The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer
My wife pointed these out to me – MMO designers who like metrics will probably find themselves mesmerised as well.
This blog runs metrics on the Armory to determine the class makeup of teams at different Arena ratings. (For the uninitiated, 1500 is an average, starter rating, whereas 1800 is considered good and 2200 is considered wtfpwnage). As an example, you can see that Druids and Warlocks own in 2v2, whereas locks are average in 5v5 and druids are considered kinda crappy. Continue reading
Cameron has some things to say about Aggro Radii over on his blog.
The idea of the aggro radius is inherently understood by longtime MMOG fans, even if you don’t describe it as such. It’s the knowledge you develop over time, by the harsh experience of repeatedly being attacked, that there’s a magic circle around your enemies which if entered will cause them to start angrily hurling everything they have at you. Eventually, you learn how big it is and how to avoid it…
This is how the aggro radius works. Aren’t pictures great?This concept, however, is completely unintuitive for people who don’t play MMOGs. When my fiancee was first learning how to play WoW, I explained the concept to her. She hated it. Even though she knew there were these invisible circles around her enemies, she could never figure out how big they were or whether she was successfully avoiding them (she wasn’t– leveling with her was interesting in those days). It really annoyed her that she could be standing in plain sight of an enemy whose friends she had just killed, but the enemy wouldn’t even glance at her until she wandered into its circle.
… has once again sailed away, as Microsoft mentions off-handedly that the title is ‘dead in the water’.
“I’ll confirm. Marvel and we have agreed to end development on the MMO. It was an amicable decision,” claimed Kim. “It’s just something that we felt that, for us and for them, it would be better if we ended development. Which is disappointing, because that had a lot of promise. But sometimes you have to make these decisions.”
Meanwhile, no one’s heard anything about Sony’s DC game in ages.
After my post last week about Shadowbane, I was asked, both in the thread and in email, whether or not one of the various Permadeath designs could be seen as a reset button. To me, the answer is simple: Unless you are talking about universally applied systematic character permadeath (i.e. a character wipe), I would argue that it wouldn’t.
Why? Well, the whole point of the reset button is to level the playing field, and bring everything back to an even keel. Reset the risk board. Get back to the land rush, where everyone has an equal chance of getting their stake. Continue reading
There seem to be a lot of people shocked at the news that Shadowbane has decided to press the reset button with their next patch, resetting all characters, items and player-built cities. They are almost equally shocked that the player-base is almost uniformly supportive of the move.
Shocker number three: when I was working at Wolfpack some years ago, I was strongly advocating doing the same behind the scenes. Even more so, I advocated making a ‘reset button’ a core part of the game mechanics. The truth of the matter is that clean shard launches were typically Shadowbane’s most successful times, in terms of player interest, surpassing even launches of the expansion packs. Continue reading
World of Warcraft hits 10 million.
Blizzard’s numbers included paying subscribers, people within their first month of free game time, and internet cafe users who have accessed the game in the past 30 days, but excludes those using promotional trials and of course, those who have managed to kick the habit entirely…for now.
Incidentally, the numbers cited show the most substantial growth in Asia, whereas I believe both Europe and NA have remained comparatively flat for the last few months.
By the way, that sound you hear is a zillion MMO powerpoint pitches being updated to contain the sentence “If we can only get 10% of WoW’s player base, we’ll have a million players! Then its money hats for everyone!”
You know what myth needs to die? The idea that big companies don’t want to take chances in the MMO space, that they don’t want to do anything other than sword-and-sorcery fare. Let’s take a look at some track records of some of the bigger publishers who have tried to enter the space.
Sony: Star Wars Galaxies, Planetside, Sovereign, the Agency, DC Online, PS3 Home.
Electronic Arts: Earth and Beyond, Motor City Online, Majesty, Sims Online, Battletech 3025.
NCSoft: City of Heroes, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Alter Life.
Ubisoft: CyanWorlds (Myst Online), Matrix Online.
Now then, some of these games never saw the light of day, and I can tell you know there are many more that you haven’t heard of from these publishers that never got past the zygote stage. But looking at the actual track record, two facts are inescapable. First, the big guys ARE trying to get into genres that aren’t fantasy, and secondly, their track record of doing so isn’t very good. There are a couple of moderate successes on the list (CoH, SWG), but even those titles weren’t as successful as fantasy titles released by the same publishers.
The big publishers WANT to represent multiple genres – they are taking a portfolio look at it. They want their online portfolio to cover a mixture of costs, ambition, and inherent risk, with fantasy games covering the ‘low-risk’ slot. So they’re all going to make a fantasy game – and good thing they do, that fantasy game has significantly helped cover the costs of the other games in most of the companies cited above.
The more interesting question is, so why haven’t they succeeded? The most obvious answer would be to blame the market – maybe the customers just aren’t THERE for an auto demolition game, for example. I would tend to reject that. I think a better answer is that we dn’t know how to build those other games yet. With fantasy games, we’ve been iterating on that design over decades now as an industry. The next guys building an MMO car demolition game will only be building the second one.
Anyway, for all you startups out there – if you want to get publisher money, I would urge you to look away from fantasy. Not because I think making a fantasy game is a bad idea, but rather because publishers usually have that slot filled internally by their AAA team, but also because they desperately want to fill slots in that portfolio. Still, don’t be fooled into thinking a unique genre is a free pass. You need to be prepared to explain how your title will beat the odds and establish a new genre precedent.
Terranova has kicked off this year’s annual ‘Why Fantasy’ debate. And to think, we almost got through 2007 without one…
Every now and then, someone asks why World of Warcraft continues to make level 70 content (examples here, here and here). After all, they only make up a small percentage of your customer base (if you believe WoWCensus, roughly 35% – of CHARACTERS, not players).
The answer is, I’m afraid, frighteningly simple: they do it because those are the customers who are out of content. Face it, if you’re level 31, you still have content to consume: it’s called Stranglethorn Vale, Desolace and Scarlet Monastery. Continue reading
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