake of course...

Nokia have a lot to answer for.

Gaming : SuperSnake.io - New Personal Best

Just shy of 20 minutes growth... Not bad... Died to a super snake, he clipped the last of his fifth gold tokens as my venom spit struck, and... boom I popped, but I was quite happy with this performance.

Supersnake.io - Still Going

New High score... level 50...

I actually made it to level 55 before something lagged out and I hit a wall... 

I'll never pay to play an MMO again...

That is a bold statement, as a player with a major elitist streak in my past, many years in vanilla WoW and later versions, running guilds, running corporations in Eve and having some damn fun whilst doing it, how can I sit here in 2015 with tall that in my past and say I'm not going to pay to play an MMO again?

Well, Russia is one source, with games of the quality (damn high) and quantity of WarThunder, World of Tanks and other titles it's hard to say why to buy into the idea of paying subscriptions.

More traditional MMO's like Lord of the Rings, you can access that game free, but pay for content, and if you've paid for content you then still get access to it when you stop paying...

World of Warcraft has the opposite model to this the moment you stop paying they cut you off, your dealer cuts you off, and you loose that world, and to some extent you loose yourself, because in these MMO's we, as players, invest a little of ourselves in those character, they are us as we walk and live those virtual lands after all.

So, to be cut off from them leaves us wondering, leaves us missing them... But that pull, in the current economy is not enough to make me want to pay.

It's not essentially Sophies Choice is it... Sub to play a game, or eat better food... I know as a bit of a fattie, I'm picking the food, and so that leaves me playing free to play games.

Dungeons and Dragons Online has graced these pages 5 years ago, though not as good as Wow it was there, LOTRO also, there are others I've tried.

So, if Blizzard come out with a new game "Titan", whatever that maybe, what would I do?... Well, the first thing is read all about it, but all that time I'd not be thinking "yes yes yes"... I'd be thinking "how much how much"... and if it's more than a dollar, I'm out of there, I'm not paying £29.99 for a title then £10 a month any more, ever.

Is this a sign of the times?... I suppose it's a sign of my maturing, and choosing to spend my time more carefully, as I've gotten older the amount of time I have to play has lessened.  So, if I get an hour a night, that's 7 hours a week, that's then what 28 hours a month... so just over a day... If I'm paying a £10 monthly subscription, those companies have to run their servers 24/7 I get that, but I'm paying £10 for 1 day... That's expensive.

The counter argument is "play more", playing every day that's 33p ish a day... That's cheap, but who as an adult, as a real person, with a real life who has time to play every day?... Every hour of every day even for some titles to achieve what you need to as a top notch achiever?... Not me...

Students maybe, people with that ability to run on 2 hours of sleep... But not me, not a middle aged man.

What shocks me about this whole feeling I have is that, I'm actually at a time in my life where I could spend on games, but I don't want to, the price per play time does not stack up, free is much more liberating and I never have that niggling feeling that; if I put that title down for a week, I'm loosing out; for free, I can't loose out... And the title itself can't, though it has to run 24/7 server power and time is very cheap now, more so than 15 years ago when I became an online player.

And that server time and cost for the publisher can be offset by premium or shop offered items in the game.... This i believe is where AAA MMO titles now have to go.

Five years ago, I'd have had the opposite opinion, if I went back and asked myself, even in the pages of this very blog I've said that, but I have to say now the opposite is in my mind.  I want to play for free and spend maybe a little now-and-then on top-up items.

Where does this leave the next generation of MMO's for me...

It leaves me hoping, maybe in vein, that they are free to play.

Elite Dangerous - Longevity

I've said many things about Elite Dangerous on these pages, and I keep going on about it, so I have to admit I'm interested.  I'm not happy about being interested, but one just has to watch the game being played or even see screen shots and you're instantly engaged.

As an old Elite hand and a Frontier Fervent Fanatic I have a series of expectations about the game, and in comparison to Eve-Online I had to admit the idea of paying once and not being a subscriber appeals.

One of the main problems I had with a subscription is that as a married man, working and trying to live life, the amount of game time I get is quite limited.  In a week I might only get to play an hour or two, so paying to subscribe to a game for the other 166 hours that week annoys me, it is just such a waste.

I however do understand why companies need to fund their service, they need to pay the developers yes, but they also need to pay to keep the lights on, and server bandwidth is not free.  It is cheap, but it's not free, energy is very costly also.

So, they're running their game server and you're paying.

However, this isn't the funding model Frontier Developments have seemingly declared for their title, they've stated that you will pay once for the title and play there after.

The multi-player information then does state that the connectivity will be a mix of peer-to-peer and server infrastructure, this makes sense as all the dynamic market elements and what players know as "Open Play" must have some short of server back-bone, despite what some players would lead you to believe.

My question to Frontier Developments, and I have posted this off to them, has been "How in the long run do they plan on funding the server", essentially I ask because the kick-starter funding literally funds the development to a point, and the amount funded is not huge.

One pays for the game also at purchase, either now for £50 in BETA or later for £39.99 (estimated), but that's it?

I can not really understand how a server is going to be funded without some sort of revenue, players will stop joining, sales will plateaux and fall.... So, might more micro-transactions appear?... Just as there are currently skins for sale?... Might a subscription be introduced for "Open Play"... Perhaps the game falls down to Single Player only, or Group play only?...

Personally I miss my adventures hosting the Frontier Club, where peeps sent in their disks with saved games, I copied them back to everyone else's disks and mailed them back... Good fun.

War Thunder - Bugs and Brush Offs

Played a lot of WarThunder over the weekend, and I have to thank my friend Craig for signing up to WarThunder and reaching Rank 2 so very quickly... Was great fun introducing a new player to the game.

I was only a little jealous of how good his first few battles went, and it was very interesting watching how his account was reduced to just one Nation and then slowly opened up...

But the tutorials are still terrible.  Improved since I started, but still terrible, and whoever their narrator is... Christ what an annoying voice, and his pronunciation is shite!

I spent much of the weekend however playing with Craig, and his low level Brits, so we spent a lot of time with me acing out planes - since I started playing before there were half as many modifications as there are now.  My British Ace aircraft swelled from two to thirteen by the time we were done, and when Craig unlocked his Hurricane IIB I received a nice 50,000 Lion bonus :)

He's determined to get to Rank 3 now on his own and earn me my 100 gold, as he says he likes the game so much...

I however spotted this problem:

Take a British bi-plane, so we're talking Nimrod I or II, Fury I or II or the Swordfish above their max speed in Arcade, so you get the "Reduce Speed" message and the flutter sound from the rigging... Jump out or die and get into a Gladiator, and you start off with the aircraft well below the max speed of the Gladiator, but you still have the warning and sounds playing!

It also felt like my Gladiator was responding to motion like my Swordfish, but that's hard to tell for sure with the Arcade flight model.

I reported this, but Gaijin don't seem impressed...

I had another bug report accepted...

And another rejected... 

For the rejected one I have two Videos, and they are different situations, but I don't see the point of allowing for trimming in the test flight models... Surely it will result in NOT comparing like for like... I felt very much as it I'd been given the brush off, despite making the post, making it informative, I obviously see this as a bug, eve the original responder must because he didn't know the policy was to have trimming in the test flight models, so not a 100% match up there and very much not testing what is happening in the game for real.

The code may behave differently with or without trimming...

And certainly for pilot training - which was why I noted the problem - it made for a false impression, in the FW190, I used the Aileron trimming on take off to stabalise the torque... I used it and was very thrown after traning for 4+ hours to go into a full real battle and suddenly not have it available!

So, available in test....

Not in simulator battle...

I dunno, I just get the impression that as excellent as the code and ideas from Gaijin are, their development style and especially testing is very much "We Do As We Want, You Follow"... I dunno, maybe it's a Russian thing?

Gaming Update - Atari ST - Heroes and Generals

Its been a long weekend, and a busy weekend, first things first, the main man lab now has a new floor laid - the last one I'm doing in the whole house - someone else can lay a new stair and landing carpet, I'm done!

I've also put up two new wardrobes from Ikea, sorted the garage out and also moved the guineapig into a new hutch.  These last two items were related to the rat issue, no sign of any rats I clearly scared that sucker off... But there were other things living in there... The first things I found were frogs, I don't mind frogs and I gave them a lift out in my hands and set them loose in the lilly pands at the bottom of the garden... They looked well happy... The wife however was horrified I'd pick up a frog and ran for it... Frogs are silky smooth very nice to hold... Not slimey and not cold - least not when the atmosphere is not cold... But she'd have none of it.

Anyway, with them moved we took up the old run the rat had got into, and I hung it on the wall as a kind of giant basket for stuff and filled it with a bunch of things, I stacked and piled things and since the last floor had been laid I now knew I could rid myself of the excess packs of Laminate flooring, so they went back to the shop... I'm yet to get a refund, but they went back...  So lots more space in the already spacious garage... Yay.

I also got some time with an Atari ST... yes, I got one down and I played a few games, notably Verminator... Blood Money... and Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters... Lovely.

The wife also picked out a film from pay-per-view... Devil's Due... Utter shit, avoid it at all costs.  I'm staggered such a bad, low tech, inconsequential film was made for 7 million bucks, and made over 38 million at the box office... The film was so bad I was more bothered what happened to their pet labrador then the people, and the film didn't even let you know what happened to the dog.  Terrible, utterly stupid, film with so many dead ends, bad camera work passed off as POV filming, just rubbish.  So avoid that sucker.

Finally, I did get a little time Saturday night playing Heroes and Generals, I was pleasently surprised to see they had a free premium weekend, so I got to play a few missions with premium bonus... And you know what... It was not that helpful... I was making between 5 and 8k  credits per game... and with premium bonus I made between 6 and 9... Nothing to write home about.

But I did have a massive "ahaha I told you so" moment in there... I've been playing with the G43, and complaining about it... and the god damn huge prices for upgrading it for so little return... Anyway, in a mission I pretty much spend my time trying to scround a bolt action rifle... And I found one and had a 14/2 K:D mission... Totally validating my thoughts on the G43, where I can't get anywhere near that without sitting on my ass camping rather than actively playing.

Later on of course I was sent back to a G43... And instantly annoyed as shit at coming face to face with an opponent, putting 4 shells into him... 4 hits... in the torso... and he just turned around and shot me in the face... IN THE FACE PEOPLE... It so unbalanced!

And this ends my rant for the week... Heroes and Generals... I like it, it could be so much better, it needs balancing... Guys over there, go play Day of Defeat for some weapon balance ideas... Oh and weapon sounds, cus the ones currently in game are crap.

Heroes and Generals - Bugs & Problems

I played a game of Heroes and Generals last night, it was the only bit of relaxation time I got, and I'm sad to report it was not very relaxing... The game is of course only in BETA, so subject to change, and I hope to god changes happen, because there are some very very annoying problems with the game.

The biggest problem I found was the strange lack of a tactical direction, what do I mean by this?... Well in the game you have your missions, they have set objectives, they show you them, but then they don't actively reward you for them, so sitting on an objective, defending gets you no points.  To earn points you have to let the enemy take it, or neutralize it, and then recapture it... This is of course playing with fire.

Once you let the enemy in, you're asking for trouble, and sure enough once the clever souls around me figured they ONLY got credits/rewards for letting the enemy in we were screwed, we lost defensive location after defensive location, but the canny sods climbed up and up in the scores... Over all we lost, but they got massive scores, and I can't help but think this was backwards, and a better metric should be rewarded for defending, e.g. being within X distance of Y flag whilst that flag remains friendly and Z enemies have been within a certain distance... So the flag is being pressured, but you're stopping the enemy... Not letting them physically neutralise it.

The next frustration was the snipers and tanks... Players were sitting far away, untouchable, nailing whole buildings with fire... So what?... Well, we had to spawn in those buildings... So you spawned and were blown up, you spawned and were head shot, you spawned and were shot... Then you finally get a spawn away from the rest of the action, and you get shot running back over and into cover... Because the mission did not encourage or provide a counter to the enemy... If you can't see 'em, you can't shoot 'em...

And then, even if you did shoot them, and hit them, in the early tiers you really don't do any damage to the enemy... I was hitting people with my G43 and so frustrated that I could shoot 3 4 or even more times and they'd just run off... Then someone else gets one hit and they get the kill... I must have seen this fifty times (I'm not joking), and it annoys me greatly.  WarThunder handle this better with their assist system.

Then of course there was the anti-tank and grenade mechanics... Grenades, what a useless thing they are, I've seen them fall at an enemies feet, and blow up, and the enemy survives... Anti-tank weapons, I hate you can't fire them from the hip... But then I've had it so you can't fire at all... So bugs bugs bugs... Plus the bullet drop rate it terrible on the projectiles, they fly like British spring fired anti-tank rounds, not the rocket propelled rounds they are!

Next, collisions... I was on a bike, going across and open area, an enemy plane dived down and rammed me with its wing, this killed me... the message... "Xelous (Killed) Xelous"... NO I DID NOT!... I didn't kill myself, I was rammed, by a plane!

Finally, the weapon upgrade pathways, are about as clear as mud, there's no clear benefit to any one set of upgrades, they are so very very costly, yet when you mention this the elitist of gold spammers call you a fool or a noob because your weapon is weak... I find this very annoying.

Still, am I enjoying the game?... Yes, am I going to be interested in how it develops, yes... Am I going to continue to explore the title, yes...

But above all this, I hope the weapons get balanced, and this tactical problem of a "direction" and more reward for actually carrying out the mission is given.

Worst case for me last night was in a defensive mission, I was only rewarded +53 for capturing an outpost... I was meant to be defending an objective, not running away from those three objectives to re-capture something else... Very counter intuitive.

Heroes and Generals - G43 Game Play

Heroes and Generals has featured in my evening game play time this week, and I'm happy to finally find another commentor finding the G43 underpowered as I do...

His comments about the gun taking 3 hits to kill is so true, and probably the most annoying thing.

I think I'm even more annoyed because this balancing act has already been done in Day of Defeat for me... So I'm used to the K(or G)43 taking 2 hits max... The Garand taking 2 hits... The K98 one, the MP4 3-5 hits then each weapon matched up with its alternate in the allied tree, and my brain appears to be wired for this, so seeing 4 hits from a G43 strike and the target start to jump and rotate annoys the shit out of me.

Though I'm still to accrue enough credits to fully upgrade the gun.

Gaming Update - Heroes & Generals

War Games, Games of War, Call of War... We could list any number of iterations of warlike words and find a hint of a game in there, so we each need to pick our genre and wade through the mess of bad games to find good ones, this weekend however I've found one which I find strangely compelling, but which I don't think is the perfect game.

What do I mean by perfect game?  Well, I think for everyone their perfect game is different, I once thought World of Warcrack was my perfect game.  But fifteen minutes of thinking about how much time I'd wasted collecting tokens to then see an expansion appear with yet more quests to collect yet more tokens (BUT THEY WERE BLUE THIS TIME!) had me quit, from sheer frustration... Many other games have come and gone since...

World of Tanks for example, this has been a staple over the last few years, but it ebbs and flows to and from in my playing landscape, mainly because of the huge step up in skill and memory needed to just play tanks... As a kid I could play tanks, I poured them out of my plastic tub and drove back and forth across the iron curtain with them in the soil and sand of the back yard... Now-a-days the entry level is so much higher, especially when you add competitive people into the mix, and you suddenly find yourself meeting people who don't just want to wallow in the mud like the little white bull, but instead they want to ammo rack you and hide behind your burning hulk.

This isn't a jab at competitive play, I was very competitive in other games, notably Day of Defeat, my first major and perhaps the only multiplayer third person shooter I mastered, and the one of the few games I've chosen to actively play competitively.

So finding Heroes and Generals, and being a little tired of being shot out the skies in War Thunder, or having my Tank blown from under me in World of Tanks, and so very annoyed with other titles in my Steam library, I downloaded and set to figuring out this game.

Figuring out is the main challenge, you see the game comes in multiple parts, there is a browser like part, which acts as a window onto the solider's, weapons, vehicles, training and skills you have - as well as the credits or game gold you've earned or purchased to unlock more of the game.

Then once you enter battle a 3D client launches connecting you to the battlefield.

Once into the 3D world, you choose your spawn location, and set about working out how this game works...

Its a massively multiplayer World War Two landscape, this is Day of Defeat of old for me... Except, one can end up training to drive tanks, jeeps, trucks, planes... Or just fight on foot.

And as a beginner, fighting on foot was my only option.  So creating a German soldier, I was handed my G43 and a few potato masher grenades and thrown into the mix.

Almost the first thing I found was the ability to use nearly anything you find on the battlefield, enemy guns, ammo, vehicles and even a villagers trusty bicycle.

At the low levels you need to get used to the bikes, because they're the ubiquitous and only transport in the game, at least transport faster then your own feet.

The mechanics of the soldier are good, raising his weapon, aiming and reloading all come naturally to anyone with even a modicum of first person shooter experience.  Moving has its down sides.

The initial problem I had with movement was using sprint (shift) and then sending my man prone (z), between the two is the "\" key or "|" bar key on a UK layout keyboard... pressing this rogue key brought up the 3D engines message queue, a little like the old style console in the Quake engine... And hitting it was very very annoying, locking out your controls and initially I was not aware I'd miss keyed and hence had no idea how I'd opened this console view... once I got it closed a controls remapping was in order... Except, I could not change this damn key - least not in the base view.

The game is very atmospheric however, providing early morning fog, dust, smoke, impressive explosions and good terrain.

If you can find a position to shoot from, you can pretty much shoot from it... However, there are some annoying problems, and problems with benefit the annoyance causing, teeth gnashingly smug, camping... Yes, this game encourages more camping than...

Initially without resorting to camping I found myself dead time and time again, but at least I was leading assaults, one tactic I noted benefited the early games (which are played on a simple set map with three capture flags) is that if one flanked around and went to capture the enemies first flag, they would all rush back to save the flag.  This allowed your own team to then capture the contested middle flag more easily... I'd be there time and again, capping the rear enemy flag as about 8 enemy would hove into view and nail me with a nail of gunfire and grenade... But all was good, because we took the middle, kept the middle and I kept going back to the enemies flank and rear to stir up trouble, thinning the struggle for the middle.

I just did this, it was obviously a winning tactic, and game after game we won...

You know what reward I got for this active effort... NOTHING.

Not a dime, not a sausage, not a scrat... I had a horrendously negative Kill to Death ratio, and received no capture points - because I never completed a full cap - and though I might spot and nail the odd enemy coming in, I was basically hiding in their base, with a limited field of fire, so unable to really get meat a head of my shots and so I didn't score much.

The agony of this state of affairs was only added to by the crappy G43 weapon I had, and the very high prices of alternative weapons... For instance, in the whole weekend I earned around 40,000 credits.... I had to spend 5,300 on grenades and was forced to spend my initial credits on a MP36 (which I never use) by the tutorial...

So, what could I get for my 40,000 credits... NOTHING... The K98, a more powerful rifle is 71,000 credits... So for playing maybe 12 hours over a busy weekend, and winning games, I didn't earn nearly anything.

Luckily I levelled up quickly and around level 4 I was earning "Soldiers Pay", this is an amount of credits automatically awarded on a Win, if you're active for 50% or more of the battle... And Winning I was in the early games, so with credits coming in, I decided to upgrade my pitiful G43 rifle, rather than save up for the K98.

New sights, different ammo and a new barrel and I had added to the punch of the weapon significantly, though it was still perhaps 100,000 credits away from being a one shot killer.

The upgrade statistics are also a bit of a black box here, you can select items to see how they affect range, or damage done, but there are no real obvious benefits to some of the options available... Huge damage, but massive accuracy penalty... Right, I smell the game balance here, but this is a war game, in war designers don't generally strike the nerf bat so hard on an option.

However, from level 4 and above I had a very quick rise in Ranks, mainly because once you get over level 4 you're out of the boring 3 flag set map and into the open world of any battle on any map... You can select which mission to enter, or even join a battle on a specific location, for example I took part in the defence of Nottingham several times - loosing each time - DOH.

But, I did find a general rule of thumb, missions either consisted of winning quickly with friendly armour and combined arms... Or my team literally under performing all around me.

Add to this the already mentioned - no reward for tactical actions - and I was getting a little bit frustrated.

So much so between Saturday and Sunday, I took a break and thought about how should I play, should I come to this game and try to play it like others - like Day of Defeat, where I would never have had a G43 as my main weapon? - or should I try to learn more about this game, about how the game designers want you to work it.

I chose the latter option, and things started to take form...  The first thing I noted was that one could select a badge on ones character, the badge is like a special skill, and it defaulted to a badge given to me by the training mission, however, changing it to a different skill I found I was much less noticeable by the enemy, great for my flanking actions.

Then I changed how I moved, instead of running from A to B, I found myself going from tree to tree, from tree to rock, reading the terrain and trying to learn how to stay in cover.  To my delight the game picked this up and awarded me skill points for scouting, for combat movement, for all manner of things... And these added into the very complex layers of the browser section of the game, upgrading my soldier.

One can pay to win here, just throw gold at your skills (or ribbons as they're called in game) and you can max them out, buy any weapon and take people out, but I'm in this for the long haul, I want to unlock the game as I go.

I think, when I'm bored of WarThunder or everything else, Heroes and Generals might be a place for me to while away an hour in first person combat.  I just hope that the unlock curve is not as exponential as I fear it maybe - as I'm now 20 hours into playing and after upgrades and ammo refills, still only have around 40,000 credits, where I want to really start to buy more powerful weapons, such as those I pick up off of corpses.

Rethinking the game play style I found most successful, it consisted of hiding in the flanks, taking out enemy as they were in obvious locations and then picking up a sniper rifle, or other such powerful rifle as soon as possible.  Sticking with the issued G43 is a real struggle, especially as you pick up the US counterpart Garand and its far superior...

Multiboxing - Healers - World of Warcraft

No, I've not been idle, the Multiboxer has had a lot of work on the local multi-client version.  Its had auto log on ability, and selective delivery (so you can stop certain clients getting the key clicks by filter) plus there's also a new master over ride, so you can hold a key to send all following keys the same to all clients...

This last item is great, because it lets you react better in PVP situations, you can hold the button if jumped, and TAB - to pick the target - and voila, nail them with everything, no need for worrying about the mappings... This is particularly good when all your running clients are the same, e.g. all Warlocks, or all mages.

Of course you can run the whole program with no filters at all, so its all 1-to-1 mappings, this lets you run the multiboxer very easiler in 5 man PVP groups, for battlegrounds!

 

One other thing I've put a bit of time into over the last few days is leveling up a free to play (Starter) wow account with a healer for the other group you've seen running.  The plan being to go take on some higher level elites somewhere - since we're still free accounts we can't party to go down an instance - so elites is our only option to show off...

 

In other MMO news, Allods online has quit being supported & operated by gPotato, it has been passed back to the Russian developers... You can migrate your account from gPotato back to them...

Now, Allods was one of those games I was short listing to add to the free to play list, however, I've been trying to download the client for a few days and been failing, it is dismally slow.

News Flash: Lord of Ultima Closing

Just a few minutes ago I heard news that Lord of Ultima will be being closed down, it is always sad to see a game going down... I doubt news of this will filter far beyond the community playing.

 

I for one briefly enjoyed Lord of Ultima, but eventually found it a very grindy game, with a lot of elitists playing it.

However, I do wonder whether this news opens the market for an open source, or free to play, game in the same vein.  When I last played it I did strongly consider developing my own version of it, which sorted out some of my problems with the game... This maybe that time... Watch this space.

WarThunder Crew Skills & the New IL2 Game

The other night, I got to enjoy a couple of hours in WarThunder.... Not a terrible successful evening, as I started to try and gain some skill points for my US crews - who are pretty much totally untrained (less than 30 skill points total for each, one crew was zero!) anyway, after two arcade battles I had earned about 11 points per crew and assigned them, so kept going, by the time the evening was over I had about 30 skil points on each crew and over 50 on one of them, and had upgraded my P40E as well as my F4F some.

However, I started to look at the Pilot skills information:

You can view this same information on the warthunder wiki here.  And I noticed the tally, 11472 total points... so to max that out at the rate I was earning them is going to be over 3500 games, per crew... In arcade.

By the number of evenings I get to play, and the number of games I get in on an evening that's over 350 weeks for me... Yes WEEKS... Either I need to vastly up the quality of my play - and so earn more points - or I need to find more time to play?... Neither seem very likely.

However, I could accelerate crew training, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to spend gold on that, I get the feeling many of the really good guys do, but I'm intent on grinding, slogging, my crews up manually... and only spend accelerated crew points once, and I regretted it, because I had one superior crew and the rest boring crews.

WarThunder however is not the only WW2 flight Sim holding my interest though, the old war horse franchise "IL2" is back soon, with their new offering...

The appeal of that Sim is the attention to detail, they're aiming to model bullets passing through aircraft with meticulous detail, not the huge broad strokes of WarThunder's damage model.

Blizzard - WoW Typo's

I'm not tempted back to the depths of World of Warcraft, certainly that game - at least for me - has had its day as a pay to play title. I might, just might, be tempted to take a look if it were free to play - but I know deep in my bones it won't be like the good old days ever again.

But, Blizzard aren't really tempting me with their marketing, not with typo's like this:

Oh a siege OF somewhere... right... Horde bias, gotcha. 

Eh, what's this?

Oh its a typo, right in the predominate headline item.

Welcome to Eberron

Right well, here we are at my second instalment of my progress with DDO. Downloading and installing the game, in both standard and high quality graphics, is actually relatively painless, indeed it took far less time and was more informative to the progress made than other titles and indeed the obligatory patching and data updating following install went on without a hitch on both platforms I tried.

The only glitch came with I starved the connected of bandwidth, throttling it down to below 100kpbs, I found the updates repeatedly stalled while downloading. But I can forgive their servers that, after all I caused the problem by watching too many Videos of Elmo on YouTube.

Once I logged in, I could select the world [I assume this is the same as realm] to visit, and previously visited realms are highlighted in bold. However, if like me you are on different machines between visits the different machines are not aware of what realms you've been on. As such I missed getting the same character twice for my time on the laptop and desktop PC's.

Creation of the characters went on without a hitch, however, when creating your character you get a few of the action animations being played. Immediately I was struck with how awkward some of these animations look. Characters will spin and swing clubs, dodge, parry and cast... but some of the moments are physical impossibilities. I don't like this much, it's a real turn off to me, I like to see natural looking [albeit cartoon-esp] movements. Not these strange efforts in DDO. Indeed I'd have to go so far to say they look amateurish.

However, after selecting my class, race, sub abilities and look I was ready to go, and after giving my character both a fore and surname, I was on a beach somewhere with a short bloke shouting at me.

Please Note - I added the speech bubble.

Now, this guy grates with me, his speech is voice acted by someone I want to punch, this whiny, adenoid dominated rat faced character is matched only by the most whiny adenoid dominated rat arsed voice acting. [Did I mention that the speech text is not bubbled and comes up in the most basic courier font?]

This is your welcome to DDO, this guy SHOUTING at you, showing how bad the 3D sound system is, because though you see the guy a head and slightly left of you the sound of his voice comes from way left and is VERY loud for someone stood so far away.

He proceeds to cajole you into moving about controls, however, there is a lot going on within the UI, if this is your first view of it then it can be quite daunting. You have an action bar at the bottom, which on default settings is hard to comprehend. You have a text/chat area with more of the bad font being used. You also have a mini-map but also a lot of crowding going on, the interface is not clean looking. It just looks to me like it has a lot of things to explain to me, or rather a lot of buttons I don't yet know about. And I'm not sure what clicking them is going to do. All of which leads to feeling that I'm in a rather cluttered user experience. And, with bars above others, and the position of things I have to just hope that I can change things around because to my untrained, but WoW Conditioned eye the interface in DDO does not appear to take ergonomics into account.

Now I suppose I have to draw on a point raised by Darren Love in the latest edition of SUWT. That is that with Blizzard's domination of the MMO Market with Warcraft, there are certain demands and requirements from a player of an MMO today, which are wants and needs influenced by Blizzard. One of these is a simple accessible learning curve and interface. And I'm afraid to say that though DDO's interface is visible, I don't feel like it is accessible.

Even simple things like popping up hints & tips, or tooltips seem sluggish. On the machines I'm running DDO on, I don't think it should feel sluggish... And these feelings about the UI don't even take into account actually achieving control of my character. I am solely commenting about the UI here. Actually taking control of your avatar feels even more alien.

For example, in World of Warcraft to attack you have to select the target and choose to attack [or you can auto attack with a different control]. In DDO you can stand and suddenly make your character punch air. I have been told that later this all makes sense, but right now to the total beginner it does not, I'm basically looking at an avatar whom is punching thin air and I can't seem to stop them doing it [again because in WOW you have to click something else to stop the auto-attack going on, not so in DDO].

I find this shift in my expectations hard to reconcile. I'm afraid to admit that Blizzard have me well trained, conditioned to jump to their tune... I am Pavlov's Dog for MMO control expectations. *Sobs*

However, I did play a little more of the game, I played through the introduction instance, more about that in my next DDO post.

Now, in other news, I have to blush somewhat. As you may gather from post number 1, Darren Love over at CommonSenseGamer was the inspiration for this blog, and today he has made mention of this my corner of the interwebs as his blog of the week.... I thank you Sir.

For now though, I'm about to take a weeks break from work, I'm going on Holiday! While I'm away I'm going to play some Total War Games... Those of you whom know me as “Lord Xelous” formerly of "The Lords Modding Collective" and “The Lordz Games Studio” will know how, and why, I love the Total War series.