Originally posted by Ikeda

Very underwhelmed so far.

Nothing in it that I must have.

I don't need my Xbox to watch TV, but the way they charge I'll need Xbox Gold to watch TV.

 

Not that it's the only solution, but a Roku is less than US$50...forever...and the size of the palm of your hand.

Just sayin...

Unless for some reason you are wicked much into Kinect, I see no reason to have an XBox at all any more.  

I confess, I have some exercise games I like -- and that's the only reason I'm keeping mine, otherwise it would be so gone

Our living room is going to look like this:

• XBox360 with no Gold, with a couple jumpy and yoga games (I need to confirm I can do this, but I think these play offline -- and if they don't, it might just go away, and I'll do more water aerobics ;)
• Roku
• TV -- big 30-something-inch old half-ton Sony lo-res monster with bright saturated flat screen CRT colors nom.  Doubles as heat in the winter.  Big entertainment hutch thingy.
• Blueray
• Laptop desk that tucks away so people can noodle on a laptop while watching a movie if they wanna -- one of those ones that looks like a cherrywood mini drafting table crossbred with a TV dinner tray on wheels.
• NO cable-per-se.
• NO landline.
• Just cable bband at the home-office level (and only because our neighborhood gets no FIOS for another 2yrs at least).
• Big comfy sofabed couch from Craigslist, originally from hotel liquidation.  Resistant to cheetos and nuclear attack, yet surprisingly inviting and buried in South Asian and Korean throw pillows.
• Coffee table covered in baskets for peripherals, screwed in charger modules, etc.

The point here is, this is a set up for social enjoyment of media.  Stream Roku to TV.  Stream livestream from laptop to TV.  Stream social viewer to TV, and smacktalk from mobiles on the side.  Sit side by side on couch and noodle on social widgets while dissing latest Syfy dawg premiere to friends on various coasts.

Otherwise, we are -- even among the folks in the same house -- on rigs in various bedrooms over the net, in the same or separate games, right?  The livingroom hearth is not the focus -- the cloud is.

And dude, I'm 53, and this is not my mother's basement...  I am the head of household here (and I am the [single] mom...) and this is my geek playground for me and  housemate and friends and sometimes son when he's home from college.

Seems to me that's the echoes of a deathknell of the console somewhere in the distance?

The ultimate measure of GW2 success is not copies of the game sold, but how much currency they sell, pretty much, from here out.  And from what I see of the in-world markets, that trade is pretty happening, every time new content is released -- not only monthly, but the tiny spurts of new widgetry, what, weekly?

I think NCSoft is doing just fine with this game.  People are putting cash into it by the reasonable aggregate boatload as far as I can tell.  Some game site (hint) should assign someone to set up an analytics site for the various in-world currency exchanges where they exist as RMT as they do in Eve, GW2, and so on, so there is a central exchange -- it would log some interest, page hits, ad revenue, scholarship points, and so on.

Kind of stunned Gamasutra or someone of that ilk isn't doing it.  Do the studios balk at the info being redisplayed/aggregated like that?  It would make an AWESOME adjunct to Free Zone.

I mean, why speculate about this stuff, when you could have...DATA?

Hell, pay me fairly and get me the subs, and I'd do it...:)  

<warcry>In the Spirit of Daedalus I invoke Yee!  (ok, couldn't resist...)

Originally posted by snapfusion

Originally posted by DeaconX

That team is working on the boarding and planet-fall parts of the game. All of this will be in first person.

 

--I REALLY wish there were a third person view option.

Just try and pretend you werent raised on console games and everything will be just fine.

I have rarely played a console game in my life and I really despise first person.  Just sayin'  PC games since INFOCOM.

On a perceptual psych level, 3rd person more adeptly allows for peripheral vision.  First person view is like tunnel vision -- it's unnatural and doesn't represent any format of human vision unless restricted by a helmet or other blinders.

So, what was that point you thought you had?

"Failed to complete this operation"  

hmm....

Asian fantasy incorporates a great deal of 18th and 19th century European cultural iconography into it in the same way that European fantasy incorporates a great deal of Ottoman iconography (Alladin, Shaherazade, any of the Arabian Nights stories and so on) in it.

There are points when a foreign culture touches another culture that set off stylistic rages, and the landing of the tall ships in China and Japan were those times.  The pale bearded explorers of the age of exploration with their gunpowder-fueled weapons and their uncouth manners were like ogres and magicians all at once, amazing engineers and huge louts, bringing riches and war and disruption, and occasionally something really amazing and worthwhile or even beautiful.

They also brought diseases and (oddly) opium wars and all kinds of crap.  Interesting times.

So yes, what you see as "steampunk" is probably romanticized first-contact with an alien race -- westerners.  It's a different point of origin than western steampunk.  It's more like us looking at people at the far east as mysterious and inscrutable.  They looked at their early contact with us as...odd adventurers...because that's the people who made landfall in those first ships, you know!  They were a rag-tag lot.

There are traces of this theme in a number of far east games, especially ones that have western- and eastern-like humans in them.

Originally posted by exile02

good for those that still have no clue what real pvp is. GW2 pvp= the worst pvp from a triple AAA Mmorpg.

Wait, so what is SWTOR then?  AA?  A larger battery size with a smaller endgame? :)

Originally posted by Zekiah

"Speaking of the martial specializations, what’s the point of playing when, as a paid VIP, I can increase my skills while I’m offline? What’s the point of a game if you can essentially pay NOT to play?... Stop letting me progress when I’m offline and making no effort.  ... If I didn’t earn it, I don’t want it."

That's all I needed to know, thank you.

Heh.  You do realize she could be describing Eve Online here, right?

GW2 has created the only game world that really feels alive to me and makes me *care* about it, and want to walk around and be in the world to know the people in every part of it.  I've never been an "Explorer" on the Bartle Test, but my main in GW2 has turned out to be a Ranger who goes to complete maps just so I have an excuse to check out all the little clever scenes.

GW2 is, in a way, a refutation to Roger Ebert's curmudgeonly "Video Games Can Never Be Art" thesis -- it's gentle, pervasive endemic environmental art -- but art nevertheless.  This is a living breathing world in a way that, for example, Bioware's portrayal of the Star Wars extended universe is not despite inheriting rich lore.  It's charming, funny, occasionally has notes of horror and high fantasy or sword and sorcery or whatever -- but it all pulls together marvelously for the western audience.

Makes me wonder how it coheres for the other audiences it is localized to (voice/subtitles)?

How about a noob corp for the Bene Gesserit?  This is to say, one of the greatest barriers to a good percentage of potential Eve players is that it smells like a geek locker room in there, and yes, I used to play for a couple years and I'm female.  I got really sick of the ( . ) ( . ) graphics and various but you get used to it after a while.  I actually won a $50 cert from the Eve store for a blog essay on women-in-Eve back a few years ago, which was roundly praised by a lot of the women (and men) who were playing at the time.  And totally ignored by CCP.

The hell with safe space for PVE.  How about some space for women who want to be in a space where they don't get harrassed out of the game?  We might be able to take it -- but it's likely that CCP loses a lot of freaking business from women who decide that the average goon is a little too hairy for her taste.  Eve players are less evolved in terms of manners than most of the gaming universe when it comes to dealing with women gamers -- and you know, that's saying a lot about their troglodyte tendencies.

But what finally got me was life circumstances and disgust over the monocle-ization of the game.  I kind of thought they were different.  I hate being played for a fool.  I don't mind a company that figures some of the player base will be asshats and subsidize the rest -- but some of the attitude that came out really got me bent about how I thought that the guys felt about their playerbase.  I gave up.  "Losing my religion..." :)

Frankly Armor has a lot of interesting orange sets but all of the Synth sets look like Franciscan monks of various parts of the middle ages.  *YAWN*  So if they didn't give Armormech any new orange sets, no big -- I could really see them just giving Synth the extra love.  Bop over to Tor-Fashion and check out the armor sets if you don't believe me.  It's a dramatic difference.

Not that the folks who do armor design for SWTOR couldn't learn something by hiring some fashion entrepreneurs from Second Life (which I believe AO did and it really improved their couture...heh...  Either that or they just copy-botted a bunch of designs, which would make me sad... ;).

But yeah, armor design in SWTOR?  NOT THEIR STRONG POINT.  omg.  Hire a RISD grad boyz.  My ghod.  What is wrong with you people?  I come from several generations of both engineers and master tailors and military -- and I could at least supervise better designed better aesthetic progression-oriented "cool" mix-and-match paperdoll/ragdoll clip-averse meshy flexi whatever sorta gear within canon than your folks are putting out and I can't draw. (but ok, yeah, been doing interactive graphics since 1978-ish...;)

But yes, I want better armor choices, and I want re-skinnable armor via the cash shop er cartel market!  And LOTRO-style outfit panels would be awesome too... And...and...

Sigh...GW2 is looking less and less like my backup game... (not that I get any of that there either...but at least I don't feel like I'm paying to not have it... with the less and less time I have to game right now...)

Originally posted by Anthur
I am just glad this doesn't work in real life. Or I would have serious concerns about the future of human race.

You obviously aren't involved in Silly-con Valley entrepreneurial culture with it's "fail early fail fast fail often" emphasis.  Seriously, just Google that.  It's...abused as a concept.

So, I was ALSO recently thinking about "anonymous" forums and assholes thereon, and had an epiphany.

A lot of these people are probably the same people who have no discretion on Facebook -- who on their social graph are the people getting shot down for jobs and dates because they have such low impulse control they post the pictures of themselves sloppy drunk, the sexists/racist/homophobic/hateful comments of various sorts, and so on -- _under their real names._ 

It's coincidental for many of them that their game handles provide pseudonymity (colloquially called anonymity).  

They've always been there.  We knew them in high school.  We walked away.  We see them being assholes outside the bars we _don't_ go to.  We walk away.  But on web forums?  We can't walk away.

That's the only difference.  It's like they walk in the door and go, "Heh, idiot, think you're too good to talk to me?  Well, I finally got you.  Talk to me on my terms, or I just own this place, and you can find your own damn bar.  Fuck you."

I just don't have that much testosterone/androgen, whatever.  I don't own the venue.  I lose.  So, oh well...  Not often, but sometimes.  Most of the time, I just go to the next conversation -- this is to say, yes, I walk away, but just to the next table.

I mean, if their assholity on the gamer forums were under their real names (and hey, you know, the game companies have their real names right?  Or generally someone's real name on a credit card...) what would you do?  Call them up and scold them for their incivility?  Publish their names so they'd lose their jobs like Adrian Chen did to the Reddit Troll on Gawker (assuming they were that bad a troll)?  Call their mom and tell her to cancel their account and their allowance?

I mean, really?  What difference would it make if there were a real name?

Isn't this real name/anonymity thing a fallacy?  WTF?  Why did it take me so long to see this so clearly?

The poor(ly behaved) will always be with us.

There will always be jerks.  You can't possibly avoid them online by the same maneuvers you do in the real world.  That's the only difference.  They are no more or less anonymous than the dude walking down the street who tells me he likes my boobies -- and yes that happens in RL too, in a big city.

There's a place for strong identity and strong anonymity on the web -- for example, on a small town civic affairs web site, likely you want people to use their real names, most of the time.  Even there, there might be dissenters worried about repurcussions of calling out the police chief for bad behavior in a small town -- there are some damn good reasons for using pseudonymity (I'm the former execdir of the Tor Project, and trust me I have a few of them I could share!  Check out the "who uses Tor" section at https://torproject.org for a good list).  

But you know, my reputation on nearly EVERY game site on the web is under shava23 or shava, and that is my name for all intents and purposes -- my handle and my rep.  More people in the world, I'll wager, know me by username/handle than by real name (and I bet more people know me by username than can pronounce my real name, first and last,  to my face correctly the first time they  meet me, even if they think they know what it is...heh).

So the blessing is, there will always be ways to find the people we really click with via this medium too.  And that's what we can lose sight of.  There were basically no serious wargamers in my town of 8000 in Vermont growing up in the early/mid 70s, anywhere near my age -- certainly none at all who were female.  I went to science fiction cons to find people like me and got to see them every four months or so after I was in my mid-teens.  

The world isn't like that any more.  Hand me the troll repellant.  I'll take the bad with the good.

It's a beta.

The reason the UI seems so awkward is that the UI is designed for ideograms where one word takes the same space as one letter (Chinese simplified character set) vs. English where one word can be one letter ("a" "I") or a bunch of letters ("everything" "consequentially," "califragiwhateveritisexplialidocious")

As a result, a UI designed to say,

"Your quest reward is a ____" (6 words, 6 characters) 

Is going to want to fit

"Your q"

...in English.

This has got to be giving them a few unhappy hours here and there, as they seem to be happier working with art than English, from my basic observations...  Where we tend to think about a lot of programming having to do with word wraps and paragraphs and formatting of text blocks, the problems with formatting Chinese and large amounts of Roman text are fundamentally very different.  (It's called the Roman alphabet regardless of whether the language is a romance or Germanic language, btw, just as we call our number Arabic numerals rather than Roman numerals even though our mathematics is really mostly Greek ;).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero%E2%80%93sum_game

In today's technical business world for several decades, cooperation within boundaries (limited *technical* anarchy) is the way successful organizations compete.  (http://www.swlearning.com/management/hitt/sm6e/isc/focus/sf11_01.html) -- which is why game guilds can be such good preparation for modern business administration sometimes ;)

That is all.

If you can't distinguish these modes in life you will become very unhappy.  

If it's a flatland about WIN WIN WIN, you still have a lot to learn, and are being run by your endocrine system, not your brain.  If you want the people around you to trust you with the fun toys and big resources, use your brains, not just your glands.

Of course, there is a perennial need for cannon fodder... *ducks*

Even there, since the invention of  ballistics, we've been teaching military from the joint staff to grunts to be increasingly savvy and ever better integrated and self-organizing in fog-of-war.

The educational requirements for mercenaries in Prussia gave rise to the first free, public, universal (for boys) public education system in the western world starting at seven years old, shortly after Napoleon started obsoleting the formerly dominant position of the King of Prussia's elite forces (and income).  It also led to those boys going back to the King two decades later and demanding a peaceful transition to consitutional monarchy, so they could  have a little say as to where they got thrown into conflicts.  

The US educational system spun off from this system when Boston educator Horace Mann convinced his rich bride that Prussia was lovely in the spring -- but the US after the revolution had no federal budget so he had to settle for local school board funding, and his only control was insisting that the teachers had a standard preparation (what was then called "Normal School" if you ever see those in New England) so that a standard curriculum could be presented to the kids.  He had aims to shape a new yeoman citizenry for the new Republic, but after the civil war there was a movement by business to take over the curriculum to prepare workers through the curriculum for factory work, and nothing in the school board structure protected the schools from that.

An educator named John Dewey effected some compromises that saved shreds of the original system, but most of the conflicts in the modern education system you see today in the US (and often mistakenly propagated elsewhere) come from this period.

Good soldiers, good factory drones -- and now we need good creative independent thinkers and yeoman citizens of the new global reality and we barely remember how to make them.  Honestly the gaming community and the tech community -- the geek community -- might be better prepared than the rest of society to provide this, although they keep telling *us* that *we* are misfits.

First, we need to reteach ourselves things like this:  it's not about winning, it's about playing the game damn well.