decisions
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Johnnie Walker's drunk-driving VR experience lacks subtlety
You've probably considered the importance of avoiding drinking and driving, but I'm guessing you've never experienced the consequences of it in VR. Johnnie Walker teamed up with Samsung to create Decisions, a virtual reality video that lets you see, first-hand and in 360 degrees, what happens when you drink and drive. The idea is to make the consequences so real that you'll be deterred from driving while intoxicated. I tried out the full experience this week (complete with a vibrating "4D" chair), and left feeling less chastened than I thought I would.
The Summoner's Guidebook: Winning LoL games takes good decisions
Decision-making is a broad topic, so I am a bit hesitant to cover it directly. It's the little things that contribute to victory in League of Legends, and decision-making is not a little thing. It's a big topic with a lot of ground to cover. As I've said many times in the past, experience is the best teacher, and I can only tell you what to look for. However, I wanted to bring the column back around to talking about what it takes to step up your game. By now, you've heard me talk at length about mechanical things -- things like last-hitting or aiming skillshots that you can sit down and practice. I've talked more on narrow things like how to make a good team composition or execute ganks. Now I'm going to begin to put everything together and talk about what things you should think about before you click to move on the minimap, place a ward, or ping your team to go for dragon. Good decisions win LoL games, and whether you're a pro or an amateur, you can improve on the choices you make.
Apple's board in a state of transition
While Steve Jobs's passing came with a lot of powerful emotional effects, it did unfortunately arrive with at least one practical effect that has to be dealt with sooner or later: Apple needs a new Chairman of the Board. A few experts say in this Reuters piece that it will probably be a tough choice for Apple to make. On the one hand, Apple's strength is in Jobs' legacy -- the company has to be committed to continuing to follow his vision, because that's what got them where they are today. On the other hand this may be a chance for Apple to diversify its team a bit, and bring in some new personnel who don't have a past history of politics inside the company. There's of course a third option, which is that Apple's board doesn't appoint a new chairman for a while, instead working on other priorities before taking on the enormous task of filling Jobs's spot. That might be the best option -- before Jobs took on the Chairman of the Board position as he retired, the company didn't have one anyway. Otherwise, Tim Cook's name is apparently going around as a possible successor, but insiders are saying that as CEO, he's already too busy to take on anything else. We'll have to see -- these next few months will be critical for Apple, as it tries to turn and face the future without the visionary that has pushed it along for so long.
Storyboard: In your own words
I really should have learned by now to not promise anything for a given week's column other than the fact that it will be there, as I got halfway through the original draft of this particular new featurette before deciding that I hated it. So while I still want to delve a bit deeper into specific game lore and backstory, that bit is going to have to wait for just a little bit while I wrestle with the concept a little more thoroughly. (It'll be worth the wait.) Instead, this week I'm going to focus on an aspect of roleplaying that I've discussed before in passing but never in any real depth: finding a character's voice. That's more than just consistent characterization, although that's a part of it. Strong characters have distinct voices and behaviors, unique outlooks, and hangups, things that help an individual stand out from the crowd. It's the trick of finding that voice and having a distinct tone from other characters that makes starting a new character at once engaging and mildly horrifying.
Raid Rx: A rock and a hard place
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. If you're looking for more healing advice, check out the Plus Heal community. Stop me if you've heard this one. You're taking on some dragon. Some really powerful spell is about to hit you and the rest of the raid. You don't have any cooldowns to use because you had to pop them earlier. The tank who is busy yelling obscenities at said dragon just took a massive fireball to the face and is down in the red. You know for a fact that the next blow is going to be lethal and you have maybe 2 seconds to react. If you move, you may well have condemned your tank to death. If you stay and heal, you'll end up taking some damage which could be lethal. Normally, this isn't that big of a deal, but we're in an age where we have so many informative addons that tell us which attacks successfully hit a player and when it happened. What's worse is that this data means the difference between staying and getting cut from a raid (or a guild). This is a topic of one of the emails that I received from a healing shaman. So what is a healer to do? Is he wrong for making the decision to take avoidable damage to keep the raid or the tank alive? Is he better off just taking the damage so that he doesn't look bad? Either way, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. Lots of players don't understand that these are some of the decisions that have to be made.
Breakfast topic: Your biggest regret?
There are some things in World of Warcraft I wish I could have done differently. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like had I rolled a different class other than a priest. There are bosses that I wish I had killed before they became irrelevant. Alas, it all boils down to time that I wish I had. As both a GM and a player, it is difficult to foresee the results of your actions and you never know what the correct choice is. Even when killing bosses and healing my raider group, I've made crucially wrong decisions. And it sucks when I realize a global cooldown spent on a Pain Suppression instead of Power Word: Shield would've saved a wipe. Have you ever experienced a moment or made a decision that you've regretted since?
Emergent behavior to be produced in Trion's Heroes of Telara
Trion World Network is trying a very different approach with their fantasy based MMO, Heroes of Telara, by pushing into an area currently untouched by most MMOs -- emergence.Emergence is one of the aspects that many MMOs aspired to, only to drop in favor of static storytelling. The problem with emergence is that simple decisions would have a compounding impact on the world. Heroes would solve problems, only to perhaps create further problems with their implemented solutions. Most game architecture can't handle decision making of that nature, as it would need developers to constantly code in the new events that would occur.However, Heroes of Telara seems to be aspiring to that using server-side gaming. Their proposed method, as it appears in an interview between Trion's CEO, Lars Buttler, and GamesIndustry.biz, is to run the game entirely server side, letting developers change and alter the game on the fly. As Buttler puts it, "There are small events, there are big events, there is even emergent behaviour in the game that changes the game world. A lot of it is not even known to us, it's like the ghost in the machine. The game is almost alive, and that allows you to create heroes."
Anti-Aliased: Serious business guys, serious business
This is one of those quintessential arguments that pops up time and time again amongst gamers, guilds, groups, and communities. It's an argument that divides people, pisses off people, and causes countless more gamers to alienate other gamers. How serious should you be about playing your game? Of course we laugh about a topic like this one. Games aren't suppose to be serious, that's why they're games! They're suppose to be fun and enjoyable. If you're not having fun, then you're doing something seriously wrong. For the most part, all of this is true. Yet, there are small segments of the games that we play that actually can require everyone to sit down and "get serious."We see it in raiding tactics, player vs. player tactics, loot distribution, and many other areas (including the entire universe of EVE Online, which seems to be played very seriously.) We've even dedicated a segment of our culture to this type of behavior -- the "hardcore" crowd.So, let's go forward and look at the question, "Are games getting too serious?"
Speaking up for what's right
This is a pretty insightful thread, from all sides, on what the forums and customer feedback are really for. Rekker on Detheroc makes a good point, and that is that while people will complain about anything, almost no one speaks up when things are working right. We talked a little bit about this on the podcast this past week: are Blizzard's decisions based on a player base that never seems to be happy, no matter what you throw at them, or on some arbitrary design guidelines that Blizzard has stuck with from the beginning? Ghostcrawler, as you might expect, says it's a little bit of both. Blizzard doesn't just do what players say -- they consider player feedback and then make decisions from there. But at the same time, they can't ignore what players say, either. GC agrees that the forums are not the best sample of feedback, for the same reasons that Rekker gives: players go there because something is bothering them and they want it changed, not usually because they really love something in the game and want it to stay the same.Of course, forums are not the only form of feedback from the community, and there are many places Blizzard can get feedback about things in the game that players like (ahem). But just like Blizzard does, whenever you look at the forums, you have to realize that you're looking at just a slice of the feedback. People don't make QQ posts about the stuff they appreciate and like having in the game.
Rob Pardo talks about how WoW gets developed
Rob Pardo sat down to chat with PC Gamer recently about all things Blizzard, but as you might expect, WoW got a nice chunk of the conversation. He talks mostly about design -- after saying that PC gaming isn't dead (duh), he talks about the lore of a dungeon, and says that whenever you step into an instance, even if you haven't researched all the lore of it, and read all the quests for it, Blizzard wants you to know that the story is there.He also talks a little bit about how Blizzard works as a team -- everyone working on the game has the power to veto something if they don't feel it works right, which is probably why we haven't seen things like player housing yet. It also explains why Blizzard takes their time -- when anyone can step in and say, "This isn't working" at any time, you get a lot of iterating and a lot of unreleased content. But as Pardo says, it pushes the whole team to do it better -- he can go to the people he'll know will have a problem with a certain mechanic and work with them to make it right.Finally, they chat a little bit about whether, as Raph Koster is quoted, "the singleplayer game is an aberration." Pardo calls out Super Mario Galaxy's co-star mode as an example of a terrific singleplayer game that incorporates multiplayer in an innovative way, and says that singleplayer isn't gone forever -- it's just going to look a little different.[via WorldofWar]
Finding Jobs 2.0
Is it even possible? Forbes does a little bit of speculating on just who might take over when Jobs takes his leave from Apple, and candidates aren't exactly jumping out of the woodwork. Jobs is about as visionary as they come -- only a guy like Steve could lead Apple from the iMac to the iPod to the iPhone, breaking records and status quo the whole time. Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall are tossed out as two names currently within Apple's ranks, but Jobs is almost as much of a company mascot as he is a CEO. As consultant Patrick Sweeney says in the article, anyone who steps into the turtleneck has to fit completely into the culture of the company, or it won't work.And forget the day-to-day and design decisions -- who's going to stand on stage and say "boom" at WWDC and Macworld? Here at TUAW, we're pretty sure the rumors of Jobs' ill health are exaggerated; he's probably not going anywhere anytime fast. But at the same time, it's hard to imagine an Apple without him at all.
Leopard review rodeo
We've talked so much about Leopard already here at TUAW that I'd find it hard to believe you readers haven't decided yet whether you're ready to pick it up (or not), but just in case, here's a few concise reviews from around the 'net to let you know whether this is something you want or not. PC Mag gives the OS a whopping 4.5 out of 5: "Leopard performs all such tasks even better than previous versions did-and Leopard is the only OS on the planet that works effortlessly and intuitively in today's world of networked computers and peripherals. Leopard is far from perfect, but it's better than any alternative, and it's getting harder and harder to find good reasons to use anything else." Laptop Magazine isn't quite as harsh on the glitches, but also give it 4.5/5: "Part useful, part flash, all beautifully easy: Apple's Mac OS X 10 Leopard bounded into stores Friday, thrilling the Mac faithful with a solid and extremely useful upgrade." CNET gives Leopard an 8.0 out of 10, saying that while Leopard is nice, it might not be necessary: "Should you pay for Leopard? If you're happy with the way Tiger works, then maybe not. If you need Bootcamp, however, then you must have Leopard. And if you're considering the purchase of a new computer, Leopard makes Macs more enticing than Tiger did." And Macworld says that while you might not use everything, the stuff you will use is worth it: "Given the impressive value of Time Machine and improvements to existing programs such as iCal, iChat, Mail, and the Finder, most active Mac users will find more than enough reasons to consider that upgrade cost money well spent. Despite a few interface missteps, particularly when it comes the menu bar and the Dock, Leopard is an upgrade that roars." Now, once again, odds are that either you've using Leopard right now, or you're already waiting on a specific reason to upgrade for it. But across the board, reviews on the new OS are generally good. And even though lots of users are dealing with bugs and unfixed errors right now, the best days of Leopard are still yet to come.Thanks to everyone who sent these in!
DS Daily: On the fence
There are so many great games slated for this fall and winter that we'll almost certainly have to pick and choose what's really important to us. After all, most of us aren't lucky enough to be able to run out and pick up everything we want! So we want to talk about some of those games that you're on the fence over. Maybe you're interested, but you're just not sure. A really great review or a rental might convince you, but as things stand, you're probably not going to buy it, though you wouldn't fuss if someone just handed it to you. Do any titles fit that profile for you?
Life imitates WoW -- or vice versa?
We all come to moments in our lives where we have to make big decisions. The consequences of these choices can change our lives completely, and often the agonising debate over a particular decision can stretch out for months.Similarly, the characters we shape and nurture in WoW can face tough choices. Which talent tree to specialise in? Which equipment to focus on? Should game time be spent levelling alts, progressing in the endgame or ranking up in PvP? Worlds apart, you may say. Working out whether to kill some imaginary elves or imaginary dragons is a completely different ball game from wondering whether that promotion is really worth the new commute. Yet recently, while concentrating on an important real life decision, I found myself retreading extremely familiar territory. In fact, when distilled to the pros and cons, it turned out identical to a recent choice I'd had to make in WoW.Putting aside any discussion of the complexity of WoW, and how one can become invested in the game, I found it fascinating to realise I had already tried and tested an important decision from my real life by making the same choice in Azeroth. So next time you're arguing over a point of raid leadership, or pondering PvPing, bear in mind you might find your thought processes useful later!
On marketing, and a thanks to Apple's department
While chatting with my brother this afternoon about (what else) this whole Boot Camp thing and its ramifications, he brought up a great point concerning Apple's marketing and a good choice they made with this new software:They didn't call it "iBoot."Bonus points for not calling it "iBooty" either. Thanks guys.
Engineering the DS Lite: 2 Nintendo hardware vets speak
Ever wonder what decisions go into a hardware redesign? Thanks to the latest edition of Nintendo's Japanese online mag, we finally get a portable peek into the DS Lite.Two Nintendo engineers who worked on the cuter DS sibling reveal how they pulled off the svelte new look while maintaining things like usability, battery life, and cost.Who knew that the new stylus was made "longer and wider to accommodate older users" (the Brain Age demographic who'd taken such a shine to the now shinier little system)? Durable, reliable hardware: it's what Nintendo does best. Let's hope they continue that trend with the Lite, as well as whatever other slicker iterations of the handheld that we're tempted to purchase -- or repurchase -- in the future.[Thanks, Princess Zelda; also via DS Fanboy]See also: Nintendo DS proven toilet-safe Playstation 2 goes silver (redux)
