Category: Gaming

SW:TOR Dev Diary

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m going to admit to being a blasphemer in the geek world…I’m not really that huge of a Star Wars fan. And blaspheme number 2…I’m not a big Bioware fan, either. I didn’t think much of KOTOR, never finished a Baldur’s Gate (except that action-rpg variant), haven’t played Mass Effect yet.

So all the fuss about Star Wars: The Old Republic has kind of washed over me. Until tonight when I sat down and watched this “Developer Dispatch”:
(I can’t figure a way to turn off the autoplay on Bioware’s player, so I’m putting the rest of this post after a More link)
Continue reading “SW:TOR Dev Diary”

Big worlds (EQ2)

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m sitting here doing my thing, and Angela is doing hers. Of course, her thing on a lazy Saturday is EQ2. And I hear her say “Hmm, I’ve never been here before.”

It took a few moments for that to sink it. She just went somewhere she has never been.

Now, this girl is a walking, talking EQ2 encyclopedia. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve asked her where to find something in EQ2 and she’s not been able to answer without a second thought. She’s been playing the game since it launched, and she plays a LOT. It is rare indeed that a day goes by without her logging in.  The /played on her main character is over 160 days. Think about that. That’s 3,840 hours spent playing that character. (Frightening, no?) And she has 12 characters, about 5 of which she plays very regularly.

Point being, she spends an incredible amount of time exploring the world.

And she’s still discovering places she hasn’t been to.

I just think that’s pretty astounding. Now granted, Sony keeps putting out expansions and new content, but still… I just find it really cool that a virtual world can be so expansive. The Explorer in me rejoices.

That is all. No real point. Just a ‘celebration of gaming’ post. 🙂

I Am SWG Legend

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I went to log into Star Wars Galaxies today and the world my new dude is on was down. Harumph. So I logged in one of my old characters. And I do mean old; I last played this character probably 4 years ago.

He woke up sitting on a hillside in some woods in the middle of nowhere. Why had I logged off in this spot? No idea. I had no clue what planet he was on, or where he was. I start walking aimlessly and as I came over a rise, I saw buildings in the distance, so I headed towards them. It was a decent sized city, player made. And all the homes were abandoned. I walked into a few of them, and all the former residents’ stuff was there, but no people. I fancied I heard the wind howling through the dusty streets as I entered building after building, but never met another soul.

It was kind of creepy, in a kind of cool way. I wondered who these people were, who had banded together to build this city in the wilderness. Had it been the home of a guild, or just an organic gathering of random adventurers? Things weren’t laid out in an orderly manner, so I don’t suppose the city had been laid out in advance, which makes me think random adventurers.

I found myself wishing that SWG modeled housing decay…these places shouldn’t have been so pristine. But at the same time, I’m really glad I logged that guy in. I wonder if he, and that city, will still be there in 4 more years.

How to sell me a game

Posted on by Nimgimli

Until 1o minutes ago, I hadn’t given Demigod, the upcoming Gas-Powered Game, a second thought.

And then I read this:

It was in this climate of despair that a man came to offer his services to the Fathers of Belrond. Fifteen hands across at the shoulders, tall enough to fill the garrison’s archway, and carrying a mallet the size of a birthday breadloaf, he called himself Mard Hammerhand. He was not a native of Belrond, nor were his features familiar to anyone who had traveled abroad, but his ready smile and booming laugh dissolved all barriers of mistrust.
Demigod Origins: The Rook

And now suddenly I’m all excited about the game. Hook me with good fiction/world building, keep me with great gameplay. Now granted, it remains to be seen if the latter will be delivered, but at least this piece was enough to get my attention.

How much do graphics matter?

Posted on by Nimgimli

Is it just me?

Since the dawn of electronic gaming, I’ve been on a quest for better graphics in my games. I don’t think I’ve been alone in this quest. Games have continually improved, graphically speaking, from 4-bit color to 8-bit color and on up to whatever bits we have now. More than enough, I’d say. Marketing hype for new consoles is based on graphics quality while on the PC, new video cards are coming out all the time offering better resolution, higher frame-rates and more realistic imagery.

But suddenly, I don’t seem to care as much. Yes, I still take some pleasure in seeing a graphically impressive game, but I no longer buy a game just because it looks amazing. I thought about this when I realized I’d been playing Sonny for about an hour this morning, totally sucked in. Here’s a flash game with simple 2D graphics that I’m finding compelling. (Thanks to Tesh for bringing it to my attention, btw.) Last night I spent a good deal of time playing Mount & Blade, another game with graphics that are “fine” but certainly not stunning. And perhaps most significant, I recently was trying Star Wars Galaxies out again (free period for ex-players). I remember the last time I tried going back to it, I couldn’t get past the graphics since the game had “aged” since its initial launch. But this time, the mediocre graphics just didn’t factor in to whether or not I was enjoying the game.

Now normally I’d just assume this was totally a personal thing. Our values change a lot as we march through life from cradle to grave, after all, and I’ve been doing this gaming thing for closing in on 30 years now.

But what about this rebirth of “Indie Gaming” that we’re seeing?  Most of these smaller games don’t have cutting edge graphics. Remember, I’m not talking about style here. I’m talking in terms of technically advanced graphics. And what about the Nintendo DS? That system still sells like crazy and the graphics it can push are mediocre at best. People don’t care. I could arguably throw the Wii in here too, but I think it sells on the strength of its “fad” quotient in a lot of cases. People who don’t buy games run out and buy a Wii, play it for two weeks and put it in a closet… but that’s another post altogether.

So *is* it just me, or have we, as “Gamers” (is that even a relevant tag anymore?) broken through some graphics barrier where, sure, cool graphics are nice, but what *really* matters is cool gameplay?

Call to Arms “Live War Expansion” announced.

Posted on by Nimgimli

Today Mythic announced “Call to Arms” which they’re dubbing a “Live Expansion”. Whatever that means.

Details here, but what intrigues me most is the new dungeon called Land of the Dead, which is supposed to be similar to the mucho-fun “Darkness Falls” dungeon in DAoC.

Sorry so brief, but I’m at work. 🙂

Solo grouping for hermits

Posted on by Nimgimli

It’s always interesting to talk about solo mmo players since the concept seems oxymoronic to some, while absolutely normal to others (I fall into the latter category). The oft-heard comment from the former group is “You should just play a single player game.”

Last night, I was playing Warhammer. I’d just jumped to a new (to me) tier and was loading up on quests, and I had a couple that took me out into the oRvR Lakes. Now I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that PvP isn’t my thing, but I went out there anyway. I got to the first quest objective and there were a bunch of friendlies there, capturing a Battlefield Objective.  So I hung out to help defend and get some Influence after the 3 minute timer counted down, then I headed to my next quest objective…and noticed that everyone else was running that way too.

Turns out they were headed off to take out the next Battlefield Objective, so I joined in the fight, helped them kill the guards (Destruction opted not to defend), hung out and got the capture after 3 minutes. Then I ran with them to the Keep, which was already under attack, and soon after we arrived it, too, fell.

Not once did I talk to these people. I wasn’t Grouped with a capital G with them, but I was working with them on a common goal.

So here’s my question. Was I, or wasn’t I, soloing last night? In my mind, I was because I was doing my own thing, which happened to coincide with what some other people were doing, and I never had to make any kind of social commitment to them. But you could argue that I wasn’t soloing because I was working with others, in which case I can somewhat see the “go play a single player game” argument. If you think of soloers as people who determinedly ignore other players, I can get behind your argument (to a limited degree). To me, a soloer is someone who resists making a formal commitment in terms of Joining a Group for the purpose of some united goal (but who will happily work alongside others for a common cause if the circumstances arise).

That kind of circumstance happened a lot more often in the old pre-everything-instanced days…I wonder if we’ve lost something there?

New MMO idea — shoot it down!

Posted on by Nimgimli

I was thinking about the differences between soloers and raiders, and how some games don’t put enough separation between crafters and adventurers, and I came up with an idea to building systems around these differences.  Thought I’d throw it out for you folks to hack to pieces, and maybe together we can find the germ of a good idea.

So last night I was once again in the Lone Lands (LOTRO) with a level 13 character trying to grab a quest item he needed in order to advance in his chosen crafting profession (Scholar).  I’d done the same kind of thing with a level 21 or so just a few days earlier (in that case, Weaponsmith). In both instances, I did complete the quests by being sneaky, but some professions require you to kill a mob to get the quest item; I never would have been able to finish those crafting quests with these characters. I’d need help.

Unrelated on the surface is the difference between solo/casual social players, and raiders. Raiders have the time and inclination to spend long hours in-game and get the best loot. Solo and casual social players never get this stuff, and normally it doesn’t really matter because they don’t need it. But what if they did?

What we need is a way to transfer bound loot and quest rewards from one player to another. Now we could just make them not bound and let players sell them on the Auction House, but that’s not very interesting and it’d really promote ‘farming’ items and would probably throw the in-game economy out of whack.

But what if we decided to treat *experience* as a form of currency that, under certain controlled circumstances, could be transferred from one character to another? How? By player-created quests. What if Character A could form a contract with Character B to go get the Fizzling Falchion of Foozle, currently hidden at the bottom of the Dungeon of Really Unpleasant Unpleasantries, which Character A needs to complete a quest. The terms of the contract are that Character A will give Character B 1000 experience points in exchange for the Falchion. That 1000 points is *not* negotiated by the players — that is the pre-defined value of the Fizzling Falchion as determined by the devs (all loot and quest rewards would have an “experience value” assigned at creation).

That’s the core of my idea. The experience value of items would have to be chosen pretty carefully — an item would definitely have to “cost” more than the quest it completes generates (otherwise it’d incent players to always “sub-contract” their quests). The solo/casual player would have to work on do-able quests or monster killing to earn the experience to pay for the quest reward, but at least they could complete these otherwise impossible (for them) quests. And the higher level player would have another type of quest they could do to keep things interesting. Or it could work the other way, too. A high level player could “pay” for lower tier crafting items with experience by contracting a lower level character to go collect them.

There’d need to be a lot of checks and balances to prevent exploiting the system (and the game would have to be built in such a way that there was a need for this kind of contracted questing). But I think it’d add an interesting new system. It isn’t the same as gold, because you’re not just selling a quest item to the highest bidder. Instead, you contract to complete the quest and now you essentially have the quest, until you collect the item, at which point the exchange is made automatically. And there’d have to be some kind of time limit, so the hiring player has some idea of when the quest would be completed (or, alternatively, either side can break the contract with 24 hours notice or something).

Like I said, this idea just came to me this morning and I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it or develop it, so I’m sure the idea is still full of holes, but I’d love to hear some feedback.

More Spore

Posted on by Nimgimli

I really enjoyed Maxis’s Spore…for about a week. But like so many others, I found that the actual gameplay just didn’t have the depth to hold my attention over a long period of time. But now Maxis is readying an expansion pack called Galactic Adventures that, from the video below at least, seems to add more gameplay, plus our #1 gaming buzzword of the 21st century, User Generated Content. Spore creators can now add “Adventures” to the list of things they create and share with other Spore enthusiasts.

I’ll be taking a pretty hard look at this one as it develops. It seems to be that Galactic Adventures could be an add-on that completes Spore and makes it a deeper, long-term game, or it could be throwing good money after bad. Guess we’ll see this spring when it releases.