I think “ultimate spycraft fantasy” is up to each person’s imagination. To me, none of the Bond stuff is really spycraft. It’s more fantasy action-adventure with an espionage theme.
Even IO Interactive’s Hitman franchise is less action-adventurey than a typical Bond movie. AFAIK, the way most people play that game, if you have to use a loud gun on a level, you’ve basically failed.
What I’d like to see from an “ultimate spycraft fantasy” are things like Dead Drops, searching for bugs in a room, maybe saying something out loud that the bugs will pick up to fool the eavesdroppers, using burner phones, catching an enemy spy based on a flaw in their disguise / accent / behaviour, slipping a tracking device onto someone or something, etc.
To me, never getting noticed is the cool part of spy / stealth games. 007 is pretty much the opposite of that.
To me, Hitman is more stealthy than the action-adventure world of Bond. Like, it’s possible (even rewarded) to finish an entire Hitman level with no dead bodies, no alarms raised, and nobody knowing that anybody was assassinated. I can’t really see a Bond game where there’s no shootouts, no car chases, no parkour type action, etc.
It’s certainly possible to play Hitman that way. You have access to loud guns etc. But, the game design seems to be that if you’re resorting to loud guns – or even if you get noticed, you’re not doing it the right way.
What I’d like to see is a Hitman-style game focused on espionage instead of assassination. Like, sneak in somewhere, plant a bug, then get out. Or, extract an asset from a hostile country without anybody noticing. Or, photograph the secret documents without raising any alarms. You could easily do all that with the Hitman engine. It would just require a little adjusting of the mission scripting and the victory conditions for the various levels.
If money weren’t an issue, I could understand it. You could invite friends and/or family to come over and stay as long as they’d like. If you wanted some time to yourself, they wouldn’t even have to leave, they could just stay in one of the guest-houses for a while.
You could have any kind of special hobby room you wanted. Martial arts dojo? Sure. Home theater? Sure. Laser tag room? Sure. Dance studio? Why not? Kitchen with every kind of tool, multiple ovens, multiple stoves? Of course! Workshop? Why not. Cozy knitting room with every kind of yarn imaginable? Great!
Some kind of good cause you wanted to support? Give them an entire wing of the place. Feel bad for a marginalized group like refugees? Hand over one of the many buildings for their use.
Overall, the world would probably be a better place if no person / family had this much wealth. But, that doesn’t mean that I’d hate to have a place like that if I happened to be insanely wealthy.
I was just thinking that, but you’d have to rewind the whole world, not just your own experiences.
What made WoW amazing at the beginning was that it was new to everyone, not just you. MMOs in general were new. The Internet was relatively new. People didn’t know about data mining, and those who did weren’t used to being able to share everything they knew with every other player out there. Also, sharing video was brand new. YouTube itself launched in 2005, and Justin.tv (which became Twitch in 2011) would only launch in 2007. Theorycrafting didn’t really exist, so people just relied on their experiences and went with the bigger numbers, or sometimes ignored the numbers and went with the cooler looking weapon.
So, you were left with figuring out a lot of stuff on your own. Realm firsts were a big deal because it was mostly people on your own realm you interacted with, and you got to know them, and if another realm had done something first, you might not even have heard about it. If your realm had a certain way of handling a PvE fight, or a strategy for a certain battleground, it might just be a quirk of your realm. There was just a lot less information available outside the game, and so you had to figure things out inside the game.
A friend of mine (hunter, naturally) didn’t know about equipping new gear until he hit level 30 or so. There was no armory page to inspect him, no gear score, no typical DPS expectations for a level 30 toon. It took one of us randomly right-clicking on his dude when he was next to us to notice all his gear was greys, and to ask him about it in voice chat (Teamspeak? Roger Wilco?) to find out he’d just been stuffing his new greens in his bag and forgetting about them.
Now, people just don’t play MMOs the same way. Devs know that everything they add will be datamined and everyone will know the new stuff as soon as it’s available in the game. There’s one well known strategy for every boss. There’s one well known talent build. If you choose to go in and face a raid boss blind, it’s because you chose to do that, and chose not to watch the hours and hours of boss kill videos there are from the competitive guilds that killed the bosses in beta.
I responded to another comment here about it. WoW and other MMOs would be my choice – but to make it any fun you’d have to rewind the whole world. Not only get rid of wowhead, wowwiki, raider.io etc., but get people to forget they ever existed, forget how to do data mining so effectively. Also get rid of streaming and video sharing services so that you had the chance of discovering things on your own. You wouldn’t be the first, but you wouldn’t know that.
Shadow of the Colossus is a good one. Up until that point, I’d never played a game that felt like that. You didn’t feel like an awesome, powerful hero destroying monsters, instead you felt like you had to make a tough choice to destroy beautiful creatures.
I just finished Dishonored 2 for the first time. I played it like 6 years ago, got to the second-last mission, and realized that even though I’d been playing ultra stealthy and non-violent, somehow someone I knocked out had died in an earlier mission, so I wasn’t going to get the stealth achievements so I shelved it.
This time, I’d forgotten enough so I started from the beginning again, remembered to keep checking the stats page to ensure I was fully stealthy, fully non-violent, and got to the end with the achievements.
The funny thing is that the game gives you so many ways to play – lots of gun upgrades, lots of ways of disposing of bodies, lots of health boosts and strength boosts. But, I play my way, and so both runs I did ultra stealthy, no killing. I’ve played almost the entire game twice, and have no idea what most of the powers are like because they’re oriented around combat / killing, not stealth.
I didn’t play it, so I don’t know, but I assume it’s the same. The only way to really play it again like it was then would be to have everyone else forget everything they’ve learned about MMOs for the last 24 years.
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power.
This is actually pretty big. I never liked me and my friends getting raided by people who played for 2000 hours and memorized PvP mechanics, I might give this game another shot.
The various worlds mostly seem completely empty. You can see 10x as many ghost and skeleton ships as you see human-controlled ships, and even those are somewhat rare. In most MMOs you’re constantly seeing other players. In Sea of Thieves you can do a whole hour-long quest and never see another player.
Human-controlled ships aren’t marked on the map unless they’re flying the reaper flag. But, people who fly the reaper flag are extremely into PvP, so most people who aren’t also into PvP avoid them. And, they’re easy to avoid because they’re visible on the map. The Reapers only see others on the map if those others are flying level 5 “emissary” flags, showing they’ve been doing quests for a certain faction for a at least an hour of in-game time.
A single quest in Sea of Thieves can easily take half an hour. A quest chain can take a couple of hours. You mostly only get quest rewards at the end of a quest by turning treasure in. If your ship is sunk you lose all the treasure, cannon balls, food and wood you had on board. For a short time the stuff is floating in the ocean where anybody can pick it up. But, there’s no cost to replace / repair your entire ship including anything bolted to it like cannons.
That means that a pirate out hunting for other players has nothing to lose if they’re sunk – maybe 5k gold in supplies (cannonballs and food) if they bought them instead of just searching barrels and everything to gain – potentially the entire haul of whoever they sink. Meanwhile, a pirate at the end of a quest chain has everything to lose, all the treasure from the quests they just completed could be 300k gold, and nothing to gain by winning a PvP battle. If they sink a PvP pirate after them they maybe get some cannonballs, that’s it. That doesn’t encourage epic naval battles, it encourages the one with treasure on board to sprint for the nearest outpost and try to unload and sell quickly.
The sprints to the outpost are also not all that interesting. Since the cannons are only on the sides of the ships, neither the pursuer or the pursued can shoot at each-other. NPC ghost ships can drop mines that players chasing them have to avoid. But, human ships don’t have that option. So, it becomes a sailing race, but a sailing race in a sailing game with very dumbed-down sailing mechanics. (You can sail directly into the path of the wind, for example).
IMO, the game needs a re-think of PvP overall. But, what I want might be too radical a shift from what they have designed.
I think there should be some overall factions that were like the major nations in the actual age of piracy: the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and so-on. The players could be privateer-type pirates working under the protection of one of these major factions. That would mean you could see more people when you’re out in the game, but that you wouldn’t have to worry about FFA PVP if you were in an area of the map where your faction had control. But, of course, any lucrative mission would mean leaving the safe area and venturing out either into the open sea, or into another faction’s area. That would make the game world seem less empty. As a privateer you might have to turn over some / most of the value of your treasure haul to your faction. In exchange for their protection (especially things like cannons around their harbors) you’d take a smaller cut of anything you brought in.
Of course, there would also be Free For All PVP pirate players who didn’t belong to any faction and who used secret pirate bases, but being FFA PVP pirates, they could turn on each-other at any time. A true pirate base might shoot at an incoming ship belonging to a major faction, but wouldn’t protect one FFA PVP pirate from another FFA PVP pirate. But, the benefit would be that any treasure they found would be all theirs, with no cut to their faction. The risk would be no “insurance” on their ships. Any ship they lost would cost them dearly.
In terms of combat, the ships in Sea of Thieves should have chaser guns – guns in the bow and stern of ships. Just like real pirate ships, these should be much smaller and less powerful than the main guns, but would give something to do while chasing / being chased. Dropping mines should also be an option for the ship being chased, but also dropping treasure should be easier, so that you could try to bribe whoever was chasing you. (They’d have to make it so that to pick up this treasure the chasing boat would have to cut off the chase for a minute or two – right now you could harpoon that treasure without slowing down).
Edited to add: The amount of treasure you have on board should also affect your handling. A treasure heavy ship should be slightly slower and slightly less maneuverable than an empty ship. The more treasure you piled onto your ship, the slower you’d be. That would let chasers get closer more easily. OTOH, if the lead ship dumped some of their treasure, they’d be lighter and more maneuverable, and if the chaser picked up some of that treasure they’d be heavier and less able to pursue. If you include cannon balls in that calculation, PvP pirates would have to be careful about how many cannonballs they carried, because too many would slow them down, but too few and they wouldn’t have enough to sink their targets. A player who mostly wanted to avoid PvP could choose not to carry cannonballs, making them faster. OTOH, they couldn’t fight back if they were attacked. Even better (if possible) add a visual to make it clear how loaded a ship is by showing how low in the water the ship is riding. A heavily loaded ship is riding low on the water, but maybe it’s a PvP pirate with a lot of cannonballs…
You can sail close to upwind, but not completely. If you try to sail too much upwind, your boat is “in irons” and you stop getting any push from the sails. Because the sails aren’t pushing, you can’t steer either. Because of that, when sailors are sailing upwind and tacking across the direction of the wind, they have to make sure they have enough momentum to cross the path of the wind without stalling.
Meanwhile, in Sea of Thieves, if you get your sails set perpendicular to the wind you get bonus speed. If you get your sails 100% wrong (i.e. they should be pushing the boat backwards) you still creep forwards.
Honestly, I’d love a pirate / 18th century ship combat simulator that actually got the sailing mechanics more or less right. The mechanics of sailing are really interesting, and then you add artillery into the mix, what’s not to love?
If you’re a PvP pirate you’re never really risking anything. You’re probably carrying a few hundred cannonballs (5k gold?), some wood and some food. If you are sunk, you get your ship back fully repaired for free and lose only the cannonballs, wood and food. If you sink someone carrying treasure, you get their entire haul and just have to get to any port to sell it.
If you’re a PvE pirate returning from a quest, you don’t really get your quest rewards until you get back to port with your treasure. If you lose to a PvP pirate all that time questing was for nothing. If you fight a PvP focused pirate and win, all you win is some cannonballs, while you have the potential to lose all your treasure, the result of hours of game time.
Having said that, if you’re a PvP focused pirate, you’re going to be bored a lot. The game world is very empty so you’re going to spend a lot of time sailing around, hoping to find someone to grief. If you fly a reaper flag people can see you on the map and steer clear of you. If you’re a PvE focused pirate, it’s easy to find something to do, so you can have a great time sailing around, having adventures… until you run into a PvP player.
The game should really be changed so that PvP focused players have an easier time finding other players to fight. Meanwhile, people doing PvE content should have something significant to gain if they ever beat a PvP player. If they choose to turn and run, there should be safe harbours where they can unload in peace.
Also a bit concerned about the “Captain your own ship” bit…
My guess is they mean that if you’re doing the Safer Seas stuff, you get a standard ship and you can customize how it looks (sails, cannons, etc.) from the NPCs in the harbour but you don’t get to name the ship, and any customizations you do aren’t saved for the next time.
If you do the High Seas, you can buy a ship, name it, and unlock lots of customizations (more than standard ones) which are saved with the ship, so they’re there next time you log in and select that ship.
I don’t know about the other current major advantage of a captained ship, which is currently being able to unload all your treasure and sell it extremely quickly. Without that you need to dock, then manually run all the skulls to the skull guys, all the trade goods to the trade guys, all the treasure to the treasure guys, etc.
Honestly, most of the time it’s not PvP heavy, instead it’s dead. I play with some cousins and we’ve had 3 hour sessions where we’ve only occasionally seen other people through the spyglass. When we do encounter other people about half the time they aren’t interested in PvP either.
Having said that, unwelcome PvP at the wrong time can spoil a gaming session. Like, you can be attacked when you’re at the end of a long quest chain and lose hundreds of thousands worth of gold in treasure.
A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise....
AFAIK, MMOs keep all the game state on the servers already. The difference is that what they send to the client is key deltas to the game state, which the client then renders. Stadia type services instead render that on the datacenter side and send the client images.
With their expertise at networking and so-on, Google might have been able to get a slight advantage in server-to-server communication, but it wouldn’t have enabled anything on a whole different scale, AFAIK.
IMO, their real advantage was that they could have dealt with platform switching in a seamless way. So, take an addictive turn-by-turn game like Civilization. Right now someone might play 20 turns before work, then commute in, think about it all day, then jump back in when they get home. With Stadia, they could have let you keep playing on your cell phone as you take the train into work. Play a few turns on a smoke break. Maybe play on a web browser on your work computer if it’s a slow day. Then play again on your commute home, then play on the TV at home, but if someone wanted to watch a show, you could either go up and play on a PC, or pull out your phone, or play on a laptop…
might as well have a glowing resume from working on those products (resume-driven development).
This is so true. Getting promoted requires showing impact. If you use off-the-shelf tools (that happen to be easily maintainable) that’s not an impressive impact. If you invent a new language (and make up a convincing reason it was necessary) and so-on, that’s really impressive and you can get promoted. The minefield you leave behind that makes maintaining your solution so difficult is just another opportunity for someone else to get promoted.
It’s interesting that this comes out during the FTC vs Microsoft case.
As much as Google shot itself in the foot, as usual, this also shows the anti-competitive landscape in gaming. One of the biggest issues Google had was convincing AAA studios to develop games for their “console”. Meanwhile, Microsoft is solving that by buying studios like Zenimax, Mojang, and soon Actiblizz. If you own the studio, they’re guaranteed to develop for your console, and they may choose not to develop for any competitor’s consoles.
its not like a brand new situation that developed right after Google announced Stadia
No, but it’s telling that one of the world’s richest companies ran into this problem. It’s pretty typical of Google to be arrogant and not understand the market they were trying to break into. Also typical of them to give up when it turned out to be a hard problem to solve. But, still, they chose to give up rather than make what (for them) would have been a reasonably small investment to buy a few AAA studios.
It seems to me that to have been successful in this attempt they would have either had to become a major console manufacturer with their own exclusives (maybe not a market they wanted to be in) or to be the junior partner working with another console manufacturer, where they controlled the server side and the other company controlled the client-facing and studio-facing side. But, Google rarely does partnerships like that. You’re right that it really seems like they didn’t go into it with their eyes open. They seemed to just arrogantly assume that their technological superiority would be enough to disrupt consoles without having to do what everybody else did.
Sure, they claimed that, but it’s telling that nobody ever took them up on that.
Google’s internal network may be good, but it’s not going to be an order of magnitude better than you can get in any other datacenter. If getting thousands of people into the same virtual space were just a matter of networking, an MMO would have already done it.
A shard is going to be storing the position, orientation and velocity of key entities (players, vehicles, etc.) in memory. If accessed frequently enough they’ll be in the processor’s cache. There’s no way the speed of accessing that data can compare with networking speeds.
That doesn’t mean there couldn’t have been some kinds of innovations. Say a game like Star Citizen where there are space battles. In theory you could store the position and orientation of everything inside a ship in one shard and the position and orientation of ships themselves in a second shard. Since people inside the ship aren’t going to be interacting directly with things outside the ship except via the ship, you could maybe afford a bit of latency and inaccuracy there. But, if you’re just talking about a thousand-on-thousand melee, I think the latency between shards would be too great.
Upcoming James Bond game Project 007 is being described as "the ultimate spycraft fantasy" (www.gamesradar.com)
Let's do this 💪 (reddthat.com)
If you could play one game for the first time all over again, what would it be? (i.ytimg.com)
(Saw this question asked on another popular link aggregation website and it got me thinking)...
Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly (twitter.com)
Sea of Thieves adds PvE mode later this year (with 30% rewards) (store.steampowered.com)
This is actually pretty big. I never liked me and my friends getting raided by people who played for 2000 hours and memorized PvP mechanics, I might give this game another shot.
Five Years After Launch, Sea of Thieves Is Finally Getting a Solo Mode - IGN (www.ign.com)
Sea of Thieves is set to add one of its most significant updates yet: solo play....
Stadia's death spiral, according to the Google employee in charge of mopping up after its murder (www.pcgamer.com)
A statement from a Google employee, Dov Zimring, has been released as a part of the FTC vs Microsoft court case (via 9to5Google). Only minorly redacted, the statement gives us a run down of Google's position leading up to Stadia's closure and why, ultimately, Stadia was in a death spiral long before its actual demise....