Where I’ve Gone

Some people have wondered where I’ve gone. The answer is simple: my gang of real life friends has opted to move on to WoW for our Friday night games. Although I still enjoy WAR, I have to admit my interest has tapered off a bit. A couple others would probably like to stay too. But we move as a pack and the majority of us are clearly restless with WAR.

 

Why are we moving on? Why now with new content around the corner? The truth is that the new content will not mean all that much to most of my friends. The majority of us never made it to 40 with our extremely casual play style.

 

So what was it then?

 

I think the first point to make is that we played the game regularly for nearly nine months (or so). By the standards of most PC games that’s a pretty long time.  As I mentioned in another post, some of the gang are fairly new MMO players. I think it’s a testament to War that they have become hooked on the genre. Clearly WAR did quite a bit right.

 

But still, it has not been as “sticky” as some other MMOs we have played. Our first trip through WoW, for example, lasted for about 2 years. I think the difference here comes down to the dungeons and other opportunities for small group play. The dungeons in WAR – those few that exist – seem to me to be pale imitations of the WoW dungeons. They are fun for a bit. But they are clearly meant as an occasional diversion to RvR.

 

But what about RvR. Well, in a prior post here that got a lot of attention, I discussed certain features of RvR that made those combats play out largely the same way from territory to territory. Although Mythic has made many changes and improvements they have still not really altered the factors that contribute the repetitious feeling in RvR. Don’t get me wrong: RvR was fun. Heck, it held our attention for several months. But ultimately, we just got sick of it.

 

Like so many other bloggers who have recently left the game, I look forward to trying it out again sometime down the road. Best of luck to all of your still playing the game. I look forward to reading about its continued improvements on the remaining WAR blogs.

Smaller Breasts Now Possible for Witch Elves

It looks like you’ll have some new options for your Witch Elf. At least according to the Onion

 

“The buzz at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show was all about a new breakthrough in the field of high-resolution 3-D graphics that has made it possible to render average-sized breasts on female video game characters.”

 

I guess this is great news for Witch Elves than now can probably jog a bit more. Faster travel times!

Now if they can only come up with some new tech to make weapons scaled to the character models we’d be in good shape.

Set Me Straight on Bastion Stair

We took a shot at the Bastion Stairs last weekend. This is the dungeon that is meant to be next in the progression from Mount Gunbad. Like Gunbad it is visually impressive. And like Gunbad it was a bit frustrating.

 

We chose the path that we perceived as the lowbie road.  There was a helpful mob standing around at front that was around level 33. This poor sap served as a signpost: “newbies this way.”

 

The path started unremarkably. There were packs of beastmen standing around with a smattering of boars. Killing them garnered influence and also advanced a PQ tracker. Eventually bosses spawned. You know the drill.

 

I can’t say that there was anything particularly impressive with the initial bosses: you had a hard hitting one, a soft hitting one that summoned and a pair of bosses that seemed to be a DPSer and a tank. The strategies for each seemed straightforward.

 

Things changed in the arena, though. That arena was a massive battle arena with a series of challengers that were triggered by the PQ. The final challenger was a massive chaos beast. This zone had quite a bit more flavor and woke us up a bit.

 

We had little difficulty up to the final boss. But at that boss we wiped quickly and painfully. In fact, we were destroyed so quickly that we wondered if we had done something wrong – challenged a raid boss, for example.

 

The websites seem to suggest that this boss can be taken out by five man teams. But considering how quickly our tank died, I find this a bit hard to believe. What level do you need to be to complete this wing? Anyone have any suggestions?

“WoW Pod” Satire Hits Too Close to Home

 

There are times when satire gets a little too close to home. I think this is probably one of those times.

 

 

 

 

Forget a “man cave” what I really need is a “WoW pod.” As this website helpful explains:

 

“The WOW Pod is an immersive architectural solution for the advanced WOW (World of Warcraft) player that provides and anticipates all life needs. Inside, the gamer finds him/herself comfortable seated in front of the computer screen with easy-to-reach water, pre-packaged food, and a toilet conveniently placed underneath his/her custom-built throne”

 

They have actually built such a thing (although its currently in an art museum and not available down at Gamestop. This is lots of yucks for me, but I have a feeling my wife would give me one of those “doctor, its time to pull the plug” looks of hers.

 

Story Can Kill the Grind

When Age of Conan started it took a half-baked notion and accidentally made it great. When the game was in development, Funcom planned for players to play the game solo for the first 20 levels. Of course, the game’s early promotion met with a huge outcry on the interwebs. “What was the point of playing an MMO”, the fans cried, “if you can’t play with your friends?” The fans were right. MMO should be multiplayer. But what was Funcom to do with all of this 1-20 solo content?

 

The solution was a breakthrough that is rarely talked about in MMO circles. The developers kept the solo content and created a “night time” mode for the game. During the “night time” players could enter an instance to complete solo quests that required their focused attention. These quests had spoken dialog complete with dialog trees and long chained quests. In other words, they included all the story elements that players love from games like Fallout 3 and Knight of the Old Republic.

 

During the daytime, players entered a non-instanced version of the same location complete with a glut of standard kill quests that we associate with normal MMOs. While the daytime was a bit generic, the quests you did in the night time gave it a greater resonance than it would have had on its own.

 

The beauty of this system was that you could toggle back and forth at will. When you friends were on you switch to daytime, but before they logged on you could play at night. In effect Funcom had accidentally married the depth and story of a single player MMO with the expansiveness and spontaneity of an MMO.

 

Or at least they would have if they had a better grasp on what they had accomplished.

 

But the problem was that this invention was a marriage of convenience rather than an intended feature of the game. The designers never really planned for the “night time” to be an ongoing feature. It was originally really just a training mode.

 

As a result, when you hit level 20 the “night time” content suddenly vanished. Sadly, all you were left with was a sub-par traditional MMO experience. The initial reviews of the game (that only focused on the first 20 levels) were glowing. But players like me that played past level 20 felt as if they had been fooled by a bait and switch.

 

But I was thinking of Age of Conan the other day while I played Fallout 3. Fallout 3 is a single player RPG with an incredible depth and story. The game has a environment that is so visceral that it leaves me feeling physically grungy after I play it. It effects my mood too. The desolate landscapes leave me feeling lonely. I have never played anything like it.

 

But as much as I love Fallout 3, it is missing the extra dimension that I love about MMOs; my friends.

 

But I wonder if the new crop of MMOs couldn’t learn something from Fallout 3 and maybe even Conan. In Fallout, you have much fewer quests than in an MMO. And each quest comes with much more build up in terms of story and is much better reinforced by the characters and setting. Instead of doing hundreds of quests between levels 1 to 10, you do maybe a dozen or so. But each quest is better rewarded and more time consuming. As a result, you end up caring about each one quite a bit more.

 

I have been told that the early MMOs like Ultima and Everquest originally had no quests at all. Instead you just went out into the world and killed things. It wasn’t until much later that Everquest began to add quests which were presented almost like Easter eggs – requiring the player to type in a specific password to even find them. Since they were added into the game after it was designed, ironically “quests” were always just an add on feature for “Everquest.” The strange part is that MMOs have continued to treat quests the same way even when they were included in the game from the beginning. In a sense they feel like merely an adjunct to the xp grinding. In contrast, games like Fallout 3 feel like the grinding is just somehow in furtherance of the story.

 

The lesson from Fallout is: when you care about the story, you are never grinding no matter how much killing takes place.

 

One of the surprises about Fallout 3 was how slowly I leveled and yet how little I cared about that. I would estimate that it took me about five times as long to level from 1 to 10 as it did in WoW or WAR. But it wasn’t a concern. In fact, the leveling sometimes seems like a distraction from what I really cared about – being in the world and advancing the story. Likewise, all the killing that I accomplished never felt old because I was always interested in what lay ahead.

 

Having fewer quests meant that I could focus on the storyline of each one and what they meant to my character. In this way I came to actually care about the NPCs and their little problems. It didn’t hurt that the quests were cleverly written with plenty of surprises and twists along the way.

 

So how can you do this sort of thing in an MMO? I think the Conan accidentally points the way. As games are improved, developers should consider adding a “night time” mode – in effect a solo mode – that will help advance the story. If the stories are good enough it will add interest to what is happening in the non-instanced world as well.

 

MMO developers need to keep players hooked for a long as possible. This motivation is often made very plain in the crude way that these games just pile tasks upon your back. I think the hope is that the more things you have to do the less bored you will be.

 

But quite often the opposite happens. With so many tasks, you inevitable forget the purpose or significance of the tasks and all you are left with is the sense Sisyphean labor. That’s when grinding sets in. And grinding kills these kind of games.

 

I would challenge game designers to try to retain players the old fashioned-way: with a good story. Focus on making less quests but make each quest supported by interesting NPCs and ideally complimented with character building features like voice acting.

 

Here’s my proposal: build me a world that I care about and I promise that you can trap me in it for as long as you can spin a good story.

 

What do you think?

Shouldn’t MMOs end?

A few nights ago I watched the “Neverending Story” with my kids. The movie was much less interesting then when I saw it in the theaters all those years ago. The metaphor was heavy handed and I think even my kids felt a bit impatient with all of it. But the point of this post is not a movie review.  I mention is because the Neverending Story made me consider the use of stories in MMOs and popular culture.

 

If you haven’t seen the movie – and frankly if you are over the age of 9 there is no reason that you should – it follows the adventures of Bastian who finds a book which he reads and by reading becomes the protagonist of. In the book, a hero called Atreyu is called upon to undertake a quest and you soon come to see Atreyu as Bastian’s avatar – both literally and in an MMO sense as well. Atreyu fights against an enemy called the “Nothing” and in the movie’s heavy-handed fashion you come to see that the “Nothing” is really the death of imagination. Eventually Bastion earns his mount and overcomes the “Nothing” by using the power of his imagination to remake the world of the book and even bring its fantastic creatures to earth.

 

The title refers to the idea that when you use your imagination no story will ever need to end. I suppose that’s a great lesson for children. But is it really the correct one?

 

As MMO players we have embarked on our own Neverending story, quite literally. And its clear why a story with no end has appeal. Like Bastion you are invited to live in the mythological world as long as you can stomach it. You can battle the “Nothing” forever if you so chose. As most people are aware, MMOs by design never end — they just fade way. As you progress in level your foward momentum beomes slower and slower. Like Xeno’s paradox, it never stops but fades so that everyone just chooses a point to quite when they can’t take it anymore. Theoretically you could continue to  play forever until your character’s progression starts to become measured on a geologic time scale.

 

So the ‘neverending story’ is ultimately a trap.

 

The problem with all of that is that stories without end aren’t really stories at all.  The appeal of a story is that it is not real life. In real life there are no clear antagonists. There are no chapter points. No climax. Stories are meant to be a relief from that. There are meant to pair down the perpetuity of your existence into a digestible and understandable slice. But the story of the MMO just goes on – and if you stop logging in, it goes on without you. There is never a summing up or a place that it is all leading.

 

You might think that MMOs would eventually adopt a more traditional story structure. But I think that the reverse has occurred. I think that MMOs have actually begun to change the way that stories are being told in other popular entertainment.  Exhibit one is the popularity of the endlessly serialized comic book movie. Marvel entertainment has even taken it to the next step where all of their movies interconnect and each one is essentially a serial of the other in a shared universe. Sound familiar? Or how about the shared universe novels such as the Harry Potter series? Even though the story of Potter has ended the author has vowed to continue writing novels in the same universe with other protagonists. I guess Rowling is an alt-o-holic.

 

Sure serialized entertainment is nothing new. But has it ever dominated mass media as it does now? You can wonder and cause and effect but there is no question that the rise of the MMO has come at a time when entertainment in general has begun to really embrace the idea of the neverending story.

 

But ultimately to me the neverending story is not a satisfying one. Do I really want to be on a fictitious journey without an end. Can there be any point to it all? It’s bad enough that real life can occur without the guarantee of a satisfying conclusion, do I really want that for my entertainment as well?

 

What do you think? Should MMOs have an ending?

Gunbad Completed: Well, Mostly

I have had two Gunbad trips since my last post here. Two weeks ago, we tackled the left side. I didn’t write much about it because we cheated – in a sense, anyway. Our group has a balanced group of characters that were roughly rank 30 (two tanks, two healers, the rest DPS). This was the same group that had finished the right path.

We had been trying the left path several times to no effect. On each occasion we’d wipe on the Plaguebearers that I now know are about halfway through the path. The strange thing is that they are much harder than the mobs that come before or after them.

Once again we wiped. Only this time we got very pissed. It finally prompted us to bring in two level 40 alts and plow past them. We quickly finished the whole path, but, as I said, we cheated. Not much more to report.

Last Friday, we took a shot at the middle path. This one starts with the usual assortment of night goblins and their pets. Eventually you have the fight spiders. Then, past the spiders, you hit a large chamber with undead at one side and night goblins at the other. At this point things got fairly tough. The two factions are shooting arrows at each other over a deep crevasse. There is only one narrow bridge over and – as you might imagine – when you try to take it you get hit by both sides.

What followed was literally some of the most intense fighting I have ever had in any MMO (including the various 5 man instances I tackled in WoW). We fought our way across to the other side and then up a hill. At the top of the hill was a mix of bone giants and skeletal archers. We continued to battle them but soon suffered from another bug. It seems that our healers became plagued with phantom archers that were invisible but continuously fired at them. No matter were we moved they continued to get shot. Unfortunately, about the time the bug hit we spawned a level boss which proceeded to wipe us out with the assistance of the bug. Fortunately, just about this time another party came through and killed the boss and then had the decency to rezz our healers.

At that point we found that we were unable to get through the portal into the room with the main boss for this path. There were various requirements – such as influence – that we couldn’t meet. For others it erroneously said they couldn’t enter because we were still in combat. I assume that had something to do with the phantom archers.

We decided rather than troubleshoot another bug, we were done with Gunbad. So it ended on a bit of whimper.

I would say that overall Gunbad was fun experience. We had several new players with us that had very little dungeon running experience and they clearly enjoyed themselves. Gunbad did a good job of getting our group on the same page and leaning to work as a team. My sense is that our Friday night groups really inspired the new players to want to tackle other dungeons both in WAR and perhaps in other MMOs as well.

On the other hand, from the position of an experienced player Gunbad left a lot to be desired. The concept and look was very good but there were just too many game breaking bugs. The bug that kept of from seeing the spectre’s death puddle in the penultimate encounter on the right path kept us from fighting the boss until ironically another bug allowed us access. As I mentioned we were stymied on the left path by Plaguebearer mobs that didn’t seem well tuned for our level. The phantom archers ended up wiping us in the middle level.

But most importantly the lock out to the bosses seemed unnecessary and highly irritating. Why not let us fight the end boss after we took the trouble (despite multiple wipes) to fight our way down there? I would strongly recommended they loosen or remove the block in the Boss room.

In any case, next up we have Bastion Stair. As always any advice in the comments below would be appreciated.

More on the Progress Paradox: Tracking the Explosive Growth of MMOs

As few days ago, I  about the effect of the progress paradoxon WAR’s perceived success. Today, I came across a link that puts a number on last years explosive growth in the MMO player base.

 

Screen Digest has foundthat the subscription-based massively multiplayer online gaming market grew by 22% in 2008. Of that number only 58% went to World of Warfare subscriptions. I say “only” because even though it’s a stunning market share, some people would have you believe that WoW makes no room for other successes in the market.

 

The MMO space is growing quickly. There still seems to be plenty of room for many successful MMOs despite the mega-success of one outlier.

WoW Dance party

While I know this is just another WoW April Fool’s prank, you will have to admit that it doesn’t really sound that far fetched.

A few years ago, the prank was a WoW/Guitar hybrid game. And then Activism bought Blizzard and it suddenly wasn’t quite as funny anymore. In any case, enjoy the prankery.

WAR: Victim of Progress Paradox

In 2001 there were roughly a total of about 400k people playing MMOs in North America. Today, there are nearly 6 million in North American playing one game alone. And yet at the same time bloggers have begun to examine why they perceive there to be so many failing MMOs. (Everything from “WoW Tourists” to “Ghetto Scum” is to blame).  They have even begun to question whether another MMO might ever be “successful.”

 

The problem is one of perception. More MMOs aren’t failing. In fact, more are succeeding then ever before. Instead it is people’s perceptions that have changed.

 

Some people have argued that discontent is the inevitable consequence of progress. For example, in the “The Progress Paradox,” Gregg Easterbrook looks to solve an apparent paradox of expectation as our society is increasingly transformed into what our ancestors would consider a utopia, yet we are no more happier. Why is that?

 

“Our forebears, who worked and sacrificed tirelessly in the hopes their descendants would someday be free, comfortable, healthy and educated, might be dismayed to observe how acidly we deny we now are these things”

 

 

But studies say we’re no happier than we used to be. According to Easterbrook, in fact, we may be becoming more depressed. Studies show an increase in reported cases of clinic depression even as societal conditions improve for just about everyone.

 

Likewise, the overall market for MMOs is unquestionably much stronger than it was even two years ago. Before WoW, Everquest was understood to be the biggest success in the history of the genre and allegedly capped out at around 400k players.  In addition to WoW’s million’s of players, you have several new games including WAR and Lord of the Rings Online that seems to have duplicated EQs success.

 

So why the doom and gloom? Easterbrook might argue that its due to expectations. He argues that as most of our necessities are taken care of, we worry about wants — and there are always more things to want. We have all experienced this, you get what you want and then you immediately move forward to the next desire. The cumulative effect is that as the tide rises so do people’s expectations but at a faster rate. In that sense, all progress can be explained by the widening divide between the improving conditions and the increased expectations.

 

Likewise, bloggers are suddenly faced with an adundance of good games. Even the worst among them have strong points. I would argue that even a flawed game such as Age of Conan would have been embraced as a revelation if it had been released 6 years earlier. We are spoiled for choice.

 

And that has led us to place ever expanding expectations on population numbers. If WoW has 5 million subscribers in North American people expect the next success to have six. But this expectation causes us to miss the bigger picture.

 

Collectively the total number of players continues to grow. WAR picked up 300k players and two other new games developed similar player bases and yet WoW’s subscriptions increased.  That should be the key point for anyone talking about the success of MMOs. Instead people focus merely on the difference between one outlier, WoW, and individual players in the market.

 

Easterbrook recommends that we combat our increasing expectations with a “gratitude journal.” In a sense, that is what this blog is for me when it comes to MMOs. And so I remind myself that MMOs are staging a revolution. We should be focusing on the question of why MMOs are working now, not which ones are comparative “failures.”