What you've heard
Likely nothing, this story broke like an hour ago.
What you WILL hear
SUCK IT MICROSOFT...and to a lesser, non-caps degree, suck it Apple and Google. You’ve had long enough to make a cheap, open OS that speaks to the people who are using it and you haven’t delivered. Motivated by profit and your desire to keep us tied to your own products, you've made the operating system more and more expensive and less and less open. No more! Steam OS is here to create an open experience for free. This is the first salvo in the REAL OS wars. Be afraid; Gabe is coming for you!
Except
This is a great example of the media both under-selling and over-selling things at the same time. They are over-selling the fact that it’s an OS and under-selling the features of that OS, which is really the important part of this story. The OS allows for streaming between Steam on any computer and a second computer running the Steam OS, while allowing a platform for Family Share and other Steam features. Although it will almost certainly be supported by custom hardware for the non-computer types, someone with the know-how could install this on a Raspberry Pi and get a system hooked into a TV that would allow anyone in the family access to everyone's Steam accounts. They could play Flash quality games like “Binding of Isaac” native, while streaming others from a gaming rig, for less than $100. It’s a huge step forward and something I’m personally excited about, but make no mistake; that gaming rig is required and runs Windows.
So what’s the deal?
Microsoft, Google and Apple have declared, to quote Apple, “thermonuclear war” on each other, creating gated communities (or walled gardens) where Apple products require Apple OS and Microsoft products require Windows. Like the Xbox? Then don’t even dream of buying a Mac, because Xbox is developing new features every day that require you to have a Windows PC. Have a Chromebook? Your Android phone just went from great to awesome, as you’ll find hundreds of features you didn't know existed that allow the two to communicate in a way they never could with your PC. This is the world we live in, and when Gabe said “Steam OS” a lot of people took this to mean he was tossing his hat in the ring. And why not, he’s said previously that he hates Windows 8 and DirectX because of how restrictive they are on gaming. But Steam, for all its dominance as a distribution network, is a horrible platform for a true OS. With the iPhone5 S and C, Apple OSX added more new users in the past 72 hours than Steam has ever had. They are just not at that level. Gabe has also never spoken out about Microsoft, or Windows itself as being horrible things he doesn't want to work with; only that Windows 8 was a step in the wrong direction. But the most obvious reason you are hearing things covered the way they are is that Steam, even more than Google, is the “white hat” of the computer wars. We desperately WANT them to make a walled garden we can hang out in, because we know it’s going to be a wonderful place. Someday, I’m sure ... but not someday soon.
Monday 23 September 2013
Friday 20 September 2013
Should be Playing - DOTA 2
I’ve never been into MOBAs, which are “multiplayer online battle arenas” or, to put it in less confusing terms, PVP games where NPCs also attack you. I love the idea, as it creates a much more dynamic experience and allows for a more team based focus, but the implementation has always been off. Most notably, League of Legends used a free to play model in which the best characters cost money to unlock, and your account status (which could also be boosted with money) gave you bonuses, leading to the birth of the term “pay to win” to describe this style of free to play. Understandably, DOTA2 was a hard sell for me. It’s free to play, provides no single player experience, and is a MOBA … three things I really don’t care for together as one, like Neapolitan ice-cream without the chocolate.
The tutorials were painful, and as I learned the basic concepts of the game I became less and less interested. Monsters spawn on your side of the map and move towards the other guy’s side of the map with the goal of destroying towers. You kill them, gain XP, gain treasure, and use the treasure to get loot, while engaging the other players in PVP at any point. There is a big monster in the center and the team that kills him gets something cool. The tutorials have done nothing to get me hooked, and very little to even keep me online. Still, the game is too big (with 6 million unique users in its first month) for someone like me to ignore, so I power on. More tutorials, games with bots, and now my first game online with people …
And it sucked. It didn’t really appeal to me more than any other style of PVP. I didn’t understand what was going on, and I didn’t feel I was any closer to that understanding after playing a game. People were yelling about things like wards and denying, which seemed extremely important but were not covered in the tutorials. I quit for a few days, only coming back because I’m a video game guy and damn it I’m going to play this big, popular video game for no other reason than being able to talk intelligently about it. First I took some time to read up on the characters and strategies, and this is when things got interesting.
Where most MOBAs (or PVP in general) focus on rock / paper / scissors style game play, DOTA has 10 unique roles permuted among 102 characters and it’s done well. An initializer / jungler / nuker feels familiar to a nuker / jungler / line support but they play very differently. More importantly, the way your team of 5 is set up drastically changes the flow of the game, while the key concept remains in place. At its core, DOTA is a game about getting your “carry” (one of the ten roles) as powerful as possible as quickly as possible and then having them “carry” the team to victory. Depending on your team set up, you might do this by actively pressing into the team’s territory with the carry close by, supporting your carry with escape abilities and ganking other players, or perhaps even turtling your own side of your map so the carry can kill NPCs without having to worry about the other team. For each play style, there is a counter style you need to adapt to in order to play, leading to an extremely rich and ever changing experience. Even better, many of the characters play exceptionally well to one strategy but not to others. A good DOTA player is not someone who has mastered one character, but someone who knows the right character to play based on his allies and enemies, and can play all of them well.
So that’s the good, but what about all that bad? It’s still free to play after all, which means rude people with no investment who don’t care if they are banned and play to win. Turns out that thanks to Steam, this isn’t the case. First, match-making uses your Steam account to put you with people who have Steam accounts about as old as yours, so the brand new “throw away” accounts play together, and you don’t see them in the wild very often. A rating system adds another level, where people who are rated as “friendly” or “forgiving” are not only matched with each other but given priority in the queue. If you are a jerk, you’ll wait 10 minutes between matches while the system finds other jerks to pair you with, but if you are friendly, you only wait a minute or two before being placed with other friendly people. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. Most importantly, the game uses socialist free to play and profit by distribution, big words that just mean there is not a single item you can buy (or earn for that matter) that effects your game play in any way. Everyone is on an equal playing field.
So it’s free, it’s friendly, it’s fun, and I’m playing it. What more could you want? Friend me on Steam right here and start enjoying this fantastic game.
The tutorials were painful, and as I learned the basic concepts of the game I became less and less interested. Monsters spawn on your side of the map and move towards the other guy’s side of the map with the goal of destroying towers. You kill them, gain XP, gain treasure, and use the treasure to get loot, while engaging the other players in PVP at any point. There is a big monster in the center and the team that kills him gets something cool. The tutorials have done nothing to get me hooked, and very little to even keep me online. Still, the game is too big (with 6 million unique users in its first month) for someone like me to ignore, so I power on. More tutorials, games with bots, and now my first game online with people …
And it sucked. It didn’t really appeal to me more than any other style of PVP. I didn’t understand what was going on, and I didn’t feel I was any closer to that understanding after playing a game. People were yelling about things like wards and denying, which seemed extremely important but were not covered in the tutorials. I quit for a few days, only coming back because I’m a video game guy and damn it I’m going to play this big, popular video game for no other reason than being able to talk intelligently about it. First I took some time to read up on the characters and strategies, and this is when things got interesting.
Where most MOBAs (or PVP in general) focus on rock / paper / scissors style game play, DOTA has 10 unique roles permuted among 102 characters and it’s done well. An initializer / jungler / nuker feels familiar to a nuker / jungler / line support but they play very differently. More importantly, the way your team of 5 is set up drastically changes the flow of the game, while the key concept remains in place. At its core, DOTA is a game about getting your “carry” (one of the ten roles) as powerful as possible as quickly as possible and then having them “carry” the team to victory. Depending on your team set up, you might do this by actively pressing into the team’s territory with the carry close by, supporting your carry with escape abilities and ganking other players, or perhaps even turtling your own side of your map so the carry can kill NPCs without having to worry about the other team. For each play style, there is a counter style you need to adapt to in order to play, leading to an extremely rich and ever changing experience. Even better, many of the characters play exceptionally well to one strategy but not to others. A good DOTA player is not someone who has mastered one character, but someone who knows the right character to play based on his allies and enemies, and can play all of them well.
So that’s the good, but what about all that bad? It’s still free to play after all, which means rude people with no investment who don’t care if they are banned and play to win. Turns out that thanks to Steam, this isn’t the case. First, match-making uses your Steam account to put you with people who have Steam accounts about as old as yours, so the brand new “throw away” accounts play together, and you don’t see them in the wild very often. A rating system adds another level, where people who are rated as “friendly” or “forgiving” are not only matched with each other but given priority in the queue. If you are a jerk, you’ll wait 10 minutes between matches while the system finds other jerks to pair you with, but if you are friendly, you only wait a minute or two before being placed with other friendly people. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. Most importantly, the game uses socialist free to play and profit by distribution, big words that just mean there is not a single item you can buy (or earn for that matter) that effects your game play in any way. Everyone is on an equal playing field.
So it’s free, it’s friendly, it’s fun, and I’m playing it. What more could you want? Friend me on Steam right here and start enjoying this fantastic game.
Monday 16 September 2013
In perspective - Steam Family Share
What you've heard
The Micro$oft Bone had planned a feature where users could share games with others on their friends list, allowing them to play them on their own system. After the backlash to the online-only policies, they changed their tone saying it couldn’t be done without a 24 hour check in requirement; it was impossible. Well, Gabe Newell descended from his home in Asgard on the wings of unicorns this week to let everyone know the impossible is possible when you are at his level of awesome. Steam Family Share gives us everything Microsoft said it couldn't do!
Except
Steam is offering an account sharing service, where you can allow up to 10 users to have access to your complete game library when you are not using it. When you log into a game (any game) anyone using your account at the time is given a short amount of time to leave the game they are playing. You might recognize this as exactly what you can do right now by simply giving someone your username and password. Microsoft, on the other hand, had a full game sharing service. I could give Duty Calls 4 to Jim and Grand Larceny: Bank Fraud V to Mary and play every other game I owned without effecting their experience. It's also important to note that where Microsoft only required a check in every 24 hours to make sure I wasn't playing the games I loaned out, Steam Family Share requires a constant network connection. That's the exact thing the internet said was completely unacceptable about Microsoft’s system.
So what`s the deal
The internet is a horrible place. Fanboys have chosen champions like Microsoft, Steam, and Sony and see them as doing battle in cyberspace for absolute dominance. The gaming media has reacted and writes articles that are going to get the strongest reactions, the most reads, and the most comments. It`s impossible to talk about Steam`s new service for what it is: a great example of how Steam has reacted to what players are doing anyways (sharing accounts) and make it easier for them to do it (no more password sharing is a great thing for security, which is in Steam's best interests). Instead, it has to be an example of why Steam was sent by the gods to purge the evil that is Microsoft from the land ... if it`s anything less, no one is going to read it.
One perfect example to illustrate this point: There is a story going around the internet detailing a teardown of the Xbox One and PS4. IGN network (with a very Sony friendly reader base) has been covering this story with the headline `PS4 faster than Xbox One`. Game Informer and UK Gamer (Xbox friendly sites) have the same story with the headline `Xbox One faster than PS4`. What does the story really say? The Xbox One has faster shading and rendering, while the PS4 has faster ram and bus, neither of which should result in any real difference in performance between the two.
The Micro$oft Bone had planned a feature where users could share games with others on their friends list, allowing them to play them on their own system. After the backlash to the online-only policies, they changed their tone saying it couldn’t be done without a 24 hour check in requirement; it was impossible. Well, Gabe Newell descended from his home in Asgard on the wings of unicorns this week to let everyone know the impossible is possible when you are at his level of awesome. Steam Family Share gives us everything Microsoft said it couldn't do!
Except
Steam is offering an account sharing service, where you can allow up to 10 users to have access to your complete game library when you are not using it. When you log into a game (any game) anyone using your account at the time is given a short amount of time to leave the game they are playing. You might recognize this as exactly what you can do right now by simply giving someone your username and password. Microsoft, on the other hand, had a full game sharing service. I could give Duty Calls 4 to Jim and Grand Larceny: Bank Fraud V to Mary and play every other game I owned without effecting their experience. It's also important to note that where Microsoft only required a check in every 24 hours to make sure I wasn't playing the games I loaned out, Steam Family Share requires a constant network connection. That's the exact thing the internet said was completely unacceptable about Microsoft’s system.
So what`s the deal
The internet is a horrible place. Fanboys have chosen champions like Microsoft, Steam, and Sony and see them as doing battle in cyberspace for absolute dominance. The gaming media has reacted and writes articles that are going to get the strongest reactions, the most reads, and the most comments. It`s impossible to talk about Steam`s new service for what it is: a great example of how Steam has reacted to what players are doing anyways (sharing accounts) and make it easier for them to do it (no more password sharing is a great thing for security, which is in Steam's best interests). Instead, it has to be an example of why Steam was sent by the gods to purge the evil that is Microsoft from the land ... if it`s anything less, no one is going to read it.
One perfect example to illustrate this point: There is a story going around the internet detailing a teardown of the Xbox One and PS4. IGN network (with a very Sony friendly reader base) has been covering this story with the headline `PS4 faster than Xbox One`. Game Informer and UK Gamer (Xbox friendly sites) have the same story with the headline `Xbox One faster than PS4`. What does the story really say? The Xbox One has faster shading and rendering, while the PS4 has faster ram and bus, neither of which should result in any real difference in performance between the two.
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