Chris Holmes Online

When I was first introduced to Dungeons & Dragons (second edition rules) I created a Ranger. I identified with that particular class because in real life I’m a bowhunter, and the two share many similarities. I thought the idea of a character that could survive in the wilderness, use a bow or swords effectively in combat, and had the ability to track creatures was a neat idea. When I played pencil and paper Dungeons & Dragons, I played rangers. Then the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale games hit my computer, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that the ranger was a completely useless class.

Computer games have inherit limitations in them that make some of the more flavorful classes, like the ranger, more difficult to implement, and thus less attractive. In computer Dungeons & Dragons, rangers became nothing more than weak warriors. The skills that made them unique, like their ability to navigate the wilderness, or track game, couldn’t be properly implemented, and so they were removed from the computer games or severely weakened. This impacted the way I played those games, and thus I never created another ranger. Why play a weak ranger when you could play a strong warrior?

I’ve often wondered what a game might look and play like if it were to do justice to a ranger’s abilities. Now I know. Storm of Zehir is that game.

Storm of Zehir is an expansion to the Neverwinter Nights 2 game. It boasts two new important features:

1. The ability to create an entire party of characters, a la Icewind Dale.
2. An overland map that is used for travel, and which makes use of many ranger/druid skills.

Storm of Zehir leans heavily on these two new features. It succeeds because of them, but it is also dragged down by them. This is a game that doesn’t play nearly as well as it should.

For starters, while the game is billed as allowing you to create a full party of characters, similar to the Icewind Dale series of games, it doesn’t quite deliver on that promise. In Icewind Dale you could create a party of six characters. Six slots turns out to be just about the right size, allowing you to create a robust team of adventurers, complete with the necessary rogues, wizards, clerics and fighters. But Storm of Zehir limits your custom party size to four. Any experienced player will tell you that four just isn’t enough.

You are allowed one extra NPC follower. Two if you blow a precious feat slot on a “Leadership” ability. Unfortunately, unlike NPC characters in previous games, the NPC followers in Storm of Zehir are rather bland, and lack any fun or meaningful dialog. There exists no reason bring them into your party other than to fill a character slot, and most players are going to want to create their own characters anyway. Fortunately, there is a simple configuration fix that will allow you to create a full, six-character party. But that it something that should have been available out of the box.

Then there’s the overland map. This is Storm of Zehir’s greatest strength, and also its greatest weakness.

The overland map achieves something that no previous Dungeons & Dragons game has really been able to do. For the first time, abilities like Survival, Spot, Listen, and Move Silently are not confined to the realm of rogues and thieves. These skills are used extensively while your party is on the overland map. They allow your adventurers to avoid dangerous encounters, find hidden treasures, or discover important locations. Finally, it pays to have a Ranger in the group.

On its own merit, the overland map is a successful new feature. The problem with Storm of Zehir is not the overland map itself, but what the developers did with it. Or more precisely, what they did not do with it.

What they did not do is create a big, vibrant world. There are no large cities to frequent, no majestic ruins to explore, no labyrinthine dungeons to plunder. Everything in Storm of Zehir is small and absent of grandeur (or fun, for that matter).

The game plays very much like a Final Fantasy game. And that’s a shame, because the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine is capable of so much more. Like Final Fantasy, your party spends most of its time wandering the overland map, and when it finally does encounter a ruin, dungeon or random group of bandits, the encounter is small (a single zone), and is over in seconds. In fact, I have yet to encounter one dungeon that is larger than a single zone.

The cities are equally pointless. The main storyline sets your party up as a group of traders (a flaw in itself, since you should be adventuring, not establishing trade routes) and so the cities you encounter along the way are nothing more than trade points on the overland map. You can visit the pub or temple of a city directly, but that’s it. There’s no actual “city” to wander around in; there are no NPC’s to talk to, no quests to be had. The cities exist only to act as points of trade. Even the grand city of Neverwinter, a many-zoned metropolis from previous games, is limited to a single zone, and only a portion of that.

On top of the poor utilization of the overland map, Storm of Zehir turns out to be the most bug-ridden of the Neverwinter Nights games. It is overflowing with glitches and broken code, to the point that there is a 29-page post on the official forums full of complaints.

One of the biggest bugs you’re likely to encounter is watching your characters get stripped of their buffs each time they enter the overland map. This presents a problem when you run into your next random group of trolls or bandits, as you will only have enough time to cast one spell before your enemies are upon you. The four or five spell buffs your character might need to be efficient in combat will be missing. Fortunately, there is a player-created fix available. But this is such a huge flaw that it speaks to the quality (or lack thereof) on the Storm of Zehir development team. It’s the type of bug that should have been discovered in play testing and fixed long before the game came out.

The end result is a severely flawed game. Many of the new features, while welcome, are overshadowed by flaws in the game. The trading mechanism is dumb and boring; crafting was “simplified”, making it more of a money sink than anything else; the plot is thin; the cities are vacant entities; the overland map is relied upon too heavily; the encounters are too small and simple.

Storm of Zehir shows that it is not enough to create a cool, new game mechanism, but you have to actually utilize that mechanism to its fullest potential. Final Fantasy VII was released in 1994 and contained pretty much the same gameplay as Storm of Zehir. Hard to believe that after 14 years, we haven’t advanced the genre any further.

There is hope, however. The overland map gives us a glimmer of what is possible with this sort of game engine when used in conjunction with a lot of previously ignored character skills. Here’s hoping that if there ever is a Baldur’s Gate 3, or even another big expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2, that the developers learn their lessons from the failures of Storm of Zehir and build a better game next time. It would be a shame to have to put the Ranger back on the shelf.

Here’s an interesting post courtesy of Moorgard’s blog: Scott Hartsman spent some time to respond to criticism about the relative quality and complexity of MMORPG’s with a blog post titled: MMOs are bigger than you think. Scott is a guy who has worked on Everquest and Everquest II, so he should know what he’s talking about.

The reason I got into software development was because of video games. My first real career goal as a software developer – the first “dream job” I ever really contemplated – was to work on a great video game. So it was with a certain amount of anger and frustration that I watched as games that I loved to play, and companies who made those games, suffered criticism at the hands of ignorant players.

I’ve long defended the developers of Everquest and Everquest II on various message boards, largely because I, being a software developer, understood the complexities and hurdles that those developers face to bring us these games that we enjoy so much. So it was with great interest that I read Scott’s post today.

While reading his post it struck me how similar his problems are to any other business application. Scott writes:

This is painful for MMOs in particular because of the unique (huge) number of critical, non-sexy things that you have to succeed at, where failing at any one of them can entirely sink your game:

- Pipelines
- Tools
- Infrastructure
- Stability (again, doubling the work – the client and all the servers)
- Scalability
- Stability
- Security (added this in for the blog post – Can’t trust that client)
- Performance (optimize both that client and all those server processes)
- Oh, and..Stability

Are these things really any different from an ERP system, for instance? Looking down the list, I see all the same issues that we (.NET business application developers) face in our domain as well.

Which makes me wonder if part of the problem isn’t the methodology. Scott brings up an interesting point:

MMOs are still really young. To a lot of the people working on them, it very much is creating something entirely new. Compare to movies or single player games, for instance. It’s less of a challenge to staff those types of projects up with people who’ve worked on them before, in all of the right positions. Doing the same on a high-budget MMO remains next to impossible.

I don’t mean “key management” or “leads” like you see in studio announcements and press releases all the time. I mean everyone other than a small number of entry-level folks. Until you’ve done it once, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.

But you know what? This is true for all software development, not just MMOG’s.

Just about every job I’ve had, I’ve been asked to develop software that I’ve never done before. Of course, that’s part of what makes this industry so damn cool – we’re always learning new stuff, and we’re always pushing our limits with new technologies, tools and ideas. But the core problem is the same: we work in an industry where we’re asked to do things that we have never done before.

I don’t think this is anything unique to MMOG’s. Sure, there are people in the business application world who have built business software a dozen times. But for every guy who finally achieves a level of expertise with that sort of domain, a dozen other guys graduate from college without any experience.

So I come back to the methodology. In the business software world, we’re learning that Waterfall is a recipe for failure, and Agile is a way to help us succeed. Methodologies like Scrum and Extreme Programming are giving software developers better techniques for minimizing risk and ensuring success. I’m starting to read more and more where game development houses are experimenting with or turning to Agile to help them succeed as well. I think these things add up…

Inexperienced developers is an issue that will never go away; it is going to remain very hard in the future to hire only the people with extensive knowledge in a particular domain. As more new blood enters the workforce, our discipline will continue to be refreshed with talented developers who lack in specific domain expertise. Mentors will always be key, and so will methodologies that help teams succeed.

The trick, as I see it, is to improve the process of software development. When you can accomplish that, even in small measures, then some of the issues Scott raises, like inexperienced developers and “wild miss-scoping” can be minimized.

If you watched the NFL this weekend it was hard to miss the new Toyota ad that incorporated the World of Warcraft. The ad isn’t terribly awesome by itself, but there were two things about it that did stick out, especially to those of us who play MMORPG’s.

First, it signals the first time (that I can think of) that an MMORPG has been used in mainstream advertising on television. I know MMORPG’s have been advertised at movie theaters and on cable TV stations, but to my knowledge no MMORPG has ever been incorporated into an advertisement for another company. And to be shown during NFL games no less. We’re talking about NFL football on Sunday afternoon – the juggernaut of sports in America – the time when every male under the age of 50 is watching. I thought it was a significant leap for World of Warcraft and MMORPG’s in general to be referenced so prominently it a commercial. It showed me that they have finally hit the mainstream in America and that’s pretty damn cool.

The second thing that was neat about the video is that it instantly hearkens to the most famous WoW video of all time: the Leroy Jenkins movie. Even if you’re not a World of Warcraft player or fan, this is one of the funniest videos you’ll ever see. There’s a summary of the event written here:

For those of you who might be unaware of the legend of Leeroy, I’ll lay it out for you, though you’d be best served to watch the video for yourself at www.leeroyjenkins.com. The story goes, Leeroy was away from his keyboard while his teammates waited and strategized about how to defeat the next encounter in the dungeon they were in, which is known as Blackrock Spire. In the midst of the elaborate planning, Leeroy returned and yelled, “Alright, time’s up! Let’s do this! Leeeerooooooy Jeeeeennkins!” And then he charged into the next room. The result was the hilarious death of Leeroy and all his friends. While the video was clearly staged, it was so well done and so classic that it instantly became a phenomenon in the WoW community.

Sometimes I think back to when I started playing roleplaying games – the first time some college friends introduced me to pencil and paper Dungeons and Dragons; the first time I scampered around a MUD with nothing more than a command prompt and my own imagination to fill in the gaps; the first time I experienced a virtual 3D world when I logged into Everquest – and I think about how far this form of entertainment has come. It’s gone from being demonized and misunderstood to mainstream. The Lord of the Rings trilogy showed that Hollywood could take fantasy seriously and still make millions of dollars, and now we have World of Warcraft as a backdrop for Toyota ads. If you’re a fantasy fan, you have to think this is pretty cool.

Every year EA hits us with a new Madden video game. And every year there are people who decline to purchase it for various reasons: not enough new features, removal of older features that were loved, reported glitches, bugs not fixed from previous versions, etc.

If you are one of those people – if you decided to skip Madden 2006 or Madden 2007 – now is the time to upgrade. This year’s Madden is as good as they come.

To start, this is the best looking Madden ever. Not so much in terms of player models (they don’t look much different from last year), but in terms of motion. Madden 2008 is the most fluid looking version in the franchise. From the moment you launch the program you can tell: this game is smooth. The menus operate as fast as I’ve ever seen them (on the same machine I’ve used for Madden 2006 & Madden 2007), and the player animations are the best they’ve ever been.

Part of this visual improvement is due to some new (and much needed) additions to the player animation library: defensive backs now have a much more realistic set of moves to use when defending deep passes (I have yet to see the Superman Jump-Swat); some additional tackles have been added that improve the running game quite a bit; the players huddle up and break into formation right after you choose a play. The visual touches aren’t overt, but you notice the quality of the game as a whole while you’re playing. This is the closest Madden has ever come to looking like a real NFL game.

But not only does the game look good, it plays good too. The running game seems more realistic between the tackles; wide receivers on crossing routes don’t seem to get tracked down as easily by linebackers; out routes seem much more viable; long passes down the sidelines seem to have a much more realistic outcomes; punt and kick returns are much more fun to deal with. You’ll still catch an occasional linebacker making a Superman slide on skates to catch up to a receiver in the flat, but overall those sorts of imperfections seem to be fewer and farther between this time around. For the most part, this version of Madden plays as good as it looks.

Even if the visuals and game play were the only improvements over last year, Madden 2008 would still be worth owning. But the developers have added a number of features and tweaks to the system – almost all of which are worthwhile – so that gamers don’t feel cheating out of their money.

To begin with, this year’s Madden fixed one of the most glaring issues from last year’s game: the complete absence of the QB Slide. I complained about this last year and was pleasantly surprised to find that this year’s development team was smart enough to include this much needed feature. Now, when your QB runs across the line of scrimmage, you can drop into a QB slide by simply tapping a button on your controller (holding the button down causes a dive). With the proliferation of scrambling QB’s at an all-time high in the NFL, this is a feature you can’t live without.

Player Roles also return this year, but this time they are augmented by Player Weapons. Different player weapons grant different abilities. For instance, a Smart Quarterback can read defenses before the snap, revealing the oppositions play call to you. Unfortunately, while the icons for player weapons do show up in the manual, the exact benefits do not; the descriptions of each weapon are incredibly vague and don’t give you the slightest idea of what exactly the benefits will be. It seems amazing to me that with 12 months between releases of Madden, EA can’t afford to print a comprehensive manual for its game.

There are other tweaks as well. This year, there are four difficulty levels: Rookie, Pro, All-Pro and All-Madden. In recent years, players such as myself have complained that the difficultly system was inadequate: All-Pro was too easy and All-Madden was too hard. Well, All-Madden is still too hard (for me) but All-Pro mode seems to have been beefed up. In the dozen games I’ve played so far only a few have been blowouts, and I’ve seen more close games than ever before (though no losses). With the four modes it appears there’s a much better chance of finding a mode that fits your own skill set. The sliders still exist for adjusting specific deficiencies, but they’re necessity seems diminished. I had to bump pass-blocking to 75% because, as usual, my offensive line faired much worse than the CPU’s, but at least I didn’t have to max it out at 99% and still watch my QB get smothered. The other sliders I have yet to touch (although, like seasons past, there are almost no penalties called during a game, but I suspect this has more to do with the Madden Challenge and increasing the sliders may create a more realistic experience).

A Long View has also been added to the view points you can watch the game from. The Long View is at a much higher angle behind the quarterback and gives you a much better view of the field as a whole; finally you’re able to see the wide receivers to your right and left and know whether a defensive back is sitting on that hitch route or not.

Probably the most radical change to the game has to do with the kicking. The classic button-clicking method has been done away with. Instead, you kick field goals by pulling back on the right analog stick and thrusting it forward when it has reached peak power. Any deviation to the right or left is picked up by the analog stick, and if you deviate too far right or left while thrusting up or down you fall out of the Accuracy Zone which can cause the kick to veer off to the right or left. The change adds a whole new dimension to the kicking game; field goals can be an adventure until you get the mechanics worked out. Unfortunately, users of the Logitech Rumblepad may experience problems with their right analog stick not being detected during the “push up” phase of the kick. I experienced this problem with my own pad, making it impossible to kick a field goal. Some users have reported that swapping their Rumblepad to a different USB port cleared up the problem. Hopefully this oversight will be corrected with a patch.

If there’s one area of disappointment it is with the play books. I expected to see a bunch of new plays this year, and I expected team play books to match their real life counterparts more accurately. But alas, when I opened up the Seahawks playbook I saw the exact same formations and plays as last season, many of them wrongly affiliated with my favorite team.

Creating a custom play book seems to be more glitch free than last year, but unfortunately the custom play books are still limited to 10 formations and 75 plays which is totally inadequate. After creating a custom play book and using it in a game I went back to using the Seahawks’ play book because the custom one was just too small.

While most plays were not changed, there was one small tweak: on some plays, certain players will be sent in motion prior to the snap of the ball. You do not have control over this, it is a set part of the play. These motion routes are indicated with a bright green line, instead of an orange or yellow one, so they are easy to find when navigating your play book. It’s a small detail, but it adds a bit of realism to the game.

My biggest gripe, other than the small custom play book, is that the Seahawks still don’t have monochromatic home uniforms. It seems absurd to me that a team that was in the Superbowl two seasons ago still does not have its uniforms replicated in Madden correctly, yet the Arizona Cardinals, who have not even sniffed the playoffs in many years, do have their monochromatic uniforms.

All in all this is the best Madden ever. It looks better, plays better, and has more features. If EA continues to make these kinds of improvements every year we won’t have any more excuses not to upgrade.

This is just a short thought: A coworker of mine was running down the credentials to a programmer he encountered online. He wanted to see more of the work this guy had done, so he was looking up the person’s profile. He came across something that mentioned that the person had worked on an online gaming project. Come to find out it was online poker.

I just find the whole thing funny. I have been an avid video game player my entire life; I’ve spent hoards of hours playing Everquest and later Everquest 2. When I read the words “online gaming” the thought of gambling doesn’t even enter my mind.