Bear models in WoW

The new bear models are driving me crazy. I think that the variety in models is a great idea. However, their hindlimbs are completely wrong and their butts should not be sticking up in the air. To whit, this is what a bear looks like from the side:


Notice that the back is close to flat, and that the shin of the back leg runs directly into the foot. In most mammals the only elements of the hindlimb that touch the ground when walking or running are the toes. If you have a dog or cat you should know what I'm talking about. However, bears along with primates (including humans) and a handful of other mammals have plantigrade hindlimb designs. The hindfoot consists of both the toes and ankle (running between them).

Here we have the World of Warcraft druid bear model:


Look closely at the back leg. Notice how the line of it bends three times, once just above the foot? That's because the skeletal design is non-plantigrade. As a side effect of adding this extra span of articulation to the hind leg, that shouldn't be there in the first place, the bear's butt sticks way up in the air. It makes druid bears look as if they are in lordosis at all times. This is a characteristic posture that females of rats and many other mammal species enter into when they are ready to mate (not to be confused with the medical condition of lordosis). Hips high and rotated.

Color me anal, but the hind quarters of the WoW bear model bug me. Druid is one of the classes I was really hoping to get into in my retry of WoW. The fact that my bear form is anatomically way off and begging to be molested at all times pretty much ruins it for me.

Update

My PC is indeed still under warranty. One way or another I'll be back on with a decent rig by the end of the month. Missing most of the CO early start was a bummer. I was playing two slight updates of my open beta characters and enjoying the hell out of them before my PC croaked. Of course given the nerf cannon that was recently applied to the game, it seems as if I would have been in for some anguish regardless.

One quote that really bugs me in that producer letter is "A good number of players were complaining that the game wasn't challenging enough." I find this hard to believe, given that players almost never complain when they are overpowered. It has been remarked by folks more knowledgeable than I that the surest sign that a class is overpowered is that no-one that plays the class is complaining about it on message boards. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I also find it hard to believe that many players were complaining about the easy of combat in CO because it's a Superhero MMO, you should feel overpowered. Finally, the current most popular MMO on the market, WoW, is if anything easier than CO was during the open beta and early start. I know this because I switched back and forth between them in the same weekend (below).

I strongly suspect that what really happened is that Cryptic got terrified of how quickly players were leveling during the early start weekend, and decided that they needed to put on the brakes a bit. They tried nerfing XP gains in the last days of beta, and players whined up a storm. So instead, they buffed minion damage and nerfed defense across the board to slow down the pace of combat. Both inelegant solutions that won't have much impact on the core problem they are trying to deal with: superhardcore players will likely gun through the game and leave in droves withing the next few weeks.

I personally don't see that as such a bad thing, though the bean counters at Cryptic surely will feel differently. To me the strengths of CO are in catering to casual players and alt whores. It just not the style of game that hardcore players are going to dig long term, regardless of how long it takes to level. Hopefully things will have settled into some sort of sane medium by the time I get back to the game.

For the time being, desperate for something my backup PC can play at decent framerates and still run i-tunes in the background, I have fired up my old WoW account again. I had fun running around and buying everyone mounts and epic mounts. I also liquidated a level 62 character (my second highest) because his finances were in such terrible shape.

One thing that is really striking to me when I play WoW now is that the combat difficulty tends to be binary. Either encounters are so easy that you wouldn't have a chance of dying were you drunk and half asleep during combat (this has been tested!), or they are impossible at your level. There is nothing like the happy medium that you can find in most MMOs. For example, in Champions Online (at least over the weekend and in open beta) any time you are in a fight that includes a villain or master villain the game hits a "challenging but not frustrating" medium really well. Combat in general in LoTRO is also a good example of that in my mind.

WoW simply offers no real challenge for a solo player these days, at least not by the mid to high levels where most of my toons are sitting. Good for new MMO players I imagine, but to my tastes it becomes stale and repetitive quickly. I'm hoping that restarting one of my mains as a level one character of a super squishy class (Mage) will provide some entertainment.

Things looking up for Champions Online, and other quick news hits

Among the bloggers that I follow, there were two in particular I was waiting on to give their impressions of Champions Online. Anjin, of Bullet Points, is a fan of comic books as well as MMOs. Sente, of A Ding World, is the most hardcore City of Heroes fan I follow. Both Sente and Anjin have posted their initial impression of the open beta, and are pretty positive. In fact, the the buzz on the net has completely turned around for this game. In addition, the open beta is truly open now (at least until Fileplanet runs out of beta keys). To me that signals confidence in the product on the part of Cryptic, and I think it's a great move. Hopefully, I'll be able to get one of the keys before Fileplanet runs out so I can stick my head in and form my own opinions.

In other news, to the surprise of few save Tobold, the leaked WoW expansion rumors turned out to be true. The expansion will certainly get me back to try things out, but my urge to play the current game has pretty much vanished. Obviously a goblin mage will will be the best character type to play (particularly if they have a flying carpet and a swami hat!)...why even bother leveling any of my existing toons?

Finally, City of Heroes is getting Issue 16 about the same time that CO launches. The main theme of the patch is that heroes will be able to customize the color of their powers. For example, if you are a blaster type that shoots lightning, you can make it any color you like. Unfortunately, CO offers this option right out of the box..which sort of steals their thunder in my mind.

Most MMO gamers like WoW more than your MMO: Deal with it

A lot of MMO commentators seem pretty hostile to World of Warcraft and the players that dig it. For example, Syncaine's popularization of the term "WoW tourist" to describe former WoW players that try out new MMOs, and then leave when they decide they don't like them as much as WoW. It sometimes feels as if the hardcore enthusiasts that have been playing since the glory days of EQ are at war those that came in on WoW and prefer it to other MMOs (newer or older). If there is indeed a war being waged, I would suggest that it is a futile one. The "sheep" have spoken, and they have won.

You can rant and rave and call WoW the "McDonald's/ Brittany Spears" of the MMO genre as much as you like. The fact of the matter is that the bulk of gamers that are willing to play $15 a month for a game like WoW better than any other MMO they've tried. The masses have spoken, and they like their MMOs easy, fast paced, relatively shallow, and with a very over the top design aesthetic. They don't care about the prose in quest text, they don't care about cohesive lore, they don't care how useful the crafting system is, and they don't care whether any attempt is made to blend zones together into a cohesive world.

What really brought this home to me was actually the most recent NPD chart. The number two selling MMO in North America in January was Warhammer Online, hanging in tough at number 14 more than two months after release. If these sales keep up, WAR will quite likely be the next sub based MMO to cross the 1 million threshold. Among the features it shares with WoW are (1) an over the top design aesthetic, (2) easy questing (red blobs on the map for cris sakes!), (3) fast paced leveling, (4) crafting system that yields many borderline useless items, (5) quest text that is (for the most part) utterly forgettable, (6) a world that sacrifices cohesion for playability.

I'm not saying that WoW or WAR bite (far from it), or that WAR is a clone of WoW (WAR actually has far superior PvP and very different class designs). What I'm saying is the features that they have in common seemingly embody what most MMO players want, at least based on sales. And I think it's about time we (i.e., the crusty MMO enthusiasts that have been playing since the glory days of EQ) all got over it and moved on. I'm really starting to get tired of MMO commentators that rail against the "mindless WoW masses" whenever the moderately-successful-to-niche MMOs they happen to like prove unappealling to the bulk of MMO gamers.

Most MMO players just don't like the same things as you. Deal with it.

Is EVE a "better" game than WoW?

I started typing out a long winded response to this post over at Hardcore Casual (you can see a much snittier one further up in the comments), but decided I wanted to turn it into a blog post. One of the points made in the Hardcore Casual post is that, like McDonald's, the popularity of WoW says little about it's overall quality. However that misses the fact that popularity is one of a very few objective criteria by which competing products can be ranked.

For example . . .

Objective Criteria

Popularity: McDonald's and WoW win over most competing products.

Financial success: McDonald's and WoW win over most competing products.

Pooled ratings of professional critics: This is the closest thing that we have to an objective measure of "quality." However it cannot be equated to quality. The opinions of critics are also subjective, and are often overturned by the historians and critics of future generations. See the initial reaction to Stravinsky's the Rite of Spring, for example. When it get's right down to it, "quality" is always a somewhat subjective, and often context dependent. The best sport's car in the world is a useless piece of junk compared to a reliable jeep for many (if not most) humans.

In any case, McDonald's is a big loser in this category. Almost any town will have some place to dine that would be better regarded by food critics than McDonald's. However, here again WoW wins over most competing products. Few MMOs have ever received gamerankings or meta-critic scores in the ballpark of WoW.

From all of this we can see that WoW is superior to EVE (and indeed most MMOs) by several obvious objective criteria. But at this point the fans of EVE will be crying foul, because all of the criteria I listed depend somewhat on popularity and prevailing opinion. And we all know that popular things are rarely "the best" (unless of course by best you mean most popular, profitable, or highly rated by critics...).

So that brings us to . . .

Subjective Criteria (wherein analogies to food are dropped).

Innovation: Innovation is in the eye of the beholder. Any new MMO has some innovative features (if however minor), and many features found in past products. How do we weight the sum total of innovations in competing products? And what counts as an innovation, exactly? Does something have to be 100% new to be an innovation, or does an improvement to an existing system count? What about integrating old systems that have never coexisted in the same product, is that an innovation? What about bringing an off-line game concept online, is that innovation?

Many have argued that WoW is not innovative because it contains few core mechanics not found in previous MMOs. Others have argued that creating a game that is easy to pick up and play, that has solo friendly quest driven leveling, and is generally user friendly and polished is itself an innovation. That alone shows that there is no widely accepted functional definition of "innovative" when applied to MMO design. EVE is widely regarded as innovative. However, the single largest innovation is that the entire game takes place on a single server. And that's only innovative if you don't count MUDs.

Even if we accept that EVE is more innovative than WoW, is innovation really the most important factor in deciding whether one game is "better" than another? If that's the case, Puzzle Pirates and Endless Forest are arguably better than either EVE or WoW.

Quality: Again, it depends on what criteria you choose to apply. Even criteria that seem objective, such as "lack of game breaking bugs" can be hard to quantify. Some bugs clearly are game breakers, for example not being able to log on. However, some bugs are annoyances to some players and game breakers to others. Where do we draw the line?

More importantly, does quality include whether a game is fun? Since the primary purpose of most games is to serve as entertainment, I certainly believe it should. If so, quality is obviously subjective.

Value: Usually understood as the ratio of price to quality. However, quality is subjective.

Fun: The only criterion that matters to me in the slightest. And what constitutes fun is obviously completely and utterly in the eye of the beholder. One man's fun is another man's torture. See rep grinding in WoW and Mining in EVE.

So in summary . . .

By three obvious objective criteria WoW is a superior game to EVE. Of course by two out these three criteria McDonald's is also practically the best food in the world, right up there with bread and rice. By several subjective criteria, EVE might be better than WoW. Depends on who you ask.

You may be thinking that I am a fan of WoW at this point. That actually couldn't be further from the truth. A lot of the subjectives absolutely ruin WoW for me. I wouldn't log into WoW or EVE even if it were free, much less be willing to pay for the privilege.

The only point I'm trying to make, is that the only way a niche title with mediocre review scores like EVE online can be considered objectively superior to a game like WoW is if you think your subjective opinion is the only criterion worth considering. Of course, I suppose a lot of bloggers and message board ranters do feel that way.