The third expansion for Dark Age of Camelot was Catacombs. This was a monumental expansion for the game, because it provided a completely new graphics engine for the game, including new character models and a ton of new art for existing monsters and regions in the game. This is significant because of the drastic leap between what the characters looked like, prior to Catacombs, player characters looked like this. After Catacombs, they had been updated to look like this – the difference is striking.

Catacombs also followed the trend of Shrouded Isles and Trials of Atlantis and added a bunch of new zones to the world. However, these zones were all underground, and disconnected from each other. While the Trials of Atlantis zones were large and sprawling, these were cavernous and filled with tunnels, and you had to load each zone individually. These zones did introduce a lot of new content for players to experience, but each zone was completely disconnected from each other. The overall effect was a lot of new areas to explore without much reason to do so, and the zones never became very popular.

It also introduced the first “instanced” dungeons for Dark Age of Camelot – this is an area that you can go to, and only you and your friends can interact with it. If someone else tries to enter, they are put into their own version of this dungeon. This is usually done to allow players a chance to get to bosses that drop special items not otherwise available to players. However, in Dark Age of Camelot, these dungeons served as the only way to get “Aurulite,” which is used to buy special armor that was more useful than anything else you could easily buy in the game. These dungeons were initially well-recieved, but over time they spread out the population so much that players stopped going into them.

Catacombs also introduced new classes, and this was probably the biggest failing of the expansion. These classes were horrendously imbalanced, and are all still (six years later) so difficult to balance that they are considered vastly overpowered. These classes, along with everything else, meant that Catacombs was viewed as a very lackluster expansion – people were glad that there was an expansion, but there were a large amount of problems with it. The only major thing that people liked out of the expansion was the new graphics engine, and many players still used the older game clients to reduce lag in PvP.

The fourth expansion to Dark Age of Camelot was “Darkness Rising.” This expansion was notable in that it was only a fraction as large as the previous three – only one new zone was added to the game, and it was only available to players doing a special quest that they could pick up. However, it did allow players to finally enter the throne rooms of their realm’s king and talk to him, and they could become a Champion of the Realm. This allowed them to start earning Champion Levels, which you could start once you had hit the level cap. These champion levels were very well-received by players, as it gave them something else to strive towards once they had hit the max level. It also gave you some limited ability to train abilities not usually available to your class, which allowed players a new level of freedom for planning their RvR groups.

This expansion was well-received for Dark Age, but probably was not worth the price that was charged for it. It didn’t have nearly enough new content to justify an entire expansion being dedicated to it – it felt more like a large patch to the game, rather than a full expansion. For many games, this expansion would have been received poorly, but it was one of the most successful for Dark Age where players received a benefit to their existing gameplay without a lot of extra hoops they had to jump through to get it.

The fifth and final expansion for Dark Age of Camelot was called Labyrinth of the Minotaur. It introduced the minotaur race to all three realms. While this race is my personal favorite, most players of the game feel that it is completely thematically inappropriate for the game as a whole. It also introduced a new class that was shared across all three realms – this class is still not very powerful, and since it is the only class that has exact duplicates in the other realms, many players feel like it was thrown in at the last minute.

The Labyrinth zone was also added, and features an enormous dungeon made up of truly labyrinthine corridors and a ton of PvE content. This dungeon is also accessible by all three realms at the same time, and features a central room where players are constantly fighting each other. The Labyrinth itself was a mixed success. It provided players the fastest access to RvR combat in the game – you could teleport straight to the center room, and almost immediately find someone else to fight. In every other zone, you had to run a significant distance, even using some of the teleportation available to you, before you could find anyone to fight. Because of this, a lot of people moved exclusively to the Labyrinth to fight, and there were less people in other zones to keep RvR going strong. Additionally, the PvE encounters in the zone are fantastically well-done, but because of the constant threat that you are under from enemy players, most players don’t even attempt to do these encounters.

Labyrinth was viewed by most as a last-ditch effort to release a full expansion to Dark Age of Camelot, and due to a number of fairly questionable design decisions was exactly that. Players either loved or hated the Labyrinth itself, and this polarized the already divisive community even further. Many players felt like it wasn’t worth an expansion, and like Darkness Rising, it probably should have just been released as a content patch instead of a full expansion.

Overall, the expansions of Dark Age of Camelot give a good spectrum of the things that a game expansion can do. None of them were perfect, and many of them introduced more problems than they solved, but every one had some good features that might be helpful to consider when designing an expansion for any future MMO.

The best example that I can think of for a game with expansions that don’t raise the level camp is Dark Age of Camelot, and there’s two major reasons there. One, I worked on it for five years and know a good deal about the expansions that they added and what choices they made about them, and two, because they explored a number of different ways to add expansions to a game without raising the level cap, to varying degrees of success in each case.

The first expansion to DAoC was Shrouded Isles, and was arguably the most successful expansion to the game. Shrouded Isles effectively doubled the PvE area in Dark Age for each realm – three completely new regions were added, each containing six zones and three major dungeons. It also added a new race and two new classes to each realm. This expansion was fantastically well-received for a number of reasons:

1. The new zones were designed to offer more areas for players to level up in – they weren’t all simply designed for the endgame content. They did have a bit more of a focus on endgame than the original zones did, but they also had content for players starting at level 5, I believe. It meant that players could level up in either place, so old players could roll new characters and have a much different experience leveling up.
2. New races and classes were pretty well-liked. There were a few issues with some of these looking ridiculous, but the classes were decently well-balanced after a bit (with the glaring exception of the Necromancer, which is the single dumbest class decision I’ve ever seen in any game – the class was designed and implemented based on the fact that monsters function radically differently than players, and so this brokenly overpowered and crippled-by-bugs class was implemented).
3. The new dungeons offered new items, but they weren’t that much more powerful than what you could already find. There were a few exceptions – the hardest dungeon of this new area’s loot was much better than what you could find elsewhere, but any player had a chance to get into a group and immediately go out and get it. There wasn’t any elaborate leveling required – you could immediately get the benefit and then return to the game you already liked to play.

Now, these are all good because of the fact that Dark Age was not a PvE game – the endgame focus was on RvR. What this meant is that players often viewed PvE as that thing that they did when they weren’t playing the real game, so not having a ton of endgame content wasn’t a bad thing – you didn’t really do what you already had that often, so you didn’t need to add a bunch of new stuff. For a PvE-focused game, this expansion would probably not have been as successful – the new races and classes would have sold most of it, but the lack of a lot of new content, especially endgame content, would have made a lot of players feel like the expansion wasn’t designed for them as much. It didn’t add a whole lot of new PvE to the game, and would have probably not sold as well as it could have.

The next expansion, Trials of Atlantis, was similar. It added a bunch of new PvE zones, but these zones were mirrored throughout the three realms – each realm had their own copy of the zone, and everything was the same for the three realms, but you didn’t have to worry about fighting other players in them. ToA also added the first “alternate progression” path for additional leveling beyond level 50, the level cap – Master Levels. There were 10 of these that granted you additional powers and abilities that were useful in RvR (and fantastically so). They also introduced a ton of new items called artifacts – these were items with extremely powerful abilities that started at level 0 – you had to actually level the items up by killing specific monsters or killing certain types of players or killing players only during the day or night (the in-game days are 30 minutes long, so 15 minutes of day and 15 minutes of night). There were also three new races added.

This expansion is viewed by most Dark Age players as the worst expansion ever designed for a videogame, for a few main reasons:

1. All of the content was endgame PvE content. The new races did change the endgame dynamic a little, but this content was only accessible to higher-level characters. Additionally, this PvE content was all on a very high level of difficulty – you couldn’t simply throw a bunch of people at the encounter and hope that you’d win. One encounter had been designed to require 200 people to complete, broken out into groups of 8-16 at a number of different smaller camps and probably around 50 at the largest one. Others required you to have specific items that you had to find, and others made you NOT fight certain types of mobs to allow you to kill others. This was all thrown at a playerbase that regarded PvE as boring and trivial, and didn’t want to have to think about it, and was very poorly-received.
2. Artifacts were, in most cases, ridiculously more powerful than anything you could have obtained earlier. Because of this, players felt like they HAD to have these items to remain competitive, which required them to do the difficult PvE encounters to get them, and then kill a bunch of monsters in order to get the scrolls to unlock them, and then usually kill a bunch of other monsters to level them up and unlock their full power. It was a ton of busywork for an item that you only got because you felt like you had to, and a lot of players resented it.
3. Master Level abilities required you to do a ton of smaller PvE encounters and quests, most of which required you to be grouped with other people (and often a LOT of other people), and took a significant period of time. Then, when you finally got the ability, about 75% of them ONLY worked against other players – it wasn’t even helpful in getting the next ability. Additionally, we only let players know about nine of these trials – they had to find the tenth themselves, and it was possibly the biggest pain in the ass to find – a portal would spawn, only at night, in the middle of the ocean somewhere. If you had an item, you could get a decent idea where this portal was, but that item was an enormous pain to attain itself. Players did the encounters, but they hated most of them simply because they were long, complicated, and took them away from what they actually wanted to be doing in the game.

These three factors were why most people really revile this expansion for Dark Age of Camelot. Right before this expansion launched was the point at which DAoC had a subscriber base of 250,000, which was huge for the time. After the expansion launched (which was coincidentally around the same time that WoW launched), the population plummeted.

Now, for a PvE game, a lot of the major animosity for this expansion disappears. It was a new area entirely designed for endgame PvE content, and that would be fantastically well-received for PvE players. The Master Level system would definitely need to be reworked to work for PvE, and it does offer the problem of possibly destroying class balance, but it does offer the ability for players to progress and specialize their character out in a unique way to distinguish themselves from other players of their class. The artifact system is entirely too clunky, and the items were made entirely too powerful – having powerful items is okay, but don’t make them so powerful that everything else is regarded as “completely useless.” The system for getting them was also bad, but I do like the idea of having to level up the item to make it more useful. However, it should probably start with most of its usefulness, and then unlock the special things that make it awesome, rather than starting shitty and becoming useful halfway through, and then becoming ridiculous at the end.

There were definitely some things that were done well and some others that weren’t in these two expansions, and a lot of their success / failure is based on DAoC  as a base that they were built off of. Next time, I’ll get into Catacombs and Darkness Rising / Labyrinth, and then what Dark Age has done since.

With the first option, the best game example I have is World of Warcraft. (Big surprise there.) All three expansions to WoW have added a ton of new content, new zones, new abilities, new races and / or classes, and and increased the level cap. This meant that everyone who has played or who plays WoW is going to play through the new content if they wish to reach this new level cap. This makes sense if you are a game designer – why would you spend months or years of your life working on something that people then don’t play? However, there are a few rather major problems with this:

1. This new content has little to nothing to do with anything the players have been working on prior to it. This was especially bad in TBC (their first expansion), because not only did you enter new zones, you were literally traveling to a different world entirely – there was no connection to the places you’d been leveling at all, aside from magical portals. And then, after 10 levels in TBC (which, because they sped up the way you leveled through the content after Wrath (second expansion) launched, meant that you only saw about 2-4 zones IN Outlands), you immediately got ferried right back to the other world. It was incredibly disconnected, and didn’t make much of any sense, especially since every expansion was designed to present one or two major threats to the world, and these threats are always usually bosses at some point in the expansion. However, now that you’re not seeing the entire content, you’re going from one major threat to another without any resolution. This was especially noticeable with Cataclysm (third expansion), when they re-did the starting zones and made Deathwing the major boss of the expansion. You now are warned about him early on, and encounter a lot of reasons why he’s bad and dangerous from levels 1-60, and then you spend 20 levels in the first two expansions’ zones and don’t hear anything at all about him…and then suddenly, you’re back in oldworld for the new Cataclysm zones and he’s super-bad again! It’s mostly silly how it was handled, and feels like everything is just being tacked on without too much thought on how these are going to weave together.
2. The new content is significantly more difficult than anything the players have encountered before, and the gear and item rewards you get from it is heads and shoulders better than what you had prior to the expansion. This was done because they wanted to ensure that players went to the new content – if the promise of new quests and levels wasn’t impetus enough, now the gear is so much better it’s not even worth using your old stuff. Some of the absolute best gear you could obtain prior to the expansion coming out was suddenly replaced by a random drop you got from a bog lord in the second zone, and it basically trivialized everything you’d done prior to the expansion coming out. This was done to “level the playing field” between players when the expansion came out, so that nobody had a head start…but it also served to make any “endgame” content in the previous zones completely worthless. There’s no reason to do any of the old raids in Vanilla WoW other than “I want to see what this was like.” You’re making some content super-worthwhile at the complete expense of other content.
3. Because there are new levels, you’re going to have to give players new abilities and powers to fill them. Obviously, you could simply go, “Well, Wizards have fireball and ice storm and magic missile, so I’ll just give them another rank of these at appropriate levels and that’ll be good to go.” The problem with that is that it’s boring. Players are experiencing a ton of new content, and they’re going to want new tricks and tools to interact with it with. So you have to create a bunch of new abilities that are unique and interesting, and then you give these to players during these new levels. What this means is that while you’re leveling up, you’re getting a set of tools, and you get a bunch initially, and then usually just a few additional ones as you level up, so you start getting used to how you deal with things. Then, suddenly, you’re getting a bunch of new tools and start having to drastically re-evaluate how you play. It’s also often incredibly hard to come up with new and unique abilities to give players, especially for the second or third time you have to do it, so you start redistributing other class’ abilities. This certainly helps you balance, but then you start watering down the overall experience for players – they might have picked a class specifically because they were good at X thing and now they’re no longer the only one who’s good at it, and maybe now they’re actually not AS good as another class. Class balance gets very muddled when you start adding new abilities and powers, and usually leads to a lot of headaches while you try and work it out.

I’m sure there are other problems, but these three, alone, are enough to make me seriously question why you’d want to make expansions that do these things. I’ll explore the other style of expansions next time, but I’m curious what people think about what I’ve said above. This is all from my perspective as both a player and a designer, but it just feels a little lazy. You want people to do your new stuff so, as opposed to just making it enticing, you almost force them to do it by telling them they’ll be pathetically underpowered and alone if they don’t.

One of the biggest things that confuses me is the rather arbitrary leveling progression that a lot of games seem to have. I’m going to harp back on the MMO that I’ve got the most experience with on this one, because it’s one of the biggest offenders in my mind, and that’s World of Warcraft. When the game first came out, you were told that there were 60 levels’ worth of content and progression for you. You knew that when you hit level 10, you were 1/6th of the way there, and that when you hit level 30, you were getting closer and closer. It did take longer to go from 31 to 32 than it had taken to go from 30 to 31, but it was a pretty predictable curve – each level took longer than the previous by about (rough estimate) 15%. It was standard, predictable, and made a lot of sense.

The problem is that when WoW went to release their first expansion, someone decided that they wanted to make…probably 40 more levels’ worth of content, in the old system, but someone else decided that “There’s no way we’re going to let players get all the way to level 100 after the first expansion! That would be ridiculous!” So instead, they raised the level cap to 70, but raised the amount of experience you needed to level between these levels by about 400%. So if level 59 to 60 took 60,000 experience, level 60 to 61 took 240,000. It was a fantastic jump in time, and was extremely random from a player’s perspective. As such, the journey from 60 to 70 ended up taking almost longer than it took to go from 1 to 60, which wasn’t something that had ever happened before. And with their third and fourth expansions, WoW did it again. Their third expansion did the exact same kind of progression, where they added new zones and probably 40 more levels’ worth of content, and compressed it down into 10 levels. The fourth expansion was even worse – another 30-40 levels’ worth of content, compressed down into five.

The problem this has is that it makes the game feel like incredibly segmented parts. When expansion 2 was out, they lowered the amount of experience it took to go from 1-60, so you flew through the old content to get to their “awesome new stuff.” They did the same thing for 60-70 when expansion 3 came out, and I’m betting that they sped up 70-80 when expansion 4 came out. They’re devaluing their old content simply because they’re figuring that players are getting bored of it, and completely changing the progression as a result, and nothing seems like it connects to anything else.

WoW isn’t the only game to do this – Dark Age of Camelot has a radically different exp / level curve from 1-40 than it does from 40-50 – it takes as much time to go from 49 to 50 as it did to go from 1 to 40. And their Realm Points system (their PvP experience) was originally designed so that Realm Rank 11 (RR11) was the cap. However, as players got close to RR11, the team freaked out and added on another Realm Rank (RR12)…but while RR1-11 had been a graceful curve between the levels, RR12 was simply, “Okay, every 10 percent of the way to RR12, we’re going to increase the number of RP needed by 10%.” This meant that you had this nice graceful curve that suddenly turned into a linear progression that was SIGNIFICANTLY sharper than anything else. Once you hit RR11, you slammed into a wall where you basically had to get enough Realm Points to get RR12…three times…in order to get to the next major number. And then Dark Age did it again, raising the Cap to RR13. RR11 required players to get slightly over 8 million RPs. RR12 required them to get almost 24 million. RR13 is above 65 million. These values make the rest of the curve seem entirely disconnected from the rest of the game.

It’s just strange that people do this – WoW’s justification is that Level 100 is the “end” of the game, and that feels like posturing to me. Who cares if level 100 is the end? Make the end level 300, and nobody’s gonna care if characters are the same “power” as they would at level 100 of your ridiculous system. Dark Age’s choice was a bit different – every time you gain 10% of a realm level, you gain another Realm Ability that you can spend to increase the power of your character, so tripling the number of available realm levels would have drastically imbalanced RvR, but they could have worked around that by awarding points less frequently at the higher levels but maintaining the same curve. It would have felt less “hacked on” and would have greatly smoothed out the leveling curve.

Progression should be smooth – every time you randomly change something on the players, for any reason, it feels jarring and poorly-planned. And that’s not what you ever want your players to think.

The concept is one that’s almost accepted, but it’s really rather strange when you think about it. It’s a good way to show that your character is getting better, but it’s also an intensely arbitrary one. Most games will let you gain a level if you simply kill enough guys…but then give you points that allow you to level up your ability to create potions or talk to people better. How does brutally removing the limbs from a thousand gnolls suddenly make you the best diplomat ever? I mean, I wouldn’t really want to argue a dude who was covered in the ichor of his enemies, but that’s hardly a reason that a storekeeper might suddenly start giving you a discount. Some games do limit this by only letting you level up the skills you’re actually using – you might gain levels that let you increase your stat bonuses, but your skills only level up if you’re using them a lot…so you level up your “talk to people” skill by, surprise, talking to people.

But this is why there’s the term “grinding” in games – you literally pick something to do, and then you do it over and over and over and over until you’re better at it. This does have some basis in reality, but it’s been massively over-simplified in games. In the real world, if you spend 30 years programming, but you only ever write the same code over and over, you’re not going to be any better at it than you were when you started. You only really get better if you start looking at some outside materials, or asking other people for help, or studying code that other people have written and seeing what solutions they’re using to overcome problems. Very rarely will you simply come up with a workable solution that’s better than what you could have found more easily, and most of the time you’ll come up with far worse code…not because you’re bad, but simply because you don’t have the knowledge to optimize it or the knowledge of specific things you can do. However, in a video game, you can get better at cooking by simply cooking potatoes for 30 years. Now, it’d make sense if you were the best potato chef in the land after 30 years, but it doesn’t make sense that because you spent all that time cooking potatoes, you are now the best seafood chef that this world has ever seen. I understand why games do it – if you had to level up everything by doing it over and over, you’d have 10 million skills and never feel like you were actually progressing any of them. But that doesn’t really remove the silly from the equation.

The other thing that’s just weird about all of this is the fact that leveling, whether it’s player or skill-based, is almost always tracked by a number, be it a percentage or a straight up number. “I just hit level 27 the other day!” This is something that people are crazy about, and it’s rather amusing. Now, if you gate your skills and abilities by level, then hitting certain levels is definitely better than others – if you get basically all of your useful abilities at level 6, then most other levels seem a lot more redundant…but by hell, people are going to be excited to some degree when they see that level number go up by a little bit. It doesn’t matter if they just hit level 726 or if they hit level 3, there’s going to be some excitement there simply because a number got bigger. That’s probably the entire reason WHY we track them with numbers, and have specified values that equal a number – it gives you something to work towards that’s not just “become a better person / thing / abomination against life.” (Some RPGs are weird, okay?)

But what’s the real problem here? I’m not entirely sure that there is one. Ultima Online is a game that doesn’t really have levels – any character can do…basically whatever he wants with his character, and if you’re willing to pay for it, you can also completely switch what your character can do, provided you’re willing to level up the next skills you pick up. It’s an interesting system, and has a fanatically stable population…but it’s also a huge turn-off for a lot of people simply because you can’t see how well you’re doing compared to other people. That’s one of the advantages of a leveling system – you can look at Bob, and immediately compare yourself to him, and that’s a reason to keep leveling in games, I guess.

But I’ve got some rather serious issues with how a lot of games handle leveling, and I’ll address those later. For now…leveling is ridiculous, but it works well enough that until I can get an idea for something better, let’s just stick with the silly that we know works.

Well, as I see it, there are two ways to have an enrage timer for an encounter. The first is the more simple way to do it – you simply say, “Yup, they have 4 minutes to beat him, and then he turns into Bahamut and destroys them forever.” As soon as you make the guy mad, he starts a timer and it’s possible to predict the exact moment that he will punch a hole in the earth and kill you. Because this is the easier way to do things, it gets used a lot – going back to my experience with WoW, I’d say that every enrage timer you fought in Icecrown Citadel was a hard-enrage timer. If there was an enrage timer, it was a fixed number that could be immediately predicted. However, the main problem that I have with this is that it also meant that, usually within the first minute of the fight, people knew if the enrage timer was going to be a problem at all, because if you had 5 minutes to kill a guy with 10 million hit points, then if you hadn’t gotten him down below 8 million HP after the first minute, you might as well give up, because your DPS would only go down as the fight went on. It meant that people became INTENSELY elitist about gear and an arbitrary number that “scored” your gear – if your gear score wasn’t above X value, you didn’t get to come to Y super-cool place, because X value meant that you couldn’t do Z DPS and without you pulling Z DPS, nobody was going to get Φ Loot. (Yes, I just bust straight into the Greek Alphabet to keep this charade going. Just go with me.) It didn’t matter how good you were – people would look at you, get a number without even talking to you, and dismiss you…despite the fact that I saw some people pull numbers way above what was “expected” for their gear score, and some people who couldn’t pull half of what their gear score was expected to pull. And a lot of this was simply because there were hard timers that you knew you had to beat.

The other way to make an enrage timer is to put a timer in that causes bad things to happen. Maybe the boss gets 5% more powerful every 15 seconds – at some point, you can expect him to one-shot whomever he’s pointing at, but you can mitigate that by gearing up or bringing along classes that can artificially inflate your ability to take damage. Or maybe the boss has a super-powerful attack that he does after a certain amount of time, and every time he does it, the time until the next one is shorter – so he does it first at 90 seconds, then at 60 seconds, then at 35 seconds, then at 20 seconds, and then every 15 seconds after that. These numbers are steep, but then it’s possible, if you’re lucky enough, to still fight him through all the damage. Or perhaps, and I’m blatantly stealing this example from Loatheb in Naxxramas (WoW, again), you have the boss throw out a bunch of AoE damage and completely limit how much healing you can do during the fight. That way, after a certain point, you’re probably going to be totally screwed, but it’s possible that you might get lucky and somehow manage to push through it. I think that designing an enrage timer in this way is a lot better – it’s harder to balance, because you do want players, at some point, to lose because they simply can’t keep up, but it also means that players can get much more of a sense of accomplishment if they manage to beat it despite all the odds. With a hard timer, there’s a point at which you might have a few seconds to beat it while the boss runs around one-shotting your group. With a soft timer, even as people die, you can struggle and possibly prevail – one of my friends likes to tell a story about how all their DPS had died and they were told “OH MY GOD JUST SHIFT OUT AND HIT HIM WITH ANYTHING YOU HAVE BEFORE YOU ALL DIE” and they managed to beat it with about 4 people, out of 25, still standing.

To summarize the previous 800 words in two sentences: Punishing players for taking too long by immediately killing them all is a stupid way to make encounters seem tense. Forcing them to adapt as the encounter gets harder and harder as you go, and eventually expecting the encounter to become too difficult for them to handle, is a great way to encourage them to get better and leaves the door wide open for those stories that people will remember forever where they somehow managed, against all odds, to do something that no one else thought possible, both of which are good.

Now, don’t get me wrong. My goal is not to murder everyone who plays the game or tries to beat the encounter. I’m a bit more severe when I’m designing things for my game, simply because if they mess up and all die, they can simply come back in a few minutes, hours, or days and try again. The penalty there is just that they lost some time. If I kill everyone in a pen & paper game, usually it means I have to scramble to come up with an excuse for the enemies not to murder them all viciously, or simply that the campaign is over…and the people I game with would more likely want to simply move on to another campaign or game, rather than continuing after I murdered them all. That might be because I simply haven’t woven a compelling enough story yet, or it might just be my group – either way, it’s a lot less forgiving if EVERYONE dies. Kill one or two people? Can make the fight a lot more memorable that way. We still tell stories about the Invoker who brought back our idiotic Dwarf Fighter with a ridiculous crit and a cajoling look.

However, what I have learned when designing things for my game is that I need to sit down, make a list of basically everything awful this mob could do to players, and give it all of that and then make it 10% worse. This could just be an issue with the game I work on, but most of the time, I find that if you don’t give the players a good chance to get totally destroyed in seconds, they’ll usually blow right through it. Additionally, AoE damage and things that make players move around are key – players who can sit there for an entire fight and simply push buttons until the big thing falls down are usually bored. That’s not to say that you can’t have a good fight where that happens, but they should be rare, and they should be racing against something. Patchwerk in Naxxramus, in World of Warcraft, is a good example of a fight that was done pretty well where you just sat there – you had a pretty short amount of time to kill him before he just destroyed your tank, and he hit a good number of people around him for ridiculous amounts of damage every 1.5 seconds. Your healers had to be absolutely on-the-ball in order to keep people alive through his hateful strikes, and your ranged DPS simply had to ensure that they could do enough damage to bring the guy down before he got super-pissed and destroyed you all. However, if you do this anything more frequently than sparingly, then things get boring – make players run around to interact with podiums, or make them run around to avoid damaging spells or traps. Or make them shift their focus fairly regularly to killing adds – things like this allow you to be truly evil, and make for fun encounters when players are trying to beat it.

D&D is an entirely different animal. Healing is a lot more scarce, so if you hit a guy for 80% of his health in a single shot, then you’re going to be seriously hampering the party’s ability to complete the encounter. Spreading out a lot of damage is actually a great way to ensure that the encounter gets tense – in my last session, the party fought a mob that, on the first round of combat, gave everyone an effect that would deal 5 damage to allies who were next to them whenever they started their turn. The party I’m facing is very melee-heavy, and my mob stayed in a corner and didn’t move much, so they had to all cram into a corner and try and ensure that they weren’t going to be blasting each other every turn. The NPC made this a lot harder for them by constantly shuffling them around and having them attack each other – the players actually did more damage to each other through that attack than the NPC did to them. Most of that was simply the damage values I was using – the NPC didn’t have enough damaging abilities himself, and the players were unable to roll low against each other.

In the future, if I was going to run a similar encounter, I’d have the mob move players over to an ally and make a basic melee attack roll – if it succeeds, then the target is dazed until the end of their next turn. It’s a powerful hampering ability, but it doesn’t mean that players are going to be destroying each other. And then I can give the NPC a few more damaging abilities to make up for the loss of damage – more blasts or bursts would have been good, and maybe something that gives players a penalty to saving throws so they’re hit by the aura damage more often…and maybe changing the aura damage so it does damage to the player if they’re alone, and then less damage to their allies if they are nearby – either 6 damage to the player, or 6 damage, spread out evenly amongst nearby allies. It’s a few fiddly changes like that that would make the encounter a lot less “Oh god why did the fighter just do 80% of my health in damage with that attack” and more “If we don’t kill this guy quickly, we are going to get brutalized oh dear god.”

These are things I’ve learned by pounding through a lot of encounters in games, but I’m by no means an expert in encounter design yet. I’d be curious to see what people think about my basic thoughts, which are:

• Fights should rarely be won simply by standing around and outdamaging the enemy – while okay, sparingly, you should force your players to react to more than just damage.
• The more mobile you force your players to be, the more you can get away with, up to a point – if you’re making everyone run around like an idiot for 30 seconds where they can’t cast healing spells, don’t have that be the same thirty seconds you blast them with unavoidable AoE damage.
• Adds in fights are great, but they need to be more than just distractions. Make them force the players to deal with them, either by giving them massive damage bonuses or CC abilities of some form.
• Avoid situations where you need specific characters or abilities to succeed, outside of the norm – designing an encounter to require 4 tanks is great, in theory, but kinda blows chunks when you can only bring 8 people to the party. If it’s a series of encounters where they ALL require 4 tanks, then that’s a different animal, but don’t have the third fight out of seven require radically different makeups than the rest of them.

I’m sure there’s more, but I feel like those are the key ones. There’s a whole separate thought pattern around encounter timers that I’ll get into another time, but I’m curious to see what everyone else thinks. There’s a chance I’m simply way off-base, and that you can’t really make a list that works for every system, but I’d be interested to see if there are a few guidelines I can write up to pass around to anyone who is developing encounters.

Mass Effect 3 has announced their Galaxy at War feature that seems rather fantastic, the more I think about it. Mass Effect, for those that don’t know, is a single-player RPG series where you play the game, alone, and things you do in the world affect the story and your ability to progress through it. In many cases, it’s possible to skip a lot of content and simply blaze right on through to the end, but you won’t get as good of an ending that way. Mass Effect 2 had you go on a suicide mission, and if you’d done the bare minimum of things, you’d probably end up with most of your squad dead. However, if you took the time to go through every character’s loyalty quests, you’d make them more powerful, and when you got to the end, it was possible to get your entire squad through the suicide mission without any problems at all.

However, in order to get the benefit from this, you have to be playing the game. Now, normally this would elicit a “duh,” but games like these aren’t exactly something you can play while you’re riding in a car or during your lunch break at work. (Mostly…when you work for the company that makes the game there are a few exceptions ) What this means is that you can only progress through the game if you’re willing to devote a lot of your time to it and only it, and there’s no way to progress if you’re not able to devote that amount of time. It’s something that’s pretty widely accepted as “the way things are,” mostly because technology was limiting you from doing anything else. However, now that the cloud data structure has become so easy to use and widespread, Mass Effect 3 has taken a rather bold leap into the future with a new feature they are calling Galaxy at War.

Now, you can continue to play Mass Effect 3 just like you played Mass Effect 2, and beat every mission and do every possible thing and come out on top at the end with the best possible victory. However, they’re also going to be releasing a number of other ways to influence your game – Mass Effect 3 will have multiplayer missions, where you can team up with other people and beat different levels, or there might be a facebook game that you can play while you’re on your lunch break at work, and a mobile application you can play around with while you’re sitting on the Metro. All of these things will affect the Galaxy at War cloud, where you can see the galactic readiness to the threat you’ll be facing, and as you complete missions or puzzles or whatever they come up with in different “areas” of the galaxy, you’ll raise your galactic readiness. Then, when you’re playing through the single-player campaign, your individual readiness is multiplied against your galactic readiness to get your overall score. High individual score and low galactic readiness would work out to be the same as low individual score and high galactic readiness, so if you can’t play single-player as much but you can play the facebook game all day, you’ll have just as good of a chance at the best victory as the guy who completed every mission in the single-player game.

It’s a very interesting concept, but one that makes a lot of sense. I’m thoroughly interested to see how people react to it, but it’s fantastic to think about the possibilities this could open up if it works. You might eventually have games where you can either kill monsters with a sword or play a facebook game where you craft armor and weapons, and both make it easier to beat the enemies you fight, which really opens up the market to a lot more people. Let’s hope Mass Effect 3 pulls it off – if they do, then it’s a brave new…cloudy world ahead of us.

My initial reaction was, “Wow. This is not a game for me.” I will freely admit that, in most situations, when I am faced with a difficult challenge, my first response is usually to start looking for ways around it. I’m not really that interested in beating myself against a challenge until I emerge victorious – I like a game where I feel like I know what I’m doing and I’m not just simply being punished for trying to get through it. The last game I really struggled to get all the way through was God of War – though a lot of that was simply me raging at the camera and the controls…especially on the part where you had to walk quickly across ceiling beams a hundred feet off the ground, while jumping to avoid sawblades that were spinning around and having to do all of this while the camera panned around, forcing you to adjust on-the-fly to keep from falling off. I must have died at least fifty times trying to get through this the one time I managed to play through the entire game, and I almost gave up a few times. (As an aside, when you make a game that is murderously difficult, and then you kill the player a few times, do NOT pop up a window saying, “Hey, you seem to be having trouble. You want to turn the difficulty down? Oh, hey, this only affects combat, not this puzzle I’ve been killing you with. But do you want to?” I still seethe a little remembering it.)

The point I’m making is that a lot of really difficult games are very, very off-putting to me. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a challenge, but most games are either universally on the easy side or universally on the hard side. It’s rare that you’ll find a game that has a difficulty curve where things can go from “easy” to “good grief” without pancaking you at the shift. However, I’ve managed to come across one in the last few weeks – SpaceChem. It was added into the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle that I’d bought, and I finally decided to download and install it after hearing that it was basically the Indie Jesus of games, come to save us from our sins. Hyperbole aside, I totally understand why a lot of people really, really enjoy this game – it’s a puzzle game where you have to take molecules and combine or break them apart to fulfill mission requirements. You’re using a very basic programming language, essentially, where you control two separate “waldos” on rails that you build, and these can pick up and move your molecules around. The trick is getting these programs written in a rather confined space, since you can’t move molecules through each other and every one of the 100 squares (10×10 grid) can only contain one command for each of the two Waldos…plus, if rails intersect, then the waldos will join up and loop back onto their rail, meaning that you spend a LOT of time optimizing your solutions until you can finally make it work. And then, you’re compared against everyone else, and you can see just how optimized your solution really was, and then go back and make changes if you want to improve your score.

I’m not quite halfway through the game, and the difficulty has already ramped up enough that I’m actually to a puzzle where I’m stumped…but it did it in such a gradual manner, and I’ve already had a few puzzles that were difficult to work out, so I’m sitting here right now thinking about ways I possibly could re-optimize my pattern and see what I can come up with. It’s rare that I find a game that challenges me so much but that still interests me so much, and the difficulty curve of the game is a large reason for it – gradual enough that the game totally hooked me before it then started punishing my mind, and challenging enough that I really do want to beat this game. Check it out if you haven’t yet – I do highly recommend it.

I just hope that I can figure out a way to translate that into games that I make in the future – whether they’re D&D campaigns or video games that I’m developing. I want people to feel challenged enough that they get a real sense of accomplishment when they finish a level, but not so challenged right off the bat that they go looking for something less difficult to play with. Definitely a balancing act, but the difficulty of finding it is just another challenge worth beating.

The system currently lets you ride a mount without any real penalties, but doesn’t give you any real ability to do so. You and your mount share an entire turn – one standard action, one move action, one minor action. What this means is that you usually just use your mount to move around, but otherwise fight as normal. This is a functional system, but there’s no improvement, at all. You can’t ever do any better than that. Plus, your mount attacks are all pretty lackluster, and if you get separated from it, it usually just sits around waiting for you. As it is, the system really feels like a cumbersome way to get a speed boost and maybe avoid falling prone every now and then.

So what do I suggest? I think the initial system that they have now is a good place to start. However, they should let you train past it – either by allowing you to buy training or feat for it. I’d probably lean more towards buying it with gold, because feats are valued differently by different classes – a fighter is often sitting there going “I don’t think I have enough feat slots to take all the feats I want to in the entire lifetime of my character,” while a bard may be sitting there going, “Well, I…guess I can take linguist for a third time? There are still a few languages I don’t know…” If you make it cost gold, then it’s a fixed value for all players, and you can balance the cost more effectively.

But what should you train? Well, that depends. It should probably be on a per-mount basis – if you learn how to control a horse, that doesn’t make you any better at controlling a giant scorpion, and what you learn is probably based on the mount itself. Maybe for a horse you can learn how to go at a faster rate, or learn how to improve your charges (maybe the horse makes a trample attack when you charge) while you’re mounted. Maybe a scorpion will allow you to have it make an attack every round as a minor action instead of a standard action, and maybe you unlock a more accurate / powerful attack just because you’re good at controlling it. I’d have to look a lot more at the mounts that were available, but it’s definitely something I’m interested at looking into. It could certainly add a lot of flavor, and actually make people want to spend the money on a mount, instead of simply pooling it all together and buying one or two magical items.