Champions Online May Win Me Back
Two weeks ago I specified a few reasons why I was going to walk away from Champions Online when my subscription expired. Normally, I try to look at the positives of a situation, but my experiences with the game, Cryptic’s handling of it and the future plans didn‘t sit well with me. Or the rest of the playerbase, as a few readers explained their issues with the game in the comments section.
Last week, Cryptic backpedaled on its decision to offer paid for high-level content. Champions Online – Revelation, what the company claims is a “full-fledged expansion,” didn‘t go over well. The decision was reversed after people like us spoke our minds about paying for content in a game that is lacking just that. Commentator Snorlax returned to the post to pose a very good question:
“Do you see yourself coming back now that Cryptic has backpedaled on their paid content pack/expansion and put out some olive branches to the community?”
Initially, no. The company lost a good amount of my trust, the damage had been done. But Cryptic followed up last week’s olive branch with another State of the Game address that focuses on the free “expansion.” Costumes, perks, and additional lairs are always welcome additions. Two bullet points really caught my attention – Adventures Packs and Monthly In-Game Events.
Adventure Packs are story driven packages that are playable at “nearly any level.” That will make them perfect for all of the altaholics out there (and casual players). Personally, I am excited to see the story part take shape. Who wouldn‘t want to battle with “villains both new and established.” The more Foxbat the better.
If there’s something that small companies and small MMOGs excel at it’s usually community. Cryptic Studios is looking to be a large part of that by joining us side-by-side. We’ll be seeing a lot more of the developers in the virtual space they created thanks to the monthly in-game events. Dates, times and details will be announced as they happen.
Cryptic, you’ve got about a month to win me back. It’s been a good start.
Champions Online – Revelation will go live in mid-March. More information will be revealed when the official mini-site launches this week.
Champions Online May Win Me Back
Two weeks ago I specified a few reasons why I was going to walk away from Champions Online when my subscription expired. Normally, I try to look at the positives of a situation, but my experiences with the game, Cryptic’s handling of it and the future plans didn‘t sit well with me. Or the rest of the playerbase, as a few readers explained their issues with the game in the comments section.
Last week, Cryptic backpedaled on its decision to offer paid for high-level content. Champions Online – Revelation, what the company claims is a “full-fledged expansion,” didn‘t go over well. The decision was reversed after people like us spoke our minds about paying for content in a game that is lacking just that. Commentator Snorlax returned to the post to pose a very good question:
“Do you see yourself coming back now that Cryptic has backpedaled on their paid content pack/expansion and put out some olive branches to the community?”
Initially, no. The company lost a good amount of my trust, the damage had been done. But Cryptic followed up last week’s olive branch with another State of the Game address that focuses on the free “expansion.” Costumes, perks, and additional lairs are always welcome additions. Two bullet points really caught my attention – Adventures Packs and Monthly In-Game Events.
Adventure Packs are story driven packages that are playable at “nearly any level.” That will make them perfect for all of the altaholics out there (and casual players). Personally, I am excited to see the story part take shape. Who wouldn‘t want to battle with “villains both new and established.” The more Foxbat the better.
If there’s something that small companies and small MMOGs excel at it’s usually community. Cryptic Studios is looking to be a large part of that by joining us side-by-side. We’ll be seeing a lot more of the developers in the virtual space they created thanks to the monthly in-game events. Dates, times and details will be announced as they happen.
Cryptic, you’ve got about a month to win me back. It’s been a good start.
Champions Online – Revelation will go live in mid-March. More information will be revealed when the official mini-site launches this week.
Why I Quit Champions Online
Even though I purchased the six month package for Champions Online I haven’t actively played the game in weeks. I’ve kept the client up-to-date just in case, but since publishing the game’s review in mid-November I haven’t put in anywhere near the time that I had previously. My absence from VioletPreston has nothing to do with being busy. The holidays didn’t stop me from logging in, neither did other video games, or even other MMOG that I play. I didn’t play Champions Online because of the game itself, no other excuses.
Plan and simple, Champions Online lost its hold on me. I continued to dive in to the game, move around the world, soak up the atmosphere, read about its future and most importantly, evaluate the content beyond my reach. What I definitively learned, and I hope my review hinted at, is that the game lacks legs. The atmosphere has always been incredibly disjointed thanks to the instancing of most zones. Even though all of the settings make sense in the universe, they lack a cohesive flow. And the multitude of characters aren’t employed effectively either. Because of these continued slip-ups through the middle to later levels, Champions Online gets boiled down to its diverse arcade-y combat;. In essence, it becomes a soulless experience.
Signing up for an MMOG to me is more than just playing a game, I am signing up as a partner to the company. I expect certain things from the service provider, and when I don’t see those things I can get upset, annoyed and even downright angry. Cryptic Studios has managed to make me feel almost all of these emotions. I was expecting the cast of Champions characters to be used in an intriguing way. I was hoping that the game would offer better grouping and dungeon experiences later on. I maintained a desire to play alternate characters (perhaps CO’s greatest strength), but was hamstrung by being forced to do the same content over and over. Instead of fixing these issues with content updates, Cryptic turned around and announced a premium content patch. Adding content to the end game and charging for it – that was the last straw for me.
The tragedy of all of this is that my experience has made me incredibly stand-offish to Cryptic’s just released MMORPG Star Trek Online, a title I was originally excited for. I’ll likely play it, but my experience and the handling of Champions Online to date, assured that I wouldn’t purchase an advance subscription, or even the game at launch.
My Champions Online account is subscribed for another month plus, so Cryptic can do right by me. But the outlook is grime for my Champions Online characters. It just couldn’t satisfy me in the long run.
Why I Quit Champions Online
Even though I purchased the six month package for Champions Online I haven’t actively played the game in weeks. I’ve kept the client up-to-date just in case, but since publishing the game’s review in mid-November I haven’t put in anywhere near the time that I had previously. My absence from VioletPreston has nothing to do with being busy. The holidays didn’t stop me from logging in, neither did other video games, or even other MMOG that I play. I didn’t play Champions Online because of the game itself, no other excuses.
Plan and simple, Champions Online lost its hold on me. I continued to dive in to the game, move around the world, soak up the atmosphere, read about its future and most importantly, evaluate the content beyond my reach. What I definitively learned, and I hope my review hinted at, is that the game lacks legs. The atmosphere has always been incredibly disjointed thanks to the instancing of most zones. Even though all of the settings make sense in the universe, they lack a cohesive flow. And the multitude of characters aren’t employed effectively either. Because of these continued slip-ups through the middle to later levels, Champions Online gets boiled down to its diverse arcade-y combat;. In essence, it becomes a soulless experience.
Signing up for an MMOG to me is more than just playing a game, I am signing up as a partner to the company. I expect certain things from the service provider, and when I don’t see those things I can get upset, annoyed and even downright angry. Cryptic Studios has managed to make me feel almost all of these emotions. I was expecting the cast of Champions characters to be used in an intriguing way. I was hoping that the game would offer better grouping and dungeon experiences later on. I maintained a desire to play alternate characters (perhaps CO’s greatest strength), but was hamstrung by being forced to do the same content over and over. Instead of fixing these issues with content updates, Cryptic turned around and announced a premium content patch. Adding content to the end game and charging for it – that was the last straw for me.
The tragedy of all of this is that my experience has made me incredibly stand-offish to Cryptic’s just released MMORPG Star Trek Online, a title I was originally excited for. I’ll likely play it, but my experience and the handling of Champions Online to date, assured that I wouldn’t purchase an advance subscription, or even the game at launch.
My Champions Online account is subscribed for another month plus, so Cryptic can do right by me. But the outlook is grime for my Champions Online characters. It just couldn’t satisfy me in the long run.
Challenge and Risk
My last post about Risk versus Reward started a couple interesting conversations both here and offline. Those conversations brought a couple of interesting points to light.
The main thing I have discovered is that most players and game devs tend to jam the concepts of challenge and risk together and call that “risk”. If an encounter is hard, a player is likely to die and they want to avoid dying and so that constitutes a high degree of risk. I think challenge and risk are two separate concepts that might be coupled, but are certainly not the same. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to define these terms like this:
Challenge = The chance you have to fail at a task or encounter. This could mean dying, party wiping, not meeting your goals or quest requirements depending on the situation.
Risk = The consequences you suffer as a result of failing at a task or encounter. This might be item loss, having to make a corpse run, a loss of experience or the accrual of “debt”.
These two ideas aren’t the same. I could design an encounter in which a boss NPC takes only 10% of the damage dealt to him and two-shots most players and this would be a challenging encounter. However, if there are no consequences for failure, then there is no risk. If you lose, you just get back up and try again, or head off and do something else. Likewise, I could have a creature that was fairly easy to defeat (let’s say 90% of all groups that encounter this creature can beat it with no losses), but if he did manage to kill a group member, that player’s items would be sucked into the void and lost forever. This encounter is very low challenge, but has a pretty terrible risk associated with it.
I think it is interesting to note that there are times when the concepts of challenge and risk are coupled. For instance, in the extreme case of an encounter where you simply cannot die (let’s say you have managed to gain full resistance to the creature’s elemental attacks), then it does not matter what the death penalty in your game is, the chance of failure is zero and so the risk is zero.
Similarly, if we crank the risk in an encounter to zero, we see that the challenge of that encounter approaches zero. I think a good example of this would be Champions Online where some of the boss battles are tough (the boss is a bag of hit points that can two shot many characters), but because the only risk is being sent back to the respawn point, the battle devolves into a “graveyard zerg” and the challenge drops considerably.
Another interesting dynamic is that risk affects our behavior and thus, affects the level of challenge in our encounters. In games with no risk, there is no incentive to hold back any resources that could help you win a fight. So in World of Warcraft, you always bring your best gear to a battle because there is no chance of losing it. If dying in WoW meant a risk of item loss, players would be forced to decide how much they were willing to bet on the success of the mission. Generally, this would mean they would bring gear they were willing to lose — presumably a less valuable set. Consequently, this would make them less powerful and thus increase the challenge of the encounter.
One last thing I noticed is that in my small sample of people with which I discussed this topic, those most averse to the risk of loss almost always mentioned how they would hate to have to grind to get their lost stuff (items, experience) back. I got the impression that for these players, MMOs were not about “doing cool stuff”, but were about “getting cool stuff.” New items, new powers and unlocking new areas were the main point of the game… in some cases even at the expense of enjoying the game play. A couple of my CoX buddies are like this. They don’t mind if a particular mission is boring; they will farm it as long as it is easy xp or drops.
In any case, I am working on a post about adding risk back into the themepark equation and I thought I would post to clear up confusion with the two terms. Happy Hunting!
Challenge and Risk
My last post about Risk versus Reward started a couple interesting conversations both here and offline. Those conversations brought a couple of interesting points to light.
The main thing I have discovered is that most players and game devs tend to jam the concepts of challenge and risk together and call that “risk”. If an encounter is hard, a player is likely to die and they want to avoid dying and so that constitutes a high degree of risk. I think challenge and risk are two separate concepts that might be coupled, but are certainly not the same. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to define these terms like this:
Challenge = The chance you have to fail at a task or encounter. This could mean dying, party wiping, not meeting your goals or quest requirements depending on the situation.
Risk = The consequences you suffer as a result of failing at a task or encounter. This might be item loss, having to make a corpse run, a loss of experience or the accrual of “debt”.
These two ideas aren’t the same. I could design an encounter in which a boss NPC takes only 10% of the damage dealt to him and two-shots most players and this would be a challenging encounter. However, if there are no consequences for failure, then there is no risk. If you lose, you just get back up and try again, or head off and do something else. Likewise, I could have a creature that was fairly easy to defeat (let’s say 90% of all groups that encounter this creature can beat it with no losses), but if he did manage to kill a group member, that player’s items would be sucked into the void and lost forever. This encounter is very low challenge, but has a pretty terrible risk associated with it.
I think it is interesting to note that there are times when the concepts of challenge and risk are coupled. For instance, in the extreme case of an encounter where you simply cannot die (let’s say you have managed to gain full resistance to the creature’s elemental attacks), then it does not matter what the death penalty in your game is, the chance of failure is zero and so the risk is zero.
Similarly, if we crank the risk in an encounter to zero, we see that the challenge of that encounter approaches zero. I think a good example of this would be Champions Online where some of the boss battles are tough (the boss is a bag of hit points that can two shot many characters), but because the only risk is being sent back to the respawn point, the battle devolves into a “graveyard zerg” and the challenge drops considerably.
Another interesting dynamic is that risk affects our behavior and thus, affects the level of challenge in our encounters. In games with no risk, there is no incentive to hold back any resources that could help you win a fight. So in World of Warcraft, you always bring your best gear to a battle because there is no chance of losing it. If dying in WoW meant a risk of item loss, players would be forced to decide how much they were willing to bet on the success of the mission. Generally, this would mean they would bring gear they were willing to lose — presumably a less valuable set. Consequently, this would make them less powerful and thus increase the challenge of the encounter.
One last thing I noticed is that in my small sample of people with which I discussed this topic, those most averse to the risk of loss almost always mentioned how they would hate to have to grind to get their lost stuff (items, experience) back. I got the impression that for these players, MMOs were not about “doing cool stuff”, but were about “getting cool stuff.” New items, new powers and unlocking new areas were the main point of the game… in some cases even at the expense of enjoying the game play. A couple of my CoX buddies are like this. They don’t mind if a particular mission is boring; they will farm it as long as it is easy xp or drops.
In any case, I am working on a post about adding risk back into the themepark equation and I thought I would post to clear up confusion with the two terms. Happy Hunting!
Risk of What Exactly? (or how WoW is like penny poker)
If you are an MMO player and bother to follow MMOs enough, then you likely have heard the term “Risk versus Reward” thrown around. For those of you who thought you were going to the home page of an investment firm or Hasbro, Risk versus Reward is a term MMO developers use to describe the concept that as you deal with more dangerous situations in the game (usually that means fighting more and bigger monsters), you should be rewarded with better stuff — more money and cooler more powerful items.
So, if I kill a lone level 1 goblin, I might find he carries 3 gold and a piece of lightly used chewing gum. If however, I manage to down a level 900 Swack Iron Dragon, I might be the new owner of a brand new piece of +10 Holy Avenger Chewing Gum of Slaying and seven gazillion gold pieces. It sounds straightforward and every game has some aspect of Risk v. Reward inherent in its design.
Yet somehow, it seems that the vast majority of MMOs get it wrong.
The inspiration for this post was a blurb in my last post in which I fawned over Darkfall’s PvE. I found myself asking why my high level WoW warlock and my max level CoX characters sat idle and why I can’t even be bothered to put in the night or two it would take to max out my Champions Online character. Certainly, all of these characters are on the top end of that risk/reward curve and in theory, should be very exciting to play — offering top tier payoffs for my exploits. So why are all of these characters trumped by my three-week old Darkfall noob who can barely take on two trolls at once and for whom a PvP encounter means almost certain ganking?
Some of it is novelty, of course. A new game is new and shiny and the old ones… not so much. I get that and admit that some of my excitement about Darkfall comes from its newness. However, by that respect, Champions Online is a relatively new game as well. It has a lot of shiny parts that I have not yet experienced and still, the excitement is not there — even with the promise of epic, superpowered battles and high-end gear.
Where do these games, and in fact, most other themepark games, go wrong?
One of the big problems is that most themepark games are linear in their progression. You start with a level 1 character in Noob Village, do the obligatory starter/tutorial quests which will take you to level 6 by doing such scintillating tasks such as “Open Your Backpack”, “Bring a Pie to the Weapon Vendor”, and finally “Kill 10 Randy Badgers”. Killing the badgers is the big risk, which isn’t really a risk because by design, the badgers are easy to kill at your level.
Once you hit level 6, you get a quest that takes you to a new area, where you are asked to kill 10 Feral Wolves. Now the wolves are tougher… more risk right? Well, not really. See, like the badgers you fought in Noob Village, these wolves are designed for you to kill easily at your new level. The wolves have powered up, but so have you and so while the wolves are objectively tougher, relative to your new power level, they are the same as the badgers. Risk is relative.
This trend continues as you progress to max level. Each new area you enter brings you new “challenges”, but each challenge is specifically designed for characters of your power level. What this means is that while you do fight different creatures as you progress, their level of difficulty stays the same. You are essentially funneled by the game designers into encounters with low-risk.
The situation gets even worse when you realize that as you progress through the game, the rewards you obtain are carefully measured to be appropriate for a character of your level. Sure you are getting more experience per kill, but the experience you need to level has increased as well. You are getting more gold, but the costs to upkeep your gear, buys skills and crafting materials has gone up as well. You are getting cooler gear, but it is the same gear that all the other level 10 characters have — having it is no big deal, but not having it puts you behind your peers. Rewards are relative.
Ok, but what if you decide to game the system and instead of doing quests designed for your level, you do quests that are a few levels above yours? If you are a level 10 character and manage to complete a level 15 quest, it is very likely that your character exposed himself to a fair bit of risk and would expect a high reward. You might certainly get such a reward in the form of a level 15 item. This is exciting until you realize the item has a hard level requirement and so you can’t use it.
Of course, you can wait for your level 15 item, but then you are wasting time and inventory slots that you should be using to acquire items you could actually use. And by the time you reach level 15 and are able to use your spiffy item, it isn’t that great anymore relative to the other items you have access to and you are powerful enough to have gotten it easily. You’ve wasted time and inventory slots on an item that is, by the time you can use it, the same as everyone else’s — the return on your extra risk investment is negative.
Now this isn’t the whole story. Many themepark games have implemented mechanics that deal with some of the problems listed above. I would argue that instances such as WoW’s dungeons help counter the linearity of the quest lines as they offer an optional “high-risk” way to get some of the best rewards in the game. You don’t have to do them, but if you do, you will get cool stuff. The Champions Online developers understood that people were routinely doing quests above their level and so they removed the level requirements on quest rewards to encourage the practice. City of Heroes has difficulty sliders on its instanced missions with better experience and influence for taking on the higher levels.
These are all good ideas and they help the situation a little bit. Still, the whole concept of Risk versus Reward is predicated on the idea that the player is risking something in the hopes of gaining something more in return. Ultimately, this is the biggest flaw in today’s themepark MMOs: Nothing is ever risked!
When you die in WoW, you take a hit to the durability of your gear, but even if a piece of gear breaks it is easily repaired with some gold. CoX gives you experience debt when you die, but the amount of that debt has been reduced over time to the point where you can often be out of debt by just letting your teammates finish off the spawn that killed you. The only penalty for dying in Champions is having to fly back to the battle. So… all this talk about risk and reward and we end up realizing the sad fact that The Risk Is A Lie. (And don’t even ask me about the cake.)
But if the risk is a lie, then the reward is a lie as well, isn’t it? If we are playing a linear game with no penalty for failure and no setbacks, aren’t we just playing a slightly more interactive version of ProgressQuest? Yeah, I know… 1300 words later and you ended up with a curmudgeon post… “blah, blah, blah, kids nowadays and their dumbed-down MMOs. When I played, pre-Trammel Asheron’s Call before the NGE…”
That’s not exactly where I am going with this. See, I like many of the MMOs in question. I enjoy WoW. I played CoX for years and Champs Online, while sporting some ugly flaws, is still a fun game. But I do think we need to consider the fact that something is lost when game designers completely remove risk from the equation.
Consider the game of poker. Theoretically, playing a friendly game with your kids “just for chips”, penny poker with your family, dollar poker with your buddies and no-limit poker at a casino are all the same. The value of the hands are the same, the mechanics of the game are the same… and yet, the games are vastly different. Bluffing in penny poker is often silly, because the cost to call you is trivial. I’ll glady pay 50 cents to watch you lay down a king-high against my pair of threes. Now, let’s make the same call when the bet is $1000, or $10000. *gulp*
Now I have something to lose and whether I call or not is going to depend on the game situation, how much I stand to win (if I win), what I know about you, the strength of my hand, what I know about the possible strength of your hand, and how you’ve bet previously. Turns out, poker has just a tiny bit to do with mechanics and a whole heck of a lot to do with betting and if you aren’t playing with risk, then you are essentially playing a different game, and in fact, an inferior game. (Or at least a much less complex game.)
Do MMOs have a lot to do with betting? I think Darkfall does. Every time I leave my bank, I am making a bet as to the success or failure of my mission. If I bring a lot of magical reagents, or high rank equipment with me, I can now take on bigger challenges and thus, make my trip more lucrative. However, I am taking the risk that if I die, I will lose the costly materials. WoW, CoX and CO don’t have this element of risk and reward.
Imagine a game mechanically identical to World of Warcraft in every way except that the death penalty included the real risk of item loss. Suddenly, the game dynamics change. Who you party with matters… especially if they can loot your corpse. How you get to a quest location is now important because you won’t want to chance running through high-level spawns, or to places where you could be ganked by the enemy. Choosing what equipment to wear into a dungeon would invole trying to be as effective as possible while still mitigating the risk of death. Dungeon tactics would have to be more meticulous and better executed as a party wipe could truly be disastrous. Rare items would indeed be rare because they would only be attained by people who were willing to make a that high-stakes bet.
Would that be a better game? Well, I am pretty sure I am on the wrong side of history here, but I am going to say that yes, World of DeathpenaltyCraft would be a better game. But my guess is that it would be a less popular game. Humans are risk-averse and a lot more people play penny poker than high-stakes poker (myself included). Appealing to a mass-market (a good thing) means taking the risk out of the game (a bad thing).
To me, the next interesting question is this: Is there a way to add elements of risk into themepark games without ruining their mass appeal? Free-for-all PvP with full loot is probably not the way to go, but are there other things we can do to add that exciting element of risk back into our designs? I’ll tackle that in a post or two. For now, happy hunting!
Risk of What Exactly? (or how WoW is like penny poker)
If you are an MMO player and bother to follow MMOs enough, then you likely have heard the term “Risk versus Reward” thrown around. For those of you who thought you were going to the home page of an investment firm or Hasbro, Risk versus Reward is a term MMO developers use to describe the concept that as you deal with more dangerous situations in the game (usually that means fighting more and bigger monsters), you should be rewarded with better stuff — more money and cooler more powerful items.
So, if I kill a lone level 1 goblin, I might find he carries 3 gold and a piece of lightly used chewing gum. If however, I manage to down a level 900 Swack Iron Dragon, I might be the new owner of a brand new piece of +10 Holy Avenger Chewing Gum of Slaying and seven gazillion gold pieces. It sounds straightforward and every game has some aspect of Risk v. Reward inherent in its design.
Yet somehow, it seems that the vast majority of MMOs get it wrong.
The inspiration for this post was a blurb in my last post in which I fawned over Darkfall’s PvE. I found myself asking why my high level WoW warlock and my max level CoX characters sat idle and why I can’t even be bothered to put in the night or two it would take to max out my Champions Online character. Certainly, all of these characters are on the top end of that risk/reward curve and in theory, should be very exciting to play — offering top tier payoffs for my exploits. So why are all of these characters trumped by my three-week old Darkfall noob who can barely take on two trolls at once and for whom a PvP encounter means almost certain ganking?
Some of it is novelty, of course. A new game is new and shiny and the old ones… not so much. I get that and admit that some of my excitement about Darkfall comes from its newness. However, by that respect, Champions Online is a relatively new game as well. It has a lot of shiny parts that I have not yet experienced and still, the excitement is not there — even with the promise of epic, superpowered battles and high-end gear.
Where do these games, and in fact, most other themepark games, go wrong?
One of the big problems is that most themepark games are linear in their progression. You start with a level 1 character in Noob Village, do the obligatory starter/tutorial quests which will take you to level 6 by doing such scintillating tasks such as “Open Your Backpack”, “Bring a Pie to the Weapon Vendor”, and finally “Kill 10 Randy Badgers”. Killing the badgers is the big risk, which isn’t really a risk because by design, the badgers are easy to kill at your level.
Once you hit level 6, you get a quest that takes you to a new area, where you are asked to kill 10 Feral Wolves. Now the wolves are tougher… more risk right? Well, not really. See, like the badgers you fought in Noob Village, these wolves are designed for you to kill easily at your new level. The wolves have powered up, but so have you and so while the wolves are objectively tougher, relative to your new power level, they are the same as the badgers. Risk is relative.
This trend continues as you progress to max level. Each new area you enter brings you new “challenges”, but each challenge is specifically designed for characters of your power level. What this means is that while you do fight different creatures as you progress, their level of difficulty stays the same. You are essentially funneled by the game designers into encounters with low-risk.
The situation gets even worse when you realize that as you progress through the game, the rewards you obtain are carefully measured to be appropriate for a character of your level. Sure you are getting more experience per kill, but the experience you need to level has increased as well. You are getting more gold, but the costs to upkeep your gear, buys skills and crafting materials has gone up as well. You are getting cooler gear, but it is the same gear that all the other level 10 characters have — having it is no big deal, but not having it puts you behind your peers. Rewards are relative.
Ok, but what if you decide to game the system and instead of doing quests designed for your level, you do quests that are a few levels above yours? If you are a level 10 character and manage to complete a level 15 quest, it is very likely that your character exposed himself to a fair bit of risk and would expect a high reward. You might certainly get such a reward in the form of a level 15 item. This is exciting until you realize the item has a hard level requirement and so you can’t use it.
Of course, you can wait for your level 15 item, but then you are wasting time and inventory slots that you should be using to acquire items you could actually use. And by the time you reach level 15 and are able to use your spiffy item, it isn’t that great anymore relative to the other items you have access to and you are powerful enough to have gotten it easily. You’ve wasted time and inventory slots on an item that is, by the time you can use it, the same as everyone else’s — the return on your extra risk investment is negative.
Now this isn’t the whole story. Many themepark games have implemented mechanics that deal with some of the problems listed above. I would argue that instances such as WoW’s dungeons help counter the linearity of the quest lines as they offer an optional “high-risk” way to get some of the best rewards in the game. You don’t have to do them, but if you do, you will get cool stuff. The Champions Online developers understood that people were routinely doing quests above their level and so they removed the level requirements on quest rewards to encourage the practice. City of Heroes has difficulty sliders on its instanced missions with better experience and influence for taking on the higher levels.
These are all good ideas and they help the situation a little bit. Still, the whole concept of Risk versus Reward is predicated on the idea that the player is risking something in the hopes of gaining something more in return. Ultimately, this is the biggest flaw in today’s themepark MMOs: Nothing is ever risked!
When you die in WoW, you take a hit to the durability of your gear, but even if a piece of gear breaks it is easily repaired with some gold. CoX gives you experience debt when you die, but the amount of that debt has been reduced over time to the point where you can often be out of debt by just letting your teammates finish off the spawn that killed you. The only penalty for dying in Champions is having to fly back to the battle. So… all this talk about risk and reward and we end up realizing the sad fact that The Risk Is A Lie. (And don’t even ask me about the cake.)
But if the risk is a lie, then the reward is a lie as well, isn’t it? If we are playing a linear game with no penalty for failure and no setbacks, aren’t we just playing a slightly more interactive version of ProgressQuest? Yeah, I know… 1300 words later and you ended up with a curmudgeon post… “blah, blah, blah, kids nowadays and their dumbed-down MMOs. When I played, pre-Trammel Asheron’s Call before the NGE…”
That’s not exactly where I am going with this. See, I like many of the MMOs in question. I enjoy WoW. I played CoX for years and Champs Online, while sporting some ugly flaws, is still a fun game. But I do think we need to consider the fact that something is lost when game designers completely remove risk from the equation.
Consider the game of poker. Theoretically, playing a friendly game with your kids “just for chips”, penny poker with your family, dollar poker with your buddies and no-limit poker at a casino are all the same. The value of the hands are the same, the mechanics of the game are the same… and yet, the games are vastly different. Bluffing in penny poker is often silly, because the cost to call you is trivial. I’ll glady pay 50 cents to watch you lay down a king-high against my pair of threes. Now, let’s make the same call when the bet is $1000, or $10000. *gulp*
Now I have something to lose and whether I call or not is going to depend on the game situation, how much I stand to win (if I win), what I know about you, the strength of my hand, what I know about the possible strength of your hand, and how you’ve bet previously. Turns out, poker has just a tiny bit to do with mechanics and a whole heck of a lot to do with betting and if you aren’t playing with risk, then you are essentially playing a different game, and in fact, an inferior game. (Or at least a much less complex game.)
Do MMOs have a lot to do with betting? I think Darkfall does. Every time I leave my bank, I am making a bet as to the success or failure of my mission. If I bring a lot of magical reagents, or high rank equipment with me, I can now take on bigger challenges and thus, make my trip more lucrative. However, I am taking the risk that if I die, I will lose the costly materials. WoW, CoX and CO don’t have this element of risk and reward.
Imagine a game mechanically identical to World of Warcraft in every way except that the death penalty included the real risk of item loss. Suddenly, the game dynamics change. Who you party with matters… especially if they can loot your corpse. How you get to a quest location is now important because you won’t want to chance running through high-level spawns, or to places where you could be ganked by the enemy. Choosing what equipment to wear into a dungeon would invole trying to be as effective as possible while still mitigating the risk of death. Dungeon tactics would have to be more meticulous and better executed as a party wipe could truly be disastrous. Rare items would indeed be rare because they would only be attained by people who were willing to make a that high-stakes bet.
Would that be a better game? Well, I am pretty sure I am on the wrong side of history here, but I am going to say that yes, World of DeathpenaltyCraft would be a better game. But my guess is that it would be a less popular game. Humans are risk-averse and a lot more people play penny poker than high-stakes poker (myself included). Appealing to a mass-market (a good thing) means taking the risk out of the game (a bad thing).
To me, the next interesting question is this: Is there a way to add elements of risk into themepark games without ruining their mass appeal? Free-for-all PvP with full loot is probably not the way to go, but are there other things we can do to add that exciting element of risk back into our designs? I’ll tackle that in a post or two. For now, happy hunting!
Champions Online — Builds I Like (Unluminous Man)
Even though I have been put off by MMOs recently, I am still plugging away at Champions Online every so often and so I figured I would post another build I am currently enjoying. Unluminous Man is a “copy” of one of my favorite City of Heroes characters. In CoH, Unluminous is a powerful Dark/Dark/Dark Defender with a ton of dark, cold, slimy, tenticular tools with which to defeat evil doers. (By the way, if tenticular is a word, be very afraid.) Since Cryptic saw fit to put a darkness set into CO, I figured it would be an interesting experiment to see how the same character concept worked out in the new game.
Unluminous Man is something of an experimental build. Most of my other builds have focused on having tons of layered defense and/or killing enemies quickly. For Unluminous, I wanted to see if I could create a character who could heal and/or drain himself out of trouble. This means drains, heals and yes, Regeneration. I have gotten this character to level 21 and so far, it is working fairly well, even though I am missing some important powers.
Powers
Shadow Bolt (Rank 1) — Nothing more than your simple energy builder here. There is a chance to cause fear, which gives a small overall reduction to incoming damage, but I have not noticed it much.
Shadow Embrace (Rank 2)– I find the darkness Shadow Blast to be a slow, lackluster power. So, I respecced out of it and went straight for the cone AoE Shadow Embrace. This power has a good area of effect and ticks damage fairly quickly. It isn’t the greatest damage power, but it cuts henchmen down in large numbers easily. It is a little clunky to use against master villains and higher because of its energy cost.
Also, this power has a great visual effect, with writhing black tentacles eminating from the character’s hands. My big disappointment is the fact that you cannot change the emanation point to the character’s head. I think the look of this black-clad figure with tentacles snaking out from under his hood would be the BEST. POWER. EVAR.
Regeneration (Rank 2) — By far, the best passive defense for low-level characters is Regeneration. On Unluminous, the goal is stacking heals of various types as the primary means of defense and regen is one of the best. So, though I generally avoid Regeneration in my builds, Unluminous has it.
Lifedrain (Rank 2) — Another mainstay of the character, Lifedrain allows me to heal while doing damage. Coupled with Regeneration, I can heal very quickly when the battle goes sour.
Crippling Coils (Rank 1) — Darkness has a hold that takes a 2 second charge and up to 100 energy. Crippling Coils has no charge and costs 30 energy. Now, there are a few advantages to the darkness hold, but in practice I have found these advantages to be outweighed by the charge time and energy cost. Crippling Coils is a nice, quick-firing hold that takes one target out of the combat for several seconds — enough time to finish off someone else, or to charge a more lasting attack.
Ebon Void (Rank 1) – The darkness block enhancement is… ok. It has a standard damage reduction and a chance to reflect some damage back at the attacker. In practice, this damage is negligible on all but the biggest attacks; no one is going to kill themselves on your shield. There are better shields out there, but this one is good enough.
Force Eruption (Rank 1 & Gravitational Polarity) — This power acts as a momentary “Get Out of Jail Free” card when I am overwhelmed. It knocks everyone down, allowing me to set up a Shadow Embrace, or Lifedrain. The Gravitational Polarity advantage is a damage buff, and has become standard on many of my characters.
Illumination (Rank 1) – This is an experimental power purchase from the new Celestial power set. It is a debuff you place on a foe that causes anyone attacking the target to get a small heal-over-time effect — another stacked heal for my build.
Stats
My super-stats are Endurance and Presence. Endurance gives me the energy I need to run full maintains of Lifedrain and Shadow Embrace. I am trying Presence as a super-stat to give me big bonuses on my heals… hopefully. Currently, Lifedrain is the only power that benefits from the super Presence. The Illumination buff might benefit, but it is pretty small and so the effect is hard to see. I need to pick up some other heals to make the Presence pick worthwhile.
Tactics
Pretty simple actually — fly in, zap all the henchmen with Shadow Embrace. Any remaining henchmen and villains (or higher) can then be dealt with using another Shadow Embrace, or if I am in need of health, a combination of Illumination and Lifedrain.
If things go bad, I can use the Force Eruption to knock people down for a second while I drain some life, or I can turtle up with Ebon Void and hope that Regeneration can save me.
Thoughts
This is an experimental build and I am not yet sure how well it has worked out. Regeneration is very good at low levels and almost any situation where your health gets low can be handled with block turtling. I hate block turtling and so my goal is to build up enough layered healing so that I can stand in the middle of a pile of enemies and heal through their damage, blocking only the charged shots of the bosses. In this respect, Regeneration is good for probably 80% of the fights in the game. In the fights where the incoming damage is too heavy for Regen, I have Lifedrain which heals for 90-100 points each tick.
I took Illumination on a whim and unfortunately, it underperforms, providing a meager heal over time effect after you hit the affected target several times. The heal amount is in the low teens every couple of seconds and this just isn’t enough to notice under most conditions. If I could, I would drop this power for Bionic Shielding which has gotten a significant boost in the latest patch by having its recharge time cut in half.
I could still use one or two more stacked healing powers and I am wondering how Ego Sprites (with Slave Mentality) and Mindful Reinforcement would perform with a Presence of over 100. Alternately, I could just take a maintained healing power, but I like the idea of fire and forget heals that allow me to recover while fighting and so I will take a traditional heal only as a last resort.
Damage is another issue. The tentacles are adequate for most fights, but take a little too long to kill hard targets. Unluminous could use a big hitter. Still, the goal of this build isn’t powerful attacks, but having the capability of outlasting and outhealing opponents. I will have to see how the next 10 or so levels play out to determine if this is a viable strategy or not.
Champions Online — Builds I Like (Unluminous Man)
Even though I have been put off by MMOs recently, I am still plugging away at Champions Online every so often and so I figured I would post another build I am currently enjoying. Unluminous Man is a “copy” of one of my favorite City of Heroes characters. In CoH, Unluminous is a powerful Dark/Dark/Dark Defender with a ton of dark, cold, slimy, tenticular tools with which to defeat evil doers. (By the way, if tenticular is a word, be very afraid.) Since Cryptic saw fit to put a darkness set into CO, I figured it would be an interesting experiment to see how the same character concept worked out in the new game.
Unluminous Man is something of an experimental build. Most of my other builds have focused on having tons of layered defense and/or killing enemies quickly. For Unluminous, I wanted to see if I could create a character who could heal and/or drain himself out of trouble. This means drains, heals and yes, Regeneration. I have gotten this character to level 21 and so far, it is working fairly well, even though I am missing some important powers.
Powers
Shadow Bolt (Rank 1) — Nothing more than your simple energy builder here. There is a chance to cause fear, which gives a small overall reduction to incoming damage, but I have not noticed it much.
Shadow Embrace (Rank 2)– I find the darkness Shadow Blast to be a slow, lackluster power. So, I respecced out of it and went straight for the cone AoE Shadow Embrace. This power has a good area of effect and ticks damage fairly quickly. It isn’t the greatest damage power, but it cuts henchmen down in large numbers easily. It is a little clunky to use against master villains and higher because of its energy cost.
Also, this power has a great visual effect, with writhing black tentacles eminating from the character’s hands. My big disappointment is the fact that you cannot change the emanation point to the character’s head. I think the look of this black-clad figure with tentacles snaking out from under his hood would be the BEST. POWER. EVAR.
Regeneration (Rank 2) — By far, the best passive defense for low-level characters is Regeneration. On Unluminous, the goal is stacking heals of various types as the primary means of defense and regen is one of the best. So, though I generally avoid Regeneration in my builds, Unluminous has it.
Lifedrain (Rank 2) — Another mainstay of the character, Lifedrain allows me to heal while doing damage. Coupled with Regeneration, I can heal very quickly when the battle goes sour.
Crippling Coils (Rank 1) — Darkness has a hold that takes a 2 second charge and up to 100 energy. Crippling Coils has no charge and costs 30 energy. Now, there are a few advantages to the darkness hold, but in practice I have found these advantages to be outweighed by the charge time and energy cost. Crippling Coils is a nice, quick-firing hold that takes one target out of the combat for several seconds — enough time to finish off someone else, or to charge a more lasting attack.
Ebon Void (Rank 1) – The darkness block enhancement is… ok. It has a standard damage reduction and a chance to reflect some damage back at the attacker. In practice, this damage is negligible on all but the biggest attacks; no one is going to kill themselves on your shield. There are better shields out there, but this one is good enough.
Force Eruption (Rank 1 & Gravitational Polarity) — This power acts as a momentary “Get Out of Jail Free” card when I am overwhelmed. It knocks everyone down, allowing me to set up a Shadow Embrace, or Lifedrain. The Gravitational Polarity advantage is a damage buff, and has become standard on many of my characters.
Illumination (Rank 1) – This is an experimental power purchase from the new Celestial power set. It is a debuff you place on a foe that causes anyone attacking the target to get a small heal-over-time effect — another stacked heal for my build.
Stats
My super-stats are Endurance and Presence. Endurance gives me the energy I need to run full maintains of Lifedrain and Shadow Embrace. I am trying Presence as a super-stat to give me big bonuses on my heals… hopefully. Currently, Lifedrain is the only power that benefits from the super Presence. The Illumination buff might benefit, but it is pretty small and so the effect is hard to see. I need to pick up some other heals to make the Presence pick worthwhile.
Tactics
Pretty simple actually — fly in, zap all the henchmen with Shadow Embrace. Any remaining henchmen and villains (or higher) can then be dealt with using another Shadow Embrace, or if I am in need of health, a combination of Illumination and Lifedrain.
If things go bad, I can use the Force Eruption to knock people down for a second while I drain some life, or I can turtle up with Ebon Void and hope that Regeneration can save me.
Thoughts
This is an experimental build and I am not yet sure how well it has worked out. Regeneration is very good at low levels and almost any situation where your health gets low can be handled with block turtling. I hate block turtling and so my goal is to build up enough layered healing so that I can stand in the middle of a pile of enemies and heal through their damage, blocking only the charged shots of the bosses. In this respect, Regeneration is good for probably 80% of the fights in the game. In the fights where the incoming damage is too heavy for Regen, I have Lifedrain which heals for 90-100 points each tick.
I took Illumination on a whim and unfortunately, it underperforms, providing a meager heal over time effect after you hit the affected target several times. The heal amount is in the low teens every couple of seconds and this just isn’t enough to notice under most conditions. If I could, I would drop this power for Bionic Shielding which has gotten a significant boost in the latest patch by having its recharge time cut in half.
I could still use one or two more stacked healing powers and I am wondering how Ego Sprites (with Slave Mentality) and Mindful Reinforcement would perform with a Presence of over 100. Alternately, I could just take a maintained healing power, but I like the idea of fire and forget heals that allow me to recover while fighting and so I will take a traditional heal only as a last resort.
Damage is another issue. The tentacles are adequate for most fights, but take a little too long to kill hard targets. Unluminous could use a big hitter. Still, the goal of this build isn’t powerful attacks, but having the capability of outlasting and outhealing opponents. I will have to see how the next 10 or so levels play out to determine if this is a viable strategy or not.
