I recently had the opportunity of participating in The Old Republic’s two final beta weekend tests. Being the avid MMO player that I am, and given my interest in the genre as a developer, I can’t help but share some of the thoughts that have been fermenting in my mind over the last few days. It’s important to note, that my indoctrination into Star Wars fandom predates the conception of the MMO. It’s entirely possible I’ve even been a fan of Star Wars longer than I’ve been interested in developing games, as both events predate my ability to confidently remember things! That said, I’ll try to carry as little fandom related baggage as possible throughout my impressions.
Speaking of baggage though, it seems like these days, when the topic of SWTOR is broached, there is a sudden polarization, people are either jittery with excitement over the character they have planned for retail, or suddenly put off by the discussion. I’m not just talking about the tendency of our internet-age culture to fail entirely at nuance, pigeon-holing everyone’s opinion into the ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ category. No, this is something beyond that. So why such polarization? While I feel a bit guilty giving any credence to such a topic, to some degree I can’t blame people for being frustrated by discussion around the title. The hype monster has been rearing its ugly head over this title for a long, long time.
SWTOR has been in development for over half a decade now, but more importantly, we as consumers have known about it the entire time. It amazes me when I read a post on the official forums and see that the poster has been registered for 4-5+ years. 4-5+ years on a forum for a game that has yet to even hit retail! With BioWare hyping their game for this long, it’s easy to see how a few feathers could get ruffled. Hype is a huge part of the psychological baggage we bring to an experience, that baggage creates our expectations, and whether or not the end product matches our expectations is not only a reflection of how well the development team has done their jobs, but how well the community and advertising teams have done their jobs as well.
We’ve heard again and again how SWTOR is going to revolutionize the MMO genre. There are many out there who are skeptical, and rightfully so. I for one am often frustrated by frequent claims that The Old Republic will be the first MMO to tell a worthwhile story, or present a story in an engaging fashion. Being a long time Final Fantasy XI player, I feel a bit cheated by this claim. Did Final Fantasy XI not exist? Were the hundreds of hours of engaging and fantastically delivered cutscenes all a figment of my imagination? To be fair, Final Fantasy, unsurprisingly did not sport a tremendous amount of choices in the narrative, instead opting to feature a silent protagonist. Choices in Final Fantasy were almost exclusively smoke and mirrors, altering a bit of dialog. The Old Republic on the other hand boasts fully voice acted main characters, and choices that are often at least somewhat meaningful. But the claims were nonetheless frustrating because they were not narrowed to the idea of story with choice.
Let me take a step back for a moment and make one thing clear. I am not attempting to indicate that the SWTOR team is guilty of making a large number of baseless claims. Even the statements regarding story are understandable. While it is admittedly frustrating to have almost a decade old MMO that innovated in many ways in its own right treated as chopped liver, qualifying their statement would likely have been counter-productive for a majority of their audience. I am simply illustrating the fact that the hype monsters we as developers often create surrounding our titles can in fact become hurdles themselves that we must overcome. So that leaves us with one important question: does it live up to the hype?
Were you expecting a yes or no answer in the next paragraph? Sorry, I can’t oblige in good conscience. I’m sure there are many impressions out there that will succinctly answer that question from the author’s viewpoint, but this is not one of them. For one thing, I was playing the beta, and only 24 levels of it. If there’s one thing years of playing MMOs has taught me, and that I often feel critics fail to realize, it’s that you really can’t judge an MMO until you’ve played a lot of it. And that’s no surprise, because there’s a lot of game in an MMO. A less philosophical answer is however, that I hope you will read the impressions and that they will couple with your own baggage and notions to answer the question for you. Because I guarantee you, our opinions do not always line up.
The thing that jumped out at me from the moment I began my playthrough was how well the game captured the Star Wars feeling. Aside from the very occasional hiccup, The Old Republic does an absolutely outstanding job of being Star Wars. From the sound, to the music cues, to the sweeping vistas. The sense of gravitas that the appearance of an imperial fleet brings with it, the hum of a lightsaber, the often intentionally campy dialog, every inch of the experience appears to have been lovingly hand-crafted to perfectly fit fan expectations. The only thing missing was Lucas’s arguably questionable scene transitions.
Unfortunately, this attention to detail and the player’s experience, coupled with a serious attempt to immerse the player in the narrative from the very first moment makes even the most seemingly minor issues and oversights stand out. I spent the majority of my first beta weekend as a trooper, my class of choice for retail, a choice I am somewhat obligated to make, seeing as I happen to own a set of actual trooper armor. While here on Earth, one can buy a fully assembled set of white armor on a fry cook’s salary, apparently a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, they could not even afford to outfit a special forces lieutenant with a set.
Now, if this had been any other MMO, where the first 10-20 levels were spent mindlessly fetching boar livers, or if the narrative had been framed such that my character was a lowly recruit or academy student, my lack of armor would have been an acceptable frustration. “I’ll just get it later, it’s a reward for leveling up!” would be my thoughts. And when I broached to the topic to other players, this was the most frequent opinion of those that did not see things my way. (Well, it was something more like “Stop QQing expletive expletive just get lv20!!” But hey, it is the internet.) But this wasn’t any other MMO, my character had been cast as the newest recruit into a squad that sported a very distinct white armor uniform with orange markings. Lowly infantry who were far below my character in terms of military rank sported a somewhat slimmed down but still very iconic set of white armor.
That iconic white armor is what makes the trooper. One only needs to look at the 501st or the Tokyo Trooper to realize just how well recognized and iconic the stormtrooper’s armor has become. To some degree, that white armor has become even more of an icon than the lightsaber. And while The Old Republic is set thousands of years before the advent of the stormtrooper, BioWare’s variation of that armor is as important to the image of SWTOR’s Republic trooper as the stormtrooper’s armor is to the movie’s Imperial trooper. And yet there I was, on Courscant, lieutenant of the Republic’s most deadly and respected special forces trooper squadron, still sporting a jacket labeled as heavy armor. Apparently for the time being, the visual distinction between a smuggler and a trooper was that troopers wore backpacks.
So what’s the big deal about this armor? Who cares? It’s a minor grievance, no? The problem is that the rest of the experience simply did not match up with this oversight, it made the issue stick out like a sore thumb. I had a spaceship! The only other member of my squad had been immediately outfitted in the squad’s uniform white armor upon joining. Elsewhere in the galaxy, Jedi were constructing their own iconic lightsabers as a rite of passage at level 10. Bounty Hunters on Hutta were sporting Boba Fett-esque plate-wear at half that level. When you have an experience as polished and refined as The Old Republic, it’s hard to ignore oversights like this.
That’s not to say that the polish isn’t noteworthy in its own right. I’m a polish freak, so the fact that I could obsess over what out of context seems to be an almost inane issue was a godsend. That’s not to say that I did not encounter a single bug in my playthrough, I got stuck a few more times than I would have liked, and had to try to take seriously the words of a Jedi master that had been erroneously scaled to about 1/10th her normal size, but the overall experience was polished so well that I hardly noticed. The years of development certainly paid off, and I can only assume that this refinement will continue into the upper levels, and future content.
Narratively SWTOR treads ground few MMOs have even tiptoed over. While titles like Final Fantasy XI may have featured a narrative that players cared about, and other titles may have featured worlds and characters that people cared about, BioWare has, at least for me, successfully made me care about the character I’m playing, without any investment on my own part, and without needing to build attachment over a long period of play. It’s natural, after playing for hundreds or thousands of hours to feel an attachment to our silent MMO avatars. Most MMOs don’t even attempt to characterize player characters with nods or grunts a la Legend of Zelda. Instead, players build attachment through simply playing as that character for an incredibly long time, or forming a back story in our minds.
The Old Republic changes that dynamic with fully fleshed out and voiced characters. This is not without its own problems, leaving quite a bit less up to the player’s imagination. To some, the experience may be jarring, like having our favorite book characters brought to life on the silver screen. But given the fact that we are coming into the experience fresh, the effect is certainly mitigated. I was delighted with the dialog, and my character and the interactions I took part in kept me immersed in the story and the setting during otherwise menial solo questing, far better than any MMO I had played to date. Though admittedly, the on-rails, theme-park style questing does fall into the same pitfalls we expect, and my first 24 levels had me for the most performing all to familiar tasks.
That’s not to say that there weren’t a few clever quests here and there, but my biggest frustration was actually completely unrelated to repetitive tasks. I realize things are going to get repetitive in an MMO. What I was annoyed to see was a frustrating problem that BioWare had already solved in its other, single player titles, rearing its ugly head. I can’t count the number of times what I expected my character to say after reading the representative blurb on the dialog menu was completely incongruous with what he or she actually said. Choosing something like “I can take care of myself” resulting in my character growling that “I’ll kill anyone that stands in my way” is simply not cool. Thankfully, the escape key let me back up and try again. I hit the escape key a lot.
Other BioWare studios have apparently learned their lesson, and contemporary titles simply print the actual dialog on the radial menu. There’s more than enough room, and it saves space, as well as man hours. After all, someone had to write a blurb for every piece of character dialog. So why is it that The Old Republic still uses this archaic blurb system? Perhaps it’s a bi-product of how long the titles been in development, it was years after development began that BioWare made that change for their single player titles. It’s frustrating that the change wasn’t made retroactively. I can understand, perhaps, the desire to have the more accessible “blurb” system, as the MMO’s audience is often a bit more casual, but some sort of option to see the full dialog choice would be great. It got old having to start a dialog sequence over because my character suddenly had what appeared to be a bout of tourettes. It’s especially frustrating when other party members are forced to start over with you.
Aside from the frustrating discrepancies though, the dialog sequences were brilliant. The sheer fact that I could participate in all dialog sequences cooperatively made playing through the game alongside my girlfriend’s character feel like we were playing a co-op console game, in a very good way. If anything, SWTOR is worth a purchase for that reason alone. Grab a friend, family member or significant other, and even if you only stick to questing, you’ve got 8, unique, co-op BioWare narratives to play through. As a developer my thoughts are always towards the future, and while The Old Republic’s dialog system is a huge step forward, I can’t help but be a little disappointed that multiplayer dialog sequences are a little anti-social. Each player makes a choice, and a random dice roll determines who’s character gets to speak. There’s no deliberation, or speaking between player characters, which could have added a whole new level of dynamism. Something to look forward to in the future perhaps!
What about the gameplay? The combat? For me, the combat was a mixed bag. On the one hand, the combat felt well-paced, there was a good balance of challenging and trivial encounters, and the much appreciated lack of an auto-attack kept things interesting. On the other hand, I wouldn’t say The Old Republic takes any risks or innovates when it comes to combat. Depending on who you are, this may be welcome news. If you’re satisfied with the state of MMO combat, if WoW’s combat is a high point for you, SWTOR combat is a refined experience that you’re going to jump for joy over. As a long time MMO player, I’m looking for a bit more. I’ve always been as much of a console gamer as I have been a PC gamer, so I crave that third person action combat. I crave a step forward, I want the feeling of weight in my characters, and impact in the actions they take. I want collision! But I wasn’t expecting any of these things in The Old Republic, so I wasn’t terribly disappointed to find out the game matched my expectations.
The combat feels good, so unless you’ve become so disenchanted with MMO combat that you absolutely can’t stand it, it’s shouldn’t be a deal-breaker for you. Having the dynamic of a companion, one of the highlights of The Old Republic, makes the combat that much more strategic and dynamic, even when playing alone. If anything its the inherent unrealistic nature of these battle systems that at times broke me out of my play experience, not the actual gameplay itself. Watching anyone survive being hacked away at by a lightsaber just feels wrong. After all, this isn’t high fantasy, so we have a different set of notions, most of which we have from Star Wars movie canon: you don’t survive being stabbed with a lightsaber. I would have appreciated a purely aesthetic solution that did not impact gameplay, something like health being replaced by stamina, and having characters dodge, parry and block strikes and shots until being dramatically finished off by a successful strike.
But arguably even more important than lightsabers, is space combat! You can’t have Star Wars without space combat can you? (Well, Star Wars Galaxies tried at first, that didn’t go over so well!) I knew what I was getting into when I took part in my first space battle. I had no delusions that I’d be reliving my childhood X-Wing vs Tie Fighter memories, redirecting my ship’s power between shields, weapon systems and engines as I engaged in massive dog fights. But hey, I love Star Fox and Panzer Dragoon, I had an open mind. I had fun! And I was certainly glad they had not skipped it entirely, but I do hope to see space combat expanded on in the future. Aside from a very strong desire to fly first person and fly cooperatively (man the gun turrets!) I was slightly irked when I realized how little player skill seemed to factor into the combat.
I was particularly frustrated because the space combat was completely optional and somewhat disconnected from the rest of the game. If ever there was a justification to make a single player system heavily skill-based in an MMO, that’s it. I can’t say I explored all that space combat had to offer, but it seemed like there were essentially sections of each level that functioned as “gear checks” for my ship’s upgrades. Unavoidable volleys of fire from capital ships that would simply blow me up unless I was adequately upgraded. As a shmup player, the fact that I was getting shot at no fault of my own made me grimace. But all that said, space combat was still fun, visually impressive, and a welcome inclusion that really helped to break up the pacing and make the overall experience that much more well-rounded. So, kudos to the developers who fought for space combat!
So what’s the closest thing to a verdict I can give? The Old Republic is a blast. If you enjoy BioWare’s single player titles, The Old Republic will be worth its weight in spice if only to play through from 1-50 in each class to experience the story the game has to offer. The Old Republic is a Star Wars theme park that’s been polished and carefully hand-crafted. Loaded with voiced dialog, SWTOR succeeds in making activities that seem mindless and often painful in other MMOs, compelling. It’s certainly not without its own set of problems and challenges, but I’m confident that I’m going to enjoy the ride.
Words we’ve all heard so many times that they’ve long since begun to ring hollow, even to the ears of the most diehard Sonic fans. Sega has spent the last decade honing their ability to drive the franchise into the ground, leaving us as hapless spectators to the public near-murder of one of the industry’s most iconic characters. In recent years it had finally appeared as if someone over at Sega had come to the startling realization that people play Sonic games to run really fast… Shocking!
But like a child at the checkout counter, they just couldn’t help themselves from wanting just one last thing. And somehow, that one last thing managed to invariably be some ill-conceived mechanic that slowed the game’s break-neck speed down. And let’s face it, the idea of slowing down in a Sonic game is about as enticing as slowing down in F-Zero (it’s not.)
But all is not lost Sonic fans! In what may be the most astonishing act of self control this century, Sega has managed to release a Sonic game without transforming the blue blur into a werehog or involving him in an inter-species romance. But it doesn’t stop there, not only are players not forced to play as any of Sonic’s gameplay crippling companions, they are outright unplayable. There must have been at least one guy standing on his desk screaming that the game would never be a success!
So what has this back to basics approach done for the game? In short… Everything!
The game offers two styles of play, “classic” mode where players take control of the shorter, rounder, and silent Genesis-era Sonic, and “modern” mode which features the lanky, fast-talking, joke-cracking Dreamcast-era Sonic.
“Classic” Sonic makes his way through functionally 2D stages that play like a collection of lost levels from Sonic 3, set in lush 3D environments. “Modern” Sonic speeds through levels that switch frequently between full 3D and 2D. Regardless of which mode though, one important constant holds true. You go really fast.
Both modes will have you careening down the track at speeds that your eyes will have trouble keeping up with. The modern stages in particular convey that sense of speed in a way that will have you reminiscing about the first time you played Sonic Adventure at a Dreamcast kiosk with your mouth slightly agape. Only this time it’s actually your fault when you go flying off the edge of the level to your doom. Well, most of the time. The nature of speed at which Sonic is moving simply lends itself to killing the player in the blink of an eye, but Sonic Team has accomplished a tremendous feat of level design genius with Generations.
Excluding a few inevitable exceptions, a vast majority of the game’s pitfalls are adequately telegraphed to the player, giving them enough time to react. Large sections of wonky 3D platforming that had become common in the Sonic Adventure era have been mercifully cut in favor of short bursts of platforming often meant to be performed at the same break neck speeds as the rest of the game. When the game very occasionally forces the player to slow down, it’s not for long and it’s paced well enough that it’s not a frustration.
Aesthetically the stage designs are breath-taking re-imaginings of some of the most memorable levels from Sonic canon. Each level introduces some new or unique mechanic inherent to the original, such as the teleport orbs in Sonic & Knuckle’s Sky Temple or the free falling in Sonic Adventure’s Speed Highway. The difficulty curves nicely, and no two levels feel too much alike, lending a tremendous amount of variety to the gameplay.
Beyond the standard stages, the game also offers dozens of challenge mode mini-stages that rebundle part of a stage’s track (sometimes changing it up enough that it’s barely recognizable) and present the player with a specific goal. The goals range from time trials and races to specific tests of mastery over a certain level mechanic. Generations also features a skill system that allows the player to purchase skills to upgrade Sonic’s abilities. Skills like boost enhancements, the ability to stop on a dime, or lose less momentum when running up hill. Both the challenge mode stages and the skill system are completely optional, but they add a substantial amount of replay value, particularly if you’re someone who absolutely has to get an S rank on every challenge!
If there’s one area where the game falls short though, it’s most certainly the boss fights. The final battle in particular is so unpolished and unwieldy compared to the rest of the game that it tarnishes the end of what is an otherwise near perfect Sonic experience. Admittedly, bosses have never been the franchise’s strong suit, the idea of reconciling the concept of a fight with a single enemy and the fact that Sonic should never be standing in one place for very long tends to lead to a mess. To the team’s credit, the “rival” stages that pit Sonic against his enigmatic doubles from previous games (Metal Sonic, Shadow, etc.) play out remarkably well, and keep the player running the whole time.
Generations is arguably the first entry in the series in over a decade to do Sonic’s legacy a semblance of justice. If you’ve been driven away from the series but have fond memories from its golden years, I urge you to pick this one up. Chances are if you don’t like this game, you’re never going to enjoy another Sonic title, and you can officially write off the series. But for most Sonic fans, this is going to be the return to form you’ve all been waiting for. Generations stands as a testament that if you build a focused experience around a core mechanic you know is fun, and throw out all the extraneous features that hold it back, the result is an equally fun game.
So a package arrived yesterday, it was a Christmas gift for me (intended to be given on Christmas), but as with any obscure, retro electronic device, came with a slew of strange problems that could not be solved by the gift giver, so I was called in to repair my own gift.
The Sharp Famicom Twin, an officially licensed Nintendo console. (And I believe the only officially licensed Nintendo console that wasn’t made by Nintendo outside of Korea.) The device was released about 6 months following the release of the Famicom Disk System, and was essentially a Famicom and Famicom Disk System built into one shell. A switch changes the system between disk and cartridge mode (no cartridge can be inserted during disk mode.) The Famicom Disk System never made it to US shores, and what with the fragility of the drives themselves, and the disks, it’s probably for the best. That said, the add-on was ahead of its time allowing users to download games onto blank disks and bypass boxed retail. More importantly the system was also the birthplace of more than a few pivotal franchises, including Metroid and the Legend of Zelda. Both of which had to be ported to cartridges with battery back up for saving in their later release in the states.
History lessons aside, unfortunately, as I mentioned; magnetic disks and the technology involved in reading them is notoriously fragile. Though it was sold as working, tested, upon arriving and being loaded with a disk… Disk Read Error No.22 graced the TV screen. Oh right, first I had to go to RadioShack and build an AC adapter that hopefully won’t cause any long term damage giving out 7.5V/1A vs the original 7.6V/1.25A. Back to the disk error: anyone who happens to own a Famicom Disk system should be aware that the system has a slew of possible error codes. After a bit of digging, I discovered that Error 22 most likely meant the drive was reading the disk too quickly, thankfully the extra drive belt I bought can be saved for another day!
So we opened her up and located the culprit. A tiny little screw in the motor, covered by an equally tiny flap that prevents me from seeing what I’m doing. So, it’s time for some trial and error. Fiddling with the screw and adjusting it slightly, booting, reading the error code, fiddling some more, you know, skilled repair work.
Thankfully it wasn’t long before the “Licensed by Nintendo” text replaced the cryptic Error Code. A quick run through of all the disks resulted in one more error that went away after a reset. Given how finicky the system is, I’d call that good enough.
Using floppy disks sure does bring back some retro gaming memories, though most of those involve PC games like Commander Keen. I enjoyed a few moments of the Legend of Zelda and Metroid, complete with the slightly improved musical quality that the Famicom Disk system was capable of.
This Christmas when I receive the gift in earnest, I’ll be sure to throw up some reviews of the console and any games I happen to get my hands on. In the mean time, anyone else own a Famicom Disk Drive and have any fun stories to tell about repairing the sucker? Or are you one of the lucky few who’s never had to open theirs up?
I’ve been neglecting my blogging duties over the summer and early fall, for shame! So I bring you this image to tell the tale of my escapades, please imagine appropriate 80s movie montage footage music as you scroll.
As you can see my time was filled with waffles and retro games. I played some new games, some old games, worked on some games, imported some games and restored some old games. I did a bit of freelance, carved some pumpkins, bugged Gears of War 3, enrolled in Japanese 301, and put together a suit of stormtrooper armor.
With the warm laziness of summer behind, bring on the cold lethargy of the winter! Wait. It’s not winter yet, Autumn is obviously the greatest season, and it’s a time to get things done. This month is NaNoWriMo, so go sign up! (If you write, that is. I did! We’ll see how that goes.) Or figure out some other way to absolutely own life (and yourself) this Fall.
Perhaps not shaving…
Hunted is Bethesda’s new co-op, third person, action adventure, role playing, cover shooter… actually, let’s rewind a second before discussing the genre of this little number. Co-op is entirely the reason I decided to pick this title up. And as chance would have it, co-op is, the entire reason this game is worth picking up. The solo experience isn’t necessarily terrible, but it is forgettable and frequently frustrating. If you’ve got someone to play with though, you have a fun and fairly lengthy (over 10 hour) experience to look forward to.
So back to the crazy genre mash-up: Hunted lies somewhere between Gears of War and Diablo, in the relatively unexplored realm of cover based dungeon crawler. You’ll be stomping through dark labyrinths fighting skeletons, orcs-a-likes, minotaurs and demons while firing your bow from the familiar semi-safety of cover. But don’t worry, you’ve got plenty of spells and melee weapons to dispatch your enemy if you’re not looking to score some medieval head shots.
Hunted follows two mercenaries turned make-shift heroes; Caddoc a male human warrior and E’lara a female elven ranger. If you’re playing solo you’ll have the opportunity of occasionally switching between the two to solve puzzles or tackle enemies in new ways. Solo players will be subjected to adventuring with a sometimes good sometimes terrible AI partner, while those opting for split screen or online co-op can find equally terrible human players to ruin their experience.
The cooperative combat and puzzle solving is satisfying and the game can provide quite a challenge (or not) depending on what you’re looking for. Each character has access to a handful of unique abilities that can be paired up during combat. E’lara can; for example, use an arcane shot to break an enemies’ shield, opening them up to Caddoc’s melee attacks. The characters are a bit cliché at times but the game makes up for it with solid storytelling and a strong voice acting cast including Lucy Lawless (Xena, Battlestar.) The banter between the two protagonists is witty, enjoyable and underscores the action well.
Visually, Hunted is a bit dated, featuring some awkward animations at times that can really detract from the experience, but a reasonable variety of settings does help to keep things interesting over the course of the game. There are some interesting online features like the Crucible mode which allows players to create and share somewhat customized dungeons, but a lack of drop-in co-op means you’re going to have to plan your outings ahead of time.
At the end of the day, Hunted is an average experience that can transform into an above average dungeon romp if you’ve got someone else to come along for the ride. So if you’re looking for a fun game for a dungeon date-night, Hunted is it. If you’re looking for a polished and engaging solo experience, there are better choices out there.
Short answer: Lots. I’ve been looking for a job, updating my portfolio, working on a personal project, continuing on an independent project with friends and finishing up a Japanese course I enrolled in to wrap up my second year in the language. Most of those things aren’t really something you can check out, but if you are for some reason interested in checking out my personal project, which is a re-imagining of Blizzard’s original 1998 StarCraft campaign in the SC2 Galaxy Editor, there’s no site up for it yet as it’s still early, but it is on my portfolio.
So with what I’ve been up to out of the way I’m going to admit, I’m realizing keeping a personal blog up to date can be a very difficult thing to do when it’s not yet been ingrained as a regular activity. Particularly when I’m very busy and don’t have any particularly awesome things to post (is it GDC12 yet?) But, I haven’t given up! I’m definitely going to be attempting to make posts more often, and I have plans to start throwing up game reviews and analysis on here. Because why not. First game I’ll be reviewing, and I’ll probably be posting the review sometime early next week, is Trion’s RIFT, so look forward (or don’t) to that.
To coincide with that, I’m considering making some changes coming up to how the topics and articles are organized (or as it seems at the moment, disorganized) so those of you who may end up here scrounging around for actual game design discussion can easily filter out why the new Pokemon game is particularly awesome. Anyways, that’s a wrap for now, see you after the weekend!
This post is a long time coming, I mentioned to many of you that I’d be sharing my ideas on a few facets of MMO design, and this is the first part of that series. The amount of time it’s taken to get up here isn’t the only thing that’s long though, so make sure you’ve got a drink before you dive into this one. This will be the first part of my discussion on MMOs, and I’ll be talking about appealing to a varied audience. I’d love to hear all of your thoughts in the comments!
MMOs are now a huge part of the market, and are only getting bigger. Figuratively and literally. The scope of these titles is ever expanding as users expect more and more content. Meanwhile developers expect more and more users. Good design practices tell us to know our audience. Yet MMO budgets tell us that everyone is our audience. Many of us may know from experience how difficult it is to create a game that appeals to even a handful of demographics. Design decisions can often break down when features and mechanics would splinter parts of your potential audience or alienate a certain element.
So how can we as designers reconcile the implicit need to create tight audience focused experiences with the financial need to create a game with a target audience defined as clearly as “anyone with a computer.“ I’m going to offer up and explore some ideas that can hopefully help us tackle this question.
One solution? Design a different game for each audience. Now I don’t mean you need to literally create a set of individual titles for each demographic, obviously you want all of your players to be together in the same world, it is an MMO after all. (Though for you enterprising masters of monetization, selling each mode of gameplay may be a good way to lower the barrier to entry and raise revenues in the long run.) But what I do mean is that if you’re trying to appeal to the audience of the SIMs, World of Warcraft, and Battlefield, you need to essentially implement as many “modes” of gameplay as you have disparate audiences.
Imagine instead of designing one single game, that you are designing multiple games that take place in the same universe. (This is essentially what you are doing.) Keeping in mind of course that there needs to be interconnecting functionality, make that a lot of interconnecting functionality. Normally when trying to appeal to such a diverse audience a variety of problems arise. Primarily scope related issues: “Oh we could add feature A, the explorers will really enjoy it.” But chances are feature A doesn’t appeal to anyone else in your audience, and since you’re trying to make essentially one core set of gameplay mechanics that somehow manage to appeal equally to everyone that feature is going to be shelved indefinitely or canned entirely.
When you have one enormous, varied audience all playing with the same rules and mechanics, no matter how easy it may be to implement a feature, by doing so you are cluttering an already convoluted rule set and possibly forcing players who have no interest in that mechanic to participate. If I told you I was going to make a single player game that appealed to the audiences of Harvest Moon and Halo you’d think I’d gone off the reservation, and rightfully so. I’d essentially be drawing a vendiagram where my potential audience was the tiny intersecting population of the two native audiences of those games.
In an MMO space if we separate those two audiences into different sets of rules and mechanics but still place them in the same world where they interact and impact eachother’s experiences, we can grab both audiences, and offer those players whose interests overlap two unique gameplay experiences to shift between. Many MMOs have already attempted something similar, usually breaking their player classes down into some sort of tradecraft and gathering classes and then the traditional combat classes. Now this approach has some potential, but there are a lot of miss-steps that developers take along the way.
The root problem is that the two disparate modes of gameplay are seen as one, and then treated as such. The user interface and controls remain nearly identical for both types of gameplay. The reality is that the same set of controls and one UI absolutely cannot fit the bill for sewing a dress and slaying a dragon. Sacrifices are going to have to be made both on the front end and the back end in favor of one of those modes of gameplay. You as the designer are going to have to make a choice between which is more important to the game, sewing or combat?
I wonder what the answer is going to be? Someone is inevitably going to argue that players who want to focus on the non-combat elements of your game are more willing to accept sacrifices to their gameplay, more willing to complete a relentless staircase of menial and mind-numbing tasks. This is most likely true, but only in the way that a self-fulfilling prophecy is true. By encouraging performance based play and providing modes of gameplay (and I use that word hesitantly) where the primary mechanic is dragging items around your inventory screen menu navigation, we are breeding gamers that expect very little, and closing ourselves off from a large potential audience of players who actually enjoy gameplay.
In these situations the developer has already made the decision to focus on a fraction of their potential audience before they’ve even gotten out of the gate. This means inevitably they will spend less time on design for these modes of gameplay, create less art and later on down the road update less frequently. The parts of your audience that you do manage to rope in with your cunning advertisement ensuring that sewing is just as compelling as combat will feel cheated, if they don’t leave right away, it’s only a matter of time as each update utterly lacking in content for their chosen style of play comes along.
The great thing about compelling gameplay is that it will actually keep your players coming back again and again. Social ties can do this as well, but only to a certain point, no matter how many good friends are playing a game with you, if the experience itself is boring or painful how long are you going to put up with it? For that matter, how long are your friends going to put up with it? When a player’s social circle inside of an MMO space collapses the chance of that player leaving rise exponentially. Solving the cliquey nature of MMO societies and the fallout of disbanding social circles is another fun topic for another day, but the point stands that with bad gameplay, social ties just aren’t enough to keep someone playing a game indefinitely.
On the other hand, if the gameplay is compelling enough by itself, a tight social circle isn’t always necessary. Part of good, compelling MMO design is encouraging social interactions, which encourages the forming of social ties; but even a player without any strong social ties will stick around if the gameplay itself is compelling enough.
Okay so this method of breaking your game down into sets of gameplay is fairly straightforward for “crafting and fighting” or “farming and shooting.” But what about less dissonant styles of gameplay? You just need to look at the different experiences you want to offer and design them in a way that makes the compelling in their own right. After the core mechanics are established, and the experiences stand on their own two feet. then you can think about weaving them together, figuring out how the two interact with one another, and making that interaction enjoyable and integral. What’s not fairly obvious is that this concept of “gameplay sets” can be applied to modes of gameplay with much subtler differences as well. To explore this, I’m going to use a hypothetical game as an example.
Let’s say we were designing a science fiction MMO, in space. What a novel concept right? Anyways, I’ll cut to the chase: the Trinity system. It’s often difficult to transpose the traditional roles (at least as they’ve existed in MMOs since their beginning) of tank, healer and attacker onto any fiction outside of high fantasy where our tolerance has been built up and we always have the fall-back explanation of “magic” for validating just about everything. Even as far as the high fantasy genre is concerned, in any other medium of storytelling outside of games, the way character roles are broken down is not nearly as black and white, nor are these roles always executed in tandem.
Imagine how ridiculous it would be to have seen the medical droid in The Empire Strikes Back following Luke around during his encounter with Darth Vader on Bespin, vigilant and ready to sew on a new hand not even after, but during his encounter with the villain. This is essentially how the role of healer plays out in any given MMO to date. In reality, the idea of a healer runs the gambit from trauma doctors to combat medics, from physical therapists to faith healers.
If I were to explain to someone with no prior knowledge of MMOs about this hypothetical (science) fiction and then ask if they’d like to be a healer in that world. If the answer is in fact a yes, chances are they’re visualizing Dr. McCoy and the Enterprise’s sick-bay, or some kind of quasi-magical alien healing ability. Maybe they’re imagining being a combat medic on a gritty futuristic battlefield, but chances are they’re not imagining shooting green beams of light at some guy getting hit in the face over and over again by a giant space alien.
For various reasons, many of them technological, and many of them related to things like the once far smaller scope of MMOs, the trinity system arose out of necessity. It was necessary for a majority of a game’s content to exist within the same context: combat. Any superfluous non-combat tasks or content was abstracted and relegated out of necessity entirely to menu screens.
We rarely stop to think about it but many other miscellaneous things were sacrificed, simplified and abstracted in the art, programming and sound departments as well. But here we are two decades later with normal maps, HDR lighting, orchestral scores, far more efficient data transfer and draw distances that take our breath away, and yet our game design is still as abstracted as it was in the days of sprites and dial-up. What happened? Did our pursuit of “balance” or some other intangible concept shut off our ability to progress?
The trinity design philosophy has skewed our own conceptions so much that we’ve forgotten that healing and combat are not the same thing, not at all. If we can realize this, and step out of the shadow of the past perhaps we can apply some of the principles of the gameplay sets I spoke about. The kind of player interested in playing a priest in World of Warcraft is not all that different from the kind of player interested in playing a mage. Yet the kind of players interested in being a medical officer aboard a ship’s sick bay one could assume would more often than not be very different than the kind of players looking to jet around the galaxy as a bounty hunter.
Despite the potential to attract two very disparate audiences by establishing unique gameplay for our healer and bounty hunter, more often than not the decision is made to consolidate these roles into a trinity system, using the idea of a healer and bounty hunter not to dictate gameplay content, but as a coat of paint to give the two professions (classes) flavor. This again comes down to the idea of attracting a player vs. retaining said player. You may have attracted one player with the idea of being akin to a Starfleet medical officer, and the other with promises of the opportunity to be a freewheeling Spike Spiegel-esque bounty hunter. But because you’ve consolidated the two into essentially the same gameplay set you’re going to have to retain both of them based on the merits of the exact same combat system.
The downsides to this approach are obvious, so why do we do it? The answer is manifold, but a big part is of course difficulty. It’s difficult to step out of the box we’ve built around ourselves with years of the trinity system dominating our minds. It’s always a risk to try something new. The important thing to realize is that if you’ve considered each of the gameplay sets (or modes) at its core level as its own entirely different game you aren’t necessarily taking as dangerous a risk as one might first think. If you can build gameplay that’s fun for people who enjoy first person shooters and gameplay that’s fun for people who enjoy FarmVille into the same product, you’re not taking a risk on some new gimmick, you’re just reaching out to two established audiences. Obviously these are fairly disparate games, but the first steps towards bringing together dissonant audiences needn’t be such a large leap.
Furthermore, when our audiences do overlap (perhaps some of our players wouldn’t mind being a medic and a bounty hunter), we’ve provided extra value. Needless to say that even if a player sticks only to being a bounty hunter, their experience is made richer by the existence of human players taking the role of medic. Whether they make friends with a medic and recruit them onto their ship as part of their crew, or merely encounter them as necessary, the experience is absolutely made richer and more diverse, and so are their social interactions. Returning though, to the extra value point, if the player enjoys both being a medic and being a bounty hunter, we should not be getting in the way of their appreciation of both.
The reality is, many of the potential players for your game will be interested in multiple facets of the experience. Any healer in an MMO at this time (to an extent) enjoys both combat and healing, because they’re always performing healing during combat. Archaic trinity based design philosophy tells us that we must force our players to adopt specific black and white roles otherwise they are a “hybrid,” which is bad, because it’s difficult to “balance.” But we’ve potentially spent a huge amount of the project resources on both the medical gameplay and the bounty hunting gameplay, do we really want to force the player to experience only one?
The answer is most definitely a no. To be clear, allowing the player to create another character is not a solution. If one player is interested only in the medical gameplay, and wants to become a doctor treating their friends after a battle that’s fine, and should be supported. On the other hand, if a player wants to pursue both paths, and be in the firefight as a combatant, and then patch his or her friends up afterwards, that’s just as valid. The reality is that even if they pursue both paths, they can’t patch a fallen comrade up and shoot their gun at the same time. A player who masters both gameplay sets is rewarded by being more versatile, as they should be. But in a situation where both skills are needed simultaneously, two players are still necessary.
Obviously there are a variety of design challenges that present when you attempt to create content to be consumed by a pool of players with very different skill sets. Challenges aren’t a bad thing though, challenges are what push us to do great things. It’s important to remember that what we’re talking about is an MMO, and it’s okay the goal to create content that is intended to be consumed by a group. Just make sure that you provide ample opportunity for players to socialize, connect and group up. Beyond that the key is to realize that creating content geared exclusively towards a certain subset of your audience is okay, as long as you don’t shove it down everyone elses’ throats. The last thing you want to do is encourage a player to force themselves to play part of your game they have no natural interest in playing.
If you’re going to create really compelling content, whether it be some sort of story event, or some kind of really cool item, making sure everyone has an equivalent piece of content, or that those large content events can be consumed by a group of players is important, not only for your players but for your budget. Expanding this core concept of allowing your players to perform tasks that they enjoy and are masterful at should be a priority. If you spend all of your time creating this amazing dichotomy between two very different gameplay sets, develop these two different styles of play in one aspect of the game, don’t throw it out in another.
Perhaps we’re adding space travel now, that’s a whole new skill set, and it perhaps does not neatly fit in with your existing audience’s divisions. Assuming that everyone is going to want to fly a spaceship and that everyone is going to be able to do so skillfully is a huge mistake. It’s just as big of a mistake to assume that because that is the case it shouldn’t be included at all, or it should be a largely irrelevant aspect of gameplay. Providing other key roles for players who don’t want to be pilots is the ideal path. Navigator, mechanic and gunner are some ideas off the top of my head that don’t even begin to scratch the surface of the ideas I am sure many of you have come up with in only a few seconds of thinking about it. Of course those skill sets are all very different, some of those roles are more hectic than others, and they may be more or less tense over specific periods of time. That’s okay, I promise.
There comes in a moment in the life of every gamer where they realize their place amongst their friends in the hierarchy of skill. This is particularly the case when only one set of skills is required for a game. Whether it is because they are more or less skilled than their friends, nothing is more frustrating for a player than being unable to play with who they want to play with because they have fallen behind. This is where providing different gameplay sets and varying roles come in. To some degree this already exists, it’s often accepted than in most games the tank can be the most difficult role to play, much of a fight comes down to the tank’s performance or decisions, and much of the blame for failures can be placed on their shoulders.
Despite this fact, many games seek to design away this discrepancy between roles, but I say embrace it. A ship needs both a captain and a mechanic, a pilot and a navigator. Sometimes on a smaller ship roles may be less clear. Regardless, some of these roles will prove to be higher tension at times, or require different types of skill. One may require methodical thinking, the other may require twitch reaction. Chances are you’ve got a friend that could whoop you at Street Fighter, and another friend that could school the first friend at StarCraft. They can both find their different but equally important roles on the ship, or within the guild, or whatever analogy is appropriate for the game.
Don’t confuse the word balance with symmetry. Fun isn’t necessarily everyone doing the same thing, homogeneity can quickly become synonymous with boring. Provide opportunities for your players to perform different roles, with different levels of importance, and different required skill sets. By doing so you will be giving them the opportunity to play with the people they enjoy playing with, not force them to abandon their friends in favor of a group of more equivalent skill levels. This means diversity in player groups and increased longevity of those groups.
So how do we reconcile the need to appeal to such a broad and varied audience with the need to create tight, compelling content? The answer is not to design for everyone in our audience, but to design for each person in our audience. If we put in the time and the effort, and create various ways for our players to experience the same world we will see benefits across the board. We can provide experiences that are as deep as all of our experiences are broad, something lacking in most MMO spaces. We can attract new audiences, provide a world where friends of varied interests can play together. A world where friends can play together, and a world where interaction is encouraged creates stronger social ties. Stronger social ties mean players stay longer, which means longevity for the title.
So next time you consider how better to balance sewing dresses with dragon slaying, take a moment to step back from the meeting room table, from your desk, from your napkin notes, or wherever you are, and seriously think about how you are approaching that dilemma.
Much like GLaDOS… I am in fact still alive!
Barely. Speaking of Portal, it’s almost April – if you’ve forgotten, Portal 2 is right on our doorstep! I’m definitely excited about co-op. Looks like I derailed myself. Post-GDC sinus infection kicked me to the curb over the last few weeks it just wouldn’t go away. There’s nothing quite as awesome as all your enthusiasm for your craft (or for anything other than sleeping) being totally sapped right after such an amazing week of inspiration.
But – with that said, I am back on my feet (or back in my chair as is the case right now) and have return to the land of the living (and blogging.) Apologies for my absence, especially to any readers who may have been looking forward to any GDC lectures I did not have a chance to post my re-caps of. I’ll be periodically going back with my notes and adding more re-caps. I’ll be adding them legacy, but I’ll be sure to add a new post linking to them when all of notes are up for those of you (if I’m talking to anyone at all) that may not follow my twitter.
With all of that said, now that GDC is long over, look forward to more original posts! Though I’ll be sure to include stories from elsewhere (otherwise known as stories worth reading) if they are interesting enough to discuss. In the mean time – happy spring!
I was lucky to end GDC 11 on a strong note with a great session: Bioware’s Damion Schubert’s talk on solo players in massively multiplayer spaces. As MMOs are a genre I am particularly passionate about, it was a session I had looked forward to. Schubert opened by proposing a paradigm: that the entire industry has abandoned the canon that MMOs must played together. After all, the loner is a heroic archetype. Many developers (and gamers) often wonder initially why anyone would want to play an MMO if they desire solo play, why not simply play an offline game? You can’t be a loner if there’s no one to ignore though, can you?
An interesting notion, and it rings true. But even the lone wolf is forced to interact with other characters in heroic tales on occasion. This sporadic interaction is where I feel that MMOs often fail entirely. Schubert was like-minded and quick to note that as developers we should never forget that draw of the genre is in fact the massive worlds (hopefully full of other people,) even for the players that choose the path of the loner. “New York city is bustling with people, but oddly enough manhattan has the largest number of single dwellings in any city.” Sounds like solo play to me. Living alone in a big city is not necessarily a lonely experience though, chance encounters abound in densely populated areas. But that’s not the experience for solo players in most MMOs. Their experiences could be more easily compared to living alone in an empty wasteland, kept company primarily by a cast of imaginary characters (npcs) and the distant sight of someone driving by along the horizon.
Okay, so we’ve accepted (and hopefully embraced) that some players do in-fact play alone. Next we’ve got to ask ourselves why? The answer is manifold, as one might expect. The simplest and most obvious example is the new player. These guys and gals have just bought and installed your game because your advertising worked, or perhaps they’re a fan of your IP, who knows, but they’re not playing it because their friends play it, or if they are, they have yet to have an opportunity to meet up with them. These players have no connections, no friends and no clue what they’re doing. How are you going to ease them into the larger world? Studies show that female players dislike learning in the presence of social pressure, and almost always prefer to learn in a vacuum. Are you giving your players opportunities to learn before throwing them into the middle of your community?
There’s a variety of other reasons players might be playing alone, perhaps their social circle (read: guild, clan, etc) has recently fallen apart, their friends recently quit or decided to take a break, they only have a short amount of time to play, or they really are just the kind of person that prefers to be alone a majority of the time. Regardless of what the reason is, their choice to play alone is valid and should not be punished. There’s a huge difference psychologically between being lonely and being alone. Being alone is a neutral activity, it’s usually a healthy respite from our daily interactions, sometimes we can be alone, even when surrounded by other people, and it’s perfectly normal. Being lonely is a negative state of mind, in which we feel like we have no social connections or anyone who wants to interact with us.
Solo players may want to be alone, but they do not want to be lonely. As much as we are often tempted to make our worlds more and more massive, it is important not to needlessly diffuse our game’s content. When people are closer together, there is always something going on. If the player sees others interacting, or has a chance to have a spontaneous interaction with another player, that gives them the feeling of being part of a larger world, even if they have chosen not to actively seek out interaction. Some players may even want to interact with others but have a difficult time taking the first step. Yes, believe it or not, some players are shy.
It seems like a painfully obvious fact that rarely occurs to us, often times we force our players to take the proactive approach, essentially forcing them to group up with others in order to complete some sort of required or optional content. We force these players to actively seek out others. This is bad! Many players would rather be passive in their interaction with other players, especially at first. By requiring them to actively seek out others, you will absolutely cause the follower-type players to either bypass group content or only begrudgingly participate. You have players who are natural leaders, give them the tools they need to bring your followers together, don’t force your followers to lead.
This rule applies to everything from chance interactions, to small instance groups, to the largest player organizations (guilds, clans, etc.) We often rely on the players to organize themselves, we assume that they will actively seek out other players. But this is not the case. You need to take steps to create tools for players to actively or passively look for other players to associate with. Your game is infinitely stickier if you reduce barriers to finding like minded players.
As important as these strong guild ties are however, a social circle like this one can disintegrate overnight. Whether the culprit is guild drama, leadership quitting, members changing servers or what have you, a player’s strong social circle can disintegrate easily. There isn’t always a proactive guild member around to throw the survivors a life raft and pull them all along to a new guild. Instead we as designers need to provide methods for these orphaned players to reintegrate as quickly as possible. Standing by and hoping they are rescued from their sinking ship is a lax approach. These players surely make up a large portion of any MMO audience’s continuous exodus.
But why is the disintegration of this close social circle so damaging? What can we do about it? The answer is perhaps not an easy one, but assuredly it is a simple one. Develop stronger weak ties in the playerbase. Ties in most MMO-spaces tend to be limited, there aren’t a lot of opportunities to develop weak ties. We pretty much interact with close friends and guildmates and nothing more. The weak ties that are often there to bail us out and keep us integrated into society in the real world are all but absent. By creating situations where weak ties can develop, we can give our players opportunities to lean on one another and rescue themselves from a collapsing social structure.
Of course, this is only going to work if your players actually want to help one another. When you consider how much inhibition is taken away from online interactions (vs. offline) however, it’s easy to understand why you may have ended up with a community where a helping hand is not the first thing players want to give one another. The age old balancing act of conflict and cooperation. This can be such and overwhelmingly difficult problem to tackle that many design decisions make it into a game despite obviously being contrary to other design decisions in the same title. Like the idea of competing for cooperative content, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you state it clearly does it?
We tend to handle player’s enmity towards one another by enacting penalties should a conflict arise. (No matter how much it undermines the game world. “We’re supposed to be at war with the orcs, why is it that every time I hit one the hand of god smites me where I stand!?”) Often times this will merely annoy the players involved or even spur more animosity when the player associates the penalty with the other player. Personally I’m not any less likely to attack another player simply because a town guard may come after me. I am however, much less likely to attack a player if I feel empathy towards that player. Developing empathy amongst players is certainly more difficult than placing restrictions on conflict, but it is arguably far, far more effective at creating a strong community.
Just as important to community is providing for all types of players interacting with one another. Schubert suggests that we provide low and high impact roles for players to take. My thoughts exactly, this approach always makes it easier for friends to play together, despite possibly varying skill levels. But the most important takeaway by far is to always remember that no matter what sort of content you provide for your players: alone is the default state of any MMO player, whether for minutes, or for months. Embrace it, but don’t design a single player game.
At times we as game designers can forget that video games are only a fraction of the world of games as a whole. Skaff Elias of Three Donkeys, formerly of Wizards of the Coast, gave a talk on what we can learn from Collectible Card Games (CCGs.) Elias worked very early on with Magic the Gathering and had a hand in most of Wizards’ CCGs. For years games have been sold a la carte, in that the consumer makes a single purchase and receives the entire game. Recently the industry has been trending away from this approach for various reasons (piracy, development costs, market saturation, economy, new platforms, etc.)
Collectible Card Games have mixed business and design since their inception, in ways that our industry is only now starting to experiment with. Elias is a firm believer that we should look not only at other video games for design lessons and inspiration, but to all games, be it sports, tabletop games, board games or card games. There are lessons everywhere.
Distributed object games (like CCGs) contain hundreds of semi-individually purchasable objects that constitute much of the play value of the game. With this in mind, these sorts of games require repeat purchases from players in order to make a profit. These repeat purchase revenue models must be built robustly, they must be part of the core design and iterated on early. This model is a huge benefit to the player and implies a degree of sophistication in the audience.
Limited SKUs don’t necessarily create bad purchases. It’s often beneficial to avoid selling your objects individually and directly and instead randomize selling, but be creative. Don’t be completely randomized in your approach. As a off-and-on player, Magic the Gathering comes to my mind, they sells booster packs which have a certain percentage of common, uncommon and rare cards, ensuring that you won’t get a pack of all commons one day and a pack of all rares the next. Including something like Magic’s “decks” (where the contents are known to the player) may also be one way to approach scaring away new users with an entirely (or seemingly entirely) randomized selling system. Like all things, it’s about balance.
If you’re planning for success in your game you’ll need to plan for different skill levels, different entry times, etc. These planning measures place large constraints on your design. You’ll need some sort of cycling of objects or depreciation in order to keep long-time players interested, and prevent new players from being overwhelmed or unable to compete. Elias noted that “If every game is a sales pitch, every object should be easily understood.” Meaning that you’re trying to get players to continuously invest money into your product, they need to clearly understand what it is they are after.
It is much easier to keep control over the impact your objects have on gameplay when the amount of impact physical skill (twitch) has in your systems is minor. It’s much harder to measure the usefulness of a 10% increase to damage in a first person shooter where most outcomes will likely turn out the same regardless of the damage increase, due to encounters being largely skill based, than it is to measure the usefulness of a 10% increase to damage in an RPG where the outcome of encounters is largely stat based.
On top of removing twitch gameplay, adding randomness to your design is another key component of this approach. Adding some randomness makes it fun for players and friends to play across skill levels, and means that lower skilled players won’t always lose (and therefore immediately give up on your game.) Randomness is often seen as the enemy of the designer, but randomness shouldn’t remove player skill altogether, and if it’s a reasonable amount the outcome won’t be too largely affected. Randomness increases the sample size, but it won’t change player rankings. If the loser could roll a dice at the end of a chess match and a 6 meant they won, world chess rankings wouldn’t change, the sample size would.
By allowing your players to have fun when facing superior players, you also give these superior players opportunities to lose, which also makes the game more fun for them. Losses are necessary to drive sales. If you’ve never lost, what incentive is there to buy a new object? If your game has a singleplayer component, this concept is just as important. The player must be able to lose. A huge part of object-driven games is reorganizing. Reorganizing the player’s “deck,” so to speak, is a crucial part of the gameplay. Because of this, play time must be kept low as repeat play is critical, not only to create opportunities for wins and losses, but to give players an opportunity to reorganize.
If your items are redistributable you must realize that changing the rarity or power of an item directly affects the price, and this must be taken into consideration. It’s extremely important to be careful when adjusting the power of an object, as you could really step on a lot of player’s toes who have gone out of their way to get that object. At all costs you should avoid nerfing an object, and instead try to simply move beyond it, cycle it out of usefulness. The perfect time to release new objects is when the advanced players have nailed down the absolute best strategy. The balancing act is between keeping it interesting for the advanced players, and not cycling so fast the mid-level players feel left in the dust.
As you create new objects you must be aware of complexity creep and power creep, don’t let them overtake you. Each new object does not need to be, nor should it be simply more complex and powerful than the last, this will make all of your old objects useless. In addition, you can cycle objects in and out of play, in order to control gameplay more closely. In the end the lesson here is that CCGs have been dealing with some of the same issues we are just now starting to tackle for years, and it does not make any sense not to look at them for lessons learned and best practices as we move forward.
Were you at the session? Did you find any great takeaways I missed? What are your thoughts? Leave a comment.
I'm Douglas Miller. I'm a game designer. I'm great at looking like I know what I'm doing, and I'm even better at trying to know how to do everything. This is the place where my thoughts go when they escape the byzantine thing I call my brain!
