Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This article by Secret World lead Ragnar Tornquist, in which he argues that there’s still room for stories that aren’t generated by player interaction, is a bit awkward. I can’t help thinking that it’s a defence against exactly the kind of criticisms I usually make of MMOs – that the effort put into their stories and quests would be better spent on providing players with the kinds of tools that they need to make their own stories. I am thinking here of the years I spent in Eve. But it made me think about the MMOs which actually put player interaction first. Other than Eve and Mortal Online I couldn’t really think of any. The Twittermind came to my rescue, suggesting Planetside – of course, with its lack of anything aside from purely player driven combat – but also Wurm Online, Neverdaunt, Love, and A Tale In The Desert. Which led me to think: What else is there? Could we make a list of MMOs where dev-developed story, fiction, and narrative content is necessarily secondary to the interaction of players? And how would be set up criteria for deciding that in borderline cases? What are the best examples of doing away with story? And what is it that generates the best stories from player interaction in MMOs? Comment peoples, open your brains.

Ooh, the Indiegames blog has served up another choice cut of news. Instant Kingdom, the Finnish indie developer behind awesome freeware survival sim Notrium (do check that one out if surviving through a long, cold, alien night sounds like something you’d enjoy) is currently hard at work on Driftmoon, an RPG that I think might best be described as personality-heavy. You can watch the latest trailer after the jump, and play the latest alpha build by simply pre-ordering the game direct from Instant Kingdom for €11.99. He just put in the talent tree in the last update, which I think could be compared to an RPG losing its baby teeth.
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Information about this expansion leaked, like a rude analogy, onto a German Sims 3 site a couple of weeks ago, and now The Sims 3 Generations has been officially confirmed by Electronic Arts. Sims will be able play in treehouses as kids, play pranks as teens, and have a mid-life crisis as an adult, but in general the expansion seems focused on fleshing out the different eras of a Sim’s existence. A shiny new trailer has been birthed, and awaits you after the jump.
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Do you want to help Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop new anti-submarine tactics? Well, then you don’t necessarily need a degree in underwater battle-conflict, and instead you can play ACTUV Tactics Simulator. DARPA explain: “This software has been written to simulate actual evasion techniques used by submarines, challenging each player to track them successfully… As you complete each scenario in the simulation, you may submit your tracking tactics to DARPA for analysis. DARPA will select the best tactics and build them into the ACTUV prototype.”

It’s a fully fledged simulator by the looks of it, with a big old single player campaign and even a multiplayer set up for submarine battles. Worth a look if you like a bit of frightening realism. Free, obviously. And you also get to help the US military fight the scourge of the waterways: rogue cannibal submarines.

Myst Online cannot die. It has been struck down and risen again on endless occasions. And now, it seems it is ascending to some kind of internet immortality by becoming an open source project. Cyan’s “Rand” explains: “Today we are announcing that the sources for the MOULA client engine and development tools (CyanWorlds.com Engine) will be made available as open source. At the same time, MOSS which is a MOULA server replacement (written by a’moaca’ and cjkelly) will also be released. Both open source projects will be hosted on OpenUru.org.”

So that’s an open source thing that happened.

One of these days, we must take a long, hard look at ourselves. And also at the StarCraft II modding scene, to see how well it’s living up to the promise that the modkit could turn the game to whole new genres.

Blizzard themselves have now made good on that promise, releasing the final, public versions of three long-promised cheeky nods to other games…
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I’m not someone who can do one thing at a time. If I’m not doing multiple tasks I cannot concentrate, and get quickly distracted from anything I should be attempting. Writing this requires the distractions of a train journey, music, and text message conversations. One game at a time is rarely enough for me. Begin your diagnoses.

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Last month’s RPS social club meet-up (which I told you guys about here) in London was a thing of beauty. Good people. Laughter. Somebody buying me a pint of Guinness so that I would have some iron.

Almost as excitingly, the venue – the Blue Posts pub – kicked ass, so it’s my great pleasure to confirm that we’ve got it booked from 8pm for the evenings of April 16th and May 28th, which are the dates of the next two Social Clubs (once again organised by stellar RPS reader Siri Hommelsgård). Ladies and gents, get those dates in your diaries! And since it’s my understanding that at the last Social Club people were present and drinking by the mid afternoon, feel free to show up a little earlier. For my part, I’ll be pressuring Kieron to come along too now that he’s back from his honeymoon, and maybe one of the others will make the precarious climb down from Castle Shotgun. As for me, I’ll see you guys there!

You there! You look like a Minecraft player to me. Well, how do you fancy maybe being one of the first to try out its developer’s next game, Scrolls? There’s nothing certain quite yet, but if you opt-in to the Scrolls newsletter you now also have the option to register your interest in helping test (and have early access to) the fantasy card-battler.

There’s no date and no guarantee, but for the brief sake of scrolling (ha!) to the bottom of the Scrolls website and enterting your email address, it’s well worth a shot.

Edit – oh, it’s a bit old. Oh well, no harm in restating it, eh?

So long as I’m listening to Vera Lynn and posting about World War 2 strategy games, here’s something we missed- Slitherine are also publishing Panzer Corps, their homage to the classic Panzer General strategy series, which I know is a classic because I think I saw it on my cousin’s PC during one of those rare occassions my 8 year old self lifted his head from a bag of Monster Munch. The new game isn’t a looker, but the trailer below sees the devs getting around that with admirable creativity. I’ve put some details together after the jump, too.
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Swedish indie studio Zeal has announced Team Assault: Baptism of Fire, a project we’ll be paying attention to in future for three reasons. First of all, the developers have cited the turn-based tactics of Jagged Alliance and X-Com as influences. Second, it looks like a turn-based Men of War. Third, the way it’s structured, with players building custom armies using a set number of points, is designed to scratch the exact same itch as tabletop miniatures games. More details and a trailer after the jump.
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