Warhammer Online is the most schizophrenic game in recent memory.  I’ve had a couple two hour sessions with it so far, and they’re almost different games entirely.

In one session, I got a Shaman up to level 5.  I only saw a couple other players the whole time.  Around level 3, I entered a queue for a “scenario” (think WoW battleground: big 10v10 or XvX fight, capture and hold).  I stumbled across several areas which notified me they were “public quests”.   These areas were just as desolate as the others, in terms of players, but contained giant monsters that squashed me flat.  I learned to steer clear.  I stopped playing about halfway through level five, over an hour after joining the battleground queue– which still hadn’t started.

In short, the whole experience was a bit of a letdown.  Warhammer has so many small improvements over low-level WoW, that there isn’t room to go into them here.  WoW can learn a lot.  But at heart, I’m done with the PvE grinding experience, no matter how easy your quests are or how exciting your environments look.  I’m not going to pay $15 a month to collect 5 stunty beards.

I also leveled a Bright Wizard to 6, on a different night, different server, and different faction.  Over the course of the evening, I completed a pair of public quests with lively groups of players, and was rewarded for my efforts with lots of experience, loot, and other increasing numbers of unknown purpose.  I cranked through a quick level or two with a couple runs through a battleground, which was fantastic 10v10 fun: my suicidal wizard set dozens of foes afire, using maxed-out spells that would frequently backfire.  Solo PvE quests worked to create a structure around all of this, moving me from place to place, and enjoyably passing the time between battlegrounds and public quests.

When Warhammer is “on”, it’s a truly fantastic game.  There’s simply no contest between the new character experiences in WAR and WoW: Warhammer has set totally new expectations for the MMO experience.  It should be– shockingly– fun from the beginning.  It should also be social from the beginning, not in some tacked-on endgame that appears after 100 hours of social play.  WoW, take notes.

On the flip side, all of the problems I encountered with my Shaman are self-evident design problems that I’m sure their designers saw three years ago.   Were the solutions too intractable?  Were the fixes worse than the problems?  Or simply beyond their capabilities?  Unless they pull something out of their hats, the problem of poorly populated or balanced lower level zones will only get worse over time.

From the essential “Theory of Fun” approach, CC’s combat gives your brain plenty to munch on.  In short: there’s absolutely no way a game like Double Dragon or Golden Axe would do well with today’s gamers.  Castle Crashers has developed a far deeper combat system, that puts it closer perhaps to Devil May Cry (especially in being juggle-centric) than the older titles that ostensibly inspired it.

Of course, a major draw of Castle Crashers is the co-op play.  I don’t even know if I would have purchased CC without online co-op.  I can’t think of a single other time that’s been true: co-op is often treated as an early, easy feature cut, and for good reason.  Does that equation change for XBLA titles?  You know your players are online.  But plenty of other titles have assumed their players are online– it’s just usually used for competitive play.  (In my post title, I have a bit of fun with qualifiers.  MMOs are co-op successes.  Golden Axe was a co-op success.  Still, I find Castle Crashers to be a surprising outlier, given today’s console game environment.)

On a side note, while everyone accepts that people enjoy playing games together, I haven’t heard an analysis of this to nearly the extent that Theory of Fun tackles mechanics.  This is probably well-trodden territory by psychologists, but how many developers read psych journals?  It sounds like the “massively solo” success of WoW caught even its creators by surprise.

Since I haven’t posted any news about the games I am working on (Brutal Legend is awesome, btw, and my personal game is finally heading towards some simple playtests), how about a game I worked on years ago?

1UP FM’s Podcast crew has spent the last portion of several shows talking about their recent experiences playing through Psychonauts.  It’s way, way better than a review, and a different experience than a focus test.  I don’t know if it’ll be interesting to people who didn’t work on Psychonauts, but I found the podcasters surprisingly insightful about what they liked.  It can actually be fairly difficult to talk intelligently and accurately about what does and doesn’t work for you as you play through a game: so many inputs combine to create your experience that it can be difficult to isolate any real causes.  The 1UP crew, though, does a solid job.  I actually took notes.

In case you’re interested– and I don’t actually know if it’s interesting to more than 40 or so people– you can get to all the relevant podcasts from their main 1UP FM page.  The relevant bits are:

7/28 - 1:09:28
8/04 - 1:16:15
8/11 - 1:22:39
8/18 - 1:15:15

(Thanks to several DFers for providing the dates and timestamps.  I merely copy-paste!)

We finished the mosaic.  It’s 4′x2′.  I fail at thumbnail resizing, so just click it.

Really, with the massive power-to-cost difference, there are only a few areas in which consoles pale compared to PCs, when it comes to gaming.  If I had to pick three, they’d be: the lack of a mouse+keyboard; the lack of open access to thousands of independently developed games; and the lack of really long installs, during which the game copies itself to your hard drive for seemingly no improvement to load times.

While some of us have been able to replicate that experience by purchasing Metal Gear Solid 4, now there’s finally a chance for the rest of us.

As you may have already heard– either because all your WoW-playing friends started calling you, or you started calling all your non-WoW playing “friends”– Blizzard has launched their new, insanely beneficial Recruit-a-Friend program.  The reasons, and some uses, are already well-covered here.  I’d like to discuss another use, which is probably my favorite.

Your higher-level newly-WoWed friend can just grant you levels if they outlevel you.  This eliminates the messy business of giving out your account info to powerleveling services– just pay them money, let them buy a new account, level it up, and send you levels.  This is now the safest way of powerleveling, and coincidentally, it also makes Blizzard the most money.  To get your brand-new character up to 60, the powerleveling service would have to buy two copies of WoW.  AFAICT, this isn’t even against Blizzard’s terms of service.

WowInsider reports that Wrath of the Lich King will let you play fetch with your pets.  Sure, WoW’s non-combat activities are fairly paltry.  On the other hand, Blizzard just keeps adding little bits here and there.  Furthermore, even WoW’s combat activities retain little to no similarity to the leveling game.

What’s the purpose of 80 levels of grinding in order to get more pets to play fetch with?  What’s the rationale behind a level 58 requirement to watch an in-game stand-up routine?  If they implement player housing, will there be a PvP rating requirement on some of the flashier couches?  A 100+ hour barrier to playing with your friends has always seemed steep, but at some point the barriers of a conventional MMO just start to seem unfathomably bizarre.

My “A40 Audio System” arrived a couple weeks ago. It’s hard to find an in-depth review of these things, and I’m not going to give you one either– I’m not your qualified gaming audiophile.

I love the sound from the headphones.  They take an optical cable directly from the back of the 360, put it through a mixer, and give you full surround support in the ‘phones.  The XBL integration isn’t going to improve the quality much over the standard headset– that signal comes through the controller– but on the plus side it’s actually mixed with your game sound.

I tried a couple wireless XBL headphones before giving up on the whole idea as a failure, so I didn’t manage to avoid cable hell.  Aside from that, and the price, I’m loving these.  They’re comfortable enough that I wear them even when I don’t need headphones, just because they sound so much better (for gaming, anyway) than my normal sound system.

So, you say you’ve got even more levels than the other guy?  I don’t want them.  You’ve got things that’ll boost my stats?  Look: I don’t care which slot, which stat, or by how much.  I don’t even care about your intricate combat systems, 30 layers deep, each excruciatingly balanced against painfully large spreadsheets full of melee attacks, ranged attacks, AoE attacks, damage types, probabilities, and resistances.  I don’t care if your strikes cause DoTs, and your nukes are cones, and every last one of your buffs has been hand-tuned down to a short duration because of the incredibly high percentage by which they boost my whatever.   I don’t want my weapon to gain an increased chance to proc– I don’t want it to proc at all.

I’ve got RPG burnout, and now these castles in the sky– these ethereal monuments to pure mathematics– have lost their thrill.  Sorry, but your leveling bonus gives me +10% to who gives a shit.  And my new points to allocate into… whatever?  Here’s a D20, roll to see if I care.  (Here’s a hint: your modifier is 0, and the DC is 21.)

Why now?  I think it’s the absence of palette cleansers.  In the past, I’ve shot people in the face (Quake), stolen their flag and then shot them in the face (Tribes), or stolen their flag, shot them in the face, and then driven over their face (Halo).  Now, my competitive fix comes from WoW’s arenas– not exactly the sharp cheddar counterpart to my complex, RPG-bodied cabernet.  (That analogy failed on both the literal and metaphorical levels.)

RPG systems are a near-perfect way to feed the gaming addiction– a constant low-level feed of new information to incorporate into use.  At some point, though, my brain simply loses the need to consume that next systemic nugget.  Maybe the problem isn’t the paradigm, maybe it’s the systems in question.  Are modern RPGs really giving my brain new toys?  I know what knockback is.  I know how DoTs work.  I can intuit the advantage of a +1 to hit.  We’ve been over this ground before, and a simple rearrangement of the objects on its surface doesn’t create a sufficiently new experience.

TIGSource’s procedural game competition has just ended, and there are some very clever and charming entries.

Rescue: the Beagles creates a fun platforming mechanic using procedurally generated landscapes plus three parallax levels.  If you need to jump up to the next level, you’ll have to find a small enough gap to do so: but if you’re too slow, the different scrolling speeds will have taken your opportunity away.

Dyson is a miniature RTS in which you send your seedlings from asteroid to asteroid, attempting to take over the entire asteroid belt by growing trees.

They’re small games– the competition period was fairly short, and these are indie devs– but still fun.  I was surprised, especially, to see that Rescue’s mechanic felt new.