Questes : The Lady's Necklace

Look at that, twice in two days! I'm on a roll. Also, this is the second-to-last one of Questes, so let's make it count with the flat out coolest piece of audio work in the game.

Who can do this?

This is a horde-specific questline, but don't let it discourage you - it only requires level 15 to do, so you might as well level up some race/class combination you haven't done yet (easiest is BE or Undead, location-wise) and you can do both WC for The Glowing Shard and then this in one demonic, or even fel, swoop.

All Credit to http://www.wowhead.com/item=22597#screenshots:id=55354

Where do I begin?

It can be annoying, or it can be easy. I've never had an issue with getting the item that starts the quests - The Lady's Necklace, dropped off of Fallen Rangers and Deatholme Acolytes at Windrunner Spire in SW Ghostlands. However, a select few have just very poor luck and end up farming for a while before it drops. It's just the luck of the RNG, but it's always dropped within 3 or 4 kills for me.

How does mine necklace?

Seriously? This is like the simplest quest in the history of simple quests. Just read the bloiting quest text. I'm not even linking to wowhead here, it's just that easy.

And now, the loot.

You guessed it! Loot.

First off, you get 100,000 rep with Tranquillien, and 250 with Undercity. Toss on a sprinkling of gold and xp, and it's not a bad quest in and of itself. After the completion event, you also get a book, if you talk to the nearby question-markless Ambassador Sunsorrow. More on this later.

That's it, though - there's not much here. Of course, as we know, the journey is the worthier part.

All credit to WoW.com this time.

So... What's the point?

If you've done it by now, you know the point. At the end of the quest chain... *SPOILERS*... Deathwing appears and blows up the Undercity! Haha... see, now, the people who haven't done it are now going to go and complete it before actually having it spoiled. What really happens is that Sylvanas and a few of her banshees sing an epic and stunning song named 'Lament of the Highborne', all in Thalassian. I doubt that something of this quality will disappear in Cataclysm, but it very well could disappear, at least in its current incarnation - as Undercity and the entirety of Northern Lordaeron is getting hit by the renovate-bat, who knows.

For those allies in the crowd who can't be bothered to level up a measly level 15, I mean, seriously, you could just make a death knight for A'Dal's sake, you can type

/script PlaySoundFile("Sound\\Music\\GlueScreenMusic\\BCCredits_Lament_of_the_Highborne.mp3")

into the text window to hear the song, or watch a video on youtube. There is, however, nothing quite like walking up to the throne room and seeing it live. This is one of the truely amazing artistic feats in WoW - and something not to be missed.

It's simple.

Whew. Back again. It's been a busy couple of months, so it's nice to finally be able to type something up.

During that time, I had the delight of experiencing two unrelated yet simultaneously very very closely related endeavors - one, I watched the entire 3 seasons of Avatar, The Last Airbender (delightfully entertaining series) for the first time. Also, I listened to a large number of 3-minute protests - informing, convincing, and venting, all mixed together, in such a short period promotes very interesting topics and thoughts to be brought forth. One which struck me as particularly cool was protesting clapping directly after a performance - that brief, 2-second interlude between conclusion and applause is a sacred and necessary moment that must be always held dear. However, I am not here to talk about the importance of postconclusory peace - I am here to talk about racism.

One of these protest speeches was on the racism in the casting of 'The Last Airbender', the live-action movie based on the aforementioned television series. I had heard about the movie before, but had not watched the show nor had I heard about the controversy. It was only after watching the show and watching a few trailers that I really understood what was going on - and after all this, hearing the speech made the subject all the more interesting. (The same person that wrote the speech drew up the above poster.) I'll summarize the argument below.

Essentially, what it boils down to is this:

1: Every single character in Avatar is not white. The main characters are Asian and Inuit, and a select few are based off of other cultures. This was intended, as the creators of the show to create an entirely eastern-based fantasy world.

2: Every single actor that was cast was white. However, when enough people protested through letters and the internet, they responded by casting the villains as Asian, Middle-eastern, or Latino. Also, because Hollywood is traditionally anti-Asian American, there a huge numbers of Asian actors very willing to play the parts. It is not a matter of acting skill.

3: This sends a very wrong message for kids, at whom the T.V. series and Movie is aimed; the heroes are white, while the villains are of different races, leading to more intolerance and inacceptance.

4: The awful irony is that the show preaches acceptance, the writers for the show promoted acceptance, the T.V. series was voiced by Asian actors which led to more successful careers in a traditionally anti Asian-American Hollywood, while the movie - a trilogy that could quite possibly be very influential - is anything but.

So, the speech went on to say, what can you do about it? Boycott the movie. Do not show up, do not give them your money, show them that racism is not ok.

(Also, they cut Sokka's humor. WTF?)

Update: There's a site full of more information, if you're interested, at http://www.racebending.com/v3/.

P.R.I.D.E: Movie-Based Video Games

Now, there is no reason to RANT if you don't follow up on it, so I have begun the "Post-RANT Idealistically Determined Exposition", or PRIDE. Essentially, I will look back on my R.A.N.T. post and either take a more explanatory/realistic view on things, or one that is far more radical if I felt I was out of line.

Obviously, looking back now, the rant was not angry enough - I find I actually agree with most of what was said. However, a few footnotes on the post:

First, games like Star Trek Online or any one of hundreds of Star Wars video games jump to mind. They did successfully, so what does this person mean when they slanderize all movie based video games? I think a point of clarification needs to be made: Games based off of IP's, or Worlds, do not fall into that category. Star Wars games produced after a trilogy, or Lord of the Rings games produced not based upon the movie but based on the land of Middle Earth, do not fit the definition.

Perhaps that was the point of the whole thing. Perhaps we can escape the downward spiral of awful. We just need to stop making games based upon all the pieces of the movie - the milieu, the idea, the characters, and the events - but just pick one and build from that. The easiest is obviously the milieu, and if we are to break the spiral then this is the way to do it, because milieu is a constant in both Card's MICE anagram (which could very well apply to movies, with maybe an addition of a Visual category) and my SPAM. But after video game tie-ins are taken seriously, one could retell the events from another point of view, or experience the character's adventures before or after the timeline of the movie. There is a world of possibility out there - all we need is for someone to take it seriously.

R.A.N.T.: Movie-Based Video Games

I have a bunch of spare time right now, so it seems about time to start another category of post. This column I will hereforth label as the "R.A.N.T." : Random Acronymized Nettled Text. Yes, I did just Google an acronym for 'angry' starting with n. So bite me.

We'll kick off this column with something that has really, really irked me. Like, alot. A great deal. This is the Movie-inspired video game. Looking at such classics as E.T., whose 4 million excess copies helped cause the video game crash of 1983 and the majority of which ended up buried under concrete in a New Mexican landfill; or Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, holding one of the worst video game reviews on multiple gaming sites; or even such recent releases as James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, it is obvious that developers do not take these games seriously. If we follow the post 1983-crash trend of gaming, we note that when developers do not take games seriously, players do not take games seriously, and so now even if a really decent game was released under a movie title, nobody would care.

The reason people actually make these games, in what seemingly has been forever, is because you can sell a few games on the wave of hype that follows a successful movie. You can also produce a game before a movie, and use it as a form of advertising - this is risky, however, because usually nobody will buy the game until after. Gamers don't buy movie-based games, and the hype-skateboarders don't have the hype to poon onto. Therefore most... scratch that, ALL, are just rushed drivel.

Why am I ranting about this? Why should I care that this market is so idiotically dull, when it is so easily avoided? BECAUSE THERE IS SO MUCH POTENTIAL. I saw two different movies this last weekend. The one I just saw, literally a few hours ago, was 'How to Train Your Dragon'. Actually a very good movie. I'd recommend it - it's a high quality film, another reason that animation can now be seen as a 'true' movie, not a specific brand. Anyway, they made a game, it was crap like the rest with poor ripped-off fighting mechanics and weak yet highly-toted customization, and I despised them for it. Here they have an epic world, one with huge potential, yet they scrap it for a dead game. GG Activision. GG.

The second, Clash of the Titans, is just a flat-out awful movie. Do not see it. Seriously. However, it got me wondering what it would be like if someone did a movie based upon Ovid's Metamorphoses (basis for most modern Greek myth), or did a full 3D epic... literally... of the Odyssey. If someone took the visual style of a movie like that, did a God of War style action-adventure game with a fairly linear storyline but great game play, it could be a very fun game... and not only would it be fun, but the game would promote the movie and the movie would promote the game. It could be epic. To bad it will never, ever, happen.

Other things I hate about movie based video games: 99.99% of them are catered towards an audience under 12. Seriously. This is because they are more impressionable and much more capable of surfing the hype wave. That means those of us gamers that want to play on Pandora or Berk or wherever are SOL. Also, they are almost always placed exactly where they should not be. A successful video game will draw you into the world - not tell you the storyline of the movie set in the world the game should be about. Why in the world would you stage a game inside of a village that was just saved? Set it in a nearby village. A cut storyline - something the writers wanted to do, thought up doing, but then never got to implement.

A video game is a second chance for writers to tell a story they didn't get to - and a second chance to explain the world through another story. Not a chance to have you run through some muddied maze of puzzles between narrated bit of exposition that tell you about a story that doesn't matter, or a story that you already know.

White Words on a Black Site

Three large cardboard boxes are, at the moment, sitting full of unread books. I intend to change this, whether by burning the boxes, throwing them around, or reading the books. Perhaps all three. However, in order to do such things, I will probably eventually read the majority of them anyway. I have about 25 critically acclaimed Fantasy/SF books now displaced onto a shelf, where I will begin to read them. As a way of making myself read them more/learn more from them, I'll post a short review/synopsis/etc. on the site about each one. Should be fun!

There and There Again; The World Strikes Back!

New oratory today, folks! However, in addition, I will try to reduce rampant resurgences of blatantly boring banality by practicing perfect punctuation and accepting an alliterative air. Or not.

I am here to converse about a game. A free to play game, in fact, the type of which I have mentioned before. A familiar, famous, frequently-mentioned free to play game, one which brings to mind many marvelous mishaps. This game is known as Allods Online. I will attempt to describe to you the wonders of my first few levels there for you. See if you can spot my point before I've said it. It'll be like a game!

Yes, I do all my own stunts. If (stunts == screenshots).

Wellp, proto or otherwise, I logged on to a brave new world with such people in it. Not over-densely populated, but a good number, so competition - as well as companions - were always within reach. I was excited, too - this was a game that took things as we knew it and shook them up a little, improving here, sidestepping there, all with a very detailed and amazing art scheme that would assuredly last a long time. A community was slowly building up around it, with jokes about awful drop rates and overpowered classes already emerging. It was enthralling, to be a part of something so new and so large. But enough about the large-scale stuff.

It began with a densely packed tutorial with firm, regimented boundaries, designed to give a thorough knowledge of game mechanics in their entirety to the player. It was successful, too - by the time I walked out of the bounded area, I understood what I needed to know to begin in the first zone. Following a number of grindy quests involving either killing mobs, getting drops, or using items, was another camp, filled with quests that involved... well, killing getting and using. Some drops were atrocious, some places overfarmed, some zones overfilled. Creatures like the Damned Soul one shotted me without a trace. In such, I was astonished to find I loved it. Why? Because it was Vanilla WoW.

I could do a recap paragraph, but really, just go read that again if you have to. It's EXACTLY THE SAME. Now, I understand that the story is more focused in this, yes, and it has a more Cryptic-style in medias res tutorial, sure, and the levels are different and it's free to play and... fine fine fine. It's not 'exactly' the same. But to me, the player, it feels the same. Like, to the note. Levels are gained insubordinatly slowly, compared to today's WoW, and the death penalty is not devastating yet is much harsher than I'm used to. Really, it was just fun feeling like the world was tougher (read: not more difficult, just tougher) than I'm used to.

Unfortunately, I cannot draw concept art for an already released game, so this is liberally hijacked from developers. :(

I'd heartily suggest anyone that played vanilla WoW and is still playing a modern MMO to go check it out. Or, those that want too feel what vanilla was like if they missed it. If anything, it reminds you of exactly why they made the changes they did - opening up content, speeding levels and death, adding a report spammer function - but the community is different, too, and it's worth checking out. People react differently to a harsher world, with a very different mindset than what has cropped up in the 'pandering to casuals' world of today. (You can stop reading now if you don't want a sweeping game design-esque solution.)

I think what this gets at for developers is that the new-game experience, eyes wide and unblinking, is not unachievable twice. While many people say that your first MMO, first shooter, first game will be the only one ever to pull you in with that fascination, I felt it slowly gripping me again. Not firmly, just an ever-so-slight tug to enter a new world, forge a new trail, leave a path of brilliance behind me. MMOs made today do not NEED to cater to new players to impart that first-game feel. It can be done. It just requires a successful IP, a brilliant developer, superior art and level and gameplay design, and a fanbase eager to explore a brave new world.

In which I rediscover oratory; or, The expotition of theatrical game design

After reading through my previous posts, I realized one thing - that they were simply tirades, endless rants that (I believe) contained useful and interesting information, yet presented in a dull fashion. Some bloggers can get away with this; in fact, almost everyone who has another aspect to their blog attached to it (see: webcomics, machinimas, class data-crunching, etc.) are allowed to make such posts, people will read them, and leave enlightened.

I am, however, slightly different, in that: a) webcomics that I made would be drawn with a trackpad in paint.net, b) Machinimas are... well... tricky, and while I've tinkered around a bit I've found that using free movie editors just doesn't cut it. I may try to do one using all in-game footage a la Scarlet Toy, but that also takes time. Which is something I am severely lacking at the moment. Lastly, c) there is already a wonderful, marvelous, magnificent moonkin blogger out there and it would be repetitive to post similar information.

So, since posting such posts would be silly, I will instead change the presentation of the posts, using in this the common oratorical device of explaining the macrocosm through the microcosm - explaining major problems, difficulties, etc. through another, apparently unrelated story. In any case, it will be an adventure. School is in session!

(Disclaimer - The picture is entirely irrelevant. Though, very cool.)

My sister recently directed her first play. Now, this was no simple series of one-acts; it was a full-blown musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, involving a huge cast and crew, and a multitude of moving pieces. From music to costuming to production to everything else, she had a huge hand in making sure each piece would line up perfectly. It was a massive amount of work making sure each piece was in line, and there is no way that she could have done it without help - so she divided it up into smaller tasks, directed by their own individual directors - one for music, one for crew, and herself for the characters and cinematography.

Parallels are abound here, and I'll let you bask in the fact that you see them - if you see them - for the time it takes you to read another paragraph. What prompted me to think about this was not the production in and of itself, which was packed with high energy and was extremely entertaining to watch, but rather the weeks up to their first performance. No more than one or two people ever saw the play in action, but when they did, they mentioned key advice and gave input over multiple views. If they had mass screenings of, say, 20% of their targeted audience beforehand, voices would become cluttered, and a number would not ever come back and see it again simply because they had seen it in pre-prediction.

Ah-ha, say ye astute readers. That sounds EXACTLY like modern MMO production! Your script-writers become writers, your crew becomes programmers, your characters become voice and action-capture actors, your costume designers become model artists, your directors become designers. Yes, this is what I'm getting at. Energy, as we see, is an extremely powerful portion of a game's success - look at the impact you see in Portal and you can understand what I'm getting at. Another key piece is division; where 30 years ago games would be made with teams of 5, now hundreds of people can work on triple-A titles, and making sure that communication lines stay open is a must.

But the key point I'm pointing out here is the evolution of Beta testing. Essentially, early MMOs took in a few beta testers after the F&F alpha phase, as a sort of meager stress test and to see a bit of reaction to the game from your target audience. This crosses over to the dramatic realm; first invite a few friends and family - and if you, say, needed to check the stability of the sound system or the capacity of the audience, you'd invite a few more in. Maybe get a few random fans in for a private screening to get some fresh ideas. But that's IT. Beginning with huge closed betas for Warhammer and AoC (10K testers there), then progressing to ridiculously large 'Open Betas' in titles like Pirates of the Burning Sea, Aion, STO, and Allods, it has really gotten out of hand. A player now sees a beta like a demo; and the testers who have a true passion and dedication fade into obscurity, outshouted by the hundreds of whining testers that are annoyed a game is not finished before it has been finished.

What do I suggest? Take a look back at our oratorical device. Pick a select few for hardcore testing. Limit the beta test for others, perhaps allowing them to run through the starting levels of the game only, at specified times to stress test, but no more than that. Jam-pack your audience full to see if they'll fit, and reward them with a promise of a better play in the future, or a cheaper play, or a play with exclusive in-play titles and minipets, but never show them the whole game, just whet their appetite for a better, sharper, more structurally sound experience.