Tag: nostalgia

One Year Old!

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’m not usually one to celebrate milestones, but I think this one is worth sharing – Mana Obscura has made it to it’s first anniversary! It’s taken a fair bit of work to get this far, but it’s also been a lot of fun and incredibly worthwhile.

The blog started off on March 1st 2010 with this post. That initial scrawl set the scene for what has been a strange and often chaotic journey through Warcraft and gaming culture. My discussion on Escaping the Vortex of Suck was probably the most memorable from the early days, and was one of those times where I was cackling like an evil henchman while clacking away at the keyboard. Shortly after that I moved the blog to it’s own domain.

Of course, I couldn’t resist doing an April fool joke last year (although some people thought I was serious!). I’ve done my fair share of other silly stuff, including a lighthearted look at the fish you can find in Vashj’ir. I also listed my three Christmas wishes, hoping for an amusing end to some of those in-game narks we all face.

I’ve also had a few rants as well. There’s been the infamous one about TERA, the one about Authenticators and the one about ‘casual’ not being a derogatory term. It’s been interesting to see the discussions these posts have kicked off.

We also kicked off The Obscurecast back in May. Still going strong and now at 33 episodes its now all grown up and at it’s own home at obscurecast.com. If you’re quick you can still enter the Talk Like A Gilnean competition running over there!

Real-life does sometimes cause a break in blogging, but last year I had the best reason ever for some time away. We had a fantastic day that still brings a smile to my face when I remember it, and some fantastic photos to boot!

So, what of the future? I’m still blogging and podcasting, although an ever-changing workload means I don’t get as much time to write these days. Still, it’s good to be able to get in front of the keyboard and put my thoughts down on paper. Even if the paper’s some kind of digital representation riddled with metaphor. Or something.

It’s likely that Mana Obscura will contain ongoing references to spellcasters in other games. I’ll still be writing about Warcraft (I’m still playing it after all!) but I’ll also occasionally talk about other games I’m playing (currently Rift, Minecraft and Dragon Age: Origins). I hope this’ll still be appealing to you, although feel free to shout if there’s something in particular you’d like to hear more of!

Before I finish up I’d like to thank everyone that’s given me help over the year. A huge amount of thanks go to the community over at BlogAzeroth for helping me with so many things. I’d like to also thank Stu, Pewter and Medros for helping with the podcast. I’m hugely grateful to Windsoar and the Mage Forum moderators for keeping things tidy there as well.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who’s visited the blog, posted a comment, subscribed to the feed, sent me an email or grabbed me on Twitter. You’ve helped me to keep writing even when it’s been tough and challenging, or when I’ve been running short of time and thought about throwing in the towel, and I owe you all a huge debt of gratitude.

Anyway, enough from me. Here’s to a year that’s done and many more to come!

The Incredible Shrinking Raidgroup

Posted on by Gazimoff

I wanted to focus on a particular experiment that Blizzard’s been working on over the years – that of the optimum raid size.  We’ve seen raid sizes start at 40 players in Vanilla, but slowly drop to 25 in Burning Crusade and then 10 players in Wrath. With the new lockout system in Cataclysm, 10-player raiding seems to be becoming the default.

Is smaller raiding the best result through? From a content standpoint Blizzard certainly seems to think so – more groups are running 10-player dungeons than ever before, defeating more bosses and getting more loot from it. Don’t trust me – Lissanna  from Restokin did an excellent analysis of the available stats. The stats might encourage Blizzard to go further down this route by either dropping 25-player raiding entirely or producing 10-player exclusive content. After all, it’s easier to balance for ten players than both ten and 25.

Hang on a minute though – weren’t we raiding dungeons with 8 or 15 people back in Vanilla? And didn’t we think back then that they were just dungeons but nothing special? Sure, they might take an evening to clear but that was the same 5 years ago.

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Last Chance To See

Posted on by Gazimoff

As is tradition, the US servers are patched a day before those in the EU. This week was no exception, as we saw our cousins across the pond upgraded to 4.0.3a before us. This patch brings with it the changes to the old world as the surface of Azeroth is remade. Many old areas that we’d grown used to over the years will be lost forever.

I often watch Twitter on patch days – it gives me an idea what to expect. Will European Wednesday be smooth and trouble free, or do problems in America tell me that we’ll have extended maintenance late into the night?

But along with the waiting and the gnashing of teeth, I also saw a lot of mourning and regret. A lot of people said they’d miss aspects of the old ‘pre-Shattering’ world and regretted not taking screenshots of particular locations.

Since we were still in the unchanged world in Europe, I thought I’d give people a second chance. I offered to go around and capture images on demand. These were the requests that came back over Twitter.

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The Machine Behind The Curtain

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’m going to start this off with a question.

Does the amount of fun you have with Warcraft decrease as the amount you know about the game increases?

I’ve been thinking about this question ever since I read an article by Larísa of Pink Pigtail Inn about someone who’d burned out on Warcraft, developing the belief that ultimately the game boils down to pressing a button on a random number generator and getting rewarded no matter the result.

This makes me nervous because of my own quest to improve my knowledge of the game. I want to improve my own ability and I like being able to share what I find with others. But should I be fearful of poisoning my enjoyment of it by finding out too much? Am I destined to become a bitter, grumpy old mage who snaps his staff in disgust?

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The Back Seat Guild Leader

Posted on by Gazimoff

Ever get the feeling that you’re standing at a crossroads, looking down at the various prongs of a Morton’s Fork? It’s a position that an increasing number of players are finding themselves in during the run up to Cataclysm, and I don’t think I’m an exception to that. And like many people, my thoughts at the moment run to guilds, friends and forward planning.

Like all decisions of this ilk, it’s long and complicated and involved. So rather than doing my usual stint of dispensing advice, I’ve decided to post this to solicit some instead. I’d like to hear your thoughts on this conundrum – maybe you can help me work out how to tackle it or have experiences of your own that can help.

Anyhow, pull up a chair. This may take some time…

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The Spark of Excitement

Posted on by Gazimoff

Hype is a wonderful thing. It serves to promote new products and bring them to our attention. It’s also there to help build up excitement; to get us thinking about what fun we’ll be able to have when we’re finally able to get our hands on whatever it is that’s being promoted.

The problem I have with hype is that by making tomorrow look so incredibly exciting, it makes today feel positively mundane. It’s like I’m being reminded constantly about the boring drudgery of my boring life. It’s the kind of thing that makes me want to take a holiday. Fly south for the winter, do something interesting, that kind of thing. Wait for the snow to blow over and come back home when everything is shiny again.

I think Larisa mentions the same thing – we’re all beginning to feel a bit down at the moment. It’s like we’re being sent picture postcards from Cataclysm saying “Wish You Were Here”, yet we can’t fly out there for another 6 months or so when the ash cloud finally moves.

But hang on a minute – our lives aren’t dull and boring. We do exciting things on a daily basis, they’ve just become a little jaded and tarnished over time. If there’s anything that’s making us feel run down, it’s the routine and repetition we end up in. The boredom of repetition though is self-inflicted – we can choose to break that repetition if we desire.

So I’m making a commitment to myself. I reckon that I only play about a quarter of all the game has to offer. I normally do endgame raiding, heroic dungeons and some light RP. I always play spellcasters, moving them in the same direction and clicking the same hotkeys. Considering how much of the game there is available, that’s pretty feeble.

It’s time to mix it up a little. Time to make my own excitement.

I’m going to try and get my rogue up from level 50 to level 80. I’m going to learn the mechanics of the class, find the parts that entertain me and make me smile, and make him my own.

I’m going to get to grips with PvP in earnest. I’m going to get a full set of PvP-ready gear on my mage, kit him out properly, learn the ropes and get an arena team going. I’m going to try and find Gnomageddon’s desire to set things on fire.

I’m going to work on some roleplay themes that have been bubbling away for a while, and stop being a passive consumer of roleplay. I’m going to try and present more of a story to those I play with in order to generate in-game excitement and interest for them today.

There’s also another side to this. It means that I’m not going to be moaning at how boring things are at present and how there’s nothing for me to do, because it simply isn’t true. There are stacks of easy achievements that I don’t have, there are tons of quests that I’ve never done. I’ve not even begun to exhaust the range of content there is in the game.

This spark of excitement is something that’s inside all of us. We had it when we first started playing the game, and it’s still with us now. We’ve just grown used to it, forgotten that it’s there gathering dust in some corner of our being. It just needs to be pulled out and cleaned up a little.

The Dying High Street Retailer

Posted on by Gazimoff

Back when I was a kid, my dad used to take me shopping for videogames. I can only half-remember the store – a brightly lit and almost empty room with shelving lining the walls and and a small island with a till in the centre. We’d go and spend maybe £3 on a cassette tape game, take it home and try it out. Sometimes the game was good, sometimes it was bad, but the journey itself was enough for me back then.

Fast forward to today and the world has changed. Independent videogame stores have now been replaced with common retail chains in almost every town. But now, even this role of a high street videogames retailer is being called into question.

Earlier in the week the retailer Game Group announced that profits had dropped by a third since last year. At the same time the CEO and COO of the firm have both decided to leave the business. It’s like they can both sense the writing on the wall and have decided to leave before things get really bad.

Thinking about it, the market that they’re in these days is hugely different from how it was even five years ago. I’ve cut down dramatically on the amount of games I buy every year. I have XBox games that I’ve not even opened because I’ve been spending so much time playing Warcraft.

The places I can buy games from has exploded as well. Supermarkets, music and DVD stores are all stocking the latest titles. The internet poses it’s own problems, with cheap prices and home delivery slicing away at the market. Services like Steam make the high street pretty much redundant – Valve have managed to build up an online gaming service with an extensive catalogue and a solid community in a way that’s almost self-sustaining.

What gets me is the complete blunder that the high street seems to be making at the moment. They’re selling a commodity product, but instead of rattling off a list of why people should buy from them instead of their local supermarket or online store, they seem to be in retreat. There doesn’t seem to be any strategy beyond relying on new games and consoles in order to have something customers want to buy. This is flawed – if you set yourself up so that I only want to buy from you when a new console is released you’re setting yourself up for a fall.

It’s not that I’m opposed to buying from the high street – I just want a compelling reason to do so. If I can get better service from an online retailer I’ll use them. If I can get a better returns policy from a supermarket, I’ll buy my games with my groceries.

By contrast , earlier this month I was in Cardiff. One of the things I always try to do when visiting the city is visit Cardiff Games – a small shop that sold a range of tabletop RPG and board games. When I went there last, the shop had closed down completely – I’m not sure why, but I can’t help but feel that it’s part of a change in geek culture. Where once we’d meet up at game stores, chat and share what we thought about the latest games it’s now all done online through messageboards, forums and blogposts. we can make our purchasing decisions based on a Google search, with a skip over to someone like Amazon or Spirit Games to place an order.

I wonder that since so much geek life is now carried out online, are the physical representations of them in forms like high street stores set to fade away? Not because we don’t want to use the store, but because we actively embrace an online existence?

Will there always be a place for geekdom in the real world?

Where Videogames Go To Die

Posted on by Gazimoff

Back when I was a kid, one of the first videogames I remember playing was Horace Goes Skiing. I was about three years old, playing this basic Frogger clone on a computer with a dead-flesh keyboard. It was great, even though it was frustrating trying to steer this character down a virtual slalom course. There were a number of other games that hallmarked my youth, from Fantasy World Dizzy through to Shenmue, stopping off at Sonic the Hedgehog, Doom, Unreal and Half-Life on the way.

It’s awe-inspiring in a way – as I’ve grown up over the last thirty years this whole new form of entertainment has grown up with me. It’s something that simply didn’t exist before my generation, yet it’s something I’ve lived with all my life.

And yet I can’t help but feel that somehow videogames are the only form of entertainment that has a built in shelf-life. I’m not talking about things like DRM or anything as draconian. It’s much more fundamental. Videogames are the only form of entertainment that is almost welded to the hardware it was created for. We expect that in time to come we will move on to better hardware, and with it newer videogames. Those older ones, the classics of forgotten generations of hardware, are abandoned and rarely see the light of day again.

Let me try and give a clumsy analogy. I have a bookshelf, on which lie a collection of books. Most of them I’ve read, some of them I’ve yet to start. But I’m in no rush – a book is a book is a book. I won’t open it one day to find the book technology has changed, or the book server has been shut down and my book service closed. It’s a kind of comfort, knowing that they will still be there and that I can get round to them, some day.

It’s the same with music – I listen to music every single day. Sometimes it’s on CD, sometimes it’s on my iPhone, sometimes it’s on computer. Sometimes I make my own music, cranking out badly plucked half-tunes on my cheap Squier Strat. But music is transient in nature, being easily movable from one medium to another. Notation on paper to bytes on a magnetic platter, it’s all the same. But I can still dig out the music I was listening to ten or twenty years ago and pull it forward, making it play on my latest gadget or gizmo. It never goes out of date.

I think it’s my fast-approaching wedding that’s thrown this into the forefront for me. One of the biggest joys in my life is being able to play videogames with other people, be they in the same living room or a different continent. I want to be able to share and pass on those experiences, and I don’t know why but I feel it all the more as I grow older. But although I can share the stories that shaped my youth and the music that inspired me as a teenager, the videogames that defined my gaming life will probably stay in the past.

Think about the games you’ve played, the characters you’ve created and the experiences you’ve had. In the case of Warcraft, you might have characters that you’ve been playing for five years or more. They have their own stories, their own paths. Even if you’ve never roleplayed, you’ve still fought battles and overcome the horrors of the world. There’s a history there full of memories.

One day the game will end. The servers will shut down and the hard drives scrubbed. Our characters will probably be long gone by then, probably only recorded in blogs like this one or merchandise like the plastic figurines or posters. And unlike a book that you can pull of a shelf and pass on to the next generation, a videogame is like a fixed point in time that we cluster around for a brief moment before moving on to the next one. Then the next one. Again, and again.

Consider that the creative endeavours of a single person might last for over four thousand years, it seems such a waste of effort that something touched by several hundred people might only live for a few years. For some reason it feels broken, as if a videogame is like a Nexus-6 replicant trying to live out beyond it’s dedicated lifespan.

In the meantime, I can only imagine that one day there’ll be a time when I’m asked about the Big Daddy figurine or the Wind-Rider plushie, and where these creatures came from. And I’ll reply:

“From worlds that once existed, but that exist no more.”

See you in-game.

Amusing the Muse

Posted on by Gazimoff

About a week ago Windsoar from Jaded Alt was celebrating six months of Warcraft blogging. In order to celebrate hitting this milestone she offered herself as a muse to anyone who asked. While I’m still new to this myself I thought that it would be fun to try, expecting something related to magecraft. Unexpectedly, the suggestion from my muse was a completely different.

I peruse a lot of new blogs as I welcome new bloggers to BA. Yours was one of those that really stood out–professionally laid out, and quick, tight posts right from the start.

What’d I’d like to know is, why’d you start? When I read a post, I feel like you’ve been doing this forever, but I know darn well that I only welcomed you to my reader in the last couple of weeks! Curious minds want to know.

It’s true, I’d only started blogging about Warcraft at the beginning of the month. I’d been playing the game since the day of release here in Europe, but only now felt that I wanted to write about it? It definitely sounds unusual, and like most unusual things it has a bit of a tale behind it.

The journey that led me to creating The Mana Obscura is a haphazard one that probably starts before I even started playing Warcraft. I was involved with a couple of hobbies and used to make little community websites for them. Forums, galleries and the like – helping them to keep in touch and share ideas. Some of them are still running, although most have been handed on. It was a start, allowing me to build up experience in how to develop content-based websites – how to lay them out, what information to put where and so on.

When I started playing Warcraft Earthen Ring famously didn’t have a realm forum. An enterprising player created one, but it went out of service once Blizzard gave us an official realm forum. Part-way into Burning Crusade a crackdown started on the same official forums, with raidguild recruitment threads being locked or deleted. In response I banded together with a couple of other players and set up EarthenRing.EU. It’s a project I’ve since handed over to other players, but it’s still used and has some interesting content.

So this explains the technical stuff but not the writing. For that I need to pull on a different thread.

For my job I write a lot of technical documentation, with most of it being designs for new telecommunications products and services. It’s mostly translating an image that I hold in my head into words on a page, explaining how whatever it is would work so that other people can go off and build it. Sometimes my blogposts sound a bit like an excerpt from one of these documents, particularly if I’m trying to explain something. It has it’s own form of language – quite formal and unemotive – that can creep into whatever else I’m doing.

I’ve worked on Wikipedia, in creating new articles and cleaning up existing ones. It’s something that’s fun for a while, but it started to feel restrictive to me. I wanted to express my own opinions on what I was writing about, but was limited to quoting other “reliable sources”. Eventually the limitations, coupled with an ongoing degradation of the community, persuaded me to call time on it.

I’ve also blogged before, keeping a geekBlog of all things technology. While it was an ambitious project, it was also fairly restrictive. I ended up having to research everything heavily just to justify the opinions I held, referencing everything out and spending a heavy amount of time on each blogpost. In the end it became a chore to update, and as a result I’ve put it on hiatus. I would like to restart it at some point, but it’ll probably have a new format and shorter, snappier posts.

While I was working on the geekBlog I also did some guest blogging for Media140. This was great for me as it taught me the value of editing – chipping away at an article until it’s honed to perfection and polished to a shine. While my own editing is nowhere near as good as the the professional editor I wrote for, I like to think it taught me a few things.

Looking back on it now, it feels almost inevitable. I had a desire to write about videogames (particularly World of Warcraft, but some other stuff from time to time), but I also wanted to have fun writing it. I wanted to feel like I was having conversations with people instead of presenting a formal argument or specification. I was also thinking that I got a lot of fun out of playing games, and that writing about that fun would give me a chance to relive it.

So there you have it – the story of how The Mana Obscura came to exist and why I started to blog about Warcraft. I wonder now if my tale lived up to my muse’s expectations…

(image credit: Parnassus by Andrea Mantegna, currently held at the Louvre)

Standing in Awe

Posted on by Gazimoff

There’s an old saying that we experience entertainment with all of our senses. We might watch in amazement at a breathtaking movie, or rock out with a CD from our favourite artists. We might enjoy the smell of a rich cup of coffee or a freshly baked loaf of bread, or savour the taste of a succulent steak or fine wine. The theory is that by tickling the senses, we generate an emotional response – we cheer at a movie, cherish the coffee. The question is, can the same be said of videogames? Moreso, can those feelings be rekindled time and again?

This shape of question was set as the BlogAzeroth shared topic this week, and it’s a tough one to tackle. This is partly because trying to recall the experiences I felt five years ago when the game launched is a struggle in itself. But also there’s the bigger question – does a game need to continually need to entertain us in order to survive? Or does it become like a soap opera – we log in, we see the same familiar names and faces and feel warmed by just by being part of something?

To tackle the first, I’ll go back to where my videogaming was at the end of 2004. I’d been cajoled into playing an MMO called Horizons (now Istaria) by my girlfriend. It was a clunky experience, but provided a contrast to my usual fare of first-person shooters. I’d been brought up on the rich visual fare of Quake (proper 3d!), Unreal (emerging from the crashsite-wow!) and so on.

In the lead up to the European launch of World of Warcraft, I’d been getting heavily into Half-Life 2. If you’ve played this game, you’ll know that it’s a visual feast. You’ll also know that it’s jammed full of loading screens – go down a pipe: loading screen, open a door: loading screen. Even so, you get the idea – I liked to go stomping around places while being hideously overpowered.

Once I’d got past the installation-patching-account creation-character selection malarkey, my patience was wearing pretty thin. I remember thinking that this game needed to impress me a ton if I was going to stick with it.

The strange thing was that I did. There were so many things that impressed me about the early days of the game – the flight from Thelsamar to Ironforge and back was spectacular, really showing off what the game was capable of. It didn’t bother me that the graphics weren’t up to my usual fare – the atmosphere and style had been loaded in by the bucketful.

I remember being taken on a journey by the guild I was with to the Shimmering flats, running through Dustwallow Marsh and the Thousand Needles just to make it to the raceway. I remember climbing the mountain in the Barrrens just to see the Shrine of the Fallen Warrior. The little touches, the way the world had been crafted, it constantly amazed me.

Of course, there comes a time where you’ve seen every location. You’ve seen the sun set over Freewind Post, or the hidden treasure of the Crystal Cave. The awe started to fade, the novelty to wear off. It was just at this point where my game changed.

My girlfriend told me that there was a raid forming to Molten Core, and that they were looking for mages in Ironforge. If I was quick, I might be able to get invited. I’d never raided before and was only dimly aware that it happened, but I was keen and adventurous (and importantly, attuned to the dungeon!) so I contacted the raidleader. I instantly got an invite and got told to head out there.

The next five hours were some of the most intense, chaotic and riotous that I’ve ever spent inside any game. It was also a ridiculous amount of fun and I’d definitely caught the bug. I’d walked away with the Arcanist Belt and was determined to collect the rest of the set. Two weeks later the girlfriend joined me on a raid and won the Core Forged Greaves. I phoned her afterwards and all she said for half an hour was “Shooooess!” For a self confessed pure roleplayer, she was thrilled to bits to have earned them.

I’ve seen this cycle repeated in the subsequent expansions. The initial discovery of new content will always be a visual feast, from the lush plains of Nagrand to the lore-rich steppes of Zul’Drak. The excitement of getting new spells is never something that will wear off, particularly when it’s things like Spellsteal, Invisibility and Mirror Image. But like anything, this awe fades over time, until the arcane becomes the mundane.

In between the content patches and expansions when there’s nothing new to explore or experience, it’s what’s created by the players that keeps a game fresh. People to team up with and raid with, friends to have a laugh and joke with. Podcasters that remind you why you’re playing the game, or bloggers that share their own tales. In the end, it’s all this that keeps filling me with awe and surprise long after the novelty fades.