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.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
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 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.
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
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.
In a flurry of press activity, a new MMO studio was unveiled today by ex-Blizzard, ex-ArenaNet MMO-guru Jeff Strain. Undead Labs is set to be a very focused developer. Focused on what, you say? Zombies. Consoles. MMO. Jeff believes he can help lead an MMO studio with a very tight game-making culture. This won’t be a “behemoth” company churning out franchise MMOs. This is going to be a company that carves an MMO from those three simple words for those three simple words. (Well not for zombies; though, after a 6-hour raid… nevermind.)  There are a bunch of good interviews linked from the Undead Labs’ news page, but the best is found on the site covering rude questions that interviewers might ask. For instance, Jeff Strain departs from his old view on MMO subscriptions:
Q: Will the game carry a subscription model like WoW, or will it be more like Guild Wars?
A: The game will almost certainly be subscription based. I’ve always said that a game should be designed around its business model, and Guild Wars is certainly designed to be a free-to-play online game. In fact, there are hundreds of free-to-play online games on the market today, but some publishers are increasingly relying on micro-transactions, in-game advertising, “premium†accounts, or, at worst, lead-gen scams to generate more profit. I don’t like this nickel-and-dime approach, because it leads to design decisions that are based on something other than what’s most fun for the players. We want to focus on making an MMOZ that is, first and foremost, fun to play. Not a Skinner Box. Not a teaser for more stuff you can buy from us. Not an advertisement for stuff you can buy from someone else. Our singular design focus will be to create a game that is fun to play, and every month we’ll either earn you respect and your money, or we won’t.
–Ravious
i don’t hate vests
I’ve talked before about how subscriptions can be seen as a form of investing. There are plenty of people that keep parking-lot subscriptions to games like World of Warcraft, where the monthly rent is paid but the car is never moved. I’ve been playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons Online lately, and while I am not ready to give my full impressions (favorable as they may be), I did want to discuss an interesting point to their business model. Continue reading Shareholder Subscription
Dragon Age’s story is the condensation, in yummy game form, of the old proverb about wanting to have cake and eat it too. You can’t. It’s quite refreshing to see how at several points in the storyline your actions and choices not only do matter, but also to come across situations that are not built around success or failure, but rather just what kind of failure you prefer and how many levels you want of it.
It’s not unfair. It makes perfect sense. Sometimes stuff just doesn’t work out and if this is true right here and now in our comfortable, padded real world existence, then it’s even more so in the dark times of a land torn by internal strife, a demonic invasion, magic and politics running rampant. You will lose. At many junctures. The choices are basically about what you’re more keen on losing.
So far, story wise, it’s been a rewarding change of pace from what we’re so used to; stories that go out of their way to please everyone and written around the ideas of success and reward. When all choices point towards success, they are soft and you’re only choosing what flavor of success you want. Being served failure on a plate, several times during the game, not only makes for this nice change of pace, but also go a long way into reinforcing how believable that world is.
One of the biggest pitfalls in your common, garden variety vanilla fantasy setting is not how can we rationalize the existence of magic, how can our characters travel hundreds of miles in minutes, how much stuff can that single backpack really hold or how can you work in space goats with dimensional ships; it’s instead how everything tends to success, including the actions of the so-called heroes populating that world.
Dragon Age’s story, which is not without its holes by the way, is not an equation that tries to balance success on one side with failure on the other. It’s more like walking a tightrope with failure at both sides. Success is straight ahead, but the choice steps have to be careful. And that makes it all the more refreshing. If Dragon Age had been an MMO we would already be talking about the death of the softcore fantasy setting.
On another “best practices” note, flip through the Game Info section on the City of Heroes website. That is really good. It does not have everything the wiki does, and it really should not, but I could actually point someone to the official site to learn about the game. I could ask for a bit more about the archetypes, but it goes through the various types of rewards/loot, you have lore on the setting and the enemy groups, there is a lengthy section on the Mission Architect, and it is all well organized. This is a useful official site that is easily navigated. It even includes the recommendation to pick a power pool by level 12 so you can get your travel power ASAP. Whoever put this site together did good work.
I know, they have had five years to put a good site together, but so many games fail to use the site as much more than a promotional tool.
: Zubon
Returning to last week’s big theme of item shops, City of Heroes shipped Super Booster IV: Martial Arts last week (discussion thread). In addition to emotes and costume pieces, it includes a power (like the other Boosters):
Ninja Run power:
Dash through the city with the agility of a ninja! The Ninja Run power is a travel power enabled through the purchase of Super Booster IV: Martial Arts and is available for use at level 4. Use Ninja Run to strike fear in the hearts of your enemies as you increase your run speed and leaping abilities, and the best part? It doesn’t use one of your power selections!
The previous powers were different. The first was a self-destruct: amusing, but of limited use, especially when it sends you to the hospital (no rez). The second gave you an other-only buff: rather useful, but not something that made you more powerful. It is hard to get angry about paying for the ability to help others, but let’s not doubt that nerd rage is out there. The third did not have a power as such. This time, though, it is a power, and a desirable one, and they are advertising it as such. Travel skills are not exactly game-breaking, and this one is slower than the others, but you get it earlier and (as they say) with no power slot consumed, meaning that you can use that slot for something else. Because there is no prerequisite power (you can pay for that another way: subscribe for 5 years to be able to pick travel powers at level 6), that frees up another slot if you were only taking Combat Jumping to get Super Leap. The most important effect is not selling a permanent, slightly sub-par travel power; it is effectively selling an extra power slot or two for all your characters.
Come to think of it, that is a heck of a deal for $10, especially since it applies to all your characters. Other games are selling you a mount or decorative pet for $10. Here, they will top that and give it to every character you have.
: Zubon