What’s your game?

“There’s an old joke – um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ‘em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.”

Woody Allen.

We don’t get video games of high quality on a regular basis. For us it can often be a long time between drinks. On rare occasions in the last 30 years of video gaming I have been spoilt for choice, but these have been rare circumstances. My post yesterday regarding savouring Skyrim received a reply which I had been expecting. Frankly I was surprised that there weren’t more that were similar. But for every comment that someone takes the time and trouble to write down I am sure many more readers were thinking along similar lines.

The comment in question is from Okrane, and I’m glad that this person took the time to voice their feelings. Lets have a look at what was written.

“… you mean the all the horrible fetch quests?
or maybe the shitty interface which when u are a wizard you have like 30 spells and skills and only 8 hotkeys?
or the really boring combat, where you whack a sword at the enemy from level 1 to 50 and beyond, or throw the same fireball over and over…
or perhaps the interesting dungeons where you battle the same kind of undead over and over again.

and I could go on. The only good thing is the big ass world which can seem interesting to explore but only when you are willing to ignore all the other shit.
For gameplay the game is really shit and does not provide much fun if trying to achieve anything else but explore …”

I understand this point of view, and I have seen it reflected in many posts from bloggers lamenting the very same points raised here. But as I said yesterday, you have to learn how to eat. You don’t wait a long time between meals and then stuff your face as fast as you can while complaining how bad some of the food is. I don’t like gathering quests either, which is why I ignore them. I have completed one as it involved an interesting alchemy line, but apart from that example the rest lie unloved in my quest journal. However, I am sure that there are many players out there that do like those quests. Thus, the developers included some. They did want to make a profit, and I for one am happy that they did. More similar games for me. But don’t complain about something while simultaneously stuffing your face with it. I mean, it’s not like there’s a shortage of quests in Skyrim.

I play a warrior who likes to sneak around and shoot things with a bow, so I’m not up on the mage-like problems regarding hotkeys. A friend of mine does play a mage in Skyrim and he loves it. As far as he is concerned, 8 hotkeys are more than enough. Back in the day when playing a mage you were lucky if you got two spells every 24 hours. But the latest incarnations of video games give him unlimited powers at his fingertips. Now with Skyrim he forces himself to make a choice.

Selectively playing in this way gives you more rewards in the long run. The game lasts longer. What’s the point of blasting your way through so much content when these sorts of games come around so sporadically? Learning how to eat is about not gorging in one sitting, but taking your time and enjoying the ride. I for one, never use fast travel in Skyrim. Why rush? Is there another game that needs my attention so much right now? Of course not. Whenever I find myself playing a session for too long and I begin cutting corners then I know it’s time to quit for the day. I’m not gaining any more pleasure from that session, I’m just playing for the sake of playing and getting things done. That’s the ignorant method, and we all fall prey to it. The trick is recognising it for what it is and having the discipline to shut it off at that time.

As for the combat being boring, I find it exhilarating. No bells and whistles here. No fancy moves of whirling blades. You have to get in and cut the enemy down before he gets you. That’s what combat is all about. I still sneak into any unknown area with the possibility of enemies. I love the thrill of taking them down with one shot from my bow. It doesn’t happen often though because I haven’t artificially gimped my skills. I’ve set them up so I can have fun, but still have a challenge. Why ruin it for myself? Why indeed. But as I said yesterday, you have to know how to play.

 

Skyrim – The luxury is in the knowing.

I’ve noticed that people that know how to eat are never idiots.

Guillaume Apollinaire

One needs to learn how to eat. But first, one needs to recognise that the need to acquire the talent is even necessary at all. It took me some little time, but once I had the skills I realised that perhaps I could apply the same process to other aspects of my life. So I learnt how to dress. I learnt how to travel. I learnt how to seduce. I learnt how to read. Whereas before I had merely consumed books, now I discovered the art of reading well. The drawback to this was the newly acquired inability to put up with sub-standard writing.

Along the way I learnt how to play video games. You may give a man the finest meal he has ever had, but if he does not know how to eat, it will have been wasted. And the man himself? He will scoff at the art digesting now in his ungrateful stomach. What kind of a meal was that, he will sneer. I’ve had better.

Skyrim is that meal. The game’s designers have placed art upon the table. But what we do with it is out of their hands. And we are bound by our own restraints. If our knowledge on how to truly play a game is lacking, then it will be reflected in the game itself. There is no right way to play the game, much as there is no right way to eat a meal. Knowledge is key. With the correct grasp of how to eat, the meal can reach new heights, and the satisfaction is deep indeed. Can this be understood? Only by those who know.

I have played 138 hours of Skyrim since its release. I have finished a single quest line, and I have a single character. The game is akin to a fine bottle of scotch that I can savour when the mood takes me. The more I enjoy it, the more I value it, the more pleasure it gives. Perhaps I will play a couple of hours tonight. Where shall I go, what shall I do? The game is my guide.

 

It’s Symbiotic, man.

I have been quiet of late due to starting a new job with an insane learning curve. Another reason for my lack of posting has been the endless drama circulating the blogging world as regards to SWTOR. To whit, most posts seem to argue about whether it’s even okay to talk about this game, and if it is okay just who is allowed to possibly have access to their own right to freedom of speech. I could have lots to say on this topic but I have recently become bored with arguing with people on the internet; it’s akin to masturbating with a cheese grater – slightly interesting, but mostly painful.

However, today Goblinworks have their new blog post up and I thought that this was a marvellous opportunity to ramble on my own blog for a bit. Truth be told they blogged about death penalties in the new Pathfinder MMO in mid-January, but I was a bit busy and I find the whole death argument just a tad tedious anyway. But their post from today concerns how PvE will function within their game world, and it is very interesting indeed. How interesting? Well, let’s just say that if this game doesn’t get made I’ll probably do nasty things to small furry animals.

In Pathfinder Online, the players are the content. And the PvE world is made up of a symbiotic relationship between fighters, crafters, and builders. Each one depends on the other for their survival and prosperity. They have a nice little graphic on how it works here, which I’m posting hopefully with their permission:

 

They go into the detail of how this works in their post, but what gets me excited is the possibility to exist and play in a dynamic world based in a fantasy setting. The idea is very comparable to EVE online, but I don’t particularly enjoy space games and I think there are a lot of other old school players out there with the same preference as mine. The vast majority of content will exist in the world in real time, (as opposed to being instanced), and will change and evolve or disappear depending on player actions. These are broken down into wandering monsters, harvesting hazards, and ruins, lairs and caverns. So let’s say that a bunch of harvesters have found a valuable source of material a fair way from their base of operations. They may find that they require protection from raiders on their operation and will thus engage some adventurers to help them deal with the problem. A deal will of course have to be agreed upon, and who knows – perhaps the adventurers will renege on the agreement and steal the resources. The possibilities for gameplay in this vein are almost endless. One idea that I really like is the fact that caverns are both populated by high level monsters and are generally found deep below civilized areas. This means that areas will remain dynamic sources of PvE play even after they have become fully settled.

There is also a little addendum where they postulate the idea of how to handle quests. These will be more along the lines of what we know as modules from the tabletop gaming world. Some will be free and available to all, and some may involve being purchased via micro-transactions. The jury is still out on this one but they have also added the caveat that there may be opportunities for players to create their own content which they can sell themselves in the in-game shop. Now that’s a good idea – get your playerbase to make content for you.

 

EVE with Swords.

Reading the numerous blog posts and subsequent comments about SWTOR, the thing that has struck me most is the amount of players recognising that there are no attractive MMOs on the market at present. While many are having fun in SWTOR, a great number of them also admit that this will not be their new long term game. It is a stop-gap while they hope that a new game will emerge to not only capture the imagination, but to give players the possibility to emotionally commit to a character and an online world for a long period of time.

This is what makes an MMO; an online organic world that is always growing and evolving based on what the players themselves do and decide. It’s why SWTOR won’t be a long term hit – story is wonderful in a single player game, but an MMO needs to be player driven. Players can take seemingly mundane game attributes to new and exciting directions that the developers never dreamed would happen. The auction house in WoW is a fine example of this.

Goblinworks have released their third blog instalment for the new Pathfinder Online MMO. In it they outline how they hope character progression will proceed; things can change of course, and they acknowledge that. This is the first blog installment where they come out and say that they will be adapting many of the core game processes from EVE Online to their game. Ryan Dancey is the head of this new game, and he worked for many years on EVE. I have seen numerous bloggers and commenters in the past cry for a fantasy version of EVE – now it looks like they might be getting their wish. Ryan admits that there are downsides to the EVE system, but they feel that the upsides will outweigh those negative aspects.

There are many things in this blog post that get me excited. Not excited enough to go out and purchase a repair kit for my ancient inflatable woman, Suzie, but excited nonetheless. The core idea is that instead of levelling to get new skills, you will get new skills in order to level:

“… In Pathfinder Online, we’ve turned the system on its head: instead of using experience points as a prerequisite for improving in a skill, improving skills are part of the prerequisite for gaining new abilities. Your character must earn all the things needed to qualify for a new “level,” and then you’re rewarded with a special bonus …”

There will be 20 bonuses available for each class which give a nominal 20 levels. How long will it take the first players to reach level cap? Ryan hopes to not see the first level 20 character for at least 2 years of real time. The gloves are off – these guys want a long time commitment from their player base. Is this fair? Well, isn’t this what MMOs are supposed to be about?

One of the features of the Pathfinder tabletop RPG is the freedom to switch between class skills, and this aspect will be replicated in the online game. So a fighter can choose a cleric bonus or a mage bonus etc. That gives a player a lot of customisation possibilities. However, stick to the one true path and level up a pure 20th level fighter and you will get an additional capstone ability. While this is nice, the volume of uproar on the forums over this means it may have to be changed. Time will tell if the developers stick to their vision. I hope they stick to their vision because this system gives players choice with real consequences, something lacking in most games today.

There are a couple of things that cause me concern, however. The use of attributes as in the standard RPG model is nice, but the way in which they are generated will be crucial, otherwise you will see every player running around with scores hovering at 18. Alignment is very briefly mentioned, but this sets all sorts of warning bells off in my head. Witness SWTOR’s attempts to introduce merely a light/dark side system and one wonders who this could possibly work in a player driven world with no set story, let alone all the possible alignment combinations. Merit badges are set out as a way to get new abilities, but I dread the thought of it degenerating into the awful achievement system that is used to keep players busy as a substitute for an uninspiring game world.

All in all though there is a lot to be hopeful for here. The teaser at the end about crafting characters is welcome news indeed, and I eagerly await the next blog to see whether Pathfinder Online will be a cross between EVE and Minecraft. If so it may just be the MMO that hard core players have been waiting for.

 

133 square miles of real estate for sale

A very quick post before I head off for a few days. Goblinworks second blog post is up where the area of the world for initial gameplay for Pathfinder Online is explained. Divided into a hex system, it is about 133 square miles in total, with three NPC factions already present, (making for a nice paper/scissors/rock scenario). To compare this, the entire world of Azeroth at launch was about 80 square miles. Throw 4500 players per month for the first seven months and I think the game has the potential to build up pace quite nicely. There is also a crapton of room available for future content development. The world is there for you to see. No mysterious land masses rising from the depths of the ocean needed.

Check it out for yourself and I’ll go into it in more detail with my thoughts next week.

 

A greeting of a kind.

A reader who is thinking of starting his own blog contacted me recently for advice. ‘Dear Adam,’ began the email. This was already a nice departure from the usual ‘Fuck you cuntface’ which I seem to receive on a regular basis. He then went on to describe in length what he was thinking of doing. I wrote back and said that it sounded very nice, and that he should start it up. Then, if he was progressing nicely and was posting with a regularity that didn’t coincide with each lunar eclipse, I’d give him a good plug for his site. His reply thanked me, and then proceeded to get to the nitty gritty of his problem: he had already written a number of as yet unpublished entries but he didn’t want to publish them yet because they were, in his opinion, too good.

” … If I post these, nobody is going to read them because nobody reads my blog. So I want to get people to read my blog before I post the really good stuff …”

Yes, I said. But in order to get anyone to read your blog you need to post really good stuff in the first place. Either that or pick on the biggest blogger you can find and hope to bait them into starting a blog war with you, (worked for me numerous times). He then offered to post them on my blog under his own name, an offer which I refused as I like to keep my readers focused when issuing me with death threats. Can’t have all the hate being diffused, that really wouldn’t do you know. And then who would moderate his comments? You don’t want me to as I let any old idiot on the site to make a fool of themselves, although I did delete a couple of particularly stupid ones this morning.

It’s tricky this blogging game, getting yourself established and finding a nice group of people to hate you enough to regularly comment on your site. Gevlon is a master at it, but that’s just because he’s a big meanie and we all know he only pretends not to like Christmas. I can just picture him on Christmas morning, sitting under his tree with the lights twinkling, and him rubbing his hands at glee at all the lovely presents which he convinced his readership he’d never open. Ha! Spoilt that one for you, didn’t I, Gevlon!

Anyway, I’m going away for Christmas to a nice little luxury resort that bans children within 500 meters of the place and has assured my wife and I that if any staff member even looks like uttering a dreaded holiday greeting they won’t only be sacked they will be summarily executed. I’m going to pack a cooler full of oysters, salmon, prawns and marinated steaks and take a case of good Italian prosecco down with me. I’ve also promised the good wife that I will leave the computer at home. Little does she realise that this will just mean that I’ll take a dozen books and I’ll ignore her anyway.

But I’d like to take the occasion to thank each and every one of you who have clustered around my blog this year, like fruit fly around a rotting durian. Hopefully next year circumstances will allow me to install a fixed internet line and I can get back to playing and blogging about games that you all seem to give a shit about.

 

SWTOR – Nothing to see, move along, move along.

Earlier in the year I gave my number one reason for not playing the future Star Wars MMO as the fact that most of the playerbase would play some form of Jedi. And from what I can gather in my purusings around the web, this seems to be the case. I’m not in the game myself, I’m not going to play it, but I sure as hell am going to comment on what other people are telling me. And what they’re saying is what quite a few of us predicted; Bioware copied WoW when WoW was broken. It’s going to explode out of the gates but I reckon it’ll have a 90 day life, if that. Very silly of them to release it during the holidays when players can overdose on playing time and chew through content. Because content is what this game is about, and with long storylines and lots of cut scenes, I’m quite certain that very few players will be able to stomach going through it all a second time.

And that is because this is a single player RPG slapped into a MMO universe. Gordon has come up with a bunch of flaws that are interesting in of themselves. But what is really telling are his good points about the game.

“… But I don’t want to be completely negative. The ability to select from different answers in conversations, even if they really have no impact of meaning whatsoever, is very fun and unique in the MMO world …”

In an MMO world, maybe, but in a single player RPG this is so standard as to be not worthy of comment. And it just proves my point that SWTOR is a single player RPG. And because of that it will have a definite shelf like. I mean, I love Skyrim, but don’t ask me to make a different toon and play through it all again. I know what that would be like; I’d rush through the whole thing and try to get to certain bits that I had missed the first time around. Going through the motions.

From Gordon again:

“… Likewise the whole Dark Side/Light Side mission options are very enjoyable plus the general maturity of the content is refreshing (it’s nice that you see a lot of moral ambiguity in the Republic story lines, for instance) …”

Sounds nice I suppose. But why is this so unique to an MMO? I mean really, what has this MMO done to advance the genre or improve on things that have gone before? I’m sure that everyone playing the game is having a great time, but while doing that they are ruthlessly chewing through content in a game format that was out of date three years ago. I’m having a great time in Skyrim as well, but there’s no way I’m going to be playing it in three months time.

 

Christopher Hitchens RIP

I’ve just heard the sad news that Hitchens has lost his battle with cancer. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his work he was one of those rare breed who switched from the left to the right as he got older. As Churchill said,

“If you’re not a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 40, you have no head.”

Hitch was a big influence on my writing and my critical thinking. And my drinking. He will be sorely missed.

So here’s a smattering of a few nice ‘Hitch-Slaps’ as they’re called for posterity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Skyrim – The God illusion.

I have been playing Skyrim for the last couple of weeks. It is undoubtedly the best single player RPG I have ever played. The wonderful thing about the Elder Scrolls series is not just their level of craftsmanship, but the lessons we can learn for the video game industry as a whole.
Skyrim, as other games in the Elder Scrolls series before it, is a theme-park game with sandbox elements. There is a main storyline, but you as the player are free to diverge from it and happily spend your days crafting bits of armor and rearranging the books in your little home if that is what you desire.
The books found in-game are an ongoing feature of the series, and Skyrim is no exception. Some of you may be aware of a study based on information in the books which breaks the fourth wall. If you aren’t then I urge you to read it. The parts to this are here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

In this analysis, the writer explores the idea that the player in the game has an effect on the game-world that goes beyond merely playing through the content. The effect is metaphysical, in such that through the texts found in game it is revealed, for example, that the inhabitants of the world are affected each time the player reboots the game to avoid an unwelcome end. The inhabitants cannot articulate their concerns, but their historians have an inkling that someone or something is “playing” with them. They know that time is being altered and lost in some way.

This is taken a step further when the player meets the character of Vivec in Morrowind. Vivec is an NPC who is aware that he is merely a character in a game, and because of his awareness he is able to free himself from the bonds of his in-game limitations. This he communicates to the player through a series of books to be found in the game, the thirty six lessons of Vivec. Thus he also knows of the player, and their god-like role and effect on the game world. In effect there is no wrong way to play the game. If the player wishes to min/max their abilities, to save and reload when things don’t go their way, to limit themselves to have more of a challenge, to modify the game code itself, all is acceptable. To quote Kateri from her final post in that series:

“… A game is a created reality, and TES invites the player to invest their imagination in that reality, and to interact with it. To shape it as they see fit. They release tools to mod it, so any player can make themselves an all-powerful god. Cheating? Wrong word. It’s part of the game. It is allowing the player to change their world.
And so it makes sense that Bethesda create ingame lore that plays with these ideas of so-called cheating, of power and agency, of warping the world around you. If the devs are the Godhead, then each player is immersed in their own god-dream. But the good player, the ruling king, is a lucid dreamer. If they can master the dream-game, if they can gain enough power, or cheat, or create their own reality in the Construction Set – this player has not just beaten the game, they have *become* part of the Godhead. Of the creative process. CHIM…”

Fascinating stuff. But if a player is a god, if there is no wrong way to play a single player RPG, where does that leave an MMO based on the same criteria? Let us now imagine the Elder Scrolls series as an MMO. While it makes sense for one player to be a God playing within his own lucid dream, it makes no sense at all when multiple Gods appear in the same dream. Now we move from there being no wrong way to play the game to there being no right way. Skyrim only works when there are an infinite number of alternate universes extrapolating on the same idea. Place a second player within the same game, make it multiplayer, and the whole thing comes tumbling down. The game no longer works as intended. Having thousands of Gods or ‘heros’ in the same world only serves to invalidate the reason for them being heros. Even more when you realize that you leaving the game, after all of your world changing hero status, will leave no effect at all. There can be many worthy characters within a game world, but there can only be one God overlooking the entire dynamic, if the God itself is bound in some way by the limits of the game universe, (ie the devs are the Godhead and each player is in their own unique God-dream.)

The starting area of Tortage in Age of Conan is routinely held up as an excellent example of a starting zone in an MMO, but it is merely a good example of a single player RPG which happens to be set in an MMO universe. Apart from multi-player quest lines, there is no need to interact with another player in Tortage, and it could be cynically said that these quest lines were made multi-player to satisfy some sort of semblance of an MMO. Once the player left the starting zone and ventured into the world of Conan, the game fell down, precisely because there was no more content on a scale that was found in the opening 20 levels. Age of Conan is two games in one: a well-designed single player RPG in Tortage, and an ill thought-out MMO for the rest, where the devs unwisely assumed that the players themselves would somehow generate content in a theme-park world. Likewise, the only conceivable reason for the new Star Wars game to be an MMO is that this is the only way for the company designing the game to recoup their development costs and show a profit.

Placing a theme-park RPG in an MMO environment merely defeats the purpose of the game itself. In an MMO you populate the world with players and bring it to life. But if every player is a God or a hero involved in their own ‘unique’ storyline of saving the world from this and that monster then the whole thing loses any sense of validity and you are reduced to mindless quests and repetitive tasks.

 

Pathfinder to limit initial player offering to 4500 players.

One of the major quibbles that I have with SWTOR is the fact that they have borrowed so heavily from other MMOs; to the point where many experienced MMO players consider it to be something akin to “WoW in Space.” The devs on SWTOR don’t appear to want to learn from previous game’s mistakes. Their propensity is to simply copy what has worked before. However, what worked five years ago may not apply to today’s market. Games do not exist in a vacuum, and technology, social attitudes of the time, and player expectations all influence the success of a game in a particular time and place.

Which is why the new announcement from Goblinworks regarding the Pathfinder MMO title is so intriguing. In it they list a number of areas which they want to follow in development. Not all of these are new; SWTOR for example has made quite a lot of use of middleware technology. But it is the culture behind these ideas which is of most importance. And Goblinworks appears to be determined to learn from past MMOs and to not only avoid their mistakes but to take game development in new directions.

So when I read this announcement I wonder if we just might be getting what we have long asked for:

At launch, and for the first seven months following, we will cap new paying players at 4,500 per month. Four thousand five hundred new paying players monthly. We expect to keep only about 25% of those players on a long-term basis, so after we factor in attrition of each month’s signups, we end up with 16,500 paying players at the end of that seven-month period.

Making a game that starts with 4,500 players and grows to 16,500 players is much, much easier and vastly less expensive than making a game designed to accommodate a million players on day one. We’ll be able to focus on a relatively small part of the world at first, expanding it only as we need to.

After the first seven months, we’ll raise the limit on new paying players to 12,000 per month. That will remain our goal for the next couple years of Pathfinder Online’s life cycle. Factoring in attrition, by the end of the game’s third year of operation, we expect to have about 120,000 paying players. For many MMOs, that number would be considered a failure, but because of our lean development strategy, achieving that number of paying customers will mean success for Pathfinder Online.

Details aside for the moment, this is thinking outside of the box. And above all it is an attempt to set up a game to succeed as opposed to positioning yourself for an epic load of failure. I can see issues with this of course, the major one being that MMOs are a social game and players like to bring their friends which this will restrict. But when you add in some more of their goals such as a non-instanced world and possibly only one server, then things start to get very interesting.

We have long lamented the fact that the ultimate expression of MMOs got bogged down with the super theme-park style display. To be honest, after Ultima Online it has been a long and slow rush downhill to where players are akin to lab rats pushing buttons to get rewards and an emotional hit. The achievement system is the ultimate expression of a game without soul and players with no mind of their own. To be honest I don’t know if this will work. But I love that at least they’re trying a different approach.