Battle Royale: UT2004 versus MMOs

There are lots of things I don't understand about gaming these days, but the latest must be the zeal in which Massively Multiplayer gamers are willing to subsidize for what the average gamer wouldn't even stand for if it was free. And what's really odd is that these are often the same people.

It's like lots of people love to hate Doom 3. But if id had only made it possible for a thousand people to wander around hell and upgrade their Plasma Gun Craftsmanship, all would have been forgiven. Even if not everyone could actually log into hell. See? It doesn't have to work, you see, it just has to promise to work massively when it does.

And if that makes any sense to you, please let me know how. So, how do these two things compare? Let's look.

	Unreal Tournament 2004	Typical MMO
Retail Price	About $50.00	About $50.00
Monthly Price	None	$10.00-$15.00
Online features	32 player max, hundreds of different servers.	Thousands of players online concurrently
Online Stability	Rock Solid	Usually flimsy
Online Security	Decent, few problems	Varies. Some have zero problems, others suffer from common problems inventory cloning, leveling scripts and character hacking.
Upgrades	Free bonus packs, free patches	Free patches, "non-mandatory" content packs costing $20-$50.
User modifications	At least a handful of high quality mods, hundreds of user based projects, completely free tools to develop out of the box.	Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Never will happen. Unless that MMO is Second Life.

OK, one could read that and say that I place an undue weight on user modifications - but I look at the wealth of gaming the UT2004 offers for free, which is itself limited really only to the energy of the user base playing it ... against the rather random ability to play the core game while still paying for it every day ... and I simply scratch my head.

I hope Guild Wars is successful, because right now I'm thinking the only reason MMO's are an attractive business model is for companies to trick gamers into digging into their pockets again and again and again and again.

I would also argue that there are things about an MMO that I'm going soft on. For instance, when Sony decided that PlanetSide was working the way "intended", they changed the core gameplay. And then they changed it again. And then again. Now that means that when someone reads a review of the game and decides to buy it - they could be buying something completely different. Sony could decide PlanetSide is just a rally race, and the gamers would just have to suck it down.

And when security goes wrong in your typical FPS, it can ruin a server, or in really grand cases effect the whole online community. But private servers and LAN games would still be fine. Security goes awry in an MMO, that could be it. The fat lady has sung, and took that fourty hours of level grinding with her.

I'm not saying MMO's are evil or inherently wrong. I think it's an interesting genre that I hope expands and evolves. I just think that if gamers assume that a) We will always pay a monthly few, because of server costs and b) These games will always be technical infeasible that the genre will have little reason to evolve. The problem with a) is that many companies work after market and don't charge a monthly fee for it (as shown by bonus packs, new modes, levels, etc.) and b) is self-defeating because some MMO's have been capable of stability.

An online chum and I were thinking of what it would take to do Minimal Massively Multiplayer, or an MMO network that ran off a normal MO framework. Maybe if we got that running, and Epic included the UT2004RPG mutator in every box ... they could just start charging a ten spot every thirty days?

Dear God*: Why, oh why do I watch Lost?

I should preface this by saying that I hated John Doe. Loathed that show. I have this friend who's pretty hip to the TV industry, tried to get me to watch it, and I've only recently forgiven him for it (he told me Enterprise got Manny Coto).

John Doe had one problem - it was a mystery based premise with a really stupid mystery. Why does this guy have no memory? Why does he know everything but still uses a phone book? What does blue smell like?

Who cares? It was self-evident from the second episode that the writing was completely shooting from the hip, had horribly continuity and was destined for a downfall.

So why do I watch Lost? This came up after some beers a couple nights ago. It's very similar in it's core. The premise must be way out there and if you had to roll the dice, chances are the explanation is probably not going to appease everyone.

But the characters don't suck. Locke is one of the best TV personas to come around for a while, and let's not even get into Sawyer. The background stories are riveting without requiring the oddness of the show and the whole castaway bit is handled quite well. So the reason, I guess, is that even if the mystery ends up sucking - the show is still very watchable.

I do love a mystery though, so here are my observations:

No, they aren't all dead. Though Lost seems like Purgatory, we've gotten to many instances where characters have mysteries not pertaining to the island. Why would we care about the odd destiny of Claire's baby if they were all snuffed out?

It's about the children. We've got two really odd children now. Claire's baby is so important a psychic is willing to send her to the island and apparently Walt is so strange that his adopted father didn't want to risk living with him. They somehow seem core to the story.

Locke knows something. Guess this is obvious, but Locke understands the island. Whatever he went through showed him a bit of the island's inner secret. I don't think he hasn't shared with the crowd because he's stingy, I think he believes they'll only understand when they experience it as well.

Sooner or later, someone is gonna die. Just a prediction. I think they're holding out on this until towards the end of the season or the beginning of the next. They've got a great cast, both of actors and characters, and there's too much tragedy to pass up here.

They're not in Kansas. The metaphysical can't be ignored, and I don't disagree with the in-show observation that none of them should have survived the accident. While I don't think they're dead, I don't think they are exactly in a place a search plane can fly to easily.

Can't wait for next week...



* I'm an agnostic...

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.