SWG timeline moving forward
January 11, 2006 on 10:44 am | In MMO (Live), SWGLeave a comment
Anyone who's played SWG or followed the recent NGE events probably knows that while a very interesting game with appreciable breadth of playstyles, the game itself seems locked within temporal stasis. Star Wars is about a story, a series of events that happen over the course of Galactic history.
Star Wars Galaxies meanwhile is set in a nebulous time between Episode IV and Episode V and has been locked largely at the same moment in history up until around November 12th when the NGE was pushed to the live servers. And even then, the biggest indication that the timeline had taken a baby-step forward was in seeing Han Solo on Tansarii Point Station rather than still sitting in Nym's Stronghold on Lok handing out missions.
This stasis seems to be ending.
Planetside account reactivations
January 11, 2006 on 10:43 am | In MMO (Live), PSLeave a comment
Just got an email stating that my Planetside account was reactivated. As if I didn't already have enough to do!
Innovation
January 10, 2006 on 10:46 am | In General Gaming, InnovationLeave a comment
There's seems to be some emergent thinking out there, some could say almost existentialist. Both in print and online, developers, publishers, and journalists-who-get-paid all seem to be asking similar questions concurrently:
where's the new ideas?
Save our Cities!
January 6, 2006 on 10:48 am | In MMO (Live), SWGLeave a comment
I'm in a funny place in my MMO gaming career. I've spent a solid year playing World of Warcraft in all its glory, cancelling only because I was getting bored with it, but not for anything Blizzard has done wrong. I've been spending the last six weeks playing Star Wars Galaxies, first curious by the NGE, and then actually enjoying the quest-based gaming that's never really been there before. And, having gotten City of Villains for Christmas, I'm playing the Hero side of things, graced by Cryptic's holiday gift in the form of a 30-day jetpack.
These three games are, effectively, fairly far apart on the span of MMO titles list. But being so different, they've highlighted a long-standing issue I've had with a facet of the world itself.
Some game's towns are all but lifeless.
Forget RMTs: Blame Time
January 5, 2006 on 10:49 am | In General Gaming, IndustryLeave a comment
RMTing inspires a lot of hate because it's an service industry people think of as "cheating". The folks against RMTing have made up all sorts of reasons that this "breaks" an experience. I was reminded of this again today by this article which talks about this article at the Daedelus Project.
People will viciously disagree, but in thinking about this for years, talking about it all over the place, and experiencing what others call the "direct impact" of RMTing, even from the days before the term itself existed, I have only grown in the following belief:
RMTing does not ruin experiences for an individual.
Time does.
Soulless resource harvesting
January 2, 2006 on 10:49 am | In MMO (Live), General GamingLeave a comment
Over the last few months, a number of discussions in a number of places have dug a bit deeper into the whole issue of Violence in Video Games. With the number of states seeking to legislate distribution of games, and most of those legislations being challenged or overturned, violent video games is fairly "top of mind" in American culture at the moment. But this isn't about violence in games. It's about something a bit deeper. Deep thoughts for the new year.
As usual, Raph posted a a very interesting article about why MMORPGs feature so much behavior analagous to historical events involving genocide and general sociopathic behavior. While the points he raises have been discussed throughout the "number of places" mentioned above, the details and references he provided adds more insights into the issue.
My take away from the article was basically that we're roleplaying Western societal tendencies by repeating actions partaken by our ancestors, with similar motivations.
And people think these are "just games."
WoW Lore
January 1, 2006 on 8:00 am | In WoWLeave a comment
World of Warcraft has a lore stretching back a decade, to the first Warcraft realtime strategy game. The lore is delivered in the game through both quests and ingame books one can read. Each of these books contains a few pages, segments of the lore listed here. I copy/pasted that lore so that it could all appear on one page, making searches easier for those who may be interested.
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