Author: Zubon

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More Guild Projects

Ravious (and the Fifth Telling) have me missing our camp from way back in the original A Tale in the Desert. It’s funny that guilds felt so much more meaningful in the game where you could have more than one, although maybe raiders appreciate their guild ties more.

An essential difference, as Ravious says, is collective rather than individual advancement. If I get a piece of armor, my character has a piece of armor, but if I make a charcoal furnace, everyone in the guild can use it. If we felt like it, we could set it up so that any passing visitor could use it; some guilds built public camps so that new players would have access without starting from zero. I made something and everyone benefited, even after I logged off.

Continue reading More Guild Projects

More Perspective and Visualization

Months ago, I went through a brief exercise helping you think about how much money Blizzard had in the queue to buy sparkleponies. That was a $3.5 million queue. I just heard that All Points Bulletin consumed $100,000,000. So go back to that $3.5 million exercise and repeat it once a week for half a year. You will have almost gotten to $100,000,000.

: Zubon

alternate hypothesis

Ghostly Avatars

Reading Melmoth’s thought of the day of avatars that lose color as they lose health (instead of having health bars), I wondered what alternative option would be available for colorblind players. Systems that work poorly for the colorblind are shockingly common in video games, despite the perception of a male-majority playerbase and the prevalence of at least red-green colorblindness in men. I suppose that relatively few artists and graphic designers are colorblind, so concerns about the visuals surface later in the process.

An alternative would be having characters fade away as they run low on health. Set avatar opacity to their hit point percentage. This fits the lore of a potential game by postulating that the characters are more like einherjar than living beings, which makes more sense than most lore anyway: we are immortal warriors who train ourselves for the great battle at the end, dying daily but arising to continue the fight. In this case, the characters are souls who fade away as their connection to the mortal coil is severed. Characters become increasingly wispy as their connection to the world becomes tenuous.

This would have the effect of making healing much harder at low health, as you just stopped seeing people. Did Bob move or is he dead? This is especially so if you take away tab-based targeting. I like the potential effects of this combined with healing as an area-effect ability, so you would see fading souls frantically flocking to the aura of a spirit healer. It feels like a classic image of the hungry or hopeful dead.

This would also create the interesting PvP option of intentionally running around at low health. Will you accept the risk of being one-shot for near-invisibility?

: Zubon

PQ 2.0

Randomessa has a good account of Warhammer Online’s pre-release comments on public quests, which were entirely borne out. The public quests are more or less as advertised. You might dispute design decisions like the quick resets and having influence bars to fill (is that grind or rewarding repeatability?), but most PQ issues came from how other systems interacted with them. The main problem was population-based: you could not get past the first stage once the population lump moved past you, nor in PQs off the beaten path.

But does anyone really think that public quests are not good? When conditions are right for them to work, they work well. When conditions are not right, they limp along better than much non-instanced solo MMO content. They encourage socialization and teamwork. If you did not like particular PQs, fine. If you think the whole game is broken, fine, but this part works.

Steal this feature. Champions Online slots a PQ into the tutorial zone. If Guild Wars 2 and Rift are offering PQ 2.0, that will be an improvement from the current quest hub model (conditional on successful implementation). Are we just trying to rein in expectations about how awesome or revolutionary this is going to be, back to “good”?

Even if it is just putting sprinkles on ice cream, I like both sprinkles and ice cream, and that other place does not have ice cream on its dessert menu.

: Zubon

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

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

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

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.