Lovely personal story, but that is all it is. You can't draw any general conclusions about game design (for example your little mathematical formula) from the fact that the chemistry of your guild changed and that you became tired of the gameplay. What game have you ever played that has kept you entertained forever? I don't remember seeing this promise on the box.
You either misunderstood the review author, don't appreciate the diversity of individual play styles that WoW accommodates, and/or simply don't like the essence of MMO game design.
Specific "raid content" is pretty much targeted at the "hardcore" player who wants to
keep playing well after hitting the level cap
is attracted to the idea of "maxing" out the design potential of a class
is interested in playing with a large team and the challenges therein.
By definition this kind of content is not meant to appeal to the casual player and is in fact specifically designed to be a time sink. One of the nice things about the TBC expansion is that it brings the "maxed" player down a little closer to what a dedicated "casual" player can reasonably accomplish, therefore excusing the casual player from feeling obligated to raid and also making the variety of PvP options more accessible and competitive for all. Furthermore, I happen to like MMOs precisely because of their design philosophy. They give me one system to learn and become proficient in while providing me with a huge amount of content to explore and the constant opportunity for improvement (up to the level cap at least). Next to my DS, WoW is the most casual-friendly game I've ever played with the most replayability. That might not appeal to you, and you are free to label this a "time sink game," but that is a fairly utilitarian characterization. For me it means a lot of content in a dynamic system with tons of replayability.
" You'll pour your life into the game, but you can still suck large amounts of ass at it. The reason that there are countless level 60/70 clueless morons is because the game requires no skill to speak of, only endless amounts of time."
These statements are contradictory and reductive. If there are "clueless morons" it stands to reason that there are very good players as well who have learned to play the game with skill. And that the "clueless morons" can beat a lot of the PvE content doesn't mean that they are doing so with any kind of efficiency (skill) or that they could beat a better player in PvP combat.
What you are talking about is the entirely valid difference between seeing WoW as a particular kind of "game" and seeing it as a "world."
As a game it is arguably a worthwhile contribution to the RPG genre, and interesting for the social component it adds to that genre. But at 60 when the novel content and the character development stop, WoW stops being an RPG game and turns itself into a giant, complicated slot-machine. You pay the price to play by being competent, and in exchange you get the chance to grind for rewards. Its just that simple. Your comment implies that you don't find this fun, and neither do I.
But I remain a subscriber because I see WoW as a world rather than a game. For me it remains an entertaining place to stop in once or twice a week and fool around for an hour or two at a time, particularly because of the social interaction the whole thing is predicated on. I certainly don't grind for anything, and I'm not that interested in trying out classes outside of my 60 Hunter and 55 Warrior. But if my guild happens to be hitting an instance or playing in the Battlegrounds, I will happily join them for the fun of it all. You might not think that is worth maintaining a $12/month subscription for, but I find it worth what fun and relaxation I get out of it.
I think the lead designer of Regnum Online made the distinction best, as recently quoted on GamesAreArt.com:
"These massive worlds, where you can do anything, are not games. A game is defined by its limitations and rules. What I've been working the last 4 years is just a big massive digital world."
Fair enough, but don't forget that the Arena will be on a three-month timer. To me that means "must play Arena solidly for three months to achieve good gear from it." Thats pretty intense, and not much different from grinding reputation for the top stuff in the battlegrounds as the system currently works.
Don't be fooled into thinking that 25 man raids means that your chance to drop top-end gear will be improved. If you read the rest of today's announcement, the intention is to shift top-end rewards from raiding to PvP, honor and reputation grinding.
IN other words, grinding will still be the way you get the best gear, it just won't be raid grinding.
hopefully Blizz begins concentrating development on actually making the war between teh Horde and the Alliance a war. More outdoor world PvP with geo-political and economic consequences should be incorporated into the game so that players can actually begin generating their own content and conflicts rather than running on one of three or four kinds of treadmills. Todays announcement about including a capturable city was a good start, but I wonder if this approach can be retro-fitted onto the existing zones and cities? Could you imagine how amazing it would be to see full-scale Horde attacks on Stormwind, or to log-in one day to find that the Alliance have blockaded Onyxias lair? I reckon we'd actually have a game that was perpetually amusing on our hands.
To summarize the brilliant and nuanced argument of our critic friend at Gamasutra: videogames are not recognized by the bourgeois, therefore videogames need to be bourgoise.
Can anyone take this man seriously?
The problem isn't that the games are not complex, meaningful or full of value, but that the critics who review them and re-present them to the wider public have no understanding of why or how this is the case. Like the rest of his journalistic ilk, this "critic" seems oblivious to the importance and meaning of digital entertainment as a completely new communicative and experiential medium. As a result, the greatest justice he can do to it is to compare it to ancient art forms like literature, cinema, dance, and painting. But if the best analysis of the value of games is by analogy to other media (much less their "elitist" forms) you've already sold games out.
There is, in fact, a massive wealth of deep artistic, sociological, psychological and political meaning in many of the games produced today. But what do people learn of this in the reviews and "analysis" that we read everyday in the mainstream gaming media? Not a damn thing. To sum up the total contribution of mainstream video games analysis is trivial because this journalism is trivial: "Oh look! A technological novelty slightly more novel than last year! 8/10." Thats basically all we get. As such, the critics and journalists have failed to do their job and have thus failed games.
Honestly, it won't be bourgeoisie elitism that saves games because what is adopted as bourgeoisie taste is what was artistically avant garde five years earlier. Rather, we need to recognize that right now we are living in an era of the digital avant guard! The best thing that could happen to digital art is for all these lazy journalists and "critics" to get off their asses and read some philosophy of the digital and critical experience. I can happily recommend Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Slavoz Zizek among others. Of course, you would also do well to start with the classics of art criticism such as Denis Diderot and Charles Baudelaire. You know, the guys who were responsible for making all that "classical high brow" art high brow in the first place?
This model is predicated on, I think, a fairly simplistic conceptualization of software. It seems to assume that one can draw clean borders between pieces of software, ie., that a webbrowser, a wordprocessor, or an image editor is a discrete unitary entity. The reality is quite far from the truth of plug-ins, extensions, proprietary data formats, competing standards, and the inevitable need to communicate with an external world that is constantly changing.
"... great is because the concentrate on games, games, games."
Indeed. If Apple really wanted to get in on the "home digital appliance" market that MS and Sony are positioning to take over teh next 5-10 years, they would not do well by buying a self-identified "toy maker" like Nintendo. If anything, an Apple/Sony partnership would make more sense in this emerging sector since Sony has the hardware and penetration, and Apple has the software.
excellent point, and entirely true. the Terra Nova post actually reproduces the phenomenon it seeks to study by perpetuating this simplistic dichotomy and even simpler correspondence theory of value (white guys = civil, green guys = deviants). its all non-sense. if you read it, the WoW lore it is actually rather post-colonial and quite self-conscious in this regard. one of my early hopes with WoW was that this post-colonial storyline would be expanded and developed through episodic narrative content, but sadly the underlying technology is too static to allow for this.
Proactivity and forward-thinking are great, and as Mac user I appreciate the concerned public contributing freely to the improvement of my OS of choice. But not since The Bird Flu Pandemic and the War on Terror has there been a more consistent media story about the imagined and unexperienced than the OSX security threats. This is simply an imagined news story about events that have not yet occurred. I would have to assume these stories exist for the benefit of the sensationalist media itself rather than the public interest.
If you look at his career Warren has always been a corporate guy who has never tied to go it himself. he has always worked for someone else. at this point he's making an effort but is nevertheless a Steam cheerleader. does he know what the fsck he is talking about from a philosophical, cultural, or *independent* perspective? he sure as hell doesn't.
frankly, he sounds more like an old man whining that he could have made more money.
its lovely to think that the kids who buy taxed games will be contributing to their own education. but unfortunately the substantial majority of gamers are over 20, and the most recent GDC expressed concern that new, younger people were not being attracted to game playing at all.
what do two movie critics and a brain surgeon know about games? i'm sorry, but Ebert and his posse make themselves look like fools because they are clearly talking about something that you can just tell they have almost no experience in.
i find it funny that he claims that "nintendo is making all about the controller" because what nintendo is trying to do is rather make the human/machine interface disappear. as it stands, current controllers are totally abstracted: "press A to do this; press B to do that". the player has to take the time to learn what really has no context, thus making it *all about the controller*. now with good software, you just roll the Revo controller to move front, back left and right, swing your sword or toss you fishing lure; the software is what has to understand the context of the humans natural movements. this makes the game more about the human and less about the controller.
That is nonsense. Other software developers on the Nintendo Revolution network might charge for incremental content additions to a core game, but Nintendo itself has stated time and time again that you should only pay for a game once. Most recently this value was reflected in the comments made by the Animal Crossing DS designer on Gamasutra, and numerous times at the GDC.
That said, Nintendo has every right to charge for *separate products* like old NES games. I don't know what you mean by "full retail price" for something like Excitebike. Nintendo will do some research and discover that no more than $5-10 for an old NES game is probably going to be the sweetspot. At least that was what they were charging for the Card Reader system that also involved physical production costs.
One final point about all this. Player-created content is the surest way to extend the life of a game and satisfy the customer, and is quickly becoming a mantra in the industry. Successful online console games of the future will be, at a minimum, like Animal Crossing or Spore, where players can interact and exchange goods. At a maximal level, the internet modding community will be able to upload free content as well.
i feel the same way. more and more of this kind of garbage makes it easier all the time to make the extra effort to shop at independent retailers. i'm so glad i live downtown where such choices still exist. i don't know how people learn to live in suburbia and just eat whatever crap gets shoveled their way.
Hopefully BioWare will take a page from Second Life and avoid the mistakes made by WoW. In a recent speech at the Game Developers Conference, a designer noted that the players of Second Life contribute over 20,000 design hours per day to the content of the game, which would otherwise cost Linden Labs $400 million per year to produce in-house. To be the "next big MMO", BioWare's game needs to empower players to create their own content and produce player-driven conflict. Otherwise, it'll just be another linear "RPG on rails" a la WoW.
this just goes to show that the producers are wasting a great opportunity to innovate in the MMO market. this bit of news tells me that they are reproducing the standard MMO. big mistake. and quite boring.
if this is emblematic of the kind of imagination going into designing this game, i can already assure you that it will be a failure.
not exactly. Rob Barris has posted in the WoW Mac Support forum that StarCraft and Diablo2 won't be getting universalized for a number of reasons, but that Warcraft III probably will.
even if we assume that this machine can ensure a level of reliability and accuracy sufficient to satisfying a legal burden of proof (either on the "balance of probabilities" in civil cases, or "beyond a reasonable doubt" in criminal), there is nothing to say that such evidence would nevertheless be admissible in court. and if it was admissible, it would likely just be part of the overall weight and preponderance of all the available evidence and testimony, rather than being determinative.
the search for a technological "magic bullet" that can slice through the rhetoric and half-truths of an adversarial legal proceeding is echoed in DNA evidence, which can be problematized as evidence in dozens of different ways depending on its collection, handling, causal connection, etc., despite its irrefutable scientific meaning.
nope. we are all fascinated by the unknown, of which space happens to be one example. but there is also religion, philosophical foundations, justice, etc.
because nintendo is re-positioning itself as an "electronic toy company" rather than as a "console company" (the old "console wars" paradigm rapidly becoming anachronistic) i expect the revolution to be quite cheap, probably not more than $150 at launch for a basic set.
Slashdot Mirror
Lovely personal story, but that is all it is. You can't draw any general conclusions about game design (for example your little mathematical formula) from the fact that the chemistry of your guild changed and that you became tired of the gameplay. What game have you ever played that has kept you entertained forever? I don't remember seeing this promise on the box.
Specific "raid content" is pretty much targeted at the "hardcore" player who wants to
By definition this kind of content is not meant to appeal to the casual player and is in fact specifically designed to be a time sink. One of the nice things about the TBC expansion is that it brings the "maxed" player down a little closer to what a dedicated "casual" player can reasonably accomplish, therefore excusing the casual player from feeling obligated to raid and also making the variety of PvP options more accessible and competitive for all. Furthermore, I happen to like MMOs precisely because of their design philosophy. They give me one system to learn and become proficient in while providing me with a huge amount of content to explore and the constant opportunity for improvement (up to the level cap at least). Next to my DS, WoW is the most casual-friendly game I've ever played with the most replayability. That might not appeal to you, and you are free to label this a "time sink game," but that is a fairly utilitarian characterization. For me it means a lot of content in a dynamic system with tons of replayability.
These statements are contradictory and reductive. If there are "clueless morons" it stands to reason that there are very good players as well who have learned to play the game with skill. And that the "clueless morons" can beat a lot of the PvE content doesn't mean that they are doing so with any kind of efficiency (skill) or that they could beat a better player in PvP combat.
As a game it is arguably a worthwhile contribution to the RPG genre, and interesting for the social component it adds to that genre. But at 60 when the novel content and the character development stop, WoW stops being an RPG game and turns itself into a giant, complicated slot-machine. You pay the price to play by being competent, and in exchange you get the chance to grind for rewards. Its just that simple. Your comment implies that you don't find this fun, and neither do I.
But I remain a subscriber because I see WoW as a world rather than a game. For me it remains an entertaining place to stop in once or twice a week and fool around for an hour or two at a time, particularly because of the social interaction the whole thing is predicated on. I certainly don't grind for anything, and I'm not that interested in trying out classes outside of my 60 Hunter and 55 Warrior. But if my guild happens to be hitting an instance or playing in the Battlegrounds, I will happily join them for the fun of it all. You might not think that is worth maintaining a $12/month subscription for, but I find it worth what fun and relaxation I get out of it.
I think the lead designer of Regnum Online made the distinction best, as recently quoted on GamesAreArt.com:
Fair enough, but don't forget that the Arena will be on a three-month timer. To me that means "must play Arena solidly for three months to achieve good gear from it." Thats pretty intense, and not much different from grinding reputation for the top stuff in the battlegrounds as the system currently works.
Don't be fooled into thinking that 25 man raids means that your chance to drop top-end gear will be improved. If you read the rest of today's announcement, the intention is to shift top-end rewards from raiding to PvP, honor and reputation grinding.
IN other words, grinding will still be the way you get the best gear, it just won't be raid grinding.
hopefully Blizz begins concentrating development on actually making the war between teh Horde and the Alliance a war. More outdoor world PvP with geo-political and economic consequences should be incorporated into the game so that players can actually begin generating their own content and conflicts rather than running on one of three or four kinds of treadmills. Todays announcement about including a capturable city was a good start, but I wonder if this approach can be retro-fitted onto the existing zones and cities? Could you imagine how amazing it would be to see full-scale Horde attacks on Stormwind, or to log-in one day to find that the Alliance have blockaded Onyxias lair? I reckon we'd actually have a game that was perpetually amusing on our hands.
To summarize the brilliant and nuanced argument of our critic friend at Gamasutra: videogames are not recognized by the bourgeois, therefore videogames need to be bourgoise.
Can anyone take this man seriously?
The problem isn't that the games are not complex, meaningful or full of value, but that the critics who review them and re-present them to the wider public have no understanding of why or how this is the case. Like the rest of his journalistic ilk, this "critic" seems oblivious to the importance and meaning of digital entertainment as a completely new communicative and experiential medium. As a result, the greatest justice he can do to it is to compare it to ancient art forms like literature, cinema, dance, and painting. But if the best analysis of the value of games is by analogy to other media (much less their "elitist" forms) you've already sold games out.
There is, in fact, a massive wealth of deep artistic, sociological, psychological and political meaning in many of the games produced today. But what do people learn of this in the reviews and "analysis" that we read everyday in the mainstream gaming media? Not a damn thing. To sum up the total contribution of mainstream video games analysis is trivial because this journalism is trivial: "Oh look! A technological novelty slightly more novel than last year! 8/10." Thats basically all we get. As such, the critics and journalists have failed to do their job and have thus failed games.
Honestly, it won't be bourgeoisie elitism that saves games because what is adopted as bourgeoisie taste is what was artistically avant garde five years earlier. Rather, we need to recognize that right now we are living in an era of the digital avant guard! The best thing that could happen to digital art is for all these lazy journalists and "critics" to get off their asses and read some philosophy of the digital and critical experience. I can happily recommend Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Slavoz Zizek among others. Of course, you would also do well to start with the classics of art criticism such as Denis Diderot and Charles Baudelaire. You know, the guys who were responsible for making all that "classical high brow" art high brow in the first place?
This model is predicated on, I think, a fairly simplistic conceptualization of software. It seems to assume that one can draw clean borders between pieces of software, ie., that a webbrowser, a wordprocessor, or an image editor is a discrete unitary entity. The reality is quite far from the truth of plug-ins, extensions, proprietary data formats, competing standards, and the inevitable need to communicate with an external world that is constantly changing.
Coincidence? This invention arrives just before Spore is released? I think not.
i reckon i could find a few science friends crazy enough to pay $15000 for the ultimate Spore gaming rig that includes this display.
"... great is because the concentrate on games, games, games."
Indeed. If Apple really wanted to get in on the "home digital appliance" market that MS and Sony are positioning to take over teh next 5-10 years, they would not do well by buying a self-identified "toy maker" like Nintendo. If anything, an Apple/Sony partnership would make more sense in this emerging sector since Sony has the hardware and penetration, and Apple has the software.
excellent point, and entirely true. the Terra Nova post actually reproduces the phenomenon it seeks to study by perpetuating this simplistic dichotomy and even simpler correspondence theory of value (white guys = civil, green guys = deviants). its all non-sense. if you read it, the WoW lore it is actually rather post-colonial and quite self-conscious in this regard. one of my early hopes with WoW was that this post-colonial storyline would be expanded and developed through episodic narrative content, but sadly the underlying technology is too static to allow for this.
Proactivity and forward-thinking are great, and as Mac user I appreciate the concerned public contributing freely to the improvement of my OS of choice. But not since The Bird Flu Pandemic and the War on Terror has there been a more consistent media story about the imagined and unexperienced than the OSX security threats. This is simply an imagined news story about events that have not yet occurred. I would have to assume these stories exist for the benefit of the sensationalist media itself rather than the public interest.
If you look at his career Warren has always been a corporate guy who has never tied to go it himself. he has always worked for someone else. at this point he's making an effort but is nevertheless a Steam cheerleader. does he know what the fsck he is talking about from a philosophical, cultural, or *independent* perspective? he sure as hell doesn't.
frankly, he sounds more like an old man whining that he could have made more money.
I absolutely hate when presenters read from a script. the attempt to sound natural just never sounds natural.
its lovely to think that the kids who buy taxed games will be contributing to their own education. but unfortunately the substantial majority of gamers are over 20, and the most recent GDC expressed concern that new, younger people were not being attracted to game playing at all.
what do two movie critics and a brain surgeon know about games? i'm sorry, but Ebert and his posse make themselves look like fools because they are clearly talking about something that you can just tell they have almost no experience in.
i find it funny that he claims that "nintendo is making all about the controller" because what nintendo is trying to do is rather make the human/machine interface disappear. as it stands, current controllers are totally abstracted: "press A to do this; press B to do that". the player has to take the time to learn what really has no context, thus making it *all about the controller*. now with good software, you just roll the Revo controller to move front, back left and right, swing your sword or toss you fishing lure; the software is what has to understand the context of the humans natural movements. this makes the game more about the human and less about the controller.
That is nonsense. Other software developers on the Nintendo Revolution network might charge for incremental content additions to a core game, but Nintendo itself has stated time and time again that you should only pay for a game once. Most recently this value was reflected in the comments made by the Animal Crossing DS designer on Gamasutra, and numerous times at the GDC.
That said, Nintendo has every right to charge for *separate products* like old NES games. I don't know what you mean by "full retail price" for something like Excitebike. Nintendo will do some research and discover that no more than $5-10 for an old NES game is probably going to be the sweetspot. At least that was what they were charging for the Card Reader system that also involved physical production costs.
One final point about all this. Player-created content is the surest way to extend the life of a game and satisfy the customer, and is quickly becoming a mantra in the industry. Successful online console games of the future will be, at a minimum, like Animal Crossing or Spore, where players can interact and exchange goods. At a maximal level, the internet modding community will be able to upload free content as well.
i feel the same way. more and more of this kind of garbage makes it easier all the time to make the extra effort to shop at independent retailers. i'm so glad i live downtown where such choices still exist. i don't know how people learn to live in suburbia and just eat whatever crap gets shoveled their way.
Hopefully BioWare will take a page from Second Life and avoid the mistakes made by WoW. In a recent speech at the Game Developers Conference, a designer noted that the players of Second Life contribute over 20,000 design hours per day to the content of the game, which would otherwise cost Linden Labs $400 million per year to produce in-house. To be the "next big MMO", BioWare's game needs to empower players to create their own content and produce player-driven conflict. Otherwise, it'll just be another linear "RPG on rails" a la WoW.
this just goes to show that the producers are wasting a great opportunity to innovate in the MMO market. this bit of news tells me that they are reproducing the standard MMO. big mistake. and quite boring.
if this is emblematic of the kind of imagination going into designing this game, i can already assure you that it will be a failure.
not exactly. Rob Barris has posted in the WoW Mac Support forum that StarCraft and Diablo2 won't be getting universalized for a number of reasons, but that Warcraft III probably will.
even if we assume that this machine can ensure a level of reliability and accuracy sufficient to satisfying a legal burden of proof (either on the "balance of probabilities" in civil cases, or "beyond a reasonable doubt" in criminal), there is nothing to say that such evidence would nevertheless be admissible in court. and if it was admissible, it would likely just be part of the overall weight and preponderance of all the available evidence and testimony, rather than being determinative.
the search for a technological "magic bullet" that can slice through the rhetoric and half-truths of an adversarial legal proceeding is echoed in DNA evidence, which can be problematized as evidence in dozens of different ways depending on its collection, handling, causal connection, etc., despite its irrefutable scientific meaning.
nope. we are all fascinated by the unknown, of which space happens to be one example. but there is also religion, philosophical foundations, justice, etc.
because nintendo is re-positioning itself as an "electronic toy company" rather than as a "console company" (the old "console wars" paradigm rapidly becoming anachronistic) i expect the revolution to be quite cheap, probably not more than $150 at launch for a basic set.