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Unintuitive Controls

The recent addition of Steam achievements to Borderlands encouraged me to fire it up and see how many popped up at once (~20). I thought I might blow up a few people while I was there, and I was reminded of how poor the interface is.

Maybe it works better on a console. The very first time I used one of the in-game menus, it felt like a console game ported to a PC incompletely. Menus required some odd, perverse combination of mouse and keyboard, screens that should have accepted either and instead asked for one but only responded to the other. At no point did I memorize which buttons brought up the different menus, instead finding one or two and then clicking between menus once the window was open.

Coming back after a break, I have no idea which button is for melee. “Had?” No, I did not guess it, though I was insufficiently motivated for much trial and error. I normally check that via the screen to edit keyboard controls. Oh, I can’t do that? At least G for grenade is intuitive enough. I can look it up, and I presume that it was in the tutorial, but once I am in-game there is nothing to suggest it. Or maybe there is something, but finding that is unintuitive, which is the same problem one level up.

I am reading The Design of Everyday Things, and I taken by the view that user error is usually design error. If your design does not lead users to the right action, that is an interface problem not PEBKAC. Some things are radically complex, but punching imaginary people in the face should not take planning or research.

: Zubon

Developer’s Gift to Modders

One great way to encourage your community to add to your game is to make it easy for players to get those additions. It is not enough to have tools for modders; you want it to be easy for players to use those mods, which will encourage their use, which will encourage their development, virtuous cycle ho!

Having it in-game helps. If I can access player-made mods, maps, quests, characters, etc. without searching the web and planning ahead, I am more likely to do so. The trivial inconvenience of downloading something and putting it in the right folder will keep many of your players from using much of anything beyond the standard game. The hardcore MMO player who will crawl through barbed wire for his fun is an atypical user.

One great gift to modders in Torchlight is having an achievement for using mods. People will do absurd things for useless badges and shinies that no one else will ever notice their having. A player who might never have looked at mods will notice when there is an un-checked achievement box to try them. It is a tiny thing for the developers to do, but it adds much encouragement. Yes, it also rewards “do it once to get it out of the way,” but some people will find interesting things in that try.

City of Heroes combines the two with Architect Entertainment. There are in-game sites devoted to trying player-made content. There are badges awarded for doing various things. After the initial release, the developers even toned down the badges to “try it” rather than “grind it until you hate the system and play only farms.”

Ease of use plus a low-cost nudge: encourage modders and harvest their ideas for official releases.

: Zubon

Torchlight Difficulty Levels

The Torchlight 2 announcement came just after I started poking at Torchlight again. I had long ago started a game on the highest difficulty but wandered off after getting tired of how that slowed down the game — it is just a matter of giving all the enemies bigger numbers, which means that my pets drop faster, monsters take longer to kill, and more things one-shot me. The game’s bosses are easy except for their masses of minions, which becomes really annoying when the end boss’s big ability is summoning masses of minions (and sometimes consuming them).

I finished that run-through this weekend. One oddity of Torchlight is that the meanest attacks are area-effect. Most games work on the principle that multiple-target effects have lower damage, but the nasty things in Torchlight tend to hit entire areas. Continue reading Torchlight Difficulty Levels

MMO Herds and Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has no quests.  At least it doesn’t have quests in the conventional sense where each player is nearly insulated in purpose outside of specific group content.  I know there have been countless occasions where an unknown player and I happened to be killing the same mobs in the same area, yet we did not group up to share the experience.  I might have been almost done, not wanting to group up in case the other player just started.  I might have needed boar tails, and each dead boar only has one (except when I apparently can’t find it on the carcass).  I might have just not wanted to deal with another possible unternet duckwad.  There was an activation energy to sharing this content, and I rarely, if ever, breached it.
 
Guild Wars 2 has events.  Events have purpose within themselves.  If I see a player killing boars, I can join in for the same purpose with the same duration and roughly the same reward.  There really is no activation energy to overcome.  In fact, I would guess it is the opposite.  I bet it takes more “energy” to choose to ignore the player-active event. It’s like some “herd instinct” activates to make us want to play with other people.  That is why, after all, we are playing MMOs, right?* 
 

Continue reading MMO Herds and Guild Wars 2

Ragnar Tørnquist

Ardua gushes about The Secret World, but I think a great asset to the game in the North American market is having a guy named Ragnar Tørnquist at the helm. Put that on the box cover. Not that most Americans know game developers or their reputations, just that the very name strikes a chord of awesomeness in Anglo America. “Dude, can you really name someone Ragnar over there? Do they still have vikings? Oh my god, they totally do!”

We may be shallow, condescending, culturally imperialist cowboys, but we have poor judgment, worse impulse control, and lots of disposable income.

: Zubon

Update: by commenter request, we shall not celebrate developers in particular, but we shall continue to highlight names that Americans will find awesome and astounding. Magnus and Thor are other good names to put on your cover, as is anything with crossed out letters. Umlauts are also likely to be received positively.

Hype

Hype has become the subject of the day, and I will contribute two repeats to the discussion.

First, You Are Judged Against Your Hype. Doing something modest very well gives you Portal or perhaps Torchlight. Take your pick on “shooting for the stars and not even delivering all the features on the box.”

Second, the example that always comes to mind on “failed to meet explicit promises” is Warhammer Online, as Zoso points out. If you ask me about WAR and I just mutter, “bears bears bears,” that is what I am talking about. Not only did developers explicitly identify a problem, identify a solution, then implement the problem exactly as described, but you were reminded of it constantly. Every time a quest sent you back to where you just came from, “bears bears bears.” Every time you killed a named enemy then got a quest to kill that named enemy, “bears bears bears.” Every time you saw a kill collector, the half-arsed version of the solution, “bears bears bears.” Then later tiers had such content/leveling curve issues that they added a bunch of kill ten rats quests as an improvement, and it was an improvement. Bears bears bears.

I am ambivalent about hype. I am skeptical, but I am gullible enough to take what people say at face value. It is not as though I am hurt if they fail to meet expectations they explicitly set; I just don’t trust the company or anyone who was identifiably a factor in lying to me.

: Zubon

Note that there is a separable issue for just doing badly. Alganon is a game that delivered everything it promised [Carson says no] badly. Earth Eternal seems to have had a similar problem.

[Update]

I Am So Happy For You

I am glad that you are still enjoying Wizard101 or Warhammer Online or Fallen Earth or whatnot. I like seeing your enthusiasm for a game that most of us are not playing. Keep blogging about your adventures. One of the reasons we have this huge blogroll is because there are so many people sharing their joy in the games that fit them best.

Take a moment to click on a new name. Read about something you have never played, maybe something you would never like because you are not built that way, and see if you can see what this person sees.

: Zubon

Odd Complementary Goods

Someone in the current corporate entity has spent the last year holding a fire sale on the goodwill that Blizzard spent a decade building. You can almost see some parts of the company working to maintain the customer’s faith, hope, and trust while other parts are strip-mining that resource. Anyone else have more metaphors I can mix in here, maybe something about BP?

Because I lack trust in the company’s businesses practices, and in light of the Battle.net requirement, I cannot seriously consider buying Starcraft 2 unless I know there is a hacked version available. I need to know that I can pop in the disk and the game will work, without an internet connection and without whatever requirements the corporate office decides are a good idea next year.

We have reached a point where the DRM has gone beyond annoyance to threatening to make your game unplayable at someone’s future whim. I am actually looking for reassurance from the pirates, in whose goodwill and long-term thinking I seem to place greater trust. We still trust the developers to make worthwhile games, but how much do you trust the corporation that employs them?

: Zubon

Guild Wars 2 Manifesto 2.0

First, if you haven’t seen this new gem from ArenaNet then feast on it in as high a def as you can muster.  It’s an updated video version of their earlier manifesto newly born for the upcoming games conventions.  The video starts out with a few of ArenaNet’s top devs giving some quick phrases on their design philosophy to shatter the current MMO mold.  The video is interspersed with in-game footage and a little concept art, and about halfway it switches over to full in-game footage showing some very impressive events.  The locations largely focus on the human starting zone and the Brand, a late game charr zone.  According to the accompanying ArenaNet blog post Walking the Walk these will be the two areas gamers will experience in the convention demos.  A deeper look at the video and the post after the break.

Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Manifesto 2.0

A Kestrel for a knave

The news that a pilot in EVE was attacked by other players who not only destroyed his ship, but also the PLEX (Pilots license extensions; in-game timecodes that can be traded between players) worth an estimated 22 billion ISK that he was carrying proves once again that, for me at any rate, it is far more fun and interesting to read about what goes on in EVE than it is to actually play the game.