Author: Zubon

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Works For Me

Every game, no matter how well designed and implemented, will have detractors. Almost every game, no matter how poorly conceived or coded, will have people who enjoy it. It is a matter of taste. If you do not like MMOs or FPSes or RTSes, the best example of its kind might rise to “decent” in your eyes. If you do like them, you might play a dozen games in the genre and appreciate their respective merits. If they play to your preferences, a marginal game could be your treasured classic.

There is some game out there for which you are exactly the target audience. It favors your tastes precisely. You enjoy its theme, its gameplay focus is exactly what you enjoy doing, and you do not really care about the areas where the developers skimped.

Not minding negatives may be more important to idiosyncratic preferences than enjoying positives. Almost every game has good aspects, and we get angriest when something stands between us and that nugget of joy. You would enjoy the game except that it is ruined by this subsystem, that color scheme, and those loading times. Meanwhile, Bob never cared about the subsystem, is colorblind, and is glad to have snippets of time for a book he really wants to read. My deal-breakers are your trivial inconveniences or positives.

While Game By Night inspired this post, I feel that Bhagpuss deserves special mention here.

: Zubon

Bunny Flags

I recently had an unhealthily long binge of Bunny Flags. Bunny-themed tower defense? Score! The attacking enemies are fingers and hands (who start to acquire football helmets and suicide vests), so it feels like “Little Bunny Foo Foo goes to war.” Your towers are bunnies in teacups. You can also choose to specialize in towers or your hero units. The maps remind me of Desktop Tower Defense: the obstacles are things like calculators and tomatoes.

I recommend playing at the highest difficulty possible, because the bonus for barely surviving that is greater than the bonus for doing any lower difficulty perfectly.

: Zubon

“Unhealthily” passes spellcheck, score. But “spellcheck” doesn’t, huh.

City of Heroes: Recent and Upcoming

City of Heroes: Going Rogue seems to be more of the same. The “same” is still as good as it ever was, but as a multi-year veteran, I have about gotten my fill. The familiar people are not in my familiar haunts, so it feels empty to me even if the servers seem more full than I was used to (welcome back weekend).

The new content is a new level 1-20 area, which is good considering how much altoholism there is in CoX. It also unified CoX by allowing heroic or villainous characters of all archetypes, from the beginning in Praetoria and with switching sides for existing characters. A unified Praetoria start is probably a good thing for an older game, because heroes and villains are not divided into separate areas, although now there are three possible divisions. There are two transitional “alignments” between hero and villain, and I don’t see the benefit of being a pure hero/villain versus a vigilante/rogue (alignment vendors somewhere? There is a vigilante mission called “Beat down Westin Phipps,” which any CoV player should appreciate). Going Rogue also brought a variety of quality of life enhancements for what is already the most convenient game around.

Issue 19 looks really promising. That really will be something new, plus more of the same and more convenience. CoX is getting an endgame, with alternate advancement and 50-only content. Six years later, they decided that was a good thing. The big change across the levels will be making the Fitness pool all inherent powers at level 2, which effectively adds several powers to almost every build out there. The big graphic change is letting you customize some power animations, in addition to the existing power color customization.

: Zubon

Plausibly One-Time

Whatever you do twice will be perceived as a permanent policy decision. If you do something once that others have adopted as a permanent policy decision, you will likely be perceived as having adopted the same.

That is, expectations matter and create second-order effects, and previous actions set future expectations. This becomes self-reinforcing once people start acting upon those expectations and your choice becomes fulfilling those expectations or dealing with the many who feel as though they have been cozened, even if you explicitly told them not to have the expectation.

The ad hoc becomes an institution. Continue reading Plausibly One-Time

Shared Loot Table

I have seen quite a few debates about random drops versus tokenization. Should bosses have a 2% chance to drop the Ubersword of Epicness or should they drop 2 badges (and a vendor in town exchanges the Ubersword for 100 badges)? There are merits in each direction, although I tend to favor tokenization because random drops tend to encourage endless grinding of a single dungeon/boss.

Let me, as I often do, mention a third-way solution used in City of Heroes (and a fourth). City of Heroes has used both, but the most sought after items (purple crafting recipes) are random drops from a shared loot table. CoX applies it even to trash mobs, but you could restrict it to bosses and let all of them have a chance to drop all the rare items. That would be an even larger lottery, but you would not have only one boss in the game that dropped the one item you want. Of course, players might replicate “grind one dungeon endlessly” by optimizing for the most time-efficient dungeon, but I am not in the mood to ponder people who want to spend their $15/month doing something they do not consider fun (if you like grinding the efficient dungeon, hey, double-win for you). OTOH, I can understand why you might prefer fewer rolls with higher chances to many rolls with a lower chance of that specific item.

Several games use a menu as a middle-ground between drops and tokens. When you win, you pick one item from a short list. WAR chests are a good example. Another implementation is to give a token that can be redeemed for one of several items, rather than tokens you accumulate as currency. CoX combines menus with randomness by including “a random pick from pool D” as an option on the prize menu. Another middle ground is to have a fixed drop that is variable by class, usually done as a barter item that some or all classes can trade in for their equivalent of the item.

My thought is that players want both fixed and random elements in their game rewards. They want to know that they are going to get something, and little nuggets of achievement are encouraging, but they also want some chance to hit it big. Slot machines make a lot of money, and developers can embrace that without making everything random.

: Zubon

Achievement Nomenclature

Can we agree to call them “achievements”? I know we mostly do, but some games seem to re-name things in the interest of being special snowflakes. Now that the largest systems in the North American market are using the same term, let’s accept that as the proper English word for those gaming account celebratory decorations.

Giving your new game a different term for the sake of being different creates verbal confusion and is just asking for really annoying forum discussions in which simpering trolls rack up post counts by “correcting” everyone for not calling them “trophies” or whatever. Double points are deducted if you have multiple and similar terms, triple points if you use “achievement” as a subset of “trophy.” You get a pass if there is a good reason for using a different word. Games that pre-date this consensus can keep calling them badges, deeds, etc.

I do not think we have a similar consensus on “guild” yet, especially given the range of games in which “guild” feels inappropriate. It would be fine in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ (“kinship”), but not so much for City of Heroes (“supergroup”) or EVE Online (“corporation”). Maybe for some instances in each. “Group” seems pretty standard; CoX’s “supergroup” unfortunately leaves them with “team.” “Clan” seems a strong competitor between games but rarely within them. Let us not get into “character,” “avatar,” and “toon.”

: Zubon

Achievement Categories

Achievement screens need some way to indicate that some achievements you will get in normal play, some involve wacky circumstances, and some involve playing for a really long time. As it is, everything gets grouped together, and the fact that you get quite a few suggests the others may be nearly within reach.

This annoys teams in multi-player games in which one player is trying to take 5,000 damage in one life, another needs to kill eleven people with a fish, and everyone else is trying to win. This haunts completionists who see “39/40 achievements” when the last one is “have 1000 levels of characters.”

I like the common division of achievements into categories like “exploration,” “monster slayer,” “fishing,” or whatnot within games. I would just like to see them also classified according to the sanity of achieving them, so you might have:

  • 10 benchmark achievements, earned at various points in a normal playthrough
  • 10 difficult achievements, earned by doing some things well, quickly, etc.
  • 10 epic achievements, earned by doing things 100 times
  • 10 wacky achievements, earned by selling all 12 types of rare fish to the pelican; by dying from falling damage 1 higher than your hit points; by defeating the end boss using only paint and sandwiches; by winning a multi-player round without drawing your weapon; …

That way Alice can have her sense of closure from meeting all the benchmarks, Bob can showcase his mad skills from beating it all on hard mode, Cindy can demonstrate how hardcore she is with 6/10 achievements that each took 500 hours to earn, and David can find a server or group that supports wacky achievement-acquisition rather than causing strife with folks trying to play the game non-perversely.

: Zubon