The Man Behind the Mines, Markus “Notch” Persson.

There's been a lot of news lately about the creator of Minecraft, best known online by his nickname “Notch.” As a developer, he's one of the respected pillars of video game culture for being all around decent to his many fans, and with some of the studios out there, the bar isn't set particularly high with regard to customer service. (Yes, I'm talking about you, Sony, EA and Activision.) With the possible exception of Valve's Gabe Newell, I'd go so far as to say that Markus Persson is the best loved industry figure by the vast majority of geeks. With his name in the news a little bit, it seems as though right now is the perfect time to talk about why.

Seeing as how I wore a similar hat and coat throughout college,
I also approve of his fashion sense.

Notch is the founder of Swedish game studio Mojang, and his phenomenal rise to success with indie smash hit Minecraft is well known. (I've even written about it once already.) As a designer and game developer with King.com, Notch had a “day job” working on titles like Wurm Online. What he really wanted to do was to branch out on his own and create something that he could support, and even sell himself. Inspired by Infiniminer from Zach industries and the roguelike game Dwarf Fortress, the combination of procedurally generated block-mining with crafting and monsters in a roleplaying-like setting got him started on Minecraft. Soon after, he quit his full-time job to work on it, a decision that paid off. The success of millions of sales from what started as a personal design project allowed Persson to found Mojang as a company, and to hire a few employees.

As months have gone by, the company has grown, and continued to update their flagship product while working on a follow-up game, an online collectible card game with board gaming elements called Scrolls. Much of the news these last few weeks has focused on Scrolls, as a controversy around the title of the upcoming release erupted online. Bethesda Softworks, the studio behind the Elder Scrolls series of roleplaying games, has had a pretty good relationship with Notch and Mojang. They've been complimentary of each other's work, as Mojang employees are huge fans of Bethesda games and vice-versa. The positive relationship between the companies made it extremely surprising when Notch got a letter from a Swedish Attorney's office demanding that the use of the word “Scrolls” be eliminated from the title of the new game or a lawsuit would be forthcoming.

Yeah, I was just about to confuse this logo with one for Skyrim.

Cue the torches and pitchforks. It is ludicrous that anyone could confuse “Scrolls” with :The Elder Scrolls,” or that use of a single word shared between titles constitutes infringement. Bethesda has been taking a beating in the press over the legal bullying of a much smaller company run by a highly popular developer. In fairness to Bethesda, they are owned by a media conglomerate called ZeniMax that aggressively defends the copyrights associated with their companies, and some of this can be boiled down to a simple overreaction. Copyright law is murky at best, and claiming to know for certain what is legal and what is not is a great way to get into a pointless and frankly boring debate without hope of resolution. What is clear, however, that where there is a case of infringement, a company is required to defend their intellectual properties in court, or forfeit the right to do so later.

While Notch hasn't kept quiet about the situation, he isn't exactly fanning the fires of the angry mob. He's been forthright about the whole thing, saying on his blog that it is “partly lawyers being lawyers, and trademark law being the way it is.” He'd offered before the lawsuit to make assurances that every possible step to avoid confusion between the franchises would be taken, including a promise to never put any words in front of “Scrolls” in the title upon the game's release and in any possible future expansions. Today, (August 17^th) Notch further made light of the situation by proposing a “trial by combat” between Bethesda and Mojang, with Quake 3 as the battlefield. Winner take all. I somehow doubt ZeniMax media will go for it, but I appreciate the nod to Tyrion Lannister implicit in the offer.

Casterly Rock approves of this proposal.

Markus Persson also recently celebrated a moment in his personal life with his fans, as he got married on August 13^th, and announced a special offer for anyone who still hadn't yet purchased Minecraft. On the weekend of his wedding, a 2-for-1 sale was available on the game, one copy purchased for yourself, and one for “someone you wub,” according to the site. Personally engaging the fan community and attempting to provide some additional content even when personal obligations and the time sink that comes with a one man operation turning into a multinational game studio continues to endear him to geeks. Events like this have converted many users who have pirated minecraft, which has no DRM besides an onscreen acknowledgement that the user is playing with a pirated copy, and lack of access to official update servers.

Notch has been forthcoming about his views on pirating games, indicating his beliefs that major game studios are approaching the problem using ineffective and potentially harmful strategies, while making it clear that he doesn't believe piracy is OK. A member of the Swedish Pirate Party, he's come out publicly saying that “pirated games do not translate into lost sales,” a position that is at odds with most of the gaming (and other media) industries. Though the piracy numbers on Minecraft are high, value is continually added to the game, and the fanbase is engaged on a personal level so that pirates can be converted into customers. As for the pirates that refuse to pay anything, no matter how small, for content, expensive and ineffective tools like DRM won't be a part of Mojang's strategy. In general, those schemes tend to frustrate legitimate customers while doing nothing to stop piracy, and Notch knows it.

Soon to be no longer the scariest thing in Minecraft. I might recommend
Googling "Endermen" for a preview of one of the upcoming monsters in 1.08.

Finally, Mojang has also been in the news about the current release of a mobile edition of Minecraft, the upcoming “Adventure Update,” and the upcoming full release of the transition from Beta to full game at the recently announced MineCon convention in Las Vegas this November. 1.08, the next update and most likely the last content update before the full release of Minecraft, promises to add a LOT of rpg, exploration and combat-type content. A redesign of dungeons, rewards, the combat system, new monsters and NPCs with their own villages are planned for the release. The most significant major content overhaul since the “Halloween Update” that added the Nether or “Hell” dimension, many fans of the game (including me) are eagerly awaiting an official release date. I'm sure that when the time comes, I'll be loading up the game and ready for a full review.

The Elder Scrolls - Skyrim at E3, and a look back at the series.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about Nintendo's keynote address, and promised more E3 coverage. So far, the rest of the show hasn't done much to impress me, Sony announced a new handheld console that doesn't do anything for me at the moment, they'll need great titles as proof-of-concept as a legitimate challenger to Nintendo's stranglehold on that market. And Microsoft announced Halo 4. Whee. Some of the coolest stuff I've seen is a little more information on a game I already knew about, from a series I already love. The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim is Bethesda's newest RPG offering, and the soon-to-be-released game marks a series that's been consistently good throughout its 17-year history. I've written about Bethesda's tackling of the Fallout series before, but I want to specifically look at Skyrim in particular, and the Elder Scrolls Games in general.

Can Bethesda keep a string of hits going with the prevailing winds blowing against classic RPGs?

The first Elder Scrolls game was called Arena, released in 1994, it was originally supposed to be a fantasy Gladatorial combat game with traveling teams, and sidequests between the arena matches. In development, however, the RPG elements took over, the engine moved into a First Person perspective, and the Arena combats seemed more and more 'tacked on' until they were dropped altogether. The game was late to publication, full of bugs and critically panned, but the world established there gave it a cult following, and enough of a fanbase to support a sequel.

Daggerfall (TES II) embraced the few things that worked about Arena, and was a game massive in scope and ambition. The continent the game is set in was twice the size of Great Britain, with over 15,000 towns and settlements and 750,000 NPCs to interact with. Players could explore many, many different dungeons, own property, become a vampire or werewolf if infected by those creatures, and the story had six endings so different that reconciling them for another sequel required Divine Intervention. Complaints about the breadth of the game at the expense of depth, as most of the nearly half a million square kilometers of space was randomly or procedurally generated by the computer, so none of the locations or characters not in major quest locations had very much to them.

There really wasn't anything quite like it at the time, or since.

The third Elder Scrolls RPG, Morrowind, was released to nervous anticipation by fans of the series. It was so much smaller than Daggerfall, did that mean it was dumbed-down, or a step backward? Upon release, fans weren't disappointed. The sandbox, open-exploration concepts in earlier games were present, but they were enhanced by packing the terrain in with carefully thought-out features. Instead of hundreds of miles of randomly-generated terrain with a few static landmarks, ten square miles (26 km) of well-developed dungeons, settlements and other locations with planned monsters and characters worth interacting with. Factions and guilds to quest for and advance in as well as a main story that was in many ways even better than Arena's or Daggerfall's made Morrowind really something special. Due to Bethesda's release of a development kit to the modding community, this game is still being played today, nearly ten years after release.

Oblivion was about twice the size of Morrowind, featured a complete overhaul of the graphics engine, and refined the option to zoom out from first-person to play in a third-person perspective, though the animations were a little clunky and awkward in this mode, though they were improved from the same feat in Morrowind. The fourth game continued to refine some of the elements that made the first three games in the series great, and allowed dungeons randomly littered throughout the world to scale up as characters became more powerful. Monsters would get stronger, dropped loot would get better. The freedom to explore any area you could see, steal any item, kill any NPC (though some would make the game's main quest unfinishable) and customize spells and weapons improved. One downside to Oblivion, however, were the hellish portals that needed to be closed to complete the main quest. Inside each was a depressingly similar generic “hellish” dungeon to trudge through and hit the magic “self-destruct” button at the end.

Typically cutting-edge visuals for the time in each game usually means that a
new Elder Scrolls game is time for a new computer.

Each of the Elder Scrolls Games since Daggerfall has worked on being more “epic” in scale and ambitiousness of content, with thousands of pages of text forming the many, many books that can be found in each world, rounding out the lore and history of the setting. The worlds are getting bigger as new games appear in the series, but deeper at the same time, so we won't be seeing more miles of empty fields like we had in Daggerfall, but instead an ever-increasing and continually interesting game world. Expanding on this promise to keep getting bigger and better at the same time, we have the newest game in the series, Skyrim.

The focus on the return of dragons to the world of the Elder Scrolls is a powerful one, with a lot of the early demos shown at E3 putting the great wyrms, and specific fights against them on display. The powerful “dragon shout” abilities garnered from defeating the winged titans give characters abilities themed on draconian powers including fire-breathing. The third-person engine and animations have been greatly improved, making that perspective a more attractive choice for play, and the complete redesign of all user interface, menus, inventory and character options is aimed at accessibility. Having seen the gorgeous graphics and read about the planned scope of the world, and some of the great moments in preview videos like a dragon suddenly swooping down and snatching up a humanoid opponent fighting the character, and dropping his mangled body some distance away... I'm excited for it.

There are a few parts of the announcement that give me pause, however. Skyrim is being developed specifically as a console game for the Xbox360 and PS3, and they'll work backward from that for a PC port. “PC port of a console game” is a phrase that gives many PC gamers the jibblies, and for good reason. All the talk of streamlining and accessibility is a great idea, until you realize that games in the past that have attempted to do this did so at the expense of depth and have greatly disappointed their fans in the process. (I'm looking at YOU, Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2.) I'm going to remain optimistic, as I remember the panic when the size of the world for Morrowind was revealed to Daggerfall fans, and how unfounded that turned out to be.