Author: Zubon

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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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“Predictable in Hindsight”

Concerning the demise of All Points Bulletin:
Blogger pundit points are awarded only if you said at the start something like, “this game is doomed,” “this will never work,” or “this game will not last a year.” Shall we say within 30 days of launch, with greater points for saying it before launch? No points are awarded for negative comments that could be vaguely interpreted as a prediction of demise.

Of course, if you are taking points for this one, you must also take all the games where you said something similar and subtract points for each one that is still going. I expect to find few predictions that APB would announce is cancellation within 3 months, that WWII Online would still be going today, or that Asheron’s Call would still be live 11 years later while AC2 barely made it 3 years. You can check your own pundit score on the effect of NGE on SWG (still live!).

: Zubon

Old School Offer

Our friends at Stardock would like us to mention that they just added Master of Orion II to their online store, $6 and it comes with the original MOO. [Update: Good Old Games has had the same deal for a while.] I am not sure what a steal that is, because 14- and 17-year-old games are pretty solidly bargain bin fodder, but I would still put their gameplay against most games made today. The graphics are a bit dated.

I think I am passing this along mostly so that I can contemplate how overpowered Creative was at almost any cost. Mmmm, peaceful customized Psilons, quietly completing the tech tree while other races waste their resources on squabbling.

: Zubon

I have too many packs of older games to try. I also have all three MOOs already.

Pro-Social Design

The question arose last week: how do you design around/against people being idiots and jerks? “You can’t fix stupid.” There is no 100% solution, because some people really are that dumb and others will go to great lengths as griefers, but there are better and worse designs in terms of the behavior they reward. If the system rewards pro-social behavior, it promotes harmony. If the player must make sacrifices to help others, you will see destructively selfish if not predatory behavior. Economics in two words: “incentives matter.”

For example, consider Marks of Triumph in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. The epic quest chain is a big feature for LotRO, but it was punctuated with instances that demanded full groups. If most of the population had completed them all, how did newer players and alts get through the epics? You asked someone to repeat one. Repeating one was a way to help friends, but you got jack for it. Your friends had to give something up, and you would not meet new people unless someone was a very charitable stranger (or, lucky day, you find a few people who need it, a couple of whom have charitable friends). Game update: repeating one of those instances began to award (once per five days) a Mark of Triumph; accumulate several Marks to barter for various rewards. The rewards were rather nice for when they were released. Pro-social behavior increased.

Because of how Marks were awarded, you did not need someone new to repeat the quest. This has the further benefit of letting you repeat older content without completely sacrificing character advancement, and developers want players to pay for recycled content. The downside is that it is more efficient to get a level-capped group and cycle through all the Mark instances rather than actually helping near-cap players on their first run-through. On balance, however, Marks increased pro-social behavior more than they inhibited it.

Continue reading Pro-Social Design

Nothing and Everything as Endgame Content

I see more games trying to avoid having their earlier content become completely irrelevant while improving their endgame. You do this by having a version of the old content that scales to the new level cap; games without levels have this mostly baked right in anyway. Feel free to comment with your favorite game; World of Warcraft and The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ are the ones I know best for having another version of older dungeons available at the level cap. Borderlands had its own version: after you beat the game the second time, everything levels to the cap, from the final zone to the first skags.

City of Heroes took a different approach, and it seems to have worked against them from many players’ perspectives. Everything scales, and you can always drop back profitably, so every instance remains relevant as you level. Everything is endgame content and leveling content. Perhaps because of that, City of Heroes has never built much that is endgame content in name. A favorable interpretation is that very little is held back and hidden behind a grind; a less favorable interpretation is that there is little new to do at the cap, which quickly becomes “there is nothing to do at the cap.” Those who took the latter interpretation generally unsubscribed. The illusion of scarcity is an important marketing principle.

: Zubon

Context-Sensitive Menus

Isn’t it fun when you mention a problem and the solution is already in the works? Last week, that was my mention of manuals and digital distribution, where the manuals are there, just not immediately obvious when you don’t care enough to look very hard. This week, it is my next bit from The Design of Everyday Things, preempted by Guild Wars 2.

One of the difficulties in making intuitive interfaces is that some things require complexity. It is not always possible to make something powerful, flexible, and simple. If you need 200 options, you have problems whether you have 200 buttons or 10 buttons with a combination of toggles or whatever. There is no simple way to present 200 options.

One solution is to hide some options. That is why most “options” menus have an “advanced options” menu, although that is rarely of help to me because the option I want to change is usually somewhere under “advanced” (as are many cool toys that you never knew you wanted). One non-computer example cited did that with a flip panel — less common options were hidden under a plate so you did not see all the buttons at once. Yes, putting a fig leaf over half the buttons can potentially improve how intuitive the interface is.

But what would be even better would be if the options auto-updated according to your needs. My phone at work does this, and I tend to demand more of my games than my phone. This needs to happen in a structured fashion, so that you are not chasing commands or having buttons change on you in the time it takes for you to push them, but we already have some good examples, dating back to adventure games that automatically do the right thing when you click or use something. (This can be done badly, if the multi-use button does things unexpectedly.)

But as I suggested in the opening, Guild Wars 2 is already doing this. Change weapons, and your power bar updates. Go into Death Shroud, and your power bar updates. Summon a pet, and your power bar updates. I was so used to needing several power bars for all my abilities that it never struck me to want my 0 key to update from “summon bear” to “command bear to attack.” Is it potentially easy mode if, when you are set on fire, a big button pops up offering to let you use that water you picked up? Maybe, but you would think that would be an immediately available option for your character, because in real life you do not need to rewire your brain to lunge for water. Do I have any evidence that Guild Wars 2 is going to do this well? No, but I endorse the idea, even if it takes a few iterations to make it work as intended.

: Zubon

Buffing

Ravious’s trinity and beyond discussion reminds me: buffing is a lot more fun than healing. City of Heroes will always have a place in my heart because of how awesome Kinetics is, especially at high levels. Buffing is less visible than putting green numbers over folks’ heads, and you cannot slap a DPS meter-equivalent on it, but it is more fun for both the buffer and the buffed (than the healer and the healed).

You know the litany against healers, in design and in playing one and in needing one, so skip that. Apart from enjoying the resource management game of the little bars you watch, the big fun in being a healer is making your friends limitless gods that go toe-to-toe with Cthonic horrors and win. Sure, you could do that by pretending you are a battery and re-filling the little bars every time the big bad all but one-shots your tank, while your other friends plink away its health, but why not actually make your friends limitless gods? Buff their defenses so that they can take the hits without constant healing, buff their regeneration to cover the gap, and buff their attacks so they swing more often and put really big numbers over their enemies’ heads. Cut the umbilical cord. (Debuffing does about the same, although something within me loves helping my friends more than hurting my foes, even if I am helping my friends hurt my foes.)

But why should I go on at length when we have this view from D&D?

: Zubon

Recettear Demo

The English-localized version of Recettear launches today. I played through the demo, and I wanted to share a few thoughts. Put me down for “weakly recommends.”

Recettear is “an item shop’s tale.” You know those merchants back at town in your fantasy adventure games? Recettear is your shop, and you are Recette. Your father was one of those adventurers, and he went missing (presumed dead) after taking out a substantial loan with your house as collateral. Tear is your partner, an accountant fairy from the financial company who provides you with advice and collects periodic, increasing loan payments.

The basic game is an economic sim. Continue reading Recettear Demo

Manuals in an Age of Digital Distribution

MMOs broke me of reading manuals. I used to read them, all of them. I am a junkie for rules and design — I have read rulebooks for far more pen-and-paper games than I have ever played. I have read ~200 page manuals for 4X games.

I now rely on tutorials. Almost all games come with them. Even games without explicit tutorials have a way to ease you along the learning curve.

MMOs broke me of reading manuals because the manuals were wrong. I do not blame the manual writers. What they wrote was presumably correct when they wrote it. Then two classes were cut in the last month of beta, one was re-done, one changed its name, twelve abilities changed names the week before the game went gold (including several that swapped names), and half the numbers changed. Then everything changed within the first three months, so only the general class descriptions were correct. Then the vision of some classes changed a year or two later. The developers’ online documentation is rarely completely correct, so let us not even hope for the printed version that needed to be finalized a month before the release date. (And people buy printed guides as they would for single-player console games, ha.) Some MMOs learned this and made the manual uselessly vague, which is another non-solution.

Even a decade ago, you went to the fan sites to learn how the game really worked. Now every game has a wiki and multiple forums with new user guides. It has become a measure of how newbie-friendly a game/community is: you need some small number of helpful, literate people to write the guides, so either the game is popular enough to have several of those people (good sign) or a small game has enough concentrated awesomeness in its community to have several (good sign). If a game is worth playing, people will be encouraging you to get started.

Now I get many games via digital distribution. Do they come with manuals? A few games have something on the start menu that directs you there, but I do not know if they included PDFs of the manual. Maybe it is in a folder somewhere? It would be helpful if the Steam library included a “manual” button, but the prominent one is “play.” So I play, rely on the tutorial, and that usually sees me through.

: Zubon

User Error and Design Error

I really want to write about design that is forgiving of error, but a more basic point in The Design of Everyday Things keeps interfering: much user error is design error. If users keep doing the same things wrong, there is probably something about the design that is encouraging them to do the wrong thing. That is not their fault. Problems that keep arising are design problems; fix them, work around them, or admit that the problem is too hard for you. Do not blame users unfairly.

Veteran players forget this. You know what to do because you have done it twenty times, and maybe the current design even feels intuitive because you know what the developers were planning, how the system has evolved over several years, and how it interacts with or mirrors other systems. You will hear people decry the ignorance of newcomers; why can they not go through a simple 20-step process across only four screens where only two of the commands are undocumented? And look, if you just install these two mods, rebind these keys, and change these settings, that dungeon is easy mode.

This relates to my refrain from Gordon Walton that hardcore gamers will crawl through barbed wire to reach the fun while most of the market will not put up with that crap. There are virtues in that, as it allows quicker iterative development and lets players get a closer connection to the game and its development. But it means having an unpolished game with sharp edges and pitfalls. The new guy did not expect pits of broken glass on the path to the picnic. That you know the workarounds does not mean that there are not things to be worked around. That someone does not want to learn them all does not make him lazy, at least not in a bad way; I pay to play, I get paid to work.

Anti-social behavior in the game is also designed in. If players keep doing the same horrible things, game design probably encourages it. If the game rewards sociopathic behavior in groups, you will see more of it. Designers do not intend to reward people for acting against the interests of their groupmates, but game designs certainly do so.

If the players are not playing your game how you want them to, you should look at what the design encourages them to do. And remember that other design issues may also be giving people trouble in playing your game at all.

: Zubon