GW2 WvWvW – The new Alterac Valley!

Posted on February 16, 2012 by SynCaine

This looks familiar.

Three-way Alterac Valley that persists for two weeks, with an ELO system and DAoC relics/keeps. Not that the above is bad. God knows we have seen far worse attempts at MMO PvP (Hi WAR/AoC/Aion).

Maxing out at about 300 players fighting it out is pretty good. Impossible if you ask Blizzard or BioWare. And sure, Darkfall has had bigger battles, and 300 people is a small skirmish in EVE (lulz but it’s in space so it’s ez to do right guyz!?), but overall, 300 is still decent by ‘genre norms’. I’m curious to hear what happens to the 301st person who tries to enter WvWvW though. Do they go into a queue, are WvWvW areas going to be sharded, or are GW2 servers going to be so small as to make this a non-issue?

The level/gear aspect is disappointing, but not exactly unexpected. Hopefully your iLvL = I-Win for PvP, and player-skill plays an important aspect, but I have my doubts. I also doubt low level characters will be of much real value. Remember how ‘valuable’ non-60s were in AV? Want to guess how much help they will be in GW2 when my guild of 100 raid-geared 80s is on the field? I get the ‘you don’t have to grind to cap’ sales pitch, but if you are attempting to not force people to grind to 80, don’t have 80 levels. Funny enough, that’s exactly what GW1 did, but hey.

There are also some “I don’t know shit about MMO PvP History” parts in there as well. The whole “small groups can capture smaller objectives” crap. If you have played a PvP MMO, you know how that’s going to work out. You know how players dropping gear is going to work out for smart/good guilds. You know how keep/relic raids are going to go (unless relic/keep timers were simply not mentioned in the post, but I doubt it).

Again, does this mean GW2 WvWvW is going to suck as bad as most themepark PvP does? Nope. Is it going to be god’s gift like the rest of GW2 and solve all MMO problems forever? Not by the sounds of that blog.

Still, come open beta, GW2 at least sound good enough to bother downloading, which is more than I can say for most of 2011.

Posted in Age of Conan, beta, Combat Systems, Dark Age of Camelot, Darkfall Online, EVE Online, Guild Wars, MMO design, PvP, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | 37 Comments

Great games are not great MMOs

Posted on February 15, 2012 by SynCaine

I’ve often commented that I believe a part of WoW’s success was a perfect storm scenario. I’d like to add one additional factor to that formula: My-First-MMO-ness.

For many MMO gamers, WoW was their first title. This is a very powerful aspect, because the first time you are exposed to ‘genre norms’, they are new and exciting to you. An average auction house is still super-awesome to the new guy because the very concept of a massive multiplayer auction house is new to them. If you are playing your 3rd MMO with an auction house, it’s not that impressive anymore, and you are far more likely to notice the faults (or just differences) than someone new.

What this ultimately means is that the new player has more ‘content’ to explore before he gets bored, because literally everything is new to them. The MMO ‘vet’, on the other hand, is only going to notice or focus on the new stuff, and most of the other stuff is old news and has already been mastered.

SW:TOR is, by most accounts, a good game. It’s just a crappy MMO. And even worse, it’s also identical to the MMO most people have played. This does not mean those who play SW are not going to have fun with it. They will. But the length of time they have fun with it is going to be very limited, not only due to the solo-focused 4th pillar, but also due to how similar it will play/feel for many, and that is fatal for an MMO.

If SW:TOR had launched in 2004, rather than WoW, its future would look a lot brighter. It would still be crippled by the 4th pillar, but most of its players would not consume the total content nearly as quickly, and things like an auction house, battlegrounds, questing, raiding, etc, would all still feel new and interesting. But SW:TOR launched in 2011.

And this is not just an issue for SW, but for all themepark MMOs that stick too closely to the WoW formula. If WoW itself launched today, players would consume it far, far faster than they did in 2004. And again, whether a game is good or not is not really the issue. Skyrim is (IMO) a far better game than most, but I’m done with it after 60-100 hours. Which is perfectly fine for Bethesda, because they got my $60 and will likely get more when they release DLC. But SW, and other themepark MMOs, don’t survive on that $60. They survive on collecting $15 a month for months/years.

The other aspect leading the industry astray here is current-day WoW vs 2004 WoW. The 2004 version (along with the perfect storm scenario) is responsible for 10m subs. The current-day version is aimed to milk that. If 2012 WoW launched today, it would likely perform far closer to SW:TOR than 2004 WoW. It’s not a bad game, but it’s a horrible MMO. The social hooks are not there, the incentives to repeat content are weaker, and the rate of content consumption vs production is more off than it was in 2004.

But unlike SW, WoW today has that massive base, has years of older content, and is no longer expected to grow or even sustain itself long-term. Blizzard is doing what they can (giving out D3) to slow its decline, but decline it will. Blizzard’s focus today is positioning Titan to replace WoW. BioWare is not at that stage with SW:TOR, nor are any of the other themepark MMO studios that released or will release games soon.

It seems that today, the focus for many is to create the best possible game, rather than the best possible MMO. Again this would be perfectly fine if the financial expectations were adjusted as well, but they are not. SW:TOR is not Skyrim in terms of business models, but they are pretty damn close in terms of game length/retention, and that’s crazy.

If the goal really is to create an MMO, a game that will live or die by how well it entertains players long-term, then long-term content is a must, and the only real long-term content is repeatable and/or player-driven content. The quality of your one-off content is, in many ways, irrelevant here. No matter how awesome something like your new player intro is, that content is only going to be consumed once. It being fully voiced, fully animated, or with the world’s greatest scripting is not going to be the difference between someone playing your game for one month or five years. How long they remain entertained by the repeatable stuff is. Figure out how to make that entertaining-enough to play for months/years, and you have yourself an MMO.

Posted in Lord of the Rings Online, MMO design, Rift, SW:TOR, World of Warcraft | 22 Comments

EVE: Scanning down options

Posted on February 13, 2012 by SynCaine

One of the defining and critical features of a sandbox MMO is options. Options are different than layers in that options don’t fade or get replaced by “the next thing”. You ‘finish’ layers. You can’t ‘finish’ options.

EVE has a lot of options, all ultimately resulting in one thing: more ISK. More ISK is always on the mind of an EVE player, and as your wealth moves up or down, your gameplay adjusts. You fly pricier ships when you have more ISK, you gamble more, or you don’t focus on ‘farming’ as much. When your wealth dips, you refocus on more profitable activities.

One of the options our Corp has been somewhat focusing on lately is scanning/exploration. Initially the driver here was poking around in wormholes, but last night we also used exploration to find a Grav site for our Sunday Mining Op. It’s not a huge difference, but it does mix things up and add something new to a weekly event, gives us a different mix of ores/minerals.

Scanning is somewhat of a mini-game within EVE, one that initially I found incredibly frustrating. Some of the blame lies in the UI, which can make seeing the location of an item difficult initially in 3D. Another important aspect is simply the newness of the activity. It’s a much different task than anything else in EVE, and when you don’t know some of the tricks (shift-click dragging all probes, setting the camera focus on an object by clicking it), it can seem borderline impossible to get a site to 100%. And the ever-present factor, skill training, is there as well. When you first start out, you likely won’t have all of the skills you need at V, or even IV, which makes the whole thing a bit harder/slower as well.

What I am looking forward to is scanning down combat sites with my indy alt, and having my combat pilot run them in his Assault Frigate. While the total amount of ISK generated won’t be the same as running level 4 missions in my CNR, it will be something different, and if I get lucky with a faction spawn perhaps the ISK won’t be horrible. Mostly though this will help me improve at scanning itself, which is a valuable skill not just for PvE-based activities, but for PvP. Being able to scan down an enemy ship quickly can be the difference between scoring a nice kill and someone slipping away.

Exploration is just one more item in the EVE bag of tricks. And rather than replacing the previous ‘end-game’ activity, it’s an invisible option in every system, waiting patiently for you to mess around with.

Posted in EVE Online, Inquisition Clan, MMO design | 18 Comments

EVE: 1400 in local, no big deal

Posted on February 9, 2012 by SynCaine

Great battle report, and good example of TiDi in EVE.

I’ll keep hammering the lag point until every last person understands what’s technically possible, and why MMOs with servers the size of a game from 97 are doing it wrong. I understand CCP is in a class of their own, and I’m not saying every game should be this flawless with 1400 people in one area, but when you see recently released games choke whenever 100 people stand around, it’s embarrassing.

Posted in EVE Online, MMO design, Rant | 18 Comments

Skyrim’s uncanny valley

Posted on February 9, 2012 by SynCaine

If you have 40ish minutes, watch all of this.

If you are pressed for time, watch the first section.

Either way, it’s awesome stuff.

Listening to the design behind Skyrim, I think I’ve pinpointed one of the long-term issues I have with the game: the world setting is in the uncanny valley. I’m not talking about its visuals, I’m talking about the simulation aspect. The world feels more ‘alive’ than in Oblivion, things are more interconnected, the NPCs react more to what you do, etc. But it’s not a real world. Not everything is connected. The mage in one city will still recommend you join the mages guild, even though you are not only the guild master, but are actually wearing the guild master’s robes right in his face.

In a ‘normal’ game, that happens all the time and it’s no big deal. Just like in a ‘normal’ game we accept unrealistic character proportions or weapons. But when a game tries hard to be ‘real’, the unreal is far more noticeable. Skyrim tries hard to be a ‘real’ world, and when that illusion fails, it’s far more noticeable. So noticeable sometimes, that it actually detracts from the experience.

And I don’t realistically think the shortcomings of Skyrim can be fixed by tuning the scripts or just making ‘more’ stuff. Yes, you could add a check for that one mage, and when you become guild master, he recognizes it. But there are dozens and dozens of such inconsistencies in Skyrim. And furthermore, while some events change certain locations (the civil war), the rest of the world is stuck in stasis from the moment you leave the intro. Again, in most games that’s normal and not something you notice, but in a game like Skyrim, that places such a heavy emphasis on ‘world’, it is.

What I would love to see the next TES game attempt is an actual world. One where time progresses whether you stand still or clear dungeons. Where the NPCs are driven by needs/wants rather than triggers and scripts. You could still have a central theme/storyline, and all of the side-quests, but they would not wait around for you like they do in Skyrim. If you decide to ignore the dragon crisis, towns/homes/people might suffer. Nothing game-breaking, but perhaps some random quest NPC gets eaten if you don’t kill a certain dragon. Perhaps the mages guild solves its problem before you get there, and instead of that being the path to guild master, it’s something else.

In some ways Skyrim is just too big. By the time you have visited half the towns in the game, the gameplay and awe factor have likely worn thin. The different stories and quests are still interesting, as are the locations, but seeing/experiencing them is no longer as fun. Skyrim really does not need 100 hours of gameplay, because the combat/feel of the game is not that good. I’m not saying it’s bad, far from it, it’s actually a hell of a lot of fun for the first 60 hours or so, it’s just that it wears thin.

So with a smaller world, more time can be spent filling it up, and creating if/when scenarios. Rather than a town having one set of quests, time/effort could be spend creating 3-4 different sets, each depending on when you visit and what has gone on before. And those 3-4 sets don’t all start/stop at the same time, or even on a set schedule. Perhaps the mages guild issue takes 10-15 days to solve, but this varies depending on what you do in the world, and also by some random factors. ‘Missing’ the current issue storyline would not be that big a deal because there would be other content behind it. Becoming the leader would simply open up other possibilities (different mages causing trouble based on who you helped/hindered earlier).

By creating a more believable, living world, the reply value in the next TES game would not come from seeing different content/locations, but seeing similar locations react to your different actions the second time around.

Posted in Mass Media, Random | 10 Comments

EVE: Trailer, Corp update

Posted on February 8, 2012 by SynCaine

Good new trailer for EVE.

Even better are the comments in that Massively article, clearly showing how so many ‘MMO’ gamers just don’t get an MMO like EVE. Expecting the PvE missions to be ‘impact’ content, the old “you get instantly podded in the first 5 minutes” thing, the ‘get to the end-game’ stuff. EVE might be difficult to master, but is it really that hard to even grasp the basics?

As for INQ’s recent activities, we are back in a war with two Corps. One of them seems to only log in once a week or so, and as they only have 3-4 combat pilots, if we have our regulars online they are outnumbered and generally don’t undock. Why they war-dec us I’m not sure, but it is what it is I guess. The other Corp has a few more combat pilots with more SP/ISK available. We have fought them before with success, but again too often they stay docked up as we generally outnumber them.

Those minor annoyances aside, we are still progressing towards living in a WH with a Corp POS. We are crunching some numbers in terms of startup cost and upkeep, and how exactly the Corp is going to go about raising the funds right now. We will also have to figure out logistics, although I’m less worried about that given the resources/skills of our current pilots.

Posted in EVE Online, Inquisition Clan, Mass Media | 10 Comments

BioWare is amazing

Posted on February 6, 2012 by SynCaine

No, I’m not talking about that 90% retention rate they have going.

I’m talking about Baldurs Gate. The RPG from 1999.

I picked up BG on somewhat of a whim a few days ago from GoG.com for $10. It’s funny that BG is $10 while games 10 years newer are selling for $5 on Steam. Not that $10 is too high for BG. A game locked at 640×480 is still worth more than that today.

What’s most interesting about playing BG now is how open and ‘sandbox’ the game feels. While gaming overall has greatly improved since 1999, there is something to be said for a game not treating you like a newborn. About not coloring ‘special’ NPCs a different color, or labeling quest items as “quest item”, or making ‘important’ items BoP. About letting you travel into an area you have no business being in, of having the dice go horribly right/wrong and dealing with the result. It just gives the world you are playing in such an amazing level of realism. It makes decisions important because of how they will actually impact your character/story, rather than what pre-scripted path you go down or what quest reward best fits your build.

It’s entirely possible to screw yourself in BG. Horribly so really, and ‘cost’ yourself dozens of hours of playtime. You can drive away party members, kill quest NPCs, produce a gimped main character, drop/sell quest items, etc. And when you die, it’s “Game Over” and you are back to your last save. And if your last/only save is still AFTER you did something really wrong, starting over might be the only option. Or you can walk uphill in the snow, power through it, and still go on. You can also min/max and go god-mode. Up to you.

I mentioned the game being locked at 640×480. A mod will allow you to increase this, but not cleanly IMO (UI gets funky, and the camera does some strange stuff if you increase the resolution too much), so I’m playing the game at 800×600 on a 24”, 1900×1200 native monitor. The big surprise? BG still looks decent. The characters and animation are very crude, but the backgrounds/scenery has held up well. The movies are somewhat laughable overall (especially the intro), but still have some charm to them. In a way though the lack of graphics just increases the roleplaying aspect. Rather than seeing every last detail, you have to imagine a lot of it based on the text, and for me that really works. It helps that the writing is brilliant, as is the voice acting when it kicks in.

BG is based on AD&D 2.5, so things like THACO are still around. At level one characters have 4-15 hitpoints, meaning that early on even one unlucky hit can be deadly. The fact that you don’t level up in the first few hours, let alone minutes, is also notable. This also means that combat is often a long series of swings-and-misses from both sides. It’s incredibly different from modern gaming, especially themepark MMO combat. My wizard, while he has access to a few spells, spends most encounters throwing stones from his sling, with the spells only coming out when things get ugly. My fighter just swings his sword; no special attacks, rage meter, or combos. It’s much simpler, but again has a certain charm and purity to it. You get to actually watch and enjoy the combat rather than focusing on a hotbar and some near-scripted rotation.

I played BG when it was originally released, but I have to say I’m enjoying it more today than I did back then. I’m sure part of that is my better overall understanding of gaming, and being able to appreciate some of the finer details. Being able to save/load without a massive delay helps as well. But I also think BG itself does a lot of things better than modern RPGs, even gems like Skyrim. Skyrim has amazing graphics, great stories, and all the modern bells and whistles you could hope for, yet BG has some moments (meeting Minsc, rescuing Dynaheir) that just stand out so vividly in your imagination. Skyrim, in part because of its technical mastery, leaves little to your imagination. Everything you experience, you experience exactly as-is. It’s all right there in front of you, and everything is exactly how the devs planned it. In BG, much of the detail is left for you to fill in, and much like reading a great book, that makes it more memorable.

If you never played BG back in the day, or even if you have, I’d recommend loading it up. Look past the graphics and UI shock, get 10 hours into it, and you will be sucked into the game. It’s as much a masterpiece today as it was back then, and it will likely give you a new perspective on current-day gaming.

Posted in Random | 21 Comments

EVE: It’s someones story

Posted on February 3, 2012 by SynCaine

Quick point about the EVE story post from yesterday: whether the story is true or not is not all that important. What is important is that it’s POSSIBLE in EVE. Maybe this guy did what he says he did. Maybe he didn’t. But someone has. Someone has had an ‘epic story arc’ that spanned years and involved/affected thousands of other people.

That’s truly massively beyond the total capacity of most MMO servers and their projected lifespan.

That’s what MMOs are supposed to be about.

Posted in EVE Online, MMO design | 29 Comments

a game that millions of people are going to be playing for a very long time

Posted on February 2, 2012 by SynCaine

Open after next quarter’s financial report:

Q: You’ve previously said you need about a half million subscribers to be profitable, is that still the case?

A: At 500,000 subscribers, we’d break even. At a million, we’d be making a profit but nothing worth writing home about. As it scales up from there, we’re talking about a nice profit. At this point with the successful launch, we can take the worst case scenarios off the table.

Frank Gibeau: Our third global blockbuster in the quarter was Star Wars: The Old Republic. You’ve heard all the superlatives, the only thing I can add is BioWare/Austin has delivered a game that millions of people are going to be playing for a very long time.

Posted in Mass Media, SW:TOR | 12 Comments

EVE: Just your average MMO story

Posted on February 2, 2012 by SynCaine

I don’t have much to add to this that has not been written either in the post itself, or in the comments. I’ll just point out that in the MMO genre, there exists only one game where such a story is not only possible, but has occured multiple times.

Being a ‘hero’ in the wrong world is far, far less epic than being a cog in the right one.

Posted in EVE Online, Mass Media | 11 Comments