Champions Online – Stubborn Developers in Action!
CO might be a good game. You can read my Champions Online Preview here. But there is a serious problem, and it points to an even MORE serious problem.
Hyper customization is the primary USP (Unique Selling Point) of CO. There are no classes. There are just tons of powers to choose from. This is wonderful and all, but right now you can only respec your last 10 choices (not just of powers, but stat training, boosts to powers, travel abilities, etc.). As you can imagine, it is INCREDIBLY easy to gimp your character given the millions of training possibilities. Even if you don’t gimp your character, you could easily ruin the fun of it with a few choices you regret a couple levels later.
It is my opinion that Champions Online will fail without a full respec option. Players will not tolerate the situation as it is right now. Currently, people are being told to “do some research before training” and “use a character planner” (which are made by third parties). Hello MMO Elitism! Again, those of us with experience playing or making games know how asinine that advice is. Most people want to PLAY games, not research them. The real reaction people are going to have when they mess up a character and have no recourse is to create a recourse – /cancel subscription. Obviously, that’s bad for business.
I expect that sooner or later, Cryptic will realize this and have to implement a full respec. The fact that they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to this OBVIOUS realization is mind boggling.
What shocks me is they should already have learned this lesson. The same thing happened in City of Heroes, and that game was LESS customizable and harder to gimp your character.
This circles back to the point I made near the top. What does this say about Cryptic’s management and leadership? Who is making bad decisions like this one (or like the ones in my sleazy marketing post)? Is it Bill Roper? He is now the “Design Director” and Executive Producer of Champions Online. That’s a pretty nice followup job to driving Flagship into bankruptcy and murdering the otherwise promising Hellgate: London.
Oh, and what was one of the things players wanted in HG:L but Roper and crew fought them on? Respecs. What else? LAN play.
Seeing any lessons for other game developers? I do.
Bill Roper was also involved in making Diablo 2, which also had a very unforgiving skill system, so this is (unfortunately) nothing new.
I wonder if they go the no-respec route deliberately to encourage people to roll alts when they realise that their first attempt was a bit gimped.
Hirvox: Good point. That was one of the major reasons why I had no interest in playing closed battle.net. In single player/LAN/open battle.net I could always use a character editor to make changes.
Spinks: I think you might be right, and that couldn’t be a worse justification. That is an example of people rolling alts out of desperation, not because they just want to have fun and try something new.
I actually kinda agree with the no respec mindset. I think character building should be a skill. You should have to put some thought into it instead of just going with the flavor of the month.
That being said though, the realities of MMOs make it a very bad idea. So many abilities don’t work as advertised. Others are buffed/nerfed. New abilities are added in. It’s just too easy to gimp a character through no fault of your own.
Ah, but it keeps them playing longer so that they can get to the fun part. In a subscription game, that’s like printing money. (Remember the “the game starts at 80″ mindset? It’s the same old shell game.)
Character building should be a skill. But having it be a skill doesn’t mean you have to stick someone with a ruined, worthless character because they later learned something that invalidated a previous choice.
Or heck, someone might simply get BETTER at playing the game and no longer need or want something they took before as a crutch.
Imagine an ability that required good circle strafing skills or the ability to respond to reactive events (parries, dodges, whatever). When you start off, perhaps that sounds too daunting “There’s no way I could have that good of reaction time.”
But then you play the game and you get better and better. Now you DO have the skill. And since reactive skills tend to be some of the strongest, you are ready to try them.
Now you have to reroll?
That’s an instant cancel for lots of people.
You’ve got a point there. Respeccing is pretty much a neccessity. A half-ass “respec your last 10 choices” system isn’t going to cut it. I’d like to see respeccing be far less frequent though.
Good post and very thought provoking. Outsider is right, character building is a skill….but way more subtle IMO then pulling flavour of the month off the boards. Finding the optimized build for your playstyle/skill level is quite difficult. Which is why I favor moderately expensive full respecs, not having the right build for your playstyle = zero enjoyment of game.
Going off the above though, build is only half the equation. Having the skill to actually use it is another matter. Hybrids may often come out stronger then single focus characters but in my experience across games are also vastly harder to play.
You guys are still missing a key point. Why have a cost for respeccing *at all* if it’s such a key to having fun in a system where 1) you can gimp your character, and 2) your player skill and preferences can change over time? Giving the respec a cost is *just another time sink* (or RMT sink, whatever), and those serve as exit points for players.
The way Guild Wars handles “respecs” is brilliant, and it doesn’t seem to hurt the game, other than not making players grind up the respec fee thereby making them play longer and extending the sub time thereby leeching more money for the company. Oh, wait, GW doesn’t *have* subscriptions. That’s not an accident.
Of course, I’d go further than even the GW brilliance by allowing *full* respecs, all the way down to basic class choice. In CO, where your “class” *is* your skill setup, a full respec would be a great tool for letting people actually *play* the friggin’ game, rather than grind to the point where they can play.
Beyond that, if learning to build your character is a skill to learn in itself, why attach a penalty to learning that skill? Adding a “processing” fee to respec is effectively “double dipping” on the fee to learn the skill; it costs the player the time to learn how to play *and* the time to generate the fee to change. That’s not cool.
There’s alternatives to putting a cost on it. Put time requirements on it(eg only 2 respecs a month). Give out respecs at certain points in the character’s career(eg every game should be giving a free respec once you hit level cap in my opinion).
Guild Wars is different because it’s such a tactically complex game. You’ve got very few choices to make in character building, so you need to make them very well. You need to consider what you’ll need to take on the popular teams, what you need to support your teammates, etc. You also need to be able to deal with metagame shifts. GW is a very different game than the average MMO, so I don’t mind it’s ‘respec’ system.
Tesh, I agree with your post 100%.
Not sure what else I can say about that.
Wow.. it’s amazying how folks are given such great abilities to so easily test out powers and even respec them and they immediately complain for it to be even easier. I personally have not played a game that made trying out new powers and undoing them so easy and I have played most of the big name MMO’s out there.
Sure, if folks don’t bother to test powers out in the Power House you could probably gimp yourself but even then I think it would be hard to do considering however powerful most abilities seem to be.
If you gimp your character in this game, I’d wager its 99% because you didn’t bother to test your powers or put them all in one basket because a power was overpowered to begin with.
I could not disagree more, Dan.
The whole forum is full of people whining that they cannot afford the respec fee.
And well, what is the point in making respeccing HARD, actually? WHY?
There is not much reason why it has to be hard at all. Except to keep people grinding and paying?
I remember reading something about trying to suck money out of players to keep the game playable without super-inflation in the auction houses. Every time you kill a monster you add money to the game’s economy. Every time you buy a skill, or anything else from an NPC (like a respec) they are just taking money out of the system. Why do we have money then? I’d wager it’s probably about 50% because it’s shiny and fun and 50% so that players have a way to exchange goods for time (my gold is worth the 5 hours I spent farming for it and so whatever I’m getting from you for my 5 hours of gold should be worth 5 hours of time).
The primary problem I have with WoW at the moment is that I don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time farming gold for Epic flying. Even with the cost reduced by grinding the correct faction to the maximum (It’s not that hard if you frequent instances with any kind of regularity) it’s still four THOUSAND gold. That’s time that I don’t have to play the game, so I’m just going to be happy with my normal flying.
To effectively sap money from players to keep them from getting super-wealthy (If players are dirt poor then the economy will follow suit with the model I’m using. Money is worth more if you have less of it, and therefore the cost of items will simply shift down based on their relative worth when compared to the money) you have to attatch a cost to something, in my case epic flying while in CO respeccing, and then manipulate the cost to try to find a good desire/benefit balance so that players will pay the price to access that content.
What is sounds like CO has done is drastically cranked up the price along with the desire/benefit for the system. They are “giving” players something great, but asking them to spend way too much time to be able to use it. It’s almost like dangling the proverbial carrot in the players faces. “Here is this great new system! Now work work work for days on end to be able to afford it!” I think that’s an unfortunate design decision, but fortunately for the devs they just have to crank down one variable to make it work (perhaps it’s more work than just ONE variable, but I think my message is clear).