Twit generation is in my MMO

Posted on September 19, 2011 by SynCaine

First, can we please stop qualifying Facebook games? “Not bad, for a Facebook game”. We don’t do it with TV (oh that show was terrible, but it was on a 3rd rate network so it was decent), we don’t do it with movies (oh that movie was awful, but it had a low budget so 3 hours/$15 well spent!), and we don’t do it with books (hey it was softcover, so even though all 300 pages sucked, it was worth it). If you are gaming, be it on Facebook or otherwise, you are gaming. Facebook is not in some magic void where ‘decent’ is the top grade and anything above “punches you in the nuts and charges you $10 for another” is considered ‘good enough’.

That rant aside, but somewhat related, I want to talk about the Twitter approach to gaming that has not-so-slowly and not-so-subtle been going on, and how it directly impacts the MMO genre. In case you have been living under a rock, I’m sure you’ve noticed it. ‘Bite sized’ dungeons, solo-instances, shorter XP curves, epics-for-all, etc. The signs are all over the place; some companies are catering to people with 15 minutes to play, and with only five of those where they can fully focus.

And look, if aiming towards that market gets you millions, more power to you. If your goal is JUST to make as much money as fast as possible, everything else be damned, set out to clone whatever is the current FOTM, pump it out asap, pray the stars line up and you become a new ‘fad’, and cash in. 99/100 times you create something totally forgettable that never gets noticed, but hey, at 1/100, you still have a chance. “The guy who invented the pet rock made a million dollars”, right?

The problem with 140 character players is that they don’t really fit into a virtual world, at least not what we traditionally consider them as. EQ1 had what, a 2000 hour leveling curve? 7xGM in UO was not exactly an overnight process (even with massive exploiting), and grinding to the cap in DAoC was tough, let alone getting high in renown ranks. Hell even WoW in 2004 had a much, much longer 1-60 curve than what most games have today (hi Rift).

And it’s not just about time. At some point getting everything stopped being a goal and become a given. Log in and collect! Not only does everyone hit the level cap, but everyone sees all the content, effort level be damned. And again, for the Twitter-types, that’s great. They can update their status and post pictures while downing the final ‘epic’ boss of the final ‘epic’ instance (solo).

But what about those of us with more than a 5 minute attention span? What about those who found the older level of challenge just right? We spend money too, and tend to spend it for longer periods of time when given the chance. Are there countless millions of us like there are Farmville players? No. But we are out there, in the hundreds of thousands at least.

Three recent examples: In Global Agenda last night we ran our first two Ultra Max missions. The first one STOMPED us, and the second we did a little better but still got rolled by the boss. It motivated me to play the game more than anything else to this point.

Second: I’m 500+ days into my current Mount and Blade game, which is a serious length of time, and it’s not my first go-around. The mod I’m playing, Prophecy of Pendor, is tuned to be much harder than the original (Native) game. Odds are stacked against you, battles demand more tactics, and to outright win you have to do some serious long-term planning and execute that planning. Best game/mod I’ve played in YEARS.

Final, I’m still playing and loving Final Fantasy Tactics on the iPhone, and I’m still getting my ass handed to me in most battles. Re-playing a battle with a different strategy and seeing the successful results is about as good as strategy gaming gets IMO.

Returning to the MMO genre, a certain level of buy-in is required to really establish what makes an MMO tick; community and familiarity. Without those, you are playing a single-player game with horribly named ‘NPCs’ that seem to do nothing but spam chat channels and dance on the mailbox. And as these core values erode, we can see devs reacting not by trying to improve them, but by providing tools to further remove yourself from them.

Sick of random PUG groups? Screw finding a solid guild. Run a solo instance!

Can’t progress fast enough because you are playing 5 different games at the same time? Screw dedication and really digging in. Buy an XP pot!

A tough battle in your path? Don’t refine your strategy or look to improve. Just wait for the nerf!

Point being; you can only push a game towards casual so much before it stops being an MMO, for the simple fact that an MMO (traditionally) has not been a casual genre. You can’t get solid communities, buy-in, familiarity, and all the rest catering from Twitter-players. You get Farmville.

Posted in Combat Systems, Dark Age of Camelot, EQ2, EVE Online, Global Agenda, iPhone, Mass Media, MMO design, Mount and Blade: Warband, Rant, Rift, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft | 28 Comments

League of Legends: One season ends, another begins

Posted on September 16, 2011 by SynCaine

Season one of League of Legends has ended, finally. I finished at 1524, high enough to get Gold status and earn the Victorious Jarvan skin. Too bad I don’t play Jarvan, but hey, free skin. Oh and my summoner icon has a gold border. Shiny.

Pre-season for season two is up and running, and basically everyone has had their ELO reset to 1200ish. This has created a very interesting version of ELO hell. You have people who were (are) 900 ELO players in the same game as people who were (are) 1900 ELO players. Half the people are playing chess, the other half are playing checkers. In a month or so this will work itself out, and the good players will move up and the bad ones will move down, but right now they are all mixed and colliding head-on.

I’m sticking to my ‘one ranked a day’ strategy, and so far so good. I’m curious to see how high I can climb, since at the end of season one I stopped playing ranked just to play it safe and ensure Gold status.

 

Posted in League of Legends | 7 Comments

Darkfall: The siege revamp is finally here!

Posted on September 15, 2011 by SynCaine

Holy crap a Darkfall patch! And with its own manual too. At the very least, forumfall entertainment should increase for a bit. Hopefully now AV can put the finish touches on DF2.0, wipe, and get everyone back in the game. I really miss playing an MMO.

Posted in Darkfall Online, Housing, Patch Notes, PvP | 11 Comments

Diablo 3, AH, Accessibility

Posted on September 14, 2011 by SynCaine

The ongoing debate about who will use the Diablo 3 auction house and why seems very odd to me. D3 won’t be an MMO, it certainly won’t be persistent, and the main activity for the game is bashing monsters/barrels to collect loot. Why in such a game one would feel the need to ‘skip ahead’ and gear up by buying something from someone else is beyond me. Double that when we are talking spending real money to do so. But then millions still play Farmville, so to each his own I guess.

Tobold’s post today about this topic circles back to the age-old “why is raiding hard?” question, and why ‘dumbing down’ that content hurts a game more than it helps.

In short, I believe that average players let themselves get dragged into raiding even if they aren’t very good at it or enjoy it very much not because they are offered shiny epics, but because they are offered new, and very different content.

As Tobold notes, hard content for the sake of being hard is a fairly weak motivator, and when you need to get 10/25/40 people motivated to wipe time after time to progress, doing it just to do it doesn’t work for most. Doing it to see more content, especially if said content is “highlight” stuff like Nef, Illidan, or Arthas, is pretty solid motivation. Shiny power ranger loot that makes those around the mailbox stop and stare helps too.

When you take away the “new content” aspect by making a Normal (easy) mode, and that mode gets one-shotted by all but the biggest PUG droolbuckets, you are seriously undercutting the lifetime expectancy of that content. You make leaving due to a lack of new content very ‘accessible’, and I don’t think that’s a great goal for a sub-based game.

Posted in MMO design, Rant, World of Warcraft | 14 Comments

Darkfall: Time for it’s own Mittani-like situation

Posted on September 8, 2011 by SynCaine

Long-time reads know I’ve been a fan of Darkfall since release, and to this day consider it one of the best FFA PvP MMOs out. It had a somewhat rough release, but in the first year Aventurine was quick to provide significant updates and the game seemed to be headed in a positive direction. Subscriber activity reflected this, and all seemed well.

Then Aventurine announced Darkfall 2010, which was billed as a massive update to the game. Close to an overhaul really. 2010 came and went, and the DF2010 update was renamed Arena. Then it was renamed DF2.0, and along with it came wipe/relaunch speculation.

The last patch to hit Darkfall was back in April, and the last real major update was Hellfreeze, in October of 2010. The patch that will bring an updated siege system has been coming “next week” for months now. Frank Sinatra chronicles things well on the forums, and looking over all the “coming soons” and “final testing” talk really is depressing.

It’s depressing for a number of reasons. For starters, Darkfall’s core is very solid. It does what it does well (really well, in terms of combat), it was improving greatly, and anyone who has played it longer than EG can see a ton of potential on top of that solid core. Secondly, it’s not like the virtual world genre is exploding with options right now, or will in the near future. Solo MMOs like SW:TOR are drawing all the big money, and even titles like Prime or GW2 sound PvP-lite compared to Darkfall. If Darkfall fails, you either play EVE to get your fix, or you find a new genre to enjoy.

For a while now I’ve been saying that the next updated, whatever its eventual name ends up being, is going to deliver. AV showed enough with the first three expansions, and with the core game itself, that they are capable of producing a quality release, and that they were no caving in to the latest F2P trend or dumping things down to appeal to ‘casuals’. Plus lessons learned since launch and all that.

I’m not all that confident right now. Who knows what this whole ‘partners’ thing is all about, and the delays are really just too much. Hell even the forums are depressed now. The obvious trolls have moved on, and only the diehard are left wondering wtf is really going on. It’s not even real fan anger either; it’s just this sick-puppy hanging-on kind of feeling. Not cool, not cool at all.

Posted in Darkfall Online, Rant | 15 Comments

Cogs are greater than heroes: Games and choice

Posted on September 7, 2011 by SynCaine

Choice in videogames has about as successful a history as games that will “make you cry”. 99.9% of the time the claim is BS, and that other .1% you had something in your eye. Point being when some marketing guy says their game features deep meaningful choices that really impact your game, he is talking about your lightsaber turning red/blue. Or at best some NPC dying that you would never see or hear from again anyway.

Off the top of my head, the only game where I ever felt choice actually mattered, and where I actually stopped to thing about a situation was in The Witcher. And surprise surprise, The Witcher also ranks right up there in terms of story and setting, while really staying away from the traditional crap like shiny hunting or a character skill tree that’s so large even the devs can’t remember half the skills. The game was about story first and foremost, and it actually delivered (waiting on a Steam sale for Witcher 2).

A game like Dragon Age is full of ‘fake choice’, where every quest seems to have multiple solutions, but the end result is just different loot or some placeholder NPC switching up one line with another. Not that it really mattered in DA, the game was still fun and its story was good-enough to see it to the end. I’d just never put it anywhere near The Witcher in terms of moral choices and tough decisions.

On the MMO front, this situation is even more ridiculous. Name one NPC you actually remember and care about from an MMO. Exactly. They are stationary loot dispensers and task-masters. Trying to make NPCs matter in an MMO is perhaps even worse than trying to get me to cry in a single-player game.

Now, depending on what MMOs you have played, you might remember certain players or situations between guilds. Currently EVE has just such a situation going (btw, is this Tobold trolling EVE, or EVE trolling Tobold?), but the reason the situation is complex and people are invested in the outcome is because its player-driver, and the end-result is uncertain. Maybe the Goons really are evil, or maybe they are just trying to improve EVE. You can’t Google the questline to find out, and the answer has more impact than a red/blue tint to your lightsaber.

Whether you love or hate EVE, you can’t deny that something like this is 100% more interesting than what guild beat raid X three hours after a patch. And no, you (yes you) will never be in the shoes of someone like The Mittani, while you most certainly can be a ‘hero’ and slay Arthas. But while slaying Arthas might get you the same achievement millions of others already have, being just a cog in The Mittani’s machine has infinitely more impact on that world. The ‘choice’ to kill Arthas is not a choice, while joining/opposing The Mittani very much is.

The other major advantage an MMO has in regards to choice is how long the impact lasts. In a single-player game, you can always reload and pick a different option, or start a fresh game and pick a different path. In an MMO, the results are more permanent (unless they are instanced…). You can’t ‘reload’ a bank heist, switching guilds, or the result of a major conflict. Both sides remember the results, and will make decisions going forward based on those past results. This, in part, makes those choices ‘matter’.

At least as much as internet sandcastles/spaceships matter (a lot).

Posted in EVE Online, Rant, SW:TOR, The Witcher, World of Warcraft | 13 Comments

This is what happens when the MMO genre sucks and I have ‘nothing to play’

Posted on September 6, 2011 by SynCaine

Random thoughts blog incoming.

Played a little more Heroes 6 beta 2. Huge improvement from beta 1. All the little UI errors are gone, skills and spells make a lot more sense now, and the multiplayer is much better. I was a little worried Heroes 6 would ship like other Heroes games before it; a solid core that lacked polish, so hats off to the Heroes 6 devs for delaying the game, holding this extended beta testing, and really taking the time to get the game right. Very happy with Heroes 6 right now.

Actually, I see no reason at all not to have free QA work (beta testing) done for an upcoming game, MMO or otherwise. Why pay for something when you can ‘grant’ fans early access and have them do it for you? Only reason I can come up with is if your game sucks and you are worried about negative word of mouth, but that’s easily solved by not having your game suck.

Still playing Global Agenda, still having fun with it. Highly recommended to anyone looking for a quick pick-up-and-queue game with some FPS-flavor. The level 30+ ‘raid’ content (10 man PvE missions that take 15min or so) is a nice change of pace, and the once-every-hour timer on it makes it seem a little special when you catch it. GA might not be an MMO, but it is a solid game.

Also still playing Borderlands with three others (thanks Steam sale). Another solid game, very Diablo-ish in many ways; kill stuff, find chests, get loot, level up, repeat. What is nice here is that usually in a shooter the weapons are all pre-determined and balanced (boring). Borderlands says screw it and randomizes it all, leading to some very interesting combos. Bit different to have a shotgun that shoots acid or missiles, verses say a sword that happens to be on fire or frozen. You still swing the sword, and while the fire is nice, it’s not game-changing. Going from one shotgun to another is (nevermind different gun types).

Also playing the game with three others means the mob difficulty is jacked up, which makes things interesting and a little more memorable. In my solo game, while I’m more into the lore (inside joke that is quickly not becoming inside) I blaze through areas without trouble, and it just feels a little… cheap? Anyway just another example of challenge = good. When you work for something it leaves a more lasting image.

Oh and Final Fantasy Tactics is CRUSHING me. Reloading almost every battle at least once and loving it. Fun to play a game somewhat balanced around min/maxing without min/maxing.

 

Posted in beta, Combat Systems, Global Agenda, Random | 15 Comments

Rift: Happy half-birthday, welcome to Azeroth!

Posted on September 1, 2011 by SynCaine

Prompted by Tobold (its Thursday blog noob, not Friday), let’s talk about Rift 6 months after release.

Pre-release, Trion was hyping Rift with “You’re not in Azeroth anymore”. Yes, Rift was never pitched as more than yet another fantasy themepark, but themepark does not always equal solo-hero shiny-vacuum ala current-day WoW.

And in beta, Rift was certainly not Azeroth. Most of the content focus was around open zones rather than closed-off instances, balance was aimed at allowing anyone to group with anyone to succeed, and the general lore was around two factions that had a common enemy but conflicted about how to deal with it. Actually, it was very much Azeroth, just circa 2004. You had group quests, elite mobs in zones, quest chains of increasing difficulty, etc. The game was in no way ‘hard’, but it was not a faceroll either.

Right at release, zone events were nerfed, and lost most of the impact they had in beta. They could now be easily ignored, and a zone would no longer feel ‘dangerous’ during an invasion. They in effect became a side-option rather than a focus.

The first world event was a dud. From a design standpoint it had some major flaws, the game could not handle it technically, and worst of all most players came away feeling very ‘meh’ about the whole thing. The second world event was more of the same, minus the initial novelty of “hey it’s the first world event!”

Patch 1.2 was a massive nerf to the games overall difficulty; buffing now easily-acquirable gear while at the same time nerfing mob difficulty will do that. The justification for this nerf was that random PUG groups collected with the very-2011-Azeroth dungeon finder were lower skilled, and in order to ensure everyone walked away with a shiny, the bar had to be lowered. Later patches continued this trend, nerfing any reasonable difficult quests, rifts, or events.

The game pitched as “not Azeroth” very quickly started to mirror exactly that, with a focus on random PUG groups, collecting tokens, and getting to the cap so you could queue up for instanced whatever.

Rift does have a few quality features, ones that will no doubt be cloned going forward much like WAR’s PQs have been cloned. The soul system is a solid progression of the talent-tree setup, and makes the old “one way up” style feel very dated. Trion should also be commended on their rate of updates; as of this date they have been steadily delivering new content and changes, along with being very active on their forums. Like the game or not, it’s hard not to admire Trion in this area, and hopefully it continues going forward and pressures other studios to try and keep up.

Right now, Rift is doing exactly what Trion wants it to do; offer a similar experience to WoW players who are tired of waiting on Blizzard. It’s not hard to see where most of those million+ subs from WoW have gone. It’s not the sales pitch they were promoting pre-release, but with a million “customers”, so far it seems to be working out for them.

Posted in beta, MMO design, Rift, World of Warcraft | 19 Comments

Breaking news: Games pitched as MMOs are not actually MMOs!

Posted on August 31, 2011 by SynCaine

Borderlands is more of an MMO than Global Agenda. It has a bigger “open world”, a longer character progression path, more itemization, more quests, more lore, etc. Both games are limited in how many people can be in one area, both are heavily instanced, and neither game plays anything like Ultima Online or even WoW.

Borderlands never claimed to be an MMO, nor was it ever marketed as one. Global Agenda was (is?), including an attempt to charge a monthly fee at the beginning. Now both games have content you can buy. In GA it’s mostly boosts and fluff, in Borderlands its more quests/areas/stuff.

Had Borderlands been marketed as an MMO, my guess is most would have focused on the justification for the cost/title rather than the actual product. That, IMO, is the biggest issue for GA. It’s simply not an MMO, but when it claims to be, you go into it with certain expectations. And those expectations can easily overshadow the simple fact that hey, what you are playing is actually fun, even if it’s nothing like playing an MMO.

Why a game like GA would call itself an MMO can be attributed to WoW. When some suit sees 12m subs, they go to throw money towards “stuff like that”, and devs looking for cash pitch games like GA as an MMO to get that suits attention and tap into an existing playerbase looking to try anything new called an MMO, real or not. We are going to see similar behavior over the next few years with MOBA titles. Games that play NOTHING like a ‘real’ MOBA game are going to be called MOBA titles simply to catch some of the buzz, and players are going to judge said titles on how close to LoL that game is rather than how much fun they are having.

The one bright spot is that at least LoL is using the ‘right’ version of F2P, and if me-too games copy that part of the business, they won’t have to deal with justifying a $15 a month fee.

And on the MMO front, one can only hope that those titles who continue to charge a monthly fee do so because they CAN justify the cost. While my feelings about Rift’s design direction are well known, I will give Trion a lot of credit for actually supporting the game like an MMO should be supported; with frequent updates and a plan that goes deeper than some minor tweaks or a breadcrumb of content every few months.

Posted in DoTA, Global Agenda, League of Legends, Mass Media, MMO design, Random, Rant, Rift, RMT, World of Warcraft | 17 Comments

Play to (profitably) crush: Round 2?

Posted on August 30, 2011 by SynCaine

 Massively has a nice two-part interview (linking not working atm…) with two original Shadowbane, and now Wizard101, devs that is well worth reading.

The story behind Shadowbane is a familiar one. New devs biting off more than they can chew, having more ideas than time to code them, and ultimately a lack of funds forcing a release and dooming the product. The final bit, about announcing the game too soon and getting people hyped too early (while also possibly allowing the game to get funding), is very interesting and really highlights how screwed up funding can be.

I played Shadowbane briefly during beta and at release, but it was basically unplayable on my machine at the time (5-10 FPS), and by the time my hardware was upgraded and the game was fixed up, I had moved on. But I played the game enough to see the good parts (city building, sieging), and it is telling that no major release since SB has attempted some of the things they had going.

It would also be fairly humorous if these guys took the money they made with Wizard101, a F2P kids game, and created Shadowbane 2. This time armed with all the lessons learned and a proper budget. One can wish.

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments