mmorchive

July 15, 2007 forums.auran.com

Isaiah Cartwright:

The new player experience is extremely rough, you start in knowing very little, with very few skills to choose from, even after the tutorial when you jump into games with people who have more skills, more equipment it’s just not fun. Every game I played I would run across some character that could do over 1000 damage to me, I only have 2500 hp, and he could normally heal himself for more damage then I could ever do. I’m sure once I understood the game better and had more team work with my team mates maybe I would know what to do to kill him, but players are not going to spend that kind of time when they die in 3 hits and never make any progress. The combat is extremely fast, extremely confusing, and is going to turn away people before they can get into it.

You need someway to limit the experience of your new players to more balanced environment, a new player cannot be getting killed before he has any time to learn anything you will lose a customer extremely fast. You need some way for a player to learn on his own and be able to feel like they have a chance to fight back. This is no simple problem, this is to a degree a large problem we ran across in Guild Wars. You spend a lot of time and effort making a game where skill matters, then a new unskilled player starts to play gets owned and stops playing. We’ve tried many things, better tutorials, more player controlled computer opponents. They all seem to help to some degree, but in general it is a hard problem with these type of games. You need to put a lot of time polishing cleaning up and making the combat feel fair and balanced for a new player, they need to score kills make progress in the game type, and not die in 3 hits. I’m not even sure why I’m taking 1000 damage is it a skill they are using am I putting myself into a vulnerable situation, is my enemy just that much higher level them me? It’s extremely hidden as to why I die that fast.

There is another scalability problem you are all ready running into in your betas, you have 3 game types and if there are not enough players in each game type everyone has to wait a long time before they can play. I think this hurts your game as if you take the stance, oh this is just beta well have a ton more people and it will work out fine, your hurting your chances of success, because for one you don’t know how the mechanics you’ve design work under the proper numbers, and two if you don’t get the numbers you want suddenly the community you have has to deal with a system that doesn’t scale down very well. You need to work into your system safeguards for both a ton of players and for very few players or your just setting yourself up for situations that your not prepared for.

I think the number one problem I would have with balancing this game is the resource system removes attrition from your game. This means when a fight starts there is all most no difference in the fight 1 min from now as when it first started. Every player has the ability to generate the resources they need on the fly, this means your resource pools are extremely small, and fill and empty extremely fast. This isn’t the end of the world or anything but it does mean you lose the ability to balance with attrition. Which means your skills need to be less powerful, because the costs on an extremely powerful skill are not very high. For example if you have a skill with Max Resources, it only takes someone 10-20 seconds to that that, and therefor the resource cost of skills isn’t a huge factor figuring out how powerful a skill can be. Recharge becomes the main balancing factor of your system, this is ok but if you are going to go this rout you MUST make sure you avoid manipulating recharge, because you can all ready manipulate your energy so much, you need something to balance off of. The lack of attrition also adds to the feeling that I’m making no progress vs an enemy. If I jump in and an enemy kicks my face in another game, when my buddy runs up and fights him I know he’s at least spent resources to fight me, and if the attrition in a game is good no matter how strong he is if we stay on him, he will die. Now a system with less attrition that is not the case, if I go fight a guy and die, he then uses some water magic heals poof he’s back to normal unless we build up a critical mass enough to kill him before he can get back to full there is no progress being made, this is EXTREMELY discouraging for a new player and they quickly feel like they mean nothing in a combat and quit.

The rewards in the game seem to be based around Skills, and Equipment. This is falling down the same evil trap that Guild Wars did and many other games do. I think this is a HUGE mistake, as you don’t want to reward players with Game Mechanics, this only leads to insane power of time feeling. Now if you want to make a power of time game thats fine, look at the rewards in games like (most MMO’s, Rakion, Diablo) If your looking for skill over time in your game then look at the rewards in games like (FPS, RTS, and turn based strategy) What you will find is that most skill over time games have very weak reward systems, while FPS and RTS are starting to move in that direction, most rewards are based off of Stats. This is a strong way to go as people are stat junkies will try and get every badge, work for cool looking items, and fun stuff like that, but you need to pick which game your trying to make, right now I feel like your doing the same thing Guild Wars did and make a skill over time game but Jam as much Power of time into your rewards system to make players feel good about playing, please don’t do that. If you want skill over time change your rewards to cool looking no game impact things, badges, and stats, and give very quick access to all game mechanics. If I had to play 100 hours to unlock mutalisk in starcraft I wouldn’t have put the 5000+ hours into the game I did. Don’t make this mistake. If you want to make a power of time game, then you need to look at your combat and make sure that you have the right mixture, making earning the rewards, and achieving that power the fun of the game. I feel this is a problem that will hurt the longevity of your game if you don’t solve it before you release.

Fury was an ill-fated MMO released in late 2007, designed to appeal to fans of PvP in the style of Guild Wars or WoW, with a number of more FPS oriented elements. The game struggled to generate subscription revenue and went Free to Play less than 2 months after release in an attempt to become profitable.