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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

[GW2] Fashion Forward Combat

Massively has a nice article on a QA session with two ArenaNet designers at PAX East. Bhagpuss already gives a pretty good breakdown along with his thoughts. I don’t agree with everything Bhagpuss says, but I feel he is right on the mark in saying that ArenaNet develops for geological time. They expect their game to be lively in the years to come, and each advancement is built with that in mind.

One issue I want to tease out of the Massively’s article is the issue of town clothes. The article states that the “cosmetic function of town clothing will be expanded”. However, ArenaNet feels that keeping town clothes to out-of-combat situations only is best for avoiding any immersion breaking. This answer seems too simple. It seems to miss so much of the forest for a single tree. Continue reading [GW2] Fashion Forward Combat

Chris Carter, Joss Whedon, Google, and NCsoft

[Warning: there are some TV Tropes links in here.]

I have confessed to contributing to self-fulfilling prophecies: if you do not commit to something/one because s/he/it may not be around for long, s/he/it probably will not be around for long. So how do you invest yourself in something when the producers have a left a wake of unfinished and canceled projects?

Continue reading Chris Carter, Joss Whedon, Google, and NCsoft

Lexical Ambiguity

“Expect,” like most English words referring to mental states, is problematically ambiguous. It could refer to considering something (1) likely to happen or (2) obligatory or reasonably due. Speakers may not realize that something obligatory is unlikely (or something forbidden is likely), and listeners can reasonably misunderstand which sense of expectation is meant.

If I say that I expect someone to do something, you’ll probably need context or nonverbal cues to understand whether I consider it likely, obligatory, or likely because it is obligatory. I have some employees who will not be meeting their performance objectives; we expect (meaning 1) them not to live up to their expectations (meaning 2).

Further ambiguity is introduced because expectation is not a single thing out there in the world but rather billions of individuals’ mental states. You and I have different estimates of how likely something is (meaning 1). We are more likely to agree about expectations (meaning 2), although beliefs differ radically on what is “reasonably due” (see: who deserves the most credit or whose turn it is to do housework). A particular person’s expectations (1) are a single thing we can reasonably discuss, as is a consensus estimate (“the publisher expects (1) the game to have 1 million subscribers”). In that sense, it becomes entirely reasonable to expect (meaning 1, personal) something to fail to meet expectations (meaning 1, consensus or someone else’s). I occasionally hear someone say s/he expects (1, personal) something not to live up to his/her expectations (1, personal); expecting disappointment is not fully coherent, but we are just a bunch of social primates with meat-based computers in our skulls.

To answer a recent question: my expectations (1) can differ from my expectations (2).

: Zubon

[WS] Warplot Whispers

At ArkShip 2013 I talked with devs about warplots more than any other thing. I mentioned previously about making sure to sit with Jen Gordy, Carbine’s PvP Lead, who has had a lot of experience developing Warhammer Online’s RvR and Lord of the Rings Online PvP . The substance of those conversations are unfortunately under NDA.

“Well, stakes not high enough for you? Then some of you and your most bloodthirsty friends should double-down and buy a warplot. Then outfit with enough firepower to blow a hole in the space-time continuum. When your death fortress is complete, go to war against your enemies, and earn rewards so epic your head will explode like a supernova. Boom.”

(Source: What is WildStar?) Continue reading [WS] Warplot Whispers

[WS] Overview Trailer

Carbine just published their newest trailer for WildStar. The announcer ping pongs in my head back and forth between epic and annoying, but for the most part I like it. The information is light, especially to fans that have been following the game. The important part, for me, is how much of the trailer is made using in-game footage. From bosses to in-game housing, things and mechanics are shown. Oh yeah, and warplots… I need to talk about those.

There are splashes of gameplay, but unlike some other upcoming MMOs, Carbine has not been coy about how WildStar plays. There are already official videos covering that aspect.

Cutting back to brass tacks, I feel like Carbine seems on a pretty good track to launching this year. They show snippits of a lot of systems in that trailer. Obviously they still have to face the tried and true Jacobs’ Rule of MMO Betas (better link here). Hopefully they can push forward with confidence in that regard.

–Ravious