On that note, I figured the best thing would be to visually compare these games, and see what I might gain from sheer observation from the developers choices of their UI and Menu design.

I took four well-known games, and one successful newcomer to the App Store: Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Jetpack Joyride, Peggle, and Tiny Wings. It is not lost on me that I chose both level-based puzzle games, and “runners”. I’m personally interested in these titles for their ability to either have continuously iterated gameplay through level design and challenges, or to keep a basic gameplay altered by the way you guide the player to interact with his or her surrounding environment.

Screenshots are provided in sections where they are applicable.

Main Menu

• In some form or another, all of these games are giving players the ability to play the game, or fiddle some knobs (options)
• A couple games use the main screen to introduce you to an immediate challenge, such as your high score or current level (Jetpack Joyride and Tiny Wings). Three of them let you jump into local or online leaderboards, pitting you against your own scores, or your friends. (Angry Birds, Peggle and Tiny Wings)
• Two games use the first screen players see as a point-of-sale (Unsurprisingly, Angry Birds and Peggle).
• Most of these games use a service other than GameCenter. This can be interpreted as an accepted inferiority of Game Center to other offerings, or just be due to the fact many of these games were available before Game Center came out, and wanted to be able to introduce Achievements and other incentives of replay-ability to players (Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Jeypack Joyride).
• Only Cut the Rope immediately introduces social media on the Main Menu, Angry Birds does if you click the bottom right icon.

Options

• Angry Birds and Jetpack Joyride don’t have specific Option screens, but their Main Menus expand a bit to offer some of the common features we see elsewhere.
• While there doesn’t really seem to be too much symmetry here, everyone seems to offer the ability to mute the audio in their game to some capacity. (I guess iOS doesn’t do this if there is an audio stream coming in from another media app.)
• Peggle offers some accessibility options, to the colorblind and lefties.

World Select

• Angry Birds and Cut the Rope have multiple sell points on this screen.
• Angry Birds invites users to gift the app, as well as purchase merchandise, sign up for a newsletter and advertises one other Angry Birds related game.
• Cut the Rope also invites users to gift the app to friends, and offers a IAP to unlock all future content without needing to beat enough levels to do it manually.

Level Select

• Angry Birds uses the Apple “page” paradigm in order to notify the user that there are pages worth of levels for this particular world.
• I included two different level selects for Peggle, since they can be somewhat different depending if you’re jumping into Quickplay or Challenge.
• All of these games mark the level icons with something to display extraneous progress on the level, past just unlocking it and beating it.

Gameplay

• With the exception of Peggle, all the games take a very minimal approach to the UI during gameplay. Most simply provide a pause button, and the score.

Pause

• Peggle’s “Pause” screen is identical to it’s “Options” screen, with the exception of having a “Main Menu” button rather than a “Credits” link.
• With the exception of Angry Birds and Peggle, the other three games are offering some sort of stats to bring the user right back into the game with something to beat. High scores, challenges, or stats.

Level End

• Angry Birds and Cut the Rope give some indication if your current score beat a previous best.
• It’s not Peggle’s “End” Screen, per se, but the fanfare leading up to the beating the level is a tremendous amount of positive feedback that is sure to make a user chuckle, or at the very least smile their first few times around, solidly awarding them for their performance.

Let me know what you think in the comments!

Almost two years later, and four products shipped with my name on them (The Beatles: Rock Band, Rock Band Network, Rock Band 3, and Dance Central), I came up for air. I had learned a ton about game development at (relatively) larger scale for the industry — at it’s peak, Harmonix was around 350 people, and has multiple projects and teams working on new stuff all the time. With such a large company, however, it is important to have some people be dedicated and focused on a particular task. By developing and harnessing experts for very specific parts of your pipeline, you can create a really strong foundation for the rest of your development team to flourish. I found my work becoming more and more pigeonholed to a direction that I wasn’t comfortable with (it was far more directed at tools than it was at game development), and I decided a change would be appropriate for me. I wanted to have my fingers in a bunch of proverbial pies, so to speak. I am fairly certain that games are my passion, but I wanted to take some time actually trying a bunch of different facets of it before I settled down into something.

Through some networking, I managed to land one of the most rewarding three months of work I have had yet, doing some development on a demo for Moonshot Games. The game is called Fallen Frontier. I did some light work in their engine, worked with the designer, implemented auto-aim, created a crowd system, and even got to design and develop a fun cannon-fodder enemy, the drone. If that experience wasn’t mind blowing enough, I got to present the game with the team at PAX East 2011. Check out some of the gameplay footage, I think everyone who worked on that is very proud of what we managed to put together for that show.

After PAX, I went full time as the lead developer on a game I had been working on in my spare time. A company in DC who does training for the DoD wanted to add a game to their training to help instill the issues that they are trying to teach their students. The game puts a player in the role of the people that they will be working with to help the player gain a broader cultural awareness of the communities, views, and goings-on of the location they are being deployed into. At a basic level, the game is a resource management and decision making game, supported by primary source information that is showing to be very successful in generating meaningful conversations in the classroom setting during the training. Being the lead developer on the project has taught me some invaluable lessons about creating systems that can systematically grow very large over the course of the project. Forcing the team, at times against their will, to deal with these larger systems during the build out caused changes much later in the project to be much smoother and understood by everyone. I can happily say that most of the requests that we get for feature additions play into the original design of the game’s system.

After about six months of full time work on that game, my tasks are starting to wrap up, and I’ve reduced my time to a four day workweek so that I can (finally?) open up some time to do some game development on my own and discover what to focus my energies on.

I bit the bullet and purchased a Unity 3 license, and am determined to release something. I hope to share some of that experience of the games I make here, not only to review the decisions I made down the road, but to hopefully help others learn from my successes and missteps, IN REAL TIME.

I had jumped into the jam knowing little of what I wanted to create, but knowing full well I wanted to have made something with flixel by the end of the weekend. Needless to say, I was incredibly impressed with how much I got done with the framework in such a short time.

While our game isn’t anything spectacular, we were able to finish it in the time that we were allotted which as far as I’m concerned makes it a success.

A few things learned from this weekend that helps keep things moving smoothly for Alex and I:

Prepare yourself early.

The night before the jam, I got my entire development environment setup. I assumed that I was going to be doing work in either flixel, or aiding on a team that might be coding in XNA. I updated my system with the latest patches, got both flixel and XNA to the latest versions, and tested compiling and running some sample projects for both platforms. I bookmarked important documentation, and downloaded a few free tools that were going to be useful for me during development. Also, I put a bunch of these tools that I was going to be using for myself up on a public folder on my FTP, so I could distribute them to my team to get them up to speed as soon as possible. Needless to say, my computer ran smoothly, I had all my tools and docs available, and I was able to jump into creating as soon as we started throwing ideas at the wall.

Start off playing some games, talking about ideas and mechanics/systems.

You aren’t going to have too much time during a short jam, so take an hour or two talking about some ideas that you enjoy, things that you may want to incorporate into a game. Play a few games that you’ve found recently that might be easy to replicate. Settings, moods, gameplay will start to fall into place during your discussions. Have the artist attempt to prototype your game on paper while the coder gets started on some basics for the game like character drawing/input, camera movement, etc.

Never turn back.

After you’ve decided on a design, keep going with it. We had hoped that our game would have some depth to it, and many more gameplay mechanisms than it ended with.  After getting far enough into the jam, we were running out of time, and decided to lock our featureset. Rather than worrying about adding extra features to make our game fun, we decided to take what we had, and make *that* the game.

Design small. Code to complete. Polish to hide everything else.

We spent probably about 35-40% of the entire jam adding content to our game, and polishing the look of it. Working on this was crucial to creating the feel of a final product. Adam and his friend Emily did a great job churning out cars, buildings, and scenery which pulled everything together. It’s incredible what a little bit of particle effects and artwork can do for a game.

Without further ado, I give you:

RUN AROUND AND JUMP ON CARS, BUT DON’T FALL OFF THE LEFT EDGE OF THE SCREEN!

Intro

When creating an A.I. system for your game, you’re going to want objects to be able to make decisions on their own, or at the very least have some sort of flowchart-like interaction. What if you were able to easily set up those basic interactions, and simply have your objects detect when certain stimuli change their states, and have actions and reactions dependent on the states of an object? We can create seemingly more intelligent objects, and a potentially more immersive game.

The Individual State

Each of the states in our machine will have the following information:

• State Name
• Minimum Duration
• Maximum Duration
• Transitions

This way, we can define the state with a human name that would make sense to a designer and something that could be easily scripted, and we can specify a range at which the state can last. With random state lengths, we can make objects seem a bit more organic. For objects that we need specific lengths, we can simply set the two to equal each other! Lastly, we need to know all the different states into which an individual state can transition.

The Transition Table

Each State will carry it’s own “Transition Table”, will include two important bits of information per entry:

• State Name
• Weighted Percentage

This way, we know which state we are going to transition to, and we are going to allow the definition of a weighted percentage of the states that are chosen. This will allow us to introduce rarity with our transitions.

The Machine

Our FSM will have several important actions which we will need to consider:

Add State

After our FSM is created for an individual object, we will add the different states that will be valid for this particular object. We will give the option to add a min/max duration of the state, in case we want to attempt to make certain states less predictable than others.

Remove State

We may see a need to remove a state from our object. Consider  enemies that after being provoked will not stop engaging/attacking the player until they kill the player or are destroyed themselves. We could get this feature ‘automatically’ if we removed the idle state from this object, and any transitions that may have brought us to this state.

Add Transition

In order for a state to transition from one state to the next, we are going to want to add these connections in individually, with a weighted percentage at which they have the possibility of being picked. This can allow for balancing the choosing of states. We will also have this action update transition if it already exists in the table.

Remove Transition

We may want to implement conditional transitions, or remove transitions for states that no longer exist.

Set State

For setting an initial state on our object, or forcing the object into a specific state.

Choose Next State

When the current state expires, the FSM will need to select a transition and set the next state

Usage

Usage is fairly simple. You’ll first want to include the code in your Solution. To every object file you wish to use the FiniteStateMachine in, you need to add a:

using Zapdot;

At the header with your other using statements.

You will then want to add a class level variable.

class Enemy
{
   FiniteStateMachine mFSM;

   public Enemy()
   {
      setupStateMachine();
   }
}

Now, for tidiness-sake, create a method that you’ll use to store the setup for this particular object, to be called once during initialization.

 private void setupStateMachine()
 {
 mFSM = new FiniteStateMachine();
 mFSM.AddState("idle", 2, 3);
 mFSM.AddState("walk", 2, 2);
 mFSM.AddState("run", 1, 3);
 mFSM.AddTransition("idle", "walk", .5);
 mFSM.AddTransition("idle", "run", .5);
 mFSM.AddTransition("walk", "idle", .5);
 mFSM.AddTransition("walk", "run", .5);
 mFSM.AddTransition("run", "idle", .5);
 mFSM.AddTransition("run", "walk", .5);
 // Pick our first state.
 mFSM.SetState("idle");
 }

This instantiates the new object, and adds three states to the Enemy object. (“walk”, “run”, and “idle”). Both idle and run will have random time between their respective min and maximums, but walk will always be 2 seconds long, no matter what.

We then add the transitions for these states, essentially saying that every state can transition to the other, and that they have equal weight to do so.

Lastly, we tell the object what state to start in.

After this object is setup, we can add it to our update class:

mFSM.Update(gameTime);

And do some tests on it to affect gameplay.

if ( mFSM.CurrentState.Equals("idle") )
   mVelocity = kIdleSpeed;

And so on.

The Code

Download (MIT License)

The code is available below, and being released under the MIT License. Feel free to do whatever you want with it, just don’t blame me.

If for some crazy reason you do start using the code, please tell me what you think, or what cool things you’re doing with it.

Future Additions!

This is only the starting point from here, and I hope to be able to add much more. Future additions include wonderful things like multiple concurrent states to give a little more depth to our objects and add for some interesting decision-making!

Enjoy!

The first entry I ended up jumping to seemed like an awesome start; “The Definition of Play and The Classification of Games” by Roger Caillios, 1958“. I was able to find the full version of the document, and uploaded it for reference, or the curiosity of others.

Important to note, games of chance are excluded. [This is a] discussion about games and rules when profit is not obtained, and it is merely the existence of the absence of reality. (p.124)

While it was not an article that redefined what I thought of “play” as a individual and social construct, it was interesting to see how the observations of a document in 1958 translates to electronic entertainment in the modern day.

Play is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often money for the purchase of [gaming] equipment… (p.125)

The industry may not be so quick to agree, but this rings true if wasted time is seen as a reflection of not accruing income. However, most if not all would agree that if play results in some form of entertainment, time and money may have been well spent.

A game which one would be forced to play would at once cease being play. It would become constraint, drudgery from which one would strive to be freed. (p.125)

I found this quote quite humorous with regards to my job, and I know some QA testers that might agree, I can’t say I “strive to be freed” from the games I play at work.

“In fact, the game is no longer pleasing to one who, because he is too well trained or skillful, wins effortlessly and infallibly.”

(In classifying games of sport) The goal of the encounters is not for the antagonist to cause serious injury to his rival, but rather to demonstrate his own superiority. (p. 132)

Both of these remind me of what the inherent draws in competitive gaming that kept such a stranglehold on me.

“Industrial civilization has given birth to [...] the hobby, a secondary and gratuitous activity, undertaken and pursued for pleasure, e.g. collecting, unique accomplishments, the pleasure in [...] inventing gadgets…” (pg. 145)

Did he just predict Achievements and LittleBigPlanet?

After that, the software transmits your input to the server-side, and the server sends back the video. Quality is dependant on your bandwidth, giving you 480p with 1.5mbps downstream, and 720p with a 5mbps downstream.

They have a very sizable booth at GDC, with a bunch of setups supposedly interacting over a 5mbps conncetion to their servers in Santa Clara, CA. They were using MacBooks, Dell Laptops, and their “MicroConsole”. People were playing games like Crysis Wars, Burnout Paradise Ultimate, and Mirror’s Edge on what appeared to be very stable, very good looking gameplay.

While the service ultimately leaves a sour taste in my mouth, it has some decent selling points (some of which I am pulling right from the press sheets they were handing out).

For one, this service transforms any mediocre PC into a legitimate gaming system. The majority of the systems they were using to stream their service had integrated video cards, which is pretty incredible, but makes sense given the technology. Since this is streaming, there is relatively no waiting time once you’ve purchased and selected your game; you make your selection, and start playing almost immediately. On top of that, the games that were being played were not altered in any way in order to be playable on the OnLive service, they were simply approved by the developer, and thrown up on the service. OnLive is gearing itself up to be a bit more integrated than that, and is offering a SDK to developers so that you can integrate some community, statistics, and “Brag Clip” features into the game. The “Brag Clip” is interesting, and is something that has begun to catch on already – the developers either allow you to record your playing, or take clips of special types of extraordinary gameplay (such as achieving a hard task/trick), and saving it to your account as a clip to share with your friends. Also, on top of being able to be run on middle-end systems, there are really negligible space requirements for the computer using it. This is huge, especially when you have games like Crysis Warhead requiring a dedicated 15GB for the install. Users are also seamlessly kept up to date with any patches that are released for their games. Lastly, and most importantly in my opinion is that while this service will probably launch with some big name game publishers, I see this as another easy way for indie developers to get their games out to a mass audience, and help push the community forward again.

There are many more reasons why potential investors of this service should be worried however. First and foremost, OnLive cannot promise the pristine connection, and stability of each of their customers internet services. Seeing as how quality of service can change almost from neighborhood to neighborhood with the same provider, this is a huge issue that could be a potential thorn in the side of OnLive. In the case that there is an unruly customer with the service because of their dismal internet connection, it would be easy to see OnLive pass the buck from their tech support and have these customers deal with and complain to their ISP. Secondly, as stories in the past have surfaced from heavy bittorrent users being throttled because of their constant taxing on their communities pipe, could you not see the same response to avid users of the service, playing hours upon hours of games a day, and filling their pipe by streaming the 720p video to their system constantly? They begin to get throttled, OnLive starts to suck, they call OnLive to complain, OnLive sends them to their ISP, rinse and repeat. Now, one of OnLive’s boasted features are: take your games with you wherever you have an internet connection. Okay – so I pay for my games, get them on the service, and then I go on vacation where I don’t have access to the net. Whoops, too bad; no connection to the net, no games. They claim to be the end all solution to the DRM woes the industry is facing nowadays, but I would say Steam (and possibly Stardock Impulse) is doing quite well on that front as well; not only that, but you can play your Steam games offline! Also, since this is PC-only, the majority of your gaming paripherals for your consoles will *not* work with the OnLive system.

Some major issues I have with the service which have not been covered through press material as of yet:

• Achievement Tracking
• Voice Communication
• Ability for individualized, saved DLC
• Customized/saved game configurations (This has to be in there, just not a major selling point for them right now)

I could go on, and I’m going to stop by the booth again today to ask some questions on the Developer’s end, but I’ll leave you with a few questions that I got the same answer to. (There were more, but I’m drawing a blank right now.)

• What are the minimum system requirements?
• How is the pricing model going to work?
• Will there be a charge for the MicroConsole?
• Can this stream at 1080p?

The answer? “We can’t comment at this time.”

I’ll come back with some pros and cons that are faced as a developer deploying their games on the service.

As a side note, I would check out Penny Arcade’s blog post and comic about this service as well, pretty funny.

A few months back I beat Mirror’s Edge, here’s my take on it!

Overview

From Wikipedia:

Mirror’s Edge takes place in an unnamed city where a totalitarian regime monitors its citizens through invasive surveillance, tracking all forms of electronic communication in order to reduce crime and quell any challenge to its power. An upcoming mayoral election seeks to retain Mayor Callaghan in power to keep the government’s control on the city, though a new favored candidate Robert Pope promises to bring change. The Eurasian protagonist, Faith Connors, is a “Runner”, a person trained in parkour, to stay out of sight and to use rooftops and other means to help deliver physical messages between revolutionary groups within the city. Faith along with another Runner, Celeste, were both trained by Mercury who also provides radio support for the two.

Impressions

Not too long ago I played Assassin’s Creed and fell in love with a chunk of the game. It looked great, had a few choice design elements that I truly enjoyed (mainly, the “teleport” system for major cities), and I absolutely loved the movement. I had mentioned to friends that if there were a game where movement movement felt this fluid, and the major part of the game, I would snap it up instantly. Needless to say, Mirror’s Edge was that game for me. I had followed the bits of information that came down the stream counting down to its release, and I had preordered my copy months in advance. Needless to say, my experience with the game was fairly positive. I thoroughly enjoyed the movement system, went along with the story, and dealt with the fighting.

What makes this game important to me though, is it took something that we are so completely familiar with (the First Person genre) and turned it on its side. Rather than act like every other shooter out there, and be another Halo, or Counter Strike, or Call of Duty, or Far Cry, or Resistance (I could go on..), they made a First Person game revolve around tactical movement, and tried to create an open system (in terms of the paths you take, and moves you perform) for the player to decide how he or she progresses through each obstacle set. The game itself isn’t about mowing down tons of enemies, its about avoiding them. Mirror’s Edge doesn’t focus your attention to specific groups and NPCs within the game, but forces you to soak in as much of your landscape as possible to decide your next move. And in this day in age where shooters and rockers (while still good products in their own right) dominate – Mirror’s Edge succeeds at delivering a package that is perpendicular to current consumer expectations and offers a breath of fresh air to the industry. Sadly, in the current economic situation that we are in, people perceive risk at a much higher value, and a $60 game that doesn’t conform to a standard that the consumer might be looking for, the game’s sales are going to take a hit.

Issues (Possible Spoilers Ahead)

Shoddy story. The story was fairly shallow – yes, there was an arcing story, but it left much to be desired, less to be explained, and far more to be questioned about how exactly everything panned out at the end. The story seemed to end far too abruptly, as if the writers were implicitly cutting us short to either meet deadlines, or to scream “WE NEED SOME CONTENT FOR THE SEQUEL!”

Cutscenes. Rather than use the engine for cutscenes between levels, (and to mask loading time), DICE used animated movies to show the progression of the story. This concept slightly reminds me of the “Story Time” you can get with the princess in Super Mario Galaxy. While it’s not the same story that you’re currently progressing through (in the sense that the cutscenes are filling in narrative gaps) you are definitely breaking out of the beautiful world that Galaxy presents to you in order to follow a side story. Some people argued that with such a great engine and implementation that DICE did that the cutscenes should have just stayed ingame, but I’m inclined to enjoy the switching between story and gameplay as the mode progresses. With a game as intense and fast paced as Mirror’s Edge, an animated sequence can provide a rest to the gamer.

What I didn’t like about these animated shorts was that sometimes they seemed like they were rushed (production wise), or done in Flash with some awful tweening/repetition. Two ‘broken’ scenes off of the top of my head that I still remember: Faith running around the time she meets up with Celeste for the second time, and one time when Faith is walking back into the shadows. The perspective on this scene tween is all types of skewed, and too easily noticed from even my untrained eye.

Fighting System. Simply said, the fighting system in this game is pretty bad. It is incredibly easy to die – which is acceptable. Your a runner with no protection on whatsoever. Taking more than a few bullets and not dying would be too far a stretch of the imagination. The enemies placement can be frustrating at times, and downright infuriating towards the end of the game. My first run through of the game I was going for the “Pacifist” achievement, where you cannot shoot anyone. Towards the end of the game though, I was looking to put a bullet through my TV. I ended up resulting in taking quite a few near death leaps in the “circular” staircase level, and resorted to hiding in corners in the levels that had an absurd amount of enemies, and took out the baddies one by one until I had cleared enough of them out to make it to the next exit.

In Left4Dead’s commentary, they talk about how they automatically do some things for a player when they get near certain areas (they were talking about automatically ducking when walking towards a vent) so that the player focuses on the fear and survival and bigger picture of the whole situation, without having to worry about a simple game movement like ducking. In this sense, isn’t Mirror’s Edge about the movement? So why not make the fighting system be a little more forgiving? Rather than having multiple whiffs when you’re trying to kick someone in the balls, let the game have a larger acceptance of error, and auto-aiming those crotch shots / uppercuts to make things go a little more smoothly, and let the player focus on what’s important: getting the hell out of wherever you are.

Linearity. In retrospect, this game was a bit too linear for me. While you could definitely take the scenic route in certain areas, there was definitely a best route for everything. I think this was partly due to the fact that the only real goal Faith had throughout the entire game was simply to run. “Getting away” can be a fun thing to do, and it can easily be a good reason why the game was on the shorter side – you can only run away from so much before the idea starts to become boring. But when you have such an open setting such as the rooftops and indoors of a city, and my choices are to either jump over or slide under a pipe that is in my way, the magic of the game seems to slowly fade away.

Consider this though: make the game a little more open-worldish, a little more Half-Life 2. Since Faith is explicitly a courier, working for what the government considers criminals, there are a myriad of things that could have been added to the story more than simply delivering packages. Interacting with NPCs to find out more about her sister’s issues, dive deeper into the corrupted body that the government has become, rather than it just being some ominous, sentient machine that deploys foot-soldiers in the proper areas at the worst times. Faith could have missions in areas, help other runners accomplish their tasks. If this were so, Merc wouldn’t actually look like he is running an operation, rather than being a guy who keeps tabs on (from who we met ingame) three runners from his computer. With respect to Valve’s shooter, put a bit more emphasis on physics, and throw some puzzles into the mix. Why not make Faith rearrange the landscape to be able to make jumps? Kick down a sign to make a bridge, or move the construction vehicles to line it up with a proper jump. Just a few of these would have added to the variety that this game could offer, would easily work well in the first-person view, and would have added to the total gameplay time offered to the user.

One more note, there’s DLC coming out for Mirror’s Edge in January 2009. They completely weeded out everything that the game provided before, and went for an abstract, texture-less (minus some coloring) design of a bunch of downloadable levels. It simplifies the game down to the basic element – movement. Penny Arcade had said something like “this is the game style that we fell in love with when watching previews about Mirror’s Edge”, and I couldn’t agree more. Personally, I stand by this game, as the successes in what Mirror’s Edge achieves to do outweighs the shortcomings.

A quest in the recent WoW expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King poses a big cultural, aesthetic and political question: Should games include torture? To which the answer is simple: Sure they should. In fact, I’ll go further. I think we need more torture in videogames.

The article is thought-provoking and a quick read. I have to say, if games can spawn healthy debates about interesting and important issues in society without breaking the player out of the box, I’m all for it.

Coming up this week (hopefully) my thoughts on Mirror’s Edge and Psychonauts.

I had always been cautious about MMOs, as I have seen many of my friends get themselves drawn deeply into the games, only to emerge months later, scarred and beaten by the speed at which the real world has passed them by during their virtual incubation. However, in giving myself a truly broad experience of the various genres available to the present day market, I couldn’t hide from MMOs forever.

So what better time then a budding new MMO released by DAoC creator Mythic Entertainment? I would be on the same starting plane as everyone else, minus the fact that I wasn’t really used to the gameplay mechanics. I had a few other friends who were interested in giving it a shot – so we took the plunge. We preordered the standard edition, so we’d get a two day start on the game, and be able to get our grips before the masses jumped into the servers. I got sucked in fast – within a few days I had brought my first character to level 20, within around 60 hours of in-game time. I then had a friend convince me to start another character on a server he was playing on, and we played all the time for the next few weeks on that server. Over the span of about a month, I had three characters: a level 31 Witch Hunter, a level 12 Iron Breaker, and a level 20 Disciple of Khaine (on a different server).

All in all I had played over 200 hours of gameplay, in an insanely short amount of time. While I wouldn’t say I had become “addicted”, I definitely wasn’t going out of my way to make other plans when I had free time to spare. The gameplay drags you in; you create your virtual likeness, and you work to improve him/her by learning new abilities, obtaining (either through fighting creatures or purchasing) new weapons and armor. One game reviewer said it best: Warhammer is a game of increasing numbers. While this is true of many MMOs, this is something that you are truly striving to do throughout the entire time that you’re within the game. You strive to increase your renown, your experience, your damage or healing stats, your guild’s rank, the amount of gold you have, etc.

Since this is my first MMO that I have gotten involved in, I can’t really compare the game to know what could be better or worse. I know that I loved playing with my friends, and when they moved on to other games, my interest and enjoyment of the game soon dwindled. MMOs (at least this one in my case) truly thrive on the “massive” part: the game itself is not mind blowing, it does not shatter gaming boundaries or introduce incredibly innovative gameplay mechanics never before seen elsewhere, but it provides a social experience that is entertaining with the company of a few like-minded friends.

If I could have changed anything to this game though, the kill-quests seem to be this recurring theme in most MMOs, and they are simply mindless, gameplay extending pieces that add very little to the game. While I would be understanding if it were simply included to acquaint a newcomer with the fighting mechanics of your character, I was constantly seeing these quests pop up along my entire trip to level 31 – and I would be willing to bet they continue to exist even past that. Taking this complaint to the next level: the majority of the quests really weren’t impressive to me- the majority boil down to kill quests, fetch quests, or meeting quests. I did enjoy some of the public quests that were available in the game (where you would usually need a few people to beat the final level of the boss), but getting people into these was not always easy.

The one thing that made this game shine for me was the Realm vs. Realm (RvR) combat, where you would either jump into a scenario and fight up to a 12v12 battle against the opposing force, or you could find characters of the opposing force simply in the world that you were in, and fight them. It was in these instances where it was truly a battle of wits, outsmarting your opponent, and being able to outperform them with the knowledge you have of yours (and their) tactics, and what you can do to defeat them. One time a friend and I came up to a few people and we were able to defeat them. Since we were near their base, they would spawn and try to chase us down again in vengeance. We ended up killing these two guys about three times before they brought a few other players with them, at which point we retreated. It was a memorable thirty minutes within the game where the mechanic truly shined.

From what I’ve read and heard from other MMO players, WAR stands out in how much emphasis it puts in RvR combat. Hopefully it is successful enough to show other developers that this is the type of gameplay we like, and are looking for.

While there aren’t any MMO’s that I’m looking to jump in anytime soon, especially not Wrath of the Lich King, a good friend has pointed me to All Points Bulletin which looks like its going to be awesome.