Terra Nova

My Cup Runneth Over

Holy hellions, Batman, 2012 is off with a bang.

Too bad about SWTOR and the LEGO Universe, but Guild Wars 2 might actually ship this year, and there are some other exciting things brewing.  Tera Online might emerge unscathed from its legal machinations and make its promised launch date of May 2012.  Blizzard is making a 'casual' MMO (with product placements)...

But here's what I'm waiting for...

The Secret World (April 2012) - This one is exciting even among the 'I'm not an MMO person' crowd.  To me, it's like the game I've been waiting for.  Here's why:

• The lore is wide-ranging and accessible, if you're one of those people who has paid attention to mystery schools, secret societies, fairy tales, monsters, alien conspiracies, black ops, and the like.  Basically 'everything is true' in a rich 'what if?' environment.  Tied into history, popular culture, etc. 
• The game is set in the modern-day world, and takes advantage of all the amazing beauty of this planet, its cities and its citizens.  The details and how they are leveraged are really incredible-looking.
• There are threee factions - the Templars (England), the Illuminati (New York)and the Dragons (Seoul).  The initial experiences are very different depending on the chosen location.
• Visually STUNNING, based on the Dreamworld engine used for Age of Conan.  Feels like a quantum leap.
• The game takes an alternate reality (ARG) approach by embedding the game with puzzles that must be solved via research online.  Building information literacy, of course, and mimicking the skill development that all we digital denizens need. (BTW, here is a podcast I did recently on this topic...)
• Character classes are thrown away in favor of a flexible abilities system.  It works a bit like a card-based game like Magic: the Gathering - the player has the option of selecting 7 active and 7 passive abilities and can re-organize them at will.  There are also templates that allow the player to map abilities toward certain configurations (like the Monk, a healing/magic using hybrid).  But the player is never locked in.  So if I want to tank today and heal tomorrow, I can do that with the same character.
• The creation of characters seems to have some of the fun aspects of creation in games like City of Heroes/City of Villains.  Many of the characters portrayed in the trailers are female, too, and cute/powerful without the mega boobage and bare assed armor we progressive women balk about.  Clothing is customizable and stat free, but your abilities also progress with equipment and items.
• Players affect the environments via their actions.
• There are various mechanisms for rallying players into group pursuits.
• Quests involve exploration of the world to uncover what needs to be done, and NPCs lead players through the locations.
• The developers (Massively) are based in Norway and were also responsible for Anarchy Online and the Age of Conan.  The interviews make it clear that this game has been really well thought out.
• This one is for Ted - the algorithms for NPCs and monsters are based on population mechanics rather than respawning rules.  I'm not sure how that's going to work out, but it sounds very interesting.
• The learning curve is well managed with in situ introductions to the game mechanics, lore and skills.
• PvP is well supported.  Guilds are called 'cabals'.  Encounters involve all 3 factions.
• Quality writing and voice acting!  Cut scenes that I might actually watch!  Clever/funny dialogue! OMG!

Want more?  Check out the initial announcements at PAX 2009, or more recent trailers and interviews.  Register for the beta, if you haven't already.  Watch out for the government.

Also, don't forget that DiGRA (the Digital Games Research Association) is holding its semi annual conference in Tampere, Finland (where all the very cool kids are).  They need papers and reviewers, so get in touch!

Minecraft and Intellectual Property

Gamasutra just posted a rather longish essay of mine about Minecraft and what's wrong today with the intersection of games and intellectual property law.  Here's the link.  In some ways, I think I'm echoing Ted's criticisms of the new Star Wars MMORPG in the last post .  In short: the more games become like movies, the less interesting they become.  On the other hand, the more games let us express ourselves artistically and socially, the more interesting they become. 

One significiant problem, as I see it, is that the current trajectory that intellectual property law is pursuing is much more supportive of the the former (games on rails) than it is of the latter (games that let players become authors).

Star Wars: The Dead Republic

How did we get to the point that an online multiplayer game feels less alive than a single-player sandbox world? Like many of you, the past couple of months have been spent in Skyrim and SWTOR. A decade ago, Elder Scrolls games were large, empty spaces. They had many actionable items but still - the NPCs you encountered were rather quiet and mindless. You were the only person alive. But the genre of open-world RPGs has gradually added more and more life-like elements. Fallout 3 was an eye-opener for me. And now Skyrim, with conversing people, merchants on a budget, reputations. I've spent much time in that game just living there, poking around, taking a nap, getting up, seeing what's in that cave, knowing it was all there for someone to find and hey - why not me? That world feels much more alive than those games did 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, MMORPGs have made a turn for the hearse. SWTOR somehow feels dead. Rather than explore everything,  you get specific quest lines. You're on rails. You're instanced away from others. They still haven't solved the ancient problem with MMOGs - quests that don't actually change the world. SWTOR adds cutscenes and narrative for each quest, but eventually you pattern-match to it and realize that you're doing the same thing every time: Running out, killing 8 rats, interacting with four boxes, and bringing back the jewel. Over and over and over.

You can't just run where you want in SWTOR. They actually have a region map clearly showing that area A is over here and area B is over there; they exist on the same planet; they are within running distance of one another; yet when you try to hoof it from A to B, you hit an 'exhaustion zone' that will kill you. You're forced to get on the rails and ride there.

SWTOR has managed to do something very weird to its markets. Players don't do crafting, rather, you have a crew to do it. Sending the crew on crafting missions involves a simple click. Player labor input is minimal. Naturally, as a result, the net monetary proceeds from doing crafting are near zero (labor theory of value works here - zero labor input implies zero profit on sales of things labor produces). So the market feels dead.

Grouping and social activities are no better than other games, and perhaps worse. Warhammer and Rift made advances in terms of allowing legitimate peripheral participation; you saw some people beating down an instance, you auto-joined it. Not in SWTOR - you have to do the LFG holler, and I noticed that as I advanced in levels, there were fewer and fewer of those calls going out.

So, once again, there are parts of the experience that you can only get if you either bring friends into the world or work hard to make friends there. This makes for unpleasant surprises, like WoW's questline capstones, where you would solo 95% of the storyline only to find that you had to team up for the last part. Does that make sense? Either make it a solo game, where solo players can do everything. Or, make it a multiplayer game from the start, so there are social norms under which everyone feels completely normal meeting strangers and playing with them. With systems like WoW's and SWTOR's, you solo along as the path of least resistance until, YOU have to be the one who breaks silence and asks for help. Remember EQ? You'd wander into a zone and immediately shout "34 Cleric lfg." That's how everybody played. In today's MMOGs, somehow it's become like the junior high dance - everyone standing around against the wall, nobody dancing.

On top of this there was some serious design weirdness in my particular class (Scoundrel). Why they made the stealth class a healer, I'll never know. It seemed that difficulty was poorly balanced - you'd destroy everything easily and then suddenly would come a quest that was impossible. Talent tree for Scoundrel was odd - you got all these punching skills (Punching? Really? In a world with lasers?) and yet, I found my DPS was better when I ignored all my talent tree talents, sat back in cover, and shot.

SWTOR's big innovation was the addition of thousands of filmed cutscenes to the game. As in Mass Effect, you're watching a movie and playing some game during the breaks. If you love Star Wars, this does let you immerse yourself in the Star Wars universe. And this is an important, critical goal; I remember Raph saying this was his main goal in designing SWG: Let people live in the Star Wars Universe. Thing is, I don't love Star Wars all that much, and I don't really like watching movies. As I wander the latest version of that galaxy, I don't feel the world responding to my touch. It's got a hard-plastic feel. And somehow, Skyrim does not.

 

 

Movies Stink

I can't count how many times a casual social conversation has led to someone looking at me incredulously, blurting "You haven't seen [Movie X]? How could you not have seen [Movie X]? You have to see [Movie X]. I'll loan you my DVD. In fact, come to my house next week and we'll watch it." I have a stack of DVDs of "essential" loaned films that I have yet to watch. Not to mention "essential" TV programs and "essential" books. I'd like to take this opportunity and tell the world: No. I don't consider it essential at this point in my life to watch or read any particular narrative. I'm sick of narrative. The vast majority of "essential" narratives stink. Most of them are lies. A few are entertaining lies, fewer are entertaining and useful lies, a very small number - very small - are interesting, shocking, and true. Well, I've read or watched those, all three of them. The chances that Hollywood's offerings in the last 20 years constitute anything important for a contemporary mind are vanishingly small. Same for fiction, indeed, almost anything made to be looked at in the last generation of creativity. Largely a waste of time. So - please stop giving me this worthless homework.

Some of you may have noted that Hollywood keeps losing business. Others lament! and write soulful essays advising Hollywood on the road back. Phooey. Go away. I'm sick of stories.