Witchboy's Cauldron

december 6th, 2000

dx mp

the dx mp patch is out! it's very cool to see people on the net finally playing it.

major kudos to the dx mp team: monte "Am I Hot or Not" martinez, matt baer, chris carollo, ricardo bare, clay hoffman, dane caruthers, rob kovach, andy dombrowski and (last but not least) the amazing alex duran (duran). the team, made up of dx1 developers plus some newly acquired staff members from Looking Glass, worked hard to pull it together. (they will now move over and join us on dx2 and thief3, full time, at last!)

the game plays more tactically than most mp fpp games. many people have commented on this so far. (for the team, this was paramount.) in response to specific comments about the movement rate of the player character, dx designer ricardo bare says this, "The player speed is the way it is for two major reasons. We wanted to encourage gameplay that was more about strategic decisions rather than twitch skills. Also, the player speed is tuned to our various tools, skills, weapons, and augmentations."

one of our principal motivations in releasing the mp patch was, of course, to facilitate the dx mod community. we're really psyched about what people will do with the dx tools over the next year.

anyway, if you like dx, go check out the mp (which includes deathmatch and team deathmatch with the dx character skills, weapons, tools and nanotech augmentations).

http://www.fileplanet.com/index.asp?file=52961

ps) just finished an _amazing_ book called House of Leaves. i am now very disturbed. be careful--the greater your imaginative abilities, the more powerful the book is.

-witchboy

august 16th, 2000

partying in haunted houses--part one

Would a haunted house be more chilling if you were alone or if you were with a group?
First-person-perspective immersive simulation games often put you in a creepy, hostile environment and allow you to meticulously explore that environment at your own pace. (See System Shock, Realms of the Haunting or Thief for good examples.) Part of the fun involved is the scary stimulation that results from being alone and in peril.
Immersive sims are more engaging in this way than, say, an old Myst clone: The fact that the space is simulated in 3D allows you to wander about in the game as you would in the real world, interacting with objects and observing things in real time. Because the experience is so similar to movement and awareness in the real world, you can forget you're playing a game for a while and get really engrossed.
If the game has been tuned and balanced to cater to a more cautious, exploratory speed, moving at your own pace can also contribute to suspense. Creeping through the halls in Thief is not as sheerly enjoyable as it is due to some game-development-process accident. The team at Looking Glass worked out a lot of design issues that contributed, very deliberately, to slowing down the pace of the game, allowing for greater suspense and more tension-based drama.
Ideally, when playing games like these, the player is sitting in a room alone, lights out and sound cranked up, completely focused on the game, to the exclusion of the world outside. When you're immersed like this, the game is more engaging and is capable of scaring the hell out of you. (If you're a fan of immersive sims and you played through the 'Hydroponics' level in System Shock 2, you know what I'm talking about.)
Essentially games like the ones described above provide a really interactive haunted house experience.
So what happens when one of your friends joins you? Will the atmosphere that makes these games what they are be utterly destroyed? What happens when you aren't alone any more and you don't dictate the pace of the game? The Haunted House question I posed at the start definitely has ramifications for adding immersive sims.
(To Be Continued)

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