MMMMMMOOOORRRPPPPPGGRR?

What you say? MMORPGER? What is that, well its basically a MMO role playing game, I wanted to add some feed back on some MMOs Ive been either playing for years or played for 20minutes. Here is the list;

Eve-Online
World of Warcraft (WoW)
Face of Mankind
Global Agenda
Warhammer Online
Planetside
Tabula-Rasa

Can you guess which ones I'm either still playing or quit in a fit of raaaagee?





Eve-Online is still my top favorite MMO, playing it nearly 3 years so far and I'm still loving it now! Face of Mankind, Awesome game, played the beta stages and was sad to hear not so long ago that the Dev's making it lost their funding. However I think a new studio or someone has taken it over, so its back into production with a new game engine (hopefully better than the AvP engine they were using before). Global Agenda, recent addition to the MMO world, not many people have seen or heard of it, its a fast paced FPS futuristic shooter currently in the alpha testing staging which I'm lucky enough to be part of but I cant discuss more you will have to find out more for yourself (I'll post links at the bottom of the blog). Warhammer online, awesome concept, love Warhammer 40k so I can take to Warhammer fantasy. But shitty, really bad publishers (GOA) managed to kill the game before it took off. They couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, keep well clear of that one. Planetside was a amazing until SOE killed it with update that seem to drive off the community, i remember the days of huge battle over different continents but it soon became a slow grind fest for the same continents over and over. Tabula-Rasa lol, its dead already. Played it for 3 days, uninstalled it and never looked back. WoW I played for 20mins, tried to get into it, hated the art style and the grind fest.

So in conclusion Eve-Online is the safest bet. Try it, theres a 14 day trial!
Also keep an eye on Global Agenda and Face of Mankind.

http://www.globalagendagame.com/
http://www.eve-online.com/
http://www.faceofmankind.com/

I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit, its the only way to be sure (week 24 FINAL WEEK)

\o/

Well yes this is the end of my tasked blogging and I am asked to review my course and how it could be improved for next year.

Well like i said in the previous blog (week 21 i think) Ive enjoyed my course, found it to be a brilliant experiance and i couldnt of asked for more....but i will.

However the improvements i think the could be implemented for next year or whenever is more work shop days or just 2 more teaching days. I found having some wednesday off then thursday and friday off abit much (i know im at uni but when im not doing anything thats set on these days im not doing alot). But thats not really abiggie. First ive found 3Dmax a bitch to get to grips with prehaps one day extra going through some fundemental parts of max we should know? But the sound of doing more basic arts like sculpture etc etc does sound extremely enjoyable. I dont mean to sound harsh but thats just the why i word things. But again i want to point out this course has opened my eyes and given me the lift i needed to start my journey to wherever im going in life!

Caek? (week 23)

Yay week off this week ^___^. However i wanted to add something about the GDC from the words of Zero Punctuation.

GDC (week 22)

Ok well, the GDC came and went by the time I started to write this blog so im gunna have alot of trouble finding out about last years GDC seeing as the GDC website is mainly covering '08s GDC. However I understand they covered Bungees built up hype over HALO and using Ilovebees.com to advertise is a extremely different way to other game companies. This to me is brilliant way to keep consumers wanting more and wanting to find out more about the game before it is released.

However I know my course leader was at the GDC, i cant remember whether or not he spoke at the GDC. However it would be nice one year to check out the GDC and see what its all about and how it documents current activities of current game designers.

So one year... yes one year i will go. Then i can write here all about it and pass this topic :D.

My Goals in life and where i want to go (week 21)

Well Ive always pursued what i enjoy in life, so this current time in my life reflects on what i want to do in my future as a game artist. However since Ive been studying on my Game Art course at university Ive seen the pros and cons of working within the creative industry such as game art.

Ive thoroughly enjoyed the art side of things, being able to explore my strength and weaknesses within my course. Ive found things to be alot harder than others in my first year. However as my first year is coming to an end soon I have found it a massive struggle trying to keep up with the work and enduring the massive learning curve Ive had to cope with since i started uni.

Theres things i wish i done before i came to uni that would of helped me more when i started, however hindsight is a beautiful thing. But yet i still try to take every day as it comes when it boils down to my uni course and my experiences. You can plan all you want in life but the best laid plans when they come into play can become FUBAR so you just have to roll with it.

After my course ends in the third year, I want to study the art i most enjoy and this is concept art (having the ability to come up with fresh new ideas). This mainly applies to the game industry however I've always wanted to be designing art for a company called Games Workshop. I love and especially enjoy the art works for their game called War hammer 40,000. As a child I wondered over the amazing art pieces and the spectacle that is WH40K. I was able to become indulged within the stories of this fantasy world and i still am today.

But like I said, i want to pursue my artist ability future and experiment more, Ive been looking at further education that studies concept art. A place on the web called ConceptArt.org runs a 2 year class in America that takes you on the journey of learning and creativity within concept art which I'm seriously thinking about taking after university. Hopefully this course may better myself in the field that i enjoy most. However again like i said above I like to take each day as it comes so I will see whats on offer when I finish my course, I don't what to set my sights to high but disappointment is only another stone to step over.

At the moment I'm really enjoying my course and uni, its taught me things i may not of know of, however its quickly come to me that its also a self teaching process you have to experience in able to get the fullest out of my course. You have to constantly be able to put a pencil to paper and come up with new ideas and then use different types of media (i.e. 3DsMAX or Photoshop) to get the right results.

So to conclude, where will I be in three years time once Ive finished uni? I don't know, but i know one thing for certain I will be doing something I enjoy.

Creativity (week 20)

What role does creativity have today? Where does it come from? Where is it most used? Where is it taught?

Creativity is what built our world today. Its the day to day things that we use, like planes, cars, toasters etc etc. Some brilliant mind said "hey what if..." and those words lead to the objects we have and use today. Without creativity we would still be stuck in the stone ages, or even before then because we wouldnt of found stone and though of creative ways in how we can use it! See where im going with this?

However today creativity seems like its been push back, for example why are maths and science still more important than art or graphic design? Even in math you have to be creative. However Art intodays class rooms, or back when I was at school it still was being taught in the wrong ways in my opinion. I hated my art teacher at secondary school and the constraites she put on us. Like we could only paint a picture from a certain topic the teacher had set. How is that going to lead to creative and let the pubil express their ideas and emotions into something they dont understand properly or dont care for? Even when I found a topic that covered my areas of intrest in my final years at secondary school in my mock GCSEs (Also schools only seem to care for exams result these days) I will stil locked in a area i was alloud to use. The topic for the mock GSCEs we had to choose from were Eyptian art, Graffti (modern art or something) and a few others I cant remember.

However I was happy enough to choose the subject of graffti, I really enjoyed this "topic", however my teacher still didnt understand enough in this area. A friend of mine did an amazing piece using ths same "topic" as I. But still came under fire from the teacher as not being propper "art". Wait a minute! How can you classifly what is art and what isnt. So what I'm trying to say is even in a creative class, creativity is still being depressed and this sickens me. Why should people conform to ideas of another when they just want to experiment? If they did so would they be called mad? stupid? Da Vinci was probaly called mad when he created the diagrams for his "flying machines".

Heres a video which my current teach whos mad on the subject of creativity in schools showed me in class recently. Sir Ken Robinson talks about the subject, it opens your eyes! http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

After watching this video again, I can clearly see what Sir Ken Robinson is talking about and how it related to my past education at first and secondary school. Creativity is being taughty wrongly or not even at all, its such an important aspect in day to day life.

Students Vs Students (week 19)

Hmm tough one this, whats the main difference between companies wanting people who have 3 years back ground in the nessary programs etc or a liberal art degree?

Ok well in my case im not the latter, its the former. The amount of companies ive seen wanting people with the minium of 3 years experiance or more is alot. Ive hardly come across any companies wanting just a degree in arts. However i think is done to the quality of the art that is sumbited by a student and also the mood in which the employers are in and the fact of what art the student is into that fits with their critera within the games company.

To be honest its a hard call to make whos best at the end of the day. For example Ben Mathis who is a very talented artist and who recently made an appareance at my university (stay for a week checking out our work and set us a task to do) is a top game designer. He currently works for CCP who produce Eve-Online MMO (which im a massive fan of), hes also helped produce the well known tony hawks series and a mass load of other games we have all played in the past. So would you say "this guys gotta have a degree in some sort of art?". Well no he hasnt, which was a big shock to me, he wasnt the student type he basically worked at what he loved and did best. So he didnt need a degree in whatever to be able to land him the job he has today.

Sounds in game (week 18)

How important are sounds in game? To be honest they are pretty important to me, sound can define a game. Like tonight after checking out my mates PS3 current desktop theme with the whole Metal Gear Solid theme i was able to remember the sounds from the first MSG i played on the PS1. Also theres some people in my class with the ! sound from the MGS game as a text alert tone.

Sometimes but not all the time sounds can trigger epic memories from games of your childhood but still they are a extremely important part of game play. As an example in Counter-Strike, sounds play a crucial roll. Being able to identify and enemy's foot steps and his location within a map can be a matter of life or death in the game that is counter-strike. However coming to recognise these sounds as significant is a whole different story. So yes, to answer my initial question sounds in games are what make the game. Would you really want to be mowing down tons of enemy's in some epic first person shooter with some BFG that has pewny little sounds to it? no, you wouldn't you need beefy sounds to enhance game play to its max!

My blogs

Ok Sorry to whom ever has to read my blogs but the weeks are messed up (thanks to blogger). So if you do need any assitance finding certain blogs (weeks) please give me a shout.

thanks

Story time! (week 8)

Story lines in games, important or not?

Yes to me story lines in games are what sell them to me. For example the story line in Halo was epic. I know people hated (well some people) Halo, however for me it was as i said and epic game with an excellent story line that just kept me hooked to it. Again for Half-life, the weird twists and turns just made you want to play the game more and more. Its all the same for all the games I play. However Counter-Strike was different, there were no story lines to it (even though the devs tried to create one for Counter-Strike condition zero but failed horribly and I got rejected by the community like a ginger step child). But Counter-Strike (CS) had playability and was one of the games that took off with E-Sports and the idea behind playing CS at a level where you became world famous.

However in some MMO games there are always storys line and back stories. However these are generally for Role players who enjoy taking a break from whatever they do in real life and pretending to be someone else in another world. They then choose who they want to become after reading about a characters back story so they can fit within the role easier.

However some games have amazing graphics engine and a piss poor story line tend to fail badly.
So yes a decent story line is needed in todays games!

Dont shoot me im just an air director! (week 7)

The importance of experience for an art director within a games company is crucial these days. Compared to yester year anyway. An art director should be knowledgeable in all sorts of fields of art. From simple pencil and paper to 3D animations etc etc. If the role of the art director is lacking then the game is lacking in my honest opinion, just look at Ubisofts Tom Clancy francise for a start and don't get me started on Ghost recon!

The difference between say a films art director and a games art director is vastly different in the fact that art in today's games is what sells the games. Generally art in films are second to effects and actors. An art directors roll within a games company also has to be creative, to enable creativity to those who server under you, you therefore also have to be creative and able to get ideas and points across to your different teams in your game design company. If anyone is looking to become an art director in the future then I think they have to have a large quantity of charisma, nothing better than working for someone you like and respect, but they also have to be able to get people working effectively in a team. They also have to acknowledge people weaknesses and be able to put them into an environment where they excel in.

From Pong to Next-Gen (week 6)

So, heres a question what makes pong so different from a game like FEAR or Battlefield 2? Gameplay? Graphics? Game Engine? etc etc. Well all these factors contribute to the differences of the games i just mentioned.

However there is one aspect that makes Pong so different from FEAR is freedom. Yes freedom, basically the way we interact with the game, i.e. mods, cheats, patches and freedom to do what you want (sort of) within the game. Early games like Pong were extremely liner. You could only do the one thing within the constraints of the game. However today a group of people can take a newly released game and change it into something completely different. This is the big difference between pong and fear.

Game Reviews (week 5)

For some reason Blogger has missed weeks 5 to 8 of my blog entries therefore i have to rewrite the lot. yay ¬_¬.

Ok Game reviews are boring, but they are the only method to use when talking about a new game. To be honest, i never really take note of any game reviews, i like what i like. Most time a game that gets extremely over hyped is bollocks. Many a time had this happend to me in the past, so now i really couldnt care for reviews, also this style of "new journalism", which tells the read a story of the experiance instead of a bog standard review.

To be honest this also sounds rubbish, im sorry but i cant stand for game reviews they do my head in. Best info i can give to anyone is try it, if you dont like it dont play it.

Game Engines (week Seventeen)

Game engines today are more complex than games engines 5 years ago, i can easily say that. However today's game engines are excellent in the fact of modding etc etc. Since the dawn of the Half-Life engine the amount of mods and games made using this engine was incredible and the same goes today for the Unreal Engines, Half-Life 2 engine and the newest and most stunning, the Cry engine.

Game engines are of course what makes the game and gives it the WOW/OMG/WTFBBQBRINGTHEBEAR factor. Using the first Half-life engine as an example, looking back at it, its not very pretty, but the things that were made possible using the engine and modding it were fantastic. If it wasn't for the HL engine and Counter-Strike i wouldn't be writing this sh!t blog :D.

Also the availability of today's game engines gives game developers the choice of whether they want their game on a certain engine to look a certain way or not. They can try and test the engines before buying which makes their efforts extremely easily to get a foothold in the game industry. However some of the key issues for next-gen game engine developers is "when will it stop?". Most likely answer is never, how real are the games engines going to get before humankind is satisfied.

Gaming Cultures (week Sixteen)

Since the dawn of games there has been some sort of gaming culture, since my discovery of online games when I was at school I was part of the Counter-Strike gaming culture. It was a very social culture depending on how involved you became. You could of been involved in the whole clan culture or not. Since my Counter-Strike days Ive been involved in many gaming cultures such as a Battlefield 2 tournament, I was heavily involved with this tournament and I enjoyed my days playing Battlefield 2 with friends I made online.
However two years ago I became involved with Eve-Online, now MMO cultures I find are very different and vast compared to, say the CS community culture. Using Eve-Online as an example of a vast culture. However you could argue that there are sub-cultures within Eves main culture, such as people from different countries integrating some of their own real life cultures into the game itself. Within Eve-Online the Galaxy's are split into Empire (npc controlled) and 0.0 or lawless space (controlled by real people). The lawless space is controlled by different alliances and all alliances are controlled again by real life people. Different alliances have different cultures and social structures. All alliances are made up by smaller groups of people, these are called Corporations (clans). These "corps" can have 10 to 500 people within them, generally they join alliances that have the same ideas, structure and culture as themselves.
I know of one corp within Eve that use Communism to run their corp and it works in a virtual environment which again is experimenting in a real time environment with different real life cultures and ideas.
Some online cultures can have alot of power and influence certain real life aspects, for an example the recent launch of the chocolate bar called Whisper. It was relaunched due to a group on Facebook that became very large in numbers of people asking the manufacturer to bring back the chocolate bar.
The biggest difference between real life cultures and Internet/online cultures is that the person doesn't have to be physically part of that culture, they can share views via the Internet and other media and everyday the Internet is getting bigger and bigger. Therefore Internet cultures and should not be underestimated.

The Game Industry (Week 15)

Back in the day, the Game industry was pretty tiny compared to the size it has grown today, before it was coders etc etc, nowadays its mainly specialist roles such as art directors, concept art, character modelers, environmental modelers etc. The Game Industry has come on leaps and bonds since the days of sweaty blokes stuck in their rooms writing code (well sorta still the same but instead of one bloke OR women its a team of them these days).

Today's Game Industry is all about the money (in someways). Budgets and Deadlines are a must for producing a game to be ready for the shelf in your local Game store. Different teams of people all work to the same goal but work on different aspects of creating a game (warning EA dig) unless its EA and they still seam to lack an quality control department but I wont get into that D:

Most people who start a new job in the games industry, start as a generalist employee. This means they work on some basic projects and help tie up loose ends, such as making 100 trees for environments, skinning buildings but these may depend on what role in the company the person has applied for. Generally it takes a certain amount of years before someone can specialise in a certain field in the games industry, unless they show outstanding knowledge and skill within a certain aspect of game design. An example of this is a Character modeler, they could start as a low poly modeler then specialise in high poly character modeling showing results that are near to pure realism.

Some companies within the game industry sub let some of their work to outside contractors, generally these contractors could be another games company working in the eastern European block or Asia where the wages are considerably lower. The reason for this is that the main games company may be working on a very tight budget and need to let some of the more basic work out to these type of contractors.

This new type of game design may have negative effects on the Game Industry in the Future, where games no longer are pieces of art but become mearly a means of wealth. The ability to churn out games at a fast rate may kill the games industry, but I may be talking like the Apocalypse is just around the corner.

Gameplay in.....Games would you believe! (week eleven)

Gameplay... One of the most important factors in a game, the game could have the most shiny and real life visuals and engine in the world but if the gameplay is piss poor then forget it. "Explain what Gameplay really is then!" I hear you shout from behind your monitors, Gameplay is... hmmm. Gameplay is what you find enjoyable in the game itself. It could range from Story, characters, shiney objects, physic engine (even though im slightly contradicting myself from my above statement), weapons, vehicles etc etc, Its anything you enjoy. Back in the day when I was a Counter-Strike Kiddie (thus nearly destroying my life at school and not doing homework). I was hooked with the gameplay within Counter-Strike, the hours I put into the damn game, because I felt it was enjoyable, improving my skills with certain weapons and playing clan matches was MY gameplay aspect I found enjoyable and worthwhile. It had no story line, no character development just pure owning the other player sat behind another computer in another country, also teabagging him was an extra enjoyment! But I wont get into that.

However during my vast time as a Counter-Strike Kid I can recall there being some sort of retail release of the game that had a story line and Bots to shoot, like an average crap FPS. There was uproar from the CS Community, "What crap!", "Don't touch it!" were the cry of every CS player at the time. The game was intended to introduce new players or milk the CS franchise at much as possible. This was an example of new introduced Gameplay that was not welcome, you see some games, when highly enjoyed by the community of players should not be touched and "remade" by the original developers. Even though they think they are somehow improving on it, it wont. It generally destroys original gameplay, thing that people found enjoyable and enjoy playing again and again.

So my conclusion is that Gameplay is simply fun...

Story and Characters in Games (Week 10)

All Characters in games, movies and books have certain effects on people who interact with them or watch them. Characters are designed to express emotions and other behavioural properties we recognise in every day life. That is why people become attached and feel like they also experience the same emotional processes the character endures during a movie, game or book.
I personally believe the first games I grew up with I felt an emotional bond with during my childhood, some sort of respect as I believed some characters as real people and I loved to emurce myself into the game I was playing. Take for instants the first ever consol game I played. Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega MegaDrive (what a consol). I fell in love with that game and back then I could easily understand the story line and other asspects of the game because of the character I could relate to.

However during the big gap between my early childhood and teenage.....age. There were many games I played which superiorly lacked the character, player bond. Some of these games I hated, for an example Sim City, i know its a town full of people but I couldnt give a damn, I just enjoyed abusing my population, because thats all they were, a figure, a number which represented people. During the past 10 or so years Game developers have made character interaction and development a key process in selling their games. Another example of this is Half-Life, even though poor old Gorden Freeman was born without a voice box, you still felt compled to sit for hour upon hours at your PC and play through the game!
Again with HALO, I couldnt wait for the second installment and the third even though so many people bashed the shit out of it, I didnt care because im a sad fan boy.