Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

If we didn"t repeat everything every 2 months, this thread would be 5 pages long, Zehn.

Also, to get on the MY OPINION IS HOW GAMES SHOULD WORK boat, fuck "press-buttan every second" combat and the VOIP/Ventrillo bullshit it forces upon us. How am I supposed to cyb0r the ML for gear if I have to talk in Vent during the raid? It"ll ruin my nubile wood-elf illusion.

You"ve ruined my immersion.

We all have wildly different concepts of what makes a game "fun," and due to our unconditional state of positive self regard, we tend to explode those as "OMG TEH FUTARE OF THE INDUSTREE." As much as I love to read Zehn"s rants, I"d hate the fuck out of the game he wants to make. And he"d hate the fuck out of the game I"d like to make.

There are many ways to make a good game, so these arguments always end up being Proponents of one school of play saying the other schools are full of asshats who don"t "understand," while the other schools do the same thing. Nostalgiafags vs B.net-tards, full-on grapple.

Good point. We should discuss idea"s for classes. It"s been awhile since we had to rickshaw a thread like that. I"ll start. You could like have a class that"s like a ranger, only with magic. And it would have a pet! You could like summon it and cast magic but you"d have arrows too!

It would be totally cool and unique! We"ll call it the manger!

Your turn!

Agraza said:

It"s one thin line away from rolling an alt if you have to go through all the same crap anyway.

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Except it"s not a thin line. It"s a big, thick, massive James" dick size line. Do you make every quest in the game repeatable? Seperate quest tracks for each job from start to finish? How hard do you have to make the job switching such that you can"t trivialize content at the flick of a switch? Is it worth it to build your game from the ground up around this design when it"s far simpler, acceptable, and easier to balance a game that has no job switching? From a raid leader"s perspective, how do you build your roster when everyone can be everything? Do you go after the guy with just one job, or the guy with 20?

It"s a fucking retarded system, and pretending like it"s just some easy mechanic to implement that doesn"t come at a cost to anything is even more retarded. You have to build your game from the ground up with a system like that, and it"s not exactly like it has a proven track record of being some kind of ub9r l33t system to go by. Shut the fuck up already.

Yes, because guilds sweat over and lose sleep at night thinking about the mythical 25 paladin/druid raid that can be anything, any time. Only it didn"t happen like that.

The sky didn"t fall James. It"s okay. Everything will be okay. You"ll...be okay. Go take some midol and jerk one out.

The ability of a player to fulfill a role in a game like WoW would still be based mostly on gear. You only acquire gear at a certain rate. At the pace they release their content even players with 3 or 4 roles might only develop 2 top of the line suits of gear given that they can"t acquire secondary gear from their team members over primary needs. You could shake the numbers around.

The point is that casuals get the sandbox where they can do fuck all they like, and raiders have to specialize in order to remain relevant. On the other hand if your roster adjusts dramatically for whatever seasonal or drama issue you"re facing, you can shift the structure of your roster fluidly to deal with it.

There is already the distinction between those that can and cannot fulfill multiple roles in WoW. The concensus tends to be those that can have an advantage. Why should your class design be lopsided in this fashion? I say equal role-shifting rights for everyone.

Pro: players, be they hardcore or casual, get versatility.
Con: designers have to overcome the initial design unknowns to initialize the system. To that, I say look to the japanese and steal what"s good, toss what"s bad. They have already done it and made money off of it. They intend to do it again.

Making actual alts would become a comparative disadvantage. Every class you play would be of the same exact race. Most likely people would play through the exact same content they did before because that is what they know and people are simple. It encourages people to grind (even if they grind quests, it will be a grind because they have done it many times already and now they will be doing the same quest with the same character). A certain segment of the population will attempt to level up all classes together because they are stupid and they will quit the game when they realize doing that is boring as shit.

Forcing people to make a new character forces players to consider a new race, sex, name and appearance. If there are unique starting areas for races, they will be all but forced to try out some new content and there"s probably a greater chance that they end up on a different set of leveling rails. For illogical reasons, people are more likely to modify their behavior when their character has a different name, different race and is a different entity altogether.

People use alts to avoid their guild. I wouldn"t ever make an alt in a job system because I would want to keep my progress on one character but I often will play an alt when I am tired of doing guild shit (I"m a terrible person). I"d probably just play another game instead.

Anyway all I"m saying is that the cost of a job system is in how it modifies people"s behaviors and perceptions (in not logical but predictable ways) not in how it effects game balance and theory crafting. Those things can be very easily tweaked and corrected and yea a job system is probably a huge net gain when that is all you consider.

Kuro said:

As much as I love to read Zehn"s rants, I"d hate the fuck out of the game he wants to make.

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See, my plan is to sell a lifetime subscription for 140 million dollars as the only subscription model and then invite Hatorade to play it since he"ll play anything.

It"s a plan that cannot fail.

Brilliant!

Obvious ploy to fleece Trekkies was obvious, Cryptic. "Chain yourself to this sinking ship for 6m-Life in exchange for beta access!"

Agraza said:

Could you please go be vague elsewhere? Trying to discuss anything with you is like playing catch with wet soap. Idea, example, pro, con, etc. not "maybe that"s not good, it could potentially be bad, +story, +immersion, +casuals, -elitist power gamer". We get it. You want to suck on bioware"s singing, dancing dick.

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Well. No. I think SWTOR is not going to be a great game at all actually based on what I"ve seen of it.

Vague? I was speaking in generalities on the idea of immersion. I"m not going to play Zehn and armchair for +internets or trying to get Curt"s attention.

If you want a concrete idea here"s one. Get rid of quest dialogue boxes. Add in on screen execution of quests via visuals and/or audio. This way you don"t have players skipping text to click on "Accept", nor are you forcing them to sit through a boring cut scene that the can"t hit escape to skip. Delivering a story or "immersion" should be through playing the game. At not time should you sit some where and wait for the fun to come to you.

I don"t get the whole -elitist power gamer comment either. I"m saying that power gamers usually don"t go through story in a game but plot the fastest way through the game to get the best rewards and not care how you got there. Power gamers often know the stories if it happens in front of them while playing.

Here"s a step further. Instead of reading text of why bad guys are raiding the good guys castle you should have the NPCs fighting each other. You should hear and see shouts and everything as you get closer. You should hear a commander shout, "We must defeat the Red Bad Guys! Quick!" and then you have a counter to kill 10 of them pop up on your screen. No more quest log, not more reading quest text to figure out where to go and what to do. This will also provide a more action paced game. "If done right".

This way you can reserve quests for over arching stories kind of like the LOTRO books which I liked a lot, or the campaign quests in Aion.

Warhammer"s newbie orc area kind of reminds me of this but they failed horribly at it because their engine sucks. But you get a sense of things "happening" in that zone except no one is really moving around or fighting each other. But they did a good job with the sound effects, I have to give them that it"s just their world design is terrible, but their idea was on the right track, but got derailed fast.

That"s what I mean by immersion delivery.

The job system? It in itself has nothing to do with adding or subtracting immersion from the game. It"s the whole repeating the same shit over and over as you level different jobs with the same character that has the potential to break immersion for some people.

Next time I"ll add some fuck yous and maggot ridden shits to my post so I can entertain you.

Understood. I"m afraid I haven"t given Aion or Warhammer a chance to comprehend your examples, but I get the idea.

It does seem like you"d have to design environments to be less open to funnel people toward these events. Furthermore handling the density and size of the event area will be more art than science if you"re acquiring your goals on-site. If you come from the wrong side do you get a different goal, or do you use geography/NPC design to help avoid the possibility? The overland quest hubs in LK, and to a lesser extent BC, are well-designed to funnel players from points A to B to C to D to Zone 2. The elegance of that flow is pretty remarkable, and shaking up the delivery system would pose a big problem.

As I said in the beginning, perhaps my inexperience with Warhammer and Aion prevents me from seeing the forest for the trees.

Draegan said:

Next time I"ll add some fuck yous and maggot ridden shits to my post so I can entertain you.

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<3

I think I"m just going to stop calling it the job system and simply refer to it as alts with benefits since the job system conjures up so many misconceptions. Though hopefully it"s at least another 30 pages before we argue over it again. It reminds me of the arguments we used to have about twinking in early EQ. I said it adds new life to the game and encourages people to make alts and the naysayers would say it ruins their immersion and the integrity of the game.

Anyways...

My apologies Draegen for trying to be entertaining. It"s in my nature. Though I imagine if I were to try to impress Curt, I wouldn"t disagree with him on pretty much every gameplay feature we end up discussing here.

Though I will say I agree with pretty much the entirety of that post. The further we"re able to get from giant exclamation points and walls of text while maintaining the accessibility that players expect the better.

My only point of contention is that power gaming doesn"t preclude you from knowing the story though. I"m willing to bet I know more about the WoW story and lore then casual Joe.

I"m not some cold unfeeling monster. I know I"ve said this before but I still get a boner when Putress laughs and shouts, "DID YOU THINK WE HAD FORGOTTEN?" as the horde, alliance and scourge all crumble arond him.

Agraza said:

It does seem like you"d have to design environments to be less open to funnel people toward these events. Furthermore handling the density and size of the event area will be more art than science if you"re acquiring your goals on-site. If you come from the wrong side do you get a different goal, or do you use geography/NPC design to help avoid the possibility? The overland quest hubs in LK, and to a lesser extent BC, are well-designed to funnel players from points A to B to C to D to Zone 2. The elegance of that flow is pretty remarkable, and shaking up the delivery system would pose a big problem.

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Ding. Your armchair dev faction just increased by 1.

You don"t need to funnel anyone anywhere by arbitrary means of quests or directions. You should see the whole zone flowing towards that central point. Landscapes, NPC scripting of supplies and troops moving to and frow. Smoke on the horizon.

Again, sounds and visuals. Just like when you"re driving and you hit traffic. Then you hear a siren of an ambulance, then you see the red lights and you move out of the way. Then you move closer and you see red/blue lights of cops. Then you see an accident. Then you determine what happened.

There was no dialogue box popping up in your windshield saying, "Blah Blah head on collision." You determine what will happen (more traffic) and what may have happened with visual cues. They need more of this in multiplayer games which they have in abundance in single player games.

However it"s more difficult to do it in public places, takes more resources, and has a larger chance of fucking up that bigger the scale especially with it all being scripted.

But each of these instances does not have to be such big scale, but a bunch of smaller scale ones.

Again here is where Warhammer was almost right. Public Quests. Except there were too many of them, required to many people to be efficient, and were artificially drawn up in certain areas. There was no flow in their shitty world design.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Though I imagine if I were to try to impress Curt, I wouldn"t disagree with him on pretty much every gameplay feature we end up discussing here.

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Hey, I told him I"d never heard of him.

He plays rounders or something, no ?

Draegan said:

Again here is where Warhammer was almost right. Public Quests. Except they didn"t scale to the amount of people available.

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fixed

Zehn - Vhex said:

My only point of contention is that power gaming doesn"t preclude you from knowing the story though. I"m willing to bet I know more about the WoW story and lore then casual Joe.

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I wasn"t speaking of you specifically. But I"m willing to bet there are more power gamers who wouldn"t give a shit or don"t know anything compared to those that do.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Exactly. Even with the job system people will gravitate towards the class they enjoy most. I"d link you my post where I went over this, but I lost all my links when I reformatted recently and I"m too lazy to search through all my posts to find them again.

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I"ll take wow classes as example: I roll a shaman, I love my shaman, I eventually reach whatever is the cap for levels, I get gear, I get all the fluff, I max my reputations, kings and tyrants cheer at me when they see me because they know I"ll pull their reigns out of the shit they fell into (with some help, of course).

I"m not only a shaman, I"m also an orc, I love my race, I have badass shoulderpads (and shoulderpads are everything in today"s jet-set), best racial, awesome hairstyle and I can eat gnomes for breakfast.

I happen also to have a name, which may have been appointed to me by my mother or by my dog, but let"s say the world knows me a Grawrgnah-eh and I"m kinda attached to my name.

Now, I decide that after being one of the 10 most powerful beings in the world (alongside all other maxed out chars that I choose to ignore), I want to delve into being a meatshield, I want to tank, but being a shaman I don"t have that option, I"m so good at shamaning but I can"t pick up the concept of throwing a tantrum at a monster or pissing him off enough to go all-out on me? That"d be weird to say the least.

Let me level as warrior this time, I get to use maybe some mildly interesting twink gear, but aside from that I start from level 1 and go up the stairs as I did before. I can"t be a warshaman, I can be only one of them professions, but I"m still Grawgnah-eh renowned in all realms as the most badass orc ever, this time I wear very small shoulderpads, at least for the time being.

That"s what I mean for multi-class system, no sub-jobbing, just the ability to switch class and likely role with a few clicks and a gear swap. No lifers can max-out every class and be the true jack of all trades for guilds and raids.

Skill based systems ala UO for me are very uninspiring.

EDIT: or just let me twink the fuck out of a new character, old EQ1 style, then you can scrap the job system completely.

Power gamer is another word that needs to be consigned to the history books. It will have increasingly less relevance in the future of MMOs. As will the wishes of the vast majority of the people on hard core forums like this. But then we"ll realise, "damn, we"re actually having fun here".

Which is an interesting point. What we want it often diametrically opposed to what will be commercially successful in the next gen of MMOs. Going on from there, I tend to look at and try to promote what I believe will be commercially successful rather than what I personally want in games.

Damn, I"m thinking out loud now. Pretty soon I"m going to start babbling about how attractive Mary Kirchoff is. 50 bucks to the 38S employee that PMs me her extension.

Flight said:

Hey, I told him I"d never heard of him.

He plays rounders or something, no ?

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To be honest, I"ve yet to watch more then a single inning of a baseball game. I prefer a real man"s sport like Starcraft or Counterstrike. I spent more time playing basewars as a kid then I"ve spent watching, playing, reading or talking about actual baseball.

Now basewars was baseball I could get into. Laserswords? Yes plz.

I don"t bring up sports in this thread since I"m a New York fan.

I"m pretty sure you dont have to be a NY fan to hate and loathe everything about Boston sports teams and its fans nowadays. After recent Patriots then Red Sox then Celtics success with the associated smugness of their fans, you pretty much wish Superman would rip that part of the continental US off and hurl it into the sun like he did with those nuclear missiles.