gdc08fanboy posts

GDC08: Are virtual item sales the way of the future?

by Elizabeth Harper Mar 8th 2008 at 4:30PM

Filed under: Economy, Events, real-world, Game mechanics, MMO industry, Legal

With the stigma associated with the term RMT -- or "real money trading" -- companies such as Live Gamer and Ping0 have an uphill battle when selling their legitimized RMT services to many gamers. At GDC recently, Live Gamer's Andrew Schneider and ping0's Steve Goldstein tried to explain to a skeptical crowd why their forms of RMT trading are the future of gaming.

Though you hear a lot about WoW gold, all online games have a large secondary market for currency. These services are all operated outside of the publisher's terms of service or EULA and are very inefficient, both for the player and the company. The RMT industry is littered with account and credit card theft -- and when a customer's account has been compromised, they don't call the RMT traders: they call the game's customer support line. It's an immense waste of resources for the game company and a huge hassle for the player involved. (Has your World of Warcraft account ever been stolen? If so, you know it can take weeks to get everything restored.) If game companies don't address RMT issues themselves, they're just going to have problems with black market RMT. Live Gamer seems to offer a, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach with their attempts to run a legitimate RMT business.

Tags: eula, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, livegamer, rmt, soe, tos

We built this city: Age of Conan's constructible PvP city system previewed

by Michael Zenke Mar 5th 2008 at 1:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Game mechanics, Guilds, New titles, Crafting, PvP, Endgame, Player Housing, Massively Event Coverage

During the week of GDC we talked briefly about the mounted combat in Age of Conan, part of the demo run for us by Gaute Godager. There was a great deal more to the demo, though, content very much worth talking about. The event started by reshashing the game's starting point, your rise from slave to adventurer in the wake of a ship wreck. We've discussed that experience, both in our own coverage of the game and in reference to work done by other sites.

Probably the most interesting element of the demo, though, was the so-far little seen guild and guild city elements. Essentially a sort of RTS-lite element plopped down in the dead center of the game's endgame PvP, Age of Conan's city construction takes the crafting and housing elements we've seen in other games and explodes them out in some interesting directions. Read on for details on this new way of tackling a well-known game system.

Gallery: GDC 08: Age of Conan Preview

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, endgame, featured, funcom, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, guild, guild-city, joystiqfeatures, player-housing, pvp

GDC08: The how, what, and why of LEGO Universe

by Elizabeth Harper Feb 24th 2008 at 8:30AM

Filed under: Events, real-world, New titles, Massively Event Coverage, LEGO Universe

Though anyone who has played the existing LEGO games would understand their charm, from an outside perspective you might be wondering why LEGO needed to go to the massively multiplayer scale. At GDC this past week, Mark Hansen, Director of Business Development for LEGO, explained the ideas behind their MMO to be, LEGO Universe. It's all about playing with LEGOS, of course! Playing and building with LEGOs is a creative experience, an imaginative experience -- and LEGO wanted a version of their product that would relevant for children of the 21st century who had grown up (and are growing up) around computers and technology.

Gallery: GDC08: LEGO Universe

Tags: featured, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, joystiqfeatures, lego, lego-universe, netdevil

Just what is Cryptic working on?

by Elizabeth Harper Feb 22nd 2008 at 3:30PM

Filed under: New titles, Rumors

GDC is nearly over and despite chatting up a couple of Cryptic employees and PR (maybe we should have plied them with booze), we're no closer to knowing what exactly Cryptic Studios has up its sleeves. Conversations with multiple Cryptic-folk suggested we check out the March issue of Game Informer for news -- so, of course, we ran right out and scoured the stores until we found a copy of our very own. It gave us oodles of information about their upcoming game Champions Online and a brief teaser of two projects (suggested to be two of many), only referred to as X1 and X2. From Game Informer's images, both appear to be in a fantasy setting. During a panel yesterday, Emmert mentioned a "secret sci-fi project" (our hope is that it's Star Trek Online, but we don't know anything for sure). And on Cryptic's home page there's a selection of concept art that ranges from lush fantasy environments to run-down modern cityscapes to military combat. (But definitely nothing that looks like Trek.) So just what is Cryptic working on? We'll have to keep calling their PR department once an hour asking, "Can you tell us now?" "What about now?"

Gallery: Cryptic's works in progress

Tags: cryptic, cryptic-studios, emmert, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, jack-emmert

GDC08: An evening with Will Wright minus friends (video)

by Akela Talamasca Feb 22nd 2008 at 1:15PM

Filed under: Video, Culture, Game mechanics, MMO industry, Opinion, Academic, Massively Event Coverage

I applied for, and received an invitation to 'An Evening with Will Wright and Friends', held in Mezzanine, a swanky club in San Francisco's SOMA district on Thursday evening. I didn't know what exactly to expect, but I knew two things: 1) It wasn't going to be about Spore, and 2) It was Will Freaking Wright. How did I know Spore wasn't on the offering? 'Cause we're all kind of Spore'd out, aren't we?

I was right about the lack of Spore, but was pleasantly surprised and gratified to hear Will speak on a variety of topics -- James Bond, cosmonauts, Gilligan's Island as the predecessor of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics, Godzilla, Care Bears, Lost, Walt Disney, Battlestar Galactica, Spiderman, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- before finally wrapping it all up with the observation that the stories that resonate with us are deconstructible; we can reduce them to components, and using those components, build our own stories.

Finally, accepting questions from the audience, I asked him what advice he'd give NASA as they create their MMO. His friends never showed up, but man, Will Wright is always worth a listen. He knows his stuff so well and is such a wonderful speaker ... check out the video I shot after the break, and you'll see what I mean.

Tags: battlestar-galactica, care-bears, cosmonauts, event, featured, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, gilligans-island, godzilla, james-bond, lost, nasa, neil-gaiman, san-francisco, soma, spiderman, spore, the-sandman, walt-disney, will-wright, zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance

GDC08: Jack Emmert on Cryptic's success (and failure)

by Elizabeth Harper Feb 22nd 2008 at 10:05AM

Filed under: Super-hero, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Events, real-world, Game mechanics, Massively Event Coverage, Champions Online

Yesterday morning, Cryptic Studios' chief creative officer, Jack Emmert, talked to attendees at GDC about Cryptic's successes (and failures) with City of Heroes (and other games). He was surprisingly frank, starting things off with a list of CoH's strengths and weaknesses. For strengths, he cited character customization, fun moment to moment game play, Flight/Superspeed/Superjump, plenty of character slots, no loot. For weaknesses, he told the crowd about how the game had few goals outside of leveling, its lack of PvP, the repetitiveness of the instances, the lack of an end-game, the lack of guild mechanics, no loot. Whether you love Cryptic's City of... games or hate them, read on for a discussion of where they went wrong and where they went right.

Tags: champions, champions-online, co, coh, cov, cox, cryptic, cryptic-studios, emmert, featured, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, jack-emmert, joystiqfeatures, ncsoft

GDC08: Massively is Live at the Future of MMOs panel

by Michael Zenke Feb 21st 2008 at 3:00PM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, MapleStory, Business models, Culture, Game mechanics, MMO industry, New titles, Opinion, Virtual worlds, Massively Event Coverage

Today at GDC Massively is liveblogging a sort of 'MMO Keynote', a panel entitled simply "The Future of MMOs". A simple title, perhaps, but probably the most anticipated event for Massive game designers and fans alike. On it are a few names you might have heard of, like Cryptic Studios' Jack Emmert, Nexon's Min Kim, BioWare's Ray Muzyka, and Rob Pardo (who has apparently worked on some sort of popular fantasy game). Moderated by MMORPG.com's Jon Woods, it's sure to offer some insights into the games of tomorrow.

Below the cut is our blow-by-blow account of the jabs, cuts, and parries from these Massive genre heavyweights. The last time I saw a get-together like this was at the Austin Game Conference, and the result was a spectacular confrontation. If ... you know ... you like MMOs. Otherwise it's a bunch of guys talking generalities about "those addictive games".

If the idea of the mind behind World of Warcraft talking about the games that he loves, along with observations from one of the founders of BioWare, combined with the insights of a tabletop gaming champion and a pioneer of Korean gaming doesn't interest you ... why are you here?

Read on!

Gallery: GDC08: The Future of MMOs

Tags: bioware, blizzard, breaking, cryptic-studios, featured, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, jack-emmert, maplestory, min-kim, nexon, ray-muzyka, rob-pardo, world-of-warcraft, wow

GDC08: Cryptic's secret project

by Elizabeth Harper Feb 21st 2008 at 2:30PM

Filed under: Sci-fi, Events, real-world, New titles, Star Trek Online, Rumors

Jack Emmert, Chief Creative Officer at Cryptic Studios, gave an interesting talk about using episodic content (read: patches) in the morning's (yes, it's still morning in California!) first round of GDC sessions. While we'll be posting a detailed write-up of the session later today, Emmert dropped a tidbit that, like any good piece of gossip, we simply must share. Talking about what Cryptic was working on, Emmert mentioned the recently announced Champions Online as well as what he called "a secret sci-fi project."

We could hardly resist squeaking with glee as this bit of information might lend some credence to rumors that Cryptic might be acquiring the Star Trek Online license. Of course, this is all speculation -- it's entirely possible Cryptic is working on an original IP or other sci-fi license. Right now we know:

STO developer Perpetual closed up shop and announces the Trek license had been given to an unnamed developer in the Bay area.
Cryptic was in talks with Perpetual for... something. We presume they were after some of Perpetual's development team, but no one would confirm or deny whether the STO license was involved.
Cryptic is now working on a sci-fi project.

This may not be proof, but if you put these pieces of news together it seems highly likely that they've become involved in STO's development in some way.

Tags: breaking, cryptic, cryptic-studios, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, perpetual, perpetual-entertainment, scifi, sto

GDC08: Xfire's video capture beta

by Mike Schramm Feb 21st 2008 at 1:00PM

Filed under: Betas, Video, Bugs, MMO industry

We missed this story last month, but our intrepid on-the-ground crew at GDC has found it out for us: Xfire, the PC chat client/game launcher/social networking tool, has introduced a beta video capture module into their application. Taking a cue from sites and services like WeGame, they are using their own video codec (xfcodec, which unfortunately won't work with a few video applications yet), and letting you record video on the fly during any Xfire-enabled game. We're told that a future version will enable you to upload your videos directly to your Xfire profile.

As you can see above, despite YouTube's horrible compression, the video itself doesn't look too bad. And James Woodcock, who took this video, says that while the audio still has a few issues, the video quality before compression is "exceptional." Not everybody is thrilled -- the client can sometimes cause lag and drop frames -- but Xfire says they want to hear about any issues you have. Anyone tried it yet?

Tags: beta, capture, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, lag, quality, video, wegame, xfire, youtube

GDC08: Building brands in virtual worlds

by Elizabeth Harper Feb 21st 2008 at 10:53AM

Filed under: Events, real-world, Virtual worlds

We've seen a lot of interesting things at the Worlds in Motion Summit which took place at GDC earlier this week, we found this post-mortum of Scion's virtual campaign in There.com fascinating. While we tune out commercials and skim over print advertisements as much as anyone, but well thought-out interactive advertisements in virtual worlds still feel novel and interesting. (Well, okay, some of them aren't.) So what made Scion's campaign stand out? Read on for an analysis.

Gallery: GDC08: Club Scion

Tags: brand, brands, featured, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, makena, marketing, metaversatility, scion, there, there.com, trilogy

GDC08: Thinking outside the virtual world

by Elizabeth Harper Feb 21st 2008 at 7:14AM

Filed under: Culture, Events, real-world, Virtual worlds

Tuesday afternoon, Michael Acton Smith, CEO of Mind Candy, presented attendees at the GDC's Worlds in Motion summit with an interesting look at the confluence between real goods and virtual worlds. For some background on where Smith is coming from, Mind Candy "creates games and puzzles that span multiple media.... [they] use all forms of technology to tell stories and interact with... [their] audiences." They run Perplex City, an alternate reality game that uses clues puzzles in the real world combined with web-based resources to create a unique type of gameplay. Their upcoming game Moshi Monsters is an adoptable pet game geared towards kids. Smith says it's a "new type of virtual pet experience." The pets will be very alive with their own emotions (driven by a behavior engine which will cause your pet to act different ways depending on how you treat it) that will be reflected in the pet's animations. The game will also incorporate a number of social tools, so both you and your pet monster can hang out with friends. And, of course, there will be toys, oh glorious toys. (Some already available, though the game itself is still in beta and closed to the public.)

Gallery: GDC08: Worlds in Motion summit day 2

Tags: barbiegirls, be-bratz, beanie-babies, build-a-bear, build-a-bearville, featured, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, habbo, habbo-hotel, maplestory, michael-acton-smith, mind-candy, moo, moshi-monsters, neopets, shining-stars, thinkgeek, toys, webkinz, wim, world-of-warcraft, worlds-in-motion, wow

How Ken Levine (maker of BioShock) plays World of Warcraft

by Michael Zenke Feb 20th 2008 at 7:00PM

Filed under: World of Warcraft, At a glance, Fantasy, Classes, Humor

Ken Levine is best known for his work on such games as Thief, System Shock 2 and (most recently) BioShock. Before a talk at GDC this morning about the storytelling BioShock we noticed a World of Warcraft icon very prominent in the quicklaunch bar on his Mac. Over the course of the lecture Levine reinforced his online influences by several times referencing some of Blizzard's talented design. We chatted with him for a few minutes after the talk ended, and he confirmed that he's a big fan of the game. In fact, he just recently leveled a druid to 57 - solo, as that's the way he generally plays.

He also touched on the depth of WoW's design in a response to differences between BioShock and System Shock 2: "Feature-wise it's not really that different from System Shock 2. We wanted to make sure every player understood what they were doing on an instictual level - not that they were doing 2d6 of fire damage. That meant there were limitations. In a game like WoW, on the other hand, they can make stuff that's incredibly deep because you're watching the numbers scroll by. My friend Joe likes to brag "My tank has 12,612 armor points!" Which in a game is a distinction that's meaningful to some extent - some people really like min/maxing, some people area really about the world, and I didn't want to get trapped in the middle."

Tags: bioshock, featured, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, howtheyplaywow, ken-levine, pve, soloing, world-of-warcraft

GDC08: SOE goes voice chat crazy

by Mike Schramm Feb 20th 2008 at 5:45PM

Filed under: Business models, Game mechanics, Guilds, Grouping

Sony Online Entertainment has announced the most comprehensive voice chat plan ever, according to a press release dropped at GDC today. They've teamed up with a company called Vivox to not only bring integrated voice chat into all of their games, but also some features that MMO players have never even dreamed of. Vivox says they'll be able to bring voicemail into games, join raid chats via landline or cell phone, and even use voice manipulation over the connection.

Apparently the voice chat service will be also available just through Sony's Launcher, so you won't need to be in-game to use the applications. Gamers will have buddy lists, and games will all have volume controls and channel controls, but the other features they brag about apparently won't be available at launch-- while voice and guild chat channels will be available right away, the other features, like voicemail and "voice fonts," are only "anticipated" for later. Still, John Smedley, SOE President, is quoted in the release as being excited about bringing the two services together, so only time will tell how it will all work.

Time, and our interviews, that is. Massively has a few correspondents on the floor at GDC right now, and we are planning to speak with both Vivox and SOE before the end of the week. Stay tuned for more on these services and just what they'll entail for players in-game.

Tags: breaking, chat, game-developers-conference, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, launcher, raiding, soe, sony, vivox, voice-chat, voice-fonts

GDC08: EVE Online's space stations

by Elizabeth Harper Feb 20th 2008 at 2:30PM

Filed under: Sci-fi, EVE Online, Events, in-game, News items

In this morning's first panel, CCP's Senior Technical Producer Torfi Frans Olafsson had a lot to say about EVE Online's upcoming space station environments. At present, EVE's player characters are little more than still portraits -- in the playable portion of the game you are primarily represented as your ship, which you can use to navegate and explore the game world. Initially announced in a 2006 dev blog, EVE will one day have the ability to exit your ship and interact with other characters as a human avatar rather -- we still don't have an exact release date (though at GDC07 they gave a 2008 date, so there's a chance it may be included in the upcoming Kali 4 expansion, about which little is known), but we have some details on the gameplay and the development process after the break.

Gallery: GDC08: Building EVE social environments

Tags: breaking, ccp, eve, eve-online, featured, gdc, gdc08, gdc08fanboy, joystiqfeatures

SOE announces G.I.R.L. scholarship program

by Barb Dybwad Feb 20th 2008 at 8:30AM

Filed under: Events, real-world, MMO industry, Education, Massively Event Coverage

We had the chance to hit up Sony Online Entertainment's soiree at GDC and were privy to their announcement about a scholarship program designed to educate and recruit women into the video game industry: the Gamers In Real Life (G.I.R.L. -- see what they did thar?) scholarship program offers a $10,000 tuition scholarship towards an education at any Art Institutes school where currently enrolled, plus a paid internship at one of SOE's studios in Austin, Denver, San Diego or Seattle. Applications will be accepted beginning April 1, 2008 and ending May 31, 2008, with winners announced on or about June 30, 2008. Entries will be judged by a panel of industry professionals at SOE.

The event featured a Q&A session with some of SOE's female production and executive staff including Torrie Dorrell (SVP Global Sales and Marketing), Courtney Simmons (Director of Corporate Communications and PR), Sherry Floyd (Producer, SOE Seattle), Laura Naviaux (Director, Global Brand Marketing), Taina Rodriguez (Publicist), Tracey Seamster (Game Designer), and Heather Sowards (Media Producer). Hit up the gallery for pics of the event and some gratuitous screens from The Agency.

Gallery: GDC08: SOE and GIRL party