I hate you every day

Growing up on a farm as I did, you get used to repeating patterns, cycles of routine; some comforting or refreshing, like the changing of the seasons or the weather, and some monotonous like some of the daily chores or need to rake out a stall. I never really grew tired or impatient with the daily routines of the farm, but I am one of those people who tends to look forward to see what's around the next curve. What's different, what's something new to figure out, what unknown thing should be made known.

We raised livestock on the farm, hogs and cattle mostly, and that too was a cycle. Farrowing, weaning the young, growing them out, loading them up, hauling them off to be sold. At the hog processor where we sold ours was where I first remember stopping to really think about what routine meant for some people. As the pigs are unloaded off the trailer they are routed down corridors and led to where they are either electrocuted or otherwise rendered unconscious.  I know it sounds barbaric, but in truth the animals experience only the momentary shock or carbon dioxide stun. They do not consciously experience their death.

Then they are bled out. Meaning, their throats are slit. It occurred to me that that is someone's job, to slit throats all day. And I can tell you, a pig is full of a lot of blood and they don't bleed gently. I thought about how someone does this all day, as a part of their daily routine, over and over. I later heard that company regulations prevented any employee from being the slitter for more than two weeks at a time before rotating off as a measure of protecting their mental stability, as if the company was afraid that after work down at the bar an employee might...you know. Take their work home with them. I don't know if that's true or rural legend, but if you've ever seen a grown pig in its thrashing, wailing death throes, it's not hard to believe. Even when unconscious the autonomic reactions are not pleasant to watch, and I can see how being the agent of an animal's pretty gruesome death, no matter how humane the process was supposed to be, over and over hour after hour could unhinge someone over time.

The closest thing to mental-imbalance-inducing repetition I ever experienced was working in a factory for several months in the middle of my college years. It was a truck body plant, building cargo boxes onto frames for Ryder, UPS or whoever needed a giant box body married to a new frame for the fleet. Tab A into Slot B. The work itself was easy, and there were a few different things I did such as checking vehicle registration, bulkhead plate cap install, final inspection. Tab A, meet Slot B. The money was ridiculously good. Tab A, welcome to Slot B. First shift jobs are great, I was home by 3:30 in the afternoon. Tab A, meet your new friend Slot B. A few months and I'll be back on campus. Tab A, goddamn Slot B.

I left that job and swore I would never return to such mind-killing, numbing monotony again. And then, World of Warcraft.

I've played WoW for years and it's in my pantheon of all-time great games, but one significant aspect of the game has always been difficult to accept. I started playing back in the early Burning Crusade days and then came back during The Wrath of the Lich King. The new content was great, the lore was wonderfully written and it was exciting to see the story unfolding as we progressed toward assaulting Icecrown Citadel. The Argent Tournament grounds promised us fantasy warriors (and Mages and Rogues and nine million billion Death Knights) the combat training and weapons we would need to face Arthas himself.

But first, we needed practice jousting.

"Why are those quests blue?"

"Those are dailies."

"What are dailies?"

"Quests."

"Daily quests?"

Daily quests. When my guildmate explained the concept of a quest you have to do every day and what purpose they were serving in the game I didn't like the concept. The Lich King content had impressed me and hooked me like never before; the story line was great and the phased areas helped the immersion by making you feel like your character was impacting the world in a material way. The WoW experience was more engaging, entertaining and addicting than ever before.

Then I discovered that at maximum level you start doing things that no longer matter in the world. I've always enjoyed questing, but suddenly doing them didn't matter because I would just do the exact same thing again the next day. Dailies were sold to players as a way to help build the Argent Tournament together to help your faction and all of Northrend prepare to battle the Lich King himself, but I saw it for what it really was: Nothing more than a timer system, another progression gate before Icecrown Citadel was ready for launch. It seemed artificial and contrary to the overall quality of the game that had improved so much since I had been away.

Then I discovered the dailies you could do to gain faction rep as well and I got sucked in like most other players. I thought the Wyrmrest Accord was cool, and then I realized that if I did enough dailies I could become Exalted and have a red dragon mount of my own. So I embarked on my weeks-long schedule. This was before talbard championing and Random Dungeon Finder, so I was on my own with nothing but a measly few dailies to give me a pittance of 750 rep points per day on my way to 42,000. Destabilize the Azure Shrine and help defend the dragons. Tab A, Slot B. Harpooning the dragon hatchling doesn't take so long. Tab A, Slot B. Just a couple more Scalesworn Elites and I'm done for today. Tab A, goddamn Slot B.

Dailies weren't new to Lich King, and once in a while some grizzled old veteran in Trade Chat gripes about how back in their day it was actually an accomplishment to have a Netherwing Drake. But since Lich King, there are dailies scattered all over the continents. Now they're not just a pursuit of the completionists or obsessives anymore. They aren't a means to an end that's a component of some other progression; now they are a gameplay destination in themselves for every player.

Every quester knows what to expect of the quest givers in WoW. Bring me 8 of these, kill 6 of those. Go here, interact with this thing, come back. At their core most quests share a basic formula, but Blizzard has improved the context of the quests and areas. Dailies, however, strip that context away and leave the objectives with no real meaning other than the arbitrary numbers their completion requires. Bring me 8 of these. Exactly 8, because over the course of the next 24 hours I will eat 1/3 of one every hour. So when you come back at this time tomorrow, I will need 8 more. 

Stop the arbitrary numbers! Why don't I need to kill the other four monsters patrolling by withing spitting distance or gather the other seven flowers I can see? Why can't I bring you all the wood you need to build the Argent Tournament at once? Why can't I rescue all the wounded soldiers, kill all the char hounds, why can't I punt ALL the turtles? And why is that tower rebuilt every day and you morons don't remember that I helped you destroy it just last night? Again? For the sixth time since last Monday?

These arbitrary numbers and the moronic, scripted NPCs don't remember you because the daily quests in themselves are irrelevant. Like many components in an RPG and WoW in particular, it's an element of the game designed to slow down player progression. If the quest objective numbers weren't capped and larger total quantities were available from the start in order to accomplish a larger world goal, most players would power through it as fast as possible and run out of things to do even faster than we already do. So there's a cap on how much players can earn, and even a cap as to how many dailies players can do. The Blizzard developers have already accelerated new content creation because Cataclysm endgamers have burned through it, despite the uneven and sometimes punishing difficulty early in the expansion. Now that most of that content has been made easier, the Firelands dailies have an even stronger presence in endgame play and it's another symptom of ills in a tiring game that continues to lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers by each quarterly earnings report.

WoW's tone has always combined middle-high fantasy drama and clever whimsy, but there's only so many times you can vanquish the same creatures for the same NPCs or rescue the same bear cubs before realizing that it's just not very much fun to do. Again. It's not satisfying to kill the same creatures every day, because despite the game's insistence, it's pretty obvious they aren't actually a threat to the world or I'd need to kill more than 6 today. So much for story immersion. And it's no longer amusing to climb trees to toss stranded bear cubs onto the trampoline below, it's an annoyance. So much for the levity of a tonal shift in the story.

I am Vaeas the all-powerful, vanquisher of limitless evil, the Arcane Forsworn, the Second of North and First of the Great Red West. Fear me and tremble! For I am also the attendant of bear cub trampolines. Care for a bouncy bounce?

Blizzard repeated the exact same pattern of progression in Cataclysm that they used for the Argent Tournament in Wrath of the Lich King, with only a couple changes. Instead of an entire faction or server changing the world, your stage of progression through the Firelands dailies is phased like many other quest areas, which gives players the choice to progress the story line at their own pace. It's a nice tweak to the formula for players who want to do the dailies in irregular doses and not log in a month later to find the rest of the server has power-injected the World Tree with Daily Quest Miracle Gro and there's nothing left to contribute in the world.

The Firelands dailies are also quite easy and can be done in a very short amount of time each day. Maybe this is another attempt by Blizzard to ease the daily suffering of players, but like a Lava Burster spewing molten streams of irony, this makes the quests more irrelevant and more of a non-event. There is no challenge and they require no engagement or need to even pay attention. Take quest, Arcane Blast a few times, keep watching baseball, plant a vine, read another Slashdot article, destroy a rune-whatever-thingee, finish crossword puzzle. They're all done in about twenty minutes, which is convenient, but it's also a greater waste of time. Like a Dalaran sewer rat in a cage pulling a lever, daily quests are just pellet dispensers that don't give players the satisfaction of having earned anything. And when players lack a sense of accomplishment, they get bored. And when players get bored, they stop logging in.

Blizzard has far more talent, creativity and resources than to leave endgame to a shallow combination of throat-slitting insanity with Tab-A-Slot-B inanity. It's lazy, stopgap gameplay band-aiding a lack of content that has become the standard. That's a crime, because on the way to 85, World of Warcraft still offers more to the player than any other MMO in gaming history.

Blizzard can do better than this.

One of these things is not like the other

In fact, they could hardly be more different.

Two huger-than-huge MMOs are creeping towards their rabidly awaited releases and they're starting to get some time in the German sun at Gamescom. We've all been tripping over our own tongues in rushing to devour any tidbit from either, and these two videos are the best look at gameplay yet. Both feature co-operative combat against a boss-level PvE NPC and comparing the two is...revealing.

And then:

I grew up on Star Wars and I consider BioWare one of the best developers in the galaxy, but the video seems to confirm what I've heard for a few months. The Old Republic looks and plays very generic. The tank and melee engage the front line, healer at range and support DPS stationary in the back attacking other targets who are plinking them in the face, and all of it is pretty stationary until the melee DPS dies and it all goes to crap. Most disappointing is that the fight appears to lack any sense of dynamism or engaging fight mechanics. Stand there, take a beating and hope your healer can out-lengthen your life bar against the enemy life bar. The visuals and animations look nice and the lightsabers look awesome but they stop looking awesome when they have to whack a single droid several times to take it down. Then they start looking like oversized Jedi rave glowsticks.

The Guild Wars 2 clip also confirms what has pretty much universally been said by people who've seen it or gotten some hands-on time: It's great bordering on amazing. While the SWTOR vid rubs a warm glowstick on my expectations and gently lulls them to sleep, the GW2 vid yanks them out of my brain, impales them on a bone wall, summons zombies to stomp on them, gnashes them in a dragon's maw, tail-swipes them into the far horizon, then dares me NOT to pre-order.

If the BioWare game did not have the Star Wars property rights and Galaxy Far, Far Away styling, no one would be interested in it. They will sell a million-plus boxes on fanbase alone no doubt, but I don't think it will appeal long-term to MMO gamers. It's following a standard MMO formula that's starting to wear thin with gamers and is based on the golden triangle of tank-heals-DPS. Once the self-touted "BioWare-quality story" is finished I wonder if it may go the way of DC Universe Online with little replayability and not enough endgame for player retention.

If the ArenaNet game had the Star Wars property rights and that video featured 30 Jedi or Sith taking down a giant Rancor, the entire Internet including Jack Thompson and Pedobear would be wetting their pants and camping out at GameStop tonight. I've played Guild Wars off and on for a couple years and it never really grabbed me like other games, but GW2 may succeed in turning those oh-my-gawd-it's-great murmurs into a roar by release time. There will be no class golden triangle in the game and the world will dynamically change based on your questing decisions as you play through, and encounters like the video above are scattered throughout the game.

ArenaNet has been confidently open talking about their intent of new MMO design and gameplay and each video they release appears to back up the promises. BioWare has fueled the hype that any studio should when developing a long-awaited Star Wars game (and spending a rumored $300 million plus) and pounded the marketing buzzword button, but each content reveal milestone to the press and public has been met with a resounding "Meh." I do not yet think that SWTOR should be written off by any means, and I don't think GW2 will necessarily be the MMO genre changer that some think it will be. But now that each game has released its first substantial combat feature video to the public and they can be compared side by side it's easy to see where the SWTOR ennui and GW2 hype is coming from. It's also obvious that these two games are diametrically opposed in design philosophy. As they continue down their divergent paths toward release, the fickle and often brutally judgmental MMO gaming crowd waits with its expectations, a fanboy beast that will turn on its master the moment the fun runs out and disappointment sets in.

If I were one of these game studios I would continue working with quiet confidence. If I were the other I would be worried that marketing hype may not buy me enough time to feed the beast.

A Month of Sundays, nearly

Between the hot, dry weather and the taxes and the Cold War, and the bronchitis and the Art Institute and ComicCon and the pushpushpush remodel job in evening heat that could buckle the knees of the devil himself it's been hard to make it to a keyboard without slipping unconscious into an exhausted and well-medicated pillow of mental fog. Back from rubbing shoulders with Patrick Stewart in Chicago and back from the dead after an extended stay in Levaquinland.

I kept up with the news while sickaway, and felt like those TV "journalist" personalities must feel when they take a vacation and all hell breaks loose and they're not on to cover it. While I was out and out:

The University of Texas ruins yet another conference with their habitual greedy overreach

I don't hate to say I told you so last year. And the year before that. And the year before that. This day was coming, and we Nebraskans knew it like we know the fullback trap. Schadenfreude? Hell yeah. Lots of it. Good for Texas aTm to get out; better late than never, but there are a few schools that will be stranded and scrambling for inclusion in some conference, any conference. Buddy, can ya spare a dime for a poor Cyclone? We gots no conference because we gots nothin' nobody wants.

Too bad the other schools didn't believe Nebraska when we saw this coming and stood alone as the dissenting vote all these years. They thought it was safer to keep Texas and puppet Dan Beebe at the tiller and keep the short-term stability, as if banding together in Texas's best interests was going to offer some shelter come the day when the Bevo boys had their pieces in place to imbalance the conference beyond sanity. There is no safety in numbers when the majority votes to fall in line with the schoolyard bully. Hey Sooners--that's not a teat you're suckling. Bevo's a bull.

It was funny to catch ESPN writer David Ubben's weekend tweet: "When does Nebraska put up a 'Through these doors walks the Smartest Athletic Department in College Football' sign atop the Osborne Complex?" How about that, the world's first meaningful tweet. This after his mockery of Nebraska leaving for the Big Ten last year, which earned him a few pages of criticism from Huskers and non-Huskers alike and prompted him to follow up with a capitulation post after many accusations of Texas pandering.

Meanwhile, ESPN's $300m deal with Texas to prop up the Longhorn Network keeps their lips sealed on the aTm secession. On Michigan Avenue I could hear the sigh of relief all the way from Bristol when the Miami story broke this weekend and gave them something else to talk about instead of pretending to not notice what was happening to their new business buddy's conference. Maybe they could get Craig James to weigh in with his opinion. That would be a fun little piece to fit in this latest episode of ESPN's twisted world of interest conflicts.

Chicago ComiCon was mega-ultra-super

My first, and it was pretty cool. Not as much cosplayers as I thought there would be and it was a pretty heavy vendor-fest. Artist Alley was great and I met a few artists of whose work I've been a fan for years, such as Arthur Suydam, Mark Texeira, Dave Dorman and Ben Templesmith, as well as met a few talented newcomers who I expect to see in A-list titles before long. The artists were universally very friendly, approachable and talkative. Ben Templesmith is particularly engaging and fun to talk to but I would have liked to see more writers there and talk to them. I dropped a little more coin on prints for my room than I planned but it was a great time and my daughter and wife got some personal drawings for them by Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani.

I didn't make it to any featured guest Q&A sessions, mainly because the timing was wrong for Bruce Campbell and Felicia Day's, and Patrick Stewart's would have been overfull and his lines were stupid long. Unfortunately I was planning on catching Morena Baccarin but she had to cancel due to a schedule conflict. Ah well. LeVar Burton was extremely friendly and my daughter was thrilled to meet and get a pic with him.

I'm just not a celebrity person though...just not interested in someone's fame for fame's sake, and I have no need to be in proximity of it. I watched Patrick Stewart sign autographs and chat with fans, yet after all the years of watching him command the Enterprise and wheel around in that Magneto-proof chair, I kept wondering if King Claudius would enjoy discussing Shakespeare sometime over some Earl Grey tea, hot. But otherwise they seem like just people. I'd rather chat with them than have them write their name on a piece of paper or a photo or a model starship. I'd rather ask Stewart what his intent was with the shrug as he drank the poison in the BBC Hamlet from last year and see if it lined up with my interpretation. I'd rather ask Ben Templesmith what movies he enjoyed this summer than pay $900 for an original print (though his Fell prints are fantastic). Maybe it's just the types of celebrity that I tend to fall into circles with, geeks and people who appreciate geekdom. Suits me fine.

Also, pretty sure I met a real Dalek. Almost exterminated for real. Close call, but I was able to escape into a mini TARDIS tent. Somehow this one wasn't bigger on the inside.

Oh boy! I like avenging!

A 90-pound asthmatic weakling is offered the chance to take a super serum, and with biceps suddenly bulging becomes one of America's most iconic modern folklore heroes. No, this isn't Barry Bonds: The Movie. Sickly and frail Steve Rogers displays equal amounts of heroism both pre- and post-injection chamber, and one of American pop culture's most emblematic and idealistic purveyors of justice is done justice on the big screen.

Captain America offers a good story and balances narrative with action well, carried by a solid cast and a script that doesn't overreach into melodrama or indulge in too much forced humor. It doesn't patronize either fans of the comic hero or the non-fan moviegoer, and if you scroll down a bit you'll find another summer super-flick that could learn a glowing green ton about exposition and backstory from director Joe Johnston. It's a fun and satisfying two hours and manages to be the most direct structural setup for next year's The Avengers as well as one of the better Avenger prequels as a film on its own merits. The first hour of the film moves through its exposition and character development at a steady pace before the action in the second hour takes over, but it's not a jarring transition and both halves of the movie are engaging. Writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were wise to keep the origin setting in WWII, though I always feel bad for all the people back then who had to live their lives in sepia tones.

The movie isn't without a significant yet nonfatal flaw. Go back a few years for a forgettable action movie with a standard villain that always comes to mind. In 1997's Air Force One, hijacker Gary Oldman gets fed up listening to the righteous pleas of his captives and finally erupts with "You who murdered a hundred thousand Iraqis to save a nickel on a gallon of gas are going to lecture me on the rules of war? DON'T." It didn't take much and the line isn't Shakespearean, but at least in that moment Ivan Korshunav isn't just a bad guy; he's suddenly a bad guy who has his reasons for why he has made his choices. We don't have to be instructed to sympathize with an antagonist or feel manipulated into liking some part of a vile person. But when even a vanilla action movie can manage to give us an antagonist we understand on his own terms, the story is better served; there's a couple more layers of conflict and motivations at play and it's still satisfying to see President Han Solo triumph.

This is where Captain America loses its way. I've read critics praise the movie for presenting its heroes and villains without irony. Certainly that's true; this thoroughly red-white-and-blue-saturated tale manages to keep the protagonist and antagonist starkly black and white but that's not necessarily a good thing. It's fine to have this particular hero with his unerringly noble compass guiding him because he's lived his life as the little guy who hates bullies, but a villain who lusts after nothing more than world domination because he's crazy and jonesing for some world domination could use a little irony to escape the shallow end of the antagonist pool.

However, there is amusing irony in the fact that a movie about America's greatest patriot hero contains far less bombastic flag-waving, grandstanding or jingoism than Iron Man 2.

Giant flag backdrop: Check. Patriotic explosions: Check. Flag-bikini models: Check. Jon Favreau overindulgence: Check.

*Not pictured: Captain America.

I never read or was interested much in Captain America the superhero until the Civil War line a few years ago that polarized the Marvel universe into pro- or anti-Superhuman Registration Act. He was just too straightforward, too unerringly emblematic and always seemed to lack the multiple layers of personality or conscience that attracted me to other titles. It's a little like how filmmaker Paul Schrader believes it's impossible to not bludgeon an audience with a Christ figure; he feels that once the crucifix imagery is invoked, the symbol and all of its connotations overwhelm the viewers' own interpretations and the character your film has built disappears. Similarly with Captain America, it's pretty tough to look at that costume and shield and not see the symbols instead of the character himself. He was a hero created to serve a specific purpose at that time in America's history, which was nicely alluded to by the film (his first issue in March 1941 literally depicts him knocking Hitler's lights out with a democracy-sized right cross). For me and many readers of my generation, he was a hard superhero to relate to. The geopolitics of the world in which I grew up are messier and have more gray areas than the colors Captain Rogers was born with 70 years ago.

Johnston's Captain America manages to consistently present Steve Rogers, with or without Vita-Rays. Given the trappings and myriad histories of this character, that's a pretty heroic accomplishment.

Absolutism and inflexibility and their dangers aside, even I can admit to feeling a little rah-rah for Cap once in a while. This summer's movie goes a long way to putting some substance behind the star.

The one you missed: Battlestar Galactica (2004)

There aren't a lot of shows gutsy enough or good enough to pull off a promo image like this one, just like there isn't a lot of TV to make the TV snob in me admit that sometimes the best stuff you'll find is on the small screen.

I never got into Lost. I haven't seen a single episode of Dexter or Breaking Bad or any of the other quality TV that my friends insist that I'd like. Battlestar Galactica was one of the few TV shows that has ever had me watching the days of the week, waiting for the next episode to grab my by the throat and shove me back down into the black hole of its intense mixture of political factions, religious ideology clashes and modern-day War on Terror allegory all set amid humanity's desperate fight to survive a war against the machines we created.

One of the first things I noticed about the show were the production values. Interior sets are detailed and thoroughly convincing, especially the Galactica herself as a museum piece brought out of our 1970s and into a war in which she's hopelessly outmatched. Sound is also terrifically done, from the ambient noise of any setting to the tension-heightening crackling radio transmissions during battle. The space combat is fast and well choreographed so that you always have a sense of what is happening in a dogfight instead of taking a shortcut and faking tension with confusing jump cuts or disorienting pans. It seems trivial until you see it done right; then it makes all the difference for action scenes, and it also helps that the series appears shot on film stock that you'd expect to see in a movie theater.

It's hard to think of another dramatic series as well written as BSG and it earned a score of Emmy nominations and critical acclaim for intelligent, intense writing that often was influenced by the events of the Iraq war as they unfolded and the social commentary the war created. Often you'll find good actors and good performances ruined by poor dialog, but BSG manages the near-impossible: intelligent, convincing dialog good enough to overcome very mediocre acting of some key characters. Katee Sackhoff (Kara Thrace/Starbuck) and Jamie Bamber (Lee Adama) are dead center in the series but their earnestness is usually over the top and their quiet scenes are frequently vacant and delivered flat. It's far less likely to find them cast in the next Spielberg film than it is to find them in the next average TV show that I'll hate. However, Sackhoff has a strong final season and at times truly shines in key scenes.

In contrast, Edward James Olmos as Admiral William Adama is frakking brilliant, as is Michael Hogan as Colonel Saul Tigh. Adama seems to hold his ship and the few tens of thousands remaining of all humanity together by sheer force of will while Tigh manages to be the best gods damned commander you'd ever follow into battle while at the same time watching his self-destructive tendencies threaten to take him apart at the end of each shift.

And here it is: Characters. Even the annoying ones have truly endearing qualities and even endearing characters will annoy you with their sheer human-ness...or Cylon-ness. Despite uneven acting, Battlestar Galactica pulls off engaging drama because even when you want to throttle the characters for being who they are, you still cheer for them and want to see where and how their role in this grand plan will be decided. They suffer greatly and triumph rarely, and in that they manage to drag us along with them.

As far as scifi dramas go you won't find anything as gritty as BSG and it earns its edginess without cheap violence or unearned plot twists. There's intense action, believable human drama, intriguing Cylon drama, a dash of semi-supernatural mystery and some way cool space dogfighting. There aren't a lot of TV shows or movies that I can remember that had me realize I was curled up in my chair with my knees drawn to my chest and holding my breath like I found myself during season four.

And about the series ending that had BSG fans debating and arguing all over the Interwebs the moment it was all over?

Don't worry. It's perfect.

Cataschism

World of Warcraft players don't ask for much. We simply want a compelling leveling experience that is fresh and new every time we start a new alt, we want PvP that is thrilling and rewarding, we want to obtain awesome gear after just the right amount of effort and minimal grind, we want any minimal grind to be a pleasant and stimulating experience, we want classes so compelling to play that level 85 is merely an arbitrary waypoint along the glorious path of countless hours logged on and we want endless endgame content that always provides something challenging and is continually available the moment we have vanquished the final boss of the latest raid. And sparkle ponies. We want sparkle ponies.

None of these things are reasonable expectations for any MMO, not even from the undisputed Blizzard king. True, we do have sparkle ponies, but since the release of Cataclysm the signs are increasingly pointing to an MMO that is getting long in the dragon tooth. There has been persistent outcry about the difficulty of Cataclysm heroic dungeons, the lack of new zones to explore and fewer levels to progress through and a general lack of endgame content.

But when you have over 11 million subscribers, there isn't a lot of cause for panic. Blizzard is notoriously difficult to pin down on exact subscribers at any given time, but when any other MMO--subscription based or not--would be a rousing success if it could sustain 1 million players, it's pretty safe to say that Bobby Kotick is sleeping well at night.

So far. There's always more to numbers, and I think there is a greater concern that they indicate an increasing number of players are finding a divide between what they want to play and what World of Warcraft is offering them.

Lies, damn lies and statistics
WoW subscriptions fluxuate by tens of thousands by the fiscal quarter, with dips in numbers correlating with competing games' release dates and players leaving when expansion content has been played through. The numbers spike up again when players return at the release of new expansions or content patches. A short-term chart of these dips and spikes representing fluctuations of thousands would look like the EKG of a manic-depressive meth addict spiking his Red Bull with Diazepam. There is no way to access Blizzard's actual numbers at any given point because the company only releases subscription data when they are required to (earnings reports) or when it sounds nice (a good PR milestone). The official global subscription numbers released by Blizzard since the game's launch look like this, with expansions noted:

World of Warcraft launches November 2004

350,000 copies sold by end of the month

2005 - Jan/Feb - 1 million
2005 - Dec - 5 million

2006 - Sep - 6 million

2007 - Jan - The Burning Crusade expansion launch

2007 - Jul - 9 million

2008 - Jan - 10 million

2008 - Oct - 11 million

2008 - Nov - Wrath of the Lich King expansion launch

2008 - Dec - 11.5 million

2009 - --- - 5 million est.*
2010 - Feb - 11.5 million

2010 - Oct - 12 million

2010 - Dec - Cataclysm expansion launch

2011 - Mar - 11.4 million

* Stat anomaly: In 2009, Blizzard's Chinese distributor was refused license renewal by the Chinese government until certain changes were made to some imagery in the game. There are no official global subscription numbers from Blizzard for that year.

Numbers most game studios would club a Hyjal bear cub for, and the figures are even more impressive when you look at the list of competing games that have had virtually no effect on WoW's numbers over its amazingly long 6-year lifespan. WoW has taken the best shots of pretty much every MMO studio and has endured the attempts of solid games such as Guild Wars, Age of Conan, Warhammer, EVE, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, Aion, Dungeons and Dragons, Lord of the Rings Online and newcomer Rift. It's hard to think of a stronger list of intellectual properties and licenses to go up against. Well. Except for one. More on lightsabers and force chokes in a bit.

But then there's that last number, the one that declines following Cataclysm's release. The impending death of WoW has been exaggerated more than once, but never before has Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime had to state in an earnings call that subscriptions post-Cata launch have decreased faster than any at any other similar timeframe following an expansion. Morhaime also pointed out that players come and go with content release cycles and when they leave to other games for a while (*cough* *cough* Rift), but they eventually return for the sparkle ponies.

He's right that players return, and Rift is far less the WoW killer than any of the others on the list that have been labeled the same. But he would also be right to worry about the unusually rapid post-expansion decline.

Nefarian, the nerf bat tolls for thee
Five more levels across five new zones goes by in the Blink of a mage when you've played World of Warcraft for more than a couple years. Blizzard knew burning through the new Cataclysm content would be a problem, so to solve it they created an entirely different, more frustrating problem.

A lot has been said about the difficulty level for many players in the Cataclysm heroic dungeons, but not enough about the rippling effect that had on the game in general. Wrath of the Lich King trained people to believe that everyone's DPS would always be enough, crowd control would never really be necessary and that healing would always be easily done while simultaneously knitting a Horde-themed scarf while alt-tabbed to Netflix. So what did Blizz do? They ramped up the difficulty of heroics and raid boss encounters in order to slow player progression.

I'll defend the choice to require players to become better and learn their classes more. Crowd control should matter. Target marking should matter. Group coordination and responsibilities should matter. Our small guild welcomed the challenge of the new dungeons and raids, and we were even among the first few on our high-population server to achieve Glory of the Cataclysm Hero. The problem is that Cataclysm brought trash pulls and boss mechanics so tightly tuned that even strong groups had no chance to recover from minor mistakes or unavoidable random events generated by the game. It wasn't the introduction of clever, new boss mechanics; it was an artificial ramping up of difficulty to the point where the tough encounters weren't a stimulating challenge as much as they were an exercise in demoralizing frustration. Of course the inevitable happened: Tanks pulled too much, groups wiped. Healers got blamed. Tanks learned to not pull too much, groups still wiped. Healers got blamed. Healers became frustrated. Healers stopped queueing in the Dungeon Finder. Queue times increased. Players complained. Blizzard defended their design choices for the encounters. Healers began leaving the game. Dungeon Finder queue times became interminable. Non-raiding level 85 players get frustrated. Endgame raiding guilds became short on healers. Endgame raiding guilds start falling apart, consolidating or leaving the game.

And then, concessions on the part of Blizzard. Not the kind where you get watery Coke and overpriced nachos with orange plastic sauce, but the kind where Blizzard instituted a flat buff to anyone using the Dungeon Finder and a radical reduction in difficulty of raid bosses in the 4.2 patch. Now Blizzard may have swung too far the other way; now the four original raids are getting dominated by undergeared groups and the elite guilds are deep into Firelands. One of the players in my Firelands raid was 7/7 with his guild only two weeks into the 4.2 release.

Further problems with 4.2 are disappointing players. The new faction is an exact recycling of dailies and rep grinding that was used for the Argent Tournament in Wrath of the Lich King two years ago. The legendary weapon quest is exactly the same system as was used then as well. The only exception is that there are more top-tier items that can be acquired by rep grinding and crafting, to the point where non-raiding players can have almost the same or better than the players slugging it out with Ragnaros. That's not a problem in itself, but it's one more example of Blizzard designing content that either will not satisfy endgame players, won't matter to them, or won't last long enough to keep them. They have released an endgame patch with negligible endgame content and they have mismanaged the pieces of the game into a situation they will have a hard time playing out of. Morhaime has promised that Blizzard is hard at work accelerating new content development, but I think they have fallen behind in providing enough incentive for a high percentage of their subscribers to keep playing.

World of Warcraft 2: Attack of the Return of the 1-60 Leveling Experience Strikes Back

WoW does what it does better than any other game in the market. It has a great leveling progression and class variety, a solid crafting system to fuel a thriving economy and it has a reasonable learning curve for new players. Cataclysm improved all that by revising class spec trees and revamping almost all of the classic zones on both original continents so that even longtime players could enjoy a new alt or two. The new WoW experience is even more new-player friendly.

And that's the problem. The largest surge in WoW subscriptions occurred over four years ago, and while there's no way to know what percentage of the current population has been recycled with new players versus how many have stayed on since then, it's reasonable to believe that there is a large percentage of the current players at max level and in endgame content. Hence the problem: Cataclysm didn't bring enough cataclysmic stuff to do for the potentially millions of players who have leveled all the alts they want, have pounded through the new dungeons and raids and have become a little bored with the "special RP" in Goldshire.

The revision of the old lands in Cataclysm is very well done and does make the game feel very different than it did years ago when it was launched. For new players and those still wanting to play a few new classes, the new old WoW experience until Outlands is full of new quests and storylines, phased progression and some fun twists on classic dungeons. Unfortunately, it all comes to a sudden halt when you step through the portal to Hellfire Peninsula and The Burning Crusade.

The Kotickification of Azeroth
ActiBlizz CEO Bobby Kotick likes money. Bobby Kotick likes selling sparkle ponies and flamey lions. Bobby Kotick makes shareholders happy. Bobby Kotick wants you to pay more per month to play World of Warcraft.

Bobby Kotick is an idiot.

The trend sweeping across MMOs in recent months has been to adopt some form of free to play or "freemium" subscriptions that offer premium options to players willing to pay a monthly fee. Usually free to play games rely on box sales, paid expansion packs and microtransaction stores where players can purchase in-game items. That's how the studio makes profit and it's worked out so well for Guild Wars and a few others that recently other big-name games such as Dungeons and Dragons Online, Champions Online and Age of Conan started offering a free play model. By all accounts, the free/freemium model increased revenue beyond studio expectations.

Meanwhile, Activision Blizzard wants to offer new features too, such as more mounts (that you can buy in the Blizzard store), more vanity pets (that you can buy in the Blizzard store) and even a way for you to form dungeon groups with friends on other servers and check your guild and auctions--for an additional cost on top of your $15 monthly fee. How many players are willing to pay $18 per month for these marginal benefits? Very few, judging by the outcry when these premium features were announced around the time that 4.2 was getting close. MMO gamers have more options and more free or low-cost games to pursue than ever before, but Blizzard apparently thinks that not only are they still the only game in town, players want to give them more money than they already do to stay in Azeroth. This is the chasm between what Blizzard thinks players want and the actual perceived value that players have, and this is Blizzard's most dangerous misconception.

No other games enjoy the clout or the luxury of millions of subscriptions like WoW does. But no one is beyond decline. It's one thing to design content that is a misstep, because players will forgive you when you change it or offer more that they like. But when players are already growing tired of your game and then on top of that feel their getting taken advantage of, they will go elsewhere. This is a dangerous time for Blizzard to start monetizing itself in the foot, for there are Jedi on the horizon.

These are not the prognostications of doom you're looking for

Star Wars: The Old Republic is not going to kill WoW. Guild Wars 2 is not going to kill WoW. The Secret World is not going to kill WoW. Only Blizzard can kill WoW, and years from now we will still see a healthy player base. The only questions are how badly any design missteps along the way will cost Blizz in subscriptions in the meantime and how much Blizzard will care at that point, because they have their own new properties on the horizon. It would be naive to think Blizzard doesn't watch those subscription numbers and trends more than any player, blogger or industry analyst out there. They know their content release map, they know their expenses and they know when they will throttle back development costs for WoW and shift resources to another, potentially more profitable project. You know, one quietly called Project Titan.

I think the development resource shifting is already beginning to happen. Blizzard has enough revenue and development talent to create and re-create World of Warcraft a dozen times before the next Super Bowl, but why would they? They can revise earlier content in order to keep drawing in new players and stay on a similar endgame content release schedule, because they are still drawing new players regularly and recalling old players in strong numbers, at least temporarily, with each new content patch or expansion. Meanwhile, their new MMO under development, Project Titan, nears release.

Let's say for the sake of random speculative mathmatics that WoW eventually slips to 8 million subscribers. Then Titan releases, and it is absurd to think it won't sell a million boxes within a few months, or even the first month. If Titan is good by Blizzard standards--meaning, a terrific game--it's easy to see it following a similar subscription trajectory that WoW enjoyed. So a couple years in, Titan has reached 8 or 9 million players, maybe even cannibalizing a few million WoW players. If Blizzard thinks WoW has in fact plateaued and is entering a natural decline towards a lower subscription base, the time is right for the next big title to be ready to carry the revenue expectations. It's not unreasonable to expect Titan to pick up where WoW leaves off in a few years; investing in a new game that could reach 10 million-plus on top of WoW, even if WoW slips to 8 million or below, is far more cost effective than watching one property slowly slide downward in numbers while requiring far more development costs to reinvent it in order to keep players who have been around for 4, 5 or 6 years already.

Certainly the numbers could go the other way. Titan could flop and WoW could continue to decline. But this is Blizzard. They simply have too much talent and too much money to make too many mistakes for too much longer. And the rumors I keep hearing are that the top development teams--the ones responsible for much of the Lich King content--have been pulled over to the Titan side of campus.

In the meantime, Blizzard can't rest. The shock of losing 600,000 players shortly after a major expansion is compounded by the fact that it also indicates that for the first time in the history of the game, WoW failed to maintain or increase subscriptions in accordance with its years-old pattern. And a million-plus players will try The Old Republic when it hits, despite reports so far that it's a bland experience bordering on disappointing. Guild Wars 2 looks very promising, and if it can deliver on those promises of true innovation in gameplay and class mechanics it has a chance to deepen the dent TOR will make in Blizzard's monthly take.

Not since the early days of WoW has Blizzard needed to evaluate what they are offering their paying subscribers versus what the players are actually perceiving as value for the money. World of Warcraft isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but there are serious cracks in the surface of Azeroth that are not Deathwing's doing. If Blizzard wants to avoid becoming the victim of their own undoing, refocusing the direction of the game content for high-level players needs to have already begun. If not, they might find themselves dethroned before they have a chance to hand the crown to themselves again with Project Titan. Between now and then, they can only save--or blame--themselves.

Brightest Day, Blackest Exposition

One of the greatest sins a writer can commit is to tell the story rather than show it. Never tell how heroic your protagonists are; show bravery and resilience. Don’t tell how your villain is the greatest evil the universe has ever known; show brutality and malice. Above all, don’t make a superhero movie about a character that most of the world isn’t familiar with and talk the audience to death in a theater.

Despite being in publication since 1941, Green Lantern is a superhero that never sustained a place in the top-tier of characters such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man or any of the X-Men. The story is a mix of human drama, otherworldly politics and space opera centered on an alien technology that allows the wielder of a ring to possess nearly limitless power. That kind of eclectic jumble of story elements has been kind of a tough sell even for fans over the years and the title has not always sold well. Hal Jordan, the primary hero, has undergone several reinventions as the Green Lantern of Earth and DC has introduced several different human Green Lanterns in hopes of pushing the title to the top shelf. Naturally, Hollywood decided this uneven history is a great target for a $300 million budget.

There are a number of things the film does right. The world of Oa and the mythos of the Corps is well presented visually and the overall tone of the movie is consistent. The action set pieces are not as poorly choreographed as others have said, and when the writing doesn't force the actors to deliver lines dumb enough to make Neil DeGrasse Tyson lose a few IQ points the cast does a decent job with what they have. It's not as embarrassingly awful as X-Men Origins: Wolverine so there is no spinning severed head of laser beam hilarity. The problem is that Green Lantern tries to appease fans by staying too close to the source material but neglects any attempt at a sophisticated--or even logical--story in favor of standard, shallow, banal plot points and nonexistent character development. Green Lantern is like the first-year student in Fiction Workshop 101 who takes his Tolkein fanfic too seriously, unaware that his characters are shallow and forgettable, unaware that his tale is a string of tired cliches and unaware that the rest of the class is laughing at his villain. The movie manages to be simple summer fun, but only if you abandon any expectations of literary competence.

Obscure comic hero titles can be made into well done, clever, fun films that appease critics and general audiences; spend a couple hours with Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy for example. Unknown source material outside its fanbase, mostly b-list cast, minimalist production budget of $66 million. Also fun, clever and engaging as both a story well told and a popcorn movie that's still hard to turn off when it's on cable eight years after release. Ironic that the world of Green Lantern is full of bizarre characters that are mostly ignored in the background of the film while del Toro gave us bizarre characters that we care about because their oddities are featured in their wit and sympathetic qualities. Green Lantern's characters stand painted in the background, saying almost nothing that makes sense and doing almost nothing that matters.

Director Martin Campbell was handed a strong cast but allowed his stars too many moments of glazed-eyed vacancy or crazed-eyed villainy instead of pushing them to convey any kind of depth or genuine introspection when they have their moment as the subject of the frame. It’s as if Green Lantern were a Michael Bay movie in which every character stares numbly at nothing for several seconds and we’re supposed to interpret that as a dramatic moment. It’s not. It’s just emptiness. It’s the directorial ineptitude equivalent of pressing the pause button on your BluRay player and thinking you can heighten the situational tension by contemplating the plastic frame of your television. There are indulgent, overwrought shots of the villain screaming on his knees in the midst of exploso-chaos, poorly timed and overlong flashbacks of the hero that disrupt the pace of key scenes and even a carefully framed Yin-Yang shot of our hero and villain collapsed on their backs lying adjacent head-to-shoulder amid the debris of their battle. Campbell’s failure to handle Hal Jordan and villain Hector Hammond are shocking compared to his brilliant control of Daniel Craig’s James Bond and Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre in Casino Royale.

Peter Sarsgaard as Hammond is actually a strength of the movie until he is transformed into a wailing monstrosity by becoming infected by a fragment of the alien entity Parallax. He’s only given a few scenes before his transformation but still manages to convincingly portray a nerdy but well-intentioned professor trying to amount to something in the eyes of his Senator father (Tim Robbins). Sarsgaard is nicely awkward and sympathetic, and it works if for no other reason than the sheer earnestness with which Professor Hammond seems to approach his work and parts of his perceived-inadequate life. Unfortunately, his inexplicable transformation renders him nothing more than a MacGuffin for the rest of the movie and the subject of unintentional laughter in the theater.

My swollen, drooling villainy is kinda scary when you read it.

My swollen, wailing villainy is kinda hilarious when you watch it.

The best performance in the film is by Mark Strong as Sinestro, a legendary member of the Green Lantern Corps until his eventual turn to the yellow power of fear and his transformation into the Corps’s greatest adversary. Strong embodies the proud, controlled-anger persona of Sinestro to the same extent that Ian McKellen brought charisma and presence to Magneto and should be mentioned alongside Heath Ledger’s Joker. Strong didn’t reinvent his character like Ledger did and the movie does not center on him the way The Dark Knight did Joker, but Strong dominates his scenes with such a forceful presence that the film should have done away with the oddly octopodic Parallax and featured the Sinestro Corps.

Badassery in yellow.

Kickassery in green.

Hal Jordan could take a lesson in heroism from future villain Sinestro and Ryan Reynolds could take a lesson in scene presence from Strong. His portrayal of Jordan is passable and he clearly has the comedy timing for the playboy-cocky Jordan, but he lacks the harder edge for the arrogantly cocky Jordan. We’re told (over and over) that the ring chose Jordan because he is fearless, but we see time and again Jordan paralyzed by reliving his father’s death and his inexplicable walking away from being a Green Lantern. This is a failure of the script and not Reynolds, but during the brief scenes where he has an opportunity to tell his girlfriend (Blake Lively as Carol Ferris) or the Guardians that he needs to Do Something Right, he’s allowed to mug with wide-eyed puppy-dog sincerity rather than display steely resolve. The audience needs to see a confident—even arrogant—Hal Jordan in order to believe the ring chose correctly.

It doesn’t help to think about Nathan Fillion’s interest in the role before Reynolds was cast. He’s an actor with geek appeal and the looks to fit the character, but more importantly has the versatility of heroic presence and confidence to pull off the weight of dramatic scenes and yet the comic sense to deliver wit and humor. In the end however, compared to Reynolds he just wasn't a star bright enough to attach to the Green Lantern vehicle. With tighter direction and a script a little better than abysmal, Reynolds could have been a much stronger lead.

"I guess I'll go...do something heroic...if that's okay with you."

"So I hear one word out of any of you that ain't puttin' me in a skintight alien leotard

or gettin' me a ring of absolute power, I will shoot you down."

Telling isn’t believing, and that’s the biggest problem with this movie. We are told over and over how powerful and important a Green Lantern is. We are told over and over how a Green Lantern is fearless, and yet we are shown Hal Jordan is a man sometimes paralyzed with fear, insecurity and greif over his father's death. This film indulges in exposition and voiceover narration at the expense of giving key characters time to develop and does not deliver scenes that actually show how powerful, important and fearless a Green Lantern is. We are told over and over what the Corps is; ironically, even Sinestro tells the Corps that he doesn’t need to tell them who they are. The script writers—all seven of them— felt the need to tell us at length, ad nauseum, ad infinum.

Horrible writing is the rotten yellow core of the movie. Shallow dialog, brief and trite action set pieces, yawning cliche after cliche, and worst of all the most broken or completely absent logic. Plot points progress without sound reason or even common sense and scene transitions are sometimes so abrupt that it's unclear why characters are appearing at their locations. That is, until they open their mouths and tell you.

Logic failure to wit: The guardians appear completely unperturbed by Parallax’s march across the universe to the point of only reluctantly allowing their greatest warrior, Sinestro, lead an attack. When he does he inexplicably leads a small group who can think of nothing more effective than constructing glowing green chains so they can hit it with glowing green snowballs. Of course most of the Lanterns die immediately, because glowing snowballs are expensive special effects when billed by the minute and the movie had to get to the next scene. A far more effective plan would have been to lure Parallax to Oa and having the narrator exposition it to death.

Eventually the guardians allow Hal Jordan to return to Earth alone (where he just was), leaving an entire planet of Lanterns on Oa to do...whatever it is they do when a single Lantern goes off to fight something that just killed several of them about an hour ago. Jordan has no reason to need the Guardians' permission for anything other than the script needed to send him back to Oa so he could deliver a heroic speech about not giving in to fear... or fighting fear with me...something something. Jordan proceeds to defeat Parallax remarkably easily but requires a last-second rescue from Sinestro and the gang who inexplicably show up after the fighting's done. Then after watching a single human Green Lantern defeat the not-very-all-powerful yellow entity, Sinestro forges a yellow ring to become his true villainous self in the closing credits.

None of it makes any sense. At all. None.

This is a script that was killed by a committee of idiocy, overproduced, overwrought and heavy-handed. It wants desperately to be taken seriously as a dramatic action movie but instead delivered lengthy melodramatic exposition. Clearly the studio was aiming to make Green Lantern the next big-money superhero franchise and has already planned two more sequels, but those sequels are now in doubt as the movie has only grossed $102 million. Merchandising and disc sales will help offset the loss but the ring slinger's future on the big screen is not as bright as the light power he wields.

There is a tragic amount of wasted potential in Green Lantern. A mass-appeal franchise remains hidden somewhere in this material but it may have been buried with incompetent film making before it will get another chance.