Quixotic Evil http://www.quixoticevil.com/ en-gb Nucleus CMS v3.22 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.quixoticevil.com//nucleus/nucleus2.gif Quixotic Evil http://www.quixoticevil.com/ <![CDATA[SWG and related initialisms]]> http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=545 SWGEmu got some press recently, essentially because SOE still hasn't crushed it. (I can't find the article, but it was pretty old news, given that SOE not having crushed SWGEmu has been the [somewhat un-]natural state of affairs since SWGEmu started.)

Besides interesting thoughts about the legal status of private servers and emulators, it got me thinking about how Star Wars Galaxies had been.

Like a lot of other people, I'm sentimental about SWG. A huge sandbox game in the Star Wars universe, with attention to aspects of gameplay that have been absent from the mainstream since (such as it is): an experience quite like that simply hasn't been available since.

Thing is, the SWGEmu guys, and hence a lot of the others who are reminiscing or wishing they could go back, are all big fans of pre-CU SWG. And I don't get that, for one simple reason:

The pre-CU game just wasn't as good, by comparison.

I saw this at the time, and everything I've learned about games since has just reinforced it.

To clarify, I'm talking about the Combat Upgrade, launched April 27th 2005. This post will say little about the New Game Experience update of November 2005, because it fundamentally changed the game into something that personally I wasn't really interested in playing.

Now, I understand why a lot of people didn't like the change when the CU was launched. People don't like change; that's fine. When you've put a lot of time into an MMO and the developers change things that affect you, you feel like you've lost something (it seems like I mentioned endowment effects at least once a week on this blog). When it's changed enough that you need to learn new things, you have a choice between relearning the current game or finding another; it makes sense that some people would prefer the latter.

It's also the case that when you rebalance anything, some people will find that their favourite things aren't as good any more. Some of them will leave, others will stay and complain; it takes some nerve for a developer to make changes despite that, but often it's worth it for the good of the game. Many will stay, try some new things, and although they won't necessarily won't realise it and certainly won't tell you in these terms, they'll appreciate playing a balanced game.

I don't blame anyone who left SWG because of the CU. I think they made a mistake doing so, but never mind.

So why do I think the combat upgrade was good? Ultimately the balancing before that was pretty bad. The game wasn't bad, but that was largely because some bits need much less balancing: combat was broken, and as a knock-on effect so were big chunks of the economy, the skill system and various other things.

The main issue was that it was riddled with degenerate solutions. The breadth of meaningful choice for combat characters was small, because so many of the options were strictly sub-optimal; only a small subset of a vast array of craftable items were really worthwhile for the same reason.

Combat characters all looked the same (but for a recolour) because there was a clear 'best' suit of armour. Two of the three hit-point pools received massive boosts from the unexpectedly powerful doctor buffs, so combat characters flocked to the two professions that could target the third pool. Certain self-healing abilities were incredibly valuable but available only in one quarter of one profession, leaving people to take that but leave the rest.
Any given combat character was very likely to be Master Brawler and Master Swordsman, with Novice Medic, the first column of Teras Kasi and whatever else he can be bothered with. He'd be wearing composite armour and wielding that one-piece Geonosian sword with the handle behind the blade. If not that, he'd be a Rifleman, although off the top of my head I can't remember a good build for one of those.

Besides the strictly dominated strategies reducing player choice, it had other issues. The doctor buffs were so good they were effectively required, and since they were expensive and lasted 3 or more hours they seriously hurt the extent to which the game could be played casually. Randomised missions woefully underestimated player power, so players would form groups to trick mission terminals into giving harder missions, all the while avoiding one another lest they interfere with each other's rewards. Combat was easily macro'd, encouraging afk training (plus the variety in optimal ability rotations was small enough that I got bored and macro'd it even at the keyboard).

After the Combat Upgrade many of these issues were fixed.
  • Health was cut back to one pool, so there was no dilemma (or lack thereof) of which one to hit, and no issues with specials that spent your health.
  • Profession abilities were better balanced, and with better synergy between professions all kinds of interesting hybrid builds became viable.
  • Players were given visible combat levels derived from the skills they had chosen in combat professions, providing a mostly meaningful measure of how powerful they actually were; NPCs were balanced to combat levels so that you could no longer solo almost anything in the game.
  • Different professions unlocked different weapons with a more sensible progression, encouraging careful choice of skills and weapons.
  • Not only did different professions unlock different classes of armour, good for different things, but each class of armour was available in a number of purely cosmetic variations.
The list goes on. I see all of these things are strong positives; I did even at the time.
Counter-arguments vary: Some people associated the newly visible combat level with the game being turned into a 'class and level' system, but the profession system didn't change and if you look carefully there had clearly always been a level system internally, just now it was transparent (and crucially, less broken). (Ironically, seven months later SWG was turned into a class-and-level game. The main reason I stopped playing.) Others bemoaned the fact that they could no longer kill krayt dragons on their own; that's an understandable complaint but I maintain that it was for the best.

There are various things I could say about the value of fixing a broken game, and the risks a developer might have to take in doing so. I think I'll leave them for another day. The story hints at useful things to learn about the tension between players and developers, but I'm not qualified to teach them.

I just think it's a shame that the SWGEmu guys have focussed on the Pre-CU game. You've got to love a game to run a community effort like that and in a way it's good that they're doing it, but at risk of sounding a little pretentious in my love of games above my love of any particular game, I can't help but think that a CU emulator would have been more worthwhile than the pre-CU one.


But it's likely that's a moot point. Although both games had good points (and I'm arguing that one had many more) neither is generally good by today's standards; the emulator appeals only to those looking for that very specific experience and know it, which mostly means former players. There aren't enough pre-NGE nuts to sustain a decent game, any more than there are legions of pre-CU players looking to go back.]]> Gaming http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=545 Sat, 6 Mar 2010 22:23:21 +0000 <![CDATA[A stray thought]]> http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=544
If I wanted to name a storage firm, I wouldn't take inspiration from something that takes your stuff and never lets you have it back.

]]> General http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=544 Sat, 6 Mar 2010 18:56:27 +0000 <![CDATA[Now What?]]> http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=543 A Tale in the Desert the other night.

I love what they're trying to do (and by all accounts, what they're managing, to some extent).

It's a non-combat game, mostly resource-gathering and crafting. The community cooperates in working toward large-scale goals, with space for individuals, guilds and regions competing as they do so. It has some interesting innovations, such democratic law-making that gets enforced by the code itself in a subsequent update.

It's one of those games that I really want to love, but I suspect it's too niche even for me. Unfortunately (or fortunately, and I'm in a quandary as to which should go first in this sentence) most of its flaws are things that could and should have been avoided relatively easily.

First thing I found was that rather than an explicit tutorial there was just a checklist of things I needed to do to prove myself worthy of citizenship. I started my customary fiddling with the interface, managing immediately to hide that list so that I couldn't get it back.

When I had arrived, someone welcomed me. Another player, I assumed, perhaps an officially sanctioned mentor-type. I missed it initially, but as he gave up and signed off the private chat window he'd left me instructions of how to find it again. Once I'd exhausted the options I could find I asked him how to bring back the checklist; he didn't know, but once I did found out I was able to tell him so that he could help the next person to make that mistake. (It had been an option I'd already tried once or twice, but that had only made the difference I needed when a different part of the interface was in the right state.)

So, with the checklist back I started to work down it. Mostly it was pretty self explanatory; an annoying amount of running around followed by some curious resource-gathering, some strange crafting, lots more running around, and so on.

The main issues its got are with the interface, both the actual GUI bits and other bits of the me-game communication.
  • Slate is picked up from near water, when the correct icon appears at the top of the screen. I can see no other indication of this, so you run around, inevitably pass over a slate spot and have to retrace your steps until the icon comes back.
  • It would be nice to be able to see the costs of learning things without trekking all the way to a school. Or if it's intended to be the kind of game where I keep notes, give me a way of doing so in-game.
  • Camera movement by mouse only is probably an accessibility issue. Just an annoyance for me, thankfully, but it could have gone horribly wrong on my two-monitor set up.
  • Lack of routefinding is a shame.
  • The map is of such a scale that you can barely make anything out: you can hide quite a lot under the 'you are here' arrow. Make it zoomable, please?
I probably have more, but you get the point.

This is a lovely idea for a game, a concept that appeals to the kind of people who see past dated graphics and enjoy the gameplay and the community. It's also been around for a while, proving that there are enough of those people to sustain it (even out of those who have found it despite the relative underground status and stayed despite the initial experience), but while I'm sure these people aren't motivated primarily by the money I can't believe they wouldn't want to show the game they no doubt love to more people.
Such an obtuse interface (and a few other things that could be improved in the early-game experience, for relatively little effort) will keep in firmly in the domain of the sandbox non-combat hardcore, which I think is a great shame.


One huge plus point: The free trial is '24 hours', that as far as I can tell is of in-game time. That's genius: you need to make sure prospective players get enough time to find good things in the game, and to feel belonging and entitlement. Look and learn, Cryptic.]]> Gaming http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=543 Thu, 4 Mar 2010 23:07:54 +0000 <![CDATA[Naming Conventions]]> http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=542
A mission briefing from STO: the Curie should rescue the Nobel

Note the bottom of the third paragraph (not including the title at the top, which is curiously in the same type as everything else). The Curie is my ship, an Olympic-class research vessel. Fans of ST:TNG may remember the Pasteur, which is also Olympic-class, and the Nobel is from the next class over.

It's nice to fit in.

(As a mission briefing it could do with better proof-reading, though.)]]> Gaming http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=542 Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:21:18 +0000 <![CDATA[Arcade Frenzy]]> http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=541
Get Chimes. Well, obviously, you can play the demo and see for yourself, but you should at least take my word to go that far. The gameplay is strangely compelling (the music is a really nice and rewarding feedback mechanism) in what should mostly be a straight puzzler, but it looks nice, sounds good and generally has a well-rounded whole. And a hefty proportion of the money goes to charity, although I don't yet know what One Big Game does.

I also tried a few others (some new, some old):
  • Lazy Raiders is fine if you like that kind of thing, but I'm unlikely to buy a level-based puzzler on the 360: far too busy with the arbitrarily-replayable kind, like Bejewelled and the like.
  • Marble Blast Ultra gave me 33 seconds of playable demo. Trial version not worth the download: someone didn't read up on endowment effects...
  • Lumines Live seems nice. I don't know how I missed this one for so long. It also uses music as a feedback mechanism, albeit it not quite as elegantly as Chimes and with music I don't like. I'll probably play MP3s over the top.
  • Greed Corp is a strange turn-based, hex-based terrain-destroying game, which seems relatively difficult. That's a turn-off, of course, me being the wuss that I am, although I might give it some more time over the weekend. Very characterful but not quite as charming as Age of Booty, and I'm not sure there's all that much there.
  • The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (which is unfortunately just called Winterbottom in the menus where the character limit is shorter) is a puzzle-platformer with a nice take on the multi-character time-slicing mechanic that I sank hours into on Kongregate, once upon a time. I've kind of had enough of that (and it might be a bit more thinking that I want to do on the XBox), but I can certainly see the appeal and if you liked Braid (which was more thinking than I wanted to do on the XBox) I suggest you check it out.


If you know me (or have some reason to want to) when get in touch and I'll throw you my gamer tag thing.]]> Gaming http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=541 Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:16:16 +0000 <![CDATA[Heavy Rain]]> http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=540
I'll buy one sooner or later.

]]> Gaming http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=540 Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:57:55 +0000 <![CDATA[Comment Moderation]]> http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=539
Maybe not, it's a little difficult to tell.

Maybe I need to switch to a less arcane CMS.

]]> QE http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=539 Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:27:46 +0000 <![CDATA[Play it Angry]]> http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=538 past posts, I've been battling with that game for some time because I want the achievements. If that doesn't make sense to you, perhaps I'll explain another time)

Ever been so frustrated or angry that everything you try and do to calm down just goes wrong, and makes it worse? Normally practising the guitar makes all manner of ills go away, but last night I kept missing notes (or words) and certainly wasn't in a state of mind to be able to play through them.

So I went and played Bejewelled 2, and had another go at the elusive Hyper achievement, for 'completing' the second speed mode (the one I initially wasn't allowed to play). Despite being too distracted to play the guitar properly, I got the achievement first attempt.

That was luck, of course: a large element of RNG finally went my way far enough for the gradual improvement in my actual skill to have made the difference.

It got me thinking though: are there activities (besides mindless violence) that are best performed while angry? Frustrated? Upset?
Are there game mechanics that would suit that?

Should we even make such games?



Requiescat in pace, Granny.]]> General http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=538 Sat, 13 Feb 2010 15:28:26 +0000 <![CDATA[Multitasking II]]> http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=537
A quick comment about the intensity of activity in STO, compared to a couple of other games.

In WoW I sometimes run two clients at once. I need to run a key-broadcasting application and keep the action bars minimal, losing a lot of potential power and flexibility, but with a little help and compromise I can successfully run two combat characters, probably at around 80% effectiveness on the first one and 40-60% on the other if I pick the right classes.
In EVE I routinely run two clients at once. I don't need any third-party applications, there's much less compromise in fittings and I can get full effectiveness out of the first character and upwards of 75% on the second.

In STO I run one client, and the space combat taxes me. There's just so much to do:
  1. I keep my strongest shield facing toward the enemy when I can. When there are multiple enemies I need to show them the best combination of facings.
  2. Ideally I also face my best weapons toward the enemy I wish to fight. Sometimes this is a secondary concern; sometimes it's a compromise.
  3. I have a set of buttons to redistribute shield power among the facings.
  4. I watch the shield and hull status of each teammate, to work out who to heal next. It's not whack-a-mole though: I need to understand the fight thoroughly because besides knowing who will be damaged next (which is the fun part of healing in any other game) I need to guess which shield facing will be hit; if it's a strong one that person is in less danger after all. This is a system with little or no threat management: in space all healing is raid-healing.
  5. I watch cooldowns. They're long, and you need to make sure the right things are used at the right time. Each shield restore power applies a damage reduction buff so having them off cooldown and unused is a waste, but having them unavailable at the wrong time is fatal. Some of them are shared: Science Team and Engineering Team have individual cooldowns and also share the 'crew' system cooldown, so I can't restore someone's hull now if I expect to need to restore shields in the next 25 or so seconds.
  6. I like to shoot down heavy torpedoes (you can't target the regular ones). As a support ship I feel that prevention is better than cure, especially against the ones that cause the DoT I can't heal. (I could learn to heal the DoT, but I only have so many ability slots available)
  7. On top of that, when in public space combat I do my best to make sure I sling party invitations to everyone I can see. If I can't get the other people in my instance into my group then I have to click on them to see their shield/hull. Not easy when they like to surround themselves with mines, or when they're using evasive manoeuvres.

It's just loads of fun. Stick to stuff of the right level and every combat is as exciting as those against-the-odds-victory battles that come around once in a blue moon in WoW or EVE, and the lenient death penalty actually helps that by not penalising me for taking on the hard stuff (unlike EVE, especially).

If you're playing it and interested in meeting up, drop me a line. I'm currently in the upper half of Leftenant Commander, with a couple of friends waiting at Commander for me.]]> Gaming http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=537 Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:35:27 +0000 <![CDATA[Immersion: My Two Cents]]> http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=536 before, there have been some interesting articles on immersion on various sites lately, namely Wolfshead (who describe's how WoW's marketing and other decisions are eroding what immersion it originally had), evizaer of That's Terrible Idea (who felt that it didn't have any to begin with), and Tobold who thinks the whole thing is moot.

These last two I disagree with, and this is the post I've been meaning to write explaining why. It's not going to refute their positions blow by blow (mainly because there are so many blows); instead I'll just go on tour and ramble.

Like I usually do.

Immersion of game, immersion of dressing
First, let's get a little terminology out of the way. We're talking about MMOs, most of which count (by various definitions) as virtual worlds with games in them. Even for those that are difficult to consider virtual worlds, we can make the distinction between the mechanics of the game and the window dressing that surrounds it. I think the distinction is important, partly because I can imagine people (not necessarily those linked about, although there's certainly some disparity in definition going on) meaning two entirely different things when they talk about 'immersion':

Immersion of gameplay isn't what people generally mean by immersion, although I can see hints of crossover in some of the referenced articles when the writers worry about the mechanics. If you're talking about losing yourself in the playing of the game rather than the experience of the world or the dressing, you're probably talking about flow rather than immersion.

Immersion of setting/world/dressing is what I think people generally mean by the term, and is mostly what's meant by the three articles. Which is why I find it interesting that they've got such diverse opinions on it.

Immersion isn't Realism
"The best definition I can think of for immersion in gaming: the player’s impression that the they're in a real world. This may capture an extremely superficial understanding of why games interest and addict players, but it misses the point." - evizaer (emphasis mine)

I like that, but I don't think I'm reading it quite as it was written. See, a lot of people (such as Tobold, by the look of the 'dragon vs. motorcycle' section of the post) seem to consider realism to be a major factor of immersion.

Realism can be immersive, of course it can. An entirely realistic game world with entirely realistic representation would likely be incredibly immersive, depending on what it actually had for players to do (the chances are the mechanics of any games set there would have been badly compromised for the sake of that realism, but I'll get back to that).

That doesn't mean that immersive worlds must be realistic though, not in the terms of being like our real world. That's why I like the quote above: immersion is the player's impression that they are in a real world, but not our real world. It's a stupid distinction, I hear you say, there are no other real worlds, but the lack of the definite article raises the question of what makes a world 'real'.

I've been using 'realism' to mean 'like our real world'. It's not entirely consistent with my position, but I believe it's the prevailing use of the world and I think to redefine it would confuse people. But let's look at what I would have redefined it as...

The role of Consistency
So I'm arguing that to be immersive the world doesn't need to be realistically like our world. It does need to be realistically like the world it ought to be - claims to be - though, and since the details of it are all fiction, what that really needs is consistency.

A world that isn't like our own may be harder to get into, and that is the role of realism, in my opinion. Using familiar tropes provides a handle that lessens the difficulty of becoming immersed in a non-realistic* world, although those same tropes can make your world seem similar to everyone else's, and often tired and unoriginal.

Suppose your world includes dragons. Dragons aren't realistic, but the rule of cool encourages their inclusion anyway: they're a staple of a certain kind of fantasy world (and a few that aren't). It doesn't hurt that dragons aren't realistic, provided the rest of the world shows that there's a place for them. In a world with prolific magic, why wouldn't physics be malleable to let dragons fly? If on the other hand you have a gritty milieu with no other fantastic elements, dragons might be a bit much.

(The film Reign of Fire puts dragons into an otherwise null-fantasy setting. Personally I feel it does it fairly well, and the film is quite good fun; careful use of technobabble can distract all but the most serious science-heads (and even some of them at times) enough to have them suspend disbelief if the experience is fun.)

* I use 'non-realistic' rather than 'unrealistic' to stress that realism wasn't intended.

Once you can get a feeling of being in a world, the consistency of it is what allows it to sink delightfully into the background and silently contribute to the experience of playing the game you came for.

Suspension of Disbelief
This is a crucial concept. You don't need people to believe the world is real, you just need them to forget that it isn't. The conscious mind is always trying to prove that these things aren't real, but it can't do so quickly enough to protect you from initial shocks and emotional impacts. That ability gets worse the busier it is, until you engage it so thoroughly that it no longer bothers; there's also a tendency for it to put in less effort when disbelieving things that are pleasurable, so if you can show it enough fun you'll get that effect quicker.

(I realise I'm stating this stuff as though it's fact. It's part of a pretty widely accepted theory of neurology and psychology, albeit one that I should read more about. I suggest Raph Koster's Theory of Fun as a start; there was a little more in one of Edward Castronova's books, but I forget which.)

Respect the Fourth Wall
Related to both the above (to the extent that I'm having trouble deciding what order to put these sections in) is the 'fourth wall' between your world and the player's (or players', if you'd rather).

Pop culture references are one of the biggest threats to immersion. I get that they're great fun to write (really, I do...) and I understand that real-world tie-ins may even appeal to some kinds of player, but they are a compromise with the ability of the game to engage and immerse. Immersion is fragile, and any reminder that there is another world out here will likely break it; if the immersion was important to you it'll be more trouble getting it back than the benefit you get from a cheap pop culture joke.

Do you need to break the wall? Of course: some elements of the whole (such as the interface) exist in our world, and so need to be explained in those terms. At other times there are compromises to be made. Tobold uses the example of WoW's dungeon meeting stones (which players can use to teleport other party members to the entrance of a dungeon, comparing it unfavourably to the new dungeon finder that lets you find a group in an interface window and teleport into the dungeon straight off. That is an immersion breaker, because the meetings stones are explained in the fiction - in the consistent rules of the world - but an interface window necessarily can't be. Is it a bad thing? In my opinion, no: it's a worthwhile break from immersion in order to bring gameplay benefit.

Since it's necessary to break the wall sometimes, it's important to do it right. In places that means taking a big breath and smashing it rather than trying to write extra fiction to protect it. When you die in Star Trek Online you get an FPS-style countdown before you respawn. No explanation, no fiction, you just come back. Sounds like it would break immersion, and maybe it does, but given that it's an established setting with no fiction that brings people back from the dead it causes less trouble than trying to contrive an answer to the question of how players manage it (and then of course why NPCs don't).

Player Expectation
Let's go back to consistency for a moment, because there's a glaring issue there. See, in order to see the consistency in the world, players must be exposed to the right parts of it, quickly. If you've used tropes (and if now, how on Earth did you manage that?) then you need to bear in mind that these will imply extra details about your work: If you have elves and don't demonstrate soon that they're not like Tolkien's elves (or WoW's elves, or Warhammer's elves, or whatever) then when players do find the difference they might find it jarring.

There may not be much that can be done about it, but it may help to bear in mind that players aren't always rational; they may make additional assumptions at odds with whatever prior sources or real-world fact you were hoping they'd understand. Not so long ago RuneScape gained a handgun weapon: there was outcry from a portion of the players because this was inconsistent with the fantasy world they felt they knew, even though that world already has cannon (rotating auto-targeting ones) at that, electricity and various other things are aren't traditional fantasy.

Immersion isn't Obvious
This one almost went without saying, but perhaps it's not as blatant a fact as we might hope. If you can see the immersion and comment on it, you're not immersed.

Why bother?
I've now gone on at some length about what I think immersion is, and various things that threaten it. Do I still think it's important? Yes. Why?

Because without immersion your game is just a game: it's the activity, a formal system with problems to solve. It's dressed up, more so than chess at least, but the player is mostly looking through that and staring at the mechanics. An immersed player is acting on a world as part of playing a game; he will appreciate the fiction and the presentation (without generally noticing that he is) and provided your world varies properly will have a variety of experiences along the way. A player who is not even slightly immersed is playing for the mechanics; if he's appreciating the sound, the graphics or the pop-culture references he's doing so by looking straight at them, and the experience of each will be detached from the rest.

Most importantly, the player who is not immersed is staring right at the game mechanics. Maybe he's going to stay because you hooked him on incrementing some or other 'progress' number, or because he has friends here, but ultimately he's soon grokked your game and he's not having nearly so much fun as the guy in the next game over who has a deliciously evolving collection of experiences even though most of the fights are tank-and-spank.]]> Gaming http://www.quixoticevil.com/index.php?itemid=536 Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:49:37 +0000