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Bang! Howdy Goes Beta
GameSetWatch relates the launch of Bang! Howdy's Beta. The new game from the folks who made Puzzle Pirates even has a Beta blog. From the article: "The game ... is 'a hybrid between turn-based and real-time strategy gameplay, and is played in short fast-paced rounds', looks very neat indeed - and it's going to be 'play for free, pay for items' when it launches, just like a whole bunch of Korean titles like Kart Rider that have been super-successful. Also, damn, it's steampunk!"
Puzzle Pirates (http://puzzlepirates.com/) has been a successful and fun project for Three Rings; it's targeted a lot of social gamers, avoiding the wailing speedmongers who powerplay on WoW and go around ganking. The lack of vast rewards for time-in-game disinterests those who want to be ahead of everyone else; by leveling the playing field to depend significantly on skill, they've made it a much more interesting game to play. The graphics are amusing; the cartooniness again pushes away powergamers. As a result of this the community as a whole is more social and interactive. They've filled a nice niche in the market, and made it work well. Hopefully Bang!Howdy will follow the same vein in a different style; if the developer/community interaction is as good as it has been for Puzzle Pirates, this should be a great game.
Powerlevellers, gankers, and those who believe that the best games request and require top-spec hardware need not apply. It won't interest you anyway, and it gets rid of you for the rest of us to enjoy better.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
You know, I had a tough time figuring out what that headline was supposed to mean...
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
Ian McConville, the artist of the webcomic Mac Hall recently started working for Three Rings, the company who made these games.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Is this in any way related to "Bang!" the card game, from mayfair games?
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/3955
Dunno about him, but I'm in my mid-30's, and, no, I'm not still in college, nor fresh out of it. So are my co-workers that play MMOs. Two even have kids. And, you know, they can still play a MMO and earn their levels and items the honest way.
"Time investment" is something you don't have to do in 16 hour bursts. Just because it takes, say, 200 hours to get to level 60 (just a number pulled out of the hat for example sake), it doesn't mean you're in a race to cross that 200 hours line in the least days. Some kid will do it in 12.5 days at 16 hours a day, but getting there in 200 days at an average of 1 hour per day is no shame either. You _can_ get the same number of hours out of the game, see the same content, and do the same quests either way. I.e., from the point of view of actually playing the game and not just willy-waving about the score, there's still the same number of game hours to play, and still the same quantity of content to enjoy. So what is the problem if that content lasts you for more days, at whatever number of minutes per day you can afford to spend there?
So basically, since that's where that discussion started, I still see no excuse for buying items and gold for real cash instead. I can understand the economics of why that trade forms, but it's still essentially cheating in a multiplayer game, I still despise those who do it. I couldn't care what someone does in their single player games, but cheating against other players is the mark of the low life.
Doubly so if they're insecure enough to pay real money to cheat. I mean, geesh, at least the idiots with wall-hacks and aim-bots in CS just downloaded one for free, but actually reaching for the credit card to buy an un-earned advantage against some kid... geesh, how insecure can one get.
BTW, don't take this as a personal attack or anything. You've already said you play RTS instead. I can certainly respect that. I'm talking about those who just use the "but I don't have as much time as a 13 year old!" just as a blanket excuse to cheat against those 13 year olds. That's what I find lame.
And I see no point in even trying a game any more, if even their own business model is selling game items to idiots for money. If from the start the "competition" (for those who view it that way) is just an excuse to sell advantages to some contestants, then what's the point of even competing? It certainly won't prove skill, knowledge, even time investment. It will just prove who's willing to blow more RL cash, and I certainly have no wish to take part in that kind of a self-destructive competition.
I already know, for example, that in a certain buggy web-based game someone blew over 20,000 USD on getting in-game advantages. Roll that sum around in your head a bit. Can I compete with that kind of a money-blower? Yes. Do I see any point in it? No. I can think of far better ways to use that money. And I certainly have better things to do with my time than being the non-paying fodder for paying gankers in that kind of a game, too.
Because that's what those games invariably degenerate into, if they didn't outright start that way. When your main income source are the idiots willing to pay real cash for a +20 Sword Of Ganking or for a Level 3 Mech in a Level 1 Battletech-like game, guess which group does the game catter to? When you have to make a choice between (A) losing a non-paying Random J Newbie that's been repeatedly ganked right in the newbie area and (B)losing Lord L33tN00bKi113r who's paying good cash for the special ammo to gank the newbies with, guess which of them the devs end up bending over backwards to keep?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I think they share names (user IDs) with Puzzle Pirates.
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
For a "casual" player, PP was actually more friendly, since you could hop on a Navy vessel and just play one of the station puzzles (sailing, carpentry, bilging, navigation) without having to talk to anyone. After a while, they started making the land-based head-to-head puzzles free only on certain days. And to run a store or own a ship, you had to have a badge purchased with dubloons (the harder currency). It was easier to buy it for dollars than grind away to get enough of the light currency to buy dubloons at auction. The whole thing ended up being no fun.
In both games, you can buy new clothes with some of each type of currency. In PP, at least, clothing deteriorated, so if you didn't want to wear rags, you had to buy new clothing at intervals. Also, some colors were more expensive because of scarcer raw materials. The look of both games is cute, as ar the themes, but if you want a casual game, get Tetris or solitaire.
I would like the developers for making Bang! Howdy no fun right out of the gate, so I wasted almost no time with it.