Cutscene? Not according to the writing in the lower right corner: in-game footage. (It’s easier to make out in a higher resolution version.)
Looks like it’s going to be an extremely atmospheric-feeling Mechwarrior. The ejection sequence in particular is outstanding. My only real complaint is that it looks like damage is going to be represented by percentage, which suggests that one of Battletech’s main draws (the sectional damage mechanism) may have been deprecated.
Battletech veteran note: if you ever find yourself piloting a Warhammer against an Atlas, try to operate at range 9 or greater, so the only weapon the Atlas can use against you is its LRM-20. 2 PPCs versus an LRM-20 is a pretty good bet, as the LRM-20 will typically connect with only 10 missiles, and they should be spread out. In an urban environment it might be hard to get that distance, but even operating at range 4-5 should gain you a nice base-to-hit advantage.
I bought and played Dungeons and Dragons Online towards release, and discovered that it was a pretty decent game. The AD&D 3.5 mechanics were translated into a surprisingly-faithful system that also pulled a real-time quasi-arcade mechanism. What was actually delivered in terms of core gameplay was actually both fast paced and conveyed a certain spirit of Dungeons and Dragons.
(Dungeons and Dragons Online Gamespot footage.)
Unfortunately, it didn’t really feel like a MMORPG. While Dungeons and Dragons Online had an excellent mechanism for finding players to team up with, the actual game was heavily instanced. There was no real compelling feeling of a unified world, instead you would go and perform instanced dungeons. Time and time again you would do these, because chances are the people you meet would need to do them to complete missions even if you already have done them before.
That the dungeons were of excellent quality with randomizing elements is beside the point: while Dungeons and Dragons Online was a pretty decent game, it was never a $15/mo game. It never had that MMORPG-like appeal, even if it was a pretty decent fast-paced RPG and Dungeons and Dragons conversion in and of itself.
(A fellow sharing my excitement over this transition.)
So I’m actually quite excited to hear that the game is in the process of going Free To Play. You can get into the beta right now if you have a Fileplanet Subscription (or likely even if you have a DDO subscription) and see what they’re offering.
I’ve played a little bit of it, and I feel a great deal like I am indeed meeting Dungeons and Dragons Online again for the first time. This is how the game really should have been at release: no strings attached play, just log in and go for it, and if you decide you want to get some additional goodies then dig out your wallet and buy em’.
The payment model is detailed here, showing that you can choose to pay $15/mo if you really don’t like the idea of micro transactions. Some of the things you can purchase include additional character slots, classes (Monks and Favored Souls are currently considered additional), modules (sets of extra dungeons), shared bank slots, ect.
An interesting thing I’m noticing about The DDO Store is that the vast majority of the micro transactions are permanent – you really can escape having a subscription in all cases except for special consumables (e.g. special healing potions).
Dungeons and Dragons Unlimited is leaving beta August 4th. The beta, of which I’m currently a part (and the NDA is dropped) will wipe its characters at that point. In this move to going free to play, I would like to see a lot more mainstream MMOs follow suit, but Dungeons and Dragons Online in particular should really benefit from this transition as the game was practically designed for it from the start.
Well, I think I figured it out: the reason why I keep halting my BYOND game-production half-way through is because I’m a fairly goal-oriented individual and I knew, at least subconsciously, that the goal of what I’m making sucks.
Halfway through June already, where does the time go? Truth be told, I’ve been keeping my promise to spend less time blogging and more time trying to develop a game… this hasn’t resulted in much progress on the grounds that I’m a master procrastinator.
All things considered, I think being the frequent updater doesn’t suit me well. I could mention what I’ve been playing lately but what is there to be said really? I’ve already said my piece on Sims 3. The two betas I’m involved in are under NDA. That leaves Ultima 7 via the Exult emulator… which I’ll talk about today if only to fill the void.
First, somebody else’s video to show off a bit of the gameplay:
Alright, now that you know how the original looks and plays, it’s on to my take.
I think Exult has done a reasonably good job of emulating the original. Back when computers could barely run it, I enjoyed Ultima 7. However, from my current experiences in Exult, I have to say that it fairly sucks. The troubles I’m seeing here in aren’t Exult problems, they’re Ultima 7 problems. The game mechanics have aged terribly. The details of my discontent follow the bump.
I skipped playing The Sims 2 on the grounds that The Sims didn’t entertain me for very long. There reached a certain point where my little computer people had exhausted all their tricks, that I had seen all the furniture of consequence, and the sim-ulated relationships they conveyed failed to evoke much in the way of sim-pathy from me.
Others’ Sim Appeal
People play games for different reasons, and the fascination with The Sims is reminiscent of when I used to work at the library and I notice several the library computers hijacked by girls who would spend hours looking at pages and pages of pictures of strangers in various social situations.
Now, as a fellow who tends to use his computers for playing computer games, staring at strangers’ home photos seems like one of the least entertaining things they could be doing to pass their time on the computer. What edge are their cunning little ids pulling from that experience to so drive this madness? It seems to be a sort of emotional eroticism of sort, albeit I’m quick to interject one not so severe as to qualify for societal scorn.
I’m not so emotionally dead as to not find the appeal of people engaged in happy acts, but at the same time I’m logically driven enough to see that there’s definitely an underlying characteristic of baseless addiction beneath it. Over-fixation on life’s little pleasures remain just that: a strange flaw that has evolved in the human character.
My Sim Appeal
In any case, I’m fairly enjoying The Sims 3 for the reasons I can enjoy it: it’s very much a fascinating environment to consider from an artificial intelligence and even simulated social environment perspective. The main thing Sims 3 removes is confinement – your Sims can now leave their homes and go to down to other Sim’s houses and walk the neighborhood.
This was something partially possible through expansions before, but not as one single simulation as Sims 3 offers it. A complete seamless transition from location to location is a formidable technical feat, and it brings a great stride with it. The Sims not a one-home simulation anymore, it’s now a whole community microcosm. Fascinating.
Overall Score: Not Bad At All
Complain all you like about how Sims 3 didn’t innovate enough from The Sims 2 – I got around that by simply not playing it. Further, I think the micro-transaction model was probably a good move. Done right, it could be a bit like online music download services that allow you to circumvent having to buy the whole CD including tracks you don’t want and simply buy the ones you do. Beats the snot out of buying box after box of expansions to get one piece of virtual furniture you wanted.
Now, if only game developers at large could bridge bringing Sims 3 artificial intelligence into your average MMORPG NPC mechanic, we’d be in business of seeing some truly compelling virtual worlds. There was The Sims Online, but the developers pretty much removed the AI entirely so the players could take over and be the sims. That, of course, was a mistake on the grounds that the AI was always the main selling point of The Sims, a selling point Sims 3 leverages well.
To be fair, I drop less mental bombshells and more complaints about how my weeks were duds. The latest distraction to defuse any potential of my week was Dragonica Online.
First impressions will be that Dragonica Online is a sickeningly sweet kids game slightly corrupted with a hint of the lolicon that’s so popular in its world region of origin as to be apparently inseparable from most products imported from there.
Yes, it’s yet another free-to-play Korean import. However, unlike most such games, Dragonica Online is not several years old, it’s still in closed beta even there. What’s even more surprising, it has gameplay that leaves me sorely wondering if we’re far behind them here in American MMORPG game design.
I didn’t abandon this Blog, but it might seem that way until late June.
I’m going to be spending awhile Over Here on my BYOND Blog working on creating some games. Any time I’m not spending doing that will probably be in beta test, which I’m not allowed to talk about, so… that leaves very little to say here on this beast.
Of course, my muse’s whims are particularly hard for me to reign in, I might pop back in every once in awhile to drop a bombshell that might have settled upon my mind.
Alright, as the last entry might have hinted, I’ve now a chronological frame of reference in my life: in one month, I’m back to school. Considering this, it’s time to stop messing around and buckle down.
My Champions Online obsession is now neatly focused on a schedule that leaves me a lot of time to get fixated on other things. The supply of interesting games has dried up again (though I might try this out just to see how Maple Story fares with higher production values). It’s reached the point where I’ve largely been revisiting Star Command, and I’m thinking to myself: lets make a better version.
Consider this last month to be preparation, and you wouldn’t be far from the mark. It bears all the hallmarks of boning up on reinventing the wheels of gaming by studying the past, while taking it into contact with the present, and I’ve learned an important thing: it’s fairly easy for me to do, it doesn’t take a super-advanced platform, and I’ve been wasting my time telling myself otherwise.
From here until school starts, I’m going to try to take a half hour to an hour on the treadmill every day, and focus heavily on design and programming of my little BYOND projects. With any luck, I’ll have something finished and playable a month from now.
I spent the last few weeks in a time machine. That is to say, the time machine we all have built into us, where we’re moseying along minding our own business and suddenly realize, “It’s the nearly the end of May? And I accomplished nothing? My God, I think I’ve traveled through time!”
By the end of the second day of Fallout 3, I was at level 18. I had not been to The Pitt yet, and the main quest was just about to the one-quarter/one-third point of finding Dad. I had been doing a lot of wandering, dusting off the old quests for advantages I wanted while taking in a bit of a sample of the new, and after a solid 13-hour binge yesterday, I had to face facts: I was burnt-out again.
I’m busy all day on Wednesday, so I’ll get back to justifying my $30 Fallout 3 expansion purchase on Thursday. In the meanwhile, I needed something to do, and I decided that something to do would be research into better games of tomorrow by checking out some more games from an era where clones were not so dominant.
The game I ended up checking out was SSI’s Star Command (not to be confused with the 1996 game from GT Interactive).
(BYOND, which stands for Build Your Own Net Dream, is a freely distributed 2D online development suite. It provides an easier learning curve to create a game while still providing enough flexibility for a person to create a game that is truly their own. This is perhaps the best possible way to come into understanding the essence of games. For this reason, I believe BYOND deserves its own link here.)
