What Blizzard Teaches Us About Games

[Zelc]

I recently saw some slides Blizzard Entertainment used for a presentation on games. If you don't know, Blizzard is currently working on Starcraft 2 as well as updating World of Warcraft, and they're facing some of the same problems WotC is with 4E. I found slides that were pertinent to 4E that I think would be good to share . Even if you're not familiar with Starcraft or World of Warcraft, I think you can tell what the message is.

Warning, they're large pictures, so they may not be safe for 56k.

Change is bad!
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The full slide.
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Intro to Player Psychology
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A specific example of mis-aligned incentives:
Alterac Valley is a battleground in WoW. Battlegrounds give a reward (honor). Both the winning and the losing team would get honor, although the winning team gets more. However, playing it the way that was intended often was a long drawn out affair that could last several hours.
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This is what ended up happening:
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As in people would do nothing so their team loses quickly. More honor per period of time.[/sblock]

 

[hong]

Tabletop gaming is like a weird mix of PvE and PvP. On the one hand, there is usually a general expectation that the players will win, even if they get pummelled a bit along the way. On the other, you have issues of ego/fairness/"fun" on both sides to deal with, rather than just one side. And then there's that whole "roleplaying" thing....

 

[The Little Raven]

*sigh* My company wishes we could be as sharp in game design as Blizzard (though you'll never hear any of our faces say that).

 

[Zelc]

Tabletop gaming is like a weird mix of PvE and PvP. On the one hand, there is usually a general expectation that the players will win, even if they get pummelled a bit along the way. On the other, you have issues of ego/fairness/"fun" on both sides to deal with, rather than just one side. And then there's that whole "roleplaying" thing....

Well, the AV examples weren't as much about PvP as it was about incentives. The most obvious manifestation of this in D&D is the 15 minute day, where people nova and expend most of their per day resources in one or two fights, then take a nap. Trying to incentivize players to do the fun thing is something every game company has to struggle with.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Where'd you find these? Interested people want to loot more from Blizzard's presentation...

 

[Incenjucar]

It's mostly the issue of different playstyles and motives.

Some people are in it to play, some people are "innit to winnit."

This comes down to "Know what your players want out of the game."

 

[Sonny]

*sigh* My company wishes we could be as sharp in game design as Blizzard (though you'll never hear any of our faces say that).

Work for SoE huh? =P

 

[Zamkaizer]

Where'd you find these? Interested people want to loot more from Blizzard's presentation...

I assume it's from Blizzard's presentation at the currently underway GDC.

 

[Zelc]

I found them on a professional Starcraft fansite (professional Starcraft fansite as in fansite for professional Starcraft, not professional fansite for Starcraft). The discussion is here, although much of it is centered around the possibility of a new image of a unit. The screens (WARNING! NOT 56k friendly!!!) are here.


For context, Blizzard has a REALLY hard problem with Starcraft 2 (sequel to perhaps the best real time strategy game ever for those of you who're living under a rock ). They have it much worse than WotC with 4E. One of the proposed changes is the addition of multiple-building selection (MBS) and having workers automatically mine if you "rally" (basically, a newly-built unit moves to its rally point) them to a resource node. Starcraft 1 did not have that, and as a result people have to be really fast in order to play well. They have to micromanage their army, manage their base, send newly built workers to mine, select what could be well over 10 buildings one by one to rebuild your army, amongst other things. Indeed, even the fastest people who can manage 500 actions per minute can't do everything perfectly.

The problem is this. Right now, all of the new Real Time Strategy games have features like MBS and auto-mine. So if Blizzard doesn't put this in, they risk alienating the game critics as well as turning off potential customers for making the game "too hard". On the other hand, part of what made Starcraft so good was people never could have time to do everything. It was impossible to master. Watching someone do some brilliant move with their army units is all the more awe-inspiring if you realize they're splitting their time between watching their units and doing stuff in their base. In a demo (of an alpha version of Starcraft 2) many months ago, pro players thought there wasn't enough to do in the game with MBS and auto-mine.

The stakes are supremely high. Starcraft, even though it's 10 years old, is still an extremely popular game, especially in South Korea. It's achieved a market penetration much larger than D&D and most games will ever have. Let's put it this way. There are two cable TV channels dedicated to hosting e-sports games (and Starcraft is the most prominent one in Korea). They each host a tri-annual tournament with significant payouts. There are 12 teams, 11 of which have corporate sponsors and the last one is sponsored by the Korean Air Force (kinda like the Air Force American football college team). And get this: they have live audiences for the tournament games, and TWO-THIRDS OF THE SPECTATORS ARE FEMALE.

Basically, they're trying to create Football 2. They have to make it more accessible and keep up with industry standards without chopping the number of players in half, reducing the difficulty with a massive drop in complexity. The troubles of WotC and 4E seem minor by comparison .

 

[Zamkaizer]

Well, 4E's designers don't have the benefit of being able to implement into the game a drop-down menu that could the revert the mechanics to an earlier incarnation, like Blizzard could easily do with Starcraft II. The solutions to these problems tend to be much more eloquent when the work falls upon the unseen programming of game, rather than upon a DM and pages of variant rules.