Naysayers be damned: Gameloft has posted on the upcoming Order & Chaos (O&C) patch, despite the fact that most critics insisted that Gameloft’s lazy attitude on updating previous titles would negatively affect O&C. The bullets:

• New quests will be added in the last two high-level regions
• A server migration system will be implemented, allowing you to change your server
• The cost needed to teleport from one city to another will be adjusted
• The amount of money lost upon dying will be adjusted
• All cemeteries will become non-Player-versus-Player areas (non-PvP), meaning no player will be able to attack another one in a cemetery
• A teleport will be added in Greenmont
• Additional content and several bug fixes will also be implemented…

What this does is confirm that the game was pushed out the door without being fully done. That is to say, the lack of quests at certain levels was suspicious, in that it felt like Gameloft didn’t spend as much time on quest content as they could have, and just wanted the game out to start generating money. If the lack of quests in the mid-20 level range is any indication, the high-level tiers must be truly quest-sparse, which the update should address. Same is true for dungeons¹ and PvP.

Presumably, the server migration system will be RMT-based², and is of questionable worth; after starting our first character, we realized that the Goons were on another server, so we briefly considered re-rolling. Switching servers would be useful, but since guilds have a max capacity of 60 people, most people who’d use this feature would switch servers to play with a smaller group of friends, rather than switching to play with larger groups.

We wonder if the likelihood of cheaper transportation³ and less of a death penalty is any indication that Gameloft expects to make adequate money via other RMT, or if they’re afraid that the complaints about these things will drive off new players. The teleport hub in Greenmont is a logical addition, and it’s amazing that it wasn’t added already.

Overall, it’ll likely be a couple patches down the road before O&C feels like a complete MMO, if things beyond solo PvE are important to you. We’d start to get more enthused about dungeons if there were a parallel announcement about a good group-finding system, but there hasn’t been one as yet. The arenas don’t intrigue us too much, as we’re skeptical that they’ll work well given the small amount of abilities, specs, and classes the game offers. But at least Gameloft is trying, and they do still have a veritable lock on the genre right now on iOS.

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Questions about Order & Chaos (O&C) are still making the rounds, because the game’s features aren’t documented well, and finding out more about the game is either a practice in raising your Googling skills, else based on in-game experience. For some, neither of these options is desirable. Since we’ve wasted time on both endeavors, we’ll happily regurgitate our findings, and correct some of our misunderstandings from our post two weeks ago.

The classes.

We pointed out earlier that we actually wanted O&C to invest in the Diku-genre, as it’s a solid starting point for a robust MMO scene on iOS. It turns out, however, that the holy triad concept is watered down in O&C, which in a way makes sense, since O&C is just watered-down WoW to begin with. What we mean here is that in games like WoW, aggo is a function of threat, which can be generated in a variety of ways. In O&C, threat is based purely on damage, which means that healers can freely spam spells, and DPS classes need to be aware that they will likely be expected to kill anything that runs towards them, or at minimum, tie it up until someone else does. This makes the defensive Warrior spec rather questionable, because while it helps keep a Warrior alive, it doesn’t really aid in herding mobs, and decreases the Warrior’s damage output.

We suppose that at end-game, and/or when Gameloft places further emphasis on team dynamics, that Warriors will be expected to hold adds, while the DPS classes help burn down main targets, but the lack of taunting, or threat mitigation via skills for DPS classes, means that Mage AoE abilities are basically too dangerous to use against difficult mobs. Since so much of the game is solo-friendly, like WoW, most Warriors are speccing offensively, and the rage-like generation that Warriors are capable of keeps them fighting with little downtime. Gear is pretty self-evident here, with a focus on strength and stamina. With the exception of maybe fighting over one-handed weapons with Rangers and military Monks, Warrior itemization should be easy, since Warriors are the only class that wear plate.

The same can be said for Rangers, whose specs basically determine whether they are ranged or melee capable¹. Ranged Rangers² specialize in slow, high-damage attacks, with crowd-control abilities keeping enemies distant so they hopefully die before getting in our face. Melee Rangers, on the other hand, mimic World of Warcraft’s Rogue class, which emphasizes stealth, fast dagger attacks, and some crowd-control to keep adds at bay until a primary target can be neutralized. The obvious downside to the Ranger is that it’s a pure DPS class, which means if more Diku-style encounters are to be added in the future, these classes will likely be a dime-a-dozen. Gear is all about agility, with melee Rangers likely looking for some stamina items as well. Since this is the only class that exclusively wears leather, itemization shouldn’t be a problem for the most part.

The Mage is pretty straightforward, with one tree focused on pure damage output (fire), and one with slightly less damage output (ice) but with arguably more utility. Both versions of the class are for ranged DPS play, so if played correctly, Mages, like non-melee Rangers, shouldn’t be getting hit much. Mages may fight over some cloth gear and weapons with healing Monks, but most leveling Monks should be military-specced anyway, so gearing up in a team shouldn’t cause too much heartache.

Monks are different than the aforementioned classes because the specs differ so much; healing Monks rely on Wisdom, while militant Monks require Strength and Stamina gear. The former is also ranged, while the latter is melee. The former is a great support class in teams, while the latter is more of a utility DPS class. Geared up correctly, a healing Monk should have adequate mana regeneration, such that downtime is minimal, but in our own experience pre-level 20, there’s a lot of eating food between fights to regenerate health and mana. Long-term, this is supposedly more of a problem with militant Monks, who blow through mana a lot quicker than their healing-focused counterparts. Still, the potential nice thing about the Monk is that you can spec for melee DPS, and as long as you have healing gear stashed away somewhere, you can probably get away with healing in a team without re-speccing³. Healing Monks are also incredibly boring to play, because they don’t have many combat abilities, and quickly get beaten in the face.

The world.

Travel is painfully slow, especially if you need to run back to a major city in order to upgrade skills. There’s a teleport system in place, but it’s arguably expensive, and doesn’t go everywhere you’d want it to. There are no mounts in the game yet, which is curious considering this would be a perfect use of RMT⁴. The main city starting out is not easily traversed, and it’s somewhat of a pain to run from one side to another; the main city needs to be redesigned to be less linear, and have vendors more easily accessible.

The auction house remains the most viable method for acquiring gold, especially considering that your character is docked money whenever she dies. At least one of the minor towns has a convenient-placed auction “vendor” near a chest, so you have a decent way to bid on and post items. It seems that raising the cash at early levels to afford skills, deaths, inventory upgrades, and the occasional purchase relies on the auction house or RMT. We hear that at later levels, there’s enough gold coming in from quests and mobs that this is less of an issue, but at earlier levels, expect to price gathered crafting materials competitively at auction in order to have reasonable spending money.

While Gameloft is known for being slow or simply unresponsive in getting game updates out, they seem to be committed to rolling out updates to O&C; some form of team-based Diku-style encounters for end-game seem planned, though it’s unclear if these will be instanced, or simply be world objectives. Currently, PvP is based on dueling or World-PvP at later levels, but a WoW-like arena system is also planned. The World-based PvP is complainant-prone, thanks to loss of gold after each death. This may be mitigated somewhat by better cash inflow at later levels, but we can see this being very annoying if it happens often.

The rest.

Crafting is actually useful, but an extremely long grind. Only smithing relies on items gathered from ore nodes around the world, as leather-working and tailoring are based on items collected from mobs. This means that ore is generally priced a bit cheaper on the auction house, while leather and cloth are less bountiful and more expensive. Expect to spend cash at the auction house for these items, unless you’re okay with farming low-level mobs for crafting supplies. We’re told that high-level crafting relies on RMT-derived items, which we’re not a fan of, but we don’t expect to get to that point anytime soon considering how much of a grind professions are.

O&C is a great way to get a WoW-like fix in a less complex package, and Gameloft has a lot of potential here to make huge waves with the game. However, updates will need to be iterative, and the business model needs to be tweaked to keep a dedicated player-base that won’t cry foul if RMT is required for success in-game; RMT should be a crutch at best, but not mandatory, especially on top of a subscription fee and up-front purchase.

We’re looking forward to how the game evolves, but with reports that the grind becomes unbearable at the later levels, we question whether Gameloft can get end-game updates out in time for more casual players to hit the level cap. Unless Gameloft gives level-60 characters something to do, World-PvP ganking will likely become more commonplace before people get bored of the game and move on. A proper end-game PvE and PvP experience will keep players around for longer, however, and with the iOS distribution model, expansions can be funded quickly and easily as time progresses. Gameloft had better lock this down now before another big player makes their entry into the iOS MMO arena.

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The business model of Order & Chaos (O&C) is irking us a bit more now, and it might help us to have a better understanding of Gameloft’s expenses for this title. Freemium titles are typically free, with profit derived from real money transactions (RMT), where players purchase in-game items for actual cash. Overall, freemium titles are considered profitable, so why is O&C not being distributed under this model? In other words, what makes O&C less profitable than other successful freemium titles, necessitating the monthly subscription¹ and up-front cost?

Because of the RMT model, players paying the monthly subscription alone are at a disadvantage; buying gold becomes advantageous when min-maxing, because more gold means more vendor and auction house purchases, which means players who dabble with RMT can level faster than regular subscribers. Plus, since characters lose money whenever they get killed, players who take too many risks, or are simply not very good, could find themselves without adequate funds to purchase skill upgrades. Again, a clear advantage for those who spend on RMT.

That said, Gameloft’s done a good job of relying on craft funds to limit gold expenditures on crafting skills. This means that crafters can potentially see decent profits on the auction house, assuming their better items don’t bind on pickup. The auction house really becomes the only way for regular subscribers to stand any chance of making decent profit for their characters, but there are a couple problems with this, too. For one, the primary auction house location doesn’t have a chest nearby, which means players can’t easily post a lot of items to the auction house at once (because of inventory issues). A good solution would be to combine the auction house and chest system at auction house locations, such that there’s no need to courier items between the chest and auction house. Two, the auction house should be more readily accessible. As it is, running to the auction house takes too much time, especially since there’s no cheap transportation system in the game, unlike World of Warcraft’s hearthstone which quickly transports a character to a major city. Here again, RMT provides players a way to get around faster, because those who buy gold can afford to make use of portals, while regular subscribers cannot.

Finally, while O&C doesn’t run on 3G, a nice feature Gameloft could add is an auction-house/chest/mail interface that’s still accessible over 3G, letting players check in on auctions, post new ones, etc. This would allow players to remain engaged with the O&C world, even though they couldn’t actually “play” because of a lack of wifi.

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As a former World of Warcraft (WoW) gamer, we found ourselves intrigued when Order & Chaos (O&C) was announced for iOS. Gameloft titles are known for cloning gameplay, art, and themes from blockbuster titles, and O&C is no different. The title offers to do one thing that no one else hasn’t, however, and that’s delivering a solid MMO experience to mobile devices¹. And in this respect, Gameloft delivered.

WoW lite.

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: Order & Chaos isn’t going to replace WoW. At least not for most people. That’s because WoW has a rich, established setting that’s interesting the moment you enter the game. O&C may share an aesthetic style, but it’s WoW watered down. The quests are just as simple as vanilla WoW, and while the world appears to have a decent scope to it, the atmosphere isn’t reflective of racial or cultural differences. New characters are basically dropped right into the game, and while WoW eases new players into game mechanics in way that’s mind-numbingly slow your second or third time around, O&C throws you into the mix a bit quicker, expecting you to get the hang of things before you’ve even explored the full interface. So maybe the tutorial could use some buffing up for people new to the genre, but maybe Gameloft expects most people downloading O&C to already be MMO veterans.

Let’s back up a bit and talk about character creation. The game limits players to four races (two per “side”), and players can choose either male or female gender. Model customization is limited to skin and hair color, hairstyle, and face style. There are about four options in each category here, so the customization isn’t horribly robust, but it’s plenty for a first attempt. What surprised us is that there are no racial bonuses, so other than appearance, there’s no benefit to which race you decide to go with.

There are also four classes to choose from, each being available to every race: Warrior, Mage, Monk, and Ranger. We’ve only played around with the Monk thus far, which looks like it can be specced to do extra healing, or be combat-proficient. It’s unclear to us as yet whether O&C is a true Diku-style MMO, but at first glance we didn’t see any threat-reducing spells available at our class trainer. By level nine, we had a one go-to healing spell, and we grouped up twice to take on some named monsters, where we were more useful healing than fighting.

There’s a talent tree for specializing, and it looks pretty deep, so the customization here may be interesting. There are some talent dependencies, and other talents that require a certain amount of pre-spent points in a given tree in order to buy them. Unlike WoW there are two trees per class, with the Monk being the sole healing class. The Ranger looks to be a cross between a WoW Hunter and Rogue, while the Warrior and Mage are more obvious. Again, without any indication of a threat meter, we don’t know whether the Warrior has a taunt-like effect, but we imagine this must exist, if only because his armour is clearly more robust.

Like WoW, each class has a trainer, but unlike WoW, you buy books that contain skills. So rather than buying the skill, you buy the book and then use the book to learn the skill, which is really just a pain in the ass considering the extra step. There are a lot of extra steps like this littered throughout the game, like when you click an item in your inventory, and you have to click another little icon in order to bring up a smaller window comparing it to the item already occupying the respective item slot. These things just go to show how polished WoW was when it came out in 2004, and how even after all this time, a clone isn’t getting everything right.

O&C includes crafting, which seems limited to tailoring, leather-working, and smithing. There’s a quest you can complete which lets you choose one of those three, and we don’t know why you wouldn’t choose the one that lets you craft your own gear. The only gathered we’ve yet seen is mining, and it doesn’t require special gear – you just click on a resource node on the map, and your character pulls a pick-axe out of her ass and starts hammering away.

Yet, decent gameplay.

It’s pretty remarkable that Gameloft got O&C to run well, particularly given the low resolution. The game does feel a tad cramped compared to playing WoW on your big-screen monitor, and we can’t help but think that reducing text sizes and some icons wouldn’t alleviate our virtual claustrophobia a bit. But the gameplay is pretty smooth, with a virtual control-stick appearing on the left side of the screen, wherever you decide to drop your thumb. This only gets in the way when you want to loot a mob whose corpse is on that side of the screen, but it’s not too annoying to move the camera to the left so you can loot easily. Yes, your right thumb controls camera movement, as well as jumping and using your hotkeys on the bottom-right of the screen. There are three hotspots near the jump button where you can place spells and items, but if you need more (and you will), you can place less-used abilities on a shelf that you can pull up or hide on the right side of the screen. This is where we stashed our potions and food, and definitely beats bringing up the player inventory just to use a potion mid-combat.

The lack of addons is actually nice. We don’t know how many hours we spent working on an ideal addon configuration, and compiling it for others to use. Needless to say, it’s somewhat refreshing knowing that every player is on equal footing, and that when you want to play, you don’t have to first update all your addons or mess with your screen layout. Since there’s no O&C version of wowhead, you have help with quests thanks to a blue arrow that points in the direction of a selected quest objective. Presumably, this won’t be as helpful when you have to travel half-way across the world, so paying attention to quest descriptions will be necessary, but in the initial levels of the game, it’s a foolproof guide.

WoW-like “groups” are called “teams” in O&C, and they work decent enough. The chat system includes a global channel, which, as in every game, can be a royal annoyance. This is perhaps even more true in O&C, if only because players come from various countries, using various languages. There are regional servers, but this hasn’t stopped Korean players from creating characters on the American servers, complete with names that we don’t have the proper keyboard set up for, even if we did want to type them.

About the only major gripe we have with the game is the business model. The game costs $7 to download, and after a free, three-month subscription, costs $1/month. That’s not bad, but there’s also a “freemium” model here, where players can buy gold and other items for real money. How this will affect balance is still up-in-the-air, but it seems as though many of the for-pay items are temporary buffs and aesthetic enhancements (like pets)².

Moving forward.

O&C is certainly deep, in the sense that player progression isn’t super-quick. It doesn’t seem to be super-slow, either, but we’ll have to play more to see what kind of curve the game offers. Right now, the game feels like more complex Gauntlet. That is to say, it’s a hack’n slash emporium with various MMO elements, but not offering enough to foster a complex community³. That’s not to say that Gameloft couldn’t expand on O&C as time goes on, offering new abilities, races, classes, emotes, customization, et al. If anything, O&C blows games like Dungeon Hunter out of the water, because of the MMO complexity.

What we hope to see in the next 10 levels or so is more Diku styling, with areas that require grouping and the holy triad of classes (tank, healer, DPS)⁴. We also hope to see varied class builds, and a world with considerable atmospheric changes. The background “lore” has been weak thus far, and we hope this will change; right now, we don’t see a reason to separate races into Order and Chaos factions, because both races are seen pretty close to the get-go near starter areas. With no clear faction contest, Order and Chaos offer even less context than Alliance and Horde in WoW does.

O&C is an awesome next step in the future of mobile MMOs. While the inability to play over 3G is a hit against the game, the fact that you can take an MMO along on an iPhone, iPod, or iPad, is still remarkable. Even better is the proof-of-concept that Gameloft managed here, showing developers that an MMO on these devices is not only possible, but that the control scheme can be good, and needn’t be hampered by the lack of a physical keyboard. So even if O&C fails to deliver an experience even marginally as robust as beta WoW, it’s already challenged other MMO developers to create something better. For that alone, O&C should win a prize.

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That iOS games are threatening the traditional mobile gaming market is no longer a surprise. Today, TiPb declared that iPhone games may very well be the platform’s “killer app.” And maybe there’s some truth to this, but let’s be honest: iOS games won’t stand ground with console giants for a couple simple reasons.

The hardware: it’s fragmented.

As much as we like to dismiss the Android platform realized (versus the platform in theory) because of how fragmented the operating system is, all mobile devices in this market are inherently fragmented on the hardware side. That’s because the big push is to drop a new, upgraded model into consumer’s hands every year, and that doesn’t work well for mobile gaming devices.

Consider that Nintendo’s Game Boy was on the market for 10 years before the Game Boy Color was released. It would be another three years before the Game Boy Advance, and three more before the Nintendo DS. When the Nintendo 3DS hits shelves, the DS will have been around for six years.

The other major mobile offering, Sony’s PSP, was released in 2004, and the PSP2 isn’t scheduled for release until Q4 2011 at the earliest. So despite minor hardware improvements, the platform itself will have been around for seven years.

Now look at iOS devices. Come next summer, we’ll be on the fifth-generation iPhone, with each year seeing speed improvements. It’s one thing for Apple to stop supporting the 2G iPhone three years after its release, but we’ve also seen Apple drop iOS features in the iPhone 3G a mere two years after its release. There are even games in the AppStore that recommend an iPhone 4 for maximizing one’s gaming experience.

In this respect, Apple’s iOS devices are more like PCs in the gaming front, with newer games making use of better and newer hardware. The console market, in the meantime, is all about maximizing the capabilities of older hardware, such that newer hardware could be pushed off for years to come. The mobile space, as much as we want to compare it to consoles, is really only a console in terms of usability, not hardware stability over time.

Granted, things may shift just as they have for the PC market, in which hardware growth has slowed tremendously. If Apple is really making more money long-term on the AppStore and iTunes than they are on hardware improvements, then they could afford not to refresh their hardware every year. But that means Android phones, and devices from other competitors, would similarly need to slow down their hardware rat-race.

The storage: it’s lacking.

Still related to hardware, iOS device storage isn’t great. For most apps, or even multimedia in general, the current storage offerings are sufficient. But when the typical FPS comes in at several GB, iOS users will be expected to have 4+ GB of storage space per blockbuster title, and that means space quickly begins to come at a premium unless users decide to only keep one or two games on their devices at a time.

That’s why games like the revered Infinity Blade and Rage 3D are on rails. Not giving players the ability to roam around freely means developers can put less “stuff” in each title, and that means less textures, levels, animations, et al. And sadly, that sucks, because it means that while the hardware can otherwise support pretty cutting edge graphics, the lack of storage is keeping the mobile gaming market from pushing ahead. If storage weren’t an issue, then we daresay that iOS gaming could challenge any current-gen console, even if the graphics aren’t quite up to snuff (see: Wii).

One interesting outcome of this limitation is that iOS may become the de facto standard for rail-based gaming. Perhaps for non-technical reasons, console-based RPGs became a genre very different from PC RPGs, and a similar genre-generating phenomenon may be forming around iOS right now.

The control scheme: it’s… different.

Touch-based gaming is great for a variety of titles, but it’s not always ideal compared to the haptic feedback one gets from a physical interface. While a degree of control-scheme complexity is possible with iOS, one has to wonder where the limits are. An MMO like World of Warcraft (WoW), for example, would be nigh impossible to emulate on the iPhone control-wise. And that means there will be major concessions in terms of genres of games that iOS will sport. Yes, there may still be hardcore games on iOS, but the platform is clearly better at fostering more casual games with less input requirements.

What can be done?

One of the simplest things developers can do is not push cutting edge graphics, so as not to limit their games to customers who have devices more than a year or two old. Look at WoW, a game released in 2004 that, even then, didn’t push the limits of cutting edge hardware, which can arguably be considered a major boon to its success. (Blizzard has done similar with its previous games, like Diablo 2.) This is in stark contrast to MMOs like Everquest 2 who were more graphics-intensive, thereby not selling as many titles to customers with older hardware.

Games like Minecraft are further examples of unique, expansive titles working well despite not having great graphics. (Intentionally retro stylings are hot right now, bdesides.) And really, while eye-candy is nice to impress, an Infinity Blade-like game with free-roaming controls is arguably more attractive with graphics not as sharp, than the game in its current iteration, which is almost more a proof-of-concept than anything else.

Yes, we know that recent iOS devices have the hardware capable to make audiences gawk at the graphics potential of iOS games, but maybe that’s not where developers should be focusing their efforts for now. Whether rail-based games are fun is not the issue: let’s not pigeon-hole games on iOS to such rigid confinements, even if such rigid confinements make for better eye candy.

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We’ve long held that the problem with most MMOGs is that they don’t offer up enough of a developed sandbox to capture the imaginations of a broader gaming audience who may not want a mere hack’n slash adventure. In other words, casual pursuits like thorough, in-depth crafting systems in lieu of adventuring were not concepts that most developers considered. So too, the idea of a robust roleplaying system for those who did not want to simply go out and kill things.

As it turns out, Blizzard managed to simplify even hack’n slash, by pushing the high of a constant item reward system, combined with a simplified skill-rotation algorithm, making World of Warcraft (WoW) appeal to the largest possible audience. To many, this is interpreted as WoW catering to the lowest-common-denominator. In this respect, focusing on more complex non-crafting pursuits was hardly necessary.

Syncaine suggests that MMOGs different from WoW (e.g. EVE, Darkfall) will never be able to attract the large player-base that WoW boasts, simply because the elements that would foster that attraction are the very same elements that would detract from these games being “true” virtual worlds. (For the purpose of this post, we think it’s a fair assessment to suggest that games with more sandbox-like qualities are a “truer” representation of an ideal virtual world, and so we’ll follow Syncaine’s lead here, even though WoW is a “virtual world” in a more abstract sense, too.)

Gamers at large want their avatars on a fairly level treadmill; too much of an incline for progression, and players will get frustrated and quit. But games like Darkfall and EVE are all about frustration because a big factor in their success is player-driven events. Only by avoiding the things about these games that make them popular among the niche audience can you avoid as much frustration as possible.

So maybe the issue is PvP, here: maybe sandbox MMOGs reliant on PvP cannot attract the type of audience WoW has, because progression is in great part limited by what other players let you do, and what they let you get away with. We can look at a game like Minecraft, for example, and say that yes, a robust, non-combat MMOG has the potential to obtain a pretty large audience, even one rivaling that of WoW.

But this presents another challenge: balancing combat vs non-combat professions. If we try to capture the elements that make games like Minecraft and, say, Farmville popular, then how do we balance that against the combat elements that other MMO gamers desire? In effect, developers will be building two games in one, and adding a strong degree of synchronicity such that interactions between the two remain meaningful for all involved, and no “true path” exists for the average player (i.e. investing one’s time exclusively in either path will not provide the majority of game benefits).

We can look at one aspect of this argument by analyzing MMOG crafting, which in most games is a part-time endeavor to be done alongside the chief objective, combat. Yet to capture a larger audience, say, including people who desire to chiefly craft, then perhaps there needs to be a cut-off point in which part-time crafting ceases to make sense, and to become a great crafter, a large skill and/or time investment becomes mandatory. In other words, if you want to “max-out” a crafting profession, then you can’t max-out a combat profession, and artisan crafters will require players who spend most of their game-time on crafting, rather than on combat (like traditional MMO gamers).

But what we now have is a deeper game with more paths for players to take, but it doesn’t alleviate the issue of combat itself, in which “hardcore” players want combat more akin to EVE and Darkfall, but more casual gamers want something like WoW. In a sense, we’re back at the PvE vs PvP argument.

Games like Warhammer Online have attempted a PvE/PvP experiment to surpass that in WoW, to questionable success. Mythic had the idea right, but perhaps the implementation is where the problem is. Returning to our initial issue, rather than offering a PvE game game like WoW and focusing on simplifying and expediting progress, nor focusing purely on the niche sandbox PvPers, what if we had a game with multiple paths for players to take, some dependent on PvE, and others on PvP, each with different “max” outcomes? Some characters would be PvP soldiers aiding their kingdom in Darkfall-esque battles, while others would focus primarily on collecting resources in PvE scenarios, which they could then provide crafters who made the majority of goods that all characters needed for their respective professions.

In this example, players could choose which role they fulfill in the game, but no role would ultimately be more important than any other, and while those who enjoy combat would be in it for the glory, other players may be in it for the cold, hard cash. Either way, end-game items would be obtainable by everyone, as their acquisition would primarily be a cash affair, as they’d be crafted items.

Syncaine may be half-right in his assertion. Developers should be creating the best-possible niche MMOGs, but if they have the resources and come upon a formula for developing true professional tiers in an MMOG that offer more than just combat, then by all means, go with it and see if you can capture an audience that may one day rival that of WoW.

But in the meantime, we’d be happy with a more accessible niche title, too.

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Classic World of Warcraft (WoW) defender Tobold discusses player skill versus character skill in the context of “twitch” versus “strategy,” effectively accusing anyone who complains about WoW’s lack of skill requirement as downplaying the strategic elements required. This follows a number of complaints people have with “twitch” games in general (i.e. those games requiring quick reflexes and hand-eye coordinating like most first-person shooters). It’s an argument that’s heavily drawn a line between the players of games like WoW and, say, Darkfall.

Now some people believe that a MMORPG should be an action arcade game, a kind of Super Mario, in which your twitch skills (hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness) should determine your success. And these people often are using a dirty trick in the discussion: They claim that only twitch skills are “skill”, while other video game skills like strategy skills or puzzle skills are “not skill”.

But that’s not really what people are saying when they dismiss WoW as a game requiring little skill. Rather, it’s that WoW has successively become a game in which less and less strategy is required by a player, since the game has, instead, provided the opportunity for players to obtain high-powered gear rather easily, which makes up for a lack of strategy. In other words, had Blizzard reduced the potency of gear in WoW, it would require players to use more strategy (e.g. better spell rotations and timing), but that would mean not as many players would be able to accomplish certain in-game achievements. Blizzard’s decision was to make the game’s content more accessible to the vast majority of players, and thus more powerful gear was made accessible to people as a sort if crutch.

In this regard, most WoW-haters who rely on the “no skill” argument are likely to place “old school” WoW on a higher pedestal, since there was less wiggle-room when it came to player skill back in 2004. But since, Blizzard has reduced the need for strategic excellence.

Darkfall, and games like it, do rely more on “twitch”-based skill. Darkfall’s developers decided that strategy elements in traditional MMORPGs like WoW were themselves too simple, even if gear bonuses were drastically reduced. While Tobold is correct in saying that the developers could have made the strategic elements of the game more complex in lieu of relying on “twitch” mechanics, the developers decided that the latter allows for an easier learning curve. Either way, Darkfall is less accessible to the same number of players as WoW, since it does not offer the same gear-based crutch that WoW does.

So while Tobold and his supporters dislike the “twitch” play-style and believe that games should be more strategic to be considered “skill-based,” the ultimate blame here still falls on Blizzard. At this point, few people disagree with the notion that WoW has become dumbed down in great part because of gear inflation. It’s simply that some people want gear to be reduced in power, others want more “twitch,” and others yet want more strategy. Blizzard, however, is the one doing neither of these things.

Yet, Tobold blames the players:

It is simply not true that there is no challenge at all available in World of Warcraft. Instead what happens is that players DELIBERATELY are constantly working on LOWERING the skill requirements, through maximizing their “efficiency” of gear / talent builds / everything else, and even through the use of third-party programs (addons) which make encounters much easier.

How is it that the players should be to blame for min/maxing what the game provides them? Sure, people can play the game with bad gear in order to artificially increase the game’s challenge, but doing so only affects the players participating. If Blizzard offered “hardcore” servers with bad gear, so everyone was in a similar situation, then this option might be attractive to many, but if we’re given a certain number of tools at our disposal, why shouldn’t we use them, and why should we deny ourselves these tools just so someone who does use them can easily pass us by in terms of content progress?

The reason I personally dislike the “WoW needs no skill” crowd is that I always suspect them of elitism. Their main interest isn’t in playing through something hard, because they already could do that. Their main interest is in excluding a broader audience from the game, or from certain types of content.

Ultimately, success at a challenge is sweeter when only a sub-set of the whole has achieved it. Otherwise, is it truly success, or is it just a matter of putting in the time? Tobold’s position comes down to one of selfishness: he believes that just by paying his monthly fee and putting in a certain amount of time, that he should be rewarded the same as everyone else, even if he’s not as good of a player. The “elitists” he points at, on the other hand, believe that better players should be better rewarded. In a sense, it really is an argument for or against welfare, and whether simply contributing by logging on warrants a full game experience. But it’s certainly not an argument of “twitch” versus strategy – those are just fancy labels improperly used to discuss WoW’s gear inflation.

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We got rid of our World of Darkness (WoD) books a couple years ago; we stopped playing games in the WoD setting years before, and while we held onto our WoD library for sentimental reasons, the success of the revised (new) WoD pretty much made our library deprecated anyway. So when more and more rumours of a WoD-based massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) hit the blogosphere, we assumed (though hoped otherwise) that the game would be based on the new WoD setting. It wasn’t until we read developer Justin Achilli’s notes about what players wanted to see in the game that we were surprised; the WoD MMOG will be based on Vampire: the Masquerade (V:tM), which is a component of the old WoD (oWoD), rather on the new WoD’s Vampire: the Requiem setting.

At first thought, we’re disappointed that other WoD campaigns won’t be featured as player characters, but the scope of implementing that kind of game is extreme: just getting the scope for V:tM is more than enough for a developer to deal with. And it’s not like the game can’t feature werewolves, mages, wraiths, and changelings later.

Let’s focus a moment on what some players want, and that’s to capture the setting accurately. The one thing that would utterly ruin a V:tM-based game is if the server population were made up entirely of Kindred (vampires). In the oWoD, Kindred hide from humans for obvious reasons, despite manipulating them from behind the shadows. And there’s no reason this can’t be emulated online.

Visiting cities, and fealty to the Prince.

Let’s assume that every server represents a city and its surroundings. Going beyond that, you’d enter a different city, and thus connect to a different server. But straying away from your city should be risky, or at least not be obstacle-free. However the game decides it, be it via a particular system, developer-run characters, or simply sorted out by the players themselves, each city has a Prince, who rules the city and keeps tabs on all its supernatural denizens. When a player leaves their home city, they should feel like they’re in foreign territory; in the oWoD, Kindred laws require visitors to check in with their destination’s Prince, else are trespassing. An easy mechanic to handle this would be to require every Kindred character to check in with the Prince or his counsel. Only then will he be flagged as a guest (safe), and able to go about his business normally, whether that’s meeting with other characters or simply grinding through quests. If the visiting Kindred fails to check in, however, or his request to visit is denied, he is flagged as a trespasser, and everyone in the city is free to hunt him.

This does two things: one, it keeps Kindred populations down in most cities, and two, it introduces a controlled PvP atmosphere to the game, especially when you have to consider the masquerade.

Using minions, and not getting caught.

In the oWoD, Kindred don’t walk around in the sun because they’d burn. And they don’t walk around using their powers around regular people because they’d eventually get caught and… burn. The masquerade is basically the Kindred’s philosophy of fitting in: acting like a human around most people. If they don’t, they’re not only likely to be noticed by Hunters (humans who seek out and destroy the supernatural), but by other supernaturals as well.

So, we have a pretty contained system here: if the WoD MMOG has a day/night cycle, it means that free movement outside is impossible. Yes, Kindred can move around freely indoors, and maybe even get around the city via a subway, tunnels, et al. But either way, they’re limited in what they can do by day. So, limit players by how many Vampire characters they can play, but let them play several humans over time, maybe by letting them unlock human character slots as they progress through the game. These human characters would serve several purposes: ghouls, blood dolls, retainers, etc. Basically, characters that serve some purpose to the Kindred character, by supplying them with sustenance, or running daytime errands. And during the day, this can be useful; there’s no reason that these minions can’t grind quests on behalf of the Kindred character during the day, or, really, be the only ones who can do most daytime quests.

At night, when Kindred characters can roam city streets freely, there’s still the issue of the masquerade, and CCP merely needs to populate the streets, bars, clubs, et al with human non-player-characters (NPCs). Most such NPCs don’t need to be sophisticated: they’d walk around, dance, and do other banal activities. And if a Kindred character does something clearly supernatural around them, be it throwing a small car or turning into mist, then there should be repercussions. One, from other player characters in the vicinity (by immediately flagging the offending character), else by other NPCs in a Grand Theft Auto-style chase. This doesn’t have to be by lowly police officers who are called on scene, but by more supernatural peace-keepers: werewolves and mages, who themselves don’t want people stumbling upon the supernatural, and especially hate vampires.

These measures, too, will keep Kindred characters from becoming too comfortable out and about, making the WoD MMORPG a more elegant affair than the traditional hack’n slash MMORPG; Kindred characters need to be subtle around human characters, utilizing their minions effectively, and utilizing their powers only when desperately needed.

More EVE and less Warcraft.

Will CCP push elements of the irregular MMOG play-style associated with EVE, rather than focusing on “traditional” MMORPG elements embraced by games like World of Warcraft? We hope so, but in the end, it will likely be a blend of the two. Yet, a WoD MMOG has a lot of potential to break the mold, assuming it’s development team is willing to take the time to truly study the source material and understand what makes it different from typical hack’n slash roleplaying games. The end result probably won’t be a game that caters to the World of Warcraft crowd, but then again, neither is EVE, and only a fool would consider that to be unsuccessful.

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When we suggest that someone consider an iPad for basic home computing, we often still hear, “Why would I get an iPad instead of a laptop?” And this is followed with our typical explanation that 99% of what people need a computer for is a word processor and a web browser, and that because of how iOS is implemented, there’s no need to concern oneself with potential driver issues, viruses, and other problems typically associated with “traditional” computers. Never mind that the iPad is more portable, has a better battery life, and is snappier than the competition. (And in this space, there’s no real competition from other tablet computers anyway.)

But there’s always still push-back. Every once in awhile, someone has a specific application or game in mind that they want a laptop for, which makes the iPad a no-go. And we can’t fault them too much for spending an extra $500 to play EVE Online, because to be fair, we purchased a 17″ MacBook Pro for the sole purpose of playing World of Warcraft back when our last PC’s video card shit the bed. So we know all about ridiculous gaming addictions.

But for the rest of you, pay attention and wake up, because you’re late-comers at this point. Per Best Buy’s CEO, the iPad is now “cannibalizing” 50% of laptop sales. And with so few iPad’s on the second-hand market, it looks like most people are happy with their decision.

Maybe Best Buy isn’t indicative of the whole industry, but we bet that for the common man, it’s a pretty good sign of what’s coming: more digital media sales, more developers moving to iOS as a platform, and in turn, less people able to point to that one killer app to justify a laptop purchase.

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Commenting on the “polish” behind Blizzard games, SynCaine likens every Blizzard product as being a rehashed version of old IP. Says SynCaine on Blizzard’s next product:

…what happens when you apply the Blizzard business model to a Blizzard game and play it really, really safe? You get StarCraft 2, a highly polished port of SC1 that leaves you feeling bored and burned out halfway through your first game. When you can build a base and pull off a rush with your eyes closed using the same strategy and hotkeys you used in 1998, you’re game just MIGHT be a little too similar to its predecessor.

Starcraft was a good RTS. We never played competitively, but as someone who probably played every RTS up until Starcraft’s release (and likely sometime thereafter, too), Starcraft didn’t leave us with the impression that it was way ahead of the pack. The backstory wasn’t fantastic, the races were only marginally unique, and in truth, we can’t even say we loved Starcraft more than Blizzard’s previous RTS offerings.

So now we have Starcraft 2 on the horizon, with many bloggers already having posted early play impressions of the game. And really, we can’t help but think it’s just more of Starcraft. And that’s not to say this is a bad thing, because we’re all for sequels being “more of the same” if the formula was perfect. We just don’t think the Starcraft formula was perfect, and we’d much rather have seen something more epic for Starcraft 2. Maybe that puts us in the minority. Either way, we’re way more eager to see what comes out of the Diablo franchise, because between Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 doesn’t need to be revolutionary to be perfect – it just needs to take one small iterative step forward.

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