Obviously the death of the King of Pop has been dominating the news and inter-webs lately: his funeral/memorial service is playing out as I type this at work.

Last night I was watching a special on television and one comment, offered as an editorial, was that MJ’s death has liberated his art from the “weirdness” that surrounded him in life.  In other words, now that he’s “out of the way” the world can enjoy and celebrate the amazing talent of Michael Jackson the musician and not be distracted by Michael Jackson the oddity.

Imagine that.  Getting in the way of your own legend – by being alive!

I have been drafting the outline of an upcoming RL quest.  Essentially it’s about setting a goal to drive my workouts until DragonCon.  Without a goal you tend to get lost or worse: become complacent.

I’ve cut my weight-lifting to three days a week with 2-3 days of some kind of cardio mixed in.  I’m not going to name the system I’m using, but I will mention that I’ve increased my strength significantly.

Strength isn’t something that I cared much about before, losing body fat was my only focus, but strength is an exciting metric to watch grow.  

Getting stronger without injury is a delicate balance, but watching the number of plates grow on a barbell kinda reminds me of MMO character advancement.

Out of context the amount of weight you can bench is shallow, meaningless, and irrelevant.  However, if I told you that an 80 year-old man can bench 225 lbs. then your ears might perk.  Likewise, if I told you that I can bench twice the amount of weight I could a year ago, then you might be persuaded to appreciate this growth even if you’re not interested in fitness.

Another thing I enjoy about strength training is that every time you work-out you learn a little about yourself, you get familiar with your limits. 

We all have fantasies of how strong we “think” we are, how we could fend off a gang of thugs with our superior “speed” and “agility”.  What’s interesting is that the iron doesn’t lie to you: you can push with all your might and sometimes that barbell stops moving.  

The reality, the gravity, of such as simple task like preforming a squat, washes away the fantasy and leaves you feeling more “real” – which is usually less than He-Man – but at least it’s you.

It’s humbling to have a dead piece of stupid iron turn you into a quivering mass of pain, but the joy of watching the weight grow, of pushing past a weight barrier that used to hold you up: it’s amazing.

I can almost see the fly text hovering over my head: Strength +1

Yeah it’s a little hokey, but hey: it’s me.

I found this video demonstration of Gaikai on Raph Koster’s site here.

Essentially this technology makes the concept of a software “platform” an after-thought (other than your browser): the end user is simply streamed a game, software, whatever, directly to their computer from a host server.  You “interact” with the software as if it were installed on your computer.

This video is compelling, but you have to wonder how it preforms in “the trenches”.

However, even a small disconnect between input commands and game-play can rip you right out of a game, but I have to admit things look promising.

Imagine being able to play a AAA new title with beefy system requirements on a lower end net-book? 

This is mind blowing; I’ve heard about this tech this past E3, but seeing this demo really has me interested.  

What do you think?

I dinged RR70 last night.  I stayed off vent and just rode the queue wave until I squeaked past the renown threshold to RR70.

RR70, what a journey.

To comment on the positive …

I have rolled no alts since WAR’s launch.  This is due, in part, to the fact that my current character happens to be my “spirit animal”: he gives me insight into myself, acts as a source of power, and somehow completes me.

In all seriousness, I just love my Warrior Priest.

WAR has been great.  I never liked PvP in MMO games – not in the traditional sense anyway.  I do love me some FPS, however, and strangely that competitive instinct never percolated into my MMO of choice.  WAR exists as a happy medium between a social MMO and  a competitive online game.

To comment on the negative …

CC and AoE

CC and AoE need to be tweaked.  Yesterday.

I didn’t realize how bad it was until I started experimenting with different mastery builds for my WP.  Trying to fight in the “thick of it” as a MDPS is just harsh.  You get disabled, knocked down, and dead in seconds – and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.  

Too often the conflict doesn’t feel like a fight at all: more like a riot of football hooligans where the entire stadium was set on fire and everyone was dosed in gasoline.

Population / Realm Balance

Coming from a FPS player, I can tell you that I wouldn’t join a Team Fortress 2 match where my team has 3 players and the other had 12 – I would leave that server and find one where my team could stand a chance to win.

Interesting that the above example would rarely occur because most multi-player FPS servers auto-balance teams between rounds and/or won’t let new players create team imbalances to ensure a “fair fight”.

I understand the romantic notion of server rivalries and “knowing who you’re killing”, to keep the conflict local, but clearly we have to find a compromise.

I would suggest a solution similar to FreeRealms or Wizard 101 allowing players to switch servers on the fly, instances within servers, etc … but clearly allowing players to choose their “instance” would result in the realms stacking the deck and actually avoiding each other like we saw during city sieges.  

Obviously the players can’t be “trusted” with this choice – ironic since it’s a RvR game and you would think players would actually want to fight, but the desire for “progression” overrides all else, and currently WAR’s end-game is PvE centric and enemy players are just another barrier to their loot.

I’m not sure how to solve the population problem but I hope the big brains at Mythic are working on it.

Luckily my home server feels rather balanced most of the time.  Destruction and Order seem to take turns dominating any given night.  We are a “low pop” server, and this only becomes apparent when you’re queueing for scenarios or pushing a fortress – there’s just not enough players to stage an effective fort assault or to keep the scenario queue popping during off peak times.

I’m happy with my time in WAR.  If I had to guess I would say that RR80 will take me about 4 more months, given my current advancement rate.  It will be interesting to see how the game changes during that time.

Have a good week.

The below video features Paul Barnett in Korea, making a pitch/presentation, and while I watch this video, goosebumps form on my arm.  Paul’s sunglasses are mirrors that reflect my own face.  Have you ever had to “sell” something you love to an apathetic audience, ever been “lost in translation”, or otherwise just been misunderstood?

Am I reading too much into this video?  

Probably.  For now, I offer you some Shakespeare:

“A poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
signifying nothing.” – Macbeth

Turbine’s recent announcement about their title DDO adopting a “hybrid” micro-transaction model sparked some debate in the MMO blogo-sphere.

A point of view that I see often repeated is that time spent in-game should equate to some kind of progression.  Players that simply “throw real money” at a game in order to become more powerful, or to gain an advantage, cheapen the experience of actually “earning it” the “old fashioned way”.

I want to comment on this.

This entire debate is just based on false perceptions from both sides of the argument.

The average MMO subscription cost us .49 cents per day.  That’s right: we’re paying every day – we just don’t think about it.  The entire subscription model is a clever way to improve customer retention.  Payment each month is easy and automatic – marketing terms for “out of sight / out of mind”, no pain – their gain.

With subscription plans we spend money in small invisible increments every day: even if we don’t log in.

However, this exchange of money – this paltry .49 cents a day, pales in comparison to the real resource being traded – the most important micro-transaction of our lives:

Time.

Time can never be restored, socked away, or earned back.  Jack Aubrey always says, “There is not a moment to be wasted.”  He’s right: time is precious.  King and peasant are both slaves to the clock.  What’s worse: at any moment your “time” might run out.

Trading time in our MMO games for progression is an exchange, a micro-transaction of epic proportions.  Every hour we spend in our MMO of choice we’re cashing in our “Mortality points” for in-game items, features, and access to content.  These points are indeed more valuable than ISK, crowns, gold, Turbine points, or any other virtual resource.  F2P isn’t free at all.

I won’t even touch the “value” of different people’s time – okay maybe I will.

Lunch with Bill Gates is worth more than sharing a doughnut with a gas station manager.  Likewise, it would cost Bill Gates 18 million dollars to grind his Shaman for 1 hour (it’s business, it’s not supposed to make sense), so it would be a better use of his “time” to buy a few epic items from an in-game shop and play the content he wants then to “grind it out.”

The point is: no matter if you’re Bill Gates or not, time is a non-renewable resource for everyone and should be selfishly guarded.

For this reason I can understand why some players that have invested a lot of “time” in their MMO feel that other player’s shouldn’t be able to “buy progression” with a wad of cash and a click of a mouse.  I totally get why they would feel this would “cheapen” their investment.  

Another factor that not many people address is positioning.  In our MMO games we start off practically naked, poor, and level 1.  Any visible progress you make is judged from the same starting point.  Micro-transactions corrupt the otherwise “fair” footing of the server, allowing characters to be born into privilege – just like in real life.

While I don’t agree with many of these player’s concerns, I do understand where they’re coming from.  If anything our MMO games are evolving: the more diversity of business models available will afford opportunities for many different types of companies to develop more games.  Translation: players get more choices.

It’s true that our MMO games are starting to mirror RL – for better and for worse, and there is no “putting the genie back in the bottle”, that’s for sure.

Conclusion: MMO’s are still a great value for entertaining yourself until you die, but there is no such thing as a free(realms) lunch.

Have a great weekend.

Turbine’s DDO: Stormreach is gong F2P – that’s free to download and play, with premium membership benefits for those that subscribe.

Turbine’s DDO and I have history.  At the game’s launch I wasn’t very familiar with Eberron, the game’s setting, but I was very comfortable with the 3.5 rules that the game was based upon.  I was in the beta for DDO and stuck around for about 2 years.

I didn’t leave DDO because the game sucks.  I didn’t leave DDO because Turbine didn’t listen to its players.  I didn’t leave DDO because I was bored.  I left because I missed SWG – I longed for a sandbox MMO that was less “instanced”.

My SWG baggage was never DDO’s fault.  DDO is amazing.  Combat is played out in real-time with MMO dice-rolling happening under the hood.  The freedom to swing your weapon anytime: the air, a monster’s legs, through a barrel, not to mention the ability to climb and jump, it all makes DDO feel totally different than any other MMO out there.

DDO’s dungeons are very three dimensional instead of the typical flat MMO instance and features some amazing puzzles and traps.  I would argue that DDO’s dungeons are the best group PvE content available – I’m talking Super Mario Galaxy level design genius.  Bravo, Turbine.

Give DDO a try, it will cost you nothing, and my hope is that hundreds of thousands of new players will discover how this often over-looked MMO is a diamond in the rough.

I’m a big fan of NPR – yeah I’m one of those people.  One of my favorite podcasts/shows is Radiolab, hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich.  

Each episode of Radiolab features an interesting subject or scientific curiosity: sperm, morality, sleep, laughter, you never know what central theme or question these guys are going to explore next.

Recently Radiolab asked the question which is better: radio or television?  They even staged a faux “boxing” event and had the audience vote by applause which is better by category.  Television was better at “pictures”, hehe, but for questions like which medium is better for conveying emotion, radio was the hands down winner.  By the second act of the show the question of how does telling stories via the radio differ from telling a story on television?

Robert Kulwich and Ira Glass, a guest host for the event, had a great back-and-forth which really nailed the distinction between the two mediums.

Essentially radio is more intimate, more emotional.  Simple moments that would be otherwise unremarkable become “mythic” because the listener gets involved in the content, we co-author the story by “painting” pictures with our minds as the story describes the scene.

Hearing a father’s deep voice describing the love he has for his daughter, how her flesh all too vulnerable and, by extension, he too becomes vulnerable, really drives home how powerful a medium radio is.  In contrast, to see footage of the father playing with his daughter, to witness a visual montage of this little girl growing up, would register as totally unremarkable, common, and doesn’t pull on the “heart strings” as easily as the “telling” of the story would.

Television, however, has to build up to an emotional moment, more production is involved to achieve a real emotional event.  Loud bright moments lend contrast to darker quiet moments.  It’s a lot of work to keep a person staring at a screen, to keep them engaged and concentrating on what’s playing out before them, and because television is a visual medium, you’ve got to stage, time, and build everything to elicit an emotional reaction.

This got me thinking about my old Pen and Paper adventures: D&D particularly. 

We didn’t have miniatures back then, my friends and I just used a dry eraser marker on an overlay map, and playing those campaigns was a pure “theatre of the mind” experience.  As advanced as our console/computer RPG games are becoming, I think the point of being a “co-author” of the story, like telling a story on the radio, is what made those tabletop games so magical.

Take a DM description of a simple room:

Compare this:

“You walk into a room that’s 20′ by 20′.  The dim chamber before you is unoccupied and dimly lit.  A thin coat of dust covers every surface.  The entire room appears to be made of a smooth grey colored stone.  The floor is tiled while the walls are adorned with elegant arches set into their surface.  The room is empty save for a simple pedestal at the center the room which appears to be made of the same stone as the rest of the room.  The pedestal’s waist is carved with the same arch shaped lines as the chamber’s walls.  Across the room you see a short ramp of stairs leading into an arched doorway.  A similar door and exit is to your left.”

To this: Click Me.

Did the GM fail to describe the room well enough or did the picture fail to meet the vision in your mind?

Do our video games involve us in “co-authoring” the story, like a tabletop game, or does the visual medium of video games diminish our need to fill in the blanks?  What special challenges do video game developers have when telling stories?  Can they elicit emotion as well as other mediums?

I admit I’m a little nervous about Bioware’s upcoming MMO, SWTOR.

We know so little about the game, I’m afraid of even putting forth a working opinion.  I once drove to Georgia to meet Funcom at DragonCon and hear about AoC – a full year before it launched.  I got to meet several developers, ask questions, and actually played a capture-the-flag demo for hours over the course of the weekend.  I felt confident about speculating what AoC would be like at launch – boy was I wrong!

Even with “hands-on” AoC experience, I could not have predicted the game’s shaky launch, the content/polish disparity “post-Tortage”, the 800k MMO tourist exodus after 30 days, and I also couldn’t have foreseen how Funcom would adapt as a company and attempt to address many of these issues a full year later.

With TOR all we’ve got are some promotional videos (read: propaganda films), screenshots, and a few interviews.  The real question on my mind, and it’s kinda sad, is what business model is TOR going to feature?  

I believe that this “bomb” is being sorted out now, the details being finalized as I write this, and eventually Bioware is going to have to let the “Bothan out of the bag” and let us know how we’re going to spend our hard-earned credits on their game.  This all feels like an infomercial where they don’t tell you the price until AFTER they make their pitch, not until after they list all the benefits and features of their product, and ONLY THEN show you how 4 easy payments of 19.99 gets you a lifetime supply of Oriental Pearl Cream – but wait there’s more . . . 

The subscription model works, has worked, in the past because it eliminates the need to make a value/pain decision every month.  The payment is automatic, debits your account, is almost invisible and painless, and you don’t have to ask yourself every billing cycle, “do I really want to spend 14.99$ this month on this game?”

Don’t get me wrong, MMO’s are one of the best values around, hours and hours of entertainment for 50 cents a day, you can’t beat it – especially if you compare that to a night at the movies!

Yes, subscriptions are an elegant model from a more civilized time.

However, the theme of the era are micro-transactions, not limiting your highly active clients from just spending 14.99 – you can spend more if you want more goodies!

Playing Wizard 101 and buying content a la carte has really opened my eyes to the micro-transaction model.  I see how it benefits casual players that don’t want the burden of carrying another subscription – but there is nothing casual about Star Wars and me.  If a SW game comes out I’ll buy it, I can’t help myself, and a Star Wars MMO makes me doubly vulnerable to greedy execs who want to leech as much of my disposable income as possible.  That’s why when I hear about TOR I just want to know: will it be the carrot or the stick?

All I know for sure is that when SWTOR is launched I’ll be playing it and at the same time George Lucas and Bioware execs will be eating sushi off a naked stripper and giving each other high-fives across the table.

E3 revealed the first official trailer of a game that I have been waiting a long time for.  

I (We) hope you will enjoy the show:

I spent hours – way too long if you ask me, writing a very detailed review of Taleworld’s medieval combat simulator Mount and Blade.  However, after it was written I hesitated to click the “publish” button.

See, the wiki entry describing the particulars of this little indy title covers everything that I could say: only better and with more brevity.  If you want a proper, game journalist review, then all you have to do is google it and read up on M&B’s meta-score.

Lots of folks have described M&B’s game-play and major features, written guides, but the elephant in the room, the reason this game features such a robust community of modders and fans, is love.  The game was made with loving hands and you can feel it every second you play it.  It’s as real as mom’s home cooking.  It’s an indy game, a labor of love, and I love M&B back.

This game surprises you like a blind date.  You wake up the next day and realize the hollow pain in your chest is love.  I haven’t felt this much passion and excitement about a single player game in years.

I’m on my third play-through now, so I’m well aware of M&B’s flaws: some dated graphics, a few half-baked game-play elements, minor bugs.  All of these things get a pass, mostly ignored, because the majority of the time you’re totally engulfed in the moment.  M&B is stocked full of surprises and what it lacks in AAA studio polish it makes up for in charm and character and depth.

Everyone talks about the combat, and well, because it is amazing.  Depending on the difficulty settings of the game (I play on 97% Difficulty – read 3% less than “Normal”), your character is as vulnerable to an arrow to the head as the foot soldier next to you.  There are moments in M&B that are filled with so much intense violence I had to walk away from my computer for 15 minutes to catch my breath.  This is a testament to the game’s realism.  The physics of the combat engine takes into account weapon speed, damage types vs armor types, relative speed of your target, weapon arc, distance, gravity, weather, it’s just a lot to wrap your head around.  The realism doesn’t trump the game-play, it’s all happening under the hood, for all you know you’re just having fun.

I should comment here about the gore, because most people associate realism with flying limbs and gallons of blood.  M&B has blood, it gets caked on your armor and weapon if the fighting is prolonged, but mostly it’s implied through sound design and not actually displayed: the gore is never gratuitous and if it was, frankly, it would have been too much for me since the actual “fighting” is so intense and personal.

Have you ever wanted to ride down an enemy with a heavy war-horse?  Shoot an arrow into the unprotected leg of an armored opponent?  ”Couch” a jousting lance under your arm and spur your horse to charge?  Climb your way up a siege tower and onto a castle, fighting along the parapets as you and your men take control of the walls?  Crush an enemy shield into splinters on his arm?  Cripple a cavalry charge with a wall of pikes?

M&B’s combat physics allows for all of the above and more.  It’s simple and then suddenly complex, opening up breakthroughs and revelations as you, the player, learn and grow alongside your character.

This is something that really stood out for me.  In most games you are limited by your avatar (in-game statistics, gear, etc…), but in M&B the inverse is more true: your in-game skills enhance your RL abilities.

This synergy between you and the game is one of the reasons I love M&B’s combat.  It reminds me of the original Tomb Raider (in essence only).  Tomb Raider on the PS1 featured a totally new control scheme that required you, the player, to develop a specialized set of skills and timing for navigating Lara Croft around the game-world.  Next thing you knew you were hanging from cliffs, springing off walls, and expressing yourself freely with the controls, not fighting them.

This progression feels so right in M&B because the combat is so utterly real.  At first you’re getting knocked around, run through, and cut down, but with each knock on the head you learn.  You learn to time your parries, to feint, to step into the direction of your strikes for added damage, and the next thing you know you’re a god on the battlefield – and this has little to do with any level or skill progression, it’s pure blood and bone and muscle: you’ve leveled up in RL.

If you’ve ever tried to melee in Oblivion then you know how “off” it felt.  In 1st person mode your character felt like a floating head with arms springing out of it – the sense of spatial distance never really clicked.  Most games try to solve this problem by taking you into 3rd person view and bringing the camera back 10′ the moment you equip a melee weapon.  Fallout 3 is an example of a game that uses this solution.  The problem here is that most character animations look half-baked in these FPS games, not to mention the camera doesn’t seem anchored in the right position and you’re left fighting the camera and the controls while trying to navigate your character.

M&B not only solves this problem by offering a hybrid camera view: somewhere between 1st person and 3rd person.  Somehow M&B pulls you into your character without losing the perspective benefit of a “chase” camera.

I struggled with the shoulder height “hybrid” camera for a few minutes during the tutorial, but then it just magically clicked.  See in M&B you have to be able to see your opponent as well as yourself: he’s heaving his arms up for an overhead strike – now you have to quickly set up your horizontal parry, or side step, or execute a quick forward lunge!

M&B exists on two different tiers.  You’ve got the “first few hours” of game-play where you’re figuring things out, learning the ropes, getting comfortable with the controls, and on the surface some of the game’s systems seem overly simple.

Sometime around mid-game you start to ask yourself questions (why do crossbows suck in the rain) and peek under-the-hood and realize that M&B is very complex – much deeper than your first glance revealed.  See, M&B cleverly allows you to experience this layered game by not overwhelming a new player but then rewarding experienced players with complexity and nuisance.

Even something simple like moving across the world map has a lot of math going on behind-the-scenes: the average speed of units in your army, the speed of your slowest unit in your army, amount of trade goods in your inventory, extra pack horses, terrain, time of day, morale of your party, etc …  M&B doesn’t “show its work”, like a elementary math teacher would say, but the more you play the more you become aware of the underground river beneath your feet.  This is true both of the combat and non-combat game-play.

I don’t want to list all the wonderful “a-ha” moments I experienced in M&B because their discovery is part of the game’s experience.  I know some jaded gamers would complain that all these little nuggets of wisdom should be in the manual, and some of them are, but part of the value of games like M&B is “figuring it out”, and I believe you’ll thank me later.

What’s makes this mini-review timely is that an expansion for M&B is due out in the next few months that’s going to feature updated graphics, enhanced game-play, and a multi-player mode.  The game began as an indy project headed by a couple from Turkey.  The final release version of M&B is our generation’s definitive medieval (mounted) combat simulator – it has no peers, no equal, and if you missed it, like I did, download it today!  You can find it on Steam or get it directly from Taleworlds website.

Anyone interested in Darkfall or the upcoming Mortal Online should visit the land of Calradia.  If you enjoy the idea of fantasy combat that mixes RPG elements with FPS twitch skills then M&B is a title you should check out.

I will say this, and this is coming from a MMO player, that single player games feel a little lonely these days.

I want to share this world, this experience, with my friends.  I want to look down a line of infantry soldiers, all controlled by real people, no AI, and look at each of them in their polygon faces and say, “Hold the line!”.  The coming M&B expansion will help (32+ multi-player), but I can’t help but ask: what if?

What if Pirates of the Burning Sea had M&B’s avatar combat?  Yoda would wisely say, “A perfect game, it would be.”

Anyway, check it out and post a comment if you have any M&B game-play questions.