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The Morning After: Wednesday, May 17th 2017
Welcome to Wednesday. We're in peak developer conference season. Microsoft wrapped up last week, Apple is coming soon, and Google is, well, today! We'll be reporting live from the I/O keynote, which starts this afternoon. We also take a look at the origins of the sex robot.
Move It puts a smart mini gym in your room
Eons ago, I used to go to the gym several times a week, but nowadays I can give you hundreds of reasons for why I no longer do so. Meanwhile, my beer belly is slowly engulfing my belt, and that's never a good sign (I really should have joined the Engadget Fitness Challenge). This is pretty much the kind of scenario that Hong Kong's Eggplant Technologies is targeting with its Move It smart fitness apparatus, which has just launched on Indiegogo ahead of its August shipment. In a nutshell, this is a four-in-one compact gym kit that you can leave in one corner of your home, and it comes with a mobile app that not only coaches you, but also lets you meet and challenge other fellow Move It users around the world.
Storyboard: Skipping scenes
There are certain bits of roleplaying that I like to think of as mechanical. They're there, they're necessary, but they're not terribly interesting. They're like random battles in Bravely Default: kind of neat the first time, altogether forgettable all subsequent times, and never blessed with an abundance of fascinating stuff. You need to get through them, but you can't really look forward to them any more than you can look forward to the most routine-filled parts of your day. So the best bet is to say they happened without acting them out. Yes, I'm saying there are bits of roleplaying that are best acted out only in reference. And I'm not just talking about your characters' bathroom visits; I'm talking about things like dates and shared experiences. So when is it actually an advantage to roleplay by not actually roleplaying at all? How do you determine the scenes that you know happened and are important but aren't important enough for you to actually play them out?
Motorola Milestone skipping on music playback, perfect for Billy Joel's 'Movin' Out'
For a device with as much superphone street cred as the Milestone, you'd think a basic task like listening to music through the headphone jack would be a cakewalk. No problems, right? So straightforward, really, that it's not even worth testing thoroughly -- and therein lies the problem, it seems. Milestone owners on both sides of the pond are reporting en masse that music playback occasionally skips over the jack -- though stereo Bluetooth, ironically a more CPU-taxing operation, seems to be fine. For many owners, particularly those who don't carry a separate PMP, that can totally be a deal-breaker. It's said you can work around the issue by putting the phone into airplane mode, which effectively makes it a dedicated PMP anyhow -- not an optimal solution, right? Yeah, Moto, this seriously isn't shaping up to be your week, so let's just make sure you earn some brownie points with awesome customer service through this rough patch. [Thanks, Vlad G.]
Breakfast Topic: Skippable quests
Shellyw has a good question on the forums: what quests do you always skip? Blizzard is pretty good about the rewards system -- even if a quest is a pain to get through, they'll usually make the reward worth it. But there are quite a few quests in the game that just don't have anything you want, and just aren't worth the time putting into them.Green Hills of Stranglethorn is mentioned early on in the thread, and I couldn't agree more -- any of those collecting quests I usually just give up on, as it's usually easier to just sell the pages off inside that zone to someone who is actually doing the quest. I often skip a lot of group quests as well, especially while leveling. While the rewards for those are usually very good (and they're often the end of long chains, which means both XP and items that come from them are great), it's often tough to find a group, so they usually sit in my quest log until grey and then get abandoned.And occasionally, especially when I need space in my quest log for newer quests, I just plain skip anything that doesn't give an item that I need. If there's a choice of quest rewards, and none of them fit my class or spec, I'll just abandon the quest entirely to replace it with a quest that works better for me. What quests do you find skippable? How do you do triage on quests when your log fills up?
The pros and cons of instant leveling
Keen took an interesting look at a strange little MMO game mechanic last weekend: instant leveling. I first encountered this in Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot-- after you get one character to a certain level, the game would let you use the "/level" command to pop any character you created up to a higher level instantly.You might argue that we haven't seen that tactic lately, but we're going to see a big example of it next year-- when Blizzard releases Death Knights in the next WoW expansion, we've already been told that they'll start at a higher level. The official explanation for that is that they don't want Death Knights to ever be level 1 (they want them cool from the start), but considering that the expansion will also bring 10 more levels into the mix, it's a lot to ask players who've already reached level 80 to roll a new character and do it again.
Writers and blocks in the industry
With the lack of respect given to writers in the industry it's only a matter of time before collective frustration causes The Shining. Richard Dansky, writer of numerous games, most recently Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Rainbow Six: Black Arrow, held a roundtable on tips, techniques and concerns for writers in the industry.After convincing a developer to actually hire a writer, which is apparently an issue all on its own, much of the conversation revolved around cutscenes. Some saw it as a reward and others thought it took players out of the game. Currently most story progression in games is handled by cutscenes so debate over the proper way to handle a cutscene is key. Dansky points out that one thing he thinks is important in a cutscene is to not show anything that the player can't actually do with the avatar in the game. One of the most interesting concepts brought up in the discussion wasn't necessarily even a "writer issue." After some conversation about unskipable repeating cutscenes when a player consistently dies, Brett Tosti of Factor 5 said, "What if we saw a brief game cutscene that told us how they failed their mission, that might be helpful." Hmmmmmm, that might be helpful in a game like Gears or War or tactical games where you can't really get a sense of the big picture with all the fighting going on.
Microsoft patents DVR application to provide targeted advertising
While Microsoft isn't exactly the first name we'd guess to be associated with a new DVR tidbit, the firm has nonetheless filed a patent for "DVR-based targeted advertising." Apparently, Microsoft's idea is to eliminate the "dilemma" that DVR users purportedly face when watching shows a week or so after its original air date. Since many commercials (like weekend sales) are time sensitive, viewing last week's ads today isn't likely to do you any favors if the information is already outdated. Microsoft is hoping to come to the rescue by establishing an "advertisement data store," from which an "advertisement manager" detects when an ad is supposed to be shown and fills that spot with a current, up-to-date spot so you witness fresh plugs during old shows. Although the concept is at least somewhat sound, the folks at Redmond presumably don't spend much time surveying actual DVR owners, as they'd probably find that a good percentage of them utilize that fast forward button as much as possible, regardless of how "fresh" the ad they're cruising through actually is.[Via PVRWire]
Sony offers up interactive DVR advertisements
Since advertisers -- and broadcasting companies -- aren't exactly fond of folks cruising through those ads while watching a recorded show through their DVR, and can't seem to get legislation to make it illegal passed just yet, a few companies have resorted to clever tactics to get those spots viewed. KFC offered up a "secret message" that could only be seen if witnessed in slo-mo, and TiVo has been testing fast-forward-proof banner ads to get the idea across even when blasting through the commercial breaks. Now Sony is getting in the act, by teasing viewers with an interactive plug for its Bravia TVs that shows "alternate endings" tailored to both men and women. It should be noted that only viewers watching through a DVR / TiVo will have the, um, luxury, of being able to pick and choose which endings to see. Sony apparently hopes to draw more attention to that fresh new LCD lineup by making stagnant ads a bit more lively, but we think they should be focusing on ramping up production on those sure-to-be-sold-out-everywhere PlayStation 3s.[Via PVRWire]
