That’s one big robot.

… is the uncanny valley.

Planetside was an early MMO dedicated to first person shooting. Of course, all the FPS games that come out nowadays have 16-player online play as their primary draw, but in the bad ol’ days, that wasn’t so true. Planetside was unique in that it was persistent and allowed for much larger crowds of people to play. It’s strangely been unequaled since.

In many ways, it was a noble failure. Allowing that many people on at the same time didn’t do much for framerate and made it kinda frustrating to play. The graphics were deliberately bad for the day, just to minimize lag. It took too long to cap bases (Typical mission: Play for an hour or so against hordes of people until the base cap becomes inevitable. Defenders go somewhere else and play, while the attackers spend fifteen minutes shooting at each other in the courtyard as they wait for the base to cap). And they royally screwed up the balance by adding the mechs later on (Typical every game: Run to base. See mech off in the distance. Pull out Rocket Launcher. Fire its 3 shots at mech. Go back to base to get another one. Repeat five times until the mech dies. Begin to run to that first base you’re still miles from, only to see that another mech has spawned. Rinse. Repeat.). But it still did so many things new and interesting that it demands a sequel, at least from me.

The certification system from Planetside was one of its outstanding features. As you earn XP (for killing people, capping bases, and leading squads), you’d earn certifications. These could then be spent on different equipment loadouts. Want to drive the planes? Get the right certs. Want to run around in power armor? Get the certs. All of these things provided different gameplay without necessarily making one player better than another. Sure, if you’re in your stealth suit, you’re probably not going to do much against the power armor-clad guy, but you’re going to be able to kill the guys with the right equipment taking down your own faction’s power armor dudes, right? Plus, there were engineering certs, which let you fix turrets, set up turrets, and plant mines; first aid certs which let you heal people, and hacking certs, which made base caps faster (and let you steal enemy vehicles). So there were lots of ways to diversify gameplay without necessarily making the guys with more playtime “better” than you.

With the success of the Battlegrounds series and CoD, it’s a damned shame Planetside hasn’t been around. These games have shown that the market exists for that type of game. And Planetside did so many cool things that these games have yet to duplicate. I, for one, am looking forward to the new game and only hope that I can maintain a positve K/D ratio.

Got my Darth title and all of that. After about an hour of futzing around with the endgame content, I almost immediately had the urge to cancel my subscription. Because that sorta stuff isn’t all that interesting to me. I’m still not entirely sure where I’m supposed to get all these specialized commendations I need for high-end gear. I’m not entirely sure what the difference between the high-end PvE gear and the PvP gear is (I mean, obviously, the PvP gear gives you Expertise, which is apparently important for that stuff – but are the stats equivalent?). And I find the Warzones to be a frustrating lack-of-an-ability-to-target-anything-fests (Even if I did score the winning goal in my second game of Huttball). And whose bright idea was it to have the Ops Bar hover over my left-bar so that I can’t click on anything over there (You know, like my heals)?

Of course, there’s other end game content. There’s PvP Zones, which I have yet to hit. And there’s a bunch of high-end Flashpoints. In between Warzones the other day, I sat around trying to drum up an interest in doing some of those in my local chat. But when there’s a total of 10 whole people in the zone all day (including one level 12 who I think got lost), that proved impossible. I don’t know whether to complain about server population (although I should mention that this was on a Saturday afternoon, when you’d think there’d be more people around) or just a lack of interest in high-end PvE content. And I don’t know how the hell you’d ever drum up enough people for the Operations.

However, the game did provide a lead-in to that content. There was a whole mission chain on the last planet to introduce you to the story of the last Flashpoint. And I got missions like “Go to the PvP Bounty Board” just to familiarize yourself with that aspect of the game. Plus, there’s all kinds of quest givers for all the Operations scattered around the Imperial Fleet, so I didn’t find the game hiding that content. Now, if only they could have done such a good job on the actual game rules (see earlier paragraph).

One last complaint before I’m done. What is the deal with every planet having its own currency? Each planet has its own Commendations, which is where you get the supersweet gear and modifications. But why? It makes money (the actual money that drops from mobs) kinda useless. They might as well have called credits “Repair Armor” points because that seems to be the only thing I ever do with them. I get it for high-end stuff – you gotta come up with some anti-farming measures to keep people paying that monthly sub. But I didn’t really get it for every other planet.

Plus, I have a ton left over. Yes, I spent all the Commendations I got for each planet as I leveled up, but when they send you back to planets for Bonus Series, you get more. Which, by the time you’re doing the Bonus Series, are worthless. I guess my next character will be receiving those in the mail.

Entertaining the troops by blowing up starships with my mind

So, uh, what else has been going on in the world? SOPA? What’s that?

Giving some love to the other science fiction franchise.

… doesn’t understand why Japan is so frightened of her.

I wanna ride one!

The first thing I want to mention is their particular take on Star Wars. The Old Republic takes place in a different era from the movies, but it looks like Star Wars and that’s cool. From seeing familiar things like Tauntauns, to people wearing robes and waving lightsabers at each other, it has enough familiarity to make one nostalgic for those halycon days of yore when George Lucas was making Radioland Murders and not touching Star Wars. But, since it is a different era, it also has plenty of new stuff that still looks like it fits. The starships, for instance, have similar lines from the starships in the movies, but are new. Many of the droids seems to feature bits and bobs from other things you’ve seen in Star Wars (there’s a particular class of Imperial droid that has an AT-AT head). And all the symbology is very similar. It’s best to ignore the fact that this all takes place thousands of years before the movies and design sensibility can’t possibly remain that unchanging.

Coolest power EVAR

Another thing that’s pretty cool is your companion. Since we’re dealing with Bioware, they love to throw interactions with NPCs in. But, since they’ve got eight billion people running around in their world, they couldn’t really have full parties. So, everyone gets a companion, with several different options as the story progresses. This person has all of its Bioware-esque likes and dislikes within your conversation options to gain Affection, which ultimately opens up new powers, sub-stories, and other mechanical bits. Ultimately, I feel like I’ve have too many now and can’t fully explore all the interactions with them all. And it makes me extremely sad that the one companion I want to bring along on missions for her story doesn’t match my play style at all and is next to useless (although I see a lot of Assassins running around with her, so I guess if I’d gone the other way with my class she would have been useful). So, yeah, there’s some investment.  And that’s cool.

This seems dangerous.

Another thing I like is space combat. Yeah, it’s in the game and hasn’t been relegated to the first expansion! Everyone gets a starship to travel around with, but it also can engage in space combat. If you ever played Starfox or Rogue Squadron, you have a pretty good idea how this works. It’s a rail-shooter with awesome Star Wars visuals. Being more of a clicky-fest separates it from the more typical “stare at moving bars” combat that the rest of the game is, so it makes a fun diversion. Plus, there’s a whole bunch that reset every day, so you can keep doing them and improving your ship. The thing that helps this the most is that it, again, looks like Star Wars. The order of the day is WWI dogfighting amongst some pretty cool terrain with capital ships dueling overhead.

The Fade is in Star Wars too, apparently

The last bit is that there’s a story and I feel like its going somewhere. It felt like a sorta typical adventure game story early on, but some bits in the mid-game made it pretty cool. Now, as I approach the level cap, I can see it starting to wrap up and incorporate the choices I made earlier into its story. Part of the success I think is that I deliberately didn’t go look at spoilers on who my companions were, so that I was constantly surprised when new people would join my party. I hope it pays off eventually, but so far I’m pleases with how its progressing. From the tiny bits of alting I’ve done, some of the other stories look pretty cool, too. So, there’s definitely replayability for this stuff.

So, yep. That’s a game. There’s stuff I don’t care for (Crafting – while they do it better than any game previously has, it’s still boring and pointless as all get out), but its pretty polished overall. So, here’s two more screenshots:

I think I broke the game

They're not gonna catch me ridin' dirty

Uh Oh

As of this writing, my Sith Inquisitor/Sorcerer is 42, which certainly says something about the time I’ve been dedicating to it. I have yet to alt, but plan on it eventually.

So, let’s start this discussion with a long and drawn out story about how I eventually got the game to run. My computer sits right in the middle of the System Requirements – better than the minimums, with some bits better than the recommended. It’s not a fancy computer (it was $600 at Wal-Mart, I’m a poor college student) but its better in some categories than my old one, just due to technology increases. I figured I was pretty set to run this game. I’d probably have to turn shadows off and tweak the graphic settings, but still good enough.

This turned out to not be true. Even setting all the graphics to the minimum (and running it in some terrible resolution you haven’t seen since the 90s), it was like watching a slideshow. Even attempting to run through the starter area gave me a headache (and even that was after hours of updating drivers and minimizing all other system functions). The main problem, I figured was that this crappy computer has an internal video card and, despite being a better internal card than the game wanted, still was stealing all my RAM for its functioning. Luckily, I still had my old video card from my old computer, which was exactly the card recommended by the game. Unfortunately, this being a shitty Wal-Mart computer, the power supply wasn’t large enough to run my old (new?) video card. But, being full of foresight, I had saved my power supply from my old computer to power this monstrosity (the old computer’s motherboard had gone bad – not the other hardware). So, I took the whole thing apart and rewired it. This only took one trip to the computer store (to test out a dud connection on the new motherboard) and eleven hours total work. But, finally, the game ran! Which just highlights the reasons I don’t play computer games much anymore – it’s a nightmare to get them to run. Consoles can’t handle RTSs or MMOs quite yet, but I look forward to the day that they do so I can not tinker under the hood to get the software I purchased to run.

The first of many EVIL meetings

So, eleven hours later, we’ve finally got a new shiny game! It even has shadows on! I was excited! I immediately rolled up a Sith Inquisitor, because you get to be evil and shoot lightning and I can’t contemplate a universe where that isn’t cool (Azula says “hi”). As for the game itself, we’re basically looking at Knights of the Old Republic III with World of Warcraft gameplay. That may sound disparaging to some people, but it really isn’t. First of all, KotR is the best Star Wars thing since Star Wars. Second, WoW has spent years hammering out the specifics of MMO gameplay into the finally crafted, six-million people-playing machine it is today. This just takes that and make it even more streamlined.

I really had no preceding knowledge on the game. I knew that it was announced and had seen the E3 cinematics before launch and knew that there were eight classes, but that’s about it. Well, I guess I also knew that it was going to be Bioware attempting to do a story-based MMO. This didn’t sound like a bad thing to me, as Bioware does story pretty well. And I guess the secret to doing that is to make sure the quest text isn’t boring. Which turns out to be a really basic secret – give voice to everything. There is no quest text. Instead, you get cinematics for every single one with the quest giver giving actual spoken dialogue the entire time. Usually, you’ll have a few dialogue options during these as well. These are handled just like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, with the three options of the ‘gist’ of the conversation. Then, your character voices the actual dialogue and NPCs respond appropriately. After 40+ levels, you can see the basic framework of all of these quest conversations, but it still works enough to keep me interested. Who knew all you needed to do to keep me interested was to have people talk to me?

With 8 classes split across two factions, each class gets in own full story. It, due to the common MMO problem, can’t necessarily be an world-changing affair, but its still a Bioware story. There are repercussions, interesting NPCs, and cool twists. While the basic story for the Sith Inquisitor involves digging through old tombs for Sith artifacts, the reasons for doing so have changed considerably. Each planet also features a main quest line with impacts on the ongoing story of the simmering war between the Republic and the Sith Empire with escalating consequences. Some of these are more interesting than others, naturally, but there are things building and I certainly hope it ends up going somewhere.

I’m not an MMO player. I don’t enjoy repetitive click quests as a rule. While the first few levels are always interesting as you gain new powers and figure out what your toon can do, eventually you get your rotation down and can practically script your way through the combats. I also get no enjoyment from grinding, could care less about crafting, and don’t care about chasing exclusives. And all my friends who play these games always end up playing the opposite faction that I’m interested in (We’ve got a guild. I’ve been the only person on for the past week as they all switched to Republic.) But somehow, Bioware has overcome my general reluctance towards the genre and kept me engaged. This is the highest level I’ve ever hit in an MMO and it’s generally been fun. I don’t have any plans to stop in the near future. I guess it helps that its eminently soloable (but with some innovative ways to keep groups engaged for all those quest conversations).

This guy's meetings are WAY eviller than mine.

So, how Bioware implemented story takes the ideas of instances and WoW’s phasing to the next level. Generally, if there’s a conversation you’re about to engage in where there will be a fight, it gets instanced. This allows them to change the surrounding scenery based on your interactions and it works pretty well. It also remembers your dialogue choices and has played with them to some extent in my current story arc. And while you could certainly complain about the less-epic nature of the storytelling, you can’t complain too much because you’re getting EIGHT different stories. Plus, there’s all that other MMO content to work through as well.

Okay, this got long, so I guess Part 2 will be tomorrow (and since I haven’t done anything else for the past couple weeks, I’m not sure what else to talk about). You can click on the screenshots to see ‘em big (and see my terrible GUI setup).

From Knights of the Old Republic, the Hammerhead class cruiser.

… is the harbinger of the Mayan Apocalypse.