Did you see that?!

With a chill-thriller like this, timing is everything. Do you remember your first time playing FEAR or Silent Hill? You know the moments that really got to you, the ones that made you jump, gave you that nervous laugh or put you on edge? Moments like those are oft-repeated in other games, but just as often they get them wrong. It’s a tricky balance: The game scripting takes tender loving care and an attention to detail that’s hard to nail down. Nightmare House 2 nails it down.

Presentation is top-notch too. It’s not just the dirty, grungy textures. That look alone won’t do it. I know I’ve loaded up my share of games based on screenshots and been disappointed that they’ve got the look but they’re missing the rest. This mod has everything else in place: The voice-acting is decent and doesn’t get in the way (not too cheesy, not too flashy). The sound, likewise. The pacing is damn-near perfect.

There are puzzles, but those too include timing. A door will lock behind you and just as you’re trying to figure out your other options, something will happen. You’ll take a direction and your perceptions will change. The game carries you as much as you push it forward. That feeling of being trapped and led, works in the game’s favour. It could have so easily gone wrong, but it’s balanced well.

If I had a critical complaint: The story leaves you wondering right up until the end. Too many reveals earlier could have spoiled the suspense, so I may be nitpicking here. It does deliver a satisfying conclusion. Story is so hard for horror to get right, so underdone is probably better than overdone anyway.

As someone who dabbles in level-design, I found myself in awe of the clever transitions and the psychological usage of the spaces around the player. Clever, clever, clever. Even if this game never scares you (some of us don’t scare easy), it may impress you with the way it manipulates your perceptions and expectations.

I know I’m gushing here. I don’t mean for this to come across as a formal review, but I can’t say enough good things about Nightmare House 2.

Download it

If you like the horror genre even a little bit, download this mod. It requires the Orange Box (or just Half-Life 2: Episode 2). If you don’t already have the Orange Box, then you should: at $30 bucks on Steam it’s the best deal around for such high-quality games.

I recommend skipping the prologue and getting right into the better content with Chapter One, at least for the first run through. You can always catch the prologue part later, jumping past it won’t spoil your experience at all. It’s a safe bet to say once you’ve seen the good stuff in 2, you’ll probably appreciate the rougher earlier work the second time through. And no mistake, Nightmare House 2 is worthy of a second run through the game.

Watching the latest trailer for The Secret World (see header above) reminded me more of single-player games. The trailer was intriguing, for sure, but I couldn’t help but think that every player and every character I create will probably go through those same single-playeresque scenes.

Playable cut-scenes?

Single-player gameplay within an MMO comes across to me like a cut-scene. I feel detached from the rest of the game and segregated away from the ‘real’ content. The playable-cut-scenes worked at the beginning of Age of Conan, as a fluid tutorial that blended into Tortage, but honestly I’d rather be thrown into the world ala WoW circa 2004 (recent WoW versions are a little too hand-holdy at first but that’s another topic).

Maybe I’m just the wrong audience for this sort of thing. I enjoy single-player games, but not nearly as much as multiplayer. Traditionally, single-player games have a larger share of the overall games market. They’re easier to make, or more accurately the developers are able to craft very complete and polished games within the single-player genres. Multiplayer by its nature tends to throw monkey-wrenches into gameplay. Game designers are often uncomfortable with the associated compromises to their intended story and scripted events.

There are developers with strong talent in character storytelling: BioWare, with its great RPGs and Funcom with the Dreamfall / Longest Journey series. I hate to be cynical about this, but I wonder if their upcoming online games are just recognition of a shifting games market. Are they trying to shoehorn their talents into the online model?

RP in the G?

The developers tell us that we’re going to get a better, deeper story this way and I’m trying to be optimistic about that. I’m trying to keep my assumptions at bay. I like immersion and I’m on the light fringe of roleplay when it comes to RPGs. I like to make my character mine. I’m not a “thee and thou” flowery speech roleplayer, nor do I have any obsessions tied to backstory, but I like the blank slate that multiplayer RPGs usually give and single-player games usually don’t.

The cynical bastard in me wonders if it’s better for the storyteller, not necessarily the audience. At least not the roleplay audience.

Solo isn’t single-player

I know they’ve done these studies that say most of player time in MMOs is during solo gameplay, but that’s not the same as a single-player game at all. These gamers are online intentionally. They like to be within the multiplayer world, even if they don’t feel like cooperative or versus gameplay. Being part of a larger world makes it feel alive.

I’ve argued before that instancing works: It gives groups exclusive time within dungeons, for a tight group experience and no interference while they kill bosses. WoW’s instances are the perfect example. I just don’t think instancing works as well with a single-player because that’s too alone, completely solitary and removed.

There may be other ways in which player segregation could work for me. In the previews of Guild Wars 2– Conversations with NPCs will throw up a background and drop away the world for a moment, presumably so the player can focus on the dialogue (and story). That seems short enough that I may appreciate the separation. I always did feel a bit odd crowded around an NPC while being aware that everyone’s talking at once, so that could be enough separation to improve suspension-of-disbelief.

I’m still highly anticipating the MMORPGs that are highlighting personal storytelling. I’m curious how they’re going to tackle it. Aside from my reservations, if games are good I’ll accept them regardless. The latest crop of MMOs certainly look great from the previews. It’s very possible that the devs have some magic up their sleeves that I haven’t thought of.

Some notable features:

• 8 player Co-op (2 story campaigns + free-roam maps) and 16 player team versus. I’m a sucker for anything co-op.
• RPG elements including full character creation & customization. 4 Classes, 2 Factions.
• City-scape level design. I’d use the term modern warfare, but not to confuse it with the games of that name. There should be plenty of corridor and close-combat, with opportunities for sniping as well. It sure looks like their maps have been built with multiple classes and combat-styles in mind.
• Quest-like objectives and side-objectives per map (See this video @3:34). The way they’ve presented these really intrigues me. I know it won’t be like an open-world MMO but it’s something new for a coop shooter.
• The Sci-Fi storyline / premise of Brink has already pulled me in. The city on the edge of a civil war over limited resources. It allows for a lot of potential conflict.
• Steamworks integration and dedicated server support, which to me says that Splash Damage is interested in the PC market and this won’t be some shoddy console-port. It should also be hella easy to connect with friends on Steam.

It doesn’t hurt that it’s Splash Damage working on this game. It’s nice to see something that’s attempting to push the envelope for an FPS game, from a capable developer no less.

I’ll be waiting until Spring 2011.

Both games will get the new campaign The Sacrifice, with the spoiler-ish title (at least if you played The Passing). Complete with new campaign ending scenario.

The overlap comes with No Mercy, which will be ported into Left 4 Dead 2, apparently complete with the Left 4 Dead 1 characters.

At first I thought to myself that this may deprecate Left 4 Dead. No Mercy is pretty much the only campaign I go back to the first game for. But then, I also play it when I feel like going back to the simplicity of no-melee weapons and less-spammy special infected. Plus, the “I Hate Mountains” mod campaign is better balanced for L4D and I suspect No Mercy will still be too.

Overall, I like this update. Even if they moved all of Left 4 Dead’s content over to Left 4 Dead 2, I would still be happy to own both games. AFAIK with this DLC you will need to own both if you want to play No Mercy in L4D2 anyway.

Final note: Bill is my favourite of the 8 characters.

I’m still in a weird head-space about it.

I’m going to try hard to not make this about Tycho and Gabe. I love Penny Arcade, but as industry insiders I think they may have lost touch with everything outside of their own realm.

Tycho voiced something I’ve heard before. A sentiment I fully understand, because in moments of recklessness, I’ve had this thought myself: He equated buying used games to piracy.

I get it. Myself and most of my friends have been employed by the games industry, or on the periphery of it. I get the idea of protecting a livelihood and I get the idea of protecting the continued production of games. Especially right now, when the games industry is at odds with itself and many jobs are at risk.

Used games don’t provide any direct service to the games industry, at least not to anyone but the store selling them. I’ve wondered why most Malls allow Gamestop / Electronics Boutique to sell used games, while they have restrictions against used-clothing and used-bookstores. I often refer to Gamestop as Pawnstop. I’ve even posted here, years before, words similar to Tycho’s.

He’s wrong tho.

He’s wrong about the effects on games development. At least in the long term.

First-Sale Doctrine

First-Sale Doctrine is an essential part of Copyright law and it’s been subverted far too often lately as it is. It outlines important limitations on the first-seller of Copyrighted material that recognizes the ownership of purchased property for the buyer. In simpler words: You buy it, you own it, you can resell it.

What’s so important about it? It’s a consumer right. Okay, that’s not enough for most folks. Allow me to explain further:

In order for Intellectual Property to have the kind of weight that consumers must take seriously, it needs to trade value to the consumer. If the rights are too lopsided to the seller, if they limit the usage of their goods too much, or even recall them with no penalty to themselves: Consumers will lose respect for Intellectual Property.

In other words, if you take away the consumer’s natural acceptance that when they buy a copy, they own a copy– and you don’t replace it with something of equal value– Eventually people will smell the bullshit and it WILL become the same as piracy.

Balance.

As respect for Intellectual Property decreases, Piracy will increase.

It won’t happen on a conscious level. Our societal rules and taboos are too strong for that. It will happen on a level of respect (the lack of it). All respect for your IP will revert back to its hunter-gatherer state of zero. Those societal rules hinge on that respect.

I’m not proposing that gamers rebel and pirate games. I DON’T WANT THAT. But if the balance of Copyright continues to sink so deeply to one side, that will be the outcome. All of the lawmakers and even the companies that were involved in the creation of Copyright laws understood that fact.

Tycho and others connected to the software industry are sometimes blind to this imbalance because they have an inherent respect for the industry. That kind of respect may be shared by some of the consumers (and Penny Arcade’s fanbase), but I doubt it runs as deeply.

This notion that used-sales should be outlawed will harm the games industry in the long run. I imagine the big suits are squeeling with glee, looking at all the people who are supporting Tycho’s opinions. I don’t think they give one whit about the longterm erosion this will have on their business, they’re just salivating over what they can throw into their EULAs for the results of this quarter and maybe the next.

That’s business today. Sadly. This is a notion that’s going to eat its own young.

It’s already coming of course, with the way EULAs now trump Copyright laws in parts of America and in some places beyond. You don’t own, or even rent the software you use, it’s on a lease of contract which is lopsided to whatever they feel like putting into that click-thru agreement. Publishers are beginning to realize they can get away with quite a lot in a EULA and consumers won’t balk, they’ll just lose respect. For today’s dollars, that doesn’t matter, but each year it will bleed out the business more and more.

I’m all for game publishers attempting to protect their markets via their own means. Consumers can decide for themselves what to do about DRM, etc.. If the publishers are smart, they can add value elsewhere to replace what they’ve taken away (Steam comes to mind as an example of providing additional value). But I’m against this sort of premise both legally and morally that consumers should have more punitive restrictions placed on their purchases than traditional Copyright laws allow.

For the health of the games industry and yes, the wages of the game developers and the innovation of the games themselves: Bring back the balance of First-Sale Doctrine.

. . .

(I’d also like to note Zubon’s take on this issue at Kill Ten Rats. Imagine where we would be if the current business models of software were applied everywhere.)

When I examine these issues, people often mistake my intent and believe I am somehow pro-piracy. I’m not.

I’m just as susceptible as the next guy to feel protective of the wages of friends and colleagues in the games industry. Blatant piracy irritates me and sometimes I feel that anger burning.

One particular type of piracy that really throws me for a loop is the leaking of betas and pre-release media. While I often argue that pirates are not natural customers, these early peaks at games (and movies & music) are far more tempting to the general populace than saving a few bucks. People who would never otherwise pirate will often talk about leaked material or even jump on it.

What irks me the most: Beta-leaking isn’t taboo. What? I can’t talk about the legality of running your own servers, but the contents and spoilers of the leaked Halo Reach are front page news?! It’s not theft, it’s a scoop?

Ugh.

C’mon, this isn’t like some developer accidentally left Halo Reach while out binge drinking at a bar, leaving the product in the hands of a few unscrupulous newsmen.

This is the actual product in the hands of many. Discussing its merits via leaked material dangles a carrot for people to go ahead and download that material. Let’s face it, we’re not exactly in a culture that’s known for its self-restraint when it comes to new shiny stuff.

Discussing that it’s been leaked doesn’t bother me (I’d be pretty hypocritical with this article if it did), but going on to point out screenshots, video and other leaked info?

Don’t give the Corporate vultures any more material. Don’t give thieves more fuel for their e-peens. Don’t watch the bloody YouTube spoilers or the screenshots. Wait until the game comes out if you’re interested and either play the demo or buy the thing. It’s less than a month away, you can wait.

Either asleep, waiting for a new dawn of Worms, or awake and choosing which variation of exploding sheep I will send against my opponents.

I was an Amiga nut, so I’ve been playing Worms since the beginning of the Wormage. I’ve been particularly excited about this new Reloaded version though. The convenience of a fully Steamworks enabled Worms has me jumping in my hot seat, eager to play. Pre-order early access starts today.

If you haven’t played Worms, it’s basically Artillery Duel on steroids. Shoot at your friends and they shoot back: Accounting for wind, range, weapon type and funky explodable terrain that guarantees no two games are the same. The core gameplay hasn’t changed much from the original, which is great because it was already damned near perfect.

Explaining the rest would be listing all the myriad options, weapons and goodies that Team 17 has added over the past 15 years. Each version of Worms iterates upon the last (unless you count the excursions into new territory, like Worms 3D, which never quite captured the magic). This version should be almost overwhelming to newcomers, but that’s just a risk we’ll have to take.

Worms also comes with a ton of customization options and its share of modding. I’ve still got a few soundpacks up my sleeve, to distract my foes. I shall explode the terrain around them while they chuckle at the pop-culture overload.

The Name

Did they have to reuse the Neverwinter campaign name again? There’s got to be some other areas in the Forgotten Realms they could have tapped. This name has a serious pedigree when it comes to PC games. Plus, wasn’t the city of Neverwinter destroyed for the D&D 4th edition?

Well they’ve decided to go there. I like Cryptic, more than most people do, but I’m sceptical that anyone will be able to match the near-mythical status of the previous games. The original Neverwinter Nights (1991) is often referenced as one of the earliest successful online RPGs, or even sometimes as the first true MMORPG. Even more notable is BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights (2002) and its sequel from Obsidian Entertainment.

It’s the BioWare game that carries weight with me and perhaps the entire online RPG industry. It’s still used as a hiring tool for filtering out would-be MMORPG designers: Prove you can make a compelling campaign in NWN or NWN 2 before stepping through the door of any RPG employment offices. I’m dead certain that Cryptic is very familiar with this game and quite aware of the big shoes to fill.

I hope they haven’t considered the name lightly. I’m sure there are a lot of interested fans that would love to see a game top BioWare’s NWN in the same style and similar features.

The Game

This is part of that untapped market that I’ve been talking about lately. The features of BioWare’s Neverwinter that I feel Cryptic would be foolish to ignore:

• Player-created campaigns, with tools that are easy to get started with, but able to create complex content with a lot of customizations.
• Player-run servers. If Cryptic decides to try to leverage Neverwinter into a cash-cow service, they will just be another game in the now-crowded F2P & subscriptions market. See my recent posts about a potentially huge player-driven RPG market (that NWN is the sole commercial product in).
• Modding. NWN brought in a huge and active modding community around it. Modders even created backend databases so NWN could be operated on player-run servers like a mini-MMORPG, complete with persistent world designs. At first BioWare was slow to support the mods that altered gameplay and offered persistence, but they ended up on board in a big way, highlighting the top mods on their website.

Cryptic could do this and go huge with it. They’ve already proven they can make good tools, polish them up and release them to the public: CrypticAR demonstrates that. Development tools are clearly one of their strong suits. D&D gamers have waited eons for CRPG games that can match the DM control and customization of table-top roleplaying. Cryptic just needs to be brave enough to give them the full breadth of the tools.

I don’t think Cryptic needs to put any sort of “game as service” lock on this. They could easily make a bundle selling packs of tilesets, textures, models and art for player-made campaigns. They could even sell the server software separately. The smart thing would be to give registered servers very visible “verified” branding to push back most of the potential piracy. I think they’d find if they support the community, it will support them back. They could launch their game into much greater popularity by pushing the full potential of the tools into the hands of the players.

This could be a lot like the dice, miniatures and trading card game markets in hobbyist stores. Selling bits of games to eagerly awaiting RPG fans.

Will they?

Since leaving City of Heroes behind, Cryptic has focused on “light” online games, at least in comparison to the rest of the AA MMO market. I can understand if their Neverwinter gets released with a relatively short campaign, because the key is letting the players run the show (and create it too).

What worries me is the short time span they’ve given themselves for development. I don’t think they’ve been that deep into it yet and they’ve already marked it for 2011. I also don’t see them talking more than just quest-building tools (ala City of Heroes: Mission Architect).

I’m imagining a scenario of too many limitations, with only Cryptic-run servers and only Cryptic-approved features in campaigns– That could disappoint the gamers that love the Neverwinter name.

No, I’m not abandoning MMOs or any other games for that matter. Modding fulfils a different drive.

MaNGOS is server software, designed for running an online RPG (theoretically an MMORPG, but generally with less users online). The software is typically used to emulate a WoW server when combined with a WoW-derived database, scripts and collision detection vmap files. Without those additions however, regardless of the intent in the development of the server, it’s just a software tool that could be put to much better usage (legally and productively).

I’m suggesting that independent developers leverage this project for their games. Why?

• Independent game developers often consider creating an MMORPG and almost always the answer from the dev community is derision. MMORPG projects tend to be huge for a variety of reasons, but two significant barriers are the server software and server infrastructure.
• It’s well written, well operating software. Good RPG server software is rare in open source development, probably because each such project gets mired in the enormous scope of possibilities. MaNGOS developers, in their drive to support all of WoW’s gameplay features, remained focused and created working software as a result. Since then, it has grown beyond WoW’s features, but most of those remain unused by the WoW private servers. It could grow further away from just private server implementations– and it should.
• Neverwinter Nights, which is the current standard for online RPG modding, is getting dated. While it’s relatively easy to use, it’s also very limited. A non-restrictive open source solution would be best.
• There is potentially a huge untapped market for independent, limited budget online RPGs where players could operate their own virtual worlds.

I’m not seeking to legitimize WoW cloned servers at all.

I’m seeking to take a tool that (despite its typical usage) could be re-aimed at making something wonderfully productive. Of course, that would mean creating a custom client, but that’s a lot smaller scope than creating both client + server. Creating content is always a daunting task, but independent developers can start small and build on their work over time.

I considered stepping up on this goal myself. This was one of the “secret” projects I had written about in past months. I’m driven, but I have other projects that take up most of my attention. If no one else steps up to the plate, eventually I may come back to this and build a team for it. In the meanwhile, it’s about time I just put these ideas and info out there.

I’d really like to see small-server persistent online RPGs (it doesn’t have to be via this software either). There’s not a lot of motivation for the bigger game publishers, because they see cash cows in full scale MMOs and gigantic F2P gateways. That’s a shame because this area has been almost entirely neglected, aside from the aforementioned NWN (2002) from BioWare.