Three years too late

DAoC’s test patch:

Performance Related Fixes (Catacombs Client)

– Fixed two memory leaks relating to trees and tree shaders.

Walt:

These days, our oldest assets in game are in Player Housing and Shrouded Isles. At this stage the vast majority of our art assets in game are solid, and we really need tech improvements to make things shine.

Yes, very true.

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Do you wonder why Eve-Online development is crawling?

Because of this.

CCP buys White Wolf because one online world is too tight for them (FYI, they HAVE announced World of Darkness MMO at the fanfest).

In the meantime the patch that was expected for early September after countless delays is still far from being released, even with many of its features cut and postponed.

CCP triplicated its staff. While Eve-Online development slowed down three folds. Funny, ain’t it?


Details from an interview with a White Wolf guy:

The established brand that is White Wolf’s World of Darkness will be brought to ‘virtual life’ by the innovative team of programmers and developers at CCP’s Iceland headquarters.

I am sorry the financial details are not for public disclosure

Communication (between the two teams) will be regularly maintained by teleconference and AIM/Various chat programs.

Expect LOTS of spinning as they’ll desperately try to convince Eve players that the development of the new MMO won’t take away resources and focus from the development of Eve.

Of course they will be lies.

Age of Conan leaked video

There’s a one-minute video of in-game footage showing combat in super-low blurry resolution.

For what I can see it is fun as noone is able to think an interface that isn’t the carbon copy of WoW. You remember Diablo and then all the clones with the health ball in a corner and the mana ball in the other? We are at that point. Blizzard didn’t make the perfect interface, but they surely have now the hegemony of game design. Noone can think out of the box.

Should I say something about combat? I don’t know. If I remember correctly AoC has that “ring” system where you choose the direction of the attack. It is vaguely reminiscent of the system I wanted to use for the first version of my “dream mmorpg”, with the differece that I wanted a system of gems that not only took in consideration the positioning, but also chaining different attacks for various combos (the gems would be “context sensitive” meaning that you see only those attacks pertinent to your current state, also vaguely reminiscent of Babylona’s idea -now a porn site, heh..-). But this system looked too mechanical and convoluted, so I discarded it entirely for another much more visceral and intuitive.

One interesting idea in AoC seems similar to the Dervish class in Guild Wars. You swing your weapon and whoever happens to be in its arc, takes damage. So you can score multiple hits with one swing.

For the rest it is hard to judge. To me it looks like WoW with Age of Conan skins, poor animations and lots of sliding (they swing their swords like bats in baseball, lots of paddling).

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On fizzles

Archiving something I wrote about EQ2’s fizzle mechanic that is going to be removed (while I controversially think it should have been changed and left in), mostly because one of the ideas I proposed was used for the interrupts:

This is the new behavior of interrupts, they now automatically restart the cast up to 3 times.


There was a long discussion a few months about WoW’s release about the Warrior class which led to an in-game protest and a long post from the lead designer. Here’s the interesting bit:

Now, regarding your opinions. Obviously it’s perfectly valid to hold the opinion that we should have designed a lower failure rate in general (miss/dodge/parry/etc) and compensated for that in other areas. In fact, if we were to do it all over again, it’s reasonable to say I might be in favor of doing something to that effect. That being said, it wouldn’t be as easy as changing all mob HP’s. Not only would it also require changing player HP’s, but compensating through HP changes also has ripple effects on the effectiveness of spells, non-physical-damage procs, etc.

I see miss rates not differently from fizzles. They are negative odds. Never directly “fun”.

As Kalgan says, the less you have of them, the less frustration. But they are also part of the *fabric* of the game.

Some games that didn’t understand that concept failed horribly. Think to Morrowind combat. If you had a low attack skill you would hit ONCE every ten or more “swings”. This is absurdly retarded.

So, as Kalgan said, here the right recipe isn’t about removing the odds, but finding the sweet spot where they add flavor without becoming frustrating.

Fizzles are essentially the same thing. They are negative odds, exactly like missing with a weapon (I don’t know how misses are calculated in-game but I guess they are related to the skill level as well, dodges with skill level compared to defence of target and so on). They are *excused* within the game because they are consistent:

– You learn a new spell and need to practice so that you can improve using it.

That’s a consistent, familiar mechanic that I wouldn’t remove lightheartedly and that’s why I commented it.

Now the problems of the fizzles:

Fizzles provide a need to hammer the same key while getting increasingly pissed off, and feelings of frustration/incompetence as their cost of failures.

– First problem. How frequently fizzles happen. This is obviously related to the skill level and should remain so, imho. To make the mechanic more satisfying you could link more directly the skill-up with a fizzle, so that if players fizzle often, they also skill-up faster. You fail (fizzle) but you are rewarded with a skill-up. Secondly, it’s essential that they are odds in combat, but not the norm. I admit to only have experience of the very early game, but fizzles seemed rare enough. If they are still perceived as annoying their chance could be made more steep depending on the skill level (so that you reduce the chance of fizzle at an high skill level, and then readjust the progression).

– Consecutive fizzles. From your comment it looks like this is the most frustrating pattern. The solution is to make the system “aware” of fizzles and increase the chance to cast a spell after one or more fizzles happen. This could transform into a *positive* mechanic: for example by affecting more than just the next spell and even by rising the chance to crit (like an invisible buff). You fail the spell but when this happen you can count on a “compensation” on your next spells.

– Spamming keys. If the problem is about having to re-issue a command (this is even for me), you could automate this. On a fizzle the character would automatically recast the spell as soon as possible without requiring the player to press the hotkey again.

In short:

– Reduce the chance to get a fizzle at the proper skill level and rise the chance to skill up after a fizzle.

– Compensate a fizzle by improving the chance to crit and succesfully cast spells on the next few spells.

– Make recasting automatic if a spell fizzles.

The idea is to transform negative feedback into positive one. So that instead of triggering frustration, you trigger revenge: “Okay, this spell failed. But the next one will tear you apart” translated into higher chance to cast the spell successully and higher chance to obtain a critical hit.

I am a patch fetishist

I’m waiting patches for Dark Messiah, Company of Heroes and Dominions 3. In all three cases it should be a matter of *hours*, or days.

And also waiting for another version of Dwarf Fortress to stabilize the latest bugs, so that I can finally play again with the SPECIFIC PILE TYPES!

In the meantime I’m having tons of fun playing the latest edition of Settlers 2 (10th anniversary) and levelling a mage on WoW’s european servers.


Dominions 3 (3.01) is out!
Dwarf Fortress 0.22.110.22f Released!

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