Yst

So, am supposed to spend $300+ on a 'new generation' console, or at least as much on pieces for a computer ... just so i can play a game which is basically old KotOR with cranked up visuals? no, thank you. if i ever get deranged to the point i'd seriously consider this kind of expense for such trivial gain, feel free to shoot me. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I too am becoming frustrated with the pushing forward of new and ever more expensive technologies which offer for their price essentially nothing at all new to game design. When I look at the consoles I currently own and consider what each brought to the table, I can pretty confidently say that each new generation really did offer something the previous hadn't really made possible yet. My TI99, even at its absolute best, can't manage anything better than representative, iconic graphics. There's no real attempt to create immersive art. It's chiefly symbolically representative stuff. So even its best RPG, Tunnels of Doom, merely has symbolic figures: Forward several years to the NES and I've suddenly got representations of landscapes, geography and monsters which actually look something like monsters. And it all loads from a cart. No need for finicky casette tapes, and it can save my game, too. A big step toward the vivid depiction of RPG worlds. Forward several years to the SNES and now worlds are depicted in lush colour, with what seems like an almost limitless number of detailed sprites on screen at any given time, and backgrounds that are complex enough to look like they could be straight out of a comic book. The art style identifiably comes through here and backgrounds are animated, with new and different animations and backgrounds crafted for each setting. It's not just "see if we can make a monster in 30 pixels using two colours" anymore, and the world isn't made up of a set of square building blocks a la Dragon Warrior here. It's something completely different. Forward several years to the N64 and now complex 3D environments are possible. Not just sprites, not just polygons, but texture mapped worlds. Nothing like this had ever been done in the last generation of consoles. Flat shading and sprites as alternate options when depicting 3D spaces had given way to detailed environements with shaded and textured surfaces. Forward several years to the Xbox and humans have finally, in this generation, taken appreciable human form, looking more like bodies than messes of polygons clinging to each other for dear life. Furthermore, formerly impossibly complex objects like grass and trees can be depicted convincingly and immersively. We have humans that look like humans, with real facial features which look like rounded surfaces rather than a mess of triangles. Of all these, I think the last was the most important step. My concern is, I don't know what comes afterward. With convincing rounded surfaces, believable human character models, grass, trees and all those formerly oh-so-irritating technologically impeded aspects of a gameworld effectively depicted already in existing game engines, I don't know what the technology will add to gameplay in the coming generation. Will there be more grass per square foot? Who cares? That's not gameplay. That's statistics. Already, it seems that artistic resources are seeing more strain than technology. We don't have a problem with an absence of detail in NPC models: we have a problem with the reuse of the same NPC models over and over again in the same games (true for both KotOR games and JE) because the human resources aren't there to detail enough models to populate the world. Rendering a world in infinite complexity just makes more work for more people. Maybe we'll be able to render it. Will we be able to populate it? I see the next gen console makers throwing statistics at me, but I don't see them demonstrating how these statistics will take gaming forward in any way. We'll just have to wait and see.

Hmm... That doesn't sound good. I suppose Bioware owns the unchanged parts of the engine. I'd like to see a company take the whole toolset/GM client idea and run with it. We need more PC games like that. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> On the other hand, haven't most of the finest combinations of good game design with good engine design been a consequence of collaboration rather than internal development by a single party? Carmack has created some great FPS engines, but it's always been the third parties who made the most of them. Valve did great things with Half-Life, but they didn't have the resources to invent their own engine while simultaneously developing the game, and neither did id seem to have the creative resources to develop an immersive story-driven 3D shooter. It's situations like that where the magic happens. The success of the Infinity Engine of course was a consequence of a collaboration between Interplay/Black Isle and Bioware, and not of a single developer taking their work and running with it. I guess I take the opposite view. Creative collaboration between parties in which I have good confidence is in most circumstances my ideal.

What's that mean? It's understood that 'Evil' is indifferent towards 'Unintelligent'?

No, indeed it hasn't. While "technologically better" is a pretty vapid distinction, it's absolutely not the case that the majority of consoles since the mid nineties have outpaced PCs at their respective releases, and I would argue that not a single one of the consoles released since 1995 has managed to outpace competing PC hardware at its release date. I'd say the PS3 has the first reasonable chance of achieving this since the N64, but we won't really know until all is said and done. The best competitors for the claim to being a console possessing "better technology" than anything else available at release (and let's be clear that when we say this, we really mean rendering technology), even surpassing that available to the computing market as a whole, would seem to be the N64 at its release and the Xbox at its release. Despite possessing the best hardware of its generation of consoles, however, the Xbox is fairly easy to write off the list of consoles which might have challenged competing PC hardware, as it was after all just PC hardware with less system memory than was available to competing PCs and a much slower CPU, having only slightly better memory bandwidth as an advantage, with a slower graphics chip, older CPU and substantially less RAM as big disadvantages in competition against contemporaneous PC parts. It might have managed equivalency to competing PC parts just barely were it not for ATI having a spontaneous and somewhat unexpected burst of R&D magnificence with their Radeon line at the time, but for whatever reason, ATI shot well ahead of Nvidia for a while there, and the Xbox's GF3 was well outpaced during its introduction phase by computing hardware. As for the Playstation 2, I really didn't hear any post-release claims to its supremacy among graphics technologies once reality had settled in and the dregs of Sony's nonsense hype had washed away. Maybe there are still some Playstation 2 pre-release era fanboys heralding the PS2 as a computing revolution which will best everything and everyone, but I somehow doubt even Sony fanboys have that kind of dedication to self-imposed distancing from reality. And just to cover all the bases, the Dreamcast was a terrific little console, and I think the package it put together was fantastic, but similarly, for what it was, it wasn't really a leap forward and, unlike the PS2, it and its fans largely didn't claim it was, either. The 3DO, Playstation and Saturn were all somewhat backwards-looking in their technologies, with fairly limited 3D rendering capabilities which I don't think can in any of their cases be considered to have prompted anything like a technological revolution which pushed past computing technologies (though the Saturn gets an award for being even more architecturally obtuse and confusing than any computing technology of its day). The N64 seems to me to have the most believable claim to genuinely pushing forward technologies not available to even the computing market, as when the machine was still in the design stages, it was indeed something we hadn't seen yet, anywhere, in both feature set and (as we eventually learned) in real world performance. It might well have successfully outpaced in features and speed everything else of its time too, had not Rendition introduced all the features which it bragged on the Verite and, subsequently, had not 3DFX added to that features list superior performance with the Voodoo months prior to the N64's hitting the market. If the N64 had come out months prior to, rather than months subsequent to the Voodoo revolution (although its arguable ATI and Rendition would have made it happen on there own if 3DFX didn't come along as the Rage II and Verite possessed everything but the Voodoo's speed), it would have been in reality what the PS3 claims to be in Sony's current hype. That is to say, a gaming machine that is better than everything in its rendering capabilities. As it is, the PS3 (or conceivably the Xbox 360, but this seems more doubtful) has the opportunity to be the first, but we'll just have to watch and see.

No, indeed, you missed the chief thrust of my post, which regarded the funding of a live dev team providing and supporting updates and gameworld events. Servers and bandwidth may get cheaper, but dev teams don't. If I were satisfied with a static gameworld which does not develop over time then a "one time" fee might be a more credible funding formula, but indeed I'm not. So if an MMORPG proposes to create a universe where nothing ever develops or evolves or happens then we can nix the live dev team and say that, like Battle.net, product support and server infrastructure are probably minor enough costs that they can be bankrolled without too much worry by a large company such as Blizzard, but if this is really going to be a persistent, evolving universe, then development costs are ongoing, and are as much a concern after release as before. Of course, one might try to restrict the evolution of the gameworld to paid expansions, in order to support continued development, but that introduces a huge array of problems, including the potential for the forced stagnation of original gameworld regions and gameplay elements, the insanity of trying to keep legacy version players compatible with heavily updated expansion version players, the unnecessary stilting of product development in between expansions and, in a PvP game, the reality of paid expansions being imposed as matter-of-fact necessities in order for players to remain in play.

Well, many good fantasy writers, and most great fantasy writers, draw all their best ideas from mythology. However, I don't at all disagree with your feelings on Jordan. While I don't impugn any writer for drawing his great ideas from mythology, and therefore nor would I Jordan were that his problem, I certainly do impugn Jordan for having simply run out of ideas altogether, mythological or not. As far as his use of mythology goes, if anything, I impugn him for not using mythology enough. When he became starved for ideas, he might have taken the time to find direction for his protagonists in the popular mythological sources of fantasy writers in general, but he lost direction altogether. He had some ideas, and he's a sufficiently good writer, but he seems to have lacked the willingness or ability to edit those ideas down to a clean narrative framework and leave them behind when they'd been expended. If he had forced himself to compress every book in the series up to Book 6 into the size of one of Zelazny's Amber novels, then wrapped things up shortly thereafter, they would have made a lovely little fantasy series.

Me, I'm distrustful of any MMORPG that doesn't have monthly fees, because I want my MMORPGs to have a big, expensive dev team working on big, expensive monthly updates and tweaks not just months but years down the line, and a one time fee is not a credible funding format for a monthly service in perpetuity. Asheron's Call 1, to which I renewed my subscription recently, for example, has a very dedicated core group of players, but a virtually non-existent inflow of new players and, not having really had one for years now, cannot reasonably charge any significant price per unit upon purchase, or gain any substantial retail shelf space at this time. If not for monthly fees, it would be dead. Because of monthly fees, it continues. I feel and have always felt the same way about any other service which offered me a one-time fee which does not credibly translate into an appropriate funding format for services provided. I will consider identically and with similar criticisms any company which proposes to market a product whose revenue stream does not attempt to base itself on cost of operation.

Heh. I assumed you meant The Great Hunt... ...when I read the title. And I couldn't think how it might be viewed as racist

Dune, good film and good game, for his time was a real wonder <{POST_SNAPBACK}> But neither was Dune the first RTS game, nor was it an RTS game at all. Dune II was crucial to the emergence of the RTS genre, but Dune itself is a fairly inconsequential Adventure-Strategy hybrid, and isn't any more significant to the emergence of the RTS than any of ten or twenty other hybrid adventure or military strategy games from the eighties and early nineties. Most people consider the first RTS (simultaneously, first Multiplayer RTS) to be Herzog Zwei for the Genesis, which significantly predates both Dune and Dune II. It's nowhere near as historically important as Dune II which followed it later, but it does have the best claim to first of its kind.

I am strongly in favour of...umm, well, whichever's the cheapest. PS3...XBOX 360...Revolution...they'll all be powerful enough to do the job. The 360 will be out first, which is an advantage for it in a number of respects. It'll also probably be cheaper, which is another advantage. I don't care about the console. I just want my KotOR 3, presuming it's made by a quality developer such as Obsidian, and LA doesn't find a way to futz it up.

I'd go to Kashyyyk And enslave me some Wookies.

Jade Empire has done this with Charm, Intimidate and Intuition options tied to statistics, as well and it was nice how it did it. I am somewhat hesitant to wish for anything more complex than that though, simply because the developers (and voice actors) don't have an unlimited ability to script an infinite array of distinct resolution and still work them all into a cohesive plot. Also, the only thing worse than munchkinism is munchkinising (reducing to a statistical/strategic framework which the player will inevitably try to tweak and max out) social aspects of the game, so I'm leery of overcomplicated dialogue systems which reduce the social to the statistical.

Cheers to Barth for reviewing a bunch of chronically overlooked games! Nice to see those names on the list.

Yeah, indeed. For me, my current abstention from MMORPGs in general is premised on my formerly having been actively part of that kind of daily dedicated guild-focused MMORPGing culture (hitting my height of play in DAOC's first two years, though also having played EQ, AC1, AC2, SWG and others) and my not being willing to dedicate that much time again at present. But my rejection of the alternative, casual play, is also premised on that same experience: any MMORPGing that doesn't have a strong guild/clan focus, that doesn't have an active, meaningful social dynamic just bores me, because it pales pathetically in comparison to the depth of the experience one gets from playing an intense game amongst a dedicated, socially rich, cooperative PvP-focused bunch of people who know what they're doing, do it well, and care about and know (whether through love or hate) their friends and enemies in the gameworld.

Apathy is death. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Apathy is death. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Is it? Meh. I dunno. Who cares? ... <dies>

Aw, man - that charge was so sad. All those heroes so cowardly cut down by the chain gun. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'm rather embarrassed to say that I cried during that scene too. Also cried each of the times I watched Braveheart. Outside of movies, Eponine's death in Les Miserables tended to make me cry, whether on CD or in performance (saw the Toronto performance). I believe I cried during Raise the Red Lantern, too. None other occur to me at the moment.

One of the toughest things a designer has to do in any RPG which doesn't use the Amnesia Trope ("you wake up on a slab/in a dark room...") or a conventional D&D framework ("You've lived an uneventful life in the village of Whatsit in the land of Thingumy since your birth, but you long for adventure. One day you set off...") is acquaint the player with his own character and his history. When this is done effectively, it's these days often done mostly through dialogue. Story boards like Icewind Dale and Jade Empire use are an option, but they're not ideal as a primary basis for storytelling, in an RPG. If you can tell the story while the player remains immersed in the gameworld, you should. These are, after all, games and not books, and if story telling can take advantage of the medium's strengths instead of ignoring them, we're the better for it. One of the best tactics for revealing character history without having to resort to the protagonist asking stupid questions he should already know the answer to, I find, is embedding bits of the protagonist's history in his own dialogue options. That is to say, the character need not even actually use a dialogue option for it to be part of the story. If the player reads the dialogue option which tells part of his story or explains something about his circumstance, the fact that he then makes another choice need not detract from its role in revealing the player's character to the player. My objection to most systematised dialogue engine concepts is that they would severely detract from the use of dialogue and dialogue options as a story-telling device. And all dialogue options, as I argue, are part of the story-telling dynamic. To systematise it is to remove some of the art from that story-telling in favour of dry automation, which I don't see as a benefit. I'm very much a fan of the use of player dialogue as a story-telling device, so I don't want to see it ruined. And I'm even moreso a fan of this recently more prominent use of protagonist dialogue prominently in story-telling. It's much better than depending on NPC dialogue for information, and often much more believable. That is to say, Protagonist: "I hate to have to ask this, but who am I?" NPC: "You're George Orckiller, the renowned slayer of evil from the eastern lands, come to the region of Hampstead to destroy an ominous presence that lurks here. Why the hell are you asking me this?" Makes a lot less sense than NPC: "Who are you?" Protagonist Option #1: "I am no one of your concern" Protagonist Option #2: (Draw blade and assume a fighting stance) Protagonist Option #3: "I am a traveller from far away. My name is George." Protagonist Option #4: "I am he who has come to rid this village of its affliction." Protagonist Option #5: "George Orckiller, renowned slayer of evil from the east, come to rid this region of Hampstead of the ominous presence that lurks here. At your service."

Yes, but Ben Stiller had to convince the producers that it was a real name (otherwise they were afraid of legal action due to the obvious similarity with the other word and the blatant attempt to circumvent good taste and the censors). They were able to find a butcher with last name Focker (I think he may have resided in Canadia), so the film went ahead. As for Gaylord, that is a strange one, although there was a Galen at my school, poor guy. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Gaylord Lindal, CEO of Viceroy Homes, is a fairly prominent Canadian businessman, and Wikipedia indicates there are at least three municipalities in the United States named Gaylord, as well as a Roman Catholic Diocese of Gaylord in Michigan.

Band: System of a Down Album: Mezmerize Song: Cigaro Love these crazy bastards.

Well, the danger wasn't really in the combination of fire and the fluorescent light tube. A fluorescent light tube itself is generally just some argon (an inert and completely harmless atmospheric gas which is all around us anyway) and a tiny quantity of mercury, which, while toxic, doesn't pose a threat unless ingested. Presumably, electricity was the killer here: the real danger was the combination of a combustible liquid (petrol) with the powering of the arc light contained within the fluorescent tube, engineered to produce an extremely intense spontaneous burst of electrons to ionise the light's ballast and illuminate the light, or, in this case, extremely quickly ignite a significant quantity of gasoline.

Or roleplaying the part of the younglings. I say Anakin didn't murder them. That's just people rushing to judgment. It was probably just a series of unfortunate light saber accidents.

The latest news on the pre-rendered E3 demos: None of Sony's E3 demos were run on PS3 hardware, as the graphics chipset isn't even finished. This on top of Microsoft's Xbox 360 demos running on a Powermac G5 and Nintendo running nothing at all makes for a pretty depressing display from all parties. At least Nintendo was the most honest, since they didn't pull make believe hardware out of their ass and claim to be running demos. I prefer "we got nothing" to being thrown a pile of garbage and being told to sort through it myself for anything that isn't just made up crap.

The mystery thickens.. or does it? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It's certainly odd. I haven't read any article which propose a reason for their having used gas in the sabers. I can't imagine what the logic could have been. Filling the fluorescent light tube with a liquid should prevent the tube from "lighting up" at all, as the tube's phosphorescence is dependent on liquid mercury, subject to an electric current, achieving its gaseous state and emitting (invisible) photons which illuminate the phosphors lining the tube. Only the "outside" of the tube emits light in the visible spectrum. The ionised mercury simply emits UV to hit the phosphor lining and create visible light. The entire process should be disrupted by the tube containing anything other than a small amount of instantly ionised gas and a tiny quantity of liquid mercury (or functional equivalent). Regardless, opening a device containing a toxic liquid which is meant to be excited as a highly toxic gas and filling said device, one of whose primary functional goals is to create as massive an arc of electrons as quickly as possible (to 'start' the light) with combustible liquid goes beyond stupid to the absolutely mind-boggling. It's as if they pursued danger wherever it could be found in the modern home. One wonders that they didn't manage to work swallowing WD-40 and being showered in Drano into this somehow, too.

In other words, they made custom giant glowsticks? But those arent normally combustible/flammable? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> They aren't normally filled with highly combustible liquids and an electrical current, either.

In my orgasmic ideal world, Creative Assembly and Firaxis would join forces to create a game with all the epic battles of a next-generation Rome: Total War, but all the empire-building finesse of a next-generation Alpha Centauri. Well...I can dream...