Love (and to a lesser extent, Eskil Steenberg)

[gdf]

http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/

I saw a preview of it a while ago, then forgot what it was called, and thanks to RPS I now remember. Looks fucking incredible.

The developer (as in one man) has a pretty fascinating blog as well. Sweden is turning into my favourite game development country (BCR and Mirror's Edge were my two GOTYs).

Have a read: http://news.quelsolaar.com

[Salka]

I think this game is a kinda cool social experiment. From what I understand, he has no actual gameplay rules or systems in mind, it's just an environment that you can manipulate, right? POTENTIALLY you can team up with others in the game to build villages and then THEORETICALLY you could attack other villages, but I don't believe that's necessarily the goal of the game. I read somewhere that Eskil doesn't know what he wants it to be and is going to wait and see what the players decide to do with the world. I think that is kinda cool, in a way.

But it doesn't strike me as a particularly amazing game, and I am not sure why it is getting so much... wait for it.... LOVE. It seems more like just a cool experiment to see how people would interact with a changing/changeable environment, or how they would/could work together to build communities etc., and to see how that could work with future MMOs where there is also gameplay involved. I don't know, I'm just making this shit up, I don't even know what I'm trying to say, bye.

[Noyb]

  Eskil said:

My first advice to anyone who is trying to cut costs is to fire your designer.

  Eskil said:

Our goal should be to cut the cost of making the content so much that Concept art is no longer needed.

Actual words once I give this more thought.

[MonkeyWrench]

Everytime I see this I am reminded of Geoff Crammond's Sentinel.

[Erkki]

So there is some more footage from both the game and the tools.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/04/22/automagic-love-footage-and-tools/

I'm especially impressed by the tools.

[Wurtsi]

I thought Love was supposed to be just like any other MMO, except no individual levels and smaller servers. Like some kind of massively co-operative village building sim with occasional treasure hunting. Well whatever it is, it definitely looks interesting. Probably my most anticipated game of the year.

EDIT: Download speed on those vids is fairly horrible

Edited April 22, 2009 by Wurtsi

[Tommy Gun]

Saw this on CO-OP, looks amazing. I really don't play PC games though, so I hope it comes out on 360.

[Nachimir]

  Eskil quoted by Noyb said:

My first advice to anyone who is trying to cut costs is to fire your designer.

Yeah, he said that pretty near the start of his GDC presentation. Love has a nice aesthetic which is why it's getting so much attention, and his tools really were impressive, but he came across as a bit of one himself.

[gdf]

  Tommy Gun said:

Saw this on CO-OP, looks amazing. I really don't play PC games though, so I hope it comes out on 360.

It's designed to run well on shitty hardware, so you may be in luck.

[OssK]

  Nachimir said:

Yeah, he said that pretty near the start of his GDC presentation. Love has a nice aesthetic which is why it's getting so much attention, and his tools really were impressive, but he came across as a bit of one himself.

Yep, saw the vids, he does seem like he's missing the only thing a genius needs: humility...

"Yeah, see, my tools are fucking awesome, I just made it all by myself and other people suck dicks cause they are 200 and can't make a better product and blablabla, and even an artist could understad that concept."

He also seems to be comparing his tools to what we used something like 10 years ago... Instead of what is used today in the industry...

Chinese proverb of the day

"An intelligent fuckbag is intelligent indeed, but nonetheless a fuckbag"

[gdf]

Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit. The public alpha is out, three euro to try it. Go here for more. I've created my account and am about to start. If you put someone down as a referral you get 24h of extra play time and they get 5 days - my account name is FRASER (very imaginative) in case you were wondering

I also have a friend account called "PAPATINKLES" (it forces caps) with the password "PAPATINKLES69", you can apparently use that for free when I'm online, but I'm not sure if that works for the alpha.

[egads]

Eskil is ridiculously smart and talented, there is no doubt about that. But whether he can create a completely procedurally generated MMO remains to be seen. It is impressive looking, but it could be completely busted. There are exploits in completely linear games, I dont see how you could make it so there are not exploits in levels that you actually have never play tested.

That said, I want to be a beta tester.

There is a good podcast with him over at gamerswithjobs, if anyone is interested.

[Altaco]

I've been playing the alpha for the past few days. So far, my impression is that at its core, the gameplay is really good and there's a lot that can be done with it. However, I'm glad this is only an alpha. It's a ton of fun starting a settlement with your friends and getting it running, setting up defenses and searching for tokens. However, there are some pretty major changes that need to be made. First, the AI needs to be drastically changed. It's ridiculously powerful - I've never seen a settlement last for more than a day or so before getting rolled by the AI. This isn't helped by the fact that at distance, other characters look like blotches. Speaking of which, while it's very pretty and has a great visual style, the fog effects and "static" effect can get in the way at times. The bloom is pretty excessive and stuff in the background goes out of focus, so it's really hard to see any detail at range, and during the daytime looking into the sun = blindness.

While I've mostly mentioned the nasty parts of the game, as I said before, there is some really solid, fun gameplay underneath the problems.

Also something to note, it may have been fixed but last I checked, friend accounts were broken so that the password was the same as the username.