Conquest Tactics Blog Live

To my massive readership on this blog, I wanted to proudly and shamelessly plug my other blog, my more official blog, the Conquest Tactics Blog.  Conquest Tactics is a strategy-based collectible card game that my company Zeitgeyser LLC has developed, and we're launching a revamped blog today.  You can check it out here!

Conquest Tactics will be launching in April, with products available online and in select retail shops.

Before WoW There Was Final Fantasy X

I have a confession to make, one that may help explain my blog’s title a bit: I’m not currently playing any MMO’s, and haven’t for a while.   I’ve had neither the money nor the consistent schedule of free time to invest in something like World of Warcraft or Rift.  What I have been playing most recently is Final Fantasy X, an incredible game whose innovations were ahead of their time.  Well, not the innovations themselves, but the attitude behind the innovations.

When it came out nearly a decade ago, Final Fantasy X was met with mixed feelings for some of its departures from the franchise’s established norms.  The Active Time Battle system that had been in place for the previous six installments was replaced with a turn based system.  The franchise (and genre) precedent of a party of 3-4 characters being fixed in battle was scrapped, and characters were allowed to be swapped in and out in the middle of a battle.  These changes were lauded by most but criticized by many of the FF faithful, who argued that the changes made FFX too easy, removing the challenge posed by the ATB and party limitations. Despite the criticism and concerns of oversimplification, Final Fantasy X went on to be one of the best selling installments of the series, even becoming the first (and only) installment to get a direct sequel.

So in essence, FFX shifted directions and moved the franchise towards streamlined gameplay without the arbitrary limitations of its genre cohorts, shifting slightly away from immersion in order to deliver a consistently fun play experience.  While panned as being oversimplified, too easy and less immersive, it went on to major success.  Sounds a lot like World of Warcraft to me!

This is the kind of development attitude I’d like to see from more studios: breaking down genre precedents to streamline the parts of gameplay that matter.  And the changes don’t even have to be revolutionary genre-shattering changes.  Something as simple as equipping new gear is simpler in FFX, where you are given the option to equip something immediately after buying it, instead of having to “click” through various menus to get to your inventory.  Games are about achieving a state of Flow as often as possible and sustaining it as effectively as possible, and this kind of development attitude only gets us closer to that perfect state of fun and Flow.

PS: I hate to admit this and so will most of you, but part of FFX’s draw is also the amazing set of visual effects for actions in combat, complemented perfectly with appropriate sounds.  I know we like to think we’re above such basic sensory titillation, but FFX proves us wonderfully wrong on that one

On the Verge of a Renaissance

I saw this article this morning, which highlights the new frontier of electronic self publishing and the potential it has for amateur authors.  Aside from getting me excited about the prospect of reviving my own literary past, this article made me realize that we are standing on a precipice in media history, with a whole new world looming down below.

Twenty years ago life was simple.  If you wanted to send a message, you sent a letter.  If you wanted to read a book you read a book. If you wanted to play a video game, you bought a cartridge or floppy disk from Babbages. Now we have more divergent options than ever, and more widely accessible tools than ever.  If you want to send a message you can Tweet, email, Facebook message, Text, BBM, Skype, or Wuphf.  If you want to read a book you can download it to your Nook, Kindle, iPad, or Browser.  Want a game?  Buy one online, download one from the cloud, buy one on your phone, or play a ton of games for free on the internet.

These new distribution options have led to a revolution in market accessibility for amateur content creators.  A few years back we saw a wave of overnight wealth generated from Facebook games and iPhone games, brought on by the complete removal of previous barriers to entry.  We’re seeing the same thing now with books through the Kindle self publishing program, and may soon see it as a result of the fantastic (and cheap) tools provided by programs like Unity.  All of a sudden, anyone with passion and talent can break into their industry of choice overnight.

What does this mean for the long term prospects of these industries? I predict that as the tools for creation become more widely accessible and as barriers to entry drop, these markets will continue to be flooded with content, both good and bad, changing the very nature of the market.  Big studios will lose ground against more agile small developers working collaboratively.  Distribution services like Steam and iTunes will thrive as consumers struggle to sort through the sea of mediocrity (and large lakes of quality content) to find the right content for them.  More importantly, the mediums will shake off their years of stagnancy and mature (and maybe we’ll finally learn how to tell a story in a video game without letting it get in the way of gameplay!).

Overall, look for a more competitive market with larger selection, greater diversity of genres, evolved design, and a healthier outlook for the future.  Prepare yourself for a renaissance!

A Road Paved with Good Intentions

So I started thinking about how an MMO could increase immersion by translating heroic game acts into real world Good.  The first thought that came to mind was allowing players to choose a charity, and the more they achieve each month in game, the larger the portion of their subscription fee that goes to that charity.  It would diminish the “evil Wall Street corporation” image of the game company, do some real good in the world, and encourage players to play more and do more because they were having a positive impact through their virtual heroics. Seemed alright on the surface, so I took the thought experiment a little further.

Imagine that the charity you are playing for is fighting child hunger and poverty, and for every dungeon boss you slay and level you gain and townsperson you save, enough money is donated from your subscription fee to feed and clothe one child for a day. A new expansion has just come out so you’re playing and slaying like mad, achieving so much that the majority of your subscription fee is going towards feeding starving children.

Then you run out of content.  You’ve maxed out your character, done everything in game you want to do, and are driven to keep playing by nothing more than guilt at the thought of taking your money away from the charity by freezing your subscription or underachieving. 

Troubling Question #1: Is it unethical of you to reduce your achievement level in the game (or cancel your subscription), knowing what that means for the children?

Interesting content wanes as the game company is unable to keep up with the players, and while total subscriptions dip, the overall level of achievement falls much further, so the level of donations drops and company revenue increases.  By making the game temporarily boring, the company has increased their share of subscription revenue and reduced the contribution to charity.

Troubling Question #2: Is it the game company’s ethical responsibility to maintain a flow of engaging content in order to maintain charity levels?

Troubling Question #3: If the company was donating at a certain level, and all that changes in the next month is how many imaginary dragons were slain in the game, is it unethical (or at least publicly frowned upon) to reduce the number of starving children that they feed and increase the amount of money they keep for themselves? Or is it simply good that they’re giving money at all?

I started this idea with good intentions, but quickly realized that it could get twisted in a bad direction and lead to a lot of bad feelings for all parties.  A shame, because at first I really thought I was on to something.

I want to get your answers to these questions and see what you think!

Rift Optimism

We're less than a week away from the launch of Rift, and I have to say, despite bashing their advertising campaign, I'm actually pretty optimistic about this game's success.  This is the first time I've been optimistic about an MMO's launch since LOTRO, and the first non-franchise MMO I've ever had hope for.  So best of luck, Trion!  Fight the good fight, dodge the shadow of the WoW colossus, and try to convert as many tourists as you can.  I'm rooting for you!

Square is going Soft

Seeing as how this is Square Enix week on Steam, I’ve been tempted by several great deals on Square games I never got around to playing.  Before buying I decided to go against my “trust Square’s every decision” instinct and downloaded the demos for Supreme Commander 2 and Front Mission Evolved.  I’m sure glad I did, because both of these games were awful.  Supreme Commander 2 is a hollow shell of what its predecessor was, with major changes that encourage turtling and hyper-specialized research.  Front Mission Evolved is not only a major departure from the franchises most successful gameplay (which I knew beforehand), it’s a crappy watered down version of its third person shooter predecessors as well.  The controls were clunky, aiming was hypersensitive, and the voiceovers were irritating.

Seeing two titles from my favorite game company fail this hard was not only disheartening, it was eye opening.  I took a moment to look back over Square’s history with my favorite franchise (Final Fantasy) and came to the realization that they’ve been putting out crap for almost a decade now. Starting with Final Fantasy XI, the company has continuously released games in the series that scrap the winning Final Fantasy formula in favor of relentless experimentation, striving to make games a showcase for their new ideas rather than fun experiences.  Final Fantasy XII and XIII were good games in their own regard, but it was clear that the focus was on the “revolutionary mechanics” of combat and advancement, pushing aside franchise staples like… fun and story.  Final Fantasy XIV doesn’t even need explanation, especially since the company has personally apologized for how bad it sucks.

Between 1997 and 2002 Square was an RPG powerhouse, raising the bar for the genre with every release.  Now it seems as if their hunt for innovation has made them forget their winning formula:

Add 1 part beautiful story,1 part gorgeous vistas, 1 part innovation, 2 parts familiarity, a great ATB combat system, Nobuo Uematsu and lots of chocobos. Not that hard, Square.  If you want some help getting back on track, feel free to hire me.  In fact, here are two big tips for free:
-More Strategy RPG's
-Whatever happened to the FFVII remake?  Scrapped? Well unscrap it!

Pixelated Memories

Two games came out this month that are sequels (one direct and one “in spirit”) to two of my favorite games of all time.  Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and Tactics Ogre (spiritual sequel to Final Fantasy Tactics) have both been getting great reviews, and making me languish the fact that I own neither a PSP nor a PS3.  But this entry isn’t actually about these new games, its about my original favorites, MvC2 and FFT.

Aside from the incredible gameplay, ridiculous replayability and visceral combat effects, these two games shared one thing in common: They were both crap graphics for their time.  FFT was a 2D isometric game that usually looked like it belonged on a SNES instead of a Playstation.  MvC2 was a Playstation 2 game that was composed almost entirely of 2D sprites.

As a result of these amazing games having crappy graphics, and other favorite games of the times having distinctly different graphics styles compared to now, I (along with many of you I’m sure) have a natural fondness for pixelated games and classic games with bad graphics. It takes me back to a time when games had to showcase good mechanics to make up for the lacking visuals, when limited audio capabilities tried their best to do justice to the beautiful scores of video game composers (ie: Nobuo Uematsu), and when game genres were still discovering their boundaries and potential.  Most of all it takes me back to simply being a kid and falling in love with video games.

What makes me sad is that the new generation of gamers doesn’t have that nostalgia and never will.  They didn’t watch game graphics improve from 8 bit to 16 to 32, they’ve seen life like 3D graphics fall into the uncanny valley and slowly climb out.  We watched graphics evolve styles, while they’ve simply seen improvement.  Thus they won’t connect graphics of the past to fond memories, and will simply continue to clamor for improved visuals.

I’m sounding like an old codger “when I was your age”-ing, so I’ll just say one more thing.  I think it was a smart move for Kongregate to start carrying Unity games, because the new generation isn’t going to have the tolerance for visually underwhelming indie games.

What were your favorite “outdated visuals” games?

Player Created Content: 1 Masterpiece > 99 Wieners

I tried the free version of Minecraft recently, and in the brief time I explored the world and mechanics I saw what everyone was talking about.  It really is an amazing sandbox game, which you don’t hear very often.  Merits of the game aside, what hit me more than the potential for creation was what players had already created.  It just reinforced for me a point I’d been thinking about lately.

Our gamer culture has produced a very wonderful situation, if you haven’t noticed.  We have created a huge pool of intelligent people who are in love with games and will do and learn and try almost anything to make a living off of video games.  That’s why sites like Kongregate and Newgrounds exist, why game development blogs are so popular, why colleges now offer game development programs, and why positions in established game studios are so competitive.  But the end result is a pool of talent much larger than the demand for that talent.  This means that there is a lot of eager talent being wasted.

Games like Minecraft allow this underappreciated talent to shine, showing the level of dedication that they have to quality content creation.  Its free content/publicity for the game and a great showcase for the player.

Now obviously the caveat here is that for every Wonder there are about 99 player created wiener jokes of content, and its unfortunate that that’s what we focus on in discussions of player created content.  But to be perfectly blunt, 99 out of 100 people in the real world create very little incredible content for the world (children aside), but that 100^th person can end up as a Leonardo Da Vinci or an Andrew Carnegie or a Mark Zuckerberg.  The point is that the world benefits more from the incredible 1% than it is hurt by the less-than-epic 99%.  

Net gain, but only if you give people the chance to try.

Established Mythos: Sales Boost or Blood in the Blogwater?

I plan to write an article later on the modern information cycle and its relevance (and detriment) to the video game industry. For now, suffice it to say that between the intensity of the blogosphere and our almost constant connection to the web, there is an unprecedented amount of analysis, scrutiny and mudslinging that takes place when even a tiny bit of information about a game is released.  This is particularly destructive to MMO’s, who naturally have a longer development time and thus more time for each bit and beta to be blown out of context and proportion.

The effect is worst for MMO’s based on established franchises.  If you hear that a game called Rift is coming out, and hear nothing for three years, how much would you have been able to criticize or speculate on (actually maybe a little bit, if you’re anything like me)?  On the other hand, if you hear that a Star Wars MMO or a Warhammer MMO or a Star Trek MMO is coming out, every moment of those three informationless years will be filled with speculation, naysaying and high expectations.

My point is, the MMO market seems unusual in that an established mythos gives little benefit to sustained sales, since it raises expectations and allows for a much longer window of naysaying.  A game with an unestablished mythos may have weaker initial box sales, but it won’t have to fight the negative tidal wave to hold subscribers.

Let’s hope this is true in another market!

Edit:  Just to preemptively clarify the links, Ravious is scrutinizing and analyzing, not mudslinging.  And I agree with Syp.

Ad Nauseum: Rift

While most people are discussing Rift’s gameplay and lore, I wanted to touch on another aspect of the game that doesn’t bode well for its long term success.  We who read blogs know about a game’s release long before the average gamer that relies on traditional media, so it’s easy for us to forget that traditional print and television ads are an enormous contributor to the success of a game’s launch sales.  Trion has launched a multimedia campaign spanning television, internet ads and even comic book pages, all with the central tagline of “We’re not in Azeroth anymore”.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that these ads look pretty cool, with the tentacles of an enormous monster clawing its way into the world as the hero looks on.  And on the surface the tagline seems like a good idea, because it could suggest that Azeroth was a boring and soft place compared to Telara, playing off of the phrase’s origin in the Wizard of Oz (Azeroth being Kansas, Telara being Oz). But I think this campaign could end up working against Rift’s success.

First of all, naming the world of the World of Warcraft is tacky and fanboyish, as they’re acknowledging WoW’s current dominance by relying on it's brand recognition for a clever tagline.  Combine that with a famous phrase that has been copied ad nauseum, and they end up with a rather low class cornerstone for a marketing campaign.

This ad is also misguided because they’re stressing the point that this game is VERY different from the most wildly popular MMO ever.  That might attract the minority of WoW players who are disgruntled with their current game, but fresh off the release of Cataclysm that minority has shrank significantly.  The context of the tagline and imagery of the ad suggests that Rift will be scarier, more dangerous and more difficult than WoW, only further alienating a playerbase who has slowly dragged WoW down into becoming more casual and less difficult.

Finally, even the metaphor they’re using doesn’t bode well for them, since they’re comparing WoW to Kansas and Rift to Oz.  I haven’t seen The Wizard of Oz in a long time, but I’m pretty sure Dorothy tours Oz (for less than thirty free days) then ends up back in Kansas.  So it almost seems like Trion is inviting WoW tourists.  Nice work, ad department.  At least the art is cool…

Titan Conjecture

With MMO fans frothing at the mouth for details on Blizzard’s mystery MMO –codenamed Titan- any and all official information is going to be hyper analyzed, and premature predictions will abound.  And I’m no exception, so prepare yourself for a conjecture lecture!  Based on scant previous details and yesterday’s tidbits from Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, here’s what we know:
1) Titan will be able to coexist with WoW
2) Titan will address MMO issues that WoW can’t “because of the design decisions we've made, you just can't address”
3) Titan will break the mold of MMOs, and "To break the mold, sometimes you have to start over"
4) Titan will be a new franchise
5) Playing with friends is critical to an MMO experience (stressed by Morhaime)

Implications:
Titan will be able to coexist with WoW – This means it won’t cannibalize the playerbase, meaning different enough to bring in new/different players, but familiar enough to still fit Blizzard’s winning MMO formula.  This is on the other side of Zubon’s Genre Uncanny Valley, and will require pinpoint accuracy the likes of which only Blizzard is capable
.
Titan will address MMO issues that WoW can’t- WoW created an entire generation of casual MMOers, and did so by excluding some genre staples.  Expect these in Titan, including player housing, non-combat classes, true exploration, and unsoloable public areas.  This also likely refers to multi-server infrastructure, and I agree that Titan will likely be an EVE-like single universe.  Hopefully this also means an alternative to the leveling treadmill, maybe they’ve discovered the elusive solution.

Titan will break the mold, and to break the mold you have to start over- Start over? Didn’t WoW start over and reset most genre conventions to a basic casual level?! How much further back can you go to start over?  Here’s a hint: Get those twitch reflexes ready.

Titan will be a new franchise- No Diablo, WoW or Starcraft, which means no Gothic, Medieval or Aliens.  As tempted as I am to believe Titan will have a space theme, I can’t help but feel that it would cause brand confusion between itself and Starcraft.  And  for anyone thinking Titan is a clue that the theme will be mythological, forget it, there’d still be too much overlap with WoW themes.

Playing with friends is critical to an MMO experience- Pretty basic, I think we all agree, but it leads to a interesting train of thought on implementation.  Finding people to play with in an MMO used to be a great challenge, but with the advent of WoW’s Dungeon Finder it suddenly became a snap (unless you’re DPS).  When you log on now and see which friends are playing, depending on where they are it may be difficult to meet up immediately.  Look for a more Facebook-esque approach in Titan, with a constantly updated friend list giving you all their recent accomplishments, locations, and a “Teleport to them” button accessible most of the time.

So what to make of all this?  Here is my prediction:
Titan doesn’t imply anything about its theme or franchise, its actually a simple comment on its own scope.  Blizzard will have about a decade of MMO superiority under its belt, pushing our expectations for Titan even higher, meaning it HAS to be huge. Not genre bending, not genre breaking, but genre assimilating.

Blizzard has singlehandedly grown the MMORPG genre population by several orders, and it would be risky to a fault for them to assume another MMORPG would somehow continue to grow the genre population without cannibalizing WoW. However, in the broader meta-genre of MMO games, there are tons of markets untapped by Blizzard.  I believe Titan will be a central context and hub for several different genres of gameplay to come together, all in the same universe, allowing players to switch between their favorite kinds of gameplay/genres without ever logging out of one game.  Picture this scenario:

You log into Titan and your avatar wakes up in his private room in a huge star destroyer-type spaceship. You proceed out of the barracks into the mission hub, where dozens of different mission types are listed, relating to the exploration, exploitation, colonization, defense, conquest and sterilization of surrounding worlds. Having worked all day in RL you just feel like some mindless tower defense gameplay, so you choose a defense mission on a nearby planet.  You then enjoy a crisp, Blizzard polished Tower Defense experience, until you begin to lose interest in TD gameplay.

Now you feel like getting down to the ground level and taking a more direct approach to the action, so you change to a First Person Shooter assault mission on another planet, spending the money you earned during the TD mission to do some last minute upgrades to your assault gear.  In the midst of capping some baddies and increasing your assault mission rank, you get a message from one of your friends to help him out on a conquest mission, so you accept his invitation and transfer into a RTS style gameplay, helping your friend secure a new colony in unclaimed territory.

After a great session of several types of combat, you head back to the mothership and find that all these missions have given you enough experience points to level up your macro rank, unlocking new types of missions and gameplay!  You visit the store, where you spend the money you earned from the various missions to buy some equipment for the new mission types you’ll be trying tomorrow.  Seeing that you don’t quite have enough game money, you make a small micropurchase, just to ensure you have an edge on your next ____ type mission.

Sound farfetched?  Sound like an impossible mega-game with too many disparate gameplay types to develop, program and balance?  Sound like it would take even one of the greatest game companies years and years and years to create? Absolutely.  Blizzard may be the only company in existence with the budget, expertise, reputation and patience to make it happen.

The End justifies the (e)Peens

If you asked a room of 50 people what the meaning or purpose of life is, the only answer you'd get more than once is "I don't know".   We didn't get a manual for our existence, we don’t definitively know what we’re supposed to do or if we’re doing the right things.  There is no clear definition of how to Win at life.  Most of us settle into what makes us happy and consider ourselves minor victors, but even still we’ll never reach that point where someone tells us: “You’ve won” (though we will all hear Game Over).

I believe this ambiguous purpose of existence –and I do mean ambiguous, not nonexistent- is one of the main drivers behind our attraction to games.  Games have clearly defined victory conditions, you know exactly what you have to do and how you can win.  They are –by mutual consent between developer and player- viewed as entire universes, separate realities, but the main difference isn’t the type of reality or its content.  The greatest difference is that you can achieve the ultimate victory within that reality, and you know how.  This is perhaps the true escapism we seek, not hacking trolls with a sword or shooting terrorists or racing our dream car, its being able to definitively achieve ultimate victory and completion of an entire existence.

And that is the exact problem with MMORPG’s.  Millions of people playing WoW for half a decade, and how many have Won? None.  The game doesn’t end.  Everything can be repeated, nothing changes as a result of your actions, and there is no end in sight. We opine that the problem with Endgame comes from the mathematical impossibility of Developers creating content as faster as players can consume it, but what if it’s the opposite?  What if the very promise of future content and further challenges is what cheapens the present content?  The excitement and accomplishment you felt when you killed the Lich King may have been 99% unencumbered, but at least a small part of you knew, this is not the end, I have not won forever, this is not how the world ends.

Howzabout: Voluntary Difficulty Tradeoffs

In the wake of an underwhelming Blizzcon, I wanted to throw out an idea for criticism and analysis.

One of the main sources of arguments in the MMO blogosphere seems to be the differences between traditional old-school MMO values and modern WoW-espoused MMO values.  MMO traditionalists put immersion before ease, and quality socialization before mass market appeal.  Modern MMOers prefer to optimize their enjoyment -which is derived primarily out of advancement- but also respect the fact that MMO's are a business first, and thus are more likely to make concessions to immersion to support a broader audience.  Neither the Traditionalists nor the Modernists are small enough to ignore -particularly because the blogosphere contains more vocal Traditionalists- so its a tough proposition for devs to fulfill the needs of both without failing on two fronts.

One form of compromise could be found in a system of Voluntary Difficulty Tradeoffs.  During character creation (or possibly in game) a player would be able to customize the gameplay experience to meet their needs for immersion and difficulty, and rewarding sacrifices appropriately.  The basic idea would be a two column menu, with sacrifices on the left side and benefits on the right.  Sacrifices would include things like:

-Semi Realistic Inventory: a sword doesn’t fill the same amount of space in a bag as a scroll does
-Realistic inventory: you can’t carry five swords, period.
-Movement affected by inventory: the more you carry, the slower you move
-Language differences (Dwarves can’t understand Humans, etc)
-No Insta-travel
-Vendors only buy items that they would realistically need or want
-Increased enemy AI (or at least randomly varied responses)
-Racial drawbacks:
 -Little types can’t carry much
 -Large types can’t move very fast
 -“Smart” types can’t learn physical skills as quickly
 -“Dumb” types can’t learn magic as quickly
-Generic “+Difficulty” for combat: Monsters have higher stats, know more skills, react smarter
 -And of course my favorite: Permadeath.

Each of these drawbacks would have an associated point value, so whichever combination you selected would allot you a total amount of points which you could then spend on Benefits such as:
 -Better loot drop %
 -Faster rate of advancement
 -Extra tradeskill slot
 -Access to Epic events, quest chains and locations
 -Faster movement
 -“Elite Flag” that serves no purpose other than to advertise that you’re a masochist

This allows players who still crave traditional “immersive” limitations on gameplay to scratch that itch and be rewarded for doing it old-school, while allowing modernists to play exactly as streamlined as they want.
This also plays into the idea of a difficulty slider, where a player can make combat more or less difficult at any time (outside of combat and dungeons), with an accompanying increase or decrease in rewards and experience.  Group difficulty would simply be the average difficulty rating of the entire party.

Disclaimer:  The bare bones outline for this idea has been sitting in my inbox since December 15, 2009, which means I don’t remember 100% if this is entirely my idea or is based on something someone else wrote.  If this looks familiar to you, please let me know so I can give credit where its due.

A Riddle

Using the clues in this description try to figure out which game my friend is playing:

My friend Harvey is the type that only plays one game at a time, and the one he's playing now he plays almost as much as he can every day. Most people consider this game too easy, but others would argue that the very ease and simplicity of gameplay is why its so popular and has millions of players worldwide.  When he receives instructions for a task in the game, any superfluous details or context either confuses him or is ignored completely, thus he prefers only the most basic instructions so he doesn't waste time and can get on with the game.  These tasks usually involve doing a very basic action again and again, and even when he completes a task he is willing to take up the same type of task again and again and again just so he can maximize his rewards and minimize downtime.

Harvey doesn't mind PUGs, but he prefers to group with those he's more familiar with.  He judges people by oversimplified factors and doesn't even consider their intrinsic skill or experience.  He enjoys grouping but in the end he isn't doing it for anyone but himself, and is only willing to cooperate when its in his best interest.  If it comes down to it he will shout at even his best friend over a contested reward.


Harvey enjoys the simple combat of the game even if he isn't particularly good at it, primarily because the punishment for losing a battle is minimal.  He isn't interested in any tradeskills, and when he does make something it usually ends up being a worthless piece of crap that he has no personal use for and couldn't sell for much if anything.  Since he is reward driven he focuses primarily on the task that yields the fastest rate of reward.



Despite usually being happy with the state of his game, if he believes that there isn't enough new gameplay being introduced or he isn't being entertained enough, he feels entitled to whine about it to everyone and anyone willing (or unwilling) to listen. 

Think you know which game it is?  Here are some curveballs before the answer:

He pays nothing to play this game, and still expects constant entertainment.

There are no levels, but he does gain experience.

He hasn't killed a single thing in the game.

So what is the game?  Do you know?


It's Fetch.  Harvey is my one year old puppy.

The only thing I cheated on was the capitalization of Pugs.

Our games are really that basic, and our game habits are really that simple.  Why hasn't our genre evolved yet?

Permadeath: The Answer to Our Prayers

I’ve figured it out! I’ve solved all of our problems! I have singlehandedly saved the MMORPG genre! The answer we were looking for the entire time was the one thing we didn’t want to address! The solution to our problem is PERMADEATH!

Deep breath, hooooooo… whewwwwwww. Okay.

After thinking about MMOs as well as Greek Mythology over the weekend (kept seeing commercials for Clash of the Titans) I remembered a quote from the 2004 movie Troy,

“Let me tell you a secret, something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be more lovely than you are now. We will never be here again” –Achilles

How excited were you the first time you faced down a dungeon boss? You had (relatively) no idea what was coming, you only knew that this intimidating monster was probably going to hand you your ass. Remember the exhilaration? Remember the fear and adrenaline pumping through your veins? What about when you first ran from a mob, realizing you were in over your head and couldn’t win the fight? Or when you peered over a hill to find an elite mob, knew you had little chance of beating it, and decided to charge it anyway? The thrill existed only because fear accompanied it. But without consequence or risk, the thrill diminishes when you realize you can die again and again and it doesn't change anything, you can always try again.


Imagine an MMO that is a bit easier than WoW, but if you die you have to start over. How much more fun would it be to do a dungeon raid or run through a higher level zone if you knew that your character really was risking his life? More importantly, how much more rewarding would it be when you succeeded? Victories would be sweeter, rewards would be even more valuable, groups would be closer, and playtime would be much more memorable.


Naturally we have to take into account that humans are terribly risk averse and might be scared to venture out if they're faced with permadeath. An inheritance system might help cushion the blow, where you can roll a new character that is the son or daughter of your freshly-killed warrior, and while they do start at beginning level, they progress faster based on how high their parent's level was. Eventually characters would be able to track their lineage back several generations and be able to level extra fast. As for gear, a "Vengeance System" could be implemented to retrieve lost gear, where a descendant could defeat the faction/boss/mob type that felled their parent and reclaim the gear they were wearing.


There are ways to slightly cushion the blow of permadeath, but its major impact is exactly what we need in games to bring back the fear and excitement


Disclaimer: I am not egotistical enough to actually think I have solved the problems of MMOs, its obviously a (bad) joke.

Bring the Narrative!

What are the common elements of a good fantasy story?

-A hero taking one earth-changing quest to save everyone from utter destruction

-An uber evil end boss

-A damsel in distress (or a longing love interest)

-A band of allies and travel buddies, including

-The quirky comic relief

-The reserved badass

-The knowing mentor

-The loyal best friend

-A nemesis of equal power/status with a mission directly counter to the hero’s

-An origin that explains the hero’s motivations and provides context to the action

All of these elements are familiar territory in classic fantasy tales, and each serve their purpose in building drama, context, tension and significance for the actions the hero takes in the story. Cut even a few of these elements from a story and you begin to lose the impact of the narrative.

Now, how many of these are in your favorite MMO? Hero, check. Ultimate Endboss, check. Anything else? Not really. We wonder why players skip quest text and hate cutscenes.

Honestly, how hard would it be to include a better defined macro quest, a choice of origins that determines certain quests, and scripted encounters with a romantic interest, a sidekick, a nemesis, a mysterious badass and a mentor? Are we even trying?

Count to Five, Let the Fear In

Permadeath. Reading that word these days is more likely to make you roll your eyes than crap your pants in fear, and that’s unfortunate. I’m not pro-pants-crapping, nor am I pro-death, but I do wish there was still respect and fear attached to the concept of permadeath in video games. Instead its now viewed as an MMO taboo that is simply ridiculous to consider viable. Why? Because when a player loses a character they’ve invested dozens and dozens of hours in, the game will lose that player, because they couldn’t possibly handle the stress of such a loss, nor would he be willing to start over anew?

Nonsense.

The level of achievement a person feels when they overcome a challenge is directly proportional to the level of risk taken. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. When the greatest risk you run in an MMO is a very temporary death (which equates to a corpse run time sink and relatively small maintenance costs for equipment), how sweet is any victory? When you defeat a dungeon boss, how rewarding is it when you know that if you had failed again you would have had an infinite number of chances to try again? What greater risk is there than losing your character forever? Now this is probably the line where people stop reading, thinking that I’m one of countless people on the far end of the permadeath ideology spectrum, but keep your shirt on for a second. Psychology aside, if you institute across the board permadeath, you’ll never have a playerbase. No one wants to HAVE to lose their character forever, especially in the normal course of the normal game for normal rewards.

Thus there are three coMMOndments for Permadeath in MMO’s:
Thou shalt make all instances of Permadeath occur in optional endeavors
Thou shalt make the rewards for risking Permadeath phat and epic
Thou shalt make a big deal of Permadeath endeavors to the rest of the game world

What do these mean? The first coMMOndment means you should never ever force permadeath on someone. There should be no activity that a player must accept the risk of permadeath to take part in. Make a permadeath version of an activity, but never a simply permadeath activity.

The second coMMOndment is the simplest. Make the rewards match the risk. And don’t underestimate the aversion players have to losing a character forever. The rewards for permadeath risk don’t scale like other types of difficulty, this shoots it through the roof, so loot drop rates, experience, and any other rewards should flow like wine for the risk takers.

The third coMMOndment will justify Permadeath’s presence in the game explicitly (complementing the implicit justification that hardcore elite player’s won’t be able to whine about difficulty). We always hear people whining that their quests and actions have no significance because everyone is doing the same thing. But if the first person to achieve a major quest in permadeath mode closes that quest forever and moves the story forward, that would give significance to questing, and would allow for lots of people to try to be heroes, and only one to succeed.

So here are my five ideas for applications of Permadeath in MMOs:

1) Gladiators- Have your typical arena setup with teams, prizes, individual matches, rankings, etc. But offer the option for any player to enter the Big League, where they fight one on one with the loser dying permanently, and the winner getting huge rewards and fame. People could issue challenges, move up the rankings and gain real notoriety. Any Permadeath match should be prescheduled and publicized at least a day in advance, and any player would be able to watch the match live.

2) Difficulty Meter- Meter for each player that they can adjust any time out of battle, which determines their game difficulty and the rewards they get from battle. Highest level is permadeath. Groups play at the average difficulty level of each individual.

3) Dragonslayer- Taking a specific group quest and attempting to beat a dungeon and slay the final boss under threat of permadeath. Failing would mean permadeath, victory would result in that boss being gone forever and the story being advanced further to open new content. Even if there was success, any players lost in the attempt would be gone forever. Victors (even dead ones) would be immortalized in the history books of that server, and celebrated as heroes.

4) Highlander- Players can permanently designate themselves as “Chosen” once they reach a particular level/time played. A Chosen player can attack ANY other Chosen player, and when one kills another, that character is gone for good. The winner gets all of the loser’s equipment and money (Even bound items), a big portion of their experience/skill, and positive boosts to any factions that the loser was very friendly with.

5) Protector- This I saw on another person’s blog, if you’re reading this and it was your idea (you described it as trees), please email me so I can give you credit. A player can opt to sacrifice their character forever to create a permanent guardian for a city or town. The power of the guardian is directly related to the sacrificed character’s power. This would work best in a game with player towns and/or faction bases.

6) BONUS: Progeny. Inheritance is a concept sometimes linked with permadeath as a way of cushioning the blow, and while I haven’t heard of a system I like yet, I really believe there is a system out there somewhere that will work perfectly and make this a really fun mechanic.

So you see, Permadeath should not be shunned and laughed at, it has the potential to bring heroicism and significance back to MMOs, as long as its done right.

Statistics Galore(y)!

Ravious is talking about leaderboards, data collection and elitism today, so I thought I’d throw my two cents in. I think data collection is a key to long term survival for an MMO, and its fortunate byproduct should be player accessible stats, both about themselves and the community at large. Its been argued before that players don’t care about the MMO’s fictional story as much as they care about their own stories and memories from the game. Player stat devices like the Tome of Knowledge and even WoW Achievements reinforce the players’ own history, reminding them of what they have achieved.

Unfortunately even a system as mindless as WoW Achievements can be perverted by players’ darker sides, as seen in the current trend of only allowing players to join a PUG for a dungeon if they can show the achievement for the dungeon.

As long as stats have been recorded, they’ve been used for comparison, its just natural human behavior. Its also human nature to pursue what’s best for yourself, and when these two instincts are combined its only natural for people to exclude based on statistical thresholds. It becomes a problem when there is no way for people to improve their important statistics. In this case it means that players who are just reaching level cap cannot improve their gearscore or complete dungeon achievements since no one will group with them. Ravious (and Sanya) mention a solution to the problem, tracking everything. I agree, and offer two more solutions.

First, don’t just report all stats, reward all stats! Johnny Newbie may not be able to kill the UberDragon within his first week of play, but if he manages to fall off cliffs and get himself killed more than any other player, he deserves some recognition. Give him the weekly title of “Johnny the Fragile, Chief Inspector of Gravity” and watch him be proud to show off his title. Even if he’s showing his title off to other new players with equally lame titles, they’ll be happy because they are unique, for that week they are the absolute best (or worst) at something. With any statistic there can be only one leader, so if no other statistics are shown (or are shown but without possibility of recognition or incentive) they are naturally going to gravitate towards the one or two stats they are told matter.

Second, don’t show statistics that can be easily improved simply by playing the game a long time. Total number of times a player has killed a dungeon boss is a number that should really be more depressing the higher it is, because its just a neon sign screaming LACK OF CONTENT, but instead it would be (and is) used to gauge how worthy a player is. Why not instead track a players success rate at a dungeon, or fastest time to clear a boss, or largest damage healed/dealt/tanked in a single boss fight? These still measure the success and relative skill of a player, but do it in a way that at least limits the impact of longer time /played. And if you absolutely must show quantity stats, show them over a standardized period, like the week or month. That way players who suffer from EPeen Redundant Incessant Comparison Ketosis (EPRICK) will still have something to show for it.

I’ll throw in a third solution just for good measure. Role Proficiency Ratings! See my previous post for details, but it addresses these same types of problems of socialization gated by arbitrary statistics.

Quick Shot: Qualifying for a PUG

What do "elite" raiding guilds and pretentious PUGs use now to determine who qualifies to join them? Gearscore and Achievements? This creates the often mentioned paradox of “Can’t do the dungeon until you’ve done the dungeon”. Why is this the case? Why don’t elite players have faith the majority of the players at level cap? Most likely because a huge portion of those capped players are accustomed to the leveling game, and hardly ever touched group mechanics. Thus the learning curve for a player’s group role is incredibly steep at level cap, leading to a lot of crappy PUGs and even more exclusion. Here’s an idea that will break the paradox and reduce the number of ill prepared group members in most PUGs.

Group Role Ratings. At any time (or maybe just in main hubs) a player can access a sort of military academy where they can take “role tests” that test how high their skill as a tank/DPS/healer/buffer/debuffer/controller is. There would be at least 25 tests for each role, and each test would be a small lesson in how the mechanics of the role works, with a staged group battle to test the mechanics in. A low level tank test would be something as simple as using a taunt, with tips on how to do it most effectively, while higher level tank tests would have NPC allies accidentally drawing aggro away from you and requiring you to get back control, or switch off to another tank. They would need to be scaled by level/gear, or ignore them altogether, allowing a low level player with true player skill to show their high rating early on.

This would also allow particularly talented special builds to show that they are just as worth taking along as the “role standard” class. If a warlock can somehow achieve a higher tank rating than a warrior, he would then actually have a chance of being picked up, because the Group Role Level would be a standardized indicator of skill.

If a player reached level cap without doing any group work, they would quickly see that no PUG or serious guild would take them along unless they were of a certain role rating. So they would start taking the tests, learning how to play their group role step by step, redoing tests they fail until they master the concepts and execution. They’re learning with NPC groups instead of human groups, giving them growth opportunities without risking other players’ lives.

You could call the program Group Role Rating Education And Testing. GRREAT! Have a tiger instruct it and you’re good to go.

Come to think of it, this could also work (almost as well) for PvP roles.

Another Thought on Old News

It was reported a while ago that 70% of WoW trial players never make it to level 10. There are a couple of interesting observations you can make about this statistic, and some important inferences to be made as well. First and most obviously, WoW is losing an enormous chunk of their potential customer base. Second, players are losing interest so fast that they aren't even willing to play for free.

Perhaps one of the important questions to ask is, why use level 10 as the benchmark? It may be the case that 99% of trial players make it to level 9 and quit, but its far more likely that this was chosen because its when Talents become available, and when many classes gain a key ability that defines their class. In other words, level 10 is when "the good stuff" starts. Its also the very first opportunity for a player to make their character different from all the other new characters of that class and race. If you're hiding the fun and player identity behind hours of initial grind, what would you expect to happen?

Cataclysm sounds like a brilliant idea, one which will revamp the starting areas and bring veterans back into old Azeroth, giving the current playerbase a great reason to invest more time and keep paying those subs. But for a brand new player the visuals and quests will be taken for granted, and if the initial grind-to-fun and grind-to-identity of 1-10 is still there, WoW will still let a huge amount of potential subs slip through their fingers.

Cataclysm should change the starting point for talents (and key abilities) to five, right around the time players are finishing the initial cave quests and leaving the very first area of the starting zones. Any sooner and they would be overwhelmed by too many features (there is a learning curve, small as it may be). At level five there should be a quick tutorial explaining the classes different talent trees, with a brief overview of each. This way the player will be less than two hours into the game and will already have their "cool abilities" and at least the beginnings of a sense of uniqueness in a 10 class world. Come to think of it, veteran players are so used to spending a talent point immediately after they level up, they're probably Pavloved into opening their talent menus, which will lead to exactly 9 instances per character of "…oh right, I don't get to do that yet. *sniffle*". Cataclysm is supposed to reinvigorate the current playerbase, so why not surprise them with talent points earlier?