Once you’ve done everything, there’s nothing left to do.
Extension: unless you like doing it all over again.
: Zubon
Monthly Archive for May, 2009
Page 4 of 7
The whole time I’ve been leveling up, I kept hearing about what a grind the legendary item system was. People complained about it and I said, “Do you really HAVE to have the best weapon in the game and does it have to be max level” Now that I’ve spent a couple weeks working on my legendary weapons, and it’s time to reflect.
Yes… the legendary item system is a grind. I’m beginning to wonder if running Helegrod 300 times while hoping for a super-rare drop is actually a superior system. Let me explain why my feelings have changed a bit.
The task of getting a super-rare drop is running an instance. You’re hanging with friends, you’re killing big monsters, and you’re watching the loot pop up like a slot-machine. One of my kin-mates put it like this, “The rarer the drop, the bigger the rush when you get it”. The only drawback is being forced to wait for a group who wants to do it.
For my legendary weapons, I’ve been doing solo instances over and over again. Even if I want to hang out with a friend to do the instance, I can’t. I need to just be all by my lonesome the whole time. The instances are not particularly challenging either. I notice when I play these solo instances, I usually become quiet on my guild’s teamspeak server. I just sit there playing the instance in silence. At it’s core, the solo instances are not fun.
Do I have to do all this grinding to be capable of tackling the content? No, no I don’t. Yet that is my perception alone. I’ve already been refused admission to a turtle raid because of my equipment. Psychologically, that makes me want to be as close to the cap as possible so that I feel sure I am an asset, not a burden, to a group. So I grind my little weapon away… trying to get better relics, trying to get higher level weapons, and trying to get higher deeds.
Yesterday’s comments prompted a weird proposal: remove enemy levels entirely.
For those of you who do not know City of Heroes’ giant monster code, they treat all characters as even-level. You should have the same chance to hit (and debuff effect, armor, etc.) as everyone else, and you receive level-appropriate damage; I think damage does not scale perfectly, because higher-level characters seem to do a lot more even after taking into account higher level enhancements, and healing is still level-appropriate so level 1s do jack for level 50s.
What happens if you apply something like this to every single enemy in the game? You can still have levels, when you get new skills and improvements to them, but they are equally effective against every enemy in the game (modulo resistances). You can still have higher-con enemies, but they will be orange to everyone.
I have chosen the winners (it was not easy) of the 5 retail keys for “The Lord of the Rings Online™: Mines of Moria™ Complete DIGITAL DOWNLOAD” as part of our five year anniversary celebration and they are as follows:
Merimet
Genda
bonedead (I’ll pass on the trade offer though!)
Sean
yunk (I’m not positive yunk was entering but his comment was epic)
yunk has passed so the new winner of the 5th and final key is: Rocqu
I will contact you via the email you used to post in the thread. If you would like to pass, let me know and I will choose one of the runner-ups.
Thank you so much to Turbine for donating the keys and congratulations to the winners!
- Ethic
All this time, we were probably just waiting for an application like this.
I’m feeling a bit like that engineer at the aluminum plant that got the visit from Montgomery Scott in Star Trek IV.
One function of levels is to spread and pace content, and to guide you through it. If you have an epic tale spread across 1000 quests, you can make a game with 50 levels and have each award 5% of a level. The earlier parts will have simpler gameplay, the middle ones can transition to using skills more strategically, and hopefully you avoid making the ending “difficult” by pumping up the numbers.
Some players in The Lord of the Rings Online™ have been complaining about leveling too quickly. If you stack rested experience with recent bonuses and the new leveling curve, you move through some levels very quickly. If you want a quest to be challenging, you need to plan on hitting it soon, because you will outlevel it within the week, at which point it is green and gray content. Mowing through grays can get boring.
City of Heroes, however, lets you keep almost all the content challenging no matter what level you are. Content is instanced, and levels scale. If you missed a story arc, hit Ouroboros and flash back to it; set your level lower with Ouroboros to make non-instance content challenging for your (new) level. You can exemplar down to play with friends, and task forces do that automatically. In the other direction, you can sidekick up, and Mission Architect can be rigged to auto-sidekick everyone. There is very little you can do at level 5 that you cannot do at level 50, and almost none of it is interesting.
Farming, powerleveling? Unlike many games, it will not hurt your City of Heroes character or make you miss content. You can always go back and do it, without its being trivialized. You can skip the entire game, but that just means you have the entire game as a menu before you, rather than whatever 10% is available at your level. Higher levels mean more content options, not just different ones, and you do not lose the old options.
Once again, I wish more games would learn the lessons that City of Heroes has been teaching for five years.
: Zubon
I have a year of A Tale in the Desert time under my belt. I play a variety of games that a major studio would not bother to spit on. I will not speak ill of someone else’s niche, except to mention if I tried it and it bored or annoyed the heck out of me. Which is to say, if you are like me, this is not your niche.
Now if you pretend that your niche is The One Game, and people only avoid it because they have personality problems you have diagnosed… I still probably will not bother to speak ill of it, because you need some seriously powerful delusions to rise to “worth mentioning” on this here series of tubes. I do not even mention a lot of the games I try, because it is not worth it to write a few sentences about them. Too trivial for a blogger to bother with: ouch.
: Zubon
EVE Online turned 6 on May 6th. Congratulations to CCP!
A 6 year persistant history. A living history where truly brilliant strategies have unfolded. Truly terrible betrayals unveiled. We are excited to see what will happen next.
This year has been very successful for EVE Online, thanks in large part to the Apocrypha expansion and a return to retail. We started out the year with around 244,000 subscribers and in five short months we’ve had a 22% growth in subscribers. In the past couple days we surpassed the impressive milestone of 300,000 active subscribers.
We’ve broken our peak concurrent user record 3 times this year alone, standing now at an impressive 53,850 in the same universe. That is exponential growth. We couldn’t think of a better birthday present than having more people playing EVE Online than ever before. It is another sweet reminder of EVE’s boundless potential.
As always, we encourage you to bring your friends, family and even enemies to New Eden. Cheers to that.
- Ethic
MMOs have you running on a treadmill to reach a carrot dangling in front of you. We talk a lot about that carrot. Is it big enough for the effort required? Is there any carrots to chase after you max your character’s level? One thing hardcore grinders like me can forget to ask is, “What about the treadmil itself? How inherently fun is the activity you spend most of your time doing?”
When I ask someone what the core-gameplay of something is, they might say it’s killing stuff like IG-88 from Star Wars. But that’s not what I mean. That’s the theme they paint on top of it. At it’s core, you have some kind of challenge like lining your crosshairs up to shoot a droid in a shooter like Shadows of the Empire on the Nintendo 64, or trying to decide which cards to play as you do in the SWG online card game, or spamming specials to try and hold agro for the group as you would do as a tank in the IG-88 heroic instance in SWG. The actual core gameplay is vastly different in all of these games.
The core gameplay isn’t just one thing though. It’s not just killing. It’s getting ready for fights too. Whether that means deciding which materia pieces to put in your sword in FFVII or which cards to put in your deck in a card game, or which traits you want to equip in Lotro, or waiting for a buff from an entertainer in SWG.
What keeps an MMO from being a grind is all about the core gameplay being fun. Crafting is one of the worst offenders when it comes to core-gameplay. In SWG the whole system is just a bunch of menus and boring click-fests. I literally used a mouse recording program to do the clicking and dragging for me when I used to make +35 powerbits because I found it so boring. If I didn’t use such a program, my hand would cramp up and hurt after the first couple hours of crafting.
SWG of course has a great crafting system overall. Searching for the best resources and the rarest junk-loots has the same treasure-hunt style core-gameplay that you have in real life when you visit a flea market. All of the good gameplay in crafting is in the finding of resources when it comes to SWG.
But this is true for most MMOs. Lotro actually lets you automate the process when it comes to actually crafting so that you can walk away from your computer while making iron bars for xp. In EQ2, they realized the core-gameplay of combat was more fun than crafting so they tried to copy combat over to crafting. You could actually die to a forge if you messed up too much. The gameplay centered around trying to simon-says match the skill shown on the forge with the appropriate skill and also spamming other specials inbetween simon-says events.
Then we have Free Realms. In Free Realms there are twitch-based crafting games that have you do things like trying to pour just the right amount of water into a pot. There’s also a clock so that you can see what your best time is. Some of the actions are a real pain in the wrist, but it shows a lot of promise as a concept.
This has me wondering tonight… what do MMOs need to do in order to have core-gameplay as fun as single player games?
Say that we were to make a MMO based on Firefly. What do you call it? Firefly? Serenity? The Verse? Do you add something like “World of” before it, “Online” or “Adventures” after it? Prefix it with “Joss Whedon’s”? Your goal is to attract the current plays (who might be drawn to The Verse) and a general audience (“Serenity” may not imply “action-packed adventure).
Thoughts?
: Zubon