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That New MMO Smell

Hello, gamers, listen to your MMO, now back to Guild Wars 2, now back to your MMO, now back to Guild Wars 2.  Sadly, your MMO isn’t Guild Wars 2, but if it stopped using stock Pokemon sounds and switched to something that would blow Hollywood away, it could sound like Guild Wars 2.

Listen around, back here, where are you? You’re in the marketplace with the MMO your MMO could sound like.  What’s in your ear, back at me.  They have it, it’s a farmer with a fresh harvest of that thing you love.  Listen again, the produce is now a crazy fisherman.  Anything sounds possible when your MMO sounds like Guild Wars 2 and not 8-bit audio.

Do you want an MMO that can sound like an actual living city with drunk patrons at the Busted Flagon talking about the illegal deal that went down in the alley by the bar while crickets chirped?  Of course you do!  Swan Dive – into the best aural experience of your life.  So gamers should your MMO sound like Guild Wars 2?  You tell me!

–Ravious
on a pale horse

Snappy One-Liners

One of my main concerns while watching many of the videos the Guild Wars 2 folks have been sharing are the little one-liners the characters shout when they attack. You know, things like “Take that!”. I knew right away I would get sick of hearing that sort of thing all the time. Thankfully, they agree with me. Read this quote from their latest news, Talking Heads: VO and Dialogue in GW2:

We’re also aware that there can be too much of a good thing, which is why we’ve developed a sound throttling system so you won’t hear the same combat chatter repeated over and over again during fights. Those concerned about the game being diluted with “snappy one-liners” can breathe a sigh of relief. You won’t hear quips every five seconds, and most of them aren’t smarmy in nature. That annoys us just as much as it does you.

Make sure you listen to the samples while you are there.

– Ethic

Learned Helplessness

I don’t like games where randomness dominates. Some can be fun, if we take them completely unseriously, but the less your actions ultimately matter, the less interesting the whole thing is. As the non-controlled element becomes larger, the virtue of winning goes to zero and the frustration of losing goes to infinity (or also zero, as you stop caring). “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Continue reading Learned Helplessness

Quote of the Day

I now have in my possession a pocket-sized computer which, when I speak a question to it (“Who is the author of Kraken?” “Who was the fourteenth president of the Unites States?” “What is the name of John Scalzi’s cat?”) provides me an answer in just a few seconds. If I take a picture of something, the same pocket computer will analyze the photo and tell me what I’m looking at. Oh, and it makes phone calls, too. Among other things.

None of that is the cool part. The cool part is, when I speak a question to my pocket computer and it gives me a bad answer, I get annoyed. Because here in the future, when I talk to my pocket computer, I expect it to get the answer right the first time.
– John Scalzi

: Zubon

Turnaround Time

How is it that Runic Games is publishing Torchlight 2 early next year while other games languish in development Hell for years before coming out late, buggy, and poorly balanced? My compliments to whoever is in charge of production and logistics.

I understand that Torchlight is not the most ambitious project ever. It is narrowly defined and does one thing really well. It out-Diabloes Diablo. It is also a single-player game, which simplifies quite a bit. I also respect the discipline it takes to make a narrowly focused game, rather than trying to be all things to all people. We have seen that. We have seen that fail.

Torchlight 1 seems like a teaser for the real thing. Single-player, limited range of options: it is a demo expanded to something they could use as a fund-raiser. Torchlight 2 is adding multi-player and other things people thought were missing. By the time Diablo 3 comes out, are you really going to be interested in it except as “more of the same” of Torchlight? And they’re making an MMO. It is like seeing someone re-create Blizzard, if they had it to do all over again with less baggage, more experience, and no Activision.

: Zubon

Character Tao in Guild Wars 2

“Tao” is one of the most simple [religious] concepts ever to describe, and one of the hardest to fully comprehend.  Simply put it is “the way.”  In smaller personalized chunks it can represent the way of living, the way of living, or the way of self.  Every MMO, whether I like it or not, has a player Tao.  In so-called amusement park MMOs (e.g., World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online) the way to play is nearly set in stone.  Sure there are filthy roleplayers that clog up an inn or ancient, ruined megastructure now and then, but all they are doing is forcing sandbox play into the set of preordained rides.  It’s very hard to fight the collectively defined way to play.  It’s even harder for a player to feel like the way of playing is his or her own.

Even though ArenaNet kept away from this deep waters concept, their latest blog article basically presents their view of Tao through an MMO through their systems of “personality” and “karma.”  They are systems to help define a player path, but also to let the player personalize it.

Continue reading Character Tao in Guild Wars 2

Die Now

A mood improvement technique I have been trying is quitting on a high point. If things go really well, call it a night. If things are as good as they can reasonably get, don’t wait for them to get worse, just take your win and leave. The two things you remember most of your experiences are the most extreme case and the last thing that happened; if you make them both the same positive event, you double-win.

: Zubon

Title reference: in Margaret Weis’s Star of the Guardians trilogy is the claim that the Greeks used this phrase to express “this is the high point in your life.” That is a bit more extreme than logging off.

Waking With A Dawn Over Enedwaith

Things have been a little slow since Dungeons and Dragons Online killed my computer.  I kid, a little.  I mean it was the game I was playing when my HP “gaming” laptop’s video card was reduced to short-circuited rubble. The game was not at fault because a simple Google search revealed that my laptop series had huge video card problems, and I was very lucky to have mine last so long.  I attribute it to judicious use of a separate laptop fan.  In the meantime I am waiting for a desktop; the first I’ve had in six years.  Anyway…

The NDA for Lord of the Ring’s big update has dropped.  I was not in beta (mostly by choice), so I am learning everything with the public.  I was accidentally leaked the fact about adding Lua scripting to the UI, and I pray we have some sort of Scrolling Combat Text mod up on Book release.  Thank you, devs, for listening.  The API for the mods is very, very limited so don’t expect anything on the order of World of Warcraft or GearScore.  Still, it is nice to give some more moddable access to a fanbase, which has infinite dev time by comparison.

There is so much to learn, like exceptional Captain updates, new bank usage, the freeish-to-play (F2P) system, the new zone Enedwaith, and so much more.  I am so far behind in information that I will have to severely piece meal it over the week.  Any Legendary Item changes? What’s available to purchase in the cash shop?  And so on.  

I clearly burnt out on Lord of the Rings Online early this year during a very stressful time in my life.  Now, with a new computer and a new game update, I feel it is time to ride in to the Enedwaithian dawn…. drunk…. on a new keg-carrying Inn League horse… with permanent drunk effect.

–Ravious
in the middle of the street

Cultural Difference

In World of Warcraft, the shared world is where you complete the leveling game. It is organized by and dominated by quests. The goal of the leveling game is to earn experience points and to complete it as time-efficiently as possible. The end game is the real game, and it takes place in instances. The goal is to improve your gearscore. Completing achievements and collecting pets and mounts are shared mini-games between the two levels of play.

Or at least that is how I see the majority of hardcore players. If you disagree, the question is not whether it is true for you but whether you think I have mis-assessed the majority. You could also make the case that the real majority is casually making its way through the leveling game. Those people are less likely to be engaged in MMO blogs or the meta-game, so I don’t know if they are part of the conversation.

In City of Heroes and The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, the leveling game is the game. There is a veneer of end game, but people who think that the game begins at the level cap are severely disappointed. There is some harder content at the cap, along with the chance to farm for best-in-slot gear, but the games are designed for the journey. If you power-level to get past the leveling game, you are just missing the game. The end game is pretty much more of the leveling game, without experience points. (Completing badges/deeds and collecting costumes/mounts are shared mini-games between the two levels of play.)

Going from the latter two to the former, I was constantly annoyed by “the game begins at 80.” Meanwhile, the population in the former is much larger and therefore is a constant source of complaints as visitors in the latter two. “I left WoW because I was bored, but this game sucks because it isn’t more like WoW. I need you to change it for me now, because I’m going back to WoW when the next expansion drops.”

: Zubon

Group Puzzle Content

Puzzles have a long and proud tradition in single-player computer games. Quality has varied dramatically, but then Sturgeon’s Law applies. (Feel free to commiserate in the comments about your favorite horrible guesswork “puzzles.”) Puzzle bosses are a classic implementation, although these are often a thin candy coating over the BIG RED GLOWING EYE that you shoot.

We seem to want to replicate this in MMOs, and I do not think it has gone well. Problems are both because you expect to fight the bosses multiple times and because you will not be bringing the same people.

Continue reading Group Puzzle Content