Month: May 2009

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On Designing for a Niche

The problem is, there’s an easy way to be polarizing that doesn’t work and a hard way to be polarizing that does work. They look similar enough from the outside that most people take the easy way and then blame the system for their failure.

By saying you’re only going to appeal to a certain group of people, you give yourself permission and latitude to say no a lot. No, we’re not going to build this feature because the market we’re targeting doesn’t think it’s important. No, we’re not going to change our message because our message appeals to our target market. And, if you disagree, well… you’re not the person we’re going after.

No can be an incredibly powerful tool but it can also be a dangerous one when it shellacs your from criticism. The easy way of being polarizing is to just arbitrarily decide your target market based on what you wish your target market could be and then act all defiant and proud about how polarizing you are.

… Unless you can succinctly and explain what your target market is and why they appreciate your product, you’re not being polarizing, you’re just giving yourself permission to swear a lot and draw whales on your website.
– Xianhang Zhang

: Zubon

Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 61: Retrospective

It has been about six months since The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ launched, and I have been paying attention for about half of it. I did a series on my return to Middle-earth, leaving off about half-way through exploring Moria. Having had enough time to get burned out, what is my view now?

First, Moria really is a great locale. It is a huge space with a great deal of diversity. There are lots of interesting things to see. There are living flames, transparent spiders, giant turtles and toads, ancient ruins, waterfalls, an underground grotto, fungal invaders, and bottomless pits.

There are many quests and more than enough content to hit level 60. This includes several epic books, finding the parts of an ancient statue, realigning mirrors to bring light to the depths, following riddles all the way to Lothlorien, and fighting many goblins and orcs.

Once you run through those quests, you have probably done most of the fun stuff. It may go a bit past 60 if you spent your early 50s completing the Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ content, but the content at level 60 is less varied and interesting than the content at level 50. Mines of Moriaâ„¢ pushed the endgame out a few weeks, but killed it in doing so.

Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 61: Retrospective

Side-kicks, Companions, and Crews

One of the  features in the upcoming Star Trek Online is the built-in crews that every player has on their ship.  Like EVE you’ll have a ship, but you’ll also have your own Spock and McCoy to hang out with after you land on the surface.  And who knows?  Maybe you’ll also walk around inside your ship and interact with your different NPC group-mates.

This feature doesn’t promise to stay unique for long, as Star Wars The Old Republic is also reportedly going to have companions like they did in their single player games to hang out with.  Knowing how this played out in KOTOR, you’ll probably gather potential artifical-group-mates by doing quests like the RPG Suikoden and then swap them in and out depending on the upcoming quest.

In LOTRO, it has been confirmed that the next book-update will include “customizable soldiers that you can train and bring into skirmishes.”  What does that mean?  Well it sounds pretty similar to the above.

Are NPC friends in MMOs the future?  And is that future a good thing or to the detriment of the multiplayer aspect of MMOs?

FIVE YEARS

cake

It’s amazing how time flies. It was five years ago today that I posted my first post here at KTR. Here’s to five more years of fun! I hope you have enjoyed the epic quest so far. Let’s go kill us some more rats.

UPDATE: CONTEST NOW CLOSED – WINNERS TO BE ANNOUNCED IN A NEW POST

To celebrate our 5th anniversary, Turbine has generously donated 5 retail keys for “The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Complete DIGITAL DOWNLOAD”. These codes will only work on the Turbine servers. For more details on what is included, follow this link. To enter, simply comment on this post telling me why you would like one of the retail keys. I will choose the 5 responses I like the best in 5 days (on Friday May 15th) and give each winner one of the keys. I’d like to thank Turbine for being so kind!

– Ethic

Guild Wars Goblin Market

After the big 4th Anniversary Update, the Guild Wars community is still trying to figure out exactly how the market was affected by the addition of the purchasable items through Zaishen Coins.  The Zaishen Coins are untradable, but the items that are bartered with the Zaishen Coins are definitely salable.  The more interesting market change comes from the roaming market created by Nicholas the Traveler.

Once a week, Nicholas the Traveler moves to a new location and requests a barter item.  So far, three of these barter items will net the player one Gift of the Traveler.  An account can get up to five Gifts of the Traveler per week.  When the Gifts are opened they can net simple things like candy or alcohol, but the Gifts can also net very, very expensive miniatures, pets, weapons, and tonics that can only be found in the Gifts of the Traveler boxes.

This past week, Nicholas the Traveler required three Branches of Juni Berries per Gift, and he was found in the Bukdek Byway.  First thing of note, this was the first week that required two different Campaigns in order to get the Gift.  The second thing was that Branches of Juni Berries could only be gained by completing a repeatable mini-game style quest, which involved a guard-dog crocodile-beast eating weakened enemies.  (I used minions plus Verata’s Aura plus Contemplation of Purity for a ton of hostile easy to kill minions.)  For some people getting the Branches of Juni Berries was a grind and a pain.  For others it was serious fun and profit.

Anyway, this supply of barter items and Gifts and demand of barter items and Gifts’ items creates this type of floating market.  Prices fluctuate dramatically (especially for the barter items), and by the time the market can be said to “stabilize” – mostly due to a sheer drop in demand – Nicholas the Traveler moves off to a new location.  I find this dynamic very interesting, and apart from the Zaishen Quests and title grind, the weekly market gives very good reason to sign on for a few hours every week.

–Ravious
all of your memories before you were three

Niche MMOs

Your favorite MMO is becoming WOW.  Little by little, gameplay mechanics and design philosophy from WOW are being copied and pasted into your world with a thin coat of paint on top.  The question is… do you like it?

No producer can ignore WOW.  It’s the only MMO which can measure it’s subscribers in the millions.  So producers think, “What can we copy in order to get millions of subscriptions?” and “What do we need to have in order for a few million WOW subscribers to feel comfortable making the switch?”

Blizzard does a lot of things right with WOW.  So it’s kind of nice to have concepts that work transported to your favorite game.  But there is a very large and very real draw back to WOWification.  The individual uniqueness of each MMO is being washed away.  WOW is the McDonalds of MMOs.  If McDonalds has a dollar menu, every other chain will have one soon.  Every place you go has basically the same stuff to offer, just wrapped in different packaging.

It’s the niche titles that really suffer the worst.  When you have a game which is distinctly not WOW, a title which does things so different that it couldn’t exist in a quest-driven level-based world like WOW, the very thing which made the game extreamly appealing to a small market is erased in favor of being just another watered down version of McWOW.

More Plants vs. Zombies

Turning to the topic of games people here actually play, I finished Plants vs. Zombies. There are 50 levels in the adventure mode, 9 levels of each of two puzzle modes (plus endless), 20 mini-games, and 10 survival levels (plus endless). You can also develop your own, zombie-free zen garden on the side.

Few things are terribly difficult, although I say that as someone who enjoys and is good at tower defense games. Continue reading More Plants vs. Zombies

Darkfall Team ignores conventional wisdom

Lets be honest, Aventurine have not been ones to heed conventional wisdom when it comes to Darkfall.  Lets look at how they differ.

1.  If a bad review comes out, don’t post about it on your forums.  The added attention will just get people who are already on your forums to read a review that says your game sucks.  The more responses from the developers, the longer the controversy is dragged out.

Aventurine started 3 threads in 3 days in their “news” forum.

2. Make your forum big and flashy and often updated.  It’s the first thing potential new players see.

Aventurine’s web site is lack-luster and rarely updated.  Looking at darkfallonline.com, a user can’t immediately tell if the game has been released or if the game is in beta.

3. Let people buy your game.  If you need more servers, quickly put more up within the first couple days.

If you can find the link to the store, you’ll find it’s offline approximately 23 hours of the day.

4. Don’t create a system where people can lose all their stuff.  It’ll just cause them to quit when they can’t get their corpse or lose something special to them.

Aventurine’s design philosophy is designed around the exact opposite.

Sorry to interrupt…

… the ongoing festivities, but Shack has been reporting that apparently 3D Realms has been shut down and Duke Nukem Forever has been presumably canceled. (seems to be confirmed by the updates on the news article).

Damion pointed us to the list, which is amazing.

“Let four captains
Bear Duke, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
 Go, bid the soldiers shoot.“