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  • Sexism in the Star Trek Online Graphics Engine?

    I really like the relatively recent update to the initial character screen in Star Trek Online. It shows your heroic Captain as well as the 4 main Bridge Officers (BOffs) with your majestic starship up above. I recently broke my long tradition of only playing male characters in MMOs by creating a Klingon female Captain (I also created a Fed one even more recently). That’s when I started noticing that when my female Captain was drawn in the character screen, her boobs would come in first, then her outfit top, as shown below:

    Klingon boobs

    Notice that her BOffs’ boobs are also there before their clothing is. Then I noticed that my other Klingon Captain has an Orion BOff, and her boobs showed up before the top:

    Orion boobs

    Finally, I saw that some of my Federation BOffs showed up with teeny little panties (not part of their uniform, as far as I know) before their skirts popped in:

    fed panties

    Now this isn’t horrible or anything, but it doesn’t seem to happen with the men. They don’t show up chest first, then uniform, nor in boxers or briefs (at least as far as I’ve seen in my not-very-extensive study). A movie of the character screen that these stills were taken from is below so you can see how it all works:

    I’m not offended by this, but it also isn’t they way I need to think about my BOffs and Captains – I’m not James T. Kirk, for God’s sake! If I wanted to play a sexy game, I’m sure I could, but I find the starships sexy in Star Trek Online, so I don’t need to see my crew in their undies. I also wonder if some of this isn’t intentional. It sure looks like that. There’s no real call for teeny panties, since there’s no viewpoint where anyone could look up my BOff’s skirt. So I’d prefer it if the graphics engine treated men and women the same and didn’t draw boobs and panties, but instead only rendered parts that were fully ready.

     

     

  • We are not the chosen one! Why I like the narrative of #LOTRO and #STO

    Ars Technica has a very interesting commentary on The Elder Scrolls Online, an upcoming MMO set in the Elder Scrolls universe, like Oblivion and Skyrim. One of the points I found most interesting was that the game uses the old “you are the chosen one” story line, which is a little odd, given that there are thousands of said chosen ones playing an MMO. (Paraphrasing from the article)

    This is one of the reasons I like the Lord of the Rings Online so much. I am not the chosen one in LOTRO. Frodo is the Ringbearer, and Aragorn is the King, and I’m just helping out. Same with Star Trek Online: There are thousands of us Captains, and we’re helping the Federation, or the Klingon Empire, or the Romulan Republic (funny how my spellchecker knows “Klingon” but doesn’t know “Romulan” – must be weak Star Trek fans making the word lists), but we won’t rule them or otherwise change the leadership, for example.

    I don’t mind being the chosen one in single player games, so I enjoyed Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind, but in an MMO, it does seem a bit much. We are not the chosen ones, dammit, so make games where cooperation and heroism can work together!

  • A few thoughts on #LOTRO’s potentially boring year

    There have been lots of recent posts and tweets predicting doom and gloom for Lord of the Rings Online. I sure hope they’re wrong, but I do wonder if this year won’t be quite a rough patch for the game.

    When Turbine announced no new major content this year, people assumed the demise of the game. While the devs quickly assured us that wasn’t true, the subsequent layoffs of several LOTRO team members seemed to confirm a pullback in resources going to LOTRO. Sure, they’ll redo some early areas, but that may not be compelling for all us level 95 players. But those areas are not exactly what I’m writing about.

    The problem that I see in LOTRO, even more than for Star Trek Online, is that the top-level content is becoming less and less compelling with each release. For example, when my first character, a Lore-Master, hit Mirkwood years ago, I loved it! I had so much fun there, running skirmishes and instances with friends, getting max reputation with the elves there, etc. Even the crafting location was great, so I worked hard to get the “return to” skill so I could use it as needed.

    Then Rise of Isengard came out, and everyone raced to hit level 75 so we could do the Dragioch raid and get the dragon cloak materials. I got lucky and got those dragon scales on my first run through (I think I /rolled a 99!). So life was pretty good. Then Great River came out and we all ran over there and finished it, but the repeatable missions into the Limlight Gorge were fun, but not great. At that point, half my kinship got bored and bailed out of the game, never to return.

    Then came Riders of Rohan. I was late to RoR, because I didn’t want to pay full price for it. Once I bought it, I loved the mounted combat. A lot! My friends didn’t like it nearly as much, though a few times, a friend and I would romp through the fields of Rohan thumping down any enemies in our path! The big end-game draw were the Erebor instances, but I didn’t have a high level Minstrel or Captain, so nobody wanted a lousy Lore-Master (emphasis on lousy) for those missions, so I didn’t get to play. Then I tried hard to level my Mini and Warden up to 85 so they could join in, but medical issues took me out of the game for a few months. I didn’t quite get them to level 85 before Helm’s Deep arrived.

    Not wanting to make the same mistake as with RoR, I bought Helm’s Deep on pre-order, so played it right away. But this time, there were no great end-game instances. Instead, there were the Epic Battles at Helm’s Deep, but they can be run solo and by any level over 20. So there’s no really compelling end-game content to make me want to level all my guys up to 95 so they can join the fun. They can already do those missions at their level.

    Now I really enjoyed the story lines in Dunland, East Rohan, and now, West Rohan. My Lore-Master does every quest and I enjoyed almost all of it. But I have a lot less interest in doing all the same quests over and over and over again with all my other characters. So they’re slowly languishing, while my LM is retired-in-place at the Aldburg crafting hall (nowhere better to be!), while I play more Star Trek Online than LOTRO.

    Might be a long year for LOTRO…

  • Star Trek Online at 4K Resolution Screenshots

    I’ve been saying Star Trek Online works at 4K resolution, but I haven’t offered proof. These screenshots are nice examples of how good things can look at 4K. Of course, my Ex-Borg Romulan isn’t the most attractive guy, but the pictures give a good idea of how the game looks at 4K. Click on the images to see them at full resolution.

    My warbird outside Earth Space Dock Earth Space Dock with Q

  • Gaming at 4K update: Star Trek Online Still On Top

    Since I got my 4K TV/monitor, I’ve been experimenting with games that can run at 4K resolution (3840×2160@30 Hz in my case). As I noted in my last post, Star Trek Online works very well at 4K. I’ve continued to play STO at 4K and couldn’t be more impressed. It looks good at that resolution (though the textures are still crap, but that is the case with almost all games – I’m looking at you, Dragon Age series), and plays smoothly, despite the 30 Hz update rate. So STO is a clear win at 4K.

    I played a bit of Saints Row IV at 4K last night and it mostly worked. It struggled a little bit, but was playable at 4K. The only bummer was the very visible tearing, because I didn’t turn vsync on. I didn’t bother with vsync, because I could see from the tearing that it was having trouble keeping up. So I turned the game back down to 1080p and it worked great. I suppose if my computer were a little faster, Saints Row IV might be a good experience at 4K resolution.

    I’m continuing to run LOTRO at 1080p resolution, because of the distracting visible artifacts at 4K, and I find 1080p mostly OK despite all the pixels being doubled in both axes.

    In short, we have a big winner at 4K in Star Trek Online, and we have a pretty good candidate if your machine is great in Saints Row IV. So cheers to 4K monitors!

  • Gaming at 4K: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

    Since Amazon had the Seiki 39″ 4K TV for a great price last week, I picked it up in the hopes of gaming at 4K. I have a reasonably decent PC with an NVidia 670 that can drive 4K monitors, so that part worked well, but there are some issues.

    The monitor itself is a great piece of equipment. It is very vivid, with amazingly deep blacks (like almost no backlight bleedthrough). The color is pretty off, but with some calibration on my PC, it looks good. The downside of 4K is that it can only be driven at 30Hz over HDMI. There are some higher end 4K monitors with DisplayPort that may be able to do 60Hz, but they are much more expensive. Having a 3840×2160 desktop is so amazingly spectacular that I was, and still am, tempted to bring it into work so I can be more productive there. And with my first gaming experience with the monitor, that thought was reinforced. Since I spent the weekend mostly doing things around the house, I haven’t done an exhaustive survey of games on the 4K monitor, but I’ll share what I learned.

    The first game I tried was Lord of the Rings Online, which can drive the monitor at native resolution and at 30Hz. The problem was that there was some odd and very distracting smearing during movement, particularly on grass and flowers and such. It was so distracting that I couldn’t stand it, so I switched back to 1920×1080 at 60Hz. Sadly, this is lower than the 2560×1440 resolution of my previous monitor, so I was losing out a bit. And since the lower resolution was at such a large size now (39″ vs. 27″), it looked muddy and unappealing. At that point, I was ready to declare failure and bring the thing into work.

    Then I tried Sins of a Solar Empire, which won’t even try 4K resolution, so I gave that up, just reinforcing my plan to ditch the monitor at work.

    I tried Skyrim on a lark, and it looked amazing! It played like crap, but it looked fantastic at 4K. For some reason, though, the game was super sluggish and annoying. Again, my though was that I was not going to continue using the monitor for gaming.

    Finally, I tried Star Trek Online, and it was perfect at 4K. It looked great, and it played just like before. I tried both space and ground scenarios and it looked amazing. I presume the newer graphics engine in STO vs. LOTRO made the difference, but clearly MMORPGs can run perfectly well at 4K and 30Hz. That convinced me that maybe I need to rethink my plans for the monitor.

    Last night, I played more LOTRO as I am trying to get my poor Rune Keeper through Lothlorien and on to higher levels. Again, it was only at 1920×1080 on this large monitor, but I quickly came to like it. Sure, it is lower resolution that I used to play at, but it now filled my vision, so was more immersive.

    In short, gaming isn’t quite ready for 4K, but if you get a good enough deal on a 4K monitor, it is a nifty thing.

    I will post pictures and screen shots when I get a chance.

  • Killzone Shadow Fall is pretty, but stupid

    Let’s say you just defeated your enemy by blowing up his planet. Then, apparently feeling guilt, you give the enemy refugees half your planet, because, hey, what could go wrong? I mean you have a (presumably small) population that hates you to the death and not just because you blew up their planet, so it’ll be okay if you give them half of yours, right? And rather than giving them some continent somewhere, you just put a wall up and they get one side and you get the other. Oh, and your citizens that lived there? They need to move, and your enemy may or may not cooperate in giving them safe passage.

    Does that sound like the stupidest, most contrived scenario for a game? It does to me, but that is the premise for Killzone Shadow Fall. Since I never finished Killzone 2 or 3, I don’t know if this is in keeping with spectacularly stupid plots or is a new achievement in stupidity for the series, but there you have it.

    Assuming you can muster up the effort to keep playing the game after that introduction, you’ll see a very attractive game that seems like it could be fun. You get dropped on the enemy side of the wall, yet for some reason, you don’t have any gear with you. You need to find all your stuff, including your personal helper robot, which is a nifty thing. Again, contrived and stupid. The video below shows me retrieving the ammo for my rifle with the help of the robot. I order it to go and kill the baddies then use it to make a zip line so I can get to the dropped supplies. I then explore a bit and find a downed allied aircraft. I stopped the video at that point, because I thought I was going to die, but I fought off the attackers and continued the mission.

    The main problem I have so far with Shadow Fall is, while it is pretty, the field of view is narrow enough that it is hard to see enemies until you’re being hit by their bullets. This is annoying. Surely if I can have flying robot helpers, I could have a HUD that outlines the enemies for me.

    In the short term, I have abandoned Shadow Fall and continued to enjoy Knack. Once Knack is done, I will consider what game I should play amidst playing LOTRO Helm’s Deep and Star Trek Online’s The Sphere.

  • Knack is my favorite Playstation 4 game so far

    I bought 3 games for my PS4 thanks to Amazon’s buy-2-get-1-free sale: Knack, Killzone: Shadow Fall, and Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag. I haven’t even opened AssCreed, but have tried both Killzone and Knack, and like Knack quite a bit. I’m not normally a platformer kinda guy, but Knack is very well done, mostly fun, and very whimsical. The graphics look good, but not in a photo-realistic way. Instead, it looks like a finely animated cartoon that we can participate in. The video below shows a short snippet of my gameplay, including me making a stupid mistake at the end and getting killed.

    While the game is fun, it isn’t easy, even on easy mode. Some of the combat gets quite easy, but some of the enemies can take you down in one hit. A few of the puzzles take a few minutes to figure out, but they haven’t been too hard as far as I’ve played.

    The biggest problem with the game is the checkpoint save system. Games and developers that use bad checkpoint systems like this one don’t respect their players. Yes, there are mini checkpoints during the gameplay, so if you die, you don’t go back too far (Killzone: Shadow Fall also has these), but they don’t stick if you need to quit the game. If you quit, the game restarts you at the chapter checkpoint, so I lost quite a bit of progress when I so nastily discovered this. Infuriating! Killzone saves the current checkpoint so you can quit and come back and not lose anything, so it is much better than Knack in this case.

    So do I recommend Knack? Yesterday when I lost so much progress due to the pathetic checkpoint system, I would have said “NO,” but after calming down a little and playing some more, yes, it is a worthy game and is fun to play. I’ve yet to try the co-op mode, but I look forward to that.

    And, of course, it’s killing me that the PS4 came out at nearly the same time as the new Star Trek Online season (The Sphere), which has a really fun battle zone for ground combat, as well as the new Lord of the Rings Online expansion (Helm’s Deep). Oh how will I get time to play all these things?

  • PS4 Impressions After a Full Day

    I’ve had my Playstation 4 since Friday afternoon and have had a good chance to work with it and can give my impressions.

    When I first hooked it up on Friday, I had planned to manually perform the required Day 1 patch from the patch file that I had on a USB flash drive. It turned out that the PS4 was faster at downloading it over the network than I was at figuring out how to convince it to update from the flash drive. The update went smoothly, as have all the PSN interactions so far. The rumors on Friday of total collapse of PSN seem to have been exaggerated, because downloads have been smooth, the store has worked well, and my small number of friends show up just fine. So kudos to Sony for a good launch!

    I don’t have the PS4 camera yet, because of a screw up with my Amazon order. While I’m partially to blame for that, it was somewhat Amazon’s fault. So my angry glare looking north towards Washington state is not at Microsoft, for once, but at Amazon. When I get the camera, I’m looking forward to checking out the Playroom tech demo that looks so cool in all the videos.

    The PS4 is, as you know from all the pictures is quite an attractive machine. As you can see from the photo below, it is smaller than an original PS3 and 2nd generation Xbox 360, and feels solidly built. I first hooked it up via HDMI to the TV and optical audio to my surround sound system. On Saturday morning, I tore all the cables out of all the machines and hooked all three game systems to an HDMI switch that connected to the TV. The TV then has an optical out that sends the sound to the audio system. This new setup meant I could get rid of my old component video switch that I was only using to switch optical audio from the PS3 and the Xbox 360. This setup works well, which is good, because there seems to be a problem with the optical audio on the PS4. When I was at the menu screen, the pleasant-sounding background music sounded good, but when I started a game (Resogun or Contrast, for example), the audio broke up and became very rough and awful. This happened when the audio output was either Dolby 5.1 or DTS 5.1, but if I forced it to use PCM stereo, it was OK (though stereo, which is not ideal). Things seem to be working better with the HDMI audio, so I’ll stick with that.

    Game Machines

    The Playstation Store is much quicker and more responsive than it was on the PS3, but of course that may be because there isn’t much content there yet. It does seem to be a better design, though. It launches quickly and getting out of it is fast and easy. The thing missing is the list of prior purchases. I preordered Warframe in order to get the preorder bonus, but I don’t know if I got it or not when I downloaded Warframe from the store. In the PSN section of the Settings menu, there is a “Services List” item within “Account Information” that shows I apparently have it, but such things should be accessible from the store, not from hunting 3 levels down in the System menu.

    The Dualshock 4 controller is quite good. It is comfortable and has a good feel to it, mostly. The “Options” button, which is used in place of the Select and Start buttons on the PS3’s controllers, is not in a convenient spot, yet games tend to use it a fair bit. DC Universe Online is the worst offender I’ve seen so far, using it to bring up a circular menu to get to everything, like your inventory and skills and journal, so you need to hold the unwieldy Options button, then navigate to the selection. Not a comfortable proposition, but that isn’t why I won’t spend much time playing DC Universe Online (more in a future post). The battery life of the DS4 is also quite lousy – certainly worse than the Dualshock 3.

    The PS4 has a standby mode and an off mode. In the standby mode, it can download updates, finish downloading games you’ve purchased, and apparently be awakened by a PS Vita for remote play (I don’t have a Vita, so haven’t tried it). For the ability to do those things, it consumes 10 watts. Always. Sounds like lazy engineering to me, Sony. I could see that it would take 10 watts when downloads and installs are happening and the DS4 is charging, but then it should throttle back to a watt or two. Y’know, cut the Ethernet to 10Mbps, reduce power on the WiFi like tablets and smartphones do, etc. We as a world, and I, in particular, consume too much energy as it is, so having millions of brand new units that are designed to consume 10 watts when they are ostensibly off is unfathomable to me. I will do my best to turn the damn thing off, even though the power button puts it into standby mode. Oh, and that DS4 that needs charging so often – it needs standby mode to charge. I turned my PS4 off last night with the DS4 plugged in, because I had heard it charges when the PS4 is off. It isn’t charged, so apparently it doesn’t charge in the off mode. Darn.

    Downloads and updates are much smoother on the PS4 than they were on the PS3. Multiple downloads can happen at once, and they continue while games are running unless the games need the network. Overall, a big improvement, and pretty nearly where my PC has been for many years. Game updates are an interesting conundrum, however. When you first put in a game disk, it immediately starts copying the game to the PS4’s hard drive, so we will all fill our drives reasonably quickly. And though the game is cached to the hard drive, we still need the disk in the optical drive for, you know, piracy and inconvenience reasons. Once part of the disk has been copied over, the game can be started, which is a nifty feature that we don’t have to wait for 50GB to be copied. But, once you start the game, if there is a patch for the game, it will start downloading, but your play will not be interrupted. Now I’m guessing they won’t patch a running game, so this means you’ll be playing an unpatched game until you quit and allow the patch to install. While this is perhaps more friendly than the PS3’s system of making us wait while a patch downloads, I don’t like the idea of playing that unpatched game when the patch may be downloaded and be sitting there on the disk. So if I see a patch download notification, I quit the game and let the patch happen before I’ll play it.

    Finally (for this post), the PS4 comes with some nice coupon codes, including one for a free month of PS Plus (PS+). PS+ is $50 a year and was essential on the PS3, because it allowed a PS3 to update itself automatically, much like Windows has been able to do for years. It also gave members lots of free games, some of which are truly great, so it is well worth it. I have been a PS+ member for a while, so I had to check what happened when I applied that free month coupon. Digging around in the aforementioned “Services List” menu item, I saw that the free month was properly applied at the end of my PS+ subscription, but the auto-renew was turned on for an option much more expensive than the $50 per year plan. So if you use that coupon, disable the auto-renew or you’ll have a nasty surprise!

     

  • My Love/Hate Relationship with Borderlands 2

    Having played and thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 2 when it first came out, I bought the Season Pass, but let the game languish as I played a few other games, had health issues that totally ruined my gaming ability for a while, and kept up with my Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and Star Trek Online (STO) playing.

    A few days ago, however, while waiting for the new STO and LOTRO updates coming this week, I jumped back in to play the Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep DLC. In this DLC, you and your NPC friends from the original Borderlands are playing a dice-based RPG similar to, but not infringing on the copyright of, Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, that means the player gets put into this fantasy world. And while you still have all your guns and grenades and powers, the enemies are using swords and arrows, though with deadly precision.

    The area in the DLC is quite challenging because of the various monster types. Some, like tree-based creatures are easy – just use fire, as are knights and others that fire works on. The damn skeletons are the problem. They are immune to nearly everything other than explosive damage and I just don’t have a good, accurate gun that deals explosive damage. But it’s a puzzle set for us by the developer to figure out how to overcome some of these tough enemies.

    That leads to my problem with the game. When you die, you reappear at a nearby respawn point, which is fine. But if you need to quit the game because it is way past bedtime, I will have to restart the area and all the monsters will have respawned. This concern was so great that I was trying to rush through a quest last night before bed, yet kept making mistakes and dying. I never did succeed, so I went to bed furious!

    Now, in the calm of morning, I can dispassionately look back at the game and not be quite so mad at it. Last night, I was sure I was going to drop the game again and go on to other games I’ve been waiting to play. Especially with the new STO and LOTRO content plus my PS4 will arrive on Friday, I’ll have plenty to do. But now that I’m not as furious, I will perhaps give Borderlands 2 another shot. When I’m calm and collected and have time to finish…