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World of myCraft
Last week, Blizzard issued a massive release of new information about Mists of Pandaria, the next expansion pack for World of Warcraft. The information confirmed that the expansion will include a Pokemon-style mini-pet battle system announced at last year’s Blizzcon. It also announced a new in-game faction that will allow players to take care of their own farm, reminiscent of the hit Facebook game Farmville. While these additions are only a fragment of the new content being offered, the two games within the larger game seem to signal that Blizzard may be setting World of Warcraft up to evolve to a more immersive content delivery platform where players can tailor the kind of game experience they want while still experiencing the Warcraft universe.
Pet Battle System
source: mmo-champion.com
Massively-multiplayer persistent worlds inherently appeal to many gamers for their ability to preserve a player’s time invested playing a game. Playing WoW’s in-game version of Pokemon or Farmville will offer players experiencing burnout entirely different game experiences within the persistent world without having to switch to a new game or platform. Perhaps more importantly, players who never were into crawling dungeons or fighting other players in arenas now have a reason to try and perhaps stick with the franchise. Blizzard has always had a strong track record of taking established game paradigms and expanding them in new ways, so their incorporation of highly successful game that appeal to a variety of audiences only makes sense as they attempt to make World of Warcraft more applicable to an increasingly diverse gaming audience.
Tiller’s Farm
source: mmo-champion.com
Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that these alternative games within the larger game seem ripe for adaptation into mobile platforms. Blizzard recently expressed interest in eventually offering a way to experience the game via the iPhone and other mobile platforms. It will probably be some time before players can experience the entire game on a mobile platform, but Blizzard already offers ways to access parts of the game experience via mobile apps to chat with players in game and conduct business on the in-game auction house. It would not surprise me if we saw mobile apps fairly soon after the expansion allowing players to engage in the pet battle system or managing their farm while on the go as well. These new alternate games not only diversify what World of Warcraft players experience, but also potentially how they experience it, likely setting the setting the bar for future MMOs.
World of Warcraft may be getting up there in age, but these developments make me confident that Blizzard has a few more tricks to show us and that gets me even more excited to learn what the company has in store for Titan. In the meantime, I’ll just have to wait like the rest of the annual pass holders out their for their turn at the Mists of Pandaria beta.
Droids Gone Wild
This week I’m going to spend some time talking about my impressions trying out Star Wars: The Old Republic. As the breakout MMO for BioWare, the game had a lot of hype to live up to given the company’s past performance with several blockbuster franchises such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Overall, I found the leveling experience in the Old Republic to be worth the money I shelled out on the game – mostly due to BioWare’s ability to get a player involved in a great story. But I do have some reservations about the game’s ability to draw in long term loyalty from fans. I expect that being tied to the Star Wars franchise itself will keep the game alive for some time, but without streamlined multi-player features, I doubt that I’ll be playing the Old Republic over the long haul. For those with attention issues, I’ve captured my key thoughts below. Everyone else, feel free to hit the text wall at hyper speed.
SWTOR…
… plays like a single player game despite being massively multi-player.
… feels like you’re in a Star Wars movie, to include cross-planet road trips.
… offers some unique gameplay mechanics, despite replicating a lot of WoW’s game design.
… rewards players for their choices, but not necessarily the way you want.
… does a poor job of facilitating group content, a major problem for a multi-player game.
… looks to have a development team who appears to be willing to tackle the game’s weak spots.
Disclaimer: When I started writing this post, I tried not to compare the Old Republic to World of Warcraft because so many others have done it. However, many of the similarities (like the way player skills are grouped) were so obvious that it was like BioWare wanted the familiarity. I’m relatively forgiving of those decisions because who wouldn’t want to copy some of the success of a game with over 10 million subscribers? Where possible, I’ve tried to highlight some of the game’s unique features, many of which do not get much press despite providing substantial portions of the gameplay.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
The Old Republic continues BioWare’s track record of emphasizing player-driven story interwoven with gameplay. I find the Star Wars movies entertaining, but I’ve never a diehard fan of the franchise . In spite of my inexperience with the Star Wars universe, playing through the game felt like I was the star in my own prequel movie. Even though I had initially planned to only play a single character, I ended up making and leveling a character in the Republic and the Empire just to see how the plot played out for both sides on various planets. Most MMOs struggle in that every player is a hero, so no one actually feels that way. The Old Republic’s personal stories for each class and the overarching plot woven across all of the planets eliminates that problem by letting each player feel like a real hero.
The visuals in the game contributed heavily to the overall feeling that the story was actually one of the Star Wars movies. Planets, space stations, and abilities alike are aesthetically rendered with details true to the experience at every turn. However, after the initial cool-factor of slicing down enemies with a lightsaber wore off, some of the environmental detail did become a bit much. For example, planets really did start to feel like planets in both detail and physical size around level 25. Even with a speeder at my disposal boosting my travel speed, I often took what can only be described as road trips just to move between quest hubs. Couple that with my compulsive need to leave no stone unturned, and I ended up wasting large amounts of time just traveling. These are forgivable sins for a novice MMO team, but it was a numbing experience and definitely detracted from the overall experience. In total, the graphics of the Old Republic struck a good balance balance between intentionally bright and trying-too-hard-to-be-real-life graphics.
The implementation of a personal crew also went a long way to making the game’s story come to life. Honestly, if I had to pick one feature from the game to take into future games, it would be the crew system. Crew members offset the impact of intentionally compartmentalizing player abilities by giving you the ability to have someone along who can complement your character abilities even when soloing. It dramatically smoothed out some of the edges in the single player experience. Even better, BioWare allows your crew members to craft items, gather resources, and even perform their own missions. This resulted in a similar crafting system available in other games but took the emphasis off of having a player perform repetitive player tasks in favor of simply making scheduling decisions for their crew. I am a huge fan of any system that lets players multi-task and perform some functions away from the keyboard. I hope that the BioWare developers eventually allow players to queue their crew up for multiple back-to-back missions similar to how players could queue skills to learn offline in Eve Online. Coupling your crew to a personal ship even offered BioWare a way to tackle the personal housing in an MMO by giving players their own real estate that does not impact the games static world space. The technique may only work in science fiction games, but this implementation works by giving players a place to call home while still being drawn to major hubs to interact with other players and for other in-game services not available on the ships.
No system is perfect, however, and the story system did have one major wart worth mentioning. BioWare chose to implement an alignment system tied to player choices. Periodically through the course of the plot, player decisions are labeled light or dark. Often these decisions are clear cut, such as letting someone go or killing them, but quite frequently the choices presented to characters are significantly more ambiguous. In previous BioWare games, a character could do what felt right, but in the Old Republic, your light and dark decisions are tied to points which act as a form of currency for some really nice rewards, the best of which can only be purchased if you go to one extreme or the other. This resulted in several situations when my dark-side character had to kill someone to get the dark points I need, even when I wanted to leave a character alive to provide material for future plot. It’s unclear how much of an impact the occasional swap from light to dark would have on a character, but as a player I definitely experienced the pressure to stick with one, ultimately denying some of the choice around which the game is centered. The good news is that BioWare has acknowledged some of the limitations in their initial design and plans to add more rewards for players walking a more neutral path.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, BioWare’s emphasis on personal story in the Old Republic completely turned me off to the game’s multi-player features. For a game that was built and billed as a massively multi-player game, this struck me as a fairly substantial problem looking toward the game’s future. Whenever I tried questing or some of the game scripted content for groups which BioWare has termed “flashpoints,” I became impatient and frustrated that I was not in control of the action anymore. Waiting on my partners to choose dialogue options becomes tedious and my light-side character now carries the title “the Backstabber” because my ally in one of the game’s flashpoints decided to vent some engineers into space to deactivate a security system rather than take an alternate airlock (as I alluded earlier, my rule in these games is never kill someone unless you have to, if for no other reason than that they may offer interesting plot twists later). I ended up leaving many group quests incomplete because the equipment and story rewards in no way justified the time scraping together a group or dealing with problems when group members got out of sync on objectives (this happened often enough for me to get very frustrated several times). As you go up in level, the group options become more numerous as players can choose to participate in warzones, conflict flashpoints (four man adventures) and operations (larger group encounters), but the lack of an effective way to find partners for these features is also going to become an issue as the player base ages and people level characters more sporadically.
BioWare has yet to implement patch 1.2, but the preview appears address some of the features the game seems to sorely lack such as more max level content. One of the most unique features to be added will be the first stage of the game’s legacy system which encourages players to make new characters and level all over again. Leveling up over and over is definitely more compelling in this game than others, and legacy will make it even better, but it will still lose its appeal. So, I still have my reservations as to whether the company will be able to produce content fast enough to keep people occupied. Interestingly however, for the past few months, BioWare had a job vacancy for a social systems designer. The position description included designing unique dynamic content for max level players. The fact that the position is gone now gives me hope that we’ll see more complex design at the end-game in the future.
HireIt
Thanks to my friend Sarah for bringing this article to my attention. The article discusses how games are being used to effectively crowdsource and solve scientific problems. In light of my previous post about the educational and social value of games over other forms of entertainment, I think it’s worth highlighting here.
Slate’s article continues the story of FoldIt, an experiment by the University of Washington that offered a game to the general populace which challenged players to build proteins into specific enzymes. “Within hours, thousands of people were both competing against (and collaborating with) one another. After three weeks, they had succeeded where the microbiologists and the computers had failed,” by identifying an elusive enzyme used by viruses like HIV. Rather than simply discuss the medical puzzle at the heart of the game, the article highlights a personnel puzzle by showing that often the best people to solve a sophisticated problem did not have and, in fact, did not need background in the field. This challenges conventional wisdom that a certain amount of experience, training, or education is needed to excel in a particular position. That’s not to say these measures are unimportant, but as the FoldIt case displays, a PHD or experience with a certain problem set did not correlate to the cognitive skills necessary to solve certain issues despite that these items are more easily highlighted on a resume:
Some gamers have a preternatural ability to recognize patterns, an innate form of spatial reasoning most of us lack. Others—often “grandmothers without a high school education,” says Popovic—exercise a particular social skill. “They’re good at getting people unstuck. They get them to approach the problem differently.
Human resource representatives are able to quickly and efficiently match people to jobs based upon data-points from game-play. The game acts as a vehicle to capture and measure soft skills that are usually difficult to quantify and prioritize them over hard skills that usually show up on a resume, but may not actually reflect a person’s aptitude for the kind of work needed.
This paradigm could revolutionize the way other career areas are staffed, particularly in an knowledge- and information-based economy where many fields place a high emphasis on cognitive ability. For instance, the title “analyst” (near and dear to my heart) does not tell much about a person’s ability to actually analyze an issue or problem. Supplemental details in an analyst’s resume cannot show how the person thinks, rather they tell a story about the kinds of things the person has previously thought about. An interview might provide a better glimpse into an applicant’s particular aptitudes, but probably not in a single conversation where often the skills being showcased are the applicant’s negotiation skills. Those skills may be useful if you’re looking for a political analyst or hostage negotiator, but they are probably useless if you need someone to find a pattern in shipping documents when investigating an illicit network. Events designed to allow applicants to show their work, either through specific scenario questions or in an applied exercise are more revealing. Artists keep portfolios to show their work, but it can often be difficult for someone in knowledge- or information-based job to do the same – especially if they cannot carry their work from one field to another due to proprietary or classification conflicts. On the other hand, a game emphasizing specific cognitive processes needed for certain tasks could go a long way to identifying the right people to fit the job.
We may be a ways off from that future, but I doubt it’s completely beyond our reach. In the meantime, if I ever start a company, I’m pretty sure the interview process will include a trial by pixelated fire.
questproquo 