61 Frames Per Second : mmo

The 61FPS Review: Battleforge

John Constantine — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

When not volunteering for the Somali Pirates' Union or attending live tapings of Glenn Beck, guest contributer Dan Thompson can be found teaching in the South Bronx. In moments free from agitating for pirate rights or being corrupted by the youth, Dan dedicates his time to battling his cat, Bishop, and heckling John Constantine's Persona 4 play sessions.

Phenomic’s Battleforge terrified me. Not terrified that this chimeric mix of collectible card game, real-time strategy, and MMO would be bad, oh no. My soul-shaking fear was that it would actually be good. I could already see it happening: my descent into a dark, screen-glare jaundiced, asocial existence, my only activity the furious clicking of virtual cards to unleash winged beasts of burning doom. Like the first time I read about aerosol alcohol’s promise of inebriation through inhalation, I was overtaken by a mixture of horror and wonder. These are three gaming genres I hold dear, and the battles looked great. This hybrid had the potential to cost me my job, friends, and family. I popped in the disc and watched the install bar crawl to the right. Thankfully, none of my fears were realized. Battleforge just doesn’t work.

Its genre blending premise is actually a front; this is just a real-time strategy game and nothing else. Rather than spend time building bases in your campaign and climbing tech-trees, Battleforge lets you put together any combination of units you like based on the virtual cards in your deck. This take on the RTS genre’s staid formula is really just a cosmetic streamlining of old play conventions meant to speed the game up. The problem is that Battleforge is too fast. Losing the more ponderous pace of a traditional real-time strategy game (like building bases and slowly accumulating resources) reduces the actual strategy. I felt like I was throwing units at the enemy just to keep up with the game. The problematic pace is compounded by an awkward interface for grouping units. Assigning groups and calling units to the front of the battlefield is straightforward, but the game automatically has those selected units join the closest group. Provided you were building a force at a base before moving out as in genre mainstays like Starcraft or Command & Conquer, it would work quite well. But since new units are summoned anywhere on the map, you end up with giant, unwieldy mobs instead of a tight, strategically arrayed army. With no time to fix groups before you’re drowning under another wave of enemies, you lose the precision timing and control that are the hallmarks of a well-built RTS. Most missions are based on a time-sensitive goal or escorting some hapless fantasy cliché around the map. Any reasoned decision making is subsumed to saving General Who Gives A Shit from the giant rhinos.

(Speaking of the good General, Battleforge’s story is terrible. It’s the kind of insipid Tolkien knock-off you expect to find scrawled on a legal pad behind the trifold of some post-adolescent dungeon master. Not only is it bad, but the vast majority of the story is delivered in blocks of text presented during loading screens. It’s almost as if everyone at Phenomic read the thing and thought the only place to hide it would be in plain sight, when most people are too busy grabbing a drink to be arsed around with reading.)

Well, at least the collectible card game stuff will be cool, right? Eh, not so much. I wasn’t joking about it just being an RTS. The “cards” and “decks” are completely unnecessary, nothing more than a shallow schema on which the simplified RTS play is hung. These aren’t cards in any meaningful sense, just glorified units and spells. In the same way that Battleforge lacks the strategy and pace essential to a good RTS, it’s also missing the strategic card interactions that are the backbone of a good CCG. Worse still, the rock/paper/scissors feel of combat makes it so there’s no incentive to explore and create novel decks. What these cards do let you do is pay EA, Battleforge’s publisher, to unlock content you already paid for on your disc. The problem of buying new cards goes beyond EA squeezing you for a few bucks. The game employs its own virtual currency, which you buy with real-world monies, and this virtual cash can be used to either buy more cards from EA, or from other players in the game’s auction house. The ability to buy rare cards at auction destroys the game’s balance, and an RTS is only as good as it is balanced.

Finally, how does it fare as an MMO? Not terribly. There is fun to be had in the two-to-twelve player cooperative campaign missions, but I had a hell of a time finding anyone to play with. It’s not just that you’re waiting for someone who wants play a particular mission, they also have to be playing in whichever of the three difficulty levels you’ve specified. My shortest wait was fifteen minutes for a two-player game and my longest a ninety-minute wait for a four-player match. The player versus player, on the other hand, is brutally not fun. For every match I was in where there was solid interplay between the combatants there were two where one of us would just not have an answer for the other player’s deck thanks to the game’s inherent imbalances.

Battleforge seems like a great idea: take the strategy of an RTS, add the variety and depth of deck construction from a CCG, and create a deeply social game with cooperative and combative aspects. Unfortunately, what Phenomic made is just a deeply flawed RTS with a money hole carved in the middle. The whole is exactly the sum of the parts. At least it looks good.

Grade: D+

Previous Reviews:

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.
Suikoden Tierkreis
Eat Lead - The Return of Matt Hazard
Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop
Resident Evil 5
Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

NYCC 2009 - DC Universe Online

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Editor's note: I'm still pretty darn worn out from the frenetic pace of New York Comic-Con this past weekend. My entire body hurts. Expect a good amount of post-con reporting over the next few days as I sift through my notes, photos, and edit together a few videos which will hopefully be fairly rad. For now, though, let's just start off with something easy, the first massively multiplayer online game to officially license characters and scenarios from one of the biggest pop-culture publishers in the world...oh lord, what am I doing?

One of the biggest crowd-pleaser games at New York Comic-Con was Sony Online Entertainment's DC Universe Online. The massively multiplayer online action title was set up for anyone to play using either keyboard and mouse or or the Playstation DualShock3 and there was a panel discussion about the game featuring several members of Sony's design team along with human-style-guide Jim Lee and story and scenario writers Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman. Those names should sound very familiar to you if you're read any superhero comics in the past twenty years or so.

That they referred to it as an MMO action game rather than an MMO RPG is very telling in what we saw from the presentation and our play sessions. It plays just like all the other open-world action brawlers, only you're playing with other people to either cooperate or compete in objectives which are continuously sent to you from the game's servers (cleverly disguised in Hero mode as Oracle from Batman and Justice League). Run, jump, smash, repeat, no arcane spell casting. Super powers and otherwise special skills are relegated to a line of icons at the bottom of the HUD and activated (on the DualShock) by holding down the left or right trigger and pressing the button that corresponded with the power you wanted to use - circle, square, triangle or X. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but no more so than any other 3D action game.

A couple of interesting points raised during the Q&A session:

Right now, the developers are able to play PS3 co-op and versus with PC on the same network but are unsure if this will be possible in the final retail copy. They'd love it if everyone could play together. "It would be better if everyone just had a PS3."

The disc release will only be "the first part" of the game as there will be seasonal downloadable updates with new stories and objectives that should keep the game up to date with the comics. Apparently this game is a new full-time job for Jim, Geoff and Marv.

Regarding the customization options on building your own heroes/villains, one audience member asked "Am I gonna see billions of other ice guys who look just like me?" This question was met with a resounding "No!"

When asked how failure/death would be handled and if, like in other MMOs, players would be need to worry about corpse runs, Jim Lee joked "You'll have to wait a year so we can relaunch you." Seriously, though, heroes and villains don't die in DCUO, they just get "knocked out." After a few seconds you will be given the option to get back up, just with slightly reduced health and energy.

All of the environments will be unique and instantly discernible (no confusing Gotham City with STAR Labs).

Pedestrians are affected by your character's Threat level. Throwing a bus will upset them, regardless of whether you're a villain or hero, but just walking down the street, villains have a higher Threat level. In the slums, though, villains fit in just fine and heroes stick out. No need to worry about protecting civilians from collateral damage as the NPCs of DCUO "will be amazingly agile."

There's still a good amount of development time to go on this game, and Sony's not rushing it out to meet a deadline. That said, the demo we played was definitely a good start. It played very similar to another Con crowd pleaser, Activision's Prototype, only without all the zombies and mass destruction. The real competition, of course, if the likes of Champions Online, who are at the distinct disadvantage of not having Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and company in their game. No subscription plan has been decided on yet, or even whether there will be one on the PS3 version, but this may just wind up being the first MMO that I will play until it ruins my life. The controls are very action-gamer-friendly and the prospect of teaming up with friends as our own heroes or villains within the DC Universe is a tantalizing one indeed.

Related articles:
DC Universe and the Console MMO Conundrum
At Least Batman: Arkham Asylum's Story Will Be Good
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New Zork MMO

Cole Stryker — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Dublin's Jolt Online is taking on the legendary text-based aventure game, this time in MMO form:

LegendsofZork.com will provide online gamers with a persistent online adventure, playable from any Internet browser. Players take up the role of a recently laid-off salesman and part-time loot-gatherer, as he explores the Great Underground Empire. Designed to provide gamers with a casual MMO game they can play on their laptop, desktop or Apple iPhone (in school, work or on the bus), there’s nothing to download, just go to www.legendsofzork.com.

The press release doesn't really give a whole lot of information as to whether it will be another text adventure or a visual reimagining of the game's universe. Go to LegendsofZork.com to be notified when the game goes live. In the meantime, go play the original Zork for free in your browser, because if you haven't played at least one graphics-free text adventure, you just can't consider yourself a serious gamer.

(via Kotaku)

The Videogame Ages, part 2

John Constantine — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

In part one of The Videogame Ages, I discussed the inadequacy of “generation” language in gaming, and laid out The Golden Age of gaming. In part two, I look at the Silver and Bronze ages before taking a look at the modern era and the future.

The Silver Age – 1983 to 1996
8-Bit, 16-Bit, Early Handheld, Early 3D, Advanced PC and Arcade

The silver age of games is defined by expansion, in not just playability but breadth of experience. When home computers became affordable and home consoles began diversifying, games started transforming from immediate, single-mechanic experiences into more lasting forms. Silver age games were still about escalating challenge, but high scores ceased being the goal, replaced by definitive endings. Games started becoming more explicitly narrative-driven, as aesthetic justification on consoles and as the focus of many PC games (see the entire adventure game genre.) Portable gaming also started to rise to prominence during this period, early single-screen LCD games replaced by multi-game consoles like the Game Boy and Atari Lynx. Arcade and PC game technology pulled far away from home consoles, but all games were shifted from the rough visual abstraction of golden age games, into more aesthetically recognizable presentations – albeit still cartoonish impressionistic rather than realistic. The rise of polygonal 3D graphics, both real-time full 3D (Yu Suzuki’s Virtua series) and pre-rendered (Myst, etc.), at the end of the silver age marks the transition to bronze. In 1996, with the release of Mario 64, Tomb Raider, and Quake, the silver age comes to a close.

The Bronze Age – 1996 to 2006 (maybe)
32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit, Death of Arcades, PC Equalization

While golden age games’ boundary was a single screen and silver age games were largely confined to movement from left to right or down to up, the bronze age is the birth of 3D space as gaming’s chief concern. This isn’t to say that games that take a place on a 2D plain ceased being important or a valid medium for experimentation (though they certainly became marginalized on consoles, PCs, and in arcades.) But creating spaces with depth similar to the physical world took center stage in design. This push toward realistic spaces is mirrored in game aesthetics. Nearly all the technological benchmarks of the bronze age have come from creating as lifelike a facsimile of real life as can be achieved on any technology. PC games typically set that high water mark, though by the end of 2006, home consoles had largely caught up to PCs, much as they did with arcade games during the first few years of the 20th century (arcades are close to extinct now.) Game narrative started heavily borrowing from film’s storytelling language, relying on scripted scenes voiced and acted by digital characters in an attempt to tell deeper stories, but games also started developing there own unique storytelling language during this period, some games allowing the player to always be immersed in drama through play (see: Half-Life.) Multiplayer games no longer required physical proximity with the rise of online play on both PCs and consoles, and portable gaming started offering richer, longer play experiences, akin to those found on consoles.

I’m not totally convinced that the bronze age has ended yet, but the telltale signs of gaming’s latest age-defining shift have been popping up with some frequency over the last few years. The argument can be made that the Heroic Age of gaming is one of community via online networks and MMOs, user-generated content (see: Spore, LittleBigPlanet, Halo 3, Boom Blox, etc.), and experiential gaming. Experiential gaming is a big one whose mettle has yet to be tested, whether or not broad physical activity, from waving a Wiimote to playing fake musical instruments, will catch on. It’s certainly a dramatic shift to see experiential gaming leave its one-time home, the arcade, and transform into a driving force of home gaming. Then again, who knows? Maybe the golden age of gaming has only just ended, and its now, when players can finally build games themselves inside of other games, that the silver age has begun. Let me know, dear reader.

Part 1

Related links:
Comparison of Wiki Articles Proves Geeks Inherited The Earth
MMO Predicts Life in 10 Years
Men Are From Hyrule, Women Are From Simville: If Gender Defines the Games We Play, Why Does Everyone Play By the Same Rules?
9/9/99 9 Years Later
Fix It: Alone in the Dark, Tiger Woods, and the Death of the Glitch
Everyone Will be Able to Rock

The Videogame Ages, part 1

John Constantine — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This past Friday, I tried to slip a little piece of language into a discussion about game emulation that I was wary about using at all. At this point, the go-to boundaries for discussing videogames’ admittedly small history is console-technology generations. We say 8-Bit or 16-Bit because these are easy identifiers based on competing, contemporary technologies. But the language “The 8-Bit Generation” doesn’t account for arcade technology, PC games, or portable gaming. Now that Bob Dvorak’s Tennis for Two is officially fifty years-old, I think we can finally start applying broader terms to gaming’s evolutionary eras. Obviously history is fluid, and chances are these classifications won’t hold true in 2050, but for now they work. The Hesiodic ages, as laid out here, consider games on every platform; the rigid parameters of home consoles, the advanced nature of PC and Mac gaming throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the fast strides made by arcade technology throughout that same period, and the predominantly inferior technology available in handheld gaming. Unlike Hesiod’s Ages of Man, however, the videogame ages are (mostly) a positive progression. Please note: these are not strict definitions. This is a discussion, and I want everyone to make their opinions heard in the comments section. Now then, onward to the Golden Age.

The Golden Age – 1958 to 1983
Dvorak, MIT, Early Arcade, Early Home Console

The golden age of gaming began in 1958 and was, for almost a decade and a half, almost exclusively concerned with tennis. It took Nolan Bushnell getting clever for us to start calling it Pong. Tennis for Two, Magnavox’s Odyssey, and Bushnell’s advice to “avoid missing ball for high score” was pretty much the only game in town until the mid-70s with some notable exceptions. The second videogame ever made has a more recognizable legacy in today’s games. Steve Russell’s Spacewar!, started in 1961 as a side-project of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT (history’s first hackers, dontchaknow,) shares the two-player, two-object dynamics of Pong but the gameplay focused on actually destroying your opponent in a science-fiction setting. These games set the standard for the golden age: individual play mechanics presented on single screens. By the late-70s and early-80s, as Atari and other early consoles that could play multiple games were becoming common, games started expanding in both scope and ambition. Adventure, Pitfall, and others introduced continuity in their worlds, while Pac-man and Donkey Kong made the first stabs at introducing narrative. On the technology end, 1980 saw scrolling action in Defender and the larval form of 3D play, vector graphics, in Battlezone. The game industry crash and the release of the Famicom in 1983 mark the end of this period.

Part 2

Related links:
Comparison of Wiki Articles Proves Geeks Inherited The Earth
MMO Predicts Life in 10 Years
Men Are From Hyrule, Women Are From Simville: If Gender Defines the Games We Play, Why Does Everyone Play By the Same Rules?
9/9/99 9 Years Later
Fix It: Alone in the Dark, Tiger Woods, and the Death of the Glitch
Everyone Will be Able to Rock

Star Wars, Lucasarts, Bioware: You’re Doing It Wrong.

John Constantine — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Come October 21st, the inevitable will finally happen. After years of hemming, hawing, clamoring, and speculating, Bioware and Lucasarts are going to announce an MMO based on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. This is not a guess. Bioware’s leash-holder, EA, already spoiled the surprise in July when chief executive John Riccitello flat-out admitted it existed. I couldn’t be more disappointed. I’m not inherently opposed to MMOs, far from it. In fact, I’m very excited about the impending boom of console-born MMOs and how, as is the case with everything designed specifically for consoles, the genre becomes streamlined and more readily accessible to players without two-thousand spare hours to hunt for rare armor. I’m disappointed because Knights of the Old Republic is Bioware’s narrative masterpiece. Even stripped of its abused license, Knights of the Old Republic’s story and characters are legitimate milestones in game development, successes that Bioware has yet to surpass. Obsidian’s sloppy-seconds follow-up The Sith Lords, despite being an unfinished mess, made the ongoing saga started in the original even more compelling, hinting at a grand conclusion that would reveal the hidden machinations behind both game stories. And now, after four years, we won’t see an actual single-player climax to the story of Darth Revan. We’re going to get a game built to accommodate literal millions of players, Xbox Live goons named Darth Ballz marching about with lightsabers, yammering bullshit in your ear that will make George Lucas penned dialogue sound like Lord Byron.

October 21st makes me sick.

(Link: Joystiq)

Related links:

Screen Test: Star Wars – The Force Unleashed
Star Wars: A New Halo
Why Wasn’t The Clone Wars A Video Game?
DC Universe Online and the Console MMO Conundrum
MMO Predicts Life in 10 Years

MMO Predicts Life in 10 Years

Cole Stryker — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Wonder what the world will look like in a decade?

A new MMO hopes to find out by evaluating the effects of five different "Superthreats" on mankind and assessing humanity's ability to cope with different sorts of impending doom.

The human species has a long history of overcoming tremendous obstacles, often coming out stronger than before. Indeed, some anthropologists argue that human intelligence emerged as the consequence of the last major ice age, a period of enormous environmental stress demanding flexibility, foresight and creativity on the part of the small numbers of early Homo sapiens. Historically, those who have prophesied doom for human civilization have been proven wrong, time and again, by the capacity of our species to both adapt to and transform our conditions.

Here are the five "Superthreats":

Quarantine covers the global response to declining health and pandemic disease, including the current Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ReDS) crisis.

Ravenous focuses on the imminent collapse of the global food system, as well as debates over industrial vs. ecological agricultural models, and basic issues of access, energy, and carbon.

Power Struggle tracks the results of energy resource peaks and the shifts in international power as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions.

Outlaw Planet embodies the volatile mix of new forms of surveillance, transparency, civil rights, and access to information as people work out new rules for human security.

Generation Exile follows the massive "diaspora of diasporas" underway globally, as the number of refugees and migrants skyrockets in the face of climate change, economic disruption, and war.

Superstruct opened for users yesterday, but the game world doesn't start spinning until October 6. Join here for free and sign up for an already very active (500+ users!) Facebook group. The more users that join up, the more accurate and interesting the results will be. Or you could just play more Megaman. Whatever.

Lastly, learn more about IFTF, the nonprofit research group sponsoring all this.

Related Links:

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DC Universe Online and the Console MMO Conundrum

John Constantine — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

You’d think that people would be more excited about the reveal of Sony Online’s DC Universe given that it premiered a mere three days before The Dark Knight, but reactions have been decidedly mixed. It not too surprising to me. SOE doesn’t exactly have the best track record. The Untold Legends series is crap, they’ve been unable to recapture Everquest’s initial success, and Star Wars Galaxies was a complete nightmare. But even beyond SOE’s reputation and the wonky looking DC Universe trailer, there’s never been a truly successful MMO on home consoles. The traditional role-playing MMO model doesn’t exactly work given consoles’ controller interface (just look at the pain playing Final Fantasy XI with a DualShock is.) What should an MMO even play like on a console? Is twitchy, frenetic gameplay, as in SOE’s The Agency, the answer? Is it keeping the player base limited, allowing only a handful of users to engage in missions, etc?