Since my last post on this subject I’ve been giving more thought to what aspects of Survivalcraft I’d like to see altered to improve my gameplay experience. Let me just start by once again reminding any readers that I am really enjoying SC and noting that SC is still in Alpha and that Kaalus, the developer, is incredibly active in moving the game forward. I feel I need to state this not just to be fair to Kaalus’ game but also to placate some of the fans of the game who have found their way to this blog and, I am guessing due to their age, can misinterpret the tone of my humour and see my posts as a criticism: I don’t mind telling a commenter to piss off for being a knob, but even I tend to feel a little bit mean when I find out they are only 10 years old o.0
Anyhoo, let me begin. Exploring, as I have said before, is hard & dangerous. My decision to lay signs and construct hard boxes has helped make it safer but also duller. Well, it hasn’t made it duller so much as shown up a weakness inherent in a world as big as Survivalcraft: there is no point in exploring because there is simply nothing to be gained. Of course you may need to find new resources and supplies but other than that there is nothing out in the world for you to see, locate or just plain stumble across. For me, the world needs more ‘stuff’ in it. Kaalus has done a great job re-working the underground generation to give us impressive caves but I’d like to see overground structures too. How great would it be to find a village nestled in the safety of a valley, or strung high in the bows of a jungle? What about a shipwreck off the coast? A stone circle atop a mountain? A huge jungle stretching for miles? But all there is is an endlessly repeating cycle of sand, grass, snow, plains, hills, mountains, trees, flowers, cactuses. All very pretty, but all very empty.
Which brings me on to my next observation. The landscape varies a lot between the main types of ground cover (grass, sand & snow) but it does so in small, often repeating patterns that don’t really make any sense. You can, for example, regularly find a thin strip of snow blocks running through a desert region right next to the sea and that just looks wrong. What I’d like to see is the landscape handled in a more natural way, either much larger areas of continuous terrain to avoid this patchwork quilt feel or a more realistic island layout with jungle surrounding mountains topped with snow only at the highest elevations.
Desert, plains, mountains, lakes and snow together at last!
In short, I would dearly love the landscape of Survivalcraft to give me a reason to not only explore but to get lost.
Still in Canada, still living my Tyrian lives vicariously though the blogs of others (thanks to Ama for keeping me sane with tales of her increasing insanity ) and I find that every day my desire to play this game that 12 months ago I hadn’t even heard of grows stronger & stronger.
Damn you Arenanet, you lovely buggers you. Damn you & roll on my return flight! Hmmm, is it bad to be more worried about a plane crash because I’ll never get to play a computer game rather than the associated loss of wife & children?
And so endeth the last beta test for Guild Wars 2 and more than ever before it has left me somewhat desperate to play the final game when it’s released in August. Out of all the tests over the last few months that was the one where, finally, everything came together, coalesced into a feeling of understanding that allowed me to really, truly, enjoy the game. Well, apart from the frigging jumping puzzles but more of those later. This time around I played (along with everyone else it seemed!) a Sylvari and by gum it was fun!
Character Creation
The character creator was a blast and I easily made a very cool looking guy who managed to avoid the constipated look that plagues the humans.
Who’s a handsome boy, then?
And who glows in the dark, eh?
Why, hello…
Hunngggnnn…
Personal Story
I deliberately didn’t undertake any of the personal story as I really, really want to save that for launch but I have to say I’m very excited to see a strong Celtic/Arthurian theme to the Sylvari. I’m so going to chase that white stag in August as I’ve been dying to write a tale about just such a quest since the very earliest days of writing about my old backpack.
The Starter Area
Unlike the other races who all start in the ‘real’ world of Tyria, the Sylvari start their adventures fast asleep, tucked up in their Body Snatcher-like seedpods and yet wide awake in their shared pre-birth experience known as The Dream. Still, despite the recumbent nature of their start, the Sylvari’s training area shares one thing in common with everyone else’s – it wastes no time in getting you into the heart of the action and in no time at all I was in a pitched battle with an amazing looking tree dragon! My only regret is not spending longer exploring the ghostly images of information flowing into the Dream and the teachings of Ventari but I shall make sure to rectify that upon launch.
Dynamic Events
Oh lordy these were fun! Partly it was me being more organised and better used to the mechanics (the mouse and keypad combo just came right back to me, something I was very happy about!) and partly it was down to some tweaking by Arenanet, but the dynamic events flowed so well. They never overwhelmed, they never vanished into the background, they seemed to happen at just the right time and throw in enough variety to keep me entertained throughout. Some were funny, some were serious, some were exciting and all were bloody good fun! I still find the events system the single biggest selling point in this game for me. Exciting, fun stuff just happens wherever I am and that beats endlessly grinding my way through LOTRO any night of the week.
Vistas & Jumping Puzzles
As I’ve said I kept away from the personal story and concentrated instead on enjoying dynamic events and exploring. Aside from the joy of finding the new vistas in the world (I’m addicted to them, it’s official) I also had a pop at the jumping puzzle near the start and boy did it frustrate the bejesus out of me! I don’t so much mind the falling off and repeating sections, but having to repeat the whole damn thing just drove me mad! I can easily see me giving up on the more difficult ones because I just can’t stand wasting two hours on a different kind of grind. Two hours, you ask. Shurley shome mishtake! Nope, just take a look at some of Wooden Spud’s videos where he and Magic Mike show the kind of will power I don’t even have the will power to imagine. Still, for all their frustrations they are a rather cool addition to the world.
Alone in a crowd…
I am beginning to realise just how important being in a guild, or number of guilds I suppose I should say, is going to be when the game launches. I was actually quite lonely in this beta weekend and I longed to go off exploring with a mate or two, especially if we could have tackled the jumping puzzles together as then I think the frustration would not have got to me quite as much. If anyone wants to adopt a casual explorer type and paitently explain how the chuff guild chat works then please think of me
As an aside I *did* actually join a guild this weekend – someone randomly invited me so I joined and then never heard a damn thing from the dozen or so members for the rest of the beta! I tried typing in /guild but got nothing back. This actually mirrors my one an only experience with a guild in Guild Wars 1 where someone randomly invited me and then went totally silent! Now in LOTRO the Guild/Kin I was in was really cool & full of very chatty, very helpful fun folks but so far I don’t seem to be able to replicate this experience in either of Arenanet’s games. How odd.
Aqua Cats?
Now let me ask you what you think is wrong with that picture. Exactly! How the chuff is Archie the Jungle Cat breathing underwater, eh? I hope this gets sorted out soon as it just looks bloody silly.
Final Event – Hunger Royale!
Ahhh, the now-legendary final event of a beta test. I had missed all the others and so took time off work just to be there for the dragon brand attack. Only thing is I got some weird kind of PvP event instead! Boy was I disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, the event was a good event but I don’t really like PvP (mainly cos I’m crap and die all the time which is not much fun) so this held zero interest for me. Still, if you like PvP then you would have liked this type of event. Don’t believe me? Let a man made of biscuit tell you about it instead.
And…
Ohhh I don’t know, what more can I say? The combat was fun, the events were fun, the jumping puzzles were (eventually) fun. The entire game is just bloody good fun and I can’t wait to get in it for real. This was the first test where I started and immediately found my feet – I could handle the skills and fights and quests without thinking about them too hard and that was a very welcome development as I had begun to worry that I would never ‘sync up’ to this game and therefore never really enjoy playing it. Consequentially this was also the first test where I left not just enthused by the beta tests but sated with them and wanting the game to be released so I could get on with it without having to stop. Enough foreplay I say, I’m oiled and ready and just want to get down to some serious lurve making, Arenanet.
Ahhh, but…
What? You want me to be picky? Sigh. Ok… Let me see. Jumping puzzles can be frustrating. Lots of people turn a fight into a particle storm. I have no idea how guilds work. And that’s about it I think. Honestly. There is still a lot to do to optimise the graphics and engine but apart from that it runs like a dream even on my old system (triple core CPU with an old nVidia 260GTX card). There just isn’t much I can find wrong with this game – its just great fun
Oooo, look at that!
I’ll leave you with a few choice pictures from my flickr stream and I hope they tempt you to meet me in Tyria in a few short weeks
Back when I was still playing LOTRO & I failed a quest my immediate thought was more often than not “Damn! Now I have to do this snaserfrassing thing again!” Now contrast that with my time in Guild Wars 2 where the failure of a dynamic event led me to think “Uh oh… things are about to get very interesting!” and that, I’m sure you’ll agree is a big difference.
Now you readers who don’t play MMOs or aren’t following the development of Guild Wars 2 may be wondering what the buggeration a “Dynamic Event” is. Well, let me fill you in on the basics and then point you to some people on YouTube who are far better placed than I to actually show you how these rather wonderful things work.
To start with you need to understand a little about how other (older) MMOs handle their quests. They offer you a simple mechanic whereby you interact with an NPC or in-game object to receive your orders which you then carry out before returning to the ‘giver’ to receive your reward. If you failed you’d have to start again & if you succeeded you moved on to the next quest or to the next quest giver. All well & good but oh so very functional & flat. The storytelling is linear, boring & unsatisfactory.
So Arenanet has decided to do away with this system and instead employs a dynamic mechanism whereby events just happen in the world & it is up to the player to get involved. This time failure doesn’t mean starting again but rather seeing the quest event dynamically evolve into another narratively linked event. Bandits suddenly attack the city’s water supply and if you stop them then the event changes on the fly from having you protect the pipes to having you hunt down the bandits all the way back to their hideout. But if you fail and the bandits destroy the pipes before you can drive them back then the event morphs into a desperate struggle to protect the repair crews sent out from the city to restore the supply. And this is just two steps of several along two branches of many in one dynamic event of hundreds in the world where the developers can add new ones quickly & easily. It’s an amazingly flexible, powerful & immersive system that’s also a huge heap of fun to experience in action, I’m sure you’ll agree
But the beauty of dynamic events, like that of HDTV or Jen from Milkshake, has to be seen to be believed so I have lined up a few choice clips from fellow beta players.Take a look & let me know what you think of the system. I hope they help some of you who might be wavering about pre-purchasing the game to make up your mind and come adventuring with me in Tyria
CaraEmm explains the branching, escalating nature of dynamic events in Guild Wars 2:
CaraEmm explores the consequences of failure in dynamic events:
MMOHut explains how dynamic events unravel:
Way back in the press-only betas TotalBiscuit explored how one dynamic event snowballed as he played:
In my last post I went over the main reasons I can never seriously play LOTRO, or any grindy MMO again and whilst it’s all very well for me to say what I hated about LOTRO maybe I should balance that out by telling you what makes me not only want to play a game but then come back to play again and again.
The answer, it turns out, is simple. Fun. Just pure, unadulterated fun. And if a game isn’t providing me with fun then I have to ask myself what the hell is the point in playing it, which seems to be a point of view Arenanet agrees with
But what, for me at least, makes a game fun? Well now that is a question that can’t be answered so simply but being the brave little soldier I am, I’ll try
Tell me a story…
First off I need a story. I’m a narrative driven lad and I can’t tell you how many games I’ve dismissed lately because their stories were either weak or sounded far too generic. LOTRO obviously had a huge advantage with me here because I’ve been in love with Middle Earth since reading LotR when I was about 13 but even when it came to GW2 I have to say I was very sceptical. Every time I heard about the game, every fan blog post or podcast that joked about its release date just reconfirmed what I thought to myself – it sounded like yet another cookie cutter fantasy game that would annoy me for poorly mimicking Tolkien. Yet something kept dragging me back, kept pulling my attention towards the game. Eventually it was Rubi Bayer’s enthusiasm in the Massively Speaking podcast that convinced me to actually look into the game seriously and almost straight away I loved what I read – here was a game who’s designers not only wanted to make it fun but wanted to pour in enough lore to sink several other lesser MMOs. I found myself suddenly falling in love with a whole new world.
Let me play, not think…
After a story I need easy gameplay. I don’t mean some kind of dumbed down system but rather an intuitive experience that is easy to learn and soon becomes second nature. The control system for Left 4 Dead 2 is a dream – it vanishes into the background and just lets me play. At the other end of the scale is the Legendary Item system in LOTRO which just leaves me scratching my head and feeling very, very frustrated. Somewhere in between is nice – the skills system in GW2 recently went from (for me at least) a big old mess of “choose anything y’all!” to a much-easier-to-understand-without-spending-hours-searching-wikis-and-forums tree system. I like that. It is powerful yet I can instantly understand it and not break my play-fun-headspace in the way that even thinking about LOTRO’s LIs does.
I vant to be alone, dharlinks…
Next I need to be alone. I want to be able to play the damn game alone. But I also want to be able to group dead easily. A contradiction I know, but one that I know I’m not alone in. I loved the group play in Left 4 Dead (ignoring the arseholes you could get stuck with), found things a little more restrictive and forced in LOTRO and breathed a sigh of relief when I played GW2. Grouping just works in GW2 so well! From formal guild membership to totally ad hoc quest groups, it is just a dream to join up and play with other people. My only note of worry about GW2 so far is about how bloody hard it can be to tackle some things on your own and make no mistake, I like to play on my own. I have kids, limited playtime, my own goals and a grasshopper mind and these things can make playing in a group a pain. I don’t always want to run with everyone else into a cave, I might want to explore the hills above instead and any game that wants to draw me in forever had better understand that. Give me a way to complete the whole damn thing on my own because I guarantee you that 99% of the time that’s *exactly* how I’ll be playing. I have lost count of how many times I simply couldn’t finish quests in LOTRO without asking kin mates for help and every damn time I felt cheated because these very nice people would come over to help with their level capped engines of destruction and reduce my experience of the quest to that of a spectator and that is not fun. Hell, why would I even buy a game I have no hope of being able to play?
Hell is other people…
Another not fun thing is other people, or rather the kind of knobends computer games seem to attract in abundance. One thing I always loved about LOTRO and have almost always hated in Left 4 Dead is the other players. In LOTRO I found a mature & intelligent community seemingly always willing to answer questions no matter how newbie they were. L4D2, on the other thumbless & rotting hand, seems to be infested with pricks. Still, it does mean when you find some good people you stick together for dear life, but that’s hardly a selling point is it. What I’m hoping GW2 manages to achieve is to take the freedom of L4D’s grouping and maintain the decency of LOTRO’s community and if it manages that then I think it will be one hell of a multilayer experience. *crosses fingers and prays to the gods of good friends*
You grind me right down, right down like a record baby…
Speaking of LOTRO and all things not fun, do I need to mention grind again? No, thought not. Still, whilst I may not mention grind I still have to explain what I want to see in its place. For kill deeds I don’t want to kill 300 bloody spiders, I want to tackle a quest chain that leads to a spider queen! For skills I don’t want to find glorified goblin toilet paper (ssorry, missing book pages) by killing 600 orcs, I want to break into a library and steal books! For reputation I don’t want to collect 400 shiny stones from 1,000 piles of recently slaughtered lizard guts, I want to save the chieftan’s daughter from a bloody scary witch’s tower! GIVE ME STORY, NOT GRIND! Make me feel like I’m a hero, not a street cleaner. Jesus H Presley people! If you ever, EVER ask me to waste my time again I’m gone. If, on the other hand, you offer fun, interesting quests and storylines I can feel involved in I will sit on your lap and stroke your luxuriant beard until the cows some home. Grind bad, play good – it is that bloody simple and GW2 gets it.
How much?!?
Do you know what the biggest reason me for never paying an MMO up until last May was? No, of course you don’t, you hardly know me after all but let’s pretend you all guessed correctly and at the same time. Yes, that’s right you clever lot! Monthly subscription fees! Now a tenner a month isn’t much and has always been within my budget (even after kids came along and ruined my whole life blessed me with their sunshine) yet I could never, ever bring myself to consider paying every month for a game. I only took the punt on LOTRO after finding out it was free and even though I bought the 12 month subscription I never counted this as a recurring fee because it just feel like paying for the game. If Turbine hadn’t totally pissed me off with a stupid combination of grind and greed then I would have happily paid another £100 last month, but their loss is my gain and now I have been shown the light by Arenanet it will have to be a very special game indeed that sees me ever, EVER pay more than once to play it.
Greed is so not good…
Did I mention ‘greed’ in that last part? Why yes, I do believe I did. Look dear game companies I totally understand you have to make a profit but when that desire to make money spills over into the realms of pure, naked corporate greed then I’m off. I am *not* a walking wallet for you to dip your hands into at every opportunity and selling me a feature that I feel you should have included into the game is the surest way to piss me off royally (*cough* LOTRO *cough*). Now I have no idea how this is going to work in GW2 but my hope is they put enough items in the shops (both important & fluff) that I want to buy from it without pulling a cheap, shitty stunt like the LOTRO wallet scam. Don’t rip me off and you’ll find more of my disposable income is predisposed to you (see what I did there?).
TL/DR (What do you mean you didn’t read the rest, you rude swines!)
So, there you have it. Just make your one-off purchase intuitive games full of fun, story driven adventures that I can complete on my own or with other friendly people with occasional trips to the cash shop for fun items rather than outright system improvements and I’m all yours, oiled and ready in your tent. Oh, and don’t ever, EVER make me grind. You wouldn’t like me when I grind.
Dear all, I shall be away for a short while. See you more often after the new year. Here is where I am. If you want to come and visit then bring guns. Bring lots of guns.
When I wrote the last post a few days ago, I was frustrated and disappointed. This hasn’t changed, but I have had time to think some more about what I was trying to say and this reflection time, coupled with the comments here and on Hotspur’s blog here, have brought me back to the subject. I don’t know about you, but I never feel I get my point over clearly enough in a post.
First off, let me state that I in no way want these posts to seem like I’m bitching about SL. I love this world and whilst I will admit it has many faults, any blame for difficult RP experiences can not be laid at its feet. SL is what it is and it’s not WoW.
I’ve also had only limited experience RPing in SL – I’ve tried to ‘break into’ several dedicated sim set ups, but despite all the rule reading & prep I did, the sims tended to be empty with little sign of RP or lagged to hell rendering even walking impossible, let alone RP. These communities seem to lack a certain something… a level of coherence that make it feel like you really are playing inside a series of impressive story arcs. Instead they seem to be more about small personal and interpersonal stories that exclude and don’t really go anywhere.
As for non-RP dedicated sims, my feeling from visiting them and reading the blogs is that you really have to move in and live in the community to take part, which is fair enough really.
It seems to me that the most successful SL-based RPing goes on outside SL, in the blogs and nings and whathaveyous of the players. The time in-world is taken up with meetings to plan and set up the events that will then be played out/photographed/filmed in-world and then expanded upon/written about out-of-world.
Rather than expand upon my perceived problems with RPing is, why don’t I list what I want from a RP experience in SL using , as an example only, the acme of my RPing desires at the moment; a Philip Marlowe-esque 1940’s hard boiled PI game:
1) A thematic location is desirable. A few sims worth of appropriate mean city LA streets would be nice. Some hills over the sea even better. Something to use as a backdrop to the pictures and films that than go onto the blog.
2) Someone in overall charge. Good RPGs need a games master – someone to direct action, help players along and enforce (with a light touch) rules. In my ideal game, the city mayor and/or DA and whilst their word would be law, they would interact and seek opinion and guidance from the players.
3) Engaging and constantly evolving story arcs. I don’t *just* want to play a story where I’m in competition for business with another PI, I want those big cases to come my way. But then I don’t always want the same type of case (broad on desk, murder rap chasing her, old man with money in the background). I want to feel that the city is alive with or without me.
4) A consistent, maintained & searchable history. How many times have I dipped into the many (many!) wonderful Caledon blogs and enjoyed what I’ve read but had no fucking clue what the wider picture is. People cross-post without links; stories start, stall and continue without recaps; no one seems to ever make a history of their character and how they fit into the world. Maybe this info for Caledon exists, but I doubt it’s any coherent form. A RP game without a sense of shared and valued history only ever exists in the present and therefore the value of the experiences being generated is lessened – after all, why RP well when the whole thing will be forgotten by everyone but the half-dozen involved.
If I had those four things, I think I’d be a happy RPer. If No 4 & 3 were in place, then I think the game would have a better chance of evolving and growing into another world you step into rather than a theatre backdrop constantly being lowered and raised behind you.
All these ‘wants’ are fine in theory, but they ignore the two biggest problems facing RP providers and players? Time and money. Someone has to pay for it. Someone has to create and maintain it. SL people seem to be transitory by nature, either leaving the world or moving on to the next big sim. Many of the Caledon blogs I stumbled upon two years ago are Steelhead blogs now. Many other blogs I read have similarly changed location and sims close or people move on. Even with a shared, maintain history it is hard for an RP game to survive this – the owners/runners of such a game have to be willing to be in it for the long haul and how the hell you make that pay, whilst still maintaining the integral feel and energy of the RP itself is, dear reader, beyond me. I guess the Guvnr in Caledon has it right – the sims pay for themselves and meanwhile small pockets of happy residents make their own RP up and blog it as they go.
And that, ladies and gentlemen is what I suspect is the only system that will work in the current SL model. Whilst people have to pay a lot of money to rent servers, RP sims will never move successfully beyond a mix of rent-to-pay and small-scale-resident-run-RP. Maybe OpenSim will one day change that? If I could rent a server cheaply, that’s 4 sims of my 1940s LA RP right there with either no or minimal need to generate revenue.
Yours in thought.
HeadBurro Antfarm, PI
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) and I find that every day my desire to play this game that 12 months ago I hadn’t even heard of grows stronger & stronger.
