Month: May 2011

I’m limping along today on minimal sleep.  Like I said yesterday my wife has picked up the remnants of my illness and been trying to get over it.  As a result she spent a good deal of the night coughing, which meant I didn’t actually get much sleep.  As a result you guys are going to get some random news blurbs.

 

Rift 1.2 Hotfix #5

We’ve been getting a good number of hotfixes this week surrounding the looking for group system.  It is really weird seeing a company work this way.  In my own job, I am constant doing minor builds until I get everything tweaked the way I want it.  It seems that Trion employs this logic of incremental improvements.  It seems like each additional pass polishes the feature a little bit better.

Original Link

 

Create a Colossus Contest

It seems that Trion has tag teamed with everyone’s favorite indie art source, deviant art, to offer a contest.  Do you have an idea for an epic elemental themed rift colossus?  Now is the time to break out the sketchbook and scanner, or drawing tablet and commit your best ideas into digital glory.

All Semi-finalists win a copy of Rift and a 3-Month premium subscription to Deviant Art.  Other prises include cash, wacom tablets, deviantart clothing, and deviant art points.  First prize is $1500 cash, a Wacom Intuos4 tablet, 8000 deviantArt points, a dA PRO Digital Artist’s backpack, deviantWEAR hoodie of winners choice and a 1 year premium membership to deviantArt.

Full Rules and Information can be found here

You can view the gallery of submissions here

 

Mage Class Trailer

 

Trion also released today the new trailer for the Mage class.  This is the follow up to the amazingly awesome rogue trailer.  I have never gone in for “finger wiggler” classes, but this trailer makes me almost want to play my mage placeholder.  The rogue trailer had the same effect, and made me develop some extreme Ranger/Bard pride.  Either way it is fun to watch mages being badasses.

 

Pen and Paper Update

As I mentioned yesterday, last night was our first meeting of a new venture trying to play pen and paper online.  I have to say all in all, after a bit of a late start things went very well.  Always in the past when I have played or run a new campaign, the first night just ends up being devoted to administrata.  However we managed to get in, get the story set and straight into action.

One of the most amazing things is that none of the players communicated over what they were planning to play, yet somehow we ended up with an extremely well balanced party.  You have the soldier, who was given the unfortunate task of escorting caskets back to a dying town.  There is the treasure hunter, shipwrecked on the shores, nursed back to health by the townfolk.  The performer with her curious clockwork dog, down on her luck and performing for the innkeeper for rent.  Lastly the teacher, out of work since the mages college closed down.

Being ever the tank, I managed to draw first blood only to pathetically botch interrogating the bandit leader afterwards.  We have already begun to slide into various roles.  When brutal force is needed, my character the Treasure Hunter is ever at the ready.  But when we need to employ finesse, we are far better relying on the performer.  The encyclopedic knowledge of the teacher, and the sturdy arms of the soldier are always there to back the party up.

I am really looking forward to next week, because we left off at an exciting point.  I have to say that I did most of my tabletop gaming in high school and college, and being able to play with seasoned veterans that I have known for years is a real refreshment.  I am expecting we will have a game with minimal akward moments.

I really don’t have anything terribly brilliant to say today.  Was a busy day at work, and I am steel reeling from finally getting that faction post hatched onto the page.  Still feel like I am not 100% over the sinus/pneumonia mess of last week.  Been dealing with it still because apparently I infected my loving wife, so she has been going through the all too familiar motions.

Down subscribers? Create new fees.

Yesterday Blizzard announced that they would be rolling out an exciting new feature for World of Warcraft.  Soon you will be able to run dungeons with all your RealID friends on other servers.  If that sounds exciting, prepare to shell out another monthly fee for this premium service similar to that of the mobile guild chat.

This feels suspiciously like Activision putting the screws to a business unit that had to publically announce they were down 600,000 subscribers.  I have read somewhere in my travels that the number is more like 800,000, but at the time of writing this I was unable to find where I had read that.  Either way, just like any commoditized service, if usage goes down you have to raise fees somehow to maintain profit margins for the shareholders.  Since raising the monthly fee would be tantamount to suicide, seems like they are going to continue the tradition of nickel and diming its users with optional premium grade services.

PSN Down Again

This one seriously felt like Déjà vu.  Before lunch I was reading an article that the PSN network was coming back online, and that users could finally look forward to using it again.  I was happy to see that life might be returning to normal for their users.  Then about 3:00 I did a run through my google reader and saw the headlines that PSN was down yet again.

ZDnet has a decent article about what occurred today.  Seems like once again Sony was compromised.  Now it still isn’t certain if this is really an Anonymous attack as some claim, of if this is a group just trying to plant the blame squarely on the high profile group.   There are signs that it might be, considering Anonymous did issue a statement to Sony.  Either way, Sony has most definitely pissed off the wrong people.

I fear if PSN was compromised so quickly, another round of attacks at SOE will not be far behind.  At this point, I can’t really see how Sony can bounce back from this one.  A little over a week ago Tobold made the very serious pronouncement that SOE is Doomed.  If another round of compromises comes through, I seems completely set in stone that this will be the case.  With them already struggling before this debacle, I just can’t see them surviving intact.

Pen and Paper and Bytes

One of my biggest laments since venturing into the world of the responsible adult is that I really do not have time, or availability to play the pen and paper games I loved so much.  For years I have scratched this itch with various MMO titles.  While they are great in their own right, they still pale from the full on creative expression that pen and paper gaming gives you.

A friend of mine was feeling the same way, and proposed we try gaming online.  He found a cool tool called iTabletop, that allows the GM to present visuals to the players and deal with various rolls that are the trapping of any pen and paper game.  Only time will tell if this little experiment will work but I am looking forward to it.  We are planning on playing a custom Steampunk setting, using the World of Darkness rule set for simplicity sake.  The “d10” system of Whitewolf has long been a favorite of mine for ease of character creation and speed of play.

Minecraft meets Wonderboy

 

Lastly this week I have been playing with a new game that just got released on Steam, Teraria.  I have heard it most often called 2D Minecraft, but in truth it is a lot more.  What it really reminds me of is the Sega Genesis game Wonder Boy in Monsterworld.  Basically start with a side scrolling 16 bit title, and add construction elements similar to Minecraft, and you have what the game plays like.

I am not very far along, and being an alpha game like Minecraft was there are numerous bugs.  When I try and run the game full screen on my laptop it runs at something silly like 500 fps and becomes completely unplayable.  However the game itself is compelling enough that I can see this really catching on.  I look forward to trying it out on a multiplayer setting.  Some of the toys you can see in the above video really make me want to explore the depths of the randomly generated world.

This topic has been incubating in my head for awhile now.  Basically I feel we have reached a point where we have strayed so far from how cool factions used to be, and arrived at something that feels very much like busywork to keep us all pacified.  I thought I would take a bit today to go into where we are currently with faction systems in modern MMOs, preface where we came from and propose some thoughts on where we should be moving towards.

State of the Grind

I will be the first to admit that I like earning faction.  There is something gratifying about seeing those little numbers after you have pulled your mace out of the skull of a monster telling you that you just got a little friendlier with a cool group of NPCs.  The concept of faction has been in place since the early MMOs, and has expanded to levels I would have never imagined back then.

Right now it feels like as a player there is a faction hidden behind almost everything, even when it doesn’t necessarily make sense.  There is an inherit need for some of us, to max out all those little bars and unlock everything we can get by doing so.  Where we currently are in the way this system works has become extremely formulaic.

The Company Store

Basically as a player you complete quests and or kill baddies for a specific NPC faction in the world.  As you do more, you gain more of their currency known as “faction”.  The faction system is traditionally divided into multiple tiers that have fuzzy little names, denoting how much these characters adore you.  The reward at the end of the tunnel is access to the company store of sorts.

Usually in an NPC faction area there will be a special NPC called generally a Quartermaster.  They have a treasure trove of items that can be purchased for currency, but each requires a certain level of standing with the NPCs.  As you go up in faction the rewards get more and more tasty until usually at the very end there are some spiffy pre-raid epics glistening there for you to take.

The problem is, currently this is about all faction is worth.  We complete these grinds, in order to get some baubles that we will ultimately outgrow far more quickly than we would hope.  As a result, once you have finally achieved the pinnacle of this crawl the rewards often seem rather lackluster.  The number of these faction grinds has increased exponentially in games, but instead of giving us more interesting things to do, they seem to all be stalled out in this formulaic model.

The Curious Case of Kael Drakkel

Thing is, the faction system used to mean a good deal more to the players.  Over time we have regressed from a very vibrant and world changing model to the very simplistic formula of the quartermaster system that exists today.  Ironically the game that had this very imaginative system was the grandfather of the current MMO genre, Everquest.  I can give you numerous examples of imaginative and compelling uses of faction in this game, but without a doubt the one that stands out most in my mind is that of Kael.

Kael Drakkel was a mythic city on the continent of Velious, the second expansion.  The entire city was populated by frost and storm giants, and as a result was scaled massively to fit their proportions.  It was located smack dab in the middle of the land, situated between the Wakening Lands and Eastern Wastes sitting as the gateway to the higher level content. 

To most players, this was a great raid zone, and killing giants here gave you faction with frost dwarves  of Thurgadin.  Killing the various giants also gave you the ability to get rare quest drops, that could be turned in with other items to produce a full set of raid worthy armor.  As a result we spent many an hour hunting here, but every now and then I would see other player characters walking around freely inside the city.  The fact that players could walk freely among these same giants that wanted to grind me to bits was a great puzzle.

I found out later that if a player so chose, they could abandon the normal faction path and choose to hunt the Dwarves of Thurgadin and several factions of Dragons, instead raising their faction with Kael Drakkel itself  As a reward for this epic task, they gained access to similar armor quests, but even more important a friendly foothold in the middle of this dangerous continent.  This gave them quick access to all the highest end content in the expansion while providing a safe haven to bank and shop.

There were many such examples of this, while I never ventured down the Kael path, I did complete a similar faction grind.  Through killing the Kobolds of the Warrens I managed to raise my faction with the evil Shadowknights and Necromancers of Paineel, giving me access to venture in and out of the city like a full fledged citizen.  My friend completed a similar path, that allowed his evil Iksar Monk to trade freely with the halflings of Rivervale.  In both cases our hard work gave us access to content our races never would have allowed.

Remembering the Past

While I love the influx of quartermasters, and the goodies they offer, faction grinding should have far reaching effects than just unlocking trinkets.  In the Everquest system, the players gained game changing effects allowing them access to new cities, new quests, and new game experiences.  The current faction grind system just seems so lifeless and meaningless in comparison.

One of my biggest frustrations has been that when you gain faction, it has no real effect on your gameplay.  I can remember being supremely frustrated in WoW upon encountering Alexstraza in Twilight Highlands, that she seemed to have no recollection of all the work your character performed helping her and the red dragonflight in Dragonblight.  Instead of getting a nice bit of lore and flavor recounting all the help you had provided, I was “rewarded” with another lifeless set of quests.

Another big issue is that factions get created for no real reason.  I can remember being frustrated when Burning Crusade was released, and all the work we had done for the Cenarion Circle meant nothing, because instead of using the same faction and rewarding players for past work we were handed yet another meaningless grind by calling the Outland faction the Cenarion Expedition.  The same goes for the frustration of having both the Argent Dawn and Argent Crusade, but no real reason for them.

A Better Future

I think we have lost too much of the nuance that we mmo players used to have in the switch to the quartermaster model.  What I want to see is in the future, our decisions as players have actual compelling results.  Earning a purple bauble that you will replace all too soon is a boring use of faction, giving players access to entirely new areas of the game is an extremely exciting one. 

One of the most interesting things I have seen in years was with the release of Everquest II.  Players chose a race, which often times forced them into a factional path.  Iksar and Dark Elves for example, will never be seen as “good races”.  However if a player so wished, they could go through an interesting series of quests and very epically “betray” their home faction, essentially switching sides in the battle.

While fun, and offering more flexibility than many games gave the players I still feel it was tied down to a very artificial black and white factional wall.  I realize the us versus them system, is in place for the most part to facilitate clean player versus player lines.  However I believe faction systems would be far more enjoyable for the players if the lines were allowed to grey a bit. 

As a traditional “light side” race, you might have in your travels managed to broker a trade route with the trolls for needed supplies.  If you were a particularly noble dark elf, you might abandon the path of hatred and take up the path of justice as such befriending the “good” races.  The players that play these games are made up of complex goals and ideals, so why shouldn’t the faction boundaries and alliances be equally complex.

I feel that by switching to this formula model we have arrived at over the years, and that each new game adopts a copy of, we have abandoned a rich tradition.  My hope is that even the current game set can start to adopt a little more flavor and spread out a bit further from the cookie cutter us or them model.  I am not expecting to get freeform factions for awhile, but it would be nice to have my actions unlock new game play options rather than just more grind.  Only time will tell, but I feel that the current model needs to change.

David Sirlin has an oft-mentioned book called Playing to Win, available in its entirety for free online. It’s a fascinating read from the perspective of a highly competitive gamer. His disclaimer at the beginning is entirely apt—most people who don’t already have a handle on playing competitively probably won’t believe that he’s right, or will get angry at his writing. Some of it seems calculated to enrage; he doesn’t really pull any punches, and throws a few that may not be strictly necessary.

I was initially enraged upon reading it. Sirlin starts by calling any player who doesn’t play to win a “scrub”, a choice of term that seems hyper-elitist and calculated to alienate, and I’m still not convinced that it isn’t. The fact that he’s largely not wrong in the rest of the book only furthered my anger, because I was left without a lot to rail against.

In retrospect, some time later, Playing to Win put me in mind of one of my college professors, who taught game design and was absolutely crucial in me getting into the games industry. His first lecture was brutal, especially for a roomful of aspiring game developers who were still wide-eyed and optimistic. It went something like this:

“Alright, let’s get started. Who here has a game idea that they want to share, or better yet, make?”

<Pretty much everyone emphatically raises a hand.>

“Good. Forget that idea; it’s worthless. Come up with a new one. You have until the end of the class period.”

A Punch in the Face

It’s almost like a physical blow to deal with that sort of thing. I was reeling after his comment and I could tell that a lot of other people were as well, with different reactions. A lot of people got defensive, others looked like they might cry, other people were clearly gearing up to drop the course. It didn’t help that the crux of the first lecture was about implementation over theory, with quotes like “Ideas are a dime a dozen; they don’t mean anything unless you can build them,” and other things that make a budding designer’s stomach tighten with emotion.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I started to get perspective. We were introduced to the “tyrannosaurus in our minds”, described as a construct that attacks any new ideas that enter the mind, and destroys ones that are too weak to survive. It became part of a larger lesson about being your own harshest critic and not getting too attached to an idea. At the time, I’d spent several years on a lengthy game design doc, a sprawling magnum opus that I’d put almost three hundred pages of text into. I had been convinced that I was going to one day make it into a full-fledged game. The professor’s tyrannosaurus analogy had an interesting embedded lesson:

“I often have people describe their game ideas to me, and I can separate the good designers from the bad almost immediately, just by how well-fed their tyrannosaurus is. A bad designer’s tyrannosaurus will be lazy, or too weak to feed, and ideas that would never see the light of day end up in their mind, wasting their time. A lot of really bad ideas get made because someone’s tyrannosaurus wasn’t trained well enough to cull it before hundreds or thousands of hours had been spent on development, and by the time someone realized the idea really was simply terrible, too much money had been spent to abandon the project.”

“The first thing any responsible producer or publisher is going to do is try to poke holes in an idea. It has to be done, because when millions of dollars are on the line you need to nip bad ideas in the bud quickly. Good designers will have thought of this already, and have answers ready.”

Picking up the Pieces

A lot of people will rail against things like the above, saying things like “this is why games are all clones of one another nowadays” and “that kind of mentality means that there’s no innovation!”

It’s not true. The very best games are a product of this kind of mentality. It’s easy to lose sight of it, but there are shining examples all over the place. Team Fortress 2 is a game that really looked deeply at other games and culled even the best of those. Team-based shooters used to release with tons of guns and as many maps as they could build. Team Fortress 2 had a bare handful of weapons by comparison and released with only two maps, but those two maps had been extensively play-tested and polished until they shone.

Pokémon has an incredibly straightforward system, one that’s gone pretty much unchanged through fifteen years of releases, and is still incredibly popular. Worth noting is that nearly every mechanical addition they’ve made to the game has felt tacked-on and extraneous, from odd baking games to playing dress-up.

Building a Better Designer

The very first thing I was tasked with doing when I started working in the games industry was building a small section of map. I was excited and inspired and, even though I’d been given a week to do it, I turned it around in a day and a half. My lead looked at it and told me it was too complicated and that I should rebuild it from scratch. Around the third or fourth iteration it finally passed muster, and I’d taken the whole week doing it. It would have been devastating, except I quickly realized that I wasn’t culling ideas as well as I should. The end result was a tight, fun experience, something that the original, heavily-overdesigned version was not.

The whole thing has stuck with me, and I’m always on the lookout for how games implement their ideas, and which ideas shouldn’t have passed by the tyrannosaurus somewhere along the way.

I still have the two-hundred-and-eighty page game design concept I’d been working on, and I was too attached to it for a long time to turn the dinosaur on it. I finally did, and mentally shredded 99% of it.

Those three pages that are left, though? There’s a solid core for a game there, one that I might make eventually.

Next: What Players Want (Ugly Truths in Gaming, Part 2)