Warning: while this review is completely Safe For Work, the subject of the review is certainly not. You should wait until you get home before trying out the game.
We received quite a few tips about the new World of Warcraft homage game called WTF?! Currently offering a "demo" version, WTF?! is a side-scrolling comedy, featuring two main characters available for your control. You can play the scarlet-topped Blood Elf Priest named "Phallicity" or the rockin' Gnome Rogue named "Lumpen."
The premise of the game is focused on the world of...
..."Azimuth" where a Rift Lord has opened a portal from the ideaological homeworld of Karl Marx, Mary Daly, and Sigmund Freud. You start off by re-sheeping the enlightened converts of Marx, only to be forced to mass slaughter them when your mentor decides Marx is gaining followers far too quickly. After leaving them nothing but ex-sheep corpses beneath your sword, you are told to go showdown with a dwarven, and rather polite, Karl. Hijinks continue to ensue.
The controls and game play for the WTF?! are relatively simple, and definitely call back to its source: World of Warcraft. You get items, armor, and spells. You complete quests. You gain cash, and levels. The game is a side-scroller, and actually leads to some of my favorite humor from the game. (Jumps, deaths, and respawns all pay homage to the most legendary of sidescroll heroes: Mario.) The controls are easy enough that you'll pick them up without having to read through too much of the tutorial.
The game itself warns you: they're playing with bleeding-edge Flash stuff in this game. It can be laggy on a weaker machine, and the developers offer you a few tips on how to mitigate poor performance. The graphics are pretty cool. They did a lot of clever costume design (I'm a fan of Sigmund's outfit, and wish I could raid Karazhan in it.) "Effin' Forest" is your starting area, and the textures and images come straight from WoW. It was pretty cool to look at, and I was impressed by the style.
WTF?!That being said, WTF?! confuses me. On one hand, it's got a lot of toilet humor, and toilet-humor's close cousin "sophomore sex humor." That shouldn't be a shock -- the main, default character is named Phallicity. Freud's appearance in the game aside, the double-entendre is reinforced when you get a holy spell to orally blow an enemy away. This style humor and reference doesn't seem to go away, and I found it distracting from an otherwise pretty fun game. I guess it could just be me getting old, but that kind of thing isn't my style anymore.
On the other hand, my confusion comes about because of the much higher-brow references and humor that litter WTF?! Like I've said, the plot of the game is focused around ideaological conflicts. The idea that Karl Marx is turning Sheep into People is a pretty fun concept to play with. I found myself reading the quest-giver's text very closely, and it was pretty easy to see him being the Man trying to keep the Worker Down. His name is Hegemon, after all, which is a pretty straightforward reference.
WTF?!I can't tell you whether you'd like the game. I enjoyed it on one level, even if the more crass jokes really distracted me from otherwise fun things on another level. It's hard not to compare WTF?! to the Murloc RPG that went around a few years ago. I think, for my money, WTF?! is probably more advanced and detailed, but Murloc RPG is smoother without the toilet-humor distraction.
It should be noted, in addition, that the authors of WTF?! makes the tools they used freely available to other aspiring game makers. The "!" suite of Flash Tools (formerly known as "WoW inspired side-scrolling Flash-based, RPG, SDK") are readily available for download from WTF?!'s website. I thought that was an incredibly generous, awesome touch. I'm no programmer, but I admit -- I've downloaded the files to see what there is to play with.
All in all, WTF?! is definitely worth the play-through. If you find the vulgar humor more distracting than even I did, you might not make it far. But the graphics, and philosophical jokes, definitely ended up redeeming it for me. I'd recommend it for the next time your waiting for your server come back up. It'll keep you in the WoW-mind while you're waiting to get back in the game for real.
Wednesday, 11 June 2008
MMOGs Are For Kids
Will was eager to play a massively multiplayer online game ever since he could grasp the concept, so when he finally got the opportunity, he wanted to do it right. He meticulously tweaked the features of his avatar to his exacting specifications before journeying into the game world for the first time. He flew through the starting zone and led his fledgling fighter out into the next area - a zone where player versus player combat was permitted - confident the real fun was just beginning.
He enjoyed himself ... for about three minutes, until a fireball from a much higher-level character struck him. Naturally, he was dead before he even knew what was happening. What's more, the aggressor wasn't alone. He and his four coconspirators "ganked" Will's helpless character five times - once each - for no obvious reason other than that they could.
Some of us might react to this obstacle with gritty determination, vowing to build up enough strength to exact vengeance. Not Will, who was 9 years old at the time. He chose not to respawn. Instead, he logged out - and didn't play an MMOG again for six years.
Many kids Will's age play MMOGs, but these worlds aren't always hospitable to children. Fortunately, more enlightened attitudes now prevail, both across the industry and especially among companies seeking to attract precisely this younger audience. They comprise a growing list that includes a number of very prominent names, including Disney, the creators of Toontown Online and Pirates of the Caribbean Online, aimed at children and teens respectively.(Disney also purchased Club Penguin in August 2007) Likewise, Mattel's Barbie Girls and Nickelodeon's Nicktropolis each attempt to provide a safe online environment for kids to interact - both with each other and each company's respective brands.
Currently in development at NetDevil, LEGO Universe will bring another major global toy brand into the MMOG space. Producer Ryan Seabury is cognizant that that for any title aimed at non-adult users to succeed, experiences like Will's can't be allowed to happen. "When talking about kids and online experiences, of course safety is paramount," he states. He points out the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which applies to websites that collect information from children under the age of 13. However, he readily acknowledges that mere compliance falls short of an acceptable safety strategy, and that the gaming industry has to set a higher standard. "Many modern kids will get their first multi-user online experience through MMOGs," he says. "It's our responsibility as developers not only to provide safe harbors for them to set sail from in their modern connected lives, but also to foster the fundamentals of being good online citizens."
Ken Locker is Senior Vice President of Digital Media at Cookie Jar Entertainment. Working with developers Tribal Nova and Frima Studio, his company has just released Magi-Nation: Battle for the Moonlands. Based on a property that includes a collectible card game and an animated TV series, it primarily targets "tweens" age 8 to 12. He places "the safety of our fans at the top of our priority list," noting that Cookie Jar voluntarily complies with the Better Business Bureau's Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU), which reviews advertising and promotional material directed at children across all media, including the internet.
Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall's Executive Producer Chris Waldron agrees. "It's essential to provide a safe online environment for children." he says. "When designing an MMOG for children, it is crucial to protect them from any form of harassment and potential online predators."
"Ganking" is one obvious form of online predation that has to be prevented. "It's no different for kids or adults," says Seabury. "It's just not a fun experience for those who end up on the losing side." He does, however, support consensual PvP as a form of good-spirited competitive play that participants who opt in will enjoy. To encourage it, he believes in rewarding both the winners and the losers, although the latter to a far lesser extent.
Magi-Nation goes a step further. It has consensual PvP, but according to Locker, the avatars don't engage each other directly. Instead, their Dream Creatures do battle. Success depends on how effectively the players imbue these summoned proxies with the strategic use of inventory items. "Battles are more like competitions. Dream Creatures don't die when defeated; they may lie dormant for a while, but they always return. Since the game is fantasy-based, we're able to accomplish competitive battles by incorporating elements like spells, curses and magic objects without outright representations of graphic violence."
Waldron and his team have also designed their combat system differently to fit younger users and to reflect the underlying franchise. "Like the cartoons that have inspired us, we expect FusionFall to be fun for kids of all ages. There's no death, blood or gore. Combat is lighthearted, rather than violent. We also believe this will make the game more enjoyable and accessible to a wider, casual audience."
Inappropriate language is another major concern. "Some of the chat features would be very different if we were targeting FusionFall toward adults," he states. "Because we're dealing with a younger audience, we provide more restricted chat mechanisms and put the control in parents' hands as to what level of chat access they want their children to have."
LEGO Universe's Seabury adds that "if people are in your house saying things you'd rather your kids didn't hear, you have every right to kick them out; fundamentally, it's no different in an MMOG. You don't often see political protests at theme parks, because they - the good ones at least - are run like mini-fascist utopias where no one is allowed to disturb the peace. It's simply the wrong forum."
out; fundamentally, it's no different in an MMOG. You don't often see political protests at theme parks.
Cookie Jar restricts open chat and monitors Magi-Nation for inappropriate behavior in order to provide an environment that's compelling, fun and rewarding for players. Ken Locker is unequivocal that "in order to make the game fun and safe for anyone who wants to play, regardless of age, those who don't want to be part of this type of environment will be prohibited from playing."
All three companies agree that providing a safe environment for kids and teens involves protecting them from a range of other undesirable behaviors, from following, stalking and harassment to scams intended to obtain items, in-game currency, account passwords or personal information. "Anything that creates a negative experience for a visitor to our world would be something we'd consider protecting against in our safety strategies," says Seabury.
These strategies encompass both design and enforcement elements. For example, Waldron says FusionFall will have both trained support staff and built-in algorithms that set off alarms when they detect potentially unsafe circumstances such as possible harassment situations. "At that point, someone from Cartoon Network will get involved and either ban the harasser or take another appropriate course of action. Our online support staff is already well-versed in online child safety."
Coming from a background of creating and operating online games for adults, Ryan Seabury may consider his team's situation to be slightly lower on the learning curve. "It's a constant but welcome challenge to find safety solutions that don't hinder fun and gameplay," he declares. "Every game will have its own unique conditions and threat landscape to deal with, and of course, specific mechanics and features that may be hazardous in different ways. If you're making a title for kids, it's a safe assumption that customer service will be more significant than if you had targeted a more mature audience."
When Will had his disagreeable experience that put him off MMOGs for six years, it occurred in a game that wasn't designed for his age group. The reason was simple: such games didn't exist. But that's no longer the case. Children, tweens, and teens now have multiple choices geared specifically to their demographic, with more on the way. In addition, developers and publishers have had several years to learn about the core problems that can hurt a player's experience, how to help prevent them from coming up and how to deal with them more rapidly and effectively when they do. As a result, we can now safely say that MMOGs - at least, some MMOGs - are for kids.
Richard Aihoshi
Richard Aihoshi has been writing about games for over a decade, particularly the massively multiplayer and RPG categories. He has been known to play MMOGs and other games that are ostensibly for kids.
He enjoyed himself ... for about three minutes, until a fireball from a much higher-level character struck him. Naturally, he was dead before he even knew what was happening. What's more, the aggressor wasn't alone. He and his four coconspirators "ganked" Will's helpless character five times - once each - for no obvious reason other than that they could.
Some of us might react to this obstacle with gritty determination, vowing to build up enough strength to exact vengeance. Not Will, who was 9 years old at the time. He chose not to respawn. Instead, he logged out - and didn't play an MMOG again for six years.
Many kids Will's age play MMOGs, but these worlds aren't always hospitable to children. Fortunately, more enlightened attitudes now prevail, both across the industry and especially among companies seeking to attract precisely this younger audience. They comprise a growing list that includes a number of very prominent names, including Disney, the creators of Toontown Online and Pirates of the Caribbean Online, aimed at children and teens respectively.(Disney also purchased Club Penguin in August 2007) Likewise, Mattel's Barbie Girls and Nickelodeon's Nicktropolis each attempt to provide a safe online environment for kids to interact - both with each other and each company's respective brands.
Currently in development at NetDevil, LEGO Universe will bring another major global toy brand into the MMOG space. Producer Ryan Seabury is cognizant that that for any title aimed at non-adult users to succeed, experiences like Will's can't be allowed to happen. "When talking about kids and online experiences, of course safety is paramount," he states. He points out the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which applies to websites that collect information from children under the age of 13. However, he readily acknowledges that mere compliance falls short of an acceptable safety strategy, and that the gaming industry has to set a higher standard. "Many modern kids will get their first multi-user online experience through MMOGs," he says. "It's our responsibility as developers not only to provide safe harbors for them to set sail from in their modern connected lives, but also to foster the fundamentals of being good online citizens."
Ken Locker is Senior Vice President of Digital Media at Cookie Jar Entertainment. Working with developers Tribal Nova and Frima Studio, his company has just released Magi-Nation: Battle for the Moonlands. Based on a property that includes a collectible card game and an animated TV series, it primarily targets "tweens" age 8 to 12. He places "the safety of our fans at the top of our priority list," noting that Cookie Jar voluntarily complies with the Better Business Bureau's Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU), which reviews advertising and promotional material directed at children across all media, including the internet.
Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall's Executive Producer Chris Waldron agrees. "It's essential to provide a safe online environment for children." he says. "When designing an MMOG for children, it is crucial to protect them from any form of harassment and potential online predators."
"Ganking" is one obvious form of online predation that has to be prevented. "It's no different for kids or adults," says Seabury. "It's just not a fun experience for those who end up on the losing side." He does, however, support consensual PvP as a form of good-spirited competitive play that participants who opt in will enjoy. To encourage it, he believes in rewarding both the winners and the losers, although the latter to a far lesser extent.
Magi-Nation goes a step further. It has consensual PvP, but according to Locker, the avatars don't engage each other directly. Instead, their Dream Creatures do battle. Success depends on how effectively the players imbue these summoned proxies with the strategic use of inventory items. "Battles are more like competitions. Dream Creatures don't die when defeated; they may lie dormant for a while, but they always return. Since the game is fantasy-based, we're able to accomplish competitive battles by incorporating elements like spells, curses and magic objects without outright representations of graphic violence."
Waldron and his team have also designed their combat system differently to fit younger users and to reflect the underlying franchise. "Like the cartoons that have inspired us, we expect FusionFall to be fun for kids of all ages. There's no death, blood or gore. Combat is lighthearted, rather than violent. We also believe this will make the game more enjoyable and accessible to a wider, casual audience."
Inappropriate language is another major concern. "Some of the chat features would be very different if we were targeting FusionFall toward adults," he states. "Because we're dealing with a younger audience, we provide more restricted chat mechanisms and put the control in parents' hands as to what level of chat access they want their children to have."
LEGO Universe's Seabury adds that "if people are in your house saying things you'd rather your kids didn't hear, you have every right to kick them out; fundamentally, it's no different in an MMOG. You don't often see political protests at theme parks, because they - the good ones at least - are run like mini-fascist utopias where no one is allowed to disturb the peace. It's simply the wrong forum."
out; fundamentally, it's no different in an MMOG. You don't often see political protests at theme parks.
Cookie Jar restricts open chat and monitors Magi-Nation for inappropriate behavior in order to provide an environment that's compelling, fun and rewarding for players. Ken Locker is unequivocal that "in order to make the game fun and safe for anyone who wants to play, regardless of age, those who don't want to be part of this type of environment will be prohibited from playing."
All three companies agree that providing a safe environment for kids and teens involves protecting them from a range of other undesirable behaviors, from following, stalking and harassment to scams intended to obtain items, in-game currency, account passwords or personal information. "Anything that creates a negative experience for a visitor to our world would be something we'd consider protecting against in our safety strategies," says Seabury.
These strategies encompass both design and enforcement elements. For example, Waldron says FusionFall will have both trained support staff and built-in algorithms that set off alarms when they detect potentially unsafe circumstances such as possible harassment situations. "At that point, someone from Cartoon Network will get involved and either ban the harasser or take another appropriate course of action. Our online support staff is already well-versed in online child safety."
Coming from a background of creating and operating online games for adults, Ryan Seabury may consider his team's situation to be slightly lower on the learning curve. "It's a constant but welcome challenge to find safety solutions that don't hinder fun and gameplay," he declares. "Every game will have its own unique conditions and threat landscape to deal with, and of course, specific mechanics and features that may be hazardous in different ways. If you're making a title for kids, it's a safe assumption that customer service will be more significant than if you had targeted a more mature audience."
When Will had his disagreeable experience that put him off MMOGs for six years, it occurred in a game that wasn't designed for his age group. The reason was simple: such games didn't exist. But that's no longer the case. Children, tweens, and teens now have multiple choices geared specifically to their demographic, with more on the way. In addition, developers and publishers have had several years to learn about the core problems that can hurt a player's experience, how to help prevent them from coming up and how to deal with them more rapidly and effectively when they do. As a result, we can now safely say that MMOGs - at least, some MMOGs - are for kids.
Richard Aihoshi
Richard Aihoshi has been writing about games for over a decade, particularly the massively multiplayer and RPG categories. He has been known to play MMOGs and other games that are ostensibly for kids.
S4 Announcement
Season 4 on June 24 (US) and 25 (EU)
Ok, that's official.
* US Starting date: June 24
* EU Starting date: June 25
Source
Ok, that's official.
* US Starting date: June 24
* EU Starting date: June 25
Source
Tuesday, 10 June 2008
Playing to Win
Playing to Win
Playing to win is the most important and most widely misunderstood concept in all of competitive games. The sad irony is that those who do not already understand the implications I’m about to spell out will probably not believe them to be true at all. In fact, if I were to send this article back in time to my earlier self, even I would not believe it. Apparently, these concepts are something one must come to learn through experience, though I hope at least some of you will take my word for it.
Introducing...the Scrub
In the world of Street Fighter competition, we have a word for players who aren’t good: “scrub.” Now, everyone begins as a scrub—it takes time to learn the game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, that one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game before he’s chosen his character. He’s lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win.
Historical Scrub: Neville Chamberlain. He didn't even try to win, instead offering "appeasement" to Hitler. What a cunt.
The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever
Historical Scrub: Neville Chamberlain. He didn't even try to win, instead offering "appeasement" to Hitler.
truly competing. These made up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. In Street Fighter, for example, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” So-called “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield which will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.
You’re not going to see a classic scrub throw his opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize his chances of winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you…that’s cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too. We’ve covered that one. If you sit in block for 50 seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap.
Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is another great way to get called cheap. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.
A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which ones tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite esoteric and difficult to discover. The counter tactic prevents the first player from doing the tactic, but the first player can then use a counter to the counter. The second player is now afraid to use his counter and he’s again vulnerable to the original overpowering tactic. (See my article on Yomi layer 3 for much more on that.)
Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.
Let’s return to the group of scrubs. They don’t know the first
Historical Scrubs: The British Redcoats. The ultimate example of being too bound up by rules to actually fight. They fought "honorably" by marching into gunfire.
The thing about all the depth I’ve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.” Superficially, their argument does at least look true, since often their games will be more “wet and wild” than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that you can counter his ever move, even his every counter.
Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.
The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is sequence of moves that are unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.” Just last week I played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him 5 times in a row asking, “is that all you know how to do? throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’” This was a big moment in that scrub’s life. He could either write his losses off and continue living in his mental prison, or analyze why he lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play.
I’ve never been to a tournament where there was a prize for the winner and another prize for the player who did many difficult moves. I’ve also never seen a prize for a player who played “in an innovative way.” Many scrubs have strong ties to “innovation.” They say “that guy didn’t do anything new, so he is no good.” Or “person x invented that technique and person y just stole it.” Well, person y might be 100 times better than person x, but that doesn’t seem to matter. When person y wins the tournament and person x is a forgotten footnote, what will the scrub say? That person y has “no skill” of course.
Depth in Games
I’ve talked about how the expert player is not bound by rules of
Scrub of the Future: Captain Kathryn Janeway. Voyager would have been home ages ago if it weren't for her silly rules. (Don't watch Voyager.):
“honor” or “cheapness” and simply plays to maximize his chances of winning. When he plays against other such players, “game theory” emerges. If the game is a good one, it will become deeper and deeper and more strategic. Poorly designed games will become shallower and shallower. This is the difference between an arcade game that lasts years in an arcade versus one that lasts 4 months. This is the difference between a PC game that lasts years on the shelves (Starcraft) versus one that quickly becomes boring (I won’t name any names). The point is that if a game becomes “no fun” at high levels of play, then it’s the game’s fault, not the player’s. Unfortunately, a game becoming less fun because it’s poorly designed and you just losing because you’re a scrub kind of look alike. You’ll have to play some top players and do some soul searching to decide which is which. But if it really is the game’s fault, there are plenty of other games that are excellent at a high level of play. For games that truly aren’t good at a high level, the only winning move is not to play.
Boundaries of Playing to Win
There is a gray area here I feel I should point out. If an expert does anything he can to win, then does he exploit bugs in the game? The answer is a resounding yes…but not all bugs. There is a large class of bugs in video games that players don’t even view as bugs. In Marvel vs. Capcom 2, for example, Iceman can launch his opponent into the air, follow him, do a few hits, then combo into his super move. During the super move he falls down below his opponent, so only about half of his super will connect. The Iceman player can use a trick, though. Just before doing the super, he can do another move, an icebeam, and cancel that move into the super. There’s a bug here which causes iceman to fall, during his super, at the much slower rate of his icebeam. The player actually cancels the icebeam as soon as possible—optimally as soon as 1/60th of a second after it begins. The whole point is to make iceman fall slower during his super so he gets more hits. Is it a bug? I’m sure it is. It looks like a programming oversight to me. Would an expert player use this? Of course.
The iceman example is relatively tame. In Street Fighter Alpha2, there’s a bug in which you can land the most powerful move in the game (a Custom Combo or “CC”) on the opponent, even when he should be able to block it. A bug? Yes. Does it help you win? Yes. This technique became the dominant tactic of the game. The gameplay evolved around this, play went on, new strategies were developed. Those who cried cheap were simply left behind to play their own homemade version of the game with made-up rules. The one we all played had unblockable CCs, and it went on to be a great game.
But there is a limit. There is a point when the bug becomes too much. In tournaments, bugs that turn the game off, or freeze it indefinitely, or remove one of the characters from the playfield permanently are banned. Bugs so extreme that they stop gameplay are considered unfair even by non-scrubs. As are techniques that can only be performed on, say, the one player side of the game. There are a few esoteric tricks in various fighting games that are side dependant—that can’t be performed on the 2nd player side, for example.
Here’s an example of the grayest area of all. Many versions of Street Fighter have “secret characters” that are only accessible through a code. Sometimes these characters are good, sometimes they’re not. Occasionally, the secret characters are the best in the game, as in Marvel vs. Capcom. Big deal. That’s the way that game is. Live with it. But the first version of Street Fighter to ever have a secret character was Super Turbo Street Fighter with its untouchably good Akuma. Most characters in that game cannot beat Akuma. I don’t mean it’s a tough match—I mean they cannot ever, ever, ever, ever win. Akuma is “broken” in that his air fireball move is something the game simply wasn’t designed to handle. He’s miles above the other characters, and is therefore banned in all tournaments. But every game has a “best character” and those characters are never banned. They’re just part of the game…except in Super Turbo. It’s extreme examples like this that even amongst the top players, and even something that isn’t a bug, but was put in on purpose by the game designers, the community as a whole has unanimously decided to make the rule: “don’t play Akuma in serious matches.”
My Attitude and Adenosine Triphosphate
I’ve been talking down to the scrub a lot in this article. I’d like to say for the record that I’m not calling the scrub stupid. I’m not saying he can never improve. I am saying that he’s naïve and that he’ll be trapped in scrubdom, whether he realizes it or not, as long as he chooses to live in the mental construct of rules he himself constructed. Is it harsh to call scrubs naïve? After all, the vast majority of the world is scrubs. I’d say by the definition I’ve classified 99.9% of the world’s population as scrubs. Seriously. All that means is that 99.9% of the world doesn’t know what it’s like to play competitive games on a high level. It means that they are naïve of these concepts. I really have no trouble saying that since we’re talking about esoteric, experience-driven knowledge here. I also know that 99.9% of the world (including me) doesn’t know how the citric acid cycle and cellular respiration create 38 ATP molecules per cycle. It’s an esoteric thing of which I am unaware, just as many are unaware of competitive games.
Biological organisms store energy in the form of ATP molecules. When energy is needed, it's released by breaking the bond of one phosphate, creating ADP.
In the end, playing to win ends up accomplishing much more than just winning. Playing to win is how one improves. Continuous self-improvement is what all of this is really about, anyway. I submit that ultimate goal of the “playing to win” mindset is ironically not just to win…but to improve. So practice, improve, play with discipline, and play to win.
Playing to win is the most important and most widely misunderstood concept in all of competitive games. The sad irony is that those who do not already understand the implications I’m about to spell out will probably not believe them to be true at all. In fact, if I were to send this article back in time to my earlier self, even I would not believe it. Apparently, these concepts are something one must come to learn through experience, though I hope at least some of you will take my word for it.
Introducing...the Scrub
In the world of Street Fighter competition, we have a word for players who aren’t good: “scrub.” Now, everyone begins as a scrub—it takes time to learn the game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing. There is the mistaken notion, though, that by merely continuing to play or “learn” the game, that one can become a top player. In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game. The scrub has lost the game even before it starts. He’s lost the game before he’s chosen his character. He’s lost the game even before the decision of which game is to be played has been made. His problem? He does not play to win.
Historical Scrub: Neville Chamberlain. He didn't even try to win, instead offering "appeasement" to Hitler. What a cunt.
The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever
Historical Scrub: Neville Chamberlain. He didn't even try to win, instead offering "appeasement" to Hitler.
truly competing. These made up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. In Street Fighter, for example, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” So-called “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield which will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.
You’re not going to see a classic scrub throw his opponent 5 times in a row. But why not? What if doing so is strategically the sequence of moves that optimize his chances of winning? Here we’ve encountered our first clash: the scrub is only willing to play to win within his own made-up mental set of rules. These rules can be staggeringly arbitrary. If you beat a scrub by throwing projectile attacks at him, keeping your distance and preventing him from getting near you…that’s cheap. If you throw him repeatedly, that’s cheap, too. We’ve covered that one. If you sit in block for 50 seconds doing no moves, that’s cheap. Nearly anything you do that ends up making you win is a prime candidate for being called cheap.
Doing one move or sequence over and over and over is another great way to get called cheap. This goes right to the heart of the matter: why can the scrub not defeat something so obvious and telegraphed as a single move done over and over? Is he such a poor player that he can’t counter that move? And if the move is, for whatever reason, extremely difficult to counter, then wouldn’t I be a fool for not using that move? The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.
A common call of the scrub is to cry that the kind of play in which ones tries to win at all costs is “boring” or “not fun.” Let’s consider two groups of players: a group of good players and a group of scrubs. The scrubs will play “for fun” and not explore the extremities of the game. They won’t find the most effective tactics and abuse them mercilessly. The good players will. The good players will find incredibly overpowering tactics and patterns. As they play the game more, they’ll be forced to find counters to those tactics. The vast majority of tactics that at first appear unbeatable end up having counters, though they are often quite esoteric and difficult to discover. The counter tactic prevents the first player from doing the tactic, but the first player can then use a counter to the counter. The second player is now afraid to use his counter and he’s again vulnerable to the original overpowering tactic. (See my article on Yomi layer 3 for much more on that.)
Notice that the good players are reaching higher and higher levels of play. They found the “cheap stuff” and abused it. They know how to stop the cheap stuff. They know how to stop the other guy from stopping it so they can keep doing it. And as is quite common in competitive games, many new tactics will later be discovered that make the original cheap tactic look wholesome and fair. Often in fighting games, one character will have something so good it’s unfair. Fine, let him have that. As time goes on, it will be discovered that other characters have even more powerful and unfair tactics. Each player will attempt to steer the game in the direction of his own advantages, much how grandmaster chess players attempt to steer opponents into situations in which their opponents are weak.
Let’s return to the group of scrubs. They don’t know the first
Historical Scrubs: The British Redcoats. The ultimate example of being too bound up by rules to actually fight. They fought "honorably" by marching into gunfire.
The thing about all the depth I’ve been talking about. Their argument is basically that ignorantly mashing buttons with little regard to actual strategy is more “fun.” Superficially, their argument does at least look true, since often their games will be more “wet and wild” than games between the experts, which are usually more controlled and refined. But any close examination will reveal that the experts are having a great deal of fun on a higher level than the scrub can even imagine. Throwing together some circus act of a win isn’t nearly as satisfying as reading your opponent’s mind to such a degree that you can counter his ever move, even his every counter.
Can you imagine what will happen when the two groups of players meet? The experts will absolutely destroy the scrubs with any number of tactics they’ve either never seen, or never been truly forced to counter. This is because the scrubs have not been playing the same game. The experts were playing the actual game while the scrubs were playing their own homemade variant with restricting, unwritten rules.
The scrub has still more crutches. He talks a great deal about “skill” and how he has skill whereas other players—very much including the ones who beat him flat out—do not have skill. The confusion here is what “skill” actually is. In Street Fighter, scrubs often cling to combos as a measure of skill. A combo is sequence of moves that are unblockable if the first move hits. Combos can be very elaborate and very difficult to pull off. But single moves can also take “skill,” according to the scrub. The “dragon punch” or “uppercut” in Street Fighter is performed by holding the joystick toward the opponent, then down, then diagonally down and toward as the player presses a punch button. This movement must be completed within a fraction of a second, and though there is leeway, it must be executed fairly accurately. Ask any scrub and they will tell you that a dragon punch is a “skill move.” Just last week I played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him 5 times in a row asking, “is that all you know how to do? throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’” This was a big moment in that scrub’s life. He could either write his losses off and continue living in his mental prison, or analyze why he lost, shed his rules, and reach the next level of play.
I’ve never been to a tournament where there was a prize for the winner and another prize for the player who did many difficult moves. I’ve also never seen a prize for a player who played “in an innovative way.” Many scrubs have strong ties to “innovation.” They say “that guy didn’t do anything new, so he is no good.” Or “person x invented that technique and person y just stole it.” Well, person y might be 100 times better than person x, but that doesn’t seem to matter. When person y wins the tournament and person x is a forgotten footnote, what will the scrub say? That person y has “no skill” of course.
Depth in Games
I’ve talked about how the expert player is not bound by rules of
Scrub of the Future: Captain Kathryn Janeway. Voyager would have been home ages ago if it weren't for her silly rules. (Don't watch Voyager.):
“honor” or “cheapness” and simply plays to maximize his chances of winning. When he plays against other such players, “game theory” emerges. If the game is a good one, it will become deeper and deeper and more strategic. Poorly designed games will become shallower and shallower. This is the difference between an arcade game that lasts years in an arcade versus one that lasts 4 months. This is the difference between a PC game that lasts years on the shelves (Starcraft) versus one that quickly becomes boring (I won’t name any names). The point is that if a game becomes “no fun” at high levels of play, then it’s the game’s fault, not the player’s. Unfortunately, a game becoming less fun because it’s poorly designed and you just losing because you’re a scrub kind of look alike. You’ll have to play some top players and do some soul searching to decide which is which. But if it really is the game’s fault, there are plenty of other games that are excellent at a high level of play. For games that truly aren’t good at a high level, the only winning move is not to play.
Boundaries of Playing to Win
There is a gray area here I feel I should point out. If an expert does anything he can to win, then does he exploit bugs in the game? The answer is a resounding yes…but not all bugs. There is a large class of bugs in video games that players don’t even view as bugs. In Marvel vs. Capcom 2, for example, Iceman can launch his opponent into the air, follow him, do a few hits, then combo into his super move. During the super move he falls down below his opponent, so only about half of his super will connect. The Iceman player can use a trick, though. Just before doing the super, he can do another move, an icebeam, and cancel that move into the super. There’s a bug here which causes iceman to fall, during his super, at the much slower rate of his icebeam. The player actually cancels the icebeam as soon as possible—optimally as soon as 1/60th of a second after it begins. The whole point is to make iceman fall slower during his super so he gets more hits. Is it a bug? I’m sure it is. It looks like a programming oversight to me. Would an expert player use this? Of course.
The iceman example is relatively tame. In Street Fighter Alpha2, there’s a bug in which you can land the most powerful move in the game (a Custom Combo or “CC”) on the opponent, even when he should be able to block it. A bug? Yes. Does it help you win? Yes. This technique became the dominant tactic of the game. The gameplay evolved around this, play went on, new strategies were developed. Those who cried cheap were simply left behind to play their own homemade version of the game with made-up rules. The one we all played had unblockable CCs, and it went on to be a great game.
But there is a limit. There is a point when the bug becomes too much. In tournaments, bugs that turn the game off, or freeze it indefinitely, or remove one of the characters from the playfield permanently are banned. Bugs so extreme that they stop gameplay are considered unfair even by non-scrubs. As are techniques that can only be performed on, say, the one player side of the game. There are a few esoteric tricks in various fighting games that are side dependant—that can’t be performed on the 2nd player side, for example.
Here’s an example of the grayest area of all. Many versions of Street Fighter have “secret characters” that are only accessible through a code. Sometimes these characters are good, sometimes they’re not. Occasionally, the secret characters are the best in the game, as in Marvel vs. Capcom. Big deal. That’s the way that game is. Live with it. But the first version of Street Fighter to ever have a secret character was Super Turbo Street Fighter with its untouchably good Akuma. Most characters in that game cannot beat Akuma. I don’t mean it’s a tough match—I mean they cannot ever, ever, ever, ever win. Akuma is “broken” in that his air fireball move is something the game simply wasn’t designed to handle. He’s miles above the other characters, and is therefore banned in all tournaments. But every game has a “best character” and those characters are never banned. They’re just part of the game…except in Super Turbo. It’s extreme examples like this that even amongst the top players, and even something that isn’t a bug, but was put in on purpose by the game designers, the community as a whole has unanimously decided to make the rule: “don’t play Akuma in serious matches.”
My Attitude and Adenosine Triphosphate
I’ve been talking down to the scrub a lot in this article. I’d like to say for the record that I’m not calling the scrub stupid. I’m not saying he can never improve. I am saying that he’s naïve and that he’ll be trapped in scrubdom, whether he realizes it or not, as long as he chooses to live in the mental construct of rules he himself constructed. Is it harsh to call scrubs naïve? After all, the vast majority of the world is scrubs. I’d say by the definition I’ve classified 99.9% of the world’s population as scrubs. Seriously. All that means is that 99.9% of the world doesn’t know what it’s like to play competitive games on a high level. It means that they are naïve of these concepts. I really have no trouble saying that since we’re talking about esoteric, experience-driven knowledge here. I also know that 99.9% of the world (including me) doesn’t know how the citric acid cycle and cellular respiration create 38 ATP molecules per cycle. It’s an esoteric thing of which I am unaware, just as many are unaware of competitive games.
Biological organisms store energy in the form of ATP molecules. When energy is needed, it's released by breaking the bond of one phosphate, creating ADP.
In the end, playing to win ends up accomplishing much more than just winning. Playing to win is how one improves. Continuous self-improvement is what all of this is really about, anyway. I submit that ultimate goal of the “playing to win” mindset is ironically not just to win…but to improve. So practice, improve, play with discipline, and play to win.
Sunday, 8 June 2008
Friday, 6 June 2008
Diablo 3...?
If there is going to be a new game for the Diablo series is still very unclear. However it is suggested from numerous hints and indications that one of the Blizzard design teams are infact working on something awsome for the Diablo series. This has naturally not been confirmed by the Blizzard administration, however its widly claimed that the game has been worked long before most of the Blizzard North team (The original creators of the Diablo game) back in 2003, it is also said that the game was almost finished but was totally reworked due to employee issues which resulted in a significant delay. A totally new team took over the project back in 2005 & has continued working on this Diablo project til this day.
This section compiles all publicly available information about the game, from rumors to official comments and denials, and you are encouraged to read the information here, follow the links, and come to your own conclusions.
Rumors & Indications:
There has been alot of rumours with slightly diffrent value. This first part will include speculative information but the ccuracy of which remains to be seen.
Let's get started:
1. It is said and inofficially confirmed that Blizzard North started to work on Diablo 3 back in 2003, however this project was dumped and totally reworked once Blizzard North was shut down. Why the initial team did not continue with the project is still unknown but it is said that Blizzard was not happy with the quality of the first version and so a cinflict rised between the Blizzard North team and the officials at Blizzard, which ultimatly lead to the shutdown of Blizzard north. A new team was then assigned to the game and therefor wanted to do their own game, the original version might have been to similar to World of Warcraft or Diablo II. This was reported by Brian Crecente at Kotaku back in 2005:
"I just got an interesting update about Diablo 3. Rumor has it that the current work on Diablo 3 was canceled and that the game is going to be completely reworked. My tipsters tell me that Blizzard North's work on the game was, to put it kindly, below expectations. While this is mildly disappointing, it's nice to know that Blizzard still so zealously guards their name."
2. The next big rumor regarding Diablo 3 turned up almost a year later when a Blizzard employee named Chris Hartgraves left Blizzard and decided to spill all he knew about ongoing project. In an email posted on a World of Warcraft fansite forum 1 on October 28, 2005, Chris was quoted saying the following about Diablo III:
"It is about Diablo 3. Last week they had a thing called "Show N Tell" which they have every 6 months to all the full time employees - Anyways Diablo 3 takes place in heaven. Hell is trying to take it over and it is AWESOME looking ... I magine the brightness of heaven being taken over by the darkness of hell ... Imagine WoW but in a Diablo world in amount of size and playability ... Also, guild housing is available in this game for those of you who know about it. They should have a gameplay demo to show at BlizzCon."
However Diablo 3 was not announced at the Blizzcon of 2005 and has yet to appear almost 3 years later. This resulted in a discussion of how serious we should take Hartgraves' prediction. The whole issue would have been forgotten but he also predicted that Starcraft 2 has been under production long before it was announced at Blizzcon. He also made some predictions about the World of Warcraft series in the same e-mail and most of them has been true.
Hartgraves' Diablo III comments were echoed, or backed up, by an unnecessarily-obscure post3 GamingSteve.com, on February 3, 2006:
"I don't want to get any of my friends at Blizzard in trouble, so from instead of mentioning "Diablo III" let's call this theoretical game "Beelzebub 3" and instead of "Blizzard" let's call them "Snowstorm".
"Snowstorm" is indeed working on "Beelzebub 3". Not only are they working on it, but they have been working on this game for no less than the past four years. In fact, "Snowstorm North" nearly completed the game several years ago, but what they developed just "wasn't fun" and been quietly reworked. This was actually one of the key reasons why Snowstorm North was closed and everyone was relocated to Irvine-based Snowstorm, so that the bigwigs in Irvine could better track and follow the development of Beelzebub 3.
...It is true that Beelzebub 3 will be done in true 3D and it did indeed look freaking awesome. It is also true that Beelzebub 3 features a story between the conflicts of Heaven and Hell and contains a very cool feature where every single item in the game can change between a "light" version and a "dark" version. However this was also one of the problems with the original version of the game. Other than the ability for any item to visually change from light to dark it didn't affect the actual stats of the item or change the gameplay in any way. So the game has gone through a total rework to inject some "fun" into the gameplay and to make it feel like the Beelzebubs of old.
The core gameplay Beelzebub 3 will play pretty much like Beelzebub 1 and 2, but the game world will be much larger and provide a much deeper experience -- many more items, more levels when you go through the game for first time, more skills, more of everything. In addition, the multiplayer aspect will be greatly enhanced from the past installments and don't be surprised to see more than a couple of WoW-based concepts to leak over into the Beelzebub 3 universe ... such as two opposing factions (Alliance and Horde = Heaven and Hell), enhanced guild functionality, and maybe even mounts?!"
This has naturally not been officially confirmed yet and I dout it will ever be until the game is announced.
4. After the depature of the four main creators of the Diablo series David Brevik, Max Schaefer, and Erich Schaefer, along with Bill Roper in late June of 2003 came as a shock for the gaming industry aswell as all of the Diablo fans. In a offical announcement Blizzard said:
"I speak for everyone in our company when I say how grateful we are to have had the opportunity to work closely with this group of individuals. Each one of them has made valuable contributions to many of our games, and we would like to thank them for all of their hard work over the years. We wish them nothing but the best and are confident that they will be successful in their future endeavors," stated Mike Morhaime, Blizzard Entertainment president and co-founder.
"At the same time, we want to convey that Blizzard's success has never been attributable to any one person or small group of individuals, and I am confident that we have the teams in place to continue creating some of the best games in the world."
Blizzard does not believe that these resignations will cause any significant delays or have long-term negative effects on the "Diablo®" series or other projects in development."
Later a new leader of a totally new team was announced:
"Blizzard has announced that lead programmer Rick Seis will take the position of development team lead for Blizzard North. In his new role, Seis will lead Blizzard North's team of developers, which will be streamlined into one core group to focus their efforts on one key project. The details of the studio's next project will be announced at a future time."
Eventually the team was shut down togheter with the rest of Blizzard North to later be renamed and reworked into Blizzard Irvine in late 2005. All project related to Blizzard North was then dumped and it is said that Diablo 3 was one of them. However it was also confirmed that "Those from Blizzard North who were offered relocation packages "will continue work on an unannounced project," which most believe is the third installment in the hugely popular Diablo series."
Bill Roper said in an interview:
"Actually, we didn't plan on leaving Blizzard, but that's the way things ended up working out. Basically, we were looking for a higher level of involvement concerning the sale of the Vivendi Universal Games unit and felt we had to go as far as tendering our resignations to try and open a direct line of communication with the decision makers in France. It was difficult to plan for our futures, and the futures of our co-workers, and with no long-term compensation or employment contracts in place, we wanted to be able to interact directly with the people making the key decisions that could drastically affect our lives and workplace.
In the end, Vivendi chose not to make that opportunity available and accepted our resignations over the matter. But going forward, we look at this as a great new opportunity to start all over again doing something we love. Life threw us a curve but, to use a baseball analogy, we're aiming to drive it out of the park."
5. Confirmation of a third Team and a new project!
Over some years there has been alot of job opening at Blizzard for a "Top Secret project" (Diablo III :P). One was so obvious it made Gamespot's Rumor Control page6 on February 11, 2005.
RUMOR: Blizzard is hiring developers for Diablo III.
Source: A job listing on Blizzard's Web site.
The official story: "We can't comment. Sorry!"--A nice-but-reticent Blizzard rep.
The speculations peaked when "an experienced Game Designer to help lead the team that designed Diablo and Diablo II." Besides the requisite experience, Blizzard would like said designer to have "Experience working on RPG titles." was asked for. Alltho Blizzard would never acknowledge the games existence this would be the most logical result.
Back in 2005 a musician from the Czech Republic confirmed that he had been invloved in recording music for Diablo III.
This news could not be confirmed, but the musician signed his real name, he had a Czech email address, and some searching through the Diablo II credits revealed that the music for that game was recorded with the same symphony in the same location.
6. Diablo Novelist Hints:
Fansite BlizzPlanet posted an interview with Richard Knaak, author of some of the Diablo novels, in which he dropped some pretty unequivocal hints that work continued on the Diablo seris.
Question: How much of the book is creation of yours, and how involved is Chris Metzen behind the canon storyline of Diablo: The Sin War Trilogy? Do you think the ramifications of this book impact in the storyline of Diablo 3 the game?
Knaak: This is a pure collaboration between myself and Chris Metzen/Blizzard. All that is written is passed by him and the others there. This will be canon and has adjusted earlier info. The ramifications here will be used for any future project ... and I ain't writing for a dead game. :)
Question: So ... Diablo 3?
Knaak: I am not writing for a dead world ... but a world with dead. 'nuff said!
7. Frank Pearce, senior vice president of product development at Blizzard, comments on the unannounced project. "Team 3 is working on something really awesome. I can’t give you any hints, but it’s totally awesome."
8. "Blizzard Entertainment owns numerous trademarks and domain names for games in their empire. These do not necessarily mean anything, especially not in the short term; they bought Starcraft2.com before Starcraft was even released. But they do give some indication that the company has an ongoing interest in developing more games in their various game worlds." From Diabloii.net.
Well I hope that this brings atleast some light to the matter. In worst case it has been a good read atleast :P. As you may notice most of this imformation is still waiting to be confirmed but it is commonly known that the game is in development and will be announced on the next Blizzard convention! (or so we hope)
More details can be found on http://www.diabloii.net
This section compiles all publicly available information about the game, from rumors to official comments and denials, and you are encouraged to read the information here, follow the links, and come to your own conclusions.
Rumors & Indications:
There has been alot of rumours with slightly diffrent value. This first part will include speculative information but the ccuracy of which remains to be seen.
Let's get started:
1. It is said and inofficially confirmed that Blizzard North started to work on Diablo 3 back in 2003, however this project was dumped and totally reworked once Blizzard North was shut down. Why the initial team did not continue with the project is still unknown but it is said that Blizzard was not happy with the quality of the first version and so a cinflict rised between the Blizzard North team and the officials at Blizzard, which ultimatly lead to the shutdown of Blizzard north. A new team was then assigned to the game and therefor wanted to do their own game, the original version might have been to similar to World of Warcraft or Diablo II. This was reported by Brian Crecente at Kotaku back in 2005:
"I just got an interesting update about Diablo 3. Rumor has it that the current work on Diablo 3 was canceled and that the game is going to be completely reworked. My tipsters tell me that Blizzard North's work on the game was, to put it kindly, below expectations. While this is mildly disappointing, it's nice to know that Blizzard still so zealously guards their name."
2. The next big rumor regarding Diablo 3 turned up almost a year later when a Blizzard employee named Chris Hartgraves left Blizzard and decided to spill all he knew about ongoing project. In an email posted on a World of Warcraft fansite forum 1 on October 28, 2005, Chris was quoted saying the following about Diablo III:
"It is about Diablo 3. Last week they had a thing called "Show N Tell" which they have every 6 months to all the full time employees - Anyways Diablo 3 takes place in heaven. Hell is trying to take it over and it is AWESOME looking ... I magine the brightness of heaven being taken over by the darkness of hell ... Imagine WoW but in a Diablo world in amount of size and playability ... Also, guild housing is available in this game for those of you who know about it. They should have a gameplay demo to show at BlizzCon."
However Diablo 3 was not announced at the Blizzcon of 2005 and has yet to appear almost 3 years later. This resulted in a discussion of how serious we should take Hartgraves' prediction. The whole issue would have been forgotten but he also predicted that Starcraft 2 has been under production long before it was announced at Blizzcon. He also made some predictions about the World of Warcraft series in the same e-mail and most of them has been true.
Hartgraves' Diablo III comments were echoed, or backed up, by an unnecessarily-obscure post3 GamingSteve.com, on February 3, 2006:
"I don't want to get any of my friends at Blizzard in trouble, so from instead of mentioning "Diablo III" let's call this theoretical game "Beelzebub 3" and instead of "Blizzard" let's call them "Snowstorm".
"Snowstorm" is indeed working on "Beelzebub 3". Not only are they working on it, but they have been working on this game for no less than the past four years. In fact, "Snowstorm North" nearly completed the game several years ago, but what they developed just "wasn't fun" and been quietly reworked. This was actually one of the key reasons why Snowstorm North was closed and everyone was relocated to Irvine-based Snowstorm, so that the bigwigs in Irvine could better track and follow the development of Beelzebub 3.
...It is true that Beelzebub 3 will be done in true 3D and it did indeed look freaking awesome. It is also true that Beelzebub 3 features a story between the conflicts of Heaven and Hell and contains a very cool feature where every single item in the game can change between a "light" version and a "dark" version. However this was also one of the problems with the original version of the game. Other than the ability for any item to visually change from light to dark it didn't affect the actual stats of the item or change the gameplay in any way. So the game has gone through a total rework to inject some "fun" into the gameplay and to make it feel like the Beelzebubs of old.
The core gameplay Beelzebub 3 will play pretty much like Beelzebub 1 and 2, but the game world will be much larger and provide a much deeper experience -- many more items, more levels when you go through the game for first time, more skills, more of everything. In addition, the multiplayer aspect will be greatly enhanced from the past installments and don't be surprised to see more than a couple of WoW-based concepts to leak over into the Beelzebub 3 universe ... such as two opposing factions (Alliance and Horde = Heaven and Hell), enhanced guild functionality, and maybe even mounts?!"
This has naturally not been officially confirmed yet and I dout it will ever be until the game is announced.
4. After the depature of the four main creators of the Diablo series David Brevik, Max Schaefer, and Erich Schaefer, along with Bill Roper in late June of 2003 came as a shock for the gaming industry aswell as all of the Diablo fans. In a offical announcement Blizzard said:
"I speak for everyone in our company when I say how grateful we are to have had the opportunity to work closely with this group of individuals. Each one of them has made valuable contributions to many of our games, and we would like to thank them for all of their hard work over the years. We wish them nothing but the best and are confident that they will be successful in their future endeavors," stated Mike Morhaime, Blizzard Entertainment president and co-founder.
"At the same time, we want to convey that Blizzard's success has never been attributable to any one person or small group of individuals, and I am confident that we have the teams in place to continue creating some of the best games in the world."
Blizzard does not believe that these resignations will cause any significant delays or have long-term negative effects on the "Diablo®" series or other projects in development."
Later a new leader of a totally new team was announced:
"Blizzard has announced that lead programmer Rick Seis will take the position of development team lead for Blizzard North. In his new role, Seis will lead Blizzard North's team of developers, which will be streamlined into one core group to focus their efforts on one key project. The details of the studio's next project will be announced at a future time."
Eventually the team was shut down togheter with the rest of Blizzard North to later be renamed and reworked into Blizzard Irvine in late 2005. All project related to Blizzard North was then dumped and it is said that Diablo 3 was one of them. However it was also confirmed that "Those from Blizzard North who were offered relocation packages "will continue work on an unannounced project," which most believe is the third installment in the hugely popular Diablo series."
Bill Roper said in an interview:
"Actually, we didn't plan on leaving Blizzard, but that's the way things ended up working out. Basically, we were looking for a higher level of involvement concerning the sale of the Vivendi Universal Games unit and felt we had to go as far as tendering our resignations to try and open a direct line of communication with the decision makers in France. It was difficult to plan for our futures, and the futures of our co-workers, and with no long-term compensation or employment contracts in place, we wanted to be able to interact directly with the people making the key decisions that could drastically affect our lives and workplace.
In the end, Vivendi chose not to make that opportunity available and accepted our resignations over the matter. But going forward, we look at this as a great new opportunity to start all over again doing something we love. Life threw us a curve but, to use a baseball analogy, we're aiming to drive it out of the park."
5. Confirmation of a third Team and a new project!
Over some years there has been alot of job opening at Blizzard for a "Top Secret project" (Diablo III :P). One was so obvious it made Gamespot's Rumor Control page6 on February 11, 2005.
RUMOR: Blizzard is hiring developers for Diablo III.
Source: A job listing on Blizzard's Web site.
The official story: "We can't comment. Sorry!"--A nice-but-reticent Blizzard rep.
The speculations peaked when "an experienced Game Designer to help lead the team that designed Diablo and Diablo II." Besides the requisite experience, Blizzard would like said designer to have "Experience working on RPG titles." was asked for. Alltho Blizzard would never acknowledge the games existence this would be the most logical result.
Back in 2005 a musician from the Czech Republic confirmed that he had been invloved in recording music for Diablo III.
This news could not be confirmed, but the musician signed his real name, he had a Czech email address, and some searching through the Diablo II credits revealed that the music for that game was recorded with the same symphony in the same location.
6. Diablo Novelist Hints:
Fansite BlizzPlanet posted an interview with Richard Knaak, author of some of the Diablo novels, in which he dropped some pretty unequivocal hints that work continued on the Diablo seris.
Question: How much of the book is creation of yours, and how involved is Chris Metzen behind the canon storyline of Diablo: The Sin War Trilogy? Do you think the ramifications of this book impact in the storyline of Diablo 3 the game?
Knaak: This is a pure collaboration between myself and Chris Metzen/Blizzard. All that is written is passed by him and the others there. This will be canon and has adjusted earlier info. The ramifications here will be used for any future project ... and I ain't writing for a dead game. :)
Question: So ... Diablo 3?
Knaak: I am not writing for a dead world ... but a world with dead. 'nuff said!
7. Frank Pearce, senior vice president of product development at Blizzard, comments on the unannounced project. "Team 3 is working on something really awesome. I can’t give you any hints, but it’s totally awesome."
8. "Blizzard Entertainment owns numerous trademarks and domain names for games in their empire. These do not necessarily mean anything, especially not in the short term; they bought Starcraft2.com before Starcraft was even released. But they do give some indication that the company has an ongoing interest in developing more games in their various game worlds." From Diabloii.net.
Well I hope that this brings atleast some light to the matter. In worst case it has been a good read atleast :P. As you may notice most of this imformation is still waiting to be confirmed but it is commonly known that the game is in development and will be announced on the next Blizzard convention! (or so we hope)
More details can be found on http://www.diabloii.net
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Boris Johnson - The Man, The Myth, The Cockfoster
Shamelessly stolen from Foss. Is it me or is that black lady looking confused and scared of the Boris Johnson masked figure?
Also on today's news: A new Zero Punctation
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