Author: Jason

A Difference In Gaming

Gaming

Occasionally, the group of us who played on the E’ci server in EverQuest will get to waxing rhapsodic about the “good old days” and how EQ was somehow “better” than more current games.  Usually discussions like these can be dismissed as a “first love” problem, where the game that got you in to MMOs it always remembered better than it was and nothing later can give you that same rush.  But, we’ve had these discussions often enough that most of the first love elements have begun to drift away and we’ve gotten more into specifics of design and approaches to game elements that were “better” back in EQ than the direction that later games went with it.

I’ve often tried to put my finger on exactly what the difference is between EverQuest and World of Warcraft, but I always seem to fall short.  This most recent time around though, I think I have hit upon a comparison that really does encapsulate the differences between the two games and makes clear which game a person might prefer based on their tastes.  So here goes…

EverQuest was like going camping or going on a road trip, while World of Warcraft was like a theme park.

In EQ, you were dropped in the world, there wasn’t much lore or story before that and you wandered around chatting with NPCs and fighting monsters.  There were quests, but often they required some reading and figuring out, and they’d take days, weeks or even months to complete.  You sort of did whatever you wanted.  At first, there was nothing in the way of tiers, that came later, and in the very beginning there wasn’t even any level gating.  When the Plane of Fear first opened there was no level 46 restriction.  I saw my first dragon raid when I was level 30, though I died quick and wasn’t itching to get back until I had more levels under my belt.  And there were people… like when camping there are other sites or on a road trip when you stop at diners and other places… and if you kept going back to the same places, you’d run into the same people, and if you all wanted to do the same stuff at the same time, you had to share.

WoW, on the other hand popped you into the world staring at an NPC with a giant punctuation mark floating over its head.  From that first moment you are following the designated paths, doing the designated tasks, and if you leave the path, you’d often find there is nothing there.  (Not always, sometimes you find some little treasure trove of mini quests or a random NPC in a hut put there on a lark by some developer.)  You have to be this high to ride this ride, and everyone gets a turn.

For me, every time I have ever gone camping or gone on a road trip, they made memories that stuck.  If this were that sort of post, I’d regale you with the story of going camping with the Cub Scouts and a few of us wandered off and found houses, and there was this girl undressing in the upstairs window… There is a lot more to that story than just some boys almost seeing their first real live boob, and maybe I’ll tell it some day, but the point is that I remember it.  And I remember EQ, because all the choices were mine and I went anywhere I wanted, and even when the game did point me in a particular direction it still felt like it was my choice.  When I go to Six Flags or some other theme park, I might remember the people I went with, or a general feeling of how I felt on certain rides, but lots of the details are gone.  WoW feels like this.  I remember the first time I entered the Plane of Knowledge in EQ (and that is years after the game launched) and what I did and who I was with as we explored, but the details of the day I entered the Burning Crusade or started my Blood Elf?  Gone.  Mostly from WoW I remember going from punctuation to punctuation, walking into towns and seeing a sea of punctuation which meant I would be busy, but very few of those punctuations stick out.  But from EQ, I recall details of days sitting in the Plane of Storms or The Overthere, pulling and grinding mobs, and chatting with people, and leading a group into Kaesora or the City of Mist or Kedge Keep, running from Qeynos to Freeport.  I know I led groups into the Scarlet Monastery, but for the life of me I can’t pluck out any details of what we did there beyond “we completed some quests”.  I went to the Deadmines and plenty of other places, but I don’t recall much of what we did.

Of course, not everyone is like me.  There are those who love and remember theme parks the way that I remember camping and road trips.  People for whom EQ was a neverending grindfest of wall sitting that blurs together, while WoW was a carnival of instances with their favorite group of friends and they can tell you stories about every one.  But it boils down, I think, to the difference between camping and theme parks.  When you go camping you have to make your own fun, but when you go to a theme park someone has designed the fun for you.  EQ more easily let you do what you wanted (even if it was boring and sucked), while WoW had its fun laid out for you, and its up to each player to know what sort of experience they are looking for.

I wish more games were like camping.

You’ve got red on you.

Random Thoughts

News comes trickling out of Valve about Left4Dead 2.  First up is the addition of a cricket bat for full on Shaun of the Dead style zed killin’.

Cricket bat goes 'bonk!'
Cricket bat goes 'bonk!'

Also, it seems that Valve is looking in to linking the two games, Left 4 Dead and its sequel, through multi-player maps/campaigns.  I sure hope all this works in the 360 versions, because I’d love to essentially have the choice of eight characters when messing around with my friends instead of just four.

Stop! Socialize!

Gaming

Back when I played EverQuest, I often described the game as a chat server with a D&D style game tacked on to it.  This felt right because most of the game could be played without paying specific attention to the graphics.  Most of the action happened in your chat window.  People talked, the NPC text scrolled by, even damage output was all in this little window (until they allowed you to customize the UI, at which point I shoved all the damage output into a tiny window that I barely paid any attention to so I could focus more on the chatting).  With World of Warcraft they put more of combat into the hotkey bar, made you care about refresh timers and started dragging your attention away from the chat window.  They even eliminated the wall-sitting exp grind and forced you to keep moving around, so you had to actually watch the screen instead of just waiting for the puller to get back with a mob to fight.  In Free Realms, the mini game design requires so much attention that I find myself playing for an hour and realizing that I haven’t been reading the chat window.  I complain about not being able to find my friends in Free Realms, but to be perfectly honest, they might have come on and sent me tells, but I missed it because I was too busy chasing NPCs or looking for quests, or in mini games where I’m too busy playing a game to be watching chat.

The progression of MMOs that I am seeing is to get people more involved with the game, but less involved with the people.  In order to socialize in Free Realms, I have to actually stop playing and stand around.  In EQ, progression and socialization could happen (did happen) simultaneously.  And we won’t even go into the fact that I have not once grouped with anyone in Free Realms, even when I’ve wanted to and tried, it just doesn’t seem to be something people care about… or maybe they simply aren’t seeing my area chat asking for a group because no one is reading.

One of the best things about the Xbox 360 is the built in voice chat that works by default in all games.  If you play multi-player, you can chat with the other players.  It would be nice if MMOs could integrate voice chat more fully since they are taking our eyes away from the chat box and using our keyboard more for play than talking.  Ideally, a game would have some sort of spacial chat, similar to the way “say” worked in EQ (and other MMOs), so people within a certain distance would hear you.  That way when you were hanging out with your group in a dungeon, your group hears you, and when you walk in to town you hear players within an X foot radius, approaching people you want to hear, moving away from people you don’t.

I’d love to see it happen, because the current trend of having to choose between playing and socializing is killing my interest in their games.

The Postman

Random Thoughts

This weekend I got my first job to level 20 in Free Realms.  Postman.  To be honest, I would not have thought this would be the first, but grinding postal jobs is relatively easy.  Unlike cooking, it requires no supplies, and unlike pretty much all the other free jobs, you can just sit at the mailbox and play the mail sorting games over and over.  Throw on top of that a star bonus, and I went from 14 to 20 very quickly.

The reason I chose to focus on Postman was because I wanted to create a guild, and you have to be level 15 in some job to do that, and Postman was at 14.  My next closest was Brawler at 10 and Chef at 9.  Adventurer was also at 9, but that job is the longest/hardest to level since you have to actually run around discovering stuff.

So, anyway, with my Postman job at 20, I created my guild. <and what army>  Initially I was going to go for an alternate spelling, like calling it the “anwatt army” or “ahnwot army”, but in the end I decided just to go traditional, so now in game I appear as “Jhaer Buegren <and what army>”.  If you haven’t gotten it yet, its a play on the idea of when you say you can beat someone and they retort, “Oh yeah? You and what army?”

Of course, I am the only member of my guild, because my friends list is STILL empty.  I just can’t seem to get online on the same server at the same time as the people I know who play.  Perhaps in the future this will change.  If you are playing Free Realms and want to join, let me know and I’ll look for you.

In the meantime, I’m still grinding out quests trying to see if I can exhaust the free content.  Sanctuary is getting pretty bare, and I’ve put a large dent in that area with the hedge maze that I can never remember the name of… the real trick is making note of the repeatable quests.  No offense to the game (or any game for that matter), but repeatable quests are rarely designed to be truly repeatable.  Sure, you can do them over and over, but the quest text often doesn’t lend itself to explaining WHY I can repeat it.  If you have lost something and I have found it, seeing that you’ve lost it again and I can find it again is particularly lame.

The freeloading continues…

Get to da Choppa!

Gaming

I know I promised zombies, but I lied… you get this instead…

I signed up for and am participating in an online game design class.  On our first day of “class” (which I actually read a couple days later), part of the reading was an example to show you that making a game is not a Herculean effort.  Simple games are exactly that: simple.  What follows is the game I designed in less than 15 minutes.

Get to da Choppa!

Welcome to the jungle!  You are in the thick of it, and something is after you.  But if you can be the first to the helicopter, you can survive.

Supplies:
26 Game Tiles – 1 “Start” tile, 1 “Choppa!” tile, 14 blank “Jungle” tiles, 2 “Tunnel Entrance” tiles, 4 “Lose a Turn” tiles (tangled in vines, stuck in mud, broke through bridge, and lost my way), 2 “Advance 1 Space” tiles, and 2 “Retreat 1 Space” tiles.
12 Opportunity Cards – 3 “Cover Fire” card (Advance another player 2 spaces), 3 “Decoy” cards (Advance yourself 3 spaces), 3 “Rest Up” cards (Do nothing this turn, next turn move 5 spaces instead of rolling), and 3 “Frag” cards (Cause another player to lose a turn).
1 Six-sided die.
12 player pieces (green plastic army men if you have them).

Game designed for 2 to 12 players.

The Rules:
The 26 tiles are placed in a pile, face up, on the table.  The 12 Opportunity cards are placed, face down, on the table.  Each player chooses a playing piece and roles the die to determine play order.  Highest first, roll again to break ties.  The “Start” tile is placed on the table and all playing piece are placed on it.  Starting with the highest rolling player, each person in turn will take a game tile from the tile pile and place it on the table so that it connects to the previous tile.  The game path can turn left and right, however when a tile is placed it must only connect to one other tile.  When tile placing is complete, and the last player placed the “Choppa!” tile, you should have a board that takes 25 forward movements to complete.

Beginning with the next player in the rotation, each player draws an Opportunity card from the face down pile.  Do not show your card to other players until you play it.

After each player has drawn a card, the game moves into the Movement rounds.  If the player is on the “Start” tile, they must roll the die.  A roll of 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 allows the player to move their playing piece forward that many spaces.  If they land on a tile with an action on it, they must adhere to it (Advancing 1 space, retreating 1 space, losing their next turn, or moving to the other end of the tunnel).  Tile actions “stack” in that if you land on an “Advance 1 Space” tile and doing so lands you on a “Lose a Turn” tile, you lose your next turn.  If a player rolls a 6, the player believes they have been spotted and hides, not moving that turn.

After the player has moved off the “Start” tile, on their turn they may choose to use their Opportunity card instead of rolling the die.  Any player moved by an Opportunity card onto a tile with an action must adhere to that action.

The game ends when a player “Gets to da Choppa!” and leaves the rest of the players in the jungle.

—–

My first prototype of the game was as basic as possible.  Sticky notes for the game tiles, more sticky notes (folded in half to hide the sticky part) for the cards, a die and some army men.  If I am inspired, I may make a “better” prototype and post some pictures.

If, my dear reader(s), you are so inclined, feel free to make your own copy of this game and try it out.  I’d love feedback on how it plays.  I feel it might need more special tiles, or some other game element to spice it up.  If you do play it, please come back and let me know how it went…

Changing Sides

Gaming

The Internet exploded this week as Blizzard announced that they are working on a way to let people change factions in World of Warcraft.  If you are unaware, WoW has always been a 2-sided dynamic, built in part on PvP play between the two factions of Horde and Alliance.  On PvE servers, players have always been able to create characters on both factions, but on the PvP realms, once you created a character on one side you were locked out of the other.  (I want to say all realms were like that at launch, but if they were it has since changed.)  Of course, like their server transfer, this faction change will be done for a fee.  In the announcement, two key pieces of information are missing.  First, how much will it cost?  Second, how will it work?

Personally, I don’t care about the first question.  No matter how much it costs, I’ll never use it, just like I will never use their server transfer.  But the second question interests me greatly, especially as it relates to a couple of posts I made previously on the idea of limiting a player to a single character per account.  (I sometimes feel bad about not continuing that series, but no one agreed with me and I even got a couple of emails to the effect that I should never be allowed to design a game or even work in the game industry.)

So, let’s take a look at what I consider to be the only two logical solutions for changing factions in WoW.

The first option would be to leave the game as it is and simply let the user change their race.  Since they introduced the Draenei and the Blood Elves in The Burning Crusade, every class is represented on both sides by at least one race, so it is possible as there are no gaps.  However, that means that any Alliance Paladin, Human, Dwarf or Draenei, would have to switch to be a Blood Elf in order to go Horde.  The main issue that I have here is for people like myself who actually choose race before class.  I tend to always play human in any game, mostly because playing as a fantasy race just doesn’t appeal to me much.  I want to be “me” in another world, not to be someone else.  If this is the method they choose to use, I would never use it because my choice of race is actually more important to me than my class.  While I might jump at the option to make my level 60 priest a level 60 paladin, making my level 60 human a level 60 undead, troll or blood elf is unappealing.  Of course, I am probably in the minority, so for many players a race switch would be just fine as long as there are options they won’t hate.

The second option is the more complicated one, and that is to let the player keep their race and to just change the side they belong to.  Now, if Blizzard is lucky, this could be extremely easy and every character has a single bit flag that says “0 = Alliance, 1 = Horde” and all game interactions build off of that.  The chat channels, the side you play on in Battlegrounds, who you can attack, which NPCs will talk to you, etc.  That would be awesome.  However, given that the game was likely built with the idea that faction was the ultimate dividing point, I doubt that bit exists.  So, either Blizzard will spend the next few months implementing that bit so they can flip it, or they’ll have to come up with a more complicated and convoluted solution.  Being able to keep my race would appeal to me, seeing as how I identify more closely with my race than my class in these games, but I think it could also cause more damage to the game.  Right now, in PvP, if you are on the Alliance side and you see two people fighting, you can tell which person to help by their race.  I’m human, I see a tauren and a gnome engaged in combat.  I heal the gnome or fight the tauren.  Simple.  Now imagine that same scenario after a race keeping faction switch.  Now I’ll need some other cue to tell me who to fight and who to heal, because that could be Horde gnome fighting an Alliance tauren.  Letting races switch factions muddies distance visual identification for PvP.  So even if they had the “faction bit” that made switching factions easy, they’ll still need to do a considerable amount of work to ensure that playing the game doesn’t become confusing, at least for PvP.

Overall, since the game was not designed from the ground up with this in mind, introducing it now is, in my opinion, not a good move from a gameplay perspective.  From a business perspective, it is an excellent idea, they’ll make money off it and make a number of people very happy.  I do think that if anyone can solve the problems of the second option, Blizzard can.  So now we just have to wait and see which path they take.

Movie Round-Up: July 1st, 2009

Reviews

Normally, Wednesdays are reserved for zombie posts, but this being the 4th of July weekend, all the movies open on Wednesday, so for this week only movies on Wednesday, zombies on Friday…

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs:

This is the third film in the Ice Age series, and I have yet to see any of them.  I once bought an Ice Age/Ice Age 2 twin pack from Target, but they turned out to be in full screen instead of wide screen, so we returned them.  I do, however, love the little short films with the prehistoric squirrel.  Anyway, I suppose if you liked the first two, you’ll like this too.  I’ll see them all some day.

Public Enemies:

In my personal opinion, Johnny Depp doesn’t make bad movies.  Or at the very least, he is always worth watching even if the film around him is lacking.  This movie is definitely on my watch list, but I’m not sure I’m going to make it to the theater to see it.  If I can manage to find the time and the money, though, I will.

Finding Each Other

Gaming

I am a big fan of the idea of having one world for MMOs, and I don’t mind if they use instances to achieve it.  The biggest concern when it comes to breaking the world up that way is the potential loss of community.  If all 100,000 of your users are on the same world, and they all go to town at once, your game might have 100 instances of that town (as opposed to needing 100 servers to make sure your population levels are such that town doesn’t exceed 1,000 players at a time), the worry is that the 1,000 people you are in the instance with will likely never be the same 1,000 the next time this happens.  Even if only enough people ever go to town that never more than 5 instances are needed, the chance you run into the same people over and over is pretty low.

Fact is, even on a game that limits players to 10,000 per server, no one knows everyone.  But finding your 100 “friends” out of 10,000 is easier than 100,000 or 1,000,000, even easier when only a portion of that 10k plays in your timezone.  An instanced game gets even worse if you leave town and enter an instance designed for 75 people max, the chances you’ll play with the same 75 people is even smaller.  So how do you meet new people and make friends?  How does a community build when everyone shares?

It would be nice if someone could take the one world/instance design and then pair it up with a player matching algorithm, so that if you play with someone in a group or raid for any signifigant length of time they’d earn a rank, and you can flag players as good or bad, coupled with your friends list resulting in the game choosing an instance with the highest matching score.  This way, you would tend to play with people you’d played with before, except of course when the game cannot let you (instances exist for a reason, and sometime you just can’t let more people in), but you can allow for player overrides so even if the game chooses to put you in Wilderness Instance 27, you can swap to join a player you know who is in Wilderness Instance 19, or they you.

Its a thought… just need to figure out how to build it…

The Problem with Ticketmaster

Random Thoughts

I absolutely understand why there are service charges on tickets.  I get it, and I even support it.  People need to get paid for their work, and since musicians actually get so little of their album sales they take the lion share of the ticket sale, and the promoter, the venue, and the staff, and of course running a service like Ticketmaster isn’t free, so they need a cut to pay for running their service that lets you get the tickets.

The problem I have is that the presentation of the service fee blows.  They sneak up on you.  I go to the site, find my concert, see the ticket price is $23, pick my ticket amount, hit the “Find Tickets” button and then, WHAM!, now they are $32 each.  You know, I don’t mind the $9 service charges, I understand them, but it would have been nice to have seen, on the original price listing page, an all-inclusive price.  Even if it was shown as “$23 (+ $9 service fees)” or “$23 ($32 with service fees)” or just “$32”, something to let me know upfront what the total cost per ticket is going to be rather than slapping it on at the end.

This is ultimately why people dislike Ticketmaster.  It is not the service charges, it is the presentation of the service charges.  People just don’t respond well in any context when they are given a price, and then at a later point told the actual purchase price is more.  I mean, if you went to buy a car and the price tag said “$23,000”, but once you talk to the sales rep he explains that there are $9,000 in service fees, so to drive it off the lot you have to pay $32,000, you’d be a tad upset that the price tag didn’t tell you that upfront.  Or how about if you went to a restaurant and bought a steak dinner listed as $23 only to find out there is a $9 preparation fee. Sales tax is one thing, since its a relatively fixed amount, but seeing a service charge after you’ve seen the original price is another, especially with Ticketmaster service charges being as unpredictable as they are.  I’ve seen $100 tickets with a $9 charge, and I’ve also seen $9 tickets with a $15 charge (yes, the service charge was almost twice the price of the ticket).  There is nothing on the initial page that lets you know what your final price might be.

Anyway, that’s my gripe of the week.

What’s in a Name?

Writing

One of the things that has always bothered me with my writing is coming up with names.  Every character needs one and mine always end up in one of two categories.  Either their name is unique and awesome, or it is horrible plain and forgettable.  I have spent many any hour agonizing over names and often end up reusing the same ones over and over.

However, thanks to an idea from Corvus Elrod, I started keeping a list of names from spam emails and comments on this blog.  I’ve already got well over two hundred names and I’ve only been doing it for about a week.  The names range from the banal to the exotic and every level in between.  The idea was inspired, so to Corvus, sir, I tip my hat.  I may never have to worry about character naming again.