Category: Games

I’m brought back to these videos again and again.

This first one is the unreleased Oni multiplayer version. Oni was a third-person fighter/shooter which was released for Mac/PC and Playstation 2. It was unfortunately the victim of the Myth II HD bug and ended up with Myth itself mortgaged to Take 2 Interactive. If there’s anyone reading this who knows anyone in Take 2 Interactive, I’d love to speak to them.

The second video here is the original Halo trailer. Halo seemed to be more of a squad level human vs alien 3rd person shooter. There was talk of a persistent world, of career specialisms. That was all dumbed down, which isn’t to say that Halo itself wasn’t awesome. It was.

(Thanks to @vipersgratitude for sending on this link)

WTIA TechNW report by Brier Dudley

So, Fries asked panelists, best of times or worst?

Gabe Newell, owner and president of Bellevue game giant Valve, said, “It’s a very interesting time.”

“Our business is growing very rapidly both on the content side and on the service platform side so in that sense, business has never been better,” Newell said. “The challenges we see looking forward are very rapidly evolving model for how value is created for customers.”

After broad pursuit massively multiplayer online games, the free-to-play model is emerging as “a really interesting opportunity,” he said.

But there are dark clouds forming, Newell continued, raising concerns about the closed-garden approach of platforms such as Apple’s iOS.

“On the platform side, it’s sort of ominous that the world seems to be moving away from open platforms,” he said.

Platform providers that used to use their role to enable developers “instead view themselves as more rent guys who are essentially driving their partner margins to zero,” he said.

“They build a shiny sparkling thing that attracts users and then they control people’s access to those things,” he said.

Considering that the Digital Restrictions Management system that Valve uses (as part of their Steam system) is much more restrictive than, for instance, Apple and their FairPlay system, I consider this to be at best hypocrisy and at worst, outright lies.

For instance: I can buy a single copy of a game from the Apple App Store and put it onto both my iPhone and my sons iPod touch. We can then challenge each other and play the game or, as with Dungeon Hunter II, play co-operatively and defeat all of the monsters. The cost to me, after devices, was £4.99.

On the other hand, if I try to do the same with Steam and say, play Call of Duty 2 (an OLD game so it should be cheaper, right?) I have to buy a copy for me and also for my son. The cost to me is £29.98. What’s worse – is that if I want to let him play my copy of PORTAL 2 while I play Left 4 Dead 2, I can’t. Because Steam only allows one login at one machine at a time. And god forbid you try to circumvent this and get your account banned for suspicious activity. So again, even for games I own but are not currently playing, I can’t use them while I’m playing something else.

Is Newell concerned because Steam isn’t and couldn’t be on iPad? Is this a defensive hyperbole designed to distract us from the reality that “PC Gaming is dying”

I’d considered Steam DRM to be restrictive and annoying. I didn’t realise that they were quite so concerned about their future revenue model. Investors take note.

From Gamasutra:

While Nintendo has historically hesitated to fully embrace online connectivity with its games and hardware, the company recently filed a patent for the concept of a “Massively Single-Playing Online Game.”

The patent says that in this type of game, users playing a single player title could influence the characters and world of another user playing the same single player title, reports Gamespot.

Based on the patent’s description, this concept hopes to capture the positive elements of online play without the need for human-to-human interaction: “Those who want to play games that are more dynamic, not-based on Al and not-pre-scripted like multiplayer games, however, don’t want to ‘deal’ with other people, appreciate the privacy it provides,” the patent says.

For some discussion of this, see this blog post and the comments. The idea of having connections between people playing the same game but not actively interacting is not a new one. (And as there’s heaps of discussion about it and a few examples of prior art, then it stands to reason that the USPTO will grant a frivolous patent.)

In truth, Nintendo are really describing the anonymity of friend codes and the ease of matching competitors in online games – where you can not only find it difficult to see who it is (through the use of Miis) but also have difficulty communicating because you have to use a set of pre-made scripted responses. And the result is genius because the last thing you want, when playing Mario Kart Wii, is some 14 year old screaming obscenities through a text chat interface while you’re trying to win an important race.

Because the best part of online gaming is, of course, everyone else. Yes, you have to put up with the noobs (people who have been playing for ages but who remain hopeless), the outraged (how dare you!) and worst of all, the TK (team killer, someone who things it’s fun to attack allies). Having one of these on your team can ruin a game. Having them on the opposing team can be hilarious but also ruin a game. The basic premise is: online people suck.

But we still want the experience of playing against humans. Where we know our win was because of luck and skill as opposed to exploiting an AI glitch which hilariously causes the boss monster to bounce like a Chinese Vampire rather than rampage through your team.

So in designing games which are ostensibly single-player – but which are online, it can be serendipitous to base some of the game events on the actions of other players. The simplest example of this? No, you can’t loot that treasure item because someone was here first. A simple idea, seldom executed.

For location-based alternate reality games, this is like a magic ingredient; being able to interact with other players in your story where a player can be in the same city, a different city or even a virtual city yet without having the hassle of finding players, timing them or even speaking to them.