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Self-Maintaining

The lack of atrophy is a virtue of online gaming’s illusion of permanence. While enemies may respawn in a few seconds, the ratchet only goes one way on character and story advancement. You need not hit the gym to keep your points in strength from fading. Your house never gets dirty, and maintenance of everything you own is streamlined to a few clicks. You can wear the same clothes continuously for months, and you never need to iron the cloth armor in your vault. Your armor is always shiny and your sword is always on fire. Cooking and eating are optional, and the thousand stuffed cabbages in your backpack never rot.

Monsters and dungeons more closely resemble your floors and bathrooms. You can clean them out entirely, but you’ll need to do it again the next time you look.

: Zubon

[GW2] Super Adventure Transition

The joke is that there is no joke. Perhaps the timing of the latest addition to Guild Wars 2 was done to ease the pain and let them have their “lols”, but for April, Super Adventure Box is here to stay.

What is Super Adventure Box (“SAB”)? An asuran genius, Moto, created a holographic video game using patented solidification hologram technologies. Players can go in to this “training apparatus” to learn about basic techniques in a closed environment. By closed environment I mean all the players stats and gear is virtually gone. Health is replaced by hearts, and gear is replaced by a few SAB items such as a sword-like stick or bombs. The graphics in SAB… well my kids were asking me how I was playing Minecraft in Guild Wars 2.

The first time I interfaced with SAB, I hated it. After a night’s rest and poking around with it a bit more, I have grown to love it. Continue reading [GW2] Super Adventure Transition

Pareto Superior Testing

Our testers can veto releases at work, but we have an allied tradition that half a loaf is better than none. We may not get everything we want from an update, but if it makes some things better and no things worse, we go live. We can add the rest in a future update.

A gaming example comes from GW2 crafting. At launch, crafting could use items only from your character’s inventory. Soon after, you could craft from the vault but discovery was still inventory only. Now both check character inventory and the entire vault.

This is easier in my work than in gaming because our users are not competing with each other. If we can implement new functionality for one interface but need another month to accommodate the rest of our users, bonus for the users with the easy update. If your FPS added rocket launchers for PC players but needed another month to add it to the Mac client, forums would explode, especially if PC and Mac players were on the same servers. You can see this in games that are gradually rebalancing one class at a time rather than all at once. The relative values of classes are having large swings each month. LotRO had “the month of the [class],” TF2 had class-specific updates, and other games have similarly revamped single classes. See also City of Heroes gradually adding heroes’ passive archetype abilities over time, so there were months in which only half the classes had them.

Sometimes half a loaf is worse than none. Beyond the cases where it distorts your competitive balance, a function that only half-works can make some things worse and no things better. Adding something that only works for a known half of the users is inconsistent but reliable, which can be okay; adding something that works for everyone a seemingly random half of the time is inconsistent and unreliable, which is bad. The new functionality must work as expected, even if only under additional assumptions, and those assumptions must not cause other problems. Half a loaf is better than a whole loaf with gravel scattered through it.

: Zubon

Warframe

I’ve been playing the Warframe open beta (available on Steam). Out of a weird impulse I decided to try it and I’ve been pleasantly surprised, despite these games not being my usual cup of tea.

The elevator pitch: Warframe is a third-person shooter in which space ninjas in configurable, upgradeable combat armors (the ‘warframes’) battle against enemy armies throughout the solar system using configurable, upgradeable weapons.

Yes, I know. But I can tell you there’s actually a good amount of gold in them thar hills. The action is always satisfying and fast (well, bordering on twitchy at times), combat is rewarding, feeling like a cross in spirit between Assassin’ Creed and Mass Effect and the visuals are just plain pretty. The spine of the game, that being the place where people like us get our addiction to progression satisfied, comes of course from the above mentioned upgradeability and customization of the different warframes, weapons and skills. The modding system used for this is not immediately intuitive but works when you pay attention to it.

It’s not all roses, of course. The play areas do feel repetitive after a while and there are issues with player guidance through these maps as well as with enemy spawning. The overall difficulty could use some tuning as well and progression seems to advance at a snail’s pace. However, this is still in beta so kinks are to be expected.

I felt Warframe, in its curent state, works admirably well in delivering high amounts of very satisfying fun in small chunks or play sessions. There comes a point where the inherent repetitiveness gets to you and the game spends little effort in trying to camouflage this sameness. Then it’s time to put it down for a while and do something else. But until then, it’s gorgeous and fantastic.

Verdict: Yes, definitely give it a spin. It’s free, supported by microtransactions for unnecessary stuff.

Or Sometimes It Doesn’t

Yesterday we discussed the tendency of a new option to expand to all potential uses. Facebook was a digital whiteboard but now you use it to share family pictures and invite people to events. I want to discuss the failure to expand in two ways.

“The gimmick” is when it does not proliferate. They tried it once, it failed to spread, and it became quietly ignored outside its home. The blade itself is lost in the back of a drawer. In MMO-land, this is usually update- or expansion-specific, the neat new idea that never went anywhere. Will LotRO have mounted combat outside Rohan? You go through a zone and need to learn a new mechanic, but you will never need that mechanic again. Sometimes that is intentional, to give each zone its own gimmick.

“The forced feature” is when it proliferates but reluctantly and only by including it whether it makes sense or not. Developers may not have a use for it, but management said that it goes in everything. The Wiimote comes to mind: it may not make any sense for the game to involve wiggling the controller, but the Wii was sold around its innovative controller, and the games must justify it. Maybe every dungeon must have a physics puzzle or use the conversation mechanic or include a trap or have a secret door with a bonus treasure behind it. You learn to recognize when you have reached The Obligatory X Scene

These two go together really nicely. In the new expansion set, every single thing must incorporate the forced feature, and then it will not be seen again until someone uses the gimmick five years later in one boss fight as an intentional callback.

: Zubon

If you have better terms than “gimmick” and “forced feature,” comments are open.

Supply Creates Its Own Demand

The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.
— Homer, The Odyssey, although I cannot find a translation online that uses that exact phrasing.

It is not a slippery slope argument to say, “Developing the capacity to X makes X much more likely.” Beyond the tautology that you cannot do X if you cannot do X, we find that humans are more likely to pursue options that are readily available. Once you have the ability to do something, you start finding occasions for it. This is a driver of progress and source of anguish.

Continue reading Supply Creates Its Own Demand

[GW2] Razing Ahead

The March update dropped last night in Guild Wars 2. There is so much to talk about. There are PvE instances along with a nice chunk of PvE content. WvW feels very different, for the better. There is new guild content. And of course a few gem store offerings. These monthly updates are addictive, and they are honestly overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to begin; so I am going to step out of the game and talk about the business model.

Each month ArenaNet puts out an update that seems to reverberate throughout the PC gaming sphere. They have to. With ArenaNet’s studio size, they have to make the game work for them. They cannot sit back and pad a few months with parking-lot subscriptions. These significant monthly updates condition players to continually check back even if Guild Wars 2 is not their priority. If the Game Director, Colin Johanson, believes that the March update is going to set the bar for the monthly updates, 2013 is going to be pretty exciting for Guild Wars 2. Continue reading [GW2] Razing Ahead

How I Fell Off Rata Sum And Landed In Jail

The way I play Guild Wars 2 may not be the way everyone else does, but I always manage to entertain myself.

Over the weekend, in between doing some storyline quests with my son, we decided to start jumping off the bridges in Rata Sum and see how far down we could get. Frequently we would land at the very bottom (splat) and laugh. Soon after that we decided to try jumping off the outside of Rata Sum and see how far down we could slide before some abrupt edge would stop us dead. Eventually we slid right up to and over the edge, watching our bodies fall (and die in mid-air) all the way down into a lake – waiting for a revive that isn’t coming. This gave us an idea. My son ran back to his bank and grabbed his revive orb and jumped off again. He self-revived and then revived me and we set out to explore this area we have never seen before.

Where?

We were actually underneath Rata Sum. We could swim under the giant cube shaped city. We found a few interesting things, like Zojja’s lab even though they ignored us and the portals didn’t work. I saw an interesting looking structure and decided to go look at it but before I got there I was teleported into a prison cell deep inside Rata Sum. This was hilarious to me. I ported out because I wanted to find the prison from the outside of the cell as I had never noticed it before. By the time I found it, my son had also been teleported into the jail cell.

[If you haven’t been to the jail in Rata Sum, seek it out. The prisoners and their descriptions are worth the trip.]

This adventure is something we will not soon forget. It was so much fun we couldn’t stop laughing. I half expected a developer to pop into the cell and yell at me because I assumed we must have gone somewhere we shouldn’t have.

After this happened I spent some time searching the internet and it appears to be a pretty well known place, but for a while there it felt like we were the first people ever to find this unexplored area and it was wonderful.

Have you ever wandered into an interesting location in a game only to realize afterwards you should not have been there? Or just found something strange or unusual that you might not normally find during typical game play?

– Ethic

The Lessons of History

I often cite smaller games because people are unaware of them or vastly underinformed. So if you like Darkfall’s prowess system, you can go play that right now in Asheron’s Call 1. Seriously, that system existed in 1999, although games did not have achievements at the time. You could even be playing the PvP version on Darktide!

To explain from the comments on that post, AC1 never had level adjustments. Levels are (were) estimates of relative power, not like in most MMOs where you must fight within the range of a few levels or there will be massive penalties that mean instant death. Level 30 archers can (could) hunt level 100+ monsters just fine with the right preparation. Levels give you more skill options, but the rest of the xp/skill system work(ed) exactly as described: doing things gets you a pool of xp that you can spend on whichever skills and attributes you like.

AC1 did mix in a bit of use-based skills by giving extra “practice point” xp for skill use. This involved an interesting formula that rewarded you for doing increasingly difficult things (rather than repetition), but it may not even still be in the game, so I am not going to spout algebra just now.

: Zubon