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SWTOR Devs won’t say a word

I was reading an article on IGN about an exclusive interview they had with the SWTOR people. Question after question was met with, “We can’t talk about that yet.” They could have used this opportunity to tell me about some pixel shader I’ve never heard of or a tid-bit about jet-pack based vehicle in their game. Such tiny tid-bit would have me drooling and talking to my friends about the article.

Instead, I’m left feeling like this game is ages away from release because there aren’t any details about even the simplest systems and I’m writing a blog about how upset I am with it.

-Ugh.

Shallow Thoughts by Ravious

PC gaming is just starting to pick up again.  The Ravious Conglomerate moved from a being-foreclosed-on apartment condo to a nice, shiny townhome in order to give Daughter #2 her own room.  I love that Daughter #1 can now dance, skip, and sing all she wants without a crabby, lonely lady banging on her ceiling below us.  I hated yelling at Daughter #1 to not do what a young kid should always be allowed to do.  With the move and ensuing chaos, the past few weeks have been gaming light, but forsooth, I say, there was gaming nonetheless!  It was all just in bite-size form.

Guild Wars: Oh how I love your little Dibs of enjoyment.  The small amounts of farming and bartering at the weekly Traveler’s Market to get the precious gifts are nice quick hits, and I am forever in love with Fort Aspenwood.  It lets me jump in to some fun, casual PvP instantly.  Deathmatch gets old for me, but objective based PvP seems to always be fun (95% of my TF2 time is payload maps).  I put up the build I always play in Fort Aspenwood here. 

Wizard 101: I hit a stopping point because the evil overlord in charge of the Conglomerate’s accounting (read: wife) says I can’t spend any more money because of the move, security deposit, and feeding/clothing children costs.  I am right at the end of Kroktopia too!  Don’t overlords understand gameplay flow?  The lightning cave in Karanahn Barracks was seriously breathtaking.  I stood upon rocky platforms while a silent lightning storm occurred below; I logged there in quiet contemplation.  Great artistic direction for that one.  Fortunately, a bonus check is headed my way so Mass Effect and a bajillion Wizard 101 crowns will soon be mine.

Lord of the Rings Online: I don’t know how I managed to sneak this one in given the higher activation energy to play, but I did.  Two kinnies and I started on Volume 2, Book 8.  We entered the Hall of Mirrors with nary a walkthrough, and had a blast figuring the puzzles out (even with a 600 silver repair bill each).  Hall of Mirrors is a three-man dungeon with a dungeon-long puzzle of repairing reflecting mirrors to send light to Moria below.  It is fantastically designed and just challenging enough.  Hall of Mirrors and developer blogs get me very excited about where Lord of the Rings Online is headed.  Unfortunately a serious bug at the Defiler/Mistress encounter wiped us to the point where a full, tactical retreat was required.  We are armed with better knowledge (of the instance and bug workaround), and are all excited to return.  Once I have time.

–Ravious
Repent, Harlequin!

Hard Core Brother: The Next Interview

Previously…

Ethic: Let’s start off with getting a feel for where you are in WoW right now. Tell us a little bit about the guild you’re in and what they are trying to do at the moment.

Grim: I’ve been with Juggernaut since July of 2006 (Immortalis on Hellscream/Dalvengyr prior to that). There is only one challenge left for us in the current tier of content, and that is known as Yogg+0. Yogg-Saron is the final boss in Ulduar, and you have the option of utilizing up to four NPC’s to aid you in the fight against him, each one providing a special set of buffs to make you stronger, faster, more resilient, etc. Needless to say, using all four NPC’s makes you quite strong, and the fight is quite easy. Most guilds at our level of raiding have successfully defeated Yogg-Saron with only one NPC’s aid (Yogg+1). Yogg-Saron without the aid of any NPC’s, however, makes the encounter extremely difficult. Currently, only five guilds in the world have accomplished this feat. Sadly, the strategy we’re employing involves two tanks (warrior + deathknight), so I get to cheer them on from the sidelines until patch 3.2 rolls around.

Continue reading Hard Core Brother: The Next Interview

Morrowind Singularity

I am reading Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Realtime, the well-known book about people who missed The Singularity. Last night, a character explained how an intelligence explosion works. You find ways to improve intelligence; you use that enhanced intelligence to improve intelligence further; repeat as necessary. At some point, you figure out the fundamental principles of the universe and build your own using common household items.

Anarchy Online and Asheron’s Call players have their own recursive self-improvement. Cast your level 5 spells to buff your stats, which lets you wear better equipment, which lets you cast level 6 spells, which lets you wear better equipment… That process caps due to game design choices like diminishing returns and spell durations, as opposed to the intelligence explosion, which is self-accelerating.

Only this morning did I learn that Morrowind includes intelligence explosion as a mechanic. You can beat the game in less than fifteen minutes, starting with the step “Create and drink Fortify Intelligence in batches of 5.” It is like having a skill that grants you bonus experience every time you earn experience, where you improve that skill by earning experience.

And now I have the compulsion to re-read Godel, Escher, Bach.

: Zubon

A Case For Massively

James at MMOCrunch brought up the upcoming game, Borderlands, which he classifies as an MMO.  Borderlands is a self-proclaimed FPS with RPG elements.  (Zubon recently discussed the “RPG” misnomer.)  Borderlands is very similar to Diablo’s style of multiplayer where players can join others’ games and the first player’s game adjusts in difficulty.  Only up to four players can join one game, and there seems to be no true persistence (even in a player hub).  Yet, James insists that it is, in his opinion, an MMO.  Going through the acronym: (1) Borderlands is multiplayer, (2) Bordlands is online, and following whatever colloquialism “RPG” means now, (3) Borderlands has some RPG elements.  So the sticking point, as is usually the case when deciding what constitutes an MMO, is whether Borderlands is considered “massive.”

 The sage Nicodemeus wrote out a classification chart two years ago to describe the thin red line between a mere multiplayer online game and one that is “massive.”  Nicodemeus wrote: “[The term “massive”] should mean that thousands of players are interacting in the same world/environment simultaneously. People that are on different *web pages* at the same site, or a game that has thousands of multiplayer games going at the same time do NOT count as massively multiplayer.”  Borderlands clearly does not fall under Nicodemeus’ definition of a massively multiplayer online game. Continue reading A Case For Massively

More Pricing Innovations

Champions Online is following The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ in offering a lifetime subscription, along with a discounted long-term subscription. As with Wizard 101, I favor trying more pricing options. The monthly subscriptions appeal to me as someone who binges madly on everything, but the long-term plans help me play more casually, without “must get my money’s worth” building atop “must consume new pleasure.” But that is not the innovation.

Champions Online is offering this option for one month, while the NDA is still up. And planning to have a microtransactions shop. Seriously? $200, sight unseen, and you already know it is going to change after release, and there will be other plans to generate revenue from lifetime subscribers (see again: The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢). That is some chutzpah.

: Zubon

Grass is greener on the other raid planner

So my husband looked at another kin’s raid planner recently. They had all these raids set up. We were jealous… Who am I kidding. We are jealous. On the one hand, I want to gear up my character, I want to see the new raids, and I want to get back to that feeling of excitement at being at the cutting edge.

On the other hand, I only know one person in the other guild. In my current kin, I’m on friendly terms with everyone and know their name. I’ve been with them for six months. If I went over to that new guild, I might not come to be friends with anyone there, and I could really hurt my relations with my current guild.

I probably won’t go to another kin, but sometimes I wonder if I’d enjoy the game more if I left.

The Controller

I haven’t mentioned Melmoth enough, which is a shame, because Melmoth is pretty awesome. Also, I still need to read Melmoth the Wanderer, but that’s a different issue. Anyway…

“We could be heroes” is his meditation on crowd control, something City of Heroes does with the usual crazy awesomeness that comes from embracing AE gameplay. He shares my usual lament of tank-and-spank MMO heroism, usually based around fighting one thing at a time. Because the hero’s journey goes from one pig to one slightly larger pig.

In City of Heroes, if you can still see your character under the pile of mobs that you’re fighting ‘you’re undertaking the task in an incorrect fashion’, as I believe the cool kids say down on the MMO street. … crowd control in PvE is a viable and interesting game-play alternative to the soft “Yo mamma!” control that the average MMO tank possesses. The controller could be the enabler to huge battles in other MMOs, without having to unbalance the player characters such that they must always face an entire battalion of enemies at a time in order to feel any challenge, and where any lone mobs would therefore simply implode the moment a hero arrived in their zone. Controlling a battle can be tremendously rewarding as a player, watching the ebb and flow of the various enemy groups and locking down those that might otherwise overwhelm your party, judging when to use AoE powers that will inevitably draw massive amounts of ire from the mobs when they eventually break free, and when to simply neutralise the more potent individuals of a wave of mobs – the healers for example … and unlike healing it would be very hard to reduce it down to a bunch of bars that you simply play whack-a-mez on.

City of Heroes crowd control was toned down years ago, on the theory that fighting a bunch of statues is no fun, but it is still head and shoulders above what any other game will let you do. And admit it, you want a confuse spell for the enemy healer/debuffer, to make him work for your team until your sudden but inevitable betrayal.

: Zubon

Divergence

At IMGDC 2.0, we met the folks from Stainglass Llama, a small studio making a game called Divergence. You may know my standing policy of not paying attention to anything more than 6 months from release, which has kept me from thinking about them. They are still working on it, and more than six months from release, but you might be interested.

If nothing else, this is something good to read for those of you hoping to live the dream of making your own MMO. We’ll show them all, right? Middleware is better these days, but it is still hard. If you look through their news history (the old site is more functional at present), you can see milestones like having a world they can walk around, actually being able to connect to that world, and getting basic chat. All those things that you consider basic and necessary? It takes a bit of work to get them going yourself. Filling in the content is even more work — even when it is not hard, there is a lot of it. For an easy extrapolation on that “develop content” problem, try making something in the City of Heroes Mission Architect. How long does it take to make one good story arc, including all the troubleshooting, text editing, making unique enemies, etc.? Okay, now multiply that by 1000 for the full game, and that is just the quests, and you had all the tech and art supplied for you.

They’re starting to fill all that in, so if you have ever wanted to get in on the ground floor as alpha starts up, here is a chance. They would love your attention and discussion. They would also love your money, if you have been hoping to fund an MMO. (On another front, our old buddy Nicodemus is wondering about funding a start-up via Twitter connections; I suppose it spoils that question for me to mention it here, but if you have the few hundred k for augmented reality development, I’m sure Robert Rice would love to talk to you.) I’m not sure at what point such the proper phrase goes from “dream” to “investment,” but then I am a professional skeptic and evaluator by profession, so don’t let me rain on your parade.

It’s Friday. Dream a little.

: Zubon