T w e n t y S i d e d
This is the sort of exchange that could go on for a long time without going anywhere.
Lonely Girl
Second Life and The Sims get used for a lot of machinima, but not Activeworlds. (There are reasons for this – which, as part of my policy of not talking too much about my job – I won’t go into.) So I was thrilled when one of our users let me know about this one. It’s a music video made with our software.
Link (YouTube) |
I admit this probably interests me more than most. I’m just sort of sharing the moment here.
EDIT: Shoulda followed my own policy and not talked about my job. Comments closed.
Journalism Fail
The story so far:
On Dec 31 of 2009, developer Brian Green announced the closing of Near Death Studios. NDS is the company behind the venerable Meridian 59, the first graphical MMO. (Although M59 will continue to run for the foreseeable future.) The story was picked up by Joystiq, although some of the reported facts were wrong. This led Green to post a sharp critique of gaming journalism. It’s an interesting read, and one of the guys from Joystiq jumps in to the comments at the end of that post. You don’t need to read it all to follow what I’m about to talk about, but it’s still interesting and worth a look.
Part of the problem with the lack of journalism in gaming journalism is that a lot of gaming sites – mine included – mix commentary and humor with news. People seem to have this impression that it’s okay to joke around on your blog, but once you’re a “real” site you need to straighten up and start behaving like a J-school professional.
It’s not clear where the line should be drawn, and ignores the fact that many sites grow gradually into larger ones, and that they often get big because of their lack of professionalism. There’s often this disconnect with blogs: The writer sees it as a conversation with friends, and the readers think of it as a hobby news site. The writer is wanting to comment and gossip, but once a site gets so big the readers start expecting journalism. I think this is a cultural problem, mostly. We haven’t had something like blogs before, and so in many cases people are still working out what to expect from them.
(This is even more true in the political arena. Web surfers will think nothing of stumbling onto some random small-fry political wonk and demanding that the author familiarize themselves with Dr. Humphrey J. Poncebottom’s 700 page tome, “A Treatise on Regionalism and Steel Tariffs in 16th Century France” before they have the audacity to complain about the cost of canned soda.)
But this serves as a good launching point for something I’ve wanted to say for a while now…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Journalism Fail”
GM Advice: Guns and Dice
I had an interesting conversation with my gaming friends a couple of weeks ago. They’re looking to start a game in a semi-modern setting, and were casting about trying to decide which system to use. We played a game in 2008 that used D&D modern sourcebooks, and we were all unhappy with it.
It’s mostly a problem with guns. If you’re making something modern, you have two choices:
1) Have it be fun & varied.
2) Have it make sense.
Whether or not it succeeded is open for debate, but D&D modern obviously went for #1. The game is balanced so that melee combat is useful and that the game isn’t just a huge crapshoot. This means the weapon mechanics don’t make a lot of sense, because they don’t resemble the real world. And I don’t mean they break from the real world in a few minor details. The rules can be downright silly if you try to picture the fight as it takes place. You end up with situations where you hit the bad guy with a shotgun at point-blank, and yet he still somehow has enough vigor to continue fighting or even outrun the players, simply because he’s the “boss”.
The problem is that the needs of a roleplaying game are usually completely at odds with how things work in regards to guns. If you’re going for a heroic tale of champions overcoming evil, then the presence of guns in your setting is going to work against that, because guns flatten the power curve quite a bit. In the real world, there is no such thing as game balance.
Put a sword in the hands of a couch potato and send him up against a decent swordsman. He has zero chance of success. Now give an untrained dolt a firearm and send them up against a decent gunslinger. Their chance of success is low, but it’s there. If that gunslinger is going to have many such encounters, then sooner or later the odds will catch up with them.
Consider that:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “GM Advice: Guns and Dice”
Two Important Announcements
1) It looks like the crew from Loading Ready Run has sold out. They used to be this cool indie comedy team, and now they’re trading all that in and appearing at The Escapist. Oh, their stuff is just as funny as it ever was, but it’s a shame to see them lose their underground status just so they can cash a paycheck.
2) In completely unrelated news, my Let’s Play series has been picked up by The Escapist, and it will appear on their site. I’ll be covering Lord of the Rings Online first. More details ought to be forthcoming in the next week or so.
Stolen Pixels #159: Rorschach Interview Part 1
Proof that my self-indulgence knows no bounds.
I’m limited in who I can have on Breen’s show. I can only feature characters that appear as ragdolls in the Garry’s Mod dB. (NSFW) Some of the interesting options include: Vin Diesel, Leon from Resident Evil 4, Superman, Link, and a Big Daddy from BioShock.
The database is mostly models that were ripped out of other games and ported to the source engine, but a few are original creations. They don’t always work perfectly, though. Sometimes the limbs don’t bend properly, and their faces can’t be manipulated. Still, it’s an interesting exercise finding usable models and dropping them into Breen’s world.
Champions Online Review Part 2
Reminder: The gameplay comments in this review are based on the game as it existed in early December. Since then I’ve played very little and it’s possible that some of these concerns were addressed in one of the patches.
Not likely, but possible.
Powers
The powers in the game are woefully out of balance. I’m not talking about PvP balance, I’m talking about general fighting bad guys balance. Note that I’m not a stickler for balance, either. I don’t mind playing a character who is 15% less effective than the same-level guy with the same-quality gear right next to me. As long as the combat remains fun and the pace is the same, it’s all good.
But in Champs that power sets are so far out of balance that some sets are simply not used. I’ve bumped into hundreds of electricity and fire based heroes, but I have seen exactly three characters using claws. And all of them were in the tutorial zones. In all my hours with this game, I have never seen claws used above level ten. Never.
It’s easy to see why. You can see what’s wrong with the class in about two minutes. Just compare its combat performance to anything else in the game. It’s not even remotely close. The claw attacks put all these debuffs on foes. By the time you’ve hit a bad guy a few times he’s going to be more susceptible to damage and deal less damage. Maybe he’ll even be slowed down. But who cares? In that same interval, the fire-based character will have killed this entire group of foes, and the next one.
Archery is another broken power set. “Archers” generally open a battle with sonic arrow and then enter the fray and use the other power sets to get the job done. At what point do we stop calling these people archers? You can tell from their costumes that the players want to be archers, but the game just doesn’t provide rewarding powers for doing so.
I can’t really make sense of the system they have. One power will do decent damage for a reasonable expenditure of energy. Another power from another set will do less damage, cost more energy, and have a ten-second cooldown timer as if it was some battle-ending trump card that needed to be carefully rationed.
Also problematic is the “charging” mechanic. Some attacks can be charged by holding down the button before unleashing the blow. Now, this is a great idea, but it doesn’t seem to work the way it should. On my might-based character I can fully charge a haymaker attack for almost exactly half of my energy. When I pop the bad guy in the nose, he’ll take about 1,000 damage. If I don’t charge the haymaker but just tap it, then half my energy will give me about 5 hits for 300 each. So, the same energy use = 50% more damage by not charging the attack? Keep in mind that when you spend several seconds charging up an attack, you’re taking a gamble. The bad guy could take one step backwards (to the game’s credit, the AI is smart enough to do this) and the entire attack could miss and the energy go to waste. You could also be interrupted or held and lose the time you invested into the attack. Right now there is simply no reason to take that gamble. (Well, there’s knockback, but you only need to charge it a tiny bit to knock a foe away.)
This is just one example of dozens of things in the game that make no sense or are counter-intuitive. The forums are full of similar complaints about other powers and mechanics. It’s possible that a majority of the people simply don’t “get” how the game is supposed to work or are misunderstanding the numbers, but then the duty falls to the game designer to clearly communicate with the player so the world doesn’t feel unfair and arbitrary.
The shame is, I love the variety they offer in the power sets. The game doesn’t pigeon-hole you the way City of Heroes does, in that you can make whatever sort of class you like. If the power sets were each useful, this system would be a tremendous success and a breakthrough. It would still be possible to balance them, but doing so would probably incite cataclysmic rage. They have nerfed a lot of powers and some of the players who were there at launch day are sore about how their characters were “ruined” by this process. I can’t speak for them or judge if their characters really did need to be nerfed or not, but I know lots and lots of radical changes will upset the player base and frustrate everyone who is happy with their power set.
Travel Powers
Traveling around is fun. Swing like Spiderman. Fly like superman. Leap like the Hulk. Teleport like Nightcrawler. Zip along like The Flash. Jump and spin like Damien Walters. Tunnel like… Bugs Bunny.
It’s all good until you run into the game’s lame-brained topography. (I know I’ve been over this before, but I want to mention it here in the review, just for completeness.) Millennium city is supposedly Detroit, but there is a massive two hundred foot cliff that cuts they city in half. Some people have accused me of wanting the gameworld to be “flatland”. This is not true. Some nice, rolling hills would be really welcome and would make this place a lot more interesting. But the city is perfectly flat aside from the arbitrary and nonsensical wall that makes life difficult for acrobats and speed runners.
(Note to fanboys: A disadvantage that can be overcome with training, patience, knowledge, and practice is still a disadvantage.)
I’d accept this if it made the world more fun / dramatic / realistic, but something which punishes some players and makes no sense is a thing which has no upside.
The Roper Factor
The last game I played with writing this bad was Hellgate: London. The similarities of the two games are worth noting:
- Taking an existing formula and making it more action-y.
- Lots of good ideas and a willingness to take risks and break conventions.
- Terrible class / powers balance.
- Horrifyingly bad writing and plotting. Both games treated the setting as a joke at the player’s expense.
- Bill Roper
The faults of the two games are so similar that it is tempting to lay these problems at Roper’s feet. I don’t know that it’s fair to do so, but if we do then we also have to give him credit for the things which worked. I think if Roper could send some ninjas to kidnap just one writer from Bioware and one of the game-balance analysts from Blizzard, he would probably be able to take over the world. But instead…
State of the game
The population of Champions Online has fallen dramatically. The chorus of chanting has followed the standard and sadly predictable arc, which began at launch:
- The game is perfect. You’re just looking for things to complain about.
- The game isn’t perfect, but at least it doesn’t [something that WoW does].
- ALL MMO’s lose some subscribers after launch. You’re making a big deal out of nothing.
- Okay, the world is empty but that’s because of the lack of marketing. This game is still awesome.
- Bah. People just don’t know what’s good. They can all go back to playing WoW.
From The Archives:
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?