Darniaq:
The games are built around planned obsolescence.
I took out of his comment what interested me, but it was good as a whole. In particular the first and last line. Then scroll up for his other comment. Then read this.
Vanguard’s combat mechanics, more dangerous than appropriate
“I’m not writing anything, but I do it well”
A couple of days ago an article describing Vanguard’s combat mechanics was linked on FoH’s boards. You could go read it like I did but you can also spare your time: it says nothing. (btw, after the restyle Silky Venom is probably the best looking and well designed fansite I’ve seen)
I think this is a perfect example demonstrating how some words put together can fool everyone without actually saying anything. In particular on the catass guild forums, the players are easily fooled by some vapor instead of actual solid ideas. That’s the power of the hype, everything is blurred and you can define what is still isn’t the way you like. Instead of looking at the actual game you are just looking at your dreams about it. And the dreams are usually prettier than what you’ll get through the compromises of the reality. This is why I think that the most important conclusion about that article and the following reactions is that the players really want to “believe”. Like Fox Mulder. They really want to be confident and anticipate a game that will be great. What is sure is that the audience is there and that the expectations are high.
But here I’m too jaded to get fooled by some steam. I like the hype but I need something solid to support it or you won’t convince me. That article in particular is rather silly. It says nothing at all. It actually delves in the mechanics and explains them in detail, but you could take the article and replace “Vanguard” with “WoW” or “DAoC” and it would be still correct. The purpose would be to describe how great is Vanguard’s gameplay compared to other games but the result, if you look through the mist, is that it describes everything BUT what sets Vanguard apart. Well, beside the fancy figures.
General Statement: If EQ’s gameplay is considered a leisurely stroll, and WoW’s is a healthy jog, Vanguard’s gameplay feels like ice skating. It is smooth.
If you give the article a quick glance you’ll notice it starts from the “autoattack”. You would expect him to claim that Vanguard has no autoattack, in particular considering how it starts: “Prior games used autoattack.” Prior games. That means that Vanguard is obviously different. Haha, you fool. Vanguard’s autoattack not only is there, but it is also EXACTLY IDENTIC to the one in every other game. You know, weapons have a swing speed and, if you don’t press any special style, the character will keep swinging the weapon at that speed. Truly revolutionary compared to prior games. Indeed. Probably the most interesting point here is that the swing speed can be as slow as six seconds. A particularly dull wack-a-mole. But let’s glide on this for now.
The second paragraph is about “Special Attacks”, because it’s obvious, the game isn’t just about a slow or fast autoattack, sometimes you can also press some buttons for a special action. Even here you’ll try to figure out what’s different in Vanguard. In this case the claim is about having in the game not only offensive styles that increase the damage or apply effects, but also defensive styles that will require the player to pay attention (oh noes!). Well, I don’t know if this can be considered as a different trait. My warrior on WoW seems to have quite a few defensive styles. I can switch to defensive stance, the Demoralizing shout is a defensive debuff, then I have Disarm, Shield Block, Shield Bash to break spells, the Sunder Armor can also be considered a defensive style, the Thunder Clap slows down attacks, the Intimidating Shout makes multiple mobs flee and I finally also have the Shield Wall for the special occasions. I guess that’s already a fair range of defensive tools available at the right time. Or not?
But the real distinctive trait isn’t that one. It’s the fact that these special attacks… have cooldowns. Oh nice. Now if only I could remember one game where the styles DO NOT HAVE the cooldowns, it could be a nice argument. But I cannot. DAoC’s skills have cooldowns, EverQuest’s skills have cooldowns and the same for WoW. In fact all these games are designed around the good timing of these skills and in fact they all, even if in different proportions, require some strategy and timing to play your class effectively. That’s what really set the difference between a poor game and a good one. The balance with which these skills are planned, the variety of the tools you can use, the synergy with the other classes, the complexity of the multiple encounters. That’s what matters, because at the origin ALL these games reply the exact same mechanics: there are autoattacks, there are specials, some specials are defensive and they all have cooldowns. There’s really *nothing* different at this level to distinguish one from the other.
Late edit: There’s an ideal link here to something Darniaq wrote recently:
If someone stopped looking at the systems once they noted the similarities, they may not truly be able to assess the success and relevance of one over the other, nor understand where future success could be had.
/end of the late edit
On the forums someone was arguing about these points:
Imagine that in Vanguard every creature in the game has the ability to do a deathtouch, but it is easy to counter. There is nothing like that in WoW and so I don’t see how you can possibly think that reacting to something after it has happened is the “exact same thing functionally” as mitigating it with abilities.
So WoW doesn’t have that?
Just the first examples I could think:
In Zul’Gurub there’s one of the mobs who has a powerful life leech that splits and links multiple targets. If you don’t Shield Bash or stun the attack as it starts, you wipe.
In Gnomeragon there are those alarm things. If you aren’t fast to kill them, they call for some elite mobs than can easily wipe the group if you are already fighting (and if you were in beta you’ll remember how hard it was to spot them since they had no sound). This is something slightly different but that still follows the same pattern.
And there are plenty of examples like this one. If you see your target with the sparkles on the hands, you know that it is going to cast a spell. And you can stop it before it happens. All the crowd control skills are again examples of “mitigating skills”. They let you control and solve a situation. They are tools that require a proper and competent use if you want to go through some of the harder instances where you have to deal with multiple mobs. And even WoW is nowhere “new” compared to other games, it just relies more on those tools and developed more patterns to figure out and solve. The original design is basically unaffected. The difference is simply about how much a system uses these tools.
A sharp armchair designer out there may say “oh great, so we will just be spamming defensive specials,” but that is not the case either…because of special ability cool-downs and the timing of autoattack, if you simply spam your defensive specials, you will not have them available for use when “the big one” occurs, because you may have “wasted” it on a lesser attack used to fake out the warrior.
And how’s this different? These games not only have the same cooldowns used by Vanguard on these specials, but they also rely on endurance or “rage”. If you waste what you have without some planning, you won’t be able to use the most useful skills when they are most needed (and I really do know this since I’m lazy and tend to reuse over and over those few skills that I can easily reach with my fingers and as soon they light up, even when I should plan my attacks more carefully).
Finally we arrive at the last paragraph, where there’s a description of something that could possibly define a difference in Vanguard. Or not. Basically Vanguard will have pop-up icons that will let you anticipate what type of attack the mob will use in the “next turn”. This means that you’ll be able to plan your tactics and the use of those specials described above considering the attacks that will come in the next turn and reacting to them in the best way possible. This is how Brad justified the slow pace of the combat since, otherwise, you just wouldn’t have enough time to see these icons and plan your reaction before the turn is over. And this is also why you’ll have to “pay attention”.
Which brings to my conclusion. All this makes sense. I’m not saying that Vanguard’s mechanics, as described, are particularly flawed (but I’ll delve even about this point below). But for sure they don’t add anything new. At all. See, these combat mechanics, in every game, work on abstractions. This is also why in Vanguard you are able to anticipate the target’s next attack, it’s an abstraction. This is why we see levels, hitpoints, statistics, icons and so on. Reacting to an icon becoming active (WoW) or reacting to an icon popping up (Vanguard) is essentially the same thing. From the player’s perspective there’s absolutely no difference. Already in WoW I cannot watch the action to figure out if my target dodges so that I can use the “Overpower”. The action on screen can be too confused and the only thing I really do is watch the icon lighting up and press it before I miss the opportunity. We play the quickbars. Still today what is going on in the graphical window is almost irrelevant. Our eyes are still locked on the quickbar and the health bars. That’s your game. It’s true that we react to what happens, but to what happens on the quickbar. The gameplay is all in the UI, this is why they are so important to make a game fun and successful. The graphical window is almost an optional, you need it to deal with the aggro and keep your character facing the target, but then you play the quickbar.
If we consider Vanguard, the underlying mechanics remain unaffected. Instead of looking at an icon lighting up as a “reaction” to an event like in WoW, you’ll see an icon popping up to which you have to react. How’s this different for the player? In one case he racts to an icon that becomes active, in the other he reacts to an icon popping up. These systems work on abstractions and these abstractions are modeling the exact same thing. Preemptive attacks or reactives are like two different skins for the same model. They don’t define a different approach, they just give a different superficial shape to the same mechanic. They are UI themselves.
What would actually matters is what in that article isn’t written: whether Vanguard relies more on these reactives or not. Because from the functional point of view those systems are IDENTIC.
The only difference is that WoW models and mixes different patterns instead of hardcoding and repeating just one. It models reactives as well as some preemptive skills and spells. Using them when they make more sense. It makes sense to see the sparkles of a spell and stop it before it is casted, and it makes sense to react to a dodge or a block after it was executed. The only thing I can see is that Vanguard’s combat is even more abstract and unrealistic. It’s more heavy on the UI to the point that we are really playing just an expensive MUD. If you can see what a mob will do BEFORE it does it, the graphical representation of the action truly becomes completely irrelevant. Why would you look at the models when the icons already describe and foretell whatever is going to happen? And I wouldn’t be surprised if Vangaurd UI will take much more space on screen compared to other games. Some players described this perfectly, it’s a direct copy of EQ2 crafting system. One of the most abstract and absurd ever created.
I already wrote at length (some ideas also here) how these games should move toward *removing* the UI as much as possible and try to simulate a realistic experience where you react to a more direct feedback instead of just to a quickbar, an health bar or a text string in a chat window. That’s what sets a graphical game apart from a MUD. That’s where its specific and untapped qualities are. That’s what would be an actual evolution. Instead Vanguard moves to rely even more heavily on the UI to the point that what happens on the screen isn’t anymore relevant. The combat mechanics become so abstract and detached that they live on their own isolated level. They are emancipated from the rest and they require a type of knowledge that is nowhere immediate and direct. Which probably fits with the “hardcore” target audience of the game but that goes right against the intuitive, accessible and smooth mechanics that made WoW successful.
I won’t argue about the goals of a mmorpg. But I still believe that the success of these fantasy worlds is more cultural than functional. It’s about their myths and what they evocate. It’s about the immersion into a believable and self-consistent world. It’s in everything BUT the overcomplicated and abstract rulesets that eradicate that immersion to show you that the game is just about math formulas, numbers and preplanned algorithms. We like what we see on the curtain, not what’s behind.
This is my opinion. These tools that Brad is developing are still abstract and a lot will depend on the final implementation. But they are more dangerous than appropriate.
Can’t you see that these games are much more than formal systems?
EverQuest got new UI and stuff
I read somewhere that EverQuest was getting a revamped UI, but I couldn’t find a link to check the details.
Now Mobhunter has a write-up about the last patch. Quoting what took my attention:
Everquest now uses the default system mouse during play. The biggest improvement seems to be mouse cursor speed regardless of the framerate of your game. Players can also mouse out of the EQ window in windowed mode without having to release the mouse.
When I retried the game, more than a year ago, I really couldn’t suffer those two issues. Those types of fixes are worth way more than new quests and stuff from my point of view. Sometimes they are defined as “quality of life” fixes, a really appropriate definition. I wish the developers would give them more consideration.
Here you can see some screenshots of the new EQ2-ish UI. Another super tiny one here.
Ahh, the days of the old rants:
The user interface looks like it was based on a web page on GeoCities. Beautiful, stunning scenery surrounded by a butt-ugly control scheme that takes up half the page. You can turn off the butt-ugly control scheme, with the tradeoff that you can then not actually do anything.
All the rest is still valid, though.
Here’s Furor big face, handy as a dartboard
 I like to put a face on devs or people I know only through words. Not like it tells you much more, but it’s always interesting to finally see someone after you have passed so much time reading and discussing about imaginative figures. This in general. Of course I wasn’t particularly interested to see Furor’s big face, but this is what I got today (assuming my guess is correct). Looking like a slightly oversized version of Clark Kent. It was somewhat amusing to see the FoH’s guys going: “Who is Alex?” Alex being Alex Afrasiabi. No, not that guy in Might armor in the Valley of Heroes right outside Stormwind, that’s only his e-peen. This being the real one, Furor, former leader of the “Fires of Heaven” catass-stereotype guild and pensionate EverQuest ranter that finished to get hired by Blizzard. He is a quest designer now. Or at least he was. Maybe he got a promotion and joined the fun trio, or maybe he is just working is ass off to get there and command the team to replace the sun with his big smiling face during the sunny days in WoW. And now we even discover that Foton’s favourite scapegoat may even be responsible of some nice content. UNPOSSIBLE! That’s one of the signs of the Apocalypse. In fact we know that he is responsible for everything broken in Alterac Valley! We need scapegoats after all. And one definitely isn’t enough. Well, from this other report we can finally blame him about something concrete: “Alex designed the Dire Maul Tribute Run.” Wait. It cannot be. That cannot even remotely live up to his reputation. Honestly, I don’t remember anything in particular about DM North. There’s nothing about it sticking out. Neither good nor bad. It’s a fairly decent run, not too long with a couple of good ideas. If he designed Gnomeragon I would have to praise him but I didn’t get any particular feelings from DM. So there, I don’t have much of an opinion, you can have your own. It’s also worth noting that the lead designer is now Tigole. What happened to Rob Pardo and Allen Adham? Good or not, this seems to be the new Blizzard. It’s interesting how the innovation could come from here. Passionate players with some crazy ideas and with almost no practical experience as devs. Maybe Blizzard dared a bit and gave these guys a possibility. Maybe the worth of the game is the result of those choices and not in spite of them. You know that it’s what I would like to believe. I’ll end with a quote from MIA Anyuzer:
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Raph has the blog flu
Maybe you noticed but Raph is really trying hard to promote his new blog thing wherever he can. In all the forums I follow he went to ask some sort of attention (here, here, here and here). Now I don’t find this bad or something, but it surely looks odd.
You know, you would expect that type of behaviour from *me*, in fact people cannot stop to mock me when I link back something, even when it is in-context. But the point is another. Now Raph is posting restelessly on his blog, his entries took over my RSS feeds. So I wonder what are the real reasons about all this turmoil. Okay, I can understand that he has lots of stuff to write but he is way too restless to make this look just normal. Heck, now he even goes with the livejournal types of tests.
It’s nowhere possible that he’ll keep this pace for long, I give him a month. He is way too restless to make this look like a long lasting interest. He seems frustrated about something, like trapped or something.
I’m not sure if you understand what I mean. I’m not criticizing or blaming him. It’s just that it looks like a frustrated kid with a new toy, he goes all hyper and then loses all the interest two minutes later because he is bothered by something else.
So, just to make some sense, there are two things. The first is that I don’t belive that Raph will get what he expects from this blog thing and after a month we’ll see him posting every so often if not abandoning the place to just poke at it sporadically like it did with his previous place. The second thing is that he looks really too restless to the point that I recognize something of me in that attitude. And it’s definitely not normal. So there may be something behind.
Or maybe it’s just that nasty blog flu.
Don’t do this at home
I cannot catch up with the things I should write. I have a “notes.rtf” file on my desktop that exceeded the 100Kb of text and it’s becoming way too large to even be useful.
So I’ll try to cut out at least this part before I forget it, that doesn’t require me to comment. A few couple of quotes I save from an interview with Jessica Mulligan:
Truly, my favorite part of the job is encouraging members of the team to exercise their passion for games by taking ownership of various pieces, then watching them and the game flourish as they build. I’m very consensus-oriented; we all know what the mission is and I mainly make sure we all agree on the mission, that we articulate it clearly to the players for their feedback and suggestions and then make sure the train doesn’t derail while we build.
Get educated. It isn’t enough to just get a job in customer service at game company and then work your way up the ladder while experimenting with different types of games. Those days are gone.
If you want to make compelling games, get a broad education in everything from computer science to the humanities. THEN go work at every job you possibly can in the industry – everything from development to customer service to marketing – and get a broad education in the business of games.
Third: Once you have that education and have some chops in the game industry, find funding and start your own company. That is the only way you’ll ever get to make the games you want to make, especially if you want to make something other than a horrid sequel (and how long will it be before we see “Killer Babes In Bikinis IV: Death Wears A Thong”?).
I guess this second part works as an update to this early post. Which also goes back to this.
I’m not really meaning anything, I don’t see a pattern yet about this. Just placing some points and drawing some links to see if they lead somewhere.
Commentary from BlizzCon
At the end, and despite an early comment, BlizzCon was useful to delve a bit deeper on the plans about the game.
Here you can find three screenshots of concept art for Tier 2 armor sets that look a bit too much like Power Rangers. (mirrored at the bottom of this article, will be back in a few days)
And linked through FoH some surprisingly interesting and information-dense articles on various aspects on the game that were discussed during the conference. I don’t think we will get much more than that in the upcoming months and I’m also sceptical that those features planned for the live patches will be added in time as planned.
You can go follow those links or “read more” for my consolidated backup. (I’ll repaste it when the kids move on)
P.S. For the goons thinking I’m taking the paternity of what was written below: I DIDN’T WROTE THAT. Hell, I didn’t even go to BlizzCon. If I take informations from the internet and archive them here instead of just linking them it’s because after a couple of months I have the blog filled with broken links. To preserve the integrity of the informations I back up them AND provide the original links to the sources till they are available.
What the hell. Fuck you all. Get away from this fucking site. Follow the goddamn links you LAZY ASS.
BlizzCon: A Brief Look at Blood Elves
The new Horde race for the World of Warcraft game, blood elves, will become available in next year’s expansion, and it was previewed at BlizzCon in Anaheim this weekend.
A guildmate of mine pointed out that waiting in the 90 minute line to play the Burning Crusade expansion wasn’t necessary, since we could wait for two minutes at the Nvidia booth to play it there. So we did.
Pregenerated blood elves — mage, warlock, warrior and priest — were set up on all the demo machines at BlizzCon, and we each gave Blood Elves a whirl. Only one quest was initially available on Sunstrider Isle, although I suspect people before us did most of the level 1 quests. The one quest available was to kill mana worms — think tiny versions of the flying dragon snake thing in “The Never Ending Story.” But running around the island, we got to see hostile miniature treants, a banished blood elf warlock (hostile) and some small great cats, also hostile.
The blood elves are definitely not simply repaints of the existing night elf models. Their features are more rounded, their ears stick straight up, and their bodies are less muscular. All of their newbie gear has a more stylized look, including kukri-inspired daggers and swords, and newbie robes with gold ornamentation. They jump in sort of a flying martial arts pose and instead of sometimes flipping, they sometimes spin instead. Their dance is a 1950s style shimmy of the hips combined with rubbing a toe on the ground — I think that might be called the Mashed Potato, I’m not sure. It was too loud to hear any vocal emotes, if they’ve even been added at this point.
Their innate mana-draining ability is pretty impressive against level 1 and level 2 foes, but only the silence ability — which has a significant cooldown period — is likely to be useful past level 20 or so.
Sunstrider Isle looks sort of like I’d imagined: Take night elf art and architecture, rip out all the nature-based motifs, and replace them with a strong reliance on magic. Objects like bookshelves float or even rotate in the air. There are small translocation gates used to get around between floating platforms. Pet Siamese cats are everywhere. Life for survivors of the Scourge attacks on Quel’Thalas looks to be quite comfortable, even if they’re effectively just living in a small gilded cage.
The one quest text I was able to read specifically mentioned the destiny of the blood elves is on Outland.
Having seen the new race creation process through the alpha period, from this brief glimpse — only one quest, and I wasn’t able to get to the zoneline for the next zone, if it was even open, with a level 1 blood elf dodging angry treants — the polish and quality looks comparable.
BlizzCon: Rob Pardo talks WoW classes, up to level 70
Blizzard Entertainment’s Rob Pardo presented an overview of the classes in the World of Warcraft, addressed questions about what raising the level cap to 70 in the Burning Crusade expansion would mean for characters and fielded audience questions Friday afternoon at BlizzCon in Anaheim.
For starters, he noted that on “normal” servers, players with level 60 characters respecced their talents an average of 2.8 times. On player-versus-player servers, the average was 3.6 times.
With the understanding that talents are important to players, Pardo said that they would be extending the talent trees up 10 points, so that players would have to choose between putting their additional 10 points in previously available talents, or going after new 41 point abilities.
But those won’t be the only new abilities player characters will be getting: Look for new types of abilities or spells between 60 and 70 — “probably four or five new spells, per character class” — and in time, the team would be going back and adding more new abilities between 40 and 60.
Also look for more racial differentiation within a class, similar to how priests have a special spell based on their race.
Paladins wanting a break from buffing, buffing, buffing on raids will be able to buff all the members of a class at once on a raid in the 1.9 patch.
Fire mages concerned about the high fire resistance on many current raid targets (although Pardo said fire resistance wouldn’t be an issue in the next two raid dungeons added to the game, the Ruins of Ahn’Quiraj and the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj) have some help coming in the form of the Spell Penetration ability on equipment, which will allow a spellcaster a better chance of penetrating an enemy’s spell resistances.
And Invisibilty, a spell that was removed from mages during the beta test, will be coming back in a significantly altered form as a post-60 spell in the Burning Crusade expansion.
BlizzCon: Chris Metzen explores the lore of Warcraft
Blizzard Entertainment’s Chris Metzen delved deep into the lore of Azeroth, Draenor and the rest of the Warcraft universe in a discussion with Blizzard gamers Friday at BlizzCon.
He started by discussing the just-announced expansion to the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade.
“It’s the proper name of the ongoing war of the Burning Legion to snuff out all life,” he said. “The Burning Legion has wiped out thousands, tens of thousands of worlds.”
The only world to ever survive being in the demonic Legion’s sights is Azeroth — and the world has done it twice now, most recently at the climax of Warcraft III: The Reign of Chaos.
“The Legion has thrown themselves against this planet twice now,” Metzen said. Recognizing their problems with Azeroth, the Legion is changing tactics as a result: “The Burning Legion is going full court press on every other world out there. And the heroes of Azeroth are being called into void to fight against the Cruasade.”
Although there are numerous other areas Blizzard could have chosen for this expansion — Metzen specifically mentioned Northrend, Undermine and the South Seas — the Burning Crusade’s Outland focus was chosen because it reinforced an important theme of WoW.
“At this point, we really want to stress that this is a cosmic conflict.”
(Northrend is also out for another reason: The expansion is only raising the level cap to 70 this tie. “I mean, come on. Arthas at level 70? No.”)
But there’s a wrinkle in the heroes’ fight against the Burning Legion. Illidan Stormrage, licking his wounds after his battle with the Lich King, has shut down all of the dimensional portals originally opened by the orc warlock Nerzhul to other worlds. Illidan is afraid the Legion will find him through the portals.
“We’re going to Outland to reopen these gateways and take the fight to the Burning Legion,” Metzen said. “Of ourse, Illidan is not going to be happy about this.”
Blood Elves were chosen as the Horde expansion race in the Burning Crusade because designers were thrilled with how well Samwise had redesigned the classic wood elves with the night elves. And they knew that, “one day, high elves are going to have to get a facelift, too.
“I don’t think anyone has abused high elves to this degree,” Metzen said.
Players surprised that the Blood Elves would have any interest in joining the Horde don’t know everything that’s going to lead the groups to joining up.
“Magic is absolutely corrupting. You shouldn’t play with it.” In the wake of the destruction of the Sunwell, the high elves of Quel’Thalas turned to demonic sources of magical energy to feed their magical addiction (which was thanks to thousands of years of constant exposure to magic, even for the high elves who didn’t practice magic themselves). But messing with “fel energy” is scary stuff, and it frightened the other races in the Alliance. “Dwarves and humans don’t want to hang around them. They’re not returning their phone calls.”
But the Blood Elves “could care less, they’re going to do whatever they have to do.” And thrilled by this new, seemingly endless supply of powerful magical energy, the Blood Elves have a unique take on the shattered planet of Draenor, now known as Outland. “They view Outland as an Eden. … Their homeland is great, but Outland is where their destiny is.”
The Blood Elves will leverage their relationship with Sylvanas, leader of the Forsaken and the former Ranger-General of Quel’Thalas. And more importantly, the Blood Elves will not come to the Horde, hat in hand.
“The Blood Elves are going to bring something to the table the Horde can’t do without.”
Look for the lead-up to the Burning Crusade to play out across World of Warcraft servers in the coming months.
The Alliance heroes of Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, who sealed themselves on Draenor as Nerzul’s dimensional portals tore the planet apart — and whose statues can be seen in the Valley of Heroes in Stormwind — will play a major part in the Burning Crusade.
“They’re still alive, and they’re kicking ass. They’re BAD. ASS. There’s a reason their statues are in Stormwind.”
The development team also fielded questions from the audience.
The two Hakkars that appear in Warcraft lore was Metzen’s fault, he said.
“The answer is my bad.”
He liked the name when he read it in drafts for Richard Knaak’s War of the Ancients novels, but forgot where he heard it, and when it came time to give the Soulflayer the Zul’Gurub trolls worship, the name came right back out.
“That happens daily” to him, he said. “‘Dude, there’s already a Luke Skywalker.'”
Lingering quest lines, including the intrigue with the Grimtotem Tauren and the fate of the King of Stormwind will be resolved, although the team couldn’t promise an immediate resolution. But things are happening: The King of Stormwind will be gone from the island prison many players have found him in when the 1.9 patch goes live.
“We know there are some unfinished quest lines out there that we’ll get back to,” Pat Nagle said.
The racial lifequests talked about for each race before the game was released have been scrapped. The idea had apparently been to give each player a storyline that would take them from humble beginnings to heroism, but while the quests felt great in a single player context, they didn’t work when thousands of undead were dealing with feelings of abandonment, or everyone was searching for their long-lost father, and so on.
“We didn’t want to make this canned story for everyone,” Metzen said.
Players wanting more interaction with the dragons of Azeroth will get it soon. Anachronus, the dragon guarding the Caverns of Time, will begin giving players quests in the 1.9 patch.
BlizzCon: Blizzard surveys the battlegrounds
Blizzard Entertainment developers held a candid discussion of the bumpy learning process experienced when making player versus player battlegrounds for the World of Warcraft Friday afternoon at BlizzCon in Anaheim, including a discussion of two scrapped battlegrounds.
Alterac Valley was originally going to be a persistent — not instanced, in other words — and quests and non-player-character-driven content was added to give players something to do for the times when no one from the opposite faction was around. When the team ended up making the battleground instanced, the quests and NPCs remained, but Alterac Valley, as it was, had quests that took players away from trying to achieve victory conditions, had a high risk of player death due to NPCs instead of players and had several zone design issues that made achieving objectives harder than they needed to be.
Azshara Crater, which was to be the second battleground, was very similar to Alterac Valley, but given all the problems that had cropped up with the battleground, work on it was stopped, although its entrances are still located in the game.
Following the success of the “lunchtime battleground,” Warsong Gulch, which featured a PVP standard, Capture the Flag, Blizzard looked at using another PVP staple, single-elimination Deathmatch play. The battleground, Gurubashi Catacombs, was to be located beneath the Gurubashi Arena, in pens where dangeous animals were once kept.
But the 5 versus 5 single elimination match invariably turned into melee classes killing spellcasters immediately, which was great fun for the melee classes, but absolutely no fun for the casters: “Of course you’re going to kill the guy in the dress.”
The issue could not be resolved, the designers felt, without a fundemental class revision that would make every class equally able to survive an attack by any other class.
The battleground was scrapped, but group duels might be made a feature of the game independent of battlegrounds at some point in the future instead.
Learning from the mistakes of their past, Blizzard has plans for future and present battlegrounds:
* They are lookin at a variety of ways to get battlegrounds to the critical mass needed to start a battleground more easily.
* They are looking into ways that, when possible, the game will automatically match up opponents more evenly.
* They will attempt to even out the honor gained per hour in each of the battlegrounds, so that people will choose a battleground based on what they enjoy, rather on where they will get the most honor.
* Battlegrounds will begin to have some sort of impact on the world outside of the zone.
* More improvements to the queueing system will be coming.
* Groups will automatically form when players enter a battleground.
* Siege weapons are currently not being worked on, since they couldn’t be made cool enough, but will be worked on again in the future.
* General PVP changes will be coming later, with announcements to follow.
* And in the 1.9 patch, multiple battleground queues can be joined at once time, and those who /AFK out early will be assessed a penalty on their times for the next queues.
BlizzCon: The shape of raids to come
Blizzard Entertainment’s Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan walked BlizzCon attendees through the design process for raids, starting some of the basic design philosophy.
“Players are only going to level up, and we want to have something for them to do.”
He also took issue with the belief that many players don’t raid.
On an average weeknight, he said, citing statistics collected by Blizzard software, 250 instances are running of Blackwing Lair, 700 instances are running of Zul’Gurub, 500 instances of Molten Core are running and 150 instances are running of Onyxia’s Lair. And given that all of those zones lock players out from visiting on consecutive days if they successfully kill a boss in the zone, the numbers of people using each is even higher.
Other things Blizzard designers take into account are what each class should expect to be doing on a raid to contribute — and it’s not always the same tasks: Druids were consciously given a chance to use their crowd control abilities in Zul’Gurub, for instance. Designers also like to design with a set duration for an average instance session in mind, which varies with each dungeon.
He also answered the common question of why non-player characters aren’t “smart” and behave like players, say, by killing characters who can heal others first.
“OK, we can kill you at any point we want,” Kaplan said. “That doesn’t make for a fun fight.”
How many healers would be interested in coming to fight Onyxia, he said, if the first thing the black dragon did was to target and pick them off?
Going back to results from Blizzard’s software, he ran through a list of the deadliest raid opponents in the game: Since the game went live, Vaelastrasz has killed more than 24,000 player characters, the Bloodlord had killed more than 11,000 and Firemaw has killed more than 10,000.
The software is used as part of an overall system of testing after content is released. In-house testing, he said, could never be as good as having players hammer on content, because despite having many highly skilled players on the team, a cohesive guild that raids together regularly will always be better at handling challenges than a group of competent people who rarely play together. (Quality Assurance has a new in-house raiding guild that is working their way up through the content, however, to help improve the testing of raid content.)
The panel also previewed the next raid content to be added to World of Warcraft: The Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj (an outdoor 20-person dungeon comparable to Zul’Gurub in difficulty) and The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj (a mostly indoor 40-person dungeon slightly harder than Blackwing Lair).
The zone will open with a war between the Horde and the Alliance (and presumably the Cenarian Circle) and the returning Ahn’Qiraj menace. The war begins in Silithus, but takes place all over the world. Before the new dungeons are opened up, players of all levels will help fuel the war effort by gathering materials and achieving certain military objectives. Meanwhile, the uber guild types will be assembling a four-part scepter, which is used to ring the gong outside the Scarab Gate. And at which point, all hell breaks loose, and Silithus is consumed in a massive war. When the dust settles, two new dungeons are available on the server forever more.
The expectation is that most servers will accomplish the tasks within three weeks of the dungeons being patched in with the 1.9 patch later this year. On the off-chance the players on a given server have no particular interest in advancing the war effort, non-player characters will eventually get the job done on their own.
A brief run-down of the Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj was given, including a glance at General Rajaxx, the first boss reachable in the dungeon. Players will fight him with the help of NPC allies, and the more allies that survive, the better the resulting loot will be, similar to how the tribute run in North Dire Maul works. (The Temple of Ahn’Qiraj will have a similar event.)
Even more so than Zul’Gurub, the ruins will be a non-linear dungeon, allowing raids to pick where they want to go and who they want to fight to a certain extent: “All roads lead to phat lewt.”
The peek at the Temple of Ahn’Qiraj showed obsidian destroyers, and the first boss, the Prophet Skeram. The dungeon is huge — the map of the Scarlet Monestary library wing was showed beside the temple layout to scale.
“Scarlet Monestary can, like, fit in the boss room” of the temple.
They also briefly talked about Naxxramas, Kel’Thuzad’s necropolis floating above the undead-controlled city of Stratholme. The final fight will include a massive frostwyrm and the necromancer Kel’Thuzad himself.
The tower of Medivh, Karazhan, which will be part of the Burning Crusade expansion, will be a 10-person raid zone, probably, and one of Blizzard’s biggest dungeons to date.
“It will definitely be bigger than Blackrock Spire, upper and lower combined.”
Among the highlights: A fight in an opera house within the tower, including a battle on stage with a boss.
Also in the Burning Crusade will be the Caverns of Time, a dungeon with four wings, including at least one five-person dungeon and a full-blown battleground.
The Outland fortress of Kael’Thas Sunstrider, Tempest Keep, will also be designed with wings, and include a Molten Core-sized raiding instance.
In contrast, Hellfire Citadel, the prison where Magtheradon is kept, will be similar to Onyxia’s Lair, where players only need to dispense with a few “trash” enemies before getting to the showdown with Magtheradon himself.
And, of course, Illidan Stormrage will be the ultimate goal in the Black Temple.
Look for smaller raids in future rather than larger.
“We feel that even a hardcore raiding guild enjoys a smaller raid zone,” Kaplan said.
There will also be a change in the raid lockout system in the 1.9 patch, changing to a calendar-based system, but the details of what that meant were not clear.
BlizzCon: Morhaime & Dabiri kick off BlizzCon
After a horrendously long registration line — next year, Blizzard Entertainment needs to just mail tickets to folks, and if they don’t, make sure to get your tickets the night before the show, no matter what — Blizzard President Mike Morhaime welcomed gamers to the company’s first-ever convention, BlizzCon.
“Eleven years ago, we created the first Warcraft game, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. It could be played by two humans over a modem, and we thought that was pretty good,” he said. “When Frank Allen and I started Blizzard, we just wanted to make great games.”
Almost 8,000 people were expected to attend BlizzCon over the weekend, he said.
“So, on behalf of everyone at Blizzard, we want to thank you.”
He also had two bits of news. The second — that Blood Elves would be playable in the first World of Warcraft expansion, the Burning Crusade — was already fairly well-known via leaks from the international media prior to the show.
But the first was greeted with applause and cheers: The zerg will be playable in multiplayer StarCraft: Ghost, the forthcoming console game.
Shane Dabiri, the lead producer for World of Warcraft, then took over the presentation, segueing into a presentation of the Burning Crusade.
Like Morhaime, Dabiri thanked the players in attendance for making it all possible, and reaffirmed the development team’s commitment to content updates for the current game. Among the forthcoming additions to World of Warcraft were the two dungeons of Al’Qiraj, Kel’Thuzad’s flying necropolis of Naxxramas, linked auction houses “in every city” (at which the audience predictably went crazy), weather (“I’m not talking about Southern California-type weather,” but sandstorms, blizzards, driving rain, fog and so on) and more.
As for the Burning Crusade, he covered what had been rumored in light detail:
“You’ll be able to play two new races, the first of which we’re debuting today: The Blood Elves of Quel’Thalas.”
Also included in the Burning Crusade will be Medivh’s Tower of Kharazan and the Caverns of Time, along with a chance to face off with Illidan Stormrage himself, the main villain of the expansion.
“You get to go to the Black Temple and kick his ass.”
Epic flying mounts will be available in Outland, the shattered remains of Draenor. And they’ll be needed, since there will be areas that cannot be reached except by flying.
The new profession of Jewelcrafting, which owes a lot to the Diablo II socketing system, will also be added in the expansion.
“There’s just too much. I’d rather just show you,” he said, signalling for the video to play. (The video is also available at the Burning Crusade official site.)
“Blood elves, huh? I guess that means more guys playing girls,” he grinned.
EQ2 character models going from hideous to ugly
Hey, that’s an improvement!
On the left the original american model, on the right the new SOGA models done for the eastern market and now optional for everyone:
Skintones still completely unrealistic, gouraud shading with almost no texture and plastic Barbie instead of Pongo.
As someone else commented: “Hello, wru art direction?”
WoW’s expansion further confirmed
On the FoH’s forum you can find a thread with the links to the scans of the 10-pages expansion preview further confirming what has been leaked all around, in the case you were fooled by the awful coverage of the mainstream gaming news sites.
No need to squint over the scans. Those articles are long but say nothing over what I already summarized a week ago.
What was interesting to read, instead, is some lore informations about the Blood Elves. The way Chris Metzen describes this race and its relationship with the Horde is in fact near to the thoughts I wrote back at release:
For example I didn’t know that the actual “normal” servers are excused in the lore, while the PvP servers are more ‘off’. The two factions aren’t at war from the lore point of view. Yes, they don’t coexist easily but the positive direction is about trying to find the peace. In this scenario, right into the lore, there’s NO distinct line between good and evil as alliance/horde. The horde isn’t evil at all, in particular the Taurens and the Forsaken (undead). To the point that the Night Elves could even be considered more evil than those (same for the Gnomes that aren’t portrayed as a good race *at all*).
From the lore point of view the gank squads on the PvP servers aren’t anymore patrols “to defend” a realm, they are instead attempts at breaking the alliance between the two factions, disrupting all the progress that was being made. Like terrorist acts to destabilize the situation. Something that I’m not sure the players are actually seeing.
Not only we have solid gameplay with each class working into its own special way, but even the races have back stories with a lot of depth that shape their role into the world and they are also not superficial at all.
They go right into the heart. Trying to reply the true essence of our myths. Civil wars, terrorist acts, heroism, peace, alliances, truces: the Taurens/native americans, the gnomes and their faith into tech that made them nuke their own population (Gnomeragon), the Dwarves and their nature to preserve and stay away from the battles, with a nostalgic attitude about the past, the Night Elves and their troubles with a world changing and destroying the “magic/nature” that they need to preserve so they can survive, the Orcs and their attempts at searching tranquility, in a dichotomy between a simple but rude attitude that makes them trying to go close to the peace they are searching and then ruin it…
WoW tries to shape and reproduce a long, long list of myths and archetypic situations. Even from the lore point of view it’s a masterpiece and does a lot more of any other game at trying to capture the essence of a fantasy world or also ‘why’ so many peoples love it.
When we firstly heard about the Blood Elves many players started to rant because they wouldn’t fit with the lore, but, in the light of some more details that were revealed, I believe that not only they fit perfectly, but they will also add a lot of appeal and justified controversy to the Horde. Metzen speaks of a “cultural trauma” that forced the Blood Elves to ally with the Horde just as a desperate act to survive, along with an ill-fated path with Illidian in order to draw their life source from demons. Their curruption isn’t blindly tied to a superficial dichotomy of good/evil. Instead it delves deeper in out cultural myths and how we perceive them.
The separation between good and evil is never so blatant and definite, “evil” is often the result of a compromise that just cannot be avoided. The most interesting evil characters are those that are felt “trapped” in a situation where they have no choice and where they need to accept the corruption only as a way to survive or even try to save who they love. “Corrupted good” is always more interesting than just straight evil and simply because it goes near to the real life and the situations we see each day. After all we love these fantasy worlds not because they are far from the reality, but mainly because they abstact and shape concretely (even visibly) those true cultural myths that strongly influence our life. Squeezing out the essence of the “cultural world” we perceive and within which we live.
Not only the Horde gains a graphically appealing race, but it also benefits from a further blur between good and evil. This faction acquires some more depth, becoming even more believable and solid than how it is already. From the perspective of the players more interesting to impersonate and feeling involved with.