One great way to encourage your community to add to your game is to make it easy for players to get those additions. It is not enough to have tools for modders; you want it to be easy for players to use those mods, which will encourage their use, which will encourage their development, virtuous cycle ho!
Having it in-game helps. If I can access player-made mods, maps, quests, characters, etc. without searching the web and planning ahead, I am more likely to do so. The trivial inconvenience of downloading something and putting it in the right folder will keep many of your players from using much of anything beyond the standard game. The hardcore MMO player who will crawl through barbed wire for his fun is an atypical user.
One great gift to modders in Torchlight is having an achievement for using mods. People will do absurd things for useless badges and shinies that no one else will ever notice their having. A player who might never have looked at mods will notice when there is an un-checked achievement box to try them. It is a tiny thing for the developers to do, but it adds much encouragement. Yes, it also rewards “do it once to get it out of the way,” but some people will find interesting things in that try.
City of Heroes combines the two with Architect Entertainment. There are in-game sites devoted to trying player-made content. There are badges awarded for doing various things. After the initial release, the developers even toned down the badges to “try it” rather than “grind it until you hate the system and play only farms.”
Ease of use plus a low-cost nudge: encourage modders and harvest their ideas for official releases.
: Zubon
The Torchlight 2 announcement came just after I started poking at Torchlight again. I had long ago started a game on the highest difficulty but wandered off after getting tired of how that slowed down the game — it is just a matter of giving all the enemies bigger numbers, which means that my pets drop faster, monsters take longer to kill, and more things one-shot me. The game’s bosses are easy except for their masses of minions, which becomes really annoying when the end boss’s big ability is summoning masses of minions (and sometimes consuming them).
I finished that run-through this weekend. One oddity of Torchlight is that the meanest attacks are area-effect. Most games work on the principle that multiple-target effects have lower damage, but the nasty things in Torchlight tend to hit entire areas. Continue reading ‘Torchlight Difficulty Levels’
Hype has become the subject of the day, and I will contribute two repeats to the discussion.
First, You Are Judged Against Your Hype. Doing something modest very well gives you Portal or perhaps Torchlight. Take your pick on “shooting for the stars and not even delivering all the features on the box.”
Second, the example that always comes to mind on “failed to meet explicit promises” is Warhammer Online, as Zoso points out. If you ask me about WAR and I just mutter, “bears bears bears,” that is what I am talking about. Not only did developers explicitly identify a problem, identify a solution, then implement the problem exactly as described, but you were reminded of it constantly. Every time a quest sent you back to where you just came from, “bears bears bears.” Every time you killed a named enemy then got a quest to kill that named enemy, “bears bears bears.” Every time you saw a kill collector, the half-arsed version of the solution, “bears bears bears.” Then later tiers had such content/leveling curve issues that they added a bunch of kill ten rats quests as an improvement, and it was an improvement. Bears bears bears.
I am ambivalent about hype. I am skeptical, but I am gullible enough to take what people say at face value. It is not as though I am hurt if they fail to meet expectations they explicitly set; I just don’t trust the company or anyone who was identifiably a factor in lying to me.
: Zubon
Note that there is a separable issue for just doing badly. Alganon is a game that delivered everything it promised [Carson says no] badly. Earth Eternal seems to have had a similar problem.
[Update]
How is it that Runic Games is publishing Torchlight 2 early next year while other games languish in development Hell for years before coming out late, buggy, and poorly balanced? My compliments to whoever is in charge of production and logistics.
I understand that Torchlight is not the most ambitious project ever. It is narrowly defined and does one thing really well. It out-Diabloes Diablo. It is also a single-player game, which simplifies quite a bit. I also respect the discipline it takes to make a narrowly focused game, rather than trying to be all things to all people. We have seen that. We have seen that fail.
Torchlight 1 seems like a teaser for the real thing. Single-player, limited range of options: it is a demo expanded to something they could use as a fund-raiser. Torchlight 2 is adding multi-player and other things people thought were missing. By the time Diablo 3 comes out, are you really going to be interested in it except as “more of the same” of Torchlight? And they’re making an MMO. It is like seeing someone re-create Blizzard, if they had it to do all over again with less baggage, more experience, and no Activision.
: Zubon
I like The Onion, but I rarely find myself reading much of it because the full text rarely improves on the headlines. You might need to read the first paragraph to see where they are taking the joke, but stringing it out for 1000 words does not add much to the first 5 seconds. (I might take this as an object lesson, but look at me go, still typing.)
Syp finds the same problem with Star Trek Online, I said the same thing about LotRO skirmishes, and many of us have said the same about Borderlands and Torchlight: it is great at first, but there is not all that much improvement or variation over time. (I do credit the two single-player games for having interesting boss fights mixed into the repetition, where MMOs tend to rely on even more repetition, even in tank-and-spank bosses.) I appreciate being able to get 95% of the benefit in 5% of the time. Portal did that brilliantly and then ended.
: Zubon
Non-MMO inspiration banished to the first comment.
I was worried that skirmishes would pale. They have, for me at least. The problem is that they are so transparently procedural content, and that is not LotRO’s strong point. Let me contrast with the equally procedural Torchlight.
Continue reading ‘Procedural Content’
I do not comment on animations often, but I am very fond of two in Torchlight. The Destroyer does not walk; he stomps. He stalks. He is a large, angry beast of prey, and not a subtle one like a great cat. To pull a line from the book I’m currently reading, “I’m leaving. The first three creatures — man, woman, or sub — that get in my way, they die. Right here on the floor. Die.” The second is Medea’s entry with her troops. This lasts for a few seconds per game, so enjoy it. Her troops, little versions of her, are in perfect parade march. She is less formal, sauntering behind them without a care, completely at home. Why not give one of the bosses a little sway?
: Zubon
In Torchlight, you can retire a character who has completed the game. Retired characters pass on one item, which gets upgraded stats and lower requirements to equip it, and items can be passed down several times to become ridiculous. Later-generation characters also start with more fame, effectively free skill points. You can also toss your items in the shared stash, but your new level 1 will be a long ways from using that level 50 equipment. (There is also an infinite dungeon for characters who will not be retiring.)
In Kingdom of Loathing, you can ascend with a character who has completed the game. Ascended characters pass on one skill, so players accumulate many skills over time. All non-quest items go into ancestral self-storage, and they can be reclaimed at different times depending on your difficulty setting. Some smaller bonuses also accumulate across the generations or just by merit of having been playing for years. (There is also an infinite dungeon for characters who will not be ascending.)
In Dungeons and Dragons Tiny Adventures (not DDO), any character reaching the level cap automatically retires. Retiring characters pass on one item, which can be equipped at level 1. Many classes, modes, and abilities are opened based on the number of characters retired, no matter what you retire.
What would you think about a MMO that offered something like this? All of the above are single-player games with limited interaction. D&D Online had a steady stream of hate about the design decision to give your first character a lower stat total than later ones, which I think was reversed. This would be more extreme: every successive character receives some improvement. That sounds potentially painful in a game with a level cap and PvP, where being the best would involve having mulched a dozen capped characters already. Balance could be difficult, hitting that window between “not worth it” and “absolutely required,” particularly as the game ages and you need to decide whether the new boss is balanced against newly capped characters or 10th-generation characters.
It could be the worst grind ever. It could also be an exciting way of re-visiting content and mixing the Explorer and Achiever perspectives.
: Zubon
Update: I should note, this is well-worn territory for the MUDers. But the populations, if nothing else, are rather different between MUD grognards and WoW players.
(yes, the Lesdanaday -is- a unit of measurement)
It’s got tons of little things, some more little than others, that make it utterly impossible to go back to Diablo II (or any other dungeon crawl isometricky cRPG) with any sense of satisfaction. Wouldn’t be surprised if D3 ends up lifting some of this stuff from Torchlight. In no order of importance:
Continue reading ‘First < day with Torchlight'
If Torchlight doesn’t become wildly successful then I don’t know anything anymore. What a wonderful game.