Category: General

General

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Individual Expression or Group Coherence?

I thought that limited class options helped pick-up groups in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ while making City of Heroes PUGs sometimes vulnerable to ineffective “concept” builds. Ravious commented that Guild Wars PUGs were improved by being able to see what skills other people were using, with the implication that you could educate the newbs or avoid people who look useless. (For the unfamiliar: you equip one bar of abilities in Guild Wars, and that is all you can use until you go back to town and change your bar. Many options, few available at once.) These experiences suggest to me that putting characters in small boxes lets you build things more easily.

Is this trade-off I am proposing between ease of grouping and narrowness of class roles a false dilemma? Can you have highly flexible character roles and still have the ability to assemble groups quickly? DC and Champions Online have both planned to bridge this divide by having roles that change on the fly instead of classes. That is, you build your character with “fire hammer,” “healing flames,” “fire shield,” and “blinding smoke,” and have a dial that makes you a DPS, tank, or support class. If you turn it to DPS, you deal more damage, but take a defensive penalty (alternately: set the dial to give only bonuses and not mention that the penalty is built in).

If the trade-off exists, which direction should your game take? I am a fan of individual expression, but as a game designer I would be more interested in seeing people play together frequently and smoothly. Bind people to each other, make cooperative play in your game a good thing, and let social factors help you retain players. This is why you add bottlenecks, downtime, and forced grouping: bring people together for interaction and bonding. Or maybe this is all crap, because WoW made its billions as an extremely solo-friendly game, but then the end-game is entirely raid-centric, forcing people into class roles.

Do you like being able to over-specialize? Planned supergroups in City of Heroes are awesome. Brutal Speed was a simple City of Villains idea: Corruptors with Kinetics, Brutes with AE attacks, everyone with Leadership, no one with knockback. A standard group was any 5 Brutes and any 3 Corruptors, with no further thought needed. No one needed to take Hasten or Stamina, because you always had 3 Speed Boosts available. And the little Leadership toggle bonuses stacked nicely when everyone had them. In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, our Casualties of War group has low DPS because we all went with tanks and support classes. Why go for that soloing build if you will always have a group available?

: Zubon

Yes, Get It Right

I keep hearing this in a LOTRO context, but it’s a general point: “It’s a no-win situation. Release now and people will complain because about bugs. Wait and fix the bugs, and people complain about a lack of updates.” Man, it’s just like your boss down at the Pizza Pit. He always wants it “done right” and “on time.” What a drag.

This is why we cannot have nice things. Too many gamers do not care or have given up hope of anything better. Zones were crashing last night, and I was listening to people in the global channel chorusing, “It’s an MMO. Get used to it.” They shout down people who want to be able to play the game they paid for.

When players complain, why do so many responses end with “or go play WoW”? Our commenters have “WoW has/had problems too!” hotkeyed. That’s right, WoW swept and vastly expanded the market by making an MMO only as buggy as a regular PC release. That’s what “polish” means at this point.

You will keep getting broken games because you are willing to pay for them. You are willing to reconfigure your system, learn the work-arounds for bugs and incoherent “working as intended,” and crawl through barbed wire to get your nugget of fun. Meanwhile, the mass-market will not put up with that crap, so they get a well-done, profitable MMO-lite, while you hide in your irrelevant niche with the broken shell of your dream game, complaining about the Big Mac-eating, Usher-listening mainstream. Because everyone ships late with bugs and missing features, so STFU and accept it.

: Zubon

srsly? You went with Usher there?

Right premise, wrong conclusion

WoW’s (former?) head dev Jeff Kaplan gave a nice little chat at the GDC. You can find it easily elsewhere in the world wide net. But I’d like to call attention to the following snippets, on quest texts and the medium:

Kaplan explained the age-old internet phrase, relating it to WoW quests that are simply too wordy.

“World of Warcraft quest designers are limited to 511 characters,” he said. “That’s all that will fit into the data entry. And all you programmers know why it’s not 512.”

Some quest designers ask for more space, Kaplan said, saying, “Why are there only 511 characters? We gotta have more, let’s blow that out.”
But Kaplan would prefer to see WoW quests go in the other direction.

“I actually wish that the number was smaller. I think it’s great to limit people in how much pure text they can force on the player. Because honestly… if you ever want a case study, just watch kids play it, and they’re just mashing the button. They don’t want to read anything.”

And this other little choice gem:

Kaplan prepared the crowd for a rant at this point.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. We’re so fortunate and privileged to work in a medium that is not only an art, but a revolutionary interactive form of entertainment. It’s unfortunate to see so many games try to be what they’re not, including our game at times. Of course we should embrace the concept of story… art, literature, film, song, they’ve all embraced story as well. But they all tell it in their own unique way.

I feel like we need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game. We need to engage our audience by letting them be the hero or the villain or the victim. [Art, film, literature], they’re tools. But we need to engage our players in sort of an inspiring experience, and the sooner we accept that we are not Shakespeare, Scorsese, Tolstoy or the Beatles, the better off we are.

“If it makes us feel better, Shakespeare couldn’t 3D model his way out of a paper bag,” concluded Kaplan.

“Basically, and I’m speaking to the Blizzard guys in the back: we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game, because nobody wants to read it.”

Dear Mr. Jeff Kaplan (Jeff K.? lawls, etc.), if you’re reading this, my humble comment: It’s not about 511 characters or more, and it’s not that people don’t want to read your quest texts because they’re too long. People skip your texts because the quality of the texts stinks. A good writer can work wonders with 511 characters. What I would suggest to you, sir, is not to lower the limit, or raise it. The solution is pretty obvious: Hire better writers. There are tons of good writers out there that produce excellent stuff and are dying to get some work. When you outsource the writing to a programmer, marketing guy, cousin or whatever you’re only doing a disservice to the game.

EASK

I have come to realize that I am an enthusiastic Explorer but often a prickly Achiever. I am most fond of exploring gameplay, rather than being visually stimulated by whatever the new zone is. Most MMOs gate the Explorer content behind Achieving, which works fine at lower levels when things go quickly, and then becomes really annoying as you proceed.

Gating new powers behind levels: fine, good way to let people get used to a few before hitting them with everything. Games average two per level to one every other level, then slow down. Eventually, you might get one every four levels, and that one is an upgraded version of an existing power. Meanwhile, leveling goes from twice a night to every few days. Instead of trying a few toy every thirty minutes to an hour, I am trying a new toy every week or two. That is when a grind can become really annoying.

Continue reading EASK

What’s in a name?

I’m in a quandary.

I am to server transfers what Madonna is to adopting children from Malawi and I find myself in a situation where I’m thinking of going back to the server where a lot of my friends are returning to after having spent the last few weeks and months cajoling them into resubbing. Although we have decided to start from scratch again, I’m not really willing to leave my undead Warlock where he is after finally getting him to 80 and spending a little while making money and getting gear together. I don’t particularly like the server I’m on and I don’t click with the guild I’m currently in but as I’m only a social member, my departure will probably go unnoticed.

The problem I face is this: since I left the server I’m thinking of returning to, someone has taken my character’s name. Not just a someone but a smelly, pointy eared Night Elf Death Knight.

It’s my own fault. I didn’t leave a placeholder character with that name just in case I ever decided to return to that server but, then again, I didn’t think I ever would. I’m sure I’ll probably be able to live with a new name as well because, well, to paraphrase a famous level 80 Bard, “That which we call a warlock by any other name would still devour the souls of his enemeie – unless thou art a gnome in which case thine foes will laugh themselves unto death.” So while I may not be entirely pleased at the thought of having to change his name, I’m more concerned about coming up with a suitable alternative.

This troubles me more than being able to find a PUG competent enough to run Heroic Nexus without wiping.

Why your game turns me off

Because it might work with other people. But me? I’m old, weathered and sometimes cynical, and I can see right through your paltry deceptions. I’ve seen a lot, and that lot includes people just like you, trying to pull the same stunts you’re pulling. As a developer, of course it’s expected of you to piss off your playerbase. It’s implicit in the unspoken sort of “social contract” between you and your players. But… you’re not supposed to piss them off too much. When you do, you’ve gone to the other end and people are gonna start to, well… you know, not play your game.

You still do make games for people to play them, don’t you? Good. Since we’re on the same page, here’s a few sure fire ways of turning me off your game. Not that you have to cater to me by doing the opposite, of course. To the contrary, feel free to use this as a roadmap to deliberately make sure I won’t play your game. Or at least that I won’t play it with a smile. Up to you.

Continue reading Why your game turns me off

New Garriott MMO in Spaaaaaaace!

With my recent street cred soaring after two interviews with people in the industry, I decided to cold call Richard Garriott to discuss his ticket for another chance to become a space tourist, I mean astronaut, another MMO.  I had to listen for half an hour about his trip in to space, and it did not get interesting until he brought up his contraband story.  Garriott told me how strict the Russians were at space camp (“not like NASA, where Tang flows like wine”), and that he had to smuggle aboard one of his favorite books, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, in a most uncomfortable crevasse.  However, once in space what could they do?  Kick him out? So, one day while he was using the vacu-pooper and reading the book, he saw an old piece of the space station float by out of the spaceship’s window.  This space junk, he said was his revelation to a critical, unoccupied niche in MMO gaming.

I was thoroughly confused by this point as Garriott threw around astronaut lingo like I was one of his comrades, and I asked him how Neuromancer tied in because I was at least semi-familiar with the book.  He cited two of the plot-rearing heroes in the book Aerol and Maelcum.  They lived in peace away from the “system” down below while enjoying their space-rastafarian lifestyle.  He said he was taking much of his basis from EVE’s drug trade gameplay, but instead of a covert-ops-keep-hidden-from-security gameplay, it would be more like sharing the new stuff in your hippy commune.  Garriott booted up the current build.  He said all he had created so far was his avatar (“Da Genahrall”) and the inside of his “tug” (I think he meant spaceship).  Garriott was then silent over the phone for about ten minutes, which was fine because my two year old had just startled in the Witch in Left 4 Dead and we had to deal with that.

Finally breaking the silence, I asked Garriott about further gameplay (namely, if there would be any), and he said that with the first round of capital infusions he was working on creating an AI that could create “righteous dubs” and inedible-art bento boxes.  When that money was gone, he would send some of the bento boxes to the investors in order to gain another capital infusion.  Garriott said the MMO would eventually focus on living in space as a free spirit, scavenging through space debris, playing a complex game of red paper clip, and spending hours floating around listening to “da ‘Mute.”  (I asked him multiple times to repeat this, and I swear this is what he said.)  Eventually, with the successful MMO he would once again buy himself in to space, and leave the new MMO far behind.  The pizza guy finally came, and I quickly wished him well while hanging up the phone.  Time to put another notch on my belt.

–Ravious
dealin’ wi’ th’ darkness, mon

In Praise of PUGs

Most of my pick-up groups have been rather good. I have clearer memories of the horrid ones, but my non-guild groups almost never fail to accomplish their objectives, and few have really serious problems along the way. The problem is that the good groups blend together: teams succeed similarly, but each fails in its own unique way.

Continue reading In Praise of PUGs

New Frontiers in Spam

If you do not know the term “augmented reality,” read Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, or for a simpler version, watch the opening to Stranger Than Fiction. If you watched the last link, imagine that on a grander scale: GPS directions projected on your windshield with the arrows in exactly the right places, binoculars that pop up information on whatever you see while bird-watching, or contact lenses that use your wireless to be the perfect monitor.

So, how are your spam filters working? Messages getting through your ad blockers? TV networks that have pop-up ads wandering through your shows because they think you’ll skip the commercials? A good company will have signs that add the equivalent of “click here for our menu and hours” as your go by. Bad companies will be like those TV ads that double the volume, or those ads you need to X out of to see the page, or flash ads that shout, “Hey!” Been rickrolled lately, or sent to something less appealing? I can think of a half-dozen way around these problems, but many of them involve potentially blocking yourself from things you want to see.

Having an IRL ignore list could be helpful, or seeing who people on your friends list have rated as an idiot. We may lose a bit of shared reality as people edit out parts of the world they don’t want to see or think about. I can already see parents putting filters on their kids’ wearable computers, so now they really can keep little Tommy from ever seeing X; we can only hope that kids continue to be better at getting around filters than their parents are at making them. Fast Company has some thoughts on the matter, but frankly, it is an introduction for the flatscans out there, and you probably have much more interesting thoughts on ways to use and abuse having computer overlays in your daily life.

: Zubon

Hat tip: Daily Illuminator