Blog Archives
Chilton and Audiences
From a NYTimes article:
“What we’re trying to do now is figure out what our current audience wants,” Tom Chilton, World of Warcraft’s game director, told me by phone last week. “It became clear that it wasn’t realistic to try to get the audience back to being more hard core, as it had been in the past.”
As someone returning to World of Warcraft after a long absence, I find the current direction of the game eminently engaging. As Mr. Chilton said, “We hear from a lot people who used to play a lot that they’re just not at that point in their life anymore, and they want to play, and they want to see the content. But they can’t make the same time commitment they used to.”
What is interesting to me is how they felt that it was realistic in the first place. And the use of “current” audience, with the implication that a prior audience existed but no longer does today. The debate over whether the “more hardcore prior audience” hollowing out was due to lack of attention or was inevitable seems almost academic at this point.
The same MMO with a new community is a different MMO, period.
Deus Ex: Cardboard Box Revolution
Been playing DE: HR for about 11 hours now, and I have come to some early conclusions.
- Many of the design incentives are all screwed up.
It is one thing for your reward scheme to be rote enough that a player can earn XP for knocking out a guard, and then earn even more XP for killing the unconscious guard. Or that there are obviously invisible XP triggers in the duct-work, that encourage players to actually wander around up there long after there was a need to. Those are fine, whatever.
Where I begin to draw the line is the differences between hacking a computer and using the known passcode for the same computer. It is not just the XP that you get for doing the former: the hacking bit is actually fun and rewards its own loot. Not getting the hacking loot might be considered an acceptable “cost” for someone who never bothers to upgrade those skills, sure. But the game design in regards to hackers doesn’t make sense on two levels. 1) Using the passcode prevents you from playing the fun minigame, and 2) it makes no goddamn sense that you couldn’t unlock those secret files with full administrative access to the computer. If I can find secret files while hacking, why can’t I find secret files when I enter the password?
Of course, many people have commented on the above inconsistencies months ago. While I haven’t gone around killing the guards I knock unconscious or running around in the duct-work unnecessarily for the XP, I find the hacking bit to be especially jarring. That could be a sign of my atrophied “simulation is important” organ lurching back to life, but I prefer to think of it as the principal of the thing. If I’m a hacker-type and get your password, I should automatically get all the goodies on your computer. It’s only fair.
- I’m getting nervous about my computer investment.
Perhaps its unrealistic expectations, but I honestly thought I’d boot up the game and play on the highest settings at 60+ FPS. That… is not the case. I turned some settings down, usually the ones with the acronyms that they don’t bother explaining, and am at a point where everything still looks good and plays smoothly. Considering Kotaku pointed out a deal today on a laptop with a i5-2430M, GeForce GT 555M for $695.20… I’m concerned I may not have got $500 more oomph for my money. Ultimately, it will come down to how BF3 plays, since that was my primary impetus for the purchase.
- Did this game begin as a cardboard box simulator?
Seriously, you cannot walk 15 feet in-game without half a dozen cardboard boxes being highlighted in helpful yellow. At first I was confused about all this seemingly pointless interactivity. But that was before I got to the basement of the police station…
Nothing out of the ordinary here, Mr. Camera.
Directly behind me was a keycard reader I was hacking; behind the boxes is an oscillating video camera with its helpful green beams. In a break from FPS tradition (Bioshock, et tal), hacking in DE:HR forces you to stand up and do so in real time. After some close calls with attempting to disable the camera with my stun gun and hack my way through the door while getting all the goodies, I came upon the more… practical solution.
Designer Responsibility
How responsible are game designers in the balancing of their (single-player) game?
Syncaine swerves to the right:
One theme I’m seeing is the debate about what is OP [in Skyrim], and how easy it is to min/max the game. I find this… odd. As Nil’s himself pointed out, you can turn godmode on if you want, and be as ‘maxed out’ as you can possibly get. Hearing that people are ‘exploiting’ the game by running into a wall for hours while hidden to max out stealth makes no sense to me. Why waste all that time, just go into the character file and put stealth to 100. […]
“Am I to blame?”
Yes.
Luckily the solution is easy; remove one or more of the enchanted pieces, or up the difficulty, or RP a reason why you no longer require mana to cast spells.
I’d rather you do that then Bethesda spend time hardcoding a solution over adding yet-another-quest, or whatever other content they could do in that time. Or have the hardcoded solution prevent me from play “how I want”.
If this was an MMO, 100% valid point. If it was a multiplayer game like Dungeon Defenders, still 100% valid. An sRPG that is far more about the journey than the end-goal? Naw, non-issue IMO.
Nils has a more center-oriented approach:
I agree that it is partly in the player’s responsibility to not optimize the fun out of his game. An example would be sneaking against a wall until you have maxed out stealth in Skyrim.
On the other hand, I just uploaded a video to youtube that shows how I enchanted four items and now can cast destruction and restoration spells witout any mana cost. This is a game changer, as the mana constraint was important in the game – until then. Many of my perks in the talent trees are suddenly useless. The game becomes worse. Playing it is less fun if I can just spam a single spell without looking at mana.
I optimized the fun out of Skyrim. Am I to blame?
The problem is that I ended up enchanting my equipment this way not by sneaking against a wall. I simply skilled enchanting and then used reasonable enchantments on my equipment.
My point is this: A game cannot use the cartot, that character power progression (CPP) is, to increase the player’s engagement with the game, and at the same time allow him to optimize the fun out by hunting the carrot in a reasonable way.
My own left-leaning approach is the same as I outlined in the Culpability of Questionable Design, the very first post I made under the In An Age banner. Essentially, it is (almost) always the designer’s fault.
Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game
As I commented on Syncaine’s post, I find it bizarrely apologetic to state that it is a player’s responsibility to not ruin the game for themselves. The specific situation in Skyrim Nils had brought up was the ability to eliminate all mana/stamina costs of spells and abilities via Enchanting. Nils had gotten his Enchanting skill up “legitimately,” as opposed to, say, getting 100 Sneak by auto-sneaking into a corner for a several hours. For the record, I see zero difference between those two activities – both are simply examples of incredibly poor design ridiculous failures of imagination.
In Oblivion there existed a Magic College where you could invent your own spells and magic items, within certain constraints. Making a Fireball spell that dealt 100 damage was expensive, whereas a 50 damage Fireball cost less. Similarly, a buff/debuff that lasted an hour was more expensive than one that lasted for only 1 second. After about an hour of playing with the various sliders, I left the College with a ranged spell that decreased the HP of the creature it touched by 100 for 1 second. The practical effect was that it instantly killed everything in the game, at least until I gained many more levels – even then, if I fired it quickly, the second hit would kill anything with less than 200 HP since it stacked with itself. I called this spell Finger of Death, and later added it to a sword along with the Soul-draining property so that as the sword instantly killed who it touched, it refueled itself.
I did not set out to break Oblivion, nor did Nils set out to break Skyrim; the both of us were simply using the tools the designers gave us and taking them to their logical conclusions. It is the responsibility of the designers to ensure that incredibly obvious things (at least in retrospect) like “-25% mana usage” does not stack with itself, that temporary decreases in HP scale the same as damage abilities when their effects are indistinguishable, and so on, are balanced. Arguing to the contrary is to admit that WoW leveling is not too quick since the player can manually shut off XP, that facerolling mobs and instances is a player failure as said player could play with just one hand, play with a gamepad, play with Resurrection Sickness, or any number of entirely arbitrary self-imposed restrictions. It is to abdicate, wholly and completely, any responsibility of the designers to present a balanced, well-paced experience.
Syncaine is right about these games being about the journey, not necessarily getting to the end as quickly as possible. And yet I derive deep satisfaction in the execution of strategies, figuring out how rules/objects work, and finding more efficient ways of doing tasks; those things constitute the journey to me. Turning on god-mode in the console may have the same end result, but it skips all the fun, thinking bits inbetween, just like skipping to the last chapter of a book. In other words: optimization is fun.
And so I believe it is – and has to be – the designer’s responsibility to ensure that if a game can be optimized, that it still continues to be fun and challenging when it inevitably is. Anything less is laziness, incompetence, or both.
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.
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.
Things That Used to Work, Vol. 1
…but don’t work anymore.
Many of the items on this list were inspired by my recent completion of The Witcher, although my (d)evolved sensibilities have been been growing this way for the past several years. Let’s get started:
Multiple Endings
Why It Used to Work: Replayability, simulates your decisions as being meaningful.
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: I am not likely to play ANY game more than once anymore (few people even finish the first time), and if I do, it will only be because the underlying gameplay was fun – in which case a different possible ending is at most a cherry to the already-frosted cake. Also, this could just be a personal thing, but whenever I am working on a game with multiple endings, my choices actually feel less meaningful rather than more, for two reasons.
The first reason is that nagging feeling whenever I reach a path-branching decision that one of the two options will be more fun than the other, and I will be stuck with the less-fun one. In The Witcher, it was choosing between Order, the nonhumans, or the neutral path. In Fallout: New Vegas, it was choosing between NCR, Caesar’s Legion, or your own way. The tenor and tone of each faction has their own charm, and in setting up a mutually exclusive decision, I am made responsible for picking the shittier option.
Even if I do replay the game, I am double-screwed. If the 2nd path ended up being better, I feel gypped that I didn’t pick it the first time. If the 2nd path ends up being worse, I am stuck playing a shittier game.
The second reason my choices actually feel less meaningful is that they typically are. No matter what side you pick in The Witcher, the final hours of the game are the same (same location, differently textured enemies). No matter what side you pick in Fallout: New Vegas, you are still battling on Hoover Dam. Different dialog from different NPCs is meaningfully different (enough that I feel like I’m losing something by not experiencing it), sure, but a lot of times it feels like Mad Lib storylines where they just switch around the Proper Nouns in the plot blanks. The last RPG I played with actual, game-changing decisions was Tactics Ogre way back on the PS1.
No Quest Hubs
Why It Used to Work: No one had really thought of it, Kaplan talks about how “the Christmas Tree effect” can leads to poor pacing and less engagement in any individual quest, it is more of a metagame issue.
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: I hate revisiting areas I know haven’t changed in any meaningful way. The Witcher does have a Notice Board which acts like a Fetch Quest Hub of sorts, but when I talk about Quest Hubs I mean the principle of being able to completely “finish” a particular zone at your own pace and move on. If a quest sends me to the fields to kill something, return to the city, then sends me back out into the fields to kill something else, my immediate reaction is “Time Sink!”
The term “boomerang quest” is an example of this principle, but it is slightly more than that. If I had to sum it up in a single way, it would perhaps be “inefficient questing.” Don’t send me on quests to kill the cave spiders, then a follow-up to kill the poison cave spiders deeper in, culminating in a quest to kill the spider queen in the deepest parts of the cave, without giving me all three quests first. Let me multitask! Whatever Wal-Mart has done wrong in crowding out smaller businesses and being jank-central, being able to make one trip and pick up milk, light bulbs, and spark plugs in a single trip is of immense value, lower prices notwithstanding.
Blind Choices (and/or Rewards)
Why It Used to Work: Puts a focus on the decision itself, more immersive/less metagame, perhaps enhances replayability through obfuscation.
Why It Doesn’t Work Anymore: Thank you, great hero! Please choose your reward:
- A book about vampires.
- Your very own hut.
- Wreath of immortelles.
Err… what? Perhaps I am simply too far down the metagame hole at this point, but how can anyone consider a choice with unknown consequences as meaningful? I mean, fine, all decisions and choices we make technically have unforseen consequences. But these game designers are literally giving you nonsense to choose between on top of said unforseen consequences. I don’t consider the choice between door #1 and door #2 to be meaningful at all – I may as well flip a coin or roll a die for as much thinking as it requires.
The above is an actual choice that The Witcher presents you with, and it is not the first nonsese choice. I picked the wreath de immortalies due to the time-honored tradition of game designers making the most useless-seeming items the most radically powerful. Plus, I figured that my own hut wouldn’t be very important to gameplay if I could choose not to have one, and I was likely leaving the area soon besides. Turns out the wreath let me complete an upcoming story quest faster than normal. Woo… hoo?
It is not as though I want WoW-like quest rewards, because there isn’t really any choice there either: something is an upgrade or it isn’t (and you probably can’t wear the other options anyway). When I think about meaningful choices, I remember back to the original Deus Ex when you’d come across upgrades like the cloaking device. Thermal or Electromagnetic? That was a meaningful decision because it shaped your gameplay in a way that had no “wrong” answers. I liked sniping people, and since I couldn’t snipe robots, easily sneaking past them (and cameras) was way more useful. There were plenty of humans/robots in the later stages so it could have gone either way. I wanted both and yet I was almost as fine with just one.
That, my friends, is a good choice to present to players. And they didn’t hide it behind a door or questionable language. You knew exactly what each did, and more importantly, you trusted the designers to present a scenario in which either would be equally useful.
More Glimpses into Blizzard Design
About two weeks ago, I pointed out how the Diablo 3 forums are really the place to be if you are interested in Blizzard’s evolving, internal design philosophies. It is not every day that you hear Bashiok come out and say that WoW has been “[…] struggling with how to cope with a skill tree system, which has huge inherent issues with very little benefit, for years.” Nor the disdain that Jay Wilson feels towards PvP affecting PvE game balance. Now there is another nugget of design insight from Bashiok which, while not as bombastic, is still rather interesting:
In some cases though we are purposefully avoiding affixes we just don’t think promote good gameplay, like +damage to X. We want people to play the game and have fun, not feel crappy because they’re in an area full of ‘beasts’ and are stacking +damage to demons. It also encourages a whole host of other divergent gameplay like holding sets for specific types of enemies, or building sets to run specific areas at end-game. Lastly it’s very difficult to make affixes like that compelling, and not necessary. Either it’s powerful enough where people do all those crazy things to leverage the bonuses in destructive ways, or the affix is just de-emphasized to the point of meaninglessness.
Feel free to read the actual thread for the full context, and the full quote for that matter.
I find it interesting because it perhaps speaks towards the larger question of specialization, and what role (if any) that it should play in games generally¹. Is having and collecting a demon-slaying set not fun? I remember back in the Quel’Danas dailies circa TBC how I would typically skip the non-demon quests on my paladin since having Holy Wrath made the impaling-demon-corpses quests that much quicker/more entertaining. Here was a time to flex an oft-neglected muscle in a thoroughly satisfying way!² Of course, the flip side of specialization also in TBC was how paladins were heroic 5m tanking demigods and largely unbalanced garbage raid tanks.
Honestly, Blizzard probably has the right idea here. Specialization with equipment sounds nice on paper, but it also devolves into the D&D-esque “golf bag” problem when you simply “specialize” in everything, and whip out the demon-slaying sword for one fight, and then the beast-slaying sword the next. Similarly, class specialization is usually long periods of underpoweredness punctuated by brief moments of awesomeness… assuming the class is balanced to begin with.
¹ Pun maybe intended.
² Err… no comment.
Of Talents and Cookie-Cutting
Jan 6
Posted by Azuriel
Other than a flippant, out of context quote post on the subject, I have not spent much time musing on Ghostcrawler’s December 8th DevBlog entitled Seeing the Forest for the Talent Trees. In my eyes, there really is not anything to muse over – once you acknowledge the notion that saying something is “bad game design” simply means you disagree with a subjective decision but want to sound like you are an authority on the subject, there is not much left to say.
However, Doone at TR Red Skies touched on a certain subject that is so perpetually misunderstood that I begin to imagine people are being dense on purpose:
The problem never was there being an ideal setup for a specific encounter. The problem was there being one ideal setup for every encounter. What really is the value of a talent system in which you spend an hour looking stuff up, set your talents, and then don’t change them until the next expansion? That is what they are combating here.
To be honest, the problem is probably vague terminology. Just like people define “casual” in different ways – does it mean time played, or level of commitment, or both? – the term “cookie-cutter” has come to encompass both “uniformity” and “theory-crafted best.” There is a nuance there that seems to escape most people. As Ghostcrawler says in the blog concerning the Warrior MoP-era talents:
“On a fight like Baelroc (one boss, no adds), Bladestorm and Shockwave probably aren’t competitive with Avatar. We’re okay with that, because on Beth’tilac (lots of adds) they definitely can be and it will depend a lot on your play style and the role you have in the fight.”
If one talent load-out is better on one boss than another, or in one situation over another, it ceases to be cookie-cutter in any meaningful way. Houses in a suburban subdivision are cookie-cutter; each house is identical in every way. A 5-iron is not a cookie-cutter golf club to a 3-wood; they have different roles, uses, benefits, and drawbacks. The Wrath/Cata-style talents are cookie-cutter because there is only one way to spec as Arms, only one way to spec as Fury, etc (assuming you desire max DPS). In MoP, you can be a Fury warrior with Shockwave if that would be useful, or Bladestorm, or Avatar.
Here is Bashiok:
The difference is that right now there’s a way you spec your character, and then there’s maybe a handful of “Ok now you can do whatever you want with these 4 leftover points.” Those points are leftover because they ultimately don’t matter. You don’t really even need to spend them to do well. It’s not a good system, and the few leftover ‘choices’ don’t feel awesome because… well they aren’t, they aren’t awesome, which is why they’re unimportant points.
With the new system we give you everything you really need automatically, and talents are going to be more interesting ‘style’ and utility choices than a bunch of stat and damage increases. The choice comes, hopefully, from choosing talents that appeal to how you like to play or what you think would be particularly useful for a specific boss, fight, or encounter, and the ability to swap around points freely while out in the world help reinforce that.
I still fully expect for people to devise optimum builds for specific situations, but there’s a difference between optimum and no choice at all.
I think once you see the majority of talent choices you’ll understand a bit more why these choices aren’t really going to be bombarded by optimum build mentality. The choices just don’t have a clear optimal because most of the choices don’t lead to direct output increases.
If that doesn’t seem to be the case then we need to work on it more.”
And here was their response to the cookie-cutter argument back during the Class Q&A in November:
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.
That is the nuance. Moreover, the way they are setting up the talents makes it more likely that you can choose the 95% optimum + fun set of talents over the 100% optimum + unfun ones. If Blizzard gets to that point, well, Mission Accomplished.
On a final note:
I am *so* over talent trees. I understand the function they have in the scheme of things, but there has got to be a better way to give the feeling of progression than giving us a talent/skill point to slap into +1% damage or other vague, ill-defined “options.”
I have been playing Dungeon Defenders recently, for example, and while it is “fun” being rewarded with skill points each time I level, on an intellectual level it feels asinine. I don’t know how 3 extra points in run speed actually impacts my gameplay. Is that 3% faster? Or can I run through a hallway 3 seconds faster? I want to move more quickly, but there is seemingly little direct relationship between the two. Nevermind how much better +3 Tower Attack Speed could conceivably be (less need to run places because towers kill faster). How the hell am I supposed to make an informed decision, especially when respeccing if prohibitively expensive (if offered at all) by design?
Here is my prediction: once people play Diablo 3, it will be downright painful going back to dumbass talent trees. I already cannot stand games that force you to make a decision on two options you cannot possibly know beforehand. Which do you want? The Kmakljfamns or the Hiagsguygag? I dunno, let me play with them first goddammit and I’ll let you know.
P.S. It’s a trick question. If you don’t pick the Piohqjasbhf, you’re a noob.
Posted in Commentary, WoW
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Tags: Blue Post, Cookie-Cutter, Game Design, Ghostcrawler, Talents