Maxis Closing; Was SimCity a Product of Misplaced Enthusiasm, or an Evil Overlord?

Well it was a fun 12 years, but it's time to turn off the lights and put the key under the door. #RIPMaxisEmeryville
— Guillaume Pierre (@MaxisGuillaume) March 4, 2015

So part of Maxis has been shuttered--note that Maxis still actually has studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, and Helsinki, so it's not like it's the end-end for the studio, but the Emeryville studio was responsible for the most recent SimCity game, and with it likely goes future SimCity games unless EA decides to revive the series in a decade or two.

But what was the deal with SimCity, anyhow? A lot of folks on Twitter, Facebook, and comment threads on articles are blaming EA for the end of the studio. In the strictest, technical way they're correct. EA owns Maxis, EA shuts down Maxis. But was EA the Evil Corporate Overlord™ truly behind the failures of SimCity? Don't get me wrong, EA does plenty of things that irk me greatly, but I think we owe the legacy that is the SimCity series to really look at what's happened over the years.

Firstly, according to Wikipedia, Maxis was not in good shape and had shopped around to be acquired in 1996-97, so Maxis as a company may have likely not existed without EA today. And once acquired, unlike Origin Systems and Westwood Studios, the absorption of Maxis took longer. EA allowed Maxis to complete SimCity 3000 on its own time, and then they created The Sims, which was a pretty big gamble for the time; it was quite unique. These don't seem to be the actions of an Evil Corporate Overlord™. At least not to start.

Fast forward to SimCity 2013. Cloud computing for city simulation and cooperative play. Huge features that were being touted by Maxis and EA, but the backlash on release was immense. Those features were online-only, and with no offline version, server scaling issues made the game unplayable for weeks. Maxis had to turn off Cheetah speed, modify their server architecture, and eventually, over a year later, finally implemented offline play. They also had to make city sizes quite small or they'd hit performance problems. What went wrong?

Clearly, the unplayable nature of the game when servers were under extreme load pissed people off. It's not like there wasn't precedent, either. Nearly every online-only game suffers services issues at launch due to demand (and bugs!). Diablo III's issues were still fresh in the gaming populace's collective mind, too. Then there's the nature of military personnel, or folks in rural areas with poor Internet access, or sometimes your Internet just goes down.

But why? Why make the game online only?

Perhaps some marketing department or the CEO said, hey, people like online stuff, so make it online. Except servers cost money and Maxis sold the game as a one-time payment product, so having to maintain servers for 3 years doesn't seem cost effective.

Rather, perhaps someone in development decided that wouldn't it be cool if we could leverage cloud computing for more complex simulations? Maxis has always been about simulation, and making more complex simulations would be great! Better yet, it wouldn't matter how slow someone's computer was if it's not doing the heavy lifting!

And someone else may have suggested how cool would it be if we could have our cities interact with other players' cities (not unlike SimCity 4 I might add), or even have cooperative works that everyone can pitch in for?

As a recent Kotaku article pointed out, developers tend to be a pretty enthusiastic bunch:

I always found it irritating when press releases or developers overused the word "exciting." We're really excited for this upcoming partnership! We're excited to show you this new feature! Surely, I thought, this is all manufactured passion; these guys make games all day, every day. How "exciting" can it be to show journalists a new section of the game, or talk to them about the story, or share a new trailer? 

As it turns out, creating stuff actually is exciting. Being able to share the fruits of your labor with people honestly gets your blood pumping.

So if we use that as the basis of why SimCity missed the mark so big at launch, rather than assuming the malice of evil overlords hoping for them to fail (which makes no sense, at all), or the incompetence of doofus overlords who just don't get it, the narrative changes significantly, but is still more than plausible.

Cloud computing requires always online connectivity. If you're offline, you can't leverage the cloud. And similarly for having players being able to have their cities interact. They have to be stored somewhere, and have a central server they can all connect to, so there's that cloud computing thing again. But maybe it'll be fine, most gamers have decent Internet connections, right? Or they will in 3 or 4 years, because it's 2009 today when they're planning this game (or whenever they started planning it. I would bet large sums of money SimCity 2013 took more than a couple years to develop).

I used to work at Microsoft as a software developer in the Office division. Sometimes, we made pretty boneheaded decisions in retrospect. This can often be chalked up to what we sometimes called the Redmond Bubble, or the Redmond Reality Distortion Field. Stephen Toulouse, the former head of Xbox Live Enforcement, expands on this idea in his blog post that I linked (it's a really good read, seriously, read it), but the gist of it is as follows:

The field that influences Microsoft employees and product designers to make wildly incorrect assumptions on the use of technology, computers and devices by the world. The field is caused by the fact that Microsoft employees tend to be far more affluent and have free access to technology than the general population. Generated by Microsoft employees, the field is centered in Redmond but can manifest itself weakly in any area where a significant number of employees gather, such as remote campuses or subsidiaries.

It's reasonable to assume that large companies like EA suffer a similar problem. So while Maxis was busy planning super awesome features that they liked and required tech they readily had at hand, the general populace was basically, "Uh, da fuq, mate?" Add to that technical issues around city size (I bet computational requirements go up exponentially as you add city space), because they assumed they'd have full cloud computing resources behind the simulation, and you end up with a mediocre product limited by a bunch of features that a lot of people didn't want because they just wanted to make their mega-city, just like in the SimCity games of old.

So it's possible that some bone-headed exec said, "Make it online only!", but I think it's just as likely--if not more likely--that a few devs had some ideas that would work in a world of ubiquitous Internet, but we're just not there as a society. My vote is honestly misplaced enthusiasm. It's hard to hold back when you have all these cool things you can do, and it's easy to forget not everyone has the same access to tech, or uses technology in a different way than your company does.

It doesn't absolve either EA or Maxis of their goof-ups around SimCity 2013; closing the studio is clear evidence of that. But I don't think this is the normal case of "Big Company Acquires Smaller Company; Big Company guts Smaller Company."

There were some very talented folks at Maxis, and I hope they find work elsewhere, either within EA or outside of it. #Maxis, #GameDesign, #SimCity

The WoW Token

Blizzard recently announced their own version of EVE's PLEX, except that it looks very different aside from the fact someone paid for a chunk of game time and sold it in game. This isn't surprising, given they mentioned it months earlier, but I was mildly surprised at the restrictions. However, I think the restrictions are a good thing.

The way the token works is as follows:

1. Player A pays for a WoW Token, representing 30 days of game time
2. Player A posts the token on a special version of the Auction House. Note this is the only action you can take with the token. It cannot be traded nor destroyed
• When listed, the price of the token is set by Blizzard
• You are guaranteed to get that amount once your token sells, regardless as to what it sells for
3. Player B purchases a token on the special version of the Auction House
• When purchased, the price of the token is based on supply and demand
4. Player B gets 30 days of game time
• The token is soulbound. There is no reselling it

Relatively simple. The actual processes of selling and buying are basically independent of each other. Blizzard also mentions that tokens sold are a queue: first in, first out

The picture above is basically how it works according to Blizzard's FAQ. So you won't necessarily get the money immediately. It depends on how many tokens are ahead of you in line, and how many people are buying. But you're guaranteed the listing price, so it's pretty low risk to the seller. It's just a question of time.

This arrangement is to induce a supply/demand elasticity that allows the player base to influence the price to something the market can bear, so Blizzard isn't constantly having to futz with the price, but does so in a way that as mentioned, makes it a very secure transaction for the seller. You'll get the gold you're promised. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually.

Interestingly, if demand plummets, Blizzard would technically be injecting gold into the game. On the other hand, if demand spikes, Blizzard would be pulling gold out of the economy. Over a long period of time, ideally that would balance out, and this really would only have the effect of transferring gold from the folks who have liquid assets to the folks who have real-life liquid assets (or at least, those who're willing to spend money on the token).

Because there's no reselling, the token can't become an alternate currency the way PLEX works in EVE. There's also no risk of losing it. If your account gets hacked, they can't just hand off that token to someone else. On the other hand, if your account gets hacked, well, you've got bigger short-term problems anyhow. You can't destroy it by accident, either, according to the FAQ.

Now, there can be a minor amount of market speculation, in that you can choose not to post a token you just bought in hopes of getting a better price when the market spikes, but depending on how big a rolling window Blizzard implements for their supply/demand algorithm, that may be a moot point long-term.

As implemented, this is Blizzard clearly putting gold sellers in their cross-hairs. 



So How Much Will a Token Cost?

@RichardkurnieJ @FinalBossTV Impossible, 3rd party is way too cheap to complete against. $0.7/1000g is the going rate I've seen.
— Elvine (@Elvinelol) March 2, 2015

Elvine, a prominent gold-making community member, mentions that the going rate for gold on gold-selling sites is about $0.70 per 1,000g (I'm assuming USD). Blizzard stated not to assume that the price of the token will be the same as a raw purchase of 30 days game time.

So if we assume that it's about $20 for a WoW Token, to match gold sellers, each Token would go for about 28k gold. On the other hand, this is a secure method of obtaining gold that doesn't come with the risk of a hacked or banned account, and people are willing to pay a minor premium for ease, security, and legitimacy (also see: the music industry).

On the other other hand, gold sellers have the bonus of instant gratification. Selling a token could take time--we don't know how long it'll take to run through a queue of tokens. So it's not quite as good as those services. Faster, but less secure.

So here's the rub, would $20 for 28,000g be worth it for me? Nope. I have about 300k on hand. I find it pretty easy to net 28k in a day of AH work if I'm so inclined. However, buying a month of time for 28k? Yeah, I might do that. Or, most likely, for myself, I'll just ignore the whole system and keep paying my subscription.


What're Some of the Potential Side Effects?

As mentioned above, Blizzard wouldn't really be introducing or removing gold from the economy long term, just redistributing it based on different criteria than gold normally gets distributed in-game.

However, the system is regional. Meaning that on a local scale, economies would potentially lose/gain gold. If one server had a glut of folks selling tokens, and another server had a glut of folks buying tokens, in theory that would cause a transfer of systemic wealth from server to server. Given the population sizes, though, I doubt this is meaningful in practice. Since it's all one big queue, I bet this will average out over time.

That being said, 28k on a small server is probably worth a lot more than 28k on a big server, so perhaps I'm wrong and we'll see more token sellers from smaller servers and more buyers from bigger servers. This would cause inflation on the smaller servers, as there'd be an influx of gold, and deflation on the bigger servers. Frankly, though, the inflation effect, if it were to occur, would be bigger than the deflation effect due to sheer population differentials. But it would potentially normalize gold across all servers long-term

This could be mitigated by making the tokens regional, but the prices based on server. You'd have to contend with server transfer gold maximums, so you couldn't just transfer a character and buy a massive number of tokens, at least not easily. And since they're purchased to sell with real money, that cost is fixed regardless of server, so even transferring to another server with a bunch of tokens doesn't help you. You may as well make a level 1 character on the server you'd transfer to and sell them directly there, but you'd again have to deal with server transfer gold maximums to get it back to where you'd want to spend it. But making the prices vary per-server definitely makes the system a bit more opaque to the average user. Since Blizzard is already making both ends of the transaction largely independent, this isn't outside reason, however.

Another question is how this differs from previous experiments, like the Guardian Cub, or the Diablo RMAH. The Guardian Cub was an actual tradeable item, but had the issue that once you had learned one, you didn't really need any more, so it's not really comparable to something like game time. Limited audience, basically. The Diablo RMAH, however, broke the core loot loop (well, the whole AH did period), and gold was so easy to come by in Diablo that you didn't really need to spend real money to get those items.

Given how likely it is Blizzard will sell tokens for more than 30 days normally goes for in subscription fees, Blizzard will make more money than normal off game time, assuming this takes off. It's a clever way to moderately increase subscription costs without actually increasing it across the board. It allows folks to continue playing even if they can't afford it in real life, as long as they take the time to earn some dough in-game (which frankly isn't terribly hard if you put a little time and research into it).

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Short of some sort of market spike that I can take advantage of, I doubt I'll be participating in it myself, but it's definitely fascinating. #WorldOfWarcraft, #GameDesign, #WoWToken

[Indie] There Came an Echo - Review

Iridium Studios is an indie game company that made the most excellent game Sequence. Sequence was a rhythm-RPG hybrid, and I played the heck out of it. Great gameplay, interesting story and characters, and awesome aesthetic. So when I heard they had release another game, I bought it sight-unseen.

There Came an Echo is billed as a voice-controlled squad-based strategy game, and it delivers on that premise pretty well. You play the part of Sam, someone who's overseeing the squad in combat, using an isometric view that you can control to get a feel for the battlefield. Then, using actual voice commands (i.e.: talking into your microphone), you give your squad commands in real time.

Voice Control

Commands are relatively simple. Among the commands you can give your squad members are: move to a location (predetermined nodes with labels like Delta 6); switch what weapon they're using; focus fire on a specific enemy; retreat; hold your fire; and so on.

You can also tell them instructions to carry out on your mark. For example, I might say, "Miranda, move to Alpha Two on my Mark. Corrin, Grace, move to Alpha Three on my Mark. Mark." And then bam, Miranda, Corrin, and Grace all move to the locations specified and if there are people to attack in range, they'll do so. You can even set up multiple marks to perform in succession. You can also give commands to "everyone" or "everybody", or "everybody but <name>" and they'll do the right thing.

Below is a 3-minute video from a stream I did of the game going through a couple encounters. You can hear me setting up marks, changing weapons, moving my squad to flank targets, recharging their energy, and so on.

When it all works, it's amazing. It feels really natural and actually quite empowering. The level of immersion it provides is pretty awesome. However, that 5% of the time it doesn't work? Frustrating. A couple of the characters' names don't seem to get picked up very well (Syll, and a 5th character you get down the line that I can't say without spoiling the game), so I often find myself repeating the commands in a more stern tone of voice naturally, and that actually makes the voice recognition worse.

It seems to work best with a moderate, almost conversational tone of voice, which when you're panicking because your team won't listen, good luck keeping calm. On the other hand, losing a fight isn't a big deal--the game will go back to the last autosave point, and they're quite frequent. That kind of mitigation certainly alleviated some of the frustration.

Overall, the experience with the voice control tech was quite positive. Having to repeat the occasional command wasn't that big of an immersion breaker, and frankly I was generally too into the game to really notice it unless it got really bad.

Gameplay

For a squad-based strategy game, the strategy was generally rudimentary, but the building blocks were there for something a lot more interesting. I played on the default difficulty (moderate), and there was a difficulty higher, and one lower.

You end up getting a total of four different weapon types to distribute amongst your four squadmates on top of the pistol each of them has, but you only get two of each type, so you can't just stack your favourite weapon and call it a day. The special weapons also take energy (whereas the pistol does not). That same energy is used for your shields, so if it runs out, you're toast.

So choices: use energy to take out enemies faster in hopes of spending less energy overall, or not. The trick here is the game takes a long-haul view of things. You only have a total of 3 bars of energy for most missions, so once it's gone, it's gone. It's not like Halo where it'll recharge if you're out of combat long enough, which frankly I found refreshing. I miss the long game of planning. Do I bring all of my forces? Or do I leave out one of them because she's low on energy. Do I use the special weapons? Or do I stick to pistols?

On the battlefield itself, you generally have a few set locations to move to, meaning you're relatively limited in those decisions. You usually want to keep yourself in cover, and try to flank enemies to get behind their cover. Relatively standard cover-shooter concepts overall.

Despite the relatively simplicity, I found I personally didn't need much more complexity. Given you don't have a lot of time to be handing out instructions verbally as the game progresses in real time, any more complexity might muddy the gameplay.

Aesthetics

The music is top notch. Ronald Jenkees and Great Big Circles are the composers and they're absolutely fantastic. Music is matched up with the scenes and levels in a way that puts emphasis on the right things at the right time. During my two playthroughs of the game, I could not stop gushing over it. Seriously, amazing.

I think Bravely Default is the last soundtrack I had this much praise for. But where Bravely Default is high energy, easy to listen to actively and focus entirely on it, There Came an Echo is a lot more ambient, laid back, background. I can easily put the soundtrack on while I'm doing something else and find myself grooving, but I don't know that I'd spend time really getting into the music and forgetting everything else the way I can for some of Bravely Default's tracks. But in the context of There Came an Echo? It fits perfectly.

The story itself is relatively high-minded. Without getting too far into spoiler territory, similar to Sequence, they address some extremely interesting sci-fi concepts like (sorta) cloning, morality, encryption, freedom of information. Things that honestly might not be sci-fi in the next fifty years. Really good stuff there.

The characters, on the other hand, come off as flat. The only character who shows any growth at all is the first of your squad mates. The rest are quite static. Oh, they're entertaining enough--I rather enjoyed some of the banter--but the game is definitely plot-driven rather than character-driven.

It's a bit of a shame, really, because they managed to snag some pretty high-profile voice-actors: Wil Wheaton, Ashly Burch, Laura Bailey, and Yuri Lowenthal, to name a few (Bonus: Tell Corrin to "Shut Up, Wesley!" in-game. Seriously, it's great). But the characters are definitely not the focus of the narrative.

A special shout-out, though, to one of the characters being gay (and Asian, and religious). It comes up in conversation naturally, where one character asks the other if he has any family waiting for him, and he casually mentions his boyfriend. And it's no big deal; the first character just wonders if he misses his boyfriend, and then the conversation moves on. No fuss, no muss, the kind of casual footnote one would expect to come up in conversation. I was quite appreciative of that moment.

The art style fits the game quite well, and while you can tell the game is low-budget by the character animations and the fidelity of the art, it honestly doesn't really detract from the experience in my opinion. They've done a great job understanding their limitations as a studio and still shipping an excellent-looking game.

Was it worth it?

Yes.

Okay, it's a bit short. About 3 hours of gameplay, and that's including a lot of very heavy story moments, so less actual gameplay. A total of 10 missions. I honestly wished it were about twice as long. I played through the game twice, though, and still had fun on my second playthrough (especially given some of the earlier pieces of the story foreshadow the end and it all makes sense).

But the game was a blast, it didn't overstay its welcome at all. I think it's a successful use of voice control that we haven't really seen before (note: I said "successful"). If you're particularly hardcore about your strategy games, however, you may want to crank up the difficulty to Hard.

Music was great, story was good, gameplay was fun, and the tech is cool. Portal felt like a steal at $20 despite being a 3 hour game. There Came an Echo feels just right at $15.
#IndieDev, #ThereCameAnEcho, #FirstImpression

Rebuttal to and Discussion of Blizzard Watch's Enhancement Breakdown

I was super excited to see a Blizzard Watch class column for Enhancement Shaman. I don't think our spec had a class column on WoWInsider at all (it was pretty well only Resto with the occasional Elemental post tossed in). Said first column was all about, "What's Wrong With Enhancement?". And then I was sad.

Make no mistake, Enhancement has some issues. I just mostly disagree with the author on what said issues are. In short, his grievances:

• Good at AoE (and therefore bad at Single Target)
• Lack of meaningful cooldowns
• Too many rotational buttons

Good at AoE (and therefore bad at Single Target)

Data suggests we're actually close to the middle of the pack for single target DPS. We're a teensy bit low, but we're not far enough below to make a difference unless you're a world-first Mythic guild:

Warcraft Logs, as of February 27th, 2015. Mythic, Gruul, 50th percentile

As you can see by the chart, even at the Mythic level for as close to a patchwerk fight as we can get this tier, Enhancement is in the middle of the pack. Nearly exactly in the middle if you toss out the outliers (Frost Mage and BM/MM Hunters). Heroic and Normal look even better for Enhancement. It's not until you start getting into the top 25% of Mythic players that Enhance truly starts falling behind.

That being said, our AoE is still a little out of control, due to how it scales up with more targets. Two targets, two Flame Shocks, two Fire Novas on one target each equals two Fire Nova hits. Six targets, six Flame Shocks, six Fire Novas on five targets each equals thirty Fire Nova hits. Exponential scaling due to number of hits. If they were to make it linear somehow instead, they could bring our AoE inline with other classes.

The question is, do we want that? According to a recent interview, specs can have niches, that's okay. It seems currently our niche is AoE. And it's not actually coming at the expense of our single target damage to any great degree if the current data is any implication.

Lack of Meaningful Cooldowns

In the article, the author seems to be using "meaningful" as a proxy for "directly influences my personal damage", and therefore having a higher skill cap. To be fair, he has a point that the Fire Elemental and Feral Spirit are effectively fire and forget. Other than lining them up with Hero/Lust, potentially Elemental Mastery, or making sure you use them when they'll have the best encounter uptime, there isn't much else to them. Not really any different from Mirror Images or Shadowfiend, either. Granted, we have two such cooldowns. But they do pack a wallop: Primal Fire Elemental makes up a good 10% of our total DPS, and Spirit Wolves another 10%.

As to other meaningful cooldowns, we have Ascendance, and potentially Elemental Mastery, which the author ignores both. Ascendence isn't a huge DPS boost, unless you're stuck at range in which case you're suddenly doing far more damage than you were previously. If you have a fight where you're going to be at range for a significant period, it might be useful to hold on to it. However, it's still probably better lining it up with Hero/Lust or Elemental Mastery.

Echo of the Elements versus Elemental Mastery is an interesting question. The haste gain from EM is amazing, especially if you want to get an extra cast or two of Windstrike with Ascendance, or can pair it with Liquid Magma. Echo, on the other hand, makes all your smaller cooldowns a lot more interesting.

So I disagree that our cooldowns aren't meaningful, or at least, I disagree with his definition of meaningful. If you ignore the cooldowns, your DPS will suffer greatly. However, I do agree that the fire and forget nature of the Elementals and Spirit Wolves doesn't really encourage much interplay with the rest of our toolkit, aside from cooldown stacking, and that means you may as well use them on cooldown. But this isn't unique to Enhancement; there aren't many cooldowns in WoW in general that are worth holding on to very long as a DPS.

A different issue I have with our cooldowns is how much of our damage is tied to the Fire Elemental as a totem. This is fine, mostly, for PvE, but in PvP? Totem stomp, and boom, all that DPS, gone. Annoying.

Too Many Rotational Buttons

This one is a bit more subjective. The author starts in this section by saying, "Instead of having meaningful cooldowns to use when we really need to burn something to the ground," which I've shown as incorrect in the previous section--our cooldowns do plenty of damage, Enhancement can still burst with the best of them.

However, his mention of making each individual ability worth more in our rotation is potentially bang on. Blizzard pruned the damage dealing aspects of Unleash Elements, but kept it in our rotation to give us self-buffs. It's still an important part of our rotation, though, because it interacts with Flame Shock and Fire Nova, and with Unleashed Fury makes Lightning Bolt hit a lot harder. Yeah, you're basically going to use Unleash Elements on cooldown, but it becomes interesting depending on if you're doing an AoE rotation versus a single target, or if you're spec'd into Unleashed Fury or Elemental Blast. The ability itself sets you up for interesting decisions down the road.

But we still have a lot of disparate sources of damage. I feel like we could lose Frost Shock from our rotation and not miss it much, and as we get higher values of haste, we're effectively pushing Frost Shock out of our rotation regardless.

We could probably be rid of Lightning Shield at this point, too. It makes up such a small amount of our DPS that missing it means you're not missing much. Windfury and Flametongue are extremely tiny portions of our DPS as well. We'd be missing a lot of flavour without those, though, but it would make each individual ability button we press more impactful, which is a valid complaint.

However, that being said, I enjoy the complexity of my rotation as Enhancement. If I wanted a simpler rotation, I'd play Retribution (which is effectively just Enhancement with fewer buttons in terms of core rotation play style). I've played games like Guild Wars where you only have 5 primary buttons, and it's boring. Boring, boring, boring. So please don't take away my buttons (except Frost Shock, feel free to run off with that). But perhaps they weren't aggressive enough with pruning passive sources of damage.

We're in a Pretty Solid Place

This is the part where we agree. We're actually in a pretty damn solid place overall as a spec. Sure, we're a bit weak in PvP (nerfing our self-healing by removing the mana benefits of Maelstrom Weapon what? Glad they reverted that...), and we're lagging every so slightly in single target DPS currently, but frankly not enough for 99% of the WoW population to be concerned about. If you're not in Paragon or Method, frankly, you should take a skilled Enhancement player over asking them to switch to a different spec that they're unfamiliar with.

For some reason, the image of Enhancement being terrible at single target DPS has persisted for much longer than we've actually been terrible--because we were in an awful place at the beginning of the expansion, make no mistake. But we're smack dab in the middle now, where the developers are aiming to have every class.

Yes, there are definitely improvements to be made. Fire totems, still too many passive sources of damage cluttering up our total DPS and making our buttons presses a little less effective. But overall, we're in a good place. #WorldOfWarcraft, #Enhancement

Crowfall, Funding, Creative Control. How Much Do Video Games Cost?

Recently a new MMO has been making waves: Crowfall. I've seen their pitch video, it's a super cool concept, one I can easily get excited about as a designer and a programmer, even if I'm less than enthralled about the PvP aspect of it. They just launched their Kickstarter, asking for $800,000. But one of the big questions folks have been asking is, "Can you make an MMO on just $800k?"

Unsurprisingly, the answer is no. The developers even cop to that themselves in the FAQ portion:

The short answer is: you can’t. At least, not a game with the scope of Crowfall. Fortunately, that isn’t our plan. 

...

Lastly, we’ve already raised some money and -- as we said in the video -- we will raise more if we need to. We would prefer to be only answerable to you, our players – but one way or the other, we’re going to get this game made. 

ArtCraft took a minority investment round of $2.3 million last year. We will likely sell the rights to Crowfall in foreign territories (especially restricted markets, like China, where we can't ship the game, anyway) to add to our development budget. If that isn't enough, we can always take more minority investment if we need to. 

The Kickstarter deliverable (the core module) can be accomplished with our capital and the crowdfunding money -- providing we are successful in meeting our Kickstarter funding goal.

They've already gotten $2.3 million, some of which I suspect they've already used given they've mentioned that they effectively have a prototype. And as they mention in their pitch video, they have other potential avenues for funding, but if they fill the rest with crowdfunding, they're more likely to retain creative control of the product as a whole. Interestingly enough, that's a concept that resonates with me as a developer on Eon Altar.

Given a high-fidelity prototype you can shop around, there are plenty of publishers and investors out there who would likely be willing to fund your game, but as the Crowfall folks mention, this usually comes with creative control strings. The only way you can assure complete creative control of your vision is to fund the product yourself, or find funding from sources that believe in your vision. Crowdsourcing, private investors, and your own funds.

I don't know where all of Eon Altar's funding comes from personally, but we've managed to retain creative control, which is really important for us to deliver a game we would like to play. I know keeping this vision intact has required us to turn down potential avenues of funding, so I can completely empathize with the Crowfall developers for turning to Kickstarter to fill their coffers for the short term.

But will it be enough?

They have 17 employees listed. If they were getting paid $40k a year each (well below industry standard), you're talking $680,000 a year on salary alone. If they were getting paid closer to industry standard (~93k for Developers, ~73k for designers, and ~75k for artists/animators as of 2012), were looking at a ballpark figure of $1.3M per year. They have a development timeline of Winter of 2016, so about 2 years. That's $2.6M right there if they were paying industry standard. That includes no benefits: no health care, no life/injury insurance. 

Add to that requirements:

• Equipment (2 monitors plus at least one machine capable of running the tools will likely run at least $2k each in bulk, if not much more); ~$34k minimum, probably significantly lowballing here
• Licenses for primary tools (Unity Pro is $1.5k per seat perpetually, Maya will run about $1.5k per year per seat); ~$40k minimum
• Licenses for programming addons (Voxel farm is unknown, Unity addons run anywhere from $20 to $3000+); Unknown, based on Eon Altar's usages compared to their much larger scope, I'd budget ~$10k minimum, probably significantly lowballing
• Office space (generally running about $1 per sqft in places like San Francisco or Seattle where these companies generally live), so probably in the range of $2k per month, so ~$48k minimum, might be lowballing
• Furniture (17 decent office chairs, crappy tables): ~$4k minimum
• Cloud Computing Services for Code Repositories: ~$3k per year

So that's in the area of $142k, and I've probably forgotten a bunch of other costs and underestimated the costs given. I tried to be conservative. That's all just off the top of my head. If we assume they already have a bunch of that stuff (because they do have a prototype), we're talking about saving $60k.

However, toss in another $25k - $50k per year for retaining lawyer services, and we're already at nearly $2.8M total operating costs for a 2 year release cycle.

That also doesn't include publishing fees, or marketing costs. This is just the amount it takes to make the game. It also doesn't take into account a QA department (not listed on their Kickstarter), or hiring contractors for smaller pieces of work for temporary periods of time--a relatively common occurrence, both of which would be significant expenses.

Clearly the people are the biggest expense (and biggest asset) of any operation, and if you can convince folks to work for less (generally because they're passionate about either your vision or working for you), you can save a lot of that money. There are also other options, like deferred payments, where you pay the folks upfront less, and tell them if we make money, you'll get this amount extra at the end. Or in lieu of cash offering a percentage stake in the company proper.

Despite all that, they're likely going to have to raise more private capital. Even with the Kickstarter funds, they'll only have a listed $3.0M (remember, Kickstarter skims an amount, plus taxes). The producers mention they're dipping into their own bank accounts, which is big of them, but won't go very far in the grand scheme of things unless they're millionaires. They don't have enough money--unless the devs are making significantly less than industry average up front--and they won't with Kickstarter. But it'll give them a pretty damn big head start as they look for more.

I hope they can find further investors who'll let them retain their creative vision, because it's actually pretty damn awesome. #IndieDev, #Crowfall, #GameDevelopment

[IndieDev/EonAltar] The Physics of RPGs

Physics isn't often the first thing to come to mind when one thinks Role-Playing Game, but even turn-based RPGs could successfully use a physics engine to overcome a number of issues. A physics engine gives you things like gravity, velocity, acceleration, forces, and collisions. And while a game like Skyrim might have something like a skill shot, where you fire your bow and you actually have an arrow with trajectory and therefore physics, many games do not. Most MMOs you press a button, and the ability will connect with the target or not, but you don't generally aim that ability in a way that physics matter.

In Eon Altar, the biggest boon that a physics engine gets us is collisions. By utilizing a physics engine to track geometric colliders and when they overlap, we can determine things such as when someone enters the hearing range of an NPC; when your movement marker is hovering near a target; when you're close enough to an item to pick it up from the ground; or when your party is near enough to an encounter that we should spawn the NPCs and populate statistics.

Note that there's little actual classic "physics" going on in the game. All of our actors (players and NPCs) are controlled by logic directly, as are our projectiles. Actor navigation uses something that Unity calls a NavMesh. Basically, a pre-calculated pathfinding mesh that Unity can run algorithms on to determine the fastest route to a location. We don't have bouncing balls, or rag-doll physics, and projectiles literally just take the quickest straight path to the target.

To give folks an idea of the examples I'm going to use, I present to you a screenshot from the current in-progress iteration of Eon Altar. Disclaimer: this isn't the final game, still under development, so on and so forth.

The screenshot above takes place in our test level--an infinite plane that designers and developers can throw whatever they like in to test all sorts of combat and exploration scenarios. In the left we have our mage, Muran, on on the right, we have an enemy--a bandit--who Muran is targeting (the green reticule). Between the pair we have a couple of walls, the closer one tall enough to block line of sight, the smaller one tall enough to block movement, but can be seen over.

The screenshot below has a bunch of debugging information showing. Specifically, green wireframe meshes are all of the different colliders we have in the scene at the moment. These colliders are known as trigger colliders. That is, they can overlap; they have no physical presence. They don't cause other things to bounce off them.

Each actor is dense with colliders. There's a small collider that encapsulates the actor them self, which we use for aiming projectiles and determining if they walked into something important (like a usable switch, an enemy's line of sight, etc.).

You'll also see a number of colliders around each actor: these are combat slots. Combat slots are used to align actors in melee. When an actor's collider enters another actor's combat slots, that slot is occupied. When they leave (or die), it's unoccupied and other actors may now occupy it. However, there's no requirement for actors to take up only a single slot. A large golem may end up taking two or three slots even (and said golem may have far more than six slots). If all the slots are occupied, no further actors can get in melee.

Just to the north of Muran you'll see the green targeting reticule, which has its own collider. When it overlaps with something that can be targeted, like other players, enemies, things on the ground, or so on, we can snap the reticule to that target.

You'll also notice two really large spherical colliders surrounding the NPC in the upper-right of the screenshot. These represent the sight and hearing of our bandit. When a player's collider enters one of those spheres, combat begins with the enemy having the first turn.

Finally, the walls also have colliders, which are used for line of sight for ranged attacks. If we draw a line from one actor to another, and it hits the target's collider rather than something else, we have line of sight and can shoot them.

The above screenshot shows our calculations for ranged attack, showing how the walls work. This time, for debug information we're showing Unity's NavMesh--basically the walkable areas--in light blue. You'll see that the walls carve out chunks of the NavMesh. Actors must walk around the walls.

The red/blue lines show the approximate calculations over the past 120 frames for whether we can shoot the end of the blue line. Red shows where we'd have to move (noting we have limited movement), and blue shows the actual line of sight calculation from there. We can see that there are valid calculations for Muran to move up and shoot over the wall by the bandit, despite not being able to walk over it, but we can't shoot through the taller wall.

While the NavMesh is strictly not the physics engine, for movement and line of sight we need to combine both pathfinding and physics calculations (ray casting) to create a path to move and shoot from. The player doesn't need to worry about the projectile missing physically (though perhaps their accuracy roll will fail), so when we actually shoot, we're not really using the physics engine at that point.

Despite our combat being turn-based, we lean heavily on the physics engine to perform calculations for colliders, rather than doing those calculations ourselves manually. We're not working on any sort of tile-based grid despite the floor being marked as such--that's just so we can quickly gauge distances in testing--so everything has to be calculated based on the geometry, and the physics engine comes with a number of optimizations that saves us run time and development time.

But that's not the whole story. Leaning on the physics engine comes with its share of problems. For instance, colliders generally only detect when they overlap. If one collider teleports from outside a collider to entirely inside in the span of a single physics frame, we'll never get notified that the colliders entered each other. If colliders are moving too quickly, it'll be just as if they were teleported. This is due to the physics engine using discrete calculations (sampling each frame), rather than continuous (interpolating the path between each frame). The latter is extremely expensive, however, and as long as we don't whip colliders around the level at high speeds or teleport them, it shouldn't be a problem.

Middle is Frame 1, left and right are Frame 2. If the colliders overlap, we're golden. If they never physically overlap, we've got problems.

Side bar: technically we can detect when a collider is contained completely inside another, but this ends up being quite expensive and we prefer to not do that if possible. Turns out, it generally isn't required.

Another issue is that eventually, between terrain, all of our interactable objects, and actors, we run the risk of having thousands of colliders in a level. While most graphics engines have optimizations to not render graphics that aren't visible on screen, physics engines generally rely on performing calculations on the entire solution. Which means we need to implement our own optimizations. Funnily enough, this includes leaning on the physics engine with a large collider (far bigger than the size of the screen) to turn on chunks of the level as we get closer so we're not running every physics object in the level all the time.

Overall, the physics engine has been extremely helpful in implementing a large number of systems. From exploration, to combat positioning, to ranged attacks, to NPC detection areas, and more. Even if you aren't using standard gravity or classical physics, the benefits a physics engine nets you can be immense. #IndieDev, #EonAltar, #GameDevelopment

Heroes of the Storm: My First MOBA Experience

I swore up and down that I wouldn't pay for a Beta experience, and luckily for me, I didn't have to. Just a week after the Founder's Pack was announced for Heroes of the Storm, I actually got into the opt-in Beta. So for most of this weekend I've been playing the game, learning about MOBAs, and actually having a pretty good time.

While I've seen League of Legend games played on occasion--it's close to impossible to avoid them given my BF played the game, and PAX always has huge screens showing them--I've never really played MOBAs before. So Heroes of the Storm was the perfect chance to get in on how the genre plays, and provide feedback for Blizzard for both bugs and experience.


Match Types

The tutorial was relatively thorough, and while it's absolutely clear the game is built on the StarCraft II engine, it still feels like its own game. You then can try solo games with AI bots as teammates against other AI bots, or Cooperative games with all five human players vs. a team of AI bots, or Quick Matches where it's full-on PvP.

Choosing Talents. How you differentiate your playstyle with a different character each game.

If you're looking for a satisfying PvE experience, this game is not it. The bots are dumb as bricks, though occasionally they get smart and start roving as a full band and roflstomping any solo players approaching them, but even as a group, human players with a modicum of coordination can take them down quite quickly. Cooperative mode is what I've been playing the most, with one of my guildies from WoW who's relatively experienced in League of Legends, and it is fun to crush the AI, I'm not sure this mode will hold my attention that long.

I've played a couple of PvP matches solo queuing, and both went extremely well. Mind you, both times I was on a team that basically roved around as a group taking down objectives and mercenary camps as a single discrete unit, while the other team rarely coordinated at all. It'll be interesting to see higher level play from both teams to see what that looks like.


Heroes

So far I've played enough games to get three characters to level 5, which is to say about 10 - 12 games each or so. And I've tried at least one game with all 6 characters currently available to me. Uther is by far one of my favourite characters. Mind you, I can play him like a roving Holy Paladin, so that's not surprising given in WoW I've played Holy since Wrath. But he can dish out a fair chunk of damage if his cooldowns are up, not to mention he has quite the stunlock build between Divine Storm and Hammer of Justice.

Compared to say, Li Li, who's also a healer, but she doesn't seem capable of dishing out nearly as much damage (though she can heal for a lot more). Uther is moderately self-sufficient, Li Li seems to really shine when she has another player with her.

But really, who can say no to Lumberjack Uther?

Hellooooo Nurse Uther

Kerrigan is also another favourite of mine. Her skills seem to have a lot of synergy where she can just prevent someone from running away if you've got good aim and good timing. There was definitely a lot of maniacal cackling when playing as her, using my skills to net Double kills on a somewhat regular basis.

Some heroes are currently bugged to the point of being ridiculously underpowered (Diablo, for one), but for the most part they've felt fairly balanced, with a few exceptions (never get into a one-on-one match with Thrall). And even those exceptions can probably be dealt with if you have a hero capable of CC. It's doubtful that anything is balanced around one-on-one encounters, that would be silly in a team game.

Gameplay

As far as the genre itself, it feels a little...simple so far. Characters aren't terribly difficult to at least get somewhat good at, and the talents don't really feel differentiating enough to make a huge difference. Some choices are difficult, but most of the time it feels like there's a right answer. You can kind of focus on a given ability to build around, but a lot of the time these feel gimmicky. And some of the talents are just downright anemic to the point of never choosing it (*cough* Conjurer's Pursuit *cough*).

Most abilities are gated by a combination of available mana and cooldown. Cooldowns are the short game, so you can't spam the same ability over and over again. Mana is the long game, forcing you to go back to your base to regenerate on occasion. I find Uther to be terribly mana inefficient, having to go back to base an awful lot, compared to Kerrigan who after the first 5 minutes I almost never have to go back for mana. The game definitely punishes you for spamming your abilities even if they're off cooldown, so depending on when objectives are up and when's a convenient time to recover, you may decide to hold off on using abilities.

It's interesting, as if I recall about League of Legends, they use getting gold and purchasing items as a way to force you to retreat back to base, versus Heroes where pretty much the only reason is to quickly regenerate mana. So a good way to keep that same ebb and flow but using a different method to do so.

The maps themselves are relatively varied, with different objectives that are all quite powerful and game changing if one team dominates them. In most of the Cooperative matches I had, the AI would beat us pretty handily in the first five minutes because newer folks ignored the objectives. However, by the second time the objectives came up, everyone would be on board and the AI wouldn't have a chance. Some maps are better than others. The Dragon Shire required you to pretty much hit all 3 lanes, whereas the Haunted Mine you could easily just focus your entire group on a single lane and be mostly fine.


User Interface

The game proper seems to be well-polished, but the interstitial UI definitely needs some work. I've logged a few bugs already, but one doozy is that sometimes the loading screen would crash my graphics driver, and I'd have to kill and reboot the client. Mind you, their rejoin logic works quite well if you have to bail and get back in early in the game. It seems to be using the StarCraft II replay feature to get the map set up correctly when you rejoin. However, if you come back like 8 minutes into the match, you're going to be in for a frustrating time waiting the 2 minutes it'll take for the replay logic to fast forward the game until you're caught up.

My graphics driver would often bail about here. However, the map synopsis was really handy.

The loading screens also need some work, as the bar doesn't tell you what's going on. It'll mysteriously stop part way through and hang for an indeterminate amount of time (I assume because it's waiting on another machine?) before restarting. A few graphical glitches within the menus as well.

The main menu UI is really confusingly laid out. To get the XP of my hero, I need to go to my player profile (rather than the hero information?), or at some point I was locked out of being able to start a game, and I never noticed it spamming info in the text box--because in-game player communication shows up in the middle of the screen. Speaking of which, there was little to no information on how to communicate with other players. A friend of mine had to tell me how to reply to a whisper.

The results screen at the end also needs a lot of work. In-game they show you stats like siege damage, hero damage, healing, so on. At the end it only shows you deaths, something that I think means killing blows, and how many mechanics you did (objectives), but even that isn't accurate. A lot of things are unaccounted for, like dealing with mercenary camps, some parts of objectives, dealing with minions, and so on. There've been plenty of games where I've been one of the most effective players because I dealt with the mechanics of the map while my teammates were dying on the front lines, but the results screen didn't reflect that at all, so it looked like I contributed little to nothing.

So overall, the game proper is probably ready for prime time from what I've seen, but all the infrastructure surrounding it is most definitely not. Not up to Blizzard standards, at the very least. So Beta is a good moniker for where they're at in development.


Free to Play, or Pay to Play?

I haven't spent a cent so far, but I think you're pretty much forced to eventually if you want to play in the Hero League (their competitive ladder). While leveling up my player profile, I've managed to net about 8,000 gold, which is enough to purchase a hero from the bottom 75% heroes expense-wise. But about 6,000 of that gold was a one-time bonus that I can never get again. It'll take about 20 - 30 days worth of Daily Quests to earn enough gold to purchase a hero (excepting the super cheap ones), and you need to own 10 heroes to play in the competitive ladder.

There are plenty of things you have to pay for, like skins (the Lumberjack Uther skin is $5), or mounts--there's a Rainbow Unicorn mount that's gorgeous. It's also $20, so screw that. Buying heroes outright is generally in the range of $8 - $12 each, though there are weekly sales that if you're patient, you can get half off.

Basically, Blizzard is currently charging a huge premium on pay-for purchases, and I'm not sure it's worth it at all. I mean, yes, the game is "Free to Play" which means somebody's subsidizing that cost, but it's so high that I can't imagine there are that many people buying into these things. On the other hand, it makes those $40 bundles look like they're 60%+ off, and I imagine that's where Blizzard is likely going to make most of their sales.

And unlike Hearthstone, where I can do enough dailies to get a pack or two of cards every day or two, Heroes doesn't have those smaller purchases to keep you going. It's pretty-all-or-nothing with the heroes themselves.


Is It Fun?

Yes. I've been enjoying myself so far. Enough that, playing with my friend, I often lose track of time and find myself four hours later realizing I should be doing something more productive (like writing a blog post). The community so far hasn't been toxic whatsoever, but I've only been in winning PvP matches, so I reserve judgement there.

I'm looking forward to purchasing my first hero soon with gold (probably Uther), and whenever the next set of free-to-play heroes rotates in, I'm hoping I'll find more fun heroes there as well. I'll have to start digging into proper PvP play soon, because unless the bots get smarter, I don't think I'm going to enjoy the Cooperative mode for much longer.
#HeroesOfTheStorm, #FirstImpression