You know how it is, you start digging into something and before you know it you have far more information than you could ever need. Well my digging into PS3 Trophies means that I think I understand them now and so I thought I would take a look at what they are for, what they are worth and how they compare. This is not the post to read if you think that achievements/trophies/etc are a waste of time.

For the uninitiated there are four levels of trophies on PS3: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. According to this they are weighted as follows:

• Bronze: 15
• Silver: 30
• Gold: 90
• Platinum: 180
  Games can only have one Platinum, and it has to be for getting all of the rest of the trophies in the game, not including DLC.

So if we take a small game, one of the Sam&Max ones will do, we get a total of 1g (90) 3s (90) and 9b(135) for a total of 315. These small games are not allowed to have a Platinum trophy.

ICO, on the other hand as a medium sized game, has 1p, 9g, 4s and 2b for a total of (180+990+430+2*15) 690 points. A bit more digging and we have GT5(1p1g4s53b) at 1185 points and an awful long time to that platinum because they’ve been weighted with lots of small ones. Burnout Paradise has a massive 2255 points and Arkham Asylum has 1230. In fact if you dig for a while you find that ~1230 is the normal value for games if you don’t count DLC.

This is all well and good, but what do those levels mean? Well stealing a table from the original post I started with you get:

• Level 1 – 0 pts
• Level 2 – 200 pts
• Level 3 – 600 pts
• Level 4 – 1200 pts
• Level 5 – 2400 pts
• Level 6 – 4000 pts
• Level 7 – 6000 pts
• Level 8 – 8000 pts
• Level 9 – 10000 pts
• Level 10 – 12000 pts
• Level 11 – 14000 pts
• Level 12 – 16000 pts
• Level 13 – 24000 pts
• Level 14 – 32000 pts
• Level 15 – 40000 pts
• Level 16 – 48000 pts
• Level 17 – 56000 pts
• Level 18 – 64000 pts
• Level 19 – 72000 pts
• Level 20 – 80000 pts
• It takes 8,000 points between levels after 20 also.
  This tells us that Just playing burnout and completing it all will get you nearly to level 5.

Putting this on a graph we see the following scores for levels 1 through 20:

Well that’s depressing to look at. At level 5 it slows down a bit, and at level 12 you hit a bit of a cliff where it then takes 8000 points to get a single level instead of the 2000 it was taking for the last few levels. I guess that explains why I think I’ve been noticing so many level 12s then!

So why is it designed like this? To start with it’s a very clear run up to level 5 and you will grab a few levels just finishing the single player side of the games you grabbed when you got the console. Things then slow down until you bog down towards the level 12 point, and that is where I think most normal players are going to hit before_really_ slowing down. In fact my first thought when seeing that is to just discard the levels completely, the time between milestones is too great.

The level system for PS3 seems pretty well thought out, it’s just not for average people. To start it gives people the sense of progress and at the end it gives a hardcore grind that makes your level really actually mean an achievement. Now I’ve seen the numbers the thought of bouncing off level 12 and maybe 13 for at least a year that makes it all a bit useless as no progress means it becomes meaningless unless you are a really heavy player.

A quick look at a leaderboard should be enough to scare you. Level 50? 275 platinum? That’s a lot of playing.

Since we know that a PS3 game will be around 1230 points we can take the standard 360 value, 1000, for the exact game in some cases and so some very quick and dirty maths to give a very misleading normalised total for the two. I’m not kidding there, this is at best a bad generalisation and at worse a total fabrication.

1. Level 1 – 0 pts 0 gs
2. Level 2 – 200 pts 163 gs
3. Level 3 – 600 pts 488 gs
4. Level 4 – 1,200 pts 976 gs
5. Level 5 – 2,400 pts 1,952 gs
6. Level 6 – 4,000 pts 3,252 gs
7. Level 7 – 6,000 pts 1,878 gs
8. Level 8 – 8,000 pts 6,504 gs
9. Level 9 – 10,000 pts 8,130 gs
10. Level 10 – 12,000 pts 9,756 gs
11. Level 11 – 14,000 pts 11,382 gs
12. Level 12 – 16,000 pts 13,008 gs
13. Level 13 – 24,000 pts 19,512 gs
14. Level 14 – 32,000 pts 26,016 gs
15. Level 15 – 40,000 pts 32,520 gs
16. Level 16 – 48,000 pts 39,024 gs
17. Level 17 – 56,000 pts 45,528 gs
18. Level 18 – 64,000 pts 52,032 gs
19. Level 19 – 72,000 pts 58,536 gs
20. Level 20 – 80,000 pts 65,040 gs
21. Level 21 – 88,000 pts 71,544 gs
22. Level 22 – 96,000 pts 78,048 gs
23. Level 23 – 104,000 pts 84,552 gs
    Looking at my gamerscore for 360 I would be level 21, which is higher than my first guess was. I think that might be a bit telling.

At this point it might be good to consider what achievement/trophies are for. Primarily they are a mechanism to make us play more games, with a secondary use of getting us to play individual titles longer than we might otherwise do so.

They make us play more games by letting us see where our friends are and hoping that we get all excited about rivalry. The Sony system doesn’t really make that as easy as the Microsoft one as it’s really not clear how far behind somebody you are until you get bored one weekend and do so much research that you blog about it just to make it seem worthwhile. On the other hand the Microsoft system can really make it clear that somebody is so far ahead of you that you will never catch them. Another problem that I also hit with my Gamerscore is that after I passed 60k or so it just started reminding me that I play way too many games. I would be less likely to consider Level 21 to be overkill than I am to think that 75,000gs is, but that comes at a cost of me not caring about the level because the progression is just too slow.

From this I conclude that past a certain point your gamerscore or trophy level become meaningless, and it would be interesting to see if it’s at the same point in both systems or if one keeps players interested longer. My gut feeling would be that slower levels would burn it out fastest, but I just can’t tell.

The more useful use of trophies and achievements are for our benefit and neither Microsoft or Sony really go out of their way to make this easy. In fact Sony have gone out of their way to make this hard in the past. I maintain that the best use of them is to tell us what our friends have been playing so we can be reminded of games we may have on our shelves that we haven’t played in a while, or that we might wish to play online. Neither platform supports this without third party sites, but something like Raptr or one of the myriad of other web sites step into the gap. These sites are all hampered by Sony’s attitude to letting you get the information as you need to give them your PSN account details (BAD SECURITY, SONY!) whereas sites have been getting the Microsoft data for years over the web without needing that information, admittedly with many issues along the way. In fact the Sony logging in situation came about from their hacking scandal, so it could be argued that they have made their security weaker instead of improving it by requiring passwords. Maybe an Eve Online style API key system would be better for their needs if they wish to restrict casual browsing/scraping of usernames.

This time we are looking at one of the more serious ways that we’ve both murdered time over the years: playing the first Civilization) game.

This time we are looking back at one of the classics of gaming history, System Shock. Remember folks, never trust a strange AI.

…

This time we are looking at Black Prophecy, the space MMO from Reakktor Media.

How well does this space sim stack up against the competition? Is there even any competition for it?

The second game in Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade promotion this was From Dust, which is a God Sim and so I just had to play it.

You are, shockingly, a god and must help a tribe travel to something called The Sanctuary. You do this through various powers such as raising and lowering land and moving water and lava. The star of the show is the landscape engine. Move a pile of dirt and it will flow neatly into a hill. Water will carve channels through the dirt to form rivers, but if you drop some lava and it will set into rock that will be a lot more robust. Your goal is to settle all the villages in each land, of which there will be a maximum of four, and each village will give you a new power. You can also collect repel water and lava powers that are flown as kites above the villages and these are very important to keep your villages alive. Once you have all the villages populated the exit lights up and you have to send some people there to end the level.

It all sounds very simple, and honestly it is. You might have to build some more islands to get them where they need to go, or build some defences against tidal waves which seem to happen every few minutes on some levels. You also need to manage lava and deal with the fact that it tends to set plants on fire, which causes out of control wildfires.

At its heart it’s a game wanting to be the world manipulation from populous, and it does this very well. Graphically it’s great, the atmosphere is spot on and using lava to create a breakwater to protect a village is immensely satisfying. The cracks start to show with the game though as the building is a bit too limited because of the task at hand, and rushing to grab villages isn’t nearly as hard as it could be even when you are diverting streams or massive lava flows.

At the end the game gives you a final level where the gloves are taken off and you get to place the villages as well as creating land, water and lava from out of thin air. This is a disappointing moment as you realise that when you are given the freedom to do anything all you need to is place four villages and then hold out against a collapsing island until an amount of time has elapsed. I’m not sure what I would have preferred, but I think it needs some more conflict instead of being against the environment.

As you complete each map you unlock challenges that go a bit further towards being an interesting game, but at the end it feels like a tech demo that has gotten a bit out of control, but it’s still worth playing if only for the experience. It feels like a stepping stone for an engine before a real game is added and the engine is more than ready for the challenge. I somehow managed to come away very disappointed that it never really goes anywhere and somewhat relieved that people can still experiment with games in this way. Take a look at the demo, and if you enjoy what you see and accept that there’s only a few days play in the game and it never really expands much beyond the first few levels then it’s an enjoyable way to try something new.

The game is out now on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 points, and will show up for PC and PS3 over the next few months.

I get this a lot – a big MMO News Item goes noisily berserk, and while everyone else is loudly Going Bananas, I’m left sitting here going, ‘Hang on a minute… I’ve seen this before…’

This time it’s the news that the alleged Diablo III will be pretty much entirely an RMT-based affair, offering we players the chance to strike it rich with our loot drops, by flogging those ultra-rare super-pixels to other imaginary heroes, for cold hard coin out in the meatspace. Commentators rightly question how this might change the social dynamics of the overall experience, but I’m sure we can already see a microcosm of it it in action already.

Back in 2005, SOE launched two ‘Exchange’ servers, The Bazaar and Shadowhaven.

These servers, something of an economic experiment, started life fully RMT enabled in a manner similar to the alleged Diablo III. I guess the reasoning being that if you can’t stop gold farmers, why not legalise them and then ‘tax’ them for a cut of the action. I remember there was a lot of scorn and kneejerk ‘RMT is the Devil!’ type news about them at launch – probably from people who never had any intention of playing EQ2, let alone on Exchange Servers – and then it all went quiet. This was all way before the current movement to Free-2-Play began, and EQ2 Exchange Servers required a standard subscription as well!

In light of the alleged Diablo III fuss, I thought I’d see what happened to them. Turns out that in 2006, Shadowhaven was merged into The Bazaar, but then that same year, when dedicated PvP servers were added, one of those, Vox, was added as an Exchange server. PvP player coin and item looting, AND an RMT Real Life Cash Exchange house!

1. Kill people
2. Rob their corpses
3. Sell the loots on officially sanctioned auction house
4. Profit!
   It doesn’t get more hardcore than that, and you’d think it’d be an unmitigated disaster, but apparently, both servers are still alive at least:

SOE: Server Status, Exchange Servers

I’m not sure what those ‘Population’ numbers mean; characters created? Certainly not concurrency! The PvP-RMT server is twice as populated as the PvE one though, which is interesting.

In March 2008, SOE appear to have handed off administration of the Exchange server to a third party, Live Gamer Inc. I’ve no idea what the deal was there, but I guess the whole endeavour proved to be either too costly or fiddley to run in-house, or more profitable spun off to someone else to worry about.

A browse through Live Gamers’ web-based auction house listings (found here) is informative. They broker Cash, Characters and Items, it seems. As of writing, there are about 700 characters listed for the two servers, but at least 90% of those seem to be speculative Level 1 name sandbagging attempts. The remaining ones are mostly Level 90 maxed out characters, and are generally listed from $80 to over $300 buyouts. Reserve starting bids are usually $10 less than that. Mind you, listed and sold are different things and I only saw one character with an_actual bid_ against it, a L54 Warden which if unopposed, will sell for $2.50. Very much a buyers market, I’d say, with such customers that there simply going for the Buy-It-Now option.

Coinage seems more straightforward, and 10 platinum costs $0.28 on The Bazaar, and $0.30 on Vox, but seems to only be available in blocks of 1000pp a go. Doesn’t seem to be any volume traded stats here either. I’ve no idea how long it would take me to farm that on my EQ2X L65 Inquisitor, but long enough for me to not want to give up my day job, that’s for sure.

The Items category, or rather ‘item’ singular is what I came to see, with the alleged Diablo III nonsense in mind, only to find it basically unused, with one single stack of 100x L82 Damage Shield buff potions, listing for $2.00. It’s hard to explain why the sale of actual loot seems to have been completely abandoned. Perhaps the items are too transitory; below level cap, they are quickly replaced, and at the cap, well, I wonder if in this context, a character itself is nothing more than a collection of specific end-game loot items. It would account for price variances between otherwise identical L90 Inquisitors, for instance.

Clearly gold and characters are the real trade here, and I wonder if that won’t be the case with the alleged Diablo III. Anyone getting fiscally involved in these strange variants of gaming-as-income is going to be pretty clued up about mudflation, deflation and many other flations besides, and it’ll be whole characters that keep their value, through upgraded gear, rather than the single pieces of swiftly obsoleted gear themselves. A well maintained character keeps or even increases its utility – items won’t. I’ve no idea if Blizzard is including character trading facilities in the new system, but they’ll need to if they want to achieve the stated aim of killing off black-market RMT.

Perhaps EQ2 Exchange is an invalid comparison anyway. I don’t even have anecdote to rely on here and know no one who has even rolled a character on there. I can only imagine that they are pretty quiet places, given how marginal they were even before EQ2X’s Freeport Server came along and started erroding the existing EQ2 Live numbers in general. I wonder if we’ll see an EQ2X Exchange server, or if the whole thing has turned out to be a useful experiment close to running its course. A system like Exchange lives or dies on a large pool of interested customers. If all that’s left is a small community of would-be businessmen all trying to sell to each other, there doesn’t seem much point in the thing existing at all.

Interestingly, an academic paper on the First Year of Exchange (2006), found here – PDF link, does have some nice graphs, and puts the average price of a platinum piece over that year at $7.38, compared to today’s $0.028, and prices a ‘high-level character’ at $2000, compared to a seemingly standard $90 today. Clearly EQ2 Stuff is not a sound long term investment! The paper also suggests that the whole Exchange programme had little or no impact on black market RMT, and that it was never a significant source of income for SOE, which all makes me dubious about Blizzard’s stated reasons for their own go at the thing.

The alleged Diablo III is obviously going to be far more popular, and perhaps more successful in that the whole thing will be a de faco automatic opt-in ‘Exchange’ type system, rather than EQ2’s tentative peripheral side-show. By playing it at all, you are a potential RMT trader or RMT customer, but I wonder how many regular single-player gamers will actually get involved in the salesmanship of it all and how many are just going to ignore the whole business?

Interesting times, certainly!

In this episode we are taking a look at a film. We decided to start with a high water mark of filmic acomplishment, but I couldn’t find that DVD and so we looked at the recent Warhammer 40k movie: Ultramarines.

Interestingly enough since recording it’s been announced that it’s now available in HD and for digital download so I’m very sorry but there’s no excuse for not seeing it now.

Summer is notoriously rubbish for game releases, but luckily Microsoft have the Summer of Arcade promotion on Xbox Live Arcade so we get a few good games each year that are released in a window that doesn’t swamp them with competition from retail releases.

The first of these this year was Bastion, which is an isometric style RPG game. You collect weapons, upgrade them by collecting items dropped by monsters and scenery you destroy and level up your character with a solid, if simplistic system, but we’re not here for the mechanics with this game. We are here for the gameplay and style.

The big, attention grabbing feature for this game is that it has a dynamic voice over that describes what you do. Amazingly this works, from the basics of standing up and starting to explore at the start to details such as destroying lots of scenery when you don’t have to, getting killed and the like. I was expecting to get annoyed by it, but even at the end of the game it was still providing a large chunk of the atmosphere, and since that is the biggest pull for Bastion I suspect that turning it off would diminish the game greatly.

You play The Kid, a silent character who has survived something called The Calamity that has caused the world to be fractured. Everybody had agreed to meet up in The Bastion, so you set off to find this area. When you get there you meet the narrator and he sets you off to rebuild the world by collecting items to rejuvenate the bastion. As you move along the world rises up in front of you in a very pleasing way and the game has that artistically interesting feel that quite a few good smaller games have strived for over the last few years.

The key question is will you like this game? You will know within a few minutes if the narration annoys you so download the trial and give it a go. I suspect that only a few people will get annoyed by it and the rest will love it.

The game itself is short, as you would expect for an arcade game, but there is plenty of extra content beyond the plot with a new game+ mode after you complete it and a large number of challenges that you can complete.

Microsoft have chosen a very high quality game to start the Summer of Arcade this year, but it’s not one that takes many risks. This isn’t a bad thing, just them choosing a reliably solid opener and it’s certainly worth a look for 1200 Microsoft points. I believe a PC version will show up later in the year as well. Grab the trial and take a look, which you can set to download to your Xbox from this handy link.

Spent an eye opening few minutes visiting the new Tenebrous Island Refuge in EQ2X the other day and found myself quite startled at the scope and scale of the place.

Player housing is something EQ2 has always done very well, even from launch, with its weekly rental Inn Rooms in the various city suburbs and large houses in the central districts. Once inside, any furniture type objects can be placed in the room using a surprisingly intuitive 3D placement system, and then there they are. Standard furniture items can be bought and a whole crafting profession, Carpenter, exists to provide more. Additionally, quests and events offer more trophy related items, and I’m finding that collection aspect of it all very compelling.

In many MMO’s a character’s accomplishments and history are very transitory things. Pieces of armour come and go, moving from aspirational motivators, to prized possessions, to bank storage keepsakes, to vendor trash in a surprisingly short time, and often we’ll end up with only memories, and perhaps blog posts, to remind us that we did anything at all. Player housing then, as implemented by EQ2, can be made to function as an outstanding kind of semi-permanent ‘trophy cabinet’. It’s how Hobbington Crescent uses our Kinship House in LOTRO and very much how I use my Four Room South Freeport residence in EQ2X. It’s an Aladdin’s Cave of curious knickknacks obtained from outlandish places and desperate deeds.

Technically, it’s a very clever way to go too; it’s very difficult to break a game by adding scatter cushions, and I’ve never heard of an instance where a bookcase has needed a forum-enraging nerf to restore game balance. Objects of purely aesthetic value tend to be immune to mudflation or expansion obsolescence, their desirability unaffected by any further changes to the game. Development-wise, I’m sure the overheads are low – much of the placeable furniture I’ve seen existing in-world as scenery anyway, so has often already been modelled and texture in the course of normal world design. And it’s a fun extra dimension to the overall ‘life in EQ2’ experience.

They do a variety of houses to put this stuff in, but lately they seem to have gone crazy with it all. More and more novelty houses are being added, mostly in concert with the EQ2X Station Cash push, and it makes sense. If you’ve moving toward micropayments in a stat-based game, the cosmetics are the area you’re least likely to cause fan-rage in. The vocal hardcore typically don’t care much about mounts, pets and housing, allowing things to be made and sold in relative peace.

Increasingly, we’re seeing more geographically themed dwellings, elaborate housing based on particular zones and styles, but this latest one is something quite new and possibly even game changing:

EQ2Wire: SC Tenebrous Island Refuge

It is indeed, a field. It’s a special magical field on a floating chunk of rock, suspended in an endless evening sky, based on the Tenebrous Tangle region of the Kingdom of Sky expansion, but it’s still just a field. It costs a one-off 1350 Station Cash, ($13.50) and has no in-game upkeep costs. The idea is that you build the _entire house_yourself, out of the various resizable room dividers, floor tiles and assorted other bits and pieces turned out by the Carpenter trade skill profession.

Initially, I thought $13.50 was laughably steep, but the more I thought about it, the more tempting it seems. For starters, that pictured field in the link above is absolutely huge. It’s an unfortunate choice of very distant screenshot, and you have to go ‘Visit’ the portal and have a look for yourself to appreciate the scale – it’s about the size of South Freeport or the inner city bit of New Halas. With a bit of design flair, you could easily build a whole village on that rock, let alone a sizable house.

I find myself comparing it to a Second Life sim, rather than anything MMO-ish, and it’s interesting to look at them side-by-side.

 

On price, the Refuge costs $13.50 to buy and no upkeep itself. Gold level EQ2X or Subscription to EQ2 Live is about $10/mo, but a Bronze EQ2X person could probably use the house too.

A Second Life region on the other hand, as detailed here, which seems to me to be roughly the same kind of area, costs an initial $1000 and a further $295/month to maintain. I’m possibly overestimating the surface area of the Refuge, but not by a factor of 74. (I’m using the ‘Full’ region for comparison. Possibly a ‘Homestead’ region is a closer technical match, but you can’t have one of those unless you already have a Full one anyway.)

On capacity, the Refuge has a placeable item limit of about 1,100. A SL region has a prim count of 15,000, but it’s worth noting that a typical piece of EQ2 furniture is a multi-prim affair. If it takes more than an average of 13 pine cubes to make an equivalently detailed piece of SL furniture, than EQ2 actually gives you more bang per buck here.

On occupancy, a standard SL region has a stated avatar limit of 100 per region, which I personally think is a laughable fabrication. I’d say at 40+ people, things begin to fall apart. EQ2 lists no character limit stats for the Refuge, but I’d guess it’ll be the same as anywhere else in game – turn the detail down for crowds of more than 20, but probably workable at full raid sized groups. 24-man raids on the guild leaders house!

There are fundamental differences of course. SL allows user uploaded assets and, EQ2 has only a fixed inventory to choose from. This is only a problem for content creator types looking to start virtual businesses, and at this late stage I’d say the variety of existing furniture ‘building blocks’ available in EQ2 are probably up to the task of keeping things interesting, allowing exercise of building skill in how you use those blocks. I’m expecting SOE to begin adding many more functional and literal building block type components in due course.

SL allows scripting, which allows people to make things ‘do things’, while EQ2’s furniture is largely static. Still, they have player writable books, and anyway scripting is as much a problem for SL as it is a positive feature, causing lag or simply being made to do bad things by malcontents.

On usability, I’d say EQ2 wins, for the kinds of things folks will be doing with this Refuge. Placing objects in a 3D space is always tricky and SL does have better camera and placement controls, but the depth and complexity of those tools is not always helpful for simple tasks, such as putting up a painting. Working with Stuff in SL is an ever more specialised and arcane set of professions in its own right, much of it carried out in third-party applications like Photoshop, Poser and Blender. In EQ2, you can do less, but do it there and then.

One thing EQ2 does have that SL does not, is a massively multiplayer online game just outside the door of its housing instances. SL just has more houses and shops on the whole, and people have to use, if anything, even_more_ imagination to entertain themselves than in the supposed Role Playing Game of EQ2.

Performance-wise, EQ2 triumphs over SL in things like Walking Around, Running, Seeing Long Distances and Not Using Gigabytes of Bandwidth During Play, so that’s nice. Also, you are unlikely to have your EQ2 floating island bombarded by a cloud of self-replicating todgers all blaring out the crazy frog song. But I think the main reason I’m tempted by the whole thing is that while I am never going to have $1000 + $295/mo to blow on a virtual lego-set sandbox, I might be persuaded to drop a one-off $13.50 on something a little more limited but a lot more accessible.

Incidentally, if you are tempted, I’d wait a little bit longer; The Kingdom of Sky is made up of three differently styled regions, of which the Refuge is only one. I’d expect Barren Sky and Bonemire themed islands along before long if this one sells well.

While not as trendy or fashionable as many other MMOs, I am always fascinated by EQ2’s continual development, expansion and redefinition. To find myself making comparisons to Second Life at all is remarkable in itself. It’s also going to be interesting to see what people create with their 1100 pieces of furniture and massive floating island.