I’m Kindled
By Cameron Sorden | May 8, 2008
If you’ll permit me a moment to talk about something other than video games, I need to tell you about my Kindle. I bit the bullet and paid the exorbitant price for one last week, and it came in the mail yesterday. I can already tell, after a single day of playing with it, that this thing has changed my life. It’s utterly amazing. Reading has always been a hobby of mine, but my interest in it shot through the roof with my Kindle.
If you’ve never heard of Kindle before, it’s Amazon.com’s new electronic reading device. Basically, it’s a portable e-book with a bazillion amazing features. For starters, the text on it looks like a book page. It’s not hard to read at all, it won’t strain your eyes, and there’s no backlight, so you treat it just like a book. It fits comfortably in one hand, although you can also hold it with two, and you click buttons to turn pages. It’s capable of storing up to 200 books by itself, and there’s room for an SD memory card so that you can store thousands more.
The coolest part about it is that you can browse the Amazon store from your Kindle and get books delivered wirelessly to the device in under a minute from anywhere. You don’t need to sign in, or deal with credit card stuff, or anything — your Kindle is always signed in as you, and when you make purchases they use your “one-click checkout” info. They just bill your credit card. No hassle, immediate satisfaction. Best of all, the cost of the internet service used to send you books is included in the initial price you pay on the Kindle and the cost of the e-Books. In other words, there’s no monthly fee. You just pay for the books you want (and they’ll send you the first chapter of anything free of charge).
I’m in love with it. I had heard a few negative things about it, like how easy it was to accidentally click your page forward and how the reader would often fall out of the case, but I haven’t had any problems with the former and there’s a great work-around for the latter, although I haven’t experienced any problems with that yet either (you just stick some one-sided adhesive rubber tabs from an art supply store inside the case and they give the Kindle added traction).
The thing is just so damn easy to use and fun to read. In addition to being able to buy and read books from Amazon, you can also load your own files on it, which suddenly makes the entire body of work from Project Gutenberg available to you, to read, free of charge. What’s even better is that I found a website that lets you download those titles pre-formatted for your Kindle. Within the first few hours of getting my Kindle I had twelve titles loaded on it that I’d been meaning to read for a long time, including The Hour of the Dragon (gotta love Conan), the Count of Monte Cristo (a classic), and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (heard great things, read it all last night, I highly recommend it).
It feels natural to read and hold, the text size is adjustable, it saves your place in every book you’re reading (if you’re like me and read several at once that’s really nice), and it can go seemingly forever without needing to be recharged (just turn the wireless feature off when you’re not using it). I love being able to just instantly look up a word I don’t know with the built-in dictionary, or get some background for something on wikipedia (also free of charge and accessible from anywhere). I love carrying around a virtual library of books and magazines in a device as light, small, and unobtrusive as a paperback novel.
I’m also the kind of person where I sometimes feel like reading something new, and nothing I have at the moment appeals to me. Unfortunately, this often happens at 10PM when the library and book store are long since closed– my new solution: pick a book from the hundreds of thousands of Kindle titles, get it delivered wirelessly in under a minute, and go. They have fiction, nonfiction, older titles, and pretty much anything that’s on the best sellers list (usually for a fraction of the cost, too).
If I sound like a Fanboi, it’s because I am. I’m converted. It only took me like 20 minutes of playing with it to absolutely fall in love with it. The only complaint I have about it is that browsing magazines or newspapers is a little weird because of the brevity of their articles, but if you’re settling down to read for a while (or even just a few minutes), it’s amazing. I can’t recommend it enough.
If you enjoy reading, do yourself a favor and buy one. It will change the way you read, permanently.
Topics: Kindle, computer, crack, literature | 11 Comments »
Age of Conan Kind of Rocks
By Cameron Sorden | May 5, 2008
Thanks to the generous Mr. Zenke, I’ve been exploring the AoC closed beta all weekend. My impressions are up at Massively as of this morning, but suffice it to say that I’m pretty impressed by what I saw. Maybe it’s just that I happened to have the right graphics card or maybe it’s the closed beta client, but I haven’t had any major issues with the game that made playing it problematic.
My favorite things about it: The story, setting, environments, and dialogue trees. My least favorite thing about it: having to reach over to the 4-0 keys all the time for combat abilities, or else having to learn a new control scheme. I suspect that will get better with time and practice. The game is a blast to play, though. I’m gonna be rolling a Dark Templar on release. I dig the whole tank/soloing/life-drain aspects of the class. I just wish I could be a Stygian, since I think the class fits them best and I think they look really cool. Sadly, I’ll probably just go with Cimmerian.
I also have a question for you hardcore PvP buffs who read my blog: I’m trying to decide whether I want to play on a PvP or a PvE server. In games where there’s open PvP, open communication between players, and no factions (which is what AoC seems to be), what usually happens with the PvP? Is there more or less of the random ganking like you see in WoW? I would expect less, since the players you’re ganking can actually communicate with you and it’s less encouraged to slaughter all your foes. Anyone wanna give me a little history lesson or some insight here? What happens with open PvP and open communication? Fun or not? Syncaine? Keen? Heartless? Anyone?
I’d really like to get on the same server as a lot of other bloggers, too — I think it’d be fun. Lets try to coordinate this as soon as we have a definitive server list for anyone who’s interested.
Topics: Age of Conan, community | 15 Comments »
Capped — Now What?
By Cameron Sorden | April 30, 2008
As you can probably tell from some recent posts, I’m kind of maxed out in WoW right now. I currently have a level 70 Tauren Shaman with 375/375 Alchemy/Enchanting, my epic flying mount, and a mix of Tier 4 and 5 gear with a smattering of the Tier 6 equivalent badge loot. My only serious gear upgrades come from raiding these days, and I attend multiple raids each week to continue my gear progression and see new fights. However, being the addict I am, I have more time I’d like to spend playing than stuff to do while I’m on (and frankly, spending every waking moment raiding is a real drag — raiding is fun, but not 24/7). What do I do now?
I’ve started a number of alts on this server, but the idea of getting to 70 again on a PvP server is pretty unappealing. I don’t want to play on a different server since all my friends are on this one. Plus, I’ve done the 1-60 game, which hasn’t changed at all in 3+ years, more times than I’d care to count. I toyed with the idea of starting an alt on a different account and power-leveling them through instances with my main. It could be interesting, but I don’t know what I would do them at 70, since I have a main and don’t want to start the gear grind on another main very much. I also wouldn’t actually get to enjoy playing through all those levels, which is arguably my favorite part of the game — it doesn’t do much good to get power-leveled if you’re not enjoying the gear and levels you’re getting and you don’t want to play at max level with that character.
My only other option is finishing the reputation grinds for Outland and working on the old-world reputation grinds for enchants and alchemy recipes. It’s something to do, but it feels kind of hollow and it doesn’t give me much to write about. “Today, I killed 3000 furbolgs for their necklaces.” You know? Bleh. I don’t like the Outlands dungeons enough to PUG them repeatedly, and it’s tough to find a guild tank willing to do them just for a faction grind (can’t blame them, there isn’t much point). I can play the game like an economy sim, and I am, but being rich is boring when there isn’t much you want or need to buy.
I’m patching a few other games I’ve lapsed from as I write this: Vanguard, LoTRO, DDO, and EQ2. I’m not sure if I want to play any of them or not yet; I just want the option open. I’m bored. None of those games sound particularly appealing either. I can’t solo in Vanguard very easily, EQ2 “feels weird” to me, LoTRO’s classes don’t particularly excite me at the moment, and I feel like I’d want a regular group if I was going to get back into DDO, which otherwise sounds kind of neat (I’ve always thought DDO was very cool). I thought about trying EVE Online again, but I hated it the one time I played it and it sounds very hardcore and unfriendly for solo players — my core game is WoW. I don’t really want to get involved with another guild or play politics. I just want to have some fun when I’m not raiding.
I hate it when I start feeling like this (it happens every so often). Blech. I wish Age of Conan would hurry and come out (though who knows how long that’ll hold me?).
Topics: Age of Conan, World of Warcraft, mmorpg, whining | 10 Comments »
Design Considerations for Gaming With a Disability
By Cameron Sorden | April 28, 2008
I wanted to take a moment and point out this latest Massively article I wrote, just in case you don’t watch that feed. I think it’s an important story for a number of reasons, and I think that it’s something to think about for both players and designers. It was a really eye-opening experience to talk to Mark, Tim, and Stephanie, and I’m very happy with the way the article turned out.
I know a number of designers stop by here occasionally, so I just wanted to reiterate that a big part of the message that may not have come across very clearly in the article is that the considerations required to make your game more disability-friendly are minor tweaks, largely interface-based, and can be offered totally optionally in most cases. I also wanted to splash the suggestions for things not to do from the article that Mark pointed out:
- Drag and drop interfaces: Both Stephanie and Mark mentioned the extreme difficulty of trying to work with a drag and drop interface for someone who lacks fine motor skills. When it’s difficult to even click a mouse button, the daunting task of clicking, holding, and moving the cursor all the way across a screen can be just too much for some players. Since many games use this system for setting up a hotbar, it can be very frustrating for a disabled gamer to use all of their skills effectively.
- Double clicking on small areas: Again, double clicking in rapid succession, as small as it seems, can be very challenging for disabled gamers. This often comes into play with crafting and harvesting interfaces or activation items. Something Mark suggested as an easy alternative was to allow players to activate environmental objects with a keystroke instead of (or in addition to) a mouse click.
- Putting items on menus: While EverQuest 2 was described as a very disability-friendly game, the right-click activation menus (similar to the dialogs that pop up in Windows) were specifically mentioned as something not to do with your game. Especially when you have to move through the menu options quickly or risk having the menu disappear, interaction with such menus can be very challenging for disabled gamers.
- Controllers: Modern console gaming is immensely difficult for gamers with disabilities, due largely to how controllers are designed. As MMOGs make a shift to become more console-oriented, developers can be cognizant of that fact and offer alternative peripherals and changeable key bindings for their games.
Other easy-to-implement suggestions included closed captioning and avoiding pure audio cues (for deaf gamers), and camera angles which are easily controlled via keyboard commands (as keys are much easier to use than moving the mouse around for many disabled gamers).
While it’s not something you should dwell on, the truth is that none of us knows what life might have in store for us and anyone could become disabled. I would hate to have to stop playing games or doing other things that I enjoy because of it. It’s not hard to accommodate disabled gamers as a designer (they do almost all of the heavy lifting themselves), and you open yourself to a sizable group of players in the process who otherwise wouldn’t play your game because it’s too frustrating (see Tim’s comments about Guild Wars).
Besides, even if the only thing that you accomplish is that one more person is able to play your game, maybe that one person gets an immense amount of joy and excitement from being able to play in your virtual world. Isn’t that a good enough reason?
Topics: community, game design, massively | 2 Comments »
More News About Age of Conan
By Cameron Sorden | April 25, 2008
Keen is pretty upset about a lot of the Age of Conan features mentioned in the recent IGN preview for the game, to the point where he in Graev actually considered whether they wanted to be playing it at all. 
Given the marketing messages so far and the discussion we’ve had about the game over the last few months around the blogosphere, I can understand why he might be a little peeved — it feels a little like a bait and switch, if you were looking for a hardcore PvP game that wasn’t more of the same.
However, PvP’s not so much my thing. It’s fun, but it’s not the reason I play MMOG’s (and WoW’s gank-fest of PvP combined with highly structured battlegrounds is so far from my ideal version of PvP as to be laughable). Age of Conan is a game I’m very excited about, being a huge fan of the original Howard pulps, and several of the things in that article that Keen is less than psyched about make me jump for joy.
I do have to say that the reward system with regard to PvP and PvE reeks of WoWism, which I’m not thrilled about (Note to designers: Blizzard doesn’t do everything right — just many things):
The whole point of the system is for only the most skilled players to rise to the top, instead of having everyone who put in enough time eventually get to the highest PvP level. Once you do get high enough, special equipment unlocks and becomes available for purchase, and the gear is supposed to be extremely powerful. It’ll be comparable to raid gear, though its statistical bonuses will benefit PvP play more than PvE.
But when you get to the part of the article about the raiding endgame, it sounds really cool. I want to point out that I still think raiding is the bane of the casual player, that 10-man raids are the ideal size (maybe 15), and that the way we handle raiding progression is archaic and flawed (I like the idea of lots of original options with tiered content). Here are some of the highlights that caught my eye and sound great:
- Initial run-throughs could take somewhere between an hour or two, but Funcom’s raid designers said a good guild could power through in a half hour or 45 minutes.
- You don’t necessarily need to repeat the tier one encounters over and over, however, as Funcom said the skilled guilds would move onto tier two fairly quickly.
- Raiding in Age of Conan doesn’t only revolve around getting all 24 raiders to smash on the same target. During boss encounters, environmental objects might need to be triggered at specific times to open up potential damage opportunities.
- One of the things that struck us about the raid dungeons was the sheer size. These places were absolutely enormous, which, as the raid designers explained to us, is a result of necessity. Since every player character in Age of Conan has collision built in, the 24 members of a raid will definitely need to spread out.
While none of that is especially groundbreaking (it sounds like it came right out of WoW’s playbook with minor tweaks), it does sound interesting.
The only thing in all of this which has me fairly disappointed was the heavy emphasis the article placed on the importance of equipment. It talked about the best gear being available from raiding and high level PvP and gear check requirements to pass onto higher levels of raiding. It was my understanding that the game would be fairly non-gear dependent, allowing players to look however they liked and have skill count for more than gear.
If the whole game boils down to another e-peen contest where the best equipped warrior wins the day every time, I’m going to be very disappointed. This is one of the things I hate most about WoW (and I’m a frickin’ raider! I have that gear!).
Topics: Age of Conan, business, game design | 3 Comments »
This Raiding Thing is Serious Business
By Cameron Sorden | April 22, 2008
Kendricke warned me that serious raiding on a casual basis is pretty much impossible, and it turned out that he was right. My tight-knit World of Warcraft guild recently merged with another tight-knit guild and made a new, combined leadership council to lead us into the 25-man realm of SSC, TK, and Hyjal (and eventually on to Tier 6 and Sunwell). I had some reservations about the merger initially, but it worked out pretty well– our guilds do well together, and the former separate groups are integrating and merging fairly well into a new tight-knit group. After all, 30-35 active raiders isn’t so much more than 20ish.
One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that the time I spend playing WoW leaped up substantially since we started on 25-mans. I’m raiding a minimum of three nights per week, often closer to five or six, for 3-5 hours at a time. While I’m not quite where Tipa is yet, it certainly makes my weekly schedule a bit more challenging. I’m pretty sure that keeping up at that pace will burn me out (and prevent me from playing anything else), so I’ll probably start limiting my raiding to 3 nights per week and toss a Kara pick-up in there somewhere for the badges.
Seeing this content and beating the large-scale challenges on a coordinated team is a huge rush, though. The feeling of defeating a complex encounter like Karathress, Leotheras, or Vashj (though we haven’t downed her yet) where everyone has to pull their weight and work in unison is just fantastic. It gives you a real sense of accomplishment when the bosses drop. I’d say it’s a lot like pulling off a winning game in any team sport. It’s a lot of fun!
Scheduling has been sticky, though. I still maintain that the ideal raid group size is about 10-15 people. Small enough that you can rotate gear drops easily and casually and scheduling conflicts are less of an issue. I’ll do an article about that someday. Speaking of which, raiding and playing WoW this much has given me a lot of material to write about at Massively. I hope you’ve all been enjoying the articles (there’s an RSS feed if you haven’t added it yet), because that’s where all my blogging energy has gone lately.
As for our progression, we are totally rocking SSC. We’ve only been to SSC twice, and we’ve downed 5/6 of the bosses (only Vashj has foiled us, and she’s ridiculous). Leotheras and Karathress both went down on our first attempt, which was great (although probably aided by the fact that we have ample badge loot), and the others all died without too many wipes. All said, we’re a well-oiled machine. There’s been some argument about DKP and loot bidding (between me and the rogues, mostly– I want to bid on some leather as an enhancement Shaman), but it was settled pretty quickly and we got back to the business of pwning bosses.
All in all, I’m enjoying being a hardcore raider so far.
Topics: Blizzard, World of Warcraft, raiding | 8 Comments »
38 Studios Is Starting to Look Pretty Interesting
By Cameron Sorden | April 17, 2008
Schilling’s 38 Studios has had an impressive team from the get-go (going back to when they were GMG), but they’ve stayed mostly under my radar just because they have nothing concrete to say about their game yet. While I was busy not paying attention to them (beyond what Ryan posts on his blog), they’ve apparently continued grabbing a number of quality people, which continued today with the announcement that EQ Lead Designer Travis McGeathy will be joining them…
The number of former SOE people on the team is impressive (Steve Danuser, Ryan Shwayder, Billy Ahlswede, Aaron Carlson, Niraj Desai, Eric Theisz, and Michael Woods). Given how much I loved EverQuest and the fact that they have R.A. Salvatore doing their writing and Todd McFarlane as their art director (have you seen Spawn art?), I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t be expecting something that I’ll really, really like from their studio. As a rule, I don’t get too excited about games that I haven’t even heard anything about (because the odds are good that you’ll be let down), but I don’t know in this case…
Great writer + members that worked on the original EQ team + recognition of EQ’s flaws + four years to watch WoW do its thing? And their CEO is an EverQuest fan? Things are starting to look pretty interesting over there.
Topics: 38 studios, EverQuest, game design, soe | 11 Comments »
Rejoice! Rejoice!
By Cameron Sorden | April 17, 2008
I was ridiculously psyched to see this post on WoW Insider today. Quote:
Bornakk confirmed in a thread yesterday that we really won’t be seeing quite as large a gear gap in the jump from Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King as we did in the past: No more doubling of stamina values this time, guys.
Brilliant! Could it be possible that Blizzard learned from the mistakes they made in BC? Is it possible that we’ll see a smooth gear progression? Will it still pay off to run heroic level 70 dungeons and do the easier ten-man content on the way to 80? Will my shiny epics actually not be replaced?
It looks like they might be addressing my central complaint in this post, by using suggestion #3:
Ditch the gear inflation that occurs at the beginning of a new expansion - Why can’t gear progression be smooth? Go ahead and let the raiders burn through the first five levels of content in their epic gear– it’s a reward for raiding so long in the first place (and they were going to work through quickly, anyway). Let everyone else continue with the same progression scale they have been. They still get gear upgrades, but all their hard work isn’t invalidated.
If that’s really the case, I’m a very, very happy camper. There might be some hope left in me for Blizzard yet.
With that in mind, our anvil for phase 3 should be done by this evening and I will be the proud owner of the best enhancement weapons in the game possible for a Shaman. I expect them to carry me well into the expansion.
Topics: World of Warcraft, game design | 4 Comments »
Raiding, Writing, and Writhing
By Cameron Sorden | April 15, 2008
I’ve been pretty busy lately between the job-juggling, finishing school (that’s where the writhing comes in), and being part of a serious raiding guild for the first time in a long time. It’s fun, and my gear on my shaman (Lagrish) is rapidly approaching what could be described as “sick,” which is only a few steps down from “ridiculous,” and a notch under “insane.” Being part of a large, cohesive raiding force still hasn’t changed my opinion on development time spent on large raids, raiding, or the nature of raids, however. I still think that the ideal game experience would be designed for around 10 players, with most of them at 4-6. There’s a whole article hiding in that sentence, and you might get it soon (or not– it’s one of many ideas bouncing around in my skull at the moment).
In other news, I can’t wait for the anvil of the shattered sun offensive to be built on my server. We’re at something like 65%, and I just got my last 5 badges in ZA last night that bumped me up to 150 badges. For the laymen, that means that I can now buy two sweet, sweet weapons (the best weapons currently in the game for my Shaman)Â in just a few days time. I already have my mats for the double mongoose enchants, since I expect the price of mats to skyrocket the day the forge is finished.
I wanted to take a moment to point out a new blogger, too… If you play WoW and you like Moonkin Druids (the nuking tree, often affectionately called Boomkin for the booming sound their nukes make), you’ll want to check out Moonkin University. It’s a new blog that’s all about Boomkins, written by a good friend of mine (he’s actually my uncle). Check it out. He’s got some really good posts up already and I expect that there will be plenty more where that came from.
Topics: Blogroll, World of Warcraft, blogging, work | No Comments »
Secret Project — Revealed!
By Cameron Sorden | April 14, 2008
Today I wanted to unveil the big news that I was keeping under my hat for a while: Mr. Michael Zenke (whom you may know as a top 50 games journalist and rogue demon hunter) has persuaded me to come and write a daily MMOG column for Massively! I think the guys and gals at Massively have been doing an amazing job at both news and content, and I’m excited to join the team and flex my writing muscles for a wider audience on a regular basis.
My column is called Player vs. Everything (PvE) and it’s going to be very similar to the MMOG discussion you’ve been reading here for the last year. Basically, I’m taking most of my MMOG content from the blog and tossing it over to my Massively column. So if you come here for the MMOG discussion, add this feed to your RSS reader right now. That’s just the feed for my column, so as far as you’re concerned the only thing that will be changing are the names of my posts (although I’d encourage you to read Massively anyway). You can also see the list of my recent columns over on the left there, if you’re actually reading this at my site.
As for Random Battle, don’t worry. It’s not going anywhere. I have as much to say as ever, and if anything this will just increase the number of posts I make. I’ll still be discussing anything non-MMO related here, as well as anything that’s too short or too off-topic for my Massively article. Look at it this way: If you like my writing (and I hope you do, if you’re reading this), add that feed to your daily reading list, keep Random Battle there too, and you get even more of it.
So, without further ado, here’s the first of my daily articles: Player vs. Everything: Learning by doingÂ
Topics: blogging, business, massively, work | 8 Comments »