I have no idea what the KOTOR MMO will look like, but if I had to guess I would say that it will be an online massively-multiplayer roguelike, with ASCII graphics and optional tilesets, with hardcore permadeath and one gigantic server.
I was talking to a friend who hadn’t played DF yet, and this is the story I told to demonstrate the differences between Dwarf Fortress and, well, every other game that exists.
A common problem in Dwarf Fortress is pet overpopulation. Dwarves, it seems, are not keen to follow Bob Barker’s advice. I had a fortress that was going quite well, my dwarves happily churning out food, drink, and tradable goods all while hollowing out a masterwork of a sunken lair, including a ludicrously tall pit extending from the first level of the fortress down hundreds of feet where I could throw all my unwanted kobold junk; the only rub was that the game was chugging along at only a few frames per second. After a few moments of investigation I pinpointed the problem: literally hundreds of dogs and cats prowling about my fortress. Luckily, pets aren’t eating their dwarven masters’ food stores in the current version.
How do you solve a pet overpopulation problem? Like most problems in Dwarf Fortress, there are a number of possible solutions. The easiest, and most expedient for my fortress, was to throw all the dogs down the large pit I had constructed. My dwarves obliged with little resistance, of course. At least one hundred dogs and puppies met their grisly deaths at the bottom of that pit.
Chucking a bunch of unwanted pets into a nearly never-ending pit, while certainly cruel, is also pretty fun. And it’s something few games let you do. (Other options for pet removal include butchering, drowning, and flooding with magma). But the interesting part of Dwarf Fortress is that it remembers what happens, or rather your dwarves remember the events that transpire around them.
A good dwarven year later (maybe two), one of my dwarves became a master crafter. After going a bit loony and becoming obssessed with the idea of making a scepter out of rock, he constructed the scepter and engraved something very interesting on it: a picture of a dog. The dog was falling.
After telling him this, my friend let out what I can only describe as a squeal of surprise. For someone less knowledgeable about the boundaries of gaming, this sort of story may not come as a big surprise. But what other games do things like this? DF is ably done but I suspect it’s no technical marvel - if John Carmack wanted to figure out a way to program NPCs who make contextual, representative art I’m sure he could. It’s not the technical prowess, but rather the strength of imagination that sets DF apart.
Look, I’m going to be honest. Dragon Age sounds great. The pedigree is awesome. I love Bioware games. But jesus christ you have to do better than this. A video on SpikeTV? At 1:00 AM? Fucking 1:00 AM IN THE MORNING? I’m asleep then! Just put the damn video on your splash-page and be done with it.
Seriously… I mean, I fucking F5ed all day for this shit?
Also - Dragon Age: Origins? That’s your title? Is this game about a sweaty neard convention? Can one of the perks be +1 to deodorant?
From Blizzard’s FAQ on the SC2 website:
How will StarCraft II be different from StarCraft? StarCraft II will run on a vibrant new 3D-graphics engine that will be capable of rendering beautiful landscapes as well as massive individual units and army sizes. We’re also introducing a number of distinct new units to the Protoss, Terran, and Zerg, and even some of the familiar units that return in StarCraft II will have new tricks up their sleeves, which will give the game its own unique flavor. In addition, Battle.net will be overhauled with some new and exciting features to enhance online play and competition, while the campaign will also offer some unique aspects for players who enjoy single-player content. We’ll have more details on all these aspects in the months to come.
I am so excited about these new 3D graphic things! And new units! Wee!
So basically SC2 is a glorified expansion pack. How fresh. I guess this post makes up for me defending Diablo III.
In an otherwise laudatory post, Fallout 3 producer Ashely Cheng bemoans Blizzard’s decision to “stay on the conservative side of game design” with Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2. I think this is a pretty interesting assertion that deserves some exploration. Is Blizzard too conservative?
My immediate reaction is yes, Blizzard is too conservative. This was the first thing I thought when Starcraft 2 was unveiled, and I think most people would agree that whether SC2 is fun or not, Dawn of War 2 will likely be a far more innovative (and dare I say, interesting) product.
Blizzard is in a unique position: they are almost universally praised for their excellent games and their headquarters happens to be stationed directly above one of the largest money pits in the contiguous 48. Once propelled into action (and who knows what dark forces can move a behemoth such as Blizzard to begin production on another addictive goody), they make some of the best, most polished, and most fun games around. And everyone knows it.
To get that kind of reputation, however, you have to make great games. And when you make a great game, no one wants it to change. And thus, the paradox: you’re Blizzard; you have the resources to make your wildest dreams true, and yet you’re yoked to your franchises. Wild and brilliant design innovations are lurking in nearly every brain working at Blizzard, Inc., but those brains are chained to the past. After all, the past is where the moneyhats come from.
But I’m going to take the other side when it comes to Diablo III; the game looks like much more of the same on the surface, but I think there’s a lot of new and interesting things going on under the hood. Shacknews’s Nick Breckon has a great feature up about what we know so far about the game, and some of the information that’s been revealed is remarkably forward-looking.
One of the most interesting things is this:
A new “Adventure” system will power randomly generated scripted events. An example provided was an area the player would come across, such as an old abandoned house, that may have a story behind it and enemies to dispatch.
This strikes me as a huge, huge undertaking, but procedural quest generation are pretty clearly where the RPG genre will be moving soon, and it’s pretty awesome that Blizzard is taking the lead here. This is the kind of thing that Toady is currently doing in Dwarf Fortress and even in its current simple form it’s quite compelling.
Neither Diablo III nor Starcraft 2 are close to being released, so perhaps Ashely Cheng is right and Blizzard is being too conservative. My take on it, though, is that while Cheng is undeniably correct about SC2, Diablo III may end up containing some very innovative elements.
I’ve been playing Ninja Gaiden 2, which is a very good game ( so far, at least ), and it’s occured to me that it’s really engaging not only my action gamer side of the brain but also my explorer side. The exploration is kind of a meta-game - NG2’s geography is almost entirely linear, and while there are lots of nice vistas there is rarely any discovery in terms of landscape - and this meta-game emerges as an exploration of behavior.
And there’s ninjas, so we’re talking extremely violent behavior.
Exploration of adversary behavior is something that’s been present in games, and particularly the adventure and fighting genres, for a long time. It started with sidescrollers like Mega Man and the original Ninja Gaiden, where enemies followed dependable and often limited patterns, with bosses exhibiting behavior that was somewhat more complex. So in this way, NG2 is a throwback.
What differentiates the game from its earlier brethren, and this was present in the XBox game as well, although not quite to this degree, is that nearly every enemey has some sort of interesting behavioral quirk to discover. It’s this aspect of the game more than any other that makes me interested in the series. And, tangentially, makes it the most interesting modern action game out there for me.
Also, ninja dogs that throw knives at you. That’s funny.
It occurs to me that this kind of interesting adversary behavior is something that is lacking in a lot of other genres - especially RPGs. Japanese ones tend to do this a little bit better, but one thing that whole genre could get better at, and as a consequence become more interesting, is investing more in interesting artificial intelligence for baddies.