This Week In MMO: We Have Zombies, Yo!

Hey Quintlyn, glad you finally got your starring appearance. You did great and hope to see you on some future stuff.

Q seems to be missing Gary’s point. In other games you can search Google to find solutions, but most games aren’t _designed_ to make you search Google for clues to a quest, and the problem is that, as more people create pages with the solution, it will be impossible to search for clues without finding those pages. And once you open a page and see the final solution, there’s no way to unsee it.

Mike pointed out a pretty good solution, though. It’s not hard to have an in-game browser that simply adds [-"secret world" -tsw -funcom] to Google searches, so that it will filter out any page with a direct reference to the game, while still showing any pages that mention the actual search subject.

Try googling this:

 kingsmouth code

And then this:

 kingsmouth code -”secret world” -tsw -funcom

Quite a difference, eh? And pretty trivial to do. They could also add names of specific “walkthrough” websites, to filter those out.

How to make DayZ players even more paranoid about each other:

- If you’re bitten by a zombie (but not killed), you start turning into a zombie. For the first 24 hours, there are no visible symptoms. Then you start to change.

- When you turn into a zombie (ex., after 48 hours), you lose control of your character (it’s basically like dying, or being put into spectator mode – seeing the world through the eyes of your now AI-controlled character, until it finally dies).

- However, if you eat a (non-infected) freshly killed corpse before the zombie transformation is complete, you set the transformation back by 24 hours.

Now go out and enjoy meeting friends.

38 Studios’ employees should walk – right to a lawyer’s office. NOW.

The combat they feel is lacking needs to be stressed that with all the skills available the player should not pigeon hole themselves into say just a hammer user or chaos user or pistol user. You need to focus on 2 basic skill sets and look at some other skills in trees that you have no want to play. For example, right now every player should be taking the hammer skill brawler. It is a passive that adds crit, so every build can use it. Not to say you must but it is a nice 1 ap skill that allows you to add damage.

Sound is another issue. Keep in mind that you are just starting and you have newbie weapons that will sound and look much cooler later on as you level them.

3 Faction pvp?… What if Dark Mellinium actually got back into business and has multifaction? Orc vs Eldar vs Chaos vs Imperial Guard vs Tau vs Various Marines vs Tyranids. not thats pvp.

Regarding TSW’s quests, and specifically the part where you click the paintings, I didn’t find that particularly “clever”, I found it pretty annoying and cheap. The quest goes more or less like this:

First stage tells you to follow the Illuminati symbols. Easy enough, you just look around and follow them around town until you find a plaque. Not exactly very exciting (there’s a bit of fighting along the way), but it introduces the notion that each secret society leaves symbols around the world that its members instinctively recognize.

The second stage, however, is where problems begin. The plaque has an image (showing a quill, a globe and a telescope, with a lighthouse in the middle) and text saying “In the Seat of Power, the Navigator immortalized illuminating the path to the sleeping priest and fletcher”. You’re supposed to “find the location the plaque refers to”.

My first through was that the objects in the plaque represented something, so I opened the map looking for a library, a lighthouse, an observatory, or something like that. I found a couple of lighthouses / light beacons, a lot of places called “priest” and a lot of places called “fletcher”. There’s a priest house, a priest island, a fletcher bay, a fletcher island, a fletcher road, and so on. I also considered what “the seat of power” could be. The logical association would be “throne”. There’s no place called “throne” but there are lots of places called “king’s [something]“, and specifically a king’s court.

There is no way to distinguish real clues from false ones, and the naming of places on the map is clearly deliberate to force players to investigate 10 or 20 different places before finding the “correct” one. Evidence of that is that nearly every logical (but wrong) place has a ton of zombies waiting for you.

As it turned out, despite this being an ancient code, “the seat of power” referred simply to the town hall, which is on Main Street.

The first thing I noticed at the town hall was that, all over the walls, there were black rectangles with red outlines (meaning you can interact with them). I clicked on one and got a message saying something like “There is nothing special about this painting.” Oh, so that’s a painting? Because on my screen it’s just a black rectangle. But okay, I’ll try clicking on another one, maybe that will show me the actual painting, and give me another clue.

And it did. Except it was (as I later found), the “wrong” painting, and so the game decided to punish me by giving me a “wrong clue”, disabling all the other paintings (so I couldn’t click on them) and sending me across town to a shop where I was told “step completed”, but my quest didn’t actually advance. I assumed that was a bug, but eventually walked past the town hall again and noticed the red outlines were back. So I looked for some clue as to which one would be the “right” painting (or were they going to force me to follow 12 “wrong clues”?). There were no usable light switches anywhere in the room, and the paintings were completely black. Eventually I found that, by going to the game’s menu, I could crank up the brightness and make the paintings visible (I hadn’t lowered it before; the paintings were black with the default “ultra quality” setting).

And one of the paintings happened to show a quill, a globe and a telescope. Clicking that one advanced the quest to the next step. So there was really nothing to “interpret” about the plaque or the text (except “seat of power”), the puzzle boiled down to using the video options to make the paintings visible, and then clicking on the one that showed those objects.

Sigh…

The next part (step #3) makes a bit more sense, but again has a couple of red herrings (one of which will make you click on up to 112 different objects – I’m not kidding) and doesn’t really fit in with the quest line (the answer is related to King Solomon, but you’re on an Illuminati quest, not a Templar quest – why would the Illuminati use a Templar reference to hide their password?).

I like the game’s atmosphere, and I think the voice acting and storytelling are excellent (light years ahead of GW2), but the excessive use of red herrings is a cheap way to make quests seem harder, and forcing players to change their video options to solve a quest step is just terrible game design.

To Gamedesign i wont disagree, but for me the ‘Riddles Hints’ change with the Fraction you choose. And as illuminati originally fouded by some Philosiphers in Hamburg, which also see Solomon as the first ‘enlkightned’, the reffering is ok, also the questhints look very simple to me, Illuminati hide things obviously in front of you. F.E. if there is a referring to an Oak in the Woods, then go to the Forest and look there, merely not the middle than at the outer border (say, an special Oak will stand in the middle, on the gloomy Center, arent? Wrong for Illuminati, but right for Templar). The Dragon would be more than an Oak in an industrial Plant or smthg. chaotic.

But thats only my opinion, cause this Game looks very similar to the good ol’ “Mage-The Awakening”-Pen&Paper (not the actual which is Reckoning-referred).

So, me has no probs with the Quest-’Logic’, eccept theyre to easy with thus Graphic-Hints (The changing Mousepointer, the glooming effect if you can interact etc….). Put em Away or at least fill in an ‘No Hinints, no names above Heads and only selfmade-Mapmarkers’-Mode. Force the Player to interact, not to grind around (theres no difference between grinding Quests or killing Mobs to grind, boring and amience-killing is both of them).

This Game has possibility to be a real Concurrence to GW2, it has better idea of a Skillsystem in  the freedom, just the actionswapping of the class is a bit….welll….odd? Woooo, now i pull out a Greatsword for an attack, next second im using a Sniperrifle and change to rangedd… Make a hard-Setup which can be choosen in ‘your Crib’ and only be changed there. Then fill in some more People runnin around, some more #normal living# as counterpart for the weird an mad ones you interact with. I feel like im the normal Guy and everyone is like me. Where is the Mob, hunting the #Witch#? With this lil changes TSW will be te alternative Game to GW2.

Still, after this ‘mourniong-around’, its a great Game and a godd idea, keep up with the Art of Gamedesingn, use the marketing as Tool to pay the fees for expressing your art, then i will see a great future of yours *making some weired actings while rollin’ eyes oddly*

The chaos Within may Guide you through the static outside.

I think this is a prime example of why people like and have liked sandbox MMOs on Day Z. The sense of exploration a raw start open world to do it how you wish and it lets the players determine the flow of gameplay. There is no standardized anything, random spawns, a legit death penalty, but one that isn’t really a turn off to play in general, no linear paths or typical experience hand holding.

I just don’t get why this wasn’t done sooner, there have been many games trying to cash out on zombies and apocalypses. They all have tend to used the same formula of fighting waves with point A to point B goals with rather a narrow scope of events.

In TSW I myself couldn’t get into the combat, it wasn’t just about animations and sound, though I did notice it lacking as well. It was for me just a feeling of a auto-attacking targets without the convenience of auto attacking. It was for the most part just spamming a (same) sequence of abilities on nearly every mob. It really didn’t feel like much though as the player was being put into what your choice of abilities did.

Its a shame because all the weapons look as great alternatives to each other, not one feels crappy or overpowering to all others, each having intriguing abilities. That, on top of being a non-class and non-level based game just seemed like such a great progressive step in MMO design and innovation. It may have been poorly executed but behind it was a great concept.