On the subject of peaks...

Yeah I know it’s late. I’ve been busy. Took me a while to decide on a topic for this blog, and then things kinda fell together based on recent experiences and decisions I’ve made. Sounds a bit profound really, but I doubt you’ll be thinking that at the end of the blog :P

For the last, well, couple of years really, I’ve tried to get into games that weren’t Final Fantasy XI: Online or World of Warcraft. I tried Guild Wars, but despite how lush it is to look at, it couldn’t hold my attention due to a shoddy (in my opinion) combat system. I tried Lord of the Rings: Online, but again, while it was very pretty (especially on decent machine) it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen in WoW — though I admit, emotes for /smoke and the player music system were kinda cool. Again, it couldn’t hold my attention.

I used to pour hours of my life into FFXI, and still do on WoW, but there is only so often you can complete the same daily quest or spend looking for a group for an instance/party. I used to spend my WoW time while waiting for instances exploring the world of Azeroth and Outland, flying or riding literally to every corner of the map to see what I could see, often risking drowning or an incredibly long and tedious journey back. Sometimes that peninsula at the bottom of the map held secret places full of creatures you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. Other times it was a dead end where no one was expected to really go. Either way, there was always something to see.

Until, y’know, I ran out of things to see.

I’ve always liked game graphics. I’m an artist, and I’m really into character and architecture/landscape design for these kinds of things. I get annoyed when I read forum posts for WoW where people moan that there isn’t enough individuality, or this, that, or the other is just a recolour of some other model. Rather than focusing specifically on stats and epics and individuality, people should take a look around them at overall scope and design of the world their imaginary characters inhabit. Yeah, we all like to be individual. We like to look cool. And yes, sometimes Blizzard’s item set designers go for the supposedly “lazy” route and do recolour sets. So what!? You don’t HAVE to get those items you don’t like the look of. If you want it so that you’ve got the best equipment, then you’re doing it for the stats surely?

One thing that appeals to me about the Korean “grind-fest” MMOs is that, much like Guild Wars, your character class really dictates the outfits you wear. There is a very stylish approach to equipment — it’s pretty much all cosmetic — which is completely different to how WoW does it. Even in FFXI, there has been a real drive over the last 2 expansions to enable players to collect stylistically cohesive sets of equipment: starting with Artefact armour and Race-Specific-Equipment, and branching out to new sets for Assault, Conquest, whatever (I’m a bit out of touch these days). Getting one’s final piece of AF at lv.60 and being able to wear the full set was a gratifying experience, even if the set didn’t always suit your character model very well. Spence’s Elvaan warrior looked very, very daft, for example.

I’ve been looking at a lot of concept art for games such as Lineage II and Rappelz lately, and there are some very distinctive things about their style. Their character designs are obviously more Eastern in appearance, but there is a certain western sensibility about the outfits and architecture in places — slowly the cultural reservations over clothing are being broken down by Westernised notions that yes, sex sells.

I downloaded Rappelz and had a quick bash to see what it was like, and it was less the game and more certain aspects of animation and character design that struck me.

Namely, that the female characters are all remarkably well endowed.

This brings me on to the first of two observations related to this month’s hot new MMO: Age of Conan. It is receiving a lot of hype, especially by less mature people, about how it is the new WoW-beater and would improve on everything that WoW does. I’ll probably discuss this in a later blog as I discover more similarities between the two games, but today I’m focusing on characters and visuals.

I was messing around with the character creation options yesterday afternoon, and try as I might, I simply couldn’t create a female avatar who looked…well…normal? Don’t get me wrong, I’m really impressed with the customisation options in AoC, but if I’m going to create an Assassin character, I just have issues with said character having *huge* pendulous breasts. Sure from what I’ve seen on the other characters I have, said breasts are animated very well, and seem to move quite naturally — unlike the over-inflated balloons in games such as Dead or Alive or Rappelz (where individual breasts seem to be bigger than characters’ heads) but I’d expect more control. Yes, there *is* a Breast Slider as well as a Chest Slider. So you can have smaller breasts on a wide torso, or vice versa, but my point still stands. Compare these 3 extreme “defaulted” body types:



I’ve almost always painted fantasy women with large breasts, simply due to my perception that this is a convention of the genre — but it is a perception that I’ve spent much of the last year breaking out from. There’s at least one girl I’m very fond of who can prove to me that women can look sexy, enticing, and alluring without having two water melons bouncing around in their bras.

So yes, while I applaud Funcom for their customisation options in AoC (there really is a LOT you can do to individualise your avatar) I wish it broke the fantasy mould a little further. The characters truly are beautiful works of art (I’ll illustrate when I can), with fairly slick animations, but the female avatars do seem to adhere too much to the teenage boy syndrome of “bigger boobs are better” — no offense intended to people who don’t share my particular lack of enthusiasm about large breasts: I recognise that this is individual taste.

Compare these screenshots for a taste of what I mean:



So that’s my rant about boobs over.

I want to end up with some pictures of peaks of a different kind. Going back to things I like to do and see: I like landscapes and sweeping scenery, vistas in my games. This was one thing LotRo did very well. The landscapes were very pretty if your machine could handle it. AoC does extremely well too. The land that it paints is dark, dismal, with Pict and Vanir bodies dismembered and hung up on pikes, people hanging from rafter beams in forgotten city alleyways, ground splattered with blood.

But it also has views like these taken from the top of a mountain. At the bottom of the mountain the Vanir (Viking-types) have set up camp, hiding in trees and rude tents. As I went up the mountain the scenery changed and you could almost *feel* the air getting fresher and brighter. Pity about the cobwebs and spiders that lurked here. *shudder*



And then as I went even further up, the ground started icing over and I suddenly got to appreciate just how much effort had been put in as the textures blended together, the footstep sounds turned to that lovely crunching sound of walking on crisp snow, and the view turned out like this. Couldn’t help myself. Had to take a couple of screenshots.



I don’t know what the same view would look like on a lesser rig (and remember, mine isn’t anything hugely special!) though I imagine that there would be a fair amount of fogging at a lesser draw distance, but either way I was impressed with my view from this mountain.

Life in General

As for life, my back is getting better now. Not much twitching unless I’m teaching, when it does tend to get a bit strained. Doing this coming Friday at Pensnett which should be easy enough, though it IS the last day of the half term so I shouldn’t get my hopes up too much I don’t think. Then in the evening we’re off into Wolverhampton to see the new Indiana Jones movie, which I’m hoping will be excellent. Someone has suggested that we go in fancy dress as characters/archetypes from the movies. If only I had the money to accessorise!! Still, I shall go as some Marcus Brody-type bumbling academic and hope that it passes as fancy dress more than “don’t you wear that to work anyways?!” >_>

-Blog Ends-