06-23-2004, 01:11 AM
Hi,
A lot of the content isn't in yet. A lot of the quantitative aspects aren't settled. A lot even of the qualitative aspects are still up in the air.
As usual with Blizzard, the graphics tail is wagging the game dog. Now, the tail is beautiful and I could buy the game (and a much better machine) just to spend a month or more exploring all the great areas that Blizzard's wonderful artists have generated. And the background music is getting better, though it still mostly isn't up to par (however, at least the inns I've been to have nice little ditties).
The trade skills are presently mostly broken, but show signs of a potential richer life in the future. A little more emphasis on trade would help a lot. The system is simple almost to the point of being childish, but with the right tweaks could be made to work. The introduction of high level "branches" of some of the skills might help differentiate characters. Of course, if one branch has the only useful item (something that seems to happen quite a bit in other contexts with Blizzard games), the existence of multiple branches is moot.
Choosing and building a character needs a lot of work still. Blizzard has been waffling on this issue, which is so central to the game it should have been worked out in detail back when the game was first being brainstormed. First there were skills, attributes and talents, and that was confused and muddy. Then there were only skills and attributes (talents were being reworked) and you had to make some very minor choices in using skill points for trade skills or to boost attributes. Other skill "points" for things like attack, defense, etc, were gained by actually using the ability and required a bit of effort to keep maxed or nearly so. Now the attributes are automatically maxed on each level up, and so the skill points are only needed to either buy trade skills or to learn new weapons. The amount of player choice seems to be going down. Talents are still "under construction", but I suspect if the game is more or less "balanced" they will go to the bit bucket and join arenas and guild halls from D2. How much opportunity there is towards making characters unique and how much micromanaging this takes will be a big influence on whether the game is good for anyone. Someone wanting an RPG lite (which WoW is already being accused of) might be happier with Blizzard's choices than I will be.
The whole PvP, PvE, FvF bit needs tons of work. So far, even on the supposed non-PvP server the opportunities for griefing under Blizzard's new (this push) rules have been amply demonstrated. If Blizzard does not include PvP, I suspect they will lose a lot of their client base. If they don't at least have some form of FvF, I think a lot of the WarCraft veterans will be pissed. But if their PvP model causes a lot of griefing, then they will not get much long term loyalty. And a person playing this game for more than a few months is worth a lot more to Blizzard than someone who buys the box and leaves after a month or so. Again, this is a major issue and again it seems to be going in the opposite direction from what I would like.
The quest system is both a bonus and a handicap. It is a bonus because some of the quests are actually interesting, and a lot of the others at least give you a "reason" to grind (you're still grinding for XP, but now you're doing it to "balance nature" or whatever). But it is a handicap in that people don't seem to just be exploring the game out of curiosity for the world. It's almost like having a "to do" list and you're going around getting "tasks" done. Of course, the a large purpose of the quest system is to guide you around the area you're in and then move you to another area when (in the designer's mind) you've been there long enough. The quest system adds a lot to the linearity of the game, perhaps making it more interesting the first time but reducing the re-playability in the long term, I think. A big question will be the ability of Blizzard to add sufficient high level content. As things stand right now, a character played by a reasonably casual player would probably max out in less than 200 hours. That sounds like a lot, but it is only two and a half months for a "couple of hours a night" player. At that point, the high level content needs to keep him in the game (and paying that monthly fee) or most players will quit since building multiple characters doesn't seem extremely viable (besides, many will fell "I beat the game, why do it again?").
A few problems exist in the interface, and again Blizzard has sort of promised to try to look into possibly fixing them if it can figure out a way. That in spite that third party UI builders have fixed many of those problems. Some of those problems are strange, given the maturity of graphics interfaces and of Blizzard. Things like clicking the up or down buttons of a scrolling window does not scroll by one line, but by some (arbitrary it looks like) portion of a page. Clicking in the slider part does not move you down one page, but instead moves the slider to where you clicked. And other similar problems. Sometimes it is not possible to open two windows with related information at the same time. User names are not an object, so that even if you have someone's name on the screen in dialog, you can't just click on it to add to friends, guild, ignore, etc. Windows are neither movable nor re-sizable, and the text does not scale with the resolution, so that at high resolution it takes better eyes than mine to read some things. And for a quest based grouped game, the interface is amazingly poor for sharing quest information or finding people to quest with.
As to the actual gameplay in PvE mode, that is too "binary". After a while you learn what you can handle and what you can't -- and what you can handle is no threat and what you can't you flat out can't.
So, as I've said, there is a lot to go, both in implementation (which is to be expected at this stage of the process) and game design (which should have been pretty well worked out before the first picture was drawn or the first line of code written). Because of that, it has the possibility of being a great game or just another MMOG wanna be. And even if it is great, it can be a great Risk or a great Panzer Generals. So ultimately no one can tell you if *you* should buy it or not.
--Pete
A lot of the content isn't in yet. A lot of the quantitative aspects aren't settled. A lot even of the qualitative aspects are still up in the air.
As usual with Blizzard, the graphics tail is wagging the game dog. Now, the tail is beautiful and I could buy the game (and a much better machine) just to spend a month or more exploring all the great areas that Blizzard's wonderful artists have generated. And the background music is getting better, though it still mostly isn't up to par (however, at least the inns I've been to have nice little ditties).
The trade skills are presently mostly broken, but show signs of a potential richer life in the future. A little more emphasis on trade would help a lot. The system is simple almost to the point of being childish, but with the right tweaks could be made to work. The introduction of high level "branches" of some of the skills might help differentiate characters. Of course, if one branch has the only useful item (something that seems to happen quite a bit in other contexts with Blizzard games), the existence of multiple branches is moot.
Choosing and building a character needs a lot of work still. Blizzard has been waffling on this issue, which is so central to the game it should have been worked out in detail back when the game was first being brainstormed. First there were skills, attributes and talents, and that was confused and muddy. Then there were only skills and attributes (talents were being reworked) and you had to make some very minor choices in using skill points for trade skills or to boost attributes. Other skill "points" for things like attack, defense, etc, were gained by actually using the ability and required a bit of effort to keep maxed or nearly so. Now the attributes are automatically maxed on each level up, and so the skill points are only needed to either buy trade skills or to learn new weapons. The amount of player choice seems to be going down. Talents are still "under construction", but I suspect if the game is more or less "balanced" they will go to the bit bucket and join arenas and guild halls from D2. How much opportunity there is towards making characters unique and how much micromanaging this takes will be a big influence on whether the game is good for anyone. Someone wanting an RPG lite (which WoW is already being accused of) might be happier with Blizzard's choices than I will be.
The whole PvP, PvE, FvF bit needs tons of work. So far, even on the supposed non-PvP server the opportunities for griefing under Blizzard's new (this push) rules have been amply demonstrated. If Blizzard does not include PvP, I suspect they will lose a lot of their client base. If they don't at least have some form of FvF, I think a lot of the WarCraft veterans will be pissed. But if their PvP model causes a lot of griefing, then they will not get much long term loyalty. And a person playing this game for more than a few months is worth a lot more to Blizzard than someone who buys the box and leaves after a month or so. Again, this is a major issue and again it seems to be going in the opposite direction from what I would like.
The quest system is both a bonus and a handicap. It is a bonus because some of the quests are actually interesting, and a lot of the others at least give you a "reason" to grind (you're still grinding for XP, but now you're doing it to "balance nature" or whatever). But it is a handicap in that people don't seem to just be exploring the game out of curiosity for the world. It's almost like having a "to do" list and you're going around getting "tasks" done. Of course, the a large purpose of the quest system is to guide you around the area you're in and then move you to another area when (in the designer's mind) you've been there long enough. The quest system adds a lot to the linearity of the game, perhaps making it more interesting the first time but reducing the re-playability in the long term, I think. A big question will be the ability of Blizzard to add sufficient high level content. As things stand right now, a character played by a reasonably casual player would probably max out in less than 200 hours. That sounds like a lot, but it is only two and a half months for a "couple of hours a night" player. At that point, the high level content needs to keep him in the game (and paying that monthly fee) or most players will quit since building multiple characters doesn't seem extremely viable (besides, many will fell "I beat the game, why do it again?").
A few problems exist in the interface, and again Blizzard has sort of promised to try to look into possibly fixing them if it can figure out a way. That in spite that third party UI builders have fixed many of those problems. Some of those problems are strange, given the maturity of graphics interfaces and of Blizzard. Things like clicking the up or down buttons of a scrolling window does not scroll by one line, but by some (arbitrary it looks like) portion of a page. Clicking in the slider part does not move you down one page, but instead moves the slider to where you clicked. And other similar problems. Sometimes it is not possible to open two windows with related information at the same time. User names are not an object, so that even if you have someone's name on the screen in dialog, you can't just click on it to add to friends, guild, ignore, etc. Windows are neither movable nor re-sizable, and the text does not scale with the resolution, so that at high resolution it takes better eyes than mine to read some things. And for a quest based grouped game, the interface is amazingly poor for sharing quest information or finding people to quest with.
As to the actual gameplay in PvE mode, that is too "binary". After a while you learn what you can handle and what you can't -- and what you can handle is no threat and what you can't you flat out can't.
So, as I've said, there is a lot to go, both in implementation (which is to be expected at this stage of the process) and game design (which should have been pretty well worked out before the first picture was drawn or the first line of code written). Because of that, it has the possibility of being a great game or just another MMOG wanna be. And even if it is great, it can be a great Risk or a great Panzer Generals. So ultimately no one can tell you if *you* should buy it or not.
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?