Category Archives: Games

PvP for the sake of PvP

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Darkfall: Unholy Wars launched a few months late but those who waited apparently enjoy what was given.  It does sound like a lot of fun and reading through that post gets me thinking about what I do like about sandboxes and what I don’t like about FFA PvP.  (To Syncaine’s credit, he has a fairly detailed post about a PvE sandbox that I would love to play someday.)

What I like is being able to do what you want to do, when you want to do it and never really having a schedule.  There’s no common ride and everyone’s adventure is slightly different than another’s.  I really liked that about UO and early SWG.  Community had a big part in it but the ability to socialize to consume PvE content was where it was at.  Killing dragons or liches, treasure hunting, animal taming, building a craft store – it was all great fun.

What I didn’t like was the open/FFA PvP aspects.  One person could ruin 20 or 50 other player’s nights for no other reason than griefing.  Goal-based PvP makes sense and it’s always around controlling PvE access.  I can’t remember a game where you hunted people for their ears in order to make a coat but there are plenty where you keep people away from a resource spawn point so you can craft better gear.  UO private shards all have this problem and typically move towards extremely aggressive PvP controls.

The thing that lacks most in PvP games is the moderation of the activities.  In the real world, there are laws and law enforcement.  Typically these two combined will keep the general population from attempting a PvP activity (theft, harm, etc…) and those that do are tracked down and punished.  This doesn’t exist in games for a few reasons.

First, players are not online, their characters are and not 24/7.  I could play Jim as a PvP dink and Paul as a savior and most people would never know the difference.  There should be tools to identify a player based on all their characters.

Second, law enforcement is a thankless job, with little bite and no compensation.  When a griefer does it for the lulz, there is no in-game punishment possible to stop them from doing it again.  Short of removing all their skills and gear, or simply access to the game, why would the stop?  Moderation then requires a higher level of authority and then you get into the “god complex” issues.  Mind you, League of Legends has a decent system, even if there are still hundreds of horrible people playing.

The sheer lack of social restraint in these games is incredible.  No one would walk down the street and say “wow, that’s a nice car” and then proceed to break the window, hot wire it and proceed to row down a street full of people.  No, what happens is that you approach the driver, compliment them on the car and have a quick conversation.  I mean, I can’t imagine anyone on this planet thinking it’s acceptable for a group of people to simply walk around town, shooting everyone and then say “it’s to teach them buggers a lesson that crime is always around”.

I get PvP, I do.  It’s the reason we have MMA, boxing or any other combat sport.  There’s a primal need to compete against live people.  There’s a superiority complex that makes us strive to be better, to improve.  What I don’t get is some people’s need to intimidate or harass other players and their ability to find enjoyment in it.

Dance the Dance

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After having played the recent Batman series, I have found a new love for the combat dance.  In my younger days, I played a lot of arcade fighters and usually held my own.  There was just one local guy who could really whoop me and I learned the combat dance from him.  The dance is a series of timed moves that work symbiotically with each other, in what can only be perceived as “what I was trying to do in the first place”.  In older games, this was called (and might still be) juggling.  Today, there’s a rhythm to most games that involve combat so that when you watch an elite player, they don’t so much memorize the buttons as they memorize the pattern of the buttons.

As there is a difference in complexity between the Waltz and the Tango, so true is it in combat games.  If memory serves, Paladins in WoW have had a longstanding tradition of horrible dances.  The 2-4-6 combo was a series of 3 attacks that you cycled continuously on end.  Hunters are the same.  Most SWTOR classes also suffer this simplistic formula and Rift often suffers from the 3 button macro effect. Some games, like StarCraft for example, have very complex combat patterns and require not only dexterity to accomplish it in short time frames but also the ability to adapt on the fly.

Back to the MMO world though, and the thought process behind generation and consumption in terms of combat.  Abilities are limited by 3 main things – time, resources and condition.  The first one is usually just a cooldown, preventing you from continuously spamming your most effective abilities.  The second can be a bit more complex.  Perhaps your character has a single energy pool, where abilities need a certain amount in order to activate.  More complex characters have a dual pool, where you need resources from two separate pools to do something – like Rogues, Energy and Combo Points.  The third type is where a set condition is required in order to activate an ability.  Say they need to be poisoned, or you need to be at a certain distance.  All this combines into a complexity ladder for a given character and in turn, the popularity of that character.

Look at WoW and the seemingly immense proliferation of Mages and Hunters.  Both have a single resource, little restrictions in terms of timed abilities and very limited conditional factors.  Both are all over the place.  Then look at Warlocks and Rogues.  They are extremely dependent on time (due to Damage over Time effects), multiple resources and plenty of conditional factors.  And that’s just DPS.  For tanks, with changes in Pandaria to an active mitigation – where you need to press buttons rather than stack stats – this means that the combat dance becomes ever more complex.  There are your buttons for attacking, your buttons for defending and your buttons for “oh my god”, all of which use the same complex resource management system of the base class.  Tanks not only have to understand  dance with a dozen more steps, they also need to pay more attention to the music to even be able to dance without falling down.

There’s certainly a balance to be had between a simple dance and a complex one.  In all honesty, I think all classes should have a basic, smooth dance that allows for a player to add complexities when needed.  Rift does the former but not much of the latter.  WoW doesn’t really do transition between the dances all that well – either it’s dumb easy or carpal tunnel syndrome complex.  I think concept of easy to play, difficult to master should be the baseline.  If the game metrics are showing that people are having a really hard time with a class structure, maybe it’s just time for a complete re-write.

Social Framework – Part 2

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To follow up on the previous post about social frameworks, I want to get back into the gaming space.  When multiplayer games started nearly 20 years ago, the mechanics were such that the people you played with were in the “Friends” group.  You had acquaintances, certainly but rarely did you ever have anyone outside your monkeysphere.  In UO for example, I knew my server’s top PKs and guild leaders and most dungeon runs were with the same set of folk.  It was a community.

A few people are posting about social fabric and the need to “focus on the multiplayer foundation” in order to avoid the 3 month life span most games are seeing today.  First to compare – other than the MMO sphere, no genre has ever lasted more than 3 months in the commons.  If they do, they are super niche.  In fact, today’s general gaming includes many MMO-like services (Diablo 3, SimCity, CoD, etc…)So while we can posit that MMOs are only keeping our attention for a small time span compared to previous, we can perhaps assume that this is due to them becoming more like other games – a convergence of styles if you will.

That being said, if you were to take the thesis to the end, you would have to revisit not only the structure of games of the past but the actual environment they were played in.  If I wanted to play with friends on a Monday night, I had to drive to their place to play.  Other than MUDs, which were highly inaccessible, in the year 2000 we had 3 options for MMOs.  Ultima Online, Everquest and Asheron’s Call.  Not really a whole pile of choice here.  When WoW launched in 2004, the landscape had expanded to a dozen or so choices, still pretty bare ground.  When the Looking for Group (or LFD) tool was launched in WoW in 2010, debatably the death of grouping, the market had grown exponentially.  Today’s market is even more crowded, what with the F2P games that allow zero investment players.

If you were to take a solid look at these games and found the core players, I would bet a year’s worth of salary that the total amount across all MMOs would exceed WoW’s peak numbers.  You have the same amount of players with deep investment, they are just spread out across more games.  I know a lot of my friends from the EverQuest days went to EQ2 while only a small handful went to WoW.  The Syndicate, the largest online guild in the world, has presence in dozens of MMOs, all with deep roots in the game.  The flipside to this is that a larger percentage of players are just tourists, trying out a game to see if they like it then moving on.  If only 20% of your base is invested, and you need to supply for 100%, you’re going to have trouble.   EvE succeeds because nearly everyone is invested.  WoW does it through sheer subscription numbers.  SWTOR couldn’t do it without turning the game into a casino.

To sum, it’s simplistic to state that MMOs have to focus on multiplayer.  Of course they do.  It is better to state that they need to focus on getting players invested in the long term through meaningful, non-punitive multiplayer foundations in order to covert as many tourists as possible into core players.

SWTOR Expansion

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Back to the gaming discussion.  This week, Star Wars launched it’s new mini-expansion.  5 levels, 1 planet, a new raid and 2 new gear levels.  Every day this week, they had a blog post covering the class changes that the expansion brought.  Given that I had 3 of the 4 archetypes (I don’t like warriors for some reason), I was curious as to the whole of the changes.

At the time the game came out, I wrote a guide for the Sith Inquisitor – since taken over by another author.  I also spent a lot of time building combat models for both that class and the Bounty Hunter – specifically the Powertech tank.  I’ve always been fascinated with numbers and this was simply a decent outlet.  Something new and mathy.

The hiccup here was that even in beta, the developers didn’t have a solid understanding of numeric balance, or perhaps they didn’t have time.  There were a few basic stats.  Power (increased base damage), critical chance, surge (critical damage), alacrity (speed) and accuracy.  Typically in any RPG game, each stat has a value in relation to the others, depending on your class.  In a well-balanced game, every stat has value, but it might have diminishing.  In a less-balanced game, stats will have caps, where points above that give nothing.  In very poorly balanced games, some stats are completely worthless and others are the only thing you should ever seek.

TOR had this latter problem.  Alacrity caused you to attack faster but it didn’t increase resource generation.  In PvP it had minimal value but in PvE it was actually a penalty.  Accuracy also had issues, where after a small amount, like the amount on a single piece of gear, you were capped.  This left power, crit and surge.  At the time, you couldn’t get any item with those combinations.  Some classes were stuck with a single stat.  The worst part was that this was flagged on the forums in the beta and during live, with tangible solutions.

Well, I left after 2 months so I didn’t get to see some of the changes that came along.  What I did read this week though was the fix for alacrity and accuracy.  They now work in a logical fashion and no longer cap or cause a penalty.  I have to wonder why it took nearly 18 months for this fix but it’s there now.  At the same time I do understand that their focus has not been on end-game balance as there really isn’t a need for it.  Maybe the next set of large changes will address that part of the game.  It seems that the game finally has a solid RPG foundation in terms of numbers.

Social Core

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There’s an old saying that goes something like this.  If I have an apple and you have an apple and I give you my apple, you have two and I have none.  If I have an idea and you have an idea and I give you my idea, we both have two.  For a long time this basically was a separation between the tangible and not but in today’s world, I have a bank full of intangible swords and there is an infinite supply (or near enough) of digital books.  In that train of thought, what you really are exchanging are concepts or frameworks.

This translates well into games so that two people who play the exact same game, the exact same way come out with different results.  You might come out of Tomb Raider antsy from the fighting or wondering about the next step.  What you are given is not necessarily what you actually receive, or interpret to receive.

If we move back a few years in the MMO space, when the time and social requirements were much more stringent the game didn’t provide you content as much as the people consuming the content provided it.  In my UO days, you could spend hours just sitting in the guild castle, talking with friends, working on some skills, maybe bring in a dragon to fight.  In contrast, today’s game is a wham-bam thank you ma’am affair of instant everything.

We’ve been down this road before but gaming is a reflection of the times and as the average “core gamer” age (~30) increases, it is extremely evident that they have less and less time to play.  Today’s younger gamers have thousands of venues to compete for their attention – Twitter, Facebook, all the Internet, Netflix, smartphones, tablets.  When I was younger, I had to leave the house to see friends. As a quick aside, Keen mentioned recently that he’s finishing up grad school this week (congrats!).  That would make him 22-24ish.  His experience in UO would have made him around 6-8 years of age.  It’s safe to say that UO had a different impact at that age than when I was playing (16-18) – especially from a social perspective.

For example, my largest gripe with SWTOR wasn’t that the game had bad ideas, just that they were poorly implemented from a social/time perspective   You were rarely able to find the social aspect while leveling (due to having a companion, very heavy instancing, low difficulty and no tools) and it stuck out like a sore thumb at max level when you 100% needed a social framework.  The time aspect was inversely proportionate to the fun factor.  You spent more time waiting around (again, with no social) for the fun to start – or even to get to the fun.  Sadly, the necessary game updates came 6+ months after launch and 90% of the playerbase had left by that point (they went from 211 servers to 23 in 6 months, now 20).  I firmly believe that the single most important reason Rift is not yet F2P is because of the social/time aspect being a core concept of game design.

Now TESO and Wildstar are both coming in with some new concepts to a genre that was originally founded on the social aspect.  I’ve heard aspects from Wildstar as to how the social portion is going to be important, in a non-combat way, but next to nothing from TESO.  I have my fingers crossed that both can maintain that core concept, with a little tweaking, in order to make either successful in the long term.  I mean, I don’t log in to kill the big bad guy for the 30th time, I log in to talk to my friends for the 300th time.

Fun Tax

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Would you pay 10$ to skip 10 hours of repetitive content?  Would you pay 5$ to acquire enough skill points to use that amazing sword?  Free to Play games are betting you value their items more than your time.  It’s the basis of the market and at a simplistic level, it’s quite accurate.  The problem is that we long-time gamers don’t play game so much for the reward as much as the journey.  I didn’t beat BioShock to see the last bad guy (there isn’t one), I played it to be engrossed in the story.

Games today don’t always follow that mentality.  Some are designed for instant (or partially delayed) gratification.  A harsh slog, through horribly produced content in order to see the really good stuff.  Any game that says “get through the first couple hours and then it’s great” is a poorly designed game.  The intro to FF13 or Kingdom Hearts 2 spring to mind.  EQ2 when it launched was like this.  Games that provide random drops in order to progress (most F2P city builders, like FarmVille) are built around the concept of the result and not the journey.  Rightly so, people will buy their way to the fun part.

Then you might get a game like SWTOR, where the good stuff is actually the journey and not the end result.  Perhaps the journey gets long in the tooth on the 3rd or 4th attempt and then the company can make money.  That could be convenience items or costumes.  Some might sell new journeys.

While I disagree with Jacob’s assessment of the F2P market going through some sort of apocalypse in 3-5 years time (I’m more inline with Wilhelm on this one), I do see some rather drastic changes to the core concepts.  The idea of a “fun tax” seems to be the current model, where you need to pay to have fun.  Game following this model are likely to be doomed (or closed as Playfish) as you can get more fun, for less money on a mobile platform.  The concept of a “fun bonus” is more likely to succeed.  Think of it as a trial of an awesome game, like demos of old.  “Oh, I get 20 hours of great gameplay for 20$?  And you want an extra 5$ for 5 more hours?  That’s reasonable.”  The kicker here is that the content has to be of the same quality or better.  WoW expansions sell on this.  Skyrim was 50/50.

There is certainly a lot of money to be made in the F2P model (or the buy to play model).  You just have to figure out how to make people want to give you money rather than need to give you money.  That is, if you want long-term success.  I mean, there’s a reason the 3 card monte guy isn’t sitting at the same street corner for more than a hour.

Less is More

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March sale estimates are out and they paint an interesting picture.  Both GoW games sold poorly while the more mid-stream, quality games, sold well.

God of War sold 360,000 (down from 1.1 million for the last game) and Gears of War sold 425,000 (down from 3 million for the last game).  Both had rather poor reviews of the same rehashed combat, lack of story and general “same-ness”.  Essentially, they were expansions priced as full priced games.

In contrast, Tomb Raider sold 696,000 copies and Bioshock sold 665,000.  2 years ago, if you told me that Tomb Raider would sell more than God of War and Gears of War combined, I would have called you crazy.  Today, we’re a few thousand copies away from that being fact.

I look at this with optimism.  People are getting tired of the franchise cycle and this bodes really well for gaming as a whole.  The days of just re-skinning the same game every year are hopefully dying, or at least making developers think twice about charging full price. (*cough* EA Sports *cough*).

My fingers are crossed that the gaming community as a whole keeps on this path of rewarding quality games and shunning the crud.  That way we can get more amazing games, as we’ve been rather blessed with so far these past few months.

Interplay Sale

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If you’re older than 25, you likely played the heck out of Interplay games.  I’m sure I put in a few hundred hours into both Fallout games.  Stonekeep, Lionheart, JAGG and Freespace also took up a huge chunk of time.  Some poor management decisions in the early 2000s meant the end of that company but it doesn’t mean you can’t still find the games.

GoG.com is having a 50% sale on most Interplay games.  There are at least 5 games in that list that I’ll be getting.  I have no idea when I’ll be playing them mind you, but having them in the back pocket for when my internet craps out (all day yesterday) is a solid investment.

For those that are a bit younger and might not have had the chance to play these games, at the very least you should try out Fallout 2.  Every sandbox-RPG built in the last 10 years owes that game.

Differing Opinions

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I read Tobold’s blog not because I agree with him but rather because I don’t.  He often starts with complicated ideas, boils them down to a black and white question and picks a side.  It’s hard to think of a personal gaming blog that elicits more comments, both for and against, so something must be working.

A recent case in point is the defense of EA argument.  In it, he postulates that disagreeing with an artist’s intended ending isn’t grounds to dismiss the game or the artist completely.  Perfectly reasonable.  Applying this logic to Mass Effect 3 however, the argument loses ground.

Rohan has a solid critique of the ending and the idea here is that a story’s ending, a twist though it might be, is dependent on the preceding elements in order to be accepted.  Casablanca might not have a happy ending but it’s acceptable and memorable due to the characters remaining true to the entire story to that point.  Bioshock Infinite might not please everyone but you can’t deny that each and every character gives additional weight to the ending through their actions in-game.

Some might have read the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind.  The first half of that series was pretty solid, the second half, so-so.  The ending was a massive Deus Ex Machina – magic saves everything.  It completely nullifies the rest of the story up until that point because the entire series could have been wrapped up in book 1.  Mass Effect 3’s ending was so poor, so full of plot holes, that they needed to retcon a few things and clarify some leaps in logic for people to accept the ending.  Even then, barely a decision you made up until that point had any impact whatsoever on the options presented to cap the series.  Starchild?  Really?

To the original topic.  EA didn’t win the golden poop because of the ME3 ending.  They won it for micro-transactions in every game, poor quality games, draconian DRM practices that inhibit gaming and for generally being so out of touch with what they are delivering that they want to blame everyone but themselves.  EA hires great companies with great ideas and somehow manages to burn out every original idea and spit out a husk of a former team.  There has to be a balance somewhere between the game experience and the bottom line – hopefully EA can find that again.