emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998…
As seen over on Fidget last week, Zombies!!!, the board game where you try to survive a zombie apocalypse, is coming to the Xbox Live Arcade (and the PS3 and PC, via Steam, but I don’t care about them).
I may never get my dream of a Dead Rising 2, but hey, beggers can’t be choosers. Â Zombies rule!
Welcome to October 1st, and to our first installment of 30 Days of Game. Â This is where I play a game for roughly a month, and then review it.
First up: Travian. Â From their own page…
Travian is a browser game featuring a world with thousands of other real players. One begins the game acting as a chief of a tiny village.
To get a decent idea of what the game is like, I suggest running through the tutorial. Â It only takes a minute.
Basically, you start with an empty village surrounded by resources. Â You place your town hall and then get to building. Â Each resource field (woodcutter, clay pit, iron mine, cropland) produces a set amount of its resource, which you can increase by building up the level of the resource. Â In town, on the various plots, you can build a variety of buildings, from armories and stables to warehouses and crannies (for hiding resources from attackers). Â As you construct buildings and upgrade them, you unlock new troop types and other abilities. Â Eventually, you can raid and even conquer other players. Â Yes, its a PvP game.
Its like a real time strategy game, only slower. Â Every building, upgrade or troop training takes resources and time. Â And while each building’s ability is independent (can be researching new armor, new weapons, training foot soldiers, horsemen and building siege devices all at the same time), setting your people to work on building or resource upgrades are only allowed one at a time. Â So you need to plan, which buildings do you need first? Â Do you go offense and raid other players for supplies or do you go defense and protect against other raiders?
You can join alliances with other players which allows you access to a private message board on the site for your alliance. Â And each server is generally allowed to run for 300 days (100 for speed games) before it resets and starts over. Â So, yes, this is not your traditional neverending MMO grind. Â The game has a finish, and leaderboards, and enough servers that you can pretty much always guarantee that one is going to restart soon or has recently restarted, so there is less worry about jumping in and being so far behind the curve that you can’t possibly win.
Now, technically, I’ve been playing for more than 30 days, because I couldn’t think of a new game to start and I was already playing this one.  However, I’m enjoying what I am now referring to as a Lazy Time Strategy game.  Early on, when build times on things were very short and didn’t cost too much, I visited many times a day to keep my peasants working.  Lately, I visit two, maybe three, times a day, trading goods with other players and kicking off my next project or sending out armies to do my bidding.  Through my alliance I have heard other players talk about getting bombarded and overrun, but I haven’t had any trouble with that just yet, and I might not before the server resets.  I am just now getting to the point where I might be able to found a second city, which took longer than it would have if I’d gone straight for it.
Travian isn’t a deeply enthralling game, but I definitely think it is one I am going to continue playing because it is enjoyable and doesn’t require a dedicated hardcore player to enjoy it, although I am sure more hardcore players could find something in this game – be it min/maxing the build orders, or just crushing your neighbors.
The purpose of this post is simple: If I were to design an MMO for a MechWarrior game, how would I approach it? Please feel free to point out my flaws, add your own thoughts, or propose your own designs.
If I had to tackle this as a game designer, I don’t think I would bother trying to do any kind of class or archtype system beyond possibly giving some initial choice of a small (2-5%) bonus in certain skills. But then, what would I do?
First off, I would completely and absolutely separate character level from character power. As a player does things in the game, be it quests, or crafting, or combat (both PvE and PvP), they would earn experience which would go toward a “rank”. I’d probably steal ranks from the military, and for each rank I’d have a few mini-levels inside, like to move from Private to Private First Class you might only fill the exp bar once, but going from something like Sergeant Major to Second Lieutenant you might have to fill it 5 times signifying the harder jump from Noncommissioned Officer to Commissioned Officer. This level would largely be a measure of how much ass you have kicked, but without a real relation to the power of the character. Meeting a Brigadier General on the field as a Colonel doesn’t mean he’s going to win, it just means he’s been doing this longer or more than you.
Second, I would tie the player’s power into sort of an “item level” system. As a MechWarrior, you pilot a Mech (giant powered robot armor), and if you like your wrist mounted pulse lasers, the more you use them, the more experience you earn with them, and you’ll level up your wrist mounted pulse laser skill which directly would affect your accuracy with the lasers, but indirectly would allow you to use more complicated and intricate wrist mounted pulse lasers. On the other hand, if you prefered wrist mounted welders and repair kits, you’d get similar skill levels, but with wrist mounted welders and repair kits instead of lasers. The key here being, if you can level up both if you want to spend the time, but you can only have one equiped when you leave the garage.
In a way, this would mirror Eve Online’s system of skills and things you can attach to your ship and which ships you can drive, but without the forced delay of a strictly time based advancement system. Think of Eve but also being able to actively grind out the skill instead of logging out one day and coming back a week later when Frigate level 5 is done training.
Anyway, as will the item skills, there would also be rig skill. Items attach to slots on your rig, rigs come in various shapes and sizes. As the game expands, more and different rigs could be added, new items and item groups, specialized items.
Because experience given is based on usage (you plus item used plus target of item use times the success of the usage in some formula), there would be no need formalize grouping or raid structures for the dividing of experience points, so groups would end up being just communications channels. Then you could even add in skills and items to support “hacking” so that you can “tap in” to an enemy’s chat, and of course to monitor for taps and counter them.
I think the entirety of the game would be PvP. The beginning focus would be on One on One gladiator style combat, expanding into Two on Two, Five on Five, 3 or more Teams, Free for All or whatever. Then, just like they have for first person shooter and racing games (or for that matter, World of Warcraft’s Battlegrounds), you can add “mission” types. Capture the Flag, King of the Hill, Marked Man/Escort, anything you can think of. In fact, the game might go so far as to run contests for player designed submissions for maps and rulesets.
If a “larger” game is needed for people to play, you can make a robust guild system having people swear allegience to an army and fight for them in massive battles. The guilds/armies can build their own bases, run scrimmages for themselves or against other teams. Blending that in with the “missions” from above, you can actually throw in leader boards and seasons to turn them from random battles into an organized sport.
Outside of the Mechs, players would have an avatar, a character, to run around “the city” in, to meet up with other people and talk. Or not… you could also go the route of EVE Online and just have an avatar image, a picture of you, with no animation (although, even EVE is adding in stuff for people to walk around space stations). The world outside of the combat zones becomes just a simple chatroom. If you really wanted to get crazy, you could even drop the text and have it all be voice chat. If you did that, and made the game playable with a controller, you might even get an MMO you could run on a console, cross platform even.
So there, in a completely un-fleshed out outline is what I would do for an MMO based around a MechWarrior style mythos. Â Feel free to comment…
A better day of panels… I got to see SOE demonstrate FreeRealms, which, in the simplest terms, is Puzzle Pirates on steroids and crossing genres. It definitely is something I am going to look into, and at the price (free), why not?
Force of Arms, a mechanized armor fighting MMO being built on the Multiverse system, has a lot of potential. However, right now, potential seems to be what it has the most of, and everything about the actual game play seems to not be nailed down just yet.
On the other hand, Champions Online, looks like it is going to be City of Heroes squared… at least. The two gents who showed off the game left me feeling really good about this one.
I took some time to go through the dealers’ and exhibitors’ halls… and it was pretty much the same. The same dealers with the same stuff for sale, the same exhibitors with the same products. Oh, there were some new items here and there, but nothing really to blow one’s shirt up.
And then the nightlife began.
The planned events by the Con were fairly normal… and like normal they were hum-drum. The Colonial Fleet party for Battlestar Galactica was alright, with it’s 80’s soundtrack… it got better when some of the cast showed up. The Shindig for Firefly was boring. But later in the evening, the BSG fans had a party of their own on the 10th floor of the Marriott, and those cats know how to throw down.
Yeah, the day is for panels, but the night belongs to the parties… its what the Con is all about. It would be a shame if they ever tried to move to a convention center and lost the hotel party nightlife.
Let’s be honest… asking if any game is the killer of any other game is stupid. No game in MMO history has ever killed any other game, simply because very few of them are actually dead. And of the ones that are, most of them killed themselves by not being very good.
However, that said, it is possible that a game could, by releasing and being similar to an existing game but different enough to warrant another game, steal enough of the population of the original game that the original game might be declared dead on a technicality. And by that I mean that the numbers officially shrink to the “die hard fans of the game who will never ever leave until you wipe their hard drives with powerful magnets and rips their keyboards from their cold dead hands” population who will stay and new subscriptions will be few and far between, if any at all.
Warhammer Online, in that respect, is not, and will never be a World of Warcraft killer. As similar as the play styles of the game may be, through interfaces and other measures, the bulk “goal” of the games are different. In WoW, no matter how many arenas and battlegrounds they release, PvE raiding is the ultimate goal of the game. Not hardcore raiding necessarily, but with Wrath of the Lich King’s supposed focus on 10 man scaled instances allowing raid groups to play through the same content as a 25 man raid but with lesser difficulty (tuned for 10 instead of 25) and reward, it is clear that WoW is primarily a PvE game. WAR on the other hand, by all beta accounts, supports PvE fairly well, but the end game, the goal, is really the PvP/RvR aspects. That change of focus in the late stage game, from WoW’s PvE raiding to WAR’s RvR conflicts, will appeal to entirely different groups of people.
If WAR is going to kill anything, its going to be Dark Age of Camelot that it steps on. From all accounts, this game, WAR, is taking many of the best elements of WoW (UI ease of use, etc) and applying them to the best elements of DAoC (realm versus realm conflicts) and then throwing in a few new elements (Public Quests). Looking at the features list of WAR, and perusing the screenshots and videos and information pooring out after the NDA lifted, unless you are a die-hard fan of DAoC’s lore or have a PC that can’t run better than DAoC, there seems to be no reason not to ditch DAoC for WAR.
So… is WAR the DAoC killer?
Welcome, welcome to the 7th installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
Topic: Does every game need to be a grade-A blockbuster title? Would you be willing to play more average games or should every game shoot for the 10.0 rating?
The problem with aiming a game for a rating is that ratings are subjective. What one person, or one group, considers to be a 10 out of 10, another person, or group, might consider to be only a 7, or worse. As huge of a success that World of Warcraft is, there are in fact people who don’t play it. There are *gasp* people who don’t like WoW.
The main issue I think that shooting for “WoW numbers” causes is that it fails to properly manage expecations. (If you read my blog long enough, you’ll see that managing expectations is a common theme in most things I talk about.) If you have a game that is set in a genre that even given the “best” game it could possibly be is likely to only attract 200,000 users, if you spend money like its going to clear a million or more, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Personally, I like seeing a variety of games come to market rather than seeing one game or game style dominate. As Richard Bartle infamously said, “I’d close WoW.” or something to that effect. The question of this month’s topic is misleading. Would I be willing to play “more average games”? Who decides what is more average? I just want to play more games, to have more options. If companies dump all their cash into less games seeking WoW or GTA numbers, then no matter how “good” those games may be, I think the industry and gamers on the whole will suffer.
So, no, I don’t think every game needs to be a “top of the line” title. I think they need to approach each game as unique and manage accordingly, so that variety can flourish, because variety is better than dominance and stagnation.
Check out these other Blog Banter articles! Zath!, Delayed Responsibility, Silvercublogger, Crazy Kinux, Gamer-Unit, Unfettered Blather, MasterKitty, Game Couch, XboxOZ360, Omnivangelist, Lou Chou Loves You.
I’m starting up a new category here at the blog: 30 Days of Game.
The topic of this category is going to be to review a game I have played for 30 days. The idea came to me quite some time ago, but to be honest the thought of buying a bunch of games, or even one a month, just to play and review them, no matter how much they sucked, was unappealing. So, until game companies are willing to send me 30 day free trials, I am going to stick to games that are free to play.
I want to start this in September, after I return from Dragon*Con, with my review coming in on the last day of the month. That said, I need some candidates, some recommendations.
Previously on this site I have reviewed Urban Dead and Mafia Matrix (a new review of that one is coming, since I am considering quitting), so those two are out, because I want to approach 30 Days of Game games as a new player. For right now, I do want to stick to free to play MMOs, so, if you know of one you think I should give a shot, post it here in the comments or email me at jason (at) probablynot (dot) com.
Not too long ago, on the Conquer Club website, they implemented a new system for player ratings. Previously it had been based on an eBay style positive/neutral/negative scale with a comment. You simply voted weather your experience playing them was positive, negative, or neither and then said something like “played all his turns in a timely manner” or “excellent team mate, worked well together” or “stupid dumbass only attacked his own team”. Anyway, they switch over to a 4 stat 5 star rating system. If you don’t care to follow the link, the short version is that after you play someone you can leave them a rating which is a rating from 0 (no rating given) to 5 (excellent) stars in 4 categories: Fair Play, Attendance, Attitude, Teamwork. And the rating isn’t revealed until the game goes into the archive (no more ratings can be made on that game).
Going back to the eBay style ratings system, I hated it on eBay, largely because it was heavily retaliatory. I once bought my wife a cello on eBay. I didn’t buy the best model out there, I just wanted to get her a practice cello so she could start playing again (seriously, I’m not going to spend five grand on anything for anyone if there is a chance its just going to sit in the corner collecting dust). The one I bought arrived and the bridge was not set up, which I expected. What I did not expect was to wind up driving around to about two dozen music stores in an attempt to get someone to set up the bridge and have none of them willing to work on it because it was an “off brand” they didn’t sell or support. I ended up setting it up myself, and did a very poor job of it, and after I gave it to my wife we finally found a music shop where someone relented and set up the bridge and tuned it. So, I went to eBay and left a review of my purchase experience. I was limited by the number of characters, but I said, “sale and shipment fine, but cello was ‘off brand’ and most music stores would not set up bridge or tune it.” and I gave him a neutral review. To which, he replied by giving me a negative review that said “clueless user, DO NOT SELL TO HIM AND DO NOT BUY FROM HIM, liar and cheat!” Now, because this was the only review I had, I ended up over the next 6 months unable to buy anything. All my bids were refused. The entire time, I was talking to the cello guy trying to get him to change his review. I had been totally honest and had not given him a negative review, I just felt that anyone who purchased his items might want to know about difficulty getting service on those items. Finally he relented and changed the review to neutral saying, “inexperienced eBay user, expects to get more than he pays for”. After having a few more bids of my dropped, I just stopped using eBay.
As this relates to Conquer Club… well, I played a game with some people and I rated most of them 3 out 5 in most categories, except attendance in which case missing zero turns got people a 5, the occasional missed turn got a 4 or 3, and every player who dead beat (missed three turns in a row and was kicked from the game) got a 1. Once the games got locked down and ratings were revealed, I got a flood of private messages from people complaining about getting a 3. But looking at the rating scale:
0 means No Rating. Or in other words, I don’t feel like I can judge you on this.
1 means Bad. A rating of 1 means you sucked at whatever it was.
2 means Below Average. This means you performed worse than I would expect.
3 means Average. Meaning you performed as expected.
4 means Above Average. You exceeded my expectations.
5 means Excellent. You are awesome.
In most cases, people are Average. To get Above Average in Attitude, for example, you just need to be gracious when you lose… or win. To get Excellent, you need to also chat and be a good natured guy. If you are silent the entire game, I cannot give you anything other than Average because there is nothing to base it on. The ratings are from Bad to Excellent, not from I Want To Kill Them to Didn’t Piss Me Off. There is a phrase where they call something “going above and beyond” and this is what they mean, you have to go Above and Beyond the Average to get better than an Average rating.
The problem is, people don’t see it that way. 3 out of 5 is a 50%, its halfway, and 50% is failing. Most user based rating systems end up being all but useless for the same reason. People being rated expect to be given the highest score possible unless there is a problem, and even then most of them want to still get the highest score possible after explaining or fixing the problem through other channels. People rating others get pulled into the retaliation loop where they are giving higher ratings than they should because they don’t want to be rated poorly themselves. And then most importantly, the site/game/whatever that is using the rating system, if they allow comments, usually have the length limited to the point where meaningful comments are not allowed.
I don’t know if there is any solution… you want to have the ratings to assist you in avoiding problem users, but the ratings can be, and are being, gamed so you don’t even know if a problem user is really a problem user.
The first thing to note when talking about Evolution versus Revolution in games is passion. If a player is passionate about the game he plays, he will strive to make everything about a new game sound as if it is only “more of the same” with some Evolution thrown in. If a player is passionate about the forthcoming game, he will strive to make everything sound as if it is all Revolution over the old games and that nothing is “more of the same”.
I’ve read a number of posts claiming that Public Quests in the upcoming Warhammer game are a Revolution. But it all depends on how you look at it. On one hand, I can see the Revolution aspect because it is encouraging random social behavior in a PvE environment, which most games actually tend to discourage through spawn locking and quests being individualized. (Its good to note here that while in World of Warcraft, only the quest holder gains the rewards of a quest completed, from the beginning, City of Heroes has always rewarded group members for assisting in completing another person’s quest by giving them a chunk of exp as well as many times giving them badges and/or enhancement rewards.) But, on the other hand, the Public Quest system, to me, looks like someone took Alterac Valley from World of Warcraft’s Battlegrounds, made one side entirely NPCs and tweaked the mini-quests in the zone. In fact, WoW could easily implement Public Quests that way, by taking Battleground style content and making in PvE, assigning rewards based on participation, similar to what they do now in their PvP versions. Whether you see the item as Evolution or Revolution, in my opinion, seems to be dependent entirely on how hard you are chomping and the bit to play Warhammer.
And Warhammer isn’t alone here. World of Warcraft wasn’t Revolutionary either, except in its broader market appeal, which could be considered just an Evolution of the trend seen in games that came prior: UO, EQ, etc. But plenty of people do consider WoW to be Revolutionary, either for that reason or because it was finally a fantasy MMO “done right” or some other basis.
The real question, rather than if something is Evoltionary or Revolutionary, is “Is it fun?” Looking at Public Quests, it addresses the one thing I have found a problem with in games since EverQuest: encourages people to be social. WoW has its raids, but outside that, you and four friends can do pretty much everything in the game. In fact, you can play the entire game from level 1 to level 70 without ever talking to or grouping with another person. In my experience, WoW is the most “silent” game I have ever played. People don’t talk, people don’t do pick up groups… most of the social activity is based in and around guild raids and battlegrounds, both of which in many cases are a minority of the players yelling at the majority of the players to do things. So, I probably will pick up Warhammer, but I’m not expecting it to be some huge revolution in gaming… just an evolution backwards toward players actually playing with each other more.
Always looking for sources of things to talk about, I’ve joined up with a group of other bloggers to do a monthly blog banter topic where we all post on the same subject.
Welcome, welcome to the 6th installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
Topic: Digital distribution of games vs. buying physical boxes and discs, which do you prefer and why?
If you had asked me this question years ago, my answer would have been physical boxes with no hesitation, as my closet full of game boxes will attest. But then again, years ago, digital downloading could be iffy. Downloading a game once from some random website wouldn’t guarantee that you could get the game again later if you needed to.
That’s the main reason I always went for the physical box. Once I have the box, as long as I don’t lose it, I can install and play that game whenever I want. Every once in a while, I’ll pull out one of those boxes even now and throw down with an hour or two of Myst or Evil Genius or some other game you may not be able to find in stores anymore.
Of course, many of those games I own boxes for are available on GameTap now, so I don’t need my box, I just need to keep my $59.95 a year subscription active and I can play any of their 1000+ games whenever I want, on any machine I install the GameTap client on. I’m a proud user of Steam, where I get my occasional fix of Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 (games I don’t own boxes for) among others. And with my Xbox360, well, I don’t fear Microsoft going out of business anytime soon, so I buy downloadable content through them, which I can always redownload.
But back to that main reason… being able to install and play any time I want. If EA has their way, that’ll be a thing of the past. SecuROM is actually going to make me not purchase Spore, a game I have been dying to play, because its some of the most idiotic copy protection I have ever heard about. Similar problems crept up when Bioshock was released, the copy protection invalidating the game, which could be avoided by either getting the console version or by going through Steam.
I guess in the end, what I am saying it… assuming the source for the digital distribution will stick around, or that I can burn my own copy of the download for safe keeping, I don’t mind not getting a physical box anymore.
Check out these other Blog Banter articles! Living Epic, Silvercublogger, Mahogany Finish, Video Game Sandwich, thoughts and rants, XboxOZ360, Zath!, Delayed Responsibility, Gamer Unit, Hawty McBloggy, Triage Effect.