It’s a valid MMO definition anymore?

Speaking about Diablo 3, developers are eager to say it won’t be categorized as an MMO:

While Battle.net can certainly support that many players at one time, the lack of a persistent world and restrictions on how many players can be within each “world” (game) would keep Diablo III from being categorized as an MMO.

Now, let’s think about the last persistent online world you saw… Mmm none? That’s the myth of MMO worlds: they are persistent.

Aside for Ultima and a few other cases, most of today’s MMOs are barely persistent, unmodifiable worlds that acts as hubs for restricted instanced contents. Unless having a common marketplace it’s your idea of persistent world, of course! Cutting trees, modifying geography and landscapes, even leaving things on the ground are gameplay elements no longer considered during MMOG design. They were the expensive part of MMOs operation in 1997, wonder why in 2008 most MMOs are free? Yes, that’s because the world you see don’t even exist in the way you experience it on their servers, it’s just a glorified chatroom background, at some extent…

Now I’m sad and nostalgic!

Mr Creeping Arm

Last night, me and Morhan decided to try to sort out the Book 1, Chapter 11 of Lord Of The Rings Online with a party of two. Needless to say, confronting the Witch King with such a small party was a suicide. The trip let me appreciate more the cure of details level and quest designers put in the game, even if the Lord Of The Rings is not my favourite fantasy setting.

At the end of the dungeon, there are a lots of Elite Wights, most of them completely dismembered, just like the Deadly Tomb Wight depicted here. The Wight was accompained by its own dismembered arm, that was flailing aimlessy during combat.

That’s the right touch of realism you can’t safely expect by today quest-design standards on other MMOGs, but when it happens, it’s always more than appreciated since it increases the realism and coherence of the quest set-ups.

Masterful writing in AoC?

Seems like the suggestion box for the cancel subscription in the Age of Conan account manager is bugged as well: it simply cut your comment up to a point, even if it let you write ad infinitum, without any warning. That’s odd, because after the first month is almost passed, server population decreased critically (in some high-level zones now  you see at most an handful of instances, when before they were about 20), and judging to the forums, lots of people are stress testing the account management page, especially the “cancel” one.

Wonder why their real-time, very small, instanced, game servers are hitching, crashing and burning with bugs? They still have to learn how to do web forms, give them some time (and definitely meaningful suggestions when your account will be cancelled).

Oh, back on topic, Eurogamer made a really strange review of AOC. Basically they say the game is perfect, well written and had the best launch ever in an MMO. The problem, is some features they give for working don’t. Like Keep-Based PVP. In fact until now there were only one Keep-Based PVP battle and was a mess, so much that developers apologized to all the gaming community in the AoC launcher!

Even if they played only the Tortage bit (admittedliy several spans better of all the other quests, but still pretty mediocre and disjointed (why the single player nonsense?), even for an MMOG) how they can justify quests masterfully written (and accompained by broken cutscenes) like that?:

You are asked to surrender to a squad of ten guards, the same guards you slayed coninously for the most part of your Destiny quests. You do that (surrender, not slaying). Fade to black, you are carried away. Fade to back. Inside the Admiral Strom stronghold, a torturer addresses to you, explaining where you are, what are their plans, the standard bad guy stereotype. Then he says: “Oh my! Nobody disarmed you!”. You massacre him, the countless guard inside the keep (“No, you can’t  beat us, surrender for your best!”, they said) and exit the keep. To do what? Looking for an NPC that tasks you to kill an escaping Strom (which is the whole nut of your Destiniy Quest from the start), the same guy that was in the keep when they brought you there.

Masterfully written, for a retarded ten years old, maybe. I’ve seen Mighty Morphing Power Rangers episodes with a better plot and sequence of events.

EVE Online source leaked in the name of fairness

Look here.

Well, this one really adds up to the virtual whipping I did several weeks ago about the useless hyping of EVE, giving its current, sad state of the art.

To be honest I didn’t expect CCP to be so amateur to start banning all the IP ranges from the BT download logs, they ended with lots of users angry because they were banned without committing anything unusual (you know, most of the ISPs use dynamic IP allocation for private internet access!). They may be a garage studio, but they should know how the Internet is working since they’re making money out of it.

The case really underlines most of the issues that brought me away from EVE after years: it’s mostly a collection of broken toys due to a very superficial and inaccurate feature planning (that leaves big chunks of gameplay in an unifinished state for months, if not years), aimed mostly to please the user base of control freaks and wannabe-slaves that plague the game and are the most constant source of revenues.

We may argue that the CCP financial stability is granted mostly by the biggest alliances (counted by the thousands): for the younger players the game today is mostly unplayable due to the skill power gap, broken features and the continued harassing of deep space founded splinter corps whose role it’s only to avoid the rise of new, organized power groups in the safe space.

The exploitable use of reporting linked in the cited chatlog is a real problem, too. Lots of people are banned for botting or bad behaviours just because they were so stupid to disagree with the wrong alliance in a public chat channel, just to receive a lot of forged reports for abuses on the Terms of Service.

I was one of those unlucky lads that was framed by an hostile corp for bad mouthing and personal harassing, and I had to fight for weeks to make the customer service verify that the chatlog submitted was a simple Notepad forgery…

I wonder if, aside for smug, CCP planned the game in this way. Sure, they were a PK guild on the first days of Ultima Online, and they declared to be still enamored for the original mafia-like, unplayable, castrating and bad designed PVP system that British himself ditched after a while to free players from griefers. So much for a player driven economy when you’re able to gain more than 100M ISK in an hour just shooting NPC ships in a 0.0 system (and the enemy is 20 jumps away because you are in the bowel of an alliance territory) and there’s no restriction on how those moneys are exchanged within the game. Several players hosts an alt in secure space to control inflation on entire regions, fueled by farm-bots (or farm-slaves) in deep 0.0. Every alliance economy is based on that strategy. There’s no way to match that money output (and there ere organized groups that are able to make a lot more than just 100M in an hour), making almost anything else in the game a waste of time and money. This outrageous state of the game was the result of a mission and bounty hunting revamp that never got finished and broken the economy so much to become a feature. If you plan to compete with any other 0.0 corp (even not in an alliance) your only viable option is to farm 24/7 to keep up with the war expenses. Any other mean is not only impractical and slow but also terribly stupid. And good luck if you plan to qualify for a researched Blueprint, too! Chances are that some big corp or alliance is so hogged with research points that the eventuality that someone else would obtain anything are less than nihil, and all the technological advancements will just finish in the same hands that still enjoy Aurora or other “ph4t l00t” events by the game designers.

That’s what you get when you tailor a game out of a very specific user base (or game designers simply don’t know what they’re doing). That’s why your user base can’t grow significantly even if every superficial reviewer in the world is ready to swear that the game is a masterpiece, mostly because he wasn’t able to understand anything from it.

Call it a Lynch syndrome, if you wish.

EVE continues pointless hyping

CCP is convinced that they can run EVE for half a century. While it’s teoretically possible, we must admit that the strategy of “building on top of it”, as Reynir Hadarson said, it’s a bit streteched up, because software become obsolete and sources become an unmanageable tangle if you just “build on top of it”. Most decade old MMOG out there are managed by battle-scarred skilled professionals (not just once UO playerkillers become self-made programmers who state the impossible :P) and are almost all ended in a state where it’s safer to touch the code as less as possible. If not for code quality it’s because in a decade the team has shuffled so many times that some part of the sources don’t have a direct maintainer anymore and knowledge is becoming fuzzy.

I would’ve been more positive about the statement of CCP if they didn’t managed to break every single release date they announced, in some cases with delays that spanned multiple years (if that’s not navigating on sight and improvising development). Come on I’m still waiting for the full Revelation feature set deployed as initially announced, hyped and broken almost 2 years ago! 😛

In addition, EVE is not so rose colored when it comes to gameplay, no mattes how CCP and the superficial reviewers who spent a couple of days in the game may describe the state of things: the combat system has been radically revised at least 5 times, the economy needs huge manual supervision and the introduction of more costly products to keep inflation stable and the radical (not to mention biased) PVP view of the game is becoming more and more grim for people that aim to have a social life. Research and development often is a joke since new items are allocated manually and you may wait for months before you’re granted a chance to get a breakthrought. As said before, PVP is so masterfully balanced towards big, pointless fleet battles that bounty hunting was made completely useless since the changes of two years ago (made to promote what they call “factional warfare”, a feature that still today exists only on the designers heads but that broke a lot of more player-friendly features) and the only role for mercenary and rogue fleets is to increase the ship numbers in battle to statistically drop the employing corp losses. In other hand, if you plan to have small battles for money, just farm 100K NPCs every minute in a cheap battleship instead of spending days to catch that 5M bounty around the galaxy.

If EVE won’t manage to make fleet combat interesting (at the moment, unless you have personally offended someone, in a 100 vs 100 battle, the fact you will come alive or dead is a matter of pure luck due to lag and the shortcoming of the interface), create better ways to manage territorial control (granting a patrol made of real people up 24/7 feels like a job to me) and keep griefers away from newbie corporations, the game may stop way before its first decade: its player count is not so stellar and the number of people who run away scared from the game (and the community) unfriendliness is worrying. Accounts are counted by the millions but the active ones are by the tens of thousands (and a good portion of them are alts purchased with a discont!).

Remember, these critics doesn’t come from a green-horned gamer but from a veteran with more of 30M (almost 40 to be precise) of skillpoints behind his back, months of services in 0.0 under several major alliances and more bounties collected than anyone can imagine. I (as many other disgruntled veterans) feel a bit silly that people we pay for a service carry on tasks and development in such a chaotic way, just like they’re still working on guild tasks in their basement and still manage to be so bluntly full of nonsense when it comes to take responsibility.

What EVE needs is a professional vision and direction, the ability to grant a baseline of experience that won’t require to sell your soul to the game itself or relearn the game completely every six months. It needs a manual that isn’t years behind development and a and designer who didn’t focus only on what a minority of the playerbase wants because is that minority of hardcore gamers and the way the game is built around them that are scaring new players away!

The idea of a free, completely player driven PVP is so ’90ish, it’s not completely bad but steps has to be taken to grant new players the time and peace needed to adjust to such a complex game. What they have today is constant griefing, mugging and menaces until they join one of the bigger corporations, because the game, in the last two years, only fullfilled the demands and expectations of a fistfull of CEOs, who practically control almost all the EVE active userbase and are the finances that back up the game.

I learned something new about Risk

We Europeans are very used to the objective-based version of Risk. Apparently the US version never had objectives and the game usually degrades in a chore for world conquest.

To fix the issue, Hasbro is about to release a new US version, called Black Ops Risk that has a brand new objective system: every player need to accomplish three objectives from a pool to win a game. The problem is that most of these objectives are just like the end-game ones from the European version, so the gameplay will still be a bit too long for many people, since you basically need to win the game three times in a row to call the day off!

The new stuff about goals for controlling capitols and per-achievement rewards seem a bit more solid than the bonuses from controlling continents present in the classic version.

I got it from Gamers With Jobs, in case you want to learn more about it.

Cloverfield and gaming

The movie came out today in Italy, so me and my girlfriend went to see it. Not bad at all, the shaky camera effects and the continuous subjective, limited FOV vision were a nice touch to keep the audience on its toe (or make it vomit, take your pick). Since you can’t see anything clear, the movie has an easy job to scare you: the creature remains mostly a product of your own imagination even when it’s partially revealed and that’s the most disturbing trait of the movie. Surprisingly the most tense scenes are those where the film remembers us that we aren’t the pinnacle of the food chain anymore and those where people are acting like mad rodents, escaping a predator or just fumbling out in panic. Real panic, not the usual mass hysteria you can expect from a monster movie.

After seeing the movie, the question appeared on many gaming site about the ability of a modern console to deliver such shaky-camera effects seemed just another movie-driven marketing gimnick than a real question.

The movie instantly remembered me the last Call of Chtulhu hybrid FPS-adventure and the frequent sequences where you have to run, scared, from Lovercraftian horrors. That game really delivers a similar experience, limiting you in the usual narrow 90° FOV with almost no peripheral vision (just like watching through a camera!), blurred sight due to motion\pain\panic and the usual disorientation that running hysterically in real-sized spaces with an FPS engine usually delivers.

I’d have some concerns about the effectiveness of the technique for a whole game. In the movie, you have no control on the camera and it adds to confusion, in a game, you are supposed to be in control and a compelled shaky-camera mode may be an overshot if not balanced correctly.

Cthulhu got it right because the visual confusion during chases is the result of your own actions combined with the visual limitations, two factors that build up a great claustrophobic effect.

FF7: the replay continues

Well, it is known that I have a very slow playthrough rate when it comes to RPGs (mostly because I play even five of them in parallel), and my replay of Final Fantasy VII is no exception. In the end, despite my last intentions, I bowed down to the almighty PSP (as an emulation device, at last) and started using it instead of pSX 1.13, mostly for convenience purpose.

So what, you may ask? Sephiroth went mad (for no believable reason, to a more careful analisys) after Cloud and his charming carnival were involved in a slightly homoerotic rescue mission for Aeris, an indefinite amount of flashbacks and a long chase against Sephiroth itself.

To be honest, the recall of the love triangle between Cloud, Tifa and Aeris was better than the real thing. I mean, the guy is blond, muscled and has blue eyes, but all the girls literally fights for him even if they don’t know him at all… Even if the motivation of Cloud resembling the lost Aeris lover is rational, it is the acting that doesn’t fit: too aggressive and in the same time, submissive. I guess it’s the teenager’s view of love in Japan, but it’s still sassy.

Sephiroth. Where to start with this guy? It’s surely one of the most cool looking villain ever conceived, he also leaves the stage among the flames, but his motivation are really confused or, at least, badly presented. I mean: since the game feed you a long flashback with highly Lovercraftian influences about the Sephiroth’s discovery of his own supposed heritage, why to deliver a such superficial fall from grace to create a fearsome villain? By being the SOLDIER spearhead, Sephiroth is supposed to be cold, detached and self-controlled type of guy, just like the algid Cloud (who seems a complete sissy, in the flashbacks). Given the length of the game, maybe Sephiroth should have been detailed a bit more before becoming a villain.

It hurts to say, but as a regular Final Fantasy-esque villain (with lots of Kefka’s influences), Rufus is better presented, despite being your classic villain stereotype of which not much is known aside he’s evil for his own good.

I guess the problem with Sephiroth is that we know too much of him but too few informations adds up to create a believable villain psychology.

Other aspects are magisterially presented and laid out. The Red XIII side-story, while pretty brief is a nice touch, especially for such a secondary character. The set-up for the Reunion and the spooky Niebehlm village recreation is as scary as I remembered it. I was amazed how combat scaled well for a Final Fantasy game, the last play-through I had with Final Fantasy titles was from the classic ones (1, 2 and 3) and the early, more mature, ones (4, 5 and 6) that aren’t exactly game design masterpieces, when it comes to difficulty scaling and progression.

Well, I plan to finish Disk 1 ASAP (don’t hold your breath, though), so I guess I will recap all my considerations in a final wrap-up before moving further.

PS3 growth rate surpassed X360 this Winter

The hard, but cold truth.

And you need to consider consider that those stats refer to console manufactured. As also Microsoft recognized, the infamous 30% return rate of the first production run (more than 10 millions pieces) had a huge impact on the number of manufactured consoles that actually landed on retail chains.

In addition, I can confirm that MS is more than eager to let out all those faulty consoles, before selling the new Falcon hardware in every bundle. In Italy most of the 360 stocks now have the console internal packaging upside down so you cannot read the production date without opening the box. A smart move… pissing off customers during the holidays.

Roguelike The Magazine #1 out now

Mario Donick released his first issue of a new webzine, Roguelike The Magazine dealing with the vast mesmerizing world of roguelike games. For those unaware of the phenomenon, roguelike games are free, classic-inspired, turn-based RPGs with very simplistic graphics (usually just an ASCII screen or tile-based graphics), heavy procedural game-play (almost everything is randomly or procedurally generated) and very complex game design depth. They aren’t for everyone but in the past they inspired a lot of less deep but still quite entertaining RPGs, like Diablo and all the action RPGs heavily based on drops and character builds (Dungeon Siege, Titan Quest, Sacred, Divine Divinity, just to make some examples).

This first issue of the webzine deals with the aestetichs of roguelike games with a serie of very informative and clear articles. Anyone with a bit of game design or game development flair should read them, since they expose non trivial analysis of themes that can be easily generalized to the whole game development scene. The article about user interfaces is simply masterful for its simplicity and insight.