...because given SOE's track record with internally developed games and the ones they've merely published, your title's going down with all hands sooner or later.
Granted that Vanguard was partially bankrolled by SOE, and was developed by a man who spent more time taking visual stock of the insides of his colon than actually developing, but SOE does have a richly deserved reputation as the publisher where MMO titles go to die.
Seriously, just do a quick Googling for Avari Press. Gaze upon the bare-bones website, and the less-than-professional cover shot of another one of (and quite possibly only other one of) their books. Marvel at their head office in the middle of nowhere, where you can personally mail your manuscript to them, no literary agent required!
If this had been published by an outfit like Baen (or, Jesus, like Prima for that matter), it might have been worthy of comment or review. The fact that these jokers can't even be arsed to do proofreading and spell-checking speaks volumes of their professionalism.
I'm not sure if it's fair to compare the two, given that most of Halo's lore and hype seems to be bundled up in the associated ARGs, rather than the Halo games themselves, and the broad differences between Halos and Shocks within the larger first-person shooter genre.
But yeah, I'm much more interested in Bioshock. Deco art style? Weird, quasi-Gernsbackian setting? Character customization? Spiritual relative to the System Shock games? Yes. Please. Oh god, please.
There's a left-handed version too, for us southpaws, but Amazon's got it for eighty bucks, where the right-handed one is going for sixty. Discrimination, I say!
Outfits like Netzero notwithstanding, there is just about no way that an ISP would be making enough money off of ad insertion to justify a reduced cost for end-users. Even if they were, your average ISP would be much happier simply pocketing the difference to begin with.
Given Safari's lack of extensibility (no plethora of easily installed adblock plugins, for example), content providers are probably crossing their fingers in the hopes that this comes to pass. As someone who can't stand any of Apple's brushed-metal UI-infected software, I'm quite the opposite.
I agree entirely, but the developer's comments from the article seem to suggest that they're aiming at the complete opposite. I get 'Okay, you throw some loose scripts together, mix in our magic semantic watchdog that knows what you meant and not what you typed, and the rest builds itself while resisting the corrupting touch of those nasty, naughty consumers'. Feels more like a teched-up interactive movie from the dawning of CD-ROMs, than an evolutionary step in MMOGs.
The rest of that summary seems pretty pie-in-the-sky to me. If they've got the capability to change stuff on the fly, and better, to have the system perform these changes on its own, they're going to have to be very careful to prevent people from injecting their own changes, or 'socially' engineering the system to react in ways unforeseen by the developers.
I have, pretty much. I don't have the income to fritter away on new sourcebooks of dubious value, or the latest point-release-cum-edition of entire rulesets anymore. It doesn't help that my tabletop group has pretty much collapsed, and our traditional GM has become obsessed enough with City of Heroes to two-box it. Not that I can point fingers-- I've got active CoH and WoW accounts (though only one of each), and I do most of my RPing in text format on MUX.
I've come to the conclusion that I don't like to mix math with fun. It just doesn't do it for me-- even the most basic to-hit rolls or character point allocations are more of an annoyance than anything else, these days, so I'm not keen on new books filled with new rules. On the other hand, I don't have very much use for tomes of theorycraft, either-- I can come up with setting, characters or my own rules variants without paying $50 for a particularly geeky...For Dummies book.
I've had the opposite experience, strangely enough. We got rid of racial level caps, operating under the philosophy that the effect of racial bonuses was only really felt at low level, and that multi-classing's drawbacks (slow progression, grotty HP, occasional gear restrictions) made up for their benefits, so picking a race was largely a matter of background colour. In the 3rd Ed games that I've played, I've noticed a vast difference in effectiveness between characters of similar level and base class, mostly as a result of feat choices. High stats and serious gear, the standbys of 1st and 2nd, weren't much more than fancy icing.
I'll concede that it's possible that I've been stuck with shitty groups, though.
In my opinion, 2nd Ed's strong clinging to the standards and methods set by 1st Edition (attribute bonus progression, core classes, and the like) made min-maxing pretty straightforward when it happened-- you wanted stats higher than a 15, and a +5 weapon. The first few runs of splatbooks (the Complete Book of Foo, etc) and the character 'kits' inside were more for roleplaying flavour than anything else, though the later ones in the series (Rangers and Paladins in particular) had kit-specific rule modifications that, in retrospect, look a lot like prototype Prestige Classes. I have blotted all memory of the Player's Option book series out of my memory, through diligent application of blunt trauma and alcohol, though.
3rd Edition's flexibility, in particular the awkwardly balanced feat system and the Diablo-style 'magic-items of Suffix', makes it very easy to create and equip characters that reach either extreme of 'broken-ness'.
What really got me were articles I've seen published in Dragon, or put up on the official D&D web-page, describing how to build combat monsters in three steps and ten assorted levels. While it is possible to min-max in virtually any system (and just as easy to run a low-power campaign in any), publishing articles like those through official channels suggests some degree of official sanction for the play style. That's my concern-- not that it's possible to min-max, or that it's easy to, but that there is at least the semblance of official encouragement to do so.
I was just discussing with a friend the other day, why I can't stand to play D&D any more. Frankly, it's all the number crunching and the min-maxing. Back when I started with 2nd Edition, that kind of thing was considered anathema-- "munchkin" to borrow the term that was used. When 3rd came out (and with it the first printing of the new Star Wars game), I was leery at first-- but the simplified mechanics won me over, because I can't stand doing math when I'm trying to have fun. Unfortunately, the number crunching came back with a vengeance-- 3rd and 3.5 had design aesthetics that strongly matched that of CRPGs (the concept of item 'slots', and a wide variety of 'buffs'), including the concept of character 'builds' tweaked for maximum efficiency. Munchkinism was no longer anathema, but virtually required.
This vaguely excites me, if only because they've stripped the numbers down again and apparently made an effort at developing a game that's fun, instead of an exercise in spreadsheet manipulation. Unfortunately, I don't think it's likely to last, because mudflation, feature creep and rule proliferation is pretty much necessary to sell additional sourcebooks. Nobody wants to buy the Complete Book of Twi'leks unless it comes with rules (and illustrations) for Doing That Thing That You Do With Your Lekku.
Amen to that. If what they did to SWG is any indication of their attitude toward 'non-traditional' games and content, aimed at the so-called masses, then SomeUnlikelyDefinitionofFree-Realms is dead already.
It certainly doesn't help that SOE has gone from being the mill against which all MMO grinds are measured, to becoming the industry's elephant graveyard, where the likes of Matrix: Online, Vanguard and SWG go to die.
Not to mention the (in)famous 'metagame' that the WoD developers played with themselves-- er, that is to say, played through entire series of sourcebooks and new core rulebook editions.
This is one MMO that I'm going to stay very, very far away from. I've played WoD tabletop, I've played it LARP, and I've had dealings with people who have played it extensively in unofficial MUX text games; common themes straight through all of those have been GM caprice, OOC politicking, whining and histrionic drama. Take a peek at the official forums for virtually any active MMO, and just imagine all of that garbage amplified by a setting and a potential player-base that is already steeped in paranoia and self-obsession.
That grumbling noise I hear, echoing out from the depths of the Earth, must be Leonard J. Crabs waking up from his millennial sleep.
And yeah, right. Like Lowtax and the admins are really going to be aiding and abetting something as stupid as this, or like the Swarm would discuss something of this maliciousness and magnitude on a publicly accessible forum.
Fantastic settings implicitly demand that the player makes an effort to understand the world that the game is situated in, whether it involves magic, borderline-magical technology, or just plain weird situations. A mundane setting obviates that, but at the same time it strips the whole arrangment of any mystique that it might have otherwise had. Part of the presentation, and of the draw of the game as a whole, is its trappings-- something like Brain Age doesn't need a backstory like Warcraft or the Lord of the Rings, but at the same time, how many people are interested in playing a Real Life MMO? And no, Second Life or the various ARGs don't count, because they simply drip fantasy... and other, less mentionable substances.
Slashdot Mirror
The Tetley. Better teabag, better tea.
I'm not sure if Bethesda has ever developed a 2D game, so the answer is probably 'yes'.
Granted that Vanguard was partially bankrolled by SOE, and was developed by a man who spent more time taking visual stock of the insides of his colon than actually developing, but SOE does have a richly deserved reputation as the publisher where MMO titles go to die.
If this had been published by an outfit like Baen (or, Jesus, like Prima for that matter), it might have been worthy of comment or review. The fact that these jokers can't even be arsed to do proofreading and spell-checking speaks volumes of their professionalism.
But yeah, I'm much more interested in Bioshock. Deco art style? Weird, quasi-Gernsbackian setting? Character customization? Spiritual relative to the System Shock games? Yes. Please. Oh god, please.
There's a left-handed version too, for us southpaws, but Amazon's got it for eighty bucks, where the right-handed one is going for sixty. Discrimination, I say!
Oh, piffle. It's not like they need all of you, just the extremity with the chip inside.
Outfits like Netzero notwithstanding, there is just about no way that an ISP would be making enough money off of ad insertion to justify a reduced cost for end-users. Even if they were, your average ISP would be much happier simply pocketing the difference to begin with.
Given Safari's lack of extensibility (no plethora of easily installed adblock plugins, for example), content providers are probably crossing their fingers in the hopes that this comes to pass. As someone who can't stand any of Apple's brushed-metal UI-infected software, I'm quite the opposite.
Caveat emptor.
My question is, did the editors explicitly flag these advertisements for display, or is someone gaming the firehose?
if { questNPC.avoided = true
spawn.goblinHordeRing(5000);
if { goblinHordeRing.defeated = true
spawn.rocks(1000).altitude(500);
drop.rocks(1000,playerCharacters);
Sys.out("Rocks fall, everyone dies!");}
}
I agree entirely, but the developer's comments from the article seem to suggest that they're aiming at the complete opposite. I get 'Okay, you throw some loose scripts together, mix in our magic semantic watchdog that knows what you meant and not what you typed, and the rest builds itself while resisting the corrupting touch of those nasty, naughty consumers'. Feels more like a teched-up interactive movie from the dawning of CD-ROMs, than an evolutionary step in MMOGs.
The rest of that summary seems pretty pie-in-the-sky to me. If they've got the capability to change stuff on the fly, and better, to have the system perform these changes on its own, they're going to have to be very careful to prevent people from injecting their own changes, or 'socially' engineering the system to react in ways unforeseen by the developers.
I've come to the conclusion that I don't like to mix math with fun. It just doesn't do it for me-- even the most basic to-hit rolls or character point allocations are more of an annoyance than anything else, these days, so I'm not keen on new books filled with new rules. On the other hand, I don't have very much use for tomes of theorycraft, either-- I can come up with setting, characters or my own rules variants without paying $50 for a particularly geeky ...For Dummies book.
I'll concede that it's possible that I've been stuck with shitty groups, though.
3rd Edition's flexibility, in particular the awkwardly balanced feat system and the Diablo-style 'magic-items of Suffix', makes it very easy to create and equip characters that reach either extreme of 'broken-ness'.
What really got me were articles I've seen published in Dragon, or put up on the official D&D web-page, describing how to build combat monsters in three steps and ten assorted levels. While it is possible to min-max in virtually any system (and just as easy to run a low-power campaign in any), publishing articles like those through official channels suggests some degree of official sanction for the play style. That's my concern-- not that it's possible to min-max, or that it's easy to, but that there is at least the semblance of official encouragement to do so.
This vaguely excites me, if only because they've stripped the numbers down again and apparently made an effort at developing a game that's fun, instead of an exercise in spreadsheet manipulation. Unfortunately, I don't think it's likely to last, because mudflation, feature creep and rule proliferation is pretty much necessary to sell additional sourcebooks. Nobody wants to buy the Complete Book of Twi'leks unless it comes with rules (and illustrations) for Doing That Thing That You Do With Your Lekku.
It certainly doesn't help that SOE has gone from being the mill against which all MMO grinds are measured, to becoming the industry's elephant graveyard, where the likes of Matrix: Online, Vanguard and SWG go to die.
Sounds like the final scene from Dallas, to me. Funny parallel, that.
Like the comic! No, wait, that's had two different publishers run screaming from it after a year.
Like the tabletop RPG! No, wait, that was two poorly developed sourcebooks for a lousy D20 wannabe.
Like the novels? Yeah, that's it-- those must be popular, because I've never seen them on the shelves!
This is one MMO that I'm going to stay very, very far away from. I've played WoD tabletop, I've played it LARP, and I've had dealings with people who have played it extensively in unofficial MUX text games; common themes straight through all of those have been GM caprice, OOC politicking, whining and histrionic drama. Take a peek at the official forums for virtually any active MMO, and just imagine all of that garbage amplified by a setting and a potential player-base that is already steeped in paranoia and self-obsession.
And yeah, right. Like Lowtax and the admins are really going to be aiding and abetting something as stupid as this, or like the Swarm would discuss something of this maliciousness and magnitude on a publicly accessible forum.
Fantastic settings implicitly demand that the player makes an effort to understand the world that the game is situated in, whether it involves magic, borderline-magical technology, or just plain weird situations. A mundane setting obviates that, but at the same time it strips the whole arrangment of any mystique that it might have otherwise had. Part of the presentation, and of the draw of the game as a whole, is its trappings-- something like Brain Age doesn't need a backstory like Warcraft or the Lord of the Rings, but at the same time, how many people are interested in playing a Real Life MMO? And no, Second Life or the various ARGs don't count, because they simply drip fantasy... and other, less mentionable substances.
Amen to that. If they're sitting there, eerily silent and dark, you might get the urge to touch one.