Cor! It’s DAW!

It took a while, but here I am on the bandwagon, just in time before the week actually ends.

So apparently it’s Developer Appreciation Week — I’d give credit where it’s due but I’m damned if I know where it’s due so we’ll just have to go with good intentions. I would if I could but I don’t so I won’t.*

(Click me to hop to the artist's site)

My problem with these appreciation hours/days/weeks is that they always make me think “Uhh, shouldn’t we be appreciating pandas/mothers/peace/developers all the time? Isn’t this a little facile? Do I have to go out and buy a Hallmark card just because everyone else does?”

I am not a big buyer of Hallmark cards, cute baby animals notwithstanding.

So here’s the deal: I love my devs whether the calendar or some blog meme tells me to.

• When I complain about something in a game, I don’t assume the developers — or designers or artists or even Joe the Coffee Monkey — are out to get me or anyone else and did it on purpose and are now maniacally laughing at my in-game discomfiture.
• I always do assume that developers give at least a little bit of a shit about the game I’m so passionate about, if only because of professional pride.
• I’m not an industry insider but I know it’s a tough job from the outside where if you get it 100% right nobody will ever bother to thank you, but if you get it 0.0001% wrong, a thousand irate forum goers will rant about it for years.
• Next time something irks you about a game, don’t instantly tie it to Gorgonzola the Mighty, Combat Developer — even if he posts on the forums saying you’re all noobs and he’s glad he screwed you over. Maybe he had a bad day (if he hadn’t, he’d have left the posting job to SmartNice the Community Person).
• Next time you like something about a game, consider giving positive feedback for a change. It’s noticed. Positive feedback almost always is, since it’s so damn rare — and not just in game development circles.

Now get outta here before I get all maudlin. I hate appreciation days. Bah humbug.

- – -

* Apparently this is all Scarybooster’s fault. I should have known.

Curse you, hype-wave! (TSW)

Not so long ago in real time, but an aeon ago in blog time, I decided I was going to become immune to hype. Well, it worked for a few months, anyway, and in internet-time nobody remembers a thing you said last week let alone 6+ months ago. So sue me.

The Secret World folks should be releasing a few more goodies today — keep an eye on gametrailers.com among other places. There’s another one out on the G4TV site but it’s essentially another first-look post, though I definitely agree with the author that “The Secret World has reinvigorated my excitement for massively multiplayer games.” Hence this post.

I’m trying very hard not to get too excited, because for all we know Funcom are just doing a great PR job and the game behind the curtain will turn out to be another gnome with warts and not an MMO giant (How To Torture A Metaphor, Part VII)… but I’m getting excited all the same.

Why? Well, the skill-based aspect appeals to me. My very first MMO was Asheron’s Call and although that was level-based, it also had a slew of skills that you could put experience points into — so if you wanted to be half-man, half-deer and run faster than Bo Jackson you could do that quite easily. It was always fun trying to figure out where you’d ended up and whether you’d left a corpse after you got disconnected during a long cross-country run. Most people ended up min-maxing to some extent, of course, but that’s a large part of the fun too as long as it’s optional: you can be a min-maxed ninja or you can be Bo Jackson, your choice.

Which is the crux of it: player choice. These days most games make your choices for you, even though there’s the veneer of options in the form of talent trees or whatever each game calls them. But the games that really intrigue me (whether I play them or not) are the ones, like EVE, where you choose what you’re going to be and if you choose to be a multi-tasker that’s okay: the payoff for not being the best at a single thing is being pretty good at a bunch of other things.

I’m not so sure about the skill-deck system they’re intending to use for The Secret World, but I’m not against it either. Quite a few people I know play Guild Wars and apparently enjoy the way skills are set up there, and from what I understand the TSW system won’t be all that different.

Ironically for an altoholic like me, the idea of being able to be different things at different times on a single character is really quite appealing. Part of the reason I have so many alts in all these games is that I enjoy trying out all the different roles… but if one character could be all those roles at different times, then maybe I wouldn’t be so tempted to keep making new characters.

And in a game like TSW, I have a feeling I might want to restrict how many avatars I have. I’m not sure how to explain that… but the setting and conflict setup seem, to me, to be far better suited to single-character play. For once in my gaming life I’d like to be able to concentrate on just one person (well okay, maybe two). In connection with that, I’d like to see a single server environment — we have no idea if that’s going to be the case, I’m just speculating — and single-account handles like they have in CoH and other games.

Because if I’m going to be excited about TSW, I especially want to be excited about being able to play it with — or against — my friends, and I’ve made a lot of them in this last decade of online gaming. I’m tired of being on different servers. I want to be able to see these people, virtually or otherwise, in the same world as me.

But most of all, I want to be in the TSW beta. There will be one and I will be in it. You heard it here first.

(There’s more info promised for release today. I’ll update as I find it.)

Aieee! The Secret World information blackout lifted!

This is the forum post. It haz linkage.

This is the linkage:

– Teaser trailer (IGN)

– IGN article

– Ten Ton Hammer

– Massively

– Voodoo Extreme

– VG24/7

– Kotaku

– And the Monsters of Maine blog

No, I haven’t read all those. Yet.

The teaser trailer is just that… a big freaking tease. Bastards!

You’ll have to excuse me; I’m off to buy more chickens to sacrifice. There will be a beta and I will be in it.

PQs? I do not haz them.

Remember Warhammer Online’s Public Quests?

If you don’t, they were — and still are — areas where players can/must cooperate in order to get through several stages of a local event, at the end of which if they’re lucky they get some treasure, xp and Influence. It’s like a normal quest — kill 10 rats, then kill 10 large rats, then kill King Rat — only bigger, and anyone who happens to be in the area can take part. There’s some complicated scoring — which didn’t always work well depending on your class, but I don’t know what things are like now — and finally a leaderboard and the top however-many get funky loot.

Although it wasn’t always perfectly implemented in WAR, the idea was innovative because it allowed anyone in a given area to take part in a regularly-repeating event. It being an MMO, repeated participation was encouraged through loot chests and the gaining of Influence, which rewarded you with really good loot if you filled up enough of the influence bar for that area.

Coupled with WAR’s open group concept, where any group can be opened up and strangers can actively join rather than having to passively wait to be invited, it meant that you always had something going on and something you could join.

In theory, anyway. Population issues were what they were, and in my opinion there were perhaps too many PQs, because in the end — at least back when I was playing, which was admittedly 18 months ago — most PQs ended up being rather deserted. And they weren’t scenarios, and that’s where most people were, all day every day. But that’s another kettle of fish.

What I’m interested in with respect to these PQs is that they allowed players to find ongoing activities and fun rather than waiting around for said activities and fun to be organised. Now, I’ve agitated on behalf of the solo player many many times, but that doesn’t mean I hate the concept of groups and it doesn’t mean I’m always averse to playing with other people — especially when a game makes it easy for me to jump in and then jump back out.

Problem is, games have gone from expecting grouping to pretty much making it a handicap if you group before the game is good and ready for you to. They’re both extreme and they both suck. Back in the EQ day, there was so much stuff you couldn’t do if you couldn’t get a group together; these days, if you do want to group you have to put up with getting less xp, taking longer to complete quests, and generally getting less bang for your questing buck than if you were by yourself.

I’ve noticed this very recently in EQ2, where I’ve started very tentatively trying to box my two accounts at the same time — not for gaining of phat leetness, but mostly because even I apparently have a limit to how many times I’m prepared to repeat newbie content. I thought it would save me some time and save me from having to do all this stuff a million times when I’m getting a little tired of it. Well, that bit works; the downside is, at my low levels everyone ends up going more slowly than if I just ran these characters through real quick, one at a time. And they get less xp, too, which means they’re also advancing more slowly. (I know, advancement isn’t everything, but we do like efficiency. When a game makes it less efficient to behave a certain way, people are going to stop behaving that way. QED.)

I’m not the only one to have noticed this. Some chap was looking for a group in low-level zone chat the other day, and at least three people spoke up to tell him there was no point to grouping up at that level/location and that he’d do a lot better just forging ahead on his own.

Grouping certainly has other advantages, namely the fact that you get to experience content with other people, but we’re all pretty venal when we play: we want other people and we want grouping to provide some tangible benefit. And those aren’t rocket science in an MMO: more loot, more xp, more of both. Duh.

As a solo player I can get around this for the most part. I forge ahead, I don’t really care about the loot, and in most cases I’m just levelling my characters enough so that they won’t get killed when they go harvesting to feed my crafting habit. All the same, it seems wasteful to me to be in a game where grouping is initially discouraged and later is about the only thing you’re expected to do (raiding). For group players, being told they have to wait till {insert game-appropriate level} in order to group must be really frustrating. (Well okay, they don’t have to, but let’s not be disingenuous: games are designed specifically to encourage certain behaviours… and they can also end up channeling behaviours in ways they hadn’t anticipated. That’s why designers get the big bucks, right? (Yes yes, joke.))

What I would like for the next few MMOs to do is to provide some genuine benefit to grouping, in game-number terms and not just in instances and dungeons. If a bunch of friends want to play together all the time — or even occasionally– it shouldn’t be made more difficult for them to do so. They shouldn’t earn less xp when grouped; City of Heroes/Villains already knows this, and increases xp as more people join. Like I said, this isn’t rocket science — Asheron’s Call was doing this a decade ago. They shouldn’t have to wait till everyone is on exactly the same quest step in order to be able to do stuff together; that’s one of the huge downsides of quest-driven gaming and quest-driven gaming is the current MMO MO, if you’ll pardon the acronym mouthful. They most certainly shouldn’t have to harvest 10 foozle-poops for every single group member — if each mob kill counts for everyone, how come each clicky-interaction doesn’t do the same? It’s possible — some quests in EQ2 actually update clicky-actions for everyone… but most don’t.

And there should maybe be a middle ground between “I’m just questing” and “I’m doing a dungeon quest-crawl” — which is where those PQs come in. They’re static content like everything else, but they’re sort of in between normal questing and dungeon crawling. For someone like me, who has a finite (read: very small) amount of head-space for stuff like dungeons, PQs are perfect. While I’m there I can contribute as much as I’m able; if I have to go AFK I can just pull out for a while (and if I’m ethical I’ll go far enough away that I’m not leeching and/or leave the group); when I get tired of it, I can just move on. Perfect.

Coupled with open grouping, the PQ idea is brilliant for jumping in and doing stuff with people, be they friends or random strangers. Yes, they’re limited in many ways, but the basic idea promotes active participation: I can join when I like and I can leave when I like; and it promotes at least some degree of social interaction, since I’m doing this stuff with other people. MMOs can’t force us to be social, but they sure as hell can make it either easier or harder. In a perfect world, these games would give us the tools to enable us to be social when we want to be and then just let us get on with it.

These days, sadly, it seems to be enough to provide an LFG box with lots of criteria.

I do not haz PQ, but I wish I did.

Linkage: The Secret World GDC Crumbs

Original forum post. Text:

Hi, guys -

I understand many of you are eagerly awaiting information and assets coming out of GDC, and it’s probably challenging trying to be patient during this time!

Right now I’m sitting in on one of the presentations we’re doing here, but I have a few minutes to spare, so please allow me to take this opporunity to inform you guys about what we’re doing at GDC and what you can expect coming out of the show.

Right now we are inviting press to exclusive presentations here in San Francisco, and we’re showing them roughly 15 minutes of actual gameplay. That’s all in-game footage, so it’s an exciting time for us. The journalists are taken through some of the core features of the game, and they get to ask Ragnar Tørnquist and Martin Bruusgaard questions afterwards.

Just as we stated before the show, what we’re doing is showing this to the press first before releasing the information and assets to the public after GDC. This is a strategic decision as we want to give all journalists the opportunity to release their coverage at the same time, and we want to give them enough time to prepare that coverage. This is a common publicity strategy, especially for games that are this early in the ‘PR phase’. If not, the journalists who were lucky to be here first would have a headstart over the other journalists, which could severely lessen the impact of our reveal.

The embargo date for the press is 23rd of March. That’s when they are allowed to report from the presentations and publish the assets. You should also note that there will be a staggered release of assets, meaning some assets will be made available on the 23rd, while other assets will be made available a few days after that.

The journalists will be free to write about anything from the presentations. They will also be provided with new screenshots and artworks. We will also make video material available, but this will differ from the material that the journalists got to see. The reason for that is simply that the material shown to the press may not be suitable for public consumption, as the video works best in a presentation setting and not necessarily as a downloadable video without that same context. It works in this setting, where we’re showing it on a monitor with Ragnar standing in front of it describing what they’re seeing. Just putting that out, in an unedited form, would most likely have a negative impact on our reveal. Sure, lots of the material we’re showing to the press will also be made public, but it will be edited into – as we said before the show – a different shape and form. As I’m sure you understand, when we are now finally putting out the very first in-game footage, we want it to be perfect and we want it to shine!

We’re all extremely excited about this reveal, and as I said to Ragnar yesterday, it’s really difficult to wait until March 23rd before we can read about what the press thinks of what they got to see. Not to mention your reactions here on the forums!

But we will all just have to be patient. I hope you will find it worth the wait!

Best regards,
Erling Ellingsen
Director of Communications
Funcom

One day there will be a beta and I shall be in it. Mark these words.

/sacrifice chicken

March Foofery

I haven’t done this in a while, so: if you’ve linked to me and I haven’t linked to you, it’s because I’m a snotty bitch and too good for you. However, if you comment and let me know, I’ll turn loose my less-eviller twin and add you to my (long, but discerning) blogroll.

One of these days I may even go through said roll to weed out the blogs that are truly defunct — though I do hear that WAR(hammer Online) blogging is undergoing something of a renaissance these days. You go, WAR bloggers!

Obligatory filler cutepic, especially to annoy bloggers with iPhones

!

The Secret World: IGN Interview, more crumbs!

Ragnar Tørnquist tells IGN a bit more about The Secret World! A few snippets below, but follow the linkage to see the full 3-page interview. It’s nothing earth-shattering — no massive seekrits get revealed, at least not at my browser clearance level, but it’s a fun read all the same.

I’m still drooling for a beta spot by the way, Ragnar!

Ragnar Tornquist: We certainly set out to be more ‘real’ than many other MMOs; to create a world that feels alive, living and breathing, genuine and – to some degree – realistic. As long as you buy into the existence of demons, parallel dimensions, ancient lost civilizations, magic, the living dead, immortal beings…of course.

We’ve actually planned out several years’ worth of post-launch content – including exciting new locations.

We want secret worlders to stick with The Secret World for years and years – and we’re committed to giving them new content, new challenges and new features on an ongoing basis.