Champions Online

A boring, non-witty post title.

This is my thoughts and feelings behind Cryptic Studios' new MMORPG, Champions Online. It's a modern day superhero MMO set in the Champions universe (it's a niche pen and paper game). It shares a lot of stylistic similarities with City of Heroes/Villains, but that's bound to happen since Cryptic was also the development team behind CoX. Honestly, CO bears similarity to a World of Warcraft/City of Heroes hybrid, which is good and bad (mostly good, imo).

Visually, CO looks and feels a bit dated right out of the gate. While the models are shiny and fairly detailed, the particle effects and animations seem clunky. I'm not sure who does the animations, but they just don't have the same crispness or flow as characters in even dated games like Guild Wars. This isn't to say they look awful, but overall the game looks kinda average. It's still crisper and better looking than WoW is, but that's not really saying much - WoW is kind of an old game.

The (visual) character customization is good, and has a wide variety of character options. However, there were a lot of bugs in the character editor the last time I saw play at the end of beta that made creating a character and costume rather awkward. If you compare it to City of Heroes, there are simply not as many options. CoX has a lot of costume pieces to make a very unique character and build, and CO has many fewer. Compared to many other games (most?) CO still has a very large number of options. Compared to their competition, they're a little low, so I can't really see it as a major selling point.

Still on the visual front, I do not understand why a game made in 2009 can't have hair and clothing physics. Remember the 90s? It was okay for Lara Croft to have a solid block of plastic hair back then. Now there are numerous F2P MMOs that have real hair and clothing physics. A game released in 2009 in box that costs 50$ and has a 15$/mo subscription fee really has no excuse.

It's worth noting that Redefining Nerds doesn't usually talk about visuals in place of gameplay, but because CO's major selling point is visuals, I feel it important to point out how it stacks up. Overall, I think it's acceptable if you are into the other facets of the game too.

Gameplay is my area of expertise though and CO falls sort of short.

The first and biggest issue I have is the reduction/elimination of the support role. Defensive support, eg. buffs and healing, are reduced to maintained beams of healing that apply heals over time, instead of strategic healing bursts and pre-emptive damage prevention. All burst healing is self-targeted and all damage reduction buffs are self only. This takes virtually all the skill out of playing a support character, and forces a support player to focus on doing one thing, instead of multitasking to protect their team effectively.

In general, CO is very solo-focused. Everyone can 'tank' with a few stray power selections for survivability, and everyone deals at least decent damage due to the way the super-stat system works. The result is that even though there are dozens and dozens of powers in the game, every character falls into one of a very small number of categories:

1: awful
2: generic melee brawler
3: generic ranged blaster
4: God

Regarding #1 and #4 is my next point. The balance of the game is really awful. Even with a wide variety of powers, many of them are like Mortal Kombat characters - mostly the same, except a few are clearly better. Some powers are 'outside the box', and these range from mostly useless (gadget mines) to absurdly good. This huge disparity even between individual powers means that it's easy to end up making a character that does the exact same thing as someone else's character, only much worse at it. Combined with a complex statistic system which rewards minmaxing, and the average player is likely to produce a character statistically inferior in every way to an experienced one.

This leads me to my next point - you can only change the most recent ten changes to your character. You can't change anything before that, so if you get to level 20 or so and find that something you picked early in the game isn't what you wanted, there's no choice but to reroll your character from scratch.

Perhaps the worst of all of it is that there are a number of powers and abilities that are must-have. Even worse is that they form a core group of abilities that supplement other powerful abilities that are not 'essential' but are in the same power tree, making them available sooner. This means that in essence, that you can make "God," a build that can literally handle any problem and deal with any situation.

During the end of beta event where numerous boss Destroids spawned which required large teams to kill, we ran "God" in solo, and easily defeated the enemies without breaking a sweat. In PvP, the God build was able to defend itself against the most dangerous forms of PvP offense (knockback infinites) and completely ignore all other forms of PvP offense, all while delivering its own knockback infinites and huge spike damage.

On that note, PvP is really broken. Currently the metagame revolves around hitting the enemy into the corner with an endless knockback loop then laying down some pets or persistent damaging power (one of which has a pulsing knockback effect) so that the opponent can't escape. All other offensive forms, such as team spikes or landing a hold into a damage chain can be easily prevented by being aware and using teleport, which can escape any situation other than a knockback infinite.

Unfortunately for CO, there is also nothing to really challenge that build. There is virtually 0 endgame content for level 40 characters. This is the same problem that plagues City of Heroes right now (except that's an issue of 'worthwhile' endgame content). Most games have a decidedly endgame focus which is probably bad, but having nothing other than PvP to sate a high level character's appetite is just a mistake.

Lastly, I'd like to point out that at the end of open beta, CO was full of bugs. There were dozens of unfinished missions, incorrect help text for powers (or no text at all!), and numerous costume bugs. While I'm sure these will eventually get fixed, they were so low priority on Cryptic's list compared to hyping the game and selling lifetime subscriptions.

Overall I don't feel like CO was a game ready for launch. It does have a decent amount of potential, but honestly unless Cryptic hires some better developers to balance the powers, CO is going to be another totally imbalanced MMO with no insight into how to fix it.

That's assuming they fix the bugs, of course.

RPS Essay

This is my submission for the contest at Rock Paper Shotgun.

I think that the best science fiction film was Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. I wanted to pick a Star Wars film, as I believe the series is the most influential sci-fi series in changing film and fiction in general. However, I feel that the original films are not indicative of the rich and deep political climate that is present throughout George Lucas' Star Wars universe. Episodes 4-6 are very classic examples of good versus evil, and while they are rife with interesting and shocking plot twists, they do not move us to change our outlooks on life or what is right and wrong.

Episode 2 is by far the best at making us think about the actions of each of the characters in the movie and ask ourselves whether they are right or wrong. Each of the main characters has their own particular moral compass, and this causes them to make many interesting choices throughout the film. Each time this happens, we are presented with a delightful dilemma - was what he or she did the right choice?

For our first example, we can take Obi-Wan. He's a pretty forthright, straightforward good guy. When we see him interact with Anakin in the early scenes, he is often stern with Anakin, chastising him. To some degree, Obi-Wan even belittles Anakin, in moments such as when he is questioning Anakin for why he would use Padme as bait to lure out the assassin. Are all of his decisions right in the movie? If everything had gone as he had wished, would Jango have been captured, or was the combination of Anakin and Padme's recklessness required in order to find Zam Wessel and later, Jango Fett?

Obi-Wan's caution is seen often in The Phantom Menace as being the voice of reason, but in Attack of the Clones his caution would have left him to forego opportunities that other characters, such as Padme or Anakin would push the story into exploring.

Anakin is the character that defines the moral ambiguity of the trilogy, though. He battles constantly with things like his love for Padme and his mother, things that the Jedi code discourage. These feelings get him into trouble and contribute to his eventual fall, but his expressions are all too human. While we frown at the way he murders the Tusken Raiders in vengeance, we also understand his fury at the loss of a loved one.

When we watch Episode 2, each of us has a different view of Anakin. Maybe we see his instability and arrogance as his defining traits, and frown on him because of that. Some of us might see his passion as a strength, rather than a weakness, though. Compared to the other Jedi, Anakin is much more 'human' and expresses emotions that we ourselves are likely to feel. The murder of his mother driving him to vengeance is something many people can relate with. I think that it is too easy to look at Anakin and condemn his feelings when he really is more like us than characters such as Obi-Wan or Yoda.

I can't talk about Anakin without mentioning Padme, though. She's every bit as reckless as he is, and her recklessness is almost always seen as a good thing throughout the movie. She is motivated to do the right thing at any cost, even if it puts her or others in danger. Even her arrival at Coruscant at the start of the movie is a decision fraught with peril. Numerous characters express concern that she should not have come. The major difference is that Anakin makes 'wrong' choices that end up getting people in trouble, while Padme makes choices that generally help the good guys out. However, it's important to note that the intent of these two characters is usually the same.

Although he had a pretty minor role in the movie, the morality of Chancellor Palpatine should also be addressed. In The Phantom Menace we see that the Republic is a slow, ponderous political beast with no real power, and that there is need for change. Palpatine, as the center of this change to a more stable system of government, is not truly a bad guy. Although we know that he becomes the "evil" Emperor later, and that he is the Dark Lord of the Sith, I think labels like "Dark Lord" serve to mask the unity he is attempting to bring to the galaxy.

In Attack of the Clones, Palpatine makes his second step towards gaining control of the Republic by getting emergency executive power. He is also never clearly portrayed as both the Chancellor and Darth Sidious at the same time. If the viewer had never seen the prequels, he or she might even be fooled into thinking that they were not the same person. Palpatine is almost always shown as impeccably nice to everyone, and only Obi-Wan even speaks ill of him during the movie (in a line that mentions him as being just like all other politicians).

But the blurred moral lines are not the only things that make Episode 2 excellent. Attack of the Clones also has excellent pacing, and covers a lot of key events in sequence that makes sense and is easy to follow.

When I rewatched the movie in order to better elaborate on the morality points that would be the focus of my essay, I noticed a lot of excellent plot flow. The chase scene with the shapeshifter Zam Wessel was particularly interesting because although it had a lot of twists in the chase (Obi-Wan getting blasted off the droid, Anakin jumping off his speeder to land on Zam's, and the final 'showdown' in the bar) they do an excellent job of making the viewer feel like all these crazy occurrences are plausible and could reasonably happen together.

If summarized, the events of Episode 2 seem ridiculous. Why does Anakin go from Naboo to Tattoine to Geonosis... with Padme in tow? If one were to explain these things to anyone else, these events would sound absolutely crazy. But when actually watched, these events make total sense. The actors do a surprisingly good job of justifying where they are going and what they are going to do there. Each plot twist in the movie feels right. When we are watching, we don't ask ourselves, "How is Obi-Wan on Kamino?" When I thought about the movie before watching it, I couldn't remember how Obi-Wan got there (it seemed like such a big logic leap). But when watching it, it made total sense.

Another thing the plot does well is handle many characters in different places. In many television shows and movies we get confused about who is doing what, and where. Obi-Wan is headed after Jango to Geonosis, Anakin is on Tattoine, and so on. The information about the characters is presented in an easily digestable and memorable way so there's never any confusion. This is a pretty impressive feat and most movies that do this screw it up.

Lastly, the movie does a great job of playing homage to the movies that came before. The Lars family, little riffs of the Imperial March here and there, and lines like "Anakin, someday you'll be the death of me," serve to really bring the old memories back. I do think that knowledge of the old movies does detract a bit, since we have certain expectations in this movie because of them. However, for those of us who did see Episodes 4-6 many times before seeing Episodes 1 and 2 for the first time, the homages were a nice touch.

I feel that Attack of the Clones is highly underestimated as a film. I agree with many of the criticisms such as weak acting (especially by Hayden Christensen) and poor scriptwriting, but the actors deliver a compelling tale that keeps you entertained from start to finish. It also lets us look at real life ethical dilemmas instead of a clear-cut battle versus good and evil.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this essay. It took me quite a while to write, and required rewatching of Attack of the Clones and a few trips to Wookiepedia.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully I've motivated you to take a look at what is really a great film.

Languages of Love? Pfft...

I would feel as though I would be giving you guys a disservice if I did not do this.

In this world, there are people who think they are smart and that they know things. These people are very convinced that their way is correct, and that they are experts and quite good at many things.

In an unsettling state of affairs, apparently some of these people have doctorates, and are practicing doctors! And to top this all off, they write books. This is one of the most infuriating things I have ever heard.

The person to incite this spite in me is Dr. Gary Chapman and he is the author of The Five Love Languages book series. He's a Christian writer, but this does not reflect for or against how much he sucks. His failure is really his own doing.

His books contain such morsels as the idea that people are receptors for only one type of affection, and if they get that one type affection, a relationship will most likely be successful. As an example, he claims that people who like attention or recognition (as a priority) don't need sex, and that people who primarily want sex don't react strongly to most other emotional triggers.

As anyone who has been in a relationship can tell you, this advice is totally retarded. What is funnier is that he tries to teach that we have to focus strongly on what our partner or spouse wants, neglecting our own wants and desires if we want our relationships to succeed.

I worded that as cleanly as possible, but the clear emphasis is away from self-fulfillment, which is absolutely critical in a strong relationship. It is of absolute importance that you are happy or a relationship will not go very far, and neglecting your own wants is relationship suicide. Yes, sometimes we have to make compromises with our spouse or partner, this is the nature of any relationship, even between friends. However, if we aren't happy, our relationship is gone city.

But the best part is that he distills love into five different types - and the best part is that they aren't the same as the types of love that are commonly taught in university textbooks relating to the subject. It's clear that when Dr. Chapman got away from the world of peer review that he totally neglected anything he ever learned in school - or maybe he deliberately decided that every other psychologist was wrong. I'm not sure. Regardless, love is not something you distill into five different types, and while everyone has their preferences, everyone needs certain things from people and you can't just say "they need material wealth - sex, affection, praise... screw those."

The five languages of love are sharply defined and don't blend into each other at all. Chapman makes up his own terms (or rather, defines existing terms like Physical Touch or Quality Time) and then uses them freely throughout his book, using his defined five languages of love like a crutch. Rather than just use words and phrases we all understand, he hides behind the banner of his made-up definitions for the "Languages of Love."

If you've ever read a good self-help book or a book about interpersonal relationships, it will conflict with everything Dr. Chapman writes. If you've studied more than 2 years of psychology or sociology, it will probably also conflict heavily with what Dr. Chapman has to say.

Where did he get his Ph.D anyway?