I rather enjoyed this book, even though there were a couple things I did not particularly desire. But those were minor, so let me get them out of the way.
First, the "hero" is telling a story about his childhood firsthand. I am not a big fan of too-tall-to-be-true stories. Not only is it hard for me to identify with a character who is half my age, but I find it disturbing that the fictional child has so many mature and adult characteristics.
Secondly, I dislike incomplete stories. 'Tis like a song that ends on a leading chord. I happened to be on Amazon looking for more information about the author, and the next book is due out in April, 2009! I will have forgotten about this author and story by then.
Ok, now that the unpleasantries are out of the way. There are parts of this book that remind me of when I read Terry Goodkind's "Debt of Bones". There is something raw, something gritty in the story that makes it come alive. Sometimes you can smell the dust that is kicked up from the well-worn dirt road atop your dappled horse, the leather saddle creaking in slow cadence to the pleasant canter. I enjoy the nature in which "magic" is employed; not some abra-cadabra fancy posh ritual, but something that some folks can tap into better than others, to various degrees and ends. I enjoy the mystery of the bad guy. I appreciate how "real life" and science is woven into various forms of magic, coming up with things I have never heard of before like "sygaldry".
I really enjoy his universe as well. There are histories that can be explored, characters that fit like puzzle pieces, even without a tremendous amount of back story. The universe is very consistent, well thought out and complex to boot. I like that. There are twists on old ideas (a nomandic musical group called the Edema Ruh) that leave you with the feeling that you might be able to come up with a comparison in some far distant land; these kind of things help draw the reader in, and I really like to be drawn in. As the characters progress and explore, the reader is compelled to go along for the ride, just to find out what happens next.
I imagine I will one day pick up the sequel at the library and wonder what it is about, probably read it to be reminded of something very very similar. Maybe I will find this post and it will all come cascading back to me. =)
20 November 2007
13 November 2007
EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online role playing game
Why do they call these things MMORPGs? Why not just MMOG, or MMG?
Anyway, this was my first foray into the MMORPG arena, and wow did it open my eyes! I sampled this fine offering with the trial account. And although I only played for roughly 2.5 days, I put in almost 20 hours. I am still unsure if it was worth it. It certainly was not the best use of my time. =)
There are many good things and many bad things about EVE, and this will be very subjective.
Bad things first
The massive multiplayer online genre itself is probably my biggest issue. Due to its nature, it is extremely immersive. Meaning that you are invited, enticed and even provoked into dumping hours upon hours into developing your character in one fashion or another. You can explore the life of EVE on your own, but that path is very slow, very time consuming and filled with pitfalls. You can join up with another group which will speed things tremendously, keeping you relatively safe (even if only by sage advice), but the intrinsic coercion of playing more can hit you like certain hot peppers that build up and pack a punch. It is very hard to play this game for, say, 1 hour at a time. It might be possible to run a PvE (Player vs Environment, dealing with computer-generated events and characters) mission or two, but you may quickly find that some times it takes a while to get to where you are going. There is an autopilot function that helps, but has a built-in safety feature of dropping you off a few klicks away from your target so you are not instantly ambushed by those with nefarious intent. Warping is not always fast, especially if your ship does not have enough juice to do the jump all in one go. So, you can chew up 10-15 minutes just travelling. And for a newbie (we all start at square one), just figuring things out takes time.
The tutorials help. But they are so slow! Amazingly slow, especially if you make a mistake. I have read that EVE has one of the most severe death penalities, and since this is my first online game, I am rather curious what others are like. When you "die" in EVE, that means your ship was blown up by "bad guys", whether that be a NPC (non-playable character) or a real person, for better or worse. Your characters, as it were, is jettisoned into deep space in a small lifeboat called a capsule. Amazingly, you can warp around with this capsule and the idea is that you make it back home so you can refit in another ship. If you have adequate insurance (all starter ships are automatically insured for free), your ship will soon be replaced. If someone shoots your capsule, you can opt to have a clone. These are your only options for "saving" the game. If you die and you have no insured ship and no clone, your account is essentially locked. What also sucks is all the stuff you were carrying is left in your ship's wreck, referred to as a "can". You can go back and claim it, but so can anyone else in the game. Which means there is quite a lucrative pirating underground. I had an opportunity to be a part of a shady group that would trick newbies and blow away their ships, raiding their cans. All perfectly legitimate, if done correctly. That is one of the things that stands out with EVE; it is one of the most dangerous game environments. Unlike a FPS (first person shooter) where you are expected to kill and be killed, EVE paints the picture of living a life in space on a ship, chipping away a living by doing "normal" things like finding a job and making money. It is just that there are a disproportionate amount of people whose job it is to take your money.
The corollary is that this "pirating" mindset is also one of the most fun for your average person, I think. EVE is a sci-fi game, and it is almost mantra that you blow things up. Mining for minerals in an asteroid field and trucking the goods home, day after day, just does not hold much excitement. There is a very strong sense that role-playing is not on a majority of your average player's mind. In fact, it is almost big news when you hear about a pure role-playing faction (I came across Lame Duck Corp, which consisted of two folks). Where is the RPG in MMORPG?
Lastly, the background music. It is a nice affect, very ambient and "space sounding", but too much monotony! I guess if you play for a short time span (1 hour or two), it is not that bad, but when you are online for long stretches, you start to hate the music. Perhaps there is a way to customize the "jukebox".
And a minor irritation that all games have, aside from the broken physics (slowing down when you stop accelerating?); there is no real sense of collision. If you happen to get close to someone, either you bump off or pass through them. I really wish that some game engine would finally get it right and respect object boundaries (and the requisite boundary conditions).
The interface is a little klunky. It looks sharp and has a very appropriate sci-fi skin, but window management is not up to par. Kudos to the context-sensitive mouse.
The good things
Very intriguing game. I love the futuristic sciences, the variety of career paths one can pursue, the vastness of space, the sheer scale. The fact that you can learn skills, even when offline, is a huge plus. Right now, my character is learning a skill that will take 6 days to complete, and I am not even connected. That is huge. It is strange that the skills are somehow not associated with what you do. In other words, there are no experience points as in the traditional RPG model. There are other stats you can accumulate, but skill points only go up when you train a skill. And you need to have skills to open up doors to other tech. I think that is a most excellent model, much preferable to the "traditional" model, and very realistic. Which makes me all the more sad that more players do not take advantage of the role-playing potential.
But blowing things up is just plain fun! The sound affects are awesome; from the ripping thundering screech of a stargate, to the squeezing acceleration of a warp, to the rewarding (but most unrealistic) reverberating sounds of missile launches and explosions. Whoever coordinated and engineered the sounds was quite good.
And the EVE universe is just big. I like that because it is easily the kind of thing that can swallow 23000 online players at once, and you can still find places of little or no activity, explore the unknown, or hang out in favorite 'hoods or crossroads. There is a realistic market force in action, along with politics, and a volunteer player-run University. Even an official EVE television station! Amazing. A universe that makes immersion very accessible.
I have also been glamorized by the cooperative efforts in gang warfare (or even fleetwar). The first group I hooked up required the use of Ventrillo, a VOIP operation favored by game-conferencing individuals. The physical technology is outstanding all by itself. You can even get software that tells you which icon belongs to which voice. How cool is that? Yes, I realize that this has been going on for years; like I said, I was smitten. Anyway, you have a gang boss (leader) who basically coordinates the attack by giving verbal orders (which is so much faster than typing). There are many technologies to deploy against a target; cloaking, damping, webbing, siphoning and the run-of-the-mill range of damage-inducing weapons. Sure, everyone wants to be a tank and just blast away, but having specialists in electronic warfare (ewar) can turn the tide quickly. Having a scout that can tell you more precise information can allow a team to take out strategic targets quickly.
The graphics are pretty sweet as well. After a couple warps, I noticed that the game engine depicts red-shift and blue-shift; wow, yet another attempt at "real physics" to demonstrate hypothetical faster-than-light travel. And back to scale; the smallest of ships (frigates) are really small. The big ships are really big, especially the space stations. I was actually hoping for a little more in terms of extremes (thinking Star Wars and the death star and capital ships), but what EVE offers is very satisfying. Except the whole thing about collisions. =)
In the end, I both love and hate this game. For me personally, the cost of my real life time is simply not worth the benefit of such an awesome game experience. If I could dabble in it, I would be hard put to avoid it. But the time commitment, not to mention a subscription fee, put this game out of my ballpark. Sure, $14 bucks a month is not much, but the principle of it is what eats me. On a more practical level, look at it from my wife's perspective. =) Which I try to do often, while not always succeeding.
Updated 20-Nov-2007:
Some other thoughts about the skill point model. It goes slow. Very slow. And you can do nothing about it, except 1) train skills that help you learn faster, 2) bump up character traits that support faster learning (ie, intelligence). I am not even so sure the last point has much of an impact. But I could be wrong.
I am not as convinced this model is superior. What you end up doing is having to buy or earn books from which to learn new skills, and there are a ton of skills out there to be learned. But books cost money (some cost mega $$). So, you end up doing a lot of missions to earn money to learn skills to earn skill points. In the old system, you went out and did missions to earn experience points, which either bumped up a skill or could be allocated towards a trait (or both). But EVE is biased towards PVP. So there is a severe lack of incentive to do missions, except for the sole purpose of getting money to buy books and stuff.
I was reading in the EVE forums about the possibility of queueing skills. I think this would be extremely advantageous, but then someone made the point that the game developer (CCP) would loose lots of money because folks would queue up skills to get an uber-ship, log off for a couple months, than restart their subscription read to rock'n'roll. I think that might be true for a number of people, which indicates there is something drastically broken about why people play. Which is why I am not going to buy a subscription.
But dang it, the game is awesome! There is so much going on that I would love to a part of. EVE TV, EVE University, fleet warefare with tons of supporting roles for folks of every niche... the EVE Universe is just amazing! And growing! Lots of RPG opportunities, although I have a hard time seeing how someone can get excited about mining ore from rocks. But folks do. You can join corporations and organizations, go the political route, or just blow things up. For me, it just takes too long to get the juicy stuff. And I do not feel like paying a subscription to get there. It would be very interesting if there was a single-player feed, perhaps a way to interact with only the NPC part of the game. I am not sure if that would sell or not.
Anyway, this was my first foray into the MMORPG arena, and wow did it open my eyes! I sampled this fine offering with the trial account. And although I only played for roughly 2.5 days, I put in almost 20 hours. I am still unsure if it was worth it. It certainly was not the best use of my time. =)
There are many good things and many bad things about EVE, and this will be very subjective.
Bad things first
The massive multiplayer online genre itself is probably my biggest issue. Due to its nature, it is extremely immersive. Meaning that you are invited, enticed and even provoked into dumping hours upon hours into developing your character in one fashion or another. You can explore the life of EVE on your own, but that path is very slow, very time consuming and filled with pitfalls. You can join up with another group which will speed things tremendously, keeping you relatively safe (even if only by sage advice), but the intrinsic coercion of playing more can hit you like certain hot peppers that build up and pack a punch. It is very hard to play this game for, say, 1 hour at a time. It might be possible to run a PvE (Player vs Environment, dealing with computer-generated events and characters) mission or two, but you may quickly find that some times it takes a while to get to where you are going. There is an autopilot function that helps, but has a built-in safety feature of dropping you off a few klicks away from your target so you are not instantly ambushed by those with nefarious intent. Warping is not always fast, especially if your ship does not have enough juice to do the jump all in one go. So, you can chew up 10-15 minutes just travelling. And for a newbie (we all start at square one), just figuring things out takes time.
The tutorials help. But they are so slow! Amazingly slow, especially if you make a mistake. I have read that EVE has one of the most severe death penalities, and since this is my first online game, I am rather curious what others are like. When you "die" in EVE, that means your ship was blown up by "bad guys", whether that be a NPC (non-playable character) or a real person, for better or worse. Your characters, as it were, is jettisoned into deep space in a small lifeboat called a capsule. Amazingly, you can warp around with this capsule and the idea is that you make it back home so you can refit in another ship. If you have adequate insurance (all starter ships are automatically insured for free), your ship will soon be replaced. If someone shoots your capsule, you can opt to have a clone. These are your only options for "saving" the game. If you die and you have no insured ship and no clone, your account is essentially locked. What also sucks is all the stuff you were carrying is left in your ship's wreck, referred to as a "can". You can go back and claim it, but so can anyone else in the game. Which means there is quite a lucrative pirating underground. I had an opportunity to be a part of a shady group that would trick newbies and blow away their ships, raiding their cans. All perfectly legitimate, if done correctly. That is one of the things that stands out with EVE; it is one of the most dangerous game environments. Unlike a FPS (first person shooter) where you are expected to kill and be killed, EVE paints the picture of living a life in space on a ship, chipping away a living by doing "normal" things like finding a job and making money. It is just that there are a disproportionate amount of people whose job it is to take your money.
The corollary is that this "pirating" mindset is also one of the most fun for your average person, I think. EVE is a sci-fi game, and it is almost mantra that you blow things up. Mining for minerals in an asteroid field and trucking the goods home, day after day, just does not hold much excitement. There is a very strong sense that role-playing is not on a majority of your average player's mind. In fact, it is almost big news when you hear about a pure role-playing faction (I came across Lame Duck Corp, which consisted of two folks). Where is the RPG in MMORPG?
Lastly, the background music. It is a nice affect, very ambient and "space sounding", but too much monotony! I guess if you play for a short time span (1 hour or two), it is not that bad, but when you are online for long stretches, you start to hate the music. Perhaps there is a way to customize the "jukebox".
And a minor irritation that all games have, aside from the broken physics (slowing down when you stop accelerating?); there is no real sense of collision. If you happen to get close to someone, either you bump off or pass through them. I really wish that some game engine would finally get it right and respect object boundaries (and the requisite boundary conditions).
The interface is a little klunky. It looks sharp and has a very appropriate sci-fi skin, but window management is not up to par. Kudos to the context-sensitive mouse.
The good things
Very intriguing game. I love the futuristic sciences, the variety of career paths one can pursue, the vastness of space, the sheer scale. The fact that you can learn skills, even when offline, is a huge plus. Right now, my character is learning a skill that will take 6 days to complete, and I am not even connected. That is huge. It is strange that the skills are somehow not associated with what you do. In other words, there are no experience points as in the traditional RPG model. There are other stats you can accumulate, but skill points only go up when you train a skill. And you need to have skills to open up doors to other tech. I think that is a most excellent model, much preferable to the "traditional" model, and very realistic. Which makes me all the more sad that more players do not take advantage of the role-playing potential.
But blowing things up is just plain fun! The sound affects are awesome; from the ripping thundering screech of a stargate, to the squeezing acceleration of a warp, to the rewarding (but most unrealistic) reverberating sounds of missile launches and explosions. Whoever coordinated and engineered the sounds was quite good.
And the EVE universe is just big. I like that because it is easily the kind of thing that can swallow 23000 online players at once, and you can still find places of little or no activity, explore the unknown, or hang out in favorite 'hoods or crossroads. There is a realistic market force in action, along with politics, and a volunteer player-run University. Even an official EVE television station! Amazing. A universe that makes immersion very accessible.
I have also been glamorized by the cooperative efforts in gang warfare (or even fleetwar). The first group I hooked up required the use of Ventrillo, a VOIP operation favored by game-conferencing individuals. The physical technology is outstanding all by itself. You can even get software that tells you which icon belongs to which voice. How cool is that? Yes, I realize that this has been going on for years; like I said, I was smitten. Anyway, you have a gang boss (leader) who basically coordinates the attack by giving verbal orders (which is so much faster than typing). There are many technologies to deploy against a target; cloaking, damping, webbing, siphoning and the run-of-the-mill range of damage-inducing weapons. Sure, everyone wants to be a tank and just blast away, but having specialists in electronic warfare (ewar) can turn the tide quickly. Having a scout that can tell you more precise information can allow a team to take out strategic targets quickly.
The graphics are pretty sweet as well. After a couple warps, I noticed that the game engine depicts red-shift and blue-shift; wow, yet another attempt at "real physics" to demonstrate hypothetical faster-than-light travel. And back to scale; the smallest of ships (frigates) are really small. The big ships are really big, especially the space stations. I was actually hoping for a little more in terms of extremes (thinking Star Wars and the death star and capital ships), but what EVE offers is very satisfying. Except the whole thing about collisions. =)
In the end, I both love and hate this game. For me personally, the cost of my real life time is simply not worth the benefit of such an awesome game experience. If I could dabble in it, I would be hard put to avoid it. But the time commitment, not to mention a subscription fee, put this game out of my ballpark. Sure, $14 bucks a month is not much, but the principle of it is what eats me. On a more practical level, look at it from my wife's perspective. =) Which I try to do often, while not always succeeding.
Updated 20-Nov-2007:
Some other thoughts about the skill point model. It goes slow. Very slow. And you can do nothing about it, except 1) train skills that help you learn faster, 2) bump up character traits that support faster learning (ie, intelligence). I am not even so sure the last point has much of an impact. But I could be wrong.
I am not as convinced this model is superior. What you end up doing is having to buy or earn books from which to learn new skills, and there are a ton of skills out there to be learned. But books cost money (some cost mega $$). So, you end up doing a lot of missions to earn money to learn skills to earn skill points. In the old system, you went out and did missions to earn experience points, which either bumped up a skill or could be allocated towards a trait (or both). But EVE is biased towards PVP. So there is a severe lack of incentive to do missions, except for the sole purpose of getting money to buy books and stuff.
I was reading in the EVE forums about the possibility of queueing skills. I think this would be extremely advantageous, but then someone made the point that the game developer (CCP) would loose lots of money because folks would queue up skills to get an uber-ship, log off for a couple months, than restart their subscription read to rock'n'roll. I think that might be true for a number of people, which indicates there is something drastically broken about why people play. Which is why I am not going to buy a subscription.
But dang it, the game is awesome! There is so much going on that I would love to a part of. EVE TV, EVE University, fleet warefare with tons of supporting roles for folks of every niche... the EVE Universe is just amazing! And growing! Lots of RPG opportunities, although I have a hard time seeing how someone can get excited about mining ore from rocks. But folks do. You can join corporations and organizations, go the political route, or just blow things up. For me, it just takes too long to get the juicy stuff. And I do not feel like paying a subscription to get there. It would be very interesting if there was a single-player feed, perhaps a way to interact with only the NPC part of the game. I am not sure if that would sell or not.
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