Is it just me, or do the unique class mechanics stand out more in Warhammer Online than in most other games? The more I reflect on it, the more I see it in other games, but it just seems more prominent in WAR.
By “unique class mechanic,” I mean the special feature that guides many of a class’s skills/abilities. (They are not truly unique in WAR, because one class on each side has it.) The orc and elf tanks tier up, the chaos and dwarf ranged DPS summon turrets, and the human and dark elf healers have an energy pool they can refill with melee combat. The mechanic mattered to different degrees based on your class and spec line; it never felt all that exciting on my chaos healer, while my dwarf ranged DPS had turret- or gun-improving talent options.
My unsubstantiated feeling is that the earlier in the design process that the mechanic was added, the more vital it feels. City of Heroes gives every class something special, but it does not feel terribly special. City of Villains mechanics do feel special, because the classes are built around them. Brutes, Stalkers, and Dominators are defined by their special mechanics. Blasters and Defenders? Eh, it’s a bit of a bonus.
You get a reset on that timer if you completely re-do the class. Then you can re-build around a new core. I expect a bit of that to happen in Cataclysm, so that there is less feel of “mana or something slightly different,” although you do get rather different effects from bars that build up during combat and those that empty out. Or I could be completely wrong, because what do I know about WoW, but you have certainly seen classes re-done so that they fulfill the same role with radically different mechanics.
Unique class mechanics create additional balance issues, but for the moment I am wondering which I would prefer: designing classes entirely around the mechanics or just using them as a bit of flavor on whatever else they would do. There is a delicate balance in the latter, sometimes done well with race: if you can be a dwarf cleric or an elf cleric, you want there to be some interesting difference in how they play without making it an effectively forced choice because one race synergizes so well. “Sometimes” because there is that narrow range between “doesn’t matter” and “forced choice.”
: Zubon
Make things visible on the execution side of an action so that people know what is possible and how actions should be done; make things visible on the evaluation side so that people can tell the effects of their actions.
— The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
Decoration and interaction appear in non-user-friendly forms, frequently and sometimes intentionally. If done well, the “intentionally” can add to a game; other times, the developers are demanding that you ignore things on one hand and use them with the other.
Games abstract. They include many realistic details to create verisimilitude, but then you are required to treat them as purely decorative. Continue reading ‘Display the Options’
Commenters elsewhere respond to Ravious’s post on the GW2 Necromancer. Within 24 hours of first Necromancer information, the comments note that Necromancers are overpowered and that Warriors will devastate Necromancers. It is not just that people are commenting on balance for a game they have never played, for which they have no stats, where the game does not even exist yet. It is that people have already chosen their classes and preemptively started calling for nerfs and buffs.
As scissors says, “Rock is imba. Paper’s fine.”
: Zubon
If the store is buying and selling used games in quantity on the day they are released? Well, technically “fencing” is not the same as “stealing” but…
: Zubon
How much less would your house be worth if you could never re-sell it? How about if there was no used car market, and instead you put the car in the landfill when you got a new one? Okay, that same effect applies to the price of new and used games.
: Zubon
Improvements can take place through natural evolution as long as each previous design is studied and the craftsperson is willing to be flexible. The bad features have to be identified. The [designers] change the bad features and keep the good ones unchanged. If a change makes matters worse, well, it just gets changed again on the next go-around. Eventually the bad features get modified into good ones, while the good ones are kept. The technical term for this process is “hill-climbing,” analogous to climbing a hill in the dark. Move your foot in one direction. If it is downhill, try another direction. If the direction is uphill, take one step. Keep doing this until you have reached a point where all steps would be downhill; then you are at the top of the hill–or at least a local peak.
– The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
Local peaks are not bad things. They are, within a certain range, as good as it gets. But if you want to go higher, you need to go down to go up. Many have seen the local peak and noted only that all paths away lead down, so we can do naught but muddle about at this height.
Ideally, you are not hill-climbing in the dark and your vision is leading you in the right direction. Some people will head in the right direction but not go far enough to get higher. Some will not even make it to the next hill, backtracking towards the familiar local peak, perhaps getting tired and falling short. You could break your legs trying to straddle the divide. People atop the local peak will point to the failures below.
And then someone proves that the next hill over is higher. They climb and keep climbing. It often seems to be the next guy who makes it to the top first, while the trailblazer was tired from trying all those false paths along the way. And, of course, there is a rush from the last local peak to this one, which is now proclaimed to be the greatest summit ever, the greatest summit possible.
: Zubon
Has any “rebuttal” opening with that phrase ever been accurate?
There are many variations on that phrase, usually amounting to “I don’t think you are taking X into account,” but the ones starting with “obviously” rarely seem to take the explanation much further than that unless it is to stack ad hominems.
: Zubon
Ravious (and the Fifth Telling) have me missing our camp from way back in the original A Tale in the Desert. It’s funny that guilds felt so much more meaningful in the game where you could have more than one, although maybe raiders appreciate their guild ties more.
An essential difference, as Ravious says, is collective rather than individual advancement. If I get a piece of armor, my character has a piece of armor, but if I make a charcoal furnace, everyone in the guild can use it. If we felt like it, we could set it up so that any passing visitor could use it; some guilds built public camps so that new players would have access without starting from zero. I made something and everyone benefited, even after I logged off.
Continue reading ‘More Guild Projects’
Months ago, I went through a brief exercise helping you think about how much money Blizzard had in the queue to buy sparkleponies. That was a $3.5 million queue. I just heard that All Points Bulletin consumed $100,000,000. So go back to that $3.5 million exercise and repeat it once a week for half a year. You will have almost gotten to $100,000,000.
: Zubon
alternate hypothesis
Reading Melmoth’s thought of the day of avatars that lose color as they lose health (instead of having health bars), I wondered what alternative option would be available for colorblind players. Systems that work poorly for the colorblind are shockingly common in video games, despite the perception of a male-majority playerbase and the prevalence of at least red-green colorblindness in men. I suppose that relatively few artists and graphic designers are colorblind, so concerns about the visuals surface later in the process.
An alternative would be having characters fade away as they run low on health. Set avatar opacity to their hit point percentage. This fits the lore of a potential game by postulating that the characters are more like einherjar than living beings, which makes more sense than most lore anyway: we are immortal warriors who train ourselves for the great battle at the end, dying daily but arising to continue the fight. In this case, the characters are souls who fade away as their connection to the mortal coil is severed. Characters become increasingly wispy as their connection to the world becomes tenuous.
This would have the effect of making healing much harder at low health, as you just stopped seeing people. Did Bob move or is he dead? This is especially so if you take away tab-based targeting. I like the potential effects of this combined with healing as an area-effect ability, so you would see fading souls frantically flocking to the aura of a spirit healer. It feels like a classic image of the hungry or hopeful dead.
This would also create the interesting PvP option of intentionally running around at low health. Will you accept the risk of being one-shot for near-invisibility?
: Zubon