[Bits and Pieces] Dragon Age Choose-Your-Path Text Game, Gamergate circles the drain, Blizzard take on TF2 with terrible cockney accent

Happy Sunday!

I was pretty excited when I found out that Bioware had partnered with Failbetter Games (producers of Fallen London, a browser game that anyone who likes gothic storytelling should check out) to produce a text based choose your own path type game for Dragon Age, as part of the run up to Inquisition.

The game, which is called The Last Court, is out now on the Dragon Age Keep! You play the ruler of a small and somewhat isolated region in Orlais and you have to try to steer it through a potentially turbulent time in its history.

Accessing the Last Court

You can access the game via the left hand menu on the Keep website.  Click on the icon just to the left of the word Tapestry to bring the menu up. 

When you do that, it looks like this (below). Click on ‘The Last Court’ to bring up the game.

You get to pick a name for your ruler and choose from two different personalities/ rulership styles and then you are off!

Personally I think my great grandfather sounds more like an inspiration than a shame!

And if you have played any of the Failbetter games, you won’t be surprised that there are parts where you draw virtual cards. And if you have played any browser game you won’t be surprised that after you have played for awhile, you will have to wait for your resources to restore.

 

Gamergate even gets called out by Blizzard, that’s how toast they are

Apologies to anyone who feels aggrieved by some of the same things as the Gamergate numpties but “the movement” really is beyond parody now. Zen of Design has a roundup so that you don’t have to read their shit.

The one that made me laugh was that one of their number made up a comically implausible Facebook post purporting to be from the owner of Gawker and some of them bought it. (The italics are from the Zen of Design blog linked above.)

“At the beginning of the week, screenshots were being circulated that purported to show a conspiracy of remarkable breath – if true.  They purported to be Nick Denton, the owner of Gawker, giving his secret facebook group a big ‘thank you’ for stirring up shit to make #GamerGate’s life miserable.  Later, another screenshot came op of a secret facebook followup, where Denton claimed to be very cross with whoever leaked the first.  Seriously, read these and, while you do, keep in mind that people fell for this.”

But really, who would fall for something that obviously daft?

“However, this turned out not to be the case – but the truth is even more hilarious.  Hot Wheels (the founder of 8chan) wrote this spectacular expose.  Seriously, read this.”

And in other news, Mike Morhaime denounced GamerGate in his opening speech at Blizzcon; he didn’t specifically name GamerGate but in the interview afterwards, the interviewer did and he didn’t disagree.

New Blizzard IP/ TF2 type game

I cannot be the only person who watched the intro trailer for Overwatch and hoped that maybe they were going for a superhero MMO to fill the CoH sized gap in the market. Alas no, it’s going to be a TF2 style team PvP shooter.

Probably a wise move to stick to the contained PvP style of gameplay that Blizzard does execute so well, and the whole game looks bright, fun and interesting if you like that sort of thing. In another mikedrop to the Gamergaters, Blizzard specifically aimed for a bit more diversity in the lineup and I’m not seeing any obvious sign that this did anything rather than make the game look cooler.

But urgh, did we really have to sit through the worst cockney accent since Dick Van Dyke? This may be one to play with the volume off.

[Dragon Age] Getting ready for DAI: Dragon Age Keep

*sniff* Alas poor dwarf commoner heroine, I may have temporarily forgotten you but it all comes back to me now!

Any Dragon Age fans out there? Course there are! Dragon Age Inquisition is going to be taking up a lot of my time come this November –  like many others I will find my gaming time massively torn between DAI and the warcraft expansion. Bioware have thoughtfully released little cameos of the new companions so like any right minded person I have already been thinking which of them I plan to romance. #ridetheironbull But that’s for another blog post.  Suffice it to say I can’t really imagine even having this discussion about another game line or developer. Also if the ‘pinkification’ of games means more cool romances I’m all for it.

Dragon Age: The story so far

Dragon Age Keep is now in open beta. This is an official website where players can look through the stories of the last two Dragon Age games (Origins, and Dragon Age 2) and either upload records of the choices that they made in their own favourite game or tweak the main choices to get the background that they want for DAI. I can only assume this means that many of these choices will impact on conversations or interactions in the new game.

One of the things they have done that I really love is that after uploading the options taken in your game/s, which it does fairly smoothly, the Keep gives a brief animated run through of the story so far. There is a narration. You are also offered  the ability to change some of the key choices as they come up. I’ve shown this in the image at the top of the post. It’s really rather great.

Later on, you get the chance to edit the whole ‘tapestry’ by being able to dip into specific parts of the game and editing what you would like to have happened. Hey, it beats having to run through the Deep Roads again.

Alas poor Anders. Gone but not forgotten. No wait, apparently I didn’t actually kill him! I may be the only one Does that mean he might make a cameo? Will Ser Pounce-a-Lot be with him? Roll on the 18th.

How long is a piece of string? How long is an MMO?

Bioware recently noted in an interview that SWTOR would launch with approximately 200 hours of content (core gameplay) per class of gameplay.

Keen, perhaps surprisingly, responded immediately with, “That’s not enough” on the basis that he reckoned he’d spent 144 hours levelling his new WoW shaman and kitting it out, and he’d rushed it (ie. could have spent a lot more time on levelling.)

It wouldn’t take a genius to reckon that via that comparison, it’s pretty much impossible for any new MMO to satisfy players like Keen. (Unless they have really compelling non-core gameplay content, whatever that means. I presume he’d be happy with a good instanced PvP type game for example.)

Whereas I read 200 hours and immediately compared that with Dragon Age: Origins, the lengthiest game that I’ve actually played to completion within the last few years. It took me 45 hours to finish my first run through of DAO and I could have taken longer. I didn’t finish all the side quests and I played on easy mode because I wanted to follow the story. And at the end of that 45 hour stint, I took take a break from gaming for a couple of weeks because it had been quite intense (ie. I’d probably have been more comfortable stretching the playing time over more days). So SWTOR is potentially offering me four times DAO’s content for each class … and I’m duly awed.

What is the right comparison for a new MMO?

An existing one? An existing single player game from the same developers? I don’t know. I just know that 200 hours of Bioware-type RPG could easily be 4-5 months of my time (and I’m not THAT casual of a player) especially when padded out with crafting, PvP, instancing, and chatting. Not to mention alts. Or time spent in other games too.

The WoW comparison

Here’s another WoW comparison. The new Hyjal/ firelands dailies comprise a complex questing grind, including opening up new phases and storylines at various points in the endeavour. Someone on the official boards calculated, assuming you do every available daily quest on every day, that this would take about a month.

ie. 32 days of doing every available Hyjal/ Firelands daily quest.

So how long would that actually take in hours? Hard to say: if you assume on average an hour a day for the first half and two hours a day for the second (rough approximation assuming that it takes longer to get through the later daily quests since there will be more of them), that’s around 48 hours. Then you can add a couple of hours extra for slightly lengthier quest chains as you unlock each new vendor for a round 50 hours or so.

Would you rather spend 50 hours in an MMO doing a complex daily rep grind, or playing the equivalent of DAO?

That isn’t as loaded a question as it sounds, the firelands dailies seem very well done to me. But they are still daily quests. And it takes Blizzard around 6 months or so to come out with each new patch, containing that much gameplay. And however fun DAO was to me, it’s still a single player game.

Bioware tweaks Mass Effect 3 for a larger market

In an investor Q&A yesterday, John Riccitello (CEO of EA) announced that Mass Effect 3 was going to be tweaked for a larger market via some handwavey changes that involve game mechanics.

You might think that – with an eye to the console best sellers of last year – they’d be aiming to CODBLOPSify the game and make it more shootery. But no, what they’re actually talking about is shooter-meets-RPG which is what I thought ME2 was anyway. (I’m still not finished with ME2, I was kind of getting bored with it for no explicable reason – I’m not actually that interested in any of the companions except Mordin so not motivated to go do their missions, and def. not motivated for any romantic involvements. It’s also a very questy game.) I suspect this is tied up with recent comments that they’re introducing a melee class into the next game.

But aside from all this is the question of how much you should really be changing the gameplay in a successful franchise to try to attract new players. What about the old players who liked it the way it was? Bioware fell foul of this audience with Dragon Age 2, another game that got rather streamlined away from the original DA:O mechanics.

We see the same reaction from MMO fans when any kind of content or mechanics is streamlined “to reach a wider audience.”

This is not because it’s inevitable that the game gets worse, it’s because players don’t like change. Also it’s very logical that if you liked a previous game, you’d want the devs to turn out another similar one so that you could like the new one for the same reasons. Yet, if things change that means they can get better …

For all the commercial drive to increase market size though, I think it’s a shame that games with a solid niche are prodded to change. And a shame for the solid niche gamers. One can only hope that gamers who loved the original ME1, original DA:O, original WoW, etc and don’t like the subsequent changes will be catered to by the indie crowd. (And will recognise games designed for them when they turn up.)

Thought of the Day: It’s so hard to talk about difficulty

The problem with discussing difficulty in games (and particularly MMOs) is that as soon as you comment that something is hard, you lay yourself open to loads of hardcore fanboys/girls leaping on your back and proclaiming that you are a noob and should l2p. Or else suggesting that you have no right to judge the game’s difficulty unless you’ve already completed it on the hardest possible mode.

Say that something isn’t hard and the reaction is likely to be the opposite – you might be labelled hardcore.

So it’s a discussion that can only really be had sensibly with mature gamers (note: this is not related to physical age), a category which is not in the majority on official bboards. It’s not that we can’t have these discussions, it’s just that there’s a lot of social pressure for MMO bloggers to pretend it isn’t happening.

Plus we should value the reviewers who are brave enough to say when they think some content is overtuned.

And fact is, particularly in games where there are difficulty settings, it’s very useful for gamers to get an idea of a) how much difficulty is most fun for them and b) which games have harder or easier tuning at different levels.

Think of it as like comparing clothes sizes in different shops. Some shops, a size 8 will be huge, and in others it will be tiny. And yet, if you say that M&S (or pick any clothes shop of your choice) cut their clothes on the large size, no one starts insulting you.

Anyway, for the record:

WoW heroic instances in Cataclysm were mostly OK for tuning, but some of the bosses were overtuned and Blizzard didn’t fix them fast enough. However the heroics were mostly way too long, and they still haven’t figured a way to stop people queueing for heroics before they have learned the normal modes so LFD was stuffed.

WoW normal raids in Cataclysm are not any harder than Wrath raids (eg. Ulduar, ICC). They may seem a bit harder for 10 man groups who used to run Wrath raids in 25 man gear.

Dragon Age: Origins was overturned in its normal difficulty mode. (Sorry Syncaine, but it was. See the comments in the link to follow that one.)

Torchlight was undertuned in normal mode.

Anyone else want to get anything off their chest about games they’ve played that seemed over or under tuned. (I don’t really include games like Demon Souls or Super Meat Boy that are sold on the basis of being hard and unforgiving.)

Dragon Age: Facebook

It was only a matter of time. In the run up to Dragon Age II, a new themed Facebook game called Dragon Age: Legends is being launched by Bioware. And you can sign up to the beta today. It’s going to introduce us to the region of the Free Marches, the primary setting for Dragon Age II. In the same vein as the web-based game that was released in the run up to Dragon Age: Origins, playing the game will give some unlocks for the main game when launched.

Dragon Age: Legends is only due to release one month before Dragon Age II, sometime in February 2011.

Screenshots, forums and a blog are linked to from the Dragon Age: Legends site, which is a little sparse so far, but one to watch.

[Funnily enough, Spinks and I were chatting about Dragon Age II the other day while both placing our pre-orders, and at the time we expressed how much we’d liked the web-based game (Dragon Age: Journeys I think was the name) and how we hoped they’d be another. Good timing, Bioware.]

Bad News, Good News, Cute Cat

Last week I discovered my Dragon Age save files  have become somewhat corrupted, so I now can’t be bothered to finish my second playthrough, and I was relatively near the end (at the Arl Howe stuff).

I’m bummed, I preferred my second character, and got so far with it, but now I’ve shelved the game until Dragon Age 2 is out. I hope for less issues and I will be starting a new character anyway. Means I didn’t get to play quite a bit of the DLC (which I found not really to be worth the money) nor the expansion. I’ll live. One day I’ll go back to it. Perhaps.

It put me off gaming last week, since I sat down all ready to lose a day to finishing the game. Bad News.

On sunday, I dragged myself to the LotRO kin raid to Barad Guldur where we actually made progress in our fight against the Lieutenant of Dol Guldur. It’s been a while since I honestly thought we’d made any good progress, and more importantly I didn’t wipe the group once, so I have a little more faith in my ability to pay attention, even when I hate a fight. So that was my Good Luck in gaming. I know it sounds self-deprecating, but the fight is so annoying on a micro-management level, and includes (for me), healing, running around to try and hit a fell beast but moving out of range of its tail and mouth, watching for fear on others, watching for yellow and/or purple eyes on me and reacting accordingly – and all later in the evening than I would like, concentration-wise. So while I’m glad the group, as a whole, made progress, I’m more happy that I managed to hold my attention the entire however-many-attempts we had. I think, now, that we will be able to down him. But I still have no love lost to Barad Guldur and will be glad when we can go to Helegrod again!

(and in secondary good news, I get to play Deathspank for the PC roday after pre-ordering my first ever game on Steam!)

[Dragon Age] Season of the Witch (Hunt)

For any fans of Dragon Age Origins who have been living in a bubble, today marks the latest (maybe the last) DLC release for the game. It’s called Witch Hunt, is set a year or so after the end of DAO and … you’ll get to find out what happened to Morrigan. Not only that, but one of the three companions is the Dog. (Or /A/ dog, if your warden didn’t survive or you want to play a different character.)

Bioware promise the chance here for players to tie up the last loose end from the original game. What happened to Morrigan and her unborn child? Personally, I can’t wait to find out.

The original game had a pretty satisfying ending, so I don’t feel that Bioware have been holding out on anything or released an incomplete game. They’ve also been as good as their word about supporting the game with DLC – a mixed bag according to reviews but a nice collection of different takes on how a DLC should play out. (Surprisingly I can’t find a page reviewing all of them but the pick of the bunch seem to be Stone Prisoner, Warden’s Keep, Leliana’s Song). Do you want a quick gear hunt? A chance to play parts of the game through a different perspective? A prequel from the point of view of one of the companions? More golems?

If they have fallen down it’s partly because players expected the same quality from the DLC as from the original game. A tricky expectation to manage when the original was fully voiced (with the notable exception of the main character) and took years to develop. And the other reason is because when you are paying piece-wise for content, the price is always going to be compared against the original game and the original will always look like better value for money. You can buy DAO for about £12 on Amazon at the moment – that’s about 40-60 hours gaming. A 1-2 hr DLC can’t compare with that for price/value.

I’m glad DAO has done well for Bioware, it was a fantastically enjoyable gaming experience for me so anything that encourages them to do more sits well here. And then all that remains is the inevitable game of the year edition with all of the DLC bundled in. Maybe some DLC-bundles for the holiday season too for people who already own the original.

Anyhow, I’m looking forwards to Witch Hunt. Who is with me? And if you’ve played any of the other DLC, what did you think of them?

Which came first, the game or the story?

I’ve read a few posts recently on immersion in gaming, and Toskk summed up the problem neatly here. There are different types of immersion, and they don’t all happily coexist.

If I’m immersed in a story, the absolute last thing I want to do is stop and min-max my character stats (or worse, be forced to go back to a previous save point, redo my gear/stats and play through some of the story I have already seen). If I’m immersed in a game, I don’t want to have to sit through seventeen cut scenes and have to care about which option would give me the best reward. If I’m immersed in exploring an area, I don’t want to have to fight through some scheduled event or be forced to grind out reputation just to be allowed to enter the next zone. And if I’m immersed in a solo resource management game, I don’t want to be forced to group.

Immersion (or we can call it flow) is not only the goal of many gamers, but it is also the problem. Having to switch between a gaming mindset and a storytelling mindset not only kills immersion but also will annoy people who liked one side of the game but not the other.

Figuring out how to neatly merge some of these styles is the big challenge for the next generation of game designers. But most MMO gamers will agree that they’d enjoy a virtual world from which stories and interesting gaming challenges both flowed naturally. We know it is possible to some extent, as long as players are willing to compromise – games like Uncharted 2 merge the storytelling and gaming brilliantly well, to a limited extent. Dragon Age charmed over 3 million players with a similarly engaging take on a similar problem. And it looks as though Mass Effect 2 will be at least as successful.

Playing the game badly

It’s very easy to play a storytelling game badly. All you have to do is completely ignore the story so far when making decisions.

If you decide that your character has no social skills so you will insult everyone you meet, you’ll still get through the game. You may also get some very amusing interactions and possibly more fights. It will involve picking non-optimal conversation options, but from a storytelling point of view, it’s a perfectly good way to play through the game. And that’s a player decision, you CAN choose to not try to pick the ‘best’ option in any conversation and … it won’t lead to disaster, just a story consistent with the choices that you have made.

In a bad storytelling game (like, many old school text adventures), making the wrong decision early on can cripple you in endgame. It’s like having a sadistic storyteller just waiting for you to slip up. But a good game, like a good storyteller, will give you plenty of hints as to where a decision might lead. Or if a decision has random and unforeseen results, then you will be given a chance to deal with them.

I was pondering this when reading Ravious’ post on why he feels stressed by storytelling games. I feel he missed the point. In a good storytelling game, you don’t need to stress about making the wrong decision. If the decision is right for your character and the story you are telling, then it isn’t a wrong decision.

But what this means is that a true storytelling game should never be heavily reliant on min/maxing from the player. Because that would lead to one preferred route through the game, and would cut out any character concepts that were not in line with the min/max result.

For example, mages are really powerful in Dragon Age. A min/maxer would tell you to pick a mage, would tell you how to spec it, and would tell you which specialisations to select. But I finished the game on my dwarf rogue and never felt hampered – being able to play on an easier mode was a way for me to tell the game that I didn’t want min/maxing to get in the way of my story.

When stories flow out of games

Storytelling is all about the art of giving meaning to things that we encounter in life. If you read a good biography, it will read like a series of anecdotes (ie. small stories). No one’s life is really a story until a storyteller sits down and pats and moulds it into the right shape. A news story might be dull when it happens to you personally … until you see it written up in a newspaper at which point it becomes a proper narrative.

Or in other words, that sword +1 that you got from the GM is very dull. But Caliburn, the sword +1 which was a rare drop that you cleared an instance 40 times to get, and that you then used to go tank a raid boss? That has a story. Adding difficulty or grind to a game is one way to add meaning. When you overcome those barriers, the results feel more meaningful than if you just woke up and got your quest reward in the post.

But difficulty isn’t the only way. Seeing the virtual world around us respond to decisions we have made in the past makes those decisions more meaningful too. It’s just that difficulty is by far the easiest way to make these achievements meaningful to all players in a multi-player game.

In a solo game, there are other options. The game can adjust more easily to the player. But in a MMO … if anything is going to be genuinely difficult, it needs to be designed assuming min/maxers. So in an MMO, either everyone must min/max or else difficulty is going to be somehow adjustable and high end achievements lose some meaning.

Freeing up the stories

Then there are players like me who love the stories and the virtual worlds and even the gameplay, and don’t enjoy the min/max side of the games at all. I’d have much more fun in games if I never had to care about how my character was specced or geared. Those things are not fun for me. So I’m glad in WoW that people make up gear lists – I wish they weren’t necessary but at least they let me skip the parts of the game that I hate.

This is also why I don’t like collectible card games. I love playing them, but only if someone else puts together a deck for me. Deck Building, like other forms of min/maxing, simply doesn’t appeal. So really I’d be happier playing a non-collectible card game like Bridge or Fluxx (which is an awesome game that everyone should try) where it simply isn’t part of the game at all.

No wonder I loved Dragon Age so much. The game was designed to let you downplay gear and talent choices. And gave you a great personalised story anyway. I can only pity the people who played that game badly, because they were too scared to veer from the min/max path in case anything non-optimal happened.

Am I spoiled for MMOs?

Maybe I have been playing too much Dragon Age over the last few weeks (surely not!!!), but levelling a Death Knight through Dragonblight at the moment is a frustrating experience in comparison.

As Horde, you encounter Koltira the blood elf death knight in Agmar’s Hammer where he has some quests. I thought, “Hey! I saved your life in my origin story, you’re going to recognise me now and we can chill out together and bitch about what a jerk Arthas was and how much better things are now, right?” Nope. He treats you exactly the same as a death knight as any other class.

I should know better than to expect more, but I think the damage has now been done. The bar on my expectations has been raised.

Fellow DAO fans, do you think playing that game is going to change your expectations of MMOs?