Jul 10, 2009

Section 8 Beta: first impressions

Let me open with a caveat: I haven't figured out exactly what I'm supposed to do yet.

That said, Section 8 plays a lot like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and Battlefield 2142. The main game mode consists of a domination/territorial control mechanic, where you have to capture and hold three control points. You go to the point, press "E" to hack the terminal, and wait a bit for the static base defenses to decide they're on your side. There are other sub-missions to unlock - like escorting convoys and capturing enemy intelligence - that give you additional "requisition points" to buy upgrades for your stuff, drop in vehicles, etc.

The main novelties to the FPS element are the ability to "burn in" from an orbiting drop ship to any point on the map, and jump jets in your armor that make both travel and combat somewhat more interesting. There's also an afterburner effect that activates after you've been sprinting for a couple of seconds, which allows you to cover a lot of ground very quickly. The drop mechanic in particular is most welcome, as it's far superior to having fixed (and thus predictable) spawns that either put you a country mile from the action when they work, or subject you to spawn-rape when they don't.

As far as the FPS element goes, the controls feel a bit chunky to me; the mouse controls are fine, but the keyboard controls lack the desired responsiveness. The main weapons are accurate, but seem underpowered. (I guess that's what's supposed to happen when everyone gets their own personal force field on top of body armor.) If you don't get a good couple of seconds of sustained fire on your target, he's not going down. Overall, the flow of combat is closer to ET:QW than it is to L4D or Call of Duty.

Visually, Section 8 is rather uneven. The character and weapon models are rendered quite well, but the textures are a mix of high-res and low-res austerity. Look down at where your feet should be, and you'll see your footprints in sand that's straight out of the 2004 edition of the FPS graphics catalog. The looks improve with distance, but you'll also notice the near-total absence of alpha blending where natural terrain (like the aforementioned sand) meets asphalt. If you're a graphics whore like me, these things are sins in a world where most games look as good or better than CoD4.

On a related note, the level design is strictly B-level. Some of the vistas do look pretty cool, but the "operational" spaces are uninspired at best. It's not that the layouts are particularly bad, it's just that none of it is very interesting to look at, and there's not much variation between maps.

This is a beta, so the canvas and the paints aren't likely to change much, if at all, with the final release. There is, however, a lot of time (and a lot of room) for tweaking the gameplay. If you're more inclined towards "pure" shooters, Section 8 probably isn't your cup of tea. If you're a fan of Battlefield 2, BF 2142, and ET:QW especially, on the other hand, you should feel right at home. The only question is whether Section 8's few innovations will overcome its otherwise mediocre execution.

Mass Effect 2: reveal trailer/developer diary

Who killed PC gaming?

Hint: the market.

Industry Gamers has published an opinion piece that's marginally provocative, even if we've heard all the arguments before. The thesis isn't that PC games are headed for extinction; it deals rather with the undeniable facts that console games get the lion's share of shelf space in retail outlets, and PC versions often get second-class status with multi-platform releases.

Here's the list (in reverse order), with links to individual pages:

#7 - Rise of laptops
#6 - DRM
#5 - Piracy
#4 - Hardware issues
#3 - Xbox 360
#2 - Windows Vista
#1 - Microsoft

There's nothing particularly controversial about any of it, but it's interesting for the fact that all sectors of the industry are held to account. That's refreshing in a debate that usually devolves into finger-pointing between the various factions. Personally, I think piracy should have been rated higher (maybe #2), but there's no doubt that Microsoft has failed PC gamers on multiple fronts, and I'm glad to see the emphasis on their culpability.

So, I'll pose this question to IUN's readers: what items would be on your list, in what order, and what items would expunge?

UPDATE: in the comments, the author (or one of them) offers some additional exposition:
Firstly, I invite everyone to read my first paragraph- PC gaming is not dying but changing in form and there's serious money to be made with online titles; we know and acknowledge that. What we're talking about is a general tendency over the past decade that's not opinion, it's fact. Multiplatform releases on PC don't usually do "pretty damned fine" all of the charts say that the consoles are the lead platforms on sales in the vast majority of cases. Certain sales numbers are certainly lost in the nebulous void of direct downloads that nobody reports, but that's still the way things are. You concentrate on simultaneous releases smithton, failing to mention that when games are ported to the PC later, they typically do very, very poorly. There's tons of games, but there always has been on PC because there's no licensing fee. When id talks about how PC only releases aren't enough to support their games anymore, when Epic purposefully keeps Gears of War 2 from PCs, when GTA IV (the latest in a franchise that used to come to PC first) releases for PC several months after PS3/Xbox 360, that's what we mean about core PC gaming dying. There are still the passionate fans out there, but the numbers suggest those numbers are shrinking.
Firstly, I'd invite him to read the title of his own article. If you lead with the sensational verbiage, expect people to ignore your subsequent disclaimers.

Secondly, the point he makes is absolutely correct, although it got lost in the main article: the console version outsells the PC version in the majority of multi-platform releases. Forget about who's to blame ... that's the market.

"Call of Duty" returns to "Modern Warfare 2"

Infinity Ward's "Community Manager" Rob Bowling recently twittered (or tweeted, or twatted; I can never remember) about MW2's box art, which does sport the CALL OF DUTY logo after all:


IW offered this somewhat cryptic explanation to Kotaku:
"Infinity Ward's Modern Warfare 2 is the direct sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare," a spokesperson told Kotaku. "We have focused our attention on Modern Warfare in order to most effectively communicate the fact that this is the first true sequel in the Call of Duty series. Infinity Ward, the original creators of the Call of Duty franchise, has said from the beginning Modern Warfare 2 resides in the Call of Duty universe. This is reflected in the title's package."
The move may have been a nervous reaction to the OTX report I talked about here, but who the hell knows. At the end of the day, I still think my theory has some legs, but we'll probably never know the full story.

Jul 7, 2009

When art imitates life

From Ars:

The problem with creating a realistic economy in an MMO is that you run the risk of being vulnerable to real-world problems like embezzlement, bank failures, and financial panic. This is something CCP learned recently when a player in EVE Online stole sever billion dollars of in-game currency from one of the game's largest banks and wound up causing a run on the financial institution last month.

According to the BBC, it was revealed that a veteran player of EVE embezzled over 200 billion ISK from, Ebank, the bank he was the CEO of. The former CEO, known only as Ricdic, is actually a man in his 20s from Australia who works in the technology industry; it was revealed that he sold the ill-gotten in-game credits for roughly $5,000, which he used to put down a deposit on a house and pay some medical bills. When news of the theft got out in the EVE community, though, it caused players to make a run on the bank. Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting that over 5 trillion ISK was withdrawn by account holders before the bank's board of directors shut down the institution to sort out the overall mess.

CCP has always prided itself on the fact that its economy is player-run and happens to be just as complicated as any one would find in the real world. Administrators from the company did get involved with this situation, though probably not in the way one would've expected. The company ended up banning Ricdic's account, but not because the man possibly caused a game-wide economic panic; instead, he was banned because trading in-game currency for real-world currency goes against EVE Online's terms and conditions.

Something to think about: if you remove the prohibition against trading game money for real money from the analysis, Ricdic did nothing wrong. He just gamed the game.