Antipwn

It shouldn’t be a surprise to any of you who know my background that I have been very interested in the forthcoming game Dark Millenium: Online – the Warhammer 40k MMO being developed by THQ. While it’s true that the game is some way out and it’s far too early to jump to conclusions just yet, the message from Danny Bilson, Core Games Director (who has done most of the press stuff so far) has been somewhat incoherent.

Take for example this interview from Computer and Video Games on July 1st:

Speaking at E3 this month, Bilson said that the Vigil-developed online game is “very friendly to the WoW player” and even he as a WoW fanatic will be switching games.

“Have you seen it? The movie? I think it speaks for itself,” Bilson told CVG. “I’m a diehard MMO player myself – going back to EverQuest. I’ve spent lots of time in WoW. As a WoW fanatic, I’m going to go right to 40K as soon as it comes out. It’s very friendly to the WoW player.”

“The brand is fantastic – it’s so deep and so wonderful,” he said. “There’s just so much for us to play with. There’s more vehicles in our thing [than WoW], the combat’s completely different; you can get four guys in a tank and go.

“[40K] is stunning. It’s going to be a masterpiece. It’s been in development for three-and-a-half years already. It’s got two more to go. Look at it.” Go on then: Look at it.

“It’s sensational. I believe within the next six months we’re going to be showing playable sections of the game, not just a movie.” According to the THQ exec, the online game only needs to poach “a million” World of WarCraft players to be successful.

“They’ve got 14 million players! Gimme a million and I’m good! We’re real good at a million, right?” He added: “We don’t need everybody to migrate. We just need some of them – and I’m full confident we’re going to get them.

Two things that strikes me about that interview. Firstly I’m gong to be generous to him and assume that the ‘we only need a million players’ line was just playful banter that he didn’t actually mean. The history of such claims for other games is an unhappy one. Secondly, I couldn’t help but notice that he mentioned WoW a lot more than he mentioned his own product. Which is an unusual marketing tactic by any standards. I thought this was a one-off and perhaps reflected a certain single-mindedness on the journalist – I certainly remember talking about WAR to press who were basically only interested in framing the interview in terms of how that game stacked up to WoW. This week however at the Gamescom in Cologne, Mr Bilson was at it again, this time talking to Eurogamer.

Eurogamer: I’ve been excited about the Warhammer 40K MMO for a long time. When will it be out?

Danny Bilson: A couple more years. It really is about two years out.

Look, there is an 800 pound gorilla out there called World of Warcraft, which is a fantastic MMO that’s going to get updated with Cataclysm soon and drive a lot of people including myself back into it.

I’m a big MMO fan and player. I’ve played EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, I’ve got a few level 80 characters in WOW. Now, imagine that the people making Dark Millennium Online are all a bunch of guys like me, who love WOW and the expansions it’s had along the way.

We all say to ourselves, ‘We’re not going to get all the WOW players to move to 40K.’ 40K has its own unique coolness and edge. And that edge and glorious gore is not going to appeal to everybody. It appeals to you and I.

But what I know about our 40K game is that if you’ve played WOW you’ll be able to pick up and play this instantly, and you’ll find all these things that feel like upgrades, in a way.

Wait.  WoW again? Sure I guess it’s a reference point for the industry and he’s certainly right to describe it as the ’800 pound gorilla’ of the scene but really, could you, y’know, talk a bit about 40k online rather than WoW for a change?

It has a lot of the same qualities of WOW in terms of ease of use and how the interface is. I want to say that if you play WOW, you’ll be able to jump into Dark Millennium Online really easy.

But you won’t be able to be a Space Marine right away, because that’s a very unique class, if you know the universe. The road there is a great road, and they are in the game.

WoW once again. Man can this guy stop talking about the competition. Seriously Activision Blizzard can afford their own PR guys and.. hold on for just one moment. Run that past me again.

But you won’t be able to be a Space Marine right away, because that’s a very unique class, if you know the universe.

In a Warhammer 40k game ‘you won’t be able to be a Space Marine’ straight away? What the hell? The single most iconic thing about the IP, the poster-child for the entire setting, the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when you say Warhammer 40k isn’t going to be playable at launch?

Scott Jennings said it best so I’ll just point you at his rant here.

Dear THQ, please don’t make this suck. Also please stop talking about WoW and tell us about your game instead.

Recently in Germany the perennial topic of ‘killerspiele’ (violent video games) has been reopened. This time the trigger event was the Winnenden shootings where a troubled teenager went on a rampage at his school. Following this, there have been rumblings in the legislature that Things Should Be Done.

This isn’t a new thing in Germany, some years ago (after a similar incident in Emsdetten) the topic was raised but quietly dropped again after many German developers advised that they would leave Germany if this law came to pass. Now we are in an election year, the Winnenden massacre has created a lot of media frenzy over the issue of violence in culture and there are strong calls from many quarters to be seen to do something. And so now the German Congress is considering a law that would make it illegal to develop or distribute these games in Germany. There’s a good chance that nothing will come of it, but the fact that it’s even being discussed in such terms should be worrying.

To be clear, these aren’t simply media soundbites from off-the-cuff interviews with fringe politicians, these are serious policies put forward by senior state ministers.

In the interests of full disclosure I should point out that I work for a German developer working on what would be classified as a ‘killerspiel’.

The argument that’s being used is that the people who do these horrific acts often play violent games and so there is an unspoken causality made between the two events. The assumption is that playing violent video games either makes ‘normal’ people into violent killers or it makes disturbed people more likely to externalise their feelings and become violent. Additionally some of the more… excitable… elements of the press are performing he usual hand-wringing ceremony and asking ‘but what about the children?’ as if Counterstrike (which is the most often referenced game in this debate) has the power to turn rosy faced cherubs into remorseless psychopaths.

Let’s deal with the first point. People who find violence attractive are attracted to violent entertainment. This shouldn’t be news to anyone. If you like hurting people, you are likely to enjoy games or films where people get hurt a lot in graphic ways. Somehow this fairly self evident piece of analysis gets turned around by magic logical leaps to ‘violent entertainment is enjoyed by violent people therefore anyone who enjoys violent entertanment is a psychopath.’ This is clearly false but it is at the heart of the argument being used against our games.

To be clear, I think that there is truth in the claim that constant portrayals of graphic violence have a desensitising influence, but how much that is has been a topic of several studies with no clear answers as yet. In any case the base assumption that bad people won’t go on shooting sprees if they never get to play GTA or Counterstrike is clearly absurd.

Secondly the ‘why are our children being exposed to this’ argument. Short answer, ‘Because you are a terrible parent’. I look forward to the day when the generation in charge have grown up with video games their whole lives. At that point we’ll finally bury this pervasive misunderstanding about games in general. Politicians assume that computer games (because they are games after all) are targeted at children and so when they are confronted with a game that is very much unsuitable for children they naturally question why this is allowed to happen. To them it is like putting a chainsaw rape scene in a Disney movie; it’s a fundamental paradigm clash.

Games are entertainment (or art if you must), and like all entertainment choices they are tailored for different demographics. The sooner that this is absorbed the better.

So what is to be done? Well, firstly consumers (especially parents and politicians) need to become more aware of the various ratings systems and how to use them to make informed decisions. PEGI in Europe and the ESRB in the US both provide clear and unambiguous guidance on any rated title. People need to pay attention to these. Retailers need to be better at restricting sales to underage customers and in helping parents make an informed choice. Yes I appreciate that this is unlikely to happen without at least some state coercion. Finally, people who need help need to be identified and treated before they become a problem. This means better resources for parents, teachers, colleagues and friends to spot the signals and provide assistance. There have always been crazy people who did terrible things well before we had computer games or movies or heavy metal music or books or whatever. The sooner that we can help these people, the less often we’ll be having this debate.

Looks at date.

Looks at datestamp for the last post here.

Yeah I know.

Anyhow, I’ve been super busy and in fact still am super busy. I’m off to Dreamhack tomorrow which will be fun in new and exhausting ways. Then I’m back in the office for a couple of days before gadding off again, this time to a field near Derby where I’ll be on holiday doing much the same thing that I do at work but with fewer creature comforts and without the whole ‘online’ thing.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk today about something I read in a magazine recently.

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I’ve been rubbish at updating recently I’m afraid. Partly it’s due to being enormously busy but mostly due to my propensity for being distracted easily. So let’s get the distractions out of the way first:

• Forumwarz
• Eve Online and Eve Poker.
• WAR Beta
• Guild meet up
• The Cult in concert

Yeah, I’m weak.
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And sticking it to him. It’s a relatively quiet time for the industry, all the big trade shows have come and gone, the line up for Christmas is pretty much now set in stone and the gaming news networks are wondering how to fill all the space they have between now and the avalanche of holiday releases. So as it goes, when news isn’t happening, one must make it oneself. Continue reading

Recently Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) published a white paper on their Station Exchange service. As can be expected this kicked off a fresh round of debate over real money trading in MMOs and also an interesting discussion on Raph Koster’s blog on the related topic of powerlevelling companies. I inserted my tuppence there but it’s not my home so I didn’t want to climb on the table and declaim too much. Here though, the furniture is less safe. Continue reading