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.
.Has any “rebuttal” opening with that phrase ever been accurate?
There are many variations on that phrase, usually amounting to “I don’t think you are taking X into account,” but the ones starting with “obviously” rarely seem to take the explanation much further than that unless it is to stack ad hominems.
: Zubon
Ravious (and the Fifth Telling) have me missing our camp from way back in the original A Tale in the Desert. It’s funny that guilds felt so much more meaningful in the game where you could have more than one, although maybe raiders appreciate their guild ties more.
An essential difference, as Ravious says, is collective rather than individual advancement. If I get a piece of armor, my character has a piece of armor, but if I make a charcoal furnace, everyone in the guild can use it. If we felt like it, we could set it up so that any passing visitor could use it; some guilds built public camps so that new players would have access without starting from zero. I made something and everyone benefited, even after I logged off.
Months ago, I went through a brief exercise helping you think about how much money Blizzard had in the queue to buy sparkleponies. That was a $3.5 million queue. I just heard that All Points Bulletin consumed $100,000,000. So go back to that $3.5 million exercise and repeat it once a week for half a year. You will have almost gotten to $100,000,000.
: Zubon
Reading Melmoth’s thought of the day of avatars that lose color as they lose health (instead of having health bars), I wondered what alternative option would be available for colorblind players. Systems that work poorly for the colorblind are shockingly common in video games, despite the perception of a male-majority playerbase and the prevalence of at least red-green colorblindness in men. I suppose that relatively few artists and graphic designers are colorblind, so concerns about the visuals surface later in the process.
An alternative would be having characters fade away as they run low on health. Set avatar opacity to their hit point percentage. This fits the lore of a potential game by postulating that the characters are more like einherjar than living beings, which makes more sense than most lore anyway: we are immortal warriors who train ourselves for the great battle at the end, dying daily but arising to continue the fight. In this case, the characters are souls who fade away as their connection to the mortal coil is severed. Characters become increasingly wispy as their connection to the world becomes tenuous.
This would have the effect of making healing much harder at low health, as you just stopped seeing people. Did Bob move or is he dead? This is especially so if you take away tab-based targeting. I like the potential effects of this combined with healing as an area-effect ability, so you would see fading souls frantically flocking to the aura of a spirit healer. It feels like a classic image of the hungry or hopeful dead.
This would also create the interesting PvP option of intentionally running around at low health. Will you accept the risk of being one-shot for near-invisibility?
: Zubon
Now if, back in 1978, you’d told me that there were going to be three main character classes in future MMOs, I would probably have assumed some kind of rock/paper/scissors relationship among them for reasons of balance. Archers beat infantry, cavalry beat archers, infantry beat cavalry — that sort of thing. I don’t believe for a moment I’d have gone with what we have, which is the “trinity” of tank, heals and dps. The tank takes all the damage issued by the opponent, the healer reduces this damage, and the dps gives damage (dps is “damage per second”, non-players) to the opponent. This doesn’t make a great deal of sense in gameplay terms: the healer is redundant (they’re basically just armour for the tank), the premiss is unrealistic (“I’ll hit the guy in the metal suit who isn’t hurting me, rather than the ones in the cloth robes who are burning my skin off”), it doesn’t work for player versus player combat (because players don’t go for the guy in the metal suit) and it doesn’t scale (a battle with 1,000 fighters on either side — how many tanks do you need?). Don’t get me wrong, it can be a lot of fun, but it’s a dead end in design terms.
Richard Bartle, “The Evolution of the Trinity”
I’ve been learning a lot about Guild Wars 2 skills from all the footage of the Guild Wars 2 demos coming in from gamescom. Â The skills are fairly similar to the ones in Guild Wars with a few twists and differences.
We’ve known for awhile that the first 5 skills are based on the weapons in the character’s hands. Â Two single-handed weapons gets 3+2 skills, and a double-handed weapon gets all 5 skills. Â Then the remaining 5 other skills can be chosen from a pool, similar to Guild Wars, with the exception that out of those 5 there is one elite skill slot and one heal skill slot. Â One thing we learned from gamescom is there seems to be no conventional auto-attack. Â Instead a player right clicks a skill for the auto-attack “slot” so when an enemy is attacked that skill will be repeated.
Been meaning to write something lengthier about this for a while, especially in relation to a lot of the recent news about Bioware’s The Old Republic. But I haven’t got around to it yet and now Sony’s Clone Wars Adventures Free2Play not-browser based “MMO” is in a free-to-all open beta, ahead of of it’s mid-September launch. You need a Station Pass Account to register and can download the plugin at http://www.clonewarsadventures.com
Randomessa has a good account of Warhammer Online’s pre-release comments on public quests, which were entirely borne out. The public quests are more or less as advertised. You might dispute design decisions like the quick resets and having influence bars to fill (is that grind or rewarding repeatability?), but most PQ issues came from how other systems interacted with them. The main problem was population-based: you could not get past the first stage once the population lump moved past you, nor in PQs off the beaten path.
But does anyone really think that public quests are not good? When conditions are right for them to work, they work well. When conditions are not right, they limp along better than much non-instanced solo MMO content. They encourage socialization and teamwork. If you did not like particular PQs, fine. If you think the whole game is broken, fine, but this part works.
Steal this feature. Champions Online slots a PQ into the tutorial zone. If Guild Wars 2 and Rift are offering PQ 2.0, that will be an improvement from the current quest hub model (conditional on successful implementation). Are we just trying to rein in expectations about how awesome or revolutionary this is going to be, back to “good”?
Even if it is just putting sprinkles on ice cream, I like both sprinkles and ice cream, and that other place does not have ice cream on its dessert menu.
: Zubon
I feel bad for ArenaNet that the leaked video was the first footage we saw of gamescom, but things have turned around quickly:
The necromancer is the next profession for Guild Wars 2, and from this video, my favorite Guild Wars 1 profession is looking pretty cool. Â ArenaNet says we will get a more official release of the profession sometime later. Â However, it looks like a necromancer builds up “life force” and then goes in to some kind of shadow form called “death shroud” with a new skill bar. Â I am very interested to see more details on this profession. Â Many more professional sites (with video) are popping up with gameplay impressions from the early press demos at gamescom.
The live stream of gamescom has also started! Â I don’t know what events will play today because there is no Wednesday schedule on the NCSoft gamescom site. Â However, in channel they are announcing the next upcoming presentations. Â An Aion presentation is first up.
And of course, the moment I post this ArenaNet puts up a new blog post with thoughts from the animators.
For the most up to date information, I would check out this forum thread or the Guild Wars 2 Guru front page.
–Ravious
Hopefully the personal story acts as a guide through the zones because that will be necessary. Players need more purpose than pure exploration… — Ravious
He is probably right, but I wonder.
The first generation of graphic MUDs had far less guidance. I started with Asheron’s Call, which had almost none. There was no quest book. Some NPCs would trade for something in a dungeon or from a monster, and that was how most quests were structured. Some locations had stories that you could follow. For the most part, though: here, have a world, go nuts. (I could not tell you the current state of Dereth.)
We moved away from that pretty immediately. Asheron’s Call 2 was organized by vaults the way The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ has its epic story, although it was a ways from the now-familiar on-rails quest hub structure. A Tale in the Desert added levels and EVE added certificates to help guide people. Can I hope that Darkfall is a last sandbox without a trail of breadcrumbs?
I understand the desire for guidance. I know the feeling of “so now what?” But I also liked the Asheron’s Call feeling of deciding what I want to do tonight. It was more of scattered attractions than theme park rides. And that left us wondering what else me might find if we ran fifteen minutes in a random direction.
: Zubon