Tag Archives: design

There’s Testing and Then There’s Testing

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Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to be in most every beta I opted in for.  I started it back when beta was actually a beta and not a sales pitch.  Most betas today are so polished that they are really just soft launches and not test platforms.

Then you have stress tests.  I work in the IT field.  Oddly enough, yesterday I was writing up an FRTM and test plan.  Stress tests are for two purposes.  First is authentication (logon screen) and the second is core systems.  Think of it as front door and inside the house.  Stress tests on the front door today should not be public.  There are hundreds of testing options for testing capacity on authentication.  The actual fallout of having your public test this feature is extremely poor press and word of mouth.   NDAs are all fine and dandy but people talk anyhow and a 21 gig character creation tool sells nothing.

What you want from a true stress test is putting a bunch of people inside the house and trying the various appliances.  You want 1000 people trying to PvP.  You want 1000 people to craft at the same time.  You want 1000 people looting at the exact same time.  Your transactional services need to be pushed to capacity and black box testing can only get you so far.

If you want to spend 3 days stress testing and the only thing you’re testing is the logon screen, then you just wasted 3 days.

Launch Windows

The average public beta of a new MMO is 60 days.  This gives some balancing numbers and time to tweak systems.  Most NDA’s drop on public beta to create buzz and word of mouth.  SWTOR is a recent example of a game with such a window, character wipes and a fairly strong NDA.  It was a rather bad beta, compared to previous ones.  RIFT is the complete opposite.  Beta was polished and the core task for testers was balance.  Balance takes time and takes recursive tests and non-logical functions.  That’s why you put people in the game, to do stupid things.

Considering we have a few big MMOs launching this year, I am somewhat curious as to the status of beta windows and NDA drops.  The goal isn’t to put something out the door.  That ship has sailed.   Fingers crossed.

Sexism in Games

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First, apologies for the lack of posts.  Work is requiring an abnormal amount of time and it leaves just enough for family and not much else.  Now onto the topic!

I’ve written about it before, I’ve commented before, the message is often lost in time.  Jewel has a new topic on it, similar to Tipa’s of yore.  If you read the comment I posted, it summarizes my point but may not do it justice.  In summary

  • Tobold and Syncaine are “professional” bloggers, on two different sides of the spectrum but who use the same toolset to instigate discussion.  A logical opinion doesn’t get much activity, but one that’s offensive/unrealistic does.  I think both do a great job at it and the bloggers as a whole gain from it.
  • Sexism in games is less and less prevalent.  Game of the Year candidates are rarely victimized by this title.  XCOM, Ni No Kuni, Last of Us, Fez, FTL, Grimrock, etc…
  • Tomb Raider has done a 180, with a strong heroine.  GTA5 is such an effective parody that sometimes you forget that it’s making fun of the genre.
  • There are outliers (Dragon’s Crown) but more often than not, it’s a conscious decision similar to point #1
  • FPS games are not so much sexist in design (racist is an another topic) but the actual targeted demographic (16 year old males) is, which means the game suffers for it.
  • MOBAs are a combination MMO and FPS.  Same demographic as the latter, same design as the former, which is an interesting problem.
  • MMOs… they are a different beast altogether.

MMOs, or as a by-product, MOBAs, suffer from the “High Fantasy” curse.  Comic books and Conan really exemplify this issue.  The demo was in the 50s and it really exploded in the late 70s early 80s with women’s lib, freedom of expression and all that jazz.  If you’re a designer today, there are extremely high odds that you were a kid from that period (e.g., Metzen, Samwise, Brad McQuaid and co…).  They were raised with a particular art style, a single art style really, and incorporated it into every game.  As game development matures and new blood is brought into the fold, art has shifted dramatically.  The independent game movement exemplifies this.  New IPs as well (Mirror’s Edge) purposefully break the mold.  Eastern games have not evolved as it is still core to their culture (manga in particular).

The target demo for MMOs is the 18-24 year old, by and large.  There are very few studies on female gamers within that demo and the majority of marketing is focused on the “serial hooker” item line. My term.  Women from pre-teen to adult are presented with a hyper sexualized media onslaught and games are simply following suit to meet the dollars.  The Blizzard MOBA fiasco is proof enough that there is a simple level of ignorance on the topic.

So if you combine developer historics, target demographics, marketing budgets and simple general media messaging, it’s clear that there’s an uphill battle for equality in such massive games.  If you’re going to spend $100 million +, your marketing team is going to push you a certain way.  Gaming as a whole is changing at the indie level and mid-market game level.  Once the big guys realize that super AAA games are cost negative because they are alienating a core demographic with money to spare, it’ll be an avalanche of change.

Like A Ghost

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It appears that Greg Street, aka Ghostcrawler, is leaving Blizzard for other opportunities. Considering he’s been the design face for 3 expansions, this is a big enough deal.

From Vanilla to the end of BC we had one mentality and strategy – integrated and complex systems with little give. WotLK, Cataclysm and MoP were all about separating systems and adding accessibility. WoD is a feather in that cap, from what I’ve gathered so far.

For good and bad, Wow is Greg’s puppy and it will be interesting to see who will be left to pick up.

FF14 Addendum

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So further to the previous post, I redid a dungeon run with some different folk. I changed nothing on my end, same healing pattern and skill set. The tank was amazing. Not so much in terms of damage mitigated (marginally better) but in overall understanding of the role.

Taking that in for a minute, FF14 does not suffer from the heroes curse. SWTOR exemplifies that problem by having every fight be against 4-5 people, even in solo fights. There’s just no skill involved. Press buttons for pew pew, they die or you die. The go-go runs in Wow are the same.

FF14 only puts you against multiple targets in group settings and rarely more than 3 at a time. A pull of 4 targets takes a lot of group skill. As a White Mage, I need to CC (sleep) most fights to reduce overall damage since I can’t heal through. It means that every action is weighed against another and that you need to understand core battle strategies to succeed. If you zerg, you will die.

I try to compare the combat to Neverwinter, in that movement is key but the speed of combat allows for more complex situations.

It’s like comparing Hungry Hungry Hippos to Chess. Both are fun but rarely to the same audience.

Pew Pew for the QQ

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The tears, they taste delicious. For what seems 5 years now, gaming in themeparks has been more or less the same ride. A few tweaks here and there but the dance has always been the same. That leads to expectations and thereby disappointment. How people deal with the latter is the subject today!

The culture of go-go-go still persists but is enabled by games that only reward success and don’t punish failure. If there’s no risk, then people try crazy things. Zubon has something along those lines.

That mentality combined with a relatively stable combat format for the past few years leaves people for little patience. If it takes too long, then it’s broken.

I started playing as a DPS back in the day. Fun times, lots of pressure to pick the right target, CC everything. WotLK came out and that model died. I stopped raiding by that point. When you level, DPS is the only option in most games. Grouping mechanics (or social ones) are typically horrendous compared to single player DPS. That path of least resistance.

This then means that unless you’ve been grouping along the path, you’re going to be a bad healer and an even worse healer. And because the model is static, and easy once you know it, people expect you to know it. It’s not so much a learning curve but a cliff.

I’ve tanked before and I spent most of my time healing now. There’s a rythm needed to do it well when the content is challenging. Overgeared only happens once you’ve gone through it. So when I see a new player come along I think “that’s brave”.

I mentioned previously that I think FF14’s mechanics are so challenging and restrictive compared to the standard that only those with interest stick around. It is extremely unfriendly to the MMO tourist. Consequently, the level of patience in dungeon runs is extremely high compared to average. Players know it’s a slog. They know CC is important and hard. They know that a bad ping can kill you.

There’s some comfort knowing the people around you can sympathize. It’s just so strange to experience again after all these years.

Crating in MMOs

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Before I get depe into FF14’s crafting system, I want to look at crafting in MMOS in general. Crafting is for many games, the only tangible player-created item set, meaning it has personal value. It’s a stamp on the world, saying “I did this”.

Crafting doesn’t operate in a vacuum, it has its own economy. Faucets and sinks are required for any balanced economy to work long time. Currently, the major sink is power creep. This means items lose value because better items come along. Some games implement destroying items, either through combat or as crafting materials. The former is by far the most effective but also the most difficult to balance.

Faucets are all over the place. Crafting materials come from anywhere and the resulting items are often on-par or of lower quality than what you can get from other means (questing, dungeon, world drops). If the faucet is too large, then the value is nil since they are too easy to acquire.

UO had an interesting mechanic for crafting. There were faucets, though limited, for crafting and item drops. Some items required multiple inventive paths to complete, like the old aquarium. Tinkering, carpentry and a few more had no real world drops. Plus, there were tons of sinks. Break on use, loss on death among others.

EQ had a multi-stage crafting process but the items had little to no value, outside of 1 or 2 per skill tree. There were no sinks, unless you let a corpse rot… but no one did that past level 10.

Wow put in a simple crafting UI at the start. Items had some minor value while leveling but a lot of value at max level. That has changed today where the items crafted have no value outside of 3 skills and are used more as combat buffs.

EvE is based on this concept. Few faucets, many sinks, an economy 100% on crafted items. Unfortunately, the game is based on a PvP mindset that is difficult to compare to PvE focused games.

Nevewinter’s crafting is more of a minigame, which can be done offline. It’s fun but not really well integrated.

GW2 is a bit too much like WoW for my tastes.  Crafting is queued, has no value outside of max level and even then, barely any impact.

FF14 is a slight change of pace. Crafting is an integrated system with multiple steps and dependencies.  There are really few faucets since there are no world drops.  This makes crafting rather important in the large scheme of things.  Even the low level stuff is used by other players, since one character can play every class.

I’m certainly curious as to how the next few games will address this system.  It’s so integrated into the MMO mindset now, that we’re sure to see it.  Just not sure which variant.

System Design & Vision

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Given WoD’s interesting take on design, i.e. simplification above all else, I think a bit of an overview of system design is in order.  I’ve mentioned in the past that I do this sort of work, outside of gaming, and that the skill set required to do this well is rather rare.  This is a “forest for the trees” problem where most people are only able to see what’s in front of them and not what’s around them.  A recent problem in my work is integrating toolsets for account management.  There are trust requirements, security levels, agreements, risk tolerance and about 10 other items that pop to mind.  Compare to the client who says “this should be easy”. Design is successful when it looks easy.   When you only look at numbers and don’t have context, you make bad decisions.

When I look back on older MMOs, the ones with multiple systems who interacted with each other, we could see some synergy.  While farming tubers in WoW vanilla was a pain, those that did it supported their guilds.  Resist gear is another one.  UO, for many years, had nearly all systems integrated – a tinker was a useful profession.  You couldn’t really be a jack of all trades or even a specialist.  You needed other people to succeed.  FF14 is the first themepark in a longtime where I’ve seen system integration – crafters are required to modify gear.

Over the years and multiple design decisions, WoW has moved away from system integration.  Keys, reputation, raid gating, resistances, crafting were all core in Burning Crusade.  This meant that there was a large skill gap in BC if you came late to the party.  If people were on Black Temple, it was a nightmare to get new blood to the game.  So participation was really high at expansion launch and abysmal at later patches.  That being said, it created strong bonds between groups.  At the tail end of BC, the design team underwent a shift.  The people who were present at conception of WoW moved on to other aspects and the live team came up.  This was the coming of Ghostcrawler.

Previous to WotLK, classes had massive balance patches.  Rogues, famously, underwent zero changes from launch until BC.  Each decision was carefully considered, the impacts measured and the changes tested.  This was a long dev cycle.  When WotLK did come out, the process changed.  Class patches were all over the place.  Resistance was gone.  Stats were simplified, drastically.  Group quests were gone.  Leveling was a separate system from end game.  Reputation meant little.  Many of the links between systems were removed and it made it a much simpler game.

Cataclysm is a rather prime example of the design team being somewhat disconnected.  Many of the decisions during this expansion were supposed to be simple but in fact had rather large repercussions to the entire game.  If you were to isolate each decision, in themselves they make sense.  On the whole, which is exactly what a system architect does, there were some rather conflicting issues that never got resolved.  MoP reversed a lot of those hiccups but then put in a gating (daily) system at launch that sucked momentum until later patches.

So two competing design intents.  Vanilla + BC was about integration, group interaction, complexity and created a rather elitist model.  WotLK until now has been pushing for a more segregated model, where systems are not dependent on each other and focus is on the casual individual.  I can’t say which one was better as they were in different periods of time and targeted different groups.  But I can say that the two design models are clearly conflicting.  Which I guess explains the complaints all the time.

FF14 – Skill Wall

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Hit level 34 as my Conjurer, now White Mage.  That’s a healer for those unfamiliar with the FF class structure.

FF14 Worm

I have a few posts queued up for the game, dealing with the rather interesting mechanics.  Crafting in this game is REALLY interesting.  This post will deal with a neat aspect I didn’t expect – a skill wall while leveling.

I’ve mentioned a few times now that dying in a game is a good thing, as long as the death is fair.  If you can improve to beat the battle, all the better.  Being “gamed” sucks – sort of the Blue Shell in Mario Kart effect.  FF14 doesn’t have Blue Shells so much as “Oh god, why did I do that?”  That’s good.

Per character, there’s a central quest you embark upon that brings you to every corner of the world.  In order to progress on this quests you must participate in the dungeons while leveling.   I’d say you can miss the central quest but then you’d hit 50 and be locked out of content.  This forced grouping (as well as optional grouping all over the place) is great on building skill sets over time.  Where games like WoW have extremely odd skill placement while leveling (some classes gets their first stun in the 30s), FF14 seems to have really thought this through.  Skill packages are thought out so that a group at a given level is only challenged so far.  It won’t ask you to use crowd control before a certain level.  30-35 is where the real fun begins.

I’ve healed in every MMO, though rarely as a primary role.  I’m a number cruncher, which is more of a DPS thing.  Healing is about patterns.  FF14 healing has no patterns until you reach the 30s, since you only have 1 real healing spell.  The big dungeon at 32 (Brayflox) is the change.  You now have Cure 2, maybe Freecure (for a free cast of the former) and poison all over the place (Esuna to cure).  I was able to heal without problem on every single dungeon up until this point.  Then I reached what I call skill wall.

My tanks were taking on 2-3 enemies at once and my heals were just covering their health loss.  Miss a heal, need to heal another or even cure a poison, and things went bad.  The final boss was a dragon that had a front spit, a front cone and a ranged spit attack.  The first tank seemed to have PING issues since he wasn’t moving out of the way.  He had about 1300 HP and each big attack was around 1000 damage + poison effect.  My heals are about 300 each, on a 2.5s cooldown.  The math was not in our favor.

I got accused of having crappy gear.  I checked at the auction house (gear is crafted/dropped, so if it’s not on the AH, you can only get it in a dungeon) and we’re talking about 3 stat points from optimal at my level (out of 180).  Gear isn’t the problem.  Actual words from the tank before dropping “the heals are slowing us down”, which if you’ve played FF14, you know is simply not possible.  There is no “go go go” mentality, or massive group pulls.  The game isn’t designed that way.

So I tried with 2 different groups, with no luck.  I got another level, which gave me access to Stoneskin for the next attempt.  That’s just a small shield spell for ~140 damage though, nothing that should make a difference.  I’ll try some spots of chain healing with Cure2 but I know that will drain my mana pools in a flash.  I’m sure I can find the skill to get over this wall.

 

WoW – Warlords of Draenor

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Since I’ve already put in a few hundred hours in WoW and it’s still the giant gorilla in the market, need to have a post right?  Lots of info found here.

In brief form, the game is using the completely new method of telling a story by using time travel. /sarcasm.  Maybe it’s because the devs have heard enough of people moaning that Burning Crusade was the best and they decided to go back.  Maybe they are simply out of bad guys to put up.  Either way, they are recycling a ton of content, adding very little and taking a way a fair amount of the complexity.

Do I think this is a bad move?  Not really.

Players housing is in, sort of.  Dynamic quests are in, sort of.  Item squish is in  (yay!).  Raids are being revamped so that top tier is only 20 players.  I don’t get why anyone would run 25 now, it’s essentially the death stroke. 10 more levels where you become even stronger!  (Some of those skill upgrades are ridiculous.)  No more daily quests.  Item stats change based on spec.  No more gear of no value.  Reforging is gone, enchanting is smaller, less gems too.

I mean, I watched and read a ton of info about the expansion.  I am feeling less enthused here than I was for Pandaria.  Pandaria had a stupid premise but a decent execution on most fronts.  I am looking at Warlords of Draenor and seeing less an expansion but more a major patch.  Then again, after nearly 10 years, it can’t be hit out of the park every time.

FF14 – Part Deux

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I liked the movie, shoot me.

A few more hours into FF14 and a few more features have unlocked.  Level 16 now, which seems to have a pattern of 1 class quest every 5 levels, which sometimes unlocks a new skill.  Super.  I rather like the leveling aspect, where activities are unlocked gradually rather than everything at once.  Still no mounts, though travel is pretty easy and the world is full of stuff to do.  Unlocked daily quests at level 10, which I’ve yet to complete.

Based on feedback from other players, I’m skipping on alternate quests and just focusing on the main line for the time being.  I’ll pick up the side quests once I unlock another class.  Currently, I get enough experience to stay on par by completing FATEs, the Hunting Log (which is a neat addition) and the central quests.

The coolest feature, and this might just be me, is the kill chain mechanic.  Kill 2 enemies of your level or higher and you get an experience bonus timer.  That lasts about 80 seconds (well that’s the highest I’ve seen) and any enemy you kill during that time has a 10% increase in experience, cumulative.  The highest I’ve got was 60%.  I can imagine that a group of players could easily hit 150%.  That is such a super smart implementation of group mechanics.

FATEs are fun

FATEs are fun

The group/open world quest system is interesting and bears some discussion.  At any given time on a map, there’s 3-8 FATEs running.  Each has a different expected level, as each zone has a very wide level range.  These provide great experience and are a nice break from regular leveling.  At level, it gives about 20x the experience of a normal enemy.  I like most that the events are just everywhere and offer some variety in enemy flavor.  RIFT has a system for this, with stages, which really was the cornerstone of the game.  It was hit/miss in some places but extremely fun at max level.  GW2, I never really got but many people think it’s great.  I’m quite curious to see how this system is managed at “end game” in FF14.  There seems to be quite a lot of potential.

Long story short, still having fun.  Pace is (much) slower than today’s typical MMO, which is nice.  There’s plenty of content and the world doesn’t seem empty, even after months since re-launch.  That’s a good sign.  I’m under the impression that this is the type of game where the complexities and investments are such that either you buy-in and stick around or just give up.  It would seem difficult for an MMO tourist to get far.