C.T.F.D.

I found myself getting dragged in accidentally to the world of video gaming. Not games, I've always been a fan of games, but the world of gaming. The year is only five months in and it's been a controversial one to say the least. Whether it be the massive losses from big companies or the drunken antics of Goonswarm Federation's Mittani or even the outcry regarding Mass Effect 3, one thing is for certain.

There are a lot of unhappy gamers out there. Now certainly there is the matter of "gamer entitlement" that needs to be addressed, but its not addressed by "You punk kids, when I was your age, this was all 8 bit trees!! When I started a +4 mace took 18 months to grind for." etc.

There is stuff that irritates the best of us even if it is only the vocal minority that pipes up in their utterly insane way. (Go read the metacritics comments for many examples.)

(An aside. I realised something which may or may not have been realised before. We have new swear words. Fuck shit piss tits cunt motherfucker do not have the power they used to, which was the power to use aggressively to shock, but used between friends as bonding language. Now the words that do that are words like  "Jew" "Nigger" "Fag" "Rape". So whereas me and my friend might say "I'm going to blow your fucking head off you cocksucker.!" Young folk are likely to say "I'm going to rape you with this fucking shotgun you jewfag!"  I think its resultant in making words phrases or ideas taboo. Swear words are the words that society deems to be offensive and unpleasant. Bear that in mind if you are the type to read comments sections.)

 Let's look at what's been pissing people off the most.

Unfinished Games.

This has always been a problem, but nowadays it is thoroughly, thoroughly shocking. The reasons are obvious, hype and release dates. The hype is understandable, it's marketing, however the release date problem is indeed a problem. By setting a release date, the company might benefit from a short term
financial injection from pre-orders, but in doing so they have to make sure the product is ready by then. More and more it is not.  Skyrim is a perfect example. We all know going into a Bethesda game that it'll be a beautifully realised landscape with vast empty areas and plot based missions midly more sophisticated than that of whack a mole. We expect bugs, frame rate issues from time to time. However we expect to be able to have a playable game. Now, I personally have had less issue with this than most, but only because I never played it after day one for a few months and patches were available.

This is not acceptable. This kind of thing breeds resentment and distrust amongst your consumer base who are already pissed off because of other greedy and underhanded business practices.

DRM.

Just... fucking... stop. This does not deter piracy it deters paying customers and encourages piracy.  Even if only one percent of your loyal customers decide that the inconvenience of  DRM on what they have legitimately purchased is more of a hassle than downloading it or getting a flash copy from a friend, then you have lost one percent of your sales and deterred them from purchasing your inconvenient products when they can have a convenient version for free. If anyone within the industry is reading this and can still think. Stop it.

Franchises.
It used to be, and still is in some respects, that when you put a 2 or a 3 after the title of your game that it was an entirely new game. The graphics would be much better, much more sophisticated and intricate gameplay, new mechanics and the like. Between issues of sequals we used to get expansions. Expansions worked on the game engine you'd purchased and continued THAT game. It was recognised within the industry that there was a difference in value between new games and expansions. Grand Theft Auto IV is the perfect example of a modern version of this. Both "The Lost and The Damned" and "The Ballad of Gay Tony" were expansions that could be bought as DLC. Both were rich with new missions and content for the GTA4 engine and both were roughly half the price of the original game. They are what DLC should be, expansions, a continuation of the story or gameplay elements.

The problem is that recently companies are selling expansions as full price content and limiting DLC to costume changes or smaller episodes that are not great value for money for most people. This has been mostly a complaint regarding first person shooters but I'm going to use another example, Assassin's Creed. At it's best it's amongst my favourite gaming experiences. The first game of the series felt short and tight, but repetitive. With Assassin's Creed 2 they expanded everything and it was more often than not a delight. It is fair to say that the continuation of the story and gameplay elements in "Brotherhood" and "Relevations"  add much more to the game, they expand it immensely, perhaps even to the point of having too much, but they are expansions of Assassin's Creed 2. The designers know this. Assassin's Creed 3 comes out this autumn. However both "Revelations" and "Brotherhood" were full priced games and as much as I enjoy the series, I'm not sure they were worth the money. What they bring to the table that is new are story and gameplay elements. Perhaps if they had released both with just a tad less effort in adding inconsequential mechanics to justify the "full game" price tag and instead took the route of DLC, say £20 quid each once a year. Then they could have a better way of perpetuating a franchise without causing resentment from the customer base.

Day one DLC.

Another sore point in the community it seems. Now I don't think anyone minds if little Barry buys a new costume for Commander Shepard for a fiver. (Well some might.) I think the biggest complaint is day one content. I can see why. Put in the fucking game. If I went into a car showroom, I expect that my car comes with extras I can purchase, sure, I don't expect to buy a complete car and then be told that I need to purchase a special unlockable code for the radio to actually work. The car definitely works without it, but the radios already there, to deny the customer access to it for extra profit is to evince oneself as both totally contemptuous of your customers and needlessly greedy. DLC is a great idea, in fact if done well it is potentially an endless revenue stream, but it's rarely done well and that's the problem.

I guess the other thing I should address is the other side of the coin, which gives the title to this post.

CALM THE FUCK DOWN.

Picture if you will you are in a bar and you hear two people discussing why one of them prefers Halo:Reach to Modern Warfare. You disagree with him because you prefer Modern Warfare and you have a salient point you'd like to make. You excuse yourself from your table and go over and say "LOL HALO? WTF? you fucking Microsoft Whore bitch. Someone should cut off your titties you homonigger fag xbox kiddie!!!"

The chances are that even if you didn't get your head kicked in you would come across as an utter tool. Internet tough guys whether on fora, comments sections or in games are those who would be the alphas of that culture. However all that means is that they are the King Nerds, the High Priest of Geekism, the Lamest of the Lamers. They just make themselves as the community look even more silly and puerile, confirming the perceptions of those outside it. "Games are for children."

Well I'm not a kid but I do see a community which is growing frustrated with elements of itself and the industry and over the last year this has become increasingly divisive. As a gamer I see nothing being served by the sort of reaction the community has to problems and nor do I see those problems being likely to be addressed by companies when the community is allowing people who say things like "F.U. E.A. Jews!! I raped your crippled holocaust baby." to be our loudest voices.
















 

Lets build. Part 3. (A tangent on combat)

I've been playing a lot of Mass Effect 3 recently and one thing that I like about it is the simple ui for the opposition's stats. Barriers are purple, shields are blue, armour is yellow and health is red. That your damage takes off a specific visible percentage of each of these I find so intuitive as to be almost perfect in dealing with enemies. I know a lot of other games use a similar thing, but for some reason I think Mass Effect's communicates the damage idea much more effectively and simply by having those percentages segmented. I'm thinking that sort of thing might be useful in an MMO setting. You know the players don't have more health than you but you can see he's got shields. You strip them with two shots, they were not the most effective. He's got no barriers or armour on underneath and he's running, throws a flash grenade and vanishes before you get to finish him off.

The console controllers we have today have enough buttons on them that it seems ostentatious and somewhat unnecessary to give options that necessitate clunky gameplay. Don't get me wrong, I love my WASD and Razer Naga, which does help deal with complex rotations and the like but it's just needless.

Range Weapon (Mouse 1 or left trigger) Melee weapon (Mouse two or right trigger) and two prime loadouts for shoulder buttons (or Q and E) say for weapon zoom and use and and four minor load outs for items like medpacks or reviv or team buffs or the like.

I don't see any need or reason for combat to be more complex than that if is FPS or TPS based. In fact I would suggest that the more complexity you have in combat, the less likely it will remain balanced.

Lets build part two...

So back in Zombie Apocalypse land...

So we have the gameworld. In it we Metropolitan areas which are infestation zones. We also have towns and villages, some are overrun with zombies others are filled with either other factions or various types of NPCs. You can do quests for these npcs. However rather than them telling you a story, you know in advance, daily that if you take 10 ruined transistor radios to the crazy radio ham trying to find a signal, you'll get a small amount of experience. you don't have to do these daily quests, though they will help skill up. You could find the radios either by going out in the no mans lands and grinding both experience and kills or you could try and find three or four others to go to a infested village and clear it out for the day for another daily quest or just for gear, or you could plan a full scale forage into the cities.

The cities are open world with various instance areas. Examples might be obvious. A Mall, a power station. You're not going to these places to fight zombies, you're going to get stuff to help you and your faction. However even within the instances there might be further instances. Imagine a situation wherein you are looking for computer equipment and know that there is plenty in a office skyscraper. You get there, while you are going through the normal instance one of the security guard zombies drops a rare keycard. This key is a one time only pass that unlocks the elevator to the upper floors, a higher level instance or a raid instance. The gear is better, but you know the game has dumped a  "queen" up there. Do you risk it or call for more people to attempt it, until you open the doors you don't know whether you'll be over-run in seconds or have discovered the nest of a recently developed queen and are about to get huge reputation and game rewards for ridding one from the area.

Five incredibly organised players could probably pull of what 20 disorganised guys might.
Really skilled players might be lucky enough to solo areas others take 5 men to. Gear progression is not the point, it is a benefit, but the point is that each day is a struggle to maintain faction lands by both PVE and PVP content. By keeping the factions on a knife edge whereupon the games mechanics mean that benefit to one is detriment to others should build up some nice PVP. Flashpoint areas where there are only a finite number of resources and contradictory motives might stop stacking and queuing. And as I said earlier, if a faction clears its region of the hive minds then another faction becomes over-run. This could have various increasing punitive ramifications for that factions progress until such time that one of the queens is found killed and the horde relents. These penalties would be reductions of Faction Resources which in turn would reduce the effectiveness of useables, perhaps lock out NPC traders and manufacturing facilities. I'll think more about this, because it's an interesting RTS element almost as a side effect. Hmmm.

Anyway the point is that instances are not level challenges, they are ability challenges. If you're not as good as others, bring more people, all your work benefits you and your faction. The more people you have the more Faction Resources you'll collect, the less the more personal benefits. If 3 or 12 of 40 people decide to do an instance why stop them? Use maths to work out how to scale the fight to the number in the instance rather than creating trash kills and phase ballets.

Rotations and the like aren't necessarily bad, but they are increasingly archaic designs restricted by old tech. There is nothing wrong with simple buff load-outs but when it begins to get too complex it becomes an artefact developed for specific use in specific ways. It becomes the counterpoint to the phase ballet, elegant, but hardly visceral and as such bettered even by rotational combos in fighting games which often managed to be both. It's a dull system, which turns the game into essentially a version of Simon.

Let's build an MMORPG. My thoughts on a genre.

First of all let me get the obvious out the way, we can all claim we want "meaningful" content in MMO's whether it be open world PVP or story based raiding, everyone wants it not to be a game of numbers or equipment drops, they want balance and challenge, difficulty but not too difficult. In short what we can reliably say is that MMO players want different things but they want them all to be better.

And why not?

In order to discuss the genre properly we have to discuss WoW, simply because it is so big. WoW seems to me now more like facebook than a game, a place where people do not go so much to play as to communicate with friends they've made playing WoW. Sure it's still vibrant, but it's increasingly stale outdated and clunky.

Obviously there have been recent pretenders. Rift and The Old Republic being the most notable but they've not lured the numbers. Why?

Well it seems to me that WoW caters to the fantasy crowd and EVE online the sci-fi crowd and between them they cover the majority of MMO players, who are not the type of people who are likely to wait til the right one comes along but will check out something.

At this point most people who like MMO's will have an MMO that basically caters for their needs.

Except perhaps a Zombie Apocalypse. So while there is no doubt someone working on one, let's use this as an example of how I think we should build one. 

How to move them en masse is the big question. To do so means pleasing all the people most of the time.
 
To do that we need as mentioned earlier, meaningful content.

Here is the first problem. Character Value.

Death in MMO's is a minor inconvenience, because life is cheap. In older games we had punishing death penalties often to the detriment to the majority of players who got bored repeating the same content over and over to level. Also some dick with a +5 sword and a lack of respect could kill you to ruin. No one wants that back. However at the same time death being meaningless is one of the major problems with the genre.

How do we get by something like this how can we make death something important without making it problematic to play.

Perhaps each PVE death gives an experience debuff of 10% for half an hour cumulative to 50% for an hour.

Perhaps PVP  outside duel give dishonour or infamy as well as honour and fame. If we made factions reputation based, it might deter lowbie ganking, especially if the game offers various bounties for those hitting specific notoriety levels. Which could offer honour as well as gear or cash.

Offenders could be penalised in game if caught. They could be imprisoned for certain periods of time dependent on their crimes. (Clearly this is not meant to do the jobs of moderators and DM's, just help keep some kind of order.

If the community fails to police itself properly, why can't the game help do it for them?


I think the above leads meaning and value to the game experience and is only detrimental to those making the experience detrimental to others.

So let's consider the world and the players in it. Clearly it being a Zombie Apocalypse means the main antagonist is the Zombie, however real conflict comes from other players. I see that we have four different communities. Two are town based militias who for convenience we'll call red and blue two are nomadic, white and black.

Red is run by a weak ineffective Government, is predominantly agrarian and ecologically sound, but produces food and medicine at a greater rate than the other three which is a player bonus from the word go.

Blue is run by a Dictator, they are technologically advanced and benefit from pre-Apocalypse tech. They get a bonus to engineering and computing.

The nomads are the Scavengers who live hand to mouth looking for somewhere to settle down, they have learned how to survive outside the walls giving them the ability to protect themselves. This gives them a boost to first aid and hunting.

The others are the Renegades. The obligatory gangs of madmen roaming about causing chaos wherever they turn up. This gives them a bonus on armour and adaptation.

So from here let's go to the build screen.

You start by picking male or female (or dog? Why not?) with a description of each of the four factions as above obviously changing to the generic "type" depending on faction. At this point it warns you that reputation rewards may result in automatic faction changes.

One you pick the faction you pick your trade. Now a lot of games like to go the complex route of hybrids and various skill trees and the like, but a lot of it is disguising the fact that they are duplicating the same three classes. Tank, DPS, Healer/Controller. Usually as meleé and ranged.

The theory goes that someone soaks up the damage and attracts the mob while the healer/controller keeps them alive and the DPS kill the boss.

Screw that. People play games for conflict and excitement, not to dance to an obviously choreographed pattern and hope they get all the steps right. There is no reason you cannot make it's combat system a first or third person shooter. Sure you can have secondary talents that may come in useful in battle, but the main focus on this should be make your way through and survive. You can't do that with a complex set of rotations. Simplicity is the key.

Since this is a zombie apocalypse scenario, I'm going to go right ahead and plunder some game sources. First off, Left 4 Dead. A cooperative and competitive shooter, it's short scenarios were perfect dungeon length and the difficulty rating along with the wonderful in game director made a great game in and of itself. However what if our four players all took shotguns and healing? Well they'd make it through, slowly and hoping they coordinated shooting and loading, they'd have plenty of healing bonuses but what if they come to a locked metal door? Perhaps taking someone who could hack the keypad might have been useful but now they all have to track slowly back through the remaining hordes to find another exit.

So what class are you? Well I've limited it to soldier, grafter, spook and boffin

All four are mostly equal when it comes to fighting. They all have the same survivability throughout. Only armour and weaponry can get increased and there is no penalty other than inherent to changing, for example heavy armour means you move slower, but take less damage. However even at the top end this would not be dramatic enough to inspire tanking, since health will always remain the same or deteriorate. With weapons a shotgun does more damage to AOE than a rifle and they take about the same length of time to reload, but the recoil from a shotgun is heavier than a rifle and it doesn't have a scope.

 The more you use a weapon the better you get with it reducing it's negative modifiers such as recoil, reloading etc and you can train in all weapons if you so desire. The same with armours.

Soldiers get a bonus to reloading and aiming, but they also get grenades and a choice of duel side arms melee.
 
Grafter's can spot rotten walls or hidden entrances, used for shortcuts, to hide treasures, medicines or whole new areas. They are the type who can get a generator working to turn on the lights of a building, they can get cars started and get a melee damage bonus because they are strong.
 
Spooks can temporarily cloak, check out dangers ahead, lay mines and explosives, hack computer systems and keypads. Turn off alarms. They get a bonus to evasion.

Boffins. He's MacGuyver essentially. Locked in a room with a horde outside and no bullets or health? Give him some crap and five minutes and he might just be able to knock up something on the fly. That tourniquet wont stop you bleeding to death, but it might slow it long enough for him to mix that petrol bomb to torch all the zombies outside the door. This concept will become more apparent

in a moment.

The second thing in MMO's which is fundamentally necessary to build a community is crafting and trade.

Here is where THIS could become meaningful.

What if the factions HAD to trade with each other from time to time to survive. Earlier on I spoke about the factions getting an bonus on specific crafting skills. What if that was because at a higher level they were the only ones who could make certain things and relied on others to do the same.

So perhaps we could have Faction specific trades and general trades. Perhaps materials that were only found in the territory of the Reds along with plans only found from the Blacks could make a specific weapon model that was useful to everyone but they refuse to sell it to the Whites, that could have ramifications.

With crafting comes grinding. However that need not be as problematic if we approach it in a different way.  Most trades in Warcraft and other MMO's involve picking up spawned ingredients. That's fine.  However what if rather than just wander around for ingredients, it was an undertaking. You need some resistors and fuses? Well time to get a few friends who need ingredients get in a car and get down to the local zombie infested urban centre. Who knows you might even find others their trying to rob you of your precious stuff. Who knows what junk you'll find? It's all useful to someone. Whether it be boffins on the spot buffs or bombs or taking the same stuff back to make into stimulants or silencers.

So trades.

Engineering.  Enhancements for weaponry armour, abiltity at higher levels to create map tools, gps devices etc.

Medicine. Stimulants, pain killers, coagulants, innoculations. At later levels can make CPR device to revive fallen teammates or Anti zombie deterrents that turn the creatures as is common in many games.

Hunting. The ability to find ingredients of all varieties especially foods including rare and unique items with greater ease and in greater numbers. Also the ability to find hidden terrains and locations.

Food. Being mostly cooking of meats and vegetables for health and buffing purposes. However also to maintain faction resources which benefits entire faction moral if in surplus.

Computing. The programming of engineered devices with specific programmes. Your engineer might have adapted mobile phones but its the computer guy who makes it useable to you.  Given time and effort can write programmes to set up defensive perimeters or viruses to shut down rivals mainframes.

First aid. manufacture of Field dressings, bandages, splints and the like. Unlike medicine, which is used prior to or after battle, First aid is designed to be used by players during battle.

Adaptation. A skill of skills. Adaptation is the process of making what you have different. Are the +20 potions much more expensive than the +10 healing well with adaptation you could make it +12 or +15 perhaps that sniper site that the engineer gave an a IR setting to would be better with a zoom?
  
Armour: Create various pieces of armour with various effects. At higher levels this could include experimental armours, electrified and the like.

(It's not that in-depth because who would read pages of that unless they were paid or interested (in which they can ask me to expand on the concept. It's just there to give the gist.)

So you build your character and log in. After the obligatory tutorial quests you're left there. What are you doing? What's your motivation? Well to win right?

So how do you win? By surviving, getting to the top of your crafting, getting the best of gear together and then attempting to tame the feral regions of the game. The next games I'm going to rip off are Resident Evil and Dead Rising and adapt them slightly.  Clearly a game with only hordes of level one zombies being torn to shreds by four silent brutal level 60 gun machines is going to be a bit dull. So the zombies need to do something more. In this respect I wanted each one to be like a single infection node, but that hidden in the cities, in sewers and penthouses of skyscrapers, (imagine having to clear level after level of increasingly mutated undead trying to tear you apart before you can get to the goal?) were what is essentially the queen, or consciousness of the hive mind of the zombies. The drones can mutate, so they provide tougher and occassionally grotesque challenges while bringing hordes of normals in after them.

Anyway, rid a city near to you of one of the hive mind things, it moves to the zone of another faction, increasing the ferocity and numbers of the Z until they choose to get rid of it. If somehow you rid your entire faction area of all of them, then everyone gets massive bonuses and access to restricted  areas or the like. If you think of each of those as Raids (though again without the complex set move ballet, just blind ugly violence) but with the possiblility that suddenly you'll be fighting another faction because if you kill it they'll be overrun. If you then add some of them in disputed zones, you suddenly have a lot of meaningful real world PVP.

So levelling up is essentially training for you to go on more complex and dangerous missions in order to get your crafting up and make better gear so you can play either PVP or PVE or both at the same time. No separate gear for either, no elaborate stat weights and cooldowns. Gun, sword or knife or whatever, armour, health bar. A top level player should have an advantage over a newb, but not to the extent that if they swapped character the newb would automatically win due to gear and stats.

Bullets don't injure less because you've killed more people, slashes don't stop bleeding quicker because you've got armour on. you might get hit less, but a headshot is a headshot.

Back to the levelling up and gearing. There are no super-special epic world drops to speak of, but mostly everything picked up will be situational and useful to someone. For example, you're not going to pick up lots of raw iron in a shopping mall, but you would in a mine.  However you might find enough things with iron on them to scavenge iron as well as getting more bullets and first aid supplies.

As such the game is defined by players going deeper and deeper into infested cities and coming back with better things for everyone to benefit from. Whether it be a straight up barter system (which I like) or a symbolic currency based system, the auction house in this game is also fundamental. Sure you can still go on a mission with your gun skills maxed on crap weapons and make it out alive, but you might have not had lost another member if you had made or bought better weaponry.


Anyway enough for now, I'll continue on this later in more detail.

Nostalgia, horror, projects and a general update.

Happy new year folks.

I've been busy, though it may not look like it from the page a week I've been flinging up for the last while. Two reasons for that. First is that my attempts to fool around with the page layout to make it a bit more dynamic have been difficult, I'm not sure how successful they'll be in the long run but I thought them necessary to the current tale and thus I've found myself having to redo pages rather than just calm down and get on with the tale. It's as all my stuff is, a work in process, if I'm not satisfied with it by the end of this first part, which is not that far away, I'll return to a more standard panel format. Which is kind of in the offing for the next part anyway.

The second reason is twofold but is in short real life. First part of which is another project which has been taking up much of my time but I'm not going to discuss other than to say, I'm working, just unfortunately not on Audley. She is quite miffed as one can tell from her refusal to blog. Also, just a lot of things I've neglected doing for the last few years all became urgent at once including my windows nearly coming in during the recent storms. Repairs, spring cleanings, repairs, getting rid of a ton of crap all took up more time than I would have imagined.

So here is my pro-tip for all you couples out there, new and old. Empty your homes! Seriously, if you haven't used it in 6 months you're not likely to need it. Obviously this does not apply to things like tools candles or each others genitalia. We've been here now 16 years and it is amazing, shocking and appalling just how much utter shit we managed to cram into this flat. It's clutter nothing more, nothing less. Sure you might be holding onto your LP's for sentimental reasons, but the operative part is mental.

Grow up, get rid of your kiddie shit, it's taking up needless space and anchors you to a fictional subjective view of your past. It doesn't help is all I'm saying. Try it, empty your homes. Keep what is necessary and you'll be amazed at how much better it feels, how much easier and more rewarding it is to clean and above all you are not living in the midst of each others psychic debris.

Now onto kiddie shit.

One night when I was about fourteen or fifteen, I can't recall exactly what age all I know was that I had been on an away day trip to Rothesay with the kids from my grandparents community centre, upon the old steamship The Waverley. I recall several events about that day and hope that I am not confusing separate events into one conglomerate memory Nevertheless, I had a brilliant day, it was the first time I ever actually tasted Whisky, a combination of dusty books and rubbing alcohol that even now with certain single malts invokes the auxiliary nurse's room in my primary school. I even ended up befriending an enemy of several years, an older kid who had beat me up when I was about ten and who years later I'd end up training and sparring with when I did kick boxing. Turned out we had a lot in common. I think I heard he died of a heart attack, or maybe he was stabbed? If it's the same fellow I'm thinking of, and I hope it's not, he never made it to his thirties. If that sounds blasé then you're lucky enough that such things are not common where you are. I've lost count of the people I was at school with or knew as or through friends that died before they hit thirty. Stabbed, shot, drug o.d. suicide, heart attacks, cancers, leukaemia. I really couldn't count them all.

Anyway, that day was great and we got home late and I had to get a bus back from my grandparents. Whereas it had been a gorgeous day, the night had turned cold and misty. I sat alone at the bus stop waiting for the first night-bus, which I didn't know was about an hour away. Two young women came up to the bus stop and asked me where I was going and when I told them they demanded that I get in a taxi with them because it was all kicking off outside the pub. It was, so I complied. I was so happy because they had allowed me to get home in time to catch BBC2's Horror Double Bill. Which is essentially the point of this, not that preamble.

The BBC2 horror double bills during the seventies and eighties were part of my childhood in the way school or Star Wars was. I'd stay in and watch them myself or friends and I would crash at each others homes and watch them together. We'd talk about them at school and often "play" out parts of the movies, often with our own stupid hilarious dialogue.

Dunno where I was going with that.

Oh well it's your problem now.

Dark Souls and Skyrim.

I never played Demon Souls. I wish I had. It's follow up though, Dark Souls, I have played, lots. Lots and Lots. Not MMO lots, but for a console game, I racked up 90 hours in my first run through and managed to miss several areas of the game. Still I had much fun despite as the game promised, dying often. Too often. This was nearly always my fault, the game wasn't cheap in that regard, working as it is, like a difficult clockwork puzzler. Over-confidence, a lack of attention for a second, the urge to rush through, these were what what caused my demise. Only once did I find it frustrating, yet again to find, it was my own fault, I wasn't thinking.

The game has little in the way of mercy, but because of that every success felt like an actual triumph. Covering ground, learning the fight rhythms, pushing on to the next boss or sub-boss, was always hard won (well at least until I got the Crystal soulmass and Logan's catalyst which somewhat made the last third of the game far too easy) but it is nothing if not fair in its difficulty, meaning shortcuts open up between areas previously sealed off from one another.

Still everyone talks about all that stuff don't they? What isn't mentioned as much are how glorious the monsters and bosses are. From the various hollow undead who stumble and stagger towards you in attack, through to the massive burning demon with the flaming axe trying to flatten you, every critter is  well designed, unforgiving and a joy to destroy. Combine that with a host of genuinely disturbing and odd npcs intent on bewildering you, a landscape that unlocks like a Chinese box, many varied areas, sub areas hidden areas, weapons and armour customisation that is actually effective towards progressing and the most genuinely original use of multi-player I've seen in an RPG, I cannot rate this highly enough, unless of course, you enjoy breezing through games with little frustration.

Skyrim. Well Skyrim is daunting me. I don't know how many hours I've put in yet but it feels like I've just scratched the surface. I went an orc and decided rather than follow the mission trail, to instead live off the fat of the land as it were and avoid towns and people when I could. Now I know this means missing out on unlocking shouts blah blah, but the issue is, I've just not had enough time to sink into the game as of yet. Still it's pretty much what I expected having played Oblivion. It's going to be a while before I can really do it justice, which is fine, its not going anywhere.
  

More stuff on games.

Alright, so a while ago I was complaining about the lack of depth in games. Seems that some designers think this is because story is tertiary to mechanics and graphics, which is a fair point, to an extent. However if gaming is going to develop further I think we need to distinguish between games like Plant Vs Zombies and titles which are story driven such as Half Life. The latter I would suggest is certainly more difficult and it is tough to walk the line between telling the story as essentially an interactive movie and making it enjoyable as a games experience.

Since I last wrote I've played through Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Assassin's Creed 2. Both are great in the sense that there is many plots to uncover and unfold but both are tragically linear. I'm not sure that it was entirely necessary for them to be so and in places where I do think they get it right is something that a lot of games lack.

Discovery and reward.

This is something that interests me deeply as a value to a game. Sure there are the collect 100... achievements. However what if as in DE:HR and AC2, these discoveries while not essential to the game, actually affected how the game progressed.

There is in World of Warcraft a programmed easter egg called "The Creepy Children of Goldshire". It's nothing more than a bit of fun, but what if it were not. What if the attentive gamer by noticing such and odd thing were dragged into a completely hidden series of quests and events which not only benefited the player with rewards but gave them the opportunity to see the entire game in a different light. Imagine if you were playing Grand Theft Auto 4 and you happened to see an odd character, significantly different from all the other characters, imagine you follow him into a building, where you end up eavesdropping on a clandestine NSA operation which is investigating your mob boss for engaging with terrorists. That you find out his second in command is a plant.


Imagine that by doing this it unlocks a set of missions again unadvertised that you could follow around the 2nd in command gaining evidence of this, leading to the option of killing him and taking his place. Or killing him and becoming wanted by both the cops and the mob, depending on what evidence you have?

 Imagine this like in DE or other games that your reponses have ramifications. None of this is part of the main game, but it does affect the game for those who are lucky or patient enough to follow it through.

I don't think the idea is that far out.

More soon...