Rather Infrequent Open Thread
I’ll be travelling today, so you all get a big list of links and the opportunity to talk about pretty much anything. Because that, Dragons and Dragonettes, is how we roll on this site.
I am here. Except on a Horizon flight.
Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun website is back online!
Raph Koster should need no introduction to anyone who is familiar with the development of Ultima Online. He is also an author, and his most well-known book — [amazonify]1932111972::text::::A Theory of Fun[/amazonify] — was for some time accompanied be a website devoted to the same topic (that is: game design).
Well, I noticed on Twitter that Mr. Koster had announced the rebirth of the site, and he was inviting people to check it out and offer comments on its design and any errors encountered in its content. Please give it a look, Ultima fans!
Mobile games earned more than portable games in 2011.
Now, a distinction needs to be drawn here. The term “mobile gaming” as used here and in the linked article refers to games for smartphones, built to run on the iOS, Android, and/or Windows Phone 7 mobile operating systems. The term “portable gaming”, in contrast, refers to handheld console games, Sony and Nintendo titles.
Which makes this big news:
Using data from NPD as well as Flurry’s own usage analysis on 125,000 mobile apps, the company reports that iOS and Android will make up 58 percent of all U.S. portable game revenue in 2011, compared to just 34 percent in 2010 and 19 percent in 2009.
Nintendo’s DS line makes up an estimated 36 percent of all U.S. portable software revenues in 2011, down from 70 percent in 2009, while the Sony’s PSP accounts for 6 percent of revenues, down from 11 percent two years ago.
The total size of the portable and mobile game software market has also increased in that time, from $2.7 billion in 2009 to an estimated $3.3 billion this year, Flurry says.
As you can imagine, freemium games (free games offering in-app purchases) have proven surprisingly lucrative and have contributed significantly to these figures. But even leaving that aside, the appeal of mobile games as opposed to traditional portable games is easy enough to see. Portable gaming systems, like consoles, don’t see generational iterations all that often (how long ago did the PSP come out?). Mobile phones, on the other hand…my iPhone 3GS was top-of-the-line when I got it less than two years ago; two new iPhone models have been released since then, each substantially more powerful than the model prior.
The current iPhone is about half as powerful as the PS Vita (the next-generation PSP) will be at its launch. It is also almost as powerful as the iPad 2. No less a gaming technology expert than John Carmack has argued that the iPad 2 is about “half as powerful” as the Playstation 3, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that the iPhone 4S is in about the same general category. The next iPhone, whatever it winds up being called, will probably match (or almost match) the Playstation 3 for power and performance, which will mean it will basically match the PS Vita for power and performance. But whereas top-end titles with high production values will cost $25 or more on the PS Vita, titles with the same production values and quality will cost between $2 and $7 on e.g. the Apple App Store.
The math almost does itself.
I should really focus more attention on Risen 2, as well.
I mean, Reckoning is worthy of attention (I think) solely on the basis that it’s a massive RPG being worked on by Ian “Tiberius” Frazier from the Ultima V: Lazarus project team. That said, it also seems to include many gameplay features that should appeal to Ultima fans.
Risen 2 isn’t being worked on (that I know) by anyone from the Ultima fan project community…but it is well-enough known that Piranha Bytes (the German developers who created the Gothic and Risen series) were inspired in part by Ultima (especially Ultima 9), and their games reflect this. If you want comprehensive NPC schedules in a 3D, open-world RPG, you’d be well-advised to look up a Piranha Bytes game!
Anyhow, here’s a piece of Risen 2-related content for you all:
An exotic pirate setting!
I’m actually modestly fascinated at Risen 2’s attempt to blend pirate fantasy (which is still kind of a big thing, since Johnny Depp keeps finding gainful employment in related roles) and classic “swords & sorcery”-type fantasy. I rather hope it works out!
I was pretty much aware of the HR-related ones, courtesy of my own cynicism regarding HR departments and years of reading Dilbert. And I was aware of the first one. Here’s one, though, that some of you Americans might take into consideration:
2. Myth: The First Amendment protects your ability to say what you want at work.
Fact: The First Amendment prevents the government from restricting your speech, but not a private employer. In most states, an employer can fire you for what you say at work, or even outside of work. (An exception to this is if you’re organizing coworkers about wages or working conditions.)
So, you know…be careful who you let read your blog and/or your Facebook profile. But I trust you all already knew that!
Ken Rolston worked for Bethesda Softworks for a number of years; he retired from game development with the release of Oblivion, but got sucked back into game-making to work on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. And on the subject of fan input, he has this to say:
“Ninety percent has to be familiar and 10 percent has to be new,” he said of evolving game design. “Fans say, ‘I want something new,’ but clearly they want the same thing with less suck.”
This would seem to be a lesson that Origin Systems didn’t ever fully grasp, at least with the last couple of entries in the Ultima series.
Anyhow, Reckoning’s lead designer, Ian Frazier (who is, as mentioned above, well-known to all of us) had this to add via Twitter:
Yes, it’s true, “eliminating the suck” is core to our design philosophy at Big Huge Games.
So…how excited about Reckoning would all of you be if it was described to you as Oblivion without everything that both Oblivion’s lead designer and a hardcore Ultima fan felt sucked about the game?
Get all the books from Skyrim on your Kindle!
Or your smartphone’s Kindle app. Or your Nook. Or your Nook app. You get the idea.
Tonight’s post brought to you by how to make extra-fluffy mashed potatoes!
Which, it must be said, works! I have tried it, and it works!
With fans, you have to be careful to remember you’re not going to be able to hear from everyone (a lot of fans don’t make their thoughts known on internet forums or wherever), not many ideas will be worth considering, and not all of those ideas will be compatible with each other let alone the developers intended design.
If they can learn from the mistakes of the Ultima and Elder Scrolls series, while also remembering what made them so popular and fun to play, they should have quite a good game on their hands. I look forward to seeing more about it, hopefully a bit more of the non-combat side (although trailers will always focus on the action).
I wouldn’t say Reckoning is Oblivion without the suck. It doesn’t really feel like Elder Scrolls from what I’ve seen. I’d say it is more like Fable or The Witcher potentially without the suck.
I keep hearing this theory that gothic and risen are like ultima or ultima 9. I don’t see it. Granted I loved gothic 1. And you could argue gothic 1 was similar with dialogue “npcs talk to other npcs” but g1 had little to no npc scheduling, magic casting was very different, stats were very different, the setting was medeval with a prison colony. You could read books on the backstory of the world, but I REALLY don’t see how gothic was like ultima. I can see why they’re compared by their time of release and being somewhat open world pc rpgs. And gothic was an AWESOME game. Where as u9, at release, was not what was expected of ultima.
Infact, past gothic 1 I’ve really not been a big fan of the series. Gothic 2 was probably alright, I played for like 10- 20 hrs until I reached a point where I coudlnt advance my exp and I put my points in the wrong stats. And g3 was a huge massive shell. You could clearly tell it was planned to be more than it was. And my strat for completing the hundreds of quests was basically pick everything up, kill everything you see, breeze through all the npc dialogues twice and win. That strat worked REALLY well.
Big, beautiful, buggy, crashy, empty shell of a world. It makes me very wary of playing another game by those guys.
As far as mobile vs portable gaming. I’m not surprised. Makes you wonder where the ngage would be if it had a larger touch screen and downloadable games.
I have a feeling, if nintendo wants to keep its dominance in portable gaming, we’ll see nintendo phones in the future.
If it was the 3ds phone rather than 3ds would you get it over the iphone? This question coming from an android user, I DEFINITELY would. But ya know
Raph’s cartoons are awesome. 🙂
“Mobile games earned more than portable games in 2011.”
If I were interested in math, I’d be programming. Oh, wait… While I’m not an idiot, I don’t think blasting one’s spooge across the widest net is a great way to go about developing a computer game. Slaves are available to port your code, you know. If you want to make a great game, do it in the environment you’re most comfortable with and the rest will take care of itself. Just don’t sell your company and/or IP, of course, like Garriott did. Declare bankruptcy and keep your IP if it comes to it. The infamy and tragedy will get you press.
“Anyhow, here’s a piece of Risen 2-related content for you all:”
I like the combination of live action and CG in the promo video. I also don’t think the lead programmer’s hair looks crazy enough. Maybe some feathers or bones would do. At least he was jazzed about procedural terrain generation for quick mock-ups. Also the jungle background live shots remind me of The Savage Empire and its group photos on paper media.
“This would seem to be a lesson that Origin Systems didn’t ever fully grasp, at least with the last couple of entries in the Ultima series.”
The 90/10 rule sounds about right for true fan desire, but Origin was blowing in the wind throughout much of its history. It’s not a surprise that things went pear shaped during that period with regard to the rule.
@WtF: Glad you finally posted about the Ultima code release/interpretation. It’s not the explicit full listing of code with module/procedure/file names, but it’s still pretty damn good. As such, your site is back in my white book.
I’ll release a full report at the end of the month, but for now the major new features are persistent and synced textual dialogue, facial portraits, character skins and inventory (left and right hands separately). Inventory is important, because it enables the exchange of objects around you (picking up, putting down). The server saves all new player states as before and loads them when new clients connect. Once basic inventory is implemented, weapons and armor can be defined and I can enable simple attack/defend combat through the use of those inventory items on the gamepad.
I’ll have to take 16 photos of a small suit of armor and a sword so they may be seen laying on the ground. At least I can already do blood flying out with physics through the particle system. I think I’ll just make a line come out to show the weapon vector, then do the damage and show the blood. Got to think about all that, any input appreciated.
@Micro – I think Gothic was very Ultima-ish in the sense that it created a living breathing world. The fact that it was in 3D is also what made it very special especially since Ultima IX failed (even if mostly due to its rushed scehdule) in many of the usual “virtual world” aspect. Gothic had strong interactivity, it had NPC schedules with everyone going to sleep at night and things like that, it felt alive which has always been a major aspect of Ultima. It also nailed the “temporary NPCs companions” aspect taht Ultima IX aimed to implement but never did. Now I guess it’s different from the overhead party RPG of Ultima VII and prior, but the comparaison is obvious and the design philosophy is indeed very similar – PB’s guys has always named Ultima as a major influence and I think it’s obvious.
That being said sure, magic and stats and settings was different from what we’d expect in an Ultima, but we’re obviously talking in term of design philosophy and not about every single gameplay details. Gothic striked me from the go as some form of spiritual successor to Ultima personally, just like Arx Fatalis felt like a spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld 3.
That being said I agree about Gothic 3 – it was a mess. They tried to make a huge game and lost everything that made Gothic fun to begin – world simulation wasn’t as good, NPCs and plot were inexistant, combat sucked an I could go on and on. It felt to me they tried to turn the series into a poor Elder Scroll wanabee… which felt very ironic to me after Oblivion seemed to aim for a more Ultima-ish approach.
*However* – Risen is nothing at all like Gothic 3, if anything it comes close to being a Gothic 1/2 remake, it goes back to the roots of the series perhaps too much at times, but after trying to reinvent (and breaking) the wheel in Gothic 3, PB went to what they did well with Risen and it worked. It also had a very Pagan feel to me in term of settings and atmopshere.
So basically if you liked Gothic 1&2 you should like Risen too.
Risen 2 should be very good I think, altough I’m somwhat puzzled about the Piratey approach. I love the idea… but it feels like a different setting altogether than a Risen sequel.
@WTF
“This would seem to be a lesson that Origin Systems didn’t ever fully grasp, at least with the last couple of entries in the Ultima series.”
I think they grasped it. I think Garriott just went like “screw the fans”. He never listened to them while doing Ultima and always aimed at what HE felt was the proper new direction – he always wanted to reinvent the wheel… most of the time fans went along but sometimes they did not. But even the higest rated games were hit with some reservation from old fans – back when U7 was released there were people who felt going to a mouse interface, keywords and real time combat killed the soul of the series for instance, and suspect some might have felt the same with the single scale map of U6
Note that I think most fans would have gone along with Ultima IX if they had been satisfied with the plot and if the game had had NPC schedules and the like. I remember very few people hating the game from the get go – a majority of fans seemed to be originally won over by the game and clamored how “Ultima was back”, how immersive the game was and so on… but their opinion collapsed as they went forward with the game and disliked or hated the plot.
Basically – I think the U9 issue came more from the plot that the game of game it was… which I would argue was very Ultima ish to the core.
I remember very few people hating the game from the get go
This is true, I distinctly remember people on RGCUD being quite excited by the whole “Avatar at home” tutorial, which was technically impressive for the time.
They assumed the game would open up and take off the kiddie gloves once you got to Britannia, which of course didn’t happen.
My computer could barely run U9 when I got it, and even then the Earth stuff was awesome. Started up, the Walking Theme started playing, the voiceover guy started talking to me. I went around trying out light switches and seeing what I could do in the house and it was awesome.
I did kinda miss the world openness of the other games (not to mention the lack of things off the main storyline), but I still consider U9 to be a good game (and a good Ultima). I enjoyed it.
I’ve never played the Gothic and Risen games. Is that something I should do, or should I stick to newer games? (ie, I have limited gaming time, and don’t want to play older games unless they are actually better than what I’d be playing otherwise)
I guess I can see where you’re coming from a bit. Then g3 lord of the rings storyline.
I enjoyed g1 I replayed it about a year ago. Its a small world map with a great storyline. G2 I couldn’t get into myself, too much land to traverse.
@Infinitron – As I recall a lot of people were rather taken by the game in the beginnings of Britannia as well, I think many hardcore fans hi the first breaking point when coming upon Gwenno and Iolo though.
@Thepal – I’m not sure I would recommend Gothic at this point if time is an issue, especially since the series rather ended up in a mess between Gothic 3. I would have recommended Arcania if Fall of Setarrif wasn’t such a crapfest and if there were any hope of a sequel but meh.
I would however recommend Risen – it has everything that made Gothic great, and with a good UI (Gothic 1 has like the worst UI ever conceived and 2 is barely better) and I think it’s a good way to sample what PB is capable of. Of course I guess you might check Risen 2 without doing teh first one too, since I’m not sure it’ll have that many ties with it
@Micro Magic – I don’t think Gothic 2 was -that- big, it’s a far cry for a TES I mean. The size felt consistent why the prison colony of Gothic 1 really (eck it even HAS the Gothic 1 area in the game) and Khorinis really was an awesome city to do stuff in. It’s a shame G3 had so many cities and none of them ever came close to the single G2 city in any level. Oh well…
Yeah… Gwenno is what did it for me. Last time I saw her she was getting on in years. Then she was suddenly a young, blonde woman. And Iolo went from being a large man to a tiny man with a high-pitched voice (who I actually killed the first time I ran into him since he didn’t do any “I’m Iolo” dialogue for me, and I was really confused when Gwenno got angry that I had killed him since as far as I knew I hadn’t actually found Iolo).
That sounds like an iconic “jumping the shark” type moment to me. I bought the line that certain characters from Ultima were from Earth, and therefore aged at a different rate than the native characters, but blatantly shitting in the face of cannon like that is a bit too much. It’s just name recycling for the sake of branding. Not good.
Which reminds me, I’m going to use these names for some random NPCs in my game:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ultima_characters#The_Avatar_and_his_companions
I figure that should really boost interest amongst Ultima fans in my project. I’ll make sure Iolo looks old, has a beard, and wields a crossbow, etc. Queue universal excitement!
Kidding, but what the fuck, really?
I think the issue with Gwenno is more that they didn’t have a specific NPC model for her and were stuck to using one of the existing ones. One of the drawback of going fully voiced 3D there, because real time dialogues are nice but you don’t have portraits to separate every NPCs anymore.
I thought Iolo looked fine though.
Three words describing how Iolo should have looked like.
Epic. Beard. Man.
He’s a man, he’s got a beard. Not very epic much it is more related to his role in the game than its look methinks.
When I found Iolo in u9 I was all like ok cool he’s out doing evil stuff now that I’m back he’s sure to follow me around and we can go kill some guards like we used to! Iolo, hey buddy, why are ya stuck there? So now you live in this dungeon? Where’s smith? Oh you don’t know? Ok… well I’m gunna go somewhere else now. Maybe ill find the real Iolo.
But I never found him…
Where did it ever say Iolo was some big dude? He graphically looked good in the game. Some old bearded dude. Like in u7 but older.
I dunno g1 interface wasn’t so bad. Takes like 5 minutes to get used to but it was pretty simple when it came down to it.
Yeah I never got the impression Iolo was to big or large… His U9 model was balder than he was in U7 admitedly, but I thought that made sense with him aging even more and all. I can understand someone not liking the voice (I thought it was okay, nothing special, nothing bad), but as for the look he worked as Iolo as far as I’m concerned.
Regarding the G1 interface, it’s okay once you get use to it but it’s really counter intuitive – the camera feels like crap and who the hell thought it was a good idea to have you hold the mouse button and press up to do *anything*? I mean as far as similar games goes, U9’s interface was much more intuitive – I know people who’ve literally stopped playing Gothic 1 because they couldn’t stand the interface.
First part of Iolo’s dialogue in U7: A rather large, familiar man looks up and sees you.
Can’t say this was apparent ingame, or in any of the other Ultima games 😛
Iolo always looked like he had the same build as the Avatar, and guess what: he does too in Ultima IX!
That’s because of the one thing that no RPG has ever managed to do – create a world where each person actually has a noticeably different height and build.
(actually, NWN2 did allow you to change your height and width to an extent)
The weird thing is that there isn’t much reason from a technical standpoint to prevent it, especially when you offer a static world like most RPGs does – it should be easy to be able to scale the size of NPCs as needed.
Eck, I’m pretty sure the U9 engine was capable of this : the Troll was just an orc model blown out of proportion, the Brute(Giant) was a human NPC turned giant as well. And of course all humanoids character whatever their size used the exact same set of animation – even the Guardian!
So it wouldn’t have been hard to have NPCs of different size, though I’d think they didn’t do this also because it would have created issues in term of schedules, having NPCs move through doors, sith and such…
Simply linearly scaling up the models is a pretty cheesy, fake-looking way of doing it, so I’m not surprised it hasn’t been done.
Scaling them up keeps the proportions, so doesn’t really offer different body types.
MMOs seem to be doing the job fairly well (TOR has a variety of body types). Pity the single player games don’t do it more.
Well, modern versus ancient, right? At the time of Ultima 9, 3D RPGs weren’t far enough along the technology curve to be able to allow wildly disparate phenotypes for playable and/or non-playable characters.
No, they weren’t, but the Elder Scrolls doesn’t do it either. 😛
Neither does the Gothic/Risen games or Two Worlds…
Actually now that I think of it MMOs seems to have been the sort of games which seems to offer the most variety in term of characters size/build. SP RPGs… Not so much.
That’s true, too.
There are outliers, of course: Neverwinter Nights and its sequel allowed for some basic phenotype selection (admittedly, the choice was limited to “trim” and “husky”, but still…). Other BioWare titles, like Mass Effect, only allow for face customization. Meanwhile, over in SWTOR, you can choose from four different phenotypes, ranging from waif-like to obese.
Yeah and TOR is actually somewhat limited in term of character customizarion compared to some others MMOs
Technically, I seem to remember there being different body types in U9.
Unless they dynamically apply deformation while the game is running they’ll have to store the the mesh variations as separate models which would take up more storage space and memory. Maybe that’s the reason even modern games seem to avoid it. Too much trouble when very few want to look pudgy or unlike the default body types.
It would be cool if your body type could be affected by your actions in-game, such as by eating too much (or too little), and otherwise being dehydrated or malnourished.
Skyrim has actually done it in an interesting way. They created two of each body/armor/clothes mesh; one for thin and one for large. When creating your character you can use a slider to scale between them. Using those sorts of mesh transformations allow for a great deal of variety without creating a mesh for every possible size.
Sanctimonia:
I’m not talking just about the player’s model. I was primarily referring to the appearance of NPCs. I want fat innkeepers, short hunch-backed gravediggers, skinny, wild-eyed mad scientists…
Skyrim has actually done it in an interesting way. They created two of each body/armor/clothes mesh; one for thin and one for large. When creating your character you can use a slider to scale between them. Using those sorts of mesh transformations allow for a great deal of variety without creating a mesh for every possible size.
Ah, I wasn’t aware of this. But height is still constant, right?