I still don’t really like doing a lot of these potpourri posts, but there are a few things I wanted to call attention to and comment briefly on, and the 140 character Twitter limit just doesn’t work for this.
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Greg Street, or Ghostcrawler, penned a minor missive on dungeoneering at the endgame in WoW. Petter called my attention to this one, and I think it’s worth a read. The parts that stuck out to me were:
Boss fights in 5-player dungeons generally shouldn’t last more than two minutes or so
That’s an interesting metric I hadn’t heard of before. I wonder how many players will think that’s too long… or too short.
In fact, we think the game is more fun overall when you play with friends, which is why we put so much effort into encouraging players to join guilds for Cataclysm.
I maintain that guild levels and perks just increase the selfish “use the other guy” mercenary nature of guilds, rather than foster friendship. That’s always what happens when you have to bribe people to play together. Some friendships might form by the wayside, but I think the cost (increasing selfishness coated in gooey guildy goodness) outweighs the benefit.
You shouldn’t need to invoke a silent majority if you can make an articulate and salient point.
Oh, if only that were understood by pundits of all sorts.
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Rowan and Copra followed up on a Twitter conversation regarding storytelling and worldbuilding in MMOs. I’ve commented on both, and recommend going there for more context, but in a nutshell, my initial Twitter response works:
I believe that MMOs should be about the player’s story in a vital virtual world that’s indifferent to them.
If I want to be the Big Dang Hero in a RPG story, I’ll play Chrono Trigger again or maybe finally pick up FFXIII. Story always clashes with player autonomy, and I’ve felt for a long time that I’d rather have autonomy in a virtual world than a big ol’ story. I’d rather tell my own story, rather than play through the exact same Hero’s Journey that everyone else does (with all the cognitive dissonance that involves).
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Speaking of story, the Rampant Coyote notes that Story Isn’t Cheating. It’s a great article that touches on a variety of things that I’ve thought about regarding game design over the last few years.
It seems to me that pure interactivity (Tetris, Chess) and pure storytelling (film, novels) have their niches, and that the potential of games is playing in the murky middle ground of the spectrum that mixes narrative with interaction. My college education was all about making movies (I’m a computer animator by training with a fair dose of technical competency), but I have found that games are more interesting to me as a vehicle for storytelling. Sure, I’m working on a novel and a couple of pure games based in the same IP I’ve created, but it’s the weird middle zone between them that makes my imagination really spark. That’s why I still prefer game development to other jobs that might be more financially lucrative or stable. Someday the economy might force my hand, but for now, I’m enjoying tinkering in the badlands. That’s where I think the best games are found.
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When it comes time to actually play games, though, I need to start digging up. (When you’re in a hole, digging yourself in deeper, stop digging down, and dig up.) Thanks to Steam, my birthday and Christmas, I’m more behind than I have ever been on games I want to play and finish. I’m in the middle of A World of Keflings, ilomilo, Raskulls, Dragon Quest V, Prince of Persia (the XBox 360 2008 game that Shamus loved for many of the same reasons I love it, despite the inevitable warts), Batman: Arkham Asylum, Recettear, The Dig, Wizard 101, Mr. Robot and probably a few others I’m forgetting. I really want to play Greed Corp., Chime and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, games I bought via Steam on deep discount for those mythical days “when I have time”. I’d even like to dig into Fract, apparently a sort of Myst-Tron hybrid. Sounds like yummy cinnamon and dark chocolate fudge to me.
Oh, and I’d like to do at least one quick playthrough of each zone in WoW, raids excluded. I have a gift card for two months that I’ll use one of these days to try to blaze through and get some screenshots. Y’know, once I finish illustrating this book for my mom. The book that was supposed to be done more than a year ago.
And after all that, I want to finalize my six player chess-inspired game and a tabletop miniatures game, write some novels and do some other paintings.
Yeah. I’m never bored. Just busy. (This is all “spare time” stuff, incidentally. Family, church and work come first, but those don’t strike me as something I want to write all that much about.)
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Oh, and speaking of work, we’re doing “art challenges” again. The theme for January is “Greek Myth”. I’m not sure if we’ll post other artists’ work on the company blog, but I hope so. If nothing else, I’ll post what I come up with when it’s done. I’m limiting myself to 8 hours of work in 1080p format. We’ll see how it turns out. Two hours and plenty of revisions into the project, with a fair bit of Clockworks and Percy Jackson on the mind?
What if Prometheus (one of the more interesting Greek mythology characters to me) was also behind the Industrial Revolution? Yay for Steampunk/Greek Mythology mashups, hm? That’s a lot of story to tell in one illustration, though, so I’m going with a fun portrait of Prometheus instead. One really must learn to limit the scope of a project that’s actually supposed to get finished.
Bonus link: Dresden Codak artist Aaron Diaz talks about Costumes. Too bad he’s doing futuresciencepunk instead of steampunk.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
Two minutes sounds short, but I suppose it’s one of those things that feels longer when you’re actually doing it.
I’m playing a goblin in WoW–the goblin intro is VERY story driven, with your character as a figurehead among goblins. It was AMAZING. But for role-play purposes, I think people would have to disregard the story. I’m not on a role-play server, but I have wondered how they treat it. It was great fun though, and the friends I always end up playing with don’t really care much about the story anyways.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is awesome, by the way. I played it through four times, back when it was new. about 1/3rd way into the game, the girl (who claims to have psychic powers) reads your fortune for you, and recommends one of three branching paths for the game. Essentially, the middle 1/3rd of the game has 3 versions. All are awesome. Wits, Team, and Fists paths.
Be sure and play all three. Wits is mostly puzzles, Team involves a lot of teamwork between Indie and the girl, and Fists is a lot of fist-fighting…Perhaps that’s too obvious. Still, the game has great puzzles, an awesome plot perfectly fit for an Indiana Jones story, and hilarious writing (the love-hate relationship between Indie and the girl).
Klepsacovic, very true.
Tesh,
That’s always what happens when you have to bribe people to play together.
Maybe you didn’t intend it, but your phrasing is that if I would have become a friend of X, if a reward is in place then I wont become his friend and will just use him.
No, people were using each other when there were no obvious guild reward. Obvious guild rewards just make the mercenary relationships to obvious to ignore.
Really I think the thing that supports guids based around friendship is enabling solo play.
Because when I don’t need you to play, if I’ve guilded with you, it’s because I like you, rather than I need you.
However, I bet there are a ton of people out there who like the personal political power of being needed and how they can enter someones social space that way. My ‘guild cause I like you rather than need you’ is probably all wussy and pansy to them.
Callan, yeah, I didn’t string that together very well. Mercenary activities aren’t anything new, and they aren’t inevitable with a bribing system. They are just more common, and I don’t like that. I’d rather players play together because they like to. *shrug* To me, that means making the actual *play* better, not the reward structure.
Anton, I liked the Goblin starting area, but it’s very strongly in contrast with the nature of an MMO with the singular hero driving events. Hmm… I must bump up the Atlantis game. Thanks for the tips. 🙂
Klep, true indeed. It still seems pretty fast to me, but not being a raider, I have little in the way of a frame of reference.
Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis was the very first game I’ve ever played and the reason I’m a gamer to this day. just saying 🙂
I’m not sure making the play better…applies? I mean, maybe I have an awesome time gaming while playing with X – does that mean X is someone I like, or just that the game is that good by itself? Indeed was it awesome despite X?
I still think some system where you can meet people who like the same movies as you … but everyone goes ‘eeww, it’s not a dating site’.
I’m wondering if in about five to seven years, everyone will go ‘oh of course you use a system which finds people who like the same movies as you, etc, so you have similar interests. Of course you do!’. Of course by then I’ll be saying something else which sounds missplaced….heh
2 minute boss battles?
That’s pathetic. Seriously pathetic.
Anything less than 5 minutes is not even a boss imho.
Then again, I feel like RPG battles in general should be longer – 30 sec to a minute at least. Otherwise, things like debuffs and such are worthless.
Yes, I thought it was very odd that Blizzard gave your goblin a backstory…but it was such a great story, I only complained for about 2 seconds and then I thought…this is awesome.
It did seem contrary to what MMO’s have always been about…defining your own character in the world. But that wall was broken long ago when you would go into the same dungeon and kill the same bosses over and over. And stand in line to wait your turn to kill an elite (again).
It comes down to simply that Blizzard tried something kinda different in their game, and made it highly entertaining, so props to them (again).