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Jeff Strain and Undead Labs

In a flurry of press activity, a new MMO studio was unveiled today by ex-Blizzard, ex-ArenaNet MMO-guru Jeff Strain.  Undead Labs is set to be a very focused developer.  Focused on what, you say?  Zombies.  Consoles.  MMO.  Jeff believes he can help lead an MMO studio with a very tight game-making culture.  This won’t be a “behemoth” company churning out franchise MMOs.  This is going to be a company that carves an MMO from those three simple words for those three simple words.  (Well not for zombies; though, after a 6-hour raid… nevermind.)  There are a bunch of good interviews linked from the Undead Labs’ news page, but the best is found on the site covering rude questions that interviewers might ask.  For instance, Jeff Strain departs from his old view on MMO subscriptions:

Q: Will the game carry a subscription model like WoW, or will it be more like Guild Wars?

A: The game will almost certainly be subscription based. I’ve always said that a game should be designed around its business model, and Guild Wars is certainly designed to be a free-to-play online game. In fact, there are hundreds of free-to-play online games on the market today, but some publishers are increasingly relying on micro-transactions, in-game advertising, “premium” accounts, or, at worst, lead-gen scams to generate more profit. I don’t like this nickel-and-dime approach, because it leads to design decisions that are based on something other than what’s most fun for the players. We want to focus on making an MMOZ that is, first and foremost, fun to play. Not a Skinner Box. Not a teaser for more stuff you can buy from us. Not an advertisement for stuff you can buy from someone else. Our singular design focus will be to create a game that is fun to play, and every month we’ll either earn you respect and your money, or we won’t.

–Ravious
i don’t hate vests

Shareholder Subscription

I’ve talked before about how subscriptions can be seen as a form of investing.  There are plenty of people that keep parking-lot subscriptions to games like World of Warcraft, where the monthly rent is paid but the car is never moved.  I’ve been playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons Online lately, and while I am not ready to give my full impressions (favorable as they may be), I did want to discuss an interesting point to their business model.  Continue reading Shareholder Subscription

Concerning Failcake

Dragon Age’s story is the condensation, in yummy game form, of the old proverb about wanting to have cake and eat it too. You can’t. It’s quite refreshing to see how at several points in the storyline your actions and choices not only do matter, but also to come across situations that are not built around success or failure, but rather just what kind of failure you prefer and how many levels you want of it.

It’s not unfair. It makes perfect sense. Sometimes stuff just doesn’t work out and if this is true right here and now in our comfortable, padded real world existence, then it’s even more so in the dark times of a land torn by internal strife, a demonic invasion, magic and politics running rampant. You will lose. At many junctures. The choices are basically about what you’re more keen on losing.

So far, story wise, it’s been a rewarding change of pace from what we’re so used to; stories that go out of their way to please everyone and written around the ideas of success and reward. When all choices point towards success, they are soft and you’re only choosing what flavor of success you want. Being served failure on a plate, several times during the game, not only makes for this nice change of pace, but also go a long way into reinforcing how believable that world is.

One of the biggest pitfalls in your common, garden variety vanilla fantasy setting is not how can we rationalize the existence of magic, how can our characters travel hundreds of miles in minutes, how much stuff can that single backpack really hold or how can you work in space goats with dimensional ships; it’s instead how everything tends to success, including the actions of the so-called heroes populating that world.

Dragon Age’s story, which is not without its holes by the way, is not an equation that tries to balance success on one side with failure on the other. It’s more like walking a tightrope with failure at both sides. Success is straight ahead, but the choice steps have to be careful. And that makes it all the more refreshing. If Dragon Age had been an MMO we would already be talking about the death of the softcore fantasy setting.

Good Web Site

On another “best practices” note, flip through the Game Info section on the City of Heroes website. That is really good. It does not have everything the wiki does, and it really should not, but I could actually point someone to the official site to learn about the game. I could ask for a bit more about the archetypes, but it goes through the various types of rewards/loot, you have lore on the setting and the enemy groups, there is a lengthy section on the Mission Architect, and it is all well organized. This is a useful official site that is easily navigated. It even includes the recommendation to pick a power pool by level 12 so you can get your travel power ASAP. Whoever put this site together did good work.

I know, they have had five years to put a good site together, but so many games fail to use the site as much more than a promotional tool.

: Zubon

Selling Powers

Returning to last week’s big theme of item shops, City of Heroes shipped Super Booster IV: Martial Arts last week (discussion thread). In addition to emotes and costume pieces, it includes a power (like the other Boosters):

Ninja Run power:
Dash through the city with the agility of a ninja! The Ninja Run power is a travel power enabled through the purchase of Super Booster IV: Martial Arts and is available for use at level 4. Use Ninja Run to strike fear in the hearts of your enemies as you increase your run speed and leaping abilities, and the best part? It doesn’t use one of your power selections!

The previous powers were different. The first was a self-destruct: amusing, but of limited use, especially when it sends you to the hospital (no rez). The second gave you an other-only buff: rather useful, but not something that made you more powerful. It is hard to get angry about paying for the ability to help others, but let’s not doubt that nerd rage is out there. The third did not have a power as such. This time, though, it is a power, and a desirable one, and they are advertising it as such. Travel skills are not exactly game-breaking, and this one is slower than the others, but you get it earlier and (as they say) with no power slot consumed, meaning that you can use that slot for something else. Because there is no prerequisite power (you can pay for that another way: subscribe for 5 years to be able to pick travel powers at level 6), that frees up another slot if you were only taking Combat Jumping to get Super Leap. The most important effect is not selling a permanent, slightly sub-par travel power; it is effectively selling an extra power slot or two for all your characters.

Come to think of it, that is a heck of a deal for $10, especially since it applies to all your characters. Other games are selling you a mount or decorative pet for $10. Here, they will top that and give it to every character you have.

: Zubon

Breaking From the Collective Tempo

Borderlands has two speeds of play, much like its ancestor Diablo II:  paced and rushed.  When I play alone, I am going at my own speed.  It might be a slow safe sniper battle or a quick chest run in one of the Havens, but if a pseudo-scientist looked at some waves or something, I feel that there would be an alignment.  A pacing tempo, if you will.  When I play with others, even close friends, not only does the tempo markedly increase but the speed of play is not always in alignment with the me.  Frenetic is a good word for this in its most emotional definition.

I don’t like that feeling.  I love playing with other people online, but I don’t feel at one with my gaming experience when that feeling happens. Continue reading Breaking From the Collective Tempo

How to Write Patch Notes

Reading the latest League of Legends patch notes, I noticed this format:

  • Tantrum Damage modified from 115/130/145/160/175 to 100/120/140/160/180
  • Curse of the Sad Mummy Duration reduced from 3 to 2.5

Notice the “from” and “to” with exact numbers. It does not say, “Tantrum Damage modified. Curse of the Sad Mummy Duration reduced.” This is especially important for test notes, as you want people to test if the numbers actually come out that way, especially since some of the notes are correcting ability numbers or text so that they match (ditto for graphic effect and area of effect).

While we are talking about doing things right, I may have attacked the City of Heroes patch notes before, but one thing they do well is pointing to themes. Some of that is the advertising copy for, “Come try our new stuff! It’s awesome!” but the valuable part is expressing the developer intent in the patch notes. “We observed that players were able to reach unintended levels of defense through stacking buffs and abilities, so we are adjusting this through the following changes…” Even when there is no theme, that is helpful: “We are making a variety of balance tweaks to powers across all classes, correcting a variety of issues that have accumulated over time. There may be some unexpected effects from making so many changes at once, so we would appreciate it if you would pay attention to X while testing.” For test notes, explain what you want tested. For live notes, explain your intent before you need to explain it in each of twenty forum threads.

: Zubon

Easy with the talky, guys

Introduced my wife to Dragon Age: Origins last night. Here I was hoping for something that would impress Ms. “I’ve got books by Tennessee Williams and Dylan Thomas in my collection and you don’t”, but it didn’t go so well.

She really disliked the talking intermissions. Or rather, she disliked how frequent and long they were. Also disliked the interaction via multiple possible answers, I imagine because she couldn’t completely gauge the result of the choices before selecting a response. And I can’t say I blame her too much. On the length issue, I mean. There is such a thing as too much sometimes, particularly when the player actually wants to get down to, you know, adventuring, and not having to listen to merchants say their 5-10 second peace every damn time you want to access their goods.

Now, I understand this is story-driven, and the vehicle chosen to deliver that story is voiced NPCs. That much is fine, and actually experiencing the level of narrative in DA:O fills my geeky heart with a joy I cannot explain. You don’t get this kind of steak often, and the voice acting sauce it comes with is supreme. But, that said, the inconvenient truth behind this is that there is a ton of it, whether you like it or not. Voiced NPCs work great but only up to a point where they start becoming an annoyance for many players. I think future titles *coughstarwarscough* have to be mindful of this and teach their NPCs how brevity really is the soul of wit.

Random Variation

Given a large number of trials, any random series will produce a large number of perverse-looking short streaks. If 100 people flip a coin 5 times, you should expect 6 of them to get the same result on every flip, but it will look strange to those 6 people. One-in-a-million chances happen all the time in a world of seven billion people. If millions of WoW players attack 100 times a day each, that is a lot of chances for long streaks of misses (and longer strings of hits).

More recently for me, it took two weeks to complete the Chasing Marcia achievement because one of the daily quests just did not appear for two weeks. What are the odds of that? Well, not bad. There are 5 quests, so 0.8^14=4.4% chance that any one quest will not appear for two weeks, but since there are five ways it could happen, there is a 22% chance. You should expect that to happen quite a few times each year, and if you started the dailies today, you should expect that 22% chance it will take you more than two weeks. (Maybe Blizzard does have some kind of streakbreaker in there, and maybe I just hallucinated having done the daily on a day I missed.)

I know all this and was just vaguely amused at the fishing streak. A similar thing contributed to my leaving The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ for about six months. I was trying to complete the Annuminas armor set, which involves getting the boss drop in each of three dungeons. With six fellowship members, that is a pretty clean 1/6 chance, minus the occasional member who just felt like running the dungeon but did not need that piece. In 16 tries, I won that 1/6 roll once. This should not be surprising: the expected value is to run each dungeon six times, and for everyone who wins a roll on the first time, there must be someone who just keeps running it and running it. I was not even up to 18 tries, and who knows, maybe it would have worked out perfectly and I would have won the next two. Independent probabilities, however, do not work that way: you still have a 1/6 chance, and I should expect another 12 tries to finish the set. And by that 16th trip, you get really sick of telling the new people to keep the silence-aura ghosts away from the healer.

Hence the approach of giving everyone a few badges, 1/6 the necessary token, or whatever.

: Zubon

Siege of Mirkwood Beta Thoughts

Since the NDA dropped, I wanted to share the strongest points in my mind that I experienced or read during my time in the closed beta.

The Good – Skirmishes.  I cannot stress this enough.  It will change how casual players access Lord of the Rings Online, and it might have a greater effect on the MMO landscape.  They are self-contained adventures similar to Guild Wars missions and Dungeons and Dragons Online quests, but most like solo instances in Lord of the Rings Online itself.  Since it has its own reward structure, players can solo to their hearts content, but the best feature is scalability to include other players to get, duh, better rewards.  12-man skirmishes are basically casual raids with customized bosses.  Plus players get a personalized skirmish Barbie to dress up and skill out.  If I had any qualms about activation energy to play Lord of the Rings Online, this feature destroys it.  This is seriously an expansion in itself. Continue reading Siege of Mirkwood Beta Thoughts