07.04.08
Posted in Games at 12:35
I bought World of Warcraft yesterday. Again. This time online, so I can play on American servers. I bought Burning Crusade as well, and since I doubt I’ll ever reach level 60, I’m going to be playing a Blood Elf mage with Jewelcrafting so I know I’ll get my money’s worth. And so I’ll see the nice Blood Elf starting area, because the fantastic environments is what I love most about WoW.
There are two reasons I’ve decided to give WoW another shot. First of all, I never played with people I know the last time. Sure, I picked the same server as Kathrine from Greenpeace, but I had no job and no education to look after at that time, and she had full time work at GP, so I out-levelled her pretty fast and then I had to team up with random people, which always seemed to mean elementary schoolers who could barely spell their own names. Secondly, I missed an important point the last time around: You’re not supposed to do every quest.
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- Game: World of Warcraft
- Music: Limp Bizkit - My Way
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07.02.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 15:54
Whoops, looks like I have temporarily failed at blogging. It’s not that I’ve been insanely busy, just that I’ve been a little low on energy recently. I have had time to play games as always, of course: Mainly Titan Quest, but also Perfect Dark Zero which I played in co-op with my friend Torsten. I’ve played it a bit in solo and as with most other games, it is far better with two players. It’s a decent enough action game, but it has at least one major weakness.
As far as I can tell, Rare tried to make a stealth action game. In my opinion they failed, and as a bit of a stealth game connoisseur, I’ve been trying to figure out why.
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- Game: Perfect Dark Zero
- Music: Sons & Daughters - Darling
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06.20.08
Posted in Hardware/Technology at 19:55
In a way, it’s kinda sad. I’m sure this version is crammed full of new security features and performance optimizations, and yet the only feature that stands out to me is that when you drag something from a page (such as an image or a block of text), a shadow of it follows your cursor.
Speaks to the importance of interface, doesn’t it?
Or possibly it just tells you how easy I am to impress.
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06.18.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 23:59
Character progression systems in roleplaying games is something I feel pretty strongly for. Growing better just seems to be one of those primal urges, like collecting better equipment, but generally without the luxury of being able to change your mind and switching out your items at will. When you’re levelling up, your choices are usually a lot more permanent than when you’re out looting, and for that reason, you grow more attached to them.
After playing quite a few (though far from all) CRPG’s on the market, I’ve developed a pretty good idea of what sort of character system I prefer. The main rule is that every upgrade to your character should be significant. The more important a new skill or ability is, the more I enjoy the game. I’d rather have a steady trickle of important upgrades to my character than sudden level-ups full of invidivually insignificant improvements.
Case in point: Compare Diablo 2 with a Dungeons & Dragons game such as Neverwinter Nights. In NWN, you receive a constant stream of experience points which don’t matter at all until you reach a specific limit which triggers a level-up, and then you get a broad range of improvements across all categories (skills, feats, spells, attack bonus, hitpoints). Picking feats and spells are interesting, since each choice you make is significant, but as for attack bonus and hitpoints, the progression is generally slow enough that you don’t notice a particular difference once you’re around level 5 and up. The difference between 50 hitpoints and 60 hitpoints can make a difference in a fight of course, but it doesn’t change the way you play the game.
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- Game: Titan Quest
- Music: Mary Jo feat. Cairbre - Bang Bang, Mystery Man
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06.15.08
Posted in Game design at 17:01
I came across a post about writing in games over at Brenda Brathwaite’s blog just now, and it reminded me of an old controversial article on Gamasutra wherein it was claimed that games don’t need writers since the designers generally do a way better job (I stress that Brenda’s post made a completely different point). The article’s main argument was that writers are good for one thing, which is structuring a plot into the necessary acts and arcs that a plot needs in order to be good.
I beg to differ. In my opinion, writers are good for at least two other things: Story and dialogue. Here, it’s important to discern between story and plot: Plot is what specifically happens on the screen or on the pages throughout a book, film, show, or game. Story is all of that plus anything else that’s mentioned, referenced, or subtly hinted at. The new Star Wars trilogy was already part of the story for the original trilogy before they were used as plots for films in their own right.
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- Game: Titan Quest
- Music: Titan Quest Soundtrack - The Prophecy
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06.14.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 15:48
Having completed GTA4 last week, I was in need of a new distraction, and Homeworld - lying installed but utterly unplayed on my desk - seemed to require too much cerebral activity for my current needs. I’ve been following Shamus‘ episodic dissection of Flagship’s Hellgate: London, and for some reason I was reminded of my intentions to purchase Titan Quest once the price dropped to something affordable.
Titan Quest was released in 2006 to mixed reviews. To call it a Diablo clone would be about as fair as calling The Witcher a Baldur’s Gate clone or Call of Duty 4 a Quake clone, but TQ does fit snugly into what has been excellently called the “Third Person Looter” (TPL) genre. It’s a top-down game that allows zooming but provides no camera rotation(!), and the gameplay, like most games of its kind, is extremely simple:
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- Game: Titan Quest - Immortal Throne
- Music: Embrun - Gigoloco
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06.08.08
Posted in Personal at 14:50
I’ve replaced my old captcha script with ReCaptcha because the old one seemed a little b0rked and the new one helps digitize dusty old tomes! So that’s nice. Let me know if it causes you any grief, such as prohibiting you from posting or somesuch. While I was at it, I also weeded out the spam user accounts. I was pretty careful not to delete any of my subscribers (I have so few to begin with 
), but in case you’re a lurker who just happened to create an account with the word “viagra” in it, I’m sorry I deleted you, and please feel free to create a new account.
As a handy tip, if you wish to make absolutely sure you’re not deleted when the spam accounts reach critical mass, please type in your name so I can easily see you’re real.
- Game: Still GTA4
- Music: Rock Hard Power Spray - Distinguished
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06.07.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 22:48
I was browsing Shamus’ blog Twenty Sided the other day, idly making plans to kill him and take over his readership, when I came across a post wherein he lambasted Invisible War for largely limiting your choices to “Kill” or “Let Live”. Not only that, but compared eg. to the similarly Life/Death-based choice of what to do with Juan Lebedev in Deus Ex 1, most of these choices seem a bit tame because you usually don’t have any reason to kill the character in question.
On Lebedev’s jet, you have your orders not to kill the prisoner conflicting with Anna’s urgent demands that you execute him and threats to do it herself if you hesitate too long. It becomes a reasonably well balanced choice between killing your ruthless partner or killing the unarmed guy who claims to know important things about your past.
As with any game design observation, and particularly those that involve Deus Ex, I immediately turned it around and looked at The Nameless Mod through its perspective, and I noticed that by far most of the choices we have in the mod are similar choices for whether or not to kill different characters. On some occasions, you have reasons for and against, but I admit they’re never quite as terrific as the Lebedev dilemma, and by far most of them simply concern ancillary characters whose deaths have little consequence and offer you no significant benefits.
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- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: Metallica - Harvester of Sorrow
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06.06.08
Posted in Games at 10:30
Yes. Lute Hero.
What this is, is a module for Neverwinter Nights 2. It’s somehow related to Dark Waters, which is an adequately impressive pirate fantasy module with a pinch of steampunk and an optional hilariously disturbing gender-bending twist. It’s made by Adam Miller whose NWN modules alone have been downloaded over a million times. And now he’s made Lute Hero.
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- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4 (my GOD it just goes on and on!)
- Music: Homestar Runner - Trogdor
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06.03.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 11:20
The indomitable Jim Rossignol just posted a love letter for exploration gameplay over at Rock Paper Shotgun, and I feel compelled to ruminate upon it here, largely inspired by some of the comments on that post. I’m in the same boat as Jim, I explore compulsively. It started with Deus Ex, which taught me great rewards could wait in the dark corners of a level, and now the activity has been granted additional weight by my aspirations to become a game designer, where attention to detail can only be considered a boon. Now adays I even explore mostly linear games such as Half-Life 2 as much as I can, just to see how they were put together.
But some of the commenters have a point: In many open games, there’s nothing there. STALKER has much exploration, but offers little in the way of gameplay. Maybe you’ll find another mutant enemy. Maybe you’ll find a randomly generated weapon stash. To me, it’s enough, I was there to satisfy my own curiosity and to check out the architecture anyway, but to most players this reward would not be adequate.
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- Game: Grand Theft Auto 4
- Music: David McCallum Sr. - The Edge
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