Another use of levels

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If I let pass a few days before returning on the argument I’ll finish to forget about it as it always happens. So I continue here what I wrote about Oblivion and use the levels to let the player adjust the difficulty of the game.

As I explained (even on Q23) in Oblivion the levels don’t really exist in the game. There is no direct game mechanic or dice rolls factoring your level. The game is skill based and the level is only a way to measure and segment the overall power of your skill pool. Basically the level of the character doesn’t exist to be used by the player, but to be used by the system.

The system checks the character’s level as a way to measure its effectiveness and then balance the difficulty of the creatures and the value of the items around that variable. The player is passive in this mechanic.

It is not a case that the best mod for Morrowind effectively hid the levels to uniform the character growth while preserving the integrity of the rest of the game (even balancing it much better). The game is already skill based, and if the levels are only a way for the system to monitor the character growth, they can even be obscured.

There are many uses of levels, more or less apparent, from all that Raph wrote to cozy worlds. But they can be also used by the *player* (and not by the system) to control the difficulty of the game as many japanese RPGs are doing from a very long time: with the casual encounters.

This is an excerpt from a post written by Kitsune about Dragon Quest VIII and the flexibility of the casual encounters:

That’s one of the biggest misunderstandings about DQ. Since the original, you have never needed to grind to level up. Yuji Horii has always, always, always designed each game so that if you explore around you and try out things, you will be at the appropriate level to be able to win. Unless you have a certain hardcore purpose in mind (in which you use metal enemies to get the job done quickly), leveling up has happened as a matter of course, for doing what the game was designed to do. If you explore reasonably (you don’t even have to do it much) you can play the entire game through without ever stopping for the express purpose of leveling up.

More than any RPG series I’ve played, its easier to control the difficulty level in DQ. Exploiting very satisfying tactical plans pays off and you can do hella hard stuff at low levels. In fact, that’s one of the reasons the game sells so well in Japan. Its made for both people who just don’t want to have too hard of a time of fighting, but want it to be fun enough to do more than attack and for people who like to make their own challenges. Both exist in great quantities. I love doing stuff like going to the treasure cave near the thieves’ town before you do anything at the abbey or for the king and then an entirely different cutscene plays when you meet the thief lady (so many name changes, I’ve been purposely vague) to reflect that. You can enter the western continent anyway you please and the cutscenes reflect that (there are different flows to plot depending on which place you start exploring at). You can visit Lapan House and get the tiger before you ever hear about a spoiled prince. Or vice versa.

Just walking around that luscious overworld invites finding what’s hidden every nook and cranny for many a gamer now, but that’s the way it has always been for the Dragon Quest faithful. That’s why every town has lots of little goodies hidden in pots, or down wells (I love the hidden health club you can find in one, and the friendly monster in another, and the stuck slime king in another), or around obscure corners, or up ladders.

As has been pointed in this thread and others, the monsters have many unique abilities and animated meticulously with many creative and charming touches. Believe it or not, the monsters are the joy of the game.

So no they aren’t just there to grind XP. They’re the entire foundation of the game and one of its biggest selling points. If you can’t get into it, fine, but you can’t criticize a game for what you want it be, instead of looking at it for what it wants to be.

And then he returned on the same concept recently while discussing/arguing about Final Fantasy XII:

No need to grind. Don’t make me give you my “Leveling up is not a valid strategy in this day and age” speech.

I have done some mob quests, but not all of them, in particular, not the ones before the more difficult bosses, but guess what? You don’t get any experience for it, maybe some LP, but no experience. The rewards are indeed helpful, but not enough so that you will be able to win against a boss. When I lose against a boss in FFXII, I try a different strategy! And guess what? If its better, I win the next time!

Besides, there’s only a handful of hard bosses in the entire game. Most of them are only mildly challenging or wimpy.

There’s no such thing as any good console RPG that requires to level up since Final Fantasy IV. None. No matter what good game you spit at me (and you know I’ve played them all), I can spit back a way to get past the challenge without leveling up. (Note: “Good” game, shit like Saga Frontier doesn’t apply, obviously bad games have bad habits.)

Its pure logic, Ex-S. If one person claims you are forced to level up for the bosses, it cannot hold true if another didn’t and can get past them. Because then you wouldn’t be forced, there’d be another way.

Giving your opinion on the slow pace is one thing, but there’s no call for saying something incorrect about a high-profile game most people won’t be able to play for months. I’m really tired of this attitude where if you’re having problems, it must be something wrong with the design of the game, not with the way you play it.

Beside the discussion about the specific games I wanted to underline how the use of the same mechanic (characters levels) are used to achieve two opposite results. In Oblivion the levels are used to measure the power of the character to then adapt the difficulty, in other games they merely articulate the character progression, and in the great majority of the japanese RPGs they are instead used by the players to adapt the difficulty of the game to their needs/desires. Customization and self-imposed challenges.

The difficulty of an encounter is always static. There are fixed variables involved and the player is required to “learn the lesson” and go through that type of encounter (often the end bosses, this is evident in DQ8, for example). The bar is set at a precise height and the player has to surpass it. The casual encounters, always hated by the western players, are here a way to offer the player a customization. While the boss monster will have a fixed difficulty, the players can manipulate the variable they control: the characters.

The level of these caracters adds a customization to the formula. You can decide to refine your tactics till you win, trying every time a different strategy, or you can slow down and gain more levels. There’s always a gap between you and an encounter. When this gap is too wide, the encounter may feel frustrating because you don’t know how to overcome it. The levels add customization to the difficulty because they help to compensate the gap. You can decide to fill it by grinding the casual encounters, or you can try to fill that space through “skill”.

I find this interesting because, as Kitsune explain, this is a huge, if not the major, selling factor for japanese players. It adds a great deal of replaying value as there are always small details to discover. The western players are less used to toy with the small details, we glide on the content and get frustrated if an encounter is too hard without trying to find a different strategy. We go through these kinds of game with the fast-forward.

Too little patience and tolerance.

It would be an interesting mechanic even in mmorpgs, but too often the encounters are so strictly codified that there isn’t much skill involved (and again, “skill” doesn’t mean “twitch”) and the “playable” level range of the monsters is narrow (fighting monster fours levels above you becomes nigh impossible, no matter how well you play). So there isn’t much to “customize”, you are just locked in a precise situation. The group mechanics are more interesting, but even here there’s this awful trend to trivialize an encounter through levels and items. See for example the instances in WoW, where the players standardized the access to each 4-5 levels above the standards set by Blizzard.

Fixing Oblivion

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There have been many discussions about the problem of “rubberbanding” in Oblivion. The term isn’t mine but it’s what I saw being used to describe the problem.

To explain, in Oblivion the whole game shapeshifts around your character. It’s the most often perceived flaw because it permeates the whole game, not only the game design, but also the graphic. The whole world is rolled at your feet like a red carpet, you walk around and things enter the rendered range and pop-up into existence, outside this radius and they cease to exist. The NPCs continue to exist and have their own schedules, which help to give the game some consistence, but everything else in is “volatile”. “Spawned on demand” and dynamically adapted to your level.

This means that all the content is potentially accessible at level 1. Every monster is in fact calibrated on your level. A wolf is spawned if you are level 1, or a minotaur if you are level 20. These are the “levelled lists” that were already present in Morrowind. You enter a dungeon and the game will populate it to be appropriate for your level, both in mosters and loot. No matter where you go and how well you play, at level 1 you will always find poor loot, while at level 20 or above you’ll always see the best of the best everywhere, and the whole world populated by epic creatures.

It existed as a way to address different playstyles in a sandbox game. It was needed to retain a general balance and keep the game always fun, trying to solve the problems that came up with Morrowind where you could quickly become god-like and then feel bored for the rest of the game because you were too powerful. It’s a general problem with an open-ended type of game, the story is not “directed”, so it becomes increasingly hard to calibrate the difficutly. You never know if the dungeon is being entered by a level 1 character or by a level 20. The solution was to populate the game world dynamically, adapting the spawns directly on the level of your character.

The result was that the players, not surprisingly, didn’t digested this workaround so well. It’s a solution that completely removes the persistence from the game in a similar way to what happens with randomly generated content. In a world and a game that relies heavily on the immersion, the world itself becomes “virtual”, potential. Every spawn represents a “possibility”, and not a fixed state. This type of virtuality has the direct consequence of removing the history. The mobs are “replaceable”, things do not exist. The world outside becomes pretentious, faked. You know that no matter where you go, every dungeon is tailored around you. The distance and space within the world cease to exist, because the world simply “walks with you”.

Here what is broken is the discovery. In a immersive game you explore the territory, discover treasures, get to know characters and stories. Think to the original Ultima series. YOU are the one who is ported to another world, you are then asked to move, explore and learn. That word exists with or without you. The fun is in the “roleplay” as immersion. You are a stranger in a strage land. So the player experiencing the discovery through the character. Make experience of the world.

The world is an essential part of these games and its value is in its history, its objectivity. Its independent state, autonomous from your character. PvE implies the fact that your character is detached from the world he discovers. This discovery implies the fact that the two sets don’t overlap and remain separate. PvE implies an identity, and, as an identity, autonomous from the one of your character. “Identity” is the opposite of “virtuality”. Virtual defines a possibility: something else, somewhere else and in a different time. Identity defines something that cannot be modified, a state. And history is part of an identity.

These are the same concepts I analyzed when discussing the use of the instancing because all these different design strategies always revolve about possibilities and the adaptation of the content. About “virtualizing” parts of the game so that they can be reused.

At the core it is needed a balance between two extremes, because the concept of the virtuality is opposed to the identity and you cannot have one and the other. One goes against the other, it precludes the other.

In Oblivion the game feels completely unbalanced toward the virtuality, so, as I said, the world loses consistence, it’s all adapted around you and the underlying rules are too evident to not get easily recognized. The “artificial wires” that connect this world are exposed and you can kiss goodbye to the suspension of disbelief. The immersivity fades away and you are soon learning and interacting exclusively with these aritficial rules. Simply put: you know what to expect, the game becomes predictable.

You know that at the end of the dungeon there will be that creature and that type of loot because you are at that level. Before going in for the first time, you already know what’s within.

This is a rather interesting mechanic because in other games the levels are used in the exact opposite way: the creatures are at a fixed level, while your own level is the game design tool used to customize the difficulty (I’ll write about this in another moment).

“Fixing Oblivion” is a way to bring the game back within a threshold so that not all problem are fixed, but at least the suspension of disbelief is once again possible, and you can concentrate more on the immersion. This could be possible through two mods, working together and addressing the basic problems of the levelled lists.

The first can be found here (Francesco’s mod, with only the core components present in the versions before 2.3) and is already quite popular. There are various mods changing the levelled lists but they are too aggressive or don’t really fix the real problem, even if they may have nice ideas. The one I linked is the best compromise I found at the moment. The second is a simple mod that slows down the skill up rate four times.

The first mod intruduces min and max levels to the quests, so that they still adapt to you but only within a certain level range, recovering some of the missing persistence. This makes the difficulty more static at certain points, it scales the content indipendently to your character and you won’t be able to finish the arena or quest lines without reaching the appropriate level or at least moving near it. The second mod works in combo with the first, making the levelling process four time slower, so requiring you to spend more time hunting and exploring for each level (slowing down the skills four times essentially quadruples the “content”), encouraging you to take the side quests without worrying about outlevelling the main quest (which, thanks to the first mod, will adapt downward and upward to your level, but stopping outside a certain range. So Kvatch will never become impossible, floating within a smaller level range).

This gives the game and the player more breadth and even more control on the difficulty. The original game is completely shaped around your character, but the levelling process was also extremely fast. So it was easy to rack up levels quickly and then arrive at a situation where you have to fight the same epic creatures every two steps. Those two mods distribute the flow of the game more uniformly. You have more time to see low level content and explore without feeling like outpacing the rest of the game. The result is that everything should feel more natural. You may find quests that are too hard, so you have the time to go somewhere else to gain more power before you try again. Your level becomes a way from a side to still adapt the game difficulty appropriately, from the other a way to adapt yourself to the challenge. Possibly achieving that balance that was missing in the original game.

I still haven’t tested everything thoroughly but for now it seems to work and on the paper the ideas are solid. At the moment I’m waiting for the official patch to come out before I go through the game for good. Hoping that it won’t take too long.

This was mostly a digression on the design implications.

Guild Wars – Fantasy Melting Pot

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Another interview with Jeff Strain confirms the same approach that I identified:

When we started working on Guild Wars and especially when we started pursuing what has kind of become the modern incarnation of the art style for the game, we really said, you know, obviously there are lots of different fantasy traditions in the world. And the fantasy tradition for the original Prophecies campaign was kind of your, very unique, but basically European kind of look, especially the early areas of it. As you point out Factions draws on an Asian fantasy theme, it’s not really Chinese or Japanese or Korean but kind of a shared cultural history between all three of them that we tapped into. And what we want to do is pursue that with future campaigns. Pursue specifically branching out into other cultures, other mythologies, other settings that are drawn from and inspired by cultures from all around the world. Guild Wars really truly is a global game, I mean one of the things that makes it different is that everybody plays together on one big virtual seamless server network, instead of being divided into shards and zones. And so we wanted to reflect that international flavor of the game itself in the art style. And so what you will see with future campaigns is we’ll pick another culture or mythology from around the world and then kind of explore that as the foundation, not only for the architecture but the character designs, costuming, the dialogue, even the quests in the story is going to be driven by that.

That’s exactly the trait I underlined with my early “review” in beta.

To be honest it’s not completely true that Guild Wars isn’t divided into zones. Europe and America are still seaparated and I think you can join foreign players only if you move to the “international districts”, which are always empty. You can port the whole account to a different zone, but even this transition isn’t smooth within the game and you can only switch an handful of times before your account gets locked permanently. A smoother travel system would be welcome in the game, considering that the technology can easily support it. In particular beween euro/american zones.

The choice to not bind the game to a precise setting is both a strength and a weakness. From a side there’s the possibility to explore freely every myth and culture, from the other it reinforces a generic feel. The player becomes a “traveler of worlds” but the strong use of the instancing and the setting-independence make the game feel rather inconsistent. I’ll return on this point but the basic problem is that there’s very little persistence, so very little immersivity. The whole game is focused on your own character and this is not the best way to feel involved with something. It is already a weak-bond.

I also continue to see the release of the stand-alone expansion packs as something not simple to sustain. It surely puts much stress on the developers and requires an high creative commitment. It is a bold choice. We usually think just about the new content added but we forget that a game isn’t just about that. With the original Guild Wars we even bought brand new technology and game systems. Those aren’t rebuilt with the new expansions but just brought over. I’m skeptical about the actual possibility to keep the game always fresh with this type of restless development. See this discussion.

It’s important that the development focuses also to expand and polish the game systems instead of exclusively on the content. The commitment to release (and depend) on these semestral expansions could be problematic to work on both fronts. It’s an incentive to reuse the same tools and patterns to optimize the production instead of allowing to shift the resources to attempt new solutions.

Considering that they need to release full-priced standalone products it may be a good idea to reverse the model and lower the price of the previous exapansion as the new one comes out. I think this could convince more players that arrive now in the game to pay another 20$ to eventually get the first chapter, instead of expecting them to spend 100$ for both.

What a big fuss for a name

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The discussion about the Nintendo Revolution console renamed “Wii” doesn’t seem to end. Considering the outcome it was definitely a winning move.

It’s from the very beginning that this console is surrounded by hype. It began with the tiny box that seemed to be empty inside, then the controller (btw, in retrospective someone got it right months before it was disclosed in September), now the name. At this moment the Phantom console is probably more solid than this Nintendo thing.

There are speculations about the name not being real and they may be attendible. Nintendo is so crazy that you really cannot say what may be true or not.

But why do we care? It’s just a name, it may be enough to keep marketers entertained for a while, but, as players, I really don’t see what is there to discuss and why so many people are ranting aloud just about the name of a console. There is really anything else more interesting to discuss/joke about?

The real point is that the name is irrelevant. The best thing a console name can do is being recognizable and catchy. This “Wii” does both, even if it sounds silly. At the end only two things will matter and define the success or failure of the console: that the graphic is shiny enough to draw the brief attention of the average gamer and if the games are involving enough to survive the word of mouth.

Honestly a console is just a vehicle and it should be almost irrelevant for a player. It’s all about the games and the number and reputation of the companies that will accept to dedicate themselves to that particular console. In fact the LESS consoles we have around littering the place, the better is for everyone.

The name could be a failure and the console could still be a huge success. What is fun is that the future marketing strategies may be influenced by flawed principles.

Now the problem is that “wii” gives an idea of something tiny, modest, hard to notice. Much better would be a “WOOOOO!” (A Q23 classic “emote”)

What is a “wii”? A weep? The game industry needs to be aggressive and pretentious, not shy and inhibited.

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The site may be unavailable

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cesspit.net domain expires in a few days and I’m trying to transfer it to dreamhost so that I don’t have to pay 20$ for the renewal where it is at the moment.

In theory the transition should be smooth since the nameservers are already at dreamhost and don’t need to be updated. But then I’m also used to all sort of problems coming up. So if the site vanishes it’s because I’m having problems with the domain. Most likely.

P.S.
While I was poking things around I reworked the code of the “Category” block so that it takes less space and allows me to create more categories for the specific games, now shown through the button toggle. I also found a workaround to hide some categories from the block so that now I can add more topics without making the block take too much space and becoming unusable.

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Overcoming current trends – The vocation of virtual worlds

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Hundred of new mmopgs are being announced and NOT A SINGLE ONE HAS ONE GOOD IDEA.

People are predicting now that the market will saturate. It doesn’t make much sense after the exploit of WoW but “believing in WoW’ would be like believing to the latest new trend. Instead trends are there to be broken, and from my point of view it’s beacause of WoW that there are now signs that the market is saturating.

This is what Jeff Strain (Guild Wars Exec Producer) has seen in this genre:

What people didn’t realize was that if you’re hard core enough to pay a subscription for a game you’re not going to do it with 2 games or 3 games or 8 games. You’re really only going play one game a year. What we saw was it was kind of stifling people’s ability to give them the freedom to go try a bunch of different games like you would normally do. Also once you got into it you were kind of forced to make this choice: either this is going to be a lifestyle commitment for me or I’m going to devote all my gaming hours to playing this one game.

There is truth in these comments. I’ve often repeated that this genre comes from an history of niche appeal. Hardcore players dedicated to THIS genre more like a “vocation” than just a general gaming culture. It was a world on its own, a world with an high price of admittance and that built its own community above the single title exactly because we all had something in common.

Now those communities are becoming weaker because the confines are blurred and this genre isn’t anymore a matter of an handful of a selected players. It is getting exposed to the large public and drawing the attention and legitimation of the non-specialized media. It is harder for a player to recognize himself in a group now. There isn’t anymore a strong identity for the mmorpg players. We aren’t anymore “special”.

The result of all this is two folds. The first part is that the market is expanding. WoW didn’t exactly demonstrate that the market is expanding at an increased pace, but more like that the market doesn’t have a defined dimension. If you reinvent it, it can be much larger, or much smaller. It is malleable, it cannot be “observed” or predicted. It doesn’t need outsider analysts because it’s a brand new space. And, as a brand new space, it has no rules.

But how WoW was able to rack up a large number of subscribers (not players, subscribers) beside launching everywhere? From my point of view, WoW isn’t an exception to the rule, it confirms it. I believe that WoW really reinvented the market but without changing its rules. It is often seen as a not innovative game, it just took all the influences in the genre and worked to make them well-olied, simplified. Removing the great majority of the Bad Habits and leaving behind the overcomplication that was plaguing the genre. It didn’t invented anything but it addressed exactly what the genre, and the market, needed: the accessibility.

The significant element in WoW’s growth is that it cleared the genre of its “hardcore” status. From there the conflict between “casual players Vs hardcore” that the game wasn’t able to solve.

In fewer words: WoW resolved the past of this genre, but it doesn’t represent its future.

We’ll have to wait for future titles (or former companies to wake up, but it won’t happen till it’s too late) to move past that point, to overcome the current trend, with a new one. It is obviously a path of obsolescence because the genre is immature and it still has a long way to go. You cannot sit down in a point because that’s not what it is needed now. And I’m in the minority saying that these virtual worlds shouldn’t become static oasis punctuating the history and evolution of this genre, but that they should move along with it. Accompany it. Fulfilling their unique vocation and quality.

At the very origin of all these considerations there is the fact that you need to have *an idea* to bring something to this genre. Do you want just a slice of the pie or do you know the ingredients that are missing? My impression, back to where I started, is that hundred of new mmorpgs are being announced but none of them seem to bring anything valuable to this genre. They seem doomed to become just short-lived comets generating a couple of threads on a mmorpg forum as they are launched to be then forgotten while trying to survive in their small niche in the following months.

These “lesser” mmorpgs try to survive in the interstices between the bigger titles, with the vain hope to become big titles themselves. But where are the premises to achieve that status? Where are the ideas?

This brings back to what Jeff Strain said above. The mmorpg market is a particular one. It’s not the same of single player games and follows completely different rules. This market is much more competitive because it’s not just a matter of placing a product, but a matter of winning an audience in the longer term. To create bonds with the players. To create a virtual world that can walk and evolve on its own, as a “vituous world”. Buy “shares” of that world, becoming part of it. Sharing an identity.

A lot more than being seduced for a few hours of satisfying playtime.

Some people, like Raph or Jeff Strain up here, believe that the only way to break this trend and generate a new one is to introduce a new business model that could break the accessibility barrier of the subscription fee. Discarding the very foundation of the mmorpg model. This could lure more potential players in, possibly for free (like the hypotetical game that SOE is supposed to develop right now), and then get money from different sources like RMT or content-on-demand. In a second moment this becomes even a strategy involving the content of the games: the plurality of genres (past the fantasy cliche) and the “bite-sized” games.

This is exactly the “Blue Ocean strategy” or, in simpler words, “thinking out of the box”. Change the rules.

I’m bringing all this up because I’m not in that group. That’s not the faction I’m fighting for. It’s not what I’d like to see. This doesn’t mean that I see that approach as faulty (but I also don’t see it any less risky), but it implies a shift of interest to completely diffent products. It’s not just a way to “present” the same thing.

Instead I’m here for the mmorpgs in their original premise (like: “the immersion” as a founding value). Of course not in their original bad habits and flaws. But I see a future, advancement and innovation in THIS genre. Not in a new one. I like this precise thing that I see right now as both faulty and promising. But I’m not a developer trying to find a new space. I’m just “a player” who is passionate about this precise thing. Investing in this.

If the market is competitive it doesn’t mean that it must be played out. That’s exclusively the perspective of the businessman. A subscription model isn’t just a way to sell a product. It is a way to define it. Part of what it is. You can reinvent the market but you cannot give us “what we want”.

There are always two different fronts. One is about expanding the market to new and completely different products, the other is about advancing a specific genre. I am interested and strongly believe in the second.

Now the point is: all those hundreds of new mmorpgs that are being developed don’t fall in any of the two categories. They aren’t new products, nor they bring new ideas.

I really don’t know what to think.

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Guild Wars: Factions – Goes live

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(work in progress post)

The new stand-alone expansion is now available on NCSoft online store for the exact same price of the boxed version (49.99$). I’m trying to gather a full feature list with more details about the new game modes, for now there’s the official FAQ that explains what you can expect from the game. For other early details there’s also my previous glance.

Since it’s stand-alone you can choose to create a brand new account or add the expansion to your previous standard Guild Wars account:

If you add the new access key to the existing account all your characters will be able to access all the content from both expansions and you’ll get two new character slots, instead if you open a brand new account you’ll get four character slots but you can only enter the areas of one of the two campaigns. Considering that the new expansion adds new skills and items for all the classes it’s obviously suggested to choose the first option. It was also announced that this summer it will be possible to buy new character slots for 9.99$.

Launching the game for the first time I noticed that now all the classes have an unique look depending on the campaign you choose. So even the standard classes will have new face/hair combinations and all-new itemization. See this example about how the warrior class looks differently between the two campaigns.

I’m moving the first steps around the moebius-shaped tutorial zone. Sometimes the pup-up messages are too quick and I have already various comments/gripes. This is a quick list I’ve written down, most of these points are complaints carried over from the original game:

– The dialogue windows pop-up right in the center of the screen, obscuring who’s talking. It’s not possible to reposition this window and it would be a much better choice to have placed it more on the side of the screen, without covering the view.
– The party window is still too intrusive and ugly. It would really need an overhaul.
– Still no way to deselect your current target without selecting something else.
– I stull dislike the ground textures, with bad-looking transitions.
– Sometimes there’s a cutscene right at the beginning of a zone, it would be nice to ask the player to press a “ready” button before it starts, when the loading is complete. Preventing to miss the cutscene on long downloads (when I alt-tabbed back to the game the cutscene was over and I didn’t even know it existed)
– The chat bubbles still appear overlapping on the NPC’s heads instead of above them. From the distance in particular, the chat bubble point of origin should be the bottom instead of the center.
– Still huge rubberbanding around obstacles.
– Many monsters still have badly synced animations and “skate” on the terrain while moving.

As in the first chapter you start fighting ugly bugs (GW’s version of the “kill 10 rats”) and the tutorial is exactly what you would expect. I noticed there’s a white circle around the center of the mini-map that represents your aggro radius, I didn’t remember this in the original game but maybe it’s just my memory. I find it quite functional but it is also a limit of the game. No matter of the type of the creature or the situation, the mobs will always aggro at the exact same distance. It’s kind of a trend in Guild Wars, more oriented toward a game-y experience than an immersive one. As always 90% of what you see on screen is just prettiness without a role, for example you could see a building, but it is almost sure that you cannot enter it. It’s mostly scenery very well done, but still nothing that gives some depth to the game. Nothing that is really part of the game. Extremely abstracted.

My very early impression is that this new chapter is rather pricey but content rich. Not much changed from the original GW so if you found it bland this chapter won’t be much better. It’s not a different game, nor one much improved from the last time you played it. But at the same time it continues on what it did, many new skills to create new, orignial builds and the new PvP modes that sound more involving, with alliances fighting for the control of the territory. I’ll comment more about this part as I reach it, even if I’m worried it is planned too much around the dedicated guilds and not easily accessible for other players (which means I could never see that content). The character window shows the three factions that will give you points that you can then spend for yourself or add to your alliance pool. In this second case I think the alliance can use those points to take control of some of the PvP zones.

About the amount of content I also have a comment from EFlannum, one of the devs:

To put things somewhat into perspective our times playing through chapter 2 are roughly equal to the times we got playing through chapter one, there is overall less square footage in chapter 2 but more content per square foot. I would describe it less as an expansion and more akin to the old d&d gold box games, it’s a new standalone game experience built on the same engine and using the same ruleset.

This wasn’t necessarily the plan right from the start but it is what it turned into. Hopefully it all works out.

The game continues to confirm its setting-independence, as I wrote as I played the game for the first time, and this is confirmed by the brand new look of all the classes in the new campaign. It becomes some sort of metaverse of parallel words represented by each new expansion. So it’s rather probable that with each new one they’ll approach a brand new setting, like this one has an asian theme. Creating a mixup of history, myths and exotic cultures. A melting-pot of cultural influences and suggestions. A truly “fantasy culture”.

I’ll write down more comments and add screenshots as I continue to play.




 

 

 

 
This map screen represents the whole landmass of the expansion, if you look carefully you should notice two parallel blue/red lines that should represent the territory of the two rival factions that the players should be able to affect.


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

ROADKILL!! (The doom of indie mmorpg companies)

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Dave Rickey: There are a lot of lessons Eve can teach us. But let’s not go off half-cocked and learn the wrong ones. Eve’s business position is so unique, it serves only as an outlier, a boundary point that shows what can happen, when a game has a niche to itself that grows so slowly that it attracts no competitors.

—
Raph recently put together some predictions about this industry and people nodded their heads in agreement. I have many thoughts about this but it’s not easy to put all of them together in a simple thesis. I’ll throw some of the thoughts here and maybe I’ll find a thread.

The first point to consider is that I find those previsions vague. At some point I could imagine me commenting, “It went exactly the opposite of what you said.” and Raph, “No, it went exactly as I said”. Some of those predictions are plausible (like the online distribution), you could even argue that the scenario he portrays is already here. More like a description than a prediction. But the title says “next-gen”. Next-gen supposes that things will change and this is exactly the apocalyptic scenario that both Lum and Psychochild have perceived. A tone confirmed by Raph himself:

Looking out at the future, what I see is an extinction-level event.

That sounds quite different from a description of the current scenario, it implies some huge paradigm shifts, innovation, revoloutions. Exciting times!

Well, my predictions are much more shocking than that: things will remain almost exactly as you see them now.

If you observe the situation with a huge magnifier then everything you’ll see will also appear huge and exhalted, but the truth is that it all falls in the average “normality”. Raph seems to predict significant changes, in particular he focuses on the extinction of the majority of the large projects for the rise of the indie companies. A plurality of offers, tiny blocks of innovation. The “spring of all the new species”. Even a new growth of the PC gaming market!

My suspect is that Raph wrote that while asleep and dreaming. A pretty, positive scenario that he wishes more than one he expects, I think. Again we could argue that all this is already happening. But where is the prediction? If it’s just a relative point of view the discussion would be pretty much null, what you see as “huge” and “next”, I see as “small” and “current”. Without an objective platform we don’t go anywhere. That scenario is already here or it is an incoming revolution? Because if it’s already here then I don’t see it as “huge”, I see it as “negligible”. Are things really going to change significantly? And for who?

Who will say what is “next-gen” when it will finally arrive? Because my suspect is that everyone will have a different opinion. Everyone will be convinced to be right even if everyone says a different thing.

So let’s focus on the three points I find relevant to discuss, at least:
– The Big Guys will crumble under their own weight
– Smaller, indie companies will flourish everywhere with a plurality of ideas
– Everyone will be happy (the market will grow, there will be more space for individuality and the offer will be richer)

Do you really believe that this is going to happen or you just wish that it is going to happen? My opinion is that things will change only if you go look in detail at every small trend, pretty much as things can already be seen from many different points of view right now. This is why I say that nothing significant is going to happen anytime soon. The genre will mature. Maturity usually brings to specialization more than variety. I don’t think we’ll see a plurality, I think instead that we’ll see a consolidation.

See? Things are already much different and still the same, at the same time. I say there will be a consolidation but this implies that there will be failures, projects going nowhere. This scenario not only is something already happening under everyone’s eyes, but it may even fall in that first point about the Big Guys.

It is going to be extremely hard for medium-sized companies to compete in the mmorpg market. There’s a race for the leadership. The upcoming scenario is an oligarchy. A few, consolidated titles, with dedicated development teams. The great majority of the companies that found their own space won’t have an easy, quiet life. They will have to fight and there will be losses because those smaller spaces will become more desirable when the market will saturate. This isn’t a process of extinction, this is a process of selection and assimilation. It isn’t even a trend specific of this industry. The mass market implies an hegemony. It’s the Borg process of assimilation and transformation. Things that will be rejected will be excluded, but after the process started it doesn’t stop, like the excessive growth of WoW. Beyond the normality. There’s a point where it transforms in a flood, the mass market culture permeates and convinces. Conforms and uniforms.

Who will survive in this scenario? The indie companies or at least the smaller sized ones that won’t fit in the Uber Oligarchy will only survive if they don’t draw any attention. Live of breadcrumbs. When they’ll rise their head and draw the attention they will get assimilated or wiped away. Or a project is too tiny to be relevant, or it will draw attention and it will be eaten alive. This is what happens when you draw attention. The Big Guys and every mass culture trend never live of innovation. Innovation would kill mass culture. They live of assimilation. They slowly recycle what happens around them. In this scenario the indie companies aren’t “next-gen”, they are just food for the dinosaurs.

What is sure is that the dinosaurs will continue to rule this land and decide what happens on a significant level. Maybe the small companies will have the blind illusion of being the center of the world, but they will only exist as long the dinosaurs want, as long they get unnoticed, as long they remain negligible. As long they don’t harm. As long they don’t poke their heads out of their holes.

And in the case they try to do that… ROADKILL!!

EQ2: the equipment damage rule

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I wanted to comment this for a while, in the last update patch there was a change that created some discussions and complaints. Here it is:

– Upon death, the most expensive item equipped in each slot within 2 minutes before death will take damage. If an item was equipped in more than one slot, the next most expensive item will be damaged in addition to the most expensive item. A single item will not be damaged more than once per death.

To begin with, this explanation is rather twisted and the first reaction from the players was a question mark. What the hell does this mean?

Well, Aggro Me wrote a bit about this rule when it was still on the test server and not in its last reiteration. EQ2 has gone through many revisions of the death penalty and, following a funny and consolidated trend, it moved more and more close to WoW. Right now the death penalty doesn’t differ too much between the two games and even in EQ2 one of the most relevant elements is the fact that when you die your equipment gets damaged and you have to repair it.

Since the two games follow the same rules both also have to deal with the same consequences. In EQ2 the players have available a /slash command to bind to a key that would quickly unequip all your items. This “smart” workaround/exploit was useful because you could press that key when a death was imminent to easily avoid to get the durability hit on your equipment on death and avoid repair costs.

In WoW the players don’t have access to powerful slash commands, but the UI scripting language also allows to create buttons to swap equipment and mirror the exact same exploit. It is interesting now to compare how this problem was addressed in the two games.

In EQ2 the solution went through various reiterations that lead to that rather counterintuitive rule I quoted up there. In fact the first problem is that this workaround to fix the exploit breaks one basic rule: “a player should always be able to understand a change or use a new feature without reading the patch notes”. In this case not only the explanation isn’t that simple to understand, but the new mechanic is based on a timer that is invisible to the player. The two minute rule, plus its precisations, is nowhere “transparent” in the game. This two minute timer isn’t revealed to the player, nor it can be autonomously deduced. The result is quite simple: or you read the patch notes, understand exactly what they mean and remember them, or this mechanic would remain completely obscure and hidden. It is clunky and complicated, not really appropriate for something that should be kept simple and transparent. Intuitive.

How the designers arrived to that conclusion? Here’s the “designers vs players” duel in the form of questions and answers:

Q: The players use a macro to quickly unequip items when death is imminent to avoid repair costs.
A: The designers introduce a 2-minute timer so that every item equipped in that lapse of time would get damaged. Even if unequipped at the time of the death.

Q: The players start to complain because they are penalized when swapping equipment for other reasons, every item equipped within those two minutes would get the durability hit. With this penalty stacking on multiple items.
A: The designers tweak the rule so that only the last item equipped for each slot would get damaged.

Q: The players once again outsmart and exploit the rule bringing with them two complete sets. One is their proper set they should use, the other is a disposable trash set to which they can quickly swap before a death to have it absorb the penalty.
A: The designers tweak the rule so that the “best” item for each slot would get damaged.

And that’s the final rule. There are even cases where you deliberately unequip items to move through risky spots without risking your equipment. This rule doesn’t prevent this, but the players would need to remember to wait an imaginary 2 minute timer to wear off every time. It is simply counterintuitive and artificial. Aren’t there better design solutions?

As I said WoW shares the exact same mechanic and risks the exact same exploit, it’s is interesting to see how Blizzard addressed the same problem. Now the point is that we don’t even need to wait for Blizzard, because Blizzard’s design is extremely simple. It’s logic.

The players unequip items to avoid them to get damaged on death. How we prevent this behaviour?

That’s the starting point, and this is a roleplay game. The more it is consistent, the better. So what’s the simplest answer possible to that problem? It’s obvious: we forbid the player to swap equipment during combat.

See? It wasn’t hard and it even makes sense. It’s extremely hard to imagine a warrior in a full plate who swaps his whole armor during a fight. Preventing this lame equip-swapping behaviour would not only fix the exploit, but also make the game mechanic more consistent, believable and intuitive. If you try to swap a chest piece during combat in WoW you get a message telling you that you can’t do that action at that time. You need to wait to be out of combat, when it makes sense to allow the character to put on a different armor set. Is this brilliant design? No, it’s logic. It’s thinking from “within the game” instead through the artificiality of game design: you cannot swap armor sets at will while you are engaged in combat. It’s not a rule to close an exploit, I would be *surprised* if the opposite would be allowed.

This is not all. If we think to a combat situation there’s still the realistic possibility to swap some of the items. For example it makes sense to swap weapons even if you are engaged in combat. This possibility would be believable. And, in fact, this is once again how WoW behaves: while you cannot swap your armor sets during combat, you can still swap two kinds of items, weapons and trinkets. Which, incidentally, are exactly those two types of items that contemplate the item-swapping as a valid combat strategy that is part of the design of the game. (trinkets don’t even have durability in WoW)

I’m far from praising WoW. What I want to demonstrate is that Blizzard’s design isn’t something complicated and convoluted that comes from the minds of game design gurus. It’s just simple thinking, logic, linear conclusions. Observation. You think to a fantasy game, you imagine these warriors and you are supposed to simulate the game mechanics so that they go close to what you would expect. The problem of the consistence.

The only excuse I can guess on SOE’s side is that they didn’t have available an “in-combat” flag to use directly in the mechanic, forcing them to find another solution. But even in this case I believe it wouldn’t be hard to code something similar starting from what’s already available, like the hate-lists of the mobs (if the players is in aggro, he would be considered in combat).

It looks like SOE has inherited Raph’s “Out Of Character” design. The absurd idea that the game design is completely abstracted (alienated) from the setting and the world you simulate. The level of the mechanics independent from the metaphoric level. The result is a complicated and convoluted ruleset that simply makes no sense and just leads to more and more problems.

Of course I’m writing about a tiny detail here with a negligible impact. But it’s a way to reveal a much broader and dangerous trend. A design apporach that I consider harmful (for these kinds of games).

—
Off-topic: What happened to Scott Hartsman? I have three guesses:
1- He just stopped posting on the boards because he’s busy planning and scheduling and there’s no major release anytime soon
2- He was moved/promoted/downgraded to a different role or project
3- He left SOE

Hey, you know I’m suspicious.
(now I have the suspect he may go to fill the space left by Raph)