I think it's optimistic to call the storyline of Everquest 'non-linear'. I think 'non-existent' would be more fair.
Yeah, but it's also inflammatory and does nothing to progress a dialogue. Certainly you can complain about the amount of content but my point wasn't that EQ was content rich. It was that your statements that a game could be pure content without leveling (at least in some form) is false. EQ is non-linear. Overall you are not forced to go from Zone A to Zone B to Zone C. There may be some instances such as when you enter the zone containing a dungeon then move into the dungeon, but the overall design is that characters can go whichever direction they please.
I think equating the position within a storyline or set of levels of SMB, to a set of numbers associated with an EQ character is a mistake.
Certainly the two are not identical, but I think they are analogous. You can't take on the big Turtle Boss until you first defeat the big Goomba Boss. One could even make a claim that the areas that you have to transverse where there is either no puzzle to solve or else the puzzles are of a type the player has solved previously constitute 'grinding' and are simply there to pad out the game. I would not make such an argument however and would point out that just like any story has to have peaks and valleys a game has to have easier areas to help bring you back down a bit before the next big thing.
It is precisely EQ's lack of context given to its gameplay that is the problem. It isn't 'levelling' per se, it's that true progression in EQ requires takes place outside of any sort of story context.
In a single player RPG, character progression and story progression are fairly neck-and-neck. You level as a matter of course while experiencing the world. You dont experience some story, then go camp gnolls until you're ready for the next bit.
Actually I have played plenty of stand alone games where you are sometimes forced to go out and beat up on the random monsters just to level up a bit so you can undertake the next challenge. It is usually not to the degree that it's done in EQ however, so I think it is more an issue of balance than in having it occur at all.
In treadmill games, the context to progression is nonexistant, or too far behind character progression. Everquest requires repetition outside of the progressive context of the story, in order to unlock the next chapter.
The treadmill accusation isn't an indictment of levelling overall - because one could easily run into the same problems in a skill-based system. But rather a charge against levelling for the sake of levelling -- power gain for the sake of power gain.
Again, I think we are really somewhat on the same page here. It equates to balance. You would not be against the fact that leveling occurs or is even occasionally required. Your objection is that with weak storylines the main goal is to level and the storyline is only an afterthought.
The idea that a tangible reward at the end of play is required is another point of departure between us. My contention is that if the journey is good, the total enjoyment is enough of a reward. A player doesn't have to be given a pile of fake money or a bigger sword to validate the adventure of killing the dragon. He needs something to ensure that he's capable of meeting the next challenge - but the desire should be to meet the new challenge - not to get a widget that makes the current challenge easier.
Yes, if the journey is good then it is the reward in and of itself. However, this is notoriously tricky to do and rarely draws the same audience as a more traditional 'winning the prize' storyline. Look at the movies and see how many of them are about reaching and winning some objective (getting the girl, winning the race, defeating the Empire) and how many are simply about the journey (such as i
In addition to being a minority and a glutted market PvP is also about three times as hard to balance. People grumble that their wizard can't kill orcs as fast as a magician of the same level but watch them scream when their wizard keeps getting cacked by the same magician.
It doesn't occur to you that maybe he works in some other field at SOE other than marketting (professional PR shill) or is against Slashdot rules these days for people to take pride in what they do?
I mean really, is it unexpected that the people who work on EQ2 read games.slashdot.org? As for him being a legitimate commentator why isn't he? Because he identifies him self as being associated with Sony? So I suppose no one who actually works for a game company should ever post (since they will obviously have their own agendas). That sounds like an excellent way to make sure you have informed people giving commentary.
Everquest is the most popular MMO with US players. It in fact has about twice as many players as the next most popular MMO in the US, both in terms of accounts and in terms of unique logins per day.
As for the other games mentioned, in addition to being popular in Asia it is also important to understand that their account numbers are boosted by a very different market. Many accounts will be owned by Baangs (the local version of an internet cafe) which will make the playing populace seem much larger than it is. This isn't to say they are not big and popular games, simply that when you hear their numbers some adjustments need to be done.
But no other form of entertainment dares to subject their consumers to repetitive content just to slow them down. What author pads a novel with repetitive slag, just to ensure that speed readers don't finish in a day? What TV series pads its DVDs with timesinks to ensure that hardcore fans can't watch an entire season in a night? Is it really so awful if a subset of your fans finish?
Really? Watch nearly any network television series. Assuming they even have an overall story arc that continues through the season you will still have a variety of 'filler' shows that have nothing to do with advancement of the character or promotion of the storyline.
The reason for this is simple, when you buy a book or watch a movie the company gets all your money up front. They don't get any more money whether you go through all their content in a day, week, or a year. In fact, they get the same money even if you never go through their content. All they need to do is sell you the book. TV series on the other hand need to keep you watching in order to make money. They trickle out just enough 'content' (storyarc episodes) to keep you watching and then pad out the rest with filler.
Online games likewise need to keep people playing in order to survive. The majority of their money is made in their subscription (though they make far less than most people realize). Because of this they need methods to make players continue to remain in the game. MMOs are expensive to make. Because of the client/server code that has to be written, a world that has to be built that is significantly larger than the world of a stand alone game, the much tighter balancing that need to be done and the customer support that has to be provided MMOs are an order of magnitude more complex than stand alone games, with budgets to match.
Currently the cost to produce an MMO is somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million. If you spent that much designing a game that sold 400,000 units (which is a lot) and most players completed it during their first free month the end retail price of the product would be around $200 (manufacturers typically see around 1/4 of the retail cost of a game after it passes through manufacturing, distribution, and retail), and that will only break even. That won't turn a profit or cover the costs of other games that are partially completed before being cancelled.
This isn't, of course, to say that grinding is the only way to keep people interested. There are other ways to slow the consumption of content. What it is saying, however, is that your idea of simply letting people proceed through the content at a breakneck pace does not work for an MMO.
I would disagree. Games like Super Mario Brothers do not have statistics associated with the character and so do not have as clear a leveling concept as a game such as Everquest, however you are not able to start a completely new game of SMB, turn left and confront the final boss. You position within these games in very much akin to your level.
Unfortunately this does not generally work for games like Everquest where the basic storyline is non-linear.
Games by their nature have to give some form of reward. If they do not then people will grow bored and stop playing them. The leveling system of Everquest is the simplest but you could use a skill gains system similar to Sims Online or Starwars Galaxies or an item acquisition based system. In the end though people need to feel some form of forward progression or else they will soon stop playing.
Now this isn't to say that a game necessarily requires grinding. It is entirely possible to make a game in which a character is able to move from well written quest to well written quest all the way through their life until they reach the end of their character advancement, but as you have said creating that much content is problematic (read: expensive).
Boy, I'm torn between suggesting that unless you are actually an expert in a field you not make statements like this and being conciliatory and suggesting this is obscure knowledge. I'm going to just take the middle line and present the facts:
It's called the Burst Cutting Area. If you flip your DVD over you should notice it between the clear plastic ring in the center and the data area. Barcode data containing the serial number of the disk is written there in a separate step after the stamping process has occurred.
I believe that all DVDs have these (certainly all Divx disks did) so claiming it is not economically viable certainly is incorrect.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but it's also inflammatory and does nothing to progress a dialogue. Certainly you can complain about the amount of content but my point wasn't that EQ was content rich. It was that your statements that a game could be pure content without leveling (at least in some form) is false. EQ is non-linear. Overall you are not forced to go from Zone A to Zone B to Zone C. There may be some instances such as when you enter the zone containing a dungeon then move into the dungeon, but the overall design is that characters can go whichever direction they please.
Certainly the two are not identical, but I think they are analogous. You can't take on the big Turtle Boss until you first defeat the big Goomba Boss. One could even make a claim that the areas that you have to transverse where there is either no puzzle to solve or else the puzzles are of a type the player has solved previously constitute 'grinding' and are simply there to pad out the game. I would not make such an argument however and would point out that just like any story has to have peaks and valleys a game has to have easier areas to help bring you back down a bit before the next big thing.
Actually I have played plenty of stand alone games where you are sometimes forced to go out and beat up on the random monsters just to level up a bit so you can undertake the next challenge. It is usually not to the degree that it's done in EQ however, so I think it is more an issue of balance than in having it occur at all.
Again, I think we are really somewhat on the same page here. It equates to balance. You would not be against the fact that leveling occurs or is even occasionally required. Your objection is that with weak storylines the main goal is to level and the storyline is only an afterthought.
Yes, if the journey is good then it is the reward in and of itself. However, this is notoriously tricky to do and rarely draws the same audience as a more traditional 'winning the prize' storyline. Look at the movies and see how many of them are about reaching and winning some objective (getting the girl, winning the race, defeating the Empire) and how many are simply about the journey (such as i
In addition to being a minority and a glutted market PvP is also about three times as hard to balance. People grumble that their wizard can't kill orcs as fast as a magician of the same level but watch them scream when their wizard keeps getting cacked by the same magician.
I mean really, is it unexpected that the people who work on EQ2 read games.slashdot.org? As for him being a legitimate commentator why isn't he? Because he identifies him self as being associated with Sony? So I suppose no one who actually works for a game company should ever post (since they will obviously have their own agendas). That sounds like an excellent way to make sure you have informed people giving commentary.
As for the other games mentioned, in addition to being popular in Asia it is also important to understand that their account numbers are boosted by a very different market. Many accounts will be owned by Baangs (the local version of an internet cafe) which will make the playing populace seem much larger than it is. This isn't to say they are not big and popular games, simply that when you hear their numbers some adjustments need to be done.
Really? Watch nearly any network television series. Assuming they even have an overall story arc that continues through the season you will still have a variety of 'filler' shows that have nothing to do with advancement of the character or promotion of the storyline.
The reason for this is simple, when you buy a book or watch a movie the company gets all your money up front. They don't get any more money whether you go through all their content in a day, week, or a year. In fact, they get the same money even if you never go through their content. All they need to do is sell you the book. TV series on the other hand need to keep you watching in order to make money. They trickle out just enough 'content' (storyarc episodes) to keep you watching and then pad out the rest with filler.
Online games likewise need to keep people playing in order to survive. The majority of their money is made in their subscription (though they make far less than most people realize). Because of this they need methods to make players continue to remain in the game. MMOs are expensive to make. Because of the client/server code that has to be written, a world that has to be built that is significantly larger than the world of a stand alone game, the much tighter balancing that need to be done and the customer support that has to be provided MMOs are an order of magnitude more complex than stand alone games, with budgets to match.
Currently the cost to produce an MMO is somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million. If you spent that much designing a game that sold 400,000 units (which is a lot) and most players completed it during their first free month the end retail price of the product would be around $200 (manufacturers typically see around 1/4 of the retail cost of a game after it passes through manufacturing, distribution, and retail), and that will only break even. That won't turn a profit or cover the costs of other games that are partially completed before being cancelled.
This isn't, of course, to say that grinding is the only way to keep people interested. There are other ways to slow the consumption of content. What it is saying, however, is that your idea of simply letting people proceed through the content at a breakneck pace does not work for an MMO.
I would disagree. Games like Super Mario Brothers do not have statistics associated with the character and so do not have as clear a leveling concept as a game such as Everquest, however you are not able to start a completely new game of SMB, turn left and confront the final boss. You position within these games in very much akin to your level. Unfortunately this does not generally work for games like Everquest where the basic storyline is non-linear. Games by their nature have to give some form of reward. If they do not then people will grow bored and stop playing them. The leveling system of Everquest is the simplest but you could use a skill gains system similar to Sims Online or Starwars Galaxies or an item acquisition based system. In the end though people need to feel some form of forward progression or else they will soon stop playing. Now this isn't to say that a game necessarily requires grinding. It is entirely possible to make a game in which a character is able to move from well written quest to well written quest all the way through their life until they reach the end of their character advancement, but as you have said creating that much content is problematic (read: expensive).
It's called the Burst Cutting Area. If you flip your DVD over you should notice it between the clear plastic ring in the center and the data area. Barcode data containing the serial number of the disk is written there in a separate step after the stamping process has occurred. I believe that all DVDs have these (certainly all Divx disks did) so claiming it is not economically viable certainly is incorrect.