Category: Gaming

I’m a gamer. I game.

Choices That Matter

Gaming

Reading up my morning blogs, Tobold has thrown down a decent shot at the missing “good vs evil” elements of WoW. He’s right, of course, the design of WoW can be described as “colorfully bland”, its vibrant and exciting, but strip away the artistic elements and both sides are the same. Kill those guys, collect these items. Later on, they even share all the same quests in the “neutral” settlements and can choose the same side in the Burning Crusade’s faction division.

I’ve got high hopes for Fallen Earth. For one, a sci-fi apocalyptic MMO that works would be awesome. But beyond that, having had a chance to talk to the developers at this year’s Dragon*Con, they plan to have 6 factions, arranged around in a circle each one will have an opposing faction, two semi-allies, and two semi-foes. And they are working on making the factions matter. Since they can take over and control/influence a town, it will be important to help your faction win and to assist in the defeat of other factions.

Realm vs Realm was what attracted me to Dark Age of Camelot, sadly I found the PvE game (which was the only way to level up at the time) to be boring, repetitive, and exactly like EQ, which I was already playing and I just wasn’t inspired to start over. Had I gone to DAoC later when they put in battle grounds and other things the game might have stuck. World of Warcraft’s stabs at it had left me wanting. The battlegrounds were predictable and short, and not overly fun when raiders beat up on the non-raiders with their superior gear. The open PvP in WoW was a joke, and the tower stuff they added in Burning Crusade was great for about a week or two… then it devolved into a bizarre cooperative dance, each side letting the other side win, trading back and forth. Capturing was better than holding, so its better to let go and recapture, for both sides, that it is for either side to hold it, unless they have a strong desire to withhold rewards from the other side while reducing their own reward gain.

I really want to play an MMO where things I do, things everyone does, really matter. And the first person to suggest EVE Online will get bitch slapped. Call me when they allow me to get out of my ship and walk around the space stations and planets.

Gender in Gaming

Gaming

By now, you may have read about the following news snippet:

Shanda (Nasdaq: SNDA) subsidiary Aurora Technology has frozen game accounts of male players who chose to play female in-game characters in its in-house developed MMORPG King of the World, reports 17173. Aurora stipulates that only female gamers can play female characters in the game, and it requires gamers who chose female characters to prove their biological sex with a webcam, according to the report.

Most of the news revolves around decrying the company for trying something like this, or as expected from the crass Kotaku commenters the CEO of the company must have had an encounter he isn’t proud of…

But let’s take this off in another direction. The game is claiming to be an MMORPG, the key being RP. Role Playing. The problem, as I see it, is that most (and I’d feel safe saying at least 70%, or in the case of World of Warcraft 99.9%) players of these games do not role play beyond the simple fact that their avatar is not a picture of themselves. Would people be as upset if the company had announced that they will be banning players who announce their true gender, breaking the role play?

Urban Dead Greasemonkey

Gaming

I have been messing around in the world of Greasemonkey lately. If you don’t know what Greasemonkey is, it is an add-on for the FireFox web browser that allows javascripts to run after a page loads. That may not sound special, but you can do some very interesting stuff with it. For example, the main reason I’ve been dabbling is that I use a Greasemonkey script that someone else wrote for Conquer Club that does some map analysis that the creator of the website doesn’t do, like keep track of card set redemption values in escalating games, hover over attack paths on the maps, and more. Nothing game breaking, nothing you couldn’t do by hand yourself, but very nice in that you don’t have to do it by hand. Well, recently an upgrade to the Conquer Club website broke the Greasemonkey script, so I’ve been looking in to fixing it.

But this isn’t about Conquer Club, as I haven’t finished that script yet. This is about Urban Dead.

One of the fastest ways to get experience points in Urban Dead is to use first aid kits to heal people. And the best way to do that is either to start as a doctor, or make sure the first skill you buy is Diagnosis (maybe second, Freerunning is very important). Diagnosis allows you to see the health of each player in the same block as you. Without it, you just have to randomly try to heal people, wasting action points as the game tells you that they are full of health (you don’t lose the first aid kit though, which is nice). Once you have Diagnosis, the next stumbling block is simply seeing who needs healing. In some places with five or ten people around, its easy, but if you go into a mall where you are likely to find in excess of one hundred people per block, it becomes a giant pain in the ass.

To that end, I have begun working on the ProbablyNot’s Urban Dead Goggles script. If you are an Urban Dead player and have Greasemonkey, click this link to install it. Right now, all the script does is change the text color of the hit point count for anyone with 50 or 60 hit points, which likely means they are full of health (people at 50 might have the Body Building skill and be able to go up to 60, but that takes effort or wasting action points to find out), it make the hit points appear black. If the person is not full (if they have anything but 50 or 60) it will leave it the normal white color. So with the script running, all you need to do look for the people with white hit points and heal them.

Very basic, but also, in my opinion, quite helpful. If I think of more things to add, I will.

The Intelligence has returned to base!

Gaming

The thunder of shotguns, the gentle rumble of sticky bombs, the whine of the chain gun.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Team Fortress is back.

I’ve made mention before that I played the original Quakeworld Team Fortress for a number of years. I participated in leagues, belonged to a clan, and loved nearly every minute of it. Team Fortress Classic, which was released for Half-Life was… lets just say it was a disappointment and leave it at that. I found EverQuest and spent the next 8 years immersed in MMOs.

I tried TFC again not too long ago, okay it was nearly three years ago, and I just couldn’t get in to it. The game just didn’t play right.

Last week, Team Fortress 2, built on top of Half-Life 2, was released, and the magic has returned. Its like the old days again. I’m not the best player in the world, but I hold my own and I’m good at teamwork, so I can have fun even when we are losing. I usually come in around the middle of the pack as far as kills/points go. Of course, the return to glory is also a return to the age old frustrations: when the flag leaves the flag room, chase it. Most servers are set to run games to 3 points, so letting the flag go just is never a good thing unless you are letting it go to assist bringing in our own 3rd point.

But, the fact that I care enough to be annoyed by it means the game has done it right. Its awesome, and I’ll be hanging around a while. If you care, keep an eye out, I play as ProbablyNot.

Zombie Apocalypse

Gaming

Yesterday’s post got me to thinking. Would I really want my zombie game to go on forever?

Sure, I can always spawn endless numbers of zombies and have the game drag on and on, but to inject a tiny bit of reality in the zombie scenario… Worst Case: You are the only survivor and every other person on the planet becomes a zombie. 1 living human versus approximately (using July 2007 numbers) 6,600,000,000 zombies. Zombies don’t breed, they only turn the living. It would be a long and arduous road, but eventually you could win. I mean, it would take years and years to kill them all, but then you don’t need to kill them all. You just need to build strong enough walls to keep them out and enough area inside to run a farm. Of course, in the case of a zombie uprising, the worst case scenario is very unlikely. There will be more survivors and plenty of people will die in ways that prevent them from rising again.

So, would a zombie game be well served by having it reset? Perhaps the world could reset when all the zombies are killed, or when a city is established and the area it is in is made “safe”. Or it could even be time based… the dead rise, but the virus that is animating them will die out itself in three months… six months… a year… just survive until then. I could award badges for surviving. Players who die can start a new character, but they lose out on the badge. Or maybe tag each account with a “death count” and award titles for length of survival, like “Six month survivor” and “Forty-seven month survivor”. With a game reset, you could even design a “start” event. The world begins populated by live NPCs for a few days, then one day chaos and zombies, people screaming, players running for cover… or do they run to the supermarket first?

Definitely worth considering as I flesh out my design.

The End of the World

Gaming

Tobold’s had an interesting post up last week about the concept of a game that resets everyone back to zero as part of a cycle. It really is a nifty idea that I think more games should consider in whole or in part. But the question becomes, how often do you reset?

The first comment on Tobold’s post mentions resetting EQ1 every 90 days. Three months seems a little fast to me, especially given the huge amount of content the game has (not to mention the ridiculous keying and flagging for some zones). Of course, on a reset model, perhaps they could remove some unneeded content (like Luclin), maybe revamp the entire game to focus on one huge storyline. If they’d thought of it sooner, the Planes of Power expansion would have been perfect for this, seeing as how in the Plane of Time the defeat of Quarm results in story text saying your characters are being sent back in time or their memories wiped or something and the defeat of Quarm is being undone since he can’t be allowed to be killed. Three months might be perfect for a game that was only the original world, Kunark, Velious and Plane of Power. In fact, I think that game would rock. Maybe you could still throw in some of those mini expansions like Lost Dungeons and Ykesha, and every three months when they reset the world they’d revamp some zones, maybe add new features, change up the lesser stories. It would definitely solve my “empty world” scenario that happens when everyone is level capped and no one plays the low or mid level game anymore.

But for the casual player, is 90 days too short? If I was the kind of person who only got to play less than 5 hours a week, in three months I’d get in at most 60 hours of play, then I’d lose my character and have to restart. I wouldn’t want to play that game if I were that guy. Wherever you set your reset at, you’ll always be eliminating a set of players below a threshold. Another blog on the subject suggested two months… that short a period would need a very shallow and/or fast playing game.

Perhaps you could just reset the people involved in the final event, or people above a certain level… or maybe allow people to flag themselves as part of the “reset content” which opens up new areas, new raids, but means that when someone wins the final event, all the flagged characters get reset. But most of these limitations come in with level gated content. What if your game had no levels? What if the only progression in the game was in obtaining items and moving through the story?

It is a lot to think about.

Catan

Gaming

Almost four months ago, Big Huge Games released Catan for the XBox 360 Live Arcade platform. It is a good example of what to do right and what to do wrong with a game.

The game is a faithful redo of the board game Settlers of Catan. It retains all the fun of the original game, translating it wonderfully into a digital format. Because of this the reception of the game was high, everyone talking about how cool and fun it is, lots of people buying it, lots of people playing it.

On the other hand, right now it really plays best as a single player game. Many people have been reporting for a while now that there is something screwy with the network code. Random drops are fairly common so that its rare you finish a game with all the other people you started with. And then there is the problem with achievements… many players come to a point where they stop getting achievements, not anything being done on their part, they are completing the goals of the achievements but the achievements are not being rewarded. It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens to enough people that the xbox.com Catan forum consists largely of people asking why they didn’t get an achievement they believe they have earned. The rest of the posts are about disconnections.

Joe Pishgar was the community manager over at Big Huge and he posted a couple of times about a patch being worked on that he said would be available “soon”. That was back on May 15th, about 13 days after the game was released. Three months later and we have no patch. We also have no Joe as he’s moved on to become the community manager over at Sony for Star Wars Galaxies.

I really want to play Catan more, but won’t until the problems are fixed… It was a great design, a good implementation, but with crappy follow through. And, for me, a black mark on Big Huge. If they can’t fix a game as small as this, I have no faith in their abilities as it concerns that new RPG they are working on.

It is a shame that more game review sites don’t go back and re-review games, because I’m fairly certain that Catan would get much lower scores the second time around, especially when you consider most of their good reviews were done within the first week of release. Some problems just don’t reveal themselves in a week.

Ethan Haas Revealed

Gaming

A while back people were scouring the Internet looking for information on Cloverfield, the secret movie project by J.J. Abrams. I’ve blogged about the movie myself once or twice. During the hunt, people stumbled upon a site called www.ethanhaaswasright.com and a blog at ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com. The first had a flash puzzle game, each level played a small video clip. The second was a blog that had just a couple entries speaking about something coming and then turning into script that had to be deciphered. Lots of people thought this was for Cloverfield, many people insisted it, and then J.J. Abrams came out at Comic Con and said the Ethan Haas stuff had nothing to do with his movie.

So what was all this Ethan Haas stuff about?

Turns out it was all hype for Alpha Omega, a new table top RPG. Of course, many of the people who’d been trying to figure it out were disappointed, table top games just aren’t exciting to lots of people, they’d have preferred it be a new TV show or a movie, or at the very least a video game. But me, I like table top games, and this one looks fairly interesting, especially since it doesn’t appear to be based on the d20 system. As nice as I think d20 is, its not the only way to play, so I applaud anyone who goes down another road.

I also applaud the effort made here. I can’t remember the last time a table top RPG managed to garner so much attention. No wait… yes I can.

If you want more out of your MMORPGs than levels and loot and grinding experience points, I recommend trying to get some folks together to sit around the table and play. If you are nervous about it because you’ve never done it before, I recommend Dungeons & Dragons for Dummies and Dungeon Master for Dummies to give you a nice overview and a little depth on both sides of table top game play.

Besides, if you love Science Fiction setting games, the MMOs have never really gotten it right, but table top games have been doing it right for a long time.

The Cost of Gaming

Gaming

This isn’t going to be some in depth study. Tobold posted an entry to his blog a while back about pricing models in gaming. It got me to thinking.

I enjoyed Puzzle Pirates. I still do from time to time, but I don’t play it enough to pay a monthly fee. When I get the itch, I go in, play some bilging or poker or sword fighting, then I log out. I don’t play enough to need my own boat, or super fancy clothes, or any of the stuff that money gets you in the game. (I’m Ishiro on the Hunter ocean if you ever care to look me up.)

While at first glance, I cringe at the idea of my other games going to RMT models, ultimately it wouldn’t matter. Just take World of Warcraft as an example. Before I quit, I couldn’t play in the Battlegrounds, I just didn’t have the time it took to earn enough gold to buy the items that would have allowed me to compete with the twinks. I didn’t do world PvP for much the same reason (and getting jumped 4 to 1 by the Alliance was just retarded). I didn’t raid because, even though I’d have liked to, I just didn’t care enough to put forth the effort it took to be a viable part of a raiding guild, farming money and “pots” and all that. The game I played in WoW was the solo or small group game, and sometimes we even went into instances. The game I played is the game that would be free.

As I look at all the other games I play, that play model stays the same: I really only actively participate in the sections of the game that would be free if they went to an RMT model.

The thing is… I still enjoy the games. Like Puzzle Pirates, only I play a little more often.

So, how on earth does this tie in to my Zombie game design? I mean, this is a Wednesday post, and Wednesdays are Zombie Wednesdays. I’ve been thinking about what kind of pricing model I’d go for with my own game. As cool as I think the game is going to be, asking $15 a month might be a bit much for an MMOTamagotchi, but the design I have in mind doesn’t lend itself to RMT, unless I want to charge people for the item designer I have envisioned or for other things, but I don’t want to have someone playing along and when they try to build a radio they get a “you can’t do that unless you pay me!” type dialog box. RMT just defeats the mood of the game I’m trying to make, and mood is important in a horror setting. The only other option would be to sell blocks of time, a number of cents per hour that you’d buy in 100 hour blocks or something.

Its definitely something to think about… but I suppose it can be delayed until I actually have a game. 🙂

No RP in my RPG

Gaming

One of the things I find distressing in MMORPGs today is the lack of that RP part… you know, Role Playing. I suppose that’s why most articles these days are using just MMOG or seeking out new identifiers.

Mostly, when I play, I tend to RP, at least a little. I try not to talk about sports or real world news, I don’t go on and on about the latest movie that I saw. I’m in a world where I am a hunter, and I have been tasked to kill bears, and while I don’t keep things deadly serious, I try to keep things contextual. Lots of people don’t.

It starts with names. From a hundred yards, when I see you running across the field and I target you and see your name is ‘Meattank’ or ‘Roxxingursoxxorz’, I know immediately that you are not playing your role as defined by the game world. Instead, you are likely grinding exp, loot, money or faction. Grouping with you would be a mistake, because you are likely to spend our time talking about the real world, or worse, DPS numbers and quickest routes of progression, boiling the game down into its simplest form. Of course, some ‘bad’ players still have good names.

I find, as I get older, that I’m less tolerant of people. I’m more apt to just pick up my toys and go home rather than put up with someone insisting that not playing a game at its most minimal and purest form is a waste of time. People who demand that levels and stats be maxed, that can only tell you where things are by looking them up on the latest spoiler site. Mostly though, the lack of role playing goes back to the idea I posted about a couple weeks ago. The min/max play style trumps my role playing style. A player playing the stat and loot game can hear me talk about getting a beer down at the pub and just brush it off, but when a group member breaks out with “Okay, lull that mob and will split the pair, cast x, y and z, if we happen to get the second, I’ll offtank until you guys down the first mob. Stay to the back and sides to avoid the ripostes. Max melee range so you don’t push.” well, it just kills the role play.

There is no solution to this. I’m just venting. I’ll still keep trying to role play, but real role playing is probably going to have to stay at the table top game level.