[Dark Age Iron Savior]

this topic is a pretty wonderful example of the uncanny valley of realism in world-building

wait a second dj wrote that two pages ago

nevermind DJ YOU ARE TOTALLY WRONG

[DJ]

[geinou]

Just finished The Passing. It was fun.

[CubaLibre]

[DJ]

We should get Booj to do it as well if we can find a weekend where we're all free (the game is long but can be finished in a day if you soldier on).

And man I am quite a screenshot whore so any excuse to go virtual sightseeing is fine with me. If we do this right, where we have at least one dissenting opinion mixed in with the playthrough, it could be Frontpage/Archive worthy.
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[boojiboy7]

Yeah, I would be on board for at least commenting on the screenshots and such. I've made it farthest in the 360 version, but I own a PC copy of the main game, but none of the episodes. I would have to redownload the game to my PC , but thanks to Steam being awesome, that's no big deal.

Seriously, I do love Valve as a business for Steam, even if I sometimes have problems with their games.

It's gonna have to wait until at least next weekend to do that though. And I might just finish the 360 version and not bother with screenshots if everyone else is doing screens. The thought of going through the boat section again gets me so mad. As for the person who asked how far I've gotten, as I recall I am just past the whole Nova Prospeckt area, though it has been awhile.

[DJ]

You'd know it if you cleared Nova Prospekt, probably. The game takes a pretty dramatic shift at that point and your objectives become a hell of a lot more, uh. Urgent. The whole section of game after that is dubbed "The Uprising", to give you an idea. The whole plot takes a sharp right turn and suddenly it turns into Call of Duty 4 vs. Aliens.

Man, guh. A game I really want to do this with? Like, really-really? Is World of Warcraft.

Hear me out.

I may break this off into a separate thread, but last time I proposed that there was a least a fair bit of interest but nobody followed through.

The reasons being, though:

A) You have a game that is near-universally hated by people who don't play it, 95% of the time this is based on either rough knowledge of the game (if any at all) or having a friend who "lost their life" to it.

B) The game itself has changed very dramatically from how it used to be; most of the complaints directed at it these days are woefully out of date, so it would be interesting to take someone who is initially hostile to the game and then toss them in it and see their reaction. You'd need someone who's at least reasonably level-headed and able to take a look at it and objectively say "This part is as bad as I thought it would be, this part is much better than I was expecting, I wasn't aware of this part of it but I like/dislike it and here's why."

C) Fairly soon, the next expansion is going to drop, and when this happens, Blizzard is re-writing the entire game world permanently. Basically, the "original" World of Warcraft will cease to exist once the next expansion hits, and there is no option to opt out of this for the players. Even if you don't buy the expansion, the "base" game world is undergoing a major overhaul and massive chunks of it are being redone entirely via a mandatory patch, expansion or no. So, this is pretty much the last chance for anyone to play through the original game.


So, what I'd wanna do is take a person (ideally more than one but realistically I think I'd be pretty lucky to find even one person willing to do this) who has a negative/indifferent view of the game, is intentionally going into it with a lot of preconceptions, but is willing to give it at least, say, a month (which is how much time you get for free upon purchasing the game anyway).

This person/These people would intentionally go in completely blind, with no advice on class choice, race choice, where to go or what to do or any of that. I would be in there to answer questions if asked of me, but I wouldn't offer any advice or any real assistance unless absolutely necessary. It would ideally be total learn-as-you-go. The idea would be to hold this aging thing up to modern standards and see if it's held up, if the changes made to it were any good, how friendly it actually is to new players, and just gauge reactions. Are you having fun? Are you not having fun? Does this surprise you? Why? What's the thing that bugs you the most, what do you like the most?

And then we'd set up something on Blogspot or a specific thread in here or whatever and that's where opinions and discussion could be posted and archived. It would essentially be a liveblogging of a huge game by a bunch of people who've never played it and are intentionally going at it with a critical eye, but the key factor of it is, they're going into a game which has been altered radically from the time it launched.

This is something unique to MMOs. Imagine if Half-Life 2 was actively being altered by Valve as they learned more about good game design. I have a feeling that if they were to go back and re-make Half-Life 2, it would've come out substantially different now than it did then. This is something that actually happens with MMOs and it's the only genre where this is really possible. It's a game that is being actively updated -- particularly WoW -- as you're playing it. The direction that WoW has moved in since launch is pretty staggering. It started as basically "EverWarQuestCraft" and in the five years its been around they've taken pretty radical steps to de-EQ it to the point where people who are coming back to the game now after leaving it a few years back barely recognize it. It'd be like if Half-Life 1 morphed into Half-Life 2 over the course of a few years.

That fascinates the shit out of me on a conceptual level, and I'd absolutely love to read a critical set of fresh eyes on the game. What were you expecting vs. what did you actually get? I think a project like that could honestly come out really, really good and really, really interesting. It's an idea that's been kicking around in my head forever and I'd be overjoyed to see it get off the ground.


Of course, the big problem with that is convincing people to do it, which is...Not...Easy. Exasperatingly so. First off, you have to find people who can actually critically examine a game. Then you have to find people in that pool who are willing to actually sit down a play a thing they probably hate just for the sake of guerrilla games journalism and actually stick it out. Then, out of that already tiny pool, you have to find people who are willing to drop at least $20 to do it.


The one thing that would make this go a lot faster is that I can dole out guest invites like candy, I think I've got five of them and more of them will appear if I use those. If you get a guest invite, it ups the Experience Rate to three times normal, which brings the pace of WoW about in-line to that of, say, Fallout 3.

So yeah, not trying to derail this thread completely but the idea of a Half-Life 2 group playthrough for critical purposes just got me thinking about doing it for WoW, something I've seriously wanted to get off the ground for a very long time because I think it would turn out to be One Of Those Actual Bits of NGJ That You Read On The Internet. I think this could have the potential to be something pretty great.

Is there, like, any interest at all in doing something like that?
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[boojiboy7]

Were this about 3 years ago, when I had (way) more free time, I would've been all over it. As it is now, my time is taken up by way too much other stuff, unfortunately. Working full-time sucks like that. I'm really interested in doing it, but being able to have the time to log in and actually play more than like an hour a day would be pretty rough.

As it is, though, I am interested in doing these types of things for any game, really. I wish grabbing console screens was easier, as that is what I do most of my gaming on.

[DJ]

[DJ]

Anyway, I won't derail the current thread. If that sounds like anything people are vaguely interested in, PM me. If I get even one person who seriously wants to give it a shot, awesome, we can start a new thread or make a communal blogspot or whatever and go from there. I can go up to five or more so don't be shy!

Only realized how much that sounds like an invitation to a gangbang after I wrote it but whatever!

Anyway.

HALF LIFE HI.
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[CubaLibre]

Yeah, the thing is, I did really actually play WoW, from release right through Burning Crusade, and I hate it. Hate it.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[HarveyQ]

i played WoW for about twenty minutes and i hated it.
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ghosts appear and fade away

[DJ]

That's fine! Really, if this did ever happen, I'd expect reactions to be mixed and probably negative overall; I'm more interested in why, coming from -- and this is key -- people who have never played it before. Never raided, don't know how any of the mechanics work, etc.

The hard part is convincing people to pay $20 to play something they probably won't like.

It's also the last chance to get a fresh opinion on the "bad" WoW, since the entire reason behind Blizzard's upcoming mandatory overhaul to the game world is to address the fact that "Classic" WoW hasn't aged well at all. This isn't like a "DJ runs an apologetics course for a game he plays", I'm seriously interested what happens when you toss people totally new to the thing into the mix with the full intent of having them rip it apart. Negative opinions are fine, but don't just say "shit suxx", explain how you think it failed.

One of the more interesting things I've read coming from Blizzard was the key notes for the GDC where they offered up a slideshow of a bunch of the stuff that they don't think worked overall in their game, and the list is pretty big. Coming from a developer who makes more money in a day than any of us are likely to see in our entire lifetimes, that's pretty intriguing. They don't have to make excuses; they're pointing out parts of their game that they think suck because they want to avoid making the same mistakes down the road and want to share this information with other developers.

Now, I do have a few things on tap that can better emulate where the current default of the game sits. The 3x Experience thing is the new "normal" way to play through the game. Blizzard uses it as an incentive to get current players to get new players to play, but that also emphasizes the fact that the game is designed to be played with other people. I have a social channel full of confirmed-not-asshole people that folks could hop right into, so there'd be a social aspect right off the bat.

Also, there's a bunch of new stuff added in fairly recently (past few months) designed specifically around making it easier for new players to see all the content without having an older player carry them through it.

There's now a queue for a Random Dungeon Finder that pairs you up with other people from a handful of servers and teleports you right into the dungeon you want to run. You identify yourself as Damage, Tank, or Healer (the game provides explanations of what these are if you're not sure) before you queue and the game checks your level and gear and slots you with other players of a similar level in a properly-built group. This works from the moment you're even remotely powerful enough to run this stuff right up to the endgame. I'm told this is a game changer, and I believe it. I know people who have levelled 1 to 80 doing just that, and it's apparently one of the more fun ways to go about this. Dungeons are debatably the meat and potatoes of the entire game experience, so to throw the doors open to everyone to hop right into that with a minimum of fuss is pretty neat. It turns it into an almost L4D style game, with the overworld acting like a big interactive Lobby if that's how you want to play.

Still though, it's just an idea. I think it would be terribly interesting.

This might be easier to do for a game that isn't WoW, though.
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[option]

Has anyone here ever tried to actually swing a crowbar in real life? I don't think anyone at Valve has.


DJ I have leveled a character in the way you are talking about in WoW, tanking all the way from level 15 to Icecrown Citadel 10-man content (where I promptly quit once jerk-offs started bringing up shit like "raid times"). It makes the game feel a whole lot like Phantasy Star Online (without nostalgia and the patience of a teenager this is not a good thing). While turning the overworld into a big "search for the fishing/cooking trainers" game.
Also it kills any sense of a cohesive world the game might have had. Its like the entirety of WoW is stuck at the shitty point in Monster Hunter where you have killed a version of each monster and your just killing the same thing over and over and over to get each piece of armor. Basically the part where the world shatters and you realize the game is just a bunch of game design documents and lines of code.

If I wasn't on the recruit a friend system and playing with someone I knew really well in real life I would not have bothered at all with the new cross-server WoW.

[Ronnoc]

[Ronk]

guys can you wait to play half life 2 until steam gets the mac release so i can actually play it for the first time ever
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[boojiboy7]

Yeah, I think that is fair, so that we get a new person, someone with a dislike of the game, and a few guys who like it in on the project.

[Mr Mustache]

[boojiboy7]

I thought it was supposed to happen when the new steam store rolled out, which would be Monday, but I could be making that up.

[Ronk]

they said april release but i've heard nothing more specific than that


i'm pretty excited because this thread made me want to play portal again too and i've only really played it on the 360, and enjoyed it very much thank you
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[DJ]

[Ronk]

although i probably might not actually get around to it until the semester is over, so mid-mayish?
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[Mr Mustache]

[Toups]

I am always happy to replay half life...
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[boojiboy7]

http://kotaku.com/5527672/valve-dates-steam-for-mac-its-may-12

For mustache.

[Mr Mustache]

Thanks boojiboy, I'm looking forward to actually being able to play some games with you guys.
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The people are like wool to me