Merus

I think it's supposed to be short for 'swagger'. KYM confirms.

It's pre-announcing an announcement. I feel that's way too forward - there should at least be a pre-announcement of your announcement announcement.

Well, that question went exactly where I hoped it would! I think Tropico is kind of along the lines of what I'm thinking about, where one of your goals is explicitly to embezzle funds from your island dictatorship and one of your key sources of funds is to manipulate aid from foreign powers by pandering to them. It's not how you're supposed to run an island paradise, but it's how it works in practice, and by carefully modelling it you're reflecting the legitimacy everyone says they're not giving this in the real world. Anyway, this is Sweatshop, which I mentioned in the letter. I'm glad Oregon Trail came up, because I think it's a great example of something I noticed when I was a kid and has never really been followed up. We had a board game called Cashflow, which was made by this "financial self-help guru" named Robert Kiyosaki. His motivation was the idea that people responded to games using their real-world behaviour as a starting point, so if you sat them down in front of Monopoly they'd make similar mistakes in Monopoly to the ones they made in the real world. My mum noticed that it was pretty easy to get in a state where you couldn't really advance your goals, and would just go around the board living, essentially, from paycheque to paycheque. I thought the idea of game design that tried to express an idea in the real world, by encouraging the players to act in a particular way, was fascinating. Oregon Trail, even though it never came out here, sounds like kind of the same thing - it's modelling a real-world system and by getting players to understand the relationships between the things, they get a stronger handle on the system as a whole. Which is why I thought that games would be a good medium for satire - by saying "here is how the system works" in a pretty direct way, and then letting players loose in that to fuck with it as they will, you'd essentially have them build their own satires.

I finished 999 recently; it's a visual novel about 9 people locked on board a ship to play a madman's game. It's got some adventurey/room-escapey bits with some mostly quite good puzzles. It has no 'text speed' option and sorely needs one, and it shares Japan's fascination with pseudo-science, probably to its detriment. However, it gets the characters right, it has at least one meaty mystery that's fair and grounded in fact, and it manages to be menacing without needing to spend a lot of time on that menace.

See, I felt the opposite way about the Arkham games - the standard stealth game tradition of sneaking right behind an enemy because he won't see you is broken, because he inevitably surprises you at some point by turning around. It's a degenerate strategy, and I feel like making that stuff hidden forces the players to not rely on it, which allows them the much more interesting gameplay of spotting opportunities, being in the right place at the right time, and making sure their escape route is clear. I would like to see a stealth game where the guards have a mental model of the world so if something changes they get suspicious. It used to be computationally expensive, but honestly I think at this point we could probably afford it.

That would be Brian Ashcraft's work. His brief is technically the Japanese side of the industry but this mostly results in him posting hentai figures or stuff he saw on his walk. Protip: if you feel compelled to read Kotaku for some reason, Kotaku AU is a licensed version that has most of the US site's content without the layout. It also has a couple of Australian writers that are actually not bad.

I should have been more accurate. You do get XP for player kills. You just don't get a lot, much like killing monsters in PvE doesn't give you much unless they've been alive a while. Defending is still the best way to stay safe and earn XP until you can start getting the nicer gear.

Whoa, yeah, don't do that. If levels aren't coming naturally, do something else. The PvE doesn't get much more interesting, there are bosses and things out in the world and some light platforming but if it's not doing it for you now then it's never going to do it for you. Get your ass to the Mists. (XP in WvW comes from the triggered events, not player kills. Defending is going to be the easiest way to get some levels and improve your gear.)

As someone who had Steam block access to their games for a month while I sought legal advice regarding the class action waiver (that advice was: there will never be a situation where suing Steam will be worth it, particularly if you know how to break the DRM), there are severe disadvantages to having only one account that you're not really thinking about. We have no assurances that Valve won't make the subscriber agreement (which explicitly states you don't own anything you've "bought") really consumer-hostile, and if they do there's fuck all you can do about it. Valve change their minds all the time, and they usually don't keep promises. Usually it works out alright in the end, but if Valve is suddenly shut down that promise that they'll do something about the DRM is going to be forgotten in the mess of salvaging the company. Those 400 games or whatever you have are incredibly fragile. Besides, you should be using a password manager anyway, and in that case multiple accounts are really not a big deal. You... are using a password manager, right? (People may look down on me for having played WoW for four years, but boy howdy did that game teach me to have different passwords for everything.)

I think that feeling that your character is more or less complete after not very much time is deliberate. Guild Wars 1 had a very similar approach where you reached the level cap by the first couple of regions and it was all pushing through the storyline from there. It's no coincidence that the dungeons start only after you've basically unlocked every ability. Although I have to quibble: there's lots of MMO games that don't have progression. MMORPGs generally have, but even there it's not universal. I find the game a bit tedious when pushing forward for expees but soon remember that the idea is to pick something to do and then go do that instead of running down the checklist of the "next" thing. You could bounce from starting zone to starting zone, trying to trigger the zone bosses, and that would be a totally valid playstyle.

Well I put down $25. Amiga fo' lyfe, yo.

Well that was pretty much what I was going to say: a lot of the time it turns tedious because you're constantly dealing with the gross douchebags. Still, not every gaming forum is at the feminism 101 level. Not even explicitly inclusive ones! Well, you could try, but unfortunately "pragmatism" is pretty much always part of this trope, because the underlying assumption is that women don't care about sex but some like to use the power it gives them over men. It's usually at this point I share the anecdote about ancient Greek culture basically thinking the opposite: that women were the ones who wanted sex by any means necessary and it was the men who withheld, as an illustration that even the idea that men don't have control over their sex drives is cultural, not biological. Also, generally when ambitious men use their sexual power to get what they want it plays very differently, so it's not a straight-across equivalence.

What they've said is that you have items you can only buy using skill points, which you normally use to unlock skills but when you run out will likely get plowed into these items. After you hit max level, you start earning skill points instead of levelling. They've also said they intend to retrofit old areas with new content, potentially adding new things like secret bosses and suchlike.

Part of it is because the developer is 'a guy at Gearbox' rather than someone people widely know, but honestly there's been an undercurrent of sexism at Gearbox for a while. Certainly they proudly stamped their name on Duke Nukem Forever, but there's also how their Aliens game wouldn't allow female marines in multiplayer because it apparently didn't occur to anyone at Gearbox that female marines in an Aliens game is an expected feature, or how Borderlands has basically only one female character whose stereotype isn't gendered (by which I mean, yep they're all pretty broad stereotypes and that's fine for what it is, but there's only one female character who is a gender-neutral stereotype). Oh wait I see Borderlands has come up: okay, so as far as I'm aware we have the seductress, the maneater, the bitch-who-is-broken, the guardian angel and the hardnosed administrator. Let's also remember the problem with sexism (and most -isms) is not strictly that unequal treatment exists, but that for all but one particular group it's predictably common in ways that members of that group don't generally grasp. The female characters in Borderlands are, with one exception, gendered stereotypes - the stereotypes that make up their character are stereotypically female. The stereotypes that make up the male characters are not usually gendered, and so default to male.

I can think of nothing worse than a NeoGAF guild. I'm playing, mostly the PvE, but I'll check out WvW and maybe do some sPvP pickups. The most fascinating thing about Guild Wars 2, to me, is that it is brazenly built on top of Bartle's player types. Bartle theorised that there were three stable configurations for online games: games that mostly attracted socialisers, games that attracted achievers and killers in roughly equal numbers, and games that balanced out all four play types, with strong emphasis put towards increasing explorer player builds. And here we are: a game where the basic gameplay loop is 'strike out in a direction and see what's going on', the chief method of progression is filling in the map, and has an intricate platforming challenge hidden in every zone, with rare events tucked away for people to find if they put enough effort into digging into the game. It's a game that scratches my explorer itch something fierce. So we'll see: we'll finally get a big-budget MMO, not a MUD, not a MUSH, that will put Bartle's theory to the test on a grand scale. Funny story; I made a list of what properties an MMORPG would need to have to knock WoW off its perch a few years ago, mostly just as a mental exercise. I figured it needed a strong solo game, as the big lesson learnt from WoW was that most players don't want to have to put the effort into seeking out relationships (which is fair enough; usually people form relationships due to being thrown together in shared circumstances). It needed to break away from the DIKU model, where you got XP by killing fairly simple monsters and so your success was a function of time spent. It couldn't be too different, because gamers won't spend money unless it's a sure thing, but it couldn't be too similiar, because it would be competing against WoW, with its history, content and network effects; it'd need to superficially resemble a typical MMORPG but reveal its differences over time. It would definitely need something better than the holy trinity, a system where players could pick their own roles or shift between them depending on what they wanted to try out. It'd also need to deal with the problems of friends not having anything to do together, and better than the CoH sidekick system did where you skip some stuff while your friend is around, but when they leave you have to trudge back to your own area. It'd need a better questing system, as traditional quests tend to drive players away from socialising normally. It'd need a distinctive artstyle so screenshots and machinima can serve to advertise the game, and it'd need day one buy-in to overcome WoW's network effects and make the most of the big launch splash, so I basically figured that Valve were the only ones that could possibly pull something like that off. Looking back at it now, it's sort of an obvious list, but I was nevertheless surprised when I heard parts of my list being parroted back to me by ArenaNet's manifesto video and realised that ArenaNet would also qualify as a company that could get day one buy-in for their game. It looks like it'll do well; I'm still not sold they've really got a plan for keeping the world feeling full of life after people get to 80, but I already appreciate that the MMOs of 2012 aren't scared of WoW like their older brethren. I'm excited for the genre to get some life in it again, finally.

I always figured they had no real reason to do HL3 because they've kind of said all they had to say with single-player first person shooters, much as I miss the company that put so much effort into developing storytelling techniques in an interactive medium. Ah well, I'm kind of on the outs with Steam as it is, thanks to not being willing to agree to the new subscriber agreement that waives my right to a class action. Valve as a developer are highly entertaining, but I have significant reservations with Steam's resolution process as it is, particularly how it seems the only real appeal process is to convince the enthusiast press to write about you. I don't want to sign away any legal recourses, particularly ones designed to punish corporations that get a little too big for their britches, until I determine whether or not I have other, also suitable options. (It's just occured to me, though, that any significant problem I have might attract the attention of the ACCC. There's nothing in the contract about bringing Valve to the attention of a consumer watchdog with a taste for corporate blood and an inability to feel fear or remorse.)

I would have said the most famous game designer in the world was one of Will Wright, Sid Meier or Shigeru Miyamoto. If it's not Mark Burnett. But for a CBS piece mentioning a famous game designer as being one, I'm not going to quibble. After all, all it would take is a little bit of mainstream press for any game designer to become the most famous one. I think Blow gets good press because he gives good quote and has a lot of industry exposure, and he makes games with that are very clearly the product of a particular person's mind. They feel less like the work of a corporation, which makes them easier to accept as a work by a creator.

I am a big fan of the unbridled insanity of Jasper Fforde's work, starting with The Eyre Affair and going on from there. The conceit of his most famous series, the Thursday Next series, is that it takes place in an alternate universe where literature is major pop culture, and so therefore attracts criminals, which thereby requires policing. The first book involves a dastardly villain kidnapping Jane Eyre from her novel and holding her for ransom, and the most recent book involved dopplegangers, Enid Blyton fundamentalists, and the impending destruction of the city by a vengeful god. I also enjoyed Shades of Grey, which is an interesting take on the dystopia novel. I imagine he's not for everyone - there's a lot of punnery, for instance, and there's quite a bit of metahumour, such as the joke about changing the ending to Jane Eyre to a happy one - but I enjoy that, despite it being seemingly very gonzo humour, Fforde takes his narrative very seriously. He's aware he's writing mysteries, and does an excellent job of ensuring his mysteries are unpredictable but fair, and of making the insane world he's created feel reasonable.

No, no, that's the bit under the cylinder. There's three bits to that room: a bunch of tightropes one on top of each other, then some tightropes which the memory of Raz's dad stands at the end of and throws knives down, and then a flaming mesh cylinder you have to climb around the outside of and jump from section to section. Invisibility helps you with the first two. As far as I'm aware, there's not really a trick to the cylinder. You can use various exploits to do things like get on the inside of the cylinder or get on top of it and get past that way, but they're unreliable and of limited utility as they make getting off the cylinder much harder.

I think a lot of the problems people had with Meat Circus were concentrated on one specific obstacle, namely the segmented mesh cylinder when Raz is being hunted by the spectre of his dad. Raz isn't capable of jumping in the way the game thinks he should be able to (he cannot jump around a cylinder), which makes that section significantly harder than it's probably intended to be. That's on top of the big top, which are puzzles on top of an escort sequence, and a rail grinding segment where half the time your momentum carries you off into the ether, and it's perfectly understandable that people would think the whole thing was bullshit.

So the discussion on Fez pushed me to bite the bullet, dust off the Xbox 360 and buy it. It's pretty much exactly the kind of thing I like, it turns out! I particularly enjoy how much environmental storytelling it does, for instance when you work out why the ruined city seems so familiar. I ended up getting a bunch of anti-cubes my first run through because I'd get into a room and know there was something there, and wouldn't let it go until I worked it out. I haven't cracked the writing systems yet, but early days. I've still got two whole areas I haven't explored yet. Edit: well, my save game's corrupted so I basically just lost everything. Awesome. Edit to the edit: no, wait, there's a workaround; you can delete the patch, move Gomez out of the room, reapply the patch and the save game will work again. Non-ironic awesome.

So long as they handle the edge case where someone gets an achievement that becomes easier for whatever reason - for instance, if someone discovers a technique that trivialises the requirement - I would be all for that as well.

The level design is super-amazing, particularly Black Velvetopia, but Gloria's Theatre is kind of a low point. I feel that that the game relies on adventure game tropes a little too much, particularly in places where you could probably come up with an equivalent that felt a little more platformer-native. You equip and use items in lots of places, but platformers are about traversing a world and that's rarely the basis of puzzles in the game. But the game is just so charming! And there's no goddamn ice world, either.

To start off with, the platform holder would have to allow you to silently award achievements - I don't think announcing to the player that an achievement is awarded necessarily has to be part of the design pattern. I'd guess then you'd tie achievements to parts where your players would ask each other if they saw a particular bit; if it's not something you want players to do the first time through, hide it. The rule of thumb I think works is to ask whether players would ask each other if they did x in a game. For something like Dear Esther I think perhaps silent achievements that trigger when you hear enough about circumstances on the island to piece together part of the story - if they're noisy then all that subtlety would be lost. I think it's okay if the achievements list prods people to believe that there's more to discover, but it's not okay to be telling people mid-game they can stop caring now because the game has decided they have enough. That said, I acknowledge silent achievements are really not common - I think Apple might allow it, but that's it - and that without it there's basically nothing you can do that wouldn't be awful. So I guess maybe I was wrong about the achievement system not really being the problem. Edit: wait, hang on. Encouraging people to think of their experience with Dear Esther as being 'done' because they've ticked off the achievements list undermines the game, because it notably doesn't have a point where it tells you you've seen all the content. In that case, I'm hard pressed to think of any achievements that wouldn't undermine the game.

I feel like a lot of the frustration with achievements is less to do with the achievement system itself and more that it's done poorly by so many developers. The point of achievements is to serve as a publicly accessible distillation of an experience you've had with a game, as well as a way for developers to flesh out the scope of experiences they expect players to have. They're a reputation tool that handily doubles as a way for developers to influence players. Story achievements are worthless (and everyone here recognises that) because for most games your experience with the game has nothing to do with the plot of the game or how many dudes you kill. They should be awarded for specific experiences that would be notable without the achievement. Also pun names are a really dumb convention.