Thousands of zombies aren't even an option. With the specs that have been demonstrated, they'll be lucky to get a half dozen animated meshes onscreen at once - PC or XBox.
The removal of Co-op, i'm guessing, is because the PC requires alot more compliance testing, and that takes time and money. On the console, there's only one hardware config - and that leaves you some breathing room to get fancy (when the publisher is aiming for a near-simultaneous launch).
That and XBox Live is broad-band only, meaning complaints about coop that boil down to latency/coherency issues are sidestepped.
I'd be surprised if there weren't a hack available for PC co-op shortly after release.
Myself, I'll have the xbox version or nothing. I already own an xbox, and I can't quite justify $400+ to update my rig just to play 1 game with a keyboard+mouse.
I suppose, that'd be 2 games, if we count the ever-delayed half-life 2. But that conveniently (for me) is also aiming to have an xbox release.
My point was that paying $10/mo is seen in the same light as $30/3mo for the consumer.
I'd thought that was implied by context, and I apologize if it wasn't so.
Clearly the publisher (NCSoft), doesn't have a problem with GuildWars' business structure - so whether or not they're concerned about their theoretical loss of $50k in interest is moot.
You can play without paying for anything, but the game is heavily mission-based. Ostensibly, the missions are what you're paying for. So, if you don't pay, you quickly run out of things to do. Paying for content in this way is effectively episodic peristent gaming.
This also leads to the interesting situation where early adopters for an 'expansion' might deem it 'broken', or 'crappy'. This could quite likely stunt the market for that particular expansion/episode. They certainly won't enjoy the automatic-upgrade that every Everquest player does for each new expansion from SOE. They'll have to earn their upgrades.
The PVP element seems to draw strength from the fact that non-payers will be able to compete against paying-customers, keeping population at critical mass for PvP encounters.
This requires that, expansions can't introduce 'phat lewt' in the traditional sense. If one gets appreciably stronger by acquiring an item/ability from paid-content, it'll imbalance any conflict with a non-paying customer (it's a pvp game). Imbalancing conflict with non-paying customers, in turn disincentivizes free players from sticking around, which will heavily diminish the viability of the 'free-play' option. Casual gamers won't likely hang out to be pummeled by paying customers with egregious PvP advantages. If they include phat lewt, their episodes become required to compete - essentially staggering the monthly into the episode fees. Paying $10/mo isn't economically different from paying $30 every 3 months.
And any reward that doesn't make the player appreciably stronger, isn't 'phat lewt' after all. So they're hanging their entire game on the idea that players will pay exclusively for the fun they get from playing the game, and not necessarily for the carrot at the end of the stick.
Fortuitously, their streaming content technology also doubles as convenient electronic distribution. This will help them keep costs (and thereby prices) down, and gives them more time and opportunity to hit fiscal viability.
Guild Wars is set up to simultaneously challenge the notions of electronic distribution, episodic content, and the traditional level-grind of the RPG genre all at the same time. It will certainly be interesting.
It reminds of the classiest 'garbage collection' design I encountered in early gaming.
Back in the day there was a frickin awesome game, Alternate Reality, published by Datasoft. Being an very old game, and having fixed memory limits, the developer had to keep players from hoarding too many items.
Thereby 'the devourer' was added to the game. It was a mean-and-nasty that would track down and attack the player. During combat, the devourer would eat random items from the player's pack.
The thing is, (unknown to me at the time) the devourer only came out when the player was getting dangerously close to the item limit.
Sure, you could eventually get powerful enough to fend one off before you lost an item - but another would always come.
It was just a real classy, practical design solution to a hardware limitation.
Though this has only tangential bearing on Dungeon Siege at best - Damn I loved that game.
(There were in fact 2 connected AR games, of a larger planned series. The City, and The Dungeon were the released games. I played primarily The Dungeon, and am only certain of the devourer in that context. I'm not certain if it was present in The City.)
There's a fairly recent console game, State of Emergency.
The Gov't/Corporate corruption has gone over the top, and the people are in a state of half-revolution. Mostly this manifests in their simply running around the mall/downtown area/etc, with occassional looting, and various street gangs laying claim to random turf. And naturally the gov't gestapo-esque enforcers.
The camera/controls for that game are more than a little amaturish, and the gameplay pretty repeptitive and dry. Overall it's not a very good game, imo, but it comes pretty close to what you were describing. (though with meatspace law-violations by the populace).
Playing through DX2 I did actually pause the game once or twice to actually think about which way I wanted to go about things. Kill the scientist, or just take the weapon?
I was a little disenfranchised when I started to replay the game and noticed that almost none of the choices had any real effect on the development of the story.
Still, it did make me think a bit. At least initially.
Even though the ridiculous claim isn't backed up whatsoever, let's grant them the benefit of the doubt (undeservedly) and say that there is a correlation between virtual violence and emat-space violence.
Well guess the f* what? Correlation does not equal causation.
If you want to prove something - you tend to need this thing we call evidence. There isn't a correlation between smoking and lung cancer -- there's a direct causal link between smoking and lung cancer. And that casual link is backed up with peer-reviewed, reproducible, scientific studies.
Not half-cocked editorials. Not half-witted armchair social commentary. and not contrived anecdotal evidence.
I bet that most people, given means and plenty of time, will do stupid rather than smart things.
Because retirees are known to be self-destructive?
People who are going to dumb things are already doing them. Your logic is akin to the logic used against the repealing of prohibition: with access to alcohol, the whole of society will become drunken bums.
That didn't happen either.
I'm pretty cynical - but even I don't think that anyone is doing 'smart things' right now, simply because they lack the money and time to do dumb things.
Their development tools (environment, compiler, etc) and libraries (TCP/FS/etc) have worked on PowerPC chips for years. The only technology they'd have to create, is implementing the DirectX runtime libraries for their new hardware and embedded OS.
And they'll have to do that anyway to adapt ATI's custom hardware/drivers to the particulars of their box.
XNA is, imo, a larger-scope embracing and extending of the existing trend. Instead of just having a development base that eases porting between the PC and XBox - why not make a development base that can theoretically extend to the Mac, PDAs, handhelds, phones, or even other dedicated consoles? (E.g. primarily the raft of planned embedded game-playing machines in TVs, PVRs, etc - that intend to play PC games, without PC overhead)
The current level of 'portability' is already there for their neXtBox itself. They will be using their familiar (and top-shelf) dev studio and libraries, and will be implementing DirectX.
XNA is just a way to extend that ease of portability to other markets.
Once again, cold fusion is championed by someone who's not a nuclear physicist.
Something about a patent clerk and theoretical physics seems like it'd be appropriate here...
Honestly, I'm as skeptical as you are of cold fusion. I just don't think the messenger has much of a bearing on the message.
Particularly since a CS/EE touting cold fusion is merely written off as 'eccentric' - whereas a nuclear physicist would be putting his career on the line for merely suggesting it isn't cracked.
With the current advertised rate of inflation in SWG, I doubt it'd take much time at all to buy a starship.
The problem I see, is the divergence between MMO -RPG and MMO -Space Combat Sim.
Frankly, I don't see twitch combat on the MMO scene working out to well, even on broadband connections. (and most gamers don't have those). Witness WWIIonline's 64 unit visibility limit, and the all-too-exploitable client-side hitscan of Planetside.
And any 'slowing down' of combat to appease technical reality is going to turn off those outside gamers. Not to mention SWG's trademarked open-ended play - which is quite a departure from traditional space shooters, and not a taste that everyone has acquired.
Surely it'll pull in quite a few new gamers, I just don't see them staying in significant numbers.
Similarly with WoW actually. Sure, "it's Blizzard" so it'll pull in people who've never played a massmog. But that doesn't mean those new gamers will necessarily convert into subscriptions.
But of course, this is all armchair prognostication. I'm just guessing based off past performance, independent of even considering the individual quality or situation of MMO expansions.
If you told me EA totally borked up the design of The Sims Online 6 months before it released, or that Mythic was going to tick off its playerbase with it's Trials of Atlantis expansion -- I wouldn't have believed you. But that happened.
At least your WOW subscription guesses are reasonable. Most people keep throwing around 500k - 1m... and everytime someone suggests numbers that large it turns into a joke.
My only point of contention with your prognostication is: expansions don't bring in new gamers, never have.
They can bring back gamers who cancelled recently - but rarely do they retain anyone they bring back. They bring a quick surge from former players who give it a shot - and they retain players they haven't yet lost. Their largest effect is stalling the hemmhorage of players who have seen/done everything and are getting bored.
And Warhammer Online is going to live or die based on its ability to pull its audience from European gamers (the way Lineage2 lives or dies based on its Asian success). It has a distinctly European 'flavor' (like all Games Workshop properties) and for the most part European gamers are under-serviced with commercial persistent worlds.
No need to recall correctly. There's an easy experiment to prove it, that you're probably already performing at your desk.
It's called the old 'chilling a beverage with ice cubes' experiment.
If the melting of the arctic ice were going to flood the world, then the melting of the ice in your beverage would flood your desk. (or at least cause an appreciable rise in the waterline -- you get the point)
As you point out the reasonable questions regard the effects of global climate change on the gulf streams, current world breadbaskets, storm severity/frequency, and water level change due to melting of the antarctic ice (as that ice is currently on land).
Short of having the greatest employers in the known world, anything not on paper will almost certainly never happen.
Who knows, your employer may even/intend/ to give you that big raise or promotion 6-12 months in. But shit happens. And if, for whatever reason, his budget is getting scrutinized - your 'promise' is the first thing to go.
Like the parent poster, I've left a handful of jobs that never followed through on promises. Sure, most people don't have the freedom in this market to drop a job on principle anymore. But never think for a second that 'promises' mean anything.
He acted primarily as a broker. He bought items, he sold items. Whether he played for enjoyment in between is up in the air.
I don't believe he was selling any items he personally farmed, or buying/selling for the benefit of any particular in-game character.
He also contained all his trading to the UO economy. Having selected EQ, or even several of the 100k+ club - I'm sure he could have at least doubled that take.
It was an economic experiment to see if he could make more as a virtual property broker, than as a professional journalist.
As for buying items as a form of cheating-- that has been endlessly debated. External markets to in-game trading weren't a design consideration for UO. Though some people arguably are playing for profit, rather than fun.
But how many blockbuster successes were licensed properties?
GoldenEye is certainly the only one that's universally loved that I can think of off-hand. And honestly, I don't know how well that one sold.
It being a licensed property, its success didn't result in Rare/Nintendo being able to parlay that into a sequel for themselves, or leave them with a franchise they could sell/lease.
Examples of wildly successful original properties on the other hand, are plentiful. And all of them left their respective developers/publishers in a position to further capitalize on sequels, tie-ins, cross-promotions, toys, film rights, etc.
While smash successes of original properties certainly being in the minority, their investments are smaller, and profit margins larger, than for licensed games of the same type/scale/genre.
I think when the potential profitability of an original property is added to the equation, 'inventing' is on a bit more even footing than licensing. Is the success rate of licensed properties really that much higher, that the increased costs are worth risking?
As you point out, the core challenge has always been good game design. But licensing doesn't make game design any easier, it just makes marketing easier.
If anything, licensing introduces as many game design challenges as it might alleviate. The higher investment (buying the license) makes publishers much more risk-averse (more apt to cut novel/innovative features), and property holders typically dictate/hold creative check over tone, story, character actions, genre, etc.
Licensing seems to do well for generating good sales off proven designs. And with a few notable exceptions, it doesn't even appear that publishers are trying to create innovative play with licensed properties.
Slashdot Mirror
Thousands of zombies aren't even an option.
With the specs that have been demonstrated, they'll be lucky to get a half dozen animated meshes onscreen at once - PC or XBox.
The removal of Co-op, i'm guessing, is because the PC requires alot more compliance testing, and that takes time and money. On the console, there's only one hardware config - and that leaves you some breathing room to get fancy (when the publisher is aiming for a near-simultaneous launch).
That and XBox Live is broad-band only, meaning complaints about coop that boil down to latency/coherency issues are sidestepped.
I'd be surprised if there weren't a hack available for PC co-op shortly after release.
Myself, I'll have the xbox version or nothing. I already own an xbox, and I can't quite justify $400+ to update my rig just to play 1 game with a keyboard+mouse.
I suppose, that'd be 2 games, if we count the ever-delayed half-life 2. But that conveniently (for me) is also aiming to have an xbox release.
My point was that paying $10/mo is seen in the same light as $30/3mo for the consumer.
I'd thought that was implied by context, and I apologize if it wasn't so.
Clearly the publisher (NCSoft), doesn't have a problem with GuildWars' business structure - so whether or not they're concerned about their theoretical loss of $50k in interest is moot.
The business model is very interesting.
You can play without paying for anything, but the game is heavily mission-based. Ostensibly, the missions are what you're paying for. So, if you don't pay, you quickly run out of things to do. Paying for content in this way is effectively episodic peristent gaming.
This also leads to the interesting situation where early adopters for an 'expansion' might deem it 'broken', or 'crappy'. This could quite likely stunt the market for that particular expansion/episode. They certainly won't enjoy the automatic-upgrade that every Everquest player does for each new expansion from SOE. They'll have to earn their upgrades.
The PVP element seems to draw strength from the fact that non-payers will be able to compete against paying-customers, keeping population at critical mass for PvP encounters.
This requires that, expansions can't introduce 'phat lewt' in the traditional sense. If one gets appreciably stronger by acquiring an item/ability from paid-content, it'll imbalance any conflict with a non-paying customer (it's a pvp game). Imbalancing conflict with non-paying customers, in turn disincentivizes free players from sticking around, which will heavily diminish the viability of the 'free-play' option. Casual gamers won't likely hang out to be pummeled by paying customers with egregious PvP advantages.
If they include phat lewt, their episodes become required to compete - essentially staggering the monthly into the episode fees. Paying $10/mo isn't economically different from paying $30 every 3 months.
And any reward that doesn't make the player appreciably stronger, isn't 'phat lewt' after all. So they're hanging their entire game on the idea that players will pay exclusively for the fun they get from playing the game, and not necessarily for the carrot at the end of the stick.
Fortuitously, their streaming content technology also doubles as convenient electronic distribution. This will help them keep costs (and thereby prices) down, and gives them more time and opportunity to hit fiscal viability.
Guild Wars is set up to simultaneously challenge the notions of electronic distribution, episodic content, and the traditional level-grind of the RPG genre all at the same time. It will certainly be interesting.
And she's just going to assume that the $600 LCD monitor is a reasonable replacement?
Yeah, I think the reason gamers didn't watch Game Over was because it was trying too hard to be accessible to the non-gaming community.
The result was basically a generic family sitcom with a few game-related background jokes.
It just wasn't a good show.
Pardon me if I'm wrong - but wasn't Total Annihilation itself a 3D engine?
perhaps you meant update the graphics to a newer 3D engine?
It reminds of the classiest 'garbage collection' design I encountered in early gaming.
Back in the day there was a frickin awesome game, Alternate Reality, published by Datasoft. Being an very old game, and having fixed memory limits, the developer had to keep players from hoarding too many items.
Thereby 'the devourer' was added to the game. It was a mean-and-nasty that would track down and attack the player. During combat, the devourer would eat random items from the player's pack.
The thing is, (unknown to me at the time) the devourer only came out when the player was getting dangerously close to the item limit.
Sure, you could eventually get powerful enough to fend one off before you lost an item - but another would always come.
It was just a real classy, practical design solution to a hardware limitation.
Though this has only tangential bearing on Dungeon Siege at best - Damn I loved that game.
(There were in fact 2 connected AR games, of a larger planned series. The City, and The Dungeon were the released games. I played primarily The Dungeon, and am only certain of the devourer in that context. I'm not certain if it was present in The City.)
There's a fairly recent console game, State of Emergency.
The Gov't/Corporate corruption has gone over the top, and the people are in a state of half-revolution. Mostly this manifests in their simply running around the mall/downtown area/etc, with occassional looting, and various street gangs laying claim to random turf. And naturally the gov't gestapo-esque enforcers.
The camera/controls for that game are more than a little amaturish, and the gameplay pretty repeptitive and dry.
Overall it's not a very good game, imo, but it comes pretty close to what you were describing. (though with meatspace law-violations by the populace).
Playing through DX2 I did actually pause the game once or twice to actually think about which way I wanted to go about things. Kill the scientist, or just take the weapon?
I was a little disenfranchised when I started to replay the game and noticed that almost none of the choices had any real effect on the development of the story.
Still, it did make me think a bit. At least initially.
Gak.
Vehemence still applies, fairly rude poke at Mexico's crime rates retracted.
...with it's real crime rates.
Even though the ridiculous claim isn't backed up whatsoever, let's grant them the benefit of the doubt (undeservedly) and say that there is a correlation between virtual violence and emat-space violence.
Well guess the f* what?
Correlation does not equal causation.
If you want to prove something - you tend to need this thing we call evidence. There isn't a correlation between smoking and lung cancer -- there's a direct causal link between smoking and lung cancer. And that casual link is backed up with peer-reviewed, reproducible, scientific studies.
Not half-cocked editorials.
Not half-witted armchair social commentary.
and not contrived anecdotal evidence.
Furthermore, American obesity rates have no correlation to economic status.
American obesity is an overall cultural problem that revolves around a lack of even rudimentary exercise, and portions that far exceed need.
Who'd have ever guessed that it would be Microsoft of all companies to get a multiplayer gaming service right?
Voice Comm, no HPBs, friends lists, out-of-game invites, etc.
Xbox Live is a glorified matching service that's worth paying for. There really is no higher praise.
I bet that most people, given means and plenty of time, will do stupid rather than smart things.
Because retirees are known to be self-destructive?
People who are going to dumb things are already doing them. Your logic is akin to the logic used against the repealing of prohibition: with access to alcohol, the whole of society will become drunken bums.
That didn't happen either.
I'm pretty cynical - but even I don't think that anyone is doing 'smart things' right now, simply because they lack the money and time to do dumb things.
I don't know if Microsoft even needs XNA.
Their development tools (environment, compiler, etc) and libraries (TCP/FS/etc) have worked on PowerPC chips for years. The only technology they'd have to create, is implementing the DirectX runtime libraries for their new hardware and embedded OS.
And they'll have to do that anyway to adapt ATI's custom hardware/drivers to the particulars of their box.
XNA is, imo, a larger-scope embracing and extending of the existing trend. Instead of just having a development base that eases porting between the PC and XBox - why not make a development base that can theoretically extend to the Mac, PDAs, handhelds, phones, or even other dedicated consoles? (E.g. primarily the raft of planned embedded game-playing machines in TVs, PVRs, etc - that intend to play PC games, without PC overhead)
The current level of 'portability' is already there for their neXtBox itself. They will be using their familiar (and top-shelf) dev studio and libraries, and will be implementing DirectX.
XNA is just a way to extend that ease of portability to other markets.
Once again, cold fusion is championed by someone who's not a nuclear physicist.
Something about a patent clerk and theoretical physics seems like it'd be appropriate here...
Honestly, I'm as skeptical as you are of cold fusion. I just don't think the messenger has much of a bearing on the message.
Particularly since a CS/EE touting cold fusion is merely written off as 'eccentric' - whereas a nuclear physicist would be putting his career on the line for merely suggesting it isn't cracked.
Anyone remember all the Doom/Quake clones in the mid late 90's on the PC?
You say that as if they stopped coming out...
With the current advertised rate of inflation in SWG, I doubt it'd take much time at all to buy a starship.
The problem I see, is the divergence between MMO -RPG and MMO -Space Combat Sim.
Frankly, I don't see twitch combat on the MMO scene working out to well, even on broadband connections. (and most gamers don't have those).
Witness WWIIonline's 64 unit visibility limit, and the all-too-exploitable client-side hitscan of Planetside.
And any 'slowing down' of combat to appease technical reality is going to turn off those outside gamers. Not to mention SWG's trademarked open-ended play - which is quite a departure from traditional space shooters, and not a taste that everyone has acquired.
Surely it'll pull in quite a few new gamers, I just don't see them staying in significant numbers.
Similarly with WoW actually. Sure, "it's Blizzard" so it'll pull in people who've never played a massmog. But that doesn't mean those new gamers will necessarily convert into subscriptions.
But of course, this is all armchair prognostication. I'm just guessing based off past performance, independent of even considering the individual quality or situation of MMO expansions.
If you told me EA totally borked up the design of The Sims Online 6 months before it released, or that Mythic was going to tick off its playerbase with it's Trials of Atlantis expansion -- I wouldn't have believed you. But that happened.
Who knows what'll actually happen in 6 months?
At least your WOW subscription guesses are reasonable. Most people keep throwing around 500k - 1m ... and everytime someone suggests numbers that large it turns into a joke.
My only point of contention with your prognostication is: expansions don't bring in new gamers, never have.
They can bring back gamers who cancelled recently - but rarely do they retain anyone they bring back. They bring a quick surge from former players who give it a shot - and they retain players they haven't yet lost. Their largest effect is stalling the hemmhorage of players who have seen/done everything and are getting bored.
And Warhammer Online is going to live or die based on its ability to pull its audience from European gamers (the way Lineage2 lives or dies based on its Asian success). It has a distinctly European 'flavor' (like all Games Workshop properties) and for the most part European gamers are under-serviced with commercial persistent worlds.
I believe that (modifier) is called (personality).
No need to recall correctly. There's an easy experiment to prove it, that you're probably already performing at your desk.
It's called the old 'chilling a beverage with ice cubes' experiment.
If the melting of the arctic ice were going to flood the world, then the melting of the ice in your beverage would flood your desk.
(or at least cause an appreciable rise in the waterline -- you get the point)
As you point out the reasonable questions regard the effects of global climate change on the gulf streams, current world breadbaskets, storm severity/frequency, and water level change due to melting of the antarctic ice (as that ice is currently on land).
Exactly. Promises mean less than nothing.
/intend/ to give you that big raise or promotion 6-12 months in. But shit happens. And if, for whatever reason, his budget is getting scrutinized - your 'promise' is the first thing to go.
Short of having the greatest employers in the known world, anything not on paper will almost certainly never happen.
Who knows, your employer may even
Like the parent poster, I've left a handful of jobs that never followed through on promises. Sure, most people don't have the freedom in this market to drop a job on principle anymore. But never think for a second that 'promises' mean anything.
He acted primarily as a broker. He bought items, he sold items. Whether he played for enjoyment in between is up in the air.
I don't believe he was selling any items he personally farmed, or buying/selling for the benefit of any particular in-game character.
He also contained all his trading to the UO economy. Having selected EQ, or even several of the 100k+ club - I'm sure he could have at least doubled that take.
It was an economic experiment to see if he could make more as a virtual property broker, than as a professional journalist.
As for buying items as a form of cheating-- that has been endlessly debated. External markets to in-game trading weren't a design consideration for UO. Though some people arguably are playing for profit, rather than fun.
Don't forget Eugene Podkletnov's gravity deflection apparatus.
But how many blockbuster successes were licensed properties?
GoldenEye is certainly the only one that's universally loved that I can think of off-hand.
And honestly, I don't know how well that one sold.
It being a licensed property, its success didn't result in Rare/Nintendo being able to parlay that into a sequel for themselves, or leave them with a franchise they could sell/lease.
Examples of wildly successful original properties on the other hand, are plentiful. And all of them left their respective developers/publishers in a position to further capitalize on sequels, tie-ins, cross-promotions, toys, film rights, etc.
While smash successes of original properties certainly being in the minority, their investments are smaller, and profit margins larger, than for licensed games of the same type/scale/genre.
I think when the potential profitability of an original property is added to the equation, 'inventing' is on a bit more even footing than licensing. Is the success rate of licensed properties really that much higher, that the increased costs are worth risking?
As you point out, the core challenge has always been good game design. But licensing doesn't make game design any easier, it just makes marketing easier.
If anything, licensing introduces as many game design challenges as it might alleviate. The higher investment (buying the license) makes publishers much more risk-averse (more apt to cut novel/innovative features), and property holders typically dictate/hold creative check over tone, story, character actions, genre, etc.
Licensing seems to do well for generating good sales off proven designs. And with a few notable exceptions, it doesn't even appear that publishers are trying to create innovative play with licensed properties.