Rejoice my children! My time-table is no longer full of twisting, time devouring juggernauts. I shall make it my first order of business to return this sorry page to its' former glory, expect at least one post a week again - and let us get this straight, if there is only a single post in a week, it will be large enough to be easily viewed from space.
During our extended interlude I missed my chance to talk about many things that I would love to discuss in detail here, the death of the Duke, E3 and... well, those two are the main ones really. But both are sprawling subjects, and have both been discussed to death, as previously stated, I have missed my window of opportunity. Instead of dwelling on that, I decided that I would steer this post in a different direction, don't worry it will be completely unrelated to work being done here, as per usual.
Sacred 2 has been recommended to me by quite a few people whose opinions I trust, they admit that it is a really buggy game, that the occasional ability is useless, and that the restrictions on the Co-op that usually prevents you playing with your friends is annoying. But they still talk about it so enthusiastically, I look into the eyes of these men and I can tell that talking to me is hurting them, that every moment away from that game is like a punch in the eye. Every moment spent in the outside world is nothing but a test of strength for these people, the reward for passing being another slice of the drug that they crave so dearly.
Observing the effect on these people, people who are much less inclined to get hopelessly addicted to any single game, I concluded that I really shouldn't pick Sacred 2 up. None of these men even felt Word of Warcraft's terrible grip, they dipped their toes into the pool and managed to withdraw without an intervention, satisfied with the experience but not looking for more, whereas I start jonesing for a hit of it roughly every four months.
Having come to this conclusion it was obvious that I had but one choice, I made my peace with my deity of choice and ordered the unholy disc from Amazon. You can tell it hasn't arrived yet because I'm writing this post instead of slowly rocking to and fro.
This post could use even more tangents, lets create some.
I'm sure that admitting that I've never played any of the Diablo series, which Sacred is quite obviously imitating, is just another way of saying that I'm letting the side down in entirely unforgivable ways, but I have at least sampled a couple of its' tribute acts. An old Westwood studios game, Nox, is the first to come to mind.
Nox was great for many reasons, but the one I want to explore is its' multiplayer offerings, which were surprisingly robust considering the how old it is, and its' genre. You would expect it to feature only some form of half -arsed Co-op and maybe Deathmatch. It also boasted a few others though, my favorite being named oddball (Think football/soccer with more knights and hell demons), but Oddball isn't really what I want to talk about, I just wanted a chance to inform everyone of the following; remember the dick who summoned the carnivorous plants in front of the goal? Yeah, that was me.
What I really want to draw your attention to was the obligatory half-arsed Co-op, which was surprisingly not half-arsed. Nox Quest, as the hip kids called it, was an infinite dungeon of sorts, that up to sixteen players could band together to tackle, to balance out the huge number of potential players the difficulty ramps up pretty hard, by level twenty five the game had started populating the dungeon with obelisks which every thirty seconds spawned a copy of the single player campaign's final boss.
The coolest thing was the players in that game, In a safe zone once I mentioned to another player how I was saving up to buy a particular spell which was pretty expensive. The other player immediately informed me that he had a spare of that spell book and gave it to me, for free, bare in mind that this was a spell book he could trade for a fair bit of coin. This is a genre of game notorious for its' selfish players, who happily scoop up all of the loot on a level, regardless of whether their class can use it, but on multiple occasions on Nox I had people pull me aside and have conversations along the lines of: "Hey man, I notice you keep summoning stone golems, you may want to give this steel golem scroll a whirl, don't sweat it, just have it." (I played a Conjurer, because I don't like dying and the force of nature is the single greatest thing since time itself).
This happened to me so many times that it was a practice I got into once I started getting a fair bit of money or finding loot that I couldn't use, I would even buy extra lives for players running low occasionally, I'd give away any repeats of spell books I came across. The people I gave to, or at least quite a few of them, then started to do the same, then those who they gave to followed suit, etc, etc.
The point I'm trying to make is that a friendly player base is self perpetuating, as a designer there isn't much you can do to keep the bad apples away, but there are things you can do to encourage the good ones. What started as a couple of guys handing out free spell books in Nox turned into an entire legion of players making sure that each of their allies is as good as they can possibly be, these are the people who are going to see the high-end content, the jerks never will, and the jerks will fall off the band wagon.
This was a long post. Possibly the longest ever made here. I went off on many tangents, then a tangent or two within those tangents, so to summarise:
- I'm back, but I can't speak for the others
- Sacred 2 could be the end of me
- Conjurers ftw
- Good player bases are self perpetuating
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