Monthly Archives: June

Level-design and tweaking of difficulty-settings are recurring items on our laundry-list, as you might imagine, so some blog-postings about challenging game-play and the ease of navigating through MMO-quests recently caught my eye. So, just how difficult should a challenge/quest in a MMO be—and should such level of difficulty vary for casual- and hardcore-related MMOs?

In Free Realms (as Eurogamer puts it), “Everything objective is clearly marked by the obsequiously helpful mapping system, dotted lines on the ground ensuring you never get lost as you follow the breadcrumbs… It’s compulsive, up to a point, but it’s often flavourless and dull.“
Sony’s philosophy here seems to be that short, casual quests (especially for a younger audience) should not comprise lengthy exploration and difficult brainteasers. World of Warcraft will soon patch something very similar in, as Pink Pigtail Inn’s Larisa describes: “A skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players can find creatures they must kill for a quest. A skull graphic with red eyes will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures can be found that must be killed in order to collect quest objects…“

Both the approach of such hyper-efficiencent streamlining and players having mixed feelings about this are quite understandable. Probably all of us have been in frustrating need of a walkthrough here and there—solving a difficult strategic puzzle or beating a particular challenge, however, is often the most memorable moment in a game. On the one hand, a short, temporary gaming-experience cannot primarily consist of aimless exploring; on the other hand (with the words or Larisa), “somehow the ‘being efficient and do things as quick as possible, ticking off things from your list’ concept has completely overtaken the ‘experience, explore and lose yourself into a different world’ idea.“

It is obvious that such settings vary with each player and the mood they are in at a time—a solution suggesting itself therefore would be to leave it to the preference of each player, of how difficult he or she wants a quest to be. This is the approach we are trying to implement in Coobico. Rather than laying out blatantly obvious lines of breadcrumbs, think more in the ballpark of “buyable” levels of advice/cheats.

An important issue for any MMO is its endgame component (what you’ll be perpetually busy with after maxing out your stuff). For Coobico, we assume that, while some players will be satisfied to just build and manage their settlement and resolve quests, others will seek to wage wars with their competitors. By any means, we are trying to implement a solution for different players’ preferences to co-exist in Coobico’s world.

Introducing fortresses: a fortress is a structure you can upgrade your city-center to, which is going to enable offensive and defensive capabilities of a settlement. As long as a settlement is not extended by a fortress, it is flagged as peaceful and cannot attack and be attacked by other players. After building a fortress, you loose this protection, even if the fortress is destroyed later on.

A fortress will need a bunch of accompanying structures as prerequisites, to keep players from building empty cities which just consist of a fortress and nothing else (a castle without affiliation to a town would not appear to be realistic anyway). More about this later, after we have implemented this features more thoroughly.

There has been an interesting study by interactive marketing firm Future Ads about dramatic cutbacks in paid- and console-games in 2009—interesting, even though the findings are disputable, since Future Ads runs a casual gaming website which lets the report appear to be a bit biased. 

“Consumers report slashing their spending on paid console and online games this year. Among the nearly 4 in 5 casual gamers owning consoles, 79% report ‘significantly’ cutting back on game purchases this year over 2008, with another 10% reporting they’re cutting ‘somewhat.’ There is also a similar tale for console accessories/peripherals: 85% are cutting back significantly, with another 7% cutting ‘somewhat.’ For paid online gaming (subscriptions, etc.) 83% are cutting significantly, and 7% ‘somewhat.’ Conversely, online casual gaming continues to boom: 61% are spending more time playing online games this year than last.

When asked what the single biggest drawback to console games was, 77% singled out ‘they’re simply too expensive,’ swamping the less than 4% that pegged other specific obstacles: ‘the technology becomes obsolete;’ ‘not all games work on all platforms,’ or ‘can’t travel with them.’ ... 78% of respondents report preferring free online games that are supported by advertising vs. the 22% preferring paid games without ads.“

Nonetheless, I dare say that these findings reveal the size of the impact free-to-play games had on the whole (traditional) gaming industry so far. Gamers find a lot of free offers online, with ever growing quality and quantity. Sure, free games cannot compete with the production-values of AAA-blockbuster games and “serious” hardcore-gamers probably mostly still prefer the next 60$ game retail, but the boundaries are getting increasingly blurred:

“The Gamevance surveys also reveal dissolving boundaries between casual and hardcore users and markets, a disappearing gender gap, and increased online gaming adoption across all age groups… 51% of online gamers surveyed personally play hardcore games. The time spent with, and enjoyment of, these platforms, is notably balanced: 52% spend more time with hardcore games, 48% more with casual. And despite multi-million production budgets for hardcore titles, 46% actually find casual games more entertaining.“
 
Via GigaOm

City-building games typically come in two flavors, either as goal-oriented games or as sandboxes; in the former, you typically share the game-world with one or more opponents who will trade with you or wage war over resources. In the latter, you can build and run your city unopposed, with a focus on maintaining economy, traffic and so on. 

Catering to such gameplay poses no problem for games which are not massively multiplayer (i.e. nearly each currently existing city-building franchise)—but what about a city-building MMO like Coobico? Different types of players will inevitably meet each other in an open world. While this is a great opportunity to play together, it might also lead a clash game-plays (i.e. griefers/killers versus socializers).

We would like to enable both competitive and sandbox-type styles of gameplay in Coobico and let players choose their own experience—but without spoiling the fun for everybody else. We are therefore restricting the level of personal confrontation between players a bit; as an example, it will not be possible to just personally walk into another player’s settlement to wreak havoc there. But apart form that, we are working on ways to compete martially with other competitive-minded players.
It’s a feature we have not yet fully nailed down. I am going to elaborate more on this in the next article about Garrisons and Fortresses in Coobico.

Recently, Daniel James, CEO of San Francisco based Three Rings Design, has shared the revenue-metrics of their MMO Puzzle Pirates with the developers’ community at Gamasutra: “People often ask me, with a wary look such as you’d give a lunatic, ‘Why do you dish out your numbers like this?‘ It’s a good question. There are possible downsides, but they are limited… The upside is that the more information that circulates the startup and games community, the more people will share their data. This rising tide will raise all boats. If I can shame my fellows into parting with their data, we’ll all benefit.“

Good job, Daniel! Read more after the jump.

Recently there has been an interesting meme about if avatars in MMORPGs should be treated as mere game-tokens or rather as more than that, kicked off by Wolfshead with a posting about gender-issues in MMOs.
Tobold holds the opinion that “ultimately your avatar is just a playing piece, and reading too much into his gender or race, and then projecting real world politics onto that, can only be a bad thing” and should thus be treated as something akin to “a shoe in Monopoly“ even if an avatar offers the opportunity to be customized along the player’s ideas.
Raph Koster, in reply, expressed the opinion that “even if we wish it to be so (and indeed, much of game design demands that it be so, much of the time) it’s not actually humanly possible,“ because “in effect, our tokens have become rich enough to cause us to subconsciously treat them as people, whether or not we intended it” as the player’s choice of appearance of an avatar ultimately influences how he/she will be treated in-game.

My personal two cents are closer to Raph’s than to Tobold’s opinion—an avatar is more than a token to interact with a virtual world; the function of its customizability is not only to distinguish a player’s avatar from everybody else, it also creates identity. Let’s not forget where the idea of MMORPGs and avatars is coming from: the good ole’ pen & paper role-playing games—where it becomes even more obvious that a character is more than a mere playing-piece.
Anyway, I would like to take this discussion even further and apply it to city-building games and related RTS games. This might not be immediately coming to mind, but it’s an important issue for Coobico as a genre-mix of city-building game and lightweight role-playing game.

In city-building- and RTS-games, settlers and/ or units are mostly plain providers of resources or forces to attack and defend. What would happen, if these tokens would be treated more as avatars? What if they would have customizable traits that, in turn, would influence the game for a player—and which would be due to change throughout game-play? It’s quite plain to me that you would end up with something akin to The Sims if you think this out in all possible details—the degree of “avatar-ization” would be the very essence here.

In my opinion it would be possible to add new, subtle yet important angles here, without twisting the genre of city-building too much into a sim-like game.

The apothecary is an advanced upgrade for hospitals, which substantially raises a settlement’s medical supplies. What’s more, an apothecary shields a settlement from certain negative events (like Plague), which occur with growing density of population.