My weekly column on news, commentary, podcasts, and videos from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com.
February 10, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
February 3, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly column on news, commentary, podcasts, and videos from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com.
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January 30, 2012
What’s happening at GuildMag?
There’s a new post at GuildMag, where Dutch Sunshine offers some news about what will be happening with the website and the magazine:
The time has come to unveil our plans for the future. Whether you’ve been with us from the beginning or just discovered us yesterday, we’ll have something coming for you that you’ll surely enjoy. We at GuildMag want to keep you up to date on the latest news, share the lore behind the game, let you see how creative the community is and also give a range of opinions on the latest news and hottest topics. But we also want to involve you in this; we’re not here to tell you what’s great about Guild Wars (2) — chances are you’ve already got your own opinions on it and we want to hear them! We’re changing the way we operate as a fansite for good, and we want you there every step of the way. So no matter when you discovered us, let’s go forward together and build upon what we’ve already achieved. This is our story.
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January 28, 2012
Photoshopping images is so passé: using game footage is the new trend
At the BBC website, Phil Coomes shows some side-by-side images of real events and modern FPS game images. The recent flap over clips from the game Arma 2 being cited as genuine film captured from the IRA is only the first of many incidents we should expect to encounter, as games get better (and advocates remain as dedicated to advancing their causes as ever):
Today we are used to seeing real time reports from across the globe, technology has advanced and anyone with an internet connection can travel to far-off places, even imaginary worlds, from their armchair.
The world of video games has progressed too. Some seem real, as highlighted by a recent Ofcom ruling that ITV misled viewers by airing footage claimed to have been shot by the IRA, which was actually material taken from a video game.
Labelled “IRA Film 1988″, it was described as film shot by the IRA of its members attempting to down a British Army helicopter in June 1988. However, the pictures were actually taken from a game called Arma 2.
[. . .]
So I went through my photos taken from various combat zones, and attempted to replicate them in a computer game.
The game Arma 2 was ideal — it’s more of a war simulation than an all-out blaster, with the correct uniforms, vehicles and weapons as well as varied terrains and bang-bang firefights.
Plenty of hours fiddling within the gaming environment, alongside Ivan who developed the game, produced some pretty remarkable results.
In some cases it is actually quite hard to tell the difference between my photographs and the computer version, which is deeply worrying. The level of detail is so precise that the virtual war zone is as convincing as the real thing.
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January 27, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
This week’s column on news, commentary, podcasts and videos from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com.
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January 25, 2012
The obvious mash-up: Minecraft and Lego
It’s just a brief mention in The Register, but if you’ve ever seen a Minecraft game in progress, the connection is pretty hard to miss:
Lego has given the green light to a set of the famous building bricks based on the world of the cult cyber-block game Minecraft.
The idea came from fan submission site Lego Cuusoo, where users can suggest new creation kits. If these submissions gather sufficient interest among the site’s visitors, the Danish toy maker takes note and sometimes agrees to take the concept to retail.
It’s amusing to think that the next generation of Lego users may consider it to be a spin-off of Minecraft for use offline.
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January 23, 2012
Guild Wars 2 goes to open beta in March
I’m very excited that the folks at ArenaNet have finally announced when their Guild Wars 2 open beta program will start (and confirmed that the game will be released later in 2012):
Guild Wars 2 has captured the imagination of gamers and media all over the world with its action-oriented combat, its living world full of dynamic events, its highly personalized role-playing experience, and the handcrafted artistry that suffuses every element of the game. Last year, thousands of you joined us at shows and events all over the world to try Guild Wars 2 for yourself. This year, you’ll finally be able to immerse yourself in the vast, diverse world of Tyria.
We recently finished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold progressively larger events. In February we’ll invite select press to participate in beta testing, and in March and April we’ll aggressively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to participate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.
I’m very eager to finally get my hands, so to speak, on the game I’ve been reporting on for over a year both here and more recently on GuildMag (I haven’t been able to get to any of the shows where ArenaNet has had demo sessions running, so video clips on YouTube have been all I’ve seen).
Update, 24 January: A comment from ArenaNet Community Manager Martin Kerstein to clarify that it’s not an “open” beta as many of us were assuming:
We purposely didn’t use the term “Open Beta”, we mentioned Beta Events. To some people Open Beta means unlimited access to the game and everybody on the interwebs can play it. This is not what we will do.
We will do Beta Weekend Events. Those of you who played Guild Wars might already be familiar with the concept. It means that many of you (like the blogpost says) will get a chance to participate in specific Events, but access won’t be unlimited – there will be some kind of selection criteria and the beta period will usually start on a Friday and end on the following Sunday.
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January 21, 2012
Those aren’t rules of economics. These are rules of economics!
These are the Rules of Fantasy Economics:
Rule 1: Everyone has roughly the exact same amount of money and/or property as everyone else of his or her respective experience-point total. Except at character creation, obviously, where some people totally get the shaft, which sucks … but “being poor” and “staying poor” are two very different things.
Only about 99.9% of all people — specifically those who lack the initiative to spend every dollar they own on studded leather and a knife and to abandon their families for the open road on a mad, bloodthirsty whim — ever really STAY poor.
[. . .]
Rule 2: Money cannot make more money. Investing in businesses is a fool’s bargain: stores burn down, castles crumble, merchants and/or bandits will constantly steal your shit, and you will never, ever make a dime. Ever.
It is far wiser to invest in non-depreciable items like swords, hats and magic boots. Likewise, the things that you need to do your job (boats, armor, weapons, rope and horses, for example) do not depreciate at all and may be used forever unless somehow completely destroyed.
Rule 3: All currencies of all countries are worth almost exactly the same amount — and all currencies of all countries are evenly divisible into platinum, gold, silver and copper pieces by factors of exactly ten. No other non-magical objects have any real value, including land.
The exceptions to this rule are gems, which are randomly & subjectively priced (and therefore effectively useless as trade goods) and ‘art objects’, presumably meaning paintings and such, the value of which are objectively determined, fixed and unchangeable, making them a lot like personal checks.
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January 20, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
This week’s column on news, commentary, podcasts and videos from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com.
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January 13, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My latest column (not “lastest” as I foolishly typo-ed last week) on news from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com.
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January 9, 2012
Dungeons & Dragons to take major leap of faith: asking the fans for help
Although I started playing role playing games in high school, I was never all that fond of the original Dungeons & Dragons rule set. I tried several other rule sets, but ended up “rolling my own” based on a simple combat and magic ruleset from Steve Jackson Games Metagaming (The Fantasy Trip, based on the Melee and Wizard hex-and-counter minigames). I worked at one of the biggest gaming stores in Canada at the time, so I had lots of access to RPG resources. What mattered to me was the role-playing, not the ultra-fine distinctions between different kinds of pole-arms.
Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the D&D franchise, are struggling to make the game relevant again:
True believers have lost faith. Factions squabble. The enemies are not only massed at the gates of the kingdom, but they have also broken through.
This may sound like the back story for an epic trilogy. Instead, it’s the situation faced by the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, the venerable fantasy role-playing game many consider to be the grandfather of the video game industry. Gamers bicker over Dungeons & Dragons rules. Some have left childhood pursuits behind. And others have spurned an old-fashioned, tabletop fantasy role-playing game for shiny electronic competitors like World of Warcraft and the Elder Scrolls.
But there might yet be hope for Dungeons & Dragons, known as D&D. On Monday, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns the game, announced that a new edition is under development, the first overhaul of the rules since the contentious fourth edition was released in 2008. And Dungeons & Dragons’ designers are also planning to undertake an exceedingly rare effort for the gaming industry over the next few months: asking hundreds of thousands of fans to tell them how exactly they should reboot the franchise.
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January 6, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My lastest column (in my nom-de-gaming guise as Raphia Naon) on news from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com.
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January 5, 2012
Firefly MMO may rise from the dead
There’s still hope, Browncoat gamers:
While Multiverse, the development platform that was supposed to be the driving force for possible Buffy and Firefly MMOs, suffered a studio shutdown, the source code lives — and has been snatched up by the newly formed Multiverse Foundation. Fortunately for those who were holding out hope for an online version of Joss Whedon’s scifi western, it looks as though this new company wants to pick up where the previous team left off.
Don’t let your hopes soar too high: this is still very far from being a complete product (and the organization’s website is still in deep lorem ipsum marination). It is, however, a sign that there’s still enough life in the fan community for the Joss Whedon properties that it appears viable for someone to take this on.
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December 30, 2011
This week in Guild Wars 2
My latest round-up of Guild Wars 2 articles, blog posts, and community activities is now up at GuildMag.
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