Fallen Earth Field Notes 6: What’s The Appeal?

I wasn’t able to do a demonstration of Fallen Earth in EDT 691: Research In Virtual Worlds yesterday: after Steam rolled out an update, no servers were available. Elisabeth Hayes had been interested in seeing the game that had pulled me away from Dragon Age, and a compelling MMO without elves

She asked me what the appeal was: it’s hard to articulate, as it’s not any one thing. Let’s take a stab at it:

• The Setting: I *love* Southwestern and desert settings. If my first exposure to WoW had been Stormwind, I wouldn’t have stayed: green-brown nature, European-ish forests, put me off in RL as well as in games. Instead, I had the good fortune to rez in the Valley of Trials in Durotar, and was immediately in love. Fallen Earth begins near the Grand Canyon, and is expanding north towards Las Vegas and west towards Los Angeles, country I know very well and love.

• The Graphics: Less  cartoony than WoW (though I love WoW’s style), yet not excessively “realistic,” Fallen Earth has a painterly style that hits a sweet spot for me.

• Crafting: This is one of the biggest appeals for me. Crafting gear in WoW is pretty much an enormous waste of time, in gathering materials and making scores of junk items to vendor-dump, and the gear you can make is almost never better than regular drops, let alone instance drops. Fallen Earth doesn’t have gear drops, so everything ingame is either made or bought from a vendor, and vendor prices are high enough to provide an incentive for crafting and trading. 

• Mature, Civilized Chat: ‘Nuff said, even though the past few days I’ve closed the chat window, being tired, grumpy and antisocial. The chat’s available, there’s nice regulars in it, and it’s remarkably grown-up.

• No Rails: Another biggie. WoW’s a perfect first MMO in its gentle, hand-holding, theme-park design. I’m ready for something  more advanced, and Fallen Earth fills that niche nicely. It’s not too different or challenging, but just enough.

• It’s an Explorer’s paradise: I’ve had good sessions of not doing a single quest, but cruising around gathering and exploring, creating a mental map of the territory between North and South Burbs and Embry Crossing – where to find cotton, hides, copper, plant chemicals for dyes and pharmaceuticals. The leveling system’s vestigial: it’s not a game about dinging, but about building your skill sets, trying professions and tactics, seeing what suits and refining those skills. While one of the most popular templates seems to be DPS rifleman crafting weapons and ammo, I’m building a very WoW Paladin-like character, and so far it’s working fine, with an emphasis on armor crafting and use, melee fighting and first aid.

What I’ve been up to: Crafting, a lot. I’ve raised my Armorcrafting from 18 to 45. Well, I’ll be at 45 when I log back in: you can queue items to craft, and they fabricate while you’re doing other things, or logged out. So, I end each session by starting builds of everything I’ve got, so I can come back to more skill points and a pack full of goods to sell.

I’ve switched out all my gear 1 to 3 times while leveling from 5 to 7 (a level seems to take 4 hours or so, or about one per session). The gear’s good looking and well designed (I wish I’d kept the black leather pants, black and red bomber jacket, black hi-tops and red headscarf – that outfit rocked). I’m ready to upgrade my horse again, but haven’t found the trainer for my next level yet. First aid and all my gathering skills are in the 30s.

At the end of my last session last week, I’d left the starter towns for the sector capital of Embry Crossing – and gotten my ass kicked. I went back to North Burb to finish off the quests there, and found a long chain of faction quests to do while crafting. I’m back now in Embry Crossing, at level 7 instead of 5, and with vastly upgraded armor and melee weapon. I’m ready!

What I’m not doing yet: I’d like to join a guild in a while, and I’m keeping an eye out for active-looking guilds, but not pursuing anything yet. I’d be interested in a light to moderate RP guild, and/or a crafters’ guild. I might wait till I’ve joined one of the game factions, which I think happens around level 15.

I’m still, so far, set on joining the Lightbearers, the most paladin-ish faction, though their portrayal in Embry Crossroads is explaining why they’re by far the least popular faction in the game. In the starter town of North Burb, they’re portrayed as sort of cracked Zen warrior-monks, which is fun, but in the big city they’re hardcore loony streetcorner preachers with a compound full of true believers – very off-putting. We’ll see how things go – I’m still working on quests for faction rep with them.

Next up: I’ve got some quests to take me to one of the other starter towns, then it’s back to the huge locus of Sector 1 quests, the Junk Fortress. I’m still not studying up, or reading the forums, so I’m not sure if some or all of it is instanced.

Fallen Earth: Field Notes 1

I’ve decided to acknowledge that my cyclical frustration with social virtual worlds is in a deep trough, and choose something other than Blue Mars for field observations for EDT 691, Research in Virtual Worlds. I’ve taken on the post-apocalyptic MMO, Fallen Earth.

Sunday morning I read several blog posts in succession that gave the game glowing reviews, leading me to think that it was different enough from World of Warcraft to be intriguing, yet similar enough that some of my experience and skills would transfer. I’m sick to death of Tolkienesque fantasy worlds, and I’ve been actively looking for an MMO in another genre, but have been put off by bad reviews of Champions Online, and found my trial of City of Heroes aesthetically unappealing.

I decided to download the game from Steam rather than ordering disks from Amazon (or, gods forbid, going outside to a store!). I started the download around 10 am, stopped it in the evening to play WoW, and restarted it before bed. The download didn’t complete until early Monday morning, as my computer had gone into hibernation during the process. Then, on setup, it required a patch almost the size of the initial download. I set it to run while I went off to class, and came home to a (supposedly) complete and ready to play game around 9 pm.

Character creation is a huge part of the game experience for me, and will immediately make or break my gameplay. Avatars in Fallen Earth draw on an artistic style similar to that of Dragon Age Origins, sort of “realistically ugly” for the setting. As with that game, bodies aren’t customizable at all, except Fallen Earth allows a choice of height (one forum poster suggested pulling the slider to the lowest setting, to make yourself a smaller target!).

The body types aren’t egregious, but they aren’t great. The male is of fairly average build, the female sort of anorexic, with a hip-to-waist ratio I’ve never seen on an actual human woman, but seems the inevitable default in games. The skin tones are okay, with palettes intended to be “white,” “Asian” and “Black,” and all conventional human tones. Per usual, the Black tones are more “Florida golfer” than “African,” but the Asian ones are quite nice.

There’s a really good, broad range of tattoos and piercings available, which also seems to be a common feature currently.

I was able to recreate my cross-world “Kaseido Quandry” avatar pretty well, while my “older, badass version of my atomic self” rendering came off looking more like mental patient/hospital orderly

The game starts with a sandbox tutorial, with access to full game chat channels, including a default Help channel that’s become general chat despite the GMs’ constant efforts to limit the forum though calls to take general chat elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the very first quest in the tutorial revealed a flaw running throughout Fallen Earth: it drops key files like whoa.

Quests are indicated by a gold rotating biohazard symbol over the questgiver. In the tutorial, you rez in some sort of personal chamber or cell, and can see the symbol over a computer terminal in the next room. The quest is given by voice and text: it’s a woman elsewhere in the facility who says that she’s going to help you escape. She commands you to go to the next terminal and “activate the LifeNet” before proceeding.

There was no next terminal. Across the way was a bank of computers symmetrical to the questgiving one, except for an open space in the middle where the actual quest terminal would be.

So, I looked all over the room, and ran out in the hall, to find a door that wouldn’t open until the LifeNet was active.

I was too embarrassed to ask for help: I thought that failing the “report to” starting quest was the ultimate in noob stupidity. I relogged to see if that might make a difference, but no. I then went to the forums and searched for “LifeNet,” and found that the missing terminal was a bug that could be fixed by running “Perform Complete File Check” from the login screen.

And, sure enough, it found another 3000 files to download. I logged back in to find symmetrical terminals, activated the LifeNet, and was good to go.

It’s *Our* Story: Character & Narrative in Alter Ego, Blue Mars and Dragon Age Origins

I’m not sure how I found Alter Ego, but I spent a few really engrossed hours with it last night. It’s a browser based (also available in Android and iPhone apps) text game, a decision tree covering life choices from birth to death. It’s charming, warm, very immersive, and really delightful. And it provides an interesting perspective on narrative and gameplay, character creation and immersion.

Alter Ego

Alter Ego looks like an iPhone screen, with a branching tree of attractive icons representing family, love, finances, work, health, and so on. Clicking on each icon generates a situation with a choice, that may in turn branch from one to four times. A separate box keeps track of character stats: trustworthiness, happiness, confidence; cash and debt; and a few other things.

And that’s pretty much it. You make choices, choices shape your character, your character shapes the arc of your life. Then you die.

My projective identity (no character names) felt real. I felt her frustrations, her triumphs, her losses – and her death after a healthy old age brought a melancholy completeness: I/she/we didn’t have quite the life I/she/we wanted, but it was rich and full, and very much complete at the end of her days.

It was cathartic, and in a way quite profound. Despite a major rewrite of childhood, her middle age nonetheless looked very much like mine: we’d converged around our core *character* – whether measured by stats or expressed in our choices. That realization gave me an “aha” moment in a way that twenty grand of therapy couldn’t – I lived it and saw it, right there on the screen.

Experiencing it through my projective identity made it real in a way that other means of learning really couldn’: that “alter ego,” that life re-roll, became my story, as much as my own life is (interestingly, WoW Insider ran a column today on “Real Life Character Re-Customization,” addressing something very similar)

A powerful, moving psychological/narrative experience had emerged from some icons and a long list of questions.

Character and Immersion: It Ain’t Graphics

Yesterday saw a bunch of gee-whiz tweets and retweets from the official Blue Mars channels, including a short video of Blue Mars running in panorama on three widescreen monitors.

I didn’t tweet my response, because I wanted to consider it (I’ve been in a “knee-jerk negativity about virtual worlds” phase, and didn’t want to just “bah, humbug” without some thought).  My immediate response was, so what? It’s pretty scenery, and I couldn’t care less. Give me people, give me a UI with effective tools for communication and expression (through text, images and building). What matters is the human world, not pretty reflections off the waves.

I was right. Alter Ego, with no more pretty than some well-designed graphic icons, deeply engaged me for the better part of an evening. Blue Mars, despite my needing to cover the world for a class, hasn’t pulled me back in weeks.

Why?

Realism and immersion aren’t generated by graphics engines, they’re generated by people, real or fictive. This is hardly news to old-time MUDders (I’m not one, but I’ve talked to them extensively), but continues to escape software engineers and too many game designers.

Dragon Age Origins

Another example: I played this week with the Dragon Age Origins character generator.

As Tobold observed, it’s not a character generator, it’s a face generator. As such, it’s really quite good (except, why is it, in game after game, you can make an avvie with nice African features but not African *hair*?).

But, using a D&D-like system, your characters are almost entirely pre-rolled, there’s no way to create a character bio, no real choice of starting talents. And you can’t modify the avvie bodies at all: not only that, the bodies across races and factions are identical aside from height (at least among the humans and elves) – so a human rogue and an elf warrior look pretty much identical below the (choose your length) neck.

So how is it a character generator?

Simple, if you think like a software engineer: it’s all about the visuals, the surface, the code that generates graphics.

Dragon Age Origins encourages you to upload your characters to a social network (an interesting take on the “alone together” phenomenon of people not really playing MMO’s socially – so Dragon Age Origins is the natural next step beyond being able to solo to level cap in WoW: it’s a solo game where you can show off your achievements socially without having to actually play with other people).

But what do you upload? Some largely pre-set stats and a profile icon.

Why not backstory? Why not the output of a little “character generator” like Alter Ego, that indicated how the character might likely behave: are they dishonest, sexually assertive, likely to try talking their way out of a fight first but brutal in finishing it, uninterested in wealth but drawn to power? How much more interesting that would be than the width of my avvie’s nose and the extra point I put in DEX?

It’s *Our* Story

This week I’ve been reading First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, an anthology covering the ludology/narratology dispute in games studies. Ultra-short version? Academic wank and turf wars. Ultra-short re-roll? “Tastes Great!/Less Filling!”  Short version? Ludology stressed games-as-rule-sets, holding in its extreme view that there’s no possible room for narrative or story in games. Narratology basically wanted to read games as just like movies, with player-actors. Yes, that’s unfair, pejorative, and grossly oversimplifying. If you want the full deal, read the book.

What struck me was that both factions were arguing over the head of the player, as it were. Both seemed to be grounded in an auteur model, just arguing over what was being authored, a rule set or a text.

But what all these examples I’ve mentioned here have in common is player authorship of emergent narrative. I wrote a life in Alter Ego, not the very skilled authors of the questions and decision tree. I created, however tentatively, three characters for Dragon Age, not Biosoft. If anything interesting happens in Blue Mars, it won’t be due to the CryEngine, but due to the people.

Here’s another interesting example: there was a consensus the other day that story is irrelevant in boss fights in WoW. I think they’re only half right. I’d say, Blizzard’s story is irrelevant in boss fights, because we’re too busy enacting the events that will figure into our narratives, our guild’s tale of the time we took on the boss. And note – the bloggers weren’t saying that Blizzard’s story is irrelevant -  not at all – but that it’s best gotten from media that do a better job of delivering authored stories: novels, manga or comics. Let each medium do what it does best.

Good designers give us good tools, an engaging setting, and let us get on with living, and then telling, our own stories. Bad designers (and a lot of academics) still think it’s their story.

It’s our story, all of it.