Gaming Parenting Tip

When gaming always keep a spare controller or keyboard handy! My daughter always wants to copy what I'm doing - and when I'm gaming that usually means reaching out and hitting as many keys on the keyboard as hard as she can. Nothing is worse than playing Command and Conquer: Red Alert on your Windows 98 machine, only to have the game constantly paused by an 8 month old relentlessly hitting the space bar with every once of strength she has! Or having your Age of Kings economy destroyed by stray hits of the delete key...

But watching her develop and learn has been one of the really rewarding things about being a parent. It's really interesting to see her try and figure things out, and trying her best to mimic what I'm doing. She desperately wants to do what her mum and I are doing, and just wants to be a part of our world.

If I'm drinking a coffee she will clamber and reach to try and get my mug - and if she manages to get to an empty mug she will pretend to drink from it. And you can trick her into eating when she is being fussy by offering her baby food out of an adult bowl with a table spoon rather than using her plastic bowls and cutlery - making her think that she is eating what I am eating. If I get my laptop out she will do her best to reach over to it and hit keys on the keyboard as if she was typing. And at 9 months old she has already figured out how to flick between the home screens on my Android tablet, and can (sort off) play the simple baby-orientated touch screen games. She understands how the device is used - even if she hasn't quite worked out what it is actually for...

Abby playing Red Alert!

But this does mean that when I'm playing computer games with her on my lap she will do everything she can to try and get to the keyboard. So I ended up buying her a cheap $10 keyboard that sits in front of my keyboard while I'm playing. She loves it - she gets to smash the keys as much as she wants and be part of the gaming, while I still get to play my game with no fuss. Works awesomely!

The next trick will be getting her to ignore the mouse...

Another Tip - Always Snip the USB Cord

Abby enjoys the keyboard so much that it ended up becoming one of her regular toys. And here is a second tip - if you are going to give a baby a keyboard to play with always snip off the USB cable. With teething she really likes the stick things in her mouth - and a USB cable is the perfect size for her to chew on. But it's also really easy for it to wrap around her neck, especially as she is rolling around on the floor with the cable in her mouth.

She was also starting to take a real interest in power cables. We were able to hide the all the AC adapters and extension cords in the living room, but it seemed like encouraging her interest in playing with cords by leaving the USB cord on the keyboard would be a stupid idea.

If she's going to play with a controller or keyboard unsupervised play it safe and remove the power cords!

Final Tip - Always use Broken Controllers as Toys 

If you're playing console games and give a baby a controller it will always end up going into her mouth where is will get soaked. It pays to give them dead controllers that you don't mind getting wrecked. No point loosing an expensive Sega Master System controller as a chew toy!

Runescape Revisited

(This is part 2 of a two part post. For part 1 click here)

Over the last couple of weeks I have attempted to get back into Runescape. I've maybe sunk 6-7 hours into the game, which I realise isn't a whole bunch of time to put into an MMORPG - but as a parent it's all I've got. So, after my 5 year hiatus am I going to be picking up Runescape again? No. It's just isn't interesting enough to keep my attention. Don't get me wrong, it's not necessarily a bad game. And I can see why people still play it and why it remains popular. It's just not a game that I want to play. After spending about 3 consecutive hours playing Runescape on Saturday, on Sunday I plugged in my Sega Matter System and didn't look back.

Sir Masarius

That said, the game is still hugely nostalgic for me. As I said, it is where I first came up with the screen name Masarius (although I forgot the password to that account early on – most of my Runescape life has been with Sir Masarius). And to be honest I'm still amazed that Andrew Gower could take some JavaScript knowledge and basic artistic ability and make an extremely successful MMORPG that not only went toe to toe with MMO heavyweights UltimaOnline and EverQuest, but also held its own against the juggernaut of World of Warcraft.

But anyway here is my take on Runescape in 2014; a look at the current game from the point of view of a long time player who last played in 2010. But first a short disclaimer. My recent experience with Runescape was entirely on a free to play server, with comparatively little time invested. As someone who played on members servers for 2-3 years I'm well aware that I didn't attempt to play the vast majority of the game, and didn't give a whole lot of time to learn the new gameplay features. Consider the following to be a 'first impressions' rather than a review proper.

What I Like about Runescape 2014

 

Sensible Streamlining

It was good to see that Jagex had taken some positive steps to make the game more streamlined and over all less cumbersome. 

• When on a quest the minimap now shows a boarder indicating the edge of the quest area, and often indicates the location of quest specific NPCs. This has the effect of reducing the ambiguity of some of the quests. 
 

• Your character now has a tool belt for carrying skilling tools like farming gear, pick axes and hatchets - meaning that you can have these items on you all the time without having to swap them for your weapons or taking up a valuable inventory space (and therefore allowing for resource gathering). And no more made rush to the bank when you see a shooting star or evil tree. 

• And they have changed the home teleport spell to allow you to teleport to all the major towns at will, with no cool down period. At first I was very lukewarm to this idea as I felt that getting access to teleport spells was all part of training the magic skill. But then alternative teleports are almost completely unavailable to low level players and people on free to play servers, so the load stones will go a long way towards eliminating the mindless backtracking between training locations and banks for low level players. Lobster fishing on Karamja suddenly seems like a viable idea.

 

Quests 

The quests, at least the free to play quests, have undergone a fairly major facelift. Several older quests have been removed and replaced with newer quests, while many of the others have been reworked to make them more fun and less grindy. And most quests also appear to have received new cut scenes, and some quests are fully voice acted.

Delrith (Runescape Wiki)

I didn’t even recognise the Demon Slayer quest. Demon Slayer is about trying to stop Zomorak cultists from resurrecting the demon Delrith and saving the city of Varrok from destruction. But the original Demon Slayer was a glorified fetch quest requiring you to do menial jobs for several NPCs before finally fighting the demon. The new quest is far more heroic, asking the player to beat three heroic challenges (physical, mental and faith) before drawing the magic sword from the stone, storming the Zamorak compound and confronting the demon. It’s just a way better introduction to the game, a way more entertaining quest, and far more in line with the idea of a medieval fantasy.

It’s clear that Jagex has really upped its game when it comes to production quality.

Path finding

The AI path finding has been improved like crazy. It used to be that you had to hold your characters hand around the game world, making sure he didn’t get snagged up on rocks, walls and trees. Now these problems seem to be gone. In the Varrok sewers I was able to click on the other side of the drain and my character ran through the entire sewer finding his own way through environment to reach the destination. Good work Jagex!

Combat

Jagex has completely reworked the combat system with the Evolution of Combat update. Although I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ins and outs of the new system, I can see that it has huge potential. Combat felt more engaging. My character (I’m playing as a wizard) felt far more powerful, with access to special abilites and area of effect spells. Mind you, it’s not necessarily a unique system – hot bars and cool down periods have been done before – but it is a huge step in the right direction to making Runescape a far more involved experience. But, then, I seem to be in the minority with this opinion as Jagex has just released an update reinstating a version of the old combat system.  

(source: www.runescape.com)

And combat seems a little more balanced. I like playing as wizards. Always have. If given an RPG I will almost always roll on a wizard. Or a cleric. But magic users in 2010 Runescape were almost completely ignored. Updates tended to focus on melee weapons and armour, and over time melee fighters became supreme death dealers while magic users lagged behind a fair bit. But additional low-mid level wizard robes have been added to the game (even the free game) making wizard armour feel a little bit more fleshed out. And it can be crafted and traded, which is an additional bonus!

All the really good wizard gear is still locked behind grindy monotonous tasks mind you, like the mage training arena and treasure trails. But it’s a step in the right direction!

Graphics

The graphics (particularly around Lumbridge) look great, Jagex are obviously pushing every drop of awesome out of JavaScript that they can. Runescape's graphics have always been unique - a little rudimentary and rough around the edges, but interesting and and detailed. The graphics have retained this quality and are unmistakably Runescape, but at the same time have never looked better.

I am perhaps a little concerned that some aspects of the game art are starting to look a little like World of Warcraft, which at this stage could almost be considered cliché. But at the moment the game looks great.

Why I don’t want to play Runescape 2014

Ultimately the same stuff that put me off the game in 2010 is still valid today. In some cases even more so. But there are also several new things that I just find really off putting.

User interface

The UI has undergone a major upgrade – which on the surface looks awesome, but I found it overly complex and frustrating to use. Yes you can rearrange the UI as you like, which is cool, but everything feels like it is accessed through drop-down menus forcing you to dig through a cluttered UI to find what you want. I’m sure I could get used to it, but the old UI just felt so easy and intuitive.

Members Advertising

When I left in 2010 Jagex was actively trying to remove as many of the members references form the free to play game as possible. F2P had always been viewed as its own game running parallel to the paid members game. Now it’s the exact opposite, and the F2P games advertises members to you at every opportunity. There is a ‘subscribe’ button constantly in the top left of the screen. New skills (like divination) have been added to the F2P game – but you can only get to level 5 then the game constantly bugs you to get members in order to progress in the skill. Upon logging in the UI invites you to vote on Runescape updates, only to tell you to pay up once you get to the voting screen. Etc, etc...

(Source: www.runescape.com)

Divination is particularly nasty, in that if you start training the skill on a F2P server then you also start a task (mini quest) concerning that skill. While this task can be activated in the F2P game, it appears that it can only be completed on a members server. And every time you log into the F2P game it nags you to finish this task.

As a free player I found this to be really annoying, distracting and immersion breaking. Jagex, look, I already know about members – I’ll pay for it the moment I want it.

Micro transactions

Micro transactions are becoming a blight on gaming. I’m a firm believer that a game should be either completely free to play and funded by micro transactions or advertising (the previous Runescape F2P model), or be a paid for app that gives you all the games content for the purchase price. The stuff that you can purchase in-game with real world cash is admittedly limited mostly to cosmetic items. But this is a slippery slope. Just look at Real Racing 3.

This perhaps isn’t so bad for free players. But at the end of the day Runescape membership costs NZ$92.95 a year to play. That’s more than a standard AAA PC game release every single year. The cost of several steam sale games. And a dozen or more indie titles. And Runescape is a game where half of the content is in desperate need of updates. For the asking price, the entire game content should be available for paying members. Simple as that.

And that’s before we get to the Treasure Hunter minigame. This game rewards players with free items and experience in exchange for keys that players. Essentially you are provided with 5 treasure chests, each containing a different item – some awesome and powerful, some not, but all valuable in some way. You then choose which chests you wish to open with the keys you have earned, and get the prize inside. The contents of each chest appears to be randomly generated so there is no way of knowing beforehand what item each chest has. Powerful and expensive items are rare, minor prizes are not.

The give us money screen. (www.runescape.com)

But here’s the thing – extra keys can be bought for real world cash. I can’t possibly see how this is not outright gambling. In exchange for real money Jagex offer the chance to win big prizes in a one-arm-bandit style game. Treasure Hunter must be in a bit of a moral and legal grey zone – particularly given that Runescape is played by a lot of children. I could see this game stimulating gambling addiction. And I would rather just not see it in the game. Is Jagex actually that hard up for cash?

At least it isn't as immersion breaking as the Squeal of Fortune was.... but I still find myself being taken right out of the game every time I open the Treasure Hunter window...

Grinding

Oh yes, the thing that had more impact on me quitting in 2010 than anything else.

Runescape is still a grindfest of a game. Yes, steps have been taken to make it less of a grind – and it is – but it is still a way more grindy game than what I want to commit myself too. Jagex have tried to reduce the grind by offering double XP weekends, free XP through treasure hunter (which I found could give massive XP bonuses if you strike it lucky), and the divination skill. The divination skill is interesting is that it allows you to create divine resource gathering spot that can give you additional resources, and allows you to make ‘signs of the porter’ which automatically transport a limited number of items from your inventory to your bank account – essentially reducing the amount of mindless back tracking to the bank while skilling.

The problem with Jagex’s approach is that it addresses the symptom and not the problem. Grinding skills is boring, so Jagex gives you bonus XP and signs of the porter to make grinding go faster, rather address the actual problem – that the core gameplay for many skills is repetitive and monotonous. How about actually fixing the skills Jagex, and introducing some fun and engaging gameplay?

And the divination skill has the added problem that you have to grind out divination before you get its benefits to use with other skills. Grinding one skill for the privilege of grinding another... Why can’t the mining guild just have a bank deposit box?

Combat and the economy

In my previous post I described how the living economy was my favourite part of Runescape classic, but how that aspect of the game was eroded over time until it was basically nonexistent.

Runescape classic logo (www.runescape.com)

Runescape is still a massively combat focused game. Even more so than when I left. The economy hasn’t been fixed to be more like the 2003-2004 game that I’m nostalgic for. I guess that combat and farming mobs / bosses is just what Runescape is about now. But I am genuinely surprised that in the 5 years I have been gone combat could get two major reworks, the Pest Control mini game could get improvements, new boss monsters, weapons and armours could be introduced... but yet smithing still languishes as a totally useless skill that has not seen an update since, what, 2003?

Time Commitment

Ultimately I just don’t have the time to commit to an MMORPG. This is entirely my problem rather than Runescape’s. Even the skills which have received huge reductions in time commitment to train (and significantly less grinding) since I last played still require a massive investment of time to complete. Doing research for this post I found this reddit thread discussing Runescape. In particular this post by user To_Be_Frank discussing runecrafting;

[...]A skill that used to take around 500 hours and earned you hundreds of million [sic] of gp and a fair amount of prestige was reduced to yet another afk-ish skill that takes 100-150 hours to get to 99, with little to no reward.[...]

Quake - a game I'd rather play than grind runecrafting

150 Hours to grind runecrafting to level 99? Clearly To_Be_Frank sees that as being too easy – but damn. In 150 hours I could play every game in the Wolfenstien, Doom, and Quake series from beginning to end with time left over!

As a parent with a full time job I might have an hour a day to play games. At 150 hours it would take me about 5 months of doing nothing but runecrafting to get the skill to level 99 - whereas if I was playing FPS games I could just about complete an entire title every week. Who actually wants to spend that amount of time runecrafting when there are so many other games you could be playing?

Although, it is nice to see that me and To_Be_Frank appear to share similar views on the Runescape economy (as out of context as the above quote is).

Would I recommend Runescape?

So, would I recommend Runescape? Yes, it’s not a fundamentally bad game – just not the sort of experience that I am currently looking for. If the last 5 years had seen the return of the old economy, or the skills had been reworked to make them fun and rewarding, then I could see me returning to Runescape. But as it stands right now there are plenty of other games that I would rather be playing, and Runescape simply isn’t rewarding enough to keep me interested. At the moment Runescape feels like Diablo as an MMO, and that’s just not what I am after in a game.

 

But, if you are looking for a combat heavy game that you can play with some friends, that has reasonably good quests, don’t mind a bit of a grind, and have plenty of time to spare, then yea I absolutely recommend giving Runescape a shot.

If you are after something more deep and engaging, with a bit more of an economic focus over combat, I would suggest looking else ware.  Perhaps at the many other free to play MMORPGs now available....

Runescape... Sucks?

(This is part 1 of a two part post. For part 2 click here).

After a hiatus of about 5 years, I finally logged back into Runescape yesterday. I’m not really sure why. Curiosity? Nostalgia? The desire to play a simple game on my laptop? Whatever the case, this was the first time in half a decade that I had ever given Runescape any serious thought. Ok, yes, I had logged in every now and then in the last 5 years to do Christmas events or what have you (but according to the log in window it had been over 1000 days since I had even done that), but this was the first time that I had considered actually playing the game again.

But has Runescape won me over this time? I really don’t know. It has a lot going for it... Its easy pick up and play nature, its easy going system requirements, its reasonably interesting  (for the most part) quests all make this game something that I could play on my current “you’re-a-parent-now-and-have-no-time-for-gaming” timetable.... But then, the game has at least as much going against it...

Runescape: A Memoir

I started playing Runescape way back in 2002. My last year of high school. It was for my first Runescape character that I came up with my screen name, Masarius, a handle I have used ever since. But I was never really a hard core Runescape’r. I never really got into the PK scene, never got any of my skills to level 99, took long breaks, and never really worried about if what I was doing was the most ‘efficient’ way to play the game. A casual player I guess. But at the same time Runescape had a lot of things that really kept interested. 

Classic Runescape logo.

For starters, as a browser game it ran really well on the family desktop computer (a crappy old Pentium 200mhz based machine, with a generic 1mb video card), and once I got to university I could play it on my low end laptop without too much fuss. And the relatively easy gameplay meant that it was something that my girlfriend (now wife) was also interested in playing with me.

But what I really enjoyed about Runescape was the setting and the environment. I’m a professional archaeologist, and history – particularly medieval history – has always appealed to me. So the medieval fantasy setting was right up my alley. But it was the game world that sucked me in.

When I first started playing, Runescape had a thriving player-driven economy. Pretty much everything in the world was player made. And there was no grand exchange auction house, all trades were done in person. It was a living, breathing, engaging, and even perhaps semi-realistic world. It felt like a real medieval community. Resource gatherers sold raw materials to craftsmen. Craftsmen then made weapons, runes and potions that they sold to monster hunting warriors. Warriors brought back the coins and rare ingredients that fuelled the economy. And, similar to reality, it was necessary to build yourself up into the economy. You might start off as a cook, baking pies and cakes to sell to warriors – saving up the money you made to buy your first set of armour or runes and then setting off on an adventure.

It was a real living economy. Being a “skiller” was a perfectly genuine and respected way to play the game. Being a high level skiller could bring you fame within the game world, and net you a huge profit. And you could actually role-play. Wanted to be a world renowned chef? Go for it! Wanted to be known for making the best swords in the land? Have at it! A world class archer? Start training! The go-to guy for magic supplies? Grab some runes and start networking! Wanted to make your fortune as a merchant or capitalist, finding cheap goods and then selling them to the right market for profit? Just take a little bit of cash and hit the streets! Just want to be a good all-rounder, a “Jack of all trades but master of none”? The game allowed for that too!

People selling items at Varrock (source: reddit).

Yes, there were monster drops – but just about every item of value could be made by the players. If you wanted to be decked out in a suit of armour, you found a smith and bought it. Wanted the best sword in the game? You had to actually hunt out the hand full of people that could make them and strike a deal. And all these deals were made in traditional marketplaces. Draynor, the centre of Varrok (later the Varrok west bank), and the Falador bank would be full of people yelling out what they had for sale and inviting you to take a look. It was a vibrant system of commerce and player interaction.

The world felt alive. It felt genuine. It felt real. And it felt like you could be a part of it and have an actual meaningful impact.

Why I Quit Runescape

So why did I quit? A big part of it was that Jagex purposely and actively eroded that player community. High level items became increasingly non-tradeable. The Grand Exchange with its set minimum and maximum item prices completely destroyed the traditional market place, while giving merchant clans a method of artificially driving prices up and down - the traditional market died over night. Non combat skills stopped receiving updates. And monster drops became the primary way to get weapons and armour – destroying the craftsmen and raw resource gatherers. When I left the only real way to play the game was through combat. Being a pure skiller, or a skill specialist, was almost completely nonviable.

Steel smithing table. You will be seeing this a lot (RuneHQ).

Take smithing for example. When I left, the best weapons and armour a smith could make were runeite. A full set off runeite armour required a smithing level of 99 – something that would take tens if not hundreds of hours to achieve, and millions of gold pieces to buy in the metal bars necessary to train the skill. When I left the weapons available as monster drops far surpassed that which could be made by smiths, and rune armour was considered entry level at best. Hundreds of hours of work, and millions of gold pieces, just to be able to make the ENTRY LEVEL armour... Jagex completely destroyed the smithing industry. Which in turn destroyed the mining industry as there were no smiths to buy the metal ores. And many of the non combat skills had this same fate.

Runescape lost its soul. The game became less about social interaction and role-playing in a living medieval community, and more about combat and efficiency. A generic Diablo or WoW clone, focusing on grinding mobs before fighting boss monsters and doing raids for loot. New quests and items were geared towards combat, particularly melee. Everything else was left to rot in irrelevancy.

Runescape and Grinding

But all that could be ignored if it wasn't for the main reason I quit - the grind. Runescape comes from another time. A time when MMORPGs were all about making you grind for experience, and dragging out the gameplay as much as possible.

Ultima Online - the grandfather of modern MMORPGs

The game has clear influence from earlier editions of Dungeons and Dragons and the Ultima series. But in 2010 Runescape was taking grinding to another level.  Everything about the game was a grind. First you have the basic do-this-same-simple-and-boring-task-over-and-over-to-earn-the-smallest-amount-of-xp gamplay for grinding out skill levels. But then Jagex had done everything it could to lengthen out levelling as much as possible beyond the repetitive gameplay. Higher level (and high xp) trees, monsters, and ore rocks are rare and have lengthy respawn times. And good training spots are almost always some distance from a bank – forcing you to walk your character a reasonable distance between loads of raw resources or monster runs, meaning a large amount of down time.

Each skill could take hundreds of hours to reach level 99. And from about level 60 onwards most skills devolved into a mind bending level of monotony. Hundreds of hours of doing the same menial tasks to earn the meagre xp offered. Hundreds of hours of marching to and from your training spot to the bank. Grinding, always grinding. Mind. Numbing. Monotony.

And of course, without the living economy skills like smithing and fletching are completely devalued and make no money. So you either have to grind on mobs to get enough good drops to sell so you can afford the raw materials, or you have to grind the corresponding raw resource skill and collect the raw resources yourself. Essentially forcing you to spend hundreds of hours grinding out a skill you don’t want to train just to get the privilege of then grinding out the skill you wanted to train. And in the end training of non-combat skills were worthless anyway. With no profit, no reward, and ultimately no point as the items you will get access to by training the skill are already outclassed by items dropped by monsters - or were simply easier to just buy from an NPC store with money made from the sale of loot.

And that is what ultimately killed the game for me. I got my character so most of his skills were above level 50, and his combat skills were in the mid 70s. I did all the quests that I could do with my levels, and then....... that was it. All the available quests had skill level requirements above what I had, and if I wanted to progress in the game I had to monotonously grind my skills. I was left with a very simple question – do I actually want to spend the next 20 hours arbitrarily grinding skills just to do the next quest? Do I actually want to spend the hundreds of hours of grinding necessary to complete all the quests and experience the end game? With no actual pay off. And do I want to grind on mobs to get my combat level high enough to experience the end game content? Or do I just want to play something else? In the time it takes to monotonously train just one Runescape skill to level 99 I could play an entire single player RPG, or several FPS titles. You know, actually experience games rather than lighting countless camp fires or burying millions of bones.

Grind runecrafting to 99, or play Baldur's from beginning to end?

The thing is I'm not necessarily against the grind as a concept. And I'm certainly not against the game being hard or time consuming to complete. In fact the economy that I want the game to have outright requires that the skills are difficult to master, otherwise everyone would be making the best items straight away and the economy would again just dry up. But Runescape isn't a hard game, or even a difficult game, just a very time consuming one. Anyone can get a skill to 99 if they are willing to commit weeks or months of their lives endlessly doing the same simple monotonous tasks. I would happily take a skill to level 99 if levelling was rewarding and the gameplay was engaging and fun. But it's not...

But now Runescape 3 is out. A new combat system. And I’ve heard that earning xp has never been easier. Will it be different? I'm genuinely interested to find out. Let’s play some Runescape!

Disney and the Star Wars Expanded Universe

(I started this post on May 4^th – so that’s something that can be said about having a baby, they suck down a lot of time…).

Disney's culling of the Start Wars extended universe (EU) came as a surprise to pretty much no one. No one except the guys of the recent Hate Bit Podcast, who were absolutely livid - particularly Razorfist.

Being a fan of Star Wars

I think many Star Wars fans can relate to my experience of Star Wars.

I lived and breathed Star Wars when I was a kid. I watched the film's at every opportunity. I used to get up at 6am to watch the Ewoks cartoon before school - and hunted out the Ewoks live action spin off films. Star Wars gear often made up a large part of my birthday and Christmas presents, and any money I had was often split between gaming and Star Wars stuff - when I was about 14 I worked out that my collection was worth over $1000. Games like X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Dark Forces and 'Star Wars' for Sega Master System absolutely blew my mind and are still among my favourite games and most treasured nostalgic memories. Countless hours were spent drawing space combat scenes, making my own star wars Lego designs, reading Star Wars books, reading about Star Wars online (after the internet actually became available that is) and playing Star Wars with my friends. There are lots of things that I was 'really into' during my childhood - Ninja Turtles, Transformers, Jurassic Park - but it was Star Wars that was the thing that I consistently enjoyed through the years.

But I haven't actually sat down to enjoy the film's the way I did as a child in years. And I desperately want too. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the couch watching A New Hope with my dad - who was himself a big fan. And I really want to share Star Wars with my daughter, in the same way that I enjoyed it growing up. So we could experience that amazement together. But the whole franchise has just been watered down to the point that enjoying it to the level I did as a kid is just impossible. Now I would consider myself a dedicated but casual fan.

It started off with the release of the 1997 special editions. I was pumped about these coming out. New digital enhancements, and new scenes? Hell yes! Then I saw them.... I can still remember my 12 years old self yelling at the TV (didn't get to see them at the movies... parents) that there is no way that Han Solo would step on Jaba the Hutts tail. And the God damned dancing scene in Jaba's palace. The bastardising of the original trilogy is still ongoing, and too this day the only copy of the special editions I own is the 2008 DVD, and only because it came with the theatrical versions as a bonus disc - as craptastic non-anamorphic as they are.

Like everyone though, it was the prequel films were the final nail in the coffin. I remember seeing Episode 1 in theatres back in 99 (when I was 15). Again I was totally psyched. And again I was completely let down. Darth Vader built C3P0? Obi Wan Kenobi worked with R2D2 decades before A New Hope? Poor cinematography and dialogue? And Jar Jar Binks? Then through the 2000s Star Wars was whored out as much as it could with crappy games, crappy books, and crappy merchandise flooding the market. By the time I was sitting in a theatre with the entire audience laughing at Darth Vader's 'nooooo' at the end of Episode 3 my passion for Star Wars was over.

Star Wars Expanded Universe

Tie Fighter - Greatest Star Wars game ever made

But anyway, the expanded universe. My experience with the EU has been mostly with games - X-Wing and Tie Fighter series, Rebel Assault, the Dark Forces series, Rogue Squadron.... And I completely agree with the guys on the Hate Bit Podcast that officially classifying all of the expanded universe as non-canon and taking the stories of Episodes 7-9 in a completely unique direction ignoring any previous EU material will devalue some great Star Wars games and books.

But the problem with the expanded universe is that it's a gigantic cluster fuck. George Lucas and LucasArts had the right of veto on all Star Wars licenses. Every story and every setting in the expanded universe got the green light from Lucas - and so in some way every licensed Star Wars product can be considered canon. Keeping track of all the sorry lines, characters, and technical details present in all the books, games, board games, card games, spin off series, D20 RPGs and toys (many of which contradict each other), and making sure that the upcoming movies don't contradict any of them and that all major plot points are considered would be absolutely impossible. Just considering the games and books of the EU when writing the new movies would be a nightmare. At some point someone’s favorite part of the expanded universe would need to be cut just so the movies could be made. Someone was always going to be pissed off. And where do you draw the line?

But this gets a while lot more complicated when you consider that the expanded universe, especially the games, is incredibly self referential and it would be almost impossible to remove some parts of the EU without impacting the others. Consider this - recently I've been repaying Jedi Academy. In this game you fight against Imperial Remnant troops, which suggests that Jedi Academy, and by extension the entire Dark Forces series, is set in Kevin J. Anderson's Darksaber universe. You could not keep Jedi Academy as canon without also keeping the rest of the Dark Forces saga which preceded it, and all the the other EU materials that have gone into the formation of the Imperal Remnant which the game is referencing.

Kyle Katarn as he appeared in Dark Forces

But it goes so much deeper than that. Kyle Katarn (of the Dark Forces series) appears in the X-Wing Miniatures Game, so for that game the Dark Forces saga, the Imperial Remnant, the Darksaber universe, and associated materials are canon. But the miniatures game also features ships from the X-Wing game series, making that series also part of the miniatures game's canon. 1994s Tie Fighter for DOS (the sequel to X-wing) features Admiral Thrawn indicating that X-Wing/Tie Fighter is set in Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy universe making that canon for the miniatures game as well. And the miniatures game also has ships from the Rebel Assault series.... Finally, just to top it off, the story of 1993s X-Wing contradicts the story of the original Dark Forces, and aspects of the Thrawn Trilogy and 1994s Tie Fighter have already been made non-canonical by the prequel films. And that's only scratching the surface...

Admiral Thrawn as he appeared in Tie Fighter

Keeping the Star Wars games canonical would require Disney to navigate a maze of poor storylines, one-off characters, contradictions, and referencing to source materials outside the games themselves. And would we have gotten a good movie trilogy out of it in the end? Doubtful. Leaving the games as canon was never going to happen. And given the complex and restrictive nature of the EU should never happen.

 

My Thoughts

George Lucas always maintained that he was not bound by the expanded universe. The EU was always licensed fan fiction that could be discarded at Lucas's whim. And at the end of the day I feel that Star Wars needs all the help it can get. We cannot have three more bad movies destroying the franchise. And if ignoring the expanded universe will allow the writers and Abrams to have full creative control for the production of the next film trilogy and we get a great core canon experience because of it then I'm all for it. Let them make the movies the way they need to be made, and we'll see what still fits from the expanded universe when they are done. Perhaps they'll even make an effort to preserve some of the better expanded universe materials.

And when it's all done I'm still going to enjoy playing X-Wing and Tie Fighter regardless of their canonical status.