Es hat ein wenig gedauert, und ich hab’s irgendwie auch verpennt. Hier sind ein paar der Bilder, die wir von der Games Convention gemacht haben. Die meisten sind um unseren stand herum geschossen worden, die Menschenmassen sieht man da ganz gut…
In a surprise move, Neocron has decided to suspend support for the Saturn dimension because of players that harass the GMs. I really don’t see how that is going to help them, and it’s definitely unprecedented.
Update: They clarified tht they will suspend the support only for troublemakers. So there’s a blacklist of players that won’t be given support. Sounds like it makes a lot more sense. Still, I would always prefer to kick troublemakers from the game, because if they can’t behave towards a GM, they’ll be even more abusive towards players.
Game Masters are a very essential part of an online game, and we’re lucky to have an excellent program in Anarchy Online (the ARKs). If someone decides to abuse a GM repeatedly, those players should simply be banned. Or alternatively, support should be a payment option, as it is in some other games. But suspending all support for a server cannot be good, and I don’t see how it hurts anyone except the poor people who really need the help of a GM…
I persoanlly believe in banning abusive players permanently – or at least for an extended amount of time that gives them ample time to reconsider, like a month or two. Being too nice to the people who are out to spoil other players’ fun always backfires.
I’ve been waiting and working a long time for this day. Funcom has announced our plans to finally make a sequel to The Longest Journey, the world’s best adventure game ever made. I can safely say that without selfpraise, because I didn’t work on it. But I loved playing it, and I’m looking forward to working on it – I hope I will. We’re looking at making this for a number of platforms, unlike the original TLJ, which was purely a PC game.
The second new game that we’ve been workin on for a while now is a massive multiplayer online game. This one is a very exciting title, and we’re putting all the experience gained from Anarchy Online into it, to make it a killer title.
We’re also producing an Expansion and a Booster Pack for Anarchy Online, but I won’t be having to do much with those, because I’m working on the new stuff.
Good news indeed, don’t you think?
It looks like Shadowlands is going to sell well. The pre-orders at least look promising, and the game has been in the top 5 at Electronics Boutique for four weeks straight.
Based on an idea I had early this year, players that pre-order the game will get a special appartment in Jobe. Those are really cool party places with a view over the floating city, bathtub, a lounge, bedroom and kitchen – a real appartment, unlike the shoeboxes that players in Omni 1 or Tir call home.
Although my involvement in Shadowlands has been pretty small (since I work on new products now), there’s still some code of mine in there, and I’m emotionally involved with Anarchy Online – I really want to see Shadowlands get off to a good start. It’s got a lot of great potential, and the new locations are awe-inspiring, and when they’re done, they’ll hopefully be packed with action.
I’ve always wanted to have a scripting language in Eressea, for all kinds of reasons. The GM tool could really do with a console, for example. And monsters could be scripted without having to change the C code every time. Eressea is really pretty backwards in terms of technology.
So today, I made the old C code C++-clean (added a lot of extern “C” around them), and made lua bindings with luabind and I’m exposing a subset of the region and unit classes to lua. First script (apart from Hello world) listed all the regions by name and coordinates, it’s not much, but it’s a start.
It was actually easier to write small C++ wrapper functions (especially a wrapper template for the Eressea linked lists) and then use luabind (which is a C++ library) than to export the C structures directly though lua’s API. I really like luabind. I found 2 small bugs while I was working on this, but if they haven’t been fixed already, I’m sure they will be soon. The iterator support is rather fresh, after all.
Mit so etwas hat man als Eressea-Spielleiter zu tun. Ist das nicht toll? Die Namen der Beteiligten habe ich zensiert, es handelt sich da um Spieler, die relativ weit bekannt sind. tut auch nichts zur Sache, wirklich.
Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 21:10:41 +0200
From: Doppelspieler
To: Enno Rehling
Subject: Re: Partei xxxx
Hi
| Du schickst seit mindestens 16 Wochen jede Woche die
| Befehle für die Partei xxxx und yyyy ein.
Ich war in einem Buendis mit *censored* und als Daemon auf sie angewiesen. Obwohl ich viele ihre Zwerge finanzierte haute sie ohne ein Wort in den Sack und aenderte die email auf mich. Wenn ich die Zwerge bisher spielte
dann weil die Daemonen ohne sie nict spielbar sidn und weil ich hoffte dass ich doch noch eine Vertretung finden wuerde.
| Du beide Parteien spielt, und gelegentlich auch noch
| zzzz.
Das war doch klar dass *removed* nicht lange von Eressea lassen konnte und seine Partei wieder uebernehmen wuerde. Das muss man die Partei doch nihct gleich in die Tonne klopfen.
| Ich muss Dir nicht erklären, was Doppelspiel ist, oder?
| Die Partei wird diese Woche aus dem Spiel genommen.
| Und wenn von Dir nochmal für irgendeine Partei ausser
| für yyyy Befehle eintreffen, dann verschwindet die
| andere Partei auch. Obowhl, eigentlich sollte ich die
| gleich mit rauskegeln. Das macht mich jetzt echt
| stinkesauer.
Wird vielleicht gar nicht noetig sein denn meine arme Partei stirbt in Raten und ich uberlege sowiso schon die ganze Zeit ob ich nicht einfach aufgebe und sie toete.
Ich wollte in den naechsten 2 Zuegen wenigstens eine Hand voll auf eine andere Insel retten. Aber dafuer haette ich wegen dem Hunger auf eurer Insel Zwischenstation machen muessen. Ich ahtte *censored* gebeten mit dir deswegen Kontakt aufzunehmen weil er sicherlich mehr Einfluss bei dir hat als ich. Aber da du ‘echt stinkesauer’ bist ist das dann wohl von vornherein zum scheitern verurteilt.
Yesterday, I had some time to work on the new Eressea. This game is going to be somewhere in between reusing the old gameplay and technology vs. a rewrite. People who have played Eressea will ercognize the game easily, production chains are similar, but it will nevertheless be a game that’s quite different from the one we’re all playing at the moment.
The first major change will be that there are two different types of units. Commoners are very much like the current units in Eressea, they can be units of different sizes, and their job is to produce things, fight battles, sail ships, etc. Commoners are lead by Heroes, which have special skills. Unlike right now, there will not be fixed limits on the amount of mages, alchemists, etc. that you can control, but instead a limit on the total number of heroes. If you decide to make an all-magician faction, you can do that, and if all your heroes should be knights, that’s possible as well.
Heroes will generate income through taxation or trade. They are the only units that can do so, other options like taxation, entertainment, or simply working have been removed. Different types of heroes get different amounts of money, and thus a magician might not be able to finance as many footsoldiers as a trader can. The decisions you make about the structure of your upper class will have secondary effects on the lower classes.
Upkeep has been removed. Instead, learning skills will cost money. Most skills are such that learning them really pays off, and recruiting more units than you can provide for is going to make very little sense.
Other things in the pipeline: New ship classes, new region types, new recruitment mechanisms, cities, strategic combat and warfare, modified economic system and a brandnew skillsystem.
We were way too late in contacting the press, which is why we’re only getting print reviews now, 2 months after the launch. Reviews are pouring in no that the press realized what we did just before Christmas, and I’ve listed a few scores below.
Check out gamerankings.com for more reviews once this entry gets outdated. In addition, we’ve gotten some cool awards last year:
Best MMORPG 2002 – Jive Magazine
Editor’s Choice Award – IGN
I’ve been interviewed by Player2Player about the Notum Wars booster pack. I really like direct interviews better, because you get more controll over where you want the conversation to go. For this one, they sent me a list of questions and I ansered them as best as I could.
Still, I’m happy enough with how it came out. I’m sure April liked the bit about the cheese.
We had a Dev Chat with Unknown Player last night. It was pretty cool, and a lot of people from all kinds of MMORPG companies were there. We had a couple of good questions about what it takes to get a job in the games industry, and how it’s like to work there, and as somebody who had done that not too long ago, I could contribute a few words about that.
I enjoy this kind of thing, talking to players. It’s not often that I get a chace, which is a shame.