Why mods are ace.

Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, there’s a video posted in which it is explained in detail why PC gamers should be given the option to alter their games, and why modding makes everything better.

In addition to being non-moddable, Diablo 3 will feature an in-game, player-to-player auction house where players can trade items for in-game gold…or real money.

Just when I thought I couldn’t despise Activision-Blizzard any more than I already do, they come up with something like this:

Diablo 3 will sport a couple of in-game auction houses to sell items from player to player. One will be run entirely with in-game gold (very similar to the current WoW Auction House), and one will let players sell and buy items with actual money.

…Yes, Diablo 3 players will be able to spend real money on in-game items, but rather than a traditional item store, Blizzard plans to create a system wherein players sell items to each other — the eBay of Sanctuary, if you will. Players will be able to put items up for sale in each of the game’s various regions around the world (with a different real-world currency for each), and other players will be able to spend real money to buy them, with the real-world money going back to the original item owners.

Blizzard will take fixed fees (as yet unrevealed, though they’ll be “nominal”) out of the sale price both when an auction goes up for sale and when it is actually sold. And when an item is sold, players will either be able to keep earned money in a Battle.net account for spending on Blizzard products and services, or cash out entirely, with another, percentage-based fee through a not-yet-announced third-party payment provider.

Sales of items in MMORPGs and other online games have been going on since the days of Ultima Online, so it’s not as though Blizzard is offering anything new and novel here (they never offer anything new and novel anyway). Instead, they are simply moving something which other MMORPGs frown upon and/or forbid in their Terms of Service inside the game.

Why? Blizzard’s “on paper” reasoning is that moving the transactions into Diablo 3 instead of allowing them to happen on third-party sites will increase the security of the process for players. Personally, I think it has more to do with the fact that they charge three “nominal” fees per item sold. Methinks Bobby Kotick has decided that it’s not enough to have pillows stuffed with Benjamins; he wants a money-stuffed duvet as well.

More details: here, here, and here!

Bonus: Diablo 3 features always-online DRM; you can’t play it without an Internet connection.

All that said, it does look like a sweet game.

I mentioned Hard Reset previously…

…and the first gameplay trailer for it has arrived since then.

Just for reference, this is the game being built (in Poland, I think) by newly-formed studio Flying Wild Hog (which, in turn, is comprised of industry veterans who worked on such games as Bulletstorm, Sniper, and The Witcher 2).

Speaking of Bulletstorm…

…Ars Technica presents a handy guide on how to ruin the PC port of your game in five quick steps!

Windows XP finally loses its majority share amongst Internet users!

This is the happiest day on the Internet. I declare it to be so!

Interview with David Gaider: The Writing of Dragon Age 2

Gamasutra examines the writing process that went in to BioWare’s Dragon Age 2 and looks at how its team wanted to focus on telling a darker, edgier story. Which, frankly, is a trend in fantasy writing that I (for one) think needs to be curbed right now.

Did Metal Gear Solid 2 predict Facebook?

Well…sort of.

Tired of hearing me ramble on about Free-to-Play?

Epic Games president Mike Capps doesn’t think it’s all that, and doesn’t expect the F2P model will become an industry standard any time soon.

Win a chance to playtest Battlefield 3 in Sweden!

Sorry I don’t seem able to shut up about this game.

Earth has a “Trojan asteroid”!

Nothing to do with Spartans or sex, though; a trojan (in this context) is an asteroid that shares an orbit with a planet, at a stable point either in front or behind said planet. A few planets in the Solar System are known to have trojans, and now it appears that Earth does as well.

Yes, your smartphone can take incredible photos…if you know how to use it.

It’s true (to a large degree, at any rate) that a professional with a crappy camera can usually take a better picture than a n00b with the most awesome camera and lens on the market. A lot of that comes down to just knowing the finer points of composition and how to control the shot and the subject(s).

Equally, though: the pro who is handed a crappy camera can spend a few minutes messing around with said camera and probably figure out what settings to enable (or disable) in order to get the best image possible. The n00b with the awesome camera, by comparison, probably has no clue what half the damn buttons and dials do in the first place, and wouldn’t know the first thing about e.g. why changing the aperture setting can make the difference between a moderately-sharp image and a razor-sharp image.

Don’t be the n00b; learn how to use your camera! Learn what its strengths and weaknesses are, learn what you can do to eke a bit of extra performance out of it. Even your smartphone can take a striking image if you know a thing or two about its tiny little camera.

Tonight’s post brought to you by stabbing yourself“planking”:

You would think this sort of thing would be obvious! Spiky fence...pointy ends...no? No? Anyone?

Bonus:

I guess this is an improvement?

It’s not every day a new country gets formed.

The Republic of South Sudan officially separated from Sudan over the last weekend, (hopefully) bringing to an end a civil war that has raged for almost half a century between the predominantly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south. Apparently, about 99% of the region’s population voted to cecede from Sudan; a landslide’s landslide.

Not that it’s all daisies and roses for South Sudan, mind you; despite their fertile farmland and oil reserves, the country has deep and severe poverty issues, and lacks for modern infrastructure.

Apple downshifts App Store prices for Aussies.

Actually, they’ve made a bunch of price adjustments for all of their global App Store portals, raising prices in some countries and lowering them in others. But I wanted to highlight the fact that they dropped the prices for Aussies (by about 17%, it looks like), since it has occasionally been discussed in the comments forms here just how much more AUstralians pay for things like games and electronics as compared to North Americans.

Scientists punch a hole in time itself.

Actually, it would be slightly more accurate to say that the concept of a “time cloak” has been demonstrated, in which short events — from 110 nanoseconds up to a hypothetical maximum of 120 microseconds — can be hidden from the passage of time. Yes, you read that right.

Dishonored might just be the first FPS I’ve been excited about since Marathon.

Bethesda has announced the next title they’ll be releasing, a stealth-focused first-person shooter entitled Dishonored. It is being developed by — get this — none other than Arkane Studios, the masterminds behind Arx Fatalis. Also on board with the project is Harvey Smith, who was the lead designer for Deus Ex, and Viktor Antonov, who designed City 17 in Half Life 2.

Let’s review: a stealth-based FPS produced by Bethesda, headed up by Arkane, with Deus Ex’s lead designer in charge of creating the game’s atmosphere and City 17′s designer in charge of shaping the world for “an open-ended adventure title that allows players to tackle missions in a number of different ways, from stealthily completing tasks to letting loose on hordes of enemy soldiers.”

Oh, and it sounds like it’ll…you know…an actual story, too: “How players decide to deal with problems will shape Dishonored’s world.”

Can I get a “do want”?

Hard Reset also sounds interesting.

This one is being developed out of Poland by a company called Flying Wild Hog, a new studio comprised of developers who have worked with companies like People Can Fly, CD Projekt RED, and City Interactive…people who have worked on games like Bulletstorm, Painkiller, and The Witcher 2. It is touted as a post-apocalyptic FPS RPG.

Consider me tentatively interested.

Did The Longest Journey predict the coming of Twitter?

Well…kinda.

100 years of IBM in pictures.

From the first clocks and dial recorders they churned out, up to the Watson system that cleaned up royally on Jeopardy! this year, it’s a short — but fascinating — pictorial.

The Vanishing Point

Okay, here’s the thing: I have a really love for what I guess could be called “urban spelunking”, and in particular for photograpy of the deep places beneath cities. As such, I simply must recomment The Vanishing Point, the photoblog of a Toronto-based urban photographer.

Be sure to check out his photos of abandoned nuclear power plant construction projects!

Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player…are they legal?

One would hope so, but who can say these days? In theory, storing music that you own in a cloud-based medium for playback on e.g. your work computer should be perfectly fine, the same as if you brought a USB drive full of tunes to your desk. 

But never underestimate the drive and ability of the music industry to argue that people should pay yet again — as much and as often as possible — for access to music they already own.

Another day, another Internet censorship bill struck down.

This time in Alaska. 

Cheaper Hasselblad cameras?

Consider me interested.

Orson Scott Card joins the writing staff for Firefall.

I was already interested in checking out the quite obviously Starcraft-inspired, sci-fi, free-to-play team-based action game. The fact that Card — an author I have great respect for — has joined the team at Red 5 and will be working on the game’s story is just icing on the cake, and pretty much ensures that I’ll be checking the game out when it releases.

No More Heroes gets an 18-years and up edition.

Ultimately, I blame CD Projekt Red and The Witcher (and, more recently, The Witcher 2), for this.

British Secretary for Education calls for games in the classroom.

This guy’s jib…I like the cut of it:

[Michael Gove] has set his sights on video games as a way of making the British education system more engaging for children.

“When children need to solve equations in order to get more ammo to shoot the aliens, it is amazing how quickly they can learn,” said Gove, speaking to the Royal Society in London regarding Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy’s Manga High system. Manga High, which allows educators to schedule online assignments that automatically reward items in accompanying flash games, represents the future of early science and math education, according to Gove: “These developments are only the beginning.”

I know for a fact that several Dragons and Dragonettes effectively learned English whilst playing the Ultima games, so I’m not at all surprised that games can serve an educative function; after all, the first education computer game I can remember playing came out over twenty years ago. I am somewhat surprised that people in positions of power are beginning to clue in to this fact, however.

It’s like Oblivion, but probably better.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Andoran is, as PC Gamer describes it, “a darker, grittier take on Oblivion with new cities, factions and creatures. The remarkable new architecture and strange environments have a whiff of Morrowind about them, but the engine upgrades make it look more like Skyrim.”

The website for the mod is currently down, but it might be something you’ll all want to check out in the near future!

The HULC: a self-supporting combat exoskeleton.

Capable of sustained running speeds of 7 miles per hour, and short sprints at up to 10 miles per hour.

Ahem: “Very formidable over short distances!”

The Practical Pyromaniac.

A guide to all things incendiary.

Skyrim developers’ open feedback interview.

And yes, the fifth The Elder Scrolls game will boast a modding kit, high-resolution textures, a refined interface…and pretty much everything else except for a natively 64-bit executable.

Oh, and…you can get married in the game as well.

Excited yet?

Tonight’s post brought to you by The Rock:

Anyone know what movie these screengrabs are from?

Bonus: Massive “haboob” dust storm hits Phoenix as the Arizona “monsoon” season begins!