Month: January 2008

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Teclisen drops a nuke about Sigil’s behind the scenes…

Hoo boy. You have to see it to believe it.

Wow, I can feel the radiation from here, and I’m pretty deep in the sewers hunting more damned rats. Ok, I have to tell you up front that I’m not sure if this guy really is an ex-vanguard designer or what, so take the post for what it’s worth and with a grain of salt or two.

Among other things, he rips into McQuaid, Smedly, and Gilbertson.

//whistle//

I thought *I* was bitter about some things in this industry!

Power/Difficulty Curves

This weekend I played a flash fantasy adventure game. Its content runs through nine levels, but it has a Diablo-style level generator that provides random maps with scaled up enemies, presumably endlessly. Many games have a version of that: levels keep rising with pure procedural content. Infinite levels show an issue common to many games: competing scaling of character power and enemy difficulty.

If power scales more quickly than difficulty, the game becomes trivial. If power scales more slowly than difficulty, the game becomes impossible. If power scales exactly the same, the game becomes very boring as you are doing the exact same thing for potentially infinite levels (“I hit for 25% damage yet again!”)

Any scaling system that runs sufficiently long will be dominated by the subsystem that scales the best. A 1% difference in scaling rate becomes very significant. You may not have noticed it in beta testing: 1.01^30=1.35, so a 35% shift over 30 levels. It is +64% at 50, +170% at 100, +345% at 150 +632% at 200. Wow, those numbers really started jumping, didn’t they? Behold, the power of compound interest. And there are games like Asheron’s Call that scale that far. If melee improves slightly faster than archery, melee will dominate the late game; if one weapon type improves slightly faster, it will be the only one worth taking.

D&D players are very familiar with how this happens in only 20 levels. A level 1 Wizard is a sleep spell in a dress, while a level 1 Fighter can take out quite a few goblins. A level 20 Wizard is a nuke-tossing god who alters reality at a whim, while a level 20 Fighter can take out quite a few larger monsters.

: Zubon

Nicodemus delurks

Happy New Year folks!

I’m working on a huge post that I will try to get up this weekend or mid-week next week. Mostly, I’m going to give my two cents on the state of the industry (mostly MMO) and explain why I’m so damned bitter and cranky about it. The problems are legion, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

In retrospect, 2007 was a pretty crappy year on a number of levels, but I think we are nearing the end of the downcycle. Expect some more horrific bombs, failures, and wtf? deals and press releases. However, keep in mind that this is still a relatively young industry with incredible amounts of hope, promise, and potential. I’m not seeing anything that really gets me excited /now/ but the winds are changing. I’ll talk about that more in my post.

In the meantime, hop on over here and leave some comments.