T w e n t y S i d e d
How many of you did NOT know what Evony was before you clicked through to the article? I’m very curious to see.
Bonus question: Have any of you played it?
Addendum: Yes, I know I should get the death penalty for the article title.
Stolen Pixels #146: The Reason for the Season
So I just got done saying how I didn’t have any plans to use Travis again, and then he suddenly appears.
Travis is talking about the cataclysmic release-day of reckoning we get every year as game companies all try to put everything out right before the holidays. I wrote about this over the summer, and now six months later we are at last harvesting the poisonous fruit of that rotten tree. Last year wasn’t too bad, because there just wasn’t that much that interested me. This year is a lot tougher. I’m actually itching to play about half the stuff in Travis’ list.
I’ve just picked up Dragon Age, and yesterday I found myself reviewing it via my Twitter. I don’t expect that to become the norm, but Dragon Age is so massive that I found myself wanting to say things and I didn’t want to wait the three weeks it would take for me to finish the game and write the review series.
As for the subject of the comic, I really do think it’s a very unhealthy trend.
Happy Thanksgiving
A day with the extended family and other folks I don’t get to see nearly often enough. I always have the urge to post pictures after events like this, mostly out of an earnest desire to share the joy. But it wouldn’t be right to just throw everyone’s faces up here and I don’t think I could imbue mere .jpgs with the proper weight and meaning.
However, someone snapped a picture of me during to proceedings. I can post that, for what it’s worth.
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Happy Thanksgiving. Christmas is the big holiday for kids, but as I age I find myself liking T-day more and more. The meaning is more potent and the company more precious. I just don’t see these people nearly as often as I’d like, and I cherish whatever moments I can claim.
Hope you’re having a great day.
EDIT: For those noting the difference between this picture and my Mugshot at the Escapist: Behold the difference between a staged shot and a candid one. And three years.
The glasses? I only wear those when I’m looking at something more than three meters away. Pretty much only when I go, you know, outside. So, pretty rare, actually.
Life of Warcraft
Yesterday John Funk asked what the world would be like without WoW. I think the following is an amusing (if impertinent) answer to that:
Assume 15 million subscribers.
Assume they play an average of 100 hours. (Which is probably low.)
That’s 1,500,000,000 (1.5 billion) hours of Warcraft.
Which is 62,500,000 days.
Which is 171,233 years.
Which is 2,195 lifetimes, using the current life expectancy of 78.
Over two thousand lifetimes of gameplay.
Of course, this is based on the assumption that players will clock an average of 100 hours. Sure, there are people with weeks and even months of in-game time clocked, but there will also be some with just a couple of hours.
Without any way of breaking it down, the “100 hours” is nothing more than an extremely conservative guess. I’ve Google’d about and I couldn’t find any solid numbers. (Which isn’t surprising, since it’s not the sort of thing Blizzard is likely to proclaim / admit.)
Exercise: How could we go about coming up with a better “hours played” estimate? Is it possible to look at the player dB, get a count of total characters / levels, and do the math from there?
Stolen Pixels #145: Re: Your Box Art
The new comic is up. It’s about the proposed box art for Mass Effect 2. Note that it borders on false advertising. I mean, look at it! It shows commander Shepard looking angry, when anyone who has played the game knows that he has the emotional range of Ben Stein at his own wake.
Below is some director’s commentary on why I’m not quite happy with this one.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Stolen Pixels #145: Re: Your Box Art”
A Star is Born:
Let’s Play Champions Online Pt. 10
I know last time I promised that we’d head for the city, but I needed to take a quick detour first. See, Canada runs out of content around level 12 or 13, but the city pretty much starts at level 15. What’s odd is that Doc Severisen gives you the quest to go to the city, and it’s tagged as a level 12 quest. This was very confusing my first time through the game, as I followed the natural progression and went where the NPC’s told me to, and suddenly found myself in WAY over my head and unable to figure out where I should go for level-appropriate content.
The problem seems to be that the city needs a few more quests in the level 12-14 range. Three levels is a pretty big gap, and the smartest way to close it is to go back and play the level 12-13 content in the desert. (Or if you’ve been in the desert, then go to Canada.) Just having the NPC’s point you to the other leveling zone instead of the city would probably alleviate a lot of the first-character frustrations.
Anyway, I’ve been through the desert*. I just cherry-picked a few missions rather than following a sensible quest progression, so it would be kind of unfair for me to take potshots at plot holes with this setup. Let’s just move on…
* If you’re over 30, I just got that one song suck in your head**.
** Ha ha! Sucker.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Star is Born:
Let’s Play Champions Online Pt. 10″
Wow, it’s your Birthday!
Happy birthday to World of Warcraft. Five years old already? *Sniff* They grow up so fast.
I’m having a hard time imagining when WoW might ever end. Even ten-year-old Everquest is still rolling and still receiving fresh content. If EQ is still going strong at ten, then how long can the juggernaut WoW survive? Fifteen? Twenty years? Given the lengths they’re going to in order to keep the game from looking dated or getting stale, it’s hard to imagine a point where it would make economic sense to shut it down.
Someday a game will nudge WoW from its perch. I wonder what game that will be. Many have tried and so far I don’t think anything has really come close in terms of raw user count.
Oops. I sort of spent the WoW birthday post musing about how it might be killed or when it might perish on its own. Really bad form. Note that I was just asking, I’m not actually looking forward to its end.
Anyway, happy birthday WoW.
From The Archives:
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
PC Gaming Golden Age
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.