Mourning the Unexpected

Previous updates here and here.

Today:

Mourning open beta delay

Despite all our efforts, Mourning won’t be ready for open its beta during this weekend.

So, in order to offer to all of you a better open beta experience, we decided to delay Mourning’s open beta until NO EARLIER than 1st march 2005, with game’s release date also delayed accordingly.

Please feel free to take any appropiate actions cosidering this, and thank you for your patience and understanding.

Dan Antonescu
Mourning Community Liaison Manager

I just wonder if in the long run they’ll be able to produce enough drama to draw the attention of the big public. For now it seems quiet but they have a lot of free time available.

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That /pizza had drugs inside, I swear

You gotta see this (at least till it’s clickable).

Too much /pizza in a day makes forum mods nut.

While I’m at it I’ll link also a signature stolen from the FOH guild (after following Cosmik’s linkies):

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Somewhere else, it’s patch day (and pizza)

Due credit. EverQuest 2 pushed out today another minor patch as you can see if you check here. It’s the fifth if we consider just February.

This while World of Warcraft happily sleeps with the eyes open: “how to swim in the money without doing anything else”.

Who needs commitment to a project when it spills money on its own even in the worst scenario possible?

More informations can be found here (courtesy of Krones). I believe Blizzard’s philosophy is summed up in a post coming from Fangtooth, a moderator:

As soon as more information is ready we will send out Update #3! Until that time we can sing folk songs but adapt them to the World of Warcraft…

Take notice that “Update #3” isn’t the patch we are waiting but just an update to the “coming soon” web page.

Obviously it’s superficial to compare the number of patches or the amount of text in each. Some players already say that EQ2 is rushing to patch what WoW had already at release. The point is that I see commitment from SOE and zero from Blizzard (aside more moderators, more fluff information, more babysitting).

I sincerely hope that SOE will mantain this pace. I hope this isn’t directly the consequence of fighting for the first place and that it will actually improve over time. A true dedication will always payback, a sudden rush without a long term plan and dedication won’t.

I hope they aren’t running because they are behind. I hope they are running because they love to run.

As a related(?) news “Mattew Gallant” posted on Q23 a funny image:

You probably shouldn’t sell this

Both AFKgamer and N3rfed commented the story about the goon buying an used box of World of Warcraft and expecting the cd key to be still usable.

On another blog, commenting something unrelated, I wrote:

I have a website because I felt the need of an “history”. So that every time a recurring topic is brought up I KNOW the point where I left. So it sets a level, from that level I move on.

This is why now I’m able to show (and link) a rare tidbit from Lum:

Lum:
At the same time, there probably needs to be a bit more oversight re: EB and selling used games.

Case in point. I was browsing our local EB one day and noticed in the used racks a copy of an expansion pack for the MMO I work on. It looked pretty used (no box, beat up manual, etc) so it wasn’t just “returned after one day”. Now, being that I work on said MMO, I happen to know that whoever bought that copy was more than likely hosed, since the CD key to “expansionize” the account can’t be re-used, and that our CS gets calls about this sort of thing frequently. So I take the game up with me when I check out.

“You probably shouldn’t sell this.”
“Yeah, well, there’s Horizons if you’re into…”
“No, you don’t understand. I work for these guys. You can’t resell these. The CD-key isn’t transferable.”
“Uh…”, and the now flustered counter guy thinks quickly, then comes back, self-assured, “Oh, the publisher reset those CD-keys. We call them in.”

I arch my eyebrow. I happen to know no such thing happens, since, um, at some point I would have to code support for it on our end.

“You *sure*?” I ask, trying not to be accustory, trying to let him save some sort of face.
“Uh huh!”

So a week later someone probably bought an MMO expansion pack, brought it home, couldn’t activate it, and posted on a message board somewhere about how we suck. Yay!

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Did you see the Vision(â„¢) passing by?

This is a blogosphere type of post. Cosmik says that the Vision(â„¢) is now blind. But the point is that the Vision(â„¢) is missing from a long time.
He didn’t quote the relevant part of the message (source):

Does anyone get the feeling that SOE tried to really grow the market through innovation? Can you look at SOE’s games and say they really tried to assimilate the meta-lessons of the genre – the community, the emergent behavior, the tension between cooperation and competition – and approached the genre tabula rasa (as Richard Garriot claims he’s trying to do with Tabula Rasa)?

Or do you look at the lineup and conclude that they wanted to grab real estate in the new world of MMOGs and fell back on the same trite conventions that stagnate the retail games business? Planetside (FPS, but MMOG!), Sovereign (RTS, but MMOG!), the cancelled EverQuest Online Adventures (EQ, but PS2!), Star Wars: Galaxies (UO, but Star Wars!)

Which is the same thing (even if written in a readable english) I’m writing from a month:

If there’s passion you don’t need motivation. You have it already. Smedley openly stated: “I want money”

My opinion is that now they are lively because they don’t like Blizzard looting them and become the number one. So they need to start to move again, they have to catch up.

There’s no intention to work on the ideas. There’s the intention to capitalize. A game for every slice of the pie. There’s no intention to develop and advance one world, there’s just the plan to conquer the whole market, once a slice of the pie is conquered they move on a new project. They never consolidate. There are targets and there are games. There isn’t a plan and commitment to ONE “world” to let it advance, evolve, improve.

Instead there’s the need to cover and conquer the market, developing games to fill all the possible gaps. Instead of INTEGRATING parts into one world, they SPECIALIZE. Classic EQ for the catasses, EQ2 to hook new players with new shiney, Planetside for twitch etc…

Conclusion: It’s market-driven development, not passion-driven. Their plan doesn’t follow the desires they have “no matter what”. They do not have wishes or aspirations. They only aim for the market and develop the game as a specific target.

With the recent announces the fun is that Blizzard demonstrated that even if you want to take over the world and become the King of Money, you don’t need multiple products.
One is enough.

War between titans – WoW vs EQ2, again

This entry is the result of a line of thoughts that spans various message boards and most of what I wrote on this site in the last days and also what I’m going to write for the next.

Again this is a (dry) analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of both games from an objective point of view (so without personal comments of preference). With the aim of looking forward though. Observing and learning what happens has no use if you don’t draw concretely useful conclusions for the future. And this is my goal.

In regards to the title of this article it’s rather obvious the link to what is written below. World of Warcraft already won the first round and probably also the followings. Smedley already congratulated Blizzard for the success, hiding the hostility and exhibiting a big smile. In a similar way Kerry did the day after he lost the elections against Bush.

What is dangerous, as I explain at the end, is the desire of emulation.


This links directly to the discussion about WoW endgame because all the guidelines and the things I wrote on that thread reflect directly here:

Feltrak:
Nagafen will not speak to anyone that does not know the draconic language, so his giant buddy sends you on a quest to learn the language. The quest involves traveling throughout the entire world and finding 26 clickable items sitting around every zone. From city zones to level 20 experience zones to level 45 experience zones. Our guild spent about 2-3 weeks running all over the world, running our mouse over every thing that looked like a book, scroll, or bag on the ground. Some of the runes were placed in such insane places like on top of a tent in the Feerrott.

This is another demonstration of SOE focusing on Fun(®) gameplay. How can they claim that their aim is to deliver a fun experience when they blatantly use unfun, frustrating tricks?

Raph Koster:
We go into every game with the goal of avoiding grinds. :) Really, it surprises me how many people think developers are willfully ignoring everyone–it’s really not that so much as how easy it is to lose sight of what you’re trying to do.

This comes from a completely different discussion but it plugs here. They *know* that what they are going to offer is crap but they do nothing at all to avoid these elements.

This is, again, deliberate. No excuses.

Feltrak:
Guilds: The guild system is awesome. My guild is on their way to achieve magic carpets as a ride through Norrath via the leveling system. Leveling up your guild allows you to get items from status merchants, and lowered cost on other things. Also, there’s nothing better walking around through town and having every Guard salute you, or bow to you. Sony did this well, as it allows the end game to not only be raiding, but achieving guild status and prestige as well.

I underlined this “merit” on my website. It’s a direct advantage that EQ2 has over WoW where the guild layer can be directly ignored like any other form of community involvement.

This is why, in the other thread, I wrote:
“The point of an online game is to live in an alternative world to build something there. To have a sense, an impact. Maintain a presence. All these things happen (even if still weakly) in all the major mmorpgs.

But WoW isn’t a world in the hands of a community. It’s a single-player world with cooperative experiences. The type of impact is often just a form of griefing and communal goals are very loose concepts.”

Point taken for EQ2.

Raiding: Raids in Eq2 are very very well done. Some of the encounters that we’ve come across are amazing. The MOBS are flexible enough that multiple different strategies can work for them, but you have to perform that strategy flawlessly to succeed. With a 24 person limit to raids, you can’t just send in 50 people to slaughter a mob and hope you can do enough damage before it kills everyone (zerging.) Alot of strategy comes down to group setup and key classes, as most all of the traditional eq1 group buffs can not be distributed to other groups.

This plugs in the discussion about the difficulty. Again this underlines basic differences in the design approach of the two games.

In WoW everything is trivialized to be *accessible*. There are no group restrictions, powerlevelling is tolerated and encouraged to an extent, the monsters always drop their loot no matter of the gaps in levels, no restrictions in the access to the instances.

All these steps are founded on other basic elements, for example the “tagging” system allow higher level players to assist and babysit lower level players so that they can get their full reward even bypassing completely the difficulty of the encounter as it was planned.

In general there are no rules in WoW to prevent the players to bypass the difficulty of a goal. On the contrary, the powerlevelling behaviour is often encouraged and is probably the main purpose of a “guild”.

EQ2 is directly opposed to these concepts. I believe that this is *evident*. A few levels and a trivial mob doesn’t give you anymore experience nor loot. In a group the difference in levels directly affects the difficulty of the encounter and the relative reward. Encounters are locked and you cannot get assisted. Grouping between similar level players is strongly encouraged by the system, grouping players in a wider gap is penalized. The instances are strictly controlled about who can enter and how they are experienced. And so on.

Now can you see that they follow two, diametrically opposite, patterns?

WoW has its main keyword in the accessibility. Everything is possible, never impossible. The difficulty can be easily bypassed if you so choose, always. You have control over the rules. You have a direct control over the difficulty of the game. Everyone is allowed in.

EQ2 has its main keyword in the challenge. The experience is always aimed. The developers set standards and rules and the players need to go through a set condition and “win” it. It’s all about beating a difficulty, so it’s always about a challenge and a reward. The gameplay is the opposite of “accessiblity”. Why? Because EQ2 operates a selection. You can continue to play only if you learnt the lesson.

In WoW you can bypass a lesson at any time. Just call your buddy level 60. (again accessibility). In EQ2 you bump into “walls”. If you want to proceed you need to endure it and win the situation as it was set by the developers. This becomes often boring or frustrating because:
1- The lesson isn’t really interesting
2- The lesson is too hard

In WoW you can choose what is interesting, what is too hard (so you “cheat”), what you should repeat, what you want to jump etc…

In EQ2 the fun isn’t in the hands of the players and strictly depends on the Vision(â„¢) and the talent of the devs. If the content sucks you’ll directly hate the game because you have no control over it to adjust it to your likings.

With all this I just want to underline again that the two games are founded on completely different patterns and goals. One isn’t directly better than the other “by design”. As the development continues, they both have different paths to follow to become better games. What is *dangerous* is to not understand the nature and the scope of these game. Dangerous and harmful is when I hear that EQ2 is starting to move to “feel more like WoW”.

The biggest mistake is on this superficial point of view that will only damage directly the game when the aim should be about *consolidating the differences* to offer a different product, at the same time addressing those strongly UNFUN and broken parts of the game that every player continues to point out, like the one at the beginning of this message.

Spaces can be considered narrative units?

I’ll have to archive a few discussion that I’m tackling on two message boards. Even if the topics are different, often there are points of contact and everything converge on a general point of view that should be considered all at once, without too much fragmentation.

In this part I want to link the discussion to something I already introduced. There are strong ties between words like “virtuality”, “virtuous”, “contingence”, “identity”, “narration”, “story”, “history” and more.

The original dichotomy is:
Contingence -> possibility -> virtual -> potential
against
History -> identity -> virtuous

An identity is something that NEVER changes. It cannot change. It’s a fixed point, an unavoidable reality. An history already written. It’s something with a personality, something to tell because there’s a story to hear. It’s hand-crafted content with a precise, fixed use. It needs rules because it must be experienced in a precise way and with a precise direction. It becomes a narration with a sense. With an order and so, again, rules. Borders. A precise message, a precise “lesson” to learn.

The contingence, instead, is open-ended. It’s generic because it adapts itself. It changes, it’s virtual, potential. It’s here now but it can be somewhere else then. It’s dynamic, it follows variable rules, interconnections, mediations, compromises. If the possibility isn’t “held” we obtain an high degree of chaos. From the game design perspective the chaos is the origin of the creativity but it’s also hard to manage and impossible to digest for the players. It’s not fun because it’s hard to discern patters, it’s hard to develop content within it because there aren’t fixed rules. A world without a compass.

If you want interaction, complexity and depth you choose the second approach. If you want to tell a story you choose the first approach. Similar choices are done wether you want effective PvP or effective PvE. This transcends the game design because the premises are deep-rooted into real-world concepts and even games (for real peoples) needs to go back at these roots if they want to be effective. We can communicate because we have something in common, if MMORPGs are “large-scale” communication (or art) they still need to consider what we have in common as human beings.

Now all this reasoning starts when it was asked why World of Warcraft (and other games) has zones closed between impassable walls, with a defined space that doesn’t seem near to the geography of the reality:

DeepT:
What is a “bowl” world? Well each ‘zone’, is like a bowl. Player’s play in the middle, and all around the sides are impassible barriers with a few exits ‘cut’ into the sides of the bowl.

Why I consider WoW in the specific? Because different games organize their space in different ways. The rules aren’t fixed when what you want to deliver is different. But at the same time there are basic rules that regulate your choices. If you want an open-ended game you aim at something precise and you’ll follow rules that wouldn’t work in a story-driven world where you want the players to remain on the path and follow it, without making them feel too much constraint.

So how the space is organized on WoW? Could it be considered a “narrative”? There are rules that the game follows? On which elements these rules are based?

Those are the answers I searched and I believe that my conclusions finish to tie with other important elements that I may discuss in the near future. In the “seamless or not” debate there are design elements that aren’t just technical and depend on the type of experience you want to deliver. The roots are above, where I put “virtuality” against “identity”. There are basically opposite ways to see the genre, opposite types of games. In a similar way as PvE is opposite to PvP.


(discussing the concept of the “closed spaces” in WoW)

DeepT:
2) It is unrealstic. The natural world is not built like this.

Games aren’t supposed to be realistic, they are supposed to take those elements from reality that are interesting to plug in a system, wiping those that create problems and are unfun. There’s always a selective process.

Even in the real world you need guides or roads to not get lost in a place you don’t know. If you get lost, in general, it isn’t fun.

DeepT:
3) It is monotonous. It limits exploration.

It leads the exploration. It is limited not as a side-effect but as a decision to lead the player along. It’s OBVIOUS that WoW isn’t an *open ended* game. We can argue whether we can build better, open ended games but WoW is far, far away from this and both its strength and its weaknesses are here: in the FOCUS.

DeepT:
Also I didn’t say all zones should be all open. Most zones should not be cupped in impassable barriers, however. Only rare zones, such as the grand canyon zone might be surrounded by impassible barriers with just a few access points.

This is what happens already, but on a different scale. There are corridor-shaped zones, there are vast plains, there are valleys, there are peaks. All that you describe already happen WITHIN each zone, just not often between different zones.

Why? Because you are, again, following a narrative. A narrative can be a line of words on a page, but can also be a linear sequence of places you visit. This linear sequence exists and is experienced by: Every. Single. Player.

It isn’t exactly linear, but it is segmented. This means that the players are able to displace the segments (quests) but, in general, the gameplay is about visiting different places in an order. Moving from the spot where the troggs are to the spot where the slimes are, to a crypt, to a cave and so on. This is a narrative. WoW is fun because it is pulverized into an infinite amount of goals, all accessible. Always offering a variation (as opposite to a grind and repetition).

The “walls”, even the concept of a “zone”, are to mantain an “order” or a linearity. This means that it’s easier to move within a zone, it’s easier to receive feedback when you are stepping outside the path. “Borders”, as a concept, lead to a control. This is a BASIC concept of WoW because the whole and only keyword on which the game is founded is: accessibility.

So if WoW is considered as a semi-linear story, it can also be considered as a book. The pages in a book are organized with a sense. There are precise reasons why page 13 should be read after page 12. You cannot have the pretence of taking this book, tear off every page and then reorganize them with a random order. In the same way you cannot have the pretence of wiping off basic rules on which WoW is built.

Silverlight:
Yes, DeepT, there are reasons to have walls. Yes, HRose, there are reasons not to have walls. The presence of them is a design decision that could go either way.

Oh for God’s sake.

I’m saying the EXACT same thing. I’m not against open ended games but here we were discussing WoW. For THIS game there are reasons why an open ended approach wreck its premises and its strengths.

You may build a good game that is open ended, you may also build a good game that isn’t, like WoW demonstrated. But you cannot take WoW and negate directly all its rules and pretend to make it better.

The reason why SWG, as an example, has no borders, is EXACTLY because it misses a narrative. There isn’t a place where the troggs live opposite to a place where slimes lurk. Every single spot in the game world MUST be virtual because it may “host” an house or an elephant or a strange bird or a rebel hideout and so on.

The world NEEDS to be virtual because it is open ended. But being open ended means that it isn’t virtuous, so it CANNOT tell a story because a story needs an history. Something that happened THERE, not somewhere else. In SWG all the elements can be displaced at any time.

You wonder why it feels “generic”?

DeepT:
Ok Hrose, lets just forget about WoW. In ‘general’ why do most MMOGs go with bowl world and what are some good reasons to keep designing them like this? And please to not bring up “It will ruin the narrative” because you have totally failed to convince me that would happen.

For the same reasons but depending on the cases. Since it’s about a control, it helps to predict and lead the players along “paths”.

Open spaces, by definition, are unpredictable. PvE, by definition, is about telling a story in a fixed environment. Games focusing strongly on PvE, in general, need predictable spaces, so controlled, closed spaces. It’s how you maximize their fun (in fact now everyone does the instances to have a complete control over the players).

Open ended games or games focusing on PvP can use better open spaces (but close in the scope, so no infinite land everywhere). At least without considering battle dynamics. For example DAoC “went bowl” with the new frontiers to create choke points and allow the players to fight, adding some strategy.

For similar reasons even in PvE you want the players to move along semi-fixed paths so that they can meet each other.

I said there is no spoon

Someone still obstinately pushes forward the hoax:

Egomancer:
The open beta will be 1 week before release. The release will be around 25th of February +/- a few days.

This is going to definitely outplay the quality of steam of Dawn. If you are able to *release* a game that doesn’t exist you deserve a prize.

Their plan is, maybe, more clear here:

Egomancer:
no such thing as bad hype when your selling something.

just look at shadowbanes initial sales.

people only bought it to see how bad it really was. I know i did.

(reference)

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