Author: Zubon

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Towards a Perpetual Stream of Events

I like festival time in Middle-earth. There is a festival for each season, and each runs about a month, so either it is festival time now, or it was last month, or it will be next month. World of Warcraft has something similar with its seasonal events. About half of each month is a festival.

As games age and have more events, they should repeat and accumulate rather than cycling out. All seasonal and holiday content can be re-used for future years. (I gladly exempt Kingdom of Loathing‘s Crimbo season from this rule, as I always look forward to the next winter solstice’s insanity. They do recycle all the other holidays, however, and they appear whenever either the real-world or in-game calendar would have them.) Just keep adding a few more each year until the game world is always having some kind of festival. If you run out of seasonal and holiday events, re-invigorate some little-used town with a local event. Have competing local events on the same theme. Come to think of it, having competing potato queens as event quest NPCs would be awesome.

City of Heroes has a slightly different take on this. Instead of adding new holidays each year, they add new events to existing holidays. The previous content still exists, but each year makes it bigger. Halloween features trick or treating and the great pumpkin and costumes and a haunted giant and zombie attacks and the apocalypse and oh my goodness.

: Zubon

Comment Spotlight

Sometimes when you receive a comment, there are so many things you want to say that you cannot say any. You can do little but regard it with wonder. As with a poem or a koan, the discussion would be far longer than the original. Rather than leave the lantern beneath a bushel, in the spirit of Warrior Wisdom Fridays, we present the pronouncement of jon:

RMT proponents are so amusingly shallow emotionally (hence easily manipulated by game devs). You people deserve to be parted with your money.
The “directs your efforts away from the unemployed” quote illustrates the mindset of RMT proponents quite a bit. Continually frustrated by their own perceived inability to compete with fellow MMO players for virtual status, they champion a form of meta-gaming where money, instead of merit, can buy status within the community.
While they would have people believe their desire for RMT based games is simply about enabling them to enjoy the game in their own unique flowery way. it’s really about finally being able to show up the “unemployed” guy. Ironically the unemployed guy (who never really existed in the first place), bored by MoneyQuest™ goes and plays something where achievement is rewarded, leaving the RMTers high and dry with nobody to show off to.
This RMT fixation indicates self-esteem and confidence issues to me. Take a break from the XP potions and zombie pandas. Use the extra money for a session with a therapist.

Long live fiero.

: Zubon

Re-Quest

My buddy invites me to his Ventrilo server, so we can chat while we are in our respective games. He is running his five-man dailies in WoW, I am starting a second playthrough in Borderlands.

“So, what’s this ‘playthrough’ BS? Does anything change, or do you just do the same boring-ass quests over again? Who wants to do that?”

“Aren’t you playing WoW right now?”

: Zubon

We Are All RMTers

Many developers have recognized that “play as much as you like” is leaving money on the table, while “pay as much as you like” directs your efforts away from the unemployed and towards capturing as much consumer surplus as possible.

WoW quietly became a came with a cash shop, only the cash shop offered account/character services rather than the usual cosmetic items, bonus xp, and sometime uber loot. WoW has officially started its cash shop. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ has started with the adventure pack, DDO is now a F2P (free to pay, free to play) game, but I don’t recall hearing any RMT for Asheron’s Call. Most of the recent releases have their cash shops built right in, and others are adding them. The more unfortunate games are adding core services and things that were supposed to be part of the basic package as cash add-ons. Wizard101 has been bulking up its shop.

Which games are left without ways for you to spend dollars beyond a monthly fee?

: Zubon

Vendors

You may have expressed your sympathies for the NPCs in your favorite MMO. They never get to leave their shops, and their families miss them. Perhaps they do not even have shops, eternally standing in the sun and the rain in the hopes that someone will come by with frayed rat tails to sell. The lucky ones get to wander along a track, but most of them might as well be vending machines.

Borderlands takes that step. Shopkeepers? You can meet both of them, but mostly you deal with the vending machines they set up around the world. Drop your money in and grenades come out. Drop your sniper rifle in and money comes out.

How does that work? In a sci fi setting, you can have good computers in a box that huge. How do they empty/restock them, how did they get them in these forsaken corners of the world, and why don’t they get robbed? Look, this is a game where shotguns can fire electric rockets and pistols can generate their own ammunition. Being nitpicky about vending machines will not help you when you want to set fire to the acid-spitting dog-thing.

: Zubon

Veteran of the Wrathgate

One of the novellas in Dragonblight is 95% great. There is even an achievement, so the game is pushing you towards quality content (as opposed to the achievement requiring The Green Hills of Stranglethorn). This is the 20-mission chain ending in The Battle For The Undercity from the eastern Alliance Keep. It is one of the central storyline quests for the expansion, and its backbone provides strength and structure.

This is exactly what you should have expected coming into the expansion pack: war with the Lich King. Entering Northrend through the Borean Tundra, this is what I saw coming, with Nerubians attacking right at the beach. The Tundra turned out to be a long digression, but the main thread picks up. You have a castle on the edge of doom, you have slavering undead hordes. Clear the crypt! Blast the mines! Save the citizens! There are a few misses along the way, but it features great heroics, you fight the undead just like you signed up for, and the NPCs praise you at every step for being the epic hero who is making a difference. You can pretend that it matters, and phasing tech helps the illusion.

It leads to the excellent cinematic that Blizzard used to promote the expansion. It really is a great video. We played it several times at the LAN party just after it was released, and we wondered when Blizzard was going into film-making. They really do make great trailers, and having played through the zone, it makes sense why dragons appear and burn everything at the end (a bit of a WTF moment in the original release). Phasing even brings the effects in-game.

The very end of the arc is horrible, absolutely terrible, just like the end of the Death Knight intro. It is a deconstruction of god mode, showing you that the game can become even more pointless if you crank all the dials to 11 and have immortal characters. Get healed for 10,000hp per second with similar DPS! Accompany your 12+ million hit points worth of allies into battle! You can join in the fight, pretending that your tiny contribution matters and that the outcome is not pre-determined, or you can go AFK and let the NPCs play with each other in a long, repetitive fight. Watch your raid boss allies fight the raid boss enemy for several minutes of pointless animations! Rather than sit through fifteen minutes with no gameplay value, I recommend reading the text on the wiki and alt-tabbing. The voice acting is the only value added by having it in-game, and that could have been done with a much shorter cut scene. Even the animation is shoddy, because Varian Wrynn resets to his default stance for a moment between each talking emote, making his swords flicker in and out of existence as he talks. It fares poorly coming directly after some of the best quests and visuals in the game.

I fear for the future of the industry when some players consider this last quest one of the “most epic.” No, the numbers and gameplay are meaningless, and the storyline advances only by wiping out the storyline advancement that happened in the previous cut scene. Hey, let’s have several speeches about how the Alliance and Horde must unify against a greater foe, show them doing so, finally cash out the implications of the Forsaken, and then hit the reset button immediately? And do the players who have not done the Frozen Throne bonus campaign have any idea what Jaina is about?

: Zubon

Re-trying Champions

Champions Online is letting everyone play for free right now, so I thought I would give it another shot. Patch installation only crashed once. I found the character creator improved in little ways that help, and getting from start to a finished character felt more intuitive, although some of that might have been having seen it before. Everything was much improved by adjusting a few settings, especially eliminating those character outlines I hate so much (tolerable in Borderlands). The power-up auto-attack is a great tool for getting that feel of constant rock-em-sock-em action, with big booms off the charged-up power. I already knew where most things were from beta, so I was off at a run. I found that I wanted to like Champions.

Then servers crashed about half-way through the tutorial. Checking a few hours later, they were up, and there was a complete roll-back. I logged in my born again virgin character to see him at the starting point. The tutorial is not so good that I want to run it multiple times per day to get through it once. Maybe next free weekend, Cryptic.

: Zubon

Bad Design or Buggy Implementation?

Continuing Borderlands/Torchlight week, there is an oddity with the scavenger quests (and possibly others), and it does not seem to affect everyone, which implies “bug” to me. It seems that, if you pick up quest objectives in an order other than the one in which the quest guide points you to them, the quest guide breaks. The little diamond on your map points to nothing in particular or perhaps one you already picked up. Luckily, the item(s) will still be in that general area, so you can just look around for a while; it helps to do this at night, when the green lights stand out.

Checking if I was the only one with this problem, I found many defenders of the current implementation. Their theory is that this is intentional behavior, that the quest guide is only supposed to point you in the general area. Some lean heavily on “scavenger hunt,” which is arguable even though scavenging has a meaning prior to (and hence yielding) scavenger hunt. They must believe that the first few quest points are exactly on the right spot as a way to ease you into it, at which point the real difficulty kicks in with no notice.

The sad thing is, I cannot say with surety that they are wrong. (Some of course claim surety that they are right. Dev comment, anyone? [Update: Scott provides, yes, a developer “known bug” quote.]) I have seen far worse “working as intended” statements. Anyone have the classic CSR response quote on the Everquest raid boss that spawned below the world, something like, “This is a challenge!”

: Zubon