Aelon is an archived blog which was run from 2004-2008. The site is being left up indefinitely to serve those looking for information on anything which was previously posted here.
The End
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The Sound of Crickets
Vermouth gives a run down of why he thinks the next generation of console games won't fix the problems of the current generation.
I like games again. No really I do. Why are you looking at me like that? I kinda quit liking games while I was going through a pretty hard bout of World of WarCraft addiction. I really had come to dislike games in general, even if I did play WoW twelve hours a day. So anyway for the last two months I’ve been playing games like crazy, so let me tell you about a few of them.
When it comes to making a game that has no non-player characters, no artificial intelligence, no missions or campaigns, and no actual visible game world, the question must be asked as to what actually drives the game forward. As I said previously, the game is, at it’s core, database manipulation through a web interface. While that may sound rather hopeless, the fact is that the simple website and database has been proven time and time again to be a very entertaining medium, namely in the form of blogs and forum systems.
As if Aelon isn’t proof enough that a blog is entertaining, a good forum system (coupled with a private messaging system and perhaps IRC channels) is really the key behind making a text based browser game work. Just the other day I finished coding the forums for The Project, marking the first major facet of the game to be completed. While they weren’t the trickiest things to program for the game, they are certainly among the most important.
Like many strategy freaks, I was awe-inspired when I saw the first motion video of Supreme Commander in action all those months ago. Seeing the massive battles, the zoom, the nukes… I was sold almost instantly. Since then, I signed up for the Supreme Commander beta and played around with it. It definitely wasn’t how I envisioned it, but being a beta I decided not to write a review here until I had some more experience with something closer to the official release. Now I’ve played the demo, and so has Holliday. Today we’re both going to share our impressions of the demo in what is Aelon’s first real joint-authored piece. It’s not quite an interview, it’s not quite an article, and it’s not quite a review. Instead, it’s all three, so you can think of it being three times better than any other material on the web. It’s also our biggest single piece of content to date, so we’ve sectioned it up.
Perhaps the key reason for the existence of The Project is my dissatisfaction with previous games like it, and the desire to do better. Having played two text-based strategy games previously, both quite different, the pros and cons of Mech Wars and NukeZone became quite obvious when contrasted with each other. One of the biggest differences between the two was how they managed game balance. Being online strategy games, each was made up entirely of other human players. Such a system is hence prone to what can only be described as the most important scientific observation of our time. So common is this problem, that computer games these days have disclaimers reminding players that the quality of the gaming experience in multiplayer is too dependent on the actions of other players for any type of guarantee to be made. For a game such as The Project, which doesn’t even have a singleplayer aspect, this is perhaps the most important single issue that we’ve had to deal with.
It’s no secret that things have been a little quiet around here lately. Very quiet, in fact. I can’t speak for the others who post here but for me at least, the lack of updates has not been without good reason. You see, recently things have started to move around here. Wheels have actually begun some kind of motion. Unfortunately this movement isn’t really related to Aelon itself, but rather another project (from here on simply referred to as The Project) which has finally broken free from the shackles of my own procrastination.
Rather than just spending my time writing on games and the technology that goes with them, I’ve decided to make one myself.
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