Gamebreaker.tv

Want to see me talk about MMOs? I’m on Episode 49 of This Week in MMO on Gamebreaker.tv.

If you haven’t heard of it before, the Gamebreaker network is hosted by Gary Gannon (one of the founders of GAX Online) and TWIMMO is their weekly MMO news show.

While I’ve done guest spots on a couple of podcasts, they were all audio only. Doing a video show was new, exciting, and a bit scary for me. There’s a big difference between being able to talk and not worry about people seeing your reactions or fidgets, than being on camera. Plus this was the first time I’d done a show with a live chat room.

I ended up having a really good time. It’s always surprising to me how fast an hour goes when recording a show.

E3 2011: Day 1

I’m not at E3 and I didn’t watch any of the live streams, but I’ve been catching up on the news of the day.

SW:TOR – Yet another movie. It’s a geat movie and it breaks my heart how much better it is than Episodes 1 and 2 (I gave up and never saw 3), but this is a game not a movie. I want to see more gameplay video.

Batman: Arkham City – I caught this inteview and gameplay demo on RPS, and man does this game look great.

Minecraft – It’s cool that Minecraft is coming to XBLA. I’m not interested in Kinect integration though and I’m not sure I’ll bother to buy the Xbox version. Half of the fun of Minecraft is modding it after all.

Mass Effect 3 – I’m surprised how much they’re showing of the game. I expected Bioware to be pretty quiet about it since it was pushed back. I’m honestly struggling a little bit with what I’m seeing in the many videos. It looks like the pace of combat has sped up considerable, which is great if you’re an FPS fan but I’m not. Still, I’m keeping in mind the lessons from ME2 where the marketing gave me a lot of bad vibes that turned out to be completely false.

Kinect Sidenote: All of the Kinect tie-ins worry me a bit. I’m really hoping Microsoft doesn’t manage to figure out something cool enough that’ll make me want to buy one. It’s not that I hate the Kinect or anything, but my Xbox is in my office which is a small fourth bedroom in my house, and there just isn’t room to set one up and stand 8 feet away from it. Well not without remodeling.

Sony Update: I’m adding this a day late since I didn’t watch it live or stay up to see the post-conference news about it. I was impressed with Tretton’s apology, but I think Sony would’ve done itself a world of good to do that earlier though. Not being a PS3 owner, more of the news I didn’t care about but there were two things I wanted to mention.

PS Vita – That is not a good name, but that’s nitpicking. As cool as the technology sounds, the only thing I thought about when reading about the new portable was that I have a PSP that’s in a box in my closet and I haven’t played with it in more than a year. Even when I was using it, it was basically a Lumines machine. They did get the price right at least.

Dust 514 – Being an exclusive is a mistake. Yes, I’m sure there were business/technical issues with Microsoft but I don’t care. CCP’s new shooter is going to be competing with a lot of established brands and limiting sales to just one console is not a good idea. I’m under the impression that the game is not coming to PC, but hopefully I’m wrong about that. Then again even if it does, I have to wonder if PC players and PS3 players will be able to play together. They can’t in DCUO.

Partners in Science

When Portal 2’s co-op mode was originally announced, I didn’t expect to actually play it. But when I mentioned the game a few weeks ago, MMOGC pointed out the amazing deal Amazon was running and we ended up planning to do the co-op portion.

The co-op game took us about five or six hours to finish, across three nights. I ended up as Blue (naturally) and GC played Orange. Organized as five courses, with eight puzzles in each, there’s nearly as much humor and story in the co-op mode as there is in the single-player game. Check out GC’s review here.

I thought having a co-op review for a co-op game would be fun, and GC agreed to do a little question an answer with me (this section is on GC’s blog as well)…

BlueKae: I had expected the co-op game to be fun, but it turned out to be a lot more fun than I realized. Challenging in different ways than the single player, and somehow easier too. What surprised you about playing co-op?

MMOGamerChick: From the start, I knew co-op was going to be about playing together, but what I didn’t expect to see was how often we were put into situations where we had to work together…but separately. Initially, I think I was picturing something akin to a two-player platformer, where you and your partner would go everywhere together, do everything together. There were some puzzles like that, but I’d say most of them involved each person doing very different things, sometimes in different parts of the room. It made things more interesting, in my opinion. It’s still very much about the teamwork because our chances of success still depended on both people accomplishing their respective tasks, but that meant trust was also very important — especially when we couldn’t see what the other person was doing and had to rely on coordination and communication.

Okay, my turn to ask a question. What did you find was most challenging about co-op?

BK: Remembering that I was playing with someone. I mean we were chatting the whole time so I knew you were there and all, but after playing through on single player I was so used to running into a new puzzle and starting to throw portals around that it was an adjustment to remember I was playing with someone. I know there were a few times when I wiped a portal of yours out with one of mine because I wasn’t thinking.

I very much agree with your surprise about how the co-op worked. I assumed that our portals would link up instead of being separate. It was definitely more about communicating, coordinating, and trust. The spike maze comes to mind. 🙂

The best part was having a second person to help figure out how to solve the puzzles. I wasn’t tempted to go look at Youtube once. If/when there’s a Portal 3 are you looking forward more to single player or more co-op?

MMOGC: Both. I mean, obviously the co-op is a huge draw, but single player has its moments. And both portions were filled with humorous moments, GLaDOS doing her thing. That’s what made the whole game, I think. It would be difficult for me to say which I prefer or look forward to more.

And I totally agree with you about remembering that I was playing with someone. Though with regards to wiping out each other’s portals, I just like to think of it more as both of us being on the same page. Great minds think alike and all that!

BK: True! I think the single player had a bit more personality, maybe that’s because it stretched across two games. Did it seem to you like the single player was more about how to solve a puzzle and the co-op was more about actually doing the solution?

MMOGC: Oh yeah, definitely. I approached single-player and co-op very differently. In co-op (and I think you might have noticed this too), the first thing both of us did with a new puzzle was run in there and start exploring, playing with whatever buttons or stuff we found. I found myself “working backwards” in co-op more than I did in single-player. First find the exit, then “do” the solution.

BK: I wasn’t quite that organized about it. Mostly I was just trying to make sure that when we picked a solution that it was using all of the different parts in the puzzle.

MMOGC: Let me ask you another thing. Were you stressed at any point? ‘Cause I know I was. I kept thinking, “Oh crap oh crap oh crap, I’m going to let Blue Kae down and he’s going to think I’m an idiot.” I’m not the best when it comes to coordination and reflexes. There were several times that I botched a jump or a portal and I just felt terrible.

BK: A couple of times, definitely. I worried about getting you killed on a couple of puzzles where there was timing involved. But most of the time it was so easy to run back in, that I didn’t worry much. I can’t remember getting frustrated at all though.

MMOGC: Well, it was definitely much more enjoyable to play with a friend.

BK: I totally agree. The frustrating parts for me in the single player game were figuring out what to do next. Having someone to talk with and point out things I missed made the game much much more fun.

MMOGC: I totally carried you. Haha, just kidding.

BK: There were definitely puzzles that you just got right off that I didn’t and vice versa. There was only one puzzle, I remember, that stumped us both for a bit.

MMOGC: That part really was cool. I saw where my own weaknesses were, and was grateful when you figured stuff out that I couldn’t. I was really happy that we were able to figure everything out between us without going to outside help.

BK: Yeah, I ended up hitting Youtube twice for puzzles in the singleplayer game when it stopped being fun.

MMOGC: And fun is what it’s all about.

Terraria

I decided to check out Terraria recently. It’s a 2D game similar to Minecraft that everyone has been excited about. I’ve only put about five hours into the game, and I’ve had fun but I haven’t gotten sucked into the game in the same way I did with Minecraft.

Both games have a pixellated art-style. Both games focus heavily on exploration and building, but Terraria has more of an adventure game side to it. You have more health than you do in Minecraft, and there’s a lot more combat in the game both in the daytime and the nighttime. Ironically, I never felt like I was in as much danger in Terraria as I have in Minecraft. Because it’s a 2D side-scrolling world, zombies can’t sneak up on you, and even if one get’s the drop on you, you can live much longer even without armor.

For me, the 3d perspective is just more engaging. In Minecraft, I feel it when I stand on top of a cliff and look down. When I’m mining run across a cavern, the yawning black space is much scarier and more exciting than coming across a cavern in 2D.

I’m planning to continue playing Terraria occasionally, but it scratches a different itch than Minecraft does.

Catwoman: Arkham City?

I’ve watched this trailer more than a dozen times today and I’m still not sick of it yet.

Ironically, I haven’t actually finished Arkham Asylum yet even though I keep planning to. Maybe this’ll provide the missing incentive?

When Catwoman was originally announced I didn’t really care. She’s an interesting side character but Batman is always the main attraction of Gotham City. The gameplay footage in this trailer looks amazing though, it almost seems like she could carry the whole game. Almost.

Catchy song too.

Super Marios Theme

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like platformers and I have especially bad childhood memories of the Mario games. When I was a kid, playing Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo usually involved half an hour of rapidly increasing frustration culminating in shutting of the console and going to my room to read or outside to play (so technically playing Mario was good for me I suppose).

I wanted to provide a little background to emphasize how cool this is, and if you like that check out the rest of Jack’s Youtube channel as well as his band Pomplamoose. It’s good stuff.

Remastered Missions

Back in January Cryptic remastered the Stranded in Space mission, which is the first mission new players do once they get out of the tutorial. Gozer went back to one of the first missions the team made for the game and updated it using all of the new tools that they’d developed since it was initially created. The result was very impressive. Ever since, players have been looking forward to more remastered episodes and Cryptic released two more last Friday: Diplomatic Orders and Doomsday Device. The new missions are just as impressive as what was done to the Azura rescue mission. I ran through all three over the weekend.

The Azura replay was offering a personal communications code that allows a player to summon the S.S. Azura II which provides mail and bank access from wherever you happen to be. That was really the only reason I ran through it again, since I’ve already played the remastered mission a few times.

Diplomatic Orders offers a cool data recorder to replay all of Spock’s Sector Block introductions, but I would’ve played it regardless to see how the mission had been updated. Ambassador Sokketh is no longer haunting Earth Spacedock but is now on Vulcan. Vulcan itself has seen some investment by Starfleet and now has a station in orbit.

Sokketh now has an issue with transporter technology, so there’s a fun section where you fly down to the surface in a shuttle. The Shuttle interior is very well done, as is the flight over the Vulcan temple complex. I do have a complaint about mixing franchises though since Starfleet has somehow managed to incorporate Tardis technology into their shuttlecraft.

Once Sokketh is aboard, the rest of the mission plays out mostly the same only with some tweaks to the dialog and a cinematic when the Ambassador’s true identity is revealed.

Doomsday Device was my favorite of the three episodes. The story is substantially changed from the original, and it really reminds me of a DS9-style episode. You start out by disabling the I.K.S. Targ and then boarding and securing the ship. I really enjoyed not actually having to blow the ship up, and I’d love to see more of that done in future missions/remasters.

MMO Gamerchick didn’t enjoy securing the Targ as much as I did since you beam over without your usual Away Team, but I actually preferred it that way. When you materialize on the Targ there is already a firefight taking place between your crew and the Targ’s crew, so I felt like a Captain beaming in to personally monitor an existing situation. If I’d come in with my regular team, it would’ve been okay but this way made if feel like more of a major operation since my full crew was involved (ignoring of course that they didn’t have names and their uniforms were different).

There’s some interesting gameplay and story in securing the ship and making repairs, not to mention getting a holoemitter disguise to make my character look like a Klingon. I really liked that I had a diplomatic choice once I beamed down to the planet and could avoid combat for the most part.

The final fight had some great story as well as some great new tech in it. The tech part is integrating character scenes into the same maps as ship scenes. This doesn’t sound like much, but it allow for some really cool story telling. Being in a space map and watching the Doomsday Device fire on a moon and then cutting to the bridge of the Targ was very seemless and as close to watching a television episode as they’ve come yet.

It’s not perfect yet. Throughout the mission, you’re talking with Lt. VanZyl whose supposed to be a member of your crew. But her uniform is off and usually in a mission you interact with your bridge officers. Still, she’s voiced well in the cinematic scene so it’s well worth it.

If you haven’t checked out the remastered episodes, I highly recommend them, especially if you’ve been through the Featured Episode series and are looking for more of the same quality-level.

New Adventures, New Ship

Champions

I was totally surprised to see  Issue 1 of the first Comic Series announced on Twitter today. The initial series is called Aftershock and issue one is Dead Air. UNTIL’s Camp Lantern in North Africa is not responding to communications and scouts dispatched to investigate have not returned.

The new series is scalable so any heroes level 11 or higher can experience the new content. There are supposed to be five more weekly issues in this series.

Despite how quickly the first issue snuck up on me, I’m very excited to get in and check it out. I started playing through the second Adventure Pack Demonflame this last weekend (more on that when I finish it) and it’s not quite the experience I was hoping for. From everything I’ve read, the Comic Series are intended to be more like the excellent Featured Episodes in STO, if they turn out to be even half as good then I’ll be spending a lot more time in Champions on a regular basis again.

Star Trek

The first Dev Diary about designing the Enterprise-F is up. Most of the controversy that surrounded the winning design has subsided now based on the dev diary forum thread (or I’m just no frequenting the right parts of the forum). The current clay model is interesting. I like how close the saucer and engineering hull are to one another and the dual neck looks much more substantial now that it did in the initial sketches. My only nit to pick is the saucer is a bit too pointy.

 

Cryptic bought by who?

On my way into work this morning I glimpsed a couple of Tweets about Cryptic getting bought but didn’t see by who. So once I got to work I found this article on Gamasutra and thought, “Oh. Ok…. Who’s Perfect World?” I’m not a fan of the eastern-style MMOs and I long ago stopped paying any attention to that aspect of the genre. So I had to do some catching up to get an idea of whether or not I should be worried or elated.

Two interesting items on the money-side of the story. Atari bought Cryptic for $28 million (plus sales-incentives) in 2008, and Perfect World is paying $50.3 million. Perfect World is coming off of a good first quarter compared to the prior year, as payoff for investing in long-term projects. If that’s truly representative of PW’s attitude towards business then Cryptic’s in much better hands.

Besides their fiscal history, I didn’t realize that Cryptic isn’t the first development studio that PW has purchased. They bought Runic Games in May last year, but has stayed mostly hands off since then.

There’s still some important details unknown about the deal though. Does Atari still has publishing writes for NWN? I assume they do. If that’s correct, is Cryptic still developing that game? I’m guessing that Atari has passed the risk on to Cryptic and PW and is charging a licensing fee. This gives them a piece of the revenue with little further investment.

Since PW is primarily in the F2P end of the MMO market, what happens to STO? For that matter does Champions stay a hybrid model or does it go full cash shop? I’ll give even odds on STO going F2P but if it does it’ll go hybrid like Champions did. I think that’s a ways out though, I get the impression that Cryptic wants to see how regular weekly content releases affect their subscription numbers. I don’t see either game going full F2P like their eastern-market counterparts. There are very few games, Runes of Magic is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, that do well in the western market as full cash shop. Perfect World seems (in my limited research) to be a bit smarter than that.

One other thing I’m unclear on is what the actual corporate structure is. There’s Perfect World and there’s Perfect World Entertainment. PWE seems to be their western-market facing corporation, and I assume that PWE would be handling management of Cryptic. But the press release announcing the acquisition was on PW’s site.

In the end, it’s much much too early to panic. For the short-term, this is good. It removes uncertainty about the fate of the development teams and their games. For the long-term we’ll have to wait and see, but I’m optimistic based on what I’ve read so far.

Weekend Plans

It’s a three day weekend! I have a few things planned, but gaming-wise the only thing I’m really looking forward to is getting back in the Captain’s chair. Star Trek Online has released two remastered episodes and from everything I’ve heard they are amazing. I still need to hop into Champions and check out the more recent adventure pack, Resistance. For that matter, I’ve not done the previous one (Demon Flame) either, because of my adventures with Serpent Lantern. Then, of course there’s Rift where I’m still adjusting to life after-CoT. Lot’s of games and actually enough time to play them.

No post (probably) on Monday since it’s a holiday, have a good weekend!