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.
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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?*Â
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Month: August 2010
Ragnar Tørnquist
Ardua gushes about The Secret World, but I think a great asset to the game in the North American market is having a guy named Ragnar Tørnquist at the helm. Put that on the box cover. Not that most Americans know game developers or their reputations, just that the very name strikes a chord of awesomeness in Anglo America. “Dude, can you really name someone Ragnar over there? Do they still have vikings? Oh my god, they totally do!”
We may be shallow, condescending, culturally imperialist cowboys, but we have poor judgment, worse impulse control, and lots of disposable income.
: Zubon
Update: by commenter request, we shall not celebrate developers in particular, but we shall continue to highlight names that Americans will find awesome and astounding. Magnus and Thor are other good names to put on your cover, as is anything with crossed out letters. Umlauts are also likely to be received positively.
Hype
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]
I Am So Happy For You
I am glad that you are still enjoying Wizard101 or Warhammer Online or Fallen Earth or whatnot. I like seeing your enthusiasm for a game that most of us are not playing. Keep blogging about your adventures. One of the reasons we have this huge blogroll is because there are so many people sharing their joy in the games that fit them best.
Take a moment to click on a new name. Read about something you have never played, maybe something you would never like because you are not built that way, and see if you can see what this person sees.
: Zubon
Odd Complementary Goods
Someone in the current corporate entity has spent the last year holding a fire sale on the goodwill that Blizzard spent a decade building. You can almost see some parts of the company working to maintain the customer’s faith, hope, and trust while other parts are strip-mining that resource. Anyone else have more metaphors I can mix in here, maybe something about BP?
Because I lack trust in the company’s businesses practices, and in light of the Battle.net requirement, I cannot seriously consider buying Starcraft 2 unless I know there is a hacked version available. I need to know that I can pop in the disk and the game will work, without an internet connection and without whatever requirements the corporate office decides are a good idea next year.
We have reached a point where the DRM has gone beyond annoyance to threatening to make your game unplayable at someone’s future whim. I am actually looking for reassurance from the pirates, in whose goodwill and long-term thinking I seem to place greater trust. We still trust the developers to make worthwhile games, but how much do you trust the corporation that employs them?
: Zubon
Guild Wars 2 Manifesto 2.0
First, if you haven’t seen this new gem from ArenaNet then feast on it in as high a def as you can muster. Â It’s an updated video version of their earlier manifesto newly born for the upcoming games conventions. Â The video starts out with a few of ArenaNet’s top devs giving some quick phrases on their design philosophy to shatter the current MMO mold. Â The video is interspersed with in-game footage and a little concept art, and about halfway it switches over to full in-game footage showing some very impressive events. Â The locations largely focus on the human starting zone and the Brand, a late game charr zone. Â According to the accompanying ArenaNet blog post Walking the Walk these will be the two areas gamers will experience in the convention demos. Â A deeper look at the video and the post after the break.
A Kestrel for a knave
The news that a pilot in EVE was attacked by other players who not only destroyed his ship, but also the PLEX (Pilots license extensions; in-game timecodes that can be traded between players) worth an estimated 22 billion ISK that he was carrying proves once again that, for me at any rate, it is far more fun and interesting to read about what goes on in EVE than it is to actually play the game.
Variable Support
My City of Heroes “main” was a Blaster, but Defender was the only archetype for which I had multiple level-capped characters, three in this case. Were I to go back, I would be all about Controllers, of which I left at least three in the mid-levels.
For me, this was all about diversity of play. Blasters and Scrappers are damage dealers, Tankers are tanks. While each archetype has several power sets, all but one of them are usually more or less the same thing: damage with some minor effect attached. The differences between Ice Blasts and Fire Blasts and Dark Blasts were small unless you specialized in those side effects rather than in damage. I did that on my Defenders, making their attacks even more support, but you rarely want your primary damage class to be ersatz-support.
The support sets, however, differ quite a bit. You could have damage prevention through Force Fields or healing through Empathy. Darkness focuses on reducing enemies’ effectiveness, while Radiation mixes buff and debuff effects. Kinetics is a ridiculous stack of buffs and debuffs. The control sets use a common template of holds and other control, but each varies and also comes with a few trick and support abilities; Controllers got a control set and a support set, so you could see some real diversity in what they brought to the table.
The only interesting thing about trying more than one version of the non-support classes is the one odd power set per archetype. Spines is the Scrapper melee with AE and range. Ice is the defense-based tanker armor with two taunt auras and a bunch of debuffs. Some Electricity Blasters went melee, relying on endurance drain to keep the enemies from doing much. And in powerset proliferation, which opens up more combos, and a second tank or DPS might be interesting.
: Zubon
Guild Wars 2 News (8/9)
Lots of Guild Wars 2 news has been dropping as the energy for the game ramps up to the first public hands-on demo of Guild Wars 2 at gamescom next week. Â Thanks as always to the community at Guild Wars 2 Guru for keeping super up to date on any Guild Wars 2 rustling in the internet.
First up is a small note. Â The guys at Penny Arcade and Scott Kurtz of PvP Online were invited by ArenaNet to play Guild Wars 2. Â Later on the UStream channel for PvPTV, Scott talked briefly about his play experience. One interesting point he made was how there was usually a watermelon collecting event at a farm, but when he got to the farm it was instead overrun by rabbits. Â There were no instructions as to what to do with the rabbits, but with a moment’s search he found a cage to put the rabbits in. Â It should be noted that he completely ignored the ongoing “large” event where some big monster was attacking and NPCs were running to defend. Â In other words, he played how he wanted to with all the ongoing events.
Account-Level Rewards
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