Friday 4 January 2002

Pic of the day: I'm sure I've seen this place before, but where am I? (Screenshot from Dark Age of Camelot. Really, I'm not going to have those all month. I think. Perhaps.)

Lost in the realms

I am usually one of the brighter candles on the Christmas tree; but when it comes to finding my way around, I am a retard. When taking a walk around the neighborhood, chances are I can’t point in the direction of home unless I can see it. Perhaps not even then. I can find east and west, approximately, if it is near sunrise or sunset and the time of year is not too far from the equinoxes. That’s pretty much it. Let me loose in any town of more than twenty houses, and there is a very real risk that I may get lost. I don’t fare much better in the wilderness either.

When I move to a new place, at first I only know my way between my new home and the nearest bus stop. Then I start to explore, cautiously. I walk a bit further; I take another fork in the road for a walk. Gradually I expand my knowledge of the area, until I have a kind of mental image of my surroundings. But it is a slow process.

I am not sure why this is so. In part it may be because I am not a very visual person. I blame this on being nearsighted and not knowing it until the age of 17. Until then, I thought that trees actually were green shapeless blobs, or at least supposed to look that way, and that you recognized people at a distance by their hips rather than their heads. Then one day for fun I put on the glasses of my cousin, and suddenly the fog lifted and I saw the world clearly for the first time. Now that was quite a surprise, and a pleasant one at that. But I sometimes suspect that the survival strategies formed in my younger years still rule my life, and those are based on the fact that the world is like a fog, and the people in it like shadows. Just shadows in the fog.

***

So why does this come up now? I haven’t moved, not even changed my workplace. No, but I find that I have exactly the same disability in role playing games. I hated the enormous dungeons in Daggerfall, where I could spend a day of real life trying to find my way out again. I quickly came to avoid them whenever possible, until Bethsoft released the patch where you can return to the cave opening by reloading and pressing F11. Now I get lost in the realm of Albion. (Dark Age of Camelot.)

Whether in the city of Camelot or out in the countryside, the main problem is that I get lost. Even with a compass visible at the screen at all time, I still have trouble finding my way back to any specific point. (The map isn’t too exact either, and there is no city map at all.) When I get a task by the guards to slay some monster, the actual fight takes like a minute. Running all over the place may take 15-30 minutes, and often ends with my character bumping into some superpowered monster eventually, being killed and thus failing the task. Armorsmith tasks are less dramatic, but the problem remains. I spend 2-5 minutes making a piece of armor, then half an hour running all over the place asking every guard I meet to point me in the right direction. (It doesn’t help that many computer-controlled characters hang out in lofts and towers.)

Seriously, when you're playing a role playing game, things are supposed to depend on your character's skills, not your own. Pathfinding should be an optional trainable skill, and when active it should give you a glowing trail to the character or place you type in. If that is too much for the poor computer, at least a glowing arrow pointing in the right direction. You don't expect my in-game combat skills to depend on the strength of my arms, do you? Why then should my navigation skills depend on the strength of my brain?

***

Hanging out at the forge in Camelot has really driven home the point of how immense this game is. The most advanced armor I have used is bronze studded leather. Above that there is at least chain mail before plate mail, which can be made of bronze, iron, steel, alloy, fine alloy and perhaps mithril. But I hear these people talk about at least two materials beyond that, and pieces of armor that I have never heard of.

And I realize that these folks must have played hours a day for months now. And I realize that I don’t think I can ever afford that, not as long as Internet access is still nearly €1 per hour (though I do get a quantity rebate, now). Well, I guess I could. But I’m reluctant to spend several hundred Euro on running in circles online, trying to find my way home...

P.S.: It turns out that when creating items at the appropriate level, I almost break even on selling them back to the merchants. This eliminates the need to run all over town. I also met some nice guy a level and a half below mine, who led me around to suitable fields of monsters, on the deal that I do most of the close-up fighting. After he quit, I had another level of XP and enough money to go smithing for days. Yay humans! "I can't do what you can, and you can't do what I can. But together we can do the impossible."