Amazing Kingdom of Loathing e-mail

I received this a while ago, but I’d been posting a lot of text so I thought I’d save it for later. Some quality e-mail from the fine folks behind Kingdom of Loathing, for sure. It’s too bad I got stuck in the midst of the endgame changes and can never go back to the game. I encourage you to check it out if you haven’t previously, though.

Dear [username],

        Okay, I’m not good at this kind of thing, but I feel like I have to give it a try. So, here goes:

        I was hanging out the other night, listening to some old mp3s, and I was just overcome with memories of when we used to hang out all the time. Remember? You were an intrepid, fearless adventurer, and I was the free-to-play, fun-and-funny online role-playing game that won your heart. Do you still remember those good times? I can’t stop thinking about them.

        I mean, I know things got kind of messed up at the end, and believe me, I’m sorry. If I could take any of that back, I totally would. And I know people grow and change, and you’re not the same person you were then, but hey – I’ve changed, too! I thought and thought about how to win you back. I figured I’d make you a mix CD, but I couldn’t decide what “our song” was. So I just concentrated on becoming a better game for you, and here’s what I came up with:

        Remember how much fun you used to have with your clan? Alternately, remember how you never joined a clan because you didn’t see the point? Either way, clans now have clan dungeons, group zones where your whole clan can work together. Crawl through sewers to Hobopolis, a vast underground vagrant vacation vista! Slide into the slime tube, and stir-fry sassy slimes!

        I know I wasn’t the prettiest game when we were together, so I had some work done. Almost every interface got an interface-lift. You can even manage most of your inventory via chat commands! I also came up with a way for you to automate most of the things you don’t love about the game, so you can spend more time with the parts you do love.

        Not only that, but there are way more animated .gifs than there were before. Don’t worry; I haven’t lost that low-fi edginess that you love, but I’m a lot easier to play with now.

        You can also have a custom title now, just in case you didn’t feel like I appreciated what made you unique as an individual.

        I should also say

        Haiku Dungeon’s been revamped.

        See what I did there?

        Maybe you quit because you got sick of always adventuring above the water. I admit that seems unlikely, but I fixed that, too – there are a bunch of underwater zones with new food, equipment, mechanics, and challenges.

        And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, trust me. I’m still the silly, clever, deceptively-complex game you fell in love with, only with about 95% more awesome.

        So, I’m just sayin’, if you can find it in your heart to give me another change, I won’t disappoint you.

        If you don’t drop by, I promise I won’t bother you again. I just really felt like we deserved one more try.

        Love,

        The Kingdom of Loathing.

Deus Ex: The Human Question4

Here’s an interesting interview with the general manager from Eidos Montreal, the guys working on the new Deus Ex game. I guess the general manager is the guy who hires people or something? At any rate, he talks about the specifics of actually making a studio work, from hiring the right people to making sure the right people sit together for optimal productivity. It’s not the kind of details that often emerge about a studio, so if you’ve been absolutely strapped for info about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, worry not. I’ve got you covered.

Sunday Something

I’m not sure how many times I’ve link dumped on a sunday, and I’m not sure if I’ll make it a weekly event. But it’s sunday, and this is something, so without further ado, I present several things for your reading pleasure. I’ve been cleaning out my Read It Later list, so for that reason you also get to read the things I’ve picked up over the last couple of months.

First we have a number of Gamasutra articles, beginning with MMOs and moving gradually into the mainstream:

  • MMOs: Just a Matter of Time?: A well designed MMO relies not on time spent playing, but rather on spacing out its content and ensuring players come back for more. By enforcing a regular schedule (raids only once a week, or limiting the experience to be gained in a specific period) it creates a mental pattern encouraging the players to come back more often and hopefully spend their spare time away from the grind making friends. Making friends means staying in the game. Staying in the game means making more money. The reality, then, is that no MMO designer wants to limit the time you spend playing their game. They just want to make the game seem more fair, and keep you around for a longer period of time. Why let you play 3000 hours in your first month, when they can limit you to 300 and keep you for ten months?
  • Targeted Focus, Broad Audience?: Two design angles for social games that are seemingly at odds with eachother. One method says to target a niche audience, another says to keep your appeal broad and get as many individuals as possible. The question, then, is how to unify the two. Some games might seem pretty niche at first (Frontier Ville, Mafia Wars - how many western or mafia games have you played recently, in comparison to much more popular genres like World War II shooters and sci-fi? Those are also bad examples because two successful and high profile games have recently come out in both of those genres, but hey, I tried), but then have a general enough appeal to get your grandmother playing. Seems like cornering a market is the real key to success.
  • Warren Specter on Game Culture in the Mainstream: Warren Spector reminds us that casual gamers are gamers too, and says that gaming will thrive as it enters the mainstream culture much like every new art form before it has. By embracing other types of gamers and expanding gaming’s appeal, we’ll see more and more widespread cultural acceptance, not to mention bring some diversity into the types of games available. Imagine if movies tended to fall in only two categories: the Nintendo family game and the violent and bloody power fantasies. The hope, then, is that with a more diverse audience we’ll have more and more demand for games that fall outside of those groups.

Next, on an entirely different spectrum, we have an article about the future of books. However, there’s a hilarious quote from a man who doesn’t know video games other than them Grand Auto Thefts and Modern Wars, so for that reason it’s the logical follow-up to articles about video games.

  • Book Have Many Futures: It’s pretty good timing that this article mentions a gradual transition away from the traditional university textbook, as spending hundreds of dollars on books that are out of date by the time they come into our hands is an incredibly wasteful, expensive, and ultimately unsustainable practice. Not that the textbook publishers have a problem with that. On a broader note, they also discuss the possible avenues for books to pursue in the future. A word of caution, too, on the Kindle vs hardcover books statistic: paperbacks are of course not included in that number, so it’s not like they sold more electronic books than they did physical ones. Personally, I loathe hardcover books, so I wait a year or more if that’s what it takes to get my hands on a paperback. Not just because of price, either, I just hate having huge books that wouldn’t look out of place in a classy library when you take off the jacket.

Moving from books to writing for anime, we have a rant from the writer behind well-known anime like Ergo Proxy, Samurai Champloo, Eureka 7, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, and the biggest one of all - Cowboy Bebop. Then a roundtable discussion on his rant from the wonderful folks at Japanator. Following that is a discussion of the American meaning of the word “otaku.”

  • Storywriter Dai Sato is frustrated with Japanese anime: Not much to say about this, honestly, it’s just the story of how this guy is really angry about the state of anime in Japan and how he sees the industry losing much of what made it special and pandering to a rapidly shrinking audience. By catering to existing fans and not seeking to provide new experiences and expand that audience, the anime industry as we know it could very well crash. More on that in the next article.
  • Japanator Discusses: Dai Sato rants on the state of anime: Analysis of Dai Sato’s rant, judging it more than a little “butthurt” but admitting he may also have a point. In particular, Brad Rice dishes (hey get it rice dishes) some Serious Business on the industry, which is exactly why he hosts an infrequent podcast called Serious Business with Brad Rice.
  • I, Otaku: Identifying as a J-Culture enthusiast: People like to have a label for themselves, if only to explain to other people what exactly they’re interested in. For that reason, otaku has largely become the accepted term for english-speaking fans of anime and pretty much anything Japanese. Some people argue against the use of the term by people who are ignorant of its origins (it’s a derogatory term in Japan), while others happily prance about squealing about how they’re the NUMBAR OEN OTAKU EVAR. The reality, then, is that this is America and we can steal words and adopt them for an entirely different use than they were originally intended. But isn’t that a wonderful thing? I think it is. I think we can be otaku if we want to be.

If you have no idea about my interests, there’s your crash course. Hope you enjoyed something up there!

Emergent gameplay in Far Cry 2 and STALKER4

“Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in games that arise from simple mechanics. For example, in many FPS games the physics of a rocket launcher will cause things to be pushed away from it. For years gamers have been using the propulsion of a rockets explosion below them to increase jump height.”

        There’s a simple explanation, but the article goes on to really neat thing like AI and how awesome AI can affect how you react to the world of the game you’re playing. Hearing a guard talk with his buddy, then crawl away from you after you mercilessly begin gunning them down, makes a game feel less like a game and more like a world. When a game feels like a world, as in Far Cry 2 and STALKER, it lends itself to “living” in that world rather than merely “playing” it as a game. You can play Far Cry 2 as a game by messing around, reloading if you die, etc. etc. The usual stuff. You can “live” in the world by doing a perma-death run: if your character dies, you start over. No questions asked. So instead of just shooting rocket launchers at your feet, you have to pay attention, sneak through the jungle, and be sure not to piss anyone off too badly.

        Simpler, linear games don’t lend themselves to this kind of gameplay. Could you really “live” in the world of Final Fantasy XIII? Not really. The story just doesn’t allow you to do that. You might look at a game with a modern setting, like Grand Theft Auto, and think you could live in that world - but when you try to follow the traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto, you suddenly realize that the game was designed for you to speed through traffic because everything is so incredibly far away. That’s why it’s so special that you can sit down with Far Cry 2 and simply be a mercenary in Africa. Whether or not it was designed that way, we’ll never know, but much like rocket jumping, chances are it wasn’t something the developers thought about as they were making the game. It’s just something that happened to pop up.

        So the fact that Far Cry 2 and STALKER have that kind of gameplay are why, in his opinion, they’re some of the most important games of this generation. I absolutely believe that we’ll see more sophisticated games in the same vein, with even more random realism (like guards helping their wounded comrades, or freaking out when they see you and you suddenly disappear into the trees) where simple little pieces of code change the game in a huge way. It’s just a question of when. I don’t know if it will be the norm, though, because it takes a lot less work to carefully restrict a player’s control and influence over the world so that you know exactly what they’ll experience. Pretty much everyone who plays Final Fantasy XIII will have the exact same experience as I did. But no playthrough of Far Cry 2 or STALKER will be exactly the same, and it has nothing to do with things like picking a different character class, race, or gender in the RPG vein. Some people may rush through the game and just play the key storyline missions, while others will do things like perma-death runs and enjoy the game in completely different ways.

        If you think about the way people react differently to novels, or paintings - socially accepted forms of “art” - based on their own personal experiences, you’d be hard-pressed not to qualify these games as art.

Interview with a senior producer of The Witcher 24

I would title this post after the name of the article, but I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea. This post is, really, about The Witcher and that’s the important bit. The Witcher was a great PC RPG meant to hearken back to the “good old days” of PC gaming. The Witcher: Enhanced Edition was a free update for anyone who had bought the original game, making the game even better and working in user feedback. Now The Witcher 2 is meant to incorporate user feedback even more, to make a bigger, better game and give the people what they want.

In this case, the people seem to want an amazing story with nothing but grey morality choices. No good faction and evil faction, no karma system, no imaginary numbers that tell you just how terrible or nice you are. The first game did this pretty well. But it’s the writing that’s really special. They actually have writers writing this stuff, and writing it in the original Polish and in English more or less at the same time rather than slapping together a translation later on. I know big games like Mass Effect and whatnot have dedicated writers, but for these guys to dedicate their limited resources on some damn fine dialogue and plot sequences is great to hear.

I never buy PC games, simply because I find very few I want to play. It’s just not the form of input I grew up with, I guess. But I’m going to buy The Witcher 2 anyway because I want these people to have my money and make good games and listen to their fans and continue to be awesome.

Well, Rogers, you win. Your bandwidth limits have taken away my flash games, but admittedly I don’t really mind. Your bandwidth limits have taken away my torrenting, which is annoying, but I’ll find a way. Just you wait.

        But this is the final cruelty. This is the one that hurts.

        With bandwidth limits, I can no longer afford to have 12 characters in Dragon Tavern.

        Or maybe I could. But they’re already gone. It’ll save me time anyway. I kept my original two, but the extra ten that I’ve been working on since the middle of april (almost five months o.0) had to go. Admittedly, the amount of time it took to use all my daily action points was keeping me from playing the game on a regular basis, but I’d managed to get them all up to level 35, only 20 away from becoming Immortals, which was why I created them in the first place. I wanted to see what all of the different paths had to offer. At the same time. Turns out, all I’d really get is a couple of cool paragraphs, but five months ago I figured, what the hell, it’ll be awesome.

        I was a little sad when I started writing this, but the more I think about it, the more this comes back to me wanting to spend my time on things I actually like. No more grinding for hours in the hopes of having fun later. No more practising some dumb minigame just so I can unlock some ultimate weapon or whatever. Just play the damn content and enjoy it, or get it over with. If it’s absolutely horrible, quit and stop wasting my damn time. As Vael put it, if the chase is fun, who cares about the catch? Only I’ve come to realize there are a million chases, and hardly ever is the catch a sufficient reward. Five hours for a thirty second victory scene, and an item that only has value as long as I continue to play the same game I’ve been playing for a week straight? Even spending twenty minutes searching for treasure in the final dungeon seems silly, when you realize that the items you’ll find are no good to you when you take down the final boss. Even if there’s a New Game+ option or something, you probably already have all the good stuff before you get there.

        So now I’m going to go play FF X-2 because I have so much fun with its class system and battle system. If something else grabs my fancy I’ll play that, but if not, I may replay FF IX and just enjoy myself.

        And I’m not even going to worry about whether I’ve missed a 0.3% completion rate cutscene, because I can just watch the perfect ending on youtube if I miss some dumb conversation you can never access again.

        Why the hell would I press X in the middle of a cutscene? Don’t you know that pressing buttons during cutscenes tends to lead to a “skip scene” feature? Screw whoever thought to assign completion percentage to such arbitrary and entirely forgettable stuff.

Videogames and the pursuit of harmless entertainment4

Let me make this abundantly clear: I want you to read this, eventually, if you have any interest in the gaming industry, or even any entertainment industry.

I don’t care if you don’t have time for it today. Bookmark it. Check it out tomorrow.

I haven’t been saying much lately but I’ll be back. I’m working on finally finishing FF X. It’ll be the third Final Fantasy game I stopped playing 10-15 hours short of its conclusion that I’ve finished in the past couple of weeks, and honestly, I’m kinda proud of myself. I’ll see how far I am in FF X-2, and decide from there whether I want to move to handheld games or finish that. FF IV Advance needs to be finished off, and I found my copy of FF V Advance that was lost in our couch for five years. I might actually finish them before turning 85.

Link dump for now folks. Post coming later. I’ll try not to make this too long, because there’s plenty for you to read here.

The Citizen Kane of Gaming: a debate that has been raging across the internet, though you may not have noticed because you may not spend time around people who care about Citizen Kane. Arguments on the subject have largely died down, and I haven’t read anything so amazing it HAD to be shared (in fact I’ve been avoiding the subject because it is a stupid argument often full of stupid people - METROID PRIME TRILOGY IS CITIZEN KANE OF GAMING, SERIOUSLY) but I’ll share these two with you today because they’re not dumb.

  • Rosebud Was His Horse - real purpose of the term “Citizen Kane of Gaming” is a game that accomplishes the same level of mastery and storytelling, but the argument is dumb so stop it
  • Keep On Asking About Citizen Kane - no, argument is worth having, because someone will make a game that good

The Disc Is Not Enough: trying to combat used game sales by making a new game worth more than a used one, and how on-disc DLC is a nice bonus, but not the greatest solution.

Size Doesn’t Matter Day: indie devs declare that short games are good too, some even admit that they may be wrong and that it’s possible gamers at large really do think short games are bad and will hate any game that only lasts a few hours no matter how good it is. There’s a lot to read here and maybe your favourite indie dude wrote about it. Most of these posts contain links to every other post on the subject, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find others to read. I’ll link the ones I read, starting with the one that sent me off to read all of these things in the first place. Check out others and let me know if they’re great!

  • The Long Game - long games can still be good games, even if most people don’t finish them, and long games should still be made for those few people who do make it all the way
  • Judging Games On Length - how and why people start to think length matters in a game, and how it can be hurtful - if you read only one, read this
  • Why Aren’t Video Games Satisfying? - giant video games take forever to do anything good, and sometimes do nothing good at all, aka the argument everyone has against FF XIII, that they shouldn’t have to play a 10 chapters of tutorial in order to get three good ones afterwards
  • Size Doesn’t Matter Day - ramblings on who thinks what, and why, about different types of games and their length - bonus scary thought about getting old and never playing video games ever nooooo
  • Too Short - World of Good dev calls out lazy reviewers who say a game is “too short” and simply lower the score, rather than explaining that it didn’t handle its ending well or that they wish there was more to play

There’s what I read this morning! Now I stop reading for the rest of the day! Goodbye for now!