X-Com was and always will be one of my all-time favorite games.  I played it at launch and put in nearly as many hours as I did with Civilization.  At the time, the game was the pinnacle of strategy-rpgs and had some rather amazing replayability built in.

I played the expansions.  Terror from the Deep was basically an expansion pack. Apocalypse was a 3d take but lacked depth.  Everything past that was garbage.  Since then, other games have tried to emulate the feeling.  I would guess the Rainbow6 game series has come the closest.

A few remakes have come and gone but they’ve all missed the feel of the original.  Nostalgia always does this since it was the first game of its kind.  I can forgive the original’s poor-ish graphics as a sign of the time.  I can’t really do that now.  This new take however, seems to be the closest in spirit to the original in a while.

There’s just something special about having an attachment to your in-game players and seeing that a bad decision cost you.  Every situation can be beaten, every situation can end in massive failure.  The determining factor isn’t skill, it’s thought. And boy, is that ever more rewarding for me.

Fingers crossed!

Watching the above video made me think of Time to Kill and it’s relationship with fun.  Is it more fun to kill a dragon in 5 minutes or kill 100 rats in the same period of time?  What if the kills gave you the same rewards?  What if the dragon or rats gave better rewards?

Time to Kill is an old measure used in games to figure out how long it takes for someone to clear an encounter (or simply an enemy). In D&D, TTK could be measured in hours.  In the arcade games of yore, TTK was fractions of a second.  The faster the TTK, the higher the adrenaline rush and sense of power.  The longer the TTK, the more skill is required (typically) and the larger the sense of accomplishment at the end.

In the MMO sphere, WoW has exceedingly low TTK numbers for everything but raid bosses.  Leveling, the TTK should be under 5 seconds for most classes.  Dungeons are about 20s for a pack, 1-3 minutes for a boss.  This is part of Blizzard’s arcade-feel and quite evident in the Diablo series, though much more so in Diablo 3.  TSW has a 1minute TTK for most encounters.  EQ1 was similar.  Rift has a slightly higher TTK than WoW but it’s still pretty close.  EvE’s TTK is measured more like D&D as the strategic elements often outstrip the value of power.

The actual value of TTK is important in the overall feel of the game.  Too short and it the rush feeling of power simply goes away after a while.  It feels like you’re passing a broom.  Those games need meta goals, where the TTK is simply tool used to stretch out time to reach the goals.  Too long and the player doesn’t feel powerful enough, sort of like an eternal mountain climb.  In these games, the rewards between TTK have to be elevated to reward the risk.

The important factor, above all else, is consistent TTK.  If the primary game mode has a consistent TTK with sporadic jumps, that makes those jumps feel special and the rewards should be appropriate.  If for some reason that sporadic jump becomes a plateau and the rewards are based on the lower one, then you have a problem.  D3 is a good example, where the TTK from 1-60 is rewarding.  Level 60’s TTK actually inverts what you had before, extremely long TTKs with short bursts.  However, the reward system is for the former.  When this happens, people complain that they are losing power when compared to before and the game loses it’s fun appeal.  From the Dev Notes for D3, it’s clear they want to address this problem.

In this regard, I think that as a fun metric, we can use TTK consistency.  If the bar is stable with spikes spread out, then you have a nice combination of challenge and power.  If the bar is 100% stable, then it gets repetitive quickly.  If the bar is stable but has drops from time to time, those feel like amazing times.  In all cases, the rewards for a given event should be directly related to the TTK of the event – otherwise people won’t bother.

RPS has a good interview with Ubisoft, who has finally abandoned their ridiculous DRM tool for PC games.  The core of the interview revolves around the fact that there are zero numbers being shared as to how piracy actually affects users.  That number, no matter the value, would provide at least some context to the “war”.

What number did come out is that Ubisoft’s sales on the PC (arguably the 2nd hardest to pirate after XBOX) account for about 10% of all sales.  Let’s be a bit more frank about it, if you pirate on an XBOX you will get caught if you go online at some point, due to the middleware from MS.  This is not always the case with PC games, who often have a direct input into an online game.  Steam, Origin and various other platforms combat this.

I understand pirating.  I used to do it because a) there was no online store sales and b) the game simply wasn’t available locally.  I did it a bit on the 360 when a) my games broke or b) the game simply wasn’t worth 60$.  For me, the main driver was service.  I got a better service from pirating a game than I did buying a game.  Today’s quite a bit different.  An EB is around the corner and all my games on the PC have to be on Steam.  Steam by the way, is amazing on the service front.

Back to DRM.  As an idea, DRM is good.  As a practice, it’s usually quite a failure.  Often times it’s incredibly restrictive.  Some games have an always-on DRM (which is what makes D3 an MMO) which is stupid in a world of laptops.  Again, Steam lets you play off-line.  Some DRM will limit the number of times you can install a game.  This is again retarded as only these games are limited.  Don’t have that on the XBOX, PS3, iPhone, CDs, movies or anything.  If the amount of times you can use something is limited, it’s called a rental.  Some DRM reduces that count when you chance hardware components.  Again, rental.

Ubisoft did all of this and more.  When their authentication servers went down (and that happens once a month for a few days), no one can play a game.  If the servers are wonky, no one can save a game.  Ubisoft had 10% PC sales?  I am guessing that will jump up to 25-30% without DRM.

If you need to stop pirates, have them authenticate the game once online with the local PC. And again with every other install.  If the game is registered multiple times in a short period from varying IPs, block it.  Give them the option to play locally – offline.  If the game is online, then have them re-authenticate when logging in.  It’s really quite simple.  Thankfully Ubisoft got the message,

Link to the fun

For those not familiar with the situation, Jay Wilson, the director of Diablo 3, took a nice trip on the creator of the Diablo franchise.  The latter claimed that the soul of the game was gone and that there were some balancing issues that had yet to be overcome.  Quite right by any means.  Jay said “f*** that loser”.  Classy.  So less than a week later, here comes the apology.

Tidbits:

The Auction House can short circuit the natural pace of item drops, making the game feel less rewarding for some players. This is a problem we recognize. At this point we’re not sure of the exact way to fix it, but we’re discussing it constantly, and we believe it’s a problem we can overcome. … If you don’t have that great feeling of a good drop being right around the corner — and the burst of excitement when it finally arrives — then we haven’t done our jobs right.

This exact issue has been my #2 complaint for the game thusfar.  In a game where loot is the be-all, end-all, having a non-binding trade system is ridiculously flawed.  It does make sense from an RMAH position though, which is becoming more and more evident as the primary driver for the AH.

Part of the problem, however, is not just item drops, but the variety of things to do within the game. Many of you have stated that there needs to be more to the game than just the item hunt, and we agree completely. The Paragon system is a step in the right direction, giving meta-progress for your time in the game, but it does little to address the variety of activities you can do while playing. I don’t think there’s a silver-bullet solution to this problem, but I do think we can make this aspect of the game better, and as such we’re planning more than just PvP for the next major patch.

This part I agree with and disagree with.  Sure, Diablo 2 had ladders but the final levels were pretty much horizontal in terms of difficulty.  You killed Baal well before level 99.  Weeks if not months before.  In Diablo 3 you hit 60 well before Inferno.  Then climb a stupid crazy mountain of difficulty to get through Act 4.  If you’re able to even start Act 4 (the first enemy is a boss), then Act 1 and Act 2 are a complete joke and Act 3 is easy enough.  This means that if you are able to clear the game, then <10% of the actual game has any challenge at max level and that challenge is artificial. Not to mention that Act 4 has some of the worst enemies in the game in terms of mechanics.

Later in the development of Diablo II, the ‘players 8’ command — which let people set monster difficulty — was added to address this issue, and we’re considering something similar for the next major Diablo III patch to allow players to make up their own minds about how hard or how easy is right for them.

What?  Later as in 3 years after launch later.  They didn’t turn that feature on for challenge, they turned it on for experience and loot to try to get to 99 on a ladder challenge.  It’s messages like this that make you wonder exactly how such an iconic franchise is being led.

I might sound like an angry gamer but it’s more like a confused one.  I hate to compare anything to TOR but D3 is right up there.  The game up until max level is an interesting one and a decent one.  Review scores show that as I don’t think there’s a single reviewer that even passed Act 1 before sending their score out.  The end game (as in TOR) is: unbalanced, unforgivably challenging (less so after 1.04), lacking rewards (you’re trading to people under you to buy better on the AH) and built on a system of unequal plateaus.

It’s like Blizzard didn’t learn a darn thing from Cataclysm’s massive failure of “moar challengez”.  People played Diablo 1 & 2 because it was an easy to pick up game with shiny rewards you could use.  Not to chain die to a whelp.

Update: Giant patch notes

So I leave for a week and Diablo 3 decides to start building a new game.  Every class is getting huge boosts to power (only 1 nerf that I saw).  The entire class posts read as if they took the loudest complaining player and asked them what they wanted.

Auction house changes are coming too.  Big changes to how it will display items and allow searches.b  6 stats to search for means people will be able to find gloves again.  The entire system turned into a pile of cement at max level with the current UI.  Maybe Blizz can make some RMAH cash from this fix.

Paragon Levels are coming.  Once you hit 60, you can gain more horizontal levels.  They give minor stat boosts but also 3%mf/gf per level, to a cap of 300%.  MF is also going to be capped at 300% so that at level 100 paragon, you won’t need a single MF piece of gear.

I’m pretty sure I alluded to a system like this in the past, if not on the post then in social circles.  Many bloggers and players have asked for the same as well (Kripparian in particular).  The system can be used as a framework for future innovation.

To top if all off, the entire massive patch comes in a week – on GW2 launch day no less.  These aren’t small changes, massive balance changes.   Essentially a massive nerf to Inferno, allowing pretty much anyone to kill Diablo with only few hurdles.

So to sum up, Diablo 3 is not even 6 months old and there will be a larger update to the system than WoW (which is sub-based) has had in a year.

1.04 Preview #1 is up.

Of note:

• magic find is no longer averaged in multiplayer (this will cause griefing – needs a vote kick button)
• monster hit points are being dropped in multiplayer
• no more enrage timers, or heal to full on elite/champ packs
• inferno regular mobs getting 5-10% more hitpoints (no biggie), champ/elite/rare dropping hp by 15-25% (big difference)
• also, regular enemies are getting 4x more loot (most people skip them completely)
• some affixes are being tweaked to be easier (fire chains and shielding noted)
• Invulnerable minions are being removed (holy cow)
• Increasing 2hander DPS
• Reducing repair costs by 25% (currently ~50K for 100% repair)
• 61/62 weapon dps is being increased to close to 63 weapons

Now, there are more blog posts coming and there’s no date on the patch.

Now, there are 3 ways to read this.  First, if you’ve never played Diablo 3, then this means nothing and is gibberish.  If you played but never bothered with Inferno, you’ll wonder what the fuss is about.  If you played Inferno past Act 1, then every single item in that list is a “Oh my god, why didn’t you do this earlier” type of statement.

Listen, Blizzard makes money off this game the more people play.  If only the “hardcore” can play, they make money for 1 month and then the game dies.  If the “casuals” can play, they make money for years.  Every single one of the changes helps the average player.  Every single one of those changes has been asked for since the first person set foot in Inferno too.

On a final, sarcastic gamer note, these patch notes read like beta patch notes.  This isn’t patch 1.04.  This is patch 1.1, as nearly every single aspect of the game mechanics is going to be changed.

This from the epic “content consumption thread” for WoW.

i dont want LFR on the same lockout. i want it removed. if players dont put in enough time and effort, they dont deserve to be rewarded with content.
What benefit would that bring to the game?

How do you explain to John Doe that he shouldn’t even think about raiding in World of Warcraft because you feel that anyone that can’t devote *this* much time to raiding just should not be allowed in? Furthermore, why would John Doe, the person that can’t devote *this* much time to raid but would like to, have any interest in venturing into Azeroth?

Do you feel it’s just alright to tell someone “sorry bud, you’re interested on this game, but you don’t have the time, go play something more fitting to you, like Solitaire”?

If you don’t see anything wrong with that, then it’s going to be difficult to have any kind of discussion in that topic. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

 

I think this is the breaking point of the conversation.  If you side with the poster, clearly WoW is no longer your game (as it was in BC).  Find another game with a huge artificial wall for progress, a game where the developers make content for a minority of players and have next to no return on it.

If you side with Blizzard, you agree with the “casualization” of content, where everyone and their dog should be able to play everything and get everything that the hardcore can get, time willing.

I think with MoP, we’ll see the end of hardcore raiding and gaming for the masses.  The space where there is a clear and definite divide between the haves and have-nots.  There are certainly some niche games around that let you do that but the flagship MMO that the world refers to has decided it’s had enough.  Cataclysm has caused a 25% subscription drop and that was primarily due to listening to the hardcore crowd.  Perhaps it was that the casuals now have more options (sort of how WoW took people from UO and EQ?) but Blizzard isn’t giving up.

MoP will define the way forward for Blizzard and WoW.  Either they maintain their user base or the game simply continues its downward trend towards F2P.