Buying games - Part 2

Applause goes to NCSoft which now sells City as Heroes and Lineage 2 directly as downloadable version over their website.

The catch is that it costs $50, so the downloadable version is in no way cheaper than buying the box. And you do not get a CD, nor a manual. So if you fail to make a backup of the downloaded client and the e-mail with the CD-key, and your computer crashes, you might be in trouble. Most people probably can live with that risk, especially if they live in a place where the box with the game is not easily available.

It would be easy to blame them for greed, charging $50 for the downloaded version. But the commercial reality is probably that they made a deal with the retailers: The retailers don't object to NCSoft offering a downloadable version, but the downloadable version may not be cheaper than the box, so nearly every customer who has the choice will use the retailer instead of the download.

The cheapest way for a European to get a US-only MMORPG is DVDboxoffice from Canada, because of their free worldwide shipping. There CoH costs 40 Euro ($48). So you save $2, and you get the box with everything, but you need to wait about 10 days for the shipment to arrive. Gamers are not well known for their patience, and there is a special feeling of urgency to play right from the start of a game, so that offer might not appeal to everybody. There are European importers like Importmadness, which ship slightly faster, but you still won't have your game on release day, and it costs 48 Euro ($58) plus shipping, with express shipping obviously costing a lot more.

So for Europeans the NCSoft offer is not such a bad deal. I'd be quite happy if all the other companies that don't do simultaneous world-wide releases would offer the same. Preferably announced BEFORE release day. NCSoft got the timing right with Lineage II, where they sent an e-mail with that offer to every participant of the open beta a week before release. But for City of Heroes somebody in the same company was not so quick, and the download was only announced and available a day after the game launched.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:56 PM Permanent Link

 
The Echelon

People often play MMORPG games long after the game itself has become boring for them. But they stay because they made a lot of friends, joined a guild, and are using the MMORPG as some sort of 3D chat room. Fortunately there are ways to keep in touch with your online friends without having to play the same game for years: Cross-game MMORPG guilds. I was lucky enough to find one of those guilds 2 years ago, The Echelon.

The Echelon is a guild for the more mature gamers. That doesn't mean you have to be over 30 to join (although many are), it just means that you have to realize that friendship and loyalty are worth a lot more than experience points and "phat loot". We'd rather be close-knit than the most powerful guild of the game we are currently playing. That also means we don't just accept anybody into the guild. But if you get in, The Echelon is the last guild you ever need to join, as it will be present in all the major games you start playing in the future.

Currently The Echelon has full chapters in City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies, Asherons Call 2, and Horizons. But there are some of us playing other games, they just didn't get "full chapter" status (or lost it) because they are either dying out (EQ, EnB, Shadowbane) or somehow didn't fit into our "among friends" playstyle (Lineage 2, Final Fantasy XI). Naturally we will have a full chapter in World of Warcraft later this year.

Of course life in a guild is not always without conflict. For example we horribly bungled our Final Fantasy XI chapter, although you could say that this was in part the games fault, as it makes it artificially difficult to play in a group with your friends. But us all being grown-ups, we usually manage to handle problems in a mature and reasonable way. The important thing is to not forget that these MMORPG are just games, a form of entertainment. Certainly doing well in a game is a possible goal, but friendship has a higher value than that. So members are expected to share items, and to preferentially group with other guild members, even if that would make a group that is slightly sub-optimal.

I joined The Echelon in Earth and Beyond, and played both Star Wars Galaxies and Final Fantasy XI with them. And I'm looking forward to play City of Heroes with them as soon as I get into that game. And every time I play some free trial or open beta without them, it strikes me how much lonelier and emptier a game feels if you don't have your friends around. Even if you decide that The Echelon is not for you, or you are playing a different game than we do, you should consider joining a guild. It makes MMORPG so much better.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:37 AM Permanent Link

 
Progressquest

I've already mentioned it once or twice. But if you are currently waiting for the next great game to be released, or if you need a MMORPG you can safely play on any office computer, or if you are simply in a philosophical mood thinking about the sense of playing a MMORPG at all, Progressquest is the game you should download and install on your computer immediately.

It is free, and the download is only 315 kB. And it contains ALL the elements of a classical MMORPG like Everquest. Give it a try!
- posted by Tobold @ 9:57 AM Permanent Link

 
Lineage 2 Mini-Review

I didn't like it.



Okay, that was maybe a bit TOO mini. :) Lets get into the details:

Two weeks ago I wrote of Horizons, that it is a game full of good ideas, marred by a bad graphics engine. Lineage 2 (L2) is just the opposite: The graphics engine is good, delivering crisp graphics without lag. But the game is full of bad ideas. The ultimate bad idea, and L2's claim to fame, is unrestricted PvP. You can attack your fellow players anywhere, at any time. That will give you bad karma, and you shouldn't do it right next to a guard. But the karma thing is easy to repair, the guards and blood pixies only protect a very small area, so if griefing and player killing is your thing, Lineage 2 is a paradise. On the other hand, if you object to losing xp and possibly even items to any random passerby killing you with one blow, because he is 10 levels higher than you and you are resting from a combat, L2 is not so much fun any more.

Lineage 2 has at least the option to create non-PvP servers, even if none existed during beta. So how does the game look if you remove PvP? Still not very attractive. Well, speaking of attractive, the character model of the female dark elf will probably attract some male players, she looks like an actress in a bad porn movie. The character models of all races are pretty enough. Unfortunately the developers decided to give each of them a unique running style. The dark elves run with their upper bodies bent forward to a nearly horizontal position, the orcs run like zombies, with their upper bodies totally stiff. The only really well animated race are the dwarves. Combat animations are usually good. So aside from those minor niggles about character animation, the graphics are one of the good points of Lineage 2.

The other good points are combat and quests. Nothing innovative here, but solid execution. Combat is fast, which is a definitive plus. Other than that, combat is the usual mix of an auto-attack with the occasional special attack thrown in. Quests are likewise pretty much standard, you talk to a NPC, he sends you off to kill 40 wolves, you return and get a reward. No animations in the quests storytelling like in FFXI, but a few of the stories are actually funny. The NPC asking you to kill the 40 wolves is Little Red Riding Hood, now clearly demented from being the only survivor of the wolf eating her family, and speaking with her dead grandmother. Quests have a minimum level, which is a good idea, so you don't try to go on a dragon-killing quest at low levels. Another nice touch is a NPC guide for new players, telling them what mobs they can kill at their level, and pointing out the first two NPC that give quests.

All this monster killing and questing leads to you gaining experience and leveling up. At least at the start you level up fast enough. But these are actually just pseudo-levels. Your hitpoints and other stats go up, but you do not get the opportunity to make any decision regarding your character development. Only after you gained level 5 to 7, are you able to buy the first skill with the skill points you gain in parallel to xp. Spellcasters start with 1 or 2 spells, and get their first new spell at level 7. At the start there are only 2 character classes, fighter or spellcaster, and only at level 20 can you specialize into one of two or three subdivisions. Many levels later there is another subdivision, so you are moving up some sort of character classes tree. All in all character development is unsatisfying, because there are very few decisions to make, and development is very slow.

This impression of being a very slow game continues when looking at tradeskills. Only dwarves can create items, being able to gain the first trade skill at level 5. But gaining that skill means spending all the skill points you accumulated up to then, and allows you only to create level 1 items. The only way to gain resources is to kill monsters. Yes, not only hides, but also things like ore or coal are monster drops. And unless you specialize your dwarf into a special resource collector class at level 20, these resources are rather rare drops. As example, my dwarf leveled up to level 6 before he had enough skill points for the craft item skill. From all the mobs he killed up to then he had found only 2 resources. And for making a level 1 leather tunic he needed first a recipe (another rare drop), and then 44 resources. I never managed to get as far in the beta to make even a single item.

Of course you can speed that up by buying resources from other players. At which point you notice that the last 4 years of MMORPG game economy development have went unnoticed by Lineage 2. There is no such thing as an auction house or bazaar in Lineage 2. To sell something to another player, you have to be online. You can set up a "shop" for either buying or selling, by setting a price to the items in your inventory. Then you presumably go afk while your character sits in the middle of the village with a shop sign over his head, hoping for passerbyes buying your wares. If you aren't afk, you can do like many others and spam the shout channel with your Want-to-sell and Want-to-buy offers. The whole tradeskill and player economy is badly implemented and not much fun.

Lineage 2 is a very slow game. At the lower levels you can not do much, not even leave your starting island, as you can't afford the price of a ticket for a boat or teleport. Progressing isn't much fun in itself, the developers obviously hope that the rewards of reaching the higher levels will keep you motivated. And of course at higher levels you can more easily kill other players. This game is targeted at a group of hard core players, of which there seem to be many in the games country of origin, South Korea. In the United States the appeal of this will be limited to a much smaller group, and the usually more casual European players will probably not be interested at all.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:46 AM Permanent Link

 
City of Heroes First Impressions

The holy grail to which all MMORPG marketing departments look, is the game that has an appeal to the mass market. Up to now, MMORPG are more for the hard core gamer, being both complicated and more expensive than a typical single-player PC or console game. Up to now, the MMORPG game with the most mass market appeal was Star Wars Galaxies, which is played by a great many Star Wars fans with no previous MMORPG experience. But while SWG is "easy" when you consider monster toughness, it is "hard" if you consider complexity. SWG is full of millions of numbers and statistics, writing macros is an exercise in programming, and new players are easily overwhelmed. SWG is also full of bugs and problems, which gives new players a bad impression of MMORPG games.

I only played City of Heroes (CoH) for the last two days of the open beta, but already I feel that this game is much closer to mass market appeal than SWG. City of Heroes compares to other MMORPG as the original Diablo compares to the single-player role-playing games of that time. Purists will say that Diablo was not a RPG, and CoH is missing many of typical features of a MMORPG. But nobody can deny that Diablo was a mass market success that made a lot of players play the first "RPG" in their lives. City of Heroes could well have that sort of success, because it is simple, but fun.

CoH is managing this, by losing a lot of the old baggage that MMORPG have carried around with them since the beginning. Character stats? There ain't any. Inventory, weapons, armor, loot, tradeskills? Don't exist. Bind points? Not in this game. Each of these things that seemed so essential in every other MMORPG has been replaced by something much simpler. Want to know what the difference between the Blaster and the Tanker character class is? The game simply tells you that Blasters have high offence and low defence, while Tankers have high defence and low offence. Crystal clear to anybody, without having to use stats like "strength" or "dexterity" which end up doing the same thing.

There not being a character inventory, no items at all, and correspondingly no tradeskills to make items, is even more surprising. But CoH manages rather well without them. Instead of items, CoH has Inspirations and Enhancements. Instead of gold pieces CoH has Influence Points. Inspirations work like "potions" would in a fantasy RPG. They either heal your hitpoints, or endurance, or they give you a temporary boost ("buff") in attack power, accuracy, defence, and so on. Enhancements are more permanent. You attach them to your superhero powers, to make that power stronger, or faster, or more accurate, and so on. Both inspirations and enhancements can be bought and sold for influence points, and you can only carry around a limited number of them. The higher in level you are, the more inspirations you can carry around with you, and the more enhancements can you attach to your powers. The system ends up to be fun, and surprisingly strategic. Which of your powers do you want to boost? Do you want to make the power faster, or do you prefer it to deal more damage? Instead of having to make that choice in an indirect way, by choosing dagger or sword as your weapon, you can modify your powers directly.

The death system of CoH is more conventional. There are no bind spots, but when you die you can get teleported to the nearest hospital, unless you can get a raise from somebody (there even is a "raise self" inspiration). Low level characters get no disadvantage from dying, except having to run back to where they were. Later each dead gives you an experience point "debt", a feature shared with some other games, generally thought to be preferable to actually losing xp.

Technically CoH is getting good marks, for delivering nice graphics with a minimum of bugs and lag. Paragon city looks convincing and alive enough, with lots of civilians and cars. You can see civilians wave to you, while the cars change lanes so to not hit you, and other nice touches like that. Frame-rate only visibly drops when approaching really large crowds of players. In two days of beta I didn't encounter a single bug, except minor graphical glitches. And the game does that with a minimal footprint on my hard disk of below 1 Gigabyte, less than half the size of Lineage, and only one-fifth the size of Final Fantasy XI.

Combat in CoH is similar to most games, except that there is no standard auto-attack. You can set one of your attack powers to auto-attack, but which one is your choice to make. I recommend setting one of you melee attacks to auto, because if you set one of your ranged attacks to automatic, you might well end up accidentaly attacking some mob you just wanted to check out. CoH combat is fun, because even at low level you already have the choice between several powers to use in combat. Some powers are attacks (or heals) that need a certain time to recycle before they can be used again. Others are switched on or off, like for example a fire aura burning your close combat enemies. All powers use endurance, so having more powers gives you more choice, but if you activate all of them you risk running out of steam too soon. Having to make choices, and those choices having a meaningful impact on the game, is the essence of fun.

CoH plays in a near-future big city, full of enemies ranging from normal criminals, to super villains and their minions, to aliens. You can simply run around in the city, and you will soon find a thug trying to steal an old ladies handbag, or commiting another crime. You can click on the criminal to see both in color code and numeric his level, and if you feel strong enough, you can clobber him. Beating the criminal will not only make the old lady thank you for rescueing her (nice touch!), but also get you influence points and experience points. If you are lucky, you will also find an inspiration or an enhancement. If you are tired of the city streets, you can also roam the sewers, which act like a "dungeon", with a higher concentration of enemies.

Another possibility is doing missions. Missions are given by contacts, which are marked in your address book. Nobody but your contacts are giving out missions, so there is no running around talking to all NPCs hoping for a quest. You start with just one contact, but that contact will introduce you to other contacts later. This makes the quest system a lot more linear than other games, which is not necessarily a bad thing. At least you only get missions that you are able to finish, although some of them are a bit tough and you'd better level up on street thugs before tackling the mission. Your contacts, the mission targets, as well as trainers, hospitals, metro stations, and everything else important is clearly marked on your map. And outside the map you also get a sort of beacon with a distance marker showing your current target. That still gives room for exploration, as in a city the straight line is not always the fastest connection between two points. Sometimes your way is blocked by a house, sometimes the straight line crosses criminal infested backyards, so you have the choice between following the reasonably safe main roads, or taking the more interesting scenic route.

All very playable and intuitive. I am happy that I followed my instinct and already pre-ordered CoH before playing the beta. Unfortunately NCSoft offers online buying only for Lineage II, which comes out on the same day as CoH, but not for CoH. So I will have to wait for by boxed CD being shipped from DVDBoxoffice from Canada, as it isn't released at the same time here in Europe. Well, release days are often a bit rough in MMORPG, so maybe having to wait 2 weeks is not such a bad thing.

While I am looking forward to playing this, I am not so sure about CoH's long-term interest. That is always the big question mark with games that are a bit simpler than the others. Will I miss tradeskills and such in the long run? I will have to see.

The other thing that scares me a bit is the way power selection works in CoH. There are 5 character classes, each with a selection of different primary and secondary power sets, each with a series of individual powers. Character class, as well as primary and secondary power sets are chosen right at the start of the game, and can't be changed later. Meaning that if you ever feel that you have chosen the "wrong" power set for any reason, you can only start over. Fortunately individual powers you didn't chose can still be chosen later, but if you chose a power that turns out to be not to your liking, you wasted one of these rare slots. So the game has lots of possibilities to paint yourself into a corner. It is well possible that for example a Defender that didn't chose Empathy (Healing powers) as primary power set will have troubles finding a group. But somebody tweaking his powers to be maximally useful in a group, will then have big problems whenever he wants to solo. The same problem exists in other games when chosing a character class, healers and other support classes generally are bad soloers and popular in groups. But if you count every possible combination of primary and secondary powers, CoH has hundreds of "character classes", with a Defender chosing Dark/Dark notably different from one chosing Empathy/Radiation. I can just hope that whatever choice I make doesn't end up having hidden negative surprises, like "Fire" for some reason being much inferior to "Ice" or the other way round.

But, all these long term fears aside, for now I'm looking forward to playing City of Heroes soon.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:19 AM Permanent Link

 
Buying games

One week before going live, City of Heroes threw open its doors and send invites to its open beta to everybody who ever applied, including me. While I'm grateful that I have the chance to play around with CoH for a week already, this move also leads to a very strange situation: I am able to play until release, will then get kicked out of the game, and will get back into the game about 2 weeks later, when my pre-ordered copy of CoH arrives by mail. Because in spite of being "the future of gaming", online games still stick unnecessarily close to the old distribution channels.

Me playing in open beta clearly proves that it is technically possible to download these games and play them. But the game company insists that I go out and buy a box with a CD if I want to play in the live version. Now getting a box with a CD is not trivial for everybody. I live in Europe, where CoH isn't released, so I have to import it. But even if I lived in the United States, I might not necessarily live close enough to a computer games shop to be able to get every game on the day of its release.

Already now, smaller MMORPG like A Tale in the Desert offer the possibility of downloading the client, playing a free trial for a week, and then just paying the monthly fee if you decide to stay. The same even exists for single-player games, go to Trygames and download not-quite-top-ten games like Temple of Elemental Evil, or Master of Orion II. You can test them for a while, and if you decide you like them, you pay by credit card online, and the game is "unlocked". I did that for Temple of Elemental Evil (a nice, single-player, 3ed D&D rules RPG), and even received the right to install the game on up to five computers. Sure, you don't have the CD, the manual is in .pdf format, and you don't have any nice printed maps or anything. But you can buy games whenever you like this way, in whatever place you live, at whatever time, and without leaving your house.

Now I see the interest of a game company to charge me $50 or so for the boxed CD, instead of just $13 or so, for the first month of play. But if you deduce the cost of the box, the CD, the printed manual, the distribution, they should be able to charge me half that price, something between $20 and $30, and still make more money of me than if I bought the box. A win-win situation, with the distributor being the only one losing out. But that is probably the rub: The distributor is most likely insisting on some exclusive deal, so if the game company wants its games in the games stores, they can't offer it online as well. I just wish that this changes in the future, with more and more people getting broadband, which makes downloading a 1 Gigabyte game less of a problem than going out and buying the box.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link

 
Does Size Matter?

I'm currently "between games", just trying out games that offer free trials or beta versions, until I get City of Heroes. I'm in the Lineage II open beta until the end of the month, but have to wait for the NDA to be lifted before I can write a review. But playing different games for a short while gives me the excellent opportunity to compare. And while browsing through different games websites, I noticed that some advertise how huge their worlds are. But does size matter? Or is it just a cheap marketing trick?

What players are really interested in is to have a large number of different areas for exploration and hunting. Huge, repetitive, computer generated landscapes which are just empty, with no monsters to hunt, are uninteresting. Putting monsters everywhere, but sparsely populated, like Star Wars Galaxies does it, is better. But even in SWG the huge planets don't add much value, as much of it looks the same. You can see which planet you are on without looking on a map, but not which part of the planet you are.

The other thing people are interested in is to get from where they are to where they want in a reasonable amount of time. One of my early MMORPG experiences was to run from Freeport to Qeynos with my low level EQ character. That is a long run, through monster-infested territory. It is interesting to do once, but not something you would want to do several times. So, later in my EQ career, I made a nice profit as a druid, one of the two classes that can teleport other people, by playing taxi. Everquest, like many other games after it, also had boats, public transport leaving every X minutes, like a bus. Developers love boats, because they are pretty. Players don't like them that much, because you usually wait 10 minutes for the boat to arrive, and then you are stuck on board for another 20 minutes. So with Shadows of Luclin some sort of public teleport transportation was added to EQ.

The same forms of transports exist in different games. Going places on foot is obviously possible everywhere, although it not necessarily get you to your destination, if it is on a different island / continent / planet. Running speed can be enhanced by magic (the famous Spirit of Wolf SoW in EQ), or by using some sort of vehicle or mount, up to riding a big yellow bird named chocobo in FFXI. Developers continue to use boats, sometimes cleverly disguised. Dark Age of Camelot has horses, which run "on rails" to a given destination. Star Wars Galaxies has shuttles, which thankfully are more similar to a teleport, even if you have to wait for a shuttle to arrive. Many games have bind spots, the place you teleport to when you die. In some of these games some character classes have the ability to teleport themselves to their bind spot, in other games everybody can do that. And if you are in a game where you can't teleport yourself to your bind spot, but the penalty for dying is reasonably low, you can always tickle that dragon to "ghetto warp" to your bind spot by dying. The most comfortable way to travel is by teleport, with either public teleport portals like in Horizons, or with the help of some character class able to teleport others.

It is important for developers to balance whatever size of world they imagine with sufficient means of transport. MMORPG are social games, where people play together. Nothing is worse than trying to organize some event with your friend and guildmates, and then somebody tells you on guildchat that he'd like to participate, but it will take him over half an hour to get to where everybody else is. People also need to travel for quests, or to get to new hunting grounds. But developers shouldn't give everybody the ability to instantly teleport to any place either, as that would kill most of the fun of exploration. The best is to link all cities with some sort of fast public transport, make vehicles or mounts available in these cities to be able to reach your hunting ground fast, and give some people the ability to teleport a whole group to some central wilderness locations. Final Fantasy XI got the later part of this right, but the transport between cities is slow and only available after having done a high level quest, which is too late, while mounts are available after a mid level quest, which is okay.

The other space problem developers usually have problems to balance right is housing. Many games avoid the problem by having no houses at all (EQ, DAoC), or by having invisible houses that don't take up any space, where on the game world there is only an entrance that leads every player to his individual house (AO, FFXI). But the ability to build a house and to show it to others is attractive to players. So attractive that if you limit the spots where houses can be built too much, not everybody who could afford a house finds a spot to build one, which is bad. This happened both in UO and Horizons. UO having a rather small world, and allowing housing on every large flat area, had the additional problem that houses and player cities sprang up in regions that previously were designed as remote wilderness. I happened to be around when houses came to UO, and watched a flat ice dessert turn into a city over night, with walrus and seal still now running through the streets. Horizons cleverly allowed houses only to be built on special housing plots, opening areas full of housing plots as pre-designed player cities. Unfortunately they didn't add decay, and now most plots are blocked by the first players, many of which have long left the game. One of the recent "news" of the Horizons world was that they would clear the deserted plots on the first of May. SWG housing is better, due to the planets having enough surface for everybody, and houses needing maintenance to stop them from decaying. But the problem of houses springing up in every remote hunting ground was only partially addressed by adding advantages to a limited number of player city areas.

So size does matter, but bigger is not always better. There has to be enough space for everybody to hunt, or build houses. But that size has to be balanced with fast means of transport, because people don't want to spend hours just traveling between two known places. And there have to be centers of attraction, places for people to gather and meet. Even housing is better if carefully guided into player cities. Standing alone in the middle of a pretty landscape with nobody around in a 10-minute radius is only attractive for about 5 seconds, then it gets boring.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:18 AM Permanent Link

 
Horizons review

After first offering a free trial for North Americans only, Horizons is now offering a 7-day free trial for Europeans also (bottom of the page I linked to). It's a 1 Gigabyte download, so you better have broadband if you want to try. The American and European versions are running on different servers, and you can currently not cross borders and play with people on another continent. Anyway, I've been playing Horizons for a few days now, enough to give you my opinion of that game.

Horizons is a fantasy MMORPG with a lot of good ideas. There are a range of character classes between which you can switch freely. The tradeskill system is very good. Many details seem to be well thought through. For example, in Horizons you are running faster on a road than on other terrain. Seems obvious, but I don't remember any other MMORPG having this feature. The game economy seems solid enough. Death has a penalty, but it is neither too harsh nor too lenient. All cities have teleport portals, making travel easy. And everybody has the ability to recall, teleporting back to his bind point at any time.

Unfortunately all these good ideas are marred by the rather low quality of the games engine. The graphics are not up to standards of 2004, reminding you more of the first generation games like Everquest. In comparison to recent games like Star Wars Galaxies or Final Fantasy XI, Horizons is definitely ugly. And even if you are willing to cope with graphical glitches and character movements that are downright silly (like running backwards), you are a lot less likely to overlook the horrible lag. Horizons manages to lag even in areas where no other players are present, like the big central city of Tazoon. And if you enter a village where 10 other players are present, you framerate drops into the hardly playable region. You can combat lag by making the graphics even uglier, but even then it is still noticable.

One of the selling points of Horizons is having dragons as a playable race. This is actually rather well done. Dragons don't have the variety of character classes that the other races have, nor do they have the variety of weapons and armor, but they are more powerful than the other races. This makes dragons an ideal race for starting playing Horizons, or even MMORPG in general. It's a bit like MMORPG-lite. And the dragons have the nicest looking character model, although they do look a bit funny when running.

What would keep a more expert player in Horizons for a while is the tradeskill system, which is much better than average. I'd rate it second place behind Star Wars Galaxies, but thats a matter of debate. Crafting itself is probably better in SWG (where the quality of your resources determine the quality of your product), but the related areas of improving crafting skill and game economy are better in Horizons. In Horizons your character has not just one character class, but two: One adventuring class, and one crafting class. Some quests give rewards for both classes at the same time, but usually you advance your adventuring class by killing monsters, and your crafting class by crafting. And you can freely decide to level just your adventuring class, just your crafting class, or both.

Crafting consists of first gathering resources, then transforming them into intermediate resources and final items. Everything in the game is crafted, not only weapons and armor, but also spells (which are curiously crafted out of stone), and player houses. Gathering resources consists of finding an area where the resource is present, like a cedar wood, and then applying your tree axe to the cedars. That will give you 1 or more cedar logs per second, until the resource is depleted and the cedar tree vanishes. Higher level gathering skill gets you more resources per time unit, a high level character can turn the whole forest into grassland in a couple of minutes, but the trees grow back after a while. Resources also often drop as loot from monsters you kill.

To transform the resources into items, you first need the recipe. Recipes are gained by tradeskill quests, or rarely drop from monsters. They can be traded between players, but can not be crafted. Tradeskill quests give you tokens which you can either trade in 1:1 for a random recipe appropriate to your skills, or you can trade in 5 or more tokens for one specific recipe you need. There are hundreds of recipes, it would take you months to collect them all. You can modify the recipes you have by applying techniques (which are gained in a similar way as recipes), which allow you to make your items better, or color your armor. Of course a modified recipe needs different ingredients, like the proper dye if you want to color your armor. So making your first basic items is easy, but with more recipes and techniques it gets more and more complex, keeping the system interesting for a long time.

In comparison to the good tradeskill system, the adventuring system is pretty standard. Quests are mostly random, like "Kill 10 zombies", or "Collect 20 maggot hides". Then you got to where the zombies or maggots are, target them, and hit the attack button. As everywhere else, combat then runs automatically. You can influence the outcome by using special abilities and spells, but once you use them they are unavailable for the next couple of minutes. Spells work just like abilities, there are no mana points.

I don't plan to play Horizons beyond the 7-day free trial. If I wanted to continue, I would need to buy the CD at full price, just to get the CD-key, in spite of already having the full game client installed on my machine. If there would just have been the monthly fee to pay, I would have been tempted to play Horizons until I receive the City of Heroes I pre-ordered.

Horizons is not a bad game. But in a year full of MMORPG releases, including some big budget games, it fails to stand out of the crowd. Would have been great two years ago, but in 2004 it is just another game.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:09 AM Permanent Link

 
Added the ability to comment

You don't have to be speechless any longer. I used CommentThis to add the ability to comment my blog. This is in response to my surprise on the Sitemeter experiment. This blog is actually getting several hits per day. And if you google for "Tobold", this blog appears as the top result. Yeah, I'm famous! Or whatever counts as being famous in this internet age.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:05 PM Permanent Link

 
The disadvantages of a player-based economy

Most MMORPG allow players to trade items and virtual currency in game. From this a in-game economy evolves, which in the case of big games like Everquest even has led to serious scientific studies on online game economies. While in the early games the economy was often developing in some unintended way, modern game design carefully considers the effect of design decisions on the game economy.

One possibility of an unintentional development is inflation. Inflation happens when more money than items flow into the game economy, looted from monsters, or by NPCs giving out too much money as quest rewards or by buying items. UO was suffering from that, with people paying lots of gold pieces for items that were only decorative. But most games suffer from the opposite effect, called mudflation, which is actually deflation in economic-speak. This is usually the result of virtual items not suffering wear and tear. Game designers quickly realized that players hate any system that makes their items degrade over time, as players grow very attached to their virtual belongings. So the item stays in the game economy forever, and every day the number of items in the economy grows, leading to a constant decline in the market value of the item. Fighting both inflation and deflation has serious consequences on game design.

Lets consider a fictional example in a fictional MMORPG. We will call the item the "Sword of Uberness", SoU. The designers decided that the SoU is dropped by a hard to kill dragon at the end of a difficult quest, because the Sword of Uberness is supposed to be "special", and not everybody should have one. So early in the game, people desire the SoU, and are motivated to go on the difficult quest to kill the dragon to get the sword. After some time, one of the few players owning a SoU gets an even better sword somewhere else, and decides to sell the SoU he doesn't need any more to another player. As supply is low and demand is high, the SoU is sold for a high price. Suddenly a lightbulb flashes in the brain of the player selling the sword. He made good money by selling his SoU, he knows how to do the difficult quest, and the dragon that was previously hard to kill is a lot easier to kill now, as the player has gained some more levels and is now using his better sword. The player kills the dragon a couple more times and sells every SoU he finds that way. Soon other players notice that this is easy money (provided you are of a high enough level), and start doing the same. Lots of Swords of Uberness are taken from the dragon. Supply rises. And as more and more people either get a SoU for themselves or buy one from another player, and the swords never break, demand is falling. Market value of the SoU is falling rapidly. And soon even low level players can buy a SoU for a couple of gold pieces.

And not only the price of SoU's is falling. Because the game also has a tradeskill system, in which a player can learn to become a weaponsmith. The weaponsmith can transform iron bought from a NPC or acquired by a certain amount of time spent mining into an iron sword. Of course the iron sword deals a lot less damage than the Sword of Uberness. At the start of the game, many people used it, because it was the only sword they could afford. But after the price crash on the SoU market, more and more people can afford a SoU instead of an iron sword. At one point the price of the SoU falls to a level where it is cheaper than the raw material cost of the iron sword. There is now no more demand for iron swords at all, and the weaponsmiths are unemployed.

The sad thing in this fictional example is that it really happened for a lot of items in Everquest. Some items dropped so frequently, that they totally replaced any player crafted items. And many players ran around with equipment that dropped from monsters of a level much higher than theirs. In consequence, game designers of later Everquest expansions and game designers of other games made a range of different decisions to combat this mudflation:

The most obvious decision is to somehow lower the influx of Swords of Uberness into the game economy. A reasonably good solution is to make the quest for SoU non-repeatable. Every player can accept the quest only once, and only one SoU per player can enter the game economy. While this solution is quite well accepted by the players, it still isn't much of a limit. Not every player wants a SoU. There might be character classes that can't even wield a sword. Or the player is using another weapon type, or another sword that is even better. If there are as many SoU around as there are players, the value of a SoU is still rather low. So many games put in another limit, limiting how many swords can enter the game economy per day. The dragon dropping the SoU only spawns once every 8 hours, so only 3 SoU enter the game economy per day. Now that solution obviously just slows down the mudflation process, without eliminating it. And if you limit the supply this way, you soon get players fighting over whose turn it is to kill the dragon, another typical Everquest phenomenon. This leads to "camping", people sitting for hours at the spot where the dragon is supposed to spawn, to reserve their claim on the SoU. Killing the dragon to get a good sword turns from a fun adventure into a money making chore. Players hate the process, but still do it to advance their character. The problem gets even worse when another typical solution is added: The dragon doesn't drop the SoU every time, but only 1 times out of 10 or so. Of course that props up the value of the SoU, but it does that by making the process of getting the sword as unattractive as possible. FFXI also uses the time limit and rare drop method, with so-called NM (notorious monsters) spawning rarely and then rarely dropping a good item. These are heavily camped and lead to all sorts of fights on the message boards.

Another approach to mudflation is to limit the demand for Swords of Uberness, by further limiting who can wield one. While in Everquest a level 1 Warrior was able to wield the weapon dropped by a level 60 monster, in later games armor and weapons are usually level restricted, or restricted to a skill which only comes with level. This lowers the demand for Swords of Uberness to people of a certain level. Less initial demand makes the quest for the SoU less of a money maker, and so less people go camping for it. This method also eliminates the competition between the Sword of Uberness and the low-level iron sword, but inside of the same level category the competition between crafted items and looted items still remain. That makes it difficult to have a well-working tradeskill system and good loot at the same time.

Now for some reason modern game developers have decided that a MMORPG economy should mainly be player based, presumably to encourage player interaction. Computer controlled NPCs, which fix the prices in all single-player RPG, and in many older MMORPG, have now been programmed to sell only at very high prices and buy at very low prices, with the spread made even higher than in single-player games, as to encourage players to trade among each others instead. And while in early EQ people still stood in the tunnel in the East Commons zone and shouted what goods they wanted to buy or sell, later EQ introduced a bazaar, and most modern games have some sort of place where people can put up items for sale to other players.

Of course the more you boost a player-run economy, the worse your problems with the Swords of Uberness get. If the main way to get new equipment is to buy it from other players, earning money becomes ever more important. And selling to other players becomes the major form of earning money. FFXI is very much a victim of that. Money is in short supply, and everybody needs it to buy equipment. Equipment rarely drops as loot, but ingredients for tradeskill recipes do. So people start "farming" low level monsters that are easy to kill in large numbers, just to sell their loot and buy useful equipment with the money. As the pinnacle of sillyness FFXI even allows you to buy many quest items from other players. You accept a quest to kill tigers and bring back their fangs as proof, go to the player market and buy the fangs, and then hand them in for the quest reward. Not very heroic, and not much fun. This is far, far away from the "Diablo" principle of the player mainly using the equipment he found as loot.

Why doesn't equipment drop as loot from monsters? Because even in Diablo you used only a fraction of the loot you found, and sold the rest to an NPC. There are different sorts of weapons, and of armor, and the game has no way of knowing whether you are looking for an axe, a sword, or a mace; whether you want gloves, boots, or body armor. So in Diablo you simply get one of each, pick what you need, and sell the rest for very little money back to the computer. As soon as you have a player-based economy, all that excess would be sold to other players, and cause mudflation.

Unfortunately this leads to loot in modern MMORPGs being not much fun. You nearly never find an item you can actually use. Instead you either camp some rare items to sell them, or farm low level monsters to sell their loot. And all this just because loot endangers the concept of a player-based economy.

I wonder if it wouldn't be a better idea to cut back on the player-based economy idea, and put the loot back into MMORPG. One simple trick would be to make loot equipment untradeable. Untradeable items are already used in MMORPG, usually for quest items. Excess looted equipment could either be sold for very little money to NPCs, or be deconstructed to provide raw materials for crafters. In parallel there would be crafters and tradeskills, producing tradeable items. There would be an indirect competition, people chosing either to use looted or crafted items, but there would be no direct competition. You might be able to craft or buy a sword with similar stats to the SoU, but if you wanted to wield the real Sword of Uberness, you will have to go out and kill that dragon yourself. And as there is no danger of you flooding the market with it, there is no need for the developers to force you to camp said dragon, it could be available all the time. I really like tradeskills and the ability to craft items, but I think good loot is a lot more attractive to the majority of players, and the existence of a crafted item economy shouldn't lead to us having to suffer bad loot. It would be nice to have a game with no farming, and no camping. A game where magical swords are special, because you had to adventure for them. Most players would rather play a hero than a merchant.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:59 PM Permanent Link

 
Quitting FFXI

After 5 months of playing Final Fantasy XI, I cancelled my account today. I still think FFXI is a good game, but it was getting boring. As I mentioned in the last blog, I'm the explorer type of MMORPG player, and after some months you simply run out of areas to explore in any game. But if anything in particular drove me out of FFXI, it was the group system.

Now I love fighting in groups. It is a lot more interesting than soloing in most cases. But FFXI has a system that seems particularly designed to make finding a group difficult. The experience points a group earns are solely based on the level of the highest level character in the group. So if there are 5 people of the same level looking for a 6th, and you are 2 levels higher, they won't invite you, as you would kill everybodies xp. And if you are 3 levels lower they will only invite you if you are a white mage, this being the only class where level isn't that important. A warrior of 3 levels lower would have problems hitting the mob, while a black mages spell simply wouldn't deal much damage if he was too low in level.

So we end up with a game in which it is nearly impossible to gain xp outside of a group, and that group has to be near perfect in composition, with a very narrow level range. This results in a high rate of "unemployment", people that would like to play, but are forced to wait for an opening in a group. There are some character classes, like white mage, where the problem is less pressing, as every group needs one. But damage dealing fighter classes are a dime a dozen, and your cool Dragoon might simply have to wait over an hour before getting into a group.

Part 2 of that grouping problem is transport. It doesn't help you to find a group at the other end of the world, because getting somewhere in FFXI is often slow. Up to level 20 you can only walk, then you can get a chocobo to ride on at a few places. Teleport spells are level 36, and around level 50 you can finally get an airship pass that allows you to take a flying ship from city to city.

So in order to get a group without a transport problem, people head to the most popular zone for their level. Everybody from level 10 to 20 is in Valkurm Dunes. The Buburimu Peninsula zone, which is identical in level range, is nearly deserted. I counted 10 times more players in the dunes than on the peninsula at any given time. If you wanted to fight on the peninsula instead of the dunes, it would take hours to get a group together. And the same thing continues at higher levels, from 20 to 25 everybody is in Qufim, from 25 to 32 in Kazham jungle, and so on. It's a vicious circle, to find a group you need to go to the most popular places, but that in turn makes them overcrowded and a lot less fun.

Changing the way group experience points are given out would already make FFXI a much better game. It is okay for a game design to encourage people to group instead of playing solo. But this has to be designed in a way that makes finding a group easy, not by simply forcing people into groups by not giving them xp if they don't. Groups should be easy to set up, allowing a wide range of levels and character classes, so you can play with your guild mates even if the match isn't perfect. In FFXI the xp drop from moving away from the perfect template just a bit is simply too harsh.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:45 AM Permanent Link