Month: May 2010

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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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Moving the Cheese

With any luck, Bioware will tell the lot of us off and take The Old Republic in a direction that current MMO players will find inconceivable. In the best of all possible worlds, you will recognize its connection to the original EverQuest the way you recognize the connection between Pac-Man and Quake. Because we have ruined these games by defining the RPG out and setting for killing 10,000 rats because it will improve our gearscore.

Darren senses that Bioware is missing the point of MMOs. Good for them. Our niche market is a horror of trying to stretch out the fun instead of making it more fun. Portal did not become a huge hit because it made you execute the same maneuver 50 times before moving to the next level.

World of Warcraft did not become a huge hit by catering to then-current MMO players. It so vastly expanded the market that it effectively created the whole thing; which has had more players, World of Warcraft or every earlier western MMO combined? Bioware is looking for that kind of success, and they are going to succeed or fail big. They are not going to settle for a few hundred thousand players. While there are a lot of developers that could live quite nicely with that playerbase, as a corporation they are not devoting resources to niches. They can try to poach a few million current MMO players, or they can take the market in a different direction.

I have no idea if the game will be good, successful, or even something that I want to play. But I will be disappointed if it ends up appealing to the current MMO market instead of trying to reach different players.

: Zubon

House of Leaves has the best dedication page ever.

Grinding as Achievement and Extender

Should I blame CRPGs for grinding, or do we want to go back further? I remember long ago in the original Final Fantasy, seeking out wandering encounters so that I could get that bit more experience or treasure for taking on the next boss. I suppose I should not be surprised to find it in online multiplayer flash games. You see it everywhere once you start to look for it. But why, because people feel like there is more game if they spend longer squeezing the enjoyment or accomplishment from it? Time spent is a cost, not a benefit!

Continue reading Grinding as Achievement and Extender

Perverse Randomization

One night last week, I was in very poor spirits while playing Elements because of losing two games in a row after a 2/15 chance failed to come up in 30 tries. (Even worse than that 1.4% chance, really, because it was two 15-set trials of sampling without replacement with a 4/30 chance. The odds were around 4/15 by the end of each.) The night before I hit the computer’s perfect counter-deck to mine three times in a row, and I’m still vaguely bitter about that game where a 1/3 chance happened 8/13 times. The next night a 6/30 chance did not appear in two 15-turn games. In games that are completely random like craps or roulette, you just roll with streaks, but it is frustrating in a deck-building game like Elements or Dominion where managing probability is the whole point. Every plan breaks at a certain degree of perverse unlikelihood.

The next day I was reading Battle Royale, which is a different sort of game. If you do not know the premise of the novel/movie/manga, imagine Lord of the Flies, but the students are put on the island intentionally, armed, and told to fight it out until there is only one survivor. They are armed at random, based on which pack they pick up as they leave the briefing. Knives seem common, in varying lengths, but I just met the guys who lucked into a machine pistol and a sawed-off shotgun. And then there is Noriko, who got a boomerang.

The universe holds more perversity than you can survive. You think you have planned for every possibility, and then a meteor hits your house. All of life is an example of gambler’s ruin. You cannot live forever because, given an infinite amount of time, not only will everything go wrong that can go wrong, but also it will all go wrong at the same time. And, just in case you can survive that a few times, since we are talking about forever, it will happen an infinite number of times.

Which puts that card game issue in perspective.

: Zubon

A Different Reality: Graveyards

In MMO land, death is a temporary inconvenience. But does the in-game fiction reflect this?

I object to many games because it is not even theoretically possible to complete them without dying many times. There are trial-and-error puzzles where “error” means “death”; in-world, your character somehow just knew to jump after opening that door and to put a bucket on his head before walking into the cave. The NPCs see an invulnerable god, but you just had many save files. It is entirely player knowledge, where the character never knows why he avoids certain doors

Some MMOs recognize that death happens. Asheron bound you to a lifestone, and there is an explanation, although not perhaps for how your equipment rebounded with your spirit. You have a telepathic bond with a stored clone, which is how you bring back knowledge of what killed you. Other games have stories in which people die, which seems ridiculous when graveyards are known to be waystations rather than permanent parking spots. Who is in those graves? Why don’t they just release? How can there be widows and orphans, and why are there epic stories about fallen heroes when they could just rez?

That you can kill the boss once a week seems less silly once you remember that you died three times in the process. What makes it more silly is that everyone else should know, so why does anyone think that VanCleef is really gone just because you decapitated him? You’ve survived worse. I want a game that takes this principle seriously and has quest-givers comment on why they would want to temporarily inconvenience the enemy, or the quest is to finally banish the Lich King rather than to kill him. Again. Of course, if you do, he would really need to be gone for that to make any sense.

: Zubon

A Different Reality: Vision

In MMO land, if your visual attention wanders, you can fail to notice that you are on fire. Almost all information arrives through vision, and the little bit arriving through hearing is usually duplicated visually.

MMO environments break with the old tradition of “off-screen,” in which objects clearly visible to the character are invisible to the player. For years, we came upon castles and dragons that hid by being straight in front of us but just beyond our myopic vision. Meanwhile, our characters had the impressive ability to see anything on-screen, even if it was down three levels, behind a wall, and under a giant turtle.

In an MMO, when looking at yourself, you mostly see a cloak and the back of a helmet. Checking whether you spilled something on your shirt requires rotating an incorporeal camera. In real life, people would find other uses for incorporeal cameras.

Video game characters’ optic nerves are linked to that camera, rather than their eyes, although some games habitually park the camera in-skull except for dramatic moments. This can cause great problems around walls and corners, as the camera might poke into a wall or torso, or else flee the solid objects in search of some strange angle. It is from this that we learn (1) everything is hollow, including your torso, and (2) the camera is trying to kill you. Why you linked your optic nerve to such a hostile entity, I will never know, although maybe it was not hostile until you enslaved it.

: Zubon

Guild Wars 2: Personal Epic

In the latest info-bomb run, ArenaNet and some game sites released a swath of info on the personal story in Guild Wars 2.  The best place to start is, of course, the official page, where Ree Soesbee lays down a pretty extensive overview on what the personal story is in Guild Wars 2.  IGN mostly regurgitates in their form the beautiful picture Ree portrays, but they got some amazing exclusive screens.

The best way I can analogize the personal story to what currently exists in MMOs is take Lord of the Rings Online’s epic quest line and replace all of that with a bunch of instances that branch wildly based on decisions you actually make.  So, you can play in the common world like everybody else where most things are the same, play dungeons that everybody else plays (with a twist), or enter your personal story which will be unique to you.  Guests are more than welcome in your Guild Wars 2 personal story, but it is your story. Continue reading Guild Wars 2: Personal Epic

War in Explorables

The Guild Wars Beyond “campaign” set in the War in Kryta theatre has been continuously plugging along since the culmination of Guild Wars 5th Anniversary.  A lot of it has been “cut scenes” and pings just inside what I consider core Guild Wars PvE gameplay, but that is starting to change.  The War in Kryta has been maturing in to a full fledged slice of Guild Wars.

Continue reading War in Explorables

Reviewer Request

This mostly goes out to my MMO blogger buddies, although I am hoping readers have similar thoughts.

If you have been following a game since before beta, your positive opinions on the final product are suspect. Call it fanboyism, irrational exuberance, or cognitive dissonance: we expect your opinion to be positive no matter what the final product is, and if you pre-ordered before playing any sort of beta, we completely discount positive views. You are an advocate. Negative views gain strength so long as they are not too strong; the negatives seen even through rosy lenses are probably real, but we also discount venom spewed by people who sound like jilted lovers.

You can write for people who have already decided to buy the game or not. Both love news that supports confirmation bias. If you want to write for people who have not yet decided and are either on the fence or just have not thought about your one game in the thicket of competitors, there are two things that I think will be most helpful.

On your enthusiasm, “show, don’t tell.” We already know that you like it, so we need to see why. This post is inspired by Ravious doing an excellent job of that on Guild Wars 2. See also SynCaine on Darkfall, demonstrating why and how he enjoys the game in a way that is compelling even to those of us who will never play it. These are model posts for bloggers.

For that final decision when the game is releasing, give us references to more disinterested observers. Have a few links to other people, noting an endorsement from a newcomer (not a long-time follower of the game), a mixed but “buy” review, and someone who decided against buying. Demonstrating awareness of “this is not for everyone” strengthens your view by making you look less like a raving fanboy, and the positive comments from someone who is not buying get that same weight as your negative comments. Please also remember to link to your pre-release posts with an update of “and this panned out perfectly” or “and this will need some work post-release.” The perfect conclusion will be “These are my 3-5 favorite aspects, but don’t buy it if you cannot stand X.”

Thank you.

: Zubon