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Atari announces iOS lineup for the rest of the year and beyond
Atari has dropped a press release announcing its mobile game lineup for the rest of 2012 and first part of 2013, and there are some really interesting titles in there. Here's the full list, for your viewing pleasure: RollerCoaster Tycoon (Q1 2013, iOS and Android) Dungeons & Dragons: Warbands (December, iPad) Atari Casino (Q4 2012, iOS) Outlaw (November, iOS) RollerCoaster Tycoon should be a fun addition to mobile platforms. Dungeons and Dragons Warbands is a D&D-themed game that sounds nice and tactical, and Outlaw is presumably either a port or an update of the old Atari game from back in 1976. Atari Casino is another old Atari title, but given how popular poker and other casino games have been on iOS, it's more likely that Atari is working on its own freemium gambling simulation rather than remaking the old classic. One thing you might not notice on this list is any of the Pong variants that won Atari's developers challenge earlier this year (for which I was a judge). Atari's reps have confirmed to us that those games are still under development, and not yet ready for a release announcement. But even without those Atari-published indie titles on the slate, this seems like a nice lineup for the company. We'll keep a lookout for the first two especially, and let you know when they drop.
Entire Apple design team receives award in London
Apple's design team was named the best design studio of the last 50 years by D&D, and, according to the London Evening Standard, the whole design team was on hand to accept the prestigious Design and Art Direction (D&D) award. In honor of the award, Apple flew the entire 16-member team from San Francisco to London for D&D's 50-year anniversary ceremony. This isn't Apple's first design award, but it is is the first time the entire design team was present to receive an award. Sir Jonathan Ive lead the team, which includes 14 men and two women, in accepting the award. D&D is a London charity that promotes "brilliance in commercial creativity" and celebrates "excellence within the creative industries and beyond." Its annual awards event is highly regarded among advertising and design professions.
Transmog your way to a roguish look
I used to play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons in college, back when v.3.5 was all the rage. At the time, a series of companion books was being released with titles like Complete Adventurer or Complete Divine; these books listed additional abilities and classes that players could use to expand upon the core classes in the original D&D rule books. Warlocks, for example, were added in Complete Arcane as a spin-off from the mage core class. Instead of using classic D&D mage spells like Magic Missile, they used invocations, which the book provided. What I liked most about these books is that they made you think outside the box about your class. A warrior wasn't just a guy with a sword and a lot of armor proficiency; he could be a swashbuckler of the high seas or a graceful, dancing dervish. Both classes were warriors, but they fought in distinctively different ways. So when it comes to WoW and transmogrification, I think a lot about the possible archetypes certain classes could have and try to explore those in different outfits. Leather wearers, for example, don't always have to look like members of the Defias Brotherhood or the audience at a Grateful Dead concert. They could also be mud-splattered bandits, solitary rangers from the Hinterlands, or sneaky Warsong scouts. Oddly enough, today's outfit might just work for all three.
Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale lands on PC
Atari has announced that Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale is now available for the PC. We didn't really like the hack-and-slash title, calling it "a terrible use of Wizards of the Coast's timeless license" (ouch), but hey, maybe you're a huge completist and absolutely must play through anything and everything having to do Forgotten Realms. If that's the case, you can pick up the game for $14.99 at a fine e-tailer near you.
Wisconsin town approves early plans for Gary Gygax memorial
Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons (and thus many of the mechanics modern role-playing video games are based on), passed away a few years ago, and the interest trying to build a memorial for him in his hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin has just cleared a hurdle with the local Board of Park Commissioners. The Board has granted a 10 foot by 10 foot area of land inside Donian Park as a potentially suitable place for a memorial to be set up. What would said memorial look like? The official minutes of the meeting approved a design that would include "a castle turret with a bust on top and possibly have a dragon wrapped around the turret." Sounds appropriate for the creator of D&D. The next step in the process is to officially design the statue, and then come back to the board with a detailed map and design. We assume the board will have to roll a d20 at some point -- hopefully the modifier is high.
Capcom's 'DD' teased with dragon hearts, stone walls
Earlier this week, Capcom opened a countdown site at capcom.co.jp/DD, which displays a timer that will elapse on April 12, and the outline of a dragon. Today, mysteriously, the dragon has a visible heart, which would seem to confirm a new game adaptation of a certain Sean Connery movie. Maybe not. In addition, readers have found hidden images in the source of the site, which ... don't really help us identify anything. They're landscape pictures of a grassy field with medieval ruins nearby. Siliconera has suggested the countdown is for "Dragon's Dogma" -- a trademark for which the site discovered back in August. As with all countdown sites, we know precisely when we'll get the full story ... one day before the countdown runs out, when Famitsu leaks reveal it.
Rumor: Atari close to announcing a Neverwinter Nights MMO
If you're getting a strong sense of deja vu at the title up above, we can't blame you -- after all, we've been covering this supposed MMO announcement for a couple years now. However, a pair of recent developments have led us to believe that Atari is on the verge of announcing the long-anticipated Neverwinter Nights MMO. The first piece of concrete news is a brief statement from the recent GenCon Indy, where Critical-Hits.com went to a D&D products seminar and heard the representatives state that Atari has an upcoming D&D video game. Unfortunately, they were unable to obtain any further information about it at the convention. Following up on this statement, Superannuation did a bit of digging and discovered that Atari recently purchased a slew of domain names, including visitneverwinter.com, playneverwinter.com and neverwintergame.com. Add these facts together with the promised announcement of Cryptic's new MMO this summer, and we could be hearing official confirmation of a Neverwinter Nights MMO any day now. Stay tuned!
The Daily Grind: How would you make a D&D MMO?
We've made it no secret here at the Massively offices that we love us some Dungeons & Dragons Online (especially with our regular Wednesday evening guild play), but we'd be naive to think that DDO is the last D&D MMO we'll ever see. Considering that the franchise has a long tradition of console titles, PC games and MMOs (dating back to 1991's Neverwinter Nights), we'd go as far as saying that another D&D MMO is probably closer than we'd expect. So if you could define the parameters of this theoretical new game, what would you choose? What studio would handle it? What D&D setting would you like to play in the most? What edition of the rules? How would you overcome the difficulties of transitioning the pen-and-paper game into a MMORPG? Would it follow DDO's highly instanced format, or be something else entirely? Cast your level one spell of Creative Thought, and let us know: how would you make a D&D MMO?
Cryptic to announce new MMO later this summer
With Star Trek Online and Champions Online chewing the scenery and igniting passions on both sides of the aisle, it's sometimes easy to forget that Cryptic Studios has a third project brewing in secrecy. Long rumored to be a D&D MMO -- perhaps even Neverwinter Nights -- the Cryptic folks have been, well, cryptic about the title. It looks like we may find out in a few months, however. In a recent MMORPG.com interview with Bill Roper, Cryptic's Chief Creative Officer cracked a small window into this upcoming announcement: "I can't speak to the specifics of what we're doing, but it's true that we have another game in the works. We won't be making an announcement until late summer, and we're still a ways off from launch. I can say that this is a game and a franchise we're very excited about. I think people are going to pleased and a bit surprised with what we're doing in terms of the game, how we make it, and even how we sell and support it. The game is being developed around new design principles merged with Cryptic's community-first approach to ongoing development."
Bring Dungeons and Dragons to your $15,000 game table
What happens when you marry board games and video games? The electrical pixel explosion of that chocolate into peanut butter hasn't been fully realized yet, so besides a handful of Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne and Hasbro Family Game Nights, there's not a heck of a lot going on. However, what happens when you force role-playing games and video games into a shotgun wedding? Pure magic for rich people. During GDC we took a look at a student project called SurfaceScapes that brings D&D to the Microsoft Surface. It's not just a simple "Ooooh, touch the screen to activate your character sheet!" port of the pen and paper game, but a touch-tastic experience that will blow your mind. Plot a miniature down on the Surface, and it recognizes your character. You can pull up radial menus for actions, spells, and attacks, see your line of sight, move your character, and run the entire game just using your power of touch.
First Impressions: Alganon
Today's First Impressions could use a little bit of external reading before you go too deeply into it. So I'm going to start by linking an article that's nearly seven years old but still excellent -- Fantasy Heartbreakers. Now that you've all clicked "Back" in some confusion or just avoided the link in the first place, some explanation. The article is the origin of a term that pen-and-paper RPG fans have come to use to describe a certain type of game referenced in the article. It's referring to the countless game companies who thought they could make a game that was better at being Dungeons and Dragons than, well, Dungeons and Dragons. Many of the games in question weren't bad games -- sometimes even good ones -- but they were built on the fundamental premise that they would be "like D&D but with X." Some of you probably see where this is going, or got it as soon as you saw the term. Because we're all very aware of how predominant World of Warcraft has become in the MMO marketplace, to the point where it's the essential standard that other MMOs are judged against. Alganon, then, could be seen as our genre's first fantasy heartbreaker. Because it's genuinely tough not to play the game and see that there's some really good stuff in here.
Breakfast Topic: Too powerful
I like Nibuca's little writeup recently from her blog asking what happens when we become just too powerful to care? Just like her, I've played a full, months-and-months, session of D&D before, and by the time your characters start to flirt with level 20 (the maximum level in that system), you're so powerful that the story barely makes sense any more -- you're crossing planes of existence, unweaving and re-weaving the fabric of reality, and taking down gods, more or less. Once you've vanquished evil from the earth four or five times, yet another threat doesn't bother you so much. And to a certain extent, that's exactly what's happening with World of Warcraft -- when the game first started, the devs casually threw out there that it would take 40 level 80s to take Arthas down, which was of course a guess based on what raiding was at the time. But nowadays, we're all level 80, you only need five people to go after Arthas, and very soon, even someone like Deathwing will seem conquerable. In the next expansion, we already know that we're going to transverse some planes of existence, and when you're a being that can do that, why bother fighting frost wyrms? Just escape their reality and/or will them out of yours.
Phat Loot Phriday: Blade of Tarasque
Been a while, I think, since we've done a dagger. Plus, this one will show off a little of my D&D lore knowledge, and I don't get to do that as much as I like. Name: Blade of Tarasque (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory) Type: Epic Main hand Dagger Damage/Speed: 108 - 343 / 1.80 (125.1 DPS) Attributes: +48 Stamina, +65 Intellect. Used to be that Stamina on a caster item meant warlock, but I think this is just an endgame item -- any caster who needs it could use it just fine. Plus, there's a blue gem socket on it, so you can put whatever you want in there, with a socket bonus of +5 spellpower. Just because it came up on the site earlier this week, I'll use this opportunity to remind you that any gem can go in any socket -- you just won't get the socket bonus. Yes, really. %Gallery-33600%
Surfacescapes puts Dungeons & Dragons on Surface, makes your d20 obsolete (video)
We've seen some fancy applications for Microsoft's Surface, the touchable, strokable, caressable computing device/big-ass table, but not a single one has made us twitter in nerdy glee like Surfacescapes. Created by a team at Carnegie Mellon University, it's an implementation of Dungeons & Dragons in 3D, something that has of course been done dozens and dozens of times before, but this is different. Way different. It brilliantly brings the tabletop style of play to Surface, with players moving real figurines over virtual battlefields, rolling virtual d20s and d6s to deal real damage against digital dire wolves and the like, opponents who can move and attack automatically. Sure, it takes some of the imagination out of the experience, but it'll also make re-rolling your character a heck of a lot easier -- not to mention eliminating the dungeonmaster's folder of magic, mystery, and crudely drawn maps.
Ghostcrawler on the Path of the Titans
Our good friend Ghostcrawler (I can say that now, because we all got to meet him at BlizzCon the other week) has done his best to explain the new Path of the Titans feature coming in the Cataclysm expansion over in this forum thread. We had this same question come up on last week's podcast as well, and we said pretty much the same thing GC does: Path of the Titans is a brand new way for max-level characters to keep improving themselves. Of course, the feature is still being developed, but the goal is a "gated, not grindy" way (as in, you'll earn rewards by doing things, not by doing them over and over again) to experience character progression outside of just reputation grinding, PvP, or raiding.He clarifies the idea more later in the thread as well. The different paths of the Titans are meant to be class-independent, but GC says that they do want players to debate which path is best for which class, even if they do end up with a "best" solution in the end. Archaeology is meant to be a part of it, so GC agrees that it could be more of a mandatory secondary profession than Cooking or Fishing has been in the past, but they're aware of that danger. And just because the paths may be tied to dailies or instances doesn't mean they'll work the same: the time in which you can progress might be longer than the daily quest limit or shorter than the weekly raid limit. The idea, as above, is to give players who don't necessarily raid or PvP something else to do with character progression at endgame.Should be interesting to see what they come up with. Personally, this sounds a little bit to me like D&D's prestige classes -- not nearly as powerful or varied, but a way of separating your character out from the rest of those that chose the same class you did. That's just me being hopeful, though -- Blizzard seems to have a lot of development before we see this as a finished product. World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.
Atari and Interplay settle D&D licensing drama
Although using an image of "Bum Fighting" would have been insensitive, that probably would have accurately portrayed the feeling of watching publishers Interplay and Atari fight over Dungeons & Dragons rights. Big Download reports the once great publishers have settled a D&D licensing dispute, with Atari agreeing to purchase all rights that Interplay had to the franchise and canceling a $1 million promissory note.Wonder what we could get the two companies to do for a block of cheese and a bottle of Listerine?
15 Minutes of Fame: WoW's new wave of new gamers
15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about at 15minutesoffame (at) wowinsider (dot) com.When I received a news tip from from Rainnajax of US Uldaman-H about being an "older female gamer," I admit that I rolled my eyes. Please, not another one who thinks having two X chromosomes makes her the most special snowflake ... Not another one who thinks being over 30 years old qualifies her as one of the Ancients ... When I read her entire email, though, I realized Rainnajax's experience was actually intriguing – but not for the reasons she thought.While Rainnajax may perceive herself as something still a little unusual among WoW players, I see her as the type of player who's becoming the new norm. She's less remarkable for being female or "older" – or even for belonging to a well known gay and bi-friendly guild -- than she is for being among the new wave of players who'd never imagined themselves playing a video game ... until they tried WoW. MMORPGs are no longer the province of a single type of player anymore. Rainnajax is here as an example of today's new-to-gaming, non-gender- or age-specific player.
Player vs. Everything: The quirks of D&D Online
From the first time I stepped into Turbine's Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach, I was amazed by how well it managed to capture the dungeon crawling feel of the franchise that I knew, loved, and grew up with. With its fast-paced, pulse-pounding, and thoroughly satisfying combat, clever use of hidden doors and traps, and resource management mini-game of health, spells, and abilities, D&D Online provides a unique gameplay experience that no other MMOG can provide right now. One only has to listen to the vehement and impassioned discussion of the hardcore fans, found in any pick-up dungeon group, to realize that Turbine has something special here---something that World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online, EverQuest and Age of Conan, or even EVE Online simply can't offer.However, is being unique and interesting enough to justify the price? On a recent Massively podcast, I mentioned that I've always felt like DDO wasn't worth the monthly fee, despite how much I love the game. The standard $15 per month pricing model is a one-size-fits-all label that looks a little too bulky on the city of Stormreach, for a number of reasons. Today I'm going to examine some of the reasons why a game which I find so interesting, exciting, and fun can't manage to crack my wallet open, and what I think Turbine could do to push the game a little further into the competitive territory of its gaming peers.
Know your roots have changed; 4E launches a new world
Even while creative maestro Metzen experiments with making World of Warcraft unique among its fantasy peers, there's not much denying that WoW has some pretty solid roots in, and respect for, Dungeons and Dragons. You can see proof of that in the patch notes from 2.4, which were dedicated to pen-and-paper legend, Gary Gygax. Many of us cruising Azeroth have some experience with good old D&D. WoW has pretty strong, deep roots in D&D, and those roots changed with the newly released 4th edition. What's new in the 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons? The class system is radically different, spells work differently, healing works differently, and fights work differently. Okay, it seems everything is pretty much different. But there's one big change that will probably make more than a few folks happy: no more Gnome PCs. Gnomes are now monsters, and not available for play in the core rules. A lot of the speculation about these changes is that D&D might be trying to distance itself a little from the World of Warcraft juggernaut. It's a good thing Blizzard isn't still following its roots. I'm looking forward to my Gnomish Death Knight in Wrath of the Lich King.
Roleplaying is a wave of the future
When you look at games like World of Warcraft versus games like Dungeons and Dragons, you can see that in some ways they are just the same, while in others they are vastly different. Thematically, they're both about romping through a fantasy world having adventures, and depending on the kind of activity you enjoy most in your games, the actual content of either one can be very similar. The difference lies in the user interface: WoW takes over your computers screen and presents you with intensive graphics, while D&D relies on paper, dice, and your imagination. While WoW is obviously a child of the early 21st century, all the practical tools used in D&D have existed for thousands of years. One might well wonder: "why didn't Plato (or any other suitably wise old figure out of history) ever think of putting together a dungeon adventure?" A recent Escapist magazine article asks that very question, and then provides us with a bunch of theories about what roleplaying is and why people do it. All these are interesting in themselves, but they leave me wondering "but wait... why didn't Plato ever think of it?" The answer I think the article is trying to give is that roleplaying is actually a form of social innovation that couldn't have existed before, because the culture and ideas to give it form hadn't developed until the '60s.So tonight when you get home and log into WoW, especially if you are logging in to roleplay your character, remember that you are participating in an activity that is on the growing edge of human civilization. Just as, all those hundreds of years ago, it was a great innovation for the Greek playwright Aeschylus to bring two actors onto the stage at once as opposed to letting one actor and a chorus carry the show -- in our own era, the way players get together today to collaboratively create worlds, characters and stories with one another is a new and exciting innovation that never existed before. Roleplaying itself is one of many brilliant and beautiful examples of how society and culture continue to evolve and progress well into the the future... and beyond.
