Blizzard table scraps, L2P DarkFall, and the 3rd WAR faction

April 16, 2009

Lately I’ve found a few amusing things around the various blogs/forums I read, and now seems like a good time to go over a few things.

The first is the general hope by so many that the secret MMO Blizzard is working on will be some major step in MMO design. The day Blizzard comes out with a totally new concept will be their first. They polish and ‘borrow’ ideas better than anyone in the industry, but when it comes to original concepts, I’ll point you to SC:Ghost and Warcraft Adventures. The reality of all this is that the people asking for something different don’t actually want it, otherwise they would actually be playing the different MMO offerings that are currently available. They want WoW with a new color palette, and that’s exactly what’s going to be delivered. The game will run on a toaster, have a difficulty level just slightly above tic-tac-toe, and will cater to the same non-MMO-gamer crowd currently making up the majority of the 11 million WoW players. The question is whether they will migrate over or just do their usual month-long visit. It will be interesting to see if Blizzard is able to keep its own fad going.

Speaking of WoW, I’m somewhat amazed that the FIRST content patch since the $40 Nax recycling project just came out. Its mid-April, Wrath of the Short Bus came out in November, and you are just now able to make any meaningful updates? And it’s been what, a year since Sunwell, the last new raid content? That’s laughably slow even by Blizzard standards, and by some accounts what’s being offered is not exactly grade A stuff. You need to make it last though, it’s going to be another 6+ months before Blizzard feeds you another scrap, and you better hope they don’t make Molten Core or BWL more ‘accessible’ by revamping it. The truly sad part is this shameful content release schedule is only encouraged by the 11 million or so subs patting Bliz on the head each month with their money.

The justification of this pace by some is also priceless; that your $15 a month is going towards future Blizzard projects you are also likely to enjoy. Are you fucking kidding me? You are accepting the fact you are being milked for cash to fund a future product you are going to spend $50+ for anyway (or $150 for all of Starcraft 2)? But hey, at least mounts can now enter water (brilliant Bliz first idea btw), and that kind of radical change does not come overnight. Enjoy the pony ride in Uld, just make sure to take baby steps.

Moving on from McWoW, this post by Keen made me chuckle. Who would have guessed being a serf in a giant alliance, one which is currently locked in a staring contest and forum pissing match with the other big zerg would lead to a boring experience? I can’t fathom how anyone could find being told which hamlet/city you can hold, being told when and who to attack, and grinding your hamster wheel for the blue team boring. Pro-tip: Stop being a number and actual go out and do something with your guild. Our guild can hardly make it over to a dungeon for some PvE without being pulled in three directions to deal with some threat. Most nights we don’t even need to head out to PvP, as plenty of targets wander into our area of control, and I’m not talking naked harvesters here. When we do head out, any direction we go will take us into hostile territory, and we don’t have to double check the guild name to know if we can kill them or not. The game, thankfully, is what you make of it, and rather than blaming the rules for not living up to your demands, why not do something about it and get your guild into a more entertaining and challenging situation? If you need to rely on the game rules to keep you safe and entertained, the sandbox is clearly not the right place for you.

Finally, just a quick note about WAR: how long are we going to wait for Mythic to announce a 3rd side? Is it really going to take a paid expansion for us to get it, because by that time even the most vigilant T4 combatants are going to grow tired, or simply move to a game that actually rewards that kind of dedication in a meaningful way. The themepark PvP model really can’t retain players in a two sided contest, because in order for that to work the game rules have to keep everything balanced, rather than the players. Order’s reward for sacking The Inevitable City every week is going to be an Order nerf and a Destro buff. The better you do the harsher the backlash, which in the end only rewards those that fail. And unlike PvE, where reward for failure gets you 11 million subs, in PvP I doubt it will have the same effect. Mythic has a solid core for an entertaining themepark PvP experience. It’s easy to jump into, entertaining once you are there, and it’s all wrapped in a solid IP with plenty of room for logical growth. But unless the players gain a little control and reward for performing well, it’s all going to be pointless sooner or later. Step up Mythic, continue moving away from the failed WoW-clone model, and get DAoC 2.0 where it needs to be. That said, I’m still finding WAR entertaining on a small dose scale, which would be larger if not for DarkFall, and I think the upcoming content will be very entertaining; it just won’t be the long-term solution WAR needs.

36 Comments | Darkfall Online, MMO design, PvP, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Why I game.

April 14, 2009

This post is going to be a little self-analysis about why I play MMOs, how I play then, and what keeps me going. For readers who have been around for a bit, you can probably guess some of the stuff below, but hopefully this post will give everyone a clearer picture of what keeps me, and players like me, logging in day after day.

The thing that drives me most is progression in an endless environment. I like to know that I’m stronger in whatever game I’m playing this month than I was last month, whatever that gain may entail. The other key is that this progression must be in an environment that rewards that progression, and one that the progression has some meaning. The event that got me to quit WoW was the imminent release of The Burning Crusade; not because of any upcoming feature or change, but because TBC was a character progression reset, instantly invalidating everything your character had done since hitting level 60. Once you hit level 70, it did not matter whether you just started that character or had Nax40 on farm, everything was back to square one. For me, that’s a killer in an MMO. When I went back to WoW, it was in a completely different mind frame; I was there to see the sites and sounds, knowing that regardless of what dropped or how I played my character, at the end of the day it did not matter. Progression for me matters, and knowing that at a set date its going to reset destroys my motivation and leads to playing half-assed. Once that mentality sets in, it’s only a matter of time before the sites and sounds grow old and my account expires. This in part explains my preference for sandbox gameplay over themeparks, as no matter how well designed the themepark is, at some point the ride progression gets reset, and that knowledge makes it hard to fully commit to going all out to progress, and also in my mind undermines the true value of a massive world that continually grows based with its players.

The progression itself does not necessarily need to be my character doing more dps, it can be simple things like knowing the lay of the land better in DarkFall through exploring, or learning a little trick in PvP after being the victim of it, or our guild growing and having more solid members who can hold their own in a fight. One of my major issues with Tier 4 in Warhammer is that while the campaign is well designed and fun from start to finish, once it’s finished it simply resets. Your character is a bit more powerful, and you slowly gear up to eventually take down the king encounter, but what then? Either another layer of progression is added (good for me), or some form of a power reset is implemented (bad for me).  Furthermore, while winning the campaign is rewarding, it only goes so far to help your side against the enemy, and for good overall balance, that power swing can never go too far to one side or the other. The issue I have is the game has to balance the power structure, rather than the players being in control. In a sandbox like DF or EVE, if one alliance gets too powerful, the game rules don’t change to hurt them, the players’ band together and take them down or deal with the oppression. The powerful alliance knows that the longer they keep their position, the more meaningful their accomplishment. Anyone who has ever played EVE knows about BoB, even if you have never set foot in 0.0. That’s a goal worth chasing IMO.

Another feature that keeps me going in an MMO is the ability to play smart and have it count. For instance, one of the main reasons I stopped playing Atlantica Online is because that game only rewards time invested (or RMT money spent). As long as you keep grinding mobs, your power increases at a steady rate, and playing poorly changes little. In direct contrast, playing poorly in DarkFall has consequences. You might have eight hours a day to play, but if you spend five of them grinding iron to get a full set of scale, only to go out and lose that set stupidly, you are no further ahead than someone with an hour or two a night that runs with a solid group and wins more than they lose. A player can grind his way to 100 armorsmithing with enough time, but a guild that organizes and specializes their crafters will get ahead faster and more efficiently, and before that solo player gets to 100, the guild as a whole will have moved on to greater things. On a much smaller level, if you plan ahead and scout an area, identifying the safest and most profitable spots to harvest, you can accomplish the same result in an hour that takes a lesser player three or four. It might not always work out that way, but just knowing that HOW you spend your time matters as much as how MUCH time you have is important to me. The true value in an MMO is that you are competing with thousands of players, and the game rules should not reduce that competition to a pure race against time.

Finally, I look for an MMO to have a story, and community around that story. I don’t mean hardcoded lore, but the story of what the players have done. The lore behind Onyxia is not important to me, but the story behind the world first kill is. The raiding progression thread on each WoW server was, for me, the story in WoW. How fast is a rival guild progressing, how do we stack up against everyone else, and what can we do to get to the top? I can’t recall a single piece of lore from Asheron’s Call, but I’ll never forget the Blood hierarchy on Darktide. Similarly, while my guild Inquisition is a small-ish guild in DarkFall, we are working to establish both our reputation and presence in our area of the world, to either establish better control of what we have now, or perhaps to become a key piece in some greater, further reaching plan. The point is, what we do today will actually impact what happens to all of us tomorrow, independent of what the patch notes next week might contain. It’s a force that keeps me logging in; to see not only the world progress overall, but what part my guild plays in that progression.

I consider myself a power gamer on a now more limited time budget. Realistic or not, my goal is always to progress towards the top tiers of power, or impact the world in a meaningful and hopefully memorable way. Even if in the end that does not happen, knowing that it COULD is a huge driving factor. And knowing that my actions reflect on hundreds, if not thousands of other players all striving for similar goals is why MMO gaming is miles ahead of any single player or less worldly game, console or otherwise.

22 Comments | Atlantica Online, Darkfall Online, EVE Online, Random, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

DarkFall burnout: The players or the game?

April 13, 2009

While I’m still having a blast in DarkFall (our recent ‘pirate’ adventure on four rafts was hilarious), I’ve been reading some forum posts (I know…) about certain players feeling meh about the game now. According to the post, part of the blame is the lack of small scale PvP (10-20 man fights), the lack of importance with cities, and the boredom of skill/craft grinding.

Some of the issues are very DarkFall specific. If you are in Hyperion or the Goon buddies alliance, you are going to have a tough time finding targets simply because your side is allied with more or less everyone around you. The major advantage of being in a smaller, regional alliance is that once we ride out 5-10 minutes, everyone we find is fair game, and we don’t have to constantly check the 20+ long ally list. Our area sees plenty of enemy raiders, but since we are so focused on our little spot, we always have people who are able to quickly respond. It makes for a very fun, dynamic environment; one I’ll take any day over an alliance owning an entire island and having to travel 30+ minutes for the chance of fighting another player. It’s this factor above all else that may lead to the decline of the zerg alliances, as trading in PvP randomness for the safety of superior numbers might not be a deal most DarkFall players are willing to accept long-term.

The other DarkFall specific issue is the whole notion of ‘keeping up’ in terms of skills. It seems that certain people just can’t accept that others will have higher magic or weapon skills, and instead of playing the game, spend all their time grinding so they can finally get themselves ‘ready’. It’s a laughable notion really, when you consider that a day one player can just jump right in and contribute to a guild run, without the need to grind anything. The other issue is that once they are ‘ready’, burnout sets in because they just spent the last month playing long hours just to keep up. While certainly having higher skill or gear helps in DarkFall, it’s not the “I win” button it is in other games, and obsessing over grinding your skills to the point of burnout is a great way to make ANYTHING not fun, DarkFall included.

Other issues however are more related to the players gaming style rather than actual game mechanics. While in a themepark the game leads you from one ride to the next, always ensuring you are on the ‘correct’ path, a sandbox is what you make of it, and not everyone is able to create something fun or entertaining. And while it would be easy to call all those players unable to find the fun in a sandbox carebears or noobs, the truth is that not everyone is looking for the same things in a game, much less an MMO. For some, they just want to log in and follow the path, seeing the sights and sounds as an escape from whatever they were doing before logging in. They don’t want to ‘work’ at having fun; they want it readily accessible and on-demand. (And one could easy point out that the ‘accessible’ population is 11 million strong, while the ‘work’ crowd is a niche)

The problem is some players don’t accept that that is their playstyle, similar to how more people THINK they want PvP than actually do. The players THINK they want a dynamic, random, and uncertain world, yet don’t actually accept all aspects of that bargain. In exchange for thrilling, random PvP encounters like finding a raft and shooting the crew full of arrows before sailing away with it, you accept an hour+ trip searching for players and not finding much, or worse yet finding a group that wipes you. In exchange for items actually having some value, you accept that crafting those items is going to take some gathering, perhaps even more so than needed because of random gankers. It’s the acceptance that for every amazing day, you will likely have an equally disastrous one, where it seems that every PK is specifically aiming for you. It’s the exact reason EVE for many is more fun to read about than to actually play, as reading gets you right to the good stuff (even if its only from a 3rd party perspective), rather than logging in and having to ‘grind’ through all that down time to actually get yourself into one of the memorable encounters.

For me, it’s the understanding that a sandbox game is as much fun as you are willing to put into it, and for some they simply don’t want to invest that much in a game. And while I do occasionally enjoy an easy trip around the themepark, the knowledge that my game is ‘on rails’ is a more bothersome issue than getting ganked while harvesting or PvE’ing. It’s not a better or worse way to game, it just comes down to player preference, and luckily now the MMO genre is at least catering somewhat to both camps.

28 Comments | Darkfall Online, EVE Online, MMO design | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

Bounty Hunter: The perfect class for solo players?

April 9, 2009

The concept of a mercenary guild or individual bounty hunter has always interested MMO fans. The idea of taking contracts from the highest bidder, hunting down a target, and returning to collect your reward is something many fans dream about in any MMO pre-release. It’s not uncommon to see multiple mercenary guilds spring up on forums, promising to be elite fighting forces willing to work for whoever has the gold to pay them.

And in all but a few games, the concept of a mercenary dies when the game goes live. It’s not because the players loss interest, or even because a game does not have an adequate bounty system, but simply because no one is willing to hire the mercs. Why? Because when death is meaningless, what good is a bounty hunter? No matter how much I hate someone in WoW/WAR/etc, what good is it to hire a mercenary to kill them? At worse the target has a quick run back to their corpse, happily resuming his adventures without any ill effect. How much gold is that worth, compared to the effort of tracking that player down? Obviously, the two don’t add up, and hence mercs don’t exist.

Even in DarkFall, with a harsher death penalty, what does a single kill of an enemy get you beyond some replaceable armor and a few minutes of interruption? Effort/reward once again does not add up. Where mercs DO factor in is during city defense/siege. This is because gaining or losing a city/hamlet is a relatively big deal, and hence is worth spending the gold to capture one or keep yours safe. Without any impact to the PvP, the concept of a merc guild or bounty hunter does not work, and impact PvP is avoided by any MMO aiming for the masses. Who wants others possibly effecting their MMO gaming time anyway!

All this brings me to a post by Keen, who wonders about the possible future of the bounty hunter class in SWTOR. Now unless SWTOR has a harsher death penalty than DarkFall (about as likely as WoW bringing back Nax40 quality raids), the bounty hunter sounds more or less like the perfect solo PvE class, hunting down NPC ‘targets’ in little more than veiled story-driven ‘go kill x’ quests. No matter how slick the bounty UI will be, or how feature-rich the whole system might become, unless one player actually gains something from another players death, bounty hunters won’t be worth a damn when it comes to player conflict. (assuming the game allows any to begin with) But in a story-focused themepark, perhaps that won’t really matter. As themeparks evolve, more and more emphasis is being placed on a $15 a month solo adventure with a chat window, and the bounty hunter in SWTOR might be the fully embraced version of this. The lore will support the loner style, and built that way from the ground up, the style will certainly appeal to a segment of the gamer population looking for an ‘accessible’ way to play an MMO. Clearly not my cup of tea, but perhaps it will be enough to extend a tourists stay beyond a month, and that in itself will be a giant step forward.

18 Comments | MMO design, PvP, SW:TOR | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

When the DarkFall devs put some bite behind their bark

April 9, 2009

Even before launch, Aventurine made it very clear they have a zero tolerance policy concerning issues with cheating or exploiting. Most took this as the usual ‘zero tolerance’ statements made by MMO devs since 1997 and UO, but we are seeing more and more evidence that Aventurine is very serious, and willing to go above and beyond normal policy to keep DarkFall legit. Case in point, this statement released today on the forums:

In 48 hours characters with names made in an effort to confuse GMs and other players, for example adding a string of lower cap L’s and upper case I’s (IlIlIIIl) in their names will start getting their host accounts permanently banned. If you have a character like that, delete him and make a new one with a proper name.

No offer to change your name, no previous warnings or rules governing player names, just a blank “clearly you named your character like an asshat, fix or die” statement. While character skills are not as make or break as levels in other MMOs, it’s still a major setback to have to delete and start back at square one. Not to mention the penalty is not a forced name change, or even character deletion, but an outright account ban. Welcome to DarkFall.

On the subject of cheating itself, Tasos also had this to say:

We know someone’s cheating beyond a shadow of a doubt, and if you’ve even done so once, you’re not safe. There’s no such thing as “clever use” when you own all the server logs. We’ll eventually get to you and ban you. If you’re currently using 3d party programs to exploit with, we suggest you uninstall these programs immediately and hope for the best.

IE: Duck and pray. Personally I’ve only seen one confirmed case of exploiting, where two players were able to exploit a bug and jump much farther than intended at a much faster speed. It’s an in-game bug, as we were able to reproduce it ourselves, and I’m guessing will be fixed shortly (it also does not work 100% of the time, so planning combat around that assumption does not work, not to mention its painfully blatant when used). Many times players THINK someone is speed hacking or otherwise exploiting because they got killed by a better players. Since player (not character) skill is such a huge factor in DarkFall, it might seem like another player is exploiting because of how well they are playing. Our own guild members have been accused of this simply due to being really, really damn good with a bow. That said, I’m sure some people are still using 3rd party programs, and the message that you WILL lose your account still needs to sink in. However the pre-launch predictions that the whole world would be using UO-Assist style programs were incorrect.

We’ve had complaints about random client crashes during sieges which we have addressed to a certain extent and looking at more cases. We will eventually get to the bottom of all these issues. We are getting a lot of reports by players, we are monitoring the forums, and we’re fixing bugs and making improvements to the game every day.

Some players have been complaining about lowered performance during massive battles. Now, let’s put things into perspective here: Small skirmishes in Darkfall are what other games call “massive battles”. We recently had approximately 2000 characters involved in battle in the same area. Battles with several hundred characters are the norm and run very smoothly. Of course you’ll get progressive frame rate drops when you’re working your way up to thousands of players in the same scene. We’re seeing a lot more characters in Darkfall battles than you see maximum units in RTS games. One of our first priorities is to continuously optimize this experience. Massive battles in Darkfall will get larger and run smoother and smoother. Now we don’t mind if people keep bitching at us about getting this even better, we’re never satisfied ourselves, so please keep that in mind.

The above is more or less true. On my system (granted a newer Alienware) the FPS don’t drop much during 200-300ish battles, always staying above 30 FPS (I normally run the game at 60 FPS maxed out at 1900×1200). The two times I’ve been a part of truly massive city sieges, the game did indeed start to chug, but even then it ran above 15 FPS, which is good enough to still play, but certainly leaves room for improvement. Just to compare, this same hardware drops to 5-10 FPS during Warhammer Online Fortress sieges, and has trouble staying above 30 FPS during 100ish player encounters. Normally WAR runs at 60 FPS maxed out at 1900×1200. Of course the two games use very different art styles (although IMO both look good, just different) and overall gameplay mechanics, but the engine behind DarkFall is still impressive. Guess that ‘seven’ years in development was put to good use…

7 Comments | Darkfall Online, MMO design | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

DarkFall: Some answers to common questions.

April 8, 2009

With DarkFall being so different from the now traditional MMOs, its only natural people are going to have a lot of questions. Since I post about the game rather frequently here, I figured I might as well try and address some of the more common questions, and also give people a place to ask other questions not answered here.

Sound: DarkFall uses sound in a much more ‘active’ way than most games. The sound of combat is often used to find other players, and anything that makes noise can potentially attract attention. Because of this, music is very minimal, and different sound volumes are used. It’s not a bug that mana missile is obnoxiously loud with no option to turn it down, it’s designed that way. Same goes for in-combat sounds like being hit or eating food. Because these noises are so loud, other players are able to hear them from a great distance, usually long before they can actually see you. It’s jarring and annoying at first, but once you realize the design behind it, it becomes second nature and critical for success. Separating vent volume from in-game sound is extremely helpful in coordinated PvP.

Mining: Unlike chopping lumber or gathering herbs, mining nodes comes in two flavors; iron and stone. Stone is used in city/hamlet construction, while iron can be smelted and used in crafting. A recent patch changed the look of iron nodes, and they are now much shinier and easier to identify. The general ratio of iron/stone is about 1 to 8, and in high-traffic areas it’s not uncommon for the iron to be all gone more often than not. Finding a good, low traffic iron spot is very valuable. Each stone and iron node contains about 50ish resources, and both have a chance to produce sulfur or gemstones. Stone is very heavy and must be deposited in a bank often. 5 iron ore produces 2 iron ingots when smelted. A full set of plate armor is approximately 200 ingots (plus gold and leather), assuming zero failure when crafting.

Combat: Hitting a player or mob in the back causes significantly more damage, and the attacks can not be blocked or parried. The chance of instant death, rather then being knocked down, is much higher if the final blow is struck from behind. Death is always instant if you die underwater. Magic can not be cast underwater, while arrows can still be shot. Arrows fired above water do not hit targets below, and vice versa. Blocking with a shield significantly reduces the damage you take (often nearly to zero), while draining stamina per hit absorbed. The attacker losses more stamina than the defender, which is very important in PvP, less so in PvE. If you run out of stamina during combat, all attacks against you will cause a significant amount of damage; you are basically dead if you run out of stam. Blocking a mob will often cause it to switch targets, while hitting a mob with a power attack seems to draw more agro.

Mounts: Attacking from a mount causes far more damage than a player running on the ground, but only one-handed weapons can be used. To hit a ground target, you must lean in the appropriate direction before swinging. After every swing, you must again lean either left or right. Mastering repeatedly hitting a running ground target is very important for players looking to be successful in PvP. Mobs will attack mounts over players generally, and its best not to fight mounted in PvE (thought it can be somewhat entertaining bashing goblins from a mount). Mounts can enter water, but move very slowly, and fighting on a mount in water is to be avoided. A ground player can easily dive underwater, come up behind you, and bring your mount down before you have a chance to even turn around on your mount. A mount can be killed, and quickly, by skilled players using a bow. Two or more players shooting arrows at a mounted player will often kill the mount before a player is able to flee. Mounts have both a front and rear attack. Both attacks will punt the player away from the mount, and cause even more damage than a weapon swing. Mastering the use of both abilities is again key for PvP, and errant bites or kicks can cause great harm to allies if used incorrectly. A mounted player is able to fall an unlimited distance without suffering damage. Depending on the area, this can be a huge tactical advantage. Mounts are crafted from steedgrass, which has about a .06% chance to drop when gathering herbs (the percentage may be higher for city/hamlet resources). A player with the taming skill can convert a steedgrass into a mount, the type depending on the crafters race.

Weapons: Generally higher rank weapons deal more damage, although your actual weapon skill impacts the actual amount gained. A player with a higher sword skill will get more out of a high ranking sword than a new player, although the new player will still notice a damage increase over a lesser weapon. Higher ranked weapons will also wear down much faster in the hands of an unskilled player, which makes using such weapons for PvE somewhat of a waste. For PvP, since you generally don’t swing as often, a high ranking weapon is always a good choice, even for lower-skill players. Crafted weapons and armor are almost always better compared to the PvE dropped versions of the same item, both in damage/protection and durability. The starter weapon should only be used as a last resort, as it’s significantly weaker than even rank 0 weapons.

Guilds: If you are not in a guild, you will have a very difficult (though not impossible) time in DarkFall. Unless you intend to stack the deck against yourself, it’s very advisable to find a quality guild as soon as possible. Consider the guilds political standing, general area of operation, allies/enemies, along with their approach to the game and activity level before joining. Since DarkFall only allows one character per account, guild hoping should be avoided as you may soon find yourself on many KOS lists. This truly is a social game on many levels (guild, alliance, general area), and someone playing solo will miss the best parts.

That’s it for now, if anyone has any other questions, please comment below and I’ll do my best to address them as best I can.

16 Comments | Darkfall Online | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

DarkFall: Skill counts.

April 6, 2009

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, a nice combo of a week off and DarkFall will do that. Hopefully things will return to a more normal posting schedule, but no promises.

DarkFall has remained my primary focus, far surpassing my expectations of the game. My guild, Inquisition, is still growing and we continue to establish ourselves as a serious presence around Moonclaw. The political landscape continues to shift almost daily, with alliances forming and crashing, and the two zerg alliances are still growing (Hyperion and Goons). Always entertaining is the fact that both sides claim to be ‘anti-zerg’ alliances, created to stop the advance of the other. The Goons, now anti-zerg; I’m sure all EVE players are having a good laugh at that one.

While the plate armor rain cloud continues to avoid me, I have acquired a solid amount of scale and banded armor, along with a nice collection of rank 30-40 weapons. The combination of being more comfortable in PvP, bringing better gear/skill, and working better with guildmates as a team means our kills/death ratio is only getting better, and we are bringing down more high-value players. The major difference now is skilled bow shooters bringing down enemy mounts. A few of our players are getting rather amazing at this, and once someone is on foot, it’s only a matter of time before we run them down. Mounted combat is itself an art, both solo and in groups, and we again have been working on tactics to minimize friendly fire and bring a target down quickly. DarkFall gets the feeling of bringing someone down from your mount perfectly; it’s brutally satisfying.

Outside of PvP combat (which is tops from any MMO I have played), DarkFall gets other things right as well. Crafting is simple yet necessary, and coordinated in a guild can really help everyone out in a noticeable way. Gathering is something you can get done between downtime, or as something to do with a 30 minute stretch. It’s not any better or worse than in other resource nod systems, but the open PvP setting increases the value and challenge of resources, especially in high traffic areas like our guilds hamlet. This goes hand-in-hand with establishing your area is a costly one for Pks. Once you bring them down a few times, they tend not to come around again, making things safer for your crafters and gatherers. It’s a player-driven game, and the players are still shaping its early foundation. So far, things have been getting more interesting each day.

27 Comments | Darkfall Online | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

The path to the mass market.

April 2, 2009

It would seem that the only way to attract a mass-market audience is to go casual. A rather simple concept right? WoW is huge because it aims at casual MMO fans (whoever that is), the Wii is dominating because it attracts non-gamer fans, and the iPhone is huge because it’s so easy to use.

Yet if success were that simple, the countless shovelware games sitting at Wallmart or Best Buy would be million+ sellers. You can’t get much more casual than video Monopoly, and while the game is remade and re-packaged monthly, it’s never topped the best seller list.

In the three example above, something happened BEFORE the mass market picked up on each product, something that launched them into the mass-market and into the massive success stories they are today.

The iPhone is the easiest example, so lets start there. While the Apple design and functionality helps set the iPhone apart, those features can be mimicked in time (how many touch screen phones do we have now?). What can’t easily be mimicked is the App Store, and Apple knows it. Yet the mass-market does not fuel that App Store, the niche market does. Part of the reason this worked for Apple is because of their large niche following, especially among the tech-savvy crowd. Given a solid development platform, a chance to be rewarded for their work (in some cases very well), and a centralized distribution system, and you get a ‘perfect storm’ to create the wide range of useful or amusing apps for the iPhone. Once this is established, the masses follow and further reward those early adopters while pushing the App Store into pop culture, money train following closely behind.

The Wii is a somewhat similar story, as like Apple, Nintendo has a very solid core following, even when the masses moved away from the SNES and to the PlayStation. The innovation of the Wii remote was viewed as a cheap gimmick before the systems launch, and all predictions pointed to Nintendo once again assuming the 3rd spot in the console war behind the PS3 (ha) and the Xbox 360. So what happened? Early buzz from that Nintendo core grew, thanks in large part to Nintendo providing their usual high-quality first-party games. (That they provided for the N64 and GC mind you) What was viewed as a gimmick became a key feature, much like the iPhone touch screen, and as the mass market caught up, Wii buzz continued to grow. Another interesting piece of the Wii story is the third-party games. They have sold very poorly, despite EA/Activision doing their best to imitate Nintendo and provide seemingly ‘casual’ games. The difference between the two is that Nintendo has the name and known quality, while EA/Activision are seen as trying to pass off a second-rate product (even if in some cases, the 3d party product is actually better). Had EA/Activision been on the Wii bandwagon day one, perhaps things would be different.

And finally, WoW. WoW is without doubt the most mass-market MMO out now, with it’s streamlined leveling game and generally low challenge compared to the genre. Add in bare-bones system requirements, a refined UI, and a mostly bug-free game, and it’s not hard to see why WoW would appeal to a non-MMO gamer. But while that is WoW today, that was not WoW in 2004. WoW had a mostly typical MMO launch, with days of server downtime (that Blizzard credited accounts for), massive bugs (loot lag, mob spawns, etc), server imbalances with long queues (both in Alliance/Horde and just total server pop, without the option to transfer), and an unfinished end-game. It was also not nearly as hardware friendly as it is today (though not as cutting edge as EQ2 at the time), and the UI was very lacking compared to today. When you have a game that requires 3-4 bars of hotkeys, and you launch with only one, it’s an issue. But the core gamers through UI mods soon fixed that issue, along with others. The core tolerated massive downtime and zone populations as well, choosing to voluntarily re-roll away from overpopulated servers. And while certainly not a hardcore game even in 2004, WoW was much harder and more MMO-like than it is post-WotLK, especially the endgame. Once the core had accepted (and helped improve) WoW, the masses caught on and subscription records followed. Once the initial buzz had been established, Blizzard continued to grow the game by continually lowering the bar (first slowly with BC , and recently completely with WotLK), pushing out the core and embarrassing the mass market. Done in reverse, or just jumping to the mass market phase, and perhaps those 11 million subs might not have come around.

22 Comments | MMO design, World of Warcraft | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

WoW tourists are good for the MMO industry

April 1, 2009

There you go, April Fools.

14 Comments | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by SynCaine

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