DFTM

Going through stacks of old papers and notebooks crammed into and around my desk, I found these pages scribbled with notes from when I was playing Star Wars Galaxies. Most of them were related to crafting, which took a lot of effort to learn and get good at. One of them is a list of where I had placed various harvesters and what kind of quality of materials they were pulling up – I’d then cross out a location when I moved them a few days later when that spawn ended. There’s also a list of various collectibles that I tried to get my hands on.

I just thought I’d share them. Oh, SWG. I miss you so. Every time I start up a MMO I am remembered about all the cool things you tried, and became really good at. I’ve said it before – the sunsetting of SWG was a major loss for the genre in general. Remember that you can use your directional keys to scroll through the photos.

(Yes, I also tend to scribble silly pictures whenever I take notes.)

I simply had to write about this, because I’m finding the whole thing hilarious. It might be old news for everyone, though. I mean, I knew about the missing textures, but I was unaware that the subject had reached such heights over the last couple of days. Be warned though, because I might be finding it hilarious because it’s 2am here and I’ve had a very long week.

During early beta-stages, Star Wars: The Old Republic featured high-resolution textures. Then, suddenly, they disappeared. People want to know why – especially since those textures still show up in cut-scenes, but are unavailable during normal gameplay. In fact, people want to know so badly why they can’t use them all the time that several threads have sprung up on the official forums. The first thread is 117 pages long. When Bioware mods locked it and started a second one, the new thread went up to 112 pages before the mods had to intervene. The third and fourth? 125 and 148. At the time I’m writing this the fifth thread is well over 100 pages.

Finally, players managed to get a reply from Bioware. Stephen Reid, more famous as Rockjaw, stepped in and gave a pretty technical explanation (you’ll have to scroll down on that page, doesn’t seem like there are permalinks for forum posts). Basically it comes down to the amount of players that could potentially show up on-screen during normal gameplay versus the controlled environments of the cut-scenes. And the whole “high graphical settings look exactly as medium”-thing? That was a bug, there wasn’t even supposed to be a “medium” option. Ooops!

Then there’s this, a whole conspiracy theory about textures being constantly sent from the servers – presumably to protect the models from being copied. “If it is in fact the case that assets have been deliberately withheld from the client,” the poster there writes, “and thus have to be transmitted to the client from the server in some form, it goes a VERY long way to explaining most of the performance problems SWTOR has been having.”

Personally I am not invested in this, since I think SWTOR looks good as is and don’t really fret over the texture quality in-game and I like the graphical style in general. But I am not sure I buy the whole “too many players on-screen”-reason for not having the textures available for the people who have high-end rigs that should be able to cope just fine.

First of all, SWTOR uses an instanced model where copies of the same area are created if too many players are present in the same place at the same time. I think the max number of players I’ve seen in one area has been around 135+, and that’s spread across the whole Republic Fleet (and suffered a pretty bad drop in performance at the time). Secondly, Rift manages to show tons of players while also firing off all kinds of magical effects and fighting moves with my computer – which is slowly aging past its prime – hardly noticing. As it stands right now even high-end rigs stutter in SWTOR’s crowded areas, no matter how many players are actually visible on-screen at the time. Unless the whole engine and network code running the game are built of dreams, hopes and chewed bubblegum, I have a hard time wrapping my head around how the talented engineers at Bioware wouldn’t be able to make the game run a lot smoother in crowded areas than… Well, more or less every MMO out there.

It’s a mystery. And mysteries deserve elaborate conspiracy theories. If you happen to have one, feel free to share with the rest of us in the comments.

The header image is cropped from this picture, which compares the high-resolution textures with normal gameplay.

I had initially planned to blog about something else, but I need to get at least one post up about NowGamer’s competition where you can win a job which won’t give you any money. If you (somehow) missed it, they are holding a competition to see who gets to give Imagine Publishing content. For free. This from a professional publication and not an amateur site. It’s despicable enough that they are asking people to give them content without any compensation, calling it a competition in an attempt to make it look like it’s a boon to the writer makes the whole thing even worse.

I don’t think I can add much to the debate after John Walker’s summary of the whole thing, though. “Servants get paid. This is a position below servant” as he puts it. Also make sure to check the comments, both on Walker’s blog and on the official competition post.

If you’re dreaming about a career in games journalism, make sure you are never taken advantage of. Most of us have. It absolutely sucks. It might not suck the moment you accept that unpaid position, but trust me – one day you will wake up and realize that you’re being treated like crap, that your employers are devaluing you and your work.

Amateur websites that never see any form of cash flow are of course not included.

[...] we need to help educate people that they are in control. I mean, right here [in the Daily Grind] people are pissed that you can’t uninstall it. Well, they are pissed at something that’s not true! I mean, what would you do about that, you know? If a columnist writes that you can’t uninstall it, man, I’d be up in arms! Of course I’d be pissed. And we have not seen that factually, we have not seen facts — especially with our latest versions — that we affect gameplay at all, but I think there’s a perception.

I had a chat with the very outspoken CEO of Pando Networks about their Media Booster software that several games companies use for speeding up large downloads. The resulting interview is now online over on Massively.

The second part of my review of Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic is up on FZ.se (Swedish link!). This time it even includes a score, which is always scary when it comes to MMOs. Since everything can change, sometimes over night, that score can fluctuate both up and down at any time. So that’s only valid right now, but it might not be next week. Ah, MMOs, you tricky beasts.

If you’re not Swedish, and chances are that you’re not if you’re reading this, then there’s always Google Translate. Briefly looking through it, it looked like a pretty good translation – at least as far as Google Translate-translations go. I am not 100% certain what “The apparent single-esteem in spite of the Star Wars: The Old Republic” is supposed to mean, though. You figure it out.

I worked with Gamereactor’s web-TV, GRTV, for about four years. When I think back on the time I spent with the magazine/websites, GRTV is the part I miss the most – we had tons of fun, either in the studio or out on the road. Yesterday, as an episode of the traditional Christmas calendar, the guys put together this tribute/in memoriam-episode for me. I am not sure what to say about it, except that I’m very touched. I try not to get too nostalgic about the whole thing, but it was hard not to start missing the boys and girls I left behind when I left the company after seeing it.

They truly did dig through the archives for material – there’s even a brief clip of the first interview I did on camera (with Jeff Kaplan from Blizzard). I wasn’t prepared at all, I had just shown up to do a written interview when Bengt told me to grab the mic. “You know more about World of Warcraft than me.” Then it all went downhill from there… But wow, so many cool places we traveled to and so many cool people I got to interview. Some of them show up in the clip above; including (but not limited to) Ken Levine, Peter Molyneux, Daniel Erickson and Mel B (!).

Ok, I’m officially nostalgic now.

I miss doing stuff in front of the camera, I admit. I do have a project in the works, but not sure when we’ll have the time to get it off the ground. Hopefully early next year.

Also, to the GRTV guys – thanks. I adore you all. I especially adore Dori’s beard. Never, ever shave.

The idea that perhaps the way women are portrayed in fandom is aleetle sexist is regularly met with denials, justifications and outright dismissal of the issue. [...] Part of the notion of male privilege in fandom is that nothing is wrong with fandom and that suggestions that it might benefit from some diversity is treated as a threat.

Harris O’Malley, who usually writes over on Paging Dr. NerdLove, allowed Kotaku – yes, Kotaku – to repost his article on nerds and male privilege. It’s absolutely worth a read and he does ask an interesting question about how criticism like this is often seen a threat. If you doubt that, you don’t have to look further than the comments.

Today was finally the day that I could go to my retailer to pick up my Collector’s Edition of Star Wars: The Old Republic. I went there two days ago, but even if they had the boxes in stock they wouldn’t give them out – it wasn’t at all frustrating to hear. Either way, it is now mine. It’s huge, it’s beautiful. I’m such a sucker for CEs, that I pre-ordered it the day it was announced. Luckily, I also paid for it at the same time; something I could do back then, since I had an actual pay-check. As a freelancer and student, my current economy would never allow such a luxury.

Since I was a bad boy yesterday and didn’t write anything here, I decided to grab my trusty iPhone (I am lazy and didn’t get my real camera) and take pictures while I unboxed it. Take a look at the photos below to see it in action. It’s yummy. Remember that you can scroll through the pictures using your keyboard’s directional arrows.

(For collectors of Star Wars toys – yes, there are some weird painted symbols on my AT-ST. I was 12 and tried to convert it into a Warhammer 40K Ork vehicle. And yes, I want to go back in time and slap myself for it.)

I guess this means that the game is officially here, even if some of us have already been playing for a few days. Hope everyone that ordered the boxed Collector’s Edition are happy with their purchase. I’m very satisfied myself.

I had dedicated myself to writing a blog post every day. Today I didn’t. The picture above is the reason why. So sue me! The smell of a fresh new MMO is in the air. It’s almost a magical thing. I’ll be back with Star Wars: The Old Republic-impressions tomorrow. Now I need to go to bed and dream about Coruscant.

I’ve had a pretty lousy day today, so I’m not sure I have the brain capacity to actually write something clever. The great thing is that other people have that capacity! Two different texts turned up on Twitter as I settled in for some brainless skirmish-running in Lord of the Rings Online – two texts that I think you should read.

‘Ooh, if you can’t take it, get off the internet’ comes the call from over clutched handbag. Well if you can’t speak to a woman without resorting to wholly unimaginative sexist copypasta, how about you get off the internet? He who repeats sexist tropes wins? I think not. Sexism can be funny, same as racism, homophobia and so on. But only when it’s used to actually say something.

Mark Sorrell takes on sexism in the games industry, looking mostly at the comment-sections of sites like IGN. The piece by Emma Boyes linked in his text is awesome (I felt similar about Saints Row 2), yet the comments make me want to curl up in my sofa and never talk to another living human being again (you have been warned). They are not only filled with sexist bullshit, they are also filled with blatant anti-intellectualism. Something the world, and the US, doesn’t need right now.

And speaking of comments…

One of the common comments I frequently find beneath game reviews I’ve written goes something like this: “You forgot to mention x, y and z!” with x, y and z equaling whatever pet peeves or mandatory videogame features that a particular gamer holds near to his or her heart. [...] I didn’t mention x, y and z in my review because I don’t care about x, y and z. The fact that I don’t give a squirt about frame rate or the ability to invert the y axis doesn’t make me a negligent critic. It just makes me a critic with way different concerns than you.

Gus Mastrapa looks at one of the most annoying comments you can get when you publish a review of a game. We’ve all been there. I am amazed that we still, after so many years, have to point out that reviews are subjective. That you and me, as reader and writer, probably won’t feel exactly the same about a given game. “Find a critic that is after precisely the same thing you’re after and you’re set for life,” Gus writes. “Just don’t get your hopes up.” That’s something many of us have been saying for years. But it’s worth saying again and Gus puts it eloquently. Bookmarked and saved for future linking.