toblix

Yeah, the interface is super-slick. As for the game, I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

Yeah. My secret hope was that they were testing some brilliant new high-performance high-volume collaboration prototype. If that article is true, and they're actually trying to achieve this through half-assing a backend, my hopes and dreams for the remaining "experiments" have been crushed.

Sounds like a typical win-lose situation.

Your sarcasm/honesty is lost on me.

Wait, didn't I play the proper game? Was this some Halloween bullshit? How much of my experience was actually DOTA 2?

This article pretty much confirms my worst fears about this game. Sounds like no amount of donations can save this.

GAME REPORT: I fired up DOTA, and, unable to find any tutorial or single player thing I jumped into a match. I selected Juggernaut, and the following occured over the next half hour: I was surprised by the French announcer voice. Is there a reason for such a weird voice other than that it's sort of cool? The M-M-M-MONSTER KILL thing was cool at first, but then I found it a bit annoying. I guess there's less of that in pro elite master gold league series games. I had some initial problems with figuring out the store and inventory. For the longest time I had a bunch of stuff in my stash, and tried to use it from there. After figuring out how to actually transfer them to my inventory I found it cumbersome having to click on each thing, then myself. Just before the end I discovered the keypad double-tap, which seemed like a shortcut to use a thing on myself. I leveled up a bunch of times, and towards the end I killed a million people. The JUGGERNAUT attack was cool and felt powerful. Everyone else seemed to have little groups of monsters with them, or they were following little groups of monsters. What are those? I opened by explaining my inexperienced status on the chat, but nobody replied. Also, nobody said anything. We won, and it ended like this: I'm not sure how to read this, but I guess I levelled up pretty all right compared to the others. I had the most "last hits" (which is probably bad) and pretty low gold and xp per minute. All in all, a positive surprise considering all the horror stories I've heard.

Again, not really having in-depth knowledge, haven't Valve really proven to be all about user-created stuff lately? One would think a main feature of their next engine is a sweet, powerful editor that lets even dumb people make awesome video game assets.

Just finished it, with all the achievements I was going for. Though I had some frustrating moments in the game, related to not knowing if I'd botched anything until after each mission, those were only the product of my getting nervous about stuff I've heard. I had no problems at al with kills or alerts getting registered without my knowing, and everything went really smooth, with the exception of having to hack that one encounter towards the end to avoid being noticed or having to kill anyone. All the main missions and levels were great – lots of feeling like a powerful superking spelling every which way throughout castles and streets. Being a huge pussy, I'm always happy when I can complete a game without getting frustrated and angry at some dumb difficult challenge, and in this regard this game was perfect (playing on normal.) I pretty quickly got all my relevant powers maxed out, and mana was never a problem, so for me this game was mainly about exploring beautiful and fantastic levels, sweetly traversing them and feeling in control of all situations. It gave me a little bit of Half-Life 2, and a little bit of Thief, and it's one of the best gaming experiences I've had this year.

I'm going to go back and see if I can find a thread discussing the Source engine before or right around its release. edit: Some good stuff here and here.

Yeah, based on my very fleeting, baseless impressions of how things are, Epic and Crytek are really engine-centric and have become so advanced Source probably won't be able to beat them on their really impressive strong points, like hot-compiling C code whilst moving real-time lighted celestial bodies around to demonstrate how gravity affects highlight shadow refraction in dynamic water beads on moist surfaces, BUT what do I know. Hopefully they'll be able to have more of what they're good at – impeccable design of everything. My number one request for their next engine: no more loading pauses.

If the Source 2 engine is as sweet compared to today's modern engines as the original Source was compared to its contemporary competition, I'm going to be really glad. It probably won't be, but it'll still probably be sweet. I remember spending way too much time in that apartment building entrance in the HL2 intro, strafing back and forth in front of the door and looking at the bicycle through the sweet distorted glass window.

One thing: do players ususlly use their human voices when playing this game, or do they chat by typing?

Holy fucking shit, someone is kickstarting an RPG! Wait, let me finish! I haven't read the details carefully, but there was something about a huge, living world in which every character has an advanced AI or something like that. Anyway, the engine looks pretty cool. Here is the link for it: here.

I thought you only had to be online when installing the drivers? Didn't hear about the malware – sounds awful.

It says exactly this in the "about" text. «Don't think every layer will just be about picking» or something like that. Still, I was more excited about the potential of this before I got to play it. Actually experiencing the game and all its technical issues made me adjust my expectations for how fantastical any layer can possibly be. Of course, we might all be playing Molyneux' little game just as he always intended. «Okay, synchronise that part of the cube! There, yes. Now, crash all the iPhone clients.»

Did anyone notice if they're handling the volume properly? If you pick an edge cube, does it disappear on both sides of the edge? How about corner cubes? When the first layer was cleared, did each face shrink correspondingly?

I would be metric tons more interested if they, instead of going for the typical RPG thing with a huge world and tons of shit, they used that seemingly sweet engine to maybe do a small, highly detailed location. Maybe a game taking place in a single castle (or why even a castle?) or something. You can definitely do a lot of interesting stuff with that physics and lighting engine, and that sweet, awkward animation/fighting system has potential for so much hilarity, excitement and unique interaction, and it kills me that the first instinct is to make it BIG and HUGE.

If they had managed to make this real-time, and you could pan around this huge cube watching tens of thousands of people chipping away, some systematically clearing out neat columns, some following weird patterns, some writing messages, etc., it would be incredible. Currently it's synchronising state with minutes delay, if at all, which only emphasises the pointlessness. Apparently they're working on some fixes that will primarily focus on the coins, which seems weird to me. My guess is people's interest and activity will die down from the initial release burst and level out until people start closing in on the core, at which point news sites will mention it and players will come rushing by the thousands, flooding the servers and leading to the most chaotic, unstable endgame the world will ever see.

It!

What's that triangle do?

I feel that, since the only thing with this game is the massively multiplayer write-once manipulation of 1 bit-per-pixel bitmap, they should at least make that part great work. The various zoom-levels are really inconsistent, and if I zoom all the way in, everything's just big green blocks, and not whatever's actually there. I can start chipping away at this, and I get money and everything, and after a long while, suddenly it gets updated and everything changes. So the feeling of actually playing along with others is not really there, which I though was the whole point. I'm guessing it's performance problems, since they said something about the amount of players being SURPRISINGLY HIGH!

Did I post this in here?

Maybe I'll just join random games and piss a bunch of people off. Can I play under a false and untraceable alias?