Tag Archives: DAoC

Dark Age of Camelot

Corporation whores

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Dana Massey.

Former Hero Team Leader for DAoC during the beta and co-author of its strategy guide, then involved with IGN Vault. Finally group lead during the early test of Wish and then World Designer for the game, largely responsible for the insane, unbelievable idea of GM-driven content.

Wish was cancelled this January. Then I made up a rumor. A rumor revealed as false just a week ago. He is now Lead Content Manager of a minor mmorpg news site.

Or not.

It’s not surprising to see him whoring for Mythic in full regalia.

This is the level of the industry.

LATE EDIT- I archive a discussion on QT3 where I make clear my point of view on this, for reference:

Walt:
So, unlike you, Dana Massey has contributed to two projects. Once, long ago, as a volunteer team lead for Mythic. And then again, as a World Designer for Wish.

And now he is a well paid game reviewer for MMORPG.com. I fail to see where any of these make him a corporate whore.

Div Devlin:
Ok… I know I’m really going to regret this but…
HRose explain. I met him last year when he worked for Wish and this year actually was able to talk to him in depth. He did’nt actually get Dave Rickey fired you know. The hiring and firing may of been more than mere coincidecne, but he does seem like a pretty stand up guy.

MMORPG is paying him, as he was out of work. He wants to stay in the game industry, while still learning about games. The best way to do that is to work a news site until he gets hired by the next company.

Now, not that I’m defending him or anything, but I’m just wondering why the hatred as I don’t understand your tag for him.

HRose:
I have this belief that Lepidus tried to join Mythic after “Wish” demise and for some reason this didn’t work out.

I use “Corporate whore” to define a lack of criticism and a biased attitude. Lepidus CLEARLY represents that and I could say more or less the same about Div Devlin.

If anything I could say that everyone is biased and has sympathies in a way or another but what I criticize is the complete lack of criticism. The propensity to purge all the problems to just see what’s good and build positive hype in order to nourish and please the “friends” working in an industry that they’d like to join.

Mine isn’t a denounce. I’m just saying that Lepidus has always been highly biased and partial. When it comes to Mythic he does a great work to build the hype and hide as much as possible the bad side. And obviously Mythic likes that a lot because it’s useful for them.

The simple fact is that he writes something in order to please someone. He wants to join the industry and this brings DIRECLY to a conflict of interest since he needs to keep the “big guys” all fuzzy and happy.

This is how the “intellectual honesty” goes to hell and how you “sellout”. It’s exactly when your ideas are there ready to be bought by someone else with enough money or power to use you as a puppet. More or less directly.

And yes, Div Devlin isn’t that far away.

P.S.
This has NOTHING to do with Lepidus being responsible of Dave being fired. I never considered them related. The problem of Wish was in the *management*.

The huge mistake was the decision to replace Dave with Lepidus but isn’t Lepidus himself responsible of that. It was just clueless management and Lepidus was just a symptom of what was going wrong.

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DAoC does something good

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The designers are not completely dead over there. After roughly a year I finally read something interesting.

The proposed RvR mission system seems solid and compelling. It goes to touch important gameplay elements and, if done right, it would offer more variation in the gameplay, interactions and situations. In particular they added realm-wide missions that will offer a focused aim for everyone. A good excuse to feel part of a realm and contribute for a communal effort. Secondly, they addressed one of the biggest dead points that I criticized with the launch of “New Frontier”: the endless sieges to towers and keeps turning into “playing tennis” with a ballista. At least in the case of the towers they introduced the possibility to finally make the tower crumble to the ground. Giving back the siege a meaning.

Really, why it took so long to solve those pointless sieges with no result? This was one of the main concerns I had with the game. The new realm missions, along with the “Tower Razing” mechanic should improve the quality of the RvR in a relevant way. They’ll add dynamism and purpose to a system that was static and dispersive. I hope that, once it’s tested and working as intended, the “razing” system will also be inherited by the keeps. Maybe with more, multiple stages.

Good work.

EDIT: And after reading the actual patch I have to say that there’s more good stuff on the plate. Finally they are paying some attention to the early levels, adding more quests and streamlining the interface so that the ruleset looks a bit less obscure. You know, I was ranting about this stuff months ago. If someone from around Mythic passes by I encourage following that link and honestly think if I was right or not.

I’m glad to see that Mythic is moving in that direction.

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Rumor

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It seems that Mythic is interested in hiring Dana Massey and Matthew Newhook (the two guys working on the story/live events of the canceled “Wish”) to work on Imperator.

Dana Massey was also know as “Lepidus”. He worked on the strategy guide of DAoC and was the Hero Team Leader back in beta.

This rumor is completely made-up by me.

EDIT: Matthew Newhook (aka DuncanFoo) wasn’t a writer, I confused him with Michael K. Donovan (aka Aura00). Instead he was the president/lead software or something. One of the few with a vague idea of what he was doing.

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What would bring me back to DAoC

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Just a random thought but I’d gladly play on a server like Mordred but with the three factions enforced.

On a first stage the coding required for such a server type is nil. Just take Mordred and enforce the use of the three factions instead of the guilds. Then, in the case the server becomes successful, you can start to develop unique elements to add a meaningful battle even within each realm.

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Fluff (and interactivity) is fun

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The last chunk of DAoC’s patch is interesting:

Herding Time!

Three new people have joined the realms of Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia and they have brought a new sport with them – Herding. In Albion, Pig Herder Stanley has taken up residence in the field south-southwest of Humberton. In Midgard, Tomte Herder Rufus has found a home north-northwest of Fort Atla and in Hibernia, Badger Herder Marcus lives next to Howth. The goal of Herding is simple – be the first team to score three points and win a prize!

[…]

This can be directly filed under /fluff. I haven’t checked but I’m pretty sure that some of the players will criticize this: so Mythic is spending time to add idiotic minigames instead of fixing the major issues in the game?

While I currently dislike Mythic as a whole and made a personal promise to never go back (to play) no matter what, I’m still able to appreciate and underline when something good happens.

Their continued work toward the newbie experience is *terribly late* but nevertheless good, this last ‘fluff’ addition is again a good direction from my point of view. It’s time that these game LOSE the focus they have. Add more elements to the game world to make it live, to make it become more interactive. The focus is good to improve the direct potential but shouldn’t become a leading plan. The game world should be improved on different fronts. The fluff is one of those.

Instead I’m critic toward their form of fluff. An isolated minigame is limited in the scope. I’d work toward adding layers of interactivity that aren’t limited to a small arena and a digression from the rest of the game. You achieve a lot more if this fluff is coherent with the rest of the game world and part of it. This fluff needs a legitimation, a ‘promotion’ in relevance.

One of my ideas about my ‘dream mmorpg’ that I still haven’t written in detail on this site and that is directly inspired by Achaea (a wonderful MUD) is a ‘butterfly’ side-game. Not mini-game but side-game. These butterfly could become a possibility of interaction that is coherent with the structure of the rest of the game, in a similar way as World of Warcraft did with the crafting professions.

You can get butterfly nets from special NPCs and then you can wander in a zone to ‘hunt’ the various types of butterflies, from common to the most rare. The idea is to improve what is already in Achaea and build on it thanks to a three dimensional type of interaction. The various butterflies will spawn more or less rarely, will move and swirl at differents speeds and fly at different heights. The fun should come directly from hunting them, using rocks and jumping to hopefully catch those flying too high, tracking one for long, hoping it will climb down a bit and enugh to be at your arm’s range and so on. The type of interaction isn’t anymore casual as in typing a message and obtain random misses, but it will be direct. The players will have to move, jump and use the net at the right time to hopefully catch what they need. Each type of net will have a set maximum capacity and a percent of possibility to loose one or three butterflies each time it’s being swung.

Again this isn’t a restricted mini-game working as a digression but something that adds a new layer to the game. You play normally and occasionally you’ll see a rare type of butterfly you need. Quests can be invented for this, other types of sub games can too, like offering time-based events or direct competitions. The rewards can range from rare ingredients for enchanting to funny (fluff) types of clothes.

Once this whole direction is choosed you can go on and on. You could create associations, build official championships, mantain server-wide ranks and scoreboards. And this can be repeated with a fishing game.

The point is that there’s no limit to what you can do in a mmorpg and there’s no limit to the type of interaction and the fun you can deliver. Still, this is a dream. The games in this genre are flat and psychotically focused on a single mechanic that directly empties the game world of its ‘world’ value. It’s both sad and frustrating.

The point is to keep dreaming. Here what I did was again ‘stealing’ an idea. Achaea has already the concept of catching butterflies but did it directly invent it? No, all this previously existed as much as the fishing games are popular in the “Breath of Fire” serie (Squaresoft games). I already wrote about this, the point is to get the inspiration to add depth, to let the dreams flow. Completely different from stealing ideas and design from better games because you weren’t able to fix and improve the same parts. “Stealing ideas” is common and useful, but as a source, not as an ending point.

A similar topic was discussed here. My comment:

The point isn’t just the humor. The point is to offer something beyond the real focus. Exactly like Raguel says the point is about planning inefficiently. Why SquareSoft is keeping to fill their games with mini-games and fluff stuff? Because that fluff is similar to the toys that Ubiq considered recently.

In the case of a mmorpg we are really trying to give life to a gameworld. These gameworlds feel often too focused, too limited. They are too obsessed by a group of tight dynamics and they do not offer a depth.

This is why I’d focus more on fluff requiring interaction rather than adding humor randomly.

The last stage is to bring the toyetic gameplay where it belongs: the PvP.
Buried in the comments of a Terra Nova article, saved here and introduced here while discussing instanced content.

The point is to have a plan and know exactly where you want to go. The ‘fluff’ will offer some of the best tools to arrive at the destination.

Virtuality, PvE and story-telling

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(lame title)

This was actually a (too long) “comment” to a message written by Ubiq on his blog. The focus is the quest system in World of Warcraft, trying to understand why it succeeded to break the feel of “gind” in a mmorpg and how it became the main activity and gameplay of the whole playerbase when the perception and use of the quest systems in other games had completely different results.

His original article is here. My own is here blow:

—
On this aspect the game is just a single player game. And it draws from that experience by removing the ‘bad habits’ of the quest systems in the previous mmorpg.

SWG has no quest system. You cannot compare a random generator of spawn points where to go grind your way to a world that is handcrafted from the first pixel till the last. SWG in this case is gameplay built around an “hole”. It makes you believe that you are doing something but in a world randomly generated you feel just like in a box with nothing inside.

WoW has a cohesive world. It’s built exactly like a single player game where every niche of the world has a specific story to tell you, if you want. Removing the ‘bad habits’ (like not knowing where to get the quest, not knowing if it will reward you properly, not knowing how to accomplish it without using spoiler sites, not knowing if that quest is appropriate for your level, not knowing if you’ll be able to finish it alone or in a group and so on…) made the experience of a quest particularly appealing, fun, interesting and gratifying.

One of the general qualities of this game is that it lets you love it, it doesn’t stick its finger in your eye as you attempt something. In DAoC, the game I know better, questing is something you FEAR. Goin on a quest is a BURDEN that you avoid whenever possible exactly because the quests are aimed to be annoying, boringly hard and disappointing.

It’s two years that I write this in my critics and only *now* Mythic is pillaging World of Warcraft of its quest system mechanics because they are blatantly superior.

To summarize my point. DAoC has a quite “flat” world with no depth. The PvE is rather unappealing, but it’s an horrible, badly used quest system to ruin the experience. SWG, instead, is just a box without nothing to tell. There’s no story to tell exactly because it’s shaped as a container, to work as a container. You cannot tell a story when everything can just be everywhere, where elephant-sized mobs wander around happily on mountains with 90% degrees slopes. Where 95% of the whole landmass is just randomly generated content and terrain without a past, a present and a future but just a potential to exist or not and to appear just everywhere.

You CANNOT tell a story, even the most simple one, when everything in your world is in a “potential” status, without something not contingent, with an IDENTITY. SWG negates directly these basic *human* and *world* mechanics. It has nothing to tell because it’s all virtual and again the virtual has no story (no history). By definition.

So from a side (DAoC) we have a storytelling that is *painful* to experience because of an awfully quest system collecting ALL the bad habits of the genre, from the other side (SWG) we have a world that simply has nothing to tell you. It’s “quest system” is a generator of “holes”. And you can only directly experience this absence. Like someone who has a story to tell but who has forgotten what it was about.

The “E” in PvE is about an hadcrafted work. It’s about a book, a movie, a tale you heard from someone. It’s about what you hear, it’s about who tells it to you, what it is about etc… It is about a *strong* identity factor. This cannot happen if the world is in a “potential” status where things can change and be displaced everywhere.

This quest system in World of Warcraft not only works because, again, it’s fun and possible as an experience by removing the bad habits, but it’s also built on top of a world where every nooks and crannies have a story (an identity to discover). The quests actively segment this hadcrafted space and you build your own story and path by intertwining it with the one of the world itself.

The facts that you underline (the segments/quests with a start and a “closure”, along with a “finited” amount of unique segments/quests) cannot exist without a WORLD designed and built to deliver a *strong* identity.

World of Camelot

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DAoC and its last patch:

– You will now get progress update messages (displayed on the center of the screen) as you complete parts of your task in Instanced Kill Task dungeons (for example, as you kill 1 of the 6 necessary mobs that you need to kill, or when you complete your task entirely).

– Moving your mouse over the top of icons on your quickbar or your active spell effects will now show a tooltip containing information about the effect and a reuse/duration timer.

– Mouse Pan: Setting this to a mouse button allows you to pan around with a single click. Previously you had to hold down Mouselook and the Camera Pan Toggle key.

Blatantly copying good design elements isn’t something I consider bad, really. It’s good that Mythic is reacting to this.

The point is still the same, though: we really needed World of Warcraft to realize those obvious interface issues and design elements?

The trend is set.

From an interview, story or whatever:

Larian: Okay, so you do have plans. Is “Strategic Planning” something that you all sit down and do here at Mythic? ?

Matt Firor: As for detailed changes and plans, no. Things just change too rapidly in the MMORPG market, and you just can’t predict them. We do have a general direction we want to steer in though, but these are all modified by new technology, other company’s games, and community demands.

This “interview” is being debated on CorpNews as misleading (or something).

I don’t know… It seems quite correct to me. Or not?

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Lethargy requires money

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Dark Age of Camelot is almost ready for the winter and they are finishing to build their stock:

we are announcing a price increase starting on February 3rd to the prices listed below.

* $14.95 per month
* $40.35 for 3 months
* $71.70 for 6 months
* $137.40 for 1 year

I believe they are thinking that the subscribers holding already after WoW’s launch are more loyal than the price hike. Probably they want to set a “ground zero”, accumulating all the odds. So that they can just “rise” from there. Something like a sperimentation to check the market.

UO rised the subscriptions exactly in the worst moment possible (after the AOS craptacular launch). Again I believe it’s a way to test the “worst scenario”. So that they can gather data and plan their future more consistently.

I think it’s horrible timing.

Those features are only the beginning of what we have planned and over the next few weeks we will be announcing additional improvements and upgrades to the game.

That line also tastes quite bad. Honestly.

Unknown promises aren’t good for the genre.

Discuss here

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