There’s a screenshot floating around from the new game by Ico and Shadow of the Colossus creators Fumito Ueda and company. It’s a picture of a chain sticking out of a hole and then dragging along the ground (or suspended in mid-air) into some shadows. Not really a big deal, but Ico and SotC were great games. So there you go.
Monthly Archive for January, 2008
Tycho at Penny Arcade posted a video demonstration on creating a head tracking display using a Wiimote by Carnegie Mellon student Johnny Lee.
Setting technical details aside, this sort of display creates an image that moves as you move. When you move closer, you see more, and you see less when moving farther away. When you duck or move to the side, the screen compensates and moves with you.
This isn’t perfect. You can’t actually turn your body to turn the display, and only one person can use the setup at a time. But for that one person, as Johnny Lee points out, it will be like looking through a window at something real rather than at a picture.
You will look like a wonky dork wearing infrared lights on your head, but this is a great direction to take Wii technology and make some truly immersive games. Just couple some Johnny Lee infrared LED glasses with one of those curved Alienware monitors, and we have virtual reality.
If that’s not up your alley, Lee also has a how-to video to make your own interactive whiteboard and iPhone like touch screen using your Wiimote on his Web site.
Industry guru Raph Koster has an opinion piece over at Gamasutra about the future of games for core gamers. Koster, the lead designer behind Ultima Online, sees the industry’s future as full of “lower-budget, asynchronous, low time investment, web-based games” emphasizing micro-transactions.
This future is geared not towards yesterday’s hardcore gamers, but to today’s market of casual gamers, of moms and gradmas and people who don’t follow daily gaming news in their RSS syndicator. They play Wii Fit and Wii Sports and ignore No More Heroes and Assassin’s Creed, games made for that small market of people who know and love games.
However, Koster’s conclusion is a positive one. He sees the mainstream, casual audience and the niche, hardcore one forming some sort of syncretism.
The mainstream will get tugged in the direction of the niche. As the world has become more science-fictional, we have seen the memes of SF appear in everyday life. Stuff from James Bond and Lord of the Rings is now common currency. The boundary lines between niche and mass market are very thin these days, and will likely get thinner. So even the casual stuff is going to have a heavy tinge of the stuff that we the geeks love.
Given the nature of games, I’d expect to see a continuation of the trend to complexify the casual, because that’s what games do: grow more complex as people master the basics. The high-end casual market isn’t very casual anymore (some match-3 games are not only expensive to make, but downright esoteric in their rules).
In other words — gamers may not want to become like Your Mom. But Your Mom is gradually becoming more of a gamer.
In my opinion, this is simply a sign that games are a healthy, growing medium. It is inevitable. Will it mean an end to complex games like Mass Effect that take story seriously? Only time will tell.
World of Warcraft players are beginning to hit the game’s cap on gold, according to WoW Insider. The cap of 214,748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper is a result of the game code. Blizzard has not commented so far.
In terms of story and character development, massively multiplayer online games are different beasts entirely, but it’s nonetheless interesting to consider how they function. Level caps exist in most games even outside this genre, preventing things from getting to easy and overbalanced. If you could get to level 9,000, somebody would, and it would end up being just like that episode of South Park.
But to have a ceiling on every quantifiable aspect of your character means that there’s a point of stasis and perfection, a point where you literally cannot develop anymore. At some point, after years of playing, you’ll be the max level with the best items and the most gold and there’s nothing for you to do but stand around Ironforge and gloat.
Is your WoW avatar a character, or a bucket you’re trying to fill to the brim for Internet prestige?
(Note: I’m grasping for news. Slow week in the story department.)
Accompanying an announcement that BioWare and Pandemic, acquired by the company in October, had now been fully incorporated, EA revealed yesterday that the two developers would be producing 10 new franchises based on six owned properties.
EA did not lay out a timeline for when these new games would appear. BioWare continues to work on Dragon Age, Sonic RPG for the Nintendo DS and presumably the Mass Effect sequels and their mysterious MMORPG. Pandemic likewise is still working on Mercenaries 2: World In Flames and Saboteur.
A blurb by Joystiq’s Jason Dobson on the announcement related EA’s corporate annexing to the borg. “At least it seems as though the assimilation hasn’t freed the developers of independent thought, though granted it does take some time before the implants take hold.” I saw similar comments anywhere BioWare was mentioned on Evil Avatar. I have to disagree.
Given time to calm down after the initial startling revelation, I was struck by one simple fact: EA is a business. As a business, their goal is to make money. Not to stifle creativity. Granted, EA has done as much by pumping out generic titles (Madden), hording licenses (Madden), and turning fresh meat game designers into enslaved husks, but I cannot see this happening in this case.
BioWare and Pandemic are successful studios, critically and financially. BioWare especially, a company I have a great respect for, has made hit after outstanding hit in the past few years. Why would EA want to damage two clearly profitable studios?
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