You're not being a troll when you're speaking the truth. Mr. Wills is himself a contradiction. He rails against RPG games while in his list of games he enjoys most he lists System Shock 2 and Freedom Force, both Hybrid-RPGs. He's writing about something he obviously knows nothing about. Show me an action game that has a rich storyline like Fallout, Baldur's Gate or heck, even Ultima. Planescape: Torment has a plot that brings most games to their knees.
He wants strategy? Deciding which areas to level up in is the whole point of the game. What fun is it if it really doesn't matter where I build up my character? RPG games force the player to make choices, hard ones with consequences to your character. What requires more thought: choosing between the shotgun or rocket launcher; or giving your last bit of money to a beggar on the street (as seen in Ultima IV).
He really speaks out of his butt with his statement "the [puzzle] game designers had more time to spend on creating devious and clever puzzles, which no RPG can compete with." A great RPG can compete on every level an adventure game and can add more twists. What Casey forgets is that an RPG can uses stats to it's advantage and allow more than one solution to a problem. To solve a problem the player can rely on intelligence and solve the problem, charisma and talk your way out of a situation, brute force and fight your way out, or take the adventure game route and use your inventory to find the right item for the right job. If designed properly, an RPG can offer a myriad of solutions to a problem and is only limited by the imagination of the player.
But the one thing that shows what an arsehole Casey Wills really and truly is can be seen in this statement: "In most RPGs, a character that is lost in a battle is lost for good." Where has he been in the last ten or fiveteen years? Most RPG games have a state between alive and death called unconsciousness. If your characters do die it's because something catastrophic happend like decapitation. There's other states between death like petrify, poison, etc that add variety and fun to the experience. It's an article in frustration.
Argh. I know Greg Kasavin, and I think I'll drop him a line to see if this kind of content can be brought back up to par.
...imagine how cool it would be if that same character could be transported to FIFA Soccer 2004, Madden NFL 2004, or even SSX 3.
Then we'd have an overweight character panting for breath in FIFA, a 99lb. quarterback being crushed by a 300lb. linebacker in Madden and a snowboarder who's skin is whiter than the surrounding snow in SSX.
In some games it works, but not in all cases. I'd rather create my own fantasy person than a recreation of myself.
Has anyone considered that ATI was to bundle the 9800XT and the 9600XT with Half-Life 2? What does this do to the deal and could this (although unlikely) delay the release of the video cards?
Driving is the only thing that really scares me. I'll be driving home from work and then all of a sudden I'll look around me and think, "Wait, how did I get here?" I'll think back and I can't remember going through the last three stoplights. It's like I'm on autopilot while I'm thinking about whatever I'm thinking about.
The rest of the time, I use it to my advantage. If I'm working on a computer problem, I get so focused on it I don't stop for anything. I might miss a meal or two (yes, I will forget to eat) but I get the problem done.
The reason that ADD kids (I'm one of the adults with it) spent so much time with games or television is that we hyperfocus. Not being able to hold one's attention for a period of time is only one part of ADD. The other is that sometimes once we do focus our attention on something, we tend to hyperfocus on that one thing. And only on that one thing.
For me, it's games and reading. For instance, if I'm reading the newspaper, my wife has to call my time several times before she can get my attention. It's like she's not even there for me. My attention is only on the words on the page. She's learned to poke me to jar my attention to her.
Games are similar. I literally lose track of time when I'm playing a game. I think I've only played an hour when it's really been three or four. Since I save my playing for nighttime when there's fewer distractions, this often occurs. It helps my gameplaying, but I'm tired the next day.
It's not that games, reading or television is addicting to kids with ADD or ADHD, it's just that once something has our attention, whatever it might be, it's really really hard to get us to do something else.
Well as cartoons, video games and Austin Powers have taught us, there is always the possiblity that scientists want to create death rays and hypnobeams.
Why is there always the assumption that all scientists are good? I mean, there's Dr. Evil, Dr. Strangelove and even scientology. All of them looking to create weapons of terrible power. Is it any suprise then that there is a lack of scientists that don't want to create new weapons?
I remember the days when the special edition *was* the regular edition. You could pick up an Infocom or Origin Online box and it would be filled with trinkets, cloth maps, extra manuals, newspapers. Game packaging is a lost art that now costs money. It's gone the way of finding cool toys in your cereal box.
I cut out a star from a piece of paper and wrote "Mario" on it and put it on the floor. It's my own personal Walk of Fame.
Seriously, my local movie theater created their own "Walk of Fame" and my alma mater sold bricks that you could put your name in to make a walk of fame.
Oh wait, I just realized! It's a press release! Hype hype hype hype! It's just a gimmick to get you to go to the movies and pay $10 for a ticket and $23.50 for popcorn and a large drink.
I would use DeCSS on that statement to try and figure it out, but with all the recent court rulings (especially the one about code as free speech), I'm afraid to.
Using a search engine with "Battlestar Galactica" and "mormon" will pull up quite a few, but to save you the trouble here is a link to a good resource with a bibliography. Larsen is himself a Mormon (as well as myself) and did what most writers do: write about what you know. Once you know the source material for the show, a lot of it takes on new meaning and at least for me, makes it a lot more fun to watch.
I spotted your problem. According to this statement, you were playing with outdated equipment back in 1992. If given the proper tools at the right age, there's no telling where your gaming skills would be today.
I'm glad that I'm reading that Grant Morrison is taking into account the show's mythos an religious undertones into the game. (Hang on... I'm not getting preachy here. Hear me out.) Whether you agree or disagree with a particular philosophy is inconsequential to the design of a game.
As someone stated earlier (let me fix the statement so that it is true) all games that have good stores are great games. Ultima is another RPG series without the Avatar and the symbolism he embodies. C&C is just another RTS game if it didn't have the competing philosophies of Communism and Capitalism. The Final Fantasy games often incorporate Shinto ideas and philosophy. When done correctly, having a mythos enriches the gameplay by unifying the game design and giving a deep background for the player to immerse himself in.
The BSG television show has a equally rich if not more so than the games listed above. I know some of you inwardly groan at the cheese some episodes contain. Blame the television execs for pushing the series and writers too much. Out of all the shows Glen Larson created, this IMHO is the best one of the lot. (He did unleash Knight Rider and David Hasselhoff upon us though.) BSG really is a biblical story with a dash of Mormonism involved. You don't have to be a Mormon to enjoy it, any more than you have to be a liberal socialist to enjoy the Star Trek Universe or espouse the views of Joseph Campbell to enjoy Star Wars. Equally, when playing games I'm not being converted to being a Shinto Monk playing Final Fantasy or becoming a druid when I cast spells in Ultima. The mythos just adds to the atmosphere and ties all the elements of the game together.
I'm curious to see Grant's take on things. Hopefully it's better than what the Sci-Fi channel is doing. I'm pretty sure I read that some of the original cast is doing voice work for the game so that's a good sign. In the end, it all boils down to gameplay though, something that a good story can't salvage. Best of luck to the entire team and here's hoping that the BSG mythos stays as intact as possible.
Ever had your office next to one of the game rooms? Major distraction. Even when I worked at a game company, we had a rule that no one used the arcade games, LAN or pool tables until after 5pm. It was just too loud.
Personally, I think the money is better spent giving it back to the employees in forms of bonuses, gifts or what have you. Try giving your employees a PS2 or XBox instead.
Developers need to realize that gamers are going to mod their games if they can. Frankly this guy should be honored that they are doing this with his game. Having an attitude of "Yeah, they can do it as long as they don't do it with *my* game" alienates himself from his fanbase.
Would Half-Life be nearly as popular without Counterstrike? My friend Zoid started CTF in Quake. You can't shake a stick at a FPS game without seeing some version of it already included as a standard feature. There have been plenty of hacks and mods added to videogames that all have either extended the life of the game, enhanced the gameplay or added more entertainment to playing. (Note: I'm not including wallhacks, cheats or aimbots here.) Some mods take a life of their own and even extend over to other games.
As long as the hackers don't violate any intellectual property, copyright laws or try to sell their mods for profit, developers shouldn't complain. Many times these mods are better than what developers can put out. To suggest that these people go out and make their own game... what? And make more competition for your game in the marketplace. Be happy that these mods are being done to your game and thereby increasing that fat bonus check.
Let me say this. The single biggest innovation in GUI interfaces in RPG games is the automap. There are times that I kinda miss the graph paper and painstakingly drawing each pathway... Wait, on second thought I don't miss it for a second. That being said, nothing beats having a big cloth map with the lay of the land on it.
No one said that it had to be a 255-page tome. Part of it is the mystique and the other part informative. A good GUI interface will go a long way to making things easy for the player in a RPG. For instance, the Baldur's Gate interface can map keys to your heart's content while providing all the necessary information in the game by right-clicking the spell scroll.
Any good game designer knows however that anytime that you have the player flip over to the in-game reference, it jolts you back to reality. Having a printed manual let's you study away from the game (like in the bathroom, the best place for study) and nothing beats paper for quick reference.
I mean, is Carmack going to start bashing tech-trees in strategy games next? Hey, he's good at making game engines, but I'm taking the word (and work) of masters like Brian Reynolds, Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley. Never mind that Warcraft and Starcraft use them as well. There's something to be said for simplicity, but there is something else called depth in game design, something that has been lacking in id Software releases of late. (Sorry guys! We're still on for lunch right?)
One last thing that I didn't cover but mentioned above. It's just cool to have the books. I shelled out the extra money to get the Ultima IX Dragon edition. Yes, I wanted to smell the cheap fake plastic leather covers of the spell books. I remember pouring over the details of all my 2nd Edition AD&D manuals. It added to the history of the game. There was a whole world to conquer and these books showed the way. The wealth of the material made me realize that the world was my burrito. So what if some games have a lot of controls. Does it prohibit the average gamer from playing an RPG? Not really because he/she is more apt to not play because it isn't their type of game. It does add to the experience though. It's okay to innovate, but not at the expense of gameplay.
Note: Major props for usage of tiltowait. Werdna forever.
[Role-Playing Games] for example, got to where they had to have a book ship with the game.
I'll be the first to say I love John's work and I've got a lot of friends at id Software. But I have to say this is *the* stupidest thing that I have heard him say. I hope that it was taken out of context or something, because it takes a real meathead to say this.
I mean, c'mon. For 25 years RPGs have always been about the books, the manuals, the spellbooks, the monster compendiums. If my RPG didn't come with a book, I'd be a little worried. In fact, when I purchased a used Wizardry 8 without the manual, I nearly lost it.
John, tell me that we're just misunderstanding you. Tell me that CNN is pulling a NYT stunt. You can't be serious. Can you?
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You're not being a troll when you're speaking the truth. Mr. Wills is himself a contradiction. He rails against RPG games while in his list of games he enjoys most he lists System Shock 2 and Freedom Force, both Hybrid-RPGs. He's writing about something he obviously knows nothing about. Show me an action game that has a rich storyline like Fallout, Baldur's Gate or heck, even Ultima. Planescape: Torment has a plot that brings most games to their knees. He wants strategy? Deciding which areas to level up in is the whole point of the game. What fun is it if it really doesn't matter where I build up my character? RPG games force the player to make choices, hard ones with consequences to your character. What requires more thought: choosing between the shotgun or rocket launcher; or giving your last bit of money to a beggar on the street (as seen in Ultima IV). He really speaks out of his butt with his statement "the [puzzle] game designers had more time to spend on creating devious and clever puzzles, which no RPG can compete with." A great RPG can compete on every level an adventure game and can add more twists. What Casey forgets is that an RPG can uses stats to it's advantage and allow more than one solution to a problem. To solve a problem the player can rely on intelligence and solve the problem, charisma and talk your way out of a situation, brute force and fight your way out, or take the adventure game route and use your inventory to find the right item for the right job. If designed properly, an RPG can offer a myriad of solutions to a problem and is only limited by the imagination of the player. But the one thing that shows what an arsehole Casey Wills really and truly is can be seen in this statement: "In most RPGs, a character that is lost in a battle is lost for good." Where has he been in the last ten or fiveteen years? Most RPG games have a state between alive and death called unconsciousness. If your characters do die it's because something catastrophic happend like decapitation. There's other states between death like petrify, poison, etc that add variety and fun to the experience. It's an article in frustration. Argh. I know Greg Kasavin, and I think I'll drop him a line to see if this kind of content can be brought back up to par.
No, wait. Let's hear this out. I for one would like to be enlightened.
Mr. Miyagi: Weld the car.
Robot: Weld the car.
Mr. Miyagi: Power sand the deck furniture.
Robot: Power sand the deck furniture.
Mr. Miyagi: For the crane kick, you must become a crane.
Robot: I already AM a crane.
Mr. Miyagi: Then you are ready.
LOGO. Easy to learn and there isn't much damage you can do with a turtle.
Then we'd have an overweight character panting for breath in FIFA, a 99lb. quarterback being crushed by a 300lb. linebacker in Madden and a snowboarder who's skin is whiter than the surrounding snow in SSX. In some games it works, but not in all cases. I'd rather create my own fantasy person than a recreation of myself.
Has anyone considered that ATI was to bundle the 9800XT and the 9600XT with Half-Life 2? What does this do to the deal and could this (although unlikely) delay the release of the video cards?
Shodan. Damn, mod the parent up! If there's one single thing that would scare the living crap out of a gamer, it's *her* voice.
Can we just all say, "Duh!" and move on?
Driving is the only thing that really scares me. I'll be driving home from work and then all of a sudden I'll look around me and think, "Wait, how did I get here?" I'll think back and I can't remember going through the last three stoplights. It's like I'm on autopilot while I'm thinking about whatever I'm thinking about. The rest of the time, I use it to my advantage. If I'm working on a computer problem, I get so focused on it I don't stop for anything. I might miss a meal or two (yes, I will forget to eat) but I get the problem done.
For me, it's games and reading. For instance, if I'm reading the newspaper, my wife has to call my time several times before she can get my attention. It's like she's not even there for me. My attention is only on the words on the page. She's learned to poke me to jar my attention to her.
Games are similar. I literally lose track of time when I'm playing a game. I think I've only played an hour when it's really been three or four. Since I save my playing for nighttime when there's fewer distractions, this often occurs. It helps my gameplaying, but I'm tired the next day.
It's not that games, reading or television is addicting to kids with ADD or ADHD, it's just that once something has our attention, whatever it might be, it's really really hard to get us to do something else.
Why is there always the assumption that all scientists are good? I mean, there's Dr. Evil, Dr. Strangelove and even scientology. All of them looking to create weapons of terrible power. Is it any suprise then that there is a lack of scientists that don't want to create new weapons?
I remember the days when the special edition *was* the regular edition. You could pick up an Infocom or Origin Online box and it would be filled with trinkets, cloth maps, extra manuals, newspapers. Game packaging is a lost art that now costs money. It's gone the way of finding cool toys in your cereal box.
I have a feeling that all Steam is going to be is a bunch of hot air. Gimme the box and the CD.
Seriously, my local movie theater created their own "Walk of Fame" and my alma mater sold bricks that you could put your name in to make a walk of fame.
Oh wait, I just realized! It's a press release! Hype hype hype hype! It's just a gimmick to get you to go to the movies and pay $10 for a ticket and $23.50 for popcorn and a large drink.
I would use DeCSS on that statement to try and figure it out, but with all the recent court rulings (especially the one about code as free speech), I'm afraid to.
Gee, that sounds an awful lot like my time working in game development.
Using a search engine with "Battlestar Galactica" and "mormon" will pull up quite a few, but to save you the trouble here is a link to a good resource with a bibliography. Larsen is himself a Mormon (as well as myself) and did what most writers do: write about what you know. Once you know the source material for the show, a lot of it takes on new meaning and at least for me, makes it a lot more fun to watch.
I spotted your problem. According to this statement, you were playing with outdated equipment back in 1992. If given the proper tools at the right age, there's no telling where your gaming skills would be today.
As someone stated earlier (let me fix the statement so that it is true) all games that have good stores are great games. Ultima is another RPG series without the Avatar and the symbolism he embodies. C&C is just another RTS game if it didn't have the competing philosophies of Communism and Capitalism. The Final Fantasy games often incorporate Shinto ideas and philosophy. When done correctly, having a mythos enriches the gameplay by unifying the game design and giving a deep background for the player to immerse himself in.
The BSG television show has a equally rich if not more so than the games listed above. I know some of you inwardly groan at the cheese some episodes contain. Blame the television execs for pushing the series and writers too much. Out of all the shows Glen Larson created, this IMHO is the best one of the lot. (He did unleash Knight Rider and David Hasselhoff upon us though.) BSG really is a biblical story with a dash of Mormonism involved. You don't have to be a Mormon to enjoy it, any more than you have to be a liberal socialist to enjoy the Star Trek Universe or espouse the views of Joseph Campbell to enjoy Star Wars. Equally, when playing games I'm not being converted to being a Shinto Monk playing Final Fantasy or becoming a druid when I cast spells in Ultima. The mythos just adds to the atmosphere and ties all the elements of the game together.
I'm curious to see Grant's take on things. Hopefully it's better than what the Sci-Fi channel is doing. I'm pretty sure I read that some of the original cast is doing voice work for the game so that's a good sign. In the end, it all boils down to gameplay though, something that a good story can't salvage. Best of luck to the entire team and here's hoping that the BSG mythos stays as intact as possible.
Personally, I think the money is better spent giving it back to the employees in forms of bonuses, gifts or what have you. Try giving your employees a PS2 or XBox instead.
Would Half-Life be nearly as popular without Counterstrike? My friend Zoid started CTF in Quake. You can't shake a stick at a FPS game without seeing some version of it already included as a standard feature. There have been plenty of hacks and mods added to videogames that all have either extended the life of the game, enhanced the gameplay or added more entertainment to playing. (Note: I'm not including wallhacks, cheats or aimbots here.) Some mods take a life of their own and even extend over to other games.
As long as the hackers don't violate any intellectual property, copyright laws or try to sell their mods for profit, developers shouldn't complain. Many times these mods are better than what developers can put out. To suggest that these people go out and make their own game... what? And make more competition for your game in the marketplace. Be happy that these mods are being done to your game and thereby increasing that fat bonus check.
Or like Wizardry 8... a *computer* RPG. I know what I'm talking about.
Let me say this. The single biggest innovation in GUI interfaces in RPG games is the automap. There are times that I kinda miss the graph paper and painstakingly drawing each pathway... Wait, on second thought I don't miss it for a second. That being said, nothing beats having a big cloth map with the lay of the land on it.
Any good game designer knows however that anytime that you have the player flip over to the in-game reference, it jolts you back to reality. Having a printed manual let's you study away from the game (like in the bathroom, the best place for study) and nothing beats paper for quick reference.
I mean, is Carmack going to start bashing tech-trees in strategy games next? Hey, he's good at making game engines, but I'm taking the word (and work) of masters like Brian Reynolds, Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley. Never mind that Warcraft and Starcraft use them as well. There's something to be said for simplicity, but there is something else called depth in game design, something that has been lacking in id Software releases of late. (Sorry guys! We're still on for lunch right?)
One last thing that I didn't cover but mentioned above. It's just cool to have the books. I shelled out the extra money to get the Ultima IX Dragon edition. Yes, I wanted to smell the cheap fake plastic leather covers of the spell books. I remember pouring over the details of all my 2nd Edition AD&D manuals. It added to the history of the game. There was a whole world to conquer and these books showed the way. The wealth of the material made me realize that the world was my burrito. So what if some games have a lot of controls. Does it prohibit the average gamer from playing an RPG? Not really because he/she is more apt to not play because it isn't their type of game. It does add to the experience though. It's okay to innovate, but not at the expense of gameplay.
Note: Major props for usage of tiltowait. Werdna forever.
I'll be the first to say I love John's work and I've got a lot of friends at id Software. But I have to say this is *the* stupidest thing that I have heard him say. I hope that it was taken out of context or something, because it takes a real meathead to say this.
I mean, c'mon. For 25 years RPGs have always been about the books, the manuals, the spellbooks, the monster compendiums. If my RPG didn't come with a book, I'd be a little worried. In fact, when I purchased a used Wizardry 8 without the manual, I nearly lost it.
John, tell me that we're just misunderstanding you. Tell me that CNN is pulling a NYT stunt. You can't be serious. Can you?