Great article at Rampant Games about enemy design ideas, check it out at http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=3665.
I’ve thought about this a lot of times: the villain is as important as a hero (and in my opinion, in a game medium, even more important, since the hero characterization is sometimes taken over by the player). Would Star Wars be the same without Darth Vader?
Don’t have time to go into this, but just thought I should share it! 
Blog post on Monday about the team working on Grey at http:/www.spellcasterstudios.com!
Back in October, I already complained about the forthcoming expansion “Mists of Pandaria”, and that it lacked “epic-ness”.
More disturbing, though, has been my experience with patch 4.3 (“Hour of Twilight”)… Finally, we’ll get the opportunity to go face-to-face with Deathwing (which seems to be one of the last really epic bosses from Blizzard’s stables), and I was looking forward for the challenge (even wondering how I would fit enough time to play WoW and SW:TOR at the same time)… But then, LFR hit…
For those that don’t know, LFR stands for Looking For Raid, and is the system Blizzard came up with to allow for people that don’t have progression-oriented guilds to see all the content. You just “queue” in it, and you’ll be placed in a 25-man raid group for (currently) the Dragon Soul raid instance. So far, so good… the problem is that the way they found to deal with the difficulties in communication in “out-of-guild” raid was to make the encounters retard-proof…
So, now we have 3 difficulty levels for the Dragon Soul raid instance: LFR, Normal and Heroic, each of it with slightly different loot (which is better the more difficult the instance is). Conceptually, it seems like a good idea, but the tweaking of the difficulty levels made it almost impossible to fail in LFR, which means that most people has already faced and defeated Deathwing!
So, two weeks after 4.3 hit, me and most people have already defeated the most end boss for this expansion! So, why am I playing?
I understand the rational, and in the most part I agree with it: not everyone can put the amount of hours into this game that will allow them to kill the end boss of the expansions, but in my view, the way they went around that in “Wrath of the Lich King” was better: just give a buff to players a couple of months before a new expansion hits, so they can see the end content…
I know I could have skipped LFR and retain my game experience, but that way I’d have people in better gear than me that don’t play as well, and that know more of the game than me (a convicted lore-whore)… Even if we allow for that possibility, it feels to me (and a MMORPG is about perception most of the time) that I got “cheated” out of an achievement; killing the end-boss of an expansion should be an epic experience that takes a lot of time, so we actually feel that it was a powerful foe and that we were fighting insurmountable odds.
I can go normal mode (which is MUCH harder, and it feels like it is geared to people that already have gear from LFR Dragon Soul… Yes, I’m looking at you, Ultraxion), but even that seems a tad too easy (my guild, which is almost a casual raiding guild) got the first four bosses down in the first week! Heroic mode is usually for people that can put a large amount of hours into the game (don’t know if this is the case with Dragon Soul, but it was definitely true with Firelands)… And even if I do all of these, I won’t have the real achievement… I’m already feeling the experience has been cut down somewhat, because I killed Deathwing on a random group in one afternoon, in about 2 hours of playing!
This, combined with the upcoming “Mists of Pandaria” feels like Blizzard is going for the more “casual” MMORPG crowd, and less for the hardcore… This is all well in theory but, for me, a MMORPG has part of its storytelling rooted not only in the lore and design that the developer created, but in the user experience… For me, it’s impossible to have an epic story if I can beat the main boss in 20 minutes after I get to him, without prior experience… It doesn’t matter how many layers of story you have behind that boss, the size of him, the scope of what you achieved… If it wasn’t hard, he wasn’t all that he was toted up to be!
So, user experience is important for the storytelling itself, especially in a MMORPG… And I feel that Blizzard is walking away from that, to give way to accessibility and hand-holding…
That might be great from a commercial perspective, I admit, but for me it just removes something important from the game… And I’m not sure if it is that good even in that limited perspective, considering WoW is hemorrhaging players for some time now (that roughly matches with the new “easy” attitude from Blizzard).
Thankfully, there’s a new MMORPG coming out soon that might keep my cravings for hard bosses in check: Star Wars: The Old Republic… At least, I hope it is any good…
I’ve made a guild to act as a kind of “sister guild” to our World of Warcraft “Crits’n’Giggles”: you can check it’s website here: http://www.swtor.com/guilds/264573/critsngiggles .
At the moment we can’t add players to it, but after the game launches, feel free to apply… 
I really hope SWTOR will give me the epic I crave, ‘cos pandas aren’t doing it for me! 
Found an interesting blog post today at Rampant Games: http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=3648.
While I don’t agree with lots of what is said, some of the points are valid.
Story and games have a different existence together… The actions of the player usually don’t modify the game world, and when they do it’s in a purely binary fashion. So, the player isn’t part of the story, which seems counter-intuitive in a sense that a lot of effort is put into immersing the player in the story.
The conclusions Paul Spooner in the above article draws from this are too restrictive and just go into the old RPG concept of DM/Player symbiosis, while I think there’s two layers to any game: an interactive layer and a story layer… They can conflict occasionally, but its possible to create game mechanics that stop the player from interfering with the story, without seemingly restrict freedom: an example of this is a story where the player needs to be a good guy and he’s out having fun murdering little children. If you attach a penalty coherent (like an alignment penalty) with the game story with the act of murdering children, the player won’t do it (or if he does, he’s aware that it might make his life more difficult in the long run).
I think that the main issue is not story vs. interactivity, but story vs. fun…
Let’s imagine the above example… the story we have designed is the typical hero of the light story, where only a hero pure of heart can defeat the dark overlord of legend. To be coherent with the game story, if the player murders innocent people, he’ll loose the pure heart and will be unable to stop the overlord… Both of these mechanics are easy enough to be implemented; the player retains his freedom, and the story can run its course… But is it fun? Is it fun to make the player go throughout the whole game, just to fail at the final boss, because in the beginning of the game he stole a villager’s purse? It’s not fun, but it is accurate in terms of both story and gameplay!
You have loads of stories without happy endings in literature, movies and other forms of narrative art, but that is seldom seen in games, because it is thought (and I agree with that) that it isn’t fun…
That’s what I think it’s missing in the above article… other than that, it’s an excellent read!
New blog post on the Spellcaster Studios website, this time about the genesis of the idea for Grey.
I’ve been spending all my off-hours working on “Grey”, and as such I have little time for my personal blog posts, etc…
Just head on to http://www.spellcasterstudios.com for a new post about what the game is really all about!
Head on to http://www.spellcasterstudios.com for the announcement I’ve been promising for a while!
We’ll have more to add in the next weeks!
I’ve been quite busy lately with work, which means that I haven’t had time for any new developments (neither in my editor, nor with the announcement thingy)…
Since I know you guys want some stuff to look at, here’s a couple of things…
First up, an indy game called Gunpoint that seems quite cool… the style of the presentation is also very cool, and the animations look sweet:
The other one is a blog post about some conjecture and rumor, but that seems pretty accurate and for DX-heads like me, pretty scary. Click here to read!
Hopefully I’ll have time on Friday to get things up and running as usual again!
I did a nifty 10 minute video walking people through the material system of my editor, but the encoding application decided to blow up and corrupt the files… 
Need to find a better way to do this kind of video captures… for fullscreen applications, I have Fraps, which works like a charm, but for “desktop” applications, I don’t have anything good… Any suggestions?
Anyway, this will be the post before the weekend… it still wasn’t this week that we did the “big announcement”, but we’ll do it next week for sure!
Have a nice weekend everyone!
Title says it all…
I’ve been busy with a series of things, ranging from work to game development. In the game dev front specifically, we’ve been getting ready for an announcement which we hope will signify a kickoff of a new stage in our lives… Stay tuned!
Here’s a very cool video to keep you company until the next blog post:
Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.