You see, I’m an eternal optimist. I’d read most of the previews who said it was a much more polished version of the original, with only a few new features. But it would still be a game about managing peons, attacking your opponent’s economy (rather than engaging in battles) and clicking your mouse button a vast number of times during a game, despite the hotkeys.

Of course, I have fond memories of the original Starcraft, mostly because – and I want to emphasize this – I loved the story in the single player game.

The story in the new game hasn’t grabbed me in the same way. While elements seem to be “grabbed from the headlines” (particularly the news network stuff), it lacks the pathos and tragedy of the original. I also find myself lacking the patience to play the longer levels. Some seem to have been made longer by virtue of adding more of the same. Escort mission too short? Make it three escort missions. This philosophy seems to permeate many of the single player missions, which lack the punch and brevity of the missions in Relic’s Dawn of War 2.

Multiplayer is no better. As with the original, the major strategies seem to all revolve around griefing your opponents economy, rather than a dramatic clash of armies. On top of that, mulitplayer is so tightly tied to competitive online play that co-op seems to be almost a joke.

The one area I have enjoyed, somewhat, are user created maps. There are already a number of Defense of the Ancients and Tower Defense style maps. While many of them seem to be quick churns, we did play one that was great fun, if a little hard to understand at first. So if I continue to play Starcraft 2 at all, it will be to hunt out user created maps. Check out the map “Storm of the Imperial Sanctum” for a playable, if a little flawed, example.

It’s not the actual small form factor system that’s crazy. It’s what I want it to do. What I typically want is to build a high performance gaming system using a micro ATX motherboard, building it into a micro ATX chassis. I’m typically lured in by some cool looking micro ATX case. That happened to me with a couple of Silverstone SUGO models (SG01 and SG03). Most recently, it was the NZXT Vulcan, which I reviewed for Maximum PC. The Vulcan is actually a good looking case with an attractive feature set that makes it sound like a badass, high end case.

As I discovered, the Vulcan is really a normal micro-tower in the skin of a high end, badass case. I don’t want to talk about the Vulcan itself much, though. Go read the review if you want more detail on the Vulcan. I want to talk about the process of building a true micro ATX system.

The idea of building a small, powerful rig that can take on most modern PC games is an attractive idea, and when you see a good looking case like the Vulcan, it’s easy to be seduced.

What you can’t do is build a small form factor system the same way you build a typical mid or full tower PC. For one thing, the order of installation is critical. In some SFF cases, for example, you can’t install the power supply until everything else is in. In addition, the interior of these cases is often very, very cramped, so you’ll need to double-and triple-check that some stray wire or cable hasn’t crept underneath the motherboard. Routing wiring is also important, as its easier for wiring to drop onto a fan, resulting in a horrible sound and possible CPU overheating if it’s the CPU cooling fan.

At any rate, I had an early Gigabyte GA-H57M-UD3 motherboard. Given its layout and use of USB 3.0, I thought it would be an ideal motherboard for building a gaming rig.

Gigabyte's GA-H57M-UD3

The CPU would be a Core i7 870 I had leftover from an old test system, a Seagate 1TB 7200.12 hard drive would handle storage and a Radeon HD 5850 would take care of GPU chores. Installation was the usual painfully slow process (it always is with these tiny systems), but the system booted up just fine. Installing Windows 7 went swimmingly.

Then the stability problems began cropping up. Initially, warm reboots would always hang — I’d have to disconnect power before the system would boot. After installing all the drivers, the system would periodically crash with ugly blue screens. I tried different DDR3 modules and memory settings, but the crashes still occurred.

Even BIOS updates didn’t fix the problems,. What I suspect is that this board is actually an engineering sample, not a retail release, since Gigabyte had shipped it to me within days of its announcement. Note that this board had never been used, and is curiously lacking in markings, though it does have a serial number.

So I thought I’d try another board, an Asus P7H55D-M EVO.

Asus P7H55D-M EVO

I actually had this board working in a another small form factor system that I’d partially disassembled, so I thought it would be pretty simple to rip it out of the other case and slap it into the Vulcan.

By this time, I was in what may be charitably described as a “system building fugue.” You know the drill — you’re so into solving problems with a new build, so into getting it completed, that you start taking shortcut, and start getting careless.

The process of removing the P7H55D-M EVO was less gentle than it should have been. I also encountered several issues when trying to get it into the NZXT case. First, several of the mounting nuts had slipped out, and I didn’t notice them until I’d wiggled the motherboard into the case. So I wiggled the Asus board back out, and reinstalled the nuts.

In my haste, I’d replaced one of the nuts in the wrong hole. Out came the motherboard, then back it went. Oops, a piece of flashing on the ATX I/O plate had been pushed back down, blocking the Ethernet port. Out came the board again, and back in it went.

Somewhere in the process, I’m sure I killed the board. Note that the P7H55D-M EVO had been working perfectly when I removed it from its original case. When I got everything installed, the board wouldn’t POST. Fans would spin up, but no video would appear. I attached an external beeper to the speaker connector, and no beeps could be heard. The memory diagnostic light would stay bright red, no matter what DDR3 modules were installed. The board seemed completely hosed.

Out came the board one more time.

I had one more micro ATX board, an Intel DP55WB. This is by no means a high end board, but it was what I had available.

Intel DP55WB

This time, I realized I had just one more try at this. So I walked away from the whole affair until the following day. When I returned, I exercised extreme care during the installation — something I should have done with the Asus board. I made sure all the cables were cleared out of the way, all the mounting hardware properly installed and that the ATX I/O shield was pristine. The board went in as easily as it could — the interior is still pretty cramped, after all — but in it went.

The system POSTed just fine. Driver installation went smoothly, as did the BIOS update. The system burn-in tests completed without a hiccup.

In the end, what I had was still a pretty powerful system for gaming, but it won’t be particularly overclockable. But then, a small case with restricted airflow precludes any serious overclocking anyway.

There are lessons to be learned. One is to be sure to use actual retail gear, not engineering samples. Most users won’t run into this anyway, but it’s still worth stating. The second lesson is more important: if you find yourself frustrated and tempted to rush the building process, STOP. Walk away. Come back later, after the fever has abated. You should always approach the actual act of building as dispassionately as possible. Celebrate after everything is up and running, and get excited about how you plan on using the system. If you get too wound up during the building process, you’ll likely do something dumb, or overlook something obvious. It’s a lesson I need to re-learn once a year or so. I just wish the price this time wasn’t two motherboards.

I had fun writing an article on new graphics technology as it affects games. That ran in the August issue of Maximum PC, and is online now at MaximumPC.com. The real bummer is that I had lots of cool screen shots, most of which the magazine ran. But the need to reduce size for both print and online makes them less effective. Still, I think DirectX 11 will have the biggest impact on PC gaming since DX8.

Also up on Maximum PC is a review of Bigfoot’s Killer 2100 network interface card for gamers. It’s an interesting product, in that it works as advertised, reducing lag and ping times… but most people won’t notice any benefit. I’d class it as a luxury product, maybe useful to the 0.5% of gamers who compete online, care about winning and have the insanely fast reflexes to notice the small differences.

More stuff after the jump.

Another Maximum PC review: the MSI R5870 Lightning. It’s one of the latest generation of factory overclocked Radeon HD 5870 cards meant to be tweaked. I find these sorts of cards interesting as engineering exercises, but ultimately too expensive with too little performance gain for most users.

Over at PC World, I wrote an article on painless motherboard upgrades — how to upgrade your motherboard without reinstalling Windows. I’ve also written a number of laptop reviews, including the Micro Express NBL60, a surprisingly good unit from a manufacturer that doesn’t get a lot of buzz. Also at PC World is the Clevo X8100 gaming notebook. Alas, that’s an earlier model, and lacks the new GeForce GTX 480 mobile GPUs.

I also had some fun appearing on a couple of Tekzilla episodes with Patrick Norton. I appeared on Episode 147, where I talk about Puget Systems Serenity quiet gaming system. It’s a reasonably high performance box, but only generates around 20dBA even under load. Patrick and I also go back and forth on how you might mod your system to make it less noisy.

In addition, I got to do a bit on their fifth anniversary show, where I doff my PC hardware cap and put on my geeky photographer hat and talk a bit about Adobe’s Lightroom 3 release.

Last, but not least (and maybe the most fun), was making a guest appearance on Troy Goodfellow’s Three Moves Ahead, a podcast focusing on strategy gaming (mostly PC, but Troy also delves into board games occasionally, and his regulars –Rob Zacny, Julian Murdoch and others — also take on console and handheld strategy games. We talked about the impact technology has had on strategy games.

So that’s what’s been going on inside and outside the basement lab recently. Hope you find it as much fun to read, watch and hear as I had working on them.

My own personal gaming interests are wide ranging, but I realized as we talked that most of my strategy gaming recently has been board gaming, rather than PC or console games. Why is that, I began to wonder?

Actually, that’s not completely true. I’ve dabbled in a number of strategy games, ranging from Panzer General: Allied Assault on the Xbox 360 to Ancient Trader to Napoleon: Total War. But I haven’t actually finished a strategy game since the last time we played Sins of a Solar Empire in our Friday Night Follies LAN party group – and that was months ago.

Some of this has been due to my recent obsession with Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. But as the podcast progressed last night, I realized that a lot of it had to do with time and pacing.

These days, even relatively simple strategy games require a fairly substantial time investment – and there’s every chance that you might spend any number of hours diving into a game… and then find out you’re on the losing side. I’m not talking about level-based RTS games. The current crop of RTS games now have levels or maps that can play out very quickly – you can usually figure out how well or poorly you’re doing within 15 minutes or so.

Contrast that with Civilization IV or Sins of a Solar Empire. You could be many hours into a large game, only to find out you have no hope of winning – or even doing reasonably well. And in a Civ game, there’s no upside to managing the tedium of the end game if you’re trailing your opponents (human or artificial) by a significant amount.

There have been attempts to alleviate this, mostly through a tiered system that gradually escalates difficulty. Troy Goodfellow once lamented the idea of unlocks in strategy game, but if unlocks are used to keep newbies from diving into aspects of the game that may be too difficult early on, that’s a reasonable use of unlockable content. However, that also means that the early campaigns or maps need to scale appropriately. I’ve played a number of strategy games with tutorials or learning campaigns that covered the bare basics with no actually guide to strategy or tactics, then throws you into the main game with only a bare understanding of the mechanics.

Years ago, I’d happily spend hours and hours exploring and learning new games, but time constraints and impatience on my part means I no longer want to dive into a game in the hopes that the learning process not be a chore. Even Troy alluded to this in our podcast, when he noted that having to learn the ins-and-outs of new, complex games isn’t as much fun as it used to be, but he does it because he’s reviewing games for a living.

RPGs have learned this lesson more effectively than strategy games, though not all have implemented the lessons well. Dragon Age: Origins is a pretty deep and complex RPG, but draws you in gradually. And RPG designers have learned the lessons of the “impossible to win” character build. If you go back as far as Icewind Dale, it was possible to build a party that couldn’t win the final battle. Even games with rough edges, like the recently released Alpha Protocol, seem to have learned this lesson.

Of course, losing is part of the learning process, too. But if you “lose” in a first person shooter, it means (worst case) starting the level over and (best case) restoring a save.

So what to do? I have no easy answers. My problem is that, at the conceptual level, I genuinely like these complex games. Subject matter can draw me in, and make me want to learn the game. Earlier, I noted that I dabbled in Napoleon: Total War. But I wasn’t all that enamored of the subject matter. But now that the Peninsular War campaign DLC has been released, I’ll probably revisit the game, since that’s one of my favorite periods in military history.

If we go back to tabletop games for a moment, the Eurogame revolution created a new breed of games that are fast to learn, offer deep strategy and are great fun. Spending 60 or 90 minutes to learn and lose a board game isn’t quite as daunting as spending six hours learning – and losing – in a game like the old Avalon Hill Age of Renaissance or, worse, Wellington’s Victory.

In the end, too many good games exist, across all genres and platforms – both electronic and tabletop – to make me want to spend a bazillion hours, only to lose, just to learn a game.  Game developers should take that to heart.

Both games offer extensive storylines, lots of spoken dialog and some excellent voice acting. Both also allow you to take your character in different directions. Once you get beyond those Bioware tropes, the two games diverge pretty significantly.

I’ve played through both games once, and working through second run-throughs on both games. Given that both games have been reviewed and discussed substantially, I’m going to narrow in on one aspect of the two games: how characters are developed. (Note: there may be spoilers ahead.)

The Character is You – or Is It?

First, let’s talk about the character you play.

Your character in Dragon Age is you. That is, you can customize the look and appearance, and play through any of several origin stories. But your character has no voiced dialog, even when responding to party members or other NPCs who have very distinct voices. I know players who actually read the dialog out loud, to give the character voice.

Mass Effect 2’s character, on the other hand, is Commander Shepherd. Both the male and female versions have voice dialog. (Jennifer Hale, as the female Shepherd, is particularly good.) That choice – using spoken dialog voiced by actors – might mean you have a little emotional distance from “your” Shepherd. On the other hand, you can certainly customize Shepherd’s facial appearance at the games beginning. So it’s something of a mix. I found myself pretty much making the decisions I might make with “my” character.

In both cases, as with any RPG, “your” character may not necessarily behave as you would in a similar situation. After all, it’s a game, so having a little fun by acting differently is part of the oeuvre of gaming.

Still, giving Shepherd a distinct voice does impact the game. Scenes with dialog or cut-scenes resonate differently – perhaps more like a TV show or movie – than the strong and silent type. In some ways, Dragon Age is a little like the Half Life series. Gordon Freeman in Half Life isn’t voiced by an actor. (In fact, Freeman has no dialog whatsoever, so you can only imagine the responses when people talk to you. Then again, Half Life and its sequels are not RPGs.)

The choices made by the two Bioware groups when it comes to the character voicing do create an interesting dichotomy. Mass Effect 2 does feel more cinematic. The cut scenes are much more extensive, the over-the-shoulder view feels a little more movie like, and the interactive scenes where Shepherd is talking, gives the feeling that you’re more “along for the ride” rather than being in the world.

By the same token, the lack of spoken voice for the player character in Dragon Age is at times disconcerting. I would have like a little more in-game emotional resonance, beyond talking to my computer.

Your Party

In both games, non-player characters have vast amounts of spoken dialog. Some players find this insufferable, and try to skip past as much of it as possible. Personally, I love the voices, if they’re well done, and listen to most of the dialog all the way through at least once.

The playable NPCs have much deeper individual storylines in Dragon Age. The options are richer, too – the characters in Dragon Age all seem imbued with very distinct personalities, and can even have emotional cycles – sometimes testy, sometimes receptive – depending on the situation.

In both games, you have to recruit party members, and then do an additional quest for each member if you want to unlock certain abilities. It’s another classic Bioware trope. However, the way those quests are structured in Dragon Age just feels more organic. Often, they pop up during conversation in a very naturalistic way.

Take Alistair in Dragon Age, for example. In some ways, he’s a key part of the story, yet you can also dispense with him if you like. He evolves over the course of the story, and can rise to become a good king – or not.

Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, clubs you over the head with these additional quests. They’re blatantly called “loyalty quests.” They often pop up in your quest log, even before you talk to the party member involved. Perhaps the most detailed quest is Tali’s return to the Quarian flotilla to face treason charges. Yet, Tali doesn’t really change (other than unlocking an ability.)

Then there’s romance.

The way love and romance is handled in Dragon Age is pretty simple: anything goes. That’s a little like real life, and you can happily be heterosexual, non-sexual or gay if you like. It’s still a little on the heavy handed side, but still feels more organic than the Mass Effect 2 romances, which often seem like a puzzle game inside the game. On top of that, none of the romances that count towards the romance achievement can be anything but heterosexual. So it all seems a little contrived and judgmental.

In-Game NPCs

The major NPCs you encounter which aren’t part of your party also seem more developed in Dragon Age. The deepest of these are the two contenders for the dwarven king you encounter, and the fallout from your choices are not so obvious at first.

On the other hand, your interactions with a number of NPCs have potentially far reaching impact in Mass Effect 3. I say “potentially,” because none of the Big Decisions in the original game really seemed to affect the sequel much. Whether you decided to come to the rescue of the council, or let them die had little impact in the overall gameplay. Some of the dialog changed, but there seem to be few repercussions overall. It would have been interesting, for example, if a darker path opened up because the alien races really do hate you for letting the council die.

Of course, there were some big decisions in Dragon Age as well. It will be interesting to see what fallout comes from your Big Decision regarding Morrigan, for example.

Final Thoughts

Both games are actually excellent, and many of the decisions regarding character development seemed to cater to the different styles. Dragon Age is very much a classic computer RPG, and the deeper characters and has a more organic feel. By the same token, not having voice for your character somehow makes the game seem like its missing something.

Mass Effect 2 is a streamlined action RPG, and the fairly shallow character development serves to move the story along in a more cinematic way. While some people may prefer one style over another, I had a blast with both – probably because the experiences were so different.

It’s in response to a question: “What are your thoughts on how PC gaming is dying?”

My first thought: way to pick a loaded question. But then oft-quoted analyst Michael Patcher goes on to demonstrate his ignorance, by saying: “Nobody has a PC that’s faster than a PS3.”

Say what?

Patcher launches into this chewy tidbit focusing on the CPU, rather than the platform. The PS3 has certain computational strengths because of the cell processor, but it’s something of a CPU dead end. IBM recently announcing it was ending its own development efforts on the Cell. As Intel moves forward into 32nm, with the upcoming Gultown, Arrandale and Clarkdale CPUs, the PC processor is still advancing.

The ignorance doesn’t end there. The commentators throw around other juicy bits of misinformation, like “dual quad Pentium 3.2…” “ … that costs $2,000.”

But the PC isn’t just the CPU. Any PC consists of memory, storage, chipsets… and, of course, the graphics card.

Right now, I can build an $800 PC with an AMD Radeon HD 5850 that’s arguably substantially more powerful than the PS3. You can even see it in games that run on both platforms, where I can get higher, smoother frame rates in titles like Borderlands and Dragon Age at higher resolutions than I can on a console.

There are the logical fallacies, like dismissing Starcraft II because it’s irrelevant. After all, “Anything that’s gonna sell in Asia and anything that’s gonna have a subscription” doesn’t count in Patcher’s book.

In other words, a data point that doesn’t agree with the premise isn’t valid. And neither are Asian gamers or MMOs.

At times, it also just gets insulting, like the idea that “the gamer is the guy who’s gonna play by himself.”

Good job dismissing woman gamers and all those people playing online. Say, isn’t one of the Xbox 360’s main value proposition its strength in online gaming?

And to think people pay these guys for their insights.

I’m not going to argue the strengths and merits of console gaming versus PC gaming. That’s a topic for another, more lengthy discussion. Rather, my point is that if you’re getting paid for your insights and knowledge, maybe it’s a good idea to have those insights be, you know, accurate.

Or am I asking too much?

I’m also having more fun with combat than I often do with computer-based RPGs. Maybe that’s because I’m treating the combat as if it were really a tactical mini-wargame. Because of that, I’ve been having a blast – and been successful – even in some very tough fights. Here’s what I’ve been doing to be successful.

What follows is my take on effective combat in Dragon Age for the PC version. Combat in the PC game becomes much more of a tactical strategy game than the console version, so bear that in mind. I’ve avoided any plot spoilers, focusing on tactics to take down enemies as effectively and quickly as possible.

What’s Not Here

This is about combat management. I’m not going into details about character builds or what type of mage/rogue/fighter to build. I will talk about specific build traits I found useful, but my general approach to character building is to build a character, not a walking set of stats.

Similarly, I don’t talk much about party makeup. While I would tend to bring along two mages, a fighter and my main character (an elven Rogue), that was more an artifact of the story. For example, I’d almost always bring along Alistair and Morrigan, because I found the dialog interplay between the two of them hilarious.

If I play through again, I’ll probably use a completely different party. On the occasions where I mixed up the party a bit, I did have to adjust tactics (not having a healer, for example, meant bringing along lots of healing poultices.)

Prior to Combat

Before you dive into combat, you should prep the party for combat. But how do you know if you’re going to have a combat?

Easy. Have a rogue in your party. More importantly, have a rogue with a couple of levels of stealth skill. Halt your party, put your rogue into stealth mode, and have him scout ahead. If you’re running through winding passages – all too common in this game – you’ll want to have your rogue be the party scout fairly often.

A rogue in stealth mode (hiding in shadows) will also often trigger enemy spawns. Some enemies can also hide in shadows, or are invisible. But they’ll sense your presence, even if they don’t see you, so they’ll often suddenly appear – enabling you to fix their location.

If have at least two levels of stealth (three is better for this tactic), you can even throw grenades or set up traps to soften up large groups of enemies. When the bomb goes off, they’ll move toward you (the direction from which the grenade was thrown), but still not see you. This allows you to draw smaller groups of enemies toward a waiting ambush.

Similarly, moving a rogue into enemy held areas using hiding in shadows allows you to spot and disable traps ahead of time. Some rooms can be full of various traps, and disabling them makes for a more effective assault when the time comes.

Use "hide in shadows" to scout enemy held territory

Managing Resources by Sneaking

In one case, I ran my rogue through a long series of areas loaded with numerous lesser enemies. At the very end, I ran into a boss battle – which automatically brought my party up to that fight, bypassing all the lesser, tedious battles. Sure, those smaller battles might have generated some experience.

But I was in that particular area with relatively few healing poultices and even fewer lyrium potions (to regenerate mana for my spellcasters.) Bypassing the smaller battles allowed me to husband my resources and save them for the bigger fight.

Buffing the Party?

The idea of buffing your party before entering combat seems like a good one. Spells like Glyph of Warding or Heroic Offense may seem like a good idea before a battle starts. In practice, it’s not so useful. What seems to work better is to pause immediately after entering combat, and applying buffs.

However, beware of the one-action queue. It’s too easy to try to give multiple commands (eg, issue a spell, then tell the character to move), only to realize that the character is moving without casting the spell. You can only queue up a single action when you pause. However, you can pause any time you like, so if you prefer a turn-based approach, just hit the space bar after an action is performed.

]]> http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/12/07/managing-combat-in-dragon-age-origins/feed/ 4 http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/13/multiplayer-lan-gaming-the-better-experience/ http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/13/multiplayer-lan-gaming-the-better-experience/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:06:58 +0000 Loyd Case http://www.improbableinsights.com/?p=779 I’m not much of an online gamer. That’s not to say I don’t play online games. It’s just that, when I’m alone, I generally gravitate to single player games. On the other hand, I do like a good multiplayer game, and I get to indulge my desire for playing with others on a weekly basis.

The problem is, though, I’m spoiled.

When we were first looking into buying our house back in 1997, we discovered it had a daylight basement. At the time, I was a full time freelance writer (as I am once again.) The basement doesn’t actually appear as floor space in the county assessor’s report – something about below-grade areas not being considered part of the living space. It’s an odd quirk around here, but then most houses in northern California don’t have basements at all.

The basement was partially finished, so when we moved in, we added carpeting and third wire ground to all the basement outlets. I also added a 200A service to the house, replacing the aging 100A box that came with the house.

The basement has two rooms, a large storage area off the larger room, plus a bathroom and a roomy closet where the hot water heater and furnace live. The smaller room became a spare bedroom while the larger room, with its associated storage area, became my office and lab space. Eventually, when my wife began working out of the house full time, the spare bedroom was converted to her office.

If you want to check out more details on the basement lab, check out the blog post on the http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/08/17/294/ basement lab.

Ever since the network was set up in the lab, we’ve had LAN gaming sessions most weeks; eventually, these multiplayer gaming sessions were dubbed “Friday Night Follies.” The office space itself is pretty large – 18 x 15 feet or 270 square feet. I’ve added workbenches (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/workspaces/11723/ IKEA GALANT tabletops with the T-legs), plus a couple of older rolling PC workbenches from http://www.anthro.com/ Anthro, which were part of a budget line the company no longer makes.

I can – and have – crammed up to ten working systems into this space, though the most we’ve had on the LAN for gamin is eight. Most Friday nights, though, it’s just four of us, though tonight (November Friday the Thirteenth), there will be six.

We’re pretty eclectic, though we tend to favor co-op against the AI to playing PvP. We have a mix of gamers, too. Two of them play MMORPGs (one is an MMORPG fanatic), while the third player is like me: single player when on his own, and multiplayer when he comes over to my place.

We have, on occasion, even played an MMO game or two, including D&D Online, Guild Wars and the flawed, semi-tragic failure that was Hellgate: London. That’s the only time I’ve ever really played MMORPGs – on my LAN, with my friends.

I’m completely spoiled by the experience.

The idea of playing online, talking to other gamers through a headset, dealing with lag and griefers, is simply unappealing. I realize I’m also missing out on some potentially great experiences. It all comes down to simple time budgeting: how much time I have for gaming, versus work, versus family life versus other interests. A lot of the time I might spend in online gaming is instead spent with single player games. Lately, for example, I’ve been completely sucked into Dragon Age: Origins.

So maybe it’s a hit on my geek cred that I’m very rarely found in any online games. But then, I’ve got my own LAN party going most Friday nights. How much more geeky can you get?

]]> http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/13/multiplayer-lan-gaming-the-better-experience/feed/ 8 http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/09/paternalism-and-responsiveness-shifting-paradigms-in-game-publishing/ http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/09/paternalism-and-responsiveness-shifting-paradigms-in-game-publishing/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:48:54 +0000 Loyd Case http://www.improbableinsights.com/?p=769 An interesting division is happening in game publishing and game development. No, it’s not the oft-mentioned indie game developers versus big game media. It’s not PCs versus consoles, either. In some ways, it’s a return to the past: passive versus interactive, but taken to a meta level.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen something of a furor surround the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 . First came the news that the latest entry in the franchise would have no dedicated servers – which also meant no user generated maps and no mod tools. On top of that, it was revealed the multiplayer maps would be limited to 9 vs. 9.

The other thing that  happened to me last week was listening to latest Three Moves Ahead, the podcast produced and hosted by Troy Goodfellow of Flash of Steel, which was an interview with Chris Park, developer of the RTS AI Wars. It’s well worth a listen.

What struck me was the difference in attitude between Activision / Infinity Ward (developers of Modern Warfare 2) and Chris Park. AI Wars has gotten a lot of buzz, partly because it’s a somewhat different take on the RTS genre, but also because Park and his small team has been incredibly responsive to the AI Wars user community.

At first blush, this may simply sound like another Indie versus Big Publisher dichotomy – but it’s not that simple. Large game developers and associated publishers can also be tuned into their user communities. They may not be able to respond as quickly as a small developer with a single title, but they can still listen.

What’s more, I think, is that it’s also a return to an interesting argument I used to hear back in the heyday of the old Computer Gaming World.

Back then, the idea was that PC gaming – and, by extension, all video games – heralded a new era of interactive entertainment. It was believed back then that electronic gaming was something new, a move away from the passivity of couch potatoes being spoon fed their entertainment by the TV networks.

It turns out, of course, that the writers and editors of that era were working from a set of assumptions that proved incorrect over the longer term. The fight isn’t between interactivity and passivity. It’s between top-down paternalism and grass roots user involvement.

On the gaming front, you now have companies like Activision, taking a highly paternalistic attitude: it’s our game; we know what’s best, take it or leave it.

On the other side, you have developers and publisher who, to varying degrees, let the user get involved. It can be pretty low level stuff, like handing out development tools to the users, as we’ve seen recently with Borderlands, Dragon Age and the Unreal Developer’s Kit. It can go deeper than that, too. Stardock, for example, will get users involved in early betas, and even alphas of a game, as they’re doing with the upcoming strategy title Elemental to get user feedback during the critical stage before the game is feature complete and the design is frozen.

Neither approach offers any advantage in the quality of the game. I have every expectation that Modern Warfare 2 will be a very polished game that offers a great experience. There’s no doubt in my mind that Elemental will also be a great title.

On the other hand, today’s generation of web-driven users who are flocking to social games – which are often driven by the players themselves – signals what may become a sea-change in the overall behavior of the gaming audience. Players will start expecting more responsiveness and less paternalism from their gaming experience.

We’re actually seeing this battle play out in the larger field of new media. Rupert Murdoch, for example, threatens to block search engines like Google from offering search results from his publications. It’s old media, at its paternalistic worst. If articles from Murdoch’s publications never show up in search results, who will read them online? What will advertisers think of this?

How it will all shake out is anyone’s guess. Interactive media, whether it’s gaming or the Internet, is still very much an evolving animal. As the new generation of developers and users connect with each other, it will be increasingly difficult for the old generation to walk back that high level of interactivity and user involvement that’s expected today. The fight will be an interesting one to watch.

]]> http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/11/09/paternalism-and-responsiveness-shifting-paradigms-in-game-publishing/feed/ 9 http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/10/23/friday-night-follies-takes-on-windows-7/ http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/10/23/friday-night-follies-takes-on-windows-7/#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:56:36 +0000 Loyd Case http://www.improbableinsights.com/?p=735 And here’s a shot of the various Windows 7 upgrades. So far, I’ve installed several onto the five gaming systems I have set

up here. Some, of course, have already been running Windows 7, which I obtained from my Technet account, and have been using in articles on Windows 7.

There’s not really a lot I can add to the hoopla about Windows 7. Like any new OS release from Microsoft, there is good and bad. But for our weekly LAN party group, I’m looking forward to moving everyone to 64-bit Windows 7.

Four of five gaming rigs in the basement lab are now running Windows 7.

Windows 7 & Gaming: So Far

I’ve been running games on Windows 7 since the release candidate. Bear in mind that most of my games are either fairly new or, if older titles, have been re-purchased from Steam or Good Old Games. I’ve run into relatively few issues. The most common problem between different titles, oddly enough, is the inability to play the startup video. This is true with Blood Bowl and the updated, free-to-play Dungeons and Dragons Online. As far as problems go, this is pretty minor.

Here’s a partial list of games I’ve played under Windows 7. These are games I’ve actually played fairly extensively, not just fired up and checked to see if they ran:

• Anno 1404
• Left 4 Dead
• Mass Effect (needed to install the free DLC to get it to work — but this may have been a Radeon HD 5870 driver problem.)
• Plants Vs. Zombies
• Risen
• Dungeons and Dragons Online
• Demigod
• Sins of a Solar Empire
• Section 8
• Prototype
• Red Faction: Guerrilla
• Blood Bowl

None of these are particularly old titles. All of these run on Windows 7 64-bit.

Friday Night Follies & the Windows 7 Launch Party

The usual crew was on hand, plus Robert Heron from HDNation. We played D&D online for about five hours.

I’d mentioned earlier that four of five of the gaming systems were running Windows 7. By that, I meant the actual release version; the fifth system is still on the release candidate. All are running the 64-bit version.

We did run into a couple of glitches, but I’m not convinced they were Windows 7 related. D&D Online crashed to the desktop on a couple of systems. Another odd quirk: occasionally the game would spontaneously change resolutions, and you’d see a “window” on your desktop. I put the word “window” in quotes, because it wasn’t a real window. You could see the desktop underneath, but the game was still running in full screen, exclusive. Fixing the problem was easy: press ALT-ENTER twice. The first time would put it in true windowed mode, the second time would kick it back into its original resolution in full screen mode.

The reason I’m unconvinced that this is a Windows 7 specific issue is that we saw the same behavior on at least one Windows Vista system a couple of weeks back. The problems seem to manifest mostly on systems running ATI graphics, though I haven’t tested this extensively to be completely sure — only one of the systems is running an Nvidia-based card (a BFG 275 GTX OC), and it had relatively few issues.

Next steps is to install Windows 7 on some of the other family systems, and see how those fare. One thing is for sure: XP and Vista are done in the Case House. I’ll keep a couple of Vista and XP partition backups, just for testing. But we’ll be a Windows 7 household going forward.

]]> http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/10/23/friday-night-follies-takes-on-windows-7/feed/ 4