Comments on: Age of Conan: Meh, I’m Done

By: Age of Conan: How to Not Run a Community « Double Buffered

Age of Conan: How to Not Run a Community « Double Buffered — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 08:33:00 +0000

[...] by JZig on July 11, 2008 I’m not playing Age of Conan any more, but I’m still following it’s development. There are still a wide variety of technical [...]

By: el

el — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:02:41 +0000

One of the things I really hate in the game, is the lack of help functions. What is this ? How to do ? and so on. Not even the graphics properties are explained in the game. Call me stupid, but I’d really like ingame help.

I got tired of playing AoC at level 10-12. The entire meaning of the game is to run around finding spots. You can’t “sprint”, cause you get exuausted immediately, and can’t fight a squirrel if exhausted. The “quests” themselves are “nothing”. It takes forever to do nothing, just move around.

When I now got to “homeland”, all my interrest in the game dropped. It’s all the same again. And what’s the point of leveling ? What do I gain ? Again, where is the help-system ? There’s nothing to drive me forward.

I’ve spent a lot of time playing Oblivion on the 360, and I think the graphics there are a lot better. Smoother and more “real life” somehow. Maybe not as detailed, but better anyways.

AI is really poor. Mobiles walk around in cirles, and stands there waiting to do anything till you are really close.

Actually, I don’t like anything about the game, and I will certainly not pay a monthly fee playing it.

By: el

el — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:00:27 +0000

I’ve spent a lot of time playing Oblivion on the 360, and I think the graphics there are a lot better. Smoother and more “real life” somehow. Maybe not as detailed, but better anyways.

AI is really poor. Mobiles walk around in cirles, and stands there waiting to do anything till you are really close.

Actually, I don’t like anything about the game, and I will certainly not pay a monthly fee playing it.

By: JZig

JZig — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:50:44 +0000

Yeah, actually, unit testing of gameplay mechanics could work. Here’s the important thing:

It has to be empirical. During CoH development we initially evaluated gameplay balance inside the spreadsheets or by using characters with time-saving “equivalent” powers. Both of these methods failed miserably, because the test environment is crappy. We eventually did all our important testing in a more realistic environment, which worked out. The only way to properly unit-test game mechanics is to use the exact same environment as the end users, because otherwise you’re going to miss something. What I’ve seen of Ben’s stuff shows that what he’s doing works (actually fire bullets off and see how much damage they do over time), and it could definitely work for an MMO as well.

By: Wolfe

Wolfe — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:41:33 +0000

We got a little plan to set up unit testing for game mechanics, think it could work? ^^

By: Ben Wilhelm

Ben Wilhelm — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:59:48 +0000

Yeah, that’s fair enough. I do rather like the idea of not-entirely-clear mechanics that the player has to figure out, but it seems like more often than not those mechanics are broken. Which is, shall we say, not exactly ideal.

I need to toss more automatic test stuff into d-net to track this sort of thing.

By: JZig

JZig — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 02:10:51 +0000

I don’t have any problem IN THEORY with opaque game mechanics in an MMO, but the reality is that MMO developers of all types (I’m including Cryptic while we were running CoH) sometimes make mistakes in implementing game mechanics. By not giving information to players, it creates a atmosphere of distrust and “we know better than you” that I think poisons the MMO player-developer relationship. FFX1 pulls that off by not caring about that relationship AT ALL and just going with a top-down design for all aspects. As a consequence, I can’t stand the game

By: Ben Wilhelm

Ben Wilhelm — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:56:27 +0000

I seem to remember that Final Fantasy XI took a somewhat similar approach to stats - yes, there were stats, and in FFXI they had very major effects, but it was never entirely clear what they affected unless you spent a lot of time testing. (Which people did, and it was basically known what things did, even if the actual formulas were crazy black boxes including your stats, the enemy's stats, buffs, debuffs, the time of day, and the weather. I am not actually exaggerating here, they included all of those things.) The difference being that they definitely did things.