Seeing Free Realms at E3 reminded me of something I’ve been mulling for a little bit. In the same way that I think guilds are simply not visible enough – too ephemeral – the primary content of MMOs can often be obscured for various reasons. Time is the one that I hear a lot of friends talking about. When Brent put down his Hunter from our Monday night WoW group, he deleted all the quests in his log. To come back fresh, he said. This is a pretty common problem, I think: coming back to a character after a lengthy absence can result in confusion – even bad decisions.

To combat this confusion, Free Realms has a unique display that appears when a player logs in. Here’s a clip from Massively’s writeup:

“When you launch the game, you start at a welcome screen which gives you information about what’s new in the game that you could be doing right now. It includes a bit of the Facebook kind of information from your profile page with your friends mini-feed, but it also has quests that you’re working on, new mini-games that you can click on and go directly to, and information about how your pet is doing. When asked how much direction Free Realms would give its players, McWilliams told us, “We don’t want you to have to go find your fun. It’s not fun to wander around and not know what to do.” The welcome screen will provide players with immediate options of fun things to do, with links to take the player directly there — with no travel time or stumbling around, not knowing where to go next.”

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Briefly, I have some more complex thoughts on the Warhammer thing:

• I think this is a “good thing”. It’s tough, it’s hard, it’s … I’d even actually use the word violent. It certainly felt like the community as a whole took a sock to the gut with this news. Everyone was bopping along, going “yay WAR”, and then fell on their faces. Overall though, I think this is going to be good for the community in the long run.
• At the very least, this resets expectations. Spent some time with my family this evening, and there was a lot of talk about expectations vs. reality; when expectations are ‘greater’ than reality can provide, the result is unhappiness. By manually setting expectations for fans at a lower level, it guarantees that players will be (probably) less unhappy.
• It nails into the ground anyone who could have said they were trying to rush this out the door poorly made. They were so unhappy with some of their content that they cut it out with a knife rather than let it muddy the experience for players.
• This may be a new “high point” for in-development games, a developer publicly sacrificing the few so that the many might live. While this is very much flying in the face of the “we’ll work on it until its done”, it is just about the firmest commitment you could possibly see to “we won’t release it until it’s good.”

The only thing I’m still a little offput by is Jacobs’ statement that EA had nothing to do with this decision. I’m … umm … going to go out on a limb and call shenanigans on that. I’m willing to bet that *somewhere* behind this announcment is an EA exec looking at his watch and tapping his foot in cartoon-like impatience.

Tip of the hat to the folks at Mythic Entertainment. I really hope this works out the way you guys want it, and I hope that the fan community continues to show the patience it has in the last 48 hours or so. It really does seem like the dedicated fans are rallying to the game … we just need to hear more about the particulars.

Thanks.

Up to this point, I’ve been pretty kind to AoC despite my personal disinterest in the game. There have been a lot of bugs and crap, obviously, but because it just released and I’m not actively playing it at the moment I haven’t thrown many stones.

Then I read this little gem. By the way, I’d like to note that I’m linking to TTH here instead of the forums proper because I still can’t see them without logging in. Despite Funcom saying this would no longer be a problem. But whatevs.

You may have read on Massively previously that male and female avatars have different damage outputs because of problems with their animation cycles. They said they’d get back to the playerbase (of which I’m still a part) as soon as they knew something. Well, now they know something:

I know that many of you will probably be disappointed to hear that it might take us as much as another three to four weeks to solve this issue, for which I can only apologize, but we want to make sure that we devote the amount of time that an issue of this magnitude and importance deserves rather than rush out a “quick fix” that might not work as well.

• This is utter crap. I’m sure there is a design reason for basing damage output on the length of an attack’s animation (and I’d love to hear it, actually), but putting on my player hat: I don’t freaking care. You’ve just told a large portion of the playerbase that their game experience has been harder than was originally intended all along. You’ve told a large part of the playerbase that their male counterparts are better at their classes, generally. This cuts to the very heart of the average MMO player’s reason for playing an MMO in the first place. “If only I’d picked a guy, I’d be a better guildmember,” is the implicit thought in every player’s head.
• Maybe, and I’m just saying here, if this game wasn’t built on an IP that includes the subjucation and objectification of half the human race … this might not seem quite as bad as it seems.
• Damnit, two out of three of my characters are suffering from this bug!

Why can’t they bring back the bug that made female breasts smaller? That one I liked. Made my avatar look a bit more, you know, human.

Yesterday I had a sort of throw-away thought bubble article over at Gamers With Jobs, and pulled together two things I generally enjoy thinking about: Massively Multiplayer Games and the design/production elements of the Disney corporation. To be fair: I know it’s weird that I spend time thinking about things like resort design, ride queues, and theming … but I do. /shrug

I love Disney. Not the company, which is increasingly reaching to foul and loathesome depths in its push to get marketoys into the hands of little girls. Not even the man, though obviously he was a person to respect. I love Disney the gestalt, the overall combination of customer service, ambition, creativity and innovation that lets places like the happiest place on earth exist. Their Walt Disney World resort in particular is fascinating, a microcosm of a country all within the space of a few former swampy marshes.

Particularly engaging is the idea that – in almost every way – Disney is the ultimate MMO developer. Though their forays into the genre have been tentative so far, the house of mouse is poised to be the designer of the happiest places on meta-earth as well.

Via the Waaagh blog, an NDA-breaking blogger who has noted the recent addition of Achievements to World of Warcraft’s Lich King Alpha test. Now obviously, this could very easily be a Photoshop Hero sort of thing. Faked ‘leaks’ are very common, and they’re darned easy to do. So take this with a big grain of salt. That said, given the nature of Warhammer’s Tome of Knowledge, this seems like a gimme move on Blizzard’s part. As I said last Friday, the implicit danger in innovations like the Tome and Public Quests is how ’stealable’ they are.

Syp (the Waaagh blogger) notes that Lake Wintergrasp, too, may be an attempt to answer WAR’s engaging RvR gameplay element. That leaves the Public Quest element as the major distinction between the two games. If Blizzard really is trying to answer the game bullet point by pullet point, look for some new kinds of collaborative questing mechanic to be announced before the expansion’s launch.
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I love doing game design thought experiments. They’re just a lot of fun, and adequately fulfill my allotment of “wanking” for a given week. My hopes for the next WoW expansion were a cheery time to lay out, and so today I’m going to do it again with that *other* game I play on a regular basis. With the Living Legacy news now out, the next expansion to EQ2 is that much closer. And yet, EverQuest 2’s The Shadow of Oddyssey is still far enough away that we really don’t know what it will be about. A few weeks back Massively Speaking featured some discussion on the subject, but ultimately it’s very much an open question.

So let’s take a look at EQ2 from the 1000-foot viewpoint, and try to figure out what we could add to the new and updated version of Norrath. We need something that addresses the needs of more than just the high end players; people like leveling up characters, dangit. Right now the prevailing opinion is that this expansion will either be about the mysterious realm of the Shadowmen or a return to Luclin.

I’m a fan of the whole nostalgia thing, so let’s go that route: back to Luclin for some nostalgia, with a bunch of new and interesting stuff besides.

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Last week the Wrath of the Lich King information drop really brought Blizzard’s view into focus. I’ve been saying for some time now that they were holding something back – a fairly obvious comment. What I didn’t really appreciate is how informative a news reveal would be when it finally hit. I’d expected some sort of specific feature, like another Hero class or some moderate old world revamping. Instead we got … well, basically a manifesto. In between the back-of-the-box features they’ve let slip, we can see the impressions of a very specific boot tread.

Blizzard is now a company marching to battle with a very specific plan: World of Warcraft is going to be a very, very casual-friendly game. You think it’s casual now, you haven’t seen anything yet. Cameron’s already done a bangup job of commenting on this over at Massively, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t do some commentating of my own. Aside from gross generalizations, I specifically want to address a few things I noticed in the interviews with Kaplan and Chilton … things that made me very curious indeed.

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