You’ll find the list of launch titles below (courtesy of Joystiq), is there anything cool that I’m missing? Please do tell me because I would love to get a good Move title.

First-Party Titles

• Beat Sketcher (Fall 2010)
• SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy SEALs (Fall 2010)
• EyePet™ (Sept. 2010)
• Kung Fu Rider™ (Sept. 2010)
• Sports Champions (Sept. 2010)
• Start The Party!™ (Sept. 2010)
• echochrome ii (Sept. 2010)
• Tumble (Sept. 2010)
• Hustle Kings (Oct. 2010)
• The Fight: Lights Out™ (Oct. 2010)
• The Shoot™ (Oct. 2010)
• TV Superstars™ (Oct. 2010)
• High Velocity Bowling (Oct. 2010)
• PAIN (Oct. 2010)
• Heavy Rain® (Oct. 2010)
• SingStar® Dance (Nov. 2010)
• Little Big Planet™ 2 (Nov. 2010)
• Sly Collection (Nov. 2010)
• Heroes On The Move (Working Title) (2011)
• Killzone®3 (2011)
• Sorcery (2011)

Third-Party Titles

• John Daly’s ProStroke Golf (OG International) (Fall 2010)
• Racquet Sports (Ubisoft) (Fall 2010)
• The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest (WB Games Inc.) (Sept. 2010)
• Brunswick® Pro Bowling (Crave) (Sept. 2010)
• Resident EviL®5 Gold Edition (Capcom) (Sept. 2010)
• RUSE (Ubisoft) (Sept. 2010)
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 (Electronic Arts) (Sept. 2010)
• Time Crisis: Razing Storm (Bandai Namco) (Sept. 2010)
• Toy Story 3 (Disney) (Sept. 2010)
• Kung Fu Live (Virtual Air Guitar Company) (Oct. 2010)
• NBA 2K®11 (2K Sports) (Oct. 2010)
• Deadliest Catch: Sea of Chaos (Crave) (Nov. 2010)
• Disney Tron Evolution the Video Game (Disney) (Nov. 2010)

Surely there must be more than one use for this incredible rubber chicken?

Spinks wrote a strong post on the topic realism in games today, explaining why we don’t really need quests to guide our every step through a role-playing game. One of her examples deals with a wagon on the side of a rode, stuck there because the horse that was supposed to pull it had lost a shoe. Spinks goes on to ask whether we actually need a quest that tells us to find a blacksmith to shoe that horse again. She’s right of course that it would be much more immersive if it was up to us to seek out the nearest blacksmith, or maybe get a fresh horse to pull the cart.

The problem inherent in such freedom of action is that it creates false expectations. There are usually various solutions one can think of for a problem and there are endless things to do in an open world. Alas it is pretty much impossible to create a game in which you are actually free to do as you please. Even the most sandbox-y of sandbox games limits possible actions at every turn. When you, as the player, hit those walls and the game tells you “I can’t let you do that, Dave”, immersion is broken. Finding  the cart in Spinks’ example, realizing what needs to be done, and then finding a blacksmith to shoe the horse would make for a good gaming experience. Finding the cart, however, and then not being able to let your pet ogre pull it to the next town (because the game has no command for that) is really annoying, especially so when the game previously gave you the expectation of freedom.

If, on the other hand, you would simply get a quest from the cart’s driver to go find a blacksmith things wouldn’t be remotely as bad. When the game presents the solution for something for you, there is no need to think about one yourself and then be disappointed when it doesn’t work (even though it logically should).

I originally played Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Infocom on my Atari ST but never managed to get through it even though I knew the story.

I’m not trying to say here that quest-oriented theme park game design is better than open world sandbox design, not at all. Theme parks should almost lead to a slicker, more polished game experience with fewer options for awesomeness but also fewer moments of disappointment due to the shortcomings of the game. If Fallout 3 had been a linear game, I would probably have been a lot less disappointed by the ending. The game designers would have known that I’d have a radiation-immune companion with me when it comes to the question of who to send into the radiated chamber and could have accounted for that accordingly. The way that the game is programmed, however, just lead to me being really annoyed that I could not just send my companion.

Part of this goes back to my post about emergence (shallow as it may have been). The more basic the implementation of your world is, the more freedom you can give your players without raising false expectations. Programming a set of solutions for the cart problem above will inevitably lead to disappointment because you can never cover all of them. Programming a physics engine (and an appropriate user interface) and a reward for getting the cart to its destination on the other hand would work much better.

Even that can lead to false expectations though. Maybe the physics engine doesn’t understand the functionality of the alcohol-fueled combustion engine you are trying to build or doesn’t give you the option to sell the location of the stranded cart to the next group of bandits. There is no way you can cover all the possibilities that users can come up with, which makes quest-based theme park gameplay the much safer (not necessarily better!) way to go if you want to avoid disappointing your players.

Planetarion anno 2000 ...

The games I’m talking about here all follow one basic formula: You gather resources through structures in your home base that can be improved for a cost to produce even more resources. You build units (better ones can be researched over time) that then allow you to plunder other bases for even more resources and build even larger armies. This is how Planetarion worked in 2000 and this is how Lords of Ultima and its ilk work in 2010. There is a somewhat different type that has come up in the past few years in which you simply build up a single character that gets to fight other characters for profit. I will ignore this type for now since I’d hardly consider them games, but we will see in the end that many of my points apply to them as well.

One limitation of browser games has always been technology. Anything that could be considered action or real-time is pretty much out if you don’t want to use technologies like Flash or Java, at which point your game wouldn’t really be a browser game anymore. Additionally, real-time interaction would demand a wholly different (and much more expensive) server structure than the browser-games we get today. Technology has advanced over time of course (some would say rapidly), yet the only difference that seems to make is graphics. Planetarion was all HTML tables, virtually no graphics, and you had to hit F5 every few minutes to see if anything changed in the game. Today we have games with scrolling maps, positioning of buildings on a grid, and AJAX synchronization with the server.

None of these technologies are used to actually change the way the game is played. Surely we have the technology to make some decent turn-based tactical combat or implement a game similar to Civilization in our browsers. This is where the second big limiting factor of browser games comes in – they are asynchronous. The basic idea of all these games is that you can log on at any time you want for a few minutes, make some decisions, and the game will play along while you are back at work (or asleep). Unlike traditional MMOs, browser games are built around the idea of giving orders that are then carried out while you are away. This is a great strength, especially when appealing to a more casual market, but it’s also the greatest weakness of these games.

... and Grepolis anno 2010. They might look different, but they are very much the same game.

When your orders take hours to get carried out and things are simplified enough that they can easily happen without human influence, then the game itself is inherently boring. You can’t really do anything in these games and the few things that you can do are simple and lame.

If I had to find a solution for this problem, I would start by making a game that is actually fun to play and then allow players to automate certain processes in their absence. If you had a traditional adventure-based MMO, you could automate farming and crafting for example. That way players could log in for enjoyable adventures whenever they have time, but still be productive when they are away from the game. One could even create a multi-pronged game in which the browser itself only allows access to the automated part of the game, but a separate client could give you full world access for your adventures. That way you can keep building your character or empire when at work or on the train and enjoy a nice dungeon crawl in the evening on your PC.

Imagine the market possibilities if you gave the FarmVille crowd the possibility of installing a full client at home, slowly showing them that they might find real games interesting as well.

Ignoring gameplay for a minute, what flabbergasts me most is the fact that the game’s performance on my computer is very close to unplayable. Keep in mind that this is a turn based strategy game with few animations that really doesn’t look good at all. The game would have been absolutely fine with two dimensional sprites, but Stardock chose instead to use a 3D engine for no purpose whatsoever. There’s nothing in the game that requires the third dimension and when you want any form of strategic view you won’t even realize that you are looking at 3D at all. I get that 3D is pretty standard today, but if you are as bad at programming / using a 3D engine as Stardock’s developers apparently are, you really should reconsider that.

"ugliest visuals since finger-painting class" - 1UP

Performance aside, the game is generally programmed terribly. Even after multiple patches it still has reproduceable crashes, pointless deadlocks, and terrible AI. The computer keeps sending its units piecemeal into my armies instead of combining them and crushing me. Or well, it would crush me if it wasn’t for the fact that the AI is even less intelligent during the tactical combat portions of the game and can easily be kited around the battlefield forever.

So their programmers are terrible and it will take a while for them to patch the game enough to get it actually playable. That is something I could live with, if the game itself was any good. But it isn’t. If you do get the game, don’t start out with the campaign. It is one terribly long-winded map with multiple choke points which only let you pass after completing arbitrary tasks. Worst of all, the map is almost void of quests, resources, and roaming monsters and the whole thing just a really boring experience. Personally, I didn’t manage to finish the campaign (and then a patch broke all the save games, so there.)

The skirmish games are where the meat of the game is at and they can actually be fun for a little while. You build your empire 4x style while wandering around with your sovereign and her army, completing quests, recruiting new adventurers, and of course dealing with enemy nations. There is a lot of theoretical complexity in the game that could really make it outstanding but somehow fails completely. You can design your own units Master of Orion style, handing them different equipment that you have previously researched. This sounds interesting, but really just reduces units to pure stats and takes away individuality. I want technological breakthroughs to give me access to new and exciting units and not simply the same unit with +2 attack. You can also design the appearance of your units and the look of their icons, which only serves to confuse you when playing a second game and your standard infantry suddenly looks different.

Elemental's research system. Nicely complicated, alas completely boring.

Speaking of units, the combat system is also awful. Your units have 2 relevant fighting stats – attack and defense – which together determine the chance to hit and the amount of damage dealt. A unit with high defense can deal with almost any amount of units with low attack value because it just never gets hit. What makes this really terrible is that there is a technology that allows you to create groups of units. When you do, their individual stats are simply added together creating something that is way more powerful than the same amount of units individually. If you have a group of three units with 5 attack and 5 defense you can kill pretty much any amount of individual 5/5 enemies because your unit with its 15 attack will always hit through their defense and they never through yours. In my experience it is enough to quickly research that technology and a bit of weapons and armor, create a couple of unit groups and conquer the whole world before the AI gets around to creating those groups itself.

If you remember Master of Orion, you might remember that there were fields of study for researchers and that you could normally just research one technology within such a field. Some races would be able to get them all and some would only get a random one. Either way, this added an interesting level of decision making to the game. In Elemental there are different fields as well which at each level have certain technologies you can pick from. Each advance in a field makes further advances in that field more expensive to research so that it is beneficial to switch between fields a bit. This also means that you absolutely can research every technology on a specific level, but that would mean making all following discoveries more expensive.

What sounds interesting in theory is pretty lame in practice as I found myself paying almost no attention to the whole thing. The technologies are boring, tech-trees cannot be seen in advance, and I was usually able to generate so many research points that the increase in research cost was negligible. Unlike in, say, Civilization games, technology felt so unimportant that I wasn’t even tempted to trade it with other civilizations at any point. Speaking of trading, the computer players would approach me from time to time with “Hey, shouldn’t we draft up some treaties” type messages, but whenever I tried to do so completely refused to agree to any treaty I offered. I was even willing to offer them some non-aggression pacts but they would have none of it. Which only lead to their demise. Computer players also randomly declared war on me but then didn’t attack, giving me enough time to raise an army and eliminate them.

Well, this has been going on long enough so I won’t even go into the atrocious UI or the fact that magic and hero units are utterly irrelevant throughout the game. Elemental: War of Magic is a collection of terribly executed good ideas, loosely strung together without sense or purpose. Even today, Master of Magic (and Orion) are strictly better games than what Stardock is offering us. Graphics and UI are hardly worse either. Go play them while you wait for Civilization V for your 4x fix.

“Firstly, the concept for FINAL FANTASY XIV was to design a system of character progression that offers meaningful advancement for those with limited time to dedicate to playing. We did not want to create a game that forced people to play for hours on end to see their efforts rewarded.” – Nobuaki Komoto, Game Director

There’s always been tension between more casual players (time-wise) and those who are willing and able to invest more time into a game. The former ones tend to be unhappy with the so-called no-lifers that get ahead of them in the game so very fast while the latter just want the ability to play a lot when the have the time for it (and are often willing to make sacrifices to ensure they do have the time for it). This new concept in Final Fantasy XIV is clearly aimed at the more casual bunch and at that pretty much a slap in the face for the other part of the player-base. Personally, I like to play a lot more when I have time to do so. The weeks right after World of Warcraft expansions still belong to the best memories of my gaming experience. Both time I freed up a week from all other responsibilities, met up with friends and played a lot of WoW. In Final Fantasy XIV, this would be impossible. Even a weekend dedicated to gaming is severely hampered by these restrictions.

Welcome to the World of Final Fantasy XIV. Feel free to browse the souvenir shops, then don't let the door hit you on your way out.

A decision to cater to the casuals surely isn’t uncommon, but I am quite skeptical whether they actually enjoy this limit so much. While many may enjoy the ability to keep up with other players who have more spare time at their hands, I can hardly believe that this feature is that much of a selling point to casuals to make up for showing the finger to anyone a bit more “hardcore”.

In order to prevent the actual issue behind this to arise, one needs to create a game where time invested does not equal power but where people can still meaningfully invest time. Creating such a game obviously isn’t easy, but surely a band-aid solution like the Square-Enix one is not where it’s at. I think that the real motivator behind this change is a completely different one: Limiting play-time each week stretches the content offered by the game over more time, which in turn means more monthly fees paid to the publisher. What better way to keep people in a game with little end-game than simply preventing them from getting to that point for a while?

Diablo III’s crafting system is pretty straightforward: You gather recipes and resources that you can then use to create new items which in turn will improve your ability to create items. Resources are gathered in a way that’s very similar to World of Warcraft’s enchanting – you get to disassemble items you find into aforementioned resources, getting better resources the higher quality the item you disassembled had. No longer do you have to travel back to town every few minutes to sell the items you found, you can instead cut them into handy little pieces and carry those with you until you get around to giving them to your blacksmith in camp.

Diablo III crafting interface, as seen on Gamescon. (image: diablo-3.net)

Also very similar to WoW is the way that new recipes are learned – some being available when reaching a new crafting level, some being dropped by monsters – and the fact that rafting is levelled up through use. One thing where Diablo might positively divert from WoW is the availability of top-end recipes. Diablo has always been about rare items that only a few people would ever get their hands on and I hope that this principle will be continued in the drop-rates of recipes. When playing the game in multi-player mode, crafting can only be made interesting and relevant if it isn’t trivial for each player to do his or her own crafting  and if the crafted items are actually good enough to be worth the hassle of collecting raw materials and finding a crafter.

Diablo has never been about getting a specific item but rather of making do with what you have (with the exception of very dedicated high-level players wealthy enough to get exactly the items they needed) and before Diablo II’s Lord of Destruction expansion there were usually endless variations of high quality items available. Crafting recipes could make great use of random stats as well – allowing for many recipe drops to be had but rarely ever the same ones. Wouldn’t you like your crafter to be unique rather than interchangeable for pretty much any other player?

Whether the news system will be more closely built on Diablo II’s random drops or on World of Warcraft’s very strict (and very lame) recipe system, we’ll have to see. But the potential is there, which makes me happy.

Clearly, Icelanders must be fans of Bioware as well.

I’m back in the good ol’ home country (though not quite home yet) and you will be getting fresh posts again from now on. I surely hope that the past two weeks of canned posts weren’t all that terribly for you guys. Personally I had a really great time over on Iceland and even managed to get a sunburn. (On Iceland! That’s how good I am.) Now it’s time to get my brain away from water and mountains and back onto computer games so I can whip up some fresh content for you people.

[This post was written in advance because I am on holiday. Please excuse the lack of actuality, I won't be able to respond to current events that happen while I'm away.]

By far the largest amount of data of most games comes to us in the form of art assets – videos, textures, 3D models, sound files, and all that good jazz. The game’s engine is usually a really small part of the total data volume, yet that is pretty much the only part that is constantly needed. When playing an MMORPG for example there is no need for you to already have the art assets for the final boss on your system, all you need is the game engine and the starting zone.

The logical step from there to allowing users to play a game before it has completed downloading isn’t very far, yet it has taken quite a while to arrive in mainstream gaming. Magic Online did it years ago, loading “optional” assets while the player was already enjoying the game. (A feature they scrapped with many other when transferring development of the game in house. Now we get lengthy patch procedures instead – hooray.) Apparently Guild Wars does something similar and game rental service Metaboli also had the technology years ago. Now Blizzard seems to be switching to it – at least they are testing it in the Cataclysm beta – and we all know that where Blizzard goes, others follow.

Personally I consider this a very important step in gaming technology. The longer players have to wait for a download to finish, the less interested they will be in actually downloading your game. If you are producing AAA retail titles this probably isn’t much of a problem for you, but if you are running an alternative business model (free-to-play, shareware, what have you) it can be very important to convince people to play your game. The player that just found your website likely isn’t looking for something to play in three days, but rather something to play right now. While not completely instantaneous, the streaming of content can greatly reduce the download barrier between the player finding an interesting game and actually getting to play it.

An optimal implementation would of course try to predict quite accurately which parts of the game the player will need next so that streaming can happen in the background and will ideally never be noticed by the player. The more linear your game is, the easier this will be of course, but even in an open world should allow for more or less accurate guesses.

[This post was written in advance because I am on holiday. Please excuse the lack of actuality, I won't be able to respond to current events that happen while I'm away.]

When you are really deep into a game, everything is great. Dragon Age: Origins was an example of such a game were I didn’t even think about thinking about something different while playing the game. Other games, however, are captivating enough to require my attention but not interesting enough to provide full entertainment on their own. Playing Starcraft II is fun, for example, and I played through the single player campaign quickly and with interest. Now that I am trying to replay it on the hardest difficulty mode I find myself slightly bored, wishing that I could do something on the side like watching a movie or listening to an audio-book.

With MMOs, this is usually quite possible because their day-to-day business doesn’t really require a lot of attention. I only ever managed to get more than one World of Warcraft character to 80 because I watched various TV shows on the side or listened to gaming podcasts. Starcraft II and many of the other games I like these days don’t allow for that though. They require too much attention to actually follow something else on the side but oftentimes don’t create enough excitement to be sufficient entertainment on their own.

Grinding in an MMO gives me the feeling of doing something “productive” (yeah, yeah, I know) while consuming some other form of interesting entertainment. (Which also isn’t enough to keep me interested on its own.) I’m quite aware that this might just be me being an odd input junkie, but I’m quite interesting if other people out there feel the same way. Do you play your MMO just to keep your hands busy while doing something else? Can bad game design sometimes actually be beneficial? Is it maybe even possible that game designers add grinding to their games (partly) to satisfy odd people like me?