GAME OVER

The character ‘builds’ I favour in RPGs that cater for that sort of thing, and MMORPGs in particular, are focused on control and manipulation, changing the tempo of an encounter or scene rather than playing a set role in its dynamics.  For all that my first WoW character was a Warlock, her Affliction focus is less on raw damage output than on control effects; fear that pins in place or sends you running, a curse that slows you down, damage that can be cloned from one target onto another, a pet that knocks back or locks down key targets and a focus on mobility and instant casts apart from a couple of ‘must stand stills’.  Numerically optimal it is not, but it’s exciting in a way that Demonology, the cruise-control levelling spec, isn’t.  The fact that my other longest serving character is a Shaman with a variety of single-target, area-of-effect and feedback-loop spells and an array of situational buffs, purges and summons for all occasions hints at a similar approach.  I want to love stealthy things like Feral Druids but they slow me down too much; melee was spoiled for me by the Death Knight and its sheer impervious hail of abilities that draw in or slow down targets, hit one place or an area…

Hark, meanwhile, is into short-term; no waiting for things to charge up or other things to trigger, but doing lots of things at a different time.  Her Rogue’s ability to stab at you in three different ways per second is part of what endears her to the class – resources are built up and consumed but as a result of doing stuff, as well as as a prerequisite.  Things that have a random chance of triggering enrage her; things that she can do sans resources, while waiting for them to come back please her.  The Hunter, meanwhile, offers some interaction with the pet, sending it off to attack something while she shoots; she draws comparisons with the Mage, which is an exercise in either firing a wand repeatedly or waiting for a big spell to charge or be channeled while being beaten up.  On the matter of the Paladin she is less certain, emitting a sort of farty indecisive harrumph.  It might just be the sheer invulnerability and power of the class – similar to my relationship with the Death Knight.

A little thought experiment for you lovely people, while I’m working for the next couple of days.  I would like you to consider the following map.  You don’t have to know anything about the game that it’s from: in fact, it’s probably an advantage if you don’t, as you won’t have any preconceived notions cluttering up your participation.  Suffice to say that you start in either the top left or bottom right, you have fifteen playable units that are most conveniently arranged into groups of five, and your objective is to accumulate points by taking and holding the five numbered objectives around the middle.  The more objectives you hold, and for longer, the more points you accumulate.  Objective four is raised up and it’s technically possible to see most of the field from there, objective two is sunken down.

This isn’t an experiment in build optimisation; it’s about fieldwork and control.  Tear your eyes away from the foxy undead lady on the right and ask yourself how you would approach this map.

It’s a good job this isn’t one of those “this is the Hobby I have done this week” blogs or I’d be kicking myself about falling behind right now.  It’s been a busy few weeks up at the Castle von Von, you see.  For one thing, I appear to been given something by arabianknight, and it’s not a hot tip on where to score secondhand gaming material in Scotland either.

Apparently this obliges me to a) reveal seven facts about the wizard behind the curtain of GAME OVER and b) nominate some other people to pass it on to.  I’ll pick seven, for consistency’s sake, and because it’s a good, honest number, from which sensible probabilities can be derived and symbolic resonances extrapolated.

1. I always wanted to design robots when I grew up.
2. Instead of designing robots, I ended up publishing short stories about them, as well as a few poems here and there (not about robots).
3. According to the electronic careers master that we all had to consult at my school, I am ideally suited to a career in the diplomatic service.
4. I have never collected a loyalist Space Marine army.  Ever.
5. I haven’t owned a television since the second year of university, when I threw mine out of a window because it made me cross.
6. There are whole swathes of geek culture that I would quite happily throw out of a window, given the opportunity (most comics, all 80s cartoons, and the Tolkienian fantasy template for starters).
7. My user icon is not quite drawn from life, but it’s close:

Goth as fuck, ne?

And now, the nominations:

1. For writing an occasionally very moving and regularly amusing set of character blogs: Ratshag
2. For doing everything she does: Loquacious
3. For a unique and inspired take on the mechancis of D&D, an excellent novel-in-progress, and a general tendency to take ideas and frolic over the farthest horizon with them: Erin Palette
4. For superb insights into the nature of D&D and the roleplaying practice and industry: Oddysey
5. For being from the Black Country, and having excellent taste in old-schoolery: Coopdevil
6. For superb insights into every game system he touches and extremely useful newbies’ guides: pointyman
7. For bad puns, doing the Four Gamers thing right, and starting out a new system very sensibly: the lads at Western Immoren Economy Tours

Right, now back to the gaming stuff.

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I don’t actually use the Escapist forum.  Let’s get that sorted right now.  I do, however, occasionally find myself morbidly fascinated by a thread title that happens to appear in the hot topics box thing while I’m doing something marginally more informative on the site, and today some weeks ago when I actually wrote this entry and then didn’t post it for ages a little gem about grind leapt out at me and instigated some sort of thought process.

Let me be the first to say that I don’t actually mind grind.  Perhaps I’m boring or easily fooled.  Perhaps I don’t mind simplistic gameplay if it’s bracketed in an interesting enough story to actually feel like something is being achieved, or if it provides new mechanics frequently enough to give me new toys to play with and incorporate into what the hardcore kids would call my rotation.  There are bits of the WoW thing that manage to do that; I’m levelling a Gnome Warrior at the minute and pootling ’round Westfall chopping up bandits feels fairly productive.  Their power bases are attacked one by one to destabilise their control and shut down their plans ready for the final attack on the Deadmines.  This is decent enough stuff.  I can play the Death Knight starting area over and over again, thanks to the phased progression by which the environment actually changes as bits of the Scarlet Crusade’s stronghold are overrun by grobbly undead horrors, making it look like I’m achieving something.

Of course, it’s not all like that.  There are whole regions of the map where context and achievement are absent, where the samey gameplay doesn’t fit into any sort of proper narrative flow or provide any new special effects to wow at (a hellish experience called ‘midgame’), into which I’ve often ventured just to complete a wee Warlock quest and then bolted from never to return.

WoW also gets grilled for its daily quests; do this thing once a day for twenty days, collect twenty-four of those, and accumulate fifty gold, and you’ll get a dinosaur for your character to ride on.  Dailies are, I admit, boring – again, because of the lack of context.  Once I’ve killed the slavemaster and rescued the slaves once, I don’t really want to do it again – it doesn’t make sense to me.  Even if the game world hasn’t moved on, my character’s inbuilt narrative has, and so there’s no real context for recovering old ground like that, and so I don’t want to do it.

On that note, one of my problems with Death Knights is the way that levelling up professions with them means trooping through level 1-55 content that, frankly, feels like it could be and should be skipped, just in order to farm stuff to make other stuff with.

What I’m driving at, I suppose, is that grind isn’t necessarily a problem for me as long as I am moving forwards, however slowly.  Having to go backwards, to break the narrative flow and do something for mechanical purposes (farming items, levelling professions, chasing gear or achievements, practicing an instance), is where things start getting dull.  That’s what I was being faced with with Sybeth a few weeks back. Having reached level 80, there’s nothing for her to do other than repetitive, immersion-breaking daily quests, farm for raid gear that I’m really not interested in (I don’t understand, or care to understand, the mechanics of the game well enough to be welcome in raid groups; WoW is brain-off story time), or go back and wander around areas that are beneath her for the sake of an abstract, out-of-context concept like an achievement.

Since this entry was originally written, of course, the Undead narrative has moved on quite dramatically, and it’s largely due to that that I faction-switched Sybeth and started playing through their starting zones in my roleplaying gear. It’s been quite enjoyable, largely because the piss-easy gameplay is contextualised by some sort of story (even if that story only exists inside my head and on this blog at the moment).

Anyway, that’s not actually where I was going with this.  While it’s quite cathartic to have a gripe about how I don’t like the WoW endgame all that much, what set me off on this little voyage was the persistent referral to ‘World of Warcrap’, and the treatment that WoW often receives for being a big ol’ bucket of grind.

Recognise this?

The thing about grind is that we more or less invited it into our homes way back when.  I remember Baldur’s Gate, people – I have distinct memories of following the main story, and just the main story, and only being able to get about ten levels out of the twenty open for my characters to occupy and necessary to crack the final few encounters.  Levelling up the other ten involved traipsing back and forth across the map, often recruiting and discarding NPCs to pick up their quest chains and thus disrupting the levelling process of my preferred party members, and basically pursuing a lot of insignificant sidelines in order to accumulate new doom spells and shiny objects.  It sounds suspiciously familiar, doesn’t it?  Computer RPGs have had this flaw for as long as I’ve been playing them, and bending WoW over a barrel while praising the Bioware games of yore seems like a double standard.

Blood Pact is full of thoughts about Warlocks, and also pictures, like this one, which I stole.

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