Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor… Broken Arm?

A nice, relaxing bike ride. Just the thing to help me unwind after the travails of E3.

What better way to celebrate my beating the odds by not coming down with some virulent form of convention-plague, contracted after shaking the hand of some guy working on Who Knows What from God Knows Where who forgot to wipe himself before he got on the plane?

Yep, a nice relaxing bike ride… cruising along enjoying the scenery at 20mph… taking in the sights and sounds… swerving to avoid a collision… flying over the handlebars… landing with all of my weight squarely on my right arm…

Damn you, E3. You just couldn’t let me go one year without a major medical emergency, could you?

Suffice it to say, with my dominant arm in excruciating pain for most of the past few weeks and popping Vicodin like it was candy, I wasn’t really in any condition to go about producing content for the site.

But, now that things are on the mend, I’m going to be going to an expedited schedule to make up for lost time, starting today with my Rift: Planes of Telara interview.

Back in Action

After a long dry spell, today’s extremely tongue-in-cheek April Fool’s Day interview should mark my return to slightly more serious games journalism in the future.

Aside from the podcast, I’ve been far too quiet around these parts, lately.

I apologize to any of my legions of fans who have been bitterly missing my reportage.

The Altoholic: A Matter Of Class

Brad Nelson is our latest contributor. This is his debut editorial for The MMO Gamer. Have a read and join the discussion!

Anyone who has ever played an MMO knows that the decision to play one class or another can be a big one. Do I want to DPS? What about this armor set? Should I roll a tank?

Class choices affect more than just your appearance. Your role in a party changes dramatically, your playstyle while soloing will sometimes be unique to your class, and some players may treat you differently. In some games, some classes are looked down upon because of their tactics or their inability to mesh into a team successfully. Usually this is not the players fault, but rather a flaw in the design of the game. It’s not a decision that can or should be made frivolously, especially if you’re new to the game. For the inexperienced player, it’s usually best to roll a standard archetype, such as a warrior, to get the basics of the game. You can then try out different characters, eventually finding what toon suits your style.

I tend to base my character choices on how interesting I think the character is going to be to play. When I played WoW I started as a Warrior, quickly changed to Warlock, experimented with a Mage, Paladin, and Death Knight. Some of these toons have seen themselves to level 80, some haven’t.

The underlying reason for this is because of my playstyle. Like most gamers, I enjoy certain classes and don’t find others to be as much fun. Some people will find their true calling as a armor-plated warrior, while others enjoy the subtleties of a rogue. Most MMO players have found their favorite class, while others, like myself are shameless alt-o-holics. The only problem with leveling a bunch of toons is that you don’t get to see the endgame as quickly and after several times through the same quest grinding areas, it can get a little boring. Sadly, endgame in most MMO’s can get a little dull as well, one can only raid the same dungeon so many times. Endgame PvP is a little better, giving you intense one-on-one combat with an opposing faction member, or charging into battle with an army beside you, facing down a equal force of enemies.

I recently put WoW on hiatus while I tried other MMO’s. I bought Aion and played it for about three months. While Aion is a wonderfully textured game, I found that it was even more grind-oriented than WoW was, so I let my subscription lapse. I found that only being able to use my wings in certain zones made the offer of flight seem more like a gimmick than a game dynamic.

Next up was Eve Online. I was very impressed with the graphics, and the character progression is much different than other games I’ve played. I’m still playing Eve, and plan on exploring the different subtleties of it. Be warned, if you’re not interested in a steep learning curve, Eve is not the game for you! At first it can be a little overwhelming, but if you ask questions and explore the game yourself you might find it to be a refreshing change from your standard “Walk around and kill things” MMO.

I’ll be trying out many more games in the future, and I’ll bring you reviews as I play them. I’d like to hear from you, your experiences, insight and recommendations, so please take a few minutes and leave your thoughts below.

Editorial: When is a choice not a choice

Welcome to my mind once again!

I’ve been playing around with a number of games recently, and I wanted to touch on something that’s really starting to bother me; probably because I’m just way too sensitive about silly things.

Generally when I start up a new game, I almost immediately make a bee line for whatever character type/class/race/whatever serves as the healer for that world. I do this for a number of reasons. The universal healer drought is one, I always ended up biting the cleric bullet when I played D&D is two, and let’s be honest it feels good to have the power of life and death.

This tends to work out rather well for me, except when it doesn’t. There are rare cases when perhaps a game doesn’t feature a dedicated healer class, or the healer winds up being underused because of the recent trend of making games easier and easier, or whatever other reason there is that I can’t find my priest/cleric/healer sapien.When this happens I have to end up picking a character class more or less at random.

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment. MMORPG has basically become synonymous with “formula” these days. There’s almost certainly going to be tanks and healers and DPS. These are almost certainly going to consist of some variety of fighter, cleric, and wizard. Then there are the rare cases, when I can’t find my regular cleric. When that happens I can’t count on the rest of the formula to be there, and that turns my selection when I create a new character into what is essentially a completely random guess as to what my characters overall role is going to be.

Granted there is usually some manner of description, and a little bit of common sense goes a long way, but my point is that even though I have a habit of picking a similar character type in every game I can, I’m counting on the game to be like other games I’ve played. This is from someone who has been playing these games for decades, imagine if this was the first time you ever fired one up on your games box.

My biggest gripe about this whole paradigm, is that players are forced to make decisions about the entire life and career of their characters before ever stepping into the world to see what it’s like, and how things work, even for one second. It’s only the incredibly rare situation that you even find a partial move list for your selection. These are not simple decisions either, there is a healer shortage in almost all games for a reason; the usual drawback to being able to extend the life of an adventurer is being more or less ineffectual in combat.

I understand this when I make this choice, but a new player who wants to play a cleric or priest or medic for aesthetic reasons, or they thought the description was interesting or they just didn’t know that the pitfall would be there has a very high chance of being frustrated with the time it takes to accomplish the easiest combat tasks.

Let me also say that I don’t think making a character go through the first five levels, or a number of simple dungeons as a “peasant” or “civilian” class is a particularly elegant solution to the problem. That just frustrates everyone. Veterans of the genre are going to be annoyed at being forced to go through what generally amounts to busywork before they even get to start building their character, and new players are very likely going to find such a solution boring and are unlikely to even make it all the way through to the meat of the game.

On that note, I would like to mention another thing that has been bothering me. It’s something that I think is absolutely ridiculous, and probably one of the poorest decisions that one could make in the design of a character creation system; and the saddest thing is that it’s present in almost every game presented to the light of day in the last decade. That problem, is the combination of the above two issues.

Generally speaking, when I create a new character in almost any game, I find myself choosing all the skills and abilities I will EVER have access to, as well as my greater role within the games combat system, all before ever stepping foot in the game world. Combined with that almost every time I start out with a broken knife or bent club or something, and one or two (if you happen to be lucky) combat abilities besides auto attack. Yes, technically I’m not playing the first five levels as a “peasant” class, but it tends to amount to the same thing.

I have to whack the first hundred enemies to death with a stick before my priest even begins to see some of the depth of an actual priest class.

So it’s easy for me to sit here and go on about how everyone is doing it wrong, much like the couch coach and people who leave “I could do that if I just practiced and had talent” comments you find under YouTube videos. I, on the other hand, am going to make the effort to suggest what I think might actually improve the lot of new characters in online RPGs, as well as possibly making the lives of altaholics like me a little bit easier.

I should  be clear that this is not a completely new idea, as I have seen it in the occasional game before, though I can’t for the life of me name one of the top of my head. It is unfortunately somewhat rare, but whenever I do come across this particular system I find it quite enjoyable. I’m not sure what the official name of this would be, but I just tend to call it tiered character development.

Essentially it works out to building your character in stages throughout the game, one might very feasibly select a base class at the beginning of the game and at various plot points, or predetermined levels, or however you want to work it out go through specialization at some future point. Aion did come close in that regard, it’s just a shame that they didn’t carry the idea a little further.

For my money I think that this way of doing things allows for a more educated character progression system, rather than finding out thirty levels into a game that your chosen class doesn’t really do what you thought it would based on whatever notions you may have had from the character selection screen.

I also imagine that it would make for a more organic character progression, one that feels a little more like a character actually growing than the flashy level ups of most games. Finally, I imagine that it would make it a great deal easier for players new to the whole persistent online world thing to feel like they have some control over their character while they’re embroiled in the process of learning everything else about how to play a game like this.

I’d like to point out that I’m certainly not saying that the way things are in the majority of cases is wrong, that’s not it at all, it clearly works very well. The ability to start a new character with little effort means that it’s not a game breaking issue if you happen to pick a class that just doesn’t “click” with you, but I just like to think that altering a characters progression path at semi-regular intervals would be a very nice quality of life feature for new players, without being a hindrance to veterans and players who know exactly what they want, and in that I might be entirely wrong.

Editorial: By any other name

So hello again mighty spacemen of the future.

I’ve been spending some time out in the wild internet savanna recently, and the sheer variety that I’ve come across has prompted me to ask myself a question.

Basically I’m just wondering what exactly it is that makes one game a Massively Multiplayer game while others are simply classified as regular online games. I’m not here to be a snob about it or anything, it’s simply something that I’ve noticed.

I suppose it’s worth mentioning here, that generally speaking almost every game that has come out in this particular genre for the last ten years has been in some fashion modeled on EverQuest. That’s not inherently a bad thing, EverQuest was a fantastic game, especially for it’s time. Heck it’s still kicking today, albeit with a much smaller crowd than it used to have. The one downside to that however, is that when you have everything trying to be the same game you end up with a very bland gaming landscape.

Zip ahead a few years and you have the same thing, except you can replace EverQuest with World of Warcraft. Once again, not a bad idea to see what the winners are doing, but it gets boring when they’re all the same.

And that’s the train of thought that brought me to my little “huh” moment. Basically, these days, I’ve heard a number of people, not many mind you, but some try to say that games which are indeed legitimately massive in many senses of the word, and certainly multi-player in at least some cases, that take place online, are somehow not Massively Multiplayer Online games. Somehow it seems we’ve created a situation for ourselves. Some people believe that you’re not playing an MMORPG unless you have an action bar and levels and gear, and if it doesn’t look like something that they’re familiar and comfortable with it should not be included in the list of games that you can find on a site such as this.

Now if that was as far as the problem went I would be happy to ignore the folks who say that and take care of making my own judgement about games individually. However, it happens that the people who make these games do end up hearing from the people who have a very narrow view of what this genre is, and since this is by no means an industry with fat margins (excluding Blizzard; but let’s not go into the outliers right now) they become just that little bit more risk averse. And when they get that little bit more risk averse they become a little less willing to try something that might be new and might work, and might just be the thing that makes all these games into solid gold ROCK HARD AWESOME!

If you’ve ever read any of my other articles, or any of my reviews you’ll know that one of the first things I’m going to bring up is story and plot and writing. And you’ll also know the second thing that I’m going to bring up is what a game or system does differently. I bring these things up in this order before all the other more mundane aspects because I honestly believe that these are the things that are most important in judging a game, not only from the aspect of how fun it’s going to turn out, but also how it contributes to the body of work that is the art (and yes, I do mean art cause I’m a nerd that way) of video game design.

Basically think about if nothing had ever been added to the first person shooter formula for twenty years, since Wolfenstein. There is absolutely NO WAY the genre as a whole would be as big as it is today if all we got was a prettier Wolfenstein every nine months. Even the sports franchises from EA, which are notorious for being re-releases and roster updates tend to add something every few iterations that makes the game deeper and just a little more involved. The same thing should be true for our beloved online games, but currently many of the developers are just a little bit afraid to try something radical, or even slightly off message.

More than a little of the problem is due to the production of games as a whole becoming more and more costly, with MMO projects being even more so; and the hit driven nature of the games themselves. It becomes difficult to predict just what’s going to take off, and I understand that I just also wish that more dev houses were willing to try new things like Cryptic, or Hi-Rez with Champions Online or Global Agenda (Of course it’s really easy to say that when it’s someone else’s money, but we’re talking about ideals here).

The one thing that I think we, as players, can do to help this process though, is to perhaps widen our vision and our nets, and allow a little more latitude in what we try. I know there has got to be a few people out there like me that are happy to have a game which features a tagline of “No Elves”, but even the people who like their Elves, I implore you to be a little more adventurous in your game choices.

One other thing that I think we can do, that I will likely expand upon on another day, is stop marrying ourselves to games. The forums are lousy with this; go into any community you like and you’re almost certain to find in the top two pages, if not the top page, some small group of individuals debating over which game is better and how the other game should never EVER be played under any circumstances, because it’s not the game they like. Seriously, this kind of display is infantile, if you try it and don’t like it, fine, stop playing it and shut up about it, but the key to that particular situation is to TRY IT!

There has never been, in any situation I have been able to find, a game that actually and actively prevented you from playing another game AS WELL AS the one you are so worked up about. Saying that you can only play one game, and this happens with online games more than most I find, is nothing more than ridiculous fan boy talk, no matter how level headed you sound.

So to nutshell for everyone, all MMO’s don’t need elves, try new stuff, and you can play more than one game at a time.

Looking forward to getting some discussion going on how Hub and spoke games and instance focused games aren’t “true” MMO’s now.

Until next time!

Almost Heroes: Middle Aged MMO Gaming

This past Saturday was my birthday.  My 30th birthday, to be exact.  Man, am I getting old or what?

I had read some blurbs about SOE’s 10th Anniversary EverQuest Hardcover, and thought it sounded great, and with EverQuest being the first MMO I started with back in ‘99, I thought it would be a great present.  Unfortunately the local Borders and Gamestops were all out of it, so my loving up wife picked up me up a copy of World of Warcraft: Rise of the Lich King. It’s been a good read so far, but I wish that EverQuest book had been in.  Then I stopped to think… 10th anniversary….

I’ve been playing MMO’s for nearly 11 years.  Six of those years were spent in the world of Norrath, almost eight if you count my dabbling in EverQuest 2. And in between all that time, I’ve had my nose in almost everything that has come out since EverQuest originally launched.

That’s a long time. A decade. I guess you can say I’m hooked on the MMO genre. From the looks of subscription numbers around the world, I’m not the only one.  And looking at the coming release list, from Star Wars: The Old Republic to Star Trek Online, it doesn’t look like the genre is going to fade anytime soon.

That’s when it hit me, I’m getting old.  Now I know, I’m sure that many of our readers our over the age of 30, so don’t take offense.  But when I was 19 and I loaded up Everquest, Lanys T’vyl server, I met people from all ages and all walks of life.  I gamed with some of those people for years, met them in real life even.

But at 19, playing a MMO with people a decade or more older than me, I thought it was a little strange.  Here is a genre that brings people from all walks of life together, to have fun in a social environment.  But even then, I tended to think differently about the older people I was playing with.  Only being 19, I thought it was strange that people in the 30s or 40s or even older, would want to play a game like this.

But now that I am 30 and still playing MMOs, I realize that I am slowly but surely becoming one of those “older folks.”  My gaming habits have changed over time, I cant spend four to six hours a night farming Kael Arena.  I have a family and kids that need attention.  I can’t log in at server up to hit 3 day timed spawn contested mobs, or mobs that just had insanely rare spawns.  I have a full-time job now.  And yeah, it does kind of bum me out that I don’t have as much free time as I used too, but at the same time games are becoming more short play time focused, allowing us to get more done in shorter periods of time.

And along with those 30 long years, comes other things.  My son is getting close the age that pretty soon here we can pick a game and play together.  My wife and I used to play City of Heroes together, and while I don’t always think she had a great time with her husband the crappy healer getting her killed all the time, it was still something that I wouldn’t have experienced if I hadn’t gotten older and the genre wasn’t around.

Even though I am 30, I don’t feel like it, especially in game.  It’s amazing that after playing MMOs for 10 years, at times I can still feel like a 19 year old noob trying to run through Kithicor forest from Qeynos to Freeport.  And while sometimes it is very strange to meet someone in a title that is like, “whoa, dude u r 2 old 2 pwn”, I can understand to some degree where they are coming from.

You hear a lot of people decrying what seems to be a design change from the original MMOs.  What I mean is going from hardcore grouping, long hour raids, extreme time commitment quests, to more casual oriented solo content, dungeons that are mini sized bites, and better rewards for people who don’t have hours upon hours to spend on content.  But the real question is this:  Are developer’s really just making easier games?  Or are they learning that a large part of the player-base is like me, an aging gamer with increased responsibilities?

There will always be a schism between people who work very hard on advancing their characters, and those that want to be able to have fun with less commitment and yet still make progress. You see games being designed from the ground up to cater to the casual crowd, and you even see some developers going back retroactively and trying to make titles more accessible. EverQuest is a good example of this. I used to spend hours just waiting to find a group to spend even more hours grinding out XP.  While nowadays if players just want to log on and go do something, they can just hire NPC mercenaries to help fill empty spots.

I am still hoping to get a copy of the EverQuest 10th anniversary book, but until then let me ask you this:  the MMO is a great genre.  It lets people from all corners of the world, and all walks of life adventure together.  But just how does age play a roll in how you game?

Editorial: We’ve Got Personality

Welcome back to the mess that is my inane musings,

I find myself recently spending a great deal of time with Champions Online, and having fun with it if that can be believed. Though there are a number of things that I can say about it, there is one particular thought that came to mind over the course of my playtime.

It all began when I found myself chuckling at a pair of mission contacts. I hail from the great white of Canada you see, and anyone familiar with what I might generously call Canadian culture (if I can stretch the term a little bit) will likely know of two fellows by the name of Bob and Doug McKenzie.

For those not yet initiated in the finer points of Canadian televison they are two brothers that ever so accurately portray what the rest of the world sees Canadians to be, what with the liberal use of “Eh”, and a rather intense fascination with beer. I mention all of this because as one of the beginning zones happens to be in Canada (which I was also pleased to see), I came across the McKenzie brothers as mission givers, albiet with less focus on beer, but the “Ehs” were out in full force.

Between that and hearing one of the greatest evils in the Champions universe proclaim that we heroes were “Less interesting than rival MMO”, I realized that perhaps the most under rated aspect of what makes a game fun is it’s personality.

I don’t mean to say that a game can get by without having something interesting to do while playing it, but rather the proper attitude can make something that was a fun diversion into something enjoyable on a whole other level.

The field of persistent online games has grown to a rather impressive size since it’s inception as a hobby for the nerdiest of nerds, and there are now thousands of titles out there of various quality and production value. One thing that the standouts all seem to have in common is a sort of sense of humour, perhaps a self awareness. It’s a vague and incorporeal quality to be sure, the sort of thing that you can’t point to and say “That, we want that in our game”.

The one thing I can say with certainty, is that for me, any game, in fact anything really, that takes itself too seriously tends to lose my interest before too long. I’m sure that says more about me than any industry, but I honestly don’t think I’m that strange, and I suspect that many other people out there would also find games that play everything completely straight are in some small fashion stuck up their own rears.

My own thoughts on the subject are probably strange, and most likely completely wrong, but I’m the one with the keyboard here so I’m writing them down anyway. I feel that one of the most important parts to keeping online games entertaining, and keeping people playing them, is immersing them in the game world and letting them feel like a part of it. Strangely, I often feel that playing the entire contents of a game completely straight, and taking everything as serious has the opposite effect of bringing the player out of the world. I know that sounds a little unintuitive but stay with me, I have thought about this for all of thirteen seconds so I consider myself an expert.

The problem I find is that immersion is tied very strongly to the suspension of disbelief, and in a great many of the games out there, we’re asked to suspend quite a heaping portion of disbelief. The elf with the magic staff tossing around magical balls of fire that don’t ignite people, and the big guys in the armor getting stomped on by dragons and getting up to take another punch. These are the sorts of things that are common place in the fantast world, and simply don’t jive with our experiences. For a time putting all that aside is no problem, but after a while it always feels to me, like the game is asking a lot and I lose interest.

On the other hand, tasteful nods to the nature of the medium and subtle hints that the game is aware of the inconsistencies, again quite unintuitively, make me feel like a member of the world without having that sense of cognitive dissonance. For me it’s not so much that bit of flirting with the fourth wall allows me to be one of the people who “get” the in joke.

All of this, however, is quite contingent on subletly and tastefulness in execution. There’s a certain light touch required when skirting with “meta”. In my opinion this is one of the few places where there is a definitively right way and wrong way to do something. There are enough examples out there that I’m sure I don’t need to make a list.

Essentially, in my humble opinion, if you’re going to joke around with your players perception of the game, you don’t want to be heavy handed about it. I’m sure it seemed clever when someone decided that they wanted to throw in the line “Hey, it’s almost like we’re being controlled by an outside force” joke, but I personally think that particular style of joke doesn’t finagle with a users suspension of disbelief as it does hang a lampshade on it. That’s all well and good if that’s the joke you’re going for, but you have to know when you’re making fun of yourself, and when you’re trying to ease the tension of the wild situations taking place inyour game. Likewise for things like “That doesn’t seem physically possible” or explicit mention of UI elements or mechanics devised to work around technical difficulties.

I said up above that the feeling was vague and hand wavy, and here is why. Pretty much anything else is fair game. Granted most everything is going to be related in some way to the elements of your game world and their inconsistencies and strange elements, but as long as they’re related to the gaming experience as opposed to the players experience, you can easily make players feel much more comfortable when they find themselves thinking that something doesn’t work out just right, because everyone else in your game world feels that same way.

Now those bits are the subtle bits, the parts that just make you think “Hey the developers thought of everything” or perhaps “Hey at least the developers thought of something” depending on your opinoin of a game. Things like that can add hugely to the “personality quotient” of the game, for lack of a better term.

The other thing that one might consider for making people smile and enjoy themselves while playing, is to jettison self importance and dignity entirely. Just cast them overboard, push them out the airlock, tie a brick around their feet and let them sink. Some of the most incredible gaming memories I have are of Space Quest and Monkey Island. Again maybe it’s just me, but I don’t want to be frusterated and depressed when I’m doing something in my leisure time, I want to smile and laugh and chuckle.

From the Editor: On Disclosure, Game Journalism and Criticism of Sources

With the recent announcement from the FTC regarding blogging and disclosure, I found this to be the perfect opportunity to write about something I feel and have felt rather strongly about for the past few years. Disclosure and trust in game journalism.

I believe disclosure to be an important aspect of journalism and as such try to have a clear disclosure policy for The MMO Gamer, something I will go into more later in this editorial as well as present some ways in which we will improve and add to the policy. I am of the opinion that it is not up to journalists individually or media outlets as a whole to decide whether or not they are being biased or unbiased, or if their objectivity is in question.

That decision is up to the readers and as such, I expect our readers to question us and what we write and how we write. Just as I expect our readers to question other media outlets. Disclosure is a method to provide readers with the information they need to make this decision, to take into account how a media outlet works to determine whether or not the articles they write should be considered biased or not. Criticism of the source.

Criticism of the source is something that has been drilled into me since early childhood; Swedish schools bring this up very early. That’s why The MMO Gamer has had a pretty clear (for staff writers) disclosure policy:

• Disclose food or beverages paid for by publishers. We have tried to disclose these events whenever such a situation has presented itself where someone from the industry actively paid for food or beverages specifically for one of our writers. On the other hand we have not mentioned this if the writer has attended a party hosted by a publisher.
• Disclose travel and hotel expenses paid for by publishers. The reason you may not have seen these disclosures is because, to date, we have never accepted paid trips. We have attended events and visited offices, but have not felt the it necessary to do so, even if we could “get away with it” by disclosing it.

This disclosure policy is not in place to appease the FTC; The MMO Gamer is based out of Sweden and probably doesn’t fall under the Commission’s jurisdiction. Are we traditional media on the web, or are we bloggers? I can’t really tell; the difference in definition between game journalist and game blogger are very vague at best. I’m not even sure what the definition of either might be. With The MMO Gamer however I aspire for a high standard, as a professional media organization. We have this policy because we feel them to be necessary for us to be confident in our readers’ trust in us.

But because of the FTC announcement the discussion has been brought up and I feel that this is a good time to amend our policy with another point:

• Disclose the nature of the review copy/account. This is probably the point that readers will see the most of here as starting now, we will disclose whether or not a game being reviewed is done so on a copy or account of the game provided by the publisher/PR or purchased by The MMO Gamer.

I think that stricter disclosure policies are important for the continued maturing of game journalism. I mentioned above that disclosure provides our readers with the information they need, I think, to be able to look at a source critically and determine its credibility. So I will end this short editorial with a question to our readers, what do you, as our readers, think is important for us to disclose?

Topics surrounding game journalism interest me quite a bit and I would love to hear what you, as readers, editors and writers think. Drop a comment here to get the discussion started or drop me a line at siam@mmogamer.com.

Editorial: On the Other Hand…

Hello again gaming world,

Today I feel like playing devil’s advocate to myself.

While I still maintain that we game players, as a group, aren’t capable of discerning our rears from that joint in the middle of our arm, I want to take some time to ruminate on how much slack developers really do deserve.

I’ve been toying about with Champions recently, even wrote me a fancy little review outlining some of the pros and cons of it. During that review I did happen to mention a rather game changing patch that went through on the first day. At the time I mentioned that I was slightly miffed, but that balance is important despite the overwhelming opinion of players that they should be allowed to steamroll content without working fingers.

Of course all that happened before another slightly more recent patch. The goal of this patch was to make some changes to the difficulty, namely making things slightly easier in response to a rather harsh increase in difficulty recently, as well as make some changes to the economy of the game. Now this would be all well and good if things had gone quite as planned. Needless to say they didn’t.

Now, having spent myself into a rather impressive hole financially educating myself in the finer points of code, I have at least a small degree of familiarity with the mercurial nature of the magical world of ones and zeroes. When it comes to programming bugs are inevitable, and the law of unintended consequences gets kicked into overdrive. It’s true these things happen, and they should be expected, and should obviously be fixed. That said there are things that one can do to avoid them.

One possible solution is to provide a testing environment for new changes. This can be either internal or provided in a limited fashion to your users. In the case of online games, the latter is actually a common solution. It is also worth noting that a public test environment was actually provided by the Cryptic team for the players to experiment with new changes.

There is only one caveat in making that solution useful, you actually have to pay attention to the data you’re getting out of it. Now my detective skills are hardly top notch, in fact I’m far too lazy to go searching for anything that’s even slightly occluded from the public view. Now with that said, when even I happen to be aware of some rather game breaking bugs, bugs that happen to have the direct opposite effect of what you’re intending, it stands to reason that these bugs might be worth noting.

Before I get too filled with hate and rage against developers there is one thing I have to say in thier defense. “Onyxia deep breaths more”. WoW vets will know exactly what I’m referring to by that, but for people who haven’t taken that particular plunge I shall explain. Players have a unique propensity to invent things and concoct wild theories in an effort to justify their vitriol. For that reason I understand the difficulty developers might have discerning signal from noise, but the last Champions patch proves that occasionally the players might be right.

Before I leap right into the recriminations I would also like to mention one other possibility that I, in my humble opinion, believe may be at play here. Despite the howling of the forums that “They obviously don’t pay attention to us”, and the fact that I find myself shaking my head and laughing at the sheer volume of game design experts with provably bad ideas claiming that they could easily “Fix your game for you”, I would like to posit that the people in charge of the game, who monitor and create and play it for a living, might perhaps have been aware of the very problem. The bug on the test server need not necessarily be the same bug that has been pushed to live even though they function nearly, or even exactly the same. Anyone familiar with the silliness of computers knows that bugs are finicky and sneaky. My personal theory is that the bug was identified, assigned, and thought to be fixed. But now we’re going to get to the root of the problem.

At the point something makes it to live, and your software has been introduced into the wild, it’s not just a matter of software engineering anymore. At that point, you’re dealing with PR. I’ll be honest and say that I’m much more forgiving than most about games, especially online ones, because of my education and lack of faith in the general populace. That said, I’m a member of a very small minority, and that group can’t be counted on for a huge amount of revenue, and as such damage control is hugely important. For that reason, testing is not just something that you should do, it’s something that you must do, on pain of death or bankruptcy.

In this case a patch was pushed through that was categorically incomplete, in that it did not function as advertised. As I said above, perhaps they thought they had caught and fixed the bugs, but in the end thinking that it’s done is not quite good enough when there’s any chance that it might not be finished. The only way to be sure that it is finished is to make sure you test EVERY change, like I said before, because your job isn’t only to make sure that it eventually works at this point, it’s also to make sure that you don’t put a great big dent in your reputation.

I’d be willing to wager that fully half of a games success can be attributed to the reputation of the team creating it. For that reason making sure that people don’t see the inner workings of your product is very important. It is also for that reason that some games continue to be successful while making unpleasant yet necessary changes, while others may flounder for making those very same changes. This is the sort of situation where one mistake can truly undo a whole product.

Moving away from the specific patch I’m going to say a few things about MMO PR and damage control in general. I think it’s safe to say that the communities of many online games are unforgiving in many ways. Beyond the unceasing hostility between the “fanbois” and “haters”, to use the vernacular, communities are not very forgiving of changes that reduce their power and abilities. If these changes are the best thing for the game, the flames usually burn themselves out before too long, but on the rare occasions that errors, either in judgement, communication, or coding occur developers can for the most part assume that the date such a patch is pushed live will be trotted out before them every time they make an unpleasant change.

In cases where errors are rare, I would call this an unfortunate side effect of a public with a high standard of quality, and this is a good thing. If we are unwilling to accept mediocre products then the average quality will remain high.  In this situation all is well, and as it should be. There are rare occasions though, where regular errors are made and pushed with shocking regularity, and in these situations I do find myself siding, at least in theory, with the “haters”.

Editorial: It’s a Little Out of Context

Hello again everyone.

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about the process and quality of writing for video games.

A lot of people have said a number of things about this topic over the years, and many of them are saying the same thing, that writing needs to or should be improved in video games. This is something I most certainly agree with.

Where I think I might differ from many people however, is that while many people might think that better writing means more words, I am of the opinion that if we had truly better writing for video games we would end up with far far fewer words coming at us.

I suppose I should clarify instead of continuing to sound like a lunatic. I am totally all for an improved level in the prose that exists in games, but I also thing that one aspect to the art of writing that is sorely lacking is the existence of context in a large majority of cases.

Now I warn you the thing that prompted this thought for me was not an MMO, but rather Fallout 3. I have been playing with Fallen Earth recently, and that has sort of rekindled my love for the good old wasteland and so I have been playing through the entire series alongside my time in Fallen Earth. When I got to the end of Fallout 3 I realized that there were some major decisions to be made, and in order to not give away any spoilers I won’t go into detail, but the information needed to complete a certain quest was not provided in the manner that one becomes so used to in MMO’s. Rather I had to understand the motivations and come to understand a certain character in order to obtain this information. While that description may seem woefully inadequate, it’s not my fault, it’s hard to talk without specifics.

It was a short while after that when I realized that I only completed that final quest by thinking of a person as a non-player character, emphasis on the character, rather than as simply an NPC.

For an example much older, but also actually related to the world of MMO’s a similar thing happened in a splendid old favourite of mine, Darkages. This time it was not just to me, or any one person in particular, but the entire population of the game had to glean important information from obscure and occasionally esoteric sources in order to best a powerful foe and expand the horizons of the playable universe.

I’m almost certain I’m the minority in this case, but I honestly think that quest descriptions, no matter how well reasoned or how flowery the language, would be greatly improved by adding a little dash of context in some fashion.

I think this for two main reasons, and a number of other little ones, but the two main reasons are the important ones.

The first reason I think players need less information thrown at them is immersion. When a quest reads like a laundry list, even a Dickensian laundry list, a player is going to treat it like a laundry list. These types of quests are distinct entities to players, and don’t in any meaningful way link a player to the larger game world. The simple act of getting a player to consider the world they’re playing in helps bring the entire game together and mesh the quest into the greater plot of the game.

The downside to that is that it requires players to learn just a little bit about the game world, which seems to be something that is falling by the wayside recently, but I hold out hope that it’s simply because the game world is currently being used as simply a place, rather than a living world.

The other reason that I think players need less information, is that we’ve all gotten quite lazy. That includes both players and developers. Almost never, in the recent past, have we as players treated NPC’s as anything more than poster boards with fliers for tasks that say reward on the bottom. Almost never do we actually think of NPC’s as characters with motivations, and empathizing with them in any way.

This may be, in part, because developers recently haven’t made NPC’s particularly worth empathizing with. Quest design recently, seems to focus almost entirely on the quest, and almost not at all on the person who is ostensibly asking you to complete this quest for them. as such they end up being entirely one dimensional. Clearly I’m not saying that every NPC in every game should be fully fleshed out and with a history going back three generations, but something that could conceivably cast a shadow at all would be nice.

The obvious problem with something like this, is that it puts a great deal more work on the plates of the already overworked writers in these games, and they may conceivably simply not have the time to create as vibrant a world as they would like. The only real solution to that problem is to increase the stature of game writers.

Screen writers are important figures in the movie world, and there have been many posters with taglines like “From the writer who brought you Murder Death Train 4 … “. I don’t want to feel like I’m overextending a metaphor or anything, but with the state of the video game industry these days, content writers for video games very much do have similar jobs to a number of those Hollywood writers, albeit with much less publicity, and seemingly less input on how a game should be made.

If you were to ask me I would tell you that it’s time to give the writers a little bit of spotlight. Even though the Richard Garriotts and Jeff Kaplans of the world might in some sense be called geniuses, they would be nothing without the modest writing crew they had behind them and they could only improve their status by adding stronger writing teams.

But that about sums up my particular thoughts for the week, so let me know if you agree disagree, even if you don’t care for story at all in your games. I just personally think that a good story can almost always save a game with poor gameplay, but it almost never works the other way around.

Until next time!

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