Sunday, May 29, 2011

Age of Conan switching to F2P

Being a fan of Funcom games, I would like to give this a whirl this summer.

Free and Premium Content Overview


What are the differences between the free and the Premium offering?
Please consult the chart below for the main differences between the free to play option and the Premium subscribers option.


How do the character slots work after the hybrid model launches?
Free players can only make two characters by default, while Premium players get eight character slots. Returning customers get to keep the number of character slots they already had.

How many character slots can I have in total?
All accounts have a maximum limit of 18 slots.
Each account type starts with a basic number of slots (2 for free players, 8 for premium players). Any slots purchased in addition to this base will be added no matter what subscription type you currently use.

What happens if I go from Premium to free?
After downgrading from Premium to free, any characters in the slots beyond the two default ones can not be played, unless enough additional slots have been purchased from the item shop to compensate. Your characters will be there, but any beyond your two slots will be unplayable. You get to pick which characters will be your included slots once you downgrade to free.

What character classes are available to free players?
The following four classes are available for all players of ‘Age of Conan: Unrated’.

● Barbarian
● Demonologist
● Guardian
● Priest of Mitra

The following classes are only available to Premium subscribers:

● Assassin
● Bear Shaman
● Conqueror
● Dark Templar
● Herald of Xotli
● Necromancer
● Ranger
● Tempest of Set

How much of the game can I actually play for free?
All outdoor playfields in Aquilonia, Cimmeria, and Stygia are available to all players.

How do I get access to the expansion content?
Access to the Khitai content is available via an 'expansion pass' - granting access to all of the expansion areas and dungeons. Anyone who already bought the expansion has this enabled automatically. Subscribers who have not purchased the expansion before do not have access to this unless they buy the 'expansion pass'.

Will we be able to play through all of the dungeon content?

Some of the instanced dungeon content will be completely free, and other will be accessed through new passes or expansion purchases.

Free dungeons:

● Tortage Underhalls (solo)
● Acheronian Ruins (solo)
● Bubshur House (solo)
● Abandoned Smuggler Tunnels (solo)
● The Maze (solo)
● Spider Caverns (solo)
● Border Ranges (solo)
● Outflow Tunnels (solo)
● Ice Cave (solo)
● Cannibal Cave (solo)
● Catacombs (group)
● Toirdealbach’s Tomb (group)
● Prison Colony (group)
● Scorpion Cave (group)
● Caravan Raider Camp (group)
● Atzel’s Fortress (group)
● Onyx Chambers (group)

Premium dungeons:
Access to Premium dungeons will work in several ways. Some access passes are a once off purchase, some allow access for a set duration, and some are linked to expansion content.

● Pyramid of the Ancients (solo) –permanent-only purchase
● Treasury of the Ancients (solo) –permanent-only purchase
● Villa Camillus, Amiel, Verde, Paetus, Lentulus (solo) –permanent-only purchase
● Slaughterhouse Cellar (solo)
● Attilius Mansion (solo) – permanent-only purchase
● Black Castle (group) – permanent-only purchase
● The Cradle of Decay (group) – permanent-only purchase
● Sanctum of the Burning Souls (group) – permanent-only purchase
● The Cistern (group) – permanent-only purchase
● Main System (group) – permanent-only purchase
● Ampitheater of Karutonia (group) – permanent-only purchase
● Halls of Eternal Frost (group)
● Imirian Ravine, Oasis of Zaara, Frost Swamp (group ACG)
● Xibaluku (group)
● Crow’s Nest (group)
● Iron Tower (group)
● Khitai Dungeons - accessed through Rise of the Godslayer expansion purchase

Can a free player take part in all the raids?
Free players may access the beginnings of raids and the raid equipment ladder, but they can’t complete tier 1 without switching to Premium access or purchasing entry to more raids, which will be available in the item store.

Free raids:

● Kylikki’s Crypt
● Yakhmar’s Cave

Premium raids:

● Vistrix's Lair
● Black Ring Citadel (all wings)
● Thoth-Amon’s Stronghold
● All raids in Khitai

Can a free player take part in Sieges?
Free players may purchase time-limited passes to the zones related to sieges (Bori and Borderlands), while subscribers may participate in as many sieges as they like, whenever they like.

How much personal bank space does a free player get?
Free players get access to half of the bank slots that are available to Premium players. In the future, further bank and/or inventory slots will be available for purchase.

Do free players earn Guild Renown?
All players may contribute Valor, Glory, and Artistry to their guilds, regardless of their subscription status.

Do free players gain Alternative Advancement (AA) points?
Free players may not earn AA points, even if they are level 80. These are only available to Premium subscribers. Free players can however purchase items to enable AA point gain in the item shop.

Are there limits to which Mount Training can be done on a free account?
Free players may only ride the horses which require the Basic Riding skill by default. Premium players retain all their mount abilities and may learn to ride swift horses, armored horses, mammoths, rhinos, tigers and wolves as usual.

Read more with a FAQ here.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

GRTV: The Secret World preview

Game Reactor has just released a new preview video for Funcom's horror-conspiracy opus known as The Secret World. Petter Martensson and Bengt Lemne have a lot to say about the title in an impressions piece that runs just north of 10 minutes in length.

Lemne talks about his experiences viewing the game at GDC, and we get to see a few glimpses of new footage from Kingsmouth and other locations throughout the world. The duo also talks about Funcom's much-publicized focus on story, with Lemne ultimately concluding that whether TSW is story-centered or not will be up to the players. "You can go and do all this [the story elements], and I think you can have a lot of fun if you do it in a group... but I think that the day the game is released, you're going to find guys that know how to do all these things, how to find these things, how to do it the fastest," he explains.

Lemne also posits that earning skill credits will be the primary motivating factor for players (as opposed to Funcom's stated aim to have the narrative drive gameplay). Endgame is also a concern, as eventually the story content will dry up, and the plan seems to be to funnel players towards TSW's PvP elements. There's more, including discussion of PvP modes and the game's "overwhelming" skill options (as well as the resulting balance issues).

Monday, May 16, 2011

Agent Changes

Agent Division Changes

Up till now, each corporation in the game had up to 21 divisions within it - Legal, Security, Distribution, etc. - each with its own agents. The missions given out by the various divisions were similar, coming from the same pool of missions available to that corporation; the difference between divisions was the relative amount of encounter, mining, trade, and courier missions given out. Yet the chance of getting one of those types of missions, by division, was quite arbitrary each time you visited an agent: For example, an Administration agent had a 75% chance of giving out encounter missions, while a Personnel agent had a 64% chance of doing the same. No rhyme, some reason.

In general, these divisions and values did little other than adding complexity to an already complex game.

So now, we've taken these divisions and amalgamated them into four simple divisions, each of which now gives out only one type of mission, meaning you won't have to decline that occasional mining or courier mission when all you want to do is blow up some Angels.

The four new divisions are as follows, along with the former divisions that have now been folded up within each:

New Division* Old Divisions (Amalgamated)
Distribution (100% courier) Accounting, Advisory, Archives, Distribution, Financial, Marketing, Personnel, Production, Public Relations, Storage
Mining (100% mining) Astrosurveying, Manufacturing, Mining
Security (100% encounter) Administration, Command, Intelligence, Internal Security, Legal, Security, Surveillance
Research (100% research) R&D (no change)
 * As a result of the division changes, a few newly made Distribution agents didn't have a destination station for courier missions within the range parameters authored for their missions, so we were forced to make those agents Security agents instead. 


Connections Skills

We had to change a few other things to suit the division overhaul, all having to do with the seven "Connections" skills from the Social skill set (i.e., Financial Connections, Political Connections, etc.). These skills each granted a +5% yield per skill level to Loyalty Point payout for each of 5 or 6 divisions; in total, it was possible, with all seven skills maxed out, to gain a 10% LP boost for every division.

We have removed those seven skills from the game and will refund those skill points to you, just as we did with the old Learning skills a little while back.

So now we have three new skills in place of the former seven, these ones aptly named "Distribution Connections," "Mining Connections," and "Security Connections"; each grants a 10% bonus to LP gain per level for its namesake division. These new skills are all rank 2, as opposed to the old rank 1 skills (meaning these new ones take twice as long to train), since there are roughly half as many to train now.

Finally, if you had any of the old Connections skills or skillbooks, then they will be replaced with new skillbooks, as shown on the following table:

Old Connection Skills
Skillbook Given
Distribution Connections Mining Connections Security Connections
Bureaucratic Connections
X
  
  
Financial Connections
X
  
  
High Tech Connections
  
  
X
Labor Connections
  
X
  
Military Connections
  
  
X
Political Connections
  
  
X
Trade Connections
  
X
  

Agent Locations

Be warned that we'll be monitoring this change closely, along with the player activity it produces, and we will very likely move or retire a number of redundant agents as time goes on: There will now be many stations with multiple agents of the same level and division. 

Agent Quality Change

In addition to the division changes, we've also implemented a pretty huge change to how agent quality works. Previously, an agent's quality, ranging from -20 to +20, factored into both how difficult it was to gain access to that agent and how much that agent paid out for missions. Yet the system by which these values affected agent access and rewards was pretty opaque, even to most devs, and the effects were not particularly meaningful.

Now, all agents in the game will have an effective quality of both -20 and +20: That is, in terms of calculating access to an agent based on your standings with his or her corporation, the system will assume that all agents are quality -20, making them (in some cases, considerably) easier to access; and at the same time, every agent will pay out rewards as if he or she had a quality of +20, meaning all agents of the same level within the same system security level (e.g., 0.6) will pay out the same amount for similar missions - and in most cases, they will pay out somewhat more than they used to.

Just be aware that these two changes, to divisions and to quality, may have some unforeseeable ramifications, and we're going to be watching carefully to see how they impact the game. Expect further tweaking, and as always, please voice your concerns and observations on our forums so we can benefit from your opinions.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The end of WoW

At least for me I think...

I posted this a couple weeks ago:
I've wanted to post this for a while, but I was hoping there was light at the end of the tunnel but I haven't seen any yet.

Lately, and I'm sure you noticed, that I have lost the motivation, willpower and desire to continue raiding. I login to raid, hoping it would be different, and would feel bad if I didn't and you couldn't get a raid going Ever since this expansion pack was released, I haven't had any enjoyment in raiding. The overcomplexity, random events and the amount of stress that involves defeating bosses is retarded.

On the bright side, one less caster, one less clothie and one less class token (half the raid shares the same token) to roll against. No real loss there. Lost rolls for 2 months straight vs someone is kinda depressing also.


There are some folks out there that I've played since vanilla and we have a long guild/raid history. We've had some great memories in that time.

I'll be honest here, I have thought about faction changing and hoping to find a new experience there, but I fear it will just be the same deal.


Convince me. Convince me there is light at the end of the long tunnel.

Account created: 11/23/04

For the first time since release:

Canceled (Expires: 8/8/2011 7:39 AM)

I haven't logged into WoW for almost 2 weeks now. However, I am still considering a faction change and maybe it will bring some new light somehow.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Introducing the Codex

There are clearly many games that have deep, engaging back stories that designers and writers have worked tirelessly to develop, but in the game, the player only sees what their character sees. Often times, the rich back story is used only for the context of quests, and players never really get the bird’s eye view of the narrative. The ‘big picture’ can become even more confusing and incomplete if the player misses a quest or discovers key plot points out of order. A lot of times, what ends up happening, is that the player just gives up on understanding the overarching storyline, and just focuses on enjoying other parts of the gameplay experience.

Obviously, this was a matter of some concern to us. Star Wars™ is one of the richest, most engaging fictional settings in all of pop culture. We have an exceptional team of writers working hard to build and expand the Star Wars universe in the Old Republic era. As you may have heard, story is kind of a big deal to BioWare and to The Old Republic™, and that story is a lot better if you understand the context for what’s going on around you and how your actions fit in.

The Genesis of the Codex

When we encounter design problems in The Old Republic, we like to first look at other BioWare games for a solution. In this case, we really appreciated the codex used in Dragon Age, which allows players to collect pieces of the story that eventually coalesce into a collected whole. We also looked at the codex in Mass Effect. The focus was slightly different, instead providing an encyclopedic view of the universe as a whole.

For The Old Republic, we took the best of both systems, using our codex to not only elaborate on the settings you fight in and the creatures you kill, but also to plant seeds of knowledge relating to key personages and concepts from your class story and long-lost lore meant to give more feedback at large. We sketched out what we wanted, and told the writers to get to work

How much work? Current estimates of our codex are around 120,000 words of text. By comparison, the average Star Wars novel comes in at around 100,000 words.

The Mechanics of Discovery

This feature isn’t just about being another way to deliver story to the player. As Lead Systems Designer, I’m mostly concerned about bringing the fun. Delivering story and context isn’t enough for me – I also want to be sure that we add new activities for players to do and goals for him to achieve. In particular, we saw the codex as a way to reward exploration.

Long-time players of MMOs are probably, on some level, familiar with the work of Richard Bartle. He wrote what is considered a seminal work on MMO design, describing the types of players that play in virtual worlds (wondering what sort of player you are? Take one of the many Bartle’s tests out on the web and find out). He divided up the player base into killers, achievers, socializers and explorers, allowing for the fact that most players are actually some mixture of the categories. He posited that, in truth, games needed to appeal to all four quadrants to be successful. Building off his work—we see the codex as a way to enhance the gameplay for explorers.

We give away some codex entries for free. For example, we think that it’s important that players have basic background about the locations they are visiting, and key people in their class story arcs will almost always merit a codex entry. For the rest, though, we want people to explore the planets a little more, and take on some challenges a little ways off the beaten path.

Wandering to distant locations on the map will unlock codex entries about those far flung corners of the globe. Unlocking the codex entry for the k’lor’slug, for example, involves killing a hard to find, tougher k’lor’slug deep in one of Korriban’s tombs. Additionally, exploring the artifacts in the Academy’s library can reveal ancient bits of lost lore, and doing quests for various alien species can unlock their entry in the codex.
Currently, none of these are locked behind a serious challenge – our codex unlocking k’lor’slug is a challenge for its level, to be sure, but not a ‘OMGPWN3D go bring back 3 friends in epics!’ challenge – and that’s intentional. Explorer gameplay should, first and foremost, reward exploring. 

The Datacrons Challenge

That’s not to say that some codex entries shouldn’t be challenging. Quite the opposite, we want some codex entries to be worthy challenges – but we want those challenges to be centered on exploration. Enter the datacrons. In-game datacrons will be a sub-set of the codex entries. The world builders had been kicking around the idea of these little world gizmos for a while now. These unique objects are placed throughout the world for the player to find, usually in hard to reach places. If you successfully reach one and interact with it, one of your stats will be increased -- permanently. The codex gave us a way to increase the visibility of these devices, and offer a player an easy way to track his progress finding them.
While most codex entries can be obtained with the players stretching their legs (searching the whole map, killing obvious targets you don’t normally need to kill), finding datacrons typically requires a little extra exploration and a even little ingenuity. While some are hidden, many are in plain sight – the trick is often in figuring out how to get to that datacron that you see on a ledge off in the distance.

The inspiration for datacrons comes from a similar game mechanic in one of my earlier projects. These items spawn in predictable locations, but are only usable by each character once. Over time, the locations of these become known, and shared lore. In this other project, the unique nature of finding these items resulted in an interesting social dynamic, where intrepid explorers, eager to prove their world mastery, organized hunting parties for groups of new players to explore these worlds and find these hidden nooks and crannies. We would not be surprised to see a similar pattern emerge in The Old Republic. 

Wrapping Up

All of these features combine to make a nice little collection game for the player, where the reward for the act of collecting is more lore and context offering insights and depth into the world of Star Wars: The Old Republic. In the codex user interface, players can not only see the entries they’ve discovered so far, but also the progress they’ve made towards finding all there is to find on a planet or in a category.

Overall, the codex system has been successful at meeting our two design goals of providing more fictional context to the player, and providing an explorer mini-game with meaningful rewards. One nice thing about the system is that it’s also designed to be easily expandable – an important consideration when building a game likely to have a long lifespan through patches and expansions. We expect the codex to become continually richer and more involved throughout the life of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

0.0 Tweaks

In the latest Devblog:

We’re going to delve back into 0.0 development in the near future and I’d like to keep you guys in the loop of what we’re doing. There are going to be a few immediate changes coming out very soon and some changes over the long run.

Short term:
We’ve been looking into players interacting and how that ties into movement and security. Jump bridges have become a bit too much of a crutch in terms of getting around, so we’re going to apply a three changes. Basically, it’s become a very easy, convenient and safe way to travel, with little or no downside. That’s not to say you’re invincible when using jumpbridges, but if you’re in an alliance with an intel channel and a semi-decent jumpbridge network, you have a pretty overwhelming degree of safety. That safety is detrimental to interaction, both in terms of meeting friendly and unfriendly players, which is the base of our change. If it’s difficult catching people moving around, roaming/open world pvp becomes more sidelined, which we’re against. On the other hand, we don't want to take jumpbridges out, since they provide a great way of reaching whatever content you’re using quickly. Anyway, this is what’s happening:

The first change is the removal of ships with jumpdrives from the jumpbridge eligibility list. This isn’t very dramatic and long overdue. Basically if your ship has a jumpdrive, it can’t use the jumpbridge (Black Ops ships are exempt from this rule). This change will go in on the 17th of this month.

The second and third changes will go in next month, with the main patch. We will be limiting the number of jumpbridges you can have in a system to one, while upping the fuelbay to 30.000 (3x) to avoid suicide among players who do logistics. We would suggest you start reconfiguring your jumpbridge network as soon as possible.

Hopefully, this will better balance the rewards of fast travel with the risk of getting caught on the way. So you’ll still be able to use jumpbridges, but every jumpbridge link adds a normal gate jump too. Anyway, that’s short term.

Long term:
We’re currently looking into a long term plan for 0.0. I say long term, not because it’s planned for 2014, but because the work will begin this winter and hopefully go on for a while. I think the community as well as CCP feels that 0.0 is in need of a bit of an overhaul, so that’s what we’ll do. The starting point for that is identifying 0.0s weaknesses, and developing guidelines for what 0.0 “should” be. Luckily, the CSM will be joining us this month so the players are adequately represented. We’ll have several sessions with them and hopefully they will be able to contribute to our goal. To give you a quick peek at the type of topics we’re looking at when doing this evaluation (in no particular order):

  • Is 0.0 industry currently geared to support the population living there?
  • Is the relationship between 0.0 and empire balanced well enough?
  • Does the current sovereignty system meet our goals?
  • Are there enough incentives for conflict/pvp outside sov?
  • Are we happy with movement/player interaction?

We will then start implementing changes that will hopefully end up making 0.0 a better place to live than it is today. This particular area of space should offer a lot more opportunities than it does today, and that’s what we’ll put in. Good things will come. Anyway, that’ all for now. We’ll keep you updated after the CSM visit.

Tuesday, May 03, 2011

Black Prophecy patch 1.0.1

MISSIONS
Following new missions were implemented:
  • "Cash for clunkers", Comadrome, Level 7, Tyi
  • "Valuable freight", Caldeena Tyi Hub, Level 34, Tyi
  • "Boosting morale", Caldeena Tyi Hub, Level 35, Tyi
  • "The prototype", Col Esera, Level 14, Genide
  • "Lost in the Badlands", Elysion, Level 18, Tyi + Genide
  • "No response from Station FG-31", Elysion, Level 18, Tyi + Genide
  • "Escort", Gyoda, Level 30, Tyi
  • "Security loopholes", Gyoda, Level 30, Genide
  • "There's always something waiting...", Geneera, Level 27, Tyi
  • "Crafting Session", Apo Kata, Level 4, Sapiens

GENERAL
  • General performance improvements in all sectors.
  • Removed exploit possibility that allowed players to collect unlimited colors in "Paint Job".
  • Fixed issues with performance and missing NPCs in Bara Kaitos sectors.
  • Fixed ship health display inconsistencies.
  • Damage distribution changed slightly: Damage is distributed evenly among active ship items, proportional to the items' durability percentage in relation to the entire ship. The item that is directly hit (unless it's the cockpit) receives slightly more percental damage than the other items.
  • Repair kit durability is distributed evenly among all active ship items, proportional to the items' durability percentage in relation to the entire ship.
  • Increased the amounts repaired by the higher level repair kits.
  • Fixed heavy alien fighter item values. It can turn at decent speeds now.
  • Implemented better spawn point variation for weapon transporters in the Nimbus, to prevent spawn point camping.
  • Fixed a bug in the mission "Energy Reserves".
  • Fixed an AI bug that caused NPCs to have steering problems when switching to sniper weapons.
  • Fixed an AI bug that caused NPCs to not move when they should try to hide.
  • Fixed an AI bug that caused NPCs to have steering problems when breaking off from a formation.
  • Fixed an AI bug that caused NPCs to ignore new threats when purposefully attacking enemies.
  • Fixed an AI bug that caused NPCs to ignore turrets on capital ships.
  • Fixed an AI bug that caused NPCs to randomly experience steering problems during fights.


HUD
  • Quickplay/instance button and sector/station name info no longer disappear when docked to a station and activating mouse mode.
  • Premium items can no longer be moved to the ship inventory while a trade with a player or NPC is already active.
  • Fixed kill-assist game messages if the player is killed by an NPC, but was damaged by other players before.
  • Quickplay is now correctly being disabled when the client disconnects.
  • More detailed information is now displayed when a player wants to request a clan sector.
  • Removed warning message when players cancel their pending mission.
  • Fixed a case where players could receive an error message "mission already starting" even after logging out and logging back in.
  • Reserved names filter has been updated to allow some popular, previously blocked character names.

GFX
  • Fixed colony ship texture flickering.
  • Fixed engine exhaust effects for Tyi fighters.
  • Fixed weapon attachment alignment for Tyi fighter wing module.
  • Enhanced areas influenced by player color for Tyi fighter modules.
  • Correct interior scene is now shown in the Gyoda Nebula for Tyi players.