Author: C.S. McFarland

Half-Life, I never finished. I played some Counter Strike, and some Half-Life Deathmatch. But that was about it. The story never really grabbed me and I probably was playing on the wrong difficulty level. But, that’s all water under the bridge.

Half-Life 2 is a better game. I played it on easy, so sue me. I didn’t really care for the jumping puzzles and I didn’t want to see the normal or hard version of fighting off twenty four soldiers in a courtyard. So, I sat back and just played the game and it was fun. On easy I made progress all the time and it felt more like an interactive movie than a first person shooter normally does. I only had a few reloads where I really screwed the pooch. If you want a good game to play, Half-Life 2 is that. If you want a revolutionary game that will redefine the genre, this isn’t it. The graphics are better, the AI is better, the voice acting is better, it’s all better. But it’s not going to blow your mind, and I don’t think it should.

The plot is pretty good, too, though it does kinda end with an ambiguous situation. I realize it leaves the door wide open for Half-Life 3, but at some point you do want to feel like you figured something out. I’m not up for the X-File jerk-around-a-thon in a game.

I can’t play a massively multiplayer online game without reading someone’s tirade about how broken the game is. That alone is not a big deal, and such rants are pretty common for every type of game people play. I certainly have spelled out my issues with games I have played in the past. What really confuses me is that someone can write a five paragraph essay about how some development group doesn’t “get it” or has caused them undue suffering yet this person will continue to play the game. Very rarely do I see a laundry list of complaints that ends with the phrase, “And that’s why I cancelled my account and will not play this game any more.” It seems evident to me that the game is worth playing, but the resulting complaining is not unlike a sixteen year old’s view of a pimple on their chin. These issues are not the entire game, but that’s the focus of forum posts, blog entries, and online news articles.

Massively multiplayer online games have some very predictable issues that are inherent in their design. Things that you use and experience in the game are going to change. Other people are going to find ways to profit or advance faster than you. Some of these problems are just perception based, and others are simply part of playing an masively multiplayer online game. My advice is to make peace with the genre or stop playing. Complaining about how one group of players is moving up some ladder faster than you, or getting more resources than you, is a fact of life. No matter how level the playing field, someone is out there getting more of something faster than you can. And when you break down and try to join that group, doing whatever they are doing, you should expect the game to change so that there is no more advantage there. All these behaviours are not conducive to actually playing the game. When a change in the game can cause you to stop having fun, you are left two options. You can quit the game, or you can develop an attitude that allows the game to change while you continue to enjoy it. And if you can’t do either of those, I’m sure you can get a job making the next great MMORPG. Just remember that what goes around, comes around.

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for a few months now. I think that this is the most enjoyable MMORPG that I have ever played. It’s probably a combination of who I am playing with and how I have approached playing that has made it so fun to play, but the game design has also played a large part.

I was playing my hunter class character and thinking about the concept of having a pet in the game. I know other MMORPGs have done this, but it always seemed poorly implimented or very flat. The ammount of control a hunter has over their pet, the complexity of pet growth, and the interface for pet interaction, all contribute to a really polished and interesting class to play. I could say the same for almost every class and race in the game.

I know that many people have been upset with server problems, but when the game you are trying to play is this good, it seems worth it. We’re not talking about Asheron’s Call 2 here.

Blizzard did a great job designing the user interface for their game, World of Warcraft. The interface is clean and non-intrusive to the game experience and manages to still be very powerful and handy. The best part about it is that anyone with XML and Lua knowledge can add to, and modify, the interface. Everything from adding a clock to changing every part of the interface you see on the screen.

Cosmos is one such modifcation to the WoW interface. It’s the heavy-weight mod and is crafted from many smaller AddOns and mods. When I first started using it, it felt unorganized and clunky. Some of the features, though, were so useful that I felt I had no choice. Either go without or take the good with the bad. As time went on, I learned more about what AddOns really were and how Cosmos was not designed strictly as one. Proper AddOn design resulted in code that did not require manipulating Blizzards code. This design concept of the AddOn being stand-alone also meant that when Blizzard updated certain interface files, your AddOn code would not break. It also keeps one AddOn from interfering with another AddOn. All good ideas that Cosmos clearly broke. And that is why, on principle, I have stopped using Cosmos and started writing my own replcement for the one feature I could not un-integrate from it.

Cosmos also caused my client to crash when exiting the game. No idea why that happened.