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When Bigger is Better

One function of levels is to spread and pace content, and to guide you through it. If you have an epic tale spread across 1000 quests, you can make a game with 50 levels and have each award 5% of a level. The earlier parts will have simpler gameplay, the middle ones can transition to using skills more strategically, and hopefully you avoid making the ending “difficult” by pumping up the numbers.

Some players in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ have been complaining about leveling too quickly. If you stack rested experience with recent bonuses and the new leveling curve, you move through some levels very quickly. If you want a quest to be challenging, you need to plan on hitting it soon, because you will outlevel it within the week, at which point it is green and gray content. Mowing through grays can get boring.

City of Heroes, however, lets you keep almost all the content challenging no matter what level you are. Content is instanced, and levels scale. If you missed a story arc, hit Ouroboros and flash back to it; set your level lower with Ouroboros to make non-instance content challenging for your (new) level. You can exemplar down to play with friends, and task forces do that automatically. In the other direction, you can sidekick up, and Mission Architect can be rigged to auto-sidekick everyone. There is very little you can do at level 5 that you cannot do at level 50, and almost none of it is interesting.

Farming, powerleveling? Unlike many games, it will not hurt your City of Heroes character or make you miss content. You can always go back and do it, without its being trivialized. You can skip the entire game, but that just means you have the entire game as a menu before you, rather than whatever 10% is available at your level. Higher levels mean more content options, not just different ones, and you do not lose the old options.

Once again, I wish more games would learn the lessons that City of Heroes has been teaching for five years.

: Zubon

While I’m on the Subject of Niches

I have a year of A Tale in the Desert time under my belt. I play a variety of games that a major studio would not bother to spit on. I will not speak ill of someone else’s niche, except to mention if I tried it and it bored or annoyed the heck out of me. Which is to say, if you are like me, this is not your niche.

Now if you pretend that your niche is The One Game, and people only avoid it because they have personality problems you have diagnosed… I still probably will not bother to speak ill of it, because you need some seriously powerful delusions to rise to “worth mentioning” on this here series of tubes. I do not even mention a lot of the games I try, because it is not worth it to write a few sentences about them. Too trivial for a blogger to bother with: ouch.

: Zubon

Happy Belated 6th, EVE Online

EVE Online turned 6 on May 6th. Congratulations to CCP!

A 6 year persistant history. A living history where truly brilliant strategies have unfolded. Truly terrible betrayals unveiled. We are excited to see what will happen next.

This year has been very successful for EVE Online, thanks in large part to the Apocrypha expansion and a return to retail. We started out the year with around 244,000 subscribers and in five short months we’ve had a 22% growth in subscribers. In the past couple days we surpassed the impressive milestone of 300,000 active subscribers.

We’ve broken our peak concurrent user record 3 times this year alone, standing now at an impressive 53,850 in the same universe. That is exponential growth. We couldn’t think of a better birthday present than having more people playing EVE Online than ever before. It is another sweet reminder of EVE’s boundless potential.

As always, we encourage you to bring your friends, family and even enemies to New Eden. Cheers to that.

– Ethic

Core Gameplay

MMOs have you running on a treadmill to reach a carrot dangling in front of you.  We talk a lot about that carrot.  Is it big enough for the effort required?  Is there any carrots to chase after you max your character’s level?  One thing hardcore grinders like me can forget to ask is, “What about the treadmil itself?  How inherently fun is the activity you spend most of your time doing?”

When I ask someone what the core-gameplay of something is, they might say it’s killing stuff like IG-88 from Star Wars.  But that’s not what I mean.  That’s the theme they paint on top of it.  At it’s core, you have some kind of challenge like lining your crosshairs up to shoot a droid in a shooter like Shadows of the Empire on the Nintendo 64, or trying to decide which cards to play as you do in the SWG online card game, or spamming specials to try and hold agro for the group as you would do as a tank in the IG-88 heroic instance in SWG.  The actual core gameplay is vastly different in all of these games.

The core gameplay isn’t just one thing though.  It’s not just killing.  It’s getting ready for fights too.  Whether that means deciding which materia pieces to put in your sword in FFVII or which cards to put in your deck in a card game, or which traits you want to equip in Lotro, or waiting for a buff from an entertainer in SWG.

What keeps an MMO from being a grind is all about the core gameplay being fun.  Crafting is one of the worst offenders when it comes to core-gameplay.  In SWG  the whole system is just a bunch of menus and boring click-fests.  I literally used a mouse recording program to do the clicking and dragging for me when I used to make +35 powerbits because I found it so boring.  If I didn’t use such a program, my hand would cramp up and hurt after the first couple hours of crafting.

SWG of course has a great crafting system overall.  Searching for the best resources and the rarest junk-loots has the same treasure-hunt style core-gameplay that you have in real life when you visit a flea market.  All of the good gameplay in crafting is in the finding of resources when it comes to SWG.

But this is true for most MMOs.  Lotro actually lets you automate the process when it comes to actually crafting so that you can walk away from your computer while making iron bars for xp.  In EQ2, they realized the core-gameplay of combat was more fun than crafting so they tried to copy combat over to crafting.  You could actually die to a forge if you messed up too much.  The gameplay centered around trying to simon-says match the skill shown on the forge with the appropriate skill and also spamming other specials inbetween simon-says events.

Then we have Free Realms.  In Free Realms there are twitch-based crafting games that have you do things like trying to pour just the right amount of water into a pot.  There’s also a clock so that you can see what your best time is.  Some of the actions are a real pain in the wrist, but it shows a lot of promise as a concept.

This has me wondering tonight… what do MMOs need to do in order to have core-gameplay as fun as single player games?

Naming

Say that we were to make a MMO based on Firefly. What do you call it? Firefly? Serenity? The Verse? Do you add something like “World of” before it, “Online” or “Adventures” after it? Prefix it with “Joss Whedon’s”? Your goal is to attract the current plays (who might be drawn to The Verse) and a general audience (“Serenity” may not imply “action-packed adventure).

Thoughts?

: Zubon

On Designing for a Niche

The problem is, there’s an easy way to be polarizing that doesn’t work and a hard way to be polarizing that does work. They look similar enough from the outside that most people take the easy way and then blame the system for their failure.

By saying you’re only going to appeal to a certain group of people, you give yourself permission and latitude to say no a lot. No, we’re not going to build this feature because the market we’re targeting doesn’t think it’s important. No, we’re not going to change our message because our message appeals to our target market. And, if you disagree, well… you’re not the person we’re going after.

No can be an incredibly powerful tool but it can also be a dangerous one when it shellacs your from criticism. The easy way of being polarizing is to just arbitrarily decide your target market based on what you wish your target market could be and then act all defiant and proud about how polarizing you are.

… Unless you can succinctly and explain what your target market is and why they appreciate your product, you’re not being polarizing, you’re just giving yourself permission to swear a lot and draw whales on your website.
– Xianhang Zhang

: Zubon

Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 61: Retrospective

It has been about six months since The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ launched, and I have been paying attention for about half of it. I did a series on my return to Middle-earth, leaving off about half-way through exploring Moria. Having had enough time to get burned out, what is my view now?

First, Moria really is a great locale. It is a huge space with a great deal of diversity. There are lots of interesting things to see. There are living flames, transparent spiders, giant turtles and toads, ancient ruins, waterfalls, an underground grotto, fungal invaders, and bottomless pits.

There are many quests and more than enough content to hit level 60. This includes several epic books, finding the parts of an ancient statue, realigning mirrors to bring light to the depths, following riddles all the way to Lothlorien, and fighting many goblins and orcs.

Once you run through those quests, you have probably done most of the fun stuff. It may go a bit past 60 if you spent your early 50s completing the Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ content, but the content at level 60 is less varied and interesting than the content at level 50. Mines of Moriaâ„¢ pushed the endgame out a few weeks, but killed it in doing so.

Continue reading Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Day 61: Retrospective

Side-kicks, Companions, and Crews

One of the  features in the upcoming Star Trek Online is the built-in crews that every player has on their ship.  Like EVE you’ll have a ship, but you’ll also have your own Spock and McCoy to hang out with after you land on the surface.  And who knows?  Maybe you’ll also walk around inside your ship and interact with your different NPC group-mates.

This feature doesn’t promise to stay unique for long, as Star Wars The Old Republic is also reportedly going to have companions like they did in their single player games to hang out with.  Knowing how this played out in KOTOR, you’ll probably gather potential artifical-group-mates by doing quests like the RPG Suikoden and then swap them in and out depending on the upcoming quest.

In LOTRO, it has been confirmed that the next book-update will include “customizable soldiers that you can train and bring into skirmishes.”  What does that mean?  Well it sounds pretty similar to the above.

Are NPC friends in MMOs the future?  And is that future a good thing or to the detriment of the multiplayer aspect of MMOs?

FIVE YEARS

cake

It’s amazing how time flies. It was five years ago today that I posted my first post here at KTR. Here’s to five more years of fun! I hope you have enjoyed the epic quest so far. Let’s go kill us some more rats.

UPDATE: CONTEST NOW CLOSED – WINNERS TO BE ANNOUNCED IN A NEW POST

To celebrate our 5th anniversary, Turbine has generously donated 5 retail keys for “The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ Complete DIGITAL DOWNLOAD”. These codes will only work on the Turbine servers. For more details on what is included, follow this link. To enter, simply comment on this post telling me why you would like one of the retail keys. I will choose the 5 responses I like the best in 5 days (on Friday May 15th) and give each winner one of the keys. I’d like to thank Turbine for being so kind!

– Ethic

Guild Wars Goblin Market

After the big 4th Anniversary Update, the Guild Wars community is still trying to figure out exactly how the market was affected by the addition of the purchasable items through Zaishen Coins.  The Zaishen Coins are untradable, but the items that are bartered with the Zaishen Coins are definitely salable.  The more interesting market change comes from the roaming market created by Nicholas the Traveler.

Once a week, Nicholas the Traveler moves to a new location and requests a barter item.  So far, three of these barter items will net the player one Gift of the Traveler.  An account can get up to five Gifts of the Traveler per week.  When the Gifts are opened they can net simple things like candy or alcohol, but the Gifts can also net very, very expensive miniatures, pets, weapons, and tonics that can only be found in the Gifts of the Traveler boxes.

This past week, Nicholas the Traveler required three Branches of Juni Berries per Gift, and he was found in the Bukdek Byway.  First thing of note, this was the first week that required two different Campaigns in order to get the Gift.  The second thing was that Branches of Juni Berries could only be gained by completing a repeatable mini-game style quest, which involved a guard-dog crocodile-beast eating weakened enemies.  (I used minions plus Verata’s Aura plus Contemplation of Purity for a ton of hostile easy to kill minions.)  For some people getting the Branches of Juni Berries was a grind and a pain.  For others it was serious fun and profit.

Anyway, this supply of barter items and Gifts and demand of barter items and Gifts’ items creates this type of floating market.  Prices fluctuate dramatically (especially for the barter items), and by the time the market can be said to “stabilize” – mostly due to a sheer drop in demand – Nicholas the Traveler moves off to a new location.  I find this dynamic very interesting, and apart from the Zaishen Quests and title grind, the weekly market gives very good reason to sign on for a few hours every week.

–Ravious
all of your memories before you were three