Digitally Staving Off Boredom

The Brilliance Of Duke Nukem Forever

2011-06-16T18:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Personally, I thought the Duke Nukem Forever demo was a brilliant game in that it was a mediocre FPS but excellent lampoon of a FPS. As a FPS, it had an unsatisfying balanced experience, it didn't feel as tight as it should, and the two-weapon limitation felt like it had been neutered by excessive consolitus. However, as a lampoon of a FPS, it was a self-referential humor experience that, while you've played much better, is nonetheless definitely worth at least one play-through simply to see Duke Nukem being a ridiculously overblown Duke Nukem.

If you pay attention to the game, you'll notice that Gearbox did not spare any effort to achieve that exact aim, just about every single thing they added to it was basically an in-joke that went like this: Duke Nukem lives in a fantasy world that exists wholly to support his colossal ego. These reviewers disappoint me in that they seem to have missed the joke, many of them idolized Duke Nukem and wanted to see him treated with respect and reverence, delivering a hardcore experience worthy of 15 years of development. But, sorry to say it, they're wearing the nostalgia glasses, Duke Nukem is just a 90s pop icon who deserved nothing less than a misogynistic, egotistical tongue-in-cheek focus.

If the game had ended to see Duke Nukem trussed up in the corner of an asylum padded room while doctors talk to each other about him being a victim of pronounced delusions of grandeur and the whole game taking place inside of his addled mind, it would have been perfection. It would have ground the point home that this is exactly what you're looking at. But it doesn't: Duke Nukem has potential sequels to make, after all. Instead we're to understand that Duke Nukem's delusions are real within his world. That works, it's a punchline of a different color, albeit one not quite as solid.

So, why am I judging it on the demo, then? Why don't I go out and buy the game, right now, and see just how bad it really is? Because I know that, in this day and age, with many great game choices available, some of them free to play, paying $50 for a game which is mostly hype and then being delivered a running joke feels like they're charging an idiot tax and you fell for it. However, $20, the price they probably should have been charging initially, and perhaps removing any annoying fluff content that would have been injected to make it seem like it should be worth more, probably would have you laughing along with them.

Where Gaming Is Today

2011-05-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

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

2011-05-19T15:54:00.001-07:00

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

2011-04-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-12T13:32:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-21T13:30:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-07T14:38:00.001-08:00

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.

F2P Champions Online Experience

2011-01-29T17:45:00.000-08:00

Oh, Champions Online, you could have been a significantly greater contender if you didn't undermine yourself with consolitus and then fail to pull through. DC Universe Online has basically done what Champions Online could not. If they had stuck to being PC exclusive and managed to avoid moving onto this unsatisfactory customization design, things might have been interesting.

That said, Champions Online was not terrible, just bland, but it's had over a year of refinement put into it and play is noticeably more refined than release. Nevertheless, I was put off by at least two things about it:

The action-based, shallow gameplay experience, which left you soloing the greater part of the time, didn't really feel MMORPGish, consequently I really wasn't hooked in such a way as to want to spend a monthly subscription on it.
While I like a bit of customization, it seems Champions Online's character progression system lacked a certain necessary structure to make progressing a character interesting. I'd have all the abilities I care for by about 20-26, the rest was redundant, I wouldn't have room in my activation chains for it, and the best picks that remained were often concept breaking (e.g. Orbital Strike, Smoke Bomb).

Champions Online going Free To Play has solved both those issues. The first, most obviously, in that I don't need to spend a monthly subscription on it anymore. The second being that the premade archetypes provide a considerable amount of structure that is sorely lacking.

This is an ironic observation considering the archetypes were clearly there to price gouge. Somebody over at Cryptic Studios (which may or may not have been completely absorbed by Atari at this point) got the bright idea that, instead of selling character slot upgrades that allow players to freely customize their characters, they were going to use their own hero customization system and sell the individual hero builds. Currently, there's some noticeable gaps: no power armor hero, no psi-blades hero, no electric hero, no force hero, and so on. Not to worry, I'm sure they'll show up as "Special Archetypes" in time.

So, here's the breakdown of a cost to play in F2P. The scale is set at 2000 pts per $25 at this time. Note that, until February 2nd, they're having a 20% off sale, so prices will be lower than these.

You're going to need some more bags. At least one, as many as three. A bag slot is 200 pts. This is a per-character unlock.
If you decide to get a special archetype, that's 920 pts. This is an account-wide unlock.
Character slots (after the first two) are available at 1120 pts per two slots, so each character will be 600 pts. At least they stay unlocked after you bought them.
If you want the travel powers Rocket Jump, Tunneling, Swinging, Jet Boots, Ice Slide, Hover Disk, Fire Flight, or Earth Flight, that's another 420 pts for each. This is an account-wide unlock.

If it's me, I'd probably be reasonably comfortable with just the bag slots (600 pts), the character slot (560 pts). So the overall cost per character is 1160 pts.

Previously "gold" (ex-subscriber) players returning to the game as a "silver" (free to play) member will discover from interesting rules apply to them.

Like all basic silver accounts, you're only allowed two character slots at first, each additional 2 slots costing 1120 points.
However, all your existing character slots are considered active, even if they exceed your current character slot limit.
However, you can't play your "gold" characters unplayable unless you convert them.
Converting your Gold character to Silver character will:
- Reset that character as the chosen archetype. You keep your level, but now your talents and powers need to match that archetype. You'll respawn in the power house so you can re-slot everything.
- Remove all your extra bags past the basic inventory, the bags and their contents are mailed to your via the in-game mail system.
- You'll keep all the bank slots you purchased, but any additional bank slots must be bought via the Atari store.
- You may probably lose a few costume frills, but you can probably find an acceptable substitute after visiting the costume NPC.
- There is a game money limit on F2P characters, not sure what happens to the overflow. Probably only affects characters in the end game.
If you decide to subscribe to the game, your converted characters are stuck in that converted archetype. You can't turn a silver character back into a gold (customizable) character again, even if you subscribe.
If you chose the wrong archetype when you converted your character from gold to silver, you're also stuck in that converted archetype.
It's apparently been announced that "archetype retcon" tokens will be sold in the future to resolve the previous two issues.

The main point of contention here would be the idea that converting your character's archetype is a one-way street. Also, deleting characters doesn't accomplish anything: you still can't create a new character until your character count is less than your allowed character slots.
To a great extent, Champions Online has missed the spirit of going F2P by creating two whole seperate games trying to co-exist: the class-based Silver characters and the classless Gold characters. They're trying to encourage players to subscribe to it in order to unlock the "real" game, but this is foolishness. What makes more money? $15/mo for the 5% of their player base interested in paying a monthly subscription, or an occasional $15 per gold character slot from the remaining 95% of their player base?

However, the problems are a little deeper than that: I don't want a gold character, silver characters are more fun. The thing is, I beat Champions Online's default chargen system. Take Chaingun, Orbital Strike (Optional), Circle of Primal Dominion, Invulnerability/Lightning Reflexes, Force Shield advanced with Energy Shealth - all content is now trivialized, you are now an unkillable juggernaut. Min/Maxing such a flexible system is too easy, I'm torn between cognitive dissonance of wanting to play a fun character and wanting not to gimp myself. The silver premade characters resolve that by introducing balanced play experiences I'd never assign myself, even introducing uses for powers I'd never have. (E.g. "The Mind" archetype actually makes good use of Ego Sleep: none of my custom characters would never need do that, because everything I fought would be dead long before they were a threat.)

Their decision to gouge players with archetypes instead of selling them gold slots is not the right decision, but it's not the wrong decision, either. Really, it seems what the game needs is a massive character generation revamp but, knowing that they can't alienate their existing subscribers, they chose to do this way instead: it's not a revamp, it's a F2P archetype limitation. Would I choose to play Champions Online instead of Rift? Probably not, Rift has much better levels of refinement and activity diversity. However, Champions Online now has the advantage of being a whole lot cheaper, so it balances itself out rather competitively.

FFXIV November Megapatch Mini-Pression

2010-11-27T16:51:00.000-08:00

Final Fantasy XIV is attempting to recover the lost ground of its largely lackluster release by releasing a couple of hefty megapatches while extending the free trial a couple months. Having given the November Megapatch a spin, I see it was mostly Graphical User Interface related.

The GUI is your portal into the game, and with its optimization the game feels much more accessible. For example:

It now seems to present a lot more information up front rather than forcing you to go a screen or two further to find it.
Many unnecessary pop-up confirmation prompts have been removed.
Customization is easier as well: I was able quickly reorganize the central GUI controls to feel more compact and present information where I wanted it.
The GUI feels a lot quicker and more responsive in most places - there's still a necessity for server updates but the impact is greatly mitigated now.
You can actually autosort your inventory (and retainer's inventory) into categories now!

To play Final Fantasy XIV now, it feels very much as though a formidable barrier between me and the game has been obliterated. However, the GUI is only skin deep. I feel more keenly than ever now what is in the game is lacking, what turned me off from the game in the first place, is the content, or rather the lack thereof.

Right now, the whole of the player's available activities could be summed up like this:

Perform main quests at combat job rank 1, 10, 15, 20. Different quests available for different cities of origin, but that requires starting new characters, and each character carries an expense of time and money.
As you earn combat job ranks through combat with monsters, you're going to need to upgrade your equipment.
- You can craft your own equipment, which involves dabbling with the rather extensive player economy. The greater bulk of existing content can be found here, as there's over 2500 things to craft, contrast against a rough guess of 75 different kinds of attackable mobs in the game (allowing for upgraded versions of the same mob) and it's clear that there's a ton more crafting content than adventuring content.
- You can buy equipment from other players, which mostly comes from earning gil, which mostly comes from performing Guildleves or selling what you find.
Guildleves are likely to be your main activity.
- You can do 8 "local" guildleves every 36 hours. These involve crafting something.
- You can do 8 "regional" guildleves every 36 hours. These involve either collecting resources or defeating monsters.
- Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of variety to the guildleves, and so you will be repeating this same task often.
Behests are started at the top of every real life hour in camps and up to 15 players (a full party in FFXIV) can participate. This is basically a hunting guildleve involving a reasonably large number of mobs followed by a stronger "boss" encounter.
Outside of that, you can certainly just go out and hunt stuff, but there's no real context to it.

The main trouble is that the only genuinely interesting thing to do in Final Fantasy XIV is the main quests because this is the only part of the game that really tells a story. The narrative contrast between this and the other activities is so great that these sub-activities feel like artificial and unnecessary toil.

Unfortunately, the pacing to reach the narrative content of the game is way off. It will take you many, many hours (perhaps days or weeks) to attain the necessary combat ranks to unlock the next main quest. Each leg of the main quest itself can be resolved very quickly, in a matter of an hour or two. So, for the most part, you're left with the activities in Final Fantasy XIV that leave it feeling like a story-barren grind.

The December mega-patch should help as it promises to introduce more quests (including "class" quests) and guildleves. However, time will tell if this will really inject adequate soul into the game.

Exploring Cutting Edge Gaming

2010-11-09T22:21:00.000-08:00

While it's comfortable to think of gaming as forever existing in old fashioned PC and console games, times change, and the cutting edge of games moves with them. Over the last few days, I did some catching up with the modern face of gaming, both in terms of the new generation of MMORPGs and a whole new platform: the iPad.

"The New Generation of MMORPGs"

By this, I'm referring to expertly leveraged free to play games, which you just know all the cool kids are playing. The two games I played today are both hosted by Nexon, which boasts account numbers in the hundreds of millions. Even if only a tenth of those subscribers ever dropped a dime on their games, the company is probably making more money than Blizzard is on World of Warcraft.

Enticed by an interesting mention in PCGamer that this was apparently the most played MMORPG ever, with 200 million accounts and 2 million concurrent logged in players, I first gave Nexon's Dungeon Fighter Online a try... and, though I have no problem with the idea of a 2D fighter RPG, I was generally underwhelmed.

The main problem is that the game is too easy: even on "hard," I annihilated the goblins of the first three quests. The root of this is that the enemies seem extremely hesistant to launch any kind of attack: I'm really more accustomed to the balance of a game like Final Fight or Batman: Arkham Asylum, where the enemies seem genuinely programmed to try to hurt you. Maybe this would change at later levels... although, looking up gameplay video of those levels in action (such as the above) the enemies still seem pretty helpless.

The bigger question is whether or not I'd be willing to exhibit the patience to play a game I'm bored of in the present in order to pursue the ambiguous promise of being able to enjoy it in the future. To answer to that big question has been carved into my soul from the jagged hooks of decades of burnout at the hands of dozens of EverQuest/WoW clones: it is a resounding, "NO!" Not unless I undergo a sudden surge of desperate masochism.

Moving on to Nexon's Vindictus, I found it to be a considerable improvement over Dungeon Fighter on most fronts: the Source Engine physics are used to good effect - ample destructible environment props and things to toss about - and the game possesses remarkably high production values.

However, like Dungeon Fighter, I found the enemies a bit overly hesitant to attack and the overall fights to be boringly simple even on higher difficulties. Again, this might change at later levels, but I would have a hard time getting myself to play through the boring beginning when the game gives little to no sign of providing an end experience that I would enjoy.

Further, the character selection and move variety would seem to be even more limited. Dungeon Fighter gives you some 6 prefab characters - as a person who likes to identify with his characters, it rankles a bit that I'd have to play what looks like a 12-year-old girl if I want to play a magic user. Vindictus has a similar approach, but with only 3 characters and 2 more in development.

Next, I'll probably give League of Legends a try. Being closer related to a real time strategy game, I suspect it will be a completely different creature

Initial iPad exploration

Admittedly, the most entertainment a jaded old gamer like me could get out of my new iPad has been something else entirely: the use of a Crunchyroll app to view anime. The iPad was clearly made to stream video, as it does so marvelously. However, there may be times when I'm stranded somewhere without an Internet connection and need something to do, and my forays into the realm of iPad gaming have lead me here:

The Incident Lite - A simple but novel game where you tilt your iPad/iPhone to move your character left and right, avoiding fallen objects, or touch the screen to jump. The game has a fairly zany sense of humor as you never know what crazy object those aliens will drop on you next, but I can't see there as being a whole lot to it. 3/5 stars.
Medival HD Lite - In the vein of "castle defense" games, Medieval HD makes good use of high quality art assets to present a game that mostly involves manually firing arrows from your castle-mounted ballista into approaching troops while occasionally sending your own troops to wreck the enemy castle or capture its flag. Unfortunately, I don't see a whole lot of depth here, though perhaps that's to be expected of the genre. 4/5 stars.
Starfall HD - My first iPad app purchase, it is a very competently executed tower defense game, both in terms of slick coding and presentation. However, as I got deeper into Starfall HD, I found it to possess a few balance quirks: having a second tier of he same base three towers renders those base three towers pointless; there are resource generation units which quickly undermine the economy; the upgraded second tier towers are a bit too powerful, rendering the game trivial. 4/5 stars.
ENDI Tank Battle HD - A very simple tank game, the main thing ENDI Tank Battle has going for it is a nice artistic style of toy tanks battling about the sandbox presented rather vividly. It's hard to complain considering it's a free app, but the praise can only go skin deep when the gameplay is pretty much all basic movement and firing. 2/5 stars.
Warpgate HD Free - I was hoping to find something for the iPad a bit like Escape Velocity Nova, a freeform space travel game where you upgrade your ship as you go along. Though the game should fit the bill for many, I found Warpgate to be considerably simpler than game of this genre I've played on other platforms, and I found the combat to be completely nonsensical. 3/5 stars.
Airport Mania: First Flight - A game where you're directing (ridiculously cute) airplanes from the sky to runways, then to the terminals where they offload and load passengers, perhaps making a stop in between if they need to make repairs or refuel, and then back to the runway again, another satisfied customer of your airport. It's a solid game in much the same way the Diner Dash is: it continually keeps the player's mind occupied with numerous things to coordinate, and so an excellent sense of flow is generated. A fair bargain for $2. 5/5 stars.

Thus far, I've been fairly disappointed with the greater bulk of iPad games as they are overly simple to somebody who has been gaming as long as I have. However, there is a massive library of iPad apps out there, and the app store seems overly designed to bury the diamonds of yesterday, thus I have much interesting digital archeology ahead of me. The very next thing I'll probably pick up is Puzzle Quest HD, a game I know to be deeper than most, and although I already have it on many other platforms, many sources claim the iPad actually the best platform it's been on.

Mass Necromancy Complete

2010-11-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

I just went through this blog's entire post history and reposted hundreds of my older posts that I had earlier decided didn't make the cut because I figured the historical significance outweighed the merit of the content... for example, I've got posts here about playing Tabula Rasa, a game you no longer can play.

Simultaneously, I revoked an earlier decision that I'd sort the posts into loose categories and instead assigned specific labels befitting the particular game I was talking about in that post. Anything that does not particularly suit a particular game or medium (e.g. "anime") tends to get sorted under "rant," often suitably so.

So,what's the purpose of the blog? I suppose that the Digitally Staving Off Boredom blog is simply the ongoing journal of one hardcore gamer's attempts to entertain himself. His adversary is, as always, boredom. The allies of his adversary are largely commercial interests which have lead mainstream gaming astray by encouraging too many derivative experiences, leaving him to try to derive entertainment out of a few games to which he frequently revisits.

You may notice certain patterns, and I think I learned a few things in review as well:

Later 2008 and the entirety of 2009 would appear to have not existed. This is because I was blogging on WordPress during that time. It's a pity, because there our story undergoes an interesting shift, where I begin to dabble in creating my own games for a change. It's a quest that has largely stalled due to lack of progress. I should look into if I can import those posts here to Blogger.
I've apparently played a lot of City of Heroes in the past, to the point where I should probably consider it a major life influence. Ironically, I'm currently terminally burnt out from the game, thanks in part to recent additions such as the Architect issue and Going Rogue severely diluting the focus of the game and its players, in part thanks to the release of Champions Online which has provided a (inferior in some ways but superior in others) alternative. I suppose all good things must come to an end... I wonder how DC Universe Online will turn out.
The only activity I've blogged about more frequently than City of Heroes is altaholicism in general, it seems to be something I'll do in any RPG of adequate flexibility the moment I'm starting to get bored, and find the very process of hunting for better characters fascinating enough to write some very long entries about.
Perhaps the part of my blog that aged the best was the original fiction. I should really do more of those. Whether or not you like the resulting stories, they're good creative exercises for me.

You may also notice some minor technical issues:

It seems the spacing was lost on many of my archived drafts, particularly if they are several paragraphs following a list, probably a Blogger compression scheme gone wrong. I've attempted to fix them, but paragraphs will flow strangely if I messed up.
A lot of my older pictures have been lost. I used to be hosting them somewhere that is now defunct. I removed the broken links, but these posts remain just walls of text at this time.
I used to have a Javascript-based text expander to reduce the wall-of-text qualities of my posts. That's no longer enabled in the inline CSS, so when I was revising my posts I simply removed those now defunct links. Of course, the previously suppressed walls-of-text are now completely revealed.

Will I start blogging more often again? Time will tell. In any case, it's been an interesting review for me today.

Honeymoon's Over: Final Fantasy XIV

2010-11-04T17:03:00.001-07:00

I've been generally supportive of Final Fantasy XIV, as the game is more virtualy-worldly than the theme park MMORPGs I've largely burnt out from. Unlike some professional reviewers, I'm not such a pansy as to find exerting a little effort or a console-friendly interface as grounds for dismissing a game's entertainment potential. Unfortunately, I've finally encountered a problem I cannot rationalize my way out of: I ran out of content.

"Gasp! The sequel to my game is out of content already?!"

I can't abide leveling or acquiring wealth just for the sake of power fantasies anymore, so what I want is gameplay or (as is usually the main draw to a roleplaying game) a story. In terms of content, Final Fantasy XIV's delivers a dreadful dearth of either:

The story-driven quest line behind each of the three major cities is the greatest highlight the game has to offer, and the greatest similarity to the qualities of the Final Fantasy brand. As it stands over a month after release, a city's entire quest line, cinematics and all, can be completed in a single evening. To thwart this, the developers utilize the typical MMORPG fashion of requiring you gain adventure ranks to unlock access to the story, but this serves only to spread the already sparse story across small snippets you'll be kept away from for days/weeks/months at a time.
There's a small handful of "guildleve" tasks, 8 local and regional per 36 hours, which nonetheless quickly get boring due to the lack of variety - like doing the same World of Warcraft quest over and over again.
There's a world to explore, but it's actually relatively small thanks to the linearity of the design, and there's nothing more interesting to be found but some pretty scenery and respawning mobs.
The greater bulk of the release day content is to be found in crafting the hundreds of items across the game's many crafting jobs in this neigh completely player-driven economy. This is undermined because crafting takes too long, quickly getting repetitive. Worse, it sort of feels pointless to craft all this adventuring equipment knowing that there's not a whole lot of adventuring to be found right now due to the lack of content.

Seriously, Final Fantasy XII was a more interesting MMORPG than this, and it was a single player game. Unless Square-Enix pulls a surprise massive content release before the next 17 days, I will be unsubscribed to Final Fantasy XIV. I had an initial desire to be amongst the veteran players who had been there from release, but this has largely fizzed because I've no interest in being amongst the best at enduring monotony. Perhaps I'll subscribe to XIV again in 8 months when it has (hopefully) released adequate content to satisfy... then the box price would not be a complete waste, though likely I could pick it up for $10 or less by then.

Post-Final Fantasy XIV Release Diversions

Having been reminded by this experience why MMORPGs are generally wastes of time that are no longer worth a subscription fee, I've instead taken to playing a few excellent single-player games:

Batman: Arkham Aslyum - Quite simply put, this is the definitive Batman simulator. The campaign is a riveting narrative, a fantastic overall realization of the Batman lore, that weaves seamlessly between segments of stealthy incapacitation and graceful pugilism. I eagerly look forward to Batman: Arkham City, though it's about a year away (Fall 2011 current estimate).
Metro 2033 - Aside from the existence of zone transitions and repetitive merchant dialogue, the most remarkable thing about Metro 2033 is that it does a far better job of delivering this sense of "being there" than any game from the Half Life series ever did, and this should be considered high praise.
Fallout: New Vegas - Fallout: New Vegas essentially delivers only one thing: more Fallout 3. The main differences are that the game is a bit less polished here and there, the tone is a bit dustier and cowboyish, and the storytelling feels a bit more canon. It's the perfect purchase for anyone who's not so much bored of Fallout 3 as they are bored of seeing the same old sights, as it delivers a whole new section of the post-apocalyptic world to explore and a whole 30 levels right out of the box.
Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale - An indie game with an unusual concept: take an item shop (as commonly portrayed in a console RPG) and have the player play the proprietor of such an item shop. Introduce the typical JRPG cast of likable but two-dimensional characters, a schedule/event system reminiscent of a dating sim, and even the option to tag along with adventurers to retrieve items for the shop from a dungeon, and what we end up with is a game whose parts may not be all that remarkable but they work together to create an overwhelmingly charming hybrid.
Minecraft - Not a new purchase for me, the really interesting thing about Minecraft is that it delivers a whole lot of nothing that becomes a whole lot of something. It's just a bunch of blocks represented on a JAVA 3D engine and assembled by a terrain generator into a infinitely expanding world. In survival mode, the mobs are braindead and the gameplay mechanic is very simple. Seriously, I could put together a rudimentary 2D version of Minecraft in like 1 day using BYOND. From this humble technical origin, Minecraft does something incredible: it harnesses and reflects the players' imaginations. It's the ultimate sandbox, and well deserves its success for achieving the necessary balance to make this happen.

There's a lesson of frugality to be found here. With the exception of Fallout: New Vegas, all games were purchased with a $20 or less price tag (albeit the first two were a temporary discount). Compared to the ridiculous amount of money I spent on a collector's edition of Final Fantasy XIV, I'm reminded that a gamer with enough patience to wait until some time after release before purchasing a game (or, if available, just rent the game from a service like GameFly) can save a lot of money.

Being a true gaming enthusiast...

2010-10-12T16:24:00.000-07:00

... entails being more enthusiastic about games than most by definition.

This is the sad fact-of-the-matter when it comes to me and gaming forums. I don't get banned from forums very often, as I'm generally a courteous participant. However, forums are funny things, mirrors of humor delusion at work. I may come up against a popular sentiment in regards to a game and I'm anal retentive enough to notice overexaggeration in the details and call them as I see them. Being less anal than I, they miss the details of what I am refuting, and begin to argue. Their irritation breeds slander, which I ultimately end up in trouble for if I'm overly caustic in retaliation. At the core of such a thread, it all begun simply because I like games more than most, the differences of our opinions are not eligible for reconciliation, and the casual observer will prefer to oversimplify the whole thread as a flame war between haters and fanboys.

The only forum I've ever been permanently banned from - it's not much of an exaggeration to say it was a diplomatic vote between a moderation staff largely hand-picked for being qualified cynical bastards - was partly because I earned a significant portion of stigma for recommending Vanguard: Saga Of Heroes. Brad McQuaid's latest (and perhaps last) major MMORPG, I was rather impressed with the detail they put towards the crafting mechanisms, the unusually interactive combat which worked on exploiting vulnerabilities, and the unique addition of a third activity that was neither adventuring nor crafting but diplomacy.

Unfortunately, at release, Vanguard's was heavily crash-prone, real bloatware for most computers to run, and they made the critical mistake of making the game too damn big. In time, they managed to work out the issues with the crashiness and bloatiness of the software, but the size of the world has remained an impediment to this day, resulting in too few players to interact with over too large of an area and large tracts of land without much real purpose to them.

Despite this, I could see the game had potential. While Vanguard never recovered the numbers it would have had if it had met the expectations of the initial launch-day hype, and likely never will, the game continues to have a strong niche following. I wasn't wrong to say the game had merit, even if not a whole lot of other players could see it at the time.

My latest game I seem to be getting in trouble for having good things to say about is Final Fantasy XIV.

In most ways, Final Fantasy XIV is a completely different beast than Vanguard. The game itself is actually very stable at release, provided you don't run it in full screen mode and alt-tab out, or suffer some kind of driver incompatibility. While it is a bit more bloated than games which made mass compatibility a priority, Final Fantasy XIV will run on the overwhelming majority of computers which are reasonably up to date even if you may have to lower the settings in a few places. The world is actually well designed for frequent player to player interaction, brilliantly utilizing corridors, major cities, and camps to assure this. If Final Fantasy XIV's brand name appeal was not already guaranteeing it would be propped up in ways most MMORPGs could only dream of, it still would not suffer for the same reasons Vanguard did.

Final Fantasy XIV certainly has some release-day flaws, including two which I cannot forgive:

It has a robust player economy, requiring the players seek out player-made goods for almost every piece of gear beyond that of the first rank - which is good - but it has a very poor means of facilitating the transfer of gear between players. Improvements to that are forthcoming, but in the meanwhile Final Fantasy XIV is leaning very heavily on a something that cannot support it yet.
The interface is hobbled by frequent client to server interaction. I can't understand why it is that their programmers could not simply allocate a little memory towards remembering what the user has in their inventory or skill set instead of recalling off the server every time they open up an appropriate page. It's not like the player could cheat if the appropriate checks are being done. Combat often flows at a snail's pace for the same reason of requiring too much server interaction. Players can overcome the latency issues with patience, but they are nonetheless a significant drag on everything.

From here, we come across the fact that I am, after all, a gaming enthusiast. Consequently, I have little to no problems with these problems:

The game was developed to be console friendly, and consequently has a menu-driven interface. However, this is a non-issue for me: I'm not afraid of using a new interface, and while this interface is different, and I find claims that it is badly designed to be oblivious of what design really is: this is, in fact, an interface with a considerable user-friendly focus.
The game world has a considerable amount of things to discover in it, and nowhere will you find a helpful non-player character with an exclamation point bobbing atop their head to lead you. If you're looking for a particular NPC, crafting recipe, or item in the game, you actually have to roll up your sleeves and research it off a site such as Yellow Goblin or discover it for yourself and take notes. Although a lot of people scream their heads off about the inconvenience of it all, I for one really like that I'm not being lead around by the nose like I am in nearly every other modern MMORPG.
It has been pointed out that Final Fantasy XIV reuses assets throughout the world. I find this to be a really interesting claim to make on the grounds that, technically, so does every other game with a really big world, with very few exceptions. I wonder if the reason why Final Fantasy XIV catches so much flak about it is because the game is actually gorgeous enough for people to care.

Frankly, when I found out that these later points were the primary reason the game was attacked in the GameSpot and GameTrailers review, I took it as evidence that either the reviewers were real panzies when it came to playing games or that they were pitching their reviews to viewers that they knew were far worse at gaming than they were.

Once you get past these largely skin-deep concerns for Final Fantasy XIV, it does deliver a type of MMORPG that I've come to sorely miss: a game which focuses more on being a virtual world than it does being a theme park. Players who log into Eorzea, Final Fantasy XIV's world, will discover that they are a small part of a vibrant player economy, completing guildleves (sanctioned odd jobs for factions) for gil (money) in between the larger main event of discovering a comfortable purpose from one or more of the game's (currently) 18 jobs.

In the end, Final Fantasy XIV is a game you either get or you don't. If you were to say Final Fantasy XIV is crap, I would respect your opinion but tell you I enjoy the game nonetheless... that's only fair. However, if you were to insist that Final Fantasy XIV is complete and utter crap and I have no taste for liking it, I'm going to tell you that you're an idiot. Like it or not, a game that scores 57/100 (currently) across Metacritic's Final Fantasy XIV breakdown is still 56 points better than a game that scores 1/100, ergo it's not complete crap. It's a great game rendered mediocre by some issues that hopefully will be ironed out soon.

I'm not worried Final Fantasy XIV will flop. As I already mentioned, the Final Fantasy fan base appeal alone will help to shore up the game's popularity enough. I need only log on and look at the "party" menu function's "world" count to see that my server has been at a good capacity of 1900-2600 players, a number mirroring that which I've been seeing release about four weeks ago: it seems to be retaining its players remarkably well, suggesting that the greater bulk of the complainers likely left before even buying their box after what they saw in the beta. Final Fantasy XIV is definitely going to be around for awhile and enjoyed by a significant number of people, even if you may have to be a true gaming enthusiast to be able to recognize the hints of diamond beneath the rough.

Final Fantasy XIV (Open Beta) First Impressions

2010-09-04T14:14:00.000-07:00

[I initially wrote this message on MMORPG.com's forums under the pretense of being a ridiculously experienced gamer's opinion of Final Fantasy XIV. Probably no need to mention that here on the grounds that this should be self-evident by it being written to my blog.]

Final Fantasy XIV is pretty much in the same vein as Final Fantasy XI, brought up to date with many notable improvements, and should be appreciated by much the same audience as the players who enjoyed Final Fantasy XI. It doesn't pretend to be anything else, it doesn't bother competing with WoW because that's the wrong audience for it. What is delivers is very solid, with some caveats:

It will require a relatively-up-to-date computer: World of Warcraft was designed to run on two year old computers when it was released seven years ago. Final Fantasy XIV requires a computer that has somewhere along the lines of 20 times the computational power you'd need to run WoW comfortably. I've got a GeForce 250 GTS, 4 GB of RAM, and a quad core processor, a fairly middle-of-the-road system by today's standards: this was enough for an adequate play experience. Anything less, and you'll likely be suffering. If in doubt, try the benchmark.
The controls take some getting used to (especially for non-FFXI players): There is some definate consolitus here, but it can be overcome readily enough. The user will need to be able to adapt to an interface other than strictly mouse and keyboard. WASD travel with mouselook working on holding right click works well enough, but navigating the menus via mouse clicks is ill-advised: get used to using the cursor, enter, and escape key for menu navigation (these can be rebound to other keys). Of course, if you're using a gamepad, you'll find FFXIV is more than ready to accommodate you. Annoyingly, there is a bit of a GUI lag as the client seems to require frequent server interaction, but imagine this will die down a bit as the servers become better at handling the load throughout the duration of the stress test.
RTFM implied, but not well supported during beta: I think it's a fair assumption that there will be a manual included with the game, and it will be required reading. There's a lot of status icons that pop up which you may sorely wish you had a manual about to know what they mean, the context-sensitive help is still in Japanese in this version. There is a wealth of help tips to be found buried in various context menus throughout the game, such as explaining what attributes do, but I've seen easier ways to presenting that information, often they can only be accessed in certain geographical locations in the game.
This game deliberately does not endeavor to make itself easy: The mobs will put up a good fight and easily overcome the unprepared or GUI-flustered. I've encountered local guildleves (a certain kind of quest) where I'm expected to comb entire labyrinthine cities trying to find an NPC by name alone. The grind has definite breadth: it does not assume you loathe playing the game. It's good that the scenery is so enjoyable to take in, as you will spend a lot of time just walking to the same place several dozen times. These things are all different facets of the essence of difficulty in gaming, their inclusion deliberate, overcoming them being means to enjoy the game. Even the GUI impediment is uniquely stylistically Final Fantasy, and to do otherwise differs from fan expectation.
Crashes and disconnections happen: Fairly infrequently, perhaps to the tune of once every 2-3 hours (give or take depending on how lucky you are) but they happen. Unfortunately, if you happen to be doing a timed Guildleve when you're kicked out of the game, you will fail it. You'll either have the patience to deal with this or you won't, but undoubtedly the frequency of this wil decrease as the game undergoes continued refinement.

In the end, Final Fantasy XIV is a game best appreciated by gaming connoisseurs: those who have a taste for fine quality in the details of their games, to the point where they're willing to overlook the kinds of flaws remaining as trivial in comparison to what is being delivered.

People who are only gamers by casual circumstance, and don't get this whole "quality gameplay experience is more important than ease-of-use" thing; who just want to have the thing do what it says on the box so they can get on with their lives; who boot up their games and scream, "entertain me without my having to lift a finger or get out," will likely not be able understand the appeal of Final Fantasy XIV. However, you're certainly welcome to learn.

XxxHolic: Not Porn

2010-08-10T16:33:00.000-07:00

Another series has fallen before my voracious appetite for anime: XxxHolic, which you can currently see for free streaming either via Anime News Network or on Funimation's YouTube channel. Granted, I've yet to find a legitimate source freely streaming XxxHolic:Kei (the second season) nor either of the OVAs, but on completing the first season I've certainly an opinion.

The plot is a relatively interesting setup. The main protagonist, Kimihiro Watanuki, has been born into modern day Japan with a bloodline that grants him the ability to see and be interacted with by spirits. This is largely a burden he has to deal with alone until he stumbles into the shop of Yuko Ichihara, a seeress who grants wishes in exchange for something of equal value. Watanuki is informed by Yuko that everything has destiny, nobody meets her by coincidence, and he is hired on as a part-timer in exchange for granting his wish to stop being plagued by spirits.

While xxxHolic may appear to be an anime primarily about creepy supernatural occurrence, something that is weaved remarkably compellingly throughout, it just as frequently deviates into stories about human nature. Though prone to spaz out at the drop of a hat, Watanuki is a well-meaning fellow, and he easily becomes entangled in the troubles of strangers. Inevitably, this leads to intervention by Yuko, who points out that many of these problems are the manifestation of karmic retribution associated with bad habits or past wrongs committed.

As the script sticks close to the ideals of karmic balance and destiny, not every story behind each episode has a happy ending. Yuko's dialogue puts a very interesting spin on each happening, her words are weaved so compellingly in the narrative that it's hard to say how much of her wisdom is dramatic exaggeration. I came away from many episodes feeling like I've learned something... then I think about it a bit and realize that what I learned has quite a few holes in it.

My main critique with xxxHolic would be that the characters seem a tad two-dimensional at times, vestigial at others. Watanuki's stubborn idiocy might produce some laughs, but he comes off as being too thick-headed to fulfill his role. His high school chums, love interest Himawari Kunogi and "rival" Shizuka Domeki, are dragged into each story in order to give Watanuki somebody to share his unusual experiences with, but more often than not play no real role in that story.

Overall, xxxHolic was a lot more interesting than shojo and shonen for me, and earned a "very good" rating. I tend to reserve better ratings for works that affect me powerfully and frequently, but xxxHolic's overall affect is that of interesting but sometimes droll philosophical bantering.

Of an interesting additional note, CLAMP (a mangaka group of four women) has a tendency to cross worlds between their various manga series. XxxHolic, a contemporary supernatural series, is a bit of a nexus series, most closely linked to simultaneously-developed Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, a fantasy adventure series. Both Yuko and Watanuki come to play an important part in this alternate world, not as copies of themselves but rather as the same characters making a journey between worlds. Taken individually, CLAMP manga series are not so complex, but put together in a whole they form rather a rather elaborate web.

On The Matter Of Guardian Characters

2010-08-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

I like to think I've adopted a good habit: every evening, I'll try to burn 500 calories on my PCGamerBike Mini. I'm no incredible bubble man, I carry my weight well, but 235-240 lbs is still enough to make me feel like crap after a day of general inactivity from abusing my favorite habit in the world, the computer.

However, an active mind requires something to amuse itself while you're busily pedaling away, and I've yet to devise a good solution for my PCGamerBike that allows me to reach my mouse while pedaling. What's a fellow to do?

Well, I've taken to watching anime. It doesn't particularly matter what I watch, so long as it occupies the mind. I might even watch a kid's anime I'm not particularly proud to admit I've caught some 110 episodes of... and this this how I ended up watching enough Shugo Chara to have an opinion on it.

The unique premise behind Shugo Chara is that everyone has a dream, and this dream manifests as an "egg in their heart." Sometimes, these eggs are unusual, manifesting themselves corporeally as a Shugo Chara (which literally translates to "Guardian Character") cute little characters who support these dreams. They are conveniently visible only to others who have such characters ("Character Bearers") or apparently to those who know if their existence. On the other hand, if one comes to give up on their dreams, their heart's egg becomes an "X-Egg" which has a tendency to pop out and manifest negatively in the world.

Fan made trailer by Shinboffo7

The primary character, Amu Hinamori, is a girl who acts "cool and spicy" on the outside but is really as much a nervous wreck as you'd expect any 21st-century school girl to be. She manifests not one but three Shugo Chara, which is apparently unusual enough to make her the Joker in the card-themed "Guardians," her school's student council who are secretly a band of character bearers who work to promote the well-being of everyone's heart's egg. Amu meets a colorful cast of characters, builds friendships, discovers there's an evil organization up to no good, sets out to use her powers to undo their damage, blah blah, tell me if you heard this one before.

Shugo Chara does a bit more than just imitate. It enhances the magical girl formula with a bunch of cute little support characters, switches the cast of characters to ordinary kids that the viewer can sympathize with a lot more with than (for example) a reincarnated moon princess, and features a powerful but down-to-earth message about realizing your dreams. Not bad, Peach-Pit, the pseudonym of duo manga authors Banri Sendo and Shibuko Ebara, you clearly know how to draw the viewer in and keep them there.

Another fan work, this time by Poppybreeze, better reflects the tone of the show.

All goes well through the first 52 episodes of Shugo Chara!, most episodes centering around a new X-Egg victim, some episodes reserved for character exposition, and finally the rare plot recap clip show. The next season of 52 episodes, Shugo Chara! Doki, actually slightly improves the formula by introducing a new kind of foe ("? Eggs" which emerge as a result of uncertainty of one's dreams) a teaser lead-in segment, and new transformation sequences. By Episode 104, the loose ends are mostly wrapped up and the evil organization has finally been defeated - what new adventure awaits Amu and friends?

Alas, they couldn't leave this functioning formula well enough alone: Shugo Chara! Party, the last 25 episodes, undergoes a dramatic shift into a variety show. We're suddenly forced to endure segments of live action cosplaying tarts in the intro, outro, and transition segments. These segments consist of physical challenge games, fortune telling, personality tests, instructional dance, and even nail painting - this is thoroughly shojo stuff. It's rather tough on an anime enthusiast who was tagging along outside his demographic simply for the quality of the anime in the earlier series.

Remember: The nail that sticks up is hammered down.
This has been your inspiring message of the day from the Shugo Chara Eggs!

The first half of each episode is full of this kind of filler, including two segments of the guardian characters engaged in adorable highjinks in an Adobe Flash puppet show and a segment of heavily garnished clip footage where they reintroduce the characters we've already had 104 episodes to get to know (they run out about halfway through the series and start scraping the bottom of the barrel by naming characters that might have appeared only once, several dozen episodes ago).

If you can survive the first half of each Shugo Chara! Party episode, you're finally treated to about 11 minutes of the decent anime you came here to watch. It's not bad, possibly even higher quality than in the previous two seasons, but has none of the conflict of the first series. It's mostly an epilogue centering on their new and rather unusual hyperactive underclassman, Rikku, and the gradual reformation of Hikaru. Any way you look at it, the shark was jumped at the end of Doki!, and Party! was a creative attempt to meet a demand that Peach-Pit was not prepared for.

Conclusion

Shugo Chara is hardly deep and compelling, nor am I really in its target audience. It did have a few redeeming plot twists (the best being Nadeshiko's twin) and kept me (perhaps overlong) in suspense about a few things. The technical aspects are quite good. However, in the end, I give it a "decent" rank simply due to the overall lack of artistic intensity of the thing. Sure, it's a kid's magical girl anime, but that does not absolve it of being low key - Princess Tutu, for example, is quite intense!

"Decent" is a rank on Anime News Networks that corresponds to, "I did not lose my time." Indeed, it occupied the mind and I was able to burn a great many calories pedaling away to the low-intensity trials of Amu and friends, and didn't cost me a thing since it's being streamed over Crunchyroll. So, thanks for that.

Post Anime Binge Quick Reviews

2010-07-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

A lot of these were mentioned over on my BYOND blog, but I've since decided to reserve my BYOND blog for discussing BYOND projects and use my Digitally Staving Off Boredom blog to discuss discuss the things I've done to digitally stave off boredom. A place for everything, and everything in it's place, right?

In that case, I've a bit of data integration to do. Over the last two months, I've had a lot of time on my hands looking for work in an environment largely disinterested in hiring anyway, and I spent much of that viewing anime streaming over Anime Network and Crunchyroll.

Having seen the entirety of the following animes, I'm now quite ready to levy a judgment about them:

(Clicking on any one of these will open the rest of this blog entry and jump to my words about them.)

Clannad and Clannad After Story (Masterpiece)

As some animes do, Clannad originates from a dating simulation, but from this humble origin came an incredible story of true love found amongst high school sweethearts leading to a neigh perpetual roller-coaster that rides out the highs and lows of everyday life, delivered on the backs of truly memorable characters, and dusted with the stuff of miracles.

Good God, this is the most emotionally charged anime on the planet. Seriously, it's not #1 out of 3800 or so on Anime Network's top 10 list for nothing. A gripping, life-changing experience, the U.S. Army should give an honorary purple heart to anyone who has watched both Clannad series in a few sittings, as it is unlikely they'd have escaped without a few injuries on the battlefield of the heart.

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Special A (Excellent)

This anime focuses primarily on a club of the seven highest graded members of a prestigious academy, fun characters all. It is primarily played out from the perspective of the second ranking member, a regular but hard-working girl, and her perpetual childhood rival she can never seem to beat: the number one ranking member of Special A, a boy who apparently has everything and can do anything... and adores the girl (much to her knuckleheaded ignorance).

A sublime romance anime, and absolutely hilarious besides, Special A received a rarely-awarded "excellent" from me due to the relatively high frequency of laughter and heart-tugging moments. It belongs in the collection of anyone who can appreciate this kind of romantic comedy. However, Special-A is still reasonably light-hearted, and evades "Masterpiece" rank simply because Clannad has a much higher frequency of highs and lows to be found.

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Azumanga Diaoh (Very Good)

Azumanga Diaoh is a remarkably unassuming show on the surface, exhibiting cute high school girls (including one genius ten-year-old) engaged in a wide variety of slice-of-life activities that employ an excellent mixture of Moe and innocence.

Though nothing particularly unusual occurs during the entirety of the series, the attention to details provides a wealth of entertainment, enough to keep the viewer chuckling in at least every other scene. It's difficult to consider Azumanga Diaoh as anything less than "Very Good."

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Maria+Holic (Very Good)

The main character, Kanako, really hates boys, and has transferred into an all girl Christian missionary school looking to find her soul mate. The catch? As fate would have it, her first crush is shattered when she discovers that the most popular girl in school, Mariya, is actually a highly affluent, cross-dressing boy with a somewhat sadistic sense of humor. He moves right in as her roommate to manipulate and prevent her from divulging his secret.

Despite the somewhat risque nature of the plot, Maria+Holic is actually a relatively clean show - though there is the occasional cleavage there's not a nipple to be found. The most morally questionable aspect is that Kanako's lusting over her fellow classmates is occurring in a (relatively lax) Christian missionary school, and that Mariya plays a number of cruel humiliation games on Kanako (the most disturbing being dousing her with gasoline and threatening to ignite her) because ironically this cross-dressing deceiver of the entire school is actually the straight man who finds her behavior repulsive.

Maria+Holic pulls itself out of the typical "Good" anime and into "Very Good" territory partly because not too many animes succeed in making me laugh out loud this frequently and partly because the depth of the two main characters alone is pretty outstanding, with quite a few self-conflicting characteristics. I wonder what the reaction of a lesbian or feminist would be to this series - it's a toss up as to whether they'd be outraged or amused.

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Nanaka 6/17 (Very Good)

The focus of Nanaka 6/17 is unique: a snobby 17-year-old girl undergoes brain damage that causes her to regress to her bubbly 6-year-old state. Her childhood friend and father attempt to cover it up. While it's funny at times (and the Japanese do have a bit of a fetish for immature-acting ladies) the actual focus of Nanaka 6/17 is more about growing up a well-rounded person, and the kind of differences 11 years of life can make to a person.

While there are certainly both funny and touching moments in Nanaka, they are relatively few and far between. This is redeemed somewhat because (contrary to most animes) Nanaka 6/17 has a definitive start and finish to the story across its 13 episode story arc. This singularity deserves at least a "Very Good."

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Princess Resurrection (Very Good)

The main protagonist, middle-school aged student Hiro, has died, rather stupidly. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, he finds himself resurrected as a half-immortal blood warrior in perpetual servitude of the chainsaw-wielding, coldly-brilliant Princess Hime. As she's perpetually-besieged by her siblings in a struggle for the throne of monster-kind, Hiro finds himself dying even more to suit his new life mission of protecting Hime.

Though I would say this is more of an action and lighthearted horror anime than a harem anime, it bears mentioning that a good harem anime has a fine balance to it: if it becomes overly kinky, or the love interests act unrealistically clingy, it can insult the viewer's intelligence. Princess Resurrection deftly avoids this, partly because Hiro is just a bit too young to get into any serious romance with the leading ladies, and so the focus actually switches to a wide variety of cool supernatural scenarios mostly involving assassins after the princess.

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Best Student Council (Good)

The central crux of this anime centers around a ridiculously powerful student council of a prestigious all girl school. Our unlikely, dirt-poor heroine arrives on the heels of a mysterious invitation with her best friend attached firmly to her hand: a hand-puppet with a mind of its own. Whether the heroine possesses a split personality or something else is going on is one of the two or three great mysteries the series gradually reveals, but such a ridiculous central premise is likely to alienate many viewers.

That's a shame, because there really is some excellent gags and characterization to be found across the wide spectrum of players in Best Student Council. While it may only garner a, "Good" due to the overall low intensity of the thing, there's nonetheless a lot of fun to be had here, and it's rare that I find myself wanting to go back and view an anime again simply to enjoy the ride in the same way I do Best Student Council.

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Alice Academy (Good)

Sort of a cross between X-Men and Harry Potter, kids whose exceptional inborn abilities (substitute "mutation" for "alice") cause them to be secreted away in a prestigious academy that they're not allowed to leave for reasons beyond their own protection. Not all fun and games, but a kid-friendly anime.

The manga is a little darker (and ongoing some 5 years after the anime) but generally sticks to the same theme of fostering friendship between the various members of Alice Academy as they suffer injustices in containing and utilizing their powers originating from the shadow bureaucracy of the Academy. In the end, the anime is a bit dumbed-down and floaty, I can only give it a "good."

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(The) World Of Narue (Good)

World of Narue focuses on hopeless okatu Kazuto Iizuka and his relationship with the cute-but-weird fellow high-schooler Narue. Narue makes no effort to hide that she's a half-alien of a somewhat genetically identical race, something nobody else believes, and possesses the ability to teleport thanks to her telepathic link to a ship in orbit.

Narue's alien origin introduces both zany alien antics and a secondary plot of Narue's struggles with the intergalactic community to remain on her native born planet, the titular World of Narue: Earth, which is treated as a very special place by the anime. Aside from her alien origin, Narue is a remarkably perfect girlfriend, and the anime actually weaves some pretty solid dating advice within its zaniness.

My main critique of World of Narue is that it's far too tame, there's very little actual conflict, and no real character development. For this reason I can only give it a "good." Maybe this improves in later volumes of the manga which has been ongoing since 1999 - there's 10 volumes, 5 currently available in English, and this anime series only covers up to about the second volume.

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Hayate The Combat Butler and Hayate The Combat Butler!! (Good)

Primarily a story about a young heiress and her incredibly unlucky butler, both Hayate The Butler seasons were a fairly enjoyable romp, full of high profile zaniness, excellently executed characters, and not-a-few inside anime jokes. Where many animes fall into predictable formulas after awhile, Hayate relishes breaking outside of the mold, it pretends to be a power struggle anime between powerful "combat butlers" and instead delivers thoroughly unpredictable off-the-wall comedy.

Yet, in the end, I couldn't rate either Hayate The Combat Butler seasons better than "good" due to an overall lack of emotional intensity throughout. A series designed for easy consumption is best critically treated as such. I do, however, look forward to seeing a season 3 on the grounds that this is certainly an entertaining series.

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Super GALS (Good)

Super GALS offers an interesting window into Japanese pop culture. The main character, Ran, is a highly independent teen who rules Shibuya (a district sometimes regarded as the most popular teen hangout in Japan). The series jinks rapidly between slapstick comedy and serious teen issues, and more than a few lovely little romances are settled by the conclusion of the series. Only the somewhat low production values and unfortunate choice to leave the later season without dubbing restrict this anime to a "good" rating.

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In The Pursuit Of Art

2010-07-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

Art Is

What is art? Don't even bother trying to universally define it, it is a word that has come to mean just about anything you can imagine. However, in the travels of my inner Internet nomad yesterday, my own personal definition coalesced in my head, trailed off my fingers, and onto a comment thread somewhere:

"Art is the betterment of thought through the invention of the truly novel."

It's a nice definition in that it explains not only the what of art but the why of it: truly novel things are needed to challenge our conventional thinking, lest the lack of stimuli cause us to fall into a rut of the same old ideas, and the artist emerges as an inventor dedicated to this task.

It also settles quite definitively what I find right or wrong with particular instances of art: when it is not very novel, it has little or no value to the human mind as stimuli, it's bad at being art.

There was once a point where I considered art a trivial waste of time. That is no longer the case: if exposure to an artist's invention, novel new stimuli, brings about a change of mind that leads to new practical inventions, then the artist is an essential component of human progress.

Art and Games

Famous film critic Roger Ebert wrote that games cannot be art, though he later recanted on the grounds that he is hardly an authority as to what a game really is. I would say that he was simply off target in an important regard: as pertains to art, games are merely a medium.

What unique artistic property do games bring as a medium? It is not that they convey an experience - all art does this. Nor is it unique that games can tell a story - books and film do this as well. The unique thing about games is that you play them.

Playing games props up an additional dimension in that you can feel closer to an experience and a story, true, but the important thing to consider as games being a medium of art is each individual game must offer a unique play experience to be novel. How they play is the foremost way in which games differentiate from each-other.

Games which are clones are not particularly good at being art because they have lost too much of their novelty. Without a unique play experience from a game they have already played, the players' minds are not introduced to the most important kind of new stimuli a game can bring, it is not advanced significantly.

It's little wonder that many players say they hate clones. It's little wonder that gaming as a medium seems significantly lessened now that imitation seems to be the rule.

Art, Games, and Me

These things are what my previous games have come to resemble thus far: Real time strategy games with their point and click interfaces. Role-playing games with their cursor navigation. Persistent accumulation of levels and gear for the sake of more accumulation. I thought I was doing people a favor by sticking to tried-and-true mechanics, but I just couldn't bring myself to finish them.

Now, I've come to understand why. I've been there before, I've even seen them combined, it's old hat. In drawing inspiration from games of the past, I ended up creating something that was too similar to them. I've accidentally been creating clones. When my muse realizes this, it recognizes bad art, it leaves me, my motivation dies. I was wondering where it went, now I know.

Then the solution is simple, is it not? Abandon the idea of the tried-and-true interface. Try something new. Make it novel. Make it change the way people think. Teaching an overgrown calculator to be "fun" is easy in comparison to my chosen task.

Altaholic's Anonymous: Lord Of The Rings Online

2010-06-20T15:07:00.000-07:00

Another MMORPG, another difficult time for me to decide on a class to play. While a great part of that comes from me wanting to savor more of the game than a single class can embody, a larger part of class dissatisfaction comes from whether or not the core mechanic of a given class entertains the specific needs of the player. To these ends, I decided to do an "altaholics guide" that specifically focuses on the play mechanic.

Burglar

Preferred Role: DPS: Melee, Debuffer

Secondary Roles: Crowd Control

Out of alphabetical necessity, I started with perhaps the most complex-to-play class first. First impressions of the Burglar reveal a simple melee combatant who uses club, sword, or dagger to artfully disable his opponents while dispatching them at speeds that rivals that of the highest damage doers in the game. However, the Burglar is a clever creature, and to be truly effective in playing one you need to be ready to utilize a range of varied abilities:

Powerful debuffs, in the form of one "trick" per enemy, should be applied promptly and evenly.
Crowd control, though less prevalent than a Lore-Masters, are nonetheless a significant enough to take a single humanoid out of the fight for an extended duration while providing some brief stuns/knockdowns to others.
The means to transfer aggro between fellowship members creates a certain responsibility to watch for that.
A number of powerful "panic buttons," or abilities with a long timer which can potentially turn around a fight gone sour, should be kept in mind at all times.
Burglars are the primary class that that initiate conjunctions (powerful cooperative fellowship moves).
Between-combat, Burglars can opt to sneak, introducing an interesting side activity of burgling (pickpocketing) humanoid targets as well as opening up said targets to devastating opening attacks.

If you have a goal of playing a Burglar in an optimal manner, you need to keep quite a few things in mind! If it's raw damage you're looking for, a Champion or Hunter has an easier time of it, the Burglar is best suited to players who want the tools to make sure fights happen on their own terms.

Captain
Preferred Role: Buffer

Secondary Roles: Off-Tank, DPS-Melee, Healer, Pet Class

Though the Captain feels a bit like a warrior (fighting at the head of the fellowship, shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of the Champion, Guardians, and Wardens) he has a larger goal of being the bolstering force from within a fellowship:

Whenever an enemy has just been defeated, Captains should immediately initiate one of a choice of "cries" which may heal allies, damage (with advantage stun) enemies, or debuff foes in range.
The Captain needs to be aware of the sequence in which they initiate the abilities, as some abilities trigger "Battle-Ready" or "Battle-Hardened" states which permit the use of more powerful attacks.
The Captain has a Herald (essentially a pet) whose primary rule is to carry a choice of banner that provides specific buffs to all allies in range.
The greater portion of the Captain's abilities come in the form of buffs (such as "tactics") which should be regularly applied to the appropriate fellowship members.
The Captain has a lesser-but-not-insignificant capability to draw and survive enemy aggression, including an ability that makes him temporarily unable to be defeated thereby being an essential "last stand" figure.
When a fellowship member has been defeated, the Captain can revive them, even in mid-combat.

Because they have the ability to take up so many different roles in a fellowship, the Captain is an excellent choice for players who love to team, particularly for those who desire to take a support role that also fights on the front lines.

Champion

Preferred Role: DPS: Melee, DPS:AOE

Secondary Roles: Off-Tank

Possessing heavy armor and dual wielding blades, the primary joy of playing a Champion is just watching those limbs flail about, raining death. In execution, there's nothing too fancy about this class:

A lot of the player's attention will be on accruing "fervour" points by performing certain abilities and then spending them on more powerful abilities.
Many abilities will provide a self-buff, boosting the Champion's odds, but some can only be applied after defeating an enemy.
As a top-rank damage doer, quite a bit of threat can be gathered on the Champion, who should be quick to transfer it to the appropriate fellowship members.
Many of the attacks of the Champion are area-of-effect based, requiring attention to positioning to assure the largest number of foes are caught.
The Champion possesses a few effective "panic buttons" for when they (inevitably) gather a bit too much attention.

With their heavy armor and threat transferring abilities, the Champion is a dream class of anyone who wanted to have the power of a dedicated damage doer but was always bothered by a general sense of helplessness in enduring the counterattack.

Guardian

Preferred Role: Tank

Secondary Roles: DPS: Melee

Compared to most classes, there are significantly less overall "active" abilities on the Guardian, a large number of them became "passive" abilities related to elaborate armor and equipment use. In addition to a smattering of relatively standard melee attacks, the main thing a player of a Guardian need to worry about are:

Utilizing their many threat-grabbing abilities.
Which stance to assume: defensive, offensive, or something in the middle.
Other than the Burglar, the Guardian is the only class that can start conjunctions.

As a Tank, watching for potential aggressors and keeping attention on themselves instead of weaker fellowship members is the hardest and most important thing a Guardian has to do. There are two primary tanks in LOTRO, the Warden and the Guardian: a preference towards the Guardian makes sense if you're either looking for less complicated game play or greater resistance to sudden spikes of damage.

Hunter

Preferred Role: DPS: Ranged

Secondary Roles: DPS: Melee, DPS:AOE, Crowd Control

Another relatively-simple-to-play class, the Hunter's main focus is on doing lots of damage, fast, preferably at range. However, they are not without a few tricks:

Through their attacks, Hunters accumulate "focus" points, which can be spent on more powerful attacks. Moving causes focus points to be lost, creating an advantage to remain stationary.
Though most of their attacks are ranged-based, they also have a small number of melee attacks which can increase their damage even more, which may be used to quickly finish off damaged foes.
The Hunters can place traps which will hold or snare enemies. Other mild crowd control includes the ability to snare (slow the movement of) enemies and fear (temporarily scare away) animals.
A choice of stance which mostly impacts damage (in exchange for power consumption) and the corresponding enemy aggro reaction, to an extent setting the "tempo" of your combat involvement.
Out of combat, the Hunters have some coveted skills such as campfire creation, fellowship travel speed improvement, tracking, or "guiding" (teleporting the party to) major cities.

If you come to LOTRO with an aspiration to be the "glass cannon," or the main ranged damage combatant, the Hunter should be your first choice. The Rune-Keeper does comparable damage but is less durable and will probably be asked to heal. The Champion does comparable damage and is better armored but can only operate in melee range. Hunters are usually the most popular class to be found in the game, but there's nothing wrong with two Hunters in a fellowship - it just ends battles faster.

Lore-Master

Preferred Role: Crowd Control, Debuffer

Secondary Roles: Healer, Pet Class

Pets spice up what's otherwise pretty standard "situational caster" MMORPG experience, exceptional only in that Lore-Masters have just about all the core groups of spells covered:

The best overall crowd controller, bar none, capable of mesmerizing or stunning more foes than any other class. Consequently, playing a Lore-Master involves keeping a constant watch for what can and should be controlled. (There is frustration to be found in throwing a mesmerizing affect on something that is just going to be awoken anyway.)
Their debuffs are substantially potent, capable of tipping the scales heavily when properly applied. Making sure the right debuff is applied to the right foes and as often as possible is a large part of a Lore-Master's responsibility.
Their pets are the most fully-featured pets in the game. Making sure the right pet is sicced on the right enemy (and not wandering off, aggravating the entire map of enemies) is a crucial.
Though the Lore-Master is a poor choice of a primary healer, they do have a powerful ability or two which can be a saving grace in an emergency, and are masters at negative status effect removal.
Though the Lore-Master is a poor choice for a primary damage doer, they nonetheless have abilities which can contribute surprisingly effectively to raw damage output.

Of the two "cloth casters" offered by Lord Of The Rings Online, the introduction of the Rune-Keeper provided a long-overdue outlet for those simply looking for raw effectiveness in doing or undoing damage. The Lore-Master is an odd duck, he does his damage where most won't see it, and undoes damage by preventing it from ever happening. The Lore-Master should primarily interest those who savor the originality of working miracles through a subtle influence.

Minstrels

Preferred Role: Healer

Secondary Roles: Buffer, Crowd Control
As a Minstrel, you are essentially twisting songs as rapidly as you can activate your hot keys, stacking as many of the best buff icons in your tray as possible, while keeping an eye on the fellowship's health bars. It's not a very complicated role, but it will keep you busy.

In a game where survival is about bolstering morale, the Minstrel's the undisputed master healer, capable of propping up the Tank against a determined assault like no other (though the Rune-Keeper is a close second).
Playing songs generally results in damage, buffs, or debuffs. Songs played unlock higher tiers of songs while the effects persist. The goal of a well-played Minstrel should is to secure as many of the most appropriate buffs into the ten second song effect window as possible.
Though not as good at crowd control as the Lore Master or Burglar, as the Minstrel can choose to briefly fear an enemy, and can hold the undead that Lore-Masters cannot.
When all else is lost, the Minstrel can call from their theatrical expertise and feign death, allowing them easy enough means to restore the fellowship after their foes thought them gone.

If you want to be the healer, the Minstrel is not your only choice - the Rune-Keeper is pretty good at it as well - but the Minstrel is the most specialized for the role. It's worth noting there is a healing effect buff to each song effect stacked, which is the perfect excuse for any healer who was ever chewed out for doing more than healing.

Rune-Keeper

Preferred Role: DPS: Ranged, Healer

Secondary Roles: DPS: AOE, Debuffer

If you've played a lightly-armored magic user on any other MMORPG, you know the essentials of the core Rune-keeper gameplay mechanic: a flimsy guy (actually less armored than the Champions, Hunters, or Minstrels whose fellowship role he shares) who stands around chucking spells. However, the interesting thing about the Rune-Keeper is that he is both a dedicated nuker and a healer:

They possess damaging spells (mostly damage-over-time in nature) that are capable of rivaling the damage output of other dedicated DPS classes, generating "offensive" attunement.
They possess healing spells (often preventative in nature) capable of rivaling the likes of Minstrels, generating "defensive" attunement.
They possess only a few weak debuffs and mob control abilities to sully what is otherwise a focus on raw power. Use of these abilities generates "utility" attunement, which counteracts current offensive and defensive attunement.
You really can't have an MMORPG where one class is able to replace the role of two others unless you have some kind of novel mechanic preventing this from happening simultaneously, and the Rune-Keeper's "attunement" system is precisely this, making sure that the best healing or damaging spells are only available for use if that was primarily what the Rune-Keeper has been doing over the past few ability activations.

If you're resolved to play a cloth mage in LOTRO, your choice is the Lore-Master, who is in many ways the subtle trickster, or the Rune-Keeper, a not-so-subtle wielder of primal power. Appearances aside, you should always assume all classes in an MMORPG are equally powerful in their own ways, and choosing the Rune-Keeper really has more to do with wanting to be an expert in quickly applying damage or quickly reversing applied damage. The Rune-Keeper seems to be the more popular choice, both for players on a power trip and fellowships who are always looking for a healer.

Warden

Preferred Role: Tank

Secondary Roles: Melee and Ranged DPS

Wardens share the same fellowship role as the Guardian, but possess an advanced combo mechanic that turn the very act of melee combat into a mini-game of sort:

The Warden has relatively few "active" hot key activated abilities, consisting of three main attacks (which build gambit icons), a few javelin throwing skills, stances, and a few interesting out-of-combat abilities, such as Stealth (second to Burglar's) and the ability to travel to outposts (similar to the Hunter "Guide" abilities).
The purpose of using their gambit-building skills is to set up a combination of 2-5 icons which can be cashed in to activate one of an extremely wide variety (about 50) of "gambit" abilities. The effect of gambits includes self heal-over-times, buffs, debuffs, and various threat transfers to help the Warden keep the aggro on him.
All combinations can be referenced after purchasing the gambit ability, but memorizing the icon combinations is necessary to rapidly trigger the appropriate gambits as needed. This is the core Warden experience.

Overall, the Warden is a perfect class for a player who always wanted to play the tank or melee character but desired a lot more to master about it. As a tank, the Warden's durability and taunting capacity roughly matches the Guardian, but their self-healing approach to tanking leaves them a bit more vulnerable to spike damage.

Conclusion

By going with a core mechanic experience as opposed to a more technical ability breakdown, you are more likely to find a class you can enjoy playing. However, if you're still having trouble deciding, then it is a good idea to do a little further research (I recommend the LOTRO Wiki) with an end game focus in mind. After all, if you're sitting at the maximum level in the game and not content with the abilities your character class has, then you may have chosen a class that does not really reflect what you want out of the game.

APB First Impressions: The Only Point That Matters

2010-06-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

The All Points Bulletin "Key To The City Event" has largely gone off without a hitch, and while I respect that Real Time Worlds have asked that there be no reviews until release, that's not to say that first impressions are out of bounds, nor to say that many first impressions about the game from this event have not already been made. Unfortunately, in this over-saturated Information Age, the first impression is often all you get.

APB "Key To The City" gameplay footage from TopZone.It on YouTube.

Now, I'm not going to come right out and say this game sucks because that's not a particularly fair observation. Though I don't like how heavily instanced it is - 64 players per map does not massively multiplayer make - All Points Bulletin has some very cool features that MMORPGs are long overdue to implement, such as the ability to customize just about everything about your character's appearance and (more importantly as pertains to gameplay mechanic) quests that dynamically pit you against other players.

(City of Heroes might have had excellent customization, but they completely screwed the pooch in that they passed up dynamic player conflict quests at about the time City of Villains was released. Granted, City of Heroes/Villains power balance was messed up in such a way that they were receiving every sign that would lead to a lot of frustrated players, but a ranking mechanism like APB features could have ironed out out well enough.)

That be said, though craftsmanship can be seen in All Points Bulletins, right down to its gorgeously animated loading screens, I cannot say that craftsmanship can be played in this game. As you can see in the above video (particularly at about the 2:20 and 3:05 points) the centric game play task of shooting another player character is nothing less than an exercise in supreme frustration. In terms of core mechanic, the problem can be broken down into several technical parts:

The Internet has latency. Therefore, there will be a bit of a delay between what you see on the screen and what your opponent is doing.
The player characters have no inertia. Consequently, they can jitter and back forth as quickly as you can tap the key.
While there is a cone of fire to the weapons, it's generally quite small, and consequently an extent of pinpoint accuracy can be expected.
Moving does not impact your accuracy nearly as much as not moving will enable other players to actually be able to aim at you for a change.
The difficulty to hit your opponent becomes worse the closer you get to them, because their position in the screen will require more movement of the mouse to compensate for. (Due to the rapid movements required, it's possible that game pads will fare a bit better without that initial overcoming of mouse inertia.)
Close range combat is preferred because many weapons are quite effective at close range and fighting at long range often gives your opponent an opportunity to drop into cover and heal (which occurs naturally once you stop taking damage).

When you put all this together, what you have is a game that actively trains the players to rush each other and "spray-and-pray." Attempting to use terrain to your advantage is more likely to get you eviscerated by people rushing you, because the main way to die in this game is to hold still long enough for aiming to work. An adequately experienced player won't give you the chance: they'll jump around so much that aiming is done by guesswork. Discovering your aim is useless is a very frustrating experience, and this first impression will sour many towards the game.

Technical achievement of what they've done aside, APB is just the lesser portion of Grand Theft Auto 4 (the multiplayer as opposed to the epic single player story), hacked off, polished to a lustrous shine, given a mechanic that matches up the players relatively fairly with objectives to do, given better appearance customization, and attaching various character perks to a grind. The result is fairly good, but not a better overall product than GTA 4 was, and APB's multi-player focus has placed far too much importance on the often critically rejected shooting mechanic of GTA 4.

The first impression is enough to tell me that, while All Points Bulletin is a fairly cool game, it is not something I would pay 55 American dollars for and then pay them an additional 35 cents an hour or ten bucks a month to play. If they completely redesigned the combat mechanism to provide an experience unlike a game I can already play without a subscription, then maybe I would feel compelled to cut them some slack of not including the epic single player story due to technical merits alone. Until then, I'm waiting a few months, anticipating they'll eventually be forced to settle for a $30 box price that includes unlimited online time.

All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter: LOTRO Going F2P

2010-06-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

My own apparent delusions of grandeur aside, I think there's actually only three things I really wanted to say:

I've become so picky about gaming that my core identity as a gamer has become threatened... it's not that I've lost my passion for games, I just can't enjoy them like I used to anymore.
If people really don't like me being confrontational in the face of their comfortable delusions, I either need to adapt a much better approach (perhaps delivering my message with a lot more consideration than typically begets an INTJ), or I need to kill this habit of confronting people entirely.
If plan to update this blog, at all, it seems I need to write from the heart from whatever I'm dwelling on at the moment. This is not a professional undertaking, I'm not writing for a magazine here, so catering to others' expectations does not make a whole lot of sense.

At the moment, I'm downloading the Lord Of The Rings Online Free To Play (F2P) beta client and looking forward to giving it a spin. My history of the game is heavily jaded by an heavily ingrained tendency towards altaholicism, usually caused because I'm not satisfied with such a heavy investment in an MMORPG unless I know I'm playing the best overall class for me, and the developers did good enough of a job of presenting all classes as having their ups and downs.

The F2P transition promises to make that easier to bear, as it allows me to take things at my own pace without worrying about a monthly subscription, and the time in which I have to worry about being among the first to the maximum level is long past. (Would that I could offer such easy solace to any friends who had aspirations to leveling up with me!) I think this game has a great potential for possible rebirth, and given an out-of-context quote it would seem even Tolkien himself would agree...

“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.”

-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings

Recent Lord Of The Rings Online video courtesy of gakiyarou and YouTube

It might seem that Lord Of The Rings Online brings an interesting new spin to the face of MMORPGs in that having a comprehensive virtual world is no longer adequate qualification to justify a monthly subscription, and to the classic MMORPG gamer who was raised to the likes of Merdian 59 or EverQuest, that might very well seem to be the case. Yet, if you're a relatively new gamer, chances are your introduction to MMORPGs were one of the hundreds of free to play MMORPGs out there, and many of them actually possess a comprehensive virtual world. If anything, this is only bringing the idea into the awareness of those gamers who consider western-made MMORPGs a completely different creature - an assertion I'm hesitant to say has much merit in a wider view of things.

To a great extent, I think that Lord Of The Rings Online going free to play is an overdue move for the entire MMORPG genre. While $9.89/mo made sense back when EverQuest was released, it was an environment where there was a very small number of competitors and the idea of virtual worlds was relatively new. Now, virtual worlds are not at all novel, players are paying more attention to the gameplay, and they have a lot of competitors driving prices down in a typical supply/demand model.

Though F2P MMORPGs generally operate on a model where only a few players actually pay (I've heard the number of paying customers varying from 2% to 70% depending on who you ask) when Dungeons and Dragons Online went free to play, a 500 percent increase in revenue was reported. Contrary to the worries that players who never pay for a game are nothing more than dead weight, hundreds of free to play MMORPGs operate and thrive from this resultant bandwagon effect of their presence. It certainly has not hurt ArenaNet when Guild Wars was funded solely through a $50 box price and yearly expansion pack - they not only survived, they're making a sequel. Is it an unreasonable premise that this whole idea of needing to fund servers and development teams with a monthly subscription may well be a financially motivated myth, especially when some companies are discovering they can actually earn more on the F2P model?

As for the game itself, Lord Of The Rings Online is indeed an excellent virtual world. It is significantly notable when any game based on an existing Intellectual Property is released that does not cause a backlash among fan expectations, and it has been my impression that LOTRO delivered much more respectively than Star Wars Galaxies did. The actual core mechanic is somewhat tried-and-true MMORPG mechanic, but it does introduce some novel perks and move that keep it reasonably exciting. About the only bad thing I can say about the game is that it is a bit of a grind, with the typical procession of "kill 10 rats" and "fedex" quests taking up a large amount of the tasks for the players to perform.

In conclusion, when I regard a subscription as being a key to a virtual world, few modern MMORPGs seem to verify the need. There's probably only two MMORPGs I've ever played in which I wish I had bought a lifetime subscription to: the first is Final Fantasy XI, the second is LOTRO. I greatly look forward to Turbine's offering the F2P mechanic as an excellent, competitively-minded alternative.

Gaming Gems: Rune Factory Frontier

2010-05-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

The Harvest Moon series are single player games based on surprisingly virtual-worldly premise: you're a farmer given a plot of land on which you must raise plants and animals, upgrading your farm from the profits, and eventually romancing a local village girl to marry and birth a child. You can almost hear Elton John singing, "Circle of Life."

To an extent, Harvest Moon was already a fantasy game. It offers the tantalizing prospect of a simpler time which largely holds appeal because they've omitted all the bothersome details of farm life (like swine vesicular disease). They even introduced such things as faeries and harvest goddesses. However, the Rune Factory series, a spin-off from the same company, magics things up even further.

In Rune Factory, your farmer is the stereotypical warrior of a mysterious past in a world of commonplace magic and monsters. Weapons, accessories, and magic join the ordinary farm tools of Harvest Moon. In addition to your above-ground farmstead, you can now delve dungeons and brave monsters in order to reach underground plots (apparently the veggies are magical too, as they require no sunlight). Your farm animals are now considered monsters which you will encounter in the dungeons and may choose to tame.

Harvest Moon meets the fantasy roleplaying game - why the hell not? There's been three Nintendo DS Rune Factories (the third has yet to be released in the U.S.) and one for the Nintendo Wii called Rune Factory: Frontier. It's the Nintendo Wii game I'm mostly writing about today.

(Open Full Article)

At 48 hours and still counting, Rune Factory Frontier has been some of the better entertainment buck I've spent in a while. A lot of this lasting appeal has to do with an absolutely shameless exploitation of classical conditioning on so very many tangents:

Plant something, water it every day, be rewarded down the line with the veggies you planted. Buy some "greenifier," and invest it in your seeds for the promise of even higher level (more valuable) plants.
Tame monsters, brush them every day (which is a little weird when your menagerie includes orcs and goblins along with sheep and cows) and be regularly rewarded with additional help on the farm, crafting materials, or battle companions.
Go to a dungeon, fight monsters, and be rewarded randomly with the items the monsters might drop. As you explore, you have the potential to be rewarded by encountering new monsters (which can be tamed for your growing menagerie) or crafting material. Defeating monsters raises your experience and level.
Crafting is in the game in terms of fishing, cooking (five kinds), alchemy, weapon crafting, and accessory crafting, offering a dizzying variety of equipment to earn. Like every other skill, crafting raises your levels, making higher level items accessible or easier to craft expertly (rigged to a timing mini-game).
You will regularly encounter various villagers including thirteen potential brides for your little Warrior Farmer. That's right, even your libido gets a light tap as you engage in a bit of virtual dating that mostly involves giving the girl regular gifts that she likes. (It's sort of odd there's no polygamy in such a harem-anime-like backdrop.)

B.F. Skinner would probably shake his head in amazement at seeing so many different kinds of conditioning structured in one game. However, a hardcore gamer like myself can really appreciate a game that goes out of its way to be compelling, while simultaneously not being satisfied over the few things it does wrong.

The primary limitation this game suffers (beyond the limitations of maintaining a kid-friendly exterior and thus pretty vapid dialogue and low-intensity environment) works out to the monotony of the daily grind. For example, you might have a daily schedule in the game that goes like this:

Wake up at your farmhouse.
Manage your farm plot, doing whatever it is that your pets aren't able to do for you.
Pet your pets, maintaining their friendship level. If you have 50 pets, this is probably going to take about 5-10 minutes. (Whereupon you hear your protagonist say "Hey there!" followed by the sound of the monster being pet, 50 times in a row.)
Take your best appropriate pet and ride it down to dungeon 1, maintaining your plants there.
If it's past 3pm, take a bath to restore your rune points. (Your rune point count limits the amount of work your character can do a day.)
Go to dungeon 2, maintain your plants there, see if you can get further in it before it's so late in the day that you risk catching a cold or collapsing if you don't return to your farm to sleep.
Back in the farmhouse, blow through any residual rune points, bringing yourself to the brink of collapse, in order to increase your trade skills. (Maybe gorge yourself on food to restore your rune points until everything is converted, if you want to convert everything in exchange for a lost food profit and a punishing grind.)
Sleep and go to step 1.

The player has complete freedom over what they want to do during a day, but these schedules will emerge as the most efficient way to get things done. It's self-limiting and prevents the player from really having much variety to their gameplay experience. The resulting lack of variety facilitates boredom.

These are a few events that may bring players to mix up their schedules a bit, for example:

There's a random chance you will encounter weather (such as rain or typhoon) that will change what you do that day.
There are holidays with unique activities, including a weekend in which the peddler visits with crucial home upgrade sundries to buy.
There's a seasonal change every 30 virtual days which changes which crops can be planted above-ground and the overall appearance of the environment.

However these agitating factors are a little too rare, and this will result in falling into a habit of most-efficient (and boring) daily schedules. Though the game does not force you to mix up the action, it's to your advantage to force yourself.

Another thing this game is lacking is a tool to quickly harvest more than one plot of crop at a time. Above-ground, the monsters will assist you, but below ground there's no such luck. Clearing a field of 72 strawberries by hand, each taking about 5 seconds, is a very monotonous activity.

Despite its flaws, Rune Factory Frontier is nonetheless pretty outstanding. Animal Crossing is practically kindergarten in comparison on the tangent of overall game play sophistication. As with any other game, I recommend giving Rune Factory Frontier a rent first and purchasing it if you're hooked.

To Savor The Game: Champions Online Edition

2010-03-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

Last entry, I mentioned I might write up a series of columns about how one can better enjoy their games. This week, I'd like to talk about Champions Online.

The lead thing to bear in mind about Champions Online is that you define the game by how your define your character as much as you do how you play the game. This is much more so here than in most other MMORPGs.

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Defining How You Play

In most MMORPGs, the class you choose determines the kinds of activities you'll be doing in the greater role of the group group. If you choose the tank, you'll be toe to toe with the enemy, trying to attract as much attention from the enemy as possible, if you choose the healer, you'll be standing away keeping everyone alive with support powers, and so on. Then, the MMORPG might offer various hybrids, such as a holy warrior type who is capable of some level of tanking and some level of healing.

In Champions Online, there are no rigid classes, even two characters with the same overall power set can be radically better or worse at various roles depending on how they distributed their statistics and power selection. You can even build a character who can perform all roles fairly well by switching which build is currently active. The player is given the responsibility of deciding for themselves what balance of power they want.

Furthermore, there's a matter of improving power execution satisfaction. You might have all the skills you need to satisfy your goals, but are you having fun? Maybe you don't like the way your character is animating? Maybe you find lining up those cone attacks frustrating? Head over to the power house and experiment a bit with some retcons. Test it out a bit in the training room. Don't lock in those choices until after you're feeling relatively satisfied with how it feels.

Generating Flow

There's more to it than merely deciding how your character plays. You actually define the difficulty level of the game through how your build your character. If you're really good at gaming the character generation system, it's not too hard to generate a character who does obscene damage and is relatively invulnerable. There's only one problem with this: for many players, that's boring!

It's not too hard to figure out why. At the very basis of game theory, there's this concept of "flow." If the player is feeling challenged at just the right level, the brain is happy. If the game is too hard, it becomes frustrating. If the game is too easy, it becomes boring. What's needed for an ideal game experience is a game that's neither too easy, nor too hard, but just right.

However, the complicating factor here is that desired difficulty level will vary with the individual player. It may even vary with mood on a particular hour. There's a lot more to it than skill versus challenge, and for an MMORPG to encapsulate the satisfaction of all players for hundreds of hours is a very tall order.

In time, they may add a difficulty slider, but in the meanwhile Champions Online's character generation offers a novel (though debatably accidental) solution. You can develop a series of characters with varying levels of difficulty based off of how you have built them. If you're really clever, you can even develop a single character who has varying levels of difficulty depending on which build is active.

Living A Concept

To a great extent, a roleplaying game survives not by simply allowing players to do things that make numbers go up, but rather through providing a certain avenue of escapism. Where most MMORPGs offer you the easy, generic answer (e.g. "you're a mage") Champions Online challenges you to come up with your own superheroic concept.

If you develop your character thinking, "I want to make a guy who's great at inflicting damage per second so I can farm quickly" then you've completely missed out on any appeal you could have derived from coming up with a compelling persona. By putting a little more effort into it, you might just find yourself with something magical: a character in a game you actually care about.

This can boost your enjoyment of the game exponentially, as every little action your character does, every little achievement earned, and every difficulty faced now has that much greater of a meaning to it.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that there's no way to "win" an MMORPG. Ask many experienced players, and they'll tell you that you're better off savoring the journey over the destination. Champions Online offers a lot of tools to make that journey worthwhile. Are you taking advantage of them?

Mabinogi: South Korea is now imperceptably richer

2010-03-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd give some closure on yesterday's Mabinogi debacle: For all my complaining about how expensive it is, I decided to spend another $40 on it.

What did I spend it on and why do I think it's worth it? Read on.

What I bought

Given that I had already spent $10 on the game before, I overall had bought 50,000 NX for $50, and my transactions went thusly:

A 9500 NX premium character card, which I used to rebirth a character I didn't play for over a year
A 10900 NX Mabinogi Premium Service subscription, primarily to retrieve the items out of the locked side of the bank and move them to pet storage.
A 4400 NX Siamese Cat pet. I've designated the role of this pet to hold my fomor scrolls, fishing equipment, and other general overflow such as cobwebs.
A 6200 NX Afgan Hound. Among the cheapest inventory you can get, and a scrappy little fighter in itself, "Shaggatha" primarily holds my tailoring supplies.
A 8100 NX Antique Mimic. The largest storage of my pets, "Egarim" is my general inventory pet, mostly holding spare resources and gems.
A 10900 NX Thoroughbred, "Blitzon," the fastest thing on land, because walking is a drag. Considering I'll likely have it out on the field, it holds my general adventuring equipment (potions, spare weaponry, and the like).

That sums up to exactly the 50,000 NX I bought. Since I discovered that I can not store books in my summoned pet inventory, my bank account now resembles a library. I am hoping that these are the last purchases I need to make in the game for a long time, and posturing myself in such a way that when my Mabinogi Premium Service expires I won't be left in the lurch for some vital feature or another. Of course, I now have 4 pets aging... ah, I'll just let them wither.

Why I bought it

I think Boturkey here did a really good summary about what I see in this game.
Bottom line: do I think that Mabinogi deserves $50? I sure do. Given that the game has moongates and a host of creatures with thought put towards their ecological footprint, it's clear that Mabinogi took a lot of inspiration from Ultima Online, largely held as the premier virtual world. However, devCat (the developers of Mabinogi) advanced the idea on many fundamental tangents. For example, PvP isn't rampant, player housing is properly relegated to its own map, quests and item transfers are elegantly handled, the NPCs have a face, and combat is actually involving.

Aside from being an all around well-realized product, perhaps the thing I like most about Mabinogi (aside from the overall variety of activities) is that each activity is hard:

Both combat and the crafting mini-games are not overly complicated, but they take an impressive amount of thought and attention to succeed in.
If you're careless in your transactions, you'll get gouged by merchants and banks. Purchasing a new a piece of equipment is a major investment that may take days of careful planning. There's also many paths to upgrade it them that require due consideration.
If you are defeated, there's a chance you'll lose an equipped item. Lost items need to be "recovered" for an oft rather high gold investment. You can "bless" items like in UO using holy water, preventing their loss, but the blessing will wear off after they've been used.
And so on.

It's not just that it's hard, it's that the things that make it hard add meaning and significance. Too many MMORPGs, perhaps out of fear of scaring off casuals, bore me to tears because the choices are meaningless and the consequences are inconsequential. Mabinogi has made the right choices to overcome this, perhaps not universally, but in enough places to stand apart.

Mabinogi: Not So Free2Play After All

2010-03-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

Nao's asking for your money, so be a dear and hand it over. Or just tuck it into the hose there.

A few days ago, I ran down a list of MMORPGs I was not willing to play and noticed that there were a few of them I was willing to give a try. The foremost of these was Mabinogi, a game produced by devCat, a studio under the South Korean MMORPG company, Nexon, also known for MapleStory - a game boasting about 100 million player accounts.

Of course, I don't play games out of brand name appeal, I play games because they have a fairly interesting mix of mechanics and, while the grind is heavier than I like, Mabinogi is definitely one of those games. The activities are well varied, the combat is genuinely challenging, and there's a focus on the virtual world that I feel is sorely missing from many MMORPGs.

So it is that I shelled ~$10.00 for one of their "premium character cards" in order to reroll a 108 year old character of mine (aging actually stops at 25) and give this game a serious shakedown. Unfortunately, 8 hours in, I encountered a fatal snag: for a "free to play" game, Mabinogi is pretty damn expensive.

Expand: Mabinogi: Not So Free2Play After All

Here's some of the basic costs you'll encounter that may not be immediately evident:

Mabinogi Premium Service: ~$10/mo.

The Mabinogi Premium Service package rolls together a number of things they used to sell separately and includes vital functions such as guilds, housing, the ability to transfer items between characters.

Most importantly, it contains extra storage, both in the form of unlocking the second half of the bank and allowing you to use storage expansion items (which can double as a merchant stall). In a game with as much "fantasy life" content as this (not just adventuring but crafting gear, ect) inventory is a vital resource you cannot do without.

You get the premium service for free up until any one of your characters reaches level 30 (this includes levels prior to "rebirth"). When it expires, you'll find that the right half of your bank inventory is being held for ransom. Very tacky. It's a bit of an odd time for it to expire because chances are you will not use the majority of the services by level 30. Housing and guilds are really more of an end game activity and you won't have much worth selling to other players anyway.

If this was the only charge the game levied, ~$10 a month is not so bad when the more typical charge is ~$15 a month. However, the potential for spending does not stop here...
Character Cards: ~$8 for basic, ~$10 for premium.

For each character your have on a server, you will need a character card. These come as either "basic" or "premium" cards with the primary difference between the two being the number of options for character appearance (hair styles, eyes, mouths, colors - all crude yet endearing features). You get one "basic" card for free, but only if you have no other characters to log in with - once you've purchased a character card, your free card goes away.

The sneaky thing about these cards is that you will want to purchase them more than once per character because the aging mechanism. Your characters age one year per real life week, starting at your choice of age of 10 to 17 (your choice). Age determines base statistics, but most importantly it grants bonus "action points" which are used to finalize any skill gains (rewarding the player with xp and statistic boosts in the process). Action points earned become less and less with age until, by the time they reach 25, they still essentially stop aging. The solution is to "rebirth."

Rebirthing allows you to change your age, appearance, and gender. You can change your character's age for free at 20 years old, but aside from this minor exception you will need to purchase another character card for them to rebirth. Your character will age from 10 to 25 in 15 weeks, but for quickest gains with the least stat penalty you may be looking at using a rebirth card every 3 weeks.

So, depending on the your rebirthing preference and how good you are at catching a character at 20 years old, you could be looking at an additional $5-$15/mo per character.
Pets: ~$2.50-$10 apiece. Additional maintenance cost.

Pets in Mabinogi are more than just cute, they actually fulfill a variety of important roles:
- Each pet has a separate inventory which can facilitate Mabinogi's many sources of inventory bloat. (Certain items, such as most books, cannot be placed in pet inventories.)
- Pets are effective combatants with combat skills not unlike your character has. They can be very helpful in battle and gain experience from participating. You can even reprogram their AIs, which enables potentially deadly tactics with the right timing.
- Some pets are mounts - purchasing one of these pets is the sole way to cut down in travel time for crossing big stretches of empty terrain.
- Some pets have special abilities such as being able to detect mimics or transmute monsters.
The good news is that, once you buy a pet, it stays bought. Pets have "pet cards" just like characters have character cards. They can then be summoned by any character on the server they were created on, which is much better than having to buy a pet for each character you have. It's a pretty slick mechanic where your pets become independent characters in and of themselves.

But there are catches. Pets are only available for so many minutes per day (usually about an hour and a half, give or take a half-hour) and while that's plenty if you summon and dismiss them rapidly, it can go fast if you have a reason to leave them out. After awhile, pets begin to lose their luster - pets age just like characters do, some even get weaker with age, but the main change is that they will offer less fringe benefits (such as providing a companion stat boost).

For all the downsides of pets, a solution can be found to those willing to spend some NX. You can "rebirth" them the same way you would a character with a pet card, even as different kind of pet, thereby migrating skills that type of pet would not normally have. You can also choose to buying age reduction potions. Of course, if you don't care about the buffs, you can just ignore when your pets linger fully withered at their maximum age... although when your henchmen are this cute, it's hard to be that cruel.
The Item Shop: Loads of optional frills.

What I've covered so far is just the "premium services" - the game also has an item shop that contains the usual assortment of goods you'll find for F2P Korean grinds, such as potions that temporarily double experience gain, potions that knock a few years off your pet or character, dyes, and so on.

These run a wide rage of prices from a few cents to $10, and basically offer a perpetual temptation to the player who wants to have it all.

Nao might seem like a sweet and innocent type, endowed well with pure anime sex appeal, but deep down she's really a hard working company mascot, a high priced escort for what could run $25/mo or more.

A Frugal Gamer's Apprehension

I am generally an extremely frugal gamer, so I recognize that the game is playable with minimal investment. Without any of the above fees, I could limp my way to the end game with a tiny one-character inventory and half a bank, true. However, I would be going without some vital features such as housing and guilds. Without at least investing in some additional storage via a pet or two, I'm likely to be extremely uncomfortable.

I do know that I just wasted ten bucks. I didn't particularly need to rebirth an ancient character I haven't played for about a year and a half, and my doing so just caused me to hit level 30 and lose my free premium service offer prematurely. I should have used that card to start a whole new character instead. My perpetually pre-level 20 (due to rebirth) character did not even accumulate half the gold needed to take advantage of an of the services offered. I screwed up, and it rankles my frugality to the core.

It also bothers me a bit that half of my character's bank inventory has just been held for ransom. Do I invest $10 for 31 days of premium access to get these cheap newbie knickknacks back, or do I play on having stare back at me whenever I open the bank? To resolve the issue would also require investing in a pet for alternate storage. That's a good $15-$25 (depending on the cost of pet) right there just to resolve a minor inventory snafu.

Another concern is that I hear Mabinogi 2 (not to be confused with Mabinogi: Heroes) is in the works with an estimated late 2010 to early 2011 release. It doesn't make a lot of sense investing in this game when a potentially-better-in-every-way sequel may be just around the corner.

The whole situation makes me sick to my stomach. Mabinogi may be the most interesting little MMORPG I could be involved in for awhile, but all these heavy financial restrictions are tough to deal with.

Illiterate Literacy: What I Learnt About Message Boards

2010-03-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

The Internet, and Internet message board forums in particular, can seem like a mentally stimulating place to hang out on. However, I have recently reached an epiphany about message boards, and that is that it's simply too hard to for people to get a point, even a seemingly simple one. This idea begins there and ends at the outer reaches of human intelligence.

How these tragic little debacles get started.

Expand: What I Learnt About Message Boards

Much of my life, from my adolescence and the entirety of my 20s, was spent on hallowed boards throughout the Internet (and dailup Bulletin Board Systems) bickering with strangers. The emotional pull! The drama! The festering feeling in my gut that, by God, I have to show that poor deluded son-of-a-bitch where he went wrong in life.

With age, however, comes wisdom. Recently, I realized that there was something funny going on with message boards. Under really close examination, the participants of most flame wars actually were in agreement, and they were mostly arguing over how they thought the other party was saying something else entirely. Even those who were not directly involved in the discussion would attempt to support a side with comments that actually supported the other side or had nothing to do with what was being discussed at all. A vast majority of participants had no idea what anyone was writing.

The emotional pull! The drama! The festering feeling in my guy that, by God, was completely unjustified. What we have on the majority of message boards is a failure to communicate. The problem is many-fold, and to try to generate a list in one sitting is likely to not produce a complete and all-inclusive list. However, here's some of the more obvious things that come to mind that have lead to this situation:

The simple limitations of language.

The English Language has over 300,000 words, about three times as much as most other modern languages. Yet, each word fails to hold meaning in itself. Words are an abstraction, we say "tree" but the word does not encapsulate a specific tree down to every single knothole. Sometimes, the differences between abstraction and reality trip us up.

Even a minor syntax error can be a major hurdle to communication. Here's a story where a faulty comma was responsible for $2.13 million dollars in damage. This is just one example of a plethora of ways that language remains imperfect for conveying absolute meaning of a thing.
Most people simply don't make time to read.

Language is a tool we use to try to convey meaning, but it assumes that there will be two earnest participants. A writer does his or her best to convert ideas into words. The reader does his or her best to convert the words back into the original ideas. The writer usually has a firm interest in seeing themselves represented correctly in word form but the reader neither has the time nor motivation to understand what was written.

The Internet is big, far bigger than any forum reader has time for, and so they will not bother to read entire posts. Internet usability experts such as Steven Krug will recommend everything from eliminating ~~unnecessary~~ words to cutting what you've written to a quarter of its original size. Even then, I know what I write won't be read by many people because who has that kind of time?
Misinterpretation is easy.

Lets say our audience did bother to read what we wrote. As modern Western thinkers, we like to believe that a clear, properly ordered sentence can be universally identified as having the same meaning to everyone. However, as we bridge the gap into postmodern thinking, we are coming to realize that the reality is actually the opposite: Everyone will interpret what they have in front of them differently based on their own life experiences.

It's cognitive psychology in action. It's not just "stimulus" and "response" anymore, now there's a "belief about the stimulus" in between. What's read is the stimulus and the reader's beliefs about the stimulus will radically transform their response. It does not really matter if that's what you meant to write or not, what the reader believes they read is all that matters to them.

For example, lets say you're skimming the net and you come across the sentence, "Black people should not do road construction work." The wheels in the head start turning and, before you know it, you've written a 95 page dissertation about racism.

Yet, what you read was referring to studies done by the American Cancer Society that indicates that people of African American descent are actually particularly susceptible to the benzene ring aerosols released by freshly paved roads. Suddenly, the 95 page dissertation should have been about why people's heath concerns should not deny them employment.

The keyword here is context, and it's quite easy to lose when you don't take the time to read and comprehend what you're reading.
It's incredibly and unexpectedly easy to misinterpret a sentence. You might be thinking to yourself, "Well, just be more specific then, so these little mistakes don't happen." However, it's not that easy. To prevent this, you would need to know how every single reader is likely to interpret it, and that would require an understanding of their life's experience you simply won't have.
Misinterpretation is often deliberate (albeit more often unconsciously so).

Upon discovering you have been misinterpreted, you may attempt to expand your single sentence into several supporting paragraphs. The bigger the block of text you've written, the more supporting angles you have to prevent misinterpretation, right? So you try... and discover that the more sentences you've written, the more room there is to misinterpret what you've written, and you've made no progress at all.

It's not your fault: you've been nit picked. Nit pickers, people who read simply to find the one sentence that offends them, are not uncommon on today's Internet message boards. Perhaps they're doing so maliciously, as a very subtle troll that even escapes many forum administrators, but more often than not they're programmed not to agree with you and will latch on to the finest detail they can find in order to do this.

How they become so programmed is because often, though especially in heated issues such as religion, people have a deep emotional stake in supporting their side of an argument. As a result, they will do everything creatively possible to misinterpret you. They can't help it - what you've written is just plain incompatible with their world view. This is to say nothing for simple Sophomorism - they think themselves smart for being able to do something as mind-numbingly simple as ignore most of what you wrote and creatively reinterpret what's left.

Once it is clear the opposition has an emotional commitment to support a side at all, you might as well pack it in. When emotions or other brain chemistry are involved, to understand what you've written, clarity is not enough. Instead, you would require something that fundamentally changes the way they think. Something like therapy or the wisdom that sometimes comes with age. Don't be surprised if you're pursued when you try to break things off - that's just how heavily emotionally invested in it they are.

Where I used to sit on message boards and bicker for hours with somebody, trying to get them to see things my way, I now realize that this endeavor is simply pointless. For me to generate total understanding in someone with words alone, I'd likely need to overcome so many hurdles I would better off hoping for divine powers to facilitate my communication.

When in doubt, use an emotional appeal like a cute cat picture. You won't prove anything, but the person you're arguing with more likely to understand that than any words you've written.

The personal growth in accepting this realization is great. Applied to others, away goes all the stress of trying to convince them of anything. When I apply this lens to myself, I realize that I am also susceptible to these limitations as any other. It's okay if people say I'm clueless or deluding myself: I am, if only because I've wasted my time doing the impossible, and that is surely delusion.

The Internet has become the focal point of the information age, a beacon of what we can accomplish if we gather humanity's knowledge and put it up for all to access. However, in doing so, we're coming to grips with the very fabric of what we call information and how we communicate it. We're bumping elbows with our own human stupidity, how far we really have come since we descended from the trees, and it has not been very flattering.

-- Edit: 3/21/10 Revised and updated based off of current experiences.

The Top 26 MMORPGs And Why I Don't Play Them

2010-03-19T17:46:00.000-07:00

I miss the days when I could have a nice virtual world to log into. A game in which I could feel like I'm making real progress in life, even if that progress was entirely virtual. Something I can feel good about coming home to after a long day of doing my work, secure in my belief that quality entertainment awaits me.

I have not been able to do that for a long, long time Looking down MMORPG.com's released MMORPG list organized by current rating/hype, it wasn't from lack of trying on my part.

Expand: The Top 26 List.

EVE Online

I can appreciate that EVE Online is a jaw-droppingly gorgeous, open-ended, truly virtual worldly experience where the very drama of what goes on inside makes it worth playing for many.

However, for a new player trying to get in this game, it's a bit like you're an illegal immigrant trying to make a living washing the cars that stop at intergalactic stop lights. You could work your fingers to bloody nubs trying to turn asteroids to gold, but there's a glass ceiling firmly in place. The newbies' main source of credits is facilitating resource gathering to make the existing players even richer.

Something that bothers me even more than the class difference is that the gameplay itself is often a matter of pushing a few buttons and waiting. Beep: you move to within 50 km of an asteroid. Boop: your mining lasers are now turning that asteroid into minerals. Beep: You are now returning to a starbase. Boop: You have now docked at the starbase. Repeat until you start hallucinating you are playing an entertaining game.

If I had to play this game, I think I would prefer to multibox the hell out of it. If the amount of interaction I'm getting out of each ship is about the same as a single unit in a real time strategy game, I might as well control several of them at once. Besides, considering a lot of EVE Online players do multibox, this would be the only way to put myself on a relatively even playing field with them. Somehow, I lack adequate incentive to dump $120/mo on a game so I can keep 8 accounts running simultaniously on 8 seperate computers like I am some kind of cybernetic one-man band entertaining my cats in the privacy of my home.

What would get me back into the game: Either introduce a way to control multiple ships at once from a single client or beef up the number of necessary interactions per ship. Put some mechanics in place that prevent a handful of fat cats with hoarded ISK, skills, and equipment from dominating the universe solely by sitting on their asses.
Lord Of The Rings Online

How it is that Turbine ended up simultaneously making the MMORPG based on the mother of all RPGs, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and then the MMORPG based on the books that the mother of all RPGs is based upon, Lord of the Rings Online, is an incredible fluke of fate. Perhaps even more incredible is that Turbine managed to actually make Lord of the Rings Online meet fan expectations while juggling all those balls.

Lord of the Rings Online a beautiful, well-rendered and pretty much completely open world without much instancing. However, as Shamus Young has been outlining in his series about his adventures lately, player density so is very low that you end up trying to make up a story just to justify the existence of this gaping empty world. You're more likely to encounter a ringwraith than another player. I could forgive this if the game was a fabulous single player experience but, like most MMORPGs, this game was designed to be played with others.

What would get me back into the game: A trial that demonstrated that there are, in fact, adequate number of players in the game... followed by a lifetime subscription offer because, if that's the case, I'll move right in.
League Of Legends - Clash of Fate

The #1 non-subscription based MMORPG listed on MMORPG.com is not an MMORPG at all. I hear it's quite good, I'll give it a spin if I'm in the mood for fantasy RTS.
Atlantica Online

Actually, this is a pretty decent game. You wander the world and perform quests in fairly standard MMORPG manner, but combat and character advancement is a whole lot more interesting. Turn-based combat is an apt description, but it's more like chess where the pieces have been replaced with monsters and members of your party which you can create and advance however you see fit.

Perhaps the main reason I don't play Atlantica Online is because of the massive time sink I could see myself getting into. That and it's not exactly an MMORPG in the same sense of having that feeling of single person immersion. It's more like you're a tiny roaming army in a world of tiny roaming armies.

Already considering playing this game.
EverQuest II

Sony Online Entertainment has refined a double-prong approach to profit in their EverQuest series. First, charge a monthly fee under the justification that you're supporting the server maintenance and developer fees. Second, charge for a periodically released expansions under the justification that you're supporting those other developers. Though this practice has caught on nearly everywhere, it's perhaps out of karmic retribution that SOE is left with horrendously bloated, over-expanded games in EverQuest and EverQuest II.

When is expansion too much? When I last played the game, I soon got bored of soloing and so spent a lot of time trying to find players who were interested in grouping up with me - last I checked, playing with other players was the whole draw of a MMORPG. However, thanks to all the expansion, they're spread very thin over the massive amount of land in this game. About the only place you can reliably find other players is at the town auction houses, where they've other things on their mind than adventure.

After weeks of searching, I finally got into a group. That was a mistake. I found that the the content was completely trivialized, with the group wiping out small rooms of monsters before I could barely get a spell off. Maybe it was because item power creep is as prevalent in EverQuest II as it was in the original, but I expect the greater body of it was because the developers have been flipping back and forth between the game being groupable and soloable and have left quite a few parameters well out of whack.

What would get me back into the game: Shrink the world down to its essentials in order to concentrate the userbase. Balance it so soloing isn't the predominant activity.
Fallen Earth

I'm going to come right out and say it: Fallen Earth is the most MMORPG-ish MMORPG released in a long time. By that I mean it has a completely seamless world and the acquisition of items and power really seem to matter here. When it takes 80 hours of grinding resources to advance your crafting skills far enough to craft yourself a pistol, it's clear you're looking at no casual gamer sell out here.

On the other hand, certain aspects of Fallen Earth are very crudely realized - monsters don't so much engage you in combat as they do slide on the ground near to you and start making your hitpoints decrease. A very PvP-centric end game without any kind of mechanic to make sure the sides are fair assures it's something I would not enjoy in the long run.

What would get me back into the game: Either a PvE alternative method to advancement or fair and balanced PvP, a smaller subscription price per month that properly reflects the quality of the thing.
Guild Wars

In some ways, ArenaNet's classic is the best MMORPG on the market. The customizable card-deck approach to character skill building is undoubtedly one of the most meaningful approaches out there. The PvP end game is very well regulated to assure the fairest matches possible, right down to dynamically handled ladders of PvP. What the hell is my problem with the game?

Well, it's just that.. Guild Wars is not an MMORPG. Call me old fashioned, but I really can't feel excited about the comings and goings of a virtual world when it's so heavily virtualized that walking from one city to the next can be done by clicking somewhere on a map. Actually, you could force yourself to walk to the next city manually, but you'll just find yourself facilitated with your own private zone. Even with breathtaking graphics and cutting edge content distribution mechanisms, a virtual world this is not.

What would get me back into the game: Dynamic content generation systems that simulate actual changes to the game based off of player actions. If you're going to have a heavily instanced world, you can at least provide concessions to pretend it isn't.
Vanguard: Saga Of Heroes

I am very impressed with Vanguard's tri-focus of Adventuring, Trade, and Diplomacy, very worldly-feeling world, and so on. The gameplay mechanics of the individual character classes is a cut above the rest as well - I actually have to think when I'm fighting things. A pity the whole thing pervades a feeling of being fundamentally unfinished.

Vanguard is a classic example of a potentially great game ruined by being rushed to market because it tried to be too "epic." The environment is very "cut and pasty," with too much land and too little unique about it. It was released over-expanded, and consequently is sorely lacking in that all-too-vital central resource that makes MMORPGs work: other players.

What would get me back into the game: Give Brad McQuaid a time machine and enough funding to have given this game the added development time it needed. Oh, and a cure for Keith Parkinson's leukemia. Frankly, this game's main enemy was life's crueler realities.
Dark Age Of Camelot

Oh, whoopee, number 9 on the list is a nine-year-old fossil of a game. Dark Age of Camelot is an EverQuest clone with a King Authurian background. Its main innovation is a "realm versus realm" PvP battle system. Its main niche is historical significance, since its release broke what was for the longest time the "big three" of Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron's call. Now, it's pretty much a played out ghost town - the busiest server peaks at about 300 players - but it is still enjoyed by a small handful of hardcore PvPers... which I am not.

What would get me back into the game: A memory wipe that causes me to forget how bored I am of this ancient game.
Ryzom

Ryzom is a rather odd duck, and it's quite proud of its oddness. In some ways it's quite traditional, with an adventure mechanic and crafting mechanic that is both overly familiar and time-tested. In other ways, it seems to be trying to break the mold, such as with its pastel-colored Sci-Fi world and fauna that sometimes behaves in a manner other than trying to kill you.

I played it back near it's original release, and perhaps the main reason I remember it as being so weird was because it really felt as though it has no point other than to make my character's numbers go up. Its lackluster launch originally got it closed down, but I hear it managed to prop itself up again and has been steadily improved since.

What would get me back into the game: A relaunch under a different name and a better-structured play experience.
Final Fantasy XI

When everybody else was busily trying to copy EverQuest, Square-Enix pulled the unusual move of copying what was actually good about the game. Final Fantasy XI is a highly group-focused fantasy combat game with just the right balance for a challenging, rewarding experience. Leave it to some of the best CGI experts in the business to create one of the most worldly-feeling virtual worlds there are. It also features a job switching mechanic that facilitated my natural alt-a-holic tendencies quite well.

Final Fantasy XI's main downside is that it eschews the typical mouse and keyboard interface for a rather-well-designed but awkward-until-you-get-used-to-it console-like interface. This is very off-putting to players who prefer the standard mouse and keyboard interface... although personally I sort of enjoyed this because it forced the game to play differently even if it was the same game on the other side of the interface.

Although I think Final Fantasy XI is super keen, and may or may not have constructed a Square-Enix love shrine in my closet, I don't play Final Fantasy XI because it requires a massive time investment on behalf of the player. This is not only to grind up the levels (which you can lose by dying enough) but simply to find a group may take hours. Even the economy is merciless - the last time I played the game, I had spent myself into the poor house on Yugudo drinks trying to unlock some more summoned monsters.

Aside from that, I mostly stay away from Final Fantasy XI due to suspicions that concessions made to allow for solo play in recent expansions have sabotaged the group dependence that made the game interesting. I also suspect that the release of several expansions have left substantial tracts of the world a ghost town. To an extent, this game's time has passed... but I eagerly look forward to getting in on the ground floor of Final Fantasy XIV.

What would get me back into the game: Shrink the world down to relevant zones or make them more accessible, make groups easier to find but require them for most activities (this best realized as a social game).
Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning

Part of the reason why Dark Age Of Camelot should be considered a fossil is because its foremost developers have moved on to another project entirely, and this was it. Consequently, Warhammer Online has the unusual benefit of being a MMORPG made by people who knew how to make MMORPGs. They chose to play primarily to their strengths: the realm versus realm combat they perfected in Dark Age of Camelot. Only this time the perpetually warring forces are Order and Chaos from Games Workshop's Warhammer series.

Unfortunately, Warhammer Online was sabotaged by a desire to become World of Warcraft (which ironically bore a striking resemblance to Games Workshop's earlier propertly). Like any other game that has tried to become World of Warcraft, this backfired because people who want to play WoW simply keep playing it. Though copying WoW probably wasn't his idea, Mark Jacobs ended up taking the fall for it, and now the game limps along on a humbly-sized playerbase.

What would get me back into the game: I'm not a big PvP aficionado and that's basically all this game has going for it. Either add a good PvE endgame or a less population-based endgame. Implement a player churn mechanic so the pre-endgame zones are adequately populated.
City Of Heroes

I am undoubtedly biased in favor of the City of Heroes/Villains games, as X-Fire has about 1600 hours logged in them for me... and I'm pretty sure X-Fire wasn't running a great deal of the time I played it.

Players who have come to City of Heroes/Villains from other MMORPGs have a hard time seeing what's so special about it, but that's probably because they were conditioned to sit there and soak damage in standard MMORPG manner. This is a game that invites you to mix things up a bit, engage several foes at once, and knock them around with a whole lot more power than you're normally allowed. The incredible appearance customization and remarkable freedom to mix and match power sets make this alt-a-holic paradise... I only managed to stick to a single character long enough to hit the level cap about 24 months into the game.

I wish I never did hit that level cap - it's there that I encountered the end game, and it sucks. There's nothing there! You're essentially just running around grabbing the badges/missions/etc you didn't grab on the way up. I also found that the architect expansion was a major step in the wrong direction - I was oft frustrated that Paragon City stopped short producing genuine spoils of super-heroics, and pulling people out of that world into their own scenarios made it seem even more artificial and pointless than its static representation made it already.

What would get me back into the game: Release Going Rogue so I can have my Paragon City Mastermind. Shut down Architect - it's a distraction from the real game. Instead, make the real game matter by adding an end game involving copious amounts of world-shaking zone events.
City Of Villains - See #13. The main difference: it's a bit grittier.
Guild Wars Factions - See #7. Expansion to Guild Wars.
Guild Wars Nightfall - See #7. Expansion to Guild Wars.
Ultima Online

Originally released in 1997 (they actually own "uo.com") Ultima Online is among the oldest graphical MMORPGs in existence, its original competitors being along the lines of Meridian 59 and The Realm. It took the legendary Ultima series online and in a radically different direction away from avatarhood and into choose your own adventure. Players logged in to find a true virtual world where they could become animal trainers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and so on in addition to the various flavor of adventurer.

The game took a turn for the worse when griefing turned out to be more entertaining than playing house and the resulting bloodbath drove away the victims in droves. The ultimate solution to solve this problem was segregation, but this removed a great deal of magic from the idea of a virtual world, and this is an omission from which mainstream MMORPG development has never recovered (with the possible exception of EVE Online, currently heralded as the #1 MMORPG on the list for this reason alone). Perhaps it was out of karma that EA obliterated Origin Systems by telling them they no longer create worlds.

However, the reason I'm not playing this game has nothing to do with all the skeletons in its collective closet. The reason I'm not playing this game is because it's so old that you can almost hear the server creaking when you queue a movement and the gameplay is a ridiculous bunch of pointing, clicking, and tedious inventory management that is sorely bereft of the foremost thing I look for in a game: depth. Recent expansions (which remarkably are still being made) have tried to bring the game "up to date," but I am under the opinion that they've done little more than put new faces on the ruins of what was once a promising virtual world.

What would get me back into the game: Net code that feels like it was not written in COBOL. Alienate your entire existing playerbase by killing Trammel and instead implementing realistic-feeling solutions that prevent griefing from going out of control without neutering the players. There was a point in which the playerbase was attempting the police themselves... what if you gave them more power than the griefers?
Anarchy Online

Whenever a new MMORPG comes out, there is inevitably some whining twit who says that this game had the worst launch ever. Whatever might be wrong with that game, chances are that you can snub them and tell them that no, they're wrong, Anarchy Online holds that dubious honor. It was a game so poorly launched that, for several weeks after release, it was either down or rubber-banding to unplayability at nearly all hours of the day. It would have died then and there if Funcom's government didn't put them on life support.

Since then, Anarchy Online has bounced back considerably and is a pretty decent product. Though this game came out at about the same time as Dark Age of Camelot, I really don't feel comfortable in referring to it as a fossil. Despite its crippling problems at release, this game was quite a bit ahead of its time and has aged better than its former competitors.

The main reason I'm not playing it is because I prefer more depth to the game mechanic. When this game came out, copying EverQuest was everybody's goal, and Anarchy Online's version went Sci-Fi with some instanced dungeons, and a less complicated skill system. Though I enjoyed their improvements to where the action took place, that the action was that much less satisfying made this a step in the wrong direction.

What would get me back into the game: Implement a core combat mechanic that is actually competitive with a modern game in terms of meaningful interaction.
Lineage 2

There exists an entire genre of games who feel that putting the players through a torturous grind is a rite of passage in becoming a big bad contender in end game PvP. RF Online and Archlord are two such games... going pay-to-play didn't work out for them. This genre of game often attempts to hide this masochistic focus behind remarkably beautiful graphics - that's been Aion Online's approach. The important thing to remember about Lineage 2 (whose approach to distraction was gratuitous use of undergarments) is that the Lineage series was the pioneer that solidified this genre.

It doesn't particularly matter to me, considering I've better things to do than deal with a deliberate torturous grind to be competitive in massive PvP combat that I had zero interest in to begin with. I prefer my PvP balanced and fair and my gameplay not prone to make a botter out of an otherwise virtuous individual.

What would get me back into the game: I don't have the patience for a 300 hour tutorial before I get to play the "real" game. Cut the grind down to a quarter of what it is now. Then cut the later game grind down to a quarter again. Shrink the newbie zones, which are ghost towns. Give me more tactically interesting powers up front. Provide some fair matchmaking practices for your PvP endgame.
World Of Warcraft

To most people, World of Warcraft has a special place in their heart. This is because it was the first MMORPG they ever played. All Blizzard had to do was take the EverQuest formula and spend millions of dollars buffing it until it was remarkably free of imperfection. The Blizzard brand-name appeal did the rest. Bam: 20 times more players than EverQuest ever had. The game is largely regarded as being the best MMORPG ever... sure, if by best MMORPG ever you mean most casually accessible and bug-free EverQuest clone with brand name appeal.

I got bored with it 4 weeks after release because it really didn't do enough from the various EverQuest clones I had already played for me to be entertained for long. I predicted it would tank because it has very little lasting MMORPG appeal. When it didn't, I thought I was wrong. A Blizzard CEO recently revealed only 30 percent of players even get past level 10. Now, I wonder how right I might have been after all.

What would get me back into the game: After my original cancellation, I tried to go back to World of Warcraft a couple times. No dice: it was still as derivative as I remembered it. Maybe I'll give it another try when Cataclysm comes out, since that does revamp the whole new player experience that bores me so.
EverQuest

EverQuest - whose main precursor could probably be considered Merdian 59 but there is a considerable jump in tech there that causes a certain cognitive disconnect - was the big man on campus among MMORPGs before World of Warcraft came along (at least in the western world). Now, I have to level the same critique against it that I would against Dark Age of Camelot or Ultima Online: it's really old.

Still, there's some merit to be found in giving it a play, if only because of the great historical significance it offers. In the same way as Ultima Online, EverQuest still thrives on a core fan base even today, and they just keep releasing expansions for it. They're up to their 16th expansion now. As you can imagine, as I feel overexpansion is a problem, I believe this game has a fatal case of it.

EverQuest II is generally better than the original, but be wary of such a comparison: they're radically different games. EverQuest really has more in common with Vanguard: Saga Of Heroes (made by the same designer, Brad McQuaid) but Final Fantasy XI and World of Warcraft did the formula better in different ways.

What would get me back into the game: A memory wipe that causes me to forget how bored I am of this ancient game.
Dungeons and Dragons Online

There was no nerd anticipation like there was for Dungeons and Dragons Online, the MMORPG to be based on the biggest pencil and paper RPG there ever was. However, when the game arrived, there was great chagrin when it was realized that this was hardly an MMORPG. Turbine had fallen for the instancing bug, nearly every zone that was not a town existed in a separate slice reserved for the player and his or her party - in this way, it was no more massively multiplayer than Guild Wars.

A few years later, Turbine made a very wise decision: they made the game "free to play" with an item mall. I was suddenly very interested in the game. Highly instanced games really feel just plain wrong when you try to charge the players subscription for them. The makers of Guild Wars knew this in advance. (Now, if only Cryptic Studios would catch on that this is what they are required to do with Champions Online and Star Trek Online.)

Anyway, I can't say that I'm not playing Dungeons and Dragons Online. Its icon is on my desktop, and every great once in awhile I'll log in. I've even spent about $50 in the item mall. The overall gameplay, while not entirely faithful to D20 rules, is actually a pretty good action-based hybrid that makes good use of feats, spells, and traps.

Already considering playing this game.
Wonderking

I did not play it, but one look at the screenshots reveals it for what it is: a MapleStory clone. Why not? Although it is basically a cartoony platform fighter RPG with an item mall, MapleStory has managed to get millions of subscribers. Getting a piece of that seems like an easy cash grab for me. However, I won't be playing it, because I'm twice the age this game would appeal to. I suspect that Dragonica Online offers superior gameplay (although its kid-friendliness would leave me just as embarrassed to play it).

What would get me back into the game: Water from the fountain of youth or a thug who gives me lots of head trauma. Whatever it takes to bring me back to that special state of mind that fosters both a love for wantonly kitschy sprites and a naive desire to engage in mindlessly simple activities.
Asheron's Call

Another fossil, I had adequate time to decide if I wanted to play Asheron's Call when it, EverQuest, and Ultima Online were the main MMORPGs in town. Though it was #3 behind Everquest and Ultima Online, Asheron's Call nonetheless had quite a few core fans. It definitely took a different approach than the other two games:
- Characters were not class-based but rather were customized by whatever skills and attributes you invested in (though Ultima Online did this as well, it was through actual use of skills while Asherons Call had you distribute points into skills).
- It had a combat system that involved attacking "high, low, middle" at varying speeds and you need to memorize which mobs are weak against which attacks.
- It had a magic system where you find new spells through experimenting with components. Once you found a spell, you needed to keep it a secret, because that spell gets weaker the more players who use it.
- It boasted little to no zoning - a truly seamless world.
I preferred EverQuest.
- The combat skills were more interesting than high/medium/low/speed to me.
- The classes introduced unique skills and interdependance.
- The spells were considerably less copy/pasty and you earned them more reliably.
- The world was more personalized than a bunch of barren hills sprinkled with an occasional settlement.
- I encountered a lot more rubber-banding in Asheron's Call.
I haven't looked back since, and I certainly don't have time to do so now.
What would get me back into the game: Go back in time and prevent EverQuest from ever being released.
Planetside

Planetside is a highly unique Massively Multiplayer First Person Shooter. It's not like there haven't been online combat simulators in the past, but this one pushed for relatively limitless numbers of players (the zones cap at about 150 players per side per map) and it had the deeper FPS elements of Tribes. For the first time, it felt like fast-paced, massively multiplayer combat, with vehicles, was here. World War II Online's developers referred to themselves as a cornered rat for a reason.

I stopped playing Planetside because of two big reasons:
- First, because there was never that essential something worth striving for that other MMORPGs had. On a personal level, you could get the same things at level 1 as you could at 20, just you would get more of them in time. This was good for the balance but it left nothing to look forward to. On a virtual world level, complexes we fought for hours to take would be taken back in minutes by a small team attacking in the middle of the night. There was no point to fighting at all, nothing would change, not personally, not virtual worldly.
- Second, the massively multiplayer combat didn't work under closer scrutiny. Once you get enough players together, there are so many dropped packets that skill went completely out the window. For the longest time, before they nerfed surge, the winning tactic was to charge people with an assault weapon, something they were largely helpless against because you were warping around on their client so much.
If only they had kept their original focus back in beta, where armor piercing ammo felt like it had a point, and the cone of fire was considerably looser. Under this balance, the winning tactic was to find some cover and take short bursts from it at enemies. How many armored suits am I likely to encounter - should I take more armor piercing or standard ammo? Does the enemy have better cover - can I flank them? Is it worth wasting my ammo at this range - should I fire when I can see the chrome off their helmets? Release day never saw the deeper, more-satisfying Planetside, and it's a pity - the world seemed to breath under it.

What would get me back into the game: Better net code, a more meaningful balance (e.g. the beta balance mentioned above), and more attention to the world as a dynamic content generation engine.
Runes Of Magic

Why the top 26 and not the top 25? Because Runes of Magic deserves to be on this list. It's a free to play game that has the flow of World of Warcraft and some of the best features from Final Fantasy XI. I might just go back to play it because, insofar as having an online 3D fantasy MMORPG is concerned, this is probably the best bet for the lowest price.

Runes of Magic also features a "job switching" system like (and suspiciously similarly implemented to) Final Fantasy XI, which suits my alt-a-holic mindset well. Considering the gameplay is so reminiscent of World of Warcraft, I can consider it just as annoyingly derivative, but actually the unique fusion of primary and secondary jobs does bring enough new material to bear that I could enjoy this game.

Already considering playing this game.

Dis/Honorable mentions:

Chronicles Of Spellborn (#27) - A more interesting fantasy RPG than most in that your hotbar actually automatically changes from 1 to 4 as you fight so that you can set up effective combo attacks with specially chaining abilities. It was largely snubbed as it feels like a lower-budget production than most, and that's a pity, because the game play is actually a lot more interesting. In response, it went free to play.

What would get me back into the game: An alternative PvE end game or mechanics that make the PvP end game matches fair.
Cabal Online (#31) - Generally speaking, this is the very model of a cheap Korean cybercafe grind, but it's made more interesting than most because of a combo system that involves tapping your attack when you're on the right part of a timing meter. It is a gigantic grind, but I was willing to humor that... right up to the point where I earned a "battle mode" and found this disabled the combo mechanic which was the sole reason I thought the game was interesting.

What would get me back into the game: Prevent the disabling the combo mechanic regardless of what modes may be active. Make the combo mechanic less prone to lag (it's mostly a frame skipping problem). Provide a PvE end game or balanced PvP end game.
Champions Online (#41) - After logging 1600 hours in City of Heroes/Villains, I had high hopes for Champions Online. Unfortunately, they decided to make the game compatible with the X-Box 360 (which they have yet to actually release the game on) and that was the start of a long downhill side that the game suffers from today.
- Initially, they limited themselves to a 7 move hotbar to facilitate the X-Box Controller. This was okay because the idea was that they would allow various moves to be bound to each power and which one activates depends on how you activate it (e.g. rapid tapping, holding down the button, ect).
- Making things even more interesting, you would have up to four "builds" of which 7 powers were active. Thus, you would be able to build your character's "decks" like a collectable card game.
When that failed to immediately bring about fun, they switched the hotbar from 7 to 14 moves and broke the individual effects that made up each move of a power into multiple powers. This rapid switching of gears completely devastated the RPG mechanic. There were now far too many attacks, many of them feeling redundant and consequently not worth taking. Having multiple builds no longer mattered because, with 14 powers to a hotbar, you might as well just pick your favorite stance and stick with it for most characters.

Then Bill Roper was hired to try to fix the mess, a move that immediately sparked even more controversy since his company, Flagship, had sunk. To his credit, I think that the addition of power tiers and removal of universal power selection did add some needed structure. However, when taking the larger snafu of the above list into consideration, it was just another wrong turn to cover up a previous wrong turn.

I tried to like this game. I tried really hard. I generated over a dozen characters and earned perhaps 200 levels between them. I was just finding to find one that "worked." Yet, despite my best efforts, all my characters were doubly damned in the end. Damned by not being able to take the powers they need to support their concept due to tier restrictions. Damned by the powers that were available typically being made obsolete by inferior (usually, but not always, higher-tier) alternatives. My 6-month discounted subscription expires today. I am not renewing.

What would get me back into the game: Significantly reduce the amount of instancing, add some aspects to make this game feel virtual worldly, and/or make this game free to play. Alienate your existing customers by ripping out the bastardized heart and soul of your existing game: remove tiers and go back to a single power point system where players can expand their characters in any direction they have the points for.
Mabinogi (#75) - A rather interesting game, although a little dated (the original Korean version was released in 2004). It is notable because the virtual world mechanics involving crafting (they refer to this as "fantasy life") is as important as combat. We have seen that only a few times since Ultima Online, and then it was not nearly as entertaining as Mabinogi's implementation.

It has quite a number of interesting features besides this:
- A macro music system. Similar mechanics have also seen in Lord of the Rings Online and the (new defunct) Asheron's Call 2. Mabinogi's is unique in that it involves arranging notes on a song sheet (which you can sell to other players) and then attempting to play it (success of each note based on your music skill).
- Combat is actually unpredictable and timing-based, which is quite refreshing over the usual "sandwich combat." (Turn on auto-attack, go make a sandwich, come back when battle is completed.)
- Your character actually ages one year a week. You eventually reach a point in which you need to "rebirth" to gain more ability points.
Is Athena alive and inspiring a game company in Korea? Other than the general monotony of grinding common to most MMORPGs, perhaps the main downside of the game is all characters are portayed as being age 10-19. This would have been a more interesting if a wider life cycle were represented - it's almost like you're being asked to leave if you're older than that. Why - does only the next generation deserve this much thought put to virtual world mechanics?
Already considering playing this game.
Star Trek Online (#Really far down the list) - Another Cryptic Studios game, another game I really wanted to like and have been unable to bring myself to. It's based on the Star Trek license. It has ship-based and ground-based aspects to the game - something I think would make for an excellent MMORPG. Unfortunately, it just doesn't feel like an MMORPG. It's a single player experience with some vague MMORPG trappings.

Worst lifetime subscription investment ever. My reasoning was that I could overlook that it wasn't free to play if that was no longer a factor, but it backfired because there's really not enough here to have a reason to play it for more than a week or two. It gets boring quick, and boredom is a death knell for any game, MMORPG or not.

Playing this game whether I want to or not. However, if I had my way:

The title is a bit of misnomer - there are a few I'm willing to play. Remarkably, they're all free to play titles: Atlantica Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Runes Of Magic, and Mabinogi. Still, considering what I've been through, mediocre grinds upon mediocre grinds, so many promises of cool virtual worlds only to be disappointed by shallow cash grabs, it's little wonder I've cultivated such a surly mindset towards games.

How To Survive As A Gamer In 2010

2010-03-18T15:05:00.001-07:00

After about a year and a half on dsob.wordpress.com, I've decided to return to geldonsgaming.blogspot.com. What has changed in that time? This is the topic of my return to Blogger.com special feature:

Expand: How To Survive As A Gamer In 2010

In general, I'd say the situation is this (although there will be exceptions to the rules to be found):

Between the casual pandering of the last decade and 9 out of 10 people apparently feeling they don't need to buy games when they can download them, the state of PC gaming has become even more of a shallow cash grab than it was 2 years ago. PC core gamers are no longer just pleasantly surprised with Indy game developers, they're now relying on them for most games even remotely worth playing.
Most MMORPGs are no longer worth a monthly subscription fee. There's so damn many of them that they're no longer novel. They can't seem to push the genre beyond the stuff we were doing in the 90s. Worst of all, recent ones tend to be so heavily instanced that they offer an experience largely indistinguishable from a single player (or limited multiplayer) game anyway.

Overall, as a PC gamer you're getting less of a game now than you would have 10 years ago. I've compensated in four major ways:

Dig up old games and play them. Personally, I found X-Com: Apocalypse, a 1997 game, more entertaining than all but a rare few games released today. It's not a unique case, games made 10 or more years ago were typically created for the core gamer.
Be extremely wary of buying anything from a big budget studio. This is because, more often than not, they're generating games for gaming newbies under the expectation they'll make more money than a smaller core gamer niche. One can only be disappointed so many times before realizing it's just a bad idea to expect that which they have no intention to deliver. Of course, studios you know which have yet to bow down to the lowest common denominator are an exemption... until they do, of course.
Go multiplatform. I bought a PSP and renewed my GameFly subscription, and was suddenly reminded why gaming is good again. The Wii is mostly casual-friendly fare to be avoided, the X-Box has more core gamer games but also a good deal of content intended for trendy knuckleheads, but Sony's Playstation network is still fairly ripe with products intended for the core market: if it looks foreign, you probably struck paydirt. Though I've always preferred the PC, I've largely been thrust away from the platform by the frequency of cash grabs over real games.
Learn how to make your own games. Personally, I've become rather well practiced in BYOND, though I've no finished artifact to show for it yet. I also picked up a student discounted version of an Adobe development package so (once I'm out of school in May) I'll be able to knuckle down and learn to do some nice flash app development.

Added to my student-earned frugality - I generally wait until games come down to the $20 mark or (if $20 is deemed too much) wait until they're being offered for 75% off or more - it's actually fairly easy to survive as a gamer these days.

Art! (And Games)

2008-09-08T00:14:00.000-07:00

Fate has interesting ways of throwing you a curve ball, especially when you’re an unemployed university student whose program is finally getting up off the ground. This weekend of mine – no doubt one I would have normally preferred to spend playing Spore on my new computer – was instead largely spent at TBA:08 – a Time-based media festival taking place in Portland, Oregon.

Admittedly, what I’ve seen and figured out during this time has been worth the trip. Though I don’t think it’s justified to go far into the specific performances (of which I probably largely misinterpreted) I nonetheless am fond in speaking in generalizations.

Art is?

There was a point in my life – not too long ago, in fact, shortly before I started going to college full time – when I considered art to largely be a completely fruitless waste of time. The trouble is that it does not seem to produce much in the way of material benefit. Where is the benefit of taking perfectly good paint and placing it on perfectly good canvas? Sure, you might create something that looks nice, but it’s just a pale imitation to life.

“I don’t know what art is,” I would say as the common philistine would, “but I know what I like.” This is pretty, that’s nice, that’s evocative. I still wouldn’t buy it, of course, it serves no purpose – but hey, good job.

That was before humanities class. Before anthropology class. Before music appreciation class. Before my current university major, Digital Technology and Culture. It was through my education that I came to realize that, in being a major appreciator of computer games, I had a certain appreciation of art to begin with.

Games Are Art… Once You Know What Art Is

The thing that fascinates me about computer games is that they are, more often than not, a creation of a new reality – a new meaning – where there previously was none. The computer game developers utilize the computer and it’s interfaces – the programming language and content creation tools – to form a virtual environment in which the game takes place. This applies to all games, not just virtual reality games: a chess game would require a visualization of a chessboard and the pieces as well as the underlying logic that runs the game, and viola, a new electronic reality of chess is created.

What I’ve come to realize about the purpose of art is that it is the same: It creates a new reality – a new meaning – where previously there was none. There’s different ways of accomplishing this, and not all start from scratch, but the thing is that art fundamentally redefines reality. Whether it evokes an emotion on behalf of the user is a very minor concern compared to the overall sweeping reality concept that is being framed and presented to the viewer to interpret.

So it is that, just like your average computer game, the main thing that stumps the artist is the implementation, which is a bitch. You might start with a promising sounding concept and, regardless of whether you’re attempting to entertain or educate, there’s a fundamental challenge of how are you going to manifest this concept in a way the viewer can interpret? This is made all the more difficult because the viewers bring their own mental baggage and expectations that will undoubtedly change the way they will interpret the stimuli that the artist delivers to them.

Worth

An interesting question posed to some artists speaking at the festival today is what is the worth or value of your art? This caused them to mentally bristle somewhat, of course – questioning the spoils of an artist’s work is a bit like questioning the worth of anyone’s job. Had they reacted less defensively, the philosophical ramifications of the question placed are actually a bit easier to understand:

Worth, any worth, exists as a manifestation of the mind. Worth cannot be found anywhere, but rather we find something and we assign worth to it. Diamonds are but rocks, yet we assign worth to them and suddenly people are killing for them. Money is an abstract concept, but (as good capitalists) we dance to its tune. In the end, what worth you find in art is up to you, and the artist never had much control over that.

It’s ironic I had to pick up this lesson about art being the creation of meaning over an exhibit on absurdism, which is apparently an attempt to create art that demonstates the universe is without meaning. In doing so, they inadverently(?) prove themselves wrong by attempting to create meaningful pieces about why there is no point to finding meaning.

Punching Out

So, that’s pretty much my current insight I’m picking up from classes right now.

Another good thing I’ll mention here is that I picked up a copy of The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. This is the same fellow who made Disney’s Toontown Online, an MMORPG that signifies success in an unusual manner: by being good enough that bored pundits like ourselves could not find adequate reason to criticize it.

The fundamental approach is not that hard to summarize: As there’s no exact science to game design, the author offers an alternative method of finding structure. 100 different perspectives, or lenses, in which one’s game can be viewed to find new insight into how to make it entertaining.

I’m hoping that by reading this I can figure out how to make my BYOND game fun. Currently, it’s a whole lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Specifically, a shared environment that uses the tragedy of the commons as an impetus for player conflict that, I’ve decided, I don’t want to turn out to be a total waste of time like similar games I’ve played that do this. (For example: Planetside.)

What actually will happen, of course, is entirely up to my motivation to see this through. Regardless, I think buying this book was $50 spent in the right direction, as apparently many of the lessons within are actually pretty good life lessons as well.

Review: Spore

2008-09-07T00:08:00.000-07:00

By the time you read this (about 6 hours after I posted it) Maxis’s Spore should now be available for download from Direct2Drive. Spore has been getting steadily hyped for several years now, but the thing about hype is that it makes bad games look better and good games look worse; In short, hype is bullshit, always has been always, always will be, and the value of a game should be determined through your own experiences playing it.

In a feat of apparent time-traveling, I have both bought Spore and I played it all the way through. My impressions follow.

The Broad Fare

Spore is not a single game, but rather a smattering of five that work together, and each stage plays differently.

The first “Cellular” stage is a simple top-down two-dimensional arcade game where your little cellular life – not a far cry from the titular spore – attempts to survive in the harsh world of cellular life. You swim about by holding the right mouse button and scoop up the food appropriate to your species. Every once in awhile you’ve collected enough food to upgrade your cell, which takes you back to the creature editor where you can tack on some more cellular structures, which often have a function: spikes to injure enemies, ect. In this way, this stage is a reasonably adept little time waster. 7.5/10

The second “Creature” stage is perhaps the most refined in the entire game, one in which you take control of a creature in a third person perspective, walk about to find food and other creatures, and interact with them in friendly or hostile manners. You should be able to get through this stage in about two hours or less, but you might opt to stay longer since it’s very much full of that personal cuteness that made The Sims such as success. 9/10.

The third “Tribal” stage is a very simple real time strategy game in which your creature gains sentience and now lives on a tribal level. It’s controlled from a disconnected overhead map perspective, which you use to direct your tiny tribe to bring the neighboring tribes into submission either by butchering them or befriending them. There’s some charm in this stage, especially if you choose peaceful resolution, but little overall lasting appeal – it’s just as well the stage is easy to compete well within an hour. 6/10

Even though the tribal stage could use
some refinement as a game, it still oozes charm.

The fourth “Civilization” stage introduces multiple cities, city planning, building design, and vehicle design… but aside from that it’s pretty much the real time strategy game from the third stage taken on a larger scale. Now, you use your units over land, sea, and air to bring the other cities on the planet under one government. The simple tools given the player at this point would not be sufficient to really overcome the opposition, so you are actually given a number of powerful moves you can activate that give you an unbeatable advantage. This stage lacks the charm of the earlier stages, and is very much a matter of brute-force real time strategy. 5/10

The fifth “Space” stage now puts you in command of a single powerful starship that you use to travel between planets and stars. It’s very much a combination of the earlier stages: the ship controls like your cell in stage 1, the creatures from stage 2 are here, there are some planets with tribes from stage 3, some planets in the civilization phase from stage 4 (as well as your city building and diplomacy is taken from there). In stage 5, you meet other races, reshape planets to bring life where there was none, and basically play a cross between God and a space explorer.

Up to this point, each stage is fairly simple and can probably be finished in about an hour or less. Thus, the fifth and final stage comes as a bit of a shock: In over 2 days of playing it, I’ve yet to really complete it, though the progress bar for this stage has been advanced all the way to the right.
It can sometimes get a little monotonous when cries come in from halfway across the galaxy needing you to drop everything and pilot your ship over to help with raiding enemies or virus-infected wildlife again. Aren’t there any competent people in the universe besides you? Still, I have to say that I rather enjoyed this stage because it’s hard to find a good space game these days. 7.5/10.

Bringing the spread together

The interesting thing about Spore is not specifically the five stages of game so much as how they work together and outside the scope of the current game.
There’s the sandbox appeal that comes with what you can create in Spore. The creature you create is a highly unique bit of virtual life, and that creature sticks around until the end. You can think back fondly on when it was just a little cell in the primordial ooze and, now look, your once dumb animal is now communicating to you through your space ship communicator from a city populated by vehicles and buildings you created.

In a rather nice touch, animated gifs and jpgs
of your creatures and other creations are
automatically generated on the fly.

Second, there’s the way all five stages are tied together. As you advance your little protozoic creature from beginning to end, your choices on how to overcome the problems in the game shape what that creature is capable of doing. Is your creature an herbivore, omnivore, or carnivore? Does your creature prefer to solve problems using warfare, economics, religion, science, or something else? What’s more, making these choices at different stages will reflect which of a number of powerful moves you have at your disposal.

Third, there’s the lasting appeal of seeing your creature go out into the Spore universe. On an individual level, this manifests as your creature existing in the same universe that your new creatures come into existence in. That means you can trip over your old creatures while cruising the galaxy with the new. However, on the online level, this goes to new heights: You can now download other people’s creature and building designs and they’ll show up as creatures you encounter in your game.

Thus, despite the simplicity of many of the games’ modes, Spore has some level of replay value. Most players owe it at least three replays to see how the game plays in peaceful, warlike, or neutral modes. After that, you may not dig it out and play with it constantly every day, but you might dig it out once in awhile and create a new creature or shape your personal universe some more. Spore is, if nothing else, a sandbox of unprecedented scale.

Overall, Spore deserves the 8/10s it’s getting. It deserves no 10s for the sparse civilization and tribal stages, not to mention the annoying persistent alerts in the space stage. However, it deserves no less than a 7 for the sheer charm and unique gameplay mechanic it exudes. Spore is a game that delivers many favorable memories upon its players, and I would be surprised to discover many PC gamers so heartless as to not want it in their collection — if only to whip out once in awhile and roll up a crazy new creature.

With any luck, Maxis will utilize Spore in much the same way they did The Sims series: by releasing regular expansions that add a number of new features and content. This would be good because it would go far to flesh out the parts of Spore that feel sparse. However, time will tell what will actually occur.

What can we learn from Spore?

From a game design standpoint, I would have to say that lead thing we learn from Spore is that an endearing presentation can make a simple game a lot more tolerable. Nothing in stages 1, 3, or 4 has not been done better elsewhere, but they nonetheless stand as acceptable parts of the game because of the presentation alone. Stage 2 manages to steal the show because it’s so very interesting to walk about as a alien creature on a strange planet, meet other creatures, and interact with them: many of the facial expressions are priceless, especially coming from a strange creature that looked like it stepped outside of a Dr. Seuss sketch.

Of course, this is not the only lesson one can pull from Spore. There’s a remarkable amount of between-game interaction here that is masterfully executed and combined with a foresight for Internet community influence. Every game released these days should be equally Internet savvy, and to integrate that level of blended gameplay diversity is a tough act indeed.

Were I to make any improvements to Spore, I think it would have been a good idea to merge stages 3 and 4. The tribal and civilization stages could very well exist as a single, unified stage that would resemble the proven formula of Civilization (the game) – except with Maxim-esque deviation, of course. Instead, we ended up with two hastily polished stages that Spore probably would have been better off without.

Bringing The Flow: A Player’s Job?

2008-09-01T00:04:00.000-07:00

Between S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s Oblivion Lost and BioShock’s Difficulty And Balance Mod, I’ve discovered a powerful point that seems to be demonstrated through both:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was always sort of hard, but Oblivion Lost adds a number of new enemies as well as tweaking the old ones to pull nifty new tricks like spawning psychic doubles that gang up on you. There’s also a random chance of having to avoid nuclear blast. This mod certainly keeps one on their toes! The new economy is also nicely retooled to allow you to make a profit only if you’ve been playing like the overcautious scrounger the titular stalkers should be.

One thing I find enjoyable about Oblivion Lost is that darkness looks really dark. Walking through the woods in pitch black, hearing the groans of a nearby zombie, is enough to keep one's finger securely on the trigger. It's something you wont' find in a more casual-friendly light balance.

BioShock’s “difficulty and balance mod” is not nearly as ambitious, but it does offer a challenge sorely lacking in the vanilla game. The wrenches are now a very feeble weapon without tonic enhancement. Respawning at a Vita-Chamber with no repercussions was the main loophole in the game, and the mod now (temporarily?) ramps up the game difficulty further upon respawning, introducing incentive to keep alive. Double-hitpoint Big Daddies are certainly a challenge, but even your average splicer can now make you pay for sloppiness.

Now, I don’t enjoy having to reload my game constantly, but I do enjoy being challenged, and that’s what those mods do for me. In both cases, the difficulty has been ramped up, and the result is pure gaming gold.
What we have here is genuine game vigilantism at its best. Fans, annoyed at how easy big-name game developers make games to please the casual market, directly intervened to make games much harder and satisfying. (It makes me wonder if I could even make Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion more exciting with a little work.)

Balance of Power

So, having to determined that making those games harder made them more enjoyable, the question remains why?

Most obvious answer: a higher difficulty is conductive to flow for a player who is good and used to the games. I’ve completed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and BioShock before, I don’t need my hand held anymore. (As an established gamer, I may never had particularly needed the game to afford me a casual gamers’ balance.)

It’s also possible that the reason why higher difficulties are appreciated is because both games are power fantasies of sorts. Pitting the player against pushovers is simply not conductive to a good power fantasy. If anything, one begins to pity the opposition. it takes a most formidable foe overcome for the inner beast to beat its chest in triumph.

Extrapolate

If anything, my own dabbling in BYOND lately has been a bit of game vigilantism of my own: if the casual market is so very lucrative that hardcore gamers are ignored, they might as well intervene through difficulty mods or (as in the case of BYOND) making their own, harder games.

I had hit a bit of a snag in my latest development in that the game did not seem intuitive, but I realize now that the problem is deeper; My game is simply not made to be conductive to a good challenge. It seems like I’ve a long, long way to go before I master this knack of flow generation and delivery. (But then, it once seemed like I’d a long long way to go before I learned to properly harness the BYOND programming language… that took about a week.)

Modern PC Game Recommendations

2008-08-31T23:54:00.000-07:00

When one first upgrades their computer, the perspective is one of, “I wonder if this game I had trouble with before plays better now.” After the new computer buzz wears off a bit, one begins to realize that all their games play the same, just without lag. (With the exception of games which were so laggy that they were unplayable to begin with, but I think my old ATI X1600XT still pulled enough pixels on lower settings that I never quite encountered that.) So it is that I look to my pile of games and wonder at what in the way of not technical superiority but rather quality there is to play.

“Old” Games (Defined as games I had sitting around my house for awhile.)

Real-Time Strategy: Supreme Commander.
As far as Real Time Strategy goes, Supreme Commander is the purest and most powerful take to it. The tried-and-true Total Annihilation balance meets cutting-edge GUI innovation. No other RTS allows you to command hundreds of units quite as well. Technically, it’s one of the few games that makes truly good use out of multiple-core CPUs. The latest expansion adds a few things, but the core game is solid enough.

Turn-Based Strategy: UFO Afterlight
It’s not exactly turn-based, but close to it, because you plan out actions and then pause or resume the action as you see fit. Thus, the thought-based mechanic of a turn-based strategy game is maintained. The earlier UFO games (Aftershock and Aftermath) are fairly awful – I can only recommend them to those who have a strong stomach and don’t mind plodding through a difficultly balanced game. Afterlight, however, is considerably better balanced. It’s still quite difficult (in a good ol’ X-Com sort of way) and not entirely stable at times, but this game has robbed me of quite a few nights rest.

Roleplay First Person Shooter: S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is not getting its own entry because, frankly, I’m sick of it. The atmosphere enthralled me at first, but eventually it wears off. (For me, this is when I first completed the main campaign. For Yahtzee, it apparently was when he first installed it.) At that point, a very tired and humdrum game is revealed. I tried many of the plethora of mods that have been made by the fan community for it, but they do not solve the overall problem that core game the engine presents is very simplistic in nature. Throw fireball, swing sword, spam heal/potions, win. Blah!

(S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky trailer.)

I mention this here because S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an awesome Oblivion replacement. It does take place in an alternate universe Chernobyl (site of a major nuclear catastrophe), a far cry from Tamriel. However, the atmosphere, Oblivion’s main trumpcard, is several times better in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Just as importantly, the gameplay involved is much more interesting: pointing and shooting with variable accuracy pistols and rifles feels much more involved.

Though I loved vanilla S.T.A.L.K.E.R. until I first completed it, I found the replay value weak. That’s why I’m happy to say that I found the (ironically named) Oblivion Lost mod to greatly enhance the replayability. It does this by introducing many elements of worldliness, unpredictability, balance, foes, and in-game equipment. I have yet to read up on the recently released “clear sky” official expansion much, and considering how good Lost Oblivion is I’ll probably be checking for compatibility first.

Fantasy Action Roleplay: Two Worlds
Maybe you prefer to Oblivion alternatives to be fantasy based, and in that case I offer Two Worlds. This game had a much poorer reception than Oblivion amongst reviewers and players alike, but I feel that’s mostly a first impression problem. Once you get into it, Two Worlds offers a much more organic feel and more interesting gameplay.

(Two Worlds gameplay)
The cities and peasants feel considerably more natural, not like they were placed there with the Elder Scrolls Construction Set. The basic combat in Two Worlds feels simplistic at first, but it picks up as you earn a number of hotbar-enabled abiltiies and learn the importance of dodging and watching your opponents movements. The spells are somewhat recycled, but that’s a crime Oblivion is equally guilty of, and the effects in Two World are actually quite a bit more diverse. Only in Two Worlds may you find yourself laying out flaming fields of fire, slowly baking your enemies to death.

The main issue with Two Worlds I can find are that the engine isn’t as pretty as Oblivion, the physics arent’ as well implemented, the controls are a bit tougher to master (especially the oddness of horseback riding and getting snagged on a pebble) and that the balance is a bit strange. It’s one of those “open-balance” RPGs where the players are pretty much free to accumulate wildly, with things such as herbs you can mix to create permanent stat increases. That’s actually a bit cool once you get used to it, the enemies I encounter deeper into the game seem to be well-balanced to counter the juggernaut of a character I end up with.

Roleplay First Person Shooter #2: BioShock

BioShock is Ken Levine’s endeavor to prove that games can be artistically incredible and still good, and this is reflected throughout its environment: A horror action-adventure shooter that takes place in a 1950s-style underwater city where society has gone horribly wrong. I shouldn’t need to say more – would you kindly just try it?

The main counterpoint of BioShock is the replay value. All those neat story twists are spent, and the balance isn’t all that tough. (There is a difficulty and balance mod… I have yet to try it, but should.) The ending is very clique, and only two endings (a black and a white) the immersive environment is somewhat wasted. Some people can replay BioShock, but (having not tried the mod) I can’t say I see the appeal after the first (quite awesome) trip through Rapture.

“New” Games (Defined as games I recently purchased or am considering purchasing.)

Action: Lost Planet: Colonies

Made by Capcom, Lost Planet has a very console-like feel to it: Run around, pick up weapons, fire away against super CGI-rendered beings great and small. However, so far as showcasing cutting edge hardware goes, there’s probably no better game to do it. Yes yes, Crysis… but Crysis’s technical superiority is diminished somewhat by its simple first-person-shooter gameplay (even the special suit abilities were not quite enough to overcome this). Lost Planet just feels a whole lot more epic… perhaps that has something to do with the several story tall aliens you’re put up against. The artistic direction alone make this game very easy to recommend, but the gameplay itself is quite solid.

Action Adventure: Assassin’s Creed
UbiSoft’s Assassin’s Creed is the rare game that is heavily hyped yet actually survived the hyping process looking good. Like many of the games listed here, Assassin’s Creed excels in both atmosphere and gameplay. The atmosphere is a truly stunning representation of the middle east during the middle ages, with perhaps the most realistic-feeling city life if any game listed here. The gameplay itself is a really well executed combination of third-person sneaking, combat, and perhaps the most sophisticated representation of an acrobatic, building-climbing character ever.

(Assassin’s Creed Gameplay)

I have not really penetrated Assassin’s Creed very far yet, so I’m projecting a bit when reaching for the downside of this game. It seems to me that the plot is a bit loopy – it’s one of multiple layers that seeks to keep the player in the dark as long as possible. Further, there’s some bothersome travel time sequences that are good at preserving immersion but at the cost of unneccessary down time.

Sci-Fi Roleplay: Mass Effect

At its core, Mass Effect is many hard-found games wrapped into one. The open-ended planet exploration of Starflight. The cover-based quasi-FPS combat of Gears of War. The 3D atmopheric adventure of Anacronox. Of course, the Bioware style story and action fusion found in games such as Knights of the Old Republic. However, Mass Effect’s wrapper is one fresh out of the high production value military Sci-Fi movie, and it feels great from start to finish. There’s even some replay value here in terms of being able to take your character through again and again to unlock achievements and special skills.

Very excitingly, Mass Effect is said to be the first part of a three-part series in which your character’s choices will influence the course of.

Conclusion

I noticed as I compiled this list that clearly my preference in games is in atmospheric-feeling games with relatively deep gameplay behind them. I’m thoroughly burnt from MMORPGs, and perhaps that’s for the best: those things are terrible time suckers for often sub-par experiences. Of these games, I’ve already completed most of them, but Assassin’s Creed and Lost Planet are two that I’ve yet to really get into yet.

I haven’t done much BYOND work lately. The game I made isn’t panning out right. I’m not a real big believer in the concept of “balancing in” the game because I think a game should be good on the core level. So it seems that currently I’m doing some “research”. Playing good games like these help remind me what I enjoy about games in ways that two weeks of screwing around with BYOND code can make one forget.

The Death Strangulation Migration of PC gaming

2008-08-30T23:49:00.000-07:00

Death?

Now that I have a PC fast enough to run modern games, a startling thing that I noticed is just how few of them there are. I have not bought that many games over the past few years – I was busy with school. Even so, I somehow owned over half of the (worthwhile) games the local BestBuy had in stock (most of which were mentioned in yesterday’s entry).

In some BestBuys, this would be your Windows Game section.

A times like this, my first reaction is to wonder if PC gaming is dying, or even dead. However, I have a hard time believing that’s truly the case when we’ve awesome games coming out soon: Spore, Warhammer Online, and Fallout 3 among them. And yet, it seems clear to me that the release rate has decreased over PC gaming’s prime.

I don’t have to take the reduced shelf space at the local computer game stores as the only indicator, consider GameSpot’s New Release List. On a week-by-week basis, the PC has more or less the same number of releases as a console, but the list is now being heavily padded by obscure indy games, Korean MMORPGs, and even the occasional hentai dating sim. When did listing those games become neccessary?

Strangulation?

Perhaps it’s more like PC gaming is strangled.

Strangled by the tired old procession of clones. So many games, so little creativity between them.
Strangled by excessive competition from consoles: PC is competing for your gaming dollar versus the likes of the Sony, Nintendo, and even Microsoft (talk about a conflict of interest). Even your cell phone is playing for your gaming time.
Strangled by excessive software piracy: it’s hard for big-name companies to take the PC game market seriously when so many people are adept at stealing their products.
Perhaps even strangled by MMORPG player retention mechanics, steadily bleeding $15/mo out of every involved gamers’ budget.

It’s not that difficult to imagine a number of reasons why the PC gaming industry would be strangled, but then what?

Perhaps a strangled PC market is a good thing. Less cluttered shelf space certainly makes finding the gems easier. Having to buy less games now means having more money around to buy games later. Most importantly, it leaves the door open to indies, who can sometimes produce something quite exceptional. In a way, my recent BYOND dabbling is very much the work of an indy, and I wouldn’t have a chance of dazzling anyone with a tile-based 2D engine if they weren’t pretty desperate by now.

Migration!

Perhaps what’s really going on is that PC gaming is neither dead nor particularly strangled, but rather migrated. Maybe the place to look for PC games these days is not at the shelves of BestBuy. Maybe the place to look for PC games these days is online. There’s quite a few online services that make getting games easy and affordable without ripping off the developers and/or publishers.

For example:

Direct2Drive – Services like Direct2Drive are becoming increasingly more common. Simply browse their online game catalog, buy one you like with your credit card, and download. No fear of losing your download: Direct2Drive saves purchased game information to the individual accounts, so you can simply redownload as neccessary. They often have big-name games available on a same-day basis – why walk all the way down to the store or struggle with reservations?

Steam – Through Steam, Valve has expanded the mechanism for securely selling the Half-Life series to interested third parties. There’s considerable debate as to what qualifies as a Steam-powered game (it seems to be an arbitrary Valve employee decision) but the nice thing about Steam is that a healthy majority of the PC gaming public has it installed and running.

GameTap – This subscription-based PC game library includes both a wide number of proven classics and “GameTap Originals” such as the Grimm series. Many games (currently 143) are completely free: simply download the software, create an account, and play. These are simply the hook to unlock complete access to all (currently 1043) games, at a very reasonable $60/year price. GameTap is essentially a season’s pass to the bargain bin, and there’s quite a few good games of yesteryear you may have missed.

Indeed, it seems the Internet has been around long enough that the problem with PC gaming is not availability of games so much as simply finding them. The Internet is an undeniably collosal pile of hay in which to dig for needles. I begin to understand the appeal of a dedicated gaming gem hunter, as I certainly don’t have the patience for it.

Game Brains: Your Artificially Intelligent Opponent

2008-08-25T23:44:00.000-07:00

As I take my BYOND project’s AI back to the drawing board for the 3rd or 4th time, I realize I’ve collected a bit of insight as to what goes into a game’s artificial intelligence that negated my earlier impressions.

In my initial impression, the main thing that worried me was creating a competent AI. Trying to design a real life robot to perform simple pathfinding is remarkably painstaking work because the computer thinks in terms of ones and zeroes – “on” and “off” switches – and the rock obstructing the way is neither “on” nor “off” but “rock.” Performing the necessary conversion is a challenge.

Games have it a bit easier because the action takes place in a digital world from the start. There are no rocks, merely 1s and 0s that represent abstractions of rock. Some challenge remains, as the environment is restructured to have some similarities with life so the player can relate. The closer to real it is, the closer we get to our real life robot trying to understand an analog rock. Overcoming even the minute challenge in a 2D tile-based game was a trial I did not look forward to when it came to writing my own AI.

The Unbeatable AI

What I’ve learned is that this is the least of my worries. When it comes to a computer game, teaching a computer program how to play itself is simply a matter of persistence. An effective game AI can be made by simply providing enough winning instructions to handle all situations provided by the game. Once enough work has been put into that, the game can even play itself better than the player, since computers follow instructions exactly and at lightning-fast speed.

IBM's "Deep Blue" has defeated the best chessmasters in
the world. However, I would argue it was not truly
intelligent so much as very well instructed.

The challenge of building the AI will differ with the game, of course. “Twitch” games, which rely on reflexes, are simple enough because the instant reflexes of a computer can dominate players the very physical level. In more open-ended games it’s more complicated because there’s more moves, but still doable if enough persistence is applied. In the end, depending on the number and sophistication of choices involved, more or less effort is required to make a perfect AI – one that makes the best possible move every time.

Whether it’s easy or hard to make a bulletproof AI, it doesn’t really matter. Unlike someone designing a failsafe workplace application AI, the unbeatable AI has no place in a game.

The ideal game AI

The real goal on behalf of a game AI designer is not to make the computer play remarkably well. The real goal is to make the computer a fun opponent. What’s fun? Lets go with flow theory: the AI needs to offer enough challenge for the player to feel challenged while simultaneously not being too frustrating. It’s a delicate balancing act that is made even trickier by having to devise a means to rate the player.

Another matter that limits me in my current BYOND work is efficiency. Just because I can run some 200,000 lines of BYOND code per second doesn’t mean I can afford to have every little robot in the game eating up 10,000 lines per second. By the time I get to 20 robots, the rest of my game grounds to a halt as my 200,000 lines are entirely consumed by the lines dedicated to the AI. Thus, a large demand on my design is to break down the AI logistics into as small of an amount of processing as possible while still allowing them to be compelling opponents.

Senster's purpose wasn't to beat its observers, but rather playfully entertain them. It accomplished this in real space with late 1960s technology.

Fortunately, these two aspects work hand in hand. The weaknesses I deliberately give my AI (so the player can feel good about finding and exploiting them) can also be the same ones that would take a lot of code to get around. One can even come up with a good in-character excuse for opponents to be thick: wild animals, clunky robots, or other such opponents aren’t expected to be highly adaptive.

An alternate (perhaps lazier) solution that seems to work well is the numerical approach. Whether or not your opponent is smart, taking on two is harder (or even one with some other physical advantage). Plus, the player can still feel fairly good about overcoming their dumb opponents when a powerful handicap was involved. I would put the caveat on this approach that too obviously dumb opponents eventually become unsatisfying no matter how many there are or how strong you make them.

Conclusion

In the end, perhaps the computer is really no match for a player in terms of opponent quality. It’s just a bit more interesting when your opponent is actually learning, and the game becomes who can learn faster. However, when there’s nobody else around, it’s better to play against the developer’s instructions than nobody at all.

Reinventing the compelling MMORPG economy

2008-08-24T23:36:00.000-07:00

Perhaps if you’re a hardcore invested economist you think differently, but capitalism is a simple game of incentive for personal gain at its core. Don’t have money? Can’t live above welfare level. Want money? Work for it. Can’t or won’t work and still want money? Commit crimes. Committing crimes is deeply frowned on by responsible authorities, of course, but there’s a certain matter of how well they can enforce it that allow the criminal element to exist. In time, a rift forms between those who excel at getting money and those who don’t, leading (among other causes) to an unbalanced economy lead by lucky/skilled entrepreneurs and criminals.

MMORPG economies, largely conceived by aspiring capitalists looking to make some money through their sale, largely work the same way. Don’t have money? Can’t play above the most basic level. Want money? Go kill monsters. Can’t or won’t kill monsters and still want money? Cheat (for example, con other players or go buy it from an RMT organization). Cheating is deeply frowned on by responsible game developers, of course, but there’s a certain matter of how well they can enforce it. In time, a rift forms between those who excel at killing monsters and those who don’t, leading (among other causes) to an unbalanced economy lead by lucky/skilled players and cheaters.

ICanHasCheeseburger dwells on the
matter of economic concern.

I could get all very excited about the parallels between MMORPGs and real life economies and say that clearly the developers were doing something right and this will lead to a revolution in gaming and I wouldn’t be the first. However, in order for me to say that I would need to be lying, because I know that the goal isn’t to make a game realistic, the goal is to make a game fun. When the result is out-of-control inflation leading to an unbalanced economy where cheating is considered a viable option, what we have is an inequitable failure. It’s time for a critical rethinking of MMORPG economies. Game money is basically the carrot and stick approach to game design. Game money rewards players for doing what you want them to do, that’s all it’s good for. Now, we look at what problems money introduces and brainstorming possible solutions to fix them.

Problem 1: Crime

I don’t want players to be able to cheat eachother by making promises and then not following through with them or simply cajoling a newbie into accidentally dropping all their gold at their feet because that rewards them for cheating their fellow player. Further, if players are able to get money through RMT, they’re being rewarded for what you don’t want them to do.

I'm sure some of you still affected by the Red Scare are looking
at this as a threat to your precious personal possessions.
Well, knock it off, I'm just trying to make an entertaining
computer game here.

As the game masters of our virtual worlds, computers are dreadfully limited in that they can’t tell the difference between what’s a legitimate trade and what’s social engineering. Thus, completely free trade between players has got to go.

It’s not that I don’t want my players to have that freedom, it’s simply that they’ve proved that they can’t be trusted without somebody to regulate the trade. I can think of a few alternatives. First, we could have trusted intermediary players oversee all trades.

Alternately, we could have a trade system where only trusted players are allowed to perform trades. Finally (and this is the easiest to implement) we could simply not add a means for players to trade – even as basic as dropping things so others could pick them up – eliminating trade entirely.

In the game I’m working on right now, I’ve opted to eliminate trade. However, there’s a certain problem with that in that I’ve removed a major incentive for the players to socialize: other players don’t have material possessions they can give you, therefore you’ve less reason to get to know them. This is not neccessarily a deal breaker, so long as alternate socialization incentives exist (such in-game advantages to working well with others).

Problem 2: Inflation

Game money is generally tossed at players whenever they do something right (slay a monster) and sometimes when they do something wrong (accidentally click on a barrel). The underlying problem that many RPG economies have is that, if you keep adding to a number, it will accumulate. This money is generally protected to avoid grief play, and so it essentially exists in an alternate dimension, where it grows and grows.

176,952 U.S. Quarters weigh 1 ton (2000 lbs),
and gold is a lot heavier. How much is your
favorite RPG character carrying to the merchant?

Part of the problem could be attributed to lack of “money sinks” — things the players could spend their bling on. World of Warcraft players no doubt recognize the chores of repairing their equipment, riding the bus (the griffin/wyvern transit system), paying auction fees, and buying mounts. These are all optional activities that soak up massive amounts of dosh. It doesn’t work – World of Warcraft is still inflated at best, or you simply can’t afford to repair your equipment at worse. Either option is non-conductive to fun gameplay.

I could say that they should adjust their money sinks further, but that doesn’t really solve that what money sinks do is only treat the symptom. What really needs to be attacked is the illness: the haphazard way that money is handled in games. I can think of at least two ways to do this:

First, be much more careful about how quickly you give players money – measure out exactly how much they need and reward it to them at the exact rate of what they’ll be doing, then make sure they get it. This solution takes a lot of work, of course, and some players might catch on that they’re essentially on rails. Whether or not you throw money at them with abandon, this is true: they’re still grinding away for nothing but virtual swag. However, dangling the carrot so elusively may cause them to question whether it’s worth chasing.

Aaaigh, my eyes, they burn!

Alternately, reward players through means other than money and cut out the middleman. There’s all sorts of alternate rewards you could give them: social standing, access to better or new abilities, direct rewards of upgraded equipment, ect. The players still get the kind of things they want, but they don’t do it with having this big meaningless number to keep track of. It’s really a whole lot more efficient, and even gives developer better control of specific rewards for specific things than a central pool from which the player can choose rewards.

The main downside of the alternate solution is a matter of audience. Many RPG players are conditioned to feel that these games are about accumulation, and would abstain from a game which does not make gain obvious. I wonder if the genre is better off without that attitude, or would excluding such cut out the entire demography of RPG players? I’m hoping not on the grounds that some people still play RPGs out of a desire to have fun or roleplay.

Conclusion

Overall, My lead critique at existing games isn’t that they use money so much as that they don’t seem to realize why they’re using money beyond, “players want it.” Well, if game money is the carrot you’re dangling before the players, then dangle it responsibly in the right places instead of throwing it at them until they drown in a bout of ill-conceived vegecide.

These and other considerations are going through my head right now as I approach the last vital leg of the GUI-level of my game. It’s not enough that I want players to do things, I need them to be able to produce things as well, and handling this necessitates thoughts as to where those things they produce are going to go. What do player characters gain in the long run, is it sufficient incentive for the player to play them, will it dig into other players experiences over time, and is it (above all) fun?

All these can only be settled by good, head-hurting, critical thinking… and I’m just the borderline obsessive compulsive to do it. I don’t know if my game’s economy will be the best in the world, but (with any luck) it may well be different than the clearly flawed examples we can find today.

Crunch Time: The end of the Learning BYOND series

2008-08-22T23:35:00.000-07:00

So ends my ‘Learning BYOND” series (though I’ll probably go back and edit those entries – for brevity, if nothing else). Ten days of “Learning BYOND” is probably enough to say that I’m past learning it, and am now simply using it.

What does use of BYOND produce? If the title is to believed, it allows you to Build Your Own Net Dream. Does BYOND live up to its name? Well, it definitely cuts down the toil of creating an online game tremendously, and I’m very much in debt to Dantom for providing it: it made building my online game accessible.

Yet, I’m finding that a game is only as good as you’re willing to put the effort into. In the end, BYOND is a canvas and brush to wield with whatever skill you’re capable – not a spigot that need only be twist to realize your dream game. (This hardly surprises the realists among us.)

Two weeks after starting, I’m staring down the barrel of a school semester 3 days from now without a completed game to show for it. That’s fine – I can continue using BYOND to further refine my Own Net Dream during the school semester — I’ve only a half-time schedule. I’ve little doubt that I’ll be able to produce something playable ~~within a month~~ soon.

Besides… I’ve always thought it interesting when I read a game credit (such as at the end of Quest for Glory 3) that says, “we hope you had as much fun playing our game as we had making it.” Sure enough, right now, it seems that making games is more fun for me than playing them. Thanks, continuous crappy quality of games leading to burnout. (Or is that a chicken and the egg scenario where burnout makes good games seem crappy?) If nothing else, when I’m building my own game and feel the balance is off, I’m able to fix it myself: that kind of freedom is awesome.

As for details on the particular game I’m making now, I’m hesitant to show my cards early. It’s not that I’m worried people are going to steal my idea — if you could do this and do it better than me, that’d save me a lot of work! It’s just that if I start talking about my game before people play it my words become hype. Hype kills games: I’d rather players judge it for themselves.

In future entries, I might drop a few hints by writing a few pieces of fiction that take place within the game universe. This would handily double as good background material.

Learning BYOND, Day 10: Early Contentment

2008-08-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

Progress has been good lately. Although I doubt I’ll have a well-polished and ready game by the time school rolls around, 6 days from now, it seems I’ve at least completed some vital foundation framework. It’s reached the point where neither the Game Designer hat nor the Coder hat need to be worn as often. Now, I’m finding myself in increasing need to wear the Content Creator’s hat.

Space Siege, a modern equivalent of a tile-based game, looks outstanding - especially if you've the hardware to run it at maximum settings. (Screenshot Source: Voodoo Extreme)

Content, content, content! Take a look at your average big-budget computer game, I’ve a point to make. Here, I’ll take a look at one I have right now on my start menu.. ah, the Space Siege demo. SpaceSiege.exe: 14.0 Megabytes. Associated dll files? Less than a megabyte each, it seems. However, the “resources” directory: 785 megabytes! The actual brains the drive the game take up less than 2% of the overall space of the game! What fills the other 98%+? You guessed it: content!

Content is all those high-resolution textures, movies, sound files, and other digitized representations of real life which the game engine tries to project out your monitor at the right time in the right places. Do good enough of a job of that, and the illusion is complete. So, as hardware improves and becomes better able to present more data quicker, the content files keep bloating, looking better and better as they go. Believe it or not, there are still places in Space Siege where pixelation is evident — more room for Space Siege 2 to push tomorrow’s hardware, no doubt.

A really early screenshot of one of my projects.
(One day soon, I'll look back at this and cringe.)

Unlike some of you out there on the Internet, I don’t have pirated copies of major development software laying around, nor the time or sheer force of will needed to use them well. So I won’t be able to create major jaw-dropping graphics.

What BYOND supports, and what I’ll be using, are basic sound files (windows .wav and .oggvorbis formats are supported among others) and 32×32 windows icon files (these can be manipulated creatively in BYOND).

To generate these, I’ll use legitimately purchased software, but (because I can’t afford much of those) mostly just freeware/shareware. To create the sound files, I’m employing three tools. One is Dr. Petter’s SFXR – this is freeware program that is capable of creating a wide-variety of simple machine sounds not unlike you may have heard out of an Atari 2600.

For music, Ableton Live LE — this is the $200 version of my big-budget software. For speech, I’m using A1 Speechtron, an excellent shareware voice synthesizer program – I could just record myself, but I’m no voice actor and there’s quite a few technical hurdles involved in making a good recording. Finally, to clean all this up, I use the impressive freeware sound-editing program, Audacity.

Archon for the Commadore 64 could look good with even smaller
than 32x32 size icons and 16 colors. The viewer's imagination
filled in the rest. (Screenshot: gw-design.net)

That covers what the players will hear, but what about what they will see? BYOND’s Dream Maker’s image support is extremely friendly, allowing for drawing your own images or simply cutting and pasting them in. It even implicitly supports multiple images tied to one labeled state, allowing for easy employment of animations and directional-based graphics.

The only inherent limitation is your ability to draw… and even this can be overcome through technology. A technique that works well is finding a picture I like on the Internet, booting up The Gimp (or even the Microsoft Paint program included with Windows) shrinking it down to 32×32 pixels, and pasting it into BYOND. Using the “masking” color in BYOND (in the upper left of the palette), I alter the (likely highly pixelated) result of my pasting to cut out the part I don’t want to display. It might look fairly bad close up, but zooming out produces a surprisingly realistic looking result: the human brain seems to naturally fill in the details the eye can’t make out.

Is this technique plagiarism? Not if you’re taking a large image and shrinking it down so much that it’s too diminished to count. Yet, why take chances? I could make the image even more by own by opening it up with the BYOND editor and subtly shifting the colors and shape to better suit my game. Creative application of rotoscoping is generally considered okay even amongst hard-nosed professionals.

I don’t consider myself an outstanding artist or sound expert, but today’s software can help overcome those limitations to a surprising degree. I may not win any major content creation prizes but, if I wear that hat correctly, I won’t get any complaints from players of my game.

Learning BYOND, Day 9: Purposeful Toil

2008-08-16T23:28:00.000-07:00

With the focus placed on my Graphical User Interface from Day 8, I’ve pretty much created the game. The GUI is the game, after all. At least that’s what I quoted yesterday… but, I have to concur from personal experience that once you’ve got the basics of the GUI ironed out, the game itself materializes.

My GUI will have three separate play modes. A sensible first-time BYOND Dream Maker user would develop one game, but I’m a fickle gamer, I apparently want my first game to be three games in one. (This is to say nothing for the dynamic content focus.) The specifics (such as balancing the individual pieces) have yet to be worked out, but I now know enough to build the basic skeleton I’ll be using and tweaking to project completion. I wouldn’t have been able to do so without knowing both the BYOND 4.0 skin features and the screen objects discussed in yesterday’s blog entry.

Whether it’s my over-ambition or simply a sign of inexperience, it’s been difficult to get my code synced up right. I’ve tried putting an entire design on paper, but I’m afraid I can’t visualize the underlying mechanics well enough. Instead, I’ve been somewhat forced to build piece by piece, creating individual aspects of the game and seeing how well they stand before moving on to the next.

Perhaps this is the way all newbies start out, but the consequence is having to rebuild or re-arrange my code when previous implementations fail, to the point where it seems I’m no closer to my final product now than I was a few days ago. It’s a bit discouraging, but I shoulder on knowing a few things:

First, learning BYOND coding is an excellent self-improvement mechanism. Second, the code I create will be doing the work for me once it’s done properly (it’ll be a joy once I can stop coding and start world-building).

Third, as I get better at using BYOND, the difficulty of putting together more content like this should lessen – design and coding are learned through practice like any other applied skill.

Finally, whether or not my games are ever popular or if I ever get paid for making them, this is essentially the birth of a game designer. Perhaps a game designer whose games only entertain himself, but a game designer nonetheless.

Well, enough slacking on today’s blog entry. Back to the grindstone.

Learning BYOND, Day 8: Is The Game

2008-08-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

It’s hot and it’s a Saturday, but I don’t care. I’ve only got another 9 days until the school semester starts. Plus, I’ve developed a relatively good design in my head, now it’s time to see it through. Back to work, slacker.

Today, the Graphical User Interface was on the agenda. A reoccurring theme I picked up many time from “Game Design: Secrets of the Sages” (merely a compilation of developer quotes and pictures, but not without some insights): “The GUI is the game.” The saying means that what the user plays is actually the graphical user interface and therefore literally is the game. No wonder some consider it the hardest part of making a game.

I’ve learned about three powerful elements that I’m looking into right now.

The newly introduced (as of BYOND 4.0) skin creator. This is a really nice suite that lets you set up your GUI configuration however you like. It’s a graphical interface creator not unlike one I’ve already been introduced to when using Visual Basic.

It seems pretty complicated, but a good tutorial on that can be found here: Making skins in BYOND 4.0: A Lesson

BYOND’s 4.0 GUI customization is both extensive and remarkably user-friendly, but I’ve still got to figure out how the code interfaces with the GUI elements added. It seems as though all you really need to do is manipulate them via their tags using the “winset” procedure. Could it really be so easy?
Menu Items
I figured this one out on my own. After opening up the same file where the macros and menus, and windows are defined (the .dmf file), go into the “menu” menu. There, it’s quite easy to add additional commands by recognizing the format is the standard column>>command format that’s likely at the top of your browser as you read it. In the “command” section is simply a verb that’s passed to the parser. So, define that “verb” on your client object just like any other verb and the functionality will go through.
Objects assigned to the client.screen list.In a way, the “screen” variable on the client object is similar to the “image” variable (the same I discussed at length at Day 7) in that it is a list of things that are continually displayed to the user on the client level. (Meaning other users won’t see what this user is seeing.)

However, it differs considerably in that what’s being displayed are interaction-capable, atom-style objects. This is really cool because you can define all sorts of interactive verbs on objects, while images can’t be clicked at all (though I’m sure an imitator could be jury-rigged).

Assigning fully manipulatable objects to be used is actually remarkably easy. I recommend this simple tutorial on the BYOND developers section. It’s quite basic and does not cover more complicated tricks, such as adding mouse interaction by defining the MouseDrag() and Click() functions on the objects you’re adding to the screen, but if you’ve been using BYOND for awhile those things are self-evident.

The skin editor is undeniably more powerful, but the client.screen object list is still a valuable tool for adding things such as on-map controls. I’ll be learning them both. As for pull-down menus, it’s hard to say what use I’ll get out of that — it doesn’t seem very immersive for a RPG-like game.

After learning these methods, I can pretty much make any point-and-click windows-based interface I can imagine (at least so long as I don’t mind that the core of the game is a 2d tile-based one… and actually, I think I prefer it). However, just because BYOND makes it easy to create and display half-dozen panes at once doesn’t mean I should.

My years of game-playing experience tells me that a very simple interface is much easier for the user to handle. Perhaps the difference between a good designer and a bad one is just how much complication you can get across in a user-friendly manner.

Intermission: Geldon’s Three Pillars of Game Design

2008-08-14T23:22:00.000-07:00

Whether it’s my recent diet (I’ve lost about 10 pounds in a week and a half) or playing with BYOND coding, my mental engine has been supercharged lately. A chart reflecting my mental state right now looks something like this:

Regardless of the cause, today I’m forcing myself to take a break from BYOND coding in order to put some serious thought into what kind of game I’ll be developing. The thing is, while I was thinking about what game I was going to develop, I came to realize what standards I hold in terms of game design. This is basically a warm-up exercise for me, but you might find what I came up interesting.

The game must be fun.
What is fun? If that doesn’t seem like a deep question for you, stop and think about it a bit. The question for a game designer isn’t what fun feels like, the question for a game designer is how can I create that feeling in my players? I don’t think anyone’s mastered the art of generating fun, the best we have in theories.

The best book I have on my shelf on the matter is Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun. There, fun is examined as primordial force, with the find conclusion being that fun results from being genuinely engaged in a learning process.

Another nice theory on fun is Xinghan Chen’s flow theory. This is basic realization that fun in games results when the game is neither too hard nor too easy. When you hit the “sweet spot,” you’ve got “flow.”

Example: Lately, I’ve been pretty enthralled with BYOND Dream Maker. It’s not a game, so clearly that alone was not generating fun. Instead, it’s just an activity that hits that ‘sweet spot’ of learning for me, producing results often enough to be satisfying, yet not being so easy that I’m bored of it.

Because generating of fun is hardly a complete science, a good game designer shouldn’t take fun for granted. They need to critically think about why their games are supposed to be fun, an recognize when results aren’t being met. There may be whole new kinds of fun, waiting to be discovered by the game artist who goes that extra mile.
Long-term games must change over time.
Whether you side with Raph Koster’s theory or just flow in general, they point out that any given game eventually stops being fun. This general consensus is that this is because the player’s skills outgrow the challenge offered by the game. Your players are learning creatures that can and will adapt over time to your game.

For the most part, this is not so much a problem: if that’s all you have to show, let the audience go home – what do you care, they’ve already paid the price of admission. However, in a subscription-model game (such as an MMORPG) the admission is paid on a monthly basis. The common result is a mechanic that tries to force the player to stay even when the flow is gone. Players often describe this as “the grind.”

Let me take a moment to point out just how bad grinds are. People don’t want to play grinds, to the point where they’re willing to pay others to play grinds for them or program their computer to do it for them. Where economic incentive exists, so also does crime. A grind bears all the earmarks of genuine human suffering. This is the opposite of what a game is supposed to be generating!

If you can’t trust players to stop playing when your game no longer entertains, you’re going to have to take matters into your own hands. Along these lines, I recommend that your game needs to do is change over time. This is the realm of dynamic content.

In a MMORPG, dynamic content is typically considered, “content generated by the players, PvP events, and so on.” That’s a start, but there’s more to harnessing the power of dynamic content, and it could be found when I’m playing my average MMORPG.

Example: “I’m playing a level 40 character and those levels are coming slower than usual. I don’t get many new abilities anymore, but instead have to work on mastering my existing abilities. This lasts a few hours of play, but the vast majority of time I’ve already mastered my character and am just killing monsters because I have to. I’m feeling the grind, now.
Eventually, I get frustrated and quit, and start flaming the developers on their very own forum. I cancel my subscription to the game and think I’m free of it. Then, three months later, I hear that there’s been some major changes done that I just have to try out. Just when I thought I was out, they fished me back in – why is that?! At least on a subconscious level, it’s because I think change has introduced something new to master. (Of course, I may be bitterly disappointed to discover it did not.)”

The ideal utilization of dynamic content is not to make the game world change over time — I’m not saying that’s a bad thing (static worlds are less realistic) but it has nothing to do with sustaining the fun. The actual goal is to keep the game challenged enough to maintain the flow Thus, the best utilization of dynamic content is to give the player more to learn over time as needed. This is the exact kind of changing that long-term games need to offer.
In making the game marketable, do not diminish the fun.
This is not because I’m a “games are art” style game designer, who thinks it’s a travesty when an artist is asked to make their work stupider for the masses. (I am a “games are art” style designer, but that’s not the reason why I believe this “pillar” works!)

Instead, I believe that games that dumb themselves down in the name of marketing success do so on false premises. For the game designer, the mental process of trying to make a game that suits a market segment is pure delusion: You invent an imaginary friend called a “casual gamer,” decide what your imaginary friend likes to play, and develop a game that would please them. The result is a game that truly pleases no-one but your imaginary friend.

It’s attempting mind-reading. Despite what powers of intuition you may think you have, chances are the only mind you can read enough to base a game on is your own. Use that: make a game you would want to play. That’s a far safer bet than trying to understand the mythical “casual gamer.”

Yet, maybe you’ve some data that strongly suggests that the game you would want to play isn’t what would sell. So, some kind of compromise is needed. How to get around that? A change in perspective: Do not think selling your game as trying to guess what someone else would enjoy and make a game to please them. Instead, think of selling your game as making it presentable enough for someone to try your game.

If it’s a good game, the person who tries your game is likely to be willing to buy it. This works on a daring premise that, while players’ tastes will vary, a good enough game will change their tastes accordingly. So your role is to make the best game you know how to play — a game you know you would enjoy — and then adapting the presentation in such a way that it’s receptive to the people you expect to sell the game to.

Example:

“The “flow” in Diner Dash is solid: move objects where they need to be at the right time, with a random element necessitating watching for visual queues as to when that right time is. It engages the mind of the player and promotes learning, therefore it is fun. However, you’ll have a hard time marketing what is essentially moving dots from column to column.

To compensate, they adapt a market-friendly presentation. The back story of a main character perhaps-not-coincidentally-named ‘Flo’ working hard in a restaurant to serve the customers (us), along with friendly graphics and an accessible interface, is integrated. The core ‘flow’ mechanic remains untouched, but now we’ve got something that marketing doesn’t need to work nearly as hard to market.“

Consider this: I mentioned I liked Diner Dash, and now maybe you’ll give it a try. Once you try it, you’ll probably like it, and now you are a conduit in which you can recommend the game to friends. What do you do when you’re considering playing a game but don’t want to try it? Exactly: ask a friend who has.

Word-of-mouth remains one of the best (if not the best) influence(s) on if something sells. This is a quality that the game designer is largely responsible for. If the core “fun” of the game was compromised to make the game more marketable, you’re less likely to enjoy the game, and less likely to recommend it to others.

Inventing a game you know you’ll enjoy and dressing it appropriately seems like a much better approach than trying to design a game only your imaginary “casual gamer” friend would enjoy. If you’ve never enjoyed games to start with, maybe you’re not cut out to a game designer – it’s like a musician who can’t hum a tune. (Granted, judging by some music these days, that doesn’t seem to be as much an impediment to their market success as you’d think.)

As I said, this was a warm-up for me. There might have been more pillars, but three pillars is enough. It sounds like I’ve a full day’s work already!

I would like to end on this note, however: Above all, make a game that you would enjoy playing. This isn’t just for the reasons outlined in pillar 3. It’s because you may well not have the motivation to pull through if the game you’re making bores you. (Well, maybe if you were getting paid for it… but that kind of motivation won’t neccessarily generate a game I have a chance to enjoy, now will it?)

Learning BYOND, Day 7: All About Image

2008-08-14T23:21:00.000-07:00

Seriously, today really was all about the image for me… the BYOND image object and how it is used, that is. It turned out to be a rather long and agonizing day: I wish I had known now what I did when I started. Sit back, read, and enjoy the butter without the churning I did today.

The image object refers to an image that is not actually part of the game world, but rather is a custom image specifically made to be drawn on the screen of any specifically specified users’ client. Such objects have many potential applications, such presenting a custom GUI or applying special effects beyond what the world engine is normally capable.

The official instructions on images is quite short. It’s not mentioned at all in the client chapter and (as we’re about to discover) that’s a major omission. The Dream Maker help mechanic and BYOND developer community are the best reference I’m aware of for image objects.

The brevity of the help is probably because image objects are actually pretty easy to use… provided you stick to one image object reference variable at a time: However, I wasn’t content with that: I wanted to do a whole image list at a time. There lay madness.

Finally, I figured out the one thing they don’t flat out tell you (unless you very carefully read the BYOND dream maker help in the “image var (client)” section):

“The key to displaying images is a specially handled client object list. The “client.images” variable is directly called by the hardcode every update to display any and all image objects involved for that client.”

Edit (Sept 8th, 08): Originally, I wrote this Blog entry with an understanding that client.images was very arbitrarily handled for a list. This is because, in my code dabbling, it exhibited unusual behavior. Trying to call image.len (to get the length of the image list) did not work, nor did using a “for variable in images” call.

Zac pointed out in the comments that actually you can do this without trouble, leading me to wonder if perhaps I was stumping myself with a simple typo or perhaps trying to call client.images without the proper references from another procedure.

What remains below are the few truths I know to be true and unusual about the client.images list.

Images must be passed to the client.images variable one at a time.

If I try to use the << operator to pass a list of images to the client, it handles it like a string and spams “/list” to the user’s screen.

If I try to use the images.Add() operator to pass a list of images, nothing happens. The image list is not added and there’s no explained reason why, it just doesn’t work.

Fortunately, it’s not too hard to simply break down any list of images you have an add them one at a time to client images. That was ultimately the solution that ended a day of misery and woe for me.
You cannot delete the client.images object.

If you try, you get a “bad del” error. This must be because the client (not the client object but the user’s actual client program) relies too much on the client.images variable to allow it to be cleared and reference to null.

Instead, what you must do is delete each image from the client.images list manually. If you want to clear out the whole thing, you can (contrary to my earlier beliefs) perform a simple loop like this:

for (var/deleteThisImage in images) del deleteThisImage
And it will work. However, if you want to delete a specific image from that list of images, you need to be able to find it first, and that can be really hard to do if you have no reference variable to that image. Thus, maintaining reference variables (or even lists of reference variables) is a good idea.

The requirement to keep a reference to added images strikes me as an unfriendly feature for BYOND designers: Never should there be a point you’ve added something that impacts the user which you can’t take away. Still, I suppose I can appreciate the logic: if the BYOND game designer did their job right, and kept a reference to every image they’ve added, this should never happen in the first place. It may not be as user friendly, but it’s the more powerful implementation, and I can appreciate that.

Progress Check

Speaking of using BYOND Dream Maker, here we are, one week later, and I’m still working out the foundations of my extravagant game world.

That’s okay, I recall I read somewhere that Richard Garriott himself said that’s the best way to go about it: build what you want the engine to do first, then worry about the story/game (I forget which). Richard Garriott (a.k.a. Lord British) practically invented the tile-based engine, the first 8 Ultima games were presented in tile-based engines built from the ground up, so (like em’ or hate em’ for a certain clean slate’s WoW imitation) I think Garriott’s advice can be trusted on this matter!

Besides, I’m not really on day 7. Looking back to day 6, I created the system that handles all the moves done by the game pieces on a one turn per second system yesterday, and that was the closest thing I did to genuine progress. All days before that, I was mostly learning BYOND… am still learning BYOND judging by today’s entry. If I already knew how to program BYOND from the start as well as I do now, I’d probably be polishing a finished prototype by now. Rather than let that discourage me, I should chalk it up to a sign of how much I’ve learned since then.

By Design

While I have been busy learning BYOND lately, that’s no excuse to not have a design document. Design documents need little working knowledge of the BYOND engine or DM code, all the game designer really needs to know is that BYOND is a real-time, tile-based engine with implicit multiplayer support (so you should factor in there will be some network lag between moves that is, fortunately, handled automatically). It’s only after a design document is done that one need take off their designer hat and wear the coder hat. (Granted, each coder hat needs has a code design section, but you need to start knowing what you’re planning on doing.)

At this point in my own BYOND project, it’s clearer than ever that I need a target to shoot for. Because I’m lacking the kind of forethought a design doc exists for, my efforts to develop a game are very unfocused. For example, I created an action queue handler, yes. However, I haven’t thought through what kind of actions need to be handled, and so now I’m encountering a problem of what happens when a creature is interrupted and needs to stop moving and start defending itself.

I’m wearing the wrong hat to move this project forward: I really need to force myself to take a break from coding. As much as I apparently enjoy it given how easy the BYOND engine makes it to produce results, I’m at the point where I don’t know what result I’m trying to produce. It’s time to do some brainstorming and designing.

(Granted, if I was making a simple game, I could eyeball it. A simple overall design document could be easily generated in my head and that would work fine. However, after 25 years of gaming, I’m far from being a simple gamer at heart.)

Learning BYOND, Day 6: Open Heart Surgery

2008-08-12T23:19:00.000-07:00

I’m probably going to go back and severely edit those “Learning BYOND” entires. Right now they’re a somewhat rambling collection that probably contain a number of inadvertent lies said out of code-newbie innocence. I’m not sure anyone finds those entries particularly interesting… at the very least, I should throw in some helpful diagrams!

Diagrams like so. Funny enough, knowing how to answer the Pythagorean Theorem is actually quite useful for aspiring BYOND users (although the get_dist() function performs much the same way).

Oh well, this entry will be somewhat more interesting, I hope. Today, I talk about what goes into coding a force that drives a virtual universe.

The heart of my game is the actionqueue procedure. This is activated when the world first boots up and stays running for the duration. Every second, it cycles through a list of designated “alive” mobs and checks the action queue on each. Each mob in the game can only execute one action per turn. In this way, BYOND’s flexible engine has been shaped into a simulated turn-based roleplaying game engine.

Controlling the use of the actionqueue is tricky because (thanks to the sleep() proc within it) it is waiting while other procedures are occurring at the same time. To protect against the conflicts that may occur, the actionqueue only performs the first action in the queue. No other procedure should manipulate that first action. Otherwise, if the timing is just right (or just wrong) then something’s going to break. If something needs to be inserted before that first action, the actionqueue procedure is the one to handle this.

Sorry Q-Bot, I've made my own

The actionqueue procedure must be very efficient. I’ve tested that my computer can run about 50,000 lines per second. If I have 50 objects and the ActionQueue wants to go through 1000 lines each, it’ll bog down the server. If, on the other hand, each object only processes 10 lines then I can support up to 5000 idling objects. (Give or take — this is a bit of a shot in the dark.) If the server’s lagging, there will be a visible hitch every second when the actionqueue goes through its list.

How many “living” objects will I need? It’s hard to say. Though my plan is not set in stone, currently I want to do an epic 1000×1000 2d tile-based world. That’s huge – traveling at one second per square, it’ll take about 16 1/2 minutes to cross the length of it. (I’ll probably add quicker means to travel.)

However, on such a large map, will there will always be something fairly meaningful going on with the players will be in the thick of it? This brings us to the central point: a huge world is pointless in game mechanic terms. Where the player is is not half as important as what I give them to do.

With the implementation of the actionqueue, I’ve harnessed BYOND’s flexible event model into a powerful virtual heart that drives my ideal game. In the coming days, I’ll have to design and implement the virtual soul that engages the player. It’s a pretty tall order – hopefully my 25 years of playing games will grant some insight there.

Learning BYOND, Day 5: Vital Misconceptions

2008-08-11T23:17:00.000-07:00

Edit: This has once again been modified both because of correcting my own earlier ignorance and thanks to Zac’s helpful comments.

Yesterday was good practice to get familiar with coding in the environment. Today, I largely took my advice from yesterday and did a whole lot of RTFM. I went from chapter 7 to 14 in the DM guide (skipping the chapter on save files for now) taking hours to read and understand it. It has not been a fruitless endeavor, as I came away with quite a few nifty new commands and understanding.

Talk about “enough knowledge to be dangerous” — apparently much of my coding yesterday was done under massively false pretenses. Here’s a few things off the top of my head that I was doing very wrong:

I didn’t really know how to declare new objects into existence.
Instead, I was declaring my objects in the game world (dynamically at runtime as opposed to with the map editor) largely by cutting and pasting what I saw and getting lucky.

This much the manual will tell you: New() is the universal constructor (translation: it’s the procedure that runs on the object immediately after it is created). I used it before to set up the default variables and whatnot on an object. The new() proc with a lowercase n is what actually bridges the gap from using var (to declare a variable reference to an object type) to actually creating the object.

Without using new(), one tends to have their procedures crash a lot from attempting to do things with null-assigned reference variables: You might have declared a variable that points to that type of object, but you haven’t actually created the object yet!

Of course, having dabbled with C++ and Java in the past, I’m no stranger to the idea of there being a difference between a prototype and the actual object. What stumped me were little things called “atoms” and why not passing a location to them stopped new() from working. Suddenly, new() was an alien command to me, it wasn’t working like new from other programming languages.

It turns out that the trick is that atoms, being areas, turfs, mobs, and (in-game) objects, have a tendency to need a place in the game world to exist. Therefore, they take (as the first argument to new) a location in which they are placed. Without passing this location, BYOND’s dream maker tends to break.

Likely this is because the involved New() constructor requires that the object be placed in a virtual world location to function right. If I try to use a mob’s Step_Dir() procedure and it’s not actually on the map, it’s not going to know what to do. If, in the New() constructor itself, I have some code that wants to check the mob’s location variable, and that location variable is set to null because it’s not actually placed anywhere, that’s going to cause problems.

Thus the problem with new() and atoms is actually pretty understandable. The location is merely an important argument without which the atom objects largely don’t know what to do. However, it’s tough to grok for the first time BYOND user.

Another tricky thing about new() is the format. It scans weirdly to the eyes of a code dabbler from elsewhere. In Java, declaring an object looks like this: “Point originOne = new Point(23, 94);” In BYOND, it’s a bit different. The following statements actually do the same thing:
var/obj/robot/myRobot = new/obj/robot(loc)
Implicitly declares a reference variable, then implicitly creates an object of the same type and assigns it to the reference. var/obj/robot/myRobot = new /obj/robot(loc)
You can put a space after new if you want. This makes no difference to the compiler but clarifies for us (the dumb coders) that what we’re actually doing here is “new typedef(argument)”. (More on that in a moment)
var/obj/robot/MyRobot = new(loc)
Without the type and/or location specified, new() automatically adapts to the left side. The location is still needed to place it on the map.
new/obj/robot(loc)
Actually, this does not do the same thing, at least not exactly. (An explanation follows.)

That last one is particularly tricky (and in more than one way).

In other coding languages, initializing an object without a variable is a bit like marking a part of your memory as a useless black hole with junk in it you can’t use. The compilers generally won’t allow it.

It’s okay in BYOND because what we’re defining here is an atom, and it lives in the virtual world so long as we pass a location in which it is created. Because it exists in the virtual world, it can be referenced and (hopefully) eventually removed and garbage collected from the world, avoiding the useless black hole problem.

The overall problem I have with most of these examples is the typedef argument. This is visible in examples 1, 2, and 4 above when we say “new/obj/robot().” Compare that to my Java example above and you can see we’ve suddenly got a whole bunch of junk between “new” and “robot()” I’m not used to. What we’re seeing is actually new/typedef(). Typedef is explicitly defines the type. As you can see in example 3, that’s not necessary, but an explicit definition at least settles the mind we’re creating the right kind of object.
Having an unclear idea how objects were created, I also had no idea how to delete them.
BYOND deletes objects in a rather novel, simplified way. In other languages, the deconstructor – which is what Del() is in BYOND – will take some arguments and so it looks just like New(). In BYOND, there is no argument.

Consequently, you don’t call Del() with del(), you call Del() with simply del – without the parentheses.

Want to get rid of that object in the world? del object – not del object(arguments).

Trickier yet, Del() Is a finicky proc to override. According to the manual, section 7.2.2 says you need to add ..() at the end of the deconstructor to resume the parent process if you’re using it, otherwise, the item may not be deleted properly.

(I’m not sure how true that still is. Section 7.2.2 of the manual also says that the contents of an object or world will be dumped to its location when it is deleted… I tested this and it did not. In the addendum page this is confirmed.)
I was using the atom object Click() (and other events/verbs) the hard way when I could have been using their callers on the client object.The client object actually triggers these procedures on the other objects through their own versions. However, this necessitates having an additional arg for the Client: the object being manipulated.

My mistake was defining the Click() directly on the tile or object every time. If you’ve been following this for awhile, you may have noticed I was wondering how I could go about passing waypoints. Through manipulation of the clientside.Click(), this is much easier.

Those are some of the more obvious blunders, I’m sure I’ll discover more in time: Such is learning.
I spent most of the day with my nose in the book. I’ll probably spent the rest of it and most of tomorrow trying to bring these new practices into fruition so that I’ll remember them.

However, first thing’s first. It’s time to draw up a proper design document. Such a document is vital for prototyping all the major objects in the game and how they will interact. I’ve found that the speed in which a project can be put together is increased a hundredfold with such a document.

It’s the difference between assembling a house with blueprint versus assembling a house by propping up poles and seeing which ones stay vertical long enough for you to tack on a ceiling. You might get there eventually anyway but a blueprint provides a clearer sense of purpose and a product which doesn’t look like it’s going to fall over if the wind blows too hard.

(As much as I’d like to give you Learning BYOND readers a respite from all these run-on entries, I probably won’t detail my master plan much: an aspiring game designer has to keep his cards close to his chest to surprise his future gamers.)

Learning BYOND, Day 4: Early Vestiges Of Awesome

2008-08-10T23:15:00.000-07:00

Am I really only on day 4? The human brain is a remarkable device – that which seems hopelessly impossible to understand yesterday is implicitly understood and being done today. Where is the tangible difference? In the individual’s perspective, it is as though a part of reality was completely redefined, and yet there’s no artifacts to be found to mark the change.

I didn’t keep a running tab of everything I figured out today, so there will be no categorized list of minor newbie tips. Sorry, I was just having too much fun. However, I can remember a few interesting things that happened in my coding exploits today that might prove enlightening.

Bloat

As I wrote yesterday, I’m just comfortable enough writing code now to be dangerous. Consequently, I’ve been coding pretty comfortably. When you type 100 WPM, that stuff adds up pretty quick. Looking at the directory now, my code is up to about 41 kilobytes (over 40000 keystrokes) of raw text now. My code probably more than doubled in size this day alone.

I’ve broken off parts of my source code into other source files named after the particularly meaty object or global procedure definitions I moved there. That’s a good practice to adapt in order to quickly leap to the code you want to access. BYOND handles all the code file inclusions automatically: if it’s checked on the left of the dream maker’s file list, it’ll be compiled and accessible. (Of course, it’d be a bad idea to split an object or procedure in mid-definition since you can’t be sure in which order those files will be assembled.)

All this bloat is just that: Little (if any) of the code I wrote today is permanent. In fact, I’ll probably regret my amateur code later and want to completely re-write it when practice brings with it new standards of coding elegance. Oh well, such is the business of programming. At least, that’s the kind attitude a fledging programmer needs to not regret another day of his life down the bit bucket. (Oh well, how else would I have spent that time? Spamming a forum mostly filled with people half my age, probably.)

Hints of reward

With size, my code is also growing more capable. All those happy little digital souls living in my program now have brand new arms and legs with which they run amok all about my virtual world, gnashing and tearing, raping and pillaging. I do hope to teach them subtlety some day, but I can only code an ideal virtual world one line at a time.

As of today, my little robot mobs can now have special items I created – “robot interfaces” – installed into them by player characters who are carrying these interfaces. Each robot interface carries verbs that allow the players who can see them to control the robot they are installed in. So far, only two interfaces work: “follow me” and “wait,” but the basic framework is in place to allow players to install and use as many as I feel like creating. In a way, my coding more robotic interfaces would be not unlike a fantasy RPG developer coding more magic spells for wizards to cast.

The interfaces work via a rather crude hack where anyone in the world can use the verbs attached to them. That would simply not do – anyone could hack your robots and use them against you – however I’ve yet to figure out BYOND sufficiently to configure a better ‘set src’ setting to allow an item in another mob’s inventory to be accessible by the player.

For the time being, access can be controlled by who is capable of viewing the items in that robot’s inventory. The only way you can see the robot’s inventory is to see the robot’s inventory panel. Though it feels sloppy to not rely on the standard “set src” verb restriction, it works. It’s almost a very clever workaround, as the verb-enabled objects merge together on the robot’s inventory list to form a dynamic right-click menu.

Another bit of progress today is making some rudimentary use of clicking the mouse in the game via the Click() procedure that can be redefined on any visible object that’s placable in the game world. One elegant-feeling trick is to hook up the mouse click procedure to swap of the client.statobj variable. This enables players to see the stat panels of something else – just be sure to have coded the neccessary access restrictions in place to prevent the statobj from being assigned to anything you don’t want the players to view. A Click() procedure is also good to put on usable items to call a default verb that activates when the item is clicked on.

Trouble Ahead: Finding The Way

Considering the difficulty I’m having with figuring out a way players can input waypoints, I might just settle for the “follow me” and “wait” robot interfaces along with a third that orders the robot to go to somewhere easily in view. Players could tow around their robots and deploy them that way, and the game will be completely playable.

That’s a cop out, however. Next on the agenda will be creating a much better way to handle waypoint travel.

Part of the reason why is because I wasted about 3-4 hours trying to paint my player character’s assigned waypoints with the image() procedure. Because my current waypoint system is so kludgey, that turned out to be several times harder than it should have been.

(It might have helped if I had some previous experience with BYOND’s Image object handling – I’ve got the theory down, but there’s a remarkable difference between understanding the theory and having the experience of actually doing.)

The much-maligned short path to knowledge: RTFM

If I wasn’t having so much fun playing with my code today, I might have taken a better look at the DM Guide PDF. I’m only up to about chapter 7 now, having skimmed ahead for occasional things as I need it. Reading through my printed out PDF file and defacing it with a pencil seems to produce excellent rules in fostering better understanding. If I actually read it from cover to cover this way, it would probably be the shortest path to neigh complete understanding of the BYOND coding environment.

Alternately, I should probably consider getting my hands on some more example code. Seeing the way things are written by experienced BYOND programmers may prove enlightening, at least once I know enough about the why of it to understand why the code turned out elegant the way it was done.

Learning BYOND, Day 3: Armed and Dangerous

2008-08-09T23:14:00.000-07:00

Today, I found that my brushing up on the fundamentals helped quite a bit. BYOND’s differences from the programming languages I’m comfortable with are beginning to melt away. I’m able to define classes of objects and place them intelligently in the game, as well as allow players to pick up and drop things. Some interesting things learned today include:

Defining the name of an object enables the right-click menu interaction with verbs. This only seems to work if the verb’s access is set to a list of things (src in *list*) and not a single user (src = *specific user*).
The interpreter won’t ask you which one you mean if you’re activating the same verb on identical objects. This caused me no end of confusion when I couldn’t figure out why it kept grabbing the nearest one (when access was set to “src in *list*”) or the sequentially first one (when access was set to “src = *specific user*”) without asking me which I want.
When referring to turfs, think of them as containing the mobs and objects in them, and as though the turf literally is the location of the mob. Thus, if Mob is standing in Turf, Mob.loc equals Turf, *not* Mob.loc Equals Turf.loc. (I would guess this works the same way for items in a player inventory: item.loc Equals player, not item.loc Equals player.loc.)
A good spot to initialize global variables is on the world’s New() procedure. Seems self-evident enough now, but prior to this I wasn’t sure the world even had a New() procedure. (This refers to initialization, the definition should be done at the root of the code.)
I found out about “image” objects which, as far as I can tell, are completely missing from the guide. The details using them are still beyond me, but discovering this object is great news. Prior to this, I had the problem that everything displayed to a users’ client would actually be a part of the game world. Now, a custom GUI seems possible.

By the end of the day, I figured out a way to allow users to materialize new objects into their inventories or onto the game world. This is a major part of my game design, which involves a Mercenaries-like capacity to call in equipment and reinforcements in battle.

The players are now armed and dangerous — at least, able to pick up things and use them. They aren’t the only ones: now that I have these basics under my control, I know just enough to be dangerous to my fledging virtual world. Consequently, designing the working model on paper is becoming more important than before.
My current immediate technical challenges to overcome:

Find better way to present the user with a selectable list of objects to be summoned. I could do so with just a bunch of separate verbs, but that’s sloppy. I could do so with an image overlay… this would probably be the best choice – but also one of the more technically challenging.
Find a way for the player to cue way points to be executed by certain the mobs in the game. This core functionality would be useful both to set a balanced speed on players’ avatars – by default they run around as quickly as the players can hammer the keys and their connection allows and that’s unbalanced – and also for vital mob automation. At my disposal is some pre-created movement procedures, but they do not implicitly have waypoints built in… I think.

If I can get those two things out of the way, the biggest technical hurdles (besides the interface) are out of the way, and I can get down to actual game mechanic implementation.

Learning BYOND, Day 2: Back To Fundamentals

2008-08-08T23:13:00.000-07:00

There’s 16 days left until I’m back at the University as a Digital Technology and Culture student for another semester. While I don’t plan to stop playing with BYOND at that point, this time is nonetheless quite valuable for the purpose of learning it.

Today, my primary accomplishments included:

I figured out some additional ways in which BYOND initializes variables. Recall from yesterday that nothing happens (no code is executed) unless an event occurs. Actually, things that are painted on the map maker pretty much are already in existence and ready to go. This is interesting because there’s actually a whole loaded database up and running before you write your first line of code.
Who can use the “verbs” on an object is determined by the “set as src” parameter. This is extremely handy, because once a verb is accessible the GUI automatically makes it available to the player in all sorts of fancy ways (e.g. right click and it pops up on the menu). Verbs are basically custom events, fully programmable by the game creator, and are the catalyst of action between the players and the game.
I can, indeed, utilize procedures on other objects. However, it requires at least a temporary initialized object in order to reference the appropriate procedures. I’m still a little rusty on this, it’ll probably be a bit easier on me once I know where (in the code) I can start instantiating things and how to reference them properly. The interfaces are not quite as clear-cut as JAVA – there’s no private and publicly declared variables and procedures.

Overall, a bunch of extremely newb-ish reading and experimenting was done today as I strive to Grok this new means of programming. If it seems like I’m backpedling a bit, it’s because I am. Shattered is the initial overconfidence that I could just dive in and make stuff. It seems I’m way too rusty for that – hell, I probably never had a chance to mess with a program that accomplishes as much as BYOND presents. Yet, this attitude seems to have made me more receptive to learning as well: I made it up to about chapter 6-7 in the official guide with greatly increased understanding. (Specifically, the longer PDF version – which is quite excellently and humorously written, by the way) .

Very little progress was made towards Building My Own Net Dream today, as it seems I’m mired down in understanding the fundamentals. However, at least part of this is because of the high aspirations I have. If I was trying to recreate an Ulltima 6 then BYOND makes that fairly easy to do – it practically is a massively multi-player enabled Ultima 6 engine by default. However, what I’m going for is more of a point-and-click, dynamically-changing-world game where custom events (such as the automation I was blogging about a few days ago) take the center stage. That’ll take a bit more effort.

Though it’s generally a bad idea to plan bigger than you’re capable of, I’m not feeling too disheartened: it seems to me that the engine is very capable and probably the friendliest in existence for me to use. Thus, it’s just a matter of practicing until understanding it is second nature. The further I get into it, the more it seems that I just need to find the existing procedures and learn to use them instead of bull my way through with overridden procedures as I was planning.

Learning BYOND, Day 1: Little Digital Souls

2008-08-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

Contrary to my previous entry, I’m not finding BYOND to be the mind-reading device I was hoping it was. Instead, I’m wrapping my head around how to code my creation. This is not just that dinky script modification stuff I was doing in Neverwinter Nights 2 or Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but rather defining a completely event-driven game already running within the generous framework provided.

Pouring over manuals and tutorials reveals that reading about it is one thing, actually doing it requires more than a skim. Several dendrites have died needlessly, however, progress has been made. I don’t have much to say about today’s progress, so this will be a short entry. However, I will leave this hard-earned gem:

I thought I knew was Object Oriented programming was, having dabbled with Java a bit in the past. However, I was mistaken, and at least part of my mind was still mired in the procedural past. Unlike Java (a completely object oriented language), BYOND offers no point in which the program starts; there’s no main() starting function. Instead, the starting point is the BYOND game interpreter itself, and what the would-be BYOND designer is given is an entirely event-driven model.

Nothing in BYOND happens unless an event sets it in motion: the server reboots, a player logs in, a tree falls in the forest (and the server was there to hear it). The event triggers a whole newly spawned process, running on its own independent thread, until it is completed. Behind the scenes, only one thing may be happening at a time due to the limitations of the hardware. However, to perception of the players and the BYOND programmer, there’s several things running at once at all times.

It makes sense. After all, BYOND was made to simulate virtual worlds. Each active PC and NPC needs no less than their own little digital soul or else the virtual reality fails to acknowledge them when the time is right. Trees won’t fall in the forest if the universe is too busy doing something else to enact gravity, so they need their own slice of time (preferably immediately after the axe has finished its work). And so on.

Suffice to say, it’s been a mind-expanding experience. I’ve never worked on software that worked quite this way before, and it’s taking some adjustment. However, like learning music, mathematics, or (most appropriately) a foreign language, anything worth learning can be learned in persistence. (Unless you die trying, of course. Pacing is important!)

Going BYOND

2008-08-07T23:10:00.000-07:00

As of late, I’ve been playing with BYOND: the acronym stands for “Build Your Own Net Dream.” On the outside, BYOND is a portal into hundreds of free-to-play games. On the inside, BYOND is essentially a completely free set of game development and hosting tools that make it relatively easy to put together the 2D, tile-based multiplayer game of your dreams. Astoundingly, it’s 100% free to use, with the only apparent supports being donating for an upgraded account and moderate ad space on the official website.

The astounding thing about this suite is that it’s basically a already-completed online game, fully mutable with a friendly GUI to manipulate it at your disposal. Even if you already know how to code, to get where BYOND takes you from scratch would take weeks, perhaps months, of painstaking work. The robust community developer support makes learning using BYOND easier than any other IDE I know, Flash Actionscript included.

At zero lines of code, it’s a functioning chat server. In under 5 minutes of work, you can have a simple tile-based game in which players can perform some interactions. All one has to do is build some simple art assets, tile the maps, and finally perform a few dozen lines of the “DM” coding language (it closely resembles C++ but with easier object oriented syntax and automatic variable type and garbage collection handling) to flesh out their mobs and support the “verbs” – all handled seamlessly by BYOND’s “Dream Maker” component. At that point, BYOND takes care of the rest, and your simple tile-based creation is automatically a fully multiplayer-capable game.

Yet, 5 minutes work would produce a game without much to do, nor anything to set it apart (it would be borrowing a great deal from the core in which you started). The more work you put into BYOND’s Dream Maker IDE, the more unique your game becomes. Any 2D, tile-based game can be made, multiplayer-enabled from the start – you can make it a stand-alone game if you want to distribute the server component. (As of August 2007, there’s even Direct3D and OpenGL support.)

Once your game is built and hosted, it is displayed for all the players on the BYOND network to see and enjoy. While there’s a lot of derivative games (and not a few blatant copyright violations by overzealous kids) there’s also quite a few fabulous examples that really get one excited about what BYOND can do with enough effort.

For example:

SpaceCastle

The simplest to pick up of the games listed here, SpaceCastle plays a bit like a Tower Defense game with a real time strategy twist. Place units, mine diamonds to buy more units and perform technology upgrades, and try to survive against the oncoming scourge of enemies. Tends to crash a bit, unfortunately, even during solo play.

The interesting thing about this game is that it is a completely different use of the interface. BYOND, by default, is a game where you control a single mob, coasting it around with the arrow keys and using a number of predefined verbs. SpaceCastle completely removes this singular focus, putting you in charge of a number of autonomous units with no keyboard movement. This is a testament of the flexibility the BYOND engine gives an adequately motivated developer.

Game URL: http://www.byond.com/games/Abra/SpaceCastle
Instructions: http://avalonentertainments.com/SCguide.html
(Solo play available.)

Dungeon Master

This is essentially an attempt to create a multiplayer version of Dwarf Fortress. Basically, you begin with three members of your chosen race and a wagon, and are free to build a mighty (if imbred) society. This is done through intricate micromanagement, manually directing your creatures to shape each tile of the world, and filling it with useful things.

Dungeon Master is still very much a work in progress, and I’d say its main shortcoming is in lacking most of the automation in the units you can find in Dwarf Fortress. (This isn’t neccessarily a BYOND problem so much as coding that has yet to be done by the creator of Dungeon Master). Without that automation, the game requires nearly each and every task be performed manually and (as I’ve been talking about a lot lately) that can be rather pointlessly monotonous. Consequentially, most of your creatures tend to sit around twiddling their thumbs while one of them (controlled by you) is doing all the work.

Dungeon Master makes up for this to a great extent by being multiplayer. Automatically hewing an extensive settlement in Dwarf Fortress is fun, but it’s a little more meaningful if other players can witness the spoils of your efforts as they can in Dungeon Master. As the game continues to be worked on, hopefully the PCs under the player’s command will be eventually made to perform more tasks autonomously, and the result should be pure gaming gold.

Game URL: http://www.byond.com/games/Ginseng/DungeonMaster
Instructions: http://dungeonmaster.murrawhip.net/forum/index.php?topic=485.0

SpaceStation 13

This game seeks to emulate a functioning space station in which players take on various roles. There’s a great deal of functioning equipment that needs to be properly maintained to prevent the station from going kaput. Consequently, there’s quite a few tools with unique applications, and the tile-based system is well enriched with features such as wiring running under paneling. The attention to detail is staggering, including the ability to track someone down with the fingerprints they left on something.

Of course, simply minding a station wouldn’t be very exciting by itself, so each game mode is a major disaster that occurs on the station, including one where a player is designated a traitor in their midst and must (legitimately for a change) raise some chaos. There’s a great deal of potential for chaos on a space station, something as innocuous as picking up a welder and dismantling an outer station wall has a tenancy to blow everybody out into space, but the most favorite form of sabotage seems to be building plasma bombs which can submerge whole parts of the station in broiling flames. Naturally, it’s the rest of the crews’ job to catch the traitor, but no one knows exactly who it is.

It’s very much a game that’s enhanced through roleplay. Realistic channels of communication are enforced, and player roles include a captain and a space station AI (in control of performing lockdowns and sealing doors). Consequently, this game is quite vulnerable to grief play, and it’s not uncommon for bored players to take it upon themselves to destroy the station and the players within whether or not they are traitors. I think that, had I made this game, I’d probably put the non-traitor players under more rigid mechanics, but the freedom of not being restricted is valuable in itself.

Game URL: http://www.byond.com/games/Exadv1/SpaceStation13
Instructions: http://www.declassified-ss13.com/index.php

Up until playing SpaceStation 13, I figured the BYOND engine is just naturally crashy, but SpaceStation 13 hasn’t crashed in several hours of play.

What each game (especially the later two) have in common is that they’re extremely obtuse to pick up and play. After all, these games were created by players, not necessarily professional game designers, and their ability to develop a GUI that perfect strangers can pick up was (judging by the result) sketchy, at best. I highly recommend checking out the instructions link for either game and having it up and available while you’re playing them until you learn the ropes.

As for me, I’m excited about BYOND because I’ve been contemplating putting together a nice 2D tile-based game for awhile. 2D tile-based games are not neccessarily obsolete technology; There’s a lot of creative game play mechanics you can conceptualize and implement with a tile-based engine that would be very difficult to pull off in a virtual 3D space. For example, mutable terrain. BYOND is absolutely fabulous because (unlike a Neverwinter Nights 2 module) the code is flexible and readily-available enough to easily invent completely new games. The way it rolls multiplayer support into each game is particularly remarkable.

The only downside is that I could probably get even more flexibility if I take the time to get good and reoriented with Java or Flash Actionscript. However, considering I don’t have to build my own tile management engine or multiplayer code, what BYOND offers is a tremendous time saver. (Considering Java or Flash are my alternatives, that BYOND runs through an interpreter doesn’t particularly matter.)

Real Life Point Systems, Automated RPGs, and Recent Awesomeness

2008-08-06T23:04:00.000-07:00

Down went my last Blog entry, a delirious rant about American politics that surprised no one paying attention. If not pro-liberal, it was at least definitively rabidly anti-conservative. In having bias, it wasn’t fair. It didn’t really belong in a Blog whose goal is to focus primarily on gaming topics. Besides, politics are downright depressing, and I’m trying to lighten up.

Racking up Points

Perhaps I was grouchy about my new diet. Weight Watchers. Essentially The Hacker’s Diet, boiled down to a sort of “calories + fat – fiber = easy-to-track points” formula.

It’s marketed as a $16/mo service. Supporting 46,000 employees across 30 countries I bet they have more subscribers than World of Warcraft. When it comes to fighting weight gain, business booms under promises of contraction.

Fire and Forget Heroism

Gaming-wise, my last real entry has put me in a fascinating position of considering the merits of the computer roleplaying game that automates the monotonous decisions away.

In terms of trying to quickly determine the overall quality of an RPG, this is a really good system: “Oh, look, you’re making me manually do a large quantity of obvious and completely unchallenging activities. I think I shall uninstall your game now.” It brings the number of viable RPGs down to a remarkably small number.

However, there’s some surprising exceptions that pop up when I consider them.

For example, Dwarf Fortress. This indy hit took the PC gaming world by surprise not too long ago. Completely text based, your role is in designating what work your dwarves need to do, and away they go. There’s an alternate Roguelike RPG mode as well.

A remarkable number of successful RPGs can be found to have automated, streamlined out, or severely minimized the more monotonous decisions. Not the least of them being Blizzard’s Diablo and World of Warcraft series. In most cases, the transformation is incomplete – they’re still grinds – but there’s signs here and there such as World of Warcraft’s fire and forget trade skill mechanism.

This eventually branches into the entire Real Time Strategy genre. When you get right down to it, isn’t that what those little controllable units do? You tell them where to go and they’ll try to work out the details themselves. The difference between an ‘active’ (attack while moving) and ‘passive’ (don’t attack while moving) move command is very much a minor re-programming of the AI – at least a dip switch of sorts. Real time strategy games can bring together thousands of units on the same map this way.

The real time strategy genre in particular makes one very aware of a difference between “Good AI” and “Bad AI” that brings about the true nature of one of the major problems in implementation:

If you give the players bad AI, they get ticked off about how stupid the units you gave them are. They’ll do what the player did not intend, which is frustrating.
If you give the players the best AI, the player feels uninvolved. Newbie players especially become quite aware that the AI is better at playing the game than they are, and feel belittled.
If you give the users an AI that they customize themselves they’re both well-involved and able to minimize the monotony. However, if it requires a computer science degree to even use, it’s simply inaccessible to most players.

In the end, a user customized AI that’s hooked up with a user-friendly GUI seems the best possible path, and this is extremely rare. It seems to me that this is a very fertile niche for game development. I’m considering writing a simple game with manual NPC behavior configuration as the predominant feature.
I wonder how much control Spore will give the player along these lines. It could be quite interesting if the players could put their creatures up against eachother and include with them instructions on how those creatures act. No sign of it in the creature creator, but then, that’s not the meat of the game – ’twas merely the character generation sequence.

Recent awesomeness
If you haven’t done so yet, I recommend checking out Jeff Gerstmann’s and company’s new site, GiantBomb. I’m not sure if Gerstmann was really fired for journalistic integrity in the face of corporate bribery, and I don’t care – that’s water under the bridge. What does impress me is that GiantBomb is an interesting combination of grassroots journalism and open-source gaming wiki maintenance. I’ve already updated some entries on my favorite little movie character, Wall-E.

On a final note, I’ll mention I finally caught the first three acts of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog (something most people would have been able to do a week or two ago if they were quick enough). I think there’s a little Dr. Horrible in us all. I wish them the best of luck and hope they’re a commercial success.