So my girlfriend bought me Super Paper Mario yesterday, after listening to me talk about it for the past 2 months. Her first attempt to silence me, arsenic, didn’t work, so the option buying this for me must have been a close second. Of course, I was ecstatic: girls, video games, girls giving me video games. What could be better, right? I didn’t actually know that Super Paper Mario (SPM before my fingers go numb from typing it out again) was an RPG, but that’s simply icing on the cake. You play as Mario, you level up, you gain experience (points). This game is incredible. I’ve seen that it’s gotten great reviews from most of the game sites out there, but I didn’t really know what to expect; this game has the kind of stuff that you can’t really explain in words.

The basic premise of the game is that you’re Mario, living in a boring, quiet world with your butt buddy best friend Luigi. One day, the two of you decide that it’s boring, decide to visit Princess Peach in her castle only to find out that she’s been kidnapped. Comedy ensues. Much later, after the comedy has ensued, you find out that Count Bleck (and not Bowser) has kidnapped PP (Princess Peach, or Poon, whichever the reader prefers) for his evils ends. Being the great guy he is and having the bold moustache he has, Mario decides it’s his job to get “shit” back on track.

It’s actually very complicated plot considering the audience, but it’s engaging and it gives you at least 10 minutes worth of excitement to thrive on until you’re given the ability to warp between 2- and 3-D. This is really the selling point of the game (well, for anything besides a Mario game, this would be the selling point), and it’s introduced with uncomfortable amounts of subtle humour and sweltering irony.

From here, the point of the game is to collect 8 pure hearts, which can be recombined into 1 massive, throbbing purity heart, allowing the legendary hero to defeat Bleck and close the dark portal that’s consuming all worlds. You’re given one heart for free, just to get the game going, and after about 1 hour of play, the second can be retreived. It’ll be interesting to see how long a game this one actually is.

Between her and me, we’ve gotten to the second chapter (of 8, I presume: 7 to collect the hearts and 1 for Bleck’s temple) and it’s looking to be a roaring ride to the finish. I’ll probably write a review on it after I’m done playing, even though the game isn’t new at all.

Well, anyone who’s been to the site in the past couple of days has probably noticed some changes. First of all, I changed the top of the site, mostly because the theme I started with in Wordpress was well designed and coded, but hideously misshapen (the top part of the site was seriously like 30% of the screen, and there wasn’t even anything up there). I whipped together that little EyesLikeOurs logo that you see now, but I’m not sure I’m sold on it. It would look better on a white background, so that may be the direction I take it from here. Hopefully, at least, the site looks a bit more roomy.

Second, and most importantly, I’d like to announce a new feature of the site. It’s something I worked on for a surprising number of hours last week and have finally got in a condition where I don’t feel bad showing it off. It’s the MMO Breakdown, a meta-database of all the information you could ever want to know about any of the most popular MMO games, at-a-glance. It’s by no means complete yet, but I’ve got what I consider the major players in the industry on there right now, and I’m working on getting all of the data up in the near future. After that, more games will be added, and after enough games are added, more features will be added.

It seems like there is some demand in this niche for a way to compare games more easily, and that’s one of the goals of this system. The main feature I’m working toward is the ability to quickly select two or more games, click “compare” and get a readout of the strengths and weaknesses of each system. This could be for the sake of discussion (black and white comparison of given game features), as well as a helpful guide for someone looking for a different game to play.

So, I’d be honored if you took a look at the new MMO Breakdown section of the site, and suggested any changes or additions you would like to see!

Lastly, I’ve rearranged and reformatted some of the ads, as well as added a new EVE online affiliate ad on the right side of the page. I’m trying to keep the ads as transparent as possible, but still in relatively good positions just to keep google happy. On a sad note, the addition of the MMO breakdown and my use of wordpress templates therewith has apparently broken the wordpress.com stats package that I loved so much. It says that there are no views to the site for every day that I’ve had the MMO breakdown there. Also, my blogtopsites counter reset to 0 inexplicably, which is extremely annoying.

I found this video earlier today, and figured that it needed to be shared. I’m excited for the next game in the Super Mario series and from the looks of this video, I don’t think I’m going to be disappointed.

It looks like there’s heavy emphasis on moving around on non-flat surfaces, which is totally cool. Plus, if anyone knows how to get the most out of the Wii controller, it’s these guys.

Enjoy!

One thing that games nowadays aren’t missing is quests. There are plenty of quests everywhere, some of them to kill ten rats, some of them to take this letter to the other npc, and some of them to guide you to the next step of your journey. In fact, there are so many quests in today’s MMOs that there are entire databases devoted to cataloguing them. So what? Maybe the reason that all of these quests need be organized and stored away on some too-often-visited website is because they’re so incoherent.

One of the main differences between offline- and online role playing games is the coherence of the main storyline. Why has such a crucial element to both character- and world-development been neglected for so long? Has the focus, up to now, always been on making a decent world for players to thrive in rather than giving them the means by which to thrive?

Playing the epic quest line in The Lord of the Rings Online has reminded what it’s like to have a strong storyline guiding your progress as you adventure throughout the world. While keeping to these quests is optional (and, of course, this is probably preferable to some), the development of your own character through the quest rewards as well as the development of other characters within the game world makes them very worthwhile. After having played World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2 for so long, I’d forgotten what it’s like to have such a strong storyline driving my character. Guild Wars has a similar emphasis on storyline, yes, but the Lord of the Rings story is one that I already know so well.

It seems to me that the one way, above all others (one way to rule them all), for Lord of the Rings to be successful was to get players engaged in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. I think that by adding such a tightly-knit series of quests that lead your character through the war of the ring was the best possible method by which Turbine could have achieved that goal. Sure, the environment is great, the graphics are superb, and the combat is acceptable; without the back story, though, all of those things matter little. For each of those categories there are games which beat out Lord of the Rings Online; It’s when they’re combined, though, that this game really shines.

How is it that the EverQuests and World of Warcrafts of this decade were able to hack it with but barely a hint of a centralized plot? Sure, EverQuest has some lore that it always seems like they made up after the fact and, yes, World of Warcraft has like 8 books out which somehow makes the back-story more “legitimate”. These facts come up very often in game to anyone who already knows about them. Where’s the personal journey, though? I thought I was playing these games for myself, to have fun. Why would I want to do anything if it’s only going to bring some out some dark prophecy that was written about 4 years ago by some struggling fiction writer?

The thing that Lord of the Rings Online has that these games don’t is the way that it really makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger that’s happening within the world. Instancing open areas within the world really emphasizes this, as it makes you feel like you’re having a bigger effect on things than you really are. Helping warn a group of rogues that one of their own and one of your newly-found friends is after their lives is one of the many things I’ve had to do so far on my character, and the process of doing it in this game feels more like a single-player driven story than any other MMO I’ve played. I just never really “felt it” in any of the other games.

Seeing that flaming ring above an NPCs head, I think, is going to be just the thing that could keep me going in LoTRO for quite some time to come.

Being a big fan of the original Fable game for Xbox (as well as embittered by how short the entire game was), seeing an article at gamespot about the upcoming Fable 2 piqued my interest.

Though information on the game is sparse at this point, according to the Gamespot article, there are 2 very interesting things that they seem to be developing:

In the finished game combat will controlled using three buttons: one for melee weapons, one for ranged weapons, and one for magic. For the purposes of the E3 demo there were no guns or magic attacks, though, so all combat was controlled with just one button. […] Tapping the button does a melee attack, holding down the button blocks, and releasing the button after a block performs a special attack. How hard you push buttons and how long you hold them for will have an effect on the attacks that you perform, as will your weapon choice, and your proximity to other enemies or environmental objects.

I wonder how the pressure sensitivity will work out. It seems to me that most games in the last 5 years touting “pressure sensitive” controls usually end up sucking at it, not because the intention is bad, but because in the heat of the moment all I want to do is press that damn button. Hard.

When you “die” in Fable 2 you won’t actually die, and you certainly won’t have to return to a previous save or a checkpoint. Rather, you’ll collapse on the ground, where enemies will continue to attack you. When you eventually get up you’ll be scarred for life, and those scars will affect the way that some other characters treat you.

This is actually pretty sweet, but I thought I remember Molyneaux saying before the first Fable came out that there would be scars that your character would wear forever, and by which other characters would “judge” him. Maybe they left it for the second game to work out the bugs.

Does this mean that when you kill bandits, they just lie on the ground for a while, too?

One other thing I hope they add is the ability to woo women more easily. Spamming one button to make sexy noises like “ungh”, and “heeey” got pretty old, especially since I do that pretty much all day in real life.

Source

I’ve been poking around in Guild Wars again lately and have been reminded of a feature that I thought was interesting back in the day. It’s kind of a slow day, as I’m working on a really nifty feature for the site that will hopefully make your visits here more useful. In light of that, I figured I should at least post something short and sweet that I’ve been intrigued at for a while.

In Guild Wars, when you run a mission (or even adventure in the world, which is still instanced for your party), all loot that drops is assigned to a player immediately. This in and of itself is just a new spin on a popular loot distribution method. Most games will simply allow people to roll for the loot if they want it, but Guild Wars assumes that you’ll want all drops, or at least not pick them up if you don’t. It’s a neat-o system, and I’ve always been a fan.

The thing I forgot about, though, is that when you finish a mission, rare or unique items assigned to you that you didn’t pick up (maybe you forgot, or you knew it would keep them for you) are available for collection in a pop up window before you leave the zone. What a good idea!

Here’s why I like this loot system better than most:

1) It encourages focus on the progression of the party and the battle rather than clicking furiously for loot.

I know I’m not the only one who thinks that people picking up loot during battles instead of waiting until the end is the first sign of the apocalypse. The evil part about picking up loot in battle is that if one person’s doing it, it’s in everyone’s interest to do it as well. Take away this incentive by assigning loot on the drop as well as giving the player no need to worry about finding their own loot, and you’ve come a long way toward solving this one.

2) It gives a nice way to pick up those items you couldn’t quite reach.

Inevitably in games, there will be items which drop way out of your physical reach. Chests, mob corpses, and other drops always have a way to put themselves out of arm’s reach at the most inconvenient of times. This system alleviates this, because any really quality drops you missed will be given to you when you leave the mission anyway.

And, because I just thought of it, here’s why I don’t like this system (I think):

I’m not sure, so someone correct me if I’m wrong, but:

1) I don’t think that this solution is given to those who leave the mission early or fail the mission.

If you don’t have enough skill or manpower to finish a mission, then it would be a downward cycle: people know they won’t get the option of collecting the good loot at the end, so they may lose focus in battle in a loot-clicking frenzy. Seems like a legitimate concern. Again, I can’t remember if this is the case.

In light of my last post, I wanted to talk about running, movement, and travel in online games. More specifically, I want to talk about why moving, running, and traveling for no specific reason is often so much better than traveling as part of a quest or duty.

Maybe it’s just the type of player I am, but I love to explore. In EverQuest 2, World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars, I wouldn’t want to stop playing a zone until all of the black space was gone (this is, in my opinion, hardest to achieve in EverQuest 2, because of the way they display the black fog. It’s impossible to tell where the limits of the map are!).

In order to explore places, you’ve gotta buck up and run there. However, when I look back on the time I spent exploring an area, it sometimes seems daunting (maybe I could have done other things, like, say, level up 14 times). Even though I’ve spent a ton of time familiarizing myself with the area, the running around trying to find the smallest nooks and most obscure crannies at the extreme edges of the map never really seems exhausting or repetitive.

Even though I love exploring and running around opening up all of the map, I find that I absolutely hate running places for quests. Even more than that, I hate running back to the spot where I died. But, and this is the most superlative hate I can muster, I hate running back into and across raid zones after wiping.

Why the differing levels of enjoyment? It’s not like I’m running that far to get back to my corpse or to finish that quest. The time I spend sneaking around mobs exploring zones I’m not qualified for far outweighs my measly jog back to the raid zone, but the latter still seems very time consuming. Of course it’s a psychological thing, but the point still remains. Why are games today seemingly going backwards in some of these aspects of gameplay? The Vanguards, the LoTROs, etc, all seem to have a strong emphasis on the running timesink and it seems like game designers should be able to do better.

Think about it this way: how much would you spend to have an autonomous in-game object take you to your destination at an increased speed in a direct route (400% run speed griffons in WoW), or at least close to it? Well, the answer to that is simple: just look at the prices that griffon masters and stable hands are charging in WoW and LoTRO. Most people would probably pay even more than that.

Now, here’s the harder one: would you pay for a service that ran you to your destination at your run speed? This means that you’re simply paying someone else to steer for you, and not arriving at the destination any sooner.

Is it the boringness and blandness of manning the controls of your character when you know you’re only going to be running? Is it the time consumption itself?

Well, after having played Lord of the Rings Online for a couple days after my initial reaction, I’ve changed opinions on a couple of points (and I’ve also gained opinions on a couple of new points!)

First of all, I’m not quite sure that I like the map.

I can’t put my finger on it, but the map bothers me in a lot of ways. Don’t get me wrong, the map is useful, and it tells you quite a lot of information about where you are, which direction you’re facing, and (sometimes) where important locations are, but it just seems to vague. Not to mention the fact that it’s sometimes hard to tell which areas you’ve been to and which areas are unexplored. For example, my map of Bree-Land didn’t have the “Old Forest” on it. I realize now that it wasn’t there because I hadn’t been there yet; well, great. I also haven’t been to Nen Harn yet (and according to TAGN, I probably I won’t be for a while), but that’s still on my map. Why would Turbine do this? I think they either need to show the entire map, or none of it at all until you’ve explored the said areas. That was always one of the things I liked a lot about other third-gen MMOs: there was an element of uncertainty regarding the map. You had to uncover it. Why the back pedaling?

Secondly, I am loving the Epic quest line.

During my stay in newb town (Archet), I was keeping up with the main (epic) quest line (I’m human, so I had my adventures with Amdir the Ranger). Then, in the second town, the epic quest line turned into a Fellowship quest. I didn’t really want to group at that point, so I figured I would just outlevel the quest by a huge margin and then solo it. Well, I got so caught up in grinding all of the deeds in Bree-land that I forgot about the quest, and didn’t get to it until I was level 14 (it’s a level 9 quest). At that point, I figured it would be time to try.

After finishing that portion of the quest, moving into Bree, talking with Strider, and starting the “Book 1: Chapter X” quest series, I really regret not pushing forward with this quest and joining the fellowship when I was designed to. The Book quest line is one of the most engaging I’ve ever played in a game, and if I had to put my finger on one thing that’s really keeping the game sticky for me right now, that would be it.

I think the reason the quest line is so interesting is because it follows the story in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, but from a distance. It adds characters into the mix that aren’t there in the book, just to give an idea of how complex the “journey” actually was. Turbine clearly took some creative license here, but I’m glad they did. They’ve taken an already intricate story and weaved in new characters and drama points in seamlessly. I enjoy doing my part to ensure the success of the fellowship of the ring!

Third, the travel quests are fun and the world is beautiful, but stop making me run so far!

I can’t believe how much travel there is going on in this game. Good lord. I seriously do not remember running this far in any game ever. The horse paths are great, but, is it just me, or are they the most expensive things ever? Considering that my highest payout from a quest or item yet is 2 silver, paying 15 silver to ride from the Lone Lands back to Bree (a 3 minute ride, 7 minute run) seems atrocious. Unless there’s some incredible inflation going on at the upper levels, I don’t really know how they got that number. Those horse ride charges should be based on supply and demand, but that’s a whole different blog post.

I’ve heard that Vanguard has a reputation for being very travel intensive without a means for doing so quickly. If that’s the case, maybe Lord of the Rings Online isn’t so bad and I’m just a whiner. Maybe I’ve been pampered by one too many carpet rides across The Sinking Sands and maybe just a few too many interconnected flight paths in World of Warcraft. Then again, maybe they’re just making me run too far.

Adrian Crook over at freetoplay.biz wrote an incredibly insightful and useful article regarding some strategies that online game designers can use to lower the barriers to entry to their games, as well as keep the players in their games longer while still monetizing a small percentage of them. I’m happy to have happened upon this article in complete accident (it gives me more hope that the internet is still filled with wonderful things).

Anyway, here is a short summary of the article, followed by a link to the original if you want more details (much has been cut). “Here are 10 ways to remove game-killing barriers to entry and create the largest possible addressable market.”

1. Free to Play
The Free to Play business model is here to stay - and growing every day. The focus now is on getting players through the front door, keeping them happy, then monetizing 5-15% of them. Non-paying customers become “content” for the paying minority, so don’t think you can ignore them.

2. Integrated graphics support

Enthusiasts who purchase the latest, greatest video card make up just 4% of the market. Integrated graphics (i.e. no dedicated video card and therefore lower graphics performance) accounts for over 60% of all new computer sales.

4. Little or no download

Get users into a game as fast as possible. If your game requires the user to download client software, make it as small as possible and give the user something to do while they wait for the game to download and install (i.e. setting up their character).

But better yet, make your game in Java, Flash, Shockwave or Silverlight so it’s playable within a browser. A game delivered via Java applet (i.e. Puzzle Pirates, Bang! Howdy, Runescape) can be downloaded and installed in under a minute. A signed Java applet will even avoid tripping a user’s installed spyware detectors.

5. Deferred sign up

Why not let a new player name and create their character, enter and start experiencing the product, then ask for sign up information along the way? A game that gets this right is Maid Marian’s Shockwave MMO Sherwood Dungeon, which allows you to start playing immediately after you enter your desired character’s name. Despite its simplistic graphics and lack of server-side character saves, Sherwood has attracted over 1M users to its Free to Play ad-supported game.

8. Warp, don’t walk

Spending precious minutes walking to destinations is, for many, a significant barrier to entry and a big waste of time. Many games and virtual worlds allow “warping” between areas to avoid long marches or simply a point-and-click interface with the world.

Source

Recents posts from Tobold’s and Random-battle have sparked a discussion of sorts on the merits and demerits of player-created content in MMORPGs.

I’m very intrigued by this idea, as it’s always been very popular with many offline RPGs and, more notable, most of Blizzard’s games up to this point. The big problem with implementing this kind of system in a massively online game is the balance (most MMO problems are). Who’s to say that some punk won’t just make an instance with one room, spawn a monster of incredible strength and amazing loot, load it up and kill it 50 times a day. Of course, that’s a somewhat polar viewpoint, but it’s what you have to keep in mind when tackling this problem. Players want easy kills, easy loot, easy status. I swear that online games would be a gold mine for sociologists looking to study human behavior and status symbols. So what’s the solution? How do we keep players from ruining a system like this?

One of Cameron’s suggestions, from his article:

Hire someone to review the player made content and deny it if it’s too broken or farmable. The issue here is that with the size of the community, this would require at least a few full time employees and they would still miss stuff. It would be a time-consuming process to review anything and they’d be wading through a LOT of crappy scenarios. Plus something like this is highly subjective.

That’s an excellent summary of the pros and cons of the solution. Time consuming, subjective, and a waste (for the most part) of human resources which could be allocated to far better uses.

As another possible solution, I commented on Cameron’s original post with this:

[…] what about a place where player-created content is voted on? It doesn’t seem like it would be so hard to create a system where players make content, other players play the content with cloned characters (peeled from their real servers and made to play these beta instances), vote on said content, and then once the instance receives a certain number of votes or consistent traffic, that instance is plowed with a fine-toothed comb and made ready for mass deployment by the developers?

Among run-ons sentences and rushed ideas, I think there is a spark of something good in there. Tobold mentioned something similar in his article, but I guess when I read his I envisioned more of a website devoted to voting, rather than an integrated experience within the game itself. Each run through of the instances by the cloned characters could be closely monitored for loot and exploits, et cetera. The idea of cloning the character is integral to this situation, since we want the player to feel like they’re progressing their character to some degree (and though they can’t save their progress, they won’t lose anything they’ve gained on their main server by dropping a clone and learning an instance). Without permanent loot or experience until final approval, these players aren’t losing much except by way of time (but MMO players in general place a low value on time).

One problem we run into here is that it’s still very possible for players to create sketchy content with exploitation possible. A solution to this problem is to require preliminary approval from a dev before the “beta” process can begin, but that goes back on the entire concept to some degree.

So where is the happy median? Players love content, developers love balance, and player-created content will be unbalanced by definition. One way to provide balanced player-created content is to entice, with a “carrot on a stick” approach, players to create quality dungeons and maps by giving them hope that their creation could be added to the game if enough player approval is garnered.

Are there any other pros or cons to this discussion not present in these articles?