So, I’ve decided to move to a different tube on the interweb. Given that, updates may be sparse until the move is complete.
Stay tuned.
Latest Posts
Going Home Again
A time or two I’ve threatened to return to Norrath. Not the shiny new Norrath of EverQuest II, but the original Norrath of EverQuest. The thing that was always holding me back was that when I left there was little to do but raiding. Sure, there was some group capable stuff, but the two most recent expansions (Gates of Discord and Omens of War) seemed to focus so heavily on raid and trial content that the future seemed to be filled only with grinding and gear and raiding. When I left, I left for City of Heroes and to join the World of Warcraft beta. Since then a number of games have come and gone, but recently a bunch of people from my old stomping grounds decided to start back up in the original MMO marketplace monster.
It was fairly easy to reinstall and patch up, even bought the latest box that unlocked the seven or eight expansions I’d missed and started up my 21 days of free play.
Just a quick side here… if a game is going to sell a boxed expansion and offer 30 days free to new players, I think they should offer that 30 days free to existing/returning players too. Would it really kill them to do that? If they really believe their game doesn’t suck, I’d have to hope that retaining returning players after a free month would more than make up for the loss than trying to convince people who quit to buy the expansion AND resubscribe. Anyway, maybe I’ll do another post on that later…
Its really amazing how different games are. To anyone who has the attitude of “they’re all the same” I would really suggest playing WoW for a month, then playing EQ for a month. Its not just the look and feel of graphics and art… the game controls are different. WoW has quest indicators and an accept/decline interface, while EQ still retains the “spoken” quests, keywords, and passive acceptance where technically you are “on” any quest you read about, in game or out, with no limit to how many you can be working on beyond your ability to cart around sacks of quest items. And as I’ve mentioned before, EQ tends to be a more player-lively game. In groups, people actually talk to each other. WoW is so quest focused that people grouped together are usually doing exactly the same thing and often there is little reason to talk, not to mention that the gameplay requires more clicking and button pressing, and combat moves more rapidly, there’s just no time to talk in WoW until you get back to town.
So far, I haven’t gone adventuring into all the new lands, Ishiro Takagi is still just 65 (ding! 66!) after all, and been living in the Silent Fist Retirement Home for Monks for nearly four years. But it feels good to be back… as a bonus, I think I’m going to subscribe to the Station Access which will let me play EQ, EQII, Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Star Wars Galaxies, and even The Matrix Online (which I doubt I’ll go back to unless someone can convince me its improved greatly beyond the trash I saw in beta). The future looks to be full of MMO gaming…
It`s Comcastic!
For a number of years, I was a customer of Charter Communications, and it blew. I know that’s a bit crass, but then their service was terrible. Outages and other issues made it so that I couldn’t get through a single day without wanting to call customer support. I rarely did though, because the customer support for as awful as the service. Nine times out of ten when I did call, I got an automated message stating they were aware of an issue and were working on it. The times I got through, I wound up speaking to someone who was only qualified to answer the phone, not actually know anything about the problems of the callers. There is this story that I like to tell, mostly because its true, about a time when I called in to Charter and explained that my connection was fine, but the current outage was because one of their routers was misconfigured. They didn’t believe me, even after I explained that the reason I know was because I had been able to telnet into the router using the default login and password. I went to my parents’ house that night, downloaded a manual, went home and fixed the router myself.
All in all, my experience with Charter was why I was happy to learn my new house was in a Comcast service area.
I really shouldn’t have been happy. While overall Comcast provides better service than Charter, being better than the worst doesn’t make you good. From day one I had connection issues, but the people at Comcast were happy to help me, after three weeks of calls, to discover that they did not support my cable modem anymore. So I bought a new one. I started having connection issues again and we found that my “signal” was too low. A technician came to the house and “fixed” it. About three months later I called in again… “low signal”, another technician visit and it was “fixed” again. Another three months, another “low signal”, another “fix”.
I should break here to explain what “fixed” means. See, they tell me that I have low signal. The technician comes out, verifies the low signal and then puts in an order to have the signal at my house increased. One time they did replace the cable buried in the yard, and one time they replaced a splitter, but mostly they just run tests and call in to have the signal increased. I suspect that someone back at the home base performs an audit every three months, sees the higher than normal signal for my leg or node of the network and resets it.
So, its been three months again, and I’m waiting for Comcast’s Comcastic service to kick in… I really wish there was an alternative that didn’t involve Comcast and didn’t involve switching to some sort of DSL/Satellite service for Internet and TV. Oh well, maybe this time the “fix” will stick.
The Monster Trilogy
There is a guy out there on the Internet named David Wellington. He’s calling himself a serial novelist. Essentially posting his works up a chapter at a time on the web, and when he’s done, getting them published into traditional book form. I would love to speak with him candidly about how successful it has been (obviously enough that he’s done six novels this way, with a seventh in progress).
In any event, I didn’t find him on the Internet. Instead, I stumbled on his books at a Borders bookstore while wasting time before seeing a movie at the theater in the same complex. I was drifting through the horror section, as I often do when I go to Borders, and found a curious set of books: Monster Island, Monster Nation, and Monster Planet. The subtitle to each was “A Zombie Novel” and from that alone I knew I had to at least read the book cover. Being near Christmas when I found them, I agonized for a couple of trips to the theater over whether I should add these to my ever growing Amazon wish list and hope to get them for the big day, or to just buy them. I bought them.
After reading the first book, I wanted to post a review, but I decided to wait. I wanted to review them all at once. So here you go, a trilogy review in one part.
Monster Island is set two years after a plague has hit. That plague: zombies. The first theory presented in the book is one that just smacks of common sense, that in a world descending into chaos places that are used to chaos will handle it better. In the case of a zombie plague, the places with the most armed citizens fairs better than urban areas full of unarmed people. In short, the Third World outlasts the First. Dekalb is a UN Weapons inspector who is tasked by a Somali warlord to find AIDS treatment drugs to help keep her well and alive. After a few failed raids of local installations, Dekalb suggests that the one place he is sure will have what they want is the UN Secretariat Building in New York City. So Dekalb and a group of female soldiers head to the United States. Remember that bit about the First World not doing so well? Yep, New York is a veritable Zombietown. Monster Island isn’t your traditional zombie story, as there is more going on with a talking zombie (a lich) named Gary and an old dead druid named Mael Mag Och who would just like to finish ending the world. The book is very well written, well paced, and I devoured it. A great read.
I wish I could say the same about Monster Nation. For the second book we actually step back to the beginning of the plague and a girl with no name. She’s a lich, one of those talking, thinking zombies with magic powers, but she doesn’t know it and doesn’t want to admit it. We are also introduced to Bannerman Clark the man initially in charge with figuring out what is going on. While this book isn’t “bad”, it doesn’t have the punch of the first book. Sometimes I literally felt like I was forcing myself to read the book. Overall, while still a decent read, I have to say that it suffers the same fate that many middle chapters in trilogies do, that is reads like a bridge from the first to the third more than it feels like a story all on its own. The only familiar character is Mael Mag Och, but he’s not as involved here as he will be in two years.
Monster Planet comes in ten years after Monster Island, twelve years after Monster Nation. Here we meet Sarah, Dekalb’s daughter, who is still running with the remains of the camp he left her in, bolstered by the survivors of the New York escapade. All the elements of the first two books come together here in a story much closer in energy and style to the first. Much more enjoyable than the second book, and a fine end for the trilogy… if it truly is the end.
Overall, I recommend the Monster Trilogy if you like apocalyptic tales and/or zombie stories. Its a bit rough in the middle, but is worth the ride in the end. David Wellington has definitely made my must read authors list, and I’ll be picking up more of his works to support him.
Rest Stop
for Confusing Yet Stupid Twists and Unneeded Characters
Rest Stop is supposed to be a horror film, but in the end its just a mildly disgusting film that leaves you saying, “What exactly did I just watch?” The 5 out of 13 I’m giving it is generous, it would be a 4, perhaps even a 3, but it had naked boobs in it, and they were kinda nice. Be warned though, I watched the unrated version, so view the regular version at your own risk because it may not even have the boobs. Overall, still not worth the time.
More after the break.
Reusing Assets
Over at the Nerfbat Forums, a question was (poorly) asked about instances and zones. I say poorly asked because I think what the original poster meant to be the focus of the discussion is if people preferred the use of instances over shared zones, as well as zones versus a “seamless” world. EverQuest is probably the best most popular answer for zone based design, while World of Warcraft would be one people would recognize on the seamless world based design. In the grand scheme of things, both use instances, however for a more comprehensive instance based design you’d need to look at City of Heroes or Guild Wars.
I threw in my two bits on that thread, but the crux of my post, and that which relates to the title of this post, follows:
I’d love to see games mix it up… you put in a town, and outside that town is a zone, the zone is shared by everyone, maybe its huge, but inside the town you also put in a “raid” where your raid leader talks to an NPC and flags his raid for the “Defend the town” raid, and when the raid members leave town they don’t go into the shared zone, but instead go into an instance of that zone, or if the zone was huge just a section of that zone made as an instance to support the raid. Then, three expansions later you decide to implement an “Escort the king to Other Town” raid which uses the same outdoor zone, again as an instance, but this time the raid has to escort the king and his caravan to the other town at the far end of the zone, defending the king from waves of attackers.
I think games need to get more creative with their use of “space” and game/art assets. Designing a whole chunk of land to be used once in only one way just seems like a gigantic waste of effort.
That last paragraph really is what I want to ramble about. It surprises me how often games seem willing to spend so much time and effort building a zone or area in a game, and then don’t bother to reuse it. They’ll reuse item and NPC models left and right, just throwing tints on them to modify their colors, but they’ll spend a month designing a castle only to put one objective in it and never use it again.
The example I outlined above is something I’d absolutely love to see. Take a zone that is normally a shared hunting zone with animals and monster camps, the usual treadmilling trash mobs, strip it of the animals and camps and throw in an organized raid objective utilizing the same (and to the player, familiar) landscape but in new ways, or even take the original zone file and then build a fort in the middle of the forest that the players need to burn down.
I think the roadblock to this is the misconception that the player wants new stuff to be entirely new, but the truth is that for most players is just needs to be new “enough” and familiarity in some aspects can actually be comforting. Personally, while I do enjoy going into a new zone and learning new stuff, I think I’d also like going into an old zone with a new objective just about as much. I’d know the general lay of the land, that while we are currently approaching the enemy camp from the north, there is a path through the trees that will allow us to flank their position because its the path I used to use to approach the old goblin camp that used to be there.
That kind of reuse might also impact the desire of players to seek spoiler sites, not that the content itself would be immune to spoiling, but that familiarity with aspects of “new” content would actually foster a level of knowledge and confidence in the player that might keep them from feeling they need to look up information before continuing.
Anyway, it is something to think about.
Embrace Your Niche
If you have been keeping up with MMO news in the last couple months, I’m sure you’ve heard some part or some version of the saga of Perpetual. First they had Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising (you might still be able to find pre-order boxes on sale at Best Buy), then they got Star Trek Online, then they cancelled Gods & Heroes (if you find the pre-order boxes on sale at Best Buy, don’t buy them), then they lost the Star Trek license. I’m sure rumors will be plentiful about who is going to land that albatross in the coming weeks, until something gets announced for sure.
In the mean time, over at Elder Game, Eric, who worked on STO for Perpetual, gives out advice for whoever gets the license.
I couldn’t agree less. I mean, Eric is a game designer who has worked in the industry and I’m just some schlepp gamer (who also does happen to be a programmer, but only for data warehouses and time management software thus far), so obviously you should believe me, right?
Every point he makes is valid under the assumption that, as he says himself, your intent is to:
Make a game for WoW players who kinda liked Star Trek. That should be your target audience. Trust me, it’ll be fine.
And that’s where I diverge, and the reason I say I disagree with his points. If you follow me around the Internet reading the posts I make on message boards and comments I put on other people’s blogs, you’ll see that I have a gentle disdain for WoW. That feeling comes from the fact that I find the game to be highly polished but bland. I played WoW for 2 years and in that time I can honestly say I didn’t hate it, but I can also honestly say that I didn’t love it either. The game just sort of happened, and its that level of mild pleasure without displeasure that has helped WoW hit the numbers it has hit. And while it is wildly successful and Blizzard executives laugh as they frequently drive truckloads of cash to the bank, it isn’t the only way to do things.
Games like WoW are not inherently bad. In fact, to a degree they are good because they expand the market place, but not every title should or even can expand that market place. As much as people tout the polish of WoW as the key to its success, the reality is that it was and is a perfect storm of game and license. WoW has “9 million subscribers”, which isn’t entirely accurate because some of the asian countries don’t do traditional subscription models, and I’d wager less than half of those are in the US, maybe even the US and Europe. Asia has been big on Warcraft for a long time. But how big is Star Trek in Asia? Do they play Star Trek RTS games like they play Starcraft and Warcraft?
For me, I’d rather see whoever gets the Star Trek Online license embrace their niche and not make a WoW clone set in the Star Trek universe. And while I do agree with Eric that they’ll have trouble making a game that is true to the previous work and pleases all the fans, they shouldn’t just ignore them and make WoW. Can you imagine a game with player created and controlled capital ships, with a captain and officer crews, away teams and engineering staff? Star Trek Online shouldn’t aim for WoW… they should, in my humble opinion, aim for a mix of Puzzle Pirates and The Sims with some Dark Age of Camelot style RvR thrown in, and the only non playable race in the game should be the Borg because players, even chinese gold farmers, have too much personality to be Borg.
Update: Since I wrote this, Eric has gone on to elaborate his opinions. And it doesn’t change my opinions at all.
Cloverfield
for Survival Panic, and Crazy Shaky Camera Goodness
Let me begin by just saying, if you go see Cloverfield expecting the traditional Us versus Them monster movie, you will be disappointed. The only real battles between humans and monsters are seen in the background, passing by or as “we” run through it. That said, if you go in looking for a heart pounding survival run through New York as it collapses around you, this film totally rock.
More after the break…
Abandoning Munford
It has only been a week since I decided to make a concerted effort to hold the Munford Cinema in Urban Dead, and I am ditching that location. The rotter revive center just proved to attract far too much attention. So, I’m now on the prowl for another theater to take.
At the moment I’m hiding in the Hildebrand Mall gathering supplies and checking my city maps… and recovering from being dead three times in a week.
This experience, to me, really illustrates the one major design flaw in Urban Dead. In most games, death might have a penalty, but you always get back on your feet. In this game, dying actually makes you the enemy. If you and ten of your friends are hiding out in a building and a couple of zombies break in and kill some of your friends, your friends are now zombies. Reviving them costs 10 action points each. The net sum of the game is that you will lose. No questions, at some point you’ll die and have to either play zed or just wandering around looking for places where people might revive you. I don’t want to play a zombie, its boring. I want to be a survivor running from building to building looking for supplies and hiding for my life.
Anyway, I’m still playing and still going to be trying to build up the MCP, but its absolutely going to need to be somewhere safer.
As Stupid As It Ever Was
American Gladiators is back.
Part of me feels that the title and that first sentence alone are enough to really say all there is to say… and yet, I’m still writing. I’ve always been fond of game shows. Tests of knowledge and physical skill just fascinate me. Backstabbing retarded nonsense and people eating gross things doesn’t. That’s why I’ll watch shows like Jeopardy and American Gladiators, but won’t watch Survivor or Fear Factor.
The new Gladiators is just like the old Gladiators. Normal people compete in events against “trained professionals”. It is silly, and stupid… but also fun background noise that occasionally pulls my attention from what I’m doing to see people hanging from rings and climbing rock walls and poking at each other with big Q-tips.
It certainly won’t save the world… and I probably won’t even be watching it all that long… but hey, if nothing else is on and there is nothing else to do…