Since no one reads blog posts in the U.S. today anyway, I figured I would show my appreciation for all the MMO devs that no one ever thinks or hears about… Bud Light style.
Continue reading Unsung MMO Heroes
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.Goodbye To You
Since no one is reading on Thanksgiving anyway, let’s serve up one of those song posts that no one cares about. As is often the case, this is a break-up song. We have relationships with these games, their communities, and our guilds, sometimes far more emotionally involved and dramatic than our romantic entanglements.
This one goes out to all of you in on-again, off-again relationships with your game of choice. You just keep going back to him, don’t you, no matter how abusive the relationship may be? At some point, you have to accept that the dream has died and move on, no matter how much time you have invested. That investment is never going to pay off. Don’t worry; you’ll find a new infatuation to keep you company, and here is Michelle Branch to sympathize while you’re on the rebound.
I’ve been searching deep down in my soul
Words that I’m hearing are starting to get old
It feels like I’m starting all over again
The last three years were just pretend
And I saidGoodbye to you
Goodbye to everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one thing that I tried to hold onto
Buffy fans may recognize this from the end of “Tabula Rasa,” an entirely appropriate use of the song.
: Zubon
“Zubon, don’t be so hard on yourself about the song posts. No one cares about the other posts, either.”
Why lore matters
No, don’t run away. Really. I know I’m coming across as the nerd in the corner who insists on some stupid technicality, but I object. I am a nerd, and I might be cornered, but this is no technicality.
Lore matters because we are human and, as such, we ask questions. Some of these questions (most, in fact) we ask to ourselves. We keep them in our heads and rarely ever ask them out loud, lest we are cast with the lot of cornered nerds. In the context of our games, the questions are plain, but powerful; Why is this here? Where did it come from? What does it do? What does it mean? How does it relate to what I’ve seen before and what I’ve yet to see? What happens when it’s used? Why are they fighting? Why are they friends? Where do they want to go with this?
There are more, but that’s basically the genesis of lore right there. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss or underestimate the importance of lore depending on one’s focus. After all if one goes through an encounter with the sole goal of acquiring a particular reward, those questions do not matter. Item acquired, goal completed, move on to the next.
No Big Damn Heroes
Mal: Well, look at this! Appears we got here just in the nick of time. What does that make us?
Zoe: Big damn heroes, sir!
Mal: Ain’t we just?
In Fallen Earth, I am not a big damn hero. I am not really a hero at all. Mostly I am just trying to get by without becoming a meal. A survivor if you will.
Ammunition is limited. If I want to shoot a bullet I need to make it first. Every time I fire a shot and it misses, seeing the bullet ricochet in the dirt behind my target makes me die a little inside each time. My own! My precious!
I don’t want to have some post-apocalyptic freaks rape me to death, eat my flesh and sew my skin into their clothing. Not even if I’m very very lucky and they do it in that order. I want to live.
Bang bang, I shot you down
Bang bang, you hit the ground
– Ethic
Context
“Cat-people get +5 Agility.” It is a simple sentence, something you could expect from a dozen YAFMMORPGs. If your game has yet to release, how can you express it without being meaningless or getting into an endless cascade of information? (Or perhaps the endless cascade is a good thing for promoting your game, and you can turn this one thing into months of web site content.) Continue reading Context
Quote of the Day
In games, a slog is bad. A romp is good, but can easily become so rapid you stop experiencing the game and end up merely experiencing the speed of your progress. The trick is pacing a game so that the player still feels as though they’re romping but is also going slowly enough to feel like they’re experiencing a LOT of stuff.
: Zubon
Macbeth, Fallen Earth Style
At Depot 66 I was involved in choosing which play the locals would put on. I chose Macbeth and since I picked it I decided to watch. It is now presented here in tl;dr text form (with spoilers?) in the best way I could put together using screen captures and some free OCR software.
Macbeth says: If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well It were done quickly.
Macbeth says: If the assassination could trample up the consequence, and catch with his turkeys success;
Macbeth says: That but this blow might be the be-all and the end-all here.
Macbeth says: But here, upon this bang and shoot of time, we’ld jump the life to come.
Macbeth says: But in these cases we still have judgment here;
Macbeth says: That we but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.
Macbeth says: This even-handed justice commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice to our own lips.
Macbeth says: He’s here in double trust; First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed;
Macbeth says: Then, as his host; who should against his murderer shut the door; Not bear the knife myself. Continue reading Macbeth, Fallen Earth Style
The Rolling Mid/End-Game
The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢ launches in a week. I am wondering what happens two months down the line.
Turbine’s Middle-earth has a punctuated equilibrium, with the level cap jumping once a year and the end-game moving a little further from the tutorial. If the future resembles the past, the mid-year additions will be less severe than Blizzard’s tiers of equipment, more of breadth at the cap than another ladder to climb. (More cynical version: many treadmills rather than one long one.) This leads to launching with a slim end-game, building it up over time, then moving to a new, slim end-game.
The Old Republic – All Classes Revealed
For months now, thousands of people have been speculating and arguing about the names of the eight classes in SWTOR. Not since the debates about the identity of the “5th Cylon” in Battlestar Galactica has it felt like this. The message boards have been bathed in flame on a semi-permanent basis as titles like “Mandalorian” “Engineer” “Noble” and “Droid” were all tossed into the ring of possible classes. The hottest debate has centered on one question. Will there be one Jedi class and one Sith class? Or will there be two for each side, making the total force-users out to be four? Would Bioware make an mmo where four out of eight classes held lightsabers?
On some podcasts, like ToroCast, they felt completely certain that they knew that there were only two force users total. On my podcast, my co-hosts and I felt so certain that there were four force-users that we often talked about them without providing a disclaimer that their existence was unconfirmed.
But now, the last of the classes are confirmed, and the two-vs-four debate can finally die.
Continue reading The Old Republic – All Classes Revealed
The Morality Gauge
I have not gone far in Overlord. I question whether the gameplay will become much more interesting than “throw a wave of imps at it,” and I found my drive to look further stymied early on by the corruption score.
Overlord includes the familiar karma score, in which all ethical decisions fall on a single line. The moral meaning of every action is absolute and completely independent of intention. A surprising amount of violence and destruction has no moral component at all, just specifically defined moral decisions. Most of the early ones are clearly labeled, although you can get a corruption score before being told that it exists (“Hey, if I click on this guy, a green number goes up. I wonder what … oh, my gremlins killed him.”), which must make for some fun surprises and re-loads when you unexpectedly shift yourself in an undesired direction.