Category Archives: Commentary
Bean Counters
So once again, Gevlon accidentally makes a compelling argument in the midst of a pompous rant:
“Work ethic”, “hamstering”, “completionalism”: I don’t have a good name for this skill, but I’m completely sure it exists. The lack of it provides the lazy bum, and we all know the good feeling of “Well done!”. The ancient hunter who went out hunting when he wasn’t hungry had better chance of survival than the guy who started hunting when he was starving. The guy who felt fun from watching his pot filling up with beans had much better chances during winter than the guy who foraged just for today. We are descendants of hard working people and we inherited the genes that give the fun feeling when we see our stockpiles filling. The traditional MMO use this form of fun. […]
Now let’s analyze the glorious rise and then the shameful stagnation and fall of WoW. Vanilla WoW was a pure “hard working” game. Your progress depended on how much and how effectively you worked. There were action in the game, but due to the GCD and cast times, it demanded dexterity that vast majority of people easily had. Of course you had to understand the game, but for non-retards it wasn’t a challenge. So you could concentrate on one form of skill: “hard working”.
People completely wrongfully assume that WoW beaten EverQuest because it was “less grindy” or because it had smaller death penalty. No. It won because EverQuest had forced grouping, making the game mixed “hard working”-“social skills”. WoW was pure “hard working” until the endgame, where raid organization needed social skills which did not belong to the game. No wonder everyone referred it as “the organizational nightmare”.
As someone who still has a Light of Elune in his paladin‘s bags, I really enjoy the bean counter metaphor. It is a concept I was musing on while playing hour 37 of The Witcher. Why was I looting every house and making several trips across town to the one vendor I know will buy damn near everything in my bags? The gold is undoubtedly superfluous at this point, especially as I now how enough ingredients and in-game knowledge to steam-roll whatever is coming my way. Then I peeled one more layer down, and wondered why gaining experience points was still fun, when The Witcher is likely my 75th+ RPG. If gaining XP is fun, then why am I not just playing Xenogears forever? It was with that thought in mind that I commented a rebuttal to Gevlon:
The “shameful stagnation and fall of WoW” has nothing to do with undermining the hardworking element, which is alive and well even now; it has everything to do with the natural reduction in the novelty of the experience.
The guy having fun “watching his pot filling up with beans” will NOT have fun filling up an infinitely large pot. There has to be an end-point – the reward of a survived winter – in order for the fun of collecting beans to be realized. Those beans also meant he could relax in his tent instead of scrounging around in the snow. The guy would have less fun filling up a pot with beans as a slave, even if the survival benefit of a full pot is the same. Why? For this guy knows that, as a slave, his task is never-ending.
As Morhaime has commented, the WoW market is saturated: there are more ex-WoW players than WoW players. The people who enjoy hardworking in games have picked up WoW, enjoyed it for many winters, and are now moving on to pick beans in new fields. It has nothing to do with anything WoW has or hasn’t done. Frequent gear resets, at most, act as more frequent winters. After so many winters in one place, it is time to move on regardless of whatever other claims of quality the game has. The novelty of gathering beans fade, and slave-like, rote gathering sets in.
In any case, a WoW that was simply building on vanilla for the last seven years would still experience a “shameful stagnation and fall.” Unlike sports/chess/etc, which have the benefits of tens of thousands of years of iteration, there will always be better, more novel iterations of videogames on the horizon.
Humble Bundle
Somewhat inspired by this post over at Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle I decided to go ahead and check out the Humble Bundle for myself. These are real screenshots:
At this point, I feel a little guilty. So:
Fine.
Some notes:
- As mpb mentioned, the entire interface is incredibly slick. These guys should be in the Internet Checkout Design business, because damn near everyone else is stuck in the goddamn Medieval Age when it comes to making it difficult to give them money.
- Also as mentioned, I felt incredibly guilty for entering $0.01 even though I was legitimately interested in testing out if they would allow it. The picture was amusing, but I was more affected by the throwaway “It appears you have no heart! Please prove you really are human” captcha line. Clever, Humble Bumble, clever indeed.
- The very fact that you had to enter at least $0.01 with your credit card information is intriguing to me, psychologically. These Humble Bundles would probably not work as well if they were legitimately free, as in not having to enter any information at all. Once you have mentally committed to purchasing something and entering in you credit card info, the actually dollar amount is a fairly trivial concern. This is the reason I believe not many MMO companies have bothered trying out $13/month or $8/month or “non-standard” monthly fee amounts – even though supply/demand economic theory dictates that going from $15/month –> $12/month should bring in X amount of new subscribers, you aren’t likely to capture a lot of new players in practice. Plus, if you charge less than $15/month, then you project the fact that your game isn’t worth a “normal” subscription amount to customers.
- The above makes me curious as what would happen to a FP2 game if it suddenly required a one-time $0.01 payment of their customers to continue playing. That obviously contradicts the “FP2” part, but it would also prove that perhaps the appeal of F2P isn’t the price-point, but rather the lack of a need to enter credit card information.
Currently Playing
I am normally a gamer that dislikes playing more than one game at a time. For some reason, I have been all over the place lately.
Shining in the Darkness
It have been 15-20 years since I played this game, and I still have most of the first dungeon level memorized. Funny thing is that I made the exact same mistake I did when I played the game the first time as I did this time around: the king gives you 200g to buy some equipment, and I ended up buying a bronze dagger for 100g that I already had equipped. Considering you spend levels 1-4 running around within the first 20 feet of the dungeon entrance killing slimes for 2g apiece, it was a costly mistake. And “Holy eight max inventory slots that count your equipped gear, Batman!” I haven’t busted out the graph paper yet, but I know the 2nd dungeon level has trap doors that drop into lower level coming up.
The Witcher
Played through the prologue, and just spent some time in the first Inn hustling the fist-fighters out of almost 100 gold orens. It makes me wonder though, whether the game designers put those fist fights in there as a way of rewarding “expert” gamers, or if you are intended to quintuple your starting wealth in order to succeed. Game is alright so far, but I sort of hope the combat system gets a little deeper than the truncated Action RPG/DDR simulator is feels like at the moment. I mean, I was seriously expecting a Block or Dodge button to be necessary, but so far all I see is a “double-tap WASD to do practically nothing” prompt. Really digging the steam magic-punk setting though.
As an aside, my first glance at the sort of leveling up/skill tree system in Witcher made my eyes glaze over. People talk about Blizzard dumbing down WoW’s talent trees and combat ratings and such, but this is why. No doubt it will become second nature by the end, but my first impression of that unintuitive mess of an interface is not good.
Far Cry
Far Cry 2 was the first review I posted on this site, so I figured I may as well try out the first game when the Steam deal came around. I knew ahead of time that it was nothing like its sequel, but wow, it’s nothing like its sequel. If difficulty is based on the number of times I have been killed, Far Cry is thus far a really difficult game. That being said, this “difficulty” feels more like the sort of trial-and-error LIMBO/Out of this World style rather than challenging per se.
For example, there is a stealth meter, but I don’t actually get the impression that it is a stealth game – a serious design issue I have with a LOT of FPS titles that pretend stealth elements can just be plopped down into any game. When I think about stealth games, I think about Tenchu and Metal Gear Solid and Assassin’s Creed. You know, games that A) dissuade straight-up combat by making it difficult, B) have enemies with relatively predictable pathing, C) have ways of silently killing foes, and D) aren’t first-person / giving you some way of knowing how stealthed you are. Maybe this is a personal problem I have with FPS games, insofar as I expect to bring my mad Counter-Strike skillz to a game that wants you to sneak into that merc camp instead of killing them all (and getting killed through an opaque screen wall that the AI can magically see through).
Fallout: New Vegas – Lonesome Road DLC
I ended up caving and buying this DLC right away for the full $9.99 price because, much like LIMBO and Bastion, I could not get them out of my head despite having other games to play until they went on a Steam sale. So far, the environments are amazing in that “this is why I play Fallout” sort of ways. I do have two “gamey” issues that sort of break the immersion though. First, one of the gating mechanisms is how you have to detonate nuclear warheads to clear paths of debris. That’s fine… except when you detonate nuclear warheads next to buildings to just clear out some wooden pallets. It’s Fallout, so I’m not expecting destructible buildings in a game where looking at your Pip-Boy freezes time. But… they’re goddamn nuclear warheads.
The other gamey issue is the signature weapon, the Red Glare, which is a sort of rocket-launching minigun. The weapon is actually fine, it’s the rockets. I’m playing in Hardcore mode, so each rocket weighs 0.25 lbs. As you may know, you can break down a lot of the ammo in the game for parts to create better versions – breaking down 2 rockets for parts to create a High-Explosive rocket, for example. When you break down a rocket though, you get a Cherry Bomb, a 0.50 mm primer, and a Conductor. A Conductor in Fallout: New Vegas weighs 5 lbs. So, yes, each 0.25 lbs rocket breaks down into a 5 lbs Conductor. It’s gamey and should be trivial, but the little things are sometimes the worse offenders.
That aside…
I forgive you, Fallout. I forgive you *forever*.
I haven’t taken this many screenshots-that-will-be-desktop-backgrounds since the original Fallout 3 and Point Lookout DLC.
Old Skool
Until next Tuesday, Steam has a deal on Sega games going on. Remember when Sega made consoles? Feels like forever ago. Anyway, as I was browsing through the catalog, I came across the Sega Genesis Classics Collection, which is about 40 Genesis games for $7.49. Among those pickings, what do I find? Lo and behold, a game of my yesteryears: Shining in the Darkness.
Like finding your old gimp suit in the back of the closet.
I played the hell out of this game for for about two years straight back in the early 90’s, and never did finish it. And right when the topic de jure is the good ole days of challenging content? It must be fate! So yes, Value, thank you for allowing me to make a $0.74 credit card payment for a game by all rights will probably not hold up at all but I’ll slog through anyway out of twenty years of spite.
Your weekend homework assignment is to blog/comment about what game(s) you actually find/found challenging and wish more games were like. This is about challenging games, not necessarily what were your favorite games (see what I did there?). And there is probably a line somewhere in there between challenging and Battletoads, but I’ll leave it up to you to find it.
In the meantime, I need to get some graph paper…
Class Warfare
Things are getting ugly out there in the MMO blogging realm. Very ugly. I am referring to Syncaine’s “Twit” series of posts. And while the implicit embrace of Gevlon’s M&S generalizations is one thing, this new pernicious brand of thinking is being focused on the one group of people that has nothing at all to do with the “twitification” of the hobby. In so demonizing them, one simultaneously give a free pass to the people actually responsible and reinforce all the stereotypes gamers have all endured for decades.
Syncaine actually started out being reasonable. He identified the problem with the (baited) Twit generation in my MMO post:
But what about those of us with more than a 5 minute attention span? What about those who found the older level of challenge just right? We spend money too, and tend to spend it for longer periods of time when given the chance. Are there countless millions of us like there are Farmville players? No. But we are out there, in the hundreds of thousands at least.
Specifically, there are less of you, ergo you are a vanishingly tiny niche not worth catering to, at least with AAA titles. That is capitalism working as intended. Syncaine does have a point insofar as the MMO mold can only be morphed so far while still retaining the things that make it an MMO, at least by any given definition of MMO. Where things go completely off the rails is when he stages a Tea Party-esque rally of entitled bourgeois to attack the players, instead of the game.
And sadly the twit-generation is not just young kids, but ADD (clinical or not) riddled ‘adults’ that have become so entitles, so expectant, that anything beyond instant gratification is not good enough. (source)
McDonalds makes its money not from starving people without options, but from twits who are too lazy or plan life too poorly to have time for a real meal. (source)
You want to know the difference between you and the entitled, unwashed masses you decry as killing your genre? Not a single goddamn thing. Whine, whine, whine. “I want challenge! I want games built just for meeeeeeee.” You and everyone else.
I have said for ages that there is nothing at all selfish about wanting content designed for your skill level. At the end of the day, that is what everyone wants. And it’s not just about skill level because that implies everyone looks for challenge. They don’t. There are people in WoW who log on, fish for an hour, and log out. That sort of thing is relaxing to them. Judging them based on that is indistinguishable from judging them based on what kind of music they listen to, how much money they make, or you know, the fact that they play videogames to begin with.
I get it. I understand you had this game/genre that seemed to be based entirely around your needs and desires, and now it seems to be slipping away. That’s life. More importantly, that’s business. Blizzard et tal are the ones who decided that they would rather chase casual dollars instead of your small wad of sweaty money. Stop blaming the players who have nothing to do with game design decisions, and blame those that do. Or, you know, don’t blame anyone because game companies exist to make money. And chances are good that the economics team of the billion-dollar game companies like Blizzard have already graphed out exactly how much your high regard is worth, and found it wanting.
Harder games are not some higher, purer form of magic. They are simply different tastes. And if none are being made, or the ones that exist are being “dumbed down,” you may want to start up your utopian commune because the Invisible Hand is flipping you off. That, or you could demonstrate some of that delayed gratification skills you accuse others of lacking and simply wait for some game company to come along and cater to your more refined palette.
Still Skeptical of Storybricks
This past weekend Nils and I were walked through the Storybrick demo with Kelly from Namaste in a sort of dual presentation. It was illuminating in a lot of different ways.
A) Storybricks is actually two seperate things: the AI and then the game.
To understand how big a difference this is, think about the difference between the Havok engine and Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock, Fallout 3, Half Life 2, LA Noir, Portal 2, and the Witcher 2. Havok, by itself, is not anything – it is not a game, it is a tool to make games. Storybricks is NOT entirely like the Havok engine though, as it would essentially be a tool within a tool, Inception-style.
This is an important distinction because the build-it-yourself AI part of it is actually pretty interesting. It reminds me of a post by Notch of Minecraft fame where he made what seemed like a mild change (animals flee when attacked) and then discovered an “emergent” AI behavior when suddenly sheep would realistically flee from wolves. Even though I pooh-poohed the thought of unintended consequences in my last Storybrick post, that was more in a story aspect. I am otherwise a big fan of tweaking small variables in a complex system and watching how the dominos fall in unpredictable ways – fans of playing/theorizing the WoW AH pretty much have to be, by definition.
B) The Storybricks GAME doesn’t exist.
This is a particular point I feel was not emphasized enough in other Storybrick write-ups. There is no game, at the moment. Kelly described how they do not want to start building a house, and then halfway through realize they should have been using a hammer instead of a rock to nail everything together. That… sort of makes sense. I mean, I am not a game designer or anything, so I do not know what the “proper” way of game development consists of.
What concerns me, and I got this impression from Nils as well, is that it is always easy to come up with ideas that should be fun; actually having them be fun is another matter entirely. As I mentioned in the previous section, I like the idea of subtle changes making surprising differences down the road. I also like the idea of a Silent Hill meets Fallout 3 style game. There is nothing to really say that either will be fun in practice however.
C) The Storybricks game won’t resemble any MMO.
Making matters worse, as Kelly explained, is that you cannot really even begin to explain a Storybrick game. This is not WoW + NPCs that remembers you. This Storybrick game would not have combat, no NPCs could die, and they are debating right now whether leveling should even exist. The socializing and NPC relationships would be the game. Which confuses me when she explained how all these D&D DMs were excited about it: what exactly are they imagining here? Their campaigns “coming to life?” What is D&D without dice rolls, saving throws, combat at all? It is a purer form of collaborative storytelling, sure. But it is no longer D&D. And they (or their players) probably signed up to play D&D.
So instead of imagining your favorite game with more compelling NPCs, imagine your favorite game without combat, without gear progression, without levels, without a set narrative at all. Then you can start imagining Storybricks and its emergent interactions. The closest thing I can imagine is Myst, except people are the puzzles.
Concerns
Now that I have kind of outlined the experience, I am going to more briefly list my concerns about the project. And because this whole post is a lot more negative and antagonistic than I necessarily feel, I have a bonus section for the Namaste folk at the end. So my concerns are:
1) I do not see Storybricks working in an MMO setting at all. One of the examples that came up in the demo was how a player might need a key from the guard to unlock a door. The guard might just straight-up give the key to Bob because of their prior relationship, whereas Tom might be forced to run some errand for the guard. The issue is that if Bob and Tom are friends/grouped up, would Bob not be able to simply give Tom the key to use? If that is the case, could you not imagine Bob hanging out in the newbie area and offering to escort new players straight past the “guard gate” (assuming there is some medium of exchange possible)?
2) Related to 1), I have never felt it particularly compelling in D&D when the guy with the highest Charisma or Speech skill is the de facto NPC ambassador. This is not to say specialized roles are not compelling, simply that if Bob is better at making the Storybrick connections (aka making the dice rolls), Bob will basically do them for the group. At most, I have a connection to Bob or the group as a unit, not to the NPCs. In a single-player game on the other hand, each player will have 100% connection with the NPCs.
3) It may be beyond the scope of the tool, but I do very much hope that Storybricks would have some kind of mode or setting that would allow the players designing the modules to be able to direct a player’s experience in a more traditional way. In other words, let people go nuts in the village with NPC interaction, while still having a overarching narrative in the castle.
4) I think serious consideration should be given right now as to what the object of a Storybrick game would be, e.g. the fun part. Sandboxes are all about player-driven goals, of course, but the sand has to be fun to play with. Speaking of which…
Bonus: Ego to Absolvo
In this Storybrick game type, the player explores a mysterious realm populated with souls from Purgatory. The object is for the player to escape the realm by releasing the Pivot Soul, the deceased spirit which binds the player to this place. Souls can be released by either directing them towards an act of contrition (absolve), or by convincing them their earthly transgressions deserves a more permanent punishment (condemn). It is up to the player to decide whether to absolve the Pivot Soul or condemn it; similarly, the player must decide whether to try and release/condemn the other souls (and which ones) before the player leaves. All the souls in each level are connected in some way, either by the event that led to their deaths, or by some other means.
The above concept requires no combat and no particular narrative beyond the Pivot Soul. Better still, you can use the same stock medieval models/setting in your demo while not being tied to a more cliche archetype. And to me, such a scenario is immediately more compelling – assuming the writing is done well, I can imagine seeking out every NPC even after identifying which of them is the Pivot Soul. Players could talk about the “moral” choice they made (absolving a murderer vs leaving them in Purgatory vs sending them to Hell), how many souls they absolved/condemned, which ones, by what means, and so on. And because of the way the Storybrick AI works, you probably could not save them all.
In any case, I do wish the Namaste folks the best of luck. My skepticism is not rooted in malice, or because the tools lack potential. Rather, my skepticism is merely a pragmatic expression of More Show, Less Tell.
Incidentally, if you want someone to brick up a truly convoluted Machiavellian scenario, or want to run with the Ego to Absolvo idea, have your people call my people.
Legendaried
As you may or may not have seen on MMO-Champ, there was an interview with J. Allen Brack, Lead Producer of World of Warcraft, in which he dropped a Legendary bomb:
Brack: There’s one more piece which is an announcement that we’re releasing a rogue legendary weapon. Specific for rogues, so it will be a dagger. There will be some sort of quest, traditionally we’ve done these quests that players need to participate in order to create the legendary weapon in this case we’ll be focusing on rogues that will try to make that happen. […]
We haven’t decided on the name and how it’s going to work, we just know that we really want a legendary weapon to come out of this tier and we really want it to be a rogue dagger. That’s really all we know at this point. As time goes on we get a lot more lore, a lot more story, an “in” to the creation of all the legendary weapons. We really did a lot with the legendary axe that you got out of Lich King and then we’ve had other legendaries with the Cataclysm tiers that have had these storylines, we’re hoping this one’s going to be the most exciting, the most epic legendary quest line.
what is this I don’t even
Where do I start?
- Did no one in the design meeting raise their hand and question how “the most exciting, most epic legendary quest line” can even happen if you don’t have the least-played class in WoW in your raid team? Hey, Brack, you know that cool quest line you did for Shadowmourne? People saw and participated in that because THREE HUGELY POPULAR CLASSES were capable of taking it. Same deal Dragonswrath, same deal with Val’anyr, same deal with every single crafted legendary¹.
- At what point was it decided that legendary weapon quests were good uses of design time while class quests were not? Is the idea that legendary quests are like class quests that only a handful of classes even have access to?
- Legendary quest lines never really made any sense to me in an MMO setting to begin with. Is the collection of fragments of an ancient weapon cool? Yes. Is infusing them with the souls of your fallen foes awesome? Yes. Is a quest line that takes dozens of people weeks to accomplish epic? Yes! Er… unless you aren’t the guy getting the legendary. Don’t get me wrong, it feels great being part of something bigger than yourself. Problem is that an item to just one person is NOT something bigger than yourself. Legendaries in WoW, aside from one brief flirt with sanity in TBC, are designed for RPGs, not MMORPGs. If it has “worked” in vanilla and Wrath and Cataclysm thus far, it is working in spite of the terrible design.
I get that it was forewarned (in the tank Q&A of all places) that the 4.3 legendary “will have much more narrow appeal.” But… really? Remember the blue post back in June that speculated about why rogues are the least-played class? I am almost wondering if this legendary dagger is a cynical attempt at rectifying that discrepancy.
¹ Meaning more than one class could use it, not that all of them had 3 popular classes or whatever.
Questing and Interactivity
I was all prepared to talk about questing and how I think MMO designers are doing it wrong… and then I discovered Jeff Kaplan pretty much said everything back in 2009.
“Basically, and I’m speaking to the Blizzard guys in the back: we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game, because nobody wants to read it.”
That line is a part of a larger commentary on what Kaplan calls Medium Envy – the tendency for game designers to turn their game into a book or movie at the expense of the one quality that sets games apart: their interactivity. The industry has wild oscillations on this subject, with brilliant examples of the Right Way (Half Life series with zero cutscenes) and the Wrong Way (Metal Gear Solid series). Of course, I say “Right Way” but obviously feel that cutscenes and cinematics have a place in expanding the narrative in ways that perhaps interactivity could not (at least without gimmicks).
I definitely recommend checking out the presentation through the summary at the above link, the Wow Insider writeup, or even listen to the whole hour-long presentation via Vimeo (audio only, but it does have photos of the slides). Assuming, of course, you did not already read this two years ago.
Skeptical of Storybricks
You have probably read about Storybricks from any number of other bloggers. If you have not, well, take your pick. Far be it from me to denigrate free thinking and innovative design (god knows we need some these days), but none of these full-page ads for Storybricks ever seem to answer what is to me the fundamental question:
As a player, why would I WANT this?
Keep that question in mind as you read this excerpt from Too Damn Epic’s Storybrick article:
By focusing on expressive AI, a different experience than currently experienced in MMOs (one that is closer to a tabletop system) becomes available. NPCs will be given drives, emotions and desires. More importantly, relationships between characters will be developed and interactions between the player and characters will affect how characters relate to the player.
For example, imagine a farmer that you as a player have never encountered, an NPC that feels neutrally toward you. This farmer owns a flock of sheep. As a player, you come upon a merchant wanting wool and kill the sheep for the merchant. If you then encounter the farmer his reaction towards you will no longer come from a neutral disposition but one of anger or unfriendliness. And what you experience may be completely different from your friend who did not kill the sheep. Storybricks is the tool that allows players to build these complex relationships into their stories giving the depth to their experiences.”
Put aside for the moment what kind of game architecture would be necessary to compute all these dynamically changing quests and attributes. Would you, as a player, WANT to quest in a potentially labyrinthine “unforeseen consequences” environment? Killing a farmer’s sheep is pretty straightforward of course, but this sort of system could engender a Machiavellian plot wherein finding the Blacksmith’s hammer pisses off the Innkeeper whose daughter is in love with the prince who gives your execution order to the assassin who buys the temper-steel poisoned dagger from the newly upgraded Blacksmith. If someone (non-ironically) wrote a plot that involved every quest you completed as having the opposite effect you intended, you would call that writer a hack. As WOPR would say, “The only winning move is not to play.”
Of course, the Storybrick guys aren’t making a game like that, or any game for that matter; they are simply making the tools. More precisely, tools for a game that does not exist yet, and one in which would require user-generated content submission, such as Neverwinter Nights or Fallout 3/NV. I say “require” because I cannot ever imagine that a game designer would leave the fate of the narrative solely in the hand of player actions. And I certainly could never see it in an MMO. Why? Here is what epic.Ben asserts from the TDE article:
In other words, Storybricks is going to shift the focus in your MMOs. Instead of mindlessly clicking quest text and proceeding through a Pavlovian loop of grinding, achievements, and raiding, you’ll actually pay attention to what’s happening in the world around you. NPCs will display emotional depth, and dynamically react to your experiences in the game world.
One of the hallmarks of the MMO genre is a notion of a persistent world, but that persistence is always in tension with the fact that other players exist. Players say they want a world where consequences matter, that if a town gets burned down it stays burned down. But do they really want a world in which the choice of saving the town is never given to them because some noob 4 years ago logged off in the middle of the quest to put the fire out and the town burned down? “Phasing” was a much-touted Blizzard innovation which amounted to open-world instancing, with exactly zero of the MMO elements intact – the designer reaction to the infinitely frustrating disappearing party member issue of Icecrown was to… phase the background and NPCs in Firelands instead.
Going back to Storybricks, what happens when Bob and Tim want to quest together, but Bob killed the sheep while Tim bought wool instead? Under traditional MMO design, nothing happens because it doesn’t matter how the quest is accomplished (assuming you can even complete a quest different ways). And under Storybricks? I have no idea. Does the farmer have a Schrödinger-sheep that is both alive and dead? Assuming the farmer hates Bob and likes Tim, does he still give out a quest to both, or just Tim? Can Bob get credit if he helps Tim complete it? If the farmer has the same quests regardless of feelings towards Bob, does the farmer having “emotions” matter at all?
This is my fundamental problem with the epic.Ben’s assertion above, and Storybrick’s unspoken premise that “if we build it, they will come.” Or more precisely: “if we build emotive NPCs, the player will care.” Emotional depth and multifaceted character development are the pinnacle of what a storyteller can achieve when crafting a tale, but it always hinges on the listener/player caring about said character first. Why do I care that the farmer is mad at me for killing his sheep? Is he an interesting character? Or am I supposed to care because he holds potentially fun (or required!) quests hostage behind a fancied-up logic gate of prior actions? Much like what happens in real life all the damn time, just because a person interacts with other emotive beings does not mean they care about how other people feel.
I can see and appreciate the work the Storybrick people are doing in building a cart, and hoping that a horse comes along to carry it. Finding a fictional character you have some interest in and realizing that there is emotive, narrative depth to their actions is a truly magical experience. That being said, it still requires someone to have crafted an interesting character to begin with. And if they already went through that much effort to make one, I just do not see the appeal of using Storybricks to fill in the blanks Mad-Lib style. Nor do I see the appeal to the player of being in an environment where potentially random actions have lasting, permanent consequences. If accidentally killing a sheep with a stray Arcane Explosion can be rectified by reputation grinding with the Farmer, that is almost worse.
In An Age 
Community Aspects
Oct 11
Posted by Azuriel
Nils is reaching the end of his WoW rope in his latest experiment, and my response probably fits better in a post than comment. Nils says:
WoW has NEVER put you in a community. At all. The most you could say is that in the early days people had somewhat of an incentive to seek out strangers because it would be impossible for them to complete (group) content otherwise – something that sounds more like Facebook games now that I think about it. The “community” could be summed up the sort of proto-typical “LF1M tank H Ramps” spam, where the alternative was having nothing to do. But if Nils doesn’t feel like joining a guild, he probably would not feel like joining a random Trade chat pug either. Or perhaps he is saying that since you can press the LFD button, one has no incentive to join Trade pugs?
Honestly, there was as much community when I finally quit as there has ever been, and I saw people trending towards tighter guild/social bonds than ever before. In TBC, the only way to see content was to “trade up,” leap-frogging Kara guilds into SSC/TK guilds into BT guilds into Sunwell guilds. Choosing friendship and sociality meant you simply dead-ended, unless you won the guild lottery and got into one that progressed. Incidentally, this was my fundamental problem with articles like the one I talked about yesterday, insofar as those never seem to be written from the majority standpoint of raiders whose expansions just end mid-tier because the guild is not good enough to progress (be it skill, drama, or other).
Nowadays, at least pre-Cata, you could have your cake and eat it too, progressing with friends at relatively your own pace without having to worry about people trading up. Yes, solo players have no “real” incentive to join guilds/groups since they can get groups formed for them. Then again… well, as we’ve seen from LFD, some of the groups you get are so horrible that there is every incentive to do LFD runs with as many people you know as possible.
Posted in Commentary, WoW
11 Comments
Tags: Difficulty, LFD