Things You Don't Care About

"I'm calling zombie bullshit on that!"

2008-12-18T01:44:53Z

Left4Dead, Valve's latest release, came out a few weeks ago, and while it's been on my list of things to get, I wasn't ready to pick it up yet, mostly because I was still messing with Fallout 3. However, the wonderful Deidei bought it for me off Steam a couple weeks ago for Christmas (thank you, Deidei!). I didn't get it installed until last week, since I didn't have the hard drive space for it. For the last few days I've been playing the hell out of it, and it is a heck of a lot of fun.

You've probably heard the basic premise of the game -- you are one of four survivors of the zombocalypse, and you need to fight through a series of levels in one of four scenarios, until finally you are rescued. Opposing you is a horde of more mundane zombies, as well as special types -- the Boomer, which can cause you to be mobbed by the normal zombies, the Smoker, which can lasso you with a ludicrously long tongue and pull you away from your friends, the Hunter, which pounces on you and tries to claw your intestines out, the monstrously huge Tank, and the Witch, which is completely harmless, until you wake her.

The game is made intentionally to evoke the feeling of a classic zombie movie, ala Night of the Living Dead, albeit with the more currently in vogue 28 Days Later-esque "fast zombies" (which, as we all know from The Zombie Survival Guide, are a complete Hollywood fabrication). They do this in a variety of ways -- each scenario's loading screen is a movie poster, listing the players "as" the character of the game (ie, "[RPGnet]BlackIsis as Zoey"), and during the game the characters exchange quips (like the one in the title of this article).

The best part, however, is how the game uses its mechanics, such as the "AI Director," which controls the zombies and the distribution of weapons, ammunition, and first aid items, as well as the various arenas that tend to host the main battles (especially in the showdowns right before your rescue) to force the players to work together cooperatively. The special undead are geared towards this -- the Hunter and Smoker especially, which immobilize one of the group and require someone else to rescue them. Unlike a lot of other FPSes, you're really forced to work together, or you won't succeed. Unlike, say, Day of Defeat, or even Team Fortress 2, your team cannot succeed with just one or two really good people.

While the AI Director does make every play through somewhat different, it isn't completely unpredictable -- Tanks, especially, tend to show up in the same general places, and there's a few places in every scenario where obstacles are set up that force you to alert the thronging masses of zombified humanity. While I am pretty happy with the experience so far, despite the fact that it tends to be fairly repetitive, it would be nice to see some new maps or a little more variation in the levels -- like Half-Life, there does tend to really only be one way to go through each level, so you'll get to know the maps pretty quickly. I'm really getting a little tired of the No Mercy scenario, for instance, which seems to be the default map everyone plays online.

Speaking of the online play, the game seems pretty good about adding players into a game in the middle, and dealing with people who drop out. This is extremely important in Left4Dead, where cooperation is key and being a man down can seriously screw over your team. While the bots that take over if a player drops out or goes idle are not as good as a real player, they aren't too bad. And when a character dies, they can rejoin the game within a short while (a couple minutes usually, not the 20 seconds of a TF2 game) by being rescued from a closet.

Versus mode I haven't played with as much; in this mode, two teams of up to four players switch off between being Survivors and Infected, and play through the stages of one of the scenarios, trying to do better at each one than the other team. The Infected players spawn as one of the special undead (with the exception of the Witch), and can decide where they appear in the level, as long as it is out of sight of the Survivors. They can also climb up a few things that the Survivors can't, like drainpipes and such, which gives them more avenues of attack. Actually, as Infected, it felt very much like Natural Selection, the old Aliens-esque Half-Life mod (albeit with far fewer players).

The game does fall a little short in some areas; while gunning down heaps of undead has a certain appeal, the fact that you blaze through scores of zombies in some places (especially the final showdowns) feels a little...lacking, in a way, especially since a common tactic in those types of fights is to hole up in a closet with two people crouching in front, constantly doing melee attacks, while the people behind blaze away and keep the special undead away, which tends to feel considerably less epic than what Valve is probably aiming for. I sort of wish the mechanics here worked a little differently, to encourage people not to hide in the tiniest space possible; part of the problem, I think, is that unlike the rest of the game, where you're trying to make progress forward, you're just holing up and waiting for ten or fifteen minutes.

The game is definitely a lot of fun; if Valve does as good a job as they've done with Team Fortress 2 lately of adding maps and new fiddly bits to the game, it can really rise to the level of a great game. As it is, I don't know if I agree with people trumpeting it as Game of the Year; it has some tough competition, and I think it's a little too early to know if it has the legs to stay fun for the long haul. However, I certainly recommend it, and I'm looking forward to playing it with people other than random strangers, since I know there's a couple other friends of mine who will be picking it up later.

Holy. Crap.

2008-12-11T15:48:56Z

Some people have way too much time on their hands.

Fallout 3, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Wasteland

2008-12-04T20:06:31Z

The first time I went to GenCon, back in 2003, I went to a presentation by a game designer from Interplay who talked about how to break into the game design industry and what he did; during the question and answer period, he was bombarded by questions about Van Buren, the not-so-secret codename for Fallout 3 in development at the time. He couldn't talk much about it (even though you could tell he sort of wanted to), but it was easy to see the enthusiasm in the room.

Not long after, Interplay abandoned development of Van Buren and sold the rights to Bethesda. For a lot of people, including me, this was followed by a sense of dread; Bethesda's games, to that point, had a reputation for being very wide open, but pretty shallow in many parts. Now they were taking over what was one of the most beloved franchises in computer RPGs, something with a reputation not only for having a huge world, but one with an incredible amount of depth. Trying to fill the late, lamented Black Isle's shoes would have been a tough job for anyone, but Bethesda's games had been very different -- first-person instead of isometric, focused on world-building instead of depth of writing.

Still, as the years wore on, things began to leak out that gave me some hope -- the first panoramas of the crumbling Capitol Building and the aircraft carrier that is Rivet City, the first trailers, Prepare For The Future, and other bits that made me think "hey...these guys might just get it." I allowed myself to be cautiously optimistic. I wanted to see what they finally made.

The game came out shortly before I left for Iceland, and so I had to sit through my brother and friends talking about it on IRC while I was busy elsewhere. Knowing that the game was sitting on my kitchen table did not help relieve the anticipation. When I finally got home, I didn't waste any time installing the game and jumping into it. And for the last two weeks, I have poured dozens of hours into the game. In short, the game is nearly everything I had hoped it would be. It is not perfect, and the ending falls incredibly flat, but up until that last minute or two, the game fires on all cylinders and it is just that good. I'm going to take a look at the nonspoiler pros and cons here; I will put spoilers for the plotline behind the cut, so if you want to be surprised by some of the story's twists and turns, just read this front part.

What stands out as good?

Character creation. Character creation is done in a way that is a bit like an evolved version of the questionaire you fill out in Jagged Alliance 2 -- in other words, it's integrated into the actual tutorial and gameplay. You start out designing how you look, as a "DNA projection," and then move on through time to being an infant, where you pick your attributes, then you have your 10th birthday party where you get your Pip-Boy, then your 16th birthday, where you take a very JA2-like test to determine your tag skills. During each of these stages, you also interact with the other inhabitants of Vault 101, and the way in which you do so can impact events much further into the game. Then the game fast forwards to when you are 19, and the game really begins. However, just before you leave the Vault, you have the option to go back and change everything but your appearance, just in case you changed your mind about something. The game also autosaves at this point, so if you want to start over, you don't have to go through the entire character creation process (unless you want handle some of the stuff in Vault 101 differently).
The art direction. Fallout 3 feels like a Fallout game. The Capital Wasteland feels like a barren wasteland. Yes, it's mostly brown and dirty colors, but that's how Fallout has been from the start. Irradiated craters are scattered about the wastes, and crumbling buildings (including a battered Washington Monument) are everywhere, many with the retrofuturistic art deco style that is a hallmark of the Fallout franchise. The ads you run into in the game, for everything from Nuka-Cola, to Vault-Tec, to Captain Cosmos serials, evoke that style perfectly as well. And Washington DC locations, while they might not be placed quite right (the world is somewhat compressed), for the most part look like their real-life analogues, down to the ceiling tiles in the Metro stations. It's not really a surprise, I suppose, when you remember that Bethesda is based, well, in Bethesda, so most of these locations aren't more than 20-30 miles away from their offices -- but it is still good to see.
The music and sound design. The ambient music for the game is very similar to the music used in the earlier Fallout games (a bit less guitar than in Fallout 2, though), and the noises for the monsters and other inhabitants of the wastes are good as well (the ant noise is particularly memorable, for some reason), when you can hear them (a bit more on that later). The in-game radio stations, including the two "big" stations, Enclave Radio and Galaxy News Radio, and the various other beacons and minor stations, are well-done and era-appropriate (GNR, for instance, includes a variety of 40s and 50s tunes, such as The Ink Spots). The only complaint I can register about them is that they do get a bit repetitive after a while -- even the "news" that GNR talks about, which gives you feedback on how your reputation is going and plot hooks, repeats a bit much after you've been playing the game for hours and hours (but it hardly seems fair to criticize them for not providing dozens of hours of radio content).
World-building. Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland feels like a living, breathing world. It's not just the art and sound design, but the open form of the game world that makes this a strength. In the previous Fallout games, the world was subdivided into zones; you traveled between them using a separate interface, and if you ran into something along the way, it was basically a random chance and spawned a special randomly-selected "zone" that was basically there for a one-time event (with a few exceptions, where the event would remain there in the game world). In Fallout 3, the whole game world is continuous, so there's much less of a feeling that everything is on hold until you arrived there. People come and go during the day and night, and you can watch them through their daily routine. Trade caravans move between towns on routes that you can wait on and have them run into you (or follow, if you'd like). People have their own (albeit short and generally shallow) conversations that you can overhear when you're near. When you run across a super mutant fighting a radscorpion, it doesn't feel like a randomly generated encounter -- it feels like you happened to run into two independent entities that also chanced into each other. There are tons of little scenes that tell a story, even though it's just a collection of objects. A wrecked Nuka-Cola truck, overturned outside a town. A long-abandoned relief camp outside a decrepit police station. A bathtub with a skeleton and a toaster. Each one tells you something about what once happened, even if there's no written record (and when you do find written records, it's often heartbreaking to read). They all feel unique, for the most part -- it doesn't feel like someone said "okay, we have to put something here -- let's spin the wheel and throw down a random shack." It's very well done, and gives you tons of stuff to explore that has absolutely nothing to do with the main storyline.
VATS. When I found out Fallout 3 was going to be first-person, I was very apprehensive. My previous foray into first-person RPGs (Deus Ex) succeeded in frustrating me immensely because it felt like the RPG skills element was making me much worse at the shooter elements than I was used to. Fallout 3 strikes a much better balance; in non-VATS mode, I don't feel completely ineffective, and my FPS skills seem to translate fairly well, while in VATS mode, my characters skills are an advantage, rather than a detriment. I never felt like I'd be better off not using VATS. The things it lets you do -- snipe, destroy weapons, cripple limbs -- are very cool to watch yourself pull off (blowing the grenade up in someone's hand is especially fun). It's a perfect way to integrate the original Fallout aimed shot system into shooter-style combat.
Set pieces. There are a few action sequences (not cinematics) that I really liked. I'll give more info in the spoiler section of the review, but there are two sequences (probably largely scripted, I'm sure) where you really feel like you're in an epic action movie.
Kitbashed items. The weapons that you can build in the game, like the Rock-It Launcher and Railway Rifle, are pretty cool contraptions that are a lot of fun to make and use. Assembling them out of the junk you find on the road seems very fitting for a post-apocalyptic game where people are just scraping by, and I hope that in the upcoming downloadable content they add more things you can build to the game.

Where does the game fall short?

Well, by far the most disappointing part is the ending -- even more than the ending of KotOR2, it feels like it was tacked on and railroady in the extreme. It's only the last two minutes of the game at most, and the sequence up until that point is hilariously awesome -- but the end of the game makes it very hard to really feel happy with how things turned out. You also don't get the ability, as in previous Fallout games, to keep playing and further explore the world, and the hallmark of the Fallout ending sequence, Ron Perlman's voiceovers telling you what happened in the various locales of the game, is only there in a vague and somewhat unsatisfying form. However, the fact that there is downloadable content being released which apparently continues the story makes me wonder if that is going to be changed. We'll see, I guess. The ending also comes up very quickly; I finished the game without really realizing I was that close. Vault 87 marks the beginning of the end, and you don't get much of a chance to deviate from the main plot after that point.
The game seems to need some work in balancing the pace of advancement. The level cap is easily attainable well before getting close to the end, assuming you do even the smallest bit of exploring. It seems like it would have been better to adjust this so that you don't hit the level cap unless you do more exploring; that would encourage people to have a look around the world a little more, instead of going headlong down the main quest and missing most of the rich world that they've developed, like some people seem to have done (and then complained about how short the game is).
If you're playing a good karma character, it's rather difficult to get a companion until quite late in the game. There's one character you can get towards the middle (at a hefty price), but after that there's no way to get one until the last third of the game. This is in contrast to evil characters, who can pick up an ally in the very first town you visit. It'd be nice if there was a bit more parity -- after all, in the first two games it was fairly easy to pick up a friend early on, and it's very nice to have one watching your back, though at times they can run off to engage an enemy upstairs or somewhere "close" but not easily accessible. This can result in them being trapped and killed while you hunt frantically for them.
I'm not sure I liked the escalation of equipment in the game. In Fallout 1 and 2, you had to suffer with your 10mm pistol or a double-barrelled shotgun for a while in the game, and getting better armor took even longer. In Fallout 3, I managed to get a hunting rifle or an assault rifle pretty early on, and didn't have to wait too long to upgrade to combat armor either (thanks to the mercenaries coming after me). It almost seemed a bit too easy, and once you are running into super mutants you rarely have trouble keeping your weapons in good shape. Ammunition can be tight -- assuming you don't do much exploring. Once you find a couple bandit camps or hidden stashes, you won't have too much trouble finding ammo for small guns (assuming you have a couple different kinds on hand, just in case). I would have liked to feel like I was in trouble a bit more, stuck with pistols and sawed-off shotguns instead of assault rifles and combat shotguns.
Some of the quests can get a little bugged if you do them out of sequence; for instance, early on you are told about Rivet City, which is in the downtown DC area. However, if you go there before completing part of the main quest in the middle, you end up breaking one of the set-pieces, forcing you to fight a super-mutant horde all by yourself, among other things! You can also pick up some quest items before actually getting said quest, and then get dialogue options to ask characters about the quest even before you know to ask them about it, which is a little weird. These are a relatively minor issue, but can be annoying; my advice would be to not delve into downtown DC until the main quest actually sends you somewhere in there, since that is where most of the problematic quests come up. There's plenty to explore outside the city anyway. The worst part about this problem is that you can end up missing out on a ton of good content without even knowing! I suspect for some people who've played the game and thought it was too short or unfulfilling, this may be their problem.
Some of the extra dialogue options you get from having high attributes or skills don't seem to make much sense, and while it's nice that you're rewarded for having a high Speech skill in many places, the fact that you can bypass entire parts of the game simply from making a Speech check or having certain perks is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you can progress along the quest faster -- on the other hand, you're missing out on some pretty fun game content that way. This could use a little work later -- Speech checks should give you an advantage, or a new way to finish the quest (a la the final showdown with The Master in Fallout 1), but I don't know how I feel about it basically cutting out an hour of the game.
Your situational awareness at times is not the best. While your Perception stat determines how far away enemies (and locations) will pop up on your radar, if they aren't in front of you, you won't see them. Some of creatures don't seem to make any noise until they are right on top of you (notably Yao-Guai, Giant Radscorpions, and Deathclaws, some of the most dangerous creatures in the game). This means that you can be charged from behind and not know it until you're getting battered across the ground by giant paws. At times, I ended up sneaking everywhere, because at least then you get a "[CAUTION]" or "[DANGER]" warning when someone is shooting or coming after you, even if you can't see them. It'd be nice if you could hear the 700 pound mutant bear running through the grass behind you. This is one of the reasons I liked having a companion, because Dogmeat will growl or your other friends will say they hear something when there's hostiles near, giving you a chance to look around.

There's some continuity issues with the rest of the Fallout series too, but I was so absorbed into the game I didn't really care that much. It does, as someone on RPGnet pointed out, feel like the Great War was much less than 200 years ago; on the other hand, I liked Fallout's setting much more than Fallout 2's setting, largely because it was much more bleak -- for that reason, Fallout 3's tone sits right with me even if it might not be completely in line with what you might expect after 200 years.

For all its flaws, Fallout 3 is probably one of the best games I have played this year -- it is an impressive feat of world-building and its plot, while it may not be the best ever, is strong enough to carry the weight of the expectations that have been placed on this title. You will feel like you have been dropped in a post-apocalyptic wasteland when you play and leave the real world behind -- it's one of those titles where you will look up at the clock and wonder where the time went. And really, that is all you can ask for from a game like this. Just do yourself a favor and don't rush through the main plot; take your time and explore, as the game is meant to be played; once you enter Vault 87, you sort of hit the point of no return -- so keep that in mind.

My spoiler-inclusive review of the plot is behind the cut, so if you want to know more about that, keep reading.
]]> SPOILERS BEGIN HERE

Fallout 3's plot revolves around your father and his work before you were born; this is ultimately what makes him leave the Vault and in turn what drives you to follow after him. Project Purity, in a bit of a nod to the original Fallout, is a plan to clean the entire Tidal Basin, giving people fresh clean water instead of the irradiated sludge that now makes up the Potomac. The plot of the game follows the second attempt at making this work; it is a suitably epic plot for Fallout, where saving the West Coast from super mutants and the genocidal plans of the Enclave have been the goals of the previous two releases.

Speaking of the Enclave, they are back, and in fine form. One of the first signals you pick up on your Pip-Boy is the Enclave propaganda station, where the soothing voice of John Henry Eden, President of the Enclave (President of America....president of your heart) tells you about how great everything will be when the Enclave rules the world. Their eyebots can be spotted in various places in the wasteland from the beginning of the game, getting more prevalent as the plot goes on. Malcolm McDowell, who provides the voice, does a great job giving the character folksy charm, and I couldn't help but find the president to be disturbingly friendly (knowing what I know about the Enclave).

The next stop on the main quest is Galaxy News Radio, where your father went after Megaton; it's not particularly clear why, since what he needs is in Rivet City, but this does give you the first real set piece of the game, and it was incredibly fun for me. When you arrive at the Metro station nearest the radio station, you run into a group of super mutants fighting a detachment of Brotherhood of Steel soldiers; after they "save you," they tell you that they are trying to get the GNR as well, where the super mutants are laying siege to the Brotherhood's outpost there, and offer to let you tag along if you want. What follows is a running gun battle through the ruins of DC, culminating in a showdown between the Brotherhood and a giant super mutant behemoth. Watching the Brotherhood soldiers move and cover each other as you make your way to GNR Plaza, and helping to take out the behemoth with a Fat Man man-portable tacnuke launcher is great fun, and really draws you in, especially with the radio chatter between the Brotherhood soldiers. I'm sure that most of the sequence was scripted, but it didn't really feel like it.

After GNR, you go to Rivet City, which is a city built on/in a moored aircraft carrier, which leads you to the defunct Project Purity base in the Jefferson Memorial, and then points you to Vault 112. Vault 112 is totally different from the rest of the Vaults in the game (or in any of the previous games), in that the people there are in cryostasis and trapped in a Matrix-like simulation controlled by the former Overseer, a sadistic Vault-Tec scientist. Dr. Braun has turned the simulation into a creepy testbed for playing psychological games with the Vault residents. Your father is also trapped in the simulation, having come here to try and get information about the GECK he needs to finish Project Purity. In order to free him, you have to go in as well, putting you in a strange, 1950s black and white world run by Betty, a little girl that is Braun's avatar in the simulation.

In this world, Braun tries to get you to do various things of escalating horror; make a boy cry, break up a marriage, kill someone, all the way up to terrorizing the entire neighborhood. You can either go along with Braun's sadistic games, or try to find another way out -- an option that is possible, but not obvious at the outset (and is therefore pretty rewarding to find). If you can find it, you can destroy the simulation (killing everyone but you, your dad, and Braun) and free yourself. After this, your dad runs back to Rivet City and then Project Purity, where you try to start it up again, only to be interrupted when the Enclave comes to take control of the facility. Your father's death scene is railroaded but poignant, and then results in a desperate escape through sewer tunnels. The only problem I had with this sequence was that evidently your father is killed by the radiation in the chamber, but the Enclave officer, (not wearing powered armor) is just fine, showing up later as an antagonist.

The Citadel, home to the Brotherhood of Steel (and formerly known as the Pentagon), is another beautifully rendered location. A mix of crumbling concrete and newly-installed wood and metal fortifications, it really gives you the feel of a majestic building turned into a fortress, and really fits the Brotherhood. When you can finally get into the building, after Project Purity is attacked by the Enclave, it has a much different feeling from previous Brotherhood strongholds like Lost Hills. Much less shiny and clean, much more commandeered military headquarters in the battle zone. It gives the Brotherhood here a very different theme from their West Coast cousins, which, considering the fact that these Brotherhood soldiers have taken on a new mission, protecting DC from the mutant threat instead of preserving technology, is really appropriate. The centerpiece of the Citadel is Liberty Prime, a giant combat robot developed during the Great War to fight the Chinese, now being restored by the Brotherhood; it plays a critical part in the jaw-dropping lead up to the end of the game, when it goes on a rampage, spouting jingoistic war cries ("Death is a preferable alternative to communism!"), firing lasers and launching tacnukes as it clears the path to Project Purity. It is an amazingly fun action sequence to play through, with Enclave soldiers and Vertibirds challenging Liberty Prime and your Brotherhood compatriots as you make your way across the Potomac and down to the Jefferson Memorial (it also answered the question of "can you shoot down Vertibirds?" for me; the answer is yes).

It's after this really fun sequence that the endgame starts to break down. After fighting your way into the Jefferson Memorial, you get to the end of the game, you are presented with a dilemma. The fighting has caused so much damage that someone needs to go in and activate Project Purity, or the power systems will overload and destroy the whole thing. The problem is that doing so will irradiate the control room and kill whoever puts in the code. You're given the choice of sending in one of the Brotherhood troops that has come with you, or going yourself. Make the noble sacrifice, you die, but your legend lives on as the person that sacrifices themself for their father's dream. Send the Brotherhood Paladin, and you are lambasted as a coward, regardless of what you'd done beforehand.

The problem is, there's the distinct possibility that you have one of two allies, a friendly super mutant or a ghoul, who are completely impervious to radiation. If you ask them to take care of it for you, they say that they can't -- it's your destiny. It is a huge cop out, and seems pretty ingrateful from someone who you saved from spending the rest of their long lives in slavery or locked in a cell. "Gee, I saved your life, but you can't go in and punch in a couple numbers to save the entire wasteland and keep me from dying, even though it wouldn't really inconvenience you in the least." It's really the most frustrating and horrible part of the game, and doesn't make any sense -- why end the game like that, especially when the "good" ending kills you off and ends any possibility of you exploring the game afterward (not to mention seemingly putting the kibosh on extra content for after the game, though that is apparently happening anyway)? While I think the rest of the game Bethesda did a pretty good job with, this is the one place where it falls on its face and really doesn't stand up to the Fallout legacy (even the rather mediocre Fallout 2 ending was less railroady than this). I hope that this is fixed later, either by Bethesda or by someone else with the SDK.

The other problem with the end of the game is that it basically starts when you go to Vault 87; when you finish Vault 87, you get hijacked by a cinematic where you're captured by the Enclave, with no way to stop them. This is another kind of cop-out, but I can forgive it -- it doesn't end the game for you, it just moves you on to a new part (it's very similar to the part of Halflife where you are captured by soldiers and dropped into a dumpster). Then you get thrown into a sequence where you fight through the Enclave's headquarters at Raven Rock, eventually coming face to face with President John Henry Eden himself. This is really where you get the confrontation that is like the meeting between you and the Master in Fallout; there's fewer real options, but you do get a fairly interesting conversation with several possible outcomes. Once you leave Raven Rock though, you are basically shepherded toward the endgame; while you can go wander around the wasteland again, the situation seems more urgent and your options for companions are very limited. This would not be nearly as big a deal if the ending were not as final as it is, but since this basically ends anymore exploration or gameplay, it's really frustrating to be railroaded towards the ending like this with no real warning that this is happening.

I could go on for quite a while about all the other smaller parts of the game you can find -- the brawl at the Capitol, the crater of the White House, the caged behemoth of Evergreen Mills, the Slavers and abolitionists of the Lincoln Memorial and Temple of the Union -- but I'd be writing for days more, and there's no reason to spoil the whole game to highlight its good and bad points. For as annoying as the flaws in the game are, it is still an amazing piece of work, and I highly recommend picking it up. I'm looking forward to seeing what people can do with the SDK and what Bethesda is going to include in their upcoming downloadable content.

Boston in Pictures

2008-12-02T04:32:39Z

So here's the second part of my trip from earlier this month, the week Marc and I spent in Boston. There's probably not going to be as much text in this one, but there should be a fair number more pictures than the Iceland entry. Unlike my trip to Reykjavik, this was really a tourist thing only; I've been to Boston before, but Marc hadn't, so we spent a lot of time seeing things in the city as opposed to me spending all my time in Iceland at the convention.

I'll start off with this view of the Boston skyline from one of the sightseeing ferries, to contrast with the Reykjavik skyline; everything else I'll stick behind the cut so I don't clutter the front page.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about other stuff I want to write about either. Look for a Fallout 3 review later this week.

]]> Charlestown Navy Yard, and visited the Museum of Science. So to start off, here's a photo of the Bunker Hill Bridge, the world's widest cable-stayed bridge and part of the Big Dig.

We hopped off the ferry at Charlestown Navy Yard, home of the USS Constitution and its museum as well as the USS Cassin Young, a World War II-era destroyer. Unfortunately, pictures are not allowed in the museum, and the Constitution itself was undergoing some repairs and winterization when we went on it. I did good a good shot of the ship's bell though, and shot of the ship from the dock:

Here's two shots of the navy yard's drydock, which is pretty neat:

I did get a number of good shots of the Cassin Young, however. Here's a selection of exterior shots, followed by one of their huge mixer on board, which I thought my mom and dad might find interesting.

From the navy yard, there's also a good view of the Bunker Hill Monument (where the Bunker Hill Bridge gets its name from -- notice the shape at the top of the bridge's supports), commemorating that Revolutionary War battle; as you leave the navy yard, there is also a plaque showing where British troops disembarked before the battle.

After that, we went to the Museum of Science; it was a bit of walk, but it wasn't bad -- that's one of the things I like about Boston. It's possible to get almost anywhere within the city very easily using the T or just walking; it's a much more concentrated city than Chicago, or at least seems like it. Most of what you want to see is within a few miles of the city center. I didn't take many pictures at the Museum of Science; I did get one of the Charles River through the massive window at the center (the Museum itself straddles the river). At the bottom of the picture, you can see the top of Archimedean Excogitation, a large kinetic sculpture that takes up much of that area.

That was pretty much it for Tuesday. Now, I'm trying to remember what we did when, and I think Wednesday is when we walked the Freedom Trail, but I might be mistaken. :) I know we squeezed in the trolley tour sometime too, which may have also been on Wednesday -- if Marc is reading this, maybe he remembers better. Next time I go somewhere I think I'll take notes (or blog about the day's events on that day!).

Anyway, assuming I'm correct, we went on a guided Freedom Trail tour for the first mile and a half or so, which was pretty neat. It left from Boston Common, so we took advantage of the time there to take a few pictures; here's the Brewer Fountain in the park:

The first stop on the trail after Boston Common was the Massachusetts State House, which was completed in 1798. It's really magnificent looking building sitting at the top of Beacon Hill, and it's pretty amazing to think that it has served as the center of Massachusetts government for over two hundred years now. Boston is one of the few places in the US with that kind of history (at least, in terms of continuous history -- having been to Cahokia Mounds, that is pretty damn impressive too, but not quite the same).

The next stop after the State House (or at least the first where I took pictures) was the Old Granary Burial Ground, where John Hancock, among others, is buried. This is right next to the Park Street Church, which you can see in the upper right of the last picture. This picture gets a good shot of some guy's bald spot, but you can see our period-dressed tour guide in the middle there, who did a really good job of showing us around and making it really entertaining at the same time. I definitely recommend taking one of these if you get the chance when you're visiting Boston.

Further on (and yes, I know I missed a few places in there -- sorry!) is the Old City Hall, which I believe was in use until the 1960s. It's now a steakhouse (which is a little weird), and the new city hall is much larger and....much different. I've put a picture of the new one right after this one (even though the new city hall is at the end of the guided tour, near Faneuil Hall).

As you can see, the new one is a little....less classical. :) After Old City Hall, we get to the Old State House, which is the oldest building still standing in Boston. Built in 1713, it housed the colonial government and then the state government until the current State House was finished. It was also the location of the Boston Massacre, and the first reading of the Declaration of Independence in Massachusetts (something which is done every 4th of July from the balcony in commemoration).

The guided part of the tour comes to an end not long after that, at Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. This is a very neat little marketplace in Boston -- I'm sure it's full of tourist traps, but there's a ton of little shops and food places there, and it's a lot of fun just to walk through. I'm sure it's packed during the warmer months.

I know that's not the best shot of Faneuil Hall, but it should give you some idea of how big the pedestrian marketplace there is. From there, though, we had to go on our own, so we walked towards the North End, which is Boston's Little Italy and also the home to Paul Revere's house, the Old North Church, and other sights. Paul Revere's house was first; unfortunately, there's no pictures allowed inside, but I did get a few of the exterior.

Here's a shot of the small square nearby to give you some idea of how narrow the streets tend to be in the older parts of Boston; you can see this even better in the Beacon Hill pictures I have a bit later.

Following on from Paul Revere's house, we walked towards Old North Church. On the way, I got this shot of the steeple of St. Stephen's, a Catholic church designed by the same architect that did the State House and the parish of Rose Kennedy:

Across from St. Stephen's is a courtyard with a statue of Paul Revere where North End veterans of every war since the Revolutionary War are commemorated. This runs from St. Stephen's to the Old North Church, which you can see in the background of this next photo.

Finally, we get to Old North Church, where the "one if by land, two if by sea" lanterns were hung. I got one shot of the outside, and then one interior shot; you'll also see it again in the pictures I have later from further down the trail.

Just past Old North Church is Copp's Hill Burial Ground, which is where we ended our walk along the Freedom Trail; further down is Charlestown and Bunker Hill, where we had gone on Tuesday. Copp's Hill was also a site where the British set up guns to watch the harbor, and as a result many of the gravestones there have dents and holes from musketballs.

Wednesday night we had dinner with benoc and his wife at Cambridge 1, a tasty pizza place just a couple blocks from Fenway, and Thursday we took it pretty easy. I'm pretty sure that's the day we went on the Duck Tour (which, no, I didn't take any pictures on, yes, I know that was silly), but we didn't do a whole lot else. Frankly, I was fine with that because I was getting a little worn out after two days of running around Boston (which was following on from some very late nights at FanFest the week prior)! Friday, however, we spent most of the day just walking around Boston having a look at all the things Marc wanted to see before we left that we hadn't seen yet. So, the next bunch of pictures are not linked in any special way, just happen to be the way we went through the city.

We started off at the Boston Public Garden, which is right next to Boston Common and just a couple blocks from our hotel. While I'm sure it looks much nicer in the spring and summer, it was still a great place to walk through. I didn't take too many pictures there, but here's a couple.

Here's the statue of George Washington that sits at one end of the Public Garden:

As you can see, it was pretty foggy that morning, but we still got a few pictures of the city from Boston Common as well; here's my best one, of the John Hancock Tower, the tallest building in New England:

We then went on to Beacon Hill, which is one of my favorite neighborhoods in Boston. It is an absurdly expensive neighborhood, where almost all the buildings are historical sites, and as a result there are a variety of rules to maintain the look of the neighborhood like something out of the 1800s. They still use gaslights to light the streets, and all the signage in the area is appropriate to that period -- and most of the streets there are tiny, like those in the North End I showed you earlier. It's very cool, and one of my favorite places in terms of atmosphere anywhere I've been (Pioneer Square in Seattle is pretty close though). The neighborhood begins at Beacon Street, just north of the Common; that's the street where the Massachusetts State House is at, and also where you can find the Bull and Finch Pub, which is the exterior used for Cheers (and boy do they milk that for every cent!):

Here's a shot of Beacon Street, looking up towards the State House:

Here are a couple of shots of Beacon Hill streets, with two shots showing the period signage.

After a while we made our way to Copley Square. This is where the Boston Public Library is, where the Boston Marathon ends, and where Trinity Church and Old South Church are; the John Hancock Tower is just across the street as well. It's a pretty impressive place, and there was a well-stocked farmer's market there as well that Friday. Here's Boston Public Library:

In the bottom right of that picture, you can see the hare from the tortoise and hare statues that mark the end of the Boston Marathon; here's a picture of them together:

Behind me in those pictures is Trinity Church, which is very impressive. Across the street from it is the John Hancock Tower, which reflects the church perfectly.

After that, we headed out to Cambridge, where we stopped by Harvard and MIT; here's a couple shots of Harvard Yard. If you have seen this and the U of I's Quad, you can definitely see some similarities.

Here's some pictures of the Stata Center on MIT's campus, some of the most bizarre-looking architecture I've ever seen (at least in person):

From there, we walked back to Boston from Cambridge, over the Charles River, over the Longfellow Bridge. I took two pictures; one of the Boston skyline from there and one of the "salt and pepper shakers" that crown the bridge:

From there, we made our way back towards Quincy Market, because we were going to have dinner at the Union Oyster House. On the way we saw the Liberty Hotel, a luxury hotel which used to be the county jail.

And just across from the restaurant is the Boston Holocaust Memorial; each of the six glass towers stands for one of the six major concentration camps, and on each one are a million marks, representing the six million Jews killed.

(Now that I look at that, I'm pretty sure I took it on a different day. But whatever.... :))

Anyway, that is all the pictures I had of Boston; Saturday we flew home, and I got back home on Sunday for the first time in over two weeks. Quite the experience!

FanFest in Review and Reykjavik in Pictures

2008-11-25T19:09:00Z

All right, I know this is long overdue and I apologize; Fallout 3 has been devouring my free time this week, I have to admit (I'll post a full review later, after I have played through the game entirely, but the short version is that it's very good -- the Zero Punctuation review sums it up pretty well). This is going to be a big article, and I'm going to put most of it behind the cut, but I think I'll start with this picture to whet your appetites. You can see the full size version in the photos panel to the right -- sorry this is a little clumsy, I'm still working out sticking stuff like this into MoveableType, so I'll try to go back and fix these later.

These are the mountains rising up over the sports complex where FanFest was held, with a gorgeous cover of clouds hovering over them. This was a pretty breathtaking view, and I took this picture at around 1000 on Friday, so you can tell how long it takes for the sun to actually rise in Iceland during the waning months of the fall.

Okay, real coverage of my trip is behind the cut, so let's get started....

]]> Nordica site with this picture of my room:

However, after being up for about 24 hours by the time I had my room I was pretty happy to get anything, and I ended up not spending much time there anyway. It was a very nice room, despite the size, and the view was really good, giving me a good sightline to downtown, the harbor, and the mountains beyond:

The view from where the elevators were was even better:

You'll notice a little key there; here's a larger view of it, so you can actually read what it is pointing to:

Anyway, so obviously you're not looking for the view from my hotel room, so I'll skip to Wednesday, when a few other FanFest attendees and I decided to go out and see Reykjavik; thankfully we had a couple people who had been there before and one person who had done an admirable job learning what there actually was, so we could actually know what we were looking at, which is always nice. There was a shuttle that took us to downtown, but we ended up walking back; it's not very far at all from downtown to the Nordica, maybe a 15-20 minute walk at most. I'll start off with a set of three pictures from the Arnarholl, which is a hill near the harbor where you get a pretty good view of the city and harbor. Looking from right to left (roughly north to west):

And here's the statue that crowns the top of the hill, of Ingolfur Arnarson, first Viking settler on Iceland:

That gives you some of the feel of Reykjavik; it's very much a small, older-style European town surrounded by modern buildings, which are growing up like crazy. You can see a lot of construction cranes in the skyline, though there aren't too many in the pictures above; most of the new buildings are going up a bit further away from the center of town. Anyway, we spent a good 4-5 hours walking through the center of Reykjavik and having lunch. Here's some of what we saw; sorry mom, I know there's probably not as many pictures as you'd like, but I still wasn't used to taking pictures of everything. I promise next time I go to get more. :)

One of the centerpieces of Reykjavik is the Hallgrimskirkja, a huge Lutheran church that is still the tallest building in Iceland. It is undergoing renovations right now and we didn't get to it with particularly good light, so these pictures aren't the best. Still, I think you can tell under all that scaffolding just how big it really is.

Once again, I find myself really awed by buildings like this, even though I'm not religious at all, really. The mere fact that something like this can be built by people motivated like that is astounding (in a good way). From the pictures I've seen of the building when it's not covered by tons of scaffolding, I certainly missed something pretty spectacular. I'm hoping I get to go back next year, so that I can take a look inside and see the change on the outside.

In front of the church, you can see a pretty impressive-looking statue; this is a statue of Leif Ericson, which was given to Iceland by the United States in 1930, which was the one thousandth anniversary of the Althing's founding. That was pretty mindblowing to realize. Of course, I was aware that Iceland has one of the oldest democratic governments in the world, and I probably could have guessed that it was about that old, but there's a big difference between knowing that intellectually and standing there, in a country where the people who live there have lived there for thousands of years -- most of us here in North America can't share that kind of history.

Back down, closer to Arnarsholl (actually, you can see it in the last of the three pictures taken from the hill there) is the Old National Library which is now the National Cultural House. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to go inside (next year, for sure!) but here's the picture I took from across the street:

On our way to lunch, we found this curiously named street, which many CRPG players may find somewhat familiar...

The street we were walking up at the time is the main street through Iceland's downtown shopping, restaurant, and club district, though most of that is further up the street (behind me when I was taking the picture). The architecture you see in this photo is pretty much what most of the buildings in downtown Iceland look like, so you can see why I said it looks very much like a small European or New England town. However, Iceland has some very ambitious graffiti:

After lunch, we took a wander down to the far end of the harbor, where we found CCP's brand-spanking new headquarters building (which if I remember right was completed shortly before last year's FanFest).

And, in case you can't read it, I've included a closer view of the sign on the side there off to the right, as you can see. We didn't stop by for a chat, obviously, but it was pretty neat to see the building nevertheless.

After that, we headed back to the hotel to rest up a bit; FanFest started the next day, and it seemed like sleep was pretty low on the list of things to do, so getting a good night's rest seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately for me, that night I didn't sleep too well and I was a bit worried I had come down with something -- nothing like being in a foreign country and being worried you need to see a doctor, and you don't speak the language. The fact that I was still recovering from surgery didn't really help matters much! However, despite the fact that I didn't get much in the way of sleep, I seemed to feel a lot better by noon after taking it easy, and I ended up going over to FanFest around noon.

FanFest is a pretty big deal every year, and it has gotten consistently larger since its inception. This was its fifth year, and like last year, it was held in the Laugardalsholl, part of a large sports complex, where among other things the Icelandic Olympic teams practice. It's also where the chess match was held that saw Bobby Fischer defeat Boris Spassky, which, while I'm not a huge chess fan or anything, is still pretty amazing to realize. Maybe I'm just easy to impress, but let's face it, there aren't a lot of historic events that have happened in my hometown, aside from the president's plane getting stuck in our airport and I suppose the first Farm Aid, but I think that's stretching things a bit. So maybe you can see why I get a little excited when I get to visit somewhere with a tad bit more history!

The walk from the Nordica to FanFest is not particularly far, but it was still kind of nippy out there -- Iceland was not especially cold (I think temperatures were in the mid 40s the whole week I was there), but during the day the wind seems to be pretty damn fierce. I was glad I had bought a new winter coat before the trip, that's for sure. Here's a picture of the Laugardalsholl from the street:

It certainly wasn't hard to find my way in:

Now, as a warning, here's the only two pictures I took actually at FanFest, because I was so busy talking to people and doing stuff it totally slipped my mind! Once again, I don't have the shutterbug instinct down yet. I did try to take a few pictures at the Saturday party, but they didn't end up coming out too well; too dark. I'll need to see if there's a better way to deal with those in the future. However, I will say that video of almost all the FanFest presentations is available at CCP's website. Definitely check it out if you have any interest in Eve whatsoever.

The first picture is of the cafe area from the upper floor, looking down; the lowest level there is the entrance.

The second picture here is one of the very cool Apocalypse-class battleship models that had been painted as a Blood Raider ship (sorry about the glare). It was being auctioned off at the silent auction for charity.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, it's time to go on to the meat of FanFest, what I saw and what I did there. Thursday was pretty quiet; the only big events planned for that day were the first roundtables and the Player vs. Dev combat; this was a day to meet and greet and get to talk to people. I did, however, make it into two roundtables (though competition was fierce!).

The first one was on factional warfare, and it had a wide variety of people who had participated (and one person who hadn't, from Anarchy Empire). There seemed to be a general consensus that factional warfare was really not living up to its potential; I told the devs a few times that right now there just wasn't really any strong impetus for anyone to take or (especially) defend systems, and that needs to be changed. While the devs seemed to think that people wanted rewards for fighting in factional warfare, but for me I think its less about rewards and more about consequences. I don't really care if I get some new geegaw for capturing a system, but there needs to be something that happens when the system changes hands -- docking rights restricted, roving factional navy patrols, or something that makes it painful to lose and/or valuable to gain. That seemed to be generally agreed as a problem. The other major topic of discussion was a way of helping players to determine who was a good pilot or fleet commander; I think the big idea that came out of this that was good was implementing some sort of karma system, like, for instance, the one on Digg.

The second roundtable I was in was for women in Eve, which was pretty good -- a wide variety of player backgrounds and playstyles were represented. It was interesting how many of them seemed to get treated a lot differently by the guys in their corps, whereas I don't think I've ever really felt like my corp treats its women members any different from their male pilots (all three or four of us). I don't think there were any giant revelations that came out of this for me, but it was just a fun social occasion to meet some other women players (which there seemed to be a good number of at FanFest this year).

That was about it for Thursday; the real meat of the con, the dev presentations, did not get started until Friday. I won't go over too much about the actual meat of these, since you can see the video of them online, but I will give my commentary on the ones I saw.

The first I saw on Friday was a presentation by the Eve economist about the differences between Tranquility and Serenity; while this was interesting to see and the differences between the two (however slight) were pretty intriguing, I have to say it didn't really stick with me as much as the rest of the presentations I saw. I don't do as much with the market as I used to and even when I did I wasn't that into it.

Next was the alliance panel, which was a bit disappointing; it seems like most of them had been asked to come up on the spur of the moment, aside from the Eve University guy and the CVA guy. Both of them had very good presentations (the CVA one especially), but the others were a tad bit disappointing, though Jade's was only disappointing because the Cosmopolite had already given a similar (and better put together one) last year, and I think Jade had been asked to do his on the spur of the moment. I was the one who asked about the Star Fraction/Stimulus split here, though.

After that, I saw the presentation on building the Empyrean Age. While not as interesting for me as the presentation on Eve IP or the storyline board that came later, I did really like this one if only for the discussion of how the various elements of game design, storyline writing, and even promotion (like the trailers that were played on TV and elsewhere) tied together. This was also the presentation were Tony went into what a mess the process of actually getting the book published was, from the bizarrely poor editing process (one guy editing the entire book literally overnight) to the sorry state it arrived back to him afterwards (out of order and covered in grime). I definitely have a little more sympathy for state of the book's technical editing (and I have more to talk about with regard to the rest in just a little bit, when I talk about the Eve IP presentation). The game design elements were interesting too, but a lot of that I had sort of figured out on my own or had been discussed elsewhere, so they were less of a surprise than the others.

Following that, we had what was supposed to be one of the big deals of the conference, the Walking in Stations presentation. For me, I have to say this was pretty underwhelming; the only thing that really blew me away was the technology demo of Geomerics' Enlighten software, which was pretty amazing. As far as the actual WIS stuff, it looked interesting, but I can't help but think that this, along with the pie-in-the-sky stuff Oveur likes to go on about in the World Domination presentations everywhere, is in danger of losing the focus of what the game is supposed to be about. If you are worried about doing this WIS stuff, and planetary combat, and all this other stuff, I worry that the core gameplay -- flying spaceships around -- which is still far from perfect, will get lost in the shuffle. There's a lot of core gameplay issues, such as sovereignty or factional warfare, which nearly everyone -- players and devs alike -- agrees needs to be overhauled, and if the company is spending time and money on this new stuff, that's game designers and programmers that aren't fixing these issues.

CCP (and, to be fair, most software companies in general) seems to be focused on new features and less fixing old problems. The biggest reason, I'm sure, is that bug fixes are not exactly big new attractors for subscribers; but for the players who you already have, I would like to think that making the core gameplay better is a good way to improve retention. WIS might be a special case, however, since this is likely just a testbed for technology already being developed for CCP's World of Darkness MMO, so leveraging that for Eve is probably not as big a distraction. Still....it is worrisome, and for me, I will probably not spend much time with this, other than to get my character something a bit more appropriate to wear than an armored bustier.

After that, we had Tony's Eve IP presentation, which I thought was one of the best presentations for me personally, as it gave me a lot of insight into how the storyline and creative elements of Eve feed into the business aspects of the game. As I'm pretty sure I've said before (though I can't remember if I've ever posted it here), I'm a bit more attuned to the pen-and-paper RPG industry, where the creative writing is a very large part of the product, whereas in Eve, the creative side is really ancillary to the game; most people do not play Eve for the storyline. However, the storyline, as Tony pointed out, is often a big factor for what draws people into the game in the first place.

This presentation (and a conversation with Tony a bit later in the con) definitely helped me understand the way the storyline was being run and how the background material had been treated in the past. Previously, it seems, it had been really disjoint, and there was no real effort to provide the kind of consistency that is necessary when you're doing that kind of worldbuilding, which I've talked about before. A lot of the problems with the book came out of this (Tony's comment about not knowing about the Caldari tube child program really made me -- and I suspect a few others -- grind their teeth), and while I still have a lot of complaints about the way that was handled, I think much of the issue was because Tony and the other storyline folks at CCP were trying to create a new baseline to build on. I don't particularly agree with how they went about it; too little value, in my opinion, was placed on trying to integrate the previous material (even contradictory material) into the current state of things, but I do agree with the basic idea of trying to establish a strong foundation to build on, I just wish it was done six or seven years ago.

That being said, I am reassured by the fact that with storyline coming to the fore, there is a renewed effort from CCP to make that sort of change. I do disagree with a lot of the details Tony talked about, however. I don't think every nation needs a powerful single face -- look at how Heavy Gear developed the various city-state leagues and confederations for instance. Or look at Shadowrun, where the megacorporations' actions are often driven by competing forces within themselves, such as the competition between Damien Knight and Leonard Aurelius. The competing personalities there are part of what drove that story and made it so strong. I don't think any race needs to be vilified in order to start a war -- in fact, in an interactive game like Eve or any RPG, I think it is better when players of any race can portray their enemies as the "bad guys" and themselves as the "good guys." Again, look at Heavy Gear, where the Interpolar War is not caused because the North or the South are evil, but because small conflicts spiraled out of control -- most historical conflicts are not nearly as black and white as people like to make them out to be. I do like that there's a new emphasis on dynamism, but frankly the speed at which some of these changes have occured is a little hard to believe. These are the sort of things that I hope will change and evolve with the storyline process in the future.

After that, I took a short break and then went to the reading of "Speakeasy," a short play about what agents do on their one hour off each day. It was amusing enough, but I have a noted preference for serious stuff and not so much this sort of thing. :)

The last presentation I saw on Friday was the CSM panel, which I went to mostly because I was curious to see how they thought the process had gone during the last six months. There no real surprises, but I was encouraged to hear about what had actually been put in the game or altered based on their feedback, and with their perceptions of CCP's response. This is really something unprecedented and it's good to see that it is going as well as it has been. Hopefully, now that the administration procedures are worked out and the process has been hammered out a little better, the next iteration of the CSM will be even more productive.

Saturday was "the big day" at the con. The lead-off for me were the finals of the PvP showdown, which was a much different format this year; teams had to mine as much ore as they could during a 15 minute period, but combat was still allowed (or encouraged, even) and the players could reship if they wanted during the battle. I really liked the idea of structuring the tournament around an objective other than "blow the other guy up." I don't know that people thought it was quite as satisfying; limits, in terms of the quality of equipment and the size of ships, were a lot more constraining than the last Alliance Tournament, so you didn't get the epic fights that you might have seen before. I'm sure with further work, though, it can be refined -- after all, it took several tournaments before the Alliance Tournaments got as polished too.

After that was the storyline panel, which was the second presentation I thought was really interesting. While a lot of the stuff that was discussed was also done at the Eve IP presentation, especially in regard to the specific storyline details, hearing how the process behind them worked, and how they had started to try and hammer out these details, was very encouraging. The fact that the storyline board has people from the pen-and-paper RPG world now will hopefully lead to a shift that is closer to what I'd like, but to be totally honest I've never been completely thrilled with what I've heard about the World of Darkness metaplot. I was never really as interested in it (or in the WoD games, period) as I was with Heavy Gear, Shadowrun, or the other games that take up huge chunks of my RPG shelves, though, so I think I need to reserve judgement and see what happens. Call my attitude on this, for now, "cautiously optimistic," especially in light of the new initiatives to document and hammer out the baseline of the Eve setting. I noticed that this presentation is not yet up on the Eve website; I hope that is fixed, because really, I think a lot of RPers in Eve would really find it enlightening.

After that, of course, were the World Domination presentations, where CCP detailed their ongoing initiatives and their plans for the next expansion or two. Of course, the big announcement here was that the next expansion is not coming out in the summer, but is on target for March, in combination with a new release of Eve to stores. Considering the amount of stuff they are trying to cram into that next expansion, though, I will be very shocked if everything they want is in there (the date, I think, is fixed because of the retail release). The tech 3 ships -- modular ships you can build by adding different pieces together, basically adding thousands of ships to each race, were a really cool idea, one which was definitely really good to see instead of just something bigger and better. The exploration ideas, the epic mission arcs, and the other elements scheduled for the next expansion definitely have potential as well; but considering the retail rollout, it seems like the one thing that must be in the next expansion is the new player experience update and UI improvement.

The COSMOS social networking/instant messenger/thin client idea that Oveur spoke about briefly before that was also a pretty cool idea, but as he joked, it is still years away from completion. The technical presentation, by the CTO and VP of Engineering was okay, but it was definitely aimed at a bit of a different level; most of the HPC stuff I had heard of because of the work I did with CSE/CSAR, but the stackless Python stuff was a bit over my head. Oveur's annual pie-in-the-sky presentation was good for a glimpse at the far future, but the planetary stuff and FPS teaser (which I've heard people say they think is a real thing being added to Eve -- my guess is that it's something that may use the IP but stands alone), I think that may be reach exceeding grasp there. I may be proven wrong later on, but I sort of hope not -- I'd rather have a really good space combat/trading game than an okay game that tries to be everything to everyone.

The CCP Panel was next; I'll touch on a few of the things I thought were interesting that came out of it in bullet points. I think (as should probably be expected) there were a lot of people looking out for their own playstyles rather than taking a larger view of the game, which was not disappointing per se but it certainly held less interest for me than things that involve many different aspects of the game, or which are at least accessible to almost everyone.

CCP is looking at changing sovereignty so that taking sovereignty does not depend purely on combat power. This was very encouraging (though it will be more encouraging when they actually change something), especially since I've talked about that sort of thing for a while, when I posted an idea here. It will all depend on what CCP can implement and run without causing more server overhead or adding unintentionally exploitable mechanics.
The Eve RPG is still on track and is considered a publicity and marketing tool (like the storyline) rather than a moneymaking tool; that bodes well for the game in what has been a depressed pen and paper RPG market for some time now.
The idea of allowing player corporations to act as "viceroys" in low security systems is an interesting one, but I think the notion that players can act like the police in certain systems at the level CONCORD or the faction navies can is a little dubious. People don't really enjoy camping gates for days on end and in 0.0, most people these days simply use an NBSI policy because it's easier to shoot first and ask questions later than hunt down the guy who turned out not to be a neutral trader but an enemy spy or cyno generator or pirate. Until there's some sort of change to add tools where the players can police systems better (in low sec and 0.0), I don't think you're going to see alliances or corporations running space in a way similar to the NPC empires. By that, I mean being able to maintain an NRDS policy without a huge amount of effort and a significant impediment.
The mystery of the disappearing Alliance Tournament was answered, and I was not particularly surprised by the reason -- they simply cost too much for the return they provided in terms of publicity, retention, and other business benefits. While I can understand why CCP made that sort of decision, it was very disappointing, especially since their suggested replacement -- player-run events using tools for that sort of thing -- will probably never have the same audience that the Alliance Tournaments had. I will miss what was really a unifying event for the player base (and even for non-players that you could rope into watching), and I hope CCP tries to do something in order to provide that same sort of experience in the future.
The Eve novel sold well enough to green-light a sequel (though I think it had a fairly limited print run). While I admit I was hardly thrilled with the first one, I suppose hope springs eternal -- and keeping that visibility for the storyline high is good for the parts of the game I like.
Talk about tools being added to ambulation in order to facilitate machinima; I think this is a sign of how much the game industry is changing to embrace that sort of thing from the fanbase, things like Clear Skies or Concerned. While I am not hugely excited about ambulation for myself, I am excited to see what sort of stuff the player base comes up with. Adherance to the canon of the Eve universe aside, I really liked Clear Skies.
Speaking of Clear Skies, Clear Skies 2 is under production. :)

After the panel, there was a short break, and then the big party that concludes FanFest began. Now, I'm not really the sort of person that likes dancing. Or drinking at loud clubs. Or having my ears annihialated with loud music. So, aside from a short stint in the main room, where I got to see how things looked (and tried to take some pictures), I spent most of my time in the Mercantile Club lounge next door, hanging out and talking with the people I had met at FanFest. I still heard RealX's set, which was pretty good; the music for Eve has been one of my favorite parts of the game for a long time (not uncommon with a lot of games for me) and his live mix from the last FanFest is in my mp3 library. I also heard RoxxoR, which is....kinda bad. :) Actually, if they got better singers, they'd probably be all right, but the vocalists they had were just....ooof. :) It sounded like they were having a lot of fun though, and I guess that's really all that matters to them (everyone else seemed to have a lot of fun listening to them maul classic after classic too). And which classic did they butcher first? But of course, Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song -- quite appropriate in the land of the Vikings. :)

Sunday and Monday I spent most of my time socializing with some other expatriates in the hotel bar -- most of whom were members of either Mercury (the fiction news article writers) or those fine folks at the Star Fraction, including the Cosmopolite. If you told me two years ago, at the height of the Mito Conflict, that I'd be sitting down and having a pleasant chat with those guys, reminiscing about what was one of the most vicious wars I think I've ever been in, I don't think I ever would have believed you, but there I was.

And so, that wraps up most of my Icelandic experiences. It was one of the best weeks in my life, really -- spending that time with people who were excited and passionate about the same sort of things I am, many of whom think about it on the same level I do, was really great. I will definitely be looking forward to doing this again next year if at all possible.

Before I go though, I have one more picture to show you....

These things are scattered all over Iceland, and I never really realized what they were until one of the people I was hanging out with told me. These sheds are actually caps over the geothermal vents that cover the island! It's pretty cool to think about, in terms of the island's geology; evidently the street that the Nordica is on lies right over an underground river, which supposedly helps the road stay clearer of ice and snow than it normally would. I don't know if that's true or not, but it sounded pretty neat to me. :)

Coming up when I can get a chance will be my entry on Boston, but I can't be sure when exactly that will happen -- I have quite a few more pictures to go through for that, so it could be a while still. I will get around to it though, I promise. :)

Back in the States

2008-11-12T13:53:59Z

Just a quick update -- I realized I hadn't posted yet this week updating my status -- I'm back in the States now, in Boston, after what was an uneventful flight. I think I've recovered quite nicely from jet lag, though I'm still a little worn out. Yesterday Marc and I went to the Constitution Museum here as well as the Museum of Science, both of which were pretty neat (though I'd seen the Constitution before).

Then we went to Legal Sea Foods for dinner -- eventually at the Prudential Center, after giving up looking for the Benoc-recommended Copley location. I had a really good lobster, but I had forgotten what a complete pain in the butt they are to eat. Marc had a just as delicious grilled assortment which in retrospect I wish I had gotten. After trying a little of it, I think I've realized that I just don't like fish when it's not fresh and well prepared, not that I don't like fish in general.

Today, I think we'll be walking the Freedom Trail. Hopefully it won't be too cold and windy today, but we'll see...

My last day in Iceland

2008-11-09T11:01:45Z

Today is my last full day here in Iceland, which gives me a little time to reflect on the last few days (but a full roundup of FanFest will have to wait until I get back and have some time to go through my pictures). It's actually sunny today for the first time since Wednesday, though I've spent almost all my time over the last few days either inside the FanFest venue or out with various people around here.

Visiting Iceland has been a really interesting and fun experience, especially being here and spending time with people from all over the world. While GenCon always has a lot of people from outside the US, here at FanFest, the attendees are mostly from outside the US -- I've heard people speaking dozens of different languages, not to mention English with as many accents, and it really gives you a feeling for the fact that the world is a much bigger place than you can possibly realize when you spend most of your time in a single place. I've been able to meet a lot of people I have considered friends here, even though we'd never met in person before, and I will be taking home a lot of great memories.

The most fascinating thing about being in another country has been seeing all the little differences between being here and being in the US. Nearly everything here seems a little smaller (including my bed in the hotel room and the bit-too-small duvet), the smell of sulfur when you run the hot water (due to the fact that hot water here comes from geothermally-heated springs under the ground), the fact that you get a yellow light before a green light on the traffic signals, and the way cars actually expect to cede the right of way to pedestrians (quite a change from the mess on campus, for sure). I think just being exposed to a different way of doing things and a different environment has been incredibly healthy for me as a person.

The worst thing about this trip is that it really hasn't been long enough for me to really feel like I have learned as much as I should about this place, and I wish I had time to learn the language and culture here. I was really excited about coming here, and it has not been a disappointment; I can't wait until I get the chance to take a trip like this again.

It is way too early to be so late.

2008-11-04T08:57:59Z

Good morning ladies and gents from Reykjavik, Iceland! I got in here about 3 hours ago now after my 5 hour flight from Boston, during which I don't think I slept nearly as much as I should have. I wanted to take a nap, but I can't check in to my room yet, unfortunately. So for now, I'm camped out in the lobby with some other FanFest refugees and waiting to get in.

Right now, it's almost 0900 local (which is also GMT), and the sun is just starting to creep up -- I'd say it looks like it does around 0630 or 0700 does at home. Streetlights are all still on and you can't see much other than a blue-tinged grey sky (though that may be because of the overcast skies). So far, Reykjavik does not strike me at all like a city only a bit larger than Champaign-Urbana; it seems almost like a Chicago suburb in terms of the traffic, the road structure, and a lot of the architecture, with modern glass and steel mixed with smaller buildings that seem a lot like older buildings I've seen in New England.

Yesterday was not without it's troubles, unfortunately -- my flight out of Chicago got cancelled due to mechanical problems, so instead of getting to Boston at 1330, I ended up getting there closer to 1700. In retrospect, that 7 hour layover I was griping about ended up being a good idea.

Anyway, not too much to report yet -- I haven't taken any pictures but hopefully I'll be able to do some of that later today and tomorrow and get those up here. I just wanted to make a quick post before I forgot to let everyone know I got in okay.

With Fallout 3 Coming Out...

2008-10-31T01:20:31Z

...I thought it might be neat to mention a website that a friend of mine so helpfully pointed out today where you can get the first two Fallout games for cheap (six bucks a pop). Good Old Games is a pretty spiffy new place where you can buy old games for cheap, download, and install them with no launcher, no DRM, and they work on XP and Vista (which was a problem for the old Fallout games). It looks like they are just rolling out, and their catalog is a little limited so far, but if it catches on, I can definitely see myself spending quite a bit collecting some old games this way. One of the best parts is that, like with Steam, you can always go back and download the game again if you have to reinstall or if you want to put it on another machine of yours (still with no DRM).

And while the catalog is small, the fact that they have the three older Fallout titles (1, 2, and Tactics), as well as the Freespace games (the best space sims ever) is a good sign. If you have never played those games, you should definitely look into grabbing them.