Results matching “Diablo”

Here's the short list of what's been announced at BlizzCon 2008 this year:

• Starcraft II: Three storylines, one for each race. (Um, who didn't see that one coming?)
• Diablo III - Wizard character class
• World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King - your favorite money pulling MMOG gets an expansion pack in a month.

A few years ago, when the first BlizzCon was hosted at Anaheim Convention Center, it took a few days to sell out; At $100 per ticket, people were rather unsure whether the convention would be worth that kind of money. Last year, at the second BlizzCon, I think people decided that it was worth the trip to Anaheim, if only for the cool factor of the Murloc Suit in the goody bag; this year, the goody bag includes a polar bear mount with a flag waving murloc, and apparently that's a good enough goody that some ticket scalpers are already selling their extra BlizzCon tickets for $400.

Consider for a moment that people were going nuts for the Murloc suit, an inventory item that gave no stat enhancements, but did change your avatar into a flag-waving Murloc. Murlocs are the love-hate villain of World of Warcraft -- you fight them as a newbie, all the way up to the high level undead murlocs -- I often joked that WoW really should have been WoM - World of Murlocs, just because of the sheer number of the amphibious reptile men that need to be slaughtered in the name of the Horde (or the Alliance). Mounts, even after all this time are still one of the most desired items in WoW -- they look cool, and are sure attention grabbers (especially if you have one of the ones that you can ride at any level, but may not necessarily give a speed boost).

With BlizzCon 2008, the convention sold out in less than a day; while we aren't talking Comic-Con crowds of 130,000+, we are talking about 10,000+ tickets sold in a matter of minutes.

Yesterday at around noon, BlizzCon sales went live; it became quickly clear that their servers could not handle the amount of users hitting their site, buying up tickets, and they promptly took it down. They brought it back up, and the server died again, going down for an hour or more. They did this a few more times up until 6pm when they brought down the server until the next day at noon. Today at noon, there were close to 10,000 tickets available, in a matter of minutes, those tickets were sold, the server died a few times, and the server was closed for ticket sales until 8PM tonight. At 8PM, the server promptly died, and came back 10 minutes later, and sold out the remaining tickets in the next five minutes. This process was a major fiasco; instead of a escrow system to buy the tickets, the tickets required several steps before you were given the option to confirm your purchase, and at each step required the server to send a message back to the potential purchaser; however, when the server can't handle all the requests, it sends back errors, and one is forced to hit reload over and over again; at the same time the potential purchaser has no idea what's going wrong, or if their order is going through. I tried to purchase tickets 4 or 5 different times; in all cases, the batch of tickets sold out as I was putting in my credit card information. How did I know they sold out? The shopping cart kindly told me so AFTER booting me back to the front page of the store.

Here's the thing -- I can almost guarantee you that almost 50 - 75% of those tickets sold may not actually be used for admission, but rather for the purchase of the goody bag for resale, so Blizzard is fully capable of overselling the convention, because even with the crowds of people at BlizzCon 2007, I'd say there were no more than 3,000 to 5,000 people in attendance; the convention floor never got so full of people that one felt crowded. However, this year's BlizzCon should be a good one: Diablo III, Starcraft II and Wrath of the Lich King all make their appearance this year, which are all upcoming products with a massive fan-following.

Last Friday, Flux of diii.net linked to my first impressions of the announcement of Diablo 3. Since I worked on Diablo II, he also contacted me regarding my thoughts about the upcoming sequel. I've sent in my answers to his questions, but in the meantime, I'm absolutely floored by the comments left by the visitors. They do ask some questions that Flux doesn't ask, so I'll attempt to answer those.

Many of the commenters have mentioned the sorceress and her ability to Teleport in D2, and ask whether I think the Sorceress is a broken class as well.

I don't think the Sorceress is broken. The Sorceress is the successor to D1's Sorcerer class, and we felt that we had to be true to D1's spells, which include Telekinesis. In D2, all the characters can run, but the spell casters aren't very physical, and so it seemed to make sense that the lazy spellcasters would want to travel at their own pace. The necromancer has his minions and corpse explosion to clear his path for him, and the sorceress can teleport. Leaping isn't the only thing that makes the Barbarian unbalanced when compared to the other characters in D2. The Barbarian also has the cheese that is Whirlwind and Leap Attack.

In the context of Diablo 3, the Barbarian is broken because he already has an advantage the Witch Doctor does not, and that is to be able to Leap across the otherwise uncrossable gap. To me, that seems like a problem, in the eyes of others, it's a feature.

There's also a lot of encouragement that the commenters have written, which really warms my heart, but unfortunately, the Blizzard North team has moved on.

In my first post, I said that I think the PC is dying as a platform, and this is largely due to what I see in the marketplace; essentially unless you're developing a FPS, or an MMO, your game will likely not make it to the store shelves. Blizzard games are an exception, as are Will Wright's (Spore and Sims), but this is because they've carefully cultivated their products to provide long-lasting returns over time. Most publishers are not willing to take that kind of risk; they want a game they can sell (preferably right before Thanksgiving) which will provide a nice fourth quarter boost on earnings.

My old Blizzard co-worker Ben Boos has his first book coming out this fall. Published by Candlewick Press, the book is entitled Swords: An Artist's Devotion, and features 96 pages of pictures and information about swords. The book is aimed at children, but as Ben worked on the user interface and background art for Diablo II, and I expect that those who enjoyed the game's artwork to also enjoy the illustrations of the book.

I greatly respected and admired Ben's work as an artist while working at Blizzard, and Ben's work had a major impact on the look and feel of the game. It's easy for me to say that without Ben Boos, the game just wouldn't have been the same. I was a bit sad when I heard that he had left the game industry, but was glad that he was continuing his career as an artist and illustrator.

When I left Blizzard in '03, Blizzard North had done quite a bit of pre-production work on Diablo III, as well as some protoyping on the 3d-game engine. Today at the Blizzard Invitational in Paris, they announced the release of Diablo III. Since much of the work we had done on Diablo III was concept and prototype work, seeing the development they've done over the last 5 years was very interesting; while some of the concepts we were developing definitely looks like it made it through to the version of the game they displayed, some of the design choices they appear to have made seem counter to the decisions the original Diablo team members would have made had they remained on development of the title -- the most apparent change that I can point to is the appearance of "floating numbers" as seen in the gameplay video -- this was a feature that Blizzard Irvine continually "suggested" during development on Diablo II, which Blizzard North refused to implement -- with development now located within Irvine, the decision to add floating numbers to the game isn't one which surprises me.

One of the design choices which again shows Blizzard Irvine's hand in the changes made is the re-appearance of the Barbarian character class -- the original design documents for Diablo III included a set of all new character classes, with no reappearance of old character classes (our reasons for this was simple -- since we were enhancing and improving the skill system, we didn't want to try and adapt old skills into a new system -- we'd rather create all new skills for the new character classes. The return of the Barbarian class feels like a change that was made after development of the title was moved to Irvine 3 years ago.

One of the reasons why the Barbarian return shocks me so much is that I always felt that the Barbarian character class was the most broken of the classes in Diablo II. The Barbarian's ability to Leap, for instance gave him advantage over other classes which had to walk around the barrier -- it is the showcasing of this skill in the video (during which a bridge crumbles away, leaving no way to cross the gap) which makes me wonder if they have an alternate way for other characters to cross the gap or if all the characters have Leap now.

Of course, going 3D means that a lot of the things that were hard to do with sprites (such as actual armor looks being reflected on the character) is much easier using polygons and textures, as well as real 3d lighting. The use of a physics engine (Havoc, according to the game specs) is also a nice touch.

While I have more or less given up on the PC as a gaming platform, I'm glad to see that Blizzard is still committed to releasing titles that aren't first-person shooters; such a shame that we won't be seeing this title on the shelves for another year or two at the earliest.

Mark Wilson has penned a op-ed piece on Kotaku called "What King of Fighters Taught Me About Diablo 3, in which he advocates a hand-drawn solution to Diablo 3:

With these boundaries in mind, the solution of hand drawing (and sticking with sprites) seems perfect. Without the limitations of polygons--current screen resolutions combined with Blizzard's artistic talent could create a Diablo that we've only seen in our mind's eye, one that is essentially concept art imported directly into the game without the artistically-limiting technical compromises of 3D modeling. (In short, it'd look a lot like Diablo 2 with the gloves off.)

I think what a lot of people don't realize is that the first Diablo game is mostly pre-rendered in 3D. The artists at Blizzard North (called Condor back in those days) used 3D modeling programs to model the background AND the characters. Sprites were assembled using each frame that was rendered, and this is what is chiefly responsible for the 3D look of the Diablo games. The decision to go sprite-based again in Diablo II was strictly a technological one: polygons rendering and shading in realtime hadn't yet approached the level where the artists were satisfied with the look of the game, and the number of polygons one could handle on the screen couldn't come close to what Diablo II required.

It's interesting to look at the game all these years later, because even though were were sprite-based, a lot of people back then thought it was real-time 3D with a locked isometric perspective, and now the assumption seems to be that since it was a sprite-based game, Diablo must have been hand-drawn. There's a number of issues when it comes to hand-drawn art, and our computers and game systems have not been designed for it. There are no sprite-based graphics accelerators to help optimize the drawing of pre-rendered frames, and there's a finite limit to how quickly data can be brought in through the system.

For Diablo II, the sprite sizes were significantly bigger than anything in Diablo I, and there were portions of the game that could lag or pop due to the sheer number and size of loading the sprites into memory. (If you've ever been killed by Duriel at the end of Act II dungeon before you finished loading the area, you know what I'm talking about).

One of the issues I've had with King of Fighters' claim to be hand drawn is that they don't explicitly define what this means; does this mean actually putting pencil to paper and drawing out each individual frame, before they are scanned in, or does this mean that an artist is using a Wacom tablet with an animation program on the computer? Both can qualify as being hand drawn, it's just that one way is much more labor intensive than the other.

With all of that being said, is it possible for Diablo III to be hand drawn? Yes. Is it likely? Probably not -- first think about all the combinations of armor and weapons that a character in World of Warcraft has, now imagine hand drawing 30 frames for each of the following: getting hit, casting a spell, attacking, talking, and running and you've got just the basics -- that doesn't account for all the different directions the character could be facing, or any of the extra variations of getting hit or casting a spell you might want to include. Doing all that work by hand just to create a look doesn't make sense when you can emulate that look with much less work using 3D animation tools.

Seven years ago, Bilzzard Entertainment released Diablo II, the first commercial game I ever worked on. The ESRB rated it 'M', and we were worried that retailers like Target and Wal-Mart might not carry it, due to the buckets of gore and blood that our artists had detailed the game with. We knew we were building something special, and a great deal of care went into building the game. At every step of the way, we asked ourselves: is this fun? Is it too easy? Are we being true to the spirit of the original Diablo?

We first demonstrated the game in 1998. Each time I showed the game off to magazine editors and reporters, they'd ask me a few questions, and typically the conversation went something like this:

Me: This is Diablo II, a sequel to Diablo, which is a hack-n-slash third person role-playing game. In the first one we had three character classes, in Diablo II, we have five all-new character classes. We tried to keep the controls the same as the first one, so it's still very friendly, you just point and click, and we've added several more features to make reassigning keys and controls much more friendly.
Reporter: Wow. This game looks great. When's it shipping?
Me: It ships when we're done with it. We still have a lot to polish, things we want to complete, features we want to implement, and we have the Blizzard reputation to uphold of releasing a game that doesn't have a lot of bugs.
Reporter: So how much of the game is done?

My response here varied, depending on how far along we were. At the very beginning, I was saying 50% because Acts I and II was all that we had done when we were first showing it off, and it was two years later that I could say definitively Summer 2000. When we presented it at E3 in 1998, there were people who played for hours in that first area, and we knew we had something really special.

In building Diablo II, we knew we were building a proper sequel. We always felt that we had to take the game up a notch, that it couldn't just be Diablo I with a new graphics set, and that was partially why it took so long to make Diablo II -- the play area was several times as big as the first Diablo, and with 5 new character classes with all different skill trees, it really set a new standard for what a sequel should be. No one ever questioned Diablo II being a game in its own right.

This is ultimately, why I hate game sequels (though I myself have worked on them). It's not enough to me that they have new areas, or a new graphics set, in my mind, such an offering is just an expansion set. It should be a new game with echoes of the past game. It should be familiar, but totally new, and if one were to examine a list of "great games" one should see games that didn't have sequels, and games that did in there. I don't mind a games list that includes Zelda: A Link to the Past along with Zelda: Twilight Princess and Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. All three Zelda games are very different, and each game brings something different, yet remains familiar.

These days, everything has a sequel, and a lot of games have sequels that are released at regularly scheduled intervals. The games industry is increasingly hesitant to take risks now, and that means sequelizing the crap out of a game before everyone loses interest in it. On the flip side, to sequelize something to that extent destroys the value of that brand name. Take the popular racing game "Need For Speed", which has a franchise so sequelized that they use subtitles to differentiate the games rather than numbers.

All these sequels are indications that the game market has gone conservative. To make a new game entails a certain amount of risk -- namely funds that could go towards a "proven" game license are going to an unknown. Brand name marketing must be done, advertising and so forth. With game studio names meaning nothing to everyone except the most hardcore of fans, the names that the average consumer is familiar with is the names of the franchises and the publishers. The anonymity of the people who make the games, and the studios they work for also don't help the situation. But the games industry can't really survive without retail, and for retail, one needs publishers to put the boxes in the Wal-marts and Gamestops across the nation.

A games publisher doesn't want something new, they want something like what everyone else is selling, which is why everyone these days is selling a MMOG, a first person shooter, a driving game, a movie or tv license of some sort and some kind of puzzle/casual game. Take a look at any of the major publisher's sites and that's what you'll see. There's very little that's new and innovative, it's the same thing year after year with newer and better graphics. Once in a while you get a new spin on an old genre, but new games that move the industry forward are few and far between.

I admire those game designers that can create something new and innovative and bring it to market, games are simply too young an industry to have expired out of ideas, but with publishers running the games industry, it seems all too likely that players will be playing retreads for the forseeable future.

Brad McQuaid made a post about the state of Vanguard recently. Brad McQuaid is on of the founders of Sigil Games, which is currently in development of Vanguard, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. Originally, Vanguard's publisher was Microsoft, and now it's Sony. Earlier in the week, Sony said:

"SOE is in discussions with Sigil regarding the future of Vanguard and Sigil Games in Carlsbad. Talks are going well and first and foremost, our primary concern right now is what's best for Vanguard and its community. We want to ensure that this game and its community have a healthy future. The specifics that we work out over the coming days will all be with that single goal in mind."

Brad's response to this statement:

"What does that mean? It means that right now Vanguard is doing decently but not as well as we hoped. If you haven't read my last long post that outlined some of the things that went wrong during development, etc., please do. So the bottom line is that SOE is going to be getting more involved with Sigil and Vanguard - our relationship is going to become even tighter - much tighter. At this point I can't say much more than that.

Does this mean an acquisition? I can't say at this point.

Does this mean more or less people at Sigil? I can't say at this point.

Does this mean management changes at Sigil? I can't say at this point."

My translation of this statement reads as saying that Vanguard didn't pull in the numbers they wanted. With their release being exactly a week behind the release of Blizzard's Burning Crusade expansion pack for World of Warcraft, Vanguard was released unnoticed.

Here's the standard cycle for MMOG developers getting released by a third party publisher.

• Step One: Find a publisher.
  This usually involves pitching the idea to everyone who might be interested in undertaking a huge, costly project. For that reason, MMOG developers have to target publishers with deep pockets, and that means EA, Sony, Microsoft and NCSoft.
  
• Step Two: Negotiate rights with a publisher.
  This is usually the part where developers say "Give us the money to make this game, so we can pay our employees, buy some servers and bandwidth." Publisher usually says okay, but they usually lay down a timeline for the developer -- meaning that the developer needs to meet certain milestones if they want to get paid.
  
• Step Three: Make the Project.
  This is the part that makes or breaks the development team. If the development team can't make those milestones, the project dies, so they kludge it together, meeting the milestones with playable but buggy builds.
  
• Step Four: Go Beta
  
  In Beta, the development team releases the build for players to try while the "Final Build" is shipped off to be manufactured. Players play, they find bugs, and programmers fix the bugs. That's the way it's supposed to work, anyways. What usually happens is that in the course of fixing bugs, new bugs are revealed. Because beta is an arbitrary time frame meant to find bugs which will be corrected in the initial patch of game release, only severe-level bugs are usually fixed, with minor fixes incoming after the release of the game.
  
• Step Five: Release the Project
  
  Usually at this point, the developer wants three more months to do bug fixing, but marketing and sales want to release it immediately so they can start making their money back. Marketing and Sales usually win this round, and the product is released.
  
• Step Six: The Call for Help
  
  With the game released to the retail channels, problems start happening. Servers can't withstand the load, hardware failures on brand new equipment, there's not enough support to handle the calls. All this, plus money hasn't even started to come in yet, since all players get one month free.
  
• Step Seven: Two Months After Launch
  
  People start cancelling subscriptions. Publisher gets worried. "Why are numbers dropping? Why aren' t we making money yet? Where's the return on investment, and why are we only making $150,000 a month on our game in subs, while Blizzard is making 120 million a month?" Developer explains that it needs time to build momentum, and that they need some time to build word of mouth.
  
• Step Eight: Three Month Later
  
  If sales numbers don't improve, Publisher and Developer meet to figure out what's wrong. Developers list their problems, which is usually "We need more people and more money to fix everything that's wrong". Publisher says something along the lines of "We've already spent 50 Million on this project, and we've only made 1 million back from the sales. We aren't spending any more on this, you guys are going to have to come up with another solution, which doesn't involve tens of millions of dollars."
  
• Step Nine: Present Yourself as a Target of Acquisition.
  
  At this point, the developer points out that in three years time, they will have made back that initial investment, and that every dollar past that point is pure profit, and that it would be terrible if another competitor were to buy them out. Developer can also point to past successes, such as Everquest, which took a year to make back the development costs, but has been running for nearly a decade.
  
• Step Ten: Publisher buys out Developer.
  Publisher decides that future revenue is good, but they want more control over the project, and that their project management is the problem. They buy the company, and replace all the middle management with their own choices. Founders stay on for a time specified in the buyout clause before leaving to startup their own company (again).
  

So what Brad McQuaid says next doesn't surprise me the least:

"What it does mean at this point is that both companies agree that we need more of SOE's involvement if Vanguard is going to continue to get the support it needs to both continue to be worked on and improved and debugged and optimized."

In other words, SOE (Sony Online Entertainment, Vanguard's publishers) likely told them "We'll give you money, but we want one of our employees to be in charge of overseeing what you're doing with our money. If you don't do what he says, we won't give you any more money."

Brad McQuaid further explains his game plan:

When people start getting burned out of the Warcraft expansion (pardon the pun), we need to make sure that the game is more polished and will play on lower end machines. As people continue to level up, it means that we need additional higher level content, including raid content.

His belief is that people who would be playing his game are instead playing WoW: Burning Crusade. It's a decent assumption, but burnout usually means forsaking playing MMOGs altogether for a time, not jumping to another one. The game polishing and lower end machine statement is more a reflection of Vanguard in its current state: buggy, unpolished, and requiring a much more powerful computer than World of Warcraft. WoW's system requirements are low, and Blizzard spent a lot of time polishing and making the user interface easy to use and understand.

It also means that presently Vanguard doesn't have any high-end raid level content. This is not a good sign. WoW built into the user interface the capability to manage raid-level content, EQ did not until several years later, even though for both games, raid level content was inserted at the very beginning. Things just work a lot better if you plan them from the beginning instead of adding it in at the last minute.

Brad says that marketing and attracting players is a problem:

If we are going to change our marketing message effectively to target those who played a lot of EverQuest but who have "grown up' such that they have jobs, families, etc. that they cannot and will not play another EverQuest even though they enjoyed they game years ago. We've done studies and it's not atypical of an old EQ player, when they hear about Vanguard, to assume that because many of the people involved in Vanguard's development worked on EQ as well, that Vanguard must simply be an EQ 3. From that point they don't even give Vanguard another look. They don't do any more research on the game. They don't go to the official sites. They don't go to the affiliate sites. Instead they think to themselves, "ah well, were I younger and had my life not changed, I'd give it a shot, but I just don't have the time for another EQ with better graphics right now.



And that's it - they don't give Vanguard another thought EQ peaked in late 2001 at almost 500k subscribers. In its lifetime it's sold over 2 million units. Putting EQ in a vacuum and that's a lot of people who played and who aren't playing anymore. And the total number of subscribers didn't start going down until sometime 2002. I'm also pretty sure up until its peak that the average lifespan of a player was nearing 9-12 months.

I'm an old EQ gamer. Avid player for 4 years. I spent 260 realtime days in that universe -- over a sixth of my waking hours for those four years, or about 8.6 months realtime. Even if it's not an EQ3, when a game gets an editor's rating of 3 out of 10 on 1up with the tagline "Massively Missing Online RPG", I can tell that I'm not missing much. Plus, unlike the WoW characters, which have a cartoonish feel to them, Vanguard is going for a more plastic look, and it really does feel like Everquest 2 Part Deux.

A lot of us, in quitting EQ made the vow that we'd never go back to Sony Online for our MMOGs. After seeing Star Wars Galaxies, it became clear to us that Sony was not interested in making a good game, and more interested in making a game that brought in money month after month.

Brad McQuaid spends the next couple of paragraphs explaining that they captured a huge market when the market was young, and now that the MMOG audience has grown, there's no reason why Vanguard can't pull in the kind of numbers that EQ did back in the old days. The market has changed. No one wants to play an EQ-like game anymore -- the badness that came with SOE and EQ set a really low bar for customer service, and players were, quite honestly, treated pretty disrespectfully. Enough so that when a better game came along, we all jumped ship

When World of Warcraft released, it was just a game that raised the bar for the MMOG genre. Relatively bug free, easy to use interface, quests that worked and had storylines attached to them, and best of all low system requirements.

Vanguard is a game that requires: Windows XP, Intel 2.4 Ghz processor, 128 MB of Texture Memory and 512 MB of memory. That's the minimum requirements -- so we're already talking sub optimal experience with a 2.4 Ghz processor, which is basically computers built in the last 9 months. Meanwhile, I can run WoW on almost any computer built in the last 4years (My Titanium Powerbook, made in 2002 can run WoW).

There can be only one

In the games industry, there is only one MMOG at a time that dominates the market. Every other MMOG manufacturer is, quite honestly, playing for second place. The only way to move into first place is to create a better game than the game currently in first place. Before WoW, the current MMOG champion was EQ1. Guild Wars, EQ2 and WoW all released around the same time, and while all of them improved on the design of EQ, they all did so in different ways. In the early days, I called WoW "EQ Better", because that's essentially what it was -- an easy to play EQ, oh it was different, but except for the randomly dropping magic items (which was a Diablo feature) everything in WoW was in EQ first. There was one difference though -- WoW actually worked. Because EQ was a work in progress when it was released, EQ never achieved the fine polish that WoW did -- and because of that when EQ launched, it was riddled with bugs and uncompleted quests and other problems which took years to fix.

If you just want to look at the Fantasy MMOG genre, there's two big gorillas in the field already: World of Warcraft with 8 million subscribers, and Lord of the Rings Online, which is much more recent game, and has has the whole background of Middle-Earth to play around with. Any contender who wants to take the two of these on, has got to outdo these two, and let's face it, WoW has a huge lead which isn't going away anytime soon, and for the time being, we ought to consider the fantasy MMOG market closed.

There's still plenty of other genres available which aren't fantasy, but may be riskier -- but fantasy is an assured loss.

When I played MMOGs, most of the time I had a female avatar. This isn't much of a secret as my game friends know my true identity, but the game is a bit more bearable as a female than a male character. Even in the virtual world, traditional gender roles apply -- men are supposed to be self-reliant, independent and never ask for help or show weakness, while women are supposed to be more social, and ask for help. In MMOGs, being social and able to ask for help are paramount to succeeding in the game, while being independent will often get one's character killed.

In Confessions of an MMOG Cross-dresser, Bruce Sterling Woodcock (SirBruce of MMOGChart, not Bruce Sterling of Islands in the Net) recollects his experiences with in-game crossdressing.

In most games, players don't have a choice of their character's gender -- if you're playing Tomb Raider, you are Lara Croft and you are female. If you're playing Super Mario Bros. you are Mario or Luigi and you are male. However, as games have gotten more advanced, the choice of gender for a character is now an option in many games (and almost all MMOGs) and three to five times as many males than females are likely to gender bend in MMOGs.

When I was working on Diablo II, I'd often read the message board and see posts by players expressing their anger over our decision to make our only pure magic class Sorceress character female (as opposed to the male Sorceror character we had in Diablo), saying that they refused to play a female character. These posts used to amuse me a great deal, because in most games, it is the women who had to play men in games, and now with a gender switch, male players were suddenly complaining (quite loudly, I might add) of what women had endured for the past two decades in games: being forced to play a role in a gender that was not their own.

Alice of Wonderland had this to say about Boys, Gender and Games:

Christmastime really hammers home awareness of gender-ised play, I think, seeing all the pink stuff on the shelves for girls, and the camo-and-guns stuff for boys. But while I'm often disheartened by the candyfloss inanity of the girls' toys, I've been really struck at how oftentimes the boys' fate can be worse.

. Alice then goes on to cite a recent experience of hers at a Disney themepark, during a promotion in which kids dressed up as pirates or princesses received a free foam wand or foam sword, but remarked that while girls could be pirates or princesses, the boys could only be pirates, and lamented there was "No little boy in a princess outfit, of course, because that would be somehow unacceptable (although I personally think it'd be superb). How is it that we're accepting of girls playing with boy toys, but not the other way round; is it healthy for boys to grow up without ever being able to play around with girls' stuff? "

While the games market is dominated by boy games, there are a fair number of gender neutral games, and a really small amount of girl games. If you go to a toystore, there's the girl section and the boy section, and they're about equal, with the gender neutral stuff (legos, block toys, stuffed animals, exercise gear) in the middle. That's the way games should be too, but they're not -- boy games take up a disproportionate amount of the videogame section when it really should be equal to the girl's section, and we have the male-dominated games industry to blame for that. While Hollywood seems content to produce movies like Titanic and Pride and Prejudice, there's no equivalent game studio willing to produce a blockbuster game for a largely female audience, and I feel a big part of this is simply because game developers don't know what attracts female gamers. Of all game genres so far, the MMOG has one of the highest female population rates (at 20%, most of them introduced to the game by their signifigant others). The Sims is a higher percentage, but the Sims is not really a game, so much as a simulation software toy.

More in the extended about my own journey to the female side, and further observations of gender roles in MMOGs.

• Metal Tins, Slide Top Tins
  might be handy for moo cards
  (tags: metal tins moo case)
• Quiz - What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die? - Quizilla Quizzes
  (tags: halloween gorey death quiz)
• Gamespot: Interview with novelist Richard A. Knaak hints at Diablo 3.
  "I'm not writing for a dead world".
  (tags: diablo d3 blizzard videogame pc diablo3)

Let's have a round of applause to Blizzard's marketing team -- deciding to make a $70 dollar expansion pack for WoW is a pretty ballsy move. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is the most expensive expansion set in the history of the games industry. Heck, even whole boxed game sequels don't sell for that much.

The normal price of the Burning Crusade expansion set is $40. For 30 bucks more, you get a whole mess of extras:

• World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade on both CD and DVD
  
• World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Behind-the-Scenes DVD
  
• The Art of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Hardcover Art Book
  
• Exclusive In-Game Pet: Netherwhelp
  
• Two World of Warcraft Trading Card Game Starter Packs, plus Exclusive Cards
  
• Map of Outland Mouse Pad
  
• World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Soundtrack CD
  

The two big things that make it worth it are the Hardcover Art Book, and the In-Game Pet. You think I kid about the pet, but I've had people offer me ridiculous sums of money when they see me running around with my Collector's Edition pets (Diablo, Zergling or Panda). And those Baby Murlocs that you get from BlizzCon are pretty sweet as well -- I've seen them ebay'd for some nice change in the past like this one, where the Murloc pet sold for 700+ dollars. That's good, solid American currency, folks. Or this unopened Collector's Edition which sold YESTERDAY for $630. Damn, I never shoulda opened mine -- but the art book was just too pretty to not look at.

To be fair, the Collector's Edition of WoW was near impossible to get -- I had heard rumors that Blizzard themselves did not even have enough copies internally to give to their employees, and so resorted to picking up copies at Fry's.

I have no clue how many copies of the Burning Crusade Collector's Edition they're making -- I know it's gotta be more than the 70,000 they made for WoW, but I would not expect it to be worth that much in the future, but I'm buying it anyway.

I wrote a guest article for Diabloii.net about my experiences working of Diablo II, entitled Memories of Blizzard North and Diablo II. I write about my experiences at Blizzard North and some of the people I worked with.

Gamespot recently reports Blizzard is bulking up the Diablo dev team based on the new Job Descriptions posted on Blizzard's website, which states "The team behind Diablo I and II is looking for..." As a former member of the the team behind Diablo I and II, I can say this -- this is another way of saying the people from Blizzard North need people to replace the ones who didn't depart to Irvine.
I think it's also fair for me to say that I can count exactly 1 person who would have been on the team for Diablo I and Diablo II still working for Blizzard, and less than 6 who would have done production work on Diablo II. Most of the people who had any inkling of how to design a Diablo game have already departed, either because they didn't want to move to Irvine or they didn't want to work on the project.
Could they take whatever the North team was working on for the years since Diablo II expansion and run with it? Sure. That's always a possibility. But Blizzard has a reputation, one for quality that hasn't been soiled by the patching of WoW -- they'll apply some of the old Blizzard polish, and they won't ship something incomplete, so even if they announce at E3 it would be a minimum of a year and a half before they will be able to shove something out the door. Which I secretly believe is too optimistic, seeing as Starcraft Ghost has been in perpetual limbo for over 3 years.

As a reader of science fiction, I've always had a great respect for the awards that they give out, particularly the Hugo Awards, because the voters of the Hugo Awards are the attendees of the World Science Fiction Convention, in other words, they are fans. This year, the special category for L.A.Con IV is "Best Interactive Video Game".
Greg Costikyan parses out exactly what that means, with a plea that to WSFC that they never do this again.
It's probably been a category long missing from the Hugos.
Awards are essentially meaningless. Funny thing for me to say, considering how full the trophy case was at Blizzard, but it's true. It's nice to receive an award and have that moment of recognition, but if the game is good enough and fun enough, it gains recognition and reputation on its own. It was always much nicer to hear a fan express praise for the game than receiving another award.
Video Games have been in the mainstream consciouness since the early 80s, but has never quite attained the prestige level of the other forms of entertainment. Now we've reached the point where gaming is recognized by other industries, but at the same time, the way they've gone about it shows a clear lack of understanding for games and the industry.
Games are not a solitary project -- there's always dozens of people involved, and it becomes hard to split who should receive the credit for the game, so rather than a producer, director or programmer or artist stepping up to accept the award for the game, it's either an executive or a public relations person, people who usually have little to do with the actual production and design of the game. There's a picture on the showing me and the rest of the Diablo II team, over 40 people, and that didn't include the Blizzard executives or the marketing and public relations people -- that was just people who had their hands in the project. Every award we had ever received was accepted by these people, and then put inside the display case in the main lobby.
Here are a couple of problems I see in the game selection and review process, and this is true for all awards, not just for Hugos:

• Getting the material out to review. While books and movies are relatively cheap to view, videogames are much more expensive -- they require a console as well as a game.
  
• Reviewing the game -- how does one evaluate a game in time for judging -- games usually take a while to finish -- it's not like a novel that one can finish in a night.
  
• Popularity and voting numbers isn't a good indicator of quality. It's more a measure of what's on people's minds.
  

Even so, while I'm happy that folks are recognizing games as worthy of receiving a Hugo, they may want to qualify what part of the game is the qualifier -- is it the story or the art or the design or something else entirely?
Since qualifying titles must be published in 2005, World of Warcraft (the obvious choice) is out - it was published in 2004, leaving 2005 full of dark horse candidates. Some notable games that I'd put on the list deserving of a Hugo:

• Shadow of the Colossus
  
• We Love Katamari
  
• LEGO Star Wars
  
• Resident Evil 4
  
• God of War
  

Last week, Asheron's Call 2 was shut down for good. The original Asheron's Call however, continues to thrive.
Some last screenshots of Asheron's Call 2
Saying goodbye is never easy, even when the digital armageddon of a world has a timer attached. Even so, there was assorted nerdspeak in the final moments along with the traditional 'goodbye'.
This world will be shutting down in 1 minute. Please log out.
Malee Xv: "For the Quest is achieved, and now all is over. I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things,", Frodo Baggins"

This world is shutting down NOW! Log out!

Ctf: so long and thx fer all the FISH!

Aken-Lotus: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"


A short history of the Asheron's Call franchise and some thoughts about the future of MMOGs follows.

Guess where? Yep. It's in Korea again. I've been keeping track of these gamer-related death stories for a while now, and odds are these days that it's either Taiwan or Korea. Once in a while someone in China dies playing games, but those stories tend to be a bit more violent, or just game re-enactments gone horribly awry. Japanese gamers don't tend to die, but they did have an incident a few years back with the Pokemon cartoon inducing seizures.

SEOUL (AFP) - A South Korean man collapsed and died from exhaustion after playing computer games for 10 days without a proper rest.
The 38-year-old man collapsed Thursday as he was playing an on-line game at an Internet cafe in Incheon, west of Seoul.
"He was carried to a nearby hospital but declared dead on arrival," a police officer told AFP.
The officer said the man had played computer games from morning to night every day and had barely stopped to sleep.
In August, a 28-year-old man died in southeastern Taegu city after playing an online computer game for more than two days.

Source: (Yahoo)

At the DIEC 2005 Conference in Tokyo this week, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell slammed Sony and praised Nintendo.Bushnell also presents some interesting numbers:
In 1982, he tells us, there were 44 million gamers. Today, there are 18 million. Where-d they all go? "Complexity lost the casual gamer", he says. "Violence lost the woman gamer." He ventures into Nintendo territory, even slamming the PS2 controller.
I don't believe that there's only 18 million gamers out there. I think there's much more than that. A number of 18 million gamers would mean that 1 out of 3 gamers bought Diablo II, and that half of the gamers out there bought Final Fantasy VII.
I do however, believe in his statement that complexity has lost the casual gamer. I don't think it's the complete fault of the controller. Games have gotten more complicated, and certainly more visual, but it doesn't have anything to do with the controller -- in fact, save the addition of more buttons, the current console controller isn't all that different from the joysticks of yesteryear.

Seven Skulls, the online website of artist Justin Parks has some really funny game related comics. A couple of them feature Diablo II, a game that I labored on for several years. There's something pleasing about seeing something you helped create inspire art and humor. Warning: some of the images contain blood and violence, and an occassional swear word or two. The views expressed are not my own, but they are pretty damn funny.

My favorites are:
N3 vs. Diablo #4

N3 vs. Diablo #5

N3 vs. Diablo #7

WoW #2: Orc Newbie Quests
WoW #3: Undead Newbie Quests

City of Heroes

Lord of the Rings #1

Lord of the Rings #2

Just had an interesting thought regarding a trend I've been noticing lately. When we were making Diablo II, we had a very small team and 5 years to make the game. That game was the pinacle of 2D graphics. To make a game with the same amount of content using 3d graphics takes substantially more man power and more time. But the encouragement these days seems to be a quick turnaround time for the game -- a shorter development cycle -- so instead of 5 years, you might have 18 month dev cycles with 3 times as many people working on the project. Is this the future? Short dev cycles that never give a idea a chance to mature?

SpikeTV had their Video Game Awards last night, and awarded
GTA: San Andreas Game of the Year. Nothing against the guys at Rockstar who made the game, but San Andreas just wasn't game of the year material. That's not to say that the viewers of SpikeTV don't know games, but their list of games is on the overyhyped-what just came out last week side of things. I figure my list is just as valid as their list (and you don't need to watch an asinine 2 hour wannabe-MTV-style presentation to enjoy my picks). Gamespot is also doing a Best and Worst of 2004 and includes some categories I don't even dare come close to touching, like Flat-Out Worst Game and Worst Disappointment.

Best Driving Game: Burnout 3

This game feels like a driving game designed by Jerry Bruckheimer. Lots of adrenaline pumping action, no plot to speak of, and it's just fun to send cars flying every which way as you ram and run cars off the road.

Best Novelty Game: Donkey Konga

You have to hand it to Nintendo, it was ingenious of them to create a fun game and then link it to a pre-existing license.

Best Movie-Affiliated Game: Chronicles of Riddick

Movie based games always suck, but this year, there were two serious contenders: Spider-Man 2 and Riddick. Riddick won my vote, partially because they had Vin Diesel reprise his role in the game, and also because I couldn't remember which version of Spider-Man was the good one (they released different versions and in one port you can swing from the skyscrapers like Spidey, and in the other one you can't).

Best Weird Game: Katamari Damacy

That's how weird this game is. It transcends categories. You roll a spiky ball to stick everything to it. Towards the end of the game, you're a little tiny guy rolling skyscrapers and islands into this ball.

Best Massively Multiplayer Online Game: World of Warcraft

City of Heroes, Everquest II and Final Fantasy XI just all sucked. Add in the fact that WoW sim-shipped for Mac and PC at the same time, and you've got a winner. Diablo was RPG-gameplay on crack, WoW is MMOG on crack. Another hands-down winner for Blizzard.

Worst TV-Affiliated Game: Alias

Wow, this game was a stinker. While they did get the cast to do voice-overs, the animations look stiff and wooden, and it has none of the intensity of the tv show.