RPS Feature Clustered
You wait forty years for a game about jumping between video games, and two come at once. A couple of weeks after we saw Davey Wreden’s experimental project The Beginner’s Guide, we now have Bedlam [official site]. (No, not that one. The other one.) Based on Christopher Brookmyr’s book of the same name, and written by the author, this is a tale of being trapped inside the history of first-person shooters. Here’s wot I think:
Some time ago, I read and then offered opinions about Bedlam, a novel by renowned crime writer Christopher Brookmyre, which was about PC games. PC games as a whole that is, rather than being based on a particular game. Its wider sci-fi trappings and its broad humour I wasn’t especially taken with, but I did greatly enjoy its clear love for and whirlwind dash through the earlier days of PC shooters, and its careful, affectionate description of what those early id’n’Epic worlds of brown rock and alien war without end would be like if somehow made flesh.
Flesh we don’t get, but what is happening is a videogame adaptation of this book about videogames, a first-person shooter that’s also a tour through the history of first-person shooters.
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There was, for a while, a theory that implosion of the high-end MMOs was inevitable but boutique online games would fill the resulant void. The trend towards big MMOs switching to free to play has at least delayed that collapse (and quite possibly extended it indefinitely), and sadly we haven’t really seen as dramatic a rise of smaller, more esoteric and/or indie MMOs as hoped. There are a few for sure – e.g. Wurm, Darkfall, Love, Darkwind – but really the expected explosion of alterna-virtual worlds seems to have centred around Facebook games, digi-playparks for kids and, abstractly, Minecraft multiplayer. So it’s good to see an MMO in the relatively classic sense approached by what appears to be a resolutely indie developer.
The Missing Ink, whose open alpha is expected next month, has an especially charming art style – paper cut-out adventurers tally-hoing through a distorted 3D world – and the added bonus of a personal sandbox construction sub-world for each player. I don’t entirely grasp how all this works in practice, but it looks both lovely and ambitious.
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The boss of virtual world tech company RedBedlam, Kerry Fraser-Robinson, has said that companies must find a way to bring virtual currency trading into their games. The must, he argued, accept that virtual currency trading will take place in games that have an economy. “Trying to stop that happening is literally like telling the tide not to come in – you will fail.”
The comments were part of a wide-ranging interview over at GI.biz, in which Fraser-Robinson slammed the idea that gold trading could be forced out of virtual worlds. More thoughts on this issue after the jump.
