Author: Nicodemus

Ah, March is a wonderful month. I’ve been lurking behind the scenes for a few months working on some *stuff*, but now that the seasons are changing and Springtime is on the way, I figured it was time for me to crawl out of my cave and say hello.

I will be a guest speaker at the Indie MMO Game Development Conference in Minneapolis (April 14-15). Come check it out. I’ll be hosting a wet t-shirt contest for some hotty elf chicks and you don’t want to miss out on that.

Read on for some opinions and ranting!

Continue reading Nicodemus delurks…

So as many you should already know, Interplay has “risen from the ashes” and announced that they will spend $75M to create the highly anticipated Fallout MMORPG. Don’t hold your breath.

First of all, Interplay doesn’t actually HAVE $75M. That means that they are going to have to convince someone to give it to them. Normally, I would say this would be highly unlikely and you would be stupid to give Interplay and its current “management” that kind of money. I mean, like so stupid, you don’t deserve to have that kind of money to start with. You should be fired from your job, your dog should bite you, and oompa loompas should beat you with nerf bats for days if you do this deal. “Wow” you say, “did Nicodemus actually just say that?”. Damn skippy I did. Why? Read on…

Continue reading Interplay’s Fallout MMORPG: Don’t hold your breath!

Ok, I haven’t posted much lately (for lots of good reasons, none of which I will bore you with here), but after reading Ethic’s recent post on farm status I couldn’t resist opining a bit.

Several of the comments posted on his topic seemed to confuse the differences between repeating the same quest/mission/instance over and over to obtain a piece of loot with the satisfaction of repeating a quest for the thrill of achievement or the sheer fun of adventure, or even the replayability of games like Tetris or Minesweeper, where the gameplay is repetitive (then again, it is the same for Chess and Monopoly, isn’t it?).

Continue reading Farming…again and again and again and again and again

Study: Researchers Determine Sex May Cause Pregnancy!

Study: Researchers Believe Poking a Bear With A Sharp Stick May Result In Mauling!

Yes, those both sound a bit uhm, like a waste of time and money, no? Well, look at this little gem I saw the other day on GameDaily Biz:

New research conducted at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has shown that massively multiplayer online games, such as Asheron’s Call (pictured) and Lineage, can expose gamers to alternate worldviews and promote sociability.

OMG, can it be true? I never noticed?! Ok, snarky sarcasm aside, is this just a case of some lazy researchers trying to win an award for stating the obvious, or did they actually miss the boat and get the wrong conclusion to their research? Read on…

Continue reading Study: Researchers State The Obvious

The Entertainment Software Association announced yesterday that E3 is “evolving” into “a more intimate event focused on targeted, personalized meetings and activities”.

This is unbelievable. I was actually befuddled for a minute or two after reading the press release. And then it all started making sense…especially when news broke that EA has been whining about the increasing costs. This is like Donald Trump whining about how expensive cheesecake is, and then demanding that only apple pie be served at restaurants.

The entire press release, and my comments are as follows:

Continue reading EA Nerfs E3

At the Develop Conference in England Mark Rein (from Epic) questioned the business model for episodic content and game releases. Some of the developers and publishers in the audience didn’t take too kindly to his comments and heckled him. Apparently a few called him a dinosaur…

Continue reading Is Mark Rein Right?

Yes, I have a fondness of ranting and raving about the things in the game industry that irritate me, or that I find to be ridiculous. I have become a bit jaded over the years and pretty cynical. I realized this morning that maybe I have been a little unfair and complained about only part of the problem.

Do gamers have a share in the blame for the problems in the game industry?

Continue reading The other side of the coin…

Earlier this week, Brian Sinclair over at GameSpot.com posted an article about Brian Farrell’s comments at a presentation at the Lazard Capital Markets Investors Breakfast.

Farrell, the CEO of THQ, was asked why none of the major publishers have done much in the MMORPG market. Instead of saying something along the lines of “well none of the big publishers really have a clue, and if they did get into the MMORPG market, they would screw it up more than it already is” he actually said the following:

Continue reading THQ is “misguided”…

Does anyone want to start a pool to bet on how long it will take for EA to cancel Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online and then kill the studio?

For our younger readers out there, EA has a history of this sort of thing so it would come as no surprise to many people if this did occur.

My guess (and it is just a guess) is that at some point, both games will get less and less attention and support from EA, and the core teams that have been working on both will be shifted to a new mmorpg project that EA wants to make. DaoC should be running out of steam by now, and Warhammer Online doesn’t look that impressive to me, although the thing that EA will be thinking about, is that Warhammer is a licensed property that they don’t own…that means that someone else is getting a cut of the profits.

Continue reading EA Acquires Mythic

I recently had a bit of a conversation with a friend of mine who is a producer at a game development community, and the topic was religion. There were two main threads to the chat…the first was about the use (and misuse) of religion and religious symbology in games, and the second was about making “Christian” games. Religion is one of those topics people don’t like to discuss, along with politics, mostly because people can be quite passionate about them and when you have individuals with differing views, things can get a bit out of hand…in my experience, this is because strong point of views (both in religion and politics) are usually the product of how someone has been raised, or indoctrination in the higher education system. Very rarely will you find a person who has strong beliefs, and can tell you WHY they believe so strongly. It is even rarer to find someone that can have a DISCUSSION about differing views without things turning into an arguement. Anyway, back to games…

Continue reading Religion…