Tag Archives: design

Future of Gaming

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Free to Play always leaves a dirty taste in my mouth.  My first experiences with the genre were when Facebook games like FarmVille starting popping up all over the place.  Extremely aggressive monetization schemes push me away – like a used car salesman I guess.  Some games have done pretty well by it, like DDO, where the proper game is solid and you buy more content for the game as you progress.  I like the concept of a free trial and buying modules; that makes sense.  What I don’t like is a game like TOR where you are given the entire game for free then nickel and dimed to get access to content not ever actually owning the content.  Mind you, reports are pretty strong that lockboxes are keeping the game afloat since nearly every single update to the store includes a new lockbox package.

I am assuming I’m not alone in this distaste as the F2P genre is in the middle of a rather significant upheaval at the moment.  Zynga is all but dead, iOS/Android apps have monetization barriers, Cryptic is taking a new business model, TSW is seemingly on its last legs and Planetside 2 is suffering from fairly massive player drops.

Take this with some salt but I see it a lot like the days of DAOC, EQ and UO, where choice was the prime determinant for games.  You like PvE?  EQ.  You like PvP?  DAOC.  You like sandboxes?  UO.  You like a mix of them?  Too bad.  F2P has such a glut of gaming choices today that no sane person is going to play your crappy game and give you money when the next game over gives a much better experience for the same cost.  If you like goblins that jump on pogo sticks and wave chickens, there are bound to be 2-3 games that can offer it.

Path of Exile

A prime example of this new paradigm is Path of Exile.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, the game provides an extremely full and rich quality experience.  There are plenty of F2P action RPGs either out or coming out, but I can’t think of a single one that provides the depth and customization that PoE gives for free.  Think of your typical loot based game where you have crappy loot and great loot.  PoE gives you the ability to upgrade the worst loot in the game to be better than anything that can drop, if you roll the dice properly.  Since the game is barter-based, there are no gold sellers.  Micro-transactions are all convenience based since you can’t outright buy power due to the fore mentioned gear customization.  One of the smartest moves they’ve done is to target a niche and under promise and over deliver on their product.

I can see this as the future of F2P, heck online gaming as a whole.  Scope your target audience, budget accordingly, get the core requirements and systems down pat, communicate it with the audience and then deliver a bug-free, polished experience.  There’s just no way today that a new IP can come out of the gate and expect to sell millions of copies in the first week or month.  Target small, reach it, and then slowly build out.

My Concerns with EvE

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While I think that EvE is a good benchmark for PvP sandbox games, I have the underlying impression that it’s painting itself into a corner.  To be noted, I feel the same way about WoW, though MoP was quite a break from the mess of Cataclysm.

If you follow EvE you likely follow Jester’s blog.   Prolific blogger is only the tip of the iceberg.  Of interest is a recent post on the current state of the game at the macro and micro levels.  A long but educating read for sure.

The thing about WoW is that while the game still caters to hardcore raiders, over the years, the game has expanded to attract more player styles.  The devs are the ones holding the real controls of the game as the cart can only follow the rails with a themepark.  If you don’t like the game, you have one throat to choke.

EvE on the other hand is a different beast, where the devs are only able to provide tools and modest controls.  While CCP might want the game to go in a certain direction, they cannot force null-sec to change unless they bring massive changes to the game structure -at great risk of pushing long time gamers out completely.  For a game that presents itself as a PvP game, there’s remarkably little of it outside of ganking – with the odd large battles occurring from time to time.  In fact, the massive battle a few weeks back was looked upon with derision since it essentially happened by accident and was fought over nothing.

EvE is at a point where the game isn’t about spaceships and moons and travel.  It’s about backdoor deals, scams, trades, alliances and stalemates.  It’s like there are two completely different games in EvE.  The starter experience is the complete opposite of the latter end.  And you can’t even bother entering the 2nd part of the game if you aren’t willing to make ridiculous sacrifices along the road.  And the joke is that CCP has stated multiple times that the people in high-sec are funding the null-sec playstyle, essentially the sheep are funding the wolves.

My concern isn’t with the game today, it’s with the direction of the game today.  Null-sec is moving towards larger, slower alliances with no middle or small alliances.  New players are put into a spot of eternal ganking or subservience to the large alliances to see anything outside of high-sec.  There’s no middle ground left.  The worst part isn’t that CCP is ignoring this – they are not – it’s that the people with the real control, the low-sec alliances, don’t see a problem in the first place.

Nostalgic Future

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Let’s talk a bit about nostalgia and the impact of looking forward, which seems to be all the rage with Mark Jacobs’ Camelot Unchained announcement.  I know I’ve touched on this topic a few times now but it seems like it needs a new look given the blog-o-sphere’s penchant for “old” games.  Just quick side-note here – I find it hilarious that Keen is playing a pirated version of UO, hosted by a 3rd party, playing for free and then complaining that the rule set is not one he agrees with.

Here’s my premise for nostalgia and its impact.  A game will grow so long as its core demographic gameplay elements remain stable.  EvE has grown because at the core, it’s been relatively the same experience with a few tweaks (albeit some major) to the game as a whole.  Anytime there was massive change, a significant drop happened.  WoW has grown over the years and cycled out its demographic at multiple points along development. 

This is an important distinction.  I do not know a single gamer that has not played WoW at some point.  I know of very few that have ever played EvE.  Of those players, the amount that have played EvE and still do are high while those that have played WoW and still do is quite low.  This is due to WoW being multiple games over the years (group-centric, quest centric, challenge centric, casual centric, story centric, etc…)

When someone comes along and says “X was the best game ever” they are pointing to a place in time where a single game appealed to their core needs.  DAoC was the “best ever RvRvR” because it was the ONLY one for a long time.  UO was the best PvP sandbox for the same reason.  When Trammel came, the core mechanics of the game changed and people moved on.

If you’re a game developer, make damn sure you have a target audience in mind and that you build for that audience.  Make sure your decisions are with that group in mind.  TOR’s failure is that the core demographic is clearly in players making alts and re-running the levelling content but was marketed towards the general MMO population.  DCUO is a perfect example of targeting the console crowd yet marketing to the PC.

Camelot Unchained will succeed if Mark Jacobs is able to target a specific demographic (admittedly small, say 50K) and cater to those needs without bleeding in the financial aspect of “moar playerz”.  This is the same concern I have for Firefall which seems to completely revamp its systems on a quarterly basis.  The same concern I had with D3 when it redid all skills 6 months before launch after 7 years in development.  And finally, it’s the main reason I have my doubts about Wildstar trying to appeal to everyone and succeeding.

Causation without Causality

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You know how they say people go to the internet to find people they agree with?  I always try to find some dissenting voices – if those voices can clearly communicate.  Tobold, Keen (not Graev, since I agree with him 99% of the time) and Syncaine tend to do the best job that I’ve seen so far.  Just to be clear, I don’t always disagree with them, just more often than not.  I would say that the common thread for all three is that they are incredibly nostalgic and unlikely to take change well.  Plus they are much more meta about gaming than I am.  I also think that’s why they get so many people posting on their topics, since they tend to take a very different approach than most.

Take Syncaine’s post about the problems of depth.  Read through the comments a bit to find that while the concept of the post is sound, the arguments used within are less so.  If Syncaine is the target demographic for PvP and has 3 accounts, is that the baseline we should assume?  PvP doesn’t run the economy as ISK needs to come from somewhere – and that is PvE.  Sort of how in WoW nearly all money in the system is now generated from  Daily Quests.  EvE is a success story in marketing and development for being able to keep so many people active.  It is not a success story to show that a new game today should have the same amount of depth.   If EvE were to launch today as it did back in the day, it would fail.  Not a question.  Others have tried with the same model, minus the community, and have all failed.  Worse than the PvE ones.

Game succeed and fail for dozens of reasons in terms of gameplay but they all fail because they don’t have enough money to keep the doors open.  No matter how good your game is, no matter how deep it is, you need people to play it.  People who are willing to invest in a game, PvE or PvP or Sandbox combination, are invested in their current game.  There aren’t 500K people out there who are willing to subscribe to a game long term because they are already subscribed to another game out there.  Developers need to aim smaller, much smaller and build from that point.

Punching Through

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I find it interesting that in a typical MMO, I’m moving through the story to get to the combat.  You know, the stuff that’s repetitive and burns people out like nobody’s business? As much as I like the social aspects of MMOs, the actual game part is severely lacking.  I don’t feel any investment in my character or the game outside of the meta.

Transfer that thought for a minute to single player games, where evidently the entire game revolves around you.  Clearly you need to be the king of the game, the be-all, end-all and the story is naturally tailored around that.  Choices matter because they are contained and you’re not affected by others.

I’ve played a couple hours of Ni No Kuni now, a JRPG of simple design but amazing execution.  While yes, you do take the prototypical white knight the portions outside of the main story are the true gems.  Your companions matter in more than simply being numbers – each means something.  The Wizard’s Book is more akin to the WAR Tome of Knowledge, slowing growing in complexity as you progress through the game.  Visual art and sound are so consistent and engaging that you don’t realize you’re in a game, more like a movie.

I miss the feeling of purpose and discovery that I get in single player games compared to the MMO space.  It seems like the latter is more of a lobby with numbers in order to chat rather than a game proper.

MMO Sub Fees Are Like the Dodo

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IGN has an op-ed piece on subscription fees for MMOs up for debate.

World of Warcraft is casting a long shadow with eight years of iteration and fresh content under its belt, asking anyone to pay the same for a new release seems ludicrous.

Above all, this is the most important quote to keep in mind for the argument and it applies to more than WoW – it applies to EvE just as much.

When SWTOR came out and people got to max level in a month or so, they looked at the game and then said “what now”?  The problem wasn’t that SWTOR didn’t have much to do (ehhh) but that compared to it’s competitor, it had a fraction of the things to do.  RIFT suffers from this as well and to its credit, it contains more in the recent expansion pack than WoW currently offers (minus pet battles) but even at that, it struggles to maintain market share.

It is extremely hard to argue that any new game coming to market can succeed with a subscription model unless it can maintain a core set of users and not require more than say, 200K players at any given time.  Other than WoW and EvE, the next game with the highest subscription is RIFT or LOTRO with about 250,000 subs.  200K, to me, would be a massive success.

This brings us to the The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar.  The former has been blunt to state that it’s going subscription while the latter has been mum on the subject.  TESO is directly competing, in every shape and form, with the existing fantasy themepark tropes and I see no reason for it to be able to break the 200K mark.  If the Star Wars IP can’t maintain the numbers (remember, it dropped subs by 90% from 3 million), how can this one?

Wildstar is a wild-card though.  While it does take the fantasy setting it is less themepark and more sandbox/themepark hybrid and doesn’t seem that it will require the same break-even point as TESO.

Are subs dead?  I wouldn’t say so exactly, more that subs are going to be smaller in scope and that any dev expecting to get a subscription game to market AND pull more than 100K players is taking a massive risk.

A New Model

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As everyone seems to be reporting, The Secret World is going Buy to Play (pretty much the same business model as Guild Wars 2) and Trion has let some people go.  The former is somewhat expected, though most thought Free to Play was the way to go.  The latter is a bit more complicated due to Rise of Nations and doesn’t speak directly to Rift’s future but could be a sign.

So what’s left in the subscription realm?  EvE and WoW as the two benchmarks for sandbox and themeparks.  They can afford to charge due to their size and business models.  Rift is a sort-of-straggler here in that the product is arguably better than WoW yet needs more mass to really justify the subscription.

Any game that comes out from now on in either realm needs to be as good or better than EvE/WoW in order to justify any subscription price.  As much as I think Wildstar looks cool, there is zero way it can compete in a sub-model with WoW.  The Elder Scrolls Online is doomed for failure on that model.    The problem with that model is that you can’t easily take it apart and change to another after launch (SWTOR is a prime example), it needs to be core to the design phase.

As Tobold alludes, the traditional single player games are converging to the model of buy the base game, pay for DLC.  We’re well past the days of Horse Armor but DLC is here to stay and a very valid way to extend the life of a game.  The argument of “on-disk dlc” is going to be a fun one, or rather the difference between true DLC and game unlocks (a-la Street Fighter).  I would think though, that the market itself will decide on the correct path as there appears to be nothing worse than an angry gamer.  BioWare has learned this the hard way – see Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect 3 and TOR – where I’m certain the cost to fight the bad press has been in the hundreds of millions.

So single player games are coming to be more like MMOs in both financial and play models while MMOs are dropping the idea of a subscription for a more a-la carte model in order to pick apart pieces of the pie.  The danger here is that the concept of an MMO community is gone.  The odds of a game keeping any given player’s attention for more than 3 months (as is the case with single player games) is low.  If you were going to play something for longer, you probably already are.

Makes you wonder where the in-roads are for any new game.

Free Isn’t Without Cost

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I mentioned previously that I was horribad at Planetside 2.  My death to kill ratio was atrocious and I put it up to lack of skill/understanding.  Truth be told, I’ve never played a game that offered zero hand holding and simply dropped you in the middle of a death match.  I am certain that someone has botted a new account creation scheme just to farm new arrivals.  And that brings me to this post’s topic, F2P and bots.

When SWTOR went F2P and decided to have zero entry to the door, they basically said to the botters “come on in”. Without restrictions, they could potentially farm entire zones, flood the market and all sorts of economic destruction without any real repercussions.  BioWare was smart enough to realize this and essentially paralyzed the non-payers with a huge wall.  Though, if they buy but a single item, they still get a lot of access – enough to cause serious damage.

Diablo 3 is rife with botters and this is due to the low cost of entry.  You can get D3 for 20$ or less.  Gold has an absolute floor of 1.25$ per million, meaning you need to sell 25 million gold to break even on the RMAH.  I can assure you that this is no challenge as most bots can make > 1 million per hour with little effort.  So let’s say you’re a botter and you want to make money.  Buy 50 accounts.  Farm for 2 weeks (14 days), 12 hours a day.  You’ve made 7000$.  I could go on about this particular point, but suffice to say that the RMAH is the cause of massive inflation in D3 and an overall failure from a gaming perspective.  From a business perspective, Blizz makes a cut on every gold sold… so you know.

Planetside 2 has zero barriers to entry and zero barriers to play.  Every purchase is a convenience purchase (to level faster) and there’s no actual trade in-game, so the economy can’t break.  What does happen however is that players can cheat the system with hacking tools: aimbots, speed boosters, etc…  SOE can ban the players but the players can just as easily come back for the same experience.  Blocking IPs doesn’t work, proxies fix that.  Blocking hacking techniques doesn’t work either, they just build better tools.  SOE has a massive problem here, where the concept of “equal footing” is a key marker for the value of the game.  If a player doesn’t feel they have a fair chance at winning, why play?  With no barrier to access, anyone can hack their way to the top.  Even if they get banned, they can do it again with no cost but time.

F2P with no barrier is a risk.  An open-world persistent PvP game with next to no penalty for cheating is a disaster waiting to happen.

Let’s Pretend

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We’re a week away, so let’s recap!

Let’s say you’re a really big developer with  solid fan base.  Let’s say you partner with a massive publisher.  Let’s say you have been using the largest IP in the world and have had tremendous success with it.  Let’s say you get tapped to make an MMO with that.  What do you do to try and find success?  Repeat it of course!

Repeat what worked in the single player game and throw in more players.  Repeat what the largest MMO has as well.  Don’t innovate, don’t provide any “out of box” thinking, just use what you know works.  Oh, and throw more money at it than some countries have GDP.  Hype it to heck and back.  Get massive pre-orders 6 months before launch.  Sell nearly 3 million copies.

Don’t forget to ignore beta feedback or all feedback for that matter than you don’t agree with.   Oh, don’t let players copy players to the test server either, and wipe after every patch so no one can test in live either.  Watch as that untested material, of which you had no experience developing previously nor had valuable feedback, turn away the playerbase in droves.  Watch after less than 6 months you have to consolidate over 90% of your assets due to player loss.  Blame the payment model.

Try a new payment model!  But wait, don’t forget you don’t have experience in that either and you need to generate cash to stay afloat, somewhere near the 500K subscription mark no less (which in F2P terms means having 5 million players at a generous 10:1 ratio).  Now, gouge players and penalize them so much that actually buying the content isn’t attractive at all and that a subscription is the only way to play the game you designed.  So, force the players to use the payment model you know doesn’t work.

Now, sit back and watch.  Wonder how the largest IP in the world, the largest publisher in the world, one of the largest developers in the world with the largest budget the genre has ever seen was able to fail in such a spectacular fashion.

I am so utterly baffled by this past year that I can’t even be disappointed.

Balance for the Sake of Balance

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Wildstar is on my map for future MMO.  It seems more focused on the action/adventure portion than the “mash 1-2-3” of current games.  I also like the art style, and if you’re going to spend dozens of hours staring at a screen, might as well like what you see too.

There’s only a bit of stuff on the site so far but one of the more interesting links is on balance.  Sure, you get the typical crud about trying to and actually achieving balance but some of the more interesting comments are:

Gazimoff: Glass cannons that are all glass and no cannon. If I’m playing a spellcaster, give me a Yamoto Cannon, not a Pea Shooter.
sirchatters: When the developers give up unique classes and just make everything fair/even. I prefer a few paths be bad than all the same.
qn2Quid: I get annoyed when special abilities are removed to create class balance, classes should be different and feel unique
jleithart: When I don’t understand why things are nerfed. patch notes should give an explanation for the reason I’m nerfed.
jkkennedytv: many players confuse 1v1 for game balance. Biggest frustration is for devs having to filter misinformation.
Gazimoff: Also: Buff Spellslingers.

This is why prefer Rift’s class balance efforts to WoW’s.  Rift knows that some builds are simply horribad and some are great.  It doesn’t focus on the details of the builds but more on the feeling of the builds.  WoW has all specs having to be withing 5% of each other, which is simply impossible to do when trying to balance raids, dungeons, single player, duels, arena and battlegrounds.  A mage should be a glass cannon.  Most games today make them a ranged tank.  Games either need to accept that balance isn’t possible at a high level or build their systems to ignore the need for balance (lower difficulty).

Wildstar is doing a few things right.

  1. The focus is on PvE first and PvP will fall in later.  Focus.
  2. Balance on fun skill vs number skills. This is a major problem I have with ToR.
  3. Due to the telegraphing mechanics of the game, CC really ins’t a factor.  AE attacks put markers on the ground, dodge them.  Active combat!
  4. Skills work on everyone.  In most games, (TOR especially) a bunch of skills don’t work on bosses for balance reasons.  They will work with diminishing returns but they will work from the start.