General mind-dump of Jonas Wæver
Yes, that is a rather fanboyish title, but Bioware Corp. have so verily deserved it. Six years after the release of Neverwinter Nights, they release the final patch 1.69. “Patch?” you ask, “it must really have been broken if they’re still patching it after 6 years.” Well, patch is probably not the right word for it. The last significant bug in NWN was fixed years ago. This is more of an update. Here are the “patch” notes. And a quick summary:
I’ll be the first to admit it: I love open world games. They cater to my powerful explorer gene. They facilitate the escapism that I so dearly need, they give me the freedom to get lost in a huge fictional world based on rules that are complex enough to entertain me for hours, yet simple enough to eventually understand and master. And thankfully they are extremely popular these days.
I’ve recently spent upwards of 70 hours playing GTA4. I’ve just been sucked back into World of Warcraft. Not long ago, I was riding around in Oblivion’s Cyrodiil, creeping frightened and unnerved through STALKER’s Chernobyl, jumping from sun to sun in Dark Star One’s damn near infinite universe, and sailing the Carribbean seas in Pirates! And before that, I spent hours upon hours dodging Boiling Point’s bugs for the chance to drive through the massive jungles of their fictional South American banana republic.
In short, I really love open world games. I love them most when they are shooters or RPG’s, when there is a story to experience. And the rest of 2008 and 2009 will be a good time for me. A really good time indeed. Here’s a quick list of the games I anticipate the most:
It’s a fetching title, isn’t it?
At first, you might think “A-hah! At last the UN has recognized that access to Deus Ex is a basic human right and started distributing the game for free to third world countries”, but no - actually it’s Gametap. But that’s almost as good! According to favourite blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun (RPS):
Gametap, that surging faucet of digital delivery, has announced that it’ll be featuring candidate for best game ever, Deus Ex, on its free games roster as of next week.
Finally my concerns about the possible necessity to include Deus Ex with The Nameless Mod in future job applications are void! Furthermore, it is no longer necessary for all those friends of mine who have lost 2-3 Deus Ex CD’s (when will people learn to take proper care of their artifacts, seriously?) to pirate the all-time greatest game when I draft them to playtest TNM. Just check out the first comment from the RPS post to see what I mean:
So this week has been relatively interesting. Events have occured that were worthy of bloggage. I will now try (and fail) to do them justice. I will also include photos, and this will possibly help. Buckle up, it’s gonna be a long one - even for me.
The conference started Wednesday, but I went to Malmö (roughly pronounced Marlm-soundthatdoesntexistinEnglish) on Tuesday so I wouldn’t have to rush off to check in half-way through the conference. On my way to the hostel, I realized I could pretty much walk the whole way through parks, just occasionally crossing the road to get from one park to the next. This turned out to be a good thing, because I ended up walking that route 7 times throughout Tuesday.
After I’d dumped my baggage at the hostel around noon, I grabbed some lunch and then headed back to the station to meet Ruben. I was fairly excited about this, since I’ve known Ruben online for years ever since he tested my NWN module and recruited me to play in his massive DM’d campaign. For the best DM I’ve ever had the honour of playing with, I was a little disappointed to find that he wasn’t an enormous immortal being of pure light, but he was a nice guy, so I quickly forgave him for letting down my expectations. (Dunno if Ruben would want me posting a picture of him here, so I won’t). We took a few walks around town, then split up to relax before dinner. We met up again half past 6 and quickly found a nice but affordable place to eat. Then we wandered around a bit, had some coffee, and went back to sleep.
I find this extremely fascinating: Game history! An old backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989 reveals interesting details about the development of the never-released sequel to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, which I have never played. I haven’t actually read the article itself, either, though I’ve skimmed some of the sources he’s reproduced there, but I took a look over the comments and was excited to see several of the old Infocom employees chiming in.
Apparently rumours circulate that Blizzard has started working on Diablo 3, based on some clues in a recent job posting. I don’t know if that’s true, but it got me thinking.
Far as I reckon, Blizzard haven’t worked with an original IP since they put out StarCraft in 1998. That’s 10 whole years of milking existing IP’s. If one felt especially spiteful, one might even point out that StarCraft is pretty much Warcraft in Space, but as far as I’m concerned the SC IP is clearly different from the WC IP in terms of story and plot, which is the important thing for the purpose of this discussion.
World of Warcraft has been out since 2004 (and was based on existing IP, clearly). It currently has over 10 million player-created accounts, though I don’t have the figures on how many actual paying players it has (personally, I’m among the fallen). I think it’s safe to assume though that Blizzard are pulling in millions upon millions of dollars of subscription fees from World of Warcraft every month. A fair bit of that goes to support and server space, I guess, but WoW is pretty much a license to print money.
So why do they keep milking their old IP’s? I mean sure, they want to make more money for their investors, that’s fine by me - make SC2 and Diablo 3, I’m sure they’ll be great games. But why stop there? Why not spend some of all that money coming up with some new IP’s? Valve presumably has far less money on hand than Blizzard, yet they consistently turn out amazing new properties like Portal, Left 4 Dead, and Team Fortress 2 (technically a ‘2′ but sufficiently different from the original that it might as well have another name). Blizzard make fantastic games, virtually unmatched in terms of polish - they used to create amazing new games. Now it seems they’re happy just creating amazing sequels to old games. It’s still amazing but it’s not extraordinary.
Or am I just demanding too much? It does make sense to keep expanding on your old work when you’ve created such a fantastic line-up of IP’s as Blizzard has. I was certainly excited when StarCraft 2 was announced. It just seems like they should be doing more than this. It seems like there are better ways to spend all that money.
The upcoming Alone in the Dark looks fantastic. The video previews alone have showed off too many fresh new ideas and amazing details to count, and the gameplay looks a lot like MacGuyver: The Horror Game. It pains me to know I will never ever ever get to play this game precisely because of the “horror” part.
It’s bad enough that apparently all games these days must have a horror element (of course I exaggerate, but even Mass Effect has creepy zombie-like enemies for crap’s sake), but I don’t understand why there are so many outright horror games - is fear just the only real emotion that can easily be conjured up by video games?
Steam has 75% off on Two Worlds this weekend. Yes, that’s seventy-five percent. You can get it right now for 10 dollars. I was never very interested in it because I kinda had my fill of open-world fantasy RPG’s with Oblivion, and TW was alledgedly inferior to Oblivion, so I didn’t see the point.
I just checked Metacritic and TW has an average score of 66%, but PC Gamer UK gave it 71%, so it can’t be all bad, and frankly for 10 dollars, it’d have to be a really poor game not to merit a download. Of course the real allure is that it supports up to 8 players in co-op. Co-op was the main thing Oblivion was missing, so it seems like a no-brainer to me. I’ve bought TW and am downloading it now.
I both hate and love PC/console arguments. There are so many interesting similarities and differences to discuss, both in terms of game library, interface, hardware platform, business and pricing models, marketing efforts, development conditions, monopolies, etc. You’ll almost always find something interesting to take away from such discussions, but at the same time it takes immense maturity to discuss the dichotomy without falling back to stereotypes and simple case study.
Lately I’ve been trying to keep up with the “The PC as a gaming platform is dying!” “No the PC as a gaming platform is doing fine!” debate, and frankly it’s not very easy. A lot of the participants in this debate have something at stake (it’s difficult to trust the pro-PC gaming arguments entirely when they come from Valve and Epic who have massive market shares to lose if the PC dies as a gaming platform) and I have significant problems digging down to the facts at the heart of the debate.
Our instruments indicate that at some point this map contained readable and fairly important treasural information.
Unfortunately pirates store things underwater so the deal is blown.
I don’t play enough indie games. To be honest I almost never play them. I should because it’s looking like my most likely route into the industry and I’ve collected quite a few ideas by now (Larry keeps poking me about sharing but I’m still working on writing them all down in a good format).
My newspaper, Politiken, recently started reviewing games in their culture section, and the first batch of games to receive this honour were the winners of the IGF. I already knew the winner of the Audience Award Audiosurf from having played the beta - I didn’t enjoy it that much, it was fun enough in the beginning but after about half an hour I lost interest. The tech is cool but I don’t enjoy the gameplay. A game that caught my interest, however, was the winner of Best Web Browser Game, Iron Dukes.
I checked out the demo today and it was great. Being a preview, it doesn’t offer a lot of content, so I only played it for half an hour - but it kept me entertained that long, not least thanks to its outstanding sense of fun. Ever read Calvin & Hobbes? Remember the naïve, playfully nonsensical feeling of Calvin’s games? Iron Dukes replicates that perfectly - it truly seems like an illustration of a universe some kids have come up with to pass the time until their parents pick them up from kindergarten. Especially the item descriptions are laugh-out-loud funny. It’s wonderous. And since the demo is free and currently all there is, I think you should give it a try. I can’t guarantee that it won’t get repetitive after a few hours, but as far as the preview goes, it’s worth your time. You can play the Iron Dukes demo here, right in your browser!
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