Worse than WoW...

[PhoneLobster]

Its bitten off a lot though

If the procedural object creation with things like the creature editing work as advertised that alone will be a major revolution for the gaming industry and set the standard (sadly the most likely generally UNMET standard) for years to come.

[Draco_Argentum]

Heres hoping, its been a while since anything revolutionary happened IMO.

[Username17]

I genuinely don't think you even particularly want procedurally creatable content in player hands. In a MOO environment you genuinely want to be able to look at someone and know that they are armed with a halberd and that therefore they hit really hard and have a decent reach but have little in the way of a shield and a kind of sketchy close combat profile, so they are vulnerable to crossbows and daggers if you can keep things at the right range.

If players make their own graphics and shit, people will just be running around with big blue penises and playboy bunny outfits that will have completely random and arbitrary game mechanics. If this giant dildo functions as a spear and that giant dildo functions as a crossbow the game just loses all verisimilitude.

Yes, people should be able to craft things. And no, that shouldn't include making up new graphics for basic equipment. Not because I think it's an unbridgeable programming problem to allow this to happen, but because I don't think that internet denizens can be trusted to stay in genre for any world. If you let people create their own graphics in Star Wars they would have lightsabers that looked like balloon animals. If you let people make their own graphics for Ancient Greece they would make breastplates that had rows of boobs on them. You cannot get people to respect the genre that other people want to play in. The drive to be "special" is too strong.

-Username17

[shau]

If this giant dildo functions as a spear and that giant dildo functions as a crossbow the game just loses all verisimilitude.

This is hilarious. I love the fact that you're against the idea of penis based weaponry based on the fact that it can be used to hide the true abilities of the weapon.

[Koumei]

Or the drive to be a dick. After all, consider how many people are, in Spore, going to try to create orky races, just to spread the WAAAAAAAAAAAGH through the galaxy. And longcats, too. Some people want to make random giant genitals, just because they know children will be playing.

And yeah, there are people who take photos of their pet cat or a can of drink for their avatar when playing golf (as in, the golfer has this beer can for a head). Some people insist on naming RPG characters "my cock" or "ah say," so naturally, people will abuse graphic customisation and make other people cry.

[CatharzGodfoot]

In a system like Spore, you could conceivably assign stats as a function of physical form. It wouldn't stop Sir Loldongs and his trusty steed, but at least his cocklance would function as a spear.

[Crissa]

It's actually not that expensive to have someone check submitted content against a set of rules, although this brings liability if something 'bad' slips through. There are places that have done this, and the amount of time spent on processing the deluge of submissions turns out to be much less than the cost of producing the content originally.

And if you have a setting, you can have users help rate things before they get forwarded to the game - though any user system can and will be gamed - such a situation can help weed out inappropriate submissions.

So far, communities have proven time and again that the desire to cause trouble is not as large as the desire to protect. Neither is inexhaustible, but one can manage the balance.

-Crissa

[JonSetanta]

It looks as though your computer was not up to snuff, no. But if it can't play Second Life, it probably can't play WoW, either, unless one of the sucky things your computer has is a slow processor or low bandwidth, as WoW doesn't have to stream the entire world to you as you wander around.

Actually, yes it can. Just fine on 'medium' at that.

And for the Second Life screenshot, every setting was on 'minimum'.

[Draco_Argentum]

So far, communities have proven time and again that the desire to cause trouble is not as large as the desire to protect. Neither is inexhaustible, but one can manage the balance.

Umm, I wouldn't say that. The desire to wreck stuff can be imported from outside the community. Anything that allows unchecked user content in is abusable. The reason user content works in shooters is you can't force someone to interact with your content.

An MMO would need some control over what gets in or it would turn into a mess. Even the amount of user generated stuff in current MMOs is abused to grief and harass. WoW only lets you add text to the game and people use that to be asshats.

[PhoneLobster]

You cannot get people to respect the genre that other people want to play in. The drive to be "special" is too strong.

Once you have an engine that supports procedural content it is utterly negligible to restrict the content and means of combining that content.

You could easily have your Greeky style armour because you only let people play with Greeky style armour parts, and you can restrict them from rows of boobs (spoilsport) by restricting them to a maximum of two armour boobs per boob plate and one boob plate per boob suit.

Restricting customisability is a total non event, its the actual customisability in the first place that is hard.

[Crissa]

The desire to wreck stuff can be imported from outside the community.

And yet, very few things have collapsed under that imported wrecking. Habbo didn't come to a screeching halt because of griefers standing in the way. Second Life chugs on. Even WoW still has RP servers, and it's still possible to read hundreds of wikipedia pages without coming across a single malicious edit.

-Crissa

(PS: Because you don't understand how to run Second Life is no excuse to bash it further. Stream the world to you. Figure it out.)

[Username17]

In a player skill based game the inclusion of player-created objects isn't even desirable. Aside from the fact that graphics not already stored on the hard drives of the players eat bandwidth like a crazed locust swarm, there's the simple fact that accomplishment within the game is measured in terms of your knowledge of the game as well as your twitch reflexes.

The more people can run in with dog heads and dildo staves the more getting a handle on what the game includes becomes intractable. Imagine what a shitty game Counterstrike would be if people could just make their own guns on the fly. Dumbasses making guns that shot at angles and crap just to undermine the skills that others had cultivated.

While having people able to design and create tapestries to put in their guild halls or whatever is fine, the fact is that having people be able to create new weapons and armor, even in skin format, is not simply too much trouble, it's objectively bad for the game and should not exist.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

There are a couple of things to remember.

1) Most games, especially skill based games are single player. If there is some dick introducing dildo creatures its YOU and you clearly want them there because you are creating a story about dildo creatures and your advancement in game knowledge is in your knowledge of the dildo creatures YOU chose to create. Spore for instance is actually a single player game. It doesn't MATTER if you make a halberd that looks like a frog because you are defining the knowledge base of your own story. And that is perfect. Now for an MMO, maybe, maybe not, still there are plenty of OTHER ways that halberds will keep looking like halberds...

2) I think you are conflating essentially freeform content from external 3d modelling programs and image editors with custom content from an in game custom content creation feature. That is not the same thing. WOW with 2nd life style user content will end up looking like 2nd life. WOW with its own internal custom content creator for your armor and accessories looks however the designers want it to look. It's not like sitting down and creating your own 3d model from scratch without restrictions. Its sitting down with a modelling program where the building blocks are already preset and restricted, its like playing with lego and having your pieces limited and having to follow rules about how they are put together. Its like the one damn feature of city of heroes that anyone ever thought was cool, the costume creator...

3) Procedural custom content, the holy grail of Spore, is not the same as just any old custom content. The "Procedural" part of procedural content actually is directly talking about the fact that it is content restricted, governed, and actually generated by a strongly defined set of rules. When you have procedural user generated content in a game you DON'T have content defined directly by 3d models and texture images you have sets of instructions that run through a predetermined rules set to create 3d models and texture images.

Part of the whole point of it is that importing regular 3d models and other custom content from third party sources is problematic for the designers and very difficult for the users.

The in application editor alternative is a means of avoiding many of the potential complications at both ends by defining and controlling the customizable content. And that in turn complements the procedural methodology that also creates gains not just in simple user customisation of objects but also in efficiency since objects can be broken down to a set of instructions instead of exact and massive arrays of 3d points frame by frame and those much smaller sets of instructions are effectively very highly compressed version of objects usable for communication or storage.

The concept of procedural content is ALSO very beneficial as a means of accelerating developer content creation and random content generation. Every dragon can follow a set of rules about how to look like a dragon but still look different based on small random variations in the instructions that run through the procedural dragon creation rules.

All in all a combination in in game customisation features with procedural content makes for a very productive addition to games multiplayer or single player and a very efficient means of creating and delivering content on large scales.

[Draco_Argentum]

echo PL

The worst thing about modern games is how damn short they are. It took me to play through Doom2 last year than Half Life 2. Models, textures and sounds simply take too much time to create with current means. The only way we can keep getting more realistic look and sound while actually getting a decent amount of game play is to have the computer automate more content creation.

[JonSetanta]

Textural quality > rendering ability any day.

But that takes the effort and time of real artists rather than scripts banged into code templates.
The former is special because it requires human touch. The latter can be easily accomplished by polishing the code of the previous game engine, applying a little more detail on the figures, and exporting to some shitty Xbox 360 "hit of the month". Like Bioshock.

[Koumei]

exporting to some shitty Xbox 360 "hit of the month". Like Bioshock.

Or the army game. You know, that multiplayer FPS set in real-world battles, often WWII as it's the last time America could be called the good guys in a war and "team US/AUS/UK" won, saving the day, rather than randomly invading foreign lands, cocking up, and leaving when they did enough damage that the locals were adopting cannibalism to survive. The game where you have a choice of era-appropriate weapons, though they're really just variants of "bazooka, semi-automatic, automatic, sniper rifle".

Anyway, you know the game. It's also known as every goddamn game that's been released on the PC and X-box for the last 5 years.

[Cielingcat]

Call of Duty 4 was actually pretty fun.

[Username17]

You know, that multiplayer FPS set in real-world battles, often WWII as it's the last time America could be called the good guys in a war and "team US/AUS/UK" won, saving the day, rather than randomly invading foreign lands, cocking up, and leaving when they did enough damage that the locals were adopting cannibalism to survive.

Well, the Korean War was pretty complicated. But you can certainly present a case that Team America was on the "good" team - if only because at the end of the war the USA pumped money and specialists into South Korea in order to make their country prosperous as a method of falsely advertising the benefits of joining the empire to fence sitting countries like Vietnam and Honduras, while China took the opposite approach and cut North Korea off from needed food in order to demonstrate to their own Koreans in Heilongjiang the futility of leaving the empire they were already in. I mean sure, it was a grossly dishonest and bloody conflict fought for entirely stupid reasons in entirely too sanguine a fashion. But at the end of the day the people in Seoul play Lineage all the time and the people of Pyongyang eat the dead in order to keep from getting macrocytic anemia.

So at the level that most people are likely to comprehend history, Team USA is "the heroes" of the Korean War. And making a game where you played that up would go over reasonably well in most of the world.

-Username17

[Crissa]

Or you could say that the Americans were fuck ups and really did nothing positive in the hot war and the North Koreans were betrayed by their allies after the war when the Americans were all butter to the South.

Neither country can currently support itself, neither country has freedom of press or freedom of speech, and the north was all saying they'd get rid of attempts to make bombs if we just said 'yes, we have no plans to attack you.' They even allow US tourists in. The US doesn't allow it, though.

You know, since we never actually signed a peace treaty with them.

But yeah, the US may be well-meaning in many of these fights... Our government is filled with fuck ups that royally screw the ground troops.

Something not realized in most accounts of WWII battles involving US troops? The US generally lost more troops than the Japanese, Italian, or German troops that faced them. Slowly that changed, but even in the final ground battles in the Pacific we lost more men than the Japanese did.

Is being the side of the zerg rush really heroic?

-Crissa

[angelfromanotherpin]

Something not realized in most accounts of WWII battles involving US troops? The US generally lost more troops than the Japanese, Italian, or German troops that faced them. Slowly that changed, but even in the final ground battles in the Pacific we lost more men than the Japanese did.

Yes, oddly enough, that's what happens when you attack entrenched defensive positions.

Is being the side of the zerg rush really heroic?

Heroism in that context is about motivation.

[Crissa]

Yes, oddly enough, that's what happens when you attack entrenched defensive positions.

You don't think having less armor, training, or maneuvers had anything to do with it?

Germans didn't lose as many attacking France. Or even more than the Russians did until they decided to retreat. Japanese didn't lose more when taking US positions in the south seas, and only lost more in the battle of Midway.

In fact, the US and Russians were the only ones to lose more and succeed.

-Crissa

[angelfromanotherpin]

You don't think having less armor, training, or maneuvers had anything to do with it?

I'm sure they contributed, but the circumstance of attacking a fortified position is sufficient cause by itself to expect more losses than the other side.

I guess I don't grant your premise. Elite ≠ Heroic, except in the Greek mythology sense, which has nothing to do with moral heroism.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

Yes, oddly enough, that's what happens when you attack entrenched defensive positions.

Right.

Germans didn't lose as many attacking France.

That is specifically because Germany did not attack the entrenched defensive positions of France. Germany went around the Maginot Line, circumventing France's defenses.

I don't know enough about assaults between other countries, and their comparative defensive measures to comment on your other examples. Perhaps someone else could. However, it would probably be best if you would refrain from making disingenuous statements in the future.

[JonSetanta]

Get read. Here comes the ultimate fate of all threads.

Nazis.

[Orion]

.

Its like the one damn feature of city of heroes that anyone ever thought was cool, the costume creator...

Is this game commonly reviled? I picked it up a few days ago and am loving it, far far better than my brief encounter with WoW.

It didn't take long at all to get to level 10 out of 50, which is good. costume creation *is* pretty sweet, as is the fact that I get to make a real decision about my character on every levelup. (Okay, the odd levels aren't super-interesting).

They even partially address Frank's concerns with systems like Sidekicking and the Rikti invasions. Plus, Masterminds are just *fun*.