I know, I know, that’s a terrible pun.  I do that sometimes.  English just lends itself well to such… malleability.

I played in the Allods Online closed beta a little while back.  (They are having another one, too, so if you’re interested, go sign up!)  As always, I didn’t get a lot of time in the game, but what I did see at least has me looking forward to playing it a bit when it gets a full release.

The Massively preview that I referenced last time I wrote about Allods Online has perhaps more than I really have to offer, so I would suggest that as a starting point.  I do have some screenshots that I wanted to chime in about (out of 173… I take a lot of shots).

Before I get to that, though, a few thoughts (noting that this time, I can’t remember where I read these things, and what inaccuracies exist about the lore are entirely my fault):

One, what exactly is an “Allod”, anyway?  It turns out that an Allod is a chunk of habitable terrain floating around in this sort of… space… Etherium-like… thing.  (The Etherium is Treasure Planet’s “outer space”… which is a strange sort of space with breathable atmosphere and unidirectional gravity… unless there’s a spatial distortion or baby black hole.  Treasure Planet isn’t a terrible movie, but the physics are just so… WRONG.)  Apparently, people used to be constrained to their local Allod, whilst the mage priesthood maintained the means to travel between them… until someone went and discovered that you could just go sail around in space, looking for other Allods.

So, we have some sort of power hungry magehood (the mage version of a priesthood, of course) conspiring for population control, rebels trying to set everyone free, power struggles between the Empire and the League (I’m not sure who is closer to the mages, or if they are a third faction that nobody likes), and Gibberlings.  These guys are sort of like a cross between Gnomes, Ewoks and Gremlins that are born in triplets and fight as a trio.  Yes, they are player characters as well as NPCs.  It’s a lot of fun to play as Gibberlings for me, but then, I wasn’t traumatized by Teddy Ruxpin or Tickle Me Elmo.  Player response to these guys will be varied, methinketh.

Oh, and ships.  Did I mention ships?  Apparently, ship combat is meant to be the “endgame”, or at least a significant part of the non-noob experience.  At some point, you can get your own ship and sail around between Allods, complete with combat and crew cooperation.  As in, you may need other players to man your ship.

I can’t shake the Puzzle Pirates feel of that.  In PP, you can solo a lot of things, and have a lot of fun playing alone, even on your own little sloop (and I hope Allods Online lets you solo ships), but the really crazy (fun) and rewarding stuff is done on ships with other players.  If the ship combat (including manning separate stations) in Allods Online can be even partially as fun as PP (but in 3D, wooooo), it’ll be worth digging into.  PP has PvP and PvE on these group ships, and both can be a lot of fun.  I lean more to the cooperative PvE (the PP equivalent to raiding, I suppose), but PvP can be a thrill at times, too.  PP is player skill based, though, which is, as always, significant when it comes to game design.  We’ll see how much player skill means in Allods Online.  I’ve never considered outleveling someone else to really be a “skill” when it comes to PvP.

Of course, the land-based DIKU standard MMO fare will appeal to some, and the ship combat will appeal to others.  I haven’t read anything on raids, but perhaps that’s still in the pipeline.  The DIKU combat doesn’t have an “autoattack + hotkeys”, rather, it’s all hotkeys.  You need to trigger your basic attack.  This can be good or bad, depending on how you play.  I had fun with it, but I’ll admit, I miss the old brainless autopilot combat sometimes (and I want more involved combat sometimes, too).  Either way, it’s something a bit different than the gorilla standard, while still being accessible.  Time will tell if that’s a good idea.  (I lean more to DDO if I want more involved combat, but hey, to each their own.)

OK, so… pictures.  I’m hiding them behind the More link for cleanliness’ sake, and for anyone who happens to be tuning in via dialup.  There are plenty of pictures after the break, for better or worse.

Bottom line, I’ll be playing this in the next beta, and I look forward to playing once it’s live.  It may not be my permanent MMO home, but it bears investigation.  I do heartily recommend it to anyone interested in MMOs, if only to see what the Russians are up to in game development.  (Apparently, there are some solid game studios in Russia.  I welcome this, since “Western” and Japanese games could use some competition.)

Pictures after the link:

This is the splash screen:

Allods Online Splash Screen

It’s pretty standard fantasy fare with a hint of sci-fi; special effects, battle cries between factions across the rift, and chest windows on the females.  It’s a good foot forward, and gives a fair sense of the art direction and design ethic, even if it’s nothing all that new.  It’s still well done.  That’s a Gibberling there to the left of the login box… one of the scarier ones, actually.  What catches my eye is the guy on the right in plate armor with the halo. That Empire Paladin just screams “Russian” to me, and I like it.  I’m decidedly not a fan of communism, but I really do like it when people around the world embrace the art, design and storytelling in their own heritage rather than just trying to ape American or Japanese creations.  Yes, there will be things that are “foreign” to me, but I like that, since it gives me a chance to learn and broaden my palate.

Empire Paladin NPC

Speaking of classes, there are class “archetypes”, like a Paladin, and each race that gets it gets their own flavor of that archetype, with a few unique twists.  (Arisen Summoners are good at healing their creations, while a different Summoner might be better at combat buffing them.)  Talent trees aren’t nearly as expansive as WoW or even Torchlight (at least presently; there are hints that talent trees may be expanding), but they still offer a way to customize your character.

Stats

The interesting bit of Allods Online character progression is that you get to pick your attribute boost each level.  You get one point to bump up any of fourteen different attributes.  The attributes have highlights to show which ones are important to your class (note the rollover tooltip), and which ones are already being boosted by gear.  It will be interesting to see what the minmaxers do with this, and just how much it can gimp a character if a player messes around.  (Bonus:  note that you’re told explicitly how much experience you need for the next level, right there in the combat log.  It’s a little thing, but a nice convenience since you can see how quickly you’re progressing at a glance, rather than trying to track the numbers via rollovers or visually on the industry standard XP bar.)  I suspect that the item shop will have some sort of “attribute respec” item some day.

Item Shop

That’s one page of the item shop.  It’s still being translated (the trouble with text in graphics, rather than as overlaid text strings that can simply be changed in code), but at the moment, you can see that they will be selling bigger inventory bags.  Here’s hoping that you don’t have the headache that sometimes comes up in these games carrying a bunch of useless junk.  (Oh, for a Torchlight “vendor ferry” pet in one of these MMO things… I’d buy that from the item shop in a heartbeat.  Convenience rules.)

Orcs

Orcish Officer

Allods Online Orcs are hulking brutes, and the Orcish police officers have a distinct Soviet flavor to their gear.  Notably, that officer also is using the “XBox 360 Avatar Lighting Scheme”, what with strong rim lights and a middling main light.  I’m not really a fan of that look, but at least it’s not flat lighting.  Other Orcs look more like Fantasy Island harbor rats (note the Steampunk “Millennium Falcon” design ethic there on the bridge):

Empire Bridge Crew

and some even have the soul of poets, seen through their sensitive eyes and ponderous expression:

Poet Sailor Orc

Here’s a pair of gratuitous bridge shots:

Empire Bridge

Empire Bridge Tangle

And a cannon on fire from ship to ship combat:

Burning Cannon

The game looks good, at least to my eyes.  It’s not trying to be hyperreal like Age of Conan (a dangerous thing, chasing the technological bleeding edge…) or cartoony like Free Realms, rather it occupies a nice middle ground, not unlike WoW.  And yes, you could be forgiven if you are thinking “this is just another WoW clone”.  Then again, what isn’t in the modern MMO market?  (*coughPuzzlePiratescough*)  Similarly, you could be forgiven for looking at these screenshots and wondering just where in Azeroth they are:

Monestary

Looking Up

Looking Down

Ruins Nook

Ruins Corner

Gigantic Glowing Geode

Fire Elemental

Steamworks

That last one is a portrait of my “Arisen” Summoner (warlock), who I so cleverly named Warlocks (get it, dreadlocks, warlock?  One more bad pun for the list, anyway…).  He’s hanging out in the second Empire area, a steampunky bunker or sorts.  The Arisen are some sort of TechnoUndeadGothEmo race.  They have interesting mechanical bits that rotate and illustrate their partially mechanical nature (sorry, it’s not animated… imagine the mechanical bits moving around…):

Super Technology, still a flunkie

You could also be forgiven for thinking you had warped to Final Fantasy Online, considering the design of this spaceborne monster:

RRRRAWR!

The humans come in a couple of different “races”, but most of them look something like this:

Sean Connery does steampunk, too

Elves are some sort of weird crossbreed with fairies… and may have a strong connection with the nasty power hungry mages:

Elven Mage tending an Allod Engine

Here, my little trio is hanging out next to an apparently rare solo Gibberling:

Gibberling Psionicists and company

Gibberling idle animations can be fun, too.  My “lead” Gibberling, Silvernose, sometimes gets bumped from behind by his little brother, Brownbrow, and turns to threaten him with a shaking fist.  Their sister Brunhilde just ignores them both:

Gibberling Squabble

This is why real woman warriors don’t wear armor with chest windows:

Windowed Armor is Bad News

Yes, those are arrows firmly lodged in her armorless bosom.  (She didn’t start that way; the arrows came from an NPC archer, and stuck there; a nice combat touch.)  Ladies, don’t be stupid like this.  It’s just asking to get shot or stabbed in a sensitive area.  Game designers and artists, curb your puerile armor fetishes, please?

…

So, mild snarking aside, I liked Allods Online.  I’ll play it when it comes out, and if there’s something good in their item shop, I may give them some cash.  (It’s meant to be a free to play game, monetized via an item shop… time will tell if they botch it or do it well.)  The art direction is solid and smart.  WoW worked as well as it did by sitting in that “relatively low spec, still pretty” art technology zone.  Allods Online also has a nice sci-fi steampunk flavor to it, and I appreciate that.  There is also a subtle sense of humor in the game, not wholly ridiculous, but not wholly serious, either, and that is always good to see as well.

This also may be the first 3D MMO where I’m more interested in the “endgame” than the leveling content.  I’m probably just dreaming here, but I love the idea of exploring the Allods in my own ship, puttering around like a pirate, doing my own thing.  I love that in Puzzle Pirates, and if I can have that freedom here, in a 3D sci-fi steampunk world, I’d probably spend many happy hours playing.  (Of course, if I have to grind through months of DIKU to get there, and I can’t solo my own ship, I’ll once again be uninterested.  This may be a poster child for a game design that should have let players jump right into the endgame from day one.)

So, as I sign out, here are a few more shots of the ships that I’d like to play on.  In the meantime, it’s back to Puzzle Pirates and my own little sloop.  I’m keeping my eye on Allods Online, hoping that it really manages to be a great game.  So far, it looks decent.  Not perfect, but fun to play, with a lot of potential.

Shipboard Steam Engine

I want one of those ships...

Just me and my ship... that needs repair

This year, I find that I am especially thankful for warmth.

We needed to replace our furnace last week, and were without heat in our home (aside from some space heaters) for three nights.  Temperatures around here that week were below freezing (around the mid twenties Fahrenheit).  It was an uncomfortable few days.

My personal thermostat is generally about 10 degrees cooler than that of most people; I’ve always liked it cold.  Still, I have little children and a wife who likes it warm, and I couldn’t help but feel incompetent for not taking care of them better.

So now we have a new, much more efficient furnace.  Nobody got sick because of the time in the cold, but it could have been a lot worse.

I’m thankful for the pair of guys who put the new furnace in.  It might have been easy to look down on them as they did their “grunt” work, but they were professional, competent and performed a service I couldn’t have done.  To be honest, they probably have far better reason to look down on me for sitting at a desk all day, making a game.

I’m thankful none of us got sick.

I’m thankful for a kind wife who didn’t yell at me, even though I felt I deserved it.

I’m thankful that I have a job that allows me to have the money to pay for the new furnace.  We’re not top wage earners, but we have enough for our needs, and we live within our means.  I’m thankful that is possible, and that my family has a history of financial prudence.

…

As always, I also have tangential thoughts.

One, it’s always nice to be thanked.  There’s a rush of satisfaction and warmth that comes with genuine thanks, and it can warm the soul like few other things can.  There is also the personal peace that comes with living a life worthy of being thanked.  There’s also a special kind of warmth that comes from doing things worth being thanked for, but doing them anonymously.

Two, I remember a moment of contrast that reminds me of those cold nights.

I was a missionary for the LDS church in Alabama for two years.  (My little brother is going to the same mission here in a couple of weeks, curiously enough.)  I spent a few months in the bowels of Birmingham.  A couple of white guys in the inner city of a Deep Southern town just didn’t fit in.  There were genuinely scary moments, and some genuinely threatening people.  (Of course, some saw us as a threat as well, albeit in a slightly different light.)

I was young, preoccupied, and somewhat scared the day that we walked past a fellow sleeping in a doorwell.  He looked rather disheveled, and probably asleep.  It wasn’t cold at that time of the year, but when you’re sleeping on cement in the shadow, with only a single blanket, you’re not going to be comfortable.  His skin happened to be darker than mine, his appearance far less presentable.

And I was afraid of him.

I don’t know his story, and I may never know.  We walked on by, and didn’t bother him.  We didn’t speak of it, so I can’t speak for my companion, but there were warring factions in my mind and heart.  My mission was to uplift and serve.  I wanted to help the fellow in whatever way I could.

But I was afraid.

Perhaps he was a drunk, sleeping off a binge.  Maybe he would wake up blindly swinging.  And what would he think of a couple of white boys in Sunday attire, rousing him from his nap?  We had more than our share of racial tensions to deal with when people saw us coming from a distance.  Up close and personal might be even more dangerous.  As missionaries, we also had our share of religious bigotry to deal with, and layered on top of racial and sociopolitical tensions, we could be in some very tight situations.  A guy sleeping in a doorway just presented a lot of unknowns.

I wanted to help, but I was afraid.

I didn’t remember Paul:

“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7)

I didn’t remember the lessons of the Good Samaritan.

I was just afraid.  And now, over a dozen years later… I am cold.

It is a terrible, bitter cold, when one is left to wonder “am I that Levite?” or “why didn’t I help?”  As I’ve noted elsewhere, charity to me is a way of life, a set of actions guided by a pure love of your fellow beings.  As one man put it:

Charity is the pure love of Christ

It’s not a check to an Organization, or a handful of coins in the Salvation Army bucket on your way out the door with a hundred dollars’ worth of food.  It’s not something done for attention, tax breaks, or donor perks.  It’s simply something you do because it’s the right thing to do, it’s very personal, and it’s more about the giving than the receiving, even receiving thanks.  It’s about doing the right thing, no matter what.

So yes, I am grateful for a lot of things.  I’ve tried to live a life where other people can be grateful for my existence.  I don’t always get it right, and I’m thankful for those who forgive me when I mess up.

You have to move on in life and not get stuck in past mistakes… but you have to learn from them, too.  So what would I do today in the same position?

What would you do?

Hopefully, something worth being thanked for, even if nobody ever actually thanks you.  Something to bring some warmth to someone else.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.

First torch I see tonight,
Wish I may, wish I might,
Find a game worth playing tonight.

Yes, it’s silly; yes, I’m not terribly original; yes, it fits the game well enough…

LATE BREAKING ADDITION:

Pete over at DragonChasers has a post up with a link to an interview of the Runic Games CEO (thanks, Pete!).  Torchlight is meant to segue into an MMO at some point.  This interview has some great comments, and it sounds like these guys understand the market.  Very candid, if a bit “softball”, this interview is well worth a peek if you’re interested in Torchlight:

Torchlight Dev Interview

…

ANOTHER LATE BREAKING ADDENDUM:

Getting the demo via Steam actually is content limited, rather than time limited, like the demo via Runic directly.  This is great news, since either preference can be accommodated.

…

I downloaded the Torchlight demo to see just what the fuss is about.  It’s a beast of a 413 MB download (though that’s smaller than many modern games)  According to the FAQ, that’s the footprint for the installed game, so I suspect that the demo download really is just the full game.  The catch is that you’re limited to only playing for 120 minutes.

I’m a bit ambivalent about that, actually.  I’m of a mind that demos function better when they aren’t time-limited, but rather, content limited.  There’s a compelling case to be made in either direction, though, so it’s not something that I’m too fussy about.  Just know going in that the Torchlight demo is of the time-limited variety.  (They didn’t point out on the site, as far as I could tell.)

At any rate, I figured I’d have two good hours with the game.  That’s fair enough to get a sense of what it has to offer, I think.  It’s not like you’re going to Torchlight for a fifty hour story.  You’re going to play it for some aesthetically appealing dungeon crawling.  And well… WYSIWYG.  Truth in Advertising.

Torchlight is a dungeon crawler with some satisfyingly fun gameplay.  The art direction is solid, and sits in a nice space between cartoony and emogothpixelshader.  (Though the token chick is still just a bimbo with a gun.  No surprise, no progress.)  It’s not War and Peace, it’s not Braid, it’s not Portal.  It’s a visually appealing loot treadmill with plenty of monsters to be whacked.  If that’s the sort of fun you’re looking for, Torchlight will make you a very happy gamer.  The lovely price point of $20 is icing on the cake.

I wound up playing as an Alchemist with a Dog for a pet.  I chased the “pet control” talent tree and wound up with my Dog and three little Imps shuffling around from place to place as I chipped in magic ranged attacks and pistol/wand shots from the back row.  Yeah, I was a Huntard/Warlock hybrid… and I loved it.  It almost felt like a squad based RTS with minimalist controls.  I’d bum rush a herd of baddies, let my little Zerglings and Ultralisk go to town at close range, and serve up three flavors of ranged PAIN.  When the field was clear, I’d claim the spoils (walking over gold picks it up automatically, but you still need to click on items individually) and spoil for another fight.

Yummy, yummy mindless loot pinata fun.  It’s not something that I’d ever do all day, every day, but man, for the two hours I had the game running, I was a happy camper.  It’s probably best played in runs like that in between other gaming so you don’t get tired of it.  Unless you live on that sort of thing anyway.  *shrug*

Of course, it’s not all hugs and roses.  (Or is that guns and kisses?  I can never remember.)  As it happens, I was staring at a loading screen for almost a quarter of my time in the game.  My laptop isn’t cutting edge, but neither is it a dinosaur.  This bothered me a little bit, but I can’t really fault the game much for it; my machine may simply be slow.  It just stunk when my time in the game was limited.  No “pick up all local loot” button seems a glaring omission to me.  There isn’t much here for womens’ lib in games.  There is no respec function without a mod. (But the modding tools look really powerful.)  You can only get the game via digital download, either from the devs directly or via Steam.  Since I don’t like Steam much these days and I’m not sure about the DRM stance of the dev download, I’m a bit leery of such a purchase.  Maybe I’ll pick it up in a box when they get around to releasing it that way.

None of these are all that terrible, and really, what the Torchlight guys are offering is a gem of a game.  I’m still on the bubble about actually buying it (since I have too much going on already and I don’t want to be tied to the internet or limited downloads for actually playing the game… especially if I want to install it on more than one machine), but I can readily recommend it to fans of the dungeon crawling genre.

If nothing else, I’m keeping my eye on the game to see what they do with the proposed transition into an MMO.  I’m leery of that just because I don’t like the internet tether… but I do wish them well.  The game will never be the “virtual world” that I’ve asked for time and again, but as a straight up funhouse grind, it works beautifully.  Sometimes, even for theorytwits like me, that hits the sweet “zoning out” spot just right.

Further Ruminations on WoW Petgate 2009: We’re All Obsessive Collective Huntards

Pokemon is 13 years old.  (Does that make you feel old?)

I think it’s a fair guess to say that the Collector gene is strong in the Pokemon generation of gamers, largely spurred by that pesky Pokedex.  “Gotta catch ‘em all”, after all.

As Spinks rightly notes, why isn’t this capitalized on in WoW?  There’s Petopia for Hunters and their collections, and WarcraftPets for everyone with noncombat pets.  There is obviously interest in these little critters, so much so that Blizzard has monetized it directly.

Guild Wars has the Zaishen Menagerie where Rangers can show off the critters they have gathered.  It’s not unprecedented to have this sort of place to show off a collection in a very visual way.

Why isn’t there something like this in WoW?  You’re either stuck with a third party site (WarcraftPets is awesome, but not incorporated in-game), five Hunter stalls, or one paltry minipet you can have out at one time.  It just seems like a missed opportunity for those who collect in order to show their collection.  (And the absence of such a function is one reason why it just doesn’t add up that pets are all about showing off, at least from a dev perspective.)

Maybe it’s on the list… right after player housing.

…

Disclosure:  My “main” in WoW is indeed a Hunter.  (My other main is a Druid, conveniently able to personally change into critters…)  I love the ability to go out in the wild world and train some beastie and make it part of my character’s approach to the game.  If there were a collector function in-game to track which critters I’ve tamed (even after I’ve let them go), it would scratch my Achiever and Explorer itches in equal measure, and I’d be a happy Nesingwary understudy.  I don’t particularly need the ability to show that checklist off to someone else, but as long as it’s being tracked, why not make it public for those who do want to show off?

So when I say “we’re all Huntards”, I use the term not as a pejorative, but rather, pulling an Aikido on The Man’s epithet as the anarchistic player that I am, thumbing my nose at those who would have the temerity to suggest that I’m “doing it wrong”.  And really, are we not all hunters of some sort in the game anyway?  We hunt Epics, Achievements, reputation dings or maybe just moments of transcendental fun.  Whatever it is, if we’re not looking for something in the game, or hunting to get something out of our time with it, why bother playing?

How about a little beta testing to get your feet wet?

“A Kingdom For Keflings” on PC, Beta Testers Wanted

The company I work for, NinjaBee, is looking for people to beta test our “A Kingdom For Keflings” conversion to the PC.  It was a hit on XBox live, and we’re excited for the PC conversion.  We need people to put it through its paces and let us know how it performs.

And hey, if you put in some work and give us some good feedback, you get the game for free when it’s released.

Oh, and we recently released a title update for the same game on XBox live, so now it’s harder for others to grief you, your Transport Keflings are three times more effective, and the game is primed for some upcoming DLC.

It’s a good time to be a Kefling fan.

(In case you’re wondering, I built and textured several of the buildings for the game.  That’s my job; working in 3DS Max and Photoshop, with a side order of Excel.)

Addendum, ’cause I R Dum n’ forgot…

The application process, so you don’t have to click through to find it (quoted from our NinjaBee forums):

Good news! A Kingdom for Keflings is coming to PC and we need volunteers willing to help test the upcoming PC (Windows) version.

Interested? If so, e-mail betatest@wahoo.com with this information:
* Full Name and Address
* Information about the PC you’ll be using to play the game
(processor, operating system, sound card, video card, RAM)
* Do you have internet access at home?
* Any other information you might want to provide on how you can help with the QA effort

We would also like to know the answers to these questions, but your answers won’t exclude you from being accepted into the beta test program.
*Have you had any experience beta testing?
*Have you played any of NinjaBee’s games before?
*Have you ever played A Kingdom for Keflings on the Xbox 360?
*What is your age?

Notes:

1. We’ll expect you to give us useful detailed (written) feedback on problems in the game. If it crashes or has some specific problem, we’ll expect you to document how you got to that error. If you’re just here to play the game and not help with testing, you might want to wait until it’s released.

2. We’re not anxious to get a ton of game design change ideas, because we expect the game to be quite similar to the Xbox Live Arcade version, though we’ll certainly consider low-impact requests.

3. We’ll probably expect you to sign some simple NDA and promise not to pass the game around to friends or talk about it outside of our test group.

4. The game seems pretty solid. Ideally, this will be a short test period and everything will be fine.

5. We’ll give the official beta-testers free copies of the final released game. To be clear: we are not paying the beta testers and you have to give feedback to receive the free game.

Thanks!

I suppose you can use me as a point man/reference, and I’ll pass along your information, but you don’t need to use me as a middleman either.    I’ve heard we’re getting applications from all over the world, and it’s great to see interest in what I think is a great game!

Warhammer Online now has a “perpetual” free trial.  It joins the ranks of Wizard 101, Free Realms (which is now almost just like WAR, albeit having arrived from a different direction), Guild Wars, DDO and Puzzle Pirates in the short list of games that I think are starting to understand the market.  Of course, Guild Wars is still the frontrunner in the business model department, and Puzzle Pirates will likely remain the one I play most (it’s just so durn schedule friendly!), but this change by the WAR crew is exactly the tipping point that has me itching to download the game.

If it turns out well, I might even give them some money, like I did for W101 and Puzzle Pirates.  In the immortal words of Daniel James of Puzzle Pirates fame:

Money can’t buy you love, but love can bring you money. In software the only sustainable way to earn money is by first creating love, and then hoping that some folks want to demonstrate that love with their dollars.

I want to like WAR. I’ve been digging into the tabletop game, and it’s fascinating.  While there are some considerable differences, WAR looks interesting enough to take a look, and Public Quests look interesting as a mechanic.  They have offered me (and many others) a gift by changing their business model this way.  Time will tell if I love them enough to demonstrate it with dollars.  The chance of that went up from 0% to at least 33%, and that has to count for something.  Even marketers understand that math.

Of course, dearest Turbine and Blizzard, if either of you wanted to up the ante by offering me a lifetime sub to LOTRO or WoW for my birthday, I’d not turn you down.  I’d even promise to take lots of pretty screenshots and write about what you are doing right in your games.  (The records show that I’ve done plenty of complaining, so I can afford to balance it out.)

It is my birthday, after all, and turning up my nose at gifts would just be… improper.

.

.

.

Disclosure:  I know, I know, some would say that WAR is dying and should be taken out back and dumped on the Tabula Rasa heap.  Some might suggest I give money to someone more deserving.  There are definitely (largish) grains of truth in those opinions.

WAR will never be my “main” MMO.  Still, this is a Good Move for the business of MMOs, and hopefully a good one for WAR, and I want to let these people know that I approve.  If they don’t read my blog (slackers!), maybe I can send them a birthday card with a nice $10 bill or something.  Since, y’know, we’re supposed to vote with our wallet.

And, well… I’ve spent my fair share of money buying games that aren’t the biggest boys on the block, and that aren’t the greatest examples of game design.  Yet… they are fun enough to warrant an expenditure on my part as a reward for a job well done.  Call it my way of paying the tab after a decent, middle class night out to eat.  It’s not The Ritz, but it’s not Carl’s Jr.  I’m totally happy paying game devs for their work, I just want to do it on my terms.  That will never be paying for a subscription.

Heck, I even gave Braid $5.  If I can do that, I can lob some dollar love at the WAR guys.  Well, that is if their gift really is a fun bit of work, not something I’m going to send along as a White Elephant to someone else in a week…  and $10 is half of Torchlight or Machinarium…

Why play as one Gnome when you can play as three of them with a pet?

Allods Online First Impressions

Is it terrible of me to think this would work for Zerglings?

Lar deSouza, artist for the Looking for Group webcomic has a trio of YouTube videos walking through what he does for the comic.  It’s a great series for anyone interested in the crafting of comic art.

Part One (sketching and layout)

Part Two (inking and cleanup)

Part Three (coloring and polish)

I’ve written before about how I do my avatar art for the Puzzle Pirates folk, effectively “draw, cleanup, color, shade, polish”.  It’s pretty much the same process as what he does in those videos, just without the inking phase and with fewer layers.  Lar does more shading and highlight passes for greater depth.  If you want some text to go with the pretty pictures, check out my walkthrough, where I go a bit more into detail on some aspects.

The biggest difference is the inking step.  He works like most comic artists, inking over the sketches to make the product crisper and cleaner.  I just take the sketch and work with it.  It’s a stylistic choice, really.  I like to preserve the fluidity and texture of my sketches.  It’s a bit like the Xerox animation production process of Disney’s animated 101 Dalmations; there’s just a different feel to the art.  There’s no One Right Way to do it, though.

Neither of us really go into the whole “this is how you do art”, delving more into methodology and processes, so it’s not going to be something you can take as a complete newbie and mimic right out of the gates, but still, seeing how someone else produces their art can be instructive.  (And if there’s interest, I can do a walkthrough on that Halloween cat, much like the monkey over at the PP forums.)

So yeah, nothing really earth shattering, but I found it interesting, and wanted to share.

*back to work*

Thank you, Veterans.

Some things really are worth fighting for.

No, it’s not the Cataclysm, it’s the latest nerdragestorm about Blizzard’s cash cow.  For reference:

Blizzard Introduces Microtransactions (via Tobold)

and

Subscription Game Item Shops are the Third Trammel (via Green Armadillo at PvD)

So now Blizzard is TEH EBIL for taking another step into a larger MMO market, one where not everyone pays their $15 door fee and competes for epics and ego via state-sanctioned grinds.  This is the proverbial “straw” to break some camels’ backs.  (Never mind that the Refer-A-Friend program had a more significant impact on the wallet *and* gameplay.)  Yeah, democracy and the free market certainly suck.  (Must be why Bush and Obama tried to strangle them.  *rimshot*)

As Green Armadillo notes, markets change.  I’d say they mature, but too many gamers think that means boobs and blood.

What gets lost in the hyperbole is that in a mature market, savvy salescritters find ways to cater to all sorts of different customers.  Trammel didn’t destroy the “old school” servers where you had to walk to town uphill both ways with gankers stabbing your squishy bits and stealing your shinies every two steps.  The players voted with their feet and went elsewhere, yes, but those nasty, tricksy old servers were there for those who wanted them.  (Of course, with fewer “sheep” to prey on, wolves started on each other, and it’s never fun for a serial ganker to be on the receiving end.  Boo.  Hoo.)  The choice is still there, but now the market has a better way to get feedback from the players who are paying the bills.  That’s a Good Thing.  (Just like the increased granularity of the microtransaction model is a Good Thing for player-dev feedback design cycles and tight feedback loops.)

In the new, mature MMO market, there will still be subscription-only games.  There will be microtransaction-only games.  There will be hybrids.  There will be companies that offer different models on different servers, while offering the same game.  There will be companies who do a great job and companies who pull jerk moves.  Thing is, you can’t map “microtransaction” to Jerk and “subscription” to “Great” (or vice versa) any more than you can map people by their skin color or political affiliation (it doesn’t stop people from trying, of course).  No, there’s a whole range of business going on out there, and all sorts of Good and Bad game design that may or may not be directly related.

The democratization of the market (maturation, remember) should be embraced.  It fosters an open meritocracy where games can be judged by the content offered their characters, not by the color of their business model.  Customers can make decisions based on what they want to play and what they want to pay, and will have to look past whether a game is on “your team”, whether you’re with the “Hardcore Subbers”, “Casual Carebears”, “Mercenary Micros” or “RMT Raiders”.  Of course, that also asks something of the players.

It means players have to grow up, too.

If you like a game, play it.  If you like it enough, pay the devs for it.  If you don’t like it, leave it alone or vent about it to the world.  Whatever the case, stop letting the Joneses dictate whether or not you’re having fun.

To be sure, I can understand the hurt feelings that come when a game changes direction and goes where you don’t feel welcome any more.  I do have to wonder, though… if we’re constantly paying for these MMO things, always expecting them to use our money to work on the game, can we really expect it to always be the same as it was in the Old Days?

Games change.  People change.  It’s inevitable that some of those changes will not be in harmony.  When those moments of discord come, it’s actually OK to move on… and sometimes, it’s better to do so before you spend more money and emotional investment.  That way lies bitterness and continued resentment, which ultimately does absolutely nothing to the party who is the subject of ire.  Bearing a grudge is a burden on the bearer, not the target.

Witness the occasional blogger who just can’t seem to ignore reasons to hate a game they once loved, or who can’t leave a company alone, always waiting for them to make an error so they can pounce on it.  This is true in all things; the divorcee who gets lost in bashing their former soulmate, the apostate who denounces their former church, the spiteful ex-employee who burns bridges.

Life is change, as Remy of Ratatouille might note, and those who can’t learn to adapt and move with the changes are hurting themselves.  If the wave you’re on doesn’t suit you, find another one.  The ocean doesn’t care.  Life moves on.  Don’t get left behind, crying over changes that you had no control over.  Rather, take control of yourself, and do something else.