So what's all this about Skyrim, anyway?

Being genetically engineered to compete, fight, compare dicks and to strive for being better than anybody else, online gaming was the perfect method for me to satisfy that craving. Half Life, Quake 3: Arena, Unreal Tournament - happy days, where people weren't willing to shell out tons of money for map packs, useless new game modes and other crap currently sold as "DLC". Most of all, no one was desperate enough to spend shitloads of money on aimbots and other 3rd party hacks. Possibly because those weren't as readily available back then and a lot easier to detect, but I'd like to believe that cheating simply wasn't as much of a problem as it is today.

When MMOs became more and more popular, I started raiding guild castles on Ragnarok Online and eventually, it all ended where everyone went at that time - WoW. And being the competitive bastard I am, I cranked out more DPS wielding a shield in tank spec than anyone else in the guild did with their damage-dealing setups. It's what I did. If they couldn't take down a boss or tackle some other crap on their own, I'd log on, kick some ass to help them get past whatever it was they were stuck on and logged off again.

Now I'm 30 fucking years old. I no longer feel the urge to "prove" anything, to myself or anybody else. And that's not simply because of age or because I've done it a million times, but also because games and people who play them have changed too much. When I played Unreal Tournament against 2000 strangers for actual prizes, we were the proverbial social outcasts, we actually had our own computers and modems and all of that freaky shit nobody cared about back then. Now look at games today. Our parents are gamers. Claire's grandmother is a gamer. I think that's awesome, no disrespect there. But "I can do more DPS than your mum" simply doesn't have a cool ring to it.

You see, it's one thing if you compete against a bunch of weirdos, who dedicate most of their lives to racking up kills and high scores and headshots and shit in their game of choice. Competing against middle-aged ladies and twelve year olds and my own parents... meh. No offense. I'm sure they'd feel exactly the same if they had to compete against me in naming Pink Floyd songs or something.
For the first time since the invention of the 56k modem, I actually want to play offline. No competition, no fighting over loot, DPS, strategies, being the world first to do something incredibly meaningless and stupid and no fucking trade chat.
The Elder Scrolls are my safe haven, far away from all of that online stupidity. Well. That is, until Bethesda decided to name their next project "The Elder Scrolls Online". Thanks a lot, you fucks!

One thing I particularly enjoy about Skyrim is how I can change and tweak the whole thing to my liking. MMOs give you a firm set of rules and you're stuck with the whole thing. If I don't like a particular quest, character, race, monster or what the hell ever on Skyrim, I can alter the whole thing, replace it with something else or get rid of it altogether. If there are weird design decisions, which I disagree with, I can change them. Take my character, for instance. He's a cat and one of his racial abilities allows him to see in the dark. Makes sense for a cat. What doesn't make sense is how I actually have to activate that ability and how it wears off after 30 seconds. That's how this thing works by default and I think it's stupid, so I changed it. Now the ability will automatically work its magic whenever my surroundings get too dark and that's it. No hotkey, no timers, no nothing. I like it that way.

That's a very minor change, of course. I could change all elves into orcs if I felt like it. Some genius changed all his dragons into Macho Man Randy Savage. With the free construction kit and some basic texture and sound editing skills, you can do a whole lot of crazy shit. Or realistic shit, for that matter. You can download a mod, which dramatically increases immersion for all those die-hard maniacs, who want to live and breathe their video games. Said mod makes your character crave things such as food, water and sleep on a regular basis. If you keep food in your inventory for too long, it will spoil. Eating rotten food or raw, uncooked meat will make you sick and you'll throw up. Drinking nothing but alcohol? Bad idea. Use them empty beer bottles to fill them up at a river, drink some water, happy hero. Yay! I wonder if it makes your character need to take a shit every now and then. I don't like this sort of thing, because having to eat and sleep keeps me busy enough IRL and I really don't need a simulation for it. But I can appreciate what the creator of this mod is doing.

Oh yeah, my character is also a werewolf.

When you compare some of the heavily-modified Skyrim videos out there, they end up looking like entirely different games. Some weirdos turn the whole thing into some kind of porn simulator with animated prostitution (that's the actual name of the mod) and all female characters wearing plated bikinis and thongs. Others go for the crazy anime crap, with characters using weapons, armor, voiceovers and silly special attacks taken straight from whatever Japanese shit the kids are watching nowadays. Personally, I like to go for stuff that "makes sense".

When I hit a baddie in my game, especially one with little or no armor, he'll show a bleeding cut. So when I beat the crap out of somebody, you can really tell afterwards. I'd like to be able to split them open and see some guts, but that's probably pushing the boundaries of the construction kit a bit. When I get on my mount, so do my companions. When my cat characters wear helmets, their ears don't just magically disappear. Neither do the horns of the lizard guys. If I screw up with my skill points, I can respec. When I bump into my companions, they get out of the fucking way. And since I like to gather adventuring parties of five or six people, I get monster spawns of 10-20 baddies where I'd normally just get 3 or 4. I didn't like the colour of my mount and my armor, so I changed the texture. Convenience stuff. Logical stuff. Fixes and minor changes rather than a whole new game. If I wanted Skyrim to be a whole new game, I wouldn't be playing Skyrim. But to each their own.

One thing that utterly fascinates me is how random and unpredictable the game can be. Some scripted events aside, Skyrim doesn't really sit and wait for you to show up and interfere with stuff. In fact, the game usually doesn't give a shit about what you're doing - the world moves on, with or without you. I've come across angry giants, pounding the living shit out of a bunch of sabretooth cats, who were attacking a pack of mammoths. The giants herd these mammoths and protect them from anything that threatens them. Which was fun enough to watch by itself, but got gradually more intense when a dragon spontaneously decided to have a go at the giants. I didn't actually interfere until pretty much everything was dead and the dragon decided to go for me next. The game didn't care. Those tigers want mammoth steak. The giants want to defend the mammoths. Dragons want to be dicks. They all act accordingly, whether you join in or not.

The AI can be incredibly stupid, too. Look at this shit:

This elk came running out of nowhere, possibly startled by some random monster, heads for the cliff and, before it realizes what's happening, plummets to its death. Maybe he bugged out. Maybe his wife left him. I'll never know. Should you watch the lengthy video at the end of this post, you'll see some random Stormcloak soldier do the exact same thing. Why? I have no fucking idea. There are some monsters fighting at the bottom of the cliff, maybe she wanted to get to them, maybe she was running away from something, but whatever the reason, I'm standing by a cliff, somebody zips by and does the Wile E. Coyote.

I find this one particularly entertaining, though:

In this case, the AI is so surprisingly smart and stupid all at the same time, even the developers didn't see it coming. NPCs will only respond to actions, which they can actually see, which is good. I like that. Smart AI. Problem is, you can exploit that feature by blocking the view of NPCs with any random pot or bucket and they're too stupid to do anything about it. Want to get away with theft and murder? Place buckets on the heads of all potential witnesses. Stupid potheads!

Some people master the art of exploiting silly AI and physics to perfection. Take a look at this stuff:

Stupid or not, it's lots of fun. Get paid a nice amount of gold for returning some ancient relic to the local shopkeeper, steal the relic right back and fence it to the thieves' guild for even more cash. Be sneaky or use a bucket, it's really up to you. And that applies to just about anything in the game. You just play any way you want without having to worry about whether or not your character is gonna be good at it. You wanna get better at sneaking and backstabbing? Wear light armor, bring a dagger and sneak and backstab. Don't like it? Grab a staff and a spellbook and toast some shit. I'll admit I was sceptical when I read about how Skyrim removes the traditional class and attribute-based character development they used in previous games, but it all plays out fine. Just do what you want, master whatever abilities and play style suit you best.

And that form of freedom applies to every aspect of the game. Become a werewolf or a vampire (the series featured that sort of stuff long before there was shit like Twilight around), join the guild of thieves or assassinate assorted dipshits in the name of the Dark Brotherhood. Join the Empire or the Stormcloak rebellion and fight in the civil war. Or just run around, explore, fight your way through the dungeons as you discover them and don't give a shit about any of the factions and guilds. Buy a house, settle down and get married! For whatever reason you'd actually want to do that...

She's almost sexy. If you ignore her being a cat and all.

It's not the most fun or spectacular thing I've ever done in any game, but having the option is still nice.  Basically, it started with me downloading some female cat companion NPC. Because my character is a tom cat, he should have a girl cat with him, that kind of thing. And the guy who created that cat has picked the creepiest, scariest face I've ever seen on any character of that race, but when I saw her in that ragged, desert-warrior kind of Redguard outfit, hacking everything to bits with stereo sabers, I thought she was cool. So I thought why the hell not and dragged her to the church of Mara, then I put some nicer clothes and some epic new sabres on her and carted her off to my house in Solitude. The whole scenic cart ride isn't actually part of the procedure but yet another mod, but I kinda like it. It's fun how my mount dutifully follows us for the journey. You don't actually see it in the video, but he even fought off the odd critter here and there. Oh yeah, video:

With my enthusiasm for MMOs fading, the upcoming Guild Wars 2 may or may not change my feelings about the whole thing. It's less than a month away now and I'm sure it's gonna be awesome. Do I want to spend all night and day on the battlegrounds of Tyria to dominate the shit out of random casual gamers? Nah. But I'm sure it's still gonna be great. And in the meanwhile, Skyrim really helps me pass the time.

-Cat

...and another one

:P

-Cat

Wahaha! Skyrim!

That is all.

-Cat

Cock Blogger

My penis is of average length and sports a rather impressive diameter. It is uncut and bent to the right by about 3 degrees. You probably didn't care for that sort of information. Oddly enough, many religious people strongly believe that god cares.

I wonder how that would even work. Imagine, a couple decades from now, Sir Elton John or maybe Tom Cruise guarding the gates of heaven. I mean, if god really hires somebody for that kind of thing, why not hire somebody who enjoys it, right? And then there's this poor, confused, newly-deceased guy approaching the gates. Let's call him Mr. Johnson, because that's funny.

Tom Cruise: "Penis, please!"
Mr. Johnson: "What? Where am I?"
TC: "Everything will be explained to you in time. May I see your penis, please."
J: "What? What's going on here? I was driving with my wife and kids and then this huge firetruck was heading towards us! What happened?"
TC: "Yes, tragic. I need you to drop your pants, sir."

So Mr. Johnson finally does as he is told, Tom Cruise gives him a quick inspection, then mumbles something into his headset. "I got another uncut one... mhm... yes... uh huh... right."
He inhales deeply and lets out a frustrated sigh. "Yes, you can put your pants back on now. One of our staff members will take care of you in a minute. Ah, there he is!"
And as the confused man pulls up his trousers, he sees a horned little demon approaching. You know, leathery wings, red skin, maybe he comes with a pitchfork and hooves and all that crap you imagine when you think of devils. And he grabs Mr. Johnson's arm and drags him off with supernatural strength. "Come on, unclean one. We have a special place in hell, just for freaks like you!"
Tom Cruise turns the other way, ignores the kicking and screaming, closes his eyes and quietly reflects on what he just saw. Tragic!

I have asked a Muslim friend about this whole circumcision deal and he told me it's done to remind us of our mortality. You know, cut off a piece, make us bleed, show us we're weak and fragile, life is precious, that kinda thing. Maybe that's how his parents explained it to him, maybe that's the official version, I don't know. I'm too lazy to google it. But let's go with his story for a bit - why do they have to remove a piece of your wang, of all things? Why not cut something that grows back, like a toenail? How the fuck did they come up with that whole thing? Did some proud parent inspect their newborn baby, then furrowed their brow and thought, 'wait a minute, this isn't perfect'? *snip* Aaaah! There we go! And by that logic, do all women automatically go to hell?

Of course there's also a non-religious explanation to all this: Hygiene. Right. If you're reading this blog right now, then there's a pretty good chance you live in a country where the nearest shower is less than 50 feet away from you. I'm not entirely sure what those hygiene freaks think I do all day with my uncut wang. Tenderize steaks? Bash my dick against them over and over again until the beef is all nice and flat and soft? Yeah, you wouldn't want blood and steak bits caught underneath that nasty foreskin. Maybe I'm gonna use my cock to bake a cake! You know, put some flour, eggs, butter and sugar in a pot and fuck the whole thing until the dough is ready. You'd probably want to be circumcised for this, so you don't get nasty crumbs everywhere.

Naturally, the other side of the fence is equally ridiculous. Apparently, some people are so crushed by the loss of their foreskin, they crave foreskin regeneration. There are whiny teenagers on internet forums, who claim they've been mutilated, raped even, because they got circumcised as babies. Because it's such a fucking huge deal and having a bit of skin cut off when you're too young to realize what is happening is just as awful as having someone screwing you against your will. Ouch. And why do I even know that some kids whine about that kind of thing on the internet? Well... I'm one creepy fucker.

-Cat

Final Fantasy XIV 2.0: Too good to be true?

When I got back into FFXIV roughly one week ago, I was a lowly level 33 gladiator. Now, thanks to my linkshell and an incredibly friendly, helpful community, I'm a level-capped paladin. Armor set and everything included:

It has been a surprisingly short and easy journey, filled with some utterly bad game design and some of the weirdest moments in my personal MMO history. I had a group of seven complete strangers agreeing to help me finish a dungeon, so I could complete one of my class quests. I told them I still had to go fetch the quest back in town, while everyone was waiting at the entrance. They didn't mind. My PC crashed. Heat issue. Couldn't log back on for ten minutes. I came back and they were still waiting. I didn't have the nearest teleport unlocked, so I had to run all the way to the dungeon from the other end of the map. They still didn't mind.

I have never met any of those people before, never joined them on any quests, dungeons or whatever. They waited for nearly a half hour, just to drag me through a dungeon, so I could finish a quest that nobody else had. They didn't even complain when I made them wait. I won't rule out the possibility that they were all friendly and helpful, because my character looks like some anime cat girl and everyone on this game still lives in the year 2005. I don't exactly end every sentence in "...and I have a cock." But when you're used to games like Age of Conan or WoW, this kind of friendly behaviour is almost a bit creepy.

The whole 'attractive female character must be played by attractive female gamer' logic creates some truly awkward moments. I had this guy in a party, who started telling me things such as, "I'm a very stressed man and I deal with my stress by helping others", clearly hoping for me to ask about his 'stress'. The same stressed man complained about having to do his homework in a message, which shouldn't have made it to party chat. Is that how guys flirt today? Was I that awkward and cheesy when I was a teenager? Hm. Nah, can't be. I've never been afraid to say what I think, no matter how wrong and inappropriate. You wouldn't believe how incredibly successful "wanna hold my cock?" is for a pickup line.

But enough about my penis. I'm about to waste a fourth paragraph on stuff, which has absolutely zero relevance to this entry's headline. So, how about a nice, fat extra line of text, which highlights that we're about to go back on topic? Like so:

2.0 - A whole new game!

2.0 beta screenshot

About one year ago, the greedy maggots who fucked up the launch have been replaced by a new team, consisting of 250 honourable Japanese guys, who devoted their lives to undoing the damage that had been done to the series by the steaming pile of horseshit known as Final Fantasy XIV. At first, their work felt like nothing more but damage control: Some new music here and there, a slightly improved combat system, a UI which is 5% less shit than the original one. The new jobs (classes) were neat and their armor sets are incredible, the battles against Ifrit and Garuda are pretty fun, but no matter how much you polish a turd - at the end of the day, it's still shit.

So I cleaned my reading glasses, poured another glass of wine, ignited my pipe and stroked my large, manly beard and asked myself: "What the fuck are those new guys doing, anyway?" Now, if you're a jerk, you'll just follow this link and click on all the PDFs at the bottom of the screen. Or you'll continue reading my blog, where I'll analyze and comment on all the crap that's shown in said PDFs.

What Square are about to do, is probably the ballsiest thing I've ever heard of: They're throwing the whole game away and start from fresh. They've decided that the game, in its current state, is so broken and so fucked up, that fixing it would be more complicated than just completely rewriting it from scratch. And I can't blame them. The current client won't let you change any graphical settings such as resolution or level of detail without actually exiting the game first. Minimizing from full screen causes the game to crash. And while the game features some of the best graphics you'll see in any MMO to date, it performs like shit. So they went ahead and wrote a whole new client software. New graphics engine, new servers, new everything. A whole new game in every way.

More to see

I could live without those guys, but oh well...

The new graphics engine will feature cool new stuff such as realistic realtime shadows, the possibility to change all your settings in-game like in every other fucking game out there and an actual, real UI with real action bars. They're even allowing addons, just like World of Warcraft. The new visuals will improve upon FFXIV's already impressive graphics, but scale better to older hardware and, most importantly, perform well on the Playstation 3. Beta Testing for the PS3 version is supposed to start sometime around the end of this year.
Seeing how FFXIV's spiritual predecessor allowed for cross-platform play for all users of the PC, Xbox360 and PS2-Versions, we may live in hope to see the same thing for 2.0.

But we're not just getting fancy new graphics. The already insanely detailed character creation options will see some new hairstyles and race-gender-combos such as male Mi'qote. A friend of mine has referred to this new option as 'Gayheaven', but if you've always dreamed about playing some pretty boy with cat ears, a tail and a massive axe, here's your chance. Since existing players don't wanna miss out on all the new features and characters will look slightly different with the new graphics engine, all current players will be allowed to re-customize their characters.

But they're not stopping with the characters. The entire game world will be rebuilt! The 3 dull, every-repeating, mind-numbingly boring landscapes from the original game? Gone! The current storyline, walls of incredibly stupid text and almost complete lack of speech in all cutscenes? Gone, gone and gone! 2.0 will feature a whole new story and speech in four different languages. The game world will be divided into smaller zones with more visual variety and more unique landscapes.


More to do

Dragoon vs Coeurl

Content-wise, we're looking at brand new dungeons, as well as team-based and arena-style pvp. They've announced a so-called 'Content Finder', which will allow you to team up with other players from every server for specific quests, instances and other activities. The abysmal trading system is getting a revamp and will finally feature an auction house and we'll finally be able to exchange mail with other players. They're also planning 'large scale pve' which could mean massive raid scenarios similar to Dynamis from FFXI. God, I hope it's not Dynamis. Just google it, look at what people have to say about it, look at it on Youtube, check out how awful it is. Let's not bring it back, mkay?

They're also mentioning summoning and pets. The previous game had a Beastmaster class, which had the power to control pets, wore heavy armor and split skulls with axes. Dragoons will most likely get their signature pet wyverns, which could be named and customized to some extent in the previous game. With all these new features, the release of new playable classes are really just a matter of 'when', not 'if'. Ninjas and dual-wielding may finally make it into the game - fingers crossed!
Prime baddies like Ifrit will become summonable by so-called Player Companies, which will also be a new feature. Players may create said companies for certain benefits and goodies, most of which are yet to be announced. They're likely to work like guilds on other games, but with stricter rules than Linkshells. Oh and did I mention they're adding the ability to fucking jump?

Can 2.0 really work?

The jump attack is the Dragoon's signature move

Final Fantasy XIV was such a massive failure, even the guys at Square admit it has seriously damaged the name of the series. Any reasonable publisher would have shut it down for good. Not just re-launched some crappy F2P-Version but completely killed the whole thing and pretended it never happened. But they didn't. They scrapped the monthly subscription fees for a whole year. They said the game is so shit, they cannot possibly charge people for playing. And they've been working on improving it ever since. All this time, the game has cost them money.
To actually get people interested, the game will be free again for several months. Distribution of 2.0 is supposed to start in early October and playing it will remain completely free until early 2013! There is no risk here, you can try it for free and you don't waste any money on something you'll hate.

And it looks like they've finally learned what people expect from their MMOs: A cross-server content finder, UI-mods and addons, pvp, more dungeons, pets, mounts, more of everything. An actual game instead of a dull, lifeless game world, where your biggest worry is repairing your fucking underpants or spending 2 hours baking a million cakes to level up your cooking skill. Where you spend most of your time finishing quests, killing baddies and enjoying the actual content instead of waisting a full 30 minutes on figuring out how to fucking get there.

They're actually turning this whole thing into a real game! They can't afford to screw this up again. They don't want FFXIV to be known as the black sheep of the series, the worst game of them all, the massive failure, that disappointed and alienated so many fans. And in order to fix that, Square will have to release one hell of a product, something that truly blows people away or, at the very least, does everything it promises to do and is good enough to draw players back in!
And they know that. You don't revive a horrid game only to screw it up again. You don't blow out heaps of cash to fix a train wreck, then do a half-assed job at it. This is it. This relaunch will either turn the whole thing into an incredible game or they can shut it down for good.

But can it really work out? For all we know, work on 2.0 has been started little more than one year ago. The game is supposed to feature all the stuff you'd expect from games such as WoW. But even with a massive team of 250 people - how much can you really create within just one year? How many of these promised features will really make it into 2.0 right away and how much stuff will be added later, possibly another year or more after the reboot?

When this game was originally released, there were no mounts, no airships, no dungeons... the whole thing was unfinished and lacking in every aspect. If 2.0 comes out lacking most features again, the community will be rightfully pissed off. Logic suggests, they'll try to cram as many new features into the game as somehow possible. No proper beta testing, no time for a lengthy QA stage, they're releasing this sucker pretty much straight away. They must be incredibly confident with their product or incredibly desperate and stupid.

And with a more modern, possibly more western approach, can the game really remain unique and stand out? With a dungeon finder, pvp rewards and all the pets, mounts and other stuff you see in every other game, will 2.0 have any cool, innovative features at all or is it doomed to become yet another WoW clone? And can pvp really work in this game? Anyone familiar with the classes will know that the majority of them are so specialised, they'll be practically useless in pvp without some major balance changes. And balancing pvp vs pve is something no MMO has really executed well.

Their plans and promises sound awesome. The screenshots look incredible. But we've seen this all before - back when the game first launched. At least this time we get to try before we buy. Let's hope Square can restore our faith in them.

-Cat