Everything I read about The Old Republic suggests that oddities arise from its developers. Without having played, my sense of the internet consensus is that this is a wonderful, brilliant, elegantly crafted single player game with excellent polish, story, and voice work. And that it completely lacks anything that attracts and retains MMO players except for having WoW-like gameplay.

Personally, I am quite happy with the notion of a game that has an intended finish rather than an eternal grind, but that has gotten about as far as possible from the old notion of an MMO as a virtual world, and it does not mesh well with a subscription model. But what do I know? I am not the target audience for “WoW with lightsabers,” and those are not my hundreds of millions of dollars invested.

: Zubon

[GW,SW:ToR] Inversion is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

–Ravious

h/t Massively

[SWTOR] Flash Mob is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Because the ArenaNet Community Managers are now on vacation, let’s do a little logic exercise. First, we must assume! We must assume that Guild Wars 2 will have queues. We know they are going to have servers (“worlds“) more like current MMOs than the original Guild Wars, where players get to fight for their world in World vs. World PvP combat and fight evil in their world with other worldly citizens. It’s a safe assumption given almost every MMO’s launch.

I wonder thought if there will be a difference because of the business model. In SWTOR and every other subscription-based MMO, wasted time is wasted money. A player stuck watching a queue is paying to do so. Now we could senselessly break it down to say that “well, at $0.50 /day a player stuck in an hour queue is only wasting a couple cents.” Except it doesn’t work that way. Time is precious and fleeting, and not being able to access something that is paid for ruins the feeling that it is worthwhile to subscribe. If I value my time at $15/hour (to throw a number out there), then perhaps I can say the queue just wasted $15.02 of my life. It gets even slappier in the face when the queue is wasting so-called “free time.”

Big question time: Will it make much of a difference when the pressure of a subscription is gone? Guild Wars 2 has no subscription fees. There is no wasting of a bought-for time when standing obediently in a queue line. The only salty rub is that there is definitely a player-herd leveling wave. Like one big tsunami players rush to the end to join the end game. I hope that the majority realizes that with side-kicking based on area, this other pressing need isn’t as… pressing.

There is an interesting option ArenaNet could take. They could make “Fragment” servers with full intention of shutting them down once the launch rush is done. We know the marketplace is going to be game wide instead of based on a server economy. The “fragment” servers could have an expiration date and no World vs. World match-up. It would be an interesting decision. A subscription-based game would never choose this because no “community” is built on a transient server. Community equals retention, which is money, friend.

–Ravious

[GW2] Queued Up is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

: Zubon

2012 Predictions is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

In Rift, I was just hitting level 45 or so and getting in to the “end game.” I quit. Between my guild and the game, I still didn’t have enough hooks in my skin to keep me interested in paying. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a fault of Rift; I just think that ye ol’ gear shift from leveling to end game in Rift (modeled after other vanilla MMOs of yore) was not for me. So I was tangentially flung away from the game. I know I was not alone.

I still don’t think the core of SWTOR is different enough for me even if it is a solid MMO, but I still have to wonder what effect the story pillar will have on subscriptions. If I assume that in 3 months time that my situation would be similar to Rift, would I pay another month or two just to see the end of my story. Would I want to start another one?

Then there is the issue of BioWare’s post launch plans adding in new story content. If I were a betting man, I would say that the story pillar will definitely keep more subscribers around at the 3 month mark. Of course, there is also the feeling of finishing, which might make some players kick their feet up as credits rolls. I don’t think this will happen often. I didn’t see many instances of players doing that in Guild Wars or Lord of the Rings Online.

I know as the inevitable first wave of subscribers tampers down, the statistic I would love to see how much impact did the story pillar have on their monthly tithe. It’s something that could definitely change future MMO ideas.

–Ravious

[SWTOR] Story Hooks and Subscriptions is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

BioWare’s games are about story, and their MMO, gosh darnit, was going to have story amplified to 11. Are these wings of words and wax enough to raise SWTOR above the crowd?

I am one of those weird kids that reads all the quest text. Even if I know that yet another hungry refugee is just going to tell me his favorite meal is boar steak, I read it. So for my admittedly short time in SWTOR, I did not skip a single dialogue piece. I enjoyed the simple quest vignettes. The dialogue wrapped up fairly simple quest mechanics, such as kill ten bad guys or collect ten things laying on the ground.

One quest that I really enjoyed involved going to an overrun settlement to retrieve a family heirloom. On the way a Republic agent stopped me to tell me that he believed the heirloom was actually a means to communicate with the Sith Empire. He believed the nice lady that asked me to retrieve her family’s prized possession was an Empire spy. The mechanics of the quest were disturbingly simple, but the story told throughout the quest made it worthwhile.

The shiny rubbed off quite quickly though. At the beginning of one quest, to disarm some bombs or kill some bad guys or something, I was dutifully talking to the ever present NPC trying to figure out where to go, and I realized that the risk of sitting through each exposition could leave me with a negative outlook on the whole shebang. If in say Lord of the Rings Online I read a paragraph or two quest starter on why I need to kill the orcs in the area, the amount of time spent is about the same amount it takes an NPC in SWTOR to say one line.

My mind was shutting down on this quest’s opening dialogue, and I wondered if after twenty hours of listening to “dialogues on rat tails” as different or snappy as they could be written, I would be ready to start skipping all that development time, money, and love. I had in a moment seen through sparkle.

Don’t get me wrong. The writing and lines were excellent. I was definitely pleased with all the lines I had seen. I just worried if they could keep it up through all the quests, or rather if I could have. The main issue I have is that the dialogue wheel is so far removed from actual gameplay. They are true cut scenes, to the game’s core. Sometimes you don’t want to be trapped, and just need to jump around a bit while they tell me the Evil Plan ™.

I do feel that this is the heart of SWTOR. It’s a rock solid vanilla MMO plus this, and when I theoretically eventually start playing the game, I am definitely sure that this will be the make or break feature that keeps me playing… or not. Again, I’d really like to hear from anybody that’s been beyond to level 20. Are you still listening?

–Ravious

[SWTOR] Dialogues on Rat Tails is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Encounters are a group of enemy NPCs (i.e., “mobs”) that are all alerted to the player’s presence if one of them is attached or alerted to the player’s ill intentions, like walking by. They all aggro, but even with a 4-on-1 fight, the heroic player wins the day.

The early Trooper skills were great for taking on these groups of mobs. I could throw a sticky grenade on one weaker mob, which would put that mob into a “get it off me”-type panic and then launch an on-hit explosive to knock another off his feet. I could start whittling down any tougher mobs in the bunch while the sticky grenade finally exploded sending nearby weak mobs again the ground. I had to admit it was tricky, but fun.

The added puzzle element of dealing with the groups of enemies made me think early on how to handle my skill rotations. It was almost like dealing with two skill rotations simultaneously where one skill rotation was simply which enemy to target in sequence with my actual skill rotation. I am making it sound horribly complex, but it was quite intuitive at the lower levels.

I admit that I am not sure how far BioWare took this mob action mechanic since I did not get beyond the Trooper’s starting zone. I would be interested to hear if this dynamic changes as player’s progress. What happens when a player gets a full skillbar with 20+ skills to chose from. One “pitfall” of many vanilla MMOs is that the fight length seems to increase proportionally to character/creature level. Does that pitfall rear its head later on in SWTOR, especially since without critical balancing fights versus multiple mobs could overwhelm players quite easily.

 The downside is that once a first player damages each enemy in the group, he or she basically “owns” that encounter. There is little point in having a friendly, ungrouped player help since the mobs are tagged only for the first player. I had to say it’s a tad immersion breaking to run into an enemy base, see an intense firefight, and not even care. The mobs will ignore you, the system will ignore any “contribution” to the fight, and the players likely will too. For the most part players essentially phase out of the persistent world as they engage the firefight.

–Ravious

[SWTOR] Mob Action is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

First, it’s rock solid. A lot of love and polish has gone in to making the game really smooth in pretty much every factor. Sure, there are a few minor bugs here and there, but if there was a vision to how the game would be, it was pretty much implemented to the fullest.

Second, the vision is of course something branching off of a vanilla MMO, which World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Rift et al. hold domain. There are some twists, which I am still digesting for future posts here, but my gut feeling is they don’t change much. It’s like the difference between presenting a nicely cooked steak on a plate and one that has been sliced for the guest to show a nicely cooked interior. It’s a steak either way. The two things that hit me were interactionable cut scenes replacing quest text and groups of mobs as being a single encounter. I’d be really interested to see how different those two things feel after 20-30 levels of gameplay.

Finally, I would love to play, but I don’t feel like shelling out $50 plus a subscription to play something essentially super-shiny vanilla. With holiday gifts needing spending, I might pick it up next year. I think I would enjoy the journey of going through each class’ story. So much of it feels though like “play together, alone.” I am a little worried at what might become of the end game too. I know once I got a whiff of Rift’s near-release end game I quit the game. For now, I think I will just look forward to stories and spoilers.

–Ravious

Star Wars: The Ol’ Impressions is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I just got a free beta key for SWTOR from Rock, Paper, Shotgun! I thought, well I didn’t think Rift was going to be all that fun, and playing in beta changed my mind. Maybe a free romp in SWTOR will do the same. Here I come static lightsaber battles!

Then I remembered I would have to install Origin. That brought my high crashing to the ground. I really don’t want to install something on my computer that seems shady at best. If EA simply wanted a great way to bring updated games the PC, why didn’t they just leave it at that instead of creating EULA-backed spyware. Any corporation that asks me to believe them when they won’t even explain what they deem necessary… well, I have my personal high road on this one.

In the world of quid pro quo, I don’t mind a source gathering information for say an operating system that I need or a game-buying service that I love, but making SWTOR’s rider the installation of Origin brings my high back to “meh.” I am now mulling my beta key. I want to play, but not that much. Put too many hoops in my way, and I have plenty of other games to fall back on. Still the first hoop (getting a free key) was a big one.

–Ravious

EDIT: Winged Nazgul to the rescue! Up we go, rollercoaster.

[SWTOR] Emotional Rollercoaster is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

For me, this is one of the most pure exploration scenarios available in any game. Unlocking a map or reading quest text in an MMO seems to pale by comparison. The developers made the chunk of game to be explored, and others have already explored it. I would go so far as to say that in an MMO the only explorers getting pure-ish exploration are the achievers working on a world first for a raid. Everything else evokes as much exploration as me going to a museum.

I want to be the scientist finding new discoveries. I want to see emergence that the developer could have only dreamed of. For me that is a purer exploration.

The best place to start, like The Binding of Isaac, would be a closed environment. Dungeons, ah ha! There has been random elements to dungeons. One particularly faded memory is of a World of Warcraft dungeon having random bosses. I remember at the time it caused a big hubbub because ‘MMO players don’t like the unexpected.’ The theory was that dungeon runners wanted the gameplan with a bunch of if/then markers. Events requiring actual creativity and flexibility were supposedly anathema to this whole raiding thing.

I feel those developers came from the wrong direction. They slapped on a random ‘exploration’ element to an existing static design. I think that the whole experience would have to be dynamic. Otherwise it would just feel cheap. Like going to a museum and randomly getting tickets to the various exhibitions, some of which are just not that interesting.

Could we have a dungeon that allows for unmitigated flexibility? I’m talking about an instance where killing a sub-boss gave us a flamethrower satchel, which anybody can wear, and hey it now makes them an area-of-effect king. Should we give it to the warrior who can stand in the middle of mobs trading blows for flame, or should we give it to the secondary healer since our tank is so good and more damage would make this go a lot more quickly? If there is a room filled with dozens of swarm mobs, the flamethrower is going to allow us to chew through them.

Ignoring, for now, the strain on the players, this flexibility and adaptability comes at a price. The next room might be a single huge iron golem resistant to flame. This golem might have any number of weaknesses, but the random number generator decided not to drop any lightning axes or thermite. Instead, things are harder because we have a flamethrower-equipped warrior, which the golem is just going to ignore. Death is an inevitability in a roguelike that many MMO players would turn tail and run from.

MMOs are creeping slowly closer in their own manner. Guild Wars 2 is going to have an ever-changing landscape based on the dynamic events system. One run-by might have a centaur-run fort, and another might have it be an allied outpost with merchants. I think this will evoke many “neat” moments, but I have a feeling that ArenaNet is not going to allow too many emergent moments where who knows what’s going to happen when these two events overlap.  Star Wars the Old Republic is going to have a branching storyline of epic proportions, akin to any of the classic BioWare games.Yet, the exploration will be personal. Some developer somewhere has already envisioned your story tree and here is the outcome. StoryBricks is the only “MMO” that seems to want to necessitate pure-ish exploration, which has caused many to simply not understand the premise of that engine.

Minecraft comes very close to having both the persistence of an MMO and the exploration of a roguelike. I would say that the level of adaptability is quite minimal in comparison to a roguelike, though, because the player can define their path by creating the tools to overcome any obstacles. It’s rarely a situation of “I only have a shovel and a bucket full of lava, and I need to take out this dungeon mob generator.” It would be really interesting to play a variant of Minecraft more similar to a roguelike.

And, so I keep playing The Binding of Isaac. Each game feels fresh. Each game feels like it’s been generated for me and only I have the answers and skill to overcome mom. There is no guide to tell me how to best use my floating missile worm pet with piercing, mirror tears. The answers either in me or dead Isaac’s will. Dreams of such pure-ish exploration in an MMO will just have to remain dreams, for now.

–Ravious

Pure-ish Exploration is a post from: Kill Ten Rats