Sunday, March 3, 2013

40 Entries in 19 days

I have a complex task today. I need to divide up the 40 entries remaining in the Blog history into 19 entries to cover the days before I leave for PAX East. I need to leave space for important information that will be reveled in those 19 days. [time has passed] Looks good. 17 Entries and most of them seem to make sense together.

Starting with our old friend Metal Maw.

Starting today's entry with video for Metal Maw that was posted September 19th along with a post about how it was done.


 So Lots of people had things to say about Telegraphs following the previous entry. They did an Uplink on it, The specific question was "Combat telegraphs are a divisive topic in modern MMOs. Why do you love or hate them? What is the best way to implement them?"

I've said my piece in an earlier post, so I'm going to pick out a couple of important points from the discussion.

Lots of Concern about it making the game too easy or requests to make it more subtle over time. I disagree with this notion.Instead it needs to be more impactful over time, more punishing. If I'm at the level cap and a monster I am fighting whirs up a 5 second cast with a telegraph and I am still standing there when it happens death should be almost guaranteed.

There is a lot of comparison to Guild Wars 2. I disagree with this too...or at least I hope I do. In Guild Wars 2 Dodge isn't a way to move quickly to avoid an area where something is happening, it is a way to be invulnerable for a global cool down. It auto avoids any damage that would have happened to you in that span of time, regardless of source or type.  I hope that Wildstar's dodge is more of a movement mechanic than a straight mitigation.

Also this:
Definitely this.

The conversation was capped off with comments from Lead Combat Systems Designer Chris Lynch. He touched on a lot of the points, and specifically on the one I just highlighted above. He says that it's an option but currently they are experimenting as using the transparency or intensity of the "decal" to indicate how dangerous it is. Which is interesting too. As always, if you want to read the whole discussion head over to the Wildstar Blog. This was from September 21st.

The weekly round up, posted on the 24th of September focused heavily on Telegraphs as well, reactions from various community sites. Massively, Gamebreaker and MMORPG all chipped in, and the consensus is that they are concerned but recognize that if used correctly could make for a fun game.

In general as time has passed from this announcement I think large portions of the gaming press who haven't had hands on with Wildstar have started to harden to the skeptical side of this issue, and see it as a dumbing down.

I'm still positive on this issue, I think the team has their head in the right place on it. Gotta trust the developer to make the game they want to make. but options are important too. I support the ability to mute or turn off the telegraphs especially for players that want to produce fan video content.

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