You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2007.
This is nothing more than a bitch session post. I do not understand why Microsoft, which has had years to get it right, cannot build a working online system. Most of us at Iron Realms have had a 360 since last spring, and we have had constant problems trying to play together online. We’ve had problems with Ghost Recon, with Burnout, with Rainbow Six, and so on.
At the moment, for instance, we were trying to have a spirited afternoon firefight in Rainbow Six. Instead, we’ve spent 45 minutes trying to find someone to host so that everyone can both connect to the game and hear each other. Either someone won’t be able to connect to the host, or some people in the game won’t be able to hear each other, though everyone else can hear them. This is the typical problem we encounter.
$50/year for Xbox Live Gold account gets us 45 minutes of wasted time. If Xbox Live was having network problems I’d understand. It’s a rampant, frequent problem, however, and has been enough to cause us to simply stop playing certain games online with each other (like Burnout) in disgust.
Rainbow 6: Vegas is a game that we at Iron Realms had anticipated for quite awhile, since we’d greatly enjoyed playing previous installments of the franchise on the original Xbox. It’s pretty good (if not brilliant), but I, and likely almost everyone else playing it, have a big beef: Advancing up rank means spending ridiculous amounts of time playing in PvP matches online. Everytime you complete an online match, you get points, which are applied to your rank. One starts at Private Second Class and moves up to Major or something. I’m unsure what the top level is.
In any case, because you get points just for completing matches (albeit less than for winning matches or drawing matches), and because the amount of time they expect you to invest is absurd (one of my co-workers estimated 12 days of consecutive play to unlock all the weapons and gadgets), many people have turned to gaming the system, including us.
Right now, even though my TV and AV setup are turned off, three of us are ‘playing’ matches of Rainbow Six over and over with the headset cord tied around the 360 joysticks to make your character run in circles and avoid the pathetically inadequate idle detection. We’ve been doing this for about 21 hours straight so far, and I’m pleased to report that I just checked and am up to “Staff Sergeant.” Everytime we tie (almost all of the time since nobody is at the controller), we each gain advancement points.
This is, obviously, a very poor game mechanic and shame on the designer (and everyone he works with) for not pointing out what a backwards system this is before launch. The only fun part of this is that every few hours I’ll hear my controller vibrate and know that one of my ‘friends’ has decided to actually play for a few minutes and has managed to track me down and kill me while I run in circles. It’s kind of funny to have my console ‘communicating’ with me even though the tv and sound system are off.
Warning: One of my rare food posts. Unrelated to anything else on blog.
This is a soup that I’ve been making a lot this winter. It’s really simple, it’s cheap, and it reheats well. I got the recipe initially from The Silver Spoon, which is the English translation of the best-selling cookbook in Italy for, reportedly, the last 50 years, though I’ve modified it to my taste. It’s an incredible cookbook in any case, though I have to admit that I stay away from the chapters on things like cow heart and whatnot. I am sadly provincially American in the meats I’m willing to eat. I do not do offal, tripe, or most organs. I would kick ass on ‘Fear Factor’ unless there was an ‘eat-a-disgusting-substance’ segment, in which case I’d just quit, because I won’t put crappy parmesan in my mouth, much less live spiders or rotted sheep brains.
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It’s typical when playing an MMO to refer to your avatar as yourself, as in, “I visited Ironforge.” or “I just killed Leroy!” The reality, of course, is that you did not do those things in any literal manner. What you did was send input to a server that moved some bits around in a database, and sent info to your client, which displayed some text and/or images. Within the fiction of the world, ‘you’ are not doing anything either. Your avatar-character is.
RPG Vault published an interview with me this morning. I’m pretty happy with it. My #1 goal with Earth Eternal when speaking to the press and prospective players right now is to try and manage expectations. We’re a small team with a small budget, and so I’m doing my best not to overpromise or hype the game. This presents a bit of a problem with current Iron Realms players (hi!) who have enormous expectations for Iron Realms’ first graphical game. A lot of them would sell their kidneys to play a graphical version of our text MUDs (heck, I might too), but I hate to break it to them: It ain’t gonna happen. Turning Achaea/Aetolia/Imperian/Lusternia graphical would cost significantly more than World of Warcraft did, and our budget is about 1% of WoW’s.
What we hope to deliver with Earth Eternal is a reasonably polished, fun experience that can be played for free. Once we’ve delivered that, we’ll get more ambitious with the design, but I am absolutely not interested in turning EE into the kind of hype-driven, promise-the-moon fiasco that, say, Horizons was.
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opened the Earth Eternal forums yesterday and we saw about 1600 posts in the first 15 hours or so. I immediately had to bring on moderation/community management help, as I hadn’t expected quite this much activity at this stage. Good omens, good omens.
People often ask me what my job is. The pat answer is that I’m the CEO and Creative Director of a small online games company. Most people kind of look at me and then ask, “Yes, but what is it you do?” I’m going to try to give an answer to that in this post, having been inspired by a post Brian Green wrote recently entitled, “What is a game designer?” In it, Brian runs down what a game designer should expect to do day-to-day (organize, communicate, champion ideas, etc) and what a game designer should not expect to do (actually designing the high-level game concept). I thought I’d take a similar approach to describing my job.
I’ve written previously about the Slamdance controversy here, with small updates here, and here.
Now, there’s new drama, of an unexpected sort. As reported by Ian Bogost at Water Cooler Games, one of the games that had been a finalist that had been pulled from Slamdance by its creators - Toblo - has been resubmitted by Digipen, the media school the creators are attending. On their site, the Toblo creators write:
“On January 16th, the DigiPen Institute of Technology — the college we attend — overwrote our decision and readmitted Toblo to the Slamdance Festival. We still have very strong feelings regarding the removal of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from the competition, and we have not been satisfied with Mr. Baxter’s numerous rationales for dropping the game. While Toblo may be on display at Slamdance because of DigiPen’s decision, we will not present our game and we will refuse to accept any awards.”
I applaud the stance of the creators in maintaining their principled objection to Slamdance’s decision to pull out Super Columbine Massacre RPG!
Digipen, on the other hand, may have the right to do that (insofar as they own the IP for what their students create in their classes), but shame on them nonetheless.
Warning: This post is nothing but venting. Bad customer service from giant corporations is not news.
I just got done having the single worst customer service experience that I can recall having. Thank you so much, Bank of America.
I was reminded of the power of convention tonight while watching the 2nd season-opener of HBO’s Rome tonight. I love this show, and as I’m not a huge Sopranos or Deadwood fan, consider it the 2nd best show on television (after The Wire, obviously, which makes almost everything else ever put on television look a bit shoddy by comparison).
You know what annoyed me right from the start of the first episode in season one though? The British accents. Rome does away with the cliched white-marble colums and toga thing and creates a much more nuanced and realistic-feeling (can’t vouch for the details) environment. Then come the British accents, and you’re hit in the face with how incredibly powerful convention is. There is absolutely zero reason to give the Romans British accents aside from convention, and yet I’ll certainly grant that having Caesar speak in anything but a British accent would have been cause for comment.
I think it would have been interesting to give that cause for comment, though. Imagine Caesar with with, say, a version of an American accent that might be generally considered a bit crass. Imagine Caesar with a Brooklyn accent. Wouldn’t that be cool? I certainly think so, but were I placing a bet, I’d bet on the conventional British-accented Caesar.
Although I’ve talked a little about Earth Eternal on the Forge previously, few people outside of Iron Realms have seen much of it. Today, that changes, a little, with the release of EE’s website. Check it out!
It is really nice to finally have something tangible (funny that we’ve gotten far enough into the digital age to consider a website ‘tangible’) to point people at when I mention Earth Eternal. It’s nice to just have something to show off for the immense amount of work we’ve put into this project so far. I have to say, producing an MMO that doesn’t suck on a budget our size (we have a 6 figure budget) is hard. We have only three core team members and an outsourced art team. We’re going to do it though, and I’m cautiously optimistic about our chances of success.
When we began EE’s development, the big questions revolved around, “Can we do this?” An MMO is a huge challenge, and we were not starting with something like Multiverse (which I’d consider using if we were starting development today). A good portion of the early months was spent just running experiments and planning.
As time has gone on, we have become sure that we can do this, if you define ‘this’ as releasing a playable 3d MMORPG. The big question now is how much of a game we’re going to be able to build on the platform we’ve built/are building. I don’t have an answer for that yet, but the beauty of self-publishing on the net is that the need for a big splashy launch is greatly reduced. Iterative growth is our thing.
Anyway, wish us luck (or don’t if you’re a hater). Either way, get ready to suck on the sweet sweet goodness that is Earth Eternal.
No need to elaborate, but good for all of them. I think it’d be fantastic if every single finalist pulled out, leaving Slamdance looking as silly as possible.
flOw, another finalist in the Slamdance competition, has pulled out in protest over Slamdance’s decision to remove Super Columbine Massacre RPG! as detailed here. Nice work!
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ecently, the Slamdance Festival, under pressure from sponsors, kicked out a finalist in the competition under pressure from corporate sponsors. That finalist was Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a low-tech game in which you play as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine murders in 1999. The game weaves dialogue together gathered from news reports, from Eric or Dylan’s journal, and so on, though the gameplay itself is fairly atrocious. Apparently the second stage of the game involves playing one of the two boys in Hell populated by cultural and pop cultural figures from present and past (ever wanted to hang out with Mega Man, Ronald Reagan, John Lennon, and Nietzsche?), but I didn’t have the patience to get that far myself. The game sucks, make no mistake, though the content is at least a little compelling.
One of the ways in which Iron Realms manages to thrive in the face of competition from Eve Online to World of Warcraft is by providing an environment that feels palpably different from that which a player can get elsewhere. Part of this drive is instantiated in our game mechanics and part is instantiated in the admin-assisted roleplaying we do. Unlike most MMOs, many of our admins also play fictional roles, usually as Gods (in the polytheistic sense), and directly interact with players in-role. Our admins, most of whom are volunteers, do a superb job at a very difficult task, both by direct in-role interaction and by ‘backstage’ work on admin-assisted roleplaying events, but there’s a general feeling in Achaea, our biggest MUD/MMO, that the roleplaying has suffered as compared to Aetolia, Imperian, and Lusternia, largely due to the fact that Achaea is quite a big bigger than the other three.
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Interesting (but short) article on World-Check today.
World-Check is a firm focused on risk reduction for other companies. The article talks about the likelihood that criminal organizations are using virtual worlds to launder money, putting the banks that work with those virtual worlds at risk, since they do no real due diligence on virtual worlds.
I actually predicted (on the now-defunct mailing list mud-dev) before Entropia Universe (then Project Entropia) released in 2003 that it would be quickly targetted by money launderers and, subsequently, Mindark (Entropia Universe’s developer) would be targetted by law enforcement. I’ve long assumed the same thing about Second Life as well.
The second (targetting by law enforcement for aiding money launderers) hasn’t yet happened to either Mindark or Linden Labs, to my knowledge, but I’d be willing to bet that the first (money laundering being performed via their services) is happening as we speak. Pure speculation, of course, but both Second Life and Project Entropia, by virtue of their official cash-out mechanisms, provide excellent laundering facilities with lower transaction costs than cleaning money through something like gold sales in WoW.
The article ends with an ominous paragraph.
“Have they[virtual worlds that allow for cashout] created a “financial institution” as the term is defined in the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 ? It would seem that the answer is yes. Let us see just how long regulators and law enforcement allow this scheme to exist before taking action.”
Thanks to Raph for the pointer to this article.
I updated the blogroll, and simply called everyone a ‘Friend of the Show.’ I haven’t added a million links, but added some few that I read often.