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RIFT answers some community questions in time for the holidays
Christmas (or your winter holiday of choice) is right upon us, and the staff at Trion Worlds seems to be in a giving state of mind. The team has just posted a new set of answers to several player questions about RIFT, ranging from the rationale behind some current content implementations to what's waiting in the wings. Whether you're a roleplayer, an endgame raider, or just leveling through the game for the first time, the answers should give you something to look forward to. Among the more interesting updates is the reveal that the team is looking at improving level 50 gear below the top tier; Hammerknell and Rank 8 PvP gear will remain as-is, but the gear along the way will get buffed up a bit. The issue of Ember Isle difficulty is also addressed, the developers explaining that the island was meant to be reasonable for existing level 50 characters, giving it a bit more punch than players just hitting 50 might expect. Check the full list of questions and answers for other updates -- there's a lot to digest, but you've got a holiday break to do it.
Breakfast Topic: Would the Raid Finder difficulty approach work for 5-man instances?
With 4.3's introduction of the Raid Finder feature, more players than ever before have the chance to see and participate in the deaths of some of Azeroth's most destructive villains. The design concept is simple: Take a raid that's fairly difficult on normal mode and ridiculously hard on heroic, and simplify it to the point that 25 random people who've never met before can emerge victorious with a little effort. Casual players who don't have the time to raid on a weekly schedule get to see endgame content, and heroic raiders can still flex their egos with higher ilevel loot and the knowledge that they were able to take on some of the toughest encounters in modern gaming and win. Assuming this works and everyone remains happy with the Raid Finder system, is there a future for the Raid Finder model in the Dungeon Finder system? We know now that Blizzard has entirely revamped the 5-man system in Mists of Pandaria, offering new PvE encounter zones, timed instance runs, and no normal versions of level 85 heroic dungeons. But what if Blizzard decided to follow the Raid Finder system instead and redesigned 5-mans with three tiers of difficulty? The first tier, the Dungeon Finder mode, would be designed to be easy enough that five puggers with no voice chat could queue for it and win. Normal mode would require five dedicated players working in coordination with one another but would still ultimately be easily conquerable without significant effort. Heroic modes would require hours of wiping, retuning of strats, and a dedicated group of players.
Diablo III game designers talk Inferno difficulty and twinking
Diablo III is not an MMO by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly has some strong online elements like previous installments. It also has a lot of expectations to live up to, several of which are discussed in a recent PC Gamer interview with Wyatt Cheng and Andrew Chambers. Both designers discuss the challenge level of the new Inferno difficulty, which is aimed at max-level characters in good gear who have already completed the Hell difficulty level. They confirm that while it's meant to be brutal, it can be played and beaten solo -- although having a friend won't hurt. And speaking of getting by with a bit of help from one's friends, Cheng and Chambers both agree that twinking out new characters is a time-honored part of the game's tradition; their job as designers requires them to find ways to ensure that twinking is a fun process for players. It's the sort of interview that can leave fans wanting more of the game before it's released -- which ties in nicely to the fact that you can pre-order the Book of Cain (a collection of in-universe lore and artwork) on Amazon right now. And you can even take a look past the break to see what the book looks like.
The Daily Grind: Do you think MMOs should be harder?
For every person I see cheering the rise of accessible games, I see another lamenting the "dumbing down" of MMOs. And while I've always liked a good challenge, it seems to me that "challenge" is usually conflated with "tedium" -- most MMO "challenges" test my patience, not my skill. I can understand not wanting a game to be a faceroll, but I'm also glad that we don't have to be professional e-sport champs to participate in this hobby. Still, there's plenty of room between those two extremes for upping the difficulty of combat and crafting without resurrecting obnoxious mechanics like corpse runs and experience loss. What do you think -- should MMOs be harder? 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!
"There are no simple solutions" -- Design diversity in WoW
In a recent post on the forums, Bashiok responded to the idea that 1.35% of all WoW players have completed normal Firelands and what that does or does not mean for the recent changes implemented to the raid instance. It's a very interesting and information-filled post that I think deserves a thorough examination, as it reveals elements of Blizzard's current design philosophy and how and why it chooses to alter raids from their initial difficulty levels. I intend to go over the entire post carefully, but here are some highlights to ponder up front: The 1.35% number is just plain wrong. Blizzard has its own numbers that it's not going to share, but the 1.35% is probably as accurate as could be expected without access to Blizzard's internal data gathering. Blizzard's design intent is to make content for all of the playerbase. "It's both a blessing and a curse that the WoW player base is as large and diverse as it is." Players raid for many different reasons, some challenge, others loot, and others just to see the content. Some players are happy if they just see a boss once, while others enjoy weekly clearing. The idea of being willing to wipe a hundred or more times to clear a boss, a staple of the raider mentality for years, is not appealing to most players. OK, so now that we've picked out a few highlights, let's go over the entire post and really consider the implications of designing for as many players as possible.
The Daily Grind: Which MMO has the hardest learning curve?
MMOs come in all shapes and sizes, and with new titles launching every other day, there's bound to be one out there that caters to just about every skill level imaginable. While many of these games boast similar mechanics, occasionally a dev team will stray from the norm and create a head-scratchingly complex title (or in some cases, a title that is deliberately user-unfriendly). Games like EVE Online and Second Life are renowned for their learning curve and the amount of research necessary to play at a high level, and we're curious to hear about others you may have experienced. For this edition of The Daily Grind, share your thoughts on MMO complexity, and whether the term entails mechanics, the UI, gameplay options, or some combination of all three. While you've got your thinking cap on, which MMO has the hardest learning curve? 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!
The Soapbox: Decent challenge
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. The ancestors of modern humans had a lot to contend with, but I'm willing to bet that the seeds of MMO gamers existed even in those days. There had to have been at least one person who looked at a wooly mammoth, a titantic mass of tree-trunk limbs and tusks and fur, and announced "I bet you get great loot for killing that thing!" And as it turned out, he was right, assuming "great loot" means "meat for food and fur for clothing." I'm exaggerating, naturally; everyone knows that ancient humanity spoke Norwegian, not English, and it's a well-known fact that the term "loot" was first coined in the Canterbury Tales along with "spawn camper." But that need for a challenge is still there, the central idea that in order to get something really awesome you have to overcome a big obstacle. Which is why challenge is such a thorny issue for MMOs and always has been, because one person's challenge is another person's irritation.
The Daily Grind: What rewards aren't worth the effort?
A gauntlet of fiendish bosses. Horrible traps and puzzles solved in an instanced format, with no chance for other parties to help you. A collection of dangerous encounters and perilous chances with your characters, in which a single death would mean undoing hours of work. All of that work for... a cosmetic helm? While Final Fantasy XI has some brutally difficult bosses, they drop powerful rewards. But even then, sometimes you might look at the rewards they drop versus the slightly weaker rewards available elsewhere and decide that the effort is just too much. It's not that the rewards are bad; it's that the rewards don't match up to the strategy and careful play required to have a chance. So when have you run into rewards that don't feel like they're worth the effort it would take to obtain them? Is it a matter of too much time or too much challenge for too little benefit? 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!
The Soapbox: Somebody should do something about all the problems!
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. Bugs. They are the scourge of gaming, crawling and chittering their way through lines of code, turning what would have been a sure win into failure, making otherwise useful abilities worthless, crippling quests and destroying playtime. And so the clarion call goes out every time a new bug emerges that the developers should fix it -- a reasonable request, given that we are paying these people every month. (Or, on several occasions, we would be paying if the game weren't such a mess of bugs that they should be paying us.) Yet months roll by, and despite countless lovingly assembled bug reports, these issues do not get fixed. And it's not just bugs, either -- balance issues go untweaked, content goes unfinished, features get rolled back or sometimes removed altogether. What the heck are we paying for? Why in the world doesn't the development team just fix these problems?
The Daily Grind: What sort of challenges feel fair in an MMO?
When I was younger (so much younger than today), I decided that it sounded like a fun jaunt to play through Devil May Cry on the hardest difficulty setting, appropriately named "Dante Must Die." For those who have never experienced this particular joy, playing the game at that level requires an insanely precise level of timing and movement, with several fights ending in instant death if you dodge left instead of right. The game's strategies weren't difficult, but the challenge was all in the execution. Of course, that sort of model can be problematic in an MMO, where a second of lag can turn a successful execution into brutal failure. MMOs have always used a wide variety of different challenges. Guild Wars asks players to make use of positioning and timing to overcome challenges, while Final Fantasy XI's endgame is much more focused on encouraging a good strategy and good team synergy. What sort of challenges do you think are best suited to the group environment of an MMO? Conversely, what sort of content design feels like an unfair challenge in context? 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!
Atlus toning down Catherine's difficulty with upcoming patch
Apparently, Vincent's "nightmares" in Catherine are a bit too scary. In a post on the official Catherine blog, director Katsura Hashino noted that fans have been complaining about excessive difficulty in the "Nightmare" climbing puzzle segments, even when playing on the easiest difficulty setting. Hashino and the team wanted the climbing segments to convey the "thrill of a nightmare" and leave the player with a "clear sense of accomplishment," admitting that perhaps the staff had become too well-versed in the game to realize that it had become too hard for the people who didn't make it. A patch is currently in development at Atlus, aimed at balancing out this difficulty, so people can follow the story instead of merely falling from illusory block towers.
Wasteland Diaries: Hardcore mode
So during your wait for Sector 4, have you conquered it all in Fallen Earth? You've overcome every obstacle and achieved every achievement? You've amassed wealth beyond dreams and have become a king among men in the wastes? Maybe not, but let's assume you have. What do you do now? Well, I've got some terrific news for you. Fallen Earth has a hardcore mode. It's a realism mod of sorts. But the catch is: Nothing is changed on the server side. All modifications will be made client-side (and they will be made legally). This mode will take a large amount of self-discipline. It will be very easy to cheat. Many of the rules that will be imposed on you will also be enforced by you. In order for it to be considered truly hardcore, apocalyptic-realism, you can't cheat. Even Fallout: New Vegas has a hardcore mode. Of course, I played it in hardcore mode and still found it too easy. I had to impose rules on myself to keep it challenging (like no V.A.T.S. allowed). I also found that the ability to save right before a big decision or fight also alleviates some of the difficulty. Of course, I could impose further restrictions on myself to make the game more difficult. With that in mind, after the cut, I'll show you how to do just that with Fallen Earth.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Question chilled
We've had a fairly calm month since our last session, and really, I'm kind of relieved. I spent most of October expecting that City of Heroes was going to drop some sort of bomb along the lines of "game shutting down in December, releasing huge new game in January, have a pony." And I'm kind of glad that didn't happen, because I have nowhere to keep a pony in my home. With that awkward preamble out of the way, on with the questions! Jeromai asked: But think, the enemy code [developed for Going Rogue] might later be used for smarter AI for enemies that Incarnates face. A higher-level challenge. Gee, doesn't that sound like endgame content? Well, yes and no. Yes, it certainly sounds like a higher-level challenge, and if you ask a certain segment of the endgame population in any MMO, that's exactly what they want. But endgame content is frequently kept challenging solely through artificial barriers, and as bizarre as it sounds, we kind of want it that way, because the alternative is really, really annoying.
Age of Conan's Morrison on designing for challenge and accessibility
Funcom executive producer Craig Morrison is drawing on his game journalist roots of late, via a series of in-depth postings on his personal blog. Morrison, a former IGN editor prior to his Funcom days, has a lot to say about gaming trends, which is great news for industry watchers and anyone interested in occasional glimpses into the thought process of an MMO developer. In his latest opus, the former Anarchy Online (and current Age of Conan) game director discusses the challenges in developing, well, challenge. In a followup post to his earlier discussion on progression, Morrison talks at length about the decisions developers face when it comes to providing players with a steady diet of dings and digital pats on the back, while simultaneously making it seem like something worthwhile is being accomplished. The post contains a number of interesting observations, among them the notion that most modern MMORPGs parcel out their challenging content in sideshows that are entirely optional (raids, dungeons, etc.) and, in many cases, tangential to the main event (questing and hunting). While it would seem to be a relatively simple matter to add occasional challenges to the leveling treadmill, Morrison cautions that care is needed to avoid alienating segments of your playerbase. "If you are going to be able to inject occasional challenge or difficulty spikes into the standard progression as well, you need to have thought about it to make sure that it won't become a bottleneck, and that it will survive a review," he says.
Lost Pages of Taborea: Is Runes of Magic too easy?
It seems things are never quiet in regard to Runes of Magic these days. If it isn't holiday events or new world bosses, it's large-scale balancing issues. Players may still be plugging away at title achievements this Halloween, but the event has been going long enough for people to settle into a daily routine and get back to everyday affairs. In other words: it's something to do, but the shiny is starting to wear off. I took advantage of this lull and decided to do a Q&A on the overall difficulty of RoM. It's not a huge issue; it's more like a constant issue that creeps into other discussions on class balance or the memento system. And after the attempted change to a percentage-based mana cost, it's definitely worth consideration. Is RoM too easy? The question seems like it'd be a quick one-line answer, but there are many ways to view it that would yield different outcomes. What are players' goals? How can a change to one system affect the whole game? How will future updates affect any changes made today? Is there an answer to whether RoM is too easy or not? Well. Let's find out.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: This edition is so stupid
Guys, I have to warn you straight up... this edition is really stupid. It's just plain stupid. I'm not saying that it's bad, and I'm not saying it's not worth reading -- I'm just saying that it's really surprisingly dumb. You're all fond of City of Heroes, and I am too, but considering how dumb this week's edition is, maybe you should do something else for however long you would normally read one of my columns. I guess there are some pretty good things on YouTube these days. Oh, wait, sorry, it looks like I was reading my notes wrong. It's not that this edition is stupid, it's that the community threads we're spotlighting today are all about things that are stupid. Because there are things here and there within City of Heroes that are just a little dumb, when you get right down to it. Also, it gave me a thematic hook for this column, so that's good too. Click on past the cut for this week's highlights!
Breakfast Topic: The best class choice for new players
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com. I'm living a dream that many guys out there have: My girlfriend is actively learning how to play World of Warcraft and is enjoying it. After a couple of false starts, she finally found a class that suited her. First, she tried a warlock. Too many things to remember. Keeping DoTs up, keeping up with soul shards and collecting them, keeping tabs on her demon in battle. It was too much for her. She tried a hunter. Taming her own pet was cool at first, but then she had to feed it and manage it in dungeons. Throw Feign Death, Deterrence and Disengage into the mix, and it was not her cup of tea. She's flying back 10 yards into other packs of mobs and feigning death every time the cooldown is up because she's afraid of the tank yelling at her for "doing the aggro thing." I was dismayed that a hunter didn't work out, because I always deemed it the default starter class for new players. At least it was for me. Then came the paladin. Oh, blessed paladin, how she loves thee. At first, all she had to do was run up to the mob and hit it with Judgement of Light. The only "tricky" thing I had to teach her was when the Judgement of Light button was dark and wouldn't let her use it, it meant she needed to apply her Seal of Righteousness again. I even put the Seal right above the Judgement so she wouldn't forget. She was actually having pure joy with her new class. She didn't wonder if she was doing it right. She didn't worry about forgetting something. Just kill, kill, kill and love every second of it.
Shannon Posniewski on the development of Champions Online's first adventure pack
It's been a quiet couple of weeks for Champions Online -- at least, from the news side of things. Players have had plenty to do in the form of the recent Serpent Lantern adventure, offering an experience for players of nearly any level and any group size. Shannon Posniewski sat down for a recent interview in which he detailed some of the work that went into the adventure pack, from the challenges in design to the lessons learned. The overhaul of the perks system and the changes made to VIPER are both cited as elements that the development team was working on without the adventure pack, both of which dovetailed nicely with the new content. Posniewski describes the biggest hurdle as the scaling issues, however, which doesn't simply translate to adding more hit points to higher-level enemies. It's part of what contributes to the four-month design turnaround he describes in the interview. If you've been enjoying the new adventure, it's well worth a look at the interview for a peek at what makes Champions Online's development tick.
Party like a rock star in Final Fantasy XIV
There are players out there who might be dreading parties in Final Fantasy XIV. Well, not precisely; they might well be dreading that the mechanics will be similar to the parties from Final Fantasy XI, where some classes could seemingly wait for ages without a trace of a group. Mercifully, the fine bilingual team at FFXIVCore has continued its apparent tradition of translating information to coincide with the new beta testing, with the newest translation being a guide to getting a working group in the game. Guildleves are the game's core leveling mechanics, but new ones can only be accepted every so often, and they can be hard to complete on higher settings alone. By grouping up, players gain access to more guildleves from other players and more support in tackling the game's bigger challenges. The full translation has information on everything from the interface to form a party to the game's battle regiments, the equivalent of Final Fantasy XI's skillchains. (We're guessing they meant regimens, but that's the challenge of translation.) Final Fantasy XIV fans are advised to take a look at the article to start gearing up for the game's release in two months.
15 Minutes of Fame: Psychologist and games researcher John Hopson
From Hollywood celebrities to the guy next door, millions of people have made World of Warcraft a part of their lives. How do you play WoW? We're giving each approach its own 15 Minutes of Fame. What keeps gamers hooked on their game of choice? Chances are, it's an element of the gameplay that was teased out with the help of games researcher John Hopson. The experimental psychologist and beta program head for Microsoft Game Studios examines what makes gamers do the things they do and then designs ways to keep them happily doing just that -- most recently, in titles such as Shadow Complex, Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach. All that, and he's a WoW player to the core. "I mostly play in the two semi-official Microsoft WoW guilds, and lately I've been a hardcore player in a casual's body," he notes. "My wife and I had our first child a few months ago, so we've both dropped raiding and have been levelling alts instead since that doesn't require a fixed schedule. So far, we're both up to 5 level 80s apiece. :)" We thought it was time to turn the tables on Hopson, a loyal reader and occasional commenter at WoW.com, and ask him for his perspectives on WoW from the inside out.
