Copies of Age of Empires III should be hitting the shelves of all the major retailers tomorrow! Best Buy appears to have broken street date a little early ... we were able to go to the Best Buy down the street from our office and get a copy off the shelves. I just logged into ESO2 and saw 230 people logged in, even!
My username on ESO2 is "Xemu"... send me a tell if you happen to see me online and maybe we can play. My Dutch home city is only level 3, so I'm starting at square one along with everyone else.
Every time we ship one of our games, I tell myself there will be a brief window of time when my months of playing the game in beta form will pay off and I can briefly be competitive with the serious RTS players. Of course, one or two games quickly disabuse me of that fleeting illusion. I just finished a game where my opponent killed my town in under 10 minutes. Sigh. Well, at least I'm still having a good time with it. Maybe I should play more 2v2s.
It's always very interesting to see the reactions to games once they are out in the hands of the fans. The reviews are coming in for Age 3, and while they are more mixed than I'd like, it's clear that the Home City feature is as addictive and compelling as we had hoped it would be. We made some conscious decisions during the development of Age 3 not to reinvent the core gameplay of the franchise, but rather extend it in some new directions ... the Home City being the clearest example of this.
Feedback really is the best way we can learn about what does (and doesn't) work. I learned long ago to have a thick skin, but the advent of fan forums has required a whole new level of mental self-defense to wade into the streams of unfiltered opinion. Some devs don't like to read critical reviews but to me those are the most useful -- only by really understanding what we did wrong can we hope to improve in the future. Of course, often the things that do or don't work in a game are outside the control of the dev process... failures in organization or unexpected positive synergy happen a lot. But usually, the core of any complaint is something that is a useful lesson to learn. Maybe in the future I will go into some critical reviews of some of my older games and talk about what are the useful (and maybe not-so-useful) elements.
The great holiday flood is clearly upon us. I came home with F.E.A.R. and Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance tonight, and I still have Indigo Prophecy, Ultimate Spiderman, Radiata Stories, and Black and White 2 starting down at me. Not to mention Shadow of the Colossus, Quake 4, and Stubbs the Zombie which are all supposed to be out this week. Madness! It will definitely take me until Christmas 2006 to work my way out from all these games...
A lot of my play time lately has gone to two lesser-known games.
Total Overdose is a ridiculously over the top "GTA-lite" shoot-em-up South of the border. It's really silly how over the top it is but that (and an awesome soundtrack) gives it a manic energy that makes it a guilty delight to play.
At the total opposite end of the spectrum, we have Trauma Center: Under the Knife, a surgery game for the Nintendo DS. The core surgery "mechanic", using the stylus as a laser, scalpel, forceps, etc. is surprisingly compelling. Unfortunately it strays into science-fiction pretty quickly... while I wasn't looking for a hardcore surgery simulation I feel like the setting is unique enough that they could have easily stayed with a more realistic vibe and accomodated all the crazy gameplay they want. It definitely showcases how the DS can do games that would be almost impossible on other platforms.
