Yearly Archives: 2011
Review: The Binding of Isaac
Game: The Binding of Isaac
Recommended price: $5 (full price)
Metacritic Score: 84 (!)
Completion Time: Technically ~1 hour, or 20+ hours
Buy If You Like: Twisted, roguelike Flash games
The Binding of Isaac (hereafter Isaac) is a game that, strictly speaking, I should not enjoy. Indeed, I did not enjoy it at all the first few times I played it. But I did keep playing it, and once I sort of stumbled my way out of fifteen years of safe game design, Isaac rekindled a bit of that stubborn old-school gamer flame that propelled my younger self face-first into Battletoads hour after bloody hour.
This is what the first few hours will feel like.
Isaac plays like Smash TV from the olden days, with WASD controlling movement and the arrow keys controlling which direction you eject the streaming tears from your naked body at the merciless demons haunting your childhood nightmares. Map layouts and room contents are randomly determined each time you start the game, with the only consistency being the number of total levels, and there being Item and Boss rooms on every level (until the last few, which have no Item rooms).
As I mentioned, the game did not seem terribly fun the first few times. There is no quick-save, there are no checkpoints, and I got the feeling that I was lucky to even have a pause button. Death is permanent, none of the items you receive are really explained before you use them, many items can actively harm you in some way, some room setups are completely unfair, and it is both entirely possible and very likely that you will get screwed right from the very start with things only getting progressively worse.
Sometime around my fourth attempt, it suddenly all clicked: this is like Solitare. A game you play because you aren’t sure you want something heavier, a game that you don’t have an expectation to beat every time, and yet something you still find fun hours and hours later.
Isaac gives you plenty of opportunities to make bad decisions.
And I have indeed been having fun hours and hours later; 20+ hours to be exact. Although you never carry over items you accumilate, beating the game or getting specific achievements will unlock new items that are then added to the random roster, some of which will radically change the tenor of a particular run. I have a few more specific achievements to grab by beating the full game with different characters (basically different starting load-outs) before getting to the truly ridiculous “take no damage for X levels” kind, so it will be interesting to see if the game is still fun once those dry up.
But you know what? Getting more than 20 hours of game time in a roguelike, a genre that I was hitherto convinced I would despise on principal, is an absolute goddamn steal at $5.
Class Q&A Highlights
There were 11,786 words in the latest Class Q&A. Here are the more interesting 668 of them.
Q: A lot of warriors feel like the stance mechanic is a bit outdated. Are there any plans to make changes to warrior stances in MoP such as giving the passive stance bonuses to each spec or allowing all of the warrior abilities to be usable in all stances? I say the latter because I know a lot of Arms warriors would love the 10% damage boost over the 5% damage boost and 5% damage reduction. Thank you.
A: At the moment, we are considering Berserker as a +AE damage stance and removing all stance penalties and restrictions. Just use Battle for single-target and Zerk for AE. That isn’t set in stone of course.
The funny thing about answers like this is how many people would leap about with their cries of “Dumbing down!” and “Homogenization!” without examining the actual value of the original design. I do not have a warrior main, but I did have a warrior that I played long enough to be completely baffled as to how the Stance system survived for so long. Simply put: how in god’s name did the designers intend the class to play out? I specifically bought a new mouse with buttons on the side solely for playing my warrior, and it amazes me that there is not an in-game tutorial on macros when warriors essentially require them to function even on a basic level.
Maybe the argument is that Blizzard did not intend for skills like Spell Reflection and Shield Wall to be usable as an Arms warrior in PvP – they are certainly impossible to use effectively (if at all) without macros and addons “out of the box.” Then again… stance dancing to avoid fears as a Prot tank has been in the game since Day 1, and PvP has to be balanced around what happens, regardless of the intention. It just seems like bad design odd to me for a class’s skill gap to actually include completely “new” buttons.
I was waiting for a new talent to make Spell Reflection no longer require a shield, for example. It’s tough enough to gauge the optimal moment to utilize the skill, let alone make the determination far enough in advance for your weapon-switching/SR macro to work. Compare that to using, say, Grounding Totem, a spell interrupt, or even “Vanishing the Death Coil.”
Q: Class homogenization has been problematic in the eyes of the player base. How are you planning to make classes feel unique while still maintaining the “bring the player, not the class” ethic?
A: Homogenization is one of *the* hardest challenges we face. Players become upset if they feel like they are losing what is uniquely theirs, but then they get just as frustrated when they lack e.g. self-healing or mobility or a cool toy that another class gets. With 11 classes and parties, (some) raids and PvP teams much smaller than that, we can’t make every class mandatory and we don’t think it’s reasonable to have 11 (or even 34 if you include specs) spells, buffs and mechanics that are unique but completely equal. We just try to keep the pulse on the community and see when players think we have gone too far or not far enough.
This next bit might start a firestorm of controversy, but we heard from a lot of 10-player raiders who asked “Why make a rogue legendary? We don’t have a rogue.” When we asked why, they said ‘Rogues don’t bring anything we need, so we don’t want them.” That’s not cool. I’m not saying the legendary is the answer for why bring rogues, but you should feel like you have room for rogues without sacrificing something else and that rogues should bring something that makes you happy they are there.
I think the biggest benefit of Ghostcrawler’s more open communication model is to highlight how much of game design is wild-ass guessing. And I do not mean that to be snarky. A designer could be “correct” in saying that change X isn’t increasing homogenization, but if the players feel differently… what does it matter? If a good design leads to decreased revenues, then can we really say it’s good? I would like to think so – what is Good and Right is not necessarily popular in politics and philosophy, for example – but then again games exist to be played.
As for the nonsense about rogues, a better answer to “Why don’t you have a rogue?” would have been “No one picked one/they aren’t fun to play.” Bring the Player is a design model centered around playing with people you enjoy playing with. So to suggest that we should “feel like we have room for rogues” is asinine if everyone you want to play with independently decided not to use one as their main. And it is asinine to make an entire legendary quest-line for a single class anyway, whether it was rogues, paladins, shaman, or whatever.
Q: I’m glad to see you guys are still interested in making the talent system as unique as possible, but it seems like by giving so few choices that cookie cutter specs will be even MORE easy to come up with then now. i know there will always be “the best choice”. but if you guys do all this redesigning just to have the same outcome, what do you have in store to try and fix it from there? and are you concerned the new talent trees might not offer the unique build options players want to have?
A: Since so many of the talents focus on survivability, movement, and utility we are skeptical that there will ever be a talent build that is the perfect build for every PvE fight in the game. It is likely that as players learn specific encounters, each spec finds an ideal set of talents for that encounter. Those will be the “cookie cutter” builds. However, that will mean that players are interacting with the system and picking a unique set of customizations on a frequent basis. This is a vast improvement over a system that is solved once by a dps spreadhseet and then everyone copies that build once and ignores their talents for the rest of the expansion. In addition, there will be likely disagreement over which talents are best for which encounters.
This, to me, is one of the best possible answers they can make in response to a lot of the talent criticisms.
Q: Some of the MoP talents seem really “OP”, is this intended?
A: One of our core design philosophies is “Make it Overpowered”. As much as possible, we like to start with abilities being very strong, and then correct problems as they occur.
I don’t know if this is more amusing as a joke, or if they were serious. Well played.
Q: How will low level balance be fixed in Mists of Pandaria.Right now you can one shot a lot of npcs or players at low levels.
A: We plan to put some additional careful effort into balancing low level combat for MoP.
Balancing the leveling game will be Big News to a lot of bloggers, should it actually occur. We’ll see, although it will likely be much too late for a lot of people who actually care about the fidelity of the leveling experience.
Delving Into the Earnings Call
The last time I talked about an Activision Blizzard earnings call, I had just quit the game myself. Now in Q3, you have undoubted heard that a further 800k subs were lost, bringing WoW down to 10.3 million. For those keeping track at home, the last time WoW was at ~10 million was in 2008 right during the release of TBC in China.
While sites like MMO-Champion and WoW Insider are nice for giving us summaries, I’m interested in the nuance inside the earnings call itself. Feel free to read alongside me at home (curtsey of Seeking Alpha).
1. Majority of the sub loss is occurring in the East.
You have probably already read the above bullet-point summary, so I’m here to assure you that Morhaime does not get more specific than this.
2. Implicitly, the difficulty of Cataclysm content was the cause of sub losses.
Feel free to try and read something different from these paragraphs (emphasis added):
That said, we know there are improvements that we can make in gaming content. The level-up content in Cataclysm is some of our best works. But it was consumed quickly compared to our past expansions set, Wrath of the Lich King. Once players reached max level, the end-game content in Cataclysm is more difficult. Balancing this content for our diverse player base can be very challenging.
Our development team is constantly analyzing the game, and we’re continuing to explore ways that we can adjust the game to better satisfy both hard-core and casual players. To that end, our next free major content update for World of Warcraft is already in testing and will be available for players in the coming weeks.
Now, the funny thing about this is how Blizzard may have cost themselves millions of dollars in lost revenue by pushing Cataclysm on the Chinese instead of letting Wrath work its magic. After all, Cataclysm was released in China on July 12th whereas Wrath was out in mid-August of 2010, a difference of 11 months. I am not sure whether Cata heroics came pre-nerfed like they ended up in the West, but even if they did it would still be worlds different than how it was in Wrath.
Which, no matter your feelings on the expansion, gained ~1 million subs and largely kept them until Cataclysm.
3. Expect some (more) “aggressive” World of Warcraft marketing.
Specifically: “We have other aggressive marketing plans in the coming months for World of Warcraft, but we’re not ready to share details yet.” Morhaime was then grilled in the Q&A section for further information.
Can you give us some additional color on what’s happening to engagement and subscriber levels for World of Warcraft, particularly following that big expansion pack announcement? Where do you think the subscribers are actually going? And I’ve got a quick follow-up.
Okay. Well, as you know, we don’t provide a forecast on subscribership levels. But I’ll say is that the announcements at BlizzCon were incredibly well received. There’s a lot of excitement around the expansion and the upcoming content in the next patch, which will be introduced in the next couple of weeks. It is currently in test on our public test realm, and we’re very excited about that content. I guess, I can say this, the majority of the declines were in the East. China still represents more than half of our global player base and historically, December has been a very good month for subscriber trends. We have a number of initiatives planned. We plan to be very aggressive in terms of our marketing promotions, and we’re looking forward to the end of the year.
It is an open question what kind of aggressive marketing Blizzard can even do with WoW. If they lowered prices on some of the other services like server transfers or even weekend sales or whatever, that might go a long way in getting me back – I’m not coming back to a dead server and then immediately spending $35+ to move one toon and just 10% of my wealth somewhere else.
Beyond that, what can they do? I doubt something like the cost of the box is keeping people away.
4. Patches are more about recapturing the recently churned.
Nothing ground-breaking, I just find it interesting.
Just out of curiosity, when you’ve had big patches before with World of Warcraft, what type of subscriber uplift do you typically see?
Well, historically, with the content updates that we’ve done, it’s really not intended to go out and drive new user acquisition, that’s a whole other strategy. But it does drive engagement with the game, and so that will impact churn, if we do it successfully and eventually will drive win back, as players tell each other about the content they’re enjoying. We’ll hopefully see a lift in our ability to win back players that may have already churned.
And that wraps up the earnings call.
Dailies and “Bad Design”
There is a fascinating conversation going on in the General Forums right now with Daxxarri concerning daily quests and how they are “bad design.” This exchange in particular piqued my interest:
This is just a bad design. A game should not ask for daily commitment to enjoy what it has to offer.
[…] I get concerned when I see players throwing out words like ‘bad design’. Perhaps an individual dislikes a design choice, and that’s fine. We do our best, but World of Warcraft can’t be all things to all people, all the time. That said, making a value judgment about whether the design is ‘bad’ or not is not only un-constructive, but in the vast majority of the cases I’ve seen, such an assessment reveals that the design was not well understood to begin with.
Followed up later with:
That being said, why are you harping on the OP’s use of the term “bad design”?
Because language is important, and also, because it’s often used in the phrase, “That’s just bad design.” to justify why a mechanic or feature is undesirable to the poster in question. It presupposes the correctness of an opinion which may not, in fact, be correct. It also tells me nothing useful, except “I don’t like it”, but it makes, “I don’t like it.” sound more erudite, knowledgeable and sophisticated. It still boils down to, “I don’t like it.”, which isn’t particularly useful without a context.
Point taken, Daxxarri. I have deployed the “bad design” argument here and in comments elsewhere, using it as short-hand for “this feature isn’t catering to me.” It is an open question of whether I should be catered to, and at whose expense. Personally though, I vote for being catered to 100% of the time, everywhere.
This does raise the question of “What can be considered good design?” It would seem to me that we need to know the intention of a design before it could be judged good or bad. Without designers coming out and explaining intentions though, is there any real way to know? Are subscriptions and profit margins the only metrics that matter?
And the further complication for subscription-based MMOs, for me, is that I cannot trust the designers to not include time-sinking as one of the principle intentions of everything they do. Do patches really come out 8 months apart because it takes that long to polish… or because that extra month means millions more dollars at little extra cost? Did Blizzard really feel Molten Front was best paced at 35 straight days of dailies? Why not, say, 25 days?
All that aside, I do want to highlight the original statement again for your consideration:
A game should not ask for daily commitment to enjoy what it has to offer.
To be clear, the poster is talking about World of Warcraft, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. And you know what? I think I agree with him.
Speaking of Rorschach Tests
Ghostcrawler made another community blog post about the Great Item Squish (or Not) of Pandaria. I read it, went “Yep, tis a pickle,” and moved on. Motstandet of That’s a Terrible Idea instead went on a bizarre rant:
Unquestioning and steadfast in their decisions, the WoW designers make seemingly contradictory choices. Why doesn’t GC want level 85’s to do higher level content? I could only assume it’s so players do the leveling “content” first. Yet they constantly assault the leveling game, […]
The article goes on, discussing various methods which could bandage WoW’s broken attribute system, and then he unloads this gem: “If your answer is that stat budgets don’t have to grow so much in order for players to still want the gear, our experience says otherwise.” Silly plebes with your naive remedies; I have data to dismiss your predictable suggestions!
Ignoring the arrogance, what metrics could they possibly have to discredit this simple solution?
I answered the post over there, but I think it is useful to talk about some of the underlying design issues of expansion-based themepark MMOs.
Design Issue 1: The “assault” on the leveling game.
The matter of pacing is of huge concern in videogame design. Even in single-player RPGs (or really any game), you still see the steady metering of items and abilities as the game progresses; going from Stone Sword –> Iron Sword –> Steel Sword and so on. I do not think I played even a FPS where I had access to all the guns in the game right off the bat. By handing out new guns or powers or abilities in a measured way, the player has time to focus on useful applications of said gun/power/ability before deciding which one(s) they want to use.
So given that, why does Blizzard continually assault the leveling game with patch notes such as “The amount of experience needed to gain levels 71 through 80 has been reduced by approximately 33%?” The issue is twofold.
First, look at the experience from a brand new player or even potential player perspective. The designers may have crafted the original WoW leveling experience to take an average of 300 hours to go from 1-60. In other words, the designers felt that 300 hours was a long enough journey to get to the endgame. When expansions are released though, an additional 50 hours is added to the leveling experience and the endgame moves farther along the timeline. Assuming that each expansion adds another 50 hours and no other changes were made, someone picking up all the WoW boxes would be staring at a 500 hour leveling wall come Mists of Pandaria.
So, assuming that 300 hours is a sweet-spot of sorts, it makes sense to truncate the leveling experience so that it always takes 300 hours to get to the endgame. The alternative of doing nothing means that all the commercial and word-of-mouth advertising would be concerning (endgame) content a new player would have to spend weeks and weeks getting to.
This is not to suggest there are not side-effects to XP reduction, such as out-leveling a zone before all the quests are complete. Then again, as long as the quests are sufficiently non-linear, why should anyone care? After all, skipped content adds to replayability. It is not entirely different from RPGs today with optional side-quests and how you can beat the game without being max level.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, one has to look at the experience from a veteran player perspective. I say “more importantly” because there are more ex-WoW players than WoW players, and thus more people who have already experienced the leveling content at least once. If I want to experience the endgame as a different class, each expansion makes the decision to roll an alt even more difficult – every hour I spend leveling an alt is an hour I potentially fall behind in progression (which is, incidentally, why it is useful to have diminishing returns and plateaus). While it is important to pace the game for new players, it makes less sense to do so for players who already learned all the lessons a slow pace was designed to encourage. I may not have ever played a druid, but I played a rogue, a warrior, and a shaman, so pacing things like I have no idea how to move around simply makes me bored and impatient.
So why doesn’t Blizzard simply make a Death Knight option (starting at level 55) for all classes? Good question. I wish they would. Heirlooms were a rather brilliant “solution” insofar as they took something they were going to do anyway – reducing XP required – and then made you spend time buying them, rather than getting them for free. That being said, from a business standpoint there is still probably value for them to have me spend 20+ hours leveling up as that is time spent in-game in those leveling ranges, making things there a little less of a ghost town.
Design Issue 2: Why not just have flatter progression?
Well, if you noticed, Blizzard is kinda doing this already. The standard ilevel upgrade between tiers used to be 13 ilevels, but now it is closer to 7 ilevels. Moreover, Blizzard combined 25m and 10m gear, so that instead of four tiers between raids, there are only two.
The problem with flatter progression is that it, in effect, removes “content.” To understand this point, let us all acknowledge what really is going on under a random loot system: the loot is random so as to give you a reason to beat a boss more than once. If the boss had “smart loot” that only dropped items tailored to the raid who defeated it, that raid would have less reasons to kill that boss week after week. As long as you continue to care about the loot a boss has, that boss remains legitimate “content” to you. I keep putting air quotes around the word “content,” because let’s face it, in every other scenario the only reason you would want to kill the same boss again is if it was fun to do so.
Another issue is when there simply is not enough of difference between gear to matter… or when older items are better. Spending weeks on a boss to gain +2 Strength is not my idea of a productive use of my free time, even if objectively there is no difference between that and +20 Strength. The way something feels is as important (if not more so) than the objective measure. There is a good reason why things are priced at $9.99 instead of $10, after all.
Flatter progression though also leads to those scenarios in which older items were strictly better than newer ones. Before relics were changed to be stat sticks, the Holy paladin Libram of Renewal reduced the mana cost of Holy Light by 113. That relic was available from the beginning vendors in T7 content and ended up being Best-in-Slot for (nearly?) the entire expansion. And yet Blizzard designed and itemized Holy paladin librams for T8, T9, and T10. If you used those, you were actually doing it wrong. And while new paladins could always just buy the T7 libram, there were situations in WoW’s past where an older item remained BiS (Dragonspine Trophy) and basically led to people farming obsolete content for years. That is not my particular idea of a good time, especially when you were basically farming an item for just a handful of people.
The Design Solution: Business (Mostly) As Usual
To be honest, I don’t think there is much different that Blizzard should have done. There were missteps for sure, such as when they introduced hardmode raiding in the middle of Wrath and had itemization quickly spiral out of control. But from a player experience, I was very grateful that my having Lich King loot did not trivialize Cataclysm leveling content the same way my having TBC gear left me slogging through hundreds of Northrend quests with zero upgrades. I can empathize with people who have all their hard work rendered moot each expansion/tier, but I also believe that the alternative is worse.
If Sisyphus had to look at the entire mountain each time instead of just focusing on pushing the boulder, I don’t think he’d ever make it to the top.
That being said, there shouldn’t be an issue with Blizzard introducing an option to slow down leveling much like they have an option to currently turn off XP gain entirely. And I would also like to see a Hero Class solution for veterans, possibly via the Cash Shop.
Hardcore Causality
The perennial semantic debate of the Hardcore vs Casual descriptors has reared its zombie horse head again, and it amuses me somewhat seeing the Rorschach results. My own take?
Casual and hardcore relate to the seriousness in which an activity is undertaken.
Length of time has nothing to do with it: as is frequently mentioned, top-tier raiders can clear 7/7 heroic Firelands in 2 hours and then not play at all for the rest of the week. Compare that to someone who levels alts or otherwise plays for 50 hours a week.
Of course, “seriousness” is somewhat subjective. Then again, there are a few objective metrics in which I believe can determine (arbitrary) positions on the seriousness scale. For example:
- Read forums or Wiki pages. +1 seriousness
- Posts on forums. +1 seriousness.
- Download mods or external programs. +3 seriousness
- Ignored phone calls in middle of the game. +3 seriousness
- Schedule your real-life around in-game events. +5 seriousness
It is important to note that while raiding (agreeing to log in at 7pm on Thursday) does not automatically make you hardcore, it is certainly more hardcore than someone who does not seriously consider convincing their other friends to move Poker Night to Wednesdays so they can make Thursday raid night.
The design of the games themselves absolutely has an impact on seriousness too. To be sure, human beings are 100% capable of making otherwise casual activities the most hardcore thing imaginable – stamp collecting, Lego models, Chess, and so on. However, the nature of the game can also lend itself to being taken more seriously. The difficulty of raiding, for example, is such that a random group of ten people thrown together is not likely to achieve success.¹ That encourages people to schedule play sessions; the social ties generated thereby encourages structuring your IRL commitments around game time instead of vice versa. I absolutely know people that asked for Tuesdays off from their retail work because, well, raids reset on Tuesdays and you would let the team down if you don’t show up.
Difficulty and social ties aren’t the only game designs that skew people towards hardcore-ness. Sometimes the game makes it hard to reasonably progress without a minimum amount of sunk time. I have been playing The Binding of Isaac recently, for example, and much as other roguelike games you cannot Save and quit, death is permanent, and so on; there is literally no point in playing The Binding of Isaac for 10 minutes, because you cannot beat the game, you cannot unlock anything, you cannot really do anything of value. Games based on Checkpoints such as Far Cry 1 also fall into this mode.
I know I mentioned time spent playing is irrelevant, but here is the nuance: if you know you need at least an hour free to get anywhere in the game, and you chose to continue playing, you are more apt to start rearranging your real life around the game life. I am not saying life rearrangement is bad or ridiculous – I do it all the time – but it does indicate you are more of a hardcore player of said game. Compare that with Angry Birds or Plants Vs Zombies or Red Remover which I play only when I am sitting around in a doctor office or at the DMV or wherever and I immediately turn it off when I am no longer waiting.
In any case, that is my contribution to the field of loaded verbiage.
In regards to the topic at large, i.e. for whom was the leveling game changed, I would suggest that leveling was indeed made faster for the hardcore. However, I would NOT agree that this somehow makes the game less casual-friendly. The boredom of disaffected veterans is not analogous to a brand new player of the game – I cannot imagine someone with zero WoW experience complaining about or even recognizing leveling “too fast” or the game being “too easy.” Indeed, a new player more than likely died several times before level 10 and then spends the remaining 75 levels being overly cautious. Or being skilled enough to recognize the lack of danger, which indicates they would have been bored no matter which way leveling was designed.
And besides: the more quests and zones that are skipped on the way to the level cap, simply means the more replayable content exists, right?
¹ We’ll see how Looking For Raid works out, eh?
John LaGrave Interview
At the tail end of the Instance’s #250 podcast (The Panda Reality Distortion Field), there was an interview of Blizzard’s John LaGrave, Senior Game Producer, with Scott Johnson and Veronica Belmont. Much like I have done in the past, I extracted that particular interview and posted the full 23-minutes on Youtube for posterity.
Some of the more interesting questions/responses:
Q: […] So what do you say to those just seeing the Kung-Fu Panda style of it right now and not getting the nitty-gritty details that we are all hearing at the conference? What do you say to ease their fears of …
A. Sure, sure, sure. Of course we rely on you guys to give your impressions of what you’re seeing here at the conference, and let them know the starting experience isn’t particularly one… [of that] overly-influencing movie, if you will. What I say is “give us a shot.” Look at what the press is going to say, look at what we’re going to do, look at what we’re going to do through the beta and evaluate on your own.
I mean, what we try to do in Blizzard development is take something we think is going to be awesome, something fun, and make it our own. Make it cool. And that’s our goal here. We’re not trying to make that movie. We’re not trying to make Drunken Master. We’re not trying to do that. What we’re trying is to take elements we like from that, improve upon those and make them our own. And that’s it.
So I would say look at what the press has to say about it overall, and know that if there are aspects that you don’t like… honestly, it’s probably going to change.
Q: […] This [new expansion] feels like we can breathe a little bit. A little bit of “ahhh, I can take some green tea.” […] From a development side, did you guys see it as a way to shift tone in a way that is significant but still shifting tone that way?
A: […] It gets back to what we did and what was awesome about Classic, which was: when you walked into a world you didn’t know about. All you really knew was if you played some of the original Warcraft; you had some notion of Orcs vs Humans, and it’s Horde vs Alliance. And we’re getting back to that theme. […]
Q: Is there any kind of imperative [concerning mods/websites] of wanting to reign them in, or is it more of an inspiration? (paraphrasing)
A: We’ve looked a mods and went “That’s a great mod, why aren’t we doing that?” […] Quest Helper and Outfitter […] we literally looked at that stuff and went “Yeah, we’re retarded for not doing this. We got to do this; this is a great thing.”
There was a rather large, but interesting section about pet battles I didn’t want to transcribe because, well, it’s a lot of text. It starts around the 16 minute mark and it is described as “one of the most complex things we’re ever putting into the game.” Towards the end, John mentions he’s a huge Civ nut, if that makes you feel any better.
Q: […] Is it to the point now where you guys say “Yeah, 90 levels, yeah you probably seen a lot of this content before, but it has been a while now for a lot of you so 1-90 isn’t going to seem like the work you think it is. You’re actually going to enjoy yourselves.” Was there that thought, maybe?
A: It’s an interesting thought… I must say that we don’t have that thought. But totally valid. One of the things we like about having that neutral race and making that decision is…
When we first made WoW, you know, there was an expectation that you were a pretty savvy MMO player, like that you had played EverQuest, or you played Ultima Online, that you were really familiar with that notion of what an MMO was. And we were also expecting that you mostly knew a Blizzard game.
As we have gotten into a broader and broader spectrum of appeal, yeah, there are a lot of people coming fairly naive into it. And they don’t know Horde and Alliance, what those are and what those mean. And literally being able to play that experience and then as you play through you get more and more information about Horde and Alliance, and making that decision informed as opposed to blind. Yeah, we think that will be a more interesting and better playstyle too.
While trying to figure out what John’s job title was, I found a bevy of other interviews from BlizzCons past. Here’s John a few months before Cataclym’s launch when they undoubtedly knew Pandaren were coming. Here’s an interesting video interview during BlizzCon 2010, but again before Cataclysm – he talks about how raiding was designed for the hardcore in Classic, then how it was made easier via training and equiping players better, and then about how Cataclysm will be much more difficult. Kinda funny given how that played out, eh? Finally, another pre-Cata print interview that has this bit in it:
Gameplanet: And you’ll be going for that “bite-sized raiding” philosophy? We can expect it to be smaller?
Lagrave: Yeah, certainly. In the past with things like Naxxaramas back in patch 1.12 – way, way back then – we were all about making enormous dungeons, right? And the idea was to spend a lot of time going through it, and we “winged” them so that it would be easier to do. You could go through one after the other. Now we want to acknowledge – and we recognise the fact – that raiding styles have changed. People want to go through about three hours of content in a night, maybe even call it quits for the week. So yes, definitely, it is more “bite sized” and that’s just the way the MMO genre has changed.
Just thought a lot of this was somewhat topical given all the recent blog discussion about WoW getting more casual vs more hardcore vs whatever else.
I think listening to these designers definitely gives you a different impression of the process of game design going on than perhaps you get just from internet debates. For example, I think there is no doubt WoW 1.0 was made for a different audience than WoW 3.0 – LaGrave came out and talked about how, essentially, WoW was originally designed as a niche title for people already familiar with EverQuest and Blizzard games.
That being said, I absolutely do not get the impression that these designers approach the WoW as we know it as “catering to the lowest common denominator” or “dumbing down the game” or anything like that. The impression that I get is that these designers would have launched the game as we know it today with its breezy leveling and integrated Quest Helper and so on if they had the technology and knowledge back in 2004 that WoW was going to be as successful as it was. In other words, the game in 2004 was shaped by whose population they were trying to lure away (EverQuest/Ultima), and not what they imagined WoW to be necessarily.
Indie Game Alert
I cannot imagine anyone reading this wouldn’t already know, but in case you haven’t checked:
- Bastion is the mid-week Steam madness sale. $7.49 (down from $15)
- New Humble Bundle is up, now with The Binding of Isaac as a bonus.
As previously mentioned, Bastion is top-quality material.
Character Customization Through Talents
I was really going to leave the talent discussion alone, it being “old news” by now and my having already presented my case. But I keep coming across what seems historical revisionism of sorts when it came to early WoW talents and the number of actually legitimate customization options available. Take, for instance, this passage over at The Babbling Gamer:
[…] When I first played WoW back in 2005, it’s biggest selling point for me was the talent system. It allowed far more character customization than most MMOs out at the time. I tried all sorts of things. I tinkered. I had fun. The Burning Crusade felt like a solid improvement on it. I played with lots of sub-optimal specs, trying to find the one that was the most fun. I don’t min/max for effectivity, I min/max for enjoyability. I don’t care if spec A does 10% more damage while spamming one spell over and over than my spec B complex rotation of silly abilities and half-working synergies. I don’t care that I hardly ever use that heal I spent talent points to get and could be doing more damage without. […]
After some digging around Google, I actually found a website that has functioning TBC v2.01 talent calculators. Booting up the Retribution tree and seeing Crusader Strike as the 41-point talent really takes me back… to a time where I apparently enjoyed auto-attacking my balls with a hammer. And 61 talent points to spend! Those will sure come handy… in filling out all these 5-point talent sinks. You see, leveling up and getting a new talent point is fun. Putting said talent point into Rank 3 Conviction (+1% crit rate, 5 ranks) is at no point whatsoever fun.
So with that in mind, I decided to look at the various class trees and basically remove every talent that did NOT change your gameplay in any possible way. Here are some of the results:
TBC paladin talent tree.
How about the mage?
TBC mage talent trees.
The rubric I used to determine whether a talent changed your gameplay was pretty simple:
- The talent added a button to your hotbar; or
- The talent changed the way you used a button already on your hotbar.
The paladin case was fairly straight-forward: cooldowns, buffs, and abilities only. Then again, paladins have a lot of bleed-over utility that eventually resulted in the “one-man army” effect of Retribution in early Wrath.
The mage tree was a little less straight-forward. For example, I left Improved Counterspell up because it changed Counterspell from a button you only should push at a certain moment (when the target is casting), to a button that could be cast strategically (to deny spellcasting at certain moments). I left Improved Scorch open because the talent makes you actually include Scorch in your rotation to keep up a vital (raid) debuff, changing your gameplay. Likewise, I left Frostbite open even though it simply gives some of your spells a 15% chance to Freeze (root) your target, because that interrupts your normal spell rotation; instead of just chain-casting Frostbolt, when Frostbite procs you’re encouraged to do a Shatter combo of firing an Ice Lance with a Frostbolt in the air. You may or may not have noticed, but Shatter itself I left covered as a talent sink – even if Shatter did not exist, the damage/time limit of a Frostbite proc would still encourage the Frostbolt/Ice Lance combo. Shatter simply increases the potential damage, just like the overwhelming majority of all the talents in TBC trees.
A question arises though: is choosing between damage talents not a choice? Well… yes and no. The easy answer is the one from the Extra Credits video, which is to say that a choice between +10% Frostbolt damage vs +10% Ice Lance damage is NOT a choice, but a calculation. A problem arose, however, when I considered these two talents from Fallout: New Vegas:
Cowboy + Shotgun Surgeon
Granted, Fallout: New Vegas does not have a talent tree per se; it has a perk system. Every two levels you must choose a perk from an ever-expanding list however, so I consider that roughly analogous. So… is the Cowboy perk a choice or is it a calculation? I just agreed that choosing between +10% damage to two different spells is a calculation, and the Cowboy perk essentially gives me +25% damage to a small number of weapons. And yet I am inclined to say it is a legitimate choice. Why? I consider these sort of talents to be stylistic and/or identity choices. In a game with no formal classes, picking the Cowboy perk is the closest thing you can come to differing “specs” in Fallout. A Gatling laser handles a lot differently than a sniper rifle that handles a lot differently than a revolver. Likewise, an Arcane mage plays differently than a Fire mage that plays differently than a Frost mage.
So, going back to the Babbling Gamer quote, we can zero in on this part:
I don’t care if spec A does 10% more damage while spamming one spell over and over than my spec B complex rotation of silly abilities and half-working synergies.
What Warsyde has done is essentially used the old talent system to create an entirely new spec. Maybe create an Arcane mage that takes Ignite and casts Fireball instead of Arcane Blast with a little PoM-Pyro action in the wings? Warsyde did not actually mention any specific spec, but a Google searched turned up this gem of a EJ mage theorycraft thread started 10/16/06, talking about an Arcane/Frost hybrid mage grabbing both Spell Power (+50% crit damage) and Ice Shards (+100% crit damage with Frost spells). That sort of thing definitely would have got my juices flowing at the possibilities. So, yes, choices!
And yet… and yet… maybe not.
See, there was never any question that picking a specialization was a choice. And while the number of talents points available in TBC and the various positions in the trees allowed for the creation of “new” specs like the hybrid Arc/Fire or Arc/Frost mage, what were those hybrid specs really? A fire mage with PoM and Arcane Power, and a Frost mage with absurdly large Frostbolt crits, respectively. You were still basically a Fire mage or Frost mage with different activated abilities. And guess what Fire mages?
ka-POW!
You can have your PoM-Pyro back.¹
In conclusion, the older WoW talent systems allowed space for unsupported hybrid specs to exist, but in actuality these hybrids were almost always simply normal specs using 1-2 different abilities; an outcome basically indistinguishable from the proposed plan in MoP. The rest of the talent choices, and arguably many of the hybridization ones, simply came down to calculations – Arc/Frost was created simply to abuse +crit damage talents, for example. The only real thing we are losing is the ability to gain a number every other level, and sink that number down into a hole.
And while Warsyde can choose between spamming one spell vs a complex rotation of silly abilities with vague (calculated!) synergy, so can a 0/0/0 mage. How complicated one’s rotation should be is definitely a choice, but not one you make with talents.
¹ Yes, I am aware of Hot Streak procs and their simulated PoM-Pyro-ness. It’s just not the same.
Interesting How That Works
As you may have noticed, I’m actually pretty fine with the direction of Mists of Pandaria, pandas in general, and sort of feeding off of the entirely ridiculous vocal reactions against the expansion. Kind of like the opposite of the following Nietzsche quote:
“In every party there is one who through his all too credulous avowal of the party’s principles incites the others to apostasy.”
-Nietzsche, Human, all too Human
In other words, when you come across people who are so vehemently opposed to something (for seemingly irrational reasons), I for one have a subconscious tendency to moderate the behavior by adopting the opposite reaction. For example, I consider myself fairly liberal, but occasionally when I read some of the absurdly reactionary bullshit of other liberals, I suddenly find myself on the other side of the aisle. There is a story about how a police officer shot a dog, and it was presented to me as “If you aren’t upset, you aren’t paying attention. I don’t want my tax dollars supporting this:” followed by a picture of the officer and the dog. Queue a /facepalm.
That being said, after watching the latest episode of Legendary on Tankspot/Gamebreaker.tv, I finally got to see how Mists of Pandaria was actually introduced at BlizzCon. The following Youtube of the actual event is perhaps the most painful thing I have ever seen:
Instead of watching the whole thing, you can skip to 2:30 when it really gets painfully overdone.
Guys, it’s just possible that the curious race we’re going to meet in this mystic land, may just teach us a thing or two about who we are, and why we fight.
I think I hurt the muscles in my neck from having cringed so goddamn hard at the above quote. If anyone’s reaction against Mist of Pandaria is based on having watched that video, you have my full blessings to have gone (and continuing to go) ape-shit over the internet.
I am still fine with the expansion, for the record, but it was clear from the video and overall presentation on how cognizant Blizzard was that people would be upset about a “direction shift.” And in being cognizant of possible negative reactions, Blizzard legitimized them. I believe the expansion would have gone over a lot better if they did not draw so much of a contrast between what came before and what was on the horizon. Don’t remind people of all the outlandish sequel escalation that they have experienced over the last 5-6 years, especially when said escalation had definitive bad guys on the box.
And more importantly, if the Horde/Alliance war is going to heat up, put that in the goddamn teaser trailer. As in, Theramore in flames, Alliance soldiers on the march, something, anything. We know Pandaria will be turned into a fantasy Vietnam, with two superpowers parachuting in to bring a little heat to the otherwise Cold War. The whole Horde and Alliance war is amazingly keyed up, and gets the blood pumping in a way fairly unique in the history of opposing faction gameplay – that linked thread is 177 pages long with ~4000 posts. Put that front and center, and you’d likely find people more amicable to the idea of pandas being srs bsns.
In An Age 