Tag Archives: design

Now That's New

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Leveling in Rift takes a while.  I think there were more 90s after day 1 than there are level 60s after nearly a week, in terms of proportion.  I’m 51 and 3/4 or so, after about 2 hours.

I started in Cape Jule and moving to the next zone everything is level 53.  So I hoped by into my magic gate and tried the second zone.  I modified my soul (for what seems like the 20th time in 4 days) to something that allows me to do some AE killing more effectively and you know, survive those darn attacks.  Working out pretty well.

I mentioned in an earlier post about the quest breakdown in SL.  Everything that isn’t a story quest seems to reward either cash or a new type of currency.  This currency is used to buy Adventurer gear.  This stuff is upgradeable with tokens you buy with more of that currency.  I’ve been a fan of interlinked systems for some time, especially when you have multiple paths to achieve a given goal.  You can get these currencies from pretty much any PvE activity, outside of crafting.  It fits solo players, group players, rift hunters or guilds.

At this pace, I don’t think I’ll be hitting 60 for another few weeks, maybe not until the 1 month mark.  Think about that for a second.  When is the last time you played an MMO where you didn’t hit max level before your first month was over?

Hats off Trion.

Rift Take 2

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Yesterday was working against me for some MMO time.  I got home exhausted, took care of the squirts and when I finally had a chance to get into Rift, I got a message that the servers were coming down for some maintenance.  Argh.  I was able to log back in near midnight while the youngest one needed a drink.

A few important notes though.  There are two new continents that are each as big, or bigger, than the original world.  The original world had a good pace of content from 1-50, with no real “dead” zones.  Compare this to WoW and quite a few useless zones (Blasted Lands, Azshara, Thousand Needles, Desolace and quite a few more), Rift seems to have a knack of putting in relevant content for their zones.  I would say the time to get to 50 back then was decent – a couple weeks of effort.  TOR took me under 24 hours of play time.  My WoW monk did 1-90 in under 2 days played (albeit with heirlooms).

I’m a few hours in now, less than 50% into the first level (of 10) and have just had piles of experience from different sources jump in.  Let’s count the ways of getting experience:

  • Complete a quest-giver quest
  • Complete an item pick up quest
  • Complete a loot pick up quest
  • Complete a “wild” quest based on kills
  • Complete a Rift
  • Complete an Invasion
  • Complete an Instant Adventure
  • Complete a dungeon
  • Complete world PvP
  • Complete a battleground
  • Kill something

All of these items assume from the start that you’re in a cooperative game.  Where Wilhelm talks about the problems of questing in EQ2, they pretty much do not exist in Rift.  I’ve rarely seen a time where I was not grouped and didn’t have the “join group” button above the screen.  Doing so has tremendous advantages.

Most enemies are of the Ember Isle difficulty, meaning that if you have a fresh 50, you’re going to have trouble here.  Grouping makes that easy.  Some quests need you to kill 20 or more enemies.  Grouping cuts that number down really fast and you’re getting experience for those kills even if you aren’t swinging the club.  Invasions are all over the place and are likely to kill you alone, groups help.  Groups aren’t silent either – there always seems to be some chat going on in a relatively friendly place.

I missed this place.

Gating Content

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I’ve talked about this a few times in the past but it would appear that Blizzard is unable to address the issue with any level of clarity.  From an MMO design perspective, gating is good.  Gating is the proverbial carrot on the stick to get people to log back in again and again.  Gating can be done with time, skill, money… nearly any variable you can think of.  Typically though, the MMO factor is time.

You want to kill the toughest boss?  You need to put in the time to learn the pattern and get the gear to beat him.  You want that special mount?  Grind that faction baby!  You want that unique pet?  Grind out pet battles!

The issue isn’t the fact that there’s a carrot, it’s the type of carrot for the type of horse.  To assume that all carrots are made the same when your game has 10 million players is lunacy.  I know it’s not design by democracy but it’s also not design by hubris either.

Faction gain is currently gated behind not only a time mechanic but a system mechanic as well.  The fact that you are limited to 8 quests a day and that it will take 20 days of quests to reach your goal is one issue.  The fact that those 8 quests can take 90 minutes (damn Goat Steaks) is another one completely.

Putting the 20 day gate in front of a character (not a player) isn’t a huge deal.  It is a large design swing decision from the past 4 years though.   Putting 6 of those gates in front of the player at the same time forces the player to choose which one is a priority.  The hiccup is that they can get those 6 done in 20 days OR they can take up to 120 days to get them all done.  That is a massive variance.  And that’s per character.  Bob forbid you have 2 or more (say one is a pure DPS).   Oh, I forgot to mention that the currency used to buy the rewards for capping out faction doesn’t come from gaining faction?  It comes from running dungeons?  Kind of important.

The system mechanics are another hurdle.  While one faction might be simple (Cloud Serpent comes to mind) others are simply stupid.  Extremely low drop rates, heavy hitting enemies that can kill a fresh 90 in a few hits, fast (and slow) spawns, thick enemy groups and crazy competition make many faction quests a chore to move through.  Anyone who’s done the Goat Steaks quest for the Tillers has probably found the worst quest in all of Panda-land.  Now, it isn’t that these quests are hard that’s the problem, it’s the aggregate effect of it all.  6 hard quests a day is doable.  50 is not.

Finally, there’s the entire principle of putting a dungeon/gear carrot in a non-dungeon/gear process, while still requiring the dungeon process.  Let’s not forget that you can’t simply pick a faction to get all your rewards, you actually need to get them all.

As individual systems, each has value and design importance.  The issue is in the aggregate impact on players.  It’s like a group of people sat in a room, divvied up the various components, designed in isolation and then patched it all together.  There lacks the cohesive vision we’ve come to expect from Blizzard (mind you D3 follows this trend) and that is distressing from a company that traditionally could do no wrong.

It's a Storm Alright

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A few gigs of download and Storm Legion is up and running.

Rift Storm Legion

Now, you might not like the art style of Rift and that’s cool but you have to admit that being able to see a vista and actually visit  the places you can see is cool.

As with all expansion launches, there are service issues.  What there isn’t is server queues, which is awesome.  What there is, is lag, which is sad.

I tried dimensions quickly and I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time tweaking mine.  It’s nice that you have a selection of dimensions rather than a single setting for everyone.  Good call.  The toolset is solid as well.

The third nicest part is the auto-looting of cash.  Drops are typically garbage and unless you want to harvest a creature (skin, herbs, whatever) there isn’t much need to loot.  What is awesome is killing and getting the cash deposited directly into your bags.  Great!

The second nicest part, for me, is the organic questing.   You still see ! around but you only get 1-2 quests at a time.  Otherwise, you need to actually go out in the world and pick up the quests naturally.  Either by killing an enemy and unlocking the quest or picking up a specific item.  This is such a different model than WoW/EQ that I’m quite taken aback.

The nicest is the open tagging system.  Now, imagine your typical tagging system where the first person gets the loot.  Imagine that being the only thing the first attacker gets.  Everyone else gets exp and quest credit, even if not grouped.  You need to kill 20 beasts?  Kill anything that you see, along with the random people around you.  Even better, press the auto-group button on the top of your screen to keep moving along.

I’m only a couple hours in but dang if I’m not having a blast.

What's in an Expansion?

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Gamespy has a quick article with guesses about the D3 expansion.

Here’s my list of what will be in it versus what should be in it.

In

  • Act 5.  As long as Act 3.
  • Set in Mount Arreat again (or some other location we’ve seen before)
  • Hunting for Adria
  • New class – melee/casting hybrid.  Likely the druid
  • Level boost (10) and a few new skills per class
  • New crafting mechanic that has some purpose.  Rune-like enchants.
  • New item art, serving no in-game purpose

What should be in:

  • Randomized maps
  • Mode that doesn’t allow AH and has ladder
  • Companion quests
  • A social voting system to catch botters/hackers.

Knowing who is running the show, I’m not holding my breath.  D3 was certainly profitable but I doubt Blizz is calling it a success.  The RMAH experiment was a success in practical terms.  They now know how it works and how it interacts with the game.  Clearly it was a “buy to win” mode since launch.  The game also released about 6 months early, from the sheer amount of bugs in game at launch.  A profitable lessons learned event.  Can’t be mad about that I supose.

TESO Video

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The Elder Scrolls Online – Gameplay Video.

TESO has a new video out explaining the high level goals of the game.

Of note, they are going for an instanced mega server.  This is smart move and why any game today doesn’t go this route is lunacy.  +1

Combat has traditionally been garbage for the Elder Scrolls and Bethesda games in general.  I’m not sure if this is an active system (only hit when in cross-hairs) or passive (soft target).  It sounds the former, which only Tera has ever done well.  Smart if it works though.  +1

Zones will be phased based on past accomplishments, from the werewolf bit I saw. I can’t see how this will work without phasing when you have multiple players.  Also not sure how you would interact with real people and NPCs if all towns are phased.

Character customization seems limited.  Everyone looks grey.  Sure, you get dark grey and light grey, but everyone is grey. In a game series where player colors are muted in order to make the world stand out, I’m not sure how this will work with hundreds of people around you, especially PvP.

Character progression though sounds neat.  4 basic classes (solider, rogue, mage, healer it seems).  Skill sets seem dependent on outfits though, sort of like The Secret World.  If you’re a dagger player you’ll have a different skill set than if you were using a bow.  Neat.  I’m not sure if the game is skill based or not, which I would think it has to be in some fashion.  How stats interact with equipment should be interesting to see.  TESO games are traditionally stat-less but skill heavy.  You don’t find a sword of +10, you find a sword that absorbs hit points.  Think of UO I guess.

The end game seems the traditionally fare of dungeons and raids.  Ho-hum.  PvP looks like its trying to follow the old DAoC model of realm vs realm vs realm.  I have seen many companies try to get this to work, I’ve only ever seen 1 do it right.  Balancing PvP and PvE is impossible, it’s just a fact.  Where TESO puts their eggs will matter here.  I vouch for PvE since Bethesda has ZERO PvP experience.

 

There are a lot of good ideas here but then again, we’ve heard them all before.  The difference here is that the game is due in less than a year and mechanics are being discussed instead of content (TOR).  Is TESO going to bring enough new to the table to keep people around?  It depends solely on their ability to make players feel like they have an investment.

And…Curtain

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Last night I was able to finish the quest line of dailies to get my flying snake (dirty!).

wow cloud serpent

Today, I was able to finish my daily quest chain to fully unlock my farm.  You can see the final part of it happening here, with that big brute knocking back the final rocks.

wow tillers farm

The only thing I haven’t done much of is pet battles.  I used to be pretty strong into Pokemon but I don’t think I want to pay 15$ a month for that single service.

I’ve done plenty of scenarios, plenty of dungeons.  The former are ok but are so distinct from the rest of the game it feels like an afterthought.  Would be awesome if scenarios were somehow linked to the rest of the game, giving a sense of progress.  Dungeons are a bit better in that they give loot (I’m about 30 runs in and 4 pieces of gear) though again, there’s nothing inherently linked.  Everything is too meta.  Raids are just complex dungeons.

MMOs are about people and I’ve met my fair share.  Overall, most are nice but I think that has more to do with MoP being fresh.  Up until week 3 of the expansion, there were still server queues.  Week 4 came around and nothing.  Nosy Gamer has a longstanding post about this issue of player populations.  I expect that by the end of November, any uptick that WoW has seen will be gone.  Especially given the design decisions of late (*cough*Brawler’s Guild*cough*).

The “new” content for this expansion pack has been consumed.  Blizzard gated certain things with the time factor but not skill or story or player investment.  Gone are the days where you do X to unlock Y, then Y to unlock Z, then Z for A.  While I understand that the gating issues of TBC were bad in regards to raids they are NOT bad in terms of PvE content.  Sandboxes thrive on that model.  Instead of giving me 5 hours of work split over 5 days, how about I can do that 5 hours in 1 day instead?  That way, if I miss a day, I’m not feeling lost.  And if I get an extra hour one day, I have something to do.

So what did Panda-land bring?  Same dungeon design (easier that Cata, harder than LK, 30m chunks).  Same raids (though LFR from the start).  Nearly all PvE content locked behind dailies (artificial time barrier).  New air mount behind quest (accomplishment I suppose).  The farm is the start of a player home (far short of the line).  Pet battles are a collector’s dream (and achievers) but that can’t be all there is.

Would I say that MoP was worth the cash?  In terms of $ per hour, yes.  In relative terms compared to other MMOs, no.  There has to be more.

Oh, It's a Wave Alright

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Massively has a post on a recent meeting of the minds in regards to F2P.  Cryptic (Champions Online, Star Trek), Riot (League of Legends) and EA (SWTOR) all have a bit to say, though the focus is on the first and last in that list.

I learned that Craig Zinkievich is now the COO of Cryptic.  I remember him from the STO days of beta and launch.  He quit when they went F2P then came back a few months later.  Any comments that Craig puts out, I tend to take with a grain of salt.  He’s a solid dev, smart head on his shoulders but sometimes it seems like he lacks an understanding of the genre.  A forest for the trees type of guy.  Anyways.

Craig’s point that SWTOR was the last great hope for subscription games rings hollow.  I’ve said it about 100 times now but SWTOR failed because of lack of incentive to pay 15$ a month to play.  Once you reached level 50, there was simply nothing to do of value past the first week.  I don’t get why Craig can’t see this as it’s the exact same reason STO went F2P.  If you provide people value for their money, they will pay.  WoW, Rift and EvE are only 3 of the examples needed to push this point across.

EA has a good line that basically says F2P competition is good for gamers as it increases the quality of games within the pool.  While I agree with the comment in spirit, this is so massively not true it’s hard to contain my morning coffee.  If this were true, then there wouldn’t be any Prada purse knockoffs and Wal-Mart wouldn’t be around.  Competition doesn’t increase overall quality, it decreases it to absurd levels.  You might have an outlier with a great product but the mass is still garbage.  The only time this comment is true is when competition breaks a monopoly.  The iPhone smart phone monopoly and the web browser monopoly are great examples.  F2P is currently a massive sea of garbage.  Finding anything of quality is more of a measure of luck than content.  Hello Zynga?

F2P is not the wave of the future; it is simply a “new” monetization platform.  Are the design decisions for SWTOR going to be different now than they were before?  No, it’s still a MMORPG themepark-a-palooza.  There are still raids, PvP, dailies and all that junk.  Instead, they will nickel and dime you through that content.  It’s simple math.  They need money to operate.  How they get that money is up to them.

The difference between a F2P model and a subscription model is in the return on investment. (ROI)  A sub model has to wait many years to get all the cash back.  SWTOR could have waited 3 years and started printing money but the ROI requirement from investors was to get the cash faster.  F2P can make all their money back in the first 2 months (many Asian models are based on this as is Zynga) by gouging players who will pay MORE than 15$ per month.  Of course, that initial blip of cash disappears after your game hits month 3.  Guild Wars 2 will be showing that off pretty quickly I bet.

Monetary Systems

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Talking to my brother made me think a bit more about WoW and the economy.   In the real world, the economy is either in a closed or open system.  A closed system says that there is a set amount of money to be moved around people and no new money can be created.  Think of this as a poker game with no buy-ins.  An open system has no controls on the money going into the pot.  The Zimbabwean dollar is a super good example.  They’re on version 3 and I think the conversion rate is 1: 1 trillion, trillion.  Just massive inflation.  In North America and Europe, we have a hybrid system.  You can’t print money but the banks can.  This is what drives inflation.  If it was closed, then the people are the short end of the stick could never buy anything since the rich would have it all (which is a sort of problem today).  In no system is there a way to remove money.  You might throw pennies away but that’s actually against the law.

WoW is like our world.  There are specific controls as to how money goes into the system.  The difference is that there are controls to remove money as well.  Quests and item drops add money to the system, in a controlled manner.  Blizz knows exactly how much money goes into the game everyday.  The removal is in money sinks or purchases.  So repairs, flights, AH fees and NPC purchases all lower the amount of money you have.  Auction Houses just transfer money between hands (though there is a nominal AH fee).  Inflation in a game happens when the controls that put money into the system are not proportionate to the ones removing money.  Since there’s always more money entering that leaving, the pool gets bigger.  People who are already rich are going to proportionately get richer in this model too, as compared to the average.  The old saying “it takes money to make money” applies.  In order to balance both the dispersion of wealth AND the lack of money sinks, Blizzard put in vanity items (mounts and bags) a while back.  They now have a Black Market Auction House where items are selling for 50-250K.  I have about 200K over all my characters, so even though I’m considered “rich” I’m still not rich enough for this market.

My monk is a great example of this problem.  When I started him, I gave him 800g to at least be able to afford a flying mount at 60.  He needed it as the gold input wasn’t high enough at my levelling speed.  Flying is likely a luxury for any new player.  By the time he hit 90 however, he had over 10K in cash and had spent an extra 10K on more flying options.  This was without using the Auction House once.  Obviously, the money taps are a tad too high as there’s no luxury for my monk, everything is affordable.  In the time since he hit 90, he sold all his cooking materials (meat from the kills), did some dailies (@20g per turn in) and ran some dungeons.  He’s over 20K now, with not a whole lot to spend it on.  It really makes you wonder how gold sellers are making any type of profit in game when money is absolutely of no concern anymore.

State of the Game Over

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Syp has a post up in regards to the PR spin that SWTOR is giving before the F2P launch.  I tend to agree with the majority of his observations though with a few additions of my own.

Format

When I first read it, I thought” holy wall of text Batman!”  Then I thought “finally a state of the game, 1 month shy of the 1 year anniversary”.  The next, “Jeff Hickman is running the boat now?  Hmmm”.  Still, the format is solid, a quick intro and followed by a few items with descriptors.  I’m thinking it took him all of an hour to write that out and wondering why it took so damn long for this type of contact to occur.  +1

Content

Saying you were EP of Warhammer Online is not something to brag about unless you can speak to a specific feature set/time period of work.  The only thing I could think of that would be worse is introducing yourself as Bill Roper.

The issues stated don’t make sense.  If your game was awesome, people would be playing it.  They aren’t leaving because of the subscription fee.  These two items cannot be exclusive.  Slow updates is also a weird one.  They are certainly slower than Rift but they are lightyears faster than WoW.  If you bring a quality product to the table, that offers a superior experience to the free variants, people WILL PAY YOU FOR IT.  Hate WoW as much as you want but it’s the reason it can charge for money.  It’s the reason Rift and EvE do too.  If you’re going F2P, then you’re admitting you do not have the quality of game you think people should pay for.  Turbine admitted it (LOTRO, DDO), Cryptic as well.

Losing Devs

Balls-on for talking about it.  Shame the reasons given are as reasonable as pixie dust.  You don’t lose the owners, the EP, 90% of the content leads and 30% of all the staff when things are peachy.  Normal cycle is one thing (say a 10-20% turnover rate) but you don’t lose 5 big names in a week.  Whether they left on their own accord or were asked to leave, that’s a different matter.

Bugs all over the place

This was such a massive issue in beta, it’s a wonder that it’s still a problem in live.  Certainly the Hero Engine is partly to blame for this but jeebus, get some better testing practices ASAP.  BW games are traditionally riddled with bugs but you simply can’t afford that practice in an MMO.  At least not while people are paying you to fix it.

Server Population

Who in their right mind thinks this is an issue for the general public to see?  There’s no one left on these servers, consolidate them.  Done.

Summary

State of the Game addresses are supposed to talk about what’s happened between this one and the previous one.  They then state what’s planned in the near future and some vision statements.  Answering questions is good but it doesn’t belong here, it should be its own thing.  So a cheer for actually addressing your paying audience but boo for doing 2 weeks before they all decide to stop paying.