Whitney Matheson has a preview of the next comic starting the members of The Guild. This one is about Tink:
This should be in the stores by mid-March.
March 3, 2011
February 26, 2011
This week in Guild Wars 2 news
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.
- Norn Week Begins — The first post to kick off “Norn Week” on the ArenaNet blog.
- Player reactions to the Dervish update in Guild Wars. I’ve certainly noticed a lot more Dervishes around in-game this week, especially in PvP areas.
- Next post on the Norn: Legend and Legacy. The voices of the Norn, with some insight into why they act the way they do. (I find the samples to be a bit too modern, but perhaps that’s just my personal preference.)
- Norn Week post 3: Go Big or Go Home. The sheer scale of the Norn and their works.
- Eurogamer speculates on Mesmers and Assassins in Guild Wars 2. My own take: Mesmers are explicitly mentioned in the 2nd Guild Wars 2 novel, so they’re in. Assassins are not mentioned, but one of the key characters in the novel has a set of skills that seem remarkably similar to GW assassins.
- A player’s response to the GW Dervish updates and how they’ve changed the playing experience.
- Norn Week: Designing and Redesigning Events.
- ArenaNet’s plans for PAX East, including a new demo featuring the Norn starting area.
- Updates and additions to the official web site’s Norn page.
- Views to admire: Relics of Orr posts the list of must-see places in Guild Wars.
- Norn Week: A Spirit of Legend
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February 23, 2011
February 19, 2011
This week in Guild Wars 2 news
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.
- GuildMag has an article on the revelations from the military forces of Kryta post last week.
- Closed Alpha and Beta for 2011: More information/speculation about the recently announced closed alpha and closed beta programs for later this year.
- Rounding up “Humanity Week”: Rubi rounds up last week’s information from ArenaNet on humans.
- An ode to love in Tyria.
- Inside the Quality Assurance group at ArenaNet.
- Rumour of a GW2 team working on “console” development. Expect this to be quashed by ArenaNet soon: UI changes between PC and various consoles alone would make this a very difficult addition to their existing plans. (Later: Regina Buenaobra had apparently already posted this message to dispel these rumours: “I just want to reiterate that the development team is fully focused on making GW2 the best PC MMO ever released. We have a very small team exploring the possibility of console, but there are no definite plans for a console version at this time. The core of Guild Wars 2 development is fully focused on delivering a fantastic PC MMORPG experience.”)
- The promised Guild Wars Dervish update has been released. This is, as promised, a major revision to many Dervish skills. I expect to have to rebuild all my Derv’s builds, eventually. It’ll take a while to absorb the scale of all the changes.
- Developer notes on the Dervish update.
- If you liked “Humanity Week”, you’ll probably be very happy to hear that next week is going to be “Norn Week“
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February 12, 2011
This week in Guild Wars 2 news
I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community. It just occurred to me that some of my blog audience might also be interested:
- Last Saturday, the official Guild Wars 2 Twitter account posted this teaser:
“Next week, we’re taking a closer look at the human race in #GuildWars2 ! Keep an eye on the blog and GuildWars2.com! Happy weekend everyone!” - http://bloogum.net/guildwars/ If you like looking at the great scenery in Guild Wars, this site is for you. It’s a huge gallery of screen shots of places in GW . . . over 6000 of them.
- Kill Ten Rats speculates that the new GW2 demo for PAX East may herald a wider (dare we say “open”?) availability.
- http://www.guildmag.com/plotting-more-than-depth Speculation on the upcoming Winds of Change content in Cantha: “if we go back to the same thing too many times, we’re going to end up with Mursaat being the equivalent of Daleks, only without the goofy and endearing qualities.”
- http://www.arena.net/blog/oh-the-humanity-human-week-begins Start of a week of posts on the Arenanet blog about humans in GW2.
- Are long-running events a good thing or a bad thing?
- Against the Wall: Humanity in Guild Wars 2
- Designing Humans The next post in Humanity Week is about the graphics (comparing humans in GW with their descendants in GW2).
- Responses to some of the questions generated by the voices of GW2 clips.
- Canthan New Year – the best bits Looking back on Canthan New Year.
- Updated info on Humans at the GW2 official site. My dogs “sang along” with the music on the Kryta video clip. (HD version of the clip here)
- Details of the GW update for the Dervish. It’s pretty significant: 90% of Dervish skills have been updated or changed.
- The Line of Duty What should be the final “Humanity Week” posting: the Three Military Orders of Kryta.
- I’ve also seen multiple references to a November 2011 release date. No confirmation of that from Arenanet, of course. (Also, the Guild Wars 2 FAQ has been updated with this little snippet: ‘We will be conducting small closed alpha and beta tests in 2011.’ )
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February 11, 2011
The Guild renewed for a fifth season
Felicia Day and friends will be back for another season, thanks to Microsoft:
The Guild, in case you’re new, is the long-running series about a pack of socially awkward MMORPG addicts, created by Felicia Day and produced by Kim Evey. Launched independently in July 2007, the show has received over 100 million views (according to an official release) and attracted a worldwide fan base that fills convention halls.
I mention the convention thing because, as promised at the end of Season 4, the action of Season 5 will involve the characters attending a convention for the unnamed game they play. According to Evey, to handle this production requirement they’re not only considering shooting certain scenes at a small convention, but working with additional brands.
“We haven’t really had success with brand integration aside from Microsoft and Sprint, who help us make sure their brands are visible but not obnoxious,” Evey said via phone. “But the brands that we need now are brands which would sell their wares at a convention like this, and are willing to be in our show.”
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December 16, 2010
Military FPS games
Perhaps all those concerned parent organizations had a germ of truth to feed their panic after all: the US military has been finding their FPS games really have been useful as recruiting tools:
The army began using simulation training game tech for recruiting a decade ago when it rolled out the online game “America’s Army” (www.americasarmy.com/). Britain, Australia and New Zealand eventually went in the same direction as the marines. To the despair of parents everywhere, it appears that video games do serve a useful purpose. “America’s Army” was originally developed as a recruiting and public relations tool. It cost over eight million dollars to create. By late 2002, it had 929,000 registered players, 563,000 of whom stayed around long enough to finish the basic training exercise. The game costs $3.5 million a year to maintain. So far, nearly ten million people have downloaded the front end (player) software. At peak times, over 5,000 players are online with the game simultaneously. Recruiters are satisfied with the number of prospects coming in because of the game. But an unexpected bonus has been the number of other uses the game has been put to.
The game, like many games today, was based on one of the “game engines” that are for sale to those developing commercial games. A “game engine” is the software for an earlier, successful, game, with all the specific graphics and play elements removed. When you buy a game engine, you add your own graphics and specific game and play elements, and have a new game. America’s Army used the Unreal game engine, and that led to clones of the America’s Army software for additional training systems. Using the highly realistic combat operations depicted in the game, special versions are used to create specific games for all sorts of combat situations. The public will never see most of these, especially the classified ones.
The USMC, of course, prefers not to do things the army way:
The marines went with a different engine because, well, even with lots of updates, the America’s Army software is showing its age. More realism is a matter of life and death in these training simulations, as getting the details wrong can teach troops the wrong lesson and get them killed. The marines have long been innovators in the use of tactical training and wargames. Back in the 90s, they adapted one of the first FPS (First Person perspective Shooters), “Doom” to marine use. Now they have a much more realistic game engine to use, and one that can be easily networked. Many marines take their laptop computers to combat zones, and that takes care of a lot of hardware problems.
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December 15, 2010
That’s not an elaborate Christmas display. This is an elaborate Christmas display
PC World says:
Turner calls the game “Snowball Blaster.” If you help Santa dodge all the snowballs, you get a special lights display. Passers-by can hop into the “blaster” unit and use a controller to play via a PC that operates 128-channels of lights to form the display.
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December 9, 2010
Preview of The Guild: Vork
Guild fans will be interested to see the first five pages of the The Guild: Vork at PopCandy:
As you may know, I’m a huge fan of The Guild, the funny, imaginative, geeky, gleeful and addictive web series created by Felicia Day. If you’ve seen one episode, chances are you’ve seen them all. (And bonus: The talented Wil Wheaton added some spark to the last two seasons.)
It makes sense that The Guild would branch out to comics, since much of its audience probably consists of comic-book fans. On Dec. 22 Dark Horse will issue The Guild: Vork, a story written by Day and Jeff Lewis (the actor who plays Vork in the series).
I offered you a preview of the Guild covers a few months ago. Now hold your breath, because I have the first six pages of Vork right here
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November 20, 2010
JourneyQuest, Episode 1
H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the link. There are several episodes available, so do follow along. The first episode is a bit slow, but it picks up nicely in later episodes.
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October 5, 2010
The Guild, Season 4 episode 12
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October 1, 2010
How to encourage co-operative play in MMORPGs
I’ve only played Guild Wars, so it was a huge surprise to me to hear that other MMORPGs had a lot of problems with getting players to co-operate. From this article, it’s clear that Guild Wars 2 will have the same useful mechanism to encourage co-operative play:
In Guild Wars 2 we’re fully committed to the concept of rewarding players individually. This is more or less a quick way of saying that we don’t want to design a system where players argue over loot settings, turn to external “out of game” systems to decide who gets what upon downing a boss, or risk spending hours in a dungeon with nothing to show for it due to bad rolls or a ninja looter that hijacked all their treasure.
In the case of distributing general monster loot or opening dungeon end-chests, this principle means that each player gets their own roll, so it’s alright if you are soloing and someone begins fighting alongside you. This won’t cause the loot you would receive to degrade in any way, as long as you actively participate in that combat. Likewise, when you get to the end of that big dungeon with your group, you each get to individually open the chest and receive your own personal reward.
In the case of gathering materials from things like ore nodes, plants, and the like, this means that when you gather from that resource you use it up for yourself, but not for others. In Guild Wars 2 there is no need to race to beat other people to the same resource node. Take your time ripping that bear’s head off, because no one can walk up and steal that copper node in the back of its cave from you. You may be helping others in your world reach that copper safely, but rest assured that you’re not just clearing a path for a node ganker.
I could go on and on with the examples of how we employ this philosophy, but really what I’m getting at is that our overall goal is for players in your world to be seen as a boon to you to help you overcome bigger challenges and larger foes, and therefore earn greater spoils for your time spent in the game. We’d much rather that everyone in the same world felt a common bond in their shared land and saw each other as potential allies. If players find themselves with leftover aggression that they would normally take out on node gankers or ninja looters, we’d recommend they step into World vs. World and kick themselves some otherworldly player butt.
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September 28, 2010
September 27, 2010
Uh-oh. Eric’s been drinking the Eurogame Kool-Aid
If you’re not a gamer, you can safely ignore this posting.
Still here? Good. Here’s Eric S. Raymond losing his religion:
I’m what people in the strategy-gaming hobby call a grognard. The word is literally French for “grumbler”, historically used for Napoleonist diehards who never reconciled themselves to the fall of L’Empereur even after 1815, and nowadays refers to guys who cut their teeth on the classic, old-school hex-grid wargames of the 1970s.
As a grognard, I’m expected to grumble dyspeptically about the superiority of the huge, heavy, elaborately simulationist two-player wargames we used to play back in the day, and bemoan how fluffy and social the modern wave of multiplayer Eurogames are. Sure, they’ve got four-color printing and unit counters you don’t have to use tweezers to pick up, but where are my pages and pages of combat resolution tables? Where are my hairsplitting distinctions between different types of self-propelled assault gun? O tempora! O mores!
But you know what? Times change, and game designers have actually learned a few things in the last forty years. In this essay I’m going to revisit two games I’ve reviewed previously (Commands and Colors: Ancients and Memoir ‘44) and take a closer look at two others: War Galley, and Conflict of Heroes. These games exemplify how very much things have changed, and how little point there really is in pining for the old-school games any more. Yes, I may forfeit my old-fart credentials by saying it, but … I think the golden age of wargaming is now.
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September 23, 2010
Meh. Civ V isn’t that addictive . . . is it really 2am?
I received my copy of Civilization V from Amazon.ca yesterday, but I was in town all evening, so I didn’t sit down to start installing it until 10:30. I figured I could install it, twiddle about with the new UI, and still get to sleep by midnight. I probably could have, except you can’t play Civ V without registering an account with Steam. After creating the account, you apparently have to download the whole game (no idea why, as there’s a DVD-ROM in the package), and because I was online at peak hour for west coast gamers, the connection speed left more than a bit to be desired.
At around 11:30, the game finished downloading and I was able to actually start. “Oh,” I said to myself, “they’ve included tutorials. That’s nice of them. I guess that’ll cover the changed UI elements. I’ll try ’em.” I spent the next two hours just playing the tutorial scenarios.
It certainly does have the “gotta play just one more turn” thing down pat. It’ll do nicely to cover the gap until Guild Wars 2 is released.
