So, Mirror’s Edge. You’re probably heard of it. I installed it last Thursday in the afternoon and finished the game around 2 o’clock that night. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve finished a singleplayer game, so that’s a good sign and it felt surprisingly fulfilling. It’s a beautiful AAA-title game in which you run from A to B, while trying to dodge your enemies, jumping from one building to the other similar to Parkour. The movement feels awesome, it looks great and just because of the colours you somehow intuitively know which way to go most of the time. It also seemed very well optimized for my pc (not just a sloppy console port). But it’s by far not brilliant and has so much more potential…

I could focus on how the game weirdly forces you to ( gun-)combat and actually kill people half-way through, which is definitely a major weak point of the game. But I’m okay with that. What bugs me a lot more is the story and how much better it should have been.

I simply do not get it. They have this brilliant dystopian ‘Brave New World’-vibe going on; an apparent clean beautiful city but under a totalitarian regime, where all communication is under complete surveillance, but where people are somewhat apathetic about it, mindlessly consume and live their lives in blissful ignorance. While it’s not the most original anymore, I love this sort of thing. They’ve invested even some effort in it, they have these slick cartoon cut-scenes before and during the game. But it does not get further than this introductory trailer I just linked. At no point it is explained what bad things the City government actually does, or who the clients of the runners are. It’s a brilliant setting, but the plot is just incredibly silly. The sister of the main-character is framed for the murder of a politician that threatens the established order (how and what we don’t know), this plot then suddenly ends up being part of the major conspiracy to kill all the runners as they are the only remaining forces that are able dodge the surveillance system, this all abruptly ends with the main-character finally saving her sister and then suddenly the  end credits rolling in… I got no idea what it was all about, I’m not even sure if I summarized it correctly, it’s a paper-thin plotline that doesn’t make any sense at all.

And this annoys me. The gameplay could have been better, sure, but I’m okay with it. To me it’s just this silly plotline (if we can even claim it to be one) that makes this an ‘okay’ game rather than a brilliant game. Can someone explain why the hell AAA titles never fulfil this potential? It would only take such a small portion of those budgets to make the game so much better. These games could actually be thought-provoking rather than just mindless entertainment.  Is it some weird attempt to stay political correct at all costs? To not shock or offend people, to not be labeled as a political game which might hurt the sales or something? I simply don’t get it. There are several AAA titles that could have been oh-so brilliant. Assassin’s Creed is a good example of a beautiful game being turned into a piece-of-shit I couldn’t even play through, because I got so disgusted by its ridiculous time-travel plotline. Assassin’s Creed is situated in the medieval Middle-East, so you have these beautifully designed and truly  living cities as Jerusalem and Damascus. Awesome right? Right, but then you for example also have several Jewish, Islamic and Christian soapbox preachers in the streets all giving pretty much exactly the same shallow speech, plus several similar examples, they don’t have the balls to touch upon any religious question. They avoid all the potentially sensitive issues while they could get so much more out this subject. Bah. And then with Call of Duty: MW2 you have developers that actually do have the balls to shock, but don’t do anything with it and keep it at nothing more than empty bullshit.

It’s just sad. Games have so much potential as a platform, but the big developers just don’t seem to get it. Of course they have their commercial reasons, but even Hollywood does something right from time to time. Why not with games? Deus Ex is now almost 10 years old for fuck’s sake. Mirror’s Edge was good value for money with this steamsale, I’m happy I bought it, but it’d have been so much better if it would’ve maintained a more thought-provoking edge. Mirror’s Edge is kinda edgeless, yeah, lets name it that way.

And this:

If you do not know Banksy, I suggest you to check it out. It’s an anonymous British graffiti artist who fills walls with amazing thought-provoking art.

Anyway. The game did launch and it seems players are having fun with it. What is particularly interesting is that Adventurine limits the ammount of people that are being able to buy and play the game and that they’ve kept it just at a single server so far. It is weird, but it also makes sense. This sort of slow launch prevents a huge ammount of players rushing in for 1-6 months and then leaving a lot of empty servers as what happened in Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. I do doubt it is commercially a wise move though. They do seem to consider opening a second NA server, but I would say that this sort of game is just much better when it remains unsharded, so stories remain unique and groups of people can’t server-hop leading to server populations being small enough to be dominated by a single group as what happened in Shadowbane.

The political landscape seems to have developed in Darkfall Online and the stories and drama surrounding it seem rather intriguing. Just like with EVE Online, it shows that sandbox MMOs allow players to create the story and drama which will always be more interesting than anything produced and imposed by developers. Here’s a nice large map which shows what’s going on (probably out-dated already) and here are some writings on the alliances. It does seem to lead to a 2-side server-wide conflict, similar to the Great War in EVE Online. Battles seem to continue running with over 100 people involved, which is quite astonishing and suprisingly well-done by Adventurine. In general the game seems to be pretty alright, although certainly not for everyone. I suggest reading Hardcore Casual and Keen and Graev if you’re interested on how the game is. The biggest miss to me personally, without having played the game, seems to be the lack of a /say channel and that it’s all just in /public. It kind of makes the game a lot less immersive than it could’ve been I’d say, you should be able to shout at your victim just before you execute him, using the Public channel for that just seems wrong.

Also, let me make one prediction: It will have something to do with the blinking big star that appeared a bit more than a year ago and suddenly dissapeared.

First of course there was the dev-blog on wormholes that totally flabbergasted me. It’s a relatively simple addition, but oh-so brilliant. I mean, just think about it, it’s just a bunch of new automatically generated systems and instead of the normal stargate there’s one that randomly appears and disappears. But it enables so many potential epic or hilarious scenarios, when I first read it I couldn’t help but fantasize of all the possibilities for hours.

Then there was the Alliance Tournament. Number 6. The biggest one yet. I followed most of the last on EVE-TV and it seemed to be done very well again. Ruleset was the best one so far and the qualification round, plus putting those videos on youtube the day-after worked out pretty good as well. ISD was a bit less active with sideline stories than during the last tournament, but the match-reports were very nice again. I do have some criticism about CCP deciding not to show player adverts and instead show an ugly Nvidia advert. Not enough adverts that were being send in eh? Shame CCP, shame. What a shame.

And then there was of course the hi-jacking of Band of Brothers by Goonswarm. Funnily enough probably the most interesting recent EVE Online event. Since I do want to talk about the  BoB events but don’t really know where to start, I’ll just start by linking the most interesting writings of other people.

Jim Rossignol of RPS was quick with reporting explaining EVE again.

“Mainstream”-media try to make sense of it, here gamespy.

And shacknews.

Destructoid.com

Scot Jennings writes the usual funny summary.

MMO-theorist Raph Koster theorizes the event.

And then there’s of course EVE-Radio having interviews with two important people of both sides. Rather entertaining.

What I think of it? Must say I was a bit sad about it initially, I guess I underestimated BoB and thought this might’ve  been a reason for their corporations to go different ways. I like consistency in MMOs and those years-old corporations and alliances make things more epic, which is also why I was sad to see Mercenary Coaltion disband even while I’m not related to them in any way, it’s just sad to see a name like that dissapearing. Now it seems it’s going to turn out fine for them and their new alliance KenZoku, which I think is an incredebely silly name (but so was BoB if you think about it).

All in all, did BoB loose and Goons win? Perhaps, but let’s just say CCP scored another huge PR victory. Stuff like this might do more for them than an expansion. I remember watching a Fanfest with the roundtable session where players could ask questions to developers after introducing themself with their ingame name, so one player walks to the stage for a question and says “Hi, I’m Dianabolic..” where a CCP developer suddenly interrupts him and exclaims “Hey, woah, did you say Dianabolic?”. Now that’s EVE. A game where individual players can become more important and achieve more fame than it’s developers. Will we ever see corporations/alliances becomming more ‘important’ than CCP itself? That’s a bit too far off I guess, but who knows, we already had BoB announcing their new campaign in the friggin’ New York Times at the last BoB bbq.

I kind of expected this as there was no open beta announced and there weren’t many official news updates, I had some hope for an open beta tomorrow the week before release, but that’s not going to happen. It would’ve been rather weird to see them actually releasing the game the 22nd without open beta, it would’ve been ever more weird  and unreal to have them do it in a succesful manner.

So in a way, I’m happy. If they would’ve released the 22nd without beta, it would’ve looked like a scam to me. Now we’ll get to play it for a month in open beta (/trial) with many players, so we can see what we’re getting, although I don’t expect all that go flawless.

Reading their excuses it seems that they underestimated the interest of people in this game. Ah well, I think they could’ve seen it comming, it looks a bit amateurish to me.

I’m very glad I started blogging. It feels good to have a personal place like this. It’s good to put your thoughts on a (virtual) paper, as writing it down forces you to articulate what would otherwise remain just an abstract thought in the back your mind. Writing this down reminds me that I really should post more. There is some stuff that I’ve wanted to write about and actually started this blog for, but haven’t….. yet. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve wanted to write about. But I’ve just looked back at my own posts, it seems there are 45 of them, which isn’t all that bad at all.

As for my other blog. I’ve posted less on it, often youtube links and other stuff I want to share. And it also has a lot less readers. I do want to post more on it and also want to improve my writing capabilities on bigger more opinionated pieces. Ah well, I want I want, etc.

Anyway. 45 posts. 96 comments. 13,524 views. 68 subscribers to the feed in Google Reader. That’s quite nice, didn’t expect so much myself. Most popular post was testing FW on SiSi, which got linked all over the internet, I guess I got the scoop on the Factional Warfare stuff. Hilarious thing is that people still almost daily search ‘what a shame deus ex’ and visit my youtube-summary on that.

Ah well. Here’s for another year. Thanks for reading.

1. Darkfall Online will finally come out on the 22nd January. While there will be some server problems during the launch that stop people of logging in the first few days, it’ll turn out to be indeed quite a good game. People will finally have their fantasy sandbox game, epic player-created stories will emerge. While the graphics, UI and overall harshness will put a lot of people off, the game will fulfill a strong niche. Subscription numbers will grow throughout the year, but won’t go above 150k.

2. WoW: No expansions in 2009, WoW’s subscription numbers will finally go down.

3. Diablo III will come out at the end of the year and make people temporarily stop playing WoW and other games. The ‘MMO blogosphere’ will mostly blog exclusively about this game for several weeks.

4. Pirates of the Burning Sea will follow the way of Tabula Rasa and close it’s servers before the end of the year.

5. Age of Conan will survive 2009, but that’s pretty much it.

6. Major drama will emerge from Darkfall Online. Somewhere during the summer people will find out that the biggest clan, that is dominating biggest server and has over 50% of the land, has been exploiting. Conspiracy theories about involvement of Aventurine will be rumored around. Aventurine’s integrity will be questioned, but in the end they’ll be able to resolve the issue.

7. As being able to pay real money to transfer your character, change your name, buy pets and tabards from Ebay, change your characters’ appearance, change your characters’ sex etc obviously isn’t enough for the Activision-Blizzard shareholders, World of Warcraft will finally introduce real RMT. All capital cities will have a new goblin shop called Ol-Mart, where players are able to buy items, potions that increase xp-rate with 150% and other stuff for real money. Hey, where did we see that before? There’ll be a heated discussion in the ‘MMO blogosphere’ where people will cry murder and where the Blizz/RMT-supporters will receive several death-threats. It will however have no influence on WoW’s subscription numbers.

8. Jumpgate: Evolution will be reasonably successful and a lot of fun for a month or so, after that however people will see that there’s no real proper endgame besides repetitive mission-content and meaningless pvp without consequences.

9. World of Starcraft will be announced on Blizzcon ’09 and shock people as it is in a far more finished state than people expected. It’s innovation will be that it is a lot more more story-driven than WoW. Hey, where did we hear that before? The other innovation will be some sort of miniscale Planetside fps PvP, that is ultimately just as meaningless as WoW battlegrounds, except being a lot more fun.

10. EVE Online won’t be on the spotlights until the fall of 2009 when Ambulation is released, which will make a lot of people go ‘woah’. It’ll continue to grow steadily.

11. Oh, almost forgot World of Darkness. CCP will release lots of details in 2009 and show the game in a near-finished state. It’ll look amazing and appear to have the best MMO graphics so far, better than World of Starcraft even. EVE sandbox player-driveness meets vampires, game will allow Machiavellian player politics. Ooh, exciting.

There you go, lets see how right I was in December 2009.

I’m watching it for the third time now and still laughing out loud. Easily the most hilarious thing I’ve seen today so I thought it’d deserve a blog post. A terrible cliche hardcore-punk song (I even recognized it, it’s Blood for Blood) projected into a Darkfall vs Clichequest context. Amazing. I’m speechless. What makes people make these sort of videos? There are hundreds of fan-made trailers for Darkfall Online on youtube.  An unreleased game they haven’t even played. Just because of the sandbox concept and the features, a game like Darkfall Online deserves a lot of attention. But I struggle to understand these videos.

Look at the profile and the other videos made by this guy. Is he for real or is it just one very dedicated troll..? Entertaining nonetheless.

Not much stuff on the Noob Comic preview site yet, but it should be updated regularly. Check it here.

But this trailer.. Holy shit, I’m rewatching and rewatching it in disbelief. It looks insanely good. It looks better than friggin’ HL2: Episode 2. Heck, it looks as good as any big-budget game comming out these days.

And it’s made by modders. You know, unpaid volunteers. Wow.

Anyway. Click. (Or Click for youtube, as link doesn’t appear to be working right now.)

Overall Impressions:

Overall we’ve been getting very good feedback about the game, we were hard pressed to find anything negative and actually had to dig for it and to ask a few times for something more critical.

The World-Graphics-Technology

The consensus about the graphics is that they’re much better than expected, something we’ve been saying all along. The game has been very stable and smooth overall, even in the full debug mode it’s running in. We’re experiencing really good gameplay from all over the world, even though our beta servers are in Germany, we’ve had no problems reported by testers in Western N. America, or in the Far East.

AI

The AI has been reported very tough, even the newbie AI. When they’re very damaged they flee and are hard to catch up to. We’ve done some tweaking and as the players familiarize themselves with the game more, they seem to be enjoying the experience. Again these are not your run of the mill MMOG AI.

Controls

We started out the beta without any instructions whatsoever. This was done to assess the intuitiveness of the game. Darkfall isn’t like your average MMOG. There is a lot you can do in it and an unprecedented level of control. As such, you have a lot more controls and UI feedback you need to navigate. It has to be said that you can remap everything to your liking, and you can move everything around and set-up transparency on all the GUI elements. While there’s quite a lot of tweaking to be done, we’ve found that after the initial shock, the GUI and controls works well for the players.

It seems that the people having most trouble with the lack of documentation are players of other MMOG games. Those who play FPS games have reported fewer problems with the GUI and controls. However this is the area where we had the most criticism, so we’re looking at ways of improving the understanding for the new player.

PvP – Looting

We’ve been wiping characters very often so it’s still hard for the testers to dive headfirst into PvP. We expect a lot more feedback in the very near future.

Crafting

The testers haven’t been reporting on crafting much yet. I suppose you start delving in it after you check out the basics, so we expect more on this soon.

Hype! Hype! Hype!

But the EVE fps.. There’s barely any info on it, and it’s claimed to be a mix of Halo and Planetside. I personally hope it’s a lot like the latter there. But while watching the new Quantam Rise trailer again, but now in decent quality from the downtimenews page, I saw something quite interesting. Somewhere in the middle they show some planetary action with airplanes, tanks and infantry. I just thought that this might just as well be done ingame in their new project, look at this:

Hmm. Looks interesting. Guess it also means Mr Kador actually invaded a Gallente planet.

It’s probably also a good idea to check the downtimenews page today, as it’s probably updated with news-reports again during this patch-day like during the Empyrean Age patch.

I’ve talked about Darkfall Online before (here, here) and while I found easily the most interesting MMO in development (its concept and all), I was still rather sceptical. It seems I forgot to post (or probably ‘lacked time’ again) about the 17 minute long gameplay trailer that was released a bit more than a month ago, but it was rather interesting, it showed a lot of the game, reminded me of amateur game-videos as it had the same quality, had ugly graphical effects, but at the same time had some very cool things in it. Funny thing is that the developers claimed they intentionally ‘showed it the way it is’ and that the graphical settings were set on low, unlike Age of Conan trailers (or cinematic trailers).

Well, it seems they gave a hour-long presentation at some gaming event in Athens and some news of was released. According to a greek gaming website they’ve been running a beta since 22 September. The beta is supposedly going to end at the start of December and the game will be released in 2008. Woah.

During the presentation they also ran the game for a hour and they weren’t lying about the gameplay trailer, as it suddenly looked A LOT better to me. Very atmospheric. It seems they’ve invested 10 million dollar in this game, so I still doubt it’ll be as polished as Warhammer Online, but it certainly isn’t vaporware. Go watch a part of the presentation on video here, and also watch the greek television piece (which thankfully has subtitles).

What I don’t understand is why there isn’t more ‘hype’ around this game, there’s barely any gamingsite reporting about it and I don’t really understand their awful PR. Not that I’m a fan of marketing stuff, I’d rather see them invest it in the actual game, but it’s still a bit awkward. Anyway, there are an awful lot of games coming out, but I think I still am actually psyched about this, I’m sceptical about them being able to run this game with 10k concurrent players though. We’ll see. It’s almost December already. Fuck. This could very well be a revolutionary MMO and the second major sandbox MMO next to EVE Online.

Oh, and you can sign up for beta as well: http://www.darkfallonline.com/beta/