Category: Gaming

I’m a gamer. I game.

Free to be Super

Gaming

Champions Online goes Free to PlayAnother game switching to the Free to Play model isn’t really surprising.  I’m pretty sure that most companies are realizing what most players figured out a long time ago: players aren’t going to subscribe to a bunch of different MMOs.  At best, subscription games get tourists, people who love one game but are burned out so go looking for something new to reignite them… and then they go back to the one game they love.  The elephant in the room is that World of Warcraft is that one game for millions of people.  Free to Play lowers the barrier for the tourists down to its minimum (at worst, a big download and install; at best, a tiny download and install followed by streaming out content to you while you create your character and play around in the introduction areas), and then pelts you with bonuses you can buy for tiny amounts.  And earning a few dollars from hundreds of thousands of tourists is better than earning a box sale from a small percentage of that number.  You also avoid people being able to say “the game just isn’t worth the monthly fee” because there isn’t one.  Now you just have to avoid them saying “the game just isn’t worth playing, even for free”.

I’ve always wanted to try Champions Online, but the cost kept me out.  I played City of Heroes for three years, and if that was free to play I’d be there in a heartbeat, but it isn’t.  At least not yet.  Looking over the Champions F2P Features list, it looks like they’ve put a good foot forward and the free parts will be worth playing.  Since Champions doesn’t have separate servers, they immediately avoid the pitfall of EQ2 in separating their F2P players from the rest.  Sure, EQ2 is reporting growth, but I hated that as a F2P player I couldn’t play my old characters from when I was a subscriber and I couldn’t play with my old friends.

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, this is nothing but good news.  I’ll be looking forward to donning in game spandex next year when they convert.

Minecraft

Gaming
Sphere in a Box
The top of the box is pulled back to reveal the construction within.

A few weeks ago, I caved in and bought Minecraft.  It is a fun little game.  The game can be played single player, or multiplayer.  Currently, multiplayer is a little broken – the monsters can’t hurt you, in fact, nothing can hurt you, so jumping off stuff is fun!  Multiplayer servers can also be modified to allow players the ability to summon items instead of mining them.  The picture to the right is what I’m currently building on one such server.  If you want to spend some time, you can go through the map of that server and see all the awesome things that people are building.

Anyway, the one thing I really dig about this game is that it shows what an indie developer can do, and that high end photo realistic visuals aren’t needed if the game is fun to play.  Minecraft is a blast and it has a very 8-bit look to it.

The game is still technically in “Alpha” (the phase before Beta, which is the phase before release), however you can purchase it now for about $15, which gets you the Alpha and free upgrades to future releases.  If you wait until release you’ll have to pay double, at least, and you’ll miss out on months of fun!

Another thing I like about this game, and the buzz it is getting, is the idea that, if embraced, some of the free form creation that exists here might find their way into other games, other MMOs.  Though I do think it will work best on a small scale.  Can you imagine World of Warcraft allowing people to make their own buildings and destroy terrain?  Insanity!

Defining Failure

Gaming

If you travel in the gaming blog circles, you might have heard about or even read a little anonymous diatribe about Warhammer Online.  And there are responses.  One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  Five.  Six.  And I’m sure there are more…  But really, I don’t want to talk about that.  Instead, let’s talk about what constitutes a failure in the MMO world.

I’ve seen a number of places, in comments on the above linked posts and all around the Internet that Warhammer “failed”.  However, they sold 1.2 million boxes, which I have to assume covered a good bit, if not all of the development costs.  We know they bled subscribers, and the last official numbers were that they had 300,000 subscribers as of March 2009.  They have cut back on servers, down to 9 (4 US, 2 UK, 2 German, 1 French) and are most certainly down below the reported 300k.  Still… if we can assume that the box sales and the first couple of months recouped the development investment, and if the current operating costs are below their subscription revenue, while the returns for the investors aren’t good, is an MMO operating in the black a failure?  I mean, they haven’t shut the game off yet, so I kinda have to assume they operate in the black, or damn close to it.  I could be wrong.

Clearly, the game did not perform as well as people would have hoped.  They didn’t make WoW-style money hats to wear while driving dump trucks of money to the bank, but did they lose money?  Is the game bleeding cash?  Each perspective on a game defines failure in different ways.  An investor, for example, will define failure as earning less money than other, less risky, options.  If he earned less on his cash than he would have just putting it in a savings account, then it’s an epic failure.  A publisher or game company probably defines success or failure on the affect the game has on both the bottom line AND the company reputation.  If a game is making money but the press keeps bringing the game up as being crap or failing, then overall the game is probably a failure since it might affect getting future investors to give you their money.

For me, as a player and a wanna-be developer, success means the game runs and I, as a player, can play it and we, as the developers, are still able to release more content.  Failure exists only when the game is in the red and we have to shut it off to keep from bankrupting everyone involved.

How many MMOs have truly failed?  Asheron’s Call 2, The Matrix Online, Tabula Rasa, APB, Motor City Online, The Sims Online… Are there more bodies in the MMO graveyard?  How do you define failure?

Dead Rising 2

Gaming, Reviews

Dead Rising 2This can’t possibly be a full review of the game, because at this point I’ve only played it through once, and if you are familiar with the original, you know that means that I failed.  I messed up a case, let survivors die and then eventually got stupidly overwhelmed by zombies.  However, death isn’t the end in a Dead Rising game.  Death just means I get to start over, while keeping my levels and skills and whatnot.  Oh, and clothes.  One of the silliest bits in the DR games is that when you start over your character will have on the clothes he was wearing when he died.  In the original, that meant that if you died after the abduction, you could wind up watching the opening cinematics in your skivvies.  In my case, I’m wearing footy pajamas, a fedora and a Groucho Marx disguise.

I digress…  The simple fact is that DR2 is the kind of sequel you love to get.  It understands what was great about the original and makes it better, and also understands what was tedious and fixes that too.  My biggest issue with the original was that the survivors all sucked.  No matter what weapons you gave them, they didn’t seem to be able to fight.  In DR2, I actually plan my routes so that I’ll have 2 or 3 or more survivors, armed with guns, when I get to a psycho or run certain parts of the game.  The survivors actually, you know, help!  But don’t just take my word for it, read this review as well.

Anyway.  I’m totally loving this game, and think that everyone should play it (and the original too, and Case 0 if they are on the 360, and Case West on the 360 when it comes out, and Dead Rising 3 when they inevitably make it).  I still haven’t played around with the co-op or multiplayer, but I’ll be doing that this weekend.

Looking for People

Gaming

Wolfshead made a great post about chat in MMOs.  I often find myself agreeing with Wolfshead.  We seem to come from the same place in that EverQuest got a lot of things right about building communities and having players be social while they play.  Anyway, that’s not what I want to talk about because, honestly, if you read his post, that’s how I feel.  But along side the chat discussion is a discussion on the Dungeon Finder in WoW.

In the comments, however, Tesh used the word/phrase “self-professed” and it got me thinking, and I commented as well.  In most games, we have to trust other people when they tell you what they’ve done or where they’ve been.  Well, not so much anymore… with gear score and achievements and bind on pickup items, people don’t have to trust you, they can inspect you or check your Armory profile and verify it.  People used to have to be social, now they don’t.

Anway… back to the Dungeon Finder.  The truth is, Blizzard named it properly.  You select the dungeon or dungeons you want to do, you select your role in the group, and then you queue.  You are finding a dungeon.  EverQuest had an LFG tool.  Looking for Group.  It was poorly named.  It should have been the Look for Experience Points tool, because that’s how many people used it.  They didn’t want to make an effort to find a good group, they just wanted to join one already formed and then soak up exp.  However, because of the nature of EQ, while Exp might be what you were after, what you got was a group since getting Exp often meant sitting in the same place with the same five other people for hours.  If you didn’t talk and socialize, you had better at least be excellent at playing and making the exp, otherwise you might get kicked from the group.  But in WoW, you use the Dungeon Finder to find a dungeon, you then do the dungeon and then you are done.  Then you use the Dungeon Finder, ad nauseum…

What I really want is a Looking for People tool.  I don’t want an objective and a role, I want a funny guy who plays with style and makes playing the game more fun than grinding the floating bags of exp and loot.  The tool should be half a personality test, and matching should be made on more than just people going to the same place.  A chatty guy should be placed with a group that wants a chatty guy.  And so on…  I know it would be a pain to build, and some people probably wouldn’t want all those options, which would be why you’d hide them.  The main screen could be as simple as the Dungeon Finder: where I want to go, what I want to do.  Then, under an Advanced Options or Social Options or Fine Tuning you put another screen with a whole mess of check boxes and/or drop downs that allow people to self select a narrower group of people.  The defaults would, of course, be Any/All and then those who wish could go from there.

The first option I’d add?  The ability to say, “Only pick people/groups from my server.”  You know, the people on the other servers in the Battlegroup might be great people, but I’d rather play with people who, if they turn out to be great people, I can play with on a regular basis.

Another Case for Class

Gaming

It is amazing how much time I spend thinking about designing classes in MMOs when I really don’t care for them.  Or maybe I do.  Coming from a table top gaming background, many of those games had classes.  Sure, there were dalliances with systems like GURPS, but we always came back to D&D or some variant thereof.  Reading Tesh’s Quest for Glory post this morning (read it, it’s worth it – I’ll wait), I made the following comment:

I loved the Quest for Glory games, and I want that kind of differentiation between classes… however, every time I spend any serious effort thinking up a design for it, it always fails in an MMO sense. Yes, I want the rogue to advance by sneaking around and stealing things, planning jail breaks, cheating at games of chance, etc… but how do I fit those skills into a group dynamic?

Ultimately, I always end up at the idea of every character having two lives. The first if your traditional MMO style play, and the second is solo or specific group tailored quests that can cater to the class of the individual or the class set of a group (a rogue goes to the quest giver and is told “this is a two man job. you’ll need someone tough and good with a blade to pull this off.” meaning you need to duo the quest with a warrior, each of you having parts of the event tailored to your class’s strengths.

In the past, I’ve always tried to avoid this because it leads to heavy instancing… but I’ve gotten to the point where I think a better game design is giant city hubs of social activity with the majority of all adventures/quests in instances.

And it got me to thinking.  And while I worked the ideas rolled around in my head until I realized something… That second paragraph where I mention characters having two lives, that is exactly how the best table top games played out.

Four or five or six of us would gather and one of us would be the Dungeon Master.  We’d roll up our characters and play.  Our play would consist of two parts.  In the Adventure play, the group would head out on a quest, part of the major arc of the world we were in, and we’d investigate and fight, and mostly we’d play as a group, taking on roles in that group, occasionally a player would do something that only their class could do, but mostly this part of the game was rolling dice and reducing enemy hit points to zero.  Sound familiar?  The other half would be Development play.  Invariably, after an Adventure, we’d have learned some information that would point us into several possible directions.  The group would split up and handle tracking down leads.  The reality for this was because the full group could get together less often than subsets of our group could.  The result was that the rogue would head off to see if he could gather some more info from a bar down by the docks, the priest and paladin would head to the church library to do some research, and the mage would head to dinner with the town elders.  Each sub group would then have the DM play out for them a tailored mission in which they’d use their specific skills.  The rogue would use a disguise and then get in on a back room card game, manipulating the game and getting the other players drunk while easing information out of them.  The paladin and priest would discover a dark presence corrupting the church librarian and have to perform an exorcism.  The mage would use his knowledge of politics to get a better picture of who might be behind the dark days that are coming.  If the paladin had gone to the docks, the mage and rogue to the library, and the priest to the elders, each part would have played out completely differently, but possibly yielded the same results of finding the things the group as a whole needed to continue.

MMOs need this.  MMOs need two games.  One that encompasses the whole world and all the players with big dungeons and raids and guilds and… well, what we have now.   And they need to intersperse it with a class specific solo or small group game that caters to the class, the way single player RPGs can.  Many times in MMOs, I’m left feeling like a cog in a wheel, a box to be checked off on someone else’s spreadsheet.  Holy Spec Priest, check!  What it is missing are the elements that make me feel “Priest” or “Druid” instead of “Healing of an adequate level”, “Rogue” or “Hunter” instead of “DPS machine”.

If you are going to have Class…

Gaming

Personally, I think I would be much happier in an MMO without classes.  I’d rather a gear based system or a skill based system, and if you dig around here you can find all the reasons why (mostly it’s because I want to move toward getting away from “level” as a separator and the focus of play), notably this post last week.  But, if a game is going to have classes, I think I would prefer a game to simplify it at much as possible.

Rather than try to make a dozen classes, look at your combat design and build classes based off of it.  For example, let’s take the most popular design, the trinity.  Tank, DPS, heal.  Or, in other terms, taking, dealing and recovery.  Really, a game designed this way only needs three classes.  Four if you really want to split up melee based DPS and range/magic/whatever based DPS, but functionally they are the same.  If your game is going to have a small group of players potentially fighting groups of NPC enemies larger than their group, you might want to also have a crowd control class.

Once you establish your primary roles, those are your classes.  But to keep a game from being too samey, as your classes level, give them talent trees that allow the player to add flavor to their character.  In my opinion, the talent trees should essentially define a secondary role/class for the character.

For example, rather than having a warrior, a priest, and a paladin in your game, have only a warrior and a priest, then give the warrior a talent tree of priest-lite skills and the priest a tree of warrior-lite skills.  If your game only has three classes (your game is 100% trinity based), then a warrior would have two trees – a priest tree and a DPS tree.  Your priest would have warrior and DPS trees.  And your DPS would have warrior and priest trees.  The one thing you want to avoid, however, is having a tree that improves directly on the base class.  Warriors do not get a warrior tree.  The reason for this is to avoid having a clear “optimal path” for development.  In WoW, for example, if you search around you can probably find the mathematically proven superior talent tree build for a tanking warrior.  Any player who takes a “fun” skill over the optimal path may find themselves unable to get into some raiding guilds.  All max level warriors should be as good at being a warrior as every other max level warrior, the difference will be in their gear (theoretically available to everyone through effort or auction) and in their tree which doesn’t affect their ability to take damage, taunt enemies, and whatever else you’ve determined is the primary role of the warrior.

Primarily, I like this idea for it’s simplification of balance.  If you have one tanking class, you only need to adjust his ability to tank up or down and needed.  If you have a half dozen tanking/semi-tanking classes, now you have to make sure that semi-tank A isn’t better than tank B without making semi-tank A useless and all sorts of complicated gyrations just to keep all the plates spinning.

Anyway… those are just my thoughts.  I could be wrong.

Fantasy Fantasy MMO Again

Gaming

Last week, I posted about how I’d design/build a world for a fantasy MMO.  At the end I said I’d post about how I’d take EVE’s character design and use it in a fantasy setting.

I’ve posted a few times about not limiting your players in their choices, and in fact a little over a year ago I actually talked about EVE’s design in reference to Fallen Earth’s decision at the time not to have respecs.  What I like about EVE’s design is that you need skills to use equipment and your skill only matters while you are using your equipment.  Applied to a fantasy setting it would essentially be: you are what you wear.

A warrior isn’t a class.  A warrior is the ability to wear heavy armor, take damage, use a weapon and perhaps a shield, and taunting abilities.  A wizard isn’t a class.  A wizard is the ability to use reagents and focus through a staff or wand and cast spells.  And so on…

A fantasy game under the EVE model would allow every character to have every skill if they take the time to train it, but what skills matter and what you are able to do depends entirely on what you are wearing/using.  If you leave town wearing plate armor, a heavy club and shield and your taunts, you are a warrior.  If you leave town in a robe with a staff, a wand and a bag of potions and reagents, you are a wizard.

The main thing that attracts me to this model is that it encourages players to play less characters.  If you get tired of being a warrior, you just switch gear and start playing as a wizard.  If next week your guild still needs a warrior, you can just put back on your warrior gear from last week and immediately be the warrior you were.  While I understand that many people like making alternate characters, and this wouldn’t prevent them from doing so, I personally have never enjoyed the work that goes into making sure my friends know where to find me.  I’d much rather be messing around with lesser used skills on my main character and have my friends be able to find me easily, than to be logged in as another character and have them have to track me down.

Obviously, a design like this would need to take care in how it allows people to wear gear and how much they can carry with them.  Letting someone carry around a few alternate skill items to swap in special situations is great, but letting someone carry around a full set of gear that they are able to use a macro to swap allowing them to cast fireballs between enemy attacks while tanking would be a disaster, unless you want the game full of macroing tank-mages.

Then again, I prefer a crafting driven economy over a mob-kill-loot based one.  Adventurers should find materials to sell/trade to crafters to buy/trade for finished gear.  But that is for another post…

The Secondary Market

Gaming

It was April 9th of this year.  I went down to the bookstore at the first opportunity I’d had to pick up the latest of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books.  At the store there was a shelf right inside the door with about three or four dozen copies of the hardback.  I picked one up and flipped it over to make sure I had enough cash to buy it when suddenly I saw a second rack of books.  Above it was a sign for “Previously Owned Books” and on that shelf was a copy of the book I had in my hands, only instead of being $26 like the one I was holding, it was $20.  Sure, I had $30 on me and could afford to buy the new copy, but who doesn’t want to save $6?  I put the new copy down and picked up the used copy, bought it, and marched home with my new book to read.

The preceding paragraph isn’t true.  I’m not sure it could be.  Yeah, you can buy used books, but the number of times you’ll have the opportunity to buy a used copy of a hardcover book just three days after release is so small as to be non-existent.  But what am I getting at?

I posted a couple weeks ago about the issue that blew up the gaming sphere of the Internet.  Discussion has continued, and many people keep on trying to equate the sale of used games with the sale of used… well… anything else.  My book example above, I’ve never seen that happen.  I’ve also never seen someone buy a $30,ooo car, drive it for 2 or 3 days and then go sell it to CarMax for half the value so that CarMax can sell it for $28,000 (if anything, they’d return to the dealer and try to undo the sale and get a lot more of their money back).  Now, I’ve seen that happen with music CDs, but that’s because people buy, rip and then resell since they don’t need the CD anymore to enjoy the music, but that is a whole different issue.  We aren’t talking about people making illegal copies of games.  But speaking of games, I’ve known plenty of folks who will buy a game new, play it for 3 days, either finishing it or disliking it, and then sell it to Gamestop or some other used game reseller.  I have walked into a Gamestop just 2 or 3 days after the release of a new game and found used copies $5 to $10 cheaper than the new one sharing shelf space with the new copy.

The fact is, in most products with a healthy secondary market, that secondary market doesn’t have a large impact on the initial release and first month (or two) of sales, and that is really the meat of the matter.  Video games, in some respects, have such a short shelf life (except for the occasional blockbuster that bucks the norm) that anything which hurts that hurts the industry.  To combat that you have companies trying to offer multiplayer experiences that encourage the consumer to retain the game instead of reselling it, and one-time access codes that reduce the value of the game on resale.  And of course you have digital distribution models that prevent reselling altogether.

I think secondary markets are great, even vital, but I also think that the creators of a product need a reasonable amount of time to make their money before the secondary market kicks in and takes that away.  I don’t like the idea that game companies are looking for ways to eliminate or hamstring the used games market, but I also hate seeing places like Gamestop selling used games within that first month of release, knowing that’s it’s contributing to less profits for the creators (and more for the secondary market).

Eventually, I think the game companies will win, and destroy the secondary market with unlock codes and digital distribution.  Imagine a future where you buy a game for $60 and inside is a one-time code that you must enter to play the game.  If you buy the game used, it’s little more than a demo, giving you 30-60 minutes of play unless you buy an unlock code from the marketplace for $60 (perhaps a bit less… $50?  $40?) to open the rest of the game.  Suddenly, the used game would only have a limited value (the disc being needed in the drive to play), which kills the resale value.  Your $60 first purchase becomes a $5 resale that Gamestop can sell for $10… or maybe Gamestop can sell you the disc AND the unlock code for $60.  Who knows…

Luckily for me, I only buy games that I know that I’ll keep, and I don’t buy used games (if I want an older game, I’ll just buy in new when it drops to $20 on Amazon or at BestBuy).  But I do occasionally lend a game to a friend, or borrow one, and whatever they do will impact that as well.  We’ll just have to wait and see what they decide to do…

Dead Rising 2 – Case: 0

Gaming

Dead Rising 2 drops next week and I’m really looking forward to it.  Three weeks or so ago, the Xbox 360 got a nice little exclusive prequel called Case 0.  If you are familiar with the original Dead Rising, you’ll remember that the story unfolds as a series of cases, unlocking each successive chapter as you complete the one you are in.  This tightly made bonus for the 360 seems to fit in nicely, giving the new hero, Chuck Greene, a path to Las Vegas, the setting of the upcoming DR2.

The one thing I enjoy most about the Dead Rising series is the stark contrast it has with the Left 4 Dead series.  L4D is clearly a high octane shooter.  Sure, you occasionally try to silently tiptoe past a witch, but most of the zombies in that world are charging at you at full speed.  Running is rarely an option, you have to fight to live.  The DR games, on the other hand, are populated with shamblers, zombies that shuffle their feet, walk, and sometimes even *gasp* walk fast!  Running is almost always an option.  This leads to Dead Rising playing more like an RPG, especially given its levels and character development.

Back to Case 0… I bought it last week and I’ve been fooling around in the little road block town of the game and it has me really excited to play the full blown DR2 when it releases, and at the same time it also doesn’t just feel like a teaser.  It feels like a complete game on its own, probably the best $5 I’ve ever spent in the marketplace.  And with the announcement of Case West coming to the 360 sometime after DR2’s launch, I imagine that’ll be a well spent $5 too.  If only all games in the Xbox Live Arcade could be this good.  Hell, if Capcom decided to just release a new mini game as good as Case 0 set in the Dead Rising universe every month, I’d be thrilled.

Anyway… if you liked the original Dead Rising and you still have a 360, I highly recommend Case 0.