Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Being the arrogant know-it-alls that we all are, it’s rather too easy to make knee-jerk suppositions about the state of the MMO market, but recent research by Screen Digest (via the BBC, via RPS-chum Dan Gril) suggests it’s in ruder health than is sometimes supposed. Currently, the industry is growing, despite last year looking, from afar, a wee bit disastrous for anything that wasn’t Warcraft. In the US and Europe, there was a jump of some 22%. At a guess, that’s got something to do with growing broadband adoption and the increasing take-up of MMOs by formerly non-habitual gamers. Also that not enough people are bored of elves yet.

Coming out of this is also a top 10 of MMOs, and it’s a slightly surprising one.
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Shiny lookin’ flying game Tom Clancy’s High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron landed safely on the IBM desKbox last week. In the quiet hours between sleep and typing endless alpha-numeric characters into the uncaring face of the internet, I’ve been giving it a go. So should the titular Tom Clancy be proud of the polygons to which his name is attached? Or is it time to grab the ejector seat lever of shame? Here’s Wot I Think.

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I used to love Amiga Power. They had a splendid letters page, which they kept splendid through a variety of methods – like giving occasional guidelines about how to write ‘em letters. Of course, some people got uppity about that – but they wrote rubbish letters, so who cares, eh? Anyway, one of them was to not write “I bet you won’t print this”, because – really – that guarantees they wouldn’t. In a similar way, there’s a series of CODE RED phrases which make RPS scowl at their letterbox. For example, “Why no love for [Game I quite like]” or “Shame On You”, which makes us print out letters just to get the pleasure of lobbing them in the bin, cackling all the while. Just don’t.

Of course, I’m a big old hypocrite, because when Pedro Lopes’ asked about the location of Battle for Wesnoth’s love, I took it as a reminder that I always wanted to give it a shot. You’ll find Love below…
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At the last GDC the industry big brains were sat around telling us how games would one day be remotely rendered on big computing clusters and then streamed to our TVs. The big unveil at this year’s GDC has proved them to be correct. Maybe. OnLive is a service on which you use superfast broadband (1.5mbps minimum) to play games on a remote server. You just plug it in to any “entry level” PC or Mac, or hook it up to your TV, and play. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have the latest 3D card: because the remote server does the rendering and streams the result to you. That’s the theory anyway, and it’s a theory a bunch of big name publishers have signed up to. Watch the OnLive spokesman Steve Perlman make his big claims after the jump.

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“We’re ahead of everybody by five to ten years in terms of destruction,” Red Faction Guerilla lead designer James Hague tells Eurogamer. “…we wanted to go toward fully-dynamic for everything. It’s a very different technical direction from where other people are going.” Judging by the insane super-hammer trailer that Volition have just released, he might just be right. I’ve been quietly sceptical about this, and I’m still rather expecting it to mess up, but that hammer… colour me interested. More varied destruction – presented by some dude I think might be from that program about big men breaking stuff – beyond the jump.

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CryEngine 3 has been unveiled at GDC, and shown off with a new video. Nothing on the new “what you see is what you play” editor (WYSIWYP, clever eh?) or any hard tech facts so far, and sadly the crappy compression of the trailer means the impact is lessened somewhat. But it still looks fractionally more impressive than Crysis, and that’s the main thing. Right? Okay then.
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It’s sure nice that the creator of the excellent Doom/Diablo mashup Fall of Mars dropped me a line over the weekend to say there was an updated and dramatically expanded version out. Rather unfortunately, I now hate him. I lost over three hours to FoM this morning, you see. Three hours during which I should have been playing Men of War for a Wot I Think. The others will surely spurn and scorn me.

Their hatred is perhaps a price worth paying, for I had a great time. Unlike the proof-of-concept last version I wittered about a while back, this is getting on for being a complete game. It has a start and a finish, it has linked maps and levelling, it has a ton of Doom foes and weapons, and it has all the ludicrous compulsiveness of Diablo’s ever-escalating click marathons. Were this released in the mid-90s, it’d probably have been hailed an instant classic.
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Welcome, it’s a new Rock, Paper, Shotgun Electronic Wireless Show. Jim and John gather to mouthspeak about PC gaming and beards for the entertainment of the masses. Wonder at how they say thoughts aloud, gasp at the interruptions from local wildlife, be astonished at our lusting after news readers with lisps, and then be brought back down to Earth by the intricate discussion of the important gaming matters of the day.

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The PC Gaming Alliance have made their 2008 report to their members, and provided us with some snippets via the magic of a press release. The release claims that “The report provides an overview of the PC gaming market and the growth of the largest single platform for games with annual revenue of about $11 billion.” The full thing is here.

The report also portrays “Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) as the leading products for both revenue and profits. Other significant revenue generators include several Asian MMOGs making over $100 million in annual revenue after five-plus years on the market; World of Warcraft® producing over $1 billion in annual revenue; and the Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft outsold its predecessor. In 2008, two major subscription MMOGs (Age of Conan® and Warhammer™ Online) sold over 1 million units at retail.”

I wish I had $11 billion. I’d buy a pony.

Rockstar drops the first hint about the next installment of the grandaddy of slo-mo man-shoots:

Do you like beards? What about scars? Blood? A possible hint of a shaven head? Oh, we could talk about this for hours.

Um.
Hmm.
No, that’s it.

A first person shooter demo. Which is just over 80Mb in size. “Wow,” you may think. That’s incredible. When most demos take up a gig, for someone to release a game of such a tiny size implies they’re the sort of developer who has side-stepped the expectations of the genre and forged their own unique experience from first principles. You can just tell it’s going to be a triumph to be filled alongside Darwinia, World of Goo and Braid. Alternatively, it could just be shit.

Let’s play it and find out, eh?
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