Thanks to OldManMurray for the title.
Check out Bushnell’s quote about gaming in 2020 from this Gamasutra article: "Traditional banquets with gaming, in the 10th and 12th century always had food and drink with them… so the living room, I think, of 2020, will likely have some kind of interactive coffee table. There will probably be an internet connection to some PC."
So Nolan Bushnell’s vision of the future of gaming is that your PC will connect to your… table. And he thinks this because people "always had food and drink" at their LAN parties in the 10th and 12th centuries. I guess they skipped the eating and drinking in the 11th century, but I’m not really sure.
I guess I’m just not seeing how plugging your computer into the fucking table has anything to do with anything. Are you talking about some type of magic table that can just materialise food and drink, like in Star Trek? Or perhaps in the Nolan Bushnell future your PC will send signals to your table to make it flash some LEDs to remind you to stop corpse-camping that asshole hunter ganked your alt and maybe take a bite of your sandwich. I don’t know, maybe he means you’ll be able to order pizza via the internet and your table will go pay the deliveryman. Any hints, Nolan? Nolan?
April 10th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Games |
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I’ve been using this "skills and spells" term for quite some time as though the two things were distinct but related concepts, but I’ve refused to admit that they’re exactly the same thing with different names. Today we explore why that is.
You’ll recall from yesterday’s skills in-depth that skills don’t deplete any type of magic meter. This they have in common with spells. Also, the broad skills and spells post mentioned that they’re both used in the same way — target with the pointer, then pick them from a radial menu. This is just about the whole list of things skills and spells have in common. So with that out of the way, let’s talk about how they differ.
Whereas skills are specific to each character and gained at level up, spells are not. Instead, when raising levels, characters will gain spell slots into which spells may be placed. The spells themselves have to be acquired — they come in book form, and can be purchased, found in dungeons, given as quest rewards, or dropped from mobs. In town, you can set up your spell slots with any combination of spells you want (you can take the same spell multiple times). Every time you return to town, your spell slots are automatically restocked the way you had them when you left (to reduce "bookkeeping" bullshit).
Spells have no resource meter and no cooldowns. Instead, you can cast each spell one time and then it’s gone until you return to town. So you can expect the spells to have rather varied and powerful effects — in addition to the obvious damage-dealing, they can be used to heal, to restore cooldowns, to apply various buffs to you or debuffs to mobs, and for various other crazy things. There is no way to add or restore spells while in the dungeon, so what you enter with is what you get.
Spells are designed to have a pretty substantial impact on the game when they’re played, so don’t expect to have very many slots at any given time, though the number does vary by character — the more magical characters get more spells. There will be some rare spells that are in hard-to-find places or dropped at a low rate from mobs and whatnot, but these will emphatically not be the real "staple" spells that you’ll have a bitch of a time getting through the game without. You basic heals, cooldown resets, and whatnot will all be easily available. Once again, we’re aiming to reduce the grind while still leaving a wide range of neat things to find.
April 9th, 2008
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Darien |
My secret project |
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We’ve talked about skills in terms of the actual mechanical means of activating them (including discussion and suggestions in the comments — exciting!), but we haven’t said thing one about what the hell they actually do.
First, let’s talk about what they don’t do. First and foremost, they don’t deplete some damn magic meter. If there’s any mechanic that’s more hackneyed than that, I’m not coming up with it offhand, and that’s not even to mention several serious design problems with it (if you’ll permit the digression). If you have the type of magic meter that replenishes on its own, then you create a situation where the "optimal" strategy is to kill a mob and then stand around and wait for your magic to come back. If it doesn’t replenish, then you have a situation where the players are bottoming-out on resources as they get to the end of a dungeon — which is, of course, where the damn boss is. This is the exact tangle that leads to designs featuring magic pools of restoration or whatever right before boss fights. And of course, either way you slice it, you’ll end up with most of your skills being pretty much worthless since, in most cases, there will be something more efficient or powerful to use.
So where does that get us? It gets us to a situation where there’s no uniform resource that’s consumed by skill usage. Instead, they’re kept in balance via a cooldown system — once you’ve used a skill once, you can’t use it again until it’s cooled (most MMORPGs have a system like this). But doesn’t that just lead to the waiting game again? It would, except for one thing: our skills don’t cool over time. Instead, skills are cooled by the use of other skills — every skill has a value by which it cools other skills.
This is a little confusing in a block like that, so let’s look at it in practice. A skill description looks like this:
Ultra Mega Ass-kick 3000: Way kicks ass, cools 5, cooldown 20
So you have a skill called "Ultra Mega Ass-kick 3000" that tells you its cooldown is 20. You get attacked by a Viscous Moldmonger and you need some of that goooood ass-kickin’, so you use it. Now it’s on cooldown. You want that skill ready again, but it needs to cool; you have this other skill, though, called "Punch Inna Mouf" that says it "cools 3." When you use it, your Ultra Mega Ass-kick 3000 cools down by 3 points to 17 — still a ways to go before you can use it again, but, hey, it’s a start.
All skills have a cooldown, and almost all of them have a cooling value. This interplay keeps you able to do something frequently while preventing you from simply spamming a high-powered skill over and again. But what happens, you ask, when all your skills are on cooldown? There are other ways to cool skills. First and foremost, every successful normal attack cools 1 — note that the attack must be successful to cool anything, as in it needs to hit a mob and do some damage (this is to prevent the situation where standing in a corner and swinging your sword between fights just replaces waiting for your magic meter to fill). Also, it’s possible to get from the "common drop" pool (as mentioned briefly here) a minor cooldown replenishing pickup. It’s also possible to use a spell to cool skills — more details on that when I cover spells.
This system should keep skills interesting and viable, while also making "less powerful" skills more useful than they often are — since the weaker skills may be on shorter cooldowns and/or may have higher cooling ratings themselves. In fact, there exists a skill on one of the characters that’s nothing but a melee attack that does less damage than normal, but has a high cooling value. So there’s some potential for flexibility here.
Be sure to tune in next time if you want to know what all this nonsense about spells is, and how they’re different from skills.
April 8th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
My secret project |
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I’m no big fan of the People’s Republic of China; you know, all that communism and totalitarianism and the like. But what kind of idiot do you have to be before you assault soemone in the open street for the crime of being Chinese… all in the name of supporting human rights? A French idiot, evidently.
Figures.
April 8th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Bullshit |
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So apparently the British say there’s a new internet coming, and they’re really defensive on the subject of who invented the old one. They’re in denial — look how hard they try to blame the internet on everybody except Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning eco-agitator Al Gore.
Al Gore jokes aside, they — and here I mean the authours of the article and not the engineers at CERN — appear not to grasp the fundamentals of computer technology. According to this article, the new internet "would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so," as though the only bottleneck on the whole path is the damn phone line. Even assuming there’s a parallel increase in local network speed, you might have a bit of a time finding consumer hardware that appreciates the attempt to force that much data onto a disk in five seconds. By the same token, how will more bandwidth make internet games better, again? I can’t remember the last game I played that was bandwidth-limited. They’re mainly latency-limited, and unless some major upgrades to the speed of light are also part of this package I’m thinking that’s pretty much going to remain the case.
Also notice the part where they say it’ll be available to government agencies and universities, but "is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users." Hey, Euro-socialists, here’s a heads-up for you. Over on this side of the pond you’re hard-pressed to find anything "domestic users" want that remains unavailable. This whole idea of some sort of government-sponsored mega-internet that the common man won’t have access to is fairly quaint. Oh, and what’s with that bit about how personal storage will go obsolete and we’ll all just "entrust it all [all of our data] to the internet?" Maybe privacy and ownership are obsolete in Europe, but I don’t quite see everybody giving up on it right quick-like.
Thanks for getting some mention of the Higgs wedged into your CERN article, though. Even though it sort of looks like it snuck in by mistake. Bit of a non sequitur there.
April 7th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Bullshit |
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As I’ve alluded to in the past, there are multiple playable characters in the game, and you don’t commit to one at the beginning of a game; any time you return to base, you can switch to a different character. Each of the characters is sort of a stock fantasy archetype, and each has different strengths, weaknesses, and skills.
One of the major design goals in this game is that it should be possible to complete sticking to one character the whole time if that’s the way you want to do it. It might not be as easy that way, since different characters will be better suited to different tasks, but it will be possible at the very least. There are, however, going to be certain tasks that can only be accomplished by certain characters, along with secret areas and hidden treasures that only certain characters can reach. So it’s best to say that it’s possible to beat the game using only one character, but it’s not possible to complete the game 100% unless you switch it up.
A good comparison for the character system would be Super Mario Bros. 2 — you can’t switch in the middle of a level, but you can switch between levels. Each of the characters has different strengths and weaknesses, and are better or worse in different situations, but all of them can get through the game. That’s the same story here. Oh, except that I don’t plan on having Luigi be hilariously overpoweringly better than all the other characters like he was in SMB2.
April 6th, 2008
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Darien |
My secret project |
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Check it out! [Certified not to contain any links to My Humps — ed.] This is interesting for non-prurient reasons also. Some years back I was involved in a long message forum discussion about artificial pets — specifically, whether or not they could ever be a viable replacement for "real" pets. This is pretty much an extension of the same topic; is it possible to have a meaningful sexual relationship with a robot?
Though I do kind of wish they’d reconsidered the line where they say the case for robot sex is supported by vibrators, prostitution, and… pets. I mean, I know what it’s talking about, but… the way it’s phrased is just unwholesome.
April 5th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Bullshit |
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By request (seriously) I’m using today’s column to go into more detail on character progression. I hinted before about it but wasn’t very clear.
There are levels in the game, and there is progression among these levels (you know, obviously), but it’s somewhat nontraditional. There is no XP awarded for killing mobs, thereby removing the "grinding" that usually goes along with raising levels, and also allowing for more flexibility in design; it’s more viable to avoid or disable the mobs as a long-term strategy since you won’t be missing out on valuable XP (there are still the drops, but missing out on some drops is a much smaller impactor than missing the XP).
So if it’s not from mobs, where does the XP come from? Quests. But not all quests. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, there are both major and minor quests (or "primary" and "secondary," or whatever terms I eventually decide on) — only the major quests award XP, and the XP for lower-level quests is less than that for higher-level quests (meanwhile, it takes more XP to advance the higher you already are). This is prevented from being overwhelming and confusing by flattening the level band; there are only four character levels.
Raising a level results in an increase in stats and some new skills, and also allows you access to the next level’s dungeons and quests. Levels are per character — if character A goes up to level 2, the remaining characters do not. XP, however, is shared in a pool; you don’t need to level the characters you used to complete any given quests. The XP can be stored and spent at will, but you need at least one character at the level of a quest before you have access to it. So you can’t complete the game without getting at least one character to level 4, but you don’t need to level all of them if you don’t want to. Hell, if you want a challenge, you can keep your play character at level 1 and just promote a character you don’t use.
This also (meaningfully and not unintentionally) avoids the situation where you can no longer develop any other characters because you completed too many quests with the same one and there isn’t enough XP left for everybody else. There will be enough XP available if you do all the quests to get every character to level 4.
April 5th, 2008
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Darien |
My secret project |
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Episode Four is fully-formed and waiting for your attention even as we speak. It’s shorter than episode three was, but, then, what isn’t?
If you want your cheap Taiwanese iPod knock-off to surprise you with new Dariencasts whenever we arbitrarily update, then you’ll want to feed it this syndication feed.
April 5th, 2008
Posted by
Darien |
Meta-meta |
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