If you can’t have one big server where all the players play, there are ways to have the next best thing. Funcom’s Secret World, for instance, was really good about letting players bop around among servers to play with each other. You could even chat freely with anyone anywhere, regardless of which server you were on. It was the best kind of MMO spread across multiple servers: one where the server boundaries are invisible.
Guild Wars 2 will do its part to tear down server walls with what they’re calling a “megaserver system”.
With the megaserver system, players won’t be separated into different copies of the same map based on the world they selected on character creation. Instead, you will simply arrive in a map and be assigned to the version of that map that makes the most sense for you as selected by the megaserver system we’ve developed. This new system takes your party, guild, language, home world, and other factors into account to match you to a version of the map you’re entering. This will increase the odds that you’ll see the same people more often and play with people of similar interests.
With megaserver technology, there are as many copies of a map as are needed to comfortably hold the population of players in that map at a given time. Rather than having a separate map copy for each home world and artificially limiting the amount of fellow adventurers you see, the megaserver system brings players together and dynamically opens up new map copies as necessary.
While I’m excited that this will allow me to easily play with friends, I think I’m more excited at what this means for player population. Guild Wars 2 is a rare game that gets better as you’re playing with more people (ironically, Secret World’s downbeat horror setting fares best with fewer people around). There is never any penalty to having other people running around doing what you’re doing. In fact, there are group quests and roaming bosses that feel like content you can’t enjoy if you’re not on a crowded server. The new megaserver system will let Guild Wars 2 be exactly as crowded as it needs to be.
Megaservers go live on April 15. Read more here.
Infested Planet might look like a modest little iOS game or even — heaven forfend! — a tower defense game, but it’s not. It’s a dynamic, constantly evolving, back-and-forth real time strategy sandbox, unique for its sense of flow. Flow isn’t a typical RTS buzzword. But I can think of no better way to explain its unique charms.
After the jump, dam. Continue reading →
When you watch someone play Diablo III, you see visual noise. Flailing around, colors, effects, little numbers flying out of everything. But playing Diablo III — actually being in that visual noise and making it all happen — is a whole other matter. The little blue smudges are my mana generating locust swarms. The slightly bigger blue smudges are my mana generating toads. The red blobs are zombie dogs, and they’re red because they’re healing me with their bites. The green pools are acid I’m vomiting onto the bad guys. The yellow circles are incoming mortar fire and I need to be sure not to stand there. The blue sparky patterns are electricity. Duh. That large yellow blob is my target, but first I have to clear out the non-yellow blobs. My friend’s barbarian is in there somewhere and I know it’s relatively safe to stand behind him. I can see him mainly when he does his spinning whirlwind. Barbarians love their whirlwind. Show me a barbarian not using whirlwind and I’ll slow you a clown without big shoes.
After the jump, a funny thing happened on the way to Malthael. Continue reading →
This week we see Noah, in which God calls a mulligan for everything except Russell Crowe. The 3×3 about our favorite messages in movies starts at the 51-minute mark.
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I’m not much of a comic book guy, so I have a hard time keeping up with the heroes in Marvel Heroes, which includes someone who summons squirrels, a member of the Black Panther movement, and an actual raccoon. Today, Marvel Heroes adds Doc Strange (pictured, foreground) to the roster. Frankly, I don’t know Doc Strange from Doc Severinsen, so I had to check the Marvel Heroes site for this helpful information:
When the injuries he sustained in a horrific accident ruined Stephen Strange’s career as a surgeon, he searched the world for a cure. In the mountains of Tibet, he found a mystic named the Ancient One. But instead of being healed, Stephen ended up as the old man’s apprentice and learned the secrets of sorcery while gaining humility and wisdom. Eventually, Stephen became the Sorcerer Supreme, dedicating his life to protecting the world from extra-dimensional enemies.
You have to admire a man who can switch careers like that late in life.
Doc Strange is available today for the low price of however many spacebucks he costs. And while you’re spending, Marvel Heroes has a “buy one, get one free” deal on all heroes this weekend. Well, all heroes except Doc Strange.
To the surprise of no one who’s played a World War II game because Saving Private Ryan, Sega will add America to Company of Heroes 2, which had previously languished on the Eastern Front where you couldn’t be America.
Company of Heroes 2: The Western Front Armies brings players back to the Western Front first introduced in the original award-winning Company of Heroes. The Western Front Armies introduces two unique collections of new content — the US Forces and the German Oberkommando West. Each army has distinctive tactical gameplay options, new infantry, team weapons, vehicles, abilities and upgrades on a total of eight seasonal multiplayer maps set on the Western Front. The Western Front Armies also includes a new progression system that introduces other unique content into the game and enables players to dive deeper into the tactical and strategic aspects of the game than ever before.
America isn’t free, of course. America will cost $13. Germany will also cost $13 but whatever. America. The country that won World War II and therefore history. Brought to you by Sega this June.
City of Horror isn’t really much of a game. The rules are surprisingly simple for a board with so many pieces, most of them being zombies on little plastic stands. It only lasts four turns, which means you will only ever make four moves. The modular board doesn’t seem to have any sense of balance or tuning. “Eh, just use whichever side you want,” it says about each tile, as if it knows the board itself is one of the least interesting things going on here, despite being gussied up with zombie apocalypse artwork. Useful artwork, by the way. The discard pile is an overturned garbage truck. The pile of antidote tokens goes on an ambulance. The zombie markers pile up behind a barricade until you put them into play.
But none of this is as important as the people sitting around the table. How you play the board doesn’t matter nearly as much as how you play these people.
After the jump, you don’t see them screwing each other over for a victory point. Continue reading →
I don’t necessarily recommend Cheap Thrills. I’m not sure I can say I enjoyed it. But I am positive that I respect it. Here is a movie that is not at all the wacky comedy you might expect from the poster of its cast — consisting of two comedians, a character actor, and a vapid horror ingenue — frozen in mid-guffaw. It is instead a premise that is willing to go the distance, without playing it for easy laughs and certainly without flinching. What would you do for money? David Koechner, playing smaller than his usual persona, doles out the dares and dollars to two hapless men, who aren’t sure what to make of this game. Is it even a game?
“Okay, but I am not going to suck his dick,” Ethan Embry insists at one point after agreeing to the premise. Besides, it’s not that kind of movie. This isn’t a bawdy comedy, and it’s not a facile observation on reality TV culture, and it’s not even really a thriller. It’s simply a grim observational about, well, what people will do for money. Real people, for sums of money we can all relate to. These indecent proposals aren’t Indecent Proposal.
The real stand-out in this excellent and committed cast — even vapid horror ingenue Sara Paxton is pitch perfect — is Pat Healy as the sympathetic everyman. Healy has been doing yeoman’s work for years, quietly but effectively filling space in masterpieces like Magnolia and The Assassination of Jesse James. Here he’s front and center, willing to drive Cheap Thrills wherever first-time director E.L. Katz wants it to go, from an apartment in West LA to a dive bar in Silverlake to a house in the Hollywood Hills, from an innocent dare to raised stakes, from a sympathetic everyman to the final harshly lit scene of the uncomfortable point Cheap Thrills was making all along.
Cheap Thrills is currently available wherever fine VOD is sold. Support Qt3 and watch it here.
There’s something to be said about a game that doesn’t explain itself, and that instead relies on you to figure out the gameplay as part of its mystery. That something is often, “screw this game!”. We’re used to tutorials breaking down for us one step at a time how to move, fire, change weapons, and bunny hop (WASD, left click, the mouse wheel, and space bar, respectively). All the other stuff will fall into place just as obviously.
But one of the early hooks in Betrayer is that it doesn’t explain itself. The mystery of what’s going on and how to play sustains Betrayer early on. This isn’t quite a corridor shooter and it isn’t quite an open world. It isn’t quite an adventure game and it isn’t quite a period piece. It isn’t quite Silent Hill and it isn’t quite FEAR.
But even more than the mystery — or perhaps part of it — there’s one thing that really sustains Betrayer.
After the jump, what’s black and white and dead all over? Continue reading →
If you’ll indulge us for one week so we don’t have to see Divergent — we’re not the target audience — we’re doing a True Detective podcast. Which, as you know, isn’t TV. It’s HBO. At the 1:12-mark, we discuss our favorite movie sabotages.
Next week: Noah
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We tried something new this week, and I’m not entirely convinced it works. But here it is anyway: me and McMaster doing a podcast stream — is that even a thing? — of a game of Hearthstone!
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I recently sat down to play a solitaire boardgame about the Ottoman Empire in World War I, which would seem like the most random damn thing ever. I don’t have any context for a game about the Ottoman Empire. They’re the ones that had the scripted bankruptcy in one of the Europa Universalis games, right? An expansive, centuries old empire in the predominantly Arab world that couldn’t sustain itself because, uh, well I guess you had to read various histories to answer that. If I recall correctly, Paradox just hardcoded into the game that the Ottomans would fall apart because, you know, that’s how it really happened. You have to work hard in a Europa Universalis game to build up your own blob. You can’t just take someone else’s blob and run with it with impunity.
So here’s a solitaire boardgame about the last days of the Ottomans and I’m eager to play it precisely because I know nothing about the last days of the Ottomans. I have no reason to care whether I win or lose. I have no context for this. But I’m happy to have the numbers and rules show me the way, to have them create narratives to pique my interest, to cultivate in me some sort of curiosity. Let’s see what happens.
After the jump, a tabletop adventure starring Peter O’Toole, Mel Gibson, and the enormity of the Armenian genocide. Continue reading →
As of the latest update, you can play Simcity offline.
Originally designed from the ground-up as an always-connected experience, Maxis reengineered the game in order to move the calculations locally to the player’s PC or Mac. Gains in optimization to the GlassBox Engine allow players to have a similar gameplay experience, whether they choose to play Online or Offline.
Players will automatically receive the Update the next time they log-in to SimCity. From there they will have the option to play either way; the new Single-Player Mode, which enables Offline Play, or continue to play in the Multiplayer Mode. The Single-Player Mode retains the same expansive feel of the core SimCity gameplay while adding more control over when and how their progress is saved. Multiplayer Mode continues to deliver the SimCity experience that includes SimCity World, Leaderboards, Achievements, dynamic pricing of resources in the Global Market and Cloud Saves.
Electronic Arts, being a ginormous publicly traded company, is very careful with their use of language. For instance, like any big company, they love throwing around capital letters to show how Important stuff is. Update, Single-Player, Leaderboards, Online, the city in SimCity.
In the above announcement for the new offline mode, EA’s language carefully implies this latest change is a matter of single-player or multiplayer. It’s not. Online-only gaming is generally an anti-piracy measure, and as such, I completely understand. Like Diablo III, Anno 2070, and pretty much every game on Steam, being online isn’t a matter of whether I’m going to play with other people. It’s a matter of how easily I can play a pirated copy. As someone who understands that companies must protect their property, I’m mostly okay with this. Because I’m also someone who doesn’t travel a lot, who isn’t stationed overseas, and who pays enough every month for a fast reliable internet connection. Not everyone is so lucky. Companies like EA have counted the beans to write them off as acceptable losses. That’s just how math works. If there’s one thing big companies do well, it’s math. Never mind the careful bending of language. Just watch them work those numbers!
But the problem with Simcity was never the online-only gameplay, especially once the launch issues were stabilized. The problem wasn’t even the design, which is based on the intriguing idea of large cities as a network of interdependent smaller cities. Here in Los Angeles, we can certainly relate to that. Sometimes sprawl can consist of discrete boxes rather than larger maps.
The real problem with Simcity was unfortunately buried under crusades against DRM or map sizes. The real problem was that it simply didn’t work. Over successive updates, or Updates, this has certainly gotten better. I haven’t played it in a while, because I’ve been spending my city builder time with games that worked as advertised, such as the superlative Children of the Nile, Simcity Societies, and Anno 2070, which work offline and as intended. But now that Simcity is offline, it will be that much easier to see how close Electronic Arts has come to finally implementing the game as it was designed.
Furthermore, this is an encouraging development for a company that is notorious for yanking online support when games are no longer popular, effectively killing good games. Maybe now they can retire them gracefully with an offline mode instead of just pulling the plug with a shrug.
You can’t really read my Simcity review here, but you can read it here, in the comments section underneath.
I’m still really enjoying Titanfall, and I’m pleased that Electronic Arts has provided it a stable and reliable online environment. I just wish they would address one thing.
After the jump, who taught you math? Continue reading →
We all liked The Lego Movie, but for some of us, not everything was awesome. What worked, what didn’t, and what other great animated movies have we missed like this? At the 67-minute mark, we declare our love for our favorite declarations of love in movies.
Next week: True Detective. Yes, True Detective. Sure, we’re a few weeks behind everyone, but we’d rather talk True Detective than have to go see Divergent.
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