If you’ve been playing it, you already know that Shadow Complex is a well-executed Metroidvania game, with plenty of secrets and upgrades to keep you scouring the map for hours.  But did you also know that its developers “collaborated from the beginning” with Orson Scott Card?  It’s true!

If you don’t know who Orson Scott Card is, he achieved fame selling elementary school bully-killing fantasies to high school nerds who had been bullied in elementary school.  Since then, he’s spent most of his time writing increasingly elaborate, fictional justifications for enforced heterosexual marriage and procreation (part of fighting what he terms the “bugger war”).

How can you tell an Orson Scott Card game story, from a typical game story?  I’ve helpfully included the full story of Shadow Complex (spoiler alert!) below, with Card’s contributions in red.

A shadowy, left-wing, paramilitary group is hiding in the United States.  On the day it plans to emerge and take over the country, only a lone, masculine hero can stop it: YOU.  Can you kill enough dudes and blow up enough shit to stop the coup?  (Yes.)

Not what you expected?  Me either– because the only justifiable reason for overthrowing the government is to stop men from marrying each other.

My July 1st post on World of Warcraft’s huge barriers to playing with friends generated a bit of discussion about what lower barriers would do to the game.  In particular, would it increase anti-social play?

Well, we’re about to find out– Blizzard just announced cross-realm grouping for instances.  Details are slim, but it sounds a bit strange so far: it appears biased towards Pick-Up Groups (as opposed to playing with friends), instead of playing with friends.  There are even special rewards for cross-realm PUGging an instance.  Maybe this is their way to finally get folks to use the Looking For Group system?  It’ll probably still be within battlegroup, and not cross-faction, so playing with an arbitrary friend is probably still out of the question.  (Most of the downsides with few of the upsides?)

With WoW’s current reputation and loot systems, this new feature would be pretty griefer-heavy.  But I don’t imagine we’ve heard nearly all the details.  Blizzard doesn’t usually release things half-assed– well, except the Looking For Group system.

Also, they’ve started hinting towards mentoring/sidekicking to allow people to uplevel/downlevel to play with their friends.  They’re really pushing the alt thing with Cataclysm.

I’m not an experienced reviewer, so let’s get this going with a bulleted list of the XBLA game’s features:

• The green deck starts with Wall of Wood.
• No matter how many games you play, and how many cards you earn, you cannot remove Wall of Wood.
• Wall of Wood is terrible.  Nobody plays with Wall of Wood.
• No, that’s not quite right.  Once, when I was 12, I made a penis-themed deck with cards like Rod of Ruin and Throne of Bone.  That deck had Wall of Wood.  No, wait– I replaced it with Giant Growth, because it even sucked in that deck.

In conclusion, 0/10.

Today, Blizzard lifted the embargo on Starcraft II single-player coverage, as you can see.

In short, it’s Starcraft– but with an added Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries / Wing Commander: Privateer gameplay style that was so popular in the nineties.  It’s all there: the adventure game “click on me to advance the conversation” bar area, list of missions you can run for cash, and tech upgrade and mercenary hiring for help with upcoming missions.

I loved Mercenaries, and I loved Privateer.  Between the release of those games and now, though, GTA3 happened– and Oblivion and Assassin’s Creed and, hell, The Simpsons Game.  Mass Effect’s Normandy felt primitive, and Starcraft II doesn’t even go that far.  Don’t we expect a bit more from our AAA titles nowadays?  2-D games with designs solved in the 1990’s feel like the domain of the small, independent developer at this point.  From a top-tier publisher, I expect huge worlds, technical feats, features that blow me away at first glance.  (Who didn’t feel a bit of awe when first playing Oblivion or Assassin’s Creed?  Or World of Warcraft?  Who expects to feel that with Starcraft 2?)

What should I have expected from Starcraft 2?  A break from the simply encapsulated, object-based missions on a rectangular map.  A world that responds to my presence, but persists regardless.  Characters that do more than simply unlock a new dialog resource when I complete my next mission.  Gameplay beyond what I saw on the prequel over 10 years ago.  Exciting, immersive, shocking moments that may not even be possible in a top-down game.

Am I asking too much from Starcraft 2?  Probably.  Start with Blizzard’s essentially conservative design philosophy, and add an existing fan base so hard-core that Starcraft II’s designers are practically imprisoned.  And the PC– we’re talking about a platform that makes technological advance prohibitively difficult.  That fragmented 5400 RPM hard drive will give you crap streaming speed; the integrated video card will surprise you if it surpasses original XBox capabilities.  Anything next-gen is a huge technical risk.

Still, I can’t say that I’m not looking forward to Starcraft II.  Reading those previews makes me nostalgic for Privateer.  Starcraft II already feels like a cozy, comforting game that doesn’t demand too much– something I’ll play well into the night, when I’m past tired, one more level after one more level.

After a while debugging Wordpress, I discovered something: when you’re out of quota on a subdomain of a site hosted on Hostgator, it doesn’t return a failure code when you upload a file via FTP.

No, it returns success, and creates a size 0 file. I didn’t have the Wordpress Blank Screen of Death at all– I simply had a very accurate display of a 0-byte file.

Yes.

I’m really excited about a console game.  It’s set in World War 2.  I’m sick of World War 2.  It has some sort of connection to Tom Clancy– that’s a minus.  The art direction looks bland, and the story hasn’t even showed up yet.

But if you check out this 8 minute gameplay vid, you can quickly tell that the design team has done a ton of heavy lifting.  (And maybe the UI team?  Do game studios even get to have a UI team?)  Let’s check out the elements:

• Positional + pitch/yaw controls.  Hey, I’m a console player, I know how to point at things in 3D– I bought Halo, remember?
• Quick zoom.  This is great for increasing precision and resolution.
• Floating cursor.  Lots of RTS games have gone with a crosshair in the middle of the screen– this floating, snap to nearest unit cursor looks a lot more useful.  Instead of trying to snap the view to a unit (see: Halo– and yes I’m contradicting point 1), snap the cursor and leave the view free.
• Tons of visualization.  Watch the player find a destination for the units.  You’ll see not only the destination, but the position and orientation of each unit when they arrive.  You can also see enemy paths, iconic views when you zoom out, and lots more UI goodness.

I’m not even going into the unit- and base-building modes, which display at least as much work, or the strategic map views, or the special abilities.  R.U.S.E. displays far, far more UI attention and innovation than almost any game I’ve seen.

I don’t see a real multi-select solution– perhaps they’ve designed a lower population cap, squad-based game to work around this.  The pace of gameplay is also short of something like Starcraft.  I’m still really excited: R.U.S.E. is clearly the most serious attempt at RTS on the console shown yet.

Here’s your typical RTS match: skirmish for a while with your level one troops. Eventually, one or both of you research some improved units, and branch out a bit, choosing units and counters. If the game continues, you tech up some more, and reach your next tier/level of units.

With this traditional ordering, each level of unit becomes rarer than the previous, since there’s the chance that the game won’t reach any level beyond the first. The casual player might get mighty sick of space marines, but not get nearly enough mecha-spacezilla.

The traditional RTS’s tech order is like a pyramid: tons of level one, a narrower level 2, and so on, and the top level is rare and pointy.

Does an RTS need this shape? Could an RTS offer up its “tiers” a la carte, any researchable at any time? Or could the research areas be arranged like a ring, which could be entered at any point, and research could continue in either direction?

I’ve been meaning to write about WoW’s Great Wall-sized social barriers for a while now, but Blizzard’s latest announcement of cross-faction transfers (for a fee) seems as good a time as any.

A while back, some devs decided to try World of Warcraft as a sort of “golf” for game developers.  It rapidly failed– not because most of them didn’t play WoW, but because most of them couldn’t play together.

The chance that a given player in the U.S. is on your same WoW server is less than 1%.  Then, the chance they’re on your faction is about 50/50.  The chance that they’re at a character level, equipment level, and commitment level to go out and productively kill something with you… well, combine them all, and they’re miniscule.

Of course, that’s not what WoW’s about.  Warcraft is about finding one group of enablers to play with regularly.  It’s not social like Facebook– it’s social like a cult, or the mob.

What a lot of would-be WoW-killers don’t realize is that it’s tough to pull people out of their cult– and if they leave, it’s not to join another cult.

The next “WoW killer” needs to be more subtle, more Facebook.  And you’re seeing plenty of it already, sneaking in through games like Call of Duty.  A Call of Duty player wouldn’t tolerate it for a second if the game said, “sorry, you can’t play with that friend– he’s on a different realm.  Oh, and level up, and reroll Horde.”

Yes, you’ll lose some of the strong bonds of something like WoW.  And maybe you can’t pull off some of the same persistent world coolness.  (If you decide to just “ditch realms”, how do you design or implement a world for 100,000 people?)  But modern, multiplayer shooters are showing you can still create a strong, enabling community out of that.  (Heck– so are the old shooters.)  They just need to figure out how to charge a monthly fee.

As a thought experiment, what would happen if WoW just made server transfers and faction transfers isntant and free?  Maybe a touch more griefing, though I’m not convinced.  The impact on server economies would give the hard core auctioneers more to do, not less.

One of the biggest losses would be the loss of the “big fish in a little pond”.  How can you be the third best guild on your server when guilds can jump from server to server on a whim?  Many game services, such as XBox Live, offer a friends-only top scores list, but that’s a bit trickier with WoW’s structure.  Plus, it’s not just the technical aspect– it’s walking around with that guild tag over your head, or recognizing the other folks in other server-best guilds, or with rare (on that server) gear.  How do you create that “little pond” again, to regain all the social pressures and rewards that come with it?

I’m using a ton of web apps nowadays. It’s mostly cool, but I have an idea.

You know that plugin you use to deploy your webapp? Or, like Wordpress, the plugin you offer to speed up the app’s performance? I think you could add a couple of key features.

First, maybe the plugin could make your app launch in its own window, with a custom icon for the taskbar. That way, I could find your app faster! Plus, maybe you could capture all input, so that I don’t worry about whether Ctrl-B is going to bold my text or make a bookmark. Also, what if you optimized the code a bit more– maybe skip past some of that browser gunk in the way, so your web app doesn’t slow down my (fairly beefy) computer? And shoot, as long as you’re doing all that, maybe you could put all the necessary code on my computer, so that I can run the “web app” while I’m offline.

I can’t believe I just put all those great ideas into one post– I could’ve kept them to myself and made a fortune.