What Would Matt Do

It’s getting closer. Pretty soon D&D as we know it will be changed forever! It’ll be grand and exciting and better in all ways! Well, if you believe WoTC. Me, I’m pretty damn skeptical.

And things like this aren’t changing my mind:

Did they run out of money already? Because I know a guy down the street who can do better work for less money in his stolen copy of 3DMax. If that’s the level of quality we’re going to get with the D&D insider and 4.0…well, I’ll just cry quietly in the corner now.

On a maybe more positive note, this rogue class sounds interesting:

Role: Striker. You dart in to attack, do massive damage, and then retreat to safety. You do best when teamed with a defender to flank enemies.
Power Source: Martial. Your talents depend on extensive training and constant practice, innate skill, and natural coordination.
Key Abilities: Dexterity, Strength, Charisma

Armor Training: Leather
Weapon Proficiencies: Dagger, hand crossbow, shuriken, sling, short sword
Bonus to Defense: +2 Reflex

Hit Points at 1st Level: 12 + Constitution score
Hit Points per Level Gained: 5
Healing Surges: 6 + Constitution modifier

Trained Skills: Stealth and Thievery plus four others. From the class skills list below, choose four more trained skills at 1st level.
Class Skills: Acrobatics (Dexterity), Athletics (Str), Bluff (Cha), Dungeoneering (Wis), Insight (Wis), Intimidate (Cha), Perception (Wis), Stealth (Dexterity), Streetwise (Cha), Thievery (Dexterity)

Build Options: Brawny rogue, trickster rogue
Class Features: First Strike, Rogue Tactics, Rogue Weapon Talent, Sneak Attack

I can’t really say how good or bad that is without having the whole system to look at, but it is interesting. Things like HP gained have changed (used to be your CON added to HP at each level), build options is both odd and scary (hopefully that’s just tips for how to build your class, not a requirement to choose one or the other) and I wonder what a Healing Surge is… Is that going to be their way to fix clerics, everyone can now heal themselves a bit…?

We do have one piece of good news from this article on everything currently planned to be released for D&D 4.0:

The PHB cover IS set to change! Scott Rouse confirms in this video snippet that the current artwork on the Player’s Handbook is changing. Wayne Reynolds has been commissioned for the new piece, which will not feature the tiefling.

That’s the first good news I’ve heard about 4.0. The cover they announced a bit back blew chunks (a zing from the past!) compared to the other two books.

Per the norm, nothing really good to report about 4.0 other than that it’s getting closer. I don’t know if that’s really good other than the geek wars it’s sure to cause once you have to (note: WoTC says you won’t have to…) pay a monthly subscription fee to play your PnP game…

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What Would Matt Do: Know what I want to do? I want to rant and rave, I want to meet the designers of 4.0 and show them the backside of my hand…but most of all, I want to not be excited that another version of D&D is coming out. I’m such a god damn addict.

So it comes out that EA offered two billion for Take Two as a buyout offer. That’s almost twice what the stock is worth at this point. And a pretty good joke:

The timing of the bid appears to be an attempt to acquire Take-Two before it releases what is widely expected to be the top-selling game of 2008, the fourth installment of the crime thriller Grand Theft Auto.

Yeah, that’s basically the point. To offer now, months before GTA 4 releases is them basically saying, let us buy you now so you’ll be cheaper than after you release your bajillion seller game. But how does EA see themselves?

Electronic Arts said it was making its offer public to “bring its proposal to the attention of all Take-Two shareholders.” In a telephone interview on Sunday, Electronic Arts’ chief executive, John Riccitiello, said, “It is an enormous premium,” suggesting that rather than consider the offer hostile, “We think of ourselves as a ‘white knight.’ “

Riiiiiight. A ‘white knight’. We’re here to help, we promise.

This is my favorite part though:

Mr. Riccitiello said, however, he believed that Take-Two’s stock price already reflected an expectation among investors that Grand Theft Auto IV would be a success, and that Take-Two would become less valuable to E.A. after the game’s introduction than it was now.

After Take Two releases their game, it will be really expensive for us to purchase them, so we really need to buy you now. So good. So full of shit.

Take Two, much like Yahoo does when it comes to Microsoft, need to pay attention though. EA is making this public so they can be the ‘white knight’ (er, dark knight) and try to take over Take Two before GTA 4 ships. After that it will cost them a LOT more.

Really, I don’t care about it. Rockstar under EA would probably suck with yearly releases though.

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What Would Matt Do: If I were Take Two, I’d watch my back.

Awhile back the story about IGE and what happened behind the scenes circulated around. I shrugged. It’s IGE…I kinda put them in the same group as the Girls Gone Wild people. Scum. So when you find out scum acts like scum, it’s not very news worthy. It’s like saying Sony had no clue what they were doing when they launched the PS3 or that EA likes to make schlock games best of all. It’s just not shocking.

But now I see some lawyering bully shit (that last link is to the firm that Pierce hired…) is being pulled. The Forge has a lot of the text up on their site (kudos to you good sir). I’m not sure why Scott pulled it down or if there is anything they can actually do (it sounds like Virtually Blind is saying they can’t, unless you’re a lawyer and then you have to follow the rules…I think), but for the moment I’m not going to copy the text as I too live in the US and I’m not sure what my lawyer would say (I don’t have one). I’ll see if I can’t find some free, and very trustworthy of course, legal advice from the internet tomorrow. Until then, read it on The Forge and more power to you, Matt (bitching name, btw).

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What Would Matt Do: Ummm…anyone know any good lawyer jokes? Other than the only good lawyer is a…well, you get the idea.

Someone linked me to this piece by Steve Gaynor. It’s an interesting article about how he views gaming as getting the same level of respect as comic books, how gaming will not be able to bridge the gap he sees that books and movies have. He states it as a wager:

I’ll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I’ll bet you that fifty years from now they’ll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today.

He goes on to give many reasons why gaming will be nothing more than a poorly thought of hobby for the next half century. I’ll give him that he put a lot of work into his argument. But I’ll also give N’Gai Croal some love for destroying the basis for most of his arguments in a two part answer:

• Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.
• On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.

That pretty much erases his books are better theory…no one is reading them. And controllers being the other big issue reason doesn’t really hold well on further examination either:

Another point worth making to debunk the idea that videogames are somehow unreasonably inaccessible is to compare them other types of games, like chess, basketball, or Dungeons & Dragons. Each of these games has rules, and therefore a learning curve. Each requires a commitment in order to develop from being terrible to mediocre to respectable to good to great. These real-world games have the advantage of leveraging more deliberately taught interfaces–motor control and literacy–than their electronic counterparts. But we’d be willing to wager that other than the not-so-insignificant problem that many have with navigating three-dimensional environments on two-dimensional screens, it would probably take less time to teach someone to become comparably skilled at Halo 3 than it would at the position of quarterback–even when you factor in the complexity of the controls.

Yeah, that pretty much says thanks but no thanks.

After reading both parts of Croal’s rebuttal, I was upset. He took my argument right out from under me and stated it a lot better than I could have. But thinking about it further, I don’t think he took it far enough.

It works like this…according to NPD, 63% of the US plays video games and 30% played more this year than last year (as of December 2007). Comic book numbers are no where near that and probably never have been. Games can do things comic books can’t. They can provide an experience, a visceral feel that only comes with “being there”. And they aren’t passive. That isn’t really my point though.

The point is this. Gaming is already a part of society. It’s as big of a business as movies are right now and it’s growing larger every year (where as movies are struggling). Gaming won’t become a part of society like movies or books (poor, poor books), it’ll be bigger and at some point, it’ll become even more a part of society than either ever was. Because gaming has the huge advantage of bringing the experience to the gamer in a way that neither of the others can do. You can be a space captain trying to save known space or a force user (may it not suck) or whatever else you can think of, someone is or has already made a game about it. Games allow you escape reality in a way that no other medium does and more and more people are catching onto this. They allow you to take a break, to solve puzzles, to destroy worlds, to change the lives of virtual beings with the hand of god.

So it all boils down to this. Gaming is already a part of the culture world wide. Korea has made super stars of their Starcraft players, Japan has fully embraced everything gaming, and the release of Halo 3 was on every news channel around the world. As games get easier to get into and more able to simulate reality, things will only get crazier. Just wait until you can jack into virtual worlds Lawn Mower Man style (without the dopey getups). We’ll have people literally starving to death because they couldn’t bring themselves to leave their virtual world.

So while N’Gai (he’s so dreamy) really took the air out of my argument, I don’t think he took it far enough. Gaming isn’t becoming a part of our culture. It already is and will only get more so as time goes on. People from all walks of life plays games now and I predict in ten years or so (not fifty) we’ll see gaming over take most other forms of entertainment. To use an oft used phrase, the future of gaming is now. Not fifty years from now, not even ten really. There are already more people playing games than not in this country alone. Let the industry grow up a bit, learn how to really use the medium, and it’ll be even more dominant than it is now.

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What Would Matt Do: I’m going to live it up personally. As I’ve said in the past, we’re living in the golden age of gaming with each year getting better than the past. It’s an awesome time to be a gamer and more and more people are seeing that.

This from Shacknews (now a pretty decent site):

Cult holiday hit The Witcher posted respectable retail numbers to back up its high critical marks, pulling in sales of 600,000 copies over a three month period according to developer CD Projekt.

That’s great! It’s great for PC Gaming (of which I’m still a huge fan), it’s great for RPGs, it’s great for censored ta tas and it’s great for new developers. May they break the mystical 1 mil mark soon and may they make more game that are just as damned interesting as The Witcher.

The most interesting part though is this:

“Only now–as we’ve conquered many of the initial barriers–can we spread our wings, which, of course, we intend to do,” added Kicinkski.

CD Projekt is planning a Witcher-related announcement for next Monday, promised to bring a surprise to fans by “late spring.” The studio has previously expressed an interest in porting the game to consoles, telling Shacknews last fall that the Witcher team was discussing the idea internally.

Hooray Surprises! I’m just hoping the surprise is that they are releasing the much talked about SDK soon. I’m jonesing to get my hands on that and see what you can do with the witcher engine. A console release would be a really good idea for them too. More money in the coffers to make more games in the future!

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What Would Matt Do: Make a game with the SDK. I’ve already got it half plotted out. I fell in love with the engine as soon as I started playing it and can’t wait to see what I can do with it. Of course, this being a mod, it’ll never see the light of day like 99.9% of mods.

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Update 1: I’m really liking these CD Projekt guys.

Not just the game itself will be improved, so will the contents of the game box. In addition to the game DVD, Enhanced Edition will ship with a second DVD that includes the D’jinii Mod Editor and two CD Projekt-developed adventures, a video DVD with a making-of video, a CD with the game’s 29 tracks, another CD with 15 tracks of music inspired by the game, an 80-page instruction booklet, a 112-page official game guide, a map of the game world, and a 50-page short story written by The Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski.

Not only that, but they promise those of us that already own it can get the new content for free as a download. That’s hot shit. Way to be awesome guys!