The Guild Wars 2 Living World has been giving us a world tour throughout Tyria. There have been amalgamated armies in the Shiverpeaks, ancient amphibious creatures claiming island territory, sky pirates, and now a celebration of human resilience complete with hot air balloons is coming our way. And there sits Orr, where the personal story ended. I asked ArenaNet if they would be interested in discussing their thoughts on Orr nearly a year after launch. I got one of the best when Colin Johanson, one of the Guild Wars 2 leads, decided to jump on this plague carrier of an interview and discuss this region.
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.[GW2] Freshman Year Storytime
“It’s like a teenager figuring out who they are.â€
“Yeah, but that’s every [MMO] their freshman year.â€
-Chris and Celeste, Guild Wars Reporter Episode 70
A month from now Guild Wars 2 will be one year old. I’m sure I, and everybody else, will have memoirs of journeys, troubles, and a look back when that time comes. For another month, though, we’re still in the freshman year. Except, it would be like if the freshman’s big sister went to high school in a conventional way, and then the freshman (and school) changed everything. There is no convention to follow. ArenaNet is trail blazing the entire way, good or bad, for the rest of the industry to follow (or not), and for a cohesive story in the Living World, it’s been a rocky path.
In the fantastic GW2Hub interview with Bobby Stein, Stein remarks that they don’t yet have a mechanism to log what’s past and what’s to come for the Living World story. It’s slated to come later this year. ArenaNet understands that it’s hard for an average player to make sense of it all with the two-week increments. I agree that the road the past couple months has been jarring. Conventionally, MMO players are used to festivals as being… breakaways. For Guild Wars 2 (post Flame & Frost) it feels like each month is a new breakaway. Continue reading [GW2] Freshman Year Storytime
[GW2] Three Cutthroat Activities
With my tongue-in-cheek rage dissipating, I wanted to talk in a more rounded way about the three new activities that came with the latest Guild Wars 2 update, Cutthroat Politics. The official site lists these as “activitiesâ€, and they are all repeatable mini-games of a sort. Two are of a PvP nature, and one is PvE.
Last night I spent way too much time playing Southsun Survival. Of the three new activities that came with the Cutthroat Politics update, Southsun Survival is the only one that appears to be a permanent fixture as part of a rotating daily activity. Southsun Survival is best explained as Hunger Games on Southsun Cove. It is one of the best PvP experiences I’ve had in a while, and each round lasting almost 6 minutes on the nose each time (out of possible 15 minutes) feels different. In one sense it feels very rogue-like, which is something I am not sure I would ever apply to an MMO. Continue reading [GW2] Three Cutthroat Activities
Responding to Incentives
There’s a problem with MMOs not valuing adaptability in general – WoW’s raids tend to be designed around characters that are optimised to do one thing well, and the whole ethos of the game and its competitors/imitators has been to push players towards making characters that are one trick ponies that perform that one trick very well. These players feel somewhat cheated if the game then throws them a curveball and that trick that has served them so well up until now doesn’t work. You would need a game where every fight is different right from level 1 to train players into expecting to have to vary their tactics. WoW doesn’t EVER do that – high level dungeons and raids tend to have a gimmick or a dance, but nothing that fundamentally requires players to vary how they play.
This is a good insight. You are trained to play a genre in a specific way. If the vast majority of North American MMO players have been trained to have deeply specialized characters, they will assume that this is just how you play MMOs and wonder what is wrong with you. And you know, I could be in the wrong here, and I certainly would be if I went into a WoW raid and expected each character to be well-rounded; Continue reading Responding to Incentives
[GW2] Achievement-Colored Content
I was having a lot of fun in Aspect Arena, which is one of the three new activities in this bi-weekly Guild Wars 2 update, Cutthroat Politics. It’s more or less capture-the-flag with three classes (wind, sun, and lightning). I was also working on the Kiel Supporter meta-achievement, which can be filled, in part, by playing Aspect Arena.
The baseline achievement for Aspect Arena is simple and does not color gameplay. Aspect Arena Frequenter just requires 15 games to be played, but time flies when you are having fun and trying new tricks and strategies. Crystal Capper is also pretty simple because it requires that the player capture 10 crystals. In a sense it focuses gameplay, but capturing crystals is really the focus of this PvP activity anyway. Crystal Breaker was where I started seeing the achievement taint gameplay.
On paper, Crystal Breaker looks fine; kill 15 players that are holding crystals. Players do want to stop the other team from scoring. After playing 15 games, every player with reasonable skill should have a few crystal bearer kills. Yet, I saw on Tuesday night that Crystal Breaker was affecting gameplay because many people were focusing on killing crystal bearers. In some games it was laughable at how neither side wanted to pick up a crystal because the players wanted crystal bearer kills. A few times a teammate and I would stand at the base of one of the side towers waiting for some poor schmuck to get up and grab the crystal. Without that achievement, the focus would have reverted to a more natural gameplay state.
In olden times, there would be two content guides in order of focus: quests and achievements. The quest line for the content update would direct people to the content, where they could check that content off for completing the quest. An achievement would increase the content’s playable time or skill become a content guide for an additional challenge. Players then could have the feeling of pure completion (“I did all the quests!â€) without bashing their heads against really difficult achievements. The casuals and hardcore each had their cake. Continue reading [GW2] Achievement-Colored Content
[GW2] New Player’s Guide to Cutthroat Politics
Cutthroat Politics is the second release to the Living World centered on Bazaar of the Four Winds. Most of the content builds on the first release referred to in the New Player’s Guide to Bazaar of the Four Winds, which this Guide supplements. This guide is written for those just buying Guild Wars 2 now or returning after a long break. Any level character may participate in the activities below, unless otherwise noted. Continue reading [GW2] New Player’s Guide to Cutthroat Politics
Crossing a Pit in Two Hops
A half-finished project is often worse than useless. A half-built house is exposed to the elements and provides limited shelter despite significant expenditure of resources. The prospect of the completed house and all its amenities drives us forward, but (as when you cross the uncanny valley) the resources become less valuable in an incomplete project.
In the age of perpetual beta, we are living in half-finished houses. Games go online incomplete with the first months’ revenue paying for getting the game into a fully playable state, then ongoing revenue carrying the game into a state that might qualify as “going gold” where the discipline of needing to ship a physical medium forces a relatively completed state. (I am well aware that many “houses” went gold by walling off the incomplete rooms and calling it “built.”)
I have previously commented on Cryptic’s exploration of how early in the development cycle one can ship. City of Heroes launched missing its last 10 levels, then City of Villains did the same, then we had Champions Online and Star Trek Online. Kickstarter has changed the pre-order equilibrium for some games, not shipping early but selling the game before coding has even started. That might actually help things — if you already have the customer’s money, you need not rush to revenue. “You’re only late once, but you can suck forever.”
There are merits to releasing half-finished. But testing always reveals that some of the early ideas were not fun, good, or workable. You are free to revamp those during testing, but if you already sold the game and people are already playing, they are going to feel betrayed when you change a fundamental on them. NGE might have been a good idea in terms of design and the long-term health of the game, but you must survive the painful transition.
As commenters suggested under the “releasing half-finished” link, while you do not want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, you also do not want the marginally-better-than-nothing to be the enemy of the good. “Good enough” is often not good enough.
: Zubon
[GW2] 2013 Plans
Last week ArenaNet posted plans on where they intend to take Guild Wars 2. I wanted a weekend (to eat hot dogs in Chicago) to digest all that the official blog post had discussed. I think for the most part things are pretty good. Some ideas are “wait until implementation to decide†and some are “OMG, I want that now!†Overall, it’s nice to see that there are many plans beyond the bi-weekly Living World releases.
Four Living World Teams Stand Before You
That’s what I said now. I think most Guild Wars 2 fans are blown away with the updates. It is very addictive to get something new so often. Tonight, I know that players are going to be a buzz with the player-decided election in Cutthroat Politics. The goal is for each of the four teams to have four months to design and polish a month of content. I seem to recall that in a Twitch developer livestream one of the devs implied that they were just hitting that four month cadence now, and it really shows. The content seems much tighter in Bazaar of the Four Winds. Continue reading [GW2] 2013 Plans
Deconstructing Games
Over the weekend, I played Little Inferno and DLC Quest. Both are basically assaults on recent gaming trends. (Warning: there are some TV Tropes links after the break, as is appropriate for trope-tastic games like these.) Continue reading Deconstructing Games
Rebuilding the MMO Theme Park
Ah, yes, the old MMO moniker, “theme parkâ€. A derided term, not worn as a hardcore badge of honor, like “sandbox†MMOs. A “theme park†MMO has rides. These rides are designed by developers to give the player an experience, that will not much derivate from the ride’s rails. This is not bad game design, especially seen with the way gamers line up for the latest console rail shooter. It can be a lot of fun to quick-time event through a game.
However, the term “theme park†gained its dark stain because it was used as a crutch. Repetition turned the rides in to a necessary activity for the reward’s punch card. The rides lost their thrill as players needed a normalized X more rides to get the shiny they so desired. Rides were populated because of reward carrots, and not because they were necessarily enjoyable activities.
What did players constantly demand? More content. Some updates offered a span of new content, but for the most part the significant content heaps were left to expansions. The theme park’s content would remain stagnant until officially expanded at a press-released ribbon cutting ceremony. I felt MMO players assumed this status quo after a while.
A year or two ago, I would have told you that the future of theme parks was incorporation of sandbox elements, such as scaling events or content with some procedural randomness. I did not expect that the MMO developers would actually embrace the theme park nature, and advance it. Continue reading Rebuilding the MMO Theme Park