chevalier
Thu, 20th Jan '05, 3:44pm
Here are today's Dungeons & Dragons Online forum highlights, collected from Dungeons & Dragons Online forums (http://www.ddo.com/forums). Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.
<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Jason Booth, DDO Dev Team</font>
confessions of a RPG-loathing action gamer (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22597#post22597)
Originally Posted by Orwell
Well, an RPG I mentioned earlier, Silver Age Sentinels (The best superhero RPG going) doesn't require exp at all. RPG and advancement have nothing to do with one another. Character development does not have to occur on paper. Of course, D&D is the prototype for character advancement games, but the way in which it occurs is really not important.
Action-rpg is not an oxymoron. The ability to hit buttons and plan strategies has nothing to do with roleplaying, really. Most mmorpgs aren't really RPGs at all in a sense. The games don't facilitate role-playing in any way. They're simply a collection of stats. Whether the game is played by itself or completely controlled by the player has nothing to do with whether it's an RPG or not.The funny part about this argument is that in a turn based game I hit buttons and plan stratagies as well. So the argument really carries no weight at all. The only difference between turn based and real time is time pressure. And you'd be hard pressed to find a popular RPG which cannot be thought of as just a collection of stats and rules; the stats and rules are simply a framework that allows people to use thier imagination to role play, it's not the role playing itself.
Another funny thing about this argument is that it's not new. There was a time when stratagy gaming was all the rage, and people thought that stratagy games could *only* be done as turn based games; otherwise there would be no stratagy! After Warcraft hit, you couldn't pay people to play turn based games anymore. After about 6 years of non-stop cloning, we've finally started to see games like Advance Wars bring back the turn based model.
DDO and Evangelicals / Fundamentalists (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22819#post22819)
Originally Posted by zanzibar
*snip*Please o' lord, make DDO a target for evangelical christians; make me the target of thier judgment, so they can cause many an article to be written about our work, causing it to sell far more copies than it ever would without thier help.
Wise cracks asside, didn't the controversy over D&D die in the 80's? Can we start it up again?
Action-oriented combat limits market appeal (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22914#post22914)
Originally Posted by fort23
There were a fair amount of female players on a few NWN pws I played on, and they were some of the best roleplayers to be found, and more than a couple were outright dangerous when it came to the combat system.
I know there was a study done sometime last year that showed an increasing number of women involved in rpgs, but I don't remember where. Anyone have any idea, or did I just think it would be nice and turn it into a fact in my head?:0Ok, I'm going to chime in on the whole women vs. men gamer thing. In my opinion, historically, games have been based on male traits. Let’s not get all politically correct and pretend that there are no differences between the male and female brain; there are significant differences in the way men and women's brain's form, process information, and what types of situations we are designed to handle best.
Our brains have been developed over millions of years for specific actions; for men, that was hunting, and for women, caring for children (and the myriad of tasks involved). Our ability to track moving objects is far greater than women's. Generally, men are stronger at spatial reasoning, while women are stronger at social reasoning. Men have more strength, but women can tolerate more pain. Men are generally able to focus harder on a single task, while women are able to manage multiple tasks with greater ease. These differences evolved because the brain needed to make tradeoff's between different kinds of thinking; and due to child birth, some natural lines of separation evolved out of the different needs. There are many other areas where we differ, and these differences were a strength for millions of years (and I still think they are today).
The brain rewards us for improving these base mechanisms of thought. Games are, in a sense, a training ground for improving our thought process. When something is not a challenge, it gets boring, while something which is too foreign to our thinking it is too hard and effectively we turn off to it's challenge. Thus, games designed around fast moving objects or spatial reasoning will generally appeal to men more than women. It is much more likely for men to be attracted to these tasks, as they are in the 'comfort learning zone' for us. It's no wonder traditional video games held little interest for women, they were almost all about fast moving objects and spatial reasoning.
Role Playing Games, especially MMPs, contain some elements that appeal to the general women's model of thought. They contain social networks to be navigated, multiple tasks and activities to manage, and a sense of consequence free social experimentation which can be dangerous in the real-world. I personally believe these qualities are what make online RPGs more appealing to women than, say, quake or counter strike.
Some types of learning applies equally to both sex's. Organization, which is the root task of almost any game, is a base level thought process useful to both sexes. Thus it only seems fitting that games which are primarily expressed through this process (ie: Puzzle Games) appeal to both sexes equally. If the skill learned is universal, the game's appeal will be too (unless you specifically style it to one sex or another).
Puzzle games are interesting because they often provide different modes of play. Many will have at least two versions, one which applies time pressure, and one in which time is not a factor but the most complete solution is rewarded. Men usually prefer time pressure, because we are exercising relational thinking (useful for hunting).
Of course, there is nothing stopping one sex from becoming good at any specific task; I generally feel that everyone's brain is able to achieve the same level of performance, if they are willing to put in the effort. But we do have general tendencies towards certain types of thinking, and some of those tendencies are divided along the sex division.
So, if you want to appeal to women, build games which appeal to the tasks their brains tend to wish to improve. Unfortunately for the industry, it’s much easier to make games about fast moving objects and special reasoning than it is to make games about social networking and character empathy. We’ve only started to see the beginning of games appealing to these areas of the brain, so up until now most of the appeal has been around skills which are shared by both sexes.
Action-oriented combat limits market appeal (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22988#post22988)
Originally Posted by Raistlin_Majere
That being aside.....be careful of classifying females as less that capable of handling twitch aspects. I have seen a few girls taht would open a can of whoop ass on you in mortal combat type games. Remember what jason said about multitasking.....well, this goes along with knowing what sequence of buttons to push to get the most interaction oout of your toon, something women are better predisposed to do....us men usually follow one tried and true route...bash it....and it that doesnt work...bash it harder!!!I'm not classifying them as being less capable; just generally less attracted to games which focus on one type of skill or another. Suttle differences can often shift the balance in unpredictable ways as well. Most of these thoughts are based on proven studies of how the brain works, not my personal social observations on women in gaming. I try to approach things from the angle of how does the average brain process information; and there are proven differences between men and women in this regard. If the industry wants to make games that cater to women, they're going to have to take that perspective into account, instead of trying to turn women into lovers of first person shooters.
If someone thinks it's sexist to say that men and women's brains operate differently, then they should go fight science on that one; it's a proven fact. As a society, we need to come to grips that our differences are what make us strong; not what seperates us. There's nothing sexist about that. And yes, the exception will not be the rule, as with anything; there will emerge an amazing female quake player; the odds are in favor of such things happening. But expecting games based around primarily male biased mental chalenges to be equaly interesting to females is a farse.
Action-oriented combat limits market appeal (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22990#post22990)
Originally Posted by pingcat
This is starting to stray from the topic, but I just have to share it ...
Regarding 'conventional wisdom' about females and their abilities and expectations, the U.S. Army did a study not too long ago regarding the performance of female in what were typically considered "the kinds of roles that only males could perform efficiently."
Frankly, I suspect that some general somewhere was going to prove, once and for all, that those pink-frilled daddy-wannabes should go home, manage the kitchen as God intended and quit mucking up his heretofore nice little game of 'Soldiers'.
However, the results were ... umm ... not quite as expected.
The one that really sticks out in my mind was the fact that females make *much* better snipers than males. Invariably, a male sniper will - at best - wait until the first 'high value' target comes along and then take his shot. The females, on the other hand, would sit up in the tree (actually, snipers don't hide in trees, but that's another discussion) for days if need be until a really, *really* choice target came along. A general who believed that all female troopers were frilly little daddy-wannabes for example.
The moral of the story: Women might be from Venus, but evidently they have armies on Venus too. And while women might excel at MMOs and twitch combat and might enjoy them for reasons different from men, the point is that they can both excel and enjoy.
Stereotypes not withstanding ...Do you have a link to this study by chance? I love this kind of stuff, because it often applies indirectly to some aspect of game design. The differences between the way men and women process information do not always have such a clear and obvious result. We tend to want to label things out in as individual tasks, but even the simplest task is composed of dozen's of different tasks which can be affected by the differences in thought. In this case, the weighing of targets, management of potential targets, and tracking targets (each of which could be broken down into dozens of smaller sub-tasks) seem like prime areas where differences in thought processes could affect the final outcome.
Action-oriented combat limits market appeal (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23032#post23032)
Originally Posted by Sunfire
WoW has proved that isn't true - it's rapidly approaching 1 million copies sold which certainly qualifies as mass market penetration.Actually, the last announced sales figures were 600,000 units, which is just over half of what your saying. It will probrably top out at just over a million units sold US, but I don't expect it to have anywhere near the numbers that Diablo, Warcraft, or Starcraft sold.
Originally Posted by Sunfire
Again I disagree and the sales numbers both for regular RPGs and MMORPGs doesnt support your argument either. "Normal" RPGs such as the Baldur's Gate/NWN and Dungeon Siege type outsell the action style Dragonlords type more than 100 to 1.
Care to share the source of your 100 to 1 claim? Diablo sold far more copies than any of the games you've listed, and it was a more action oriented game. As for MMPORPGs, there hasn't been an action oriented one yet (unless you count RYL).
[quote]Originally Posted by Sunfire
The reason that all of the successfull MMOs are stats-based combat based is any attempts at action-based MMOs have failed. Both WoW and EQ2 tried more action-based combat in their alpha and early beta phases (still not to the level of DDO) and in both cases it play-tested miserably.WoW and EQ2 were never designed as action oriented games, despite your claims to the contrary. You can disagree with me if you want, but I know enough people at both companies to know a fair bit more about thier development history than you probrably do.
Originally Posted by Sunfire
In the end you'll need to balance a more action/skill based combat system (which is a nice unique feature) with some form of "default" attack mode which is sufficient instances or your game will not be the kind of success it could be if it was developed as a character stats based combat game.So in other words, you think the industry has to keep putting out clones of the same basic game over and over again. That nothing can deviate from the existing formulaic approach which has evolved. If that was true, Warcraft wouldn't have been a success, because it challenged the notion that was prevalent at the time; that all stratagy games had to be turn based.
Action-oriented combat limits market appeal (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23222#post23222)
Originally Posted by Sunfire
My point is that you have the hottest brand in the industry and the majority of people playing MMOs want to see a WoW-type, EQ-type game with some more action - some increased role for player skill.... but I wanted to make the point that there is a "too far" point beyond which you will be shrinking your audience rather than growing it. Rejecting out of hand the option of a simplified combat system for those that want it might be too far IMO.The majority of people *expect* to see an EQ clone; but that doesn't make it right for the market place, or the right move for us. They allready have EQ, and quite a few clones out there. If it's EQ you want, go play EQ.
A "simplified", "dumbed down" combat system would effectively remove what makes the game fun in the first place; the game would have to be balanced around it, and effectively we'd have to remove any element which could not be properly represented in both systems. This would also suck up considerable dev time (on the order of months), just to make the game LESS fun. That is not a wise way to spend valuable development time, and successful development is based around spending your time wisely.
If you follow your logic forward, you eventually reach the argument that what we should be doing is releasing a DVD video of someone playing our game, so that everyone can enjoy it, rather than actually building something people have to think about. If asking you to think and react means it limits our "market appeal", thats more than fine with us. Personally, I consider it our biggest market asset, because no other MMPORPG offers what we'll offer.
Possibility space and the Paradox of Choice (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23511#post23511)
Originally Posted by Radazim
-Source (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060005688)
Here's the rub: How do you know when the possibility space gets too large and the game suffers from the Paradox of Choice?In some ways, MMPs allready suffer from this problem; but in thier world model. You get dropped into a world with little direction, often with miles of open terrain and no clear guidence. WoW has patched up many of these problems by sheer amount of content, but I personally feel the quality level of the content suffers when it needs to be that dense; you effectively pull out the cloning brush and duplicate the same experience over and over.
In the realm of game dynamics, it's important that there be both posibilities, and clearly correct answers. The best way to create this dynamic is through the combination of simple elements. For example, take a game like Mario; there is nothing complex about the AI or level design; no fancy tricks. Yet you still die. This is because those simple elements (the mushroom hopping, the lava, the turtle) combine to create a complex situation which must be managed. It's the combination of elements that provides the difficulty, not the difficulty scale of a single element.
When the number of dynamics, or the nature of each dynamic, becomes too great to parse (ie: you can't break down each elements simple nature and track it), the game becomes more chaotic. A little chaos is where the game begins to cause you to make errors, but those errors are understandable to the user; they can see the root cause of thier mistake. When the number of elements or complexity of the elements increases, the root cause of those mistakes becomes obscured, making the game play seem truely chaotic and random, and the user cannot understand the root causes of thier mistakes, making the game play seem arbitrarily hard.
All monsters in D&D have unique AIs. We come up with a unique set of behaviors for them, and write custom AIs for each variation of a creature. Each one is designed to have a set of strengths and weeknesses, which may exist in either the behavioral (knock down charge, pauses after the big attack) or statistical (attacks with ice, weekness to fire) aspects of the character. Chaos is increase with multiple AIs in the scene, but increased far more by the variety of AIs in the scene (IE: Several different monsters are harder than several of the same monster).
The idea behind this is to both manage complexity of the possibility space, and to increase the 'bang for buck' ration on each asset made. Each combination of monsters provide a unique challenge, which gives us a closer to n^2 model of experience than an n++ one.
We can add another layerof complexity to a given senerio by placing various modifiers on the quest; do it quickly, do it while escorting this NPC and protecting them, etc. In essense, the quest acts as a modifier to the goal, causing the player to optimize themselves into a more difficult situation. This further increases the possibility space, while not overly increasing the chaos level of the situation.
Originally Posted by Radazim
-Source (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060005688)
My opinion is that the "character development" dimension has, in most recent MMORPG games, received far too much attention at the expense of the content dimension. In other words, too much emphasis has been placed on creating a semi-infinite variety of character design choices (races, classes, skills, spells, etc.), requiring a LOT of research time on the part of the player to learn what the "best" combinations are.I agree and disagree; the problem in my mind is that it has recieved all it's attention in two areas; the statistical and astetical. For instance, the frustrating aspect of races for me, as a designer/artist/programer, is how much development time they consume for a purely astetic dynamic. That dynamic has value; just not to the longevity of game play. The number of skills and spells effectively reduces the creative value of any one of them. In my ideal game, there would be far less skills and spells; but each would be useful in far more ways. Much like in a super hero world, a single ability (the ability to make ice) can be used for many different dynamics. There are some spells in D&D which accomplish this, but the running dynamic is more around creating a new spell for each case, rather than creative use of a single spell for multiple cases. This also makes UI for these games hell, on both the developer, and the players.
Originally Posted by Radazim
-Source (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060005688)
In the end, however, this takes away from the size of the content dimension, meaning that you have infinite character combinations available to consume very limited content. This means that the players will very quickly find the optimal character builds (and strategies) to conquer the content. What's worse, players who create sub-optimal characters suffer from the "gimp" stigma: "there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless." And in the end, a handful of optimized character designs become the only "viable" choices anyway....Thus negating the choice in the first place. It's a funny paradox; people want choice, but they don't want the consequence for choosing a wrong choice. Classes are the primary way to address this, but I always thought that AC1 with half the skill credits would have been a much more interesting game.
Originally Posted by Radazim
-Source (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060005688)
Still, I would like to see Turbine focus more on expanding the size and quality of the "content" dimension and providing a large and varied supply of quests, with a variety of challenges and objectives, than to see them try to incorporate every last race, class, skill, feat, spell, and item from the core rules, complete books, and ECSB.And thats the exact approach we've taken, though one could argue that we've gone too far, or not far enough, depending on your point of view. With an existing licence (or even without) there are certain expectations; we try to balance the line between what we know is right for the game, and what we know is right for the expectations. Hopefully, people will be able to see and respect that balance.
Possibility space and the Paradox of Choice (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23730#post23730)
Originally Posted by Chaosprism
Chaos for programmers is anathema to them because the amount of bugs that are caused by it truly is staggering. Of course each person looks for different things in any game, and this can even change from moment to moment in the same person. I'm in favor of designed randomness in games because otherwise you simply have a fully predictable interactive movie where your character really is of no moment at all. The secret is to put boundaries on the scope of the randomness so that it usually doesnt fall outside reasonable bounds. Though sometimes even that will. As long as it isnt the mainstay of the experience then you havent caused the players unnessesary angst.I guess you didn't know that there is no such thing as a random number in computing. Random number generators follow strict algorithms in an attempt to create the illusion of randomness; but they are not truely random as they will produce the same result each time with the same input parameters. Thus, what you percieve as randomness in a game system is really just an algorithm which is producing results that are too chaotic for you to see the root causes involved.
Coders have no fear of randomness; there's nothing hard or complex about using random functions in code. Making functions have lots of randomness in them is easy; but often just degrades the game play by creating chaotic results where they are not wanted. Personally, I've always found it best to construct your own chaos through the intersection of multiple dynamics than trusting such a delicate game play dynamic to some random function of a compiler. With enough intersections, you'll find a nice balance between chaos and what looks like an ordered system which is somehow, just beyond your recognition, controling that chaos. Conway's game of Life is a particularly good example of this type of balance, and with various rule changes, you can go from completely ordered systems, to ones that appear completely random, using a very, very simple ruleset.
<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Xundau, Community Relations</font>
Any word on system requirements? (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22948#post22948)
Originally Posted by Raistlin_Majere
This has been brought up......but Nik or Xundau has stated that most any mid-range computer for today should be able to run DDO. Of course they may adjust that feeling during beta...
System Requirement (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=14164#post14164) (found linky after a couple of searches)Thanks for the link Raistlin. For the record, everything I said back then still stands. We probably won't have final system specs until the end of beta.
January Producer Letter, and oh so much more ... (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23175#post23175)
Hi Everyone,
We've been busy lately. Really busy. This isn't to imply that we aren't always busy, but the last few weeks ... yowza.
So, in my humble opinion, the game's really coming along now. I spent about three full days testing the game and writing a short manual for it last week, and I am pleased to report that this game really plays like a game now. It's exciting. It's fun. It's D&D.
Unfortunately for the team (or maybe fortunately, since they all love their work), the pace isn't going to let up too much for the forseeable future. A gigantic milestone now looms on the not-so-distant horizon. A milestone that rhymes with ... um ... "theta."
But our Executive Producer has graced us with a January Producer Letter about this very subject, so I better not steal her thunder. You can find Judith's letter here:
http://www.ddo.com/index.php?page_id=66&pagebuilder[module]=article&pagebuilder[display_item]=33
We're also going to post a long-overdue official FAQ update, as soon as I can wrangle it into our publishing tool, and we're going to add a new forum for the discussion of PnP D&D. Nik and I are calling today "Super Tuesday."
Today marks a kind of turning point for the DDO Community. Since the launch of the site in September, we've been pretty low-key. There hasn't been a ton of information to release, so we haven't really been pushing the site too hard. To be honest, we weren't sure at first where our community was going to go. Looking at the community today, I can truly say that we couldn't be happier with where things are. We have a solid group of intelligent, passionate people, who clearly care about DDO.
In the next few weeks, we're going to start releasing more information, and perhaps more significantly, open up beta signups. As a result, we expect the community size to jump considerably. On the one hand, this makes me a bit sad. I like what we have going here, and I don't want to dilute it as the community takes on more and more people. On the other hand, it's exciting -- in order to be the game we want it to be, DDO is going to need a big, healthy community, as opposed to the small, healthy community we have right now.
You guys are our pioneers, and I want to let you know that we're not going to forget that. At the same time, I'd like to ask you to be good to the larger community that is about to grow up around you. We've actually been gaining steam since the second half of December, and you've been assimilating our new members smoothly, so I probably don't even have to ask this. But lend them a hand when they get here -- let them know what you like about the game, what you're still concerned about, answer their newbie questions ... you know the drill.
Times are changing, and they're changing for the better. Our community will get larger, but I still want it to look and feel like the community we have today. With your help, I know we can make this happen.
Post here or send me a PM if you have any questions (please don't flood me with beta questions though -- Judith's letter pretty much says all there is to say until our signup announcement).
January Producer Letter, and oh so much more ... (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23197#post23197)
Originally Posted by Zorbon
I'd like to thank Judith, Xundau, and the rest of the ddo team. The update is great news!
I’m pleased to see the game is getting closer to beta.
You pretty much answered all my questions, well the ones you guys can answer...
Well maybe not one... Think yall could release some more screen shots, or maybe a trailer? I need something to droll at for the next few weeks =D
The only thing I regret about ddo is not finding it sooner... your comments about this community are all true, it is a great place, and we haven’t had too many retard people ^^ (I my self not included).
I hope that when the throngs of people come due to the beta, we are still able to keep the community as great.
So here is to a new year! (Even if we're 18 days into it =D)
So how about three cheers for the dev team????! =DAh yes, screenshots. Great question.
Here's the deal. We finally have some production-quality areas, creatures, and avatars, and at least some of these should be suitable for new screenshots. Until now, we've had a lot of art assets in various stages of near-readiness, but nothing new has been good enough to get the thumbs-up for public release.
So we're working (actually have been working) on some fresh screenshots to share with you guys over the coming months. However, the approval process for screenshots is a long one -- hopefully we'll be able to get you some for early February.
Movies are, quite frankly, even trickier than screenshots. We recognize the value of them though, and we're currently investigating the idea of doing a couple of short gameplay videos in the coming months. Unfortunately, I can't make any promises here -- our A/V team is pretty booked, and it remains to be seen whether they'll be able to squeeze something in before they start work on all of their E3 stuff.
<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Nik Davidson, Administrator</font>
Against Players Owning Multiple Characters on a Single Server (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22514#post22514)
I think it's time for this thread to pass into the mists as having run its course, its discussion well played-out.
We will be allowing one account to have multiple characters on standard servers.
We may re-float this idea when we get back to our discussion of alternate rules servers, but I must stress that those discussions will be discussions, which may or may not lead to actual alternate rules servers at launch.
Thanks
Number of characters by account (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23450#post23450)
More than one. That's as good as I can give you at the moment.
<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Jason Booth, DDO Dev Team</font>
confessions of a RPG-loathing action gamer (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22597#post22597)
Originally Posted by Orwell
Well, an RPG I mentioned earlier, Silver Age Sentinels (The best superhero RPG going) doesn't require exp at all. RPG and advancement have nothing to do with one another. Character development does not have to occur on paper. Of course, D&D is the prototype for character advancement games, but the way in which it occurs is really not important.
Action-rpg is not an oxymoron. The ability to hit buttons and plan strategies has nothing to do with roleplaying, really. Most mmorpgs aren't really RPGs at all in a sense. The games don't facilitate role-playing in any way. They're simply a collection of stats. Whether the game is played by itself or completely controlled by the player has nothing to do with whether it's an RPG or not.The funny part about this argument is that in a turn based game I hit buttons and plan stratagies as well. So the argument really carries no weight at all. The only difference between turn based and real time is time pressure. And you'd be hard pressed to find a popular RPG which cannot be thought of as just a collection of stats and rules; the stats and rules are simply a framework that allows people to use thier imagination to role play, it's not the role playing itself.
Another funny thing about this argument is that it's not new. There was a time when stratagy gaming was all the rage, and people thought that stratagy games could *only* be done as turn based games; otherwise there would be no stratagy! After Warcraft hit, you couldn't pay people to play turn based games anymore. After about 6 years of non-stop cloning, we've finally started to see games like Advance Wars bring back the turn based model.
DDO and Evangelicals / Fundamentalists (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22819#post22819)
Originally Posted by zanzibar
*snip*Please o' lord, make DDO a target for evangelical christians; make me the target of thier judgment, so they can cause many an article to be written about our work, causing it to sell far more copies than it ever would without thier help.
Wise cracks asside, didn't the controversy over D&D die in the 80's? Can we start it up again?
Action-oriented combat limits market appeal (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22914#post22914)
Originally Posted by fort23
There were a fair amount of female players on a few NWN pws I played on, and they were some of the best roleplayers to be found, and more than a couple were outright dangerous when it came to the combat system.
I know there was a study done sometime last year that showed an increasing number of women involved in rpgs, but I don't remember where. Anyone have any idea, or did I just think it would be nice and turn it into a fact in my head?:0Ok, I'm going to chime in on the whole women vs. men gamer thing. In my opinion, historically, games have been based on male traits. Let’s not get all politically correct and pretend that there are no differences between the male and female brain; there are significant differences in the way men and women's brain's form, process information, and what types of situations we are designed to handle best.
Our brains have been developed over millions of years for specific actions; for men, that was hunting, and for women, caring for children (and the myriad of tasks involved). Our ability to track moving objects is far greater than women's. Generally, men are stronger at spatial reasoning, while women are stronger at social reasoning. Men have more strength, but women can tolerate more pain. Men are generally able to focus harder on a single task, while women are able to manage multiple tasks with greater ease. These differences evolved because the brain needed to make tradeoff's between different kinds of thinking; and due to child birth, some natural lines of separation evolved out of the different needs. There are many other areas where we differ, and these differences were a strength for millions of years (and I still think they are today).
The brain rewards us for improving these base mechanisms of thought. Games are, in a sense, a training ground for improving our thought process. When something is not a challenge, it gets boring, while something which is too foreign to our thinking it is too hard and effectively we turn off to it's challenge. Thus, games designed around fast moving objects or spatial reasoning will generally appeal to men more than women. It is much more likely for men to be attracted to these tasks, as they are in the 'comfort learning zone' for us. It's no wonder traditional video games held little interest for women, they were almost all about fast moving objects and spatial reasoning.
Role Playing Games, especially MMPs, contain some elements that appeal to the general women's model of thought. They contain social networks to be navigated, multiple tasks and activities to manage, and a sense of consequence free social experimentation which can be dangerous in the real-world. I personally believe these qualities are what make online RPGs more appealing to women than, say, quake or counter strike.
Some types of learning applies equally to both sex's. Organization, which is the root task of almost any game, is a base level thought process useful to both sexes. Thus it only seems fitting that games which are primarily expressed through this process (ie: Puzzle Games) appeal to both sexes equally. If the skill learned is universal, the game's appeal will be too (unless you specifically style it to one sex or another).
Puzzle games are interesting because they often provide different modes of play. Many will have at least two versions, one which applies time pressure, and one in which time is not a factor but the most complete solution is rewarded. Men usually prefer time pressure, because we are exercising relational thinking (useful for hunting).
Of course, there is nothing stopping one sex from becoming good at any specific task; I generally feel that everyone's brain is able to achieve the same level of performance, if they are willing to put in the effort. But we do have general tendencies towards certain types of thinking, and some of those tendencies are divided along the sex division.
So, if you want to appeal to women, build games which appeal to the tasks their brains tend to wish to improve. Unfortunately for the industry, it’s much easier to make games about fast moving objects and special reasoning than it is to make games about social networking and character empathy. We’ve only started to see the beginning of games appealing to these areas of the brain, so up until now most of the appeal has been around skills which are shared by both sexes.
Action-oriented combat limits market appeal (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22988#post22988)
Originally Posted by Raistlin_Majere
That being aside.....be careful of classifying females as less that capable of handling twitch aspects. I have seen a few girls taht would open a can of whoop ass on you in mortal combat type games. Remember what jason said about multitasking.....well, this goes along with knowing what sequence of buttons to push to get the most interaction oout of your toon, something women are better predisposed to do....us men usually follow one tried and true route...bash it....and it that doesnt work...bash it harder!!!I'm not classifying them as being less capable; just generally less attracted to games which focus on one type of skill or another. Suttle differences can often shift the balance in unpredictable ways as well. Most of these thoughts are based on proven studies of how the brain works, not my personal social observations on women in gaming. I try to approach things from the angle of how does the average brain process information; and there are proven differences between men and women in this regard. If the industry wants to make games that cater to women, they're going to have to take that perspective into account, instead of trying to turn women into lovers of first person shooters.
If someone thinks it's sexist to say that men and women's brains operate differently, then they should go fight science on that one; it's a proven fact. As a society, we need to come to grips that our differences are what make us strong; not what seperates us. There's nothing sexist about that. And yes, the exception will not be the rule, as with anything; there will emerge an amazing female quake player; the odds are in favor of such things happening. But expecting games based around primarily male biased mental chalenges to be equaly interesting to females is a farse.
Action-oriented combat limits market appeal (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22990#post22990)
Originally Posted by pingcat
This is starting to stray from the topic, but I just have to share it ...
Regarding 'conventional wisdom' about females and their abilities and expectations, the U.S. Army did a study not too long ago regarding the performance of female in what were typically considered "the kinds of roles that only males could perform efficiently."
Frankly, I suspect that some general somewhere was going to prove, once and for all, that those pink-frilled daddy-wannabes should go home, manage the kitchen as God intended and quit mucking up his heretofore nice little game of 'Soldiers'.
However, the results were ... umm ... not quite as expected.
The one that really sticks out in my mind was the fact that females make *much* better snipers than males. Invariably, a male sniper will - at best - wait until the first 'high value' target comes along and then take his shot. The females, on the other hand, would sit up in the tree (actually, snipers don't hide in trees, but that's another discussion) for days if need be until a really, *really* choice target came along. A general who believed that all female troopers were frilly little daddy-wannabes for example.
The moral of the story: Women might be from Venus, but evidently they have armies on Venus too. And while women might excel at MMOs and twitch combat and might enjoy them for reasons different from men, the point is that they can both excel and enjoy.
Stereotypes not withstanding ...Do you have a link to this study by chance? I love this kind of stuff, because it often applies indirectly to some aspect of game design. The differences between the way men and women process information do not always have such a clear and obvious result. We tend to want to label things out in as individual tasks, but even the simplest task is composed of dozen's of different tasks which can be affected by the differences in thought. In this case, the weighing of targets, management of potential targets, and tracking targets (each of which could be broken down into dozens of smaller sub-tasks) seem like prime areas where differences in thought processes could affect the final outcome.
Action-oriented combat limits market appeal (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23032#post23032)
Originally Posted by Sunfire
WoW has proved that isn't true - it's rapidly approaching 1 million copies sold which certainly qualifies as mass market penetration.Actually, the last announced sales figures were 600,000 units, which is just over half of what your saying. It will probrably top out at just over a million units sold US, but I don't expect it to have anywhere near the numbers that Diablo, Warcraft, or Starcraft sold.
Originally Posted by Sunfire
Again I disagree and the sales numbers both for regular RPGs and MMORPGs doesnt support your argument either. "Normal" RPGs such as the Baldur's Gate/NWN and Dungeon Siege type outsell the action style Dragonlords type more than 100 to 1.
Care to share the source of your 100 to 1 claim? Diablo sold far more copies than any of the games you've listed, and it was a more action oriented game. As for MMPORPGs, there hasn't been an action oriented one yet (unless you count RYL).
[quote]Originally Posted by Sunfire
The reason that all of the successfull MMOs are stats-based combat based is any attempts at action-based MMOs have failed. Both WoW and EQ2 tried more action-based combat in their alpha and early beta phases (still not to the level of DDO) and in both cases it play-tested miserably.WoW and EQ2 were never designed as action oriented games, despite your claims to the contrary. You can disagree with me if you want, but I know enough people at both companies to know a fair bit more about thier development history than you probrably do.
Originally Posted by Sunfire
In the end you'll need to balance a more action/skill based combat system (which is a nice unique feature) with some form of "default" attack mode which is sufficient instances or your game will not be the kind of success it could be if it was developed as a character stats based combat game.So in other words, you think the industry has to keep putting out clones of the same basic game over and over again. That nothing can deviate from the existing formulaic approach which has evolved. If that was true, Warcraft wouldn't have been a success, because it challenged the notion that was prevalent at the time; that all stratagy games had to be turn based.
Action-oriented combat limits market appeal (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23222#post23222)
Originally Posted by Sunfire
My point is that you have the hottest brand in the industry and the majority of people playing MMOs want to see a WoW-type, EQ-type game with some more action - some increased role for player skill.... but I wanted to make the point that there is a "too far" point beyond which you will be shrinking your audience rather than growing it. Rejecting out of hand the option of a simplified combat system for those that want it might be too far IMO.The majority of people *expect* to see an EQ clone; but that doesn't make it right for the market place, or the right move for us. They allready have EQ, and quite a few clones out there. If it's EQ you want, go play EQ.
A "simplified", "dumbed down" combat system would effectively remove what makes the game fun in the first place; the game would have to be balanced around it, and effectively we'd have to remove any element which could not be properly represented in both systems. This would also suck up considerable dev time (on the order of months), just to make the game LESS fun. That is not a wise way to spend valuable development time, and successful development is based around spending your time wisely.
If you follow your logic forward, you eventually reach the argument that what we should be doing is releasing a DVD video of someone playing our game, so that everyone can enjoy it, rather than actually building something people have to think about. If asking you to think and react means it limits our "market appeal", thats more than fine with us. Personally, I consider it our biggest market asset, because no other MMPORPG offers what we'll offer.
Possibility space and the Paradox of Choice (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23511#post23511)
Originally Posted by Radazim
-Source (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060005688)
Here's the rub: How do you know when the possibility space gets too large and the game suffers from the Paradox of Choice?In some ways, MMPs allready suffer from this problem; but in thier world model. You get dropped into a world with little direction, often with miles of open terrain and no clear guidence. WoW has patched up many of these problems by sheer amount of content, but I personally feel the quality level of the content suffers when it needs to be that dense; you effectively pull out the cloning brush and duplicate the same experience over and over.
In the realm of game dynamics, it's important that there be both posibilities, and clearly correct answers. The best way to create this dynamic is through the combination of simple elements. For example, take a game like Mario; there is nothing complex about the AI or level design; no fancy tricks. Yet you still die. This is because those simple elements (the mushroom hopping, the lava, the turtle) combine to create a complex situation which must be managed. It's the combination of elements that provides the difficulty, not the difficulty scale of a single element.
When the number of dynamics, or the nature of each dynamic, becomes too great to parse (ie: you can't break down each elements simple nature and track it), the game becomes more chaotic. A little chaos is where the game begins to cause you to make errors, but those errors are understandable to the user; they can see the root cause of thier mistake. When the number of elements or complexity of the elements increases, the root cause of those mistakes becomes obscured, making the game play seem truely chaotic and random, and the user cannot understand the root causes of thier mistakes, making the game play seem arbitrarily hard.
All monsters in D&D have unique AIs. We come up with a unique set of behaviors for them, and write custom AIs for each variation of a creature. Each one is designed to have a set of strengths and weeknesses, which may exist in either the behavioral (knock down charge, pauses after the big attack) or statistical (attacks with ice, weekness to fire) aspects of the character. Chaos is increase with multiple AIs in the scene, but increased far more by the variety of AIs in the scene (IE: Several different monsters are harder than several of the same monster).
The idea behind this is to both manage complexity of the possibility space, and to increase the 'bang for buck' ration on each asset made. Each combination of monsters provide a unique challenge, which gives us a closer to n^2 model of experience than an n++ one.
We can add another layerof complexity to a given senerio by placing various modifiers on the quest; do it quickly, do it while escorting this NPC and protecting them, etc. In essense, the quest acts as a modifier to the goal, causing the player to optimize themselves into a more difficult situation. This further increases the possibility space, while not overly increasing the chaos level of the situation.
Originally Posted by Radazim
-Source (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060005688)
My opinion is that the "character development" dimension has, in most recent MMORPG games, received far too much attention at the expense of the content dimension. In other words, too much emphasis has been placed on creating a semi-infinite variety of character design choices (races, classes, skills, spells, etc.), requiring a LOT of research time on the part of the player to learn what the "best" combinations are.I agree and disagree; the problem in my mind is that it has recieved all it's attention in two areas; the statistical and astetical. For instance, the frustrating aspect of races for me, as a designer/artist/programer, is how much development time they consume for a purely astetic dynamic. That dynamic has value; just not to the longevity of game play. The number of skills and spells effectively reduces the creative value of any one of them. In my ideal game, there would be far less skills and spells; but each would be useful in far more ways. Much like in a super hero world, a single ability (the ability to make ice) can be used for many different dynamics. There are some spells in D&D which accomplish this, but the running dynamic is more around creating a new spell for each case, rather than creative use of a single spell for multiple cases. This also makes UI for these games hell, on both the developer, and the players.
Originally Posted by Radazim
-Source (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060005688)
In the end, however, this takes away from the size of the content dimension, meaning that you have infinite character combinations available to consume very limited content. This means that the players will very quickly find the optimal character builds (and strategies) to conquer the content. What's worse, players who create sub-optimal characters suffer from the "gimp" stigma: "there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless." And in the end, a handful of optimized character designs become the only "viable" choices anyway....Thus negating the choice in the first place. It's a funny paradox; people want choice, but they don't want the consequence for choosing a wrong choice. Classes are the primary way to address this, but I always thought that AC1 with half the skill credits would have been a much more interesting game.
Originally Posted by Radazim
-Source (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060005688)
Still, I would like to see Turbine focus more on expanding the size and quality of the "content" dimension and providing a large and varied supply of quests, with a variety of challenges and objectives, than to see them try to incorporate every last race, class, skill, feat, spell, and item from the core rules, complete books, and ECSB.And thats the exact approach we've taken, though one could argue that we've gone too far, or not far enough, depending on your point of view. With an existing licence (or even without) there are certain expectations; we try to balance the line between what we know is right for the game, and what we know is right for the expectations. Hopefully, people will be able to see and respect that balance.
Possibility space and the Paradox of Choice (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23730#post23730)
Originally Posted by Chaosprism
Chaos for programmers is anathema to them because the amount of bugs that are caused by it truly is staggering. Of course each person looks for different things in any game, and this can even change from moment to moment in the same person. I'm in favor of designed randomness in games because otherwise you simply have a fully predictable interactive movie where your character really is of no moment at all. The secret is to put boundaries on the scope of the randomness so that it usually doesnt fall outside reasonable bounds. Though sometimes even that will. As long as it isnt the mainstay of the experience then you havent caused the players unnessesary angst.I guess you didn't know that there is no such thing as a random number in computing. Random number generators follow strict algorithms in an attempt to create the illusion of randomness; but they are not truely random as they will produce the same result each time with the same input parameters. Thus, what you percieve as randomness in a game system is really just an algorithm which is producing results that are too chaotic for you to see the root causes involved.
Coders have no fear of randomness; there's nothing hard or complex about using random functions in code. Making functions have lots of randomness in them is easy; but often just degrades the game play by creating chaotic results where they are not wanted. Personally, I've always found it best to construct your own chaos through the intersection of multiple dynamics than trusting such a delicate game play dynamic to some random function of a compiler. With enough intersections, you'll find a nice balance between chaos and what looks like an ordered system which is somehow, just beyond your recognition, controling that chaos. Conway's game of Life is a particularly good example of this type of balance, and with various rule changes, you can go from completely ordered systems, to ones that appear completely random, using a very, very simple ruleset.
<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Xundau, Community Relations</font>
Any word on system requirements? (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22948#post22948)
Originally Posted by Raistlin_Majere
This has been brought up......but Nik or Xundau has stated that most any mid-range computer for today should be able to run DDO. Of course they may adjust that feeling during beta...
System Requirement (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=14164#post14164) (found linky after a couple of searches)Thanks for the link Raistlin. For the record, everything I said back then still stands. We probably won't have final system specs until the end of beta.
January Producer Letter, and oh so much more ... (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23175#post23175)
Hi Everyone,
We've been busy lately. Really busy. This isn't to imply that we aren't always busy, but the last few weeks ... yowza.
So, in my humble opinion, the game's really coming along now. I spent about three full days testing the game and writing a short manual for it last week, and I am pleased to report that this game really plays like a game now. It's exciting. It's fun. It's D&D.
Unfortunately for the team (or maybe fortunately, since they all love their work), the pace isn't going to let up too much for the forseeable future. A gigantic milestone now looms on the not-so-distant horizon. A milestone that rhymes with ... um ... "theta."
But our Executive Producer has graced us with a January Producer Letter about this very subject, so I better not steal her thunder. You can find Judith's letter here:
http://www.ddo.com/index.php?page_id=66&pagebuilder[module]=article&pagebuilder[display_item]=33
We're also going to post a long-overdue official FAQ update, as soon as I can wrangle it into our publishing tool, and we're going to add a new forum for the discussion of PnP D&D. Nik and I are calling today "Super Tuesday."
Today marks a kind of turning point for the DDO Community. Since the launch of the site in September, we've been pretty low-key. There hasn't been a ton of information to release, so we haven't really been pushing the site too hard. To be honest, we weren't sure at first where our community was going to go. Looking at the community today, I can truly say that we couldn't be happier with where things are. We have a solid group of intelligent, passionate people, who clearly care about DDO.
In the next few weeks, we're going to start releasing more information, and perhaps more significantly, open up beta signups. As a result, we expect the community size to jump considerably. On the one hand, this makes me a bit sad. I like what we have going here, and I don't want to dilute it as the community takes on more and more people. On the other hand, it's exciting -- in order to be the game we want it to be, DDO is going to need a big, healthy community, as opposed to the small, healthy community we have right now.
You guys are our pioneers, and I want to let you know that we're not going to forget that. At the same time, I'd like to ask you to be good to the larger community that is about to grow up around you. We've actually been gaining steam since the second half of December, and you've been assimilating our new members smoothly, so I probably don't even have to ask this. But lend them a hand when they get here -- let them know what you like about the game, what you're still concerned about, answer their newbie questions ... you know the drill.
Times are changing, and they're changing for the better. Our community will get larger, but I still want it to look and feel like the community we have today. With your help, I know we can make this happen.
Post here or send me a PM if you have any questions (please don't flood me with beta questions though -- Judith's letter pretty much says all there is to say until our signup announcement).
January Producer Letter, and oh so much more ... (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23197#post23197)
Originally Posted by Zorbon
I'd like to thank Judith, Xundau, and the rest of the ddo team. The update is great news!
I’m pleased to see the game is getting closer to beta.
You pretty much answered all my questions, well the ones you guys can answer...
Well maybe not one... Think yall could release some more screen shots, or maybe a trailer? I need something to droll at for the next few weeks =D
The only thing I regret about ddo is not finding it sooner... your comments about this community are all true, it is a great place, and we haven’t had too many retard people ^^ (I my self not included).
I hope that when the throngs of people come due to the beta, we are still able to keep the community as great.
So here is to a new year! (Even if we're 18 days into it =D)
So how about three cheers for the dev team????! =DAh yes, screenshots. Great question.
Here's the deal. We finally have some production-quality areas, creatures, and avatars, and at least some of these should be suitable for new screenshots. Until now, we've had a lot of art assets in various stages of near-readiness, but nothing new has been good enough to get the thumbs-up for public release.
So we're working (actually have been working) on some fresh screenshots to share with you guys over the coming months. However, the approval process for screenshots is a long one -- hopefully we'll be able to get you some for early February.
Movies are, quite frankly, even trickier than screenshots. We recognize the value of them though, and we're currently investigating the idea of doing a couple of short gameplay videos in the coming months. Unfortunately, I can't make any promises here -- our A/V team is pretty booked, and it remains to be seen whether they'll be able to squeeze something in before they start work on all of their E3 stuff.
<font size="3" face="Verdana, Arial" color="#cc6600">Nik Davidson, Administrator</font>
Against Players Owning Multiple Characters on a Single Server (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=22514#post22514)
I think it's time for this thread to pass into the mists as having run its course, its discussion well played-out.
We will be allowing one account to have multiple characters on standard servers.
We may re-float this idea when we get back to our discussion of alternate rules servers, but I must stress that those discussions will be discussions, which may or may not lead to actual alternate rules servers at launch.
Thanks
Number of characters by account (http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=23450#post23450)
More than one. That's as good as I can give you at the moment.