Stumbling Into War in the Pacific

I said I would get to this in the April month in review post.

I ended up owning War in the Pacific in the usual way these things come to pass.  In this case a friend has been posting to twitter about an epic, full war campaign they have been playing.

War in the Pacific: Admiral’s Edition

As is often the case, when watching or reading about somebody else playing a game, my immediate thought is, “I want to play too!”  I am bad at watching people stream video games.  If I own the game, I tend to stop and go play it myself instead.  If I don’t, I end up tabbing out and looking into the game.  A while back I had been watching videos about people playing IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad and had to suppress the urge to go buy it and try it out.

Anyway, as I was watching the Twitter threat unfold, the virtual campaign moving along almost in real time to the actual war, but taking different twist, I became invested and wanted to try it myself.

The title is available from Matrix Games, which specializes in war game niche.  The price of the game, however, is $80, which is a bit much for me to drop on a whim.  But then on Easter weekend they had a big sale and I violated the standard purchase limitation rule and bought something after 8pm on a Friday night because I was a bit bored.

And now I am wondering what I have gotten myself into.

Development work on the game started back in 2003 and the goals set for it were highly ambitious.  Creating the game was quite a trial, or so I have read, and it finally released in 2009.

In 2015 the game got an overhaul, and is now referred to as War in the Pacific: Admiral’s Edition to distinguish it from the original release.

I knew that in advance and was prepared for some bad UI design.  War games are a niche market and few developers will worry about horrific interface choices getting in the way of the simulation they are trying to achieve.  Even more mainstream titles, like the Hearts of Iron series has been known do things like scroll information past you and off screen before you can read it.

And I was not disappointed.  WitP has a UI that feels like a war game from the turn of the century in many ways.

What I was not prepared for was the difficulty in figuring out how to play.  Not how to play well, or to know all the options, but how to play at all.

There is no tutorial, no simple scenario, or other “babby’s first campaign” option, unless you count jumping into the battle for the Coral Sea or the Guadalcanal campaign as such.  I am not sure they should count, even if their scope is reduced from fighting the whole war against Japan.

The basic scenario options

Nor is there a manual or any sort of guide to get you started, so I have spent a considerable amount of time just figuring out what to do in a very basic, mechanics sense.  Turn based games tend to have a cycle of play, a series of steps like “supply, orders, movement, combat, resolution, start again,” and it is clear that WitP follows that general idea.  But the game is opaque enough that I cannot quite grab onto it.

Again, I am not struggling to play well, I am struggling to play at all.  I would be happy to play badly but at least feel like I had some grasp of the turn cycle and basic mechanics.

But this is what the internet if for, right?  My ability to fix things as a home owner is directly proportional to how many YouTube videos exist related to whatever is broken.  And there is a very passionate community around WitP, so there is lots of material to explore.  There are some community patches that fix some issues, make the map more readable, and even a utility to set up the launch alias to set it to the right screen resolution and settings.  Unfortunately, when it comes to actual game play I have yet to find the right bit of material.

What I have run into tends to either be strategy and tactics that assumes you know what the hell you’re doing at a basic level, which I clearly do not, or so basic and introductory as to leave me feeling I have made little progress.  I spent two hours watching a series of videos that went through the basic premise, the map, icons, and the types of units each side has access to, but which never once actually played a turn of the game.

I saw a bit of advice that suggested I pick one the smaller scenarios and set it to play through with both sides run by the AI.  This is kind of a neat feature.  The AI is said to be good and you can use the scenario editor to create situations and watch the AI battle it out as kind of an observers view.  You can turn off the fog of war even to see what both sides are up to.

The basic game play options

Unfortunately the AI doesn’t use the UI to give orders, set ship courses, select patrol areas, or any of the other many bits and pieces of the game.  It does that in the background, so you can see the results, but the mechanics, the simple “how to” bit is missing.

Anyway, I am not giving up yet.  I put a bit of time in now and then trying to get over the hump that separates me from feeling like I am playing the game.  I am still looking for that tutorial or description that will get me into it.

A Flawed Profile in Gamer Motivation

Another set of shared posts started in the Blapril Discord channel around the Nick Yee/Quadratic Foundry gamer motivation profile quiz, and I was going to simply give it a pass.  After all, I had done that back in 2015 and then again as part of Blaugust last year.

But then I read the post from Bhagpuss on the whole thing and decided that I needed to take the quiz again right then and there if only to prove a point or two.  So I opened up a fresh Chrome session in privacy mode and ran off to take the quiz.  I already have a profile there but didn’t want to be tainted by anything I had done in the past.

One quiz later and the results were mine.  I am “Aggressive, Spontaneous, Gregarious, and Grounded” according to my answers.

My profile summary graph – May 2020

Just eight months back during Blaugust I was “Calm, Driven, Gregarious, and Grounded,” and had this chart.

My profile summary graph – August 2019

And about four years earlier, back in June 2015, I was “Calm, Spontaneous, and Grounded,” according to my answers, with the following graph.

My profile summary graph – June 2015

I guess there is a common theme in “grounded,” though that may be due to wearing a static strap while taking the quiz.  You cannot be too careful!

So what is going on here?  Is the quiz garbage?  Am I a liar, and an inconsistent one at that?

Maybe some of both?

That the quiz is garbage isn’t a hill I am willing to die on.  But I will stick with the idea that the quiz, like much in the realm of the social sciences, is trying to measure complex things via simple parameters.

And while I am demonstrably an unreliable narrator when I speak of my own motivations, I would contend that is because said motivations are not simple, but are often complicated, interdependent, and contextual.

So when I get a question like this about story absent any sort of context, there isn’t really any clear choice.

How important is this to me?

In a lot of games it isn’t important, or it is something that is organic to the game and develops over time.  There isn’t a whole lot of story in RimWorld or Civilzation V or Minecraft other than what you make.

In other games, like EverQuest II, there is a lot of rich story going on that I tend to skip pass.  I am at the quest giver saying, “Cool story bro, but just tell me who you need killed already.”  I honestly cannot tell you any of the big story arcs for any of the expansions in any but the most simple terms, if at all.

I am a little better in World of Warcraft, where I can at least tell you the major plot line of most of the expansions, but I still tend to read the quest objectives on the way rather than listening to any NPC tales.  Just give me the damn quest Anduin!

But in a game like Diablo III I am all about the story, which is part of why the post story seasons don’t do much for me.  Slaughter and levels upon levels and piles of gold don’t mean much as the context in which the really mattered has passed.

So if I am playing a Civ game, it is not important, if I am playing Diablo III it is extremely important, and if I am playing WoW or LOTRO is is somewhat important.  So what is my answer supposed to be then?  As with a lot of questions I went for the middle ground, which you can interpret as a shoulder shrug and append the phrase, “I guess” to the end.

And that is how I felt about a lot of the quiz.  Absent the anchor of a specific situation, my answer is always going to feel uncertain.  It is like asking me how important strawberries are to me.  I like strawberries, and they seem essential if we’re talking about a strawberry shortcake or strawberries and cream, but maybe less so if we’re talking about nuclear proliferation or civil rights.

It is thus easy to argue yourself into the position that everything on the list is not important at all.  Nobody is going to die if the storyline of your game is insufficiently elaborate.

Without context the questions are meaningless, and the quiz is no fun if you you just wet blanket the whole thing, so what happens to me is that I start to think of context where the thing in question is more or less important to me.

But those are all thoughts of the moment, and if I took the quiz in another two weeks I bet I would come up with a different set of contexts that would alter my answers.  I took the quiz less than an hour ago and, as an example, I cannot remember what came to my mine around this question regarding being an agent of chaos.

Not an Agent of KAOS

Right now I can come up with context that get me to any of the response options, but I cannot even recall the answer I gave, which at least implies I did not weigh it heavily.  It was very much in the moment.  And given that the only common thread in my three results is being “grounded,” which sounds like the opposite of being an agent of chaos, I almost feel like there should be a slider for how serious an answer should be taken.

I think the only thing I picked as extremely important was about explosions and blowing things up, which was probably my most visceral response.  But I don’t know how much of an indicator it really is.  Blowing things up for me tends to apply mostly to EVE Online or maybe Minecraft when I have some dynamite.

At the end of the quiz, once you get your score, you can then go to the game recommendations page.  My theory is that if you have answered all the questions correctly… yeah, what does that even mean… the recommendation results should include at least a few games you know and like in the top results.  According to the site, the results are based on the favorite games of the 1,000 people whose answers were closest to your own, so it gets around the whole “is the quiz even valid” and gets straight to “garbage in, garbage out” for results.

For the last two sets of answers I got the following recommendations:

Balanced (2020 / 2019):

1. Elite: Dangerous / No Man’s Sky
2. Borderlands 3 / FTL: Faster Than Light
3. Factorio / ARK: Survival Evolved
4. Subnautica / Factorio
5. Fallout Shelter / Cities: Skylines
6. Kerbal Space Program / Subnautica
7. Portal (series) / Terraria
8. Civilization (series) / Portal (series)
9. Rise of the Tomb Raider / RuneScape
10. Half-Life 2 / The Sims (series)

Not completely off the mark I suppose.  I own a bunch of those games, and certainly Civilization would make the cut and I guess RuneScape is an MMORPG, but there is nothing on the list I am playing a lot of lately.

“Balanced” refers to the relative popularity of a given title in people’s lists overall.  You can also see just “Popular” games or you can open it up to “Niche” games.  Going with “Popular” makes the list less likely for me. The Fallout series dominates as individual titles.

Going with “Niche” does get my Lord of the Rings Online on one list, and RimWorld makes the other, but it puts Cookie Clicker at the top of one of them and WTF is that doing on any list of mine?

Now I am curious to know what answers would get me to EVE Online or World of Warcraft as a top ten recommendation, even in the “Niche” category.  I want to reverse engineer this, to figure out which buttons I need to click to get an answer that matches a game I am currently playing and then evaluate whether those answers really fit me, even if it is only in the context of a specific game.

All of which seems to make this quiz and its results a good conversation piece or a starting point for some self-reflection, but it doesn’t seem to provide anything that one might qualify as a solid answer

Anyway, if you want to see the results and responses from other bloggers, Jeromai over at Why I Game has the list of links you are looking for.

Daybreak Rumor Review

Just over a year ago I wrote about a series of Daybreak rumors that had been posted to Reddit by an alleged disgruntled former employee who had just been laid off.  The original Reddit post has since been scrubbed.  No doubt somebody was reminded about their NDA, an action which I think actually adds more credence to the whole thing.

The eye follows you as you move about the room! Or it will with the next update.

Anyway, as I said then, we could not measure the veracity of the claims, so all we could do is watch and see what came to pass.  Forward looking rumors based on plans of the moment have an expiration date and, generally, the further time moves along the less likely they are to match reality.

Fortunately a year ago I had the foresight to record these rumors before they were disappeared.  Back then I ordered them by how much each particular rumor meant to me, which put EverQuest things at the top and H1Z1 at the bottom.  This time around I am going to sort them into baskets based on accuracy.   So let’s take a look at what happened over the past year.

Came to Pass

These are the items that I think arguably happened.  Maybe not exactly as stated, but close enough to count.

Just Survive is on its last legs. Several ideas for increasing profits have been floated around but at this point it looks like a sunset is most likely.

I don’t think this was much of a surprise.  I believe I had predicted this for 2018.  There was some talk about maybe finding a way to keep it going, but in the end it was shut down.

Planetside 3 is in early development. Other teams will be siphoned into this project next year. This will be a team based battle royal game that combines the building aspect of Fortnite with territory acquisition.

While it is called PlanetSide Arena and not PlanetSide 3, I think that otherwise came to pass.  They may have been calling it PlanetSide 3 internally at that point.  Lord knows I’ve been through product name changes late in development cycles, which is why you don’t create file names with the product name in them.

Maybe Sort Of

These are the items that seemed to have come to pass, but the details given were off by enough that maybe something changed, or maybe the person predicting had incomplete or out of date information.

H1Z1 will get a smaller map as well as a remake of “Z1”. The PS4 port is looking good. After that new skins will continue to be released but most of the team will be moved over to Planetside 3.

I am pretty sure this came to pass.  As with the previous mention, PlanetSide 3 became PlanetSide Arena.  H1Z1 also clearly got its Z1 remake as well, except on the PlayStation 4, where it remains H1Z1.  However failing to mention NantWorks and NantG Mobile, essentially another company taking over development, at least lowers the accuracy score for this one a bit.  And certainly anybody left at Daybreak working on the PC version of H1Z1 ended up on other projects.  That the NantG Mobile thing failed with Z1 is beside the point.

Planetside 2 was supposed to be getting new character models and animations in May. A new map and an aircraft carrier are planned for the end of the year.

I am pretty sure this came to pass for the most part.  PlanetSide 2 got new stuff.  I just don’t care enough to go figure out if this is exactly what happened.

Seems Wrong

These are items that I believe straight up did not come to pass.  Whether they were never planned or circumstances changed I cannot tell, but a year down the road they just seem at odds with reality.

Everquest will have one last expansion. The 20th anniversary will introduce a series of nostalgic raids that tie into complex quests. These quests can be done in order to grant alternate characters powerful scaling weapons.

This was at the top of the “matters to me” list.  EverQuest being put in maintenance mode would have been a blow.  And perhaps that was the plan over a year ago.  However, with the EverQuest 20th anniversary and statements from Holly Longdale, any plans along those lines appear to have been overthrown.  It looks like we will be getting expansions and updates and special servers to farm nostalgia for some time to come according to her.

Everquest 2 will also have one last expansion and eventually a similar series of send-off weapon quests and raids.

As with EverQuest, it seems like this has not come to pass.  If nothing else we already have confirmation of another expansion for EverQuest II.  There was enough ambiguity in the whole thing that I did wonder at the time if the person meant the expansion for this year would be the last, but since we will have two expansions announced since this tidbit dropped I am going to call it wrong for now.

Of course, we did not get as much warm and fuzzy from Holly about EverQuest II as we did EverQuest.  EverQuest II just doesn’t have the same sense of history or nearly the same large fan base to be farmed for nostalgia dollars.  But I think it is good for now, and maybe Holly will talk up what I have referred to as the “Prince Charles” of MMORPGs (ever in the shadow of the Queen Elizabeth that is EverQuest) when its fifteen year anniversary hits later this year.

I Just Do Not Know

And then we have we have the item about which we cannot say much.

Everquest 3 has been back in development for a year and is being rebuilt from the ground up. It aims to compete with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and to be the first fantasy MMORPG to put an emphasis on team battle royal PvP.

I have heard rumors of various incarnations of a new Norrath game since they put a bullet in EverQuest Next.  It was supposed to be a small co-op RPG at one point.  At others it was going to be just an updated EverQuest.  Making a Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen competitor seems plausible I suppose, though that seems like Daybreak really setting its sites low in the market.

The whole “emphasis on team battle royal PvP” seems like an abomination to me, but I guess in a world where Fortnite is king of course they want to put battle royale in all the things.  Of course, this was back when they thought they could revive H1Z1 by renaming it Z1 Battle Royale and before they pushed off the launch of PlanetSide Arena by six months or so.  So perhaps “more battle royale” has all the impact of “more cowbell” in San Diego at this point.

And then there is Holly Longdale, who seems to represent the faction that won the ideological war over what EverQuest franchise should be.  As part of the 20th anniversary she had some words about EverQuest Next and any possible new EverQuest game.

So there we go.  A bit of it was spot on.  Some of it was close.  And a few were off the reservation or unknowable.  Not an unexpected set of results.  Actually pretty decent so far as predictions go, at least when compared to my own.  And, as I noted, what was posted on Reddit may have reflected the plans as the person last heard them which may have changed over time as plans do.

The Never Ending Story of New Eden

I started off yesterday’s post about EVE Online’s fifteenth anniversary with a few points in the back of my brain that I wanted to cover.  I got through a few of them before I went sort of “onion on my belt” about things back in the day and warp to zero not being a thing and all.

That and memories of space

But I did not get to everything on my mental list.  If anybody asks if my posts are planned or accidental I think I can say, “Both!”

Anyway, a key item I wanted to mention was story.

As the years have gone by I have become ever more certain that story is one of the most important parts of an MMORPG.  Not necessarily the story on which the game is based however.  Sure, the fall of Arthas or the various re-tellings of the events around the Burning Legion make for fine backdrops for a game like World of Warcraft.  In fact, in a game where you have as little freedom of action or impact on the world as you do in WoW they may be essential threads from which to weave the tapestry that is the tale of any given character.

But in the end, the essentially piece, the compelling bit, is how you and your friends took part in the story.  That Archaedas was slain in Uldaman yet again is far less important to and individual player than the fact that their group did it and how they accomplished the feat. (In the case of our group, it was nearly 3am and I was excited enough that I woke up my wife in the other room.)

Which brings me to EVE Online and the importance of story there.

The game does not lack for lore.  It provides a backdrop of dates and events and names in which you can immerse yourself.  But that lore is like the props and backdrops of a play.  They can set tone, give you a feel for what is going on, even be part of the narrative.  But the important bit is what the actors themselves do.

And in New Eden the players are the actors.

Yes, you can make a career of wrestling with the props.  You can do what your career agent tells you to do, run missions ad naseum, and chase the epic arcs all by yourself, but statistically CCP says you’ll quit sooner rather than later.

Even opposing the endless efforts of Sansha Kuvakei to occupy space (mocked here on Reddit) will likely lead to boredom if you are looking for the game to give structure to your personal story.

In New Eden, as in a play, it is the story created by the players that is important.  They key to longevity in the game is having an ongoing story.  And there are many possibilities.  Stories are as diverse as the player base and being a part of a story is a compelling reason to stick around.

Story explains my connection with EVE Online, why I have left in the past and why I stick around now.  At various points in the first half of my time in the game I grabbed onto and then lost hold of a story that could keep me interested.  Often the story in question was a trip to a destination, like achieving mining perfection or succeeding with invention or making a billion ISK.

Moving to null sect in late 2011 changed that.  That move put me into a story that just keeps going.  It might be the biggest story of the game, the ongoing conflicts and over sized personalities of that part of the game.  It is the part of New Eden they write books about what the players are up to rather than the lore.

From the Dark Horse Comics telling of the Fall of Band of Brothers

Being a part of that story, seeing it in person, “being there” is a big part of what keeps me logging into the game.  It creates a considerable tolerance in me for the often mundane day to day operations that go on in null sec.  You never know when shooting a structure or dropping a citadel is going to be the start of a series of events that leads to a war starting or a coalition abandoning their space.  Even yelling at somebody can start a chain of events.

I am also pretty good with the time dilation lag fests that often describe big battles in the game.  Sure, it isn’t the game as we would have it in our ideal scenario, but it is the convergence for a short period of time of thousands of player stories into a single event.

Reinforcements bridge in at 6VDT-H

Even in defeat there are stories, stories I am happy to have been a part of, like the Imperium’s exodus from the north at the end of the Casino War.

Jay leads his people through Rakapas… unless they only had JDC4

But null sec isn’t the only story.  It is just the biggest, shiniest, and easiest to follow, played out on maps that you can follow via DOTLAN or the null sec influence maps.  It also suits my play time availability.  In a large group you don’t have to show up for every fleet.  I’d probably be considered a slacker in a wormhole corp, but am a respectable line member in a null sec coalition.

And so story is everywhere.  Every pirate corp, every wormhole group, every gank fleet, every industrial concern, and even those miner bumpers, they all have a their own story that keeps them going, their own narrative that defines who they are and why they log in.

I walk away from World of Warcraft at some point during almost every expansion because my story within the lines they have defined wears thin.  But I have remained subscribed and active every month since December 2011 in EVE Online, which has to be some sort of record for me.

Story is where it is at in New Eden.  ISK oils the wheels of conflict and enables action, but story is the engine that keeps the game moving forward.

And move forward it does.  It seems odd, but EVE Online is the only game I can think of that has a calendar that really seems to measure something.  Even TorilMUD had a calendar.  If you typed in “time” it would give you the time, day of the week, date, and month.  But the game didn’t change.

But in New Eden the year YC120 is different from YC119, which was different from the years before that.  The missions didn’t change.  That damsel is still in distress, worlds still collide, and you’re still being asked to avenge a fallen comrade.  The epic arcs didn’t change.  You still have to follow the same steps through them.  And Sansha Kuvakei sure didn’t change.  He is still launching his incursions time and again.

But the player stories all moved on.  Some new ones start, some old ones end, and the rest continue, maybe in a different part of space or facing different foes or competitors.  Maybe there are good days, successful ops or being well positioned in the market for a change, sometimes there are bad, but the story carries on so long as you want to be a part of it.