Continue reading »]]> There is something about Eve Online that keeps calling you back to play it. My character was created a few days after launch and has enough skills to make everything more than comfortable and I even had a tech 2 BPO for a while so why aren’t I playing? The whispering has started again so I’m trying to resist.

The big problem is that there isn’t anything I want to achieve in the game any more, and that’s a really good reason not to go back. The way Eve always gets you is through other people playing and blogging about it and so I keep thinking that the solo industrial side could be fun as a low impact month or so because I can play at my own rate and buy and sell materials and make menials do all the hard work for me while taking the bulk of the profits.

This is of course what Gevlon from Greedy Goblin has started doing, but from the minion end and like a cute little newbie he thinks that he’s in control to the point that he sent an “I’m a newbie! Look at me!” message to the person who paid him to do the unprofitable part of their supply chain. Bless. Joking aside it is hard to get your head around your place in the world in a single world game with a complex player driven economy, especially when you go in there assuming that everybody is a fool.

There is a problem with a soloist outlook in Eve, and it’s a trap that I fear Gevlon has fallen into like so many new players before him. Not that it’s a bad thing, everybody learns that lesson the hard way and you just need to recognise that you’re in a trap. Manpower is the most valuable thing in Eve, not ISK, or even skills. More people solve every problem. A hundred day old newbies in frigates will always beat a couple of high skillpoint characters in well equipped ships. Delegating industrial responsibilities will always give better results than soloing, and sometimes people are cheaper than minerals.

An example is a scheme that several of the industrial corps I have been in have used. We would pay higher than market rates for minerals from our members. This bemused a lot of newbies who couldn’t understand why we did it when we could buy on the open market and make, from their point of view, much more profit, but it was all a question of scale.

An industrial corporation gets through a lot of minerals. It soon takes whole freighters full to get anything meaningful done and this just scales up along with the blueprints that you have available to you. A capital ship needs many components made before the ship can be assembled and so you are juggling a dozen BPs with concurrent manufacturing jobs in POSs while BPs are also copying and researching in order to maximise growth. Without minerals all this grinds to a halt and money stops coming in.

So what options do you have as a corp? A region wide buy order at a certain level? Nice, but you just end up with minerals scattered far and wide and often in hostile systems that cost to have a fighting escort for your big industrial ships who go out and collect. Even without hostile systems the real cost of shipping alone is astronomical when you are tying up freighters and skilled pilots who should be moving higher value goods. Another option, contracts, become too expensive to manage very quickly so and people just don’t pick them up so It just becomes economical to pay above the odds and pay a bit of the profits out to the corporation members who bring the minerals into predesignated stations. You cap buying mineral stocks this way by budgeting what you need in the next month or so and so don’t get taken to the cleaners, and if a single corp member keeps buying at a lower price and supplying all your minerals then yay! You have all your minerals but he will get bored of doing that very quickly.  You are actually best off dissuading him from doing it for the sake of the other members or their contributions dry up. This isn’t kindness, it’s miner husbandry After all if you don’t meet your mineral needs for the month then you aren’t making the money you should be, and when your items sell for a billion ISK then that’s a big hole in a multi-month supply chain.

I guess it’s the idea that you have to spend money to make money. In a corp you are paying your members, but in open space as a soloist you are just doing the same in order to make your aspect of industry viable. You can chose not to do it, but you will find you can’t reach the profits of somebody who does because your only limits are available capital and available play time. The capital should always be growing if you are playing correctly, but your play time will always find it harder than going for 23.5 hours a day or so. Less if you don’t want to die. The key for profit as a solo Industrialist is to specialise, which can mean paying somebody to do the bits you don’t do.

This is where Gevlon will fall down as a soloist. It’s really hard to keep a large supply chain going on your own especially as you are pushed towards needing access to POSs for the larger construction jobs. This means living in wormhole space or 0.0 and that isn’t a solo industrial activity. I predict he will stop playing because he hits the limit of what he can do on his own in a few months, or somebody will decide to have a vendetta and drive him out.

Either way it’ll be an interesting look at what Eve looks like from his mindset. I quite like the idea of a fully armed and dangerous Gevlon carving his place in Eve, it’ll be the ultimate test of his beliefs and very amusing no matter if it goes well or badly. He’s sure to polarise opinions along the way, and that is always fun.

So what about the whispering in my ear? Do I want to go back? Maybe. We will just have to see. I think I’ll avoid industry though, it’s far too dull.

Continue reading »]]> What happens if you reboot a reboot for a film series? Do you get something that corrects the mistakes of the past and is great, or do you keep making the same mistakes? This week we’re looking at Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Is it better than the Tim Burton remake? Can intelligent apes taking over the world really work as a believable idea? What’s Mckay doing here, and why isn’t he the intelligent one?

Most importantly, does Tim like Monkeys more than Goats? Join us this week to find out.

Continue reading »]]> This week we are examining a book, and not just any book as it’s written by Hugo winning author Greg Bear. We are both massive fans of his earlier works so surely we will both like a more recent book? There’s one tiny flaw, and that’s the fact that this book is a Halo tie in novel and we’re both not exactly massive fans of cash-in attempts on unsuitable IPs.

Can the book change our mind? Does a good author stand a chance of making a good piece of work based on an Xbox game? Does Greg Bear even know what a Halo is? Join us to find out.

Continue reading »]]> Fascinating academia here, complete with Diagrams!

Raph Koster: Narrative in a game is not a mechanic

In which the learned designer thouroughly dismantles what to me had always been a rather opaque medium and lays out the nuts and bolts for all to see. The big coloured shapes help and I think the gist of it is that tripple A games are becoming more and more cinematic experiences laden heavily with blue squares and not nearly enough is being spent on ensuring the black squares are up to par. He then goes on to question whether a square-circle-square experience made up almost entirely of tiny yellow ones, tiny black ones and enourmous and constant blue ones can be rightfully called a ‘game’ at all, in the technical sense. It certainly rings true in my experience and a lot of my more memorable single-player experiences, now I think back on them in these terms, might as well have been me just pushing ‘Next Chapter’ on a DVD remote lots.

An exaggeration of course, but thinking about whether I’d have enjoyed a Mass Effect or Arkham Asylum feature film that didn’t pester me with having to couch behind boxes lots or quicktime some super-psycho into a wall every five minutes just to see what happens next in the story, I think the answer is probably yes. I’m a big PvE player and generally enjoy storyline stuff in MMOs; campaigns, episodes, missions and the like, which is the sort of stuff that doesn’t go down too well with the Sandbox crowd, who rightly believe that in an MMO, other players should be the stories and content. Probably explains my aversion to PvP as well. It all leaves me in an odd place really. I don’t mean to be single handedly destroying the games industry with my fickle purchasing choices, but I really do like a good story well told and forgive way more than I should on the yellow-circle and black-box front. I should probably just go watch more movies instead!

The notes on replayability also ring true and I generally won’t plunge striaght back into these sorts of games for another playthrough until many months or years have passed, once the first-play narrative has been delivered. He doesn’t mention The Old Republic at all in the piece, but it’s not hard to find oneself applying those shapes to the posts and comments one reads about the current big MMO, and the implications they bring. I don’t know, I’ve not played it but do seem to be regarding it as a future purchase in some distant month when I fell like a good story to play through, probably alone. In general though, the whole thing did make me wonder about the Future of Games and I’ve always had a vauge sensation that these things are just costing too much to make and that most of that spiralling excess is going into larger and larger blue squares. I guess gaming has always aspired to be as big as movies; I just wonder if thats necessarily a good thing in the long run. I should probably play more indie games instead!

Perhaps there is room for both sorts of experience. Maybe this is merely a matter of terminology. Lots of back and forth about Themeparks and Sandboxes in the ether lately, quite a lot of it highly charged and this seems a similar distinction. Sandbox fans perrenially cross that studios keep trying to chase the WoW Dream, when I suspect theres probably no real intersection there anyway. Pre-WoW, EQ1′s 300k subscribers was the benchmark and then at it’s hieght WoW showed that 14m was another big number, but I think WoWs big innovation was creating an online single-player game that attracted an entirely different crowd who were never going to like sandboxes anyway. Maybe there was always two seperate industries going on in the same space, confused by an sloppy and casual use of the term ‘MMO’ by all concerned. The success or otherwise of TOR seems to me to have very little to do with EVE Online’s fortunes at the end of the day. A game with small blue squares probably doesn’t need anywhere near the mind boggling amounts of dollars we see on the really high profile Narrative Experiences, so it doesn’t seem to me that games like TOR are stealing anything from potential new sandboxes, which are a different kind of project anyway.

Have I just become lazy? Clearly games with large yellow circles and large black boxes require the player to do a lot more work for their enjoyment, while games with enourmous blue boxes become more passive experiences. It’s entirely possible I’ve become used to being entertained, rather than taking part, and I’d only have myself to blame for it.

Anyway, a fascinating look behind the curtain and quite thought provoking. I’d like to think I probably am a gamer afterall, but with new insights, I’ll have to look carefully at the games I do play and see if any of them are still ‘games’ in the technical sense, and see if I’ve now become irroevocably seduced by the easy life and cinematic spectacle of an entirely different kind of recreational experience. Food for thought!

Continue reading »]]> This week we are looking at what we’ve been playing recently. There’s lots we play, read and watch that doesn’t need a full show and so we’ve gone through a few of the the things that we’ve been up to.

The studio only fell down a little bit during the recording, so ignore any strange noises.

Continue reading »]]> This week we are examining a film that managed to get very different responses from both of us, Le Quattro Volte. Can an Italian film about a goat herder that contains no dialog or, in fact, much of anything happening at all be a good film? Or is it just so much pretentious bollocks that people are pretending to like just so they can look clever? Listen as we disagree over the film for half an hour.

Continue reading »]]> I’m very much an MMO tourist. I’ve usually been playing at least two of the things at any given point in the last decade or so and the explorer in me enjoys seeing entirely new games for their own sake. I’m looking forward to Star Trek Online’s upcoming F2P quite a bit, mostly for the personal novelty of it all, more than anything it may or may not be in itself. Whatever else it is, it’s a world I haven’t seen yet. Many, in fact! Not all of these games stick though and in many cases, seeing them once is enough.

My list of more serious games, the ones that I actually take part in rather than just rubberneck through the starter areas, is much smaller, and if I had to pick one to call ‘home’, I suspect it might just be Guild Wars. While most of these serious ones are characterised by distinct multi-month seasons of my interest, and feverish obsessions in many cases, I think Guild Wars has always been just there. Sometimes its in the background with weeks between visits, and sometimes its been two or more sessions in the same day, a patient cycle of interest which never quite goes away entirely. Although I’ve indeed uninstalled now and then, I don’t think I’ve ever consciously hung it up as I have other games.

Remarkably, I’ve always had stuff to do in there too. Granted, much of it is repetition, but the unique structure and feel of the various missions and explorable areas leans toward a sport or board game at times; I’ve held Thunderhead Keep and breached the Gate of Madness many times, but each has its quirks and each can be done well, or barely adequately, and there is satisfaction in the former. Perhaps this is what keeps some people doing the same raids over and over again in other MMOs, once the loot potential is exhausted. Many people play the same golf courses over and over too.

The Hall of Monument Calculator (cosmetic rewards in Guild Wars 2 for Guild Wars 1 achievements) is fairly recent and an added incentive, but I suspect I’d still be doing these things again and again anyway, through simple enjoyment of the basic gameplay involved.

One title I had been chipping away at all along was the Legendary Skill Hunter and regular readers/listeners may remember me going on about it years ago. To gain this one, you need to capture every Elite Skill in the game, about 140 of them in all. Each is only obtainable from a specific boss out in the world and it really is one of those ridiculous post-endgame achievement tasks which takes you far above and beyond what is required to ‘win’ the game in any normal or sane sense.

I’ve been chipping away at it since long before it counted toward free stuff in GW2, but since I have this… fetish for colourful and interestingly designed iconography, it’s been something I’ve genuinely enjoyed doing; a massive ongoing scavenger hunt with only limited real utility that actively encourages you to go interesting places and meet new monsters. I’m not sure I ever really expected to complete it to be honest, instead viewing it as a pleasantly futile task which just kept me busy. But gradually the three bars filled over time and in recent weeks I suddenly realised I only had about 20 left. Some frenzied wiki-fuelled monster stalking later, I actually finished it!

It did one of those game wide broadcasts with my name it! No-one cared! It was awesome!

I did the ‘/age’ check and it turned out that the feat had taken me 58 months to do, which is bonkers. It’s also pretty slow and a determined min-maxer with enough platinum, a well planned itinerary and a fiercely resolved purpose could probably get the job done in under a month of focussed contract killing.

I don’t mind though and barely even noticed it happening really. I just really like the Signet of Capture mechanic. There is some minor utility in it all though, and now all of my configurable Heroes on all my characters on the account can be slotted with any Elite in the game, which is handy, although I could have just bought that unlock for $6 or so in the shop. I think I’ve earned at least $6 in the 58 month span in my day job – I’d have to check.

There are plenty of new and lengthy obsessions which can replace the skill hunting for me now. Cartographer titles involving uncovering every square mile of all the world maps, another silly task I find personally compelling. The Calculator suggests more, expensive prestige armour sets, redoing the storylines – but harder, killing every…single…overland monster… in hard mode. Even…PvP! No shortage of replacement windmills to tilt at and I think I’ll do just that. Not because I like titles, or want exotic fluff in Guild Wars 2, but because I need only the flimsiest of pretexts to be playing Guild Wars at all.

All in all, a fairly whimsical tick in a largely pointless box, helping me a small way towards owning a cosmetic pet in a game I’m not even sure if I’ll like yet, but as well as that, a sense of quiet satisfaction and closure too. I think it’s never a good idea to put too much store in MMO achievements – they impress only other MMO players, (if that!) and are gone when (and not if) the server is turned off for the last time. I’m not sure anything I’ve done in any MMO will outlast me, and that’s fine. But time enjoyed, in the company of friends or alone, is never time wasted for me and perhaps that quiet satisfaction is one of the things that keeps me coming back to Guild Wars long after other, more intense, MMO seasons have long gone. It’s about the nearest thing to an online home I have.

Incidentally, if you’ve never really understood Guild Wars but have always wanted to, come hang out with the Tuesday Noob Club! We don’t know either, but are damned well going to find out even if it takes us another 58 months! Classes starting soon!

Continue reading »]]> We start the new year with what we are calling the start of a new season of the podcast. This week, in a special longer episode (why not call our inability to stop talking a deliberate feature?) we run through all of the games that Jon played in 2011, starting with some mobile phone games and ending with some small Star Wars game that snuck in at the end of the year.