Category: Gaming

I’m a gamer. I game.

Frodo`s New Shoes

Gaming

I played in the Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar beta for a bit, but I stopped once I realized I really didn’t have much interest in the game.

I have always loved the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings books, and the Peter Jackson movies were fantastic. But what makes those things great is the story, the lore. And while some of that is captured in the MMO, there were some things that were just out of place. Much like with Vangard, their attempts at trying to attain a “realistic” look and feel for the game is destroyed by floating question marks and exclamation points. Over in this thread for the problem in Vanguard, Destral proposes what I think is an excellent idea:

I would have thought it wouldn’t be too hard to have NPC’s react to the proximity of a character that can perform a quest for them by having them call out to the player (and only to the player, so that other players don’t see it).
So a character could be walking around in Leth Nurae, when they might see ‘Flavian Vel’selth calls out to you, “Good day, Soandso, would you have a moment?”‘. If the player is interested in accepting a quest, he could then walk over to the character and hail them, initiating the quest dialog.
Of course, this should only happen with some NPC’s in any case, else all quests would be discovered all too soon.
That should take care of the floating question marks, imo.

That is one seriously good idea, and while there are issues brought up in the following discussion, I’m sure most of them could be worked out rather easily.

The other really huge problem I have with Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is the title to this post. Yes, hobbits wear shoes. Sure, you can disable the graphics much like turning off helms and cloaks in World of Warcraft, but seriously… in the original lore Tolkien spends entire chapters (well, not really all at once, but over the course of the tales) talking about hobbits and their feet. Their leathery soles and hairy toes are arguably an integral part of the world. Even giving them a shoe/boot equipment slot is abandoning the lore. Of course, the designers were probably worried about equality in equipment… but why? Why does there have to be equality? Why not give the hobbits an anklet slot instead and allow them to wear ankle jewelry that no one else gets to wear in place of the shoes that they don’t wear.

Overall, it is things like this that keep me playing WoW. I want to play an MMO, but so far no new game has really shown me anything I want that isn’t in WoW that is good enough for me to put up with the stuff that is wrong with those games.

Zombies: An MMO Idea

Gaming

If I could design an MMO, completely from the ground up and I had full control, what would I do? Easy. Zombies.

First off, there would be only one world, and the world, in effect, would be as large as the real world. It would not be a zoneless game, but for most people it would feel like it. When you log in for the first time, you create a character, no classes, just a person (using the obligatory super cool character creator with eleventy billion combinations of body parts and textures and clothes), and you choose where you are going to be from (a nice world map with glowy red dots for player populations, so you could decide to be where there are lots of people, or where there are no people, or somewhere in between). You would also choose a “player type”. This “type” would decide if you are issued a house or if you are given a list of dwellings of appropriate survivor capacities that are currently open to new members (if you pick a type for a size of group to which none is available, a new one will be created for you and new players will begin joining you shortly). In game a player can always choose to change their “type” by simply leaving their current group and joining a group of another type (or if you have decided to abandon people and go it solo, you have to clean out a house and bar the doors for safety).

Welcome to a world populated by endless zombies. You and your group (or just you) need to implement and maintain defences as well as gather survival supplies, food, fresh water, broken pipe replacements, clothes for the winter, a way to stay cool in the summer, weapons, etc etc. And of course the zombies need to be killed, because zombies tend to bunch, and if you don’t keep an eye out you’ll be surrounded and starve to death before you know it. Zombies tend to walk, but some will run when they see food. Rarely do they think, but once in a while they’ll be accidentally crafty. Log in, survive, log out… but don’t forget to make sure you’ve got food before you leave, you might starve while you are gone (working in groups helps, if your mall has 24 residents you can afford to not log in for a month as long as the rest of your group keeps you fed, but be careful, if you don’t pull your weight, they might feed you to the ghouls).

When you are logged out, your character is an NPC in defence mode. Unless other members of your group are online to manage the perimeter, its assumed you will warn people trying to break in and kill them before they succeed.

If a place gets too overpopulated by players, not only will you run out of zombies, but you’ll run out of food, unless you start farming, but farming (unlike your home) isn’t safe and you might get robbed. Get enough people working together and you might rebuild a city, at least until people stop logging in… dead players becomes zombies, and your city might be destroyed from within.

And what about player death? Well, a player can only have one character at a time. If they find out friends or coworkers play, they can always travel to them… if they can survive the trip that is. Death is death, and you have to roll up a new character, but without levels in the game, the only thing you’ll really have lost is your home and your possessions (given to your groupmates if you had any, left for scavengers if you didn’t).

What can you do besides fight zombies and survive? Well, anything you want to really, as long as you are also fighting zombies and surviving. Rebuild a PC and get a working satellite dish and some power and you can hook up to the remains of the internet and communicate with others, even play games… or play games with your group mates or other neighbors when you have them over for tea (or they get cut off while scavenging and needed a place to hide until daybreak). Depending on bandwidth and licensing issues, run your own TV station or radio station… publish a newspaper. Rebuild a car and go for a drive (be sure to lock the doors).

Essentially, Second Life… but with zombies!

Setec Astronomy

Gaming

The irony of most secrets is that they are not, in fact, secret. It is strange to see people fight tooth and nail to hide things which everybody knows. Even more so when their attempts to dodge certainty and protect their secrets result in miscommunication and bad blood between people who should be getting along.

How does this relate to gaming? Well, in the world of game design, there are many developers who post on blogs and on message boards, and all of them to some degree talk in vague notions and hints, hiding their precious secrets. The funny thing is, most times when their games finally do come out they really don’t introduce anything that was worth hiding, at least not hiding to the degree they did it. I realize that many times they are being vague because they might get fired for revealing company secrets, but if that is the problem why are they getting involved in the discussions at all? If you aren’t supposed to talk about your work, then don’t talk about your work. Its almost like that kid back in grade school who’d dance around singing “I know something you don’t know.”

Why the hell am I blogging about this? I’ll tell you…

I do not work in the game industry. I wish I did, but currently I live in Atlanta, and there isn’t much going on around here (at least not that I know of), and I don’t want to move. Also, while I feel that I have a good grasp on programming and design, I don’t have the experience on my resume that would make other people have the same faith in me that I have in myself. I mean, hey, I’ve only done full life-cycle design on a time and attendance software package picked as the best on the market by several independant studies, and a data warehouse application for one of the largest telcos in the US, but clearly that’s not good enough. I also am currently accustomed to a lifestyle that precludes me from starting over at the bottom, so I can’t just pick up and move across the country to take a bottom rung CS or QA job making next to nothing. But, despite not working in the game industry, I love games and I think about them alot. Starting this week, I’m going to start posting every idea I have ever had for games on my weblog. Some of them are raw, some of them are more thought out, and I hope people find them interesting enough to discuss them with me, and maybe, just maybe, someone might give me credit if they decide to steal one or two of them.

No more secrets.

How do you play?

Gaming

Ryan Shwayder over at the nerfbat has begun a discussion on the definitions of Hardcore and Casual.

I think, especially if you delve into the comments, he is pretty near the target. Essentially, I think its impossible to define a player simply as hardcore or casual for their entire entity. Instead, you have to break it down into many factors.

For instance, game play time. Someone who is casual with their time in games wants something they can pick up and play with in ten minutes, or two hours, or whenever they happen to want to play. Often this is referred to as “time-starved” but I feel adding the usage of “starved” there just gives it a desperate and needy connotation… also, it implies that if the person had more time they’d spend it gaming, but that really isn’t true at all. Someone who is hardcore with their time is going to schedule blocks, often large blocks, of time to play… three hours, five hours, Saturday. The time hardcore player is the kind of player who spends all their free time gaming.

Further down you can get into distinctions like “knowledge commitment” which would be how willing is the player to remember bits of information or lore of the game. I know when it comes to this, I’m very hardcore… not by choice really, it just sort of happens. If EverQuest (the original) were to have a free weekend starting today, I bet I could log in and get around fairly well. Even though I have not played it in a few years, I still know where stuff is (as long as the zone hasn’t been revamped). The wife on the other hand, well, we play World of Warcraft about once a week, and lots of times she just doesn’t remember where anything is. Its not because she has a bad memory, but because its simply not important to her to remember it. Plus, she has me, and I remember everything, so…

You can literally take any aspect of any game, show a hardcore and a casual approach to it, and show how its not really dependent on any other aspect. To use the example above, the wife and I both love to explore and are fairly hardcore about going new places. She just happens to think that almost everywhere is a new place since she doesn’t commit to memory having gone there.

So… what’s the answer? What is the definition of hardcore and casual? I think the answer is, “It depends.” Even Ryan’s attempt to narrow it down to 4 points isn’t going to cover everything. Is it enough to design a game by? Sure, and as long as you accept that no matter how few or how many boxes you draw there will always be players who live outside them, you’ll be just fine.

Arbitrary Changes

Gaming

I am throwing this in the gaming section because some of what I’m about to say, while not directly aimed at gaming, applies to game development and design.

This week I have been dealing with a Teradata upgrade at work. We upgraded our Development and Test environments a while back and are now about to move it to production. As part of my process for the upgrade, I went through the list of changes between the Teradata versions and made sure that either a) they would not impact our program or b) our code was prepared for the change. What I have been dealing with this week is a list of undocumented changes (at least not in the documentation I was provided) that are giving me headaches.

Now, realize that the errors I am getting are showing up in our Test system, and only the Test system, and only because we are adding a new feature to our application that involves getting a new group of people on the Test system. See, in the Development environment it is pretty much always the same people. It has probably been over a year since we added someone new to Development. Test had been the same until this week.

The error, once fully discovered is that Teradata changes the result from SQL that creates a new user from 1 indicating a success to -1. 0 still means a failure. After a user gets created, I have to execute some other commands to finalize their rights assignments, and as you can imagine the switch from 1 to -1 caused an issue. See, my code was set to check if the return value (the .NET return value on SQL is number of rows affected) was greater than 0. Greater than 0 was a success, less than 0 was a failure. So, with the undocumented change, all my successes were now failures.

The problem I have is two-fold. First, it was a seemingly undocumented change. Second, I don’t see a point to the change. Why switch from 1 to -1? Sadly, this isn’t the first time or place I have run into changes like this, and it will probably not be the last.

As it pertains to game design… well, honestly, how often has a game put out a patch message that didn’t list every single change? All the time… and how often do those changes affect the players? Almost as frequently. In games, or in any product design arena, changes than affect the users of your product should never go undocumented, especially if its an output that what will affect applications designed to work with your product.

Sneaking Seventy: The Beginning

Gaming

I am sure it has been done before, but I don’t care. I’ve rolled up a new character in the World of Warcraft, he is a rogue, and he shall not fight, and he shall only do quests that can be completed without killing. My goal is to explore, everywhere and everything, hence the title: Sneaking Seventy.

So far, I’ve explored Stormwind, Elwynn Forest and some of Westfall… and then I went to Dun Morogh. The ability of monsters to see me and kill me is astounding… I definately need some money and some gear. I’ll post screenshots later.

Crisis on Infinite Servers

Gaming

One thing I am a big proponent of is building games to have one single world server. The simple reason for this is illustrated by every single game that doesn’t do it. I play, then find out some of the people I work with or chat with on message board or whatever play on another server. Usually we have just one option, someone has to start over. Although, more and more games are allowing server transfers… for a price.

However, I do understand the limitations of many games to support a single world environment. Imagine World of Warcraft with only a single world… the lag would be unbearable. Outside of the sheer population problems, one world means you need to actually develop more content in order to spread people out and keep it from being bland, unless you go with a 100% group/raid instanced world.

As an alternative to trying to cram everything on to one world server, I think what I would like to see is an in-game acknowledgement of multiple worlds (or shards, if you prefer) with a method to allow players to move between those worlds.

Lets take WoW as an example. Put in an NPC in each major city who wanders around like a crazy homeless person muttering about the multiverse. Give him a quest, where the player needs to gather a few simple items (a gemstone of some kind, a few other things, nothing rare, all common drops cheaply obtained, maybe some food for the crazy guy as well). Upon bringing the items, the NPC gives a second quest and sends the player to a room where they take the items gathered (reconfigured by the NPC) to an obelisk, opens a dialog with a list of all the servers, they pick one and hit Complete Quest. *poof* The player is logged out to character selection where the character they just chose to transfer now has a listed status of “Travelling to [insert server name here]…” The transfer takes somewhere between 3 to 10 days to take effect. That last part is there to discourage people from transferring back and forth alot.

Maybe even throw in a part about how the shifting between worlds is rough, and the character will lose all items not tightly bound to their souls (i.e. – droppable items and money are gone, oh, and the bank is going to give your stuff to Goodwill after a few days so you lose that too), if you fear transfers will hurt the game economy. And of course, the devs could exclude servers that are new (if that is desirable) or already over populated (but if you give players the ability to leave crowded servers, doesn’t overcrowding become their problem?), and even provide a glimpse into the interdimensional pathways (a count of server populations including the number of characters queued for transfer).

I guess what I’m saying is, at this point in time, a game that launches should have, from day one, a way to easily transfer characters (at the very least from the DBA point of view) since the games that have come before have shown that players desire it. I know in some cases, making this player controlled would eliminate a revenue stream from the company, but maybe instead they just add twenty-five cents to the monthly fee they were planning to charge. Besides, if they build it into the game from the get go, it means they don’t have to pay someone to run character transfers later.

Breaking the Mold

Gaming

A post over on Aggro Me about City of Heroes got me to thinking…

One of the things I enjoyed most about City of Heroes was that it was very hard to put together a group that didn’t work. Even if you didn’t have a “healer” the group could still do well. Since just about any character could solo, unless you got unlucky, any group of characters can pretty much make a team. All this is said with one caveat: as long as the players were willing to adjust and learn as they went.

The biggest downfall of CoH was, in my opinion, the fact that it did break the mold. It wasn’t your traditional tank/heal/dps game, and people who insisted on playing it as such usually got more frustrated than people who were open to the more freeform style that CoH thrived on.

How it dealt with healing was one of the major breaks from the norm. Since combat was fast and furious, so was healing, and more focus of the game was spent on the prevention of damage than pure healing. Buffs for friends and debuffs for enemies, with healing as something you do when things go bad.

Aggro’s post talks about the Kinetics method of healing, and my experience in the game was similar, yet different. Throughout beta and for over a year after release, the character build I played most was the Dark Miasma/Dark Blast Defender, or Dark/Dark. The playstyle of the Dark/Dark mainly consisted of charging your team into a group of enemies and then making one of them your bitch, dropping a handful of area effect debuffs making him and his friends less accurate (damage prevention) and easier to hit (damage increase). When allowed to do my job, it was a thing of beauty. Clouds of dark fog slowed and blinded our enemies and if it was necessary I would leech health from them. If things went bad, I could even mass revive the group while draining the bad guys. But, all of this requires that I keep one enemy locked with all my debuffs running on him… most players had this horrible habit of just wildly picking targets and taking them down or worse, assisting me, and causing my powers to drop. After a while of being blue in the face trying to explain this to people, I simply gave up grouping with strangers, and later nearly gave up grouping alltogether.

In the end, I applaud CoH for doing its own thing and breaking the tried and true triumverate, but I have to hang my head in shame at the players who seemed to want the exact thing they complain about in every game and refuse to learn to play the game on its own.

One of these days, when I finally do upgrade our PCs, the wife and I will go back to City of Heroes (and City of Villains) because it really was the most fun I’ve had in an MMO, despite the problems. And who knows, maybe at this late date people might finally know better.

Henchmen

Gaming

Inspired by Friday’s post and the comments that followed… How would you handle multiple characters under a player-NPC style system?

One thought would be henchmen. You’ve started a fighter character, gotten him a sword and some armor, but now you decide you want to play a mage… So, you roll up your mage, but you don’t want to go it alone, so you pull up your characters and pick your fighter to be a henchmen. Your fighter is now an NPC pet that you can give orders to.

Immediately, its appearant that in a game with levels this probably would be game breaking and unbalancing. Even a skill based game could make this a challenge to implement. But in a game without levels and skills, one that is based on player skill and goal achievement through narrative (quests), this could work very well. A system like this would allow a player to be his own party and play it like the old days of the AD&D games made by SSI, or allow a few friends to fill a gap in their group when they can’t find a player to fill it.

These pets wouldn’t be super smart, they’d be much like current game pets, simple commands and defending the owner, etc, because you wouldn’t want pets to be the defacto method for playing your MMO. Obviously much research and legwork would be needed to make this function, and it would have to be a “right fit” for the game being designed. But for now I just like thinking stuff up until I hit that lottery jackpot…

Offline Play

Gaming

Some days I wish I could remember to write stuff down. I had alot I wanted to say concerning this post over on Tattered Page, but I could only remember one part, so I’ll just go with that.

As much as I ultimately end up hating EVE Online every time I go back to it, I keep going back to it because ti does have a few really cool ideas. The biggest of these is the introductions of true Offline Play.

Many games before and after have had some type of reward for people who are offline. In World of Warcraft, being offline in an inn or city would result in an experience bonus when you returned. The longer you were gone, the longer the bonus would last. It had a cap, of course, but it was a nice way for casual players to feel like they had a chance in hell of keeping up in level with the people racing to the top. But in EVE, skill training happens whether you are logged in or not. So, if you set a skill that’s going to take fourteen days to train, you can log out and come back in two weeks to find it complete.

So… where am I going with this?

What if, you had a game that was designed around player created and/or controlled towns, and when a citizen of that town logged out in town he was given a menu of a list of work tasks that the town needs performed that he can set himself to do while he’s logged out? Things like, collect garbage, defend walls, work the mine, tan leather. And all of these things would amount to resources that the town leaders could manage and pay wages for.

The mayor says he’s going to pay 2 gold per pound of trash/weeds cleaned up from the street. Now, a player could, if he chose to, while playing, run around picking up junk and pulling weeds, turning them in for pay. But how many people would really do that? Instead, based on the town size, the mayor lists he needs three garbage men, and a player who logs out can pick that, his character will be seen (as an NPC) walking the streets and collecting garbage during daylight hours that he isn’t logged in. When he does log back in, he finds that over the last week working as a garbage collector he earned twenty two gold.

But who wants to be a garbage man? Why not join the town militia? The militia pays ten gold a day, and while you are logged out, your character will be used as an NPC to patrol the city walls and to fight off attackers. Now, you won’t die while you are offline and lose your character or gear, but the point is that non-player-based-NPC guards are always of level or strength equal to the average citizen minus two, or something like that. So getting players to be guards is likely better than leaving it up to the NPC guards, unless you are new to the world and fall below the NPC level. (Of course, in my overall design, the game is PvP and players playing will be given the option to actively defend assaults before NPC-players or NPCs are populated.)
And working in the mine? the fields? fishing? You help increase the resources of the town. Players as NPCs would always be slower/worse than players playing to give incentive to play, but would allow players to still feel like they are contributing and not falling so far behind even when they can’t play.

I’m sure there are many complications that I haven’t thought through, but its an idea I’d love to see a game take a whack at.