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Tuesday
3/25/2008 2:15:07 PM
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Michael Wells
I wonder how soon age will begin to play a role in MMORPG's? It would be interesting to have characters who start young, and weaker, and have to train up. Then adulthood, middle age, old age... perhaps in real-time rather than game-play-hours time, so that all of the characters on a server age consistently?
Then you could have cool things... fountains of youth, youth spells, stats changes (perhaps you get wiser, but weaker with age). And glancing at someone would give you a rough idea of their experience level.
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Wednesday
2/27/2008 9:23:04 AM
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Michael Wells
Some online games like EverQuest have magnificently large worlds, where you can run seemingly endlessly through the plains, woods, deserts. But ultimately there is an end and once you've explored an area thoroughly enough, it becomes boring. At the same time, having an "end" to places in the game feels un-natural, no matter how much they dress up borders with natural-looking obstructions like oceans, mountains, cave walls... it seems you should be able to go further than the designers allowed for.
Ever since the days of paper Dungeons & Dragons, and the earliest computer games such as Zork, I've been really looking forward to these developments;
Automated World Generation
This is already done in 2-D games like Heroes of Might and Magic, however it's not seen much in 3-D games.
In online multiplayer games (MMORPG's), it seems that when a player goes to the border of the game, that the system should be able to begin building more world there. If it can do so in real-time then, wow, it would be an amazing rush to just head off into the virtual wilderness and go deeper and further than anyone has ever seen. Add some interesting factors like biologic elements; mutations to the standard set of creatures to create new and interesting species, and you have a very compelling game.
Of course, in an MMORPG, anything you do in the game must be there for others to see. So if you drop a sword in the middle of a forest and someone finds it a year later, it should still be there. Though... a bit rusty I would imagine.
I suspect that Morrowind and Oblivion used a good deal of automated generation techniques, which were then "landscaped" by the game team. That seems almost a pre-requisite because the worlds are just huge.
EverQuest takes a different tactic to world expansion. The team manually creates new zones and adds them on to the game as purchaseable upgrades. Besides being an interesting revenue model, that approach helps keep the game interesting even to its most demanding players.
Planet-sized Spherical Worlds
Obviously, the idea of never-ending world generation has a limit of usability, so it seems logical to go with the natural spherical planet design. If you go far enough in any direction, you eventually end up where you started. And when you eventually run out of space, you simply allow deeper dungeons, better ocean exploration, or you start a new planet.
This seems relatively trivial by today's standards. Storage cost continues to reduce, so today (with client-side rendering) you can place the storage burden on the customer. The more actively they explore the game, the more hard drive space they need. The game client silently buffers world model in the background, even when the user is not playing, to prepare for the next gaming session.
Once internet speeds are up to snuff, rendering can occur server-side so that the clients get thin (a gamepad, a screen, and a NIC), and at that point the client needs no hard drive space at all.
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Saturday
6/3/2006 11:35:16 PM
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Michael Wells
The characters in Oblivion are stunning. And--it's really something you have to see to belive--every one of them looks different. Not just clothing or skin color tints--I mean completely unique faces.
It turns out that computer games are getting so advanced, that there are technology companies emerging behind the scenes to handle complex tasks like face modelling.
Here's an interesting list of the technologies used in Oblivion.
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Saturday
6/3/2006 10:56:33 PM
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Michael Wells
A few years ago I bought an $850 Windows PocketPC as a means to organize my... little random bits of data. Schedules, notes, address book, even a bit of music (though memory was a whopping 64 MB then, so you could only fit a few songs).
One of the cooler things I found to install was a free version of those old Infocom text adventure games like Zork -- great games that brought back memories of the Apple IIe and the pre-Microsoft world.
By today's standards, Zork is to Oblivion, what the children's book "See Spot Run" is to the movie "Armaggedon". That is, Zork is text, only text, and sparse text at that... add lots of imagination to fill in the gaps.
But having these Infocom games on my PDA was great, see, because I could pop one open right where I left off, instantly, and pause it just as quickly by pressing a button. No saving. No loading. No waiting for the game to startup. No DVD's to carry around. This meant that I finally had something fun to do every time I was stuck waiting for a taxi, or waiting for a train, or stuck in a taxi, or in a train, or, in an elevator (56 floors takes awhile, and occasionally you can get stuck in that elevator)...
If you look around the commuter train today, you see a lot of people actually playing those ditzy little cellphone games like breakout and snake... only suddenly those games aren't so ditzy anymore...
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Saturday
6/3/2006 10:42:07 PM
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Michael Wells
From this article.
This is going to happen eventually -- already we can see gaming controllers heading in a direction that involves the player physically. The ultimate direction of this is that new-school computer games will challenge the strength and endurance of its players just as much as the old-school gaming interfaces challenged attention and reflex.
In 10 years, it may just be that the buffest, most muscular dudes walking down the street are all computer gamers.
But I'm not certain that computer gaming should ever be part of the traditional Olympics. The reason is rather simple -- the audience interface will never compare.
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Tuesday
5/30/2006 8:53:36 AM
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Michael Wells
In its broadest sense, my business is information management -- so creative uses of modern content tools like wikis really jump out at me.
Traditionally, gaming enthusiasts, especially RPG enthusiasts, have created and published walkthroughs. A walkthrough is a beginning-to end detailed summary of how to play the game, how to solve various quests, certain tips that might be useful for certain character classes, and so on and so forth.
The point is, that's a lot of work for one person to do, and it ends up with essentially only a single person's perspective (plus any emailed notes from other players, that they've chosen to integrate).
Wikis are the collaborative equivalent -- essentially a website that anyone can edit using only their web browser. Players can contribute new content, fix errors, add notes, etc., and keep the content as perfect and up-to-date as possible.
For Oblivion (and a number of other great games) the UESP Wiki performs this service. It's based on MediaWiki, the open source technology behind Wikipedia, and it's absolutely amazing how much player-generated content the UESP Wiki contains. Especially when you consider that the game was released not two months ago?
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Tuesday
5/30/2006 8:52:41 AM
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Michael Wells
Despite the fact that computers are my profession, I spend the majority of my time immersed in "application space". Primarily, that means web technologies, .NET, servers, and business logic.
Focused in this way, it seems that other areas of computing--even fundamental changes in the Windows configuration paradigm--can sneak by me unnoticed. Imagine my surprise when I purchased three (yes, three) new computer games, and then discovered that my 18-month-old Shuttle XPC simply could not play any of them.
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Wednesday
6/8/2005 11:17:36 PM
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Michael Wells
[low whistle...]
But aside from the title and focus of the article, the background content is hugely interesting;
- The internet games section of Ebay saw mroe than $9m in trades in 2003.
- South Korea has a section of its police force that investigates [Internet-based] in-game crime.
- More and more gamers are seeking justice through the courts over stolen weapons and credits accumulated in games.
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Tuesday
6/7/2005 8:27:03 AM
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Michael Wells
There is a new category of gaming experience coming of age. Between "Reality" games (soccer, rugby, basketball, hockey) and "Virtual Reality"-style 3-D shooters (Quake, Far Cry, Doom), you have "Augmented Reality".
Augmented Reality (AR) is a game played in a real world, with some computer augmentation. This can take the form of visual queues that are played through special glasses, overlayed on the normal landscape, and they can involve auditory cues as well. Tracking the players through GPS and other means is also common.
So what does this mean?
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Monday
4/5/2004 6:41:55 PM
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Michael Wells
You know you've played Everquest too much when someone says "add" and you look up in panic expecting to get attacked from behind.
When your husband/wife asks you a question, and you respond "Aye"
One word - "WOOT!"
If you stumbled through your average department store like most people go through the bazaar, you would probably get arrested.
If tailors had to work as hard to make things in real life as they do in Norrath, we would probably all be walking around naked.
If Ogres fought like bixies, they would be invincible.
The moon may not have any green cheese, but it sure has a lot of fungus.
I wonder what sized train you would pick up if you ran through Shar Vahl trailing a ball of string.
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Thursday
3/4/2004 7:18:23 AM
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Michael Wells
From New Scientist Magazine...
Ever fancied taking your favourite possessions with you into the virtual world? Spiral Scratch, a start-up company in Liverpool, UK, has come up with a cheap device that generates three-dimensional computer representation of any object it scans.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994737
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Wednesday
12/10/2003 7:11:25 PM
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Michael Wells
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Monday
10/13/2003 9:59:41 AM
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Michael Wells
According to NewScientist magazine, gaming companies are adding an intelligent new anti-piracy scheme to their arsenal. Instead of preventing the game from launching, Fade causes gameplay to slowly degrade; giving the player time to experience and (hopefully) get hooked on the game enough to shell out for a legitimate copy.
Operation Flashpoint is one of the first games with the technology, which is developed by MacroVision.
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Saturday
10/11/2003 10:41:32 PM
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Michael Wells
Some interesting EverQuest articles...
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Saturday
10/11/2003 11:22:06 AM
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Michael Wells
EverQuest is a very cool game, but in case any Sony/Verant employees come across this blog, I thought I'd start a list of wishlist features.
After all, anything can be improved...
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Friday
10/10/2003 9:59:19 AM
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Michael Wells
Well, to be short, there was no easy solution. Instead I spent another $100 on a separate firewall, and created a DMZ for my computer to run in. Currently, I move the computer back and forth between the internal network (when I'm actually working) and the DMZ (when I'm sick of working), and while not optimal, it's... functional.
It seems the right way to do this would be to setup a permanent DMZ area of my network. In this case, I would have two firewalls--one protecting the outer perimiter, and one protecting the inner
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Wednesday
9/24/2003 4:13:49 PM
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Michael Wells
Before checking out the upcoming conference, I decided to check out the game. Such pain! Apparently, EverQuest is NOT firewall friendly, which is a great aggravation to any intelligent internet user, trying to protect their systems and data.
My own configuration involves the use of Microsoft's ISA 2000 server, which is quite configurable, but I can't seem to discover the magic formula.
Below is my latest response to Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) technical support...
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Sunday
9/21/2003 12:23:09 PM
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Michael Wells
The EverQuest convention is coming to Chicago, and this one promised to be interesting. Sony is preparing the release of EverQuest II, and fans are getting more immersed than ever.
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Friday
8/1/2003 5:06:08 PM
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Michael Wells
Diablo II is a particularly fun game, for its mind-numbing, fast action qualities. It also has an enjoyable item system, which includes standard weapons and armor, as well as magical items, set items, rare items, and unique items.
Because really good items take hours of playing to find, a sideshow has evolved in which people initiate an online game for the sole purpose of trading items. Pretty cool, and a lot of fun.
But there's a huge limitation... unless you happen to be online at exactly the same time another potential buyer or seller is, it's unlikely you'll acquire the items you're looking for, or get the best trade for the items you want to unload.
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Friday
8/1/2003 11:52:22 AM
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Michael Wells
Standards. Not usually the first thing gamers think of, but with the proliferation of new user-interfaces, standards may be just what the gaming industry needs. I propose a Gamers' Manifesto, which combines the best knowledge and observations of gamers into a well-thought recommendation for game developers.
http://manifesto.gaming.michaelwells.com
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Wednesday
5/28/2003 6:24:39 PM
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Michael Wells
Gamers score off the charts in several standard vision tests, while non-gamers improve dramatically after just 10 hours action.
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Copyright © 2003-2013, Michael Wells. All Rights Reserved.
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