Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

M

Miele_foh

shitlord
0
0
Flight said:
Agree with this big time, even on raids.


They"ve taken the scripting too far (they always have, partly - only partly - because of how powerful the user app development tools are - they"ve had to compensate for various "auto" apps users have designed). A symptom of this is the dumbing down of the latest expansion.

It went something like this :

i) design most fun and engaging MMO yet seen;
ii) do everything the best we can - including as complex end boss encounters as we can design;
iii) pat ourselves on the back about how much our encounters are scripted, publicly laud ourselves and chuckle at EQs tank and spank "ho ho ho";
iv) realise the vast majority of the user base (read $$$$$) can"t manage to co-ordinate and beat the scripts;
v) take the difficulty level of the whole game down to compensate for iv).


As much as anything this triple underlines how much the foundations have to be right, before you build on them.

I suspect a large part of the problem is that they need new blood, particularly in strategic decision making. Instead, they are constantly doing interviews where they boast of their pride that they have all the same design team and key players. Good on them that they stand by their staff, but creative processes need a view from the outside and fresh blood now and again or the ideas and creation stagnates and falls in on itself.
Click to expand...
Well, for what I know several people left Blizzard from Wow Launch, so I assume they actually did changes, probably not high enough in the food chain to have significant impact on the overall design, but even there: they pretty much changed the game in the last 2-3 years or at least some concepts that were more Vision(tm)-alike than anything else.

In terms of design, WoW is second to no other game, but in terms of complexity, it"s been lowered several times and will keep doing so, to let more people play it to the fullest, thus increasing retention.

For what we know, 38 studios could follow the same path, or maybe find a way to make encounters more complex for those who want them like that (hard mode?) or make everything super accessible, etc.

Looking back at 2004-2005 design, both for WoW and EQ2 (the 2 MMOs I played the most) there were not that many encredibly fun scripts outside of raids and even in raids, it"s been from BWL and beyond (and never in EQ2, until partially in KoS and more pronouncedly in EoF-RoK raids) that scripts started to become more complex and encounter design more sophisticated.

Everyone remembers Razorgore, or Vael, just to mention a few, they stroke the audience as a total new concept for MMOs encounters as in "you mean it"s not tank and spank?". They were not the standard gimmick fight, as for gimmick I mean "keep the boss away from the adds" or "play around the boss fearing every 30 seconds".

Nowadays the tech and the hardware people owns (on average) allows for much more complex scripts, but as for all scripts, there is a hard limit: once you learn it, it"s 100% predictable.

How many elements can you incorporate in an encounter after all?
- main boss attack(s)
- main boss ae damage
- environmental splash damage
- adds
- debuffs or buffs, single target or ae
- encounter phases
- something I likely forgot


Players have these parameters instead:
- quality of gear
- raid composition (if it can be a factor, in wow the impact of this has been significantly decreased)
- knowledge of the encounter
- awareness of their surroundings
- reaction times
- proper usage of consumables, cooldowns and so on
- ability to work in a coordinated manner with the rest of the team

Most of these are based on the individual player skill and capacity to do the right thing at the right moment, possibly coordinating with the rest of the raid (or part of it).

I think this is where developers have room to work: make these requirements less strict in terms of "reaction time needed" and "consequences of suckitude" to allow a broader audience to experience the game, tighten them up for "hard mode" and hold the carrot of better/more loot in front of them.

Example: one person being a tool on Shade of Aran = raid wipe, one person being a tool on Heigan, the person dies.

There is a reason why good players can do stuff in greens and blues that bad players cannot do with a mix of blue and purples, but the harder are the requirements, the more people get "rejected" by the system: they simply are not good enough, so the game must cater to them first, to the good players later.

If there is a different solution than this ahead, I bow to the dev team who finds it: something like Zehn dreamt about the final Ulduar boss fight is not so doable in today"s gaming environment (flee from an angry Yogg-Saronn while Ulduar collapses around you? Awesome idea), not because the tech doesn"t allow it, but because the playerbase doesn"t allow it. This unless there is a way to make hard-mode the real fun and normal mode just a show for keyboard+mouse impaired people, in that case you can pity people in bad guilds, but be happy they won"t whine as loud because they can"t see the new zones.
 
F

Flight

Molten Core Raider
1,229
285
FoghornDeadhorn said:
There"s nothing wrong with heavily scripted boss fights. Ultimately, however, it needs to be:

1) Fun to learn
2) Challenging (complex issue, I know)
3) Still at least somewhat fun a few times in
Click to expand...
I agree with that, mate. Spot on.

As you say, challenging is the "complex" part of this equation. Its not as simple as 3 bullet points - 1,2,3 fun, challenging, replayability. The real question is how far you take challenging to satiate our obsessive compulsive, primal hunter, l33t gamer personalities.

WoW introduced fun into many aspects of MMOs. WoW should now be the baseline for this industry, not the pinnacle, in every respect.

Fun should be the foundation of the games pyramid. Challenge is a layer above the foundation. The challenge layer should never be wider than the fun layer - fun encompasses everything. If it isn"t fun don"t include it. Then at the heart of it you have rewards running through the spine of the whole thing. Reward will vary for some people - its not just loot or character advancement, either. It might be friendship or escapism. This is quite a different model to just making people endure the challenge because of the carrot of the loot at the end.

Replayability isn"t part of our pyramid, but this formula is a massive aid in achieving it, even before we make design decisions with it in mind.


edit to say : Good post Miele.
 
M

Miele_foh

shitlord
0
0
Flight said:
Fun should be the foundation of the games pyramid. Challenge is a layer above the foundation.
Click to expand...
Very true and at the same time, very unlikely to happen in every encounter.

Fun is very subjective, but we can agree that as long as an encounter keeps people busy in some form that is not totally mindnumbing, it can be considered fun (many more factors can be discussed, but most risk to be just subjective).

Challenge is a totally different beast: I consider myself a decently skilled player, but I"m 100% sure that there are player on these boards that would make my performances pale in comparison. I"ve witnessed, albeit rarely, people that just play in a flat out perfect mode, going through their parses, they do zero mistakes, perfect rotations and so on.
I can and sometimes do minor mistakes, not raid-wiping ones, but for what concern my performance surely you"ll find them spread all over, yet I"m miles above some players who just don"t get it.

As a joke I said to a friend once: "the first thing humans learn is how to suck, some people just don"t want to let that go".
It"s true, some people seem made for sucking at playing games, but in the majority of the guilds, there is always a handful of these subjects that come to raids and keep dying even on the most trivial things, phenomenon even more amplified in group content where relying on them is asking for troubles and them dying can have a greater impact on the overall party performance.

That"s why, hard-mode encounters are the current brilliant solution: you bring only good players when doing hard mode, but those nice people, friendly and helpful etc. still get to taste the pie and for them it"s probably enough.

Foghorn raised the stake by saying "Still at least somewhat fun a few times in". If it"s a scripted encounter like the ones we"re accustomed to see today, they are fun until beaten and then maybe one more run where the guild defeats the encounter straight away, kinda "perfecting it", so to say.
Then enters the farm-mode mentality and the fun is all but present, let alone the excitement, except for that minuscule moment of joy when looting an item or the nerd-rage explosion when losing the fight against the loot tables RNG.

A script that varies everytime is the most elegant solution on paper, but in practice? Is it possible to make an encounter completely unpredictable? If the raid must have time to react, it means that every element that can change must not be a wipe-threatening difference, or it"s just something picked from a list of possible events.
The unpredictability is quite limited nowadays: will Shade use flame wreath or blizzard or explosion this time? Who will be injected by Grobbulus?
As a matter of fact, today lag and disconnections are the most unpredictable elements on a raid scenario (followed by "who will fuck up tonight?" of course), which is pretty much saying everything.
 
Zehnpai

Zehnpai

Molten Core Raider
399
1,245
tl;dr version: Any unbroken fight will be beaten in a single night and dubbed "ez" no matter how challenging you make it. Gimmicks that keep you on the move retain some of their value over the long haul, gimmicks that rely on you sitting on your ass for 10 minutes waiting for a boss pop while you alt-tab out to watch naked chicks pee on eachother don"t. Finally, I may hate certain fights, but at least I get to enjoy everybody else hating them too.

~~

Any decently tuned fight will be beaten in one or two nights no matter how many gimmicks you throw at the players. This solid goddamn fact. The only way to make an encounter not beatable in a single night by a solid group of gamers is to throw bullshit at you.

Let"s for sake of argument, imagine that they wanted Ulduar to last more then a week before even "ezmoad" was beaten.

First encounter, we"ll call it...oh I dunno...mother slot machine. Mother slot machine has a roughly 75% chance to cast an ability called "Teleport your healers onto the main tank and gib the raid right after saber lash" There is no preventing or recovering from this ability.

However, you might be one of those elite guilds that brings 20 warlocks to soulstone the entire raid before you zone in. Not that any guild has ever done anything similar to that to get world first on RoS or anything...so you managed to beat MSM. Onwards then!

Second encounter, we"ll dub this The Class-stacking Horsemen. Otherwise known as Shamanwell Plateau. This encounter is sorta difficult in nature, but it"s made obscenely next to impossible because you need to stack your raid with classes 90% of guilds don"t have that many of.

However, you happen to be one of those few guilds that -does- regularly raid with 7 hunters or 9 rogues or whatever the bizarre encounter demands. After making a smug post on your guilds forms/frontpage about how perfectly tuned the fight is and how you wish all fights were as challenging, you move on...

Third encounter shall be dubbed Patchgearcockblock. This fight is -very- basic in nature, but is made impossible by the fact that he will hit your tank for 50k damage, constantly, unmitigatable. The problem is that even your best geared tank only has 45k hp and only by farming the zone you"re in for 4 months will you have the gear to survive the Cockblock Strike.

So after 2 months of managing to beat the odds on MSM and you breezing through 4csH every week while other guilds struggle you manage to actually down him. Congrats! Onto the zones final encounter!

lingerie.jpg


Oh wait, wrong encounter. Back yet? No, I"ll wait. Alright, onward then!

We"ll go with an old EverQuest favorite but not an event completely unknown to WoW....The old god C"broken. This fight is relatively trivial to beat by anybody with a pulse if it were working. However, the developers overtuned the fight "slightly" making it completely unbeatable no matter how much you class stack or BiS geared people you bring.

After 3 months of throwing yourself at this fight and no response from the developers either way but they still keep on releasing fixes for door hinges in the bank in Orgrimmar even though it has no doors half your guild quits in disgust, the other half is burned out and only plays casually now.

Then 3 years later you bitch when perfectly tuned unbroken fights are simply too easy when you have a raid of 25 competent people and pine for the days that almost made you quit the game on internet message boards like a complete douche.

Anyways...

You"re going to be hard pressed to make any encounter still "fun" after the 5th clear. The best you can really do is make it fun for the first few and then tolerable for any lengthy duration after that and make damn well certain they still aren"t doing that shit a 25th time.

There are notable exceptions. Heigen will always remain the epitome of fun and C"thun was ridiculously entertaining (until Naxx made it not worth the retardation of getting to him) to watch as the same 6~10 people die to the painfully obvious huge fucking death ray every single goddamn time.

And yet they still get his loot before you. 8(

Anyways...

I will say though that in the end, the majority of the fun from end game content is going to be largely in who you play with. It"s all about playing with other people. The only reason I could tolerate Hyjal after the second month is because I knew there were 24 other people with me who were just as miserable that we were yet again sitting through mandatory 2 hours of trash clears and bosses with shit we didn"t need to get at the one boss only to get ANOTHER fucking hunter bow and double Vanguisher when all we wanted were caster swords.
 
Azrayne

Azrayne

Irenicus did nothing wrong
2,161
786
^ which is why we need someone to make a real PvP game. A good pvp system = an endless font of content that provides constantly shifting and basically ceilingless challenges.
 
Zehnpai

Zehnpai

Molten Core Raider
399
1,245
WoW"s pvp wouldn"t be terrible if

A) They abandoned Arena"s

And

B) They created a new map every month or so.

10 years later I"d cut myself if the only CS maps still available were dust and office. I still -play- those maps, but the option to play orange, all the surf maps, the zombie mods, the WC3 mods, the etc...etc...

One new map every 2 years is -not- good game design.
 
Azrayne

Azrayne

Irenicus did nothing wrong
2,161
786
Yeah that"s one of the things that shits me off to no end about BG"s. They"ve added 2 maps over nearly 4 years. For a grand total of 5. If they want to imitate FPS"s then they have to at least give us some variety in the maps. 5 just doesn"t cut it.

They need to give us different game types we can queue for, then at least 3 - 5 different maps for each. So instead of queueing for WSG I queue for "CTF" and the game randomly selects one of 5 maps, each with it"s own unique layout, aesthetic, and so forth. And I mean honestly, even with a company as pedantic about polish as Blizzard, how fucking hard can it be to whack out a couple different CTF maps? Then do the same for AB/SoTA/AV. There"s just no fucking variety and I literally can"t bring myself to play any of the BG"s anymore because doing my 1000th WSG makes me want to stab my face in.

The system right now sucks because they have to worst of both worlds. They have the lack of "meaningfulness" that comes with instancing PvP, but they don"t even try to take advantage of what the system offers in terms of variety of maps and terrain.


Arena is a lost cause. There"s really not much to say about it except that they just need to give up on the idea. Obviously they never will, because they"ve pushed so hard to try turn it into some CSesque "e-sport", but the whole system is hopeless and just completely fucks with game balance.

I"d love to see them do something awesome with world pvp, but that"s a whole other bag of worms and honestly, I think we"re too late in the game"s lifespan to suddenly try drastically alter the game to allow a real world pvp system.

But there"s absolutely no reason they can"t make BG"s stop sucking. They need to stop pouring resources into the black hole that is arena and fix the rest of PvP. So many people just plain don"t give a fuck anymore because Arena balance is raped beyond recognition and BG"s have been completely neglected for the last 4 years. Hell you go to queue up for BG"s and there"s maybe a handful of games open, it used to be that the list would scroll down past the bottom of the box 24/7. I don"t know specific numbers, but I don"t doubt for a second that arena participation is at an all time low as well. People simply don"t care.
 
F

Flight

Molten Core Raider
1,229
285
Zehn - Vhex said:
tl;dr version: Any unbroken fight will be beaten in a single night and dubbed "ez" no matter how challenging you make it.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:Gimmicks that keep you on the move retain some of their value over the long haul, gimmicks that rely on you sitting on your ass for 10 minutes waiting for a boss pop while you alt-tab out to watch naked chicks pee on eachother don"t. Finally, I may hate certain fights, but at least I get to enjoy everybody else hating them too.

~~

Any decently tuned fight will be beaten in one or two nights no matter how many gimmicks you throw at the players. This solid goddamn fact. The only way to make an encounter not beatable in a single night by a solid group of gamers is to throw bullshit at you.

Let"s for sake of argument, imagine that they wanted Ulduar to last more then a week before even "ezmoad" was beaten.

First encounter, we"ll call it...oh I dunno...mother slot machine. Mother slot machine has a roughly 75% chance to cast an ability called "Teleport your healers onto the main tank and gib the raid right after saber lash" There is no preventing or recovering from this ability.

However, you might be one of those elite guilds that brings 20 warlocks to soulstone the entire raid before you zone in. Not that any guild has ever done anything similar to that to get world first on RoS or anything...so you managed to beat MSM. Onwards then!

Second encounter, we"ll dub this The Class-stacking Horsemen. Otherwise known as Shamanwell Plateau. This encounter is sorta difficult in nature, but it"s made obscenely next to impossible because you need to stack your raid with classes 90% of guilds don"t have that many of.

However, you happen to be one of those few guilds that -does- regularly raid with 7 hunters or 9 rogues or whatever the bizarre encounter demands. After making a smug post on your guilds forms/frontpage about how perfectly tuned the fight is and how you wish all fights were as challenging, you move on...

Third encounter shall be dubbed Patchgearcockblock. This fight is -very- basic in nature, but is made impossible by the fact that he will hit your tank for 50k damage, constantly, unmitigatable. The problem is that even your best geared tank only has 45k hp and only by farming the zone you"re in for 4 months will you have the gear to survive the Cockblock Strike.

So after 2 months of managing to beat the odds on MSM and you breezing through 4csH every week while other guilds struggle you manage to actually down him. Congrats! Onto the zones final encounter!

lingerie.jpg


Oh wait, wrong encounter. Back yet? No, I"ll wait. Alright, onward then!

We"ll go with an old EverQuest favorite but not an event completely unknown to WoW....The old god C"broken. This fight is relatively trivial to beat by anybody with a pulse if it were working. However, the developers overtuned the fight "slightly" making it completely unbeatable no matter how much you class stack or BiS geared people you bring.

After 3 months of throwing yourself at this fight and no response from the developers either way but they still keep on releasing fixes for door hinges in the bank in Orgrimmar even though it has no doors half your guild quits in disgust, the other half is burned out and only plays casually now.

Then 3 years later you bitch when perfectly tuned unbroken fights are simply too easy when you have a raid of 25 competent people and pine for the days that almost made you quit the game on internet message boards like a complete douche.

Anyways...

You"re going to be hard pressed to make any encounter still "fun" after the 5th clear. The best you can really do is make it fun for the first few and then tolerable for any lengthy duration after that and make damn well certain they still aren"t doing that shit a 25th time.

There are notable exceptions. Heigen will always remain the epitome of fun and C"thun was ridiculously entertaining (until Naxx made it not worth the retardation of getting to him) to watch as the same 6~10 people die to the painfully obvious huge fucking death ray every single goddamn time.

And yet they still get his loot before you. 8(

Anyways...

I will say though that in the end, the majority of the fun from end game content is going to be largely in who you play with. It"s all about playing with other people. The only reason I could tolerate Hyjal after the second month is because I knew there were 24 other people with me who were just as miserable that we were yet again sitting through mandatory 2 hours of trash clears and bosses with shit we didn"t need to get at the one boss only to get ANOTHER fucking hunter bow and double Vanguisher when all we wanted were caster swords.
Click to expand...
Is it worth exploring randomly generated content as a potential solution ? Random tile sets, a pool of potential bosses, a pool of potential abilities, a pool of potential mobs, storylines and settings .... It"s as rich an environment as the development resource that could be applied to it; now we are in the realm of billion dollar franchises we need ot think out of the box in one way or another.

The beauty of such a system, if it is included from the games foundation, is that it is as scalable and as challenging/rewarding as you want it to be.
 
G

Grave_foh

shitlord
0
0
Not really related to the current topic, but I"ve been playing LOTRO lately while WoW is boring. I had never given it a proper chance before now.

It"s certainly not a perfect game, but I highly recommend some of your team take the time to play it awhile if they have not already. Overlook the flaws temporarily and check out some of the awesome stuff the game has, because it really needs to be seen in more MMOs.

Two things I really like in particular:

- The Deed system is awesome, and way better than achievements in WoW. It rewards the player for simply playing the game. If I want to go explore some area, I feel good that the game is going to acknowledge my exploration with a new deed that will eventually get me a trait or a title. Even killing random trash feels less annoying because there is usually a deed attached to it that will earn my character something. This is far better than just some meaningless achievement score. There are even deeds attached to your abilities that allow you to enhance the ones you use most often, which not only makes sense but just feels good when you realize you"ve advanced it simply by playing the game.

- They use instances to tell a story. So far I absolutely love the "Book" quests in LOTRO: heavily scripted instances that progress the story, and can take place in a variety of locations. Many actually take place outdoor in the zone you"ve been adventuring in, but it creates an instanced portion for you to do the event in. It"s a great way to tell a story and should be used more often. This kind of thing is what instances were meant for imo.
 
Big_w_powah

Big_w_powah

Trakanon Raider
1,887
750
Anyway, fuck it all.
Whatever you do, I emplore you to include a class, preferably healer or support type, that is 100% instacast spells that relies on movement and ground targetting for the most part.

Fuck all this bullshit "click you, cast heal, click you, cast heal. I wanna be able to move in a goddamned battle while playing a healer or support class.

Goddamnit, I"m thinly veiling my want for a bard in a game again.
 
D

Danth_foh

shitlord
0
0
Better yet, don"t require people to cease all movement when channeling a spell. That"s how Vanguard did it. After playing Vanguard, Warcraft"s spell casting model felt clunky and obsolete.

Danth
 
V

Vatoreus Malfost_sl

shitlord
228
1
It just doesn"t seem necessary though. It doesn"t do anything in terms of making anything more difficult or skilled, it"s just...annoying. Not to mention, it doesn"t really hold up to the "Is it fun?" test they pride themselves so much on.

If it were to change, it wouldn"t even really change the dynamics of any of the classes, you"d just have a lot less "My fucking computer didn"t sync with my actions, so I have spell fail!"
 
D

Draegan_sl

2 Minutes Hate
10,034
3
Sure it necessary. There are tons of movement required fights. Deciding whether or not to cast a spell is part of the "challenge".

You get into all sort of things in terms of PVP and kiting etc if you can cast and move at the same time.
 
V

Vatoreus Malfost_sl

shitlord
228
1
The degree of movement that as available to you was absolutely negligible in terms of mechanics that make you decide to cast or run. It"s the simple fact that you didn"t have constant spell fail due to not being fully sync"d to the server and didn"t have to come to an absolute full stop. Having your movement speed reduced by roughly 95%+ wouldn"t change any of those decision making moments.
 
Caliane

Caliane

Avatar of War Slayer
14,571
10,064
Draegan said:
You get into all sort of things in terms of PVP and kiting etc if you can cast and move at the same time.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I think its called "fun".

having to stop to cast is pretty lame. Imagine you had to stop to fire a rocket or rpg in any fps? How annoying that would be?

Perhaps an buff/penalty for stopping to cast or not maybe, but all abilities should be able to be used on the move. for example, sniper rifles in any fps. Can be fired while moving, but not very accurate.
I"m all for just allowing full movement on all skills, but if you really wanted, you could for example, apply a 50% miss or damage reduction on casting something like wow"s aimed shot, or fireball/pyroblast while moving.
I think we already mentioned it, but pushback is also a mechanic that really needs to die and never comeback.
 
D

Draegan_sl

2 Minutes Hate
10,034
3
Well on sync issues, I"ve rarely seen many issues with that over the years unless it"s a shitty game.

As far as "fun" well, maybe, but there are balance issues involved. You can"t generalize it, I think. While a caster might think it"s fun to instant cast everything or be able to cast on the run, a melee guy might think it"s OP or annoying because he"s getting kited.
 
V

Vatoreus Malfost_sl

shitlord
228
1
Draegan said:
Well on sync issues, I"ve rarely seen many issues with that over the years unless it"s a shitty game.

As far as "fun" well, maybe, but there are balance issues involved. You can"t generalize it, I think. While a caster might think it"s fun to instant cast everything or be able to cast on the run, a melee guy might think it"s OP or annoying because he"s getting kited.
Click to expand...
I don"t know if you did or not, but did you play VG as a caster class of any sort? It"s hard to explain how it feels, but it really is as restrictive as not moving, but it just doesn"t feel as annoying. I don"t really know why, but being slowed by 95% > full stop but it doesn"t really affect things. Kiting doesn"t change because of it, because you"re barely moving at all, it just feels less restrictive.
 
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