Neverwinter: Those little things

Just a quick mind dump:

I've had an idea several years ago about 360 MMOs: Those which offer you a limited external access of in-game features via a web/mobile interface. It could include accessing mails, auctions, etc. The idea seemed so trivial, that I was totally puzzled why no one ever implemented it. It's easy to see how this can strengthen the bonds of the players to the game, and while it certainly helps the hacker type to write auction bots, it's not so overpowering that it breaks the game. 

Lo and behold, Neverwinter does offer a web gateway page to access your characters. There you can manage your professions, mails and auctions and guild. 

Well done, Cryptic.

Update: Here is a link for those who play the game and didn't know about this: Gateway

My very special Birthday Present

Never before I received such a unique birthday present as this year from my daughter. She is seven years old, and worked hard to put this Minecraft world together for me. The whole idea and all of the work is her own.
Needless to say, I was deeply moved, and speechless.

Is Ingress an MMO?

You might or might not have heard of Ingress. Certainly, not too many people outside of the Android owners have, and not a significant percentage of those have either.

So, what is it? It is a multi player game from Google, with a two faction, 'capture the flag' like gameplay, in a huge, persistent world. So far this description is very typical for MMOs, so why would some people this it is not one? For one single reason: your in-game location is tightly bound to your real world location, thus your gaming experience is very different from an average MMO game. 

Well, I do think it is a fairly common MMO, with almost all the common trappings: Collecting experience and gaining levels; building an inventory; working in teams for a common goal; grinding. Yet, there are a few very interesting design aspects which makes it special.

The most important one is the one I mentioned above already: You need to physically move to different locations in the real world for to be able to get close to important points - the portals. As these portals are not equally distributed over the surface of the planet, you might find that the are where you live/work/travel/etc has a lot/just a few/none at all. This will obviously affect your game a lot, as the portals are the main source of your items. Consider the difference between the case when you have a home portal (community term for a portal that you can reach from inside your flat) and the case when you only see portals if you go to the closest town, and only a few even then. It also changes a few things about your habits: You start choosing places for going out where there are portals, and you may even start referring the portals as actual real life points of interests - I often tell my wife to meet at 'The Insect' or other portals close to our flat.

Also, I admire the way how the game motivates you to join your local community and play in groups. There is a very simple motivational factor: Items for a given level can be gathered mainly from the same level portals, so say level 6 items are mainly looted from level 6 portals. Yet from level 2 (maximum level atm is 8) the players are only able to create portals which are lower level than their own. For up to lvl 4 this is acceptable, but then it gets gradually worse, until the point when a level 8 player is only able to create a lvl 5 portal on his own. As a result of this, players start to actively look for communities when they reach level 5-6, and at level 8 (where you need exactly 8 players to create a lvl 8 portal), they often organise events which are very similar to raids in normal MMOs. The main difference here is obviously the requirement to turn up physically. :)

Another point to mention is the simplicity of the level/item system. Atm there are 6 types of items in the game: Resonators, Bursters, Power Cubes, Shields, Keys and Media. Of these, the first 3 are levelled items: They have versions between lvl 1 and lvl 8, and you can only use them up to your own level. Shields have 3 different kinds, but you are free to use any of them on any level. Keys and Media doesn't have level differences (Media items have levels, but it doesn't mean anything). It is very simple to understand which one you can use for what, but it offers enough variance that you have a yay! moment from time to time when you get a great loot from a hack. 

It will be interesting when - probably next year - Google will port the game to the iphone. A surge of new players, and the inescapable chaos will give the game a new kick, I am sure. :)

The Cube

After you found a few of diamonds, built your own Nether Gate and used it, dug down to the bedrock and killed pretty much everything you have seen in the game, Minecraft somehow loses its charm. Well, for me, at least. There are basically four things that are left for me to do:

1. Adventuring
2. Redstone experiments
3. Using interesting mods
4. Writing mods

At least, these are the activities I think can still motivate me to play. Today, as I only had about an hour to play, I started experimenting with Redstone mechanisms, and thus, the Cube has come to life.

So, what is the Cube? It's made of a lot of glass, some cobblestones, a bit of redstone dust, a few redstone repeaters, a lever and a block of stairs. The glass is mainly there for the effect, though, and the stairs could be left out by moving the whole structure one block down, into the ground. Anyway, it is how it is now.

But, you may ask at this point, what does it do? Well, simply speaking, it is an elevator.

At the moment it takes you (or, well, a block) up by 4 blocks. But that is only just how tall I build it - you can pretty much repeat the whole structure and make it even higher. I did some optimisation in the circuits, but I think there is still some possibility to make it more modular and space effective. 

There is a lot in this game that is extremely deep or entertaining. Quite possibly the best sandbox game I ever played.

Lack of Time

Lately it seems that I just don't have enough time for anything. The only game I - half heartedly - play is Ingress, mainly because I don't need to sit in front of the computer for that. Usually by the time I get some time in the evening to play it's too late, so I don't even bother to start up any game, just read some stuff on the internet, turn it off, and that's it. I've just got too much to do.

On one hand, I think I mentioned earlier that I started working on an old project of mine - a graphical client for a PBEM game - I did a lot of renovation work on that one, and finally got to a point when the whole thing is getting in shape, with just a few bugs remaining, and a lot of added functionalities which make it much easier to use. This is a good thing, btw, because the 100th game is approaching, and I expect a few people to pick it up and use it again. Btw, the thing is called Korzo, and you can check the game here: Turn 2 Turn. 

When I am done with that, I'll start experimenting with a new kind of RSS reading, to replace Google Reader. Then I'll return to the Ninjas & Dragons development..

What does that mean for you, the reader? Less blogposts. Even more abstract posts. Sorry for this, guys, but this is life. At least I'll not stop blogging altogether. I think. 

Played Recently: The Secret World

Although I didn't plan to play TSW for a while yet, certain circumstances motivated me to try it. Mainly the huge number of blogposts and the two weeks membership extension I got from Funcom. 

Anyway, I started again. The last time I played in the Beta, my spec was elementalism/fist weapons. I call this combination the "Cleaner" deck, because the groups of zombies I encountered were using me to mop up whatever floor we were standing on. (It was usually my blood that stained it at the first place). None of those specs are good against groups. This time I was more careful, and picked the Sword spec, which has a nice DPS against single enemies, and great against groups. But, obviously, it is melee range, so I needed something that is ranged. After a bit of this and that, I decided to go with pistols, which is not the longest range, but inherently cool. 

It works much better. So far the only time I died was when I accidentally activated a booby trap, and couldn't get far enough before the explosion. I must admit, the game is much more fun this way, because I don't have to carefully get around the groups of zombies whenever I need to go somewhere, and the nasty surprises when I find an enemy somewhere when I don't expect one are much less threatening. 

Storywise, as I only played for about 4-5 hours so far, and I am still only halfway through Kingsmouth, I can't tell much. I like the mood, but sometimes it's a bit too depressing.. 

Blogcast: Zubon and the Wildstar, NoizyGamer about RMT, Psychochild's Secret

Some comments on some blogposts

• Zubon (and Ravious) over at Kill Ten Rats had a chat with the Carbine Crew. Aside of being 'pleasant folks', they showed an older build to the guys, and talked about some interesting things. Sadly, there isn't too much in the post that is new, but the perspective is very interesting.
• NoizyGamer wrote an post about some quotes on RMT from famous people at famous studios. I've never thought that these studios suffer as much from these gold sellers / farmers as the players.. or even more, given the amount of money they spend on them. 
• Psychochild, in the spirit of talking about current games (and their design problems), wrote another long winded post about The Secret World. I haven't played this game since the Beta (except for creating a character after buying it) but this article just convinced me to jump in again.