Tortage, Rashomon, and Class Quests
Tobold wrote today about his thoughts on Tortage in Age of Conan and how it affected people's expectations for the rest of the game. I have never played Age of Conan so I cannot comment on that, but there was one part of his post that stood out to me.
"The same story was told from four different angles, depending on what archetype you played, with your part in the story being appropriate to your class. Thus the fighter would get the kill quest, and the rogue the sneak quest, while the mage feigned alegiance[sic] to the evil sorceress to get information."
I wonder why this is not utilized more in MMOs.
When questing in MMOs presently, your only means of accomplishing a goal is combat. If you need a book from the top of a sorcerer's tower, you kill everything in your path and take the book. If you need to get information from someone unwilling to give it, you fight them until they submit and give you that information. If you find out orcs have taken up residence on the local hill, you only choice is to usually to go kill 10 orcs. I wonder if there is a better way.
One initial thought would be that if every quest was tailored to your quest, then you would only ever be on the same quests as others that are your class. But instead, I wonder if giving options based on race, class and profession would be the best option.
In the situation that orcs had taken residence the local hill, you could have many options. Rogues could be given the option to sneak into their camp and assassination their leader. Warriors would have a frontal assault to take out as many as possible. Alchemists could have the option to concoct a poison to poison their food supply. Blacksmiths could have the option to craft some weapons for the local militia so the militia could deal with them.
In most MMOs right now, the class that you choose only affects what role you will end up playing in a group. Mayor Dave in Questingville will still give you the exact same quests as the rogue, priest, ranger, or necromancer standing beside you.
I think the best way of implementing this would be an epic questline based on your race/class and then having "contract system" I talked about previously in all the town hubs, but have it offering you contracts based on your race/class/profession with some general options.
The overall storyline that happens in the game and the world would be the same, but the way step along the way was approached would be different for different classes (though there would be occasional crossovers). I see it similar to the book quests for Lord of the Rings online from different viewpoints. If each chapter of the storyline was eight quests long, you could a couple class specific quests, a couple general quests and then end it with a large group quests that everyone had. Perhaps it would be delving into a dungeon.
You would not be the one singular hero of the world, you would just be one piece of the puzzle. In LotRO your character is one piece of the puzzle, but you are going through all of the same steps as every other character so in the end everyone is one piece, but the same piece. Under the system I would prefer, in leveling your character through the story, you would see the full storyline unfold but if you played a different class, you would see different things that were done to help it unfold.
Perhaps a warrior would be told by his NPC questgiver to go attack a traveling group of bandits that would be at a specific meeting place. That would be his piece of the story and he would move on.
If a rogue was at the same part in his quest line, the NPC questgiver would give the rogue a map and instruct him to sneak into the bandit camp and replace it with their current map so that they would go to a different meeting location. In the end this "different meeting location" would be the place that the warrior was instructed to go kill them.
Each character would play a role, but it would only be a piece in a larger puzzle. The ending would be the same for every class, but every class had a different part to play.
I hope something like this is what Bioware is doing with The Old Republic. I will just have to cross my fingers and hope.
Knowing When to Quit
Okay so when I wrote this post, I was not expecting it to be so long. I apologize for the length in advance.
I have been raiding without significant break for the last three years. I started playing World of Warcraft in October 05, almost a year after it had come out. I had just joined the Air Force and was in technical training school. There was a cyber cafe there with a group of people that started the game and were playing Alliance on the Sargeras server. I started as a human paladin and only made it to level 20. I rerolled as a night elf rogue and made it to level 38.
When I finished up my tech school in January 06, I got sent to the base I currently work at. Here, I found that quite a few people played WoW and almost all of them played together as Horde on the Bleeding Hollow server. I joined their guild as Mordiceius, the undead priest. The Ahn'Qiraj patch had recently come out and everyone was working towards the War Effort. My guild was killing Ragnaros on a weekly basis and getting ready to start Blackwing Lair. My very first raid was Easter Sunday.
In the following months, I raided MC countless times, I went and killed Nefarion, we got up to Sartura in AQ40 and killed Razuvious and Anub'renkan in Naxxramas. My guild was so big that at one time we even had TWO Molten Core raids going on at the same time. When Blizzard announced that Burning Crusade would be giving paladins to the Horde, I was one of the first volunteers to reroll. I leveled an orc hunter to 60 and used that hunter to farm gear for my paladins so from 20-60 I could have blues that I would constantly swap out as I leveled. When Burning Crusade came out, I was the 6th blood elf to 70 on my server. The day I hit 70, I ran Arcatraz to finish off my Karazhan attunement and I attended the raid, helping my guild get their very first Prince Malchezzar kill.
Throughout Burning Crusade I did some guild swapping and though, I was never in the top guild on the server, we were generally on the bleeding edge of progression. We had our Tempest Keep, Serpentshine Cavern, Mount Hyjal and Black Temple attunements before those attunements were removed. My guild was up to the Eredar twins in Sunwell when 3.0 came out.
Currently, my guild is working on Yogg-Saron in 25man Ulduar.
Through all this time, I never really had more than a one month break from raiding (not counting the level up time when an expansion launched). I think that in all this time, I may have had about three different one month breaks from raiding where I went and played other games. There have been many times over the past years where I felt I was missing out on events due to being committed to a raid schedule. If I am in a raiding guild and do not show up, I am letting 25+ people down. Sure, it is just a video game, but there are still people on the other end of that computer.
A lot of people bemoan the change of Blizzard's raiding design to a more casual focus, but at this point I cannot help but praise it. If raiding still required the same commitment as vanilla WoW, I would have had to quit a long time ago. When I started playing WoW, I was single without anything important on my plate and so I could afford to spend many ours in raids and even more hours farming for those raids. I cannot make that commitment anymore.
The last two weeks, I have been dreading approaching raid times. While in a raid, I am only ever anxious for the raids to be over. I love all the people I raid with, but I just would often rather be doing other things. I can barely focus in raids anymore and that makes me a liability to the raid.
So many people talk about how Blizzard's shift in raid design takes away from the sense of accomplishment you receive when you kill bosses. Well personally, I have never raided for that. I raided for the social experiences. I never think back to the times we fought certain bosses, I only think back to all the different actions and personalities of the people in the raids. And this it what makes it hard for me to quit. Those that play just for the purples can come and go freely and not feel an attachment. When you play for the social experience, friendships can drift apart since you do not spend so much time raiding together anymore.
I am not quitting World of Warcraft, I just do not want to be tied down right now. No matter what doom and gloom people talk about, I think it is a great time to be a gamer. There are so many different games out there that I just want to be able to come and go freely. I do not want a responsibility to 25 other people at this time in my life. It is time for me to move on.
More Ranting on Quests
Stop making quest chains that span multiple levels. It breaks up the pacing. I hate doing one quest at level 20 only to find out that the next quest is marked as level 25.
Stop making me return to a ridiculously distant area for an single quest in an unimportant chain. If I have to keep making return trips, I should have more than one quest for the area.
Make quests mesh better. If you have a quest to kill 20 wolves in one quest chain and then another quest to kill 30 wolves in a different quest chain, make them at the same place in the chain. I do not like having to kill 50 wolves when I could have only killed 30.
Stop writing a novel just to tell me you are hungry and want some boar meat. I do not care about your dreams and aspirations. I am a mercenary and I am just doing a job. You have friends and family to talk to. I am neither.
Stop giving me group quests followed by solo quests followed by group quests. And for that matter, stop giving me group quests followed by group quests. If you are going to have a quest chain, have it all soloable up until the final quest and make that quest for a group. This way, if I cannot find the group, I at least completed most of the quest line instead of missing huge numbers of quests.
Make drop rates more intelligent. If you want me to collect 10 orc medallions, do not make a set drop rate of 20%. Perhaps start the drop rate at 20% and then for every orc I kill in a row without getting a medallion, increase the drop rate by 20%. Once I get a medallion, reset it to 20%.
When I get back to writing more about Dawn of Steam, one of the things I will elaborate on is quest placement. It will be a "contract" system. Instead of running to town and seeing 30 people who want you to do quests for them, you will see a notice board that has contracts. These contracts will not have huge descriptions and can vary between repeatable quests and one-time quests.
Running into a town may show you a contract board like follows:
Tinker Town Contract Board:
Farmer Joe needs meat. (Daily)
Contract text: Farmer Joe recently broke is leg and is seeking someone to provide meat for his family. Collect 10 boar flanks.
Farmer Steve lost his cow. (One-time)
Contract text: Farmer Steve's cow Bessie has run off. Please return her to Farmer Steve if you find her. Find Bessie.
Mayor Bopkins issues wolf bounty. (Repeatable)
Contract text: Mayor Bopkins is rewarding citizens for helping curb the wolf problem. Rewards are issued for every 10 wolves killed. Kill 10 wolves.
Engineer Meyers is collecting gears. (Repeatable)
Contract text: Engineer Meyers is offering rewards for anyone who brings him gears. Rewards are given for every 5 gears. Collect 5 gears.
Tinker Smith needs a bodyguard. (Daily)
Contract text: Tinker Smith needs is seeking to hire a bodyguard to escort him to his place of work. Protect Tinker Smith.
So few people read the flavor text of a quest, doing quests like this would be more efficient and less overwhelming. Another benefit to this system is that when people eventually do find a quest that is a novel in length they are more likely to actually read it since it it stands out.
Quest Design
I have really been enjoying my time back in Lord of the Rings Online. I am just about to hit level 30 with my minstrel and it is a lot more fun this time around since I am in a kinship with a fun group of people. Though one thing that strikes me as I am leveling up is how many of the quest chains were designed. They remind me of some of the questing flaws Jeff Kaplan talked about in his recent lecture on quest design.
One thing that I noticed Turbine changed with LotRO is when you pick up quest items, you do not really pick up quest items. They do not go into your inventory. If you open up your quest interface, the quest items you picked up are shown under the quest they are for. This is nice since LotRO does well enough already clogging up your inventory with useless items.
On the other hand, the quests in LotRO are far too wordy, far from interesting, and far too great number too quickly. I enjoy games having a lot of quests to get through content, but I feel there needs to be a more streamlined way. The "Christmas Tree" effect that Jeff Kaplan talked about really bothered Rynala when we were playing LotRO together before. We would walk into a new quest hub and walk out with 15 different quests. If we logged in again two days later, we could not remember who wanted what done and why.
While the epic quests in LotRO are pretty grand, the other quests in the game are your standard kill ten rats affair. In the Lone Lands alone, I think there are about five different quests to collect boar meat. I would be fine with that if the quest did not take 500 words to tell me it wanted me to collect boar meat. I would venture to guess that at least 90% of players in Lord of the Rings Online do not care about the reason why any given NPC wants us to collect 20 boar pelts or 30 wolf claws. It has come to the point that I look at what the quest wants me to gather or kill and then I decide whether to read the quest text or not.
I wonder if it is maybe time to shift from this design of quests. If everything is presented in this wordy quest design way, the meaningful quests become just part of the mix and do not stand out anymore. I would almost prefer a "contract board" where you could go pick up the kill quests for that town. If you went to the board in a new town you might see quests to "kill 30 wolves" "kill 15 orcs" "collect 2o boar pelts". The contracts would need little to no reasoning. Perhaps "Wolves have been terrorizing the countryside. Farmer Joe is looking to hire someone to eradicate the wolf population." That is all the text that is needed and then you go along with the task. Then when you finally come across someone with a quest that has a page of text, you would realize that it might be something meaningful and actually read the text for a change.
How to Make Housing Work in WoW: Part 3 – Neighborhoods and Choice
My two posts yesterday were about how I would like to see guild halls and player housing implemented into WoW. Overall, I see guild halls as something that should have been in for a while and player housing as something that would be nice but not necessary. This post is about how I would like to see them integrated together.
I love and hate the neighborhood system in Lord of the Rings online. I think that the idea is solid but there are some problems with the system. For instance, I would like to see a choice of what style houses were built in a neighborhood. Maybe I like the look of the elf neighborhood but prefer the look of a hobbit or human house. Another problem with neighborhoods in LotRO is location. When I asked my kinship where I should look for a house they all said "go to the dwarf area, you will be closer to travel options". It turns out the dwarf housing area is about a 30 second walk from the fast travel NPC whereas the elf, hobbit and human ones are a few minute walk (human is really bad about this). Anyway, I am getting off on a tangent.
I think the neighborhood system overall is a good idea but if something like that were put into WoW, I would like to see more abilities to customize it as well as a couple other changes.
The best way to start is have neighborhoods directly connected to towns via instance portal. Putting neighborhoods a distance from the cities can cause unfair advantages to certain ones. This could also add some popularity to other cities. How many people actually ever go to cities like Darnassus, Exodar, Silvermoon or Thunderbluff? I would say that at least 90% of people only ever go to Orgrimmar for the Horde and Ironforge/Stormwind for the Alliance.
Racial neighborhoods should have the landscape of the race but not the houses. I would like to see the option to build Forsaken homes in the Orgrimmar neighborhoods or build Gnomish homes in the Darnassus neighborhoods. Perhaps at the time when you are purchasing a house in the neighborhood you could be given a choice as to what racial style you would prefer. Maybe if the person wanted to put the house of a different race in the neighborhood, the purchase price would cost 10-20% more. People would still pay it.
Give the option of starting your own neighborhood and give multiple different layout styles. This is a way people could live in the same neighborhood as their friends without much trouble. Just make it like a guild charter where you need 10-15 signatures to start a neighborhood. Neighborhoods could be sponsored by a guild or an individual. When you went to the instance list for the Undercity, you might see "Neighborhood of Mordiceius and Friends" for individually sponsored or "Dibt Fakk's Neighborhood" for guild sponsored.
I would also like to see some variety in neighborhood layouts. Every racial neighborhood in LotRO looks the exact same. There are about 3 guild halls, about 10 or so premium houses and about 10 or so bargain houses. They all are in the exact same layout on the exact same streets. I would like to see there be default neighborhoods are set up and zoned for different housing (perhaps each neighborhood would have a couple yards that were specifically zone for guild halls). One zone might have just space for one guild hall and all the rest for player houses while another might have no zoning for guild halls and is just for player houses. There could also be many different street layouts as well to choose from. I like variety.
Blizzard talks about how they have no plans to implement housing and perhaps they think it is not worth the development time but I could not disagree more. I would love to see the next expansion really expand guild tools and housing a more community element to the game.
How to Make Housing Work in WoW: Part 2 – Player Housing
In my previous post, I talked about how I would like to see the implementation of Guild Housing take place. This post is about how I would do player housing.
Thinking on how to properly implement player housing was a lot harder than guild housing. A lot of the guild housing features are a no brainer. Player housing, however, is a much more difficult nut to crack. The problem with player housing is figuring out how to make it more than just "a place with more bank space". In Lord of the Rings Online, player houses are neat, but I cannot see myself going out and farming for furniture or monster trophies. Plus, in LotrO all that stuff can just be bought on the auction house.
While thinking about housing recently, my thoughts drifted to the Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. In that game, you were never given a house yourself and while you always could steal one, a vast number of people just used the modding tools and created one for themselves. From this came two of the greatest ideas that should immediately be put into MMOs: weapon display racks and mannequins.
I know many people that like to keep old tier sets in their bank. The problem is that these sets take up a LOT of space. Most people will just sell/disenchant/destroy the items. If player houses had mannequins, then you could put those gear items onto the slots of the mannequin and have it displayed in your house. You get to keep the armor and you get it out of your inventory. Heck, this may even drive people to go run old world content more for a chance of getting the old armor sets. Mannequins could even have plaques that displayed the name of the armor set and when the full set was accomplished.
Weapon racks would also be neat. I know that as long as I have played this game, I have collected a lot of awesome weapons that just rot now. I know many warriors that would love to display their old Ashkandi in their house.
As for boss trophies, I think the end boss of 5mans should have small chance (maybe 2-3%) of dropping a trophy item. They should be BOP and something you really have to work for (unlike guild house boss trophies which should be unlocked once you do the boss in hard mode).
While a player house would never be as important as a guild house, I think mannequins and weapon display racks would be the best addition in the history of WoW.
Tomorrow, I will talk about how I would do an integrated neighborhood system for World of Warcraft.
How to Make Housing Work in WoW: Part 1 – Guild Housing
For those of you that play WoW, I have two questions for you.
Aside from raiding or doing instances together, how often do you actually see other players in your guild?
In WoW, what benefits does a guild give other than just a chat channel?
WoWInsider recently did an interview with Tom "Kalgan" Chilton about the future of WoW. Overall, it was mostly just things we have all heard many times before. He did touch on player housing though and this has sparked some conversation and though between myself and some friends.
Overall, I think that player housing in WoW is unnecessary. I am not talking about player housing in the way of "go find some spot of land a put a house on it" but more in a neighborhood sort of way like Lord of the Rings Online has. Even still, I do not think that the return on time investment for a player house would be worth it. I think that player houses would end up just being an alternate bank location for players but not some place where people would linger or meet with others.
On the other hand, I think guild houses would provide a great boon to players and guilds. This post will be about my ideas on how to make guild housing work in World of Warcraft and my follow-up post will be about how to make player housing work. Depending on how long each post turns out, I may put in a third post on house to integrate them together into neighborhoods.
If just integrating guild houses, they should be attached via instance portal to a capitol city. There would be a guild house style for each race's different architecture but it would only be accessible via teleporting to the guild house or entering through the corresponding city's portal. So you could not get to an orcish guild house via the Undercity or Silvermoon. You would have to be in Orgrimmar. Furthermore, give us the ability to teleport directly to our guild house with a 1 hour cooldown. Lord of the Rings has 3 different player teleportation spells: guild house, player house, and mapping (hearthstone equivalent) and I think that works well.
The benefits of the guild house would include banks, vendors, trophies, portals, meeting areas, and crafting areas.
Preferably, there would be two different guild halls per race: a bargain one and a luxury one. As would be expect, the bargain would have less features. Costs could be something like 30k gold for the bargain guild house and 100k gold for the luxury guild house. Basic guild house upkeep cost could be around 500 gold a week for the bargain house and 1500-2000 gold a week for the luxury house.
I would personally prefer that guild banks just be removed from capitol cities and then just be one of the features of guild housing. When you bought a guild house, you would have the first guild bank tab for free and then have the other tabs cost like they do now. The problem with this is there are a lot of guilds that use guild banks right now and would not buy guild houses so you cannot remove the ability to access it from the cities.
You could buy mage portals for your guild hall that might cost something like 10k gold each. Furthermore, you could buy crafting areas such as anvils, forges and alchemy labs. You could also buy reagent and trade goods vendors for your guild house that would give a 25% discount to members that bought items from them.
One of the things I would like most would be guild trophies. Make it so that final bosses in raids unlock a trophy in hard mode. You could then put these trophies up in your guild house. You could have a tentacle from Yogg-Saron if you defeated him with no keepers assisting. If there had been a hard mode from Kel'thuzad, you could put up his phylactery. All of these items would have a plaque displayed next to them that would display information on when that guild first killed the boss and when you first killed the boss in hard mode.
This would allow for guilds to keep a bit of a living history of their accomplishments. If the guild disbanded and reformed, all the trophies would have to be reaccomplished.
Now players would have a place where they could go and hang out if they wanted all the features of a city without having to worry about vast amounts of lag from other players *coughDalarancough* or if they wanted to just not worry about trade chat spam (yes I know you can just turn trade chat off but that is beside the point).
All in all, I think guilds in WoW need a lot of work to make it feel like you are actually part of a community and not just in an additional chat channel.
LotRO Auction House Madness
I am completely dumbfounded by the auction house in LotRO. Either people do not care, do not pay attention, or do not mind throwing money away.
In WoW, there is generally always a steady amount of items on the auction house and prices generally stay static (except around patch time). If Felweed is going for 20g a stack today, in two month it will probably still be between 10-30g a stack. It will not be 200g a stack and it will not be 2g a stack. This is what happens in LotRO.
I was selling some goods I had made via farming and they were selling well 100 silver a stack. Prices then went down to 20 silver a stack and then back up to 150 silver a stack. Massive fluctuations are a constant. What baffled me the most was when I was trying to pick up some Worn Tablet Fragments last night. The AH looked a little like this:
How does this make any sense? This was not the item price spread out over a couple days. This was a snapshot. All those prices were up at the same time.
Here are some screenshots of auction house madness:
Talking to some members of the Kinship I am in (The Nazgun), people told me that this is completely normal. One week they will spend multiple days listing stacks of ore for 50 silver or less and them not selling and then the next week the stacks will be selling for multiple gold (1 gold is worth 1000 silver) and the items will be selling out faster than they can farm it.
One explanation is that maybe the items are being listed by a bunch of people that do not pay attention or do not care. I just do not understand why some people will sell items on the auction house for LESS than it would sell for to a vendor.
It seems like if you play the buying/selling game in LotRO, it is going to be a lot more unpredictable than it is in WoW. WoW prices stay fairly steady, especially prices of items from level 1-50. LotRO prices are constantly in flux. You may make a killing on profit one week and then the next be not able to move your goods. A great deal one week may just be insanely expensive the next. There is no rhyme or reason to this auction house, only pure chaos.
Dawn of Steam Wiki – More on Factions
Last week, I went over the three different factions within Dawn of Steam. I have a million different ideas going through my head but at the current time not all of them can be transcribed clearly.
I have been thinking about different splinter groups within each faction. The splinter groups may often disagree with each other, but in the end they all work together for the goal of their main faction. The splinter groups there to add some different flavors for each faction. They serve as a way to encompass multiple different art styles and philosophies under one main faction and also serve to add at little drama and flavor for role-players. Most splinter groups have a similar group within the other factions.
I have not come up with names for each splinter group and the ones that do have names are probably just going to end up as temporary names.
Julian Splinter Groups -
The Enlightened - A religious group. They believe in technology someday leading them to the promised land.
The Iron Hammer - A militant group. They believe war is the first and usually the only answer to any problem and technology is just a means to an end.
The Tinkers Union - An independent group. They work for whoever is paying and just live to create, not caring for politics too much.
Organic Splinter Groups -
Harbingers of Balance - A religious group. They believe that the gods and goddess are peaceful but that the Julians and Synthetics are upsetting the balance of the world. They wish, albeit fanatically, to bring harmony back to the world by eliminating the Julians and Synthetics.
The Forest Keepers - A militant group. They believe that the gods and goddess are vengeful and wish for them to reclaim the world by force. They conquer so that they can dominate.
The Paragons of Hope - An independent group. This group wishes for equality of all three factions. While they may not understand the motives of the Julians and may not approve of the existence of the Synthetics, they wish that each faction just shared the land equally.
Synthetic Splinter Groups -
The Heralds of Andras - A religious group. This group of Synthetics worship a demon lord from the Void and consider themselves heralds of his coming. They believe that their worship will give them power under the demon lord in the next life.
Guardians of the Void - A militant group. This group is out for revenge. They blame the Julians and the Organics for what they have become and wish to subjugate the world and transform everyone into Synthetics.
The Blight of Night - An independent group. This group has come to terms with who they are and just wants to live their lives without persecution from the other factions. They do not wish to dominate them, they just do not want to be persecuted and will do whatever it takes to stop it.