What Would Matt Do

Yeah, the site is going slow these days. Maybe it’s because a giant dragon ate the staff. Maybe.

In more interesting news, Valve is looking at changing TF2 again:

Team Fortress 2 lead Robin Walker says that Valve is not entirely happy with its new method of random weapon drops, and could eliminate the unlock system entirely. "I think we’ve learned that the random drop system is only good for some types of things, like the rare cosmetic hats," said Walker to CommunityFortress

Valve’s contiinual work TF2 is highly interesting to me. No other game has its metrics, its player habits and so on tracked in such detail. I really wonder what their tech is like on the other side. Are they parsing massive text files so queries aren’t easy to run or is everything being put into a sql database and queries are done on a regular basis on the gathered information to figure what features work and what doesn’t?

Is there a massive database of every turn ever taken in every game Valve has made since HL2? Could you track it by player ID, see what turns specific players made as specific points? Can you see how often people actually save and reload? Can you we aggregate data of everyone that ever reach a specific point in the map and make design decisions based on the reaction?

If any of that is possible, Valve is way ahead of the game. MMOs can do that, I imagine. But they are already pushing and storing so much data I’m betting they don’t. Heck, I’m betting they don’t based on the ability of the average MMO to find and fix bugs.

Here’s what I’d love to see Valve do. Put up a website that shows all of the info they’ve collected on the likes of HL2. Or EP1 or whatever. Just a site where you can create simple queries by map and location and see what players actually did and how they reacted to things. Of course, Valve probably isn’t sharing that info, if they have it, any time soon. It sure would be fun to peruse though.

What Would Matt Do: I guess I’ll continue to be a data geek wishing I could run queries on real life objects. Or at least that the language to do so was simplier.

I don’t know that it’s quite that big of a thing anymore, but it’s still somewhat shocking to see Id Software has been bought. I just assumed they had enough money to do whatever they wanted for as long as they wanted. Maybe being the grand daddy of the FPS genre just doesn’t pay as well as it used to.

I don’t know how long you guys have been games, but I remember playing Doom I//II on the PC in my math lab in high school. I learned two things from that. 3D games are awesome and even then, pirates existed (a friend installed the full version he got from somewhere). I played the original QTest, convinced the entire office to play Quake when it first came out (and was the best in the office of course). After that…well, I played each and every game id released since then, though most of them for not quite as long. Quake Arena holds a special spot in my heart for all of the multiplayer and mods that came from that. Shit, anyone else play ActionQuake? It was the spiritual precursor to Counter-Strike.

Id Software started the whole thing. And now they are just another development house owned by a big corporation. A time as passed, an old era left beyond. Maybe this will mean good things, like Betheseda will have pretty engines for their games or Id will start releasing games again (maybe even without monster closets). Who knows.

What I do know is this. Today, Id Software is no more. That is a sad moment.

What Would Matt Do: Pour out some OE for my fallen homies and keep fighting the good fight. Because those Terrorists/Monster/Demons aren’t going to kill themselves.

I’m back. Well, still here. Just been busy. Couldn’t bring myself to talk about the few controversies that have been going through the game world (He’s back, run! and this one is suing their previous employer). Life is good, I just haven’t had the urge to comment on anything really. Until today:

This summer, Dawn of War II is going to receive a major update that adds tremendous value to the multiplayer experience through new features, major balance improvements, and new content.

Yeah, that’s right. Relic is releasing a major patch that not only release eight new maps (yay!), they are rebalancing the entire game. And we know they are really good at that /sarcasm. We didn’t really know what that meant until this video on shacknews. Just watch the first few minutes of this video and you’ll get a good idea of what they are trying to do…completely change the game.

What will all of this mean? Well, we can’t guarantee anything, but I’m going to hazard some guesses.

1) Relic will definitely screw up the balance of the game. They have every single time they’ve made a major release.

2) Relic is releasing a lot of stuff with this one and according to the past record, they are most likely going to miss a major bug or three in the initial release. They may or may not quickly fix them.

3) Potentially, this could make the game even more fun. Maybe

I’ll definitely play it. I’ll definitely be interested. Lets hope it’s not like most of the other Relic patches…sloppy at best.

What Would Matt Do: Pull for Relic to release a good patch/update. Mainly because I’d really like to play more DoWII.

And I’m pretty damn sure there won’t be any kissing. Just a quick note in my continuing love story with Valve:

“The PC and the 360 are just more straightforward. We can focus on what we want to do, which is make game experiences, instead of sweating bullets over obscure architectural decisions they make with their platform. [...] I didn’t come into this business in the 90s because of some technical fetish. I came in because I wanted to give people experiences that made them have fun.”

Of course, that’s kind of mean. I mean, why would you say that about such a simple and easy to use product like the PS3. Lets let Sony set the record straight here:

"We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that (developers) want, because ‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the rest of the nine-and-a-half years?" explained Hirai.

Huh? But his explanation didn’t end there.

"So it’s a kind of–I wouldn’t say a double-edged sword–but it’s hard to program for," Hirai continued, "and a lot of people see the negatives of it, but if you flip that around, it means the hardware has a lot more to offer."

Oh, so you made it hard to develop for on purpose… Well, that’s pretty dumb. Turns out that means great developers like Valve aren’t going to be interested in your system at all. Strange, I know.

What Would Matt Do: I can’t help it. I’m going to keep laughing at Sony. Also, I bought Rockband 2 yesterday. This price is just too good to pass up (link will die when the supplies go).

Oh, and I’m sure you got all of your news about E3 from the big boys…but did you see the video of the APB character creator? If you didn’t, try not to get too happy at work while watching this video. Just think of the possibilities. Not to mention we should have NPCs where every single one of them looks different. Bad ass.

If you’re a strategy gamer (and really, everyone should be a strategy gamer), you know who Big Huge Games is. Not only did they release Rise of Nations, but they also have the ever awesome Brian Reynolds. Thankfully, I already prayed at my alter to Alpha Centurai today, so I won’t have to embarass myself doing so at the moment…

On that note, the reason we’re gathered here today is we’ve just word gotten that BHG is no longer on the chopping block. A company called 38 Studios bought them. And BHG is working on an RPG with no less than Ken Rolston.

Sounds like win win to me. Glad to hear BHG is not shutting down and will continue operations with…38 Studios. I honestly have no idea who that is. I have heard of their other game in development, an MMO called Copernicus (no really, they use italics wherever they use the name) though. Mainly because R.A. Salvatore (A big D&D writer I don’t read) and Todd McFarlane (a big headed comic book guy whose comics I used to read) are working on the story line together. If nothing else, that ought to be highly interesting.

Oh, and I don’t know if this matters at all, but the 38 Studios was started by Curt Schilling. Yeah, the baseball guy. He posted on qt3 a bit back and he sounded like he at least had some idea of what he was doing. Hopefully.

What Would Matt Do: Celebrate, celebrate, dance to the music!