Having been disappointed by Fallout 3, I found myself looking for a similar game which is more fun to me. Now where do I find a more fun post-apocalyptic shooter/roleplaying game hybrid? Turns out I had already bought that game during some previous sales on Steam: Borderlands. So I spent most of the weekend playing Borderlands, and I was having a blast. The combat is more fun and varied, because now different weapons actually require different tactics. Instead of useless junk I loot only things I need. And instead of my weapons getting worse all the time due to wear and tear, I now get constant weapons upgrades. There are as crazy characters in Borderlands as are in Fallout 3 (albeit not so many), and the main story isn't any worse either.
Apart from the combat system (where Fallout 3 has no excuse), I can see that the main difference between Fallout 3 and Borderlands is that the former is mainly designed as an immersive virtual world, while the latter is mainly a game. Borderlands is more fun because it is *made* to be fun, and not designed to give an accurate depiction of a post-apocalyptic world. Which is all fine with me, I didn't find Fallout's vision of how a world after nuclear war would look very believable in the first place. I can see that weapons degrading is somehow more "realistic" than finding them as loot even from enemies that aren't using weapons, but "realistic" often ends up being the same as "tedious".
If I want to explore a coherent, realistic world, I turn off my computer and take a walk. Any virtual world in which I am a hero is by definition already unrealistic. So I'm really not all that worried about how immersive a virtual world is, as long as it is fun to play. The cell-shaded graphics and over-the-top whacky boss mobs of Borderlands are more fun to me than the realistic eternal grey-tones of Fallout 3.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Civ5 map of Azeroth
A reader wrote me to let you all know that a Civilization V map of Azeroth is available at Civ Fanatics. As in spite of the name and the origin of the series, World of Warcraft does not offer the possibility to conquer territory, this Civ5 map is your chance to conquer Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. It's just the map, though, so you'll still play with English, Roman, or Chinese civilizations, not with Orcs, Human, and Blood Elves.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Fallout 3
No, the title is not a typo or something. Playing a lot of time-consuming MMORPGs, I tend to be way behind the curve with playing single-player games. So while everybody else is on Fallout: New Vegas, I just recently started playing Fallout 3. The joys of digital distribution: You can get a two year old game for half the price, and if the reviews were good two years ago, the game probably still is good today. Only that in this case, with Fallout 3, in spite of good reviews and starting out enthusiastically, I got bored rather quickly.
The start of Fallout 3 is great. Playing a character from birth on is brilliant, and I really liked how creating your character with stats and skills was woven into playing your childhood. And at first I liked leaving the vault and exploring the wastelands, scavenging the post-apocalyptic ruins for useful scraps. So I played, and played, and played some more, and 8 levels, lots of quests, and a bunch of hours later I was *still* scavenging post-apocalyptic ruins for useful scraps. More specifically I was searching still the same desks, file cabinets, and metal boxes, all of which look the same, for the same bottle caps, junk, and handfuls of ammo. There aren't all that many different containers in this game, and most of the loot isn't really exciting. I ran through endless same-ish looking metro tunnels, fought the same types of enemies over and over, until I just couldn't bring myself to continue. Yes, the characters are very well done, and the freedom to explore is great, but I found the main story-line a bit weak, and the post-apocalyptic wasteland soon gets repetitive.
Now at the heart of it Fallout 3 is a game of managing scarce resources. That should make the fights interesting, because the less ammo you use and the quicker you kill with minimal health loss, the better off you are. Given that, I'm not sure it was a good idea to design Fallout 3 with two different combat systems. And maybe I'm just lousy at aiming, but in my case the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) is much, much more efficient than playing Fallout 3 like a first-person shooter. I just get close to the mob, hit the key to enter V.A.T.S. mode, select 3 headshots, and easily kill about every monster with 3 or less bullets without getting a scratch myself. Not very exciting, and not very tactical either; I would have hoped that an alternative "turn-based" combat system would have more interesting choices than the obvious "shoot the head" best option. Playing the game like a shooter doesn't make it any more tactical, but I waste a lot more ammo and get wounded more.
Well, shooter games are always hit-or-miss with me, even if they are part role-playing game. I liked Bioshock and Call of Duty 2 a lot, but some shooter games I just don't warm up to. Life is too short to play games I don't really enjoy, and so I'll just stop playing Fallout 3 and try something else. Just goes to show that even a game with excellent reviews isn't necessarily for everybody.
The start of Fallout 3 is great. Playing a character from birth on is brilliant, and I really liked how creating your character with stats and skills was woven into playing your childhood. And at first I liked leaving the vault and exploring the wastelands, scavenging the post-apocalyptic ruins for useful scraps. So I played, and played, and played some more, and 8 levels, lots of quests, and a bunch of hours later I was *still* scavenging post-apocalyptic ruins for useful scraps. More specifically I was searching still the same desks, file cabinets, and metal boxes, all of which look the same, for the same bottle caps, junk, and handfuls of ammo. There aren't all that many different containers in this game, and most of the loot isn't really exciting. I ran through endless same-ish looking metro tunnels, fought the same types of enemies over and over, until I just couldn't bring myself to continue. Yes, the characters are very well done, and the freedom to explore is great, but I found the main story-line a bit weak, and the post-apocalyptic wasteland soon gets repetitive.
Now at the heart of it Fallout 3 is a game of managing scarce resources. That should make the fights interesting, because the less ammo you use and the quicker you kill with minimal health loss, the better off you are. Given that, I'm not sure it was a good idea to design Fallout 3 with two different combat systems. And maybe I'm just lousy at aiming, but in my case the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) is much, much more efficient than playing Fallout 3 like a first-person shooter. I just get close to the mob, hit the key to enter V.A.T.S. mode, select 3 headshots, and easily kill about every monster with 3 or less bullets without getting a scratch myself. Not very exciting, and not very tactical either; I would have hoped that an alternative "turn-based" combat system would have more interesting choices than the obvious "shoot the head" best option. Playing the game like a shooter doesn't make it any more tactical, but I waste a lot more ammo and get wounded more.
Well, shooter games are always hit-or-miss with me, even if they are part role-playing game. I liked Bioshock and Call of Duty 2 a lot, but some shooter games I just don't warm up to. Life is too short to play games I don't really enjoy, and so I'll just stop playing Fallout 3 and try something else. Just goes to show that even a game with excellent reviews isn't necessarily for everybody.
Body control
Kinect, Wii Remote, PlayStation Move, there is a definitive trend towards console games being controlled with some sort of device that tracks the motion of your body, instead of just being controlled with the fingers. But I'm not buying any of these, after having tried out both the PS2 EyeToy and the Wiimote. Very simple reason: I like play sessions that last several hours. Technically I'm not a couch-potato (I mostly play PC games sitting in an office chair, not a couch), but a full body control game is a lot more strenuous than either a gamepad or a mouse/keyboard control scheme.
For exactly this reason I don't think that this sort of controller has any future for MMORPGs. The amount of hours people want to play a MMORPG for per week largely surpasses the amount of hours they'd like to work out. I think these full body control schemes are great for casual games, and have a potential to get people to play who think gamepads are too complicated. But they aren't the future of gaming.
For exactly this reason I don't think that this sort of controller has any future for MMORPGs. The amount of hours people want to play a MMORPG for per week largely surpasses the amount of hours they'd like to work out. I think these full body control schemes are great for casual games, and have a potential to get people to play who think gamepads are too complicated. But they aren't the future of gaming.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Buyable faster advancement coming to a MMORPG near you!
Warhammer Online started selling the Specialized Training Pack for $9.99, an item which makes all of your WAR characters advance one full level. Meanwhile EVE Online is offering the EVE Online: Commissioned Officer Edition as a new boxed set, which allows you to create a new account with a new character which gains skills significantly faster for the first 30 days (beyond the usual newbie bonus). As players have shown that they are very much interested in faster advancement, companies react by selling that faster advancement to them. Where will that lead?
The purpose of a level cap
When I played the original Everquest a decade ago, the average time players needed to reach the level cap was 2,000 hours. When World of Warcraft was released in 2004, the average time to reach the level cap in WoW was 500 hours. Today the average is *less* than 500 hours, in spite of the level cap being 80 now instead of 60; a veteran player can level an alt from 1 to 80 in 200 hours without breaking a sweat. But even a new player has an easier time nowadays to reach the level cap, both due to better information from various guides and websites, and due to Blizzard having streamlined many parts of the leveling process.
Now some people believe that faster leveling is always better. Gaining a level is one of the stronger rewards a MMORPG hands out, and people just love getting rewarded frequently. But player levels are linked to level-appropriate content in a persistent, non-random world, and as we can't make infinite content, we can't have infinite levels. There has to be a level cap. And obviously the original Everquest and today's World of Warcraft have very different philosophies about what the purpose of the level cap is. Everquest had a lot of players who never ever reached the level cap, I was one of them. If you don't play a lot, and maybe have some alts on the side, a "2,000 hours to the level cap" requirement can result in the level cap being lifted by an expansion before you hit the cap. It is thus possible to be *always* leveling, and obviously Verant/SOE considered that as a good option: If you never hit the level cap, you never run out of content.
The big disadvantage of such a game with endless leveling is that it seggregates players, mostly by amount of time spent playing, and to a lesser degree by how efficient they are in leveling. And the experience of Everquest showed that the players who reach the level cap do not necessarily consider that as a "Game Over" message, but are quite willing to keep on playing with characters at the level cap, as long as the devs provide something level-cap appropriate for them to do, for example raiding. Thus the different idea of World of Warcraft: If everybody levels up quickly, then most players will be at the level cap for most of the time between two expansions, and will be able to all play together, being all the same level.
Unfortunately that didn't work out that way. Because even at the level cap character development is still important. It just isn't expressed in terms of leveling up any more, but in terms of improving your gear. Some form of reward to improve characters is necessary to keep people playing. According to the Daedalus Project of Nick Yee the average MMO player spends a bit over 20 hours per week in a game, which adds up to 1,000 hours per year, or 2,000 hours between two WoW expansions. Imagine you would spend only 200 hours of those 2,000 hours leveling up your character, and then you'd be completely blocked in development for the other 1,800 hours until the next expansion. Most players would quit long before that. Thus today players reach the level cap, and then switch into a different mode of World of Warcraft, in which they mostly level up their Gearscore in heroic dungeons and raids.
So now we arrived at a truly perverse situation, where people quickly level up to the level cap, but end up being NOT of similar power at that cap. As yesterday's interesting discussion pointed out, today one of the biggest social problems of World of Warcraft is the random Dungeon Finder putting people together into a level 80 heroics group with vastly different levels of gear, skill, and even goals. As I am currently playing a level 76 druid and a level 62 shaman, I made the surprising discovery that a random group assembled by the Dungeon Finder during leveling is *more* homogeneous in terms of power and purpose than a level 80 random group found with the same tool. To boot, "normal" dungeons played through with a level-appropriate group are *more* challenging than the average "heroic" dungeon, because the average group for a heroic is completely overgeared compared to the content.
Some people blame the Dungeon Finder, but in fact that tool works perfectly well to assemble a homogeneous group and provide a reasonable challenge to them in the lower levels. Where it completely breaks down is at the level cap, because the possible difference between two level 80 characters can be so huge. Imagine a freshly dinged level 80 tank in iLevel 187 decent blue gear: There is simply no way the Dungeon Finder can put him into a working heroics group today. His best option is to sign on as dps, because groups are used to at least one dps guy doing basically nothing on any heroic run.
And I'm not sure this will get any better in Cataclysm. Of course at first things will get better, when everybody at level 85 is of similar gear level. But as long as the justice points or other rewards enable players to get the highest level of gear from endlessly running heroics, the seggregation of players will continue in the next expansion. Maybe the Dungeon Finder has to be reprogrammed to put groups of similar Gearscore together and then upscale the monsters in heroics accordingly so that the challenge remains the same for every group. But then what's the point of becoming stronger if the content isn't getting easier by that? Maybe a game which took a bit longer to reach the level cap would be better after all.
Now some people believe that faster leveling is always better. Gaining a level is one of the stronger rewards a MMORPG hands out, and people just love getting rewarded frequently. But player levels are linked to level-appropriate content in a persistent, non-random world, and as we can't make infinite content, we can't have infinite levels. There has to be a level cap. And obviously the original Everquest and today's World of Warcraft have very different philosophies about what the purpose of the level cap is. Everquest had a lot of players who never ever reached the level cap, I was one of them. If you don't play a lot, and maybe have some alts on the side, a "2,000 hours to the level cap" requirement can result in the level cap being lifted by an expansion before you hit the cap. It is thus possible to be *always* leveling, and obviously Verant/SOE considered that as a good option: If you never hit the level cap, you never run out of content.
The big disadvantage of such a game with endless leveling is that it seggregates players, mostly by amount of time spent playing, and to a lesser degree by how efficient they are in leveling. And the experience of Everquest showed that the players who reach the level cap do not necessarily consider that as a "Game Over" message, but are quite willing to keep on playing with characters at the level cap, as long as the devs provide something level-cap appropriate for them to do, for example raiding. Thus the different idea of World of Warcraft: If everybody levels up quickly, then most players will be at the level cap for most of the time between two expansions, and will be able to all play together, being all the same level.
Unfortunately that didn't work out that way. Because even at the level cap character development is still important. It just isn't expressed in terms of leveling up any more, but in terms of improving your gear. Some form of reward to improve characters is necessary to keep people playing. According to the Daedalus Project of Nick Yee the average MMO player spends a bit over 20 hours per week in a game, which adds up to 1,000 hours per year, or 2,000 hours between two WoW expansions. Imagine you would spend only 200 hours of those 2,000 hours leveling up your character, and then you'd be completely blocked in development for the other 1,800 hours until the next expansion. Most players would quit long before that. Thus today players reach the level cap, and then switch into a different mode of World of Warcraft, in which they mostly level up their Gearscore in heroic dungeons and raids.
So now we arrived at a truly perverse situation, where people quickly level up to the level cap, but end up being NOT of similar power at that cap. As yesterday's interesting discussion pointed out, today one of the biggest social problems of World of Warcraft is the random Dungeon Finder putting people together into a level 80 heroics group with vastly different levels of gear, skill, and even goals. As I am currently playing a level 76 druid and a level 62 shaman, I made the surprising discovery that a random group assembled by the Dungeon Finder during leveling is *more* homogeneous in terms of power and purpose than a level 80 random group found with the same tool. To boot, "normal" dungeons played through with a level-appropriate group are *more* challenging than the average "heroic" dungeon, because the average group for a heroic is completely overgeared compared to the content.
Some people blame the Dungeon Finder, but in fact that tool works perfectly well to assemble a homogeneous group and provide a reasonable challenge to them in the lower levels. Where it completely breaks down is at the level cap, because the possible difference between two level 80 characters can be so huge. Imagine a freshly dinged level 80 tank in iLevel 187 decent blue gear: There is simply no way the Dungeon Finder can put him into a working heroics group today. His best option is to sign on as dps, because groups are used to at least one dps guy doing basically nothing on any heroic run.
And I'm not sure this will get any better in Cataclysm. Of course at first things will get better, when everybody at level 85 is of similar gear level. But as long as the justice points or other rewards enable players to get the highest level of gear from endlessly running heroics, the seggregation of players will continue in the next expansion. Maybe the Dungeon Finder has to be reprogrammed to put groups of similar Gearscore together and then upscale the monsters in heroics accordingly so that the challenge remains the same for every group. But then what's the point of becoming stronger if the content isn't getting easier by that? Maybe a game which took a bit longer to reach the level cap would be better after all.
Efficiency is irrelevant
Imagine a guy taking a month of holiday to do a road trip from New York to San Francisco. He sees a lot of America, has a lot of fun, and relaxes. A successful holiday. The fact that he could have gotten from NY to SF much faster and more efficient by taking a plane is irrelevant. Getting from A to B was not the purpose of the trip. Calling him a "n00b", or a "moron & slacker" for not having choosing the fastest route is utterly ridiculous.
The same is true for MMORPGs. Sure, some people have fun pursueing goals, and some like to reach those goals as fast as possible. But that does not make them better players than somebody who spends his time role-playing or exploring. There is no win-condition in a MMORPG; getting from level 1 to 80 with all best-in-slot items in the most efficient way is irrelevant. That is especially true for World of Warcraft, because Blizzard is notoriously slow in releasing expansions. Getting to the end of an expansion faster only means you are blocked for longer without anything left to do. And it doesn't exactly make the fast players more sympathetic that so many of them appear to use that time with nothing to do for berating other players for taking it slow.
One could even argue that the most efficient players are the least good, because by definition there is only one most efficient path and taking it is the least original way of playing a MMORPG. There is only a handful of players actively engaged in figuring out the most efficient path, the large majority of players just copies and pastes the findings of the theorycrafters. How many players rush through content in the fastest possible way, following somebody else's description of a most efficient path? That is certainly one possible way to play a MMORPG, but I see no justification whatsoever to claims that this would be the "best" way.
The same is true for MMORPGs. Sure, some people have fun pursueing goals, and some like to reach those goals as fast as possible. But that does not make them better players than somebody who spends his time role-playing or exploring. There is no win-condition in a MMORPG; getting from level 1 to 80 with all best-in-slot items in the most efficient way is irrelevant. That is especially true for World of Warcraft, because Blizzard is notoriously slow in releasing expansions. Getting to the end of an expansion faster only means you are blocked for longer without anything left to do. And it doesn't exactly make the fast players more sympathetic that so many of them appear to use that time with nothing to do for berating other players for taking it slow.
One could even argue that the most efficient players are the least good, because by definition there is only one most efficient path and taking it is the least original way of playing a MMORPG. There is only a handful of players actively engaged in figuring out the most efficient path, the large majority of players just copies and pastes the findings of the theorycrafters. How many players rush through content in the fastest possible way, following somebody else's description of a most efficient path? That is certainly one possible way to play a MMORPG, but I see no justification whatsoever to claims that this would be the "best" way.
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