I have to disagree with this notion that games must result in a story where the protagonist makes 'perfect' choices.
Innumerable RPGs are based around the 'twist' at the midway point where someone you have placed your trust in turns on you. Or where the recovery of the Magical Widget / Discovery of the Treasure is found to be a cover for an evil plot. Then you spend the second half of the game fixing the wrong you've done.
In the initial round of story-free first person shooters (such as Doom), it was a case of doing everything well to win, but look at any action movie. How often does the hero get killed? The hero survives against impossible odds, every time, to win the day. Though they may get badly wounded or low on ammo, they come through and save the day. Just like the player does in Doom.
Please explain how you're going to get anyone a decent education, if all the best & brightest take only the high-paying jobs for the high-end classes at the end of the education tunnel.
Really, I'm all ears. Tell me how these kids are going to get effectively taught 1-10th grade if they are only getting teachers who are only taking those low-paying teaching jobs because they are incapable of performing at a higher level. Tell me about how those high-paid qualified teachers are going to have any students worth teaching at their high-merit high-pay jobs. Tell me how they'll teach calculus instead of basic arithmetic to students who haven't had a decent teacher up until that part.
Short sighted "PAY EVERYONE BASED ON MERIT" monkey howling is pretty useless if you can't see that there is a process where every step IS actually valuable. I would even suggest that 1-5th grade general-education teachers are _more_ valuable than some wanker with in-depth knowledge in one subject. If you get poor teaching at that stage, you're going to be playing catch-up all the time in the newer, more specialized subjects.
Nonsense. Try thinking a little bit outside the box.
Sample classes could be that a Space Marine is a character who is moderately tank-like in nature. Rather than having a player play a guardsman, you instead play a squad leader, and you have 'pets' of guardsmen who fire on your behalf. There's a basic "x number of guardsmen = 1 space marine. roughly." rule of thumb you could go by, and scale that up as characters level, until you become able to have 'pets' as a Commisar such as tanks, heavy artillery, or the equivalent. and the marine works their way up to, say, Terminator armor, or a single rhino/land raider.
If you don't assume one troop unit = 1 player, and break things up, the game could get quite interesting.
There is a world of difference in terms of content and design between a single player and a multiplayer game. This is one of those "water is wet" statements.
What might be unbalanced-but-no-big-deal in a single player game can be a game-breaking dynamic in a multiplayer game.
And the monthly fee for an MMO is not there to recoup the costs of game production itself, but to cover the costs of actually maintaining and providing the service. Again, this is on the level of "water is wet". Bandwidth costs, 24x7 uptime/network monitoring and silos of hardware are neither cheap nor free, and likely require semi-frequent upgrades. Include things like semi-regular patching and free content updates, and the cost continues to seem reasonable.
You are also failing to take into consideration what you do not spend money on as a result of a game like EQ or WoW or DAoC. I know that when I was a serious player of EverQuest, I bought perhaps 1 game a year, instead of a game a month or game every other month. at even $40 per title, I was ultimately saving money. Now it's true that I was sinking money into a single game, but if you enjoy that single game, and wind up saving money over time, why not?
In short, you're making a lot of the same un- or mis-informed arguments by people who don't play MMOs and can only see the $15/month pricetag as being an affront to their sense of what the 'right' way of paying for a game is.
Are you completely cracked? The bible may not call out Lot's decision as being justified, but he is rewarded very clearly as being the only 'Just' man in all of Sodom. The Angels and/or God reward him by blinding the crowd allowing him and his daughters to escape. And then this just man went on to knock up both of his daughters because he was apparently 'too drunk to know what he was doing'.
And the crowd of rapists weren't there because he picked the 'good land'. Where are you getting this from? It's fairly clear from all the fables around this that part of why Sodom was destroyed was because of the alleged wickedness of the citizens, who treated strangers poorly. Like, say, the strangers in lot's house. Now you can make the argument that if Lot hadn't chosen to live in the midst of wickedness because of the good land nearby, this wouldn't have happened. But that's not at all what you said.
Lot's wife did not die because of anything _he_ did. She was turned to a pillar of salt due to her own actions of disobeying the Authority (Angels/God) that said to make haste and not look back upon the burning city.
QA will not be a path to anything but a series of contractor jobs in the majority of the game industry for a number of reasons.
First and foremost is the general value the software culture puts on QA to begin with. In any software environment, QA is frequently looked down upon, or at the very least not seen in the same light of respect and value that development is. This makes the QA position something that can be seen as nonessential to the primary function of the company: writing software.
Obviously, that's incorrect, and anyone who has actually worked with a good QA team will tell you so. Trouble is, there are plenty of bad QA teams, and badly managed projects where the value of QA is not clearly laid out.
In the game industry in general, you have the problems as already laid out: soul crushing work hours, ludicrous release schedules, and a sense that there is always someone waiting to do your job because it's a 'dream job' in the game industry. But that applies for every single game developer too. Or have people so quickly forgotten the EA scandal & lawsuit about the lives of their programmers?
Because most development houses are not their own publisher, they have external dependencies and requirements for quality that they must meet. Someone publishing a game thru Vivendi will hand it off to VU for an acceptance pass based on whatever criteria vivendi have in mind. Publisher's QA groups are probably the worst to work for and offer the least amount of actual outside visibility for the tester, but that's where the jobs are. The majority of QA jobs in studios are going to be reserved for people who have inside contacts or are lifetime career testers that are not trying to 'get into the game industry through qa'. They're in those positions because they're excellent testers who can help the company reach the publisher milestones. In some companies, there isn't even a QA team. The logic goes that the publisher will tell you when your game is good enough to release, and you can always bring in contractors on a temporary basis if you need to.
The real answer as to how to break into the game industry isn't a certificate from Game Design University Of DeVry Technical ITT College, and it isn't trying to get 'any job you can in the industry'. The real answer is to develop people skills. More than any industry I've worked in, the games industry runs on word of mouth and personal references. If someone knows you, you are vastly more likely to be hired than the person with superior skills on paper who doesn't have a personal recommendation.
In an environment where "faggot" and 'that's gay' and other wonderfully mature terms are thrown around regularly, it is deceitful to try and claim the environment is a 'level playing field.'
I note that there haven't BEEN any Het-Friendly Guilds created yet. Either straights are too lazy or don't see the need for it. Who are _you_ to tell other people what they should and should not be able to do?
ON that note, let's talk about a few of the more obvious fallacies and intentionally ignored facts that the Straight Nerd Libertarian I'm-ok-with-fags-really-i-know-some brigades seem to always use, and put them to rest for good.
1 - "would you have a problem with a fundamentalist christian guild?"
These guilds already DO exist, on multiple servers, and they see WoW as a chance to minister to the unbelievers and bring people to Christ. So no, they dont' have a problem with it, and neither does Blizzard. Straw man, red herring, you name it, this is it.
2 - "what if someone wanted to make a hets-only guild?"
This is a false premise, as the original guild was not gay-only, but gay-FRIENDLY, where shitty behavior from slope-browed homophobes and teenagers trying to prove they're macho in a videogame would not be tolerated. I'm sorry if people think that "gay friendly" think "only gays can be friendly to gays", but that's the problem of your uniquely bent worldview, and has nothing to do with the facts of the situation or the nature of reality.
3 - "Blizzard can do whatever they want they own it."
Perhaps you missed the sixties and civil rights, where people fought to be able to be treated fairly in restaurants, buses, restrooms, and everywhere else. You can reserve the right to refuse service to any ONE person, but you can't simply bar an entire class of people from your establishment, or create multiple rulesets for different people. This should be obvious, but is simply one more diversion that the Scared Straight folks are using to justify things.
and finally, this gem:
4 - "They're asking Blizzard to make an exception for one single group!!!!!11!!!oheoneone!!"
No, they're pointing out that Blizzard is already making an exception for one group (the GBLT group) while not making exceptions for the christian groups or others. But some real life groups (such as have been listed already) have been declined. If blizzard had played its hand like this with the xtian guilds, I suspect the uprising now would be much less, given that it was a consistent policy.
But as it is NOT a consistent policy, they should be brought to account for their actions and explain why Christianity is a-ok in a game world, but homosexuality is not. After all, christians get bashed all the time as well, so being openly christian just encourages negative behavior.
I hope that this can be useful to people fighting the legions of self-appointed dimwitted "libertarians" and "brilliant nerds" who think they know everything and are above their prejudices, while dropping such gems as, "how can someone look at a hairy guy's ass and find love? that's fucking gross dude! I don't want to see that."
and that they don't actually 'destroy' immersion. Trying to remember mouse gestures, or figure out the 'right' way to make some things happen when there are no simple menus or keyboard shortcuts? That's a way to ensure my sense of immersion is totally hosed.
One of the things that absolutely wrecked B&W (gameplay issues aside) was the lack of any kind of real, usable in-game menus, icons, etc.
I can't think of any game where lack of menus actually led to a greater sense of immersion, but I can think of plenty of games where an outstandingly crafted UI with menus, buttons, bars, numbers, etc, led to a deeper sense of immersion and a better game experience overall. I suppose Myst would be an exception that comes to mind.
I respect that Lionhead is trying to do something new(ish) with their game design, but since they haven't gotten it right yet, maybe they should try doing something that will actually make for a fun game, and then work on modding that fun game with the EVIL MENUS OF DOOM to match up to their design paradigm of NO MENUS ONLY IMMERSION.
I don't think I'm that far outside the realm of the Typical when I say that I found the no-menus vague world-based feedback (village statues, condition of your animal) requiring a lot more time to analyze to decide what to do next than using a simple menu-driven system.
From the article, it sounds like they are implementing tooltips and things as a compromise, so it might not be as bad. But I genuinely don't see the gain they're talking about from taking tools away from the user. Having complex underpinnings and status in a game is swell, but it doesn't matter if I can only view it through primary colors and simplistic graphics.
It would be a very important difference, if you were right.
Yin and Yang are opposites. They are two separate concepts that, together, balance one another out. If one or the other is too out of balance, you see problems, according to the theory.
But the fact that yin or yang energy can be out of balance would indicate they are, in fact, two different things. Look at Chinese medicine, some substances are considered to have a strong 'yin' value, others to be primarily 'yang'.
In short, you're getting it right that the two opposing forces are both necessary to create a 'whole', but you're getting it wrong to say that something can't be yin or yang. Although I suppose if your point is really that there is no such thing as a pure-yin or pure-yang object in the universe, that is technically true. but damn, that's even more pedantic than I thought you were being. =)
Of course, this is all needless wanking around an article that thinks 'yin or yang?' is a clever way of saying 'good or bad?' And, as has already been pointed out, can't spell 'yin' right in the first fucking place.
I hate to break this to you, but both girls AND boys can spread cooties.
no, really, it's true. I read it in a book once.
Geeks only bitch about bar culture because it's a culture they frequently don't understand the rules for, and they can't stand to see an environment where they're unable to thrive. Thus, bar culture must be inferior to geek culture, because geeks do not thrive within it.
It takes almost no time at all to get to level 16. Are you suggesting that by playing WoW "religiously", you only do it for an hour every sunday, and don't think about it the rest of the week?
"You can clearly see where Richard Garriot got his influences for Ultima from."
You are, of course, kidding, right?
Ultima - Published in 1980. Final Fantasy - published in 1987.
'87 was when Ultima 4 came out. I think you have your influences backwards. And that's assuming anyone would even agree that they are influences on each other at all. I don't think they are or were.
In a similar vein, I've barely begun the game (done perhaps 7 or 8 missions thus far), and I've amassed a total of... almost $1k.
Compare that to Vice City, where you were making 1k-5k PER MISSION right from go. Going to the clothing store and buying a new outfit is a hard choice. You go in and the shit costs what feels like 'real' money.
I'm sure as the game continues, money becomes less of an issue. But I'm very pleased that they did successfully map the relative poverty level of "the hood" so that the player didn't have thousands of dollars to begin with.
I do have one problem with the game however, and it's a problem that I'm surprised slipped through QA & product evaluation.
In a very early mission, you take a baseball bat, and you have to fight multiple enemies. The manual does _not_ tell you how to switch targets when in 'lock on' mode. In a mission that happens several missions _after_ that one, you are walked through shooting a gun, locking on targets, and cycling through all available targets.
-1 : failing to document the target cycle controls in the manual
-1 : ordering the 'tutorial' missions such that the useful knowledge comes after the mission when you would first need it.
First, the agreeing! I think you're 100% on point about the publisher test team, since publisher's have their 'acceptance tests' that a game must pass before it can be declared gold, and their test team is a part of that overhead.
The idea of test coming into the product to test something that's already playable is very likely a common approach (I don't work in the game sector, but it's a common attitude in other places in the software industry, so I feel pretty ok making that assumption). But as anyone who has had to sit through a presentation on test knows, bugs found at the beginning of the design/implementation phase are a lot less costly to fix than ones at the tail end of it all. Having test involved in design and planning meetings at the early stages can make a huge difference in the final quality of a product.
With a 2d point/clickita adventure game specifically, I don't think test would necessarily provide much in the way of useful feedback, but let's consider that for a moment. If your game is going to be an extremely simple, single-solution / single-path adventure game, that 30k number is quite reasonable.
But if that's the case, what do you need all 4 programmers for? you'll really only need the Lead Programmer (who can tweak engine issues) and probably 1 junion dev, and perhaps an intern or some other nearly-free work. Heck, have a junior-junior dev who is also your tester, and save money in BOTH areas.
Now if your game is going to have multiple solutions to puzzles, multiple paths, 'ideal' endings, and all the other things that are often looked for in modern games, test's job (and development's) becomes much more complex, including reviewing the game's relative difficulty, if following unexpected branches break forward progression in the game, etc. And in that case, 30k is not going to be enough, and everyone would benefit from having Test involved at a very early stage to provide feedback on the design and planning.
It's also worth noting that "testing" is just considered a monobloc expense, and not an actual person/position, which goes to the heart of the problem in the games industry. "testing" isn't a job, it's a commodity you buy. You hire programmers to make your product, but you pay for the testing of your product.
In the budget was this:
Testing
Subtotal: $30,000
In case anyone wants to ever wonder why the game industry releases consistently buggy, shitty product, there's your answer.
Testing. ALL the testing for 1 year. $30k. Half the salary of a single developer. I would assume that's either for hiring a single real person at 30k to do the testing, or else to pay 30k to a contractor service for some amount of hours of testing.
I think it's interesting, especially given that the stated numbers are from his experience in the industry.
Perhaps in this specific case, with a known engine and no cutting-hedge technology, spending such a tiny amount of testing of the game could work out, if you also have the developers and everyone else playing the game / testing along the way as well.
Overall, a really interesting breakdown of how things would work for even an extremely simple game idea, and how much money is involved.
Is there any chance of this being ported to Windows, I wonder? I adored the first Crimson Skies and played it endlessly. But I don't own an xbox, and don't plan on owning one.
Still, even if this doesn't get ported to any other system, I'm glad to see the Crimson Skies franchise being used again. I really enjoyed the world that it was based in, and the not-real physics of flight were nice. It's a minority view, but when i'm playing a flight-based game that has lots of gunfire and dogfights, I prefer the physics to be less realistic, so you can get in closer to the enemy, and actually see those wonderfully detailed models. radar lock & firing missiles at blips on a screen are more realistic, but boy howdy are they not visually exciting.
Because so much source code has been stolen in the past from Microsoft and Valve and every other company on the planet that allows people to work remotely.
Are you really this aggressively stupid, or is this some sort of 'method acting' thing for a part in the sequel to "Antitrust" ?
You do realize that the level of 'tradeoff' you are suggesting is not unlike saying we should build all buildings underground from now on so we can avoid having planes fly into them, right? I MEAN LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED ON 9/11!! If those skyscrapers had been COREscrapers, that never would've happened!
And it is all tradeoffs, and the ludicrous idea you are presenting has far too many negatives for an ostensible positive "keep your code from being stolen". And carefully ignoring the years and years of source code _never being stolen before now_.
Really. Truly. go get a dollar from your mom, head out the door. Get on your bike. (put the helmet on first!) and ride down to the corner clue store. Walk in, slap that dollar on the counter and say "Give me one of your best, my good man!"
While they're at it, why don't they put all the development computers into a separate building and make people walk across the street to code! That'd be even SAFER.
This is a plainly simplistic and idiotic approach to how to address security, from people who have never actually dealt with it.
You have people who work remotely. You have people who work from home. You have people who think up fantastic ideas to fix a bug or implement a feature in the middle of the night.
Should all of these people be forced to work in the office on that little private LAN that has no external connectivity? How about when it's time to test things like Steam? You have to put it on the 'net at some point to see how it plays with others.
If you have a realistic suggestion that will work in the real business world, spit it out. Otherwise, enough with the endless harping on a completely idiotic idea that anyone who has actually worked at a large company would shoot down in moments.
"Indeed, the Legends learning curve is nearly vertical. That is the beauty of it."
And that, in a nutshell, is part of why the linux platform isn't a top priority for most game development houses.
a vertical learning curve is NOT beautiful, by any stretch of the imagination. Only terminal *nix geeks and people enamored of their own inherent brilliance think a ludicrously steep learning curve is a good thing. The proper learning curve for gaming is more of a series of troughs and inclines, with very little actual vertical. You want to challenge, not frustrate. You want to progress the player through the game naturally, not be doing the same small thing over and over until they finally get it right, only to instantly meet another wall head-on as they must move 1 more step up the curve.
A game needs to suck in the new player in the first 30 minutes, and make them feel like they know how to play and will have fun, or else it's entirely possible in today's short-attention-span world that the game will get shelved in favor of something that offers the instant gratification the user is after.
The only 'striking similarities' between an Anne Rice novel and the World of Darkness/Vampire worlds are the fact that they have, er, vampires in them.
The idea of 'werewolves vs. vampires', and the concept of a vampire society that has a clear social order and houses/clans/whatnot is to be found nowhere in the homoerotic misunderstood-poetry-writing-loner vampires of Anne Rice's novels. Hell, the Dark Island where all the vampires end up agreeing to come to meet and remain in touch is more of a friendly stopover. There is no community, no politics, nothing. An argument could be made for the existence of ancient progenitor vampires that want to destroy all their young, I suppose. But the Akasha/Enkil reality shares very little with the Ghennom mythos that WW's WoD talks about.
Now in the movie that's coming out (i have only seen the television trailer for it, so i am making some very base assumptions), there appears to be a war going on under the unseeing eyes of mortal men. That is pure white wolf, and not something that I think many other Vampire-based games/books have addressed. If someone wants to correct me, please do. I'm far from a fanboy or expert in this stuff.
First, the date everyone keeps mentioning in the thread (and here) as being the end of September for the release?
According to ebworld.com, the currently listed release date for hl2 is 11/18/03. Which, needless to say, isn't this month.
Second, nobody has available anywhere on their preorder pages (at least that I can find) any information about collector's edition vs. standard vs. 'lite' versions of Half-Life 2.
I do wish that the information about the 'extras' was a little more clear. If the extras are simply a 'autographed' manual, a little Gordon Freeman figure, a soundtrack CD, and a bigger box, big whoop. I don't care.
But if the extras are 'extra player models, additional maps, a tf2 preview / playable demo' or things of that nature, then the collector's edition becomes more appealing.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree with this notion that games must result in a story where the protagonist makes 'perfect' choices.
Innumerable RPGs are based around the 'twist' at the midway point where someone you have placed your trust in turns on you. Or where the recovery of the Magical Widget / Discovery of the Treasure is found to be a cover for an evil plot. Then you spend the second half of the game fixing the wrong you've done.
In the initial round of story-free first person shooters (such as Doom), it was a case of doing everything well to win, but look at any action movie. How often does the hero get killed? The hero survives against impossible odds, every time, to win the day. Though they may get badly wounded or low on ammo, they come through and save the day. Just like the player does in Doom.
Fantastic plan.
Please explain how you're going to get anyone a decent education, if all the best & brightest take only the high-paying jobs for the high-end classes at the end of the education tunnel.
Really, I'm all ears. Tell me how these kids are going to get effectively taught 1-10th grade if they are only getting teachers who are only taking those low-paying teaching jobs because they are incapable of performing at a higher level. Tell me about how those high-paid qualified teachers are going to have any students worth teaching at their high-merit high-pay jobs. Tell me how they'll teach calculus instead of basic arithmetic to students who haven't had a decent teacher up until that part.
Short sighted "PAY EVERYONE BASED ON MERIT" monkey howling is pretty useless if you can't see that there is a process where every step IS actually valuable. I would even suggest that 1-5th grade general-education teachers are _more_ valuable than some wanker with in-depth knowledge in one subject. If you get poor teaching at that stage, you're going to be playing catch-up all the time in the newer, more specialized subjects.
I'm surprised this has to be explained.
Nonsense. Try thinking a little bit outside the box.
Sample classes could be that a Space Marine is a character who is moderately tank-like in nature. Rather than having a player play a guardsman, you instead play a squad leader, and you have 'pets' of guardsmen who fire on your behalf. There's a basic "x number of guardsmen = 1 space marine. roughly." rule of thumb you could go by, and scale that up as characters level, until you become able to have 'pets' as a Commisar such as tanks, heavy artillery, or the equivalent. and the marine works their way up to, say, Terminator armor, or a single rhino/land raider.
If you don't assume one troop unit = 1 player, and break things up, the game could get quite interesting.
There is a world of difference in terms of content and design between a single player and a multiplayer game. This is one of those "water is wet" statements.
What might be unbalanced-but-no-big-deal in a single player game can be a game-breaking dynamic in a multiplayer game.
And the monthly fee for an MMO is not there to recoup the costs of game production itself, but to cover the costs of actually maintaining and providing the service. Again, this is on the level of "water is wet". Bandwidth costs, 24x7 uptime/network monitoring and silos of hardware are neither cheap nor free, and likely require semi-frequent upgrades. Include things like semi-regular patching and free content updates, and the cost continues to seem reasonable.
You are also failing to take into consideration what you do not spend money on as a result of a game like EQ or WoW or DAoC. I know that when I was a serious player of EverQuest, I bought perhaps 1 game a year, instead of a game a month or game every other month. at even $40 per title, I was ultimately saving money. Now it's true that I was sinking money into a single game, but if you enjoy that single game, and wind up saving money over time, why not?
In short, you're making a lot of the same un- or mis-informed arguments by people who don't play MMOs and can only see the $15/month pricetag as being an affront to their sense of what the 'right' way of paying for a game is.
To reiterate: water is wet.
Please to be demonstrating how this is 'outright fraud'.
Use both sides of the paper if necessary.
It is now!
http://www.popcap.com/launchpage.php?theGame=bwa
Are you completely cracked? The bible may not call out Lot's decision as being justified, but he is rewarded very clearly as being the only 'Just' man in all of Sodom. The Angels and/or God reward him by blinding the crowd allowing him and his daughters to escape. And then this just man went on to knock up both of his daughters because he was apparently 'too drunk to know what he was doing'.
And the crowd of rapists weren't there because he picked the 'good land'. Where are you getting this from? It's fairly clear from all the fables around this that part of why Sodom was destroyed was because of the alleged wickedness of the citizens, who treated strangers poorly. Like, say, the strangers in lot's house. Now you can make the argument that if Lot hadn't chosen to live in the midst of wickedness because of the good land nearby, this wouldn't have happened. But that's not at all what you said.
Lot's wife did not die because of anything _he_ did. She was turned to a pillar of salt due to her own actions of disobeying the Authority (Angels/God) that said to make haste and not look back upon the burning city.
QA will not be a path to anything but a series of contractor jobs in the majority of the game industry for a number of reasons.
First and foremost is the general value the software culture puts on QA to begin with. In any software environment, QA is frequently looked down upon, or at the very least not seen in the same light of respect and value that development is. This makes the QA position something that can be seen as nonessential to the primary function of the company: writing software.
Obviously, that's incorrect, and anyone who has actually worked with a good QA team will tell you so. Trouble is, there are plenty of bad QA teams, and badly managed projects where the value of QA is not clearly laid out.
In the game industry in general, you have the problems as already laid out: soul crushing work hours, ludicrous release schedules, and a sense that there is always someone waiting to do your job because it's a 'dream job' in the game industry. But that applies for every single game developer too. Or have people so quickly forgotten the EA scandal & lawsuit about the lives of their programmers?
Because most development houses are not their own publisher, they have external dependencies and requirements for quality that they must meet. Someone publishing a game thru Vivendi will hand it off to VU for an acceptance pass based on whatever criteria vivendi have in mind. Publisher's QA groups are probably the worst to work for and offer the least amount of actual outside visibility for the tester, but that's where the jobs are. The majority of QA jobs in studios are going to be reserved for people who have inside contacts or are lifetime career testers that are not trying to 'get into the game industry through qa'. They're in those positions because they're excellent testers who can help the company reach the publisher milestones. In some companies, there isn't even a QA team. The logic goes that the publisher will tell you when your game is good enough to release, and you can always bring in contractors on a temporary basis if you need to.
The real answer as to how to break into the game industry isn't a certificate from Game Design University Of DeVry Technical ITT College, and it isn't trying to get 'any job you can in the industry'. The real answer is to develop people skills. More than any industry I've worked in, the games industry runs on word of mouth and personal references. If someone knows you, you are vastly more likely to be hired than the person with superior skills on paper who doesn't have a personal recommendation.
Oh please. Spurious argument at best.
In an environment where "faggot" and 'that's gay' and other wonderfully mature terms are thrown around regularly, it is deceitful to try and claim the environment is a 'level playing field.'
I note that there haven't BEEN any Het-Friendly Guilds created yet. Either straights are too lazy or don't see the need for it. Who are _you_ to tell other people what they should and should not be able to do?
ON that note, let's talk about a few of the more obvious fallacies and intentionally ignored facts that the Straight Nerd Libertarian I'm-ok-with-fags-really-i-know-some brigades seem to always use, and put them to rest for good.
1 - "would you have a problem with a fundamentalist christian guild?"
These guilds already DO exist, on multiple servers, and they see WoW as a chance to minister to the unbelievers and bring people to Christ. So no, they dont' have a problem with it, and neither does Blizzard. Straw man, red herring, you name it, this is it.
2 - "what if someone wanted to make a hets-only guild?"
This is a false premise, as the original guild was not gay-only, but gay-FRIENDLY, where shitty behavior from slope-browed homophobes and teenagers trying to prove they're macho in a videogame would not be tolerated. I'm sorry if people think that "gay friendly" think "only gays can be friendly to gays", but that's the problem of your uniquely bent worldview, and has nothing to do with the facts of the situation or the nature of reality.
3 - "Blizzard can do whatever they want they own it."
Perhaps you missed the sixties and civil rights, where people fought to be able to be treated fairly in restaurants, buses, restrooms, and everywhere else. You can reserve the right to refuse service to any ONE person, but you can't simply bar an entire class of people from your establishment, or create multiple rulesets for different people. This should be obvious, but is simply one more diversion that the Scared Straight folks are using to justify things.
and finally, this gem:
4 - "They're asking Blizzard to make an exception for one single group!!!!!11!!!oheoneone!!"
No, they're pointing out that Blizzard is already making an exception for one group (the GBLT group) while not making exceptions for the christian groups or others. But some real life groups (such as have been listed already) have been declined. If blizzard had played its hand like this with the xtian guilds, I suspect the uprising now would be much less, given that it was a consistent policy.
But as it is NOT a consistent policy, they should be brought to account for their actions and explain why Christianity is a-ok in a game world, but homosexuality is not. After all, christians get bashed all the time as well, so being openly christian just encourages negative behavior.
I hope that this can be useful to people fighting the legions of self-appointed dimwitted "libertarians" and "brilliant nerds" who think they know everything and are above their prejudices, while dropping such gems as, "how can someone look at a hairy guy's ass and find love? that's fucking gross dude! I don't want to see that."
and that they don't actually 'destroy' immersion. Trying to remember mouse gestures, or figure out the 'right' way to make some things happen when there are no simple menus or keyboard shortcuts? That's a way to ensure my sense of immersion is totally hosed.
One of the things that absolutely wrecked B&W (gameplay issues aside) was the lack of any kind of real, usable in-game menus, icons, etc.
I can't think of any game where lack of menus actually led to a greater sense of immersion, but I can think of plenty of games where an outstandingly crafted UI with menus, buttons, bars, numbers, etc, led to a deeper sense of immersion and a better game experience overall. I suppose Myst would be an exception that comes to mind.
I respect that Lionhead is trying to do something new(ish) with their game design, but since they haven't gotten it right yet, maybe they should try doing something that will actually make for a fun game, and then work on modding that fun game with the EVIL MENUS OF DOOM to match up to their design paradigm of NO MENUS ONLY IMMERSION.
I don't think I'm that far outside the realm of the Typical when I say that I found the no-menus vague world-based feedback (village statues, condition of your animal) requiring a lot more time to analyze to decide what to do next than using a simple menu-driven system.
From the article, it sounds like they are implementing tooltips and things as a compromise, so it might not be as bad. But I genuinely don't see the gain they're talking about from taking tools away from the user. Having complex underpinnings and status in a game is swell, but it doesn't matter if I can only view it through primary colors and simplistic graphics.
Ok. I'm going to burn down the Sistine Chapel.
undo it.
It would be a very important difference, if you were right.
Yin and Yang are opposites. They are two separate concepts that, together, balance one another out. If one or the other is too out of balance, you see problems, according to the theory.
But the fact that yin or yang energy can be out of balance would indicate they are, in fact, two different things. Look at Chinese medicine, some substances are considered to have a strong 'yin' value, others to be primarily 'yang'.
In short, you're getting it right that the two opposing forces are both necessary to create a 'whole', but you're getting it wrong to say that something can't be yin or yang. Although I suppose if your point is really that there is no such thing as a pure-yin or pure-yang object in the universe, that is technically true. but damn, that's even more pedantic than I thought you were being. =)
Of course, this is all needless wanking around an article that thinks 'yin or yang?' is a clever way of saying 'good or bad?' And, as has already been pointed out, can't spell 'yin' right in the first fucking place.
I hate to break this to you, but both girls AND boys can spread cooties.
no, really, it's true. I read it in a book once.
Geeks only bitch about bar culture because it's a culture they frequently don't understand the rules for, and they can't stand to see an environment where they're unable to thrive. Thus, bar culture must be inferior to geek culture, because geeks do not thrive within it.
And everyone knows geeks are superior life forms!
It takes almost no time at all to get to level 16. Are you suggesting that by playing WoW "religiously", you only do it for an hour every sunday, and don't think about it the rest of the week?
"You can clearly see where Richard Garriot got his influences for Ultima from."
You are, of course, kidding, right?
Ultima - Published in 1980.
Final Fantasy - published in 1987.
'87 was when Ultima 4 came out. I think you have your influences backwards. And that's assuming anyone would even agree that they are influences on each other at all. I don't think they are or were.
In a similar vein, I've barely begun the game (done perhaps 7 or 8 missions thus far), and I've amassed a total of ... almost $1k.
Compare that to Vice City, where you were making 1k-5k PER MISSION right from go. Going to the clothing store and buying a new outfit is a hard choice. You go in and the shit costs what feels like 'real' money.
I'm sure as the game continues, money becomes less of an issue. But I'm very pleased that they did successfully map the relative poverty level of "the hood" so that the player didn't have thousands of dollars to begin with.
I do have one problem with the game however, and it's a problem that I'm surprised slipped through QA & product evaluation.
In a very early mission, you take a baseball bat, and you have to fight multiple enemies. The manual does _not_ tell you how to switch targets when in 'lock on' mode. In a mission that happens several missions _after_ that one, you are walked through shooting a gun, locking on targets, and cycling through all available targets.
-1 : failing to document the target cycle controls in the manual
-1 : ordering the 'tutorial' missions such that the useful knowledge comes after the mission when you would first need it.
Still, total score: 98/100.
I both 'agree' and 'don't agree'.
First, the agreeing! I think you're 100% on point about the publisher test team, since publisher's have their 'acceptance tests' that a game must pass before it can be declared gold, and their test team is a part of that overhead.
The idea of test coming into the product to test something that's already playable is very likely a common approach (I don't work in the game sector, but it's a common attitude in other places in the software industry, so I feel pretty ok making that assumption). But as anyone who has had to sit through a presentation on test knows, bugs found at the beginning of the design/implementation phase are a lot less costly to fix than ones at the tail end of it all. Having test involved in design and planning meetings at the early stages can make a huge difference in the final quality of a product.
With a 2d point/clickita adventure game specifically, I don't think test would necessarily provide much in the way of useful feedback, but let's consider that for a moment. If your game is going to be an extremely simple, single-solution / single-path adventure game, that 30k number is quite reasonable.
But if that's the case, what do you need all 4 programmers for? you'll really only need the Lead Programmer (who can tweak engine issues) and probably 1 junion dev, and perhaps an intern or some other nearly-free work. Heck, have a junior-junior dev who is also your tester, and save money in BOTH areas.
Now if your game is going to have multiple solutions to puzzles, multiple paths, 'ideal' endings, and all the other things that are often looked for in modern games, test's job (and development's) becomes much more complex, including reviewing the game's relative difficulty, if following unexpected branches break forward progression in the game, etc. And in that case, 30k is not going to be enough, and everyone would benefit from having Test involved at a very early stage to provide feedback on the design and planning.
It's also worth noting that "testing" is just considered a monobloc expense, and not an actual person/position, which goes to the heart of the problem in the games industry. "testing" isn't a job, it's a commodity you buy. You hire programmers to make your product, but you pay for the testing of your product.
In the budget was this: Testing Subtotal: $30,000 In case anyone wants to ever wonder why the game industry releases consistently buggy, shitty product, there's your answer. Testing. ALL the testing for 1 year. $30k. Half the salary of a single developer. I would assume that's either for hiring a single real person at 30k to do the testing, or else to pay 30k to a contractor service for some amount of hours of testing. I think it's interesting, especially given that the stated numbers are from his experience in the industry. Perhaps in this specific case, with a known engine and no cutting-hedge technology, spending such a tiny amount of testing of the game could work out, if you also have the developers and everyone else playing the game / testing along the way as well. Overall, a really interesting breakdown of how things would work for even an extremely simple game idea, and how much money is involved.
Now I know how all the *nix zealots feel.
ahem.
Is there any chance of this being ported to Windows, I wonder? I adored the first Crimson Skies and played it endlessly. But I don't own an xbox, and don't plan on owning one.
Still, even if this doesn't get ported to any other system, I'm glad to see the Crimson Skies franchise being used again. I really enjoyed the world that it was based in, and the not-real physics of flight were nice. It's a minority view, but when i'm playing a flight-based game that has lots of gunfire and dogfights, I prefer the physics to be less realistic, so you can get in closer to the enemy, and actually see those wonderfully detailed models. radar lock & firing missiles at blips on a screen are more realistic, but boy howdy are they not visually exciting.
Because so much source code has been stolen in the past from Microsoft and Valve and every other company on the planet that allows people to work remotely.
Are you really this aggressively stupid, or is this some sort of 'method acting' thing for a part in the sequel to "Antitrust" ?
You do realize that the level of 'tradeoff' you are suggesting is not unlike saying we should build all buildings underground from now on so we can avoid having planes fly into them, right? I MEAN LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED ON 9/11!! If those skyscrapers had been COREscrapers, that never would've happened!
And it is all tradeoffs, and the ludicrous idea you are presenting has far too many negatives for an ostensible positive "keep your code from being stolen". And carefully ignoring the years and years of source code _never being stolen before now_.
Really. Truly. go get a dollar from your mom, head out the door. Get on your bike. (put the helmet on first!) and ride down to the corner clue store. Walk in, slap that dollar on the counter and say "Give me one of your best, my good man!"
While they're at it, why don't they put all the development computers into a separate building and make people walk across the street to code! That'd be even SAFER.
This is a plainly simplistic and idiotic approach to how to address security, from people who have never actually dealt with it.
You have people who work remotely.
You have people who work from home.
You have people who think up fantastic ideas to fix a bug or implement a feature in the middle of the night.
Should all of these people be forced to work in the office on that little private LAN that has no external connectivity? How about when it's time to test things like Steam? You have to put it on the 'net at some point to see how it plays with others.
If you have a realistic suggestion that will work in the real business world, spit it out. Otherwise, enough with the endless harping on a completely idiotic idea that anyone who has actually worked at a large company would shoot down in moments.
I mean, really.
And that, in a nutshell, is part of why the linux platform isn't a top priority for most game development houses.
a vertical learning curve is NOT beautiful, by any stretch of the imagination. Only terminal *nix geeks and people enamored of their own inherent brilliance think a ludicrously steep learning curve is a good thing. The proper learning curve for gaming is more of a series of troughs and inclines, with very little actual vertical. You want to challenge, not frustrate. You want to progress the player through the game naturally, not be doing the same small thing over and over until they finally get it right, only to instantly meet another wall head-on as they must move 1 more step up the curve.
A game needs to suck in the new player in the first 30 minutes, and make them feel like they know how to play and will have fun, or else it's entirely possible in today's short-attention-span world that the game will get shelved in favor of something that offers the instant gratification the user is after.
You misspelled "Bram Stoker", genius.
The only 'striking similarities' between an Anne Rice novel and the World of Darkness/Vampire worlds are the fact that they have, er, vampires in them.
The idea of 'werewolves vs. vampires', and the concept of a vampire society that has a clear social order and houses/clans/whatnot is to be found nowhere in the homoerotic misunderstood-poetry-writing-loner vampires of Anne Rice's novels. Hell, the Dark Island where all the vampires end up agreeing to come to meet and remain in touch is more of a friendly stopover. There is no community, no politics, nothing. An argument could be made for the existence of ancient progenitor vampires that want to destroy all their young, I suppose. But the Akasha/Enkil reality shares very little with the Ghennom mythos that WW's WoD talks about.
Now in the movie that's coming out (i have only seen the television trailer for it, so i am making some very base assumptions), there appears to be a war going on under the unseeing eyes of mortal men. That is pure white wolf, and not something that I think many other Vampire-based games/books have addressed. If someone wants to correct me, please do. I'm far from a fanboy or expert in this stuff.
First, the date everyone keeps mentioning in the thread (and here) as being the end of September for the release? According to ebworld.com, the currently listed release date for hl2 is 11/18/03. Which, needless to say, isn't this month. Second, nobody has available anywhere on their preorder pages (at least that I can find) any information about collector's edition vs. standard vs. 'lite' versions of Half-Life 2. I do wish that the information about the 'extras' was a little more clear. If the extras are simply a 'autographed' manual, a little Gordon Freeman figure, a soundtrack CD, and a bigger box, big whoop. I don't care. But if the extras are 'extra player models, additional maps, a tf2 preview / playable demo' or things of that nature, then the collector's edition becomes more appealing.