GameUSD.com

I just came across this website which tracks and graphs the values of Virtual Currencies vs the US Dollar over time. As I flipped through the various MMORPG titles I noticed a pretty common trend - every game sorely suffers from inflation. Some more than others. I guess it’s expected, but I was surpised how much the value of the currency has declined over the last year. For instnace, in World of Warcraft the price for gold has dropped 600% since last January. I wonder if the cause has more to do with the increased population of gold farmers, or that players have already purchased everything they’ve ever wanted for their characters and thus the demand for money is down.

Only one game has had it’s currency’s value drastically increase over a given time segment - Eve Online, and I bet that was when that corporation’s entire bank account was syphoned-off by a embedded spy working for a competing faction (true story).

Note to self - there isn’t much a future in gold farming these days.

~DDB

Engadget has the story.

Official word from Nintendo has the Revolution debuting for less than $300 bucks. This dissolves some guilt I’ve place upon myself for ignoring the 360 (and the PS3 when that time comes). Now I know there’s a cheap pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Good news for my wallet, but still pretty expensive for a non HDTV device, IMHO. I was thinking more along the lines of $200… Ah well.

~DDB

Genres come in waves. We just went through a FPS phase: Battlefield 2 Special Ops, Quake IV, and FEAR were all neighbors on the fall release timeline, and now we’re entering a concentrated release schedule of RTS goodness.

These titles are on my personal ‘must play’ list for next year. Truth be told, I have some reservations about most of the titles based on some demo movies that I’ve seen (more later), but still - each has a shiny hypnotic lure hanging above a gaping maw, and I swimming forward full speed ahead.

Company of Heroes
Preview and movie on Gamespot

This little WWII explosion-fest comes from developer Relic Entertainment (Homeworld, Warhammer), and is the winner of the Gamespot ‘Best Strategy Game Best of E3 2005′. Everything on the map is destruct able.. everything. That includes buildings, and degrading cover from ubran rubble like: rock walls, old cars, and various pianos (what’s with Pianos in WWII? Does everyone in Normandy tickle the ivories?)

Both the graphic and animation engines seem phenomenal. There’s also a behind-the-scenes AI engine that provides units with enough intelligence to grab cover when under fire.

Well.. sorta. Everything isn’t peaches and cream. Sometimes guys linger out in the open for no apparent reason, or stick behind degrading cover far too long. Also the game seems to relish a bit too much of the John Woo. Causality rates seem way too over the top, and last I checked WWII battles didn’t have this many explosions. Most conflicts were fought with guns, not Bazookas, and the WWII purist inside is disheartened that they strayed so far from the path of realism. If mankind had this much firepower back in ‘44 then I don’t see how the heck the martians could have beat-on the good old US-of-A so successfully in their War of the Worlds ‘53.

Still this game looks hot. Let’s face it, Relic has only created one truly disappointing game - Impossible Creatures - which was a bit too ‘out there’ for even me, and I like David Lynch movies. This title, however, is A WWII RTS with big explosions riding hot on the heals of Warhammer - another fun RTS game with big explosions. And with “E3″ awards under its belt, I’m pretty certain Company of Heroes is going to be top notch when it ships in February.

Rise Of Legends
Official Site
Gamespot Preview

Big Huge Games (Rise of Nations) brings you a one of kind gorgeous RTS pitting Classic Fantasy units vs Da Vincian History vs a still-unknown faction that I’d classify as Arabian Magic. Big Huge are the guys who did things right with their first title, Rise of Nations.

The winner of many ‘RTS of the Year’ awards (and game of the year awards) RoN successfully mering Civilization with the human-history / 12-epoch RTS games like Empire Earth. There were so many new RTS mechanics in that game that it still makes my head spin.

And from the preview movies of Legends (watch this NOW), I have very little doubt Big Huge Games’ production skills have fallen off. In fact, they might have even picked up. The artwork or Legends is fantastic. Take a look at some of these RTS cities (just like in Rise of Nations, bases are actually cities instead of a walled in collection of unit factories). That shot is amazing. Stepping back it’s harde to tell if that’s an adventure game or an RTS.

Don’t shoot me for saying this - but this could be the game that Total Annihilation Kingdoms should have been. After all - there were some good things about that title.

Empire at War
Gamespot Preview
Official Site
I’ve played computer games for a long, long time. Since the begining of PC Gaming time I’ve dreamt of playing this game A Galatic map of planets to conquer and manage. Get your ducks in a row, produce ships, and send those ships out discover and secure systems. Drop troops from those ships to fight over planets to add to your empire. A Master of Orion meets RTS, Empire at War does all these things, and it takes place in the beloved Star Wars Universe to boot. Oh sweet day of days, on so many nights I’ve lost sleep thinking about this game.

But I’m not anxious about the release of this title Why? Because I’ve just got that feeling that everything is going to be a-okay. It looks so good that I don’t even want to hear anything about it anymore. So long as I get to trap Russ’ fleet with an Interdictor Cruiser - just once - and then ambush it with my own fleet from “behind the moon” - then I can rest easy for the rest of my life. I’ll lay there satisfied, sigh deeply, and smoke a cigarette.

Gaming has come so far.

This preview write-up may seem a bit high-level. It might damage my credibility. That’s fine. This game is all about the high level. It allows for fantastic intangibles; it let’s you create your own stories of the warring systems in a Star Wars backdrop. OMG, unless the ships fly backwards then this game isn’t going to suck.

You might not share the same love of Star Wars as I’ve had growing up. If so, then I do offer this one criticism I have with the title: I’ve noticed that units in the land battles tend to clump up. Other than that, I haven’t seen one bad thing about this title.

I can’t wait for this game’s ‘tough’ decisions. Do I work on my Army? How should I refit my Navy… do I need to work on my large capital ships, or should I start pumping out Y-Wing bombers? Should I produce more X-Wings, or should I upgrade to A-Wings??

The mulitiplayer campaign is going to consume my soul. Maybe not for as long as Civilization IV has gripped me (and will continue to do), but the flash of brilliance of Empire at War will definitely burn brighter.

Finally…
Sorry if I kinda left for infinity there. I’m just revelling in how great PC gaming is right now.

The RTS genre is going amazing places — it’s temporally shedding the arcadey elements we’ve seen in the recent past to finally add some strategy to the gameplay (as opposed to just more complex tactics). At the same time it seems to reatin the fun n’ exciting gameplay. Remember how remarkable Homeworld was back in the late ’90s? It literally added depth to the RTS genre. Well I believe another dimension is coming - the addition of a greater ‘war simulator’ on top of the individual battles that we’re all used to. The meta-game battle map has now become part of the living battle itself.

I think we’re on the cusp of a new subgenre of RTSs.

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve left off Supreme Commander from the list. That title, more than any other, will breathe strategy back into RTS games. But will it come out in 2006? Hrmmmm.. not quite sure. We’ll have to wait until E3 to know more. Whenever that does game comes out it’s going to rock my world, and it’s going to shake the ground of the RTS genre. When the dust settles I foresee two different tastes of the RTS enthusiast - those who like macroscopic control on the epic scale, and those who like to use RTS titles as a sort of death match hour-long slugfest.

Thankfully I think there’s enough demand for both segments. RTS is the largest selling genre in PC Gaming today. 2006 is going to be a fantastic trip; one that certainly has a huge lasting impact on the genre. And guess what — A lot of these titles are slated for a Spring release! So go out and play CIV IV through the winter. When you’re burnt-out in a few months (HA) there will be plenty of titles to soak up your attention.

~DDB

Bear with me here. According to various websites, including Playfuls.com, there’s a news story on GameMag.ru (which is very much not in English) which says that Nintendo has settled on the Revolution hardware configuration. This, of course, means that the hardware is ready for mass production.

Now - that doesn’t mean that factories are already pumping Revs off the line, but it’s a good sign that we could see the Revolution launch sometime soon-after it’s official unveiling at E3 in May. That’s what industry reporters are suggesting, anyway.

Nice. My birthday is in May.

Mark my words now - Spore will forever change gaming. We’re talking the entire industry, here. And not just in one direction, either.

A game has never spanned so many genres. Arcade, Diablo, RTS…

A game has never shipped with so many amazing creation and tools. Effectively the game is the editor (it doesn’t ship separately) . From creatures, to buildings to vehicles - you create these ‘things’ and let them go

The game world is the biggest we’ve ever seen. Bigger than you can imagine. Galactic Big.

And because the game uses procedural functions to expand data from small seeds (more later), this galaxy can fit on your laptop machine, maybe even handhelds.

And all of the other creatures you meet out on your planet, and in the galaxy, are creations made by other players. They were downloaded seamlessly and in the background while you were still teaching your creatures how to use pointy little spears, and they have their own cultures, behaviors, and physical abilities designed by other people across the world.

Back in March Will Wright (The Sims, SimCity, Raid on Bungeling Bay) drove a Mack truck through an otherwise standard day at the Game Developers Conference. Officially Wright’s presentation was billed as a generic talk about game design. But as his presentation developed, the audience quickly realized that Will Wright was actually announcing his new game. Spore will have the largest scope ever attempted in gaming. Design a creature starting from the microscopic level, alter it through generations up and through the stone age, then influence its culture and its social planetary footprint (ie: conquer your neighbors) until your creatures are ready to move out into the unknowns of space. From here you’re given a UFO that contains many unlockable abilities - from the basic ‘transport your creatures’, to terraform tools, the genesis device, weapons, SETI tools, etc.

Sounds absurdly complex, bloated, out-of-control huge right? Well there’s an added kicker. Will thought long and hard about the future of the industry. He realized that blockbuster publishers spend money up the wazzo on artists who design game content to make their title bigger, brighter, more eye catching than their competition. This, of course, kills a huge potential on profit margins. Don’t get him wrong - he doesn’t wear a suit and he’s definitely not all about the money, but he does have a point here. Smaller game studios have been clossing left and right while the behemoths like EA continue to do well. Why? Because companies like EA own their own Motion Capture Studios, they have armies of artists, they’ve inked deals with Music companies for soundtracks… they effectively have all of their content-creation talent held on retainer. Smaller studios do not, and they’re suffering for it.

Wright hopes to change the way we think about game design. He wants users to design their own content. When you fire up Spore, you’re going to be given a blank canvas with which you physically design your own creatures from scratch. The editing tool looks like a breeze to use - you can add new limbs, stretch bones, affix weapons to your creature, etc. And instead of Maxis whipping the backs of in-house artistic talent to predetermine all possible behaviors for any bizarre creation gamers come up with, they’ve instead created procedural algorithms to determine the physics of motion of your creature. If you guy has 3 legs and a tail, then the game figures out how these limbs coordinate how to step forward, counterbalance with the tail, etc. It figures out what weapons you have (spiked tail, giant mouth) and attacks/eats other creatures accordingly. The game is all about emergent behavior that you create and control. It’s a giant sandbox of life from the microscopic to the galactic.

These algorithms are all over the place, too - small seeds of data are fed through algorithms which dictate creature behaviors, the layout and weather of planets, the solar system , etc. The game is sooo good at compressing data down into the seeds that the game can, and does, eventually move on the galactic level. You can zoom out and hover your mouse over distant stars to listen for radio signals from another civilization that’s living in this universe. If you chose to visit them, then you’ll come across creations that another player’s computer uploaded to the Spore repository and your computer fetched seamlessly while you were busy playing around with your critters. Picture an entire living galaxy of thousands of moving systems (stars age, explode, and then reform new planets over time) each populated with content created by players the world over, and it’s all contained right there on your laptop.

Out of control. Mind blowing.

Anyway - I recently fished up the original GDC presentation where Wright released Spore on the world. You’ll have to register on this site, but you can use bogus information (there’s no ‘we’ll email you with a password’ phase). The presentation is in flash - note that the slides on the right never appear, but yes - you will eventually see footage of the game in the video window. My recommendation is to NOT fast forward through the parts where you see Will speaking. This man is a genius. Everything that man says in the presentation is so golden and true, and is on the cutting edge of game design. Simply put, he ‘gets it’.

Enjoy.
–DDB

In yet another turn of the amazing concept of synthetic worlds comes this Wired article. (Safe for work, but the image links off it are not)

So.. in There Second Life.. an online world that really has no rules. A very resourceful player has started making his own online porn magazine. That is to say.. the models in the magazine are from the game… IN game. And the magazine sells IN game.

Too crazy.

From Endgadget comes this beauty:

“Those 24 hour gaming sessions might be great for pumping up our Xbox Live stats or practicing speeds runs through Mario’s Time Machine, but those jello neck muscles and deformed spine of ours can get in the way of true domination. Enter the gamer pillow from Japan, which promises to prop us up by the chin and put us in prime gaming form to send Bowser straight to 9993 BC where he belongs. Looks great, but where’s the cup holder? We’re seeing some solid hands-free caffeine action potential.”

Neat!

Via slashdot comes news that World of Warcraft now has over 5 million subscribers.

To put this in perspective, I have taken some nifty world population charts from wikipedia, and stuck World of Warcraft in there.

Here’s a few countries now outpopulated by WoW:

• New Zealand
• Norway
• Croatia
• Ireland

FYI.. Azeroth would now be the 98th most populated region on this list of 221.
(Note that this chart has some regions not recognized as “countries”, including: the world, each continent, the EU.. etc)

Here they are in order:
Now, I konw WoW is a bit down there, but look at all its beating!
(note that wen you click a chart, your browser may scale it.. click it to zoom in some)

C’mon WoW! Keep climbing!

Wired News: Not With a Bang but a Whimper

Wired has a story of their gaming guy logging into Asheron’s call 2 just to find out what its like to be in a game thats about to vanish. AC2 shuts off in 2 weeks, and to be honest.. it sounds downright creepy and empty You konw.. THE WAY IT ALWAYS WAS!

PlayStation 3 Demo - Explosions - Nikush.com - Google Video

OOO
Thanks Jordan for finding this gem.

Apparantly this is a demo of the PS3 showing realtime explosion.

I likey when things go boom.

P.S. Again, Google Video ROXXORS!