Category: General

Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance’; You would say, ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment’

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be pleasantly surprised by the next update that promises to solve all the problems, but you must be surprised. Can you flip a fair coin and get heads 10 times in a row? Sure, that is only a 1-in-1024 chance, it must happen all the time in a world with many coin flips. But if someone is taking your money based on that coin, after 10 flips, you should be looking for a two-headed coin.

“They have learned their lesson” is rarely a safe assumption. If someone did a lousy job last time, you must raise your probability that he will do a lousy job next time. Otherwise, you are taking bad work as evidence that good work must be coming. Do you take good work as evidence that bad work must be coming? If you take both good and bad work as reasons to believe that good things are coming, you are shaky on concepts like “evidence” and “reason.”

To end on a concrete example, before turning it back to Mr. Russell, Age of Conan had what was by all accounts a miracle patch at the end of beta, and perhaps several post-launch. At it still had that quality we have come to expect from Funcom.

I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

: Zubon

Yesterday I promised you thoughts on each of the eight demigods in Demigod. For those of you who were just itching with anticipation, click for more words. For those who could not care less, this will not take up much of the front page; sorry if you are getting this via RSS. Continue reading Demigods

There you go. I would avoid caring about it for a few years, but some of you have been hoping for it since Warhammer Online was announced. Perhaps that is how they justify “one of the most eagerly anticipated MMOs on the horizon” [citation needed].

I am going to assume it is vapor and forget about it until they reach open beta, but feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

: Zubon

Demigod is similar to Defense of the Ancients All Stars (DotA), but feels more like Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War than Warcraft 3. It has that pacing, with the back-and-forth around flags.

If you don’t know DotA, it is a custom map for Warcraft 3 that constitutes a new game and is starting to spawn a new sub-genre. You control one hero (of 80+) who levels up and buys items in classic CRPG fashion. Your goal is to destroy the enemy base, which is guarded by towers along the three entry paths. Waves of troops spawn at the end of each path at each base, crashing at the intersection. You support your troops, destroy enemy troops, and fight the enemy heroes doing the same, until one of you destroys the other’s base. It is a great game, and Warcraft 3 is worth buying just to play it.

Demigod is a lot of fun, and I’m not even playing it to its full potential. I have been playing alone with computer bots, learning how the heroes work. It is possible that it will all turn to ashes once I play real humans, who exploit imbalances instead of relying on an “as intended” AI, but I have been enjoying my time. I expect it to be even better on the LAN.

Continue reading Demigod

Running through my head: “There’s a badger badger badger on your lawn…” The images would fit together well, too.

: Zubon

Once you’ve done everything, there’s nothing left to do.

Extension: unless you like doing it all over again.

: Zubon

All this time, we were probably just waiting for an application like this.

I’m feeling a bit like that engineer at the aluminum plant that got the visit from Montgomery Scott in Star Trek IV.

I have a year of A Tale in the Desert time under my belt. I play a variety of games that a major studio would not bother to spit on. I will not speak ill of someone else’s niche, except to mention if I tried it and it bored or annoyed the heck out of me. Which is to say, if you are like me, this is not your niche.

Now if you pretend that your niche is The One Game, and people only avoid it because they have personality problems you have diagnosed… I still probably will not bother to speak ill of it, because you need some seriously powerful delusions to rise to “worth mentioning” on this here series of tubes. I do not even mention a lot of the games I try, because it is not worth it to write a few sentences about them. Too trivial for a blogger to bother with: ouch.

: Zubon

MMOs have you running on a treadmill to reach a carrot dangling in front of you.  We talk a lot about that carrot.  Is it big enough for the effort required?  Is there any carrots to chase after you max your character’s level?  One thing hardcore grinders like me can forget to ask is, “What about the treadmil itself?  How inherently fun is the activity you spend most of your time doing?”

When I ask someone what the core-gameplay of something is, they might say it’s killing stuff like IG-88 from Star Wars.  But that’s not what I mean.  That’s the theme they paint on top of it.  At it’s core, you have some kind of challenge like lining your crosshairs up to shoot a droid in a shooter like Shadows of the Empire on the Nintendo 64, or trying to decide which cards to play as you do in the SWG online card game, or spamming specials to try and hold agro for the group as you would do as a tank in the IG-88 heroic instance in SWG.  The actual core gameplay is vastly different in all of these games.

The core gameplay isn’t just one thing though.  It’s not just killing.  It’s getting ready for fights too.  Whether that means deciding which materia pieces to put in your sword in FFVII or which cards to put in your deck in a card game, or which traits you want to equip in Lotro, or waiting for a buff from an entertainer in SWG.

What keeps an MMO from being a grind is all about the core gameplay being fun.  Crafting is one of the worst offenders when it comes to core-gameplay.  In SWG  the whole system is just a bunch of menus and boring click-fests.  I literally used a mouse recording program to do the clicking and dragging for me when I used to make +35 powerbits because I found it so boring.  If I didn’t use such a program, my hand would cramp up and hurt after the first couple hours of crafting.

SWG of course has a great crafting system overall.  Searching for the best resources and the rarest junk-loots has the same treasure-hunt style core-gameplay that you have in real life when you visit a flea market.  All of the good gameplay in crafting is in the finding of resources when it comes to SWG.

But this is true for most MMOs.  Lotro actually lets you automate the process when it comes to actually crafting so that you can walk away from your computer while making iron bars for xp.  In EQ2, they realized the core-gameplay of combat was more fun than crafting so they tried to copy combat over to crafting.  You could actually die to a forge if you messed up too much.  The gameplay centered around trying to simon-says match the skill shown on the forge with the appropriate skill and also spamming other specials inbetween simon-says events.

Then we have Free Realms.  In Free Realms there are twitch-based crafting games that have you do things like trying to pour just the right amount of water into a pot.  There’s also a clock so that you can see what your best time is.  Some of the actions are a real pain in the wrist, but it shows a lot of promise as a concept.

This has me wondering tonight… what do MMOs need to do in order to have core-gameplay as fun as single player games?