PAX 2006 Gameplay footage of Fury

Gamehelper.com has this gameplay footage as part one of their coverage of Fury.

I know many gamers were probably really annoyed by the really loud announcer guy yelling at everyone in the expo hall about "unleashing their fury" but if you didn't get a chance to unleash it, you can at least watch someone else do it...

I sat down with the folks over at the Fury booth (before the hall opened so I could get away from the loud dude) and play the game. I've got 2 videos for you to watch: the first is gameplay footage with developer commentary and the second is an interview with their lead (and hungover) designer Adam to discuss the finer points of unleashing our fury.

The footage isn’t all that exciting; its more basic introductory type stuff than furious PvP action.

I didn't think having the announcers was that great of an idea for E3 and I was wrong. They were great and really got people into the booth. The hot two Amazon-sized Fury booth babes helped too. At PAX though I can see how their style may not have meshed with the real hardcore gamers especially without the hot babes. Nothing is really as good without hot babes. I’ve always said that.

PAX

MMORPG.COM has some pictures of PAX, (Penny Arcade Expo to you noobs) where you can see the Fury booth. I don’t want to imply anything, but compare the Fury Booth picture vs. the ArenaNet Guild Wars Booth picture.

Carolyn also mentions playing Fury in her coverage from the floor.

UPDATE! I was just told that Fury was also mentioned under the tournaments feature:

Fury on the other hand had no super fancy prizes. Their supremely well placed booth is in the center of everything and attracted a lot of attention, especially thanks to their two loud-mouth commentators. They simply randomly handed out loot on the first day to lucky “MVPs” of matches. Carolyn and I both played quite a bit and had a grand time, which I will get into in a more formal article later. Nonetheless, Fury looks like the ultimate game for jump in, causal, fast PvP action.

UPDATE! Dana Massey from MMORPG.COM posted her write up of Fury as part of their full coverage from the floor of the Penny Arcade expo. Few minor points were off the mark but a nice general primer.

Kane

I just saw the latest sneak peak video for Command & Conquer 3. No, I’m not going to link it. I’m not doing anything for EA unless they are giving me lots of money to do so. If I’m going to be a hypocrite I’ll at least have to be bought first. Yeah I redid all the infantry icons for the German version of C&C: Generals for them but it paid for my trip to Disney World. If you want to see all 20 seconds of the video it you can go looking for yourself. I just wanted to say: Joe, if you’re reading this. I hope you're making EA pay through the nose!

Check!

Breaking out the “things to do before I die list”… Snorkeling on The Great Barrier Reef… CHECK!!! Been there done that! It was very very cool and I am definitely thinking about going again.

I did loose my Tour de France hat though. I watched some lady go out onto the fore of the boat and have her hat just vanish. The wind was so strong coming up over the front of the boat and funneling along the side that it didn’t blow off, it vanished. So then a few minutes later when I was getting motion sick I made sure to hang on to my hat very tightly when I went out. I had a barf bag in my other hand but once I got up front the fresh air and being able to see the dips and waves coming calmed me down. I decided to stick the barf bag in my pocket but I couldn’t fold it up one-handed. I was going to take the hat off and tuck it under my arm but when I lifted it an inch off my head the wind caught it, ripped it out of my hand and it was gone. I replaced it with a hat from Quicksilver, the tour outfit that took us out to the reef.

We also went up to the Daintree Rainforest for two days where we hung on the beach and did some Jungle Surfing but missed out on the night forest walk because it was constantly booked up. On the drive back down to Cairns we did see a Cassowary standing in the middle of the road. One of the Jungle Surfing guides had asked us if we had seen one saying it had taken him 5 years of living up there before he saw one. We had read a sign somewhere that said we should report any encounters or sightings of the bird but none of us could remember where we had read that or where we were supposed to report it to. Besides we couldn’t figure out how to describe where we had seen it since “that curvy part of the road with all the trees” wasn’t going to narrow it down much.

I got a whole slew of pictures from the trip but I seem to have uninstalled Photoshop. I was using it a few weeks ago and did do some cleaning up of my harddrive since then when making room for ComicBase. I can only guess I uninstalled it by accident when using the Add/Remove Program list to remove crap.

Back to the list, it originally said “Scuba diving” not “Snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef and last year I did go down to take scuba diving lessons. The first introduction lesson was free and we asked ahead of time if my diabetes and irregular heartbeat would be a problem and they said no worries. But once we showed up they said I would need a note from my doctor. I did plan on getting said note but then we spent that money on a trip to Sydney to see the Lord of Rings museum exhibit which was being extended an extra week.

What else have I done on the list? Play Poker in Vegas which isn’t really fair because I was living in Vegas when I first decided to make a list.

I’ve also seen Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC which was a disappointment because I found out that the theatre had collapsed in 1893, was rebuilt as a warehouse, then abandoned in 1931 then rebuilt and restored in 1967. So it’s not like it’s really “the same” Ford’s Theatre anymore. The museum in the basement was pretty cool though, seeing the coat President Lincoln was wearing stained with his blood really brings it all into reality. The coat had a big section cut out where somebody had been cutting it up and selling small squares of it as souvenirs to people.

Actually I’ve never actually “made” the list as in formally write it down. But if I did number one on things still to see would be the Aurora Borealis. I’ve wanted to see that since I heard about it. Then in no particular order Mount Rushmore, Great Wall of China (a remote part), Easter Island, Great Pyramid of Giza & the Sphinx. I’m a little wishy-washy about those last two now that I’ve checked the area out via Google Earth. The place looks like tourist hell. I would also have to include Uluru here in Australia.

I’ve had a chance to see the Statue of Liberty and to go up into the World Trade Center when I was in New York a few years ago. But I passed on those “standard” tourist things in favor of some other things. Of course now that the two towers aren’t there anymore I wish I hadn’t passed. I get to see the guy and kitchen they based the “Soup Nazi” on in Seinfeld, a Broadway show whose name I can’t remember, and hang out in Grand Central Station to people watch. I also saw a really scary, crazy, homeless man down in the sub-way. Not things on “the list” but still pretty cool.

Now after reading all this, you may think you really know what kind of dweeb I am but you'd be wrong. What was I doing while hanging out on the beach in the Daintree Rainforest? New Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo DS.

Fury / Duke Nuke'm Forever Combo Pack

Adam has an interview about Fury over at Game World Network where he totally busts me for making a Duke Nuke'm Forever joke.

ComicBase

I recently bought the Archive Edition of ComicBase. It’s a really powerful comic book inventory database program that is tied in with Comic Buyers Guide prices and has weekly updates (example of a weekly update here) of prices and new comics. The 1 long box, 2 short boxes and handful of graphic novels I brought with me to Australia have grown into 1 long box, 8 short boxes and over 200 graphic novels. In comparison I have 20ish long boxes and an unknown number of graphic novels in storage back in Vegas.

ComicBase is way and above the other inventory programs out there. Some of the other ones I’ve looked at aren’t much better than the one I wrote in basic on my Commodore 64 back in the 80’s. I called it CIA for Comic Inventory Assistant. Cool, huh?

I bought the Archive Edition of ComicBase, the most expensive of multiple flavors of the program, because God forbid I not spend forty bucks when I could spend three hundred. The Archive Edition comes with over 150,000 cover scans so you can see pictures of the issues in the program. It also allows me lots of cool options for the Windows slide show screensaver. I really wish the slide show screensaver didn’t suck so badly though, if the Megabucks Slot Machines used the same type of randomizer we’d all be multi-millionaires.

I also sprung for the handheld bar code reader which allows me to jump to and batch add comics just by scanning their bar code; provided they are new enough to have bar codes and that they were entered when the issue was added. This version of the program allows you to submit new or corrected data so I’m doing my part by entering and sending in the ones I have that it doesn’t. I would love to say I’m doing it out of a generous nature and desire to share with others, but honestly I just like playing with the bar code reader. Bleep!

I do have a problem with the program though. It is very ridged on what it will report. I was expecting to be able to build detailed, custom queries and reports. It allows me a number of custom fields and check boxes but I can’t build reports based on them. It also doesn’t allow me to build reports based on many of the fields it has built in nor does it let me alter the report format.

For example I want to print a wish list. It allows me to easily build an “Issues I am missing” list by taking the list of titles where I own at least one issue the series of and printing the issues I am missing. The problem is that I have a lot of comics from a lot of titles where I am not interested in the issues I am missing. I can easily print a report based on titles in my collection and then not select those titles, but besides the hassle of going through several hundred titles to do that I also have a good number of comics on my wish list where I don’t own any comics in that title series.

What I want to do is to be able to mark comics as being on my wish list and then to print just a list of those marked issues. To do that under the current system I have to use the provided “marked” check box which is fine, but then I have to print a title report of EVERY comic in the database and tell it to only print marked issues. At least I think that is what I have to do because it’s been a few hours and its still “preparing report.” I'll let it run overnite before giving it up.

I’m thinking at this point, at least for the wish list functionality, I’m better severed by the pocket-sized notebook I carry around.

Fury-Sanctuary Interview

Fury-Sanctuary just posted an interview I did with them last week. In the interview I paraphrased some quotes and then challenged them to find out where they are from. Cameron has been sitting in the IRC channel this morning and says that they arn't having any luck so far. I quote Kriuq "The internet is failing me".

I also signed up for some News Alerter service at MMORPG.COM which tells me they are kicking off their brand new series of exclusive screenshots. They say I should check back every Monday for 2 new images from Fury, the new MMORPG in production at Auran. Currently they have 2 shots of the School of Life. I'm pretty sure those are the first shots of that area. They are okay, its just doesn't look as cool frozen in a screenshot after you are used to seeing it while running around and animating.

Console Modding Versus Region Coding

Ozymandias is a Microsoft employee with a blog. I tried rewording that several times so that it didn’t sound like I was saying something I wasn’t. But it kept coming out sounding like, well like “Tommy is a 3 year old, a 3 year old with a gun!” But that isn’t what I’m saying at all. He is a blogger and he works for Microsoft, that’s all I’m saying.

Oh, and he wrote a bit entitled: The Problem with Modchips where he shares his thoughts and opinions on Modding. Modding being the purchasing and installing of special chips into your console game system; which in turn allows for playing of import games, creating your own custom content, and piracy. You all knew that unless you’re my mother reading my blog again. Everyone say hello to my mother.

So of those three in reverse order:

3) Piracy
Piracy is wrong. They are stealing. I too am a game developer and you are taking money out of my pocket. I don’t care if you wouldn’t have bought the game anyway. If you are playing it you should be paying for it.

2)Custom Content
Bah. He goes into the business model of the console systems and explains why you shouldn’t be doing what you want with your own hardware, making your own games but instead should be buying official games.

You know I don’t really see this as being a problem. I think the very few hardcore people that are making and sharing their own content are buying just as many games, if not more, than the rest of us. Plus they are gaining experience and are better positioned to get a job in the industry.

1) Import Games
Okay this is where he really looses me. Let me quote him:

The desire to play import games is at least a reason I can rationally understand, but cannot condone. Sure, there are games you might want to play that are either released earlier or, quite possibly, not released at all in your region. But sometimes companies have good reasons to either not release a title into a region or release it at different dates. It may be because of the time and cost of localization, marketing plans, ad buys, cultural considerations, or perhaps even because of the impact of piracy in the region. Whatever the case, it’s safe to assume the publisher has thought about it. The good news is that most publishers are developing with multiple platforms, regions, and languages in mind up front, so this is becoming less and less of an argument. (After all, it’s in the publisher’s best interest to sell as many copies as possible, right?)

What a load of bull$#!+ (remember my mother may be reading this so nobody tell her how to translate those symbols.) They might be valid reasons why the company didn’t release the game in that region, but none of those reasons are valid about why people that are actually paying above and beyond the cost of the game should be allowed to enjoy the game. They are spending their hard earned (well I assume its hard earned, but lets not judge) cash for the game. This is yet another sale for the publisher. On top of that they are also paying for the shipping cost of the game from what ever other region they are buying it from. Plus they paid for the mod chip and maybe even paid to have it installed. All of that so they could get a copy of a game that isn’t available in their own region.

Lets go through Ozymandias’ lame reasons and see if we can find any downside:

Time & Cost of Localization
The Company didn’t take the time nor did they pay the cost of localization and yet they made an extra sale of the game can’t really see the downside here.

Marketing Plans
Let’s not let the tail wag the dog here. Marketing plans are things to which the company does in order to get people to buy the game. Somebody bought the game, job well done have a cookie. It doesn’t spoil any marketing plan if somebody buys the game early.

“Oh my God! Somebody bought the game before our TV commercial came out! Our marketing plan is ruined! What ever will we do?”

Actually somebody buying the game early is a marketing plan itself. It is like when movie studios do sneak peeks before the movie is released in order to generate a buzz about the movie. I can’t see a problem here unless the game really sucks and they are afraid that the early purchaser is going to tell everybody it is turd in a box before their marketing plan can trick more people into wasting their money on it.

Ad Buys
WTF? He doesn’t have a lot of good reasons so he tried to fake another one but it this is more “Marketing Plan” crap. Seriously somebody bought the game without having to have witnessed some marketing spin; again I can’t see the downside.

Cultural Considerations
Like what? I think what he really means is that if the company doesn't think the game is the kind of game that would sell well in that country. I completely understand that a game company might think this due to the country's prevailing culture. That is a perfectly reasonable justification for not having released the game in that region. I do not expect a company to spend all the money it would take to sell a game in a region if they don’t think anybody there is going to buy it… but somebody did buy it! We are talking import purchases here remember. Somebody is buying the game even though the company didn’t release it in their region. That’s and extra sale!

I am not even trying to use any of this as a reason to say the company should have released the game in some other country. I know that just because some people imported the game doesn’t mean there would be enough people who would buy it to justify the expense of releasing it in that country. I am only saying that this isn’t a reason to be against somebody going through the extra effort of buying and importing it. Somebody bought the game that otherwise wouldn’t. Once more there is no downside.

Impact of Piracy in the Region
Okay this is the KEY POINT deserving of capital letters. If they are against modding of console systems for the very understandable reason of possible software piracy then why keep with the practice of region coding and restricting of consoles and games? It is companies like Microsoft that are region restricting the damn things in the first place! If people didn’t have to mod their console in order to play a game they imported from another region they wouldn’t also be able to play pirated games. Would some people still mod their consoles to play pirated games, sure. But modding wouldn’t be going more and more main stream with each console generation and in turn increasing the market for pirated games! (slam your fist down on the table when you read that, it helps with the effect.)

I do not currently own a modded console. But I do own a region 1 (United States region) Microsoft XBox, Sony Playstation 2, and Nintendo Game Cube each of which I bought the week they were released while I was in the United States. As you should know I moved to and am currently living in Australia now. Australia is region 4. I can not go down to my local game store and purchase games to play on any of those three systems because they only play region 1 games and aren’t modded to play region 4 games. My only choice is to import them from the United States which is a big pain in the ass so I haven’t been doing it.

In the past I have always bought all console systems that have come out right when they were released. I have yet to buy an XBox 360 and I probably won’t be buying a Sony PS/3 or Nintendo Wii right when they are released because I don’t want to buy a console that is restricted to region 4 because I will most likly be be going back to the US sometime in the future. Now I will admit I am not even sure if any of these systems are region restricted but I haven’t read anything to the contrary.

Game companies have not gained any new console video game sales from me in the last 2.5 years and they are losing out on selling me their new expensive console systems all because of region coding. The only way they will regain me as a customer is if I move back to the United States or if I am willing to start modding. Well either that or Microsoft can ship me a region 4 XBox and copy of every region 1 XBox game I own and then be willing to swap them all back plus any new one's I've bought while in Australia for region 1 versions if I go back to the United States. Somehow I'm sure they will have some detailed buisness model rational on why that isn't a good idea even though the current buisness model that I just spelled out doesn't have me doing any actual buisness with them.

Doing localized language versions is understandable, doing different packaging for each reason makes marketing sense, doing NTSC and PAL version is still unfortunately necessary even if just about all new PAL TVs support NTSC signals. But adding the region coding requires additional coding, packaging and versions without adding any real benefit in return. I’ve heard some song in dance in the past about how it’s done because retailers are demanding it, but since they are the ones selling and shipping the games to people ordering them outside their own region I do not believe it.

Papercraft Video Game Models

I really love vintage video game artsy stuff. I stumbled on this paper art site that has "papercraft" models from the Advanced Wars series, Legend of Zelda, Tomb Raider and others. The site offers template downloads of all the models with full instructions on how to assemble them so you can make your own.

I of course rushed to down load and print out copies of my own that I can now leave sitting on my desk, unassembled, for the next few years because who has that kinda time?

Fury Fan Videos

Online Welten has posted two videos of Fury that he took during E3. The first one above shows a few minutes of Vortex combat and the second video is just them watching the slow motion promo video that has been out for awhile.

E3 Cancled?

Next-Gen.Biz is reporting that the major video game industry convention, in its present form, has been cancelled for next year and the foreseeable future. READ MORE

It's still Sunday in the rest of the world so they story doesn't seem to have spread much yet but I am sure we will see a lot more of this on all the news sites by tomorrow. The last I had heard was that the show had gotten so big they were planning on moving it to the Las Vegas Convention Center in 2008.

Personally I thought that the event was a bit of a money sink for a lot of reasons. But it did serve one really good purpose which was to put a lot of industry people together. It allowed industry people looking for jobs to get a lot of interviews with developers, it allowed developers to meet and show their products to a lot of publishers, etc. Just having been there as a developer looking for a publisher I got to experience a lot of that first hand. I loved going to the show before that just to see it all and I know a lot of people here at Auran who had never been before were just awestruck at how big and exciting it was. It was even great now that my former Westwood Studios co-workers are spread to the four winds to get a chance to run into a few of them.

If this story is true I'll be very disappointed.

Audio Books

I have been listening to unabridged audio books for many many years now. I was a big customer of Books-On-Tape and Recorded Books Inc. which were mail order rental companies plus I had a huge collection of well over 200 or so titles. For example I haven’t read a single Harry Potter book but instead own them all unabridged on CD. I also own the entire Lord of the Rings set including The Hobbit and the Silmarillion unabridged on CD.

Before I left the states I sold most of my collection to a used book store. I only kept ones that I thought I would be really listen to many more times such as my unabridged Douglas Adams collection which includes all 5 (1, 2, 3, 4 & 5) books in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhikers Guide trilogy (plus 1-4 abridged which were my first audio books and were out long before the unabridged books were available), Last Chance to See, the 2 Dirk Gently books(1 & 2). (also a copy of the first one abridged which again came out before unabridged version), Douglas Adams at the BBC and Salmon of Doubt. The problem with these is all but the last two are on cassette not CD. Last time I listened to them I noticed that they are starting to exhibit some wear, really bad wear as they are about 18 years old. When my last cassette player gave out on me I figured I would get a new cassette player and then convert them to MP3 files so I would always have them to listen to before they completely disintegrated on me. Well you might not have noticed but you can’t easily buy a cassette player anymore.

Then I noticed several books on iTunes that I would like; most notably George R.R. Martin’s New York Times best-selling series: A Song of Ice and Fire. I already own and have read books 1 through 3 in the series. Let me expand on that because it kind of plays into my point later on. I already own the books 1 through 4 in hard cover and have 2 copies of books 1 through 3 in paper back. I also own two copies of the unabridged audio version on CD of book 4, though the second copy was given as a gift by my brother in-law who didn’t know I had already bought it for myself.

I bought books 1 and 2 in the series from iTunes. I would buy book 3 but although they have book 4, they don’t offer book 3. I wrote them email about it, no answer.

Here is the list of unabridged audio books I have purchased from iTunes since I bought my iPod:
• A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin for $52
• A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin for $27
• Evermore by Sean Williams for $8
• The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett for $35
• The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett for $35
• Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock for $19
• Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde for $26

That is over $200 dollars in not a long period of time. Actually the last 5 of those were in the last 2 weeks. Point I am trying to make is I am the target hardcore customer of unabridged audio books.

I am really dying for the 3rd book in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. I tried listening to the 4th book on CD when I first bought it back in December but it has been so long since I had read the first 3 that I was lost. Yes, I actually READ them! Just because I listen to audio books doesn't mean that I don't also read books. Normally I have two books going at once, one that I'm listening to and one that I'm readying before going to sleep at night. Anyway I started re-reading the series but I was slogging through them very slowly and kept having days pass by where I would read something else at night. That is why I jumped at them on iTunes.

I noticed that they are provided to iTunes by a company called Audible.com. Heading over to their web site looking for the 3rd book, I found they sell the audio books but you can’t browse their collection unless you join. You can browse their categories and see about 8 titles in each, but that is all they will show you. At the lowest level plan you pay $9.95 for a re-occurring yearly membership where you can download 1 audio book. But I want to see their selection before I give them money. As with all shopping on the internet I’m a bit suspicious of anything that wants my money and the fact that they won’t even let me see what they are selling before taking my money makes me think they are hiding something.

I know they are a legit company. It would even appear they are selling downloads recorded by both Recorded Books Inc. and Books-On-Tape. A few of the books I have bought through iTunes are labled "Recorded by: Recorded Books Inc. Offered by: Audible.com" But still I hesitate and if I, their core customer type, hesitate; how many new customers are they scaring away? What hoops and hidden dangers luck inside Audible.com? What, dear reader, will our hero do?

2 new Fury Interviews

I have an interview up at MMORPG.com. You can tell it’s actually me who wrote the answers because of all the spelling mistakes. For example I wrote “sneak peak” instead of “sneak peek”.

There really is a message written as I’ve described it in the last question. It is one of two references to one of my favorite book series that I snuck in there.

Cameron, who sits next to me and is one of two designers who recently shaved his head, also has an interview up over at Fury-Sanctuary. He doesn’t get a cool header graphic though.

Half-life Portals

The Half-life Portals video has been going around and if you haven’t seen it you should give it a look-see. It shows off the puzzle type game play that I expected to find in Prey but didn’t. The portals in Prey weren’t used to any real effect except to A) to get you to a new place in much the same way a newly unlocked door can and B) allow mobs to spawn out of nowhere which is nothing new. Prey also had the gravity stuff which I liked but wasn’t used for nearly as much puzzles as it could have been.

The Portals video shows that it is much more a puzzle game, a 3D first person puzzle game, which is what I was looking for and failed to find in Prey. Half-life Portals is based on and being done by the team that did Narbacular Drop which I just downloaded. Expect that site to be down a lot as everybody and their giant robotic dog pet is heading over there to check it out since the Portal video has been released.

...actually its been a few days now, I started writing this post last Wednesday or Thursday and am just now getting around to finishing it. I forgot about it in all honestly and only just remember when uninstalling iTunes and now have to reboot. It’s a big pain involving copying all these Audio Books from my iPod to my home computer. What a pain in the ass.

I Told Them "No Archery"

Did you ever read an interview with a game developer and suddenly realize that he isn’t really answering any of the questions? I mean he is answering them by spouting off marketing points that don’t really say anything you didn’t already know or could guess. Take for example this question and answer regarding the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean MMO game that I found on Worthplaying:

Q: What differentiates this game from other MMOs and pirate games?

The biggest difference between this game and other MMOs is that the pirate-themed world we are designing will feature some supernatural elements that are unique to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise: defending your ship from sea monsters, fighting skeleton pirates, and casting voodoo spells. We will also include the classic pirate activities: epic sea battles, searching for buried treasure, playing dice and cards, and carousing in towns.

My first thought that this must be some new use of the word “unique” of which I was previously unaware. I mean aren’t defending your ship from sea monsters, fighting skeleton pirates, and casting voodoo spells pretty standard? Did this guy not play Secret of Monkey Island? Here is a posting from Ron Gilber, Designer of the Secret of Monkey Island, on his blog Grumpy Gamer which mentions the similarities and inside jokes that exist in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that relate to The Secret of Monkey Island.

The point of this was that he didn’t really answer the question because none of those things differentiates that from other pirate games. Hell the pirate game I worked on, Pirates the Legend of Black Kat, had all those things. Here are some more screenshots from my old resume site.

He doesn’t really answer the question, just rattles off some stuff in his game. But you know what he wanted to say don’t you? He wanted to say, “The thing that is going to differentiates Pirates of the Caribbean MMO from other games is that mine is gonna be really great!” But he can’t say that. He would also probably love to go on about some really cool features that putting in but he can’t do that either because until those features are in the game, working, and balanced they are likely to change or get cut. People reading interviews tend to carve words in stone. Then if ANY part of those features changes, they like to drag those stones out, tie them to your legs and send you for a long walk off a short pier.

Another thing that developers are afraid to do is say that something isn’t in the game. For example if somebody were to ask me if we were going to have player housing in Fury I would be afraid to just say, “No. we aren’t.” But that is what I would want to say. And as soon as somebody opened their mouth to complain I would calmly explain to them that there is no player housing in Battlefield 2. There is no player housing in Command & Conquer! There is no player housing features in checkers! And then, when they pointed out that those are different kind of games I would beat them senseless with my keyboard while screaming, “Exactly my point” over and over.

So all that leads up to the fact that Weezer_blue posted about bows and archery in Fury over on the Fury-Sanctuary forums. I watched the thread for a little bit and then decided to bit the bullet and just come right out and say that there is no archery in Fury. It was a big risk. I think I might have actually pulled it off. Check it out its pretty good. Here are some quoted responses:

I must admit that this is certainly the best reply I have seen from a dev saying NO! to his fans.
-Tchakra

Well said.
-goku19123

Best answer from a Dev, ever...
-Bladen Skull

Best Answer from a dev or PR person ever...
- Lissar

That's easily the best response from a Dev I've read in a while, even if I don't particularly like the news.
- Weezer_blue

Another Fury Fan Site and Another Fury Interview

Recently Library of Rage went online as Fury's second fan site.

MMOsite.com has also posted an interview with our Lead Designer, Adam Carpenter.
Auran will be showing Fury at PAX, thats the Penny Arcade Expo, next month. Unfortunately I won't be attending. I did however do an interview that should be up on MMORPG.com next week.

Prey

I bought Prey PC DVD Saturday afternoon at about 4ish in the afternoon. I had played the demo and thought the puzzle aspects of the portals and gravity changing stuff might have potential. I’ve always wanted to design a tesseract into a FPS. I used to use them in my AD&D campaigns after reading about how it work in an issue of Dragon Magazine back in the early 80's. I even managed to work one into my old live action game. There isn't one in Prey, but with their engine there could be one. So anyway sometime just about midnight I finished the game. One night that was it. I’m going to see if somebody at works wants to buy the very slightly used copy off me.

I don’t really fault the game for being short. I remember a good number of years ago when everybody was raving about the first Max Pain game saying it’s only flaw was that you could finish it over a weekend. I thought that was a good thing because a weekend is really the only time had between work and (at the time) raiding in Everquest.

It is why Prey is short that bugs me. I really feel that the designers dropped the ball on the game. I think the biggest problem was that you can’t die. Well you die but then you go to the spirit world, shoot some ghosts that fly around you, and then you are resurrected right back where you left off. This means there is no point trying to figure out how to get through a difficult level because you just blast away until you die, you resurrect, continue, rinse and repeat.

Because of this “no dying” thing the designers were allowed to get away with building some really bad boss encounters. I cannot believe they designed those encounters without expecting you to die, die a few times, to get through them. I’m sure if some really good, twitch-master, 14-year old FPS video game ultra-expert sat down he could do it, but me… I died a few times. There was a little thinking involved with finding the ‘trick’ to killing some of the bosses but nothing that stumped me for more than half a second.

I can almost see the designers doing a little creative thinking and coming up with some cool ideas for bosses… and then just putting them in as is with little follow up or additional tweaking. I’m just speculating here but I really didn’t get the feeling they spent much time on how the player is supposed to fight the boss. They didn’t seem to put in other things in the area that the player can use to avoid the boss when he charges, or shoots his barrage of missiles, or whatever. Most boss fights felt like you were just supposed to go toe to toe with the mob, die, shoot some ghosts with your spirit boy, resurrected and continue where you left off.

Another problem with Prey is the horrible script and voice acting. I certainly didn’t feel like the main was a Cherokee warrior reconnecting with his cultural heritage. I thought he was a doofus, a complete dork. I can certainly see why Jen, his girlfriend, didn’t want to leave the reservation with him. Starting back at the beginning: He is disillusioned with the whole reservation thing, doesn’t believe in any of that spiritual nonsense, and wants to leave and start a new life. Okay, I get that. But then Aliens abduct him (notice I don’t associate myself, the player, as being the main character), his girlfriend and the grandfather. The aliens kill his grandfather in front of him and then when he should have died in a fall to his death suddenly finds himself in the spirit world where he meets his grandfather again, gets the spirit of his childhood hawk pet as a companion, and learns to separate his body from go spirit walking. You would think by this point he would be open to new things, start to sit up and pay attention to what the old (dead) guy is saying. But no, next time he goes back to the spirit world he is the same stupid doofus.

I love lines like, “I have to find Jen! She has to be close by!”

Does she? Does she really HAVE to be close by? She wasn’t by the way.

The back-story, the story germ itself was okay. It just failed in its execution. Getting Art Bell for the radio bits was cool though.

In conclusion I thought the game was just okay. Great technical aspects and good artwork but the design let me down. Multi-player might be really good but I have World of Warcraft and Battlefield 2 taking up that time. I also downloaded The Ship from Steam last night too. At $20 bucks I figured it was worth a shot. I only got to play the offline version for 10 minutes today before we went out so I still don't know if it is any good or not.

Oh if you do spend a evening playing Prey, watch through to the end of the credits for a short sequel set-up. It’s nothing great but you might as well squeeze the last drop out of the game.

Lords of the Dead

Lords of the Dead is a very old guild having gotten started in SSI’s Dark Sun Online in 1995. They were a powerful PK guild on the Baja server in Ultima Online and have also had a presence in Asheron’s Call, Dark Age of Camelog, Everquest, Guild Wars, Shadowbane and Star Wars Galaxies.

They added FURY to their list of upcoming games they were interested in at the beginning of the month and have just now wrangled a very good set of Questions and Answers from our lead Designer. Both of those two links are hosted in their forums so you can read the reaction posts of their community as well.

Ganked versus Pwned 2

After rereading my previous post just now; I should have been more careful writing it. The key element that differentiates being ganked and being pwned is expectation.

Just because you are a 3rd level character and you are killed by a 75th level character doesn’t mean you were ganked.

If you walked up and smacked the 75th level character and he turned around and killed you just by raising his eyebrow, you were pwned. If you were wandering around in an area of the game mean for characters of that level and one of them popped your head off as he rode by, you were pwned. You should know better in these cases. You deserved to get beaten. You brought it on yourself. Did you really expect thing to happen differently?

-Now for my answers to the 5 situation questions:

1. You have a group of high level players hiding out at the crossroads and along comes a lower level player picking flowers. Your “gank” group leaps out and starts smacking him around when suddenly his allies who were just using him as bait teleport in and kill you and your team.

You’re expectation was that there would be a fight. You instigated the fight, you just didn’t realize they were not only expecting it as well, they were also better prepared. You were pwned.

An even more complicated example of that situation happened to me in WoW last month. I was on an alternate low level character grinding through some quest mobs when a character of my level that was flagged for PvP kept trying to steal my mobs. Because we are on a PvE server he can’t attack me because I am not flagged for PvP until I attack him.

Now, I’m not a complete idiot and I knew he was just doing it to bait me into attacking him. And eventually when I was finished I thought I would toss a fireball his way before running off. I didn’t want to waste time fighting him, just wanted to have the last word so to speak. As soon as that fireball hit him his friend, the high level rogue, popped out of hiding and sends me to the graveyard.

Now I felt like I was ganked. He was definitely baiting me. But it was my fault. I knew he was baiting me, I knew that the way he was baiting me was specifically against the rules but I took the bait and I got pwned.

2. You sneak into the other team’s tower and go to grab their flag when 6 opponents who were hiding behind the door fill you full of holes.

You are in the other team’s tower. Again your expectation is that there is going to be a fight. You may have hopped to avoid it by sneaking in, but you failed. You were pwned.

3. You are tooling around in the game when you wife walks by wearing that skimpy outfit she wore on the honeymoon. You chase her off into the bedroom and return to the keyboard 3 minutes later to find you were killed.

You weren’t at the computer. Your expectations have much more to do with the bird and bees than with the game. This one is a very grey area. Because you left the computer with your character in a place where he could be attacked and killed, your expectation should have been that you could be in for a fight. But I am going to say you were ganked but you deserved it.

4. You are dueling another player when suddenly he does something that causes the game to bug out and kill you.

This one may seem like a grey area. Obviously your expectation is for a fight by the fact that you are dueling. But taking advantage of a bug is an exploit and not only completely unfair but should get the other player suspended or banned from the game. Exploits are outside of your expectation of the game. You were ganked.

5. A game master is in the game doing a story event of some sort. You decide to attack him with your meteor showers of instant death. But it doesn’t have any effect on his character and he turns and kills you with a developer command.

What did you think would happen? You attacked a GM. You were attempting to disrupt an in game event. You expectation should have been that you were going to get pwned and you were.

Ganked versus Pwned

After last E3 it became clear to me that way to many people don’t know the difference between being “ganked” and being “pwned.” These are two completely different ways of getting your butt kicked online, they do not mean the same thing.

For example in my upcoming game Fury, we advertise there is no “ganking.” But that doesn’t mean you aren’t going to get “pwned.” So let’s see if we can straighten this out.

First off let me preface this by say that for the purpose of this discussion I don’t care about the origin of the terms, who is credited with first coining them or what other uses they have besides how they are applied to gaming. I just want to stop them from blurring together and becoming synonymous when applied to being defeated.

That being said lets look at ganked and pwned on Urban Dictionary. You can kind of see the difference in the two words but there is way to much signal to noise on that site.

So now let’s try Wikipedia where we find ganked and pwned. Those are much better definitions.

Do you see the difference?

“Ganking” is when a player or players use a massive and unfair advantage to defeat another player. The defeated player wasn’t expecting to be in a fight and didn’t really stand a chance.

“Pwned” is soundly defeating a prepared opponent. The loser may have been caught by a surprise tactic, he may not really have stood a chance against the better player that defeated him, but he knew he would be in for a fight and got beat bad.

Examples of being Ganked: (Edited after I put up next post)
• You are jumped and killed and killed by a much more powerful character in a place where you thought you were safe from PvP.
• You are defeated while AFK (edit: very grey area, if you left your character somewhere he was vulnerable and that means you don't have the 'unexpected' excuse. But killing somebody who is AFK is pretty lame so I'll go ahead and say you were ganked. You deserved it though.)
• You opponent takes advantage of a exploit to defeat you
• You are attacked by surprise and caught completely unprepared and are defeated before you even knew what was going on
• You are tricked into performing what the game thinks is a hostile action in an area where NPCs will kill you if you do hostile actions
• You are attacked while you are already fighting another player or NPC and defeated

Examples of being Pwned:
• You duel somebody and they defeat you without taking much damage
• You jump out of the bushes in an attempt to gank a lower level player and he kills you instead
• You do something really stupid and your opponent defeats you.
• You talk a lot of smack about how you are going to defeat your opponent and he beats you

I guess it is important to mention some examples that are neither ganked or pwned. These are just cases where you won and dancing around saying pwned them will just make you look stupid and if he starts whining that you ganked him makes him an idiot:
• You are dueling somebody and beat them but not by a lot nor by any superior playing on your part
• You are fighting another player and defeat him by accident caused by some advantage that neither of you was aware of
• You defeat a more powerful opponent who was already just about dead from another fight

Now let’s have a quiz.

1. You have a group of high level players hiding out at the crossroads and along comes a lower level player picking flowers. Your “gank” group leaps out and starts smacking him around when suddenly his allies who were just using him as bait teleport in and kill you and your team. Were you ganked or pwned?

2. You sneak into the other team’s tower and go to grab their flag when 6 opponents who were hiding behind the door fill you full of holes. Were you ganked or pwned?

3. You are tooling around in the game when you wife walks by wearing that skimpy outfit she wore on the honeymoon. You chase her off into the bedroom and return to the keyboard 3 minutes later to find you were killed. Were you ganked or pwned?

4. You are dueling another player when suddenly he does something that causes the game to bug out and kill you. Were you ganked or pwned?

5. A game master is in the game doing a story event of some sort. You decide to attack him with your meteor showers of instant death. But it doesn’t have any effect on his character and he turns and kills you with a developer command. Were you ganked or pwned?

Post your answers in the comments.