Title stole from TAGN commenter Asmiroth, because it sums up my feelings on this whole thing.
Congrats, you are paying more to have less content. Or, in the situation where you want to play with all your lvl 90 friends RIGHT NOW, you are paying $60 for RIGHT NOW. /shrug
Wilhelm is asking if an MMO must contain PvP. It’s actually a more interesting question when you really thing about it, especially if you limit the discussion to themeparks (the answer for sandboxes has its own tab on this blog).
Instinctively you might want to say ‘no’ for themeparks, because they are PvE focused and you would want that to remain the focus. Makes sense, on paper. But in reality, themepark PvE content is often one-and-done, and what is repeatable (daily quests, raiding) is often tied to some long term, but still one-and-done reward (rep grind, raid gear).
PvP shouldn’t be the focus, but rather play the role of filler between content updates. From my experience I think vanilla WoW did this best. Whether you were waiting for a raid to reset or had a night off, battlegrounds provided a nice side activity, made more rewarding as you could use your raid gear to get an edge (though not a brutally overpowered one from MC/BWL gear).
As time went on PvP in WoW got a bit silly, first with PvP-specific gear and later with rankings and all that stuff. It went from being a fun side activity to a game-within-a-game. It also didn’t help that all of the talent on the WoW team left and the interns ran the place, but we know that story.
I like, on paper, what ESO has planned. Once you reach the level cap, you can still PvE to gain more skill points for horizontal progression (you can only use a small number of skills at one time, so getting more skill points to open more skills doesn’t increase your power, just gives you options), but you can also get into the 3-way RvR battle areas. I think the limit to horizontal progression will help the PvP balance a great deal, as will the fact that (as of now) the best gear comes from crafting, not PvE, raiding, or PvP. Assuming that stays mostly true (a few items being BiS from non-crafting is fine IMO, so long as most stuff comes from crafting and the gap isn’t too great), I can see the model working.
I can further see it working because as players spend time on the repeatable content that is RvR, Bethesda will be given time to expand the PvE offerings. I don’t think ESO players will experience running into a ‘content wall’ like in SW:TOR.
So my answer to the question is yes, you do need PvP, but at the same time you need to ensure that the PvP remains a low dev time, high repeat, limited impact aspect. Not easy to get right, but certainly pays off if you do.
The newest Pathfinder Online video is out, and um… yikes.
I’ve said here before that I like a lot of the ideas Pathfinder has behind it. On paper, a lot of things that I believe make a sandbox work they have, and the game is certainly on my radar in terms of upcoming MMOs.
That video though? The reason I’m not a Pathfinder backer to begin with is their first video during the Kickstater campaign was terrible, and at the time the effort looked like some good ideas on paper without a team to execute them properly (Which, you know, is how one could describe 90% of Kickstarter efforts). The newest video, while better in many areas, still at its core looks terrible in terms of combat.
Now I don’t need Darkfall-level combat in an MMO to enjoy it. I think EVE is the best thing out by a mile, and while it’s combat is a lot deeper than F1 and walk away (unless you’re into that and only engage is such things), it’s certainly not what most would call great. But there is a lot of space between great combat and what this latest video is showing, and I’m left wondering if I could really get into a game should the combat remain this… well terrible.
I know the game is still in the early phases, and like I mentioned, this video is a lot better in many areas than earlier videos, but yea, the combat needs to improve between now and release. I don’t need perfection, but what was shown here is asking just a little too much from me.
(Totally unrelated side-note: My latest Banished town went into an amusing death-spiral. First I had an event occur that lowered food supplies, and while I was able to increase production to make up for it, that caused secondary production to suffer. That caught up to me when I ran low on coats and tools. Without coats and tools, people worked slower and did far less during the winter. This in turn further pushed food production down, resulting in starvation. As starvation killed people off, production dropped far faster than the population, as workers would die and would sometimes be replaced by a newborn. Babies eat food, but don’t contribute until they grow up, so things just accelerated down and down. A harsh lesson learned. Game is fantastic.)
I took part in my first siege since returning to DF:UW last night, and good times were had. The siege was over an ally’s hamlet, and the enemy included my old clan the Old Timers Guild, so it was fun to see and kill some old faces/names.
The siege had close to 100 players total, with our side outnumbering the attackers by a few. Scroach groups were at a minimum, and didn’t impact the siege. I didn’t experience any ping or FPS drops, everything stayed at my normal 50ping, 70FPS. Siege performance had been a hot topic on Forumfall of late, so either the last patch greatly improved things, the people complaining are playing on welfare machines, or Forumfall was once again making a mountain out of a mole hill. My guess is all of the above.
The action of the siege came in two parts. The enemy initially charged into the hamlet, and while the attack somewhat caught us off guard, the push wasn’t coordinated enough and between our numbers and the guard towers, they were repelled quickly. I was fine with this, as the brief skirmish was a nice little warm-up. Between just having returned, changing over to using the Slayer role as my secondary, switching from greatswords to polearms, and still being terrible at FPS games, an ‘easy’ fight is a-ok in my book.
The second battle happened just outside the hamlet. The enemy was stationed on top of a mountain, and as the siege stones went live, we pushed into them. We had a group of warriors on mounts flank them while our main force drew their attention from the opposite side. It worked, they broke quickly, and the cleanup commenced.
Once the enemy was dispatched, our clan group went off to search for scroach groups, and we found one not too far away. That provided the most even fight of the night, with our 7-8 taking on a similar sized group. I certainly wasn’t the deciding factor or anything close, but having warmed up I was able to at least contribute here, forcing warriors off our primalists in melee and preventing others from chasing after people with some archery.
So all in all a good night of siege and small-scale action, and a quick remember of just how great the combat really is in Darkfall. It will be interesting to return to ESO for the next beta after this refresher with DF. I suspect, much like going from DF to Skyrim in the past, that I’ll be a little disappointed. Ignorance is indeed bliss sometimes.
Banished is a title I’ve mentioned here a few times, and it was finally released yesterday. Spoiler alert: I love the game.
To quickly cover some basics; Banished is a city building game set in a non-historic medieval setting. You start with a small group of people who have been banishes (and that’s as deep as the lore goes) and you use them and their starting resources to create a new town. Housing, food production, resource gathering, trading with merchants that come via river, dealing with disasters; Banishes has most city-building basics covered. There is no military/combat aspect. Maps are randomly generated, and you can tweak some aspects (small/med/large map, mountains or valleys, milder or harsher weather, starting difficulty, etc).
First it’s very important to note that Banished is the effort of one man. In that context the quality and depth of the game is stunning, because even out of context the game (based on the 4-5 hours I’ve played it so far) is fantastic. And it’s fantastic not because it has one new feature to write home about, or has stunning graphics, or because the 4th pillar of voice features some semi-famous ‘celebrity’.
No, Banished is fantastic because it’s very clear that the game is one man’s vision of what his ultimate city building sim would be, and he had the talent to pull it off and put wonderful, atmospheric graphics and sound around it. Playing the game is almost zen-like, in that you just get lost in watching it so often rather than constantly jumping between moving things along at 10x speed, executing a few commends, and going back to 10x (btw, if that’s how you play it, you are doing it wrong. Don’t be that guy and ruin the game for yourself).
Another great thing about the game is how flexible it is; you don’t need to build things in a specific order to open the tech tree (there is no tech tree, you are only limited by what resource you have and if you have people who can do the work), so if you want to move faster towards a trading-based town, you can do that. If you want to ignore trading and just build a self-sustaining town, that’s possible as well. You can focus on farming, or hunting, or goods production; the game doesn’t force you down a path to an ‘end-point’.
You can also do it all, and the game is interesting in that the difficulty does ramp up as your town gets bigger because as you have more people, a shortage of something hits you faster and harder, and once people start dying, it can be really tough to reverse the trend (though it is possible, and feels extremely rewarding).
I really can’t recommend the game enough if you enjoy city builders. It’s both familiar so you can get right into it, but also just different enough to feel special. It’s also great to see this game is currently the number one seller on Steam. A niche title made by one man beating out everything from huge publishers, even if only for a few days, is a great sign for PC gaming, and is exactly the direction a lot of us have been hoping things would go.
As previously noted, Darkfall: Unholy Wars took a huge step towards becoming a sustainable sandbox with the recent increase in gear loss from PvP. As some have asked, I don’t know if it’s enough, but it’s certainly a start, and more importantly shows that AV is serious about the game and making it something worthwhile for the long run to MMO players, rather than continuing down the path of creating an oversized, risk-free PvP arena game.
This post isn’t about analyzing the change however, as it’s much too early to do that. Instead let’s see how Forumfall is taking the news (this below is a reply to how PvE would work as a sink, since the poster suggested that would be a better solution than a sink from PvP):
Remove resources? I don’t care if resources are removed or not, you do. I want active activities like mob farming to actually be worth it. Why? Because I actually play the game. I want to see an active world, and I want contested mob spawns. Does that mean make bandits drop 50 neithal essences each? No, it doesn’t. Give us open world mobs that are actually worth farming though. The Golems would be a great start, limited amount of them in the world, and they have a fairly high respawn timer.
The above is the best of the worst, at least in terms of the content/froth ratio that runs rampant on Forumfall. It does, of course, completely fall on its face in terms of logic, and that really is the point here.
For a long time I had feared that AV was listening to Forumfall too much, and were just doing what Forumfall said it wanted. I think the above post is a nice highlight of that. The player is asking for mobs to be ‘worthwhile’, at the same time that he is saying he doesn’t care to balance how resources enter and exit the game.
Bad AV would just do what was asked, buff mobs, and a month later Forumfall would once again ask for mobs to be made ‘worthwhile’, or more likely complain that non-mob rewards are now ‘worthless’, and to buff those. This, of course, assumes there still exists anything of value, an end-point that DF:UW was rapidly approaching, with most already regularly PvP’ing in the second-best gear (r70). Once R80 is common, what then? Do a themepark-style soft-reset?
So as predicted, the usual suspects of Forumfall are throwing their hissy fit as they experience actual consequence for PvPing. What is surprising, and encouraging, is that others on Forumfall are seeing the benefits of this addition, and trying to push back the idiocy. Ultimately it doesn’t matter so long as AV continues to show a basic understand of MMO design and what’s important to keep a game going.
Furthermore, most of those currently complaining will change their tune, as AV is finally able to add more meaningful and interesting faucets to the game, and those faucets will stay relevant for longer than a week. On that front they have some good plans, and recent actions suggest they will correctly follow-through on said plans.
As for the game’s future overall, as multiple MMOs have shown in the past, a game can slowly build itself back when its core issues are fixed and things start working again. Launch is the best time to grab the most players, certainly, but especially in the MMO niche space, where DF:UW resides, players have limited quality options, and are more than willing to revisit something if they hear it has improved. If AV continues down the path they have set out on with the last update, they will be successful. Here’s hoping.
This article over at Massively by Larry Everett mirrors a lot of my most recent experience with the ESO beta, in that the first area is 100% linear, the second feels like a typical themepark zone, and the third feels like a comfortable cross between a full open world and an MMO themepark. I would love if someone could confirm that going forward, the rest of the game’s PvE is like the third area, if not even more ‘open’. Anyone?
Now to nitpick, I think it’s a bit silly to complain about the first, very short, 100% linear area as not being very Elder Scrolls. Load up Skyrim with a new character and no mods, and tell me what you experience for the first half hour or so? Oh right, a 100% linear experience that is mostly to setup the story. Load up Oblivion and it’s the same thing. If anything, the linear part in ESO is shorter than the single player game bits.
The traditional themepark zone is also a bit of an extended tutorial, in that it introduces you to some of the new stuff ESO does (skyshards, finding runes, stuff like that). I could do without it, but I also see why it will be helpful for new-to-MMO players, which I think will be a significant portion of ESO’s playerbase.
I feel like I need one more weekend with ESO to put down a solid “ESO is themepark 4.0” prediction post. I’m getting there, and I don’t think Zenimax is going to bork ESO just before launch like Trion did with Rift, and hopefully they don’t do a Rift 1.2 ‘accessibility’ patch to kill it, but who knows.
I will say this however, the comparisons to SW:TOR with ESO are ridiculous. SW:TOR wasn’t predicted to be the Tortanic because it was ‘boring’, or ‘more of the same’. It was easy to spot the Tortanic because on day one the devs told us the 4th pillar was the path to greatness, and some of us (or just me) called the game DOA on that day back in 2010. There is no 4th pillar for ESO, at least not that I’ve found yet.
Pre-ordered the digital collectors edition, in part because I think the game will be a good time, and also in part because the genre blows outside of spaceships.
Instead of linking to that old PR release about how great LotRO and DDO are doing thanks to F2P, please use this updated link.
F2P ALL THE WAY!
Just wanted to get this down so others can keep an eye out on this trend; current day people from SOE talking is like listening to someone talk about MMOs in 1999.
First we had Smed pondering if maybe player-driven content is more sustainable than dev-created content, and now we have this, with the grand conclusion being you can’t just run metrics and believe the first thing the numbers tell you about your MMO players and their behavior. I swear tomorrow SOE is going to announce that they concur with EA about Sundays and player activity.
Hardcore Casual 