character-advancement
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Neverwinter previews post-60 advancement plans
You've hit the level cap in Neverwinter. You are officially as hardcore as you can ever be, and that brings a smile to your face. But it also makes you kind of wistful. After all, there are still so many roaming bags of experience points vicious monsters to fight, and all of the experience from those is going to waste. But that's going to change when Module 3 comes out and all of your otherwise unnecessary XP turns into sweet, delicious piles of extra loot. When Module 3 goes live, characters will continue accumulating experience as before when they hit level 60. Once they accumulate 250,000 XP, the character will be rewarded with a special pack that can contain extra Power Points, Enchants, account-bound XP Scrolls, and other useful goodies. The Power Points can only be used to add a total of 20 points to your character's Power Tree, but it still means that hitting 60 doesn't mean the end of your character growth. So go out, slay, and enjoy a little bit of extra potency as a result.
New Defiance developer diary explains what makes an MMO shooter
If you like playing an MMO but also like shooting things, you may enjoy the gameplay underpinning Defiance quite a bit. The latest developer diary for the game might be answering questions you hadn't asked, however, as it's focused on explaining how the game blends the MMO and shooter genres together into a cohesive whole. But there are still interesting tidbits about the game, including a look at vehicles and character advancement. Characters advance partly through the acquisition of powerful new weapons, which is almost a given based on the nature of the game. Weapons are also heavily customizable, with visible differences between stock weapons and customized versions. Players will also be able to acquire points to spend on special abilities of varying types, although points can be swapped into different abilities later on. If you want a more in-depth look at the game, click on past the break to view the full development diary. [Source: Trion Worlds press release]
The Road to Mordor: Six wonders of the newbie world
As I reported last week, I've recently rerolled as a Hobbit Minstrel in an effort to refresh my attitude toward the game, to get a different perspective, and to continue my series in which I go through all of the single-player quests in the game. It's been, in a word, smashing. Having been away from the tamer lands of Eriador for so long, I had forgotten the charm and serenity that these lowbie areas exude. Plus, it's always fun leveling up a brand-new character, since there are plenty of goals and ways to develop your character that your level-capped toons have long since surpassed. As I've been plugging away at Bree-land quests, I began to make a mental list of exactly what's so special about the low-level game in Lord of the Rings Online. The mental list became an actual one, and after a period of milling and refining, I've baked it into a nice loaf of observations to share with you.
The Soapbox: Level the playing field
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. Levels exist in every single MMORPG on the market today. There are games that eschew the class-level format popularized from EverQuest onward, but even those games still feature levels of one variety or another -- your character in EVE Online might not be a Level Seven Warship Pilot, but she still has certain skill levels at the right levels to make her effective. Levels are a great way of marking character progress, of showing a character growing in power and competence over time. They're also a great way to cause all sorts of problems, from PvP to PvE, from disparities in high-end play to the infinite frustration of having to gain twenty levels just so you can play with your friends. And unfortunately, the obvious solution of just removing the blasted numbers doesn't actually fix things. Levels are a great advantage to MMOs, even as they're also a big hindrance.
Chasing carrots, and why we do it
A while ago, Kill Ten Rats advocated a rather interesting approach to solving the problem of any tedious grind: cheat. More viable in a single-player game (but still possible if you're willing to use methods of dubious legality), the reasoning was to cut away the reward portion and see if you were enjoying what you were doing on its own merits. Two follow-up posts have been made since then, further extrapolating the question and getting into the way our brains fire in response to anticipation of reward. Grind, of course, is both a dirty word and a quintessential part of any current MMO, which means that we generally aim at games with the most enjoyable grind. But are we focusing on an enjoyable grind, or just one that's not too painful as we head toward the end goal? Is the problem with Aion (to pick a game routinely raked over the coals for its grind) the basic structure, or could the grind become irrelevant if it were just a hair more enjoyable? The very structure of MMOs encourages a certain amount of grinding, and it's interesting to take a look at whether we're doing it because the grind is fun, or just because we've tricked ourselves into thinking it's not all that bad.
The Agency's character advancement stays true to skill-based gameplay
In most MMOs, we're used to our time investment leading to a character that is overwhelmingly powerful, compared to a player that is fresh out of the gates. For example, a level 30 is going to thrash a level 10 in World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online, barring gross incompetence from the higher level. However, The Agency's developers are making sure that a ranked-up character isn't guaranteed to beat down a rookie in PvP combat, as SOE Seattle game designer and writer Matt Staroscik detailed in a recent interview.This doesn't mean that there's no point to leveling up a toon -- Staroscik reminded us that players will gain new skills and weapon techniques as they play, and the ability to equip different gear. These perks will make an experienced player a tad more deadly, but a newcomer that takes quickly to the shooter gameplay should be able to hold their own. It sounds quite similar to Call of Duty 4's multiplayer advancement.Staroscik also mentioned the "alias" outfits that we've heard about in the past. The system sounds like it could provide a nice change from being a heavily-armed bad-ass, provided that there's some variety to the missions that come up.
Mixing skill into a multiplayer game
Clockwork Gamer posted an interesting look at skill in MMOs the other day. He categorizes skill in online games into three areas: character gear and advancement, game knowledge, and player skill.Character gear and advancement can be done by anyone-- the longer you've played a game, it's almost guaranteed that the better your character will be. Game knowledge is usually something cultivated both outside the game, and by social interaction inside the game. It's only by reading sites like this one and talking to your friends that you can learn strategies to defeat enemies (or other player classes). And player skill is the hardest form of skill to get a grasp on. It's that weird measure of how good you are at aiming the mouse and hitting the right buttons when necessary.Usually, when people say "playing skill," they're talking about games that require twitch and computer knowledge to conquer: first person shooters, real-time strategy games, and so on. MMOs don't usually fit into that because in most cases, the other two forms of skill can match up or even outweigh actual "skill"-- a level 1 character will never topple an endgame character, no matter how great his aim is. But there's a lot more research to do here-- it seems like there is definitely a sweet spot for player skill to be found in MMOs. While some have tried (and are trying) to find it, we haven't quite hit it yet.
Lore and storytelling in the MMO genre
KillTenRats has a good commentary up on lore and its role in MMO games. Story in videogames is a tough thing to get right, and it's even tougher in a world where you don't just have one hero-- you have hundreds or thousands of them. (Sidenote: while it's not an MMO, Portal-- my vote for Game of the Year this year-- deals excellently with story, and you should read this long but insightful debate between N'Gai Croal and Stephen Totilo about it). How do you describe a changing narrative in a place where the world itself is designed to be persistent?The common answer is world events, but those are still so complicated that even their little brothers, instanced events, are still in the stages of infancy. We may be able to clear out a castle in an instance, but can we destroy one? And the very fact that it's instanced means that we can leave, walk back inside the door, and nothing has changed. We chalk it all up to coding right now that the prisoner we just rescued a few minutes ago still remains in his cell, and we simply sigh, resigned to the fact that we're not really changing the world, just leaving it reset for the next group of players.Still, there have to be some ideas floating around that could work to bring around a great story in a persistent world.
