The Joys of PC Games

Oh…that… I’ve reinstalled the various Infiity Engine games. I want to play them. But yeah, I kinda forgot how difficult it can be to run PC games that are older than a year or two. For one, after all these years there still isn’t an official no-CD patch for Baldur’s Gate 2 and the expansion pack. Worse, the old trusty Gamecopyworld doesn’t have a crack, either! The idea was kinda that I’d be playing these games on my laptop wheverever I am, and having to keep 4 different CDs in my pocket doesn’t sit particularly well with that. Which brings us to problem #2: none of these games support widescreen displays. So now I can either play a stretched game in fullscreen or a windowed 1600×1200 game with woefully tiny sprites and details. I tried the tiny stuff a bit yesterday and my eyes started to hurt – I guess I’ll go to a stretched display next.

Games for PC – Killing Momentum since 1984.

Now Playing: Titan Quest

I don’t play that many games anymore, so when a game hooks me for more than a few hours that’s a major accomplishment. By that token, Titan Quest has already done an incredible job. But I was predestined to play this game ever since it was announced. I have an affinity for Greek myths and anthropology. Combine that with a solid Diablo-type experience and I’m there the day the game goes on sale. Never mind that it took me almost three weeks just to get through the Greek part of the quest. That’s a different story. My actual problem is that now that I’m done with the Greek quest I don’t have any motivation to go back and finish the game even though I really want to want to. The experience curve in Titan Quest is well paced. It looks great. It’s easy to play. But unfortunately the game just kinda flattens out after a few hours. You just stand there clicking away without ever having to dodge anything (the first Telkin battle is a joke compared to the Diablo II bossfights), losing your companions (who do most of the work for you) isn’t penalized at all, and the economy is so out of whack that reaping in all the gold you find doesn’t add to the feeling of accomplishment. I never finish listening to the conversations because they’re non-quintessential to what I’m doing anyway. There’s only one way to follow and I’m following it because that’s where I get more experience, not out of motivation to further the story. But anyway, it’s hard to make great games and it’s easy to criticize them after they’re done (I should know). The point is this: I’m done playing about a third of Titan Quest, a game I really like – and what’s it’s really made me want to do is play Icewind Dale again.

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E3 2006

E3 2006. People, games and excitement in the LA heat. And Lair, on the big screen in the Sony Playstation 3 area. More pictures of the conference soon (Sunday). Online version of the trailer here.

A Postcard from GDC

As mentioned earlier there won’t be any online material from the GDC talk about Lair, but Victoria just got some pictures developed that she took during that time. Here’s one of me setting up before the talk. See, it’s almost like you’re there! No? Not really you say? Ah well…

Page Updates Resuming Soon!

Been busy! In the meantime, if you want to know what I’ve been working on: a screenshot of Lair made it to the web after GDC (click for 720p version).

Video Games Will End It All!

As you all know I am very busy corrupting America’s youth by creating video games. Of course that begs the question what I would have done if I hadn’t been born during this technological age? We all know that Rock’n Roll turned the youth into rabid Satan worshippers, and comic books have been breeding little criminals for several decades. But maybe I could have made my evil contribution to society’s downfall even earlier?
Wired has an article with choice quotes about various forms of entertainment that were introduced during the ages. According to those people, society should have crumbled by now…so excuse if I don’t take all the current video game nay-sayers too seriously. I mean, just look at what the Waltz did to us:

“The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced … at the English Court on Friday last … It is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous inter­twining of the limbs, and close com­pressure of the bodies … to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was con­fined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is … forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.”
- The Times of London, 1816

Oblivion Redux

Well, it looks like somebody in the GA forums (Hi!) picked up my Oblivion posting and ran it as a discussion topic. Which is okay by itself, but instead of discussing the points that I made in my opinion, the thread mostly degenerated into a discussion about my motives for posting what I posted in the first place. After all I work for a gaming company that’s creating what seems to be a fantasy title!

Guys, I understand the need for internet drama as much as the next person. I’ve been following and enjoying it for the better part of my internet career. But please – if you want to report on this story, please do it without prejudice. In which case it would go something like this (Warning, attack of the commas!):

Matthias Worch, who happens to work for a game company, today, in his private blog, posted an opinion of the PC version of Oblivion, a game that he admittedly only played for an hour and that several of his friends and former coworkers at Bethesda contributed artwork to.

Because really, that’s all I was trying to do, and it’s what I have been doing for the last 10 years. By turning this into a public debate with an implied undercurrent of “console war” you’re now forcing me to make the disclaimer that this is a private blog and that the opinions offered here in no way represents the opinion of my employer, Factor 5. You’re also putting me in the difficult position of not being able to speak my mind in the future – even though this page here still amounts to a private blog that is mostly read by family and friends.

As I mentioned in the last post, I have great respect for Bethesda. My old company Legend was in the same geographical area and several of my friends work in the art department over there. I have played all games in the Elder Scrolls series religiously. As I said earlier, I also expect to play Oblivion religiously once I’ve had a chance to really get into it and get past the (mostly cosmetic) initial dislikes. All my friends have been sucked in!
But I did feel that I made valid, if subjective, observations of the first hour of gameplay (in which I bested the initial dungeon and ran around the world and city a bit). Please feel free to agree or disagree with them, that’s what I have my (rarely used) comments thingie for. But when doing so please do it without insinuating ulterior motives on my part. I was not comparing Oblivion to anything but its own predecessor, and comparisons to other games (especially the ones my company works on) are unfair and very much not in the intention of this blogger.

BTW, I liked this reply: “That guy can think whatever the heck he wants. I could not care less. *goes back to playing Oblivion*” Exactly!

Now Playing: Oblivion

This is going to be a negative post about Oblivion, and I expect that precisely 99.9% of my readers will disagree with me on this one. So before you read any further I need you to understand just how much I want to like Oblivion. I loved Morrowind (and I played Arena and Daggerfall extensively back in the days, too!), I’ve been looking forward to Oblivion for a long time.

With that out of the way, and with the express understanding that this is not a dig at Bethesda, I have to say that I am seriously under whelmed by Oblivion’s first hour of gameplay. The 3D just does not look all that good, the UI feels crippled to account for the Xbox version and the game runs like ass on my GeForce 6800 (at least as soon as a character appears on screen). In 800×600, I might add, with video settings that the game auto-detected itself.

I could deal with bad framerate any day if I felt that I was playing something seriously impressive. Unfortunately the overall presentation just leaves me unimpressed. The main menu, UI and loading screens look unfinished and stylistically bad – as if somebody was doing a bad impression of the “old parchment” look that the last game used. It’s trying to be medieval classy but bright and friendly at the same time, and that just ain’t working for me. (Then there’s UI issues like the fact that I can’t ESCape out of menues or right-click the inventory away, but that’s just a side note.) Textures are blurry even at the High setting with no detail textures, the faces look artificial and disproportionate. The terrain, supposedly one of Oblivion’s major selling points, doesn’t look very good even with details maxed out. Anything more than a kilometer away is a huge, blurry texture mess. Never mind that I had to go through six or seven dungeon levels just to get to the surface…

A lot of criticism to level against such a popular game, I know. I just felt like sharing my first and honest impressions. Of course I’ll keep playing, and I still expect to love the game as much as the last one. But I seem to have been way too hyped up about this game so that the first playing session inevitably led to a letdown.

GDC Slides?

I’ve received a few requests for the GDC 06 lecture slides, and as much as I’d like to do that – the truth is that there just isn’t that much to release! The Powerpoint itself was only about 10 pages, the rest was life program demos in XSI, similar to what I did in 05. Last year I compensated by recording videos of what I did, but that won’t be possible this year. I’ll look into what can be arranged, but in the end the demo was one of those unfortunate “had to be there” affairs, I’m afraid. Sorry!

GDC Talk

Softimage have published their GDC 2006 plans, among them the Visual Arts talk by yours truly:

FrankenDragon Flies Again! Creating Playstation 3 Art for Lair
Special Guest: Factor 5.

Location: Room C4
Time: 09:00-10:00AM
Presenter: Matthias Worch

A big part of the industry now knows what it means to create “next-generation content”, but many lessons that come with the new workflow are still learned the hard way. In this presentation, Matthias Worch from Factor 5 looks at the highly detailed creatures and environments of Lair, Factor 5′s upcoming Playstation 3 title, and how Factor 5 used SOFTIMAGE|XSI v.5.0 to solve various problems that cropped up during development.

About Factor 5:
Based in San Rafael, California, originally founded in Germany in 1987 and privately held, Factor 5 LLC is a leading developer of interactive entertainment software and technology for a variety of console and computer platforms. Among the company’s many successful titles is the multi-million selling Star Wars®: Rogue Squadron™ line of games for LucasArts Entertainment Company and the classic Turrican® series.
With the imminent arrival of the next generation of console and handheld technology Factor 5 has multiple game and technology projects in production for major console manufacturers.

For more information, visit www.factor5.com

Hope to see you there. The GDC page should be updated soon, as well.