Posts filed under 'Computer Games'
I very seriously doubt I’ll still be playing WoW when the Warth of the Lich King expansion (newly announced by Blizzard) is released, but here’s a quick list of the interesting features:
- The first new WoW class since release: the Death Knight (a hero class; you can create a character with this class, starting at level sixty-something or higher, only after completing a quest with some other high-level character)
- An increase of the level cap to 80 and the profession cap to 450
- The content of Northrend, open to characters 68 and above
- Siege weapons in an outdoor PVP zone
Those, at least, are the features that are interesting to me. I don’t mind the increase in level and profession caps, as getting those up is supremely easy and presumably means there are new and interesting abilities to play with past 70 (and 375).
I like to content, so this ten-zone continent of Northrend may be fun. I didn’t wind up liking the Outlands all that much, apart from Nagrand. They felt too alien and strange to me, too different from what already existed in the game.
As for the Death Knight class, well, new classes are fun. I enjoy learning the mechanics of each class. But Blizzard has always been committed to making the classes truly unique. To do that with the Death Knight, they’ve had to invent what sounds like a fairly bizarre mechanic, with a new sword bar that has runes etched on it that get spent but can be re-etched after a certain time expires. Different, yes, but weird!
Also, I’ve never liked the mechanic of creating a completely new character simply because you’ve achieved something with a different character. It spoils my already very tenuous willing suspension of disbelief, underscoring the gamey side of things instead of the simulation, immersion, and roleplaying that I really like.
But more interesting options for PVP? That I can get behind 100%.
For more details, one great write up is at 1up. Check out their detailed write up here. Or just watch WoWinsider, where there will no doubt be hundreds of posts on the topic of the new expansion over the next few months.
August 3rd, 2007
Not mine, of course! I’m in the beta but under the NDA. Michael Zenke at MMOGNation, is permitted to post his impressions (something about an exception for the press right now).
And he nails it. There’s only one area he doesn’t cover that I think deserves some discussion, but I’ll save that for when the NDA is lifted for me. In the mean time, if you’re interested, read what he has to say and you’ll know all you need to know.
August 2nd, 2007
There’s nothing much there yet, but the Bollywood3d web site is live. One Sanjit, apparently associated with the effort, commented on my last post on the subject. He mentioned that, yes, it’ll be possible for people in the U.S. to play, so I’ll be watching very, very closely.
July 31st, 2007
I love Bollywood movies. It’s a lucky Sunday that I catch the four-hour Bollywood music video show on my local cable company’s “international” channel.
So I’m very excited that Bollywood3d is experimenting with game tie-ins to Bollywood movies. What they’re doing actually sounds a lot like what Google and Universal are doing with the Ultimate Search for Bourne. The games will come out before the movies they’re tied to, to build up hype and interest. But unlike the Search for Bourne, players will buy these games, and it sounds like real development may actually go into them.
Apparently, the Indian computer game market is slow, but Indian culture and history and its awesome movie industry make fertile ground for fascinating and fun video games. Will I be able to participate? I don’t know. I don’t speak one whit of any Indian language, and I probably wouldn’t qualify for the prizes even if I can participate.
But I’ll be watching in December, when the first game is scheduled to come out.
July 26th, 2007
Today, Tobold wrote about what may be the death of turn-based strategy games, pointing out that even though technical limitations don’t force game developers to opt for a turn-based model, in some cases a turn-based model can offer greater depth of play.
Attempts to move tabletop gaming online have mostly failed. For instance, I ran a campaign in Neverwinter Nights that didn’t work for two key reasons. First, it took an enormous amount of time for me to create the game world between sessions. Even if I’d had more and more time to practice developing the world with the provided toolset, I’m sure I would always be spending more time creating scenarios than running them.
Second, as soon as combat began, the players were hopelessly outgunned. I kept lowering and lowering the difficulty of the fights in the game, but the players couldn’t keep up. Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games are designed to simulate combat to some degree of accuracy, but the all depend on a turn-based model.
Sure, this means a few seconds of battle can take an hour to play out. Sure, in a real fight people don’t have time to make such decisions. But it allows people pretend they actually have combat skills. No one’s ever penalized for not remembering a keyboard shortcut and losing because her war-hardened combat veteran character forgot to raise her shield at the right moment.
(Neverwinter Nights actually was a turn-based game, though by default set to simulate real-time action. In a multi-playered, game-mastered game, though, allowing all players to pause was impractical. It simulated D&D reasonably well for the solo campaign, but failed for group play.)
Porting board games to computers has been more successful simply because no one’s trying to change the rules. No one wants to play speed-Monopoly, with button-mashing magnates making a Trump-like killing in the real-estate market simply because they can roll their dice the fastest. (Okay, maybe that’d be fun, but only in a weird way.)
But something breaks down with roleplaying games. Computer RPGs are an almost completely different genre than tabletop RPGs, even if they’re built around the same ruleset.
I asked before (in the context of voice chat) about non-MMO online roleplaying. But I’m thinking about it even more, now, ’cause I’ve got a friend from college who wants to start a campaign up again.
How can I get the tabletop roleplaying experience with remote players? Now that video conferencing is effectively free, we can at least talk to one another. And I’ve mentioned Gametable before, which provides a shared map and die rolling.
But are there any tools that really take advantage of web-connected computers to simulate the game itself while still giving the richness of turn-based play? Any tools that can handle the intricate interplay of a multi-character fight—with positioning, fancy moves, conditions that persist from turn to turn, all the number crunching—while still giving the players freedom to choose at (at least moderate) leisure their characters’ next actions? If so, I very much want to hear about them!
Has anyone successfully moved a tabletop campaign online? If so, what tools did you use? If it failed, what didn’t work?
July 26th, 2007
In the 5 days I’ve been in the Tabula Rasa beta, I’ve tried the game three times. If I’m interpreting the NDA correctly, I can’t say anything about “software, software code, designs, graphics, rules, playing strategies, artwork, visual depictions, plot, theme, setting, characters, characterizations, skills, marketing and promotional plans.” That’s pretty much everything. I think it’s probably okay to talk about things mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the game, although I’m not going to repeat what’s said there just to have something to say.
Instead, I’ll just record some general reactions:
- I am excited that combat itself may demand some player skill. It does feel somewhat more like a first-person shooter or over-the-shoulder shooter. It’s still damn easy, but it’s fun.
- On some of the very early missions, when my character ran with a bunch of NPCs to defend a front from invading aliens, it really felt, for a brief moment, like I was participating in a front-line battle. The odds seemed overwhelming, and even though I didn’t come close to dying it felt like a narrow victory. This was probably the most fun I’ve had so far.
- The missions since then have basically felt the same as any MMORPG, with the normal blend of FedEx, kill-10-rats, and gather-20-widgets quests. Not unfun, but nothing new.
- The cloning system seems clever (save off a copy of your character at any time, so you don’t have to re-level), but it appears there’s no way to respec. Why not just allow players to spawn new characters from any branching in the class tree at any time, cloning retroactively?
- The UI has all the familiar elements, but the default controls are different enough to give gameplay a more action-oriented feel.
- As in other MMOs, everyone basically runs around jumping.
From other MMOs, I’m used to extensive online resources in which other players have figured out optimal specs, written up spoilers for every single mission, and optimized lists of equipment. That simply doesn’t exist yet (and what’s on the playtest boards is speculative and hard to find). This uncertainty is fun, and I should remember to embrace it in other games (that don’t penalize bad choices too harshly).
So far, I don’t think I’d call Tabula Rasa anything like a “next generation MMORPG.” It is, indeed, the same game with a different coat of paint. Whether that science-fictional coat of paint with the games innovations and tweaks is enough to make it a contender for real market share—and more importantly for my dollars—remains to be seen.
I’ll just have to keep playing to find out.
July 19th, 2007
While visiting a friend’s vacation home this weekend, I took the opportunity to play Resident Evil 4 on his PS2. I’ve never played any Resident Evil games (nor, for that matter, have I ever touched a PS2).
The game was definitely fun. Basically a first-person shooter, although it had that over-the-shoulder view. I found the control a little frustrating, as I’m used to being able to swing my view in any direction instantly with a mouse or second joystick. In RE4, this was a slow process and somewhat limited.
That said, I actually think this added to the feel of the game. A survival horror game should make me feel like I just can’t possible keep up with the swarms of zombies coming from every direction. A little more practice with the controls and I’d have been able to just have fun.
In my twenty minutes of play, I made it into the first village, ran around screaming for more bullets, and finally died to the brutal caress of a chainsaw in the hands of a maniac with a burlap sack over his head.
Not having enough bullets was deliciously terrifying, and I actually managed to survive for a while just with my knife. I even managed to deliver a skull-crushing kick to one persistent villager I’d stabbed a few times.
I see there’s a PC version of the game
. I’ll have to get my hands on it and see if I can get it to run on my iMac using Parallels.
July 7th, 2007
Back when I played in the beta and early release of Ultima Online almost a decade ago, I almost couldn’t believe my luck. This would really be the game I’d longed for. I could meet people online in a fantasy world, and together we’d have emergent, collaborative stories unfold of derring-do, chivalry, and virtue.
And vice, of course! Mustn’t forget the vice. I eagerly looked forward to the duels that would take place when one character took in-character offense at another’s words. I contemplated a Robin Hood–style character who would help himself to the contents of rich player’s purses and earn fame handing out my ill-gotten gains to newer players.
I relished the thought of being a homesteaded in an isometric world, carving out a place for myself in Britannia through the work of my own two virtual hands.
I had a horrible time. My big mistake? Assuming that other players wanted pretty much what I did from such a game—or at least something compatible.
I tried to have fun. I didn’t worry about whether other players roleplayed the way I thought they should. Instead, I wrote a guide on how to speak “Britannian.” (Oddly enough, it’s still floating around out there. I wrote it as “Josephus the Scholar.” It even got mentioned in a book! I had no idea. Too funny.)
And when my young and idealistic animal tamer got killed seven or eight times in a row, I shrugged and started to gather feathers so I could make some more arrows. Mind you, I’m not complaining about UO being too “difficult,” even though a post at Tobold’s blog on that topic inspired this little ramble. (Oh, and I see it’s actually to the new Hardcore Casual’s first post. Good post, Syncaine!) In fact, I argued passionately for three freedom to stab my fellow players in their backs and rifle through their goodies.
I just didn’t count on people who played the game simply to dominate other players.
The PKers did ruin the game for me. The in-game law enforcement meant I could create my wicked characters, and the PKers themselves meant I couldn’t really function as a good guy. My hard-won equipment would be stripped from my corpse, and I couldn’t even get to the interesting places I wanted to explore.
And, of course, the “gamist” players cared mostly about advancing their characters, a more-subtle incompatibility to my own preferred style of play. (I wanted to level, but I wanted to do it while roleplaying.)
The PKers were a malicious minority who really did ruin the game for a vast number of others. But I was in a small minority, too, dreaming of a game that just couldn’t exist.
I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if a visit to Britannia today would show me a game much closer to what I hoped for back in the day. Can anyone still playing tell me?
Great gaming minds tried to make UO work, and basically they failed. (The game hasn’t failed. It’s still going! But for a while at least, it was nothing like what the creators—and I for that matter—envisioned)
Could a massively multiplayer fantasy simulation be made to work, one where talk of PVE and PVP were irrelevant, because the world functioned and you functioned in it? I now know the audience would be small. Most people don’t want a game where vendors go to bed at night or where the goodies on their corpses can be taken. And in fact I can fully understand why. But if someone set out to do it and make it genuinely enjoyable, could it be done?
June 29th, 2007
Games are the best (and second-most effective) education tools available.
Slate had an article yesterday on educational video games that I think serves as a pretty good high-level survey of the ongoing discussion right now, especially since it pointed to Koster’s key point from some time ago that adding an artificial incentive to perform an educational activity isn’t very effective but requiring learning in order to achieve a genuinely interesting goal does. (Koster responds directly to Slate’s article here.)
Here are two things I know:
- People will go way out of their way to acquire skills and learn things that help them achieve a goal that interests them and that they perceive as achievable.
- When people are motivated to learn something for such goals, they learn it faster and more efficiently than they will under any other circumstance (except in cases where survival is at stake, in which case they may achieve an even greater efficiency).
In other words, when people understand why learning something is worth their while—when they recognize for themselves the reward—they have all the motivation they need. Thus self-motivated, they will learn more rapidly than they ever would in a classroom or at a parent’s insistence.
I know a dozen people whose vocabulary exceeded their own parents’ (though with a geekier slant) thanks to Gary Gygax’s sesquipedalianism.
I knew a boy, something of a slacker, who rapidly learned the fundamentals of programming when he got caught up in a game in which you could tweak the code of your virtual robot to increase its chances in fights. (Alas, I don’t remember the name of the game.)
To make a video game—or any game, for that matter—that is effectively educational, the designer or design team has to focus on two key elements: goals and obstacles.
This is, of course, exactly what any halfway decent game designer already does. MMOs, for example, primarily focus on power-acquisition goals that are just fun enough to justify the obstacle of spending more time playing the game. The goals have to be satisfying, however arbitrary, and the obstacles have to be just challenging enough that people don’t think they can’t surmount them but do feel a sense of accomplishment when they do. A series of increasingly difficult obstacles centered on a theme, ubiquitous in all game design, is the right approach.
But to be educational, the obstacles have to require something more than just dedication or quicker button-pushing. Some RPGs (such as some of the Ultima games) require a little bit of language acquisition in order to complete them.
I’m willing to bet that a child (or grown-up for that matter) could get the benefit of six years of class-learning in a foreign language in the course of about two months of regular gameplay in an immersive single-player spy-based roleplaying adventure game in which acquiring the actual skill to learn the language was essential to completing the game and the mini-goals along the way provided the tools to do so. Early goals would require demonstrable skill in simple vocabulary and easy phrases. Later goals would hone in on those subtle points of a language that can trip a non-native speaker up, punishing sloppy and quick reading with setbacks and rewarding fluency with access to better in-game skills and tools and, ultimately, the final parts of the story.
The game could offer language instruction directly, in the form of mini-games or simulated classroom learning, but also reward language fluency acquired outside the game. If people find they learn faster on their own, they’re free to do so, but if they enjoy the in-game learning, that’s available too.
A couple of months after the game’s release (if the game is done right), high schoolers across the country would be chattering in French during study hall.
(I’m not an expert on the economics of the game industry, but I’m willing to bet that an A-list game of this sort sold at $50 would be able to make far more money than a language-learning program sold at $150)
Am I crazy? I know I’d drop fifty bucks on a well-written game like that in a nanosecond. Not because I’d finally learn French, but because I’d like a damn good, immersive spy-themed adventure-RPG set in the period after World War II. (Base it on Tim Powers’s incredible Declare to get some good supernatural elements, and I’ll spend $150!)
June 28th, 2007
For the past several weeks, lots of stories concerning video game addiction have come out, in part because the American Medical Association has been chattering about it, trying to come to a conclusion on whether video games can properly be classified as addictive.
As a passionate gamer, I’ll ring in with my opinion. By the popular definition of “addiction,” I think it’s safe to say that some people do get addicted to video games, MMORPGs in particular. At least, many people play them compulsively, to the point that they ignore other important aspects of their life.
I know this because I have acquaintances who do this and friends who do this, and because I’ve done it myself. In fact, MMOs are specifically designed to entertain with a system of reinforcement and punishment that fosters addictive or at least compulsive behavior. Such games are certainly more worthwhile than slot machines—they have social dimensions and narrative richness and cost a lot less. But the lower cost actually means that people sink more time into leveling their characters or questing for gear than they’d ever do feeding slugs into a one-armed bandit.
Whether or not this behavior is properly defined as a psychiatric addiction is, to me, irrelevant. The fact is that it can mess up people’s lives.
So can alcohol, of course.
In fact, I think treating video game addiction like alcoholism is probably the best approach. We don’t need to outlaw or even further regulate video games, but we do need to watch ourselves and those close to us for signs of problem behavior. Let’s be honest with ourselves, seek help when we need it, and help others when they’re in need.
So even though I think the AMA and the media mostly say pretty silly things about video games and addiction, I’m very glad people are talking about it!
Do we have any other ex-addicts out there? If so, how did you break your addiction?
And hey, if you think you have a problem and don’t know where to turn, you can speak up here safely and anonymously. There are tried-and-true methods that work, and we can talk about them.
June 27th, 2007