Mythos: Two Studios, One New Beginning

After Flagship flagshipped themselves, the free-to-play faux-MMOG Mythos disappeared off the gaming landscape. Now there is news that Hannbitsoft managed to hang on to the Mythos license and tech upon Flagship’s demise and are putting not one, but two, development studios to work on resurrecting the game:

The funny thing about Mythos is that it was essentially finished, with future plans being more about additional content than sweeping changes. Hannbitsoft, however, seem to have tasked the new studio (two of ‘em, in fact - T3 Entertainment and Redbana US) with a fairly significant rethink. “MYTHOS is currently in a good condition where it’s being reconstructed” says the official release. “We are trying to keep the strengths that MYTHOS used to have, and strengthen them even more to make more suited as an online game.”

While the linked article notes that Mythos was "essentially finished", something I strongly disagree with, the questions have to be asked.

Will it remain free-to-play?
How many changes will be made?
And what's the end goal? Traditional MMO? Quick time waster? Other!?

When I last played Mythos, Flagship was in the process of gutting the game from a Guild Wars-style hub-world design to an "Overworld" traditional MMOG. I did not like the move and I believe Mythos lost its charm in the process.

It will be interesting to see what the new developers do with Mythos. I am hoping they can put the technology behind the game to better use than Flagship. The original idea that Mythos was going to be updated on-the-fly while gamers were playing never came to fruition and by the end of Flagship's existence, Mythos turned from a neat little testbed for Hellgate's multiplayer tech to a washed out hack'n'slash game trying to be an MMOG.

Darkfall, The Lost Review (made possible, unknowingly, by Kieron Gillen)

Smart people, when confronted with a bee's nest, avoid it. Others carelessly walk into it and learn their lesson for the next go-around. The rest of us get a stick.

Not letting a crisis go to waste, I present a review of Darkfall, as made possible by Kieron Gillen, edited by me, and published below without permission.

There's an urge to give it one out of ten. Maybe a two, because two sounds more genuine than one. One sounds like foot-stomping petulance. Two sounds considered, as if I really do mean it. I'm not, because I don't, but it'd serve a couple of good purposes. Firstly, if considered solely as a classical game, Darkfall is bloody terrible. Secondly, if you're the sort of person who cares about the review score, it's almost certainly not for you and I should turn you off as quickly as possible.

That's what a lot of this review is going to be about. Darkfall is a strange, unusual, progressive and unique game, which may even be important for the industry and the development of the form in a handful of ways. It's not for everyone. And I've got to write a review which says that, while not turning "It isn't for everyone" into a challenge for people who quite like to think of themselves as one of the Not Like Everyones.

The name "game" is always going to confuse people. You only really work out what something should be called after a name's codified. Names for mediums are always kind of made up on the fly. "Novel" has a particularly tortured history as a word. Comics comes from the fact they were the funny pages in the paper - but soon became anything but. A century down the line, they realized they should call comics "sequential narrative", which cuts to the core of what the medium is. It'll never stick, because it's so bloody ugly and there's already a name everyone knows. C'est la vie. We're stuck with novels, comics and games - and novels that aren't novel, comics which aren't comic and videogames which aren't...

Darkfall is a videogame that isn't a game. Or at least, the game part is deeply vestigial. It is deeply interactive - in fact, in parts about interaction - but in terms of the mechanics which characterize games, there's "sporadically collecting and killing stuff". It's most like an adventure game, but there are no puzzles. The win/lose state is ironic.

That's fine. As a medium, videogames' fundamental characteristic is interaction. The classical "game" is a form of interaction, but it's not the only thing we can do, and certainly not the only thing we've loved - think of the first half of The Cradle in Thief 3, think about the rollercoaster linear scripted sequences in many shooters where you've got no chance of dying, think of selecting jokes to make in old school LucasArts adventures which don't change anything. Games are more than games. Don't come to Darkfall expecting any of that.

Eyes glazed over? It's safe to say that Darkfall isn't for you. It'll try your patience far more than a mere 500-word "what-are-games-anyway-man?" intro. And it's even more pretentious. No, really.

Darkfall is a riff off the old MMORPG. You choose between six races: Elves, Dwarves, Humans, Mahirim, Orks and Alfar. You're then deposited at the start of your racial capital, with little more than a name, some basic equipment, and a neutral alignment. You’re given two commands. One, go kill stuff. Two, be killed. If you obey, another player will kill you in a couple of minutes and you’ll be told by the death screen you've lost all of your gear. You probably won't do that. You go off and find a wolf to kill. Eventually, after the confrontation, you've wandered outside some clan’s city, in the rain, and you slowly limp inside before being presented with a semi-interactive nightmarish walk around the city before you're finally escorted to the death screen with oblique, brutal images. You’ve just been PK’d. Now the death screen says you've succeeded, and you're deposited back on the selection screen with a race played and five more left to go.

In the previous paragraph, read that wolf as "Wolf". It's not that literal. In fact, if you're looking for literal, you're really in the wrong game. The Wolf is what, for better or worse, puts an end to your character. Everything is explicitly shown, and some ends are suggestively brutal. You suspect that the developers would agree with Poe's famous quote about the death of a beautiful woman being the most poetical topic in the world.

So it's a horror game, in an atmospheric, oblique manner. The atmosphere is the point. It's about as goth as Dracula's armpits. And as dark, though less smelly. The visuals are dated, jaggged, and drab. The smears of sound alternate between semi-pastoral and openly nagging oppressive, swelling brilliantly in the game's set-pieces.

And then there's the actual game. You're on a single track, and any interaction with the controls makes you take another step along this delirious route. If you don't keep moving, someone will find you and I've never actually been brave enough to just leave to see what happens. This fact, for me, is one of the finest formalist parts of the game - that step-to-move captures how you feel when you're actually getting PK’d. Running through houses, knowing something's behind you, trying to escape, knowing you're on a track, trapped...

It's not the only place where interaction is reduced for an aesthetic effect - though generally speaking, they're less successful. For example, to interact with anything in the game, you press F, and then your character will wander over and have a nose at whatever's nearby. To interact, you stop interacting. I more admire the elegance of that control system than its obvious deconstruction. The one total mis-step is removing the run option when you're out of stamina, forcing you to walk around. It actually discourages you from exploring these locations as it takes so long to do. The most interesting parts of the game - this misty lake, this abandoned fort, this massive stage - find their effect slightly neutered.

The stars of the game are the other players. From their visual design, to their animations, to the one-liners they respond with to whatever they just did, each is well characterized and memorable. They live and they die and we know them better for that. Replaying the game for a second time, actively seeing what each player makes of something an earlier player did is part of the... fun? No, fun's not the word. But the interest. To see what happens. To explore.

If you put aside its pace - which is its point - the biggest reservations with it are how it both introduces itself to you and how it uses its game elements. The irony of the lose-everything-on-death undercuts somewhat callously any affection you had for your character, for example. When it clicks, the UI is obvious - icons on a hotbar and a map towards the periphery guiding you towards interesting locations - but when a game throws as many visual distortions over itself, it's easy to miss their importance. There's some minor twitchiness around some of the characters - like running into trees or characters magically appearing, which cuts the atmosphere for a second.

The problem with Darkfall is that to explain it is to ruin it. It's an exploratory game, and being surprised by the first time you see something, and wondering what it's for and what it's about is the main thing. The game rarely spells anything out. You spend a lot of time bemused - sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad - and wondering what it's about.

I'll say this: you'll have a strong opinion on it if you play it. Friend-of-Eurogamer Ed Zitron was profoundly perplexed by the game. Others have come claiming it's a rape simulator - which, for the record, I consider unsupportable by the game, even if you take everything on a solely literal level. It is, at worse, a being raped simulator - though I'd say that was a misreading too. What do I think? Metaphorical story of a character’s growth to adulthood, with each "death" leading to the birth of the next. But that's an essay. I don't know for sure. If you play it, you'll have your take. That's kind of the point too. It sticks with you and provokes thought. It's probably art, if the a-word matters to you.

It's totally no fun. It's interesting, but there isn't a fun bone in its mopey body. But I've paid to go into modern art galleries. I've paid for really oddball, minimalist art films. I've gone to gigs where music is divorced from any physical reaction and raised to some cerebral, abstract place - and plenty of gigs where most sane human beings would consider there was nothing actually musical going on. I haven't, but could pay for experimental theatre tickets. Lots of poetry. Whatever.

In our corner of the world, the thing with close-to-pure art-games... well, they're all pretty much free and buried away on the internet. Darkfall is on one of the biggest game distribution systems in the world, for a reasonable yet "proper" price, and still does what it does. Its existence is a statement of belief that, like any other media, there's a small niche of people who are happy to actually pay for this kind of cultural material.

That's who Darkfall is for. And if you're one of them, Darkfall is probably worth it.

If you're not, really, run for your bloody life.

For those of you lost; Aventurine declined Eurogamer's offer to have Kieron Gillen re-review Darkfall. But don't worry Kieron, I've saved you the pain of having to stoop to their level.

$24 Million Dollar Arsebiscuits

News today, Richard Garriott blasts NCsoft with $24 million lawsuit:

Yesterday, Kotaku broke the news that Garriott was suing his old pals at NCsoft to the tune of $24 million for fraud, and generally being a bunch of fetid arsebiscuits.

Interesting, this shall be.

By the way, what are arsebiscuits?

H is for Hypocrite and Heartless_

Yes, I am playing Free Realms. Yes, I still hate SOE, but I simply can't argue with a quality free games. Yes, I just referred to SOE, game, and quality in the same sentence without any curse words.

After a couple hours of play, I like the basics of Free Realms: do whatever you want, whenever you want. There is competitive, co-op, and solo play galore. Free Realms boils down to a bunch of mini-games connected via a hub world.

So far, I have not run into anything in-game asking for a credit card number, but then again, I was side tracked at the race track with the destruction derby mini-game for most of my playtime. I know micro-transactions are out there and that the card game (which is of great interest to me) relies heavily upon real cash.

I am skeptical that the micro-transaction model can generate enough revenue to support, what seems to be, a traditional game with a significant development footprint. Especially when a lot of game is available free of charge.

My other concern, after a few hours of play on US Server #1, is the lack of socialization in Free Realms between players. I found myself wandering aimlessly, rarely meeting another player in the hub world. In the destruction derby competitive mini-game, it wasn't very clear how to identify other players or how I could communicate with them. On top of that, Free Realms encourages players to always be doing something, which makes it hard to socialize properly.

Oh well, look for me online as Heartless Gamer, male of the human variety.

Quake Live Dev Says Mac and Linux Are "Top Priority"

We have news today that support for Linux and Mac will be coming to Quake Live:

Mac/Linux
These have proved more difficult than expected, but we're getting close. We expect to also be testing Mac and Linux versions of QUAKE LIVE internally this month and then making those publicly available just as soon as we feel they are ready. This work is being done by a separate programmer in parallel with the other work that we're doing, and is his only priority - point being, that this is a top priority for us and not being delayed because of other work.

Personally, I want to know why support for Linux and Mac is even needed. After all, Quake Live is a browser-based game.

Anyways, beta is probably a good time for figuring this stuff out.

Aion and Other NCSoft Titles Available via Steam

Being the Steam connoisseur that I am, not sure how I missed this one: NCSoft adds its titles to Steam.

If you're one of those gamers who prefers the digital minimalist approach as opposed to having game boxes everywhere then you're in luck. MMO-giant NCSoft have announced they will be offering their titles -- including City of Heroes, Guild Wars, and Lineage -- via Steam. They're also planning to offer their latest, most anticipated and shiny MMO, Aion as well when the game launches later this autumn.

Aion has me somewhat intrigued, even though I am on a free-gaming kick currently. There is just something a subscription-based MMOG delivers that freemium, free-to-play, and micro-transaction games don't.

Honestly, it will be great to finally have an MMOG available at launch via Steam. I'm still bitter that Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning was months late to the Steam party.

Not Gone Yet!

Shadowbane, as far as Ubisoft cares, is gone forever.

However, the development team doesn't seem to be giving up without at least some sort of massive send-off.

Following our recent news, the support and enthusiasm the community has shown for Shadowbane has led to an extension of the closure date to July 1, 2009. This should allow the community enough time to play out its final days appropriately. We are looking into various options to make these final days as fun as possible!

Shadowbane, the cockroach of MMOGs-that-should-be-dead-already.

Update: Aeria Games has twittered some interest in buying Shadowbane and keeping it afloat.

@game_zine Not yet. We are discussing with Ubisoft on Shadowbane. Let us know what you think about the game.

@LisaFinefrock Please give us feedback as we are very interested in Shadowbane.

@grumpywalker Please let us know what you love about Shadowbane.

Warhammer Blows

Mythic, attempting to fight another forest fire for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, have come up with the the Winds of Change.

The goal of this system is to ensure the best Open Realm vs. Realm experience for as many people as possible and to prevent server crashes. Overall, this system will only take effect in the most extreme server load situations, and will only happen as a last measure before the zone would actually crash.

In order to accomplish this goal "The Winds of Change" will now teleport a small number of players in Realm vs. Realm lakes to the closest "safe point" when crowds are large enough to threaten the stability of the server. This will generally be the nearest Warcamp, however, it may also be a Chapter Hub within the zone depending on where performance is being impacted the most.

Interesting solution, but any solution that doesn't address the root of a problem is going to face criticism.

Server stability is a fundamental of an MMOG. When there are issues, development needs to come to a screeching halt and all resources need to be redirected to evaluate the stability/performance issues. Mythic has continually shown the opposite, opting to steamroll develop new content in the face of continually worsening performance.

Maybe, Mythic does have all cylinders firing on the problem, but what little they tell the community shows no signs of it and in the case of announcing something like the Winds of Change, one has to wonder if Mythic is taking the problem seriously.

Personally, if this system stays in the game, it nails the door shut on any chances that I would play WAR again.

Update: 29 April, 2009 - As Werit pointed out in the comments, the Winds of Change have been retracted.

After reviewing the metrics and community feedback Mythic have removed the Winds of Change feature from Dark Crag. - Nilax, English Community Manager

Heartless_ Gamer's New Look

I have uploaded my new template for the world to see.

Thanks go out to lawnydesigns for the great base template to build from and the frivolousmotion blog for the tag cloud code.

Please report any bugs to the proper authorities (preferably with browser name and version # if possible).

And my blog roll disappeared into thin air, so stay tuned for a newerish version.

Because I Can!

I am changing my blog layout.

Why? Because I can! And I want to play with some stuff; like a tag cloud!

Watch my progress here.