City of Heroes recently allowed gamers to create their own questlines. I've only played CoH briefly, and my impression apparently was, "Tired engine, bland missions, and large headaches means they likely won't be getting my dough."

Having gamers pay for the privilege of providing free labor has always fascinated me. I've got AWB (Another WoW Blog) myself, and have posted a bit on Thottbot and WoWWiki. I guess you'd have to add Player vs. Player as another sort of gamer labor.

But CoH has taken this free labor to another level by letting players create in-game quest lines. It can't be that hard; heavens knows the quests in WoW and my recollection of CoH are usually pretty boring. "Kill X of Y and get Z from their corpse" just about sums up the typical quest experience, somewhat reminiscent of Matt's and my critiques of a number of games being little more than variations on the "find key, eliminate enemies, exit level" theme.

Which is why a comment like this one from the City of Heroes' news site seems self-deflationary:

We did some data mining of our own, and 3,800 surpasses the amount of content that we, the developers, have made for all of City of Heroes and City of Villains combined. In just one day our users did more than we could in almost five years.

What does such a comment tell us? I understood why I'd buy Quake -- for the engine -- and then play mods released for free. I'm not so sure why I'd spend a monthly fee to play user created content. More interesting, though, is figuring out why players would give this content to CoH so freely and why CoH would say it's the equivalent to years of their own work. I wonder why Second Life or an equivalent doesn't play engine to these sorts of adventure construction set games. We've obviously gotten to the point where quest creation is a franchiseable process, easy to reproduce by almost any french frying knucklehead.

Labels: construction kits, developers, ethics, MMO, modding

--ruffin at 11:18

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UT3 PS3 can't download mods directly: true

But this isn't news, despite complaints by Penny Arcade and now Kotaku:

FileFront has the download and installation instructions, which, curiously, point out that removable storage of some sort is required for import. Whether it be compact flash, Memory Stick or simply a USB thumb drive, it seems one can't simply download to the PS3's built-in mass storage via the internet browser. What's up with that?

Believe it or not, this was known almost a full month ago. I remembered reading it today after Mike sent me the Penny Arcade link. Read it:

What we do to finalize it, make sure it makes the most efficient use of memory, and runs the fastest, is we bake it down to the PS3 version, but that's just like saving a file in Word in a different format. If you save it on a PlayStation 3 format, you can stick it on the Internet, and someone can download it, put it on a memory card [USB drive, memory stick], and import it into their PlayStation 3 version of the game. That works really well.

Awkward? Yes. Should it have been fixed before launch? Of course. Sony needs to fix it ASAP. I recall having trouble downloading themes directly from the PS3 browser too. And remember, this is the same outfit that hasn't gotten movie downloads online yet and can't seem to make an online PSP storefront that doesn't involve another machine (Windows PC or PS3).

But, hey, free fricking mods and levels, people. For all the kvetching we see over paid downloadable content, isn't free better, even if it takes a tiny bit of elbow grease? Jeepers.

And, no, that's not Free. It's free.

Labels: business, modding, online distribution, ps3, sony

--jvm at 23:45

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Lara Croft, next-generation doll

If you ever doubted that Lara was eseentially a 3D dress-up doll for some people, well, this thread at Tomb Raider Forums will set you straight. Her model in Tomb Raider Anniversary demo can be retextured and people have been remaking her at will. Here's what she looks like in the demo:
And here are a couple of reworkings by TR Forum denizen jvjv:
Wow. Just...wow.

Labels: modding, tomb raider

--jvm at 21:17

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