Submitted by: Uriel on 5/22/2008 4:19:58 PM Permanent Link

(Title blatantly ripped off from the Penny Arcade comic dealing with this issue.)

Since the first screenshots of WAR were posted, a comment has been made time and time again - by the media, by fans, and by haters.

The comment is simply "that looks like WoW", with varying degrees of "they're ripping off Blizzard" thrown in.

The response of Mythic and WAR fan(boi)s has been "nuh-uh, Warhammer looked that way first, so really Blizzard stole from Games Workshop!". That's quite true, and fine as far as it goes. But I have two problems with that response, especially when it's made by Mythic.

Firstly, WAR does look like WoW. It just does. Exactly like WoW? No. But enough that the comparison is obvious. And simply saying that the two games look alike does not mean I think Blizzard was the first to use this art style and Mythic is stealing it wholesale.

a = b is the same as b = a; saying that WAR looks like WoW is also saying that WoW looks like WAR. If someone attaches a negative connotation to the comparison, address that, but being defensive about the comparison itself is absurd, because of my second problem with the typical response.

That second problem is that it is blatantly hypocritical. I have absolutely no doubts that Mythic has deliberately designed WAR to look like WoW.

I believe Mythic when they say that their goal was to make WAR look like Warhammer. That does not mean they were not also trying to look like WoW. It would certainly have been possible to make WAR look like Warhammer but not like WoW (higher detail landscapes is about all it would take, really); Mythic didn't choose that path. Instead they've made a game that looks much more like WoW than it absolutely had to. The terrain, the character design, the UI - the art direction as a whole - is WoWish.

There are many advantages to the art direction Mythic has chosen, many of them unrelated to WoW. They were able to keep the same graphics engine, which reduced development time. The lower polygon-count models will help with lag, especially during huge battles. The hardware requirements should be relatively low. They sidestep a graphics fight with Age of Conan, for the most part, by being in an entirely different category of graphics.

But alongside all that is the desire to lure players from WoW to WAR, as DAoC took from EQ. Mythic WANTS players to make a mental comparison between the games. They want WoW players to have an easy transition. They apparently just don't want anyone to mention this out loud.

Submitted by: Uriel on 5/18/2008 12:40:02 AM Permanent Link

First off... damn, it's been a long time since I posted anything here. Woops. Sorry?

For a really long time I completely ignored Zune Social. The idea of a social network based around a device that hardly anyone had seemed ridiculous. It still does, for the most part.

However, I had to log in to my account for the Zune 2.5 software update, and while there I noticed a "my recent activity" section on my profile that listed some acheivements. For example, "UriSage is now a top listener of Thing A Week Four". UriSage being me, Thing A Week Four being an album by Jonathan Coulton. This intrigued me, so I went to learn more...

Apparently the Zune Social now tracks plays on your Zune device and on the Zune software. You can earn "Badges" - I don't know why they're not calling them Achievements, but they're not - for playing a certain number of songs from an album or an artist. Play 500 songs from a single album and you get the Gold Power Listener badge for that album. You can earn badges for as many albums and artists as you can listen to, it seems. And there's a spot on your "Zune Card" (a sort of Zune-specific image to stick on a website or in a signature; think of the xFire sigs that people use to show what games they're playing - the Zune Card shows what music you're listening to) that shows your total number of Badges.

I'm not sure what the point of this is. Is Microsoft hoping that people won't want to leave behind their progress on the Zune and switch to another player? That achievements will bring them into the Social, which other players don't have? It certainly doesn't seem like something you'd buy a Zune for, nor does it really make any sense when listed as a feature. (Which is why I so completely dismissed it until just now.) But Microsoft has put a lot of work into the Social side of Zune - to the point that it's probably slowing down development of the software as a whole - so they must think it'll benefit them at some point.

For me - well, why not leave the Zune software playing overnight?

Submitted by: Uriel on 2/26/2008 7:26:58 PM Permanent Link

Every MMO in development attracts those who are determined to like the game despite not really knowing much about it. Often, those fan(boi)s will latch on to a few catchphrases or themes – because they may not know what the hell they’re talking about, but by God, they can parrot back marketing phrases with the best of them! Unfortunately, Age of Conan fans have latched on to the idea that the game is more “adult”, which leads to the fanbois exacerbating a problem that already annoys me a great deal – the use of the word “adult” to mean both something that appeals to adults, and that only adults should be allowed to see.

I haven’t kept up much with AoC, but as far as I can tell the main reasons for the game being “adult” are that it:

1. Has boobies.
2. Has lots of gore, including Mortal Kombat like finishing moves.

These are both uses of “adult” in the sense of things that children should be shielded from. It’s adult in the sense of ratings.

But AoC fans who have chosen this as their battlecry are using it to mean that AoC is not a kiddie game, it’s being made to appeal to adults. o rly, I say? Because when I think of people who would consider boobs and blood to be a major feature in a video game, I don’t think of mature adults – I think of preteen boys. And, of course, those boys who got older but never actually grew up. Plenty of adults may be playing female Night Elves because they’re sexier – but that’s not why they’re playing WoW.

So. AoC fans, if you want to make the argument that the game is more appropriate for adults than WoW is, come up with something other than “there’s stuff in it you wouldn’t want children to see”. And stop trying to convince me that AoC is serious, mature stuffs until you've actually read some of the comics...

Submitted by: Uriel on 2/17/2008 10:12:20 PM Permanent Link

For the most part, the transition to Vista has gone very smoothly. I've installed most of the programs I was actually using before (and not installed all the junk that accumulated over the years) - including the WAR beta client. All drivers are installed and working fine, I can play all my videos, etc. The filename issue, it turns out, was that a couple audiobooks had absurdly long folder names. I'm using Vista quite happily every day.

However, there are a couple problems:

Windows Media Encoder 9 is not working to transcode my videos from AVI to WMV. This is almost certainly a codec problem, but it's one I didn't have before, and it's been hard to fix. On the other hand, it seems it's only a WME problem - I did a test run with a commercial program, and it worked just fine. And it did it in about 14 minutes, rather than the 50ish with the old computer.

There's an odd crash bug that's cropped up several times - it seems to happen when absolutely nothing is going on (including the middle of the night, a couple times).

Thus far, though, still seeing nothing of all the doom and gloom surrounding Vista. The crash bug is annoying, but I had plenty of those in XP as well, and the codec issue would show up with any newly installed OS.

Submitted by: Uriel on 2/5/2008 9:45:37 PM Permanent Link

So I've moved my new computer to its permanent spot - I've also hooked up the speakers, both monitors (now both with DVI, yay), and moved my media hard drive from the old computer to the new.

The good: Everything is working. Vista recognized the added hard drive without me having to do anything at all. I like the displays when alt-tabing and when hovering over items on the taskbar. (And no, Mac fans, I don't care if you had it first. Get back to me when I can play games on OSX - or install it on this computer, for that matter.) Aero is smooth. The organization of folders is nice, though I can't understand why Videos don't get the same treatment as Music and Pictures. You can adjust the color scheme using a color slider, so you can get just the right color.

The bad: Vista seems to have trouble judging how long it'll take to copy something. As I've been writing this the copy of my music folder (33GB - mostly audiobooks; that doesn't include podcasts or Zune subscription tracks, which are in other folders and make up another 15 gigs) has gone from an estimate of 28.5 minutes remaining to, at the time of this sentence, 3 minutes and 35 seconds. (And it hasn't taken 25 minutes to write this.) I got a driver error about Intel ICH9. And though it's hardly Vista's fault, my DivX-encoded AVI files won't play just yet.

And it just finished copying my music... yay! Another problem - many of the file names are too long, for some reason. It seems there's a limit to the length of the overall path?


And now it's time for bed - tomorrow, the long (maybe) and arduous (if things go badly) process of installing software, codecs, setting up preferences...