Recognize the phrase? If you watched Rocky & Bullwinkle, you’ll easily recall Boris Badenov’s voice. Here, in fact, IS the game plan for the development of GODD Games:
Diablo III is finally here, after more than two decades in development. Notably, the servers are down again today, this time for five hour or more, while Blizzard irons out the bugs they failed to catch because they never player-tested the game until final release.
The game is … well, okay. It’s visually stimulating until you work out that there are only four types of trees, three types of fence, two kinds of road and exactly one kind of grassy knoll. You’ll see the same models again and again, sprinkled liberally across the landscape.
That’s quite literally true. The way Blizzard makes its landscapes now is the way they make them in World of Warcraft and their other equally dismally photo-realistic fantasy games. You’d think the fantasy illustrators are seeing their fantasy drawings come to life. Naturally, the women all look like some variant of a Playboy Bunny, and the men all look like the Marlboro Man.
But that’s normal for Planet Earth, and we shouldn’t expect more.
Other aspects of Diablo III are not so pleasant. There is no actual cow level. There is no “rush”. No player standings or comparative scores, therefore no resetting of the ladder, simply because there isn’t one and furthermore with the current design of the D3 engine and server, there will never be.
Teamplay? Down to four members of an expedition, which makes it really lousy for us with our Bardo Safaris. Our GODD server will easily handle 32 players, but it isn’t the same as those billion-dollar games. There are only four of us making the engine, resources, game and release mission-paks.
Okay, so where does that leave YOU in the picture?
1. Retain Diablo II on your computer. We will probably use that for some time to come, because it allows a larger group of participants.
2. If you’re a good player and are so inclined and furthermore have a spare $60 bucks burning a hole in your pocket, go ahead and download/install D3 and play with Overlords of the Internet Clan, which is us. You’ll have to go through a Clan Initiation Process in order to play with the higher-up mucky-mucks, the Earls, Princes, Dukes, Duchesses, etc. of the Kingdom of Numisma, which is our playground for Diablo III. In four days of gameplay on the release engine (I had the beta long ago) I have developed seven high-level characters to use in games related to the Kingdom of Numisma and clan activities.
3. Be sure to sign up for the GODD Games CTF level releases. You only pay what we have to pay for the download service, to avoid disaster, meaning if we accidentally get 1 million downloads — and that would certainly be classified under “accident” — we’d have to pay out a million bucks for a million “free” downloads. The fact is that someone must pay, and if you don’t pay in cash for what you download from the internet, you’ll end up paying another way, not always known until collection day, and not ever pleasant.
There is no free lunch. The sooner you learn that, the more fairly you’ll be treated by the universe. Don’t live your life sticking someone else with your bar bill.
When you take advantage of the GODD Bardo Games, you’re using resources that cost us far more than gaming on them will ever cost you. We have invested three decades of daily grind — 8 to 16 hours a day — on the GODD levels to make them totally immersive triggers of past lives, other lives and other universes in which you are living right now!
Trigger Safaris — you’ll find out more about them when you join the service — are available only on the GODD Engine. The cost is quite minimal; I’m not certain of what the monthly is, but it’s cheap compared to any private music lesson anywhere today, and music lessons won’t do you Jack Sprat, in the Bardos.
Trigger Safaris are private lessons in Basic Bardo Behavior. You learn to control your reactions to Bad Things Suddenly Happening, and moreover, happening to you, like dying all the time, just to protect the flag from yet another annoying scout.
You’ll be learning an entire language related to Spirit Travel and Ethereal Awareness, plus revisiting some old haunts of yours back in the day when Babylonians and Sumerian ruled the Earth. I think you’ll find 2Egypt5 a most stimulating past-life gaming experience.
There’s more, much more, all intended for release at the Summer Solstice Festival on June 22nd, 2012. You can attend online — in fact, it’s better if you do!!! We’ll be doing lots of interpersonal online work, many hours a day of it, where you’ll be learning how to communicate in the Afterlife and/or without a body at all. You’ll experience some of the spaces you lived and died in many years ago, and some fascinating spaces in far-flung dimensions outside our space-time discontinuum.
The development program for GODD? It will be along the lines of giving you the Bardo and Waking State Experiences of your life!
I’ll meet you in GODD!