Yes, because Nethacks rule number one - think before you act - works so well in a realtime game.
It might! I've yet to see anything about Nethack that makes it *imperative* that that style of play could not work in a real time setting. Maybe not for Nethack itself, (the DevTeam says in the FAQ on their site that they don't think realtime multiplayer is right for the game because of its complexity), but that style of game might still be workable. Rogue, for instance, is nowhere near as complicated as NH but is still recognizable as its predecessor.
Once upon a time there was a variant called Interhack, which used a system called "surreal time," in which players who were far from other players got lots of time to make moves, but less time the closer they got to each other, to try to get around such blocking, but it seems to have vanished from the web.
I mentioned in another message in this thread that ToeJam & Earl does do a pretty good job of living up to the Roguelike ideals, and it *is* realtime, realtime multiplayer (where "multi" = "two") in fact. It's perhaps the best thing they ever made for the Genesis, and worth checking out.
Uh, the entire Fushigi no Dungeon series (Including Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon and Pokemon: Fushigi no Dungeon) which are commercial versions of Rogue and Nethack? I know for a fact there was a Gameboy Advance title along the same lins as well (Monster Dungeon or something along those lines).
Yeah, I remembered those shortly after I posted. I don't know enough about them to see if they really seek to do what true Roguelikes do, or if they're half-hearted attempts to utilize that kind of gameplay, like Azure Dreams, Timestalkers/Climax Landers, Fatal Labyrinth.
And I also remembered one commercial game that DOES do a good job of following the Roguelike model: ToeJam & Earl!
Does SWG compare with World of Warcraft? I sure as hell don't know as I haven't played either game; I must be the only City of Heroes player in this discussion. But I do try to keep up with the MMO world. And....
Okay, someone correct me if I'm wrong on my facts here.
Item 1: They release the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion. A full, buy-it-at-the-store update to the game, so it took a while to ship. Available in boxes, which take a while to print. Containing loads of new content for a number of classes, and that couldn't have been quick to develop.
Item 2: Two days after its release, they implement NGE. Entire thrust of the game changes. Over half the character classes evaporate into the ether. Some of those classes were the same ones for which new content were created for under Trials of Obi-Wan.
Hopefully NGE, which affected the entire game, took more time and sweat to implement than Trials of Obi-Wan, which was a standard new content expansion, did.
So logically, BOTH projects must have been in development at the same time. Logically people on the Obi-Wan team must have known what was coming down the pike. And they had to have been super demoralized to see what was coming, right? Or maybe they didn't believe it would really happen?
But working on two wide-ranging, world-changing events at once? That's a lot of wasted developer muscle and energy, and I don't think that a sane development process can account for it. I think, more likely, that some schizophrenia was involved, so I present these two possible scenarios:
1. NGE was slapped together at the last second, as a result of some unseen-from-outside pressure, either from Sony or Lucasarts. Someone didn't meet a quota, and judging from Smedley's comments it must be a damn big quota, so someone panicked. A bad, bad situation.
2. There was some kind of internal upheaval at Sony, or Dilbertesque maneuverings prevented communication between teams, or a power struggle between old guard and rising stars took place resulting in a fulcrum shift in the teetertotter of SOE office politics. One power bloc was responsible for Obi-Wan, the other, NGE. An even worse situation than scenario 1.
Either way, something is happening there that is causing them to make drastic, ill-considered changes in their game. And any smart player should be able to see that the risk that it'll happen again is exceedingly great.
Even if the NGE produced the Metaverse, I would think that Sony has now destroyed the customer base of Star Wars Galaxies completely. And such is the depth of the incompetence displayed here that I would be surprised it if didn't wash over into their other online properties.
It is not the controller OR the less powerfull hardware. It is the constant hammering on making games easy to understand. I mean this article suggests that there are people out there who do not understand current controllers and that nintendo wishes to attract them.
Okay, this is going to be regarded as elitist and it is. I just like to suggest the following. If you have trouble figuring out a console controller perhaps you should go back to the field and settle in the soil with the other vegetables.
I understand the sentiment behind this concept, but I still think that Nintendo's concerns are not misplaced.
Look at it this way: every neuron you devote to interfacing with a game is one less neuron you'll devote to playing that game. Simplify the controls, and the player is that much more willing to get more involved with the strategy of the game itself, before the game triggers his "too complicated" objection and he goes off to pick berries off of trees, or search for females.
The controls of a game are typically an obstacle to playing it, and not something that can be enjoyed for its own sake. Revolutions primary advantage is that it has the potential to make the game fun to control; imagine swordfights, aiming guns, casting fishing lines, and the like.
Few games these days are actually fun to just *control*. Katamari Damacy is the best example I can think of; there is something entertainly tactile about rolling that ball around, with the metaphor that each analog stick corresponds to one of the character's hands being simple to grasp, yet allowing for a great flexibility in how the player controls the ball.
The "Not that I'm aware" statement I made refered to the whole line that I quoted. I was aware that there is a permadeath option. Yet the game is designed around non-permadeath, with permadeath being a fairly "hardcore," in their own words, alternative.
But concerning permadeath, sure, I'll take up the challenge of responding to why their permadeath isn't the same as Nethack's.
Both games allow the player to play a non-permadeath game. In Nethack, you arrange this by entering Discover Mode (Shift-X during play). However, the ideas behind both concepts are different in subtle, yet important, ways. Nethack Discover games are not registered on any score list, they "do not count," and you haven't "won" at Nethack unless you do it outside of Discover. Diablo 2's default expectations are reversed, and most games are played in normal mode.
Further, Nethack is designed around permadeath, while in Diablo 2 it is just a flag attached to a game. Permadeath is an essential part of Nethack's item discovery gameplay.
Some time ago, when I was complaining to someone about how Diablo and D2 had taken only the superficial qualities away from Nethack while leaving behind the more awesome aspects of its design. The guy, whose name I forgot (it could have been right here on Slashdot), set me straight: Diablo isn't based off of Nethack. It was inspired by Angband, which made a lot more sense. I don't know if Diablo is better than Angband; I suspect the games are strong to the same degree, and it should be stated that those strengths are not inconsiderable.
Majora's Mask is interesting because of all the differences in the basic Zelda formula it contained. It showed just how willing Nintendo was to play with the archetypes and structure of the game. Despite how some people complain that Zelda games are all alike, MM three-day system makes it fundamentally different, and those people tend to overlook that.
- At the beginning, Link seems to mistake Marin for Zelda when he wakes up. - The game has Pieces of Power as a temporary powerup that double attack strength, and they're pretty obviously modeled after Triforce pieces. - One of the forms the the final boss Nightmare takes is fairly close to Gannon at the end of Link to the Past.
I noticed you stopped short of saying Zelda wasn't in Majora's Mask, since she was... although only in flashback form.
And if MS have learnt anything from the likes of the PSP (as they undoubtedly have). Any exploit will be quickly patched, either when you install a new game or next go online.
Ah, but that mechanism itself, if insecure, can be just the hole hackers need to get their code in just the right places....
The identity of the item matters less than how the player discovers its purpose.
multi-use(spell items),
But Nethack's multi-use spell items are much richer: wands can be zapped in a direction, at yourself, aimed at the ceiling or the floor, recharged, cancelled or broken. Concerning recharging, each time you recharge it, there's an increased chance the wand will blow up. If you zap an empty wand often enough, on each zap there's a 1-in-131 chance that you'll wrest a last charge out of the wand and it'll turn to dust -- useful if the wand is a Wand of Wishing, perhaps the most massively useful object in the game.
That right there is emblematic of the difference between the Roguelike philosophy and other games: Roguelikes are actually known to grant players wishes. And yet, Nethack is much better balanced than most commercial RPGs. Isn't that strange?
and permanent (armor/weapons) all of which are randomly generated and have randomly picked effects with randomly generated intensity levels.
Interesting here is that, while the items that get generated on each level in Nethack are mostly random, the qualities that items have, beyond their basic identity, are NOT random. This doesn't matter to my point, but just illustrating that Nethack doesn't randomize everything. Even so, for Nethack that was a valid choice, since there are fewer sources for many "intrinsics" (Nethack's name for player flags like cold resistance and slow digestion) than in a game with hundreds of possible items that are differentiated largely by what resistances they offer.
Like all good RPG's the random effects come from a fixed list, which is used to rule out unbalancing items.
This is not a well-substantiated point, and speaking as a person who has put an awful lot of thought into matters of item generation in these kinds of games, I doubt that it is absolutely true. It is true that a game would have to be specially designed, compared to what is accepted as the default in these kinds of games today, to allow for this. But anyway, Nethack item definitions, as I said above, are not randomly decided. Excalibur and its friends, in all games, have the same abilities. Of course, they are generated lying around on the dungeon floor only extremely rarely -- most players either make them (in a very few instances), get them as a gift from the gods from sacrificing, or wish for them.
Items are generated from a 64 bit random key, combined with an 8bit power level (used to limit the intensity of low level items).
Ah, you just hit on one of the most important differences between Diablo and, if not all Roguelikes, two of the major ones, Rogue and Nethack: these games do NOT adjust item generation according to level.
Angband has weighted item generation as the player descends, so some items are never generated on level 1. In general, Angband items get stronger as the player gets deeper. ADOM goes even further, and weights item generation according to the player's class. In my opinion, both of these strategies are bad design.
In Nethack, and especially in Rogue, there is no single item that can guarentee player survival. Even games in which players get early Wands of Wishing, which translate into at least four wishes if a player knows what to do, often end death (although an experienced player with such a wand can practically assure an ascension). Of course, the odds that a player will find a Wand of Wishing on level one are extremely slim; most players don't find one randomly in the whole game (there is one guarenteed wand on the Castle level).
But the point is that Nethack knows that great early item finds make for interesting games. It doesn't "cheat" the player that way. And the best Nethack items tend not to be those things that give lots of resistances, but that give the player a useful ability, like Speed Boots, Rings of Free Action, Rings of Levitation or Wands of Cancellation.
Diablo 2 has random everything that you listed for nethack. It also offers permanent character death.
No, not that I'm aware.
The randomized item system is substantially different, and considering that identifying items has half the game in a Roguelike it's important that they get it right. One-use items are preidentified in Diablo 2. Equipment is often not ID'd, but it doesn't follow the "discover one, discover all" concept that true Roguelikes use. Further, all the "armor" tends to be different things on which different flags are set. Diablo follows the fundamentally weaker Angband item system more than Nethack's.
It's worth noting that Angband's system dates back to Moria, which was created from the ground up to be a game like Rogue but different from it, while Nethack's come from Hack's, which was originally a Rogue clone. Rogue is the primal archetype and source of design goodness here.
Permanent character death is not so controversial as you might think, although it's important to note why Roguelikes do it. 1. To lend an actual sense of danger to a character's adventures. 2. To give a sense of real accomplishment to his feats. 3. To "restart the game," and thus rescramble the items, at various times. 4. Most importantly: to prevent people from abusing the item system.
If no item can harm you that much, then the necessity of experimenting with the items to figure out what they do isn't that dangerous.
There are two ways, to which I am aware, to which permanent character death could be made to work in a modern MMORPG design, that followed Roguelike principles, that would be acceptable to casual gamers: 1. Instead of actually ending his character, just rescramble item descriptions for a player every time he dies. If the player is carrying a potion of healing, he'll still know what it does, but that potion of poison he had ID'd and was studiously avoiding might appear to be something different to him. It players are forced to make use of those random items as part of basic gameplay (like the Inspirations in CoH), and there were enough bad and very bad effects from them, then it would both impose a substantial, though not overbearing, penalty on death *and* do a lot to lessen abuses of a Roguelike's ID system. 2. Use social engineering to decouple player expectations over what a character is supposed to be. In the story to the game, note that the player, instead of supposedly "being" the character, is instead a guiding spirit of that character's family. Every time a character dies, he gets a free replacement at a lower level, who inherits all the past character's possessions. Of course, items would be scrambled for this character, and he may have a substantially lower level, but if he keeps all the items he had before, and if they're as powerful as Roguelike items tend to be relative to their environment, and if he gains levels as rapidly as they tend to be gained in Roguelikes, then it wouldn't actually much of a setback.
The reason people play Roguelikes, despite the fact that characters die so often, is that starting a new one is so painless. It needn't take more than ten seconds to start a Nethack character. Roguelike characters are disposable. MMORPG characters, for various reasons, are not, but if designed cleverly enough, I think a designer could have the best of both worlds, in precisely the ways described above.
A lot of people don't play Nethack. It's very appealing to a certain kind of person, and a very impressive feat of both game design and social engineering. It's a wonderful piece of work that anybody would be proud of.
Well, my original was about the possibility of using random generation to create a game world. My point was that it can definitely work, but you can't just generate new terrain unless there's something about it (like Nethack's altars) that adds to the game beyond just adding a bunch more largely-identical places to explore.
Your response is more an attack against Nethack, which I will respond to, but I think it's important to note that you didn't actually respond to my original point; an MMORPG doesn't have to ape Nethack in creating random content. It just has to do it in a meaningful way, in a way that ultimately means players have to make real choices instead of doing the same thing over and over again.
Now, to address your points concerning the game.
Nethack as social engineering, hm. It might be, although not intentionally so. I would submit people who don't play Nethack are victim to a much greater web of social engineering than those who do.
This is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, so long as one is willing to recognize that one's biases, to a large degree, come from a set of unquestioned assumptions that one acquires through life, and that one should be able to discard them if the situation requires.
The fact is, the difference between a Nethack player and someone who would never play it in a million years, comes primarily from expectations over what a game should be. New genres, like MMORPGs, emerge by breaking some of those expectations, but new ones calcify at the same time. MMORPGs are in danger of becoming a genre who's expectations are calcifying around the idea that the game not only is, BUT IS SUPPOSED TO BE, what amounts to killing the same monsters over and over again.
It's not the game people want to play. Most of the reasons you list as good things about Nethack are precisely themselves the reasons that those people who don't like Nethack don't like Nethack.
Then forgive me for being blunt, but these people are fools. Gameplay is gameplay, and Nethack's is among the best -- and these are not idle words I am typing.
I'm not talking about people who would play Nethack, but don't have the time or energy or have another game they'd rather play, but those people who are almost morally opposed to it. Say what you want, but there are plenty more gameplay aspects to Roguelike games that are just waiting to break out into the mainstream social consciousness than those in Diablo/Diablo 2. It's only a matter of time... possibly a lot of time, concerning how enlightened tend to be commercial game designers and producers at this time, but still a matter of time.
I'll put aside the question of whether Star Wars Galaxies' random content was good or not. I'll even grant you that it might not have been possible for any Star Wars game to be randomly generated -- it may have been possible to get that workable engaging, but for the sake of my point I'll concede it.
I don't think that random content is inherently bad. I don't think it'll always look like a computer made it and not a human. I don't even think that always matters.
You invoke the sacred and holy name of Nethack as a talisman against the gameplay it stands for, but the plain fact is, no one's ever tried to make Nethack-style random gameplay work in a commercial product. (Diablo does not count for reasons to be revealed.) And Nethack, despite how it looks, is absolutely not outdated -- indeed, its open source nature has spawned dozens of interesting and creative patches for the game, ranging from special levels (Lethe, Heck2) to new monsters (Biodiversity) to entire new play mechanics (Color Alchemy, described below).
But it is not controversial to say something like "Nethack rulez" on Slashdot, in which the radio of Nethackers as opposed to the general population is, shall we say, higher than normal. So to avoid mere karma whoring, I'll attempt to explain how to make random content work.
You do it by randomizing more than just maps. (Re Diablo: There.) Having an infinite amount of terrain to explore is not enough to make a game interesting. Roguelikes do it by also randomizing the item definitions, restricting player knowledge of them, and making their discovery a major part of each game. Some games randomize still more, or provide mechanisms by which the basic item randomization has profound effects on the game. Examples: The presence and alignments of altars in Nethack has a profound effect upon that game, even though technically they're just part of its map generation. ADOM generates different alchemy recipes each game, which can potentially give players a potent source of resources. There is a user-created patch, Color Alchemy, that does something similar in Nethack: instead of having that game's potion mixing system be based upon type (Healing Potion + Gain Energy Potion = Extra Healing Potion), it's based on the color in the potion descriptions (Whatever Red Potions are + Whatever Yellow Potions are = Whatever Orange Potions are)!
Also, randomly placed monsters are not interesting in a game in which they... A....have no "hard" way of harming the player. When overcoming player death is as simple as clicking a respawn button, no monster is really that dangerous. Rogue had *common* monsters that could do permanent strength damage, could quickly drain levels, could confuse with a glance, permanently degrade armor, etc. Nethack, of course, has the infamous cockatrice, Medusa, monsters that can curse items, monsters that can burn with a glance, thieves, and many others.
And all true Roguelikes have permanent character death. When that foe around the corner could suddenly destroy your entire character, let alone his stats and equipment in ways that are not trivial to overcome, then that random generation begins to really mean something. Show me a MMORPG like *that* and I'll be there like a shot.
B....are all essentially aliases for each other. This is related to point A, I think, in that many games tend to support umpteen different types of damage, but the main way in which they are differentiated from each other is in the kinds of resistances a player may have. (This is a reason I don't play Angband, despite its being a major Roguelike.) Often, many of them tend to behave in the same way as the others, have the same general types of attacks, and ultimately, due to the reluctance of the designer to have them do really bad things to characters, don't have anywhere near the personality that Nethack monsters have.
So, I think you can indeed make randomly generated content, but it can't be half-assed. And ultima
I'd think the answer here is obvious: you must logically be "no one."
(Heh heh.)
But seriously, you didn't think that was an amazing ending? The king just letting Hyrule get washed away? Ganon's laughter? The last boss fight with the water flooding around everywhere?
No one who thinks Wind Waker was too cartoonish finished the game, you can bet on that. Not after we get those words of remorse out of *Ganon* of all people, not after what after what happens to Hyrule....
In a way, the cartoon style was a test: IF you're enlightened enough to get over yourself concerning the art style and enjoy it for what it is, THEN you get the most kick-ass ending ever seen in a Zelda game.
There are some pretty strong hints in Wind Waker that refer to Ocarina of Time. While they're all named link, since Ocarina of Time, Links have also been given a title. Ocarina and Majora's Mask had the Hero of Time, and Wind Waker has the Hero of Winds. Point is, the Hero of Time *was* explicitly mentioned in the into to Wind Waker.
Also remember the room with the Master Sword in it? The characters in the stained glass windows around the room sure looked awfully familiar....
I own two of the three Wi-Fi aware games, Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing: Wild World. Here's my impressions:
Mario Kart DS: Although only twenty of the thirty-two included tracks are playable, and despite the fact that gameplay chances subtly while playing over Wi-Fi (you can't drag items behind you and karts can't bump each other about much regardless of weight), online Mario Kart is surprisingly playable. You can either choose to play against randomly-selected opponents in your region, around the world, "rivals" with a similar win/loss record to you, and "friends" who you've traded friend codes with.
It's important to note that, so far, no Nintendo Wi-Fi game allows for you to play with specific people you've not already traded a friend code with. There exist a good number of sites on the web that allow you to trade these codes (Zonk offered his own here a couple of weeks ago), but even if you've traded (and BOTH players must have the other's code to count), you can't be sure to get that specific friend if you choose a Friends game. I can understand they did this to take care of matters of griefing, and also because of the complete lack of a communication lobby. I'm torn on this approach: it'd sure be nice to be able to play against specific opponents sometimes, but it does make setting up a match very, very easy, as the service takes care of all matchmaking automatically.
It's worth saying that there are players who have decided on off-color or even downright obscene player handles, as well as choosing pictures of genitalia for their kart emblem. So far, it's uncertain what Nintendo plans to do about this, if anything. Once I read on their forums that the proper response to these forms of abuse was to email someone at Nintendo, but later it seems that statement was retracted. Official word so far seems to be that this is the reason for the CYA "Experience may change during online play" message below the ERSB symbol on the splash screens, an attitude that, depending on your view of the matter, is either very irresponsible or surprisingly enlightened. Nintendo is able to track all activity by each DS' MAC address, of course, so it's possible that they could outright ban players for abuses, but it's uncertain if or when they'll do that. It's worth saying that so far, the majority of players I've encountered have no such issues, implying that either fairly few gamers are doing this or those who do it are quickly, quietly sucked into the void.
A bigger issue with the service is definitely my own fault: there are some SERIOUSLY sharp drivers on the online Mario Kart circuit, and despite the essential randomness introduced by the item system, driving skill still matters a lot. Unlike in some past incarnations of Mario Kart (I'm looking at YOU, MK64!), drivers who are behind receive no artificial catch-up speed boosts here; all of the balancing comes from the item system. (Karts also have an "Items" statistic now, which influences how often you get the good stuff.)
If you have any illusions about your skill in driving cartoon vehicles, they will quickly be shattered the first time you go up against a driver who's mastered "snaking," which is a technique for executing drift boosts on straightaways. Drivers with extremely high degrees of accomplishment in single-player mode get stars above their name during races, up to three, but you can be sure when you find someone with even one star on their handle that you're in for a tough battle. Similarly, you'll encounter all kinds of strategy online, including players who'll get a Blue Shell and sit on it until just before you cross the finish line. But even in that case, it's balanced by the fact that the driver will probably have to have foregone many other items in order to hold onto that shell. This is the best-balanced Mario Kart, arguably, since the original, and it may be even better than that.
While we're on the topic of shooting shells at your opponents, the sorriest omission in Mario Kart DS is the fact that its
I don't know... I'm not ready to say that human experience is qualitatively different enough between people that no one is right to critique the games intended for another.
I will say that there are Atari 2600 games I'd rather play than some GBA titles. Seanbaby's essays on the matter may be a bit overly rancorous, but I don't think he's entirely off-base.
Castlevania's use of the touch aspect, I agree, was gimmicky, but the screen aspect was great: for the first time in a Metroid-style game, we could have the whole map visible during exploration! THAT I liked.
Actually, I read a developer's interview in an issue of Game Informer that said the PSP's power was similar to that in the original Playstation, but with significantly better graphics hardware.
The DS' power, meanwhile, is like a weaker N64, but with slightly *better* graphics: note that Mario Kart DS contains MK64 tracks but also renders polygonal characters, instead of resorting to MK64's cheaty, sprite-based rendering of drivers and karts.
I don't think the DS/PSP battle is over yet, but the recent rush of consecutive must-have software for the DS (Kirby, Nintendogs, Meteos, Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, and * Advance Wars *) has given it an advantage.
And would you care to enlighten us as to what the political agenda of the ACLU is? As far as I can see, they'll handle cases on *either* side of the political divide. (They've been known to defend the right of neo-nazis who wanted to demonstrate but were denied permits.) What I had heard was that they actually strive to be neutral, and just go ahead and do their jobs regardless of who hates them for it.
The weirdness of the neo-nazi thing was effectively lampooned by an Onion article, by the way....
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because Nethacks rule number one - think before you act - works so well in a realtime game.
It might! I've yet to see anything about Nethack that makes it *imperative* that that style of play could not work in a real time setting. Maybe not for Nethack itself, (the DevTeam says in the FAQ on their site that they don't think realtime multiplayer is right for the game because of its complexity), but that style of game might still be workable. Rogue, for instance, is nowhere near as complicated as NH but is still recognizable as its predecessor.
Once upon a time there was a variant called Interhack, which used a system called "surreal time," in which players who were far from other players got lots of time to make moves, but less time the closer they got to each other, to try to get around such blocking, but it seems to have vanished from the web.
I mentioned in another message in this thread that ToeJam & Earl does do a pretty good job of living up to the Roguelike ideals, and it *is* realtime, realtime multiplayer (where "multi" = "two") in fact. It's perhaps the best thing they ever made for the Genesis, and worth checking out.
Uh, the entire Fushigi no Dungeon series (Including Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon and Pokemon: Fushigi no Dungeon) which are commercial versions of Rogue and Nethack? I know for a fact there was a Gameboy Advance title along the same lins as well (Monster Dungeon or something along those lines).
Yeah, I remembered those shortly after I posted. I don't know enough about them to see if they really seek to do what true Roguelikes do, or if they're half-hearted attempts to utilize that kind of gameplay, like Azure Dreams, Timestalkers/Climax Landers, Fatal Labyrinth.
And I also remembered one commercial game that DOES do a good job of following the Roguelike model: ToeJam & Earl!
Does SWG compare with World of Warcraft? I sure as hell don't know as I haven't played either game; I must be the only City of Heroes player in this discussion. But I do try to keep up with the MMO world. And....
Okay, someone correct me if I'm wrong on my facts here.
Item 1: They release the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion. A full, buy-it-at-the-store update to the game, so it took a while to ship. Available in boxes, which take a while to print. Containing loads of new content for a number of classes, and that couldn't have been quick to develop.
Item 2: Two days after its release, they implement NGE. Entire thrust of the game changes. Over half the character classes evaporate into the ether. Some of those classes were the same ones for which new content were created for under Trials of Obi-Wan.
Hopefully NGE, which affected the entire game, took more time and sweat to implement than Trials of Obi-Wan, which was a standard new content expansion, did.
So logically, BOTH projects must have been in development at the same time. Logically people on the Obi-Wan team must have known what was coming down the pike. And they had to have been super demoralized to see what was coming, right? Or maybe they didn't believe it would really happen?
But working on two wide-ranging, world-changing events at once? That's a lot of wasted developer muscle and energy, and I don't think that a sane development process can account for it. I think, more likely, that some schizophrenia was involved, so I present these two possible scenarios:
1. NGE was slapped together at the last second, as a result of some unseen-from-outside pressure, either from Sony or Lucasarts. Someone didn't meet a quota, and judging from Smedley's comments it must be a damn big quota, so someone panicked. A bad, bad situation.
2. There was some kind of internal upheaval at Sony, or Dilbertesque maneuverings prevented communication between teams, or a power struggle between old guard and rising stars took place resulting in a fulcrum shift in the teetertotter of SOE office politics. One power bloc was responsible for Obi-Wan, the other, NGE. An even worse situation than scenario 1.
Either way, something is happening there that is causing them to make drastic, ill-considered changes in their game. And any smart player should be able to see that the risk that it'll happen again is exceedingly great.
Even if the NGE produced the Metaverse, I would think that Sony has now destroyed the customer base of Star Wars Galaxies completely. And such is the depth of the incompetence displayed here that I would be surprised it if didn't wash over into their other online properties.
This is SOE's Edsel.
It is not the controller OR the less powerfull hardware. It is the constant hammering on making games easy to understand. I mean this article suggests that there are people out there who do not understand current controllers and that nintendo wishes to attract them.
Okay, this is going to be regarded as elitist and it is. I just like to suggest the following. If you have trouble figuring out a console controller perhaps you should go back to the field and settle in the soil with the other vegetables.
I understand the sentiment behind this concept, but I still think that Nintendo's concerns are not misplaced.
Look at it this way: every neuron you devote to interfacing with a game is one less neuron you'll devote to playing that game. Simplify the controls, and the player is that much more willing to get more involved with the strategy of the game itself, before the game triggers his "too complicated" objection and he goes off to pick berries off of trees, or search for females.
The controls of a game are typically an obstacle to playing it, and not something that can be enjoyed for its own sake. Revolutions primary advantage is that it has the potential to make the game fun to control; imagine swordfights, aiming guns, casting fishing lines, and the like.
Few games these days are actually fun to just *control*. Katamari Damacy is the best example I can think of; there is something entertainly tactile about rolling that ball around, with the metaphor that each analog stick corresponds to one of the character's hands being simple to grasp, yet allowing for a great flexibility in how the player controls the ball.
The "Not that I'm aware" statement I made refered to the whole line that I quoted. I was aware that there is a permadeath option. Yet the game is designed around non-permadeath, with permadeath being a fairly "hardcore," in their own words, alternative.
But concerning permadeath, sure, I'll take up the challenge of responding to why their permadeath isn't the same as Nethack's.
Both games allow the player to play a non-permadeath game. In Nethack, you arrange this by entering Discover Mode (Shift-X during play). However, the ideas behind both concepts are different in subtle, yet important, ways. Nethack Discover games are not registered on any score list, they "do not count," and you haven't "won" at Nethack unless you do it outside of Discover. Diablo 2's default expectations are reversed, and most games are played in normal mode.
Further, Nethack is designed around permadeath, while in Diablo 2 it is just a flag attached to a game. Permadeath is an essential part of Nethack's item discovery gameplay.
Some time ago, when I was complaining to someone about how Diablo and D2 had taken only the superficial qualities away from Nethack while leaving behind the more awesome aspects of its design. The guy, whose name I forgot (it could have been right here on Slashdot), set me straight: Diablo isn't based off of Nethack. It was inspired by Angband, which made a lot more sense. I don't know if Diablo is better than Angband; I suspect the games are strong to the same degree, and it should be stated that those strengths are not inconsiderable.
They just aren't as awesome as Nethack.
Ah, memories....
Majora's Mask is interesting because of all the differences in the basic Zelda formula it contained. It showed just how willing Nintendo was to play with the archetypes and structure of the game. Despite how some people complain that Zelda games are all alike, MM three-day system makes it fundamentally different, and those people tend to overlook that.
Link's Awakening:
- At the beginning, Link seems to mistake Marin for Zelda when he wakes up.
- The game has Pieces of Power as a temporary powerup that double attack strength, and they're pretty obviously modeled after Triforce pieces.
- One of the forms the the final boss Nightmare takes is fairly close to Gannon at the end of Link to the Past.
I noticed you stopped short of saying Zelda wasn't in Majora's Mask, since she was... although only in flashback form.
And if MS have learnt anything from the likes of the PSP (as they undoubtedly have). Any exploit will be quickly patched, either when you install a new game or next go online.
Ah, but that mechanism itself, if insecure, can be just the hole hackers need to get their code in just the right places....
Diablo 2 has one-use (stat boosters),
The identity of the item matters less than how the player discovers its purpose.
multi-use(spell items),
But Nethack's multi-use spell items are much richer: wands can be zapped in a direction, at yourself, aimed at the ceiling or the floor, recharged, cancelled or broken. Concerning recharging, each time you recharge it, there's an increased chance the wand will blow up. If you zap an empty wand often enough, on each zap there's a 1-in-131 chance that you'll wrest a last charge out of the wand and it'll turn to dust -- useful if the wand is a Wand of Wishing, perhaps the most massively useful object in the game.
That right there is emblematic of the difference between the Roguelike philosophy and other games: Roguelikes are actually known to grant players wishes. And yet, Nethack is much better balanced than most commercial RPGs. Isn't that strange?
and permanent (armor/weapons) all of which are randomly generated and have randomly picked effects with randomly generated intensity levels.
Interesting here is that, while the items that get generated on each level in Nethack are mostly random, the qualities that items have, beyond their basic identity, are NOT random. This doesn't matter to my point, but just illustrating that Nethack doesn't randomize everything. Even so, for Nethack that was a valid choice, since there are fewer sources for many "intrinsics" (Nethack's name for player flags like cold resistance and slow digestion) than in a game with hundreds of possible items that are differentiated largely by what resistances they offer.
Like all good RPG's the random effects come from a fixed list, which is used to rule out unbalancing items.
This is not a well-substantiated point, and speaking as a person who has put an awful lot of thought into matters of item generation in these kinds of games, I doubt that it is absolutely true. It is true that a game would have to be specially designed, compared to what is accepted as the default in these kinds of games today, to allow for this. But anyway, Nethack item definitions, as I said above, are not randomly decided. Excalibur and its friends, in all games, have the same abilities. Of course, they are generated lying around on the dungeon floor only extremely rarely -- most players either make them (in a very few instances), get them as a gift from the gods from sacrificing, or wish for them.
Items are generated from a 64 bit random key, combined with an 8bit power level (used to limit the intensity of low level items).
Ah, you just hit on one of the most important differences between Diablo and, if not all Roguelikes, two of the major ones, Rogue and Nethack: these games do NOT adjust item generation according to level.
Angband has weighted item generation as the player descends, so some items are never generated on level 1. In general, Angband items get stronger as the player gets deeper. ADOM goes even further, and weights item generation according to the player's class. In my opinion, both of these strategies are bad design.
In Nethack, and especially in Rogue, there is no single item that can guarentee player survival. Even games in which players get early Wands of Wishing, which translate into at least four wishes if a player knows what to do, often end death (although an experienced player with such a wand can practically assure an ascension). Of course, the odds that a player will find a Wand of Wishing on level one are extremely slim; most players don't find one randomly in the whole game (there is one guarenteed wand on the Castle level).
But the point is that Nethack knows that great early item finds make for interesting games. It doesn't "cheat" the player that way. And the best Nethack items tend not to be those things that give lots of resistances, but that give the player a useful ability, like Speed Boots, Rings of Free Action, Rings of Levitation or Wands of Cancellation.
Diablo 2 has random everything that you listed for nethack. It also offers permanent character death.
No, not that I'm aware.
The randomized item system is substantially different, and considering that identifying items has half the game in a Roguelike it's important that they get it right. One-use items are preidentified in Diablo 2. Equipment is often not ID'd, but it doesn't follow the "discover one, discover all" concept that true Roguelikes use. Further, all the "armor" tends to be different things on which different flags are set. Diablo follows the fundamentally weaker Angband item system more than Nethack's.
It's worth noting that Angband's system dates back to Moria, which was created from the ground up to be a game like Rogue but different from it, while Nethack's come from Hack's, which was originally a Rogue clone. Rogue is the primal archetype and source of design goodness here.
Permanent character death is not so controversial as you might think, although it's important to note why Roguelikes do it.
1. To lend an actual sense of danger to a character's adventures.
2. To give a sense of real accomplishment to his feats.
3. To "restart the game," and thus rescramble the items, at various times.
4. Most importantly: to prevent people from abusing the item system.
If no item can harm you that much, then the necessity of experimenting with the items to figure out what they do isn't that dangerous.
There are two ways, to which I am aware, to which permanent character death could be made to work in a modern MMORPG design, that followed Roguelike principles, that would be acceptable to casual gamers:
1. Instead of actually ending his character, just rescramble item descriptions for a player every time he dies. If the player is carrying a potion of healing, he'll still know what it does, but that potion of poison he had ID'd and was studiously avoiding might appear to be something different to him. It players are forced to make use of those random items as part of basic gameplay (like the Inspirations in CoH), and there were enough bad and very bad effects from them, then it would both impose a substantial, though not overbearing, penalty on death *and* do a lot to lessen abuses of a Roguelike's ID system.
2. Use social engineering to decouple player expectations over what a character is supposed to be. In the story to the game, note that the player, instead of supposedly "being" the character, is instead a guiding spirit of that character's family. Every time a character dies, he gets a free replacement at a lower level, who inherits all the past character's possessions. Of course, items would be scrambled for this character, and he may have a substantially lower level, but if he keeps all the items he had before, and if they're as powerful as Roguelike items tend to be relative to their environment, and if he gains levels as rapidly as they tend to be gained in Roguelikes, then it wouldn't actually much of a setback.
The reason people play Roguelikes, despite the fact that characters die so often, is that starting a new one is so painless. It needn't take more than ten seconds to start a Nethack character. Roguelike characters are disposable. MMORPG characters, for various reasons, are not, but if designed cleverly enough, I think a designer could have the best of both worlds, in precisely the ways described above.
A lot of people don't play Nethack. It's very appealing to a certain kind of person, and a very impressive feat of both game design and social engineering. It's a wonderful piece of work that anybody would be proud of.
Well, my original was about the possibility of using random generation to create a game world. My point was that it can definitely work, but you can't just generate new terrain unless there's something about it (like Nethack's altars) that adds to the game beyond just adding a bunch more largely-identical places to explore.
Your response is more an attack against Nethack, which I will respond to, but I think it's important to note that you didn't actually respond to my original point; an MMORPG doesn't have to ape Nethack in creating random content. It just has to do it in a meaningful way, in a way that ultimately means players have to make real choices instead of doing the same thing over and over again.
Now, to address your points concerning the game.
Nethack as social engineering, hm. It might be, although not intentionally so. I would submit people who don't play Nethack are victim to a much greater web of social engineering than those who do.
This is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, so long as one is willing to recognize that one's biases, to a large degree, come from a set of unquestioned assumptions that one acquires through life, and that one should be able to discard them if the situation requires.
The fact is, the difference between a Nethack player and someone who would never play it in a million years, comes primarily from expectations over what a game should be. New genres, like MMORPGs, emerge by breaking some of those expectations, but new ones calcify at the same time. MMORPGs are in danger of becoming a genre who's expectations are calcifying around the idea that the game not only is, BUT IS SUPPOSED TO BE, what amounts to killing the same monsters over and over again.
It's not the game people want to play. Most of the reasons you list as good things about Nethack are precisely themselves the reasons that those people who don't like Nethack don't like Nethack.
Then forgive me for being blunt, but these people are fools. Gameplay is gameplay, and Nethack's is among the best -- and these are not idle words I am typing.
I'm not talking about people who would play Nethack, but don't have the time or energy or have another game they'd rather play, but those people who are almost morally opposed to it. Say what you want, but there are plenty more gameplay aspects to Roguelike games that are just waiting to break out into the mainstream social consciousness than those in Diablo/Diablo 2. It's only a matter of time... possibly a lot of time, concerning how enlightened tend to be commercial game designers and producers at this time, but still a matter of time.
Argumentative transmission, out!
I'll put aside the question of whether Star Wars Galaxies' random content was good or not. I'll even grant you that it might not have been possible for any Star Wars game to be randomly generated -- it may have been possible to get that workable engaging, but for the sake of my point I'll concede it.
...have no "hard" way of harming the player. When overcoming player death is as simple as clicking a respawn button, no monster is really that dangerous. Rogue had *common* monsters that could do permanent strength damage, could quickly drain levels, could confuse with a glance, permanently degrade armor, etc. Nethack, of course, has the infamous cockatrice, Medusa, monsters that can curse items, monsters that can burn with a glance, thieves, and many others.
...are all essentially aliases for each other. This is related to point A, I think, in that many games tend to support umpteen different types of damage, but the main way in which they are differentiated from each other is in the kinds of resistances a player may have. (This is a reason I don't play Angband, despite its being a major Roguelike.) Often, many of them tend to behave in the same way as the others, have the same general types of attacks, and ultimately, due to the reluctance of the designer to have them do really bad things to characters, don't have anywhere near the personality that Nethack monsters have.
I don't think that random content is inherently bad. I don't think it'll always look like a computer made it and not a human. I don't even think that always matters.
You invoke the sacred and holy name of Nethack as a talisman against the gameplay it stands for, but the plain fact is, no one's ever tried to make Nethack-style random gameplay work in a commercial product. (Diablo does not count for reasons to be revealed.) And Nethack, despite how it looks, is absolutely not outdated -- indeed, its open source nature has spawned dozens of interesting and creative patches for the game, ranging from special levels (Lethe, Heck2) to new monsters (Biodiversity) to entire new play mechanics (Color Alchemy, described below).
But it is not controversial to say something like "Nethack rulez" on Slashdot, in which the radio of Nethackers as opposed to the general population is, shall we say, higher than normal. So to avoid mere karma whoring, I'll attempt to explain how to make random content work.
You do it by randomizing more than just maps. (Re Diablo: There.) Having an infinite amount of terrain to explore is not enough to make a game interesting. Roguelikes do it by also randomizing the item definitions, restricting player knowledge of them, and making their discovery a major part of each game. Some games randomize still more, or provide mechanisms by which the basic item randomization has profound effects on the game. Examples: The presence and alignments of altars in Nethack has a profound effect upon that game, even though technically they're just part of its map generation. ADOM generates different alchemy recipes each game, which can potentially give players a potent source of resources. There is a user-created patch, Color Alchemy, that does something similar in Nethack: instead of having that game's potion mixing system be based upon type (Healing Potion + Gain Energy Potion = Extra Healing Potion), it's based on the color in the potion descriptions (Whatever Red Potions are + Whatever Yellow Potions are = Whatever Orange Potions are)!
Also, randomly placed monsters are not interesting in a game in which they...
A.
And all true Roguelikes have permanent character death. When that foe around the corner could suddenly destroy your entire character, let alone his stats and equipment in ways that are not trivial to overcome, then that random generation begins to really mean something. Show me a MMORPG like *that* and I'll be there like a shot.
B.
So, I think you can indeed make randomly generated content, but it can't be half-assed. And ultima
'Nuff said.
I'd think the answer here is obvious: you must logically be "no one."
(Heh heh.)
But seriously, you didn't think that was an amazing ending? The king just letting Hyrule get washed away? Ganon's laughter? The last boss fight with the water flooding around everywhere?
No one who thinks Wind Waker was too cartoonish finished the game, you can bet on that. Not after we get those words of remorse out of *Ganon* of all people, not after what after what happens to Hyrule....
In a way, the cartoon style was a test: IF you're enlightened enough to get over yourself concerning the art style and enjoy it for what it is, THEN you get the most kick-ass ending ever seen in a Zelda game.
There are some pretty strong hints in Wind Waker that refer to Ocarina of Time. While they're all named link, since Ocarina of Time, Links have also been given a title. Ocarina and Majora's Mask had the Hero of Time, and Wind Waker has the Hero of Winds. Point is, the Hero of Time *was* explicitly mentioned in the into to Wind Waker.
Also remember the room with the Master Sword in it? The characters in the stained glass windows around the room sure looked awfully familiar....
You mean you never ran out of hearts even once?
Granted, that wasn't much of a problem in Ocarina of Time or more recent games. But the original Zelda was hard in places!
I own two of the three Wi-Fi aware games, Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing: Wild World. Here's my impressions:
Mario Kart DS:
Although only twenty of the thirty-two included tracks are playable, and despite the fact that gameplay chances subtly while playing over Wi-Fi (you can't drag items behind you and karts can't bump each other about much regardless of weight), online Mario Kart is surprisingly playable. You can either choose to play against randomly-selected opponents in your region, around the world, "rivals" with a similar win/loss record to you, and "friends" who you've traded friend codes with.
It's important to note that, so far, no Nintendo Wi-Fi game allows for you to play with specific people you've not already traded a friend code with. There exist a good number of sites on the web that allow you to trade these codes (Zonk offered his own here a couple of weeks ago), but even if you've traded (and BOTH players must have the other's code to count), you can't be sure to get that specific friend if you choose a Friends game. I can understand they did this to take care of matters of griefing, and also because of the complete lack of a communication lobby. I'm torn on this approach: it'd sure be nice to be able to play against specific opponents sometimes, but it does make setting up a match very, very easy, as the service takes care of all matchmaking automatically.
It's worth saying that there are players who have decided on off-color or even downright obscene player handles, as well as choosing pictures of genitalia for their kart emblem. So far, it's uncertain what Nintendo plans to do about this, if anything. Once I read on their forums that the proper response to these forms of abuse was to email someone at Nintendo, but later it seems that statement was retracted. Official word so far seems to be that this is the reason for the CYA "Experience may change during online play" message below the ERSB symbol on the splash screens, an attitude that, depending on your view of the matter, is either very irresponsible or surprisingly enlightened. Nintendo is able to track all activity by each DS' MAC address, of course, so it's possible that they could outright ban players for abuses, but it's uncertain if or when they'll do that. It's worth saying that so far, the majority of players I've encountered have no such issues, implying that either fairly few gamers are doing this or those who do it are quickly, quietly sucked into the void.
A bigger issue with the service is definitely my own fault: there are some SERIOUSLY sharp drivers on the online Mario Kart circuit, and despite the essential randomness introduced by the item system, driving skill still matters a lot. Unlike in some past incarnations of Mario Kart (I'm looking at YOU, MK64!), drivers who are behind receive no artificial catch-up speed boosts here; all of the balancing comes from the item system. (Karts also have an "Items" statistic now, which influences how often you get the good stuff.)
If you have any illusions about your skill in driving cartoon vehicles, they will quickly be shattered the first time you go up against a driver who's mastered "snaking," which is a technique for executing drift boosts on straightaways. Drivers with extremely high degrees of accomplishment in single-player mode get stars above their name during races, up to three, but you can be sure when you find someone with even one star on their handle that you're in for a tough battle. Similarly, you'll encounter all kinds of strategy online, including players who'll get a Blue Shell and sit on it until just before you cross the finish line. But even in that case, it's balanced by the fact that the driver will probably have to have foregone many other items in order to hold onto that shell. This is the best-balanced Mario Kart, arguably, since the original, and it may be even better than that.
While we're on the topic of shooting shells at your opponents, the sorriest omission in Mario Kart DS is the fact that its
I don't know... I'm not ready to say that human experience is qualitatively different enough between people that no one is right to critique the games intended for another.
I will say that there are Atari 2600 games I'd rather play than some GBA titles. Seanbaby's essays on the matter may be a bit overly rancorous, but I don't think he's entirely off-base.
More disturbin than a game about a giant rolling ball of debris gathering up all the matter in the world in order to turn it into stars?
Castlevania's use of the touch aspect, I agree, was gimmicky, but the screen aspect was great: for the first time in a Metroid-style game, we could have the whole map visible during exploration! THAT I liked.
Actually, I read a developer's interview in an issue of Game Informer that said the PSP's power was similar to that in the original Playstation, but with significantly better graphics hardware.
The DS' power, meanwhile, is like a weaker N64, but with slightly *better* graphics: note that Mario Kart DS contains MK64 tracks but also renders polygonal characters, instead of resorting to MK64's cheaty, sprite-based rendering of drivers and karts.
I don't think the DS/PSP battle is over yet, but the recent rush of consecutive must-have software for the DS (Kirby, Nintendogs, Meteos, Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, and * Advance Wars *) has given it an advantage.
Oy, now why did someone thing my post was -1 Overrated THIS time?
And would you care to enlighten us as to what the political agenda of the ACLU is? As far as I can see, they'll handle cases on *either* side of the political divide. (They've been known to defend the right of neo-nazis who wanted to demonstrate but were denied permits.) What I had heard was that they actually strive to be neutral, and just go ahead and do their jobs regardless of who hates them for it.
The weirdness of the neo-nazi thing was effectively lampooned by an Onion article, by the way....
A lot of the early titles were PS2 ports.
Which ones? I can't think of any off the top of my head, except maybe Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid, and I wouldn't call those early.