It seems that differing animation cycles in the game have resulted in an unforseen side effect: female avatars do less damage then male ones [previously at WCFTWD]. At the time, the Funcom developers said they’d let us know as soon as they could about a fix. Today they let us know, but the news is mixed. The good news is that ’straight damage’ (what they call white damage) has been fixed. Simple autoattack routines use few animations and they’ve all been fixed and pushed to the live servers.
The problem comes in with the much-vaunted realtime combat system, which requires heavy use of combos and unique animations. There are almost a thousand of those animations, and every single one will apparently have to be tweaked by animators and then retuned by a designer.
Wow.
Truth: live teams can’t depend on anything but design time, because artists get moved to other projects and coders are busy fixing shit. Even if you’re so sure that your project will be better!, just play it safe. Design data should always be the final arbiter of anything that may change during live.
I don’t care that your animation was painstakingly handcrafted to look great at a four second cast time — I will change that cast time someday, and I do NOT want to ask for art time to do it.
One of the commenters asks why female characters’ DPS couldn’t be fixed with damage multipliers. That would be a nice quick fix, but I would guess they can’t do it — the ability system would need to be able to check gender, which would require code and data format changes. One would assume that they don’t have a lot of code time to spare! And then it’d be a huge amount of crap for designers to maintain in the future.
Netflix decides to keep the profiles feature after all.
Because of an ongoing desire to make our website easier to use, we believed taking a feature away that is only used by a very small minority would help us improve the site for everyone. Listening to our members, we realized that users of this feature often describe it as an essential part of their Netflix experience. Simplicity is only one virtue and it can certainly be outweighed by utility.
* post title totally stolen from here — aside from many, many MMO examples, of course.
Pirates of the Burning Sea makes quite a lot of changes with the help of a patcher survey. Joe says:
The patch survey process is a new one for us, but so far I’m very happy with the results. This kind of feedback is a great complement to the information we get through the forums, support tickets, live metrics, and talking to players. I encourage you all to keep your eyes on the launcher once 1.5 is live. Your answers on the next patch survey will make this process even better!
We discussed a patcher survey in Lord of the Rings Online earlier this year.
Because these things are good to know.
Shadowbane’s combat outcomes were similarly based on ratings, determined by gear and base statistics, not level. But if I remember correctly, attack rating and defense rating only determined chance to hit. Damage wasn’t scaled.
Content density in Life in Vegas, an upcoming open world game that looks like it would be really cool if the tone weren’t so relentlessly immature:
Open world games have so much content, but do you ever worry that you’re working on this content that no one’s going to see, necessarily? Someone doesn’t go all the way down that tree?
[…] we’ve also made it a very big point for design, to make sure that the missions were covering — we literally have coverage graphs all over the map, how much time you spend in any given area, and when. So it’s all paced so that you’re going from location to location, and really utilizing the game environment.
It’s literally a tool that we’ve used behind the scenes, so that we can tell how people will play the game, basically, so we can tune the missions to make sure people are using the world appropriately. It’s completely transparent to the player.
The toolset that you’re using to design the game, you have this tool, so that when someone’s designing that mission tree, it will encourage them to place the missions in different parts?
AP: Yeah, exactly. So, when the designer is literally placing the missions, first we make up, “OK, we don’t really go to the Fremont area, you know, for the first two hours of the game, so let’s put a vigilante gig there that’s going to reward the players for exploring that area.”
And then, within the vigilante gig, we may go, “OK, in this area, no one’s really hitting that for another two hours, if people played linearly through the game, so let’s reward the player from that.” So you’re really making sure that players are hitting all locales within the open world, no matter how they play; whether it’s just going off the rails, doing gigs, which again are optional missions, or doing the narrative.
I’m curious about what the tool looks like. I’m picturing a room full of level designers working under density maps on monitors like the NYPD.
Netflix is eliminating their profile feature, where an individual account (say, two movies at a time) can be split up into separate movie queues (say, one for my movies and one for my spouse’s, in case our tastes don’t match).
At least, we assume that the reason the feature exists is a) because it’s a nice feature for households with multiple movie watchers who disagree on DVD priorities, and b) because it allows them to data mine individual preferences for said movie watchers. Without this feature, they can do neither, and they piss people off while they’re at it.
I wonder if maybe the data just wasn’t that useful (but I like seeing recommendations driven by my movies!). I wonder if the data storage was getting to be a problem (doesn’t seem like it’d be that much, aside from maybe the individual rating data). Maybe they never used it in the first place (ahh, the world of corporate “business intelligence”).
Like somebody points out in the Metafilter thread, it’s a bad time to piss off subscribers for any entertainment service. Food for thought.
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