Warhammer Manifesto

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“Epic, heroic, pe-petuual struggle…”

Some leftover still from the E3. In this case an hilarious video interview with Paul Barnett (a “design manager”, something along the lines of a Mythic – Game Workshop coordinator) who explains what the Warhammer universe and Mythic’s game will be about.

Now I know who Paul Barnett really is.

Ramus from Lunar: Silver Star Story!

That small sound clip is an almost perfect parody of Mythic’s plan with the game. Sneaking in the cave where the WoW dragon is sleeping without waking it and get back what is legitimate of the Warhammer franchise.

“Now that the warm weather has melted the ice near the dragon’s cave, there isn’t any time to waste getting started on our big adventure! If we hurry, we may be able to sneak in without waking the dragon. Then we can get a fantasitically huge diamond from its lair worth thousands and thousands of silver, making us filthy stinking rich and very popular in the process!”

The first line is a reference to the time that has passed since WoW’s release, with Blizzard having secured their position and success with the game. Thinking they don’t need to do much else to continue to tap from that bottomless source of money, not fearing any competition. The dust settled, it’s all calm. “If we hurry” is about the correct timing of the launch for Warhammer. And the huge diamond is the symbol of hopes and dreams (popularity! money!), of something that is being stolen back and forth to the point that noone knows anymore to who it legitimately belongs. WoW stole from Warhammer setting and lore, and Warhammer is going to use WoW as a direct ispiration and open antagonist to lure back those players that WoW brought in the genre.

…Or, in other words:

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Three reasons why Warhammer is a great licence for a MMO:

1- Iconic look
2- An excuse to smash the living crap out of each other
3- A-pe-pe-cciual work with no ending from where to draw from (lore, backstory etc..)

Three “devices”:

1- Zone story arcs – With the theme that defines a contested zone
2- Racial story arcs – Race vs Race
3- World story arcs – Between the races, plots, trickeries, “convoluted excuses” to fight etc..

“Everybody fights everybody, for-ever! That’s all we are interested in.”

Race cliches:

“The greenskin are soccer hooligans. All they do is wander around, pick up sticks and try to hit other people. There are no long term plans, no long term concepts. There’s a group of soccer thugs, on the march to glory.”

“The dwarfs are the northern(?) working class of England. They live down mines, all they want to do is get drunk. They just want to fight people who call them “short”. They have no money, they are very proud of their holes in the ground.”

“The high-elves are British posh people. Never done a day working in their lives. Don’t understand about “doing the washing”. Have had too much time, so they read the la-dee-dar-dee books, get really good with the swords and doing special magic.”

“The dark-elves are English posh people who have taken drugs. Basically Lord Byron. They’ve got money coming out their ears. They have taken a load of opium and have decided that they can run the goddamn world and can have it any way they want.”

“The humans. The empire is basically humans. You know, wonderful dreams, terrible nightmares. They don’t really pay attention, build huge amount of technology. They like to explode and destroy the world. Cut down all the forest, they don’t really understand it.”

“The Chaos is humans that have been totally corrupted, tentacles, crab claws, extra eyes, horns. Some people get confused and think Chaos is like the devil. No, no, no. It’s not fire and brimstone, it’s chaos. It’s custard falling from the sky. It’s an arm that turns into a sword. It’s the ability to cut open your arm and mice(?) pour out rather then blood. It’s chaos, it’s corruption.”

“It’s not a computer game. It’s a total hobby experience. We want you to buy this game, and never buy another one.”

“We want you to spend all your time playing it. We want it to involve: skill, commitment and imagination.

– The more skill you put in, the better the game is, the better you feel.
– More commitment you put in, you got piles of money, you got a great(?) of played, the more the game rewards you.
– Imagination. Over in America they call it “immersion”. It’s not immersion. Immersion is playing Half-Life and not realizng the house is burning down. And your wife’s left you. And you haven’t slept for weeks. Imagination is: I played the game and then I want to talk about it, go to the websites, draw pictures about it, have t-shirts, I wanna think about what I’m going to do when I play next week, I talk to all my friends about it.

If you get skill, commitment and imagination, you get a total hobby experience. And a hobby experience should grab you to the core of your being and be the only thing you want to do.

That’s the game we’re making.”

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Solo players “plaguing” the genre?

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Here’s a poll I’ve noticed on EQ2’s forums (need to be subscribed to answer):

In other words 76% of those who answered the poll prefer to play up to a full group, while a small 14% likes larger groups.

I bet that in WoW the raid lovers would be even less in comparison.

—
Adding some comments. I’m often (more often than you imagine) a “solo” player but I don’t like this general trend. In fact I believe it’s pretty negative for the solo players, the community and the overall game.

It’s important to understand these trends and not just dismiss them superficially. In this case the situation is not encouraging. And that poll could be considered more as an “alarm”. Something that is also generalized to all mmorpgs, so not a specific problem of EQ2.

Stealing a comment from Darniaq that has some implications in what I’m describing:

* Sometimes, yes, people just want to get in for 15-30 minutes to kill some stuff. So forced-grouping is a problem for them.
* Other times they’re just shy. They want the opportunity to see other people, and experience the economy, but they won’t want to openly interact.
* Other times they don’t match the requirements of a group. Like, how many guilds would let a pickup raider join them on an AQ run if that raider still had green equipment?
* Other times someone just rubs them the wrong way, but leaving ostracizes them from the larger group.

I think there are design implications if the players start to deliberately avoid group content. It’s a symptom that needs to be considered seriously because it may say that something in the game doesn’t work too well.

In my case I said I’m often a solo player. But the real truth is that what I do depends above all on the *game* and not on my personal preferece of a playstyle over another. There are mmorpgs where I NEVER grouped with anyone even if I played for months. There are mmorpgs where I passed the majority of my time in groups and got even quite involved in the community.

Are solo players growing consistently in the genre because they really don’t want to bother with other players, or because they bump against accessibility barriers and design models that aren’t exactly encouraging and rewarding the cooperation?

Is “solo play” a real necessity or just a reaction to a lack of accessibility?

I have my answers as always and I know about these problems rather well since when I started playing mmorpgs I could barely write some words in english. Being “shy” isn’t a small detail, in particular when you face something completely new to you. Game design can do a lot in these cases, to overcome those “barriers”.

In fact I think there’s noting more important and pertinent to game design than that.

Brad Vs SirBruce

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Haha, this one is really fun.

SirBruce’s E3 report was linked on Vanguard’s forums beside other places and it got the attention of Brad. The result is great.

Both with their usual shortcomings. SirBruce desperately attempting to defend his credibility with the result of ridiculizing himself more than what everyone thought possible and Brad continuing to use EQ1 as a quality standard (combat more action oriented than EQ1, beta longer than EQ1).

Two noteworthy passages, because I’m mean:

Actually with the gamespace growing my estimate has grown too. I said in the past that we’d likely do 250k-500k. I think now we could on the more optimistic side go north of 500k.

Along with Turbine with MEO and Bioware with the undisclosed project, they are the third company now to consider the 500k at arm’s reach. Fun how WoW is feeding silly dreams. Everyone wants a slice of that pie.

And:

heck, I took back Lum to see everything and his report was pretty positive

That’s just because Lum is now always nice and optimist :)

—
EDIT: More from Brad:

We do need enough subscribers such that Vanguard is a profitable venture such that Sigil can go on, making expansions and the like, as well as achieve meaningful profit sharing with our employees.

As I’ve said, however, to achieve that requires around 200k. I think given the appeal of the game, it’s design and focus on immersion, long term gameplay and retention, freedom, etc., the size of the audience we are targeting, how much the gamespace has grown, the assertion that a significant number of people for whom WoW was their first game will find themselves wanting a game like Vanguard for their next MMOG, and the fact that because of our pedigree that we will attract a significant number of EQ 1 and EQ 2 players (and I don’t mean just existing subscribers — EQ 1, for example, while it peaked at between 450-500k subscribers, also has sold 2-3 million boxes — so there are a huge number of people who played EQ 1, for example, over the last 7 years that while they aren’t currently subscribers, were at one time, and are likely to be looking for the ‘next’ EQ)… I think if you consider all of that, a very conservative number for Vanguard is between 250k and 500k, a likely number 500k+, and a more bullish number one that approaches a million.

And from Lum:

More to the point, Vanguard is a game aimed at a very specific market: people who played Everquest 1 and wanted “more Everquest”. I don’t think it’ll make the 500k+ numbers that Brad McQuaid’s talked about, but it will make enough to carve out a respectable niche, much like Eve. There’s easily 100-200k ex-EQ players out there who miss Vox raids. (Most of them post on FOH’s boards, I think.)

Honestly, niches are where you’re likely to see originality and new design ideas, not in World of Warcraft version 2.4.

I did warn the Sigil guys at E3 that the people who post on beta forums are not the people who are going to be playing when the game goes live, more often than not. I’ve yet to see an MMO where the message board traffic didn’t drastically change as the game transitions from beta to live. Expectations change, massively. The game is no longer a dream or an ideal, it’s a service.

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Ubiq is with Bioware

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It seems that Ubiq isn’t going to miss Shadowbane:

Back to the pixel mines I go. Today is my first day as the Lead Combat Designer for Bioware Austin.

In the jobs page at Bioware it is interesting to notice one of the “skill sets” recommended:

Familiarity with fantasy role-playing games is a must.

From SirBruce (attendible or not):

In a surprising statement at E3, Rich Vogel says they are aiming for 1 million subscribers, with 200K – 400K being at the minimum of what would be considered successful. This should give us an indication of the potential scope of this game and the resources BioWare is committing to it.

It seems also that the game will have a focus on the “story” (also confirmed by this request), which doesn’t really appeal me since I’m waiting for more interaction, PvP and sandbox-types of games more than content-driven.

This is all I’ve gathered till now. Only one thing is sure, we won’t see much for at least another couple of years:

BioWare, like Blizzard, does not rush things.

Game design strictly dependent on software development

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I was reading the second part of an article on the evolution of level design in 3D games (mostly FPS) and it made me think that the game design has always evolved after new technology was available. In the FPS history the big titles have always corresponded to brand new engines and features. Significant advances in the technology to support new means of interaction.

This brings me to an older post:

One (of the many) requirements for new content is that it must be backed up by new systems.

Basically, content is a variation on systems.

You can only produce so much worthwhile content using a given system without having the player say, “It’s just another fedex quest, except I’m delivering jelly babies instead of flour” or “This monster is really just and orc with a different 3D model.”

Game design is and should be strictly connected to software development. Innovative games will need to be based also on significant progresses on the client and server technology. And this is also why innovation is more likely to come from consolidated, veteran companies instead of indie game development. Right now it looks like to have a mmorpg you just need chat functions, a trerrain engine, a pretty render for the water, a skybox, monsters and combat systems.

The high number of clones of mmorpgs is also due to the fact that the software development is much more complex and it barely progressed. Both EQ2 and WoW are supposed to drive the genre forward since they can take advantage from their many resources, but their upcoming expansions add very little on the front of software development. New levels, new zones, new monsters, new skills and spells. Stagnation. Maybe only the flying mount in WoW is something new.

I’m also thinking to Guild Wars. The second chapter is supposed to have roughly the same amount of content of the first chapter, in fact it was sold at the same price. But when the game came out I didn’t buy just the content. But also all the new technology that made the game possible. Technology that was then reused for the second chapter with very little improvements or additions.

The same with the upcoming release of “Episode 1” for Half-Life 2 (1 June). It isn’t expensive because they want to sell roughly six hours of content for 20$. But because the game is based on old technology (beside new filters like HDR) that is being reused, so the final price should also reflect this aspect. The production costs should be much lower. So the price.

It’s undeniable that when you pay for a game you also pay for the technology that made it possible. Episodic releases and expansion packs more and more cut to zero the software development and still pretend to be sold at a full price. This doesn’t sound right to me. Content isn’t “time wasted”. Content is variation and support for variation.

Beside the considerations about the costs, the main point is that the game design cannot progress without being integrated with an active software development. This is a CRITICAL issue for a mmorpg, whose technology research and progress is often completely abandoned just after the game is released (beside bug fixing).

It’s quite ovious that the limited life cycles of the current mmorpgs are a consequence of this behaviour. Software development stops and you can only stretch the game systems so far before the players see that there’s really nothing new beside cut&paste of the same stuff. The downward trends aren’t a rule. They are the consequence of a stagnation that comes as the result of a lack of support on the game. Even if mmorpgs continue to release expansions there’s often little to no development on the technology to support new features and evolve the game.

Immobility -> Stagnation -> Downward trends

The cause is still the lack of a true support.

At the same time this has also brought to the useless “sophistication” of the latest mmorpgs, with Vanguard as the most glaring example: aggro lists, multiple targets, complicated relationship and intergaction between the skills. All kind of GUI-intensive gameplay that I defined as a direct byproduct of the meta-game we are forced to play.

The way Raph rewrote my point:

he argues that the traditional healer role that exists in the modern MMORPGs only exists to fill a need in the core combat game system; that it is, in other words, purely mechanical, and present merely as a formal system, not because it captures the spirit of healing in any way.

Along those lines the current evolution (or better, convolution) of combat systems with the insane multiplication of hotbars, buttons, triggers, colored bars and pop-up messages.

It’s like if we hit a wall and are trying to compensate the lack of advance through the sophistication of what’s already available. A “specialization” of a genre out of its natural context and evolution.

Things you cannot do in mmorpgs

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I noticed that Aggro Me linked a video with EQ2 players doing crazy jumps around Freeport. It reminded another video that I saw the day before about a totally insane domino setup made in Oblivion.

“Empowering the players”, or: things you cannot do in mmorpgs.

Try for example to do those jump in Guild Wars, or, in the case of the domino example, try to give the players the possibility to dig holes in the terrain. The day after the whole world would be transformed in a Gruyere.

When I was imagining my “dream mmorpg” and thinking about focusing on the interaction, I got the idea of allowing players to “push” each other. Well, a simple feature like this would be already a disaster, but also “magic”. Think for example of sitting near a cliff, watching the panorama. A player passes by and pushes you down the cliff. See ya. It’s already a mini-game!

Add a platform as a limited space, add five players on it and then let them toy with the “push” function to see who’s the last one to remain standing on the platform.

It could be already a fun model that could lead to add some variation in a game and add to the experience. For example those thoughts lead me to imagine the “inferno” zone. A full PvP zone mingled with PvE where squads of players have to move around with flying platforms. Through a simple physics model these platform can bend in a direction (depending on triggers or players’ position) and the inclination would affect the physics model. Add both PvE and PvP combat to this situation and you would have the most crazed experience ever in a mmorpg.

There are lots of possibilities. During WoW’s beta you could create fireplaces to cook stuff, it’s still possible in the game. But during beta these fireplaces had collision on and the players learnt to use them to create absurd piles as ladders to reach unreachable places. I remember insane piles in Ironforge going up to the roof where the gryphon passes right now and people sitting on top of the auction house. The result? Blizzard removed the collision from the fireplaces so that you couldn’t stack them anymore.

While it’s not possible to give the players “control” in a game, all these tools can be extremely innovative and precious *in a mmorpg*. Not in a single-player game. These features aren’t a limit in a cooperative game, they are a potential that must be governed. It’s when you can affect other players that things become interesting, that what you do achieves a meaning. The interaction becomes the focus of the game. A game-world becoming consistent and moving steps away from game-y environments where you can only follow what is strictly part of the game. The overall idea of a “world” as opposed to just a game.

3D is powerful even for that reason. You can look around and turn in the direction you weren’t supposed to look to. Or jump and reach places where you weren’t meant to be.

At the end the driving purpose of these mechanics was the “immersion”. Or the possibility to shape an environment coherently with the expectations of the player. Or: self-consistence.

If it isn’t possible to give the players the control, it’s still viable a modular approach. The video from Oblivion suggested me some interesting possibilities for a “trap system”. Think for example to a PvP environment where the players can conquer territories and castles. It could be possible to build a simple trap system made modular so that a castle would have a number of hook points where you could place triggers and related traps. With a good modularity (different triggers, different traps, linked triggers and traps etc..) it could be easily possible to remove the predictability and obtain a system that still plays within the rules while adding variance to the game. Think about then letting the players set traps in the forests, set alarms and so on.

All these tools would add very little to a single player game, but they could become truly interesting in a game where you have more ways to interact and affect other players. With rules so that these systems cannot be used out of their context.

Adding this type of “variation” and focus to other types of interaction beside combat and enhanced treadmills, are ways to shape an immersive world. Think about going to hunt in a forest, and have the animals not react just to aggro radiuses, but to sound and line of sight, so that you would have to sneak in slowly and pay attention to not scare your prey and let it run away (instead of suddenly charge against you in every case).

These are ways to make the experience richer and more immersive. To create truly interesting and FUN virtual worlds. This is the “variety” I want to see. Consistent and immersive. Not penguins and metaverses.

More time wasted

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I noticed on mmorpgdot something about “Mourning”, one of those vaporware mmorpg projects that exist only to demonstrate how people are gullible and that mmorpgs are the new cult (just open a website saying you are working on a new mmorpg and the forums will get swarmed with goons). If you search for “mourning” on this site you can find some fun about its launch a year ago.

Here’s some recent fun:

Nuanced Entertainment to develop Age of Mourning.

Based in Greenville, South Carolina USA , with additional staff located all over the world , Nuanced Entertainment is focused on the development and research of Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming. Nuanced Entertainment consists of a tightly knit group of seasoned professionals which have held positions with such organizations as Electronic Arts , Blizzard Entertainment and NCsoft in the past and have been involved in many of the higher profile titles in the MMOG genre such as Everquest , World of Warcraft and lineage 2 as programmers and artists bringing with them an indispensable wealth of knowledge.

It looks like now everyone and their sister has Blizzard devs in their company. Come on, I really cannot believe that someone working for one of those three companies prefers to start a contractor studio to work on that sort of crap that will never get released. Is this really the only way for emergent developers to find a place? Nah, I don’t think it is, the situation isn’t that awful.

This is definitely a complete waste of resources. If you give a look at the website you can see that they are supposed to work on three/four projects at the same time (one is a MUD?) and that “Mourning” is being co-developed with another studio called “Loud Ant”.

But the most fun comes from the description of the game and main goal:

Age of Mourning is about your deeds and continued struggle to carve out your name within the world. Age of Mourning is about your bloodline. Most MMORPG’s claim to be realistic online worlds when in reality they are nothing more than static level treadmills that eventually only cater to the high end player base. Once you have “leveled up” and experienced all the low end content; there is really no purpose for it any longer and it rarely if ever gets any attention so it remains a useless forgotten experience when it could be much more. In Age of Mourning our world is truly dynamic and always changing. Because of our bloodline system, players have the ability to experience not only new high end content but also new low end content because of the endless life cycle of being reborn and dying while continuing their bloodline or lineage. This endless cycle allows us to concentrate on both the low end and high end experience and no longer makes the low end gaming experience useless over time. No longer is there a high end cap. Players will experience all the game has to offer continuously in a changing , endless , real world gaming cycle.

Eheh, yes. You have read it right. Their world is “truly dynamic and always changing” because you have to regrind all over again all the content every time you die.

They are trying to sell this as a quality. It’s incredible how many amateurish projects out there can reach those peaks of design stupidity. It’s really all on the most basic and elementary level possible. And they have no clue. Less clue than a player randomly picked from the battle.net community. I’m in pure awe.

I’m writing about this essentially because I already examined this silly point of view. And defined it “selfstabbing”.

See also this other shorter point of view.

That goal they want to reach is actually possible. But you don’t reach it through permdeath. You reach it through sandbox models and a flat power growth on the characters (no levels). Aka: permeable barriers.

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Eve-Online 2006 Battleplan

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Even Eve-Online has its own Battleplan. You can read it in the dev blog feed I’ve set up (scroll down).

Oveur is probably the most competent mmorpg producer currently in this industry but the recent announces didn’t please me much (the delay to the Factional Warfare and the support for voice chat, for the most part). With this battleplan he goes in great detail to explain what are the reasons behind those choices and I think I’ll be back already in September if everything goes as they are planning (I expect delays). They haven’t lost the ambition, even if I don’t share some of their choices.

Most of what’s written in the Battleplan is what they already announced at the E3, but there are a few relevant changes about their schedule.

Actually, from the forum posts I read, the main point of Kali’s delay isn’t such a bad thing. TQ is doing well and a good stable Kali release is the best thing for everyone. However, Factional Warfare seems to be the main object of frustration. While it’s great to see such enthusiasm for a single feature within EVE, there is a boatload of reasons for the segmented release.

Yes, there’s another delay. Initially the DirectX 9 engine upgrade was planned to be released around September, with the first segment of the Kali patch scheduled for a late June/early July release and Factional Warfare not sooner than next year.

The new plan pushes back the engine upgrade to April 07, if not later, even if Oveur says that it may arrive sooner. While the first segment of the Kali patch won’t arrive before September and with the Factional Warfare that should be ready before the end of the year.

The reason of these delays, in particular about the first Kali patch, is the launch in China:

China is a very big project. We realized that it would be big, but never this big! The China release was not supposed to have any effect on Tranquility – and to try and ensure that, we doubled the number of developers here at CCP. We’re now up to 96 people.

Still, because of EVE’s complexity, there is a need for a lot of the talent to work on the China release at some point in time, which has caused a cascade of resource shifts. With the expectations of the China market and the nature of the MMO industry over there, you only get one chance (the China MMO market alone is bigger than its entire western counterpart).

We therefore switched the focus points of a number of core developers to make sure we would be successful. And I’m sure you would ask why; how can EVE China be in a position to cause delays for Tranquility projects?

It’s really simple at its core. If EVE is successful in China, the revenue which would become available to fuel the evolution of EVE would skyrocket.

—
We tried to prevent EVE China from affecting the Tranquility release schedule and diverted considerable sums of our revenue into trying to ensure that. However, it still happened. Fortunately, EVE China will get launched over the next month and the effects of a successful EVE China will bring EVE to new station-dancing, planet-bombing, asteroid-bursting heights.

So the launch is planned for June and they seem to have high expectations about it. I hope everything goes as planned but launching a product in a bigger market doesn’t mean that it will automatically scale with it. We have already plenty of examples of mmorpgs launched in different zones and with much different results.

Lineage didn’t go anywhere in the western market, WoW was extremely successful in the eastern market and EQ2 didn’t even manage to successfully launch. It’s extremely hard to find a pattern. Summary: unreliable results.

It will be interesting to see how the eastern market will react to a completely different product like Eve, but at the same time I would keep the expectations realistic. It’s extremely hard to predict how this launch will go and how it will affect the future of Eve.

About the delay to the “Factional Warfare” (announced for next year at the E3) it seems I wasn’t the only one deluded:

Prioritize, dammit! Factional Warfare is God!

As much as I agree with this point, it’s also the most risky project we have done for a while. We don’t want a situation where 120.000 subscribers start doing Factional Warfare only. (Remember level 4 agent missions?)

Likewise, there are a number of core features that need to be in place for us to be in a position to release Factional Warfare. Better Combat Organization is one, the Contract system is another. This simply needs to be taken in steps.

The main frustration comes from the timeline, since the path to Kali spans the next year from now and Factional Warfare would be at the end of that. Well, this isn’t exactly how it is today, but plans tend to change.

“Plans tend to change” and here is the new planned “best effort” schedule:

Kali One Release – September 2006

This is what we’re aiming to release in Kali One. The list is created from a number of criteria, the main factors being a “Prerequisite for future release”, “low risk, short development, big bang” or “we really need to get this done” project.

* Contracts
This is the most extensive addition in this release, something which will affect players of all ages. Gives you the ability to manage corporations offline and create “missions” for players and corporations alike.
* Combat Organization
The new seamless map with new system scanning, new gang features and better facilities for situational awareness.
* Exploration
Rewarding exploration of space, utilizing new system scanning and the new seamless view (see above), enabling you to discover escalating paths. This is a prerequisite for Next-Gen R&D, which will be used for gathering a plethora of R&D items.
* Next-gen Research & Development
We’re opening up this aspect of EVE with Reverse Engineering and Invention, enabling you to create Tech II blueprint copies by gathering knowledge and technology through various means, such as exploration.
* Combat Boosters
Creates regional uniqueness for 8 regions, from 0.0 COSMOS constellations with unique resources to mini-professions and specialized starbase structures. A whole value chain will be created around these items, enabling players of all “ages” to be part of the bigger process.
* Ship Upgrades & Salvaging of Shipwrecks
This instantly creates content throughout the whole EVE universe. By making all destroyed ships – player and NPC alike – drop new ingredients, which are salvageable with the right profession skills and tools, we create a massive market for ingredients and ship upgrades, which the average EVE player can now utilize to further upgrade his own ship.
* Tier-3 Battleships
The third battleship will be added to all races. Battleships are one of the most frequently used ship classes in-game and the class has only had 2 ships for each race. It’s time for the third Tier.
* Tier-2 BattleCruisers
This popular ship class receives its second battlecruiser to all races.
* Eight New Regions
We’ll be opening up the eight existing but closed regions in the “top right” section of the universe (No, not Jove, just below them). They won’t be owned by any NPC faction and there will be no conquerable stations, only ore and stuff. This is done to make room for more players. It will include various rogue NPC entities.

This is our goal for September. Some of this will in all likelihood not make it, but now you have an idea of our intentions and what we want to achieve.

Kali Two Release – December 2006

Factional Warfare. Nothing else.

Kali Three Release – April 2007

Our final graphics engine upgrades and a similar feature set to Kali One.

The “contract system” is probably the most interest feature they are going to add and that I commented along with the Factional Warfare as they are strictly connected (it’s the backbone of the mission system that will be used dynamically by the NPC factions to assign tasks to the players). But I don’t think it will have a so huge impact on the game during this first stage.

The other features aren’t so clear but there will be more dev blogs coming in the next weeks with exactly the goal to go in great detail about each change. In the meantime there’s this older post with some more details. The most important point is to understand how they’ll be integrated with the game and made accessible to the players. They say that some of those features will have an impact on everyone, we’ll see if this is true and how the players will react.

I just wish they took some time to add formations (I’m waiting them since they were promised in beta) and a better combat representation. Those are still my pet peeves along with some smaller bugs and inconsistences that are in the game since forever.

The delay to the Factional Warfare is unsurprising and expected. As Oveur explains it depends on many other systems and it could easily become the most radical change in the game since release. The potential is HUGE and I really hope they get it right. My disappointment about the delay was mostly because this is a system so complicated and rich that it will become more a “thread” for all the future updates than just a system that is being added and then left behind. I see it as a whole new direction for Eve. A new beginning that should become an overall structure where every other part of the current game will be relocated and reorganized. So it was better to start this as soon as possible because I saw it as an ongoing project that will absolutely need to be segmented by itself. There’s a first step and then all the rest to add more “juice” to it (professions, new missions, new relationships, careers and so on).

Probably the biggest challenge is about putting player corporations and NPC corporations in the exact same condition and potential, so that the overall Factional Warfare structure will include both seamlessly and without discriminations (in the sense that the “logic” of this system won’t make any difference between a player corp and an NPC corp). If this happens it will be easier to integrate the current corp activities in the new overall scheme without disrupting them. This is how I would plan to solve the problem outlined by Oveur, instead of nerfing the impact and potential of the whole system:

We don’t want a situation where 120.000 subscribers start doing Factional Warfare only.

Instead I think they should. But continuing to do what they are doing already WITHIN the context of the Factional Warfare. I see this system as an overall organization. A “motivation”. Rules and possibilities that will apply in particular to the corps that are already active in the game.

I don’t mind the delay by itself, but I think that the accessibility of the game should have the priority and I hope that the Factional Warfare won’t be limited to just a weak attempt without fulfilling its true potential or really starting to move the game in that new direction. It’s both evolutionary and revolutionary. It’s important that it won’t be rushed out, but at the same time it is important that it can become an overall structure for the game, and not just a sidetrack.

Before it was wishful thinking. With the added resources and the growing playerbase this is becoming a necessity for the game. It needs to evolve to support what will come next.

After having said all this, I’m going to criticize what Oveur says about the voice chat. In particular about the implicit accessibility issues:

Sure, not everyone wants it. That’s one of the main reasons why only those that do want it will have to pay for it. It’s optional. There will be opportunities for a corp to enable it for all its members, which is really our main target group.

Nobody is forcing you to use it.

Well, this is far from reality. Voice chat can discriminate and when you are not alone like in a mmorpg you are never really free. You’ll have to adapt. If you can.

Simply put: some can and want to use it, some cannot. This will become another selective process and it will become another barrier. Who is in and who is left out.

The optional support for the voice chat WILL create reasons for a discrimination and WILL divide. This is never good for a mmorpg, whose main purpose should always be about integration.

As I wrote, selective processes are THE WORST OF THE WORST for a mmorpg.

Quoting Darniaq again:

What actually matters is the rules players set. You can mock and sneer all you want, but if 39 people use Voicechat for Raiding or PvP or just dicking around at the Auction House, the 40th person is going to use Voicechat too.

Players make the rules. Everyone else decides to follow them or gets excluded.

WoW 1.11 patch notes

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I gave a quick look at the notes for the next patch 1.11. I guess we can expect this one to go live by the end of June if everything goes well. They’ll need some time to test all that hardcore stuff if they don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the previously released epic dungeons.

The 1.10 patch went live at the end of March. It looks like WoW definitely settled for three-months path cycles. On the positive side I have to admit that they are doing more than everyone else with the live patches and the detail with which they address the game problems and inconsistences. They are still doing a very good work from this perspective. In particular if you consider this insteresting point (from Tigole’s interview at Gamespot):

The exact same team building the expansion is also building the live content updates.

What I strongly criticize is instead the direction of the whole game. The excecution continues to be excellent. And the decision to keep the team together instead of splitting it between live and expansions is another of those ideas that the mmorpg industry still has to learn.

Other two unrelated highlights from the same interview:

The flying mount can run on the ground faster than epic mount speed.

We know that sometime in WOW’s lifetime, we’re going to upgrade the graphics engine.

Let’s continue with some highlights from the 1.11 patch notes:

The cost to unlearn talents will now decay over time.

A good, long overdue change.

After a disconnect from the server, it is now possible to log back in immediately, instead of receiving the message, “A character with that name already exists.”

Asking this on every game since forever. I wish Mythic would copy them here (in DAoC you not only cannot log in if you lag out, but you need to restart the whole client after every attempt).

As a note: EQ2 is still superior here. I can disconnect and then quickly reconnect and the game would recuperate without even disconnecting.

– Chain targeted spells and abilities (e.g. Multi-shot, Cleave, Chain Lightning) will no longer hit stealthed or invisible units unless visible to the caster.

– Fear: The calculations to determine if Fear effects should break due to receiving damage have been changed. The old calculation used the base damage of the ability. The new calculation uses the final amount of damage dealt, after all modifiers. In addition, the chance for a damage over time spell to break Fear is now significantly lower. Note that Fear continues to be roughly three times as likely to break on player targets as on non-player targets. In addition, Intimidating Shout now follows that player versus non-player distinction, while previously it did not.

– Periodic Healing: Spells which do periodic healing will now have their strength determined at the moment they are cast. Changing the amount of bonus healing you have during the duration of the periodic spell will have no impact on how much it heals for.

– Reflection: Effects which cause reflection will no longer reflect triggered effects separately from their base effects (eg. Impact, Improved Shadow Bolt, Aftermath, etc.)

Good bunch of consistence fixes. In other mmorpgs these would be just “working as intended” and ignored.

Optimization code known as “M2Faster” is now enabled by default. M2Faster can improve performance in crowded scenes when “Vertex Animation Shaders” is turned on.

I had this enabled when they introduced it a couple of patches ago. But on my Geforce 6800GT it barely made any differece.

To enable this manually you need to add the following line to your “config.wtf” file in the WTF directory of the game:
SET M2Faster “1”

Or type in the game chat: /console M2Faster 1
It should save the variable in the config file automatically.

Alterac Valley
Most of the NPC guard units have been removed.
Creatures that remain in Alterac Valley have had their hit points reduced.

Another long overdue change.

As I wrote a while ago: NPCs in PvP aren’t a bad idea on its own, but only if the respawn timers are really long. This is not the case in WoW.

Overall it looks like a good patch from the game design perspective. Beside what I quoted the patch has:

– New catass raid instance (Naxxramas)
– Tier 3 armor sets for all classes
– Bunch of class changes that I won’t comment
– Key rings
– Some changes to the cooldown timers on potions and items that seem to make sense
– Nature resist recipes with the Cenarion Circle rep for the catasses
– UI improvements to the raid interface (ported some standard features from CTRaid)
– Flight paths added
– Some PvP Honor armor sets upgraded
– Removal of bijous and coins in ZG (?)

This last one leaves me perplex after what Tigole said in the NY interview before the E3. As I highlighted there, he said that a token system + reputation don’t work well together and they were thinking about changing it. I wrote that I was expecting this to be an intention only for the new content that will be added in the future but the changes in this patch refute my theory (which is good). At the same time I don’t understand the logic behind the changes.

This is what Tigole said specifically about ZG:

ZG was supposed to be a stepping stone into raiding. So you take a guild that has little experience and they go into ZG and for a new group, it’s going to take them a few tries to down the first boss, Venoxis. And they finally kill Venoxis and what do they get? Probably one blue item and then this token item. But even using that token item might require Honored reputation, and so they feel like they’re not being rewarded.

I had that happen to me on one of my characters and I was like, “This is just broken.”

Here I underlined the part that Tigole explained not working really well. It looks like the problem is the reputation being a cockblock on the equipment (what a surprise), preventing you to get the loot even if you won the encounter. But what are they changing with this patch?

Armor quests now only require a Primal Hakkari piece and appropriate faction with Zandalar.

They removed the smaller tokens but not the faction.

About the PvP Honor armor sets, it is interesting to notice that they were upgraded, but not retroactively, nor it’s possible for those who have the old armor sets to return them for new versions. You’ll have to re-grind all the ranks all over again. FUN! FUN!!

Btw. I heard a rumor that with the 1.12 patch they are reworking how the groups for the PvP BGs are being made. If this patch will coincide with clustered servers then it’s possible that they’ll create two different queues for those who join as a group and those who are randomly picked up.

Guild Wars anticipated this since the very beginning.

Overall a good patch with a good execution. But it leaves untouched all the problems that plague this game: satisfactory and accessible endgame content, worthwhile alternatives to raiding and a PvP system that isn’t completely fucked up.

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