Tag: design

My Struggle with Sandboxes

Posted on by Gazimoff

I’ve been having a bit of a Minecraft kick lately, after finally getting enough time to enjoy the recent(ish) updates. The world generator now spawns features like abandoned mines, subterranean strongholds and populated villages as part of an Adventure Mode overlay.

The great thing about this Adventure mode is that it’s entirely optional. You can either spend time building the huge mine cart roller coaster you’ve always wanted, or you can build the portal, traverse the Nether and defeat the Ender Dragon. Or you can do both at the same time.

It’s also convinced me to check out the limited selection of sandbox MMOs currently available. After digging into EVE, Wurm Online (a previous Notch creation) and the Glitch beta, it becomes pretty obvious who these games are aimed at: builders. Go to this location, harvest these resources. Go to that location and build something with what you’ve gathered. Sometimes there’s a “kill ten rats”, but before you can do that you have to find a tree, cut it down, mine some iron, learn how to blacksmith, until finally… the rats have gone home for the weekend.

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LFD: No Simple Answers

Posted on by Gazimoff

Looking around the blogsphere today reminds me of battle re-enactment. I can see the same people pulling on the same uniform and dusting off the same weapons to have the same good-natured scrap over something. The sheep-skin drums are beating, the blue and red overcoats are being pulled on. The beer tent is filling up as the two sides filter in and catch up on old times. The battleground? Looking for Dungeon.

The argument is that Star Wars: The Old Republic needs a Looking for Flashpoint tool in order to help groups form for both levelling instances and endgame content. There are currently a large number of players unable to experience this content, either because their guild doesn’t have enough players at the same level or because they’re too busy enjoying the stupidly good questing content.

The choice seems to be between a Warcraft-style Looking for Dungeon tool, or not having one at all and just making do with shouting in the chat channels like some market trader. Neither is a great solution – one end leaves you frustrated with anonymous people you’ll never encounter again, while the other leaves you frustrated at the lack of response from other players as you sit doing nothing for hours on end. Either way you’re left frustrated.

The exception is if you have a guild that’s both large enough to support flashpoints (and populated with people who want to do that content) and which has people in broadly the same level bracket. If either is not the case then even with the best of intentions the guild is less of a guild and more of a social chat channel. But I digress.

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The Best Raids: Past, Present Or Future?

Posted on by Gazimoff

Last week a subject cropped up in one of the article discussions: is Warcraft raiding getting steadily better all the time, or has it reached a peak and is in decline. Answering this by itself can go either way – more people than ever are able to experience tier 13 due to the predicted arrival of LFR, but by contrast I’m observing more raidgroups than ever struggle with recruitment and retention.

Talk to your fellow raiders about the tiers that they’ve done and it’s likey that you’ll get some interesting answers depending on how long they’ve been playing. I did a similar straw poll on twitter recently. The top two raids were Ulduar and Karazhan by some margin, with Sunwell grabbing the third spot. Raids from Vanilla and Cataclysm barely got a mention.

I’ve asked the same question before and I constantly get the same answers. Ulduar, Karazhan and Sunwell. I’ve been trying to think why these instances are so well loved by so many raiders, and I can only think of a couple of reasons.

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Pure DPS: The One True Class

Posted on by Gazimoff

Every so often I hear this argument crop up: character classes that can only deal damage shouldn’t exist in modern MMOs. Every class should instead be able to switch to tanking or healing, or possibly even both. The idea is that a shortage of any one of the three roles should be resolved by players switching over to fill that demand.

I’ll admit that it is a tempting concept. When I was designing my own MMO I was keen to allow players to pick any direction they wanted to head in. By providing them with freedom for their character, the idea was that you’d end up with an even population of tanks, healers and DPS depending on the demand for those roles. Interestingly, this is the same concept now being used in The Secret World.

I also don’t think it’ll work.

The problem’s a basic one. Very few people actually enjoy healing or tanking. You need a will as tough as iron to handle these roles without being reduced to a wreck when the blame truck rolls into town and tries to work out why we’ve failed to kill the raid boss for the fifth time that evening. For everyone else, pick a DPS class that you know will never ever be asked to tank or heal. Ever.

So what’s the solution? Remove tanking and healing. Everyone plays DPS.

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Questions To You: On Criticism

Posted on by Gazimoff

As we move into the new year I wanted to take some time to pose a handful of meta-questions. Instead of doing my usual role of talking about MMOs, I wanted to get some feedback from you on some broader questions. I’ll have a handful of these over the next week, with the first one about criticism – what is its role and when does it start becoming excessive?

There’s a great many things that I like about the current crop of MMOs, the community that surrounds them and the culture that they promote. By the same token there’s a whole bunch of things that I’m not a fan of – behaviour, poor design and unengaging content being a few. That whole edge-point should provide great critical blog-fodder for years.

This is a bit of a tricky topic that I’m trying to handle carefully, so I apologise in advance if I mess up slightly on this one. One of the easiest and yet hardest things I find as a blogger is about being critical. When is it right to be critical, what’s the right level to aim for? Am I being harsh or unfair? Are my claims defensible?

Am I being fairly critical of a game, or am I just bashing it relentlessly?

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SWTOR: The Broken Mess of Crew Skills

Posted on by Gazimoff

Over the last few days I’ve been digging into the crafting system in Star Wars: The Old Republic. This isn’t something I really got into during beta – I was too busy waving around my lightsaber and shooting lightning from my fingertips to be concerned with harvesting materials and making pointless items.

I’m regretting that decision now, as I’d have loved to provide some choice feedback on the system. Other people may have found SWTOR’s biggest flaw, but for me crafting is about even with my issues on Space Combat.

For those of you yet to dig in to the intricacies of fabrication in Bioware’s MMO, here’s the run-down. At level 10-ish you gain your first companion, and with this you can learn Crew Skills. There’s three categories: skills that make things, skills that gather things and skills that send your companion on missions. Credit where it’s due, the last two choices are interesting as they allow you to focus on questing while your companion does all the tedious work of banging rocks together.

But pick a crew skill that makes anything and be prepared for a whole galaxy of redundancy. Let me explain.

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My MMO Manifesto

Posted on by Gazimoff

About a week ago Brian Green asked a problem over on Google+. After seeing that various bloggers were complaining about the stagnant situation of current MMOs, he asked what it is we truly want to see from the genre. I can understand why – it becomes frustrating when you’re trying to improve the games we play, yet the players don’t seem to be asking for it.

With that challenge in mind, I sat down and wrote a wishlist. Then I edited it. Then I threw it away and started again. Then I started grouping and merging concepts together to come up with a list of ten points.

Have a read through and see what you think. These aren’t in any order of significance, although you may feel that some are more important than others.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic – First Impressions

Posted on by Gazimoff

The NDA for Star Wars: The Old Republic has now been lifted and I’m finally free to share my opinions with you. In theory this would mean that I’d be unleashing a huge mega-post containing details of every single nuance about the game. I’m going to resist the urge and scale back a little bit on this, instead focusing on a couple of key areas.

I’m going to go into a bit of detail about my experiences with the two “caster” force classes in the game: the Jedi Consular and Sith Inquisitor, along with the Jedi Sage and Sith Sorcerer advanced classes. I’ll also be talking a little bit about how SWTOR advances the MMO genre and the areas in which it falls back a little.

I’ll be concluding this post with a look about how the game performs on a range of systems. If you’re wondering if your PC will handle SWTOR or whether you should upgrade then feel free to skip ahead to this section.

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The Gates of Compelling Rewards

Posted on by Gazimoff

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re somehow missing something when you read a particular piece of news? That’s how I felt when I was reading over Ghostcrawler’s latest blogppost where he talks about item stat inflation and the problem it presents. While it’s a great article that hints at some difficult choices ahead, I’m not sure we’re seeing the whole picture.

The big clue for me was in the phrase “we want rewards to be compelling”. Think about this for a moment as I’ll be coming back to it later.

The problems around itemisation extend far beyond just deciding what numbers to put in the tooltip. There’s also ramifications across the game, from how we experience levelling through to the performance of the game client on our machine. Get it wrong and there could be a whole world of problems. It’s why the Squish versus No Squish argument is more complex than just what kind of number we want to see.

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Mobile MMO Missteps

Posted on by Gazimoff

At the moment I’m on holiday, which probably explains why I’ve been a bit lax on updates. While for some that might mean hitting the nearest beach and putting their head into a good book, for me it means working out just how many of my glorious gadgets I can take with me.

What started out as a sackful of handheld games consoles, MP3 players and so on has nowadays shrunk down to a smartphone and a laptop. While having the laptop is handy for occasional sessions in Warcraft when I can get a good wifi connection, I tend to use my smartphone for my mobile gaming needs.

This predictably ended up with me giving mobile MMO gaming a try. Buoyed on by Massively’s MMOBility column I downloaded a few titles and gave it a go. Unfortunately the experience was incredibly disappointing, and while I share Beau Hindman’s optimism about the future of the genre I think that these games make several important missteps.

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