Balance between combat and other

Combat is an important part of many different games, including role-playing games. While games without combat are possible, see for example A Tale in the Desert, they are few and far between. Nevertheless over the decades we moved from single-activity games to multi-activity games. Especially role-playing games always had multiple parts; for example Bioware talked about the 4 pillars of SWTOR being combat, exploration, progression, and story. Regardless of how you call these elements, it is clear that player in a modern game do not spend 100% of their time in combat. At which point the question poses itself of what percentage of the game should be combat, and what percentage should be handed over to the other activities.

For example accepting a quest in World of Warcraft is done with 2 clicks. Reading the short quest description is more or less optional, as the essential summary of "kill 10 foozles" will be shown on your quest tracker and the location marked on your map. Accepting more or less the same quest in Star Wars: The Old Republic takes considerably more time. There is more description, and the cut scenes and voiceovers invite the player to stay a while and listen. The player also will have to make dialogue choices. In addition to that SWTOR on average has longer ways between combats. Add all that together, and on average a player of WoW might well kill twice as many mobs per hour as a player of SWTOR.

Of course there is no universal answer to what the optimum is. Some people hit the space bar often in SWTOR to skip most or all of the dialogue, others quite enjoy it. And to some extent the players have some choice of how much combat they want to have, because they can spend more or less time with optional non-combat activities like crafting.

I was thinking about that balance in the context of writing the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition adventure I'm currently preparing. As I mentioned before, up to now we have been playing Warhammer FRP, which has a set of rules which supports role-playing very well, but isn't all that combat-centric. Players can have character classes like merchant or boatman, which lend itself somewhat less to combat-heavy adventures. And thus lots of the premade adventures have plots of intrigue and murder mysteries to be solved by role-playing dialogues with NPCs, and not all that much combat. D&D 4E is leaning towards the other extreme, where all character classes are designed for combat, and the rules are heavy on how to run a combat with miniatures. As a result the premade adventures are often very combat-heavy, with typical plots leading the players in some monster-infested dungeon with lots of battles and little role-playing.

Fortunately a pen & paper RPG can be more easily adjusted than a MMORPG. If you enter a dungeon in WoW you don't get the choice whether you want to fight or dialogue. If you prepare an adventure as DM for a pen & paper session, you have a much wider range of choices: You can invent an adventure by yourself and put in exactly the ratio of combat to other activities that you want, or you can take a premade adventure and modify it heavily. Remove half the monsters from that dungeon and play up the interaction with the NPCs leading to that dungeon, and you might get closer to the balance you want.

Hopefully what the DM prepares is what the players want. I am not quite sure what degree of combat my players will want in their game, I plan to start with something and then try to get some feedback whether that amount of combat is too much, too little, or just right. As we literally had no combat at all for several months, I hope the players will like a bit more of it. The trouble with long political intrigue and mystery adventures in a group that only meets one evening every two weeks is that the DM spends a lot of time reminding the players what has happened before. I am trying to structure my adventures in smaller chunks, having a sequence of combat encounters and non-combat encounters, with clear objectives to concentrate on at any given moment, and the larger story a bit more in the background. D&D 4E lends itself nicely to that approach. I guess that too is a modern development, taking into account that the role-players have gotten older, and often play less frequently now.

Which side of the game do you prefer in pen & paper roleplaying? Do you like campaigns with very little combat, with a lot, or what percentage in between?

Amateurs and professionals

The word "amateur" has French (and ultimately Latin) roots, literally meaning "lover of". It describes somebody who does an activity out of love for it, not because he is getting paid for it. While that can result in a performance which is less good than that of a professional, it also can result in an equivalent but different result. Many people argue that for example game developers should feel a passion for games, that they should create games because they love them, thus that they should be amateurs. And it is certainly true that a lot of young people with a love of games dream of becoming game developers. Which is at the root of the many stories you hear of exploitation, long hours, and uncertain recompensation in the game industry.

On the player side the opposite trend takes place: Not only do discussions of games from the players' side often have an air of extreme seriousness. But with price money in e-Sport leagues and the selling of virtual items, some players actually are becoming "professionals".

I think that both of these developments are dangerous. Just like I wouldn't want to drive a car that has been designed by an amateur, I don't always like playing games that have been coded by amateurs. Between rushed releases of unfinished games, bugs, and half-baked "wouldn't it be cool if we had this" features, I really long to see more professionalism in game development. Including regular working hours and proper compensation for the game developers, instead of companies exploiting a bunch of eager kids.

Playing games is the quintessential hobby, something to do to relax and entertain, without a larger purpose or financial interest. Turning it into a profession very much diminishes the entertainment value. One of my commenters uses the handle "Angry Gamer", and the internet is full of people like him, constantly angry about games or their fellow players, because they just took those games far too seriously. And as a actual source of income games are a rather bad choice. If somebody would put the same amount of energy that he uses for theorycrafting a MMORPG into lets say studying engineering, his earnings potential would become much higher.

Thus I would say that games should be created by professionals, and played by amateurs. What do you think?

SWTOR claims 1.7 million subscribers, Rift goes Free2Start

In yesterday's investor's earnings call, Electronic Arts said they sold over 2 million copies of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and had 1.7 million subscribers. I'm not quite sure at what moment in time exactly they counted those subscribers, but if they really only lost 15% of their players after the free month, that would have been quite a success. Nevertheless I would say that we'd better wait for the next earnings call in 3 months to get a more solid idea of the longevity of SWTOR.

Trion on the other hand announced that you can now play the first 20 levels of Rift for free, in a version called Rift Lite. Which is an exact copy of what Blizzard offers for World of Warcraft. I'd love to see some official subscription numbers, but with all the latest news about Rift being about server merges and price reductions, I get the feeling that they aren't doing so well. It is likely that they lost a number of "anything-but-WoW" players to SWTOR.

Linearity vs. Open World

Much has been discussed on this blog on the relative advantages and disadvantages of linear games versus open world games. Skyrim was widely hailed as a great open world game, but it also serves as example of the limits of computer roleplaying games in that respect: There are a *lot* of seemingly trivial actions that you can't do in Skyrim, for example moving a table or chair. In computer games only the actions that have been specifically allowed by the programmers are possible. So it depends on the game whether you can do things like breaking a window, moving furniture, or jumping a 3-feet high fence.

Pen & paper roleplaying games work the other way around: Players should assume they can do anything "logical", unless the DM tells them they can't. There usually are no unmovable pieces of furniture in a Dungeons & Dragons adventure. If a chair is printed on a battle map, and the player wants to move that chair for some reason, the DM will come up with a solution, a token that represents the moved chair or something.

So at first it would appear as if pen & paper role-playing games are the ultimum of open world games. But most of that is an illusion. The world only exists in the head of the DM, and to the detail to which the DM has prepared it. So if the DM has prepared a dungeon, the players had better enter it. About 20 years ago I once played as a player in a game of D&D that failed: The DM had prepared this Pharaoh's tomb from some bought module, but the module had a rather lousy story hook: The players got robbed by bandits in the desert, and find the entrance to the tomb while stumbling around. But nobody in our group wanted to enter that tomb. Without equipment, are you crazy? We much rather wanted to pursue the bandits and get our stuff back! The DM hadn't foreseen that, tried more and more to force us into that tomb, which we more and more resisted, until we all just gave up on that campaign.

With that experience in mind, I always tried to give my players all available options. But of course in previous campaigns that led to them sometimes refusing to do the adventure I had prepared, and I had to jump to the next one or improvise. Thus now I hope I can do better. Ideally I want to give the players meaningful choices. But "do you want to enter this dungeon or not" shouldn't necessarily be one of those. I tend to think of a campaign or an adventure as some sort of flow chart: It can have branches and decision points, but ideally the story and the incentives for the players should be designed in a way that they want to go along the story path I prepared. I will see whether I can manage that.

Sepeda Motor Injeksi Irit Harga Terbaik Cuma Honda

Sepeda Motor Injeksi Irit Harga Terbaik Cuma Honda > Atas dedikasi dan komitmen pada kualitas dan Harga Terbaik  yang di berikan oleh PT Astra Honda Motor (AHM) yang menjadi produsen Motor Injeksi Irit Harga Terbaik Cuma Honda di Indonesia  kepada konsumen selama ini, Astra Honda Motor merilis lagi dua produk terbaru yang menggunakan teknologi PGM-F1 alias injection yaitu Honda Spacy Helm In PGM-FI dan Honda Supra X 125 Helm In PGM-FI.

Teknologi Injeksi ini memberikan banyak manfaat bukan hanya untuk konsumen namun juga untuk lingkungan sekitarnya . Selain ramah lingkungan, teknologi ini juga sangat irit bahan bakar. Iritnya bahan bakar tersebut dapat dilihat ketika pengendara menarik gas sangat tinggi. "Injection mampu menyuplai bahan bakar dengan teknologi kontrol elektronik yang mampu memasok bahan bakar dan oksigen secara optimum sesuai dengan kebutuhan mesin.

Manfaat lain teknologi PGM-FI yaitu mudah dalam perawatan karena terdapat sistem kendali elektronik yang didukung oleh MIL (Malfunction Indicator Lamp) serta kemudahan menghidupkan mesin dalam segala kondisi suhu udara.

Selain pada perawatan teknologi mesin Spacy PGM-FI yang tidak sulit karena telah dilengkapi dengan sistem kendali elektronik yang didukung Malfunction Indicator Lamp untuk kemudahan dalam menghidupkan mesin dalam kondisi suhu apapun. Malfunction Indicator Lamp ( MIL ) terletak pada instrumen panel speedometer, ada lampu kecil menyala sebagai indikator injeksi. Dalam keadaan darurat seperti ketika terjadi kerusakan sistem injeksi, lampu ini akan berkedip menunjukan komponen apa yang bermasalah.

Karena motor ini sudah injeksi, kalau di karbu menggunakan auto choke, maka di skutik injeksi ini ada sensor Engine Oil Temperature yang akan memberikan info ke Electronic Control Unit, dan ketika suhunya relatif masih dingin maka injector akan menyemprot agak banyakan. Semua sensor akan langsung menciptakan campuran kabut bahan bakar yang paling ideal.

"Sepeda Motor Injeksi Irit Harga Terbaik Cuma Honda"


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Otomotif

Ancient game meets new business model

The original Everquest goes free-to-play. Somehow I'm not sure that is going to be a big success. But then, I might actually try it again sometime, just for laughs and nostalgia.

Which useless collector's edition did you buy?

Syp has a picture of the day a photo of him holding up a Star Trek Online Collector's Edition he bought for $6.50. Which had my fullest understanding, I bought a collector's edition of Final Fantasy XIV for 9.95 over the holidays. With some collector's editions now priced at $150 and more, getting one on the cheap is fun. You never know when you decide to try the game, and if you do you might as well get all the extra CE goodies.

So, are there any collector's editions you bought but didn't play yet? Did you at least get them cheap?