Can we embrace the change anymore?
What happened to innovation in interactivity? Did it disappear? No, someone said nothing is destroyed. It just abandoned the weirder, damper, larger grounds of total game structure and headed to accessibility and encompass-all technical elements, more reassuring grounds. What's lost is that weird pioneering. It was uncomfortable, it got us games such as Alone in the Dark, Little big Adventure and Dune, games that are essentially awkward though fun and great. I bet that's how Infocom and Sierra and Origin and so on have felt all the time. To rethink basics. Years trod on, we built our plastic floor, nomore rincing the bog.
Enough with offline games. This is about online worlds. Hey it seems innovation stopped right with the overwhelming invention of virtual worlds(1998 .ca), which was an incredible break-through, way, waaay ahead of its time because 10 years later we aren't ready, we're not even willing to begin questioning the basic meaning of virtuality. We are back in a frontier, but built a small haven of plastic floor around a vast, damp and weird cosmos. It seems we were scared by its(omg there is no God then) possibilities. This is arbitrary historical rehash junk. Don't mind it too much, i don't want to tell you how history went, just pick the "ha-ha!" shock of recognition flavor of it.
Enough with wondering why innovation got hid by market experts. I wanna tell you where it is, but it must be someplace you will recognize just by sheer evidence. We gotta establish common grounds. I have no idea why i should write articles for people to read them, if not to establish a network of common ideas. Why else does one write? To persuade you that i'm awesome? A fricking smart-ass of a girl thinks so(but she don't love me, i got limits too), so i don't wanna know if you believe it too.
Innovate is latin, i studied latin, i AM latin myself.
Innovo, -as, -avi, -atum, -are: to renew, make something new afresh.
Innovation in MMO is such an exciting concept because an online game should be nothing but one of the static worlds created by writers in the past years and decades and millennia that simply becomes alive. MMO's shouldn't have internal genre standards but simply take everything from that written world and make it virtual, and to make it virtual you can pick traces of virtuality in the written stories as well, you don't need to make stuff up even there. A Warhammer, a Star Trek MMO is not a typical "game", with normal genre elements and with star trek and warhammer gimmicks, it's THAT world as it was imagined by its creator, with no influence from "us" other than persistancy.
The above idea is already innovative(innovative but more realistically most persons forgot that MMO's were meant to do this). To it add that since a good MMO is an artistically/creative world + the gift of life,or persistancy, it's only natural to assume that the MMO genre has no element in itself, except that, virtual life, living virtuality. Mkay?
MMO is almost not a genre; would you call "giving life" something directly related to "gameplay"? No, it's just "a start", a sparke that creators bestow on their peoples. Is the famous Origins' motto "We create worlds" meaning still something hermetic and obscure? Oh yes they were the ones who invented MMO's.
Let's start with the examples of turning books into life.
Star Wars is mainly conspiracies to get total political power. A MMO about star wars should be mostly about that. A player(or group of) that spends days and nights concocting a way to obtain power, spends months at the galactic senate, try to bribe generals, gain favors in planets, gather separatists, build super offensive weapons to "control sectors without the use of bureaucracy", because "fear will keep em in order". Its "100% LIVE WORLD" should revolve around a politician who, as Obi Wan said "follows his passions" [...] "aims to please so that others may fund his campaign", and the players around and below these politicians should be young jedi who have to weave their careers and lives and they risk their sanity and damnation. And then face the consequences for having supported a player they thought was good.
See i didn't "invent" anything, it's just what the movies told us. I repeat, i don't want to tell you about my personal point of view on MMO's, this is meant to be common grounds.
The point is that you gotta design a MMO gameplay AROUND the original material.That's the way with MMO's, that's the innovative concept; too bad what really happens is the opposite thing, the original material is glue-patted around the average "MMO-genre" gameplay tropes that i believe don't exist, nobody forces people to apply so-called "MMO elements" upon an MMO. The only acceptable MMO trope is life. Life to Star Trek, life to Warhammer, life, to Herbert's Dune, life to Hamlet, life(back) to a historical period like 1500 Engand, life to the Necromancer, life to Do Androids dream of electric Sheep and oh that'd be good, life to I, Robot. Even in the case of a historical period, al you have to do is collect informations, and just tick it with a magical life-giving wand(don't mean to underestimate this point which of course is the most critical moment).
A MMO about, say, I, Robot shouldn't recycle stuff from other games, it would ruin it instantly. IT should be just players that do what was in the books, but simulated in a live world and where players write their own new tales and adventures and plots that all remotely remaind at their original intention: that's because you can't betray the creator's goals and convictions and that's where a MMO stops being a "total freeform life simulation" and reminds us it is a fictional world and a game after all. It is simple as that, developers should be the gods that give players the "tools" to live NEW stories. It's the future, the natural way for ALL licenses to move on, old written novels(the world they describe) should become alive in everyway, and what were the readers should be the new writers. Only when it's a good old offline game the programmers may discard persistancy, not give players tools to create new stories and just retell the original story in their personal way.
Let's take the most evidently troubled franchise of all, Star Trek: this one has been decadent for the last, uh-wha, 10 years? Why are we unhappy about it? Isn't it even too obviously because WE don't like what those writers wrote, how they interpret that cosmos, how they interpret a world that became rightfully OURS because we bought it piece by pice? Us being unhappy and them being decading shows even too clearly that WE are ready to claim the right to write new stories for 'em. It's the clear way of the future, not innovation, but an epoch-long-waited "social" revolution.
Change is to think differently. Can we do that? Can we settle an appointment for it to take place?
13 March 2012
17 September 2011
Syndicate, Interaction and Time.
A reply on Starbreeze's game director Neil McEwan's defence of their upcoming new Syndicate(themed) game
Hi.
This software company announced a new Syndicate game, they stated it's gonna be a first person shooter. Many videogamers of diverse background, possibly many elitists, attacked this choice because they're not stupid, they smell the bane of humanity(Our Lord Money!) behind this decision, they sense the rodent-like aroma of a market expert, you know, those who hate both videogames and gamers because they assume the majority of people wanna play dumb products(expressed magnificently in the phrase "like the salivating dogs that you are"), and they hate videogames because they don't care about them becoming as deep as "The Importance of Being Earnest". I like to believe, instead, that the videogamers got angry because they are ready for more interesting games, not to mention most PC gamers adore real-time strategy.
Sorry for the long premise. Mr. McEwan defended their decision stating that because of today's technology most of the games are bound to have a first person perspective, they will naturally be visceral, immersive. Syndicate will be like this, then, it's only logical, and the game would have been a fast-paced FPS back then.
he's just talking about graphics, apparently, about aesthetics, they improved because time has moved on. It totally makes sense, in a way.
The problem is, that person is willingly(or not) hiding many other statements that implicitly follow from the simple and candid argument of technology. He's ignoring gameplay and interaction. Modern graphics will change a lot of things in the gameplay, but he's assuming it's just a question of different interface and camera applied to an untouchable game style. There's consequences to the choice of making an FPS that each fall to the ill-treated unfortunate and virtuous child that is Miss interaction:
First to the ever-enjoyable time-travel argumentation that "always works" because time paradoxes are ideal to confuse us dumb players: if the original Syndicate had cool and immersive 3d graphics then, its gameplay would have been generally more streamlined. The game featured a good system of "surgical" augmentations to the agents roster which would have disappeared(and will be) in a FPS. Then we'll say goodbye to the simulative urban navigation we had in the original game in favor of more constant and dramatic shoot-outs filled with useless dialogues. Next we'll never have that dynamic global-map gameplay that turns Syndicate into a total war'esque kind of game. As a matter of fact, Creative Assembly would do a wonderful job with a new Syndicate.
But the biggest consequence is that this game does not feature a 4-characters tactical management and this we already know for sure, they told us. It is possible to do it, technically, but this new Syndicate will not; there will be instead visceral single-character co-op play, because time has moved on.
Sure, He says they'll try to "pay as much homage as they can", which simply means everything will go. That's fine, it's their marketing choice. It will be my choice not to buy the game and boycott it. But what does that have to do with time moving on, pray tell us, you simply referred to graphics by that, you said it yourself. Let's recapitulate:
-old games were great
-time has moved on
-graphics let you immerse into the action
-action has to be visceral
-the new Syndicate will be visceral
-the new Syndicate will pay homage to the old games "as much as we can"
A line is missing there, please complete the syllogism.
How can you, Mr. McEwan, mention time moving on, when co-op gameplay comes directly from 25 year-old arcade gaming? We move on by replaying Gauntlet?
Hi.
This software company announced a new Syndicate game, they stated it's gonna be a first person shooter. Many videogamers of diverse background, possibly many elitists, attacked this choice because they're not stupid, they smell the bane of humanity(Our Lord Money!) behind this decision, they sense the rodent-like aroma of a market expert, you know, those who hate both videogames and gamers because they assume the majority of people wanna play dumb products(expressed magnificently in the phrase "like the salivating dogs that you are"), and they hate videogames because they don't care about them becoming as deep as "The Importance of Being Earnest". I like to believe, instead, that the videogamers got angry because they are ready for more interesting games, not to mention most PC gamers adore real-time strategy.
Sorry for the long premise. Mr. McEwan defended their decision stating that because of today's technology most of the games are bound to have a first person perspective, they will naturally be visceral, immersive. Syndicate will be like this, then, it's only logical, and the game would have been a fast-paced FPS back then.
he's just talking about graphics, apparently, about aesthetics, they improved because time has moved on. It totally makes sense, in a way.
The problem is, that person is willingly(or not) hiding many other statements that implicitly follow from the simple and candid argument of technology. He's ignoring gameplay and interaction. Modern graphics will change a lot of things in the gameplay, but he's assuming it's just a question of different interface and camera applied to an untouchable game style. There's consequences to the choice of making an FPS that each fall to the ill-treated unfortunate and virtuous child that is Miss interaction:
First to the ever-enjoyable time-travel argumentation that "always works" because time paradoxes are ideal to confuse us dumb players: if the original Syndicate had cool and immersive 3d graphics then, its gameplay would have been generally more streamlined. The game featured a good system of "surgical" augmentations to the agents roster which would have disappeared(and will be) in a FPS. Then we'll say goodbye to the simulative urban navigation we had in the original game in favor of more constant and dramatic shoot-outs filled with useless dialogues. Next we'll never have that dynamic global-map gameplay that turns Syndicate into a total war'esque kind of game. As a matter of fact, Creative Assembly would do a wonderful job with a new Syndicate.
But the biggest consequence is that this game does not feature a 4-characters tactical management and this we already know for sure, they told us. It is possible to do it, technically, but this new Syndicate will not; there will be instead visceral single-character co-op play, because time has moved on.
Sure, He says they'll try to "pay as much homage as they can", which simply means everything will go. That's fine, it's their marketing choice. It will be my choice not to buy the game and boycott it. But what does that have to do with time moving on, pray tell us, you simply referred to graphics by that, you said it yourself. Let's recapitulate:
-old games were great
-time has moved on
-graphics let you immerse into the action
-action has to be visceral
-the new Syndicate will be visceral
-the new Syndicate will pay homage to the old games "as much as we can"
A line is missing there, please complete the syllogism.
How can you, Mr. McEwan, mention time moving on, when co-op gameplay comes directly from 25 year-old arcade gaming? We move on by replaying Gauntlet?
Read more!
20 April 2011
Gameplay-story. The new Alliance. Yet another blog about it.
Nobody actually wants to solve this division. There IS a conflict, deal with it, you can't do anything. We aren't strong enough to bring peace. You either play a game or you follow a story. Pitfall and The Godfather don't mix.
Yet a few persons seem to graze the solution, but they precipitate back to their personal anecdotes and many, many clichés. It won't do.
To be stuck in a dicotomy is probably the most frequent mistake of human thought. There's dicotomy everywhere because our brains aren't developed enough to reunite things that apparently are contradictorial.
So there's story, uh writing, a plot, an intrigue, dialogues, feelings, bad boys, love and betrayal. And then there's you playing a silly game, beating things up, shooting, running, shooting again, stuffing bars with skill points... things that count, things that aren't nerd-oriented, thank god! That is a game, that is interaction. But there's no room for story, there. Because it's two different things. There's conflict because we load those things with cultural rigid ideas, these ideas build a WALL that separates them. And both things rot, they're isolated and are diminished because they can't evolve.
Symbiosis is not only possible, though, it's natural. A story told WITH actions still requires writing, a new kind of writing that takes interaction into account. Videogames are interaction so story has to be interactive!
Role-playing, for instance, is not you abandoning the actual game to feel all emotional and immersed in the lore, just to abandon it again when you're slaying things, get down to the serious business, that's misconception. Roleplaying is already a symbiosis of the two elements, it was there all along. You must interact, or play, with story, which is you having a role(or an active function: a villain, an adjuvator, a hero etc.) in some events.
That is role-playing, nothing else. It's simple as that. See RP is the proof that cultural anecdotes we tend to knit upon terms lead astray from obvious natural meanings that are in front of us.
In an RPG you shouldn't develop your character because of tactics and power, because then you're interacting with meta-elements. Your developing the character has to be influenced and have direct impact on the story(which is a two-way interaction).
-you don't follow the story= you cannot play, story kills you, stabs you right in the end(see Laura Bow... zounds, did that game traumatize yet excited me).
But on the other hand, story progresses only thanks to your material game choices and choices aren't necessarily dialogue and text and the classic concept of writing, they can easily be pure action.
When your character enters a tavern, you will talk to someone instead of someone else(even in sequence, not necessarily a rigid "choice"), thus affecting the story; when you buy a long sword you will be categorized as a soldier or warrior, thus affecting story, when you assign certain points to your skills you choose a class and a sub-class, thus affecting the story.
Everything makes story, choices happen all the time and they're everywhere and they trigger new drama and scripts. And they're fluid, not just useless ranting, boring text written by wanna-be hollywood scribblers. Videogames are not books, interaction is an "ACTION". It is, i repeat, a new type of writing that takes into account the actual game mechanics, they're not independent events, story is the expression of a gameplay.
Mind you folks, i'm not talking about a fantasy simulation... i'm not talking about Oblivion's(lousy and childish, the Bethesda way) virtual aspects, generic life as opposed to the actual story-line... that stuff doesn't need writing, i'm not talking about a player who writes his own story. The game writer needs to write a solid piece of drama, but the player needs to actually play it, not just spectate it.
Bulletstorm's gameplay consists on the player having to shoot and kill with style so you get a score. Story should revolve around this concept so that you may interact with it and feel like you're making the story. When you choose to use a rocketlauncher instead of a machinegun the story has to change accordingly.
This way good writing and good gameplay will be saying the same thing. That's the new alliance that is our common omen. The old concept of story cannot work in videogames, because videogames are in-ter-act-ion. Story has to kneel in front of interaction and shift its shape, humbly... to become something entirely new. We have to forget all we learnt about it, as Yoda pointed out.
Naturally a person who doesn't appreciate or understand gameplay will never be able to write a good story in a videogame. Bioware's Dragon Age 2 writer, a person who hates actual videogames, is clearly a plague to all the medium and IT needs to be purged and boycotted. No wonder Dragon Age 2 is mostly a failure of a game.
I feel it's time to provide clear examples otherwise it's all abstraction:
-at an inn, a person hires you for a job. Go to a cave, kill bandits. So yo do it, kill and kill, reach the boss, the boss talks to you and reveals the quest giver is a bandit renegade, he wants to be the new boss, using you. So you may choose to kill both bosses, one or the other, or tell the peasants so they will get their stolen money back. Choose any, you get different rewards such as different companions, different equipment, different skills, a different alignment, and if it's not too much trouble, you get a few different dialogue lines, sometimes. They're mostly gameish consequences.
2nd version.
-at an inn, a person hires you for a job. Go to a cave, kill bandits. So you do it, but the hints about the trickery can be gathered by investigating the premises, by using your skills of stealth, of disguises, of charisma to infiltrate and persuade the bandits to reveal their secrets and gather info. Now it's time to decide what to do, as above, you can choose how to end the quest. But writing intervenes again in connection with your choices, to provide SERIOUS consequences. Sparing the bandits means that when you face the final evil entity, the bandits will show you a slick way into the castle in the deep of the enchanted forest, or the bandits will support you when you want to run for feudal lord of the zone.
You guys can see WHERE exactly writing allies with gameplay, and on the contrary you can see how external, forceful and sham it feels in the first version; there's a rigid separation between killing phases and dramatic events, even alignment, which is by definition a consequence dense of spirituality, of karma, doesn't have any result except a "scoring needle" that moves up or down(i'm clearly referring to how Mass Effect handles alignment) whereas in the 2nd case dramatic events are triggered by your own actions and your own final choices result in outcomes that WILL change your character's life.
Yet a few persons seem to graze the solution, but they precipitate back to their personal anecdotes and many, many clichés. It won't do.
To be stuck in a dicotomy is probably the most frequent mistake of human thought. There's dicotomy everywhere because our brains aren't developed enough to reunite things that apparently are contradictorial.
So there's story, uh writing, a plot, an intrigue, dialogues, feelings, bad boys, love and betrayal. And then there's you playing a silly game, beating things up, shooting, running, shooting again, stuffing bars with skill points... things that count, things that aren't nerd-oriented, thank god! That is a game, that is interaction. But there's no room for story, there. Because it's two different things. There's conflict because we load those things with cultural rigid ideas, these ideas build a WALL that separates them. And both things rot, they're isolated and are diminished because they can't evolve.
Symbiosis is not only possible, though, it's natural. A story told WITH actions still requires writing, a new kind of writing that takes interaction into account. Videogames are interaction so story has to be interactive!
Role-playing, for instance, is not you abandoning the actual game to feel all emotional and immersed in the lore, just to abandon it again when you're slaying things, get down to the serious business, that's misconception. Roleplaying is already a symbiosis of the two elements, it was there all along. You must interact, or play, with story, which is you having a role(or an active function: a villain, an adjuvator, a hero etc.) in some events.
That is role-playing, nothing else. It's simple as that. See RP is the proof that cultural anecdotes we tend to knit upon terms lead astray from obvious natural meanings that are in front of us.
In an RPG you shouldn't develop your character because of tactics and power, because then you're interacting with meta-elements. Your developing the character has to be influenced and have direct impact on the story(which is a two-way interaction).
-you don't follow the story= you cannot play, story kills you, stabs you right in the end(see Laura Bow... zounds, did that game traumatize yet excited me).
But on the other hand, story progresses only thanks to your material game choices and choices aren't necessarily dialogue and text and the classic concept of writing, they can easily be pure action.
When your character enters a tavern, you will talk to someone instead of someone else(even in sequence, not necessarily a rigid "choice"), thus affecting the story; when you buy a long sword you will be categorized as a soldier or warrior, thus affecting story, when you assign certain points to your skills you choose a class and a sub-class, thus affecting the story.
Everything makes story, choices happen all the time and they're everywhere and they trigger new drama and scripts. And they're fluid, not just useless ranting, boring text written by wanna-be hollywood scribblers. Videogames are not books, interaction is an "ACTION". It is, i repeat, a new type of writing that takes into account the actual game mechanics, they're not independent events, story is the expression of a gameplay.
Mind you folks, i'm not talking about a fantasy simulation... i'm not talking about Oblivion's(lousy and childish, the Bethesda way) virtual aspects, generic life as opposed to the actual story-line... that stuff doesn't need writing, i'm not talking about a player who writes his own story. The game writer needs to write a solid piece of drama, but the player needs to actually play it, not just spectate it.
Bulletstorm's gameplay consists on the player having to shoot and kill with style so you get a score. Story should revolve around this concept so that you may interact with it and feel like you're making the story. When you choose to use a rocketlauncher instead of a machinegun the story has to change accordingly.
This way good writing and good gameplay will be saying the same thing. That's the new alliance that is our common omen. The old concept of story cannot work in videogames, because videogames are in-ter-act-ion. Story has to kneel in front of interaction and shift its shape, humbly... to become something entirely new. We have to forget all we learnt about it, as Yoda pointed out.
Naturally a person who doesn't appreciate or understand gameplay will never be able to write a good story in a videogame. Bioware's Dragon Age 2 writer, a person who hates actual videogames, is clearly a plague to all the medium and IT needs to be purged and boycotted. No wonder Dragon Age 2 is mostly a failure of a game.
I feel it's time to provide clear examples otherwise it's all abstraction:
-at an inn, a person hires you for a job. Go to a cave, kill bandits. So yo do it, kill and kill, reach the boss, the boss talks to you and reveals the quest giver is a bandit renegade, he wants to be the new boss, using you. So you may choose to kill both bosses, one or the other, or tell the peasants so they will get their stolen money back. Choose any, you get different rewards such as different companions, different equipment, different skills, a different alignment, and if it's not too much trouble, you get a few different dialogue lines, sometimes. They're mostly gameish consequences.
2nd version.
-at an inn, a person hires you for a job. Go to a cave, kill bandits. So you do it, but the hints about the trickery can be gathered by investigating the premises, by using your skills of stealth, of disguises, of charisma to infiltrate and persuade the bandits to reveal their secrets and gather info. Now it's time to decide what to do, as above, you can choose how to end the quest. But writing intervenes again in connection with your choices, to provide SERIOUS consequences. Sparing the bandits means that when you face the final evil entity, the bandits will show you a slick way into the castle in the deep of the enchanted forest, or the bandits will support you when you want to run for feudal lord of the zone.
You guys can see WHERE exactly writing allies with gameplay, and on the contrary you can see how external, forceful and sham it feels in the first version; there's a rigid separation between killing phases and dramatic events, even alignment, which is by definition a consequence dense of spirituality, of karma, doesn't have any result except a "scoring needle" that moves up or down(i'm clearly referring to how Mass Effect handles alignment) whereas in the 2nd case dramatic events are triggered by your own actions and your own final choices result in outcomes that WILL change your character's life.
Read more!
16 April 2011
Defocusing puzzle adventures and Jane Jensen's Gray Matter
What a heavy heritage recent adventures have to take on, that of Lucasfilm cult games. But someone didn't agree with that scheme, back then.
During the 2nd half of the '90s many "puzzle adventures" were experimenting with the concept of time progression, with the concept of crime stories investigation and as we all know, with real actors. But with the new millennium's bell toll, for some reason videogamers didn't enjoy "graphic adventures" anymore. The genre went back to its roots, and the roots were those of Lucasarts puzzle-centric games.
The essence of these games is that to proceed you have to use the right item in the right spot of the environment. There's nothing else to it, basically. I remember Revolution's Broken Sword featured a system of progression with dialogue icons, but that didn't really make a difference, the important moments were all about items!
There's nothing wrong with it, the player has to squelch his mind out to imagine possible combinations and functions and so on, it's interaction 101... it's one of the best degrees of interaction especially when compared to FPS... in an adventure you have to analyze the possible functions of a, let's say, a sink by mentally relating it to the gameworld, to the story, to the character, even to the game's spiritual mood. In Crysis a sink is good out of its throwing value, your interaction with it, or functional considerations is just its weight and killing value, it's the cerebral level of a primate, or the scientific level in the 1600, when all scientists believed that the whole world's phenomena could be explained by the objects' weight and speed(Newton's law).
But i digress, sometimes i can't contain my despise for those players who justify playing dumb videogames by shouting "it's just entertainment!"
So as i was saying, "item-o-centric" adventures were the norm but a beloved software company of mine whose headquarters were south of the entrance to Yosemite National Park, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, in Oakhurst, founded by Roberta and Ken Williams, had a different idea concerning story and gameplay... and it's kind of sad that even though their idea was spectacularly different, their games are equalled to Lucasarts ones.
One of Sierra Online's most ingenious games, one that today would be considered absolute avant-garde, called "Laura Bow: Colonel's bequest", featured a thriller story which plot would proceed fluidly through the game's internal clock, almost to the player's unawareness, while he/she had to struggle to collect all possible informations about the non-playing characters that roamed the gameworld(a dark villa lost in a bayou), until the final act, so that the player could "control" the situation out of her/his obtained informations, and conquer a happy ending. The same basic structure was used in the sequel. Also Colonel's featured a final lengthy "score" listing all the informations that could be grasped by the main character's investigation: subplots, disturbing secrets, illicit affairs and so on.
It's an extraordinary game concept, open to hundreds of uses. The game still included an inventory and many item-related interactions, but it wasn't the fulcrum of the game, not at all. That's how you developers can defocalize and reinvent not only puzzle adventures, but many games.
Jane Jensen's Gray Matter features a score, apparently. But although i would definitely call it a tribute to(her friend, I think?) Mr.s Williams, i'm not sure it has the same gameplay depth. I'm willing to bet Mr.s Jensen struggled with the game design, and wanted to come to a similar result... i fear commercial reasons prevented her from going the whole way, but i was wondering just how close the comparison can go. I played the demo, and i sort of enjoyed it. The game is NOT exactly focused on items: when the character has to use one, you're informed by the cursor's shape, and i bet you will always know what item you're going to put there. So the game is centred around getting informations about people and stories, i believe. But is that enough to reach Laura Bow's height? I don't think so because there's no time progression, and because there's no time progression there's no non-linearity(no difference between the plot's progress and your investigation's progress), which means time will pass only if the score goes up, and the score goes up only if you get the right actions. That's the limit of Gray Matter's design, so done because of(i guess) commercial reasons, user-friendliness.
But i'm glad Jane Jensen paid homage to her former company and to an immortal masterpiece... who knows, it may inspire others.
During the 2nd half of the '90s many "puzzle adventures" were experimenting with the concept of time progression, with the concept of crime stories investigation and as we all know, with real actors. But with the new millennium's bell toll, for some reason videogamers didn't enjoy "graphic adventures" anymore. The genre went back to its roots, and the roots were those of Lucasarts puzzle-centric games.
The essence of these games is that to proceed you have to use the right item in the right spot of the environment. There's nothing else to it, basically. I remember Revolution's Broken Sword featured a system of progression with dialogue icons, but that didn't really make a difference, the important moments were all about items!
There's nothing wrong with it, the player has to squelch his mind out to imagine possible combinations and functions and so on, it's interaction 101... it's one of the best degrees of interaction especially when compared to FPS... in an adventure you have to analyze the possible functions of a, let's say, a sink by mentally relating it to the gameworld, to the story, to the character, even to the game's spiritual mood. In Crysis a sink is good out of its throwing value, your interaction with it, or functional considerations is just its weight and killing value, it's the cerebral level of a primate, or the scientific level in the 1600, when all scientists believed that the whole world's phenomena could be explained by the objects' weight and speed(Newton's law).
But i digress, sometimes i can't contain my despise for those players who justify playing dumb videogames by shouting "it's just entertainment!"
So as i was saying, "item-o-centric" adventures were the norm but a beloved software company of mine whose headquarters were south of the entrance to Yosemite National Park, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, in Oakhurst, founded by Roberta and Ken Williams, had a different idea concerning story and gameplay... and it's kind of sad that even though their idea was spectacularly different, their games are equalled to Lucasarts ones.
One of Sierra Online's most ingenious games, one that today would be considered absolute avant-garde, called "Laura Bow: Colonel's bequest", featured a thriller story which plot would proceed fluidly through the game's internal clock, almost to the player's unawareness, while he/she had to struggle to collect all possible informations about the non-playing characters that roamed the gameworld(a dark villa lost in a bayou), until the final act, so that the player could "control" the situation out of her/his obtained informations, and conquer a happy ending. The same basic structure was used in the sequel. Also Colonel's featured a final lengthy "score" listing all the informations that could be grasped by the main character's investigation: subplots, disturbing secrets, illicit affairs and so on.
It's an extraordinary game concept, open to hundreds of uses. The game still included an inventory and many item-related interactions, but it wasn't the fulcrum of the game, not at all. That's how you developers can defocalize and reinvent not only puzzle adventures, but many games.
Jane Jensen's Gray Matter features a score, apparently. But although i would definitely call it a tribute to(her friend, I think?) Mr.s Williams, i'm not sure it has the same gameplay depth. I'm willing to bet Mr.s Jensen struggled with the game design, and wanted to come to a similar result... i fear commercial reasons prevented her from going the whole way, but i was wondering just how close the comparison can go. I played the demo, and i sort of enjoyed it. The game is NOT exactly focused on items: when the character has to use one, you're informed by the cursor's shape, and i bet you will always know what item you're going to put there. So the game is centred around getting informations about people and stories, i believe. But is that enough to reach Laura Bow's height? I don't think so because there's no time progression, and because there's no time progression there's no non-linearity(no difference between the plot's progress and your investigation's progress), which means time will pass only if the score goes up, and the score goes up only if you get the right actions. That's the limit of Gray Matter's design, so done because of(i guess) commercial reasons, user-friendliness.
But i'm glad Jane Jensen paid homage to her former company and to an immortal masterpiece... who knows, it may inspire others.
Read more!
Quests and MMO's: paradox city
Apparently almost every MMO to name in the last years features quests taken from NPCs: As far as i know World of Warcraft was the first one to make extensive use of them. The staff must have played Dark Age of Camelot and noticed how terrible levelling was, and i agree, i played it, couldn't stomach it, i left.
Today, if you ask for a game without quests, you will hear one reply: then what, never-end grind? That's Camelot's spirit of the past talking. DAOC is one heck of a trauma.
This to me is an infantilized point of view; because it's black and white, and especially because it's how people's minds turn when they cease thinking, our betters(the puppeteers) somehow effectively manage to make people stop thinking outside the box. This is the effect of post-modern society, control.
But some can still do that. There are games with assassinate/collect/deliver etc. driven quests, there's daoc where there's no quests and one simply bashes at mob over and over just to get experience pts, and there's a MMO where "killing" 100 boars makes sense and it's a funny, social, active, dynamic experience.
Because if outside your character's village there's a problem with snakes and rats over-population, or bandits attacking, or someone in need of protection, or thieves, or vampires in the underground, you don't need an NPC to tell you, and it doesn't have to be a begin-end geomterical vector, with a short story, and before and after it there's... darkness... No, sir, nu-hu, reality is not geometry, there's no A to B time-line, there's a past-present-future sense that "all humans share", there's dynamicity, progression. The character may know, someway(a poster hanging at the city hall, a monitor-terminal, a dynamic visual from above, ), of the outpost's condition, in supplies, men, medicines, safety, crime, invasions, etc..
Where is the difference? The character still farms and collects stuff, no? It is in how the area responds. The village thrives or decays. What happens? The player is aware of the economical and political situation of the area; He co-operates with players; He affects the environment; He has a coherent reason to do stuff, soon he won't even call it farm, he will call it killing. He will start giving these actions real life names, not meta-names. When you've exterminated most of the snakes the village will be snake-free for the next day and you'll see the difference in the environment, when you've assassinated conspirators, the city will be ruled soundly. The player doesn't need to be told what to do, he can figure it out, and in one stroke, re-establish a connection with players, with the world, with human-shared temporal progression, with economy, even with geography. In "timeless", or out-of-phase tasks, the player seems to be stolen, kidnapped from everything, he's secluded in his personal world, he's like in a single-player game, he's more of a ghost than a person living in a massively populated on-going world. This has got to stop. This is the reason why people are wondering why they pay to play these games. It's the reason why they say "this game would work wonders as single player". Every game is turning F2P. The genre is dying. I repeat, this-has got-to stop.
Today, if you ask for a game without quests, you will hear one reply: then what, never-end grind? That's Camelot's spirit of the past talking. DAOC is one heck of a trauma.
This to me is an infantilized point of view; because it's black and white, and especially because it's how people's minds turn when they cease thinking, our betters(the puppeteers) somehow effectively manage to make people stop thinking outside the box. This is the effect of post-modern society, control.
But some can still do that. There are games with assassinate/collect/deliver etc. driven quests, there's daoc where there's no quests and one simply bashes at mob over and over just to get experience pts, and there's a MMO where "killing" 100 boars makes sense and it's a funny, social, active, dynamic experience.
Because if outside your character's village there's a problem with snakes and rats over-population, or bandits attacking, or someone in need of protection, or thieves, or vampires in the underground, you don't need an NPC to tell you, and it doesn't have to be a begin-end geomterical vector, with a short story, and before and after it there's... darkness... No, sir, nu-hu, reality is not geometry, there's no A to B time-line, there's a past-present-future sense that "all humans share", there's dynamicity, progression. The character may know, someway(a poster hanging at the city hall, a monitor-terminal, a dynamic visual from above, ), of the outpost's condition, in supplies, men, medicines, safety, crime, invasions, etc..
Where is the difference? The character still farms and collects stuff, no? It is in how the area responds. The village thrives or decays. What happens? The player is aware of the economical and political situation of the area; He co-operates with players; He affects the environment; He has a coherent reason to do stuff, soon he won't even call it farm, he will call it killing. He will start giving these actions real life names, not meta-names. When you've exterminated most of the snakes the village will be snake-free for the next day and you'll see the difference in the environment, when you've assassinated conspirators, the city will be ruled soundly. The player doesn't need to be told what to do, he can figure it out, and in one stroke, re-establish a connection with players, with the world, with human-shared temporal progression, with economy, even with geography. In "timeless", or out-of-phase tasks, the player seems to be stolen, kidnapped from everything, he's secluded in his personal world, he's like in a single-player game, he's more of a ghost than a person living in a massively populated on-going world. This has got to stop. This is the reason why people are wondering why they pay to play these games. It's the reason why they say "this game would work wonders as single player". Every game is turning F2P. The genre is dying. I repeat, this-has got-to stop.
Read more!
21 August 2010
MMO's: the difference between inspiration and recycling.
Players are divided in a dramatic way when it comes to MMO's. Some hate clones, others don't understand what they hate, and others simply love more of the same. Let's try to mason a bridge between them, after the jump(hehe... ehm).
Thousands of persons are worried that Vigil games, with their Warhammer 40k: Dark Millennium Online, are about to cook the usual pastiche WoW threadmill of levels, quests, maps and gear handed-over gratuitously mixed with a linear story and instanced PvP. There was an interview stating "if you're familiar with WoW, you'll feel right at home". This phrase could mean anything, who knows what that person had in mind when saying it, maybe he was thinking of combat(hopefully, because i don't mind point&click combat one bit).
But i was thinking about my character spawning at the usual newbie village/camp, looking for NPC's with an exclamation mark, a window that opens, a few epic blabla, a little objective of collecting space rats, 2 rewards and finally a marker on the map telling me where to run for my first errand... and while i run i gaze at nice things i can't touch... then when i'm done with all NPC's i'm sent to the next map and so on... then i can queue for an instance where PvP is relegated. I don't need to explore, i don't need to find my way to gain riches, i don't need to socialize for gear, i don't need-to-do-anything because chilling quests will give me all i need.
So... at this point a slice of the community will say there's nothing wrong with it as long as the story is good, graphics are too, weapons are big, space marines are epic and they make me feel good about myself without the need to stuff my underwear with paper.
AND I'M FINE with these persons! I respect people's tastes, they want a MMO that's an accessible themepark game because that system is efficient, it works, and after having played WoW for years, they die to see it in a different scenario.
But there's a little misunderstanding with an other part of the community. When we yell at WoWclone, their first answer is "then Half-life is the clone of Wolfenstein", which is such a funny statement, because they believe we're talking about the generic presence of quests, the generic presence of levels, of maps, of NPC's, of PvE, even of instances. Half-life is a clone of Wolfenstein because it has weapons, it has first person view, etc.
But if we actually complained about generic gameplay parts we'd be insane. The generic concept of a quest is that somewhere there's something to be done. How can anyone complain that there is such a thing in a game? Of course there is. We aren't mad at that.
When we complain, we don't think of the generic concept of "quests"(among other parts), we're thinking of the EXACT quest we all saw and played on WoW(and all other MMO's ever since WoW), we're thinking of an NPC with an exclamation mark-type symbol above his head and the rest of the process you read above.
The same can be said for every other element but as you can see quests usually take up 95% of the game's content(lore, exploration, profit, equipment). What's left? Instanced pointless PvP.
So i repeat, these people can't say "then every game is a clone of the previous" because we're not referring to generic gameplay parts that's alright to recycle, but we're noticing that THAT specific gameplay part is exactly IDENTICAL to the cloned one.
This should solve the issue and my aim is to be useful to the community.
Vigil Games' are about to make an MMO that will probably feature the usual gameplay mechanics, because they know players accept those parts as an inevitability, they accept quests and levels in the usual way because they don't see they're identical to every other MMO, they see them as the generic concept of quests, they don't question its identicality. Developers got LAZY because of us, because we can't see this difference, but if we are able to perceive it, to perceive this shameless recycling of the exact same gameplay, then the rebellion can begin.
Maybe it's already begun.
Thousands of persons are worried that Vigil games, with their Warhammer 40k: Dark Millennium Online, are about to cook the usual pastiche WoW threadmill of levels, quests, maps and gear handed-over gratuitously mixed with a linear story and instanced PvP. There was an interview stating "if you're familiar with WoW, you'll feel right at home". This phrase could mean anything, who knows what that person had in mind when saying it, maybe he was thinking of combat(hopefully, because i don't mind point&click combat one bit).
But i was thinking about my character spawning at the usual newbie village/camp, looking for NPC's with an exclamation mark, a window that opens, a few epic blabla, a little objective of collecting space rats, 2 rewards and finally a marker on the map telling me where to run for my first errand... and while i run i gaze at nice things i can't touch... then when i'm done with all NPC's i'm sent to the next map and so on... then i can queue for an instance where PvP is relegated. I don't need to explore, i don't need to find my way to gain riches, i don't need to socialize for gear, i don't need-to-do-anything because chilling quests will give me all i need.
So... at this point a slice of the community will say there's nothing wrong with it as long as the story is good, graphics are too, weapons are big, space marines are epic and they make me feel good about myself without the need to stuff my underwear with paper.
AND I'M FINE with these persons! I respect people's tastes, they want a MMO that's an accessible themepark game because that system is efficient, it works, and after having played WoW for years, they die to see it in a different scenario.
But there's a little misunderstanding with an other part of the community. When we yell at WoWclone, their first answer is "then Half-life is the clone of Wolfenstein", which is such a funny statement, because they believe we're talking about the generic presence of quests, the generic presence of levels, of maps, of NPC's, of PvE, even of instances. Half-life is a clone of Wolfenstein because it has weapons, it has first person view, etc.
But if we actually complained about generic gameplay parts we'd be insane. The generic concept of a quest is that somewhere there's something to be done. How can anyone complain that there is such a thing in a game? Of course there is. We aren't mad at that.
When we complain, we don't think of the generic concept of "quests"(among other parts), we're thinking of the EXACT quest we all saw and played on WoW(and all other MMO's ever since WoW), we're thinking of an NPC with an exclamation mark-type symbol above his head and the rest of the process you read above.
The same can be said for every other element but as you can see quests usually take up 95% of the game's content(lore, exploration, profit, equipment). What's left? Instanced pointless PvP.
So i repeat, these people can't say "then every game is a clone of the previous" because we're not referring to generic gameplay parts that's alright to recycle, but we're noticing that THAT specific gameplay part is exactly IDENTICAL to the cloned one.
This should solve the issue and my aim is to be useful to the community.
Vigil Games' are about to make an MMO that will probably feature the usual gameplay mechanics, because they know players accept those parts as an inevitability, they accept quests and levels in the usual way because they don't see they're identical to every other MMO, they see them as the generic concept of quests, they don't question its identicality. Developers got LAZY because of us, because we can't see this difference, but if we are able to perceive it, to perceive this shameless recycling of the exact same gameplay, then the rebellion can begin.
Maybe it's already begun.
Read more!
1 August 2010
Interaction: the trial of Choices & Consequences.
I'm going to pass this essential element of videogames under the inquisitorial eye of interaction, this great arbiter.
No, i won't pester you with historical outlines on the C&C. Let's get to the point.
Sometimes developers insert elements in their games that don't really belong to videogaming. Sometimes it's morality, sometimes art, or cinematic cutscenes, or even drama, they feel fictitious, false... these xeno elements(that in this case it's right to be phobic of) are proud of their origins, cinema mostly, and they harm videogames because they seem to compensate for the poverty of the "ACTUAL" act of videogaming, interaction: they help the feeble lad.
It happens with choices & consequences too.
In many so-called RPG's, characters talk a lot, and in a cinematic way, so choices are only there, to not disrupt the hollywood value. The player gets to choose the mood in which the character answers. Also, these "choices" are VERY moral-based, they invite directly the player to consider real-world problems... and my opinion in this matter is that moral problems should come in mind post-lectum(after the gamer-over), when the player is re-thinking the game, not at the same time.
There's many more elements that don't belong to videogames, the actual videogame seems to happen only when you shoot and kill and jump, because, hey, that's what games are about, no? and they can't evolve, They can borrow things from books and cinema(cutscenes, intrigue, love affairs, suspence, sexy expressions), but the actual game is still mario and it will always be like this.
But interaction doesn't agree with this. It demands a challenge be given to the player because that's what's unique about videogames. Story and drama(a blessed gift come from the Gods) BEND, graciously shift their shape for interaction and are transformed into something unique as well(just as it happened with theatre and epic tales when NOVELS were born in '700).
So what happens, in many cinema games, with C&C?
-the player picks any choice he likes, they're all there, easy to make, they're dialogue lines, or nuke/don't nuke, kill/don't kill.
-the player knows videogames tend to be movies these times, so he's not afraid of consequences, they will never hurt him.
what instead SHOULD happen, when C&C's are under the enlightened dispotism of interaction?
-the player can still choose easily BUT now he's aware that if he explores, inspecting the environment thoroughly, if he solves secondary puzzles, acquire information, seek alternative routes, the outcome MAY be better(Black Isle's Fallout).
-the player cannot choose anything he wants because consequences WILL be terrible. His character may be murdered right in the ending scene(See Laura Bow2: the Dagger of Amon Ra or CdProjekt's The Witcher, but the most shining cases to me are Ken & Roberta Williams's unforgettable adventure games).
Story, drama, dialogues etc. are transformed into something unique which is pure players' logical considerations, they become electrical impulses from the game to the player and back to the game...
which we call interaction.
When a player chooses he MUST reflect whether there's a better way to do something and he must be "afraid" of the consequences. If some such C&C system doesn't do that, it's because the designer was tempted by elements that come from other media, he/she has failed in making a REAL videogame.
No, i won't pester you with historical outlines on the C&C. Let's get to the point.
Sometimes developers insert elements in their games that don't really belong to videogaming. Sometimes it's morality, sometimes art, or cinematic cutscenes, or even drama, they feel fictitious, false... these xeno elements(that in this case it's right to be phobic of) are proud of their origins, cinema mostly, and they harm videogames because they seem to compensate for the poverty of the "ACTUAL" act of videogaming, interaction: they help the feeble lad.
It happens with choices & consequences too.
In many so-called RPG's, characters talk a lot, and in a cinematic way, so choices are only there, to not disrupt the hollywood value. The player gets to choose the mood in which the character answers. Also, these "choices" are VERY moral-based, they invite directly the player to consider real-world problems... and my opinion in this matter is that moral problems should come in mind post-lectum(after the gamer-over), when the player is re-thinking the game, not at the same time.
There's many more elements that don't belong to videogames, the actual videogame seems to happen only when you shoot and kill and jump, because, hey, that's what games are about, no? and they can't evolve, They can borrow things from books and cinema(cutscenes, intrigue, love affairs, suspence, sexy expressions), but the actual game is still mario and it will always be like this.
But interaction doesn't agree with this. It demands a challenge be given to the player because that's what's unique about videogames. Story and drama(a blessed gift come from the Gods) BEND, graciously shift their shape for interaction and are transformed into something unique as well(just as it happened with theatre and epic tales when NOVELS were born in '700).
So what happens, in many cinema games, with C&C?
-the player picks any choice he likes, they're all there, easy to make, they're dialogue lines, or nuke/don't nuke, kill/don't kill.
-the player knows videogames tend to be movies these times, so he's not afraid of consequences, they will never hurt him.
what instead SHOULD happen, when C&C's are under the enlightened dispotism of interaction?
-the player can still choose easily BUT now he's aware that if he explores, inspecting the environment thoroughly, if he solves secondary puzzles, acquire information, seek alternative routes, the outcome MAY be better(Black Isle's Fallout).
-the player cannot choose anything he wants because consequences WILL be terrible. His character may be murdered right in the ending scene(See Laura Bow2: the Dagger of Amon Ra or CdProjekt's The Witcher, but the most shining cases to me are Ken & Roberta Williams's unforgettable adventure games).
Story, drama, dialogues etc. are transformed into something unique which is pure players' logical considerations, they become electrical impulses from the game to the player and back to the game...
which we call interaction.
When a player chooses he MUST reflect whether there's a better way to do something and he must be "afraid" of the consequences. If some such C&C system doesn't do that, it's because the designer was tempted by elements that come from other media, he/she has failed in making a REAL videogame.
Read more!
PC is the mother of gaming, Sony/MS consoles are sterile
Bioware declared CVG that "PC is made for gaming". They mention controls, of course, but also genres fit for it. What's with genres that makes PC the mother of all gaming platforms? Let's see to it.
Console sales(always referring to XBLA and PS3) are always identical, it's a block formed of identical customers, squared in a type of ludic fascism, while everything on PC is free of rules, changable, open, and this forces a slowdown in megalomaniac production costs.
PC hosts every genre that holds on to its peculiar mechanics, a genre that doesn't give up its niche uniqueness, the platform welcomes players of a dozen different specie. Could that be the reason why PC players download a game that's too flat? Because they buy only the games that belong to the genre they love? That's going too far, maybe. From this point of view, the sometimes inferior sales on PC are the sign of the platform's vitality, its strength. Some equal big volume of sales to health, they don't see that this mechanism is a swelling up that's slowly destroying them.
On the PC niches dominate with about 100 wargames per year, and rpg's, puzzle adventures, simulators, and obviously RTS'. Consoles instead have no niches, or they're a marginal phenomenon that has no impact on new titles. There are no "pure" genres anymore! Even JRPG's, they're less and less interactive, because the more they cost, the more people they have to attract to them, and these people are not old players, they're movie fans who eat popcorns on the sofa. the old community was squashed like a parasite, they had to cater to a new kind of player who in the end despises "actual" games but loves movies, cool effects, sexy characters, a lot of romance and drama. This is hybridation, console genre is a non-genre ever since it embraced the so-called "action-adventure" label and cutscenes mindset. Final Fantasy suddenly stopped being an RPG, it became a film, and the same happened to Metal Gear Solid franchise.
What are the consequences of all this?
Console players will buy anything as long as it feels like a movie. When they design a game on PC, instead, developers have to pay their respects to the tastes of the niche players, because THEY decide; The niches, and how the new game is respectful to them, determine the economic success.
See the new X-Com: I would have never expected PC players to react as they did. Every marketing-expert porphiric-rat can predict console folks tastes because, i repeat, they're people who simply want independence-day glamour in their games, a game that simply gratifies them with rifles and long(and always hard) swords; while nobody could predict PC players standing up angrily, demanding respect for their good old brand. They ACTUALLY want a turn-based RTS!!!?
That's PC community and market: it's an incontrollable and unstable sea in turmoil... but my god,so much life, so much devotion and love. Isn't that the definition of Mother?
Another example could be Dragon Age. Bioware had to be deferential to the old niche of RPG'ers... they wanted a new game but also a new Baldur's Gate. While console players didn't even know what they were playing, they only enjoyed "feeling immersed in a cool world". Mass Effect instead was again a bastard son. It was neither an FPS, nor an RPG. It had more story, more film than anything.
This does not mean that consoles welcome experimentation and PC doesn't, because you can innovate being faithful to the more complex mechanics of a genre. Console titles are not innovative, they're simply non-games who renounce the deeper sides of interaction. Evolution doesn't mean forgetting that an adventure game needs to have items and verbs, it doesn't mean that RTS and RPG's need less numbers and complexity.
Betraying niches is not innovation, PC never did and that's why it's the mother-platform.
Console sales(always referring to XBLA and PS3) are always identical, it's a block formed of identical customers, squared in a type of ludic fascism, while everything on PC is free of rules, changable, open, and this forces a slowdown in megalomaniac production costs.
PC hosts every genre that holds on to its peculiar mechanics, a genre that doesn't give up its niche uniqueness, the platform welcomes players of a dozen different specie. Could that be the reason why PC players download a game that's too flat? Because they buy only the games that belong to the genre they love? That's going too far, maybe. From this point of view, the sometimes inferior sales on PC are the sign of the platform's vitality, its strength. Some equal big volume of sales to health, they don't see that this mechanism is a swelling up that's slowly destroying them.
On the PC niches dominate with about 100 wargames per year, and rpg's, puzzle adventures, simulators, and obviously RTS'. Consoles instead have no niches, or they're a marginal phenomenon that has no impact on new titles. There are no "pure" genres anymore! Even JRPG's, they're less and less interactive, because the more they cost, the more people they have to attract to them, and these people are not old players, they're movie fans who eat popcorns on the sofa. the old community was squashed like a parasite, they had to cater to a new kind of player who in the end despises "actual" games but loves movies, cool effects, sexy characters, a lot of romance and drama. This is hybridation, console genre is a non-genre ever since it embraced the so-called "action-adventure" label and cutscenes mindset. Final Fantasy suddenly stopped being an RPG, it became a film, and the same happened to Metal Gear Solid franchise.
What are the consequences of all this?
Console players will buy anything as long as it feels like a movie. When they design a game on PC, instead, developers have to pay their respects to the tastes of the niche players, because THEY decide; The niches, and how the new game is respectful to them, determine the economic success.
See the new X-Com: I would have never expected PC players to react as they did. Every marketing-expert porphiric-rat can predict console folks tastes because, i repeat, they're people who simply want independence-day glamour in their games, a game that simply gratifies them with rifles and long(and always hard) swords; while nobody could predict PC players standing up angrily, demanding respect for their good old brand. They ACTUALLY want a turn-based RTS!!!?
That's PC community and market: it's an incontrollable and unstable sea in turmoil... but my god,so much life, so much devotion and love. Isn't that the definition of Mother?
Another example could be Dragon Age. Bioware had to be deferential to the old niche of RPG'ers... they wanted a new game but also a new Baldur's Gate. While console players didn't even know what they were playing, they only enjoyed "feeling immersed in a cool world". Mass Effect instead was again a bastard son. It was neither an FPS, nor an RPG. It had more story, more film than anything.
This does not mean that consoles welcome experimentation and PC doesn't, because you can innovate being faithful to the more complex mechanics of a genre. Console titles are not innovative, they're simply non-games who renounce the deeper sides of interaction. Evolution doesn't mean forgetting that an adventure game needs to have items and verbs, it doesn't mean that RTS and RPG's need less numbers and complexity.
Betraying niches is not innovation, PC never did and that's why it's the mother-platform.
Read more!
Star Wars: The Old Republic - Please Save Us From Ourselves
Everyone mentions classes and combat but who knows the actual mechanics? They seem to assume everything works the usual WoW way. A linear sequence of quests until level-cap. Then dungeon raids to loot the coolest gear before others. And call them noobs.
As usual in my articles i intend to aim at the essence of videogaming activity: what the user's mind is fixed upon, what his goal is when he's playing. In the case of recent MMO's you gain levels and complete quests to get better and better equipment. Seeing your character get bigger, tougher, harder and more muscular is the current standard of any online game, something that in the absence of negates the existance of a massive online world.
Most MMO players, when they're reading and discussing a new MMO like BioWare's upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic, they already know that the fulcrum of it is greed... and there's also other things they assume, otherwise how can they discuss what a smuggler is and does, not knowing anything about the game? Why would they? Obviously the important things are gear and power. What's in the middle is useless. Naturally it's a negative reason to play. In this case MMO's are obviously drugs. First they soothe your nerves, then they become addictive. How natural the comparison to drugs felt? Surprising, hm?. This is why i'm always glad when i read of politicians and psychologists condemning videogames and particularly MMO's... because they are right, MMO's are inarguably wrong.
But i see videogames as vessels of literature, philosophy, socialism, and all that jazz cultures... anything in videogames that's seen as relaxation, as venting of frustration is an insult to me. I spent 1000 sterlins on POT?(meant as drug but also as dumping device) Even more insulting if they're drugs. Is that all videogames can achieve? ?Physiology? Release of acid liquids? Interaction is the natural successor to literature, cinema, theatre and essayism, and i say it as a person who studied literatures and philosophy all his life.
After this long premise, let's get to the topic. Star Wars: the old Republic has the first chance to detox players, and if they fail, many should follow to do it right: IF done right, it can divert players from their obsessive fixated goal, as we said greed and, uhm, to enlarge your character with big plates of armor and huge, hard swords and woody rifles, and NPC's that keep telling you subliminally, after you complete a quest, how brilliant, sexy, gifted, handsome, confident powerful, succesful a person you are in "life"; sorry, i'm really indulging in the sarcastic disgust i have for you players who i hope right about now feel wounded; one could say SW:TOR subject is an excuse to lash at you unaware slaves of the WoW-mentality with these Sternian loopy-digressions. But i assure you it's a false assumption, i REALLY want to make a point, but it's constantly derouted by how sick i am of the MMO scenario. The two points i wanna make seem to be boxing each other.
Back to the point. SW:TOR doesn't want to be a so-called "sandbox" type of online game like Galaxies(why should it? They're completely different games except for the license, and license is just looks nowadays), and that's probably good... those simulations tend to forget the beauty of drama. In The Old Republic the character does a sequence of quests, and probably also gets equipment as he goes. But this doesn't necessarily(unless they screw up royal) make it the next attempt at a WoW-clone, like every single AAA title since 2004.
Ray Muzyka said that quests are never about collecting rats' testicles, they're focused in a narration: this is revolutionary. A normal WoW-clone player needs a quest that's sufficiently generic, vague, mindless, because what's important is the equipment at the end. Remember HEllgate:London, made by probably the inventor of the WoW drug-system? Quests are all about collecting kills and objects, that game is scandalous because the "story" in it shamelessly doesn't even try to justify WHY WOULD the character EVER care about doing those errands, the NPCs just see you and ask you to do things... and the tasks are left purposely repetitive and vague so that you may NEVER EVER loose sight of the real meta-goals, which are the one we cited above(gear, power, ever-growing).
Doesn't it sound like a porphiric addicted person, roaming the streets of nightly downtown Paris, doing no matter what to "feel happy" again? Ouch, see, i'm digressing again. Let's rush to the point, i'll write as a junkie plays: If the quest in TOR itself is ruled by narration, and because of its enlightened dispotism(see Communism), you MUSt follow it or you're in trouble, the player's obsessive object of his uncontrolled dribbling dreams is pulverized. What does story do in a game, especially in a MMO?
1) it finally kills meta-gaming. HAVING to follow story means, willing or not, you have to think as the character thinks.
2) Story being paramount now dominates gear&power. You will still enjoy bracing your new penis... i mean rifle... i mean penis, but loot and level-cap obsession will not tyrannize your mind anymore, the usurper of Otranto is being dethroned.
But the biggest achievement, one that i don't even know whether it will happen in TOR or not, is that story reconciles persistancy and virtuality, so a simulative day/night casual progression, with drama. I'll explain: when a player completes his story-line, he'll have to face a "finale". If you don't follow the story, if you make the wrong choices, you may end up as a complete scum, hated, hunted, chased by everyone. Your condition will be intolerable, tho it might have its charms(then again there's nothing in life that hasn't charms). naturally one would expect that you, as player, would have to deal with your virtual everyday life only up to the next expansion Bioware make, then you have a chance to improve your social condition... this also sort of explains what they mean as "Tor is Kotor 3, 4, 5, etc.", doesn't it? So the chain is: story creates consequences, consequences create life. And fear of consequences destroys greed and addiction to power, reminds you that you're in "this" world to help and socialize with people, fear re-establishes an order of things, control over the anarchy of your low instincts.
This possibility of a gameplay actually mixes a unique story with its pre-scripted drama with an on-going everyday life. It's as if you just acted in a play, and the ending act defines your normal daily life like in a terrifying tale of mystery that we might have seen somewhere, a curse of the player or some such. It's a revolutionary concept, it's a writer's dream, and it's one of the many proofs that decree the supremacy of interaction on cinema and literature...
To conclude, i don't know what Bioware will actually do with their MMO, some say they didn't divulge any information about it because they don't know themselves. Well, for god sake, I was inspired by it to write this, they may be inspired making it, will they read this.
As usual in my articles i intend to aim at the essence of videogaming activity: what the user's mind is fixed upon, what his goal is when he's playing. In the case of recent MMO's you gain levels and complete quests to get better and better equipment. Seeing your character get bigger, tougher, harder and more muscular is the current standard of any online game, something that in the absence of negates the existance of a massive online world.
Most MMO players, when they're reading and discussing a new MMO like BioWare's upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic, they already know that the fulcrum of it is greed... and there's also other things they assume, otherwise how can they discuss what a smuggler is and does, not knowing anything about the game? Why would they? Obviously the important things are gear and power. What's in the middle is useless. Naturally it's a negative reason to play. In this case MMO's are obviously drugs. First they soothe your nerves, then they become addictive. How natural the comparison to drugs felt? Surprising, hm?. This is why i'm always glad when i read of politicians and psychologists condemning videogames and particularly MMO's... because they are right, MMO's are inarguably wrong.
But i see videogames as vessels of literature, philosophy, socialism, and all that jazz cultures... anything in videogames that's seen as relaxation, as venting of frustration is an insult to me. I spent 1000 sterlins on POT?(meant as drug but also as dumping device) Even more insulting if they're drugs. Is that all videogames can achieve? ?Physiology? Release of acid liquids? Interaction is the natural successor to literature, cinema, theatre and essayism, and i say it as a person who studied literatures and philosophy all his life.
After this long premise, let's get to the topic. Star Wars: the old Republic has the first chance to detox players, and if they fail, many should follow to do it right: IF done right, it can divert players from their obsessive fixated goal, as we said greed and, uhm, to enlarge your character with big plates of armor and huge, hard swords and woody rifles, and NPC's that keep telling you subliminally, after you complete a quest, how brilliant, sexy, gifted, handsome, confident powerful, succesful a person you are in "life"; sorry, i'm really indulging in the sarcastic disgust i have for you players who i hope right about now feel wounded; one could say SW:TOR subject is an excuse to lash at you unaware slaves of the WoW-mentality with these Sternian loopy-digressions. But i assure you it's a false assumption, i REALLY want to make a point, but it's constantly derouted by how sick i am of the MMO scenario. The two points i wanna make seem to be boxing each other.
Back to the point. SW:TOR doesn't want to be a so-called "sandbox" type of online game like Galaxies(why should it? They're completely different games except for the license, and license is just looks nowadays), and that's probably good... those simulations tend to forget the beauty of drama. In The Old Republic the character does a sequence of quests, and probably also gets equipment as he goes. But this doesn't necessarily(unless they screw up royal) make it the next attempt at a WoW-clone, like every single AAA title since 2004.
Ray Muzyka said that quests are never about collecting rats' testicles, they're focused in a narration: this is revolutionary. A normal WoW-clone player needs a quest that's sufficiently generic, vague, mindless, because what's important is the equipment at the end. Remember HEllgate:London, made by probably the inventor of the WoW drug-system? Quests are all about collecting kills and objects, that game is scandalous because the "story" in it shamelessly doesn't even try to justify WHY WOULD the character EVER care about doing those errands, the NPCs just see you and ask you to do things... and the tasks are left purposely repetitive and vague so that you may NEVER EVER loose sight of the real meta-goals, which are the one we cited above(gear, power, ever-growing).
Doesn't it sound like a porphiric addicted person, roaming the streets of nightly downtown Paris, doing no matter what to "feel happy" again? Ouch, see, i'm digressing again. Let's rush to the point, i'll write as a junkie plays: If the quest in TOR itself is ruled by narration, and because of its enlightened dispotism(see Communism), you MUSt follow it or you're in trouble, the player's obsessive object of his uncontrolled dribbling dreams is pulverized. What does story do in a game, especially in a MMO?
1) it finally kills meta-gaming. HAVING to follow story means, willing or not, you have to think as the character thinks.
2) Story being paramount now dominates gear&power. You will still enjoy bracing your new penis... i mean rifle... i mean penis, but loot and level-cap obsession will not tyrannize your mind anymore, the usurper of Otranto is being dethroned.
But the biggest achievement, one that i don't even know whether it will happen in TOR or not, is that story reconciles persistancy and virtuality, so a simulative day/night casual progression, with drama. I'll explain: when a player completes his story-line, he'll have to face a "finale". If you don't follow the story, if you make the wrong choices, you may end up as a complete scum, hated, hunted, chased by everyone. Your condition will be intolerable, tho it might have its charms(then again there's nothing in life that hasn't charms). naturally one would expect that you, as player, would have to deal with your virtual everyday life only up to the next expansion Bioware make, then you have a chance to improve your social condition... this also sort of explains what they mean as "Tor is Kotor 3, 4, 5, etc.", doesn't it? So the chain is: story creates consequences, consequences create life. And fear of consequences destroys greed and addiction to power, reminds you that you're in "this" world to help and socialize with people, fear re-establishes an order of things, control over the anarchy of your low instincts.
This possibility of a gameplay actually mixes a unique story with its pre-scripted drama with an on-going everyday life. It's as if you just acted in a play, and the ending act defines your normal daily life like in a terrifying tale of mystery that we might have seen somewhere, a curse of the player or some such. It's a revolutionary concept, it's a writer's dream, and it's one of the many proofs that decree the supremacy of interaction on cinema and literature...
To conclude, i don't know what Bioware will actually do with their MMO, some say they didn't divulge any information about it because they don't know themselves. Well, for god sake, I was inspired by it to write this, they may be inspired making it, will they read this.
Read more!
Antithesis: commercial casual games or virtual worlds. MMO's
I'm empathically inspectng the minds of online game-developers to understand why they all make such lousy products, why they treat players like children to be babysitted... what are their contradicting scopes + the marketing needs etc.
Massively, a good site with news and opinions on online-gaming, posted an article about the lack of innovation in MMO's, called "we put the NO in innovation". The current situation is well depicted, title after title we keep playing the same game... it all started after world of warcraft came out... they speculate on why this happened, the typical issue of what online players want, whether they're subscribed to the blizzard's antichrist or not, and so on. It's a complicated affair that's being analyzed in a messy ambiguous way. As usual i intervene to put thigs simpler and straighter.
When developers are conceiving a game, two forces are at work in their heads... one of them focuses on the game's peculiar characteristics, like the trademarks of a specific IP(i.e R.E. Howard's Conan, Lord of the rings etc.), the other force, in sheer contrast with the first, is aware of the genre's established standards, and for one or more reasons He feels that his game needs to have those said standards. Everyone knows what these standards are, WoW made 'em so paramount that many players even treat them as the very foundation of an MMO(iit's irrelevant whether WoW invented them or not... the vikings discovered America but everyone knows Columbus did it because he made it public to the masses).
From now on, to know whether a game is a clone or not, we just need to count the % of uniqueness and that of recycling. Most of the times the uniqueness appears in the combat system and some of the more superficial PvP mechanics, while everything regarding for example the character progression is repeated exactly the same from game to game. I estimate this percentage as being respectively 15% to 85%. The problem is that a minority is always suffocated and assimilated by the winning side. Take Warhammer Online... the unique part is obviously the realm vs realm element. There's forts all around, players need to conquer them. It's practically the only original bit about this game(and the tome), everything else is exactly like warcraft. So what happens? These bits play and feel like random, shallow, confused open-area battles we've already seen in warcraft.
Why? Because these mechanics are not developed and detailed as they should have been, exploiting their unique personality in new mind-numbing systems and mini-games. In Warcraft the open pvp was immediately trashed because the game structure wasn't suited for it, they cleverly focused on other things... they knew this because the structure was their own. The Mythic folks reused a framework that comes from other people, they didn't understand that WoW as it was couldn't be converted into a PvP game, the elements don't work that way... the result is then that the more prominent elements of this game, Warhammer, are exactly the least cured ones, they feel half-done, just as those in WoW were before the game took a definite conceptual path.
So to resume, a cloned gameplay mechanics, with the same UI, the same character progression, the same world framework, such as the separation between instanced and open-world, the separation of maps/zones, the separation of factions(order vs chaos) inevitably affects and crushes the small and bashfully developed unique bits(bashfully because of market obbligations, because market dictates players are scared of innovation bits), ultimately strangling them. Another example would be Fallen Earth... scavenging SEEMS to be a unique element, but in the end it's choked by the fact that a player scavenges only to level up, to sell those wrecked parts, to upgrade the same old talents, to make recipes, to craft stuff in the same old way... it's in the end the same old game... if these elements had been developed more thoroughly, making up mini-games from ZERO, new global objectives, new activities that change the player's point of view, instead of gear farming, loot, and having the best template, they would have given the whole game an original identity. Obviously they didn't and are destined to fail. It's exactly the objectives, that determine a WoW clone, the reason for doing things. Even if you do certain things in a new way, the old recycled clichés will still cover the reason for doing them, crushing every trace of innovation.
Finally, to understand what an MMO should be, let's talk about Star Trek Online by Cryptic and its potential. The game is destined to be the same old goop of WoW clichés adapted to Star Trek names, scenarios, places, some of the more superficial extremely gimmicky aspects of the franchise, a juicy bait for the idiotic fans with nothing inside(aw! Saint Joe how i love being blunt!). Instead, what should it be? It should simply be the Tv shows and films made into a virtual progressive world, whose only requirements are massivity and persistancy... after the developers simply take everything from the franchise, the next step is to filter the informations from the tv shows that give away hints to real-time continuity and virtuality... for example how much time is needed to make a journey, or to study a subject of the academy for an exam(naturally with real manuals the players must study).
This is the difference between videogames and virtual worlds... when MMO makers will understand this, a new era will most likely begin, everyone will realize that the future of cinematic, literary and dramatic fictional worlds and settings is not to make film after film, but to become real... their natural evolution is a virtual world because it's not one transposition of class-A products into a collateral class-B random funny gamey that vaguely reminds of that world and uses the names with a license, it's that very fictional world that, thanks to persistancy, in every way becomes alive.
I hope one day we can understand the impact of this concept.
Massively, a good site with news and opinions on online-gaming, posted an article about the lack of innovation in MMO's, called "we put the NO in innovation". The current situation is well depicted, title after title we keep playing the same game... it all started after world of warcraft came out... they speculate on why this happened, the typical issue of what online players want, whether they're subscribed to the blizzard's antichrist or not, and so on. It's a complicated affair that's being analyzed in a messy ambiguous way. As usual i intervene to put thigs simpler and straighter.
When developers are conceiving a game, two forces are at work in their heads... one of them focuses on the game's peculiar characteristics, like the trademarks of a specific IP(i.e R.E. Howard's Conan, Lord of the rings etc.), the other force, in sheer contrast with the first, is aware of the genre's established standards, and for one or more reasons He feels that his game needs to have those said standards. Everyone knows what these standards are, WoW made 'em so paramount that many players even treat them as the very foundation of an MMO(iit's irrelevant whether WoW invented them or not... the vikings discovered America but everyone knows Columbus did it because he made it public to the masses).
From now on, to know whether a game is a clone or not, we just need to count the % of uniqueness and that of recycling. Most of the times the uniqueness appears in the combat system and some of the more superficial PvP mechanics, while everything regarding for example the character progression is repeated exactly the same from game to game. I estimate this percentage as being respectively 15% to 85%. The problem is that a minority is always suffocated and assimilated by the winning side. Take Warhammer Online... the unique part is obviously the realm vs realm element. There's forts all around, players need to conquer them. It's practically the only original bit about this game(and the tome), everything else is exactly like warcraft. So what happens? These bits play and feel like random, shallow, confused open-area battles we've already seen in warcraft.
Why? Because these mechanics are not developed and detailed as they should have been, exploiting their unique personality in new mind-numbing systems and mini-games. In Warcraft the open pvp was immediately trashed because the game structure wasn't suited for it, they cleverly focused on other things... they knew this because the structure was their own. The Mythic folks reused a framework that comes from other people, they didn't understand that WoW as it was couldn't be converted into a PvP game, the elements don't work that way... the result is then that the more prominent elements of this game, Warhammer, are exactly the least cured ones, they feel half-done, just as those in WoW were before the game took a definite conceptual path.
So to resume, a cloned gameplay mechanics, with the same UI, the same character progression, the same world framework, such as the separation between instanced and open-world, the separation of maps/zones, the separation of factions(order vs chaos) inevitably affects and crushes the small and bashfully developed unique bits(bashfully because of market obbligations, because market dictates players are scared of innovation bits), ultimately strangling them. Another example would be Fallen Earth... scavenging SEEMS to be a unique element, but in the end it's choked by the fact that a player scavenges only to level up, to sell those wrecked parts, to upgrade the same old talents, to make recipes, to craft stuff in the same old way... it's in the end the same old game... if these elements had been developed more thoroughly, making up mini-games from ZERO, new global objectives, new activities that change the player's point of view, instead of gear farming, loot, and having the best template, they would have given the whole game an original identity. Obviously they didn't and are destined to fail. It's exactly the objectives, that determine a WoW clone, the reason for doing things. Even if you do certain things in a new way, the old recycled clichés will still cover the reason for doing them, crushing every trace of innovation.
Finally, to understand what an MMO should be, let's talk about Star Trek Online by Cryptic and its potential. The game is destined to be the same old goop of WoW clichés adapted to Star Trek names, scenarios, places, some of the more superficial extremely gimmicky aspects of the franchise, a juicy bait for the idiotic fans with nothing inside(aw! Saint Joe how i love being blunt!). Instead, what should it be? It should simply be the Tv shows and films made into a virtual progressive world, whose only requirements are massivity and persistancy... after the developers simply take everything from the franchise, the next step is to filter the informations from the tv shows that give away hints to real-time continuity and virtuality... for example how much time is needed to make a journey, or to study a subject of the academy for an exam(naturally with real manuals the players must study).
This is the difference between videogames and virtual worlds... when MMO makers will understand this, a new era will most likely begin, everyone will realize that the future of cinematic, literary and dramatic fictional worlds and settings is not to make film after film, but to become real... their natural evolution is a virtual world because it's not one transposition of class-A products into a collateral class-B random funny gamey that vaguely reminds of that world and uses the names with a license, it's that very fictional world that, thanks to persistancy, in every way becomes alive.
I hope one day we can understand the impact of this concept.
Read more!
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