Category: General

I have previously mentioned that games with achievements have better sales and ratings, which is to say that you can both make more money and increase the average user’s enjoyment of your game by incorporating achievements. That’s a significant win-win for tossing in some decorative trophies.

If your game does not have achievements in it, you are probably leaving money on the table. While business acumen and game design are not entirely overlapping areas, and some people take a principled stance against achievements, I worry about the quality of the product you are selling if you are overlooking proven methods of improving both your sales and the perception of your product. Bad decisions are correlated with other bad decisions.

This has become a signal I use when shopping on Steam. It is not an overwhelming factor, but it has helped avoid some marginal purchases. It is a signalling game: whether or not you like achievements, their presence or absence potentially says something. Unless you are explicitly counter-signalling by pointing out the lack of achievements (the way Magicka points out its lack of side quests), I’ll tend to assume the worst. Not caring in one area can be correlated with not caring about others. Maybe adding achievements is harder than I think, but how many copies of indie games sell when Steam has its semi-annual raffles and awards tickets based on achievements?

Basically, I am asking the game to say, “shibboleth.” Know that this will be used elsewhere in your life. If your cover letter or resume has the keywords that indicate that you are “one of us,” you are more likely to get an interview. If you fail to observe the server’s conventions in your LFG message, you are less likely to be invited to group. Fly the colors if you want to connect to your tribe.

: Zubon

There are lots of fun examples of meaningful failures to say, “shibboleth”; if you use an eggcorn of a key technical term, you are signalling that you do not know what you are talking about.

Since we’re on the subject of other gaming genres, I wanted to point out Shootmania Storm with a killer announcement trailer. It’s a first-person shooter (FPS) which is built in the vein of pure arena FPS like Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament. The palette is pretty pure with hit counts instead of health, recharge instead of ammo, and a sprint. Yet, when the gameplay is so focused it still retains very tight variants.

The recent E3 tournament focused around a variant called Elite. It’s 3v3 attack/defend except each round is actually 1 elite vs. 3 defenders. The elite gets 3 armors and an insta-kill rail gun, and the defenders get no extra armor and a slower moving rocket launcher with small splash damage. Defenders can fire off 4 rockets at once, while the elite’s rail gun has a couple second recharge between each shot. The elite has about 45 seconds to scout the flagpole capture point and then about 15 seconds to capture the flag. If the elite gets eliminated (3 rocket hits) or the defenders all die (one rail gun hit each) the round can also be over. It’s a really nice twist on arena gameplay, which requires very high skill.

My favorite announced variant is Joust, which is a 1v1 map with two opposing capture points. Each player has limited ammo (5 shots or so) that can only be refilled at the capture points along with a rail gun with one shot. Points are gained per hit. I’ve heard in other previews that if a player doesn’t touch a capture point within 30 seconds the match is lost. The announcement trailer showcases another variant which seems more akin to team deathmatch with capture points.

Just like Nadeo’s Trackmania series, Shootmania Storm will have easy map-making tools, scripting tools for servers, and ‘casting/machinimas capabilities. It’s slated for release later this year, but you can sign up for beta now. It’s got me pretty excited.

–Ravious

Regular readers know that I love little differences with big effects. Elegance in design is a thing of beauty, and tracing the secondary effects of a small change can yield big results.

Our friend Tesh has a good example with critical hits in Zomblobs! (under development):

Criticals in Zomblobs! happen when all of the dice you roll show the same number. … Most curiously, these criticals are easier to score the fewer dice you roll. Weaker attacks have greater potential to hit a little bigger. This particular “crit” design is therefore more of an “underdog” mechanism, rather than a “win more” mechanism. Instead of harder hits probably hitting even harder, it’s the weak hits that are most likely to slip in a little extra punch.

Simple, elegant, effective. On the other side, it reminds me of the old World of Darkness botch mechanic. Under the previous generation of their system, 1s cancelled out successes, and having negative successes led to a critical failure. Higher skill gave you more dice to roll, and higher difficulty meant needing a higher number to succeed. The net effect was that, for very difficult tasks, having more dice meant a greater botch chance. In some sense, this made sense. If you are an utter novice, it is hard to get far enough in to really mess things up; it is the middling-low range of competence that is really dangerous. On the other hand, you can see the statistical perversity of a system where getting better can hurt you. The designers there did not have the numeracy and/or interest to trace through the effects of their system.

: Zubon

I finally booted up LIMBO yesterday, inspired by the Humble Bundle. I would not recommend it. If I may refer back to a recent post, if the first things people praise about a game are its mood and atmosphere, you should immediately note that “gameplay” is not at the top of the list.

The mood and atmosphere are good, though broken at the mid-point. Continue reading LIMBO

Amnesia, Limbo, Psychonauts, and Superbrothers, plus Bastion as a bonus game, plus all their soundtracks. Heck, I own four of those, and I’m considering picking it up.

: Zubon

The dirges of 38 Studios and the many employees of BioWare passed me by last week as I lay in bed with a virus that wished it was strep. Thankfully at this cowboy ranch we call Kill Ten Rats, Cyndre was able to get up a heartfelt post for our team. My favorite two posts on the subject were the reawakening of Broken Toys as Scott Jennings penned an ode to the MMO genre, and Spinks hammering out an always amazing link post. A few days before as the virus began its assault on my tonsils, I wrote a few languishing thoughts that set a desperate preview of what was to come.

I’ll repeat part of the much quoted Jennings’ post where he writes “…the incredible amount of money wasted by EA on what was essentially a roll of the dice that came up 2 and 3, and the even more incredible display of massive hubris and utter incompetence on the part of Schilling and his management team, is killing the very concept of massively multiplayer gaming.” I thought a lot about his words as I lay there staring at the ceiling. Continue reading The MMO Siren Song

Via The Verge.

Items of note:

• Reckoning was a “failure.”  They needed to sell 3,000,000 copies just to break even on the deal.  They sold 1.2M.
• They are closing both offices completely.  Providence and Maryland’s BHG.
• First internal communications grew ‘sparse’ then paychecks stopped coming, then email servers went down, they heard the bad news a few weeks later…

First of all…  3,000,000 copies!?!  Did anyone think it would sell that many?  I thought 1.2M sounded pretty good.

My thoughts are with all of the developers and their families who are dealing with a very difficult time.   This is a sad day for the entire industry.   Bioware laid off a ‘significant’ number of their employees working on SW:TOR and now all 337 employees of 38 Studios are unemployed.   Sad times, indeed.

~Cyndre

One Guild Wars 2 fan has a really cool site up that compares side-by-side the differences in the world of Guild Wars 1 to Guild Wars 2 called Project Tyria. For instance most of Guild Wars 2 charr country is built directly upon key locations in Guild Wars Prophecies pre- and post-Searing. There is the Barradin Estate:

I admit that I miss a lot of detail through the quick beta weekend playthroughs, and I usually regret not stopping to smell the roses when there is a lore discussion or someone talks about finding a quiet picnic spot with a Yogi-bear vignette. I can’t wait to see how Project Tyria grows after launch. I bet there are going to be a plethora of amazing side-by-sides.

–Ravious