Get Gone. Or, the one where game devs need to get out of their chairs more.May 21st, 2008 by Leslie
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Deep down, I have a burning desire to kick the shit out of a mob. Any mob. It could be a zombie, an orc, a dragon, a military officer or, hell, even the graphical representation of your mother-in-law. Doesn’t matter. It could even be plural. Actually, the more the better, yes. Spread the zombie infection across an entire city. Incite the tribe of orcs into frenzied attack. Invite over your whole family-in-law.
That destruction is all well and good, especially when enacted in the company of battle companions. But see, I’ve got a problem. I’m a picky gamer. I like to be comfortable.
What makes a game comfortable to me? I’ll talk about what makes them uncomfortable.
After quitting World of Warcraft quite unceremoniously last weekend for dramatic reasons upon which I would love to expound perhaps in another post about social networking and MMORPGS I was trying to find another game to play casually and have fun with friends.
Hopping on over to MMORPG.com I clicked into their Games section listing every MMORPG they have recorded and started reading through the titles. I was looking for something familiar as I checked this list, wanting to avoid learning and entirely new game and system.
As I scrolled through the titles my tired mouse came to rest over a game I had tried once but failed to love. I figured I could give it a second shot. The game? The Lord of the Rings Online.
I was so excited.
I remember being near tears at the sight of Tom Bombadil and his merry house and squealing with adoration over the mysteriously entrancing Barrow Downs. I clearly recalled the happy Hobbits and their beautiful farm lands and pastures, and toiling by the sweat of my own brow to raise firm and supple crops.
All my beautiful recollections from the novels and my flights of fancy into the everyday lives of Middle Earth’s inhabitants. They could be right in front of me! They had been right in front of me… Why had I ever given up such a masterpiece of literature-to-game translation?
Because it’s a steaming load of utter horse shit on the gaming side.
And I am trying to play a game here, after all.
I recall the typical issues this game had, a trait shared with all other games created. The house that Tom Bombadil built? Oh yes, I remember – it’s the one you couldn’t get into to complete your quests, depending on time of day – yeah, that one.
Things such as this are all minor annoyances I randomly felt the need to complain about today, but the game-breaker for me, the one thing that made LotRO completely impossible to play…
It was the movement.
Alright, I’ll stop lying to you. I’ll be honest. It was the lack of movement.
How in the bloody hell can you expect to immerse yourself into a decent role playing online game if your dunderhead of an Elf can’t get it into her skull to move out of the way of that blasted, infernal, woe-begotten monster. Or that big obstacle blocking the view. Or through the doorway. Or just simply at all.
That’s what I don’t get. Care to explain it? Do we have any LotRO players here? Honestly, let me ask you this question: If I held a conversation with you, would I, within twenty seconds, determine you have lost your sanity? Can we find out?
I’ll just chock it up to your steely nerves and ability to overcome all obstacles that may make themselves a hindrance to your pure, glorious determination to absorb the story and zealous dedication to the lore.
Really, it’s OK. I understand. I had that star in my eye when I downloaded the seven gigabyte high resolution installer as well.
And then the cold, bitter reality set in. I am a gamer, and my intention was to play a game.
One that would frustrate me with challenges related to my understanding of its mechanics, and choosing the right combination of skills with which to battle foes. Not about how to get a character to walk across the screen.
What kind of tactics work best in the game - hit and run, tank and spank, a plethora more? This is what interests me. Not abusing my keyboard as I plead with my toon to gtfo.
I happen to be a twenty three year old woman, and I know how to walk perfectly fine. I’ve actually been doing it for a while now, you see. Every day in fact. Which is probably more than the game developers because my character simply cannot mimic this basic skill. Perhaps they’ve just forgotten.
Shaking my head in frustration I trudged back to MMORPG.com’s list of games and went down them one by one again, this time analyzing what I knew about each game under much harder scrutiny. Which games have I quit because of the same symptom of poor design that made LotRO a flop?
Let me list a sample of them – the ones I still have a hankering to pick up and play again.
FFVIII (to a lesser extent), Guild Wars, Lineage, Lineage II, SilkRoad Online, Ragnarok Online, ROSE Online.
Each one of these games sticks out in my memory for one reason or another, but all have caused me great frustration due to movement issues.
Now, I’m not asking for games to possess some creepy intuition of player controls. Look to World of Warcraft to see an example of movement that felt natural and responsive at all times. Is it too much to ask?
I think not.
So, what am I playing now? A whole lot of solitaire. Oh, and the PC-crashing, repetitive, half-assed Diablo clone failure known as Hellgate: London.
Yes, I like it. What contributes to my fondness for this game? You guessed it. My pink-blob-lobbing Cabalist isn’t crippled.
No LotRO players were strangled or maimed during the writing of this article. Really, more power to you.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Your post got me thinking of bad controls and unrealistic walking. Bad, bad memories. Angel of Darkness is a console game I can think of that just never, ever got the controls right. That’s the series title that nearly crashed and burned all of it, and mostly due to controls that completely destroyed Lara Croft.
Pretty much sums it up well.
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:08 am
OK, seriously, what the hell are you talking about? I played both WoW and LOTRO in January (both for the first time in my life), and I cannot possibly remember any difference between the movement in the two… I read the whole post waiting for a bit of detail about what is wrong with movement in LOTRO, as I am still playing it now (dropped WoW after the free trial, didn’t appeal to me) and any annoyances I might have with the game have nothing at all to do with movement…
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:59 am
I agree that the portrayal of movement in Lord of the Rings Online was one of it’s weak points. Dwarves and hobbits particularly showed odd movement - albeit not so bad that it ever became more than a minor annoyance (for me).
I can’t see what some of the other games you mention have to do with it however. Guild Wars’ portrayal of movement was much better than WoW’s plus the pathfinding on mouse control was stellar - and there’s nothing wrong with the movement in either of the Lineage games. As for Ragnarok Online… it’s an isometric 2D cartoony game, how ‘off’ can the movement be, seriously?
Age of Conan did appear to become a beautiful game with horrible character animations, all the videos seemed to show characters that just didn’t move ‘right’. But after actually getting to play the game - the animations are actually surprisingly smooth & properly executed.
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:15 am
Droniac, in RO there was a place I couldn’t access because running to it was ridiculous..I really hated that game for a lot of reasons but the controls top it. Movement is just off for me when you try to move in a striaght line and you walk as if you’re drunk or you have an awkward bounce to your step in 3d.
Anyway I liked this article-are you a new author? Didnt recognize your name.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:03 am
Small complaint:
GW movement is no where as good as WoW’s. No MMORPG really has been, though I do look forward to Conan and other game’s take on it.
Comparing LotR to WoW is laughable, at best. The games are different in the fundamentals and engines. If you tried to run out of Bloodboil from Gurtogg Bloodboil in Black Temple using LotR’s controls, I am guessing it would not work and your raid would wipe.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:23 am
I’d argue that 10SIX featured the best movement of any MMO(RPG) ever made, if only because you could hover across the whole planet with your own private little army… absolutely nothing was unreachable and you had full movement control. Lovely fake physics and it was great to swoosh in between your units and fight alongside them. It may not have looked particularly great, but then nothing really did in 1999. WoW had solid movement, but in my mind it never really stood out much.
I’m kinda confused as to what aspect of movement we’re talking about here… Accessability of the environment? Controls (then again, WASD is WASD everywhere..)? Animations? All of the above? In Age of Conan the controls are great as are the animations, although jumping might not please everyone, but in some areas of zones you can get kinda stuck on the environment or run into invisible walls if you try climbing too much. That wouldn’t be any different from WoW if it weren’t for the fact that Age of Conan is much more ‘3D’ and therefore it’s easier to get stuck climbing stuff (there’s simply more to climb) so it’s more easily noticeable. The upside is that environments look much more ‘real’.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:38 am
I think it’s not WASD, because you can change that in nearly every game. It’s more does your character go where you want to. It’s possible it didn’t stand out ot you in WoW because you didn’t try to be on a top 2v2 or top raid or something where control was integral–if I hadn’t been able to flawlessly slip into travel form, move exactly six feet away out of range, pop out, and cyclone, due to maybe moving a little slower or a little off target, it would have ruined any arena match for me.I think it’s these controls that brought WoW to the league, even if I do think it wasn’t the best of moves, it does show some of its excellence.
No one bashed Conan, btw, I guess? I brought it up because the original videos were really bad, like WAR’s, but I hear it’s changed from many people so I don’t have a grudge against it. Leslie never mentioned it period. It sounds very solid, but I’d have to play it to see and I may or may not. It’s 50/50.
I will say in LotR, again, characters move awkwardly and the game fails on many levels. It’s just one, but when my hobbit nearly falls over himself while ruining, it’s a game I don’t want to renew. In Silk Road, which I believe Leslie mentioned, I played it for an hour and had to quit because the character bounced almost and never ran right–it felt awkward and unpolished, a feeling I can’t stand in the game.
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:16 am
Having played LOTRO for a few months now, I’m confused what you mean by the movement, too… It’s one of the few games that I’ve felt I had to play in 3rd person, though… When I played EQ, I ALWAYS played in 1st person. I couldn’t stand the 3rd view. But with LOTRO, totally the opposite.
I wonder if maybe they changed the movement a bit since you played? I never started playing til a year after it came out, so it may have had a good chance to work a lot of bugs out.
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Yeah I never bothered with the whole raiding thing and couldn’t care less about the ‘competitive arena play’ because I’d long left WoW by then. Blizzard killed the game for me in the very first few months by ditching World PvP and to me that was the only alluring aspect to the game aside from the fact that my friends played it.
I really agree with you (Monique) on the Conan videos. They sucked - shitty walking animations, lame armies clashing into each other… it just didn’t look right. When I got into open beta I still expected it to be like that - none of the videos looked any better. Strangely when you’re in game, it actually looks amazing. Very fluid animations with tons of emotes and even the combat swings flow fluidly into one another - at times it can look quite awe-inspiring.
In terms of the level of control - it seemed a little like Savage 2 (awesome game). So somewhat dumbed-down-Quake-ish: constantly on the move, dodging blows, positioning and aim determining how you hit and who. It’s not really comparable to WoW, which is a more standard MMO providing a slower paced, more static experience. The response for controls is great, although it takes some getting used to the flow of combat before you can really time attacks properly. If you’re used to WoW and MMO’s like it then combat in AoC will definitely be very different and new.
May 29th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
To clarify, the movement in Lord of the Rings Online was unresponsive and cumbersome.
As Monique had stated, if you took your party of LOTRO characters to Mt. Hyjal and fought Rage Winterchill from World of Warcraft, anyone under the AoE of his Death and Decay would be dead. Why? Because of the delay in trying to get a character to stop what it’s doing and move. Absolutely horrible.
It’s not even a game mechanic of “If your character is concentrating on this complex spell, they will become immobilized for a short time, even if interrupted”. It was just bad construction. Stopping your character from moving also had a very slight delay but definitely not as bad as getting to to move in the first place!
Drionac - There was a boss that you had to beat in Ragnarok Online every time you wanted to enter the enchanted and cursed Geffen Tower of magic.
This boss went by many names, but we just called it “The Stairs Boss”. That’s right. Stairs.
Your character pretty much walked everywhere BUT up and down the stairs. Walking through the Clock Tower and its narrow pathways with holes in the floor? My God, shoot me.
The memories still make me quiver with frustration.
Guild Wars also had the same issues that Lord of the Rings did but they were a little less cumbersome. Except tack on the extra annoyance that you would get stuck on “invisible objects” here and there.
I should also add another series of games that I never picked up again because it acted exactly like Guild Wars but the costumes weren’t charming enough to keep me coming back to it every few months: Neverwinter Nights. I loved how the characters ran backwards randomly when you told them to move forward! It was so entertaining. Really…
Dennis - I’m old! Kind of. I guess. Actually, I used to write here, but I had to take a long time-out for other things.
Dave - I played LOTRO a week before this article was posted, so they definitely haven’t done anything to improve their code, unfortunately…
I was contemplating making a videocast to show exactly what the issues were, since details were requested. Then I realized I’d have to download 30-some gigs of horror. I couldn’t do it.
November 9th, 2008 at 12:45 am
first off i’ve just been rolling laughing at how you tell a story and rant on. anyhow if u decide to give Lineage II a chance again you’ll be supprised with all the additions lately. though still have a bit of a bot problem though. but what mmo doesnt have that. its alot more mainstream with alot of the changes from quick lvling 1-20 and addidtion of a vitality system kinda like WoW for time ur rested a xp bonus, while its still a chaotic pvp game full of people who belive pve is the way to play. >_