The folly of Cryptic

Posted on by Nimgimli

So let’s talk about all the weirdness going on with Champions Online.

Let me preface by saying that until a few weeks ago, I was pretty sure I’d be playing Champions Online on launch day. But then Cryptic started making really strange decisions.

First, they tied early-start to a specific retailer (Gamestop). Now, anyone who is a fan of video and computer games should NOT be purchasing games from Gamestop. That outfit is a fat, bloated leech sucking the lifeblood out of the game developer community. I don’t shop there if I can possibly help it (basically I’ll spend gift cards there if I get them). So that means no early access for me.

Not a huge deal, but a bit strange. I get that PC developers don’t have the same issues with Gamestop as console developers do. But where I live, the brick and mortar Gamestops don’t even stock PC games anymore.

Then there’s the Lifetime Membership issue. Cryptic’s Bill Roper used to have a little company called Flagship Studios, and they made a game called Hellgate: London, and they offered a lifetime membership to it. Roper was from Blizzard. I’d met the man, I knew how passionate he was about games (at least at one time). Even though Hellgate was kind of broken at launch, I forked over $140 for a lifetime membership, partially to show how much I believed in Roper. I just knew he’d pull the game together and I wanted to do what I could to help Flagship get that game fixed and awesome.

Of course, that didn’t happen. I would’ve been much, much better off had I bought $140 worth of scratch-off lottery tickets. Or $140 worth of horse manure. Or something.

But now here’s Roper’s next project and next Lifetime Membership offer. But this isn’t Roper’s company and it’s a much bigger team and anyway, everyone produces a dud at some point. So I actually consider this new offer. I also bought a Lifetime Membership to LOTRO and I’ve never regretted the decision in the slightest. Quite the contrary. So I’m thinking about my budget and if I can figure out a way to carve out $200 and be able to play CO indefinitely.

Assuming I like the game, of course. But wait…what? I have to buy the Lifetime Subscription BEFORE the game launches? Hey, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you, Cryptic. How about we trade? What a lack of confidence in their product this deadline broadcasts. This says to me “We don’t think you’ll want to buy this Lifetime Subscription once you’ve seen the game, so we’ll try to bribe you to purchase it pre-release with perks like access to the beta of a totally different game.” Huh? How in the world does that make any sense? “Buy a lifetime sub to this game and we’ll give you early access to another game in a few months.” So presumably you expect I’ll be SO BORED of Champions Online by this winter that I’ll be desperate to play another half-built game?

Less than a month from release, the NDA is still firmly in place. But Beta Keys went out today to pre-orderers and to Fileplanet Subscribers. I’m in the latter camp. I kept an eye on my email all day, assuming the alloted Fileplanet Keys would get snapped up quickly. And I scored one. Yay! Can’t wait to get home and download the client. But wait….what? I can’t actually PLAY the beta until the 17th of August? Then why make this big fuss about sending out the keys today? Downloading the client took all of 30 minutes from Fileplanet, so I don’t buy the ‘pre-load’ bullshit. Release the keys a couple days ahead of beta opening? Sure. But 12 days?
Once again I read a lack of confidence in this decision: “We want to wait as long as possible to let more people into the beta because we want to delay players realizing how bad our game is for as long as possible.” Or more generously, “We don’t want to give players time to hit high levels in beta and find out there’s no content up there.”

I don’t know who is running the marketing and/or sales divisions at Cryptic, but it almost feels like someone is deliberately sabotaging the hype of this game. Every new bit of information I read makes me less inclined to want to play it. It seems really evident that Cryptic has something to hide from us, the potential customers. Folks in the beta remain under an NDA gag-order, so they can’t tell us what’s going on, and the gates are barred from the rest of us getting in.

What’s really going on inside Champions Online?

Gambling on game design

Posted on by Nimgimli

Been quiet around here, but as you can see from Tipa’s widget over on the right, I’ve been playing the heck out of LOTRO. LOTRO seems like a pretty divisive MMORPG – people hate it or they love it – and frankly I haven’t been in the mood to debate the merits of a game I’m enjoying. I’ve just been playing, and having fun, and enjoying the experience without deconstructing it. It’s been a nice, relaxing change of pace.

Then I decided I wanted a Summer Festival Horse, and I ran into a system so infuriating that it almost made me walk away from LOTRO for a while (one of the joys of being a LOTRO Lifer is that walking away is easy since you know it’ll be there when you feel like coming back, with zero hassles).

Y’see, there used to be races that let you win a Summer Festival Horse, but I guess those generated a lot of ill will. People would think they’d come in first but the game would say they were in second, due to latency/lag or whatever. I’ve seen this in just about every MMO I play..if you play next to someone, your character on their screen is always behind where it is on your screen.

But I digress. For this Festival they removed those races and instead put in a couple of 3rd party races. There’s a hobbit’s pie-eating contest/race, and a dwarf’s drinking race. You place a bet on which contestant will win. If you bet right, you get 12 Summer Festival Tokens.

But in order to bet, you need Race Tokens. You can get 2 of those via a zero-effort quest (just talk to an NPC) but that quest is on a 2-hour cooldown.

The actual races run about every 12-13 minutes, I’d say. 10 minutes after a race ends, a new one begins, and races are 2-3 minutes.

With me so far? Get 2 tokens. Go to the race location. Wait up to 10 minutes for a race to start. Bet on a contestant. Win or lose. Wait 10 more minutes for another race to start. Bet. Win/lose. Then wait ~1:45 for the Race Token quest to cool down.

Duplicate this: there’s one race outside Thorin’s Hall, the other on The Hill at Bag End. So you can travel back and forth to maximize your time.

It takes 56 tokens to get a Festival Horse. So you have to win your bet on 5 races. There is zero strategy to the races – at least that’s what they say: that it’s all random.

It took me 22 races to win the number of tokens I needed. My win/loss ration was 4-18, but at one point I was 0-9 & had determined that the game was rigged against me! To say I was frustrated would be quite an understatement. I left LOTRO running all day, actually setting a timer so I’d know when to come back and get Race Tokens again.

Now, LOTRO defenders will tell you there are other ways to get Festival tokens: You can fish for them. But my character has a lousy fishing skill, and you can only improve your fishing skill 10 points a day. There are 4 fishing quests. 3 of them are 20 minutes long, and 1 is 10 minutes long. During these periods you can catch special “Festival Fish” which you can turn in for tokens (4 fish/token, although there are rare fish worth 2 tokens each). This would be a fine alternative except that these quests have a 14-16 hour cool down, so effectively you can do them once/day. I did do them all, which is why I had 56 tokens after winning 4 races.

LOTRO defenders will also tell you the new races are fun social events, and that may have been true with the Festival began. But when I was doing them during the day, I was the only one doing them, so it was boring as hell waiting for the races to begin.

I would urge Turbine to make some changes to these races. Some suggestions: let the players influence the race in some way. Maybe cheering for your contestant could help them go faster or something? Give the user some kind of feeling of control. Second, give tokens for more than 1st place. How about 1st place: 10 tokens. 2nd place: 4 tokens. 3rd place: 1 token. Lastly, let us save up ‘losing tickets’ and cash them in for a consolation prize of a few tokens.

Basically do something so that a player on a bad streak at least feels like he is making some kind of progress. Lose 9 of these races in a row and let me tell you, it’ll drive you to a very unhappy place. I felt like Sally Brown after Linus convinced her to wait for The Great Pumpkin instead of going trick-or-treating.

Anyway, to sum up my rant: sending players through such a huge time sync and taking all control away from the outcome of the event just makes the player feel bad about your game. I know this is a ‘stop-gap’ while you try to get the real races working, but it needs to be tweaked before the next festival!

In the end, through sheer stubbornness, I got my Festival Horse (shortly after midnight. I’d started working towards it before morning coffee). Yay! I actually just bought my regular horse the night before (which is why I started going for the Festival horse so late). And then today (with more tokens from fishing and some left-overs) I added a Summer Cloak!

Screenshots or it didn’t happen:

festival_horse1

festival_horse2

Aside from this occurrence, I’ve been having a hell of a good time in LOTRO this time back. Saving up for my horse was a good short-term challenge. Normally I think you’d have the $$ to buy a horse by the time you hit level 35 (when you get the ability to ride) but I’d been paying 50 silver/week in rent for long stretches when I wasn’t playing (and therefor not generating any income) so I was way behind the curve on savings.

I’ve also been *gasp* grouping with people. PUGs. And so far, no bad experiences. Since tuning into the global LFF channel my appreciation for the game has changed. For the most part, the folks that hang out on that channel are happy to answer questions and have interesting discussions on how to play and or ‘build’ various classes.

I started a 2nd character and have been experiencing the new “New Player Experience” with him. There’s a lot less running back and forth, which I know people hated. But at the same time, now it all feels much more like a WoW-style “theme park” experience. You’re carefully shunted from one NPC to the next, spoon fed quests and passed along. I guess that’s what people want, but I was surprised to find that I rather missed roaming around Breeland.

Shatter (PSN)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Sidhe’s Shatter came to the Playstation Network yesterday, at a very reasonable price of $7.99. I wasted no time grabbing a copy.

At its most basic, Shatter is a Breakout clone: you move a paddle back and forth in order to bounce a “ball” into the play field where it will smash blocks. But Shatter adds some new twists and gameplay elements that make it different from every Breakout-style game that I, at least, have played.

First, when the break a block, it smashed into Fragments. You collect these Fragments in order to build up a power bar. How do you collect Fragments? By Sucking them in to your paddle. At any time you can pull one of the left shoulder buttons to Suck. And conversely, the right shoulder buttons Blow.

So it is Breakout with Sucking and Blowing. I pity the marketing team.

What makes this interesting is that when you Suck or Blow, it affects everything. The Fragments, the ball and (some of) the blocks. By using Suck & Blow, you can curve the ball’s trajectory (little hint marks on the edge of the playfield help with this). Basic blocks are fixed in place, but there are some special blocks that kind of ‘float’. Generally these are trapped by basic blocks at the start of a level, but once those ‘fence blocks’ are gone the floaters drift. If they drift into you, you lose a life.

So you need to use Suck to pull in the Fragments for energy, but not use so much of it that you start sucking all these floating blocks towards your paddle.

What’s energy for? Well, you do have a Shield that will protect you from incoming floating blocks, and that requires energy. But once your energy meter gets full, you can unleash a torrent of laser fire at the blocks. When you do this, everything slows down in a kind of laser bullet-time.

Shatter also has all kinds of power-ups dropping out of busted blocks, and a wide range of block types, from the basic and floaters I mentioned, to ‘rocket’ blocks, blocks that spawn other blocks, explosive blocks, and so on. The playing field is sometimes rectangular, sometimes circular. In the latter, about three fourths of the field will be surrounded by a fence that things rebound off of, and the last quarter is where your paddle roams, following the curve of the level.

Every few levels there’s a boss battle, which is kind of a new twist for Breakout games. Oh, and you can release as many balls as you want (well, up to the number of lives you have). But every time you lose a ball, you lose a life.

Shatter has PSN Trophies and Leaderboards for you Achiever types.

I’m no where near done with it, nor have I seen everything it has to offer. But for a mere $8 I feel justified in recommending it to anyone that’s enjoyed any kind of Breakout-like game in the past.

Here’s a video of the game in action (not mine). Skip the first 2 minutes or so to get to the actual gameplay. You can see the Sucking and Blowing as concentric arcs moving towards or away from the paddle. Notice how the ball trajectory curves in response to this. Since this is world 1, you won’t see a huge variety of blocks, unfortunately.

Scribblenauts

Posted on by Nimgimli

And yet another video. I should be putting this stuff on my Tumblr blog-thing I guess.

Scribblenauts is a pretty fun and crazy looking DS game coming out this September. I suspect two copies will quickly make it to this household, as both myself and Angela are really looking forward to it. It just looks so quirky, and we’re huge into quirky here at the Dragonchasers Castle Hovel.

Video from Joystiq.

Rebutting Wolfshead’s Rebuttal of Tipa’s Rebuttal

Posted on by Nimgimli

I think I have the nesting correct in that headline. 🙂

So the saga so far:

An anonymous game designer who goes by the handle ‘Wolfshead’ posted a fairly scathing critique of the first 15 minutes of EQ2. Tipa rebutted his post. And Wolfshead rebutted her rebuttal.

I was posted a few comments in response to Tipa’s post, and this morning posted a comment on Wolfshead’s blog. Comments there are moderated (as they are here) and s/he chose not to approve my comment. Which is fine — your blog, your prerogative. But my spidey-sense was tingling when I posted that comment and I had the forethought to keep a copy of it.

So here is that comment. Imagine it was in the comments section of Wolfshead’s last post. I’ve left it intact, poor phrasing included (I was rushing to post it before work). The only change I’ve made is to add italics to quotes from the original post:

===
The problem I have with you is, you make too many assumptions about
EQ2 players. For example:

I would like to challenge Tipa and others to put forth their
suggestions to help SOE make a better EQ2 newbie experience.

What makes you think she doesn’t? My significant other is a die-hard
EQ2 fan, and she is constantly giving feedback to the team via proper
channels.

You, once again, act as if your interests are altruistic, but any
potential new EQ2 player that read your ‘First 15 minutes’ would be
pushed to give up on the idea of trying the game; you make it sound
about as much fun as bamboo shoots shoved under the fingernails.

In my experience (I dabble in EQ2, but honestly never stay in it for
very long myself) the EQ2 community is pretty welcoming to new
players. I’ll admit I see that situation through the lens of my SO and
her guild and all the new EQ2 players in it.

But neither can you. You have no idea what SOE is doing back at its HQ.

You say:

Companies pay thousands of dollars in consulting fees to get into the
head space of their potential customers.

Well how do you know SOE hasn’t done that? Doesn’t continue to do it?
Some of the things you critique (eg, the background images at
character creation) were the way you suggest that should be (different
background for ‘evil’ characters) but SOE changed it so that all
characters are in front of the same background. Why did they toss out
the ‘evil’ artwork? Was it an arbitrary decision, or was it based on
market research and focus testing?

If you truly, honestly want to help SOE improve the game, then submit
feedback TO THEM. Don’t trash the game on your blog…all that really
helps is your page view count. And I know you’ll say you weren’t
trashing it, and maybe that wasn’t your intent, but that is definitely
the feeling one comes away with after reading your 15 minutes post.
You come across extremely arrogant and dismissive. I’m not saying you
*are* either of those things, but that’s how the post reads.
====

Since I posted that, Wolfshead has approved other comments, so I suppose I’ve hit a nerve. Redacted. SmakenDahed makes a good point…the other comments might be ‘auto-approved’ by virtue of them being previous posters. Update: Confirmed that this was indeed what was going on, so I fully retract the ‘hit a nerve’ statement.

Revisting Bartle’s MMO player types

Posted on by Nimgimli

We haven’t talked about the old Killer-Socializer-Explorer-Achiever thing in a while. Time to drag it out and beat it again…

So to start, I would self-categorize myself as almost full on Explorer. Logic:

Killer — I don’t like being killed in an MMO. And I assume that other people don’t like being killed, either. I am, when centered, a generally nice person. I don’t like to inflict pain, suffering or unhappiness on other people. (Other people would probably not say I’m a nice person because I am often not centered, and when I’m frustrated, or angry, or sad, I’m a royal son-of-a-bitch, but we generally point our introspection lens at ourselves when we are ‘neutral’.) So I don’t like PVP because I don’t like killing other people because I assume that upsets them, and I get no pleasure out of upsetting other people.

But, curiously enough, even though I don’t like being killed, I do kind of like being in danger. It really adds something to the MMO experience when you know you can be unexpectedly attacked at any moment (in days of yore you’d have to worry about that from NPCs, but that’s not often the case these days).

Point being, I don’t put my Killer quotient at zero, but it’s pretty low. I enjoy, now and then, the thrill of running through PvP areas and having to be on the lookout constantly.

Socializer — I solo almost exclusively. I don’t chat a lot; I’m *extremely* impatient with people who are intolerant, and most MMOs are full of people who are intolerant. The irony of me being intolerant of people who are intolerant is not lost on me…I wouldn’t want to talk to me, either. 🙂 I do like to swoop in and save people in trouble; that makes me feel heroic. I do like player-driven economies and the dynamic feel that lots of players brings to a game. I love people watching, in game and out. People are strange and twisted beasts and you never know what they’ll do next.

Point here being, Socializer again very low, but not quite at zero.

And now things get really interesting.

I would self-evaluate myself as being low Achiever, and high Explorer. Or I would have, until I got into a comment thread with Tipa over gaining levels. Quick summary: Tipa thinks of leveling as a chore, and she’d just assume games not have levels. She points to Eve as a game where you can go anywhere and do anything on Day 1.

Now that baffled me. It’d be like saying you don’t like ice cream! There’s nothing wrong at all with not liking ice cream, but I just find it hard to fathom. I love gaining levels, or speaking more generally, progressing a character (levels, talents, skills, traits, gear…whatever ‘increases’ to make your character more capable).

Tipa says she is an Explorer, not an Achiever, and that explains why she feels the way she does.

It took me a few days of pushing this around in my brain before I realized that I *am* an Achiever. I never thought I was because I very, very rarely make level cap. I never log in with intent to gain more levels, but when I do get them, I smile a lot. I never raid, I never stay up past a reasonable bedtime in pursuit of a goal. I don’t feel driven my Achiever-ness. But it turns out I am an Achiever.

I’m Explorer too, but that exploration has to be tempered with Achiever goals. Give me a brand new MMO where I can toggle on god mode and fly everywhere around the world and see everything the game has to offer, and I’m done with the game in a week. To me, Exploring new parts of an MMO world is the reward for Achieving new levels. [Tangent: I love Japanese RPGs, too, even though they tend to be very linear and so not very popular in the West. I love having to ‘earn’ the next bit of the story, the next area to explore. Same basic mechanics as in my MMOs.]

All of which is why I probably don’t buy into the popular “DIKU-MUD based MMOs must DIE” sentiment that is so popular these days. I don’t play for the game mechanics, I play to Explore a new world. Once I stop regularly visiting new areas in a game, I move on to another game. The mechanics are irrelevant, and in fact I might argue that I prefer them not to change much because I don’t feel like putting in the effort to learn a new set of controls. Take WoW or EQ2, strip out the geography, lore and npcs and replace those with new geography, lore and npcs and I’ll happily repurchase as a new game.

So I think if I were to self assign my Bartle archetype, it’d be something like:

Explorer: 40%
Achiever: 40%
Killer: 10%
Socializer: 10%

(Not that Bartle results add up to 100%)

For reference, the last time I took the test I was:

How about you? Forget the test… how do you see yourself?

* * *
After reading such a diatribe, I can at least share with you the kinds of views I play for:

wallpapers,lotrowallpapers,lotro

Click through for 1680×1050 wallpaper versions.

Aion beta’s nerdrage evoking policy

Posted on by Nimgimli

I resisted posting this whine, and it is a whine, but I just can’t get it out of my head.

I got into the Aion beta via a paid-subscription to Fileplanet (and getting into betas is my main reason for being a paid member there). By the end of the July 4th beta weekend, I was pretty burned out on Aion and had decided not to pre-order.

In the weeks since, I’ve been feeling the urge to play it again. Specifically to experience the combat system again. I’m not even sure why; I wanted to play more to identify what it was that was calling me back, or if this urge was even based on reality or just faulty memory.

So I was excited about this weekend’s beta event. I eagerly updated my client, logged in and got the message that my account wasn’t eligible for this beta event. A bit of research confirmed it: the Fileplanet keys (and many, many other keys) were for that 1 single weekend in July.

Nerdrage ensued. I could try to justify it (it was a pretty big download just for a couple days of play; I would’ve tried more classes had I know I just had 3 days, etc) but the real truth of the matter is, it just felt like a bait and switch. Jump through the hoops to get in, we’ll give you a taste, but now we’re going to cut you off. It felt like artificial scarcity designed to try to increase demand. It felt sleazy, like a tactic that crystal meth dealer who hangs out down on the corner would use.

My assumption is that their plan is something like this:

Give a bunch of people a very short beta access, then cut them off. Wait a few weeks for the satisfaction levels to settle, then open beta again, but deny most of the people access, unless they pre-order.

A marketing-driven scheme to psychologically manipulate the audience into pre-ordering. It has nothing to do with beta-testing. But to be honest, over that July weekend I was just playing for free, not really testing. So on some level we’re even.

But I come out of the situation pretty angry at NCSoft and Aion, feeling the urge to say something childish like “I hope the company goes bankrupt!” but of course that isn’t really true — it isn’t the worker bees coding the AI and creating the art that made this decision, and I wouldn’t want to see such a tragic outcome for them. But whatever marketing person came up with this plan…his or her head on a pike? That I’d like to see (metaphorically speaking). Sometimes psychological marketing tactics backfire, I guess. And I bet a lot of people did turn around and pre-order so as to get into this beta event.

Demon’s Souls preview

Posted on by Nimgimli

These days, with money as tight as it is, I don’t generally buy brand new games. $60 on launch day, $40 a month or so later when it goes on sale? I’ve got plenty of other games to play while I wait for that 33% discount, thank you very much.

But for Demon Souls, an incoming PS3 RPG, I’m making an exception. Watch this Gametrailers video to learn about its unique and interesting ‘passive multiplayer’ system. I want to be playing this one when everyone else is!

I’m going to embed it but you should probably click through to the HD version.