Medieval Dynasty

"Gdzie telewizji nie ma, radia nie ma, zasięgu brak"

Cool Kids of Death - A Moze Tak

 

I've been in the mood to try out several titles built around old-timey village life themes and thought Medieval Dynasty would serve, along with The Guild, as a quaint but ultimately negative point of reference, an easily dismissed amateurish attempt at something better. After all, the market's littered with dime-a-dozen asset flips. But damned if it hasn't insisted on earning my appreciation. Don't expect too expansive an array of content. Mostly it does a few basics very well. If you wanted an FPS Banished, it's worth a look.

Best daub 'em wattles afore win'r, a-yawp

If you've played such games before, the core elements are straightforward enough: pick up basic resources, make some tools, gather better stuff, build, get wood for sheep, keep advancing through the tech tree, form babby, keep building up your settlement. Classic stuff. But its resource and time management mechanics are uncommonly fine-tuned and its various elements' progression flows more smoothly into each other than you normally see.

 

Setting out in The Oxbow map I sought a spot not too far from NPC villages (foreseeing frequent trade runs) and knew I'd need water/fish but also wanted someplace with a nice view, and settled just west of Piastovia - by dumb luck, almost on top of one of the map's few caves. This has yielded me quite a bit more cash than I'd otherwise have gotten early on (bronze hammers and sickles is how humble Werwolfe pays the bourgeoisie's onerous bills) with the only inconveniently spaced resource being clay. Thus, as I round out my third year I've hit a pretty good balance.

I can finally devote some time and geld to more frivolous exploration and decoration, but until now it's been a scramble to get a working community up and running. From doing everything yourself at the start you gradually begin delegating more and more to the villagers you recruit. Build them a house and then you find you have to feed them, recruit a hunter and you realize everyone needs water, plant some fields then scramble to make tools fer da hoein' an' fertilizin'. I almost started losing villagers recently because I ran out of buckets of all things. I was never stuck, never overwhelmed yet never at a loss for more options going forward. In between all of that you need to find time to run fetch quests for reputation to raise your population limit and make a bit of spare cash to buy recipes.

 

Oh, and mind the wolves.

 

The other half of the game is a first-person-slasher array of kill and fetch quests, slightly more interesting than usual due to the solid resource / inventory / travel time interplay making you plan out your trips. Unfortunately the FPS combat is both twitchy and sluggish somehow, with lightning-fast enemies aggroing on you from behind brush and lauching themselves at you in pinball maneuvers. Combined with poor pathing, massive damage/health ratios and nearly absent attack animations or hit confirmation, combat ends up feeling both annoying and unsatisfying. Suddenly there's something at your feet and your health bar dissappears. (Though I did luck out again. First bandit I killed was a crossbowman out in the open so I could rush him with my stone axe. Then his crossbow got me a kill on a mook with a helm and iron sword, which has gotten me through the next couple of years in style.)

 

Aside from the combat, the interface has some odd quirks. The radial menu for building/crafting is pretty good, but I don't see any point to keeping the clock running while it's open, since you'll frequently find yourself opening it to check costs. And on the downright weird side, in order to even load a game, you're forced to cycle through two extra confirmation screens, including one asking whether you want to play your game in single or multiplayer... every... single... time! Why? I've gone over this repeatedly: the early-2000s dream that multiplayer competitiveness will maintain your single-player game's popularity and sales has long ended, largely because we've all noticed the world's full of subhuman garbage. And if the only point of pretending to have a multiplayer mode is so Epic Games can mine my data, fuck'em! At least keep the multiplayer button from being too intrusive.

 

Aside from all that, the skill trees are also mostly just there to exist, and though you can customize a fair bit (I switched from 3-day seasons to 4, then later to 5) that doesn't extend to mob and resource respawn rates, which default to nigh-instantaneous for animals and daily or seasonal for even the more valuable stuff like metal ores, which respawn faster than trees! But in one aspect in particular, despite its otherwise unexpectedly solid effort, Render Cube nonetheless shows its amateurish side: writing.

Can you not at least slap an "OOC" in front of such lines?

Only a couple of dialogues so far have been written in-character. The rest read like forum troll banter or some middle-schoolers reveling in making "a game" not bothering with consistency or immersion and "going meta" for a cheap feeling of superiority. Pity, because otherwise the world itself is or could've been one of the best village life sims around, and despite some fumbling due attention was paid to quality-of-life mechanics often absent from such games, like auto-using stored resources from a nearby shed without making endless twenty-pace trips back and forth from your construction site.

 

Medieval Dynasty could've been great, but even with its flaws it's still pretty decent.

I've never had the guts to actually taste juniper berries

Are they as miraculous as the gourd doth prophecy?

Oxygène

There is only one possible musical suggestion for a French movie with that title.

 

Let's see, where do we begin? In a mesh coccoon inside a high-tech sarcophagus, gradually running out of air. And if that sounds like a prompt for some kooky old text-based adventure game, the feel actually matches fairly well. Please don't spoil your viewing by reading too much of any summary. This is... not a masterpiece, fine, but pretty good Science Fiction, implicitly rather high-concept, the sort of flick where you'd do yourself a disservice to pre-empt your own guesswork as to WTF is actually going on.

 

What can I say without giving too much away? That hiring a horror director for SF actually hit precisely the right note for once? That I was shocked a movie with a trapped starlet didn't resolve to her being tied to the train tracks by a rapist as we've grown to expect from our misandrist culture's nonstop effluvium of cheap propaganda? That it consciously avoids the gratuitous nudity its intimate confines would presume for most low-budget summer thrillers and is far more immersive for it? That you'll never guess who the villain is?

 

Just fire up Netflix and give it a chance. I'll be right here when you get back.

 

...

...

...

 

Done? Did you guess it? I didn't. Not quite. The clone part was easy. But after it became less likely this would turn into some feminist screed, I'd then immediately jumped to the idea she must be an organ bank clone a la Never Let Me Go, and only gradually began to catch on with the gravity trick. And of course, you'll never guess who the villain is... because there isn't one. As in so much good SF, there are only Cold Equations, and generalized human stupidity somewhere in the background, and smart individuals doing their best in an inimical world.

 

I do have to remark "C'etait pas moi, je vous ai pas clones" not only displays the heroine's vigorous mental gymnastics, but is an elegant way of sidestepping the by now woefully overdone clone identity conflict to avoid it derailing the real climax. Kudos to the writer, director, star, everyone involved. Solid work all around.

I notice a couple of you are sticking around for longer than readers would in previous years. Maybe I've improved my writing, but I just think that once the U.S. government got handed over to his honorable lordship BigBalls, reading rants by Werwolfe just doesn't feel so demeaning anymore.

Habeas Corpus Christi

"Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action. One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissue and fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation."

 

- a passage which sounds like it inspired Deepak Chopra's entire career, from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shunned House

__________________________________________________

 

(alternate titles: Canadian Godfriend or Gap of the Gaps)

 

I rarely bother with all those youtube religious/atheist debates because they inevitably require me to listen to some home-baked Alabammy Foghorn Leghorn trying to sound condescending to us heathens yet spouting something so utterly moronic from his very first syllable that it invalidates anything he could possibly say afterward.

And the top syllable on that list is:

"god"

Now me, I base all my arguments on the principle of blarg. The electricity which runs through this computer is directed by blarg, the national budget should be balanced by blargonomics, all my mathematical equations resolve to the blarg quotient, I sprinkle a bit of blarg on every meal and we should colonize Venus 'cuz blarg said so. And don't ask me what? who? huh? blarg is, blarg works in mysterious ways. Blarg!

If I told you my parakeet has solid platinum feathers and edits all my blog posts, you might reasonably ask to see the beast.

If I told you my car goes 500 km/h you might skeptically launch into convoluted arguments based on how few vehicles terrestrial or aerial achieve such speed, where did I acquire its fuel, where exactly I've clocked it, what my qualifications are as a stunt driver, etc. But the unspoken query behind all that is: wait, wolfman, do you even have a car?* Where is it?

There's a step zero before allowing anyone to base any argument on what a god did or what a god wants: produce your deity. Then we can chop the fucker up and see what he's made of, or maybe buy him a coffee and ask what he wants. The above examples are in fact far more reasonable than any faith; parakeets and cars exist as categories, but no religions have ever produced even one angel, oni or yaksha, much less one of their magic sky-daddies.

 

I could bring up the Sagan Standard or Hitchens' Razor, but really you don't need to read Hume and debate any bishops to call bullshit on the all-purpose religious pig in a poke.

If I say my car goes 100 km/h, sure, consumer-grade vehicles are expected to.

If I say it goes 200 km/h... well, okaayyyy, theoretically, but you might raise an eyebrow. Have I actually tried?

If I say 400, you'll laugh in my face and tell me to pull the other one.

But if I say my car goes warp ten, suddenly you fall to your knees and worship me as a prophet of the almighty grille?

HOW THE FUCK DOES THAT WORK?!?

In bitching out left-wing insanity over the past decade (be it gender Lysenkoism or moral superiority by melanin quotient or especially female supremacism) I've repeatedly pointed out that the same capacity for reason which allows one to disbelieve the existence of fairies allows disbelief of special claims to personal experience and entitlement by special interest groups. Well, reverse the polarity. If you call bullshit on the notion that perfect angels of light and goodness march down Halsted in Chicago for the gay pride parade every year, you're even less able to show they marched around the Dead Sea two thousand years ago. At least the ones on Halsted leave some glitter behind. The same bullshit-sense that allows you to discern a Nigerian prince scam applies if I claim to be in good with some omnipotent prince in the sky.

 

And always, when calling the gullible out on their feeblemindedness, you hear a recurring fall-back position from otherwise well-educated, comfortably middle-class suckers. From centuries ago it might've been electricity, relativity, radiation, or more recently "dark matter" or "quantum" whatever. Mind blown; everything now real. The universe is weird, therefore, well, anything might be possible, you can't prove there's no god. Umm, I don't have to, any more than you somehow have the duty to prove I don't own a quantum platinum parakeet and a quantum Corolla that goes warp ten. (Quantumly.) Not only should you assume hoofbeats come from horses, not zebras, but the existence of zebras in no way proves the existence of unicorns, and even if you found a unicorn it would in no way prove the existence of Yahweh. The fact you or I don't know how the universe works proves nothing except our own ignorance. That negative is not positive evidence of anything, much less of the preferences and demands of some imaginary lawgiver whose existence you've never demonstrated in the slightest. And you have no more excuse for going along with the faithful's big lie than you would with phrenology or the Piltdown Man or the Fiji mermaid - except that priests have been playing you for a much bigger fool than P.T. Barnum ever dreamt, and for far longer.

 

The religious effort to destroy science ignores the fact it would do nothing to prove the existence of their idiotic fairytales - much less justify the demented pretense that you're getting specific instructions on how the world should be ordered. Even if we had no scientific explanations for the world whatsoever, even if we were all Homo erectus a hundred thousand years ago just learning how rocks work, belief in a supernatural agency would still be stupid if its proponents cannot produce the object of their worship. Disproving Australopithecus or carbon-dating, even if you could pull it off, would not achieve that. The proposition that the universe has a creator is no different from saying rivers always flow uphill or pandas write novels. It is a statement about the world around you, and it's up to those making such statements contrary to observable reality to produce said river, produce said panda or

produce

your

deity!

 

"In any case such a monster must of necessity be in our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty with every man not an enemy to the world’s life, health, and sanity."

 

Blarg be with ye.

 

____________________________________________

 

 

* Yes I do and it's a hatchback. Shut up. (And the parakeets died decades ago. (They were green, blue and white-with-blue and they loved millet, very adorable. No platinum.))

No Longer of the Rings Online

Before I get to LotRO's current worthlessness, it may be worth reminiscing on past failures.

It was only two or three months after release. I spent quite a lot of time sitting in front of the Agamaur entrance at level 32, failing instance run after instance run... or more often quitting them in disgust. The first instance cluster at level 24 had gone well enough. Everyone tried and failed and learned and triumphed, playing the instance on-level. But by the time I hit the Lone-Lands, the powergamers had hit max level, which means absolutely every group just wanted to get powerleveled through Garth Agarwen instead of actually... PLAYING THE MOTHERFUCKING GAME!!! It was literally impossible to get a real group. Even if it started with on-level characters, at the first death some retarded cunt would say "hang on I'll get my buddy to run us through it" and that was the end of gameplay. When I went from level 32-40 all by having to quit groups who'd rather cheat than play, I cancelled my subscription.

 

So, with player idiocy, it began.

 

 

1. Turbine

 

At launch LotRO was just one of many, many WoW-clone MMOs on the market, slavishly copying it in most respects. But it did a better job on the stand-and-shoot early MMO mechanics fleshed out by a healthy suite of resource management and status effects and crowd control, plus the game's signature "conjunctions" or "fellowship maneuvers" requiring groups to coordinate for big nukes or heals. Aesthetically it distinguished itself by going in the other direction from the cartoony/weeaboo trend of World of Warcraft or Guild Wars, with better-proportioned character models and staying as true to Middle-Earth lore as it could while still providing lots of uglies to beat over the head. Laudably, it avoided treading on the source material, making clear you are not the center of the story but working in the shadows of the fellowship, removing side threats and carrying messages, etc. The starter zones felt LotR-ish (which has probably done more to save this game over the years by hooking new players than any more recent content) and even early expansions like Forochel or Eregion preserved the dignity of the classic.

 

I wasn't playing when the Moria expansion hit, and everything I heard about it made me continue avoiding the game. The "legendary" item system was a blatant gear-farming timesink atop the existing timesink (weapons with their own inventories; recursive grinding) and when I did finally see the place, I wasn't particularly impressed. The environments were more cut-and-pasted, the monsters more kid-friendly D&D-ish (bigger flaming orcs with spikes on their shoulders) and while Lorien and Dol Guldur walked back some of that idiocy, they also continued a trend started shortly after release of long, tedious cinematics and cutscenes. Nonetheless the Moria instances remain, to this day, some of the game's most interesting, with unique spawning and phase transition mechanics rewarding group coordination.

 

Enedwaith, at least, returned to a more coherent Middle-Earth feel, but it also cemented a long-running trend afterwards of minor zones interposing long faction reputation timesinks between more content-heavy expansions.

 

2. Warner

 

I've said it before but in many respects getting bought up by a megacorp helped the game. The added production values show, and not just in glitz. Rohan and Gondor are both expansive and thoroughly planned out with few or no corners cut, and the writing improved, not greatly but noticeably. Characters' speech patterns and concerns feel far more authentic to their Anglo-saxon roots, and the heroics (with some glaring exceptions like Thrymm) balance most adequately between fable and modern fiction... which, let's remember, was Tolkien's big achievement in the first place.

 

Sadly, Warner Bros. obviously had no other interest in the game but as cross-promotion for those disgusting Hobbit movie maladaptations, and the era (2010-2016) shows a rapid pace of cranking out zone after zone, largely indistinguishable from each other, just to keep the IP in the public's eye. Gameplay dumbed down rapidly during this period.

 

Sadder still, much of the extra funding sank into cinematics and half-baked attempts to diversify game modes, watering down its necessary focus on team dungeoneering dynamics, which deteriorated constantly, dropping fellowship maneuvers, resource management and anything the least bit challenging to make it more "accessible" to mass-market retards. All the new features then proceeded to fail monumentally.

- Mounted combat was never supported by a game engine and netcode which had been optimized for stationary, counter-heavy back-and-forth gameplay. Warsteeds' rubberbanding made them nigh-impossible to control, not to mention it required keeping both mouse buttons constantly pressed.

- Epic battles were supposed to make it easier for players across levels to team up, but in practice it just amounted to long, cutscene-laden minigames having nothing to do with the rest of the game.

- Roving threats, big landscape bosses, were a last-ditch attempt to rebuild the appeal of open-world adventuring. They did help for a bit, but as a lone feature thrown into an otherwise endless solo grind and endgame instance gear grind, rapidly lost relevance.

 

However, this is also a period when news of the game trickled out (thanks presumably to WB's advertising) to many who don't normally play games but were attracted to the Tolkien license, and you'd find, say, some random cardiologist hopelessly blundering through the fields of Fornost, or a writer and lawyer teaming up against wights in Angmar. Though it lost many of the smart players from release, LotRO (very briefly) regained a few even as it lost any better gameplay by which to retain them. When that ended I wrote this and quit for the fourth or fifth time.

3. Standing Stone

 

After Warner lost interest (though I'm not sure if the game's still licensing its Tolkien content through them in some weird deal) some old developers got more creative leeway. Starting with Mordor the effect was ambiguous, with obvious stalling, slower development pace, etc. and a half-assed attempt at yet another new mechanic duplicating the existing hope/dread feature pointlessly. Also, by the late 2010s the game had simply lost the interest of better minds altogether. Where I had been able to find on-level or challenge run groups at least occasionally before, the remaining playerbase did nothing but grind the Dol Guldur arena to powerlevel and play the one latest instance. And has done nothing since.

 

However,

1) They've undertaken the painstaking task of undoing many of the moronic decisions from the past. They've redone skill trees to restore most skills' utility. The legendary item grind was streamlined a bit, more status/conjunction functionality has gradually returned, classes have been refunded some of their lost individual roles beyond "guardian, minstrel, and everybody else is DPS"

2) At first the new content refocusing on the admirable task of fleshing out Middle-Earth did a damn good job of sticking to the Tolkien feel. The Dale-Lands, Iron Hills, the two northern Anduin zones, were for the most part lovely, immersive places to visit. 

But you weren't allowed to stay there. Notice I said "at first" which leads us to:

 

 

4. ??? who the hell is even in charge over there now?

 

Though some half-decent efforts at worldbuilding persist, like new alternate low-level zones in Cardolan or The Angle, these are poisoned by lacking the same cash shop currency rewards as the older zones, and therefore (unless amusement park dollars are removed) have not made a real impact in player experience. But the real break seems to have come during the pandemic, when I can only assume there must have been a major shift in writing staff, entirely for the worse.

 

From 2020, from The War of Three Peaks onward, the vast majority of storytelling, characters, worldbulding, has shown not just incompetence in creating a Tolkienish feel (stop. repeating. "uh-oh!") but active vandalism toward Middle-Earth. The Gundabad expansion was especially terrible (and having gone into some depth here I won't repeat myself) but though the social activist garbage is slightly more muted now, it's no less pervasive. The leveling thread has moved into Umbar and Harad, given the snowflake idiots writing quest dialogue plenty of chances to posture on grounds of skin colour and not just sex.

 

I wavered quite a bit before buying last year's Legacy of Morgoth expansion after a year's absence, knowing pretty much what to expect.

- At the tipping point between expansions, Elladan, Elrohir, Legolas and Gimli are all officiously shooed out and replacement heroine Sigileth (returned from presumed death to show up her brother) makes sure to note she doesn't know some man's name.

- Then you've got a young naive white guy getting lectured by a dark-skinned sage on how Gondorians are a bunch of imperialists who dunno nuthin' 'bout nothin'.

- Of course you immediately run into a matriarchal warlike society.

- "I am fine. These *MEN* were no match for me." quoth one female NPC (emphasis added... but not much)

- Another antivillainess is of course victimized, cast out by her beorning kin.

- No male leaders unless they're villains; all good factions led by blandly idealized "strong women"

- As you're chasing two new villains escaped from prison, both male, you're repeatedly reminded the game's sole remaining villainess is only acting out of revenge for her dead husband. (see rules 3, 14)

- It wasn't enough putting in black elves, of course they're special-er than regular elves, turning into trees by way of fading.

- There's an entire romance quest chain between an ingenuous young male bookworm and a woman talking down to him, particularly funny when he's forced to apologize for the presumption of saving a woman, then having to risk his neck anyway, segueing into pages-long rants about the damsel escaping male aggression, longer than far more important quests, and how independent she is, yes she's very independent, now shut up and listen to her babbling, she neeeeeds it!

- On and on like that. It's hard to miss quests resolving to some "man bad; woman good" face-off:

- Then of course, though the last dungeon brings back some of the heroes, it also features the highly... creative... enemy type of giant orcs led by evil elves from the first age. Because of course. Build up the orcs as impressive, shit on elves. Because that's apparently the brave new frontier of social justice.

 

With the MMO genre collapsed, LotRO stood a good chance to cleaning up the scraps, getting yet another second chance after the endless second chances it's gotten since 2007. But at the same time it tried gambling on that by offering all pre-Gundabad content for free, it also poisoned the well with the idiotic writing and mission design. And sure, I could complain about quite a few other matters:

- every class has a DPS role now

- fights move away from dazes toward interrupts, call 'em quick-time events, meaning away from players needing to be aware of their greater surroundings and exert the minimal self-control not to break a daze and toward button mashing, idiotic twitch-gaming

- last year crafting was paramount, now it's been forgotten and all your loot upgrades are dungeon drops

- infinite teleport skills

- infinite cash from trash loot

- content is being proofread less thoroughly, see an ability placeholder-named "a ranged double attack" or elves from North Carolina

- bugs are cropping up more often - NPC turns hostile in tower mission, NPCs do not spawn in the mission following that, etc.

- heavier emphasis on the "delving" system of solo dungeons, whose difficulty is nothing but idiotic gear-checking, getting nuked from nowhere and having enemies spawn right on top of you, giving them infinite speed to make them impossible to kite, making them aggro regardless of normal aggro radius, all to remove the possibility for crowd control or tactics

- then there's the timesink of making the new bribe loot for faction rep usable as stacks, but wasting any overflow due to progress being locked by trivial turn-in quests

But remember what I said above. During every phase of LotRO's development, no matter how smart or stupid the fights, how time-wasting or exploitative its monetization, its Tolkien license has lent it a tremendous amount of undeserved goodwill. I did try to warn them: parasites die if they kill their host. Shit on Tolkien at your own risk. And a Middle-Earth reinterpreted by Valerie Solanas' understudy does exactly that.

I hadn't known how petty the feminazi vandalism had gotten, but apparently at some point they actually went back and invested time in rewriting a quest in the Glittering Caves so that Gimli now gets K.O.d by a miniboss, only to have a random little girl effortlessly beat the same miniboss.

Yeah.

Fuck this retarded trash.

 

Without the literary tie-in, you were never going to get by as a pure multiplayer game. You never had enough worthwhile individuals for it among the rabble. Simpleminded MMO grinding draws simpleminded subhuman trash, and from the very start it was impossible to get them to do anything other than race for cake, a routine which will captivate none but the most degenerate. Middle-Earth was your selling point, and the latest expansions have less and less tying in to the peoples, events, themes of Tolkien's writing, instead being repurposed so some narcissistic snowflake wastes of oxygen can push to the forefront their original fanfic characters in a social justice warrior wonderland full of knockoff drow and noble warrior orcs.

 

Though they're still plugging away at improving team tactics, level design, skill balance, the few good points are too readily washed out by the stupidity of their attached content. Too little, too late. The game recently upgraded to 64-bit servers, which also functions as an unofficial server consolidation. Combined with the latest instance runs, this briefly made raids possible again. I immediately cautioned the fanboys the excitement wouldn't last, and though it lasted a month instead of the two weeks I'd predicted, group recruitment is already more slapdash with the LFF channel going blank for fifteen or thirty minutes at a time. Whatever windfall LotRO could've reaped as other MMOs contract to oblivion, it's already pissed away by deliberately destroying its core appeal in the name of vapid posturing.

 

Maybe I'll keep logging in now and then to continue wandering about older zones. But I sure as hell don't intend to give these clowns any more money. LotRO's gotten more undeserved second chances than anything else in the industry, and it's long past time to let it die.

Allow me to give you the room-temperature fuzzies:

Are you coming or going? Oh, who gives a peck.

A bit of surfing (thank you BugFinder) seems to narrow this down as Halysidota. Apparently it's a good thing I didn't try to grab it, as the hairs can cause rashes and it may or may not be mildly toxic in its larval form. Otherwise, it's a harmless low-impact broadleaf generalist.