Month: January 2011

Shouldering the weight of your words

Posted on by Nimgimli

So in the bright sunshine of the morning after the Massively/Rift controversy, I wanted to open the topic up a bit more. Clearly I found it wrong for a pro-blogger to dismiss a soon-to-ship product without giving it a fair shake. Others, like Tipa and Arkenor, thought I was off my rocker. Ark voiced the opinion that anything goes in gaming coverage as long as it’s an honest opinion. Tipa just didn’t care one way or the other.

So I wanted to elaborate on my feelings a bit, setting aside the specifics of this situation.

First and most importantly, we have to ask the question of whether or not (presumably, see below) high-traffic sites like Massively influence buying decisions. If they don’t, then none of what I’m about to say matters. I’m assuming that some percentage of readers come to these sites in order to determine if a product is worth their buying consideration.

Next is the issue of scale. The higher the pulpit, the more carefully you need to weigh your words. Some guy on a street corner preaching about the end of days won’t have much impact, but if a TV network starts saying the same thing it could cause a panic. My assumption here is that Massively has significant traffic. If they don’t, then again, my arguments (and concerns) are invalidated.

So we’re talking then, about a site that has the ability to significantly move the needle when it comes to a game’s sales.

And we’re talking about a game still in beta and still being changed. This is not the game that customers will be paying for. We don’t know what that game will be.

With all these conditions met, I believe it is irresponsible for an author to off-handedly trash a game (and thereby influence sales of the game) in a post on the site. It isn’t irresponsible to say “This type of game isn’t of interest to me.” and it isn’t irresponsible to say “After 1 hour of playing my interest wasn’t captured enough to inspire me to dig deeper into this title” but it is irresponsible to say “This game is just like every other game” when you haven’t played enough to know if this statement is true or not.

As a blogger on a high-traffic site, you need to consider the impact of your words more carefully than, say, I do here on my dinky little blog.

Consider the situation from the other side of the fence. Imagine you’re working for a game developer. You’ve been helping the team make a game for the past several years and finally it’s coming to fruition and then some pundit posts untrue things about your game. Not out of malice but out of ignorance because said pundit never really looked closely at your product. Now you’re taking a hit (however small) on sales because of an off-hand comment.

Consider the situation from the point of view of your audience. They (presumably) trust you. They come to you to learn about a game. Don’t you owe it to them to know what you’re talking about? By stating what you perceive as (but what in fact isn’t) a fact based on incomplete data does an injustice to your audience.

Finally, consider the impact on your own career. By flippantly dismissing a title for reasons that aren’t accurate, you’re blowing your credibility with readers who have played the game and know that you’re stating things that aren’t true. Credibility that is very, very difficult to regain.

I’ve seen potentially good games canceled due to mishandled press coverage. Granted that was back when print magazines existed and the lag time for ‘corrections’ was very long. But damage can still be done, and if you’re a gaming enthusiast, that should matter to you. New games should be given a fair chance to prove themselves, and not be slagged prior to launch because a particular journalist wasn’t interested enough to really look at the game, and instead just made assumptions that ultimately aren’t accurate.

I firmly believe the writers at high-traffic sites need to be held to higher standards than they currently are. They should write about what they’ve experienced, and not what they assume to be true. If they’re writing about things they’ve only heard about, they should cite sources. I’m not saying they should sugar-coat issues, just that they should report accurately, even if what they’re reporting is just their opinion. Opinions based on assumptions need to be described as such.

Rift – the hook is in the name

Posted on by Nimgimli

First, I’m sure you’ve heard it a dozen times by now, but we now have a Rift release date of March 1, 2011 for North America and March 4th for EU. Pre-order and get into the beta as well as the headstart which begins February 24th.

Anyway, on to the business at hand. After reading a post about the Massively staff’s Rift beta impressions I tweeted:

Reading this post @Massively http://bit.ly/h7bYAg and LOLing at how much Jef Reahard doesn’t get it. Yeah, an hour into Rift it is familiar

I wanted to go into a bit more detail here. Now we’re supposed to accept Reahard as a knowledgeable MMO player, right? He gets paid to share his informed opinion with us. We pay his salary by reading his posts. Here’s what his beta impressions were:

I rolled a Pyromancer in the Defiant beta and spent about an hour running around the initial zone (and fiddling with the UI). That probably doesn’t seem like a lot of time to form an accurate impression, but it was more than enough for me to realize I’ve played this game about a hundred times over the last few years.

That’s not to say Trion doesn’t have a serviceable title on its hands. It’s very pretty and runs well compared to most betas, but I’m already slogging through a couple of on-rails quest grinders and don’t really have the patience for another one. Wake me up when (or actually, if) someone dares to spend this kind of money on a sandbox.

Now I’m not saying Reahard has to like Rift and I’m not saying he isn’t entitled to his opinion. But y’know what? After an hour of playing an MMO you generally aren’t entitled to an informed opinion yet. How could you be? And in the case where a game is named after a significant gameplay feature, and you don’t play enough to even experience that feature, you’re really on thin ice. (In Rift, you can pretty much ignore quests and level up by fighting rifts if you want to. In fact fighting rifts levels you faster if you’re in the midst of an invasion.)

The fact is… fact, not opinion, Reahard hasn’t played this game about a hundred times because there haven’t been that many games that feature large scale open world PvE events. Warhammer has it’s public quests but they don’t even approach the scale of Rift’s rifts. A few games have offered very rare GM run events where an epic mob storms into town and all the players have to cooperate to take it down, but few games have that sort of gameplay as a central system.

If Reahard played only Beta 1 of the game for an hour (he apparently didn’t even get to where he could choose a 2nd soul, which used to be level 5 iirc, though that’s changed now), he should have been professional enough to opt out of the article or, if that wasn’t an option, just admitted that he wasn’t interested enough to play into the main parts of the game. Dismissing Rift after an hour of tutorial quests and a few of the newbie proto-rifts is like dismissing WoW after only experiencing the crafting system. You just haven’t seen the main point of the game.

In general I think this was an ill-advised article overall. These experts are complaining about systems that are being tweaked and improved with every beta. When Krystalle Voecks says “Certain things I experienced on the Rogue drove me nuts (only 30 seconds’ worth of stealth, mobs’ seeming ability to see through stealth anyway, the odd ability to shoot fireballs with my daggers, poor-to-meh gear-availability) and utterly killed the fun for me.” how many of her readers are savvy enough to stop and think “Well, it is beta, maybe those issues will be addressed.”

Read the comments on the article and you’ll see people who’ve opted not to play based on the problems the Massively staff encountered during beta.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been in all three betas. These are not “stress tests” and they aren’t just marketing events (and I know, this is what we expect betas to be these days). Trion has adjusted things in response to player reaction between beta 1 & 2 and radically between beta 2 & 3.

Aside from Reahard, I can’t really fault the rest of the staff. This is the problem with game journalism in general. Players are stupid. They’re not savvy enough to differentiate between a preview and a review. Film critiques don’t go watch a movie before the special effects are done and then post previews talking about how shoddy the special effects are, but game players have this need for game journalists to report what they see, but then don’t take personal responsibility for understanding what the journalists are reporting about.

Put another way, if the journalists don’t report on bugs they see, then the players accuse them of being on the payroll of the game developers. But if the journalists DO report on bugs they see, then the players seize on these reports as a reason to slag on the game, swear off buying it and tell their friends how much the game sucks, never mind that those bugs might be fixed already.

The only solution, IMO, is to avoid this kind of article when a game is in flux.

A visit to Aion

Posted on by Nimgimli

Back before launch I played in the beta of Aion. At the time I didn’t find the experience compelling enough to pay full price for the client at launch (and, correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t it come out somewhere around the same time as Warhammer, which I did get at launch?) but I always meant to check the game out when I could get a good deal on it.

During the big holiday sale, Steam offered Aion for $10, so I finally took the plunge. I have to say after all I’d heard (or not heard) about Aion since it launched, my expectations were pretty low.

The first (potential) challenge facing new Aion players is NCSoft’s byzantine support system. After installing I found I couldn’t log in. Their knowledge base had no answers and while I did open a support ticket, in an attempt to get faster help I headed to the official forums. I got some ideas there but when I tried to post a message I was told I couldn’t post unless I linked my forum account with a character name. Well since I couldn’t log in, I didn’t have any character names, ergo I couldn’t ask for help on the forums.

This is a small thing but generally speaking I’ve had terrible luck with NCSoft’s account management. In my support ticket I included a ton of information, including my ISP, my router name and model, the name of my anti-virus program and the information that I had turned it off as well as shutting down my firewall for testing. The next day I got a response (so points for timeliness) and the first questions they asked me were who my ISP was, had I tried turning off my anti-virus, etc, etc. It’s so frustrating when it becomes clear that support people can’t take the time to read your support request.

Anyway, this is a blog post about Aion, isn’t it? Sorry for the sidetrack.

It turns out the problem was with their servers or something. (A tracert to their authorization servers was dying about 15 hops down the line from me.) Since then I’ve had no problems.

I’d been playing my pet-using mage in Rift and having fun with it so I decided to go Mage in Aion too. I’d go with the Spiritmaster class when I hit 10. Aion’s leveling progression has you as a base class for the first 9 levels, then at level 10 you “ascend” and get your wings (literally) and pick a final class.

Levels 1-9 were familiar to me from the beta; that’s the problem with tightly scripted quest lines that have to be run through on more than one character. However they were a bit more challenging and interesting (at least towards the end) when there weren’t crowds of people doing them.

I’d forgotten how lovely the art style of Aion is (well to me at least). Screenshots can’t capture the whole experience; animals make some really interesting sounds too. And sometimes silly ones, like the patter of their feet. This is very much an Eastern game. When a mob notices you, there’s a Metal-Gear like “plink!” sound accompanied by a ! over the mob’s head.

That said, the gameplay in these levels really isn’t anything special. It isn’t bad, just very familiar. The one interesting mechanic are spell chains; cast Ice Spell 1 followed by Ice Spell 2 and get a bonus effect. Unfortunately this happens automatically. When you case Ice Spell 1 the icon then changes to that of Ice Spell 2. There’s no way to cast Ice Spell 1 twice in a row and then Ice Spell 2 (unless there’s a setting somewhere). If part 2 of a chain is off cool-down, that’s what’ll fire.

I’d been playing Rift before I jumped into Aion, and ironically enough, Rift felt more polished than Aion did, just in tiny details. Aion was a bit laggy and I saw other players rubber-banding around a few times. Jumping feels clunky. You can get hung up on the terrain pretty easily when you’re just trying to jump over a small obstacle. There’re places with invisible walls between an object and a geometry wall (for instance when trying to hug the wall of a canyon, if there’s a tree growing a few feet from the wall, you can’t go between the tree and the canyon wall) and some sloppy combat feedback at times (if a mob is slowed by a spell, when it dies you get feedback that its speed has returned to normal). None of these are deal breakers but they just seem like issues that should’ve been ironed out in the time since release.

Finally at level 9 I Ascended and remembered why I hadn’t played Aion at launch. After a semi-epic battle at the end of the 1-9 quest chains you get your wings and…become an errand boy. You’ll spend the next hour or so running around the Sanctum (or whatever the other side’s main city is called) doing FedEx quests which are, I suspect, intended to force you to learn how to get around the city. In general the city is too big and too empty. I find myself jumping from one end to the other and having nothing at all to do in the middle except run through it. I was already frustrated by this when I noticed something that wasn’t in beta: a teleport system to jump you across the city. If you play, find it and use it!

Just to give you a feel for how Eastern and grind-happy the game is, there’s one quest to take an item from 1 NPC to another that can be repeated 100 times for some special reward. I did it 3 times and never wanted to look at these NPCs again.

Another problem is this:

The word “Mythrazil” is my character name floating in space. But in amongst that mass of player names and guild tags are 3 NPCs in a different shade of bluish-green (or greenish-blue?). If you know where you’re going this isn’t a problem but for a noob looking for a specific NPC this is a real PITA. Aion also uses character item shops so in some places all you’ll see is a mass of characters sitting around with sales pitches floating over their heads. Thanks to Aion’s dwindling population this isn’t as bad as it was in beta but I still dislike these schemes.

When you finally beam down to the planet to go back to adventuring, you’ll realize just how low on the Ascended totem pole you are now. Your first tasks will be to kill crustaceans and turtles and even inert blocks of rock. IIRC this was where I bailed in beta. This time out I pushed on and once you get past those first few quests things start getting a little more interesting.

One of Aion’s big hooks was the ability to fly. So far I haven’t done a lot of that so I can’t comment much on it. It’s fun though. 🙂

The last thing I wanted to talk about is the community. When you first enter an established and potentially struggling game like Aion, you tend to feel like a real stranger. There’re all kinds of vernacular and game systems that I still don’t really understand, and listening to the chat going back and forth is like listening to another language. It’s like crashing a party or something.

There’s clearly some kind of appearance armor system in play since I saw tons of different ‘styles’ of outfit. Everything from typical fantasy gear with huge glowy weapons, to characters in very mundane gear that look liked they just walked in off the set of The Sims or something. Doing all my FedEx quests in the Sanctum was made somewhat more interesting just via people watching.

One thing I haven’t noticed is a lot of spam. In fact I haven’t noticed a General channel at all (maybe its off by default) but there are Trade and LFG channels that get plenty of traffic and it seems fairly ‘orderly.’ I’ve had invitations to Duel a few times but so far no whispers to buy gold or anything like that.

All in all, my time in Aion has been pleasant. Is that damning with faint praise? The world and creatures in it are interesting even if the combat system is (so far) fairly average. I don’t think I’ll stick around long enough to get to the PvPvE stuff that kicks in at level 25, but for my $10 I’m having fun. If you can get a similar deal and feel the urge to be an MMO tourist for a week or so, I’d say go for it.