Guildwars World Preview Event

Guildwars was supposed to launch its World Preview Event today, lasting from October 29th to 31st. But in fact you could already start playing yesterday, so excuse me for the news being late. Seems they found a good trick to avoid everybody clogging their servers at the same time, by simply starting one day earlier than announced.

You can download the client from the Guildwars web site. Don't be surprised that the file is tiny, 62kb, the game downloads in several stages. Zones are only downloaded when you enter them, which makes the game client small, but means you need broadband internet access if you do not want zoning into a new place take forever.

Guildwars is well worth checking out, the preview is both pretty and stable. But if you miss this preview event, you'll have to wait for my review. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 1:09 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
The Universal Strategy Guide

It may seem that a lot has changed in the last five years of MMORPG history. But a closer look reveals that at least combat, especially combat in a group, hasn't changed that much at all. The same strategies that worked in Everquest in 1999 will still work in World of Warcraft in 2004, as well as in most character class based games in between. But these universal strategies aren't written down anywhere, certainly not in the game manuals. No game tutorial explains them, and most veterans simply assume that everybody already knows them. This makes it hard for new players to join these games, because learning these strategies in game involves a lot of being shouted at and being called a n00b. This Universal Strategy Guide is meant to help new players to know the most basic combat strategies. And we invite veterans to add to it by way of our forum.

Group combat in MMORPGs is all about controlling which group member gets attacked. A monster facing a group of several players has to decide whom to attack, and does that based on a hidden number called “agro” (short for aggravation), or “hate”. The aim of nearly all group strategies is to manipulate hate so that the monster makes a poor choice of whom to attack.

This worst possible choice for the monster to attack, from the point of view of the monster, is the group’s tank. A tank is some sort of heavily armored warrior whose armor will absorb the monster’s attacks, reducing their damage. The very first thing any group has to agree on is who the tank is. Besides heavy armor, the tank also needs some way to increase the hate on him. Most games give their tank classes a skill named taunt. The job of the tank is to taunt as much as he possibly can, all of the time, so the monster only hits him, and not the much lighter armored other characters.

Obviously the tank wouldn't survive this long without a healer. The healer's job is simply to heal the tank. Ideally, the healer should never have to heal anyone else, as the tank is supposed to keep all the hate and thus be the focus of all attacks. If the monster hits somebody else, the correct response of the group is for the tank to taunt the monster off the other player, and for the healer to keep healing the tank, unless the other player has to be saved from death. It is more important to keep the tank alive than to keep the whole group at maximum health. Healing itself generates hate, so the healer has to experiment how to achieve maximum healing while producing the minimum of hate directed at himself. Spells that heal over time, regeneration, are often very effective in this.

A group can have more than one tank and more than one healer. In this case, they should agree before combat starts who are the main tank and the main healer.

Most of the other players in the group will be damage dealers. Their job is it to deal the maximum amount of damage to the monster, while avoiding drawing too much hate onto themselves. This is especially difficult for spellcasters with many offensive spells. They often have to make deliberate pauses, because if they just cast all their spells one after another, they would produce too much hate, and the monster would go after them instead of the tank. But they can unleash their most powerful spell when the monster is nearly dead, as dead enemies don't hate any more.

It often comes to some surprise to new players that tanks are not very good at dealing damage. Many games have other melee fighters that are considerably lighter armored, but deal more damage than the tank. This is done due to game balance, because if the same character class had both the best offence and the best defense, not many people would play anything else. Before choosing a melee character class, one should find out whether this class is more a tank, or more a damage dealer, and then behave accordingly.

If the group is fighting more than one monster at a time, things get more complicated. This often requires one group member with "crowd control" skills. These are spells that temporarily confuse one or several monsters, making them not attack anybody unless they are attacked themselves. Ideally all but one monster are thus controlled ("mezzed"), and the group concentrates on the one monster that is still attacking. Needless to say, nobody should start an attack that affects the whole area and thus wakes up all the mezzed monsters.

Without crowd control, combat is more difficult, but not impossible, as long as the group has more than one tank. The tanks keep all the hate on them, the healers heal them, and the damage dealers concentrate all on the same monster, the one on the main tank. It is much better to kill the monsters one by one than to distribute the damage over all of them.

One final job for the group is to designate a puller. The group should ideally stay at a safe place, away from all monsters. The puller’s job is to "pull" monsters towards the group, so they can be killed. The puller could either be the main tank, as pulling already produces hate. Or it could be somebody with some form of ranged combat, who pulls the monsters from a distance, and then the tank taunts the monster of him. It is very important that there be only one designated puller in a group, and that nobody else pulls a monster out of boredom. Two or more people pulling monsters from different directions at the same time is a sure way to get the whole group wiped out.

With these universal strategies, one is well armed for most MMORPGs out there. In the harsher games, like Everquest, such tactics are the only way to survive. But even in easier games this strategies are very useful, as they will allow the group to kill more and harder monsters than they could do without them.

This article has also been published on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 1:43 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
EverQuest II - Official Release Date Announced

The official release date for EverQuest II has been announced. As the rumors predicted, the game will ship on November, 8th, and should be available everywhere in retail stores by November, 9th. The game is simultaneously released in North America and Europe.

World of Warcraft release date is still just a rumor, but this rumor points to the 22nd of November, two weeks after EQ2. And WoW will be released only in North America and Korea, with Europe not only not being supplied, but also prevented from importing by not accepting credit cards with European billing address. Which means that at least the European players have no problem to decide what to play this winter, WoW Europe will only be released "early 2005".

I'm still looking forward to the release of EQ2, but I am a bit sceptical how stable the game will be on release. The game is making huge progress against lag and crashes, but this is still just the closed beta, with a quite limited number of players.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:15 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Evil isn't cool

How would it be to be an evil person in a society full of evil persons? Many games have a "good" and an "evil" side, or only the evil side, but most of them are giving a very wrong impression of evil. In very many games "evil" is either not fundamentally different from "good", besides changing the decoration to something with a more cool, black, gothic look (Play an undead in WoW to know what I mean). Or "evil" is depicted as more interesting as good, with you as the evil guy being the actor, and the good guys being the victims (for example the Grand Theft Auto series).

But the first time I had a realistic feeling of evil was when this weekend I played an evil character in Freeport in the Everquest 2 beta. Being weak and poor meant I had to live in a slum. The whole city being evil meant the slums are dirty, scarcely furnished, and bleak. The NPC giving quests to me either obviously lied, or didn't tell me much about why they sent me doing something. Some quest givers even cheated me of my reward. All NPC, quest givers, merchants, or passer-by, were rude and unfriendly, or displayed a wide range of unpleasant character traits. Living in Freeport is extremely unpleasant, but one has to admire how brilliantly realistic this evil community is shown.

Problem is, players instinctively don't like it. Most people try both the good and the evil side, and then tend to stick to the much more pleasant city of Qeynos, where even the poor suburbs are clean and cheerful, and the NPC are nice, sometimes funny, and at worst a bit grumpy. Although the world is designed to be symmetrical, with the same number and size of zones in Freeport and Qeynos, there are significantly more people on the Qeynos side. A lot less people are interested in playing evil when evil isn't cool.

I will play on the more pleasant Qeynos side in the live version as well, Freeport is depressing me. But players that are not that impressible might consider playing evil the better strategy when the game is released. Overpopulation is causing problems in MMORPG. Lag in the Commonlands around Freeport is significantly less than in Antonica around Qeynos. And there is less competition for "phat lewt" from named monsters, and for other scarce resources. Being evil has its advantages even in EQ2, they just aren't that obvious.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:32 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
EverQuest II Release Date Rumors

MMORPG.com reports that SOE has told retailers to expect Everquest on November 9, 2004. Quote: NOTE: This is not an official word from SOE - but our sources are indicating this is a very likely release date for EQII.

I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand I would really like to end beta and play my character in the live version. Getting you character to higher levels has always been one of the main purposes of playing a MMORPG. Leveling a character in a beta, where you are sure that he is going to be wiped in the not-so-far future, is kind of lacking this purpose. I play betas to learn about new games and be able to review them. If I then play the retail version, the knowledge is often very helpful. So I'm happy that I can play the real game in 3 weeks.

On the other hand, I honestly do not believe the game is ready for release. Lag has been worked on, and is now much better. But that just means that instead of 60 seconds of lag, you have between 2 and 5 seconds of lag. It is possible to fight mobs in Antonica, but the lag is still very noticeable. I also still experience crashes of my character, of zones, the login server, or of the whole game.

Furthermore the announcements on the official boards scare the heck out of me. They are going to completely revamp the character classes, to add more individuality. They are going to add traits, and special abilities against your most hated enemies. And all this not 3 weeks before the game goes live? You must be kidding me. "Thank you for beta testing the class balance, we are now going to completely change it, and then release the game", or what?

Now some people say "But this is just a beta", implying that everything will be fine by release. In my experience even games where the beta went smoothly had problems on release day, because with such an anticipated game, the number of players overrunning the servers is going to be huge.

So all in all, I'm looking forward to the release, but predict it will be problematic.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:42 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Slashdotted

What I wrote about EQII both on Grimwell.com and here got slashdotted. Being mentioned on Slashdot.org is considered to be the pinnacle of what passes for fame on the internet. So, according to Warhol, I now got 15 minutes to bask in this fame.

Actually I wouldn't even have noticed, as Slashdot is a bit too chaotic for me to read regularly. But I received an e-mail from John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, thanking me for writing a balanced opinion. Which actually impressed me more than being slashdotted did. Oh, and he promised to fix the lag in the next couple of days. Good news.

[Correction] Warhol was wrong. Fame on the internet doesn't last 15 minutes, but according to Site Meter which is counting my page visits, it lasts about 4 days:


- posted by Tobold @ 2:05 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Everquest II - My Opinion

The NDA of EQ2 has been lifted today. Time to write what I think about this game. I'm going to sort my rambling thoughts into Good, Bad, and Ugly. So, lets start with the good side of Everquest 2.

Good

Everquest 2, like its predecessor, is a masterpiece of social engineering. It does a great job of bringing people together in different ways: Groups, guilds, trades, and chat. Groups are nicely balanced versus solo play, giving you a strong incentive to group, without forcing you to do so to gain xp. Guilds are well supported, and receive a range of goodies, like horses that can be bought with guild status points, guild housing, and even a free guild website with an automated guild roster. The player economy is well done, offering people the possibility to either find each other on the traders chat channel, or by selling stuff on a broker.

But the best feature to bring people together is probably the chat. Sure, it would have been even nicer if you could combine your chat windows into one window with several tabs, but that is the only feature that is missing. There are a good number of existing world-wide channels: For your race, your home city, your profession, a crafters channel, and a traders channel. On top of that you can open your own chat channel, and invite people to it. And of course there are the usual channels for tells, say, guild chat, group chat, out-of-character chat, shouts, auctions, and so on.

The second good point of Everquest 2 is content. There is tons of it. About half the NPCs I've met offer quests, and there are hundreds of them. This is especially nice since most of the quests given out in the cities can be done at a comparatively low level, so you can start questing right after you leave the Island of Refuge. I haven't seen all that many zones yet, but there are lots of them. Even the city has several instanced newbie zones, and with all those quests and newbie zones you might be well past level 10 before you even leave the city.

Combat in Everquest 2 is solid, and well balanced. Every class can solo, but also fulfills an important role in a group. Group play was especially fun, because nearly everybody in the beta was an EQ1 veteran, and knew the basics of how to play his class. In comparison to EQ1 not much has changed in combat, but there is the new feature of heroic opportunities. If the player(s) in a combat perform certain actions in the order shown on the screen, they get some special bonus. This is great in solo combat, but requires some coordination and discipline in group combat, and these are generally in short supply, so group heroic opportunities rarely happen.

Tradeskills are a big improvement over EQ1. The fact that you craft by doing a very simple mini-game makes crafting impossible to macro, which is good. The accidents you have to repair, and the two buffs you can cast on yourself to help your crafting for a few seconds, keep you occupied while crafting, so it isn't too boring. The latest patch about doubled tradeskill xp, so you level tradeskills now with nearly the same rate as adventuring levels.

Bad

Unfortunately EQ2 is far away from being finished, and it is unlikely that the game will be released in November in a state that I would be happy with.

The worst problem is lag. EQ2 suffers from bad geography. When you leave your city, Qeynos or Freeport, you arrive in a huge zone. Huge as in "you can rent a griffin to cross the zone". The zone has many hundreds of mobs and NPC, lots of teen-level content, and you need to cross it to get anywhere else, so there are always hundreds of players in the zone as well. And the servers can't handle that up to now. Lag is not only noticeable, at certain times the zone simply becomes unplayable. I checked with a stop watch, and clocked more than a minute of lag between hitting a button and the game reacting to it. Combat becomes totally random, and very slow. Your client trying to predict where the other players are makes them appear to jump all over the place. You can't even chat well, with over 1 minute delay between hitting enter and the chat appearing to others. Fortunately the devs are very aware of this problem, and are confident to get it fixed before release.

But the game has other technical issues. Crashes are still too frequent, of characters, zones, and sometimes even the whole server. Frequent hotfixes are necessary, and there will probably still be a lot of server downtime after release. There are lots of bugs that affect gameplay negatively, and many cosmetic glitches.

Everquest II is also not yet feature complete. Big features, like automated trading, or horses, are still being added in every patch. Many things simply don't work yet, for example you can buy repair supplies, but not use them yet. Several quests can't be finished yet. Sure, there is visible progress in each patch. But frankly, one month before release the developers should be putting final touches to a finished program, and not still be working on fundamental issues like lag, crashes, and major feature addition.

But even if the game were finished at release, there are other problems. Everquest 2 is firmly targeted at the veteran EQ1 (or other MMORPG) player. The learning curve is steep, and I wouldn't really recommend this game to anybody who never played a similar game before. EQ2 is more newbie-friendly than EQ1, but that isn't saying much. The tutorial and starting island will teach you the basics of how to play, but still leave many questions unanswered.

The first pitfall is probably the choice of your character class after having left the tutorial ship. You click on a NPC, and he asks you whether you are a fighter, scout, mage, or priest. You select one, the NPC says something very general about the class, and you are asked to confirm your choice. What you are *not* told is which stats are important for which class, or which races are suited for them. If you are new to the genre you could easily make the error of creating a gnome fighter, or a troll mage. And while these combinations are playable in other games, in EQ2 they simply are not, unless you have a deep-founded masochism.

Another rather fundamental information that you are never told is that you can upgrade your spells and skills. Upgrading spells and skills is very important for success in this game, and is relatively cheap. But you need to be aware of the possibility first, and even veteran EQ players can miss this one, as the system is new. The upgrade system is also unnecessarily complicated, with its scale from Apprentice 1 to 4, then Adept 1 to 4, then Master 1 to 4. You never know which upgrade level would be appropriate for your level.

You not being told important information is a constant feature of Everquest 2. This is most annoying in quests. There are many quests where you are given so little information of where to go, that you can either search for hours, or be forced to ask other players. Chat is full of people asking where to go for this or that quest. Painfully missing as well are maps. EQ2 has a nice map feature for the Island of Refuge, and the two cities. And then there simply aren't any maps any more, not even rough ones, for all other zones. Many zones are large, and/or labyrinthine, and some sort of mapping feature would help a lot, even if it was dark at the start and would only become visible once you visited the landmarks.

There will be a host of websites offering quest information and maps for EQ2. Not just for fun, but because such information is sorely needed.

Ugly

In my personal opinion, the first thing to mention under ugly is the graphics. But I am well aware that other people like them, you will need to judge them yourself. Everquest 2 graphics are "photorealistic", up to a point. But realistic includes a distinct lack of color, a washed out look, and things becoming foggy and fuzzy starting from a rather short distance. It might be realistic that you can't see that there is a green goblin standing in the green grass, but it sure isn't helpful for playing the game. It also taxes your computer a great deal. Do not try to play EQ2 with a computer bought last year or before. Quote the minimum specs: "EverQuest II requires a video card capable of handling both Vertex and Pixel shaders (the GeForce3/Radeon 8500 Series and above, for the mainstream cards). Any cards that do not conform to this requirement will not work (this includes the GeForce MX line, in any incarnation, including the GF4 MX line)." Since the last patch EQ2 also requires DirectX9.0c.

The other ugly things to report are a wide range of half-baked ideas. Features that first sound good, until you begin to notice deep flaws in the details:

Tradeskills still have a range of problems. Making one item can take several minutes, depending on quality level. That is good if you are making final items you gain good xp with and are proud to sell. But before that there are a lot of steps where you have to refine resources. These are often trivialy easy, so don't give much or any xp, and take a lot of time. Some refined resources can be bought, which solves the problem of the time refining takes, but obviously makes the un-refined resources pretty much worthless. Most people only gather resources because there is a very small chance to find a highly valuable rare resource.

One typical half-baked idea is automated trading. You can only sell things using the automated broker if your character is online and standing in his house, with the selling board screen open. You can not simply dump the item for sale on the broker and go adventuring, no, you have to stay in your room. You can chat, or rearrange your furniture, and hope that at some point in the future crafting tools can be placed in houses, but most players simply go AFK while selling. So the only thing this system produces is people remaining logged in away from keyboard, instead of logging out and freeing server resources.

Another new idea is traps on all the good loot, and the traps can only be disarmed by a scout class character. Good idea to encourage groups to take on a scout, he is useful in other ways too. But really bad idea for soloers of all other classes. You fight a hard monster all alone, are happy to survive, and then the treasure kills you.

The final ugly thing I would like to mention is the spell / skill upgrade system. Not only is it needlessly complicated, it also encourages twinking. There is no level restriction on spell upgrades. A high level character can buy rather expensive spell upgrades for low level spells and pass them to his low level alts. Twinking with equipment has been limited in EQ2, by making equipment have certain level requirements, but spell upgrade twinking will be rather common, and will make a big difference between a twinked and an un-twinked low-level character.

Summary

Everquest 2 is a good game, but it definitely has its flaws. Given a choice, I would rather play World of Warcraft. But living in Europe that choice is not given to me, so I will play Everquest 2 until WoW comes out.

Once the worst bugs have been fixed, Everquest 2 will be a very good game for the experience MMORPG veteran. Newbies are advised to play something else first.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments

 
Everquest 2 - How it works

As a private citizen and blogger I am under the NDA and can't say anything about EQ2. As writer at Grimwell.com I got special permission to post about EQ2, limited to the game below level 20. You can find the result here, at Grimwell Online.^

[Edit] NDA has been lifted, so for archiving purposes I copy to here what I wrote on Grimwell.com

Everquest is one of the most successful MMORPG of all times, going strong since 1999. But computer game graphics have considerably evolved since then, and there is only so much you can do to tweak a five-year-old graphics engine. So SOE is launching Everquest 2 at the end of this year, probably in November 2004. Since mid-September the staff of Grimwell.com is testing the EQ2 beta. Up to now we were under the NDA, not allowed to say anything, but we got special permission now to talk of the under level 20 game. As this is one of the great releases this year, and there is a lot to say, we are going to split it in several parts. This is part 1, in which I describe how EQ2 works, without judging it. Part 2 will then have the collected opinions of several of the Grimwell.com staff. Please be aware that we are talking about a beta version here, and some things are still likely to change.

Everquest 2 starts by you creating your character. First you chose your race and gender. There are 15 races already available, with the 16th race, Froglok, to be opened up later by actions of the players. The characters are depicted in photo-realistic detail, and you can modify their look with a great number of sliders to the smallest detail. Of course there are limits, you cannot make a really tall or fat gnome, or a small or thin ogre. At this point in time you cannot chose your character class yet, so no stats are shown.

When you are finished determining the look of your avatar, you start the game on the tutorial ship, The Far Journey. Here you are explained the basics of the game, how to control your character and the camera, how to interact with NPC, how to do quests, and how to fight.

The Far Journey then sets you up on the Island of Refuge, which is the newbie zone for all players up to level 6. This zone is instanced; meaning several identical copies of it can exist. Whenever all existing Islands of Refuge are crowded, the game simply creates a new one. You can travel from one instance to another, if you have friends starting at the same time as you and want to group with them.

The first thing to do on the island is to choose your basic character class, of which there are four: Fighter, Mage, Priest, and Scout. Fighters are the experts of melee combat. Mages cast offensive spells, while priests are more specialized in defensive and healing magic. Scouts are the experts of stealth and cunning. At level 10, each of these archetypes splits up into 3 classes, for example priests can become clerics, druids, or shamans, while scouts can become rogues, bards, or predators. At level 20 these classes split up even further, so a predator could become either assassin or ranger. Every race can become any class; there are no restrictions. It is up to you to ponder the wisdom of creating a gnome warrior or a troll mage.

Once you have chosen your archetype, you receive the first class specific spells or abilities. From then on, whenever you gain a level, you receive one or more additional spells or abilities. While you receive them for free, you only get the most basic level of the skill, called apprentice 1, and it is advisable to upgrade as soon as you can, although you probably need to wait until you left the Island of Refuge for that. Apprentice 2 skill upgrades are available from NPC merchants in the cities. Players with tradeskills craft apprentice 3 skill upgrades. Apprentice 4 skill upgrades can later be gained by special quests, but these aren't implemented in the beta yet. After the Apprentice series of skill upgrades comes the adept series: Adept 1 are dropped from monsters, while adept 3 skill upgrades are crafted using very rare components. At higher levels there will be master level skill upgrades.

You can get your first introduction into tradeskills on the Island of Refuge. You craft by learning recipes from artisan books, but you are limited to books with a volume number equal or lower to your artisan level. Crafting gives you artisan experience points, and then levels, in a career that is parallel and more or less independent of your adventuring career. Crafting consists of a mini-game, in which you have to react to unforeseen accidents by pressing the correct button. Some of these accidents can even hurt you, and if you aren't paying attention, you might even get killed.

On the Island of Refuge you can do quests and fight monsters until you gain experience level 6. The island is also the first opportunity of grouping with other players. Everquest 2 has a unique system in which when you click on a monster it not only tells you its relative level compared to yours, it also clearly states if this monster is designed to be soloed, or to be attacked in a group. This is just a recommendation, but attacking a "group" monster alone can be hazardous to your health, while "solo" monsters don't give much experience points for a group. Your stay on the island ends with you taking the boat to one of the two cities, Freeport or Qeynos.

Freeport is the city for people with evil alignment, while Qeynos is for the people with good alignment. While there is no PvP in EQ2 yet, it is expected to be added later. Good and evil players are separated after leaving the Island of Refuge, and cannot chat with each other, or be in the same group. Some races are considered good and can only start in Qeynos, other races are considered evil and start in Freeport, while neutral races have the choice. It is possible to change sides by doing a difficult betrayal quest, but only once. Some character classes are linked with alignment, e.g. only evil players can become assassins, and only good players can become rangers. So if you want to play a troll ranger, you have to start in Freeport, and then betray it and move to Qeynos.

Arrived at your starting city, you find yourself confined to the suburbs, until you do a simple citizenship quest. This quest introduces you to housing, furniture, the bank, and the instanced newbie zones. Once you have done it, you are free to roam all over the huge city with its many zones. Outside the cities are huge overland zones, Antonica around Qeynos, and Commonlands around Freeport, which then lead to further and more dangerous zones, with countless adventures still untold awaiting you.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:02 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Personal Decision About WoW

I can't really say that I'm happy with the fact that Blizzard is forcing me to play World of Warcraft several months late, and on European servers. But if Blizzard is giving me lemons, I'll have to try to make lemonade. So I have made a personal decision about World of Warcraft: I will play on the German servers.

Yes, I am aware that I won't meet anybody I know on the German servers. But being an expatriate German in Belgium, I don't get to speak my native language all that often. And if it doesn't work out at all, I can still move to the UK server, the European client allows that.

Well, thats decided. Now I still got several month, probably until February or March 2005, before this plan goes into realization. And unless I get some sort of Euro beta invite, I can let WoW rest until then. To better concentrate on EQ2, which is looking as if it is well able to hold my attention this winter.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:21 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
The Matrix Online goes beta

The Matrix Online starts its beta on Tuesday, October 12th. Following a trend, access to the beta is exclusive for subscribers of Fileplanet. The release date for this game has been announced to be January 18th, 2005.

The main site of the game is a bit outdated, talking of May 2004 for the beta, and November 2004 for the release. The trailers for the game don't really look all that exciting, graphics wise, but it's sure worth to have a look.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:14 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Massively Multiplayer?

The game aspects of MMORPGs have been widely discussed here and elsewhere. But the success of MMORPGs is not based on their offering better game play than single-player games. Rather it is the interaction between players which gives the game the additional kick. An MMORPG is a wonderful 3D chat room as well as a game, but the chat aspect has often been neglected. Is a game really "massively multiplayer" if the players can't interact much with each other?

Chat

It is surprising how bad the chat interface is in the majority of MMORPGs. Far too many games have only one message window by default, which holds both the game messages of the type "Orc hits you for 3 points of damage" and all the different forms of interplayer chat messages. Whenever you are in a group fighting one or several monsters, the amount of game messages makes this message window scroll far too fast, and you are more than likely to miss messages from other people.

Some games make it possible to open several chat windows and then choose which types of messages go where. But that only works well if you can arrange those windows as you like, including stacked all together in one corner, with tabs to chose which window is readable at the moment. If you can't stack the message windows, they simply take too much space on your screen, blocking your view of important elements of the virtual world.

Another big problem is the number of chat channels. Most games have channels for your immediate surrounding (/say), a wider area (/shout), direct communication with one other player (/tell), a channel for your current group (/group), and one for your guild (/guild). Other channels that would be equally important are not always present, for example a trading channel, or a channel where people can ask and answer questions. Far too few games allow players to create new, specialized channels, for example a channel for players from one country, where they can speak their native tongue. And even games that allow such custom channels often do not have a way for other players to list them. So a group of Swedes might create a Swedish language chat channel, but other Swedes on the server are quite likely to be unaware of that channel, because they can only find it by word of mouth.

The final problem with chat windows is that there is an inexplicable tradition of making them the least intuitive part of the user interface. Often the majority of options are only accessible via slash-commands on the command line interface. Options might be there, but they aren't explained in the tutorial or the manual, so most players just miss them. Many are needlessly complicated, even in otherwise user-friendly games.

A series of tabbed chat windows, which is already organized in a reasonable way by default, easy to manage, and offering the possibility to create new public channels, would go a long way to create stronger bonds between the players.

Guilds and Groups

A lot of the social interaction of a MMORPG takes place in temporary groups or more permanent guilds. Sometimes, though, the user interface or game play elements get into the way of these important social interactions.

Guild chat is one of the places where players are most likely to have the feeling of chatting with "friends". It is often a sense of duty towards this guild that keeps people playing a game which in itself wouldn't hold their interest any more. So restricting guild chat is a bad idea. Several games (City of Heroes, Lineage 2) have caps to the maximum possible number of guild members. As players typically have several characters, such caps can easily be reached, preventing communication and thus the formation of social networks.

Communication and groups is a totally different problem. Group chat works reasonably well in most games. Where the communication often breaks down is in the formation of groups. I haven't seen a single game yet with a "looking for group" chat channel. Many games have LFG flags, but these are far from perfect, as they give little information beyond level and class. Often a zone wide channel like /shout is used to look for a group for a specific task or quest. But as this channel is not very specific, the signal to noise ratio is low. If you are able to look for groups outside your current zone, the problem is often one of travel time to then reach the newly found group.

Trade and Population Centers

Beyond groups and guilds, a frequent sort of interaction between players is the game economy. Players craft or find items they want to sell to somebody else, while others made money which they want to invest in items. There are a lot of different systems how the various games handle trade, of widely differing quality.

A trade or auction chat channel is certainly helpful. But if you make that channel server wide, buyer and seller might be divided by a distance too large to be worth traveling for a minor deal. On the other hand, more local trade chat channels often have too small an audience.

Sometimes players solve that problem spontaneously by informally agreeing on a place or zone which becomes the main trading spot. Game developers can aid this process by arranging for natural population centers. If all the players regularly need to visit the city for training or quests, the higher population density soon results in trading activities.

The best case is some sort of auction house or bazaar, where items can be bought and sold between players on a slower time scale, enabling them to trade when elsewhere in the virtual world, or even offline. The area in front of such an auction house can then easily develop into some sort of market area, where other deals are made face to face.

Less good is a trading system by individual vendors, whether they are NPC vendors or the players avatar in away-from-keyboard mode. Finding the one vendor that is selling what you want is often difficult. If the vendors are distributed over a wide area, they are even harder to find. And if all the vendors are standing in the same market place, they often cause lag and frame rate problems for other people approaching that space.

Summary

To have the positive network effect of a true massively multiplayer game, the developers have to improve the communication and interaction possibilities between players. That becomes especially important with games that are following the current trend of enabling players to fight monsters on their own, without a group. If players are fighting solo, they need other communication channels to enable social interactions. Otherwise a game can easily turn into a single-player game in disguise, and it is doubtful that this would justify a monthly fee.

This article has also been published on Grimwell.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:19 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
A short trip back to Naboo

Many ex-players of Star Wars Galaxies received e-mails inviting them to 10 free days back into the game, and so did I. The procedure is very painless, you simply reinstall, log in with your old username and password, patch, and play. No need to provide credit card details or anything. Of course SOE is hoping that at the end of these 10 free days you will resubscribe to their "improved" SWG, and in that case you will get another 10 free days added to the subscription period you paid for.

I hadn't played SWG since November of last year. But my avatar was still there, and playing him now might save him from being wiped in the announced character wipe. What wasn't there any more was my characters house. The annoying thing was that I had an in-game e-mail telling me that the house collapsed only 3 weeks ago, as I had put a lot of maintenance money into it. There go all of my collected rare armorcrafting resources.

And that lead me to think that SWG is one of the games where coming back to is difficult, if not impossible. A lot of the activities in SWG serve to build up something which isn't permanent, something you will lose if you have been gone for some time. Your friends are mostly gone, your customers have long forgotten you, your house crumbled, the resource collection which was far too big to store in your backback has disappeared. You aren't re-starting from total zero, but it isn't far off.

Over at Grimwell we often discuss a classification of MMORPGs into "games" and "worlds". And SWG is a typical example of a MMORPG which is very much a "world", but not so much a "game". Unfortunately getting back into a game is much easier than getting back into a world. A typical game heavy MMORPG like City of Heroes I could restart at any time with no problems, and not have lost much in comparison to the day I stopped. And I might well do that, for the City of Villains expansion. But as much as I think that the Jump to Lightspeed expansion is important for SWG, it will not lure me back into this world, because I simply don't want to start over building a house, collecting resources, and finding customers.

The important difference is that the "world" games often have a "grind to fun" concept. You repeatedly do an activity which is not fun, but you do it for the reward, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The "game" games concentrate on offering you immediate fun. That is easier to get back to, but less ideal for holding your long-term interest, as there is not so much of a final goal to strive towards.

I wonder if a game that does both is possible. World of Warcraft is certainly in the insta-fun category, giving you lots of options already in the low levels. But I haven't played it long enough to find out whether it also has "world" aspects, long-term development, a real reason for a mid-level player to want to reach the higher levels, instead of making a new character.

What I do know is that SWG still isn't much of a game, however wonderful you may find the world. The promised combat revamp has been postponed into 2005, so I don't really feel like hunting mobs under the old boring combat system. Most of my SWG time I spend searching for rare resources, but that is a project that takes months before it results in a high-quality composite armor. So in my 10 days I will probably just do a short sentimental journey, and then put the box back into the cupboard to collect more dust.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:16 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments