Last week at PAX I demonstrated a new free program coming from Stardock called Ready to Play.

During my demo I start with “I am sure I’m the only person who has ever encountered a mean person on the Internet…”

Of course, most people have run into people on-line who are obnoxious or griefers and such.  Ready to Play is designed to alleviate that issue by letting people create gaming profiles of themselves.

Here’s how it works:

Users enter in data like how old they are, how competitive they are, what they value in gaming the most, and a bunch of other data.  Then, it will take that data and generate a list of “recommended” friends, these are people who have similar gaming profiles.

For example, I, as a father of 3, 38 years old with a very scarce amount of free time have very different priorities when it comes to playing online than a 15 year old.  Nothing wrong with 15 year old gamers at all. But if I want to get a quick game of say Demigod or L4D or Rise of Legends in, then my best case of getting a fun game going is to find people to play with who have similar gaming expectations in mind.

Once you’ve set up your profile you see a screen like this:

Read to Play also supports traditional “Friends” lists and indeed you can use your existing Impulse Friends with this seamlessly (Demigod’s built in Friends handling is going to be updated to make use of Ready to Play for v1.2).  But in addition, you will also have the Recommended Friends too.  Now, you can always block those people if you run into someone who you don’t like.

 

But when you’re ready to play, you pick the game you want to play from the list then pick who you want to broadcast to (by default, it’ll be everyone who has the game that is on your list).

Users who have Ready to Play running and are opted in to be broadcast to will get a small dialog in the bottom corner that looks like this. If they choose join they go here.

 

This pre-game chat window lets players set up what map they want to play, what password they want to use to get into the game, etc.

The results have been particularly spectacular internally when played with games whose persistent online communities have diminished over time.

Ready to Play supports any PC game. It will automatically pick up games on Impulse and soon from Games Explorer, Steam, and elsewhere.

If you want to sign up for the beta go to www.stardock.com/products/readytoplay

 

Greetings!

The Penny Arcade Expo is the best game related trade show I go to each year. The reason I say that is that as a gamer, I really like hanging out with other gamers to see what they think of things.

 

Beatles: Rock Band looks like it’s going to be crazy popular. I am probably one of the few people who haven’t gotten into Guitar Hero or Rock Band but this might make me take the plunge.

I got to play some Diablo 3 at the show and was just blown away at the continued dominance of Blizzard in terms of crafting games to perfection.

Starcraft 2 was another game people could sit down and play.  This is a game that is going to own the RTS genre for some time I think as again, Blizzard demonstrates why it’s the world’s greatest game developer at PAX.

 

At the risk of being biased, I think Elemental was one of the more talked about games of the show too based on Twitter traffic from PAX.  Stardock’s upcoming fantasy strategy game isn’t due out until next year but was playable at the show.  Stardock also showed off some Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy at the show as well.

Dragon Age: Origins had a super cool booth with a huge dragon.  My gripe with this, however, was that it was shown behind closed doors.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good screenshot of Star Trek Online so I put up one I took from their booth. It looks extremely fun.

 

Another thing that was surprisingly popular at the show was Ready to Play. It’s a new program set to go out into beta this week that lets people quickly find other people of like mind to play a given game. Someone described it as real-time eHarmony for gamers. 

 

Pirates of the Burning Sea had one of the coolest booths. They assembled their own pirate ship. Arrrgh!

Even Tru Blood was there!

Coming home is so hard (a view from the plane)

To say we were pleased with the reaction Elemental got at the Penny Arcade Expo would be an understatement.  Despite the game only being in alpha, users seemed to really like the direction we’re heading.

Some of the features that really got people going included:

Family Trees and Succession.  That is, one of the strategies for victory is to quietly arrange marriages so that your family is in the path of succession when sovereigns start getting killed.  In Galactic Civilizations, succession often seemed random (it wasn’t but it came across that way). So the Arceans would “surrender” to the Thalan even though you had been helping the Arceans.  In Elemental, if a sovereign surrenders (goes into exile) his kingdom might be divided up amongst heirs belonging to the various houses.

 

The planned number of players allowed in a game being 32. We only plan to have 12 “canon” factions just like in Galactic Civilizations.  But we also plan on letting people create their own (which we think will be typical).  If you’ve ever played Master of Magic or Master of Orion, you probably have an inkling of the kind of race customization we have in mind. 

 

The consequences of magic on strategy. Because of the engine, we plan on letting people alter the world a great deal. Later in the game, the arms race on magic will become increasingly apparent.

 

Modding. People at PAX were able to see the modding tools first hand. Hearing us talking about modding is one thing, seeing highly polished, functional modding tools built into the game long before the game is released lets people see just how serious we are about letting people create their own worlds and share their creations with others.

 

Now, all that said, the beta, which is due out in the next 2 weeks, is NOT going to be fun.  Let me reiterate that: IT WILL NOT BE FUN. IT WILL BE HORRIBLE. WE ARE TURNING OFF THE MAIN GRAPHICS ENGINE.

 

BELOW ARE THINGS YOU WILL NOT SEE IN BETA 1 OF ELEMENTAL:

 

This is the built in modding tool. You take these, classify it, and then share it on the Internet within the game. Then, players can optionally have these mods inserted into their games.

BETA 1 will not have the magic system in it. At least, not until November.

 

The graphics engine in Elemental will not be enabled until January.  Why? Because if the game is good it should be able to be fun without super good graphics.

 

I’m still waiting to get a decent, non-windy weekend to go up north before Fall.  It ain’t looking promising.

Since 9/11, I don’t travel nearly as much as I used to.  It’s not because I worry about terrorists or that the cost has changed. It’s because air travel has become such a hassle.

If you travel once or twice a year, the process for getting from the terminal to the airplane may not be that big of a deal.  But if you’re a frequent traveler, it’s a royal pain.

For me, the biggest problem is airport security. I absolutely hate having to take off my shoes and having to take my laptop out of my laptop bag.  While they have recently introduced special laptop bags for airports, they are so impractical as to be useless.

Would it really be that hard to come up with a way so that people don’t have to take off their shoes or put all their stuff into tons of little trays in order to get through security?  One has to wonder how many billions of dollars are lost each year because of the accumulated decrease in air travel by people like me.

Greetings!  I’m currently at PAX, getting ready to head back.  New builds have been coming in from GPG. 

Right now, they’re trying to get the replays nailed down.  I also asked about a number of player requests such as Torcher Bearer casting when running (the answer on that is that he’s not intended to be able to do that be design – some people will obviously disagree but there’s the answer).

Some exploits have been addressed that I won’t get into here.  I won’t give an ETA since the build is in internal beta and it’s hard to guestimate how long it will take to eliminate bugs and such in order to make is public.

The mod handling is also pretty advanced in this build but there are some security features that have to be in to help avoid some malicious mods that we’re looking to put in before that goes out.

The two new Demigods look pretty good. The visual quality is absurdly good.  The demon assassin is definitely something that I think will be very useful in a team based game.  I’ll try to get some screenshots up shortly.

It was great being at PAX and meeting many of you. It’s nice to hear a lot of positive feedback on the game since sometimes, reading the forums, you tend to get a…specific demographic of players that aren’t necessarily representative of the wider Demigod player base.

More to come shortly.

We’re on the last day of PAX.  If you want to get into the beta, you can still do so by pre-ordering it.  After the beta goes out, the beta will be closed to new users until next year.

Note: The beta will NOT be fun. These are real betas. The game mechanics are only partially implemented and subject to radical change based on player suggestions.

I can’t even begin to express how much fun I’ve had at PAX talking to other gamers. It’s been great meeting other gamers!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574387021307651050.html

Hilarious article in which a doctor turns the table on lawyers when it comes to “reform”.