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Follow the Lemmings

February 9th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Me, MMO

I finally submitted to the years of peer pressure and Burning Crusade hype. I now have a World of Warcraft account. For now, it’s just a single level 10 Tauren. And thankfully I’ve had some friends and a guild to lend me a hand and give me some advice – no twinking unless free bags and a little gold count as twinking. I’m still a purist about this sort of thing.

Some initial thoughts.

1) Trial accounts are evil. Sure, Blizzard gives you ten days, but those ten days mean only sixteen baggage slots. You can’t give items to people, trade items to people or get stuff in the mail. So a lot of the group dynamic stuff is lost and you continually run back and forth to and from town to sell the crap you picked up so you have enough room for your quest loot. No wonder I upgraded.

2) So the Tauren are Sioux? Or Cherokee? Maybe Mandan? Something Native American. Here I thought I would be a big bad minotaur eating Athenian virgins, but instead I go on vision quests, learn the Way of the Hunter, and talk to people called Brave Cloudhoof or Shaman Hufflepuff. The only non-Indian thing I do is use a tiny portion of a dead animal instead of the whole thing. If there were bison around, I’d probably have a quest that involves collecting horns and nothing else.

3) The difference between medium graphics and high graphics isn’t that stark. I was astonished. But then I remembered that you don’t sell five million boxes by keeping really good stuff hidden from mid-range users. Everybody already knows how great the art design is.

4) I always feel sorry killing goblins because they make such a sweet, cute sound when they die. And they are tiny.

5) The trade chatter in the channel is either a special language crafted by illiterates or an efficient way of trading crafted by stock brokers.

I should probably make new characters on new servers to see how this goes. And I promise that this blog will not turn into Yet Another Blog Wherein The Blogger Bitches About His Guild. But I will post questions and game design thoughts as they come to me. And try better to tie them to strategy games.

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You read it here first…

February 7th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Gas Powered Games, RTS

Six months ago, I hypothesized that Supreme Commander‘s use of a super zoom could lead to players’ ignoring all the artwork and animation so they could look at the big picture strategic zoom. Why deprive yourself of more information in real time combat by sticking close to ground level?

Now, Gamespy’s Allen Rausch is saying pretty much the same thing.

As the campaign missions went on, the map got larger to the point where (except in a few specific cases) it became a waste of time to zoom in close enough to actually watch the battles.

It’s a pretty helpful hands-on look at the demo, for the most part. He repeats the canard that there is too little strategy in real time strategy games (HINT: Economics and build orders are strategy, not tactics.) Rausch admits that he wasn’t a big Total Annihilation fan, but says that maybe Supreme Commander will “show us a whole new way to play the RTS.”

The demo is widely available now, and hopefully it won’t take me ten hours to download it today, like it would have yesterday. Since I’m not a Total Annihilation veteran, I may just wait for the reviews to come in. (PCGamer and its UK sister mag, as usual, get the first reviews to print and they are apparently glowing.)

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GDC Award Nominees Announced

February 6th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Awards, GDC

As if telepathically discerning that my GDC travel plans are now finalized, the IGDA has announced the nominees for the Game Developers Choice Awards. Get more info and a link to the full list at Gamasutra.

As expected Oblivion is a frequent nominee, and Company of Heroes is the strategy game with the most nods. Winners to be announced on the Wednesday night of the conference, March 7.

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That’s Not Funny

February 6th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Design

“When it comes to humor, I’m very anti ‘jokes’ in games. Most designers try too hard to tell a joke, and it just doesn’t work.”

So says Bethesda’s Todd Howard in the new Escapist.

Humor is, obviously, very subjective. I was at a job interview last week and one of the students asked me who my favorite movie comedian was. I stumbled a bit, since I doubt old-style Woody Allen would have meant anything to her, let alone Groucho Marx or Buster Keaton. I made an off-hand comment about how I thought Adam Sandler was the least funny millionaire in Hollywood (this is assuming Chris Kattan is not a millionaire) and there was an audible gasp.

But Howard puts his money where his mouth is since The Elder Scrolls titles are probably the role playing games most devoid of humor. They are dark, serious and morally ambiguous. The upcoming Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion has a little more humor, but not in the way of jokes or situational anomalies – it encourages you to laugh at the NPCs, and considering most of the NPCs have some sort of mental failing, this is dark in its own way. (I’ll have more on this when my preview gets printed.)

Last year the big question in the gaming blogosphere was whether games could make you cry. It was always assumed that games could make you laugh, since we’ve all laughed at games. SpaceQuest, Sam and Max, Baldur’s Gate…all were humorous in their own ways and some of them could even tell jokes. I finally dipped my toes into the World of Warcraft ocean last week and found it full of life an humor – as well as some curious social commentary. (Hey, I’m a scholar. I see social commentary everywhere.)

So is Howard wrong? It could be that he’s a hard person to make laugh. Humor is harder to communicate in text than it is vocally, as anyone who post on the internet knows all too well.

I think the real problem, though, is trying to stick humor in a game that is, fundamentally, serious. It’s one thing to have a funny game, or funny moments in something that is light or neutral in tone. (Like Leonard Nimoy going “beep, beep, beep” in Civ IV.) In real life, humor in dark moments is difficult to pull off and most serious literature is devoid of laugh out loud humor. (Note how many complaints about the Lord of the Rings movies center on the weird comic relief of Gimli? Does anyone consider Victor Hugo funny?) A post apocalyptic RPG like Fallout may not be the best place for humor; in fact Fallout 2‘s greater reliance on going for laughs is oft cited as a failure of the sequel.

In strategy games, most of the humor is visual, in spite of futile efforts to make RTS peons “funny” with wacky acknowledgement sound cues. I can think of very few instances of written or spoken humor in strategy games aside from amusing manuals or the occasional text description of a unit. And it aims for smiles more than laughs, since you will see the same “jokes” over and over again.

But I tell you, cyclopes tossing elephants in Age of Mythology never gets old.

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February Strategy Preview

February 5th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Preview

Beat the February blahs with one of these upcoming strategy games.

February 2 – Blitzkrieg 2: Fall of the Reich (Take 2/Nival), City Life: World Edition (Take 2/Monte Cristo)

February 5 – Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusader (Dreamcatcher/Metamorf)

February 6 – The Sims Life Stories (EA/Maxis)

February 13 – Great Invasions (Strategy First/Nobilis)

February 14 – Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar (Stardock)

February 15 – Dreamlords (Lockpick Entertainment), Making History: The Calm and the Storm (Strategy First/Muzzy Lane)

February 19 – War Front: Turning Point (CDV/Digital Reality), UFO: Extraterrestrials (TriSynergy/Chaos Concept)

February 20 – Supreme Commander (THQ/Gas Powered Games)

February 27 – Sims 2 Seasons (EA/Maxis)

A lot of titles but not a lot to look forward to. Of course, the GalCiv expansion should be good, and the educational strategy title Making History has been in development for a long time. I’ve also heard some positive rumblings about War Front.

But this is really the month of Supreme Commander – probably one of the most anticipated RTS games that doesn’t have a franchise attached. It’s the de facto sequel to Total Annihilation, so fans of that game are ready to grab it if they haven’t already been playing in the open beta.

A lot of people talk about the problems facing MMOs that are opening in the post WoW explosion. WoW’s numbers are insane and impossible to copy at this point, but indicate that there is a real desire to play games like this. So how do you develop for this audience when everybody – and a much larger everybody than Everquest – is playing in a bright and shiny cartoon world like Azeroth?

A friend has suggested that RTS developers are in a similar bind, only its a design problem and not a market share one. The last two or three years have been great for RTS fans. We’ve had everything from traditional manage thy peon games like Age of Empires III to cinematic epics like Battle for Middle Earth II to the amazing Company of Heroes. They have pushed the limits of what can be sensibly managed in the real time strategic environment and added interesting variations on an old theme. There has been no better time for this type of game. Well received recent titles like Panzer Command and Empire Earth II look like dinosaurs compared to what we have available to us now. The friend wonders if the genre hasn’t plateaued again; that just as there was a spate of innovation early in the genre and now stagnation, whether everything that can be invented has been. At least for now.

I have not played Supreme Commander. (Unless asked, I tend to avoid unfinished games.) But Chris Taylor hasn’t made an RTS in a while. Being a smart guy, I hope he’s been watching what has been going on around him, but many of the most innovative and interesting games have come out while SupCom was in development. So he can’t learn from the lesson of BfME2 that sometimes the illusion of many soldiers is as good as the real thing, or from the lesson of Company of Heroes that making every resource hard to keep ensures that tension is built in from the opening bell.

I never played Total Annihilation either, so when I do go SupComming, it will be in a vacuum. I won’t be able to speak to how it differs from Taylor’s classic game or how it simply repeats what he has done before. This is good, since I won’t spend my time complaining about how it is better/worse than a ten year old scifi game. This is bad, because I won’t be able to see which lessons were learned about RTS design in the decade since the original TA.

As usual, I will have to rely on my learned colleagues to help me out.

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Hannibal Rides Again

February 3rd, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Ancients, HPS

As an ancients nut, the news of another sword and sandals game thrills me. The fact that it is a semi-turn based wargame with historical scenarios, what-ifs and hypotheticals makes it even sweeter.

HPS Simulations has announced a new game based on ancient warfare between 300 and 200 BCE. Punic Wars: Ancient Warfare is the company’s first stabby-stabby game; they tend to like their muskets and tanks over at HPS. It has simultaneous resolution to get around the mess of having to wait until Hannibal’s Numidian cavalry is done beating you before you can move. Plus a scenario editor.

These years cover a lot of ground. Two wars against Carthage, the war against Pyrrhus and the final Roman clean-up on the Italian peninsula. Depending on the flexibility of the editor, I suppose that you could even do some Diadochi stuff if you really wanted to – the Epirote army of Pyrrhus is just a modified Successor army…

I’m hoping that the screenshot is really low-res, though, because this is pretty ugly. And the HPS tendency to make unnecessarily large maps continues here, in an era where the site of combat was usually mutually decided, ambushes excepted.

Still, this is good news. HPS games are hit and miss for the most part, with the battle scenarios themselves usually interesting (but often too long) and the campaigns are usually neither interesting nor all the playable unless you commit a lot of time to the venture. But last year’s Defending the Reich is still one of my favorite wargames of recent years, so they can churn out some really to notch stuff.

(Spotted at Tacticular Cancer, because I don’t browse Wargamer often enough.)

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