Okay fine. No permit. See if I care.

And welcome back to part three of my thrilling series on expansions for MMOs. I realize it’s been a bit of a slog – just remember, the longest post is probably yet to come. In Wednesday’s post, I went over the first two expansions for Dark Age of Camelot and the different advantages and weaknesses that they had for MMOs. Today, I’m going to go over the other three expansions that Dark Age released.

No, seriously. You need a permit.

As I discussed in Saturday’s post, there are two main ways I can see to add an expansion onto an MMO. I covered the first last time, and so this time I’m going to focus on the second type, where you add a bunch of new content but don’t increase the level cap at all. There’s a lot to talk about with these type of expansions, so I’m going to break it in half.

Do you have a permit for that?

Regarding this comment on my previous entry, I’ve realized that how games do expansions is not a standard thing, at all. Some games give you a ton of new content and attach it at the end, raising the level cap so that everyone has to do this new content to reach the final level. Other games simply add new zones and things to do, but don’t change the level cap at all – more content that they offer to players but don’t require. I’m sure there are other alternatives, but I’m going to explore both of these since I’ve been thinking about the merits of either in the next two posts.

Now I’m level 30.4! Sweet!

As I alluded to in Saturday’s post, games having a leveling system is a bit arbitrary and strange, but it’s a system that fundamentally works. It gives you a sense of how powerful you are, and rewards you for the time you’ve played the game, if only superficially. There’s nothing really inherently wrong with the system as a whole…but there are some things I’ve noticed that are a little strange. Mostly I’ve found these in video games – both single-player RPGs and in MMOs.

You are now Level Kumquat

As you’re playing most role-playing games, you’re going to level up. This isn’t a new concept at all – even the earliest editions of most pen & paper RPGs had some form of leveling in them, and it’s been a staple of RPGs ever since. It’s a way to keep track of how “powerful” your character is, and to give a sense that, as you continue your journey through the game, you actually ARE getting better and learning cool new things you can do. However, when you actually think about it…when was the last time you actually “leveled up” at anything?

I’M SO ANGRY

So, as I hinted at on Saturday, I’ve got a few thoughts about encounter timers – specifically, ones that are designed to limit the amount of time you have to complete an encounter. The title of this post is alluding to what most people tend to refer to them as – “Enrage” timers. This is probably because, in a lot of cases, when this goes off, the NPC you’re fighting grows in size by about 25-50%, turns red, and starts beating the hell out of you and everyone you have ever loved, and “Enrage” is less silly than “Hulk Out.” (Though I find the concept of the “Hulk Out” timer rather amusing.) So, why do I have to think about this?

Unforgiving

One of the things that I wonder about when I’m developing encounters, either for the game I work on or for a D&D session, is how hard I can make things before my players start throwing things at me. People enjoy walking through things, but after a while it just gets boring. The fights that people remember are the ones where they had everything possible thrown at them, and still managed to prevail. I’ve got videos of myself and a friend killing bosses by ourselves in an instance (and I still watch them from time to time). I don’t have any videos of me walking through a bunch of low-level mobs, because it’s just not really as fun. So when I’m designing encounters, I’m usually aiming to be as unforgiving as possible.

Too many clouds

The latest tech buzzword seems to be “Cloud.” Everyone’s got a cloud, everyone wants a cloud, everyone is putting stuff on the cloud and taking it back off. Microsoft really hammered cloud into the public lexicon, and now Apple has just moved that way too as Google gets theirs up and running. Even Steam has opened their own cloud, albeit only for games that want to use it, and with other programs like Dropbox that let you sync to anywhere, it’s becoming increasingly easy to store all your data online. But one thing I’ve seen recently is a new type of cloud that is fantastically interesting to me, as a game developer. Warning: Cloudy with a chance of nerd.

Difficulty Curve

I was talking with a coworker and he recommended a game to me today – Dark Souls – and he said that it was a game that you beat, not one that you simply participated in. He went on to talk a lot about how, unlike a lot of games these days, it was designed in such a way that players should go into the game expecting to fail and die…a lot. It’s apparently rather brutally hard, a throwback to games of yore, and it’s something that a lot of people find refreshing.

That’s a nice mount you have there.

One of the things that came up in Monday night’s session was the fact that mounted combat in D&D 4th Edition is not fleshed out in the slightest. I can understand why – they’re spending a lot of time focusing on getting new classes / races / items into the game, and balancing mounted combat can be tricky in the best of circumstances – how do you balance encounters when your players could be moving anywhere from 5 – 12 squares a turn, or when they can fly or burrow or cross difficult terrain without penalty? What they did get in is workable, but it doesn’t seem like a great system.