Tag Archives: design

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.

Follow Up

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In relation to the previous post, Microsoft brass has come out with an apology for what seemed like a crazy tweet.

“We apologize for the inappropriate comments made by an employee on Twitter yesterday. This person is not a spokesperson for Microsoft, and his personal views do not reflect the customer centric approach we take to our products or how we would communicate directly with our loyal consumers. We are very sorry if this offended anyone, however we have not made any announcements about our product roadmap, and have no further comment on this matter.”

That makes step 1 complete.  Step 2 will likely be happening on May 21st, if sources are correct.

This does beg the question about pricing and was one of the main reasons the PS3 had such a hard time penetrating the market.  2006 was a good financial year and still the >$600 price point was too much.  Today’s market is garbage, worldwide.  For the same price you can get a decent laptop and build a media center, wifi everywhere and build a massive collection with Steam/GoG.

Microsoft’s push towards the subscription model isn’t folly.  They’ve had it since the first XBOX with a sub model to connect to their network. This “subsidized” model allowed them to sell consoles at a loss and make it up over the years.  Sony did not do this, but instead gave you the best price Blu-Ray player at the time.  If MS is going to push a contract model, similar to cellphone arrangements, this could work in their favor.  Let’s say they sold you the console with free network access for 600$ but also had a 300$ console with a 15$/month connection fee, I would gather the former would sell like crazy.  You’d end up paying more by year 2 with the contract but the system would be on your shelf.

If you were to read the internet about this whole MS vs. Sony debate, the only “
known” factor seems to be the network connection – and it’s not even confirmed.  People can’t compare price, spec, game selection, there’s just no information out there.  Instead people will latch on to the tinniest piece of information, rumor or not, and preach it as the death of X console.

In my RL job, I do a lot of analysis and this entire process is quite the case study.  There is the advantage of early PR on Sony’s behalf, with not a peep from them since – nearly 2 months ago.  The big picture PS4 is out there but we have next to no details past that.  MS has a die-hard following on XBL, with 10+ years of network service behind them.  That they maintained the console lead for so long, with next to no technical/game reason for it is a testament to the online service’s integration.  You would think by this time more info from MS would be revealed, even if it was just a teaser site.  This gap of information, in an age of instant information, is causing massive speculation.  I have never found a time where speculation was positive.

May 21st is a long time out, a couple weeks before E3.  With a near complete lack of details from either camp, there really isn’t much to do until then.  But when has that stopped the interweb?

 

There Be Finger Pointing

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finger pointing

When SimCity first released, those people who did publish official reviews clearly had reviewed a demo copy.  Eurogamer Sweden published a 100% rating on the 4th, when the servers were taking a pretty large poop and a true play test of the multiplayer portions had not really begun.  A few days after launch, the metacritic score was around 85.  Now it’s 67.  Let’s not even discuss the user score.

I know that most publishers tie a revenue bonus or tier percentage on returns based on the metacritic score.  This can clearly be gamed if the review sample is small, such as what happened with Fallout: New Vegas, where a single % cut off all bonuses for what was arguably one of the best games that year.

Now let it be clear that I like Maxis.   They’ve made some pretty amazing games over the years, one of which I’m pretty sure is still the all-time best selling game (The Sims).  Darkspore, to me, was their first toe step into the multiplayer arena.  Again, the reception for that game was mediocre.  Given that, it’s hard to imagine that it was EA that was pushing the muliplayer aspect of SimCity and that a portion of the blame of what was delivered sits squarely in their lap.

So here we are, 1 week after launch and the game 10 years in the making is most definitely going to cost EA a few million in lost sales, Maxis any possible bonus and likely quite a few people their jobs.  It’s a business after all and one with next to no tolerance for failure.  I do feel bad when people lose their jobs, but at the same time, you can look at SimCity and see nearly everything wrong with games today:

… in one package, that’s Sim City 5. To wit:

– Overpromise
– Underdeliver (bordering on flat out fraud)
– We still buy a lacking product

Aging Gamers

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First, the gushiness, I have two adorable children.  If you’re a parent, you have the same problem I do.  Children make you feel old and out of touch, like you’re 2 steps behind the pack.  It’s an effort to be at the same pace they are since every generation moves at a quicker pace than the last.  Which brings me to this post which has been simmering in the back of my mind for some time now.

In general, the blogging generation is older.  Few people take the time to sit down and write something down that has more than 140 characters or isn’t a cut and paste from somewhere else.  I tell people I write a blog and most think that’s quaint, as if I was writing an op-ed piece in the newspaper (which is my reaction to those who do just that).  Being older brings with it a sense of nostalgia and entitlement.  Things were better back then and gosh darn it, I put in my time and I deserve something better.  You know why they don’t make cars with carburetors anymore?  EFI is better.  It’s the same reason that you need to be 40+ to own any car with a carb, today’s generation simply never knew it existed.

Gaming isn’t much different.  There are quite a few blogs out there that mourn the loss of gaming of old and put out such amazing pieces of hyperbole that you’d think Chicken Little was at the keyboard.  While I appreciate dissenting views, sometimes you just have to shake your head and wonder what planet these people are on.  Torchlight 2, Borderlands 2, Ni No Kuni and Tomb Raider are recent examples of near perfect gaming, each embodying a particular facet of their genre and shining it to golden luster.  The difference is that these games aren’t designed for us (the older folk), they are designed for the core gaming audience, the low to mid 20s.  They might have features we like but their targets are much different.

Ni No Kuni is a great example.  This is Pokémon meets JRPG/FF13 combat, with a sprinkle of Tales story telling.  The individual elements are all fairly recent, the cutesy characters aren’t meant for realism but the whole of the game, the final package, is just pure fun.

MMOs aren’t much different.  For the vast majority of MMO players, their first game was World of Warcraft.  UO, EQ, DAOC, AC – it all means bunk to them.  Bygones of a forgotten era.  Heck, I played AD&D for years before version 3 came out.  By the time 4 came out, no one really remembered what THAC0 meant anymore.  MMOs today are simply not designed for the people who played those first games.  The originals were not built on gameplay, they were built on social structures for people who had 4-6 hours to invest in one session.  You’re kidding yourself if you think there is an infinite pool of those types of players.  They are all already playing some game and invested in it.  You think Blood Legion (a hardcore WoW raiding guild) has the time to play another MMO for 30 hours a week?  You think they are going to drop years of investment in a game for another one with 10% of the content?

Today’s gaming generation plays short sessions with quick rewards.  Their lives move at an incredible pace and they have other things to do.  They certainly won’t sit for 4 hours a night in front of a computer and wipe continuously on a boss for 2 weeks.  I daresay they aren’t the crazy ones.  I certainly don’t have the time to commit to that with kids in the house.  I barely have time to commit to one 2 hour session a week, especially if it’s in my own house.

As aging gamers, perhaps it’s just time to take a backseat to the sky-is-falling attitudes and simply enjoy the fun games that we do get to play.  There are plenty of them out there and I bet for most of us, we don’t even have time to play half of them.

SimCrappy

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To the surprise of no one, SimCity launched and then fell flat for many players.  Either failed downloads, failed connections, server queues or just plain old bugs, many people were unable to play the recent installment in the classic series.

While I think the concepts behind the game are pretty cool, I do have reservations on a few items:

  • It requires Origin to play, no matter where you buy it.  I have a dislike for Origin for many reasons, the least of which is their EULA and shoddy customer service.
  • It’s from EA, a company who is charging players for a priority queue to play the game.  Now that’s brass balls folks.
  • The city size is 80-90% smaller than in previous versions.  Hitting 500K population is an achievement.
  • Due to the former, cities must work together in a region to support each other.  Cool concept until one of those cities decides to stop playing and you suddenly lose all your power.
  • You can “finish” your city relatively quickly, in a few hours.  Past Sim games took quite a while to reach a prosperous city.  To me, this is going to hurt the longevity of the game as once you’re at maximum capacity, every corner is filled and you know a change in direction (say from Power to Knowledge) would destroy your region, why bother?
  • Always on DRM.  If Diablo 3 taught me anything, it’s that always on DRM for a single player game is one of the stupidest things ever seen.  If it’s single player, I want to be able to play offline for when I don’t have the internet.  That’s why I have a laptop.

It just seems like a wasted effort on a game that had a lot of potential.  I am hoping that EA and other companies learn from this and find some middle ground between letting players actually play the game and securing their games (like a once every 2 week ping to the server).

Risky Business

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I have a quick story to tell about PvP and item loss.  Back in the day, Ultima Online had open world, free for all PvP.  When you died, no matter how you died, anyone could loot your corpse clean.  If you died to a bear, another player could loot you and they would take a reputation hit.  If they had killed you, then they already had the hit.  Take too much of a hit and you turned red and people could kill you without worry.  Most PvPers had a main character for PvP and then alts that were “clean”.

My characters had houses.    Before the Trammel split, you needed a key to open the door and you needed that key to be on you.  Most players had multiple bags, in bags and hid their keys deep down.  That way, when someone tried to loot you, they had to find the key.  My crafter character (mining, lumberjack, smith, tinker and more) had no ability to fight.  He did have the ability to create and sell items from the house.  One day, out cutting lumber he was killed and lost the key to the house.  With that key, the PvPer took ownership of the house, then sold it on eBay.  I remember quitting that day.

When I did get back, again before the Trammel split but after the housing updates to no longer worry about keys, when I did get killed I lost time.  Since items degraded on use, and a super weapon was perhaps 25% stronger than a regular one, the difference wasn’t huge.  That part didn’t bug me as much.   The game had items that provided a boost but not such a boost that items were prized over all else.

I don’t mind PvP and item loss, if the item loss is reasonable.  I consider reasonable as a measure of time to get back to what would be competitive, not to where I was.  Losing a house and vendors, I would have to work for weeks to get back anything close to the competitiveness I had.  Losing a set of weapons and regeants, I’d be out 30 minutes.  I like having some risk involved with PvP.  I don’t like forced risk with no options to mitigate it.  I mean, imagine if EvE didn’t have clones.  You think people would still be playing today? 

PvP without risk is pretty boring as you can’t really invest into it.  Planetside 2 has no risk but plenty of benefits (which is why there are so many aimbots).  WoW PvP is even worse, with no link at all between PvP and the rest of the game.  I do have my fingers crossed that Camelot Unchained it able to find the right balance between PvP with risk (therefore investment) and not causing people to quit with rage.