Emeraldtablet’s Weblog

OMG!! I have been awaiting this news for more years than I care to remember. Blizzard, the corporate giant among the MMO universe, is finally beginning work on Diablo III: the greatest computer game of all time. How can one not end every sentence with not one exclamation point, but a slurry of them to express my utter delight!!

Head over to their site: www.blizzard.com/diablo3/

I have looked over the new abilities of the barbarian and I am salivating like a starving dog. Oh still my beating heart, I am nearly in heaven.

My biggest woe now is the waiting….

The waiting…..

The excruciating wait….

When?

When will it be available….

I am still waiting…………………………………………

Last week I started feeling sick; the typical sore throat, murky sinuses, itchy eyes, muscles sensitivity, and feeling really run down.

Three days later, I rolled a critical fumble and I was told I had a severe flu — immediately they told me to go home, drink plenty of liquids, and take Ibuprofen every 4 hours. That night my temperature was a 102 — my mind was whirling a hundred miles an hour and I was never really sure if I was asleep or awake.

Then things started getting better — but it was not the end to my dilemma. Perhaps I had entered the eye of the storm.

Unwittingly we had a big garage sale that day and with my flu licked, I pitched in whole-heartedly moving and setting up tables, standing outside talking with the old geezers coming to screw me out of 50 cents over books and baubles.

That night, I fell into a heaving wreck of coughing, wheezing, and uncontrollable shaking. My temperature soared again and I felt the world falling around me. I went to emergency where they told me I had pneumonia and bronchitis. After spending three times what I made at the garage sale and four hours of my life — I escaped with a fist full of drugs.

Ahhhh the life on drugs is serene — as I lay in bed staring at the dust mites on the ceiling I had an epiphany of incredible game articles whiz through my mind — of course now I cannot remember a single one, but that night I could have written a magazine of articles on every facet of gaming.

Still recovering, I now dare to do anything more than walk around the house. I feel grand as long as the medicine is at full strength, but every now and then the ugly head of pneumonia rises and I hack and cough my lungs out.

Regrettably I am pushing off the production of my latest show, the Travels with Troy a bit to recover. I hope to have the show done later this week.

I am looking with great anticipation to the new MMO game, Age of Conan, by Funcom. What truly intrigues me about the game is review after review that paints the game as aimed at adults or designed for a mature gamer.

Before I get too much into my philosophy on this, I want to clear the air on what I think is an Adult Game. Many, I believe, think adult games mean lewd, profane — often pornographic, and to some lesser extent extreme violence. Although, these descriptions fall into Adult Games, I do not believe they paint a complete picture of what I hope Funcom, and others in the game development community, mean by this.

To me, Adult Games, are those that are created for gamers who have the ability to concentrate and analyze complicated systems and revel in adult themes. Adult themes does not necessarily nudity and violence, though they could. What I mean by themes is character mortality, character achievements, and ultimately character Resolution.

In Character Mortality, I think we need to seriously look at the death of a character. In a fantasy world such as AoC (Age of Conan), death can be permanent but there are always options for a player to bring his character back to life. This resurrection process, however, needs to be lengthy (as in time out of the game) or difficult (either incurring expense in ingame money or quests [performed by subordinates]). We must put into the game the obvious threat of death — and not a death that simply plops the character to an entrance zone with some minor debuffs. As “Adults” we must understand and quantify the dangers of adventuring and fighting. This would accentuate combat and make each battle more meaningful. Death would be less common, but mean something to each player.

Character Achievement also needs a hand at bringing it into more adult themes. Instead of the simple “Candy Reward” after each quest or mission, we need to accentuate long term growth of our characters in the world with long term results — land, status, marriage, children — simply put a legacy that matters in the course of history in the game. As long as we simply give “candy” in items or titles without engaging our characters into the day to day activities of the world, we are playing like children.

And ultimately, we need to address Character Resolution, or ending our character’s career — and not just ending it when we get bored or our subscription to the game runs out. One adult theme that we need to seriously look at is time in the game — the worlds of MMOs run at a much accelerated time than ours, but our characters are ageless and the world does not change. This is a serious flaw in common MMOs today, and must be addressed with adult themes of time, aging, seasons, family, heads of state, governance, and geopolitical fluctuations.

I also think that adult-centric games are those that have robust and complicated character generation systems and physics.  Games such as WoW are definitely not adult games, even though I think they play on the scantily clad female elves and the profane violence of the evil side. I often think that Vanguard, initially, had an adult themed physical world, with a rich sense of character generation and development.  I hope that in future MMOs, designers will think less of showing skin and gore when experimenting with adult games, and concentrate more of complicated game systems with rich and powerful scripting language — to allow greater freedom and breath in the game.

These are the real “Adult Themes” in games. I am more concerned with that others think are the “Adult Themes” which are simply nudity, sex, and abject violence. I hope the people at Funcom see an adult game as more than that.

If you have not checked out episode III of the Travels of Troy, please visit www.virginworlds.com and listen or head over to my page on GAX and you can find it there as well.

In this week’s episode, I have four segments of the show. In the first, I offer a bit of history on the writer and originator of the Conan mythology, Robert E. Howard. Many of his fans, and soon many MMO gamers, may not know the sad history behind the creative genius. Without letting too much out of the bag, let us just say that we should have had many more tales of Conan in Hyboria than we did.

The second segment deals with my ongoing discussion of Phantasm Adventures pushed into the MMO genre, and how I would like to see a MMO created. This week, we talk about the 60 playable races in Phantasm, and highlight a few of them with examples. It is interesting to note, that there were 12 races left out at one point due to their difficult playbability — such as not having hands to manipulate treasures or objects in the world. A MMO would be a perfect place to experiment with tough races, allowing seasoned players the option of “rolling” characters that are much more difficult to play.

I then move on to what I have been playing — which is mostly Everquest II and my new method of dual-boxing with Multiplicity. Even though everything about Lord of The Rings says I should adore the game, I am having a very rough time wanting to spend any time in it at all. The game is utterly beautiful and rich to travel through — its character creation and advancement is smooth and very engaging — treasures and appearance tabs are generous and plentiful. The question, however, is why I cannot find a sustained reason to stay in the game? I am even in a great guild, but there is something hollow about the game — and I cannot put a finger on it.

In my segment, I discuss the Free MMO Dungeon Runners. To summarize my review, you get what you pay for. With that, and without going into much detail, unless you are on a severe budget or you have very little time to invest into a MMO, I would move on to something else.

Next week: Karen, from the Journeys with Jaye stops over and we talk about Women In Gaming. We also will disucss Background Picks in Phantasm Adventures. And for those who have not discovered the site, if you are looking for bargains, surf over to www.slicksdeals.net

Over the last several weeks I have been podcasting on a product from Stardock called Multiplicity.  What it essential does is allow you to use one keyboard to control up to 6 computers.  I recently started using it because my old setup for controlling two computers was causing increased pain in my wrist and shoulder — I basically gave up on two-boxing because of it.

I got the free 14 day trial and have been enjoying the freedom it allows me with just using my best keyboard and mouse.  I am actively trying to configure my third computer to use it — essentially I have to move some things in my room so I can put another monitor next to the other two.

The program isn’t all roses, and there are some programs either that does not work with it or I have not figured out how to use it.  I have noticed, for example, in Civilization IV that the screen centers on the mouse, and when I move the mouse to my other screen, it follows it to the edge and then just continually scrolls across the world — I remedied that by hitting the escape key and that locks the screen where I want it.  I also noticed in Call of Duty 1 that it seems to use its own mouse, so I can’t use it to control another computer.

It works quite well in Everquest II with only a few gaps where I forget where my mouse is, and have my second toon go off running because I forgot to move the mouse back to the main screen.

In honor of this nifty program, I wrote this obviously parody of a well known poem:

Two screens for the news junkie focused on hearsay

Three screens for the programmer writing code solid as stone

Four screens for the gamer who knows not of night or day

Five screens blazing for the researcher looking to atone

In the cloud where IT does it melee

One keyboard to rule them all, one keyboard to find them

One keyboard to bring them all and in the IP bind them

In the cloud where the Multiplicity lie….

Travels with Troy

Episode II

I want to thank Brenden, over at anotherhere, for his funny little show’s bumper. Head over to Brenden’s site to read about his interesting and often funny stories. He draws and has his own graphic novel; check out his artwork at his web page.

This week in the Travels with Troy, we continue to discuss the use of Multiplicity a program from stardock.com. We discuss the general use of the program and how I am using it to two-box in Everquest II. I have recently received some emails from people that have not had as good experience as I had with the program, and next week we will talk about issues and control schemes in using the program.

I then move on to my discussion of my theoretical game called Advanced Phantasm Adventures. In this week’s show we delve into the secondary and teritiary attributes: Hit Points (and Death), Hit Point buffer, Shock, Bleeding, Recuperation, Food, Drink, Height & Weight, Size Codes, Movement, and ending with a brief discussion on Experience Points.

Within the TMOG segment, my first discussion is about Hit Points in the game and how we must break away from the paradigm of levels and ever increasing Hit Point scores. One of the primary reasons characters within an MMO game cannot journey with each other is the abstraction of HP (Hit Points) within the progression growth of a character’s career. As stated in the show, new characters often have low hit points and as they experience the game, they gain levels, and increase in HP. The monsters of the game follow the same rule set and thus start a practice of forcing long time players onto tougher and tougher monsters.

Instead of making the monsters more lethal with special abilities, armor, buffs, and debuffs, designers simply add more HP to the monster and have them do greater amounts of damage. This then complicates the issue of new characters playing with veteran players because their statistics are wildly different.

In Phantasm Adventures, all characters and monsters have a fixed set of HP that will not vary much over play of the game. Two identically created characters, one that is two years into the play of the game, and another that is freshly made, will more than likely have the same HP score.

Of course this begs the question, what separates the two characters then? We will address this with much greater detail in shows to come, but as a overview characters that have played longer will be better equipped, will have better skills in the use of weapons and defensive talents, and veteran players will have a greater social status so they are able to wear better armor, use better weapons, ride faster mounts, own more land (to obtain more money), and travel to places where the younger characters can not go.

I also talk about a number of other attributes owning to a character, such as the ability to heal and recuperate. Unlike modern day MMOs, Phantasm limits the amount of magical healing that can be performed on a character and thus changes the overall tactics of the game. No more can a group of characters rely on a single tank, but will have to alternate tanks and front line combatants as they run out of Hit Point Buffer.

I also briefly talk about Shock and the need to add another layer of complication (to me complication adds richness to a game’s mechanics) thus allowing more versatile play in solo, groups, and raids.

Food and drink in the game is talked about briefly and I discuss how one determines the amount of food and water one needs to consume to be sated — we will talk more about sustenance in later shows.

We move on to a discussion on how to determine the Height and Weight of a character, and what Size Code the avatar has. Size Code is a very important attribute that will affect a character in both a good and bad circumstances throughout his play.

Smaller characters will benefit in a low Size Code because it allows them easier access to expensive equipment and gear, but is a determinate to the use of their skills and combat and magic spell ranges. Large characters suffer greatly with big Size Codes because it scales all their gear and equipment costs, weight, and construction materials — but they gain bonus in many skills, combat and spell ranges, and often leverages themselves with more physical threat in the game overall.

I often look at older fantasy literature and movies and see these giants swinging a tree limb or a boulder and wanted to make a logical reason why they would do so — with Size Codes, it makes sense very quickly why giants would or could not gain access to the materials to fashion weapons and armor for their size. Ultimately, I have always envisioned smaller fey races to be decked out in shining metal chain and plate, with the most outlandish and crazy looking weapons.

I end this week’s discussion on some basic ideas of changing the way characters gain experience points in MMOs — divorcing ourselves from xp gained through killing monsters and doing quests. One thing that has always caused me great aggravation was the designers of the game forcing me into a path of growth that I may not have wanted to take. With choosing three out of thirty (perhaps less or more) Goals each character can fashion their own ideas of how they want to progress.

Each goal would have their own benefits and penalties, but would allow the players to explore the world anew from different view points. Exploration in the beginning would be give easy and fast experience, but as the world is explored, so the Goal of exploration slow. One of course could choose Combat as a goal, but at the start of the life of the character, it would be slow and methodical until the character gained enough skills to survive battles without as much downtime.

With the discussion of acquiring XP also we briefly discuss how to spend it. There would be many areas of a character to develop such as attribute points for statistics, sensory scores, devotion to a deity, learning and mastering magic and magic spells, and developing a social (faction) level within a particular region or kingdom.

I round out the show with a discussion on a new show I discovered while poking around in my Netflix library called Torchwood. The first time I watched the show, I must admit, I wasn’t overally impressed with it. It is a british production and reminded me of an updated version of Doctor Who — which I found out was basically true. The characters of the show grow on you quickly, and you will truly fall for the main star of the show; a girl called Gwen played by the mysteriously ravishing actress Eve Myles.

Torchwood, an anagram for Doctor Who, is about a group of dedicated detectives and scientists — and some mysterious characters as well — trying to apprehend aliens visiting our world and also reclaiming lost alien artifacts that often end up in the wrong hands. Some of the stories are a bit silly, but the acting is good and the stories are very engaging.

I hope everyone who reads this will at least watch a couple of episodes and give the show a whirl.

Until the next episode, I thank everyone who listened to the show and who has stopped by the Emerald Tablet to read it.

It was only a matter of time before the itch of podcasting crept back into my blood. For those of you who don’t know, I have been doing a podcast called the Voyages of Vanguard since last April and a show devoted to Everquest 2 since August.

Both shows were a lot of fun, and I had some great guests and a super duper cohost, known as Jaye in the worlds of Telon and Norrath (Vanguard and Everquest 2 respectively). We pumped out show after show for nearly a year, with only two small lapses for vacation and the Christmas holiday.

Then about six weeks ago my mind ground to a halt — I bet my wife could see the wisps of smoke and hear the grinding of sprockets in my brain. My work really started to suffer several months ago — somehow I lost the spirit of podcasting and to a lesser extent I was not enjoying the games I was talking about. Its very hard to work on a show that you don’t play any longer — it become hollow and the listener can immediately tell that the JAZZ is no longer in your words.

With that, I turned away from podcasting and just took a deep breath. Man, those first four weeks went by in a blur. I started playing Lord of the Rings online as a diversion — something different than anything I had played before. I really thought I was going to hate it — I had heard from so many people that the game was boring, grindy, and repetitive. I am happy to say that I disagree with those statements now, but do have some reservations towards the game. I have a short capsule commentary on LoTRo in my new podcast.

That brings me to my new podcast. Yes, about two weeks ago I started playing around with some ideas of getting back into podcasting. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but from the outset I did not want to repeat what I had done before, and I did not want to step on the toes of the many other podcasters at the collective. I toyed with a number of ideas, but ultimately decided on a short and compact show dealing with the travels and adventures I had in the universe of Multi-Massive-Online games.

With the encouragement from Brent over at Virginworlds I cooked up the idea of the Travels with Troy, a weekly half hour (or less) show on a wide variety of topics all centered to some extent on MMOs or the very least the things I do to enjoy those games. I will have to say that I do have some future segments that may deal with topics outside the MMO genre, but for the most part it will be all about the games we all love to play. Better, I will not be tied down to one game, but can talk all about LoTRo, Eve, City of Heroes, Everquest, WoW, and future games such as Age of Conan and others!

I am also presenting on a weekly basis a segment of the show called Phantasm Adventures TMOG, where I provide a pdf of a set of rules and talk about projecting the game into a hypothetical MMO of the future. There is so much to be said for future games, and I hope I can inspire others into thinking what the next blockbuster will be for MMOs.

I am once again so excited about podcasting, that I am eagerly developing the second show as I type this blog. I look forward to listener comments and am jazzed at the thought of tweaking and changing the programming according to what I read.

Please stop by www.virginworlds.com and listen for yourself.

I purchased my game computer almost a year ago, in part to play Vanguard, and also to update a sagging older computer that I used for more than five years. I really got a good deal on it, for the day, with dual processors, 4 gigabytes of RAM (yeah I know it really can’t see that much, but that is a different rant), a RAID hard drive, and a decent but not over the top video card; a 7900 GTS with 256 MB of RAM.

Even that monster machine had a rough time swallowing the huge chunks of data that Vanguard threw at it regularly. What I noticed, however, more than the stuttering and other hiccups of Vanguard, was that my gaming experience overall had dropped? How could it have become worse after, literally, upgrading every piece to two to three times the power!

What I noticed was that none of the devices in my computer was running right, and to try and upload new drivers was a chaotic wreck of constantly re-affirming the choices that I made. I often even hit a brick wall when I was told I did not have the authority to make that change, even though I was the only account on the computer and i was the Administrator.

Over the course of ten months, Microsoft and its vendors rectified the driver issues. Up until my last round of updating, I was still having problems with my Nvidia drivers — can you imagine that? That would be like driving up to a Shell gas station and pumping gas, but finding out it was a weird variant of diesel instead? The purpose of having drivers is that they “drive” the hardware in your computer. If a driver is going to make all my colors shift or run all my games at 15 Frames A Second, then really it should be called a Parker?

Most of my devices are running smoothly now, but I did have a terrible year with that. I consider myself somewhat savvy when it comes to computers, mostly little desktop jobs. If it wasn’t for my constantly fiddling and knowing what to do when, I believe that my computer would be collecting dust right now. I ask myself, is that what the average person is doing with their two thousand dollar computer?

My greatest enjoyment came last week when against all better judgment I turned off UAC .  I had heard that if you turned it off, Vista would become completely vulnerable and an open door to all sorts of evil.

Let me say up front that without going into specific details, turning off the damn UAC has been utterly wonderful.  I no longer feel like I am in a constant battle with the computer.  I am free to copy, move, paste, and open any application I feel like.

Now, with that I of course have to be a bit more responsible in where I go and what I do.  One of the things that I always wondered about Vista and their re-approving scheme was that in the year that I had UAC turned on, never once was I asked to approve a program that I did not initiate.  So, I was either lucky or there are things going on that is not visible to an administrator — that itself begs the question?

I also turned off the silly sidebar and do not miss it one bit — just another added waste of memory and candy glitz that you don’t need.

There are at least a dozen other features you can turn off as well, including things like Faxing, Tablet Support, and various reporting features that seem only to track what you do and report it to Microsoft.

A friend of mine said to me, “Dump Vista and go back to XP!”  The problem with that is, I have already bought Vista and my system runs fine other than all of their crazy protection schemes. buying XP (assuming you want to have a moral conscious) costs 90 to 200 dollars and I can’t justify that when Vista runs OK with UAC turned off.  If people say, well without UAC you are no better than XP, I counter; its no worse either?!?

Vista and UAC is like a lock door to protect you against 99 percent of the thieves out there.  The problem is UAC locks every door in your house.  I dont need a lock on my linen cabinet…nor do I need to lock my bathroom door.  One lock is fine — just don’t advertise FREE TV INSIDE on your lawn. Get it, be a bit responsible on your actions and you are fine.

All the other features of Vista including its Defender is still running.  Get a FREE copy of Adaware run it every two weeks.  And remember, don’t open attachments from anyone unless you know they are sending you something — even if mom says she has a video of Bin Laden in a dress?

The bottom line is don’t get rid of Vista when you can just turn off UAC.

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) — Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.

He had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.

Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.

Gygax always enjoyed hearing from the game’s legion of devoted fans, many of whom would stop by the family’s home in Lake Geneva, about 55 miles southwest of Milwaukee, his wife said. Despite his declining health, he hosted weekly games of Dungeons & Dragons as recently as January, she said.

“It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them,” Gygax said. “He really enjoyed that.”

Dungeons & Dragons players create fictional characters and carry out their adventures with the help of complicated rules. The quintessential geek pastime, it spawned a wealth of copycat games and later inspired a whole genre of computer games that’s still growing in popularity.

*************

I have so many fond memories of Dungeons & Dragons and my life was forever changed because of this man’s creation. I will forever be in his debt, as well as several generations of dreamers.

I will always remember the day I bought my Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, DungeonMasters Guidebook. It was late August of 1979 and I remember how unbearably hot it was. It was during the day when not everyone and every car had air conditioning. It was when my family lived on a small farm that was 90 minutes away from the closest hobby store. I was still very young then, perhaps 15 years old. After my schoolwork was done and my chores complete, I would spend my day reading about the game and planning my quests and adventures.

I remember calling the hobby store up and they told me that they had three left — I begged them to save 1 copy for me. I then had to plead with my mom to drive me out to the hobby store. We were quite poor back then and money was hard to come by. After several hours of begging, my mom broke down and drove me out there. The ride was hot and dry — our car, of course, did not have air conditioning — hell it barely ran.

We finally arrived, and I rushed into the store and found the Game Section. To my amazement, there was no DM books there. I then ran to the counter and ask the clerk for my reserved copy. He said that he sold the last one ten minutes earlier and he was all out for several weeks — I stood there completely in shock, struck silent, not knowing what to say or even do. My mom was not so silent and began to beret the poor guy behind the counter on what she had to do to get me here and that someone was supposed to have saved me one. The guy called the manager, who walked out from his office, leaned over the counter and pulled 1 fresh copy of the book from a hidden cache.

That very moment froze in time for me — the book could not have sparkled anymore than the the largest jewel. I grabbed it and clung to it like it was my baby. I cracked the cover and drank in the fresh ink smell — its binding of glue caused my head to swirl.

All the way home, my mother tried to quiz me on the book, but I was lost in the grandeur of what I held. Each page was so stuffed with new ideas, spells, monsters, NPCs….you named it, it had it. Oh god! It was so terrific and I could not put it down.

I truly remember falling to sleep that night, holding on to the book. Hoping that if I died, my mother would bury the book along my side (ya, a bit weird, but I do remember that thought).

Gary, you did so well — no other person would shape my life as much did. God Bless you.

Disclaimer:  All names are pure concoctions, its their personalities that are real: believe it or not.

Josh, Fizzlegiggle Tizzletops, the emoter, thirty-something guy who plays the off-the-wall classes, that no one else wants to play, but often critical to group mechanics.  Josh is the player who just loves using his emotes at the end of every battle and chest drop. He plays the dancers, the cook, cabin boy, the grease fitter, or seamstress.  Josh spends more time researching and implementing the craziest emotes one could imagine – his gear and skills are all underpowered but man he can shake his ass and do head stands until the dragons come  home.