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Our Undead Are Different

Eric of Elder Game discusses more game development on his MMO in progress. This time: why the undead are evil, not “misunderstood.” It’s a lovely, short treatment of the question in world-building:

Early in Diablo 3, you meet a Necromancer. And your character basically says something like, “Hmm, you don’t see many of those around town!” This is the saddest reaction to necromancy ever. Necromancy should be evil. …
Most zombie flicks don’t suggest that it’s Grandpa inside that rotting corpse: it’s just a meat puppet. So if you can get over the shock of seeing Grandpa’s rotting body, reusing his corpse isn’t so evil. It’s almost a noble act: you’re up-cycling useless flesh into something productive! …
[Shifting to talking about his differing design:] Necromancy mostly uses hate-filled undead, but there are other kinds, mostly occurring naturally. Ghosts, wraiths, banshees, and so on are fueled by unpleasant emotions like depression, greed, agony, and jealousy. They’re all sentient, and all of them are feared…
The Combat Psychology skill now has direct tie-ins to undeath. If you make a skeleton feel less hatred, you’ll literally make him weaker. Psychoanalysis can kill the undead!…
Maybe depression in this world is now a serious public safety issue. Most suicides are committed by extremely depressed people, and if they come back as ghosts, haunting their loved ones, they can spread more depression like an infectious disease. What would society do? …

Worth reading.
: Zubon

[TSW] And so the NDA drops…

… which means we can finally talk a little bit about The Secret World without the risk of being ambushed by a warband of Dire Lawyers.

I’ve been in the closed beta for a couple of months now, and while I’m still prevented from discussing anything regarding the previous builds (Cthulhu knows why), we can kinda spill the beans about the CB’s latest iteration which, if versions are any indication, should be something very similar to what will be delivered to customers real soon now.

Thoughts and points after the break.

Continue reading [TSW] And so the NDA drops…

[GW2] Unskinned “Fun”

The other night I played Team Fortress 2. I played my favorite map, Hightower, on a public server. I mostly played as a pyro, but changed as I felt was necessary. I was just having fun. I would’ve preferred my team always win, but when we lost it was just the beginning of another round. I would have preferred to win a ton of items, but I didn’t even give a second thought to a play session if I didn’t receive anything. I just played for fun. I have spent hours and hours doing exactly this, and I still have fun.

To my side my wife plays Carcassonne on her iPad for the 700th time. My friends will come over later this week to play the same scornful game of the Magic the Gathering variant, EDH (or “Commander”) that we always do. My dad sits down to watch the St. Louis Cardinals keep their head above being a .500 team.

The common thread of our activities is that there is no goal besides to just have fun. To just play.

Continue reading [GW2] Unskinned “Fun”

Unknown Losses

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.
— Frederic Bastiat, What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen”

Spinks points us towards Battlechicken‘s battle with customer service: false positives on cheat detection and then a series of form letters rather than anyone responding to what she actually said. A week of fighting, blogging, and cancellation eventually led her to a human being.

I wonder how many players would have just quietly dropped the game, upset, on receiving the first email and not tried to fight back and argue their case. I wonder how many would have kept trying after the second and third form email.
–Spinks

This is a virtue of the vocal minority, the bloggers and the forum-dwellers: you (the developer) get feedback on why people are leaving your game to which your system might blind you. It took heroic efforts to find someone willing to entertain the hypothesis that the cheat-detection system was driving away customers. For the customer service rep responding to banned potential-cheaters, I can promise you that watching for that problem is very low on their rewarded activities, if they would be allowed to provide useful feedback on the question at all (if anyone with decision-making power was aware that the question might exist). These are the unknown unknowns, the blind spots where your organization is incapable of looking without violating the normal structure.

: Zubon

[Eve] The Adventures of Commander Nooblet

I have been busy playing Eve lately, which has severely limited my time to write about playing it.   I’ve started to pen a number of tales, only to have Mumble explode with a warning of imminent PvP, an operation forming up or most commonly, pilots needed for some crazy scheme hatched by our fearless leader usually involving an enemy wormhole several jumps away, and the wanton destruction of everything they hold dear.

My Adventures have been nothing short of epic, but I am still a Nooblet Eve pilot, just barely coming up on 5,000,000 skill points on my main account and living this unbelievable and crazy wormhole life, that is nothing short of the pinnacle of Eve action.   Moving into the C5 Class Wormhole, and joining the alliance Surely You’re Joking was the best move we could have made, and has revealed so many new layers of Eve to me.

Continue reading [Eve] The Adventures of Commander Nooblet

Complete the Gaming Metaphor

This is my first time touring around Las Vegas. The hotels are also casinos, malls, theaters, and/or theme parks. They have various themes and decorations. The casinos are the most consistent, both in prevalence and content. Underneath the decorations, the casinos that take up so much of the floorspace are nearly identical, down to having the exact same video poker and slot machines repeated by the dozen in each building. The settings vary widely, so this place is a Roman forum with high-end shopping establishments that don’t exist in most states, while the place across the street seems to have skipped having a theme at all, and its in-hotel mall is at the low end, complete with minimall food court and a half-dozen jewelry stores that all claim to be going out of business soon, everything must go, deep discounts!!! I am sure that the experienced gambler could spend hours pointing out ways that the table games differ or how one casino makes better use of its floor space in terms of flow dynamics, but the core content featured inside is the same everywhere I have looked.

: Zubon

Shootmania Storm Alpha Impressions

Nadeo graviously invited me in to the Shootmania Storm alpha. I’ve been playing around with the late alpha builds, and I am having a blast. Shootmania Storm is a competitive multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) video game bounded with the ideals of the creativity and engine of Trackmania, Nadeo’s claim to fame. Read on for more impressions….

Continue reading Shootmania Storm Alpha Impressions

[GW2] The Gathering Progression

Even in my absence through most of the last Guild Wars 2 beta weekend event, I still lurked on plenty of community sites where I could. The two most prominent complaints I saw were about progression, namely weapon skill unlocking and major trait tiers. We’ve already covered weapon skill unlocks, and I think the most elegant change would be to change it to skill usage instead of critter death. It will be interesting to see the iteration that Jon Peters, ArenaNet dev, hints at. So, that leaves us with major trait tiers.

ArenaNet already put forth a pretty solid argument on why this current iteration is necessary.  What I find interesting is that now traits mirror skills a whole lot more. There are 5-basic skills, 3 more complex, more powerful utility skills, and 1 elite skill, and there are 6 basic traits, 4 mid-level traits, and 2 “elite” traits. Also at the top end only one elite skill or elite trait can be slotted.

Long ago in the days of Guild Wars 1, it was stated many times that Magic the Gathering was a guide to how the skill system was designed. They brought up the collectible aspect many times as well as the need to build a skill deck with only a few of many possibilities. While the Guild Wars 2 system is farther away in terms of build creation in that a large portion of the deck is built for the player with weapon skills, it is much closer in terms of rarity.

Continue reading [GW2] The Gathering Progression

[GW2] Leveling a Crafter

The way leveling XP gain works in crafting is this: For leveling a discipline from 0-400, you will gain 10 levels along the way. By maxing out all 8 disciplines, you will gain 80 levels. That means you could dedicate a character to crafting, feed it all the mats you get on other characters and level it all the way to 80 without ever needing to kill a thing. As hardcore crafters, we think that is pretty cool.
— Linsey Murdock (ArenaNet Game Designer), Guild Wars 2 beta forums

To note, Guild Wars 2 lets you use 2 crafting skills at a time, but you do not lose progress in a skill when you switch to a new one. There is a cost to switch which two are active, scaling to your level in the crafting skill. : Zubon