Similar to Syp, I too have one heck of a time figuring out what to make of the Elder Scrolls Online.  It seems like everything that made the games great, they are trying to avoid like the plague.

So what makes an ES game?

• Dynamic content
• Skill-based progress
• Fantasy setting
• Hero of the world
• Multiple paths of progress (main story, guilds, etc..)
• Massive enemies from the start
• An end that is a new beginning
• Actions are linked across the world
• World areas stay the same based on your actions
• Housing

Essentially, it’s a snow-globe hero adventure, where every action you take can have repercussions down the line.  It is the pretty much the exact definition I would give to a sandbox game.  TESO however is aiming for the themepark variety, where the world is static, it’s level based, item based, PvP centric and divided into single player and multiplayer like a giant fence you need to climb.

How does anyone who has worked on any ES game before this think it’s a good idea?  How does anyone think we need another fantasy themepark MMO after stumbling of Rift and TOR.  Especially another split between single and multiplayer that is the single point of failure in that game.

It almost makes you feel like they took everything that was core to the ES series, pulled it out, found the worst stuff about MMOs and put it in.  And really, the more the devs talk about the game, the more you go “wut?”  Public dungeons?  Was that not clearly enough of a failure every time it’s been tried?

I am here crossing my fingers that this game gets cancelled soon.  As much as I would love an ES MMO, there is no way I would ever pay to play this game.

So this morning is a patch for Diablo3 and an 8 hour window.

You know what other single player games I have that requires an online connection?  Plants vs Zombie, Fallout 3/NV, Skyrim and all the other games I have on Steam.

You know what the difference is between those an Diablo 3?  I can play them.

It took a bit but I finally unlocked Whimsyshire, Diablo 3’s answer to the Cow Level of D2.  The link has the info as to where the items drop and it was pretty smooth, except for two parts.  The plans from Izual take time since it’s a ~5 minute trek to get to him and a 10% drop rate.  The Gibbering Gemstone drops from a boss that has a chance to spawn in a cave that has a chance to spawn.  Getting to the cave is fast, lightning fast, but it’s still 20-50 runs on average.

Trained my blacksmith, paid the 100K for Wirt’s Bell and 50K to make the darn thing and off I went in Normal.  Access to other difficulties requires you to kill Izual – essentially be on the last quest of the game in Act 4 – then buy the next recipe from a vendor in Bastion Keep.  Nightmare cost me 100K to make and took the first staff, which is fine and dandy by me.

There are a few neat things about Whimsyshire that I should share, above the fact that you know, it’s ponies, teddy bears and clouds.

• all enemies are melee only with no special attacks
• champions roam around, though I’ve yet to see a unique
• enemies are about equal in difficulty to the last enemies in the game (late act 4)
• the zone is made up of roads more than open spaces, making combat much easier
• it’s a loot pinata

Playing in a group is a blast and probably one of the best designed zones in the entire game.  Minus the Act 3 bridge crossing segment, that thing rocks.

When I set my mind to something, I usually exceed at the given task – as would anyone else really.  When I decided a few years ago (middle of Lich King expansion) in WoW that I would spend a month making as much money as possible, I spent a few days reading on ideas, another day building an economical model with possible price points, another day developing a strategy then a plan, and finally after a week I jumped in.  I made 10K the first day.  After the month was over, I had over 300k in cash, had bought the best flight training on every character I had and a few knickknacks along the way.  I easily cleared 500K from my numbers.  And then, I gave up trying because money was all of a sudden useless to me.

At the time, my brother wasn’t necessarily broke but he did think about how to spend his cash in game.  I didn’t have a worry in the world, I could buy whatever I wanted at a moment’s notice.  I could easily skip content and speed up the game process.  In effect, this cheapened the game experience.

Diablo 3 has an auction house but the main difference here is that all the items in the game are tradeable.  That uber-mega weapon in WoW that you can only get by killing Heroic Lich King?  For sale in Diablo 3.  I have a level 54 and a level 48 and across all the levels, I have used 2 items that have dropped.  Every single other item has come from the auction house.  Why is this a problem?

Think of it this way.  In the best case, you have a 1% chance to get an item you can use and is an upgrade.  So you need to get 100 items to drop to see it.  That takes you about 4 hours (25 rares per hour).  Let’s say there are 4 million people on your server (US), that means that every 4 hours, there are 4 million pieces of upgrades found – or 1 million an hour.  Not everyone will sell it but even if half those people do, they are going to compete for your money and sell it at a decent price.  So at any given time, you have access to thousands of quality items, for a decent price and next to no chance to see an upgrade on your own.

From normal, to nightmare then hell difficulties, this isn’t so much of a big deal.  Skill is more of a factor but if you needed to buy items, you could do all 3 difficulties and still come out a millionaire at the end of it all.  Inferno though, is a massive gear check.  If you were getting hit for any noticeable damage in nightmare, you will die in a single hit on Inferno.  This puts an artificial barrier on entry to Inferno where you have to buy your way in.  Since fewer people are there now, and the amount of money that drops from enemies is significantly higher than in Nightmare, prices are 20-50 times higher than they were at level 59.  The cheapest item is 200k and the majority in the millions.

To top it all off, the money sink of the game, disenchanting (or blacksmithing breakdown) provides basic materials that sell for 5-10% of the value of vendoring the item.  And using those items to craft costs about 200K at level 60 and has the same chance of providing a good item as an item drop (1% in our example).  So 200k for a chance, or 200K for a guaranteed item?

It’s an interesting business model. Once more people get into the millionaires club, the prices will rise accordingly, putting an artificial barrier for lower level items.  I mean, if I can sell an item for 1 million, why bother posting something for 5K?  Without item decay, item loss or just a simple money sink, the economy is doomed to spiral to a ridiculous level in just a few months.

Maybe, in the end, this is what Blizzard wants, so that they can sell in-game money to buy the items you need to actually play their game.  Maybe not.

I’m not saying TOR is a failure, I’m saying it’s not a huge success.  Serious errors of judgment were made along the way.  TERA launched to some acclaim and apparently, the fervor is up and done.  Guild Wars 2 is still on the hype train as the savior of MMOs (which I highly doubt) and then we have the Secret World, with an open skill-set game plan.  Sort of like super power sets I guess.

From a “major MMO” perspective, we won’t be seeing anything for a long while after.  Elder Scrolls Online I guess is the next one, with questionable goals, followed by perhaps EQ Next.  One is aiming for some new stuff while the latter is aiming to get back to the original EQ feel.

I played EQ in beta, at launch and for 4 years.  To quote Tobold

So what would you think if Everquest Next had level loss on death, naked corpse runs, 15 minute forced breaks for meditation between fights, forced grouping, 20 minutes waits for boats, and all the other features of the original Everquest?

What is it exactly people are looking for in the next MMO?  What’s wrong with their current one for that matter?  I can think of 20 MMOs running right now that could easily compete for your hard earned money, yet there’s always people clamoring for the next big thing. When trying to compare feature sets, you quickly realize that all the bases have been covered.

If you’ve narrowed down your list to a set of features, say PvE Raids, Mounts, Auction House, you have 5 big games to choose from (WoW, LOTRO, SWTOR, EQ2 and Rift).  Oddly, 4 of the 5 are in the same fantasy setting and use the same “skill bar combat” but the major differentiating factor is the content diversity within those features.  WoW clearly blows the rest out of the water, if only for the amount of time it’s been around.  Rift gives “better” character choices, TOR gives a better story and LOTRO gives a better integration into the game world.

In the end though, why do people move from one of those 5 to another game?  WoW has had the same features since launch (minus a LFG tool 2 years ago and some recent customization options) so why did 2 million people leave?  Why did 400,000 people (25% of the playerbase) leave TOR after only a couple months?

It’s that exact question that buggers MMO developers and game developers in general.  Why does Batman get an average playtime of 10 hours and Skyrim is 50?  Are both successful?  If the metrics say the average MMO player puts in 10 hours a week into a game, do you have 500+ hours of content for the year?  What’s your proverbial carrot on the stick to get people to continue playing?  If it’s a story, then make that story last hundreds of hours.  If it’s item acquisition, make it hard and long to accomplish.   If it’s the social environment, put in the community tools necessary to get people together (guild banks, LFG, housing, customization, etc).

I just hope developers and investors pay attention to the gaming trends.  The medium is saturated with choice and for your product to stand out, it needs to both do something different but also do it for a long enough time to keep people interested for months.  Fingers crossed.

A week in and people are complaining that D3 Inferno is too hard – even though some have completed it.  Mind you, they used abilities that completely (or nearly) negated all damage taken.  Two particular quotes for this:

There are definitely some aspects of Inferno and the way damage comes in that we’re looking at. Before we get there though we want to address the skills that are ‘must haves’, and see how the skill and gear game settles out a bit before we address content. If there’s a skill that you absolutely can’t survive without, that’s a much more serious issue to customization, build diversity, and the game as a whole than someone not being able to progress as quickly as they feel they should.

I think tweaks to content difficulty is a given, it’s going to happen in some shape or form, but we’re not there quite yet.

And

We purposely launched the game with Inferno being far more difficult than what we were able to progress in ourselves, assuming people would find it as difficult but with a few skilled players able to pull it off, or the difficulty would simply help root out problem skills and builds that allowed flaw-filled progression possibilities.

I think the main problem we’re running into is people progress more or less linearly to Inferno, and the brick wall effect makes it seem like these broken skills were the correct way to overcome the difficulty because the belief is that Inferno must be an immediately surmountable challenge, which it isn’t intended to be. Or the reverse, that because these skills allowed progression the classes that did not have them were too weak/broken, which isn’t correct.

From a player perspective, this seems incongruous to Blizzard’s “when it’s done” mantra and usual level of polish.  Mind you, their last release, Starcraft 2, was a PvP game with an insane amount of games in beta.  How could you possibly test the hardest difficulty with a testing team of like 20?  Answer – they didn’t, which is the problem.

There are a few points I take from this and my playtime:

• Someone thought that releasing untested content was a good idea.  Sort of like untested raids in WoW that were bugged for weeks. A beta test would have shown this in a day.
• Melee are at a serious disadvantage on Inferno where they must be taking hits in order to attack, which in turn requires them to reduce their offence and increase their defense.  Ranged attackers do not have this problem.
• Any skill that increases absorption is superior to avoidance – this has been tested profusely in WoW. The difference between spikes and smooth damage taken.  Get hit 1 out of 20 times for 40K or 19 out of 20 times for 2K.  Both take the same damage over the same time except the former needs 41K health to stay alive during that process.
• Healing skills do not scale.  Best heals are 12K and people are running around with 40K+ health.
• People are following a somewhat linear curve from normal to hell, then a big spike in Inferno act 1 and a huge one in Act 2. (30% differences between the last few)
• Blizzard realizes that some skills are seriously underbalanced, others are overpowered and until there is some level of balance on those skills, they can’t tweak the difficulties.

Here’s where I have issue.  If this game was released by any other company, it would have been trashed for the issues mentioned above.  Imagine if in Batman, when you fought the Joker, none of your abilities worked and he one-shot you from behind a wall.  Frustrating a bit?  Blizzard gets away with a lot these days, way more than other companies.  If they had not released Inferno at all, the game would be fine (minus the lag, broken ah, and disconnects).  Yet they pushed a feature in multiple promotional articles and it is for most intents, broken.

Le *sigh*.

I finally entered Hell difficulty last night with my monk.  He came in with about 2K DPS, 10K in hit points and a fairly solid build.  I 1-shot Diablo in Nightmare and overall the path was simple enough.  Then Hell started.

First, every enemy has 12-20K hit points.  Each hits for about 500-1k.  On their own, not so bad.  In a group of 5, you need to deal 100K damage and take 5K per second.  Monks don’t have a choice here, we’re a melee class.  Still, it’s doable and I like the challenge.

Then we get to the Champions/Rares with multiple affixes.  In Hell, you get 3 affixes per though I think I’ve seen 4.  Anyways, I always seem to get a combination of the following Vortex/Jail/Frozen (which removes any mobility) and Molten/Plagued/Desecrator/Arcane (all of which can kill you in under a second if you get hit by their effects).  So combine the no-movement ability with the if-you’re-not-moving-you’re-dead ability and you can guess what happens.  One particular pack had me stuck at the entrance to a zone, so I died a solid 10 times just trying to get in and not die.

To top it off, the jump in difficulty is also a jump in loot quality.  If I were to go back to Nightmare to try to find gear, it would be significantly worse (35% or so) than what I get in Act 1 of Hell.  So going back isn’t so much for the gear as it is for the levels.  What do levels bring?  More skills, certainly but I have the ones I need to succeed already.  I need more Hit Points and each level causes a significant boost to the exchange of Vitality to Hit Points. I could use the hit points and the cash boost wouldn’t be bad either.  I’d then have access to the best AH gear too.  Mind you, with 400K in the bank, I would be able to afford all of 2 pieces of level 60 gear and cheap ones at that.

Finally, massive nerfs/bug fixes were hotfixed yesterday.  Monks had a skill completely removed (that allowed tanking in Inferno no less), Wizards has a damage shield removed and Witch Doctors an immunity.  I should point that every character than has cleared Inferno Diablo so far was one of those classes – the first ever was a Monk.  I should also point out that these problems would have been clearly evident if Blizzard had allowed testing past level 13 in their beta as it took all of 1 day for people to find these issues and a week for Blizz to “nerf it into the ground”.  Their game that was supposed to take months to complete was beaten in 4 days.  I’m sure someone got an earful.