f13.net

Considering the amount of money they've sunk into the game at this point, I can't imagine they'd want to do a 'quiet' launch. edit: Of course, now that I've said that, and I think of what happened with Auto Assault (:gamecube:) ... maybe? Grim, if true.

I feel about 'PVE Planetside' the same way I feel about the combat in Gods and Heroes: Sure, it's interesting and different than the norm, but is that enough to pull people away from whatever traditional MMOG they're playing right now? Is 'squad-based PVE' or 'twitch PVE' really what people want from their Massive game? Getting past the attachment people have to WoW/LOTRO/EQ2 is going to take more than a new combat system, methinks.

The thing that really weirds me out in the 'we haven't heard about it' category is this:


That's from my notes from his talk, and I'd completely forgotten about it until I reread it last night. That was all the detail he gave, so don't shoot the messenger. Wouldn't you think if he was adding this into a Massive game he'd want to talk about it? That seems like a much bigger departure from the norm than twitch-combat.

There's not going to be a moral element to the game. TR is a PvE title. Not only that, but a PvE title in which the setting is a war/invasion. That moral element shit is just bs. As much as I'd like there to be one, from everything I've seen, there isn't enough Sandbox OR Freedom for there to be anything moral about the game. Unless he thinks "Save this Puppy" "Yes/No" as a questline is somehow worth calling "moral," well, he's blowing smoke up your ass.

(That wasn't targeted at you Zonk).

No offense taken, sir. I didn't give the talk. ;)

Indeed, the fact that he stood up in front of a group of people at GDC and said 'moral element' ... you would think ... meant that he was going to follow through.

I tend to agree with the 'smoke up the ass' line of thinking though, in which case we're back to the "What is this game again?" state. The first TR 'beta journal' (http://www.playtr.com/news/archives/2007/05/report_from_the.html) says absolutely nothing, media says nothing, so we're left to come to our own conclusions. Mebbe if this game is coming out soon we should hear something about it?

Sorry no, that was somewhere around the end of '97 on the Origin Ultima IX boards. The boards had become hostile even before release, post release they absolutely exploded due to the major technical problems and "its not Ultima!". My memory is that the community manager issued a statement that appeared on the front page of the boards that more or less acknowledged the clusterfuck, that she had advised Lord British to stay away from the boards to which he had agreed (he was a regular poster before that), and that she would take the heat/funnel feedback. It was a rather heroic move on her part, she did as good a job as possible to quell the :mob: peasant uprising, and was one of the better game community managers in my estimation (aside from the "OWOO:O UO2 "Woo Woo!"" boo boo, LOL). Later on she became a designer for TR but was apparently fired (typical corporate equivocation used) during the reorg. I don't know the particulars, but from the outside it seemed unseemly that such a competent and loyal subject would get ceremoniously tossed due to problems that she probably had little or nothing to do with.

If memory serves me, there was also some sort of "apology" issued years before all that for Ultima VIII.

A lot of that history probably has something to do with the clamped-down PR for TR.

I think Garriott was a great solo/small team guy, but when the projects started getting bigger he got in way way over his head. It's probably difficult or impossible for his subjects to speak truth to an out of touch, castle building, "big poofy king". :lol:

Wait wait... isn't the lore for this game how L. Ron Hubbard defended the world from Xenu and the Galactic Confederacy 75 million years ago?

This poor old game should have been vapourware but will be terrible instead.   :?

Let's just say it's going to be interesting around here when the NDA drops, considering the links the creator has to all of our earlier days in MMOs :)

Not mine.  :-P  But I see your point.

Damn beta-droppers.

You never played any of the Ultimas? That's what I meant, in the sense that he played a big part in our formative years of RPGing. But reading what I wrote now, it does come off as if I was talking specifically about UO.

We didn't own a computer beyond my dad's Sanyo. You could barely call that thing a word processor, as it didn't even have a hard disk and you needed to boot it up by swapping out varoius  5 1/2" floppies.   My first machine was a 486 I bought for AutoCAD halfway through my 2nd year of College.  So, no, I didn't play any of the Ultimas until years later when I picked up a copy of U7 in a bundle sometime after UO had started already.  I never finished it.   :-D

I know you were talking to Merusk, but I will go on record as saying that I too never got a chance to play the Ultimate games back in 'my day'. I unfortunately grew to like RPGs based on JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. I think the first time I played Baldur's Gate was when I realized these things could be RPGs and also not soul grinding. I may have wept.

As for earlier days in MMOGs, I will admit a fondness for my brief stint in Ultima before I jumped to EverQuest. Somehow, though, I doubt that my primary form of amusement in UO (wandering around peoples' unlocked houses) will be a big part of the gameplay in Tabula Rasa.

Pfffft. I'll be honest.

I thought Ultima was trash. Still do. Console RPGs - even starting with the NES with stuff like Dragon Warrior, Scheharezade, Startropics, etc - it was simply light years beyond what was being done on the PC. Ironically, the first PC RPG I could tolerate was all text - Tele-Arena.

If not for the Ultima games (of which there were FOUR before the NES even existed) there would have been no RPG's like the ones you mentioned.  So, claims like, "Light years beyond" are kind of stupid.  The Ultima games also were the first ones to really try and make a 'world' for you to explore and inhabit.  Extreme Console Bias aside the Ultima series of CRPG's provided more innovation for mixing story telling with gameplay than any other game until the invention of the cutscene.

Let's not even go into all the other innovations to come out of Garriott's Origin studios that led the way to make games what they are today.

It's all temporal. The reason I mentioned the Ultimas wasn't to cast a value judgement. It's because of when Ultima III hit. If you weren't burning through your third set of 5.25" floppies within months of the game launching, you're just a kid as far as I'm concerned :)

Just kidding (of course). Everyone who has a love for RPG-like experiences traces their roots back to some point. For me it's Ultima III, largely enhanced by my first MMO being UO (unless you consider D2 MMO enough). I never got into the console RPGs, probably missing out on stuff.

With all due respect, and correct me if I am wrong, but weren't you a bit too young when the Ultimas were hot to have a formed opinion about them?
Or do you mean that TODAY you think they WERE trash? Respectable opinion anyway, it's not like I am not allowed to judge cinema or literature before my age 12. Just trying to get some perspective.

Never played them.

Dont care.

My first rpg taste was FFIII at a friend from my soccer team's house, watching the airship and a cutscene from that changed my life.  I went over to his house some more, played my own game to the part where you have to fight yourself and not fight to win.  Then dedicated my life to getting my own console somehow.  I would probably be a much better human being had I never seen that.

My first games were the Zork and Wizardry series.

I never tried Ultima until VI, and while I liked the concept of morality, thought it was awfully black and white and poorly implemented.  I also thought the whole person transported from Earth and was now ruler of the land was stupid.  Had I know it was also supposed to be the main developer, extremely egotistical.  And stupid.

Aw man I love those games. Obviously didn't get to them until quite a while after they were released, but *heart*. I eventually played the 'real' Wizardry games on the PC, but Wizardry on the NES was a special kind of treat unto itself. Good times.


Heh. Darniaq, if it makes you feel any older, I was born the year Empire Strikes Back came out. ;)

Console RPGs are their very own kind of awesome. FFVII is nowhere near as unique as everyone says it is, but (for better or worse) it is a seminal moment in Role-Playing Game history. Titles we play today are still being effected by the decisions made by the designers of that title ... so have to give it credit on that front. More recently, Knights of the Old Republic is probably the best console RPG I can point to and say "hey look at how awesome they can be". That may just be BioWare, though. Really ... really ... really looking forward to Mass Effect.

I think Ultima III/IV "RPG" is very different from KOTOR "RPG". Similar to launch-SWG vs WoW, when I'm playing them, I love both styles of RPG for different reasons. But overall, I prefer the theory of a more open-world RPG than those that provide directed goals through a series of progressive decision trees.

Just as an aside, I realized awhile ago that my first exposure to grinding/farming was in Ultima III- enter Bucc's den, avoid just enough to steal from the chests, leave to let the zone reset, re-enter :)

My mistake, when I said light years beyond, I meant fun. The stuff on the NES was fun. Ultima was Work. Innovations don't mean shit to me if I have to trudge through crap gameplay and ugly visuals to see them. On that note, Final Fantasy IV and VI still feel like more "world" than anything with Ultima attached to it ever will.

Now, I'm not saying that Ultima isn't important. I'm just saying that they're entirely overrated and viewed as fun through rose-tinted glasses all across the internet by the generation of gamers slightly older than me. The gamers who are mostly making PC Games these days. The gamers who ARE making our MMORPGs. It is not coincidence that these particular gamers have forgotten what fun is, you can trace it back to Ultima. No one ever said UO was fun, everyone always says UO was fun with other people. There's a reason for that.

UO and Ultima IV are entirely different beasts.

I can't talk for anyone else, but to me U4 was fun at the time by virtue of a number of factors that don't exist anymore, importantly that uniqueness factor. It wouldn't be as fun for me if it launched today of course. I don't consider it the best game evar!1/1, just an important part of what I did back then.

As for the console stuff, there's a reason most of the games sold in this industry are for consoles. But there's also a reason the most retentive MMOs are "work". Different audiences looking for different things. If they ever made a console game into a workable MMO solution (as in, it had no end, was fun with random other people, etc), maybe that'd be teh winar by attracting the elusive console gamer. But nobody seems to be going that route. Probably because of the reasons you note. So they'll keep cannibalizing the existing playerbase or expanding it by attracting those who didn't realize they had the same preferences.

I've always thought that stuff with the blue moongates from Earth to Britannia was inspired and brilliant, but totally agree with the extremely egotistical part. Someone needs to pay a visit to the Shrine of Humility. (http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/15-06/ps_lordbritish) I'm poor so maybe I'm not very objective, but that kind of conspicuous consumption and pompous flouncery is just disgusting.

Well Schild, I need more perspective (if possible). Please tell me which RPGs you consider fun from year zero to 1985 (age of Ultima IV).

Are you underrating a franchise (Ultima) or a whole videogaming era?

As much as you like to think that Dragon Quest was fun (and I agree), go tell that to my son. He will tell you that it is trash, it's work, while the fun RPGs are Kingdom Hearts and Dark Chronicles. Light Years.

Yea, UO was based on Ultima 7 and Ultima 7.5, the 2 most popular games of the series. And Ultima 7 was NOTHING like the previous games other than the lore.  At the time it was a huge leap forward in gaming engines. I remember that a lot of people (myself included) had to actually have a seperate boot disk to play Ultima7 because it had its own way of using extended memory. The game took up around 95% of my hard-drive space. So basically, all my computer did was play Ultima7.

Considering there's 15-20 years between DQ1 and Kingdom Hearts and only 3-5 years between the Ultima's and the first JRPGs. I'd like to turn your challenge down. DQ1 and the Ultima games that really changed thing came within the same era. The other games you mentioned did not.

Edit: Also, you bring up another point. The vast majority of western style RPGs are crap outside of the glory days of Black Isle, leading up to Obsidian (I'll give Obsidian credit even though I dislike every single game they've made). Other than the odd Bloodlines or whatever else is out there, Western RPGs have largely stagnated compared to Japan. Where the entire nation of gamers loves RPGs, America simply doesn't. We're still stuck with people bitching and moaning about changes in UO, a 10 year old game, here on f13. It's depressing. Meanwhile Asia is kicking our fucking ass all over the place. (And then there's WoW, but this isn't really about WoW).

The six years between the first Ultima (1980) and the first Dragon Warrior (1986) were hugely important fucking years.  There was barely a game industry back then, and the first couple Ultimas had a development team that consisted of a young Richard Garriot banging away on a computer stowed in his parents walk-in closet and... nobody else.  If you actually do want to compare things from the same era, Ultima V came out in 1988 and makes every pre-SNES console RPG look like a joke.

A warrior type in Ultima V could choose weapon-and-shield, two-handed weapons, dual-wielding, or ranged combat.  Halberds and morning stars were heavy but had more reach than other melee weapons, spiked helmets and shields would let you get in extra attacks, and blunt weapons were better if you had higher strength than dexterity.  Ranged weapons actually had different ranges, and sometimes you would have to do things like move around the battlefield to get a clear shot at something.

Here's the equivalent in your choice of console RPG of the same era:  Buy the most expensive weapon you can afford, equip it, and select FIGHT instead of ITEM or RUN on the combat menu.  Whoop-dee-shit.

Meh, I was just trying to show how things can appear differently if you weren't there to test them firsthand.

When you say that the Ultimas, or the pre-console RPGs, were work well you are just wrong. They were FUN when they came out. Not the "there's nothign else" kind of fun. The "real and exciting" kind of fun. Believe it or not, you weren't there. And that is where my son's example is going to lead: he has different things under his eyes, nose and hands to try and to form his opinions and ideas of fun on.
There's no way he can see Dragon Quest's gameplay as anything else but WORK. We both know he's wrong, but there's no way he can see that.

For the records, I only had the chance to play Ultima IV in 1988 and Ultima V in 1989. I tried the first three chapters years later so my opinions are based especially on U4, which is chronologically the closest one to the birth of the console era. In fact, at the same time, circa 1989, I was playing a lot of Ultima IV, Bard's Tale 2, Mars Saga, Wasteland, Pool of Radiance, Dungeon Master (!) AND Phantasy Star 1 and 2. Couldn't see said light years anywhere between those games.

EDIT: Oh, and Autoduel.

Autoduel kicked ass.

If only AA had been more like Autoduel and less like a shittacular MMO.

From a 'Growth of the Genre into new homes' perspective, maybe.  From a "Evolved and Explored New Facets of Gameplay' stance?  Not even close.

The same mechanics used in FFVII (and to a large extent FFIII) are still the ones in use today.  Be led by the nose from area to area, grind out kills, repeat ad infinitum and the only thing FFVII added to that mix was the socketing customization and mini-games, everything else was well entrenched long before that.

Let alone FF12 mimicking the dreaded autoattack of MMORPGs. Damn fools.

Whoa. Whoa. If MMORPGs were as streamlined as the FF12 autoattack system, I might actually play them.

He's lucky everyone knew how to swim with that Titanic stunt.  I'd have strangled him myself had my dad been present.

Schild, I know this is like your place and stuff, but considering your well advertised hate against PC games and MMORPGs in particular, why do you post in the MMOG Discussion forum at all?  :evil:

So is this game FUN or what?

There really is no relation whatsoever between the classic singleplayer ultimas and ultima online. They're fundamentally different experiences in every respect. I didn't much care for UO and yet I consider ultima7 to be the best game ever made. It was fun back then and I assure you it was fun when I replayed it last year.

That doesn't mean Garriot can do no wrong. He hasn't made a good game in the past 15 years. I cut him no slack.

I don't hate MMORPGs or PC Games. I hate bad games. MMORPGs are nothing more than a chat room with a grind. Someday, someone will make something better. Unfortunately, that'll involve narrative and throw the MMOG part out the window since you'll be interested in a story. Basically, Diku isn't it. But that's not the conversation you wanted.

I like good games and give more credit where it's deserved than most of the other gamers around these parts. But the pendulum swings both ways.

In fairness guy different people like different things. I find MMORPGs very compelling. Single player games much less so though I buy them, it is just not where the hours go. Your not wrong and I am not right and vice a virtue just we have different tastes. WOW and LOTRO are well crafted games.  EQ2 can be fun. These are good games in the MMORPG space. If you don't like them then you do not like the current generation of MMORPGs and that is fine. Do not discount the media just because it does not suit you.

Yes. But I suspect that's not the real question. I think you want to know if it's engaging, by being both momentarily fun and providing for repeat playability. Those are harder to answer without violating the NDA.

Not for this thread, but we'd need a common frame of reference to have a real debate about this. MMORPGs are not DIKUs. Only DIKU-inspired MMORPGs are. Sophestry maybe, but there's a good percentage of the world not playing DIKU-inspired MMORPGs. It just depends on how you split MMOG from MMORPG, and whether your preferred need for "RP" is being met.

No NDA breaking please.

Is this as ridiculous as I'm reading it?  Or is it just a badly worded bash at current MMOGs (acceptable).

Badly worded bash.

It still makes sense in my head, but I can see where a problem with the wording could arise.

It's okay.  My brain started interpreting your words as dolphin squawks to protect my sanity after your "Ultima games sucked, STARTROPICS NOW THERE WAS AN RPG!" post.

Do you know that dolphins in Wales make noises completely different than dolphins any place else in the world just like Welsh people?

Ultima's kicked ass. Ultima 7 was an awesome game. Nothing like scoring some of that shiny blue magic shit.

Hoe of Destruction FTW.

Yeah, I don't the Ultima hate. I played 4, 5, 7, 7.5, 8 and unfortunately 9. 9 could've been good, but wasn't. 8 caught a lot of shit, but once they patched out the awful jumping system, I liked it alot. I missed 6 due to being on the road and poor. 4,5,7 and 7.5 were total splendiforousness.

Then again, I don't get the jrpg love. Every one I've seen has been garbage.

It's called different tastes and opinions, with a healthy serving of the lolinternet.

Yeah, my brain pretty much melted down at about the same point. I might have to fly to Phoenix and give Schild the Clockwork Orange treatment to help with his console obssession. Or at least kick him in the nuts for all the old school Ultima lovers out there.

RPGs do not belong on consoles. Stupid menu-driven crap. ARRGHRHGHSDGHDHGDHZG.

That's loltastic.

Go take 2 doses of Shadow Hearts and a side of Digital Devil Saga and call me back in the morning.

Touché, as those are two of my favourite JRPG ever.
Still, the Ultimas (most of them) ruled.

They absolutely belong on consoles. I believe the disconnect here is that JRPGs and western CRPGs are entirely different experiences, and liking one doesn't mean that you'll like the other. JRPGs are really more like traditional adventure games with RPG trappings. I like JRPGs, but I love CRPGs.

I can sort of understand the sentiment regarding old CRPGs being work; a few years back I looked at some of my old Ultima stuff and was amazed at the amount of notes and maps I had made on scraps of paper. Don't think I'd like to do that nowadays (mainly due to time required, but also tedium), but back then it was incredibly fun. Its hard for me to form much in the way of cogent thoughts on the subject though, work for me really is fun, seems like it's the other crap (physical pain or a feeling of futility or purposelessness mostly, maybe?) that can get mixed into work that is the unfun part.

That TR rep's quote about them not having instituted some basic game dynamics (death penalty) at this point seems odd and eerily reminiscent of some past debacles. Have they announced a release timeframe yet?

Fall 2007 according to the PC Gamer release meter.

As to old RPGs being work, yea, I agree. I made more notes to get through Ultima V than I ever did for UO or EQ1. We call that "bad UI" today, or "niche", or some other unfortunate variant on the idea that nowadays having games where people need to figure shit out is a bad thing.

The lack of death penalty info isn't so bad.  Unless it's some byzantine system where you're supposed to fight your way back from hell, it should be easy enough to code-in damage on death, or xp penalty, or whatever.  WoW didn't have its death penalty in place until a few weeks before the open beta, for example.

Much more distressing is the lack of 'other stuff'.. but I'm beginning to harp on that point.

They could make the greatest JRPG ever and I wouldn't even know it at this point.  The genre has been spewing pure Gay for so long that I've long since quit paying attention.  Shadow Devil Digi-what?  Is that the one with male protagonists way less masculine than the average WNBA player?  Or the one where Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck team up with Cloud to fight Sephiroth and the wicked witch of the west with the power of children's happiness?

Probably not, but damned if I know.

Dude. Shadowhearts 1 opens in a fucking cannibal village with evil children... after some CRAZY SHIT happens on a train.

Shadow Hearts Opening (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmEm1mzFk1E).

Too be fair there are pro-wrestlers that are less masculine than the average WNBA player... even the ones that aren't nappy headed.

(Thundercats) Ho(oooooooo)!

:heart:

That's ThunderCUNTS, goddamnit.

Not when you're making fun of the media it isn't.

That's it, I demand the immediate resignation of Haemish from his non-existant post on behalf of Thundercats everywhere.

Snarf, bitches.

On the contrary, up until at least 1997, JRPG design was incredibly stagnant.  Core gameplay concepts left over from the early eighties were dolled up in pretty graphics, cutscenes, and minigames, and tossed out there to an uncritical audience over and over again.

I say 1997 because that's the release year of the last JRPG I played, namely Final Fantasy 7.  I greatly doubt that a sudden wave of creativity swept over the genre the moment I quit paying attention, but nevertheless, I won't try to comment beyond my experience.

So, Final Fantasy 7.

Party of characters represented by a single figure during non-combat gameplay?  Check.  Separate combat screen where the other party members suddenly appear to fight?  Check.  Separate city zones, accessed by moving your character over a miniature city on the overworld map?  Check.  Townsfolk who don't do much of anything besides sit in their designated spot and say one designated blurb of dialog when prompted?  Check.

Wait a minute, I'm not describing FF7, I'm describing Ultima 3, and that came out fourteen fucking years earlier.

Ultima 4 added a conversation system to give townsfolk some interactivity.  Ultima 5 gave them schedules to follow.  Both of these allowed for new types of puzzles to be added, and the day/night cycle introduced in U5 was a nice way to select how much overland spawn you wanted to deal with while traveling, since the monsters mostly came out at night.  Mostly.

Ultima 6 went whole hog and threw out the separate city/combat screens entirely.  Cities simply existed as part of the world, all party members were visible at all times, and combat simply happened where it happened.  This was back in 1990, and the game was eventually ported to everything from the SNES to the Commodore 64.

But there I am playing Final Fantasy 7 on a PS1 in 1997, and I'm still trucking my party around the overland map as a single character, going to the combat screen for random battles, and entering cities by walking into their little icons.  It's 1983 all over again.

But OMFG did you see Aeris get stabbed in that cutscene?  Man those graphics were nice at the time.  And chocobo racing was fun, right?

Whoop.  Dee.  Shit.

No one ever claimed Final Fantasy 7 was innovative outside of the graphics. Anyone that did was a fool.

But! Final Fantasy 7 was bigger than any Ultima could ever hope to be. Still not innovative though.

And I know I can't bring things like Deception, the Megaten series, Live A Live, Y's, or Fire Emblem into the topic. Mostly because there isn't a frosty mug's chance in hell you've spent enough time with any of them to offer any sort of argument. Which is a shame.

On a side note, JRPG needs to be properly defined since they were doing hybrids long before America was. Whatwith Zelda 2 and Simon's Quest.

Sweet reference.

Yeah, WUA AND 99.9% of North America.

119.9 Million PS2 owners have never played Ultima. So.... what's your point?

Ultima is crap today.

I expect the next few years will bring some wonderful FFXII knockoffs from Japan.  I expect nothing in the Western RPG scene other than Dungeon Lords Part Deux, The Elder Scrolls V: Even Less Game, and Fable 2: Electric Molyneux.

Wow. That Fable 2 joke works great when you know how to pronounce his name.

Crap how?

And which Ultima is crap?

What's your meter?

I can safely say that U4, U5 and U7 are great great games, but given that you don't like 'em, I'd love to hear which (J)(C)(?)RPGs d'you think are better than the said Ultimas, and most important of all WHY.

Why the "Ultima is crap" line sounds so much just like a flamebait?

The key here is TODAY (even though I would disagree).

Ultima was revolutionary, innovative, and fun. Hell, part of what made UO so great to me was me and my brother used to say about Ultima 7 ... "Now how cool would it be to be able to play this with hundreds of other people." Very rare when your hopes come true.

Today.  Ultima is crap today.  It was great at the time and was why I wanted to play UO so badly.  Today... I have Exult installed on my PC but I still can't get around to finishing up U7.  Since U7, we have had U8 and U9, which I would think people are not going to use as a positive example of anything and so I will just talk about U7.  I played U7 a whole lot back when gas cost less than a dollar.  I happen to like U7 very much, but in relative terms.

So, how is U7 crap?  Looks like crap.  Controls like crap.  Also looks like crap, even in Exult.  It is a good game in the same way that FFIV is, which means that I just can't force myself to play it again.  FFIV is my favorite of the series but I just can't do it.  I am, however, able to replay Super Mario World today and I think that says something about both games even though they cannot be directly compared otherwise.

My meter is 2007.  A RPG with better real-time-combat than U7 would be FFXII or Daggerfall or Morrowind or Ultima Underworld or System Shock or Deus Ex or System Shock 2 or Thief1/2/3 or Magic & Mayhem or Arx Fatalis or Super Paper Mario.  I won't bother listing off RPGs with better character control, but I think I would prefer Gothic 1 to U7.  Better story is pretty subjective, plus I can't really remember what the hell was going on in U7.  Gargoyle discrimination and religious assholes.


Because it instigates posts that give me a great excuse to spout off.

I just finished playing through FFIV again. Just saying (GBA re-release).

Not to sound like a negative against you, but you have a lot more time for that stuff than me.  You mentioned something about having too many games for people to waste time on shitty titles in some other thread, and that's my problem.  Am I going to replay FFIV, which is my favorite one and which has nice nostalgic feelings associated with it, or something I have not played before or that is more engaging for Reason X... maybe Odin Sphere or Etrian Odyssey or F.E.A.R. (need to pick that up again).  If today was May 31, 1992 then I would consider Ultima VII a viable contender for my game time, but advancements in GAME TECHNOLOGY mean that I am more likely to play Final Fantasy Tactics tonight.

But let's talk about pewpewnicorns.

Every JRPG an average American kid like me ever got his hands on was the same Ultima III + cutscenes shit that they would keep spewing out until I finally eventually forsook the genre.  The stuff FF7 was doing in the late 90's wasn't just "not innovative", it was downright retarded game design in the most literal sense, in many ways unchanged in over a decade.

How anyone can trash Ultima and then praise something like the original Dragon Warrior, essentially a clone of Ultima gameplay circa a couple years prior, is beyond me.  Final Fantasy IV?  Don't get me wrong, I loved it in it's day and it broke new ground in terms of story presentation (the only area JRPG ever seemed to advance in) but the actual game design was pretty stone-age even when it was new.

The JRPG genre got it's start in ripping off Ultima.  And if you want an innovative western RPG, I'll throw my pet contention into the thread:  GTA: SA.  As I've said before, when I find my little brother playing and he's grinding his Uzi skill so he can dual-wield, a line has been crossed.

You're not here because you're an average american kid WUA.

You're a goddamn freak just like the rest of us.

That's why I said it's a shame that I can't bring about 50 other eastern RPGs into the mix.

WUA I dont even know why god taught you to type other then to punish the internets, shut the fuck up and stop acting like you can have some kind of solid opinion on anything other then the taste of dick.

Fuck even when talking about some other stupid Ultima game you fag the boards up...



Is what I would say if I even sort of cared about this stupid cripple fight.  Fallout was good, a few of the FF's were good.  Most were not.  I dont see how putting your entire party on the screen is an innovation.  I never touched the fucking Ultima games pre-UO.  Lets talk more about Diablo1, that was a cool rpg...

These super nostalgia discussions are such a waste of space.  I know that there hasn't been an interesting new title in forfuckingever but do we have to necro the same old ponies over and over to pass the time?

I wouldn't play any of the old shit I dearly loved as a kid now adays.  I've already played it, I dont care any more.  I know how it ends.  I have seen the cutscenes.   Besides that, the interface and gfx usually make me cringe.  I really always have a hard time believing so many of you go back and play decade old video games.  I think its just an internet lie so you can fight it out in stupid ass threads about ye olden days from positions of authority.

There are exceptions, almost none of them are RPGs.  Mario World, Metroid, Zelda (NES and SNES), Mario Kart etc.  But really I'm not going to beat them or anything.  I'm going to fuck around laugh about the good times and go back to playing the latest shiney.

You are just a son of your times. How could you play any of the Ultimas except the goofy ones if you were 8 when Ultima VII came out?
Too many kiddos here think it's cool to piss on the past. If they weren't around, it doesn't count/matter/exist.
What's so cool in not having played any of the classics? Face it, you are not Schild: you are not interested in videogames, you can see just as far as the length of your nose. You are just a player.
As such, and not having played any of the Ultimas, why are you contributing in this thread at all?

Oh yeah, the cynical l33t act. I forgot.

L2R dipshit, the paragraph you quoted was followed by saying that waxing nostalgic about thess old games you all clearly see through rose colored glasses is a waste of fucking time.  Also I'm not pissing on the past, merely the frenzied discussions about what old video games pwned other ones.  Are you going to try to convince me that is a kickass past time now?


Ohhhh just a player, you cut me deep sir.  God are you for real?  As for why I'm posting in this thread, well letsee its not a thread titled "Boring stupid slap-fight about old as fuck games!" it was about TR at one point.  So I keep checking to see if anyone knows anything about TR's gameplay.

But whatever, I'm just a player.

Lollerskates~!

We can argue back and forth that I'm talking through rose colored glasses. But I've played and thrashed every Final Fantasy re-release.

Except 3.

3 Sucked.

But you are a freak when it comes to video games.  I seriously dont believe anyone else around here that claims to fucking blow the dust of 10 year old games on the regular because they are so enthralled by ancient superior gameplay conventions.

Also play old games all you want, fighting about which one is better is fucking retarded.  Feel free to stop doing that at any time.  Alternatively lets have a fight about what flavor of ice cream is best next because WE'RE THAT FUCKING BORED.


I blame the game industry...

Not to sound like an asshat, but I saw something about FFIV in this thread.  Did they remake it?  I thought I saw plans to... please PM me if it has been remade (and possibly added to!!!!).


My groin is erect and throbbing for this; I was just thinking the other day about how cool it would be if they remade it!

FFIV is being remade on the Nintendo DS.

Oh look, Hoax is here to flame WUA, spew bullshit, and compose a few terabytes worth of posts on how everyone else is wasting their time.

That's new.

Thanks for enlightening us, oh guru of the intarweb.  We didn't mean to force you to read our crappy posts.  You're free to piss off and stop doing so whenever you like.

And you are free to post on topic outside of fucking retarded threads you start and not refer to yourself in the third person any time you like.

Did you have a point?

Hey Schild, no more talk about JRPG design.  Hoax is tired of the off-topic posts.  I think he's a moderator or something.  Maybe the king of moderators.  He might ban us.

I'm not siding with either of you. You're both freaking me out.

1. Hoax, there's nothing to say On Topic about Tabula Rasa. The team is quietly freaking out and not releasing any info. I've put a call in to hear from their QA tester. Hopefully he'll get back to me shortly.

2. WUA. Your lack of knowledge about modern JRPG design made me want to stop talking about it anyway.

Deja vu.  I seem to remember a thread or two about a recently launched massively multiplayer online game that had a single QA tester as well.

How did that work out for them?

Sarchasm.

Diablo was not an rpg. It was a hack-n-slash action game.

It's hard to post about a game under  :nda:, Hoax.

Thank you. The Diablo was boring, shittastic clickity click pellet fests. It was snake brain manipulation. It was an MMORPG with a better loot system, more clickity click and less (or no) other people involved.

Me and a bunch of my friends still play Star Control 2 melee. Good gameplay will bring you back to good games. I for one appreciate older games that did not have the crutch of super uber graphics, cause those back then had to rely on gameplay. Not saying I play many old games, but some of us do 'blow the dust off 10 year old games' and enjoy them.

Honestly?  Snake brain manipulation is 85% if what I'm looking for in a game.  If the other 15% can tickle a few of the higher functions to keep the snake brain distracted about the repetition that's just bonus.

I play M.U.L.E. with my friends on a C64 regularly since 1988, and NHL Hockey on the Megadrive since 1993. When they come at my home they don't ask me for the PS3 (which sits mostly unplayed in a corner), they ask me for the classics.

I re-played Bard's Tale 3 on the same C64 last year.
I never uninstalled Wasteland since I finally put my hands on it and I bought the Phantasy Star collection for the DS last year and yes I played them all again.
On my desktop there's this old Commodore 64 ready to fire up all my collection of original floppy disks and an Amiga 500 all set for the same purpose. I have an Intellivision, an Atari VCS 2600, a Sega Megadrive, a Dreamcast and a Nintendo 64 all ready to be played in about 2 minutes (time needed to untie and plug in cables).
I am (loosely) playing right now the Ur-Quan Masters port and (not really an old game but that's the style) 5 days a stranger.
I have all the Mame arcade classics installed on my PC since the invention of arcade emulation and you can bet I play them everytime someone else feels the urge to play some shitty flash game over the internet.

This is not a showoff, after all it is well known that I play and pay for all the shittiest mmorpgs that come out every year.
It's just that, believe it or not, sometimes software, and videogames, improved old formulas over time. Sometimes, they didn't.

It's not like you stop watching the original Hitchcock's Psycho because it was black and white while the Gus Van Sant's one has better (?) cinematography and blood FX.

You must be more then just a player then.  Congrats!@!!

*golfclap*


/edited in

Seriously, I'm not anti old games, nor playing old games.  But acting like that somehow makes you someone who appreciates the "art" of video games is fucking ridiculous.  Also fighting on the internet about which old games were more influential or moar better is fucking six kinds of stupid.

Seriously everyone but Schild sounds like they are trying to be the video game equivalent of some art fag who only watches foreign films.  Schild only gets away with it because he literally does talk about games I've never ever heard of.  Also he tends to have relevent opinions about current games that make sense.

WUA hasn't had an valid opinion about anything but UO and SWG for as long as I've been here which makes him fucking useless.

Falconeer, I swear your the one who spent like 20 pages w/ geldon talking about Vanguard, but I could be wrong.  Somehow your name is associated with VG in my mind, which sucks for you.   :-P

/one more thing edit

I've literally been party to playing 6 copies of EA's NHL 2002 until they broke.  Because it is by far the best Hockey game they made for the ps2.  Go me?  Everyone has old stuff they will always hold dear, human nature and whatnot.  But I keep checking this thread because when we finally do find something out about TR I want to know.  If you started this classic-game shit off in the PC / Video game forum I would be blissfully unaware and totally uninvolved with this shit.  But instead I kept checking to see if anyone had any clue to what kind of game TR will be.

And you are our resident angsty douchebag. Well played.

Please, tell me how much I suck because I like Starcon 2 and Diablo 2 and a few others.

Gameplay > Graphics    is all im saying, I'm not trying to sound leet oldschool gamer. Basically, it's a matter of opinion. Mine, of course, is superior ;)

Man, playing SC2 and D2 doesn't make you old school or leet. The industry hasn't given us anything better for those particular niches.

Ok, agreed. My first posts about this concerned Ultimas and whatnot. Don't make me flex my Tandy 1000 gaming on ya! ;) THAT SHIT HAD 16 colors yo! And if you wanna talk about consoles, holler at my Intellivision BIATCH!

I play pong on my laptop at work.

I love Wasteland.  It and the Fallouts are among the few games I go back to over and over.

You guys are insane. Now is what matters to the industry. Then is merely what got us here. It's important to understand the past, but this level of argument and e-peening about one's temporal l33tness only matters if you're in a fucking position to prevent history from repeating itself. Otherwise, you're just bashing each other from the bleachers.

I could swear I've said that like five times in the last page...

Everyone arguing about old games: What the hell am I looking at?... When does this happen in the gaming?
Darniaq: Now, You're looking at now...Everything that happens now is happening now.
Dark Helmet: What happened to then?
Darniaq: We passed it.
Everyone arguing about old games: When?
Darniaq: Just now... We're at now now.
Everyone arguing about old games: Go back to then?
Darniaq: When?
Everyone arguing about old games: Now.
Darniaq: Now?
Everyone arguing about old games: Now.
Darniaq: I can't
Everyone arguing about old games: Why?
Darniaq: We missed it.
Everyone arguing about old games: When?
Darniaq: Just now.
Everyone arguing about old games: When will then be now?
Darniaq: Soon!

You missed one.

Crap.

That was awesome though  :-D

Even though it was addressed as such, my last post wasn't really for you.

Hoax, go play in traffic.  I couldn't give a fuck less about your shrill pissant opinions, or your horseshit wannabe-moderator routine.  Yeah, the Tabula Rasa thread is thoroughly derailed and nobody but you gives a fuck.  Eat shit.

Um guys? Can't we all just get along?

 :heart: WUA

Everyone is fighting all over f13 lately.  At least two of my threads disolved into verbal fisticuffs yesterday.  Of course, none of the fights are even about the original subject so it's not my fault.  I'm innocent.  If we were all in the same room, we could settle our differences the old fashioned way.  Like children.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/media/le_kidfightwk27.jpg)

Signe, we all know you are far from innocent :)

I care :(

Gimmeh TR news, damnit!

Moderator routine?  I dont even know what that means, I believe I merely voiced my displeasure with finding your fucking halfwit posts in a thread that wasn't clearly designated as a retard habitat.  You know, the ones with StarWars or UO in the subject line?  Then I noticed the only reason I was experiencing said displeasue is because you were completely off-topic so you could argue with Schild about whether JRPG's or the old Ultimas are better rpgs.

No seriously, YOU eat shit and die stupidass.  I may be a ton of things, but I'm not the fucking numbnuts fighting about which game from 10+ years ago was cooler.  We know that the effeminate character designs of azn games freak you out because you aren't that comfortable with your manhood or whateverthefuck I dont need to read about it.  Again.  Ever.

One of my all-time favorite movies for clever conjunctioning of profane words is the first Diehard. Ya can't go 30 seconds in that movie with Bruce Willis uttering some fanciful twist of phrasing. He wouldn't win any professorships for the Queen's English, but it's fun nonetheless.

Looking through the screenshots and some of the fiction on the TR website makes me wonder if the rather harsh looking environments might severely limit the potential longer sub term playerbase. It seems that in most MMOGs there are a lot of really beautiful, somehow familiar, and/or pleasant places to go; nice places to explore and congregate. I think this is certainly part of WoW's success. Maybe that stuff says something about the prevalence/success of fantasy vs SciFi MMOGs? Will they put some sort of Holodeck with pretty stuff into the amusement park theme?

Die Hard = Diablo.
Bruce Willis is my Blizzard.

I'm going to start banning people if you guys don't calm down.

~insert chirping crickets here~

So... about those old games.  I find that if I am going back to an older game I am really going it because it is endearing, or funny, or so different that I can't find anything like it elsewhere.  I feel it's rarely about superior design.  Earthbound - I play it every couple of years I guess.  It reminds of of happy times.  Maniac Mansion - same.  I also love River City Ransom.  Something about those stubby legs and hamfists pummeling fat-headed baddies gives me a glee that no amount of particle-effect wizardry can emulate. 

I remember watching my mother play one of the Ultimas way back when.  She loved RPGs (last I heard she played through The Longest Journey).  All the choices bogged her down and seemed superfluous.  The idea was ahead of its time.  It had all of the fancy choices we expect and prided itself on that.  There was little pay-off for all of that decision-making though.  Why did it matter if she went sword over flail?  It played and looked basically the same.  If the choice is pointless I resent making it.

But I see a pattern forming.  With myself, anyway.  I just end up not caring.  Too much deciding shit and I just end up hating my choices and starting over again and again.  Then I quit.  The one MMO exception is CoX.   The choices are endless, the result is always pretty cool, and people get compliments just for being creative and unique with their backstories and costumes.  There's not much Serious Business about it and it reminds me of the old games I love.  "Go kill the bad guy for Great Justice!" and "Go smash the stupid do-gooder because he is in the big bosses' way!" is all I need.
 
 

"Why Ultima sucked"?? Flamebait title!

Who gives a fuck what you need?  You can either learn to suck it up and scroll past posts you don't want to see, or you can continue to throw girlish hissyfits everytime you read one.  It makes no difference to me.


I'm always calm.

A little late to the conversation, but I was pretty much avoiding the topic when I thought it was about Tabula Rasa.

RPG's aren't moving forward?  What do you expect?  The defining aspect of an RPG... the very thing that makes them what they are, is a reliance on archaic character building systems with stats and hitpoints and xp, still being reused from the P&P RPG's.  I'd say that Japan has stagnated in that they haven't realized yet that RPG's have just about outlived their usefulness for anything other than nostalgia.  Look at something like God of War.  It shows just how elegantly you can tell a story, and have character building (spending points on increasing weapon and magic strength), without all the tedium of random encounters, talking to dozens of NPCs, or grinding from level 62 to 63 to gain a few more hit points.  P&P RPG's were all about rule systems.  Shit you could use that was simple enough to follow on some pieces of paper, because we were the ones that had to keep track of everything.  Now the computers and consoles can keep track of all that stuff.  I don't need the rule systems to be readily apparent in my games now, it can be kept behind the scenes.

The best RPG stuff that's come out of Japan has been hybrid stuff like Odin Sphere, and it's their non-RPG aspects that make them notable.  Had Odin Sphere just been made as an action game, with most of the RPG elements trimed out, would it have been a worse game?  Shadow Hearts main innovation was the judgement ring.  In essence it was a band-aid the developers used to cover up the fact that combat in most console RPG's didn't actually require you to pay attention most of the time.  With the judgement ring, you couldn't just keep pressing the attack button, you actually had to pay attention.  But again, it begs the question, why make the game an RPG if developers realized that a lot of the trappings of the genre were just inherently unfun?

I don't know.  I used to love RPG's, but these days I just don't see what they have to offer that no other genre can do better.

Of course the hybrid stuff is fantastic. They took the best of two worlds - one, a dead genre, and the other, the classic RPG - and merged them. They took the beat-em-up (2d and 3d) and made things like Valkyrie Profile, Radiata Stories, Rogue Galaxy and it even goes as far back as Zelda 2. But while the height of Beat 'em Ups was like Final Fight and Alien vs Predator, the hybrid genre that was birthed kept progressing. Really, that's the future. The hybridization. We're seeing it now with Trusty Bell/Eternal Sonata and Last Remnant. But make no mistake, even with all the beefcake Beat 'Em Up trappings, at their core they are still JRPGs. Meanwhile, KOTOR is like "Hey, I'm fun, look, we changed the angle on Baldur's Gate." Meh. The JRPG genre means more than heroes on one side, monsters on the other, and levels. So much more. Western RPGs? Not so much.

Which might be a problem for you but I could easily play a few more Baldurs Gates.

Given story line of both KotOR games and characters involved, the "heroes on one side" etc is extremely bad simplification, imo. The plots aren't really different from lot of jRPG's depth-wise and hey, you can even choose the flavour for your ending and overall story which on the eastern side seems to be reserved mostly for dating games.

edit: also, KotOR reminds me: how does Jade Empires compare to modern eastern RPG games? It sounded pretty interesting and quite evolved, but then I didn't play it so lacking first-hand experience.

I enjoyed Jade Empire a lot, but I know a lot of folks who dug Bioware's other stuff didn't so much. The martial arts system feels very different than their other games, and the story twists and turns ... a good amount? But somehow less than KOTOR and others? Feels a bit more linear, I think is the best way to say it.

It's not much like modern Korean/Japanese RPGs, though, to answer your question. Has a definite American feel. Sort of has a Seven Samurai meets High Noon feel to it, if that makes sense.

Game play did trump graphics at least in the 80's and 90's in my opinion. But any game released now has to have great graphics to sell now. I mostly played and still do today wargames like:

Kampfgruppe (1985)
Gary Grigsby's Pacific War (1992)
Steel Panthers (1995)

And at least a few years ago played again some of the " SSI Gold Box" AD&D and Eye of the Beholder, good times. 

I replay all the Gold Box stuff every few years or so.  The combat in those games is some of the earliest Tactics-style gameplay I can think of.

I miss the Monkey Island games. And Grim Fandango. And fuck, X-Wing and Tie-Fighter.

Wait, those are all LucasArts titles. Fucking George Lucas ruined the games industry, just like he ruined Star Wars. DAMMIT!

Seriously, I do get the Monkey Island joneses every now and then. And my wife called me at work yesterday to let me know she'd downloaded the original Leisure Suit Larry and was having a blast (and dieing a lot). I recommended Space Quest when she was done.

That's about all I have on old games, although I admit I am hoping Sid Meiers redoes Alpha Centauri. One reason I'm following Spore is that Wright has identified the critical problem in modern game design -- that graphics and art are eating up an ever increasing percentage of the game budget and time -- and has tried to make a game that gets around that problem, to an extent.

I don't see any real solutions at the moment, except "better tools" or "longer development times" or "bigger budgets"....not really great ideas, I admit.

Actually, I think Jade Empire felt western because the Asians had notably Asian faces and the combat sucked.


You'd be correct. The earliest straight tactics title I can think of for consoles is Fire Emblem for the NES, which was never brought over to America. I think it came out in 1989 or 1990.

So, all you people who play older games once in a while, what's the best way to slow them down these days?  I used to use Mo'slo or whatever when it was free, but I'd think you could fire up dos 7.0 in a vpc these days or something.

I have an old copy of x-com that is burning a hole in my um... desire to play it.

Keep an old PC.

Could try DOS Box

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1

" DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. DOSBox has already been ported to many different platforms, such as Windows, BeOS, Linux, MacOS X...

DOSBox also emulates CPU:286/386 realmode/protected mode, Directory FileSystem/XMS/EMS, Tandy/Hercules/CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA graphics, a SoundBlaster/Gravis Ultra Sound card for excellent sound compatibility with older games...

You can "re-live" the good old days with the help of DOSBox, it can run plenty of the old classics that don't run on your new computer!

DOSBox is totally free of charge and OpenSource."

But Schild is right, certain things you cant beat having a real DOS box.

Yeah like running Daggerfall with full sound and music on old machine. I really loved the twisting dungeons in that game. Tried it with XP, sure it runs but movement really sucks :(

Yep, I use Dosbox. Works like a charm.

Yeah, that really worked out well for him, seeing as development started seven years ago and the projected release isn't until early -> mid 2008. :P

If he can get the game delayed until the year 2807, technically everything up to this point will have been only 1% of their total development time.   :-D

They replaced the time and resource requirements of generating assets with time and different resources for generating mathematic probability formulae :)

Yea, instead of bogging down my computer with shitty textures (par for the course with previous Will Wright titles), we're gonna bog down our computers doing math. Meh. Critical problem my ass.

Will Wright should cancel Spore and concentrate on making a game with lots of effeminate big eyed characters in it. 'Cause there's just never enough of those.

edit: spelling

Yes, because that's what I was saying. Don't troll.

Geeze Schild it's not like I've based my whole Internet persona on hating anything popular and loving obscure stuff that nobody has ever heard of.

Hence the "to an extent". :) He's running into the same problem from a different direction.

Bog our computers down by doing math?  Oy Vey.   :roll:

WINNAH

Guys, procedural shit is pretty intensive. Remember how long it took that 300kbps shooter to load the first time? Just saying. I'm not saying it'll be intolerable, I'm just saying, they didn't realize any sort of critical problem and set out to "fix it."

I didn't say -- or at least didn't mean to say -- that he fixed it. I said he recognized it as a problem, and Spore was one attempt to find a way around it. He's been pretty open in interviews about how insanely huge a part of his games budget art assets have become, and how each new game seems to find art assets becoming larger and more expensive a part of the game.

He coupled that with the fact that the fans of his games seemed to like nothing better than to make their own crap for the Sims and share it around, and came up with a notion wherein he could bypass the bulk of the "Art generation" and make "creating your own shit to share with people" an integral part of the game.

Doing so was a huge technical challenge (I make no claims as to whether he can actually make it work) since no one has really tried this on this great a scale.

His 'solution' such as it is doesn't really scale to anyone else, or probably to any other game (save sequals to Spore, assuming there are any) -- other than it's generally worth it to include tools to build art and game assets because some people like to mod, and a lot more like to download them and play them.

I only mentioned him as an example of someone noting that games these days spend a hell of a lot more time on "teh pretty" then they used to, and that the more time and money you devote to art assets, the less you have to gameplay. Will Wright's trying to turn "creating art assets" into the gameplay -- but that's a pretty limited solution.

You know... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God). 1954 was a great year for sci-fi (http://tabo.aurealsys.com/archives/2006/10/07/computer-is-there-a-god/).
(Yes, Murgos for winnah).

Yes, it's easier to just look up what color and shape to make a set of pixels from a set list (i.e. a 'texture map' or model) than to compute what color it should be based on dynamic inputs (procedurally).  I was just goofing on your 'math is hard for computers' line.

Seriously though, loading textures into and out of memory is what takes a great deal of the work of a computer in a modern game and does a lot to restrict how detailed a scene can be.  A single 512x512 resolution texture is 1,048,576 bytes of memory in 32bit color.  Procedurally generated graphics can be [but not necessarily will be] much more efficient.  I'll even go so far as to say that most video lag you see today is due to textures being swapped in and out of memory.

http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger

Now granted, my computer is dogshit. But loading that took more time than loading up Doom 3 because it was procedurally texturing everything. Which is to say, I was merely saying that Will Wright's "Fix" isn't much of a Fix at all, it's just something to make his shit smell like roses.

You might -- and this is just a total stab in the dark -- wait until you can actually play it, which admittedly might be 2024. :)

More seriously -- as I noted, Wright went with procedural generation for two reasons. First, art assets were taking up a huge chunk of his budget. Second, people seemed to like making shit FOR use in his games almost (or sometimes more) than actually playing his games. Procedural generation killed two birds with one stone, allowing him to to make a game that was, pretty much, people making up the art assets for the game.

On a tangent, you should only have to crunch the numbers on a creature once and cache it after that. Once the software has worked out what it looks like, how it moves, and how to properly draw and animate it, you don't have to crunch all that shit again -- just display as normal.

You do realize you aren't actually saying anything, right?  Pointing at one dudes tech demo of procedural graphics and going "La, it's all shite." is a little sweeping, eh?

Procedural graphics are hard and to do them right is difficult.  Usually, they are only used when EXTREME optimizations are needed.  That particular game takes so long to load because he creates all the graphics from formula to keep the size of it down to 300kb.  You do realize that the whole point of that tech demo is that it is a 'look what I can do if I push this concept to it's utter limit.' sort of thing, yes?

That would be The Sims 2.


Also from The Sims 2.  I think it could work but I am still in a serious wait-and-see mode with Spore.

In the absence of pewpewnicorns, I would like to point out that I have easy-clicky access to Space Quest and X-COM via GameTap, but I still don't play them.  Well, I started to play each of them but have not made much progress.  Space Quest, man, I forgot how angrifying it is to type in wrong word after wrong word.

You are missing the point.

First, the textures and other procedurally-generated stuff can be cached after they've been "rendered".

Second the point of generating textures, surfaces, and other objects procedurally in a large game is that you don't have to have armies of people creating those art assets for you by hand. When people complain about game development getting more and more expensive it's the cost of the art asset production work that they are mostly complaining about, and also why many game companies are starting to ship that work overseas to China.

Yep. You can buy and modify a database, an engine, various middleware, tons of solutions in a can that have the bulk of the work done for you. You cannot really buy "Art assets". That shit has to be new. The best you can buy is tools that fit whatever engine you've bought, and even then the tools have to be modified to work with whatever engine changes you've made. And then all that art has to be done from scratch each and every time.

Will Wright's lucky -- the people that play his games view 'creating the art' as a huge portion of the game, so he makes a game where creating the art assets IS the game. It's not something most games can do. According to a few interviews, he got the idea for Spore -- and using procedural programming -- because his art costs ballooned in The Sims 2 and even then, users quickly exhausted it and moved to user-created content.

A large problem with procedurally generated content (aside from intitial research/implementation time) is imo, it can greatly hinder any sort of effective QA. When you have an artist create walk cycle for 5-legged dog, then it's not too difficult to watch it, decide it looks like shit and send it back for rework. With procedural content you need the QA guy to come up with idea of 5-legged dog to test in the first place, then after it's found to look like shit the guy that brewed spaghetti code responsible for this disaster not only has to figure out which part of his mess is making that dog walk like shit, but also to come up with fix to underlaying theory that _may_ fix the issue ... and then finally actually fix the code so it conforms with this upgraded theory without introducing series of bugs in 3-winged fish and undersized gorillas with two heads. And all this vs tweaking few animation keyframes.

But that would meant that you'd have to hire QA people that were creative... and you'd see your QA costs balloon... so mabye a game developer would think, "hmm, if I use evolutionary coding styles, I could replace my QA staff with code and servers... servers are much cheaper then people!... and I can spin this with marketing!  GENIUS /HUG ME!"

Nah, no ones is that crazy.

Um, no?  The power of procedural animation is that it is easy to tweak it.  You change the constraints on the range of motion allowable on the joint, compile, run, change range of motion, compile, run, change length of leg, compile, run, etc... etc... etc...

The same cycle involving artists, rendering and all that other crap has to be much more time consuming and intensive.  The initial investment is building a mathematical model of a 5 legged dog.  Once you have it tweaking it is the easy part.

You say it like there's a problem with a 5-legged dog walking like shit. Maybe that's a clue that 5-legged dogs walk like shit. It is an evolution game, after all. Not every being that evolves is a winnar, the vast majority are dead-ends.

This is one reason I am actually wary of Spore. He's got such a great design concept, I hope he doesn't ruin it by trying to put too much game into it for the plebes. I hope he doesn't water down all the scientific background that inspired it, but it already looks like it's heading that way. And unfortunately it still won't sway the people who need directed gameplay.

If it's a science-heavy massive sandbox...I'll be happy.

Unfortunately, his publishers won't. The Sims is the best selling PC franchise of all time. Though WoW will eventually overtake it...

With the money and years that have gone into Spore, I don't think anyone at the developer or publisher wants a niche title.

Thus my concerns.

Precisely: change, compile, run, change, compile, run, change, compile, run, *rinse, repeat* until it starts to resemble something reasonable. It's easy to *tweak the numbers* but tweaking numbers is very small part of getting good looking end results. What you describe is actually typical process your "old way" 3d animation guy will go through when they create IK rig to _help_ them animate that walk cycle by hand. Note: help, because all the tweaking and often complicated setups at the end of day still require manual keyframing, cleaning up and corrections... simply because the end result of what essentially is 'procedural animation' generated by automated solution just doesn't quite cut it. IK can and does go weird, especially if you are trying to use some kind of universal rig to handle range variety of motions. The problem is while with traditional approach you have someone who will see it and manually enforce changes for that particular instance so it "looks right", with 100% automated solution you have to get the procedural handler that's so universal and robust it'll get things look right entirely on its own. And that's something that's much harder... to the point where there's only one company that I know of (NaturalMotion) that advertises this kind of middleware/solutions. Even though these automated IK helpers have been around for years, and they could save movie industry tons of time and money long before games started to get anywhere near such budgets... so it's not like inventive to create these is anything new.



If it was indeed the easy part, the need for hand-created animation would cease some 5-6 years ago. Because mathematical models of human joint range, scale etc were created aplenty and are readily available. In other worlds, if this is all that's needed then the necessary tools have been out there for long time. And we should've been playing games with 100% generated procedural characters for years now.

Instead games focus on stitching together results of mocap sessions, and procedural animation tends to be limited to ragdolls (animation of these rare situations where internal joint constraints are mostly removed) ... are all game makers just idiots who don't know how much time and money they could save?

I wasn't very clear in the wording there, sorry. When I said 'looks like shit' I meant purely technical aspects -- body parts sticking through one another or mesh warping odly because the shape doesn't happen to cope very well with angles skeleton is put through. Stuff that simply *looks* bad. And you only need to read the numerous "zOMG my sword/cape sticks into my horse when I'm riding around" whines to see this sort of things does matter to number of people.

I suspect at least part of that is mocap and standard animation techniques are considerably faster, and allow the generation of more art assets more quickly. Frankly, if Spore was just a artist's tool for creating creatures and creating animations for them -- it wouldn't be worth the time or money. They've spent millions of dollars and years of work, and STILL someone has to go in there and put the bloody creature together.

It's faster for a professional to do the animation the standard way, and move onto the next creature. Spore -- as a tool for animation and art asset creation -- isn't nearly as good as most of the standard things artists use.

But Will Wright isn't trying to generate art assets for a game -- if so, he'd have tens of thousands of alien creatures already built and populating some game world for a fraction of the cost -- he's trying to make it the game.

So once more -- procedural generation is a good solution for Will Wright for the problems of bloated art asset costs, because what his players really want is to make the damn things themselves in a sandbox. In fact, for him, I suspect a lot of Spore's design work will be reused for later games to allow more user customization.

It won't do shit for, say, the guys making an MMORPG. It's cheaper and faster for them to create Elven Race #505 the normal way. That still doesn't change the fact that, in the end, the costs of creating Elven Race #505 PLUS Elven Land #505 and Elven High-Level Zone #505 keep spiraling upwards.

Yes it has effeminate girly men, needless kekekeke, oversized swords and axes, impossibly large eyes, and upskirt shots.

Superb argument, good suh.

Nah, it's much faster and cheaper to just stick a couple of guys in a body suit with some ping pong balls on it and make them jump around a bit than it is to accurately describe every realistic maneuver a person can make in a sword fight in 3-D calculus for every moment of time.  It's also much quicker to paint something that looks like a single chain mail shirt and give it a couple of predetermined flex points than it is to describe in math the set of all chain mail shirts and their appropriate behaviors.

I haven't done crap loads of modeling and texture work but I have done a few things here and there for game mods in 3d studio max and photoshop and the level of effort for creating a wire diagram and a texture to wrap around it is pretty minimal, not to mention the training time and level of skill required.  I was able to start making mediocre items within an afternoon with the help of a few tutorials.   About the same amount of time it took me to mock up a sword and stick it into oblivion was necessary just to get a simple colored box spinning around procedurally.

edit:  wiki link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation