Design Blog

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Guild Wars and Design Mechanics

Instead of continuing with the BlazBlue stuff today I thought I'd take a break and talk a little about some issues going on in a game that I play frequently, Guild Wars.

Guild Wars established itself as an online RPG without monthly fees, which at the time was pretty much unheard of in the MMORPG market. In fact, there really haven't been too many other games that have followed the Guild Wars model an been successful (at least not that I know of), moreso, I'm not even sure if there are any that tried to follow it. Guild Wars strikes me as kind of different from tradtionl MMORPG structure anyhow and I hesitate to affix that label to it since the game is fully instanced and is focused more on skills than on leveling which sets it appart at the base mechanic level.

Background asside, the game has been around for four years so far and recently had it's 4th Anniversary. The fact that the game still has an audience after four years is pretty impressive for one thing, but for this event they added a host of new features and game elements in an attempt to liven up the game and get people to play it.

And yet as I browsed the forums I found this amazing sense of entitlement from a lot of the playerbase which even got hostile at some of the updates that the developers worked hard to bring to this event. Obviously, not everyone is like that and I recognize that the percentage of people who complain on online forum postings tend to represent only a small portion of the audience (the people who like it tend to go and PLAY THE GAME instead), but I wanted to talk about some of the new features and my thoughs on them from a design perspective.

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Pet Management
An entire new area was introduced that allows players to store their captured pets and pet evolutions. As you level up pets you can unlock them permanently in this area, called the menagerie and summon them back at any time. It's useful for players who want to use different types of pets on their rangers and ranger secondaries, since it allows to you experiment with different pet evolutions. Further it provides a sink for certain resources both old and new in order to unlock pets that would otherwise be too troublesome to find or level up. As a final option players can purchase an unlock pack to unlock everything for about $10. This type of thing isn't new with Guild Wars, since they also provided a PvP skill unlock pack for about the same amount.

What is interesting about this, is that I always felt that pets were a very small part of the game. Your character has to be ranger primary or secondary to even use a pet, and for the most part, it's fairly uncommon to see pets in PvP and PvE. There is a clear expenditure of resources for this new area, but at the same time I wonder how big of an impact it ends up having, since the actual use for pets is limited to a small part of the game.

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Extra Storage Tabs
More storage is always a useful thing especially for people who like to save everything they pick up like me. ArenaNet has always been warry about giving more storage though since they claim it has an associated cost. Many people will tell you that server space can be bought relatively cheaply ($100 per TB was one such number I've heard), so the logic is that it should be realatively easy to add without a huge cost to the consumer. In fact this update did add a large quanity of storage to the game without any cost to the player. There is a free promotion for 20 extra storage slots on the website and new 5 slot equipment bags can be purchased for a resonable cost in game.

Oh but here is where the entitlement comes in. If you want more than the 20 free slots with the promotion which oddly enough people actually DISLIKE because it requires you to make an NCSoft account (it's STILL FREE), you need to pay $10 per 20 slot tab, up to 4 tabs. Now the thing is that storage tabs are more convienient since they can be accessed on all characters on your account, but the thing is another character slot cost $10, and characters can hold over twice that amount in their normal inventories. So it becomes a matter of cost vs convenience. I'm not going to argue one way or the other, I think the sales numbers will influence any further changes to the price, and I'm not privy to those things, but some of the complaints call charging for storage a scam because it costs a disproportionate amount.

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Extra Storage Bags
The equipment bags are another can of worms. Anyone can by a 5 slot bag for a modest fee but 10, 15 and 20 slot bags come at a much higher cost. You need to trade in special coins for them, coins that can only be aquired through questing. Additionally the price for the larger bags increases exponentially. The 20 slot bags cost FIFTEEN TIMES more than the 10 slots. Which is a large commitment in gameplay time, since you have to earn the coins and cannot trade them with other players.

I'm not sure how I feel about this type of incentive, and certainly there are many complaints about having to grind coins for storage, but in general the tasks required for gaining coins feels fairly entertaining for me most of the time. The notion though that players should be entitled to the 20 slot bags though is something I can't agree with. Certainly everyone CAN get them, but like most things in Guild Wars, it's a goal with clear steps to reaching it. I don't want to say this is the perfect solution (since the cost is truly does feel steep) but think people exagerate the magnitude of the issue. It's actually fairly common to set up grind for players in MMOs for more storage, you tend to earn more as you level up, so I don't see this as that ridiculous. If anything it's just a way for players to advance their characters after level 20. I find that the general design behind most MMOs is to develop a character you really like and get them all sorts of cool things. Since you can't progress past level 20 in Guild Wars, the team has made many other (optional) things players can do to advance their characters, and this doesn't seem any different.

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Daily Quest
This is kind of an odd little thing in my opinion. Daily quests are common to other games like World of Warcraft already, and the idea is that every day some new quests are available for some kind of reward. In the case of Guild Wars, that reward tends to be the coins I mentioned earlier as well as cash and sometimes faction (another type of currency really). The only wait to get the coins required for the equipement bags is to do these quests (there are other rewards for turning in the coins). There are three types, two for PvE and one for PvP that cycle every day, and players are limited to having three of each type in their log at a time.

This is an interesting strategy, but one that so far seems to be working well. The problem that occured after four years of being online is that certain areas of the game were basically empty and nobody except new players would be there. Older players would rarely go back to old content, and unless you had a guild or group of friends, it was unlikely for you to find many people to play these areas with.

The daily quests encourage people to go back and re-do old stuff for new rewards. So far this has revitalized areas of the game as they daily quests change every day. Certainly some of them have been far more challenging than others, but if one quest is too hard, you just have to wait a day until a new one replaces it. This seems to be an amazing way to revitalize mission towns and areas of the game that the designers feel are lacking, without actually creating new content for the areas. I'm a big fan of this part of the update myself.

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Wow, I talked a lot about that, so I guess I'll stop for now. There's certainly a lot more to it, but I don't want to make these blog entires so long that nobody will read them.

Labels: design philosophy, entitlement, game mechanics, guild wars

posted by Saikyo at 6:05 PM

Monday, November 17, 2008

After 4 weeks of work

I finally manage to get around to posting on this blog again. I definitely need to shoot for once a week from now on, otherwise I'll start feeling too complacent.

So first how the job has been after 4 weeks, in a word: AWESOME.

In more words: SUPER AWESOME

Seriously though I think working at Big Huge Games is a fun and interesting place to work where I can do all the stuff I studied for back in Guildhall, except now I get paid for it! The only odd part is that now I seem to be much more of a money hoarder than before even though I have income coming in instead of going out, it's a very strange effect.

I mentioned before that I can't say much about the game I'm working on due to the NDA I signed, but will say that I work with great people in a relaxing and casual environment that is pretty amazing when I remember that in addition to all this I'm working on stuff for a video game and getting paid for it.

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I promised I'd talk about YANPA this time so here's the idea.

YANPA stands for: You Are Not the Player's Adversary

It's a funny acronym that I always try to remember when working on a level. The goal of the game is not to torment the player or to make a puzzle that the player is going to have to try very hard to solve (although this second one may be part of it). The point of the designer is to provide fun. Now I said previously that I don't really agree with the entitlement mentality that some people have. I believe that as a designer, the player is entitled to the chance to have fun, and that the designer should make every effort to provide that fun to the player. However I don't think that the player deserves to win because he bought the game or regularly pays a monthly fee (in the case of MMOs). Winning with skill is part of what creates fun, and it's the designer's job to work that fine line between fun and frustration to create a challenging experience for the player without becoming the adversary of the player.

The term YANPA was coined by an instructor I had when I was in college at ASU taking the first iteration of a "programming for game design" class taught by some graduate students. Admittedly, the class was fairly rough and I didn't have the best of experiences in it, but I did learn some important lessons about game design that I still keep in mind today.

I hope the instructors for this course have been improving their teaching methods and class structure in order to get more students interested in game design.

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Next time: Left 4 Dead and why it is one of the most awesome games I've played this year.

Labels: big huge games, design philosophy, entitlement, left 4 dead, YANPA

posted by Saikyo at 4:31 PM

Monday, October 20, 2008

First Day / Design Thoughts

My first day of work at Big Huge Games just completed and I came off with the impression that this job will be pretty fun. I'm still learning a lot of things about the game (not that I could really say much about it on a public blog due to NDA) and I'm looking forward to working on it. Unfortunately I got very little sleep the night before due to my air mattress getting a hole in it and me spending half the night trying to find, and then fix it. Sometimes I feel like have very awkward luck.

I had a conversation with my lead near the end of the day that I wanted to expand on a bit. It comes from the idea about making games easier for players to complete. In general I think that games (with the exception of a lot of MMOs and the notable Ninja Gaiden series) have been lowering the difficulty scale so that it becomes accessible to more people.

Back in the day of the arcade, games were made difficult on purpose to get the player to keep shelling out more quarters, but the idea that was presented here was that nowadays when a player buys a game he is giving the designer all his quarters up front. So he's entitled to beat the game.

... Honestly I don't agree with this.

Now I understand that yes the player is paying money for the experience and entertainment of playing the game. Further, if the game is too difficult for them and they cannot complete it, there is a chance that they will feel that they didn't get their money's worth.

I look at it a little differently though. First of all I don't think that purchasing a game should entitle the player to experience 100% of it. Certainly 100% of the game should be available to the player, but to believe that the game designers should try and please every player is absurd. If you pay to watch a movie and then don't like it, you can't get your money back, if you buy a basketball court that doesn't mean you can suddenly become an NBA player and putting money into a slot machine sure as heck doesn't mean you're gonna get a jackpot. In the end though, people still enjoy movies, basketball and gambling.

I believe that part of being a game designer is being able to anticipate the needs of the player, and that good design is one that takes a challenging, but not adversarial relationship with the player. (I'll talk about YANPA in my next blog entry.) The designer shouldn't be a person who tries to frustrate or foil the player, but I don't think that he should be a person that sacrifices the challenge that defines video games for the sake of reaching a few extra people.

Labels: arcade games, big huge games, design philosophy, entitlement, YANPA

posted by Saikyo at 4:58 PM