Archive for the 'Warhammer Online' Category

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Hope, Hype, and Expectations

Posted by Zubon on October 15, 2010 in Guild Wars 2, Rift and Warhammer Online. 11 Comments

It takes me six months to forget exactly how bad hot dogs taste. I occasionally have a good one, but mostly it is a process of thinking, “it cannot be as bad as I remember, even if I said that six months ago.” It is like Hofstadter’s Rule, only for lower quality rather than longer time.

I look forward to games on two-year cycle. Maybe that is how long it takes me get over the last disappointment. When did Warhammer Online come out? How disappointing was that? Hey, the 2011 MMO crop looks promising.

It is easier to meet expectations if you do not set them too high. After everyone tells you to read/play/watch something, it has a lot to live up to, whereas “so bad it’s good” can be enjoyable under that expectation. Perhaps my greatest disappointments have been cases where I thought I had lowered my expectations enough, but people told me that it was okay as long as you went in with low expectations, so I unconsciously raised my expectations about how well it would go. “It’s not as bad as you’ve heard” is dangerous.

Which is to say, look forward to some really bitter posting next year, even though I explicitly know better! My mental hardware is made of meat; I may truly be unable to help myself.

: Zubon

Shared Loot Table

Posted by Zubon on October 8, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft. 8 Comments

I have seen quite a few debates about random drops versus tokenization. Should bosses have a 2% chance to drop the Ubersword of Epicness or should they drop 2 badges (and a vendor in town exchanges the Ubersword for 100 badges)? There are merits in each direction, although I tend to favor tokenization because random drops tend to encourage endless grinding of a single dungeon/boss.

Let me, as I often do, mention a third-way solution used in City of Heroes (and a fourth). City of Heroes has used both, but the most sought after items (purple crafting recipes) are random drops from a shared loot table. CoX applies it even to trash mobs, but you could restrict it to bosses and let all of them have a chance to drop all the rare items. That would be an even larger lottery, but you would not have only one boss in the game that dropped the one item you want. Of course, players might replicate “grind one dungeon endlessly” by optimizing for the most time-efficient dungeon, but I am not in the mood to ponder people who want to spend their $15/month doing something they do not consider fun (if you like grinding the efficient dungeon, hey, double-win for you). OTOH, I can understand why you might prefer fewer rolls with higher chances to many rolls with a lower chance of that specific item.

Several games use a menu as a middle-ground between drops and tokens. When you win, you pick one item from a short list. WAR chests are a good example. Another implementation is to give a token that can be redeemed for one of several items, rather than tokens you accumulate as currency. CoX combines menus with randomness by including “a random pick from pool D” as an option on the prize menu. Another middle ground is to have a fixed drop that is variable by class, usually done as a barter item that some or all classes can trade in for their equivalent of the item.

My thought is that players want both fixed and random elements in their game rewards. They want to know that they are going to get something, and little nuggets of achievement are encouraging, but they also want some chance to hit it big. Slot machines make a lot of money, and developers can embrace that without making everything random.

: Zubon

Unique Mechanic

Posted by Zubon on September 1, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft. 13 Comments

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

PQ 2.0

Posted by Zubon on August 19, 2010 in Champions Online, Guild Wars 2, Rift and Warhammer Online. 8 Comments

Randomessa has a good account of Warhammer Online’s pre-release comments on public quests, which were entirely borne out. The public quests are more or less as advertised. You might dispute design decisions like the quick resets and having influence bars to fill (is that grind or rewarding repeatability?), but most PQ issues came from how other systems interacted with them. The main problem was population-based: you could not get past the first stage once the population lump moved past you, nor in PQs off the beaten path.

But does anyone really think that public quests are not good? When conditions are right for them to work, they work well. When conditions are not right, they limp along better than much non-instanced solo MMO content. They encourage socialization and teamwork. If you did not like particular PQs, fine. If you think the whole game is broken, fine, but this part works.

Steal this feature. Champions Online slots a PQ into the tutorial zone. If Guild Wars 2 and Rift are offering PQ 2.0, that will be an improvement from the current quest hub model (conditional on successful implementation). Are we just trying to reign in expectations about how awesome or revolutionary this is going to be, back to “good”?

Even if it is just putting sprinkles on ice cream, I like both sprinkles and ice cream, and that other place does not have ice cream on its dessert menu.

: Zubon

MMO Herds and Guild Wars 2

Posted by Ravious on August 13, 2010 in Guild Wars 2 and Warhammer Online. 17 Comments

Guild Wars 2 has no quests.  At least it doesn’t have quests in the conventional sense where each player is nearly insulated in purpose outside of specific group content.  I know there have been countless occasions where an unknown player and I happened to be killing the same mobs in the same area, yet we did not group up to share the experience.  I might have been almost done, not wanting to group up in case the other player just started.  I might have needed boar tails, and each dead boar only has one (except when I apparently can’t find it on the carcass).  I might have just not wanted to deal with another possible unternet duckwad.  There was an activation energy to sharing this content, and I rarely, if ever, breached it.
 
Guild Wars 2 has events.  Events have purpose within themselves.  If I see a player killing boars, I can join in for the same purpose with the same duration and roughly the same reward.  There really is no activation energy to overcome.  In fact, I would guess it is the opposite.  I bet it takes more “energy” to choose to ignore the player-active event. It’s like some “herd instinct” activates to make us want to play with other people.  That is why, after all, we are playing MMOs, right?* 
 

Continue reading ‘MMO Herds and Guild Wars 2′

Hype

Posted by Zubon on August 12, 2010 in Alganon, Earth Eternal, General, Guild Wars 2, Torchlight and Warhammer Online. 6 Comments

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]

Account-Level Rewards

Posted by Zubon on August 9, 2010 in City of Heroes/Villains, EVE Online, General, Lord of the Rings Online, Team Fortress 2 and Warhammer Online. 6 Comments

I am interested in seeing more factors tied to the account rather than the character and in the form of unlocks rather than items.

Most MMO elements are tied to the character. Your level, skills, reputation, achievements: all of these are character-specific. You may be able to trade money and equipment between characters. Some games are progressive enough to let you share a few items like a friends list, chat channel, guild affiliation, or key bindings across characters.

Some of my interest comes from being an altoholic. If I have a dozen characters, a bonus that applies to all of them is more interesting than a single-character upgrade. It is secondarily of use to the hardcore with multiple level-capped characters, less so to players who devote themselves to a single character. It makes it a lower-investment decision to try new character options, and it retains the illusion of progress and permanency rather than making each character feel like something entirely new. Continue reading ‘Account-Level Rewards’

Guild Projects

Posted by Ravious on June 3, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online, Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft. 3 Comments

Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) is coming out with a pretty cool update at the end of this month.  It has a new adventure pack, some new skills and what not, but the biggest feature, in my opinion, are the guild airships.  The guild airships effectively take the place of guild halls and guild banks that appear in other MMOs.  The guild airships feature coincides with a guild leveling mechanic that will also launch with Update 5.  I think that in many MMOs guilds are one of the most overlooked features, and having a guild project will be a great addition to DDO.

Continue reading ‘Guild Projects’

Guild Wars 2 Event Pitfalls

Posted by Ravious on June 1, 2010 in Guild Wars 2 and Warhammer Online. 5 Comments

There is a thread on Guild Wars 2 Guru forums titled “Go away! You are upscaling my event!”  It is rife with a deconstruction, from the available knowledge, of the Guild Wars 2 event system.  It’s a pretty good thread detailing possible pitfalls of the event system, but most importantly it shows with all the dangers just how big of a risk ArenaNet is taking in stepping away from the standard MMO quest (!) system.  It is a less tested mechanic in the MMO genre, but Warhammer Online’s public quests provide a very good Petri dish to show what ArenaNet devs will have to consider for Guild Wars 2. Continue reading ‘Guild Wars 2 Event Pitfalls’

Orphaned Warhammer Online

Posted by Ravious on May 7, 2010 in Warhammer Online. 14 Comments

Thanks to Arkenor, over at Ark’s Ark, I learned that Games Workshop had sued Warhammer Alliance for mostly trademark issues.  First off, Games Workshop is not really the bad guy.    They have a very strong trademark with Warhammer, and with trademarks, if you don’t protect your ranch, the fences start to erode.  Disregarding whether Games Workshop is actually correct by law in its lawsuit, we can assume that Games Workshop believes that Warhammer Alliance is harming the strength and worth of the Warhammer trademark.

We can also assume that Games Workshop knew that by suing a proprietor of a community for Warhammer Online that it would be hurting the community, which in turn would very likely hurt the actual MMO.  Now, Games Workshop, of course, can choose in a timely fashion when to launch the lawsuit, and they did so not long after the whole billing fiasco with Warhammer Online, which according to some caused a not-insignificant decrease in subscriptions.  The bruises have barely healed, and now Games Workshop is opening up another wound.

So let’s get back to basics.  This lawsuit is aimed at protecting the whole Warhammer IP, but in doing so it will actually harm the Warhammer Online portion of the IP because the goodwill towards Warhammer Online will decrease.  I believe that big daddy Games Workshop’s position on the viability of baby Warhammer Online for the long run becomes pretty clear here.  Do I really need to spell it out any further?

–Ravious
a fool’s excuse for failure