Author: Zubon

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The Great Value Inversion

Any other trade skill aficionados in the house? Between crafting and badges, I could go through entire games without killing things. I look at my time in A Tale in the Desert, and I wonder how much money I spent for the privilege of pretending to make charcoal. Good times.

Tuebit at WorldIV has some The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢-specific discussion of one of the great problems crafters face: raw materials are worth more than finished products. Go, read, see how gold ingots are worth 0.005 gold each; how treating raw wood (the only thing you can do with raw wood) makes it fall in value; and how you can reduce the value of your raw materials by 85%, simply by making a finished product. Now you know why you can carry huge stacks of metal ingots around: each is far far smaller than a gold piece.

People are paying to make progress in a profession that is so wholly un-enjoyable it is preferable to not play that profession, but rather, to grind cash and, in effect, purchase the profession.

Very strange.

: Zubon

Review: Omnibus or In Pieces?

Last week I experimented with a new format for reviewing a game. Instead of one huge post with thirty paragraphs, I commented on different parts of the game spread over a week. How did that work for you?

I had hoped that breaking it up would help us comment on different aspects of the game, rather than whatever one point the comments seized on in a longer discussion. I don’t think that happened much. Perhaps I should have outlined when I was getting to various things at the start.

Everyone had Dungeon Runners fatigue by the end. Perhaps few cared much at the start. The extended format did provide a chance to try it and comment before the series was over. At least a few people did that, posting here or on their own blogs.

Last week was coincidentally the first major content patch for Dungeon Runners, so that was a big attention spike in our little gaming blogosphere.

: Zubon

Testy

Pvthudson would like you to test the game if you are a beta tester. Revolutionary concept, I know. I skip most betas for that reason: why provide free bug-testing for some company when you could pay to play someone’s live-but-should-still-be-in-beta MMO? Wait, that didn’t come out right…

I propose something in the opposite direction: developers, please tell your players what you want from this test. Pvthudson cites the mis-labeled stress test. If you are not seeking feedback on something, let us know that, since it does no one any good if you invite 20,000 people and they fill your forums with comments on balance. And frankly, it will just annoy everyone who feels like his feedback was ignored. On your test server, please do not describe the change as “increased fire damage”; your players cannot test if something is working as intended unless you tell them what is intended. Don’t be vague or coy here. You can even tell players, “This will be on test until we are sure of X, Y, and Z.”

If you want to harness the power of your playerbase, you should attach that harness to something.

: Zubon

Furry Friends and Fiendish Foes

Earth Eternal Earth Eternal has head and torso images of its character models (16 races * 2 sexes). I think they are mostly rather good, and certainly different from what you find in most titles. Well, a lot of games have a few anthropomorphic animal races, so about half of these are similar to something out there, but I cannot recall seeing goat- and badger-people before. Did you know that you can make a boar look feminine with the right eyelashes and hairdo? You can scroll down to see some of the villain models.

Matt Mihaly has some comments on releasing the (partial) screenshots and subsequent commentary. I recommend avoiding the Kotaku thread: it starts as a train wreck and goes downhill. If you feel the need to post “furries suck,” you can join the poo-flinging there. Three comments:

  1. I like the frog and lizard headshots.
  2. I had a poor reaction to the concept art, but I think these turned out well, even though they track the concept art closely. That could be because these are just head and torso shots, so I do not have the odd limb length ratios to squick me out.
  3. They don’t have any furries on staff for this project? Isn’t that like making a Barbie game without any women on the development team? That seems like a huge pool of expertise (?) to be missing. Maybe there are enough in the community to give them input, but there is an entire subculture already devoted to answering questions that must have come up at meetings.

: Zubon

Contemplations of a Demiurge

In the beginning, my Virtual Villagers were few. I watched them closely and took part in all their affairs. It was I who guided them to food and fire, and it was my hand that led them to open the waters once, twice, three times. When they begat, I chose the pairings and placed them together. They daily saw the architect of their lives.

Later, I allowed them more freedom. Once I was certain that they would not starve in my absence, I left them unattended to live their lives as they would. I would check in a few times a day, a few times a decade in their time, and lo the hand from the sky would again steer them. The lazy were sent to work, others’ careers changed in a moment, and many flew through the air to land where I wanted them to carry out my tasks. None could say where these tasks would lead, not even I, but the villagers were compelled to obey.

I stand outside their time and world. I can double their speed or freeze their time. With merely an adjustment to my computer’s clock, I can send their lives forward centuries, without their noticing any change in the flow of time. I cannot be in many places at once, but if I freeze their world and change many things, it looks to them as though the invisible hand is everywhere.

I mostly leave them to themselves now. In the early days I knew every name, every job. I celebrated the first Master Scientist and mourned the first death. Now I know them not. They breed in great numbers, and I do not gaze upon them for decades of their time. I do not recognize the names on the new graves being filled today. Now when I appear, I check a few metrics, I heal the sick, and I smile upon the frolicking children. They live in a tropical paradise with endless food and no enemies. I mostly ignore their world, but I do not delete it, and they do not notice that all the years of their lives pass in the instant of calculation when I restart their world from its stasis.

: Zubon

No End Game

I’ve been playing this so-called “Super” Mario Brothers for a long time now, and let me tell you: there is NOTHING to do after 8-4. I’ve been there for months now, and it’s like the game just stops. Did the developers even THINK about having an endgame? Where is the high-level content? No, their idea was to just let you play the game over again – with more beetles! Yeah, there’s a bunch of creative devs. Your reward for getting through 32 levels is to start the same 32 levels over. “Unlock epic mode” my sweet plumber arse.

Don’t tell me that I just sped through the game with the warp zones. Yes, I have used warp zones, but I have also played through every single level. It is like there is no point except to farm: farm lakitu for spinies, farm turtles for extra lives, farm gold coins endlessly. There is not even anywhere to spend the gold coins! The entire economy is broken.

I swear, it’s like the devs have given up on this game. I’m not the only one who is moving on to other games. I want thank all the people who made my time in-game so much fun, and a shout out to my guild who helped me as I became one of the top-ranked players in the game. I’ll check back in a few months to see if there are any improvements, but I doubt it. See you all in Zelda 2!

Another RL Invasion

I work for the government. I get to tell our partners, “Good news, your project has been approved! Once you enter the edited application into the online system, I can review it and route it to financial section and the grants manager, then if they don’t have any issues I can immediately send it for final review from the section manager. After your authorized official officially submits it, our division director can approve and then we will send you the approval letter. Then you are set to run it through your local bureaucracy! (This is all conditional, of course, on approval from the State Administrative Board, along with the state and federal funding coming through, but we will run that paperwork concurrently.) I will let you know if there are any questions or revision requests along the way. We are almost there!” This is the fastest and most streamlined the process has ever been. We start planning for fiscal year 2009 soon.

Today I sat at my desk thinking, “I hate lag.”

: Zubon