The New Curve

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I finally hit 85 with my Monk the other day, which means that Pandaria is open to me.  Let’s meta first.  Monks have a daily quest that gives a 1 hour buff for 50% exp boost.  Every 10 levels (it seemed) the quest became available again and refreshed the buff plus added another hour.  I had full heirloom gear plus accepted a random level 25 guild invite, giving me something like 70% experience boost.  I also created the monk and waited a day, to get some rested experience (monks rested exp lasts twice as long as other races).  So take all of that in and I was sitting at nearly 350% experience boost for the first 60 levels.

I rather enjoyed the “new” 1-58 portion.  It linear, granted, but the stories were much better.  Especially in the underused zones.  Punching Deathwing in the face or riding a motorcycle with a babe into the moon is pretty funny.  58-68 is the Outland stuff.  I barely entered Terrokar (3rd zone) before I happily left.  There’s one town in that zone, when I first entered, had a solid 10 quest givers hungering for me to help them.  It was like  Christmas Tree had lit up.  Next up was Northrend.  I did one starting zone, then the game quests pushed me through 2 zones in a flash, with me ending up in Zul’Drak.  The experience gain here was crazy.   I missed some of the more involved quests, like the one where you blow up the zombies with an abomination.  Cataclysm is still behind a level 80 wall but once in, you only need 2 zones (out of 5).  Now this is linear questing!  I chose Hyjal to avoid the 3d mess of transport in water-world.  The story here is pretty cool and getting to take on massive bosses (with the help of other bosses) is awesome.  Fighting Ragnaros is a massive letdown though, as you’re just a gopher.  “Slay these bugs while I hit this massive wall of fire”.  Like they couldn’t kill them with a blink?

Deepholm is next, which is my favorite of all Cataclysm zones.  WoW has a penchant for keeping all single player zones above ground and all dungeons underground.  I guess people like the feeling of an “open” zone.  Well, this is a massive cave under the Maelstrom, full of fairly rich lore that hasn’t yet been abused. I remember the original WoW and the first dungeon patched in – Mauradon.  I played that with friends a whole bunch of times, it was a blast since it was an open dungeon.  I found Theradras to be a damn cool idea as a boss.  Earth elementals, to that point, were a collection of random rocks.  They remained that way until Cataclysm (while Fire and Water were used in Molten Core).  Deathwing lived underground for millenia.   Why only 1 zone?  Bah!

Level 85 opens the Pandaria stuff.  I zone in, get on a helicopopter and start nuking some things. 2-3 quests later, I’ve killed some horde bad guys then this massive wall of gunk comes alive.  I’m 1 zone through and I’ve never seen another horde enemy.  I thought this was the Horde vs. Alliance expansion pack?

Anyhoot, I’m having fun.  The quest structure is a lot better.  I get sent all over the map to discover new zones and enemies.  Some are silly (the SI:7 quests), some are somewhat serious and others are just strange (stomping bookworms).  A few times though, I’ve run around without any quests in my log and no direction.  That was the most fun I’ve had to be honest.  I haven’t really “explored” WoW since Vanilla and having to get off the rails for a bit felt good.  I had to cross half the zone before I found the next breadcrumb quest.

I have leveled 3 characters to 85, 2 more to 80 and 3 to 60 over the years.  If I were to rate the leveling curve experience thusfar, I would go with Pandaria > 1-60 (post-Cataclysm > Lich King > Cataclysm >1-60 (pre-Cataclysm)>>> Burning Crusade.  The 1-60 (pre-Cataclysm) isn’t really fair since the game wasn’t even a themepark back then – at least not by today’s standards.

The next few posts will probably cover my experiences from 85-90. It’s an interesting ride.

Hope

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Crappy painting skills aside, here’s a graph explaining my point of view of good MMOs.

A really awesome MMO isn’t about single player experience (TOR comes to mind) and a really good MMO isn’t only about group content (EQ for the most part).  MMOs are awesome when both of those interesect.

Back to EQ for a second.  People are going to clamour that EQ was a great game and in some parts it was.  It did drop subs like a brick once WoW and EQ2 came out though, so there were obviously some issues with it and they mostly surrounded the group aspect.  What EQ did right was find the balance between personal story/responsibility and group content.  Meaningingful consequences to your actions (such as faction gain/loss) affected not only your group’s ability to progress (gated content) but also your ability to progress (say enter a city without being KoS).

WoW Vanilla did this too, to a degree.  It opened up the intersection of the two parties and really rewarded group play while keeping the single player aspect alive.  You could do something meaningful in 30 minutes.  This simply has never been the case in EQ.  WoW today however, focuses much more on the single player aspect.  LFD/LFR are all for the “what about me” generation, with quick rewards.  If you don’t like it, leave ’em and try another one.  Guild levels don’t provide any type of group reward.  Enter any city without a guild and you’ll get 100 invites an hour to a 25 guild.

The success of the next great MMO will be about finding the balance of group content and single player content.  Hopefully the ship can right itself.

RIFT Readies for its Expansion

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We’re a couple weeks away from Storm Legion, RIFT’s first expansion.  Patch 1.11 (yes, 11 content patches since the launch, WoW rarely got past 3) is out and is prepping all the souls for the new expansion.

I have a 50 Cleric as a main, a 50 Warrior as well, a mid range Mage and a low level Rogue.  I had a decent set of builds for the first 2, opting for a healing/tanking set for the Cleric.  I really liked the flow of tanking with a Cleric but there were some rather serious limitations at launch – namely spell resist.  There have been a lot of balancing patches, a few with rather large re-writes to skills but the overall balance between everyone is pretty good, considering the thousands of combinations possible.

1.11 is pretty much re-writing every skill tree though.  You still spend 51 points (until the cap is lifted in the expansion) but there are plenty of new things to pick from.  As a general rule, the game is moving away from the RNG issues it had before, into a more streamlined stacking buff mechanic.  The changes for classes are so large, that each class has it’s own post,  typically 5-6 pages long of changes.  Wilhelm goes over some of the player perspective points.

Let me contrast this with WoW for a second.  My Rogue has the exact same playstyle as before.  Poison the daggers, build CP to keep Slice and Dice running, finish with Envenom/Rupture.  My Shaman has the same priority.  Flame Shock on, Lava Burst, Shock Burst at 7+ stacks, Lightning Bolt.  The only class with a real change is Warlocks.  There’s just a distinct lack of choice now.

Back to RIFT.  I like how the devs are taking their builds to task. I like how they listen to player feedback and promote players to moderate positions.  I like the forums as they generally are not cess-pools of vitriol.  Players seem to do a great job of self-moderating and the bad apples are rooted out fairly quickly.  I like the feature set for the next expansion – especially player housing.

I think the thing I like the most about RIFT is the clear amount of fun you can have when a system is made by people who genuinely understand their market and aren’t hopping on some hype train.

Good Old Games

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I am an avid PC gamer, have been for nearly 30 years now.  I remember programming in basic.  I remember getting Quest for Glory 1 (called Hero’s Quest back then) for Christmas one year and playing that game for nearly a year straight.  I remember Dune 2, one of the first RTS games.  Civ, XCom, Commander Keen…  there were some absolutely amazing games back then when the ground was still being broken.  Then, as with all markets, someone saw an opportunity to make cash and the whole free-ware wave came in.  Crappy games, filled with viruses, for under 5$ each.  Consoles (the NES and SNES for sure) came around and gave you some very simple multiplayer games. The PC lost it’s way forward during the 90s, with only some sporadic content worth mention.  That being said, the games worth mentioning are the cornerstones for gaming today.

Steam keeps me going with my current game catalog.  I can find friends, play pretty much any game on it and access games from any computer.  There are a few tweaks I would like to see (like me playing XCOM while my wife plays Plants vs Zombies on the same account) but in the larger picture, Steam has done to consoles what consoles did to PCs 20 years ago.  Made them practically irrelevant.

One hiccup Steam has, and it’s by no means a killer, is that older games don’t get a fair shake due to the nature of the online platform.  Good Old Games can hook me up with that. I picked up the Baldur’s Gate series for 9$.  Interplay games are in a “pay what you feel” sale right now.  I got Stonekeep for 3$.  There are hundreds of games from the late 80s to late 90s available – some even from later.

A few neat points.  First, the cost is low.  I don’t think I’ve seen a game over 10$.  Second, there’s an integrated client to download everything about a game, even the manuals.  Often times, games had some obscure clue in the manual to prevent piracy or to actually help you finish the game.  Third and related to the previous, there’s no DRM.  There’s no always on, there’s no PC limit, nothing.  You bought it, you own it.  Which is damn cool.

I realize this sounds more like a sale pitch but my point is that there are amazing games out there that many people have never played.  Trying some of these out, you can see how games today have used those ideas and improved upon them.

Knight of the Old Republic Free

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See what I did there?  We’re a couple months away from SWTOR going F2P but we have more info about it now!

You get absolutely everything good about the game for free.  The story, the classes, the companions, the art.  You get what is arguably the best Star Wars game in 10 years for absolutely zero dollars.

What you do pay for is the MMO portion, the part that is pretty bad.  You pay for quick travel, you pay for purple item, you pay for bag space, you pay for crafting, you pay for PvP, you pay for dungeons, you pay for raids.  We don’t know how much, but it’s more than zero.

There’s still missing details on what exactly gets unlocked for the P2P players.  I personally cannot see why people would pay cash for a great game with crappy MMO components piece meal.  Either people will sub or they will play for free.  Hopefully we get more details down the road.

That being said, for anyone who has not had the change, KOTOR3 will be launching in a couple months.  FOR FREE.

Themepark Levels

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There’s a growing trend for themeparks to avoid the idea of character levels.  Ultima Online has this same mechanic and it was one of the first out of the gate.  EQ came along and took the D&D model of levels and that seems to have somehow become the themepark standard.  There’s a bit of a shift now though.  TSW has no direct levels tied to the character, simply levels tied to skill useage.  GW2 uses levels but doesn’t gate content behind it, it simply levels the content around you (a-la Oblivion I guess).

TOR certainly has a disconnect between leveling and story.  The “openess” of previous BioWare games (minus DA2, ugh) was apparently cut on the floor in order to allow players to stay together.  Other than the personal stories, which account for maybe 10% of all content, there was nothing keeping you on a planet past the artificial level barrier.  RIFT has the same mechanic for moving forward but you can easily move down levels with the mentoring ability.

WoW is the odd one out.  Keen covers some points and there are some good counterpoints. You can argue that content and levels are two separate items.  I do understand the gating mechanic of levels in a game with 100 buttons.  If I gave you all of them to start, you’d have no idea how to play.  If I gave you everything to start, then you’d burn out on raids/dungeons.  The actual content is pretty decent but how do you pace content reward? There are over 10,000 quests in the game.  That’s a ridiculous number.

If themeparks were to remove levels, you’d still need some gating mechanism to extend playtime and get people used to systems.  If I bought a level 90 Druid it would take me a couple hours to gear them up to heroic dungeon levels. If I played a Druid from 1-90, it would take me a few weeks to get to the same place (if not more).

That being said, how in the world Blizzard thinks than John Smith is going to pick up WoW today and go through 90 levels to play with their friends is ridiculous.  I’m leveling a monk in full heirloom gear (45% exp boost), with 20% from the guild bonus and with 50% from the daily monk quest.  I’ve been leveling for 5 days now, having 7 years of experience in the game too, and I’m still not even finished the LK content.  I still need to do Cataclysm and then MoP.  Once I’m there, the content from 1-89 is practically irrelevant.

Real themeparks are about all the rides.  Sure, there are rides where you have to be “this tall” to get on, but I don’t know of any that say “you’re too tall”.  Rift makes previous content relevant through artifacts, quests, achievements, pets and mentoring. WoW makes previous content relevant through achievements (x quests complete) and pet battles.  WoW’s dungeons and raids previous to an expansion pack (say Stonecore) are 100% empty.

It would certainly be fun to have access to all dungeons at max level and at an optional scaleable level.

 

 

Bags and the Problem with Space

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Inventory space is a problem in all games.  Either you can only have 2 guns, or 10 slots or 100.  Most F2P games take advantage of this space issue and charge you real money to increase the size.  It’s obviously a balancing issue where the dev needs to have enough space for moderate use while not making it so big that their databases crash from billions of items stored.

When WoW started, you had 5 bag slots with a maximum of 16 per slot.  Banks gave you 32, plus 6 bag slots for a rather large amount of gold.  Today, you can get bags with 26-32 slots, which pretty much doubles the storage that existed previously.  RIFT also offers multiple bag sizes but they’re still in Vanilla mode, so we haven’t seen the explosion, if at all.  EvE has this problem too, but it’s combated by increasing your ship storage size (which is offset by reducing offense/defense).

A possible solution for the themepark crowd is the exchange and trade-up.  Where each WoW expansion typically adds 2-10 new tiers of commodities –  and MoP has added a stupid amount with cooking – you really are stuck with each character holding on to items, then mailing them across to players who can use them.  What I suggest is a shared commodities bag.  When I’m out and about and collect a piece of Turtle meat, who says my Shaman needs it?  Perhaps my Rogue is the cook.  If I was able to put items into an exchange pile, that all characters had access to, I would be saving on space.  Many games do this today in the Action RPG sphere  – D3 and Torchlight 2 shared stashes come to mind.  Heck, WoW and Rift and all of them do it with a Guild Bank already.  People have been forming 2 man guilds for years for the group storage.  By sharing the commodities, I am reducing the individual slot requirement by the number of characters I have.  Win.

The second option is the trade up.  Inscription is a PERFECT example for this.  You need to carry a solid dozen inks, milled from dozens of herbs in order to make glyphs.  The trade up system already exists here where you trade 1 type of ink for another.  This exact same model could be used for other tradeskills and not necessarily on a 1:1 basis.  Maybe 5 gold bars gives me 1 truesilver.

A final solution is the elimination of grey items or, like RIFT, the addition of a “sell all crap” button to the game.  The entire purpose of these items is to bloat bags and to be traded for cash.  If you go the first route, simply change the RNG to give a cash bonus when a grey item should drop.  If you go the latter, I know half my bags would empty in a second.

Increasing bag size is a temporary solution.  The problem is that there is too much stuff that people collect in their travels.

 

Social Climate

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A bit of a deviation today, turning once again to the social climate of gaming.  I’ve been gaming for nearly 30 years now and across all that time there has been a definite progress in terms of social interaction and stigma.  We’re currently in a time where it’s “cool” to be geeky but not yet cool enough to game.  It’s getting better mind you.  When I first started writing guides/selling items online, people looked at my like I was a weirdo.  Nowdays, people simply talk to me about what I write.  I’ve been at parties where complete strangers walk up to me and talk about it, simply from reference.  There really isn’t much more to be said about this particular point as it’s generational.  Give it another 10-20 years and gaming will become more popular than sports (if it isn’t already).

My point for this post is the social interaction that exists within gaming culture.   This is no different than any sub-culture’s social growth in most respects.  It starts small, with a dedicated group and similar (if not identical) interests.  If you like to roleplay in real life, then the odds of you finding kindred spirits at a LARPing event are rather high.  In essence, you need two things: common interests and opportunity.

Transcribe that to gaming.  In the early days of BBS, the player pool was miniscule and the interests common.  You could make friends rather easily.  The first MMOs came out and with a lack of competition, again, simple to make social pairings.  In UO, I ran the largest anti-PK group on the server and made good friends with most of the PKs.  Vanilla WoW had server limitation, so that at the top end of any server, you had a pool of perhaps 100 players.  It was rather easy to make groups.  As the game moved forward and “casualized” the content, more and more people fit into that player pool.  Borders broke down and LFD/LFR came into play.  Now, when you play the game, you have better odds of finding a bad with 1000 gold than seeing the same person 2 days in a row.  The player pool has been massively diluted.

This is one reason why the more niche games have a better social grasp on their players.  The games serve a specific need – which attracts a specific individual.  Since those are smaller groupings, it’s somewhat easier to make the social connection.  EvE is a superb example of how a game goes from social-hive to wild-west.  Over 80% of the player base never touches the social aspect of the game (minus the core mechanics of the game).  However, EvE is still partially controlled by the original player base, through the CSM.  Where WoW is categorically aimed at a different market than launch, EvE is headed in the exact same direction as day 1.

There’s an additional topic on about how EvE’s social atmosphere is actually negative and WoW’s is a positive one from a psychological aspect.  By keeping a small social group that never changes, you become isolated and xenophobic.  WoW’s idea to expose all players to all sorts of different social stimuli is a net positive for social integration.  How both of these games actually integrate these ideas through game mechanics is a completely different topic.

Social Repercussions

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What happens when someone can say something online that they would never say in person?  What if they couldn’t say that in person or face legal consequences?

In Canada we have free speech up until the point of hate speech.  You can say pretty much anything unless it causes direct harm to a group of individual.  The US 1st amendment is a bit different in that you can say pretty much anything to anyone, with no consequence.  In the EU in general, there are laws to combat this sort of behavior.  You can be a bully if you want but if you get caught, jail time.  We don’t have that in North America.  (I realize some people don’t think we need those laws.  I prefer to think that in terms of social reform, the countries that have been around ~1500 years longer have a better grasp.  The US is especially divided, making it a rather poor example as a whole.)

Back to the online presence.  A few people are aware of the GIF Theory.  A simple theory in that given anonymity to everyone can lead to bad things.  WoW tried to combat this with their RealID fisco a few years back, where you could only post with your real name.  The irony is that would have led to more harassment that it would have prevented.  No word of a lie, WoW random groups can be cesspits of society.  F2P games, League of Legends in particular, has the same problem.  Random groups of people, with no investment and low odds of meeting each other again, have no restrictions on behavior.  Heck, play any XBOX Live game.

The UK comes into the news spotlight from time to time for giving forum trollers prison sentences.  Not a lot, only a few weeks, but it’s enough deterrent to make people think twice.  Imagine explaining to your employer that you have to go away for 3-4 weeks.  I rather like this model as the punishment is social and economical but with restrictions.  Having 4chan or reddit go after someone (which they’ve done multiple times) usually means a destroyed business and personal life.  Rarely do they go after anyone where there is legal precedent.  Nearly all the time, it’s someone in the US that has done something asinine.  Sometimes they get it wrong though, and that’s where I have issue.  The person being targeted has no escape or recourse to recoup the losses.

I think that the current responsibility for managing this problem is within the hands of game developers.  They aren’t selling a singular experience, they are selling a group experience.  It’ll take 1 company to put in some system (LoL is trying) that curbs this activity and then the rest will be liable to do the same.  Heck, the majority of privacy changes that Facebook has had to implement are because of Canadian law.

Sooner or later, the legal systems across the world will catch up.  The internet and games as a whole, will have to mature.

 

Missing Best RPGs

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This links up to the previous comments on best RPGs.  I was thinking about it a bit more, while watching kids movies of all things, and two more came to mind.

First up is the Dark Cloud series, notably the second one.

This was an interesting series as it required quite a bit of playthrough to complete.  You needed to rebuild your towns, players and buildings at a time.  You also needed to build your gear up over time.  This required components, sub levels, transformation and piles of grinding.  I think this would make a great MMORPG in a group setting.  LOTRO sort of used this with Legendary Items, Istaria with their towns.  Sadly, the series wasn’t expanded but I think the spiritual successor will be Wildstar.

 

Second is Eternal Sonata.

This is an odd one certainly.  This RPG follows the real world music composer Chopin and uses some typical RPG standards with a few twists.  Chopin died at a pretty young age and this fantasy take on his life is one of the most interesting RPG stories I have ever played – no tropes here.  Combat is a decent mix of tactical and action, using light and dark (from shadows) to power your moves.  This dynamic battlefield makes for some cool battles.  Well worth trying out to any RPG fan.

 

There are certainly other RPGs that fit on this list.  As I come across more, I’ll definitely refer them here.