81

Yeah I’ve had people (Pirates) pop in on me when I was doing missions in dead space. They flag and target you in an attempt to bait you. This was in 0.9 too.

82

FYI, it looks like CCP will unveil another game tomorrow.

83

Judging from the reactions to the Champions Online beta, I should add that to the list. Is that really the future of MMOs? :(

84

I think technically they haven’t unveiled the WoD MMO yet. Not with an official announcement. So should be info on this one. Seems unlikely they’d do 3 at the same time.

85

This is a photo I took today. Notice how it mentions both, EVE and World of Darkness. Notice that there’s a title they put black tape over to the right. I’ve asked them if this is related to tomorrow’s keynote by Hilmer Petursson. They did confirm that and mentioned that the tape will be removed then.

86

It’s called DUST 514

from
http://twitter.com/developonline

  • …it’s a hybrid FPS and RTS set within the EVE universe, for consoles. It’s CCP’s MMO for consoles!
  • takes place on the planets of EVE Online
  • backstory to the ‘cloned’ soldiers coming in an upcoming EVE book
  • it’s a massively multiplayer game that ‘connects’ to the EVE universe. Dust will become an ‘input’ into who controls planets in EVE
  • EVE players fight in space… Dust 514 players fight on the ground… both feed together to dictate control of systems in EVE universe.
  • Been in development for three years at CCP’s Shanghai studio… woah.

Two pics at kotaku

87

Bit more than they could chew.

88

That’s an odd move. I hope tying their successful game to a new product won’t bite them in the end. And is this something existing Eve 0.0 entities will have to pay attention to in order to be successful? That might not go down too well.

89

haha I was just saying

laid back console dudes interacting with the nerdy alpha nerds of eve, I just don’t see it

90

Rest assured the link between the two games will be so bland that it will be just used as marketing blurb (one world!).

CCP has an habit of claiming fancy ideas that have near zero relevance in actual gameplay.

It’s not that. It’s that I don’t see them being able to do a good FPS. Especially in Shanghai.

91

+1 Internet

92

It’s going to be an interesting balancing act for CCP. On one hand, I agree the freeform nature of Eve Online does create a huge pile of immersion by letting players be players.

The fortunate thing is that most players want to blow each other up and build empires if left to their own devices and that serves Eve’s setting very well.

Will that natural inclination of players, and the way players tend to communicate with each other, in any way enhance a more complex and subtle setting like World of Darkness? Like many others, perhaps most others, I’m familiar with OWoD more than NWoD. It’s not all about empire building or duking it out or even politics. This is part of the backdrop but the meat tends to be more about individual characters pursuing personal goals and interacting on another level than what we tend to see in Eve Online.

There’s a good deal going in /internally/ with each character and every game has rules that balance power with sacrifice or madness. Vampires fear the Beast (most of the sane ones anyway), Werewolves have to watch out for Rage getting out of control, Changelings juggle banality against completely loss of sanity, Wraiths have a living darkside embodied by another player that tries to drive them to self-annihilation, Mages struggle against madness and the dominant paradigms of reality…

And each faction and subfaction has different established agendas and philosophies that give players a whole lot to talk about, to create characters from, more than arguing over territorial boundaries or forming alliances to swipe some resources from a third party. That latter, not to be dismissive, can be complex enough in Eve Online - there are incredible stories about what self-empowered Corporations/Alliances and the occasional individual can pull off. There’s no other MMO in existence where it’s almost as entertaining to keep up with what’s going on out there, because it could impact you even if indirectly, as it is to play or be personally involved in everything. There’s that amazing propaganda that all sides put out in every conflict that tells some wild stories as if the truth weren’t entertaining enough.

But…

Will players really be able to embody an ethos, a setting, as complex as World of Darkness? Even if it was just one race of supernaturals the subtleties and complexities of the setting just don’t lend themselves to Goonswarm tactics and mentalities. Piss on the setting by treating the metagame as a big joke or a toy to be broken as creatively as possible and you lose the setting.

The setting, presumably, should be the selling point.

I suspect CCP will have to balance freedom with verisimilitude in this design. Instead of a competitor, directly, for Eve Online (the ugly moshpit of liberty) more stylized conflicts and battlefields will have to be set up and ones that leave much more, encourage much more, breathing room for non-martial interactions and contests.

93

Let’s not get silly.

The type of people who play WoD aren’t any more sophisticated than the type of people playing D&D, In Nomine or RIFTS. Okay, maybe they’re more sophisticated than RIFTS players, but so are most trees. For the most part your WoD guys might be wearing a little more black, but that’s about it. So if those guys, in the games they’ve been running, have been embodying this complex ‘ethos’, then there’s no reason to expect it can’t be pulled off at least as well as games and MMOs based on other complex settings such as Eberron, Warhammer and the Lord of the Rings have.

I’m a WoD fan, but man, there’s nothing special about it that makes it more complex than any other RPG setting that ends up going on a little too long and releases a few books too many.

94

It’s rare that a company can surprise me, but CCP has done so.

I’ll be really interested to see where they take it. Having one game be a simple input for another is a clever idea that may just work.

95

Bahrimon, if you’ve just focused on say Werewolf or the Hunter games those could very easily be as straightforward as the other titles you mentioned. But look a little bit behind, say, paths of morality in Vampire and you see shorthands for many real world ethical systems (if simplified and warped to fit Kindred sensibilities). Some of the sourcebooks for Mage especially wander pretty far afield. Philosophy and history are big factors along with, of course, secrecy (how’s an MMO going to manage The Masquerade or The Veil or whatever the NWoD uses).

These encourage much more subtle kinds of conflicts and conflicts over ideas rather than just resources.

How does an MMO make ideas matter? Can it just leave that in the hands of the players or ignore it entirely as a factor if the goal is to evoke the sensibilities of a specific IP?

96

How is this really difficult? Global aggro meters similar to faction ratings that dissipate over time. Done.

97

You really think that’ll do it? The Masquerade is a big deal because, in theory, it keeps the entire Kindred population from annihilation (which nearly happened before during the Inquisition). It’s not like Grand Theft Auto where you can wait the little police badges out. Or at least it shouldn’t be. The mechanics behind how the Masquerade is maintained are pretty convoluted and riddled with manipulation and politics that can often drive the gameplay. At least in Old World of Darkness.

Keeping your business out of the public eye, no matter what group of supernaturals you belong to, is a theme of every game in the old series because humans, while weak and not terribly bright at times, can turn into dangerous, well armed and well financed mobs that will win just by sheer weight of numbers. Some supernaturals, of course, ignore the restrictions at their own peril to pursue various ends.

But a simple videogame mechanic just won’t work here. There needs to be something more global and tightly screwed on to keep idiots from running around and deliberately burning the community right and left. This is what I mean when I say CCP needs to find a tricky balance between freedom and verisimilitude. Typical asshole behavior might work in some settings but it could be a real problem in a game like this.

98

I’m also thinking Diablerie griefing will be an issue in the game as well.

99

I’m not real familiar with Eberron as a setting, but D&D is a strongly combat-oriented set of rules. Warhammer is all about war. Lord of the Rings has subtler elements to it, but the stories are still most certainly full of armed conflict. All of these translate fairly naturally to a traditional MMO model because it’s easy to focus on a go kill stuff paradigm - DDO has tricks and traps and such, but still plenty of killing. WoD, all the action is behind the scenes, and the setting itself tends to reward treating combat as more of a last resort. A bit less so in the case of Werewolf and Hunter, but still. You’re operating amongst a very large number of people who have no idea what the fuck is going on, and one of the key rules for everybody in WoD is not to break that particular news - battles tend to be detrimental to keeping things on the down low. -especially- if you break out the supernatural powers.

I mean, like any table roleplaying game setting or system, how things go is going to depend a lot on the GM and the players, but in terms of the overall intent, WoD strikes me as being tough to manage even for one set of supernaturals. Roll in all of them and you have a recipe for chaos because even though technically they’re in the same setting, they were never really meant to interact much.

100

Well, the new WoD seems more designed with the idea different groups of supernaturals can work better together and are more balanced. And each has more a particular area of influence rather than the often redundant subfactions in the old games which were each designed to be self-contained universes.

The best way to deal with the hidden qualities of the setting may be to only create spaces that aren’t in public. But if there are no humans around and no need to interact with or prey on them then that takes away 90% of what makes it cool to be a supernatural and have those flauntable superiorities. On the other hand, how can we believe there are secret cabals of mystical or horrific Others if they’re all wandering around Times Square hollaring LFG LOL!?