Tag Archives: EA

The Avatar Returns to the World of Britannia (An Early Review of Shroud of the Avatar after its official release)

Business, Computer Games, , , , , , , ,
It’s amazing how this game looks so much like a visual from my every day life.

For the longest time, I was holding out on playing Shroud of the Avatar. Which is kind of strange, considering the fact that I’m exactly the type of player the game has been looking for. You see, I grew up as a programmer and gamer while playing every Ultima game ever made. If you follow the natural evolution of that series of computer games, it eventually leads directly to Shroud of the Avatar. The chances of me not playing this game were slightly lower than zero percent. Yet, it took me a number of years of the game being in development for me to finally decide to sign on. I guess that probably needs a bit of unpacking. So, let’s unpack.

As I mentioned, in the early days of computer games, Richard Garriott developed a series of games that ran under the IP of “Ultima”. It was a series of roleplaying games where you played a warrior, a mage or some semblance of fantasy classes and unlocked the secrets of the world before facing down against some huge big bad guy (or girl) and then saved all of the land. A review:

Ultima 1: You fought against an evil wizard named Mondain. But Mondain had a secret student and lover. This takes place on Sosaria.

Ultima 2: His lover’s name was Minax. You then have to defeat her. But she and Mondain secretly had a kid. Of course they did. This takes place on Earth through all sorts of time periods.

Ultima 3: The kid was kind of weird, in that Cylon kind of way. You, as expected, had to defeat him. This takes place on Sosaria.

Ultima 4: Gets weird and colorized. You spend the entire game becoming the ultimate character, an avatar. This introduces the virtues and eventually becomes the foundation for all of the Ultimas. This introduces Britannia.

Ultima 5: A bad lord under British gets corrupted by the shadowlords and basically takes over Britannia. You gotta stop him and them. Takes place in Britannia.

Ultima 6: A bunch of gargoyles get involved, creating a plot about immigration and enforcement. Or something like that. You act as an example and make everyone happy again. Much merriment is involved. Takes place in Britannia.

Ultima 7: Probably the best of the single player games. Takes place in Britannia and introduces the Guardian, who is a kind of twisted version of enlightenment. He sticks around for two more games. Takes place in Britannia.

Ultima 8: You get taken to some other place and do some stuff. To be honest, never really got into this game as I got stuck on the dock in the early part of the game, couldn’t figure out how to get out, and then just decided to play another game instead.

Ultima 9: Game becomes first person. Much more interesting world (still Britannia) but seems kind of lonely as the new perspective seems to eliminate a lot of npcs you’d normally meet. It’s the final encounter with the Guardian. Involves a Captain Kirk mind meld sort of conclusion, but should have been expected.

Ultima Online: Garriott brings the series to an online environment by making the argument that when Mondain was around, he split a shard into multiple pieces, each of which was another copy of Britannia (meaning you were on a different server). Game has lasted over twenty years now, even though Garriott has been divorced from it for most of that time.

Shroud of the Avatar: This is the eventual successor to the franchise, even though the understanding is that Electronic Arts still owns the rights to the Ultima name. It’s been pretty much understood that EA has no idea how to actually allow a franchise to breathe, so fortunately Garriott has given new life into what was once a very original idea.

So, what is Shroud supposed to be like? Well, it released officially on March 27th of this year, although it’s been in extended beta for a number of years now. Several times during the beta, the world was reset, so people had to start over, but the current beta that was playing through was allowed to survive and on March 27th, the game went from idea to actual release. Much rejoicing was had. Not much change, however, occurred. Okay, some change happened, but it was mostly patched kinds of changes without much of an impact on what was happening with the world itself.

But the story itself argues that the avatar has returned to Britannia (or Novia, or whatever land this is supposed to be now). A bunch of comets have caused problems, and there appears to be some kind of “evil” that may be under the surface. But for the most part, other than a couple of dragons wandering around and a ton of bad guys, pirates and thieves, not much seems to be going on in the lands. There are extensive player owned towns and an appearance here and there of Lord British (Richard Garriott’s character), but like Ultima Online before, the one thing sort of missing appears to be a general purpose behind what’s going on in the adventure. It might be there under the surface, but it’s not obvious enough to someone just starting the game. For the most part, when starting the game, you’re told that the Oracle (kind of like a benevolent-sounding Guardian from before) wants you to somehow unite the concepts of love, truth and courage (which were the foundations of the original eight virtues). As for why, I’m still trying to figure that out. And what happens after that, still kind of confused. I’m going to be really disappointed if we discover after all of this preparing and adventuring that we were really trying to figure out where Lord British left his car keys.

The combat mechanics are pretty decent and quite extensive, if one takes the time and effort to learn them. The game can be played on a simplistic level, but there are decks involved in the combat skills, so you can start to develop some really complicated types of maneuvers. There is also quite a bit of involvement with the crafting system as well.

The player housing is pretty awesome as well. As this was a huge part of Ultima Online, I would have been shocked if this was not the case. It’s a bit expensive, but judging from the conversations on the official boards, there may be some effort to make the land choices a bit more achievable for the common player. I’ll admit I’ve probably spent way more money than I should have playing this game, but I’m not the typical player; I do stupid things like that. Most people are generally a lot smarter than I am when it comes to that sort of stuff.

Where the game really needs to grow is in attracting players to run around in that world. They’ve done the one right thing by offering a free access sort of pass to players exploring the game, but a lot more needs to be done to get those same players to want to stay. Right now, the initial price to play the game after visiting is $40. That’s the price of a general AAA game that’s just been released. Although that price can sometimes go up to about $50, the $40 price tag is still pretty close to what people generally remember paying for a newly released PC game. And yes, the game was just released, but it is still showing a lot of early growing pains that may take many months to fix. Those are the kinds of problems people are going to see when visiting the game for free, so this might make it really difficult to translate into full members of the game itself. As long as housing is costing people over $100 in real money, people are probably going to avoid this game like the plague. Add to that the majority of the negative feedback for the game has been about the price of transactions in the game, and you have a recipe for why this might be a difficult sell.

One other problem that hasn’t been addressed all that well is another positive feature of the game: The single player game built within the game itself. You don’t have to play the game online. You can actually start the game as a single player and enjoy pretty much the same world. Without other people. The obvious negative to that is no one else is playing with you, but the positives are numerous, including three npcs that become your partners and experience the world with you, so you’re not always under powered by being alone. But like I said, they haven’t given this avenue enough attention because there are some blatantly missing things, such as player owned towns. On the surface that makes sense, but in reality, those player owned towns are often used for reasons other than housing. A lot of the connections to other zones come from linkage people have made tying numerous towns together (like carriages, balloons and boats). If no player owned towns exist, those connections just don’t exist. Which means there are islands throughout the game that have no ability to be reached because no player connection was made beforehand. So, it’s just eye candy real estate in the game where you can never visit.

As I said before, it’s easy to come up with things to complain about in pretty much any game. It’s no different in this one. Which bothers me a lot because there’s so much strong potential with the game. There are times when it can be a lot of fun. We just need to find better ways to get more people to experience that fun without the costly aftertaste.

Overall, it has a lot of potential but can easily defeat itself by letting these types of problems fester longer than they need to. Unfortunately, online devs are historically really slow at addressing these kinds of things, or in addressing them at all. And once the game starts to go in the down direction, the spiral doesn’t end until the game is gone or a shadow of its original self.

Origin Offers A Free Copy of Ultima VIII

Computer Games, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ultima_VIII_box_cover

Most people who know me know that I am probably one of the greatest fans of the Ultima franchise ever. There probably isn’t a title in the series that I don’t remember with great fondness, including some of the more obscure entries in the series. I was probably one of those rare individuals who was devastated when Richard Garriott decided to part ways with Origin (the company that was bought by Electronic Arts and then gutted by that same company). As long as he was part of the franchise, there was always the hope that he would create yet another installment in such a great universe.

Well, he left and he is supposedly working on Shroud of the Avatar, which is kind of a follow up to the series, but time passed on, and people aren’t that into the whole franchise any more, mainly because it spawned Ultima Online, and that game was allowed to whither and die (well, it’s still around, but it’s still spiraling out of control and trying to die).

This week, EA, through its Origin online service, has decided to give away Ultima VIII to anyone who wants it, for free. Unfortunately, for anyone who wants to explore the Ultima universe for the first time, this is somewhat of a strange way to do so as Ultima VIII was never about the Ultima universe but about some alternative location that the avatar ended up going during the adventure. None of the companions are in the game, and to be honest, I’m not even sure the virtues have anything to do with it. Sadly enough, after Ultima VIII, we had Ultima Online as the only entry in the universe and then one last attempt to recapture the magic, a more first person perspective in Ultima IX, which was plagued with so many problems.

It’s probably important to point out that there is still a huge audience that desires anything Ultima that might ever rear its head again. Unfortunately, because of corporate crap and creative licenses, we’re probably going to see very little brilliance in this universe again. So at least with Ultima VIII, there’s the opportunity to live in that mindset again, as it was as close to Ultima as we were probably ever going to get after the wonderful world that was Ultima VII, which I argue is probably the greatest Ultima world that we will ever come to know.

There’s really never been another world quite like it, and I know I speak for a lot of people when I say how much I wish we could somehow go back to that world with the computer technology we have today. So, at least until then, if ever, we can at least pretend we’ve found something close by revisiting those worlds that brought us closer, even if they didn’t bring us exactly there.

From the too little, too late file: Sim City is going to allow offline play

Business, Computer Games, , , , , , , ,

london

Last year or so, EA/Maxis released the latest version of Sim City, the continued offspring of one of the originally wonderful games to come out on PC. Unfortunately, it had some things wrong with it. Okay, I’m being nice. It had a LOT wrong with it. So much that after a week of trying to play it, I deleted it from my hard drive. But that wasn’t enough. I then burned my hard drive, pulled it out of my computer, threw the hard drive out the window, installed a brand new hard drive and even replaced my operating system so that there would be no hint of that game ANYWHERE near my computer. Okay, not exactly the events that happened, although all of the events DID happen. But the rest of that had nothing to do with Sim City. My hard drive crashed for another reason, but I hated Sim City so much that I’m now blaming all of that on Sim City. It’s kind of like how I blame all of my bad relationships that I’ve had with women on Anne. Not because Anne did anything wrong, but she gets blamed and happened to be at the right place at the wrong time when it came time to forever blame every bad relationship on someone.

But I digress….

The problem with Sim City was that it was designed with great mechanics but horrible mathematics. Let me explain. Imagine a town where its population is made up of tens of thousands of people. And then you throw a big party so that lots of other people come to your town. Well, and then after the party was over, instead of leaving town and going back to their own towns, all the people stay and then move into any available house that happens to be located anywhere nearby. If someone already lives there, that’s okay. They’ll just stay there and the person who lived there before can drive around the town all day, making it impossible for fire trucks to get to fires because everyone’s on the road without an actual place where they actually live. Then add more people (cause they called everyone on their cell phones and told them about the grate party), and then you have a cluster**** of people driving around and walking down the streets all day long, and anyone can work in any job because education no longer is important. Just people.

And you get an idea of why the game kind of goes nuts once you start to actually get any decent population.

But the biggest complaint was that the game forced you to play online (on EA’s servers). And quite often, they’d crash. Or just stop working. Or whatever.

People demanded an offline mode (because that’s what every previous version of Sim City was), but EA said that was impossible. And then people abandoned the game. So EA has announced that is NOW going to allow offline play, which by the way I did mention they said was completely impossible, right? All along, I got the idea that EA was trying to sell us stuff in real money, and the only way to do that was to make sure everyone had to play online, kind of like Blizzard is doing with its current crap load of games, like Diablo III, another game I abandoned shortly after a few weeks of realizing it was a shadow of its original versions.

So, will this cause me to go back to Sim City? No. Not a bit. I own the game and haven’t reinstalled it on my computer mainly because they screwed it up enough that I saw no reason to ever do so again.

What I do know is that I will NEVER buy another Sim City game again. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: I used to work at Maxis and used to love everything about Sim City and the Sims. Not any longer.

Oh well.

Sim City: A Game You’ll Learn to Love and Hate

Business, Computer Games, , , , , ,

londonI recently bought the new release of Sim City (from Electronic Arts, using its subsidiary Maxis Software, which is bought some years back). Maxis used to be one of the greatest companies on the planet, creating Sim City, the Sims and then Spore (which was a little after they were bought by EA). However, Sim City has always been the bread and butter of Maxis, and most likely the reason EA bought the company in the first place (The Sims was released under EA’s ownership, even though it was the last project begun under the Maxis only name).

So what are my thoughts on Sim City? It’s a lot of fun, at least until you get really involved with the game. Let me explain. When you first start playing the game, you get overwhelmed by how much there is to do. You build a road from the highway through your patch of land, you then zone residential, then industrial and commercial. Soon after, someone complains they have no power or water, so you build some kind of power plant and a water pump. This goes on for awhile, until someone else complains that there aren’t enough people to work the zones (so you zone more residential), and then you start to realize your city is lacking in fire support (you build a fire house), police (you build a police station), health care (you enact Obamacare…oh wait, I mean you build a clinic), and you continue until your little patch of land starts to become a thriving city. There’s always something to do, so you’re never going to get bored with it.

And then, eventually, you start to build a major city. And unfortunately, that’s where you start to hate it. The reason you hate it isn’t because there’s not a lot of fun things to do, but because the game was designed badly, almost as if they realized they didn’t have the ability to handle AI as they needed to, so they dumbed down the simulation to be less of a simulation and be a compromise instead. Here’s an explanation of that:

Your Sims (the citizens) are disembodied people who don’t really have a specific place in your city. The people who work at the health care clinic are not doctors. They’re just arbitrary Sims, meaning that when people get up in the morning, they might be a doctor, a fireman, a ditch digger, or a protesting hippie who hates government. The way they find their jobs is through a process I like to call “first come, first serve”. A Sim wakes up in the morning, at the same time as every other Sim, and walks out the door of his apartment to find that there’s a business next door selling donuts (so he decides to work there). The next day, he’s not so quick to the donut shop, so he ends up being a neuro surgeon instead, because the clinic or hospital is located next door to the donut shop. He’ll work his entire day in whatever place he’s in, and then he’ll come home–to any home, because he doesn’t live anywhere; he just occupies the first building that’s built for housing. When visitors come to the city because of your tourism stuff you’ve added (like a building that holds mega super concerts), the Sims will fill up the buildings on their way out, or may or may not leave the city. There’s really no rhyme or reason for what different people end up doing when they’re in your city because they’re all interchangeable. Which brings up the problems that destroy your city.

If your traffic was bad before, it becomes a nightmare when everyone is out on the street trying to get to whatever place they need to go. Your firemen, stuck in traffic stops aren’t putting out fires, and your city starts to burn down, even if the buildings are across the street from the firehouse. Your police can’t stop crime, so you have Sims moving out of town because there’s too much crime (caused by cops not being able to maneuver through traffic (or by cops choosing to be donut makers that morning)).. You probably get the picture.

The city’s infrastructure works the same way. If you have water running through your city, it gets bogged down by the fact that the designers of the game didn’t design water (or electricity) any better. Your power gets clogged and randomly just kind of moves around the town so that you can end up with an important set of buildings just not getting power or water because the AI is too stupid to deliver it now that your city has become a lot more complicated. Even if your water pump is across the street from the building that needs water, it waits until the water fills in some cycle that makes no sense to common sense and has as much simulation value as whack a mole does to international diplomacy.

I had a great city that turned into ruins because these problems just blew up at one point where I became too big to fail, but failed miserably. All attempts to fix it were useless because nothing could move through the city. This wasn’t because I was using weak roads; it was because there was so much going on at one time that the Sims pretty much just sat in traffic, water wouldn’t flow, and the city kept complaining that I needed to provide more power, even though I had about 2x the capacity of power that just kept clogging itself up. Even putting a power plant next to the one building lacking power didn’t work because of the previously mentioned random traveling that everything in Sim City does.

This problem is now being noticed by a lot of players, needs to be fixed, or the game is going to be the most successful failure of all time (although it will compete with Diablo 3). EA has the ability to fix this, but I suspect that they’ll do the corporate thing and basically take the money and run, chalking it up to a good experience for the bottom line, even though it may provide the final nail in a coffin that doesn’t need to really happen.

The next move is for EA to do something. The question is: Will they do it or just screw over its player base?

EA’s Sim City Reboot Isn’t Going As Planned…unless you’re one of the disasters that destroys the cities

Business, Computer Games, , , , , , ,

On the third day of the release of the new Sim City by EA’s Maxis studio, things have gone from reviews of “best game ever” to “what a crappy piece of s4#&!”

The problem isn’t the game itself, although some complaints have started to come in on that level as well (like how small the cities are in comparison to any previous incarnation of Sim City). The problem is the servers because this was EA’s attempt at forcing every single player to have to play on EA’s servers, requiring an always on internet connection. Another company with a more stellar reputation, Blizzard, tried doing the same thing with Diablo 3, and let’s just say that the result was a lot of people claiming Diablo 3 to be the worst game put by Blizzard in a very long, esteemed career of putting out great games.

So everyone is complaining about EA right now because not only do they have to be online all the time, but EA doesn’t seem to know how to run their servers so that the servers are on all the time. 3 days in, players who paid for the game can’t even play the game. So people on numerous game boards are attempting to cash their games back into EA, complaining about how badly the game was implemented.

I should point out that I was working for Maxis when EA took over it. As we were moved from Walnut Creek to Redwood City, you could see the company of Maxis being gutted out by the new owners. The last project I worked on was The Sims, and you could see how things were slowly going downhill for those at Maxis. Working on Sim City 3000 was a pleasure. Seeing what was happening after The Sims was awful and I felt bad for anyone that was sticking around.

If anything, hopefully other companies will learn that just because a bigger company has money to buy you out doesn’t mean that they’re going to continue to make your quality product with actual…well, quality.

The Secret World: An MMORPG that’s struggling to make itself known

Computer Games, , , , , ,

Recently, NCSoft announced that City of Heroes Freedom is closing shop. NCSoft did this because it was trying to consolidate its properties, and (at least according to me) it chose to close a pretty profitable property to focus on its other crap…I mean games. In October, the game will shut down, and it will no longer be accessible.

Therefore, I decided to start searching earlier and try to find a new game. First, everyone who I know that games suggested Guild Wars 2, which was just released. But Guild Wars 2 is made by a company that is actually controlled by NCSoft, and after this announcement (and the closing of Tabula Rasa, another game I enjoyed), I’ve decided to avoid NCSoft products like the plague. That means no Guild Wars 2 for me. Besides, I’m really not in the mood to play another medieval-like game with orcs and elves (or some variation thereof).

So I came across The Secret World, which happens to be made by Funcom, which to my surprise happens to be owned by Electronic Arts. To be honest, EA doesn’t have a stellar record when it comes to MMOs. It was the company behind Earth and Beyond, which turned out to be one fo the first MMOs to shut its doors while so many others were struggling but remained open. Under its Maxis-bought brand, it put The Sims Online almost as fast as it closed it down. To be honest, I don’t know if The Sims Online is still around, but it’s such a failure that even if it is still around, no one cares.

But, with no other real options, I decided to try it out. I refuse to go back to World of Warcraft because of how limited it is in depth. Their recent addition (or soon to be addition) of Kung-Fu Pandas really has me scratching my head, wondering what happened to that company, but that’s another story.

So I picked up a copy of The Secret World at Wal Mart. Why Wal Mart? I don’t know. I was there looking for a bookshelf and then decided I’d just pick it up because at $50 of a release price, I honestly wasn’t going to get a better or worse deal anywhere else. Sure, I could have probably found a cheaper copy through Amazon or some other obscure online dealer, but sometimes the hassle just isn’t worth the savings.

I signed in for the first time on Saturday. Essentially, if you  don’t know what the game is about, it’s a three sided game (a lot like Dark Age of Camelot and every realm versus realm-like game released since) in which you play either a member of the Illuminati, the Templars or the Dragon. I started off as an Illuminati, and it’s a hybrid version of the “real” Illumnati, except for reasons that I haven’t really figured out, they’re headquartered in New York City. The game makes the point of stating that this isn’t the Illuminati we all know and love, but I think that’s more for legal reasons than anything else (and a fear of the real Illuminati targeting developers for revenge or other such nonsense). The Templars makes a point of indicating that it’s not “really” the Templars of history but a new version of the Templars that has its origins recently, although their history stretches back through time and embraces the old ways (huh?). They’re headquartered in London. The Dragon is the “Asian” mystique group in which all sorts of Japanese-like mysticism are combined into a mish mash of ridiculousness, where voice overs recreate bad acting from the 1940s when white actors used to pretend to be Asian by speaking badly. The part that doesn’t make sense for me is that the faction is so grounded in Japanese-ish nonsense, and then the faction is headquartered in Seoul, which is Korean, not Japanese. I haven’t spent a great deal of time walking around Seoul yet, but I suspect that I’m going to see Japanese writing, although I hope the developers were smart enough to realize that some people might actually speak and read Korean well enough to recognize that Japanese isn’t Korean and Japanese writing in Seoul is pretty damn out of place.

Regardless of what side you choose, your starting character starts in Kingsmouth, Maine where zombies seem to be getting out of control. Yep, zombies. And ALL of the enemies you fight are essentially some kind of zombie or zombie-like hybrid. I understand that demons show up later in the game in other areas, but so far it seems very limited in the kinds of things you fight.

The story isn’t all that great either. Essentially it boils down to this narrative:

“Hey, you, stranger, you’re not going to believe what happened. This morning, zombies tried to take over the town. Nope. Not sure where they came from or why. But they’re everywhere and I really need a can of tomato juice from the local grocery store (that is overrun with zombies), so would you be a dear and head over there for me and get me some? If you do, I’ll give you a couple of bucks for your trouble.”

This may sound like a complaint thread, but it’s not really meant to be that way. First off, the game is interesting in that it’s in our time, not in some fantasy land that exists in some weird dimension. No, this world exists in our world and seems to be happening while the rest of the world is oblivious to what’s going on, thus, the secret world. The three factions are in conflict with each other, but when they meet in a place like Kingsmouth, they all work together but then go head to head when they end up in a pvp area (which I have yet to find being such a low “level” character).

Which brings up the subject of “levels”. In The Secret World, there are no levels. Instead, you get ability points (AP) and skill points (SP). You use those to buy new abilities and skills that help round out your character. It’s like someone who played Ultima Online liked the idea that there were no levels in UO, but you just improved your skills instead and tried to update that for the 21st century. It’s a noble idea, but the one problem it causes is that people aren’t exactly sure how they stack up with/and against other players. To be completely honest, I don’t know how I stack up against any creature I come across until I actually start fighting it. I went to the area next to Kingsmouth last night and killed the first mob of bad guys I came across. The second one schooled me like I was a converted ghost in a Pac Man revival. So, I have no clue how to figure out if the monster I’m looking at should be attacked, avoided or worshipped like the god it is.

Another problem I’ve come across is apparently a bug in the game design in how it interacts with a laggy system. I have an assault weapon specialist who has a leech heal ability, but it works about 70 percent of the time because I’ll be fighting a mob of zombies and then every time I press the button for it (and I press it a lot), it gives me a message of “you don’t have a consistent line to your target” or something equally unhelpful. This can happen when I’m standing in front of the target, poking his chest with my finger, and it will still not let me use the ability. Which means I either get lucky with my other abilities, or I die.

In this game, I die a lot. As a matter of fact, there’s a GREAT quest story of trying to find an old killer that was never brought to justice, and the only way to do it is to die yourself and follow a mysterious group of white ravens that help you solve the mystery. Strangely enough, that doesn’t actually count as a spoiler because so much more has to be done that you’ll kind of figure that out, or you’ll end up just quitting the game out of frustration.

One of the things that seems promising is the possibilities of unexplored ground in this game that I haven’t yet discovered. It seems to be very much like a game that has a lot of mysteries and secrets, which is generally my kind of game. But I’m fearful that it will collapse into one of those grinding MMOs where there’s no important concept that you’re exploring through the game. An example: I’m playing an illuminati character. I would like to see that the organization has many secrets that I have to uncover, and those secrets need to be important to the game itself, not just some lore I click on to add an entry to my lore book. I would like to see that new areas of the game open up after you figure certain things out. That, to me, would be so much cooler than finding harder to find lore buttons in the middle of nowhere and having no reason for doing so.

One of the real problems the game faces is that so few people seem to be playing it. The developers aren’t really responding well, playing the “nothing’s wrong…it’s going just as planned” card, which usually gets played right up until they shutter the store, And EA will shutter it. Don’t ever think anything different.

But I’ll let you know more as I get deeper into the game. I had a three day weekend to fully explore what I could. I suspect that there’s FAR MORE that I haven’t seen yet. My hope is that whatever I have yet to discover ends up being interesting and fun.

Civilization V Review–A Lot Like An Old Friend Who Can’t Remember Your Name

Computer Games, , , , , ,

I’ve been a big fan of the Civilization PC game series since the very first one came out. Sid Meier is considered one of the gods of computer gaming, and there’s a good reason for it. He completely understood what gamers like, and he brought that experience to each and every one of us who paid money to pay that series of games.

Civilization I was a great game that introduced us to the idea that you could make a great board game into a wonderful computer game. It literally invented the term “just one more move” for gamers who realized it was getting late, and they had to stop or they’d never get any sleep.

Civilization II pretty much redesigned the game from scratch and realized that there was no way it could just rest on its laurels. It had to do much more, and it did. Most gamers who are familiar with the series will argue that this was the zenith of the series, and the game just didn’t get any better.

Civilization III didn’t do a lot for me. It was okay, but I still loved Civilization II.

Civilization IV was the real successor to Civilization II. It really enhanced the graphics engine, and when they released the expansion pack, Beyond the Sword, the game was just amazing.

And then they released Civilization V. I’ve played it now for a few days, and I have to say that it’s obvious that it’s a sequel, but at the same time it’s also somewhat obvious that the designers of this game were not the designers of the previous games. Or they are, but they all had Alzheimer’s while designing it (apologizes to anyone who suffers from, or knows anyone suffering from, Alzheimer’s) because it’s like they forgot some of the elements that made the originals so great. They really dummied the game, and I couldn’t believe they did it. It’s like somewhere down the line some executive at Firaxis decided that they had to appeal to the console crowd with the new game. They weren’t happy being one of the greatest selling game franchises ever; they wanted to do so much more. And they did it by doing so much less.

There are so many places in the game where I found myself thinking, why would you do this? When I was having conversations with world leaders, I kind of expected that there would at least be a tool tip or something explaining to me what the hell a Treaty of Secrecy might mean before I had to decide yes or no whether or not to grant one. Civ IV did that. But not Civ V. Instead, you make a blind choice and then look it up on the Civilopedia, where all the information is contained, and suprisingly, it’s extremely vague. It’s like they had Todd, the guy who goes to get sodas for the group when they’re busy making the game, decide on what to put in the game information and then they forgot to let him play the game first to at least be able to fill in some of that information.

The whole game feels that way sometimes. And some of the bigger issues that happened in the earlier games are just glossed over. Religion is not an issue any more. Most stuff is gone. Now, you just gather up culture, like you’d gather health ups in a first person shooter, except they just kind of gather on their own over time. Yeah, it’s really dummied down.

The game is somewhat okay, but there are no real ways to customize a game. The interface for customization appears almost as if they decided to release the game and then fill it in later. There is also no way to design the world, like the famous World Builder in Civ IV. The fans on the message boards say that Firaxis is going to release that at a later date. That’s really ominous, the kind of thing I’d expect from a money grubbing company like EA, rather than Firaxis.

The game’s okay, and wonderful if you’ve never played a Civilization game before, but I’m somewhat underwhelmed. I’m sure the patches and addons will add more, but honestly, we’re purchasing a game on the assumption that the designers and the game community will fill in the blanks. That’s a horrible situation to be in, and I’m very disappointed in the whole Sid Meier franchise. I used to believe they were a lot like Blizzard and Bioware, in that they could do no wrong.

I hate to be proven wrong.

When a Gaming Company Jumps the Shark

Computer Games, Social Networking, , , , , , , , ,

Years ago, I used to be a seriously addicted Ultima Online fan. I played it every day. I became a counselor in the game, which meant I officially worked for EA as one of the in-game special operators who helped other people who were having problems in the game. I ran community events that were quite popular. I mean, I lived and breathed the game.

Then EA decided to do something really stupid. The game population was having problems at the time due to a segment of the population that was preying on other players. The forum community was in an uproad, demanding something be done about it. There were all sorts of alternatives EA could have taken, including to continue to ignore the problem. But they decided to take the easiest route, which was to create a completely “safe” environment in the game by completely duplicating the entire world and then making that “new” area safe. Oh, sure, you could stay in the dangerous area, or you could go to the completely safe area and eat candy canes with the rest of the safe population. And that’s what everyone did. And the old lands died out because no one went there.

But something else happened, too. People stopped playing the game because it became too easy. You couldn’t be killed, and suddenly the game seemed like a joke of its previous existence. So people left in droves. And then new games appeared, like Everquest, so that became the new stomping ground. UO died out. Oh, sure, it’s still around, but it’s a shadow of its once great self.

To me, the reason was that the owners of the game listened to the players, and then when it came time for really listening to the feedback, they decided to take the easier path and then stopped listening. The players, pissed, and practically screaming at the developers, kept begging them to listen to what was happening to the game. The developers not only didn’t listen, but they closed down the forums, figuring that as long as they didn’t have to listen to the complaints, then the problems didn’t exist.

So a LOT of people just dumped the game. I did as well. I realized they weren’t paying attention to the players any more, so I went and found another game.

Fast forward some years to Star Wars Galaxies, and wow, it’s like they didn’t learn a thing. What’s even funnier is that some of the same names were there making the same mistakes. When the game started going down hill, instead of listen to the player base, they went ahead and completely changed the game to one they thought players would want to play. Boy, were they wrong. The player base disappeared overnight. Realizing they made a mistake, but refusing to admit it, they made another abrupt change, causing the few remaining players to say “screw you” and leave. The game is less than a shadow of its former self. To this day, they refuse to admit they did anything wrong, but in all areas where they discuss how to screw up a game, Star Wars Galaxies is ALWAYS mentioned as the showcase of an example of what NOT TO DO EVER.

Well, fast forward to today, and we have the most popular game on the planet for MMORPGs: World of Warcraft. Yesterday, they made an announcement to do something that has me shaking my head because it’s like I’m reliving those two previous examples over again.

You see, some weeks ago, WoW decided that it was going to implement this new feature called REALID, which meant that in order to group with your friends, you had to present your real identification and play as yourself, not as a character name. If someone wanted to know who you were, they would know. This pissed people off, but Blizzard, the maker of WOW, said that you don’t have to use REALID if you don’t want to. Then they announced yesterday that in order to use the forums for WOW or their new game coming out called Starcraft 2, you have to use REALID. What they didn’t really mention is that as their parent company Activision is now partnered with Facebook, this is more about giving identification information to Facebook than it is in presenting a new way to socialize in the game. People are pissed. People don’t like having their ID out there when playing a game.

To prove how dangerous this is, one of the trash-talking employees for Blizzard stated it was no big deal and put his own information out there. In no time, all of his private information was out there, and suddenly his phone was ringing off the hook from angry players, and his Facebook account had to be shut down because of the onslaught of attacks. The problems he’s experiencing are still going on. Blizzard’s response wasn’t to realize they made a mistake but to unofficially announce that its employees wouldn’t have to comply with REALID, just the players would.

This has started a nightmare of bad publicity for Blizzard, which is treating it like the old ad business, thinking that as long as people are talking about Blizzard, it must mean good business.

I’m starting to hear A LOT of people talking about dumping WOW because of this. And that’s interesting because up until now I’ve always believed that the only thing that could ever destroy WOW would be WOW itself. I just didn’t think it would happen by allying itself with the scuz bucket that is Facebook.

This should play out to be a very interesting situation. I’ll be watching this closely.