MMO Money and the Bally effect

That might be like, the worst title ever. Anyway...

Debate has now raged about whether WoW is the next coming of all computer games, or the worst technical blunder since the N-Gage. No, the N-Gage wasn't all that long ago, but I like to beat on it whenever I can.

Now, I haven't played World of Warcraft and have been told that I'm the gaming equivalent of primordial soup for not doing so. I can live with that. I can get that Blizzard has taken their gaming prowess, identified all the slimey parts of the MMORPG genre and fine tuned into something like a gourmet soup. I get that.

But I just can't get behind this parade of companies blundering their launches technically time after time after time. And I really can't get behind the parade of gamers willing to write it off as "just part of the genre". That's a ridiculous excuse for a scheme that no reasonable person should willing find themselves in.

That scheme is the one that has turned the fitness industry into something of a cottage and more of a castle. Bally's, who I think is something of the Microsoft of the fitness world, makes a fortune off of the above attitude. Basically, Bally's tries to push people into an annual contract. It does this for one reason, and one reason only. Most people stop going to the gym after three months. The other nine months is nothing but free revenue for mother company.

So why is that MMO after MMO gets released and yet the dollars and time aren't being spent to insure that the launch goes smoothly. Blizzard is no fly by night studio, they're a major game company with good assets and years of experience. So why didn't they expend the goods to make sure that people weren't getting dropped like flies from their game?

Well, why would they? If gamers are willing to keep paying $15 a lunar cycle even if they have no guarantee whatsoever that they'll even be allowed access to the service they're paying for ... what incentive is there for Blizzard to fix anything in a timely manner?

Surely, MMO's require a steady and relatively sizeable base to maintain the game's playability - it's one of the downfalls of the design. Having Massively Multiplayer is meaningless if nobody is playing. So in the long term, Blizzard will have to appease enough players to keep their world filled. Look at PlanetSide, which shipped in something of a less than beta version (not even the core gameplay was well tested), and after multiple technical problems had droves of people fleeing the scene (SOE's horrible customer support didn't help). Now one of the biggest problems PlanetSide has is getting a good crowd together.

I'm sure Blizzard will be able to avoid that scenario, but it's sad to know that gamers are willing to subsidize it. I subsidize lots of stuff. I pay for websites and services I don't always go to or use, but honestly think are good. Paying for a game I couldn't play when I wanted simply makes no sense, not for the luxury of occasionally doing it with a hoard of other people.

How much wood can woodchuck chuck...

...if it found itself in a bizarre post-Christmas flood of various titles to try and game through? The answer is not that much.

I'm not sure how it happened. After Christmas I went on the hunt for quality cheapie titles. I picked up Thief 3, Baldur's Gate and Fire Emblem for the GBA, and backordered Alien Hominid. Before Christmas, my girlfriend and gotten me Rune for the PS2 (I never did finish it for the PC). Battle Engine Aquila came through Gamefly last weekend. And for some reason, I decided to either use or lose my games.yahoo account ... and ended up downloading Temple of Elemental Evil.

Now mind you, I work an eight hour day, spend about an hour on the road commuting, and have a tendency to work on my mod for at least two hours after I get home. Then there's herding cats, gathering food for dinner, and oh - of course, that girlfriend usually requires some attention as well. Thank god she turned out to be a closet gamer, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten some Hominid time in.

I really don't know what I was thinking, especially since Mercenaries is now coming in the mail as well. Thankfully we've got some trips lined up, so I can reserve the GBA for that.

No real point to this. When the next Champions of Norrath comes out, I might go slightly insane, is all.

New Year's Resolution: One Last Multiplayer

Truth is, I've been really turned off from developing anything multiplayer again.

When I first starting modding/dabbling with games - there really wasn't an internet to go publish things on, so I knew I was more or less doing it for my own amusement. Then came DooM and I started making maps for friends in college. This more or less kept up through Half-Life and Unreal Tournament when I made a couple of maps of our workplace for my co-workers then. It was also around that time that a friend and I started to design a mod.

Not making a multiplayer mod didn't really seem an option. Everything we were playing was multiplayer then. Mods were different then too, because just about any decent mod would get at least a few servers of people trying it out. In fact, when I finally made a workable mod for Unreal Tournament, it was pretty easy to get some notice and when I finally evolved that code into Freehold, I had made a few online friends with that we could playtest/play for a couple nights/afternoons a week.

That all seemed to change recently. Gamer curiosity seems to have peaked, and now they really want a well saturated mod before they dip. Plus, and I hate to sound like an old curmedgeon here, but the online crowd has really changed. Way more l33tSP3K trash talkers than there are decent players it seems.

Because of this, my desire to play online with people I don't know has been pretty much quenched. I'm sure there will be games to lure me back from time to time, but I doubt it will ever become the norm again. Hence, a lot of my focus these days is on how single-player games work.

But, my resolution is to try and make at least one last multiplayer mod. I really think the concepts of how gametypes evolve has stagnated and I'd like to try some things with dynamic team and goal creation. So it might not always be one team against another team to get a flag, but perhaps on the same map three guys are trying to get a flag while a fourth has a mission to stop them and fifth is out to frag any of them.

So I'm taking notes and will just have to see if this goes the way most resolutions do...

Dev Day Diary: Crisis of Design

There's an occurence in my work, both professionally and as a hobby, that I like to call a crisis of design. Think of it like a crisis of faith, only completely different. A crisis of design occurs when you have like four seperate good ideas that just can't work together. On their own, each of these ideas are perfectly sound, reasonable and technically feasible ideas. The problem is that one of these ideas eventually conflicts fundamentally with another idea and the whole house comes down.

To put it in Tom and Jerry terms, sometimes it's a good idea to get a cat. And sometimes it's good to have a cute rodent around. Sometimes when you do both you get an anvil on the head.

Unreal Defense Squad was supposed to combine Unreal action with squad level management. Nothing on the order of an RTS, but you were supposed to feel like you were in control of the squad and get a notion that you could use different strategies to solve different problems.

One way to do this would be to have well designed maps with specific map objects to assist in controlling the squad and setting up strategies. So a door could be hacked open, or blown open, etc. And specific points could be used for cover, sniping, etc. The HUD would help out in creating these points. The problem with this approach is twofold - 1) it requires a create deal of custom asset creation ... and I'm just one guy. 2) It becomes repetitive - players will likely use the same strategy that works repeatedly and never be forced to change up.

So the other way is to create random maps. Random maps would insure that players couldn't solve a level using the same tactic because they would have to change up to compensate for variations in the map. The problem there is that Unreal uses a node based intelligence system, and making the squad seem both obedient and moderately intelligent becomes counterproductive.

Hence, crisis rises. The three design requirements - squad level command, mission replayablity and decent AI conflict with each other.

So there's two solutions to a crisis of design. Either brute force through the problem or redesign it. Since I'm just a hobbyist I have both the luxury and option of doing the second. There's probably fewer than five people in the world even aware of this mod, so it's not like anyone will be broken hearted. Plus, I have found that brute forcing through something as a tendency to just trash everything in sight.

So, the redesign. What leg of the stool will I change? Well, oddly I'll be removing the decent AI completely. That's right, completely. Well, mostly. Unreal Defense Squad is going turn based. This way the squad will be as intelligent as you make them. The only AI required will be rudimentary hunt and attack from the enemy, although if that goes smoothly I may attempt group level tactics.

I've actually always wanted to make a turn based game using the Unreal engine and these designs are based on the Freehold Tactics gametype I never quite started. I spent about half this weekend getting it kicked off and it went remarkably smooth. Well sort of. I have a basic turn system for the player working. You have a time limited turn, you can select various squad members and tell them to either move somewhere or fire at an enemy. The enemy will also take a turn, selecting a single pawn, find and enemy, and run to them firing (which, with the complete lack of cover is remarkably effective).

Most bizarre bug though - everyone on your squad has the same name. No matter what. Gotta love it.

William Lisle Bowles

Non Geek News: Sodium over eBay?

OK, videos of blowing something up is kinda geeky. But is anyone else worried that you can buy enough raw material over eBay to blow up a house? Guess I'm just paranoid.

Action UT is all out of bandages

I won't rant much about this here, as I already am getting embroiled here and here.

Action UT has ceased development and will probably not be passing the series on to anyone else. Action was one of the first big mods to ever be in existence. They were around before people bothered describing things a Total Conversions or whatnot. They were around before Valve realized that if they bought out Counter-Strike, they wouldn't need to develop a new title for a while.

My, how things have changed. Have they changed for the better? Well, lemme ask you this. When is the last time you wished a mod came in a box? DSL has made that relatively obsolete. When is the last time you played a mod and said, "I'd pay $30 for this." A lot of gamers quibble about paying $40 for a commercial title. But most importantly:

When is the last time you played a mod and said - wow, I've never played anything quite like this before. I hope more games in the future are made like this.

Probably been a while.

Doh, that was a short rant. I think I need some ibuprofen.

Overthinking Half-Life 2 [spoilers]

During my morning crawl, I came across this via UnrealOps. It's more or less a literary deconstruction of Half-Life 2.

It also reminds me how easy it is to write bullshit academia. I mean, take this:

As Freeman, we have to enter a casket and move onwards and upwards to confront and challenge those who've managed to decide what happens directly below. Yet through such change of environment, it becomes evident that the cold sterilised factory portion of the building, which harshly sits on the surface of City 17, is also cut off from the clean, pristine look of the upper floors. There almost appears then to be a clear fragmentation too within the Combine partnership and where the hierarchy and foot soldiers fit in with each other.

Funny, I thought that part of the game was merely a poorly contrived game mechanic to force a relatively non-existent plot forward. Here is our man Freeman, mysteriously dropped into a mysterious city, finding himself in the Citadel of HorseHead Evil or somewhat, having eluded capture a dozen different ways ... and he willingly places himself into constraints and gets delivered via crane not once ... but twice.

C'mon people, I like Half-Life 2 as much as the next guy ... but let's be honest. The story was seriously lacking. Gordon, having just spared Black Mesa and swept away by the bizarre G-Man is dumped ... into the future? A future where the aliens of Black Mesa have taken over the world in a time about equivalent to Freeman's escape from his lab and the administrator of this lab, now responsible for countless deaths and the inevitable downfall of mankind ... is somehow charged with running the whole place? The whole Earth that is?

Putting aside for now that much of this is told through a single bulletin board in the game, since none of the main characters seem to bother with actually explaining to Freeman what's going on, this smacks heavily of trying far too hard to make two completely divergent story lines appear connected. There is nothing particularly logical or realistic about that premise, it just makes it seem more like a sequel since they can rehash characters.

Half-Life 2 had some interesting mechanics. As Penny Arcade pointed out, it's unabashedly first-person, even when third person might serve better, which works to a good effect. It's got some of the best design in video game history. It does not, however, have a story meriting thinking like "As such, if her first and second betrayals are so close, both from decisive calculation to heated indecision, what does that say about the lack of instinct over our fundamental grasping of it?".

The article does, at the end, make some interesting points about game design in general - basically exploration versus expedition, but it takes way too long to get there. Let me make it simpler for you. Valve does good level design.

Maria Farber

A Mod By Any Other Name

So, I'm reading EGM last night and they have this interview with one of the guys responsible for Halo 2. Now I've got nothing against Halo 2, liked Halo 1, plan on playing the sequel sometime somehow and I've got respect for anyone responsible for that series (not to mention Marathon). I've complained in the past about Bungie hyping the hell out of Halo before it was really even a game, and then selling it off to Microsoft, but I'm willing to let bygones be bygones.

But this guy, and I'm sorry that I don't have the article in front of me, but this guy was talking about a "lost" gametype - Headhunter. In Headhunter, when you kill someone, you get a skull. You can take this skull to a dropoff to get frags. People can kill you and steal your skulls.

Sound familiar? It should. It was an old Quake mod, relatively shortly after the days of Zoid CTF. Sadly, this guy attributes the gametype to some XBox game called Fuzion Frenzy. XBox game? Are you serious?

Look, if you're going to go rip off someone else's gameplay - at least have the decency to know their name. This really annoys me because the role mods have played in enhanced and innovating first person shooters has become more and more obscured over the years. Now, they can't even get credit when credit is due?

Robinson Jeffers

The Many Deaths of Gordon Freeman

An idea for a Half-Life 2 mod came to me as I finished up the game on Friday (is there a myth about finishing games before the New Year? Hrm, nevermind - I still have Genesis games to finish) which would be essentially the inverse of your normal singleplayer.

In a normal single player, you play a single person who battles against multiple enemies trying to make it through maps with the most amount of health/items remaining.

In The Many Deaths of Gordon Freeman, this would be reversed. You would play multiple opponents against a single enemy (our man Freeman) trying to keep him from completing a map too successfully. The plot events would be the same, the puzzles would be more or less the same, but it would be all told from the POV of the enemies that Freeman fights against.

It would definately be technically challenging. First you would need to have an AI Freeman. Not an easy task since he has the most complicated actions in the entire game. Next you would need to make player versions of the major villians and the various weapons they have. Finally the SP maps would need to be altered to handle this reverse and all HUD/Control functions would have to support it.

Perfect Dark had a similar coop twist like this, I believe. One player would play the main character and the other would play the enemies. Course, this would also be an option to remove the need for a smart AI Freeman script but would introduce a whole new problem of multiplayer code. A multiplayer version could also quickly descend into a hunter gametype, with many players against one (being Freeman). Course, that might not be such a bad thing either.

Year End Rally + Dev Day Diary

Getting a vacation at the end of a vacation is truly a twice blessed event. I love holidays with my family, but it's hard with all the running around and driving that becomes mandatory not to want to come home and crash. And so having a four day weekend for the new year's solidifies that as my favorite holiday of the year.

Yesterday I had nothing to do, full day off and got to do nothing but work on Defense Squad. I know, I'm sick. I get a day off and I work on something. I get it from my dad. But put this in perspective - half the time I'm working on this thing, I'm blowing something up. Very fun.

Any rate - it's starting to become a real game. It's fun to watch it gel, the combination of the base orientated management and the squad orientated play. Still, I'm concerned with the redudancy of the missions right now. Plus their difficulty level - the Mokara take out my best guys over half the time, and I probably have a better squad than I'm supposed to right now. The gameplay adjustments are getting a sort of one step forward two steps back feel now. The new lighting in the maps helps (pure dark was getting to be a bit much) as does improved cover. However, my mantra of "bots should be obedient if not smart" is slipping a bit. I lost several squadmates because they left their hold point to chase after an enemy. Some balance will help this out (commendations will increase a soldier's damage, weaponsmithing is going to give rise to more powerful weapons) - but it seems right now every encounter descends into chaos.

Still, sometimes chaos is fun. Like when I sent my two soldiers into an archway only to watch them get instantly ambushed and turned to skeletons. Or when walking along a low level getting literally jumped by three Stormhands above us. This kind of random encounter is probably going to be core, so it's nice to see it emerging.

Dev Night Diary: Filling out a framework

My online pal Wong and I like to compare notes on how we generally get nothing done. It's really not fair because both of us love to write frameworks. We love to write the core foundation to prove that if you can get x to do y that you actually do end up with the evil stepson of a hamster.

Our problem is that once we prove the hamster's existence, we don't do very much with it. We have this framework, but then some other shiny thing (like Half-Life 2) distracts us and we're off to prove something new again. This time I'm trying to do it differently, and actually finish this mod before moving on to anything new. I'm actually forcing myself to scale back and not scope creep the hell out of things. By sticking to single-player and trying to write this firmly in the Unreal Universe (which is a poorly cobbled affair as it is) I'm making the goal a bit easier to hit.

Last night I really started to fill out the framework. With some new tricks in UED I can make dark maps in a few minutes, so I'm taking some choice ones over. I started to add in new enemies, new weapons, etc. And then I was reminded why I don't usually take anything this far.

Because it shows you all the problems in your framework. I think I broke three distinct things just by using them. Sigh. Oh well, it's mostly working now and it's slowly starting to feel more like a game.

Holiday Half Life

So now post holiday I can finally bite into the full version of Half-Life 2. Definately enjoying it. The most impressive bit is that this still feels like Half-Life. I never called that one. I had assumed that with the Source Engine that you would see a new feel to the game, like you did with UT2k3 and Doom. Not sure what they kept around, but the movement and "inner loop" (Epic's term for the interactions closest to the player, like weapon handling) ... still feel like Valve's classic.

And Valve still does some of the best set pieces in the industry. Some of the way the world interacts in these scenes makes HL2 feel more like a play than a game.

Still, I have to repeat the statements below. I'm amazed by the similarities between this and Doom 3 that everyone bitched about. Let's ... silly flashlight. Check. (sorry people, a $2 flashlight from a gas station has more juice than Gordon's ... WTF?). "Classic" monster AI. Check. (while the "squad" tactics were revolutionary in HL, they've grown pretty predictable now). Sweet monster movement which ends in rudimentary attack. Check. Check. (If the leapers don't remind you of Doom's imps, you're playing with your eyes closed.) Monster closets? Monsters respawning behind you? Monsters spawning from seemingly nowhere? Check, check check.

I'm by no means saying HL2 is a bad game ... it's a very good game. And definately there's a differential ratio at work here ... HL2's flashlight mechanics are less annoying than Doom 3's because the flashlight isn't as necessary. The monster closets are less noticeable because they are less constant. Etc., etc. Still, it's interesting to watch gamer perception.

I haven't decided if I'll mod for HL2. After getting UDS done, I'd consider it. Be interesting to do a City 17 Police mod in the same vein.