While I was considering the Landmark closed beta, because it has more features and is much cheaper than the alpha, I am not going to play a game which doesn't allow me to leave for a week. If that stays in for the release version, I can't see me playing this for long, or paying money for it. Maybe SOE is planning to sell claim protection for real money, but otherwise I have a hard time to understand this short claim period. 

I was reading an article in the New Statesman about how horribly players behave to each other in the sandbox game DayZ. And that got me wondering whether bad behavior is inherent to all sandbox games, or whether certain game design elements push it.

What I was playing instead was The Collectables from Crytek, although I'm not exactly a valued Crytek customer. I played none of their Crysis games on PC. And there is a lot about The Collectables that you might dislike: It is Free2Play with cards that come from random boosters, plus it uses an annoying energy mechanic, where after 7 games you run out of energy and need to wait hours (or pay) to play again. But the controls are brilliant! The Collectables is a tactical third-person shooter and it is astounding how well that works with just a few taps. Your squad moves where you tap on the screen. Only if you want to be in cover you need to drag and drop individual soldiers, and honestly, to me it seemed the cover wasn't doing much. In addition you can easily drag and drop action cards onto the battlefield, for example to heal your soldiers or to throw a grenade.

I much prefer the Free2Play business model of World of Tanks to that of The Collectables, but in the end it was the controls of those games that decided which one I ended playing.

There is a discussion ongoing in the blogosphere, of which I'll just link to one post, Better Gamers for a Better Community. Quote: "We all like to think that bigots and trolls are a loud minority, but what can we say about that silent majority? Are they not facilitators and complicit in the abuse due to their silence?". The idea basically is that gamers and especially gamers who write, should strive to create a better community in strict adherence with better cultural values.

Wait a minute.

The cultural values of whom? If you scratch the surface off these wonderful words (who wouldn't want to be a better gamer for a better community?), you'll find out that the underlying conflict in which one side is accused of being bigots, trolls, and abusers, is the discussion of political correctness, with the people pushing us towards "better" cultural values are very much on the ultra-liberal side.

The problem with that is that not everybody is ultra-liberal. For many of us more moderate human beings, some of the extreme political correctness appears hard to understand, if not borderline fascist. For example the politically correct Apple app store has a policy that a game should not depict "people from a specific race, culture, government, corporation, or other real entity as the enemies in the context of the game". And thus proceeded to reject the game "Tank Battle 1942", because it showed Germans and Russians as enemies. They then backpedaled after people pointed out to them how ridiculous that was.

If you know your history, and then watch modern films or TV shows, you will frequently find that history has been "corrected" by ultra-liberal people to rather show events in a way that fits the ultra-liberal world view better, rather than how it really was, for example on gender roles or with respect to slavery. To me that is very George Orwell 1984, "He who controls the past controls the future."

The "silent majority" that often fails to speak out when these ultra-liberals complain about something silly, like a video game character with high heels, are NOT "facilitators and complicit in the abuse". They simply do not share the cultural values of the person complaining. That does not make them "indecent people". There simply isn't just one "decent" set of cultural values. Certainly not over the whole length of history, but not even if you just look at today, not even in one country among people who are nominally of the same religion. And sometimes there are simply no easy answers to a problem, for example if you have to decide between the value of granting religious freedom, and the value of gender equality. Is it okay to forbid a muslim woman to wear a veil? I don't think that there is an easy answer to that question based on a "better" cultural value shared by everybody.

I reject the fascism of ultra-liberal correctness. I would consider myself a liberal (in the European sense, not the US American one), but I abhor zealots of any flavor. The world is full of many cultures, and there is no such thing as one set of cultural values that is inherently superior to all others. We need multi-cultural gamers for a multi-cultural community, not 1984-style groupthink aligning everybody to a single set of cultural values and dismissing every other culture as "indecent".

On this blog I discuss all sorts of games that I play, from pen & paper role-playing games to computer games on various platforms. And sometimes the comparison of very different games, or making links between the discussions about those very different games, can be enlightening. That caused me to rethink my position on 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons.

The thing is that for me "4th edition" is not just a label, but really a 4th version of something I know. I played through all the previous editions. Mostly 1st edition AD&D and 2nd edition, a bit less 3rd edition, and now 4th edition since two years as a DM. I also played a bunch of other pen & paper roleplaying games from other companies. Thus my way to play 4th edition D&D is not based solely on what is written in the 4E rule books, but is based on over 30 years of experience with pen & paper role-playing games.

Pen & paper role-playing systems all have holes in their rules. Different systems cover different aspects of the game better or less well. Early systems, and that means especially early editions of Dungeons & Dragons, did not talk a lot about the actual playing of a role, in the sense of interactive story-telling. Yes, there is some sort of story in an adventure module like the Tomb of Horrors or Keep on the Borderlands (Caves of Chaos). But the bulk of such an adventure was always a huge dungeon full of traps and monsters. It was some years later that modules like the UK series or Ravenloft started to put more of an emphasis on the story and the played interaction between player characters and NPCs.

Some people preferred that sort of interactive story-telling to the hack'n'slay ways of old. Other companies developed RPG rules systems which put a lot more emphasis on the story (and were often much less detailed on tactical combat rules). Personally I came to the conclusion that it would be best to mix the two, somewhere around the 50:50 mark. And I found that the "best practices" of role-playing are easily transferable from one system to another. For example in the 13th Age rules system there are very nice rules on character creation which encourage a player to come up with "One Unique Thing" about their character, like "I am the lost heir to the fallen dwarven kingdom". That rule works for pretty much every pen & paper system, and I'll certainly use it for my next 4E campaign.

The consequence of all that is that the 4E campaign that I am playing is not "4E as written", but is the 4E rules augmented with 30+ years of experience and rules from other systems to plug the holes that 4th edition has. Thus if somebody tells me "you can't role-play in 4E", I disagree, my campaign certainly isn't like that.

But when we recently discussed MMORPG design, I said that players tend to follow the incentives that the game gives them. So I find it important for a MMORPG that it doesn't make one path (like questing) far more rewarded than everything else, because that leads to everybody following that one path like a herd of lemmings. While you *can* do other things in MMORPGs than following that path, the game often lets you know quite clearly that "you shouldn't do that", by giving you no or inadequate rewards and thereby discouraging you from doing anything else than the lemming path. And then I realized that while maybe not expressed that way, the problem that people have with 4th edition is pretty much the same: If you don't have the experience and "best practices" of role-playing, you would probably end up playing 4E as written in the rules and adventure modules, and then it becomes just a series of encounters with not enough role-playing in between. The 4E rule books and adventure modules give no incentives or encouragement to role-play, so if you don't resist the general "pull" of the system, you end up doing something too linear and boring.

Now even for 4E enough years have passed that there are adventures with very different qualities here. The first 4E adventure Keep on the Shadowfell is horrible regarding NPCs, and does a very bad job of introducing them and making their motivations clear to the players. The "story" of Keep on the Shadowfell ends up being "we fight through a dungeon and kill the boss mob at the end". A more recent adventure like the Madness at Gardmore Abbey we are currently playing is already a lot better in that respect. But still I found myself modifying stuff in the Gardmore Abbey adventure, to improve the role-playing part of it. And the presentation of 4E adventures always has one part of the adventure being page after page of encounters, while any information about story and NPCs is written elsewhere, and it isn't always evident on how to mix that story part with the tactical encounters.

I remain convinced that of the many pen & paper role-playing systems I have played, 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons has the best tactical combat rules and the best class balance. Which for me and my group makes it the perfect rules system, because we can fill the holes on the story-telling side with rules from other systems. It would be much harder to play a story-centric system and try to add the tactical combat rules of 4E to it than the other way around. Having said that, I think that 4E Dungeons & Dragons is probably not a good system to learn pen & paper role-playing games with: The tactical rules are complex, and there isn't enough information in the rule books to assure good role-playing. Having said that, this isn't edition-specific. Previous editions were just as bad to teach people how to role-play, and 5th edition appears to be only a bit better, with rules like the "background" instead of free choices of skills and talents.

Kudos to NCSoft: The pre-ordering process for Wildstar was one of the smoothest that I have seen for a long time. When you buy the game and already have an account, they helpfully ask if you want to apply the game code to that account, and then lead you through the subscription options. They even accept PayPal for both the purchase and the subscription.

I recommend the standard edition. The deluxe edition appears to have only a few virtual items thrown in, of which probably the hoverboard is the only remotely interesting one. Devs promised more in detail discussion of the deluxe items for next week, if you want to wait. But mostly the deluxe edition appears to be an option to give them more money just out of appreciation.

Congratulations to Teut Weidemann on winning the Evil Game Design Challenge 2 at Casual Connect Europe last month. Although I am not sure whether he is proudly sitting in a corner, stroking his white cat, or whether he is somewhat embarrassed and got into trouble about the "wrong" kind of publicity with his bosses at Ubisoft about this. Because this is a challenge which does not have a very easy, straightforward message. Some people will watch the video and just find all of their prejudices about evil game designers confirmed. Others will like the "evil" version more than the original.

The challenge was to make an "evil", Free2Play version of Minecraft with maximum monetization. Three designers present their various ideas and the audience votes for the best one. And while of course there are ideas on "how can we make people pay", many of the ideas are also about "how can we make players not lose interest in the game". And those ideas are similar to the ideas that you would have gotten if the design challenge had been "how can you make Minecraft more fun". People are willing to pay for a game they have fun with.

What was interesting about the exercise was that monetizing linear themepark games is obviously easier than monetizing sandbox games. But the video shows that the latter is far from impossible. So if you want to know how Everquest Next and Landmark are going to make money once they are released, watch this video!

In 1996 Dr. Richard Bartle published "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who suit MUDs", describing what came to be known as the "Bartle types" of killer, achiever, explorer, and socializer.  Erwin Andreasen and Brandon Downey later turned that idea into the "Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology", an online test where by answering some questions you could find out which type you tended towards,which made these player types very well known in the MMORPG community. So it wasn't surprising that many people who wrote about Wildstar tried to explain the "paths" concept in that game as representing the four Bartle types, even on Wikipedia (until somebody edits that out). Which is utter nonsense.

If you put the Bartle types on a graph, it shows that achievers and explorers want to interact with the world / game, while the socializers and killers want to interact with other players. The other axis is whether the interaction is competitive (achievers, killers) or not (socializers, explorers). Now if you look at the four path of Wildstar: Soldier, Explorer, Settler, and Scientist, they are all about an interaction with the world / game. The Settler path has a tiny social component in it insofar as the buff stations you erect can be used by other players; but to do the Settler missions you do not need other players, you only interact with game elements. All four Wildstar paths would better be described as appealing to explorers and achievers, while they won't appeal much to killers (defined as player killers, not monster killers) or socializers.

In fact as far as Bartle types go, the four paths are pretty much the same: You get a list of things to do in each zone (achievers like to complete that sort of stuff) and you need to go to various points on the map and click on things (explorer stuff). The differences are in details that can't be expressed on the two axes of player/world and competitive/non-competitive interaction.

The Wildstar Explorer path is for people who like jumping puzzles and good views. Plays pretty much like the vistas in Guild Wars 2. Curiously there isn't much exploring to do, except of exploring how to best jump on to a high place. But the locations you need to visit are clearly marked on your map.

The Settler path ends up having more exploration elements than the Explorer path, because you need to gather extra resources to power up those buffing stations. As the resources aren't marked on your map, you actually need to explore to find them. Well, to some degree at least. Of course you run across plenty of them while you just do normal questing.

The Soldier path is all about killing monsters (not players). You go to marked locations on the map where either you have to kill a specific semi-boss type NPC, or hold a position against waves of monsters.

The Scientist path allows you to scan wildlife with your drone, which gives some minor buffs sometimes, but mostly provides you with more text windows to read. If you are interested in lore, and the type of player who read every book in Skyrim, this is the path for you.

I do like the idea of paths. The different paths will appeal to the preferences of different players. You just can't force these different preferences into the corset of the Bartle types.

For some people, that is. And I mean that literally. And it is an important factor I forgot to mention yesterday in my listing of criteria for choice. If you tend to suffer from video game motion sickness, The Elder Scrolls Online with its stronger camera movements due to the cursor stuck in the middle of the screen is more likely to make you nauseous than other MMORPGs.

I experienced that myself. Actually I didn't play Morrowind and Oblivion because of video game motion sickness, although Skyrim was better in that respect. TESO is somewhere in between, I can play it if I zoom out to max and play in third person view, while I can't play it first person.

And in the spirit of balanced reporting, Wildstar is probably more likely to cause epileptic fits, with all its colorful, flashy animations.

Playing a MMORPG can take up a significant chunk of your time, and it is hard to play more than one of them intensively at the same time. In the case of subscription games you also might not want to be subscribed to several of them at the same time due to financial reasons. That often makes the choice of a MMORPG non-trivial, and somewhat more akin to a lifestyle choice than to just choosing a game. At least that is how some people feel about it. And like with any lifestyle choice, people tend to come up with reasons why theirs is the best choice, and how other choices are simply "wrong". That starts out as a justification to themselves, and in some cases ends up with bad cases of fanboi-ism, attacking others for having chosen differently.

Now 2014 has three major contenders for the triple-A MMORPG crown of the year: The Elder Scrolls Online, Wildstar, and the WoW expansion Warlords of Draenor. How to choose? One option obviously is not making a choice at all, but rather playing a tourist: Play TESO a month or two from its release in April, switch to Wildstar in June, and end the year playing Warlords of Draenor when it comes out in "Fall 2014", "on or before December 20th". But maybe you don't want to play MMORPGs all year, or you would rather stick to one game longer.

Now while I have made a choice for myself, I am in no way a fanboi. In fact I would say that the three games have more similarities than differences. While the fans certainly will argue while this or that feature or detail makes their game far superior to the other choices, I think that if you regard the games with a bit less passion, you will find that they aren't all that different: They are all three quest-driven "themepark" MMORPGs, and they all are rather expensive with a box cost plus $15 monthly subscription cost. They all will offer features like housing, PvP, a solo PvE leveling game, and a collaborative PvE end game.

One factor in deciding for many people will be the novelty factor: TESO and Wildstar are new games, which can make them either more attractive or less attractive for some people than an expansion to a game that is going to celebrate it's 10th anniversary this year. Another factor is graphics style, and beauty is in they eye of the beholder there. But clearly Wildstar and WoW can be grouped together here in the colorful category, while The Elder Scrolls Online has a less colorful, but closer to photo-realistic look. Or you could choose a game based on what your friends play. In the end there are many possible criteria for choosing a game, sometimes down to minor details like only one of those games offering a particular race which just happens to be a big favorite with the person choosing.

Personally, apart from the "what my friends play" and preferred graphics style criteria, my biggest consideration was combat. Let's face it, most players spend a large majority of their time in these games in combat, or moving from one combat to the next. If you dislike the combat of a MMORPG, you won't stay long, which is for example what happened to me with LotRO, where all my love for the setting and my life-time subscription couldn't overcome my dislike for the combat system. Now overall I would say I prefer less twitchy combat, which would point towards World of Warcraft. But having already killed thousands and thousands of monsters in WoW, I grew somewhat bored of WoW combat. The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar both have faster combat system, where you need to "aim" to some degree to hit somebody, instead of just target-locking on him. But to me (and other people) the TESO combat system felt somewhat "floaty", with not sufficient feedback on whether you were actually hitting your target and how hard. I much preferred combat in Wildstar, where both your and your enemies' attack zones are clearly painted on the ground, combat feels very immediate, and you get good feedback.

While I consider the feel of combat an important criterion of choice, it is obviously a problematic one if we consider the box purchase plus subscription pricing model. I had to get into the betas to find out which game I liked more. While that wasn't terribly hard, it is only an option during a limited window of time before release. Only World of Warcraft offers a free trial in which you could see for yourself whether you like the combat of the game or not. After release for the other two games it would cost you $60 just to find out whether you like combat and other features of the game which aren't obvious in screenshots and descriptions.

While they do tend towards a more passionate, less impartial view of games, I'd like to link to No Prisoners, No Mercy here, who write about an article in Forbes arguing that The Elder Scrolls Online should either have a box price or a subscription, but not both. What worked for World of Warcraft in 2004 will not obviously work as well for the new MMORPGs of 2014. Times have changed. People today complain loudly about an iOS/Android game costing $15, or a Free2Play game which expects you to pay $15 once to unlock something. So a $60 game with a $15 monthly subscription looks out of sync with the time and the spending habits of today.

That brings us to a last method of choosing a 2014 MMORPG: Don't play any of them in 2014. There is a significant probability that all three of these games, and yes, that includes World of Warcraft, will move away from the subscription pricing model in the years to come. I really wouldn't be surprised if by 2016 all three of them would be Free2Play. Which as we all know isn't really "free", but would at least allow you to play the game first and then decide whether you like it.

In the end you need to decide what exactly is important to you in a MMORPG, and make the choice based on your own criteria. I would say that all three games have their strong points and their weaknesses. They might well receive similar review scores. So in the end it might be helpful to keep in mind that you are really just choosing a game, and not a lifestyle. Respect those who made a different choice!

[Note 1: Starting from this session I added a new house rule, coming from 13th Age: The escalation dice. At the end of the first round of combat I put a big d6 with the 1 on top onto the battlefield. That gives all players +1 to attack and damage. After round 2 the bonus grows to +2, and so on, until it reaches +6. Monsters get half the bonus. By making it more likely to hit and increasing the damage as combat goes on, combat goes about a round faster, especially when killing the last remaining mobs of a larger battle.]

I did a direct comparison of The Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar this weekend, playing the former all day Saturday, and the latter all day Sunday. And what I noticed was that ultimately the two games are very similar. Sure, there are lots of differences in the details and the style, and I prefer the better feedback of the Wildstar combat. But what I couldn't find was any significant difference in the quest and progression system. Particularly I found the claim that TESO gives you more freedom were simply not true.

What is true is that in Wildstar you would have an easier time to follow a chain of level-appropriate quests, while in The Elder Scrolls Online you constantly need to look on your compass while traveling to not miss all those hidden quest-givers. But neither game gives the option of NOT doing all those quests. You can't go out as you wish, kill mobs, earn xp and loot from those kills, and advance your character. Or rather, you can, but you would be horribly punished for doing it. Killing 100 mobs somewhere in either game gives you less xp and loot than doing one quest which requires you to kill 10 of them. So linear questing is your only sensible choice. You might be given some choice of in which order you want to tackle those linear bits, but that is all the freedom you get. It is a fake freedom.

Another option you don't really have is whether you want to play solo or in a group. Content is designed for either one or the other, and much of the leveling and questing content is designed to be soloed. Again, you have the theoretical freedom of forming a group, but in practice that freedom also turns out to be fake. Doing a quest in a group might well end up being harder or slower than soloing it, because of issues with phasing and such. And there is no advantage to grouping. Back in the days of Everquest people complained about "forced grouping", but I find "forced soloing" to be not any better.

So what you do in both games before hitting the level cap is very much the same: A long series of one quest after another, solo. You either play on those rails, or your character doesn't advance. "Exploration" has been reduced to finding predefined spots on the map on which you need to click for some achievement or bonus. There is a bit of PvP and a few group content dungeons, but otherwise the quests totally dominate these games. That gives me not much sense of a there being a living "world" in which I can adventure freely. And often the story line which declares me to be some sort of hero and savior clashes horribly with the long list of rather mundane chores I am asked to perform all day long. Not to mention all the other saviors around me, following exactly the same long list of mundane chores.

In the South Park parody Make Love not Warcraft the kids kill 65,340,285 level 1 boars, which is obviously not much fun. Nobody wants a return to the days of Evercamp, grinding mobs at the same place all day until you leveled up and moved to the next place. But quests have evolved from a useful tool of getting you to move around a bit to essentially BEING the game. And I would very much prefer a game where if you are being sent to kill goblins at a stronghold, you would actually have the freedom to stick around for a while and kill more goblins than the quest required, without that being horribly inefficient. And I would very much prefer a game in which entering that goblin stronghold alone or in a group would both make perfect sense.

And technically all that is very easy: One just needs to balance the experience points and loot that quests give against the xp and loot from killing mobs. And likewise the rewards of group play need to be balanced against the rewards of solo play, as not to totally favor one over the other in efficiency. MMORPG players are very much motivated by rewards, so if you create one way of playing the game which is obviously much more efficient than any other, you'll get a herd of lemmings trampling that path. 

So after downloading the huge client twice and following instructions from the forums on how to prevent the launcher to uninstall the game every time you close it, I managed to play The Elder Scrolls Online for about 8 hours. Enough to form a first impression. Enough to see the potential of this game, which is undoubtedly there. And enough to see many of the serious flaws the game has.

In many ways The Elder Scrolls Online reminds me of Everquest 2 when it came out, a month before World of Warcraft. And given how much Wildstar resembles World of Warcraft, that is like sitting in a time machine to go back a decade. It also gives us a good estimate on how this will end, as history tends to repeat itself. Personally I would still make the same decision I made back then, and go for Wildstar.

One good reason for that decision is that Wildstar (which I played too, but the NDA only dropped recently) is technically in a much better state than The Elder Scrolls Online. TESO is a buggy mess, from the broken launcher, via the bugged quests, to the ESC key to quit the game sometimes not working. I once was stuck in a quest and asked in zone chat whether that quest was known to be bugged, and was told that no, it worked perfectly, provided that I logged out and back on repeatedly on the spot until the script started. That is pretty much the TESO definition of "working perfectly", you need to know all the tricks and workarounds.

The need to know stuff to be able to play brings me to my problems with the gameplay. I love exploration. So I should be happy about the various exploration style content the game has. But even I start to think that TESO is overdoing it. Exploration is only exploration if it is voluntary. In The Elder Scrolls Online much of that exploration is mandatory. For example you really, really wouldn't want to miss the skyshards distributed in every zone, as three of them give you one skill point. Between getting all the skyshards and not getting them is a huge power difference for your character, which makes searching for the skyshards mandatory. Or, as most people will do, following a map from a third-party site.

The skyshards I could still live with, but what I absolutely hate is having to search items and containers in every room. If you see a screenshot of a room, you would not be able to tell which of the items on it you can interact with, and which of them are just decoration. So you need to go through the room and move the cursor (which is stuck in the middle of the screen, so you basically need to move the camera) over every bloody item in the room to find out whether you can do something with it. And if you can interact with the item, most of the time you just find a crafting ingredient. If you are lucky, a recipe. So for a craft like cooking you would be forced to really search every item in every room, which gets old very fast.

Many people believe that quests are quests, and that is all there is. That is why you frequently hear it said that World of Warcraft didn't do anything innovative to the MMORPG genre, because quests were there before WoW. But what the actual invention of World of Warcraft was, was how the quests guided you through the game, making sure you were in the right zone at the right level and so on. The Elder Scrolls Online doesn't do that. It has tons of quests, heavily scripted and using lots of phasing, but every series of quests stands on its own and doesn't lead you to the next series. Instead you see the icon for a quest-giver on your compass (and then over his head). As there are not really "quest hubs" like in WoW, it is easy to either miss quests, or to follow a quest line to an area which is too high level for you. For example you end the tutorial at level 3 and get dumped into a city with a suggestion in a text (but no quest) to go to the docks. As you can't get to the docks without encountering other quest givers, you easily end up doing level 5+ quests and missing out on the place with the level 3 quests that the docks would have sent you to. I even managed to do some quests where the quest reward item was too high level for my character, and I had to level up to use it. With your quest tracker only holding a single quest, it also isn't all that easy to keep your quests sorted by location, so you might very well do a quest in one location and then follow that quest series away, only to later find that you had another quest nearby.

Otherwise the quests aren't much different from quests in any other MMORPG. There are less quests that ask you to kill a specific number of monsters, but quite often you do have to go to a specific list of locations, each of which has monsters. Or, due to heavy use of phasing and scripting, the monster appears when you go somewhere. The advantage of that system is that if somebody else killsteals that mob, it doesn't hurt the progress of your quest. Even killing a specific quest end boss can be done in a group. Only the person initiating the attack gets the loot, but there is very little loot in this game. For many levels most mobs you kill will have exactly 1 gold piece. With a level 3 item costing already hundreds of gold pieces, your gold and gear will come nearly exclusively from quest rewards.

So what about the auction house? Well, there isn't one. Instead there are guild stores. So you will need to join a big guild with a big store if you want to buy and sell items or materials from / to other players. TESO is the first game I've seen that has "forced guilding", unless of course you don't want to participate in the player economy and crafting at all. The crafting system appears to be highly complex, with elements like "traits" being found by disassembling items, or special crafting stations allowing research that takes hours. And there isn't much in the way of a tutorial or explanation for it, so other than refining some jute I didn't do much crafting in the beta.

Combat in The Elder Scrolls Online is kind of weird. While you do get the choice between 4 character classes, they end up playing not so much different from each other. Your sorcerer will kill his first skeleton with a sword. At level 2 he will learn his first spell, but even then he can run out of mana quickly, and will still use a weapon. If you choose "veteran gear" to show on your character creation screen, you'll see your sorcerer in heavy plate armor with a big weapon. I haven't found a good reason yet why somebody would wear light armor instead of heavy one, but maybe there is some light armor in the game with big bonuses for casters. At the lower levels I played my sorcerer and my templar played basically exactly the same. Weirdly the templar's first healing spell didn't work on himself, only on others, and I read on the forums that xp distribution for healers in groups had issues. Not sure if that is a bug or a feature. Anyway, there was no reason to group in the levels I played. As others have reported, in combat you don't get much feedback whether you hit or missed your opponent. I suffered some lag (because to get the launcher to work I had to play on the American servers), and the system to block and interrupt the enemy attacks didn't work all that well for me. So basically most combat for me was casting spells until run out of mana, and then flailing some heavy weapon wildly and approximately in the direction of the enemy. Sometimes I got blocks or interrupts to work, but that felt somewhat random. So overall I didn't enjoy combat that much.

As I said before, I can see the potential of The Elder Scrolls Online. Some people will enjoy the game holding their hand less, and the complex sub-systems of gameplay. This is a game where reading up on what you should do in many areas is probably needed to do well. If you think that all information about a game should be contained in the game, TESO is probably not for you. On the one side The Elder Scrolls Online is pretty and complex, on the other it is full of bugs and annoying design choices. Personally I am not going to buy it. I assume that TESO will go Free2Play in a year, and that it'll take at least that long to get the most serious bugs out of the game, so I'd rather wait and play this for free in 2015, if at all.

Thank you for inviting me to your The Elder Scrolls Beta. You asked me to tell people what I think about the game, and here is my opinion: In the current state the game is completely unplayable for me. Every time I start the launcher, it starts downloading all 22 GB of game client again, even if the previous installation finished without a problem. That would be not so bad if it was just me, but your beta forums are full of people with the same problem.

So you want to release this game in less than a month and not even the launcher works?

I have been reading a lot of interesting blog posts lately about the economics of content creation. Apple Cider Mage argues On Funding and Revenue "that people should be compensated for their time and efforts" of creating content, including blogs or podcasts. Herding Cats replies that Blogging for Cash is a zero-sum game, where "financial support received by Blog A is financial support not received by Blog B". Meanwhile Chris from ihobo argues that Games are not Shoes, trying to counter the argument of Nicholas Lovell that in shoes it is the marginal cost of making another shoe that determines the price of shoes, so the marginal cost of games being zero would drive the market towards free games.

I think that there are a lot of good ideas here, and a lot of confusion. First of all, not all content is created equal. Some content is made because the author has a need to express himself, while other content is made because a client wants it. Think of it that way: If by law tomorrow it would be illegal to pay for content, what content would survive? Lots of blogs wouldn't be affected at all, while triple A games and blockbuster movies would disappear.

I don't know how many people have read content that I wrote. My blog had 6 million visitors, but the same person reading this blog every day is then counted as a visitor every day, so it is far less than 6 million people. But even if I just say that "thousands" of people read my content, there is less than 1% of them who use the donate button on the upper right of this page to give me money. That makes me think that the market value of my blog posts is very close to zero. If we say that opinions are a dime a dozen that might actually be rather close to the economic truth of blogging in general.

If Apple Cider Mage says "that people should be compensated for their time and efforts", then I need to ask where that "should" is coming from. If I decide to build a cathedral out of matches in my garage, why should anybody compensate me for my time and effort? I could then put the finished cathedral in a public place and ask for donations, but there is absolutely no "should" involved. Just like the donate button on my blog, people *can* donate to show their appreciation, but there is absolutely no moral requirement for them to do so.

Just as I blog basically for free, somebody could make games for free. The kind of games this results in would be akin to Flappy Bird. Most of the games we play are too complicated for that, and require a team, with some people coding the game, others making the artwork, others the music, and so on. A garage band type of game development team is theoretically possible, but not very common. Most games are produced with the intent to make money of them. And that reverses the notion "that people should be compensated for their time and efforts", into the consideration of an entrepreneur: Can I make more money with the game than the compensation I will have to pay to people for the time and effort to make it? That means that sometimes the entrepreneur is wrong and we get a game for cheap because he miscalculated. But overall it means that we as the community of players need to pay the cost of making games, otherwise games won't be made.

"Free" games in this discussion are a red herring. The reason why we get more and more "free" games counter-intuitively is that game companies often make more money with free games than with fixed price games. League of Legends made $624 million last year, so Riot Games makes a big profit on it, and can continue to make games. As LoL has 30 million active players, and we need to assume that at least 90% of those never pay a cent, many of the people who pay of League of Legends actually pay more to play this game than they would pay to play a game that comes in a box with a price tag and has no subscription. If the EU comes through with their proposal to ban the use of the word "free" for games that aren't actually completely free, "free" games would mostly disappear.

Free opinions on the internet on the other hand are here to stay. Attempts to monetize them are mostly doomed to failure. You can ask for donations, but you would get more donation money with a fake charity website or a scam Kickstarter project than with a blog that requires a lot of time and effort.

I was reading Ravious' declaration of love for the 13th Age pen & paper role-playing game system. And I couldn't help but notice that the first half of the cited strong points of the system, covering character creation and narration, are in fact not system specific at all. That is if you play any other role-playing system, be it Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, or even non-fantasy systems, asking your players what the "one unique thing" about their character is on creation would work just as well.

Basically a pen & paper role-playing game has two parts: The role-playing and the game. The role-playing is either not bound by rules at all, or can use rules from many different sources. The 13th Age "rules" book has a long description of the world and the icons, the major players in that world. It has "rules" about how to create a great background story for your character, or how to handle story-telling. And all these things aren't so much "rules" as rather suggestions on how to encourage good role-playing. Most of these suggestions work just as well in any other pen & paper role-playing system.

The good news about this is that you can use the 13th Age book as an accessory for whatever other system you want to play, in the case that you don't want to switch systems. The bad news is that the other half of the book then isn't of much use to you. Game mechanics are far more difficult to transplant from one system to another, although I thought that I might give the "escalation dice" from 13th Age a try in my 4E campaign to make combat shorter. But to give a counter-example, you wouldn't want to copy a spell from one system to another, as they might use very different numbers for health and damage.

Similar considerations apply if you want to invent house rules for a pen & paper role-playing game: As long as those rules cover the role-playing part, it is relatively easy. But you fiddle with the rules of the underlying game part at your own peril, as that might affect the balance of the game. So adding a new race to D&D is relatively easy, as long as you keep the racial bonuses and powers roughly in line with the existing ones. Adding a new class or making major changes to how a class works tends to be far more dangerous.

I am still undecided whether I will resubscribe to World of Warcraft for at least a few months when the next expansion comes out. However I do like what I hear about the announced changes to healing in that expansion. Basically healing will be slowed down, making it less twitchy and less susceptible to both reaction time and lag spikes. At the same time the changes will force healers to think more about who to heal, because there will be less "artificially intelligent" healing.

I liked healing in vanilla WoW, where for some time I was in a serious raiding guild. To me it seems as if the changes move healing back towards the intelligent healing of vanilla WoW, instead of the twitchy healing of the later editions. The smaller raid sizes today prevent us from getting mechanics like healer rotations back (where a healer deliberately didn't cast spells for some time to regain mana). But as long as your decision who to heal matters more than your ability to press a button within milliseconds, I am happy.

Stealth games are not part of the list of my favorite genres. I did play some, like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or Dishonored, but these are more the kind of games I don't buy on release but pick up for half price at a Steam sale if the reviews are good. So I didn't play Thief. But I read a couple of reviews on Metacritic, which gave it an aggregated review score of 68, not great. And of course every single review refers to the original Thief from 1998, which has a Metacritic score of 92. And I couldn't help but wonder if the review scores would have been different if the same game would have had a different name.

I am seeing more and more games which I would consider to be of medium quality released with names of great games from the past. There are a few games that end up being about as good as their predecessors from the last century (e.g. XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Deus Ex: Human Revolution), but the majority look more like an attempt to sell a middling game with an appeal to nostalgia. I don't know if that has a positive effect on sales, but it seems to me that it has a negative effect on reviews: Expectations aren't met, and reviewers end up not being able to judge a game on its own merits, because the unfavorable comparison with a great game from the past gets in the way.

I'm not sure how many people buy a game unseen just because they are nostalgic about its name. What I consider far more deceptive is the use of nostalgia on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. For Thief I at least have the option to wait for the reviews. By definition your decision about whether to back a Kickstarter project can only be based on promises. And quite often that promise is based on past greatness, somebody wanting to make a game "just like the great ". Or even worse, somebody who was a developer on some great game and now claims that this game was great because of him, and that necessarily his next game will be just as great. To me all that sounds like a recipe for leading people into bad decisions they will regret later.

I don't believe great games are the result of a single great idea that is easy to replicate, nor are they the result of the genius of a single person. The history of gaming is full of names of developers who made a great game or great series of games, only to then create a bunch of unremarkable games. And it is full of bad clone games, where somebody tried to copy a great idea but failed to make a great game. Buying or backing a game because of a name is a mental shortcut that is statistically unlikely to lead to a good result.

I am a capitalist insofar as I do believe that game companies are not charities. The overall revenue they get from a game needs to be higher than the cost to produce that game plus the cost of capital. And I am open to different business models. I do not consider "pay once, play forever" to be the only viable option. For example I am quite in favor of DLCs because of what I said about the revenue needing to be higher than the cost. If a whole triple A game would require a one-time purchase cost of $100 to keep up with inflation, I'd rather get half the game for $50, and the other half in the form of five DLCs for $10 each. That way I can play through a shorter version of the game before committing the other half of my money.

I am also in favor of a particular business model which is popular on mobile game platforms like iOS and Android: You get a game for "free", but that game has only a very limited number of levels. After level 5 or so you come to a screen telling you that you unlock the remaining levels for a one-time in-app purchase. That basically is the same as a game you pay for once, with a free demo. I do not share the EU's concern about the misuse of the word "free", although I do support the idea that app stores should have warning labels about "contains in-app purchases" and a list of the most popular purchases to give an idea of the real cost of the game.

I don't mind things like the sparkly pony in World of Warcraft either. As I am not an achiever at heart, and do not even believe that you can "win" a MMORPG, I don't even mind in-game stores selling stuff that could be said to give the player some in-game advantage, and not just being decorative fluff.

Where I am a lot more sceptical is thing like the recently revealed business model for EQN Landmark, where you pay money for the resources that you would otherwise need to spend time in game to gather. Again I am not worried about that being Pay2Win. Instead what bothers me is that you are paying more for the privilege of NOT playing the game. In my previous examples you paid to get *more* content, so you could play the game *more*. If you buy resources in EQN Landmark, you pay money to play the game *less*.

And it is not that I dislike resource collection in MMORPGs. In fact I rather like gathering resources in typical MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. I also am currently playing Craft the World, a game in which you spend most of your time gathering resources. But if you have a regular MMORPG or a game about gathering resources, the game developers have an interest in making resource gathering a fun activity. I'm afraid that in EQN Landmark the game developers have an interest to make resource gathering as annoying as possible, so as to maximize the number of players who rather pay than gather.

In addition to that, I am somewhat suspicious of whether SOE is price gouging rather than covering the cost of development, capital, and some reasonable profit margin. I mean up to $99.99 for access to the alpha version of what is basically a kind of editor for a future MMORPG? Resources being sold already in that alpha version? What we have here is a pricing scheme which would be considered somewhat expensive for a release game applied to an alpha version. Shouldn't such early access come with a heavily discounted pricing scheme to make up for the lack of features and finish?

So if you were wondering why I am not playing EQN Landmark, now you know why. For a game that has "Free to Play. Your Way.®" written on its homepage, I find it far too expensive right now. If it really becomes free to play, I'll probably try it.

Where does magic come from, and how does it work? If you read fantasy novels from different authors, and play fantasy games from different producers, you will get a lot of different answers to that question. As it says on the label "fantasy", the magic is just made up in the imagination of the author. While other parts of the fantasy world might follow real-world examples, e.g. a society with a real-world medieval feudal structure, magic has more freedom, and thus often more variety.

I was thinking about that when I read this rant about the Bore-lock, in which the author complains that the warlock in 5th edition D&D (they apparently dropped the "Next" label) is boring, because he works with the same rules system on magic as the wizard and sorcerer. Because if you consider the question how magic works in the context of designing and pen & paper role-playing game rules system, you have one big question to answer first: Is there only one rules system for magic, which applies with different flavors to all spell-casters? Or do different character classes have different rules systems?

Of course both are possible. It comes down to a question of design philosophy, how complex you want to make your rules system. The author of the blog post linked to above clearly prefers more complex system in which every class has a different rules system. But there are obvious advantages to less complex systems, in terms of clarity, as well as class balance. If for example the different spell-casters in your group recover their spells in different ways, they end up pulling the group into different directions. The caster who in a Vancian model "forgets" his spells after casting them will want to rest more frequently to regain them, while another class whose resources aren't linked to long rests might want to carry on.

Personally I prefer the simpler model of having only one system of how powers work. That doesn't mean that all classes become the same, because different classes can have different powers. But you don't need to keep half a dozen different rules system in your head, and the resource management of different classes is more closely aligned.

The uncanny valley is a dip in a curve showing how people react to images showing humanoids that are more or less similar to real humans. The idea is that people react well to real humans and to humanoids that clearly aren't real, but somewhere in the middle there is a valley, where people react with revulsion to almost-human things like zombies. I don't know if it is only that, or if it is just a factor, but for myself I noticed that I clearly prefer computer game graphics that are a bit further away from photo-realism. Or in MMORPG 2014 terms, I much prefer the look of Wildstar to the look of The Elder Scrolls Online. A decade back I much preferred the look of World of Warcraft to the look of Everquest 2. I prefer candy-colored worlds with characters like pink pigtailed gnomes or characters with bunny ears to worlds using only shades of grey and brown with characters that all look human. I also like cel-shading and other means to create a more comic-like look in games.

Besides uncannyness, I also see an advantage of a less realistic look in terms of the user interface. For example TESO has an ongoing discussion where players complain that they don't see the effect of hitting an enemy very well. If you have a game where hitting an enemy causes floating damage numbers to fly away from the mob you hit, you don't have that problem. But those floating numbers are clearly better suited to a comic-look world than to a photo-realistic one. In Wildstar every attack has an area of effect which is painted in color on the ground, which in a world full of colors looks quite okay, but would break immersion if your immersion is based on things looking "real".

Furthermore a less realistic look is often easier to achieve, especially with animations. If your character is supposed to look very much like a human, you need to get human movements exactly right for that to work. If your character looks like a stuffed animal, its animations can be a lot simpler and still look good. A mono-colored surface without texture can look okay in a comic world, but looks strange in a photo-realistic one.

Maybe it is just me, but I can easier get immersed in a game when that immersion is just by gameplay, and not by the game pretending to be a video-camera. I don't know if that would change if I was using virtual reality goggles instead of a flat screen. What do you think?

Richard Bartle has published a paper on The Decline of MMOs. You should read it. It is not that I agree with everything he says, or the way he says it (all but one of the citations in his paper are to himself, what a narcissist), but this is one of those must-read documents if you want to up to date on the theory of games and gaming. Many points in the analysis of how we got to where we are now are spot on. The solutions he proposes not so much: For example making lots of servers with 250 players each has obvious problems a few months down the road when server populations vary widely and the game company needs to merge servers every month. Still, the paper is well worth reading and many of the ideas are worth considering. Recommended!

Sometimes you read discussions on blogs whether a blogger is a journalist or not. As most questions in life the answer is neither black nor white, but some shade of grey. The most recognition my blog ever got in this area was a press pass for a Blizzcon, including the opportunity to interview a World of Warcraft developer. But in general the big game companies do not consider me as "press", as they have access to bigger publications. Small game companies on the other hand, who can't get their games written about on bigger websites or print magazines, are sending me press releases all the time. And in 99% of cases I simply ignore those, because this isn't the kind of site that publishes press releases.

But yesterday I received a press release for Shikihime Garden: "For your information, Shikihime Garden is an original hybrid browser-based game of gardening and deck-building embedded with RPG elements where players must foster lovely Shikihime (female characters with magic abilities), take care of beautiful gardens and collect a variety of cards through numerous battles. The game combines turn-based card combat and simulation gameplay with exploration and quests." Deck-building and *gardening*??? What is that? Farmville with turn-based card combat? The game is browser-based, Free2Play, and will be released on March 11. You can sign up for Shikihime Garden here.

As I said, I wouldn't normally promote Free2Play browser games. But this one definitively wins the prize for the weirdest game description I have come across this year. So I will probably try it out just for the fun of it. Turn-based combat with cards might actually be good, if I'm lucky. Otherwise I can at least enjoy the weird cultural differences of a Japanese RPG.

Imagine a game which consists of different parts, one part being soccer, the other chess, played on the same field. Presumably the soccer players would complain about the chess players being in the way, while the chess players would complain about not getting the quiet required for their moves. Looks like a bad idea overall. So why do MMORPGs insist of having this mix of totally different games? One of the most frequent complaints in MMORPGs is about other players "not doing it right", which in most cases is due to those other players simply playing a different part of the MMORPG. Talking in Bartle types, for an achiever, an explorer is "not doing it right", and a killer thinks the same about a socializer.

Wouldn't it be much better to separate parts of those games into new games, for example make a game just about raiding? Not only would you not be forced to play hundreds of hours or pay $60 to level up a character in order to raid, you would also presumably find only people actually interested in raiding in that game. Then for the people who like leveling up, we could have a very different game, in which leveling takes much longer, and where reaching the level cap unlocks new classes which you'd have to level up again.

If you look at great computer games, they usually concentrate on doing one thing very well. As soon as a game has several parts, the additional parts are usually not that good, or get in the way of the main game. By trying to be all things to all players, you only end up making nobody happy. We will see that probably next year, when EQ Next comes out. Right now people are very happy about EQN Landmark, which does only one thing and does it well. It isn't all that obvious if the concept is still that fun if it is dropped into a MMORPG in which lots of players have very different ideas about what the actual game is.

As an added advantage, reducing the scope of MMORPGs would also make them cheaper to produce. I think it would be financially more viable to make a focused game, which costs less, and stands out from the crowd of MMORPGs that all have the same bloated list of features.