Revolutionary concepts in MMO Gaming: AION

Well it's not like AION really needs an introduction per se but there were some interesting things worth mentioning in a recent little review-of-sorts I read. In the article/blog/review, it mentioned about how you can pair movement during combat to give yourself bonuses. What kind of bonuses? Well, moving forward will give you a slight damage bonus, backwards will give you a defence bonus and strafing will give you an evasion bonus! Amazing! Except that it's not and just goes to illustrate how... pathetic -- for lack of a better word to come to mind, our current and "oooh next generation" [MMO] games are.

Disclaimer: I've not actually played AION in any capacity. And from the videos illustrating my complaints, I dont ever intend to.

'Fallen Earth' Review (5/10)

Well, I was sick of pixies, faries, orcs and elves. I gave Fallen Earth a shot. Seemed like a riot

• There was first-person/third-person gameplay (Hellgate +1)
• There was melee and ranged combat -- with proper guns (Hellgate +1)
• Open world concept (Oblivion +1)
• The Earth was devastated by a deadly virus and there's so few of us left (Fallout +1)
• The graphics are great (Hellgate +1)
• There's support for PhysX technology (Coolness +1)

And then I played it.

I hate programming

Ok so that's a bit of a lie. I don't hate programming. I just hate web-programming. Or maybe it's me hating reality, that might be it. Ok, well when we learned how to design software, we were all (or should have been) taught a series of core principles. It's these principles that separate 'our' clean, efficient, meticulous code from that of a hack (who may or may not be brilliant in and of her/her own right -- just not capable of working on a team etc). Whatever. One particular principle that stands out to me relates to hardcoding.


Don't hardcode. Sure there are cases where hardcoding is acceptable/ideal but for the most part (i.e. the majority of web and client applications), there's not a whole lot of need for hardcoding and in fact, hardcoding can get you into a world of pain down the road. Sure, you might think you just finished coding whatever it was you were doing and it's perfect -- until someone comes along and says "hey, can you change to ? thanks!" -- that's when you realize you were dumb and you now have to do do a search/replace-all. Naturally it gets more complicated/tedious if it's not longer a case of search/replace-all. So yeah, hardcoding is generally, non-ideal (besides, it's far more elegant to have a universal algorithm that handles a wide range of scenarios than to be stuck in the box of only one scenario).