Ultima Online's third sequel

Ultima Online was released in 1997. Already in 1999 a sequel was announced, called first Ultima Online 2, then renamed Ultima World Online: Origins; it was cancelled in 2001. Then the Ultima X: Odyssey MMORPG was announced, but also got cancelled before release in 2004.

There are currently rumors about EA having a "secret project" for another Ultima Online sequel. Which would be the third. I wouldn't get up my hopes too high. This is not likely to be a real MMORPG or in any way a spiritual successor to Ultima Online. We are more likely to just get a cheap knockoff Facebook game further exploiting the Ultima brand, after the already shameful Lords of Ultima Free2Play browser strategy game.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:51 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Gamification

It is not that I don't agree with Heather Chaplin's rant against gamification. It's more that I don't have a comment any more, because I wrote all I had to say about the subject a year ago. Short version: Real life is not the same as a game, because the risks are different. Thus you can't easily "gamify" real life.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:04 PM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Whose story?

Following some comments of readers on my The Sims Medieval review, saying that TMS had received "mixed reviews", I checked out Metacritic. Currently The Sims Medieval has a Metacritic score of 82, thus very similar to for example Rift at 83, and the same as Dragon Age II. Metacritic calls that "good" reviews, the "mixed" review category starts at 70 and below. But what was certainly "mixed" about the The Sims Medieval reviews was that when you cast your net wider, you will find everything from "worst game ever" to "absolutely fabulous". And, as already remarked earlier, it is usually The Sims fansites who give the less good reviews. People who come from role-playing or online role-playing games usually give The Sims Medieval better grades.

The German print magazine with PC reviews I'm subscribed to gives The Sims Medieval a mediocre 74 score, and complains about the quests restricting gameplay too much, and the mini-games for the crafting getting boring. At that point I realized that while the reviewer might have a point, the reason why MMORPG players tend to like The Sims Medieval is that in a MMORPG the quests are a lot *more* restrictive, and crafting without a mini-game is even more boring than with one.

So while browsing reviews I stumbled upon a review of a completely different game, the Gamespy review of Homefront. Quote: "Homefront is a modern (by which I mean "oppressively linear and highly scripted") FPS stripped of all pretense." So role-playing games aren't the only genre suffering from being oppressively linear and highly scripted. But for me this shows that the famous fourth pillar of storytelling risks overwhelming some games or even whole genres.

The problem is that the stories being told aren't mine any more. The more a game is linear and scripted, the less control I have over the story, and the more it feels like me passively watching a pre-packed story I couldn't care less about. I don't bloody care why exactly NPC Farmer Brown wants me to go into the forest and kill ten foozles, so even voice-acting won't make me any more interested in that story. What I want is my own story.

But that doesn't mean I want a completely empty slate. I certainly don't want something like Second Life. In games where the players are given all sorts of freedom to create whatever they want, the developers are forced to discuss concepts like Time To Penis (TTP) which describes how long it takes for the editor to be used to create something obscene. In MMORPGs where players are given freedom and PvP, they end up organizing ganking events.

Thus the art of a good game is to create an environment which offers sufficient freedom for players to create their own stories in, but with sufficient guidance to avoid them just wandering around completely lost, or so bored that they start annoying each other. Neither a pure themepark, nor a pure sandbox, but something in between. The Sims Medieval is certainly somewhere in between, which is why I like it, but unfortunately it isn't a MMORPG. WoW/AoC/Rift/LotRO are all too much on the themepark side for me. And A Tale in the Desert too far on the sandbox side. The previews of Guild Wars 2 are looking good, but I've long ago learned to not cheer for a MMORPG before I actually played it.

It all comes down to replayability and entertainment value. Highly scripted linear stories can be good, but at best only once. A game with total freedom and no goals at all gets boring fast, there is a reason why adults don't play in real sandboxes any more. But if a game can create an interesting environment where your decisions lead to the story being different every time you play through it, there is the potential for endless fun.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:39 AM Permanent Link  (15) comments Links to this post

 
On the difficulty of intelligent discussion about MMORPG features

This is a blog about massively multiplayer online role-playing games. In general. With some posts about games in general, technology, and blogging thrown into the mix. This is *not* a "WoW blog" or a blog about any other specific MMORPG. Unfortunately it has become evident over the years that most people are simply unable to discuss MMORPG features in general, without attaching themselves to specific implementations of those features. So I usually discuss features of specific games, so people know what I'm talking about. And of course quite often the example chosen is from WoW, because that is one of the games I know best, and where I can assume that most of my readers know it as well.

The disadvantage of discussing features of specific games is that MMORPG players are so bloody tribal. Thus exactly the same feature will be described as the greatest thing ever in somebody's favorite game, while simultaneously being condemned as being utter shit in another game the writer happens to hate. That makes it pretty much impossible to hold any sort of intelligent discussion on the merits of a a features by itself.

I was thinking about that while pondering the feature of automated group formation, that is groups forming by means other than one player inviting another player. There are a lot of possibilities how that could be implemented in a game: People could flag themselves as willing to group and be automatically grouped with players in the same area. Or people could sign up to group for a specific purpose or target, and then be automatically grouped with others going for the same target.

Such a feature has some inherent advantages: By making forming a group easier, it is more likely that people end up playing in a group than playing solo; which in turn makes it more likely for them to meet new friends. Furthermore with MMORPG endgames often being dominated by group content, automated group formation makes it more likely that a player arriving at the endgame already has some basic group combat experience, and you don't run into the problem of the tank not knowing where his taunt button is.

On the other hand the automated grouping feature has some inherent disadvantages: If you only need to press a button to get invited into a group, there is no need to politely ask for an invite. Getting into groups easily means that some people don't feel the need to display any sort of even basic politeness or decency. Thus automatically formed groups can end up being either just totally silent, or worse they can become a platform for absolute jerks.

What is important to notice is that these advantages and disadvantages are inherent to the feature, and not all that much influenced by any specific implementation of it. The harder it is to form a group, the more effort players will exert to keep to group together, which means being nicer to other players. So the convenience of easy group formation goes hand in hand with the risk of anti-social behavior. A strict invitation-only system forms groups less often, and has people waiting for groups more often, but if players need to be social to get into a group they will be, and thus groups formed on invitation only are on average "nicer".

When people notice this, they usually notice it in a specific game they are playing. For example Melmoth wrote a rather brilliant piece on Rift's default-to-open group system feeling sometimes a bit impersonal and antisocial. Others blame Blizzard for having made World of Warcraft more antisocial with the Dungeon Finder. And the frustrating thing is that the WoW fans will find the Dungeon Finder great and hate the public groups of Rift, while the Rift fans will praise the Rift open groups and blast the WoW Dungeon Finder. Thus the discussion quickly breaks down to petty bickering between fanbois, and yet another intelligent discussion about a MMORPG feature, and the greater balance between convenience and social gameplay is avoided.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:52 AM Permanent Link  (59) comments Links to this post

 
The Sims Medieval Review

I never wrote a list of what features of The Sims 3 I found boring. So it is somewhat spooky how EA managed to get hold of that list and to eliminate exactly those boring features from The Sims Medieval (TSM), and to replace them by some rather good role-playing game elements. Gone, of course, is the boring American suburb setting: Instead of playing rather ordinary people you now play the monarch of a fantasy / medieval kingdom, plus several of his subjects, from the wizard to the blacksmith. Gone are 4 of the 6 needs, with only hunger and energy remaining: No longer are you spending most of your day on potty breaks or under the shower, you now have more time to do the fun stuff, or pursue your quests and responsabilities. And gone is the general lack of purpose: The game is now organised in campaigns called "ambitions", and structured into quests.

The quests are definitively the highlight of The Sims Medieval, because they are putting what modern MMORPGs call a "quest" to shame. In TSM a quest is closer to the original meaning of the word, a search, a medium-term goal with several sub-tasks. Here the game for me pretty much hits the sweet spot between sandbox and themepark gameplay: While you are always on a quest while playing, there is no time-limit. If you neglect your quest tasks too long, the game gently reminds you of that by lowering your focus and quest progress. But in general you have plenty of time for all sorts of other activities; and blindly just following the quest tasks is actually not even giving you the best result, as you need the other activities to keep your focus bar high.

Not only are quests thus much longer than a "kill 10 foozles" trivial errand in a MMORPG, but The Sims Medieval also offers plenty of choices during each quest. Already when starting the quest you can often choose an "approach", for example when a wild boar appears you can choose whether to try to hunt him or to save him from other hunters. If the quest isn't made for one specific profession, you can choose which of your characters to play the quest with. And during the quest tasks, and during other events, you often have choices to make on how to proceed. Choices with actual consequences! Because there is no over-arching scripted story, you aren't fobbed off with fake decisions all leading you back to the same story on rails.

But of course TSM is still a Sims game, that is there are plenty of sandbox elements. While you can't change any more how big your houses are and where the walls are, you can still furnish your various buildings. Your characters can still interact with other sims, be it NPCs or your own characters. Every character has traits, normally two positive and one negative one. New, and playing more like a MMORPG, is the ability to gather herbs and ores from nodes distributed all over your kingdom, and to craft items from the resources thus gathered. And your kingdom has lots of interesting locations your sims can interact with.

Of course The Sims Medieval is no MMORPG, but it is an interesting demonstration of what a MMORPG *could* be if developers wouldn't neglect the "world" aspects so much. In spite of being mostly populated by NPCs, your litte TSM kingdom feels a lot more alive than the totally static worlds of online games. People go about their business, and your actions and choices make a visible difference to their virtual lives. And that makes The Sims Medieval a lot of fun. Recommended!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Moving a stack of items in The Sims Medieval

Pro tip for The Sims Medieval: If you want to move a whole stack of items, for example from your inventory to the larder or to stock the crafting workbench, you need to click on the lower right corner of the stack and drag the items that way. If you click in the middle of the icon, you move them one by one.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:54 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Playing in 3D?

I was reading a review of the Nintendo 3DS, the new handheld console with 3D capability. The reviewer said that the 3D effects were nice as long as you held the console very still, but that if you played for example in a moving bus, or your mashing buttons moved the console a bit too much, the 3D effect was lost, and you got a blurry double picture instead.

Technical problems apart, I'm not quite sure about the advantages of playing in 3D. Has anyone of you already tried it? Do you think this is the future of video gaming, or is it just a fad that will pass?
- posted by Tobold @ 2:07 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Death of the raid model

MMO Melting Pot has a post about raid guild burnout and asks whether WoW is dying. That is revealing insofar as it equates World of Warcraft with its raiding endgame. As I happen to be married to someone who managed to play 6 years of WoW without ever setting foot into a raid dungeon, I can assure you that WoW and raiding are not the same. The raid endgame is just a subset of the game of World of Warcraft.

And that particular subset of the game certainly has problems. It is increasingly self-contained, that is the only use for the rewards of raiding is getting access to more raids. Raiding also has the biggest social problems of all the sub-games of WoW, because on the one side people are forced to rely on each other, but that on the other side leads to a strong segregation along the levels of virtual power. And raiding has the big problem that on the one side it is supposed to be the endgame goal for everybody, but on the other side the people who are raiding would like their activity to be exclusive.

But ultimately all comes down to a problem of simple mathematics: In a game like World of Warcraft where expansions are released only every two years, but offer only at best two months of leveling, people spend a huge amount of time in the endgame. If you raid X times per week for 100 weeks, and there are Y raid boss challenges in the game, you will need to spend (X * 100) / Y raid nights wiping on each boss if you want the challenge to last until the end. If you advance faster, you'll find yourself in a situation where there is no new raid boss to kill left before the next major content patch. If you advance slower, you never make it through. Because Blizzard can't offer hundreds of raid bosses, by definition you spend more raid nights wiping than progressing. Take all that together, and at some point you realize that you are working hard, under frequent frustration, with the reward being some even more frustrating content being made available to you.

Blizzard's decision in Cataclysm to reverse their Wrath of the Lich King "raiding is for everybody" policy, and to instead reinstate the "raiding is for the leet" game design isn't exactly helping. A much better design would have offered easier heroics and an easy entry-level raid dungeon, and then made the further raid dungeons harder. While advancing slowly or getting stuck can be frustrating, that is nothing compared with the frustration of not even getting a foot in the door. The average player today has problems even getting accepted into a BoT trash run, with the very existence of "trash runs" telling you a lot about the state of Cataclyms raiding.

Further contributing to the death of the raid model in World of Warcraft is the inconsistency in game design: While making raiding harder, Blizzard made the rest of the game easier. Even my casually playing wife is complaining that she is leveling *too fast*. And the lower level game appears to have been changed from "kill 10 foozles" to "just show up where the foozles are, and they will die on their own from a heart attack when seeing your overly powerful character".

Blizzard will need to decide whether they are making a game for everybody, and that would have to include letting everybody play in the endgame as well; or whether they are making a game in which the leveling game teaches you the skills necessary for the endgame, and that would mean making the leveling game less trivial. The current model with its stark contrast between trivial leveling game for the masses and raid endgame for the leet just isn't going to keep World of Warcraft running for the remaining 20 months of Cataclysm. But it won't be WoW that is dying, but just the raid endgame, which will become increasingly seen as a detached activity for a small minority of no-lifers, and not worthy of sustained investment.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (86) comments Links to this post

 
The Sims Medieval

Sometimes I like to play one of The Sims games. So when I read that The Sims Medieval was released yesterday, and was somewhere between a Sims game and a RPG, I was obviously interested. The only thing that stopped me from impulse-buying it was the strange release-schedule in which Europe has to wait two days longer for the game. On the upside that gives me time to read the first reviews of The Sims Medieval before I buy it. Has anyone of you already played it? Is it any good?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
An insult to my readers

Every week I get e-mails from various companies which found my blog via it's Google Pagerank, who want me to promote their wares. Yesterday I got a mail suggesting that my readers would certainly be interested in that company's Farmville guide (not going to give you the link). What an insult! I would most certainly hope that my readers are sufficiently intelligent to play Farmville without a guide, if they play it at all.

But then this got me thinking that a Farmville guide is actually somewhat symptomatic of modern gaming. There is even a Farmville for Dummies book in print, so apparently enough people buy such guides. There are whole publishing companies producing nothing but guides for video games. And that is just the most commercial tip of the iceberg, the internet is a huge repository for game guides, wikis, databases, and even videos explaining you how to play every step of every video game there is.

In general, playing a game consists of two major parts: Figuring out what move to make, and executing the move. With games being played by many thousands, sometimes millions of people, and communication via the internet being so easy, players crowdsource that first part. And there are some good reasons for it: Imagine you bought a game, and got stuck at some point, because you can't figure out how to proceed further. Looking up the solution on the internet is obviously better than never playing the second half of the game.

The obvious danger is using guides all the time, and never even trying to figure out how by yourself how a game works and what to do in it. That reduces playing a game to pure execution. Now obviously there are games in which the execution is the fun part, but that is hardly the case for Farmville. Even MMORPGs, apart from the endgame, are mostly trivial in execution. Figuring out the virtual world is the fun part, and outsourcing that fun to databases and addons leaves us with nothing much.

But not only is there a trend towards game guides, but games more and more incorporate those guides into the game itself. In a way the quest systems of most MMORPGs are nothing more than a big pointer showing people the way towards the next suitable loot pinata. It avoids players exploring the virtual world on their own, and god forbid accidentally stumble into a higher level zone and getting killed.

The most surprising part of this is that the community *wants* all these guides and aids and crutches. You'd be laughed at in your guild if you proposed to do a raid without looking up the boss strategies first, or to try raiding without addons. People would consider it strange if a player would just go out and explore the virtual world, killing monsters without having a quest for them. In a community where the virtual reward for playing is considered more important than the fun you have by playing, it is considered normal to deliberately use tools and aids that diminish the fun to get to the virtual rewards faster. It is the players who write the addons and contribute to the databases and guides that make our games so trivial now. It is hard to blame developers for making games too trivial, if the players then go and further trivialize those games with guides and mods.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:03 AM Permanent Link  (31) comments Links to this post

 
Real tanking

One of the subjects that pops up regularly in the MMORPG blogosphere is that of the holy trinity, the combat system based on tanks, healers, and damage dealers. Many people have grown dissatisfied with that system, so frequently there are blog posts with various ideas of improvement, or ideas how MMORPGs could abandon that system. I was playing a turn-based fantasy strategy game this weekend (Fantasy Wars), and that made me think how "tanking" worked in strategy games, in reality, and in MMORPGs. And I think that tells us a lot about the holy trinity.

In Fantasy Wars you have some units you don't want to get hit, like archers, or a healing priest, or a mage. So what you do is to build a wall of heavy infantry units (tanks) in front, and because these units have a zone of control, and enemies can't simply pass through, the enemy is forced to attack the tanks and not the squishy units behind. Your wall needs to be wide enough so that the enemy doesn't have enough movement points to simply run around it. While still a game, and thus not totally realistic, this is a lot more similar to a real battle with infantry in the front and archers in the back than the MMORPG system.

In MMORPGs with the holy trinity system, a tank fulfils the same basic function: Standing in between the enemy and the squishier group members. But he doesn't do that by (virtually-)physically standing between the two. In fact in many MMORPGs characters and monsters can run through each other, there is no collision control, and there is certainly no zone of control hindering enemies movements. Furthermore movement in MMORPGs tends to be unrealistically fast and agile: It is pretty certain that a knight in shining armor would have considerable difficulties to "circle strafe" in real life at the same speed that characters do that in video games. Thus with movement being too fast and unhindered, the tank cannot stop the enemy by positioning himself in front of the healer or mage.

What a MMORPG tank does instead is "taunting". Apparently nearly every enemy in a MMORPG, from a mindless slime to the Lich King himself, will always attack the guy telling the "yo mamma" jokes. Even if he is currently right next to a squishy, high-danger target, while the tank is deals less damage and is harder to hit.

Even if we explain away the "taunting" as some sort of magical mind control, there remains a major difference between tanking in a strategy game or real life and tanking in a MMORPG: The ratio of tanks to squishies. In a MMORPG you can have one tank protecting 3 mages and a priest, even against multiple enemies. That obviously wouldn't work if he had to stand between the enemy and the other group members. For a more realistic tanking situation your group would more likely have 3 tanks, 1 mage, and 1 priest. Or in a larger group 5 tanks, and 2-3 mages and priests each. Unless all your dungeons are narrow corridors, where one or two tanks can completely block the way, you'd need about half of your group as tanks if tanks would work by standing between monsters and the rest of the group.

While this sounds very much like a completely hypothetical and theoretical exercise, there is nevertheless one lesson to be learned here. By having gone from a war or war game situation with multiple tanks to a MMORPG situation with only a single tank, the responsability for tanking has become extremely concentrated onto a single person in groups and even raids (the "main tank"). The tank is held responsible for aggro control, up to the point where in a pickup group some dps unable to reliably target the mob with the skull floating over his head or to use /assist will *still* blame the tank if a mob attacks him. Or blame the healer of course, another case of all the responsability for one function concentrated onto one character in a not very realistic way.

Thus while I am not offering a different system than the holy trinity here, I can very much offer a basic condition for a different system to work better than the current one: Responsability has to be better and clearer shared between the group members. Maybe some multi-tank system with slower movement, collision control, and zones of control would work, but we appear not to be quite there yet from a technical point of view.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:00 PM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
Rifting through some misconceptions

Lately my blog has been invaded by proselytizing Rift fans, which in their eagerness to spread their religious cause said a lot of things that were simply false. That didn't exactly endear them to me. But I'll try to correct some of those misconceptions, and establish some ground rules in this post.

Misconception 1: "Tobold doesn't know Rift". I already played Rift during the beta for several days. Of course there is the eternal discussion how many hours exactly one has to play a MMORPG to fully "get it". But I certainly played it sufficiently long to have experienced the two factions, different archetypes, the soul system, the rifts, and many hours of the general gameplay. Don't pretend I don't know what I am talking about.

Misconception 2: "Tobold hates Rift". I never said that, in fact I said a lot of nice things about Rift. It is a fun enough game, and far more polished at release than most MMORPGs. It is *not* the best MMORPG I've ever played, but certainly ranks up somewhere in the top 10. The top 10 are full of MMORPGs I can't find the time to play, like Lord of the Rings Online, and for LotRO I actually have a lifetime subscription.

Misconception 3: "Everybody should play Rift". I'm not convinced of that. And what is absolutely certain is that if you think everybody should play Rift, you are doing a lousy job of promoting it here. Sorry, but this is not a soccer stadium with some sort of contest whose fans can cheer the loudest. This is a rather intellectual blog discussing the merits of various features of all possible MMORPGs. The majority of pro-Rift comments I've seen completely failed to address even the most basic question of *why* Rift is a good game in your opinion. I would be very much interested in hearing your opinion about that: What exactly makes Rift better than other MMORPGs in your eyes? Up to now I've mostly seen mindless cheering, garbage arguments like "Rift is better because it doesn't have a Dungeon Finder - Oh, wait, they are just adding one - In that case Rift is better because of it's superior Dungeon Finder", or the eternal "Rift is the best game evah, because everybody who plays something else sucks". Sorry, you are unlikely to convince me or anybody else with arguments like that.

I've played Rift for hours, and during those hours I was mostly occupied doing "kill 10 foozles" quests, and moving from one quest hub to the next. That is exactly the kind of gameplay I've grown bored of from other games. I also battled in some rifts, but from my experience with WAR and reports from blogs like Kill Ten Rats I still have questions about the long-term viability of such public quest features once the initial bulk of players passed through a zone. I have a long list of other games which I would like to play, which don't play like the standard generic fantasy quest-based themepark MMORPG. So right now I just can't justify spending the 50 bucks and the time to play Rift. I have a intellectual interest in discussing what features "work" for you in Rift, but I am under no obligation whatsoever to play Rift, or to support the crusade mindlessly promoting that game.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:12 AM Permanent Link  (59) comments Links to this post

 
Possibility space

Imagine a n-dimensional space.

...

Hmmm, that probably isn't going to work as introduction. Let's try something else: Imagine a list of features describing a MMORPG. For example the first item on the list could be the genre, with 1 representing fantasy, 2 science fiction, 3 historical, and so on. The second item describes the advancement system, with 1 being with experience points and levels, 2 being a skill point system, and so on. So you list ten or twenty or more sub-systems of a MMORPG, and in each of these sub-systems you assign numbers to all possible options.

What you end up with is a single long number describing a MMORPG in all its features. And if you do the list right, and include every feature of every MMORPG ever made, including exotic games like A Tale in the Desert, Puzzle Pirates, or Wizard 101, the totality of all the long numbers possible spans all the possible MMORPGs that can be made, just by using already existing ideas. You could then create random numbers, and see what kind of a game you get, for example a historical game with a skill point system, combat done via a collectible card system, and crafting done by puzzle mini-games.

Now if you take a list of the 50 biggest or best-known MMORPGs and describe them each with their single long number of all features, you would find that many of these numbers closely resemble each other. Starting with the first cipher, it is already obvious that the fantasy genre dominates over the other possibilities. Games with experience points and levels are far more frequent than games with skill point systems or other forms of advancement. And so on. To come back to my n-dimensional space, if you plotted all the existing games using the feature numbers as coordinates, you would see that most of these games form some sort of cloud, with only a few games like A Tale in the Desert being really far away from that cloud.

MMORPG players are an extremely territorial bunch, constantly fighting turf wars of "my game is better than yours". Thus when I am trying to express my disappointment about the possibility space of MMORPGs not being used better, that is immediately interpreted as bashing some particular game. You guys simply don't understand. I am not "anti Rift". I am just saying that in the huge possibility space of MMORPGs, I would like to see more games further away from the cluster of the majority of MMORPGs. I would like to see more games that aren't fantasy, more games that don't have xp and levels for advancement, more games that don't use autoattack plus hotkey combat, more games that don't guide you through various zones by series of quests, more games in which you don't spend the majority of your time killing and looting monsters, and so on. As there are a few examples of games like these, I know that the possibility exists. I just would like this possibility space used better, with more different games produced, instead of lots of minor variations of the same features and principles.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:11 AM Permanent Link  (38) comments Links to this post

 
Fake escape

Let's play a little game, a small quiz: I'll give you a list of 5 games, and you tell me which 2 of those 5 resemble each other the most. Ready? Here we go:

{Call of Duty Modern Warfare - World of Warcraft - Pro Evolution Soccer - Shogun 2 Total War - Rift}

Too easy? Maybe try a harder list:

{Rift - Puzzle Pirates - World of Warcraft - Ultima Online - EVE Online}

Hmm, still everybody giving the same answer. But even if further narrow down our list to lets say {Lord of the Rings Online - Age of Conan - Warhammer Online - World of Warcraft - Rift}, most people would still pick out WoW and Rift as being the most similar games on that list. In fact it is kind of hard to come up with a list containing WoW, Rift, and three other games and have the majority of the answers pick WoW and another game but Rift.

That is not to say that Rift is a "WoW Clone", or that there aren't significant differences between Rift and WoW. But it is hard to deny that there are also significant similarities between the two games. Fortunately the MMO blogosphere is full of masters of denial; and so it isn't uncommon to find blogs in which a blogger who spent considerable time to tell his audience that World of Warcraft is fundamentally flawed as a game concept now praises Rift as being the greatest game ever. That has more to do with some people's need to rationalize their game choices than with any real fundamental differences between World of Warcraft and Rift.

Therefore I am highly sceptical of the advice often repeated in the comment section of the Cataclysm replayability thread: Combatting World of Warcraft burnout by switching to Rift. Not because I don't believe that Rift isn't a good game, or that I'd deny that by nature a new game has more fresh content than a 6-year old game. But because I doubt that Rift is *sufficiently* different from World of Warcraft to not have the same burnout reappear in a few months. Or in other words: If Rift is the solution, then the problem with World of Warcraft can't have been all that fundamental.

I am reluctant to switch to Rift, because I'm afraid that will quickly turn out to be a fake escape. It won't take long before the same social patterns evolve in Rift that I dislike in World of Warcraft: The "leet" complaining about the "morons & slackers". The virtual idolatry of the purple pixel e-peen. The fundamental belief that somebody who advances faster and further in a video game is a better human being than somebody who doesn't. Of course in a new game these old attitudes might take on new forms and express themselves in new vocabularies. But I seriously doubt that Rift somehow magically managed to solve all the social problems of the MMORPG genre. People might still be too busy with the new shiny, but very quickly they will fall back into the bad old habits.

I think I'll play more single-player and browser games in the coming months, instead of another MMORPG. I'll play WoW when I feel like it, and will unsubscribe when my weekly playtime naturally dwindled to nothingness. I'll certainly try out Star Wars: The Old Republic later this year, which is probably slightly less similar to World of Warcraft than Rift is. But I'm not holding my breath hoping for any miracle.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:39 PM Permanent Link  (69) comments Links to this post

 
Why is my comment not showing?

Just a technical post about this blog, and the Blogger comment system.

In the great majority of cases, when you write a comment to one of my blog posts, the comment will appear on the blog pretty much immediately. If that is not the case, one of the following things happened:

1) The stupid heuristic Blogger spam filter identified (probably mistakenly) your comment as spam, and quarantined it. About once I day I have a look at that spam folder and "unspam" comments that have been mistakenly withheld. Unfortunately Blogger does *not* allow bloggers to turn that spam filter off.

2) You commented on a post that is more than 2 weeks old. In that case your comment is automatically withheld until I approve its publication. The reason for that is that comment spam most often happens on older posts with a high pagerank. Yeah, blog discussions are short-lived, and 2 weeks are an eternity on the internet.

3) Your comment was initially published, but then later deleted by me because it didn't comply with the rules of civilized discussion. That happens rarely, to less than 1% of comments, and usually to one-liner comments containing profanity and personal attacks instead of contributing to the discussion. But in those rare cases the comment does *not* disappear without a trace. Instead the text of the comment is replaced by a "This post has been removed by a blog administrator" message, so the commenter knows his comment has been deliberately moderated.

So, unless you see a comment moderation message, if your comment is not showing, chances are that it is stuck somewhere in the pipeline. I'll do my best to unclog that pipeline regularly, but you will understand that I can't watch the comment section 24/7. My apologies for any inconveniences.

P.S.: I know that other blogging systems or comment systems might have technical advantages. But I'm not moving my blog elsewhere.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:17 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
1,000 hours per year

Various surveys over the years showed that MMORPG players on average spend around 20 hours per week with their favorite game, that is 1,000 hours per year. As a consequence of the RealID debacle I turned on parental controls for my World of Warcraft account, and the weekly play time reports Blizzard sends me confirm that I too play around 20 hours per week. That makes over 6,000 hours since the game was released, so it isn't really surprising that I and many others (see comments in yesterday's thread) are somewhat burned out.

But still the question remains whether it would be possible to make a game in a way that players *don't* burn out when playing it 1,000 hours per year for several years. Basically there are two major axes along which a game can entertain for thousands of hours: Content and replayability. Of these, content is currently the focus of most game developers: Blizzard made a huge effort to tell more engaging stories in Cataclysm using a mix of quests, phasing, scripted events, and cutscenes. And Bioware promises epic storytelling as the "fourth pillar" of their upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG, with "over 50 novels worth" of voiceover text.

I have repeatedly voiced my doubts about that approach. It is not that I don't believe that games can't tell stories well. But I do believe that they usually do it well only for shorter blocks of time. If you play through lets say a Call of Duty game in 10 to 20 hours, you will have experienced a gripping story. Keeping that level of story-telling up for 1,000 hours and more is a challenge that hasn't been met yet. Even voiceover is no help when ultimately the game goes back to telling you to "kill 10 womp rats".

Replayability is about "making interesting choices", the hallmark of a good game according to Sid Meier. Unfortunately MMORPGs don't appear to have made much progress in that area in the last decade. In some areas the making of interesting choices even regressed, due to the growing popularity of MMORPGs leading to theorycrafters finding the mathematically optimal solution, thereby eliminating choice. Game developers also contributed to that, by trying to make their games more convenient, and less punishing, thereby eliminating the *need* to make a right decision. The only thing we gained since Everquest is better technology that enables us to play much faster, thus making a "do not stand in the fire" type of challenge possible. Unfortunately "not standing in the fire" is *not* an interesting choice, and ultimately boils down to reflexes and excellence of execution. It makes it possible to fill 1,000 hours of gameplay with 10 hours of wipes each for 100 different raid bosses, but that isn't everybody's idea of fun.

Replayability suffers a lot from different MMORPGs having so similar basic gameplay. An Everquest player frozen for a decade and thawed up at PAX East to play a SWTOR demo would have found the controls and combat very familiar, just prettier and faster now. If anything the choices are less interesting now, because in a modern game randomly mashing buttons has a higher likelyhood of success and a much lower penalty for failure. That carries the risk that players burn out in a new game much quicker than they burned out in the previous game. Once the player consumed all the new content of the new game, the gameplay isn't holding him, because he was already bored of that from the start.

I do believe that if MMORPGs want to ever make the next quantum leap in popularity, developers will have to come up with new forms of gameplay that offer more interesting choices, and thus better replayability. Chess has been doing quite well for hundreds of years, in spite of it having lousy story-telling. Instead of creating interactive television, which by nature is limited in the number of hours of entertainment it can provide, developers will need to remember some of the core values of game design. It is hard to fill 1,000 hours per year of gameplay if that gameplay doesn't offer interesting choices.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:22 PM Permanent Link  (29) comments Links to this post

 
Cataclysm replayability

Blizzard releases expansions for World of Warcraft every two years, and there is nothing to suggest that Cataclysm will be an exception. Thus the question is: What are we going to do in the remaining 20 months? Of course there is not one answer for everybody, as different people play the game in different ways. But I'd like to tell you a bit about my characters, and what I'm doing.

At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, I had 5 level 80 characters, a priest, a warrior, a mage, a druid, and a paladin. I leveled up the priest to 85 doing Vashj'ir, Uldum, and dungeons. I got the warrior to 85 mostly by doing archeology and gathering herbs. The mage got to the level cap by doing Mount Hyjal, Deepholme, and Twilight Highlands. And currently the druid and paladin are level 82.

Now questing in Cataclysm level 80 to 85 zones feels different from previous expansions. The zones are rather linear, with one major quest chain leading through it. You cannot pick, lets say to just do the Therazane quests in Deepholme, you need to do nearly all the quests in the zone to get there. You can't even skip quests you don't like all that much. And this structure really kills replayability for me. I tried doing Vashj'ir again, with my druid and his aquatic form, but doing exactly the same quests in exactly the same order thoroughly depressed me. Knowing that I wouldn't be able to skip the naga quests, which I hated because I had to play a completely different character through them, I abandoned the idea. And I didn't have much more fun with the paladin in Mount Hyjal, so instead I started to tanks dungeons and gather ore with him. As my paladin is Alliance, and the other 4 characters are Horde, I also discovered that in the new Cataclysm zones there are basically only neutral quest givers, and there is practically no difference between Horde and Alliance quests in this expansion.

So right now I'm struggling with my motivation. There are only 5 zones, one doesn't get much choice which quests to do or not do, and even switching from Horde to Alliance doesn't give access to more variety. It isn't as if there was no content in Cataclysm, but most of that content is in the level 1 to 60 range, and I'm not sure I want to level up another bunch of characters to 60, and even less beyond. I did the goblin and worgen starter zones, and then stopped. But I don't really have a good plan about what to do with my high-level characters either. I made 100k gold with gathering and tradeskills for fun, but even that is getting old. 5-man dungeons are still the most fun to me, but there aren't a huge number of those at level 85 either, and running them repeatedly for the next 20 months doesn't really excite me.

So I was wondering how Cataclysm is treating you. Are you still having fun? What are you doing? Do you play alts, and if yes, how did you experience replayability in Cataclysm?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:19 AM Permanent Link  (78) comments Links to this post

 
Fighting the G.I.F.T.

It is widely accepted that communication on the internet is often subject to John Gabriel's G.I.F.T., the Greater Internet F-wad Theory, stating a normal person given anonymity and an audience will say things he wouldn't tell you to your face. Basically, if there are no consequences, people feel free to say whatever they want, however offensive that is. Worst thing that can happen is an offensive post being moderated, so why hold back?

Well, EA and Bioware decided to fight that G.I.F.T.: You can only post on their forums with your EA account, so you are known to them. And if you say anything offensive, you can be banned FROM ALL YOUR EA GAMES. Even single-player games like Dragon Age 2 are affected, because these days such games have an online account check as copy protection. So EA / Bioware can hand out temporary and permanent bans that will prevent you from playing any EA game with an online activation. You can be sure that the SWTOR forums will be a *lot* more pleasant than the WoW forums due to this. Until, of course, Blizzard follows suit, locking you out of WoW, Starcraft 2, and Diablo 3, whenever you post a rant on the WoW forums.

In related news, I'm in negotiations with Steam to make them hand out 72-hour bans to everybody posting troll comments on this blog. You have been warned! Big Brother is watching you!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:23 AM Permanent Link  (39) comments Links to this post

 
Thought for the day: Designed later

The Guild Wars 2 crafting news is yet another occurrence of game developers *first* creating a fully fleshed game, and *then* parachuting a crafting system in. If they find the time (WAR shipped with a half-baked system). Apparently a crafting system is somewhere on the list of required features, but developers don't think it is all that important. Thus the primary requirement for any MMORPG crafting system appears to be that it can't produce anything actually useful, because that would distract players from the *real* game.

I wonder how a MMORPG would look like if the developers *first* designed the crafting system, trade, and the player economy. And *then* designed the adventuring system around that.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:21 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Discovery crafting in Guild Wars 2

A reader alerted me to a description of crafting for Guild Wars 2:

When the correct items for crafting an item are added to the interface, the resulting item can be crafted. If you haven’t previously crafted that item, you discover the recipe for that item, allowing you to easily view the correct combination to recreate the item. Some basic recipes are automatically learned by characters, but the recipes for most items must be discovered by the crafter.
...
We decided to go with a discovery system for learning recipes so as to allow crafters to distinguish themselves. When there is a static list of recipes learned from a trainer, every character with that crafting discipline is the same. However, with a discovery system, players that spend time and effort on their crafting disciplines have a way to distinguish themselves.

Unbeknownst to ArenaNet somebody already developed a sneaky technology which is designed to thwart this sort of game design. It is called "the internet". The kind of puzzle that is finding all valid combinations of a limited number of resources is best solved by brute force, and is done fastest by crowdsourcing, many players working together on a Wiki. Before Guild Wars 2 is even released, all possible recipes will be already available on some such site. Thus every character with that crafting discipline will be the same. Objective failed!

So what could ArenaNet do instead? One system that can't be killed by some internet database is recipes being discovered randomly while crafting other items. Every time you craft an item of level n, you have an X% chance to randomly discover a recipe for an item of level n+1, and so on. If you want every crafter to be unique, you have a cap of how many recipes of every level can be discovered, while having at least twice that many recipes in the game. Thus every crafter has a different random set of recipes in the end. Of course that means that some people will be luckier than others, and get more desirable recipes, but that is the price you pay for not every crafter being the same.

Theoretically one could make a game in which random recipes that are different for every crafter are combined with the kind of combination style puzzle ArenaNet is planning. Two people using the same combination would get different results. But given a limited number of recipes that would also mean that two people crafting the same item would use different resources, and thus have different costs. Not a good basis for a player-run economy.

The game which solved crafter differentiation by far the best is Star Wars Galaxies. Everybody had the same recipes, but the quality of the items produced depended on the quality of the resources used. The difficulty was thus in finding the most high quality resources, the location of which randomly changed every week.

But sorry ArenaNet, a system which is based on combination puzzles to uncover hidden information doesn't work well when players can exchange that hidden information. You have to do better than that.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
What do you think about the Paypal donation button?

Dear Reader,

You visit this blog occasionally or regularly, or you read this content on your RSS feed reader. And maybe you wondered what I do get out of this, why I am putting so much effort into creating this content that you are reading. Obviously one major factor is that I like to talk about my hobby, everybody does. But my interest in games, and MMORPGs in particular, is not the only thing that keeps this blog going. I am also very interested in blogging itself: Blogging as a social phenomenon, as lowering the barrier of entry into publishing, the interaction between bloggers and their readers, and everything that is related with that. Thus about 11 months ago I started an experiment, putting up a Paypal donation button on my blog. Not because I needed the money, but because I wanted to know whether that was a viable way of blog financing.

The experiment certainly was interesting. Apparently there was pent-up demand, and I received hundreds of dollars in the first month. Then donations slowly came to a halt. My total donations income for 2011 up to now? $0. On the other hand I recently followed a trackback to a forum where somebody had linked a post of mine, and found that some people thought that blogs shouldn't have donation buttons at all, that a donation button was "proof" that I wrote only for money, thus making my opinion less valid.

Thus I was wondering whether I should remove the Paypal donation button from my blog, for example in early April, after exactly one year. But I would like to hear your opinion about this: Does the donation button bother you? Do you think it diminishes the value of the blog and the opinions expressed here? Is there any advantage for you, the reader, in me having a Paypal donation button? Is a donation button better or worse than having for example Google Adsense ads or banner ads?

Regards,

Tobold

[EDIT: After reading your comments, I decided to keep the button, but change it from "Donate" to "Buy me a coffee", to make the nature of the donation more clear.]
- posted by Tobold @ 9:17 AM Permanent Link  (36) comments Links to this post

 
A leveling game

Yesterday I described a pure endgame MMORPG, for people who are only interested in the raiding endgame of existing MMORPGs, based on various comments from raiders about what they want and what they hate. Having thus got rid of the endgame, I can now describe the game I would actually want to play: A pure leveling game without endgame.

So how would a MMORPG without endgame be even possible? To understand that, one has to realize that the endgame is a fake solution to a real problem. The problem is people with different levels having difficulties to play together. Thus, on paper, once everybody is at the level cap, everybody is at equal level, and we can all play together. In reality that turns out to not work at all. Just try to join a raid with a freshly dinged level 85 in WoW if you don't believe me. An expansion in World of Warcraft offers 2 years of continual progress. The fact that only 2 months or so of that are "leveling" is irrelevant, as people *still* progress afterwards, and thus *still* have vastly different power levels, which prevent them from playing together. People are in reality still "leveling" after hitting the level cap, only that now they increase their gear level, which is measured in iLevel or Gearscore instead with character level.

Thus a pure leveling game would work a lot better if it adopted a different solution: The ability to temporarily adopt a lower level to play with a group of lower level friends, or even to temporarily adopt a higher level to play with a group of higher level friends. That has been done in various other MMORPGs, like City of Heroes/Villains, and if you choose an intelligent implementation of it, that works extremely well. Problem solved, thus no more need for an endgame.

Having only a leveling game has some big advantages. Experience point rewards and penalties can be tuned a lot finer than loot rewards. How fast your gear progresses in the WoW raid endgame is to a major extent based on luck: If you happen to be the only leather-wearing caster in your raid and a lot of caster leather gear drops, you make huge progress, while somebody in the very same raid with the very same performance doesn't get the same reward. If you are in a game in which most progress is by experience points and leveling, then rewards for group effort will be a lot fairer.

There are already a lot of people playing World of Warcraft without participating in the heroic/raid endgame. The level cap is actually a major problem for these people, as the game basically ends at the level cap, and there isn't much left to do. To avoid that, a pure leveling game would have to have a lot longer leveling process. Instead of needing 2 years to reach the last raid boss of an expansion, players would need 2 years to level up to the level cap.

People who only ever played World of Warcraft and games produced after WoW often have problems to even imagine how leveling can be challenging. But of course the fact that leveling in WoW is so trivial is a deliberate design decision, and not inherent to all MMORPGs. A pure leveling game would work by being easy only at the lower levels, and then getting harder and harder, requiring better and better performance to advance further. But unlike the current raid endgame, a pure leveling game can tune that a lot better: A lack of performance would not mean that you get totally stuck like a guild that can't get past a certain raid boss. In a pure leveling game your performance would directly be reflected in the speed of your progress. Thus somebody playing badly would still advance, because sometimes he gets lucky and kills a mob and gains xp. But somebody playing better would advance a lot faster.

The same principle would also serve to create a flexible social game. It would be possible to solo, but the efficiency in experience points per hour would be relatively low. Group, and you advance faster. And you wouldn't need a full group for that, as a group with 2 or 3 members would simply advance faster than a solo player, but slower than a full group. Thus given the possibility to temporarily adjust your level for a group, and a flexible group size, you would always be able to form a group with whoever of your friends is online, without one of you having to sacrifice progress and the other "leeching".

Having eliminated the endgame need for instanced dungeons, the pure leveling game would take place in an open world. Part of the content would be static, as in quests and scripted events. Another part would be more dynamic, like in Rift and the upcoming Guild Wars 2, with players being able to change the world around them. Not permanently maybe, but at least to the point that as long as there are players defending a village, that village would remain in friendly hands, and as soon as the players give up on it, an invasion turns the village into an outpost of evil, which has to be taken back to get back to village status.

Of course gear would still exist in a pure leveling game, it just wouldn't be the only means to advance, like it is in an endgame. Having a slower leveling process also enables a more meaningful crafting and player economy. If you don't outlevel your gear every 5 minutes, it makes more sense to gear up during the leveling process.

There being no raid content, there would be no need for raiding guilds in which you are valued only for your performance. Instead guilds would be mostly social, a means for people to play frequently with the same bunch of other people, instead of having to look for pickup groups. But pickup groups would also be a lot nicer, as it would always make sense to group up when you see another player hunting the same monsters as you are. And as performance is measured gradually (advance faster for playing better) instead of a simple black/white success criteria of either wiping or clearing the dungeon, there would be less recriminations flying around.

Class balance would have to assure that every player can advance solo at the same pace. If some roles are more desirable for forming a group, in this pure leveling game the balance between roles would establish itself naturally. As grouping accelerates progress, it would only be natural for players to choose roles which are likely to get them invited into a group, and the extreme problems like "tank shortage" in WoW would be less likely to arise. Nevertheless nobody would be forced to play a role he absolutely hates, as there would always be enough other players choosing whatever role there is currently in demand.

Players finally reaching the level cap can either continue playing to help friends, develop their tradeskills, or just fool around. Or they can play alts, and come back to their level capped characters once an expansion raises that cap. If there is enough to do, enough challenge, and enough interest in a leveling game, the artificial raiding endgame really isn't necessary for a MMORPG.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:42 AM Permanent Link  (45) comments Links to this post

 
Call of Warcraft

As you know, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft are two major franchises of Activision Blizzard. And if you play both, you notice some similarities: Scripted events, challenge based on execution, gameplay where if you fail you can try again armed with a better knowledge of what will happen. I’ve been playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare this weekend, as well as World of Warcraft. And on my blog my proposal to split the leveling game from the raiding game was answered with the question of how exactly I would create a pure raiding MMORPG. So I came to the conclusion that maybe a solution to make such a raiding MMORPG would be to introduce elements from Call of Duty, and produce a new game: Call of Warcraft.

As raiders hate the leveling game, that part of a MMORPG in Call of Warcraft would be reduced to a tutorial, of just a few hours length. Players would “gain levels” at a very fast rate, basically receiving a new skill or ability, getting one “quest” or objective to do using that new ability, and being rewarded with a “level”, which gives them the next ability. At the end people would be about as competent in playing their class as they are currently after 200+ hours of leveling to 85, but without the boring kill ten foozles repetitive bits.

Thus quickly arriving at the raiding “endgame”, we can find a solution based on what we know is problematic in World of Warcraft, and see how Call of Duty does it better. To quote Jean-Paul Sartre: Hell is other people. Or to summarize some of the comments in the blog posts of this weekend: Having real people as your guild mates is a problem, because in a raiding game you are looking for performance, not friends. In Call of Duty in single-player mode that is beautifully solved with you being member of a squad of AI-controlled non-player characters. Thus Call of Warcraft should work the same way, and present us with a “guild” of non-player characters, which we can take with us to raid. No more problems with different people having different schedules and real-life obligations and interruptions. And the performance problem can be solved with a bit of clever AI: Your NPC “guild mates” will be programmed to be as good as you are. If you stand in the fire, so will they. If you improve your moves and do everything right, they will play better as well. Especially for the dps (and frankly, who would want to play anything else in Call of Warcraft), one important algorithm in the AI would make sure that *you* are always on top of the damage meter, with the NPCs closely behind. Thus the better you play, the better the whole raid group becomes, without the NPCs risking to outshine you.

Call of Warcraft would have a challenging raid progression via gear. All bosses drop loot just for you, and your AI guild mates will “gear up” in the background without stealing your loot. You will need the loot from the first raid dungeon to successfully tackle the second, and so on. But to prevent you from getting stuck, you can repeat the first raid dungeon and gain additional advantages in the form of enchants and gems from bosses you already killed before.

Just like Call of Duty, Call of Warcraft would effectively have two games: A single-player and a multi-player game. Thus if you don’t want to play with NPCs, you can also via the internet connect to a server where with a ladder system you can find players of similar skill levels working on similar content as you do, and raid with them.

Call of Warcraft would have the advantage that at least the single-player game would not require a monthly fee, you just buy the box for $60. The multi-player game might or might not be free; Activision Blizzard would have to calculate the cost and whether they can afford to offer the required servers and bandwidth for free. But they could certainly charge for downloadable content (DLC), additional raid dungeons released several times per year, both in parallel and in extension of the existing raid progression.

Thus taking all the best parts from Activision Blizzard’s most successful franchises and eliminating all the bad parts from the raiding game, Call of Warcraft would certainly be a smash hit. Or what do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:46 AM Permanent Link  (37) comments Links to this post

 
Playing without you

The most moving commentary on guilds and challenges in World of Warcraft I have read in a long time was Larísa's story of how she left her guild. The core of the problem was expressed by one of her guildmates, who said: "If there are hard modes we can't do with you, then I do not want those hard modes. Do not leave, please."

Is the purpose of raiding to play with your friends, whatever the content is you can reach with those friends? Or is the purpose of raiding to reach the top, regardless of how many friends you need to ditch on the way?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:52 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Thought for the Day: Buying blind?

Many of you commented the widely held belief that in a MMORPG there are two completely different games, the leveling game and the endgame, and that the leveling game "doesn't really matter". But if that is the case, the question arises on what basis we are buying a new MMORPG like Rift, when all the reviews only cover the leveling game. Are we buying our MMORPGs blind, knowing nothing about the really important second part of the game?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:11 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Does Rift prove that Cataclysm is too hard?

Do you like to play with others in a MMORPG? As you know, World of Warcraft and Rift use two very different models for cooperative PvE: In WoW a raid leader carefully selects who to take on a raid, because if he takes on an underperformer, he risks the whole venture to fail. Thus much of the "social" game of World of Warcraft consists of weeding out the underperformers, of separating the "cans" from the "cannots". This takes place everywhere, from guilds, to trade chat, to pickup groups. In Rift there is not such selection. People join groups by simply showing up and can even join other's pre-formed groups that aren't full.

Reading around the blogosphere about people's experiences while playing Rift, you will notice two things: Most players are extremely enthusiastic about Rift and how it handles playing together. And secondly, nobody is even mentioning the word "challenge". The sort of gameplay where you have to perfectly execute a boss strategy or wipe repeatedly not only doesn't appear to exist in Rift (yet?), but also nobody appears to be missing it. Instead Rift players are talking about the possibility of Rift being the fabled "WoW killer".

That opens up the question whether World of Warcraft, and especially Cataclysm, did it wrong. Certainly the most hardcore players are not only advancing at a reasonable pace, but they are also extremely happy that the majority of players is *NOT* advancing at the same pace. To feel elite, you not only need to succeed, you also need the majority of the rest to fail. Cataclysm certainly delivers on that account. But that catering to the leet comes at a huge price: Cataclysm has made World of Warcraft an even less social game. I was stunned when recently somebody made a snide remark of some of my gear "not cutting it in heroics" in a guild group! Our guild used not to be exclusive like that, but rather took extra care to include everybody. And there are a lot of people either quitting WoW in frustration, or quitting their current guild in favor of one advancing faster, in spite of the new guild perks system that was supposed to prevent guild-hopping.

At least for now, Rift's "you advance just by showing up" model appears to be wildly more popular and fun than World of Warcraft "show up, be judged on your gear and/or performance, and then get kicked" model of cooperative gameplay. Of course you can insert a Gevlonesque comment here about how of course the morons and slackers prefer a game in which they don't have to perform. But take that comment and remove all the negative judgement from it, and it becomes: "Most players prefer a game in which they don't have to constantly justify their performance". And that is a truth which Blizzard would do well to ponder. They might not get "killed", but losing a couple of millions of players to Rift, and then potentially SWTOR, certainly hurts. Given the difference in available budgets, it is remarkable how well "inclusive" Rift is doing against "exclusive" World of Warcraft.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:19 AM Permanent Link  (62) comments Links to this post

 
How long to judge the success of an MMORPG?

Looking at what is going on in World of Warcraft at the moment, I can only conclude that today's release date for Rift has been perfectly chosen. With the level 80 to 85 content of Cataclysm being on the short side, and the "flow" from reaching level 85 via dungeons, heroics, to raids being somewhat bumpy for a large population of WoW players, the time is ripe for a game like Rift to tap into this pool of frustrated and/or bored World of Warcraft players eager to try something new.

Having said that, I must nevertheless remark that other MMORPGs started strong as well, only to decline quickly afterwards. No, I have no reason to *predict* such a fate for Rift, but on the other side I also cannot exclude it. Which brings up the question at what point in time it is safe to say whether Rift is a smash hit or failed to live up to initial expectations.

Most certainly the honeymoon period of any subscription MMORPG is at least one month long. That is simply due to the business model which packs one free month with the box. Even if players actually stop before that time, the game company would still count them as "subscribers". Going from "playing a game from a box" to actually paying a subscription is a significant step, which gives some players reason to pause and consider whether they actually want to continue playing. On the other end of the spectrum I don't think you need years and years to say something about the success of a MMORPG. Sorry, WoW-Haters, but in whatever terms you describe your projections of WoW's future doom, it is too late to erase the impression of "most successful MMORPG ever" after over 6 years.

Thus I'm falling back on the wisdom derived from when two people who tend to strongly disagree with each other about everything manage to agree on something. Syncaine and me once bet whether Blizzard's next game would or wouldn't be a success, and we set a criteria for measurement of over 1 million subscribers after 6 months. I'm not holding Rift to the million subscribers number, but I do think that the 6-month period was wisely chosen. After 6 months player tend to know whether this is a game they want to stick with, and the period is long enough to make possible hidden flaws with e.g. the endgame apparent. So let's reconvene here on September 1st and discuss whether Rift was the game of 2011, or whether it tragically petered out after a few months.

What do you think? Is six months a good evaluation period for a MMORPG?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:29 PM Permanent Link  (44) comments Links to this post