Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

I would argue that it was not "retarded" in EQ, until we had something with which to compare it to. At the time it was all we knew, and it was "normal".

Trust me, as a monk I suffered as much as anyone by that system but it also spawned a lot of funny memories.

Funny thing is those memories are exactly like the BB gun story, they are funny now, were funny then, but they"d suck horribly if they were in fact the game play today.

The genre has moved on but the acceptable levels of discomfort you put on players through game systems is a moving target, very much niche specific in my opinion. What one group wants is another groups worst nightmare and vice versa.

"Hard core" players tend to think there is really only one way to make a hard core game and that"s with as much penalty as you can muster for things like death.

I consider myself a hard core player, I think my wife would as well, and I guess the tip of the cap I give Blizzard and WOW is that the death system is nothing I"ve ever felt strongly one way or another about.

Content, asset re-usage? Don"t get me started, but the death system? Not so much.

Twobit Whore said:

What do/did people at level cap in EQ risk? Honestly. Raiders faced almost zero penalty. To think otherwise is just silly.

So that whole risk-reward argument is moot. You go for the greatest reward and faced the least risk and frankly that is a busted system. WoW may not be perfect but it"s leaps and bounds better than EQ from a scaling standpoint.

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I remember at 60 and wiping assloads in EQ1 caused possible delvling. Hell, people didn"t want you in Fear/Hate until you were atleast 1 level higher than 45 or you could get fucked. So yes, there was a hurt on raiders in EQ1 but it was not cash, it was time you needed to spend re-exping.

Back in the beginning of EQ you ran to get your body because you usually didn"t have a cleric with you and the time it would take to get a cleric to you was a waste. Hell, I didn"t get my first rez until my monk was level 45 and got stuck in a death loop and a GM fixed me up.

Then as you got big and tackled the larger stuff you pretty much always had a rez. Sure, there are time when you died without a rez, but on the whole when you grouped at the top levels you always got rezzed so death wasn"t an issue. It was actually more of an issue BEFORE you reached max level.

EQ"s death system was backwards. For those at the top and doing the cutting edge stuff you always got a big rez. For those not at the top or working without a net then it was a harsh penalty.

WOW has very little death penalty until you start working on truly hard stuff, then the cost becomes a problem. Sooo...the harder the stuff you are trying to do the more of an issue the death penalty becomes. It is much more aligned to the risk vs reward system than EQ ever was.

The nice thing about durability is that you allow the player to choose when and how they will regain what they have lost. You don"t have to fight for exp, you could farm, or play the AH, or transfer some money from an alt. It allows the player to recover in a way that works for them and it has a natural progression of cost depending on what you are doing. Do the hard stuff and get hammered for loosing. Do the easy stuff and you aren"t penalized a lot.

Ngruk said:

Content, asset re-usage? Don"t get me started.

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Lets!

We see it in WoW (hello mine_01), VG, EQ2.... not sure about EQ1 and other games. Pet peeve of mine truly but do the benefits out weigh the atmosphere loss?

Of all the MMOs I have played, I think Anarchy Online has the best death mechanics. The Insurance/Reclaim system let"s the penalty be a controllable level of harsh. The good parts are:

1) You cannot delevel from death, since leveling is an autosave to the last known Insurance terminal used.

2) The exp pool anooys some hardcore purists, but is a great idea. It"s like making every zone a hot zone until you recoup all the exp you"ve lost.

3) For the people who squeeze into their gear using outside buffs, it creates a really tough death penalty because they have to go back and find all those outside buffs for their gear to work. Engineers and bureaucrats reliant on Mocham"s Gift for soloing know what I am talking about.

4) You can decide whether time or money is more important. If time is important, you save often and pay the Insurance terminal piper more often. If money is important, just rely on the autosave when you level. If you"re somehwere in between, save here and there in the middle of the higher levels.

Your gear doesn"t degrade, you don"t have to fetch a corpse, but for most difficult content, a death puts you out of the loop for at least 10 minutes, maybe less if the guild is using a dedicated fixer/MP/engie team who warp people back into action. and unlike the WoW system of ghosting, running back to where you were fighting isn"t a free ride past any respawns or whatever.

It doesn"t get better than AO for well balanced death penalty that doesn"t make new people quit and still gives some measure of excitement/nervousness to long time players.

Noah EQ2 said:

Lets!

We see it in WoW (hello mine_01), VG, EQ2.... not sure about EQ1 and other games. Pet peeve of mine truly but do the benefits out weigh the atmosphere loss?

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It HAS to come down to the cost component of creating new content vs. reuse of old, it can"t be more deep than that.
I can"t fathom a situation wherein a designer or artist would say "let"s just use the interior from X for this cool new content."

It"s the suck.

When you see the single largest money maker in the industry constantly reusing art assets over and over, its hard to really expect more from smaller companies. There are mines that are almost identical other than the window dressing from the original WoW continents and to what we saw in Burning Crusade. The very first mine you see outside of Thrallmar is identical to the one in the Barrens, I think even the Kobolds are identical!

Is that laziness, penny pinching (something that obviously leads to> 40% profit margins), or both? If Blizzard can"t afford another 10 artists to churn out unique world art, who can?

Ngruk said:

It HAS to come down to the cost component of creating new content vs. reuse of old, it can"t be more deep than that.
I can"t fathom a situation wherein a designer or artist would say "let"s just use the interior from X for this cool new content."

It"s the suck.

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Everything boils down to the common denominator of cost. I think the immediate impact is Time. Yes, time = cost but even when money is not a factor, there are deadlines to meet and Art is a huge timesink on pipelines.

Assets that are built like bulk lego blocks would be a pretty good start vs just using a whole dungeons like we see in eq2 / wow / vg. Having those assets available that fit nicely together in different formations allow for faster dungeon / area creation and also keep with a "theme" that you want for a given location. Not to mention you have those assets for later expansions. Add a few tools that can play with lighting / cosmetic and you are golden.

Unless there is some lore/ event reason for it, locations should never be copied 100%. It ruins emotion and doesn"t allow for memories to happen.

PS: yes, im arm-chairing all this so sue me

Cybsled said:

WoW"s death penalty scales, which is important to remember. For the average player, it"s a PITA but not a game buster. You have to run back, maybe rebuff. The catch is in dungeons, where there is a possibility of respawn. You die for 2 hrs, no biggie. You die beyond that, and shit starts to respawn and you have to reclear.

For raiders, you lose out on LOTS of gold (repairs + consumables) + you risk reclears for certain encounters. This is magnified by your raid force...you might not be bugged by it, but keeping 25+ players motivated to keep playing that night becomes harder and harder.

The golden rule I think needs to be remembered is that, in the end, it"s a game. Games, usually, are supposed to be fun When the game starts to feel like a chore or a job, it"s not fun anymore...and you"re more likely to stop playing. For games like EQ1, this was a problem because the chore/job was a core game mechanic (kill stuff). I do like the freedom in WoW of being able to just log the fuck off when I get really frustrated. No having to stay around for CR, no begging/pleading for a rescue/res, etc. You lose at your present goal, but your guy will still be there in the morning ready to tackle it again (although with raiding, this requires more farming/gold...). EQ1 was always a chore...I hated those damned 4 hour CRs going on past midnight, when I just wanted to goto bed.



If you"re just diddling around doing PUG crap, sure. But WoW does have a pretty harsh raider penalty: You don"t get your mob, and you gotta farm alot. In a way, that works well. Raiders usually = hardcore, and hardcore = the ones who want to be punched in the nuts with a hammer.

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i was a hardcore raider in EQ and in WoW, and i can say without a doubt that EQ was a thousand times harder. if your guild wiped in EQ, you had to pretty much start over unless you were lucky enough to camp out a cleric in a safe spot. in WoW, you wipe, everyone runs back to the instance in ghost form and you start again, sprinting back through the instance to the place where you left off. you usually had a few hours before respawns. i can recall some wipes in plane of hate and fear that took almost all night just to get your corpse back, and that"s just one example.

i"m not saying that that was "fun", but death actually meant something. it was a penalty and made you want to avoid dying in the future. whether it was in a guild raid, a dungeon or just out in a zone, you didn"t want to die in EQ. in WoW, it"s just a small inconvenience to die. you die, ghost back or just pop your corpse back to the graveyard. like i said, i had enough money in WoW that the repair cost was trivial. in EQ, losing exp meant time, and lots of it. if you lost your level, you had to not only relevel, but get enough exp so that you didn"t just delevel again the next time you died.

Your view is heavily biased and its plain to see. You are free to have your opinion, however wrong it may be. Ngruk is right that people get too hung up on death penalties when it"s a trivial thing. Having a stiff one doesn"t make a game harder and having a lighter one doesn"t make a game less challenging. Just do what works in your world. EXP loss is largely a thing of the past though, and rightfully so.

For death penalties.

It depends on what game you"re going for whether it"s PVP or PVE. I don"t think you"re going to aim to make a game "niche", so you want it to be appealing on a large scale (Don"t debate the scale, just go with it). I"ll stick with with PVE since PVP deaths can have all sorts of easy penalties with ranking points etc. that are more easily accepted.

What is the main goal of PVE? Fighting bad guys and exploring dungeons for loot and discovering new things. Do you want your players scared of playing the game and play it safe looking for exploits in every corner (see EQ1). Or do you want players to have fun and play the game as intended? If a player"s only penalty on death is a delay in fun and some money sink you"ll have more people fighting bad guys when they aren"t sure of the outcome instead of making sure they completely overpower the encounter before they try.

I certainly don"t want to play a game where death results in me losing hours of time. Everyone can take their risk vs. reward and shove it. Take your stories of the time you spend 20 hours after your bedtime trying to get your body back. That"s just the definition of a broken game. If I lose hours of my precious game time because I fell through the world, or your server crashed or a mob bugged out I won"t play your game.

It all depends on the market you"re aiming for and the cash cow is in the casual average gamer.

I"ll give you a very good example of a casual gamer. My 60 year old father. Almost 20 years ago my father introduced me to Ultima III on the computer and we"ve been playing RPGs since. He play"s WOW and loves it and we"ve had our own version of casual vs. hardcore debates down at the bar. My father has two level 70 characters, a rogue and a paladin. He"s done most of the quests and almost zero instances. He enjoys logging on for a few hours at a time, here and there, and picking up and playing. He likes grinding for an enchant or questing or helping people at all levels of the game. He loves WOW because it can afford him to play the way he likes and there is no deterrent for him trying different things. If he does lose the few hours on Saturday morning because he tried to kill an elite and died, he wouldn"t be playing. My father likes leveling and loot etc, but he likes playing by himself and not have to rely on anyone else. This means CR"s and other mechanics are annoying and usually a deterrent to the average gamer.

Boring story, I know, but the point is you don"t want the penalty for playing the game the way you want to keeping you from doing that. The extreme casual (my father) is the type of person you want playing their game. Easy people to appease and they"re money is just as green. These are the people who don"t post on the forums, don"t whine about the game, and consume content at an extremely slow rate.

A lot of people hate hearing this, but WOW has it perfect. You lose some cash depending on your gear level and you can move on. You get pissed because you have to run back and waste a few minutes but as soon as you get back in the action you forget about it and you can start enjoying the game again. Key word here enjoying.

Just use the current death system that EQ has. It"s pretty damn good imo. Not overkill, but you still don"t want to die.

Don"t want to do your CR? Fine, but you gotta drop Xhundred plat to summon your corpse, and then you need to find a rez or eat the xp (unless they"ve changed something in the last year).

One of the main points they try to beat into our heads in class is that the average player doesn"t want tobegood at games, they want tofeellike they"re good at games. The point really isn"t risk but perceived risk.

Almost everyone remember how terrible EQ"s death penalties were, but really, once you leveled up and had built a halfway decent social network built, there wasn"t much of a penalty for death. How many unressed deaths did the average person really eat once they hit the top level? Sure, it happened on occasion, but those occasions were rare enough that overall penalty per death was almost nil. However, the fact that it did happen, albeit damned rarely, makes it stick into people"s heads. The risk was actually very low, but the small chance of losing a ton of your time or even your corpse made the perceived much higher than it really was. How many people ever really lost corpses? (well, at least once you were level 20 anyway) Pretty damned few, but the risk, no matter how remote, made a psychological difference. The only people that had any trouble stemming from death were the clerics (ok, ok, and maybe one other person if the cleric was too lazy to drag corpses themselves ) who for the most part had a similar penalty to WoW, in that they had to at least run back to their corpses. Everyone else just got to watch TV until their res box popped up. Hardcore death penalty indeed :/ (Of course, EQ did have it backwards for much of its life. Dieing at level 30 was much more of an ordeal than dieing at 60, which is a really odd way to do things.)

Deaths in WoW always felt more like an annoyance than a risk, which sounds nitpicky, but I think the difference in the way the deaths feel is significant. Instead of having anything to fear from a WoW death, it was just an inconvenient hassle. You lose time running back, if you"re in an instance you might have to start over, wasting the time spent on that, and you lose coin on the durability hit. One problem is that it"s static. You lose what you lose, and you don"t really have a choice in the matter (sure, once you"re well equipped, the durability hit is harsh, but its not like people choose not to gear up).

EQ gave you choice. If you hunt in an outdoor zone along a zone wall, its easy to get back to your corpse and easy to get a cleric to come to you even if you don"t have one. If you move away from the wall, you might need invis or a rogue/monk to get your corpse. If you move into a place with see invis mobs, you might have to have a monk/rogue. If you fight somewhere really nasty, you might need a necro and coffins. If you fight somewhere that"s keyed, or has a difficult to reach entrance, or a unsafe zone in, it might be really hard to find people to help you if you don"t have ready access to them.

Additionally, these risks changed depending on who was in your group and how good you and your group were. Have a resser in your group? Less risk. Have an evaccer? Less risk. Have a monk or rogue? Less risk. Know that you"re good enough to make it back to your corpse without dieing? Less risk. Know that you"re good enough to fight back to your corpses naked if need be? Less risk. Know that your group is solid and dependable? Less risk. Have a guild or friends you can depend to rescue you if you get stuck? Less risk. In WoW, your only risk is losing some coin and not finishing your instance. That feels hugely shallow in comparison.

Now I"m sure its the case that WoW opened up dungeon crawling and raiding to people so risk averse that they never would have been able to do such things in EQ. That"s certainly good for those people and for the profitability of the game. I just hope that future games will be able to accomplish the same thing by increasing choice instead of eliminating it.

Having durability loss as a death mechanic is not too big of an issue, as long as you have some time sink ala daily quests to help offset the costs, and include some way for raiders to avoid sending the raid back to "thorium point". If this is repair bots, repair kits or npcs within dungeons able to repair, I don"t see that it makes much difference.
Its certainly a more appealing mechanic to me, then EQ1s Exp loss, and EQ2s Exp debt.

The other question along side death mechanic for me, is what are you going to do re corpse retrieval?
Do you go the EQ1 route where you appear at your bind spot naked. WoWs ghost or Spirit Res, or EQ2s release and have all your gear back.
I must profess that I prefer being able to release with all your gear in EQ2, to WoWs ghost run. But thats mainly from a point of convenience.

How did EQ give you choice and WOW doesn"t because of death penalty? I think EQ gives you less choice because of the "risk" involved. I suffer through enough risk driving home from work every day. Make the game as hard as you want but do it without tedium. Loss of XP/Gear just forces you to grind more, and I don"t think anyone likes just grinding.

On assets, I think the key is designing things to be intelligently modular from the beginning. It makes sense for things in a given area to share certain characteristics and even certain entire components. If planned correctly, you can create two areas with very different looks and feels while using a high percentage of identical assets. Of course, that doesn"t mean that copying and pasting huge dungeon segments is the best idea, but at the same time, one tunnel built by whoever for whatever purpose, is likely going to look a whole lot like another tunnel built by the same people for the same purpose. Designing assets to be shared as much as makes sense can go a long way. I would think that due to common sense such practices would be common, but having played these games, it seems that wholesale copy/pasting as well as areas being created in utter isolation from the rest of the world seems prevalent.

Depth is another area where asset strain could be helped. Instead of making lots of areas with wildly different looks and feels, why not make half as many areas but make them deeper? The shallow feel of newer games really gets to me, and I think this is part of the problem. Was anyone upset that there were 2 Guks? Maybe, but I remember everyone being pretty nostalgic about them. Having areas that are vast, well developed, and highly connected to a certain theme makes the world seem more realistic and alive imo, and the added bonus is that maintaining the theme throughout means fewer assets need to be developed for the space. Win on both counts from my point of view.

Draegan said:

How did EQ give you choice and WOW doesn"t because of death penalty? I think EQ gives you less choice because of the "risk" involved. I suffer through enough risk driving home from work every day. Make the game as hard as you want but do it without tedium. Loss of XP/Gear just forces you to grind more, and I don"t think anyone likes just grinding.

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I think I explained pretty clearly how you could choose what level of risk you wanted to deal with in EQ, though you can certainly disagree if you want. I find WoW far more tedious and far more of a grind (though we"re probably also disagreeing on what "grind" means when I say this) than EQ, in a large part for the reasons I listed above. And also, as I said before, in reality, I don"t think there was very much loss of either xp or gear in EQ. Reality v. perception and all that...

What"s with this "fear" shit in EQ? The only thing I "feared" was having to grind xp in a mind numbing camp to regain what I lost, on top of having to get xp for the 3 dozen AA skills you were trying to get. Ooo...scary. So scary, after awhile I had to uninstall it for fear I might have to pay one more month of that piece-of-shit game. Ya, it was fun for awhile, but it was kinda like one of those crazy girlfriends: At first, the craziness is kinda cute and you have some fun. After awhile, the novelty wears off and you realize the girl is psycho and you"re just hurting yourself staying with her.

I -HATE- mindless grind. I fucking hate it. I want it to die. That was EQ"s mechanic, and in the end, I said "fuck it, why the fuck am I playing this stupid shit? I don"t even like it".

Any penalty system that involves mindless grind = can go fuck itself.

I never really worried about reused assets in WOW. I hear people talk about the same mines, or the same little hole in the wall, or the same inn, and wonder why it bothers them. Its a very small item slapped into a brand new locale with different mobs and goals.

Now, if they reused content/assets that was exactly the same, with exactly the same mobs in exactly the same locale it would bother me. But as it is the sum of the whole isn"t bothered by a very, very, VERY tiny part. The sheer amount of flavor that is spread over everything else isn"t diminished when I run across 1 or 2 things in an entire zone that have been reused.

splok said:

I think I explained pretty clearly how you could choose what level of risk you wanted to deal with in EQ, though you can certainly disagree if you want. I find WoW far more tedious and far more of a grind (though we"re probably also disagreeing on what "grind" means when I say this) than EQ, in a large part for the reasons I listed above. And also, as I said before, in reality, I don"t think there was very much loss of either xp or gear in EQ. Reality v. perception and all that...

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You"re not choosing level of risk, you"re dealing with the risk of dieing AGAIN based on what you have around you. You"re being forced into a situation. You also have to rely on other people. Successful game these days will have every portion of the basic game accessible no matter how many people you have with you.

Whether you hate or love WOW, I don"t see how anyone can think that WOW is more tedious or more grindy that EQ. You may want to expound on this because I"m at a loss.

Also, on loss of xp and gear in EQ. As you state, thats only in the top end game and not at the beginning. It also depends on people you know. What about the early part of the game when you know no one? The first 10 minutes of game play has to be perfect. The first 5 hours of gameplay will set the tone for the rest of their time with the game.