The Nature of MMO Gaming

A friend of mine recently read this post by Raph Koster.  He suggested (perhaps "demanded" would be a better word) that I write a blog post about it, and give my opinion.  Well, he's sort of going to get what he asked, but not really, because instead of analyzing and/or discussing Raph's post, I'm going to describe how what Raph wrote (which I agree with, by the way) applies to MMO gaming, and why it clearly illuminates one of the fundamental problems with current MMO design.  First up though, I'm going to further discuss "feedback" as described by Raph, and how feedback affects us as gamers.  Here is what Raph has to say:

Ah, but the feedback for even a trivial action is very important. It matters that we hear the sound when we click the mouse. And should the designer choose, they can make the feedback be hugely disproportionate to the problem solved. Feedback serves the purpose of cueing the user whether or not they are being successful in figuring out the black box. So we provide feedback each time an input is made, and the feedback is intended to help guide the user as to whether they are doing the right thing.

In short, feedback is any sort of response that occurs as a result of player action.  That could be pressing a button on a mouse to get a "click", tripping a lever in the game and having a door visibly open with an audible rumble, or clicking on the "fireball" icon and killing an enemy.  Through this feedback you learn that levers open doors that might be blocking your progress, and fireballs will defeat an opponent that would otherwise kill you. The lever opening a door you can't see or hear would be an example of bad feedback -- you don't know whether your action accomplished anything at all, let alone the thing you were trying to accomplish.

Game rewards are also a type of feedback (and indeed, as Raph notes feedback is itself a reward), earning experience, gold, items, levels, etc., are all feedback that lets you know you're doing the right thing, but they also serve as rewards that trigger the chemical responses in the brain that react to accomplishments and acquisition (typically dopamine I believe).  Leveling up or acquiring that great item you wanted can provide an actual rush, a burst of pleasant chemicals in the brain, albiet one that diminishes with repetition (an issue I will discuss later).

So what's my point?  That you can essentially change Raph's problem --> black box --> feedback paradigm to problem --> black box --> reward.

Totally ripped from Raph's post.  Please don't SOPA me!

Sometimes that reward is feedback that you're on the right path, and sometimes that reward is an actual reward, it all depends on the context and scale of the problem --> black box --> reward/feedback.  A quest in an MMO consists of multiple levels of these paradigms, everything from "how to get there --> use the griffin --> flight cutscene" and "defeat enemy orc --> use abilities --> xp/loot" to "kill 10 orcs --> repeat defeat enemy orc 10x --> quest reward".  Within those are even smaller ones, such as how to use abilities, or how to walk to the griffin.  An insane person could draw out a nested diagram showing all the problem interactions and it would be enormous.  I'm not that insane, sorry.

Point, Warsyde, got one?  Ok ok, I'm getting to it.

The point is that there are diminishing returns on the enjoyment of rewards.  The more, and bigger, rewards you get, and the faster they come, the less you enjoy any particular reward.  Humans have the remarkable ability to become accustomed to almost anything if exposed to it enough.  This is part of what makes addiction so dangerous, as an addicted person gradually needs more and more of whatever they're addicted to in order to achieve the same sensations they started with.

This has two effects.  The first is in a game situation like Raph describes:

Disproportionate feedback

If the game offers huge feedback all the time, it's likely to rapidly become tiresome as the constant barrage of feedback causes each additional instance to have less impact than the one that came before.  Not right away of course, but eventually it would happen.  Because so many games are using the model above it's a good thing they're short - a 50 hour game like the one above would burn a player out, but an 8 hour game might be able to get away with it.

What I'm really interested in though, is how this applies to MMOs.  MMOs are games intended to be played for hundreds of hours.  They simply, absolutely, cannot use the model above, as the reward structure would result in burned out players wandering off after a week or two at most.  Instead, the MMO model looks more like:

Large number of small interactions, one large reward

or

Large number of small interactions, large number of small rewards

Additionally, you can have a combination of the two that gives small rewards on the way and a big reward at the end.  The first method is the Everquest method, the second method is that used by most modern MMOs. Both methods are designed with the intent of keeping you playing for as long as possible.  The Everquest model did it by giving you really big rewards (class epic, omg!) for a large number of tasks spread over a long period of time.  The more modern method does it by giving you a lot of little rewards, hoping to both keep you going with the rewards while not overstimulating your brain and diminishing your appreciation of the rewards.  Both methods only delay the inevitable, but delay it they do.  It should be noted that raiding, even modern raiding, essentially follows the EQ model, though World of Warcraft is trying to make raiding fit the second model with their raid finder tool.

These models combined with how humans react to rewards accurately describes player behaviors in MMOs over the long term, and explains why casual players tend to be the happiest and hardcore players the most likely to burn out.  Someone who only plays an MMO for a couple of hours a week is unlikely to become inured to the reward structure as they get rewarded infrequently enough to not build up much resistance.  Compare that to a hardcore player who burns through two months worth of content in a week.  Not only is he or she now bored with nothing to do, the rewards they accumulated through the course of playing came so hard and fast that additional rewards will trigger almost no response in their brains.  At this point, they're either addicted and clamoring for another, bigger fix, or burned out and leave for a new game, or a new hobby entirely.

Is there a solution to this?  For MMOs, I'm not sure that there is.  The need to make the games essentially endless means that content needs to be designed a certain way, and excessive activation of reward mechanics is effectively in the hands of the player, the one thing the developer can't control.  A game that is perfectly balanced for someone who plays 10 hours a week could quickly bore someone who plays 50 hours a week.  It does suggest though, that the greatest potential for long term retention of players could be found by catering actively to the casual player.  The biggest issue is attracting the casual player to your game in the first place, as while the hardcore/burned out player will always try something new, the truly casual player is generally happy with what they've got.  Blizzard has clearly profited from this as the more casual World of Warcraft became the larger their subscriber base grew, and the fluctuations in their subscriber base can generally be attributed to the more active players leaving for new games and coming back again.

I think in the long run there will be two types of MMOs - casual MMOs, and niche MMOs.  World of Warcraft is very casual friendly, while EVE Online fits a very specific niche.  A generic fantasy MMO that is not casual friendly, however, probably doesn't have much long term potential.  I'll be interested to see how The Old Republic does in the long term, as the dialogue and cutscenes provide large amounts of feedback for small amounts of input, which suggests players should eventually reach the point where they become bored and skip through the dialog even if they haven't heard it before, but the game is also fairly casual friendly, and those players could consume the content at a slow enough pace that they don't reach the spacebar-spacebar-spacebar stage.  Time will tell.

Diablo 3 - Not sure what to think

According to my e-mail invite to the Diablo 3 beta I am free (and even encouraged) to discuss my experiences as much as I like.  So I'm going to, starting right now.

When I received my beta invite late last week I thought Blizzard and/or fate was playing a cruel trick on me, getting me access to one of my most anticipated upcoming games right as SWTOR (another of my most anticipated upcoming games) is about to release.  "Oh cruel fate," I railed, "I don't have time to play both!"
After checking the beta out over the weekend though, it's not looking like much of a competition after all.

I'm going to discuss the good and the bad of my experiences, starting with the good.

First off, the game runs very smoothly on my moderate spec machine, even with all settings at maximum.  Anyone who has ever played a Diablo game is going to be hit with a wave of nostalgia as you first enter the game world as the music and some of the sound effects are straight from the earlier games.  Combat is the smooth click-fest you'd expect, and loot is plentiful.  Experience seems to accrue at a reasonable rate, but not so fast that you feel like things are whizzing by too quickly.  It definitely slows down after level five or so, maybe too much, it's hard to say.

Some of the new features are really nice, especially the crafting system.  Rather than relying wholly on the randomness of drops and vendors, the Blacksmith has a list of recipes for items he can create.  The item itself has semi-random stats, but the items are blue quality or better, and you can choose which slot you need an item for.  Don't have a helm yet, or only a crappy one?  The Blacksmith can make you one, assuming he's learned the right recipe.  Crafting is paid for with materials acquired by breaking down magical items into their components along with a small amount of gold.  The Blacksmith can be "leveled up" by finding five recipe pages which can be bound into a Tome of Learning.  The Tome, along with some crafting materials, can be given to the Blacksmith to level his crafting skill, which in turn unlocks new recipes.  It's a nice system that lets you turn junk drops into something useful, and my Wizard has been making good use of it.  There are two more crafters in the game, but I haven't encountered them yet.

I also really like the change to character development that they've made.  As you level up you will learn new skills/spells, but you can't just use them willy-nilly.  Instead, you have a limited number of skill slots into which you place the selection of skills you want to use.  You gain additional skill slots as you level up, starting with one at level 1 and eventually expanding to six.  At the lowest levels it feels pretty restrictive as you don't have much to do with only two or three skill slots, especially if you pick a long duration buff as one of your skills.  Still, I like the system overall, as it has something of a Guild Wars feel to it, where finding the combination of skills that works for you is more important than cramming every skill you've got onto an expanded skillbar and trying to remember what they all do.  It means one level 20 wizard could have an entirely different selection of spells than another -- wizard A might toss magic missiles and arcane orbs, while wizard B electrocutes his foes after freezing them with a frost nova.  Most importantly, you can freely re-assign skills by visiting a shrine in town (or at the start of some dungeons) so you can experiment and play around with your build endlessly until you find what you like, rather than making permanent changes that can only be altered with great difficulty.

Another positive is that for the most part there are no class/attribute restrictions on gear.  Certain items are class specific, such as the Demon Hunter cloaks and crossbows, but anyone can wear that suit of plate armor if they are high enough level.  That was true in Diablo 2 as well, except in that game your mage would have to meet the strength requirement to wear the high defense armor.  In Diablo 3, they can just wear it.  This means when you choose your class you're just picking a playstyle, not a role.  If you want to be a plate wearing wizard that fights with a sword and shield, you can do that.  The stats on that sort of gear probably won't maximize your DPS, but you'll have loads more defense than the wizard using a wand and focus, and you don't have to gimp yourself by stacking strength to achieve it.  Good stuff.

It's not all sunshine and roses though.  The beta currently has some pretty severe server issues, which is strange considering the amount of experience Blizzard has in implementing this sort of thing.  They've been doing Battle.net for over a decade, and World of Warcraft since 2004.  They should be pros at this by now, yet most of the time the beta servers were crashed and I couldn't log in.

Part of the reason the game plays so smoothly is that the graphics look a bit dated.  Diablo 3's prolonged development time is counting against it here, as "modern" graphics pass it by.  The in-game graphics are passable, but I have to say the character graphics on the character creation screen (which is significantly more zoomed in than in game) are downright ugly.  The spell effects have so far also been pretty lackluster.  They're upgrades from Diablo 2 no doubt, but seem fairly flat.  I have yet to see anything that makes me go "wow".  It's functional, but uninspiring.

And that, sadly, seems to describe the game quite well - functional but uninspiring.  It's a well crafted game with some solid new features, and should be a satisfying experience for any Diablo veteran.  A couple of hours into the game though, I found myself getting bored.  As I worked my way through the levels of the Cathedral, it really started to remind me of Torchlight, which was a strange thing to note.  Torchlight should have been a game in the vein of Diablo, but it's passed its inspiration by and now Diablo 3 is a game in the vein of Torchlight.  Outside of the things I mentioned earlier, Torchlight already does most of the "new" things Diablo 3 is doing (such as mobs climbing out of the terrain, secret doors, destructible terrain, etc.) and the three dimensional dungeon levels feel almost identical.

This isn't really a failing for Diablo 3, I mean Torchlight was a good game and I enjoyed playing it.  Plus many of the new things it did are just sensible evolutions for the genre and it would be odd for Diablo 3 to NOT include them.  Nevertheless, it gave Diablo 3 a real feeling of sameness, like I'd done all this before and sapped the feeling of "new shiny" from the game very quickly.  I know the game is going to ramp up as you go along, and I'm sure it's way more fun when played with friends, but playing the first act solo was a bit of a let down.

Am I still looking forward to the game?  Absolutely.  Is the Diablo 3 beta going to compete with my SWTOR playtime?  Not a chance.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North

On Monday, with Tuesday gaming night fast approaching I found myself looking around for something more interesting to do with the gaming group.  Titan Quest had been ok, but felt pretty bland, and while the multiplayer worked ok it didn't really add anything to the game.  We just sort of moved along in a little pack and clicked on things until they were dead, and didn't really need to talk or discuss what we were doing because it was all pretty brain dead.  So I was interested in finding something a little more exciting, something that really benefited from all three of us playing together.  I just happened to stumble across Lord of the Rings: War in the North and saw that it was 1) an action RPG and 2) designed for co-op with 3 players.  How extraordinarily convenient.  I mentioned it to my friends, and we all took the dive based on the premise alone.  Two of us played last night (the third leg of our gaming holy trinity couldn't make it, darn you Mr. Heals!) and overall I walked away moderately impressed, but more importantly, quite satisfied.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North (WitN) was developed by Snowblind studios, the folks behind a number of similar games, including some decent Dungeons & Dragons action RPGs on the original Xbox.  Much like Lord of the Rings Online, players take on the roles of characters that worked behind the scenes during Frodo's death march from the Shire to Mordor.  In this case, your group of three characters, a dwarf champion,  a human ranger, and an elf loremaster are tasked with running interference against armies of orcs and goblins to prevent them from invading the Shire before Frodo gets out.  It looks like we'll be traveling across Middle Earth, meeting famous figures from the book (Aragorn gives you your first quest) while slaughtering minions of Sauron and his lieutenant Agandaur by the hundreds.

You can't keep us apart.  We're like family!

The three characters in the game are set.  You can choose which of the three you want to play, but you can't change their names, pick their classes, or anything like that.  All three characters must be present in each game (no more, no less) so if you play by yourself, the AI controls the other two characters.  If you play co-op, each player picks one of the three characters, with no duplicates allowed.  You won't have a group of two dwarves and a ranger.  The characters roughly fall into the rolls described by the holy trinity of MMORPGs - tank, dps, healer.  The dwarf Champion is the most logical tank, being a heavy melee class with the best armor.  The Ranger is the most logical dps character, using a bow and melee weapons to deal damage at any range.  The Loremaster is the support class, providing healing, buffing, and some damage as well.  That's just at the start though -- each character has a skill tree that you spend points in when leveling up, and it's possible to focus the Champion on ranged dps, the Ranger on tanking, and the Loremaster on dual wield melee dps.  The trees are pretty short, but in a game like this any sort of customization is good.

The thing that struck my friend and I most distinctly was that the game is clearly, obviously, and wonderfully tailored for co-op play.  Co-op isn't something tacked on as a necessary feature, the game was designed with co-op in mind.  A big example -- all loot in the game is randomly generated for each character and if you find a chest, every character gets to loot the chest and gets a full share of loot from it.  There's no competition for loot, and no concerns about taking things that might be better for your buddy over there.  Instead, the loot I picked up wouldn't have even existed if I hadn't been playing in my friend's game.  When we found things the other player could use, it was easy to trade as well, since you can simply send items from your inventory to any of the other players directly.  No dropping things on the ground and hoping they pick up the right thing. The game is intense enough that communication matters, and we were talking far more than we ever did during Titan Quest.  Teamwork matters here, and that's a great thing for a co-op game.

What do you mean you never saw Gandalf do this?  What a slacker!

Which brings me to the gameplay itself.  It's pretty standard button mashing action RPG fare, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.  I found it both engaging and relaxing, and really hit the spot for an evening of gaming. Each character has a normal and heavy melee attack, a ranged attack, and a selection of skills from the skill trees.  Hitting enemies enough time will make them vulnerable to a critical attack, which if done right will reward you with a fancy finishing move played out in slow motion.  It's also possible to do headshots with your ranged attacks for bonus damage.  Nothing deep, but solid and fun.  The skills are varied and interesting, everything from a "sanctuary" spell cast by the Loremaster that prevents ranged attacks from entering (but not leaving!) to heavy melee aoe strikes by the Champion.

The graphics are decent, but not exceptional, due no doubt to the game's console pedigree.  Dialog is voiced, both for the player characters and the NPCs, and your characters will even do battle shouts or announce skill usage during combat for certain skills.  The sound effects and music seemed good, and fit with the Lord of the Rings theme.  I don't recall anything glaring like death metal blaring as we charged up a ruined canyon into hordes of exploding goblins.

All that said the game certainly has some issues.  I was playing using an xbox 360 wired controller, so camera control and movement was fluid and easy for me.  My friend was using a mouse and keyboard though, and it took some time for him to get used to the sometimes wonky camera movements.  The game is clearly a console port, and both the control scheme and user interface reflect that.  It's not insurmountable, but it does take some getting used to, and I think the game is probably best played with a game pad.  Strangely though, the list of controls in the menu refers only to the mouse and keyboard even if you have a gamepad plugged in, though the in-game tutorials and loading screen tips thankfully report how to do things with the controller.

The other rather strange issue we had was voice chat.  The game apparently has voice chat built in and enabled by default, but has absolutely no settings to control it anywhere in the game at all.  We were connected through Skype and when the multiplayer game started my friend's voice started echoing in my headphones, while he was hearing my voice from both his headphones and his computer speakers.  We figured out pretty quickly that WitN was providing voice chat and turned off Skype, but the control and quality of the voice service was inferior to that of Skype and we'd have rather stuck with Skype.  There was no way to turn it off though, so we were stuck.  I'm assuming there must be a .ini file or something we can edit to shut it down.

Reviews of the game have been pretty luke warm, and if I was playing the game single player I could understand that.  I don't doubt it would get repetitive, and the relatively weak story wouldn't keep me going.  Co-op though, the game is a lot of fun and deserves a much higher rating than the reviews are giving the game as a whole.  If you're interested in WitN, play with some friends to really enjoy the game as it was meant to be played.

Overall we had a good time and I'm looking forward to playing it again next week.  We made it to level 6, but are still in the first area of the game, so playing one night a week WitN could last a couple of months.  I think we've finally found a game that we can all enjoy and play together, at least for now.  Finally!

RPG Death Penalties

I responded to a post on the Path of Exile forums and found the topic stimulating enough to want to share it here. The question was what sort of death penalty Path of Exile should implement.  In the likely event you don't know what Path of Exile is, it's a F2P action-RPG currently in development that clearly draws a lot of inspiration from Diablo 2.

Here is my take:

I don't think death penalties have much of a place in action RPGs.  You are almost certainly going to die at some point.  You are probably going to have times where your particular class/build/gear is at a distinct disadvantage against particular foes and die a LOT.  Having a penalty on top of that can get frustrating fast, especially if it's something that's going to contribute to you continuing to die (lowered stats, loss of gear, loss of xp/levels) or is so painful you'd rather log off than keep playing.

You never want to put your players in a position where they'd choose to stop playing because it's no longer fun.  They might not come back.  Earth and Beyond had one of the silliest death penalties ever -- an xp penalty that faded while you were logged off.  If you died, your best bet was to log off the game and come back tomorrow.  How's that for incentive to play?  How's E&B doing these days?  Yeah.

Rather than a penalty, why not do something different?  Maybe you are stuck in the netherworld and have to complete a random puzzle to outwit Death and return. Or a mini game.  That might get tiresome if you have to do it a lot in succession, but still, it would be different.

Or maybe you appear in the spirit world as a spirit, and have to fight your way out using ghostly versions of your skills and equipment, and can earn xp (but no loot) by doing so rather than losing it.  Death becomes a learning experience, and a player stuck fighting enemies too strong for them and dying over and over will have the opportunity to level up while recovering from death (assuming they're dying a lot) and maybe overcome the enemies.

The real penalty of a death in a game is loss of time.  That loss can be expressed in a lot of ways, from losing xp or gear to suffering a stat penalty that slows you down.  The end result is always the same -- a loss of the player's time or progress.  There are plenty of ways to inflict that loss of time without generating frustration at the same time.  The simplest is to force a respawn further back in the game and force the player to run back.  Sometimes simple is best, but it would be nice to see something more inventive here.

What do other people like (or dislike) in death penalties for RPGs?

This whole Diablo 3 real-money AH thing

I don't really care.

I think that sums it up, but I'll go ahead and explain a little.  The Diablo games have always been about killing monsters, leveling up, and getting loot.  Lots of loot.  Bags and bags full.  Unfortunately, a lot of that loot is completely useless to the character that acquires it due to Diablo loot largely being tailored towards certain classes.  This means item trading has always been a big deal.  In Diablo 2, some people eventually decided that there really wasn't anything they wanted to trade for their Uber Scything Axe of the Apocalypse and that they'd rather just have money instead.  It turned out there were people playing Diablo 2 who would rather pay real money than try and find something worth trading.

This had no effect on the majority of people playing the game, as PvP only occured for people who wanted it, and most people played solo or with friends and never even saw the people spending real money for Diablo 2 items.  Diablo is not a persistent world game, so you can't have the situation of item farmers camping a mob and denying others a shot at the loot.  Every player (or group) gets their own instance of the world and their own shot at getting loot.

Diablo 3 is legitimizing the item trade with two auction houses -- one using in game gold and one using real cash money.  There is nothing forcing you to purchase items from either of them, let alone the real-money version.  Unlike an MMO, there is nothing forcing you to play with people who have geared themselves up with real money.  This is pay-to-win light, VERY light.  Especially since, unless they change this for Diablo 3, items have stat requirements to equip them.  If you don't have the stats you can't equip it, and if you're a level 1 you can spend all the money you like but it won't let you equip that gear.

All the cash AH is going to do is allow players to do what some players would do anyway, and give Blizzard a cut.  I'll be spending all my gaming time solo or with friends, so what other players choose to do is of no concern to me.  If I get any good items I can't use, I might even try and sell them to recoup the cost of the game itself.

This sounds like a big deal on the surface, but only because we've conditioned ourselves to consider buying items in MMORPGs as bad, and because nobody has done anything quite like this before.  But Diablo 3 isn't an MMORPG--if it was, I'd probably have a different opinion on this, but it's not, so it barely registers higher than purchasing a DLC for Dragon Age that includes new, more powerful weapons.  Whatever.

Dragon Age 2 - Is This Bioware's "4th Pillar?"

I am now almost, finally, finished with my first play through of Dragon Age 2.  It's taken me a long time, playing in fits and spurts and just generally not really getting into it.  At the prodding of a friend I'm pushing on through to try and finish the thing, and at this point I have a few things to say about the game.

The game certainly has many positive improvements over its predecessor.  The graphics are better, the conversations are more interactive and the PC having a voice is nice.  Streamlining the crafting system and removing the fatigue system were both solid quality of life improvements.  Runes giving benefits based on the quality of the item they're slotted in is a big plus in my book.  I also like that each companion has there own unique skill tree in addition to the ones every member of their class has.  Overall, the game has been moderately enjoyable to play.

There's a "but" though.  A really big one. More than one to be honest.  Dragon Age 2 came out very quickly after the Dragon Age expansion, Awakenings.  That suggests the game might have been rushed a little, and unlike typical Bioware games, that seems to be the case.  There is a disturbing lack of polish to the game, and an annoying number of inconsistencies in stories and events.  I haven't encountered too many actual bugs, but the game just feels very rough at times.  I think DA2 could have benefited greatly by an additional 4-6 months in the oven.  Even two or three more could have made a world of difference.

While I understand the reasoning behind having the text displayed on the conversation wheel differ from what the character actually says (repetition is boring) I've lost count of the number of times what Hawke says has absolutely no relation to the text I chose whatsoever.  Saying the same thing in a different way is fine.  Saying something different is not.  Why give me a choice if my choice doesn't matter?  Of course, that sort of comes back to the "number of inconsistencies" complaint I had earlier.

The combat has also been a disappointment for me.  Sure it looks nice.  It makes for some great promo videos.  When actually playing though it's pretty monotonous.  Whereas Dragon Age had an emphasis on highly tactical fights with small numbers of strong enemies and fairly frequent use of bosses, Dragon Age 2 has focused on massive brawls with large numbers of weak enemies, often coming in waves, and very few bosses. So in general the fights are easier (and thus more mindless) but take as long or longer (due to numbers and waves), and rarely culminate in anything as there are so few bosses.  Ogres in Dragon Age were fearsome foes and the first battle with one was very difficult.  Ogres in the sequel are pushovers who only manage to kill someone in a cutscene.  I don't consider this an improvement.

Dragon Age was always somewhat "on rails" with only the illusion of an open, explorable world.  DA2 has discarded the illusion and turned the game world into a series of compartments that are accessed through an overview screen.  Kirkwall doesn't feel like a contiguous place to me, whereas Ferelden did.  Well, closer to it anyway.  So they divide the game into little boxes and then fail to take advantage of some of the benefits of doing that.  The game world tends to be very unchanging, much like an MMO, and not at all like a highly instanced single player rpg.  Once the dragon burns down the mines the equipment there burns forever.  You can leave and go back as much as you like, and the fires just keep burning.  It's bad enough in an MMO, but what excuse is there in a game like DA2?  Laziness?

The single biggest issue I have with Dragon Age 2 though, is story.  Or rather, the lack thereof.  From a developer proposing to revitalize the MMO genre by bringing the story of it's single player games into the MMO format, Dragon Age 2 is surprisingly lackluster in the story department.  Unlike the original game which featured an epic quest to stop the Blight while simultaneously taking down a traitor to the crown and installing a new king, DA2 has you mostly . . . running errands.  The "story" of DA2 seems to be "the crap that Hawke had to deal with in Kirkwall over 5 years".  Instead of a single overarching epic, we have dozens of little short stories.  It's all very MMO-like.

Instead of injecting single-player story goodness into their MMO title, Bioware seems to have injected multiplayer quest blah-ness into their single player title.  I can only hope that they'll take the time to make Dragon Age 3 a better game, and merge the aspects of the original game and its sequel that worked, rather than use Dragon Age 2 as the starting point, or worse yet, start from scratch.

Darkspore Beta Redux - A few wishes and comments

So the Darkspore beta popped back up on my Steam client yesterday and I decided to take another look.  The game is still interesting, but they did a character wipe and now I have to start all over, which isn't too enthralling when I know they'll just be wiped again at some point.  Still, it's a pretty simple, relaxing, mind-emptying game to play, so not bad when I want to play something but don't really have much energy.

Playing through the starting area again did drive home some of the flaws in the current system.  The first flaw is the complete and total dependence on item drops to improve your characters.  There's no xp in the game (for the characters anyway), just items.  Equipping items increases a character's "level", which in this case is just an approximation of their overall power, and used as a guide for picking appropriate challenges.  This means though, that the ability to improve your characters is tied entirely to the random drop system, and items are either character specific (these claws can only be used by Blitz) or element specific (these shoulderplates can only be used by Cyborg characters).  The result is that you can go through a mission without getting any drops that are useful for the characters you play, and so you don't improve their power and are stuck replaying the same content until you do.

This ties into the second flaw, which is that you don't get to pick your starting characters.  You will always start with Blitz and the bio guy (who's name I have forgotten), so if your first mission gives you nothing but quantum drops (as mine did), too bad for you.  This could be rectified a little by letting players pick all of their starting characters, and giving a wider range of low level characters to choose from.  Still, that's only a short term issue.  After increasing your player level a few times you'll be able to pick more characters and can phase out the start characters entirely if you don't like them.

I would like to see more control over the development of the characters.  Using items controls their stats and their "level", but the abilities they have are very static.  Every version of Blitz you encounter the game will have different stats and look different (maybe), but will always have the same abilities.  I'd like to see a little more customization there -- maybe one ability slot can be loaded with a choice of different abilities at the start of each mission.

As I played through the game last night it occured to me that Darkspore has a very "Ben 10" feel to it.  If you don't know, Ben 10 is a Cartoon Network cartoon starring a boy with a special device that lets him transform into different aliens.  Each alien has it's own repertoire of special abilities.  There are aliens that can tank, aliens that do lots of damage, aliens that stealth, etc.  You only get 3 "forms" at a time in Darkspore (out of hundreds available), but in many ways the gameplay mimics the cartoon.  Each character you use has set abilities, and you can "transform" between the 3 at will.

I'm still undecided as to whether that similarity is a good thing or not though.

Darkspore Beta Impressions

Darkspore, in case you've never heard of it, is a new action-RPG being developed by Maxis for EA.  You can find out more here if you like.  You can currently get access to the Darkspore Beta through Steam, for this week only.  You must have a Steam account and an EA login (if you've ever played Dragon Age you've got one already), download the client through Steam, and you're good to go.  I had heard about the game before, and since science fiction action-RPGs are rare, and good ones almost non-existent, I've been eager to see if the game will be any good.  I'm tired of fantasy.

Darkspore, as the name and developer suggests, is built on a (presumably upgraded) version of the engine  used to create Spore.  This was a bit of a concern for me, as Spore looked great on paper, looked nice in videos, and ended up being boring as anything to actually play.  Still, this is an action-RPG, not a life simulator, so I was willing to give it a shot.

So far, I've been pleasantly surprised.  The game is not Torchlight in space, which many of the screenshots might lead one to suspect.  The game offers a fairly unique method of gameplay and advancement, and it's really only going to make sense if I describe everything in detail.

To start with, Darkspore is set in a universe where an ancient race known as the Crogenitors went around the galaxy mucking about with other race's DNA, trying to make ever more powerful creatures.  Eventually (of course!) one of them stumbled across a very powerful mutagenic modification that started turning everything into monsters, and the monsters' main instictive drive was to convert everything to more of themselves and destroy whatever wouldn't convert.  These monsters became known as the Darkspore, and wiped out the Crogenitor civilization, along with any others they came across.  You play the role of a Crogenitor that went into stasis while computers anaylized Darkspore DNA and tried to find a way to stabilize it.  You've just awoken from stasis and been informed by your trusty computer that a method to stabilize Darkspore DNA has been found, and it's now possible to confront the enemy.

You're just a weakling scientist-type though, not much use in a fight.  Instead, you create genetically modified supersoldiers (heroes) and control them from the safety of your ship while they romp around on a planet's surface slaughtering everything they find.  You can only control one hero at a time, but teleportation technology allows you to swap out squad members at will.  This ends up being one of the key features of the game, as you deploy for a mission with a squad of 3 heroes (to start).  Each hero is aligned to a specific element, and enemies of that element will deal double damage to your hero.  So swapping out heroes when your current one is confronted by his/her/its own element is an important strategy.

Enemy creatures drop items, DNA, health capsules, and power capsules.  Items are used to upgrade your heroes in the editor, and are generally element or hero specific.  Like any good action rpg, there are a wide variety of items from common to rare, with various modifications and stat effects.  DNA is used as currency for items and upgrades for your heroes.  Health capsules and power capsules are used to restore your hero's hit points and power points respectively, and effect all squad members whether active or not.  So a badly wounded hero can be swapped out for a healthy one, and that hero can collect health capsules that will heal the wounded one as well as themselves.  It's a nifty system, and makes character swapping worthwhile even if you really really love the guy you're playing.

The heroes are not created by the player.  Each hero is essentially a genetic template of one of the races the Crogenitors tinkered with.  They are what they are, at first.  Once you have activated a hero you can change skin colors and modify a few features using the Spore editor.  Heroes do not level up like traditional action-RPG characters, instead they gain power (and "levels") by equipping items.  The more powerful the item, the higher their level becomes.  Items can be attached to the hero using the Spore editor, and can be placed almost anywhere on the body (with the exception of weapons), be scaled up or down, rotated, inverted, etc.  While all heroes will start out the same, as time goes on they have the potential to become very unique.

As I mentioned, the heroes don't level by gaining xp but you, the Crogenitor, do.  As you level up you unlock additional hero templates and gain the ability to purchase upgrades for your heroes.  It's a simple enough system and doesn't require much explaining (which is good, since the tutorial mostly skips that aspect of the game).

Gameplay is fairly typical action-RPG fare.  You have an isometric overhead view, left click to move or attack, and a number of abilities activated by the number keys.  I'd say the pace is generally a bit slower than your typical actioner, and that suits me just fine.  The visuals are sharp and enjoyable, though I'm not a big fan of the monstrous design of the hero characters.  An internet connection is required, as you have to log in to play, but you can proceed through the campaign solo or set up cooperative games with friends.  Co-op might be a lot of fun, and is one of the things Torchlight sorely lacked.  Game performance was excellent, so I'm hopeful Co-op play would be relatively lag free.

My biggest issue with the game right now would be the mission content itself.  Essentially you enter a map, clear some enemies, teleport to the next map, clear some more enemies, teleport to another map, clear some more enemies, teleport to a boss map, fight the boss, mission done.  If all the content is like that, it's not going to matter that you're fighting different enemies in different scenery, it's going to get old fast.  Hopefully further into the game you have more involved mission goals.

Still, I spent most of my playtime last night playing Darkspore instead of Rift, which says a lot about its ability to entertain.  At this point I don't know if it's going to be a flash-in-the-pan like Spore was, or something that offers long term fun and enjoyment.  Hopefully they'll do more beta events as they continue development so I can check it out some more.

Dragon Age 2 Impressions

I've been playing Dragon Age 2 in spare moments when I haven't really been up to playing Rift, or have just wanted a more story driven experience than MMOs currently deliver (whether Star Wars: The Old Republic will truly bring story into the MMO gamebook is another topic entirely).  Overall I do like the game, but much as I didn't care for the simplification Mass Effect 2 wrought upon Mass Effect, I don't like the direction Bioware has gone with Dragon Age 2.

At it's heart, the game is fun.  I have very few qualms with the core gameplay of the game.  I will admit it seems a little too easy compared to Dragon Age, but they have difficulty settings for that after all.  But, the sad truth is I'm an old-school RPG gamer at heart, and when you start ripping out (sorry, "streamlining") core RPG tropes like armor collection, inventory management, and meaningful character development choices I get a little cranky.  I will say that Dragon Age 2 has not been streamlined as heavily as Mass Effect 2 was -- you can still find cool armor for your main character and weapons and accessories for everyone, there are still multiple meaningful ways to spend your skill and attribute points as you level up . . . but there's less variety than there was in Dragon Age.  I am not a believer in the "less is more" approach to RPG development.  Those are nitpicky things though.  I still enjoyed Mass Effect 2 even though I couldn't really find cool weapons and armor anymore, and didn't get to pick a cool specialization, or any of the other things they cut from the sequel.  I'm sure I'll still enjoy the gameplay of Dragon Age 2 despite it's streamlining as well.

However, where's the story?!  I'm several hours into the game now, and have no idea what my goal for the game is supposed to be.  In Dragon Age you after the starter area that your goal was to find a way to defeat the Blight, and no matter how many side quests you diverged on, you always came back to this core storyline.  In DA2 . . . I'm running errands.  That's it.  I know there must be a story here somewhere, since there's a narrator retelling the story from his point of view and it can't all be about errands, but I'm having trouble logging into DA2 lately because there seems to be no point.  I've even had quests that seemed like they should be leading up to something (such as the DLC "The Exiled Prince") that just . . . stop.  If this is still the "tutorial" area, then . . . ugh.  Final Fantasy XIII had a "tutorial" that just dragged on and on and on, but at least it was clearly directed.  Either give me an open world where I can do whatever I want or give me a well crafted story.  Don't give me a guided errand running experience.

MMORPGs are the ultimate "errand" games.  Most quests in those games are just errands for NPCs.  If single player RPGs start devolving into that they're really going to lose me.  It's especially galling that Bioware, champion of the "fourth pillar", seems to have forgotten the importance of story in their single player games.  Mass Effect 2 was like this as well -- the actual "story" for ME2 lasted a mere couple of hours.  The rest of your time was spent running errands . . .