Four of my blog’s top 5 search terms:

• fable 2 detailed map
• fable 2 maps
• fable 2 map
• fable 2 world map

Oops.  (Oh, btw: it’s here.)

Yet Another Warlock Nerf has posted a great summary of the major patches.  As the author, Horns, put it:

Can you imagine WoW today without daily quests? Without guild banks, flying mounts or Biscuits? Remember the days when warlock and hunter pets followed us on the ground while we were flying, when there weren’t any battlegrounds or arenas? When warlocks could beat rogues, when quest givers didn’t show up on our minimaps? When meeting stones served as a sort-of LFG tool, when I spoiled the entire post by giving you a summary at the beginning?

It’s a must-read for any WoW fan.  He excluded class changes, calling them the least significant.  (I agree with the approach for a different reason: I think they merit their own, in-depth post.)  The post shows the difficulty of going head to head with WoW– look at what they’ve managed to add since release.  But Blizzard’s learning process is also exposed, with several less-than-successful stabs at some thorny issues.  (Does anyone use the in-game voice support?  Or the LFG tool?)

One of my favorite things about MMOs is the exposed design process.  Designers encounter the most exacting balance standards ever, in a post-release setting with thousands/millions of players, and we get to watch the successes and failures.

This was already linked from Penny Arcade, so I probably don’t have to mention it.

You know how sometimes, you’re in the middle of composing an email, and you accidentally hit the send button?

Like, you might be attaching a file, and accidentally click “game_footage_EDITED_OUT_OMG_DO_NOT_SEND_TERRIBLE.avi”, instead of “game_footage_promo.avi”.  You try to click “remove attachment”, but instead you click in the “to:” field, and add all your PR and marketing outlets, and then you accidentally click “send”.

Anyway, that happens to me all the time.  And by “me”, I mean Square.

Click after the jump to get my full impressions.

(more…)

I had a brilliant idea for a WoW mod: Yelp for WoW.  Call it Whelp.  Rate your group members, your gear, instances, whatever.  “Five stars– finally a tank that knows what he’s doing.”  “1 star– ninja’d my Thori’dal for his rogue.”

Cons:

• May violate WoW mod rules for drawing on external data.
• Everyone would have to download and install it.
• You can’t make money from WoW mods.
• Would degenerate into a cesspool of gossip, rumors, and griefing, and the drama would completely overshadow its usefulness as a tool.

Pros:

• Would degenerate into a cesspool of gossip, rumors, and griefing, and the drama would completely overshadow its usefulness as a tool.

So… get to it, modders!

There are 615 people ahead of you in the queue to read my Wrath of the Lich King impressions.  Estimated wait time: 54 minutes.

From these shots of the latest SoCal fires over at boston.com, real life imitating video games.  (But with fewer super mutants.)

I hadn’t been paying too much attention to this round of fires, since even though I’ve got friends and family down there, I’m used to the “oh crap everything is burning down” news from down there several times a year.  However, I am hearing about some friends of family losing their homes and property in the fires– this looks like a worse year than usual.  As these photos from a friend show, the fires got right up into the inhabited areas.

Fable 2’s a pretty great RPG, with one huge flaw: you have no idea where you are in the world.  Zones exist in seemingly unrelated points in space, and roads connect them randomly to other zones.  One imagines the designers had a highly detailed world map as they created the game– and then excised all the intermediate spaces from the game, and ran the map through a shredder.

I’d forgive the process if, upon each zone exit, a group of mysterious kidnappers threw a bag over my head and tossed me into their trunk.  In the absence of such an explanation, I suggest these community-created world maps.  Set your laptop next to you, and you’ve got Fable 2 in-game maps without the interface load lag of a real in-game UI!

Pretty, with minimal locations (pre-spire):

Higher detail:

“Look up.  Now look down.  Interesting.  Now look left.”

That’s the generic dialog for detecting horizontal and vertical controller invert settings in many modern, high production value games.  It’s become quite common, yet fewer than 10% of gamers invert their controls.  If you were to guess “no invert” and just go with it, you’d be right over 90% of the time.

Now, how often do you think a game properly guesses your gamma settings?  Across my three current gaming platforms (360, laptop, desktop), games guess too dark on them almost every time– and I play in the dark!  I struggle for a while, getting shot by things I don’t see, or missing important items that blend into the darkness.  Then I finally bring up the gamma configuration option– and realize I can only see four or five of the ten test bars.  After a fix, the game instantly becomes twice as fun.

I could figure out how to play with non-inverted controls in about 10 minutes.  (My eyes would never develop the ability to see the lower light intensity.)  I would realize the controls were inverted in about a second.  (It often takes me a good half hour of frustration to remember gamma settings.)  The guessed settings for controller inversion are right 90% of the time.  (I see proper gamma guessing in about one of ten games I play.)  The XBox 360 has a game-wide setting for controller inversion.  (No such setting exists for gamma.)

What am I missing?

We hooked up a blue screen (the color of fabric we had lying around) at our recent Halloween party, and took pictures of people against it.  We set up a Photoshop script to automatically composite the images against randomly selected backgrounds.  There are a lot of improvements we could make next year– you’ll see tons of major artifacts– but it was quite a bit of fun.  We had a TV displaying the results in the chill room, so guests could see them immediately.

Check ‘em out.  I’ll probably post some of the best pics directly on this blog later.