Love (the MMO, but still may be fleeting)

[UnSub]

The indie MMO Love goes paid open beta Jan 7.

Anyone been playing it? What is it?

[Goreschach]

What exactly do the words 'paid open beta' mean when put together like that.


Those words do not fit together like that.

[Kageru]

Paid Beta = It's not finished and doesn't work that well but we need money.

They've certainly scooped the pool in the ugliest MMO award, and I regard "procedurally generated content" with deep suspicion.

But what the heck, good luck to them. I hope they find enough suckers customers to fund its no doubt infinite gestation period.

[raydeen]

What exactly do the words 'paid open beta' mean when put together like that.

Warhammer Online?

/snark

[Venkman]

What exactly do the words 'paid open beta' mean when put together like that.

They're finally formalizing what we've been doing for years.

[DayDream]

I think they mean it's a developement style experiment, with a hype engine tacked on to recoup some investment.

[Xanthippe]

At first I thought this was the porn mmo, but it's not - whatever happened to that?

[UnSub]

It's paid open beta in that it costs 3 Euros to get in. It's a 1 man indie MMO so I can let that pass.

[Ratman_tf]

Love is played form a first person view, because you should see the world not yourself.

So they solved the problem of peripheral vision? 

[Endie]

This is the game that was developed by the one guy, yes?

[UnSub]

Yes.

[Jerrith]

I paid and tried it out when the alpha first started.  Impressive for a single person, with a bunch of neat ideas / techniques that have actually been implemented.  Sadly, I get motion sickness within ~5 minutes of playing it, and just can't keep going.

[Mrbloodworth]

Not knocking this guys accomplishment, but I have never seen this as anything more than a bad shader someone made, and ran with it. It looks like one giant error.

[Prospero]

If you haven't watched the demo video you should. I'm definitely going to throw down for the beta.

[Jamiko]

I get motion sickness while playing too. It seemed interesting but I couldn't tolerate it.

[Chinchilla]

That is weird as all hell looking.  It looks like as if you are playing in a abstract art world on drugs.

[Malakili]

I decided to toss the 3 euros at this (it comes out to 4 USD and change depending on the day). 

I've only played a bit, and its definitely still pretty rough, but you can see what he's going for.  There are some obviously annoying things (like no sound yet), but I actually find the world pretty charming, and when I logged in, I found a settlement of players pretty easily (it directs you to a settlement automatically).  Apparently someone was telling me that for some reason the server was in a state where it wasn't spawning more tokens (the main items that are pretty much EVERYTHING in the game), so after running around a bit, I logged out.

I did get to edit the settlement i was in a little though.  Let me just put this bluntly, you could grief the hell out of people with this.  I'm hoping this game is just so far under the radar that it doesn't attract griefers though, because the vibe I'm getting from it is that it has a lot of potential.

The actual "meat" of the game is all about these settlements which players build.  The game seems to be PvE only, no PvP at all, and settlements of players work together to find tokens which can be used to add new stuff to your settlements, are items or weapons, etc.  There are enemy settlements as well (NPC), which you can attack, and such.  The gameplay video says that  NPCs will attack your settlements as well.

Anyway, anyone who wants to check out something different and is willing to spend a few bucks would probably do well getting in on this, but be well aware you are beta testing and this is NOT a finished product yet. 

The demo/gameplay video he made is here: http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/gameplay_video.html


Fake Edit:  Also, I did not experience motion sickness while playing, and I have been known to occasionally get it while playing games (though usually due to head bob in shooters, which this does not have).

[Severian]

Here is a post with links (collected in September) to a bunch of different interviews with the dev: http://www.gaminglove.net/forums/showthread.php?t=20

You can also do an advanced search of those forums for user "Eskil" to find his posts.

I remember finding his Assembly 2009 Seminar interesting.

[Numtini]

I rather like small intimate interesting games, but is there any population here? I don't mind low levels, but the Underlight experience where you'd see at most a dozen people on Saturday nights and be the only person on the server most daytimes was a bit hard to take.

[Malakili]

I rather like small intimate interesting games, but is there any population here? I don't mind low levels, but the Underlight experience where you'd see at most a dozen people on Saturday nights and be the only person on the server most daytimes was a bit hard to take.

As of right now I haven't seen many people in game, usually only a handful.  The good news is that the game directs all the players to the same area automatically, so you will generally at least find some folks.  It is, of course, a paid open beta for an indy game almost no one has heard of, so it isn't exactly bustling.  Still, I've found people in their vent server, and on the fan forums, and in game.   As of right now, it is very beta, servers going up and down a lot,  etc.

[Malakili]

So, there is no NDA or anything like that for this game, would there be any interest if I were to live stream while playing this?  It wouldn't be much of a big deal for me to set it up, since I already have Livestream functioning from when Torchlight came out.

[gryeyes]

This game is a myth.

[Endie]

This game is a myth.

I see what you did there.  Very subtle and very meta.

[Draegan]

I see what you did thar.   

[Malakili]

Dev Interview: http://gaminglove.net/forums/showthread.php?t=841

[Jerrith]

Gaming Love: In the patch notes, evil players are mentioned. What's that about?

Eskil Steenberg: It was a plan to let banned players join and lead AI settlements to make the AI more interesting and personal. The problem was the time it would take to implement, and how rare it would be to ever have it play out. I still plan to add something like that in the future.

Getting banned to unlock a new game mode?  That's, ah, interesting...

[Malakili]

Yeah, I'm not sure what that is all about, it doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of what I've seen in the game so far.


Anyway, the game has actually been improving pretty much daily, and players have already made some really nice settlements in game (though they are often wiped clean due to the fact that changes are coming down the pipe literally every day).  The more I play the better my brain has gotten as parsing the graphics into actual objects, almost like I've gotten farther away from an impressionist painting.   

I know he mentioned in his interview that he would like not have a map, as exploration is important, but I've found I would really like one.  I think part of the problem is also the fact that because the servers have been reset so many times since I started playing, its re-procedurally generated the world a lot of times since I began, so I rarely have more than 1 or 2 play sessions in the same world, before the geography is totally changed, which means I never learn my way around very well.     

Definitely like it though.

[Endie]

Malakili, what do you do in game?  How would you sum it up in five sentences or less?

[Malakili]

Malakili, what do you do in game?  How would you sum it up in five sentences or less?

Generally a play session goes a little something like this. (Adding at the end of posting: I realize a lot of what I typed might not make sense without a bit of knowledge about the game mechanics, so feel free to ask follow ups)

Log in.  If everything has been reset, I first make my way to the nearest settlement (which is always indicated by an arrow in the UI).  I talk to the other players there and see if they have any projects going (building something, is the AI attacking, etc).  I pick up a few key tokens from the settlement (usually a weapon upgrade and a radio have priority).  If there is nothing the settlement needs, I will pick a random direction and go explore until I come across 1) a token or 2) an AI settlement, after which I will fight the AI for a bit, and see if I can find anything useful to steal from them, and bring it back to my settlement.

A lot of time is spent planning too, as if you try to assault an AI settlement (and steal their tokens), you'll like die if you don't have a plan for disabling their defense system.  The pacing of the game is fairly slow because of this sort of "down time" but the actual combat/running speed, etc is rather high.

The game is meant to be played co-op, and thus working with other players is really important.  They've set up a Teamspeak server for people to talk on in game, and I have found my best experiences with the game have been when I have been on Teamspeak.

[jakonovski]

I remember finding his Assembly 2009 Seminar interesting.

That is just awesome. He's describing exactly what's wrong with games development today and is actually building a solution. I think I'll become a fanboy.

[Endie]

Yeah I feel a lot of goodwill for the guy persnoally just because he has the willingness to follow through on the faults he sees.

And Malakili: I forgot to say thanks at the time but that was good of you to describe the gameplay like that, cheers.

[Mrbloodworth]

I remember finding his Assembly 2009 Seminar interesting.

That is just awesome. He's describing exactly what's wrong with games development today and is actually building a solution. I think I'll become a fanboy.

Like what? Having to work with others, or writing every single thing from scratch?

Sounds like most programmers I know already, most rather than understand what is already there, will opt to rewrite it all, causing the project to fail. There is already game middle ware that updates assets on the fly with the engine running.... and a whole school of thought on tool chains.

While his accomplishments are impressive, the output is still programmer art and logic. That's not usually consumable by average users.

I have noticed its the holy grail of programming to have a procedural program that can write procedural programs. The end result is always, procedural. There is a reason he has what looks like a broken shader obscuring the entire game frame by frame.

Case in point, in the first video, he asked how many programmers there were... because they are the only ones that will agree with him. Second he says that halo looks crappy...

 

EIDT: Oh how awesome, he "Completely removed the need to UV map", bullshit, he found atlas mapping, one of the more useless projections.

[jakonovski]

If I use quote the text field goes all wonky so I won't quote you.

The biggest thing he hit IMO was cost. You have hugely expensive development with diminishing returns so bad that games stagnate and become so formulaic that they might as well be procedurally generated. The dude single-handedly created a perfectly good MMO world where you can run around freely, yet in big bucks development you're still mostly running around in rooms connected by corridors, even if they're masked by graphical design. And if you do happen to get a sandbox, it's inevitably still just a potemkin village.

It can't be that hard to make better games, and I think that guy showed it isn't.

[Mrbloodworth]

You can keep the cost of anything down by removing the need of others with other skill sets, sure. Look at the end result. Its funny that his entire premises was to remove artists from the loop, completely, he even says it as one of his last comments before his time is up.

You get what you pay for I guess. Nothing he displayed was new, it was just assembled in a package. Just about everything he has shown, were tools or parts of tools for enabling artists... only, striped WAY down so that the output is so homogenized, you would be hard pressed to make anything but box man in box world with fuzzy shader.

I still think it is awesome what he has done, and I know its a programmers wet dream to not have to work with others, or work with artists in particular. The whole thing is like Relmcrafter for programmers though.... All output will look the same. But I suppose that can be a good thing?

[jakonovski]

I'd like to see what could be done with an actual dev team and a modest budget, using that guy's tools. The big idea being, don't spend your resources creating a high-def squad of roid raging space marines running through a giant worm's bowels, but build a world instead.