Free Candy For Everyone

Ok, this thread is only hilarious if you’re a huge WoW geek. But I was laughing really hard when I hit post #16. Wow. So there appears to be some problem with the World of Warcraft patch 1.10 which went live today. All the servers are down and have been for hours. I was browsing the internet and stopped on by WOWInsider and found a link to this forum thread (here’s a furl‘d version for when it goes down).

For those who don’t get it, we use w a s d to move around and tend to hold those down, so that’s what’s up with the string of random characters at the start of the lines. And all those chats are pretty accurate to what you hear in the game. Really awesome. Then post 16. It refers to this frickin’ awesome piece of work. Basically, it’s the recording of a guild raid gone bad. But the guild leader is really funny, telling everyone to put more DOTs, more DOTs, and to DPS slowly (what the hell does it mean to Damage Over Time SLOWLY?!? Why would you want to do damage slowly anyway?). And then minus 50 DKP, oh, I can’t even explain it, it makes me laugh so hard. Ok. Well, DKP stands for Dragon Kill Points and it’s this complicated system a lot of guilds use to figure out how to give out the loot in these endgame raids where you have 40 people, many of whom are gonna want that totally rare drop that spawns out of the big boss critter.

My guild ran Maraudon on Sunday and we were just constantly yelling “Minus 50 DKP, not the imps, that’s a 1 in a million chance!” and other misc stuff from that. Which prompted me to put this page up on our guild website listing our current DKP standings. We don’t take these things all that seriously.

I didn’t get much farther than post 16 into that thread, but that was worth it. Looks like no WoW for me tonight. Guess I’ll try tomorrow.

Still working through my notes from GDC. Next one up to write about was Richard Garriot’s talk. I went because I have something of an interest in MMO games since I started playing World of Warcraft. As well, he’s a big name. I never really played the Ultima series that he created. I came a bit too late to the party - I was playing RPGs back then, but somehow missed his. By the time I heard about them it was a bit too late.

Regardless, I thought I’d go to his talk. And I’m glad I did - it was really interesting. He was talking about the current title he is working on, Tabula Rasa. He was just really open about the problems they ran into, which was refreshing. Most people don’t want to talk about where they went wrong or their failings. He didn’t seem to have any such qualms.

A bit of history that he shared with us, he started up Destination Games (after he’d “retired” from his first company, Origin Games) in 2001. Within a month, he’d heard from NCSoft, home of the very insanely popular Korean MMOG Lineage. They knew of his success with Ultima Online, which was, I believe, the first graphical MMORPG in the States. They bought up his company within a month and decided to embark on creating a hit for US and Korean markets together.

While this sounded reasonable, it didn’t work out so well. Error #1: They crafted a “dream team” of developers, with the best of the best that they’d worked with at every level of developing. They had Richard Garriott, Starr Long, and Jake Song, apparently all used to heading up projects as co-leads. This problem was apparently replicated down the chain as well. Even their “junior” designers had been lead designers on previous projects. They had the classic problem of too many cooks. Plus, at the top, it wasn’t clear whose game it was, who was making the ultimate calls on what game this was.

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I rented a car while I was out at GDC last week. It was not a good car. No. It was not. It was a Chevy Classic. I’d never heard of that before. At home, I drive an Infiniti G35x, which I’ve been enjoying for… wow… almost a year now. It’s fun fun fun. And definitely good in the snow and rain. Well, I went from my car to my uncle’s car. He let me drive his brand new BMW M5. Now that’s a crazy good car. It’s totally decked out with all the latest geek gadgets. The strangest thing I noticed as a driver is this roll control feature. If you’re stopped at a light and take your foot of the brake, you do not roll. That doesn’t sound all that weird, but it is, trust me. We all assume we’re gonna roll a bit. I could see how that would be really really nice for someone learning to drive stick. Heh. I remember how much I feared hills when I was learning stick. That was not good.

Anyway, the M5 even has a heads up display. There’s a little screen above the dash that somehow reflects onto the windshield. It’s really inobtrusive and can display your speed, or direction information from you navigation system so that you don’t have to look away from the road to see where you should go. It’s very scifi-future, and it’s very much nearly here. It’s not quite as cool as it will be. Right now it’s not in color, it’s just orange. And it uses the polarization properties of the windshield, which is made out of some special kind of glass, which means that if you have polarized sunglasses (which I do) you cannot see it through them. But soon, I can see it. It’ll be everyone and awesome.

Update: Here’s an image I found of the HUD. I didn’t actually see any info except the speed displayed, so I don’t know if it actually is in color like this pic shows, are if this is just a “simulated” picture.

So I went from that fantastic machine to the Chevy. In the rain. In rush hour traffic. I was driving it for 5 days, and by the end of the week I was finally used to the fact that it took that thing more than twice the distance it takes my car to stop. That is not fun. It was so nice to get home and get into my car. The brakes felt so ridiculously responsive. It was, and is, really really great. I love my car. Glad to be home…

I’m going through my notes, and this is where I stopped keeping up with things. I mentioned a bit about the EGW earlier. Basically, the idea is what it sounds like - talk about non-mainstream game experiences. Work on games that is different and experimental. Yeah. If you check out the website, you’ll see a link to a summary that has some screenshots and stuff.

The first up was the reason I went in the first place, some folks from Harmonix demonstrating the cut Freestyle mode from Guitar Hero. The idea was to let the player get the experience of soloing, a classic guitar playing experience that they really wanted to reproduce. Ultimately, it turned out to be really hard to get it to sound good, for a number of reasons. The first problem was that it was hard to convey the mechanics of this mode to the player. There were, I believe, two types of things you could do. You could play simple samples that would pitch modulate so if you ran down the frets on your controller it would run down the notes. And if you played really fast you could trigger a canned riff to play. There were a bunch of other mechanics I didn’t even write down. Basically, it was pretty confusing. They had one of the dev team up there, and even he had a tough time making it sound convincing. He did a good job though. There were also design and technical challenges getting enough of these samples made (per song! that’s a lot), and also mixing them into the rest of the track. It was ultimately cut because of these inabilities getting it to sound good. The PS2 didn’t have enough DSP power to do what they wanted. It was pretty awesome though, and the guy demoing it went all rockstar and smashed his guitar controller at the end of his performance.

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I got home late last night, and have spent today … well, I meant to spend today unpacking and cleaning and all the other boring stuff. But, ya see, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion came out last week. And it has been getting rave reviews across the board. My uncle has an Xbox 360, and I got to see it in action this past week. It’s pretty cool. That + great fantastic RPG = Tara wants an Xbox 360. So this morning, I’m just sitting around, checking online to see where it’s in stock, thinking “what the hell, who knows?” It was in stock! At my local Circuit City! I went, I bought, I came home, it’s all setup.

So I spent a good part of today buying and setting up my Xbox 360 (Premium, of course, with the hard drive and HD cables). Played a couple hours of Oblivion, and I’m not sure how I feel yet. I need to give it some more time. I’ll let you know. Also tried out a puzzle game that came installed on the hard drive, Hexic HD. It’s ok, we’ll see if I get hooked or not. I have enough things occupying my time right now, you know?

Here’s my Xbox 360 gamer tag, not clear if I think this thing is nifty enough to get a permanent home on my blog yet:

I still have pages of notes to put together on GDC, but I have my weekly World of Warcraft guild instance run tonight. Later in the week, I’ll make the time.