Welcome home. Let’s talk games.
Will’s keynote at SXSW is up at Kotaku. He talks about Spore and… well, not really just Spore. He talks about it and a lot of other things.
Very much worth the read if you like Will or if you’re interested in what’s going on in his head. Which is an Herculean task on any given day.
And I’ll be damned if he doesn’t like a mix between David Carradine and Kevin Sorbo in that pic.
I was recently skimming the LOTRO boards, and a post caught my eye. Rather, a post that shouldn’t have caught my eye, did. I should have just read the topic and kept going, simply because I have seen posts like that, with subtle variations, a thousand times already regarding different games.
It was a post complaining about crafting.
Why is it that, way more often than not, crafting systems all across the board feel hollow and unrewarding? Why is it that, going by that nebulous thing known as the opinion of the gamer in the street, we can only point at one or two more or less common examples of acceptable crafting systems (DaoC seems to come up usually), while the rest are generally determined to be crap? Just what the hell is it about crafting, and why does it seem that no one apparently can get it right?
…it’s what you do.
The latest controversy/gaffe/MMO boo-boo still rages on and is rippling out as I type this. By now, many in the “gaming press” (hwah!) got ahold of it, many are even running with it. “Jumpgate” they call it. Are we the best thing since bread came sliced or what?
(you can read up all about the festivities in this article from The Escapist. It’s a good summary, if you need to catch up. Ethic also has a nice discussion going over in that place where they kill rats.)
All the resulting online drama and forum wars from this event, colorful as they are, thankfully brought to the forefront an interesting point and question. One that, in my opinion, needs to be answered and codified into an industry standard M.O. as soon as possible. The question is quite simple:
Should devs be allowed to play the online games they create?
That’s what we seem to be when it comes to multiplayer. Particularly MMOs.
Remember WoW two, three years ago? All the hoopla about the Hero classes? “Oh, they’re coming”, they said, “we’re just working on them. Tweaking the details. You’ll see”. Well, here we are, years later, and we still have not seen a thing. Chances are we’ll never see a thing. I quite doubt we’ll ever see Hero classes implemented in WoW, and I doubt a little less that we’ll see something like that in other, future games.
Continue reading ‘Afraid of heroes’
My apologies for having left this space unattended for so long. You see, I had no internet. None of it. No connection to the world. For almost 2 months. How did that happen? A real life move to a place forsaken by the gods and angels of connectivity.
Oh, we called them. We did call them, sweetly. We wanted to give them our money in return for their precious tubes –the ones that make up the internet, arranged in a series–, alas it was not to be. Cable? They laughed. DSL? Not in your area, sorry. Should be there in “6 months”. Wi-Fi? No, that thing has something called ‘coverage’ and you guys are out of it. Next! Satellite? Sure, they said. Just give us 50 bajillion dollars and we’ll hook you up with our low-bandwidth, high-latency dishy-dishy goodness. No thanks.
So, in desperation, here we are. Dial up. A fate truly worse than death itself.
I have nothing to do when I log in to WoW.
Hold the vegetables. Hear me out. Don’t point me to the this, that and that other thing I could be doing. Been playing since Dec. of ‘04. I’ve done them all. And this is not pre-expansion lull blues. I’ve been like this for a while. So, why is that I say I have nothing to do when there are clearly things for me to do? Because they aren’t worth a damn. Continue reading ‘Water, water everywhere…’
I want a MMO with guilds that mean a damn. Replace ‘guilds’ with corporation, player associations, hunting group… whatever tickles your game bone. I’ll use ‘guilds’.
I explain. Most games I’ve seen treat guilds basically like a larger party, and that’s about it. Your typical game does not contemplate the possibility for guilds to radically alter gameplay itself, neither for that guild, other guilds and your vanilla unguilded player. Your typical game goes by one thing most of the time: guild size. And that’s about it. Guilds are not setup with the power to influence events, do not grant any palpable advantages to its members other than a few cosmetics here and there. No bonuses, no penalties. Nothing that directly affects the game world, player abilities or player performance. Guilds are classically seen and guild mechanics typically coded with only one governing condition; that they are a collection of players under one cosmetic banner and nothing more. In reality, when the player truly meets and intersects with gameplay itself, that player might as well be not guilded. It makes no difference at all. Players do not kill monsters better or faster by being or not being in a guild. Players gain no special abilities by being guilded. In essence, the main problem is that guilds are largely irrelevant to gameplay itself, whereas guilds are one of the most important things, conceptually, for the players themselves. Continue reading ‘Let it mean something’
Well, it’s been two years (more or less) of World of Warcraft. Happy Birthday.
To this day, perhaps what I find most amazing about WoW is not found in the game itself, but in its surroundings. To this date, I haven’t seen anyone that could sit down, think about and say “Okay, this one thing is what made WoW successful”. Not one.
Sure there’s been talk. Tons of it. Many issues brought up, many opinions crossed and much ink put to paper, virtual or not. But the result is the same. Beyond our individual appreciations of the object itself, we gamers still haven’t managed as a group to reach some sort of nebulous consensus and point to one thing unequivocally. We seem to be at a loss when it comes to WoW; two years in, and we still don’t know what makes it tick.
Continue reading ‘The Wow Factor’
Yup. Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (a title designed to compete with Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazhakstan)
Of all that’s coming down the pipe, I guess this is the one that caught my eye and I’m really looking forward to. Graphically, of course, it’s quite pretty. It’s got a few more things going for it. Most importantly, it will be based strictly on Tolkien’s books, and from what I’ve seen and gathered here and there, the team seems to be taking Middle Earth lore and attention to detail very seriously. Second, if you take a look at some of the (old, E3 build) videos around, you realize how it’s really-really similar to WoW, at least in spirit. Looks like WoW with the graphics kicked up a notch. Continue reading ‘Concerning LOTRO…’
Well, welcome aboard. In here you’ll find random musings about games and gaming in general. Normally, things I’m too ashamed or too modest to put up in my personal, yummy superdelicious personal blog.
Why about games? Because I like. And since I like, I want to see it better. How to make it better? Talking about it. Examining what we have and coming up with new ideas, new knowledge and new destinations. And to rant about it, of course. You really can’t have a proper gaming site without some whine to go with the cheese every now and then. Us gamers are whiny creatures almost by definition, and it can be healthy to let it out sometimes. For catharsis if nothing else.
Feel free to comment on anything that might appear here. Who knows… maybe something good comes out in the end.
