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The issue of PC Gamer that’s just come out is one I’m uncommonly pleased with. In it, I get to:
Recount my horrible, agonising quest for a bent spade covered in shit in Fallout 3: Point Lookout (Now Playing) Champion about thirty of my favourite mods in a feature by me, Graham and John, and take what must be among the most inherently comic zombie dismemberment shots of my career (50 Essential Mods)
Finally vent my mounting exasperation with multiplayer games for being rubbish 50% of the time, and propose a few ways people could keep killing each other without anyone having to lose (Devil’s Advocate) Geek out about game engines, celebrating their increasing failure to look significantly better (Special Report).
Use the word ‘bat’ ten times in a single sentence about Batman: Arkham Asylum, which I liked for three reasons and resented for one (Review) Turn ninjas into forest animals by stabbing and beating them in Mini Ninjas, which has absolutely wonderful character profile videos and lets you use your hat as a boat (Review)
Write a script for the pilot episode of CSI: Azeroth, which was supposed to be about figuring out how wild animals came to possess money and forks, but went off the rails and turned into something else entirely (It’s All Over) It’s buyable (in Europe and the US now, it seems?) here. | ||
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Pentadact: I get paid a monthly salary, as do all our staff. Only freelancers are paid per article. I know some blog empires pay their full-time writers by the hit. Accordingly, their sites tend to be rapidly updated and predominantly lies.
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Is a sci-fi multiplayer shooter out this week, extremely like Battlefield 2142. Battlefield 2142 was awesome, and so is this. You literally dive into the battlefield from orbit, with no parachute, then pound each other with raucous guns and squabble over objectives. I like it because you can design your own class in a powerful and elegant way, choose where to drop down and angle your descent, and the dynamic missions that pop up are clear, fun and varied. Enemies get dynamic missions too, and in one round they were coming very close to capturing our intelligence. I’d died, so chose my custom Assault Sniper class, and picked their intel capture point to drop in on. I smacked into the ground just as the intel carrier reached the walkway leading to the capture point, and knelt there nailing him with sniper shots as he ran toward me until he buckled. It occured to me afterwards that I was the final boss in some AI dude’s epic quest to take our intelligence across this huge warzone. Sorry AI dude! Boss fights suck!
Aside: I got to see this game at an event in Texas once, and ran into the developers in the hotel the next morning, on my way out from breakfast. I asked them how they felt the presentation went, which is a stupid thing to ask developers because that’s exactly what they want to know from you. So they invited me to sit down and tell them. Previously I knew them only as the guys responsible for a FEAR expansion so drab I openly mocked it on this site (sorry!). But after my oat bran French toast stuffed with maple banana cream-cheese with them, I was left with the impression that they were smart, fun guys who play all the games I play and have most of the same loves and gripes about them. I’m really pleased to see that actually comes out in their game.
Is a film released in the UK this week about aliens living alongside humans in Johannesburg. It’s unusual in that the aliens are powerless: only the workers survived their accidental arrival, and they don’t have the wit to stand up for themselves. It’s also unusual in that the protagonist is both dorky and unsympathetic. He’s a smiling bureaucrat who goes about his unpleasant task with equal parts relish, cruelty and incompetence. The horrors that befall him, initially satisfying, soon become hard to watch, and the whole film threatens to become darker than its slightly flimsy premise warrants. Mercifully it stops short of that, and instead explodes in a giddy celebration of slapstick ultraguns and splattery comeuppance. The gritty unease of the first half sets off the geeky indulgence of the second satisfyingly, mixing moods and genres and smart and dumb in ways we rarely see, but should more often.
Aside: Mark Kermode said this week that all good sci-fi has to be a metaphor for something, make a point about reality. He’s an idiot. District 9 wilfully draws parallels to social rifts in Johannesburg, but like much good sci-fi, does it to add potency to its alien imagery, rather than say something about the source. You don’t need to replace black people with aliens for us to recognise cruelty and oppression. Is Bletchley Park, which became known in wartime as Station X partly because it was the tenth wireless communications station established, and partly because if they went around calling it Bletchley Park people might realise it was in Bletchley. It’s where the first programmable electronic computer was invented, not to crack the Enigma code but the Lorenz cipher, a much harder encryption that no-one seems to have heard of. It’s also where the war was won, a good two years earlier than it otherwise might have been, thanks essentially to mathematicians there being better at maths than the Germans thought anyone possibly could be. The ability to read communications they assumed were undecipherable was such an enormous advantage that the Allies had to pretend they didn’t have it. They’d send scout planes to locations they already knew contained German fleets, just to give the Germans a feasible explanation for why they were about to be destroyed.
Kim and I went there last weekend. It’s falling apart. They can’t afford to maintain it, and no-one’s willing to help. Some thieves stole a German Enigma machine from there a while back, wrongly assuming that the site of one of Britain’s greatest contributions to humanity would have government money to pay the ransom. They couldn’t. The thieves gave up and posted the machine to Jeremy Paxman, who returned it with what we must assume was an expression of some bemusement. Aside: This week the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown capitulated to an online petition by coder John Graham-Cumming for the government to apologise for sentencing the man primarily responsible for breaking the Enigma code to chemical castration for being homosexual. I don’t follow my own country’s politics closely enough to be conversant in the many reasons I should hate Gordon Brown, but the slimy, repulsive way he or his writers attempted to turn that apology into an excuse to boast, bafflingly claiming that he’s ‘pleased and proud’ to have to apologise for our country’s mutilation of its hero, is officially one.
More Films
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Inferno: I just watched district 9 and wow, the CG in that film is simply incredible. I thoroughly enjoyed the film too. Though, as you say, the stuff that befalls him and the populace of the alien district becomes harder and harder to watch. I was glad it changed into an overdramatic actiony silm with awesome special effects and alien technology. The best part was it didn't play out in the way I'd expected. It's also a LOT gorier than I expected it to be, just as a warning to anyone intending to see it.
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Levelling up is pretty much the heart of RPGs, because it does these cool things:
All this makes repetitive tasks feel worthwhile and even fun, which is particularly useful in a massively multiplayer game, because you don’t want players to get through all your content quickly, get bored and stop paying you a monthly fee. But it has some problems:
All of these bother me, but the first in particular is absolutely ridiculous. If Tim and I are playing World of Warcraft at the same time, I can’t kill level 80 bears with him because I’d get slaughtered, and he can’t kill level 26 bears with me because he’d destroy the challenge and gain nothing in the process. The two activities are functionally almost identical, we don’t mind which of them we do or even if we do something completely different, but the game can provide absolutely no way for us to enjoyably play together. So I hate levelling. Champions Online and City of Heroes get around this with a cool side-kicking system, where you can bump a friend up to your level for a bit. But it really just demonstrates that levels are meaningless anyway, and suspending them briefly shows how good life is without them. Champions has other level-related problems (I’ve run out of doable quests), and it’s that which got me thinking about what the perfect superhero MMORPG would be. This post is the first of a few about that. What I’d like to see is a system where content – zones, quests, groups of enemies, bosses – has no level. It would work like this:
Firstly, it means me and any friend can go to a zone neither of us have done and be on equal footing. Until between us we’ve done everything the game has to offer, there’ll always be some new challenge we can take on together, have fun and make progress. Even if we go to one that one of us has made progress through, the newer player can still take on one enemy at a time effectively. Talking to roBurky about this, he suggested the newer player could just generate less ‘Threat’ – so even in a large brawl, only one or two enemies would go for him, the others would concentrate on the more dangerous player. The second obvious benefit is that you can start anywhere in the world and the challenge will be appropriate to you. As well as the freedom that brings and the ease of joining friends with existing characters, it means that when you start a new character yourself, you can immediately be playing stuff you’ve never played before. Starting again is as fresh an experience as continuing. That’s particularly important in a superhero game, because there’s all sorts of fun stuff we can do with alternate characters made by the same player that I’ll get into. The third is that all new areas, enemies and quests added to the game after launch are relevant to all players. That spectacularly increases the efficiency of content creation: every little thing you work on makes every player of the game happier and gives them more and more varied stuff to do. The fourth is that it means anyone can fight anyone in PVP and have a chance. More experienced players will have a wider selection of powers, but late-game powers wouldn’t be outright better than your starting ones, just useful in different circumstances.
Aside from the problems fixed, it also builds on all three of the key reasons levelling is fun:
The biggest potential problem with it is the notion of getting one new power per major questline completed: depending on the number of powers and zones, it might need to alternate between new powers and improvements to old ones. Adding new questlines in free updates seems like it could take as much work as raising the level cap on all classes, but whether that’s significant depends on how the end-game works, and that’s for another post.
More Amateur Hour
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Pentadact: You'd still have a notional 'level', it just wouldn't translate to a massive power differential over someone with a lower figure. Max level would just be the number of content chunks in the world at launch. No objection to achievements, but the ultimate goal is always going to be getting every power your character can get.
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The posts I’m vaguely writing in my dashboard here are getting very long and game-designy, and I’ve done a lot of that lately. So now I’m just going to tell you about everything I’m playing at the moment.
Osmos: You are a blob, propelled by firing tiny chunks of yourself behind you. Hit a smaller blob and you absorb it, hit a larger one and it absorbs you. It’s a serene, slow and hypnotic game-ification of some of the most fundamental principles of physics, which at first makes it boring, but later transforms it into something beautiful. One branch of levels involves blobs with gravitational pull, and once you’ve got four of those bouncing around and you turn on orbit prediction, watching the curve of your future motion flex, curl and invert as you drift through the gamespace is an extraordinary glimpse of pure mathematics at its most disarming.
Civilization IV: Having played Civilization Revolution on the Nintendo DS enough to a) get Civ and b) get that this was a travesty of it, I finally felt less daunted by the full game. So far I’m getting the same absorbing satisfaction from it that I get from Galactic Civilizations, but it feels somehow watered down. It’s just as complex, sometimes more so, but potential sites for cities don’t seem to vary in quality anything like as much as planets do in Gal Civ, and so I’m less inclined to bicker over them. No-one really has anything I want in Civ, and I’m only really crushing them because winning by cultural influence is too dull. Batman: Arkham Asylum: Can’t talk about this, since I’m playing on PC and have reviewed it for PC Gamer. As a tip, though, I’ll say that everyone should try Hard mode once. Half-Life 2: Synergy: Graham and I are playing through the whole game in co-op with this – a co-op mod. It also supports Episode One and Two, which we’re hoping to complete around the time Valve at least say something about Episode Three. We just finished Nova Prospekt today.
AI War: Preposterous co-op space conquest game in which tens of thousands of ships clash over vast networks of up to eighty planets, each of which is as large as a conventional RTS map. I’m still in the tutorials, but the tutorials are good. Gratuitous Space Battles: Sort of like ‘Space Battle Manager 2080′: you design the ships and fleets but the battles are hands off. I like the concept, but the tutorial is five hundred and sixteen text-box interrupts that I am not even close to having the patience to read, so I have no idea how to play.
Team Fortress 2: In which I play a class I like right up until we need to win, when I switch to Soldier. Every now and then, though, you hamstring a Scout mid-air and all is right with the world.
Spelunky: I am always playing Spelunky. I’ve now completed it twice in my 1,000 attempts. It’s coming to Xbox Live Arcade.
Champions Online: I’m a level 16 Gadgeteer called Angel of Beth. The game is like City of Heroes after a design-flaw epidemic, and it’s a testament to City of Heroes that it’s still not half bad. I have a more specific post brewing about those two games, and a third imaginary one. | ||
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DoctorDisaster: I feel the opposite way about GalCiv vs Civ Civ. I bought GalCiv after reading your diaries and enjoyed it enough, but I found it didn't have whatever magic keeps me coming back to Civilization. I think it's partly that space makes for really dull terrain, partly that I don't really respond emontionally to GC's rival leaders, but mainly the micromanagement. Installing every single component on every single iteration of every single ship makes me feel more like a mechanic than a galactic overlord.
Certainly there's a good bit of red tape in Civ, particularly in the endgame, but at least you're dealing with [i]lordly[/i] minutiae. Generally I end up spending more time than I'd really like wrangling an excessive military once I've progressed to a more scientific phase of development. In GalCiv, however, those moments of tedium are almost always spent arm-wrestling budget screen bureaucrats over the exact apportionment of state resources. (Or, as I mentioned, playing interplanetary Lego-Ship-Builder-In-Chief.) And while certainly GalCiv makes different planets differ wildly from each other, Civvers get that fix from the strategic importance of the terrain your cities allow you to culturally control. Resources, roads, water features, and defensive hideouts are very important stuff to control. | ||||
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The new TF2 update is a bigger deal than expected: today Valve suddenly announced a huge list of balance changes and fun new touches, and also that the update was, like, out. We played around with it tonight, and the highlight by far is the new set of animations for the losing team running around after the match is won. At one point I broke into the enemy supply room and found a Scout, on his knees, just sobbing.
The new mode, King of the Hill, is excellent – exactly what I wanted Arena to turn into. One cap point, quick rounds, normal respawning. More than half the matches I’ve played, both on Nucleus and the snowy new map, Viaduct, have been preposterously close. The control point sometimes changes hands two or three times after both teams’ countdowns are at zero, just because it keeps getting retaken during overtime. This, or some other glitch, is causing the histrionic announcer to declare “Overtime! OVER time! OVERTIME! Oooover time!” frantically for the duration.
Oh, and I got my Shafted achievement for the Sniper – the one for killing someone with the taunt animation for the Huntsman bow. I’d cleverly fooled myself into thinking I already had it, because I have a screenshot of me stabbing a Medic through the neck with an arrow, but of course that was during the humiliation stage so it doesn’t count. Usually my quests for the taunt kills are more epic, but the Spy’s I got while cloaked – killing an Engy while his dispenser kept me invisible – and this one was just a spur of the moment decision. Terrifying nevertheless: sacrificing that gleeful certainty of killing someone who hasn’t seen you for the ridiculous risk of making yourself vulnerable, deep in enemy ranks, to achieve the same result in a more flamboyant way. Sorry VokKz. More scenes from update night:
Also, holy shit, I’ve been nominated for another Games Media Award. I don’t have to nag you to vote for me this time, since it’s not a public vote anymore: this year it’s decided by a ‘panel’ of a hundred odd industry judges. Evidentally one or more of this mysterious cabal nominated me, and Graham, and PC Gamer, so if you’re reading this: holy shit, thanks! If only I knew someone on this panel so I could show them an unrepresentative selection of my work and beg for their vote. Not whoring myself is weird, I don’t feel seedy enough. Oh, that was the other thing, I’ve been made a Games Media Award judge. Anyone want to trade votes? Ah, that’s better.
More Team Fortress 2
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![[N.O.O.B] Paradise is looking good!_0000](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3520/3826938421_3e682a3bf0.jpg)
Roadrunner: When you go into work on Monday, Tell Buck we love him for putting alltalk on the PCG, and I would send him some toblerone of gratitude if the internet accepted actual objects.
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I’ve been playing the inbred-hick themed Fallout 3 downloadable expansion. It’s the only one of them I’ve liked so far, but I haven’t tried Mothership Zeta yet – and it looks awful pretty. Full set is here, full set as fullscreenable slideshow is here.
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Pentadact: Caribou: forgot to answer. That's actually my Shish Kebab, but possibly due to a mod, a Tribe dude ran over and grabbed it. I'd ditched it because I don't enjoy fighting with it as much, even though it's more powerful than Fisto!.
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Oblivion’s main quest wasn’t unusually long, bad, or difficult, but it’s rare to actually find someone who bothered with it. The overbearing waffle of the introduction didn’t help, but I think it’s mostly that we just don’t want a single, long main questline in open world games. A primary story that’s the same for every player sits awkwardly in a game about freedom and customisation, and Oblivion’s sits more awkwardly still if you attempt it as the wrong class or at the wrong level. You could have no main quest, but that might feel aimless or trivial. Even if we don’t do it, the existence of a main quest gives purpose to the world. So what if the main quest was split up and woven into the guild questlines? People actually do those, because you can pick one that makes sense for your character and suits your style of play. In the case of Oblivion’s demons-invade main plot, each questline could have three key missions where the guild business brings you into contact with the invasion:
Luckily, the guild questlines are already structured into three neat groups of quests. These special missions could come between each group, like this: Fighter’s Guild
If you haven’t got far enough in any other guild questlines at that point to have encountered invasions during them, it’s not made clear to you at this point that you’ve only truly quelled a quarter of the demonic forces about to break through to this realm. Once you have, you’re sent to see Raminus Polus at the Arcane University who explains their mystic types had feared as much: that the prince you vanquished was one of many. From there, the other guild questlines would unfold as if they were your first, each woven into a demon invasion of a different part of Cyrodiil, each of which is ultimately stopped in a style befitting that guild’s unique talents. It’s a bit redundant to say things like that in vague terms, so specifically: Thieves’ Guild
Mage’s Guild:
Dark Brotherhood:
Dedicated players may ultimately do all four questlines, and a final Main Quest chunk ought to wrap them up and confer a final reward. But most people would probably play the same amount of Oblivion as they already do. The point is not to try to make players see more of the game’s content, but to turn missed content from a negative thing to a positive thing. Right now it’s a negative thing because people get bored with the long linear quest, or struggle with it because it’s not for their class, or don’t want to do the standard thing. They don’t know how much they’re missing, and they feel indifferent or even guilty about missing it. If it were split, the stuff you don’t end up playing is just paths not taken, and the more of them there are the more meaningful and personal your choice feels. Spending masses of time and money on content most players will never see is inevitable when making an open-world game. But if it’s structured in many strands rather than one long line, unplayed content can have a positive effect on even the players who don’t play it.
More Amateur Hour
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Taric: Main quest was awesome for me...And i probably wouldn't play Oblivion near as much without it
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Best not to know much about this film going in, so I’ll be vague.
It’s not a twist film; the quirk occurs early and almost casually. But it keeps dodging expectations by straying close to clichés is has no intention of treading in. That makes events feel natural rather than contrived, which is disarming. Also on the positive side, it’s awesome.
More Films
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Cpt.Average: Just finished watching it at 1.30am. This is an example of why I favour sci-fi as a genre (despite the 80% or so thats worthless) - good sci-fi is REALLY good and extremely unpredictable. It has a pedigree that allows for not always letting the good guys win, which raises the suspense potential immeasurably.
Thanks for the recommendation =) | ||||
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Fallout Girl
Murder Inc.
GalCiv 2 War Diary
The Best And Worst Of Mass Effect 2
Open World Games: The Good Stuff
SWAT 4: The Movie
Impression Of A Buddy
Don't Make Me Play Football Manager
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