Category: General

General

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Why lore matters

No, don’t run away. Really. I know I’m coming across as the nerd in the corner who insists on some stupid technicality, but I object. I am a nerd, and I might be cornered, but this is no technicality.

Lore matters because we are human and, as such, we ask questions. Some of these questions (most, in fact) we ask to ourselves. We keep them in our heads and rarely ever ask them out loud, lest we are cast with the lot of cornered nerds. In the context of our games, the questions are plain, but powerful; Why is this here? Where did it come from? What does it do? What does it mean? How does it relate to what I’ve seen before and what I’ve yet to see? What happens when it’s used? Why are they fighting? Why are they friends? Where do they want to go with this?

There are more, but that’s basically the genesis of lore right there. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss or underestimate the importance of lore depending on one’s focus. After all if one goes through an encounter with the sole goal of acquiring a particular reward, those questions do not matter. Item acquired, goal completed, move on to the next.

Continue reading Why lore matters

Context

“Cat-people get +5 Agility.” It is a simple sentence, something you could expect from a dozen YAFMMORPGs. If your game has yet to release, how can you express it without being meaningless or getting into an endless cascade of information? (Or perhaps the endless cascade is a good thing for promoting your game, and you can turn this one thing into months of web site content.) Continue reading Context

Quote of the Day

Ysharros:

In games, a slog is bad. A romp is good, but can easily become so rapid you stop experiencing the game and end up merely experiencing the speed of your progress. The trick is pacing a game so that the player still feels as though they’re romping but is also going slowly enough to feel like they’re experiencing a LOT of stuff.

: Zubon

The Morality Gauge

I have not gone far in Overlord. I question whether the gameplay will become much more interesting than “throw a wave of imps at it,” and I found my drive to look further stymied early on by the corruption score.

Overlord includes the familiar karma score, in which all ethical decisions fall on a single line. The moral meaning of every action is absolute and completely independent of intention. A surprising amount of violence and destruction has no moral component at all, just specifically defined moral decisions. Most of the early ones are clearly labeled, although you can get a corruption score before being told that it exists (“Hey, if I click on this guy, a green number goes up. I wonder what … oh, my gremlins killed him.”), which must make for some fun surprises and re-loads when you unexpectedly shift yourself in an undesired direction.

Continue reading The Morality Gauge

Jeff Strain and Undead Labs

In a flurry of press activity, a new MMO studio was unveiled today by ex-Blizzard, ex-ArenaNet MMO-guru Jeff Strain.  Undead Labs is set to be a very focused developer.  Focused on what, you say?  Zombies.  Consoles.  MMO.  Jeff believes he can help lead an MMO studio with a very tight game-making culture.  This won’t be a “behemoth” company churning out franchise MMOs.  This is going to be a company that carves an MMO from those three simple words for those three simple words.  (Well not for zombies; though, after a 6-hour raid… nevermind.)  There are a bunch of good interviews linked from the Undead Labs’ news page, but the best is found on the site covering rude questions that interviewers might ask.  For instance, Jeff Strain departs from his old view on MMO subscriptions:

Q: Will the game carry a subscription model like WoW, or will it be more like Guild Wars?

A: The game will almost certainly be subscription based. I’ve always said that a game should be designed around its business model, and Guild Wars is certainly designed to be a free-to-play online game. In fact, there are hundreds of free-to-play online games on the market today, but some publishers are increasingly relying on micro-transactions, in-game advertising, “premium” accounts, or, at worst, lead-gen scams to generate more profit. I don’t like this nickel-and-dime approach, because it leads to design decisions that are based on something other than what’s most fun for the players. We want to focus on making an MMOZ that is, first and foremost, fun to play. Not a Skinner Box. Not a teaser for more stuff you can buy from us. Not an advertisement for stuff you can buy from someone else. Our singular design focus will be to create a game that is fun to play, and every month we’ll either earn you respect and your money, or we won’t.

–Ravious
i don’t hate vests

Breaking From the Collective Tempo

Borderlands has two speeds of play, much like its ancestor Diablo II:  paced and rushed.  When I play alone, I am going at my own speed.  It might be a slow safe sniper battle or a quick chest run in one of the Havens, but if a pseudo-scientist looked at some waves or something, I feel that there would be an alignment.  A pacing tempo, if you will.  When I play with others, even close friends, not only does the tempo markedly increase but the speed of play is not always in alignment with the me.  Frenetic is a good word for this in its most emotional definition.

I don’t like that feeling.  I love playing with other people online, but I don’t feel at one with my gaming experience when that feeling happens. Continue reading Breaking From the Collective Tempo

How to Write Patch Notes

Reading the latest League of Legends patch notes, I noticed this format:

  • Tantrum Damage modified from 115/130/145/160/175 to 100/120/140/160/180
  • Curse of the Sad Mummy Duration reduced from 3 to 2.5

Notice the “from” and “to” with exact numbers. It does not say, “Tantrum Damage modified. Curse of the Sad Mummy Duration reduced.” This is especially important for test notes, as you want people to test if the numbers actually come out that way, especially since some of the notes are correcting ability numbers or text so that they match (ditto for graphic effect and area of effect).

While we are talking about doing things right, I may have attacked the City of Heroes patch notes before, but one thing they do well is pointing to themes. Some of that is the advertising copy for, “Come try our new stuff! It’s awesome!” but the valuable part is expressing the developer intent in the patch notes. “We observed that players were able to reach unintended levels of defense through stacking buffs and abilities, so we are adjusting this through the following changes…” Even when there is no theme, that is helpful: “We are making a variety of balance tweaks to powers across all classes, correcting a variety of issues that have accumulated over time. There may be some unexpected effects from making so many changes at once, so we would appreciate it if you would pay attention to X while testing.” For test notes, explain what you want tested. For live notes, explain your intent before you need to explain it in each of twenty forum threads.

: Zubon

Random Variation

Given a large number of trials, any random series will produce a large number of perverse-looking short streaks. If 100 people flip a coin 5 times, you should expect 6 of them to get the same result on every flip, but it will look strange to those 6 people. One-in-a-million chances happen all the time in a world of seven billion people. If millions of WoW players attack 100 times a day each, that is a lot of chances for long streaks of misses (and longer strings of hits).

More recently for me, it took two weeks to complete the Chasing Marcia achievement because one of the daily quests just did not appear for two weeks. What are the odds of that? Well, not bad. There are 5 quests, so 0.8^14=4.4% chance that any one quest will not appear for two weeks, but since there are five ways it could happen, there is a 22% chance. You should expect that to happen quite a few times each year, and if you started the dailies today, you should expect that 22% chance it will take you more than two weeks. (Maybe Blizzard does have some kind of streakbreaker in there, and maybe I just hallucinated having done the daily on a day I missed.)

I know all this and was just vaguely amused at the fishing streak. A similar thing contributed to my leaving The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ for about six months. I was trying to complete the Annuminas armor set, which involves getting the boss drop in each of three dungeons. With six fellowship members, that is a pretty clean 1/6 chance, minus the occasional member who just felt like running the dungeon but did not need that piece. In 16 tries, I won that 1/6 roll once. This should not be surprising: the expected value is to run each dungeon six times, and for everyone who wins a roll on the first time, there must be someone who just keeps running it and running it. I was not even up to 18 tries, and who knows, maybe it would have worked out perfectly and I would have won the next two. Independent probabilities, however, do not work that way: you still have a 1/6 chance, and I should expect another 12 tries to finish the set. And by that 16th trip, you get really sick of telling the new people to keep the silence-aura ghosts away from the healer.

Hence the approach of giving everyone a few badges, 1/6 the necessary token, or whatever.

: Zubon

Happy Blog Birthday

The Steve Jackson Games Daily Illuminator turns 15 today. It is, to the best of their knowledge, the oldest blog still being updated regularly. Yes, it mostly exists to advertise their products (Zombie Dice this spring!), but the random internet items that proceed the daily product spotlight can be fun. As a RSS subscriber, I don’t even see the daily product spotlight. A personal favorite is the occasional chronicling of how we now live in the future, what with bladeless fans and people becoming cyborgs so slowly that no one much notices. Or I suppose you could just watch for DARPA RFPs for super-soldier suits and mechs (actual US military research), but it helps to have someone else spotting.

: Zubon

Conflict of interest watch: I once published a column for the Steve Jackson Games online magazine.

Weekend Deals on Steam

“Overlord: Complete Pack” with Overlord, Overlord II, and Overlord: Raising Hell is $8.75. I note that Overlord itself is just $1.50. I have heard mixed things about Overlord, notably that you spend too much time saving villages considering that you are the villain, and the Raising Hell levels sound like a lot of that. On the other hand, there are only so many good “be the bad guy” games out there, and there are good things too. If you want a review of a game from 2007, I might say some things after I play.

$1.50 for an old game, and it downloads and installs itself while I sleep? I should be looking through these digital distribution channels for classic games I never played. My list of books to read and movies to see also has a “games to play” section.

I did not enjoy Left 4 Dead much, but if you want the sequel, your pre-order time is almost up. Steam has the same deal there that Borderlands did: 10% off plus buy-3-get-1 free, which is just a brilliant offer for games with 4-player coop. Various places will also give you stuff for pre-ordering, like a Team Fortress 2 hat or a L4D2 bat.

: Zubon