August 24, 2007 by Matt.

Have you noticed with this current trend of MMOs that…

everyone looks the same?

Seriously, look around.  There’s like one body type per race nowadays, and only five or six races.  Perhaps I’m a bit spoiled with EQ and DAoC (for number of character races), SWG pre-NGE (for customization) and various MUDs (see previous) but when you’re just like everyone else the character itself loses its flavour.  Apparently it’s British flavour, imported.

I’ve always been more willing to play a character that I crafted more than a character I just slapped together.  Five faces,one body type just isn’t cutting it for me anymore.  This goes double for more of the Korean-style MMOs where you’re playing a character with this backstory, that everyone else can pick from.  It’s like a cloning machine went amok!  And that just screams “hey, you could play NWN2 and make a better character” to me.

If I’m going to play an MMO, I want a character that is *different*, and not just in mannerisms.  Heck, most of my early MMOing I made friends with people by starting conversations with “Wow, that is an awesome [loot item here], it makes you look sharp!  What is it?”.  Note that I have no problem with one item looking the same way, but if you can have five “fighters” standing in line, all be relatively the same effectiveness and look completely different then you have a winner.

I WANT TO BE AN INDIVIDUAL!

POR FAVOR NOOOOO!

Posted in Rant, MMORPGs | No Comments »

July 26, 2007 by Matt.

Of course, you read that and think “well duuuuh, you have a link to GamePolitics right over there.” When you actually see what a psychologist hands you for a “survey”, you’ll wonder if they’ve ever touched a controller.

It started off with the usual demographics - age, gender, race, married or not. It asked daily how much time you spend gaming (4 hours a day nowadays) and how much today (30 minutes, jumped in to play a little Beyond Good and Evil) which brings me to my first issue. This is the list of games they apparently know about:

• First Person Shooter
• Sports
• Simulator (Sims, Real Life? Real Life isn’t a game!)
• Real-Time Strategy
• MMORPG

I wrote in “Other - Adventure - Beyond Good and Evil”. Note also how they listed FPSes and MMOs at the top and bottom, for ease of selection.

Next they go on this long list using very big words about how you were able to “control” the game session. Whether you could interactively look at stuff, how natural it was to do things, all in very clinical terms as if we could lift boxes, bring them to the screen and spin them around or something. They did ask some of the important questions like “how engaged were your senses”, but the rest just didn’t seem like they had ever played a game. I’d love to see a chess player with the same questionnaire and see how they’d answer some of that part.

The last part was the real clincher. How do you answer “Given enough provocation, I may hit another person” or “If I have to resort to violence to protect my rights, I will”? ONOS HE WILL DEFEND HIS RIGHTS WITH HIS FISTS, HE IS AN ANGRY GAMER. Or worse, if someone threatens your loved one with bodily harm and you step up, that also apparently makes you a violent gamer. Also, disagreeing with someone can be a flag - “When people annoy me, I may tell them what I think of them.” Yes, if they’re annoying I’ll say “hey man, that’s… a bit annoying”. “I tell my friends openly when I disagree with them” is called being open and honest, not violent.

I must say I’m boggled.

[edit] After speaking to the person who handed out the survey, the one who wrote it is a friend’s friend and no, she hasn’t played games before.   Based on some of the other responses I’ve heard, she’s going to get some very interesting feedback concerning it.

Posted in Rant, Fluff | 1 Comment »