Tag: World of Warcraft

Crafting and Mini-games

Gaming

I could swear I’ve posted about using mini-games for tradeskills before, but damned if I can’t find it. Not here, not on blogs I frequent, not on message boards I visit.

In any event, what I’ve posted before is that I don’t agree with either extreme. World of Warcraft’s click and create method is just so lifeless, no skill required at all. Then there are games like EQ2 which required you to “battle” your crafting every single time (no idea if this has changed, but that’s how it was when I last played).

What I think I would love to see is a system where a mini-game is used to set a “quality” bar, or several to set several bars, and then click and create to actually craft the items. Expertise in the mini-game would equate to better crafting, but once set you wouldn’t have to play over and over just to make items if you are happy with the items you are making.

Anyway, not going in to much depth here, just a broad stroke idea… thoughts?

Urban Dead – Revisited

Random Thoughts

Nearly three months ago, I mentioned a game by the name of Urban Dead. At the time, I checked it out, messed around one day and then dismissed it. I just wasn’t interested in a web based text adventure.

Things change.

I have been checking out all sorts of games since my recent abandonment of all my usual MMO haunts. With City of Heroes/Villains and World of Warcraft canceled and Lord of the Rings Online only holding on by the skin of its founder price, I really wanted something low impact that I could just play at now and then without investing any time (since any time I invest will be in beta tests or my 360). I stumbled back on Urban Dead and decided to give it a go, this time from both sides of the fence.

Everything in the game is controlled through Action Points, which you earn at the rate of 1 per half hour and you max out at 50. As a survivor, walking from one block to the next costs 1 point, and so does just about everything else. Searching, attacking, talking, entering buildings, etc. As one of the undead, walking takes 2 points per block, at least until you get enough experience points to buy the Lurching Gait skill that allows you to move as fast as the living. The limit of points you get per day means you have to keep track of where you are and how long it will take you to get back to safety. The living don’t want to get caught outside, the dead don’t want to wind up standing alone near lots of people. Really, this is where the strategy of the game comes in.

While the game does contain “levels” and skills that you purchase with your experience points, there isn’t, at least for me, a huge rush to max out and get to the top because this game has no “end game”, its just about survival.

I’m really enjoying the game far more than I thought I originally would, and its totally worth the cost… free. If you decide to check it out, I’m Jhaer on the living side and Reahj on the dead side.

Playing Well With Others

Gaming

Many moons ago, some friends and I all agreed to pool our money and buy network cards for our PCs. Coaxial token ring cards to do an ad-hoc IPX network. All for the purpose of playing DOOM. We would actually load up our computers in the trunks of our cars and drive over to one person’s house, throw together our network, and spend all night playing, laughing and eating pizza.

It was during these gaming sessions that I was introduced to a little game called Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. We all bought copies and our game nights shifted from DOOM to splitting time between DOOM and Warcraft. It was great, and like the FPS game, the two factions of Warcraft were pretty much equal in design, all that mattered was random luck and a little player skill. When to hold back, when to charge. Warcraft II continued that trend, mostly, and we played the heck out of it.

Then came Starcraft. But it was different than the other games in that the sides were not equal. Supposedly there was balance, but since the units were different, they developed different strategies, and often times defending against an enemy’s attack strategy meant playing to your weaknesses while they played to their strengths. In online play, you either agreed that no one played the Zerg, or everyone played the Zerg because they were strong when the other races were weak. The Zergling rush was very effective and while at the beginning it was considered a cheap tactic, it eventually became a part of standard play with people devising rush strategies for the other two sides. And rush tactics began to invade Warcraft II and Total Annihilation, would become a part of Warcraft III and every RTS game around.

I hated rushing. I liked to settle in and build out units so that we could have later, larger tactical wars that ranged all over. Its not that I couldn’t rush, I could, but I just didn’t like it. It ended the game too quick and utilized so little of the game. Among friends we would set timers and say “No fighting for the first ten minutes.” or something like that, but online, it was nothing but rushing.

Real Time Strategy games were not the only place I ran into this sort of thing. Over in the First Person Shooter world, circle strafing had taken over. Running a circle around a person at high speed (sometimes while jumping, moving in impossible ways), all the while with them unable to reliably target you. Thankfully this was less prevalent in Team Fortress, which I has started playing exclusively. Death Match and regular CTF were closed to me, like with rushing in the RTS games, I could circle strafe, I just thought it was stupid.

When EverQuest came out, I looked forward to the idea of settling back and playing a table top RPG in a 3D world. I’d actually enjoyed UO, even PvP in UO, and this looked to be like a step up. But EQ attracted the FPS crowd, and flaws in (or a simple lack of) game design allowed circle strafe jumping to take over the PvP side of the game. Again, I could do it, I just thought it was lame. Honestly, have you ever tried holding a sword, running around a target in a circle, jumping repeatedly AND successfully hitting that target? Its nearly impossible to hit, and even if you hit that is going to be very little power in that swing. Even now in World of Warcraft, the Battlegrounds are ruled in melee range by circle strafe jumping morons.

One of my more recent addictions (which I recently realized I’ve been playing for over a year) is Conquer Club. Its basically RISK online, but with a couple dozen or so maps, some with very different rules. Playing random pickup games, I run about a 33% win ratio. I’m happy with that. However, I’m a little envious of some of the people there who have regular teammates and work together to develop strategies. So, last week I hooked up with a guy I’d recently won a game with and we decided to play 6 games together as a team. We created the games on Thursday, and in less than 2 days, we’ve already lost 2 of them. In both games we lost to the same strategy. I spent some time looking around and have found, like rushing and circle strafing, this tactic has become prevalent in the team game world on Conquer Club. I don’t like it. I don’t want to play games this way. It makes the games short, and usually ignores any rules of the map… to me, its cheap. Sure, I could do it too, the strategy isn’t that hard, but I don’t want to. Luckily, the strategy only works in team games, so all I need to do is avoid games against prearranged teams.

Overall, all these strategies boil down to one thing that I don’t like… the best defense for them is to use them yourself. Using any of these tactics dumbs down the game and removes nuance. Both teams are now fighting exactly the same way and the only factors remaining are “luck of the dice” and who can execute the strategy faster. I can respect when someone executes a thoughtful attack and forces me to change my plans to react, but I just find it distasteful when the strategy they use is a trump card: I either lose, or I play the game exactly like them.

Can this be fixed? Should this be fixed?

I don’t know… but I do know that slowly it is driving me away from real time multi player games and more toward single player and turn based games with clearly defined rules of game play. You can find me on Xbox Live playing Catan, Carcassonne, Uno and others.

Together Alone, Alone Together

Gaming

Over at the nerfbat, Ryan adds another lesson, this one about Solo Content not being a bad thing.

He is right, in his way. Solo content isn’t bad, and personally I think that every game should have solo content. But to what degree?

One of the major issues you will run into here is that solo content will actually affect your entire game design and reverberate through your community. Take World of Warcraft as the 800 lb. example. Pre-Burning Crusade, soloing to level 60 was easy. Anyone could do it given enough time at the willingness to do so, with any class. But, if you only played solo content, you were viably limited to solo and small group content. Even if you did instances now and then, or even were hardcore at the five man instances, when it came to open PvP or the battlegrounds you were completely outclassed by raiders. The gear obtained from raids was head and shoulders above the rest of the gear in the game, to the point that raiders could have nearly double the hitpoints, resistances and damage output. Unless you were a perfect assassin type circle strafing PvPer, you almost could not win. Most games on the market are like this because of the weight that items carry, they are item-centric designs.

Post-Burning Crusade, it got better… the “crap drops” from “trash mobs” and easy quests were nearly equivalent to raid gear from the Pre-BC era. Of course, as people explore the raids of BC, the disparity is re-emerging because the game is designed for raiders to get better rewards than anyone else.

Of course, you could try to solve this problem by giving soloers and raiders the same gear rewards… but then your raiders would complain, or they simply wouldn’t bother with raiding since the organization and trials of doing so earn them nothing better than they could get in a group on a lazy Saturday afternoon. As a non-raider myself, I would not mind this in the least, but there are people who would.

The flaw here is in attempting to cater to many play styles AND have those play styles interact. Each style is rewarded differently, and those differences become glaringly aparent when the styles clash.

The solution? Smaller, more focused games… or move away from item-centered designs. I really think that the Xbox 360 is on to something with its achievement system. Games need kill sheets, titles and trinkets. Adornment to show that you’ve done raid X or killed monster Y or cleansed the world of Z hundred creatures or completed quest chain A or defeated W other players in combat. We need more rewards that don’t affect game balance, things that show what you’ve done without making you capably better than players who haven’t.

Pete and Re-Pete

Gaming

Pete and Re-Pete were paddling a canoe when Pete fell out, who was left in the canoe?
-first grade humor

Now take a moment to consider that. If you don’t get that joke, please, please… stop reading my blog. Encapsulated in that joke is the one thing that really irritates me most about MMOs. Just the other night in World of Warcraft, my group and I went off to collect the heads of some thieves. Now, when we killed each of the offending people and take their heads, my suspension of disbelief allows me to equate that fact that each of us gets a head to be taken as we have evidence of the head, or since we all plan to go back together that there is really only one head that we share. Of course, one of our group had killed them and taken their heads and turned them in for the reward two days prior.

People in EverQuest used to make jokes… “Oh thank you!” quest giver Sarah tells you. “You found my mother’s locket!” She tosses it over her shoulder into a box full of identical lockets.

I realize that designed content is limited, and players will exhaust content faster than it can be created, so I’m not sure what the answer is here… except to stop generating content. The one thing that EVE Online does better than any other game I have played is to encourage you to get involved in PvP. Honestly, unless you really enjoy playing the economy game of buying and selling goods (I have a friend who makes a billion isk a month and rarely ever leaves his hanger), or grinding the same twenty missions over and over, there isn’t anything else to do. Of course, EVE Online is a niche game.

And that comes to the real point… its one I’ve made before and will continue to make: the world needs more niche games. We need more companies who plan properly and would be happy with fifty to one-hundred thousand players, maybe less, maybe more. We need more companies who actively do NOT want to be the next big thing.

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.

Aradune is Stinky

Gaming

I am seriously considering remove the Vanguard link from the probablynot main page. Seriously.

In case you missed it, Brad has been dropping mini-videos of gameplay on their forums. You can get some of them from Ten Ton Hammer, or you can go straight to the V:SoH forums.

In short… Brad has done it again, almost exactly. The game looks like EverQuest, with a touch of World of Warcraft and the graphics engine of EQ2. For something that is supposed to be a next generation game, its looking to be a last generation game that requires a next generation investment.

The NPCs seem to all just stand around, rigid. Sure, most games are that way, but that’s the point… you can’t claim to be next gen if you don’t improve anything, and requiring me to upgrade my computer isn’t improving anything. The combat looks to be just like every other combat around these days… auto-attack and some button mashing. I thought there was supposed to be this whole chained attacks and opportunities thing going on, but if its there he doesn’t show it in these videos. One thing of note during the combat… notice the way the group stands… tank in front, everyone else to the back and sides. I assume this means we will see more of the EQ game mechanics of NPCs with area attacks that you have to avoid by being out of the forward arc. Boring. Age of Conan impressed me with its model interactivity (player and monster actually making contact, a grapple move actually grappling the opponent), but Vanguard is sticking with the everyone is independant method of animation. So I could look forward to huge mobs with large bounding boxes whom I don’t have to actually be near to hit as long as I’m in range of his hit box. *sigh*

If this is all Brad has to offer, I’ve got no reason at all to stop playing WoW and plunk down the money for a new PC.

Thanks to Heartless Gamer for the heads up on the future of tedium.

Stay Classy

Gaming

Over at the Zen of Design, a post has been made and hopefully a violent and bloody discussion will ensue. The post is about Classes in MMOs.

Somewhere around my room I’ve got a document I started about class design. See, I really hate the way many games implement classes. You make one choice, at creation, and you are stuck. A warrior is a warrior, a cleric is a cleric. You are what you are and so is everyone else. Basically, EverQuest. World of Warcraft managed to do one better and essentially each class is actually three classes since you can choose to focus your talent points in one of three trees. I like this flexibility, so much so that I play a shadow priest in WoW… that’s a priest who is okay at healing, but better at dealing damage. I love it.

Back to my document. The idea I had for class design involved giving the players more on an illusion of control. What you would do is group skills together into sets, or schools as I called them. All melee weapons would be in a melee combat school, wearing armor and armor types falls into the defence school, healing arts both magic and non-magic fall into a healing school, and so on. In the end I had 6 or 7 schools that covered most things. Then each player would choose the ranks of his schools. They could put defence first, and melee combat second… making them a warrior… putting healing third might make them a minor paladin type, if they went defence then healing and melee combat third that would be a major paladin, healing first then defence then melee makes them a cleric, healing/melee/defence makes them a healing monk, melee/healing/defence makes them a fighting monk… and so on, involving all the schools. At first glance this looks like a ridiculous amount of freedom for the players, but in reality it is a very finite number of “classes” and all balance can be approached from that angle. No need to worry about someone maxing healing and melee and defence and damage spell casting because its not possible, if fact the ranking can inherantly reduce the effectiveness of the skills in that school, and since everyone will have to place one school at the lowest rank it means that everybody will suck at something.

Essentially, all I’m really saying is… totally unrestricted skill systems are bad, and totally rigid class systems are bad. A good system is just floating somewhere in the middle, a nice balance between player freedom and developer control.

One Character

Gaming

Would you play an MMORPG that only allowed you one charcter?

I’ve been thinking about this alot lately, mostly because I strive for a little “identity” in games. I am Ishiro in the World of Warcraft, and Ishiro is me. So far in games I’ve never run into another Ishiro (but I don’t play asian games), and only one Ishira. That means, more than likely, if you are in WoW and see Ishiro, its a pretty good bet it is me. The problem comes in with if I tire of being an alliance human priest on Durotan, or a horde undead warlock on Eitrigg, or any of the other Ishiros I have out there, I can’t change him without deleting him and starting over.

I think this is why, more and more as I think about fundamental game design, I favor a skill based system of some sort, where everyone starts exactly the same and becomes different through the choices of skills. The advantage, of course, is that if the game allows me to redistribute skill points or simply to focus on new different skills, I can be an all new person but without the crazy item swapping of class based mechanics where I have to delete my character, or the complete identity overhaul of playing a new name.

Now… take that desire to play one identity and take that to a physical limitation of being only allowed to create a single character in the game world. Again, I think I’d be in favor of it as long as my character worked like I’ve described above, where my fate isn’t decided at character creation and the only way to change is to dust off and nuke the site from orbit.

So yeah, that appears to be the direction I’d like to see games go, and the direction I’m going to take my silly Game That Never Was project.

Memory and Grouping

Gaming

Tobold, whose blog I’m reading more and more, made a couple of really interesting posts recently.

The first post is about repetition in game design. Basically, lots of MMORPG games are designed around the “fail and repeat” methodology. You fight, you lose, you try again with gathered knowledge. This can be great if you are the first, but once guides get put on the internet, chances are your guild is trying to learn the fox trot instead of inventing new dance moves.

I agree with Tobold in that games need more unique content. And by unique I don’t mean cramming a hundred developers in a room and refusing to feed them until they create a hundred unique dungeons, but instead games need a way to have content such that if you fail you can’t just repeat it, but instead it will learn from your failure or have a random set of possible design parts that combine upon spawning, if you kill all a bosses henchmen, they should have different henchmen when you return, not the same guys standing in the same places. But this isn’t something really easily done… there is a problem in that games that have tried to use randomly generated content feel randomly generated, and no one really likes RPG games that feel tossed together. They should feel like the tasks you are undertaking are important.

His second post about grouping in games details exactly one of the major issues that I have in World of Warcraft. The problem with grouping is in actually finding a group (well, not for me, I play a priest, I have half the server on ignore). So his conclusion is thus:

But even more effective would be for the developers to introduce tools that diminish the group finding time. World of Warcraft could make huge improvements in their looking for group tools. And meeting stones could be reprogrammed to work like a warlock summoning, so the first three people arriving at the dungeon could summon the two stragglers. The beauty of such changes would be that at first sight they don’t change the rewards rate at all. But by cutting down on the rewards lost to a group due to waiting, improved group finding and gathering tools would make grouping relatively more attractive to players, and lead to more positive social interaction between them. We are not a bunch of hermits preferring to play alone, it is the parameters of the game that influence our behavior and preference for soloing or grouping.

And that’s it. WoW needs a looking for group tool beyond the meeting stones, which most people won’t use anyway because they don’t want to be in queue so long that the game decides to make weird groups.