Tobold the Astronomer views the galaxy of n-dimensional possibility space of MMOGs and sees the clustering; Keen the Traveller sees great distances as he moves between the points. But which is better? There’s only one way to find out…
Reasoned debate establishing a common frame of reference to develop a series of prepositions supporting differing perspectives!
Nah, just kidding…
I ran into a dilemma last night in Rift, the likes of which I had been hoping the game would avoid. But alas, itemisation has reared its ugly head Godzilla-like above the bow of the good ship Carefree Entertainment, and as I stare up in slack-jawed awe at the beast, with a cascade of sea water falling around me from off of its scaly hide, it ruptures the air with a soul-sheering bellow before thrashing once with its tail and obliterating my boat, dumping me into the spirit-sapping cold of the Sea of Grind.
I’d made it all the way to level twenty and out of the first playground, joining the group of slightly older kids who were now getting a bit too big to play nicely with the newcomers to Telara. That’s what it’s like, isn’t it? These neatly zoned areas of ‘exactly this level to exactly that level’ in MMOs, they’re like playgrounds at primary school, where the range of ages of the children is such that you can’t let the oldest kids play in the same area as the youngest kids because the disparity in size and strength is such that Painful Things were likely – unintentionally or otherwise – to happen to the smaller children. When you see a level-capped character come into the starter zone that you’re levelling through there’s just the briefest moment of awe as they one-shot most living things in their path, before you quickly realise that the things they’re one-shotting are the things you need to finish your quest – they’re stealing your lunch money – and you try to compensate by grabbing one of the mobs for yourself before the Big Kid AoEs the entire zone into bones and coin, at which point you over-pull, get six mobs on you, promptly die, and as the Big Kid runs past they give your corpse a wedgie, just to rub it in.
Regardless, I’d progressed up to the next playground, and in all this time itemisation hadn’t been a problem. The most I’d had to worry about as a Warrior was the fact that I needed to keep a one-handed sword and a shield in my bags in case I needed to tank, because my levelling role focussed on damage with a two-handed weapon. This wasn’t a problem in the main because most quests would reward one of a shield, a one-hander, or a two-hander, for a Warrior, while also offering a single item for each of the other three classes, Mage, Rogue and Cleric. Armour was never an issue, as each piece was generally an upgrade on a fairly predictable path of itemisation, incrementing the basic stats required by the class, while boosting armour level some more. However, some of the best gear outside of dungeons and the aforementioned basic questing ‘greens’ can be found on the Planar Rewards vendors, these folk offer various blue and purple weapons and armour in exchange for shards which are earnt as rewards from closing rifts. Upon entering Gloamwood for the first time last night, I made my way to the first quest hub and found the reward vendors in order to drool over the shiny gear that was on offer, as you do. Also I like to try the outfits on in advance in order to preview just how much cleavage will be on display in this season’s latest armour set, and whether my character needs to shave only her legs, or whether there will be so much flesh showing through her heavy plate armour that an all-over body wax is required. Actually I have a theory that fantasy female warriors have evolved as a sub-species separate from other members of their race, and are actually entirely hairless apart from the hair which they grow on their head, which is often a veritable mane, long and luxurious enough to make male lions weep and the TRESemmé marketing department drool; they’re like a sort of semi-hairless cat, only less wrinkly, and not so prone to licking their own genitals, despite the hopes and desires of many a randy male gamer, I’m sure.
And there on the vendor in Gloamwood were two pieces of armour for the warrior class, one which had all the right stats for my DPS role, and another which had all the right stats for my tanking role. And this simple thing suddenly makes the game a chore. The joy in Rift, the thing they absolutely nailed on the head, was the fact that players want to be able to pick the right role for the moment. I’m perfectly happy to bundle into a rift using my DPS spec and just spam damage attacks with the best of them, but I’m happier knowing that at the throwing of a switch – well, okay, it’s a button, but you have to picture it as one of those big ol’ circuit closing switches from many a mad scientist movie, otherwise you’re just not trying – I can turn into The Hairless Cat Tank, and admirably pull aggro and hold it in the finest of ‘Yo mamma’ taunting traditions. Of course World of Warcraft had this already with its dual talent specs, but itemisation was something that made it merely passably useful, and generally only to those who were happy to add yet another cog to the grind machine. In Rift, up until now, I hadn’t had to worry about switching all my armour and jewellery over as well, and this made the system dynamic. Fluid. Almost organic: my character could grow into the role that the moment demanded. You could say that one was able to ‘role’ with the situation. Ah ha ha! But then you’d probably get groaned at, or pinched on the arm.
I’m hoping this is just a blip and that itemisation between roles isn’t a concern in the later levels of the game, because otherwise it seems to me that Trion have included one of the most flexible and forgiving multi-role setups in an MMO to date, and at the same time included a time-honoured tedious MMO mechanic which entirely undermines the point of it.
Here at KiaSA towers we’re both in the grip of Dragon Age II. I’m only a few hours in, hardly enough for a full and complete appraisal, but I believe it’s sufficient to allow me to reassure you (in a spoiler free fashion) that no, it’s not the worst game ever released in the entire history of time.
I can see how you might be worried. Critic’s reviews are decent if not spectacular, currently averaging 81 on Metacritic, but we’ve all seen the stories of pressure on reviewers from publishers, reliance on advertising revenue from games companies, how can we trust them? Better to look for honest, unbiased scores and reviews from many contributors, get in on the crowdsourcing action.
At least it would be better, if half the contributors weren’t batshit mental. Even by usual internet standards, where ludicrous hyperbole is a second language (after lolspeak), the Dragon Age II ratings are a bit crazy. After I tweeted about starting to play it, mbp inquired if the terrible user reviews on Metacritic were justified so I had a quick peek and found a mass of 0/10 reviews (“Bad graphics, bad gameplay, bad story”, “This is the worst steaming pile of poop i have ever played”, “A horrible, wretched nightmare without end”; actual quotes, I didn’t even have to bother with comedic Angry Internet Man paraphrasing), with it limping to an overall 4.1 at the time of typing partially thanks to a few equally unhelpful 10/10s (“th1s game is so awsome!”, “I have to say Dragon Age 2 is 1000 times better than Dragon age origins”).
It’s like there’s a bunch of people dying to chip in who have a vague notion that this internet business runs on some sort of computer things, and these computer things use some weird binary stuff with only two states, and thus the only possible ratings available on these computer things on this internet business are “0/10 ZERO PERCENT NO STARS WORST GAME EVER it turned my weak lemon drink to blood and unleashed frogs and lice and gnats and locusts and a disease on my gerbil and unhealable boils and hail and thunder and darkness and it killed my frogspawn” or “FIVE STARS ONE HUNDRED PERCENT 10/10 BEST GAME EVER I was blind but now I can see and I only had a pilchard sandwich for lunch but that was enough to feed the whole school after I bought this game”. Then you get the Forces of Balance, incensed by all the 9s and 10s (or 0s and 1s) who feel compelled to weigh in at the opposite end of the scale to try and even things out. In some cases (via Scopique’s tweet) they might be the ones who made the game… (I doubt there’s a sinister corporate policy of astroturfing, just an overenthusiastic employee, but it doesn’t really help the whole situation)
Personally I’m rather enjoying it so far, but for a less positive piece that takes the unusual approach of using “words” to convey “meaning”, John Walker’s “Wot I Think” on the opening hours is well worth a read. I do think the start of the game feels disjointed, a bit like sitting down to watch a film with someone who says “yeah, yeah, the start’s a bit boring, there’s some running away or something, but there’s this great bit here!”, and they play a few minutes, then “oh, yeah, and then more boring stuff happens, fast forward, someone asks you to do something or whatever, fast forward, ooh, this bit’s good!” As Walker says, some of the side quests turn up and are completed almost randomly, more akin to the “follow the glowing punctuation” of a MMOG, and it has some slightly jarring quirks like only being able to talk to your companions in certain locations where they can express surprise at you being there, despite the fact that you just walked through the door accompanied by them (though at least that avoids the Camp Of Many Elite Warriors Just A Bit Further Down The Path Who Don’t Lift A Finger To Help from the first game).
I don’t entirely agree with him, though; I found Hawke’s initial situation and family relationships to be clear enough, albeit somewhat cursory so early events lacked emotional impact, I think it’s a valid enough in media res beginning. The conversation choices tend to fall into the Mass Effect 2 trap of “The only sensible one to pick”, “Inappropriate attempt at humour” or “Needless antagonism”, but I’m finding my (female) Hawke likeable enough, and I seem to remember the options in Dragon Age: Origins would often be similarly restrictive; perhaps that’s just inverse nostalgia, or perhaps your character having a voice removes some of the nuances that you could read into text choices. I’m certainly finding the combat far more fun as a Rogue than the first game and mostly staying in control of Hawke, rather than kicking off a couple of Super Stabby abilities then taking control of someone else until the stamina bar filled up again.
With all the difficulties presented by a numeric scoring system we’ve decided to instead institute the KiaSA Second Wilson Cabinet Rating Mechanism, wherein games are assigned a member of the cabinet of Harold Wilson’s second prime ministership, so by this system I’m delighted to award the first few hours of Dragon Age II: The Lord Elwyn-Jones
The finest thing about Rift for me, so far, is the fact that I can get bored or frustrated with my character’s build and simply tuck it away and try a new role without having to start the character again from scratch. For an altoholic (I’ve decided to start a support group and call it Altoholics Unanimous) like myself it’s an invaluable aid to avoiding burnout in an MMO.
Dragon Age 2, which I’m also currently playing, has a piece of DLC called the Black Emporium which, amongst other things, allows you to completely change the appearance of your character, akin to the ‘barber shop’ functionality in World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online. In combination with this are potions which can be bought very cheaply from many merchants, and which allow the player to reset their character’s ability points, essentially allowing them to change the way the character plays within the chosen class.
I like this increasing trend in RPG games at the moment: there seems to be an understanding on the part of developers that players get bored or frustrated with options in RPGs, that choices made in the early stages of a game can become weights which prevent a player from continuing, and that it’s better to give the player some freedom of choice in these things, rather than obstinately force them to continue for reasons that from a player’s perspective are hard to perceive as being reasonable.
It’s these simple things that have kept me playing two games that I might otherwise have given up on, having otherwise found myself burnt-out while trying to find a character with which I was comfortable playing for fifty hours or more.
Reinvent, not re-roll. Re-specialise, not rebuild.
For those of you who are not monitoring our podcast RSS feed or stalking us on the Twitterverse, brace your main hats and hang on to your sails, because we’re pleased to announce that it’s time for KiaSAcast episode eleven.
This episode of the podcast includes:
– Introduction
– Radio KiaSA presents David Ragefury and Steve Wiseman
– Games which one of us is playing but the other one isn’t, including::
– Pirates of the Burning Sea
– Rift
So ArenaNet blogged about their crafting system yesterday. Here’s a summary of some of the salient points, with my feelings on them:
I’m Andrew McLeod, one of the Game Designers responsible for creating an in-depth but accessible crafting system for Guild Wars 2.
Well hello, Andrew.
Characters can be proficient in up to two crafting disciplines at a time. We feel that this allows players to have a good variety in the items that they can craft, but still maintains player interaction and exchange. It also gives a stronger focus on the specifics of what you can craft- especially with the depth and size of each of our crafting professions.
Show me the depth and size of your crafting profession, baby.
Although a character can only have two disciplines at a time, they can change their crafting disciplines by visiting the master craftsmen NPC that can be found in all major cities. When you change back to a crafting discipline that you’ve previously learned, you regain your skill level and known recipes from that discipline, but the cost of changing disciplines increases with the skill level in that discipline.
Mmmm, yes.
Characters can gather all types of crafting materials, and gathering nodes in Guild Wars 2 are not exclusive, or used up after a player gathers materials from it.
Ohhhhh, yes.
If you’ve played other MMOs, you may have felt frustrated when trying to gather crafting materials; you’re running around zones trying to find nodes, only to have someone beat you to the node, or take the resources while you’re fighting an enemy that attacked you before you could gather them. In Guild Wars 2, each node can be gathered by every player, so when you see a rare node off in the distance, you don’t need to abandon what you’re doing to try and beat other players to it.
Nnnnn, yesssss!
We decided to make gathering available for all characters for a couple major reasons. First, we wanted gathering nodes to be sought after by every player, so that when players are grouped together they don’t need to feel guilty by making the group wait for them while they run off after an ore vein on the side of the road.
Oh God! Yes! Yesss!
Secondly, gathering professions are often used for economic gain, through selling materials to other players, and we didn’t want crafters to have to sacrifice their economic potential in order to be able to craft gear for themselves and friends.
YEEEAAAAHH Oooooooo!
If you haven’t previously crafted that item, you discover the recipe for that item, allowing you to easily view the correct combination to recreate the item. Some basic recipes are automatically learned by characters, but the recipes for most items must be discovered by the crafter. A few recipes can only be learned from a trainer or from drops in the world.
Ooo, ow. Not like that. That’s awkward, I don’t want it in the wiki, baby.
Leveling up your crafting skill uses an experience system—each item you craft is worth an amount of experience. There are 400 skill points in each discipline, though crafting items will often give multiple points worth of experience.
Mmm, that’s better!
Our intent is that you should never have to make something you consider worthless while leveling a crafting discipline.
Oh yeah, here we go. Here we go. Oh. OH! Yessssssss.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at crafting in Guild Wars 2. As you can see, the crafting system we’ve created really reflects our philosophy of cooperative, accessible gameplay.
Well, it was good for me.
/cigarette
When starting out in Pirates of the Burning Sea I was drawn by the prospect of naval combat and sword fights, fearsome broadsides and boarding parties, chasing dastardly pirates around the Caribbean and consuming large quantities of rum. At the career selection screen the game presented three options:
A naval officer like the heroic Admiral Lord Nelson, working up to captaining a mighty ship of the line with devastating firepower ensuring the Britannia rules the waves! A noble calling!
A privateer like the dashing Francis Drake, commanding a nimble frigate, sweeping down upon treasure-laden galleons in the name of His Majesty in between games of bowls and wearing enormous ruffs! The scourge of other nations!
An Independent Trader like…. erm… Derek Trotter. Buying and selling stuff in the ship equivalent of a Transit van. The stuff of… sitcom.
Needless to say Freetrader didn’t sound like what I was after at all, I picked Naval Officer for the prospect of some Really Big Guns, and that seemed to suit the game. Pirates of the Burning Sea has plenty of missions on offer, and they generally involve either sailing around shooting other ships with guns, or running around stabbing people with swords, historically areas in which the Navy has tended to excel. There are variations, of course; sometimes you stab people with swords, then hop into your ship and shoot other ships with guns. Sometimes you have to shoot other ships until they stop, then board them and stab people with swords. Sometimes you just need to have a nice chat with a few people, although it often turns out a smidge of sword-based stabbing is needed just to really emphasise what you were saying. For about 25 levels, all was going swimmingly (or rather sailingly, with a bit of swimming here and there when overambitious naval encounters led to regrettable negative buoyancy situations). Then I got bitten by the shipbuilding bug, and it turns out Freetraders actually have quite a few advantages when it comes to trading and production. Who would’ve guessed?
This is a bit of a dilemma. My Naval Officer isn’t completely useless at production, and with a bit of assistance has set up a shipyard, but has some drawbacks compared to a Freetrader, notably not being able to globally search all auction houses to hunt down bargains and not having access to the really big hauling ships to shift large quantities of raw materials. On the other hand a Freetrader isn’t completely useless at fighting, but isn’t really up there with a Naval Officer, especially if specialising in the “travel quickly around the map avoiding taxes” skills rather than the “SHOOT PEOPLE IN THE FACE WITH CANNONS!” range.
It’s a shame PotBS has the three fixed classes from the start. The early levelling process seems to be very similar for everyone; there’s no difference at all in avatar combat as far as I understand, any class can pick any of the fighting styles. There are very few restrictions on early ships, Freetraders can quite happily captain the same brigs and light frigates as low level Naval Officers and Prvateers. The quests are the same, including the nifty main story quest, apart from class-specific quests every five levels that see Naval Officers climbing up the ranks (mostly by sinking the French), Freetraders brokering deals or engaging in industrial espionage etc.
For somebody new to the game there’s a fair bit to get to grips with without even considering the economy, and I suspect I’m not the only player to only take an interest in production after a couple of months of more combat-focused operations. With an EVE-like skill system you’d perhaps have the option of pausing with the combat development and switching to build up your production skills for a while, but less structured skill systems can be a pretty tricky proposition as per the big debate a couple of months back. A model that would seem to fit rather nicely would be the tiers of increased specialisation of Tabula Rasa, where everyone started out as a Recruit for five levels before selecting Soldier or Specialist, then from e.g. Solider to Commando or Ranger, Ranger to Sniper or Spy. In Pirates of the Burning Sea I don’t think it would do any harm for everyone to, say, start out in the Navy for ten or fifteen levels before deciding whether to continue that career, resign to focus on trade, or go freelance as a privateer. Something else Tabula Rasa had was a cloning system, so that before making one of the specialisation decision you could create a clone, and follow an alternate path without having to re-do the earlier levelling. Obviously cloning wouldn’t fit in so well with the 18th century (apart from that Doctor Who episode where it turned out Calico Jack was part of a Sontaran clone army out to seize a Spanish galleon carrying what the crew thought was an Aztec relic but was really the Great Key of Rassilon), but family members would make sense; if you’ve had enough of trading, return to a “New Family Member Introduction” point as the brother/sister/uncle/second cousin and select a different career.
In the absence of such mechanisms, in a bid for the best of both worlds I’ve settled for rolling a Freetrader alt on a second account to focus on production while the Naval Officer keeps shooting people (with guns). It works quite well, running two instances of the game in different windows, as when one character needs to make a long journey for a class mission or to pick up some exotic supplies you can indulge in a spot of what Van Hemlock has dubbed “Galleon Bowling”: point your ship at the destination on the other side of the map, accelerate to full speed, then alt-tab over to the other character (or a web browser, or go and make dinner or something). When you return you get 50 points if you can just click to dock at your destination port (with 10 bonus Danger Points if the journey took you through a red PvP circle and you blithely sailed AFK through pirate infested waters), 25 points if you’re bumping into the coast in the general area but out of clicking range, and 0 points if you forgot you were supposed to make a course adjustment halfway through and ended up in Newfoundland.
Tobold writes:
“But unlike the current raid endgame, a pure leveling game can tune that a lot better: A lack of performance would not mean that you get totally stuck like a guild that can’t get past a certain raid boss. In a pure leveling game your performance would directly be reflected in the speed of your progress. Thus somebody playing badly would still advance, because sometimes he gets lucky and kills a mob and gains xp. But somebody playing better would advance a lot faster.”
Personally I think the best sort of levelling game is one where you forget there’s an XP bar at all, and thus there is no concern for ‘progress performance’.
I’ve had those moments occasionally in MMOs, where I’ve enjoyed the game tremendously to the point where gaining a level was an incidental bonus to my entertainment. For me, that’s got to be the aim of it: make the game-play the reward for playing, the ‘role-play’ trappings should still be entertaining and involving, but perhaps no more than supplementary diversions.
I wonder if MMORPGs have perhaps maintained the fixation with the character sheet to the detriment of actually making things fun.
Put another way: has progress in the MMO genre been stifled by the fact that we’re all still obsessed with the idea of character progress?
Rift. A curiously apt name considering that the game has caused such a schism in my MMO playing personality: I really am having trouble knowing how I feel about it, which is a new sensation to me. It’s as though a rift from the Vacillation dimension has torn its way into the plane of my mind and started to spew forth all manner of invaders. These invaders form two separate warring factions however, and their internecine dispute makes it impossible for my mind to form an adequate defence against the destructive indecision which they both spread. Sometimes I’m in support of the group that thinks Rift is a brilliant breath of fresh air – as evidenced by the many hours I spent playing it over the weekend – but just as quickly my mind finds itself backing the rebel faction, who claim that at level twenty the game has already shown me all that it has to offer. Sure, I will continue to have fun up to the cap at level fifty, but after that I will, in all likelihood, rapidly run out of steam and return to my mature mistress.
“Yet always LotRO is there to welcome me back from my folly, she opens her arms wide and cradles me against her voluminous content, hushes my blubbered apologies, reminds me of the intimate little details that made me love her and make me love her still. She is the mature mistress, secure in the knowledge of her own worth, happy to welcome and entertain the experienced and inexperienced alike, and I remain there in her embrace, comfortable and content. Until I catch a glimpse of the next porcelain and lace doe peering out from behind the curtain of MMO news, fluttering her eyelids innocently, her shy yet coquettish demeanour promising a life of long term commitment and happiness, and delivering yet another sharp blow to the head and dent to the wallet.”
And if I’m going to inevitably return to her, then why not stay with her now and continue playing the rather enjoyable alt that I’ve recently gushed about? At which point the pro-Rift faction rallies its troops and gives a big push, dropping propaganda leaflets extolling the virtues of the flexible class system, the attractiveness of the game’s graphics, and the efficient (if impersonal) effectiveness of the public group system.
The game tears at me, and I can’t remember the last time that I experienced a game where I had a constant nagging feeling that I should be liking it more than I actually do. I do like the game, I honestly do, but at the same time I find it hard to get enthusiastic about it. It’s a game where, when I picture myself trying to explain to others why I enjoy it, I find myself struggling to give a convincing reason. It’s like trying to explain the flavour of saffron. Like trying to explain smaragdine without reference to other colours: every explanation I begin necessarily starts with “Well it’s like that mechanic in MMO X, but tidied up and streamlined”.
So it’s a game that is greater than the sum of its parts, but where those parts are all the refined result of familiar elements from other games. This is, perhaps, where the seemingly strange split in the game’s personality stems from.
Unless you live under a rock you will already have had the broad picture of Rift painted for you by other blogs, so in the next post I’ll simply try to add a few of my own highlights and lowlights, hopefully helping to add further definition to the general impression. I’m not sure if the picture can even be completed yet, however; the game needs time to bed and then blossom, and trying to paint a true picture of the game at this early a stage would be like trying to paint an accurate representation of a flowerbed in full bloom by observing during winter the soil in which the seeds were planted.
M’colleague has concerns over the rapid levelling in Rift, and whether there’s enough of an end game to sustain players who may be reaching it within the first month that comes with the box. Sounds like a sufficiently weighty issue on which to unleash the Sentient KiaSA Anti-Spam Captcha AI, so I uploaded plenty of subscriber numbers, levelling trends and forum posts from MMOGs of the past ten years and asked it for an optimal end game solution.
Its response:
+++ Melon melon melon +++ +++ zerozerozerozerozerozeroone +++ +++ Suggest: upon reaching level cap, display large banner: "CONGRATULATIONS! Now bugger off back to WoW." +++ +++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
