An
interview on Gamasutra talks with Thomas Farrer from CCP's Shanghai studio about
Dust 514, the upcoming PlayStation 3 shooter, the ambitious plan to have the game interact with
EVE Online, the sci-fi MMORPG. Here's a bit on how they envision this working:
This is actually really important and goes to what you're saying about looking at how players interact. There's no difference between a Dust corporation and an EVE corporation. It's the same thing. Dust players can join an EVE corporation. If a Dust player creates a corporation, EVE players can join that corporation. It's the same thing.
Say if, for example, you only have pilots in your corp, you can quite easily hire a mercenary-only corporation to fight for you. You want them to go and just destroy someone's things on a planet or take control of them for you, you can do that. You can hire them; you can use them as mercenaries.
Or much like you see in EVE corps, you have different groups within a corporation that specialize in different things. You know, you've got your miners. You've got your pilots. You've got people manufacturing. Now you've got a standing army.
In an interesting twist to the competition between Valve's
Steam and Electronic Arts'
Origin, the Origin store is now selling some Valve games, as seen in
this buy two get on free promotion, where the games in the "buy two" part include
Counter-Strike: Source,
Left For Dead: Game Of The Year Edition, and
Left For Dead 2. Thanks
Joystiq.
An
interview on Eurogamer talks with Martin Edmonson of Ubisoft Reflections about
Driver: San Francisco, the new installment in the action/driving series. He addresses some of the criticisms of the game, including the way the unhinged Tanner is depicted:
Most people that play the game think the actual function of Shift is good fun and bringing something different. There are reviews that get the story, they understand it, they see how Shift came and how it develops. They also recognise that we're showing Tanner's schizophrenia deliberately. One minute he's doing a police investigation and the next minute doing something completely crazy with a bunch of Japanese street racers or a learner driver.
And this is by design - it's an intentional thing. One or two of the reviews just go, "Oh this story is completely ludicrous." You need to stop for a minute and think why have we done it this way. This is why: because he thinks he's having a mental breakdown. I don't think they've thought about it carefully enough. What we have done is, very deliberately, treat it with a light touch. Jones, for example, his partner, is constantly taking the piss out of him. And this is because it's such a ludicrous situation. All the time we're being very, very deliberate about this. Tanner has to basically convince Jones, and he starts to think very quickly that things are not quite as they seem.
A
YouTube video from about six weeks ago shows off a prototype of a "working" Fallout-style PIP-Boy 3000. Some features aren't working, and you can't actually wear it on your wrist, but it's still pretty cool (thanks
VG247). This also lead to
this older video showing a wearable one, though this is an iPhone app, which obviously made things easier to work out.
Graham Jans' Blog - Microtransactions Under the Microscope. Thanks Mike Martinez.
As mentioned above, the value of real-money purchases is largely defined by the player's perspective within the game world. But additionally, the real-world value of items affects their perception within the game. The obvious case of this is that selling a top hat item for $1,000 will provide a kind of instant prestige for any player owning that item, even if it has no intrinsic value or significant aesthetic value. It's valuable because it's expensive.
There is a more subtle case with content that can be accessed both through real money and in-game effort. Take, for example earning a new Champion in League of Legends. On one hand, the paying player can say, "Woo, I payed $5 and saved myself 5 days of effort!" But the non-paying player can also say, "Woo, I earned this myself, and saved $5!" It actually gives an extrinsic value to the time the player is spending in the game.
I may give up on my plan to play through the original QUAKE using the Dark Places mod, as I seem to have lost my saved-game progress most of the way through the second chapter. If I can't figure out what's gone wrong there, I may not be willing to play through it again so soon.
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