I hate dailies. My tolerance for the extends exactly as far as is required for me to access whatever content I’d like to get into and basically no further. It’s the fastest way for me to burn out on a game. The obligation to log in every day and do [whatever] loses me instantly.

At the same time, I understand the need to pace out progression in some sane way. FFXIV has a great system in its daily leve allowances, and I wish that would extend to other things. Let me run a week’s worth of expert roulette on Saturday, rather than needing to log in every single day to max out my currency income.

I haven’t logged in much to FFXIV this week because I’d been grinding every day to reach i170 on my Summoner. I know I can get higher than that, but it’s just not enticing to me. I’ve come to lack the overriding desire to make all of my numbers as high as possible, I’m more than happy with “high enough”, because there’s other stuff I want to do. I appreciate how lightweight the Law grind was in FF, especially right after the levelling process, but I’m not terribly motivated to jump right back into it to chase the gear treadmill a little further, especially because I know my current state is sufficient for what I’m doing and, furthermore, the investment required to move forward to the current “best” tier will drop here relatively shortly. I’ve chased the cutting edge of content before, and I don’t have the interest in doing it again that would motivate me to grind dungeons until I achieve the absolute best [numbers] I possibly can.

What motivates me is interesting new stuff to do. I am, at my core, an Explorer-type, though I don’t fall into the category of Explorer that people tend to think of. Wandering around geography isn’t interesting to me; I want to explore the story and the gameworld and see how everything plays out. I don’t care about finding the secret hidden treasure chest in a cave on a mountainside, but I will jump through nearly any hoops to get all of the possible endings to something. I’ve only played one Kingdom Hearts game, but I did get the ‘true’ ending for it, and I played through enough Chrono Trigger to see every way that game ends (it’s a lot).

Exploration for its own sake doesn’t interest me– I want something to find. In the same vein, progression for its own sake rarely excites me: I want to be progressing in order to see something I haven’t previously seen. It’s something I miss from older MMOs– current games want to make sure you don’t miss anything, so there’s rarely anything to find by wandering off the beaten path. You might get some cool screenshots or something (which other people really love, and I appreciate, but don’t care to chase after for myself), but by and large you’re not going to find anything meaningful at the top of that mountain if the game didn’t expressly tell you to go there.

It was my biggest disappointment with Wildstar– for all it claimed to encourage exploration, I still felt like it was taking me on hikes along well-trodden paths, not rewarding me for forging across the wilderness. The coolest part of the Explorer subclass was finding hidden quest areas that weren’t apparent to other people, but they felt thin; I didn’t really find exciting stuff in there, just a challenge and maybe a single quick quest. It wasn’t the life-changing revolution that was expected.

That being said, I continue to feel like we’re on the cusp of a big sea change in MMOs, but of the various directions it could go, I’m not sure yet which one I think is likely. I hope we get away from games and back towards experiences that feel like worlds. I find I miss the sense of being a denizen of a vast digital world, versus a player in a multiplayer game. The difference is, as always, progression. In worlds, you can make progress in a variety of ways and they’ll all benefit you. In games, if you’re not spending your time progressing in one of a relatively set number of ways, you’re kind of wasting your time. I miss feeling like I could spend my time doing whatever and still be productive.

Good translation makes a huge difference. Honestly, it can make or break the experience, and it’s genuinely hard to do.

I picked up Hollow Fragment a few months back on the Vita. It was a really, really interesting game mechanically set in a world that I find really compelling. I can’t talk much about the story because if you haven’t seen any of SAO it drops enormous spoilers within the first five minutes or so of the game, but the game’s concept is a sort of extended “what-if” sequence, which is really interesting and something I haven’t seen in game tie-ins.

I put a solid 15-20 hours into the game before quitting– as much as I loved the gameplay, the translation for the Vita version was atrocious, so much so that I didn’t really have a clear picture as to what I was doing wrong in particular sections nor did I have any idea what was happening in the story. I was fighting exceptionally difficult enemies and dying frequently, and didn’t have a lot of intelligible feedback on what I could do to improve. At the same time, the dialogue was garbled to the point of being incomprehensible, so I could get a vague emotional tone but very little else. It made it difficult to figure out where to go and what to do.

Don’t do this.

Loading up the new (retranslated) PS4 version was stark. I had a clear picture of what was going on almost immediately, and I suddenly understood how a bunch of game mechanics worked before even leaving the tutorial. One of the big things that the retranslated version did was clarify how the game is structured. There are two separate areas that you can progress through, and it wasn’t clear to me which the right one was. On the Vita, I had this helpful hint:

“For ready players, advance through floors of Aincrad. If still collecting loot and exp, try the Hollow Area.”

Based on that, I jumped into the Hollow Area straightaway. Why not collect loot and exp until I feel “ready”? The PS4 version translates that line a little differently:

“If you’re still getting used to the game, try some of the early floors of Aincrad. If you’re an advanced player and want to test your skill and get rewarded with loot and lots of exp, try the Hollow Area.”

SLIGHTLY different. It explained why I was getting pummeled in my entire Vita playthrough– I was basically trying to advance through the special advanced bonus dungeon right from the start. This playthrough, I started playing through the ‘appropriate’ sections first, and wound up basically crushing my way through the first few sections, largely thanks to the skills I’d honed fighting things way out of my weight class on the Vita.

What I’ve discovered is that the game is much, much more nuanced than I’d realized, mechanically. I can’t talk much about the story, but it does a really good job of interspersing the ensemble cast and keeping all of the characters at the forefront (which the show didn’t do quite as much) and keeping the story relevant– there are a ton of events that occur in between going out and beating up monsters, but you can spend quite a bit of time just doing that if you like, and you have a ton of characters you can level up.

Because the game drops you in the middle of the action, you start at a pretty advanced level with quite a few skills and resources– it’s a little odd to start a game at level 97, but it works pretty well in this context. You’ve got enough abilities to start to make things interesting and you can slowly explore them, but because you’re so overleveled for the starting point (a thematic staple of the series), you can ease into things. It also doesn’t waste any time with introducing things you’ve already covered in the series– the only catch-up it does is letting you know how the game diverges. This probably isn’t great for anyone who hasn’t seen the series, but it’s kind of an obscure title to pick up if you haven’t watched Sword Art Online. Cutting to the chase as far as establishing story and characters lets them get detailed and personal with interactions very quickly, as well as occasionally very silly.

Overall, I’m having a lot of fun with it, especially with a translation that lets me make sense of the story. Because the game’s story diverges hugely from a major plot point in the series, I’m interested to see where they go with things. I like the idea of the game building out into conceptual space rather than simply retreading the ground covered by the series, and I’d like to see more of that in game tie-ins. It makes me think of KOTOR, which created a whole new space for Star Wars that’s proven to be incredibly fertile ground.

If something provides value, it’s worth paying for. I’ve talked before about follow-the-money problems, and one of the key things to remember is that nothing is free to create. If you’re not paying any money for something, there’s a reason. If something costs more than you think it should, it’s worth looking into why that is. Sometimes there’s a very good reason.

Possibly it’s cynical, but TANSTAAFL is one of those resonant concepts for me. It stands for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”, and comes from Heinlein, as a sci-fi slang word. If you’re getting something for free, it’s because the cost is being taken from somewhere other than your wallet. Sometimes it’s some other obligation you have (buying lunch next time), sometimes it’s some other inconvenience (sitting through ads), sometimes it’s coming out of someone else’s wallet. The one that always gets me is “free to play” games. Yep, you can absolutely install and play in some capacity for free. Pretty much every monetization effectiveness study out there shows that players who do actually pay money wind up paying rather more on average in a free-to-play game than in an equivalent game that uses a box sale, or a subscription, or what have you.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are a ton of creators who sell their goods for a pittance, way less than they’re worth, and that skews the system rather badly. The rise of predatory free-to-play games came from the slew of early indie game devs who gave their work out for free just for “exposure”, and you can see the same kind of thing in other creative industries. By undercharging for a good or service, the overall availability and quality of that good or service drops– people who paint minis for a dollar or two per model work out to usually less than a dollar an hour of work, making professional services that charge a more reasonable amount (even at a minimum wage of $7.50/hour, an individual mini can take 2-5 hours of work; $15-30/mini is entirely reasonable, cost-wise) look outrageous by comparison.

I’d actually be interested in chasing down studies on how the hobbyist market that’s arisen in the last 5-10 years impacts traditional economics models– I suspect it’s incredibly disruptive to the usual models and throws everything off. It’s certainly the case with a lot of creative industries where independent creators can get a foothold– the increased volatility and wildly changing pricing schemes for video games showcases that quite nicely, even as hobbyist shop centers like Etsy put items on the market that probably wouldn’t have existed before.

We’ve shifted from a society where value is dictated by the seller to one where value is negotiable, like the barter systems of old. It creates a situation where value is a moving target, and different people put different values on things. At the same time, we’re so accustomed to the idea of “fairness” that the idea of different people being charged differently based on how much they value the good or service is anathema. The idea that one person might play a video game for five dollars while someone else pays a hundred to play it at the same time would make a lot of people angry, but it’s a reality of the negotiable value proposition. The only difference is we’re very good at masking it– we look at games that are “free”, but behind the scenes people are looking at the ‘whales’ and seeing how best to keep them around. Who is willing to pay more for something and how are they convinced to stick around?

We can’t have it both ways, though. If you’re willing to accept that you can talk a price down when commissioning an artist, you have to be willing to accept that a chef might talk your meal price up for your favorite dish. In the meantime, if you’ve gotten some fun out of a game that you didn’t pay for, kick a few bucks to the developers. Try to pay what something is worth to you, not just the cheapest amount you can get away with. It’ll make the stuff you’re able to get that much better in the long run.

We talked about Astebreed over the weekend on the podcast, but as per usual I wanted to put a few more thoughts here.

I’m awful at memorizing things, which I’ve talked about a bit before. It’s kept me out of a lot of bullet hell shooters, because those are entire games around memorizing patterns and executing the right evasive maneuvers to match the patterns. I don’t really have the patience or interest to play the same level tens or hundreds of times just to get the pattern down. I like Astebreed because, for the most part, it lets me come up with my own solutions for each boss pattern without forcing me to memorize a specific set of “the right” moves.

Playing Astebreed, however, got me thinking about raid bosses in MMOs. They’re often pattern-driven, and almost always require that I memorize the associated attacks and the appropriate (highly specific) reactions to them. I like them, though, whereas I tend not to like the memorization-heavy bullet hell genre. The conceptual gap there bothered me, and I’ve spent a few days mulling over why I like one but not the other.

The two obvious answers are that MMOs involve other people and that they also are much less demanding and punitive than bullet hell shooters. Both of these lessen the impact, but don’t change the core concept. That being said, there are a lot of things where I don’t like the ‘pure’ version but dearly love the dilutions– the JRPG is a really good example of this. Similarly, I never really liked Forza, but I enjoy both Burnout and Mariokart, both pretty heavy dilutions of the racing mechanic. Having other people playing along with me also makes the experience more fun, because I’m both able to help out my friends and get help from their cues– it isn’t always a binary fail state, and the experience itself is shared.

Another angle I looked at it from is my own approach to the game vis a vis classes. Avoiding deadly attack patterns is only half the boss fight; the other half is actually fighting the boss. I tend to play healers and specific types of damage classes. In the former case, there’s no set rotation; I’m reacting to the fight on the fly and (ideally) proactively inserting abilities as the situation changes. In the latter case, I tend to avoid rotation-based classes in favor of ones that focus more on reacting to the situation. A lot of my favorite classes have been ones that lean on situational adaptation (often priority systems) rather than straight rotations.

Astebreed also separates itself from other shooters I’ve played by focusing a lot more on offense than evasion. I’ve played a number of games where evasion is the key (Touhou, Ikaruga, etc) and where actually attacking enemies is something you kind of do on the side in between avoiding shots. In some cases, the primary attack is simply always on, further emphasizing how incidental actually attacking is. It’s not something I like a lot, even in the other bullet hell shooter I’ve played recently– Sine Mora. Sine Mora is a Vita title that gives you a slow time effect, letting you slow everything down while moving at the same rate. It’s great for getting out of tight places or figuring out how to evade, and let me get away with less memorization throughout the game (probably why I beat it), but it didn’t really let me focus on offense over defense the way I like.

I’ll admit I’m tempted to pick up Astebreed on PS4 despite playing it already– a lot of my frustration with the game (as you likely heard or will hear in the podcast) was from a feeling that I was fighting the controls. Without that, I probably would have done a lot better, and there’s likely a whole rant about intuitive control schemes with the PC version of Astebreed as a catalyst, but that’s not for today.

Hope you enjoyed the podcast! At some point today the PS4 release of Sword Art Online: RE: Hollow Fragment is dropping, which I’m really excited about. I talked about it a bit before, as I played the Vita version, but honestly the retranslation is a huge draw for me. We’ll see!

I love good craftsmanship. I have a deep appreciation for things that are made well, with skill and attention and care by their creators. It can be anything, from games to carpentry to drinks. I particularly like it when I can see the craft at work, and appreciate it in progress.

I don’t drink beer, and only occasionally drink wine. I know there’s often a lot of craftsmanship that goes into both, but I don’t get to *see* it. What I like are cocktails, where I can watch the bartender put them together and where each one, even if I’ve ordered the same thing, has a different twist based on who’s made it and with what. For me it’s not even about the liquor, it’s the huge spectrum of interesting flavors and mixes that really make the experience for me. If there existed a place I could go and get interesting mixed drinks sans alcohol, I’d go there all the time.

This weekend was the last weekend my favorite bartender at a local bar will be around, and I’m going to miss him quite a lot. In more than six months, I never had the same drink twice from him, and he would consistently come up with interesting, creative drinks that both perfectly hit my favorite tastes and pushed the boundaries of my comfort zone. I have an appreciation for flavors I couldn’t even name previously, and each drink would come with a history and a story– this is a drink that was popular in the ’40s, this drink was originally made in this place in the late ’90s, this drink can only be made this specific way, this drink used to be made with this liquor but it’s changed since then… all kinds of interesting tidbits. The craft wasn’t just in the drinks, but in the presentation and the delivery. I would rather pay $12 for a drink that I remember than $4 each for three forgettable alcohol-and-sodas. If it takes ages to make (like a Ramos Gin Fizz, don’t ever order one of these from a bartender who you aren’t 100% sure likes you), I’m happy to wait, because it means I’m going to get something finely crafted.

In a lot of ways, the same is true for games for me. I’ve spent enough time building them myself to have a sense for when the developer is ghosting alongside me while I play, grinning and pointing at the next cool thing around the corner. The really well-crafted games are excited to show you the next thing around the corner, and when there’s a pause in the pacing or a period where I’m waiting, I know that it’s because really finely made things take time. I’ve played games that lack this spark, where slow pacing or a drawn-out wait are an obvious way of extending a game that’s rationing out its cool stuff. It’s easy to dismiss a carefully-paced-but-slow segment as an intentional time-waster, but you can tell the differences.

Take KOTOR. Knights of the Old Republic is one of the best RPGs out there, particularly for its time, and was a fantastically well-loved Star Wars game. It deserves a lot of the credit for rekindling the franchise during a lull. It starts with what many people have criticized as an overly long, drawn-out planet sequence, before you get to “the good stuff”, flying around from planet to planet lightsabering people. What I think is easy to miss is how absolutely chock-full of content that first planet is. Taris is a busy place, with a lot of stuff going on, and that time you spend on the ground, getting a feel for the characters and the “normal” game makes it all the sweeter when you’re not grounded and have the awesome Jedi powers that (spoilers) you get to have later on. “Just wait,” KOTOR says, “we’re setting up some awesome stuff for you but you’ve got to see this to really get it.”

FFXIV is very much the same for me. Sure, I have to wait between content patches, and a lot of what there is to do in the interim is slowly work on getting incrementally better gear, but the next content they’re going to drop is almost certainly going to be amazing, and well worth the wait. It’s a game where I can take it slowly and enjoy myself OR push the line and grind out the best of the best, and in either case get to enjoy the really great content that’s coming up next. It will all still be around, and it will all still be relevant. Heavensward would have had nowhere near the impact if I hadn’t played through all of the main story content, and while some people have raged against the need to play through the main story to access Heavensward content, the game would be poorer for skipping you past that considered, crafted wait.

I feel like in FFXIV, as in KOTOR, there’s a designer ghosting alongside me, excited to show me the next cool thing as soon as it’s ready. It’s like a really great bartender, flitting around the bar and pulling liquors and bitters and mixes out, grinning to himself and nodding as he takes tastes of what he’s making for you, then setting it down in front of you, assured that good work has been done and that it’s there for you to enjoy.

I love the effort and the craftsmanship, and I don’t think I’d want to rush it. The wait makes the experience really sing, and gives me pause to appreciate the work.

I’m awful at memorizing things. Anything requiring rote memorization was always the worst for me. My mind wants fundamentals that I can work out a solution to on the fly, not a preset pattern that I need to simply know.

So, I’m working on teaching myself Japanese. I have two syllabaries (Hiragana and Katakana), each larger than the English alphabet, and a few thousand Kanji to memorize. There’s nothing more fundamental to work with here; these are the fundamentals that I’m going to build the rest of my understanding of the language on. On top of that, the entire structure of the language is different from what I’m used to, so these fundamentals are really important.

At the same time, I’m learning how to parse sentences using Rosetta Stone. If you’re not familiar with how the software works, it uses spoken and written dialogue paired with images to slowly build understanding by forcing you to intuitively understand the differences between one dialogue/image pair and another. Rather than explaining directly how to, say, express a plural noun, it simply shows you two pictures and reads off two sentences, and the differences between the sentences are how you form understanding. It’s described as a very natural learning environment, “how babies learn”, and I’m inclined to agree. It works very well at a very basic level, and it does so without using English as a go-between language.

The first three images give me enough context to figure out the appropriate sentence for the fourth.

For me, it’s the ideal way of learning a new language. By forcing myself to separate from English, I have to go from concept to Japanese word, rather than mentally translating. Rather than using English as a go-between, I’m using my own intuition, and it’s surprisingly effective. I can’t really explain grammar rules yet, certainly not in English, but I can make sense of some sentences and I’m working on building my vocabulary to the point where I can communicate reasonably.

The whole experience parallels FFXIV for me in a number of ways. I’ve never been good with rotation-based classes, where I memorize what moves I use in what order and work on executing that string precisely and effectively. I play a Summoner, and I couldn’t tell you beyond broad guidelines what I’m doing at any given moment. I push out a ton of damage, but I intuitively understand what I need to do and when things need to happen– there’s no counting in my head or working out a set ability order, it’s all done by feel. On the other hand, I’ve memorized a lot of the fundamentals– my cast times, my ability ranges, my cooldowns, and these form the building blocks for my intuition to kick in. Thinking back, it’s also how I approached math in school. Formulae made more sense to me when I could derive them in ways that made sense to me, but I was never good with the ones that I had to “just memorize”. It makes me want to track back the things that I’ve struggled with learning in the past.

Kind of a scattered post today, but I’ve been interested in how much more effective my attempts at learning Japanese have been in a week or so than my (many, many) attempts at learning Spanish. My mom would roll her eyes if she read this.

One of the weirder / more frustrating parts of being a game designer is being in the position of seeing things that other people don’t. You have to be thinking ahead of the people who might play your game, and your ideas have to reflect the ‘final’ game, not necessarily bits and pieces of them. It’s weird because it means you have to think about what people might want to play well ahead of them actually knowing they want to play it, and ‘people’ in this case includes yourself. It’s frustrating because that foresight represents vision, and it’s hard to get people to see your vision clearly.

It’s often the case that you’ll hear that an idea “will never work” simply because there isn’t a example of it in the wild. In this case, seeing is believing, and until you prove the concept by actually putting it in front of someone to play, they won’t believe you if you tell them how it works.

As an example: take any single mechanic in a vacuum and it can be made fun. Even the most reviled, most hated game mechanics can be fun when applied correctly and implemented properly. You hate hotbar combat? I guess you don’t like KOTOR or Dragon Age. Refuse to play ‘mindless’ shooters? Mass Effect, Portal, and Thief say hi. Can’t stand real-time strategy? Played the Sims or any tower defense game recently? There aren’t bad mechanics, there are just bad implementations. You can combine mechanics in a way that simply don’t work, but a single function isn’t ‘bad’ on its own.

The above having been said: I talked the other day about how much I hate levels, and how I’d want to see a game that does away with them as a hard-locking progression mechanic. A few people I know had the automatic twitch– that “but how will I know I’m more awesome?” response. I want to break that response down a bit, because it’s important to see the parts that go into it. You’ve got a bar, that slowly fills, that tells you how close you are to an arbitrary milestone. You perform activities that fill that bar. The bar usually lights up or noticeably moves when you fill it, and if you get a big chunk of the bar at once (say, by completing a quest), you get a little audio cue. Guild Wars 2 has a TON of ways to fill that bar up, and they let you know by making blatantly obvious sparkles travel from the middle of your screen into that bar to fill it up a little bit, regardless of what you do. FFXIV shows you an arbitrarily large number, starting in the hundreds and going up to the tens of thousands, and plays a familiar bit of music when you complete a quest, or FATE, or levequest and get a chunk of exp. Dungeons show you a fanfare at the end, corresponding to the time at which you get your big chunk of experience. When that bar fills up, you get another cool particle effect, a bit of music, and a new, empty bar. Have you ever looked closely at your exp bar in FFXIV right as you level? It goes from nearly full to empty in a single frame, with absolutely no fanfare at all as the rest of the screen lights up. It’s doing that to take your attention away from it, so you don’t notice that your full bar is now empty until you’ve enjoyed your music and effects.

Turn off all of the music, all of the flashy sparkle effects, and the other HEY LOOK OVER HERE messaging that’s tied to experience gain and levelling, and I guarantee you won’t notice when you level up. Don’t believe me? Talk to someone who played EQ in the early beta/alpha. The loud gong sound, that sound that was so memorable that it’s become the well-known “ding” through game after game despite not actually sounding like that, didn’t exist. It was added a bit later, because players weren’t noticing when they levelled up, and didn’t feel like they were progressing, even when in some cases they had made it through several levels in one sitting and only realized what was up when the mobs they’d been fighting seemed a lot easier, somehow, and were barely worth any experience.

When designing games, that messaging goes wherever you need it to, to guide people to play the game the way you want them to play it. It’s way more effective than telling them how they should play, just make the sparkly things and cool music and sounds play when they do what you want. It’s why Guild Wars 2 gives you sparkles flying across your screen every time you explore, or why Wildstar gives you voiceovers letting you know when a challenge is starting. Those challenges are meant to slow you down, to get you to spend more time in areas that you otherwise might overlook or blast through while you’re levelling. Quests are placed to push you through challenge locations, and when you enter one and start it, it’s suitably distracting such that you spend some time being a little bit inefficient. The cues are hyper-effective, but they’re placed with a purpose and with intent.

I’ve described, a few times, the shape of a game that doesn’t use levels. As you progress through the game, you’d get more options, and more options means you’re more powerful, but you’d be hard pressed (or simply not allowed) to use all of those options at the same time. You have a breadth of skills but can only bring a limited number to bear at a given time. I’ll break down a little bit what I’m talking about:

• Abilities, stat points, and passives are all tied to skill trees. These progress as you use them, unlocking more stuff as they progress.
  • This takes the place of “traditional” levelling; these skill trees would unlock new abilities and make you more powerful.
  • These skill trees would be much flatter than traditional levels– a person with a complete skill tree might have a lot more ability options than someone without any skill in that tree, but isn’t going to be more than marginally more powerful.
• Skill trees must be “slotted” in order to use, and characters have a limited number of slots to equip skill trees.
• Slots can be increased through completing skill trees, allowing you to slot more skill trees and have more abilities at your disposal.
  • If we really want to, we can tie this to a meta-tracking system that might as well be “character level”, but it wouldn’t have any bearing on raw power, it would just be representative of how many skill trees and how many unlocks a given character has. It’s a useful measure, but for practical purposes a level 50 character could run around with a level 5 character with the same skill tree equipped and be roughly equivalent in power.
  • A more progressed, more powerful character can do more things, but isn’t going to simply be better than another character that might have the same skill trees slotted.

There’s a little fanfare every time you progress the tree you’re currently working on, just like levelling up, but even if you’ve been playing for a week and have a handle on a particular important skill tree, there’s nothing stopping you from hopping in with your friend who’s been playing for a year, provided you’ve got access to the skills that complement theirs.

EvE uses a system like this extremely effectively. A player who’s been playing for years might be adept at piloting powerful capital ships, but a giant capital ship can’t effectively fight small fighter ships. New players can pick up fighter pilot skills very quickly, and within a very short period of time can join a years-progressed player as a light fighter and play a meaningful role– one that the capital ship pilot simply can’t perform at the same time, despite their years of progression.

We retain the progression and its fanfare, but we reconfigure the actual mechanics of progression to be friendlier to players who have played differing amounts of time, allowing them to play together and retaining all of the satisfying parts of levelling without the segregating parts.

What makes a system like this interesting is the limitation on what you can have slotted. Even a fully progressed player can’t do everything at once, even if they have every skill tree in the game maxed out, so from this you have character builds that emerge. Here is where the beauty of this sort of skill system becomes apparent. Mixing and matching trees becomes an optimization game, but it’s entirely possible to have the environment itself react to how players are attacking it. If it’s determined that raw offense is effective against orcs, orcs will start wearing heavier armor and shields. If goblins are being attacked singly, over time they’ll call for help sooner and over a wider radius. If ogres are attacked by groups, they’ll start using AoE attacks. All of these things are well within the technical means we have at our disposal, and furthermore are really easy to message. It breaks the paradigm of “the best build” because a build that is particularly excellent will slowly have the environment work against it, until other builds emerge on top. Rather than trying for the madness of perfect balance, you create a constantly shifting environment which makes both standard encounters more interesting every time you do them and continually moves the goalposts for what constitutes an “optimal build”.

We can use that levelling-inspired sparkle and fanfare here as well. Persona games give you some great messaging when you use an attack that an enemy is weak to– there’s a special effect when they’re hit and they’re briefly stunned. If all of the enemies in an encounter are stunned, you get the chance to unleash a really powerful full-group attack. There’s no real reason that sort of thing couldn’t work in an MMO, where your encounters operate like little puzzles and you try to hit enemy weak points with particular types of attacks, then finish everything off with a big super move. FFXIV’s Limit Break is an incredibly fun button to press, and it’s not something we get to hit terribly often. That kind of mechanic could easily get stolen for this sort of thing, unlocking a powerful attack based on weakening enemies.

The problem that comes in here is one of inputs. To have enough different attacks to make for an interesting byplay between enemy weaknesses, you need a LOT of abilities at your disposal, and your standard hotbars stop being sufficient. You need some better way of accessing a wide repertoire of abilities based on your equipped skill trees, and doing so very quickly and efficiently, as well as chaining them together intuitively. I don’t know what that kind of input looks like, short of having a game console plugged directly into your brain. There’s some possibility of a Magicka-like system, where spells are formed from a selection of possible inputs that you string together, and similarly melee attacks could be a series of directional attacks chained together into combos, but that quickly becomes a lot of memorization. There’s enough combat in an MMO that perhaps that’s okay; you’d learn your favored abilities through frequent use, but it’s a relatively complex system to try to implement.

These are half-baked ideas, formed enough to paint an impression of the kind of game that you could play where levels aren’t the ball and chain they are elsewhere, but hopefully it makes the outline of a picture that makes sense. A lot of times, designing a game means starting with a very rough sketch and establishing the edges and main shapes, then filling in the rest as you go, and sometimes redrawing details as you determine if they will or won’t work.

The goal here is a system where just because I’ve been playing longer than you have doesn’t mean you can’t join me meaningfully, ideally done without a blatantly artificial “level-balancing” system that just inflates your stats but doesn’t actually give you anything more to contribute. Mentoring/sidekicking is a good stopgap solution, but all it does is paint over a problem that doesn’t need to exist in the first place. Everything else is a matter of figuring out where to put the sparkles and fun music.

I really love FFXIV, and I’ve gushed over it quite a few times in this blog. What I am right now is frustrated with it, and while I’m going to talk for a while about why, I want to point out that it only slightly diminishes my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent game.

We’ve been playing the expansion for a few weeks now, and people fall into one of three categories: finished levelling, still levelling, or not yet in the expansion. The gaps in all of these are tied heavily with level, and to some extent, the amount of story content they’ve been able to complete. What frustrates me is that in a game that has done so much excellent work to help friends play alongside one another to the benefit of everyone involved, it has thrown a lot of that out the window for the expansion. We return to levels as a hard barrier to playing together, and the number of times I’ve seen people lament that they can’t join– despite playing the right role or being ready, willing, and capable of joining a group– simply because they aren’t the right level has been maddening.

I’ve seen and heard frustration from nearly everyone I play with on a regular basis– they can’t join a group or can’t fill a particular need because they’re held back by levels. I’ve watched people sigh and frustratedly grind, draining the fun from the game for them, simply to “catch up”, and I’ve seen a number of people try to branch out and try something new and exciting with the expansion content only to lament that they “fell behind”.

In the meantime, what is a level? Is it that meaningful that I’ve gone from level 52 to 53? 17 to 18? 59 to 60? Other than displaying an incrementally higher number next to my name, what am I *actually* getting from levelling up, other than some satisfying music and particle effects? I’m occasionally getting a new ability (except all of the abilities in Heavensward are quest-linked, and could easily be unlocked with story progress rather than levels), I’m getting a stat point every few levels (except the stat allocations are mindless for every class in the game save one, and the one where it isn’t mindless is considered a mistake by the devs that they’ve talked about wanting to fix), my spells go up in MP cost (hooray!), and I can, every so often, go into a new zone (except this, too, is linked to the main story quests).

What I feel like I get every time I level up is either a widening gap between myself and my friends, or a small bit of relief that I’m catching up to my friends. Often it’s both, as I leave some friends behind and catch up with others. Other than the knowledge that eventually the levelling process ends and the little fanfare and particle effects stop being a bittersweet trigger, levelling is a net neutral experience, other than the questionable joy of making a single, questionably significant number slightly larger.

I get the desire for progression. Opponents of level-less systems say that you can’t make people feel like they’re progressing if they don’t have a single, nice, clear indicator that they’ve become more awesome. I think we’ve long outstripped that in MMOs; levelling isn’t progression anymore, it’s either the game you’re playing until you reach max level and have nothing else to do, or it’s the chores you have to do before you really get to enjoy the game. What makes me love FFXIV is that the main storyline quests continue throughout the levelling process and into the ‘endgame’, the max-level content, giving me the distinct feeling that the main form of progression for me is through the story. I want to get better gear and progress further so that I can see more of the game’s story when it becomes available. However, the levels still block me from playing with my friends.

Every little happy tingle I get at seeing the level-up fanfare is countered by looking at a friend who I can’t play alongside, or who feels like they’re bringing the group down, or who looks at an apparently insurmountable hill to climb, who skips the story so they can catch up faster and doesn’t really get attached to it or who jumps into story instances with strangers who won’t wait for them to see the story just so they can catch up faster. I’ve reached the point where I no longer care what reasons people might have for enjoying levels, I’m tired of being forced to mediate between the people with a singular focus and (sometimes) copious free time and the people with less free time or a desire to explore and have fun, because they’re all at different points in the levelling process. I’m lucky to have a guild that’s incredibly understanding and patient, and even more painfully aware that that isn’t the norm. I’ve seen my own guildies panicking because they don’t think they can catch up in time, because they had the unmitigated gall to do something else for a day or so some weekend. I hate watching the frustration and the stress.

The game that keeps players is the game that makes it easy for friends to play with one another, and among a variety of other things, MMOs have been trapped in the past on this one, blocking friends from playing with each other for the convenience of a simple number to denote power. Levels make people feel bad for gaining them too quickly, or too slowly, or at the wrong times. They separate and demoralize and incur stress, and I’m painfully aware that when they’re fun for me, it’s at the expense of other people around me, because me getting ahead drains the fun from others who aren’t ahead and who now need to catch up.

I want those walls torn down. I want to be able to play my games without worrying if I’m behind, or if me playing is going to stress out my friends who are going to feel left behind. I’m tired of levels as a meaningless marker of ‘progress’, and an artificial gate to me having fun with friends.

We’re back! Thanks for putting up with my week off; I’m feeling a lot better and more functional now.

I had a discussion with a friend recently about games as a social outlet. She had some trouble wrapping her mind around the concept of a video game being a social event; she viewed them as largely solitary activities. The idea that you might meet someone through the internet and have that feel “real” was confusing, because (as she put it), “In the end, you’re just interacting with your keyboard and computer screen.”

There’s a layer of abstraction that I think we often take for granted and is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t see it. To connect with someone through a game online, you have to view your game avatar as an extension of yourself, and other people’s avatars as themselves– the sprites or pixels you’re seeing on the screen are not only representative of actual people, but the act of moving the mouse or pressing keys is just the background noise for what you’re REALLY doing– interacting with those people.

I used a couple of examples to illustrate the kind of thing I was talking about to my friend. The first was straightforward– a game of catch. I tossed her a frisbee and she, intuitively understanding the game, tossed it back. I asked her why she did that, and how she was thinking about throwing the frisbee. Specifically, I wanted to know what she thought she was interacting with– the frisbee, her own hands, or me. I got a laugh and a “you, obviously”, and pointed out that she didn’t interact with me at all– she used her hands to throw the frisbee at a shape she was looking at that she identified as me. She made the jump pretty quickly about the difference between, essentially, user interface (hands, frisbee) and the game itself (playing catch with me).

From there, everything else is just layers, and it’s a pretty quick jump to a game like Mariokart (where you’re shouting at the people on the couch next to you) to an MMO (where you’re typing in chat or chatting over VoIP). Having gotten the connection, she had a followup question that I found insightful: “How do you know who to play with?”

It’s an interesting question, and one I have a hard time adequately answering for myself. A lot of MMOs have group search functions, like FFXIV’s Duty Finder or WoW’s dungeon queues, but I think it’s hard to make a solid argument that those are necessarily social experiences; you often don’t exchange a single word with the people you’re with, and it’s rare to see them after the run. I have my guild/free company mates, who’ve been slowly (for certain definitions of ‘slowly’) recruited over time and who form the core social circle I operate in. Other than seeking out a guild, however, I don’t know how you find a group like mine. There’s also the friends I know personally, the ones I’ve spent time in realspace with, who might be separated geographically but with whom I can still play games. I can’t always play with them, though, because we’re not always playing the same games or even necessarily caught up with one another if we are in the same game.

In the meantime, I’ve watched a number of my friends get into social mobile games, exchanging currencies and helping each other out in a variety of similar-looking-to-me titles. I heard a story recently about a couple who met playing Ingress, because they happened to keep showing up to the same place to score points or capture the location (I’m not really sure how Ingress is played). It makes me wonder if, done right, mobile games could be the new MMOs, bringing disparate people together who otherwise might not meet.

For me, the real appeal to video games is the social outlet– while I play a decent number of singleplayer games, a lot of my motivation to do so is anchored in wanting to talk to other people about them. One of the fondest memories I have is sitting and playing Chrono Trigger with my sister on the couch next to me, asking me questions about the story and what I was doing, and inserting her own thoughts on the matter. It turned a singleplayer game into a social experience, and I’ve talked about games with my friends ever since (and, indeed, have picked up games I would never have played otherwise because people I knew were playing them and would have stuff to say).

I think that a lot of modern games have pushed the social aspects aside to some extent, going for more convenient play with more temporary connections. I don’t think the desire to connect with people through games is likely to go away, though, and I’m interested to see where the next big social game comes from, that connects people like MMOs in the early-to-mid-2000s did, and the arcades of the 80s and 90s.

Sorry about being AWOL for the last couple of days. I’m coming out of a pretty intense weekend experience and I’m still emotionally unpacking it. This is the first I’ve been able to bring myself to post here, and while I’m feeling better, I’m not going to force things. I’m going to take the rest of this week off to recuperate and will be back Monday.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a sticker I saw on the back of a sign today, that was the right message at the right time for me. Maybe it will be for you too: