scaling
Latest
WildStar explores the design of Veteran Shiphand missions
Veteran Shiphand missions are coming to WildStar, and that's great, but their design also posed a lot of unique challenges to the design team. Those challenges are outlined in the game's most recent development diary, starting with a core set of assumptions that had to be true for these missions: They had to remain scalable, they had to still be soloable, and they had to offer appropriate rewards. This meant making challenging combat that could scale up or down for party sizes and didn't require tanks, healers, or pre-made groups. To settle nicely into the gap between other solo content and Veteran Adventures, the Shiphand missions reward Renown even for solo play, as well as various appropriate bells and whistles for higher medal performance. Renown vendors will soon sell variety of gear as well as social items to ensure that playing through feels rewarding. Veteran difficulty will also offer remixed elements of the missions to give players a taste of something novel even if they've been through the base mission before. If you've been looking for more scaling content in the game, this one's for you.
WildStar is scaling Datascape down to 20 players
WildStar brought 40-player raids back to the forefront. The game is now pushing said raid size back away from the forefront, as the game's 40-person raid pinnacle is getting scaled down to 20 players. The official post on the subject notes that the number of people entering was far too low and the attrition rate far too high, so the raid is being rebalanced (but not nerfed) to account for having only half of its originally designed population inside. Several reasons are cited for the changed, such as the game's combat working best with a smaller number of people, the lowered demands on computers, and a consistent raid size for future raid content which will hopefully make guild management easier. While the topic stops shy of saying that the 40-player versions are never coming back, that is certainly the implication. So it'll at least be marginally easier to form a group for Datascape soon if you're able to get through the first raid successfully.
Advanced Warfare console comparison drops a few frames on PS4
Sledgehammer Games recently confirmed that the Xbox One version of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare automatically scales its resolution up to 1080p on a frame-by-frame basis. By comparison, the PS4 version consistently maintains a high resolution, but performance analysis tests from Digital Foundry show that it comes at a price. In a video (seen after the break) of Advanced Warfare version 1.04 running on both systems, the testers found that the Xbox One version held up at a mostly steady 60fps. As for the PS4 version, it had more frequent dips in frame rate, dropping as low as the mid-40s during some scenes. The tests were primarily focused on the game's campaign; initial looks at Advanced Warfare's multiplayer performance bore similar results, though the Xbox One version did not scale up from its 1360x1080 resolution during multiplayer sessions. [Image: Activision]
What will raiding be like in Warlords?
When discussing how the changes coming in Warlords of Draenor will affect raiding, we're of course looking at an incomplete picture. We don't know what new spells and abilities might come, we just know to an extent what won't be there - abilities like Skull Banner will be gone, as well many CC abilities, and healing will be greatly changed - casting on the move will also see a significant decrease. What we therefore need to consider is that raiding itself will have to change to embody these changing philosophies. It would be a disaster to alter class abilities and leave raids designed around the same high damage, high mobility kit we see in modern raiding. But what will raid design entail? Well, I'm not a raid designer. If I was, I'd be super busy designing some raids. What I am is a guy who raids a lot, so I can give you my perspective as a dude who has seen every fight in the game at this point. What are we in for in Warlords, based on what Blizzard has said is changing, and what they intend to try and do?
Lichborne: The pitfalls of class balance arguments
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. By the time this column is published, it will be official. Greg Tiberus Street, the man formerly known as Ghostcrawler, will no longer be Lead Systems Designer for World of Warcraft. For many years now, even if his job encompassed so much more, he was pretty much the target for class-based arguments. The most passionate, angry arguments for class changes were directed at him. In his final days as Ghostcrawler, I noticed he did a lot of tweeting about some of the aspects of his job and how the dev team saw class feedback from the community. With that in mind, I want to take a look at the forms of class feedback and some terms that come up again and again as discussed by Ghostcrawler, not just as a tribute to Ghostcrawler, but as a way to hone our toolkit for when the Warlords of Draenor beta test drops and it's time for us all to give our feedback on the future of the death knight class.
Community Blog Topic Results: Scaling characters down to low-level content
Our latest Community Blog Topic is about whether or not WoW should offer the scaling of characters to low-level content. mrfusticle explains the many negative reactions to this and other features. Blizz: Hey, we're bringing out strawberry ice cream! Player1: Whaa! I hate strawberry ice cream.. You're gonna waste time making that and not the vanilla I like?!? screw you! Player2: Whaa! You better not get rid of chocolate ice cream!.. I like chocolate ice cream! Man, I'll be so furious! Player3: Whaa! You don't even know how to make strawberry ice cream! This game is dying! I'm going to Frozen-yoghurt-star.. At least you get tough ice cream that gives you brain freeze!!!eleven!
Community Blog Topic: Should characters be scaled to low-level content?
This week's Community Blog Topic asks, "Should characters be scaled to low-level content -- or any content lower than max level?" Olivia Grace recently reported on a possible feature allegedly stumbled upon, shown in the video above. The player somehow accidentally ported into Stratholme as a max level and his gear and health were scaled down to match the instance level. If this is not a hoax, it looks like there is some functionality imbedded into the system to allow for scaling characters down to dungeon levels. This would presumably allow players to play with their leveling friends and still allow the lower level players to get experience.
The Daily Grind: Do you notice huge MMO interiors?
I had a bit of MMO deja vu this week. See, I read a lot about the industry on a daily basis, and somewhere recently I saw someone commenting about the unrealistically huge interior spaces in some video games. It may have been here in the Massively comment section or it may have been on one of 200 other sites, I can't remember. The point, though, is that I noticed the phenomena first-hand, for the first time, while I was playing both Star Wars: The Old Republic and EverQuest II this weekend. My player house in EQII has bedroom doors that a 15-foot cave troll could comfortably pass beneath, and yet my avatar and all this furniture are scaled to normal-sized humans. Similarly, starports (and really, all the interiors) in SWTOR are gigantic metal caverns that could hold a dozen of those space slugs from The Empire Strikes Back, and the humanoids are absolutely dwarfed by the bizarre architecture that makes it seem like you're outside when you're not. Is this sort of scaling noticeable in your game of choice, and if so, does it bother you? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Ghostcrawler: A discussion of gear scaling
It's been a common thing lately to hear "my spec doesn't scale well" as an excuse for poor DPS. People tend to toss the term around a lot without really knowing what it means, or at least what it means in the context of the WoW design team. A a very basic level, scaling is the capability for spells and abilities to grow stronger as your gear (item level) increases. A spell that doesn't scale well is a spell that doesn't get as strong as it should as your gear increases. This is where Ghostcrawler comes in today via a forum post. He talks about the history of scaling (how some abilities used to only do flat damage and not scale with attack power, and thus gear), and how the complex (but really rather simple) interaction in scaling happens between primary and secondary stats today. However, despite the discussion being about gear scaling, my favorite line from Ghostcrawler's thoughts has to be this: Encounter mechanics can have a much bigger impact on DPS than 5-10%. Keep that in mind when reading and talking about his post, which is in full after the break.
Apple applies for patent that scales content to match face distance, save us from squinting
Most software has to be designed around a presumed viewing distance, whether it's up close for a smartphone or the 10-foot interface of a home theater hub. Apple has been imagining a day when the exact distance could be irrelevant: it's applying for a patent that would automatically resize any content based on viewing distance. By using a camera, infrared or other sensors to detect face proximity through facial recognition or pure range, the technique could dynamically resize a map or website to keep it legible at varying ranges. Although the trick could work with most any device, the company sees that flexibility as most relevant for a tablet, and it's easy to understand why -- iPad owners could read on the couch without needing to manually zoom in as they settle into a more relaxed position. There's no knowing the likelihood that Apple will implement an automatic scaling feature in iOS or OS X, let alone make it the default setting. If the Cupertino team ever goes that far, though, we'll only have our own eyesight to blame if we can't read what's on screen.
Star Wars: The Old Republic livestream discusses free-to-play, HK-51, and scaling
The community team behind Star Wars: The Old Republic hosted a livestream, and as you can probably imagine, the whole session has been recorded already by the team from Darth Hater for your viewing pleasure. But if you want to know the highlights and you can't wait for a more detailed take (say, from next week's Hyperspace Beacon), you can always get the rundown of some of the bigger points from the half-hour session. For those currently playing, HK-51 can be expected before the end of the year, with Cathar getting a somewhat more ambiguous release of whenever the species is ready. There will also be other species to be unlocked when the free-to-play conversion goes live, along with moddable gear (without endgame stats), mounts, and pets. The team is also looking into implementing a hood toggle for the Force-using classes of the game and scaling content down in difficulty for smaller groups of players. Check out the full recording past the break, or just take a look at the highlights.
Netflix web streaming interface gets a new look with bigger icons, embedded previews
With the exception of tweaks for new features like HD video and closed captioning Netflix's Silverlight-based web player has been largely unchanged for years, but today everything is being reworked. As detailed in a post on the company's blog, PC and Mac users (no word on ChromeOS) the size of the player controls now scale to the window they're in and replace words with icons. Other new features users will notice is the ability to preview additional episodes of TV series without stopping the stream, title information that pops up when the stream is paused and that full screen viewing now has the same options as the windows player. The finale tweak is that the back to browsing button that brings viewers back to their queue has shifted from the bottom right to the top left. Hit the blog for the full breakdown, or just expect a surprise tomorrow when you're watching Downton Abbey at work Drive in the comfort of your own home during leisure time. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
DUST 514 server architect reveals the magic behind the techno-miracle
While behind-the-scenes technical details may not excite all gamers, there's sufficient interest in DUST 514 that we're willing to bet info-starved players are willing to get a little nerdy for the mind food. CCP's Lin Luo wrote up a dev blog about how the studio is working to meet the challenges of creating a MMO that utilizes fast, first-person shooter dynamics. As Luo says, it's not only difficult that CCP is creating an MMOFPS, but that it has to be programmed from the ground-up to interact with EVE Online as well. Luo presents a hypothetical battle scenario that illustrates how the two games might interact, with DUST mercs accepting a contract from an EVE corp to take over another corp's territory on a planet. The team is using a dedicated multi-core server machine to handle the strain of thousands of players duking it out in real-time. Luo reports that the team has fine-tuned the tech to the point where battles are able to host a "satisfying number" of simultaneous soldiers, and that thanks to the way it's designed, the battles can be scaled up and down in terms of numbers depending on who is present.
Ask Massively: The next internet fad will be tires edition
Tires are round bits of rubber that are placed upon the wheels of vehicles in order to facilitate spinning or something. Also, sometimes your parents might string some rope around one because they're too cheap and lazy to buy you a decent swingset. Anyhow, the next thing on the internet will be tires. I'm calling it right now. Don't look at me like that. We're talking about the same people who made Rebecca Black and Happy Cat famous. Just... tires. Rolling or... whatever. It's time for Ask Massively this week, as you could probably tell from the introduction about half a step away from a schizophrenic rant. This week, we've got a question about scaling instance difficulty and a couple of questions from our forums, none of which has anything to do with tires. If you'd like to ask a tire-related question, leave one in the comments or mail it along to ask@massively.com. I guess I can answer MMO questions, too.
NVIDIA SLI faces AMD CrossFire in a triple-GPU shootout
Place your bets, folks, because this one's gonna get ugly. On your left: a thunderous triad of AMD Radeon HD 6950 cards running in CrossFire. On your right: the terrorizing threat of triple NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 in SLI. In the middle: a Tom's Hardware tester just trying to stay alive. The winner? Well, as usual in these benchmark articles that sort of depends on what you're doing, but in general it's the AMD solution and its CrossFire barrage that comes out on top in terms of performance, cost, and even efficiency. But, that's certainly far from the whole story. You'll want to click on through to read about every agonizing blow.
Aika introduces scaling instances for players
Irregular schedules are the bane of group content. When you can't know when you'll log in or how long you'll be online at a stretch, it's really hard to make plans that involve getting other people together, and that's assuming that the content in question isn't an hour of continuous play. So Aika's latest addition should be a welcome change to players -- the development team has changed all of the game's instances to scale according to group size. Scaled-down dungeons operate under a few restrictions, none of which are terribly restrictive -- players will have a slightly lowered drop rate for items when in a smaller group, to compensate for the lowered difficulty. Although some comments in response allege that the difficulty is still tuned a bit high or low in certain spots, it's a welcome change that's been requested in several games over the years. So if you can't get a half-dozen people together in Aika for a simple run, you don't have to keep looking -- you can just go.
Sigma finally brings 'professional grade' VXP video scaling to consumer boxes
After buying up Gennum and its VXP video processing technology back in '08, Sigma Designs has finally managed to shoehorn its "professional grade" scaling (previously sen in high priced boxes from Kaleidescape and Mark Levinson) into a chip destined for consumer set-top boxes. The SMP8910 system-on-chip claims to have enough power for all manner of over the top application or middleware, while the VXP processing cleans up video well enough for it to claim Netflix streams of higher quality than on competing hardware and reduced ghosting on 3D content. We'll need to actually see the chip at work in a Blu-ray player, IPTV box or similar device to judge its capabilities for ourselves but if it was good enough to make some people consider a $4,000 DVD player and is available for more reasonably priced applications, then we're all ears.
Champions Online looks back and ahead
After the anniversary earlier this month, it's been fairly quiet within Champions Online. Shannon Posniewski, the game's executive producer, recently sat down to talk a little bit about the game's past and future. It includes some interesting tidbits about the game, such as Posniewski saying that the game wasn't quite ready for launch a year ago, and he would have preferred for the game to be either delayed or to cut out some features and polish more vital elements. Moving beyond the past, however, he outlines some of the plans the team has for the game as a whole moving in to the next year, which includes a general re-evaluation of all powers and an ongoing expansion to lower-level content. Coupled with the continued focus on adventure packs that can be played at any level, it looks as if Champions Online players will have plenty of things to enjoy over the next year of service.
A translated look at Final Fantasy XIV's Guildleve system
With the coming of a little show known as E3 -- you may have heard of it -- fans of several upcoming titles are hoping for new information. Final Fantasy XIV players are no exception, but as has slowly been the case ever since the testing began, little bits of information are becoming more readily available to players. FFXIVCore has recently translated a piece from 4Gamer, taking an in-depth look at one of the central features of the game, the Guildleve. The main source of quests in the game, the system promises to be somewhere between Final Fantasy XI's Fields of Valor and the timed battlefields. Once a Guildleve is accepted by a character, they're directed to an Aetheryte crystal to begin the quest. Touching the crystal fully restores HP and MP, as well as starting a time limit and making the targets of your quest visible. A given battle can be tuned based on party size, desired difficulty, and party level, giving players a variety of options for playstyle. The full translation has more screenshots and specifics on the core of Final Fantasy XIV's questing system, and fans are encouraged to take a look in anticipation of this week's news from E3.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 4-way SLI exemplifies law of diminishing returns
What's better than three monstrous GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards in a 3-way SLI configuration? How about four... is what we'd like to say, if Hardware.info hadn't just discovered that said setup is a huge waste of cash. With a full four GTX 480 cards buckled into an X58 Classified 4-Way SLI motherboard plus a Core i7-980X processor and a massive 1.5 kilowatt power supply to squeeze the juice, the €4,064 ($5,440) box still lost to a similarly configured 3-way rig in a wide variety of benchmarks. You could argue the system was CPU-limited, but Hardware.info used the fastest consumer chip available -- so it seems there's no place in today's market (keyword: today) for GTX 480 4-way SLI. Except, of course, for droolworthy snapshots like the above.
