Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 2

Yesterday I kicked off my own versions of the Developer Appreciation Week with five companies and game teams that I greatly appreciate it.  It seems like we are starting to get some traction because yesterday MMOGames.com independent of my own intervention ran a piece of what we are doing.  I still hope to see more people join in the fun and talk about the development staff that they really appreciate it.  I play a lot of games… so I have a lot of love to go around.

Blizzard – World of Warcraft Team

WoWScrnShot_033115_220604 Last night was quite possibly my single best night in World of Warcraft raiding.  After some sluggish weeks we strolled into Blackrock Foundry and cleared seven normal bosses, then popped out and took down two heroic bosses… one of which was our first kill.  To make the night even more special we managed to one shot all of them.  After riding that high last night, it is impossible to do a developer appreciation week post without talking about Blizzard.  World of Warcraft has been the juggernaut in the room for so long that I can barely remember a time when they were not the clear market dominator.  While I have some disappointments about Warlords of Draenor, I feel like they are legitimately trying to turn the franchise around after what felt like years of neglect.  It feels very much like they have doubled down on this game, and at the end of the day I am still enjoying playing it with my friends.  For a ten year old game to still maintain relevancy is a pretty mighty feat, so my hat is off to the Blizzard staff who have supported it throughout the years and made it this experience that we judge all other MMOs against.  It has been the gold standard for good reason.  Even if World of Warcraft is not your game, you have to marvel at the level of polish that they deliver when they roll out a new expansion.

Bioware – Star Wars the Old Republic Team

swtor 2013-08-13 23-38-38-65 Star Wars the Old Republic and I have somewhat of a checkered past to be honest.  I went into this game feeling like it was going to be the WoW Killer for myself and my friends, but ultimately we lasted the same three months that we normally do in this sort of game.  When they chose to go free to play, I was frustrated by how insanely restrictive the system ended up being.  All of this said… if you can some how push past all of the limited time loot boxes and free to play cludge…  there is a great game there at its core.  With the launch of SWTOR I tried something that I don’t normally do… I leveled as part of a dedicated duo with my friend Euron.  I played a Jedi Guardian and he a Jedi Consular, and we participated in each others stories.  The way those two tales interweave was something to behold, and while it felt a bit confining to always have to make sure you and your friend were on at exactly the same times…  it was a leveling experience unlike no other.  The thing that stands out about SWTOR is the story, and what ultimately killed the game for me was when I ran out of it.  Now I know I have several expansions that I can go back and experience and I keep thinking that one day I will do precisely that.  In the meantime I have fond memories of the time we were all obsessed with this game, and give massive props to the folks who built such engaging content… that we pulled some fourteen hours a day to get through it all.

Zenimax – The Elder Scrolls Online Team

eso 2014-07-14 21-46-45-167 Since Daggerfall I have been in love with the Elder Scrolls franchise.  Each time a new one comes out I end up devoting hundreds of hours to playing it, but all the while I keep thinking… this experience would be more enjoyable with my friends.  So when I found out that Elder Scrolls was in fact being made into an MMO I was completely over the moon about it.  I was lucky enough to be in the first round of alpha testing, so ultimately I participated in this game for over a year before launching it.  Unfortunately this was a bit of a double edged sword because I got to see some features that worked better in early versions of the game, as compared to later more minimalistic ones.  When you test a game that long it skews your vision of what the game actually is.  Elder Scrolls Online has some of the best story content I have experienced in any game, and there are a number of quest lines that stick out in my memory.  The whole concept of being able to continue into another faction after you have finished yours was inspired.  The problem is by the time I hit the Aldmeri content I had lost a lot of my steam, and our guild was suffering the traditional drop off in players.  Now that the game has shifted to buy to play however I am able to experience this game again and realize just how great it actually is.  A lot of the problems I had with it early on have been smoothed out, and the post 50 progression no longer feels quite so grindy.  I really appreciate the staff that has been plugging away quietly on making this game a better place to be, and I look forward to playing it more in the coming months.

Trion Worlds – Trove Team

trove 2014-10-16 22-40-54-21 Trove is this quirky world building game that blends MMO combat, MOBA style character design, and Minecraft style exploration and construction.  I was lucky enough to be including in the first round of alpha invites for trove, and it has been insane to watch this game evolve.  What I love the most is the way the developers have been meshed with the community since day one.  Instead of a traditional forum, they decided to open up the process with a reddit, in fact I think this is the first game I can ever recall doing that.  In those first days the community was so amazing, because it was so tight knit.  You would log in and get welcomed by people that might recognize your name from the Reddit, and there was rarely a time when a developer was not in game talking to players.  As the game has progressed the community has gotten larger, and the rigors of development have degraded this closeness a small bit, but it is still very much a game that draws its inspiration from the players.  While I don’t play it as much as I should, I have loved watching it evolve around me.  It feels like the sort of game you get when you throw a bunch of seven year olds in a room and tell them to solve a problem.  It is pure unbridled joy and imagination… and has been good for my jaded soul to see that a game like that can exist.

Riot Games – League of Legends Team

League of Legends 2013-08-15 20-37-32-38

League of Legends is 100% not my type of game.  In fact I might never have played it were it not at the suggestion of my friends.  Actually I rarely ever play this game other than when a bunch of friends want to do so.  That said the experience of playing with a team of friends is contagious.   There are a lot of aspects about this game that are problematic for me, a huge one being the still very toxic community.  That said I give the biggest credit I can possibly give to the character designers.  What League has in spades is the personality that seems to be lacking from so many other MMOs.  The characters in League of Legends have a life of their own, and they make you fall in love with them.  I have joked for some time, that this isn’t actually a game, but a modern sticker album… because I seem to largely collect characters and skins rather than actually play with them.  Each character is really a triumph of taking what are mostly remixed elements and making them feel fresh and new.  I tend to stick to the characters I know and love however like Darius, Graves, WuKong and Garen.  My favorite gameplay mode however will probably always be ARAM simply because no one expect you to know what you are doing, which is about perfect for me.

Grinding Gear into Plasteel

Ready for a Freeze

The last few weeks my allergies have been killing me, and this is not usually the case for fall here in Oklahoma.  It feels like the seasons are getting horribly confused, and ragweed that normally hits its worst during July has been still active in August and October.  As such my lungs have decided to betray me under the onslaught, and yesterday afternoon I ended up going home from work.  I took a few breathing treatments and got some sleep and this morning I feel marginally better, but still on the scale of “lousy”.  Right now I am just read for the first hard freeze to happen and kill off most of the allergens.  Sadly that doesn’t look like it is going to happen any time soon.  The temperature is dipping down today to the 60s, but otherwise we are still having 70 to 80 degree days.

dragon-age-origin-1024x640 The constant drainage and coughing just makes me want to stay inside and hibernate.  Thankfully right now I have a ton of good games to play.  With the impending release of Dragon Age: Inquisition several of my friends are replaying Dragon Age: Origin since like many Bioware games there is reportedly going to be a save game import feature.  I know my experience playing through all three Mass Effect games in a row produced a ton more quest options than when I played Mass Effect 3 without importing.  So it has me wanting to try going back through the past games as well.  My upcoming gaming schedule may be devoted to Dragon Age: Origins for a bit, but I still plan on poking my head into FFXIV, Trove and Destiny on a nearly nightly basis to see what is going on.

Grinding Gear into Plasteel

Destiny_20141003060320 Thanks to the miracle of the Queens Bounty event I’ve managed to shoot up to 24 light through upgrading the two purple pieces of gear that I managed to get.  Through running various other things I have managed to pick up a handful of nice weapons and other light bearing blues.  Right now I am running around with a level 20 scout rifle, that while it doesn’t deliver as much punch as the hand cannon, it still has a bit of impact and can carry like 250 rounds with me.  It makes it extremely good for whittling down enemies at range with extreme accuracy.  I would still love to find a level 20 blue or purple hand cannon, but so far my only purple ingram has produced crafting materials instead of a weapon.  Upgrading gear right now seems to be my sole source of getting more light, as I have yet to find any items that can directly replace anything I am currently wearing.

Destiny_20141003060344 Last night my play time entirely revolved around trying to find more green armor to grind down into Plasteel, and finding Relic Iron… which so far is the hardest of the materials to spot.  I’ve gotten rather good at picking out the chunks of brown against the red brown landscape of Mars, and had a fair bit of luck finding chests that had quite a large quantity of it.  The problem honestly as you can see from the screenshot is that I just cannot seem to get enough plasteel.  I could in theory buy ingrams from the Cryptarch and grind those down… but that seems defeatist.  Instead I am mostly spending my time doing patrol missions on Mars since they give me reputation and have a fair chance of dropping greens.  I have now entered the grind phase of the game, and while I am still very much enjoying myself I can see how this might wear on folks with a lower tolerance to grind.

Tron and Infinium Ore

Trove 2014-10-03 06-23-24-633 With the release of Beta and the addition of the Neon Ninja, they added in a biome to go with that theme.  While this morning I was only able to find a very small one… this is what folks have dubbed the “Tron” biome.  In fact when you are in the biome a musical theme plays that reminds me quite a bit of some of the Tron Legacy soundtrack.  There are rivers of neon blue water, and instead of grass and brushes you have chips and resistors.  It feels like you are in a datascape and the various robots have similar tron coloring.  Each biome has a version of the skeleton, and in this biome they look like the Red MCP guards from the original Tron movie.  I hope that eventually I can build a table that allows me to spit out stuff themed like this biome, because I will completely switch my entire cornerstone to look like it.

Trove 2014-10-03 06-14-54-858 This little innocuous looking block is Infinium Ore, and it has become the bane of my existence.  After a certain point in the crafting system… every single recipe requires this.  The problem is that as you go up in level this doesn’t seem to get any more common.  You can find Shapestone and Formicite Ore until your heart is content, but Infinium still is a very rare occasional, and any given vein maybe gives you twenty if you are extremely lucky.  Most of my playtime has been wandering around looking for these ore spawns.  The problem with Trove is I simply don’t understand how the game works yet.  In Minecraft the spawns were based on a certain logic, and once you mastered that you could be plopped down almost anywhere and be able to find the resources you need.  In Trove it feels more like you have to be lucky.  I feel like I need to spend some time scouring the Reddit looking for tips and strategies for finding this ore node.  I won’t be able to do any of the really cool things without large quantities of it.

#DragonAge #Trove #Destiny

Neon Ninjas and Knights

Its A Voxel World

Trove 2014-09-25 21-00-16-293 Yesterday something pretty awesome happened…  Trove Beta launched and overall everything went pretty smoothly.  I have been a fan of the game since I got into the very first Alpha wave.  You can check out my first video from November of last year and see just how much the game has changed.  This is one of those titles that has changed at an almost staggering pace.  I would pop my head in about once a month… only to find that the framework of the game was in a massively different place than when I last left it.  I have to say during the Alpha this became a bit of an impediment to me playing it.  I would want to just pop in and do something interesting and essentially have to relearn how to do anything at all.  That said my friend Rae showed interest in the game early this week, and oddly enough we happened to both log in together on the very last night of Closed Alpha.

Trove 2014-09-22 23-56-16-632 We had such a good time running around and smashing things, that we decided last night when the Beta launched to skip playing Final Fantasy XIV at least for a bit and dive straight into leveling up in Trove.  The above mounts we found during the final hours of closed alpha, and they are essentially rainbow piñatas that shoot rainbows and confetti out of their butts as you ride along.  Basically it is my goal to manage to get this mount again during beta.  Nothing says Trove quite like leaving a trail of sprinkles everywhere you go.  Unfortunately the mount comes from their version of a lootbox.  I have no clue what the drop rate is for one of the piñata mounts but I know I purchased 10 of them last night and Rae purchased 5 with the points we were given going into the beta… and all we managed to get were a few crafting recipes.

Neon Ninjas and Knights

Trove 2014-09-25 20-37-50-103

One of the brand new things for Beta was the introduction of the Neon Knight class.  For most of the night this is what Rae ran around as while I played my Knight.  The class is a bit of a stealthy melee in that your right mouse click causes you to drop a decoy and shift into stealth.  From there you can throw shuriken at your target for a fairly devastating effect.  The purple rings around you seem to be some sort of a charging up mechanic that indicates when you are ready to throw shuriken.  Other than that if you attack from stealth you do a significant amount more damage.  I personally found the class a little frustrating, since I like to rush headlong into combat and bash all the things in the face.  For someone who wants more tactical game play however this might be the ideal option.

Fortunately or unfortunately I feel like the most “Bel” class in existence is still the Knight, which is essentially your default.  For starters it is a melee class with pretty high survival in up close confrontations.  The secondary attack is this impressive weapon slam that can knock back enemies and deal a cone of damage.  The first ability you get is a charge and god knows I love charge attacks, but this one also doubles as a movement ability and a way to dash across gaps to get to places more easily.  Finally the last attack is this shield that you can put up that causes you to take no damage for a period of time.  The last one is on a long cooldown, but it serves nicely as an “oh shit” button for doing some of the harder content.

Content Density

Trove 2014-09-25 19-18-34-398 One of the coolest things about late Alpha and now Beta is just how diverse and dense the content is.  Early on in the game each biome section would have a single objective be it a castle or a tower or something of the sort.  This time around you would be hard pressed to go for very long before discovering something that has a boss or a challenge or something of the sort.  Granted by the time I came back later in the night, the world was getting more than a bit picked over…  so I am hoping that the world reset happens pretty frequently.  In any case we were able to roll around the map going to areas that had not been touched and doing the challenges we encountered along the way.  The above shot is from this insane rainbow dungeon in the clouds that you get to by climbing up through the hollowed out tree pictured in the back.  Each biome has its own challenges with is own mob types which make the gameplay feel fairly fresh.

Essentially the challenges that I have encountered break down into a few themes.  The first involves triggering an event.  These tend to say that there is something dangerous inside in the upper right hand corner of the screen.  When you trigger the event you have to survive a few waves of enemies, and if you do so a chest appears.  The negative is that both you and the mobs you are fighting have to stay inside a blue ring that spawns when the event starts.  We had issues when fighting mobs up in the air, that they would fall off the edges.  The positive is you can retry the event over and over by simply moving out of the ring and waiting for it to reset.  The part that makes these challenging is that generally the area with the totem that triggers the event is covered in spikes or surrounded by these pillars that shoot fireballs in a Castlevania fashion.  So while the half dozen mobs really isn’t a huge problem… keeping them from knocking you back into environment obstacles totally is.

Something Minecraft Doesn’t Give Me

Trove 2014-09-22 22-31-52-013 At it’s core the gameplay of Trove is similar enough to Minecraft that you cannot talk about it without at least mentioning that game.  You could call Trove Minecraft with more meaningful combat and MMO style loot, but the game itself feels richer than that might denote.  One of the aspects of the game that I like the most is the existence of my Cornerstone.  This is basically a plot of land that I control and can build permanent structures upon… but that also moves with me around the world.  I can walk up to any plot that is presently unclaimed and the  game will rebuild my cornerstone before my eyes.  So I can have crafting machines travel around with me, and each time I do this it resets my spawn point.  This gives me some permanence that I crave in an otherwise very flexible world.  This however does not make for a great community, as folks are constantly picking up their home like a hermit crab and moving it with them.

What is more interesting is the fact that players can create clubs, which in essence give you guild like functionality.  I’ve created a Club for the Alliance of Awesome, and as such we have a “Club World”.  This is a fully instanced biome where we can control everything in it.  This means you can build super intricate guild houses and give other players the ability to teleport into them.  This is the more permanent structure from the looks of it, and gives folks a way to link up and meet in user created worlds.  While ours does not really do much of anything at the moment, I have plunked down a few machines and will likely keep adding to it as we go along.  You are given only the smallest of islands to start building on, but it looks like more or less you can freely build out over the ocean for quite some ways.  There are a number of websites giving away beta keys right now, so I highly suggest you track one down and give this game a shot.

Cancelling Titan

Bragtoberfest 2014

bragtoberfest_spooky

This month Izlain and J3w3l of Couch Podtatoes are running an event for the gaming community.  The idea is to have an entire month of remembering the good things about gaming.  The last few months have been frustrating to be a gamer, and the word gamer itself has been drug through the mud a bit by some misguided individuals with other agendas…  and their willing or not so willing peons.  The idea is to get back to the roots of gaming… and just play awesome games for the fun of it.  I was brought into the equation to help out with some logo work, and I did a couple of them that you might see used during the event.  For a better description you can check out what Izlain posted on his blog Me Vs Myself and I.

We all know that the last few weeks have been a frustrating time to be a fan of video games. There are sections of the Internet and our society as a whole that don’t necessarily see things the way we do, and a huge push back against women, other minority groups, and the industry have stigmatized the word “gamer.” I want to take it back. I want us to remember why we started gaming in the first place. I want you to enjoy being a gamer, and to brag about your accomplishments in games, be it a high score shattered, a nice piece of loot earned, or your name at the top of a leaderboard. That bragging can take place however you see fit, be it via your blog, on a podcast, in a video, whatever you want. Let’s just get back to our roots as gamers.

Bragtoberfest aims to make it fun to be a gamer again. We all game, and most of us also either blog, stream, vlog or podcast about games as well. Why not combine the two into a month-long event?

If you are interested you should definitely check out the Bragtoberfest 2014 nook as that Is where the contest will be running out of.  There are four major events that Izlain and J3w3l are running, as well as a slew of prizes to be had.  More importantly this is an embracing of the good that is left in gaming, and the enjoyment each of us have that first time we boot up a new game.  Also to get some buzz going, don’t forget to mention #Bragtoberfest when you post about the events.

Goodbye Alpha

Trove 2014-09-22 23-56-16-632 Monday night on a whim I hooked my good friend Rae up with a key for the Trove Alpha, since she had shown some interest in the game.  So we spent the evening wandering around the game, and I wish to god I had been streaming it… because the running commentary of her and I “discovering” things had to be hilarious.  Trove is one of those games that I really enjoyed early on, but have simply not played of late.  Each time I do manage to boot it up the game has changed so massively since the last time that I almost felt overwhelmed to even begin to play it.  If nothing else the game has shown players just how in a constant state of flux most game development is.  Trove has broken some of the rules and for the most part uses Reddit entirely for its user forums, as well as communicating copious amounts of information back with the community about what it has done and intends to do.

As much fun as we had, Monday night was a little bittersweet.  It was only after logging out that night and checking into the Reddit yesterday that I realized that it was in fact the end of Alpha events that we were seeing.  So many awesome things were going on, mostly that people were throwing down these pinatas full of loot on the ground for us to combat.  We both managed to get amazing Pinata mounts… that leave a trail of rainbows and sprinkles as you move around.  Sadly all of this went away that night as the servers went down.  We will not be able to play again until Thursday when the beta officially begins… and I have to say right now I am feeming to play again.  In the past I had pretty much played by myself, but to be running around with someone else was an absolute blast.

Trove 2014-09-22 22-31-52-013 Right now we have tentative plans to wander around Thursday night leveling.  I plan on working on Knight since that tends to be my favorite, and at this point I am not sure if Rae will be a Gunslinger or a Faerie Trickster.  At least a small part of me is hoping that the new Neon Ninja class will be ready at the start of beta.  I have to say the game is so much more solid than at any point I have ever played it in the past.  The biggest improvement is just how content dense the various biomes now are.  Once upon a time there would be a single element in the biome that was worth finding and clearing, but we stumble across all sorts of points of interest, each with their own bosses and treasure chests to  be found.  Right now I have an Alliance of Awesome guild running, so if you are playing or plan on playing let me know and we can get you invited.

Cancelling Titan

projecttitan Yesterday during an interview with Mike Morhaime the website Polygon broke the news that apparently the mystery project Titan has officially been cancelled.  For those who are completely unfamiliar with the name Titan and the mystery surrounding it, you can check out this excellent post from Massively running down the short history of a game that doesn’t exist.  For me I guess it feels weird to know now that Blizzard does not have a new MMO up its sleeve, and makes me wonder if they are completely abandoning the MMO genre in general in favor of games that are frankly easier to manufacture content for.  Right now Hearthstone is by all reports doing amazingly well, and they have managed to find a mix of value in their micro transaction model so that it does not feel abusive to the players.  Similarly with the ramping up of Heroes of the Storm, we have them formally throwing their hat into the MOBA arena which at least for the games that have done it right, is also a cash cow.  The amount of effort that it takes to develop a new hero for example is so significantly less than it does an entire MMO expansion.

Statistic: Number of World of Warcraft subscribers from 1st quarter 2005 to 2nd quarter 2014 (in millions) | Statista
Find more statistics at Statista
I feel like one of the things that most players do not understand is that World of Warcraft is following a very bell shaped decline.  Each time a new expansion is released there is a momentary bump, but the last one of these only raised the subscribers enough to cover the exodus at the tail end of the previous expansion before steadily declining again.  I am not trying to claim doom and gloom about World of Warcraft, but it feels like fact that the game has long since entered its golden years.  The positive is that both Everquest and Everquest 2 have enjoyed significant followings and stability long after the buzz died down.  In both cases they continue to churn out expansions happily, and for the small but extremely devoted fan base they are great places to be.  As such I more than expect that the same will be true for World of Warcraft.  I expect the game will likely taper off and flatten the curve a bit around 2 to 3 million players.  Looking at the number alone however, we can see that the game is at a level of subscribers that it has not been at since the sometime between the opening of AQ40 and the launch of Naxxramas in vanilla.

So I guess my question is this…  does this really mean that Blizzard as a company is moving away from the MMO model that they popularized?  Do they have another skunkworks project up there sleeves that they can surprise the player base with at a later date?  I realize talk about the decline of World of Warcraft makes a lot of fans nervous.  I am trying to do so with the least amount of hyperbole available, and in a way that is an non-incendiary as I can.  The truth is right now World of Warcraft still brings in a very significant amount of money.  As it ages however, that revenue stream keeps diminishing.  The question is, can they make enough money from micro transactions to replace the stability of the subscription dollar?  Will they be able to muster the same amount of fandom without an MMO to stir up the hysteria to eleven?  What does the future of Blizzard look like, and is it as dominant a force as it has been to date?

#ProjectTitan #Trove #Bragtoberfest