.

Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

.

Cash Shop Upgrades

At Spinks’s suggestion (congratulations on that engagement to Charles Dance, by the way), I have been trying Game of Thrones Ascent, a Song of Ice and Fire-themed game on Facebook. They have had exciting growing pains as millions of people pounded unsuspecting servers over the weekend.

As ever with these, monetization is an important question. Beyond the usual power and convenience items, one or two items in almost every upgrade track (for the talent trees and each building) require the RMT currency to unlock. For the buildings, that is usually the best economic upgrade it has to offer, like doing things faster or queuing up resource gathering.

wolves pay, being a sheep is free The talent tree RMT upgrades get interesting because most of them are PvP improvements: better rewards, higher defenses, more frequent attacks. The increase per point is small, but they add up, and the cash shop items are stronger than anything I’ve seen available for crafting so far.

I feel like I should be upset at what translates to a pretty blatant Pay To Win, especially since unlocking all the options would take more than $50 in cash shop currency, not including any convenience or power items. (So far, the only way I have found to earn the RMT currency in-game is the reward for logging in for many days in a row. This is odd; most games give you a little so that the taste will encourage you to buy.) Part of this is ameliorated by the fact that you still need to spend the talent points in those PvP skills, so the people you are attacking are spending theirs elsewhere and probably not falling behind much. The improved economic options are a bigger thing than the explicitly PvP options. Part is the comic’s observation: if you are not paying for the game, your only value to the company is as content for the people who are paying. In F2P MMOs, you provide content by grouping, talking, and being someone to whom the paying players can show off their leetness. Here, you are sheep to their wolves. That makes a certain sort of sense to me, and it is not like the strictly PvP games where the only reason to play is to fight others. You get to play along/through the Game of Thrones story, so presumably you could PvE it up in quiet obscurity. Also, this is Westeros, where life generally sucks for the poor and powerless, so if you’re not bringing money to the table, the nobles will stomp on you while sneering.

: Zubon

Ooh, reincarnation mechanic. If that comes with an ascension bonus, I’m interested.

[GW2] Calling Out Content

This month five events had to be completed to finish a daily achievement regardless of the day of the week. A lot of people, like myself, flocked to zones packed with events, such as Queensdale. Yet, the increased population for people looking to knock out the daily achievement was not the best part. The best part was that people were creating a community culture centered around the storm chasing of events.

Group Events

Guild Wars 2 shines when players shock the zone with communication and activity. My favorite zone is quickly becoming Malchor’s Leap. Since the repolishing of Orr, the whole region feels better, and I love the flow of the zone. The Cathedral of Eternal Radiance has got to be one of the most magnificent structures I have seen in any game. The view of the Cathedral from Pyrite Peninsula to the east is breath taking. Tangent much? Continue reading [GW2] Calling Out Content

C/S/T

Ken at Popehat has developed his own online game:

The hardest game on the internet is one I call “C/S/T”, which is short for “Crazy, Stupid, Or Troll?” I like to think of it as a broader application of Poe’s Law. There are nuances to those categories — sometimes a troll is a performance artist, sometimes someone is not so much stupid as willfully ignorant — but the broad categories suffice.

… Occasionally someone is all three.

He goes on to cite some very challenging content recently added to the game:

Whoever is running the internet-threat operation… has certain defining characteristics — truculence, functional illiteracy, and a grasp of law cobbled together by listening to 13-year-olds swearing at each other on Xbox Live.

The nature of the game makes it difficult to Google for quest spoilers.

: Zubon

[WS] Arkship 2013 Non-Disclosed Feedback

I flew in to WildStar’s Arkship 2013 with a preconceived notion that had been implemented by Guild Wars 2 Fan Day. Fan Day was an event where there was no NDA, and we were asked to discuss/ Tweet/ blog/ soapbox-on-an-NYC-street-corner just about everything we had seen. Arkship was different. We weren’t there to advertise anything to the community. We were there because Carbine wanted to get to know us, they wanted us to network with each other, and they wanted our constructive, helpful, and brutal feedback on systems that might not be ready for public consumption. It took me most of Friday night to realize this. Continue reading [WS] Arkship 2013 Non-Disclosed Feedback

[WS] Arkship 2013

We have visited Carbine Studios and chatted with pleasant folks. The build we saw was a few milestones old, most of what was said was already covered in their recent info dump, and things said after a few drinks are under NDA, so I am mostly going to be working from links here. They have started releasing their “personality videos” (trailers/previews), and I am hoping they release some of the “making of” footage they have, because it’s fun; we saw the voice actor mugging through the Dominion video and met the winsome lass who acted out the Exiles video for the animators.

The surprise hit of the event? The prop room. That is the shared office space for the artists working on “everything that doesn’t breathe or move,” all the items and buildings. There was great enthusiasm from and about the half-dozen artists who came in to show their stuff. When meeting zone designers, there was at least as much oohing and ahing about their (proprietary) design software as the zones being worked on.

Over the weekend, two of our favorite sites independently cited some major challenges for WildStar, so I will give them the floor. Keen recommends finding your niche because competing head-on with WoW, Rift, EQ(s), FF(s), GW2, LotRO, SW:TOR, and all the smaller games already in that design space is very red ocean thinking. A game would do well to have 1% of WoW’s peak playerbase, but there is a big fight for that scrap, and are you budgeted for that? It is a crowded design space, and so far the big selling point for WildStar is “layering,” which you could somewhat cynically cash out as “stack as many systems and implementations as you can and bank on emergent gameplay.” New combinations of existing elements is in a strict sense what we are all doing, but it may not be the strongest selling point. Spinks calls it a smorgasbord approach, give the players everything and let them pick their own paths. She specifically cites the oddity that WildStar has a game design element explicitly called “paths” but restricts characters to picking one of four, so not all the layers are always available (although you could group to share in path content).

My summary view of their challenge in designing and selling the game is “don’t be ‘Rift in space,'” especially if you multiply the relative subscription numbers of WoW:Rift and WoW:WoW with lightsabers. The available details do not put a lot of daylight between them and the competition unless that layering leads to some awesome emergent gameplay. We did see a bit of that, the build we saw was months old, and what they were allowed to hint at has some prospects, so this has promise. Surprisingly, given my preferences, the combat and PvP panel was the one I found most interesting, informative, and innovative. They have found new areas in both design spaces (warplots have already been mentioned, and you get a combat hint in the “demolition” section of the Soldier video).

They are taking a more recent version of what we saw to PAX East, so attendees can preview it there.

: Zubon

[GW2] Expansion Calculus

That Korean Investment firm, KDB Daewoo Securities, is talking Guild Wars 2 expansion… again. They are really keen on it happening the second half of 2013. They probably use models, stock discussions, and neuromantic rituals to determine it among all the other NCSoft happenings for 2013. Let’s make this simpler.

ArenaNet says their Guild Wars 2 Live Team is 15-20 times larger than the live team of Guild Wars 1.  The Guild Wars 1 Live Team is about 5 people. ArenaNet staffs over 300 people. That leaves 2/3 of the studio working on something else. Take away business, pure tech, etc., etc., that still leaves a big chunk working on… something else. Enough to make KDB Daewoo bring it up a second time. Continue reading [GW2] Expansion Calculus

[WS] “D”ominion Bags

WildStar is going to be two-factioned. That’s a discussion I want to have with Carbine, and the merits and flaws are better saved for another post. Regardless, the limelight has fallen on the evil empire, and they are turds. World of Warcraft had vanilla versus monsters. Rift had religion versus technology. Star Wars The Old Republic had yin versus yang. WildStar appears to have rag-tag rebel hippies versus a pretentious, self-loathing evil empire. And right now, the Dominion is who I would choose to play. Continue reading [WS] “D”ominion Bags

Conventions of the Genre

I picked up Spec Ops: The Line on a sale while people were celebrating it as one of the best games of the year, particularly for its message about escapist violence and moral ambiguity. I have the problem that I have never played a military shooter game, so the deconstruction is wasted on me. The characters start doing things that are morally problematic and I immediately recognize it as such, from the first fight in the helicopters where no one seems to care that those are potentially occupied buildings you are shooting around/through. Bioshock’s “would you kindly” is not quite the same if you are not inured to obeying quest givers just because they are quest givers. Funny Games and Natural Born Killers do not fully work if you are not familiar with what they are critiquing.

On a different level, not having played a military shooter game, there is gameplay for me to get used to that the game takes as a given. All those bars and dials and buttons and mechanics we are so used to in MMOs can be bafflingly complex for a first-time player. Starting my first game, I’m not 100% sure where I should be looking for those, while this game obviously assumes some familiarity. Maybe I need to play it on newbie difficulty so I can figure out the buttons while people are shooting at me. Conversely, I have the opposite problem in games where I already know all the genre conventions: the introduction is ridiculously tedious as it walks new players through everything while I just want to know the three things that differ in this game, and they might not even cover that because the few differences are “advanced features” that will be explained well after the tutorial. It is hard to find a good middle ground between “you don’t need to tell me everything” and “hey, the game never explained that!” particularly with wide diversity in player knowledge. (Advantage: WoW for being the first MMO for the vast majority of its players.)

: Zubon

[WS] Ark Questions

Like I said last week, Zubon and I are heading off to sunny California to participate in Arkship 2013. Arkship 2013 is going to be a pretty big gathering (30-40 people) where we will get to play the upcoming MMO, WildStar, and participate in dev panels on specific topics. There will be an NDA, but after the event, we will be able to talk about a lot of our experiences.

There was a crush of press feedback last week, and since today is WildStar Wednesday there might be another one today. I highly recommend checking out some of the links compiled by WildStar Central. If you just read one, I recommend Ten Ton Hammer’s write up From Beak to Butt.

Anyway, if you have questions regarding anything about the game. We will do our best to get them answered. Or let us know if there is an aspect of the game that has your attention. I think we are going to get a good amount of play time so we could try and focus in on that aspect. Either way, I am sure next week, and following, we will have plenty to say about WildStar.

–Ravious

Static Gameplay

I have continued to poke at Anti-Idle, and I have run into the same problem that others have cited about Guild Wars 2: there is a large dead zone between “have all your toys” and the cap. In Anti-Idle, that is actually thousands of levels, but it’s an idle game, so those can mostly happen while you’re AFK.

Once you reach the point where all the fights feel the same, you have completed the meaningful content. You beat the game. You’re done and can quit now. Also, when “RPG elements” has come to mean “character advancement,” it stops feeling like your character is advancing when you are just adding new numbers to old abilities. Again, game over, you won.

The sense I get from GW2 is that we are seeing the history of its development. (Entirely made up story follows.) Long before they abandoned the idea of horizontal progression, the original idea was like GW1: low cap, almost everything at the cap. Let’s give the characters all their skills by level 20. Hmm, people really like progression. Okay, we’ll match the industry leader and have 80 levels. Let’s push the elite skills back so we don’t have a 60-level dead zone. You saw a bit of that “needs more progression” when slot skills went from “all available immediately” to “buy 5 in this tier to unlock the next.” There must have been months of meetings trying to decide how to give players more toys over time without breaking the model of having one skill bar. There are some bonuses to unlock via talents, and your gear starts giving you more (not just bigger) stats, and … well, that plateau is kind of essential in the original notion of horizontal progression. Let’s hope they solve it before the coming level cap increase(s) and new tier(s) of gear.

GW1 had hundreds of elite skills you could capture, along with secondary classes, so you could pick your one bar of skills from literally thousands of skills. Part of horizontal progression is having the option to progress, more options not just ones with bigger numbers.

: Zubon