Monthly Archives: March 2006

Does SE really care about RMT ?

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I think money has something to do with the way SE handles these things. I believe that money is more important then banning suspected accounts. Seriously they have so much more power in their hands. And yet nothing is done. They make the rules about what is allowed and what is not. They are the ones writing the stuff you have to sign up to when you agree to play. I mean they say botting is illegal. But yet certain players are online 24/7 for months at a time. Years even. There is no logical reason to why these players are allowed to continue to play.

If SE or any other company made it impossible to play for more then 30 hours without logging. They would give the Gilsellers and powerleveling services a big blow.If a gilseller char is beeing prevented from playing for 10 hours. They are loosing money. Because time is money this is the best way I believe to fight the RMT business.

I know that SE has done somethings lately. But why aren’t they doing the logical thing banning the bots ?

Daniel

DAoC in fullscreen, finally

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One of the things I hate in DAoC is the client. It has been always the biggest weakness of the game with all its limitations and odd behaviours.

The most annoying problem is that there is no way to properly resize the client when playing in windowed mode and if you set it at your screen resolution the game window goes out of the screen and even prevents you to use the taskbar. The only choice is then to set the client resolution to be smaller than your screen, but this is also so annoying because you cannot use all the space available and you have to stare at the desktop or another window behind the client window.

No, Mythic didn’t suddenly wake up to work on the client as they should from a long time, but I discovered a program that at least overrides the client window and allows to play with it covering the whole screen without covering the taskbar at bottom.

Unfortunately the program still cannot remove the borders of the client window, nor it can dynamically resize actual resolution but it can at least automatically move it so that the borders aren’t shown, allowing you to play with the game at the same resolution of the screen. The program is quite simple, you just select the DAoC window from a menu listing all the running programs and then select the fullscreen option and “trigger it”.

It isn’t perfect but a huge improvement for me. Mythic should really start to learn how much are important these basic functionalities that they have ignored for far too long. You know, something like a better mouse sensibility or the possibility to change server without having to quit and restart. But I guess they are too busy on Warhammer to care about an acient game that when it comes to basic systems didn’t improve at all (controls, options, interface, pathing code, casting interrupts, ghosting issues, lagcasting, lagjumping, surface/dive in the water, steep terrain, the possibility to relong on a lag disconnect without having to restart and so on for a very long list that just keeps growing).

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Big news: Bioware stepping in

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From IGN:

Acclaimed role-playing game developer BioWare announced today its first venture into the world of online role-playing with the revelation that the company has begun work on a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) title at is newly-opened studio in Austin, Texas. The Austin studio is the company’s second studio and the first to be located outside of BioWare’s home in Edmonton, Canada.

According to the company, the new studio, called BioWare Austin, has “recruited some of the top talent in MMO and RPG development…to develop a game that combines the best of BioWare’s great past games with a compelling persistent online experience.”

Joining the Austin team as lead designer is James Ohlen, BioWare’s Creative Director, whose previous credits include lead or co-lead design roles on Star Wars®: Knights of the Old Republic(TM), Neverwinter Nights(TM), Baldur’s Gate(TM) and Baldur’s Gate II(TM). Also leading the BWA team are MMO veterans Richard Vogel and Gordon Walton. Richard Vogel brings 15 years of experience to BioWare Austin, previously serving as VP of Product Development for Sony Online Entertainment’s Austin studio, as well as launching Ultima Online(TM) as a senior producer at Origin. Gordon Walton recently served as VP, studio manager and executive producer at Sony Online Entertainment as well as VP and Executive Producer at Electronic Arts.

We’ll see, we’ll see. This industry moves at a glacial speed so it will take a while before we’ll see the results.

This is the second studios after Blizzard that has proven its worth before stepping in the mmorpg genre.

I’ll avoid to make jokes about bunnyhopping but I wouldn’t be surprised if those guys will jump on a new company even before the first product is released.

Incestuous industry, what it will breed this time?

EDIT: It’s a fantasy game. Lietgardis spotted the job ads:

Familiarity with fantasy role-playing games is a must.

From J.:

Walton’s been working in games since the 1970s, and was studio head at Kesmai in the mid-90s (Air Warrior, Legends of Kesmai) just before EA took them over and shut them down. After UO2 got cancelled, EA moved him out to California to work for Maxis, but he came back to Austin soon after The Sims Online launched, and he’d probably rather forget all about that now.

Vogel produced Meridian 59 for 3DO before he went to Origin.

Mark Jacobs getting on my nerves

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Now tell me if he isn’t irritating:

Mark Jacobs:
– We don’t care about getting 5M users and we are not going to even try. If we wanted to do that we would have to fundamentally change the design of this game and throw a heck of lot more money at it. Neither of which appeals to GW or Mythic. Look, neither GW nor Mythic are stupid, we both know that if we wanted to appeal to the crowds that are playing WoW, WAR would have to be a very different game and neither of us want to do that. If that was a priority for Mythic & GW, we could make it happen but we have no interest in that. What we are going for is the “sweet spot” in creating a game that is Warhammer but not as dark, dank and depressing as it could be nor as light and fluffy as it would need to be in order to get the 5M+ crowd. Our decision to make this game about war should tell you that.

– As far as hoping we will attract DAoC players (former or current), yeap, we expect we will do that as well as other players who are looking for more than PvE. We want to do for RvR what WoW did for PvE. If we can accomplish that, we will be very successful and very happy.

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Just saying

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Wow, just wow.

Eve-Online just reached 26.665 accounts logged in at the same time. No crashes nor complaints about the lag on the forums.

Impressive. This game is flourishing.

The yearly glance at Final Fantasy XI

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Ugh.. must.. resist.

I cannot understand how regularly every year Square convinces me to buy the latest exp pack, reactivate my account, patch for hours and then only look around for a couple of hours before unsubscribing again. I’m weak and hopeless like that.

But, come on, it’s soooo pretty.

There’s a new expansion (Treasures of Aht Urhgan) to be released around the end of April and looking truly interesting. But even before the features what really stands out is the graphic. Despite the engine is still exactly the same, it seems that Square artists and animators just keep surpassing their excellence. I love the screenshots I’ve seen, the new creatures and zones stand out compared to everything I’ve ever seen in a mmorpg. Square is the new “Origin”, they are the only one left that truly “create worlds” with their own consistency and depth. Each of their games is an unique world on its own, fully crafted in every detail and where you can immerse yourself completely. There’s an engrossing backstory that ties all the elements together and that is the true heart of the game, not just a generic theme used as an excuse. Noone does this better than them.

Stories, characters, worlds. Where are they in today’s mmorpgs? We just chase loot and have bland excuses to move through superficial content.

The features coming with the expansion are quite surprising. There are going to be new zones, monsters and missions that will follow a similar scheme of the content of the two previous expansions (the missions are consecutive adventures used to narrate the story of the game) but in one of these zones there will be a city, Al Zahbi, that will introduce two new gameplay modes: Besiege and Assault.

“Besiege” sounds like a dynamic scenario that could trigger at any time while you are around the city. Basically the monsters will start to attack and swarm the city instead of roaming quietly in the wilderness and it will be your duty and the duty of those caught in the attack to defend the city. If you die you won’t lose xp points so the assault shouldn’t be a major burden for the players we are surprised into one. The NPCs will defend the city and fight along with you and from the previews I’ve read it sounds as something really chaotic but also a hell of fun.

In our town, we took on hoards of giant lizard monsters that were out for blood. Think of Besieged as the battle for Helm’s Deep in Lord of the Rings. The enemies just keep coming and they don’t stop.

“Assault” instead should be like a reversed besiege. You gather a group of players (from three to six) and grab an “assault mission” available in the town and then go to “assault” the lair of the mobs. It’s unclear if this will be an instanced zone but from the sound of it I believe these tasks can be taken just by one group and will be unavailabe to others till the group accomplishes it or fails. There’s a screenshot suggesting that there will be impassable barriers, and the official description says that the zone will be evacuated of players that don’t belong to the group who “tapped” the assault task.

EDIT: The two modes seem also related. From a dev note:

The strength of the beastmen that attack all depend on the players attacking the strongholds. If the players have beaten the beastmen back, their raids on the town will be weaker. The stronger the beastmen in the region, the harder their attacks will be.

Completing assault missions will grant you “assault points” and move your character through mercenary ranks that will probably give you the possibility to get some fancy, unspecified props. I love alternate advancement in mmorpgs when it lets you explore different parts of the game world and different gameplay. Both the Besiege and Assault sound absolutely fun and interesting. I wish other games would also try to add some new gameplay with the expansions instead of just bigger mobs and fatter loot. Can’t you see how it is awfully boring to be stuck in just the exact same, redundant gameplay as always? What are bringing to the table the new expansions of WoW, DAoC, EverQuest if not just more instances, mobs, levels and zones?

At least here we have a variation, an exploration of other possibilities to enrich the experience.

But the assault and besiege models aren’t the only interesting features in the work. The expansion will also intruduce three new classes: the “Blue Mage” who will mimic the attacks of the monsters, the “Corsair” who will be able to shoot at range with a gun and “elaborate luck-based abilities to alter the stakes of battle” (it should use a deck of cards randomly drawn) and a the recently revealed “Puppetmaster” who has a puppet following him around and will probably use it to deliver the attacks (that’s all I was able to find out).

And Chocobos! Yes, I know they are already in the game, but with the expansion you’ll be able to raise your own chocobo!

Not only, you’ll also be able to make it breed with other players chocobo to generate new ones, hinting (I hope!) the possibility to customize them and develop sepecific traits. Also because the most awesome features is what comes next: The chocobo circuit! You’ll be able to ride your chocobo in a race against other players and, maybe, win prizes. How awesome is that?

The last new feature in the expansion is the Coliseum, it is still in the dark but taken directly from the tradition of the series. It is unclear if it will involve directly the players or if you’ll only be able to bet on monsters vs monsters encounters but it’s possible that Square will continue to add more content after even this part is released.

It’s interesting to notice that all this new content won’t be available right away but it will be staggered along the bi-monthly content patches. So all the features will progressively dribble in the game as it already happened with the story-missions in the previous expansions, distributed along the year till the possible next expansion.

While looking around I’ve also read the notes of the February patch. Along with the new quests and content I noticed something that I would gladly see in DAoC or WoW:

In a previous update, damage taken during Conflict (PvP) by melee, ranged, and magic attacks was adjusted to an amount relatively lower than damage taken in regular battles with monsters.

Anyway, what really picked my interest about the expansion is the graphic that is truly amazing and without the need to use any new technology, which again demonstrates that tech is not art and that an engine is never a true limit for anything. Along with a feature list that for the first time isn’t limited to just “more of the same”, but that truly tries to explore some new possibilities and add to the variety of the game instead of drying it.

Maybe Brad McQuaid was right. Maybe it’s true that the fresh air into the genre will come from the evolution of the consolidated models we have now. What I know is that I like when these game introduces new possibilities and content that don’t just overlap with something else.

Vana’diel is easily the most interesting, original and detailed world between those I’ve experienced in this genre, it’s a pity that there are some structural design flaw that compromise its quality and undermine its accessibility.

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Race and class selection as metaphoric values

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This is my contribute to the discussion about race selection and implications. I’m not sure I see any pattern that could be really theorized and I believe the most interest part is not about the consequences of the choices (concretely close to zero in my experience) but the reasons behind those choices.

I love my dwarf in WoW. Not because it is unique or less popular than other choices, but simply because I find him having a lot of charisma. Pretty or not pretty is just a superficial point of view, as is taking the physical features “out of context”. The physical appearance of a race is much more than that. It doesn’t just define how a character looks, but it also suggests who he is, his story, his attitude.

The character customization/look is the first step into the “roleplay”. It’s the very beginning of your personal story.

You aren’t just going to choose what looks better, but you are already choosing a pattern of interaction with the game. This is already the level of the metaphore. Who You Want To Be. This being the very most important thing in a persistent world. There isn’t really anything more important than the role you choose for yourself. Simply put: your identity.

Really, I’m not surprised if the physical appearance is so important. Why I should be? It’s the ideal of the virtual world. The player is immersed in a consistent world and the very first choice is about the identity. Alternate realities, “Let’s Pretend”, “Magical Mystery Tours”, roleplay. These are the elements that define the choices of the players. It’s the level of the metaphor. Your symbolic presence and value in the virtual world. The possibility to “roleplay” and evocate a wish, a desire, an aspiration.

It makes sense that the majority of the players choose a human shape compared to an alien shape and it makes sense that they choose something looking pretty instead of something looking ugly. Aspirations, wishes.

What is being offered to the players isn’t simply a different look, but a “packaged myth”. A pattern of interaction with the game world. The way a character looks already suggests a lot about his story and his nature. All these aspects are tied together.

I completely agree with Raph here:

“Character classes and races are just modes of expression.”

The players choose the mode of expression they feel closer to themselves, or the idea of themselves they have in their minds. We are still handling symbols here, the emotional interaction with the game, the ideals it suggests you. We follow again personal myths.

Now it’s obvious that these interactions all happen on a personal, even intimate, level. The identity, the part you perceive and build, not the part the others observe, is always something stirctly personal. I’m not sure how it can be useful to reasearch the physical features of the avatars isolated from the symbolic context where they are immersed. A similar type of reasearch would just reveal the obvious, something that we can already postulate without going through it.

If I use a dwarf I’ll make it sturdy with a long red beard, if I make an ogre I’ll make it as huge as possible, if I make a gnome I’ll make it short. These choices depend on the ideals I have behind those archetypes. It’s like Plato and the theory of “ideas” and “forms”. The phyisical features of a character are its form, the idea of it is the way you think about it, the ideal. In the game you’ll try to match as much as possible the form with the idea. The single features you are going to choose are strictly dependent on that particular archetype, so it’s quite silly to think or theorize that the players will choose always tall and always handsome.

Want more concrete proofs? I have them:

Aside from Humes, the general image of each race appears to influence character size selections, i.e. Tarutaru are more often of the smallest size, while Galka players usually choose the largest model. Even last year’s trend of medium-sized Elvaan males has now been replaced by a higher percentage of large-sized characters.

Final Fantasy XI is also one game with a surprisingly even racial distribution. Why? Because everything in a Final Fantasy is strongly characterized, so building its own personal myth and style more than borrowing from a shared, consolidated “imaginary”. All the element of the game are much less stereotyped and familiar compared to western games. This means that the races were all able to create their own ideal model instead of just referring to a preexisting model. Less stereotypes = less predictable choices.

And it’s absolutely not surprising to see the race affecting the job selection: the cat girls being thiefs in majority, the Tarutaru tiny guys being casters and the huge Galka being monks and warriors. It’s again all part of the “package” that bundles together the physical appearance with the symbolic value suggested by that race. When you choose one you also choose your “mode of expression”, your identity in the virtual world in the way you see fit. The way that is more appropriate to the ideal you have. The form is always a reference to the metaphor suggested.

Along with a physical, objective description, there are always subjective, typical traits.

Who you are. What you are saying about yourself.

What actually matters is a “blind spot” in those abstract researches. The choices will be ALWAYS defined by the context. If I’m going to play a game where I’m going to save the world and marry a beautiful pricess I’ll choose the handsome knight, if the game is instead about pillaging villages and eating people alive I’m probably going to choose a troll. Ideal models. Archetypes.

These choices cannot be encoded and theorized because they strictly depend on the context. We choose the point of view from where we want to observe that *particular* story.

At the end what truly matters is the possibility for a game to offer a plurality of modes expression, variations. Even if some are going to be statistically (and unsurprisingly) more popular than others.

Server-travel is a reality

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For all those who criticized and mocked my idea on server population/faction dynamic balance.

This is from Jeff Strain about Guild Wars:

Our server infrastructure is actually kind of reflective of our core technology. We have data centres all over the world – we have data centres in Europe, data centres in the US, Korea, Japan and Taiwan. As you know, when you create your account in Guild Wars, it’s a global account – you don’t pick one of those data centres or servers, you’re not even really aware of them.

What happens is that it knows where you are, and when you play, you’ll probably be connected to one of the European servers – if you’re playing with your buddies, or by yourself, in general it knows your home datacentre. But if you want to play with me, and I’m on one of the US datacentres, the datacentres will communicate with each other and try to figure out the best place to host our game. They may decide that the total experience across both of us is going to be better if it hosts the game in Europe, and so it’ll hand off my character – it migrates my character record temporarily to the European datacentre, you and I play our game, and then when we’re done, it migrates my character back.

The datacentres all work in a confederated manner. It’s presented to you as one big massive server that’s serving the entire world, because you never have to be aware of where they are, but there’s a lot of datacentre communication going on on your behalf in the background to make sure that it’s optimising the play experience for you.

They not only move characters between different servers, but ACROSS the oceans between different datacenters. Now tell me again that my idea is impossible.

Quoting again the goals behind my project:

1- Regulate the load on each server/shard, so that the population is spread equally on the servers, avoiding queues, overcrowded and crashing servers and totally empty servers.
2- Regulate the balance, so that the population is even between the factions of a PvP environment.
3- Create an united, global and massive environment that doesn’t artificially encapsulate the players inside air tight spaces.
4- Allow the players to travel cross server, meet and play together with their friends and reorganize and build new guilds without the need to restart from zero or create alts specifically to overcome the limits in the current mmorpgs. The choice of a server won’t be “tragic” (as an unavoidable consequence that cannot be made up) as it is in other games.
5- Break the global community into smaller, manageable units-per-server through the shard system (too big communities are overwhelming and, paradoxically, make the social ties nearly impossible).

“There were a lot less of us back then, so it was easier to get to know most of the folks around you. Since there were so few players reletive to current community sizes, you become friends of friends of folks and a lot sooner you really end up knowing virtually everyone whos playing, or at least are familiar with guilds.”

If I’m a visionary, I dream of possible things.

Guild Wars: Factions – April 28 release

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From the press release:

ArenaNet® , developer of the award-winning online roleplaying game Guild Wars®, and NCsoft® Corporation, the world’s leading developer and publisher of online computer games, announce today the release date of Guild Wars FactionsTM, the hotly anticipated second game release from the critically acclaimed studio. Guild Wars Factions will be available in stores worldwide April 28, 2006.

Guild Wars Factions takes place on the Asian-inspired continent of Cantha, where new and existing Guild Wars players join an epic quest to defeat an ancient evil and save a war-torn empire. Roleplaying and competitive player-versus-player gamers alike will be able to join together in guild alliances to take control of territory and determine the fate of Cantha. New scored challenge missions and strategic competitive missions allow players to test their roleplaying prowess and earn the right for their alliance to take control of cities, towns and outposts. Large-scale alliance battles pit teams from opposing factions against each other in a struggle to conquer new territory and redraw the battle lines across the continent of Cantha. New elite missions allow the most skilled players exclusive access to areas designed to be the ultimate cooperative challenge.

While Guild Wars Factions is a standalone product that does not require Guild Wars to play, gamers with Guild Wars accounts who purchase Guild Wars Factions will be able to play in both campaigns with their existing characters and even gain extra character slots.

The extra char slot is all I want to hear. I also expect the expansion to be available for digital download the day after it is out in the stores, so I’ll wait for it.

Previous coverage here.

I still would like to know more details about the new types of gameplay and all the new features. Something explaining clearly all the new content that is going to be added instead of generic claims.

From now onward there should be an expansion every six months, with the next one scheduled for a late October release:

Jeff Strain: each of these new campaigns has an entire year of development, from a full development team, and they’re released on staggered six month cycles.

Last October we had staffed up to the point where we had parallel teams – overlapping, staggered development teams. So each of these new campaigns has an entire year of development, from a full development team, and they’re released on staggered six month cycles.

For example, Factions has been in development since the say we shipped Guild Wars. Campaign III has been in development since about November of last year, and is already far far down the pipe.

Jeff Strain:the lead designer, James Phinney, who was also the lead designer of Starcraft. He arbitrates both and makes sure that no team is doing something that screws over the other one, or fundamentally violates the core mechanics of the game. He stays on top of that.

while Factions is a standalone title in so much as you don’t require the original game to play it, there will only ever be one game client. As such, whatever version of Guild Wars you own, you’ll be able to play the game, with various unique aspects available to owners of particular campaigns. So you could be playing the original game and see characters from Factions. Furthermore, the technological advances of the most recent campaign will have an impact on every version of the game.

Jeff Strain: Five years from now we could be at Guild Wars Campaign 10 and the graphics engine would be state-of-the-art, not a five-year-old engine.

Jeff Strain: It costs us far less to operate Guild Wars than a traditional MMO. The technology team behind our server technology is the team that built the original Battle.net. At that time, there was no broadband, so the whole thing was built around 28.8 modem assumptions – so we learned a tremendous amount about latency masking and bandwidth optimisation. When we built the core network technology behind Arena.net, of which Guild Wars is one game that uses that technology, it was really designed with those principles in mind. Even though we knew that broadband was growing and that most people would have it, we wanted to make a game that was very bandwidth-light, because we knew from the beginning that we were not going to charge a subscription fee, and that – bandwidth – is one of your primary operating costs. Obviously you pay for the server infrastructure up front, but your ongoing cost is bandwidth, and we use substantially less bandwidth than almost any online game out there. So, right up front, we’ve cut our support cost that way.

Some other vague details about the new gameplay modes:

It’s a PvP map in which two teams go up against each other, with victory secured by a mythical creature transporting matter from one area to another. First to 15 wins. We had some kind of weird tall thing on our side, whereas the enemy had a giant turtle.

brand new high-level gameplay elements in the form of a constantly moving battle line between the two titular factions, and new systems which force role-playing focused players and combat-focused players to cooperate in order to win certain objectives for their Guilds.

There are some preview screenshots that looks absolutely great. Some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen. This game is worth buying even to just walk around and gape at the environments. Awe-inspiring.

And japanese dragons.