Aion: JRPG influences

One concept that pretty much every videogamer has become aware of, even if it’s only at some subconscious level, is the idea of a Japanese role-playing game or JRPG. This unique variant originated from Western tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons being imported into Japan and translated, with homegrown variants springing up shortly afterwards.  These then translated into videogame products, which is where series like Final Fantasy come in. It’s difficult to say if later Korean MMOs such as Lineage are a direct result of the JRPG videogames, but there are some heavy influences that come through in areas such as art direction (smooth, anime-style characters) and gameplay choices (long, drawn out and repetitive grinding sessions). Players seem to love them, with Lineage notching up 3 million players at it’s peak, while the Final Fantasy series has enjoyed continued international acclaim. It comes as no surprise then to see NCsoft try and explore this market again with a high-fantasy MMO that has a distinctly different taste to the orcs, goblins and kobolds that typically inhabit more Western fare.

Atreia: a world of two halves

The setting of the game lends it to a range of environments, with one half of the world of Atreia being continually bathed in light while the other languishes in darkness.  These two halves occupy the inside of two hemispheres, with the rubble and rock between them described as ‘The Abyss’. The background to the story involves the central tower being shattered halfway, with the inhabitants of each hemisphere blaming the other. Thus, the stage is set for conflict between the radiant Eloys and the shadowy Asmodians, providing PVP fanatics with all the reason they need to gank with impunity. Mindful of the upset that can be caused if one faction starts to dominate, a quirky design trick is to introduce an AI controlled faction called the Balaur in order to maintain some sort of balance. Depending on the amount of control each faction exhibits, the Baular can switch sides from fighting alongside to against them. It’s a clever solution to a problem that can cause heavy issues in PVP specific realms where one faction heavily outnumbers another.  NCsoft are trying to christen this type of realm design ‘PvPvE’, but it does feel to be more of a case of PvE with a special PvP zone between the two PvE areas.

Eloy: Bunch of posers

Aion: The Tower of Eternity has all the feel of a Japanese or Korean videogame. The visuals are stunning to look at, with clever texture and model work benefiting from the Crytek CryEngine used in Far Cry. Atmospheric lighting and glow effects are all there, with sunny Elysium, gloomy Asmodae and the Abyss all providing a range of environments to work with. Although influences from other fantasy settings are evident, the styling and art direction provide enough distinction to make this feel a game in it’s own right rather than just a collage of borrowed ideas. For a start, nothing looks ugly – not the creatures, not the landscapes, not the non-player characters – nothing. Whether it’s due to it’s unique heritage or just a by-product of game lore, but there is a definite aura of beauty about it. The characters themselves look like they’ve come out of a top anime movie, complete with Dragonball-Z hairstyles, plated armour and humorously over-sized weapons. The character choices themselves though are fairly straightforward – you can either choose an Asmodean or an Eloy, but there are no other racial choices available. Customisation is in a similar ball-park to Age of Conan, with sliders for almost every option conceivable. While having a limited number of choices is likely to upset players who want to play Mr Ugly, it does mean that all those issues such as racial abilities and balancing them are removed.

Classes: Simple choices

Character development is also straightforward. Four classes are initially available: Scout, Warrior, Mage and Priest. From there, players can later specialise into one of two subclasses, depending on what their personal preference is. For a warrior, this means specialising as either a tanking Templar or a general combat Gladiator. Unlike other games where switching between these two types is easy, in Aion the change becomes permanent. Although this can be a limiting choice, characters can also pick up ’stigma stones’ from the corpses of defeated monsters and use them to gain the abilities of other classes. This can mean that a mage would be able to wear heavy armour, or a warrior could gain some healing abilities.  Characters are restricted with how many stigma stones they can use and when they can swap them, and some stones will be harder to find and become bound to the character when used. It does mean though that some of the characters designed mainly for group roles such as healers and tanks will have a little more versatility during solo play. It also means that character skills can be bought and sold, providing something new for player economies to haggle over. Characters also gain the ability to fly at their tenth level, although it’s fairly tightly controlled. At first, a character can only fly for a minute, although this can be increased through the use of items, potions and general character development. Flight will also be useful in combat, with a number of flight-only abilities such as dive-bombing being possible.

Combat: Button-mashing optional

Adventuring in Aion is available in three ways, with either solo-play, 6-man parties or 9-party raids available. Most of the content is open-world, including the dungeons, with only limited content being instanced. As far as combat goes, it’s a fairly standard hack-and-slash or spellcasting affair, with a combo ability mechanism bolted on to provide even more spectacular visuals. Combo trees are also talked about, allowing a player to customise an attack to add a particular effect. Now, while I’m not averse to having combo-mechanisms to pull off spectacular attacks instead of blindly mashing buttons, I do get a little nervous when they start talking about combo trees. If the options are nice and simple I can’t see a problem with it, but if you end up with about ten different combo tree options for each ability it rapidly becomes unwieldy. There’s also what happens if a combo fails – do you deal some damage, or do you have to complete it exactly in order to do anything at all? It’s these subtle choices that can take a cool design idea and either make it something that adds a little uniqueness or something that makes it inherently frustrating. Then there’s the death penalty – not only does your character suffer debilitating effects for a short time and restart at a fixed location, but there’s also an experience point penalty. I thought we’d moved beyond these penalties, as it means that if you’re having a bad day questing or just continually getting ganked in PVP you can actually lose levels and start moving backwards. Yes, death should be harsh and unrewarding, but XP penalties are one of those design choices that should have been discarded long ago.

Crafting: can be a gamble

Crafting also seems to be one of those areas where game design choices seem to reward with one hand and punish with the other. Although the usual rollout of professions are there, the way they are implemented is cause for concern. As well as having a regular crafting success or a critical success to make an item with increased stats, a character can also fail to craft anything at all. This places increased risk on crafting economies – just imagine collecting the resources to craft a difficult to make set of armour and finding a blacksmith willing to make it, only to have your materials wasted by a failed crafting. As a consolation, players will be able to transmute resources from one type to another (such as wood into iron), but it means that you’re more likely to sell materials and buy completed items instead of finding a crafter and paying a small fee to get an item made.

At the end of the day, Aion is as much a game trying to interlock two gaming cultures together as it is about two factions opposing each other. In making concessions to western gameplay styles while still keeping eastern roots, it’s attempting to carve out a niche for itself that it hopes will make it appealing to a wide range of audiences. But while design choices seek to punish players for unlucky play sessions, reaching audiences in depth may be more of a challenge. Although it’s easy to attract a number of players keen on the more hardcore aspects of an MMO, pulling in the large numbers of casual gamers out there may prove more of a challenge.

Halo 3: $30 million in development cash

Developers and publishers have for many years sought the holy grail of gaming: a reliable, recurring revenue stream. Traditional game development can be a high-risk business, with top class titles such as Halo 3 estimated to cost around $30 million. This cost can be shared and managed between the developer and publisher, with the balance of cost on each depending on the commercial agreements in place. Trouble is, there’s a large amount of risk involved in this process – what happens when a game eats through a wadge of development cash only to fail to sell well once it hits the stores? Being as averse to losing money as the rest of us, publishers try to reduce the risk by financing titles that are likely to do well, either because the characters or concept involved is already well known (a sequel or franchise), or because the developers have prior history of creating similar successful games in the past. Once a developer released a title, they became almost dependant on it’s success to fuel an appetite for future products. This cycle can play havoc with cash flow, especially with the average title taking between 18 months and 3 years to develop.

The strategy of almost every developer is to try and smooth out the bumpy cash flow they face. Some larger studios aim to run two or three development cycles in tandem, with the conclusion of each offset from the others. Smaller studios may look to partner up with a large publisher then seek milestone or interim payments on the road to delivery. Both of these are more a case of commercial mechanics that are unlikely to have an impact on the overall delivery. Publishers may also seek to re-release popular games at a lower price point, under a “classic” or “platinum” banner if the game does well initially, potentially bringing in further revenue. In terms of getting further revenue from customers who buy an initial game, there’s only one further choice available: expansion packs. In a similar way to tabletop or role-playing games, a developer could re-use the existing technology and game mechanics and just provide a continued storyline with new creatures to defeat and areas to explore. An example of this is Beyond the Dark Portal, an expansion for Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.

Spore: Creepy concerns

Expansion packs aren’t without their downsides though. EA Games took expansion and content packs to an extreme level with The Sims 2. Over the course of four years,  eight expansion packs and ten “stuff” or content packs would be made available to buy from retail stores. Seeking to repeat the process, Spore was quickly followed up with the Creepy and Cute pack. Unfortunately, EA had lost a substantial amount of goodwill in relation to Spore due to the SecuRom debacle upon release. Users (and I have to count myself among them) experienced further problems in using this new content with existing saved games, further damaging the reputation of a game dogged with controversy. It’s when moving into areas like this that publishers have to be careful, particularly in the current climate. Players have to feel that they’re buying an entertainment product, not a chore. More importantly though, they have to feel that they’re buying something that represents to them value for money. With retail growth slowing during the crucial winter season, it’s more crucial than ever to reward customers for their purchases. Some publishers have started to move in this direction by lowering the prices of some of their newer releases, but if discounting becomes the norm it increases the risk that a game will not generate a profit.

Aion: Tower of Eternity: NCsoft's next MMO

The question is, can MMO studios fare any better? Although they release videogames to similar schedules and charge about the same for them, they generally take longer to develop and require additional infrastructure to support them. Likewise, while they can provide a regular revenue stream, players expect regular content updates to be included as part of the agreement. Plus a fair chunk of that recurring revenue has to be spent on operational costs such as maintenance, customer support and so on. And don’t forget, a developer has to splash out on getting all this up and running before a single copy of the game is bought – if the game doesn’t sell or if forecasts are wrong, they may end up with too few subscribers to sustain the online platform. The history of Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted (formerly Horizons: Empire of Istaria) serves well as an example in this regard, with the development and ongoing maintenance changing hands several times. Firms such as NCsoft, with a range of multiplayer games spanning multiple markets, and with a support and server infrastructure already in place, may fare better in the medium term.

Of course, this does depend on subscriber loyalty. As we dip further into an economic downturn, are players more likely to give up buying new games to continue paying for subscriptions to their current ones? How high is a gaming subscription on a player’s list of financial priorities – is it something they’ll hang on to as long as possible, or something they’ll only cancel if almost forced to? How much of an improvement does a new MMO have to provide before players switch from one game to another? It’s difficult to say for sure, but I have a feeling that players are likely to consider giving many other things up before closing out on a game they’ve enjoyed playing for some time.