Civ4 interruption -- a "modder's dream" or needless complication?

Well, I've got Civ4. I have to say, I've been with the Civ series since day one (and Sid Meier games before that). Love the series. Along comes #4. Two things:
1) I'm impressed by the gameplay;
2) I'm utterly underwhelmed by the "editor", which in fact isn't an (as in, one) editor, but multiple pieces that have to all be used to create anything worthwhile.

Civ3 had an editor "in one place" -- aka, one interface to randomly generate maps, tweak the maps, tweak game rules, etc. One can argue about how "powerful" Civ3's editor was, but it did provide an easy-to-use tool with a large range of "power" to the majority of players.

Civ4 has... well, there is no easy place to go to just randomly generate a map and tweak it. You have to go through the process of starting a new game, then go into the World Builder, make changes there, and then save it there. Want to randomly generate a different terrain map? Exit out to the main menu, go through the "start new game" process again, and re-enter the world builder. That is to say, many extra steps to accomplish something that was simple in the prior game's editor.

Want to edit rules? Civ3, one editor, go in and check it off. Civ4? Well, that depends. Some are in XML files, so you'd best learn how to be careful in editting XML (not difficult, but a few second's thought realises that not all, and certainly not most, people are familiar with it). Some are in Python files, now requiring you to go find a Python editor and learn how to edit those files. So now we're at three different programs and places to achieve something basic, like altering a few basic rules and making a new map. Civ3? One editor, one place, simple. Civ4? Multiple programs required, specialised skill required (the bulk of the masses are not familiar with XML or Python editing). And that isn't it for Civ4, since neither the Python script, XML, or World Builder still does everything -- for the last bits, you'll need the FOURTH part of the CIv4 modding capacities, which is to be released sometime in 2006 as an SDK (Software Development Kit). So now, to do something simple and quick, like toss off a random map, tweak it, customize a couple of rules, alter the color of your country's borders and such, you have to: go into the game, randomly create a map through the new game process, go into the world builder from there, decide if the random world is something you want to work with... (deep breath), if it isn't, you have to go back out to the main menu and repeat again until you get a basic map that's a good "starting point" for your customizing of it. Okay. Now that we've gone in and out of the new game process several dozen times, just to get a basic map that we'd like to tweak, we can place things in the World Builder and alter the terrain. Fine. Now I'd like to tweak the color -- oops, can't do that from the World Builder or any program provided with the game. So, open Textpad, a basic way to edit XML (though not everyone knows that), and then go on a hunting expedition to figure out for yourself which of the very many XML files in the various game directories are actually the ones you need (good luck, there's nothing included with the game to help you at all with this). Find it, edit the XML specific to country coloring, resave. (deep breath). Now I'd like to tweak a few rules about gameplay -- hm. Do I look in the XML files, or the Python files? Oops. Gotta get a Python editor first. Go find that. Download it. (deep breath). Well, there's no help in the game to say "these rules are in these files", so it's time to start rooting around through literally dozens and dozens and dozens of files to find the right parts of the singular file(s) I need to open to alter. (deep breath) Okay. So several hours later of random searching and going through the process above, and now I've located what I need to change. Now, I'm familiar with XML, but have no experience with Python, so... how do I alter something if it's in the Python scripts? Hm. Now I need to go self-teach myself how to read and edit Python. Fast-forward to ... oh, forget it. This is beyond ridiculous.
Do I want a lot of power to edit/mod the game? Sure. But the labor required just to learn how to START -- learn XML; learn Python; learn whatever is going to be required for the SDK; go through the four different stages of creating ONE mod or a few minor changes -- is assinine. Civ3 wasn't the best editor in the world, but it put a lot of power in a simple-to-use place and let the neophyte (read: most people don't have a reason to know XML and Python and the SDK languages) create maps and tweak rules easily. It followed the oldest rule of software development: create something that combines depth and capacity and filters it through an easy-to-use interface. The Civ4 rule is exactly the opposite.

I've loved this series and its easy-access to the masses, both in the game and the modding. The "holier than thou" attitude on most of the Civ boards (quote: "if you can't be bothered to learn all this, you don't deserve the game"; "go find a baby's game"; and other enlightened pieces of self-absorbed arrogance) is so disgusting and counter-productive that it's brought the worst of the online MMORPG communities into the Civ communities, and that's a terrific shame. Here's a clue: not everyone has the hours required to learn new skills and programming languages/skills just for a game, because they want to do something so overwhelming as generate random maps and make a few quick tweaks. Nothing is quick about the modding in Civ4, nor is it simple, nor is it geared for "the most access for the most people". Modding in Civ4 is the exclusive domain of those who already have all those skills or have an abundance of time (and desire) to learn all of it. And that's a shame. I'd rather a game that offered 75% of the power and capacity for the editor that in doing so opened up editing to more people, than have the arrogant elitists the only ones who will be doing so. It's a shame, and it runs contrary to the philosophy of the prior Civ games, which was to bring the ultimate game (in all respects) to the most people.

Civ 2 and Civ 3 still sit on my hard drive, and they're still played. That's a testament to the strength of those games. I never considered returning the games, nor haunting forums to complain about things. Civ3 made mistakes, but they were rapidly fixed and they weren't fundamental to the overall philosophy -- the games were still time-sucking turn-based masterpieces, with editors that the masses could easily get into and crank out maps and tweak rules for fun.

Civ4 is the first Civ game I have ever considered returning. The abandoning of the philosophy of giving the most power to the most people, including and especially the ability to mod/tweak the game's map and rules, is a complete stab-in-the-back for a lot of us who have been here since the beginning. And it's a profound shame.

I've interrupted my commentary on MMORPGs, but Civ is the one line of games that has never failed in any aspect, even across multiple generations of the game and literally more than a decade of time. This is the first time that they've specifically released "editing capacities" that are contrary to the philosophy of opening the game up to the most players. And it's a shame.

Great Games for Roleplayers

Or, to rephrase the title: l33t-speakers need not appy.

Well, it's Tuesday, and the Gamer thought he'd run down a bunch of games and hit the highlights of why these games are worth your time, effort, and subscription fee. Might through in a few that aren't, and why.

The Worthies:
1) Asheron's Call 1. There's so much that AC1, which was released in 1999, does that the so-called "modern" games don't do or even try to do. Combat in modern MMORPGs is basically click on target to attack, click buttons that have specific abilities tied to them, repeat, wash, rinse... Combat in Asheron's Call 1 was a specific and constantly involving thing. Do you want your shield to count as blocking? You, the player, will have to constantly maneuver yourself so the shield stays between you and your opponents. Fighting? Walk up and attack, but keep maneuvering yourself to keep the shield up, and you have to choose whether to hit high, low, or medium-height and how much power to put into the swing. These are important factors, since some creatures are weaker in the leg than the stomach, etc; and how much force you use translates into how much damage you do and how often you can attack. This a system that requires the player to be involved in the combat and to think while actually fighting -- unlike the others, where it's just stand still and bash buttons over and over again.
Further, AC1 out of the box has full seasonal models, not just random weather effects (and many, like WoW, don't even have any weather effects at all). Seasons change, the weather changes with it. Snow piles up, making travel harder; rains fall, causing floods. A believable environment.
Quests? The raw tonnage is breathtaking. The one AC1 website has maps and info for over 686 dungeons -- and that's just dungeons! Further, the monthly events of AC1 are dynamic -- villages burn and are rebuilt over time; NPCs die; quests disappear and are replaced by others. The world actually CHANGES.
There's far more to it than just those things, too. Scavenging -- collecting scraps and loot to break down into the basic material components, then compile those scraps and apply them to items in order to improve or reinforce them. No zoning, except into specific dungeons -- the outer world is one vast place, and "vast" is the key. Exploration is ample, environments change and blend into one another (as they should to be realistic in feel and appearance). The different cultures are fully realised, even visually -- architecture varies by what culture's town you're in, for instance.

2) Dark Ages of Camelot (DAOC). Summation: weather, awesomely realised, complete with drifting fog; vast worlds (three realms that correlate to Norse, Celtic, and Avalonian (camelot) myths) for exploration, all fully realised for your fun and enjoyment; architecture, class types, and races are all realm-specific and appropriate to the myth behind the realms. Combat is not as specifically involving as AC1, but it works; there are skills that work in and out of combat. DAOC brings something that AC1 doesn't, and that's the ability to craft spells and items and to customize those creations. Most modern MMORPGs are an utter failure when it comes to crafting, because you can't customize your creations and wind up making the exact same item that's been made 80 trillion times by everyone else. In DAOC, you can custom everything down to the raw coloration of your creation, and even apply dyes to color items you didn't build but bought instead. Quests are ample, as are "tasks" -- in most MMORPGs, there are quests, and the bulk of those are "kill" quests, since creating quests that just have you go kill a number of creatures is the easiest to do. DAOC separates "kill" missions from other quests and calls them "tasks" -- which also means that the Quests you can get are more involved and involving, deeper, and while they may incorporate fighting, it's all in the pursuit of the larger quest. This is a distinction that none of the others make, and it lets DAOC's devs build a wealth of detail into the quests while throwing out "tasks" in abundance to keep folks busy. It's a great system. They also update the graphics regularly, and not just in a minor way. The latest graphics update to the system was huge and revamped almost every aspect of the graphics and made them very much competitive in the modern world of MMORPGs (and frankly look a LOT better than the glazed anime look of WoW). And the biggest and most unique thing of DAOC is its Realm-versus-Realm combat -- the realms connect in geographic areas. These areas are where the Realms are at war, where the players fight one another in mass combat. The RvR is fantastic and interactive: you can take a keep and defend it and use the environment and pots of boiling oil and so forth to do so. It's highly interactive and amazingly fun and provides new skills and rewards for participating in the "defense of your realm". Many have attempted to copy the formula, notably WoW, but none, especially WoW, have suceeded.

3) Horizons. Now, this is a big *. The questing side, the content side, is haphazard and weakly put together for all but one racial type of character. If you play a Dragon, there's a great game here, but if you play a non-Dragon (humanoid) race, it's weak. Despite that, Horizons has something done flawlessly: crafting. The crafting offers an amazing breadth of possibilities, all done so in a neat interface that makes the actions of crafting easily done. And that's the perfect mix: a deep crafting system mated to a simple system for doing it, resulting in an enormous range of things for players to do (build equipment, create foodstuffs, etc). There are a wide variety of ways to customize each and every construction, from using colored materials and dye to achieve specific "looks" to using special "techniques" to infuse your creation with special characteristics you choose. The results are vast and totally customized -- and therefore you aren't locked into the "build what everyone else builds" like you are in WoW and Everquest2. But Horizons goes further: each player can build his own house, or help others build theirs, and the process and result of that building is fully realised in the world. You can build bridges and other constructions that remain in the world (unless someone destroys them). And Horizons integrated that construction capability into their questing. A for-instance: one quest led to a great chasm that separated the known lands from an unknown land. Crossing that chasm required players to work together to build the bridge, but also to defend the players doing the building. Once it was built, the new land was opened -- but that led to the "release" onto the known areas of the races that were cooped up in those other lands! A terrific use of player abilities, which resulted in an array of consequences -- a very dynamic structure for questing, for player involvement. The game lacks overall in the intelligence of its questing design (it's very, very hard to figure out what you're supposed to do at any given time or how to find a path to follow, because the peoples of the world aren't very helpful and the quests they do give, if they do, aren't always phrased in a way as to be intelligible or followable.). But crafting and player involvement around crafting is flawless and should be the example to others.

Next time, more games that are worth a look, and a short summary of others that aren't.

EQ2, faillings, continued

Everquest 2 is my special pal, the one who gets the most criticsm because of its pedigree. The original Everquest was and remains a fantastic RPG filled with the awe of exploration and the dangers of learning what's "out there". So by calling the new game "Everquest 2", the developers specifically leave themselves open to that comparison... and more imporantly, set up their own quality "bar" to reach. And they haven't reached it.

The original Everquest offered up a world of creatures for us to look at, talk to, and fight with/against. Those creatures were all individuals, unless they were near each other or within "earshot", at which point you might face a piling-on of the creature you targetted and all his buddies who were nearby. But the design was the point: it's believable. You can see a skeleton standing there, and you can see two more that are no more than twenty feet away. It is reasonable, based on what you see in the environment, to assume that, if you run up and hit the first skeleton, the other two will come up and help out their kin. That's called "learning from the environment". The game didn't tell you that information -- you, the player, were able to walk around the world and learn from what you saw and make tactical decisions based on experience. Now, you might be able to use a bow or a spell or something to lure away just that first skeleton, but if your shot fails, you very well may face the whole trio, and you know you can't handle that... hence the danger, the excitement, of: learning from the environment; thinking about the situation; and being able to choose for yourself a course of action that incorporates many different possibilities (take a shot and hope to draw away the one target; hit the one target up-close and run backwards, hoping to draw him off; hit the one target, hit him enough to knock him down, and then run, hoping to escape the other two; etc.). The environment gives you that option. The creatures are separated believably in the wild, and they move around -- leaving it to the player to take that bear while he's with three others, or wait and track him and take him when he's "out of earshot and vision" of the others. Could a group of players do something together? Sure. They just have different math -- they could take all three bears at once, and get the benefits from not having to consider all those other options that a solo player does (wait, draw, etc). The gaming environment, the world, creates the situations but it is left to the players to interpret how to respond and in what numbers. And the responses, the choices, are myriad, and often involve the capacity for the player to do things that the developers might not have thought of -- climbing up on a treelimb and shooting at the skeleton from that perch, where he can't respond to you, etc.

Now we get Everquest 2, the most over-scripted, linear, force-feed info at you and make most of your choices for you game out there. It isn't simplistic, as in World of Warcraft; but it's just as egregious, since it does everything for you AND does it in a ridiculously complicated way.

Take the creatures from the examples above. In Everquest 1, creatures had their "social auras", the area around them that represents their ability to shout and make noise to get the attention of others. Overlap those auras, and you've got a mob forming.

In Everquest 2, it's all handed to you. Creatures aren't individuals at all, they're all "mobs" -- even if it's just one creature. There's no "social aura" really, because when you click on a creature, it's automatically identified for you as individual or group and so forth. The game mechanism TELLS you everything, so you don't have to THINK about anything, you don't learn anything from exploring and paying attention to creatures patterns, etc. There aren't any patterns to learn. Worse, that one creature you see on this side of a hill? When you click on him, it will light up and identify him as part of a group -- meaning, you can't see the others, and this individual can't logically shout or reach the others because they're out of sight and out of earshot, BUT the game mechanic has artificially linked this individual to all those others. So when you hit him, REGARDLESS of your action, you will be FORCED to take all those linked to him. There is careful thinking, no evaluating the environment, none of the learning capacity in Everquest 1 that made it realistic. Here, you hit that one creature, and his buddies who are over the hill and out of sight and out of earshot will come running... not because it makes sense within the gameworld and the environment, but because the developers decided to make it so and put in a game mechanic that artificially requires that to happen. Is that immersive, does it contribute to a believable environment, does it offer a realistic and flexible environment where players learn and players make the decisions about how to approach the content offered? Nope. EQ2 does the exact opposite. It force-feeds the "mob design" on you, creating such idiocy as described above; it channels you, requiring you to only go to "this set of places only", and once you've levelled to a certain point, now you're able to go to the next "set of places" -- and these sets of places are very limited in number and over-designed so that you do the same things repetitiously. EQ2 weaves a host of game mechanics that removes from the player that most important of things, the ability to explore and learn by paying attention; and the ability of the player to come up with solutions to problems that the developers might not have come up with. In EQ2, you will NEVER do that, because the mob-design system prevents it -- you can only take this mob with a certain set number of possible actions, period, end of story, don't dare think for yourselves like you could in the first EQ or almost all of the other games out there.

More insult comes, when in their latest "re-tiering" (aka redoing the power/difficulty levels in the world of those mobs), they put "solo" targets (targets that are specifically labelled as being able to be done by solo players) in the midst of "heroic" targets (targets that are specifically labelled as being not able to be done by solo players), thereby being able to claim that they have solo content (yup, it's right there) while ruining that content and making it undoable. But more egregious than that is the fact that the language you have to speak just to describe the game demonstrates how horrible the "mob" system is. Solo targets versus non-solo targets? We shouldn't even be talking that sort of language in an RPG (MMO or not). The environment should make sense, the creatures should have things they do and therefore paths they follow as they move around, and each target should be itself. Have a place you want to make undoable to an individual player by himself? Make a nice campfire, put fifteen individuals around it -- you won't be able to pull without getting everyone's attention, and it would make sense to use other players in a group to take the campfire area. But then again -- look at what we just did. We looked at a situation, and we, the players, came to conclusions based on the environment. How does EQ2 do it? You click on any of the creatures, and it tells you "group mob only" (aka "heroic"). End of thought. End of trying to think of ways to handle the problem. The game mechanic just defined and limited your world for you.

And that's terrible game design. It runs counter to what made games like AC1, EQ1, Dark Ages of Camelot, and even World of Warcraft fun and believable in terms of the environment: the PLAYER runs around the world, learns from the environment, and comes up with the solutions by thinking about the situations. In EQ2, the developers have already limited your options by the mob design, and then craft the environment to to accentuate the mob design, and they tell you that they have divided the world into "solo" and "heroic" (aka, non-soloable) targets for you and make the game rigidly along those lines.

They can keep it. And while I would have liked to continue playing EQ1, I'm making my choices about what subscriptions to keep open -- and it no longer makes sense to pay Sony for the Station Access, so I can play all the games I like, when those games are now only one: EQ1. So end of the Station Access account.

What am I playing? Asheron's Call 1 and Dark Ages of Camelot. Either of these games is so superior to EQ2 in terms of a consistent, believable, non-force-fed gameworld as to be incomparable. What might I play? I keep hearing too many interesting things about Saga of Ryzom, I might give that a shot. But I can tell you flatly, EQ2 will not be in the playing mix -- it's over in the gather-dust area of my shelves, with WoW. Not unless they scrap the moronic, force-fed, artificially-limiting "mob design" they're using ... and I don't see that happening. They're not interested in making an immersive, believable, consistent world -- they're design philosophy is very limited and limiting and linear.

World of Warcraft, or how not to make a game

Part Two.

In the last post, I lamented the lack of depth and the oversimplified game mechanics in World of Warcraft, today's most successful (in terms of subscription numbers) MMORPG. To repeat one point, I loathe any game mechanic that intrudes into the game environment and therefore anything that directly contradicts the integrity and immersiveness of that environment.

World of Warcraft was built to be easily accessible for the casual player and the players who don't have six hours at a time to slog through the time-sink parts of online games. To that end, the first 50+ character levels and the quests/environment around them are exceedingly friendly to the player looking to kill an hour, to "play through a few quests", and such. But what happens at the "Endgame", when the character levels reach the high-point, the maximum level? The game suddenly becomes very unfriendly to those very players, as it becomes the same RAID/enforced-grouping game as WoW's predecessors (or, specifically, like EQ1, since other games have avoided the RAID=endgame trap). So we have a game that encourages so-called "casual" or solo play... right up to the endgame, when suddenly it is very UNFRIENDLY to those very same people. By its own construction, the game offers nothing to the very players who it targetted and sculpted the first 50+ levels for. Hence the huge numbers of people who play the game and leave at the same point for the same reason: the game gets excessively boring, and offers nothing to the very player-type it encourages for the first 90% of the game.

It gets boring not only for the split-personality design, but also because of the reasons mentioned in Part 1: the failure of Blizzard to support the game with regular content and game-changing updates, so as to keep the gameworld fresh and dyamic; the failure of Blizzard to release additional expansions in its first year, made worse by the fact that, so far at least, the only official word about expansions is that they're working on one and that it won't be out until "sometime in late 2006 or 2007".

It's ironic that the game company that was so brilliant in creating the gameworld for WoW (and building it in the Warcraft strategy games) and equally brilliant in creating Diablo2, a phenomenal-selling multiplayer game (with very little RPG in it)... is doing so poorly from a creative and supportive side with their game. Yes, they've got truckloads of money from their subscription base. Never said they didn't. My point is, by the standards I've listed here and in part 1, the game is a failure. That doesn't mean that they can't turn that around, but they've done nothing to indicate that they plan to do anything to "right these wrongs", so to speak.

To repeat the criteria: an immersive world where game mechanics do not intrude into the game world artificially, and where the environment encourages the players to explore, investigate, and work through mysteries and plotlines FOR THEMSELVES, without just handing all the clues to the players and requiring no real effort to "figure it out" for themselves. Creating dynamic content -- content that lets players actually impact and affect the game-world, as in Horizon's excellent crafting side (built entire structures, like bridges and housing, and demolish said structures and use these capacities WITHIN the questing/plotline content); or in Asheron's Call 1, where the live events in the past have, through player actions, changed the terrain, burned down villages, etc. Creating constant dynamic content -- the two keys being "constant" and "dynamic", so that the world is constantly changing (and therefore believable) and stays challenging... and isn't, therefore, always the same world, same quests, same everything, each and every time a player plays the game.

I've re-upped my subscription for one month at a time, twice, since leaving the game -- once in May, once in August. The game never changes -- play through as a new character, it's the same experience, same static quests, same static content over and over again. Play as my higher-level characters from the original few months -- and it's the same "run this instance" over and over again, RAID, yawn... There won't be another return to the game. Ten months of release, and the quests are the exact same, the NPCs are exactly the same, buildings and such are the same (and many unfinished or still "clones" of one another), quests are the same, repeat, repeat, repeat...

I played through EQ1 for literally YEARS and never got as bored as I did with WoW in the space of two months. Kept coming back after I finally let my subscription lapse, and it was still fun, still a great time exploring... because they had kept adding expansions and content all the time. Ditto for Asheron's Call 1 ...

But WoW, WoW is just the most unchanging, static, oversimplified game I've ever played. Like crafting? WoW offers crafting -- just oversimplified, to the "find resources, stand in right place, click combine" variety, with no chance to personalize what you make (which Horizons offered out-0f-the-box, which EQ1 and AC1 offered years ago, etc. etc.). Questing? Hope you like doing the same quests over and over again, regardless of what class you play -- the dialogue is stilted and short, it never changes, and it's only offered when there's a specific purpose to it. There's no dialogue that fills out the gameworld and makes it feel "real" - like talking to a fisherman about the weather, best places to fish, etc. And so forth. No quests that require you to think or figure out something -- it's all "go to this place, kill this, recover this item, come back". Games that came years before WoW were already doing dynamic scripting for quests -- but again, being dynamic wasn't WoW's point. Being as simplified, repetitive, and offering a chance to bash things, including other players, in a quick way was. And to that end, they got all the l33t-speaking, juvenile deliquents in the world to come and play their game.

Roleplayers of the world, rejoice. There are actual RPGs in the MMORPG world, like Asheron's Call, or even Dark Ages of Camelot, for you to play and enjoy -- WoW is simply NOT one of them.

WoW, or how the misuse terrific potential

I've castigated Everquest 2 for its many failings in the past few postings, so now let's turn a critical (and unsparing) eye on the current subscription-champion, World of Warcraft.

Let's throw out some qualifiers right away. Subscription numbers are NOT reflective of a game's quality. The best game in the world could have the lowest subscription numbers, and the worst piece of junk could draw in the most players. If you think subscription numbers = quality, stop reading.

And: I played World of Warcraft in Beta, and I played it for several months after release (what I like to call "extended paying Beta"), and then again in May and then August of this year. The complaints I had in Beta continued to be the same complaints I had in May and ultimately were still the same complaints in August. I've played every one of the major releases and far too many smaller specialty MMORPGs.

The potential: World of Warcraft comes after several Warcraft strategy games. What that means is, the MMORPG comes to the table with a pre-existing lore and story -- and a very deep, rich lore. The chance to roleplay (those last three letters in MMORPG, which are the most underused letters of all) in that setting was very exciting. They didn't need to create tons and tons of content from scratch -- they had a fleshed-out world just waiting to be realised.

Debatable: graphics. Blizzard chose to go with a glazed anime-style to their graphics. While it does let a wide range of computers run the game, it also leaves a lot to the individual's taste. Personally, I think the graphics are no better than, say, Asheron's Call at its release -- and AC1 was released in 1999. Something like Dark Ages of Camelot has better graphics -- and it was released several years ago. It's a question of individual taste -- lots of folks like it. I'm not going to judge the game based on this issue. For me, if the graphics convey the world in depth, and these do, then I'll keep playing -- the gameplay, the depth, the lore, the roleplaying is why I play. Graphics are the tool to render the world and realise the visualization -- okay graphics mated with phenomenal depth is preferable to me over the latest/greatest graphics mashed onto a poor, underdeveloped world.

The biggest complaint I have with WoW is simply that Blizzard brought nothing, literally nothing, new to the table. Is that automatically a problem? Nope. It's only a problem if they take existing conventions and game mechanics and don't do anything with them. In this case, Blizzard took all those existing conventions (questing, getting experience for killing and for doing quests, crafting, exploring) and game mechanics (camera use, creatures in the world, etc.) and dumbed them all down. Now, this is sheer genius in terms of creating a game to bring in the maximum dollars and the most subscribers. And they did this with an amazing polish. But what they created was the ultimate in MMORPG-Lite. By dumbing down all the mechanics and conventions, to maximize its "availability" to the most people out there, they spoiled it. Part of the point of any RPG, be it MMORPG or standalone or pen-and-paper, is to learn for oneself what's there -- to explore, to talk to the NPCs/PCs in the world to learn things. To be immersed not just visually (which it does achieve) but in a believable world. Here EQ2 does a good thing. Those NPCs in the world who have a quest to give animate and wave and attempt to get a player's attention -- by doing things that are believable and consistent within the world (waving, talking). How does Blizzard handle it? Again, their focus wasn't immersion, nor maintaining the consistent "believability" of its world. Blizzard put giant yellow ? over the heads of any NPC who had anything to say that was doable by a player. Which mechanic facilitates the immersion in a believable world? It surely isn't giant yellow ? hanging in the air.

But it's worse than just that. That's one example. Every game mechanic was similarly simplified. The purpose of the simplifications? To remove from the player the need to do anything for themselves, to actually learn from the world. In WoW, once the NPC gives its little fixed speech, that's it -- it won't talk again, unless it has another quest to give. No fleshing out of the people, no talking about the weather or how the snows have made it hard, etc. Here's your quest, that's it. It's totally focused on "do your task" mentalities. Does the player have to, say, figure out for himself that he has to talk to people in order to learn things? Nope. The game mechanic intrudes into the world to do it for you, because (according to Blizzard) people want it as easy as possible. No, Blizzard, not all people do. Some of us actually want to roleplay, to have to think for ourselves, instead of having the game shove each step at us visually and intrusively.

Another key to MMORPG life is the constant addition of content, preferably dynamic (aka changing/changeable content) content. Blizzard has just now reached its patch 1.7, which implies 7 content updates. Everquest 2 in that time has released more than fifteen huge content updates, including a complete revamping of every skill and spell in the game, as well as several online expansions and one retail expansion. Dark Ages of Camelot has pushed more content in the same timeperiod, and has another retail expansion out; Asheron's Call 1 has done several live events (with content that players actually interact with and generally content that allows players to have a lasting effect (dynamic content) on the world) and has had one commercial expansion in that same time period. What's the point here? Blizzard entered the MMORPG genre and has failed magnificently at the most basic of aspects of the genre: supporting the game and expanding the game in a dynamic sense. And, coincidentally, their attempt at "live events", which they make much fanfare about, have been adding Santa Clause to the cities (um, Santa doesn't exist in World of Warcraft???), or Easter Eggs (huh? Inconsistent with world lore), and of course... a fishing contest! Yes, that's their idea of dynamic content. What's some other folks ideas of dynamic content? Well, let's see. Asheron's Call's live events have deformed terrain, burned villages, and generally altered the storyline and geography several times over. That would be "players affecting the world". What's Horizons idea of dynamic content? Letting players build housing, bridges, etc and demolish the same that is fully realised in the world. What was WoW's idea again? Oh, yes, a fishing contest, or hiding Easter Eggs, or a travelling Faire with some wack-a-mole games. Hm. Wonder which one will appeal to the roleplayers of the world.

The Gamer will continue the WoW commentary on Monday, in part 2 of this ongoing commentary.

Playstyles, Game design, and how to create a world for everyone

This time, let's again focus on EQ2. The so-called casual player, who for whatever reason, be it the various "real-world" things that affect game-playing time (like wife, children, job, etc.), or simply by choice (preferring it), simply doesn't have or like to put the time into forming a group (which can take a lot of time itself) or doesn't like the fact that, all too often, you spend the time (often a half-hour or more) to get a group together only to discover you're "working with" a bunch of l33t-speaking idiots or selfish morons who think only of themselves. These players clash with the RAID-centric and group-centric players, who seem to be the current (and original) focus of SOE with regards to EQ2. Or, I should say, they don't clash -- too many group-players bash casual/solo players, often mindlessly. I've seen far too many forums with too much mindless, childish bashing of one style or another, one player or another, and usually without a single cohesive thought in the diatribes.

What is the solo player interested in? Content. Questing. Story. Character development, in ways that includes the stat-development (attributes, skills) but more importantly in the development of actual CHARACTER instead of STATISTIC. Exploring. Learning the environment for themselves, instead of being narrowly herded from one place to another in a linear fashion. They don't want to be the only playstyle in a game -- but they want the game to accomodate their playstyle. Ironically, the first EQ (Everquest) achieved that, though the focus of the game was RAIDing and grouping. The gameworld was open by design and facilitated the "explore the world" mentality, where literally roaming the world "To see what's around the next corner" could take months and motnhs if not years. I solo'd a Froglok shaman and a Dwarf Paladin literally for years, grouping only VERY ocassionally (probably less than ten times total in the space of years) and never doing any RAIDs. Roaming the world was awesome (until they added the portal-books, that let you jump from place to place, thereby reducing the value of actual exploration) and involving. Was an area filled with creatures too tough for the individual? The challenge became to find a way around them, to see what was beyond them -- and that was precisely the point: the environment created a challenge for the soloer (learn and adapt, find innovative ways to face or get around obstacles) and the grouper (attack with partners) and didn't pit them against one another in a perverted "battle over who gets too much content". That sort of argument only comes around if the game's design herds people along a limited number of geographic areas, accessible only at certain levels (either by putting in artificial limitations to getting to those areas, or by artificially clumping hordes of creatures to achieve the same "barrier"). And that brings us back to EQ2, which is guilty of all those things.

EQ2 out of the box was a FRACTION of the space EQ1 offered, but worse than that, it offered, effectively, only two starting areas (Queynos/suburbs and Freeport/suburbs). Progression was excessively over-tailored to "open up" new geographic areas ONLY as you reached new levels, thereby destroying the game for the "explorer" gamer. At first, you literally COULDN'T go between areas without doing horrendous "access" quests that were unsolo-able. Then they opened that up, but concentrated hordes of creatures that were level-specific to prevent exploration for its own sake. Again, the game's focus is so narrowly tailored, from a geographic sense, that EVERY SINGLE PLAYER has to follow the same route. Example: all Queynos suburb players will do the same few "zones" around Queynos, before reaching a high enough level to feasibly go into Antonica, the first big geographic area outside the city area. It's literally the same for the Freeport area, just renamed. In the old EQ (and many others, if not most others) with its spread-out starting areas, there was diversity of geography and a vast array of content for starting levels, with the corresponding freedom in the game's design to be explorable. Or, rephrased: more starting areas by definition equals more exploration by more players. Fewer correspondingly "focuses" all the players through the same progression of the same areas in a nice, linear line.

What's the lesson, for this portion of the argument (exploration)? That it is far better to have a plethora of starting options for players that AREN'T clumped in one area -- spread them out, which in turn spreads out and diversifies the starting content (and subsequent level contents too), and frees up the gameworld from artificial limitations that require players to adhere to a train-like progression that's predefined for them. Explorers get a world they can explore, even in the dangerous areas; solo players get tons of content to play through, because of the need to "surround" each starting area with said content; and group-players get the same, as areas can be better tackled with coordinated tactics than solo (though again, there shouldn't be specific "group" or "solo" content, it should be the same content, the difference being how one individual chooses to tackle the obstacle over other's choices). Diverse starting areas that are separated by geography also get other benefits: it creates a value to travelling and exploring, in order to see the other cities/starting areas, and to see the other races (since most starting areas in MMORPGs are racially-defined); it spreads out content, which by definition offers a wider, more diverse, and deeper world, where players seek the content instead of it being heavily-concentrated in one area where everyone goes to the same NPCs over and over again (aka, as EQ2 is now, think Queynos, everyone regardless of race on the Queynos side has to see the same people, etc., no diversity by choosing a different race, etc.).

Who get it right? The original EQ. The original Asheron's Call. Both of these introduced expansions that right away began adding new starting areas, which only added to the world's depth for all players at all levels. Dark Ages of Camelot (to a lesser extent than the other two). World of Warcraft (roughly, multiple starting areas that overlap but still spread out the content and thereby offers up a world to explore freely). In all of these, a low or high level character could explore the world -- the low level character could wander and attempt the challenge of seeing areas with creatures too big for them to fight, by being careful, by thinking. I know, I've done exactly that in all these games -- WoW, crossing the marshes as a sub-level-12 character, it was challenging, dangerous, and therefore thrilling. Horizons -- doesn't have "multiple starting areas", only has one, but you can travel to a wide array of distant areas that are effectively "starting areas". And more.

Who gets it utterly wrong? EQ2. You choose any Good-aligned race, you start in the tightly-clumped suburbs of Queynos. You do the same quests as literally every other good-aligned race (the only difference being class-specific quests), over and over again. You fight in the same few areas, moving to the next "set of areas" ONLY when your level allows it. There's ZERO chance of navigating the world for exploration purposes, say of setting out at level 10 to wander Antonica to see what was there and then head into the Thundering Steppes and wander there. Exploration value? Zip. Your exploration, like everthing else in EQ2, is narrowly tailored and limited by the game design.

That isn't to say EQ2 is a failure as a game. I'd rather spend time and money playing it than WoW. How WoW fails is a different article -- and perhaps the saddest story of all (the most mis-used potential of any game, ever). But I'm not paying for EQ2 anymore, which means one less Station Access pass (the more expensive subscription type) for them. When they expand the game and spread out the world, I'll come back and play. Until then, there are too many other options that actually allow more than one or two narrowly-tailored playstyles (notably group/RAID) to feel "worthy" or successful.

Next time, the failings of WoW, and why it represents the greatest disappointment of any game, at any time, ever (other than the failure to properly create sequels to the original XCOM masterpiece) -- even though it has the most players of any game. I love paradoxes.

Language and the Art of Politics, or how politicians misuse words

Well, a bit of a turn away from my gaming-related thoughts this week. As a grad student in a liberal arts field, the foremost thing that I always kept in the back of my mind was the need to be careful and specific in my use of words. Making an allusion to something with significance, or using such in a comparison, should be something we do with such full and accurate care that we are fully appreciating the meaning of that allusion.

Which brings us to the politicians who throw words out there, words with historical significance, words with meaning, without a thought to the application of that word in the context they're using it. Or, to rephrase: if you're going to call someone a Nazi, you'd better be fully prepared to back up your statement by demonstrating that the person you're calling a Nazi, or saying that their actions are Nazi-like, actually justifies the use of the word. There are no, repeat NO, politicians currently in the United States Senate or House of Representatives to whom that word applies, nor are there any actions taken in the past decade by any of them that would warrant the use of the word Nazi in any sort of contextual, factual sense.

But that hasn't stopped the idiots -- pardon me, politicians, leaders of this great country -- from throwing around the word to describe one another or one another's actions. Calling a Senator "a Nazi" or saying that the President's actions are "like something a Nazi would do" is beyond disgusting, it's also intellectually bankrupt and should be called such by every journalist and rational, thinking person out there. Of course, that never happens either - but our failure as a society to recognize the misuse of words is another article. No, these are supposedly intelligent people who are doing this, and because they do it, we need to stop and think: why would they knowingly (hopefully knowingly, or else they aren't smart enough to be there in the first place) use a word like "Nazi" that doesn't apply? It's really simple, and it's equally as insulting as it is simple: the word has an emotional connection, and the politicians are more interested in stirring those knee-jerk emotional reactions than actually being factual in their allusions or even remotely fair in the same. They take advantage of the fact that the public, as so many, many studies shows, is exceedingly ignorant about things like history, current affairs, the names of the leaders of the country, geography, etc. They know far too many of the public are going to hear "Nazi" and react -- but without knowing why they're reacting, just that the word has a bad connotation to it. The fact that they, the politicians who lead us, knowingly use words like this one deliberately and specifically to take advantage of the public's ignorance is and should be highly insulting -- but of course, the same people who don't know the full meaning of the word, don't fully understand all the very potent and truly evil depths of that word, aren't going to realise that they're being taken advantage of in a very insulting and demeaning way.

And that, my friends, is the greatest tragedy of all. In a society that's more interested in the comings and goings of Hollywood starlets and in calling sports figures "heroes" (another misused word), where more than two-thirds of college students can't even find Iraq on a map, the tragedy isn't that smart politicians are taking advantage of the public ignorance -- it's that the public is as ignorant as it is, and doesn't seem to even realise why that's bad.

Next time, a comment on culture, the word "hero" with a thought toward this article, and why the many unnamed souls who have won the Congressional Medal of Honor for their actions are "heroes" and exactly ZERO sports figures are "heroes" for their sports careers. But again, that would also require us to think about words instead of just using them lightly... more on that next time.