Antipwn

The latest WAR newsletter dropped into my gmail yesterday and I skimmed through it quickly as I usually do – I don’t play any more but I keep an eye on what’s going on. The stuff about the imminent patch and Halloween event was all pretty predictable but then I saw this:

WAR Free Trial

Very soon, you will be able to use our unlimited trial offer. Now you can enjoy the trial experience and New User Journey for as long as you like!

On the VN Boards Andy Belford, a Mythic CM confirmed that the newsletter was correct but declined to clarify what the limits of the ‘unlimited trial’ would be. Popular speculation is that the unlimited trial will restricted to tier 1 and capital cities as that is the current trial experience.

WAR is certainly hurting for subs and this may bring a few new people in but conversely a lot of current subscribers may decide to just roll the trial and replay the first few scenarios over and over. This is a popular playstyle in both DAoC and WAR and I’m certain that the number of people who’d downgrade from a paid account to the trial is a non-trivial number.

I’m going to start off with a couple of caveats. Firstly I’ve only got to level 20 and so I’ve not yet tasted PvP or any of the higher level content. Secondly this isn’t intended to be a review of Aion so much as a discussion of the design. I’m not going to tell you whether I think you should buy this game or not, there are plenty of places to look for that kind of advice if you don’t have the ability to figure it out for yourself.

Continue reading

Firstly I’m going to start out by sending some props to Randolph Carter of Grinding to Valhalla. His mission is to interview as many MMO bloggers as possible and, last Friday he featured me. Many thanks to him for that and I found it all too easy to get lost in the archives of his site.

I was playing Aion over the weekend in the closed beta preview event. For what it’s worth I thought it was a very pretty game with a lot of promise (I only managed to get to level 10 and out of the newbie area so I never saw any of the higher level gameplay or any PvP). I felt that it was a very traditional MMO (in the context of a genre that’s still only a decade or so old) and that – flying aside – it didn’t seem to advance the genre at all. This seems to be a game that (graphical aspects aside) could have been designed ten years ago. I will almost certainly play it some more in the open beta and commercial release but I’m not sure how long the prettiness alone will keep me interested.

A lot of people have predicted that Aion will kill various other titles. The more excitable ones are saying it will kill WoW, others are saying that Aion’s release will be the deathblow for WAR. That got me thinking about ‘gamekillers’ and, to date I don’t think we’ve seen one. I remember working on DAoC when WoW was gearing up for release and the common wisdom held that WoW would kill our game. That didn’t happen and, if WoW can’t kill a game then I don’t think anything can. WoW didn’t even kill EQII which had the double misfortune of launching the week before WoW and of not being very good at launch. Even that one-two punch didn’t deliver a deathblow to the game and now, while EQII may not have been as huge as perhaps Sony hoped, there’s no doubt that it’s a very solid game that’s been turned around into a successful product.

Aion will certainly bleed some subscribers out of existing games and will take a chunk of the market share but I’m not going to predict any closures as a result.

Once upon a time there was a little company. It was very small and only had a very small amount of money. Despite this it had a good game that people liked to play. The company was happy that people liked the game and tried hard to help the players. Sometimes the players were unhappy and wanted more from the company and when this happened the company would try to see if it was possible. Sometimes it wasn’t possible and the players had to be told that it wouldn’t happen, sometimes it wasn’t possible to explain the reasons for this either and so the players would grow angry with the company. Still the game was good and people liked to play it. The people who ran the company sometimes made mistakes but they always tried to do the best thing.

Then the company got a new game, the new game was going to be even better than the old game and a lot of people got really excited. The new game was going to make everyone very rich and so the company was given a lot of money to make sure that the new game would be a big success. The company bought a shiny new office and lots of shiny new computers with shiny new employees to sit in front of them and work hard for the players. This shiny new office was across the sea from the old company office and the people in charge of the company stayed in the old office while everyone else travelled across the sea.

For a while everything was good. The new game looked very exciting and the company spent a lot of money telling people about it. Lots of people were hired to look after the new game and a lot of these people were very clever and knew a lot about how to make games a success. The people at the old office however became unhappy because they were not so important to the game’s success anymore. So they made sure that they made all the decisions themselves instead of leaving it to the clever people at the new office. They tried to make important plans which the clever people pointed out wouldn’t work but the people in charge didn’t listen. Then the plans failed just like the clever people said they would and the people in charge got angry.

‘Our plans are good!’ they said. ‘The only reason that they don’t work is because you don’t obey us. We are the clever ones not you and you should listen to what we say.’

And the clever people at the new and shiny office mostly stopped caring at that point and started looking for new jobs.

The End.

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.

The drama du jour is served up by the combination of Darkfall (srs bzns PvP MMO) and Eurogamer.net (mostly solid games news site). I’d imagine if you’re reading this that you are already likely acquainted with the affair but for those of you who may have missed it, the summary goes as follows:

• Eurogamer review Darkfall and give it a very unflattering review.
• Darkfall devs complain publicly about the quality of the review on their forum. Highlights of the complaint are that, according to their logs, the reviewer only spent 2 hours playing the game and most of that was in character creation.
• Eurogamer responds, standing by their reviewer and his review but offer to re-review it with a different staff member.
• Darkfall comes right back with another post in which they’re very clear that they don’t want insinuate that Eurogamer are lying but this is somewhat disingenuous as they all but state outright that they believe this to be the case.
• Finally, the whole event comes to a (temporary?) close when the Darkfall devs categorically refuse a re-review from Eurogamer. Their rationale seems to be a little patchy however, they claim they don’t want the game to be re-reviewed because the old review will stay up until the new review is complete, but of course if the game isn’t re-reviewed then the old review will stand regardless. It’s a puzzle.

The review, is of course very hostile and is apparently factually inaccurate in some areas, what’s interesting is that none of the meatier criticisms of the game are unique to this article. Tasos rails that the reviewer didn’t give it a fair shake of the stick and was clearly biased against the game, but there are no new things being said in this article that haven’t already been pointed out by other reviewers. While Tasos and the Darkfall fans are complaining about the minutiae, the takeaway from the article is hard to dispute. Is it accurate? Possibly not. Does it accurately convey Mr Zitron’s feelings about the game? Very probably.

Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about Darkfall particularly but rather the relationship between the gaming press and the industry they cover.

Continue reading

So Cuppycake asked a question that she thought would be controversial, namely ‘Are games designers who blog worth reading?’ Not particularly surprisingly (except to Ms Baribeau apparently), the answer was a resounding ‘depends’.

Now clearly I have a horse in this race as a games designer who blogs and so you should definitely be listening to me. It’s posited that there are 3 kinds of design blog (Scott Jennings adds a fourth in the comments):

1. Ivory tower theoreticians
2. Enthusiastic amateurs
3. Guys who know what they’re doing and show a good example

(Scott’s fourth category was ‘Guys who know what they’re doing but prefer to spew bile becasue it’s more entertaining than playing nicely”).

For what it’s worth the blogs I read regularly are all linked in the sidebar to the right and the vast majority of them are in category 3 with a few of Lum’s category 4s for the slow news days and you should read them too.

Once you’ve visited here of course.