.

Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

.

Complete the Gaming Metaphor

This is my first time touring around Las Vegas. The hotels are also casinos, malls, theaters, and/or theme parks. They have various themes and decorations. The casinos are the most consistent, both in prevalence and content. Underneath the decorations, the casinos that take up so much of the floorspace are nearly identical, down to having the exact same video poker and slot machines repeated by the dozen in each building. The settings vary widely, so this place is a Roman forum with high-end shopping establishments that don’t exist in most states, while the place across the street seems to have skipped having a theme at all, and its in-hotel mall is at the low end, complete with minimall food court and a half-dozen jewelry stores that all claim to be going out of business soon, everything must go, deep discounts!!! I am sure that the experienced gambler could spend hours pointing out ways that the table games differ or how one casino makes better use of its floor space in terms of flow dynamics, but the core content featured inside is the same everywhere I have looked.

: Zubon

Shootmania Storm Alpha Impressions

Nadeo graviously invited me in to the Shootmania Storm alpha. I’ve been playing around with the late alpha builds, and I am having a blast. Shootmania Storm is a competitive multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) video game bounded with the ideals of the creativity and engine of Trackmania, Nadeo’s claim to fame. Read on for more impressions….

Continue reading Shootmania Storm Alpha Impressions

[GW2] The Gathering Progression

Even in my absence through most of the last Guild Wars 2 beta weekend event, I still lurked on plenty of community sites where I could. The two most prominent complaints I saw were about progression, namely weapon skill unlocking and major trait tiers. We’ve already covered weapon skill unlocks, and I think the most elegant change would be to change it to skill usage instead of critter death. It will be interesting to see the iteration that Jon Peters, ArenaNet dev, hints at. So, that leaves us with major trait tiers.

ArenaNet already put forth a pretty solid argument on why this current iteration is necessary.  What I find interesting is that now traits mirror skills a whole lot more. There are 5-basic skills, 3 more complex, more powerful utility skills, and 1 elite skill, and there are 6 basic traits, 4 mid-level traits, and 2 “elite” traits. Also at the top end only one elite skill or elite trait can be slotted.

Long ago in the days of Guild Wars 1, it was stated many times that Magic the Gathering was a guide to how the skill system was designed. They brought up the collectible aspect many times as well as the need to build a skill deck with only a few of many possibilities. While the Guild Wars 2 system is farther away in terms of build creation in that a large portion of the deck is built for the player with weapon skills, it is much closer in terms of rarity.

Continue reading [GW2] The Gathering Progression

[GW2] Leveling a Crafter

The way leveling XP gain works in crafting is this: For leveling a discipline from 0-400, you will gain 10 levels along the way. By maxing out all 8 disciplines, you will gain 80 levels. That means you could dedicate a character to crafting, feed it all the mats you get on other characters and level it all the way to 80 without ever needing to kill a thing. As hardcore crafters, we think that is pretty cool.
— Linsey Murdock (ArenaNet Game Designer), Guild Wars 2 beta forums

To note, Guild Wars 2 lets you use 2 crafting skills at a time, but you do not lose progress in a skill when you switch to a new one. There is a cost to switch which two are active, scaling to your level in the crafting skill. : Zubon

[GW2] Weapon Skill Unlocks

Your skills with each weapon unlock through use. You start with one skill, and then you unlock #2-5 by killing 5, 10, 15, and 20 enemies. (It counts as a “kill” if you do any damage, so hit those events as AE away.) One-handed weapons only have #2 and 3, off-hand items are always #4 and 5, and two-handed weapons use all five slots. For those off-hand items, you advance them if you already have #2 and 3 done on your main hand.

An Engineer will do this without noticing. Pistols can be used in either hand, a shield in the off-hand, and rifles and (underwater) harpoon guns are two-handers. 50+50+50+35=185 kills to unlock everything, 50 of which must be underwater. Don’t worry, Engineers have lots of options because they get kits in their utility skill slots. A Warrior will be spending a bit more time even collecting weapons, with 11 weapons available in 21 combinations. That’s 520 kills. The Elementalist has just 5 weapons, the second-fewest, but remember that I said each weapon has four elements. An Elementalist needs 200 kills per attunement to unlock everything, so 800 kills, 200 of which must be underwater. Elementalists gets nice AE skills, so you could spend time in crowded events and unlock many of those quickly, but 800 remains a large number.

In the long run of the live game, you need to do that once ever, and you will certainly kill more than 800 enemies over the life of a character. Still, they’re looking at that:

This is definitely a problem that we would like to address. While it only happens once per play through on a given character it still feels a bit unwieldy on Elementalist.
— Jon Peters (ArenaNet Game Designer), Guild Wars 2 beta forums

: Zubon

In GW2 BWE1, I tried an Engineer and an Elementalist. You notice that difference.

[GW2] Experiment in Real Time

I basically missed this beta weekend in Guild Wars 2. It was unavoidable due to real-life circumstances that basically made sure a gaming rig was not available. I read as much as I could. I still enjoyed watching Twitter, Reddit, and hearing tales of play here and there. On Saturday night I lucked out with a single hour of play. Instead of worrying about the server quagmire and guilds issue from last Beta Weekend Event, I just decided to jump in and play. It was an experiment.

In real life, many of us have only a few minutes to play. Work, kids, dishes, wife, dogs, gods, parties, school, and Steam sales all limit free time. Some gamers have chunks of hours scattered through the week to play their favorite MMO. Gamers like Ethic and I (and countless others) have an hour here and there. How would Guild Wars 2 play when I had to jump in, see what I could do, and jump out?

Continue reading [GW2] Experiment in Real Time

Measuring interest

I’m gonna do my best to put some time aside and start posting again. The magic 8 ball points to… The Secret World being the next game I’ll spend time in.

How’s your interest in TSW? It’s not a massively popular one ’round these parts, to be sure, but you never know who’s lurking and how strongly it might be beeping on people’s radars.

Achievements as Signals

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.