A flurry of activity descended with the holiday as we mingled with family from near and far. My wife and I were happy to host my immediate family for Christmas Eve dinner, and over the course of the next several days our holiday activities took us away from home often. Consequently, I have had little time to play games and have not spent any of it with Torchlight, which may be the most potent argument yet that Torchlight is no true heir to the Diablo franchise. However, fault may lie not chiefly with that game, but with another.
I long ago chastised myself to ignore the compulsion to complete daily quests in WoW, but it seems that I am unable to heed my own warnings. Their design is ingenious, providing a multitude of benefits to the game, but I find their pull to be insidious as well. It is as though each day is a window of opportunity forever lost should I fail to complete the appropriate daily quests. And while, certainly, the same quests will be waiting there tomorrow and each day thereafter nigh unto eternity, yesterday's rewards will remain forever lost to me; two Emblems of Frost, one Cooking Badge, one Jewelcrafter's Token, and a small mountain of gold which I allowed to slip through my fingers. These treasures will be available again tomorrow, it is true, but they have value only in their accumulation, and their accumulation is, by necessity, quantized by the daily system. Relative to the player who performs these duties diligently, I will have fallen behind.
The result is that when I have time enough only to play one game, that game is WoW by default.
To many, this system may seem a cruel marketing ploy to hook players and keep them coming back, but I do not believe that this is so. The opposite is more likely true: only a player already dedicated to continuing to patronize the service finds any value in the regular pursuit of daily quest rewards.
This dedication is itself the necessity that birthed this damned invention. In any game that provides content updates from ongoing development, there exists an underlying inequity: content is consumed hundreds of times faster than it is created. A new dungeon that can be completed in 45 minutes likely requires thousands of man-hours to create, test, and deploy. In order to combat this, MMO developers create repetitive content: items with low drop rates, high cost purchasable items, and rare currencies. These obstacles may be frustrating for the average player, but an even larger dilemma arises when one considers the most dedicated players. Such a person will simply repeat the new content until they have all the desired rewards. Historically, players have in one or two days obsoleted content that was months in development, farming new instances, enemies, and repeatable quests in a single marathon session, after which they are left with no challenges for the period of months it will take to create more content.
The ubiquitous reaction to this behavior is indifference. Indeed, early in the life of World of Warcraft, I believe that developers did not concern themselves with this phenomenon. But regardless of who is to blame for this behavior, it does have troubling consequences for Blizzard. MMOs are, by their nature, often competitive games. Even when direct competition is not involved, there are economies of many sorts which tie all players together. In order to make new rewards desirable, new content grants greater bonuses to the player's power. Massive inequities in gear result in substantial advantages in player-versus-player competition, as well as increasing economic dominance, and both work to the detriment of the enjoyment of the majority of players. It does not make good financial sense to alienate 95% of your customers to please the top 5%, and this goes double when one considers that the top 5%, having completed all the available challenges, quickly grow bored and quit the game for greener pastures. To make matters worse, this hardcore community offers more than direct subscription revenue: they are also the most effective and least expensive form of advertising available.
The solution is a design concept referred to as "gated content". Gated content is arbitrarily restricted in order to limit the maximum pace at which players may proceed. The daily quest is perhaps the most visible example of this concept, but this design can be seen in raid and heroic dungeon locks as well as deliberately delayed rollouts, as we have experienced with Icecrown Citadel. The trouble with gated content is that it establishes a pace at which the game will run, and those who do not keep up will be forever behind the pack. There is no making up lost daily quests, and so, when I have only one hour of free time, I feel compelled to log into WoW and race to finish my dailies.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
The Lighting of the Torch
I may deny addiction to any other game (and yes, that does include WoW), but I must confess to being a long-time Diablo junkie. It is true that I don't even have Diablo II installed at the moment, but I wouldn't say I'm off the habit, precisely. Not one of the last 12 years has passed without I have succumbed to the urge to click furiously upon the demon horde.
Annually, as if alerted by some primal biological imperative, I will agonize over skill trees to give birth to the character which will slaughter demons with the greatest efficiency. Such a character, by necessity, is truly feeble for the first 20-30 levels of the game, often requiring great patience and care to overcome simple obstacles, like some sort of dark fantasy kid-in-a-helmet. But there is no padded bus to escort my charge safely to the top of Mount Arreat, and so I must caudle him through the deadly poisons of Andariel, past the impossible might of Duriel, beyond the freezing reach of Mephisto, and deep into hell itself, unable to cast my array of rank 1 spells for lack of mana, unable to wield even the modest club for lack of strength. Beyond all this, the prize: a character with no wasted skill or ability points, free to invest heavily in the deadly-orb-of-killing-everything or perhaps the mighty-smash-of-monster-obliteration, and free to cast forever from the pool of mana that surges forth from the goofy-hat-of-infinite-resources.
In Diablo II, a single solo playthrough (including the expansion), will take the average player through approximately 35 levels of character advancement. And while I have a deep and abiding love of the game, despite my well laid plans I rarely play a character long once I have slain Baal. What this truly means is that I make the game much more difficult and less enjoyable than it ought to be in exchange for the promise of a reward that never comes. A sensible person may not repeat such a process, but I am clearly not such a man: I have endured this tortuous cycle a half dozen times now.
To be honest, Torchlight stayed completely off my radar until only a few days before it launched in October. I happened across a couple of trailers for it which immediately filled me with a sense of "This is just like Diablo!" In truth, I think that what I felt at the time was that the game appeared to be strikingly similar to what I have seen of Diablo III, a notion that bears further consideration (but will have to wait for another day). Clearly I had not learned my lesson about Diablo clones, because despite being completely disgusted with Titan Quest, Divine Divinity, and Dungeon Siege (also the sequel), I resolved without delay to acquire Torchlight as soon as my resources allowed me to do so. I would like to say that the $20 price point was a motivator in this decision, but such a claim would be a fabrication. I most likely would have felt the same had the game been offered at $50.
Over the weekend Steam offered Torchlight for only $10, and some elaborate cranial process alerted me that, despite being broke, this qualified as "within my means". I consulted the wife (the phrase "Christmas present" may have been invoked) and moments later found myself downloading the game via Steam. I've since begun sampling this offering in small doses, cleansing my virtual palette with WoW before nibbling at the entree. Already Torchlight has revealed to me flavors both sweet and foul, and provoked a whirlwind of notions regarding the making of games, especially when they closely resemble other games, and doubly so when your team is led by folk who worked on said other games.
Annually, as if alerted by some primal biological imperative, I will agonize over skill trees to give birth to the character which will slaughter demons with the greatest efficiency. Such a character, by necessity, is truly feeble for the first 20-30 levels of the game, often requiring great patience and care to overcome simple obstacles, like some sort of dark fantasy kid-in-a-helmet. But there is no padded bus to escort my charge safely to the top of Mount Arreat, and so I must caudle him through the deadly poisons of Andariel, past the impossible might of Duriel, beyond the freezing reach of Mephisto, and deep into hell itself, unable to cast my array of rank 1 spells for lack of mana, unable to wield even the modest club for lack of strength. Beyond all this, the prize: a character with no wasted skill or ability points, free to invest heavily in the deadly-orb-of-killing-everything or perhaps the mighty-smash-of-monster-obliteration, and free to cast forever from the pool of mana that surges forth from the goofy-hat-of-infinite-resources.
In Diablo II, a single solo playthrough (including the expansion), will take the average player through approximately 35 levels of character advancement. And while I have a deep and abiding love of the game, despite my well laid plans I rarely play a character long once I have slain Baal. What this truly means is that I make the game much more difficult and less enjoyable than it ought to be in exchange for the promise of a reward that never comes. A sensible person may not repeat such a process, but I am clearly not such a man: I have endured this tortuous cycle a half dozen times now.
To be honest, Torchlight stayed completely off my radar until only a few days before it launched in October. I happened across a couple of trailers for it which immediately filled me with a sense of "This is just like Diablo!" In truth, I think that what I felt at the time was that the game appeared to be strikingly similar to what I have seen of Diablo III, a notion that bears further consideration (but will have to wait for another day). Clearly I had not learned my lesson about Diablo clones, because despite being completely disgusted with Titan Quest, Divine Divinity, and Dungeon Siege (also the sequel), I resolved without delay to acquire Torchlight as soon as my resources allowed me to do so. I would like to say that the $20 price point was a motivator in this decision, but such a claim would be a fabrication. I most likely would have felt the same had the game been offered at $50.
Over the weekend Steam offered Torchlight for only $10, and some elaborate cranial process alerted me that, despite being broke, this qualified as "within my means". I consulted the wife (the phrase "Christmas present" may have been invoked) and moments later found myself downloading the game via Steam. I've since begun sampling this offering in small doses, cleansing my virtual palette with WoW before nibbling at the entree. Already Torchlight has revealed to me flavors both sweet and foul, and provoked a whirlwind of notions regarding the making of games, especially when they closely resemble other games, and doubly so when your team is led by folk who worked on said other games.
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