Monthly Archives: May

Upon reaching achievement level 3, players can pick up a settlers’ quest and thus start to build their own settlement--or associate themselves with an already existing village. New cities are founded as private per default, which means new settlers can join this settlement only on invitation by its founder. There are also public cities which can be joined freely without permission; such cities are mainly NSC-run, like the harbor-village which builds the starting point of every new arrival. It is not yet fully decided if players can decide to start their new settlement as public, too. Opinions, anybody? 

Resources (necessary to build structures and earn gold) were harvested at resource-spots like Mines and Farms so far. However, the introduction of a dynamic economy in Coobico finally turns harvesting inside out: resources are now harvested around natural formations (like groups of trees or rocks), which in turn will be depleted temporarily after extracting a certain amount of raw goods. Such deposits replenish automatically after a while--but both mineable amount of resources and regeneration-time of a deposit can be optimized by building a resource-spot nearby. 
Harvesting still costs you happiness (work is not supposed to be funny). This is a game-mechanic that still proves to be fine and stable, as it will keep resource-farmers from throwing both economy and game-play out of balance.

Did you ever had the feeling there is too much name-calling profanity in your favorite multiplayer game? There have been various blog-posts touching the topic of abuse of foul language in MMOs lately:

Josh Smith posted a (somewhat limited) statistic on the frequency of curse words on XBOX Live, namely on Halo 2. F*-words were most widely encountered (43 percent of all profanities, at an average of around 8 F*s per hour), along with sexual and homosexual derogatory terms. Racism had a share of around 9 percent.

Adult language has also become an increasing problem in children’s online games--according to an interview with Club Penguin’s co-founder and general manager Lane Merrifield on GamesIndustry. She claims the games-industry has been irresponsible with kids: “We know the limits of technology, even though I would put our filtering software up against anybody’s, especially because of that human element - we’re adding 500 to 1000 words every day to the filters, simply because of slang that works its way into the language.”

Such “bad word filters” are a inevitability in the anonymity of multiplayer worlds, sadly, because it speaks for itself if members can’t treat each other with a minimum of mutual respect.

via BigDownload

It is a novelty that a virtual world closes its doors in the face of its eager members. Such closure is currently happening at Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom, which is effectively shutting down as of today, despite growing protests. As Worlds in Motion reports: “passionate audience has gathered nearly 20,000 signatures for an online petition protesting the service’s termination. Other fans of the MMO have gone so far as to write letters to Disney chief executive Robert Iger imploring him to cancel the closing. Disney has so far not announced any plants to extend the service past today.”

VMK was a Shockwave-based online resort developed by Sulake (operator of Habbo Hotel) with a strong resemblance to Habbo Hotel, even though more limited. Nonetheless the virtual world could gain some traction in the past years, with the most recent report about its userbase (2007) claiming 1 million player characters. Disney seems to have another perspective though, as Disney Internet Group president Steve Wadsworth explains, “It never achieved scale. It was promotional. There was no business model attached to it. It had a small but passionate audience.”

Disney Internet Group, according to its spokesman John Spelich, hopes that users will migrate to Disney’s other virtual properties: “At Disney, we’d rather do anything in the world than disappoint a guest. But we hope our VMK players will choose to sample some of the other ways to engage with Disney online through disney.com or through virtual worlds.”

It will be interesting to see if this is really going to happen after such forced removal, since disgruntled members of VMK’s target-group can choose from a crowded field of competitors by now.

We are currently knocking together a tutorial level, besides working on a gazillion of other odds and ends (or so it seems). The short opening single-player-style chapter will teach important game-mechanics and introduce a few unique NPCs. These two nice (or rather not so nice) fellows will help along learning Coobico’s casual combat-system: Theodor Flint, one of the shadier characters on Qubus’ Island and his sidekick Rusty, a rather old and re-programmed Clockwork Knight (a type of Q-Bot which is introduced here).

Femur raised a few important questions concerning events lately, let’s get to know the ropes of events a bit better here.

So, will events occur solely at the whim of players or will they also be random?

Events have two important functions: first, competing players will be able to pepper each other with some unpredictable incidents, which will keep them from resting on their laurels too much. And second, events are easing out both negative and positive spikes during the progression of the game, for example balancing out a too large or too low influx of resources. So the answer is, events are both deployed by players and will occur more or less at random (well, more less than more)…
While positive events can be bought at an alchemist’s store in the starting city at the southern shore of Qubus’ Island, negative ones are only available at a witches’ house inside a dungeon (namely the Foggy Forest), keeping them somewhat from being ubiquitous.

If players are in full control of events (namely negative ones), is there going to be any protection against griefers?

Yes, it might happen that players are pelting each other with negative events, but there is a way to protect your village from “bought” events: a settlement can only experience one event at a time—it is therefor recommended to play a positive event on your own settlement from time to time if you are getting barraged with negative ones. There are positive events (like “Good Luck") which will protect you from a certain amount of incoming negative events. 

If they also occur randomly, will there be any type of maintenance buildings settlers can build to prevent them from happening?

That’s correct, there are two types of buildings which will keep a village from specific bad influences and events: the scholar and the apothecary. Take notice though that there is no allround no-worry package against misfortunes—it is part of the game that a settlement might get hit by incidents from time to time. Villages will be ruthlessly exposed to negative events (luckily all induced by the game-system) once in a while, when they are not properly maintained: if a settlement’s wellbeing-score falls to a minimum, the locality gets prone to a “Riot”, which will greatly harm every building’s structure-points in the city. And, with our brand-new system of individual NPC-happiness, there is the event of “Abandonment”, a building of a too disgruntled NPC will crumple and disappear after a while—so keep your inhabitants happy…

Coobico’s game-mechanics are of course due to sudden changes during its alpha-stage, and will still be during beta, as we try to finetune the whole system. Oh, and speaking of the Coobico-beta: there have been some big and exciting changes behind the curtains in the recent weeks. We will keep you posted with news and schedules as soon as possible.

Though Coobico works with a fixed, non-dynamic economic model during its alpha-stage, it is planned to switch to a more dynamic economy later, which should prove to be more vivid and interesting for everybody. Besides harvesting building-materials themselves, settlers will be able to buy and sell resources at any merchant-store, with prices rising and falling with the current demand at that individual merchant. Players can even earn a few bucks by buying low, transporting goods to another settlement and selling higher there.
The main entry-points for wealth on Qubus’ Island will obviously be the time people will be spending on harvesting or picking up loot from the occasional critters and monsters. The sink of the economy (the point where wealth leaves the system again) will commonly be building-activities and events; from time to time a village might be struck with a fire, devouring its warehouses, or resources are snapped up by a travelling NSC-trader, for example. 

A mischievous, mean spirited species of half-sentient fungi sprawls over the remote forests and grassy plains of Qubus’ Island: the hot-tempered Phoenix Mushrooms. They seem to burn with an inner fire and notoriously ambushing innocent wanderers, so it’s not recommended to go on a mushroom foray to find them. Still, their smoky-tasting mushroom-flesh is very famous with gourmets and can be sold at your local tavern.

Ankama Studios, developer and operator of its remarkable Flash-based MMORPG Dofus is notorious for keeping different grades of topicality throughout the French and English versions of their news- and development blogs. The following (French) news therefor seems to have slipped away nearly unnoticed outside France, so let’s change this:

As announced by Tyn, member of Dofus’ development-team, Ankama is currently working on a new release of Dofus. Dofus 2.0 will be written from scratch to optimize client and server architecture, instead of creating an umpteenth patch. The team hopes to achieve higher performance and lower memory consumption--which should come as no big surprise with the all new capabilities of Flash 9. The new client will further offer performance-related options, like disabling fancy, but resource-demanding eyecandy.

It is also expected that Dofus 2.0 will feature new ways to customize avatars, since Ankama is working on a skeleton-based animation-system for its characters. 

Dofus Blog
Google Translation

The mechanics of a settlement’s wellbeing is presently being reviewed. Remember, wellbeing is an important stat of every settlement, measuring its quality of living. The concept is somewhat similar to city-building games like Anno 1701, where you can access a tax-bar which indicates your settlers’ general condition.

However, Coobico’s basic concept is to approach city-building bottom-up from the view of your avatar, instead of putting you into an elevated top-down position. It therefor felt more gripping to have a happiness-gauge for every NSC settler, indicating her or his individual condition while talking to them. Just like the NSC’s home-building this score is on the decrease constantly and needs to be taken care of by players by fulfilling quests. A successfully finished quest will fill up the happiness-gauge of the according NSC again. General wellbeing of a settlement represents (besides other factors) the average happiness of its inhabitants. This should prove to be a nice incentive to keep players busy when expanding their settlements.

Below is another range of (non-unique) NSCs to be encountered in most villages: from the top left to the bottom right, an innkeeper (taverns), a kilnmaster (brickyards), a banker (banks) and a sergeant (watchtowers).

Steam Tyrants are the most hulky and hazardous breed of Q-Bots from Dr. Qubus’ Laboratories--thankfully they are not encountered regularly these days. Knowledge of these towering steam-powered automatons’ primordial purpose is lost, but thanks to their wacky and wicked artificial intelligence Steam Tyrants seem to indulge in tearing down buildings. Therefore they are a dreaded sight to settlers.
Other notable Q-Bots found on Qubus’ Island are Steambots and Drillbots. 

EA-Land, successor of EA’s multiplayer online version of its popular The Sims-franchise will be closed in August, just weeks after its debut. The game’s homepage is already re-routed to a developers’ blog, where the team officially apologizes: “It is with mixed emotions that today we are announcing the EA-Land experiment will soon draw to a close. Since 2002, EA-Land / TSO has attracted a very special group of players (of which you are one) and we certainly appreciate your participation in the EA-Land community. The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena.”

At the same time EA offers an immediate termination of billing, as well as a coupon and three free months for EA’s Club Pogo for former subscribers. Nonetheless, the announcement has stirred up a storm in a teacup, with 203 comments on the article ranging from sadness to angry abuses. Some commenters indicate that they were being billed in the past days, even though they already terminated subscriptions. Others raise the question if The Sims Online was just rebranded into EA-Land to be shut down later without harming the successful Sims-brand--which is pure speculation; it doesn’t come as a big surprise that harsh decision need to be made sometimes when an idea doesn’t really fly.

And TSO did seemingly not fly well enough. According to (admittedly a bit outdated) reviews, TSO suffered from sluggish connections, technical restrictions when compared with the Sims-franchise, lack of content and seemingly unbalanced gameplay. A fatal blow probably was a money-cheat enabling players to get large amounts of Simoleons (the Sims Online currency), effectively destroying the already broken in-game economy and rendering many of the objectives of the game useless.

With the termination of EA-Land, EA seems to silently admit to be unable to address these shortcomings.