It's called 'angst'. Artists need it otherwise their stuff is considered too mainstream and derivative.
A friend and I used to talk about being a rock star and how we could never be. Aside from musical talent (that can be somewhat learned) we had no angst. Neither of us had ever been abused and/or confused about our sexuality and/or social outcasts blah blah blah. Therefore we would having no interesting emotions to convey to an audience.
Honestly, am I supposed to write a song about how excited I am about a new game coming out or a new graphics card? I didn't think so.
As for the FPS comment.. Well when the hell did a console do FPS well? (STFU Halo fans before you even start). PCs are always better than consoles at FPS and RTS because they were more or less designed for their unique controls.
I think the Wii is going to make an FPS truly playable on a console. Using the remote to point and shoot? What could be more natural than that? I think too many people are hung up on using a mouse to look around and shoot.
A lot of people are also forgettting about the downloadable NES/SNES/N64 games that you can play on the system. That alone is going to bring a lot of people back. I can't wait to download a couple games I played but didn't own on those systems.
I think you give Halo itself too much credit. The single player campaign had a story that was mediocre at best and the level design was boring as hell.
What made Halo what it is and as a result sell many XBoxes (XBoxen?) was the multiplayer over XBox Live. It was the first console that had LAN/Internet networking integrated and a nice simple interface. Without it the game might have been just another FPS that faded away. Without XBox Live we wouldn't have Halo fanboys.
MS could've put out Halo without the single-player game and it would've still sold tons which really doesn't say much about the game itself. Honestly, how many people bought Halo 2 for the story?
Halo is like tittie magazines, you don't buy it for the story.
I frankly don't really care who gets what, I'm just disappointed in Blizzard.
I've played a Shaman to 60 and enjoyed it. It was the uniqueness of the class that made Horde stand out. The dungeon 1 shoulders are unmistakable, you know it's a shaman. In PvP a shaman is really fun to play due to the high survivability and DPS, although melee was nerfed somewhat in the last patch.
On the other hand, I found it unique to also fight against a class I couldn't group with. Paladins are a special challenge, especially against my rogue. Their gear is mostly gold, so you can really see them coming as well.
This just seems like a cop-out by a company that used to do innovation very well. They supposedly class-reviewed the shaman and for some reason gave them PvP buffs (especially with their offensive spell tree) when shaman were asking for more PvE utility. Horde in the end game is tougher than Alliance and the pally/shaman issue is the reason. So instead of coming up with a good idea or listening to the customers who had some great ideas to help shaman out, they just ignore the whole thing and give the Horde paladins, and Alliance shaman.
It'll take months after the expansion for either to make their presences truly felt but I guess Blizzard is just trying to scape a couple extra months of playtime out of an increasingly boring game.
There is no way in hell Master Chief will every achieve 'mascot' status. I'm not hating on Master Chief, he's a great character but he can only be used in fighting. He just doesn't have the age independent appeal that Mario has. He's on the level of Link or Samus, which, honestly, is pretty damn good.
He's just not versatile enough. He'd look out of place playing tennis, golf, or baseball. He's not going to be getting captured by ghosts so his brother can save him. He would've killed Bowser outright with a headshot in the first game. He isn't going to settle for some prissy little princess - he would've loved her and left her.
I could see him playing football... that would be sweet!
Was it just me or did that video from the article look a lot like Pikmin? The sounds seemed to be the same, and the throwing was similar. It makes sense because he was instrumental in that one too. Pikmin is one of my favorite GC games.
I think Miyamoto would be a cool guy to talk to for even just 5 minutes. He seems to have a lot going on in his mind yet he somehow manages to keep it all coherent enough to get the relevant information to the right people to make great games. That's impressive.
I hadn't heard about the MMO "All Others" but 3.3% can't be wrong. It's pulling in more subscribers than Everquest and Everquest II COMBINED! I might have to try it out!
Not only that but videogames are so mainstream that politicians are trying to curb who gets to buy the content. You don't get that kind of response unless you are BIG, like movies or music.
If we're exhaling now (and I'm not convinced we are), relax. The industry will inhale soon enough.
I defintely think you're on the right track. I remember listenting to an oldies radio station once on a long car ride home from college. They played three songs from the early 60s. They were terrible and I wondered why they were being played. Then the announcer said that these were the top songs on the radio a couple weeks before the Beatles premiered (in the US of course) on the Ed Sullivan show.
It definitely seems like we are at that point now. We are fine with what we are getting but we are in a holding pattern for our next video game rock stars.
I'm not saying that I agree with this, but let's be honest, this is not an Apple factory, this is a company that Apple contracts with, because guess what Apple doesn't make the drives, chips, and a lot of other parts that go into their products.
Sure, it might not be an Apple factory so I guess Apple is off the hook. And Hitler didn't run the concentration camps so he's not responsible for those, it's someone else's fault.
It sounds like you're an american
I'm not the poster you responded to but I'm an American. I know exactly where my clothes and food come from. However, I expect people who are working to work in conditions that are appropriate. I live in Washington State and we have a lot of immigrant Mexican labor here. They make a pittance when it comes to our standards but when they head back down to Mexico they do pretty well. Guess what? When they are working here there are rules that cover safety and minimum wages for migrant workers. Is China that way? Don't give me the bullshit about this being an American problem because Europe/Australia/Canada/UK are in the same boat.
We depend on reporters to tell us how working conditions are and then as consumers we can make the decision whether to continue to support the companies that do this. It happened with Nike. It happened with Kathie Lee Gifford and K-Mart. It might happen to Apple. Only time will tell. I can't fly to a foreign country and check up on labor conditions, can you? When Apple throws Bono in our face and markets itself as a progressive, liberal company, they are worse than Nike or K-Mart because at least they didn't give us the marketting line that they gave a shit about anyone.
Another response clueless non-Java Swing programmer.
I've been programming the GUI for my company for the last 5 years. We are a Java shop - client and server. The fact is that a lot of our customers don't know they are even running Java for the client or the server (although the server is on an appliance) because the look and feel adapts to the environment and it is as responsive as any windows app. The problem is the people who still thing Swing is AWT or spent 5 minutes using it and had it lockup because they don't know that they can't run a database query inside of the event thread.
Please try to learn a little about a language before talking shit about it and making yourself look like an ass.
So they could own and enforce the PVR patents TiVo owns. The patents already have been defended so there's little risk that they could be tossed and other PVR companies would be more wiling to pay to use the patent than possibly infringe on it (or waste money trying to defeat it).
I think the rating board is given a target rating and then watches the film and then either grants the rating or sets a different one. If they choose a different (higher) rating for the movie they say what would get it lower.
I've heard filmmakers talk about what they had to cut out to get it down and it sounded to me like it is a pretty specific list they get back of where they could make changes to comply with the rating they want. 'Eyes Wide Shut' is a good example. It was going to get an NC-17 for the orgy scenes. But they added CGI 'others' to the scenes to block the view from the camera to tone down the scenes and got an R-rating instead.
FYI, a PG-13 movie can only have one use of the word 'fuck' in it but it can't refer to anyones mother (like 'mother-fucker'). You can say 'shit' all you want but I think there are restrictions on that like it can't refer to literal 'shit'. No noun, only a verb/adverb/adjective.
I'm not on the test server so I don't know but I don't think you will need a few hundred players in the same location at the same time. More likley you will need a few hundred players to gather resources and turn them into a quest giver in the major cities. Might need a 40-man or someone with exalted with Cenarion Hold to truly open the gates.
Frankly, I'm not too excited about AQ. How long until the 20-man and 40-man are down to a science? Probably very quickly. And in the end the 2+ week wait while doing hte gate openings is going to be just a pain and not really unique. It's just another 'key' quest (like Onyxia or UBRS), just everyone has the key once it's opened.
If Blizzard truly wanted to get people excited they would've left the 5-man that was supposed to go in AQ. That was a big mistake leaving that out.
We HAVE laws that specify which games can and cannot be sold to minors.
No, we don't, at least not federally (states may try but will probably be shut down by the state or federal courts). Just like we don't have laws that enforce the rating for movies. These are guildlines that are pushed down from controlling bodies within each industry.
You can't get arrested for letting a 12 year-old into an R-rated movie. There might be sanctions from the MPAA on the movie theater but frankly I've never heard of this happenning and I was never warned about it when I worked in one when I was in high school (10 years ago). Although I have common sense to follow guildlines but I did work with people who didn't care.
They become conditioned to associate violence with fun...
Violence IS fun. Frankly humans have a need for violence and strife.
That's all sports really do except focus that into something that in the end is harmless. Even something as benign as chess is a battle of two armies. Any sport with a 'goal' or 'endzone' is clearly the same game with a few different rules. Some have more contact than others.
why something like this only applies to games and not other forms of media
Because the average American doesn't see video games as an adult industry. Over and over it's been shown that more adults (18+) are buying video games than minors, and it's a huge difference. It makes sense because we (I'm 29) were playing games since Atari, NES, SNES. We've grown up and so have the games but the gaming industry is still seen as being something only kids buy.
The only oversight the movies get are MPAA ratings and TV has ratings - they've already done this to video games. TV has parental controls and so do consoles. If the parents don't use those then they either don't care what their kids play or they just don't know. Ignorance is no excuse.
That's what WoW has or are you defining 'market driven' differently? As long as I can sell something for whatever price I want then that is market driven. If I can only sell my 'Boots of Escaping' for 5g then that's not.
*player world interaction (building homes, villages, guilds, shops)
I don't see a problem with this except it's not so easy. The world has to be pretty big to handle all those homes. On the server I play on in WoW, if every player had a home and/or shop there would be no game to play because the world isn't big enough. People complain enough about travel time.
*player driven content (I want a new sword that can only be had in the depths of a cave that I can't get, I put out a quest and a reward, raids on other villages, and completely random monster and loot placement)
That's a lot of logic that the devs need to create. I also don't think it'd work too well since the people who have money are usually the ones who get the phatty lewtz and sell them. If you can't get it yourself you probably can't afford the reward.
That's all, basically the MMO creator just needs a basic storyline with a few warring factions and a big interactive sandbox in which the players can live and play with randome monster placements. They just need to come at it from a new more simplistic angle.
Oh yes, that's all - very simple. I'm sure that if it really was someone would've done it already. As for random monster placements, unless you don't have player or weapon levels in your game then running into a level 40 when I'm level 1 isn't very fun. That's what zones are for - to protect players from not having fun. Can they adventure outside of those easy areas at a low level? Sure, but at least there's a buffer that they know if they cross they could be in for a long run back to their corpse.
...then why do gamers care if gamers are depicted negatively on TV?
The reason that gamers should care is because the TV show is saying that playing video games does influence behavior.
You seem to be mistaking behavior (someone actually doing something) for image (the perception of someone doing something). This episode can influence the audience's image of gamers and strengthen the falsehood that games alter behavior. And although I don't personally think it could happen, the result could be lawsuits against game makers or sanctions against certain 'undesireable' game content. Lucky for us, CSI: Miami isn't the ratings hog that the original is.
Ask Twisted Sister what they think of a negative image. Their 'We're Not Gonna Take It' doesn't have a single violent, sexual, or vulgar lyric in it yet was used in a Congressional hearing to promote explicit lyrics stickers on music. Dee Snider got chewed out by Al Gore just to be saved later by John Denver who trashed the sticker when he said that people mistake his 'Rocky Mountain High' song as a pot-smoking song.
Image is all you have and once it's gone it's almost impossible to get back. Gamers should protect it whenever they get the chance.
The Star Wars franchise is just too hot of a commodity to pass up. It's worth billions and has billions of people who know what it is. Blizzard can't hold Star Wars' jock. What Blizzard can do is create a much more stable and playable game.
Maybe Sony should focus on making SWG 2 and leave SWG alone. They need to let it go. Get a good new project manager and a new good software architect and start with a new team from scratch. New graphics, new gameplay, keep what worked, toss what didn't. Two years dev time and SWG 2 could be released just as WoW is getting old and stale. Ready for Christmas '07!
Oh please. There are no interesting arguments in that letter at all. To say that there are is just being small-minded and not taking the facts into a consideration.
First of all, comparing a police shooting to a school shotting is a waste of time. Especially when there is no context. How close were the police? How close was the school shooter? There is no proof that violent video games make you a better gunman. If that were true wouldn't baseball games make you a better batter or fielder?
Hand-eye coordination is one thing but to think that one specific type of it gains grounds in a different specific type is rediculous. I.E., just because I can fly a chopper in Battlefield 2 doesn't mean I can fly one in real life. And just because a mother, father, or community has mental anguish over a tragic incident there is no reason to start laying blame on things that have no logical link.
Trying to keep violent videogames away from people they aren't the target audience for by restricting sales won't work. If the parents didn't know what games their kids are buying they won't know what games they will have to buy for them. It might keep a few kids from getting an M-rated game but it's not going to keep someone from getting shot or making poor decisions that lead to them getting hurt. The plain fact is that parents think video games are Pong, Frogger, Joust, Mario, and Zelda. They still think that games are simple kids toys when in reality are cross-generational entertainment - just like movies, television, and books.
Parents usually pay attention to what their kids watch on TV and what movies they go to so why not video games? This is still up to the parents.
They *could* fix it and have made an effort to try but they made a fatal mistake. What they did was add more higher-end recipes that you can learn. Sounds good? Sure, except those recipes are usually bind on pickup and usually drop only in the major instances.
So you need to be a hardcore instance person AND be a hardcore crafter. But even then crafting isn't that much fun. I like the idea (once again I didn't play SWG) in SWG of being a producer and not necessarily just a fighter. Collecter/harvesters were a neat concept.
Would a game even have to have fighting in it for you to be interested? Just an MMORPG where it was all about collecting/building/socializing?
WoW made a simple choice. They chose to do the standard questing for loot. There is some crafting to appease a small group of players but true crafters won't like it.
Now let me say that I didn't play SWG but I had some friends who played it from the start until, if I remember correctly, City of Heroes came out. From what they explained it sounded like the crafting system was excellent and the non-levelling 'skill tree' was really cool. However, to me is just sounded like there wasn't too much adventure. They were also constantly bitching about the 'flavor of the week' - the class/build that was overpowered today but tomorrow would be nerfed. Then the next class/build would have to nerfed and so on. The balance issues were their biggest complaint.
WoW is adventure based with the social game not influenced by the game itself - you have to go out and get it. I play WoW and do I wish there was player housing? Yes. Do I wish the crafting system was better? Yes. But would I settle for a fun, balanced game instead? Definitely.
I think a lot of people don't need to socialize too much in WoW, they want an adventure. If you want crafting you are going to have to look somewhere else. I think SWG was that place but in it's current incarnation, from the sound of it, it's not.
Re:Current MMORPGs are doing just fine
on
MMORPG Evolution
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· Score: 2, Interesting
weigh the balance between structured storytelling and open worlds
Call me crazy, but I think WoW does a fine job of this.
Wow does an a acceptable job of this but I think there's a subcontext to that small sentence. The continents are used up, there's no open space. No player housing or even just guild housing.
A guildy brought up how cool it would be for the large guilds with sufficient in-game cash to be able to create a guild house. Maybe have a flag or something that other guilds could try to 'steal'. Be able to buy guards and merchants for the guild house. Have an actual guild bank, not just an extra character that gets mailed stuff. But that isn't going to happen because, of course, they never intendid it to and that even if they wanted to do it it's not like you can just plunk down a guild house in the middle of the Barrens or Duskwood.
Even as much as I like WoW, you can go on to the forums and see people asking for some pretty standard stuff that is included in other games. I'm still holding out for a global 'looking for group' channel.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called 'angst'. Artists need it otherwise their stuff is considered too mainstream and derivative.
A friend and I used to talk about being a rock star and how we could never be. Aside from musical talent (that can be somewhat learned) we had no angst. Neither of us had ever been abused and/or confused about our sexuality and/or social outcasts blah blah blah. Therefore we would having no interesting emotions to convey to an audience.
Honestly, am I supposed to write a song about how excited I am about a new game coming out or a new graphics card? I didn't think so.
As for the FPS comment.. Well when the hell did a console do FPS well? (STFU Halo fans before you even start). PCs are always better than consoles at FPS and RTS because they were more or less designed for their unique controls.
I think the Wii is going to make an FPS truly playable on a console. Using the remote to point and shoot? What could be more natural than that? I think too many people are hung up on using a mouse to look around and shoot.
A lot of people are also forgettting about the downloadable NES/SNES/N64 games that you can play on the system. That alone is going to bring a lot of people back. I can't wait to download a couple games I played but didn't own on those systems.
I think you give Halo itself too much credit. The single player campaign had a story that was mediocre at best and the level design was boring as hell.
What made Halo what it is and as a result sell many XBoxes (XBoxen?) was the multiplayer over XBox Live. It was the first console that had LAN/Internet networking integrated and a nice simple interface. Without it the game might have been just another FPS that faded away. Without XBox Live we wouldn't have Halo fanboys.
MS could've put out Halo without the single-player game and it would've still sold tons which really doesn't say much about the game itself. Honestly, how many people bought Halo 2 for the story?
Halo is like tittie magazines, you don't buy it for the story.
I frankly don't really care who gets what, I'm just disappointed in Blizzard.
I've played a Shaman to 60 and enjoyed it. It was the uniqueness of the class that made Horde stand out. The dungeon 1 shoulders are unmistakable, you know it's a shaman. In PvP a shaman is really fun to play due to the high survivability and DPS, although melee was nerfed somewhat in the last patch.
On the other hand, I found it unique to also fight against a class I couldn't group with. Paladins are a special challenge, especially against my rogue. Their gear is mostly gold, so you can really see them coming as well.
This just seems like a cop-out by a company that used to do innovation very well. They supposedly class-reviewed the shaman and for some reason gave them PvP buffs (especially with their offensive spell tree) when shaman were asking for more PvE utility. Horde in the end game is tougher than Alliance and the pally/shaman issue is the reason. So instead of coming up with a good idea or listening to the customers who had some great ideas to help shaman out, they just ignore the whole thing and give the Horde paladins, and Alliance shaman.
It'll take months after the expansion for either to make their presences truly felt but I guess Blizzard is just trying to scape a couple extra months of playtime out of an increasingly boring game.
There is no way in hell Master Chief will every achieve 'mascot' status. I'm not hating on Master Chief, he's a great character but he can only be used in fighting. He just doesn't have the age independent appeal that Mario has. He's on the level of Link or Samus, which, honestly, is pretty damn good.
He's just not versatile enough. He'd look out of place playing tennis, golf, or baseball. He's not going to be getting captured by ghosts so his brother can save him. He would've killed Bowser outright with a headshot in the first game. He isn't going to settle for some prissy little princess - he would've loved her and left her.
I could see him playing football... that would be sweet!
Was it just me or did that video from the article look a lot like Pikmin? The sounds seemed to be the same, and the throwing was similar. It makes sense because he was instrumental in that one too. Pikmin is one of my favorite GC games.
I think Miyamoto would be a cool guy to talk to for even just 5 minutes. He seems to have a lot going on in his mind yet he somehow manages to keep it all coherent enough to get the relevant information to the right people to make great games. That's impressive.
I hadn't heard about the MMO "All Others" but 3.3% can't be wrong. It's pulling in more subscribers than Everquest and Everquest II COMBINED! I might have to try it out!
Not only that but videogames are so mainstream that politicians are trying to curb who gets to buy the content. You don't get that kind of response unless you are BIG, like movies or music.
If we're exhaling now (and I'm not convinced we are), relax. The industry will inhale soon enough.
I defintely think you're on the right track. I remember listenting to an oldies radio station once on a long car ride home from college. They played three songs from the early 60s. They were terrible and I wondered why they were being played. Then the announcer said that these were the top songs on the radio a couple weeks before the Beatles premiered (in the US of course) on the Ed Sullivan show.
It definitely seems like we are at that point now. We are fine with what we are getting but we are in a holding pattern for our next video game rock stars.
I'm not saying that I agree with this, but let's be honest, this is not an Apple factory, this is a company that Apple contracts with, because guess what Apple doesn't make the drives, chips, and a lot of other parts that go into their products.
Sure, it might not be an Apple factory so I guess Apple is off the hook. And Hitler didn't run the concentration camps so he's not responsible for those, it's someone else's fault.
It sounds like you're an american
I'm not the poster you responded to but I'm an American. I know exactly where my clothes and food come from. However, I expect people who are working to work in conditions that are appropriate. I live in Washington State and we have a lot of immigrant Mexican labor here. They make a pittance when it comes to our standards but when they head back down to Mexico they do pretty well. Guess what? When they are working here there are rules that cover safety and minimum wages for migrant workers. Is China that way? Don't give me the bullshit about this being an American problem because Europe/Australia/Canada/UK are in the same boat.
We depend on reporters to tell us how working conditions are and then as consumers we can make the decision whether to continue to support the companies that do this. It happened with Nike. It happened with Kathie Lee Gifford and K-Mart. It might happen to Apple. Only time will tell. I can't fly to a foreign country and check up on labor conditions, can you? When Apple throws Bono in our face and markets itself as a progressive, liberal company, they are worse than Nike or K-Mart because at least they didn't give us the marketting line that they gave a shit about anyone.
Another response clueless non-Java Swing programmer.
I've been programming the GUI for my company for the last 5 years. We are a Java shop - client and server. The fact is that a lot of our customers don't know they are even running Java for the client or the server (although the server is on an appliance) because the look and feel adapts to the environment and it is as responsive as any windows app. The problem is the people who still thing Swing is AWT or spent 5 minutes using it and had it lockup because they don't know that they can't run a database query inside of the event thread.
Please try to learn a little about a language before talking shit about it and making yourself look like an ass.
Why would any want to buy TiVo out?
So they could own and enforce the PVR patents TiVo owns. The patents already have been defended so there's little risk that they could be tossed and other PVR companies would be more wiling to pay to use the patent than possibly infringe on it (or waste money trying to defeat it).
I think the rating board is given a target rating and then watches the film and then either grants the rating or sets a different one. If they choose a different (higher) rating for the movie they say what would get it lower.
I've heard filmmakers talk about what they had to cut out to get it down and it sounded to me like it is a pretty specific list they get back of where they could make changes to comply with the rating they want. 'Eyes Wide Shut' is a good example. It was going to get an NC-17 for the orgy scenes. But they added CGI 'others' to the scenes to block the view from the camera to tone down the scenes and got an R-rating instead.
FYI, a PG-13 movie can only have one use of the word 'fuck' in it but it can't refer to anyones mother (like 'mother-fucker'). You can say 'shit' all you want but I think there are restrictions on that like it can't refer to literal 'shit'. No noun, only a verb/adverb/adjective.
I'm not on the test server so I don't know but I don't think you will need a few hundred players in the same location at the same time. More likley you will need a few hundred players to gather resources and turn them into a quest giver in the major cities. Might need a 40-man or someone with exalted with Cenarion Hold to truly open the gates.
Frankly, I'm not too excited about AQ. How long until the 20-man and 40-man are down to a science? Probably very quickly. And in the end the 2+ week wait while doing hte gate openings is going to be just a pain and not really unique. It's just another 'key' quest (like Onyxia or UBRS), just everyone has the key once it's opened.
If Blizzard truly wanted to get people excited they would've left the 5-man that was supposed to go in AQ. That was a big mistake leaving that out.
We HAVE laws that specify which games can and cannot be sold to minors.
No, we don't, at least not federally (states may try but will probably be shut down by the state or federal courts). Just like we don't have laws that enforce the rating for movies. These are guildlines that are pushed down from controlling bodies within each industry.
You can't get arrested for letting a 12 year-old into an R-rated movie. There might be sanctions from the MPAA on the movie theater but frankly I've never heard of this happenning and I was never warned about it when I worked in one when I was in high school (10 years ago). Although I have common sense to follow guildlines but I did work with people who didn't care.
I blame the south. They really tank our standardized testing average.
I agree with you fully. Also:
They become conditioned to associate violence with fun...
Violence IS fun. Frankly humans have a need for violence and strife.
That's all sports really do except focus that into something that in the end is harmless. Even something as benign as chess is a battle of two armies. Any sport with a 'goal' or 'endzone' is clearly the same game with a few different rules. Some have more contact than others.
Cut your hair, hippie!
:)
j/k
why something like this only applies to games and not other forms of media
Because the average American doesn't see video games as an adult industry. Over and over it's been shown that more adults (18+) are buying video games than minors, and it's a huge difference. It makes sense because we (I'm 29) were playing games since Atari, NES, SNES. We've grown up and so have the games but the gaming industry is still seen as being something only kids buy.
The only oversight the movies get are MPAA ratings and TV has ratings - they've already done this to video games. TV has parental controls and so do consoles. If the parents don't use those then they either don't care what their kids play or they just don't know. Ignorance is no excuse.
*A market driven economy
That's what WoW has or are you defining 'market driven' differently? As long as I can sell something for whatever price I want then that is market driven. If I can only sell my 'Boots of Escaping' for 5g then that's not.
*player world interaction (building homes, villages, guilds, shops)
I don't see a problem with this except it's not so easy. The world has to be pretty big to handle all those homes. On the server I play on in WoW, if every player had a home and/or shop there would be no game to play because the world isn't big enough. People complain enough about travel time.
*player driven content (I want a new sword that can only be had in the depths of a cave that I can't get, I put out a quest and a reward, raids on other villages, and completely random monster and loot placement)
That's a lot of logic that the devs need to create. I also don't think it'd work too well since the people who have money are usually the ones who get the phatty lewtz and sell them. If you can't get it yourself you probably can't afford the reward.
That's all, basically the MMO creator just needs a basic storyline with a few warring factions and a big interactive sandbox in which the players can live and play with randome monster placements. They just need to come at it from a new more simplistic angle.
Oh yes, that's all - very simple. I'm sure that if it really was someone would've done it already. As for random monster placements, unless you don't have player or weapon levels in your game then running into a level 40 when I'm level 1 isn't very fun. That's what zones are for - to protect players from not having fun. Can they adventure outside of those easy areas at a low level? Sure, but at least there's a buffer that they know if they cross they could be in for a long run back to their corpse.
...then why do gamers care if gamers are depicted negatively on TV?
The reason that gamers should care is because the TV show is saying that playing video games does influence behavior.
You seem to be mistaking behavior (someone actually doing something) for image (the perception of someone doing something). This episode can influence the audience's image of gamers and strengthen the falsehood that games alter behavior. And although I don't personally think it could happen, the result could be lawsuits against game makers or sanctions against certain 'undesireable' game content. Lucky for us, CSI: Miami isn't the ratings hog that the original is.
Ask Twisted Sister what they think of a negative image. Their 'We're Not Gonna Take It' doesn't have a single violent, sexual, or vulgar lyric in it yet was used in a Congressional hearing to promote explicit lyrics stickers on music. Dee Snider got chewed out by Al Gore just to be saved later by John Denver who trashed the sticker when he said that people mistake his 'Rocky Mountain High' song as a pot-smoking song.
Image is all you have and once it's gone it's almost impossible to get back. Gamers should protect it whenever they get the chance.
The Star Wars franchise is just too hot of a commodity to pass up. It's worth billions and has billions of people who know what it is. Blizzard can't hold Star Wars' jock. What Blizzard can do is create a much more stable and playable game.
Maybe Sony should focus on making SWG 2 and leave SWG alone. They need to let it go. Get a good new project manager and a new good software architect and start with a new team from scratch. New graphics, new gameplay, keep what worked, toss what didn't. Two years dev time and SWG 2 could be released just as WoW is getting old and stale. Ready for Christmas '07!
Oh please. There are no interesting arguments in that letter at all. To say that there are is just being small-minded and not taking the facts into a consideration.
First of all, comparing a police shooting to a school shotting is a waste of time. Especially when there is no context. How close were the police? How close was the school shooter? There is no proof that violent video games make you a better gunman. If that were true wouldn't baseball games make you a better batter or fielder?
Hand-eye coordination is one thing but to think that one specific type of it gains grounds in a different specific type is rediculous. I.E., just because I can fly a chopper in Battlefield 2 doesn't mean I can fly one in real life. And just because a mother, father, or community has mental anguish over a tragic incident there is no reason to start laying blame on things that have no logical link.
Trying to keep violent videogames away from people they aren't the target audience for by restricting sales won't work. If the parents didn't know what games their kids are buying they won't know what games they will have to buy for them. It might keep a few kids from getting an M-rated game but it's not going to keep someone from getting shot or making poor decisions that lead to them getting hurt. The plain fact is that parents think video games are Pong, Frogger, Joust, Mario, and Zelda. They still think that games are simple kids toys when in reality are cross-generational entertainment - just like movies, television, and books.
Parents usually pay attention to what their kids watch on TV and what movies they go to so why not video games? This is still up to the parents.
They *could* fix it and have made an effort to try but they made a fatal mistake. What they did was add more higher-end recipes that you can learn. Sounds good? Sure, except those recipes are usually bind on pickup and usually drop only in the major instances.
So you need to be a hardcore instance person AND be a hardcore crafter. But even then crafting isn't that much fun. I like the idea (once again I didn't play SWG) in SWG of being a producer and not necessarily just a fighter. Collecter/harvesters were a neat concept.
Would a game even have to have fighting in it for you to be interested? Just an MMORPG where it was all about collecting/building/socializing?
WoW made a simple choice. They chose to do the standard questing for loot. There is some crafting to appease a small group of players but true crafters won't like it.
Now let me say that I didn't play SWG but I had some friends who played it from the start until, if I remember correctly, City of Heroes came out. From what they explained it sounded like the crafting system was excellent and the non-levelling 'skill tree' was really cool. However, to me is just sounded like there wasn't too much adventure. They were also constantly bitching about the 'flavor of the week' - the class/build that was overpowered today but tomorrow would be nerfed. Then the next class/build would have to nerfed and so on. The balance issues were their biggest complaint.
WoW is adventure based with the social game not influenced by the game itself - you have to go out and get it. I play WoW and do I wish there was player housing? Yes. Do I wish the crafting system was better? Yes. But would I settle for a fun, balanced game instead? Definitely.
I think a lot of people don't need to socialize too much in WoW, they want an adventure. If you want crafting you are going to have to look somewhere else. I think SWG was that place but in it's current incarnation, from the sound of it, it's not.
weigh the balance between structured storytelling and open worlds
Call me crazy, but I think WoW does a fine job of this.
Wow does an a acceptable job of this but I think there's a subcontext to that small sentence. The continents are used up, there's no open space. No player housing or even just guild housing.
A guildy brought up how cool it would be for the large guilds with sufficient in-game cash to be able to create a guild house. Maybe have a flag or something that other guilds could try to 'steal'. Be able to buy guards and merchants for the guild house. Have an actual guild bank, not just an extra character that gets mailed stuff. But that isn't going to happen because, of course, they never intendid it to and that even if they wanted to do it it's not like you can just plunk down a guild house in the middle of the Barrens or Duskwood.
Even as much as I like WoW, you can go on to the forums and see people asking for some pretty standard stuff that is included in other games. I'm still holding out for a global 'looking for group' channel.