I wrote an article this week about convention photo-ops over on my column at MMORPG.com. Don’t worry. There are loads of pictures to look at.

However, I wasn’t able to use my favorite Kevon Sorbo photo.

So here it is:

Kevin Sorbo is awesome!

I’ve been a bit quiet recently for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I went home to England  for a lovely long vacation.

And secondly, I got asked to write a column over at MMORPG.com. They wanted me to start almost immediately, which required writing a bunch of articles to use in reserve over the Christmas break.

One of the bonuses at MMORPG.com is that you do get your own spiffy cartoon head.

The first article, Why Some MMOS Suck seemed to go over quite well, but I did notice a murky undercurrent in the comments … a kind of disgruntledness with an appetite that can never be sated. The article itself wasn’t really very incendiary. It contained  some observations I’ve picked up over the past few years, all of which I believe in 100%. Check it out – it’s the closest you’ll get to a WAR post mortem from me.

The second article was about how Twilight is a perfect IP for MMO development. Again something I believe to be 100% true. However, most of the posters in the forums seem to think that I was comparing how “good” Twilight vampires are compared to other types of vampires … which I wasn’t. Instead, I was commenting on the opportunity of developing for an untapped genre-based IP with a massive fan base with disposable income.

One poster also made a facetious comment about whether I thought High School Musical would make a good MMO. I actually do (and have market research and trend data to prove it), and I will cover this in a future article. Many others made fact-based statements about what a vampire “is”; should they be stakeable, would they be nice to humans, etc. For the record, it doesn’t matter. They are fictional.

The end result was that the forums exploded. This is probably a combination of bad writing on my part and low reading comprehension on the forum-dwellers part. There seems to be a resounding sentiment in MMORPG.com’s forums that a game has to be western-fantasy and DIKU-MUD-based to be classified as an MMO, and that the only demographic deserving of an MMO is theirs: i.e. young American adult males. Again, this is a subject I will also tackle in a future article.

Anyways, that’s what I’ve been up to.

Yesterday, while surfing around, I came across — nay unearthed — a single intriguing word that had been hidden to me for the better part of five years. That word resonated with me, so I wrote it down so I could come back to it later.

Well, later is now, and that word is Hatebeak.

So, apparently, back in 2004 there was a metal band whose lead singer was a parrot. Clearly, this is awesome. How did I not know about this?

Here’s a picture of the band. They look like sensible lads. Apparently, Blake likes to play heavy-metal guitar and Mark is quite handy on the drums. Waldo, a Congo African Grey parrot (beautiful plumage) likes to sing.

Here’s an interesting fluff piece about Blake, Mark, and Waldo at Parrot Chronicles Magazine — THE best webite for parrot-based current affairs stories.

That’s a very interesting story, but what’s their music like? Luckily, there are a few Hatebeak tracks on Youtube, so we can find out. Here’s one:

There’s an informative comment after this one from apollyon1: “they do not play live and all the parrot is recorded separately.” Thanks for clarifying that apollyon!

Unfortunately, after doing a bit more research, it turns out that Waldo passed away a few years ago. So, a reunion tour is probably out of the question.

Definitely going on my IPod though.

A few weeks ago, Gamasutra posted a recap of a talk given by Zhan Ye entitled “Game Designers – Everything You Know is Wrong”. I read the article the day it was published, and then made everyone on my team read it too. It’s very very good, especially if you have any kind of interest, personal or professionally, in developing free-to-play microtransaction-based online games for China.

I now work for a Chinese company (Tencent) who specialize in making online games for the Chinese market. One of the main design challenges is trying to figure out how to think like a Chinese gamer — What do they like; How do they like to express themselves; How do they like to play, etc. We spend a lot of time with our Chinese partners discussing the subtle differences between Chinese and Western gamers.

Anyways, the gist of the article is that if you approach designing a game for China using the same “rules” as you would if you were designing a game for the West, you WILL fail. It then proceeds to give a list of reasons with examples.

The information in the article generally matches with the conclusions we’d made — Chinese players expect completely different things from their games than Western players do. And, of course, it’s vitally important that you figure those things out before you dump millions of dollars into developing a game for China.

Overall, I agree with everything in the article. However, there’s a lot of it that makes me feel professionally very uncomfortable.

I re-read the article again today after Josh Drescher tweeted about it.

What I found the most interesting the second time through were the comments. The majority of which are marvelously arrogant (in that way that only opinionated designers can be), completely reinforcing the point that Zhan Ye was trying to make. There’s an overall tone of dismissal in the comments as if the author just made everything up. Astonishing.

Many comments smack of “we are Western developers and we know best”, conveniently missing the warning at the beginning of the article that this attitude is the road to failure. One observer even makes the comparison that, design-wise, free-to-play games are “B-rate”, while many of the other commenters are squarely just in the blinkered “microtransactions are evil” camp. One observer even makes the classic schoolboy mistake of invoking Halo, ironic because that game has had enormous problems breaking into the Chinese market (for all the reasons given in the article).

Many of the game features that appear in Chinese games do so, not purely because it’s the most brutally effective way of removing money from the player, but because Chinese players (culturally) really dig those features.

For example, Chinese players really REALLY want to stand out and they really want to EXPRESS themselves. They want to be able to show off (hard to do if you don’t stand out). Chinese players are also totally fine with “money spent” being one of the vectors used to quantify their avatar’s customization. They also really like features that accentuate socializing – marriages often have systematic benefits in Chinese MMOs; while guilds are complicated systems and are way more than just chat channels (yeah, I’m looking at you WoW). The commenters should have been focusing on “why did the guy want to give the girl some flowers” instead of assuming that the game was inherently sexist.

Chinese players want moments of drama to punctuate the experience when they play online games – these moments are great forums for self expression. For example, they generally prefer “unfair” unregulated PvP (free-for-all open-world gank fests) to “sports”-based PvP (battlegrounds, scenarios, etc).

So while the Chinese MMO industry is clearly much much younger than ours, not all the game features that appear regularly in Chinese games do so because of any kind of immaturity in the market. In fact, Chinese games often embrace the two Ms (Massively and Multiplayer) much harder and better than their Western counterparts.

Also, it would be very foolish indeed to dismiss the entire free-to-play model out of hand. I totally get that a lot of Western players have a Pavlovian hatred toward microtransactions. I’m not overly fond of them myself. I think that’s because it’s often assumed that those for-sale items are absolutely required somehow to progress through the game past a certain point. In reality, that’s not the way to do microtransactions, and everyone doing them knows it. Again, Zhan Ye’s remarks about microtransactions are well worth reading.

In fact, the whole article is. If you have any interest at all in the booming Chinese MMO industry and/or how to make a successful game for China, I strongly recommend reading/absorbing the article.

 

This has got to be the best Star Wars-related costume I’ve ever seen.

Chinese farmers – the good kind. Truely spectacular!

Hoping that all my meals are dead when I go to China.

I picked up Dragon Age: Origins last week. I’m about 10 hours in, and I’m having a good time. The game doesn’t hold your hand and will kill you dead in five seconds if you stop paying attention, which I respect. ‘Reminds me a lot of Risen in that respect. I’ve been seeing a lot of So-in-So has become a fan of Dragon Age on Facebook, and I’ve been very hesitant about throwing my hat into the ring in support of this game. While, the overall Dragon Age experience is quite jolly, there are some things that just drive me crazy about it. None of them are game-breaking. They all smack of “not quite having enough time”. Clearly trade-offs have been made. Such is the way of things in this industry.

Zones: Some of the exterior zones are painful. The borders and backgrounds are nice, but I grow weary of the two-foot-high un-climbable fences or slightly-too-steep-to navigate slopes. The game world pretends to be a sandbox, but slaps the player in the face if he or she ever tries to divert from the fairly linear track. The level of detail in the actual playable spaces is also an order of magnitude worse than the detail in the backgrounds, resulting in an unfinished sloppy feel to many of the exterior areas.

Combat: It’s nice that there are plenty of options. But those options don’t play well together.

Regardless of whether I select the whole party or not, my dudes do stupid things. Since the key to success in combat appears to be “everyone gang up on one mob at a time”, I want the group to use their special sexy abilities as much as possible, but on the enemy of my choosing. Instead, if left to their own devices, my dudes will attack whoever takes his or her fancy. None of the four group-option permutations seem to allow my dudes to do what I want.

If I have them on “hold positions” I have total control, which is great for the first few rounds of each really tough encounter, but this requires choosing actions for each team member every round. This is fine on bosses, but becomes very tedious on trash mobs. Even if I just right click on an enemy to have the group all attack, some group members will stop attacking and just do nothing if the enemy runs by them, or is killed.

There seems like there is a group option missing, and it’s the one that would allow me to play this game the way I want to.

Tactics: The tactics system looks like it would be awesome, but its complexity scares me just enough to put off experimenting with it. I’m also convinced that the combat tactics don’t always work. Simple tactics to drink health potions never seem to be obeyed.

Abilities: There are some very weird design decisions on how abilities work. If I spend a precious level-up point to buy a new ability, I feel like I should be able to use that ability with no penalty. Getting a new ability should result in me being “strictly better” than before. However, abilities with “sustained effects” “reserve” mana, essentially reducing your available total mana – very important to have lots of mana if you’re a mage. This results in, admittedly, an interesting decision for the player: “How many buffs can I risk having active at a time?” Often this results in me not being able to use all the buffs that I want. Spending a point on an ability did not therefore make me “strictly better”. This is BAD.

I took me a while to figure this out. Why was my mage only regenerating mana up to about 50% of her total. The bar said “X mana (Y reserved)”. What does “reserved” mean? There was no mention of this in the manual. Gaaah!

Loot: The itemization throughout the game is very uninspiring. Chests requiring tier-3 Thiefy-ness to open regularly contain a single herb. Bosses often drop nothing too. Opening a chest should be exciting; not just a mechanism for accumulating vendor trash.

There also doesn’t seem to be that many armor art assets in the game (which is a problem I can definitely identify with). One of my characters is a human mage. She’s in her mid-teens level-wise and is still wearing the robes she got when she became a warden. I want her to look like a bad ass, but there seems to be little in the way of mage upgrades during the first 10 hours. In fact, the only staff I’ve managed to find so far converts all my staff damage to nature damage (even though the slot on my character page clearly says it’s still arcane). This would be great if undead (the majority of mobs in the game so far) weren’t immune to it.

Also why is everyone wearing brown or grey?

Who is the hero? It’s certainly not my mage – she routinely gets killed first in a fight.

I’m thinking that this game has a little bit of an identity crisis. In typical Bioware style, story is king, and, don’t get me wrong, the story IS compelling. The premise and setup makes you think that your main character is going to be something special, a real hero. However, there are plenty of things that my character sucks at, or just can’t do at all. Need a chest opened, switch to Leliana. Need a poison, you’re out of luck, they can’t be shared. I thought I was the hero! I feel like the other three characters in the party would do just fine without me, and that is inexcusable.

Voices: I’ve read some criticisms about the voice work. Surprisingly, I have none. So far, for me, all the voices have been great. Steve Valentine does a great job as Alistair, giving him a cheeky intonation that reminds me a lot of Dominic West. Corinne Kempa does a great job giving Leliana a very sexy lisp.

So, clearly, I have some problems with the game. However, I’m still playing it, and I actually do like it a lot. Is it an 91? Nope. IMHO, probably more like a 78. Barnett has reassured me that my complaints are common to people who have only played about ten hours. That the somewhat linear feeling to the first chunk of the game ends shortly after that, and then the game opens up and becomes much more wonderful. I really hope this is the case.

If you were born in 1970/71 or thereabouts in the UK, you are the perfect age to have experienced the following three things in geek/nerd history:

• You are exactly the right age to have completely lost your mind when Star Wars came out. In fact, June of 1977 is probably when your love of movies began. Prior to that, “going to the pictures” would have involved a choc-ice and a Disney matinee with your mum.
• You are also the correct age to have experienced, with a sense of wonder, the video-arcade boom of the late-70s/early-80s. There was a time when going to the seaside as a nipper meant swimming in sewage, sunburn and donkey rides. However, if you were lucky, in 1978, you played Space Invaders for the first time while waiting for your fish ‘n’ chips (or Galaxians in 1979; or Pac Man in 1980). From then on, the “seaside” meant “arcades”, and you made damn sure you brought a roll of 10p pieces with you whenever you went on an outing.
• Now, if these two events hit hard – hard enough to set up the resonant frequency that triggers the nerd gene to surface in pre-adolescents – then you found yourself in the perfect place and the perfect time to ride the home-computing wave through to the present day … god help you.

Clearly having just dated myself with the previous reminiscent musings, it’s time to get to the point of this particular blog entry.

There are few things in life that can get this jaded grumpy designer excited, so when one of my colleagues (Matt Dohmen) casually mentioned in passing that the “largest video-game arcade in the world” was only a couple of hours away, I pretty much lost my shit. I’d been in the Boston area for a few months by then, so obviously I chastised Dohmen for not supplying me with this information earlier, like when I was filling out my new-hire paperwork.

So, what does an Englishman for who the three points at the top of the page resonant with the fury of a million suns do with this information?

Roadtrip.

Long story short, last weekend, Angie and I made the pilgrimage.

Funspot is big. So big it has multiple entrances.

It’s also the arcade featured in the movie King of King. The layout is a bit weird. Imagine a giant three-story wooden cabin filled with delicate electronic antiques; a restaurant; and a bowling alley; all in the ass-end-of-nowhere in the middle of New Hampshire.

And they have everything. And by “everything”, I mean every important arcade game you can think of released between 1976 and 1986. It’s all classics – virtually nothing at all from the 90s. Now, I’ve been able to kinda play a lot of stuff using MAME when the itch has struck: however, MAME is absolutely no substitute to playing the real thing. For example, MAME has no idea what to do with Ikari Warriors; and somehow manages to screw up Time Pilot too.

I had a mental list of games I really wanted to play again, and Funspot did not disappoint. I got to play Mr Do! Pooyan; Elevator Action; Space Ace; Gauntlet; Gyruss; Gravitar; Xevious; Ikari Warriors; Track & Field; Berserk; Star Wars; Joust; Kung Fu Master; Paperboy; and dozens more that I had played as a kid but had forgotten.

And I sucked at them all. Really hard. It was glorious!

In fact, the only game I was actually better at now-vs-then was Berserk (which is weird).

So, if you are an old nerd living in the New England area, you could do a lot worse than checking out Funspot.

Dan Enright and I popped into the Circuit City in Fairfax on Saturday during the last few hours of their liquidation sale … and the pickings were slim.

Apart from fixtures, there really wasn’t anything left in the store at all. No TVs. No Stereos. No DVD players. No real hardware of any sort.

There was a handful of crappy Rap CDs for a dollar, and a few cables here and there, but no DVDs, video games, or software. It was kind of like the Cheese Shop from the old Monty Python sketch.

Then we noticed an endcap that seemed to actually have something to buy on it.

They’re on the top shelf. About 20 of them.