Monthly Archives: May 2014

Neverwinter – Icewind Dale

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I make no secret that I am a rather huge D&D fan.  I don’t get the chance to play the tabletop version anymore but the world and rules have always fascinated me.  Neverwinter has that near perfect combination of lore/structure and action-oriented combat to keep me coming back.

Expansion #3 is out today, Curse of Icewind Dale, and it seems to be adding a fair bit of content to boot.  Raids, dungeons, a new campaign with daily quests, new paragon path for the Ranger, a new profession (Black Ice) and dynamic group content (aka Public Events).  While there is some vertical progression, as the game uses a gear score, there’s actually a fair amount of horizontal progression as well.  Experience is no longer “wasted” and you continue to gain “levels” of a sort.  These give you points to allocate to your active skills.  You can’t slot more skills, you just have more skills to choose from.

The previous post spoke about the 3 phases of ESO.  Neverwinter has 2.  First is the leveling aspect, from 1-60.  You have access to companions, customization, foundry (awesome), dungeons, skirmishes (5 minute dungeons) and a whole slew of other features.  Phase 2 starts at 60 and adds 2 things.  First, elite dungeons and raids, where the gearscore/skill requirement is a fair bit higher than before.  This is the typical end-game for themeparks and the time commitment is manageable.  Second are campaigns, which are themed daily quests with gates.  Pretty much what 1-60 gave you, you’re just limited to about 1 hour’s worth per day.

This new expansion seems to add a few more 1-60 things to do without the need for typical end-game progress, which is pretty darn good.  I know that breadth doesn’t equate to depth but we’re not talking about a game that is aiming a whole lot at the latter – it’s an action RPG after all.  I do know from my experience in the dungeons/raids that you need to be attentive to what’s going around.  Proper stat allocation is also pretty important but that part is rather hard to gimp yourself with, due to core mechanics.  SWTOR’s customization (and WoW’s now-dead reforging) provided way more options than Neverwinter.

It’s free, there’s a ton of content.  Give it a shot.

ESO – Veteran Levels

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It’s a simple fact that all games that want to have retention need re-useable content.  Sandboxes have a distinct advantage here as the content is generally created by the players and not the developers.  EvE, UO, ATitD are examples of user-generated worlds.  Themeparks have contained experiences that, by and large, are the same for all players.  The “ride” is balanced against other rides and provides a more uniform experience.  UO, until the shard split, was  near death-trap for any new players venturing outside, with a completely different experience depending on time spent in-game.  Themeparks are the same formula from 1-max level, with a few variations at the top (raiding, achievements, PvP, collecting, etc…)

While I have posted a bit about Wildstar and its approach for end-game activities (there are many), ESO has taken a slightly different approach.  First though, some quick context.

ESO has 3 main “phases” compared to the typical 2 in other themeparks.  There’s the 1-50 phase, following a central quest structure through a half-dozen zones for your faction.  As you level, you have full access to PvP and level appropriate dungeons, across all factions.  Once you hit 50, then you reach the veteran levels, of which there are currently 10.  That’s phase 2.  This phase encompasses a central quest structure for the other 2 factions, split between the levels, with a bit more challenge.  Phase 2 is therefore twice as long to get through as Phase 1.  You still have PvP access and you now have access to veteran-ranked dungeons, which are rather unforgiving in terms of tactics compared to their regular variants.  Phase 3 is what happens at veteran rank 10, and this is where the new Craglorn content comes in to play.  Group-based open world objectives, is the main gist of it. That said, there are dozens of quality of life changes in the pipes (fixing many grouping issues).

J3w3l goes into it from her personal experience.  Phase 1 is simple, phase 2 is significantly more complex and unforgiving and then phase 3 has no relation to either previous phase.  Due to the odd grouping mechanics, where it’s rather difficult to find someone to play with during Phase 1-2 (phasing, quest progress, etc…) you’re in a solo-only world for about 400+ hours.  I am curious how Phase 3, with a heavy if not singular focus on group content will work with the player base.

On top of that, given that 99% of the content is consumed by phases 1 and 2 (all quests across all factions) and that you have enough skill points to fill out 80% of all skills (which works out to more than 100% of the useful ones) there’s no replayability, outside of the 3 class-specific skill lines.  There’s a difference between a Dragonknight and a Mage but not enough to fill out 400+ hours.

Finally, as current metrics seem to indicate that the wide majority of players are in the mid-30s at the end of the first month, or somewhere around 60 hours in, and that the new content requires 400+ hours to even access – you need to wonder about the design direction.  I give a lot of flak to Wildstar for their 20-40 person raid commitment as end-game content (it’s just stupid to do in 2014) but ESO deserves a fair amount of head scratching too.  If you want to retain people, there’s only so many turns on the Magical Tea Cups that people can stomach before heading to the door.

The Weekend Approacheth

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I know they say April showers bring May flowers but it seems like it’s raining every other day here.  With 2 kids suffering from cabin fever due to a near 6-month winter, good weather is sorely needed.  Fingers crossed that Mother’s Day is sunny so the kids can leave my wife alone.

Neverwinter

I am short on gaming time, with under an hour per night, if I can get a night.  Neverwinter does scratch an itch with their daily quest progress.  I can do Sharandar and the Dread Waste quests in about 30 minutes with my Cleric.  I have noticed that a Cleric deals, oh, about half as much damage as any other class but I am quite literally impossible to kill.  I also have a Guardian (tank) who is quite good at soaking up damage but wow, Cleric in Neverwinter are a solid choice for the solo player.

Also have a Rogue (mid 40s) who is a ton of fun to play but has trouble on elites or long fights.  I made a few AH purchases and my “gear score” went up by 50%.  That made a difference.  Anywho, it’s like playing a 3d arcade game really.  Scratches a heck of an itch.  Plus, for a F2P game, it doesn’t scream “give me money”.

Wildstar

Open beta has started, which is a good thing for anyone wanting to give it a shot without forking over some dough.  Plus, you get access up to level 30, which is more than previous beta had.  I think I’ll try a couple more classes up to level 10, see if there’s another option out there.  Right now though, my sights are on a Chua Esper.  A squirrel that shoots birds.  Come on, that’s cool!

Recent patch had a fair chunk of fixes, including the GW2 overflow server concept.  I am really hopeful this becomes the defacto launch practice (outside from mega-servers like ESO)  Nothing worse than trying to play on the same server as your friends only to see “server full” or “queue ETA is 1 hour”.

1849 – Android

I like city building sims and this one takes it to the frontier using a scenario approach.  Rather than the delicate balance of self-sufficiency, 1849 requires you to continually trade in order to keep your folk happy.  Some scenarios let you log, others only let you hunt.  So each is unique in a way.  The hardest part is juggling the housing, and employment ratios.  Sometimes I prevent upgrading just to save me the hassle of too much unemployment, then an increase in crime.  Suppression for the win!

I’ve played a bunch of tablet city sims, they are all F2P money grabs of some sort.  This one is an actual sim, with a $5 entry cost, with what I expect to be a solid 50+ hours of gaming to boot.  It’s rare enough to get a decent tablet game (last one was Room 2 for me) so I highly recommend it.

Continual Content – Gated Dailies

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Themeparks have to give you a reason to run the ride again and again.  There’s a carrot somewhere that makes that switch in your brain go, “ok, one more time”.  Way back in the day, this was more or less organic – run a dungeon.  Eventually it turns into formal quests as we know them today – dailies.  For a very long time, this was mostly about money.  Free cash!  Just jump up and down!  Then this became a reputation grind to get items.  Just 18 more dragon eggs before you get a new shoe.  Then we reached a really weird stage where dailies were the precursor to more dailies. Hello Golden Lotus!

Dailies were also typically capped in terms of how many you can complete in a day.  Not only are the individual quests on a timer but you could only do X amount per day.  The reason for this was three-fold.  First, this was a massive money tap that could be exploited easily.  Millions of gold entered an economy per day unchecked.  Second, they often rewards reputation scores for better gear – which was vertical progression.  If you could do them all, then you would be progressing very fast.  Third was the natural gating requirement of time.  The game should last Y amount of time.  People would (and did) burnout.

Using WoW as a solid example, dailies went through many iterations and nearly all based around expansions.  From BC to MoP, there have been different flavors.  The main driver, or success if you will, for dailies is an alternative progression path.  Certainly, given the choice people will naturally take the path of least resistance.  Dailies however give you a chance to “quickly” make progress through alternate means.  The tabard/daily quest reputation grind made sense.  It fit both playstyles.  The “only-dailies all the time” approach of MoP put in an artificial gate that could not be bypassed.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the cloud serpent faction as the quests were related to the outcome.  Pat Nagle progressed through fishing-related activities.  Golden Lotus had (before 5.4) no purpose other than to gate access to 2 other (and more rewarding) reputation grinds.

SWTOR takes a slightly different approach in that “zones” have daily quests that share rewards.  Tokens/progress is made.  This supplements the raiding/dungeon game with modifications.  There’s a fair amount of horizontal progress as well (customization).  It works for me.

Neverwinter is an odd mix.  Daily quests reward Astral Diamonds based on activities – been there since day 1.  It works in that the rewards are the same, regardless of the content consumed.  Most of that content is social so, more people doing things together = good for the community.  The last 2 expansions added “gated dailies” where the rewards are not item based but content based.  You complete a few and get access to new dungeons.  A few (a lot) more and you get passive stat buffs that are not gear related – you keep it forever even if you get new items.  You complete more and get a better chance at loot.I like that this is daily and gated but that brings me to the final daily hiccup.

If you miss a day, you miss a day of progress.  Missing a raid means you have, usually, another shot in the week (assuming the timer is a week).  Miss a dungeon, then run 2 the next day.  Dailies are the only content with a short expiry.  I personally think it would be great if you could “store up” daily quests for a period of 3-4 days, or perhaps have the rewards reflect that “store”.  Have it run at a reduced ratio too, say 25% per day missed.  I know a game wants a hook to have you login often but unless that game is offering off-line progress (and an interface), then after a while you just lose interest.

If I knew that after a long weekend I could come back and make some additional progress, even reduced (which would be double daily rate based on the numbers above) I think that would motivate me to login and spend more time.  Especially if it related to gaining access to new content (and not items).

Why I’m Looking Forward to Wildstar

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There’s about 3 weeks to go before the head start of Wildstar and I am certainly looking forward to that date.  I wasn’t lucky enough to get into the fall beta but I did get into the Winter one which was “feature complete” and obviously the pre-order weekends too.  I played all the classes in the tutorial, which really means squat.  I did get an Esper to the mid teens, to get an idea of mechanics but I skipped over ALL THE FLUFF.  Which was really hard, since I really like fluff.  I think I may be one of 3 people in ESO that read the books I found. This post is to describe the parts I’m really looking forward to, as well as a couple things that I’m not so souped up about.

Art style

To me, gaming is an escape from reality.  I like comics, anime, hyper-realistic art, sci-fi… stuff I can’t find in the real every day world.  Photorealism doesn’t work for me – maybe a little too uncanny valley?  ESO’s world is amazing but I really think the characters are awful.  I rather enjoy Wildstar’s depiction of everything.  There’s size variation between objects, movement is fluid, attacks are unique, targets are distinct and varied.  I can tell when I’ve changed zones or even areas.  When I’m seeing the same wolf art at level 2 as I’m seeing at level 40, it irks me.  You know how in Avatar, all the wildlife looks like it belongs?  Everything has 6 legs, body types are similar but different enough… that’s consistent design.  I think Wildstar really gets this right.

Combat

Let’s not kid ourselves, combat is the majority of content in all MMORPGs.  The days of stand and fire are gone for me.  Zerg runs to the Plane of Fear or just throwing more bodies at Sulfuron… we’ve move on.  I’ve expounded on the fact that I really, really enjoy Neverwinter’s active combat system.  You need to be moving often, near around half the time. Movement is easy too and obvious.  There’s skill balance and synergy.  The Limited Action Set (LAS) works for me too, so I don’t need to map 100 buttons and move my mouse all over the screen to find that one skill I use once a month.  I like the theory crafting for selecting skills and not having 5 that do the exact same thing (looking at you ESO).  Combat flows, each class is distinct and can fill their role without gimping themselves.  It works for me.

Horizontal Progress

Shiphand missions (solo dungeons), dungeons, housing, warplots, crafting, meta-gaming, raiding, paths, adventures (dungeons with random events), battlegrounds.  I wanted to take the time to write them all down as each is distinct and likely will attract a different audience.  I personally enjoy all of them, minus those that require 19-39 friends and take 4 hours to complete.  I am disappointed that paths are more of a side quest than a true alternative to leveling but at least it’s more stuff to do.

Crafting won’t reach the bar that FF14 has set but I do like that it’s not an afterthought and is rather complex and involved.  Also that gear “levels” are only 2 levels apart and are relevant.  In most MMOs, you get crafting level ranges, where by level 20 you can make gear that fits a level 12, 16 and 20 player.  Typically the gear is next to useless compared to world/quest drops and leveling is so fast that it takes you 30 minutes to skill up to craft for the next tier, negating the craft completely until max level.  The system works as an evolution from the basic crafting macro, which is great.

Housing, from my limited experience (a couple hours) of tinkering is a massive money sink of fun.  I really enjoyed managing my house in Rift and this aligns pretty closely to that.  That housing drops are all over and there’s a crafting profession just for this, awesome.  It makes me feel a part of the world.

Customization is also pretty nice.  You get costume slots from the get-go and it’s a lot of fun to make some sets.  Dyes are in-game too.  The current implementation (as of last weekend) has you go back to the capital to manage it, which I am hoping due to massive negative feedback gets reversed.  Seems weird to offer so much flexibility but only a single interface to manage it in.

Lore

I am a sucker for lore and I want to be a part of the world and understand what’s going on.  Wildstar’s twitter approach to quests is novel in that everyone should have enough information to complete activities but the true lore hours have a bunch of other interfaces for more data.  Datacrons, lore books, the exploration/scientist paths.  There is a lot of love/attention being put into a consistent story.  The 2 factions are really separate in ideals too, which I find is a tad more consistent than other games.  That said, I do miss the voice acting in more recent games.  Still, I have more faith that Wildstar can continue to deliver content at par quality in a ~2 month timeframe compared to the more iceberg pace of other games on the market.

The thing I’m worried about

End game stuff mostly.  There seems to be a rather large focus on raiding and warplots.  The latter one I don’t have such an issue with but raids are core focus at max level is a recipe for disaster.  I’m sorry but the days of 40 man raids died 5 years ago.  Your “average” player isn’t going to be able to put in more than 2 hours per night on average.  WoW has clearly shown that people who raid are in a drastic minority.  FF14 isn’t much different as the top quality content is 4 person dungeons.  I will gladly run some dungeons (only 4 so far at max) and adventures (there are 6) at max level.  I’d also love to run some shiphand missions (no clue how many).

Fingers crossed

3 weeks to go.  Beta has been fun, things look promising.  I’m not putting the game on a pedestal but I am hopeful for its long-term success.  Many of the core concepts of the game appeal to me and I’m hoping they appeal to enough people to make the game a long-term prospect.

The Future of MMO Combat is Here

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While I hung up my ESO sword, I do have a few comparisons to make with other games.  The Internet and I have an outstanding issue with the combat in ESO (it’s better than Skyrim but combat in Skyrim was never the point) and the mix between a limited action set, “don’t stand in the red”, and free-flowing combat.

Combat is, for better or worse, more than half of the time you spend in game.  Figuring out the model that works for you is key.

Limited action set

I won’t say that League of Legends created it but it certainly put it to the forefront.  LAS provides a strategic (what skills can I slot) and tactical (what skills can I use) view to combat.  There’s a fair amount of situational choice and LoL exemplifies that, to a degree.  LAS in MMOs is best seen in Neverwinter and soon Wildstar (which also combines resource management).  There’s skill variety, different variables (similar to the morphs) on a given skill and the flexibility to change pretty quickly outside of combat.  I think it’s fair to say that LAS is going to be the way forward for MMOs and games in general from this point forward.  It has a low skill barrier as you don’t have to map 18 keys so it’s easy to learn, hard to master.  Good stuff all around in my opinion and sort of makes WoW look like a dinosaur in comparison.  Mind you WoD is cutting what seems half the skills due to bloat.

Don’t stand in the fire

It seems any 3d game with terrain today has an indicator system rather than a numeric damage system.  We’re no longer trading punches (which in Molten Core was 90% of the battles) and debuffs.  There are damage spikes but also telegraphs or visual indicators to avoid it.  Smart play avoids damage, bot play dies.  The margin for error on this is where games differentiate themselves.  Some have a lot of room (SWTOR) and some have next to none (Wildstar, WoW).  Most straddle the line and allow different levels of skills.  This brings in a bit more of the action-aspect of gaming from consoles and makes every fight thematically different as the bad stuff is different as well as the dance to avoid it.

Free flowing combat

This is a bit harder to define but it deals with combat on the move.  Older games were more of the “stand and shoot” variety.  The traditional glass cannon mage is a good example.  Cast-times where you cannot move are a more old-school system, mind you they combine the risk/reward system for decision making.  At a low/medium skill level though, it’s far from evident how you decide to keep casting with 0.25 seconds left or just stop and move.  More recent games force you to be mobile for the majority of an event, with Neverwinter and Wildstar really pushing this concept.

The hiccup with moving combat is keeping track of your target.  With the screen moving everywhere, you want to be able to continue attacking even if you aren’t directly looking at the enemy.  This is a skill thing as circle strafing (a FPS concept) is very difficult for most players to grasp.  For tab-target games, like WoW or FF14, this is built-in.  For free-from games like Neverwinter or ESO, then you lose targeting when you move the screen.  Wildstar uses a hybrid approach. The basic concept is “can I deal damage while moving”.  Depending on the auto-target configuration, ranged and melee attackers have different situations too.

Current Options

Of all current games, I consider Neverwinter the current best case scenario for active combat in an MMO outside of a MOBA.  It’s got skill variety, plenty of stuff you should avoid and stuff to stand in, and a very response active combat system. You need to dodge, dip, duck dive and dodge a lot.  It’s frantic but manageable.  Given that it’s a free to play game, it gives the chance for everyone to give it a shot to see if the model (and not so much the rest of the game) fits.  I won’t compare other games to this system as it’s really personal preference.  It does bode well moving forward that the combat from this point forward is going to be more engaging and require more than a macro of pressing 1, 2, 3 for 10 minutes at a time.

NBI 2014 – Get Blogging

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The Newbie Blogger Initiative for 2014 has begun.  This annual event is a chance for new blood to mix with the old and to help strengthen the blogging community. I wrote about last year’s event and it’s nice to have another repeat.  There’s a fair chunk of advice in that post as well.

In this day and age of Twitter and Instagram, typing more than 150 characters might seem like a chore but it is of my opinion that blogging is the framework on which all the other tools depends.  That tweet you posted or that link you put on Facebook – it’s likely that the idea was from a blog.

I read a ton of blogs.  I really should make a larger effort to link to them in posts, cross-seeding as it were.  I have the ones I frequent most on the right side of the screen but for those reading on mobile devices or RSS readers, you might not see them.  There are some real smart and funny people out there.  Who knows, you might be one of them and you haven’t even blogged yet.

The neat thing about blogging is that it’s a zero cost investment, other than the time it takes to write.  You don’t have to do it every day, though that’s certainly a good habit.  It doesn’t have to be targeted to an audience because in reality, blogging is about writing for yourself.  If you’re a perfectionist, you’re likely not going to be a having fun blogging.  I know I rarely review my text except to fix spelling mistakes.  I just get better at writing from doing it and reading other people.  Practice makes prefect right?  heh.

Give it a shot.  Get a blog from Blogger or WordPress (or something similar) and just start writing.  Link to some other blogs.  Follow other blogs.  Comment away.  In no time at all, you’ll find out that there’s an entire world of people waiting to say hello.