SWTOR comparisons to WOW: Why not compare it to any single player RPG?

If you have a prior game like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which involves killing monsters and doin' quests, does it seem missplaced to say Star Wars: The Old Republic is a clone of World of Warcraft?

Really that game structure is in alot of single player RPG's.

Of course maybe SWTOR picks up nuances of WOW's overall design. But if WOW's only distinguishing features are nuances of design, it's not like theres some sort of deep substance there to be copied.

Would you pay 20cents to play a naked orc game? No? That sounds silly?

Is it an observation to say that what seems to be the cool thing, though not much to do with the game...



Is done here in the second video?




I dunno, perhaps there in the current wow there is more running around in the word and massively hammering stuff as part of gameplay (I'm not sure pissing about in crossroads counts as part of gameplay)?

It also raises the question that if you pitched a game where you said "Hey, in this game for two hours you can run around as a naked orc and wail on something to not much effect" the very people in this video would be unlikely to buy it, or even download such a game for free. Yet here they are, doing it, no doubt for roughly two hours or so (including getting there, etc).

People act like they have high standards and pretend they aren't into certain game stuff, so much so they wouldn't buy it. But they are. It's hard when your actually trying to make games, yet people wont admit they wanna do X. Even to themselves.

Oh, the twenty cents I pulled from the idea of playing five hours a day multiplied by say thirty days. Then divide $15 by that.

No one has played world of warcraft

Yay, this has happened 79 times! It felt really different than the 78th!

No one has ever played world of warcraft.

There's an apparently incongruent idea.

Remember before you'd ever drunk any beer? Okay, imagine you started drinking your first beer, but you get through say a quarter of it, then throw it away.

Have you drunk a beer yet?

Perhaps you'd say no.

Now, what if you did it again? Drank a quarter, threw the rest away. Again and again. Have you ever really had a beer?

Okay, now, have you ever finished a game of world of warcraft (or any other mmorpg, for that matter)?

"But it's different! It's supposed to be endless"

So? It still means you haven't finished even one game of it.

"It doesn't matter, world of warcraft and other mmorpgs get an arbitrarily shifting definition of play so I end up right on this matter!"

Fair enough.

Note: I'm wondering about warhammer online, with it's city sieges. These perhaps qualify, in the way many a person measure it, as an an ending. So perhaps more people, many more people, have played warhammer than have played wow? Heh.

World of Crevice Craft!

WE HAVE CREVICES!

I was going to post the video and then caught myself, realising I was passing around the advertising. So I'll just link it, which is entirely different (not)

I mean, watch the video. This is the real voice over.

"See this!?? THIS!?? WE PUT A CREVICE THERE!!!! And that? That!? WE PUT A CREVICE THERE AS WELLS!!!!!1!!!"

$60 at a retailer near you. And buy our newest sparkle pony....NOW WITH A CREVICE IN IT!!!!1!!!

Crevices! Because an absence in the ground makes for content, not a hole!

I think the rest would be better if a guy with a ripped shirt, a chick and a plucky little kid hid in the mouth of a cave while two slightly badly animated dinosaurs had an awesome fight. Because B movie is good when you embrace it, rather than try and pretend it's something bigger.

'You can't out-WOW WOW' - a fallacy?

I've heard this one before and I've even subscribed to it for awhile. But I'm thinking it's rubbish now.

For the simple fact that WOW (world of warcraft) 'out-wowed' other mmorpgs. It took components from all of them and 'out-wowed' or more technically apt 'out-mmorpg-ed' them.

But even there I don't think its subscription numbers are due to 'out-mmorpg-ing' other prior mmorpgs.

It just had a wicked hot advertising campaign! An advertising campaign that quite possibly started well before the idea of seriously making a mmorpg even occured to anyone at blizzard.

The warcraft RTS games - it's all advertising for wow. Years in advance. Every single session of play, millions of them - promoting that warcraft brand.

Then every single other company goes 'HAI I WANTS MONEY LIKE THAT 2!' and makes a mmorpg. They even make, arguably, better games/mmorpgs than wow. But they don't do as well.

They just lack years of indoctrination...sorry, I mean propaganda...sorry, I mean advertising!

The guys who made torchlight, they put it out as a single player, with plans for some sort of big multiplayer in future years...they've got the idea!

Literally years of advertising before the product even exists. Advertising that people paid to aquire - an advertising campaign that profited in itself, let alone in terms of the eventual product sales/subscriptions. Think about it.

Secret blizzard transmission intercepted

A blizzard presentation to shareholders somewhere in a secret location...

Blizz dev: "Things have been going great and weve got this great new idea for an expansion! We just need three or four million for development, and it'll make us even more money - and given how we make millions each month, we were thinking..."

Shareholder, in a faintly german nazi voice: "...you vew thinkink..."

Blizz dev: "Could we have a few million to make this amazing new game world area...it's bound to be a profitable as every subscriber will buy one for around one hundred dollars a unit and..."

Shareholder: "...we have heard of somethink else you haft made..."

Blizz dev: "..."

Shareholder: "Something called a....sparkle pony?" *the shareholder withdraws thier long filter cigarette, acrid smoke spewing from their lips, and slowly taps the burning ember into a rotten ashtray*

Blizz dev: "Ah yes, but, but we have this new game world idea..."

Shareholder: "Be tellink me...how much did this sparkle pony be costink to develop?"

Blizz dev: "...around five hundred..."

Shareholder: "Five hundred thousand?"

Blizz dev: "*cough*...no, five hundred dollars...and actually...alot of that was the pizza we ordered...."

Shareholder: "So you are tellink me you want four million dollars to make around a hundred per subscriber?"

Blizz dev: "Yes, it's a great opportunity and.."

Shareholder: "When with the mere pittance of five hundred dollars, we could make twenty five dollars from millions of subscribers?"

Blizz dev: "Yes, I know it sounds good, but the game world..."

Shareholder: "I am thinking...I am thinking, yes, you will begin work on a...new sparkle pony. Perhaps a star pony this time, yes? Perhaps one around the theme of...death?"

Blizz dev: "But my lord, I really must protest, we could...gah! gah! *Blizz dev starts clutching at his throat and slowly rises into the air, until his feet leave the ground, he face red as he chokes. Eventually he falls to the ground...dead!*

Shareholder: "You, the other one, your in command now. I want that rebel base found and I want this death star pony deployed now!"

Newly appointed blizz dev: "Yes, lord Vivendi" *bows and hurries away*

*Duh duh duh der da der der da durrrrrrr*

~~~~
Kind of an addition to this.

Looking at the Warhammer Online Free Endless Trial #3

One important element in warhammer is how your not stuck in a linear path in terms of what your doing. For example, I don't know if they changed it since, but in WOW you either PVP'ed, or you quested out in the world. You had to stop questing, head all the way into the heart of a city and sit around waiting on a battle que.

In warhammer, you can have your thumb in a few pies at once. You can be questing around, but have set yourself into a PVP battle ground que from any point (even from the very moment you start playing a new character, actually). It'll pop you into the scenario once its ready, then put you right back afterward. That way if you want to do PVP, questing is something you can work on in between scenarios rather than being a big one or the other, not both situation.

To me, the low level PVE questing is much the same as other mmorpgs - somewhat interesting, but if it's the only thing your doing, the shine wears off quickly. However, if your breaking it up with an occasional intense PVP scenario, the questing doesn't drag on an keeps it's shine. Or if your enjoying the questing just for its own sake, don't turn on the scenario que. It's up to you and you shape how you play, rather than being stuck in the way some developer decided to go.

That and you can dip into public quests as well while on the way to your normal quests, which you were doing while you were waiting on the scenario que - you genuinely choose how you have fun and in a way that doesn't hurt your progression (sure in other mmorpgs you might have freedom to explore, but generally it hurts your numbers progression - and if that doesn't matter to you, then 95% of mmorpgs don't matter to you).


I'm done - go play! :)
......

Looking at the Warhammer Online Free Endless Trial #2

I've been playing for about a week or less now and have gotten a few classes to level 10. I'll talk about how I feel about play now - latter I might get into my first experiences.

One thing I appreciate is that characters are solid in PVP combat. You can't run through another person. In world of warcraft this just seemed A: The most incredibly lamo tactic, along with jumping (which you don't see in WAR combat either) in world of warcraft and B: If you have a slow connection, it was even more powerful.

I mean, why bother with this sense of a world with living, breathing characters (who have been drawn and animated with so much care) when you then have combat with surrealist tactics like walking through someone? Why not make a seduku world or some such, where some arbitrary mathimatical rules are the key issue? Why try and make all these stupid powers named in relation to real world actions, like charging, and they look like a charge, but then the heart of combat involves walking like a ghost through, and then back through, other people?

Anyway, you can't do that in warhammer online. And as said, people don't jump around in combat either. It lends a solidness to gameplay, and even with my slow connection I can actually connect with people in melee combat on a regular basis.

Looking at the warrior priest class (hope I've got the name right there), because I'm playing it right now, I find their healing actually is kind of a challenge to do, instead of just dropping heals everywhere then doing nothing when your mana runs out. Instead you build up healing points by bashing things. That or you can sit there for five seconds using a power to regenerate a bunch of healing points. So along with the targeting, where you can target an opponent and a friendly at the same time, your looking to slap opponents with melee attacks (some of your powers grant healing to yourself and comrades) to help charge up healing so you can then turbo heal a bunch of folks, then run in and bash, etc. You don't stand there sort of wack a mole clicking on team mate bars that are dropping, healing, then doing nothing if your mana runs out.

That's another thing that deserves quick mention - the action points your character uses to attack, they regenerate very fast. And about twenty seconds after you've left combat your health comes back at a fast rate too (about a quarter every five seconds). This game isn't really about slinking around, licking your wounds and not doing anything on a repeat basis!



Okay, I'm out for now, more soon!

mmorpgs: heavy personal investment before you even know if you like a game

It struck me the other day, about world of warcraft or pretty much any other mmorpg, how they have an 'invest in the product before you even know if you like it' structure.

Eventually top level raiding is what your either going to end up at, by design, or you will have quit.

But do you know if you'll like that? No, you have to plug in 300 hours or so for something you don't even know if you like.

Heck, even if you had to plug in one hour to find out whether the main part of the game is for you, that wouldn't work.

So why's it work? Well the classic mmorpg doesn't present itself that way - the first few levels seem to go by at the same sort of speed a single player game would. So compared to if you were playing a single player game, you seem to be playing the game.

But then it slows down and...you'd be throwing away all that effort and why not play a bit longer, eh?

And pretty soon you've invested in a game you don't know if you'd actually like. It's like pre ordering a game and can't get your money back, but then trying to think about not playing...not gunna happen, is it?

The critical thing here is once your invested in something, psychologically your more likely to think it's good. It's hard to be invested in something yet then genuinely critically analyse it.

By hooking players into investing heavily well before they see a product, they effectively turn off the players critical analysis.

Imagine just playing a raid on the first day of playing a game. You'd think about whether you like it.

Now imagine having invested 300 hours to get to the raid. Are you really going to think 'Oh, nah, don't like this'?

That 300 hours is likely to have you play a game you normally wouldn't find fun (enough) to play.

A man and his told you so's

There seems to be alot of love going around for WOW's new looking for dungeon (an example is on Tobold's Blog)...it'd be terrible of me to say that I wrote about the idea of dungeons working more like BG ques on RPG net perhaps about a year and a half ago and the idea was put down that 'dungeons don't work like that'. Terrible cause I don't have a link to it so you'd have to take my word on it and...ah screw it! There, I said it anyway! Bwa ha ha ha! :)

Hmmm - I'll throw down another prediction - they'll put in some sort of socialising service, almost like a bar in game, so people can get to...wait...that's a public quest from warhammer, I guess.

Okay, I'm out!

The Blizzard Authenticator - A rip off in itself

I saw an article on mmocrunch about world of warcraft authenticators. The little device that generates a second code needed to log in (you don't have the device, you can't log in, even if you've hacked the regular password). I wrote the following:


I am surprised how people are so excited to spend money on these if they are so necessary to play the game.

If it’s a necessary part of the game, why doesn’t it come with the game – or atleast after X amount of subscription time they send you one?

It’s like you guys rented a house, then your real excited to buy a lock and key for the front door – the house should come with one.

I mean, if the game didn't come with a password field at all and you 'only' had to pay $6.50 to get one, would you think that's great? No, you'd insist it should come with a password field. You'd say it's absolutely necessary to have one.

And yet you say the Blizz authenticator is absolutely necessary as well.

Grouping isn't always healthy

Augh! Just reading Tobolds blog and I find the attitude in one entry kind of sick. I'll quote my responce for context

Augh, Tobold, your position sounds like a kind of sickness? You want people to make friends, not because they actually like the other person, but because they can't have fun with the product they bought if they don't.

That's a terrible reason to make friends! That's not even making friends, it's just finding people to use.

If people like other people, they'll make friends and group with them even if there's a bunch of NPC's to group with. This whole article seems to be tainted with some idea that it's not important whether people want to do things with each other.

What you need is some mechanism to help people come in contact more, so they actually know what other people are like in order to have a chance at making friends

I mean honestly, it goes back to the worst of the worst table top roleplay habits, where people who would have absolutely nothing to do with each other outside of roleplay, would indeed roleplay together so they could get their game fix. It's an incredibly unhealthy attitude, but here we have the same perpetuation of the idea the game should force people together not because they like each other, but because they want their mmorpg fix.

What you need is some system by which players can get to know each other. This was done, retardedly, by forcing people to group or they get nowhere. You just need a system which gets them in contact without such a blunt instrument involved.

And it's not hard to knit together a bunch of reward systems for entering in details of what you like, then more rewards for browsing other players. And no, I don't mean holding back part of the game like loot and seeing the insides of certain dungeons - I mean handing out some gold or such. Which will mean social gamers are richer, but that's not gimping the main content for any soloer.

Honestly, the fact that mmorpg design kind of fell together into a retarded block content unless you group model is excusable since it fell together. But to perpetuate a culture of people finding other people, not because they like them, but because they want to use them to get at a game they've already paid for? It's unhealthy.

mmorpgs, myth of cheap entertainment. Mark 2

There's a myth around, about how mmorpgs are cheap entertainment. This hinges on the idea that 'hours' of gameplay provided, are a good thing.

Let's shoot that out of the water right now. Take this example, where we quantify fun had over the entire experience into actual points.

• Game A gives 500 points of fun over 20 hours and costs $20
• Game B gives 500 points of fun over 10 hours and costs $20

"OMG", most of the gaming community would cry "Game B only gives 10 hours of entertainment, what a rip off!!!!!1!!"

Actually, game B is better value!

It's because weve all sucked up a lie that 'hours' are somehow entertaining in themselves, that we are thinking completely wrong headedly.

Look at the numbers - it's 500 points of fun for either game, over the entire experience. Whether it's 20 hours or 10 hours, it's 500 points of fun either way.

Starting to see the difference here? See how in the 20 hour game it's just taking you 10 more hours to get to the exact same level of fun as the 10 hour game?

It's not better that it has 20 hours. It's actually worse! ALOT worse!

It's at this point that you realise hours are actually a cost alongside the monetary cost. Hours are a negative! While most gamers look at it as 'hours of play' divided by price, this is like evaluating a car by fuel consumed per mile divided by the cars price...as if more fuel consumed per mile is a good thing. As if more hours of your finite life span consumed is a good thing!

I'll leave it there for now, since the key issue to get across is that hours <> value.

The longer version of this is here.

Character customisation: Stupid!

I've noticed in a few reviews of mmorpgs or dragon age, etc, around, that there's an emphasis on character customisation and how good it is.

Character customisation is stupid. It's the ultimate reflection of the shallow "It's what's on the outside that counts".

How your guy looks, does not matter. I'll admit, I've fiddled with face, etc. But it's fiddling - it's nothing significant at all. I know it was a waste of time. But not everyone does - other people seem to go in thinking it deeply important.

Substance, not style! Deeds, not looks!

But no, we get a display animal/peacock culture. Perhaps even stemming way back to table top roleplaying, where the players had some incredibly railroaded gameplay, so they just focused on making pretty characters because that's all they got to choose. And what do you get in video games - take the rat killing quest or...stand around doing nothing. So pretty much again, railroaded.

I remember that WOW's presentation at a blizzcon of the wrath of the lich king expansion included a barber shop, and there being cheers from the crowd apparently. Of all the things, of all the events, self preening was the most epic!?

Character customisation is stupid! Indiana Jones is not Indiana Jones because of his hat! Spiderman is not spiderman because of his suit!

Now, thinking your cool looking after completing some sort of deed or event, fair enough. But just fidling around with looks, just for their own sake? It's being a poser.

Like a change of government in WOW?

There's an interesting post on Tobolds MMORPG blog about the changes to WOW's looking for group system. There does seem to be a policy change in WOW group forming development, changing from 'Fend for yourselves' to some sort of actual human resource management on the part of the company.

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/11/kudos-to-blizzard-for-honesty.html

Grinding out grind

Grind reminds me of the old woody allen skit/joke, where he's telling his therapist he hardly ever has sex with his wife, only once or twice a week. Then his wife complains they always are having sex, usually twice a week!


Clearly game companies like you being a subscriber for a long time. But this doesn't mean they have to drag out gameplay. Take EVEs skill learning - do you have to grind that out, or set it up and it takes time, but it does so automatically and even while offline.

Now imagine if you killed a monster and got some XP, but then there was also a large amount that slowly trickled into your character, even while your offline. You don't have to grind all that XP, and the company gets it's maintained subscription.

The mmorpg model has been really strange in how it's maintained the same pattern of stretching out content, even though it drives everyone mad, rather than looking at ways that both developer and player can come to a compromise. Or is grind as we know it supposed to be a compromise?

"Solo players don’t have a ghost of a chance here"

http://www.runesofmagic.com/en/news,id1414,patch_212_storming_acropolis.html

Solo players don’t have a ghost of a chance here; only well-equipped groups
will ultimately get to step up against the leader of the Naga army: King
‘Sharleedah’ will provide a tough battle for adventurers and can only be toppled
by the mobilising of every force.

Once again the lack of human resource management in a mmorpg astounds me!

But I'll give an example of some human resource management - public quests from warhammer online. These would funnel people together and help them form groups. Or even battle grounds from world of warcraft - click to join a BG que, wait, go in, your with a group (some dumb groups, but hey, even if you lose you get a token and it'll only last for X number of minutes).

Okay, so what do we have here? Sweet FA human resource management. You'll need a group - how you get one, entirely up to you. Hey, this isn't like a game where we could code stuff to help you - we leave this vital component (assuming you want to see this new content weve paid money to develop) up to you and that's considered normal.

MMORPG's, stop doing this!!!

MMORPGs; The myth of 'cheap entertainment'

I've run into this before, but this is the most recent case.

It's the idea that mmorpgs are cheap entertainment per month. "Hey, it's only $15 a month for hours of entertainment!"

This is kind of a weird phenomenon, because it seems to equate all video game entertainment as being absolutely equal. That's weird, because we all think some TV shows are better than other, some movies are better than others, but bang, here you get some sort of mental flat tire that treats all video game entertainment as exactly the same and only the cost matters.

I think part of the problem is quantifying fun - people just think something is fun but honestly don't think of it in any terms that could compare it to something else that is fun. But it's not hard to get over - let's rate fun on a per hour basis, on a scale of 1 to 100 (hundred being pretty damn fun).

Now the other thing to do is rating lifespan spent, as a cost. Yes, a cost - one that goes right next to dollars and cents. And lets avoid self referencing logic like "Life spent is not a cost if I'm having fun - and I am having fun. Because spending time on this game is fun! How do I know spending time on the game is fun? Because life spent is not a cost if I'm having fun - and I am having fun, so it must be fun...etc, etc"

The equation runs something like:
Fun per hour / Monetry cost + Lifespan cost

Take the following

• Single player game: Gives 20 hours of play, at say a fun rating: 50 out of 100, at $80
• MMORPG: Gives, say, 56 hours of fun (about two hours a day), at say a fun rating of 20 per hour. Contraversial! Well, lets just put it in at 20 for now, as clicking and waiting five seconds for a node to gather, then waddling over to another node and repeating probably isn't >20, right? Also, this is at $15 for the 56 hours

Single player: 50 / 80+20 = 0.5
MMORPG: 20 / 15+56 = 0.28

The single player is simply more fun/better.

The problem is, people think in reverse - they think only of how many hours they are buying. As if hours are a fun commodity!

Hours are not fun in and of themselves, people! Go watch paint dry for an hour, and tell me that hour was valuable in itself! This is a Pavlovian miss association! Fun is being associated with time spent like Pavlovs  dog associated music with food - and then when hours are presented, we salivate like the dog does. But it's only being presented with music and no actual food! Wow, 56 hours of entertainment! That's good value! Can't wait to buy that!

"But I find MMORPGs to be way more fun that 20 per hour!"

Fair enough, maybe you do. From my experience though, they set around the 10 to 20 range. Sometimes they get a possitive spike in fun, but then that averages out (simply because they take so long).

But in this case, you would have to get 40 fun per hour to only just beat the single player game. That's not exactly far off the single players fun per hour rating.

The cake is a lie, and so are the hours/the idea it's cheap entertainment.

Edit: Here's a concise version of the same idea that time <> value: http://philosophergamer.blogspot.com/2009/11/mmorpgs-myth-of-cheap-entertainment.html

Death and taxes and mmorpgs

Now to get a bit more gamey

In alot of mmorpgs there's a penalty if your character 'dies'. I'm thinking this is really lopsided. You can't make up for this loss - if you were fighting monsters for loot before, you'll be fighting monsters after the death too - that doesn't make up for having lost, your just doing what you did before.

Take this idea - imagine that after defeating a certain number of monsters, you gain a 'life', so to speak. Once you have this, if your character dies, he suffers no penalties - he just loses the life. And you can have, say, three lives. This way you can store up some protection against your character dying and get ahead if you've died before (because you will die at some point, if only from server issues - this lets you store up something that will remove a future loss).

Or heck, maybe my idea isn't even enough. Perhaps if you die, there's some way of fighting monsters and getting their loot PLUS extra loot until the death penalties costs are made up for.