Quote of the day

Apologies to Syp who more usually does this sort of thing but I think Tipa deserves a gong for this one:

Simply put, World of Warcraft is not part of the MMORPG genre.

It is funny how much healthier the mmorpg scene looks if you do remove WOW from the picture. If you include WOW you see one all powerful market leader with a horde of failed wannabes. If you ignore WOW you can see a large variety of different and interesting games some good some bad some paying the bills some not.

But can we ignore WOW? Heaven knows that I and a lot of other former players would like to. I resent its overpowering influence on the market and I have more or less convinced myself that many many World of Warcraft players are not really gamers at all never mind mmorpgers. Me convincing myself doesn't mean its true though. WOW exists. It is big. Whether it really is an mmorpg or not it is kind of hard to ignore

Quick impressions of the Left 4 Dead 2 demo

( based on two single player run throughs and two pick up group multi-player run throughs. )

Graphics seems a little better than Left for dead 1 but ran just as well for me on an aging mid range machine.

The maps feel bigger and less linear but it is hard to draw conclusions based on only two maps in the demo.

The infected look scarier.

The new types of infected add more variety to the game but I suspect there isn't enough in the demo to fully appreciate all their roles.

There is a wider selection of weapons which is good. There isn't such a simplistic distinction between normal weapons and upgraded weapons even though some weapons are definitely more powerful than others. My favourite so far is the AK47. It is very powerful and insanely accurate.

The melee weapons are fun but gimmicky. If you equip a melee weapon you lose your pistols and twin pistols are just better than a melee weapon. Nevertheless I imagine there will be lots of fun to be had with melee only servers and such.

There is a wider range of accessories available including adrenaline and a defibrillator. In our run throughs on normal difficulty we didn't have to use any of these. Perhaps they play a bigger role at higher difficulty settings.

I really like two parts of the demo - a park where you thread your way though hedgerows avoiding or confronting infected as you see fit and also the "alarm" section where you must run a twisting path through a gauntlet of infected to silence a ringing alarm. Sadly the demo peters out after this gauntlet run - it ends on whimper rather than a bang.

Overall impression - good but not spectacularly better than L4D1. I do wonder if the demo does the game full justice. I think a lot of thought went into the new special infected and the new weapons but there isn't enough space in the demo to see them all in their intended roles. The spitter for example spews toxic bile on the ground which is a minor nuisance in the open maps of the demo but could  be deadly in a narrow indoors map.

A (long) question about how Micro-transactions will change our hobby

Arnold Hendrick writes thoughtful information packed articles about the mmorpg business and one of his posts about "Selling Mmos" prompted me to write down a question that has been brewing  in my head. The short version of the question is "What impact will the rise of micro-transactions have on gaming from a customer perspective?" 

I wrote a much longer version of the question in a comment to Arnold so being lazy I will copy the comment here:

Great article Arnold full of interesting information and insights. My knowledge of game development and marketing is very limited but I am a long time game playing customer. I am still trying to work out what impact the apparently unstoppable rise of micro-transactions is going to have on my hobby from a customer’s perspective.

I can see several good things about micro-transactions: They offer a business model that allows smaller companies to compete with the industry giants which increases the choice and variety of games on offer. In theory free to play with micro-transaction offers the customer all the choice. Customers can sample a wide variety of games at little or no cost and once they choose to play a game they can pay as much or as little as they like.

Unfortunately the reality in many cases does not seem to be as customer friendly. My two biggest concerns are i) The impact on game design (games will be designed as grind fests order to maximise item shop revenues rather than customer entertainment) and ii) Micro-transaction systems which are designed to squeeze excessive amounts of money from a small number of addicted customers. I call this “customer abuse”.

You mention four types of item commonly sold in an item shop:
1) Faster advancement, 2) tedium shortcuts, 3) appearance selection and 4) Item access.

To me 1) and 2) are almost always problematical. If a game is fun to play why would people want to pay to skip parts of it? There is a moral hazard here encouraging designers to design grind fests in order to encourage people to spend money to bypass the grind. As these items are usually consumables they are also a prime vehicle for customer abuse. We read about addicted customers spending hundreds of dollars a month in item shops and I imagine a good deal of this goes on pots and other consumables.

I don’t have a problem with 3) even though I think Blizzards $10 for a non combat pet is just bad value.

I have mixed views about 4). I don’t really have a problem with people paying for items but I can see dangers. If getting powerful items is one of the main objectives of the game then allowing people to buy powerful items for cash may be game breaking. One common form of customer abuse is to introduce a gambling system where you buy a box with an unknown item in it. It may be high quality or it may not. I have read of addicted players spending large sums opening such boxes in the hope of gettign a good item.

I am perhaps most surprised that you don’t mention a 5th item shop category: 5) pay for access to content. This is very unproblematic and in my mind provides the best deal for the customer – you buy the parts for the game you want to play. The incentive on developers is to make an interesting compelling game so that customers want to buy more of it.

I have recently broken my own micro-transaction taboo and have started playing Dungeons and Dragons online. I have even bought stuff in the item shop. I am happy enough with Turbines implementation because a lot of the item shop stuff is “pay for content” and I also think that the existence of a monthly subscription option limits the potential for customer abuse.

My question for the future is this: given the apparent inevitability of micro-transactions for everything will this mean a descent into grind-fest games surviving on the revenues from a small number of their most addicted customers or will market forces ensure that only interesting, fun to play games with non abusive item shops survive?

DDO: Wizard versatility

First dungeon run last night: We encountered a locked door that neither I nor my cleric hireling could open. No problem. Once we had killed all the monsters we headed back to the nearest shrine and after a quick rest I swapped out "Melfs Acid Arrow" for "Knock" a spell which allows me to open locks.

In a second dungeon we were stopped by a door which had a minimum strength requirement to open. Again no problem - another visit to a shrine allowed me to swap in "Bulls Strength" a buff spell which gave me the strength I needed to open the door.

Versatility is the hallmark of a Wizard. Without question Sorcerers are better at casting spells. Both Wizards and Sorcerers can choose from the same list of arcane spells but sorcerers cast faster and they have more spell points which allows them to go on casting longer. Sorcerers cannot however swap spells mid mission. In fact they can only swap spells once every few days and they pay dearly to do so. Wizards can swap their spells freely in any tavern and they can swap after resting at a shrine during a mission. Shrines are on a fairly long cooldown but in an emergency there is the option of leaving the dungeon,  popping into the nearest tavern and legging it back before the dungeon resets.

If you have any one job you want doing a Sorcerer can probably do it better than a Wizard. The Wizard on the other hand brings the advantage of far greater flexibility.  That flexibility is a huge advantage to a solo player. As a wizard I can use spells that help make up for the lack of a rogue or a warrior in my party but a sorcerer would be unwilling to waste a valuable slot on such rarely used spells.

DDO: Look after the copper and the gold will look after itself. NOT!

Dungeons and Dragons online has possibly the most confusing currency system of any game I have yet played.

In the first instance there are too many types of coins: Platinum, Gold, Silver and Copper. Copper is useless. Even at level 1 everything costs silver or gold and by level 3 I routinely buy things that cost 100's or 1000's of gold.

The next problem is that the multiplier between tiers of coin is only 10 as opposed to the more usual 100. I am sure I will eventually get used to this but even after two weeks playing I still need to remind myself that 50 silver is  equal in value to 5 gold.

The NPCs vendors don't help the situation by routinely ignoring platinum when quoting prices. The ingredients to inscribe a level 2 spell for example are quoted at 420 gold instead of 42 platinum.

Finally and perhaps the most confusing thing of all is that your purse does not automatically convert coins to the largest denomination. For example my purse might contain: 21 Platinum, 194 Gold, 211 Silver and 384 Copper. Can I afford to buy level 2 inscription materials which are quoted at 420 gold? 

Is this some kind of slavish adherence to the AD&D ruleset? I don't know but how hard can it be to implement a simple algorithm to add up the coins in your purse?

By the way the answer is yes. I can afford the inscription materials and I will have 0 platinum, 8 gold, 9 silver and 4 copper left over. 

Not So Free Realms

Thank you to Green Armadillo for highlighting the fact that Free Realms is going to put a barrier in at level 5 beyond which you must be a subscriber to advance. As Green Armadillo himself puts it:

"Free Realms is now all but officially a subscription game with a free trial, rather than a free to play game with an item shop and optional subscription"

I know very little about Free Realms having only played one character up to (coincidentally) level 5 but on the face of it this is a staggering move. For quite some time it has appeared that microtransactions were an unstoppable force which would eventually signal the death of the subscription model. Turbine's recent move of DDO from compulsory to optional subscriptions has reportedly been a big success. Sony are the only company I have heard of moving back towards a compulsory subscription model.

Without more information it is hard to read this. I assume Sony are doing it because they think it will make them more money but is this because they have decided that their non subscription players are costing them more than they are worth? If so this has implications for all Free to Play Games.As one of the commenters to Green Armadillo asks "So F2P does not work then?"

Torchlight Is not For me

Lets face it, when it boils down to it every computer game is a pointless waste of time. Some games try to hide this fact with engaging story lines and complex game-play. Torchlight on the other hand celebrates its pointlessness and glorifies in it. It is the very incarnation of progress quest with added button pressing and better graphics. Meet monster, press button,  kill monster,  loot better gear, level up, meet tougher monster .... repeat. There are some embellishments involving pets, enchanting and gems but the essence remains unchanged. The game's quests and dungeons may be scripted but they just as easily be procedurally generated from what I have seen of the demo.

I know that a lot of people love this.   Wilhelm2451 and other bloggers whose opinions I respect are full of the game's praises but I still don't get it. I don't care if it follows in the illustrious foosteps of Diablo, Dungeon Siege, Titan Quest and its own direct antecedent Fate. I find the game boring.

There are times when we all can use a bit of mindless button mashing but I think that this market segment is very well covered by free to play flash games. To my mind both Sonny and Monsters Den have more depth than I have seen in Torchlight.

EDIT: On second reading my post above comes across more negatively than is warranted. For balance I should point out that Torchlight is very well made with a very well polished interface.The combat though repetitive is well done and the sounds in particular are very satisfying. The game is actually a lot of fun to play at first. Its just that I find this type of game play gets repetitive. Perhaps my biggest complaint is that it remains compulsive long after it has ceased being entertaining.