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The Soapbox: MMO slot machines
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. We are beginning to drown in a sea of MMOs that are shedding variety to mimic simplified slot machines. The danger in this is that MMO gameplay is becoming akin to gambling. Enjoyment of minute-to-minute gameplay is being replaced by hours of frustration unless we manage to match three-of-a-kind to get our loot drops. The success of the games isn't resting on the shoulders of enjoyable content but on the prizes to be won by schlepping through that content. We're letting developers know this not just by playing these games but by literally asking for more of the same. The result is that money flies into developers' hands while they skirt the boundaries of ethics by supplying "gameplay" soaked in habitual greed, delivering to players only the barest skeleton of an MMO.
Lo Res Project builds abstract low-poly models of luxury cars and other trinkets
Triangles. Their scarcity has been the bane of gamers since the dawn of time (circa 1993) and every single leap forward in graphical performance has been tied to increasing polygon counts and smoothing out curvatures. Color us amused, then, to see someone going in the opposite direction for art's sake. The Lo Res Project from United Nude scans in 3D models of everyday objects -- like a Lamborghini Countach, we've all got one of those, right -- before scaling down the complexity of the resulting data to achieve radical-looking angular representations of the original as above. The best part, however, is that if they're really happy with their digital outcome, the designers go and build the damn thing in the real, living, breathing world. Some might describe it as sophistication through simplification, but we just see it as one of the truly geekiest ways to decorate your abode. Hit the source for a picture gallery.
Simplified WoW lore
The WoW community is growing ever larger, and for lots of people the entire Warcraft story is a puzzling maze of overlapping tales. I know if I were a new player and someone told me, "Oh yeah, you can go play this other stategy game to get some of the story... or you could read some books!" I might balk at the time commitment required just to understand the background story for this new game.Dawnbow has a solution though. This is the cliffs-notes version of WoW Lore. It won't keep you on the edge of your seat with spine-tingling suspense, but it'll give you a rough idea of what's going on behind the scenes of the game, without you having to spend extra time and money on other things.A few responders to her original post on the forums say that there may be a few errors here or there in her summary, but don't worry too much about that. Lore fans often disagree on details -- sometimes they're both right, sometimes both wrong, and sometimes Blizzard just hasn't been consistent. Either way, if you're looking for a quick catch up on the essentials of the WoW story, spend a few minutes with some simplified WoW lore, and then check out WoW Insider's own Know Your Lore column for some the juiciest character portraits you'll ever read about a game story.
