Wrath of the Lich King

The other night I finally got around to rolling a Death Knight in World of Warcraft and playing through the starting areas. It was good, I guess - a huge step foward for World of Warcraft, anyway - but it wasn't the Second Coming of Blizzard that I'd been promised.

The more bells and whistles Blizzard hangs on the DikuMUD formula, the more it reminds me that the entirety of WoW is built on the bones of an 18-year-old text adventure. It's like if Namco were still devoting the totality of their corporate effort to getting Pac-Man just right.

In a way it even feels like a step back. The much-lauded "phasing" content, whereby your perception of the world changes as you complete quests, is only a short step from instancing, and the knowledge that other players aren't seeing the same world as me brutally grates on my suspension of disbelief. When I'm taken to the Death Knight assault on Light Hope Chapel I'm unable to forget that this isn't the real Light Hope Chapel but rather an ersatz copy spawned entirely for my benefit, and that elsewhere, in the real Plaguelands, people are interacting with these NPCs entirely oblivious to the devastation I'm wreaking.

I'm hopeful that in as little as five years we'll be looking back on this as the unbelievably primitive scratchings of neanderthals on cave walls, but in the mean time it's perhaps appropriate in an expansion about undeath that the bleached skull of Azeroth should show through so clearly. It feels like in the attempt to hear the story of Warcraft I've lost that sense of it being the world of Warcraft.

Read This

Picture: you're standing around with your friends, and you hand one of them a document, and go, "Here, read this." The response is pretty standard: "What does it say?"

I love reading, but there's a time and place. It's not a social activity. It requires concentration, it requires a relaxed pace, and it requires something inherently worth reading.

No wonder, then, that MMos do such a bad job of delivering story through flavor text.

As mentioned previously, I'm playing World of Warcraft again. Being a long time Horde player, the Alliance content is wholly new to me, so I just ran the Stockades for the first time yesterday. We killed a bunch of guys. Who were they? I don't know. Why did they need killing? Beats me. I turned in some quests and got given some money. The questgivers seemed pleased that I'd murdered these guys, so I guess it's all okay.

World of Warcraft has thousands of quests, each with a couple of paragraphs of introduction text. Some quests have great introductions that enrich the world, while others are little more than a series of puns and pop culture references. The only way to tell which is which is to read them. Or alternately, you can skip all the text and just click the "Accept Quest" button.

World of Warcraft is a social game. A lot of the time that you are playing, you are intended to be grouping. Other people's time is valuable. When you are standing outside an instance, and somebody shares you one of their quests, you do not have time to read. You can hear their virtual foot tapping.

Reading text is not gameplay. Time spent reading is time spent not killing. It is time spent not levelling. For that matter, it is time spent not chatting with real people.

Text pops up in a window. While you are reading, you can see time passing around you. You can see people moving past you and presumably having more fun than you. Your chat window is scrolling. MMOs are a distraction-rich environment.

For all these reasons, text is an inherently poor way to present story in an MMO. It is not a fault of the players. It is not a fault of the flavor text writing team. It is just a bad idea. If you want to immerse players in the lore and narrative of your game this is not the way to do it.

The acquisition of lore needs to be passive. It needs to happen while players are doing other things. Storytelling needs to be during gameplay, not between it. Players need to be learning while they're fighting, while they're looting, while they're exploring.

Flavour text doesn't have to be long to be deep. A look at collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering or Legend of the Five Rings shows that an intriguing world can be built using only one line of text per card. A lot of small fragments can go together to form a greater whole. Everyone who's played Alliance is familiar with the kobold line, "You no take candle!" This could as easily have been a fragment of lore or flavour text.

Story can be told in many ways. Imagine that you want to tell players that a great war is being fought in an area. World of Warcraft has done this several ways, and is slowly improving. One of their first tries is in the Horde side of the Desolace zone. Here, an NPC who is just standing there, doing nothing, tells you in flavour text that they're in a desperate struggle against the centaur-like Kolkar. It's not terribly exciting.

A later try was during the Ahn-Quiraj war event. Here, NPCs at capital cities presented you with flavour text about the war, and visitors to the Silithus zone would see roving warbands, catapults being assembled, and major factional leaders convened around a map table.

World of Warcarft's best attempt, though, is one seen by all players setting foot in Outland for the first time. Upon stepping through the Dark Portal, you find yourself overlooking a massive raging battle where Horde and Alliance soldiers strive endlessly against huge demonic entities. No flavour text, no quest - you know exactly how desperate the battle is because it's right there in front of you.

This is a long way of saying show, don't tell, which is a key concept of storytellling in any medium.

If you must have text, at least make it dynamic. I understand that Warhammer Online is taking steps in this direction with its Tome of Knowledge. Lore should be collected, and be accessible at any point, any where. It should be broken down into discrete segments, with links to other relevant content. Players in World of Warcraft can already put dynamic links in chat which refer to loot, skills, and other game content; they should similarly be able to link to quick lore summaries. Picture your group leader saying, "Okay, now we're about to do [Uldaman]; this is one of the [Titan] cities so it's all [golems] and [dwarves]." The lore is right there if you want it, which is much better than scrolling back through quest descriptions or running off to find in-game books.

Sound can do a lot of work, too; Blizzard have experimented with zone-wide spoken dialogue in a few areas, most notably outside the Black Temple in Shadowmoon Valley where you can hear Ilidan's voice whenever a raid group reaches the final boss of the Black Temple instance. This can be annoying if done poorly, but with a sufficiently wide variety of dialogue and a reasonable spacing between repetitions players could hear a lot about the world while they quest.

Look, I don't ask for much; just do it a little better. When I do a new instance, I'd like to hear from other players, "The end boss here is Gromsh Arrowsong, who found this cave system but then was driven mad by all the ghosts," rather than, "The end boss is a big orc with a bow." In fact, I'd like to know that for myself when I start the instance, rather than learn it from the NPC nameplate when I finally get to the end. And ideally, it would be nice to have heard about Gromsh and know who he is four to five levels before I even get to his instance, so the whole experience means something and feels like the culmination of a story.

I note that Bioware has promised a story-driven experience for their upcoming Star Wars MMO. I'm looking forward to seeing how they do that. I'm not expecting much, but it's alright to hope, isn't it?

Wrath of the Lich King - Game On?

I should mention that with World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King only ten days out, I'm looking for other players to help me wade through the new content.

I run a Kara-geared Troll Priest on Dath'Remar; I'm levelling a 30-something tank on the Alliance side of Doomhammer. Any takers?

You're welcome to post the usual round of WoW related mockery.

ALSO, in unrelated news: Lost Planet was not the game I was hoping for, Condemned is reminding me what good survival horror looks like, and Penny Arcade Episode 2 is a vast improvement without in any way becoming attractive to people who disliked the first one.

Game Publisher Profit & Loss

Via Kotaku, profit and loss margins for the 20 top game publishers. On its face this reflects what might be thought to be common sense; publishers who produce quality make a profit, while publishers that make rubbish pay for it.

It's not quite that simple, of course. The numbers include hardware divisions, so Microsoft shows a large loss representing their ongoing efforts to advance their market share. I seem to recall that Microsoft actually posted their first games division profit last quarter so next year's chart might look very different. Sony, of course, were more focused on launching Blu-Ray than they were on winning the console war this time around so their massive losses are less of a defeat than they are an investment in the company's ongoing future.

EA have recently come out and said they made a mistake by not backing the Wii as the winner in this console generation; their somewhat blinkered focus on the PS3 and 360 hasn't helped them over the last year. Ubisoft, on the other hand, are doing quite well, probably deriving both from their excellent Montreal and Montpellier studios, and from the way they were astoundingly quick to fill the Wii market with shovelware.

Atari, Midway and Sega are all victims of their own poor quality titles. These companies couldn't find quality gaming if you shackled it to their wrist.

My guess on Take 2's dismal performance here is that it's got something to do with their ongoing legal troubles. Take 2 of course includes Rockstar, whose games sell like hotcakes but can't seem to stay out of court. It's probably also worth noting that the chart above caps out before the release of Grand Theft Auto 4 so the profits from that are obviously not included.

Namco, Capcom and Squeenix are all excellent examples of producing good games based on original IP on a regular basis. We like what they make, and we pay them money for it. Everyone's a winner.

Vivendi is of course just another way of saying "Blizzard and Sierra"; most of that profit you see there is World of Warcraft alone. Vivendi's now merged with Activision so it's not unreasonable to expect a monster result next year from the resulting juggernaut.

Konami's interesting in that it feels like it should be down next to Capcom and Namco but instead they're storming the market. It's especially interesting as this chart predates the release of Metal Gear Solid 4. Konami's doing unusually well for a company that's shown such partisan support for this generation's console loser, the PS3. Does anyone have insight as to what's going on here?

Disney comes as a surprise to hardcore gamers; this is mostly just licensed games being made dirt cheap and sold by the truckload. It's a bit depressing that this kind of rubbish is so very profitable. Disney does own a few smaller studios like Lumines creator Q Entertainment, though.

And finally Nintendo tops the chart; they're the only company currently making a profit (and a fairly massive profit at that) on their hardware division, through both the Wii and the DS, but they're also the major developer for both those platforms, and platform-exclusive games like Super Smash Bros Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy spent significant periods of time at the top of sales charts across all consoles. Nintendo was making a profit even during the lame-duck years of the Gamecube, and now that they've actually got quality hardware on the market they're unstoppable.

Diablo 3 Announced

The series of teasers on Blizzard's website over the last few days has culminated in the announcement of the long-awaited Diablo 3.

The official site appeared to be having some problems when I visited but hopefully those will clear up shortly. Exactly how the game will continue from Diablo 2 is unclear, given that the Diablo world was destroyed at the end of the Lord of Destruction expansion.

Revealed character classes include the Barbarian and Witchdoctor. The town of Tristram will make a return appearance, as apparently will the sage Cain.

Presumably more details will be revealed over coming days.

Level 30 WoW Mounts

I was just discussing with a friend the other day how grim the climb from level 30 to level 40 in World of Warcraft can be.

Good news, then, in the public test realm patch notes:

Mounts at 30?! Yes, it's true: Apprentice Riding and mounts are now available at level 30. Training costs 35 gold.

This might go a long way to making Stranglethorn Vale lose its reputation as Chump Central.

Diablo II Patch 1.12

Blizzard just patched Diablo II, removing the CD check.

Which is awesome. Anyone up for some D2 LAN gaming?

April Fool *sigh*

Blizzard's April Fool's offerings are uncharacteristically weird this year.

If you want to really fool people with April Fool's, you can't release these things on April 1. You have to do it, like, September 18 or something. People will never be expecting that.

WoW Horde Banner

I never realised before that the Horde banner from World of Warcraft is a kind of Union Jack.

That's an Orc shield in the middle (the red) bearing the traditional Horde crest, with three purple Troll paragons above it, all fixed onto a Tauren standard. Not sure exactly where the Undead are represented there, but they're only barely in the Horde anyway.

Cinematics

What happened to the cinematic? What happened to finally blasting through some controller-destroying boss fight and being rewarded with a chunk of the finest computer-animated cinema that money could buy? When did it become acceptable to just render things in the game engine, no matter how shonky or poorly animated said engine might be?

Yet another trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV has been doing the rounds, and putting aside how increasingly unexcited I am about this franchise serving me another giant sized helping of more of the same, the trailer on its own merits falls considerably short of amazing. Line after line of cliché-ridden Russian-accented mobtalk is being delivered by in-game character models with significantly less expressive range than a sock puppet. It’s never been clearer that when the only body language you’re capable of delivering is a firmly upthrust middle finger, there’s a whole range of dramatic possibilities you’re just not competent to explore.

I’m an unabashed fan of the cinematic. I happily bought the Blizzard DVD that has all the Starcraft footage back to back. I used to sit there and watch the second act epilogue in Diablo 2 again and again. I can describe the entirety of The 7th Guest as “thoroughly entertaining” and keep a straight face.

Good cinematics can conceal any number of gameplay faults. Look, for instance, at Dragon’s Lair. I dare you to walk near an arcade stand of that machine and not put in whatever ridiculous fee it wants to charge you for a game. Decades on, and people are still being suckered into experiencing its almost complete lack of interactivity.

Cinematics can be so important, indeed, that if you get a well known director to film 90 to 180 minutes of cinematic with well known actors, you can screen it in a theatre and not a single person will complain that it didn’t have an online component and the multiplayer was weak.

I think this was a lot of the reason I felt let down by Warcraft 3. It started off with these gorgeous films of beautifully rendered orcs smacking the living crap out of armoured knights, and then you get into the actual game and you’re being emoted at by what are effectively low-polygon plastic soldiers. That, and the plot, script, and gameplay were rubbish.

I firmly exhort the A-list developers of the world to not let the cinematic fall by the wayside. Spare me from another meandering rant through the games of my misspent youth, and put in the hard yards to deliver a quality multimedia experience. After all, you’ll appreciate it next time I’m comparing your game to a trip to Auschwitz but stop to add, “but, much like the Nazi propaganda machine, it has top notch cinematics.”

Starcraft: The Board Game

With your desire for steamy Zerg/Protoss slash fiction whetted to a keen edge by the forthcoming release of StarCraft 2, you may have found yourself in your local game retailer, face to face with one of the cyclopean boxed sets of the associated board game and quietly exclaiming, "My God, it's full of stars."

A mere $160 AUD will make you the proud possessor of StarCraft: The Board Game, and in the interests of the enlightenment of my fellow man I've made the necessary sacrifice to acquire myself this oversized item of merchandising.

Carrying the thing is a bit of an enterprise in itself. I’ve seen ten year old children that are smaller than the box this thing comes in. By the time you lug it back your domicile or place of abode you’ll be wheezing so hard that you'll barely be able to make humerous references to spawning more Overlords. It’s entirely possible that your last words before keeling over from a massive coronary will be “Left heart ventricle... requires more... vespene gas!”

The perpetrators of the boardgame, by the way, are Fantasy Flight Games, who by and large have an excellent history with licensed boardgames. Their War of the Ring remains one of the finest strategy games I have ever played and comes highly recommended. So it’s a bit odd that Starcraft: The Board Game comes across more or less as a mish-mash of reasonably original ideas with no clear focus or genius. It’s deeply hit and miss, and while fortunately the hits outstrip the misses, the sheer quantity of glaringly obvious game design errors it makes is sufficient to induce epilepsy in small children.

It’s got a lot of pieces. It’s got a LOT of pieces. If you’ve dealt with one of FFG’s previous licensed efforts you might have an idea of what you’re in for, but Starcraft still completely outstrips even the massively epic War of the Ring for quantum of ridiculous minutiae. Each of six players will get a double handful of plastic miniatures, a deck of 40 odd cards, 15 cardboard worker tokens, a score marker, cardboard bases, cardboard buildings, cardboard modules, cardboard dropships, and cardboard order markers, and that’s before we get into the shared card decks, giant cardboard planets, space connectors, z-axis markers, first player tokens, score tracks, rulebooks and other detritus that FFG have shoved into the box.

There’s actually too much in the box. Literally. Some of my plastic pieces came pre-broken, because they’re quite delicate pieces, and to fit them in the box they needed to be jammed in there by (I presume) some kind of piston-driven robot. The flying pieces in particular have ridiculously fragile stands that they sit on, and a great number of them were snapped like the flimsy mass-produced pap that they are.

The surviving pieces look pretty great, though. Hydralisks and Dragoons look notably wonderful, and the Ultralisk model is almost worth having all by itself. Pushing them around the board is exactly the sort of fun that makes you want to pay $160 in order to have it.

The game gets off to a promising start by not attempting to perfectly recreate its computer-powered parent. Instead of fighting intricate battles planetside, you’ll instead be looking at things from a galactic perspective, and attempting to take territory on a variety of different colonies.

The board is created dynamically by linking together planets to form a map in a manner reminiscent of something like Settlers of Catan. There are six different factions to choose from; as Terrans you can play Jim Raynor or Arcturus Mengsk. The Zerg get Kerrigan or the Overmind. Protoss are stuck with choosing between Tassadar or Aldaris. Each race gets a couple of reasonably interesting special rules, and each faction of each race gets a slightly different starting setup.

You win by achieving either a normal victory or a special victory. A normal victory is achieved by reaching a certain number of conquest points, which are gained by holding key territories at the end of a turn. Special victories are different for each faction, and this is probably the biggest problem with the game, in that some factions have special victory conditions which are just flat-out better than others. Tassadar in particular is incredibly cheap, requiring him merely to be in the lead at any time during the endgame in order to win. We’ve played about five games now and we’re talking next time about removing special victories entirely before we’re forced into fisticuffs over who gets to be Tassadar.

The best aspect of the game is probably how orders work. You have three types of orders, being build, research, and move, and in one round you’ll lay down a combination of four of these orders around the board. Where it gets tricky is that each order has to be assigned to a planet. Orders on a planet stack, so that when you place an order it sits on top of all orders already assigned to a planet. Also, orders are executed in a last-in-first-out manner, so that you have to plan backwards by placing the things that you want to do last down before the things you want to do first. What’s more, players take turns placing orders, so that your orders can get buried beneath someone else’s, so that the build order you desperately need won’t get executed until the jerk to the left has used his move order to attack you. It’s a wonderfully deep tactical exercise that’s responsible for the majority of the game’s success.

The game does reasonably well at stopping itself from focusing exclusively on an optimal first economic turn. Very tight unit limits and a reasonably flexible build system mean that a subpar opening does not necessarily lose you the game.

The game’s second major weakness, after victory conditions, comes from the way it handles technology. To research a technology, you have to spend a research action. You then must pay the cost of the technology. Technologies come in the form of cards that are placed into a deck of combat cards which you use to resolve battles. As technologies are only effective on at most a couple of types of unit, you’ll only want to research technologies for units you’re actually using, or risk diluting the power of your combat deck. What’s more, a large number of the technologies are just bad, requiring very specific scenarios in order to be effective or providing little advantage.

Some units (notably detectors and support units) are completely unable to do anything until you’ve bought them technologies. This doesn’t mean you’ll by them technologies – it means you’ll ignore the units. I’ve yet to build a Zerg Defiler or Zerg Queen, and I haven’t seen anyone bust loose a Templar or a Science Vessel yet either. The game seems to contemplate an ongoing cloaking vs detection metagame that never really emerges, largely because cloaking is not really useful even when there’s no detectors about.

Still, if you’re prepared to slice off large sections of the game as not worth your time, what remains is pretty decent. The three races seem reasonably balanced once you discard the special victory conditions, and there’s no doubt that what you’re playing is recognisably Starcraft.

One thing that seems a bit cheap is that there’s none of the characters or units from Brood War present; it’s a move that seems calculated entirely for the purpose of selling an expansion, and it’s just coldly commercial enough to feel annoying. Still, you’ll forgive the game’s makers each and every time you build an Ultralisk; deploying your top end units is just that satisfying.

The game works best with about four players, although the two player variant is not entirely without charm. Games go for about two hours at the four player size (once you’ve already sorted the pieces and learned the rules) and the rules are clear and require little interpretation. The game looks and feels gorgeous and it’s not hard to see where your money went once you examine the cornucopia of full-colour crap inside the box. It’s just a shame that the tech cards and the special victory conditions are so obviously and deeply rubbish.

Is the game worth $160? Probably not, unless you have a lot of friends who are going to want to play a lot of this game. If you’ve got the crowd, however, Starcraft: The Board Game might well be worth the investment.

Edit 14 January 2008: It turns out we've been playing one of the rules a little wrong, so in light of us now understanding it, I should say that Special Victory Conditions are not quite so extremely unbalanced as depicted above. They're still unbalanced, and the tech tree is still broken, but it's just a little bit better than we had thought.

StarCraft II

Just thought I'd be the five millionth fanboy on the web to draw your attention to StarCraft II.

Upcoming Game Releases - Australia

More to remind myself than anything else, here's forthcoming game releases over the next few months in Australia that look interesting.

Dec 12 - Myst (PSP)
The frustrating, shallow, and visually attractive point-n-click puzzler finds a natural home on Sony's frustrating, shallow and visually attractive handheld.

Jan 12 - Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (X360)
The Halo-esque first person shooter I got to try out at TGS. I don't own a 360 but this game's come closer to persuading me than anything yet.

Jan 17 - World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (PC)
Blizzard's MMOG expansion is probably going to sell considerably better than most full fledged games.

Feb 8 - Rule of Rose (PS2)
Despite all the mediocre reviews it's gotten, I still want to play this disturbing survival horror populated by evil 1930s teen and pre-teen girls. Can't believe that the OFLC let this one slip past, but I guess their loss is Australia's gain.

Feb 8 - Contact (DS)
It's what all the cool kids in the blogging circle seem to be playing, so I'm dying to try it to maintain my guru-like position at the top of the interweb's totem pole.

Feb 22 - EA Replay (PSP)
EA Replay is an anthology collection, but what an anthology collection! Ultima VII, Syndicate, all the Road Rash games, both Jungle and Desert Strike, Virtual Pinball, Mutant League Football, Budokan and the original Wing Commander. I'm almost willing to forgive EA their many sins just because of this collection. Almost.

To the best of my knowledge there's still no Australian release date for Final Fantasy XII (PS2), Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops (PSP), Elite Beat Agents (DS) or Elebits (Wii). Anyone care to tell me differently?

World of Warcraft CCG

For those who were remotely curious about the World of Warcraft collectible card game, here's the rundown:

1) It's pretty much just Upper Deck's putrid Versus system wrapped up in a new box. That is to say, Magic: The Gathering with none of the charm and frenetic pace.

2) The "loot cards" that you get in each pack are each redeemable for 100 loot points. Loot points can be spent to get "a range of items". In practice this translates to (a) desktop wallpaper, (b) screensavers, (c) sleeves for your card deck, (d) tabards for your WoW character, and (e) a trinket that lets your WoW character turn into an ogre at will. Tabards cost 2,000 points (20 booster packs of the CCG). The ogre trinket costs 25,000 points (250 booster packs). So, in short, don't get excited about the loot

3) The one cool thing about the game is the multiplayer. They're releasing "raid decks" soon, where basically (as I understand it) one player runs this overpowered pre-made raid deck, and a bunch of other players team up to take them down. Sounds interesting, but not worth buying into the game for.

Short review: the World of Warcraft card game isn't worth your time, even if you're a WoW fan. Avoid as though it were made of zombies.

WoW and Median Gamer Theory

Kill Ten Rats, which has been a bit light & fluffy for the past couple of months, has apparently been saving up all its energies for two excellent articles about why World of Warcraft is so successful.

"After the first two hot dog stands are on the beach, the best place for the next one is…actually, still next to the other two. Now you get that ~49% of the beach, the guy on the far side gets ~50%, and the poor schmuck stuck between you gets virtually no one unless there is a line. This explains why, despite EQ and its many clones, WoW and EQ2 set up in a very similar space. Guess where Vanguard and Crusade are aiming for? Is City of Heroes essentially EQ in tights? We have also seen EQ in space, and let’s not even talk about the Korean MMO market."

The articles are called Median Gamer Theory and Network Effects, both by Zubon, and are worth five minutes of your time if you're remotely interested in MMOGs.

Back In Azeroth

Did I mention that I'm playing World of Warcraft again? I'm logging on when RL friends are on, and we're hoping to start a small guild down the track, so now's a great time to roll Horde on the underpopulated Oceanic server of Dath'Remar. My main's a troll priest called Skordi. If you know me in real life, or knew Ukulkos from Mortal Wombats on Khaz'goroth, or just read this blog, drop in and say hi some time.

But I'm not on anywhere near as much as I used to, because (a) I've done it all before, (b) addiction sucks, and (c) Marvel Ultimate Alliance calls to me in a sweet siren song.