A Realm Reborn - The Limit Break

        This weekend, I spent a lot of time playing the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn beta test. All in all, I've really been enjoying the game. In addition to playing, I've got a boatload of notes to talk about in the upcoming days/weeks, and hopefully will be able to swing together some more updates in the upcoming weeks. For now though, I wanted to talk about a feature that really got me excited. The Limit Breaks.

        I was lucky enough to get to level 20 and the ability to jump into dungeons. This also means that I was able to get to use the limit break system. Anyone who's familiar with the final fantasy name has an idea about what the limit break system is, but for those of you who don't it's a system that builds up energy as you participate in combat, and eventually gives you access to a large and powerful ability, essentially releasing that stored energy. This has seen many different interpretations over the FF series, but is often seen as a fan favorite.

        With FFXIV being an MMO game, they've moved the limit break system to a group activity, which has some pretty exciting potential. Here are some quick details on the Limit Break system.

• About the new Limit Break System
• The new party battle system. When the gauge shared by the party fills, any of the party members can invoke it. Afterwards, the gauge becomes empty.
• The gauge is filled by hitting enemies with standard attacks, but will accumulate faster with "Fine Play," well-timed healing or blocks, which is judged by the system.
• The more you accumulate in your gauge, the Limit Breaks have several phases. If you remember back to the Limit Breaks of Final Fantasy VII.
• The same Limit Breaks have different effects depending on the player's job.
• You will be able to use a Limit Break to some extent even if your character level is low. A high level Limit Break can not be invoked if your character's level isn't high. The feature will be linked to their growth.

And a quick trailer courtesy of youtube if you want to SEE it :

        When first hearing about this system, I was really excited after having played FFXI and experiencing the Skillchain system. (Skillchain increased in power as people participated in sequential order. "player1 go now! -> player2 next!" etc.) While the skillchain definitely had it's faults, it allowed for a group to feel very cohesive and powerful. A group that time and execute a skill chain was given a huge boost in power and thus became a more effective group. I still remember the feeling of seeing a perfect skill chain carve out 75% of an extremely tough monster's health with a single hit, and feeling pride that it couldn't have happened without me. Was it required for the average player to use? Not really. Was it in your best interests to use? You betcha.

        So, naturally with FFXIV:ARR, this system is going to be improved on and made more awesome! Only not really. >< There are problems with the system as it sits now. Of course, this is BETA still, and being only level 20 I can't comment on the "high level limit break" point listed above, but based on what I've experienced of the system so far, I am quite let down.

1. My main concern with this is that the usage of a limit by any one player consumes the whole meter. Thus stripping away the whole "group" aspect of the system when it's used. Each role has a different potential break (healers do a big heal, damage does big damage, etc) which gives the system some flexibility in usage, but the problem is that everyone puts into this pool and only 1 person gets to take out. I believe the intent here was that it would be a tool of versatility, used by adventurers to cater to whatever situation they are currently facing. "Oh crap, heals are falling behind, limit break!" or similar reactiveness. It sounds great on paper, but it also limits that feeling of elation from skillchaining to a single player. Any time you put in something big, flashy, and powerful like this into a game, players are naturally going want to get to use it. And who can blame them?! "Here's this big awesome flashy ability! But only so-and-so should touch it." In one of the dungeons I participated in, We assigned the healer to limit break whenever they felt we needed it. Which, as a DPS, wasn't exciting at all. In other, everyone just started spamming the button when the gauge almost filled, and whoever got it off did their thing. In another, we never used it at all because nobody wanted to step on anyone else's toes. In all three scenarios, the system failed. 


2. Second is less of a problem, as much as something that I just think could be done better. The whole "it fills faster with Fine Play" aspect. Rewarding "fine play" is a good thing. This also has the potential to make the usage of the limit breaks less predictable, unlike a cooldown. You aren't guaranteed that it's going to be available at the same time every encounter. This is somewhat of a double edged sword, I worry that groups may count on this to get through certain phases of an encounter, or to deal with certain mechanics. While there's nothing directly wrong with this, it runs the risk of becoming a requirement instead of a bonus. While I think the core concept here (play better, get bonuses) is spot on, I want to know how it works. As a player, I want to see my enhanced contribution, games have become very proficient at giving negative feedback to players, but this is a perfect opportunity for positive feedback! We often shroud player success and reward in so much mystery, yet rub player failure and punishment in their faces, why not try to let the player know that they did something great, and are getting some reward for it? Heck, you could even combine this with the first point and let the biggest contributing player pull the trigger, though that definitely doesn't solve the first problem at all, it just blames the problem on the players. (don't do that)


3. Third is the usage and implementation of the ability. Let's picture you're a new player, and in your first dungeon. You've got this glowing bar in the upper left of the corner flashing at you, and not the foggiest on what to do with it. This ability requires you to take an ability out of your spell book and place it on your action bar, not too terrible, but the ability is only useful in groups and dungeons. So if you're not group you are just adding to interface clutter (something I hate). This is one of my personal favorite things that wow solved by giving you a contextual button on your screen that pops up. The limit system feels like the perfect place for the same type of resolution. How enticing is that button when it pops up? 

        Now, it's very possible that these may change moving forward. Even the bullet points above talk about higher level versions of limit breaks, it's quite possible that higher level breaks have different rules or functions at this time, I can't say for sure. But as they sit, I was a bit let down. 

        So what do you think? Any of you get a chance to try out the beta? Or maybe the Limit Break system? If not, that's fine, what do you think about it based on just the descriptions above? I'd love to know. 

I'll probably be doing some more FFXIV posts in the near future, as I've really been enjoying the game a ton in beta.

Bioshock Infinite

This could get in trouble wish some of my friends, but let's take some time to talk about Bioshock Infinite.

If you're a gamer, you've undoubtedly at least HEARD of this game. It's one of the year's most highly rated and highly talked about games. And for good reason, there's a lot to talk about here. There really aren't a whole ton of games out there that command as much attention as the "-shock" series has built. The series as a whole has built a large and loving following over the years.

The game opens up extremely strong, the first hour or so is basically an introduction into world of Columbia. This introduction is incredible. The world was breathtaking and so full of life. You're flooded with all of the interesting characteristics of this magical floating 1912 city. You enjoy time during a festival where everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, but things just don't seem right for you. There are quite a few odd things happening around you and way too much to be considered coincidence. I felt like the first couple hours with bioshock really set the game up to be incredible.

                Unfortunately for me, that feeling didn't last. After learning about the world, it's beauties as well as it's horrors, the shit hit's the fan. This is, of course, expected from a first person shooter. I remember where you get your first taste of the graphic violence of the game. Now, as a gamer, I'm no stranger to graphic e-violence. The scene early on where you deal with the racism of the society, and end up dealing with the situation through extreme violence is a powerful moment. The horrible violence in stark contrast to the sheer beauty of the world hits pretty hard. That first moment of the unspeakable violence here is a shock, and I think did exactly what violence in a game should do, it shocked you. You go from saying "This place is beautiful, but it's got some pretty dark and messed up under tones" into a "hoooooly shit" moment. While I feel this part was impactful and effective, the problem is that the entire rest of the game hangs on this high level of extreme violence, it loses its impact and the effect and remains the standard for the rest of the game. Essentially turning the violence away from our initial, shocking, interaction with violence into a desensitized, excessive, and childish game of spraying as much blood everywhere as you can. I think this is where violence usually fails in video games, it's extremely powerful when proving a point, giving character depth, building the story, and a thousand other uses, but when it's just constantly over the top as it is from this moment on, it loses all of its power and becomes childish.

The characters in the game are completely the opposite. They aren't obvious, in your face, and shoving the world down your throat at all. In fact, the Lutece siblings are the polar opposite of this. They speak in what seems like riddles, and continue to make you question what is really going on. From a story/character perspective, I feel like the Luteces are definitely the high point in the game for me. They were interesting, made me ask questions, really kept me moving forward through the game, and did so with a whimsical nature that only intrigued me further. The same can be said for Songbird. His first show on screen I said "oh, that's a boss for sure." But the game develops the character, exposes you to his internal struggle, his motivations, and you begin to pit the creature. In the end he even turns to your side for the final battle, only to die off in one of the better death scenes I can remember from a game. The people who designed, animated, and told the story for these characters should be applauded, as I feel these characters are responsible for the greatest achievements this game made.

Of course, we have to talk about Elizabeth. I have to admit, she really bothered me in this game. The buildup to her rescue felt good, and finally getting her on your team felt good as well. But that's where she kind of lost it for me. The game presented itself as an escort mission of sorts, to get her out. But it turned away from that pretty quickly. While I think Elizabeth was masterfully animated, written for, and performed, her interactions with the gameplay itself became really obnoxious early on. First and foremost, she's basically non-existent to the enemies in the game. She can't take any damage, and they don't even see her despite the fact that she's standing right in front of them. She runs around the battlefield picking up items and money for you, yet it's as if you're the only who can see her. It completely breaks my immersion into the game. Here's this precious girl, who I've done so much to protect, and even though everyone is out to kill me for it, nobody ever thinks to just grab her away. While the world not interacting with her is frustrating, what's worse is that she doesn't seem to have her eyes open the whole game. She'll eventually make some comments about how she doesn't like the killing, but only after you've used your skyhook to rip the faces off hundreds of enemies, none of which seemed to cause even a flinch from her. While I appreciate her desires to help in combat, I don't appreciate how generally useless she is. The rifts had a ton of potential, but they only used then for the occasional skyhook, gun, or Health packs. Not to mention it's completely uncool to have her offering a health pack or salt, then the second I'm out of combat that health pack mysteriously disappeared.

OK, on to the important stuff. Everything up to this point, I'm willing to tolerate from a video game. The story and the characters while at times annoying, oblivious, quirky, or just nonsensical, are all parts of the game and the messed up world that I'm tolerant of. After all the whole game seems to be about trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Where this game really made me feel let down is where we got into the mechanics and gameplay going on here.

Let's start with the skyhook. If you kept up even slightly with the hype and the buildup of this game, you knew about the skyhook. A fancy hook strapped to your arm that lets you ride on rails and fly around the world like an agile monkey in a forest. Except that it doesn't. The skyhook was grossly underutilized in the game. There were times where you got to jump up and grapple overhangs, or slide around for a few staged fights, but for the vast majority of the game I found myself using it as nothing more than a meat grinder. While I'm all for items having multiple uses, I wanted a lot more skyhook. I wanted to spend more time zipping around Columbia and dealing justice from the heavens. The times where you did get to use it felt so intense and powerful that I found myself wanting a lot more. Of course, much like violence, this could have easily turned into a situation where the whole game was just riding on skyhooks, which would have made the whole experience become dull, but I felt like I hardly EVER got to use the damn thing. And when I did, it was often to a fixed point to try and find some stowed away clothing crate somewhere; versus having more combat-based skyhook adventures.

Speaking of clothing, I was pretty bummed out here as well. The first hat I obtained in the game got me really excited. I liked the idea of getting some character customization out of the game. Giving me a system where I can change things up for different battles and circumstances. Unfortunately, with clothing being so rare coupled with randomly generated effects, I ended up finding an outfit and never changing it throughout the whole game. I feel like this system had a lot of potential, but when an equipping system ends up being used only 2 or 3 times early in the game, it makes the whole system seem really minor and destroys any attempt for growth from it. Sometimes I wonder if a small and simple crafting system could have been helpful. In turn, allowing me to really push my character into the direction that works with my playstyle.

On a random side note of Bioshock systems, what the hell is going on with the food here? Some give health, some gives salts, some take health for salts, etc. Yet nearly all of it is basically pointless. If you see an apple, you're going to eat it, along with everything else in the vicinity. The penalties were negligible at best, and the system feels like it's something they started to plan out, and just never bothered to finish. Given that your character has two primary resources, having restoration choices that force you to prioritize one over the other could develop into a system with some value, but that never happened here. This honestly feels forgotten about by the dev team. Not to mention that the presence of food feels somewhat pointless thanks to the presence of the shield which auto regenerates. Scrounging for health and focusing on survival wasn't even really a concern for me.

OK, back on track here. Let's look at the shield in Bioshock. The "halo-shield" has become quite the staple in FPS games in recent times. It self-regenerates when "out of combat" for a few seconds, and gives the player something of a "protective bubble" in the game. This isn't, exactly, a bad thing on its own, we've seen loads of games with this system do well, but where it gets a bit wonky is how this forces the game designers to change the game to accommodate for it. Thanks to the presence of the shield, the developers are forced to make their enemies capable of very high damage to break through it, or they need to try and set you up with ambush situations to surprise you and break through the shield. Not to mention that the breaking of the shield is way too graphically intrusive. Your whole screen goes yellow and you can't see anything for a couple of seconds. The presence of the self-regenerating shield forces the level designers into basically having stupid AI and play cheap tricks. They are forced to overwhelm the player to allow for the shield to be brought down, you're ambushed from all sides and without some system telling me where I'm being hit from I have no idea where it's coming from half the time. In the situation of enemies doing massive damage, it simply makes them feel cheap and unfair. While this isn't always a bad thing in games, the amount of damage taken should mean something. If you get hit by something that does lethal damage, you should have been able to avoid it through skill. I shouldn't walk into a room and get jumped on for my whole shield plus half of my health. This whole system essentially made it so getting hit doesn't matter half the time, and when it does it matters so much that it's grossly unfair. I remember the first automaton cannon I fought (before I had the shield) being really exciting. I had to plan out a way to deal with him with him without getting creamed, I tried changing up my positioning, attacking in bursts, paying attention to audio cues to try and catch him while reloading. It was a great experience, it felt dangerous yet manageable. After having the shield, they turned into a game of "pop out, do some damage, chill until my shield regenerates. Repeat"

This ties in to the enemy design which felt pretty lacking in bioshock infinite. Many of the enemies in the game just felt really stupid or grossly overpowered. In a world that's so intriguing and interesting, having essentially two enemy types was really disappointing. You're either being swarmed by a lot of small guys who do little more than charge at you while shooting, or your stuck with a heavy hitter who wrecks you if you get too close. The enemy behavior essentially turned me into a one-trick pony while playing through. Once you found something that worked you were never really forced outside of that comfort zone to experiment with other vigor/gun combinations. I can think of 2 maybe 3 situations in the whole game that asked more of me than to simply unload as much ammo as possible. Maybe drop a vigor here or there. These situations were the closest thing that bioshock had to boss fights and were welcome additions to the repetition of the gameplay and enemies encountered through most of the game. I really wish there had been more bosses or enemy variability.

Which leads me to the weapon system. Guns, lots of guns. I have to say, and this could fully be my fault and my fault alone, but I felt extremely limited by the ability to only equip two guns at a time. Often times I found myself completely skipping weapons because I didn't want to risk losing a weapon that I'd found to be my go-to. While this provides me with some level of choice in my weapon loadout, it also prevents me from trying out new things and really experimenting with my armory. There are guns in bioshock that I've only fired once or twice just to see how they behave. There were situations where I picked up a new gun from a safe, assumed it was very powerful due to finding it in a safe behind a lock, only to be hugely disappointed the second I got to test it in combat due to how weak it was. I feel like the vast gun variability would have worked out much better if ammo had been the limiting factor in my weapon usage instead of my ability to only hold two guns. Running out of ammo in my favorite forcing me to search for alternate ways to complete the task at hand is a great way to push people to experiment with weapons. But, due to the placement of vending machines, I never ran out of ammo. This part feels like a wasted opportunity to me, there are so many guns in bioshock, and I really wanted to play around with more of them I just never had a reason to. The  upgrades did so little for me, making them feel almost useless. While any gamer knows that stat improvements like "increased damage" are the right choice, they are seldom the most fun or interesting choices. Guns, although, or only half of the equation here, this is bioshock, so we've got to talk about vigors.

I loved the vigors in concept. In stark contrast to the weapons, vigors also had some interesting upgrades. Not all of them, but there were a few good ones in there here and there. While the whole super powers and mana bar thing is nothing new in games, bioshock didn't really force me to play with them as much as I'd have liked. It's very similar to the gun concept I talked about above. There's no real need or reason to deviate from the formula that you've grown comfortable with. You'd get a new one here and there, but they felt really formulaic as you'd acquire them, and you'd essentially be confronted with some challenge in the next few minutes that is ideally suited to your newly acquired power. After said challenge, you switch back to your comfort vigor and simply keep on keepin' on. This could have been mitigated by using per-vigor charges, essentially the same way that guns use ammo above. I feel like the presence of all of these weapons and all of these vigors begs for me to play around with different combinations, it wants me to try new things and be continually exploring my arsenal and powers in tandem with my exploration of Columbia and the story, but the game never actually asked me to do so. The trapping system was an interesting touch, but without enemies that do more than just charge straight at me, trapping didn't feel like it was ever really worth the effort. Had the game had some level of a stealth component to it, I think the trapping could have been a major boon for the vigors, but as it sits I never felt the need to play with or really use traps or vigors during the game. Which is a real shame.

 When all is said and done, I feel like bioshock is a huge game of missed opportunities. After playing through a few times I feel like the game made no real attempts to push me out of my comfort zone. The death system was far too forgiving, allowing me to zerg many situations, the weapons and vigors never pushed me into the area of ability experimentation. The shield allowed me to play recklessly and aggressively, while the enemies were predictable and formulaic. I really wanted to love this game, it's beautiful and the world had infinite potential (pun intended). Luckily, the masterfully crafted characters and story do a lot to keep the game going. 

Wow Hunters

*This is very stream-of-consciousness. It's scatterbrained and mostly just me rambling. If you're reading this, please keep in mind I didn't take the time to pretty this one up, I hope to later. But I just had to get this written down while I was thinking about it.*

In a recent discussion with some friends, I was confronted with the question of what I play in wow, and what I didn't like about my class. I thought to myself “oh, this easy”. I answered that I play a hunter, and that I feel like I have way too many abilities on my bars. There’s just too much stuff there, it’s overwhelming. Then they followed up with “I think that’s fair, what would you cut?” and I stumbled.

It’s weird, ability bloat or issues with class-kits are easy problems to “feel”. I think everyone who has a high end character in wow feels, sometimes, like parts of their class are excessive or too specialized. The irony here, is that while I knew WHAT I felt about it, I hadn't really made the effort to dive in and try and identify what was making feel like my class was bloated.

So, I decided to do so. It’s one of those things that you know by feel, but without some analysis it’s just a gut thing. And when trying to really explain something to someone, saying “that’s just how I feel, I don’t have examples” just looks bad.

Anyways, in the process of going through all of the hunter abilities, what I feel their purposes are, and how useful I think they are, I came to some conclusions and drew some connections with the hunter design that I hadn’t really explored in the past. Having played a hunter for years, I’m a bit annoyed that it took some prompting to make me do this. I guess I never really dove into class design due to focusing my thoughts elsewhere. Either way, here are my thoughts on being a hunter, ability bloat, hunter systems, and what I feel like would make being a hunter more enjoyable for me.

The first thing with hunters, is that I feel we’re still plagued by some remnants of old design. By this I mean that we still have abilities around or systems running that just don’t really apply to modern wow. Look at some of the abilities we have for our pets.

Pet System Abilities:

Feed Pet: This ability made a ton of sense back when we had to worry about pet happiness, and our pets abandoning us. It allowed us to give food to our pet and keep them happy. The happiness system is now long gone. But we kept this ability, it was retooled to be a 50% heal for our pet, only usable out of combat, and it still requires the consumption of an item. This is one of those abilities where I love the fantasy of it, but the current functionality isn't really there. I logged into my hunter and realized that I don’t even have the thing on my bars, talking with my fellow guild members, neither do they. This could, essentially, be pruned. Better yet, it could be rolled into the mend pet ability. Mend pet is a nice hot that heals your pet for 2.5% a second, and is usable in combat. It seems to me it would be super easy to make it heal 5% a tick out of combat.

Beast Lore: This is another ability that is antiquated. There was a time where your pet was super important for a hunter. I mean, it’s still important for a hunter’s effectiveness, but in today’s wow all pets have the same stats. You tame a pet now-a-days not for higher damage but for which buff/debuff it gives, or a specific ability the pet has. While information like damage/health/diet/armor were all super useful in the past, they are pretty much pointless in today’s wow. This ability essentially gives a hunter two important pieces of information: Special Ability and if it’s Tamable. Both of which could simply be added directly to the hunter tooltip when selecting a beast.

Aspects:

OK, there’s two buttons we can get rid of, next I want to talk about the hunters aspects system. Again, this was a neat system at one time. It worked similar to paladin auras or warrior stances. The hunter would take on different aspects that did different things. One of which used to make us more mobile, while another would give us more mana. It forced us into adapting our aspect to the situation. It was pretty slick back then. Today, we have three aspects. Hawk gives us a passive damage boost, while cheetah makes us move faster, but with a penalty if we’re hit. Any hunter spends 95% of their time in Hawk in today’s wow. When talented it even gives you a damage reduction! So let’s talk about cheetah/pack.

I feel like cheetah served a great purpose in the past. In my experience this was a wonderful ability for rapid wipe recovery. Thinking about the old days of Vaelstraz where you had 1hr or he despawned, shaving a few seconds off your wipe recovery was mandatory. If you wanted to get another attempt in, you needed to save every second. In today’s wow, this ability is pretty much just a troll. Raids now return you to the instance much closer to where you wiped, so your runs back are minimized. Many raids allow you to mount while inside, so cheetah is useless there. Currently there really aren't any limited timed bosses anymore, so getting back 2 seconds quicker doesn't make or break your group. As a hunter, I honestly wouldn't miss this ability in the slightest.

So let’s say we cut aspect of the pack out, that leaves us with cheetah and hawk left. Cheetah is exactly the same as pack, only for just the hunter. I feel like this is MUCH more practical, as one of the hunter’s most powerful tools is the ability to kite. So let’s keep cheetah, but this leaves our aspect system with only two abilities. Which is far from exciting. I really like the aspect system personally. It makes me feel like I’m being active and reacting to my surroundings. Either way remember the aspect system, we’ll come back to it later.

Active Abilities:

There are a few buttons in here that I honestly feel like are just in the way. First and foremost is hunter’s mark. There was a time where this was the only method of “mob marking”. Getting through Garr without this ability and 4 or more hunters was not an easy task at the time. But with today’s raid markers, I feel like the “marking” aspect of this ability doesn't really apply anymore. But, lucky for us, this also gives a debuff that gives us a damage bonus. Which is awesome, and useful for sure! But the hunter’s mark is currently automatically applied when we use our core damage abilities. With the fact that it’s auto-applied, and that marking is a thing of the past, just take the button away. We don’t need to have it actively on our bars anymore.

Next ability to go, is eagle eye. This has some neat functionality in pvp and for reconnaissance work, but the fact that it breaks camouflage is just painful. You’re essentially just standing there doing nothing while it’s active. In high end pvp, there’s really not enough time to use this to spy on the other team. Now, this is one of the abilities that I love the fantasy of. The ability to see far off places is so fun in theory. But in actual game play, I think I’ve used this ability only for messing around and handful of times. I don’t think I've ever seen another hunter use it.

Let’s also prune, or at least change scare beast. This is a fantasy spell, it seems really cool in theory. The hunter has power over beasts! He can scare them away in fear! Well, so can other classes. Except they can scare anything. Hunters are already pretty notorious for their control, so I wonder if changing this to a non-beast specific fear would force us to lose some other control elsewhere, but I feel like the only time this really becomes super useful is when fighting other hunters (or the occasional warlock), or if an encounter is specifically designed for this ability. It’s simply too limited to be of major usefulness.

Widow Venom. I hate this spell. Looking at all of the other mortal strike effects, this is by far the weakest one. It has the advantage of being ranged, which does count for something, but let’s look at the other mortal wounds effects. Mortal strike, rising crane kick(ww), wound poison, warlock pet, devilsaur pet. This is the only one that doesn't have a damage component to it, or isn't completely passive. In the case of the warrior and monk, they are also part of the CORE rotation, which essentially makes the debuffs application pretty passive as well. Now, anyone who pvps a lot, or even in pve at times will tell you how powerful this debuff can be. So I wouldn't kill the debuff entirely, instead I think this is where we could go back to the aspect system. To me, this feels like it should be part of serpent sting. Give me a third aspect that makes my serpent sting do less damage, but also apply this debuff to the target. It mimics the rogue usage fairly closely at this point, but by forcing us to have a slight dps loss in the process, I feel like it’s more in-line with the rest of the mortal wounds debuffs. It also gives hunters a bit more of a reason to, at times, drop out of aspect of the hawk.

Traps! 

Traps are core to the hunter. We have invisible deployables that, if used with some thought, can be extremely powerful; doubly so with the addition of the trap launcher. The trap system gives hunters some unique gameplay that I don’t think many other classes are fully aware of. But not all traps are created equal. Personally, I feel like snake trap could be done away with, or at least changed to be more exciting. Again, this is a fantasy spell, the idea and the visual for snake trap is great. But the fact that they are easily wiped out in 1 or 2 aoes (even when glyphed) gives them limited pvp potential. They are controlled by ai which can, at times exhibit odd behavior. They don’t do any meaningful damage, and I can only think of one real use for them in modern raiding. I almost feel like these could be combined with the ice trap, make them no-longer targetable, stationary, and have them spit their venoms at anything that comes in range for 30 seconds. This would essentially do the same thing as ice trap, give a great visual, bring the hunter down to 3 traps (only one of each school, right now there’s 2 ice, 1 fire, 1 nature) and it would still serve the purpose of both traps. Of course, I think we’d need to have  a shadow or arcane trap to fill the gap, which doesn't really eliminate this ability, but tweaks it a bit instead.

Spec Specific:

I generally feel most of these are pretty spot on. Except for cobra shot, that is. Cobra shot is a total replacement for steady shot. I’m not sure why to be honest, it seems to me like it would be just as effective to simply make steady shot refresh serpent sting for survival/beast mastery. It’s nice that when specced into survival/BM that steady shot is completely removed from our spellbooks, preventing someone from using the wrong focus generator while in those specs, but I don’t really feel like having two separate abilities holds a whole lot of value. It could be rolled into the mastery, or simple have steady shot taken out and just make everyone use cobra shot.

Black Arrow is another ability I’d like to see purged. As a survival hunter myself, it fits nicely into my rotation, and prevents me from being focus positive, but it shares a cooldown with explosive trap. Now, I’m ok with it sharing the cooldown, what I don’t like is that it takes away value from the trap system for me. I think that having the trap proc explosive shot, and removing black arrow makes my gameplay more interesting. Albeit it’s a bit more complex as the trap requires placement, but I honestly have more fun using the traps than I do applying a dot on cooldown. Of course, this solves movement issues, and losing explosive traps positioning. But the lock and load proc could easily be moved elsewhere, turning explosive trap into a dps spell. 

February, bloody February

This was an interesting month.

My goals were far from achieved, but as with all worthy failures, I think I learned a ton more than I would have had I succeeded (and done the smart things. :P) 

As a designer, I always have all sorts of off-the-wall ideas of crazy insane things that I've never seen and just wonder if they will work. While I think this creative curiosity is healthy for anyone who wants to be a game designer, it's dangerous for someone who wants to WORK as a game designer. Ideas are cheap, and worthless. That may sound harsh to many, but I guarantee to you that any game designer, working or otherwise, has hundreds of ideas just floating around. I guarantee that any professional game has an army of people behind it with a backlog longer than you can imagine. Ideas are great, but implementation is what separates the dreamers from the doers. With this in mind I made a decision fairly early on that I was going to make a platformer game. 

The purpose of this was to force myself into an environment of focusing on implementation and prevent myself from getting too experimental  I think it was a wise decision, but i think my handling of it crashed and burned. If you've ever done any looking at game maker, you've seen that there are hundreds of "engines" out there for all sorts of game types, and platformers is the most common. People have, essentially, mastered the systems underneath platforming games. This is a good thing, it allows for people interested in play, mechanics, and design to get involved without spending too much time digging around in things like coding collision or figuring out how to work with gravity. 

It's also something that I, very stupidly, decided not to take advantage of. I'm not sure if I was thinking "oh, it'll be easy" or if I was just getting a kick out of the coding aspect, but I decided that I was going to code my own engine. I don't regret this, as I learned a ton about coding and how the Game Maker Language works. But, I definitely feel like it was a bad idea from the perspective of operating on a limited time frame and my desire to try and focus on the design aspects. I ended up spending more evenings trying to refine player collision versus spending my time trying to figure out how to make interesting situations/obstacles for the player to deal with. I basically spent the month as a coder with designer on the back burner. 

I did learn some very valuable lessons as a designer though. First, and most obvious in retrospect, is to avoid duplicating work. Doubly so if it's something you don't fully understand or aren't highly experienced at. Had I taken one of those platformer engines and focused on just building the player epxerience within that engine, I think I would have come out with a much more desireable product in the end.

Anyways, on to more designery topics. Easing into complexity was a big thing I struggled with in this month's project. I think there's a certain appeal to the fantasy of "everything is normal and BOOM SHIT GOES NUTS!" but in practice that's a lot more difficult than it sounds. I started this project throwing in all sorts of obstacles and abilities right off the bat. Partly because I wanted to test them out, and partly because when most of use think of games, we think of them as completed pictures versus a lot of tiny pieces. It's important to make it clear to your player what they are supposed to be doing. When I dropped my player into a room with guns shooting, enemies jumping at them, and pitfalls of death, it became instantly clear that this was too much too fast.

After changing to a more smooth introduction, the game felt a lot better. Let's look at my first room. (I know, my collision blocks are an eyesore)

Starting the player in a position where you have one tiny block standing in your way, it's easy to come to the conclusion of "i should hop over that". And you just tought your player something valuable. Next I gave a jump two blocks high, "OK, I can jump that high. check".

 The next jump worked out pretty well. You can make the jump from two different positions. I wanted a few buddies try this jump out and saw a lot of interesting responses. Most people tried the jump from Point A first. Where it got interesting is when people failed. Some tried to jump against the 3-high wall a few times, few decided to try from point B (which is easy), but most immediately rushed back to point A to try again. They become, almost instantly, fixated on this one minor goal, that they completely ignored that there was a much easier way right there. They failed at least 3 times before looking for point B. The ones who stuck it out would eventually get it though. I expected them to stop once they got it and pause for a second or say something, but none did. This makes me question the concept that we need to shower our players in rewards to get them to do anything.

 I had a few ask me if it was possible to make it. I found this really interesting.  Specifically when the people asked me if jump A was possible. I think being a video game, when presented with a jump like that, most people naturally assume that a game would not give them an impossible task. I noticed the people going for jump A were a bit more active gamers while the people who went for B were the more casual camp. I suppose games have trained group A that they should seek out the greater perceived challenge even with a lack of any form of reward? I'm not sure, but i found it interesting.

From there, the level forces you to back track to get the disc to open the blue door, then to do this again. What I liked here is that the A group, upon seeing it a second time, seemed to lose all determination to get the jump. They've done it once, so they knew it was possible, and that they could do it, but it wasn't until the second time through it that they realized there's an easier jump there, and they kind of had a "damnit, whatever" moment and went for jump B.

Anyways, I've talked too much about a single jump. :P

The second room I introduced hazards  Originally I just had a "ramp" (I never got the character running up a ramp to work, which is already coded in tons of platformer engines... grrrr) where green balls of slime drop from the blue circle and roll downhill. Simple enough, just jump over the green things. But I found that some people didn't immediately realize that they were hazards  I was a bit surprised here honestly, assumed knowledge would lead me to believe that stuff rolling at you would be bad. But it (apparently) wasn't readable. So I added a second "slime dropper" thing a bit earlier that just dropped slime from the ceiling. People immediately recognized this one, nobody got hit by the falling slime. This could be a question of graphic fidelity, if they were spikes would people have let the rolling slimes hit them?

With this set up, I was able to more clearly communicate the slimes as bad. Then giving the player a bit of a corner to jump out of stalled the player long enough for them to see slimes rolling down the ramp as well. After adding this nobody had any question as to what was going on.

BAH! This is no good, I fear that going through this thing room by room is going to make this blog post way too long. While I would like to talk about the next room introducing projectiles and teaching a player how to use duck, but I fear this is getting lengthy already, and that I need to wrap this up.

Conclusion
Overall, this is a huge failure as a game. But it was a huge learning opportunity for me as a designer. I've learned a lot of things that I will never repeat. And obtained some interesting perspective on level design and player behavior. I think that I may revisit this one after the year concludes, as I really enjoy the idea of a platformer and trying to make that interesting. I've got some concepts for an aesthetic and some further room puzzles and stuff that I'd love to try out. But when operating on such tight time tables, I fear I just went *WAY* out of scope here.

January...

January was actually pretty good to me.

I started a bit late, so I felt a lot of pressure working on this one. As I mentioned previously, I hadn't actually found out about the 1GAM community at all until about half way into febuary, I actually started this under the inspiration of someone else where I work.

Anyways, let's talk about the game I made for January.

Concept: 
Anyways, the idea for the January game was a really simple strategy game. The core idea was that your offense and your defense are linked in the form of your units. I wanted attacking to feel risky, where by attacking, you are leaving your bases vulnerable  Once defeating an enemy base, of course, it's now a player-owned base. Next I wanted to make upkeep and maintenance of your forces important. I decided on letting the player build a network within their bases, allowing them to move resources around rapidly versus waiting for bases to churn out soldier naturally. This also allowed for a base that was locked in by friendlies to still serve a purpose and still be part of the game.

Aesthetics: 
Originally, I wanted to do a cellular theme, where you were controlling an army of cells/bacteria/viruses,etc. I played around with art assets i could find online (remember, I am NOT an artist), but I couldn't really find anything that felt right. I decided to make it pixel art characters. I wanted to build out a campaign where you start with tribal characters and your bases were huts, then the next level of the campaign you were moving into the bronze age with rudimentary weapons, then into the iron age, and so on. All the way up to the future. The core game itself wouldn't have changed, but each "time" had a small upgrade that it would add as the game went on. Eventually you'd be able to upgraded bases, soldiers, use player activated abilities, etc.

But that ended up being a bit too ambitious for a 30 day project and my development skills.

Implementation: 
For some reason, I envisioned the game as something that would work on phones. So I, very intentionally, kept the control scheme as simple as possible. In a lot of ways, this actually helped me out. It served to keep a lot of feature creep in check, and kept me trying to think of ways to do things that would fit. It basically kept my ideas reeled in an my focus pure. For the sake of being in development, I attached the functionality to "transfer" soldiers to the right click, so in it's current state, it couldn't work on a touch device, but that was done to allow me to separate out all the functions and see things happen in isolation, I never got around to move it to Lclick.


The map was never intended to be the map. It's extremely basic, there are a series of neutral bases with the player having one base in the corner and the AI having it's own base in the opposite corner. I basically just needed a test bed to see how things worked. Which ended up being the one and only map I had. Since I realistically had no idea about the time investment needed to make even an insanely simple game, coupled with the fact that I'd never done anything in gamemaker before, and the fact that I was just flying by the seat of my pants the whole time, there wasn't time for more maps.

Most of the functions weren't too awful to implement  although with even the little that I've learned up to this point, I can tell you that the code, scripts, animations, etc are all horrible. There's a chasm between code that functions and good code that's elegant, functional, and efficient. Mine BARELY functions. As I mentioned, I initially wanted to stay out of code, but I quickly found that to be impossible. So any coding that I did end up doing was pretty begrudgingly done, as I move further into this whole 1GAM thing, I'm getting more comfortable with code and hate it less... but I still don't like it.

Transferring was probably the most exciting part. It took me a couple days to figure out how the heck to make it work, but once I did get it to work making your soldiers to zoom around felt pretty good. It's one of those things where on paper it seemed like a boring mechanic, and in implementation it's not amazing or anything, but I though it felt pretty good. Moving around the map and having your soldiers zoom around feels pretty cool. Getting that short burst of super speed, and seeing your soldier zip around the map definitely made the mechanic feel like it was actually somewhat important. The management of the player network of bases is probably the thing that I feel like worked out the best. Of course, it ended up making the game extremely easy, but that's OK.

I'm not sure that having one-way transfers was really a good idea. It was actually harder to implement unidirectional movement than it was to enable bidirectional, at least with the way I put it all together. There's also no way to undo a road. I did this intentionally as I didn't want network management to be haphazard, but it ended up limiting the players ability to be reactive to a situation  I'm still not sure if that's good or bad, do I want players to pay for their mistakes that gravely?

Conclusion:
Overall, I'm actually pretty pleased with January's game. It's insanely simple, and I don't think it's fair to call it anything more than a prototype, but I think there's a lot of potential here. One of my goals of the 1GAM thing, is to build 12 prototypes and then next year see if any warrant coming back to and further developing/polishing. It's way too early to say, but I definitely can see how this prototype could be further expanded in a million ways. In addition to the fact that this is the first thing I've ever made in this software, and that I went into this with no friggin idea what i was doing, I have to say I'm alright with it.

Honestly, I'm just happy that I was able to make something. Anything. Anything at all.  :P

If you want to check it out, you can here : https://www.dropbox.com/s/khttvmqdkafmkal/takeover.exe 

I realize that it's an exe file, and that scares a lot of people. That's ok, if you're not willing to click an unknown exe, I can't blame you. But if you REALLY want to play it, and REALLY don't want to mess with .exe's, give me a hundred bucks, and I'll buy the HTML5 export module. kthx. :D

There's a lot more I could talk about, rudimentary AI (and how it can stomp your face in if you don't put in decision making cooldown), the upgrades I wanted to include, working with game maker, how difficult it is to get feedback from friends, etc. But I feel like this post is already getting too lengthy, and I'm sure those more general topics will be revisited over the course of this year.

Next time, I'll talk about the February game, and what a huge failure it's been and how boring it is!!! Stay tuned.

I almost forgot about this thing!

Well, here I am again.

I had almost forgotten about this thing! hah.

I guess updates first. It's been quite some times since I've written anything here. The most pressing update, and the reason I remembered I even had this blog, is that I'm participating in something called 1GAM. Over at http://www.onegameamonth.com/ It's a pretty interesting little site that challenges people to make 1 game a month for a whole year.

I actually decided to do this long before I found out about the site, and the community. I made it through my whole January project before discovering this community.

Anyways, to go along with my whole "year of game dev" I decided that I should be documenting a lot of what's going on this year. It's pretty important for me to be able to identify my struggles, pitfalls, successes, and all of that stuff. Which, of course, led me to the idea of starting a blog when I suddenly remembered that I already had one!

SO! Let's talk about some general observations.

First, how this started up. I found the gamemaker software free on steam and decided "what the hell". The original idea here was to try and keep my barrier for entry as low as humanly possible. I wanted to try and avoid code if at all possible, and to be able to focus purely on the design and mechanical aspects of the game.

That didn't work.

At all.

I've come to accept that I need to know some coding if I'm going to work in the digital realm. There's really no escaping that. It's good, and it's bad, but it's the truth. One one hand learning how code works, and programming logic, and all of that is of major value. As computers and internet make our world smaller, knowing how to function within software is increasingly valuable.

I've already learned *SO* much, it's really kind of surprising. To be quite honest, I have no clue how translatable the game maker language (GML) is to another, more advanced, language but I figure any experience can't really hurt me. I've always been able to decipher code and reverse-engineer it to figure out what's going on, but never before have I really had to think long and hard about generating code.

I find that most of the logic and math is actually fairly easy for me, it's finding the functions and formatting that is a huge pain in the ass. Of course, I'm typing this from a position of "I've only attempting extremely simple development" so I could (and likely will) end up eating those words in time.

While coding can be troublesome, where I'm struggling the most is with Art.

I am not an artist. I have very little skill with art, or patience with it. I realize that art is absolutely a learned skill. Having gone to art and design school and being forced to "do art" a lot, I know that the more you do it, the better you get at it. But I don't enjoy it.

I love mechanics, systems, how things work together, I love to sit down and figure out how things work. I'm often highly inspired by art and art itself can cause me to flood with ideas on how I can factor that into systems or what neat things I could do with it. But generating art is... simply not my bag. baby.

Anyways, I'm going to be trying to update this more often now that I legitimately have something to talk about. I'll write in a bit on my January game and do a post-mortem of sorts, then later I'll do some writing on the February game and what a disaster it's been so far! :D

WoW for One - Quests and the Journey

Today I want to talk about wow as a single player game. A friend of mine brought up some thoughts on quest design and his opinions about it. Our conversation resulted in a realization that this facet of the game is one that I hadn’t taken the time to explore deeply enough. I have multiple loremaster characters, and I’m positive I’ve done every quest available at least once, but had I really sat down and looked at the system? As the existence of this entry suggests, I decided to do exactly that. I’m not quite sure how to feel about my findings, sometimes overanalyzing something can make you hate it, other times it can make you appreciate it more. While I need some more time to decide how I feel about my opinions, I’ve decided to share the opinions themselves here with you all.

I hadn’t really noticed it before, but looking at WoW as a single player game really feels like it is on rails to me. What I mean here (for the not-into-hip-lingo folks) is that the game moves on a pre-defined path almost on its own. Think of a game where you ride in a car and someone else is driving. That is “on rails” the path is pre-defined, the car will get to its destination on its own, and you’ll get out at the end of the pretty trip. It’s a ride at that point, it’s on rails. Let’s take a look at what I mean here.

Let’s start up a new character together shall we?


From the get-go there are a few things I don’t like here. First the scroll bar on the quest, Is that needed? It feels like an instruction book for a quest here, should I really have that much text to tell me to go talk to someone? What if I don’t want to talk to this person? I can’t decline the quest, nor can I “X” out of the quest dialogue in the upper right corner of the quest window. OK, ok, so you really want me to take this quest, I’ll bite.

Being as this is the first quest in the game, I think it’s fair to be a bit forceful and keep the experience controlled and directed. So let’s move on to the quest itself “It’s time to begin ya trainin’ Ceejjay. Speak with Ortezza to the east” OK! That’s cool for a newbie. The quest tells me where to go and who to talk to. (I originally did this in the Orc starting zone, and they (brilliantly, I might add) made sure that the completion NPC is already on your screen and 15 yards behind the guy you’re talking to, further enforcing this act and behavior of questing to a new player. “Oh, that guy now has a gold question mark. OK, I get it!” But no such luck here in Sen’Jin.) A fitting way to start my character, to get me involved in the world, to make sure I understand what’s happening and what I should be doing. If you didn’t read the whole quest, then you’re also given an objectives area to make sure that it’s crystal clear. Additionally, the npc talks to you in a chat bubble, a quick three lines of chat that gives me an idea of what’s expected of me.

This is a great way to start out the game. I’m given a task or a purpose right off the bat. As a new player, or someone new to a zone, this helps me to make sure I’m getting off on the right foot. Early in someone’s game career or in a new area, the rails serve as a great way to get me involved. It’s a system designed to give guidance, which was a relatively new thing when WoW was released.

At the time that wow was originally released the majority of peoples’ experiences other MMO titles was HUGELY lacking in narrative driven play. In fact it often felt like the game was working against you most of the time! Questing in EQ was borderline torturous, not only did you not have clear indications where to get quests or turn them in, you had to hunt quests down by emoting guards. A quest was a hugely difficult mystery solving adventure that was far more difficulty than it was worth. In FFXI the questing aspect was reserved for very momentous occasions and often times put you into a situation of “You need to figure this out on your own” much like EQ did.

It was natural and brilliant for the designers of classic WoW to explore this system. They recognized that typical MMO play operated under the mentality of a sandbox style game “It’s an online persistent world, let people do what they want. Let them really make it their own!” as opposed to idea of a guided experience. The WoW designers saw that by building a quest system to guild the players through the world, they could make the game far less frustrating and make it open to a larger audience. Additionally, this continually gives people a sense of something to do, something to drive their behavior and something to keep people playing. For it’s time, the development of the quest system in WoW is one of the greatest advancements in MMO play to this date.

OK! Now we have a little back story, but here we are seven years later. WoW has been the long standing king of MMOs and has continued to raise the expectations of the genre. (Yes, seven years later, I’m still a huge WoW fan and play every day.) Undoubtedly, quests have grown over these past seven years. So let’s go check out one of the newer quests. Oh goodie, our little hunter is all grown up now, so let’s grab a level 85 (max level) daily quest!


That looks pretty familiar. I know it’s a quest simply by the interface, the exclamation mark, the accept / deny buttons (the scroll bar… ggrrrrr). These things all have stayed rightfully consistent through the game and leave me with no questions in my head that I’m getting a quest. Let’s look at the quest itself. I get a bit of background as to why I’m doing what I’m doing, and an objective that tells me exactly what I need to do for the quest.

At this point, as a max level character that has presumably done a fair number of quests in my day, I feel like the system is a tad insulting. OK, so insulting might be a bit extreme, but I definitely feel like at this point I’m capable of a little more than needing a step by step instructions to tell me what to do. Where is the play in this? Where do I get to get involved and make decisions? From this quest specifically I’m given a little bit of wiggle room as I can slay any 7 invaders, but I’m still given clear step by step as to where I am to go, and what I am to do. This system works great for leveling up, or going through a zone with the story in-mind, but I feel like it’s essentially taking a lot of “the play” away from us as max level characters.

The quest system in wow has great potential to grow, but that’s exactly what we need it to do. Grow. A quest feels far more enjoyable if I’m able to play an active role in deciding how to tackle the obstacle at hand. Instead of giving me, a level capped player, a step by step blueprint as to what to do tell me the end result you want and let me figure out the steps on my own. Giving me even a little bit of play makes the whole task feel far more unique and personal, even if my decisions or my choices are only impactful in appearance.

A great example of this would be the hunter quests “Steady Shot”. This quest gives a bit of background saying “You already know how to fire an arcane shot. Good. But doing so depletes your focus. To gain your focus back you will need to switch to a second type of ranged attack. I can teach it to you.” The explained functionality here is key to the quest itself. It’s attempting to give you a very basic knowledge of the mechanics of the hunter class and how focus works. But it does so in such a way where I’m practically reading an instruction manual. Why not let me figure it out a bit. Give me a debuff that reduces my focus by 10 a second, and tell me to not let my focus fall to zero over the next 10 seconds. That makes the situation feel a bit more pressing, and gives me the option to figure it out on my own. Being that this quest is immediately after getting a new ability the solution is pretty obvious. But the obviousness of the answer isn’t what makes it feel good, what makes it feel good is that I connected those two dots by myself. It’s a game, I want to play it. I want to be given the tools and the means then the freedom to work the issue out on my own terms.

I think this “hyper instructional play” is one of the bigger reasons why a lot of end game players feel that questing is tedious and dull. Nobody drops you in front of a barrier without telling you “HEY! You should jump over this!!!” I can figure that out for myself, thank you. If you give me a problem or a decision to make and I figure that out on my own, then suddenly things change from you delivering an experience to me into the game and I creating an experience together. Now to be clear, a lot of this isn’t exactly appropriate for starter zones, in the interest of making the barrier for entry to WoW as low as possible, asking people to figure out complex situations in the first 10 minutes of play is going to cost you more players than it gains. But at end game levels, where people have already put in a large amount of time and effort making the assumption that your players is intelligent and competent could allow the quest system to be much more robust.

I look back at so many of the quests from the past, and the quest “The Relic’s Emanation” stands out for me. Was this the most fun and entertaining quest ever created? Not a chance. But the quest did a lot of really important things in my opinion. It gave you a task that focused on the results first and foremost. The quest didn’t tell you the answer, It simply said “Become attuned to the relic”. It never said “go click blue, then blue red, then red yellow green, etc”. It asked you for a result and gave you a rough idea how to do that. What makes this shine for me was that the play itself allowed you to define how you were going to resolve the situation. It was a fairly simple Simon style game, but the pattern did not simply tack on a new color at the end, and they provided no in-game method for tracking the pattern being given. Some people created an addon, some people were able to memorize the patterns, some people sent themselves whispers, while others used a notepad next to their computer. The point was that the quest asked people to develop their own solution, and most people came to their own solution on their own terms. The quest asked for just a little more than simply following a play-by-numbers system that’s laid out in front of you clear as day.

Thinking about this, there are a near infinite number of tools that could be added to the quest system to make it more robust:

• Decisions - Why not give me more decisions to make while questing? How about a quest that says “Our troops are hungry, give us some food.” And that’s it? Have any item that a player can eat be an eligible turn in for the quest. If someone is hungry and I’ve got 200 roasted chicken in my inventory that seems like a reasonable solution to me. It also let’s me to inject a little bit of my personality into the situations my character is participating in. Let’s say I play a Tauren, I’m not so sure I am comfortable with slaughtering an animal that could a distant cousin simply to feed you. But hey, I’ve got some berries!
• Bonuses – All quests that have a baseline expectation. Why not give bonuses for going above and beyond? The quest above would work great “My troops are hungry, anything will do, but roasted quail has the most nutrients!” if I turn in berries, awesome the quest is completed and I am rewarded. If I bring the guy roasted quail, then I get a slight boost in my reward. The players leveling or questing for profit could use the bonus if they find that valuable, while those seeking achievements or in a hurry could just completed and move along.
• Timers – We see a little of this in quests today, but I think more timers could add some urgency to play. Again, using the example above “My troops are starving to death! Get us some food asap. Quail is the most nutritious, but anything you can get us will help!” A situation of people starving to death is most assuredly one that I would think is time sensitive.
• Stop making me read – So much can be explained through play and behavior. Let’s stick with the starving army theme. How about I have to pass by a large number of “starving grunt” npcs as I approach a quest giver. These grunts die and respawn fairly quickly, they mutter as I walk by “I haven’t eaten in a week” or similar phrases. Give me enough queues that I’m guaranteed to see enough to paint the picture. This could change the quest description into something short and sweet like “Bob sent you to help? Look around, my men are dying. Get me some food! That will help.” More importantly, it would tell me the story and potentially make me WANT to help, without having to completely stop my play to sit and read for a minute. After 3000 quests, that can add up to a huge amount of time spent just reading and not actually playing the game.

The quest system could be taken even further. How about decisions in quests lead to branching questing paths within a zone or narrative? Anyone remember the quest in Mount Hyjal “A Bird in Hand”? This quest gave you some options on how you wanted to interrogate the harpy. These were fun and made me feel like I had a little control over my characters disposition. But the big moment came at the end of the quest, I was given a choice as to if I wanted to kill the harpy or let her go. This was an exciting decision! I thought to myself “oooh, what will this choice change?! Does this impact my follow up quests?!” I remember asking my friends later “did you kill her?! What happened? I let her live!” Sadly, I came to find out that it only changed the follow up flavor text. Why couldn’t there have been two different follow up quests? If I killed her, give me a quest to dispose of the body. If I saved her, give me a quest to put her into witness protection and ship her to barrens where nobody would be the wiser. Then the split paths could reconvene into a quest that basically told me “Well, now that we’ve taken care of that situation, let’s move on.” This could result in multiple branching paths and develop into a system where people genuinely feel that their experience was somewhat unique. As long as the number of completed quests and the rewards remain consistent, things like achievements stay consistent and nobody gets any form of in-game advantage. On top of that, think about the replayability this could potentially add to people who love to play alts, or people who are super interested in the lore.

I want to see max level characters talking to each other at end-game about their paths to max level. I want to see the surprise as they say “Wait, a quest to kill the demon guy? I befriended him and got all sorts of info on the demonic inner working from him, you killed them all?!” Even with the extremely limited options presented in front of us now, I still see people get excited when talking about quests after the fact. I can personal vouch that I’ve had at least 5 hilarious conversations based around choosing your admirer on “The Day that Deathwing Came: What Really Happened”. This very simple choice, even being purely cosmetic has created situations where the majority of people I’ve talked to about it felt that they were in control of the narrative.

By its nature, questing is a process that is most commonly equated to leveling. Quests are designed around the progressions through zones and through levels. This leaves us in a position where, as one-time experiences, we eventually run out of quests. Introduce the daily quest. This is a system that allows for specific quests to be repeated once per day. Initially, I was extremely excited at the possibilities of this system. I love the idea of being able to go back and do things that I enjoyed again! Quests like “Vigilance on Wings” or “The Restless Brood” are great examples of this. These were really high-profile quests that broke my normal questing routines and gave me a tweaked experience that was different and unique, being able to relive these experiences felt great!

Dailies though, have taken on a different purpose. I feel like it’s not about “re-experiencing awesome situations” as much as it’s now the questing experience for max level characters. Dailies have become the premier way to farm a reputation at a controlled pace, or to give high level characters reasons to go back into areas that they haven’t been in a while.

The most recent Max Level daily questing hub is The Molten Front. This area, as a whole, I felt was pretty disappointing. It felt like so much of a grind. On some level this was undoubtedly intended, as this content needs to stay relevant until the next content is released. But the act of obtaining 150 marks of the world tree when I’m only capable of obtaining 12 a day feels like a cheap and transparent way to artificially extend that life cycle. Additionally, it makes the idea of doing this on alts or two years down the road on a max level character who’s going back to see what they missed a painfully dull experience. I'm all for having content with replayability and that is fun to play again and again, but the key to this is that the content is FUN to play again, not that I'm forced to play it over and over.

Nearly every person I’ve talked to who completed the Molten Front fully has said “Ugh, never again.” I’m not attempting to say that dailies do not have a place in end-game here. But personally I felt the systems used in Isle of Quel’Danas felt a lot more future proof. Experiencing the event and dailies during progression was exciting and rewarding, opening the island up yielded new things to do and kept people motivated to see what’s next. But going back and doing that rep grind again on an alt is nowhere near as time consuming as it was when the content was relevant. The island as a whole is now fully opened up and ripe for a new character to come in and experience all of these quests immediately. While potentially unintentional, this also helps to reinforce the growth of a character. As a character becomes more powerful, they should be able to complete old content more easily. It makes sense for a level 80 character to be able to blow through level 70 quests easily.

While I didn’t care for the gating or the repetitive quests, The Molten Front has some amazing storytelling and lore going on. The feeling of a constant battle back and forth was well executed, and being able to see progression in the environment as you play is something I hope to see a lot more of! But having to put out the fires or destroy the temple every single day only to unveil the exact same 5 quests got to be pretty frustrating. If the system included a few of the bullet points above, I feel it could have felt a lot more dynamic. Additionally, while I’m happy to get you the marks you need Mr. Malfurion, didn’t I just kill Rangaros the other day? I seem to recall some of the older raid instances dropping items that could be turned in for reputation gain and helping to expedite the grind a little bit. It’s not that any of these quests on their poorly designed on their own, quite the contrary, most of them are quite enjoyable as singular quests. But even a great quest loses its luster after doing it 30 days in a row.

I’m not saying that every single quest in the whole game should be an epic and grand undertaking, that would make simply playing the game exhausting, especially for someone who plays only casually. I want a certain amount of heavily guided questing. There are times where we all just want to relax and not be forced to figure out how to play a game, or be asked to have the manual dexterity of a teenager to button mash through some horrible gauntlet that makes a mockery of my nowhere-what-they-used-to-be reflexes. But I do feel like the system itself has become somewhat self-defeating. People are so accustomed to questing on rails that they stopped putting any mental effort or thought into a system. Now, after years of “play by numbers” the system requires so little from us that any effort put into the system feels frustrating and defiant.

I suppose the heart of the issue is summarized well by Shepard Book from Firefly “The journey is the worthier part.” I’m all for rewards, and helping me get to my destination. It feels great to finally get to your destination. But in doing so, let *ME* make that journey worthy. After all, the destination is nothing but an excuse to take the journey. Give me opportunities to actually play the game, and to work some things out. Let me feel like what I’m doing is personal and unique. If I’m sharing the same experience as everyone else, at what point does the game become nothing more than an interactive movie? Give me the tools and the opportunity to make my own personal story.