I don’t know what the first thing you do in a game is, but here is a video from our friend Bill Murphy basically running through all the things you can click on the screen, which is more or less where I start in-game.
: Zubon
.
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.
.[GW2] The Opening Crush of Closed Beta
Another fun week of Guild Wars 2 info dumps is headed our way. On my end I played in a much more relaxed manner than the last press beta weekend. I have many stories to tell, and two larger posts on crafting and the personal story. The focused posts should be out later this week. In the meantime here are a few smaller stories and thoughts.
I enjoyed the higher amount of invited players with a few “worlds” up. There was never a queue, but I was in the Queensdale overflow area for a little bit. I was in the middle of stopping some centaurs from stealing wine with two other players when I was asked if I wanted to get to “real” Queensdale. I was having so much fun I said no. (It puts you back in the queue, and I was asked again in a couple minutes.) I don’t think I noticed a difference between the overflow Queensdale and the “real” one that much. It was really nice to not even really notice that I was queued. Continue reading [GW2] The Opening Crush of Closed Beta
[Eve] Wonderous Complexity
So… I installed Eve Online last week for the first time in the game’s eight year life span…  I can’t pinpoint why it has taken me so long, perhaps there was a perception that the game didn’t suit my tastes, since I like DIKU high fantasy settings, and since I left UO, have played all class/archetype, level progression games.
Well it suits me just fine.
SynCaine, of Hardcore Casual, was kind enough to offer me a 21-day free trial, with nearly no limitations and membership in his Eve Corp, so that is about as risk-free as you can get with a new game.  After just over 24 hours, I bought a three-month subscription, and by day three I have subbed a second account to duel-box with my main.  My undivided loyalty to GW2 has been replaced with a foreboding sence of indecision about whether I should even pre-purchase the game, or wait and see how this Eve addiction holds up.
What attracts me most about Eve, is the complexity of the game systems.  Complexity for the sake of complexity can be a bad thing, but in Eve it just seems so organic and interconnected.  The industry, harvesting and player economy is so involved and so active it immediately causes me to question why all game economies aren’t designed the same way.  The immensity of the server (50,000 players concurrent last night) and the dynamics of the political and social meta-game is just staggering…  If CCP can do it, why isn’t every AAA game server capacity designed in the same fashion?
I am very glad I gave this aging, niche game a try, and my only regret is that I waited so long.  I can’t wait to explore more of the universe and start to peel back the layers of this onion…  I keep hearing and reading about Eve events that each make me realize that this game goes so much deeper than I can comprehend, and I am looking forward to having my mind blown over and over!
~Cyndre
Safe Design
When I worked in traffic safety, a critical point was that systems need to be forgiving. A momentary lapse in attention or judgment should not lead to disaster. Granted, we live in the kind of universe where that’s just the way it is, but your design should seek to minimize that rather than to wrap people around trees.
In terms of game design, I am thinking about UI rather than combat here. Most games have figured out that one-click character deletion is a Bad Thing. Most games let you lock items or bags so that you cannot accidentally sell or deconstruct an important set of gear. Another aspect is that these need to be sufficiently customizable: if there are too many “click OK to confirm” screens, you start automatically clicking OK without thinking, which is just a more tedious version of not having the warning. As a player, I want to be able to pick what is hidden, what gets a warning pop-up, etc.
In terms of hardware design, I need a computer case whose power/reset buttons have a panel over them. I want it to be like the self-destruct button you’d see in a movie, with the clear plastic cover you need to flip before hitting the big red button. I’m not worried about myself in this case. I have a cat.
: Zubon
[GW] Artifical Intelligence and Natural Stupidity
Computer-controlled characters do some things better than humans can. They have complete battlefield awareness, so they can see someone start a spell with a 0.5s casting time, switch targets, and interrupt with a 0.25s casting time spell. (Of course, a human can occasionally interrupt a 0.25s spell with a 0.25s spell by just firing at random, “I’ve got a hunch he’s about to cast…”) NPC healers never whine about needing to be the healer, and they never get tired of staring at hit point bars.
The hard part can be making it so you want anything other than NPC companions. There is a narrow space between “completely useless” and “good AI,” and then between “good AI” and “better than the player.” In a FPS, the only limits on how aware and accurate an NPC is are computer-defined. One balancing factor is that NPCs exhibit perfect tactics but absolutely no strategy. Another is that you can just stop trying to improve the AI at some point; if it is already competitive with the humans, you don’t need to improve it, and you may have gone too far. GW also PVE-only skills, which are overpowered and not available to heroes and henchmen.
Another is letting the computer do completely stupid things that humans do. This also adds a sense of verisimilitude when playing with them. I used to joke that my heroes needed advanced “don’t stand in the fire” lessons. Then I watched a hero run past me into a sandstorm to start casting his spells, and it stopped being funny.
: Zubon
[GW] Diminishing Marginal Utility
Man, that’s a great spawn you’ve put together. I bet our players will want to fight it 15-20 times in one sitting.
— GW1 design meeting minutes
I am open to the argument that Prophecies PvE content was good when it came out. Maybe if you start in Prophecies and play through, this seems fine. If I grant you that, I need you to grant me that whoever put together Prophecies hard mode did what could very charitably be described as “the best s/he could, given the circumstances.”
I would love to help you VQ Eastern Frontier, but I promised my mom I’d quit cutting myself for Lent.
— guildmate
It is not just that the content is poor and not much fun. It comes in huge doses that the game encourages you to choke down. Guild Wars encourages its players to go kill all 300 enemies on that map. There are only 4 or 5 different spawns on that map, and you get a small team size, so go have fun killing those 4 or 5 groups for an hour or two. It is a bad sign when the wiki recommends starting 6+ zones away as a time-saver because it you can run a large team from a distant zone faster than you can vanquish a zone with a 4-person group.
Vanquisher runs of this area without active quests requires defeating around 350 foes. Including quest influences, it has been reported to range from 271 to 393.
— Guild Wars wiki
I’ll discuss sometime soon why balancing Prophecies hard mode is nigh impossible.
: Zubon
[GW2] Diversity Solipsism
A post for GuildMag’s Third Blog Carnival.
There is so much character diversity in Guild Wars 2. Just a while ago one of the ArenaNet devs, Leif Chappelle, was discussing that there are a staggering 30 choices for the first story arc (levels 1-10). I know these aren’t all-roads-lead-to-Rome choices either. A person dies in one player’s story and exists forever in another player’s home instance. Tack on five trait lines per profession, a billion dye combinations for town clothes, anti-clothes, and a million armor combinations and character diversity goes to infinity and beyond.
And it’s all there for you. Just you. Continue reading [GW2] Diversity Solipsism
I’m Back!
Greetings Rat Slayers, I have returned… Not that I’ve been anywhere exciting or exotic, quite the contrary, I have been wandering about in a bewildered MMO malaise for the past few years and suffering from a general apathy regarding the titles that have been produced.
That’s not to say that I haven’t kept abreast of the goings on in the industry, and I have continued to test and trial games, and I’ve even gotten excited a few times about features and innovation, that later turned sour and left a bitter taste when the ‘innovation’ failed to deliver or amounted to old mechanics re-skinned to appear revolutionary.
Thankfully, 2011 brought about the F2P revolution and gave me something to pass the time until I could get excited about something again.  From a retail release perspective, Guild Wars 2 has done that for me, finally.  More importantly, I see trends in the trenches, that suggest we are starting to see developers breaking out of the misguided meta that ‘a better WoW’ is the future of the industry.
I see more indie developers taking risks and pushing new paradigms and that is exciting.  I can’t wait to share my experiences in several exciting projects currently in early stages of development, as well as whatever else comes along.  Kill Ten Rats has always been an epic quest, and I am glad to be back with all of you brave adventurers as we carve out our destinies and push this MMO universe in new and exciting directions.
~Cyndre
[GW2] Microtransactions – Philosophy and Market
There is a lot that was said in what will likely be a seminal blog article by ArenaNet’s co-founder Mike O’Brien. Fans are going to point to this piece for years, I would imagine. There are two major encircling themes in the post “philosophy” and “market.” O’Brien does a good job showing how ArenaNet envisions that the two will entwine in Guild Wars 2.
Philosophy
Philosophy is a hard sell. ArenaNet has been in the favor of “showing, not telling” for a long time. they continue to do so by letting press film video and discuss the experiences of Guild Wars 2 during the beta events. It’s tough when they are not ready to show, but feel pressed to tell, as is the case here. Continue reading [GW2] Microtransactions – Philosophy and Market
[SWTOR] The Duo Strikes Back
This past weekend was called “Weekend Pass” for Star Wars: The Old Republic, which granted new players a chance to try it out for 4 days without needing to spend any money. I took the opportunity to see how my favorite method of gaming (the duo) works in SWTOR. I enlisted my son to be my “other half”.
First we picked a server, easily done. Next we had to find classes that start on the same planet/area. New players might not realize that they would need to do this but as an old veteran of the MMO wars, I know how things work. Research showed us as follows: