Author Archives: Abalieno

ROADKILL!! (The doom of indie mmorpg companies)

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Dave Rickey: There are a lot of lessons Eve can teach us. But let’s not go off half-cocked and learn the wrong ones. Eve’s business position is so unique, it serves only as an outlier, a boundary point that shows what can happen, when a game has a niche to itself that grows so slowly that it attracts no competitors.

—
Raph recently put together some predictions about this industry and people nodded their heads in agreement. I have many thoughts about this but it’s not easy to put all of them together in a simple thesis. I’ll throw some of the thoughts here and maybe I’ll find a thread.

The first point to consider is that I find those previsions vague. At some point I could imagine me commenting, “It went exactly the opposite of what you said.” and Raph, “No, it went exactly as I said”. Some of those predictions are plausible (like the online distribution), you could even argue that the scenario he portrays is already here. More like a description than a prediction. But the title says “next-gen”. Next-gen supposes that things will change and this is exactly the apocalyptic scenario that both Lum and Psychochild have perceived. A tone confirmed by Raph himself:

Looking out at the future, what I see is an extinction-level event.

That sounds quite different from a description of the current scenario, it implies some huge paradigm shifts, innovation, revoloutions. Exciting times!

Well, my predictions are much more shocking than that: things will remain almost exactly as you see them now.

If you observe the situation with a huge magnifier then everything you’ll see will also appear huge and exhalted, but the truth is that it all falls in the average “normality”. Raph seems to predict significant changes, in particular he focuses on the extinction of the majority of the large projects for the rise of the indie companies. A plurality of offers, tiny blocks of innovation. The “spring of all the new species”. Even a new growth of the PC gaming market!

My suspect is that Raph wrote that while asleep and dreaming. A pretty, positive scenario that he wishes more than one he expects, I think. Again we could argue that all this is already happening. But where is the prediction? If it’s just a relative point of view the discussion would be pretty much null, what you see as “huge” and “next”, I see as “small” and “current”. Without an objective platform we don’t go anywhere. That scenario is already here or it is an incoming revolution? Because if it’s already here then I don’t see it as “huge”, I see it as “negligible”. Are things really going to change significantly? And for who?

Who will say what is “next-gen” when it will finally arrive? Because my suspect is that everyone will have a different opinion. Everyone will be convinced to be right even if everyone says a different thing.

So let’s focus on the three points I find relevant to discuss, at least:
– The Big Guys will crumble under their own weight
– Smaller, indie companies will flourish everywhere with a plurality of ideas
– Everyone will be happy (the market will grow, there will be more space for individuality and the offer will be richer)

Do you really believe that this is going to happen or you just wish that it is going to happen? My opinion is that things will change only if you go look in detail at every small trend, pretty much as things can already be seen from many different points of view right now. This is why I say that nothing significant is going to happen anytime soon. The genre will mature. Maturity usually brings to specialization more than variety. I don’t think we’ll see a plurality, I think instead that we’ll see a consolidation.

See? Things are already much different and still the same, at the same time. I say there will be a consolidation but this implies that there will be failures, projects going nowhere. This scenario not only is something already happening under everyone’s eyes, but it may even fall in that first point about the Big Guys.

It is going to be extremely hard for medium-sized companies to compete in the mmorpg market. There’s a race for the leadership. The upcoming scenario is an oligarchy. A few, consolidated titles, with dedicated development teams. The great majority of the companies that found their own space won’t have an easy, quiet life. They will have to fight and there will be losses because those smaller spaces will become more desirable when the market will saturate. This isn’t a process of extinction, this is a process of selection and assimilation. It isn’t even a trend specific of this industry. The mass market implies an hegemony. It’s the Borg process of assimilation and transformation. Things that will be rejected will be excluded, but after the process started it doesn’t stop, like the excessive growth of WoW. Beyond the normality. There’s a point where it transforms in a flood, the mass market culture permeates and convinces. Conforms and uniforms.

Who will survive in this scenario? The indie companies or at least the smaller sized ones that won’t fit in the Uber Oligarchy will only survive if they don’t draw any attention. Live of breadcrumbs. When they’ll rise their head and draw the attention they will get assimilated or wiped away. Or a project is too tiny to be relevant, or it will draw attention and it will be eaten alive. This is what happens when you draw attention. The Big Guys and every mass culture trend never live of innovation. Innovation would kill mass culture. They live of assimilation. They slowly recycle what happens around them. In this scenario the indie companies aren’t “next-gen”, they are just food for the dinosaurs.

What is sure is that the dinosaurs will continue to rule this land and decide what happens on a significant level. Maybe the small companies will have the blind illusion of being the center of the world, but they will only exist as long the dinosaurs want, as long they get unnoticed, as long they remain negligible. As long they don’t harm. As long they don’t poke their heads out of their holes.

And in the case they try to do that… ROADKILL!!

EQ2: the equipment damage rule

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I wanted to comment this for a while, in the last update patch there was a change that created some discussions and complaints. Here it is:

– Upon death, the most expensive item equipped in each slot within 2 minutes before death will take damage. If an item was equipped in more than one slot, the next most expensive item will be damaged in addition to the most expensive item. A single item will not be damaged more than once per death.

To begin with, this explanation is rather twisted and the first reaction from the players was a question mark. What the hell does this mean?

Well, Aggro Me wrote a bit about this rule when it was still on the test server and not in its last reiteration. EQ2 has gone through many revisions of the death penalty and, following a funny and consolidated trend, it moved more and more close to WoW. Right now the death penalty doesn’t differ too much between the two games and even in EQ2 one of the most relevant elements is the fact that when you die your equipment gets damaged and you have to repair it.

Since the two games follow the same rules both also have to deal with the same consequences. In EQ2 the players have available a /slash command to bind to a key that would quickly unequip all your items. This “smart” workaround/exploit was useful because you could press that key when a death was imminent to easily avoid to get the durability hit on your equipment on death and avoid repair costs.

In WoW the players don’t have access to powerful slash commands, but the UI scripting language also allows to create buttons to swap equipment and mirror the exact same exploit. It is interesting now to compare how this problem was addressed in the two games.

In EQ2 the solution went through various reiterations that lead to that rather counterintuitive rule I quoted up there. In fact the first problem is that this workaround to fix the exploit breaks one basic rule: “a player should always be able to understand a change or use a new feature without reading the patch notes”. In this case not only the explanation isn’t that simple to understand, but the new mechanic is based on a timer that is invisible to the player. The two minute rule, plus its precisations, is nowhere “transparent” in the game. This two minute timer isn’t revealed to the player, nor it can be autonomously deduced. The result is quite simple: or you read the patch notes, understand exactly what they mean and remember them, or this mechanic would remain completely obscure and hidden. It is clunky and complicated, not really appropriate for something that should be kept simple and transparent. Intuitive.

How the designers arrived to that conclusion? Here’s the “designers vs players” duel in the form of questions and answers:

Q: The players use a macro to quickly unequip items when death is imminent to avoid repair costs.
A: The designers introduce a 2-minute timer so that every item equipped in that lapse of time would get damaged. Even if unequipped at the time of the death.

Q: The players start to complain because they are penalized when swapping equipment for other reasons, every item equipped within those two minutes would get the durability hit. With this penalty stacking on multiple items.
A: The designers tweak the rule so that only the last item equipped for each slot would get damaged.

Q: The players once again outsmart and exploit the rule bringing with them two complete sets. One is their proper set they should use, the other is a disposable trash set to which they can quickly swap before a death to have it absorb the penalty.
A: The designers tweak the rule so that the “best” item for each slot would get damaged.

And that’s the final rule. There are even cases where you deliberately unequip items to move through risky spots without risking your equipment. This rule doesn’t prevent this, but the players would need to remember to wait an imaginary 2 minute timer to wear off every time. It is simply counterintuitive and artificial. Aren’t there better design solutions?

As I said WoW shares the exact same mechanic and risks the exact same exploit, it’s is interesting to see how Blizzard addressed the same problem. Now the point is that we don’t even need to wait for Blizzard, because Blizzard’s design is extremely simple. It’s logic.

The players unequip items to avoid them to get damaged on death. How we prevent this behaviour?

That’s the starting point, and this is a roleplay game. The more it is consistent, the better. So what’s the simplest answer possible to that problem? It’s obvious: we forbid the player to swap equipment during combat.

See? It wasn’t hard and it even makes sense. It’s extremely hard to imagine a warrior in a full plate who swaps his whole armor during a fight. Preventing this lame equip-swapping behaviour would not only fix the exploit, but also make the game mechanic more consistent, believable and intuitive. If you try to swap a chest piece during combat in WoW you get a message telling you that you can’t do that action at that time. You need to wait to be out of combat, when it makes sense to allow the character to put on a different armor set. Is this brilliant design? No, it’s logic. It’s thinking from “within the game” instead through the artificiality of game design: you cannot swap armor sets at will while you are engaged in combat. It’s not a rule to close an exploit, I would be *surprised* if the opposite would be allowed.

This is not all. If we think to a combat situation there’s still the realistic possibility to swap some of the items. For example it makes sense to swap weapons even if you are engaged in combat. This possibility would be believable. And, in fact, this is once again how WoW behaves: while you cannot swap your armor sets during combat, you can still swap two kinds of items, weapons and trinkets. Which, incidentally, are exactly those two types of items that contemplate the item-swapping as a valid combat strategy that is part of the design of the game. (trinkets don’t even have durability in WoW)

I’m far from praising WoW. What I want to demonstrate is that Blizzard’s design isn’t something complicated and convoluted that comes from the minds of game design gurus. It’s just simple thinking, logic, linear conclusions. Observation. You think to a fantasy game, you imagine these warriors and you are supposed to simulate the game mechanics so that they go close to what you would expect. The problem of the consistence.

The only excuse I can guess on SOE’s side is that they didn’t have available an “in-combat” flag to use directly in the mechanic, forcing them to find another solution. But even in this case I believe it wouldn’t be hard to code something similar starting from what’s already available, like the hate-lists of the mobs (if the players is in aggro, he would be considered in combat).

It looks like SOE has inherited Raph’s “Out Of Character” design. The absurd idea that the game design is completely abstracted (alienated) from the setting and the world you simulate. The level of the mechanics independent from the metaphoric level. The result is a complicated and convoluted ruleset that simply makes no sense and just leads to more and more problems.

Of course I’m writing about a tiny detail here with a negligible impact. But it’s a way to reveal a much broader and dangerous trend. A design apporach that I consider harmful (for these kinds of games).

—
Off-topic: What happened to Scott Hartsman? I have three guesses:
1- He just stopped posting on the boards because he’s busy planning and scheduling and there’s no major release anytime soon
2- He was moved/promoted/downgraded to a different role or project
3- He left SOE

Hey, you know I’m suspicious.
(now I have the suspect he may go to fill the space left by Raph)

The noob experience

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I noticed a piece of news about Ryzom and planned changes to the newbie experience and it triggered some thoughts:

The current “newbie land” system made of 4 separate islands, is completely changed and replaced by a unique island; and, the new players should also be able to find more help through new missions that will guide their first steps on Atys regarding the gameplay and the lore basics.

I don’t want specifically to discuss this game but just some general points. It is interesting because there’s a trend about consolidating the newbie zones and simplify a lot the offer in quests and content. For example it happened consistently in DAoC, with a progressive approach, and in the classic EQ with brand new “alienated” tutorial content that gets revised and redone from time to time. I say “alienated” in the sense that it’s like a different part of the game, like a “ship” that brings you later in the real game. A transition. The same approach was used in EQ2’s newbie island that is “somewhere else”. Almost a stand-alone game (“The trials of the Isle”).

The whole newbie experience is another crucial point in this genre because it brings up many problems, that get systematically ignored only to demand overhauls and redesigns later on. In fact I think Mythic hasn’t learnt from DAoC when planning Warhammer as I already commented about the introductory PvP model they have hinted.

Anyway, I can observe this general trend to restructure, consolidate and simplify the newbie content. This is probably the consequence of a “redistribution of the players” over time. Exactly what Raph explanied in this often-quoted chart (and that I commented specifically). The players behave like waves, moving uniformily toward the perimeter of the game, till they reach the dam and start to stagnate there (while the center exsiccates till it needs to be refreshed).

There are a few interesting concepts in there to consider, though. One is that I don’t think WoW will require a redesign anytime soon. What is different then? The fact that the game was planned and designed completely around the accessibility, something that noone else was able to reproduce well enough. WoW starts as a single-player game. The zone can be fairly crowded or deserted but the key element is that you are “emancipated” from the presence of other players. The game teaches itself, you follow along. There aren’t barriers to pass, you play it exactly as a single-player game, so if there aren’t other players the game doesn’t suffer. This isn’t only valid later on, but even during the off-peaks (that get always ignored in the design). So it’s a self-supporting part of the game and that is expected to work under much different conditions.

What have we learnt? I’ve written recently: the multiplayer part is a “natural drift”. The key point is that it is “spontaneous” instead of imposed. The idea of an connexion, a join. Or, as I defined it to go at the core design idea: a gateway. The single-player experience can be used as an efficient “gate” to bring the two parts together. To add the value of one, to the other. “Gated content” to make the impermeable barriers, permeable. To make the genre accessible.

Now there are a few other points to consider. One is how you can add new content to the early game. This is a common topic that gets frequently brought up. Recently I’ve seen Aggro Me writing about it. The content is always exclusively added at the endgame, following the linear progression model, opposed to a “systemic” approach. It’s a way to let the players surf the wave on the border and you have to regularly extend their space, adding “segments” through expansions and rising the level cap as a rarer measure. What about adding new content even for new players? It is not a simple consideration about the convenience (since there are more players at the endgame) but a risk. If you add new low-level content you risk to spread the players thin and fragment the playerbase too much. As we’ve seen in Raph’s chart, the noob to mid level content is almost always underutilized and frequently mudflated out of irrelevancy. It will be increasingly hard for the players to meet and enjoy the game together.

So are there ways to add new content for the low level players without damaging the game or change completely model? Of course there are. To begin with I consider stupid to erase and rebuild. You can work to reiterate the development, which would bring to very good results if it was actually done. Polish old content, refine the quests, update the monsters with new attacks and behaviours, loot, graphic, animations. Bring more life to what was too limited in scope. Then add more tie-ins, more connected plots, quests that link together and deepen certain paths. There is no need to stretch the content and fragment the players. There is no need to add ten more zones when the population clearly doesn’t support that choice. But you can bring new life to the old zones, not just reskinning a couple of mobs (Mythic has often this kind of superficial attitude), but with a more comprensive approach that delves in the content and makes it more interesting and complete. Something that could be positive not only for the new players who are presented with a better game, but also for the veteran players who may enjoy to reenact past experiences that were made more rich and would present interesting variations in the gameplay.

So it’s interesting work that could be done on both fronts: update and refresh the content already there and add new one that blends naturally with the rest. That completes it without dispersing. That is enriching instead of diluting. Instead of creating more and more and more space, you optimize, polish and reiterate.

The classic EQ has in the work another expansion that will be released later this year and that will have content supporting the whole level range, from level 1 to 75. I think it is a good idea but at the same time I cannot avoid to think what will be the role of the old content? Is this going to be the biggest mudflation event ever? If they plan for an autonomous expansion, particularly focused on the solo experience, they’ll finish to obliterate the old content, which is the exact opposite of what I proposed above: reiterate on what is already there instead of dispersing, fragmenting and diluting.

When you think to these problems you always finish to imagine some sort of adaptable server structure that can support dynamically the redistribution of the players along the lifecycle of the game. Guild Wars is the only game that specifically put these problems at the center of the design and the idea would work smoothly even to support the off-peaks. The players would be clustered depending on the need and the single servers would become multi-purpose instead of zone-specific, so that they would be actively used depending on the necessity. If the first day of release you have 99% of the players in the newbie zones, all the server would run newbie zones logic, when most of the players will be at the high levels, all the servers would run endgame zones logic, adapting dynamically and grouping the players to avoid both the desertification and the overcrowding.

Is that the best scenario? Not really, because abstracting the space means that the only persistence that is left is that of the players and not that of the environment. It would mean that there’s little to no active interaction, that the players only move on a static background and that the PvP is extremely limited. No consequences, no roles, no ownership, no management. No self-consistence.

Ultimately, from wherever I start to think about these problems and and possible solutions, I always land at the same conclusions. My tripartite model takes into consideration all these variables: the ease of accessibility through soloable content progression, a spontaneous drift toward the multiplayer without enforcing it, “gated content” to blend and interconnect PvP with PvE and a server structure that keeps the servers all balanced uniformly while solving the problem of the lack of persistence (just examined). The removal of the “levels” also helps a lot to close the circle while still retaining the role of the “cozy worlds”.

In particular my model follows what WoW does and then builds on it. For example at the end of WoW’s newbie zones there’s usually a quest that is more group-friendly. In the Dwarf/Gnome zone you have to go kill a named troll in a cave. It is common to find other players in there, sharing the same objective and group with them for a short moment (weak-ties) to complete that quest. It’s the first “multiplayer” step you do in the game, your preliminary grouping experience. But at the same time the quest is still soloable, if there aren’t other players around you can still carefully move through the cave and manage to kill the named troll. The group is a possibility that is naturally given (and spontaneously taken), but in absence of that possibility you can still move on.

This is the same approach that I follow (the second layer of the tripartite model) and that I extend to the whole game. All the content that is *mandatory* for your character progression is soloable, but at the same time adaptable up to four players. This makes it flexible, if you have more than four players you can split in two or more groups, noone is left out or put in front of a barrier. Noone is excluded. Parallel to this the content is then expanded to become truly group-oriented and requiring more than five players sticking together and collaborating (up to raids), but in this case the functional purpose of THIS content isn’t anymore tied to your own character progression but instead to a “world progression” and then “gated” toward the player vs player. So the design idea clusters the players from the single player up to large raids, it contemplates content for all these cases. With the key design goal to make the character progression always soloable and instead motivate the communal, group-oriented content through exclusively communal objectives (or “horizontal” personal character progression and personalization, like armor and weapons that aren’t stronger but with an unique look that defines a “status” without unbalancing the game).

The accessibility is there, the adaptable servers are there, the persistence is there.

Think to a twisted WoW’s model: the basic landmass where we have now the horde and alliance zones would become the open PvP field where the players and guilds conquer territories and raid cities and castles, a truly persistent environment. Ironforge and the other capitals would be detached from their location and become the “planes” in my model. Suspended and intermediating between that open PvP territory and the new PvE. “Hubs” where the players would gather and then begin their journey into the different PvE adventures (the dungeon instances). With the raids inheriting a different role. Instead of becoming the only way for your personal character progression, they would acquire only communal objectives that would finally affect the PvP world. Bringing to concrete consequences in the persistent world (evocating heroes and artifacts and triggering events).

Every time I reconsider those basic points I arrive at the conclusion that those solutions I’ve thought long ago are still enough satifying and innovative. I don’t know yours.

Laughing Out Loud (of the Monday morning)

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It speaks by itself:

Vice president and general manager of Codemasters Online Gaming (COG), David Solari, has revealed a target of over a million players for the division’s upcoming Lord of the Ring Online (LOTRO) title and admitted intentions to compete directly with Blizzard’s genre-leading World of Warcraft.

“I think the goal [for LOTRO] would be over a million subscribers in the west,” said Solari, speaking at the COG LiVE event in Warwick, UK, yesterday. “World of Warcraft is such a benchmark now, but if something’s going to do it it’s going to be a Lord of the Rings brand that lets people play in that environment and experience that content. It’s got to have probably the best chance of competing with it.”

LOTRO, developed by US developer Turbine, is scheduled for a Q4 release. Demoed in fully playable form at the event by executive producer Jeff Steefel, the initial release is to include the content from the first Lord of the Rings book, The Fellowship of the Ring, with the rest of the trilogy to be added as the game evolves.

This goes right into the group with Campion (Eve-Online clueless producer who luckily quit shortly after release) claiming that Eve would have 100k of players online at the same time (and the servers supporting that without troubles) and Marc Laukien (MutableRealms clueless president) claiming that Wish’s target was at least 100k subscribers.

Why people in the high positions never have even remotely a clue?

Adding my own guesswork:

1M of players is laughable, 500k is laughable. Anything below that depends solely on the quality of the game.

Imho the best scenario they have is 150k to 200.

(I think I’ve been excessively optimistic, this game may never see the light of the day)

WoW: Cross-server battlegrounds

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Gaming Steve has friends at Blizzard. And he doesn’t skip an occasion to repeat it.

So here some largely anticipated guesses about the cross-server battlegrounds that some of us were expecting and suggesting since beta:

Blizzard is hard at work right now creating new enhanced Battlegrounds servers. These servers will no longer be regulated to a single realm, but cross-linked across Realms to create an diverse PvP experience! Right now they are planning on linking 16 realms together per Battleground server for massive PvP action. You could imagine how this can really help out the Battlegrounds situation, not only will the queues go much faster but you’ll finally get a chance to fight across Realms.

And the best part? This enhancement is going to be released very shortly; most likely by patch 1.12 or 1.13 at the latest.

Then he starts to rave about worldwide tournament when I’m still waiting Blizzard to back up the claims during beta:
After the european launch we’ll give you the possibility to choose where you want to play.

The european launch was one year and a few months ago. The european servers are still inaccessible with an american account. And vice-versa.

Of course the problems of WoW’s PvP aren’t just about the queues. But to understand that you would need to have a clue.

P.S.
Interesting to notice that he says the expansion release could slip to early 2007.

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The Orrery, too pretty to blame

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I wanted to comment Oblivion’s downloadable add-ons since when Raph give it some weight. This week even Lum added his opinion and I was going to back up those points.

I really don’t mind paying for content, especially for games I really like and wish would never end. Before Oblivion was out I was already anticipating these mini-addon they announced but I still didn’t know how superficial was the concept. I like the idea of “ongoing development” even applied to single player games, with mini-packs of content added regularly and aimed to continuously enhance the game.

I was waiting for new dungeons, factions to join, plots to discover, new scripted events, new zones to open up, new herbs to collect, new magic effects, weapons, armors, monsters. Extension to the game, content that could be worth a price.

Instead Bethesda’s idea of add-ons seems just taking the worst out of mmorpgs. Loot-driven instead of content-driven. As I often wrote this *genre* should be more than just “loot whoring”. When you offer something and ask for money, you should offer some kind of value. A “communicative pact”. In this case the message that Bethesda is sending is definitely wrong.

These mini-packs were an extremely interesting possibility that was ruined by an absurd mentality that, as Lum wrote, could be negative for the whole industry.

This is what I wrote on Q23 (in response to one of the devs):

ashileedo: Not to belabor the point, but I’ll say again — the Orrery itself took an artist a month to create – something we never did for Morrowind.

—
It’s not a problem of appearance, it’s a problem of substance.

You are basically selling loot, taking the worst from the RMT and mmorpgs. Instead we expect “content”. Something that has something to say. Some gameplay.

Role playing games. Not loot whores. The Orrery could be pretty, but it needs a role.

You have a team. The content you release should be the work of a mini-team as a mini exp pack. This means that in this team of devs you should have at least one member for each core duty, like a world builder, an artist, a scripter and so on.

Instead you are fragmenting too much. Leave that to the mod community. And instead take advantage from the fact that YOU CAN HAVE A TEAM.

And that’s the difference. Content-less plugins tweaking a couple of elements in the game are a type of content that the community can easily do. It’s that kind of superficial approach that everyone tries while poking things around with the toolset. You tweak here and there those few elements so that they fit better your taste.

From Bethesda I expect more than that. I expect at least small teams working together to add something to the game. I expect that kind of collaborative work that isn’t easy to find in the mod community where the great majority of the stuff is one-man work focusing in his area of expertise. I expect from Bethesda that special added value that is about working as a team, have different developers that are specialized in different areas and that can work on a project in its multiple aspects. Not just a new texture, a new model, a new bandit camp, a new script or a new monster. But all these “segments” of content brought together so that they build up a piece of the game with some cosistence. Complete in all its parts.

The Orrery is extremely deluding if you consider the gameplay. It drops a note directly in your backpack, enabling a waypoint where you have to go kill a bandit. This bandit will have a letter that will then mark four other locations where you have to kill more bandits and retrieve four dwemer mechanical parts (btw, it’s damn hard to find corpses rolling down hills and hiding in the grass). When you have these you go back to the mage guild and hand the parts to an NPC that will go work to repair the Orrery. You return one day later and finally the Orrery is open. It consists in a room and a button that you can press to get a daily power, the button will then give you different powers depending on the moon phases.

The gameplay sucks. It’s another random excuse and a button you press to get a special power adding nothing to the game. But I have to say that the Orrery itself is a true MASTERPIECE. And masterpieces have no price.

The value of this plug-in is truly unique. It is just a “room” but the work that the artist has put on it is something unparalleled. This is pure art. One wonderful steampunk machinery, completely animated that made my jaw drop. The detail in every little texture is impressive. This goes beyond a “game value”. It is pure visual awe toward a fancy artifact that leaves you speechless. And in this it captures perfectly the spirit of this object in the game.

This dwemer machine is a planetarium. It serves no game-y purpose and it is absolutely optional for the game. But it is optional even in the fictional Oblivion world as it would be in the reality. It won’t help the population to fight monsters or resist the invasion from the outer plane. It is like a museum. A museum that transfers its visual value from the game to the reality. Because this machine is impressive to see as you would go watch it in a museum if it was real. It’s like a blur between two realities and, in this, it becomes a true masterful work. There’s just no gap anymore in the suspension of disbelief.

It is definitely something new and unique. I’ve never seen something like this. Basically the artist has brought to life a dwemer artifact as if it was real. A veil rift. It is obvious that this work is an absolute exception. It just cannot be reviewed as a “game” product, since it is not. It is not a piece of loot with a price tag added. This is pure art form and a dedication from an artist that can be directly felt.

And in this it has no price.

(two critics:
– the animation of the walls is unbelievable the first time you activate it, sadly once active you cannot switch it off anymore. I wish there was a switch so that you could trigger the whole process at will
– I also wish the quests were more naturally blended into the game instead of just POP-UP screen messages the first time you reload)

P.S.
There was an Orrery even in Morrowind.

(screens here)




 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

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The website is having issues

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I don’t know why but it’s not because of me.

In the last couple of days there are moments when the website doesn’t respond. E-mail, ftp and shell oddly work. Only the webserver seems to take vacations.

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Why Auto Assault will fail

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Auto Assault should have launched recently and noone cares.

At least I don’t. I played Jumpgate for six months after launch. There was ZERO support. Nothing if not superficial massive “events” that were all about massive grinds (think to Ahn Quiraj). It was pretty obvious that NetDevil shipped the game and then forget about it.

When you do this, you deserve to go back into irrelevancy and stay there.

But of course people are stupid and the worst companies always get more founding. So now we have “Auto Assault”. It seems they worked on this for more than four years. With a team of 50. While Jumpgate was going on with a team of one.

Here’s the reason why this game and this company will never go anywhere:

NetDevil’s only other game was another massively multiplayer game called Jumpgate. NetDevil still maintains the game, which was launched in 2001, even though only about 1,000 people still play it.

And Brown said he plans to expand the company beyond its two current games.

“NetDevil is going to start another team and multiple games,” he said, adding that the company might also look at creating more traditional, non-MMO titles.

You cannot support ONE game and you already plan for multiple projects. What a fucking CLUELESS management.

For now, Brown and his crew will watch the gamers roll into Auto Assault and hope they stick around long enough to see what else they’ve been working on.

I hope they don’t.

This whole industry needs surgery to remove inflated egos.

P.S.
There’s a thread on Q23 if you want to read more specifically about EverQuest on wheels.

In Interstate 76, you had to deal with the physics of your car, and what armor was on what quadrant. You had to use your front rear and side weapons very intelligently. If your left armor was gone, you had to constantly manuever to keep that side out of the line of fire.

In Autoduel, it was even more strategic. You had to do many of the things mentioned above, as well as deal with subsystems of the car going out. Like tires, engines, weapons getting destroyed after the armor was gone (Granted, Auto Assault has this as well, but with one health bar car placement strategy means nothing. Once your health bar is gone you have no control over protecting your precious interior).

In Auto Assault, you have one health bar. Your main weapon is on a turret, so it doesn’t matter where the enemy is. You can always shoot it. Also, how you manuever your car and it’s position relative to the enemy means very little. There are front and rear mounted weapons, so you have to keep the enemy in this front arc that is drawn in front of your car to use the front mounted weapons.

The problem lies in the fact that skill plays almost no role. For the turret, if an enemy is in range, every shot may or may not hit them dependent on a die roll. Same with the front weapons. You basically just drive around in circles keeping the enemy in the front arc and hope that the die roll rolls a hit. It’s a piss poor merging of standard MMO combat mixed in with a pseudo-skill based system.

The reason this exists is to give you weapons firings stats that slowly increase over time, to keep you playing. Unfortunately, it makes the combat so ridiculously dull because it doesn’t reward skill. The only reward is eventually getting your weapons skills high enough to auto-hit enemies.

If it was for me I’d have put all the weapons on fixed positions so that you have to steer the car. More like an x-wing simulator done with cars, which should be easily doable even in a mmorpg since the car movement is easily predictable for the netcode.

Then it would be all about ramming other cars with blades or tailchasing them with a machine gun. It seems Auto Assault fails already on these extremely basic expectations.

Oh, and if I would make a game about “cars” it is quite obvious that it would all pivot on “modding” them. That’s what the car geeks expect. No “ding, level up” shit.

At last we feet, mace to mace, you halfwit human!

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I just got this morning Dragon Quest 8 on the PSX2 which is finally out in europe. I got the english version from play.com because I hate the translations here (and my brother’s PSX2 isn’t modded) but I noticed the european version has already all the different languages bundled in.

I simply LOVE this game. At first the graphic was a turn off (too ‘clean’), then I started to slowly grow fond of it and now I’m in love with just EVERYTHING. The characters, the monsters, the environments, the battles, the animations, the musics. This is a true masterpiece. Pure old-school RPG BLISS! One rare example where the new technological tidbits don’t get in the way of the long tradition of the series.

The night/day cycles are impressive, I find myself always instinctively thinking about grabbing a screenshot of the places and the character (I even tried for a few minutes to try to get a panty shot at the bunny girl in the pub with no luck, hm…). This is also the first game where you hoard healing herbs that you’ll HAVE TO use. Before reaching the first big mob at the end of the waterfall cave I died two times, maybe this is a game where the fights aren’t so trivial.

It is filled with cutesy stuff. At the beginning I couldn’t conceive to attack mobs so absolutely cute. My god, this game has the best mobs EVER. It’s something that must be seen. The whole things is a design masterpiece. It’s all extremely exemplified to the essential but with a polish and care that are incomparable. The modernity isn’t represented by bloated features and appearance but is instead more polish and detail. It’s hard to nail down exactly but often game design (here I consider game design the whole thing, mechanics, story, characters, look atc…) becomes just more, more and more. Here instead it’s all about an handful of elements, but all “right”. It’s enlightening. A gaming epiphany.

I so love the optimistic, lighthearted mood and the story remains archetypical but still involving and with fun and humorous twists thanks to the characters and that special feel that only Enix games have. A game with no age.

I just played for a few hours. A RPG classic. They are so rare nowadays.

If I had to review it, it would score a “perfect”.

You can tell that crystal ball’s a real’ un. Glows better, like. Bet we’ll get a good fortune outta this one, eh?

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