Smed's Blog

My Dad died unexpectedly last week at the age of 76. My family and I are going to miss him terribly. I thought for sure we had another 10 years with him at the very least. I have him to thank for being in games in the first place. He bought our family an Apple II+ when I was in 8th grade. Back then $2,000 on a Navy salary was a serious investment. I can remember my Dad typing in those BASIC programs from one of the Apple magazines. He had a lot of patience to sit there and enter that stuff line by line. Sometimes 15 pages worth. Wow. I remember sitting there going through those programs and tearing them apart trying to understand. Eventually I did. I even learned 6502 and eventually got my first professional gaming job making a game in it. All because my Dad got us a computer and thought playing games was a pretty damn fun thing to do!

He and my Mom also funded my D&D habit. They didn't think it was weird at all that my friends and I would rather hang out at our kitchen table and play all weekend instead of going out like the other kids. My Dad also never told me for a second not to pursue my dreams of making games for a living. He loved it! In fact he's come to the last 3-4 of our SOE Fan Faires with my Mom. He couldn't get enough! He just loved all the great people he met and even though MMOs never were his kind of game ( Dad had quite the Flight Sim habit... Including hooking a computer to his big screen TV at home) he loved seeing all the wonderful people at our events. 

My Dad and my Mom gamed together all the time.. Well in the same room anyways. When he wasn't playing on the TV he would be up on his office PC flying away and my Mom would be playing Pogo on hers. I guess after nearly 50 years of being married ( it would have been 50 this October) they could still hang out in the same office and have fun. 

I'm going to miss you a lot Dad. 

I would usually sign as Smed here. You can probably guess what Dad's nickname was. 

Love your Son

Hello,

Well.. we're in full swing on the DCUO beta on both the PC and the PS3. It's really exciting logging in and seeing so many people having a lot of fun. We have a patch coming out on the PS3 (and the PC)  very soon that should take care of the crashes and hangs (this is exactly what a beta is supposed to help us find) and address a lot of the UI issues people are seeing. We're hoping to get it up sometime this weekend or Monday (unlike the PC we have to work with our sister companies SCEA and SCEE to coordinate the patch so it takes a bit more time).

Check out this awesome player made video of PvP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEOHu4gCFOw&feature=related

One of the better one's I've seen.

Personally I play on the PvP server. It's a lot of fun to see all-out hero vs. villan fights. We're working on the balance and tuning at a furious pace, but it's a blast.

Look for an annoucement on the launch date in the very near future.

In other news - early next year we will have announcements about Planetside Next followed by a beta. I can say this - it's coming along awesome. I can also say that the first beta testers are going to be current Planetside subscribers. I've gotten a lot of email from current players offering to help test the game and we're going to take them up on it.

One final thing - Magic the Gathering Tactics is going to be released here very shortly. We're nearly done with the game. If you're a Magic geek like me, you're going to love this game. We really hope to bring Magic to another dimension and attract a lot of strategy gamers. I happen to love Magic and I love games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Heroes of Might and Magic.. and our game is really a great blend of all of those games. Plus it's F2P, so you'll be able to try it out for free.

Hope you all have a great Holiday season!

Smed

The video game business is like the movie business. We're in this because it's what we love to do and we all thoroughly enjoy a great game, even if it's from a competitor.

I have to say without reservation that Modern Warfare 2 is the best single player experience I've ever had in a video game ever. This game is unbelievable. I've never seen such an amazing and engaging game. That airport level was seriously intense. It took a second to even register what was going on, and then replaying it a bunch of times to try and figure out if there's a way out of the moral quandary.

The multiplayer game is spectacularly done too. I can't say I've played a lot of that yet though. What I have played has also been first rate and I plan on spending a lot more time playing it.

Congrats to the team at Infinity Ward on a job well done. They've set the bar very high.

Smed

It's interesting how many comments we get about BFR's. Well you can stop sending the "please don't put BFR's in PS Next" emails. They aren't in there.

Smed

Our Denver office is going to be insufferable tomorrow :) Come on Brady... you  couldn't pull that off? That's ok. Monday night isn't so far away.

sports.espn.go.com/nfl/recap

We all have our vices. For some gamers RPG's really do it for them. One of the things I've always loved about SOE is that we built our company on the core idea of making games across many genres, and that includes the world's first MMOFPS, Planetside.

I love Planetside. I really do. It's an amazing game. you won't find any other FPS where you can have a 100 vs. 100 battle raging. And we pulled this off 5-6 years ago.

There's a great description of a Planetside battle here:

www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/09/05/planetside-the-1/


I really couldn't sum it up any better than that. To me the idea of a massive firefight on that kind of scale is why I'm a gamer. 

Planetside had a lot of really great things about it, but it also had some frustrating things. The whole Sanctuary concept is something that slowed things down too much. We also didn't get people back into the action quickly enough.

But the core of Planetside - massive battles with vehicles and infantry was something we nailed really well.

To me, Planetside Next means we get a chance to take the essence of everything that was fun in Planetside and make it a lot better. Massive battles on a scale no other FPS will touch. None of this 64 player stuff. REALLY MASSIVE. With much better organization, and a tight focus on making sure the action is always going on, with awesome graphics.

Damn I love Planetside. I really do.

Smed

This is going to be a new thing for me. writing a blog for work is hard for me. I feel like I have to always talk about the company, and I guess that's how it should be. But I really love the idea of getting out there with a lot more ideas about a variety of subjects.. sometimes about games, but sometimes about a great new book I've read. Pretty much whatever comes to mind. 

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It's funny... even though  I run an online gaming company, a lot of people wonder whether or not I play games or if I'm just some "suit". I got into this business over 20 years ago because I wanted to make games. This isn't a job to me, it's a big part of my life. It's what I do when I go home at night. I'd like to pretend I have a super balanced life. But mostly I like to go home and play games with my kids, or I read (I read a LOT). I play a ton of FPS games... (BF2, TF2, CS, Combat Arms).

I have 4 kids. All of them play games. My oldest 2 kids (my son who's 14 and my oldest daughter who's 12) play MMO's with me all the time. It's a lot of fun. It's a built in group. My younger 2 daughters (ages 9 and 8) play a lot of online games too.. mostly Free Realms (one of ours) or Club Penguin (not one of ours but an awesome game nonetheless).

Been playing a lot of Heroes of Newerth lately.

That game is absolutely amazing. I am thoroughly impressed with the level of polish and balance that S2 Games has put into it. if you haven't checked it out,  give it a try. It's based off DOTA (the widely played mod for WC III).

www.heroesofnewerth.com

Smed