T w e n t y S i d e d
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While often nothing the players do makes any sense at all within the contex of the gameworld, you can be sure they will fixate on any and all flaws in the thinking on the part of NPCs.
DM of the Rings LXV:
Player Hater
Jaquandor quotes me, and then has this to say:
I have got to stop reading Shamus’s blog, because every day I read him I feel my resistance to allowing computer games in the home to slip a little.
I see this in the comments as well. People say things like, “I don’t play computer games, but reading your site makes me wish I did.” I can’t explain this. Most of my posts are long, nitpicky rants that enumerate the various flaws of a game in obsessive detail. The more I hate a game, the more I write about it. My favorite game of the past year was Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, and I haven’t done a single post on it. My least favorite was Neverwinter Nights 2, and I won’t shut up about it. I’m like the anti-fanboy. My hobby isn’t videogames, my hobby is complaining about video games.
Still, I’m glad my painstakingly cultivated neurosis is a source of entertainment to others.
Eve Online: Final Thoughts
In my previous post I mentioned that for my first real job in the game my employer sent me on a mission of certain death that ended with the destruction of my first ship. After playing all weekend, I’m still stuck on this very first newbie mission*. I’ve upgraded my ship twice and upgraded many skills, and I’m no closer to success than when I first started. I’ve experimented with different ships and weapon loadouts, messed about with different defensive configurations, and even tried doing the mission at different times of the day. No matter how I play it, the enemy fighters usually take half of my shields before I can get off my first ineffectual shot.
When I arrive at the spot where I’m supposed to kill the pirates, there are two groups of ships. One is in the distance, and one is right on top of me, so that they establish a weapons lock as soon as I drop out of warp. Perhaps the distant group is my intended target, and the other is a stronger force which is there for other reasons? My ship is now strong enough that if I’m really quick and begin warping out the moment I arrive, I can escape with only minimal damage to the structure of my ship. There is one last level of ships available to me in the demo. If I train skills for four more days, and earn another couple of million dollars (about two days of steady work) then I’ll have access to the next grade of ship. Still, I’m so far outclassed that I don’t think it would be enough. In any event, I think by that time I will have spent over two and a half million bucks beating a mission with a $67,000 reward.
Welcome to the game, newbie!
Dangit, there is a reason most games are built on top of a steady upward slope of increasing challenge instead of a mild incline followed by a sheer, smooth wall. A game which has sharp upward spikes in the danger level, and which gives the player no way to appraise that danger in advance, is a game which is more or less designed to kill characters. It’s not so much a game of stats-building as a giant, Massively Multiplayer Online Russian Roulette. (MMORR)
I’m sure I could ask for help on the rookie channel and find a high-level buddy to help me take take these guys out so I can proceed with my quests. I could start another character from another part of the galaxy, where I probably won’t get this particular mission. But I shouldn’t have to resort to this sort of thing to get past newbie mission #1. Is it bad balancing? A bug? Poorly placed bad guys? I don’t really care to diagnose the problem further. The game threw me to the wolves, and I think I’ve wasted too much time on it already. I can see in the Rookie Chat that I’m not the only person to find themselves in the deep end tied to an anchor. My problem isn’t an aberration or a one-time fluke. There seems to be a steady supply of newbies being daunted by early missions.
I was hoping to get a little further so I could talk about the more in-depth aspects of the game, but that isn’t going to happen.
Here are some final thoughts:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Eve Online: Final Thoughts”
Quote of the Day
Courtesy of Alex:
Ebert was later sent into the rehab clinic known as “The Road to Erudition”. He has not been seen since.
(Cue undignified braying laughter.)
Eve Online: First Impressions
While following up on some comments in response to my post on multiplayer games, I checked out Eve Online. They offer a free trial. I mean free as in: Totally free. You download the client for free. You create an account for free. You don’t even need to give them a credit card #. I give them major points for that last one. I know there is tremendous money to be made in getting people to sign up for a free trial that will auto-bill them in 14 days unless they cancel, and then waiting for them to forget. Everyone else does this, but not the folks running Eve Online. Nicely done. Below are my thoughts after a little more than a day with the game.
Doing a “first impressions” post on an online game is a little unfair. These games are large, and it often takes days just to get a feel for what works and what you like. Often there will be rewarding aspects of the game that won’t be available until you’ve been at it for weeks. You should read everything I say here with the same attitude you would have for an article titled, “The first twelve minutes of Starcraft”.
The good and the bad, in no particular order:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Eve Online: First Impressions”
Failure to Communicate
Some players see death or failure in a videogame as something that should only happen if you are careless. Other players see it as inevitable part of the process. (This article sums up a lot of my thinking on this subject.) Beyond that, different players have different expectations for the penalty they expect to endure for failure. Some players are comfortable with replaying the last five minutes. Others resent the setback and would rather simply retry the game from the point just preceeding their failure. (See also, Jay’s recent post on saving the game, which outlines the fiendish details of this problem.)
But the most overlooked thing that governs both difficulty and the enjoyment of the game is how well the player understands what the developer was thinking when they designed the challenge. It’s possible to have a game which does not require great skill, but which results in repeated failure until the player “learns” how to complete a particular scenario. Here is an example of this problem in action from the game XIII. (For those of you following along at home, I’m talking about Mission #25, “Bristol Suites Hotel – Surveillance”)
(I’m going to be really negative here because I’m focusing on a major weak spot in the game, but XIII has a lot of neat ideas and isn’t the train wreck you might think it is based on my comments here. I might have more to say on this game later.)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Failure to Communicate”
DM of the Rings LXIV:
A Shocking Revelation
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In the comments of the previous strip, I said, “In hindsight, the ideal thing would have been to cast Aragorn as a dumb, distracted stoner. He spends about half of the movie blinking very, very slowly. I can come up with a shot of him looking baked or mouth-open stoopid in just about any scene. I should make a “I am so high” montage out of all these shots.“
The amount of screen time he spends in a vacant stare or a prolonged blink is sort of alarming. I’ve come to think of him as Stareagorn.
From The Archives:
Why I Hated Resident Evil 4
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
The Strange Evolution of OpenGL
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Netscape 1997
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Project Octant
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?