- Keen over at Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog posted his thoughts about the Aion beta weekend. While his sentiments echo others I've read, what caught my eye was his displeasure with the mage class in the game. Not that there is something wrong about the class, it's just that the Aion mage plays just like every other mage back to the beginning of time.
- I see where he is coming from. Some games, like Warhammer Online, tried to dress this up with unusual resources to balance, but is all comes down to spamming hot keys over and over again. So today I'm going to play Junior MMO Designer and create my own caster mechanic. And by create I mean outright steal.
- It will be no surprise based on how much fun I had with the class, but I want to make spellcasters play like the Warden from Lord of the Rings Online. For those of you who have not tried it, the warden fights through the Gambit system. You have three basic attack options: a spear thrust, a shield bash, and a shout. As you use each attack, a corresponding symbol is added to the Gambit line. Depending on the combination of symbols, a different gambit can then be launched with the special hot key. For instance, two spear symbols gets you the Deft Strike gambit (an increased damage attack) while a spear followed by a shield gives The Boot (an interrupt and stun). As your warden increases in level, the gambits increase in length until you can chain five symbols together for increasingly powerful abilities. The nice thing is that the gambits have a logical progression. If you know spear-shield is an interrupt, you find that spear-shield-spear is also an interrupt with extra attacks and spear-shield-spear-shield is an interrupt with more powerful attacks.
- This is exactly what how I want to play a spellcaster. Here are a few ideas for magic using character:
- Elementalist - Played almost exactly like the warden, I see the elementalist as a manipulation of arcane forces. Spells will be built with combinations of fire, water, earth, and air. Instead of each basic element acting like a small attack, spells will only be cast when the chain is built. Fire would be the offensive spell tree while earth would be defensive. Water give crowd control spells and air would be the utility tree.
Some simple spells might be:
- Fire-Fire for a standard attack,
- Air-Air for an interrupt,
- Water-Earth for a snare,
- Water-Earth-Water for an area-of-effect snare,
- and Fire-Earth-Fire-Earth-Fire as a meteor strike.
- Cleric/Priest/Holy Dude/Dude-ette - For healing classes, I would use a similar system, but slightly modified. The cleric will still build spells the same way by adding various energies to the spell. But instead of casting them with a single hot key, the caster has the choice of two casting options: positive and negative. Positive spells would be healing or defensive and negative would be harmful spells. For instance, casting one spell positively might be a heal-over-time for a party member while the same spell cast negatively would be a damage-over-time to an enemy.
- Runemaster - This finally idea is a little more off-the-wall than the warden template, but could be interesting nonetheless. For a runemaster, I envision spells built from individual runes. And instead of these rune words getting longer as a character levels, new spells will be built from an ever increasing variety of available runes. If you are familiar with the Ultima series, you might recognize where I'm going here. Just for flavor, you could change the rune into words of magic which the character would speak to cast a spell. The more I type, the more I'm starting to like this idea.
- There you have it, three ways to buff up the MMO spellcaster. I look forward to your comments telling me exactly which game already has this system and why it sucks. Or you could just tell me it's stupid on principle. I'm fine with that.
© 2009 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
If you're reading this on a site other than Bullet Points, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.
- For the last few years, my wife and I have attended the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. While we go primarily to see the authors' panels, there is no avoiding the large number of bookstore tents scattered around the UCLA campus. I take a large courier bag with me because I know she will find several books that are too good to pass up. I sigh and roll my eyes and carry that bag around until the end of the day. This year though, I was the one with the giant stack of books, and all but one were from Hard Case Crime. My very understanding wife did not roll her eyes once.
- From that stack, I first dove into Two For The Money by Max Allan Collins. I read his The First Quarry previously and knew I wanted more. Actually, Two For The Money is a compilation of two prior books, Bait Money and Blood Money. As the second book is the sequel to the first, they fit well together, though there is a noticeable style difference between the two. Collins' prose is spare in both cases. The words hurry to get out of the plot's way, which is fitting for this type of novel. That is not a bad thing since the plot is a lot of fun.
- Two For The Money is a story about an thief name Nolan who is getting on in years. They have been long years too since he's been avoided the Chicago mobster who has it in for him. As Bait Money begins, Nolan's cover has been blown and he needs to make one large score to even things with the Mafia. Only since no one will work with him anymore, Nolan has to pull the job with three inexperienced youngsters from another generation. And because Blood Money picks up right after, there's not a lot I can say about it.
- Nolan, an admitted pastiche of Richard Stark's Parker, is a lot more likable than that description would imply. He's might have been a tough guy before, the circumstances at the beginning of the book have set him on his heels. He can't just push around people like the comic book collecting Jon, his new criminal partner. Since they are from different generations, Jon and Nolan don't have much in common. But Nolan becomes an unconventional father figure for the younger man, an act that softens the tough guy even more.
- While I enjoyed his later novel more, there is a lot to like in Two For The Money. Max Allan Collins' work here is enjoyable and I look forward to more.
© 2009 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
If you're reading this on a site other than Bullet Points, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.
- After a drought of MMO blogging, I thought I would talk about travel times in MMO games. At least I was until I saw that Syp from Bio Break had knocked this subject out of the park. I'll try to form a few coherent thoughts anyway. /sigh
- The world should be big - One of the things that attracts me to fantasy games is the size of the world. There should be wide open plains, sweeping vistas, huge mountain ranges, vast seas, and I'm running out of adjectives but you get the picture. Fantasy is not about doing things small. I want to play a hero of gigantic proportions and I want a world big enough for to deserve me. Playing the hero in a tiny little sandbox does not feel very epic.
World of Warcraft earned its theme park designation not just because of the guided experience, but because of their use of forced perspectives to make the world feel larger than it actually is. Azeroth feels big even though it really is not. Flying mounts in the expansions showed us exactly how small those worlds really are.
- Exploration should be an adventure - The reason a game needs a big world is so that there is something to explore. Richard Bartle was not wrong when he listed exploration as one of the four game categories. The size of the world dictates how many mysteries it can hold. Travel is an important part of exploration, so distances are the limiting factor.
I understand there is a limited amount of hand-tailored content that can be placed into a game. One can design a nearly infinite world procedurally if you want to, but that would be just as pointless as too little content. People want to explore, they want to find something neat, and they want the journey to be a challenge. An infinite canvas is not a challenge, it's a chore. Too small a world, due to physical size or reduce travel options, expends exploration content too quickly.
- Travel powers should be a reward - One of the reasons I wanted to play a mage in World of Warcraft was because of the ability to teleport around the world. The game didn't just give you the spell either. You had to travel to a city and purchase the spell for each potential destination. Nowadays there are so many options for teleporting, most people actually refuse my offer to summon a portal.
When traveling abilities become commonplace, they lose a sense of wonder. Just look at gripes about Everquest's Plane of Knowledge to understand that fast travel options change the dynamics of a game. Travel powers should feel epic. They can only feel that way if they are limited and if the world is large enough to care about them.
- Travel time should not be a punishment - While all of the above can be dismissed as fuzzy nostalgia for the old days of gaming, I hope I redeem myself here. Many times, games use travel times as a punishment. They're just stringing you along. And with a monthly subscription, they're charging you for every minute you spend on some mystical taxi. There is no reason to design a quest that sends you across the world to accomplish a single objective and then back again. That's not adventure, that's an errand. And it is a deliberate waste of time. Changing this one problem would make limited travel options much more palatable.
- And that's it really. Travel can be good, unless it's bad. It all comes down to the developer acting responsible. Speeding up travel does not correct a bad design, it just masks it.
© 2009 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
If you're reading this on a site other than Bullet Points, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.
- For as much as I love hearing his podcast, Shut Up, We're Talking, Darren from Common Sense Gamer posts the strangest things on his personal blog. The last couple of days, though, he's gone completely off his rocker and it's all over a horse. A rather expensive horse.
- The game in question is Runes of Magic and the horse is ten dollars.
- Does that shock you too? Would you balk at paying that much for jumble of electrons and light in your computer? Would it help if it was seven dollars or maybe five? Would it change your decision if you knew that all normal mounts expired after a certain duration but a $10 mount is permanent? Or how about if I told you that you could create a character, shop at the in-game store, and ride your horse right into the tutorial area? What if I told you that you could play the entire game for free but only had to pay real money for convenience like this horse?
- Tobold has the right of it when he says that money has differing values for different people. So for Darren, ten dollars maybe more than he's willing to stomach. For myself, considering I think nothing of paying fifty dollars to purchase a game then spend fifteen dollars a month to subscribe, ten dollars as a one-time purchase sounds like a good deal. Of course, the horse is tied to a specific character so players with many alts might think twice about purchasing mounts for each.
- Just as there is a decision to make about RMT vs. Subscriptions, there are a multitude of variations between RMT models. This is the reason why Dungeons & Dragons Online is allowing both RMT and subscriptions. There is no reason to drive away the audience just because they don't like your pricing model. Giving multiple ways to pay might help alleviate that sticker shock.
© 2009 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
If you're reading this on a site other than Bullet Points, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.
- I haven't been able to spend as much time in Age of Conan this week for various reasons, but was able to make a couple forays into Conall's Valley in Cimmeria. It seems I'm still in the honeymoon phase with the game since I'm still having a great time whenever I do log in.
- The zone is beautiful. I know I said that about Tortage, but Funcom has really captured the barbaric north here. The villages are all huts with a couple wooden buildings and log palisades with muddy paths between them. Then when you step into Conall's Valley, you literally have to follow a path down the hill, past moose and wolves and rabbits, into a valley. And it's not just a ramp to change elevations. There are switchbacks and log bridges where the path has fallen away. But the most beautiful and terrifying sight is just east of the cleverly named Cimmerian Settlement. Just past the wall seperating the Cimmerians from their Vanir enemies is a field of corpses skewered on pikes. This grotesquerie hits you right in the face with the brutality you see in this conflict.
- Quests here are the standard "Kill Ten Rats," "Collect Ten Rat Tails," and "Fed-Ex" style. However the story dresses all of these up real pretty so you won't care as much. They do tend to mix multiple objectives in the same quest which makes them a little more interesting. The last quest I completed last night had me kill ten Vanir guardsmen, kill a specific Vanir supply master, and collect a supply crate from the camp. Nothing unusual but themed nicely.
- I've quickly gone from level 21 when I left Tortage to my current 26. That's over the course of only two good play sessions and a couple stray hours here and there. Either the early leveling curve is a little low or I'm burning through content too fast. We'll see if the level 30 speed bump is still there as other people haved warned.
- There are, of course, other lands to explore and I have several breadcrumb quests leading me there. But now that I've found the next outpost, the just-as-cleverly named Mysterious Glade, I want to see what else I can do to lay waste to the Vanir invaders.
© 2009 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
If you're reading this on a site other than Bullet Points, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.
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