In case anyone doesn't keep up with these things, Eurogamer gave Darkfall a 2/10 score on their review. Obviously, Adventurine wasn't too happy about this score and after trying to sort it out with Eurogamer, took things public.
Tasos' first post.
To which Eurogamer responded, which prompted a followup post from Tasos yesterday, and then a 'final' post on the issue today.
I think Tasos comes off as too defensive and uppity a lot of the time, but I did like his final post. Also, I never realized just how much weight is given to these professional reviews. Personally, I prefer reading reviews on individual blogs instead. They generally point out good and bad things while approaching it from a true gamer perspective rather than a paid reviewer perspective.
/end
Showing posts with label Darkfall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Darkfall. Show all posts
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
We Need a Sandbox PvP MMO Done 'Right'
Over on Broken Toys, Scott Jennings made a post stating that players don't really want hardcore PvP in an MMO.
While I agree that his basic arguments are correct, I think much of the crash that PvP-oriented MMOs have regularly suffered there is simply due to lackluster and/or half-assed implementations. There is definitely a lot to be said for doing a game 'right'. If someone would make a PvP-centric sandbox game, AND do a good job of it, there is plenty of room and interest for it to be successful. More thoughts through the link...
And if you lok back on the 'Holy Grail of games', as many old MMO players fondly remember Ultima Online, it wasn't ONLY about non-consensual, full-loot PvP. It had an extensive crafting system, tons of non-combat skills, semi-interactive environment, options for dying clothes, and the ability to have fun, experience the game and interact with other players without ever leaving your starting city. In fact, some players never even stepped into the wilderness or a dungeon in UO.
In my opinion, there are two very important factors that no PvP MMO should be without:
* Resources to fight over
* Non-PvP activities
Don't just say, here's Important Spot #1. Now fight! Important Spot #1 should actually be important beyond a developer attaching a flag to it and giving players points for interacting with that flag. Why is this spot worth more than that one down the road? Was it just arbitrarily chosen? If so, throw that idea out of the window.
Let the playerbase decide what is worth fighting over. Put one of a kind resources on the map. Plop a keep down onto a narrow pass that happens to be the only way through the mountains. If the players aren't fighting for the spots that the developers thought they would, then look at what they are fighting about, re-evaluate your premise and tweak your world as appropriate. Make those large battles meaningful. Let players affect the status of their world.
But even more important than that (if the combat is fun, players will fight even if there is nothing to gain or lose), is providing some alternatives to 24 /7 combat. Some players just don't enjoy PvP, and even those that do need some downtime occasionally. Crafting, PvE, mini-games, world interaction; these are all aspects that both increase the worldliness of your online world, and also provide alternate outlets of fun for your player base. Even something as seemingly superfluous as animated emotes can provide hours of entertainment.
As an example, lets look at Shadowbane, which was a game about guild vs guild PvP and city sieges. There wasn't even any crafting or other activities in the game. Spawns were exceedingly static and PvE was pretty boring overall. So ALL they had to rely on was their hardcore PvP selling point and their city building / destruction system, and they couldn't even do an effective job of implementing that limited feature set. Lacking in other areas, Shadowbane had all of its eggs in the PvP basket. IF they had delivered a polished, functional and fun city building and siege system, they would have likely had a lot more success. (And for any who are curious, I tried playing Shadowbane on three different occasions, dropping out after shorter periods each time.)
Eve is a good template to look at for how to make PvP combat meaningful and provide alternate forms of entertainment beyond blasting other players to space dust. Territory control and PvP are crux of the end-game for a lot of Eve Online players, but there's plenty of other things to do such as playing the market, mining, creating equipment and blueprints, salvaging, etc. There is a lot more to PvP than the PvP itself. An army doesn't run on fighting alone. It requires infrastructure and support. MMOs need to realize that this infrastructure can be as fun and interesting as the actual combat, and it should be just as important. And they didn't open up the game and then tell players that they had to go out and fight over 0.0 space. Instead they put the more valuable minerals out there and allowed players to decide on their own what to do about it.
Unfortunately, putting all of this together requires a lot of work. So far, all the studios that have tried going this route have been forced to cave into outside pressures and released half-baked games (Shadowbane, Horizons, Tabula Rosa, Roma Victor, just to name a few). I don't know about you, but eating something that is half-cooked is never a pleasant experience for me. And to continue the metaphor, once you've had that first, awful bite, its very hard for anyone to convince you to try it again.
Sadly, Darkfall is looking even less than half-baked and will likely join that long list of MMOs that had interesting ideas and great potential, but simply failed to deliver. And that, I think, is what results in the constant failures of the 'hardcore PvP' MMOs. Its much easier to build a successful themepark MMO. But I'm still holding out hope that one day, someone takes the time and money to look back on these failed trailblazer MMOs, learn from their mistakes and their successes, and build a truly enjoyable, PvP-oriented, sandbox MMO.
While I agree that his basic arguments are correct, I think much of the crash that PvP-oriented MMOs have regularly suffered there is simply due to lackluster and/or half-assed implementations. There is definitely a lot to be said for doing a game 'right'. If someone would make a PvP-centric sandbox game, AND do a good job of it, there is plenty of room and interest for it to be successful. More thoughts through the link...
And if you lok back on the 'Holy Grail of games', as many old MMO players fondly remember Ultima Online, it wasn't ONLY about non-consensual, full-loot PvP. It had an extensive crafting system, tons of non-combat skills, semi-interactive environment, options for dying clothes, and the ability to have fun, experience the game and interact with other players without ever leaving your starting city. In fact, some players never even stepped into the wilderness or a dungeon in UO.
In my opinion, there are two very important factors that no PvP MMO should be without:
* Resources to fight over
* Non-PvP activities
Don't just say, here's Important Spot #1. Now fight! Important Spot #1 should actually be important beyond a developer attaching a flag to it and giving players points for interacting with that flag. Why is this spot worth more than that one down the road? Was it just arbitrarily chosen? If so, throw that idea out of the window.
Let the playerbase decide what is worth fighting over. Put one of a kind resources on the map. Plop a keep down onto a narrow pass that happens to be the only way through the mountains. If the players aren't fighting for the spots that the developers thought they would, then look at what they are fighting about, re-evaluate your premise and tweak your world as appropriate. Make those large battles meaningful. Let players affect the status of their world.
But even more important than that (if the combat is fun, players will fight even if there is nothing to gain or lose), is providing some alternatives to 24 /7 combat. Some players just don't enjoy PvP, and even those that do need some downtime occasionally. Crafting, PvE, mini-games, world interaction; these are all aspects that both increase the worldliness of your online world, and also provide alternate outlets of fun for your player base. Even something as seemingly superfluous as animated emotes can provide hours of entertainment.
As an example, lets look at Shadowbane, which was a game about guild vs guild PvP and city sieges. There wasn't even any crafting or other activities in the game. Spawns were exceedingly static and PvE was pretty boring overall. So ALL they had to rely on was their hardcore PvP selling point and their city building / destruction system, and they couldn't even do an effective job of implementing that limited feature set. Lacking in other areas, Shadowbane had all of its eggs in the PvP basket. IF they had delivered a polished, functional and fun city building and siege system, they would have likely had a lot more success. (And for any who are curious, I tried playing Shadowbane on three different occasions, dropping out after shorter periods each time.)
Eve is a good template to look at for how to make PvP combat meaningful and provide alternate forms of entertainment beyond blasting other players to space dust. Territory control and PvP are crux of the end-game for a lot of Eve Online players, but there's plenty of other things to do such as playing the market, mining, creating equipment and blueprints, salvaging, etc. There is a lot more to PvP than the PvP itself. An army doesn't run on fighting alone. It requires infrastructure and support. MMOs need to realize that this infrastructure can be as fun and interesting as the actual combat, and it should be just as important. And they didn't open up the game and then tell players that they had to go out and fight over 0.0 space. Instead they put the more valuable minerals out there and allowed players to decide on their own what to do about it.
Unfortunately, putting all of this together requires a lot of work. So far, all the studios that have tried going this route have been forced to cave into outside pressures and released half-baked games (Shadowbane, Horizons, Tabula Rosa, Roma Victor, just to name a few). I don't know about you, but eating something that is half-cooked is never a pleasant experience for me. And to continue the metaphor, once you've had that first, awful bite, its very hard for anyone to convince you to try it again.
Sadly, Darkfall is looking even less than half-baked and will likely join that long list of MMOs that had interesting ideas and great potential, but simply failed to deliver. And that, I think, is what results in the constant failures of the 'hardcore PvP' MMOs. Its much easier to build a successful themepark MMO. But I'm still holding out hope that one day, someone takes the time and money to look back on these failed trailblazer MMOs, learn from their mistakes and their successes, and build a truly enjoyable, PvP-oriented, sandbox MMO.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Darkfall, the next Messiah of MMOs?
A little MMO called Darkfall is looming on the horizon, with its release date currently slated for February 25th, 2009.
This game has been in development for many years and has made enough promises to make it seem like it will combine the best aspects of Ultima Online, Shadowbane and Age of Conan. A skill-based character development system, the ability to build towns and villages, ship and mounted combat, the ability to craft almost any item in the game, dynamic weather and NPCs, smart AI, meaningful factions, open PvP, twitch-oriented combat, the ability to loot your enemies and 'real' stealth. Sound too good to be true? Well, it probably is!
Besides the fact that this game has been hyped since 2001, with only a few marginal gameplay videos and screenshots to go on, and the fact that they took applications for a Clan Beta test in 2005 and never followed through, and that previous games over-promising something different and grand in the MMO universe have generally flopped, probably the most disheartening part in my opinion are the latest patch notes. You would think that something as basic as 'Dungeon monsters are now enabled' would have been taken care of and tested sometime before the final month of development!!
That being said, there are still lots of high hopes for Darkfall in the MMO gaming community. And I expect those high hopes will be crushed. I'm taking the route of low expectations to avoid disappointment, myself. I'm expecting to pay to play an early beta release, with lots of bugs, exploits and balance issues. I'm just hoping that they do indeed have a diverse, interesting and fun core game that can be tweaked and polished on a regular schedule after release.
The developers have certainly talked the talk over the last seven years, and I applaud the fact that they've stuck with the game this long, I only hope that they can deliver on enough of their promises to avoid turning this into another Horizons, Roma Victor or Pirates of the Burning Sea.
This game has been in development for many years and has made enough promises to make it seem like it will combine the best aspects of Ultima Online, Shadowbane and Age of Conan. A skill-based character development system, the ability to build towns and villages, ship and mounted combat, the ability to craft almost any item in the game, dynamic weather and NPCs, smart AI, meaningful factions, open PvP, twitch-oriented combat, the ability to loot your enemies and 'real' stealth. Sound too good to be true? Well, it probably is!
Besides the fact that this game has been hyped since 2001, with only a few marginal gameplay videos and screenshots to go on, and the fact that they took applications for a Clan Beta test in 2005 and never followed through, and that previous games over-promising something different and grand in the MMO universe have generally flopped, probably the most disheartening part in my opinion are the latest patch notes. You would think that something as basic as 'Dungeon monsters are now enabled' would have been taken care of and tested sometime before the final month of development!!
That being said, there are still lots of high hopes for Darkfall in the MMO gaming community. And I expect those high hopes will be crushed. I'm taking the route of low expectations to avoid disappointment, myself. I'm expecting to pay to play an early beta release, with lots of bugs, exploits and balance issues. I'm just hoping that they do indeed have a diverse, interesting and fun core game that can be tweaked and polished on a regular schedule after release.
The developers have certainly talked the talk over the last seven years, and I applaud the fact that they've stuck with the game this long, I only hope that they can deliver on enough of their promises to avoid turning this into another Horizons, Roma Victor or Pirates of the Burning Sea.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Crafting and MMOs: A Look from Three Perspectives
Crafting has always been a system that has attracted my attention, especially from a design standpoint. Partially because most games seem to relegate it to a sidebin.
As serendipity would have it, there has been some minor discussion from three different games in development about their crafting systems. Those being Warhammer, Earthrise and Darkfall.
WAR released a podcast several weeks ago where Mark Jacobs talks about crafting in WAR. This was followed with a three-part interview (which seems to be divided into three parts just to be annoying since each part only has 3-4 questions).
In these , we find out that the WAR devs claim that their crafting system is non-recipe based, which is a bit disingenuous. There is a recipe system, its just not presented to the players up-front, and it is more flexible than crafting in most games, which tend to go for crafting systems that are extremely static (IE, X +Y makes Z with no variations). In WAR, the crafters will be able to play around with various ingredients to alter the results of the standard recipes.
WAR also plans on having only a few, limited crafting options at launch; three gathering professions and two crafting. In the interview, Jacobs explained that they would rather start with a small subset that can be expanded later and do it right, rather than trying to do everything at once. And that's certainly a philosophy I can agree with. Three years after launch, WoW is still working on trying to make their crafting professions useful, and failing for the most part.
The ability to customize your potions based upon your needs is great. The more control you give to the crafters the better. I also find their idea of having more gathering than crafting professions interesting, though we'll have to see how it plays out in-game. Is the world going to end up flooded with crafters who cant get hold of materials because there is too much competition for them? WAR also wants to make it so that crafting doesn't replace item drops and quest rewards, which I'm a bit leery of. Now we're headed back into EQ and WoW territory, where the crafted items are only minor bonuses compared to what you get from defeating the Big Bad Boss.
On the other side of the coin, you have Earthrise. In a recent interview, the talked about their plans for crafting (which are also revealed in a post on their forums. They are planning on making crafting THE way to acquire items. Players will be able to craft every item in the game, and they will also be able to make customized items by sticking various parts together. A complex system, and a bold venture by Masthead, but one that I hope works out well so that other games will feel emboldened enough to make crafting more than a side diversion from their amusement park rides.
And then, to round things out to a nice even three, I also want to include mention of a recent post from the Darkfall devs (yes, apparently they are still alive). In Darkfall, the plan on letting players
Hey, they're stealing my ideas! Though I didn't go into complete detail in the linked post, I've actually had a similar concept floating around for some time, so as you imagine, I'm excited to see how Darkfall handles it (assuming that they ever release their game). I really like the idea of being able to harvest from almost anywhere, ala Ultima Online, but also encouraging player cities/guilds to invest resources and time into creating semi-permanent structures that function as advanced resource harvesting centers. Not only does it allow for multiple levels of play and interaction, just within the harvesting system, but it also provides focal points for interesting conflicts between players.
So, there we have it. Three games will very different philosophies about crafting, though all look to be trending in the direction of giving more control to the player. I certainly hope that this is a sign of things to come in the future of MMOs.
As serendipity would have it, there has been some minor discussion from three different games in development about their crafting systems. Those being Warhammer, Earthrise and Darkfall.
WAR released a podcast several weeks ago where Mark Jacobs talks about crafting in WAR. This was followed with a three-part interview (which seems to be divided into three parts just to be annoying since each part only has 3-4 questions).
In these , we find out that the WAR devs claim that their crafting system is non-recipe based, which is a bit disingenuous. There is a recipe system, its just not presented to the players up-front, and it is more flexible than crafting in most games, which tend to go for crafting systems that are extremely static (IE, X +Y makes Z with no variations). In WAR, the crafters will be able to play around with various ingredients to alter the results of the standard recipes.
WAR also plans on having only a few, limited crafting options at launch; three gathering professions and two crafting. In the interview, Jacobs explained that they would rather start with a small subset that can be expanded later and do it right, rather than trying to do everything at once. And that's certainly a philosophy I can agree with. Three years after launch, WoW is still working on trying to make their crafting professions useful, and failing for the most part.
The ability to customize your potions based upon your needs is great. The more control you give to the crafters the better. I also find their idea of having more gathering than crafting professions interesting, though we'll have to see how it plays out in-game. Is the world going to end up flooded with crafters who cant get hold of materials because there is too much competition for them? WAR also wants to make it so that crafting doesn't replace item drops and quest rewards, which I'm a bit leery of. Now we're headed back into EQ and WoW territory, where the crafted items are only minor bonuses compared to what you get from defeating the Big Bad Boss.
On the other side of the coin, you have Earthrise. In a recent interview, the talked about their plans for crafting (which are also revealed in a post on their forums. They are planning on making crafting THE way to acquire items. Players will be able to craft every item in the game, and they will also be able to make customized items by sticking various parts together. A complex system, and a bold venture by Masthead, but one that I hope works out well so that other games will feel emboldened enough to make crafting more than a side diversion from their amusement park rides.
And then, to round things out to a nice even three, I also want to include mention of a recent post from the Darkfall devs (yes, apparently they are still alive). In Darkfall, the plan on letting players
"You can gather crafting materials from killing mobs, and looting and/or skinning them. You can harvest materials from the environment, for example from rocks, trees, bushes etc. You can get the materials faster from organized resource production, like mines and farms, while collecting in nature is slower. You can craft crafting materials used to build complex items when they’re made of building blocks. Finally you can kill players and take theirs."
Hey, they're stealing my ideas! Though I didn't go into complete detail in the linked post, I've actually had a similar concept floating around for some time, so as you imagine, I'm excited to see how Darkfall handles it (assuming that they ever release their game). I really like the idea of being able to harvest from almost anywhere, ala Ultima Online, but also encouraging player cities/guilds to invest resources and time into creating semi-permanent structures that function as advanced resource harvesting centers. Not only does it allow for multiple levels of play and interaction, just within the harvesting system, but it also provides focal points for interesting conflicts between players.
So, there we have it. Three games will very different philosophies about crafting, though all look to be trending in the direction of giving more control to the player. I certainly hope that this is a sign of things to come in the future of MMOs.
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