Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Ngruk said:

I think it speaks volumes about how good WoW gameplay was, back then. Compared to many other MMO"s the starting "experience" sucked .... but the variety was non-existent.

...

EQ had some pretty awesome variety

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Wait a second, what? I think you"re misremembering here. Tirisfall, Mulgor, Durotar, Teldrassil, Dun Morogh and Elwynn Forest are all vastly different. And most of them bleed over into completely different secondary zones.

Granted there"s little difference between kill 10 rats and collect 10 monkey ass quests but by the same vein, there"s pretty much zero difference between killing a goblin and killing a kobold then.

By level 15 in EQ we were all following the same progression path. There was no greatly diverse leveling experience unless you were a soloist. I like the multiple starting cities idea and EQ did a good job of it for it"s day. But saying that EQ was amazingly diverse and WoW was not for it"s starting gameplay is just...well...

If anything you should mimic LotRO opening"s. The first 5 or 6 tutorial levels were great at setting the backstory for your race choice as well as what was motivating you to start adventuring in the game world. AoC tried something similar but it was too long and got annoying by the 3rd time you did it.

Wolfen said:

Amen. No more frakking Firebolt 1, Firebolt 2, Firebolt 3 kind of crap. Unique spell names make each one seem more special.

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I don"t think the name really matters. Sometimes simple is really good as well. Is anything really as iconic to the casting class as "Fireball." No reason you can"t use a mix of both though. Would Ice Comet really be more awesome if they threw some random fantasy name in front of it?

And as neat as having bigger and more elaborate particle effects are when casting, it sucks having to turn that stuff off in a raid because it"s so flashy. Subly increasing the size of a fireball or adding to the number of magic missiles you throw out is one thing, but we don"t really need a laser light show.

More important I feel is how you get the spell.

If all I do is kill 30 boars, ding level 3 and get my ice armor buff...yippee? You could call it Jingle"s Merry Armor of the Horrible Cold and have it summon Shiva straight from Final Fantasy to lick my all over with her icy tongue and...well okay that would be pretty cool.

But honestly, getting it by going to the trainer or just automatically getting it kinda blows. On the other hand, if I climb the frost wizards tower and then rip the secrets from his very mind as he lays before me broken and beaten, that"s a little better then paying some guy who has nothing better to do all day then hang out and wait for little wizards to run up and hand him 5 gold for the instruction book on how to cast it.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Wait a second, what? I think you"re misremembering here. Tirisfall, Mulgor, Durotar, Teldrassil, Dun Morogh and Elwynn Forest are all vastly different. And most of them bleed over into completely different secondary zones.

Granted there"s little difference between kill 10 rats and collect 10 monkey ass quests but by the same vein, there"s pretty much zero difference between killing a goblin and killing a kobold then.

By level 15 in EQ we were all following the same progression path. There was no greatly diverse leveling experience unless you were a soloist. I like the multiple starting cities idea and EQ did a good job of it for it"s day. But saying that EQ was amazingly diverse and WoW was not for it"s starting gameplay is just...well...

If anything you should mimic LotRO opening"s. The first 5 or 6 tutorial levels were great at setting the backstory for your race choice as well as what was motivating you to start adventuring in the game world. AoC tried something similar but it was too long and got annoying by the 3rd time you did it.

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Eh...depending on what race you rolled you"re leveling experience was going to be different at 15. I leveled exclusively in unrest for many levels and I never did befallen or any of that crap over on Antonica or any of the stuff near Qeynos side of Antonica till I decided actually to adventure and explore the world and did the Aviak camps and still there was plenty of options during those levels than Aviaks wasn"t the only place to exp. In the 40"s is where everybody mostly had two choices and that was solb or lguk.

And lastly!

Tanking balance isn"t really that hard. Blizzard got close at the start of WotLK.

All they really needed to do was normalize HP, give paladins another defensive cooldown and warriors/paladins were pretty goddamn close. They scaled similarly and had relatively close EH"s.

They fucked up pretty hard with DK"s and Druids though. But this is more the fault of them being stubborn assholes then anything. Buy me a steak dinner and let me handpick my own team and we"ll have this shit sorted out in about 15 minutes.

First on the chopping block, bood/unholy tanking. I sure as shit can"t be a "holy" tank so DK"s get to enjoy the more easier to balance, blood is dps, frost is tanking, unholy is for pvp balance.

Step two is the addition of defense to druid gear and the removal of the crit immune talent. They now get to balance that shitty stat like the rest of us. They can also now parry attacks. Justify it how you want. Poop is a weapon, bears now throw it to deflect attacks. There you go.

Step three, having a shield now blocks all attacks, regardless. However, blocking now prevents a % of damage done rather then a flat amount. Blocking, hp and armor normalized across all classes. Block value/rating removed.

Now, thanks to my genius innovation, all classes standing still doing nothing tank relatively the same.

(As a side note: If you really insist on having the stupid "gets hit for more, but dodges more often!" style of tank, make sure you reduce the RNG nature of tanking. It works better in a "no healing" type game where you"re going to take 100 swings before going down to reduce the impact of the RNG. But if you"re a jerk and insist on healing, RNG is going to heavily impact you when it only takes 2~3 swings to die.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, now you pick 5 tanking cooldowns for each class and find different ways of them functioning but ultimately achieveing the same goal. The less they have to do with you mitigating damage, the more unique they can be. The different taunts in WoW add unique flavor and are pretty awesome. Shield wall (arguably the most powerful) being direct copies is the opposite side of the acceptable spectrum.

Ah well.

Araxen said:

Eh...depending on what race you rolled you"re leveling experience was going to be different at 15. I leveled exclusively in unrest for many levels and I never did befallen or any of that crap over on Antonica or any of the stuff near Qeynos side of Antonica till I decided actually to adventure and explore the world and did the Aviak camps and still there was plenty of options during those levels than Aviaks wasn"t the only place to exp. In the 40"s is where everybody mostly had two choices and that was solb or lguk.

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Unrest and Aviak"s. Welcome to what 80%+ of the people who had to group did. Not saying you couldn"t go somewhere else, just saying that most people didn"t. Unrest, Oasis, SK, HH, LGuK and SolB were pretty much it for most people once they got out of their starting area.

Again, my main point of contention with what Curt said was that EQ was a diverse experience with unique starting points for most of the races (even though plenty double-dipped) while WoW did not. Maybe his login screen was bugged and only allowed him to selcect dwarf and gnome or something, dunno.

I"m saying they both had it and it was something I appreciated very much about both games.

I absolutely loved Unrest. I leveled there for as long as I could. The zone had so much flavor and different enemies to encounter. You had skeletons, animated hands, undead hags, dwarven ghosts, tentacle terrors...a smorgasbord of neat stuff to whack. To me, every inch of that zone was interesting.

Zehn - Vhex said:

If anything you should mimic LotRO opening"s. The first 5 or 6 tutorial levels were great at setting the backstory for your race choice as well as what was motivating you to start adventuring in the game world. AoC tried something similar but it was too long and got annoying by the 3rd time you did it.

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For the love of god please do NOT have an "in-game" tutorial. I loved the way EQ originally did it with the out of game tutorial. That tutorial gave you a quick and easy walkthrough of the game mechanics, it gave you an idea of melee and spell casting and after you had tried it all you THEN started up the character creation with an idea of how the game works and without the first few steps in the world being a jarring tutorial that removes the sense of stepping into a new world of discovery and instead very much removes you from that fact.

When I take my first few steps in the world as my actual character I want to already know the basic mechanics and be able to just explore and check stuff out, not be hit by a million popups telling me how to open a backpack and how to save a spell on my spellbar.

Zehn - Vhex said:

But honestly, getting it by going to the trainer or just automatically getting it kinda blows. On the other hand, if I climb the frost wizards tower and then rip the secrets from his very mind as he lays before me broken and beaten, that"s a little better then paying some guy who has nothing better to do all day then hang out and wait for little wizards to run up and hand him 5 gold for the instruction book on how to cast it.

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Still agree with you on this type of thing though, Ngruk please put in more of this type of thing and do away with the "ding you are level 22, now spend 120 gold and here is 6 more spells". More then almost anything the game could have I want to have to quest, fight, and explore for the spells and skills. I would love it if after level 30 a trainer is useless to you as you are as powerful as they are and you must go out into the world and find that long lost spell book in an ancient library to get a new spell or climb a mountain to find a long lost monk who gives you a quest to learn a new combat move.

I didn"t find the lotr one to be too obtrusive. I think after WoW most people are going to be familiar with general FPS/MMO controls. So long as a game doesn"t use some retarded shit like Aion and middle mouse button to swivel camera (seriously? damn crazians).

So the tutorial is good for more game centric stuff. Explaining the con system if it"s different (Dot"s, elite mob, whatever). But yeah, adding it to the initial login screen before you even create an account wouldn"t be a bad idea just to have a generic tutorial to explain most of the shit.

Zehn - Vhex said:

I didn"t find the lotr one to be too obtrusive. I think after WoW most people are going to be familiar with general FPS/MMO controls. So long as a game doesn"t use some retarded shit like Aion and middle mouse button to swivel camera (seriously? damn crazians).

So the tutorial is good for more game centric stuff. Explaining the con system if it"s different (Dot"s, elite mob, whatever). But yeah, adding it to the initial login screen before you even create an account wouldn"t be a bad idea just to have a generic tutorial to explain most of the shit.

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Hell, put the tutorial online via a web page. You could show all the basic stuff in a browser without needing to download a client. You can do some neato advanced stuff in a browser these days.

Tropics said:

For the love of god please do NOT have an "in-game" tutorial. I loved the way EQ originally did it with the out of game tutorial. That tutorial gave you a quick and easy walkthrough of the game mechanics, it gave you an idea of melee and spell casting and after you had tried it all you THEN started up the character creation with an idea of how the game works and without the first few steps in the world being a jarring tutorial that removes the sense of stepping into a new world of discovery and instead very much removes you from that fact.

When I take my first few steps in the world as my actual character I want to already know the basic mechanics and be able to just explore and check stuff out, not be hit by a million popups telling me how to open a backpack and how to save a spell on my spellbar.

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I think tutorials are good, but the way they"ve been done in every MMO so far is pretty meh. I agree the pop up boxes are the worst conceivable way to do it. No one wants to read that nonsense, they want to play.

The LOTRO ones are almost good, but they still rely too much on the text boxes.

I think it"s better to use visual cues and let the player either discover for themselves if they don"t know something, or use their own intuition to figure it out. Your game should be easy enough to understand without the lecture.

For example, a thief might start off being thrown in jail. Your character coughs up a lockpick he had swallowed and it falls to the ground nearby. There doesn"t even need to be a UI at this point. The lockpick is gleaming so anyone, even a child, understands they need to go pick it up. If they don"t do anything for a few seconds, you can just show the WASD and mouse keys on the screen, but you don"t need a big block of text. They pick up the lockpick and only then is their inventory shown, which immediately connects with them. Then the lock on the door could glimmer slightly guiding them once again, and so on down an actual interesting sort of quest/adventure (escape from prison) that teaches the concepts very quickly. Maybe the player knocks out a sleeping guard (thus teaching combat mechanics against a non-retaliating opponent) and takes his armor in attempt to disguise himself and escape. If you make it story driven, something the LOTRO tutorials manage decently, it is interesting even to those of us players who do not need the tutorial.

Whether the tutorial is offline or online doesn"t really matter to me, but it would be pretty awesome to be able to play the tutorial while patching, I"ll give you that.

Grave said:

Whether the tutorial is offline or online doesn"t really matter to me, but it would be pretty awesome to be able to play the tutorial while patching, I"ll give you that.

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Fuck, there you go. Have the tutorial pop up while installing/patching. There may yet be some hope for you Grave. <3

What wow failed with the starting zones, and can"t comment on EQ since I didn"t play that, but liked in lotro or VG, is starting zones are also a good way to introduce your ingame lore to new people. Sure Wow was Warcraft, many people knew what the fuck was going on and many had finished both war3 and TFT and maybe even war1 and 2 for the oldest ones. But other than that, there was nothing really relevant to lore in wow.

You start in durotar and Joe the greenskin asks you to kill boars. Who are you, why the boars, where the fuck are you, nothing about that. Just bring me boar meat yo.

They improved for example when they made BC. The quests in silvermoon and azuremyst introduce you to the race. Eh yo you just woke up from a cryofreezing capsule because we can"t pilot our interdimensional spaceship and somehow managed to crash on a fucking planet, here take a bag and get some weed to heal the minds of the lazy fucks in the camp. There was a story, then you make contact with the other races and more lore. But original wow? Pretty much nothing. Very slight scarlet/burning blade related lore, but nothing that helps you understand what are the orcs, or the forsaken. It expects you to know from playing the warcraft game, which is why the zone are somewhat failing.

On the contrary, lotro directly puts you into little scenarios that explain various things, and take you into the main story arc right away. It does explain what hobbits are, what dwarves and elves relations are and stuff like that, even though it"s based of one of the most famous fantasy(the most famous?) book. Vanguard starts basically the wow way, but at 10(or was it 5) you get to town, start diplomacy, and there"s 4hours of lore based quests to explain your race relations with the other races. And card games, awesome card games, with awesome TWWWIIIIINNNN sounds. However that wasn"t at launch, added later, vanguard was like wow at first, tons of starting zones, each with a distinct visual personality but very bland quests and no purpose/lore.

I think to make good starting zones, you want some lore, and some purpose to these zones. As for the tutorial shit, don"t care as long as you can turn it off. I"d be more interested in having advanced tutorials in game at certain levels so people understand how to actually play, than a tutorial right when you log in telling you wasd lets you move, and using your mouse lets you select targets.

Wolfen said:

Hell, put the tutorial online via a web page. You could show all the basic stuff in a browser without needing to download a client. You can do some neato advanced stuff in a browser these days.

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^ and Wolfen, you"d know

Zehn - Vhex said:

If anything you should mimic LotRO opening"s. The first 5 or 6 tutorial levels were great at setting the backstory for your race choice as well as what was motivating you to start adventuring in the game world. AoC tried something similar but it was too long and got annoying by the 3rd time you did it.

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Please no, LotRO"s opening was something out of a bad single player game.

Locithon said:

Please no, LotRO"s opening was something out of a bad single player game.

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They were boring, but the concept itself is a good one.

Most tutorials act like the person is an absolute retard, which isn"t necessary. I get that you might feel that shooting for the lowest common denominator is the way to go with something like that, but it often just makes it feel ridiculous and dull.

I learned from watching my girlfriend (who has never played a game before, ever) pick up WoW/Lotro how easily people understand simple visual queues and well designed pathways leading them through content. But she consistently hated the windows popping up even though it was designed to help her. I didn"t coach her at all, mostly because I wanted to see what it was like for a first time gamer to log into these MMOs.
LOTRO was much easier for her to pick up than WoW simply because it put her on rails and made her do things successfully to progress. She didn"t want to read the stuff, but it was easy enough to figure out and move through the linear area. WoW wasn"t too bad, but again she didn"t want to read the pop ups and just grabbed the first quest, didn"t read it, ran across the river in Elwynn and got killed by bandits. Humorous, sure, but she immediately said she liked LOTRO more. That"s why I think real tutorials might be worth having if you want to appeal to the widest base - then again, WoW is the most appealing of MMOs so far, so who knows. I would certainly say a tutorial cannot hurt you in any way, regardless.

Other interesting tidbits are that she hates quest text and cut scenes (I"ve got her slogging through FF10 now, she"s growing up so fast) which I think is something most gamers of this new generation share. That"s why I"m glad to hear from Steve"s blog that 38 Studios is trying to bring about a new method of storytelling that always keeps the player involved. I think that"s very important.

The thing with a tutorial is, that for those that don"t need it it"s skippable or can be run through in no time.. but for those who DO need it it"s invaluable. Don"t be myopic, realize that these games need vets and noobs alike. WoW has attracted more people who never played a game seriously short of Popcaps. Those people cannot be tossed aside like they don"t matter, because they do.

Twobit Whore said:

The thing with a tutorial is, that for those that don"t need it it"s skippable or can be run through in no time.. but for those who DO need it it"s invaluable. Don"t be myopic, realize that these games need vets and noobs alike. WoW has attracted more people who never played a game seriously short of Popcaps. Those people cannot be tossed aside like they don"t matter, because they do.

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True. We "veterans" take for granted that once you play one MMO you can play them all. The true noob has to start somewhere. If you frustrate them early on, they won"t stay long enough to figure out the game is actually fun.

Wolfen said:

Hell, put the tutorial online via a web page. You could show all the basic stuff in a browser without needing to download a client. You can do some neato advanced stuff in a browser these days.

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If you did a small download tutorial/demo that was a 2 level mini version of the game using the same interface as the real game with some simple combat, a hybrid class that does not really exist and does a bit of everything (cast, melee, heal), some small scale profession stuff, abit of loot dropping to show the inventory, ect... and put that on the website for the game and treated it like a tuturial/demo that could be one of the greatest marketing successes a company could ever create.

Put that thing on the website a couple weeks before the games release and as long as the game"s interface is good and the tutorial is entertaining and interesting the hype for the game would be enormous AND a huge portion of your player-base would know exactly how the interface and contros work by the time they bought the game. They would ALSO have an easy way to get friends to try it out without having to give out trial accounts that require a epic sized download.

Were I in charge of a game company I would be talking to people about the feasability of doing this, it sounds like a pretty solid idea.

Locithon said:

Please no, LotRO"s opening was something out of a bad single player game.

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Aren"t you referring to the very short scripted and instanced part of those first 5 levels? For Humans you had to free a couple of halflings and it ended with that Black Rider. That was indeed pretty amateurish. But the part after that is pretty ok, where you do Quests for 5-6 levels in Archet (talking for the Human newbie experience) in the actual gameworld which also ends with an instanced Quest after which Archet will forever be altered in these burnt-down ruins.

That last part does a decent job of introducing you to the World and your Race in about 5 or 6 levels.