Steam is having it’s fall sale right now. The flash sales are solid buys, if you can get in on time. The real meat today is getting XCOM or Terraria for an absolute steal.
If you’ve yet to try XCOM, it really should be on your list for the future. I expect it to pick up a couple Game of the Year awards.
What is an MMO? I think when we talk about this particular topic the definition itself becomes personal and very subjective. At a basic level, the wording must mean something though. Massively. Multiplayer. Online.
Massive doesn’t have an objective definition and is completely relative. What one person thinks is big could be small to another. At the highest possible level, we can infer than massive means big. So let’s say that Massive, in this case, is when you compare to the typical games. A typical game has enough content to last 12-20 hours. A massive game would require content that extends beyond that time. While you could play Solitaire for years (who hasn’t), you wouldn’t call that massive. The content needs to provide diversity. Counter Strike might have the same basic elements but the randomness of other players increases the content value.
Multiplayer is very objective. Either you can play with other people or you can’t. Pretty much every game on the market today has multiplayer. If the actions of one can affect the other, than it’s multiplayer. Simple enough.
Online is also objective. Either you need a network connection or you do not. If you don’t need to be online (or a LAN) then it’s not online. Co-op on a console is not online.
Using these terms we can come down to some agreement on what games should be considered MMOs, if their primary mechanics fit into the three criteria. EvE, Rift, WoW, LOTRO, DDO and the rest in that genre are certainly MMOs. Call of Duty has that primary focus, even if there’s a single player component. Minecraft is the same.
Some games do straddle the line though. Assassin’s Creed has MMO components but it isn’t primarily focused on those 3 attributes (certainly not the massive portion). Mass Effect, Uncharted don’t either. Diablo 3 might sink hundreds of hours but the content is the same throughout and the people around you don’t affect that. If I said that you needed to connect online to play Final Fantasy X, you could easily argue that it is much more massive than Diablo 3.
Looking into a crystal ball we can see some patterns emerge in gaming as a whole. The Multiplayer and Online portions are pretty much going to be the norm from this point forward. The kicker is in the Massive portion. Skyrim is massive. Batman is not. Most indie platforms are unable to be massive – unless they have procedurally generated content (Rogue-like games come to mind).
In the end though, what difference does it make if D3 is an MMO or not? Do all of a sudden all future MMOs have to follow that game? Is it easier to compare D3 to WoW or EvE to WoW? Do you even want to? Games today are more than simple statements. Games are experiences and experiences are personal.
I remember playing WoW during the Burning Crusade and thinking “These guys sure know how to make clowns look powerful”.
When Rift launched, it didn’t come with a Wardrobe out the gate but it did have dyes. A patch or two in, Wardrobes were put in so that you could have up to 6 “looks”. At the time, this was to help with the costume pieces that were around. When it came to actual in-game gear, the look was pretty decent, if I do say so. It was pretty hard to look like a goof, but it was still possible.
Snazzy
As you can see in this picture, I took the time to make a decent looking character and save the look. No matter the extra gear I got, I had a solid picture and it was relatively easy to make. I can assure you that doing so in WoW, even today, is next to impossible. It’s like 100 monkeys through bananas at the wall. Probably because there are no dyes. And less polygons.
Back to Rift. I was never really paying attention to the new models, as I liked my current look. I guess that’s a bad thing for the devs? Anyways, here’s what I look like without a costume active.
Conan Smash!
Is this what the devs are trying for? I look like a cross between a Conan and Mad Max. I mean, it’s better than any clown look but it’s still pretty bad.
Guess I’ll keep my costume for a little while longer.
Clearly my previous site was having performance issues. Last night it took over 15 seconds to load this site and that had been going on for over a month. I wasn’t on any free service either, it was ~100$ a year.
My provider, iPower asked me to make a few changes. After about 12 ticket exchanges, the answer I finally had was that I was on a shared infrastructure and if I wan’t good service, I had to pay 100$ per month to get on a dedicated VM. That is one of the dumbest things I have ever heard of in my life. I had been with them for about 5 years now and up until that message, I would have recommended them to others. Today though, we’re in 2012 and everyone should be on a service managed VM. It probably didn’t help their case that I work with that stuff on a daily basis.
So here I am, hosted by WordPress (it made sense since I used the program already) and we’ll see how this works out.
Here’s my theory, and catch me if I’m wrong. The typical gamer is easy to please on the short term, hard to please long term. Halo, CoD, Batman – pretty much any console game has a ROI period of a few months at best. Rarely are any played past the 1 year mark. MMOs on the other hand, typically only get into the black after the first year.
While I love Rocksteady’s Batman series (really, it’s amazing), I can’t see myself playing it 4-8 hours a week for a year. Only RPGs ever reach that height of game time and that’s due to massive grinding (I have over 200 hours in FFX over many years). This is one main reason many games now have RPG elements – not so much for the customization but for the stretch in longevity. If CoD had no gated content with multiplayer, there would be a whole lot less players after month 2.
So, MMOs require some RPG element to gate content and stretch out the life of the game. Any game that does not do this, that gives access to everything on day 1, goes out of business on day 2.
MMOs need to make that RPG experience both rewarding in terms of goal but rewarding in terms of activity. FPS games do this well through bite size pieces of adrenaline – combat lasts 10-30 seconds at a time but there’s always a risk of dying. Hackers/cheaters break this experience though, so you do have massive bans from time to time. Typical PvP MMO don’t have cheaters, they have system abusers/exploiters. When you’re not beaten by skill but by some mechanical fluke, you’re less likely to continue to engage. UO failed to address this issue properly and lost a lot of people because of it. EvE has problems with this as well, since it’s a mob mentality. When it’s 100 vs 2, then there’s not much fun there. EQ took away the PvE zerg strategy because of this. Really good PvP is not static and each experience has enough nuances to make it different from the pervious. It also makes you a better player. Bad PvP has you mashing all your buttons. The rewards are certainly motivating but the actual ACT is motivating as well. There should always be something new as you’re working against 100K+ brains.
PvE content in general needs a risk/reward system as well. If you never have the chance of losing something, then the actual act is meaningless and only the goal is a reward. You then pick the most efficient route to get to that reward. Once you have it, then there’s zero reason to participate again. Eg: why go run a dungeon again if you have all the loot? Achievements were an attempt to solve this problem, especially those that say “stand on one leg and talk like a chicken while surviving the dragon’s breath”. It made you experience the content in a different light. Still, once complete, why bother?
Good PvE has you gaining skill and situational awareness. You should encounter different pieces of PvE abilities and be able to adapt on the fly to counter them. You can mess up a couple times but too often and you’re cooked. Bad PvE has you pressing the exact same buttons over and over again. The catch here is that there’s going to be a point where you’ve learned all you can and the devs can’t think of anything new as you’re working against 50+ brains.
A quality experience is defined by the journey and not so much the outcome. We could all say we’re going to take a trip to Vegas and back but how we get there and what we do once we’re there will give us vastly different experiences.
Let’s say you’re looking at the vehicle market, trying to get in as a seller. You notice that trucks are by far the largest return on your investment – half the components of a traditional car after all. You say to yourself “that must be easy, I’ve driven a truck”. You run around piling up some investors. Let’s say you end up with $200 million, all with a pretty picture of a truck.
Next is the design phase. You go and buy a couple trucks, pull them apart to see the pieces. You copy as much as you can but change the overall aesthetic design. You start early production and testing. The people who are testing your truck are people you know and likely people who are willing to give you a break. Best-case sort of thing.
You know there are a few issues but your deadline is coming along and you decide that they are minor enough that you can fix them in the next release. Launch day is here, there are massive line ups. People think “wow, that looks cool” or “hey, I’m bored of my truck, let’s try this new one”. You put up adds with words like “revolutionary” or “cutting edge” – even though it’s a clear copy + paste from what’s already out there.
A couple weeks go by. Those minor defects that weren’t a huge problem now are a massive PR problem with 2 million people driving your truck. All of a sudden, once the truck hits 30,000 kms, the steering wheel locks up. The innovative wipers only wipe ¼ of the windshield. The engine has trouble pulling even a half load, since you didn’t understand the mechanics of it. You have a nice looking truck but once people start using it, they notice a lack of attention to detail and long term testing. Your innovative pillar is a set of fuzzy dice that people are continuously trying to get out of their sphere of vision.
What do you do to get your money back? Discounts. Massive discounts. Maybe even sell the truck at a loss then sell the parts they need (say seatbelts) for a premium. Maybe you break even, maybe you don’t.
Is that the end of the truck market? The end of you? The end of simple straight up sales?
Leveling in Rift takes a while. I think there were more 90s after day 1 than there are level 60s after nearly a week, in terms of proportion. I’m 51 and 3/4 or so, after about 2 hours.
I started in Cape Jule and moving to the next zone everything is level 53. So I hoped by into my magic gate and tried the second zone. I modified my soul (for what seems like the 20th time in 4 days) to something that allows me to do some AE killing more effectively and you know, survive those darn attacks. Working out pretty well.
I mentioned in an earlier post about the quest breakdown in SL. Everything that isn’t a story quest seems to reward either cash or a new type of currency. This currency is used to buy Adventurer gear. This stuff is upgradeable with tokens you buy with more of that currency. I’ve been a fan of interlinked systems for some time, especially when you have multiple paths to achieve a given goal. You can get these currencies from pretty much any PvE activity, outside of crafting. It fits solo players, group players, rift hunters or guilds.
At this pace, I don’t think I’ll be hitting 60 for another few weeks, maybe not until the 1 month mark. Think about that for a second. When is the last time you played an MMO where you didn’t hit max level before your first month was over?
Hats off Trion.
Yesterday was working against me for some MMO time. I got home exhausted, took care of the squirts and when I finally had a chance to get into Rift, I got a message that the servers were coming down for some maintenance. Argh. I was able to log back in near midnight while the youngest one needed a drink.
A few important notes though. There are two new continents that are each as big, or bigger, than the original world. The original world had a good pace of content from 1-50, with no real “dead” zones. Compare this to WoW and quite a few useless zones (Blasted Lands, Azshara, Thousand Needles, Desolace and quite a few more), Rift seems to have a knack of putting in relevant content for their zones. I would say the time to get to 50 back then was decent – a couple weeks of effort. TOR took me under 24 hours of play time. My WoW monk did 1-90 in under 2 days played (albeit with heirlooms).
I’m a few hours in now, less than 50% into the first level (of 10) and have just had piles of experience from different sources jump in. Let’s count the ways of getting experience:
All of these items assume from the start that you’re in a cooperative game. Where Wilhelm talks about the problems of questing in EQ2, they pretty much do not exist in Rift. I’ve rarely seen a time where I was not grouped and didn’t have the “join group” button above the screen. Doing so has tremendous advantages.
Most enemies are of the Ember Isle difficulty, meaning that if you have a fresh 50, you’re going to have trouble here. Grouping makes that easy. Some quests need you to kill 20 or more enemies. Grouping cuts that number down really fast and you’re getting experience for those kills even if you aren’t swinging the club. Invasions are all over the place and are likely to kill you alone, groups help. Groups aren’t silent either – there always seems to be some chat going on in a relatively friendly place.
I missed this place.
I’ve talked about this a few times in the past but it would appear that Blizzard is unable to address the issue with any level of clarity. From an MMO design perspective, gating is good. Gating is the proverbial carrot on the stick to get people to log back in again and again. Gating can be done with time, skill, money… nearly any variable you can think of. Typically though, the MMO factor is time.
You want to kill the toughest boss? You need to put in the time to learn the pattern and get the gear to beat him. You want that special mount? Grind that faction baby! You want that unique pet? Grind out pet battles!
The issue isn’t the fact that there’s a carrot, it’s the type of carrot for the type of horse. To assume that all carrots are made the same when your game has 10 million players is lunacy. I know it’s not design by democracy but it’s also not design by hubris either.
Faction gain is currently gated behind not only a time mechanic but a system mechanic as well. The fact that you are limited to 8 quests a day and that it will take 20 days of quests to reach your goal is one issue. The fact that those 8 quests can take 90 minutes (damn Goat Steaks) is another one completely.
Putting the 20 day gate in front of a character (not a player) isn’t a huge deal. It is a large design swing decision from the past 4 years though. Putting 6 of those gates in front of the player at the same time forces the player to choose which one is a priority. The hiccup is that they can get those 6 done in 20 days OR they can take up to 120 days to get them all done. That is a massive variance. And that’s per character. Bob forbid you have 2 or more (say one is a pure DPS). Oh, I forgot to mention that the currency used to buy the rewards for capping out faction doesn’t come from gaining faction? It comes from running dungeons? Kind of important.
The system mechanics are another hurdle. While one faction might be simple (Cloud Serpent comes to mind) others are simply stupid. Extremely low drop rates, heavy hitting enemies that can kill a fresh 90 in a few hits, fast (and slow) spawns, thick enemy groups and crazy competition make many faction quests a chore to move through. Anyone who’s done the Goat Steaks quest for the Tillers has probably found the worst quest in all of Panda-land. Now, it isn’t that these quests are hard that’s the problem, it’s the aggregate effect of it all. 6 hard quests a day is doable. 50 is not.
Finally, there’s the entire principle of putting a dungeon/gear carrot in a non-dungeon/gear process, while still requiring the dungeon process. Let’s not forget that you can’t simply pick a faction to get all your rewards, you actually need to get them all.
As individual systems, each has value and design importance. The issue is in the aggregate impact on players. It’s like a group of people sat in a room, divvied up the various components, designed in isolation and then patched it all together. There lacks the cohesive vision we’ve come to expect from Blizzard (mind you D3 follows this trend) and that is distressing from a company that traditionally could do no wrong.
A few gigs of download and Storm Legion is up and running.
Now, you might not like the art style of Rift and that’s cool but you have to admit that being able to see a vista and actually visit the places you can see is cool.
As with all expansion launches, there are service issues. What there isn’t is server queues, which is awesome. What there is, is lag, which is sad.
I tried dimensions quickly and I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time tweaking mine. It’s nice that you have a selection of dimensions rather than a single setting for everyone. Good call. The toolset is solid as well.
The third nicest part is the auto-looting of cash. Drops are typically garbage and unless you want to harvest a creature (skin, herbs, whatever) there isn’t much need to loot. What is awesome is killing and getting the cash deposited directly into your bags. Great!
The second nicest part, for me, is the organic questing. You still see ! around but you only get 1-2 quests at a time. Otherwise, you need to actually go out in the world and pick up the quests naturally. Either by killing an enemy and unlocking the quest or picking up a specific item. This is such a different model than WoW/EQ that I’m quite taken aback.
The nicest is the open tagging system. Now, imagine your typical tagging system where the first person gets the loot. Imagine that being the only thing the first attacker gets. Everyone else gets exp and quest credit, even if not grouped. You need to kill 20 beasts? Kill anything that you see, along with the random people around you. Even better, press the auto-group button on the top of your screen to keep moving along.
I’m only a couple hours in but dang if I’m not having a blast.
Leo's Life 