What Would Matt Do

With whom, you ask? Why, one Mr. Chris Taylor, of course, Because he’s dreamy. But he’s been dreamy for awhile now what with all of his making of superb strategy games (TA, DS, and now SupCom). Why am I now head over heels in love with Taylor? It probably has a lot do with his D.I.C.E speech:

The energetic Taylor forewent the podium when he took the stage, and described how when he and Gas Powered Games created the earlier Dungeon Siege games, overtime hours were in the thousands. “It was completely wrong [to work that much],” he said. “I don’t like to admit it, but I’m at an age now where I can admit that. We impaled ourselves on a sword…”

This kind of thing just makes me happy. Each time a development house, be they gaming or otherwise, realize that you don’t need to kill yourself to create good software, an angel gets their wings. Really, it’s true. It’s especially true when a game developer gets this. The most overworked, underpaid people in the software industry? Game developers.

More from his speech:

He elaborated, “…Creators don’t stop creating when they leave the office. … When I figured that out, our productivity went up. … When you’re twenty… your family is the guys you work with. … We were 20-year-old guys making games for 20-year-old guys. … Meanwhile the rest of the world is asking ‘When are you going to make games for us?’”

Taylor said that at first he questioned whether or not publishers, who are investing millions of dollars in a game, would appreciate how game creation at Gas Powered would come after health and family. “They were okay with it” because they have kids too, he said. “The industry is growing up.”

“We have so much more to lose than just sales,” he added.

So, with that in mind, I’m now liking Mr. Taylor even more. To able to create something as spetacular as SupCom (Eurogamer gives it a 9/10) and do it without completely killing yourself…well, I can’t say much else, but I love you. And now if you’ll just pay your developers what us saps in the business software industry make, I’ll be happy to work for you. Because I know you’ve been waiting, wishing, hoping I would work for you.

Now to be fair, my industry isn’t all roses and candy, but ask around…crunch time at gaming companies can lost for months and sometimes years. That happens in my industry and you find another job.

Oh, and note to anyone developing games? Yoga is key.

Taylor said that a key to staying balanced is yoga. “It absolutely changes people. … I could not do what I did without [yoga].”

What Would Matt Do: You think if I started doing Yoga I could get paid more to work at Gas Powered Games? Hmmmm…

It goes like this… If you’re not in American, you still have to pay to get your first generation 360 fixed. Yeah, that’s right. The same 360 you don’t have to pay for to get fixed around here. I don’t know what Microsoft’s reasoning is there beyond I’m sure they think they can get away with it.

So the BBC’s Watchdog program is running a show to cover the problems. Is the show sensationalistic like our media? I have no idea, but is the general idea wrong? No. In an informal survey (i.e. - not scientific) around here, 100% of first generations fail at some point. Ok, maybe it’s only 99.9%. Really though, it’s a LOT. So what does Microsoft say to the claims by the BBC?

“It’s important to note that there is no systemic issue with Xbox 360 - each incident is unique and these customer inquiries are being handled on a case-by-case basis.

That may or may not be true, but damn me if they don’t play the PR game much better than Sony. If this were Sony we’d have gotten some claim about how no PS3 has been returned, ever. As a matter of fact, some of the PS3 systems have somehow managed to duplicate themselves allowing the owner to give the system to the poor if they so desire.

Sony, pay attention. I think Microsoft’s claims are plain silly. Especially when there was so much of not an issue they had to give free repairs to anyone that bought a first generation system. Yeah, no problem at all. Nothing to see here. But here’s the the point, Sony. If you’re having to cover for bad news, do you a) make outlandish claims that are easily discarded by anyone with half a brain and at least one eye? Or do you b) make potentially untrue claims that are really hard, maybe impossible, to prove otherwise?

There’s a lesson here, Sony. A big, beautiful lesson. Also, the PA guys are offering up some help for you. Oh, and you owe them some money.

What Would Matt Do: Well, for one, not live outside of the US and own a first generation 360. Hell, not own a first generation 360 at all. And Gears not withstanding, I almost wish I had waited in the first place.

On Game Tunnel, you can read this interesting piece of work by one Russell Carroll. The gist? From the horse’s mouth:

Multiplayer gaming is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think that online multiplayer modes are all that great. Unless I’m playing in the same room as the person I’m playing against, I lose the emotional and physical connection that makes multiplayer games fun.

There’s two points to cover here. Lets start with the simple facts. Online multiplayer does not sell most games. It just doesn’t. The facts and figures back up people buying all kinds of game and playing it mostly if not exclusively single player. Of course, that wouldn’t count for MMOs, but in general, it’s true (Unreal Tournament for instance? Mostly played single player…). So in that point, the numbers back up Mr. Russel.

That being said, with the success of Live and considering things like Battlefield, it’s lesser cousin Battlefront, and many other games like that, people like to play multiplayer games online. Yeah, not enough to drive all sales, but enough that not having a multiplayer component in your game can/will hurt sales. As Russel says, sure it’s better to have players in your living room with you, that often doesn’t work out and it’s damn hard to get 16 people together with 16 tvs and consoles attached to them. You can do that online pretty easily.

More from Mr. Carroll:

Playing against someone I don’t know or care about further dampens the experience for me, and adding a headset on top of that, just so that I can listen to some 17 year-old who thinks that profanity (and their M-rated title) somehow makes them an adult only makes me want to avoid the playing online any further. (can I cast my vote for changing the ‘M’ rating to ‘J’ for Juvenile)

Welcome to the internet. Yep, a fair amount of people playing online are jackasses. No kidding. To counter that you need to do things like play on the same servers or with the same people over and over. Find people you like to play with games, friend them or favorite the server and keep going back there. If it’s on a PC you find a server with active moderators. If it’s on a Live type service, you friend people you liked to play and invite them to play again when they are online. It takes more work than just randomly joining a service, agreed completely. But it’s well worth it.

Overall Russell’s argument is that he doesn’t like losing to people better than him, doesn’t care to play against people he doesn’t know and would rather play single player because it’s less work. Not a lot to say to that, other than to ask if those kids are still on his lawn…

What Would Matt Do: Play multiplayer all the day long. It’s the spice of life. Especially with the direction AI has taken recently. It’s going downhill, not getting better, in most cases. Bluh.

The recent release of the SupCom single player demo really brought a few things to mind as I played through a bit of it.

One, I’m really tired of the tried and true RTS mechanic of doling out unit types. You either need to have me find and expand my tech in some believable in-game manner or give me all of my abilities up front. The entire single player game doesn’t need to be a tutorial on how to use the system and if your campaign is depending on the next unit type as a driving force to get the player to continue, you’re already losing. That being said, this isn’t the end of the world, just annoying. Maybe I should I tell those kids to get off my lawn too…

Two, this game has really good graphics…when you see them. I mean it. I was zoomed for some reason or another looking at my material extractor and was amazed at the level of detail it had. Same goes for a lot of the units, the explosions, the forests catching fire, the guns/unit missing with their shots and so on. The problem? You don’t see that very much. Due to the very nature of the game, you’re often zoomed out to such a level that you either can’t distinguish units from each other or you’re just seeing icons. And the one thing that is always present, the map, is VERY sparse. Those factors together give the impression that SupCom doesn’t have great graphics. You’ll hear this complaint a lot. It’s not true really, but at the level you’re playing, it often will feel like that. And if it feels that way…

Three, I was impressed with the level of story and the voices for the single player game. I thought for sure it would just be a tacked on thing to help you get used to playing for multiplayer. That is not the case. I was pleasantly surprised.

Four, and perhaps the most important, I really like the multiplayer of SupCom a lot more. Yeah, the voices and story are interesting and the objectives are plainly spelled out, etc. But it’s pretty straight forward.The AI is going to do this and this and that’s about it. Playing the multiplayer beta is overly interesting because there are so many viable tactics. It’s truly war on a massive scale. Work a land invasion, attack via the water, dominate in the air, turtle up a bit and sneak attack, build on their continent when they aren’t looking (taking out that radar isn’t very hard), etc. The unpredictability of the human player makes the battles better. Though, much like Risk or Axis & Allies, the moves the beginning often decide the late game. Which is a good thing.

My only complaint with multiplayer? Yeah, there is no unit micromanagement, but you had better rush the resources. If not, you’ll get destroyed in the later game. You need all of the material sites near you and as many of the other guys as you can get and you need power stations like a mad man. Get it done! So yeah, it’s not WC3 (dear god that was annoying), but resource management is still as or more important than good battle management. Which is an RTS staple for sure, but I think I was looking/hoping for a bit less fo that.

So, icon war game comments aside, I’m definitely going to give this one a go. The multiplayer alone has sold me on it. The single player is just and added bonus.

What Would Matt Do: I’ll buy it as soon as I can. It’s a good to great game. And I love everything GPG has put out so far, minus that last expansion for DS2. Ugh.

Maybe I’m reading Mr. Au’s latest argument incorrectly, but it appears to be saying, because sex clubs have mundane items in them, they aren’t 100% sexual activities.

But look closer: entirely non-erotic are the furniture, the money, most of the textures, all the construction materials of the building, the fixtures, and more. Don’t believe me? Teleport there, and have a look for yourself.

Seen this way, maybe 10% of this location depicts commercial content that is unambiguously sexual. (And this in a white hot center of avatar-based sensuality.) If it’s just 10% here, how much smaller is it across the wide swathe of the grid?

I figure I MUST be reading it wrong. But to go with it, lets say that’s true… I’m just going to go on down to my local strip club and sit in the furniture, buy some drinks, and watch the girls. And that will perfectly all right with my wife because it was only about 10% sex related?

Or, if I watch porn, I can say I’m not really in it for the sex because someone had to create that bed and walls and presumably the cameras and the lighting and so on. I’m just a mundane item aficionado, what can I say.

To express this observation as a rough ratio, every time two avatars engage in sex, twenty content creators have spent untold hours creating and selling aspects of the environment they’re in, most of which having little to do with their chosen activity. In that sense, Second Life porn and erotica are, at best, a niche business dependent on a much larger, much more multi-varied market.

What kind of lousy argument is based around the idea that mundane items at strip club make the place mostly not related to sex? I’ll tell you what kind, James’s arguments when so lost in the grip of SL he can’t see straight. For the love of all.

I’d rail against this some more, but what’s really left to say? My only hope is that he’s trolling us and isn’t serious.

What Would Matt Do: I’d hope I’m never so embedded in anything that I can’t see the forest for the trees.