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Yea, it's got to the point where the simple mention of the Z-word means an instant no-no. I had a book recommended by Amazon, the blurb looked interesting... until a review mentioned the Z-word. The book immediately went from wish list to "I'm not interested".

Curiously, it hasn't changed for those three months. I'm playing Minecraft and casual GW2. And by casual, I mean, I'm closing now on my first level 80. (funnily enough, I've spent more on those 3 casual months than the initial box purchase. My bank and collection space has inflated beyond any...

A friend of mine told me yesterday that there's three categories on Kickstarter: - The guys who are complete unknowns, have never done any game but "awesome ideas", and want you to give them money so that they'll realize making games is hard. - The guys who tell you how awesome they were in...

You can certainly play, but parts outside of your claim regenerate, so anything dug or excavated below the claim will refill and close. If you want to create a dungeon, you have to claim below ground. Claims do three things: prevent others from claiming close to you unless you allows them...

You have never tried to build large-scale stuff in Minecraft, do you? For reference, I'm doing a large-scale project: 155x155x155 (about 6-7 claims volume), using common materials (wood/stone/wool). I've started last february, and am probably putting an average of 20-25h/week on it. It's...

People always want to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

I use Bootcamp for my gaming needs. Less these days, almost all of my games work natively, I just boot it every second wednesday of the month (for the monthly patches). Otherwise, it works perfectly fine, and yes, it runs Win7 64 bits. If you have a 27" iMac or a recent 21, you're good. An...

Time to whip out the CC for my very first Kickstarter ever, I think.

Friend (who is a big Elder Scroll fan, played every one rather hardcore except Oblivion) went into beta this weekend. His first remark is "Conan syndrome?". The second was that it was a MMO, it wasn't Elder Scrolls at all. All the spirit of the ES series is missing. The problem is that almost...

There's a big difference between fungible loot tokens and AA XP, and that's important to remember. When you're doing the dungeon for loot tokens, be it LK-era various badges (didn't we get BC-era badges on each boss? My memory's hazy on that) or LDON-era tokens, the token comes in a discrete...

What's that newfangled C64 stuff? Graphical adventures on the TRS-80, man. That's what it takes to make a programmer out of you.

They've set themselves on a sub-based business model. They're going to try to stay sub-based for as long as they can. If they hemorrhage subs, they're going to adjust whatever causes them to lose them if they can identify what it is (unless it's so embedded in the game design, it can't be...

IFthey want to be one. You still have to unlock the class, get (possibly) some out-of-class utility skills, and get them to tier 5. Plus gear.

If you want people of the same classes play differently, then the solution is simple: have obtaining the "perfect build" be difficult/long. There's a perfect build, but you need 200 hours of specific dungeons and questing and raids to obtain every skills in that build. So, what are you going to...

Yea. Have a small team spend a lot of money churning out 40 different looking mounts. Sounds like a plan.

A challenging crafting system can be challenging across three separate axis: - It is difficult to acquire recipes - It is difficult to acquire craft materials - It is difficult to execute recipes And the last axis doesn't mean "I have a whack-a-mole mini-game each time I craft an axe's...

They speed up content consumption by a factor that is out of whack with their apparent utility. Witness the problem Blizzard is having, right now, with regard of limiting their use during the levelling process because the ultra-fast WoW levelling is made even faster with it and even they...

Well, apparently,no one wants Matt Firor in their Dream Team of MMOs.

No matter what, you WILL have people min-maxing (if you have a choice to make). What causes problems is when people insist YOU min-max as well. That happens only if the min-maxing process is sufficiently easy to do that people can expect a significant portion of their potential playing...

And if you got BOTH the PS and the XB? (not me! not me! But I have a friend who must purchase every console when it comes out. And yes, he's looking forward to the Steamboxes)

At the time, you did NOT have a new gear season coming out every patch.

Including all the copies that were sold months after the game came out, when it's 50% discounted on Steam or something.

Well, the devs usually get only 1/3rd of that. But it's still pretty good money. Enough to pay for a TESO.

Usually, when I talk about an EVE-type game, I mean "a single-world PVP game based about territorial control of resources".

It's already a challenge in space-based EVE A fantasy-based MMO that has the same room and pop as an EVE-universe will probably have to use the same basic tricks: hard zones, zone population caps, quick process migration between servers in your universe cluster, net-buffers concentric bubbles...

The Trailblazer pack is supposed (I think) to be a limited offer. The other two should probably be available at least during beta. I'd be in if the buy page didn't land me on Prosieben.

Actually, the Minecraft landscape is a cubic approximation of a completely smooth Penril noise function. If, rather than generating cubes, you create meshes at a 4-inch resolution, you'd get your smooth terrain (otherwise completely identical to the 1x1 metric cubes). Actually, Minecraft does...

You don't need the Trailblzaer pack to get alpha access, the Explorer pack at 59$ also has alpha access (but not all the items, title and the 4 weeks of beta gifts).

Nah, we're bored. So, like every game thread that has zero info in it, we're making our dream game, and discovering that our dreams are not exactly similar to other people's dreams...

100$ in 1999 gives you 140$ in 2013. So, yea, 7 millions $ for EQ today.

And yet, funnily enough, that's what a game like Minecraft does. In Minecraft, your game world is generated in 16X16m chunks whenever one player comes close to an empty area. Each of those 16X16m areas connects with the four adjacent squares (including those that don't exist yet and will be...

Uh? Why not. The thing with procedural generation is that, if you have the same procedure and same seed number, it generates the same things on the server and the client. It's done all the time with Minecraft, people see a nice vista/location/village/whatever, post their world ID and the loc...

I do remember our first Lucifron kill, we were about 31 I think. We got stuck a bit later (because casual family-oriented guild, not hardcore optimizers) until we got more bodies to throw at Garr. Never did it in Vanilla, but the Naxx10 we killed him once with 3 (the MT, a mage and me). It took...

One of the things I think would work pretty well would be for player activity to influence an established area's building. We're Heroes (even in games where we're not designated as The One True Savior of the Universe). Where we go, where we operate from, merchants and artisans and bankers...

The real question is "what other sources of cash". 38S never managed to get any additional funding for its MMO. EA was ok for an almost-finished single-player game, but no one stepped up to fund Curt's real dream. So, it was "accept a RI loan with unrealistic conditions, or fold and close MY...

Or it means "we've looked at AC1, and we liked how managing item drop on death was a whole subgame". (probably not)

Releasable and earning back how much? At the point RI found itself, it had spent spend XX millions, there appeared to be no chance of finishing the product within the remaining X millions on the loan, 38S failed to secure additional funding (ding ding: no one believed them enough to pay? And...

... and floating turning cubes full of meat hooks and chains and non-euclidean angles.

It's a game about secret conspiracies. Of course it's intentional!

Expressed in simpler words, "we haven't dropped the NDA; we've merely hired for free a number of marketers for our game".