[WoW] Raiding in Warlords: The Good, The (Maybe) Bad, The Strange

Now that Blizzard has published their raid retrospective and how it all feeds into their design decisions for WoD (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), we can finally start dissecting their big picture, from valor points to heroic 5-mans, to the raids themselves.

The Good

The greatest things that Blizzard has “discovered” were the idea of having multiple difficulties, and the idea of raid sizes not being static. I put discovered in quotation marks because, as Ion Hazzikostas even mentions, difficulty levels in video games isn’t precisely new. In fact, it’s a very old concept; but no one until now has really applied it with rigor in an MMO. Wrath of the Lich King really was the start of difficulty modes, but rolling into Warlords of Draenor we’ll have four official difficulty modes: LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic. LFR being tourist mode where you can faceroll your way through, to Mythic being the hardest of the hard.

It’s funny, because I don’t really Flex raid (which is the difficulty just above LFR today), but I love the fact that it exists. It’s great for folks who want to get into raiding but need some practice at a lower difficulty, or the folks who just want to raid as a group, but don’t really care for progression. I think adding a difficulty between stupid easy (LFR) and moderately difficult (Normal) was good, because let me tell you, Normal raiding the past two expansions has been a bit of a harsh wakeup call for a lot of raiders, especially those of us who raided 10 man in Wrath.

Non-static raid sizes, basically, the raid scaling in difficulty from 10 to 30 people and every step in between, is also amazing. No longer do I need to bench people. I can just have a core 10 people, have a few extras, and go from there. I feel like Heroic raiding will likely still favor static rosters with no bench, as having that solid core of people is still really important at higher difficulties.

The other part that I’m pretty happy with is the idea that LFR—tourist mode—won’t drop tier sets or super awesome trinkets. One of the frustrating things is being “stuck” running lower difficulty content with people who are going to yell at you for being a try-hard just so you can get those pieces. By making separate loot tables, Blizzard is divorcing LFR from the other raid difficulties. There’ll be no reason for someone raiding higher difficulties to venture into LFR, keeping two populations that are often at odds apart.

The Potentially Bad

Now, they have a potential issue here with Legendries. If they pull a Mists of Pandaria and make you run LFR 20 times just to get the random drops for it, then they’ll have undone any of the work they did to separate the two audiences. I think if they want to go this route, they’ll need to be hardcore about really disincentivizing raiders from moving down the difficulty ladder.

Which bring us to another potential issue: raid lockouts. Today, the highest and second highest difficulties lock each other out. If you’ve killed up to boss 7 in your raid, regardless of either difficulty, you couldn’t kill those bosses a second time in a different difficulty and get loot. With the new system, no difficulty will lock the others out. This brings back the issue around high-end guilds pressured to run lower difficulties to get loot to hit those World Firsts. Or not even the World First guilds, but Mythic raiding guilds.

Nobody wants to be the person who’s holding everyone else back, and since the game is largely gear-based, it creates an incentive for players to run as many difficulties as they can to get more loot. This has already happened once before in WoW’s history: Trial of the Grand Crusader. Folks would run it on 10 man normal, 10 man heroic, 25 man normal, and 25 man heroic, every week. Running the same raid 4 times a week is a bit crazy, and draining.

“But Talarian,” you may ask, “isn’t that their choice? Why should we stop people from doing that if they don’t want to?” Well, depends. I’m already on record as stating that game designers can absolutely influence the community and player behavior via game design. If Blizzard is truly concerned about high-end raider burnout, then they’ll do something to keep those raiders from running all the raids during the week. One option might be to only allow for loot from one difficulty a week.

Another interesting option is one Theck brought up ages ago; he proposes that when you defeat a boss on a specific difficulty, you get personal loot rolls for every difficulty below it, on top of the normal loot drops. Basically, you’ve proven you can beat the higher difficulty, and you don’t need to run the lower difficulty. It has some quirks around off-spec items that may need extra UI or thought.

@TheckPhD Heck, it could a Spec Bonus for Lv. 3 Barracks. The loot is put in your Garrison Loot Cache, "gathered by Followers". @WatcherDev
— Brian Packer (@thesmall001) April 30, 2014

A slight variation on the idea was brought up by Brian Packer on Twitter, where you could tie the lower difficulties to your Garrison and have followers “raid” lower difficulties for you to possibly get loot once you defeat the higher difficulty that week.

Now, to be fair, they’re probably mostly okay for later tiers. Ion is on record that Tier 17 Mythic gear will be better than Tier 18 Normal gear, so if that’s the case, later tiers in the expansion bring the number of raid difficulties with upgrades down to two, which might be just fine in the long term. The first tier is still going to stink though, short of another solution, as everyone will be starting from scratch.

@promdates @DaikatsuCTR @ArielleEJ @HamletEJ @CoffinBurier Blarg, sorry, many tweets. Yes, T17 Mythic higher item level than T18 Normal.
— Watcher (@WatcherDev) April 30, 2014

The Strange

One of the strange things about the entire system is how it interacts with Heroic 5-Mans, however. We know that Heroic 5-Mans will be decently hard. Not Cataclysm hard, mind you, but harder than they are today. And gated by Proving Grounds, as well (a silver, which isn’t terribly onerous today). But apparently LFR 6.0 loot will have a higher ilvl than 5-Man Heroics.

.@itschrysaetos 6.0 LFR ilvlis between Heroic dungeon and Normal raid, same as today.
— Watcher (@WatcherDev) April 30, 2014

The tourist mode, which is already really easy today, will have better loot than the higher difficulty, skill-gated 5-Man dungeon content. Watcher claims that it would kill LFR to make them equal because the Heroic dungeons are available day 1, but LFR is gated; wings appear week to week. But if the harder content has less rewards, nobody will do them. See: Heroic Scenarios today. I’d argue H Scenarios are more difficult than LFR, but they give pretty crappy rewards (well, they are one of those efficient sources of valor today). Don’t see too many people clamoring to do heroic scenarios anymore. But I don’t have that data, I suppose.

Which is another thing. There’s been almost no mention of scenarios in all of this. Were they a failed experiment?

Originally the Heroic 5-Mans were touted as an alternate progression path to LFR, but if the gear is worse, not much of an alternate path, that. If there’s no change, then I think between the gating, the harder difficulty, and no real rewards, they’ll be as empty as they are today, or emptier, even. The only saving grace is you can chain run Heroic 5-Mans, so when you can’t run LFR anymore that week, you might fill other slots with lesser gear. But that’s really not an alternate path anymore either, that’s just filler. We’ll see how much weaker Heroic 5-Man gear is. If it’s not significantly weaker, then it may be okay.

The Conclusion

Overall, I like the changes, or largely indifferent. I’ll be honest, I don’t raid higher than Normal today (Heroic tomorrow). I mean, we’re just starting to dip our toes into the highest difficulty in the next month, but that’s an artifact of an extremely long raid tier. I’m not sure we’ll have it in us to bang our heads against the highest difficulties for long given it’s effectively the same content we’ve been raiding for nearly 8 months already. So with that in mind it doesn’t really affect me around the higher levels of difficulties. We’re just not hardcore enough to worry about running all the lower difficulties all the time. We may dabble in them, but no more than that. It’s an interesting point from an academic perspective, though.

But more difficulties and the flexible raids of all types (barring Mythic) really are great changes that will help raiding overall in my opinion. I’ll be waiting to see how the 5-Mans play out though. I’m pretty skeptical their plan will work well. #WoW, #GameDesign, #GoodDesign, #BadDesign, #DesignExperiment

PAX East 2014: Next Generation MMO Trends Panel Recap

The other panel that I went to at PAX East was “Next Generation MMO Games: What’s Next for Multiplayer Trends?” (If you missed the first panel recap on Modernizing Fantasy RPGs, check it out here). Traditionally, Blizzard represents the best of the best of the old guard: the themepark MMO, including raiding, question, and the guided experience. The folks on the panel were from other companies, who are currently innovating in different ways as it’s become incredibly difficult to compete with the incumbent in the themepark MMO space.

The panel consisted of Ian Fisher (Director of Design at Robot Entertainment, Orcs Must Die, Hero Academy), Stephen Frost (Game Design Producer at Carbine, Wildstar), Dave Georgeson (Director of Development for EverQuest Franchise, Landmark), Kjarten Pierre Emilsson (Principal Game Designer at CCP, EVE), as well as Stephen Johnston (President of Guild Launch).

Unlike the Modernizing Fantasy RPGs panel, which was a narrative across the history of RPGs, this panel was presented as a question and answer period, with a moderator asking questions. I’ll admit to not having the time to jot down notes about who said what, unfortunately, but hopefully the responses will still be interesting.

 

What do you see as the Strongest Evolutionary Force in MMOs now? Over the next 2 years?

Right now MMOs are really lots of smaller games in a single game, with interlocking systems in order for you to care about them (i.e.: crafting is a mini-game, with ties to gathering, which all ties into combat). That will continue to be the case in the future, and expanding to more interlocked systems added on.

Finance is another strong evolutionary force. It takes an enormous amount of money to make an MMO. If you want to be able make games with a smaller team, and smaller investment, we’ll see smaller niche MMOs that do a small number of things in an MMO setting.

User generated content, creating worlds together to play in together like in Landmark and EverQuest Next will be where things go.

More games in the same universe, and interacting with each other in novel ways, being able to affect each other in different games. The emergence of affordable VR technology is interesting as well.

Server sizing is important; letting users and players interact without barriers, and making player communities and how they evolve, enabling them in the future.

What is the most effective business model for a new game launching today and why? Any new business models in the next 5 years?

Different things work for different people; how you monetize your game, and what kind of game you’re making, and how is the economic model tied into it so that you are playing something that is fun, but also fair. It’s a lot like asking what kind of car you should drive. Geography, the game itself, and the players all tie into which model to use.

Free to play really drives quality, as people won’t buy what they don’t like, but also requires volume. It does work for fast gameplay (like League of Legends), whereas a game like EVE with slower gameplay, a subscription model makes sense.

Pre-launch phase of Kickstarter style funding is certainly getting bigger, with getting people excited for the game and actually getting into the game early. MMOs, however, are the biggest, scariest thing to make. A game like Wildstar takes a lot of money, time, failure, iterating to make sure things are good. The problem with Kickstarter is you get your money, and that’s it. If you release it and it sucks, it’s basically, well, sorry about that. Kickstarter isn’t sufficient for an MMO. A lot of the people who give you the money believe $100,000 is a lot of money, and they think, “C’mon, we gave you $100,000, you’re not gonna get the game done?”

Landmark, on the other hand, the Founder Packs and the like doesn’t come even close to funding development. Founders Packs are a gate for people who are super interested in helping them make something better. The people with a trollish nature aren’t going to want to pay $100 to get in. If we were going to talk about a business model for the future, rolling out new features/content and making development interesting could be a good new business model as long as they don’t screw it up the first time.

Player created content has existed in various forms for a long time, but are we seeing a Renaissance?

Wildstar handles this by putting it in its own instance, but other people can visit. It keeps it out of the way, but other people can come visit and get benefits out of your content. It doesn’t affect the outside world as that has issues, but it can still remain social.

Emergent simulation from player content is extremely powerful. Graphics are now prohibitively expensive to continue improving, so we’ll see more people look to AI and player generated content, including social content. Minecraft, DayZ, EVE are all good examples where player-generated content is very much the game and it works well.

Landmark has proven that what players can do with tools is astounding. Giving them tools will produce amazing results. But it’s not just building things, it’s also dungeon layouts, AI, scripting, and so on. This is the future, creating a new platform, where the players are designing.

Content in EVE is very much social content, which is the way people play. It’s a like a chemical reaction that is self-sustained, and EVE created an environment that can maintain this reaction going on forever. The reaction needs to feed on energy, though, or it will die out. The energy in the reaction is the emotions of the player: things like betrayal, or caring for other players. These kinds of social dynamics can lasts for months, or years, and keep this whole thing interesting and living.

How are MOBAs changing the landscape of MMOs?

Wildstar has a lot of skill shot based combat (MOBA like). TERA, Neverwinter also exhibit this. It’s not just tab-target, hit the guy, win. MOBAs have influenced combat a bit.

All games feed into other games. You have things where MBOAs will get into MMO. If there is one thing MOBAs have proven is that it’s okay to be deep, complex, and hard to get in to. We’ve learned is that there is a market out there. We spent so many years trying to market to the lowest common denominator player, but no matter how easy I make it to play, mom still doesn’t want to play Age of Empires, so why are we spending so much money trying to get them to play?

Side quote: “I think the terminology is ‘filthy casuals’.” “Did you just call my mom a filthy casual?”

There’s still a market for casual players, but we shouldn’t be afraid to market to a community who likes that complexity. Heck, if it wasn’t for that community like in League of Legends, how would you learn to play? Or even Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress. And that’s okay.

MOBAs leveled up people’s expectation of pace and skill levels in the industry. Like WoW, LoL and DOTA brought a large number of new players into gaming and the genre, opening up more opportunities for games in all genres.

MOBAs are like an externalized single shard (server) game, fame is the emotion driving the high end, and in eSports people are trying to take down the top position, not just in a single instance of the game, but globally. You could think of this as an activity you could do in an MMO, like watching a sports event.

It would be nice if MOBAs could have more community. MMOs create a lot more downtime where people learn about one another. Maybe that downtime is not frantic fun, but it’s where you build relationships.

What is the biggest challenge facing MMOs in the next 5 years?

Funding is the biggest issue. These things are multi-hundreds of millions of dollars to make. Going to investors and saying, “This will take six to eight years, hopefully it’ll be good, and hopefully people will continually pay us money to keep making it.” It’s a really hard pitch to make. Instead we’ll see people make sub-sections of games (i.e.: dungeons, housing, trade skills) which should be independent games with connections, rather than dropping the entire thing on the players at once. If these games don’t sell well, they’ll start dying out.

It’s getting harder to get noticed with more games out there, and have low barriers to entry so people will jump around a lot. The challenge is making a good game that’s an interesting enough game to keep people around and keep people coming back.

MMOs have the unusual challenge of building games for ten to twenty year lifespans, and keeping people entertained for long, long periods of time. EverQuest just hit its 15^th birthday, and that’s a really long time to have a community for any game. It really means you have to have something really special to keep people’s attention.

Kids these days have been immersed in a virtual reality, and have been living there for a long time. Even though it’s not a 3D immersive one, it’s certainly a virtual reality they’re using on an everyday basis. Trying to understand how that generation thinks, and how they use different ways of communication and devices, how do you create an experience that can translate to that reality? Do you need to spread the game across the various means they use to communicate? Walking around with an avatar is not adapted to that kind of context, so how do you give these players agency in these kinds of worlds?

 

What do you imagine as the future for MMOs?

VR stuff is really intriguing. Where will that take us? There are a bunch of MMO concepts making it into other games, so we’ll see mutt-genres in the future.

On the other hand, games may not be that different. Games we logged into 10 years ago look pretty much like how games we log into today. Things have changed some things are better, but games haven’t fundamentally changed in the past 10 years. Content may be very different, with more simulation and more undefined sandbox, where players have most of the impact on game state.

We’ll be wearing mylar armbands, space goggles, augmented reality and be playing MMOs that way. You won’t stop playing PC games, you’ll just play them everywhere.

Hopefully there’ll be changes in the way you play, even if the tech doesn’t change. Want to make worlds that are more meaningful than real life. The impossibility of reaching towards a goal like a virtual world where you are doing meaningful things in your virtual world. Today, you go to a bar to socialize. Tomorrow, maybe you log into your virtual world, and maybe someone will give you something in that world that has actual value.

The interface is the piece that hasn’t changed in 30 years: keyboard and mouse. Why are we still pressing those buttons and clicking that mouse. The Oculus is interesting that may change the interface in the next 10 years.

Question and Answer Period

Compared to big companies, Indies can get away with less, because they’re focused on the fun. If you want to make something, try to make something no one else has made, so you don’t deal with expectations. If you’re trying to make something that someone else has made, it’s really difficult because expectations are extremely high.

How much thought is there about how much a person’s life is going to be required to play this game?

Fun is the most important part, if it’s so much fun you want to play all the time, it’s a win. As a game designer you want to make sure people can have fun in 20 minute increments, and leave it to the player as to how many chunks they want to consume.

Gone is the sense of wonder in games. Nowadays by the time a game is released there’s strategy guides, maps, tips, etc. Is there anyway to get that back?

For EQN and Landmark, we got tired of making static themepark worlds. There’s a lot of really good ones out there, but we wanted to make something different. Player created content is appealing because they’re building dungeons, and PvP areas, and areas to explore, and even if you as a player aren’t creating that content, you still get that sense of wonder because it’s all new and you aren’t getting guides for that.

A reoccurring issue in a lot of MMOs is that there’s two phases of the game: the leveling and the end-game. It ends up creating 3 problems: You have people who try to get through leveling as fast as possible to get to the end-game. You have folks who pick a class, and they may love that class at end-game, but getting through it levelling is meh. Then you have the people who love a class though leveling, but when they get to end-game, they can’t do crap. Moving forward in MMOs, do you think leveling will stop being a thing? Or is there really value in the leveling experience and how do you create that value?

Leveling is helpful because it teaches the player a lot of different and interesting things. The designer’s job is to make it not painful, but fun. You have to have something to do for everyone to play at the end, or people leave.

Player interaction and community is important, and the end-game is just what you do during that interaction time.

There doesn’t have to be two games. The objective in an MMO is to make it fun all the time. Leveling is a fine mechanic, but unfortunately it creates a race mentality where they have to get to the end and win, but then they lose because it’s not the game they wanted, or there are people there who are complete uber gods and it’s impossible to compete with them. Leveling is not required, but you have to have an open mind.

Eve is interesting in that things you do on day 2 is still useful in some capacity 6 years later. You can fly entry-level ships, and they have a role in later events, even if you’re flying a battlecruiser later.

When you make a new game, where do you expect players to come from? Migrating from other MMOs, or RPG players?

All over the place, basically. Because it’s a massive game with so many different things, you have to have all sorts of stuff. But if you don’t like MMOs, you still probably won’t like Wildstar, for example.

A lot of crossover between MMOs, with mass migrations between MMOs. All depends on the people you play with.

It used to be our demographic was males aged 18 to 25. Then we got older, the MMO demographic got older, wiser, international. When you’re interacting with someone online, you don’t know where they live, what their race is, what their religion is (unless they tell you), in general you’re judging people by their actions, not who they are or where they’re from. Today, when asked what our demographic is, we don’t have one. It’s everyone.

It was extremely interesting to hear these industry veterans talk about where they think things are headed, and I really appreciated the diversity of MMO-types the designers represented (themepark, experiential, sandbox), as it gave us some pretty different answers.

#PAX, #GameDesign, #GoodDesign

PAX East 2014: Modernizing Fantasy RPGs Panel Recap

One of the panels I went to at PAX East was one dubbed, “Modernizing Fantasy [Pen and Paper] RPGs.” It was an interesting look at some of the history behind Pen and Paper RPGs, what concepts we think we should keep, and the way forward. It was run by industry veterans Luke Crane (Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, Torchbearer), Thor Olavsrud (Torchbearer) and Adam Koebel (Dungeon World).

When people look at modern Fantasy RPGs these days, you think dark, gritty settings and expansive rulesets, but it clearly wasn’t always the case. In the early days, the sophistication of current role playing games just wasn’t there. After Gary Gygax released D&D to the masses, the first immediate result was revulsion from some sectors of nerdy fandoms. Turns out the whole idea of hating on D&D and what it stood for isn’t remotely new. So out came Chivalry & Sorcery in 1977, a game aimed at realism but ended up with a horrible ruleset.

Most early RPGs had cover art like this. The industry was not precisely in a place to afford high-quality art.

 

Shortly after (1978) came Runequest, a game which was level-less, class-less, but entirely skill-based (oh, and it had spell points). Another shining example of those crazy ideas that you might have, and oh, someone already thought of it in the first 5 years of the entire genre. However, what was really important about Runequest was it was the first example of a game that tied rules and setting together. Rather than trying to be just a generic dungeon crawl (D&D), Runequest took the setting and translated it to rules that made sense to convey that setting.

Move forward to 1985, and we have a game called Pendragon. The designers behind this game went the opposite direction of Chivalry & Sorcery. “Fuck realism,” was the precise term used, I believe. You’re a Knight in King Arthur’s court, where does realism come into play? The game featured personality traits, passions, historical and mythological sources, and a deep metagame. But the game was laser-focused: you could be a Knight, or another kind of Knight. The game promised a very specific game, and delivered by not trying to be everything to anyone.

 

Compare that to Vampire: The Masquerade, released in 1991. The game setting proposes a game where you could expect brooding political drama and high urban fantasy intrigue between vampire clans, but in actuality delivered a superhero game, where you walk into a room and gun down or fist fight all the baddies. Basically, the setting and the rules delivered discordant games.

Then in 1999 Sorcerer was released—a game which reached back to source material of the past, and directly addressed emotional content. The game was all about atmosphere: what makes people do bad things? And so the rules provided a structure and impetus for the players do bad things and experience the fallout from that.

Of course, any panel wouldn’t be complete without the panelists plugging their own products. Burning Wheel was brought up as a game that emphasized player priorities and dramatic play over exploration, loot, and murder. Dungeon World was the exact opposite, being all about said exploration, loot, and murder, trying to bring back that feeling you had playing D&D when you were 12.

So what, in our panelists’ opinions, were the hallmarks of great modern fantasy RPGSs?

First is Task vs. Conflict Resolution. The ability to address success, but also “fail forward,” that is, failure doesn’t necessary mean your game stops. A trivial example of a task would be to pick a lock. Clear skill roll, but failure means you’re stuck. However, conflict resolution might be to gain entry to the chest before the guards appear. Maybe you get into the chest, maybe you don’t. Maybe you do it before the guards appear, or maybe you get in just as they’re rounding the corner. Conflict resolution gives you options as a party and DM to move the game and story forward. The rules should encourage and enforce this.

Second, a comprehensive system that is focused. You want more than just magic and combat to allow for situations outside the generic dungeon crawl (assuming you want that), but the rules should be laser-tight and not trying to be everything (i.e.: GURPS), as trying to be everything to everyone inevitably fails, and ends up with far more complexity than is useful.

Third, a clear and present procedure; rules text that contains the entire game rather than just giving the class descriptions and combat tables and hoping you have a friend who can teach you. Many games are much better about this these days, and rules text that also teaches you how to play is the ultimate goal here.

Fourth, player agency. If your GM is being a shit, players can go to the Player Agency to file a complaint. No, actually, this is talking about persistence of character, player priorities, focus of action on the character story rather than just the GM binging his module and driving everything. An interesting aside to this is what the panelists referred to as the “Nuremburg Defense of Gaming,” an essay found in the Vampire source book. Player agency is well and great, but being a dick to your fellow players just because, “that’s what my character would do,” is a terrible way to play what amounts to a cooperative game. That’s not to say there are not ways to play evil characters and parties, but it’s a tricky balance that most players are incapable of maintaining without the game devolving into useless party self-immolation.

Fifth, narrative. Formally acknowledging “story” and drama, and producing the capability to either deliver a complete story or episode in a single session, or a complex interwoven plot over many sessions. An interesting point brought up was that there’s a myth in gaming that the only game worth playing is the two year campaign with all the same players in the same game and the same story and everything is ruined if someone leaves. One-shots and other formats can be equally as fun and valid.

Early fantasy women were there to be enslaved or ensorcelled. Nowadays? I wouldn't want to tangle with this Pathfinder Paladin. She's pretty badass. The boob armour is still a bit odd (studies show that's just going to get a sword through her sternum), but companies are getting better.

 

Once we covered all of the above, the panelists covered some odds and ends and went into some miscellaneous points as well as answering questions.

• Fantasy has a bad rap. It’s seen as puerile, and with good reason given some of the awful cover art (especially from the 90s). But it is pretty cool that we’re airing our dirty laundry and getting better at representation of anyone who isn’t just the straight male.

• The RPG industry is going through a bit of an old school Renaissance, where games with really small but focused rulesets to convey a specific setting/feeling are coming back into vogue.

• Roleplaying has exploded over the past decade. All sorts of ages and people playing these days.

• Video games and RPGs have a bit of a cyclical relationship, where each borrows from the other. Board games were a good impetus for creating procedural rules in games.

• A game’s rules can set the tone for interpersonal dynamics, but cannot fix someone acting in bad faith. Your only recourse is to get them to change their behavior or kick them from your group.

• A game should have enough rules to be a good game. If you’re trying to experiment with the smallest number of rules, you probably won’t end up with a good game.

• The rules are the setting. The intent of the mechanics should absolutely change with the setting. A sword fight in a medieval game can be quite in-depth about scoring hits, but in science fiction you’ll just cut them in half because SPACE SWORD. As such, mechanics can imply things about the setting.

• Game rules are modifying the behavior of the people at the table. If the players are constantly making poor decisions, you need to change the rules to incentivize the right decisions.

• Things like ability scores are not necessarily obsolete. They create a boundary and comparison for characters. If you need to know if you’re stronger than the orc you are fighting, it’s an important statistic. If you’re making a dating game, it probably doesn’t matter if you’re stronger than your date.

• When a player is at a loss as to what to do, the first thing they do is look at their character sheet to determine what options they have, making the character sheet an extremely important way to convey information and options.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting panel. Definitely lots of good information that can apply outside the Pen and Paper RPG genre, as well.

#PAX, #GameDesign, #GoodDesign, #BadDesign

Complexity and Depth, or Why WoW Devs are Axing Abilities

A topic that pops up again and again, especially in World of Warcraft expansion discussions, is the twin ideas of complexity and depth. The two definitely often have a correlation, but their relationship isn’t precisely simple. When you hear people talk about things like modifying talent trees, or pruning the number of abilities, the devs suggest they are removing unnecessary complexity, and your random smattering of forumites complain about the devs dumbing down the game.

Before we can really dig into complexity and depth, it’s important to know what we’re talking about. Complexity, when boiled down to its essence, is the idea of how many “rules,” or things you have to know to play the game. Depth is the possibility space enabled by the game’s rules, or how many meaningful choices can you make playing the game?

A game like Tic-Tac-Toe has both low complexity (the rules are extremely simple), and low depth. The possible moves afforded by the game are extremely low, and frankly an eight year old can master the game pretty quickly. Compare that to the canonical example of the game “Go” as a game with low complexity, but enormous depth. The entire ruleset is small enough that you can learn how to play Go in 5 minutes, but to master the game can take many hundreds of hours of play.

Go (picture stolen from Wikipedia)

 

An example of the other end of the spectrum would be The Legend of Zelda series. The game is pretty complex when you consider the number of tools like the boomerang, bombs, bow and arrow, potions, magic, bottles, and so on, as well as the concepts of health, magic power, inventory space, and then all of the enemies, bosses, temples, etc. And yet, there is generally only one way to solve each temple, and one way to kill each boss. A lot of complexity, but a small possibility space.

Game designers actually have a name for the idea of low-complexity, high-depth ruleset, which is to say such a game would be “elegant.” But the interesting thing about that concept is that it’s all relative. It’s quite possible to have a complex game with a much greater possibility space. Think of StarCraft, which is definitely a lot more complicated than Go, but has an immense depth, as evidenced by that fact that 10 years after the game was released, people were still demonstrating new strategies, counters, and tactics. So perhaps a better definition for elegance would be a high ratio of depth to complexity.

Elegance is often considered the Holy Grail, or the Theory of everything, of game design. But why is that? The thing to keep in mind is that complexity unto itself is neither bad nor good. There are plenty of games out there that are extremely complex but still are absolutely a blast to play, like the Civilization series. There’s something to be said about the joy of wrapping your head around a giant rule space and managing to make something of it. And like the StarCraft example before, just because a game has a complicated ruleset doesn’t mean that said game isn’t elegant.

However, complexity brings with it a number of issues with it that make game design more difficult than it often should or needs to be.

The first problem is a restricting ruleset. Just because something is complicated doesn’t mean it gives rise to a large possibility space. A trivial example would be you have to race from point A to point B, but you can only turn left or move forward. More rules, but now you’re restricted in what you can do, so therefore your possibility space is smaller. Now, you can introduce more rules like that to make the problem more interesting to solve immediately, but you’re trading immediate difficulties for long-term depth. A restricting ruleset, like anything else in design, isn’t inherently bad or good. But the issue is that the more rules you have, and the more they intersect, the more likely you’re going to accidentally introduce rules which restrict the possibility space in a way you didn’t foresee and is undesirable.

Which leads into the second problem, which is obfuscation. Just because you have complexity doesn’t mean you have depth, and even worse, the complexity may be disguising something trivial as depth. The perfect example of this would be the talent trees in World of Warcraft circa Wrath of the Lich King. As you leveled, you got points to put into the trees, but as there were very few truly mutually exclusive choices, and a few traps that you’d be silly to put points into, it wasn’t really that deep of a system. When you looked at all the possibilities after discarding the traps, it was a really small number of talent trees per class specialization. However, because it was presented in a complex way, it quite successfully hid the fact that it was complex without really adding anything substantial to gameplay. If 99% of your players make the same choice, then the choice isn’t meaningful and therefore is false depth.

Phenomenal cosmic complexity, itty bitty possibility space.

 

The third problem with complexity is it inherently breeds inaccessibility. The more complicated your game, the steeper and longer the learning curve your game will have. While many folks have the patience and desire to learn a complex ruleset like the kind you can find in a game like Galactic Civilizations II, so many more people do not. So by reducing complexity you increase accessibility, and with it broaden the pool of players with the ability and want to learn your game, which is just good business.

Complexity brings with it a load of issues, and it is possible to create rulesets that are simple but provide an immense possibility space, hence why many game designers believe that elegant design is the best design. Accessible, obvious at first glance but full of nuance and possibility, easy to learn but difficult to master, and so on. Complexity isn’t bad, but complexity for its own sake can actively harm your game. It’s a tough balance to achieve.

So when we apply that to what the developers are trying to do with paring down the number of abilities on our action bars, we have a game that is extremely complex, and each class within the game is their own sub-game, pitted against bosses which each have slightly different rulesets each. Add to that things like buffs, consumables, interacting with other players in your group or raid, professions, quests, etc. not to mention the fact that combat is in real-time rather than turn-based, and you have a game that is quite inaccessible, but not necessarily that deep, either.
 

Randomly found a UI image on the Internet. This is not the face of an accessible game.

 

To use an example, Hunter’s Mark. Ignoring the iconic aspect to the ability, in PvE it really only increases the damage of Hunters against the target, and it’s auto-applied by a number of your abilities, so you aren’t really thinking about it. It’s an ability that adds unnecessary complexity but absolutely no depth, so it’s ripe for the chopping block and the 5% damage boost just baked into the class. But if you’re a player digging through abilities, it’s something that you notice in your spellbook, and have to think about on the fly. Nothing substantial about your rotation changes with its removal.

  

At the end of the day, Blizzard’s developers are trying to increase accessibility and depth, and reduce complexity. On the surface it looks like they’re “dumbing the game down,” but if the things that are being removed or changed had little to no actual consequences to playing the game itself, then are they really dumbing it down, or are they just cleaning up the cruft that’s accumulated over the years and making things a little clearer? And why wouldn’t that be a good thing?

And if all of that was tl;dr, then go watch this video. They do a pretty good job of explaining the concepts:

 

#GoodDesign, #WoW, #DesignExperiments, #WarlordsOfDraenor

A Landmark Occasion

If you haven’t heard of Landmark, it’s a new MMO by the Everquest Next folks. At its core, it’s effectively Minecraft the MMO, but boiling it down to that really does the game a complete disservice. A friend of mine gave me a Closed Beta key, and I played around for a good 15 hours or so over the past few days.

First, the developers are advertising this stage of development as a beta, but in reality it’s more of a late alpha. They’re absolutely nowhere near feature complete, missing a few basic things like caverns, water (static, let alone dynamic), health, combat, real crafting, and so on. Actually, the developers are pretty freaking awesome in that they have a blueprint for what they want to achieve in this stage of development, taking the transparent development cycle to the extreme. It’s a fascinating window into their thoughts as a team. It’s a minor quibble in the end, beta versus alpha, but it is a difference of expectations I had given the term “closed beta”.

 

So what can you do? Explore; harvest trees, plants, and minerals; perform really basic crafting; and build stuff. When I entered the game, after creating a quick character, I ran off to do things!

I made a decision early on not to rely on outside information if I could, because exploring is quite fun. After about three hours of mindlessly wandering, mining copper and chopping down trees, I had staked out a spot and realized…I couldn’t build. I needed to claim it! Which required building a claim flag as far as I could tell from the map UI. Of course, I didn’t know how to build anything, but I figured there might be something by the entry point, and lo, there were basic crafting stations.

But to make a Claim Flag, I needed Elemental Iron, which meant I needed a better pick than my stone pick. After making a copper pick, I ran off to find me some iron. After about 5 hours total playing, I had finally crafted a Claim Flag. When the developers mentioned on the closed beta intro video that, “this wasn’t a race,” they weren’t joking. It seems a little bit ridiculous that it took me that long to be able to actually put down roots somewhere. It’ll be especially vexing later once you can die.

Look at those pretty voxels! LOOK AT THEM!

One of the first things I noticed when mining things was how natural the voxel system felt. Don’t underestimate the feeling of chipping away chunks of earth and minerals, rather than breaking blocks: I still haven’t tired of the mechanic, it is awesome! It does lead to some interesting floating artifacts sometimes if you chip away at either side of a voxel, but it generally didn’t hinder me at all.

What did hinder me was the camera system, however. When you’re inside a hole you’ve dug out, your camera goes right through the wall with great ease, making it impossible to see anything at all. I found that the only recourse was to be in first-person mode when mining. Over-the-shoulder failed to be useful underground pretty well entirely.

Anywho, I went and found a spot to place my Claim Flag, in a nice pretty tropical forest valley. Most folks seem to place theirs on top of a hill or mountain, but like the hermit I am, I found a quiet, secluded spot way off in the middle of nowhere to stake my claim.

You can actually claim more land around the initial claim by crafting a different type of claim flag, but I certainly didn't need it yet.

 

Once I had put down my claim, I started clearing stuff out. Trees, rocks, and so on. I even laid out a stone foundation for the house I wanted to build. Once you’re in your claim area, you can’t mine or chop trees. Instead you use the building tools. If you want to get rid of a tree or a rock, you can just right-click and select “Delete” and bam, no more tree or rock, which is super handy. Unless that tree or rock rests partially outside your claim space, in which case nothing works. You can’t harvest it outside your claim, and you can’t delete it inside your claim. Also annoying, if a large tree has branches that rest inside your claimed area, you still can harvest it. Minor known issues, but interesting nonetheless. Really, just clear out the space before making your claim so you don’t need to worry about it.

After making everything neat and organized, I realized that I didn’t have any crafting stations to make props, or smelt ore, or anything really. So back to the portal I went to make a Forge. I also required a Tinkerer’s Workshop, and an Alchemist Station, too. But each of those required higher level materials than what I had.

I could mine Copper, Tin, and Iron, but I needed Silver and Tungsten as well. I also needed higher-level wood, which required a higher-level axe. So back to resource gathering I went. To upgrade my pick, I needed a better axe to get the wood. To upgrade my axe, I needed a better pick to get the minerals. The upgrade path alternates between the two: pick, axe, pick, axe, and so on. It feels good, and natural. However, like everything in this game, it takes an inordinate amount of time to get the resources needed to upgrade my tools, and make the crafting stations I needed. After about 12 hours, I finally had the resources I needed to have the crafting stations and building tools I had to have to build cool things.

If your crafting interface looks like this, you're stalling the game industry using a 15+ year old mechanic.

 

A slight aside, they are working on Crafting 2.0 (as they put it), but like every other MMO, “crafting” currently consists of having the ingredients, pressing a button, and waiting. There is literally no good reason to have that as a mechanic, other than that’s how it’s always been. WoW does it too, and it irks me greatly. If you want it to be time limited, then make the time count for something! Make it take 6 hours to smelt that iron. Or better yet, make it take 0 seconds, just have it happen when you press the button. There’s no gameplay here, it’s just tradition.

When you look how Minecraft does it, that’s where time can make a difference. When you’re making 64 wood sticks, it just happens. When you have to smelt 64 bars of iron, it takes time, and the limitation isn’t just time, its inventory space as well. Unless you build an automated smelter, of course! The trick for Minecraft, however, is that you can do other things during that time period.

FFXIV does away with all of this, and makes crafting like combat, which is far more engaging and fun in my mind, but not really necessary.

Be bold, SoE developers! Don’t do something just because it’s always been done. Make it better, or cut it!

Crafting stations in a very pretty stone room. I think the floor is some sort of gemstone or metal. Also note that you can give someone's claim a thumb's up if you like it, and folks can see how many people have done so.

 

Once of the cool things about exploring and looking for resources is getting to see other player creations. I’ll be the first to admit my creativity is severely lacking when it comes to architecture, not to mention my patience. What other players have done is absolutely astonishing. In a desert biome, I ran into a desert palace under construction, and further back another player had built a statue in embedded in a pyramid in the side of a mountain.

The "stained-glass" windows are raw metal I believe. You can see the pyramid in the background.

The statue is awesome, and there's an entire set of rooms and such inside the pyramid as well.

 

I wouldn’t even know where to start on that.

But! I had been gathering, exploring, and digging through menus long enough! The time had come to finish my house. Or well, start it.

And this is where Landmark really shines. Ignoring the fact that it took me nearly 12 hours to get the materials to create the building tools, Landmark absolutely will change the way sandbox building games will be made in the future.

The building UI really, really shines. Landmark at its best is building things.

 

While inside your claimed area, you get to use your building tools. You start with the basic tools of add, delete, and heal. Add and delete either create a cube of stuff, or remove a cube of stuff. You can technically change the shape from a cube to a slope, a sphere, or a number of other shapes, and using the menu on the left, you can also change the material.

Now, if you had to place walls and such tiny cube by tiny cube, it’d take you forever to get anywhere. In the screenshot above, I was using the selection tool. You select some voxels (the white ones on the right), hit Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, and bam! You have that exact shape and material to place (assuming you have enough materials in your inventory to do so. Cut and paste! Seriously, amazing!

The placement controls are pretty clever as well. In the image above you can see the axis I’m controlling is the vertical axis. Using the mouse scroll wheel, I can slide the placement cursor along that axis. And as the instructions indicate, I can switch axes, and I can also switch to rotation. I’m completely floored by these controls and just how well they work. My only complaint is that there is no strafing yet, so moving my character while trying to see if my placement is correct is incredibly difficult.

Now, in the screenshot above I’m clearly placing more of the wall, but I didn’t realize at the time that I could just make a selection using the selection tool and fill it with a material of my choice. So while it took me an hour to make the shell of the house, really, if I were to do it again now with the selection tool it’d likely take me 5 minutes.

Other tools you get are a line tool (which I have yet to use successfully), a smoothing tool to make your voxels mush together all pretty, and a fill tool (which I have also yet to use successfully).

But of course, since we have a fully-functioning voxel rendering system, all sorts of interesting emergent building techniques have surfaced, like inlaid patterns, and zero-volume voxels. The techniques used to generate some of these structures is crazy, and apparently the developers didn’t even have an inkling of many of these techniques. They’ve hit upon the holy grail of emergent game play.

 

Eventually, when they complete the ability to save off templates of your work and sell them to other players, I’m fully expecting to purchase awesome windows, doors, etc. so I don’t need to spend an hour just putting together railings, for example. But that will also be an amazing game changer as far as the industry is concerned.

After building the shell of my house, I spent a little time making stairs to it, and used my crafting stations to build props like lights and furniture. So now I have a cozy little (unfinished) house:

My gravel garden path all lit up, leading to my front steps.

The inside is simple, but having actual props like tables, chairs, chandeliers make a world of difference compared to Minecraft.

Granted, what I’ve thrown together pales in comparison to what others are capable of, but it was still a tonne of fun. Seriously, the building aspect of this game is the best, bar none. Which is unfortunate that it’s saddled with some uninspiring, lengthy gameplay surrounding resource collection and “crafting”. If this were an actual beta, I’d write the game off and say, well, it was fun for a bit, but given that it’s really an alpha disguised as a beta and we have more features coming down the pipe, I’ll be interested in seeing what other things they add.

Overall, the systems that exist are quite polished and relatively bug free. The client bailed twice, and I had to kill it once, which for 15 hours of play total is actually really good for a beta in my mind. I fell through the world once by using the add tool on top of me (makes me think that geometry calculation is done at the edges of materials and it figured I was “under” the earth rather than above). And of course the camera is extremely wonky. Everything else can be charted up to either missing or incomplete features.

Much of what Landmark is doing is pushing the envelope in the Minecraft-y genre, and I’m extremely impressed by what they have so far. I cannot wait to see what else they do. And I can’t wait to see what other creations players make, because the screenshot below from the alpha tells me that what players can do in Landmark is only limited by imagination and time.

I don't even... the level of detail is freaking fantastic!

#BadDesign, #Building, #FirstImpression, #GoodDesign, #Landmark