Category: General

General

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Ozzie’s in a pickle!

Guess what game I bought myself for an early holiday gift? The title should give it away, more than likely. It’s making my MMORPG vacation due to traveling on work so much less painful.

Much geek love for this finally coming to portable. This, Secret of Mana, and Earthbound were my all-time favorite SNES games growing up. I’ve very nearly bought one of those emulator kits for my DS simply so I could play these games. With this release, I see the possibility for Secret to follow (Children of Mana was horribly disappointing) and perhaps, dare I dream, Earthbound. Ness, Randi, and Crono are the three kings of RPG history…

Efficient Trolling

Arnold Zwicky blogs at Language Log (and if you read only one linguistics blog, it should probably be Language Log). Earlier this year, he wrote about caring for his late partner Jacques. Jacques had brain cancer, and the best treatment available only moved him from impending death to inevitable dementia, an Alzheimer’s-like decline a decade down the line. Arnold spent twelve years caring for him.

This appeared on a linguistics blog because of Jacques’s particular problem: avoidance of evidence that he was in California. I encourage you to read the whole thing. He could read normally, but he could not consciously process the word “California” if it implied that Jacques himself was in California. For him, license plates were blocked, news reports were garbled, and postcards were illegible, but only the parts implying that he was in California. National news that mentioned California would have been fine; you could see those anywhere. His brain was effectively reading ahead, recognizing the word and the context, blocking it from his conscious awareness, and then rationalizing why the word was not there.

Prof. Zwicky has some comments about similar dementias. Others in the comments share their stories about caring for family members and their cases of implicit and explicit awareness. The dialogue draws out more details. It is a heart-rending account of loss.

And then one commenter tossed in, “TL;DR” Five characters, and I wanted to track the IP to put a brick through someone’s window or skull.

: Zubon

Introduction to the Kingdom

My occasional references to Kingdom of Loathing seem to miss many, so this is your briefing. Kingdom of Loathing is a silly browser-based fantasy adventure game with a limited number of turns per day. It makes mocking or ironic use of the familiar computer RPG tropes, and most of the game text is humor-based. The graphics are stick figure-based. Over time, it has developed a loyal following, an active economy, and a sort of meta-game developed by/in cooperation with the community.

You pick one of six classes: melee (Seal Clubber, Turtle Tamer), ranged (Accordion Thief, Disco Bandit), or mage (Pastamancer, Sauceror). A Sauceror might protect himself with a Jalapeño Saucesphere and attack with a Saucegeyser, while a Seal Clubber uses Musk of the Moose Ox to find enemies to beat down with his Lunging Thrust-Smack. The three types of classes each lend themselves to different play strategies.

Your goal is to save King Ralph XI, who has been imprisoned by the Naughty Sorceress. Along the way, you level up by completing quests like killing rats at the Typical Tavern, making a Bitchin’ Meat Car, or helping the Deep Fat Friars. Once you save the king, you can hang about and mess with whatever you like (content keeps going), or you can Ascend and start over. Ascending lets you make one skill permanent, and you can get your stuff back (eventually) from Hagnk’s Ancestral Mini-Storage.

Along the way you will fight monsters like filthy hippies, chowder golems, vampire clams, zmobies and zobmies (at The Misspelled Cemetary), and spooky gravy fairy ninjas. You might stab/club them with the ridiculously huge sword, shoot them with a bubblewrap crossbow, or channel your pasta spell through a Gnollish slotted spoon.

It might be worth checking out the wiki for more silliness. You will want that link anyway, because it is probably not possible to reach and defeat the Naughty Sorceress without some spoilage.

: Zubon

Filtering

Throwing things away unread is key to internet literacy.

To be able to focus on anything, you must immediately ignore 99+% of the content out there. If you are reading this, you are not currently reading about knitting, extreme kayaking, the history of Cambodia, upcoming metal shows in Berlin, the proper care of camels as pets, or homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck (actual Wikipedia topic). Once you narrow your interest to MMOs, you have dozens of games (in English), and once you have one game, there are still dozens of sites.

I cannot take it personally if you pass on Kill Ten Rats. There are literally millions of other blogs you do not read either.

: Zubon

Which ToS Have You Violated Today?

Lori Drew convicted. Possible dismissal or appeal to come. Previous discussion.

William Roper: Arrest that man!
Sir Thomas More: On what law?
Margaret More: Father, that man’s bad.
Sir Thomas More: There’s no law against that.
William Roper: There is: God’s law.
Sir Thomas More: Then God can arrest him.
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

– Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons

: Zubon

More of “The Guild”

Episode 1 of The Guild: Season 2 is now available for viewing.

Unless you’ve had your head in a kobold hole for the last year or so, you’ll be aware that The Guild is a web based comedy series that was conceived, written and starred Felicia Day – an actress a gamer who happens to also be a gamer an actress. The show is about a group of people who, unsurprisingly, are all members of an MMO guild. The storyline of the first series centres on them all meeting outside the game for the first time to deal with some, um, personal issues. It’s very funny and well worth the 30 minutes or so of your life it’ll take to watch.

The Guild garnered a lot of critical success and a huge fan following. Deservedly so too. They released the series on DVD and used the profits from that to start funding production of the second series. Felicia and her co-producer Kim Evey have also managed to partner with Xbox and Microsoft and the show is now sponsored. This is most definitely A Good Thing and is very evident in the very amusing second series opener.

I’d like to say that I had an exclusive interview with Ms Day for you about her experience playing MMOs and about writing the Guild but I’m sure she’s a very busy lady and there’s also some trivial matter of a restraining order that means I’m not allowed to make any further contact even over the web which is more than a little annoying but anyway.

So, here’s the link to the official site and a little thought: if you hadn’t have spent the last couple of minutes reading this rubbish then you could have already been watching it. Bet that’s really annoying.

Interview with ArenaNet’s Linsey Murdock

Linsey Murdock is the game designer for the Guild Wars® Live Team. She works exclusively on Guild Wars Live issues, bugs, added content, and general maintenance. The latest big addition to Guild Wars was an update to rebalance how players acquire some of the titles in game, and Linsey graciously took time out of her busy schedule to answer a few questions about this major update.

What change in this update are you most proud of?

It’s hard to pick one thing from such a large build, but I suppose it would have to be the Storybooks. Condensing the entire storyline of the game into single-paragraph segments was pretty tough, but I think we pulled it off. Plus, I think bringing the book system into the other three games will really help revitalize those areas and reward players for repeating that content, much in the same way that the introduction of Hard Mode did.

Were any of the changes hard to implement or suggest because of the fact that prior design choices were going to be overwritten?

Not really. We are all interested in the game being as good as it can be, and so we recognize that as the game grows, previous design decisions may no longer be practical and/or could stand to be updated.

What change are you most curious as to how players will respond or change their play-styles in lieu of that change?

I am hoping that the reward updates to Challenge Missions and Jade Quarry/Fort Aspenwood will be enough to bring players back into those areas.

Were any of the changes made with Guild Wars 2 “achievement systems” in mind?

No, my work on Guild Wars® is completely independent of Guild Wars 2.

Was there a change that required major out-of-the-box thinking where ideas were pulled from really weird places?

We mostly just looked at each title we wanted to address and assessed the areas in which it could be improved. We didn’t borrow from other MMOs…I also don’t feel the changes we made were necessarily “out of the box.” They seemed much more like common sense to me.

With much of ArenaNet working on the upcoming Guild Wars 2, how much interest do those employees take in the Guild Wars Live Team, especially with this update?

Though they’re focused on GW2, there are still tons of people at ArenaNet who are extremely passionate about Guild Wars. We even have folks who stay late to put in overtime on Guild Wars after a full shift at their “day job” working on GW2.

Can you give us a short walkthrough of the design process you took for changing one of the titles?

We started with the Luxon/Kurzick title tracks, as we felt those were in the most dire need of adjustment. I took a look at the ways in which players currently gain faction, particularly the FFF (fast faction farming), and calculated a per-hour faction gain number to use as a base. I outlined my first impressions of how we should adjust the existing ways of gaining faction to bring them in line with the FFF, as well as how we should fix the issue of botting. I then ran my outline past a few people for feedback.

That initial assessment got the ball rolling, so from there I started doing detailed research on all the ways that players currently gain faction, as well as all the ways we felt they should be gaining faction. I went back and played through many areas of the game that we felt needed better rewards, in order to get a fresh picture in my head of how they played. I put together a number of spreadsheets to crunch the numbers and find the right balance.

I ran my ideas past a few different people to see if we were on the mark, and then tweaked the numbers according to their feedback. I built a design document with all the changes we wanted to make, and then sent it out to even more people for feedback—I particularly wanted to hear from Joe Kimmes, who would actually be programming the changes. Then I sent the design document to James Phinney for final approval. Once he signed off on the changes, I sent it to the rest of the designers to make absolutely sure that there weren’t any remaining issues.

Next I handed the document off to Joe for implementation while I went to work writing text for all of the Storybooks and designing a reward structure for them. Joe began implementation, and I continued to review the changes being made to make sure there weren’t any holes. We also added a few things here and there, and when implementation was complete we moved into the testing phase to make sure it all worked as intended. We kept on making tweaks and bug fixes as we got closer to build day.

Once everything was integrated over to our staging servers, another round of testing and bug-fixing began. After QA signed off on that, we were free to push it all up to the Live servers and run the build. And that’s pretty much it.