Stardock is perhaps a name that you don’t know well, mainly due no doubt to their penchant of making software that mods windows XP or Vista. Such fare as ObjectDock and the like. The sort of thing we have all installed once, but removed once it dragged Windows to its very knees. They also pioneered the online product delivery method back when Steam was just a gleam in a fat mans eye. To order a Stardock game it is required that you download and install their horrendous client first. This then unlocks the game itself and downloads the content.

Yes, Stardock are strange alright.

I was lucky enough to come across their previous games thanks to Penny Arcade,when they introduced me to Galactic Civilisations II. In the office, Gal Civ was a God of games. It had more depth than the Mariana trench and yet managed to remain accessible. Hour after hour was sucked into this game and even on a limited and simple map one could easily start to need vitamin D supplements. I spent so much time telling my staff to get back to work that I almost felt that I should do some too.

But I don’t know how to dance the dance of the Australian aboriginals, so I wont beat around the bush; Gal Civ II was deep, involving and brilliant but it was also slow. Glacially slow. So glacially slow that Polar Bears could take up residence and global warming start taking effect before anything actually happened.

Sins is Gal Civ like you imagined it could be. It is also every Star Wars space battle, every Cylon Base Star attack and every White Star Fleet engagement rolled into one. IronClad have taken the best from many lesser RTS games and built them into an amazingly coherent core around which they… well around which they forgot to hang a story.

To explain: Sins has an animated intro when loading. However, you can safely ignore this in its entirety as there is no single player story. At all. There is only skirmish mode.

Probably the best skirmish mode ever devised.

Sins borrows shamelessly from lesser games. The 3 classes are very similar to CNC3, the maps are straight out of Gal Civ II, the mahoosive tech research tree is an idea taken from Civilization and the battles are similar in play to Age Of Empires 2.

That is one hell of a pedigree!

Chuck all these games in a blender and pour the results into space and you have 80% of Sins. The last 20% is the graphics engine from heaven. Many times in my RTS gaming history I have wanted to zoom-out for some tactical clarity. Similarly I have also wanted to zoom-in to get a real feel for the battles. Sins has an amazing engine that allows you to smoothly zoom out until the very star systems are little blobs and then in a second smoothly zoom in until you can literally read the numbers on the side of a carrier. This effect is not just a gimmick, it is built into the very fabric of the game’s control method. Using the mouse wheel you zoom out and then while holding down the right mouse button you rotate the view in 3D. Once happy you then use the wheel to zoom back in. Once this is understood you can be in the middle of a hundred-strong battle and hear an alarm from another system, instantly zoom all the way out and, by moving the mouse over the required planet, zoom straight back in. You get so used to doing this that, frankly, going back to the old way of doing things is going to be a serious step down.

That is the rub with this game. Every single time you come across an RTS stable, such as ship production, Ironclad have got there before you and somehow worked out exactly what the genre needs to improve from before, such as auto-fleet assignment. At every single turn IronClad have improved the template they “borrowed” to such an extent that it is difficult to remember how it used to be before.

So what is the basic premise? You are the leader of a civilization that starts off in a small uncharted backwater in the unfashionable end of the western arm of a star system and you must build your people up until you are either dominant or at peace with other races. There are in total three races and up to 8 players spread out amongst the stars. You must build, fight and coerce your way to victory through strength of arms. The planets are all connected by at least one space lane and travel is only via these using Faster-Than-Light drives. Remove or ally with all the other civilizations and you win. The three races in the game are the TEC (Trade Emergency Coalition), the Advent, and the Vasari.

The history of the races is quite interesting. The TEC are a group of trade worlds that descends from earlier human exploration and are playing catch up in the space wars they find themselves embroiled in. Attacking them are their rejected cast off’s the Advent. Back from the remnants of space the Advent were originally a desert religious sect that mastered psychic powers. They are 1000 or more years ahead of the TEC. They have returned to exact vengeance and unite the human race with the “Unity”. The Advent tend to favour cheap lightly armoured units but make up for this with energy weapons (lasers and plasma), psi-weapons (weapons that are mentally charged with a user’s mental powers) and shields. The final race are the Vasari. The Vasari are the only alien race in the game, they tend to have fewer but more expensive units that have extremely hardened hulls. Their ships tend to use Phase Missile technology, which has the possibility of completely bypassing the shields of enemy ships.

So far so very template. In fact change the names to GDI, NOD and Scrin and I wouldn’t blink.

What Sins offers is at once very deep in the level of personality you can bring to your strategy, but eventually very shallow in that all non violent options are tactical in nature. In other words, Sins always comes down to battles in space; to violence. It is not possible to win the game through peace like in CIV. However, while this is not too much of an issue it does explain the contrast between the game’s extreme combat depth and the light diplomacy options.

Here is a basic scenario I played (and lost) in my first go at the game:

Here is my new TEC home planet.

You can see the contextual menus at the bottom, which change based on what I have selected, and the standard research/resource menus at the top. Hovering over these gives readouts on the performance of all aspects of my civilisation. What is new here is the fold out menu to the side which gives a graphical run down of the planets and fleets I have at my disposal. This menu is excellent in messy situations. In battle it is what I spend my time looking at as it shows the enemy in rank order; thus giving me my next target.

Here is the same view totally zoomed out:

My corner of this map is very small; time to expand! I tell my builder ship to claim the local resources. In Sins, resources are split into three. Cash gained from taxes, metal

A TEC Metal refinery.

and Crystal.

A TEC Crystal refinery.

Each planet may have a number of asteroids in its gravity-well from which you can harvest a stockpile. You are going to need it. I have completed the entire research tree a few times and it takes hours. Cash on the other hand is earned from taxing your people. More people means more taxes. Cash can also be earned by selling excess resources to the pirates (or other players in multiplayer). Thus, what resources are around which planet becomes an aspect of your unfolding strategy. Do you go for that ice planet, rich in crystals, or is it stretching your fleet too far? Leaving yourself and your planets open and undefended is quick death in this game and expansion cannot be unchecked.

In order to defend this lush bounty I need ships. There are four types of ships: non-combat (freighters etc), light frigates, Medium frigates and the special Capital Ships (which can have short range fighters/bombers called strike craft). Each race gets a completely different set of ships, not only in look but also in weaponry and firepower. The TEC are basically standard BSG humans and their ships use only human based weapons such as gauss guns, ion cannons, lasers and auto cannons.

The TEC frigate builder.

My first ship!

A Cobalt light frigate.

This is the lightest of the TEC combat based ships (leaving aside colony ships and scouts) and like all RTS games is great at the beginning and end of the game. The beginning because they are cheap and no-one has researched anything else yet, but also good in the end game because (as always) there is an upgrade which makes them relevant that is buried somewhere in the tech tree.

I send the little fella’ off to scout the next planet and build myself a military research station.

These items are the basic requirements of researching certain technologies and come in military and civilian flavours. Each planet can take only a limited amount of space-born equipment before running out of “slots” for them. This means that to research the higher end items, you will need to expand to other planets and place down more stations. There is a massive amount of space born items that you can place, such as civic research centres, fighter hangers, planet defence guns, FTL “phase” jump inhibitors, planet shields and even massive super weapons.

Everything must be researched.

A few hours later…

I have managed to move my forces and empire up to the next few star systems. Mainly due to this bad boy:

“Mr Gaeta, bring her around.”

The Kol is one of the TEC capital ships and vital to successfully winning the game. Capital ships have shields far in advanced of normal ships, weapons of all types and can be individually upgraded based on their experience or culturally upgraded based on what you research. There are about 30 different upgrades you can research and 10 levels of specific upgrades. The Kol is a direct fire ship. It is brilliant at simply diving in full steam and laying the smack down. Anyone who knows me will appreciate that this is very much the way I like to do things. Capital ships carve up frigates and smaller craft like Sunday joints. They hammer colony ships to bits and their powers can include all sorts of special bonuses from reduced damage (due to multi-phasing shields), to dropping nukes on their opponents. The non TEC ships are similarly spectacular and can drop special bonus powers such as the ability to reflect damage or cause 250 damage to all ships in range. Capitals also come in different flavours. All races have carriers of some description (although some are better than others), support ships and combat vessels. The TEC have a missile boat, while the Advent push out the Mothership which is a direct homage to Homeworld.

It is not long before I have pissed off the other races to the point where they have allied together and attack me in force.

The map half way to my death.

The flash point comes when the enemy attack one of my planets…

…while my fleet is away taking on pirates!

Prepare to jump:

Ah pirates! In this game pirates attack the player with the most bounty on their head. you can drop credits onto another name and save yourself the bother of fighting them off, or you can take them on and use them to upgrade your capital ships. Either way just be careful that you don’t get wiped out or dragged into a bidding war with another player!

The pirate homeworld is well guarded and they quickly pounce on my clumsy attack.

While the battle may look confusing a simple roll of the mouse zooms out and the ships turn into icons, which are simple to read. I often find myself placing orders and then zooming back into the action. The fleets meet and I am clearly outclassed so I order the retreat!

So much for ridding the world of the pirates! I quickly learn that pirates can be your best friend. With them in play they can act as a buffer, a predictable enemy or even a mercenary fleet to unleash on your opponents.

While I have been away the AI has been watching. They don’t like the look of my fleet so they have quickly settled their species differences and ganged up on me. I meet them few jumps from my homeworld in a deserted asteroid belt and the the battle is fierce indeed!

Here they come!

My fleet do their best and take down the enemies top carrier:

and the mighty Mothership:

But it is a losing contest and as the enemies bombers and fighter strike craft swarm around my capital ships I know I am doomed:

My fleet is gone and the enemy quickly jump to my homeworld to wipe me out once and for all:

Game over.

I have played in total now, 30 hours of Sins. I know this because after every game you get an exhaustive report. This stats-based ending is always gratifying if you have done well and mind blowing when/if you see how far off the mark you actually were. Yes, the AI in Sins is of a high standard. Not a single time that I left a homeworld undefended did it stand.

You quickly learn that this is a game of many battles. Often there is a final keystone battle, but mostly the play is one of a war of attrition. You are trying to reduce your opponents ability to wage war rather than win through a decisive final conflict.

So that’s the game play in a nutshell. Every race is significantly different to be unique and the AI is stunningly good at the higher levels. All in the all the experience is very well balanced and refined by a team who obviously love RTS games far more than the rest of us.

I have since gone to play some multiplayer online and in the office and my teams three man structure played well to the games setup. Jim prefers the tricky Advent, with their sneaky play and cleaver psychic powers. He loves taking over the ships and craft of the others.

Notice the hands in the graphics as the Advent take over this missile boat.

Kieran, on the other hand, loves the alien nature of the Vasari. They place emphasis on large ships that don’t die easily. Power is the role for him. Myself, I love the TEC. Why? because my idea of a good night in is to check in with Adama and Number Six. I often find myself imagining Starbuck in the little craft or Boomer in the bombers. That is the power of the engine here that it can achieve that level of detail.

So what’s wrong with it?

Well, the diplomacy is very light and you cant give missions out to others like the constantly do to you. Also, there is no campaign just skirmish mode. That’s about it. Everything else is exemplary.

There is nothing wrong here that isn’t wrong with a million other RTS games.

An RTS of significant depth is all about the massive level of possible moves. It is like Chess or Go in that your objective is to find the best way to victory for you. It is about carving out the correct strategy to marry with your fleet’s tactics. The questions the game asks you are:

• What is the right amount of bombers, ships and capitals to obtain victory?
• Which tech’s to research first and which to leave to later?
• How do you advance your civilization safely?

That’s all good.

But eventually you will get it. You will crack what it takes to win and refine that idea down to a formula. Once that is achieved the game will lose its shine. This is the same for all RTS’s; they only keep you glued while you are learning.

Long may that be.

Sins is a masterful RTS from a stable of masterful RTS makers and specialists. That perfect formula is a long finish line away and there are three races to master. And even then, once that race is well a truly won, you will still get surprised. I was a master of AOEII, or so I thought. I won something like 50 games in a row and then played Kieran and lost again and again.

There is nothing as refreshing as getting your ass kicked by someone else in a ways that you didn’t even consider. Sins is the next and best of a genre that steps us inventively towards the game found in Iain M Banks’ “Player of Games” novel and as such is a welcome addition to a bloated genre. It throws up some surprises and features a wonderful 3D engine that polishes up the serious depth. Thus it is a brilliant game.

Oh, you can mod the game easily, I cant wait for some of these mods to come out:

Sins scores 8.5/10 (losing only half a mark for the diplomacy-lite options)

Regards,

Basho

…right.

Basically Brent spent sometime asking his podcasting collective a very good question and I wanted to run with it a little to give some of my ideas and see if this is spotting a trend. The question was, “What do you see as the future of (Game) podcasting?” My answer to this is to say that the future of game podcasting is tied up with the future of MMO gaming itself. MMO’s the next generation.

So where is that going and how does podcasting fit in?

We are all tired of MMO’s as they stand. Sure people play WOW, but a lot, a significant lot have quit and we all know the state of the recent releases. Vanguard tried to break my heart, but it was already broken by SWG. My friends and I all wanted Vanguard to work. Why was this? It was because of The Curve. The Curve is a way of describing the future. Around the curve is the next generation and before the curve, back down the road, is the past generations. All games exist somewhere on the curve itself, like a set of racing cars all vying to round the bend of the curve first.

The further they go forwards the more of the future comes around the curve and the more of the past generations you can no longer see as they drop off and fade away into nostalgia. Many MMO games are already back there, way back there, and probably start with Nethack then all the way through Mud’s, early university MMO’s, Ultima online, Everquest, DAOC, and up into the curve itself.

Nethack owned

Currently the head of the curve, the one to beat is of course WOW. There have been attempts to try and do this: for example Vanguard, which tried to be more hardcore and build up from a playerbase of fanatics and by popular acclaim overtake WOW.

It failed dismally.

The truth is this, WOW is so far up the curve that in order to overtake it you need to produce a game that is actually around the corner. That is; a game that is the next generational leap.

So what would such a game look like and what does it have to do with podcasting?

I don’t think that the traditional MMO genres of ripping off AD&D are going to cut it going forwards. And I don’t mean just the EQ2’s or Tabula’s, I mean the fact that the way you play AD&D; the dice roles, is still at the heart of all current MMO’s. As I have blogged before, I don’t see this trend being core to the games around the curve.

So what is going to be the core?

We all are.

I have seen the trend coming on…

I have been watching the media interest in Second Life and wondering at it for quite a while. Second Life is a terrible MMO’s, because it isn’t really an MMO at all. It is the front end to an MMO. Second Life is like those waiting rooms between maps in an online shooter. The problem is that the shooter never starts.

But an idea occurs to me.

Sony have been working this idea for while with Home; the interface for the PS3 that is like a social meeting room before you go off and play a game with your buddies. A kind of 3d version of Xfire, mixed with social tools to interact with your gaming comrade’s.

When I saw the Internet buzz around Home (from Penny Arcade, Edge Magazine, etc)…

Will Home ever get here?

You too can have hair this bad!

…I was reminded of the greatest MMO you have not played; The Metaverse in the novel Snow Crash.

You should all read this book NOW!

In Snow Crash the book is based around a kind of social MMO that people connect into and hang out. It is from inside the Metaverse that they then go on to play a game. It could be anything, riding bikes at high speed, shooting at each other, sword fights, etc, etc. The Metaverse is the gateway to the online existence and it is through that gateway that all games are played.

Everyone connects to the Metaverse and hangs out first.

I loved this vision of the future and I remember Brent mentioning in his show 100 that game designers are interested in such things as Gaxonline, Virgin Worlds and all the self created social spaces generated by the games banding together. Looking at how fast Gax has grown I can see why.

It cant be long before you are able to launch your MMO of choice directly from Gax Chat. It won’t be long after, that social sites such as Gax will become a front end to MMO’s. Imagine, if you will a 3d version of Gax, where all the users could hang out, socialise and blog to their hearts content. Imagine being able to use Gax as a hub to go to whatever game you wanted and to bring along all you Gax friends with you. It cant be long until a self organising collective of gamers use the technology of the web not only to talk about games but to create a true portal to actually play them too.

So what of the podcast?

Metaverse Media such as Radio or even 3d TV casting.

In the Metaverse shown in Snow Crash there would have been tons of cool radio stations pumping out info on the latest gaming. With radio, podcasters get the opportunity to put out information that is much more up to the minute and reaches a much larger audience. If the coolest way to get into a game was to meet up in GAX3d first, imagine how many people such a radiocast could reach? It could be millions. No longer would you have to fuck around with the crap interface of iTunes, you could catch the latest news right as you log in.

So imagine if you will the next stage beyond that.

Games that download in GAX3d.

your mates playing the latest game and you don’t have it? No bother! Simply log into GAX3d, walk your avatar down this particular corridor and by the time you get to the door at the end the game will have downloaded, installed, created your account and be ready to play, so simply open the door and walk in!

So, for me, the next generation of gaming is not about making a better WOW, it is about harnessing all these player built social spaces to better communicate to gamers and allow them to experience their friends and make new ones in a more visceral way. And while they are waiting for more to join their upcoming raiding party, pumped over the digital airwaves is the smooth and soothing voice of Brent…

…although he is probably telling them the game they have downloaded is shit

Basho

Playing with others, a rebuttal to The Waiting Game.

While I share all Gaxer’s joy in the clearly excellent writing talents of Elliott (and wish that I had some Absinthe left) I cant help but feel that he has totally missed the obvious answer to his questions.

What is the point of MMO’s?  What are the designers trying to do?

The answer is that they are trying to give you a social space to play with your friends.

Friends in RL

Friends in game

Nowhere in Elliott’s post does he mention the primary aspect to all MMO’s; grouping.  Grouping is so fundamental that without it any MMO will eventually become stale and frustrating.  Now, before you reach for the comments button to go on about solo content, let me make my argument clear.

Social interaction is the most fundamental aspect to having fun, whether it is with your dog and some videoshop mannequins as in “I am Legend” or being a part of a brotherhood of pillocks like in “American Pie” people cannot live without it. 

What’s the point of a pose this awesome unless a friend has a camera?

What do you think was what made MMO’s evolve in their current form in the first place?  The first MMO was probably multiplayer Muds and Trek back in the days of mega UNIX systems abounding in Universities. They haven’t stopped growing since. This endless expansion is because people want to play with their friends.  More than that; people want to make new friends and be alongside them.

This is the core of humanity since the days of fighting Mammoths.

Also like that distant past people need each other.  Look at the fundamental class balancing in an MMO such as EQ1.  In this game the Warrior class couldn’t even solo something 5 levels below the player.  Why?  because the Warrior needs a healer.  The healer needs a Warrior.  And just like a team of men fighting a mammoth, clad only in furs and wielding only spears, they need to work together to achieve the big kill.  

Team attack, I friggin’ hate spiders!

This is the behavior that game designers are putting in MMO’s.

Take EQ1 again.  I used to be the raid master for a EQ1 guild back in the day when Lord Nagafen was the top mob. 

Big, red and mean!

Naggy could rip me a new asshole in ten seconds flat.  The only thing that kept me alive was my friends; my guild.  And how did I meet them?  I met one man, Rodrick, and grouped with him over a few days play in the lower levels.  It didn’t matter that he lived on the other side of the planet and I never met nor saw a photo of him in real life.  In the game, at the agreed time, we would team up together and we would accomplish much more and have much more fun than on our own.  He introduced me to the guild and my natural tendency eventually led to me becoming guild scribe and running lowbie events to recruit talent.  The master of the this guild was a genius with people and we all grouped up everynight on hunts.  Eventually, after many battles together, we learned each others play and how the other reacted.  No longer would we need to shout or order.  It was natural.  We were ready.  We met up at the zoe line and all bowed as one to each other.  Then with typed “woots!”, as this was all before TeamSpeak, we zoned in to nagafens lair and I pulled the Big Red Bastard(tm).  Like clockwork we moved all as one, I stood in front of him and waved my Short Swords of the Ykesha, he roared and I took to repeatedly hacking into his toenails, which was all I could see.  Healers kept me alive, Wizards nuked carefully and our leader, a mighty bard, danced a blue jig of battle.  We fought that red bastard many times and the best moments was always just as he fell.  The relief, the collective sigh, then the zone echoed with the shouting. Those times were wonderful.

Or, on my own, I could have killed boars.

This is now such a well known dynamic in MMO’s that most include team related bonus’s.  Take EQ2, where careful watching of the events and timing special moves can lead to the team pulling off bonus damage or all sorts of events.  In fact in EQ2 certain mobs are clearly marked for groups and will hand you your ass alone.  This boring button mashing becomes a symphony when done in a tight group.  Like Rock Band; you all play in tune.  Each doing a part of the music that adds up to a cacophony of damage.  The simplicity is multiplied and becomes complexity. 

You cant solo this big bastard.

The enjoyment comes from achieving together what you couldn’t alone.

After I left EQ1, I quit MMO’s cold turkey for over a year and pretty much left my guild.  I returned when SWG came out in the UK.  I tracked down the guild’s new website and learned what server they were on.  I then created a toon and logged in.  I immediately made my way to the guild player-city of Mos Nevah.  I hadn’t had contact with any of these people in over a year and they had no idea I was coming.  Many of the officers were still the same people from EQ1 and of course the leader was still there.  The city looked empty so I walked into the tavern and came across a very strange sight: 20 people were all dancing and being clapped on by another 20.  I had walked in right after they had just had a hunt and they were regenerating their energy.  I made a “ahem” noise.  Many looked around.  There was a long pause as the dancers stopped.  Then someone reconised me and stepped forwards, “BASHO!” he cried.

I was home again.

They gave me a house, a speeder, a really nice sword and a shit ton of money.  I then was set aside for special treatment in our groups so that I could catch up with their levels.

Soon I was raid leading again and fighting the Force Witches of Dathomir. 

Nothing had changed because even though:

1.  I had never spoken to these people with my true voice

2.  Never met them in the flesh

3.  Lived on the other side of the planet

4.  Been missing for over a year

…they were still my friends.

Or, on my own, I could have hunted Chubas.

So why did I leave SWG?  Soloing.  I eventually became so powerful a swordsman that PVE, the core of being a swordsman, was too simple. 

I could slaughter half the planet with one set of doctor buffs. 

Playing with others meant PVP, which the swordsman is not best at.  I tried and spent a few very interesting battles waiting for the enemy to breach our control point and therefore be in swords reach.  However, when I was nuked by riflemen and beaten by TKM’s I couldn’t go on.  PVE meant nothing alone and so I left.

I know games like WOW have made soloing to higher levels possible, but it is only by the shere size of the game that this is palatable.  Eventually you need others to keep having fun. 

If I want to solo, I will play Morrowind. 

So, the crux of my argument is that I don’t think the designers of MMO’s are lost at all.  They know what they want to do.  They want to give us a framework where we make our own fun together with others.  The whole Raid dynamic, the dancing emotes, the guild ladders.  This is all very carefully made to give the space to interact with others. 

Of course the MMO has miles to go.  Vanguard was a drug fueled washout, the coming games look like nothing new, but as long as I can play with friends I will be eventually coming back to this genre.

Playing with others.  That is living the MMO game, anything else is playing with yourself and if you are sitting in at a computer playing with yourself on the Internet then have to ask if you are merely masturbating.

Basho

Click to open and download.

Only a few years a go the FPS had reached a lull.  The traditional corridor structure was blamed for stifling the genre and so, in response, many FPS’s were put into development that featured outside environments.  However, this was a move that missed the point.  It wasn’t that the outsides of corridors needed to be rendered, that limitation on old FPS’s was purely one of technology, it was that gameplay needed to evolve and thus move forwards.  After all, merely rendering the outsides had been mastered in the excellent FPS: Operation Flashpoint.

The coming Operation Flashpoint 2 may have what I crave.

Many FPS’s were put into development that not only had open spaces, but more open stories as well.  Stories that told much more epic tales.  Personally, I feel that Half Life 2 is the current pinnacle of this epic style; the Singleplayer story-mode FPS, in that it manages to represent a large sense of space but at the same time is the most epic story telling.  But there are other notable FPS games, especially from The Golden Year:2007.  Such games as

Stalker,

QuakeWars,

Arma-Armed Assault,

Oblivion (a First Person Slasher)

Crysis.

So where now?

I feel it is moving beyond telling the story from one point of view.  I am predicting that the next generation is going to be all about multiplayer co-op FPS’s.

Imagine Phantasy Star Online (Dreamcast)…

3rd Person offline Multiplayer was perfected in PSO.

…but as a FPS. Imagine COD4 single player but every character was controlled by a real player. Imagine FPS RPG’s, such as Fallout 3, but as a co-op FPS!

Imagine multiplayer Oblivion! (Yes please!)

Gears of War points the way. There a singleplayer story is shared by two people who need to work together to achieve the denouement.

“Cover me!”, the shout of a GOW Coop session.

Let’s take another angle on this.

What of MMO’s?  Haven’t MMO’s answered this question?  Isn’t what I describe in Starwars Galaxies before they borked it? The storyline was very strong and you could get a Bounty Hunter Mission to hunt a PC Jedi character, which was generated only once he had been spotted by a NPC. This hunt was the most fun in the entire game as you tracked him down and then approached for the final battle. It was only ruined when people found ways around the mechanics (basically dropping a PC house and hiding inside).

Thus story driving gameplay over multiplayer.

No. Thus far no MMO has successfully integrated the twitch gaming of an FPS.  But, it is coming.  Coming is the combination of what is good in MMO’s; the team play, the individuality, the massive choices; together with the twitch-gaming high of shooting things; but for once playing with your friends through a story not just in an endless deathmatch.

Quakewars is heading in this direction with the mission structure and classes built into the game. Becoming more story driven. Becoming more class dependent.

Consider my real life. There, I play with my friends alongside me (in airsoft).

Three Darkangels relax after storming the OpFor Base.

This real life coop mode is what we actively look for in games for our online lives and the lack of storyline in traditional multiplayer FPS’s is what is missing.  What I really want is the necessity of two people (or more) playing together to complete an objective. How cool would the Oblivion-realm tower-assaults be if there was 10 of you hacking in and up the stairs?

Well, my question is answered in Lineage II, which has exactly that. It’s just missing the FPS twitch.

Castle Assaults are amazing in Lineage II.

But, that’s my point; many games have elements of what I want but none have managed to join up the genres.  Thus I predict that the next step in FPS’s, RPG’s and MMO’s is the genres slowly converging. Look at the evidence: even the basic online FPS (COD4) has RPG elements now and the latest MMO (Tabula Rasa) has FPS elements.

COD 4 RPG elements - create a class (beta version).

What I foresee is the dividing line between story-laden single player epics, like Half Life 2, disappearing all together and becoming twitch-capable multiplayer-coop.

Only then will the great gaming moments of MMO’s, the amazing immediacy of FPS’s and my offline/online worlds converge.

I can’t wait, see you in 2008!

Basho

This year has surely been The Golden Year Of Gaming since the launch of the SNES. So many good games have been launched this year that simply picking one and naming it Game Of The Year would deny the others their just deserts. Also, such an approach would be too subjective as my tastes in gaming have evolved over 20 years of playing games and the fact that the majority of my gaming is on the PC. So this year I am going to change to a categorised list.

I love gaming. Gaming brings many positives in my life.  Increasing such things as hand eye coordination, reasoning ability, awareness and even morality. I love the worldwide community that has sprung up, testament to the fact that gamers are really a social bunch who just sometimes lack the skills or confidence to be ‘face to face’. ‘Screen to screen’ offers gamers the chance to fulfil the need for friends and the need to challenge and be challenged in what amounts to a very safe environment. Size matters not while on-line.  Only skill, determination and the will to win with style.

In the history of gaming there have been many golden years, but there has not been one recently to match the output this year. Almost every genre has had a masterpiece released, some have had three or four, and some have been record breakers in all possible senses of the word.  There has also been disappointments.  In defence of the over hyped games this has to also go down as hardest release year of all time since many games that would have been lauded by the pundits and public have been up against such leviathans that they have barely made a splash in the heaving sea of major releases.  Similarly some games that we have all been looking forwards to for many years have been over analysed for critical faults that would have been simply overlooked in a more fallow season.  It has been survival of the fittest.

I have endeavoured to remove much of the subjective reasoning in this list, but some, of course, may remain.  This was the year that the major releases, with a few political exceptions, were released on all the major platforms at the same time.  Finally the person who doesn’t own all the different platforms doesn’t have to miss out!  So without further ado here is my personal gaming set for this year:

Graphical Achievement Of The Year

Honourable Mentions

The Orange Box - Halo 3 - BioShock

This category is made for First-Person-Shooters and 2007, more than anything else, will be remembered for the high quality of the FPS’s released. Other top shelf games released against the entrants in this list have vanished without trace and will never reach their full potential.  This says something about hype, and the amount of cash pumped into the market, that I don’t much like.  On the positive side indy games are going strong.  I still play the brilliant Mount and Blade (which costs a tenner) and Gal Civ 2, which remains a top seller.  However, since making the games in the following list costs millions, don’t expect the situation regarding marketing to change soon.

Runner Up

Crysis

Crysis is without doubt the best looking game ever released onto the PC at least it is if you have a PC with the power of a 2001 monolith.

My rig was considered top of the range a year ago, but now struggles to display this game in all its undoubted glory. In the old days simply having a graphics engine this good would have been enough, but not this year, The Golden Year.

Crysis suffers in only few areas. Firstly, the AI is a dumb as a bucket of spanners. This is on purpose as the game’s main fun feature is playing “Predator” and hiding in the jungle laying traps for the patrols.

This is a sandbox zone where you are making your own fun and not at the mercy of the developers. Nothing is as fun as sneaking up to a sniper, leaping clean over his head, grabbing him from behind and throwing him off a cliff. If our friend sniper had better AI, and shot you clean through the eye the second he saw you, the whole effect would have been ruined. Anyhow this AI restriction does show up the gaps in play (Unlike FarCry where the dumb AI fitted the dumb mercenary enemies). Another thing similar to Far Cry is the sudden change of play style.  Here, around half way through, the entire game stops with the sandbox and becomes something else. As if the creators realised that Half life 2: Episode 2 was coming out and they damn well better put back in the cinematic themes. This jars with the jungle sections and you find yourself missing them. Finally, the game steals shamelessly from any action film in the last 15 years. Especially Predator, Aliens and Starship Troopers.

The actual shooting in the game is well handled and the sense of combat is clearly attenuated to some sense of realism, especially on the ultra hard “delta” difficulty. The gun mechanics are flawless and the feel is well handled.

A worthy runner up just don’t mention the ending.

What ending?

Exactly!

Winner

Call Of Duty 4

The winner in this category has to be Call Of Duty 4.

This modern interpretation of the prior Call of Duty games steps up to some of the best on-rails shooting ever designed. Fantastically themed levels combine with a very interesting plot that engages the player totally, eventually leading to a strange effect to find in an FPS; starting to really care. By the end of the game I actually felt an emotion regarding the NPC’s fates. Also top banana in this game are the graphics and perspective shifts. This game defines why you need good graphics.  Graphics must drive the story, be part of the action, not just be a background.  This game uses the graphics, it doesn’t just display them.

The very clean design of the graphical system leads the player through some amazing set pieces that really deliver. Whether it is protecting a stricken tank from suicide bombers, blasting through a rain shattered tanker in a stormy sea or engaging in SAS house-to-house hunting the game is peerless in its approach to immersing the player.

Even the introductory credits are in game as you play the part of a third-world-dictator being driven through the city and dragged to his execution. By the end of the game you are so used to seeing the amazing amounts of scenery that you get quite spoilt by it.  The final chase section features entire cities of high quality 3D being chucked about as your truck flashes by. This is a titanic achievement.

Explosion, bullet and battle effects are all excellently presented and at times I felt that I was playing the film Black Hawk Down, or any number of top-draw modern war films. This effect is further enhanced with some fanboy quotes from such films as Aliens being peppered around the place (which all raise a smile for those “in the loop”). Also the sounds are expertly cued to the action and all the voice acting is timely and of a high quality.

One particular mission deserves a mention, which is the sniper mission to Prypriat near Chernobyl. This mission is the probably one of the best designed and smoothly executed pieces of gaming ever set to disk. Everyone loves this mission and rightly so. A perfectly encapsulated experience that ranks alongside the best output of any game ever.

Shooting in this game is entirely governed by the difficulty level set by the player. On top difficulty it is very very tough and sometimes even getting the first shot off will not guarantee victory in a fire fight. Tactics, luck and an exacting aim are all necessary to win and the enjoyment level can suffer in response. However, with the difficulty turned down a notch the game opens up a little and is probably the best fun gunplay ever.

Problems do exist. On some levels the enemies can pop into view and on the harder difficulty settings you will suffer many replays as you get nailed again and again. Also the whole “keep moving forwards or enemies re-spawn” dynamic is not to my taste. But, set against the positive experiences in this game, these are seriously minor points of contention.

Truly the best shooting game this year and possibly any year and an amazing graphical achievement.

The COD4 trailer:

Best Multiplayer Experience

Honourable Mentions

Call of Duty 4 - Halo 3 - Enemy Territory: Quake Wars 

Runner Up

World in Conflict

World In Conflict is a smashing game and one which has received a lot of effort in the design of the multiplayer elements.

The single player game has some of the most interesting effects ever seen in Real Time Strategy, including a very high standard of graphics outside the players actual focus, which lends itself to the immersive feeling that you are playing only a part in a greater conflict. The multiplayer is the natural extension of this in that you are actually only playing a part in the greater conflict. By forcing the player to pick the role of a commander of one type of force the game places you into a storming battle, the winning of which is not entirely in your hands, and you step up to become part of a larger team effort.

This is true multiplayer team combat. With the right team in place victory by combined arms can become a mesmerising experience that you really feel a part of.

The only issue is in finding said team.

Playing with “Internet puddings (TM)” can be dispiriting for exactly the same reason. Since you cannot win the battle alone, plus that fact that every unit type has its nemesis, you can sometimes feel that multiplayer is like banging your head against a brick wall.

Whilst this is not the designers fault, it prevents the game taking the top slot.

Winner

The Orange Box: Team Fortress 2

So the top slot goes to the remake of an old classic.

TF2 re-imagines the entire on-line shooter in a way that no other developer would have the balls to do. Only Valve have balls this big. The Orange Box is already a default top buy this year and in no small part this is due to this king of on-line FPS games.

The original concept of Team Fortress and Team Fortress Classic (my old TFC site) has been honed to a fine point. This would be good enough, but then Valve have layed over the top a cartoon look-and-feel that works. Not too camp and not too cartoon like at all really. The characterisations are simply a masterpiece of design. Whereas you imagine the cartoon look to detract from the animation and shading, this is a cartoon by Pixar not Hanna-Barbera.  It is all high shaded 3D and smooth animation which beguiles the player into acting more to type. So, spies become more sneaky and soldiers charge into more battles all thanks to the most fun class balancing ever created.

The clever maps mean that you never get bogged down and the variations on a theme means that the different rounds, modes and styles all mesh together. The fact that the maps are quite similar is entirely on purpose so that a style of play can be honed into a set of play parameters that work on any map. This is what happened to Counter Strike and why the older maps were dropped in favour of dust-U-likes. Dedication to your character is never un-rewarded by the design layout of the map.

This is why many other games are not in this top list.

Team Fortress 2 is simply too much fun to put down and has depth in spades for those willing to look beyond the screen shots.

Best ending

Winner

The Orange Box: Portal

The best ending this year is perhaps also the best ending of all time.

/spoilers

Portal started out as a minor project to add to The Orange Box. The sort of long-shot that only a company like Valve would go for.  Well, long-shots sometimes pay off. The ending to Portal is a long-shot inside a long-shot.  On paper having the computer you just killed sing to you would be a recipe for, if not disaster, marking your game as completely weird.  In reality the song is so charming that you wont care. GLADOS surely hit the nail on the head when she wrote: HUGE SUCCESS.

Brilliant, funny and it will have you humming it for weeks. If ever a small, quick game stuck in my mind it was this one. Why? Because of that song.

Here is the winning ending in all its glory:

Best opening

Winner

BioShock

Redefining openings.

/spoilers

BioShock wanted to impress me from the first moment.

I started watching the intro sat back deep into my chair with a beer in hand. I watched as it unfolded noting the aesthetics of the scene. Then the main character fell into the sea and it was on fire. I watched the sea glisten and the fire burn. I remember thinking that this was some of the best CGI I had ever seen and a very neat looking opening; what with all the droplet effects. Then nothing happened. I looked closer, suddenly I realised that this wasn’t CGI, this was in real time! I moved the mouse and the camera smoothly panned across the fiery devastation. My jaw hit the floor and with small whimpers of “Wow” coming from my lips I swam my character’s body towards the Rapture elevator.

No game intro has had that effect on me.  BioShock disappointed me eventually, but that intro lifted my spirits through the first two thirds. It was a hell of a thing for any game to live up to. That is the perfect intro. Something that starts the player’s engines. Starts them start falling in love with the game. Sure a game needs to live up to that intro, but like all those who we fall in love with, fate is decided in those first few seconds.

/spoilers

The intro set-up the twist in the tale quite nicely. The simple accidental nature of your arrival to the city, the trip down to the sea bed and the huge sense of “newness” the city evokes is all one with the awe of discovery. Since you are seeing the game in the first person this sense delays the player from realising that you are simply a puppet in this play and this strange city being revealed to you is no stranger after all. All good intro’s trick you in this way. They set-up the feelings for a reason.

BioShock’s is a masterpiece.  Here is its opening, watch and learn:

Best Innovation

Winner

The Orange Box: Portal

I include this as a category mainly in response to the Edge article on the same subject I read today, they have Halo 3 as the most innovative game of the year. Now I have played Halo 3 and if anything it is simply an extension of Halo 2. Even a little derivative of Halo 1. Claiming it is innovative, not to mention they gave it 10 (there is no accounting for taste), is akin to an actual crime.

Of all the games released this year the obvious choice for innovation is Portal.

Portal has rebuilt the puzzle game, rescuing it from Pop games and on-line lunchtime pursuits. The sense of space being manipulated, the core dynamic of Portal, is amazing. Being thrown around and flipped as you dive into portals from heights and come out at odd angles, all from the first person perspective, is completely new. Completely. Portal is miles ahead of anything else released this year in terms of fresh ideas up on screen.

Real throw-away ideas that should, by all rights, have been dropped onto the cutting room floor.  Not be picked up, polished, buffed up to a mirror shine and given to us like some rescued pearl of a game. The core mechanic is so simple but that is essentially its strength. The new trick is to shift it to the first person. Of course, they didn’t stop there. Valve, like a great movie director, ladles detail into the background plot holding this story together. New ideas wheel out of Portal such as Cake, GLADOS, the Companion Cube and the empty observation rooms. This is all not core to the game, but it is core to the player enjoying the actual puzzles. Portal is a simple story beautifully told. Like a pot from ancient China; It has the most intricate and dazzling painting on the surface, took expert craftsmen much effort to paint it, master potters to bake it and weeks of glazing to fix it but in the end you still just keep flowers in it.

Portal is a innovation masterpiece bar none and no one but Valve could take such a small idea and build it into something that everyone loves.

Game of the year

Winner

The Orange Box

Game Of The Year is always a subjective judgement. Edge may say Mario. Microsoft may say Halo. PC magazines may say whoever they are most bribed to support.

I say that it is The Orange Box.

Not just because it is the best. Not just because the game play of its components are all brilliant. Not just because it comes from the best developers in the world. No, rather because it represents the best value I have ever seen in a gaming package. So many games do not live up to their hype. Half Life 2 has exceeded the hype in every sense.

Episode 2 manages to refresh the entire game and still come up with new and interesting ways to play in this amazing environment.

Team Fortress 2 redefines what you can do with the on-line genre. It is the granddaddy of the FPS reborn as a new and exciting injection into the dead arm of online gaming.  Other games may disappear up their own arse, but TF2 never takes itself too seriously all the while having a history that blows all others clean away.

As for Portal, it is genius.

In this world of bribed on-line reviews, fat-cat gaming sites and the EA ‘Masters of Gaming’ all getting their cut of my hard earned money The Orange Box is sticking it to The Man.  Why? Because all the money goes straight to the developer, bypassing the cancerous polyps that infest the rest of the industry.  HL2, Steam and The Orange Box are ensuring that future years of gaming can be as golden as this one was.

Buying The Orange Box is to a strike a blow for the freedom of the gaming industry.  Quality years await us ahead with content like this coming out, see you in 2008 and remember to damn The Man!

The HL2:E2 trailer:

Comments welcome!

Basho

I really felt that Bioshock lacked something. The cohesion of the environment had a sore note in it that broke the “spell” that it was trying to weave. Namely the vending machines. The tons of gun dispensing, health giving and weapons manufacturing machines just seemed wrong. People were supposed to live down here, why would they have so much firepower kicking around? Why are all the Plasmids to do with combat?

Sure many of the mechanics were new: the free roaming baddies, the big daddies and the very special moments when you rescue a Little Sister. This I liked, but the manic FPS gameplay was pure Doom and offered nothing new to me when I have since played Deus Ex, BF2, TFC and, especially, HL1/HL2.

The HL2 storyline is flawless. The connectivity of the story they are telling with the environment you are in is amazing. I never “snapped out of it” with HL2 like I frequently did in Bioshock. Many of the moments in HL2 just made me stop and stare in amazement. Remember the facial animations, the running from the Combine in the flats in the beginning, the voice acting, the comedy and especially the ending.

Don’t tell me that Bioshock has a better storyline when HL2 has this:

http://members.shaw.ca/halflifestory/

I guess that I was hoping for Bioshock to be a spiritual successor to Deus Ex, but I got a spiritual successor to Doom. Even the “twist” was something I saw coming, in the sense that I knew I was being fed a false note of some kind all the way through.

HL2 is definitely a grander achievement than Bioshock and while neither of them have the gun controls of say Stalker, HL2?s combat feels more real to me.

Here is a list of things that HL2 had that Bioshock didn’t:

1. A good ending, and by good I mean fantastic.

2. Emotional connections with the NPC’s. Big time. I personally didn?t care about the Little Sisters in so much as I thought the ?harvest? option’s animation seriously disturbed me and I didn?t want to see it again.

3. Fear. That running in fear that pervades the entire first part of the game.

4. A million expansions. TFC rocked, TF2, Counter frikkin’ Strike, The brilliant mod; Natural Selection and many more.

5. NPC’s (IE ones you don?t kill). That you work with. That aren’t fucking you over. BS gave itself away as a Doom 3 clone when I realised that you were not going to meet any NPC’s (outside scripted sequences). From that realisation came the certain feeling that a Scoobie’Doo moment of unveiling was on the cards.

6. Variety of location. Put side by side HL2 has a far more varied locality.

I could go on, but perhaps this list would be better,

Things that HL2 has that Bioshock also has:

1. Atmosphere. In spades.

2. Initial 5 minutes wow factor. Much like meeting a person for the first time and making your mind up in that 3 seconds you shake hands, games either grab you or they don’t. Sure they can slow burn a little and you may learn to appreciate them, but if you don’t immediately go “wow” you will never fall in love with them. The train station in HL2 and the fire-on-water start of BS were both amazing.

3. Automated sentries. Usually used in games to make up for lack of challenge (GRAW 2 I am looking at you) in these two games the sentries server a higher purpose and are both reusable in interesting ways.

4. Interesting weapons. The gravity gun is an example of a very smart design decision. I felt that in BS that the crossbow was by far the best weapon; simple and to the point, but it was amongst many.

5. Alternate fire modes. Grenade!

6. Both take place in the shattered remains of their respective game worlds with you as the redeemer of humanity through superior firepower.

7. Moments of grandeur. “Time, Mr Freeman”. “Would you kindly?”

8. The illusion of open ended play. “Open worlds” is the new buzzword. HL2 and BS show us clearly and we don’t really want true open gameplay, just the illusion of it. The sense of immersion in the choices that naturally leads you to the next stage of the experience without you noticing the gaps and stitches; like locked doors, or invisible walls. This is why such games as HL, BS, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Operation Flashpoint, etc are great. It is a fine balance. Go too far and you have chaos. Go too restrictive and you have a console platformer fodder.

9. Unscripted encounters. Both games convincingly “fake” unscripted encounters. Giving the AI just enough juice to surprise you. Who can forget the marines in HL1? I won’t forget my first Big Daddy fight, I had already seen the guy smash in a splicer…

10. Full development time. Finally, both games are good examples why you must never rush to release. HL2 was a full year late and it showed. Completeness comes from time. Too many PC games are rushed out.

Basho

Portal is a new type of single player game that changes how players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment in a manner similar to how the Gravity Gun changed our approach to how an object may be leveraged in any given situation.

Amazing stuff! I can’t wait until HL2 - Episode II.

1. After loosing all self control and using too much fast travel I installed a mod to turn it off completely.  Fast travel can break your immersion in the game, why do they even have it when the game has horses; I don’t know?
2. I installed another mod to give “Morrowind style” mages guild portals.  A half way house to fast travel and much better.
3. I installed a mod that reduces the distance that dungeons show up on the map, which makes the exploration of the game much better and more rewarding.
4. I have also installed a mod that gives my horse saddle bags.  This makes over burdening yourself with loot not such a problem.  It is graded so the horse cannot simply carry tons of stuff.
5. One of the best mods I have is one that fixes the epic rewards fault (Basically, if you complete an epic quest at a young level you get a watered down reward.  Whereas if you complete the same quest later in the game you get a much stronger item or power), this mod auto-upgrades the reward to the higher version when you reach the next level.
6. I have also installed a mod that gives you a nice colour map rather than a boring brown one and takes off the squares around the icons on the map.

All of these are at PlanetOblivion

It is amazing to me that a game that has been out for so little time has such amazing mods available so quickly.

What a game and what a community!

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