If that sloppy manchild is even slightly correct, then as he ass-backwardsly suggests, the fighting game "community" either needs to be abandoned to rot from within and die, or razed to the ground and rebuilt from scratch without all those toxic elements.
Responses like "who cares" are bad enough, but there are people actually defending this guy?! Oh, great, he "always jokes around" and "gives everyone shit" so it's all good and fair; he's being an equal-opportunity douchebag. Except, you know, when your population is, what, 98% male nerds of some variety? Maybe it's a bit harder for one of them to feel singled out when you hit them with whatever brilliant bit of "trash talk" bon mot like "nice one fatty!" or whatever these idiots say (I don't even know I don't even want to know) than it is when that tiny maybe(?) 2% of your community is being called a "bitch" because you're playing against them and they were born with a different chromosome.
If I was that guy that got yelled at I would never want to live that down. But good on you. Also is it wrong for me to have the urge, seeing how long this is, to scroll to the bottom and type in "God man, get on with it.
Nope! But thanks to the wonder of bloggery, i can be as goddamn longwinded as I need and rest easy knowing nobody has to deal with it if they don't want to. True democracy is within our grasp.
@EdIsCool: Thanks for the totally plausible technical info! Indeed, the simple reality of networking limitations is where I was going to go to in my finale post; the question will be, will all that data be forth throwing around anyway? Damned if I know!
Howdy, some of you might remember me as the guy Ryan yelled at during the End of Star Wars Galaxies gala. While I can't exactly say that went... quite as well as I hoped (for my thoughts/apologies/lessons learned from the experience, check my posts in this thread), I'm glad people were entertained by the responses to my poor performance and appreciate that the guys still discussed my question thoughtfully and considerately, even if I didn't necessarily get my point across as well as I'd hoped.
Anyway, now that I've had some time to reflect on the whole thing in a less-pressured situation, I'm finding that the ideas which caused me to pose the question on the show (the title of this post, more or less) are still swirling in my head, so why not put up the arguments I was hoping to get across then here where people can read and respond at their leisure? Hopefully, a bit more coherently, because gosh that would be nice.
To build on the preamble that invited Ryan's wrath on the show: I love FPS games that are small, quick and chaotic, and ones that are huge, slow, and deliberately tactical, and any combination in between. I also love FPS games with large scale and huge player counts, and have since the first multiplayer online PC FPSs started to feature the unimaginable sums of 32 or even 64 players in a single match! Of course, for most of those (relatively) early FPSs with their emphasis on fast action and limitation on map sizes, all those extra people generally just meant you killed or were killed by other players every 5 seconds, instead of every 10. Crazy, chaotic fun for sure, but perhaps not quite doing justice to all those extra people.
For me, it took games like the original Operation Flashpoint (which I basically never even tried to play online, for whatever reason) or Battlefield 1942 (which I definitely did) to reveal the possibilities those large player counts could provide.My system/connection could barely handle BF1942 at even 32 players for a good amount of my career in it, but I still couldn't stay away from those crazy 64-player servers, even though it meant a good 20 minutes of chugging at least as my piddly insufficient RAM was overburdened by all those dudes running and driving and flying and sailing around.
Not a great quality image I found, but just look at all those little red dots on the map; those are all your dudes! Awesome! Now close your eyes every 3-5 seconds for a second and shift them slightly before reopening Chugging simulation complete.
Yet as much as I had always loved the idea of games with MASSIVE player counts, I still have little to no experience with MMOs of any sort. Originally, this was due primarily to being too poor to deal with a monthly subscription fee; nowadays, it's more just that none of them really seem to appeal to me. Many of my reasons jibe with those Jeff gives in his most recent Jar Time; not really wanting to devote all my time to a single game, the necessity of grouping/scheduling, etc. Plus I hate grinding. I hate grinding so much. Sooooo much. But a FIRST PERSON SHOOTER that was also an MMO... surely that would eliminate most of my problems with the concept, right?
I never did get to try something like Planetside a chance, but there is one MMO I managed to give a go a few times when they offered occasional free trial weeks/months a couple years back: World War II Online. I thought this would be a sure-fire thing: I loved the setting, the scale was enormous, player count was essentially unlimited (well, no so much, it turned out...), this game should be perfect for me, right? Well...
WW2O revealed to me the fundamental issues inherent in an FPS of that size and scale. Jeff mentioned several of them during my ill-fated call-in: it took forever to reach the action, for example. BF42 could have long treks from spawn point to action at times, but I feel it mitigated that very well with an abundance of transportation opportunities nearly everywhere, and it was worth occasionally having to spend a few dozen extra seconds walking for the tactical possibilities that space provided. WW2O, by contrast, typically involved riding a truck or driving a tank for 10-20 minutes or more from a base to a point of action, an event both tedious and terrifying because there was always a reasonably high possibility you might run into an enemy tank or get strafed by an enemy plane 15 minutes into the journey, killing everyone on board and putting you right back where you started. Even if you survived the journey, odds are your driver might drop you off right in view of an enemy machine gunner, giving you approximately 10 seconds of life upon debarking before you were returned to the great spawn pool in the sky. Later versions mitigated this somewhat by instituting the ability to spawn at forward bases and probably other things I'm not remembering closer to the action, but the problem never really went away.
Enjoy the ride, fellas! Anything you see or hear moving in the next few miles will probably kill us all.
But design issues weren't the only problem with WW2O; technical limitations also played a huge part in making the experience so much less than I had hoped for/imagined. To be clear: I have no problems whatsoever with playing a game where the graphics are not up to modern levels of flash and detail. I'll happily accept ugly, archaic-looking graphics if the tradeoff is deep, multifaceted gameplay. Unfortunately, in the period when I first tried playing WW2O, the graphics were quite honestly so limited and abstracted as to be detrimental to the gameplay to a rather severe degree. In addition to the above, here is another typical example of the view you would get as a standard infantryman playing WW2O during its first incarnation:
At the time, simultaneously impressive and depressing.
Now, it's VERY important to keep in mind the limitations this game had to work within. When first released in 2001(!), the kind of draw distance on display there was (and really, still is) practically unheard of. The good people at Cornered Rat Software were doing what they could to realize their dream in a form that standard PCs of the time could handle. The result was a lot of very flat terrain, and a hell of a lot of sprite-based objects populating said terrain. Stuff like those tree sprites you can see in the image there blocked bullets (I think), though it was rather hard to tell where their collision boxes really covered. I couldn't even find a picture of the "woods" back then, which were represented as crazy abstract constructs of flat green sprites arranged in a mass that infantry could sort of navigate and hide within by slowly picking their way through little holes in each sprite. Just like grandpappa had to during the Big One!
Much like the better spawning systems later implemented, the graphics of WW2O were GREATLY improved in later updates as technology marched on, leading to not just better sprites for things that remained sprites, better textures, and more high-poly player/vehicle models, but actual trees and woods populated by real polygonal trees and everything. Still, a rather severe problem remained that still (to my knowledge) persists to this day in WW2O and in fact most other large-scale FPSs: the severe flatness of the terrain. Even on the plains here in Saskatchewan, perhaps the flattest spot on Earth, the ground is full of ditches, depressions, divots, etc. that would undoubtedly be essential in the kind of long-range tactical combat on display in a game of this type.
Here's what I mean: In the real world, a man under fire could throw himself to the ground and be likely to find at least some cover, if not total defilade, very quickly; the terrain of WW2O was, and I suspect still is, flat plains inclined or declined only at certain rigid points, where a person going prone when under fire is far more likely to simply delay their inevitable death in the time it takes their enemy to chamber a new round and shift their sights down a few millimeters. Even if they are lucky enough to be near concealment, their enemy probably has little difficulty in guessing where they are now at and delivering a follow-up "lucky" shot to their now-concealed but still fully exposed meaty bits.
Oh, and one other quick graphical limitation concerning WW2O: it may have supported hundreds of players at a time, but the number of players that could be displayed at a time (infantry, tank, airplane, or whatever) was something like 32 or so (I believe), at least in earlier versions. This conceivably meant enemies further away could conceivably not even be visible to you but you might be visible to them depending on their viewpoint; an issue that, while certainly rather rare, was of course rather troublesome in situations where it mattered.
Well hell, that's enough writing this garbage for a Saturday. I'll call this part 1 and maybe finish it off later, wherein I'll cover a few more technical concerns with WW2O and indeed most online games MM or otherwise, such as networking, and then finally get to the real meat of this whole question: even if you can make a beautiful, really massive MMOFPS that performs just fine technically, does it really matter from a player perspective? Can such a game appeal to anything but the most hardcore simulation nuts?
I'd love to hear some comments on anyone who's managed to read through this mess. What's your perspective on MMOFPSs? Any recent players of WW2O have any insight on how the developers have dealt (or not) with these old issues?
Hey, I really appreciate the friendly responses on this, folks! I will freely admit that I really didn't think I'd get in on the call because I have never once had any luck on any such call-in thing before, so when the friendly Whiskey folks actually picked up it was exciting, in that kind of "oh man, really? Now I actually have to try and not fuck this up!" sorta way. Sure, it's not lives or prizes are on the line, but these people are putting on a sweet show and you don't wanna blow that right?
It's a reaaaal tough balancing act if you're concerned your question might not be clear enough or misinterpreted on its own as well; getting the right amount of info in to make that work while still not bogging down the show is not easy, and it's certainly where I completely stumbled. I was too afraid I would just ask my question and get quickly disconnected before I made it clear what I was talking about, plus once the discussion is going you don't want to step in over top of the people who everyone actually wants to hear. In retrospect, best form would have been to get the question out there right away and then let the hosts ask for more clarification as necessary. Unfortunately, there's no real guidebook for all this, but lesson learned.
(Another tip for those who've never had the pleasure of calling in: I you get connected just forget trying to watch the stream at that point. You're plugged in live directly to the studio audio and the normal stream is a good several seconds behind, so it gets real disorienting right quick.)
In any case, I do indeed take pride at getting yelled at by Ryan because he is undoubtedly a world-class yellsmith, and it was a certainly an honour to get it directed at me. Making him or anyone angry was definitely not my intention, but if it made for good video, that works out just fine. Glad you people enjoyed it! Big thanks to him, Jeff, Will, and Andy for still taking some time to discuss my question, and of course to Vinny for not just cutting me off right then and there. And even if I didn't necessarily get to make my points 100% clear, it was a pleasure to be a small, if stupid, part of the wonderful crazy nonsense that is any WM production.
I'll cop to being the dude who botched his question with all the preface. Convinced myself setting up the question first was the right way to go when it was really the worst, then the lag on the stream made sure I couldn't realize how much I was dragging until I was already being (fairly) yelled at.
I blew it. Still, I'm glad my chewing out proved entertaining for some and I thought it still worked out to an interesting discussion from the staff so whatever.
Still, apologies to all for being the sort of poor guest I most didn't want to be, and thanks to all for a great show!
Hoooooly hell what a travesty. Wow. I'm not looking for hyperbole here, this just honestly makes me so disappointed and a bit sad.
I just really "love" the irony here... at a time when the other big WWII games (and hell, even now the big Modern War games...) were pretty much directly ripping off Hollywood for half of their random setpiece-based missions, particularly those big, iconic ones, the original Brothers In Arms were focused on producing well-researched, reasonably original historical battles with a solid stab at authenticity. Sure, they were still about American paratroopers on D-Day+X, but at least it was the story of a company that hadn't been all over any movies or miniseries or other shooters.
And now... well, the other "real war" shooter franchises have moved onto becoming their OWN crazy over-the-top action war flicks, and the new game to carry the BiA name is apparently a cartoony ultra-violent Inglorious Basterds ripoff. With a *record scratch* in the trailer. Ugh.
But anyway, now that that's out of me the real reason I had to comment on this was to ask what this business of Gearbox ever being on the brink of closure is about? And because of the BiA series, no less? The original games seemed to be quite successful by all accounts, and while Hell's Highway certainly had plenty of steps back for every step forward (oh the tragic loss of the brilliant, truly inventive multiplayer of the originals), it still seemed generally well-received. Were sales really that poor?
An RTS night might be pretty entertaining; the Starcraft 2 TNT was a lot of fun, why not extend it into a couple different RTSs but play'em as chill, maxed-out team games? Maybe even have a couple different games going at once, where everyone can just casually create ridiculous units and try crazy builds for maximum entertainment value. 4v4s with the GB team on one side and lucky suckers on the other. Games like Company of Heroes or Men of War seem particularly well-suited for this, I believe. They're a lot of fun to watch even if you know nothing about the gameplay or mechanics since the setting is all based in elements recognizable to nearly anyone: take a bunch of little army men, tanks, and explosives, throw them into a bucket o' landscape, give'em some orders, and watch gleefully as chaos erupts. I
League of Legends might be cool, but games tend to run a little too long and be prohibitively slow-going at first, so perhaps something like Bloodline Champions might be better in this regard. But either of these may be a little too unintuitive/impenetrable to those not familiar with their mechanics. Hell, how 'bout some Brutal Legend? I know it's not loved by the GB crew but the multiplayer holds a fascination to me such that I could not in good conscience go without at least mentioning it.
More unusual/alternative multiplayers would be great as well; echoing the suggests for Chaos Theory or more Brotherhood (wouldn't pass up another chance to stab a dude!), perhaps even some The Ship. The "crazy but brilliant stealth games that never should have worked for multi but totally do" theme night.
For an actually rather unique FPS, there's the first two Brothers in Arms with their fascinating combination of standard FPS elements and actual vital squad control in multi that could make them a lot more interesting to watch than standard FPS fare. I haven't played it myself yet, but ditto (maybe?) Bulletstorm's point-based cooperative modes which seem tailor-made for entertaining viewing with its focus on killing with style.
The folks suggesting Trackmania (any of 'em) are geniuses as well, those are game perfectly suited for chill driving around insane tracks with a couple dozen (hundred?) people and laughing as your car goes careening off into the stratosphere after a poorly (or perfectly?) navigated corkscrew-loop-bend abomination.
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