In the mean time, I had a bit of a look at the upcoming Bioware MMO yesterday. Star Wars: The Old Republic claims that its new emphasis on story, voice acting and player conversation choice is going to change the MMO playing field for ever. It’s quite a claim, particularly given the general Star Wars game concerns that Jedi and Sith are always going to be wildly over-represented when players have a choice and, to stay true to the universe, will be wildly over-powered.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M1PCIW2JSI

Having watched some of the gameplay and info videos, it looks as if the class balance in Old Republic is going to be pretty solid. The Jedi and Sith are powerful, yes, but they’ve split both into two classes, one more lightsabery and one more force-wizardy. That allows both to be a little less utterly uber.

On top of that, they’ve brought the other classes up so that they do, in fact, kick lots of ass. Rather than weaken Jedis to the point where it’s time to go off and fight cave rats for ten levels, they’ve brought everyone up to being seriously dangerous from the off. In addition to the four Force classes, there are bounty hunters and secret agents on the Imperial side, and troopers and smugglers on the Republic. Force users don’t get much in the way of armour or insane gadgets; the other classes do.

The weakest class in terms of sexy image is the Republic trooper, but they’ve shored that up by making the character feel quite considerably like the Master Chief from Halo. The sod has some pretty colossal guns, too. They claim everyone is fully balanced, and honestly, it looks like that’s the case.

They’re insisting that all classes are flexible. They do break down into the old tank-melee-ranged-heal pattern, to my disgust, but there are plenty of options in class development. One class each side can be adapted to all four roles, two more to three roles, and one to just two, and the devs insist that once specialised into a role, each class is as potent as any other in that slot. Respeccing will be possible, at least partially. Everyone gets companions, although they’re not compulsory, and healers will be happy to know that the more healery they get, the more their companion gets boosted, so you can actually level as a healer.

One thing that does definitely excite me is that they’re encouraging exploration of the worlds — not just as a necessary way of stumbling over extra quests and the such, but also with rewards of hidden, out of the way goodies. They mentioned holochrons, if I recall correctly, giving permanent stat bonuses. As a dedicated explorer, that rocks.

There will undoubtedly be plenty of Jedi weenies… but all of the roles have the potential to be very entertaining. Plus they’re saying that there are absolutely no duplicated quests from class to class, let alone from faction to faction. Each class is the focus of a specific dedicated story line, has an entirely different pool of companions to draw from, &c &c. I assume the various storylines will dovetail towards the top levels, but they’re claiming that there will be massive replayability, and the stuff they’ve put out so far does seem to back them up. So even if there is a glut of Jediots, they may well then dissolve into other types as the game progresses.

Having said all that, I note that there are ‘World Quests’ and ‘Flashpoints’ (dungeons, effectively), and I suspect that when they say there are no duplicated quests, they’re talking only about Class Quests. I seem to remember seeing that Class Quests are a high %age of starter worlds, about 40% of mid-range worlds, and a smaller %age still of later worlds — so there could in fact be a bunch of tedious common content to have to wade through. It depends on how level-scalable the Class Quests are, I guess.

The story devs are saying that each class’ personal story will extend as updates roll in, and it seems to me that an update adding a class will give a whole new meaning to the idea of extra alts. There is an end-game, they say, but it looks like they want different play-throughs to be as compelling an option. One dev estimated the time to levcap — 50, at launch — as 200 hours.

Having looked at some of the “What character do you want to play” developer polls on the main site, the four Force classes are getting an average around 14% of the vote each, with the other four classes getting an approx av of 10% each. If people really mean it, class balance will be no worse than in WoW.

The combat looks really good, incidentally. It appears, from gameplay footage, as if the game choreographs fights a lot — so you might just be hitting “bash with light-saber” or whatever, but your toon will be swinging, lunging, slashing, stabbing, leaping, and so on. On top of that, the emphasis on moving combat from ‘one mob per party’ to ‘one PC per group’ does appear to make things feel much more fluid and epic.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeZYGgcUDcY

Of course, take all the above with a big pinch of salt. All the videos will have been PR’ed to the max. The most recent gameplay video, of ‘Flashpoint’ Taral V, managed to come off feeling like it had been shaved, lubed and buggered comatose by the Marketing department, which was depressing. It also immediately split the party into the same boring quad of taunting tank / sneaky distance DPS / big melee DPS / control ‘n’ heal. Then there are those uncertain World Quests, and there’s been a couple of comments about side-quests that sound like they involve killing X nearby gribblies. So it could all end up as “WoW with a LOT of cut scenes”.

But this is Bioware, with Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age under their recent belt. Almost everyone is bored with WoW now, so anyone planning to base off that is setting themselves up to fail mightily, as Rift is finding out. Bioware are claiming a very different effect, and the bait-n-switch strategy has been a spectacular failure in MMO land repeatedly, so they’d have to be utterly stupid to be relying on that. Given that their release date has recently slipped from Q1 2011 to ‘before the end of 2011′, it could be that they’re busy tweaking some of the more tedious aspects. Or they might just be dragging their heels.

We’ll see, in time…

Please excuse any random html at the bottom of the vid. Smart Youtube appears to be being stupid; if the vid won’t play, here’s the Youtube link.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLXOO9PnnMQ

If that’s not enough Whovian insanity for you, you might also enjoy dropping in to the BBC’s very own Radiophonatron.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dadPWhEhVk

It’s a fantastic piece of work, and a really impressive demonstration of the internet’s increasing power to get talented visual (and audial) creatives noticed.

I was involved for a while, and still love SLA deeply.

So I’m pleased to see that Earle and Allsop have put together a new website, MonsterBook. As they are two of the most deliciously twisted people to ever pen a role-playing game, it will be fascinating to see what appears there. They’ve been running for a mere three days, and have already notched up several bits of Allsop’s art (along with some how-tos), a nod towards the impressively sickening Hello Kitty murder, some excellent horror review information, and a thoughtful piece on ghosts in Japan by David ‘Jimbly’ Boylan, one of the original Nightfallers.

If all of that isn’t enough to tempt you to go and have a look at MonsterBook for yourself, here’s a selection of Dave Allsop’s artwork for your amusement. It speaks for itself.

Grizzled Vets by Dave Allsop

When the Wind Blows by Dave Allsop

Cthulhu by Dave Allsop

Forsaken Priest by Dave Allsop (c) Blizzard

Cemetery Reaper by Dave Allsop (c) Wizards of the Coast

Seamless integration of graphical displays into day to day reality has been a mainstay of science fiction for years (have a look at Venor Vinge’s “Rainbow’s End” and Charlie Stross’s “Accelerando”). It’s the last stepping stone before having virtual reality piped straight into your brain, and in many ways, it’s almost as revolutionary. The article mentions pilots, and simultaneous translation for foreign languages, but there is literally no end to the social and personal changes that this could bring about. It is, quite literally, a paradigm shifter. When this tech hits the streets, everything you think you know about society will be obsolete. And don’t even get me started on the sorts of games and wonders that it enables.

Augemented Reality by xmstellou

It’ll be several years before this is ready — given New Scientist’s usual place ahead of the curve, probably 4 or 5 — assuming that the military don’t decide they want the technology for themselves. That’s happened before with VR tech, when the US military shanghaied a system for projecting images onto the eyeball via laser, back in ’93. There’s also the chance of it just fizzling, too. The profits for the first company to bring this to market are going to be astronomical though, so there’ll be a lot of pressure to make it happen. If it does make it out, it’s going to be an exciting and unpredictable time to live in.

Wow.

Talking about mind-blowing, have you every heard of Exploding Head Syndrome? There you are, minding your own business, when WHAM! You hear a shockingly loud blast, and then everything goes white… and then you discover you’re still alive. Sounds utterly horrible and, offensively, it’s entirely real.

A Mary-Sue character is usually the mark of a naive or inexperienced writer. The term originates from fan-fiction, in which enthusiasts write amateur stories based in the worlds they love. There’s plenty of great fan-fiction of course, but many Mary-Sue characters literally are the author as she dreams of being, dropped into the pre-existing cast of a story setting. The name comes from Paula Smith’s cutting 1973 parody of bad Star-Trek fan fiction, “A Trekkie’s Tale”.

Oh, Mary-Sue, we've been looking all over for you.

Note that despite the origins, some professional original fiction characters have been criticised as being Mary-Sues. The most notable in fantasy are widely held to be Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake of the “Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter” series, particularly as she appears in later books, and Eragon, from Christopher Paolini’s “Inheritance” trilogy. Outside the genre, Wesley Crusher from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (Wesley was even creator Gene Roddenberry’s last name) and Dagny Taggart from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” are often considered two of the most egregious examples.

The movie in an animation, filmed entirely from old computers and broken toys. The creator, who calls himself mdotstrange, undoubtedly has a wild imagination and a nice touch for disturbing imagery. Throw in all the visuals and sounds derived from old tech, and the result is a paean to 8-bit computing. It draws furiously on sounds and graphics styles of that era, with the sporadic dialogue is as unhinged as any badly-translated Japanese classic of the time.

It is an audio-visual attack, relentless, nonsensical and wonderfully compulsive, and it’s garnered mdotstrange a bunch of awards. It’s not easy viewing — and at 1h 25m, it’s one hell of a piece of animation for a solo creator to produce — but it is genuinely fascinating, evocative and, yes, very, VERY strange.

This is the English version; mdotstrange has subtitled versions in sixteen different languages, including hacker Leet Speak, over at his youtube video page.

Part 1:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1wD3hGCVco

Part 2:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pdK1dEa5Gc

You could have a whole selection of different bodies — a corporate business body, an athletics body, a party body, a seduction body, a manual labour body, a fighting body, male, female, black, white, young, old, whatever. The obvious type of story for that sort of setting, where identity is so fluid and mortality so avoidable, would be a mystery or suspense. Whether I write anything from this premise or not, the reality of it sounds like fun. I’d like some spares :)

Coco Body Transplant by Natalia & Gabriel

Surprisingly, we may be getting closer to this sort of operation becoming feasible. In 2001, Dr. Robert White successfully removed the head from a monkey, and transplanted it — with no apparent loss of mental function — onto the headless body of another monkey. It wasn’t the first time he’d managed it, either; that was back in ’63. It’s not possible to reconnect spinal tissue yet, so the frankenmonkey was paralysed from the neck down, but otherwise it functioned well, the poor bloody thing.

White believes that humans could benefit from the same procedure, and that it is just a matter of time. Quadriplegics, already paralysed from the neck down, generally die from organ atrophy within five or ten years. A full body transplant could give them a way to survive longer, even if it doesn’t give them back any movement. Unsurprisingly, a lot of spinal injury researchers consider this whole line of thinking utterly abominable. They point out that it’s much saner to look at repairing spinal column breaks. When did sanity ever stop science, though?

Others are already thinking further ahead, of course. A cloned body, with the development of the brain somehow suppressed, could potentially give you an endless supply of new ‘you’. It’s just a short step from there to trading clone-bods with other people, much like Magic: The Gathering cards :)

I, for one, welcome our new headless clone overlords.