Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
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If I told you that a browser-based “strategy” game was advertising itself with ad banners reading, “One Click for a Roman Orgy! Click Now!” could you guess the game? I cropped the name out of the picture, to avoid giving them that bit of free advertising, but… wow. The big surprise, really, is that they are still in business.
: Zubon
Advertise discreetly, my lord.
It’s the start of Sylvari Week! Kristen Perry begins with a shebang as she tells us how the player-controlled humanoid, plant race was designed and re-designed. I, personally, am just amazed. It’s another example of working and re-working things in that ol’ iterative process until it feels right. Perry did it at night on her own time!
The original design was not any more evocative of plants or nature than some forest elves. Perry mentions that they never seemed to hit the trifecta of noble, beautiful, and plant. Their visual design always felt like fae at peace with nature. I loved their story as it seems to stem largely from sidhe mythology, but they were about as interesting as elves to the eye. Or, rather, humans that were slightly different.
Now they feel alien. Something about them is not quite right. It doesn’t feel like an obvious, natural creation, like making yet another anthropomorphic race. The plant-grown sylvari feel unnatural, and that is why I think Perry hit the design straight on. They should be unnatural. They aren’t a culmination of evolution or even magical…uhh.. offspringing. They are weird. Perhaps unliked.
In so many stories about the sidhe and other noble fae, we are told that they have otherworldly beauty. Strange beauty. It rarely made sense to me. I usually went along a supermodel-ramped-to-eleven route in my mind, but I think the answer is something more along the lines of Medusa. Alluring and repulsive at the same time hits the mark, and it works great for the sylvari. I think that this design will especially appeal to both men and women gamers, whereas the old “elvish” design might not have appealed to that tough, CODBLOPSy guy.
I can’t believe the “stock” of the sylvari can rise much higher after this start, but, once again, I am waiting to be surprised.
–Ravious
wyrd
Playing the Steam free game of the weekend, I have come to wonder: how many games have an Engineer that builds a turret; how many games have an Engineer that does not build a turret; and how many games have a non-Engineer that builds a turret. (I think I will avoid counting Warhammer Online’s Magus and units/classes that “summon” rather than “build.” I’m unclear whether the Raven builds, summons, or do we count “deploy”?) Was there some first game that set the standard that Engineer = build a sentry gun? It feels like engineers and self-directed turrets have become a standard game item, but perhaps exploring some examples will reverse this. I keep finding near-hits, where perhaps they consciously avoided calling the turret-builder an Engineer in recent games. I wonder if non-builder Engineers are also intentional aversions? Inventory below the break, please contribute in the comments.
Edit: let’s see what happens if we add in enemies that do the same, some of which may mirror heroes. Continue reading Engi Census
Civilization V uses policies where previous editions had civics or governments. They function as little talent trees for your nation, and one great virtue is that they have no drawbacks. You no longer pick a government type that receives more production at the cost of less science or an economy that is good for guns but not butter. You just pick “more production” or “good for guns.”
Invisibly baked in is that “less science” and “bad for butter” are the default states. There are bonuses for production or science, and when you pick production, you do not pick science. Balanced around this, the effect is the same, but the player is happier because there is no visible penalty. In MMO-land, designers have learned to give a buff for eating rather than a debuff for not eating; the math is the same, but the psychology differs.
The trade-offs are more visible in the mutually exclusive policies. There is a pair and a trio, and you can pick only one from each set, but the other five are open to everyone. Do you prefer hard-coded mutual exclusivity or just the exclusivity caused by having limited choices?
Civ V also uses a soft cap for policies, with increasing culture costs for each, rather than a hard cap. The game will not run long enough for you to unlock 42 policies, so the potential for another is always there.
: Zubon
It is the weekend, so I can play Civilization. I have learned that it is bad for my sleep schedule to do so during the week.
ArenaNet has posted another great article from one of the other roles fans hear less about than the glamorous Colin job. I absolutely love that they are releasing articles like this. The people at ArenaNet have such drive and passion, and even the IT guy in charge of the server room was intensely passionate about his role in the company. The sound guys below the noisy server room follow the studio’s energy, and some of their daily routine is shown in a video recently released by ArenaNet. Yet, pragmatically speaking I couldn’t help wondering if they were wasting time with horse clops and smashing glass. Surely, those sounds are out there?
Not To Scale is a little flash gem. It takes a simple game mechanic that you know (swap the tiles to assemble the picture) and adds a twist (the “squares” are different sizes, and the tiles stretch themselves to fit). I don’t know that I see anywhere further to take the idea, but it is a novel variation on a classic puzzle that utilizes the strengths of the computer, the way that Elements does for collectible card games with mechanics that change and duplicate cards in ways you could not with physical cards.
: Zubon
Jaradcel writes up a guest post on Rift news. Enjoy! –Ravious
Rift has released its state of the union address on the game. Some additional info slipped out from a conference call to journalists, and the most intriguing information is below.
The two biggest highlights include Chronicles, a form of solo to small-group content focusing on the lore of the world, and the possibility of Alternate advancement experience sometime in the near future. A lot of what I’ll be talking about is theorycrafting based on available information (of which there really isn’t a lot of)
First off, Chronicles. These are listed as instances for players from one to three, and are meant to be finished relatively quickly. They will do things such as have players interact, fight alongside or work against famous in-game non-player characters. It will also allegedly flesh out the lore for players who prefer that, rather than loot or bashing heads in. Unfortunately, there is very little beyond the bullet point information to go on. Serrain at RiftJunkies reflects a lot of my concerns regarding this introduction, such as whether it’s for max-level characters only, how it will be implemented et al.
The little things matter. One of the solved problems in multiplayer online gaming is that 1/day timers should use an 18- to 22-hour day rather than a 24-hour day. I call this “solved,” but I still see many games using 24-hour timers. (Feel free to debate the merits of individual timers versus “everyone and everything resets at midnight.”)
If you play everyday, you probably start around the same time, usually before/after work/school. A 24-hour timer gradually shifts your activities unless you are clockwork-perfect and can consistently complete X exactly 1,440 minutes later, and may the server gods help you if some blip renders the timer slightly off. More likely, you cannot begin whatever quest or instance has the timer until the old timer resets, so if it takes you an hour to complete it, you effectively have a 25-hour timer. There might be some merit to keeping people from building up a daily routine (use a 28- to 32-hour timer in that case), but these games tend to encourage that daily habit. The best mechanics are invisible, not pulling the players out of the game world to check whether the group is waiting on Bob’s reset timer because he hit traffic on the way home last night.
Some examples:
: Zubon
A community which cannot or will not realise how insignificant a part of the universe it occupies is not truly civilised. That is to say, it contains a fatal ingredient which renders it, to whatever extend, unbalanced. This is the story of one such community.
— opening lines of Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss
: Zubon
There’s a secret to great underdog journalism (i.e., blogging): ask community questions. It’s such a simple idea, but it comes with a flipside: don’t ask wide-audience questions. I have been following news on Trackmania 2, and one of the devs expounds on this idea quite handedly in a fan interview (about the 3:40 mark). He even calls answers to wide-audience questions “ammo,” much like ArenaNet’s Chris Lye analogized here.
The difference between the two is a matter of expertise. Wide-audience questions require no expertise. “When is the release date?” is the most prevalent for Guild Wars 2. Community questions require some knowledge of things, and Sardu’s interview with ArenaNet’s Colin Johanson at the San Diego Comic Con is chock full of them. The answers are fantastic because Johanson can answer them without wasting “wide-audience ammo.”
Then readers get passionate answers just brimming with excitement, like this: