Gamers' Creed

Day 6 of the RPS Morrowind game diary. Imagine a lame thief with a Twitter account:

Agentloaf Really should do something useful now. Topless old guy asks me to do stuff for the Blades. Don’t like being told what to do by topless men.
9.17 AM Jun 30th from web

Agentloaf In dwarf fortress. Take all 7 torches in crate near door, but over-encumbered and can’t move, so leave 3 pairs of trousers on the floor.
11.30 AM Jun 30th from web

Fidgit has a hilarious post of what is believed to be a real Craig's List post by a Korean offering Starcraft lessons for $20 an hour. Note the bolded text... Snicker!

This Craig's List entry promises to make you better at Starcraft:

I'm 100% full blooded Korean, meaning I have been gifted with unparallel talent to master any video game, particularly, Starcraft: Brood War...I'm offering my expertise in Starcraft to be taught to non-Koreans that wishes to have the skill of a Korean player. I have advised and coached many professional gamers such as Im Jae Dong, Park Myung Soo, Ma Jae Yoon, and more. Boxer and I were great friends until he started using my dropships to gain his fame. I started training other players to be on par with Boxer and eventually surpassing Boxer. He is no longer the best player thanks to my contribution to rest of the players. I did not compete in pro gaming because they KTF did not agree with my seven figure contract demand. The hourly rate you pay to learn Starcraft skillz vary by whether you're looking for basic training, advanced training, or race specific training. For some reason, it's only $20 an hour to learn the ways of the Zerg. The rate skyrockets to $30 an hour is you want to learn the ways of the Terrans.

1UP.com reports that the government of China has banned gold farming in their country. Um... okay... not sure why grown a conscience but here's the scoop.

The Chinese government has officially banned gold farming, declaring that virtual currency can only be traded for virtual goods and services. According to InformationWeek, the ruling will affect "more than 300 million Internet users in China," and curtail a trade that "exceeded several billion yuan (one billion yuan is approximately $146 million) last year" while growing "20 percent annually."

According to a 2008 survey by the University of Manchester's Richard Heeks, between 80 and 85 percent of gold farmers are based in China. The process involves collecting in-game currency, then selling it via a website or PayPal to other players.

Gold farming has attracted controversy not just because it exploits certain game mechanics, but because entrepreneurs in America and Korea have hired low-cost labor in places like China to farm large amounts of gold. This has lead to accusations that gold farming outfits are sweatshops.

John Walker @ RPS writes a list of things he would pay money to see happen in gaming. Of course, to get the British pound to U.S. dollar conversion, you need to multiply their amounts by 6 billion. Anyhow... Indulge!

£3 a month for all tutorials to not explain how to move the mouse, but rather explain key aspects unique to their game.

£21 for all tutorials to not freeze the action while I’m trying to do the required task in order to tell me how to do the required task.

£45 for every company logo screen at the start of a game to be skippable, forever.

£37 to never read another article about the death of the adventure game (go buy Time Gentlemen, Please this bloody instant).

An extra £10 for a version of Burnout: Paradise that loaded straight to the car on the road, and not the 47 screens I have to click through.

An extra £5 on top of that for it to never play Guns N’ Roses at me ever again.

£100 to never hear Paradise City by Guns N’ Roses ever again, anywhere.

Day 5 of RPS' Morrowind game diary. Behold!

The Diamond Job

The armed guard wasn’t the problem. The child was. I’d successfully lockpicked my way through the upstairs door, sneaking into this alchemist’s store from their unwatched balcony. The guard, I knew, was downstairs, watching the front door. If I stuck to the shadows, I should be able to get past him to the storeroom, where the jewel awaited. Easy. Straight in, straight out, cash reward, and if I was lucky a spare diamond for myself.

But the child almost ruined it.

There had been reports that Vvardenfell was once a sad, strange place with with nary a youth in sight, but these days children were all over the towns. One, a teenage boy, was inhabiting the upstairs bedroom of this shop. He spotted me the second I entered the room. Rather than shouting or running, he simply stood stock-still at the top of the stairs. I had no way down.

Unless… dark thoughts flickered across my self-interested mind, and I placed a hand on the hilt of my dagger. No. There had to be a better way around this than physically carving a thoroughfare through a faintly creepy Aryan child.

Instead, I skulked in the shadows, and waited. For hours, I waited. It was boring as all hell, but somehow it made me feel like a professional – just waiting for my chance to strike. I must have dozed off at some point, for when I came to around 4am, the child was gone. I didn’t know where. Was this his home? Was he a thief like me? Had I imagined him, even? No matter – the important thing was that this tyke-obstacle was now gone.

I crawled downstairs, coolly cast my Chameleon spell to sneak right past the guard’s eyeline, and swept everything in sight – including two diamonds. O frabjous day! – into my bags. Then I just walked right out. If the guard was surprised, he didn’t show it. He was a consummate professional – just like me.

GameSpy has a hands-on preview of the multiplayer beta currently going on for Starcraft II. It sounds interesting, but I wonder how the single-player piece will work. Lookit!

Let's start with some of the biggest changes. Gone is the 12 unit selection limit from the original StarCraft. Now you have limitless selection, allowing you to control the movements of a massive force at once. According to Lead Producer Chris Sigaty, this is one of the most controversial changes that the StarCraft II development team has decided to implement. Will it make the game that much easier now that you don't have to set up quite so many control groups? From my hands-on experience with the game, it definitely helped to be able to control the massed Zealots that were the first strategy I employed in a battle against a Zerg player.

1UP.com has an interview with John Carmack in which he discusses the recent acquisition of id Software by ZeniMax (the owners of Bethesda Software. Naturally, internet imaginings of Doom/Fallout/Elder Scrolls game combinations emerged the second the deal hit the news. However, Carmack gives a more realistic scenario for future collaboration between the two developers. Feast!

1UP: So can we expect to see any sort of synergy between id and Bethesda? Will Fallout 4 be powered by id Tech 5?

JC: Each of the studios already has a pretty good trajectory going on, and neither one of us is going to be making any sharp turns. That would be a foolish thing to do in an acquisition; to try and force something like that along. We're both doing great independently; the things that we do together will be targets of opportunity. There's going to be lots of cases where there's specific knowledge or expertise we can share; we want to learn everything we can from them about downloadable content, and some of their work going through the submission process on the publishing side of things, and the promotional side of things. And I'm more than happy to share everything we know about different technologies; they can cherry-pick any bit of code they want from our codebases.

When a new team does start up, they'll have choices about how they want to build their technology base. They have a long-term, mature technology base for what they've been doing at Bethesda; they've got people who've been using it for years and years and years. It would not make any sense to just scrap that and change over. But they may wind up taking some technical direction from us. The great part about all of this is that it is in all of our best interests to do everything we can to make each other successful. Because on the off-years, while the next Elder Scrolls is being developed, Doom 4 will be paying their bonuses essentially, and vice versa. We hope to be able to get our two cents in where we think it's going to be valuable, and try to make as much of a difference as we can, wherever we can.

Day 4 of the Morrowind game diary at RPS. Look!

Balmora is a strange city. It’s small, but so labyrinthine that it nonetheless feels strangely overwhelming. Much of this is down to the river that bifurcates it into two – creating a very rough divide between the small houses and bars on one side, and the mansions and shops on the other. If there is a class divide here, the people don’t outwardly show it. Nonetheless, quiet conflict is at the heart of Balmora. It’s in the uncomfortable adjacency between the Fighters Guild and the Mages Guild, the festering rivalry between the Thieves’ Guild and its fellow criminal organisation Camonna Tong, and it’s in the constant, sinister patrols by the golden-armoured Hlallu Guards. Balmora is peaceful on its surface, but secretly fuelled by aggression.