The Brilliance Of Duke Nukem Forever

More and more, it seems the entries here are something I wrote elsewhere that I realized would probably make a decent blog entry.  Here, another Broken Toys comment, where I refute professional reviewers talking about a game I never played the full version of, though at least I played the demo.  Hey, not the best of platforms, I know that, but let me see if this point I'm making holds solid nonetheless.

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Where Gaming Is Today

It sure is a lot easier to copy a post I already made in reply to existing commentary than come up with a new blog entry, so here we go.

It's funny just how much time we spend talking about how to define the words we use considering how anything said on the Internet is doomed to be taken out of context anyway.

I think we're all in general agreement that an MMORPG is a game that is predominantly made of persistent space with an extremely high amount of players able to interact within that space. However, even this common definition is a bit of an optical illusion. In reality, no MMORPG really has successfully managed to put several hundred players in close contact with eachother without suffering from bottlenecks that sabotage the gameplay and the solution has been to split them up by worlds (servers), geography (zones), and even outright copies of the same geography (instances). The more divided the player base is, the faster the gameplay you can host, and a large challenge in designing an MMORPG is how to do this transparent enough that it least feels like an MMORPG.

So, knowing this, what good is that acronym, "MMORPG," really? Not much. It's only as Massively Multiplayer Online as each individual player believes it is. Barely anyone RolePlays. As Games, repetitively grinding mobs to make numbers go up is about as fun as doing your taxes. About the only reason I don't look into the mirror and ask myself why I've been lying to myself to idolize the term MMORPG is because I know, deep down, that there's always the chance somebody will come along and do it right, and if such a great portal of escapism were ever devised, my exultation of the genre would be fully justified.

Moving on, a lot of what Ryan Seabury is saying here is true by virtue of its obviousness.

• Yes, MMORPGs are no longer the new kid on the block. There are now hundreds if not thousands of MMOs in operation (though the greater bulk of those are eastern Cyber-Cafe fare). What that means is you're now going to have to compete on the quality of your game as opposed to assuring some measure of success simply through overcoming the technical merit of breaking open a whole new genre.
• Yes, if you make the tried and true and do not push the boundaries of innovation at all, you are fairly asking to fade away into mediocrity. If you look at EverQuest and say it's just the grind, look at World of Warcraft and say it's just a streamlined EverQuest, or look at Rift and say it's just another WoW clone, you have yet to cultivate an eye for what is true innovation, and your attempts to emulate their success will fail.
• Yes, anyone who plans to sustain themselves in an entertainment industry has to come to grips with the fact that their pay is ever at the mercy of a fickle audience. I tend to look at those TV commercials advertising computer game development degrees as a real travesty considering how many of those kids are bound to run face-first into a meat grinder. The smartest developers are the indies who spin their creative vision with cheap tools while keeping themselves afloat with real jobs.

Up to that point, he's reading past observations, and hindsight is relatively 20/20. It's when he slips into predicting where technology is going to go that he begins to slip up.

In this case, I disagree with the idea that making casual gimmicks that troll social networking is sure success. For every Farmville, there's hundreds of games that want to be Farmville and fail, it's generally the same ratio of being noticed versus not you'll see in neigh any particular genre of the gaming industry. Sorry, as amazing as you might think Facebook's social pervasiveness is, social gaming is neither a magic bullet nor unexploited technology.

Also, I believe that this whole casual paradigm over the last decade is beginning to dry up. The trouble with that approach is, if you develop a game that only interests non-gamers, your resulting audience isn't going to hang around long by virtue of not being the type of play games to begin with. This is the reason why the next Nintendo console is suddenly boasting beefy rendering capabilities instead of being the Wii 2: the casuals proved untenable in the long run.

In the end, I think the reason way so many developers don't bother to push the envelope of games in order to interest real gamers who are far more likely to give them real cash moneys over a consistent period is because that kind of innovation is hard. Partly because making a game is a heck of a lot easier when you've a working example to study. Partly because real gamers have standards that are mighty hard to satisfy for developers who modus operandi is to clone what a real gamer is already bored of.

Terraria and S.P.A.Z. are awesome

This week, two extremely fabulous gems dropped out of the sky upon me, the significance of such being as though the Gods had descended from on high to apologize for that whole "casual friendly" butchering of the gaming medium and make up for it by heralding a new golden era of PC gaming all in the same week.

 
The first was Terraria, a procedurally generated world that allows you to live vicariously in glorious 2D. It features a digging and building mechanic very similar to Minecraft. Unlike Minecraft, Terraria actually feels like a game, and a large part of that has to do with a subtle switch in balance and content:

• In Minecraft, you spend days digging hoping to find a diamond block or a chest with a record in it. The greatest thing to do in Minecraft is to build elaborate 3D fortresses out of blocks, and the occasional creeper is just a speed bump.
  
• In Terraria, you can build a little city inhabited by various merchant NPCs that come if you fulfill certain conditions, meanwhile digging for ore and encountering cool artifacts that grant you special powers, heart containers for more health, mana, and so on while encountering steadily nastier monsters.

In terms of sheer entertainment value, provided you can get over the fact it looks like a budget SNES title, Terraria is probably the best $10 you'll ever spend as it offers hundreds of hours of play, if not thousands.

Space Pirates and Zombies is almost the game I've been waiting for my entire life. I say "almost" because my dream game would be more in the vein of a procedurally-generated Starflight meets Sentinel Worlds, but I guess if that's what I want I'll have to make it myself sometime. Like Terraria, the unfortunately acronymed S.P.A.Z. features a procedurally generated world (universe) in which you can live vicariously in 2D, but that's about where the similarities end. It's actually an open-ended top-down action space combat adventure game, sort of in the vein of Escape Velocity Nova but significantly different in several key facets:

• You control several ships which you can switch between on the fly while the rest are controlled by autopilot.
  
• The combat is a lot tighter feeling, an extremely fluid action game with just enough depth to make you think.
  
• There's less emphasis on trade. Instead of having to muddle through hundreds of components and hulls, all you need to buy is technology blueprints and your mothership fabricates ships on the fly.
  
• Destruction of your ships is common and they're replaced easily as long as you've enough REZ on hand.

None of this can really tell you how great the game is. I advise giving the demo a spin. It's a really brilliant game for one developed by two chaps out of British Columbia.

Perhaps the best thing about both Terraria and S.P.A.Z. is that they're both fully playable works in progress. So, in addition to be fairly awesome in the present, there's a lingering promise they will be even awesome in the future.

Impaled by the Sword of the Stars

I'm still operating on a college student's game budget and, daunted by this rather poor job market, generally bad at improving this situation.  However, over the past month, some rays of sunshine have entered this bleak picture. The latest being being Sword of the Stars, which I picked up a complete edition of for $7 three weeks ago and have been happily playing since.

Sword of the Stars, a 4X space empire game, is in ways both old news and new news. 

• The game was initially released in 2006, but has received three expansions.  
• The first expansion, Born in Blood, was released in 2007.   
• The second expansion, A Murder Of Crows, was released in 2008.  
• A third expansion, the Argos Naval Yard, was released in 2009. 
• A complete edition, that includes all the expansions and some additional bug fixes, was released in 2010.
• A sequel, Sword of the Stars 2, is due around the end of this year.

f you were to buy the "complete" edition, released in 2010 and all-inclusive of all expansions and patches, you can simply enjoy the spoils of four years of refinement.

What's so interesting about a silly old sword, starred or otherwise?

I think the main thing that makes Sword of the Stars so interesting to me is that they've streamlined out a lot of the boring monotony of space empire 4X while simultaneously adding some tantalizing organic details.

"Streamlining" in games can be a problem if it eliminates the right kind of depth, but a good move when it rids of the wrong.  Space empire game economies often mire the player down in excessive detail.  In Sword of the Stars, maintaining your economy is simply a matter of setting a slider between how much of your leftover money goes to savings (primarily spent on buying ships) versus research (which goes to unlocking technology categories).  

You micromanage further by adjusting individual planetary sliders but, for the most part, this is wholly unnecessary.  The only micromanagement you really need to worry about in Sword of the Stars is designing your ships (from an easy selection of three sections and weapon layouts) and purchasing them.

The "tantalizing organic details" can be seen in three aspects: the races, the combat engine, and the technology tree.

• The races differ from that you'd typically see in a 4X space empire game in that they have elaborate back stories, unique travel mechanics, and completely different looking ships.  The unique travel mechanics are perhaps the most jarring difference of them.  This makes for a large difference in how you will look at traveling about the galaxy depending on what race you are playing.
  
  
• While out-of-combat is primarily turn-based, as 4X games can be expected to be, the combat takes place in an elaborate real time strategy engine.  The really interesting thing about the combat engine is the elaborate amount of detail that went into simulation.  With the exception of the Liir, all race's ships have inertia and this is not only affected through thrust but also projectiles impacting impacting their hull.  It's not uncommon to watch a projectile reflect off one ship's armor and strike another one.  Each turret on the ship is individually modeled, each projectile's hits or misses not predetermined but rather occurring naturally, you can even direct your ships to aim at a specific part of the target.  Despite this sophistication, the control scheme is rather simple, somewhat reminiscent of a standard real time strategy game.
  
  
• The technology tree is organically interesting in that there is an element of randomness between games as to which technologies will be available to your race.  While there are "core" technologies you can be sure will be there, the greater bulk of the tree is randomly rolled on at the start of the game to see if your race will be able to eventually learn that technology, which higher probabilities of that technology being available to certain races but there being no guarantees.  This approach helps to make each game feel relatively fresh by forcing the players to undergo new approaches to the game when a certain technology turns out not to be available.

In addition, Sword of the Stars has a rather excellent multiplayer hosting capability that includes the ability to spontaneously adjust turn time limits (or remove the time limit entirely), allows players to drop their race (having the AI play it for them) and pick them up again later, and more.

Overall, Sword of the Stars is a game I can recommend.  No game is released perfect but, after four years of refinement, Sword of the Stars is about as close as you can expect.

Confound These Ponies, They Have Driven Me To Blog

I can no longer contain my incredulousness of this thing, one of those "truth is stranger than fiction" things.

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This series has become a forced meme that took over 4chan up to the point where the mods put their foot down and it spun off its own boards. Suffice to say, there's been quite a few fan works...

... and, surprisingly enough, I'm fully on board with this meme. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd actually like My Little Pony. In my world view, the 80s crap was and remains a vapid mind killer that is fully worthy of derision. Generations 2-3 stayed the course with slicker styling. Hey, if little girls wanted that sort of thing, more power to them, but given the choice between watching the original series and movies versus enduring a waterboarding session, I'd have to flip a coin.

Along comes generation 4, masterminded by some of the talent behind Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary friends, with clever writing and genuinely likable characters. Watched an episode and it was hook, line, and sinker. Sure, it's a bit overly sweet in some places - the intro gives me a sugar withdrawal headache that may in fact be a self-inflicted lobotomy of cognitive dissonance waged between the inner kid and adult shouting, "you're watching this, are you fucking kidding me" at each other for differing reasons - but damn it, the series is good. Best new kids show of 2010 good

I think I mostly posted this because this show's Internet popularity has slightly surpassed all expectations.



Slightly.

Basically, just about any message board of sufficient geek significance will have a thread on this show, and it'll be at least 20% larger than any other topic in the history of the board. Though the show debuted in Oct 2010, its popularity is the highest its ever been, and only increasing. Why? Nobody knows. 

I like it, your mileage may vary, but be forewarned: once you go sufficiently pony, there may be no going back.  I have no man card anymore. Pickpocketed, stolen by little pony hooves. *sob*

Rift Class Selection Breakdown

The beta for Rift: Planes Of Telara has come to a close.  However, I did spend an extensive amount of time giving all the classes a serious shakedown specifically so I can settle that age old altaholicism of mine.

Choosing a main class

An important consideration to give towards Rift's 4 main classes is that each of them can fulfill role on the holy trinity of Tank (the hero who absorbs the enemy's wrath) Healer (the hero who heals the damage the tank takes) and DPS (the hero who inflicts damage on the enemy). However, there's a varying degree to it. To sum it up:

Warrior

General play style: Just about every soul the Warrior plays will put you into melee combat, with the Riftblade offering some options otherwise. If you like getting up close and personal for steel-on-steel, the Warrior is your pick.

Can Tank? Absolutely. The Paladin, Void Knight, and Reaver are specialized to do this. However, every Warrior wears the heaviest armor and has ability to grab aggro (enemy hostility) and so they are the first choice for the role.

Can Heal? Not really. Although some souls have healing and wards (damage point absorbers) they can apply, the greatest means a Warrior has to counteract group damage is to take it upon themselves. A warrior is at their best when somebody else is propping them up while they hold the aggro.

Can DPS? Surprisingly well. The Champion in particular is exceptionally good at delivering high DPS, punishing blows. The Beastmaster and Paragon are likely no slouches at it, either. The Riftblade does decent damage on its own, but is even better at adding damage to any existing DPS subclass.

Mage

General play style: The Mage prefers to toss spells from a distance; unlike the other three classes, none of the Mage's soul options are built for melee unless you count by proxy of a summoned pet. Aside from where the Mage prefers to stand, a remarkably diverse set of experiences can be found here. The Dominator is unique in that it is primarily a control-based soul. The Archon is focused heavily on buffs/debuffs. The Chloromancer has the Mage playing an effective substitute healer between damage doing.

Can Tank? Last place amongst the four, but quite possibly. The Elemental Summoner's greater earth elemental packs a remarkable amount of aggro grabbing, and you can set up a nice healing feedback loop with Chloromancer's Synthesis ability that can keep that elemental alive. Throw in some Dominator control for adds (extra enemies attacking) and there's even greater potential for aggro management.

Can Heal? Surprisingly well. The Chloromancer is the main soul to choose for this, possessing a great deal of means to heal, mostly reactive to damage dealt by the Mage or the party, but even some powerful direct heals can be found. Some additional supplemental healing can be found in the other Mage souls, but none really holds a candle to the Chloromancer.

Can DPS? Absolutely. Although some Mage souls are better at it than others, all Mages can put out a substantial amount of damage. The Pyromancer in particular has a great deal of focus put on enhancing their own damage, and is an ideal base to the role. Depending on primary soul taken, the Mage will excell at DoTs (damage over time), AOE (area-of-effect), or direct single target damage. (Warlock/Necromancer, Pyromancer/Elemental Summoner, and Stormcaller respectively).

Cleric

General play style: Depending on souls equipped, the Cleric can be fighting in melee or at range, avoiding aggro or collecting it for themselves. Alternately, taking a role that focuses on any of their three healing souls will keep you watching the group's health bars to try to prevent them from depletion.

Can Tank? Surprisingly well. The Justicar in particular has the means to reach armor levels that rival (and at times exceed) the Warrior, and their ability to feed back their damage into healing themselves can even give them greater survivability on their own. The two other melee roles, the Druid and Shaman, are significantly less effective at tanking, being more offensively oriented.

Can Heal? Absolutely. A Cleric role specialized in the Warden, Sentinel, and/or Purifier soul should be your first choice for a healer role. This incredible healing capability also translates into a remarkably safe, if slow, soloing experience.

Can DPS? Last place amongst the four, but DPS is there. Particularly effective is the Inquistor's soul drain ability, which inflicts sharp spike damage when three targets are within 7 meters. The Cabalist is also built for damage doing, primarily AOE, although I feel their attacks are a bit redundant for what they accomplish. Aside from those two souls, the Cleric's damage is moderate, that overwhelming survivability of theirs comes at a cost.

Rogue

General play style: Six of the Rogue's eight souls are offensive in nature, granting the Rogue a choice of whether they want to hurt foes quickly from afar, in toe-to-toe melee, or (unique to Rogue) a sudden stealth attack. However, the Bard and the Riftstalker pull a surprise upset in exactly what a Rogue is capable of, granting them the full range of any role in the holy trinity they care to play.

Can Tank? Surprisingly well. A well-played Riftstalker is a very flashy tank, they can grab threat and bolster their own armor well. True, I may put them in third behind the Warrior (any) and Cleric (Justicar), but they would not be trailing by far.

Can Heal? Surprisingly well. The Bard is the sole soul to deliver healing with, possessing a wide amount of heals that can keep a party's hit points topped off. Their primary weakness is heavy spike damage, but this is actually somewhat compensated for in later levels. A second-tier grudge match between a Bard and Chloromancer for best healer would be a difficult one to call - they're both quite good at it. The Bard is also a popular choice for soloing due to the survivability that level of healing brings.

Can DPS? Absolutely. Of course, where the Rogue is strongest will be single target spike damage, whether you're doing it up close (Bladedancer, Assassin, Nightblade) or afar (Ranger, Marksman). The Saboteur provides a bit of AOE to the mix. If you want stuff dead fast, a Rogue or Mage will likely be the ones to bring it. I think it's the comfortable rate of damage dealing, making for speedy and fun soloing, that makes the Rogue such a popular class.

Population Assessment

I often put a bit too much pride in originality, and figure (irrationally) that what other people play should have an influence on what I do - gotta support the underdogs, right? So I did an experiment. Looking down the Defiant side of Shadefallen (a PvE-RP server) and Guardian side of Wolfsbane (a PvE server) at about 11:30pm PST on the last day of Open Beta, I investigated which of the classes seem to receive the most play by hand counting the /who list for level brackets.

Taking levels 15-30 into account the breakdown was the following:

Shadefallen Only - 27% Warrior, 17.6% Cleric, 23.9% Mage, 31.4% Rogue
Wolfsbane Only - 23% Warrior, 22.1% Cleric,16.9% Mage, 38.0% Rogue
Overall - 24.7% Warrior, 20.2% Cleric, 19.9% Mage, 35.2% Rogue

(There were 372 players in this level range overall.  It was pretty late in the day and the servers were mostly cleared out as the beta was coming to a close.  However, if we believe that no one class has an advantage in a tendency to want to stay late on the server, this shouldn't have impacted the overall ratio.)

Consistently speaking, the Rogue is far and away the most played class, making up roughly a third of the server population. The Warrior is the second played class, but trails at about a quarter of the server population. The Cleric and Mage seem to be roughly tied for third place.

Overall, I don't think population should worry you much. Considering how flexible Rift is in supporting the holy trinity of Tank, Healer, or Mage, even if the server was 100% Rogue there would be successful groups for running those difficult dungeon instances.

Tried-and-true MMORPG fans: your Rift has come in

I’ve played Rift: Planes Of Telara pretty extensively, participating in two of the six previous beta events.  Me, a repeat MMORPG burnout for whom the current heavyweight, World of Warcraft, only entertained me for about four weeks.  Yet, I've a level 30 Mage in the Rift beta and am suffering from "riftdrawl" for the time between now and the final open beta week that begins on February 15th.

I suspect a significant amount of players will jump on board at release. Why wouldn’t they? As far as games in the lineage of Meridian 59/EverQuest go, Rift is the finest available.  Trion did the exact same thing Blizzard did with World of Warcraft: they disseminated what all the good features were in the greater bulk of MMORPGs that came before it and captured these features in a single, unusually well-polished game.   It's all here:

• Your World of Warcraft slick combat, death mechanic, simplified crafting, and dungeon instances.
• Your Warhammer Online public quests, PvP scenarios, and contested zones.
• Your EverQuest 2 item collections and auction house (okay, auction house is hardly EQ2 unique).

As pertains to this genre of MMORPGs, Rift is literally the state of the art, and plays like it:

But Trion didn’t stop at taking all that’s good from what came before it and putting it one well-polished game, they did innovate in some important fundamentals:

• They added dynamic content in the form of rift invasions, a form of public quest that genuinely impacts the game world depending on whether or not the players overcome them.  They add a whole extra element of play to the PvE aspect, a much needed sense of context beyond quest grinding.
• They added a character generation system that retains the appeal of a more structured system while still being exceedingly flexible to customization. 
• This not an all inclusive list.  I've noticed many numerous smaller features, the type of subtle additions that you quickly forget how you ever played a game without, that are either wholly unique to Rift or so rarely found they may as well be.

Rift is a great game for me, an MMORPG burnout, as it finally provides some solutions to things that long bothered me.  I was often tired of of how little influence players have over the game world, the rift invasions change that.  World of Warcraft's quest focus provided some much needed context, but eventually I got tired of being funneled to a never-ending procession of them: the rift invasions provide activity diversity where it is needed.  I would often resort to altaholicism to stay interested in playing, but Rift's flexible class system grants a considerable amount of flexibility in one any character, at most I'd only need four for the four classes. 

Can I nitpick the game?  Sure:

• They didn't quite capture that same sense of, "go forth, young newb" that World of Warcraft did, you don't really feel in the zone until somewhere in the level 15-20 range, and I blame the instanced introduction, essentially an elaborate tutorial, as being a vestigial prologue that derails that initial impetus.
• The character generation system can get overwhelming.  You'll soon have eight seperate souls (subclasses) and several roles (configurations of three subclasses) and a ton of abilities you don't necessarily need anymore.  It's a bit of hassle to get over, but you'll learn and be better for the added depth in the long run.
• Some people don't like the art style - personally, I prefer it over World of Warcraft's strange pastels or EverQuest 2's strange sense of scale, but beauty is ever in the eye of the beholder. 

Yet, these complaints would seem insubstantial in the face of how the whole game exudes a highly unusual level of MMORPG craftsmanship. Scott Hartsman (formerly of Gemstone, EverQuest 2) really knows his stuff.  Not to put the whole responsibility of such an incredible result on his shoulders alone: to see Rift as it is, the whole Trion office must be filled with these kinds of MMORPG luminaries.

I’m not going to say World of Warcraft fans will defect en masse to Rift, but I will say this: if Rift is anything less than very big then it will be proof positive that technical prowess means nothing in terms of popularity.