Not too long ago, Tam wrote a post (and a follow-up) about why we should get rid of levels. SAO contains hints of this, mentioning how a level-based system isn’t really fair in PVP contexts, with a subtler hint at the same idea explaining why the second arc doesn’t have levels. In general, I don’t disagree with the arguments presented, but I still think levels are worth keeping.
Progression
It’s possible to have progression without using levels, but I feel that having a level as a symbol of how far you’ve come is more important than any actual increases you get from it. Diablo 3 is a good example of this, as each paragon level doesn’t get you much, but it still feels good to get the level up animation and sound. Skyrim likewise gives you a small power boost as you level, but a large part of your power is based on your skill levels, which might be somewhat far removed from your actual level. (A system was introduced after Dragonborn came out that even lets you reset your skill levels and level indefinitely.) I haven’t played a lot of SAO: Hollow Fragment yet, but it seems to work similarly. (It also has the somewhat ridiculous level cap of 250, and Kirito starts at level 100. These numbers are kind of just there.) Tam kind of dismisses this point, but I feel like it’s relatively important. Even at max level in games with vertical gear progression, you tend to make a different number go up (since both WoW and FF14 tell you your average item level). Admittedly, there’s no “ding” noise for hitting ilevel 170.
Yes, I hit 70 on my first character from desecrating a fire.
Baby + Bathwater
I think more than that, my problem is that most level-less systems that I’ve seen so far either aren’t (TSW) or are 100 times worse (Destiny), with a few exceptions. EVE seems to have figured this out, but it has the problem of being EVE. TSW claims not to have levels, but that’s a big fat lie, as your power is 90% based on your talisman levels. If the big skill wheel was all there was, that game could still be compelling, but they felt the need to add a power gating mechanism on top of it. Contrast this with Guild Wars (the first one), which had actual levels, but intended you to hit the level cap (20) about a third of the way through the campaign. The bulk of your time is spent acquiring additional options, especially Elite Skills, which had to be acquired from bosses out in the world. It’s not a level-less system, but it acts like one, and I find it one of the better examples of such.
There are… other problems with this wheel.
Destiny tried to be like Guild Wars, but is structured more like WoW or FF14. The story is enough to take you to about level 20, and you have “light levels” after that. Most options for getting additional light relied on random drops, and your light level still restricted what you could do, so this ended up being worse in almost all cases than having normal levels. Bungie seems to agree, and is going to normal levels with their first real expansion. Most systems I’ve seen so far that attempt to gate power in a way that isn’t related to level don’t actually fix any of the problems Tam outlined. As a consumer of games and not a designer, levels are easy to understand and mostly work, so I think I’ll stick with them. Changes have to do better than “mostly work”, and so far I can’t think of any that have.
It’s interesting seeing things about a game that I’m done playing. If you are unaware, WoW: Legion was announced today, with the addition of Artifact Weapons (among other things). With this, they finally, finally have a weapon that feral druids give a damn about because it looks cool. (Ok, there was one other.) The Druid relic weapon enables form customization for feral and guardian druids, something that has been a complaint since I started playing and was kind of, sort of, not really addressed in Wrath, with the addition of forms based on hair/skin color.
It’s taken me a while of not playing WoW to realize that I care more than I thought about how my character looks when playing MMOs, and going back to the same cat/bear forms is kind of a drag. The transmog system was a great step in the right direction, but no matter what my normal armor looked like, I still turned into the same bear. No matter how awesome that weapon upgrade was, I sure couldn’t see it in cat form. Really I’m glad that they’re doing something about this, but it’s maybe too little, too late.
Other things they’re adding sound cool, like the class hangouts for all of the classes (Monks, Druids, and DKs pretty much already had these, but it’s nice to spread the love). The Artifact weapons look a lot like the weapon upgrades in Destiny (which despite my overall thoughts on Destiny, is a cool system) so I hope they work out here too. If MMO-Champion’s writeup is to be believed, they might even understand why 5-person dungeons are worth keeping around. It’ll be interesting to see where this one goes. WoW can be a successful, sustainable MMO even at numbers far below its current ones, so I think players of the game have a lot to look forward to. I just don’t think I’ll count myself among that number in the near future.
A while back, a friend posed a question to a group of us, asking what 15 games had most influenced us. Bel posted about it a while back, and I came up with my list around the same time. It’s now the first post of Blaugust. These are in roughly the order in which I encountered them, which means that they’re roughly arranged by date, but not quite. Trimming the list to 15 games is hard, and each of these led to other similar games in almost all cases.
Sonic 2 (1992)
This is the game I would credit with getting me into video games in general. My earliest memories of gaming are of me playing as Tails in this game. Tails is essentially invincible, but can be a valuable co-op partner if the person controlling him is good. Even if they’re not (and when this came out I certainly wasn’t), it’s not a real drawback. This being one of my first experiences is probably why I value co-op games so highly now.
Honorable Mention: Super Mario World
Overkill (1992)
I’ve talked about Overkill before, so I won’t expand here. This is the first game I “beat” on my own (Like a lot of games in the genre, Overkill starts again harder when you beat the last stage), and it established my love of scrolling shooters.
This is a bit of an odd case. I played Street Fighter 2 with friends before any of us knew what we were doing, or how to do a fireball motion or any of that, and found it fun. I learned what a Hadouken was too late to put any of it to practice in these matches or in the arcade, but memories of those experiences are why I found fighting games fun. I eventually enjoyed the more over-the-top games (BlazBlue, Marvel vs. Capcom) more than Street Fighter, but this one remains special.
Honorable Mention: Tekken 2
Illusion of Gaia (1994)
Illusion of Gaia (or Illusion of Time if you’re in Europe) was my first “Action-RPG” of sorts. This is the game that taught me that games could have actual stories beyond “rescue the princess” or “stop the bad guy”. This game in particular is somewhat difficult, so I didn’t actually beat it on a real SNES; I played it to completion on an emulator years later.
Mario Kart 64 (1997)
The joy of multiplayer, now with twice the players. Mario Kart 64 was my first 4-player game, and therefore the first game around which gatherings were specifically held. Prior to this, gaming was something my friends and I did while hanging out, this marked the start of hanging out specifically to play games.
Honorable Mention: Star Fox 64
Mega Man X4 / Mega Man 8 (1997)
These released in the same year, use almost the same sprite for the main character, and were played by me literally back to back, so they can share this slot. They also share terrible voice acting (but I didn’t know better back then) and relatively high difficulty (which is common to the series). This was the expansion of my earlier enjoyment of the Mario and Sonic games, but with an additional layer of complexity that wasn’t just “jump on enemies”. I went back and played a lot of the earlier games later, and they’re also great. The same can’t be said for what came after…
Pokemon Red/Blue (1998)
This might as well be My First JRPG, but it’s hiding some ridiculousness underneath. The simple nature of this game and ease of understanding the basics got me in, and trading with friends kept me in. As I got older, I grew to enjoy the complicated parts.
Legend of Dragoon (2000)
This game made me aware that JRPGs as a genre were a thing I was interested in. Legend of Dragoon grabbed me in a way Final Fantasy 7 did not*, and it became my life for a period of time in 2001. The story is a bit cliché, and the translation is terribad (they couldn’t keep things consistent). But the combat system requiring timed button presses is fun (others have described it as “tedious”) and it has beautiful backgrounds and animations for the PS1 era.
*I died to the guard scorpion because I didn’t know “Attack while the tail’s up” was a mistranslation and it’s the same ATB tutorial boss the series used since FF4. I was 10; I hadn’t played any of the SNES games yet.
Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001)
AKA the most fun I had with a multiplayer game since Mario Kart. Despite what some people say, this is a fighting game at its core, so a lot of the same principles of spacing and timing apply. At the same time, the simple nature of inputs and the chaotic nature of combat allow for people without much knowledge of the game to play and have fun. The skill ceiling is rather high, so it’s possible to see experienced players completely destroy beginners, but it can stay fun as long as the skill gap isn’t too wide.
Final Fantasy 5 (1992)
My favorite Final Fantasy, which is surprising when people learn I played this after 4 and 6, and it was the fan-translated version on an emulator. I’ve also talked about this one before. (As a reminder, you have exactly one month to finish/join the Fiesta.) My love of systems was established by this game, and it hasn’t worn off. Pieces of it still shine through in later Final Fantasy games, most notably in Tactics, X-2, and 14.
Shining Soul 2 (2004)
This is probably the game in the list that other people are least likely to have played. Shining Soul is a dungeon crawler of sorts for the Game Boy Advance, featuring a variety of characters and a very simple story. I picked this up because I liked the dragon, but I ended up playing more of the wolf. I’m fairly certain this was the start of my trend of playing non-humans in things that allow it, in addition to the start of me actually enjoying dungeon crawlers.
Honorable Mention: Diablo 2
World of Warcraft (2004)
I didn’t play WoW until 2007, right when Burning Crusade came out. By sheer virtue of the number of players it had at its peak, World of Warcraft was the first MMO for many people, and I count myself among that crowd. It’s thanks to WoW that I met a bunch of the people I now associate with, including Belghast and Kodra. It’s had ups, it’s had downs, but what I think of as an MMO is shaped almost entirely by World of Warcraft, from my preferred roles to what kinds of classes I like.
Mass Effect (2008)
Mostly what Mass Effect did was teach (or re-teach) that I didn’t dislike shooters. I played a bunch of Goldeneye when that was relevant, and a fair bit of Halo 2 in high school, but after that everything seemed to be Call of Duty and competitive multiplayer, and I wasn’t a big fan. Mass Effect brought me back in a number of ways, mostly thanks to RPG mechanics and abilities. Mass Effect 3 did even more, thanks to the greatly expanded abilities on show in the multiplayer.
Bastion (2011)
Bastion is a marvel of sound design. It’s also pretty and plays well, but those are honestly secondary to the music and the narration. This opened me up to the difference sound can make in a game. Without the work of Darren Korb and Logan Cunningham, Bastion would be a good, but not terribly special top-down action game, and it would draw unfavorable comparisons to things like Diablo or Sacred 2. The music and voice are what distinguish it. (My personal favorite track is Spike in a Rail.)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011)
I played Oblivion when it came out and didn’t like it very much. I tried it again in 2008 and liked it more, but not enough to “finish” it. Skyrim engaged me in a way that Oblivion did not, and the streamlining of certain things (like attributes) made the experience much more enjoyable for me. Oblivion (and GTA) made me think I didn’t like Open World games, and Skyrim taught me otherwise.
Honorable Mention: Saint’s Row 3
Final Words
Now that I’m here at the end, this is kind of a ridiculous post. Expect most of my Blaugust posts to be about a 5th of this. Thanks to MobyGames for the vast majority of the screenshots.
Edit:
Forgot to mention this when it went up, but for more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative.
I’ve noticed that whenever a game gets mentioned as a negative experience on Aggrochat, the game is usually Guild Wars 2. Occasionally it’ll be Champions instead, but these games share common issues. Both of these games suffer from group content being chaotic and uninteresting, because a group of players (in PVE) is not more than the sum of its parts.
The Problems
Both Guild Wars 2 and Champions forced players into moderately survivable builds for running around the world near their launches. For Guild Wars, this was a case of mob damage being incredibly high relative to health, so you needed to have a build capable of blocking/evading attacks or you were on the way to many deaths. Since dedicated healers didn’t exist, and defensive archetypes had no way to generate aggro, groups had neither. For Champions (which has more “traditional” mechanics), this was a case of over-tuning almost everything about the dame the day before launch, rendering completely offensive or defensive builds non-viable (unless you were spamming condemn). This meant that while tank and healer builds were supposed to exist, in practice they did not function.
In both examples, the group makeup for dungeons was 5 solo builds with maybe some attempt at support thrown in at the last minute. Also in both cases, provided you didn’t die too many times, the so-called “graveyard zerg” was a viable strategy. this led to an incredibly un-fun experience where the ideal strategy was throwing damage at bosses until they fell over, with some attempt to avoid or heal minor damage.
The Standard
The ideal thing to mention here would be Everquest (or if I felt like being a hipster, DikuMUD), but that’s before my time and so I’m going to respectfully acknowledge that and start with what I know. The first game I played that conformed to what is now the standard group makeup of 1 tank, 1 healer, and X DPS was World of Warcraft. I probably don’t have to explain how it works, but there’s generally one person trying to keep enemies under control by drawing their attacks, one person trying to heal any damage the group members take, and several people trying to do damage to the enemies without taking much damage themselves.
This is the standard for a reason. It gives everyone involved something specific to do, and people know what’s expected of them (roughly) from the outset. Despite many accusations of the aggro mechanic being “not realistic”, group setups like this mirror reality, with each person having a specialty, and all of them working together to accomplish a common goal in different ways. It’s not free of problems, with the usual accusations being that the number of DPS outnumbers healers and tanks massively, or that it isn’t fun to play a healer or tank. While I disagree with some parts of this, there are other options that can be explored.
The Standard, Reloaded
While I’m 100% certain that players don’t know what they want, enough people seem to want to abolish the trinity that it might be worth looking into deeper. The most superfluous role happens to be my favorite, but when it gets right down to it, Tanks don’t need to be “tanks” to do the job they’re there for, which is controlling the enemies. It’s not hard to imagine some sort of heavy-CC class filling in this role, although classes like that aren’t really designed because of balance issues. Such a class is either overly strong or worthless in PVP and high-level PVE, depending on how many of their tricks work on players or bosses. But a class that could stun groups of enemies or possibly move mobs at will would make a tank unnecessary. There is the risk that if they themselves don’t incur damage from this, they also make healers unnecessary.
A different approach to solving the same problem is to have a defender type character that has some sort of damage redirection. In this scenario, it matters less that this person has the attention of everything, and more that they’re keeping the amount of damage the group takes controlled. An example of this type appeared in WoW, as the Red Drake in Oculus.
Healers are a bit trickier, as I play one far less and don’t know what makes the archetype appealing to people who are naturally drawn to it. An example that has seen some success is a character focused on damage prevention, which I’m told was stronger than direct healing in the first Guild Wars. The problem with this is an inability (or decreased ability) to recover from mistakes.
Oculus provides another answer here with the Green Drake, a healer who siphoned health from enemies and transferred health to allies. When I was playing WoW, I found maintaining a balance like this and using my own health as a resource was far more interesting than any “normal” healer. Potential balance issues still exist, but I’d like to see a game try this as a mechanic for normal players (even though it’s kind of hard to avoid giving it a “blood mage” theme).
I don’t have good answers for DPS. It’s already the role with the largest number of character types and the largest general interest, so I’m not sure much needs changing.
The Conclusion
What I think we need isn’t an abolishing of roles, but more options for them. The Tank options in WoW amount to three options for “dude in full plate” and a bear, all of which are increasingly mechanically similar. Healers tend not to have more complicated mechanics than “cast spell, watch health bar go up”, with possibly a choice between “efficient spell” and “fast spell” depending on the situation. More variety is needed, not the complete destruction of the roles themselves.
Everyone has their preferred character archetypes. In D&D terms, everyone is familiar with the traditional Fighter, Mage, and Thief, so most games try to provide player characters with options along those lines. Other games expand a bit more, with a healer archetype (sometimes a variation of the mage) or an archer archetype (sometimes a variation of the thief). More classes are usually created by combining these in some way. The Barbarian is a combination of the swiftness and light armor of a thief with the power and strength of a fighter. My favorite archetype is a different sort of combination: the shape-shifter.
In a way, shape-shifting characters are usually a combination of the thief and mage archetypes in that they are (usually) magic-users with tools to adapt to a variety of different situations. More generally, it’s characterized by the ability to switch between archetypes. The stereotypical example is the Druid, which is usually given a variety of nature-based spells to heal or harm, and the ability to turn into animals when spells aren’t an appropriate solution. There are other characters that fit this archetype that aren’t the druid, like the lead character of the Breath of Fire series, who turns into a variety of dragons.
There is the lesser example of things with a single alternate form, like most depictions of werewolves. In games, this usually manifests as some sort of temporary power up or super mode (which I like a bit less), but it’s sometimes an alternate form with different strengths and weaknesses from the “base” form. League of Legends likes this model a lot, using it for Nidalee, Elise, and Jayce (sort of).
Balancing this character type has historically been difficult, and for good reason. If one person can duplicate the jobs of three or four at a moment’s notice, it risks eliminating the need for the more focused characters. The traditional tradeoff for this is usually decreased effectiveness at any one role, but this leaves the shape-shifter marginalized in any situation where a single task is valued. “Alternate form” types tend to fall into this trap especially often, where the strengths of one form do not sufficiently cover for its weaknesses, leading to use of only one. (Nidalee in League is perhaps the best example of this.)
Some games balance the ability to do everything by forcing a choice of role, and decreasing the effectiveness of other forms or roles. WoW is the best example here, but D&D Next seems to also use this approach. An alternate approach is limiting the ability to transform in some way. Breath of Fire 4 has both a transformation and a perpetuation cost, so you can’t stay a dragon forever. (I think BoF1 only had a transformation cost, but I haven’t played it in a while.) These have shown to be acceptable ways to balance the power level of this type of character, and I wish more games would use them rather than declaring it too difficult and leaving my favorite archetype out.
You would think that there would be some good solution by now for turning the servers on and letting people in to these online games. But time after time, games launch with troubles. All things considered, WildStar’s launch wasn’t really that bad, but it still creates a lot of frustration when everything doesn’t go smoothly.
First, they dramatically underestimated the number of players who would be interested in playing on a PVP server. As a result, all of the PVP servers at launch had queues, some of them several hours long. In addition, the number of English realms for EU was too low in general, so those also had long queues. More servers and free server transfers seem to have addressed the problem over the weekend, so it isn’t all bad.
Despite the complaints, it really isn’t all that bad. SWTOR had similar queue issues, but it’s a better illustration of a different problem. After launch, there were too many servers, leading to server merges and the general unhappiness that accompanies that. FF14 (Realm Reborn version) had numerous issues on launch, including not having queues (so you had to retry login until it worked) and during head start, having the instance servers (which were required for quest and character progression) frequently fail to work entirely. WildStar is at least ahead of both of these cases.
On the other end, ESO’s launch had fewer issues. Quest bugs were particularly bad during the first week, but at no point did I ever have trouble logging in to play. WoW’s original launch wasn’t great, but their expansion launches are pretty good at this point, even though the rush is usually at least the size of a typical MMO launch [citation needed]. TSW also managed to remain mostly functional (again with quest bugs) during its launch. I think the traditional servers are presenting scalability issues for games that use them, and something else (like TSW) might serve better in the long run.
Aggrochat and More
This week’s Aggrochat is out, and the usual cast is missing Rae, but joined by Tam. About halfway through we switch to discussing massive spoilers for Transistor, so I recommend stopping there if you haven’t finished it. (We don’t talk about anything else after.)
As an additional note, registration for the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta is now live, and you should sign up for this wonderful charity event. Ongoing documentation of my pre-fiesta run is here, on YouTube. If you are in Alliance of Awesome, you should take a look, as there is an extra bit of charity money riding on your registration. (If you’re not, you should still register, and then consider poking into what AoA is doing in various games.)
I’m not much for traditional PVP. I play a bit of League of Legends, and I’ve messed around in Cyrodiil in ESO a bit, but it’s not really my thing. I don’t take particular pleasure in the experience of facing off against someone, knowing directly that it’s a zero-sum game; someone must win, and someone must lose. I especially don’t like it in situations that are massively one-sided, like most gank situations in Open-World PVP. There’s little sense of accomplishment in winning such a fight, and it sucks to be on the receiving end. In a sense this is why I tolerate League more than other “PVP games”, because match-ups are relatively even, at least at the outset.
But this isn’t to say that I don’t like competing against other people. I’m a sucker for leaderboards and time trials. My very first real post ended in a challenge (which as far as I can tell no one’s taken me up on). I put up a relatively competitive score for Pixel Purge as part of the Indie Game Gala for the Newbie Blogger Initiative. Someone doubled it, but I’m pretty happy with second place. I’m pretty excited about the Trials in ESO because they have leaderboards, although I realize I am not likely to be hardcore enough to appear anywhere near them. I’m not even at veteran levels yet.
I really appreciate this form of competition more than others for a few reasons. First, you can usually try again immediately. There’s a sense of progression in constantly improving your score/time. There’s a feeling of accomplishment for actually passing someone else. And when someone else passes you, there’s incentive to give it another shot and beat their score. I know World of Warcraft attempted to get this sort of thing going with Challenge Modes for dungeons, but it fell pretty flat. I’m not sure how to get people more interested, but making it part of “normal” progression helps, because at least people are trying it and making some sort of entry.
I’m not saying that other forms of PVP are bad. Battlegrounds and the like can be enjoyable if well done, and their general popularity reflects it. However, I think things like this should be considered more often.
Aggrochat
It’s Sunday, so there’s a new Aggrochat available (or there will be soon, if you’re here early enough). We spend a bit of time talking about League (and why Braum is awesome), Hex (and why lawsuits suck), FF5 (and why I’m insane), and crowdfunding (and why I think early access isn’t living up to expectations). Also, hear me be wrong about when the Wildstar Beta ends (it’s actually tonight at 23:59 Pacific). Check it out here.
