Month: August 2010

Guild Morning, Gamescom

I feel bad for ArenaNet that the leaked video was the first footage we saw of gamescom, but things have turned around quickly:

The necromancer is the next profession for Guild Wars 2, and from this video, my favorite Guild Wars 1 profession is looking pretty cool.  ArenaNet says we will get a more official release of the profession sometime later.  However, it looks like a necromancer builds up “life force” and then goes in to some kind of shadow form called “death shroud” with a new skill bar.  I am very interested to see more details on this profession.  Many more professional sites (with video) are popping up with gameplay impressions from the early press demos at gamescom.

The live stream of gamescom has also started!  I don’t know what events will play today because there is no Wednesday schedule on the NCSoft gamescom site.  However, in channel they are announcing the next upcoming presentations.  An Aion presentation is first up.

And of course, the moment I post this ArenaNet puts up a new blog post with thoughts from the animators.

For the most up to date information, I would check out this forum thread or the Guild Wars 2 Guru front page.

–Ravious

Pure Exploration

Hopefully the personal story acts as a guide through the zones because that will be necessary. Players need more purpose than pure exploration… — Ravious

He is probably right, but I wonder.

The first generation of graphic MUDs had far less guidance. I started with Asheron’s Call, which had almost none. There was no quest book. Some NPCs would trade for something in a dungeon or from a monster, and that was how most quests were structured. Some locations had stories that you could follow. For the most part, though: here, have a world, go nuts. (I could not tell you the current state of Dereth.)

We moved away from that pretty immediately. Asheron’s Call 2 was organized by vaults the way The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ has its epic story, although it was a ways from the now-familiar on-rails quest hub structure. A Tale in the Desert added levels and EVE added certificates to help guide people. Can I hope that Darkfall is a last sandbox without a trail of breadcrumbs?

I understand the desire for guidance. I know the feeling of “so now what?” But I also liked the Asheron’s Call feeling of deciding what I want to do tonight. It was more of scattered attractions than theme park rides. And that left us wondering what else me might find if we ran fifteen minutes in a random direction.

: Zubon

Kill Ten Rats Events

A lot of people that watched the leaked videocam of a Guild Wars 2 demo (beware: poor quality and obviously a dev in godmode), saw at the very end of the video… dun dun dunhhh… a kill ten rats quest… specifically an asura needs harpy glands to make some perfume.  Go kill enough harpies to get the harpy glands.

At first, I was kind of bummed just because some naysayers put down the event quite harshly.  But, I thought about the differences.  Crucial differences.

First, it’s not a quest for you.  It’s an event for anybody that wants to help.  Honestly, though, that isn’t a very strong selling point.  Kill ten rats together is still… you know.  In hindsight, it really had to be expected.  They have over a thousand events, if not more.  In a game based largely on combat, I think it would be nearly impossible to make each event based on something other than kill count or item collection.  It is very unlikely that Guild Wars 2 can defy each and every convention in the MMO genre.  This one just hit close to home.

Anyway, the reason to write this post is the second difference.  When a player completes the quest for the asura by bringing back a handful of harpy jigglies, the world changes.  Perhaps the asura starts selling perfume to players for a short time.  Perhaps the asura tells each buying player that it was thanks to Legolocharr that he can sell perfume.  That’s the potential I hope ArenaNet taps to make their kill ten rats events a bit more special than what we are used to.

–Ravious

APB: Deep Knowledge

A commenter at the PC blog every PC gamer should follow Rock, Paper, Shotgun with the moniker ExRTW gave a long, insightful comment on the news story about all the layoffs for All Points Bulletin (“APB”) developer Real Time Worlds.  In my opinion, the saddest part is, rather than being a revelation, it really just seems to confirm everything we knew or should have known about the game.  The game definitely had highlights, but the community pretty much seemed to be unified on the main problems of the game: vaporous design and silly business plan.  As ExRTW notes, they were pretty big problems for a released game.

The biggest issue, for me, was the business model.  It confused me even though I could rationalize that $50 for 50 hours of gameplay (not counting art time) was a pretty good deal for a fun game.  I would guess most potential consumers who gave APB a free pass with some of the gameplay could not do so when they also saw “subscription.”

I’ll be honest.  I still have hopes for APB.  There is some great potential, but I imposed the 6-month wait (or Steam sale) rule on myself for the game before launch.  Hopefully there is some energy and funding to change the big problems before the game goes belly up.  Good luck to all ex-employees of Real Time Worlds, and good luck to those staying the course in the emptier halls.  I hope all you guys can land on your feet quickly.

–Ravious
there will be blood

Design of Theme Park MMOs

Yesterday I accepted the suggestion that design should lead users to the right action. If what feels intuitive is wrong, change whatever part of the game is encouraging failure. I was talking about interface design, but this is how we get theme parks, isn’t it?

The trail of bread crumbs leads you from ride to ride. Follow the big symbols over NPC heads and then arrows to whatever they want. One ride sends you to the next. “The right thing to do” is so obvious that we strongly notice sub-optimal ordering in quests and trip combinations.

We can complain about dumbed-down design, but it is good design in the sense that it provides good guidance, works with users’ intuitions and expectations, and is a big improvement over games that have one “right thing to do” but hide it behind an illusion of freedom. We expect games to have a goal and a victory condition and something to do, rather than toys or worlds where we expect to make our own fun.

EVE Online is a wonderful sandbox with entirely user-defined victory conditions. Those design decisions go well together: there is no way to “win,” so there is limited guidance about the “right” path to take. (It is an improvement that certificates help you figure out the steps on common paths.) World of Warcraft is a wonderful theme park with very clear paths and velvet ropes to make sure you stay on them. The middle ground is harder to establish.

: Zubon

DDO, or how to take the RP out of ‘RPG’

Allow me to preface this by saying this isn’t a hateful post. It’s merely an observation.

I’ve got absolutely nothing against DDO. I think it’s a fine game. Not the best game there is, but does it have to be? It provides fun and that should be the basic mandate of any game. I like the visuals overall. It’s AD&D which, despite its DDO-specific splashes of flavor, is basically a known quantity and familiar waters if you’re into that kind of swimming. It treats its F2P players well and the Eberron setting is interesting.

However, after coming back to the game and playing it more or less steadily for the last couple of weeks something rather ironic stuck out at me: The RP scene is quite barren. The sadly ironic part of all this is that we’re essentially talking about D&D, kickstarter extraordinaire (however you wanna slice it) of Roleplay Gaming, paper or not. So it should have a more or less healthy RP community, but I haven’t observed it (and yes, I know where to look. Us RPers are like dogs sniffing each other’s butts when it comes to this).

So where’s the disconnect?

Continue reading DDO, or how to take the RP out of ‘RPG’

$omething for Everyone

Thanks to a guildmate I came upon this interesting blog run by David Edery, who has his fingers interwebbed throughout the gaming world.  The post of interest was an argument for “aggressive” monetization of games.  He wrote that Western game developers were wary of Asian games, especially F2P games, where a player could buy everything from functional items, boost items, aesthetic items, and so on.  Edery said that Western games had a much more tame monetization of games.

To be honest, I found the entirety of the post a little vague.  He has some hyperbolic analogies such as comparing F2P games to coin-driven arcades or TV advertising, and it is unclear whether he is talking about true F2P games or something less when he talks about how some developers rope off a portion of the game for later purchase.  Then he briefly brushes past the wildfire topic of “ethics [in a cash shop],” which is a too-big-for-this-post concept that really muddied his best point.  He did have a fantastic point in his post “[a] game with a more diverse array of offerings is going to satisfy more people and earn more cash in the process.”

Continue reading $omething for Everyone

Unintuitive Controls

The recent addition of Steam achievements to Borderlands encouraged me to fire it up and see how many popped up at once (~20). I thought I might blow up a few people while I was there, and I was reminded of how poor the interface is.

Maybe it works better on a console. The very first time I used one of the in-game menus, it felt like a console game ported to a PC incompletely. Menus required some odd, perverse combination of mouse and keyboard, screens that should have accepted either and instead asked for one but only responded to the other. At no point did I memorize which buttons brought up the different menus, instead finding one or two and then clicking between menus once the window was open.

Coming back after a break, I have no idea which button is for melee. “Had?” No, I did not guess it, though I was insufficiently motivated for much trial and error. I normally check that via the screen to edit keyboard controls. Oh, I can’t do that? At least G for grenade is intuitive enough. I can look it up, and I presume that it was in the tutorial, but once I am in-game there is nothing to suggest it. Or maybe there is something, but finding that is unintuitive, which is the same problem one level up.

I am reading The Design of Everyday Things, and I taken by the view that user error is usually design error. If your design does not lead users to the right action, that is an interface problem not PEBKAC. Some things are radically complex, but punching imaginary people in the face should not take planning or research.

: Zubon

Developer’s Gift to Modders

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

Torchlight Difficulty Levels

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