Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Sunday Sep 23, 2012

Filed under: Random 31 comments

You know how sometimes I write about programming in a way that makes it interesting for people who don’t care about programming? My brother Patrick does the same thing for sports. I don’t follow sports or pay attention to sports, but he has a way of making the hobby compelling and accessible to outsiders. When we get together, he’s always got some crazy story about a sports rule that got changed because the fans demanded the old coach be ousted, and as a result the new coach told a player to do a thing, which in turn upset a team, which led to a lawsuit, which enraged the league, which then changed a long-standing policy, which eventually annoyed the fans. Or somesuch.

He’s always talking about the business around the teams and how it shapes the sport, kind of the same way I’m always discussing game companies and how they shape our videogames. When we get together, he does more talking than I do, and I enjoy it even though I don’t know a thing about sports. I’ve been on him for years to stop running his mouth and start blogging some of this stuff, and now he’s actually gone and done it.

We’re both gamers in the same way that Tiger Woods and Dwayne Johnson are both jocks. It’s only true in the most technically confusing way. He plays sports games on his PS3, which is the only genre of games I don’t play and the only current-gen system I don’t have. He’s one of those players that dutifully buys each new release of Madden. He’s fully aware of how the series is creatively dead and how EA is basically exploiting his love for the sport and not honestly attempting to make something worthwhile. It’s pretty much the same relationship I have with BioWare games at this point. It’s very interesting to see the same dynamic play out in other genres. Yes, it’s a mess and it could be so much better, but where else are you gonna go?

Check out his post on MLB 13: The Game, which is a game you are actually playing right now.

Also, if you have any feedback specifically for him, be sure to post it there and not here. The sad truth is, most of my family doesn’t read this blog.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Mass Effect EP3: Barfights Solve Everything

By Josh Posted Saturday Sep 22, 2012

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 71 comments

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Link (YouTube)

I still maintain my position on Marina Sirtis. Troi was a poorly-written character that had nowhere to go and nothing to do besides “I sense deception” and “Someone is using absurd space magic to attack my empathic senses!” Interestingly enough, originally Sirtis and Denise Crosby (who played Tasha Yar during the first season of TNG until she was killed by a sapient oil slick) were slated for the opposite roles – Sirtis was to play Yar and Crosby was to play Troi. In retrospect, it would’ve been interesting to see how things turned out under those circumstances. Crosby became disillusioned with the series while playing one of the characters with lots of stuff to do in the first season, and it’s doubtful things would’ve been different with her as Troi, so we might’ve actually seen the Troi character killed off before the end of the season. On the other hand, where would Worf have ended up without the opening that Yar’s death provided?

Ehem. Yeah so, Mass Effect!

Interesting bit of backstory to an incident in this episode that I don’t think we’ve ever told before: When Randy blurts out “What do you mean you’re disappoint?” out of nowhere around 15:19, he was actually talking to Mumbles. She was in a different channel and he was using a binding to send voice messages specifically to her while she watched the stream without actually, you know, being on the show yet. So Mumbles has actually been involved with the show, at least indirectly, for a lot longer than you might’ve thought.

I wasn’t splitting the audio into separate files for each person for editing at this point, and my own editing skills were, shall we say, “crude.” Thus, at the time, I hadn’t figured out how to remove that line from the episode. And so you have a two year old mystery that I’m sure nobody remembers but me that’s finally solved.

Josh Viel is the primary editor and producer of the Spoiler Warning video series. You can support the show by backing the Patreon.

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Experienced Points: How Massive Multiplayer Should Work

By Shamus Posted Friday Sep 21, 2012

Filed under: Column 117 comments

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Boom! Outta nowhere. Suddenly I write an Experienced Points column. This week I’m talking about How Massive Multiplayer Should Work.

Of course I’m talking about Guild Wars 2. I’ve covered these ideas a bit here on the blog, but I wanted to gather them up and present them in some kind of order.

In the column I mention that I’ve spent a lot of time in a group. The sad thing is, not all of it is as productive as it could be. Some people are so enamored of the idea that helping is kill-stealing that they deliberately avoid helping. Just an hour ago I was pounding the snot out of an ogre, like you do in these games. Someone else came up, and began hitting another ogre, nearby. If she’d helped me, we’d both get credit for the first ogre, kill it twice as fast, then both get credit for the second. We also get a loot roll for each ogre. We’re effectively doubling the experience and loot for the same effort by working together.

Still, it’s hard to explain these mechanics to people in the middle of an ogre-brawl, and it’s probably just easier to push on and let other people do their own thing. Still, her behavior is incredibly common, and I’m sure it’s just a habit picked up by long-time players of old-style* online games.

* By “old” I mean, “older than last month, which is when Guild Wars 2 launched.

It’s not a horrible problem and it doesn’t really harm anything, it’s just an interesting behavior to observe. Me? I’m a habitual murder-buddy. If I cross paths with someone I often drop what I’m doing to follow them and help them kill stuff for a while, but because it’s interesting to see the various classes and players do their thing, and because combat is more fun with low-commitment teamwork.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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BioWare: Zeschuk and Muzyka Have Left the Building

By Shamus Posted Thursday Sep 20, 2012

Filed under: Video Games 118 comments

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BioWare co-founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka are leaving the company. According to their own announcements on the issue, they’re not pulling a Pete Molyneux and going indie. They are very explicitly retiring from the games industry altogether.

Now would be an excellent time to bring up the BioWare video from Mr. Nerdrage. I love this video not just because I agree with it, but because he takes the points I’ve been arguing for years and puts them into a nice organized package.

Link (YouTube)

I’ve said or touched on many of these same points before:

Tone at the top: The leadership sets the values for an entire company.
Just because a company is big and powerful doesn’t mean it’s being run optimally, or even competently.
“All our games should be like FIFA” and “all games should have multiplayer” are great examples of what you get when non-gaming executives look at sales trends and make broad decisions for developers, ignorant of the fine details.
Games should be getting cheaper to produce, not more expensive.
The “we make money to make games” versus “we make games to make money” mindsets will ultimately produce different sorts of products. This circles back to the “values” point in #1.

Seriously, someone needs to get Errant Signal and Nerdrage under the same roof of long-form academic-style analysis. And the guy who makes Reset Button should totally make more videos.

The frustrating thing about the story of Zeschuk and Muzyka leaving BioWare is that everyone has a strong desire to read between the lines. We want to know what’s been going on at BioWare over the last few years. How did SWTOR end up as such a soulless, ugly, broken, disappointment? Was the Mass Effect transition move from “thoughtful” to “shooty” something that BioWare chose, or something imposed by EA? Was the smaller scope and art recycling of Dragon Age 2 a result of a creative decision, or from executive pressure to make Dragon Age a FIFA-ish yearly title? What happened to the small, creative company launched by three passionate guys that turned it into a grinder of perma-crunch and revolving-door contract work? How can a company change so fast in such a short time?

Basically, how much blame can we put on hated EA and how much can we spare Zeschuk and Muzyka?

Of course, unless someone writes a tell-all book we’ll probably never know. In fact, not even then. We don’t know, and we can’t know. All we can do is guess and argue and speculate, which is what we’ve been doing since EA bought BioWare in 2007.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Mass Effect 3 EP15: Sniper Sandwich

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Sep 19, 2012

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 199 comments

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Link (YouTube)

So the question posed in the episode: If Mass Effect 3 was a stand alone game – or, if it’s easier to imagine, if it was your first encounter with Mass Effect – would you think of it any differently. Would people call it, “A really smart shooter”? Would people praise it for bringing dialog and characterization to a genre where it’s mostly mute dudes having orders shouted at them?

I find it hard to squint in such a way that I can see that particular hypothetical, but my guess is that I’d be giving this game a lot more praise.

This is not to say that we should excuse the lack of payoff or thematic cohesion. It’s just an interesting thing to note.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Mass Effect 3 EP14: Hacket Unit

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Sep 18, 2012

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 217 comments

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Link (YouTube)

Let us pause for a moment of silence for poor Rutskarn. He died as he lived: Screaming puns. In the show I joked that we murdered him. Obviously that’s not true. If we’re being honest, it was more like euthanasia.

As mentioned in the show, Electronic Arts no longer develops any games as single-player experiences. So that’s a story that’s going on. And on a completely unrelated note that has nothing to do with that last story, I just wanted to point out that back in April EA closed a bunch of multiplayer servers. Again, these two news items are entirely divorced from one another. I don’t even know why I put them in the same paragraph, really.

Going back to the discussion about gaming in the 90’s:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 3 EP14: Hacket Unit”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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Mass Effect EP2: Screw the Rules, I Have Plot!

By Shamus Posted Monday Sep 17, 2012

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 120 comments

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The second episode of our very first season, wherein our hero dithers about the Citadel for a half hour, yelling hyperbole and non-sequiturs at everyone he sees. Also features our very first complete failure-state bug, requiring a full reload.

Link (YouTube)

It’s so odd, going back to this game and seeing all the things that were abandoned. Shepard was the one that interfaced with the Prothean beacon. That’s what made him special. That was the hook for his character, to justify keeping him at the center of the conflict. That’s a pretty useful trick on the part of the writer. The game even established at the end that only Shepard could understand Prothean VI. Boom! Magical pass to make sure that if anything is going on with the Reapers, artifacts, ancient ruins, or Prothean devices, anywhere in the galaxy, Shepard can plausibly be the one people send for.

It’s barely mentioned in the second game. (And they only do so to glue the collectors onto the end of his nightmare vision as part of a clumsy retcon.) It’s not even mentioned in the third game.

There are a a lot of elements like this, where old ideas are abandoned and new ones are shoehorned in.

On a related note Drew Karpyshyn, former BioWare writer and one of the creators of the Mass Effect universe, was interviewed by Eurogamer. Maybe you like his work, maybe not. But either ways it’s an interesting look at what he contributed.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

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