decodingdragons-blog

[decodingdragons-blog]

So by the way

I got sick of Tumblr as a blogging platform and went back to wordpress. You can find cool stuff what I wrote here. Additionally, my main tumblr account is here.

[decodingdragons-blog]

I've got no idea what I'm doing // Pat Pat Pat

After a frenzied evening of adding blog after blog to my feedly account, and setting up a wildstar list on twitter, I settled down to read some of the lovely content that To Boldly Nerd has recommended. As a result, I came across this blog post at Pat The Chua.

My first question was "Is the Chua called Pat?" 

Njessi's About Page does not answer this, so now I want to make a Chua called Pat. As I did not reserve any of my names, I doubt I shall have that chance.

Anyway, Pat aside, I would like to confess that I am extremely unprepared too. I have a feel for the races I want to play, and the starting zones I want to stick to (I'm not really a fan of the Drakken starting area, that stormy island was much more fun.) Beyond that? I have a general idea about classes (Stalker, ESPer, and maybe spellslinger or warrior). I have an exile guild to aim at, thanks to Twitter.

If I was still in my Warcraft raiding mode, this state of open-ended generalities would have been pushing big anxiety buttons. Instead I'm enveloped in the glow of promise and all the shiny things to discover. And that's just fine. I'm determined to throw myself into the social side of Wildstar, to talk to people instead of retreating, and to make new friends.

Not having every little thing planned out is part of the fun. My Aurin and Drakken will grow organically into their own characters, just as my warcraft ones did.

[decodingdragons-blog]

I got a print from this guy at London Comic-con, which was beautiful and features robots. However this one provokes an upwelling of feeling, and also makes me think of the Dragon from the Peter Grant books.

London riot dragon

[decodingdragons-blog]

Still, those options are there. I'm trying out an ESPer, but I'm likely to play a Drakken Stalker at launch. Spellslinger requires too much mobility from me, and I'm not attracted to the Medic or Engineer at all.

Also note - Cassians have cool 'Eldan/Emperor' inspired jewelry, so I can be a faux-space-elf without being a weird cross between undead and trolls (lookin' at you, Mordesh)

[decodingdragons-blog]

[MMO Quick Thoughts] What are the major factors behind the range of character customisation options?

So, a bit of me assumes there are a couple of guidelines behind the art of designing character models, primarily for customisation by players in MMOs, as opposed to designing a protagonist or antagonist for a storyline. As a non-designer, I'm presuming the following factors.

Design consistent with the art style of the game

Functional shit - skeleton/animation

Something players will be happy playing ('happy playing' here covers a range of things from 'connects to the character' to 'likes looking at their butt')

But not playable options need to be equally as attractive/played by all players (kinda impossible to achieve anyway)

Where you have races, the design of that race communicates multiple bits of information to other players AND the player that picked them

Or possible, no 4 is wrong - in order to justify time spent designing each model/texture/frame/ and animating that stuff, all the models that players can chose from need to be thought of as having a chance of being used a bit? Internal prioritising of resources could easily lead to this?

Building off point 3, customisation is something many players like to do (I know some people who hit random and then create, but many others who will plan their characters out months in advance.)

Something the designers themselves are inspired to create.

This is not the most eloquent list, but a good starting point for discussion. Am I way off base with this? Are there more points I should add?

[decodingdragons-blog]

The Sublime Spaces in MMOs

I have a thing for pictures of abandoned things. I follow the /r/abandonedporn subreddit, and various tumblrs that are dedicated to the empty spaces and places that have been left behind by humanity. These pictures show wear, decay, neglect, the passing of time and the fleeting fancies of human beings (such as the abandoned driveway that will show up in this feed shortly.)

My play in Warcraft is always dominated by this feeling of space, because I have always played on low population servers. However, even though I have transferred to the busiest RP server in Warcraft, I am always alone while wandering through the early zones of Mists of Pandaria. Perhaps I do not frequent those parts of Pandaria that give level 90s a reason to revisit, but as I climb Kun-Lai Summit, I think of the depths of Vash'jir, and the loneliness of Icecrown. Icecrown and Grizzly Hills were bleak the second time I levelled through them, for all the people on my realm were already raiding Trial of the Crusader at that time. Now they must feel desolate.

And that feeling of space, that beauty of the abandoned, of the ugly things that wander and rage, forever entrapped by their AI, wandering through a landscape that is bereft of people to enjoy them? Is that the sublime? Are these empty digital lands the closest that a game can come to the truly sublime? The wolves that endlessly kill the same herd animals over and over again, enacting a cycle of simulated death for the enjoyment, the immersion of players that will never pass through again.

Is it really flight, or lack there of, that makes a world feel big? No, I don't think so. Restricting or opening up are two sides of the same coin. What makes a world feel big is scale, and corners to be found (whether on foot or by flight), the idea that the world in it's entirety is unknowable by a single person. That there is more to it than we can explore. Restricting us to foot makes it about what we can explore on foot, but one really need enough breadth of spaces to still make the game feel big. As for flight - the same applies. The Storm Peak are large, dark, and full of terrors masked in a coat of snow, and they felt huge when I was flapping around them on my Proto-drake. Kun-Lai summit has treacherous mountain paths and stormy weather that pushes back at us, the environment is a true presence in this zone, because it also feels (to me) bereft and bleak. It's at a very late stage of the game, and I only see players in that rare gap between one phase and the next.

So I'm in a landscape populated by the ghostly echoes of other players, traversing a land that to everyone else was filled with people when they trod these paths. The difference between these abandoned spaces of the real world, is that the neglect, the decay, only appears at the literal hand of God - when time moves on in that zone.

[decodingdragons-blog]

As a whole, this is intended to be a text blog, but this picture is relevant, I promise. I've been playing a lot more World of Warcraft recently, and all the now abandoned spaces of the game have their own sort of beauty about them. Post coming soon.

Abandoned Drive-In theater

Source: SneerfulJam (reddit)

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[MMO Quick Thoughts] There's more to 'community' than Dev Blogs and Guilds

One of the things I have struggled with in new MMOs (Rift, GW2, SWTOR) is getting a sense of the server community. When I played WoW, I knew the names of all the major guilds on the servers. I'd interacted with other players on the forums and in the game for years, from TBC onwards. I had a friendlist of people I'd ask to come along on Dungeons. I knew where my guild sat within this network, and as an officer did my best to live up to our reputation for being 'good people'. This was an RP server too, so there were multiple hierarchies of prejudices and assumptions about hardcore raiders, PvPers and RPers from all sides.

But I knew all that shit, and I always had a sense of the 'good people'. The people I'd want to hang out with if my guild mysteriously vanished. This wider social network, our guild/server neighbourhood, can be an important part of an individual player's identity. Back then it was definitely important to me to have a good rep on the server, and be part of a wider network of players that had to interact with each other.

Now that my guild has moved to Argent Dawn, every time I log in I feel adrift. That's partly because I'm crap at maintaining social connections (not something I would expect game designers to fix). It's also partly because I have to start from scratch. I have no idea how the reputation of my guild is developing on the new server. With multitudes of 10 man raiding guilds, the social side of MMOs looks like it is devolving from being part of an expansive network of communities, to being much more divided 'cells', with very little need or wish to speak to each other.

I think that our modern social conveniences (cross realm raiding, LFG tools) are absolutely fantastic bits of kit for me as a player who wants to get stuff done. I've been the person looking for that last dps, or the healer so that one could do Shadow Labs or original Deadmines, and that 30 minutes of dead time was absolutely not fun. As an adult who attends a lot of meetings and gets (privately) grumpy when people turn up 5 minutes late, I definitely get that there is no practical reason to not have such systems if technology allows it.

I do think they impact on server life. It is one of my bug bears that MMOs don't spend enough time looking at the middle ground communities that sit between the overall community of the game, and the individual cells and friendships that will go to making a guild. Quality of life touches that allow you to play with your friends are without a doubt a great things that should not be rolled back, but more work needs to be done on the ties that bind one to a particular server (or even a region lock!)

One of the things that I believe makes EvEOnline so amazing (as a concept that I can read about, rather than a game I want to play) is the fact that gameplay and Corporations naturally results in the creation of guild neighbourhoods and complex networks of interactions. This is in part because it is a sandbox and as a game does allow players to literally take control of an area. The impact of those players impacts the game for neighbouring guilds.

I can't think of a solution - how does one come up with a way to create 'larger' neighbourhoods of guilds WITHOUT at the same time preventing people from playing with their friends? As much as I think back fondly to Southshore Raids, and PvP rivalries, are those moments as inherently valuable as to outweigh all the 'wasted' time that one can now avoid with ease?

To be honest, the only thing I could think of was giving guilds 'guild housing', and allow them to be extremely creative with the housing (a'la Wildstar). And THEN put some mechanism that would mean you visit guild housing regularly. And THEN put in some mechanism whereby your guild members would cross paths with members from your neighbouring guild. And also that you could see what other guilds had built - you know, a bit like a wizard is always supposed to want a tower taller than all the neighbouring towers.

Or something.

Not particularly practical, and 'guild neighbourhoods' may not sound like a killer feature, but I think the true next gen MMO is going to have to be much cleverer about the social factor than merely looking at all of us as nodes with friendlists.

[decodingdragons-blog]

[Wildstar] Beta Happened - Tiny Waists and Atmosphere

I was fortunate enough to get to play in 2 of the recent Wildstar beta weekends. The NDA has now been lifted, but I find that unsurprisingly a lot of my thoughts and feelings about the game have already been articulated elsewhere (such as this post by To Boldly Nerd). My notes weren't quite as comprehensive, so I'm going to cover some things I did like, and some odd things I didn't. While I rolled a number of alts, my main 'play' was a female draken spellslinger with a scientist path. That's right, the long time Alliance player went Dominion!

The overall art style and designs of the environments

Absolutely beautiful, and blew me away (despite my innate dislike of the female character design). The tutorial zones are a little odd in terms of story concept, but I really enjoyed the grandiosity of the spaces my character was travelling through. The team have taken the best from a lot of other games, and made a style very much of their own. Be warned though, this game feels massive to me. The city I went to was absolutely sprawling, and if it wasn't for the bonus pink hoverboard, I'd have spent the majority of my experience running (more on this later). 

Great character animations

For a long time I've found it difficult to truly get into new MMOs because for years I have been spoiled by the polish and brilliance of Blizzard animations. Guild Wars 2 came very close, but ultimately never felt right. While I might not be a huge fan of the female character models as a whole, I absolutely adore the way they were animated. The female draken felt nimble but with a sense of weight - especially in the jump animation!

Speaking of jump animations, double jumping is pretty fabulous and some how made me feel that bit more awesome and ninja like. More MMOs should add this in.

Telegraphs & Limited Action Set

I always sort of enjoyed the combat in Guild Wars 2, and since playing GW2 and Neverwinter Online, have really struggled with the combat in World of Warcraft. Not struggled in the sense of 'unable', but struggled in the sense that 'stand and nuke' didn't really do it for me any more. I've never been great at tab targetting and multi-dotting etc, and all those spells used to make an elemental shaman more mobile have always been a bit 'odd' as a concept.

So the telegraphs system, forcing you to keep moving and to direct your spells, works really well and intuitively. You can still have a traditional target, but the directional nature of combat and having a limited action set is really fun. I didn't really get to the point where I was trying out different action sets for different situations, but I can see the potential (and have experienced it as a Warrior in GW2). 

Initially I did expect to find telegraphs disorientating and a difficult way to fight, but muscle memory catches up quickly as you learn to double tap to get out of the way, and your mouse is still king for directing the force of doom that you roll down onto your enemy.

I Feel Let Down By Character Customisation

Like many other a player, I'm not happy with the one size fits all approach that Carbine took to their female character design. Even World of Warcraft, a game with it's own unique art style, and races that clearly do cater to the 'hyper sexy' market (whether that's a woman who wants her character to look sexy while she does badass things, or a man who wants to do bad ass things and look at dat ass), even WoW manages to represent the female bodies in a variety of thick, thin, hourglass and pear-shaped. I think it's a shame that Carbine didn't take a few more risks and present us with a greater variety of looks for the female races that didn't sit on a variation of 'big boobs and big booty with THE tiniest waist ever'. (Something we should have as an option, but I don't get why it has to be the only options - and no, 'art style' is not a good enough excuse.)

Not only do we have the traditional ultra-hourglass shape, but the human forms on both faction are, to put it bluntly, mostly coded as white. There are a variety of skintones, but the darkest tones were not there when I tried to find them, and the face designs and hair options are white coded for the most part (perhaps with a hint of middle-eastern or east asian aesthetic). I think this is a point that many MMOs still strike out on - if you want hair styles that are coded as black, you have play an alien. In fact many of the granok styles in particular could be viewed as sourced from black/kinky hairstyles.

I don't except it was deliberate, but it's still pretty problematic and undermines, for me, the fun of the rest of the game. I fully intend to do a separate post on the female character models that puts out my likes/dislikes more fully (yes, there are things I like!)

On a more mundane note - more hairstyles, hair colours etc etc for ALL the races please!

Questing Is What It Is

Questing was very traditional MMO, but I definitely enjoyed Carbine's method of combining Guild Wars 2's progress bar with the traditional quest log. I do wish questing was a bit more dynamic/reactive. Carbine also throw in some variations on the 'interact with a hot spot' style quests. Instead of 'pick up 10 objects from the floor', you get tiny rhythm or 'Simon Says' games. That's definitely a mechanic/idea that I think could be implemented better - I found the 'mash F at the right time/speed/length' part a bit tedious, but I enjoyed the occasional actual puzzle.

I enjoyed the use of the datacron/phone to deliver quests, based on your level or your arrival at a new location. The size of the quest text is a bit small, and the tweet style box sometimes disappears too fast, but the questlog is extremely comprehensive. If you are able to pay attention, there's a lot more story out there than you'd expect.

Granted, at the end of the day it still your traditional 'have 30 quests, complete some, move on to next up' style of levelling, but if you're end-game focused, I doubt that will bother you. And for me, it's the old game play I enjoyed in WOTLK/TBC, with much more fun questing and quality of life, so I'm sort of looking forward to it. Guild Wars 2 left me feeling a bit directionless.

Sometimes I did feel that the questlog and tracker were bizarrely organised. It automatically divides itself in to 'tasks' vs quests (which can then have sub-tasks). I much prefer just a 'region' based list, but there are plenty of addons in development so that is something I can remedy myself.

In Conclusion

Yes, I will probably be pre-ordering, but not without due consideration. I think there is a lot to love about this game, enough that I can get past the thoughtlessness of the female character designs, and the love of the designers for their work clearly shines through overall.

Next time - more on character customisation, and WHY all MMO developers need to do better. I'll tackle housing, the implementation of paths, and whether AMPs need to be rethought.