Curmudgeon Gamer
19 April 2008
EVE Online expansion based on a novel, an Elite idea.
This from an interview on the WarCry Network about EVE Online's expansion:
That sound familiar? How about The Dark Wheel, released with Braben & Bell's Elite years ago. I'm not sure if I've ever read all of mine (though you can read it all right here), but it was in there to try and create a little plot to go with the randomly created planet names.
I've always wondered about plot in MMORPGs. In WoW, there's really no requirement to understand the plot of your quests nor does Blizzard create the quests so that you have to learn it, which bugs me. "Why am I killing X of Y and giving you N Zs from their loot, again?" In UO, you were, for the most part, supposed to create your own. I hope EVE pulls it off, even if you don't bother to read the latest scifi space trading [almost] pack-in novel.
The title of the next expansion - revealed here for the first time - will be 'The Empyrean Age,' the same as the EVE novel by Tony Gonzalez also slated for the summer. The reason is simple, this is the first EVE Online expansion where the story of the game and its universe will play a key role, a lot of it based off the novel.
That sound familiar? How about The Dark Wheel, released with Braben & Bell's Elite years ago. I'm not sure if I've ever read all of mine (though you can read it all right here), but it was in there to try and create a little plot to go with the randomly created planet names.
I've always wondered about plot in MMORPGs. In WoW, there's really no requirement to understand the plot of your quests nor does Blizzard create the quests so that you have to learn it, which bugs me. "Why am I killing X of Y and giving you N Zs from their loot, again?" In UO, you were, for the most part, supposed to create your own. I hope EVE pulls it off, even if you don't bother to read the latest scifi space trading [almost] pack-in novel.
--ruffin at 20:43
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03 March 2008
Two steps forward, two steps back
I'm as big a fan of Moore's Law as the next guy, but I'm not sure why it needs to apply to the latest engine rebuild in Ultima Online.
Here's an Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn client Ultima preview from Ten Ton Hammer via the Wayback machine set to Jan 28, 2007:
No, it doesn't do a thing to my videocard, but it grabs over three-quarters gig of my memory all by itself. That's not cool, and I've had it crash once already in less than three hours of play. The claim a five or six year-old computer would run KR "no problem" is absolutely bogus. My poor, poor spinning hard drive.
I hate to continue the downer thread I started and amended slightly over in the Game Journal, but seriously, the biggest shock to me playing last night was just how daggum similar the Kingdom Reborn client experience was to playing my Second Age client from 1999 (Exhibit A). I don't see that the UO team has found any distinct advantage of using 3D. The game is as it's always been. The problem's not the video, but the bloat of the code's inefficient foundation, I suppose.
Honestly, I'm happy to see Ultima Online's still alive. It's a great monument to the birth of the commercially viable MMORPG. I'll readily stipulate the user interface improvements are a huge change and somehow worthy of all the time that was required to recreate every freakin' tile of art for the new client, but for the life of me, I just can't yet see it. Third Dawn, UO's first shot at a 3D client, was a starker, more noticeable change than this. Love it or hate it, at least there was a discernible difference, noticeable within seconds of launch, that accompanied the sluggish performance. Then, you could at least put your finger on what you were waiting on Moore to speed up.
And as I pointed out in my Game Journal entry, what is the appeal for old-timers to return if they haven't purchased expansions since, say, the Second Age? I download gigs on gigs of new client, receive the same -- make that more sluggish -- play experience as 1999, and can't even see one new land or one new dungeon from when I played nearly a decade back unless I shell out the equivalent three months' virtual rent (ie, $30). Without the now long-delayed Stygian Abyss expansion, Kingdom Reborn is nothing more than an extended beta test accessible to those still willing to give UO a shot for old times' sake. I've finally begun to believe Lord British's leaving did shoot the game in the creative feet.
Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn feels like we're treading water, and I'm surprised that's enough to keep the game afloat.
EDIT: I found a quote from RPG Vault attributed to J.P. "Grimm" Harrod whose titles at UO range from "2004 to present as Character Artist, Senior Artist, Art Lead, Lead Character Artist, Associate Art Director, and now, Associate CG Supervisor". That's a pretty good list. In any event, the quote makes me hope there's a future for UO:KR. Here tis, slightly truncated.
Obviously KR is more about opening up the client for modification than any sort of graphics improvement. Heck, KR even has a 2D compatibility preference, where you get to use ports of the old art in the new client. There's a reason the memory management is so poor; it's the innards have been rewritten like mad, opening it up to the XML, lua, etc toolbox that not so coincidentally matches World of Warcraft's.
KR now becomes an impressive, extremely long-term gamble that people will continue to appreciate what remains for all practical purposes a two-dimensional game, but at the same time will, for the first time, intentionally open the game up for the same sort of freely given, end user labor that's made World of Warcraft so popular. Take a look at the items at thottbot.com, for heaven's sake. This stuff, from prices at auction to stats, I think, are all the results of having good, standardized hooks for people to write add-ons into seemingly every facet of the game. Where is UO's thottbot equivalent, presenting easily searchable, extremely detailed information culled from the game and players on every item that's been in the game? Where is the "Auctioneer" mod that makes creating wealth in WoW a breeze? Without KR, such mods would never happen. Now, the technologies are there.
But will the players stay?
Here's an Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn client Ultima preview from Ten Ton Hammer via the Wayback machine set to Jan 28, 2007:
Like the legacy client, 'Kingdom Reborn' is targetted [sic] toward a very low system spec. [UO producer Aaron] Cohen joked that the new client 'would not melt your videocard at all,' estimating that any computer bought within the last five or six years would run the new client, no problem.
No, it doesn't do a thing to my videocard, but it grabs over three-quarters gig of my memory all by itself. That's not cool, and I've had it crash once already in less than three hours of play. The claim a five or six year-old computer would run KR "no problem" is absolutely bogus. My poor, poor spinning hard drive.
I hate to continue the downer thread I started and amended slightly over in the Game Journal, but seriously, the biggest shock to me playing last night was just how daggum similar the Kingdom Reborn client experience was to playing my Second Age client from 1999 (Exhibit A). I don't see that the UO team has found any distinct advantage of using 3D. The game is as it's always been. The problem's not the video, but the bloat of the code's inefficient foundation, I suppose.
Honestly, I'm happy to see Ultima Online's still alive. It's a great monument to the birth of the commercially viable MMORPG. I'll readily stipulate the user interface improvements are a huge change and somehow worthy of all the time that was required to recreate every freakin' tile of art for the new client, but for the life of me, I just can't yet see it. Third Dawn, UO's first shot at a 3D client, was a starker, more noticeable change than this. Love it or hate it, at least there was a discernible difference, noticeable within seconds of launch, that accompanied the sluggish performance. Then, you could at least put your finger on what you were waiting on Moore to speed up.
And as I pointed out in my Game Journal entry, what is the appeal for old-timers to return if they haven't purchased expansions since, say, the Second Age? I download gigs on gigs of new client, receive the same -- make that more sluggish -- play experience as 1999, and can't even see one new land or one new dungeon from when I played nearly a decade back unless I shell out the equivalent three months' virtual rent (ie, $30). Without the now long-delayed Stygian Abyss expansion, Kingdom Reborn is nothing more than an extended beta test accessible to those still willing to give UO a shot for old times' sake. I've finally begun to believe Lord British's leaving did shoot the game in the creative feet.
Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn feels like we're treading water, and I'm surprised that's enough to keep the game afloat.
EDIT: I found a quote from RPG Vault attributed to J.P. "Grimm" Harrod whose titles at UO range from "2004 to present as Character Artist, Senior Artist, Art Lead, Lead Character Artist, Associate Art Director, and now, Associate CG Supervisor". That's a pretty good list. In any event, the quote makes me hope there's a future for UO:KR. Here tis, slightly truncated.
I was hired on during the development of Samurai Empire... This was one of the first expansions, so we found ourselves having to reverse engineer a pipeline in order to get new assets in - and with no tools and no blueprint to follow.
...
The second thing was the development for Kingdom Reborn. As far as art goes, this was the renaissance for UO. We had an established pipeline and evolving tools, we had migrated to the latest versions of 3D Studio Max, and we finally had the opportunity to break the limitations of the 2D client that we had been confined to (nine year-old limitations, mind you).
Obviously KR is more about opening up the client for modification than any sort of graphics improvement. Heck, KR even has a 2D compatibility preference, where you get to use ports of the old art in the new client. There's a reason the memory management is so poor; it's the innards have been rewritten like mad, opening it up to the XML, lua, etc toolbox that not so coincidentally matches World of Warcraft's.
KR now becomes an impressive, extremely long-term gamble that people will continue to appreciate what remains for all practical purposes a two-dimensional game, but at the same time will, for the first time, intentionally open the game up for the same sort of freely given, end user labor that's made World of Warcraft so popular. Take a look at the items at thottbot.com, for heaven's sake. This stuff, from prices at auction to stats, I think, are all the results of having good, standardized hooks for people to write add-ons into seemingly every facet of the game. Where is UO's thottbot equivalent, presenting easily searchable, extremely detailed information culled from the game and players on every item that's been in the game? Where is the "Auctioneer" mod that makes creating wealth in WoW a breeze? Without KR, such mods would never happen. Now, the technologies are there.
But will the players stay?
Labels: UO
--ruffin at 12:42
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18 January 2007
Burning Crusade and Ultima's Ghost Towns
Last night, I fell off the wagon and reactivated my WoW account. I don't have the Burning Crusade expansion, so I'm stuck in the Old World, so to speak. What I saw reminded me of my experience with expansions to Ultima Online.
When UO started throwing in expansions, the old worlds very quickly started clearing out. Ole Britannia (or whatever the capital is) went from a bustling urban center to an absolute ghost town, made all the more eerie as the wandering NPC robots grossly outnumbered humans for the first time in my experience.
That's happening now in WoW. Ironforge is nearly empty... auction houses, banks, city square, all nearly empty on my server, even if n=1 nights played for now. I couldn't tell if my "new video card" was providing much better performance or if there simply wasn't anything to render!
This should concern Blizzard. The creation of a virtual ghetto is a bad thing. Maybe Ironforge can add a bingo?
Blizzard needs to ensure that expansions are backwards compatible, not so much that expansionless folk like myself can go to the new lands, nor even that we should be provided access to the new trainers, etc, but players with expansions should continue to flow through old hotspots (possibly with new buildings in cities accessible only if you have the expansions, etc) so that the communities at least do not give the impression of being quite so perfectly cleaved.
Perhaps it will hit an equilibrium at some point, but without adding new zones in the old world, (even without knowing what's in the Outland) I somewhat doubt Ironforge will ever be the impressive hub it was before.
When UO started throwing in expansions, the old worlds very quickly started clearing out. Ole Britannia (or whatever the capital is) went from a bustling urban center to an absolute ghost town, made all the more eerie as the wandering NPC robots grossly outnumbered humans for the first time in my experience.
That's happening now in WoW. Ironforge is nearly empty... auction houses, banks, city square, all nearly empty on my server, even if n=1 nights played for now. I couldn't tell if my "new video card" was providing much better performance or if there simply wasn't anything to render!
This should concern Blizzard. The creation of a virtual ghetto is a bad thing. Maybe Ironforge can add a bingo?
Blizzard needs to ensure that expansions are backwards compatible, not so much that expansionless folk like myself can go to the new lands, nor even that we should be provided access to the new trainers, etc, but players with expansions should continue to flow through old hotspots (possibly with new buildings in cities accessible only if you have the expansions, etc) so that the communities at least do not give the impression of being quite so perfectly cleaved.
Perhaps it will hit an equilibrium at some point, but without adding new zones in the old world, (even without knowing what's in the Outland) I somewhat doubt Ironforge will ever be the impressive hub it was before.
--ruffin at 14:58
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