Crew Skills

Prompted by DC Universe Online’s recent shift to free-to-play, and looking for something with which to while away the next few weeks, I reactivated my account a few days ago. I played when it launched earlier this year, for a month or so, until I hit the wall known as “hi, you’ve run out of content, it’s endgame or nothing for you!” – I played a hero, then, so I figured I’d try out the villainous side of life this time around.

Which prompted some ponderings about factional games, and narratives, and how careful you have to be when writing the ‘bad’ guys.

The fundamental problem is that if your factions are Good vs Evil, it’s really really hard to believe in the evil side.

Most MMOs are set up so that the factions are equal-and-opposite – to avoid balance problems regardless of who plays what. The Alliance will never ‘beat’ the Horde, the Sith Empire will never ‘beat’ the Republic, and the two sides can oppose each other for the lifetime of the game. One side may win a battle, or gain some ascendancy for a while, but the fundamental conflict can’t be resolved without changing your game more dramatically than most players will accept. (Which is, tangentially, the fundamental problem I see with the upcoming WoW expansion: the storyline has to end in stalemate or you piss off half your player base, but fighting just to stand still isn’t particularly satisfying.)

Equally, the two opposing factions are usually carefully cast not as Good vs. Evil, but Us vs. Them. Red vs. Blue. Each side has its moral high ground on some issues, and its utter sketchiness on others, but generally the player can believe that their faction is in it for the long haul; it works as a society, there are reasons for co-operation, and political bickering aside you’re not actually counting down the minutes until your own faction’s leaders try to shiv each other in the kidneys.

This is not a strength that DCUO possesses. It’s a limitation in part imposed by the source material – comic-book villains have always been very … well, comic-book – and the writers either didn’t manage to think beyond the problem, or didn’t realise it was one.

The villains in DCUO are exactly equal and opposite to the heroes, which strains credibility til it squeaks – or at least, it does for me. We understand why the heroes build themselves a Justice League Watchtower and organise for strength and mutual support – they have the same goals, and an ethos that values peaceful co-operation. Nobody thinks it’s surprising to see Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman working together, nor encouraging their protegés to do the same.

When it comes to the villains, though, it’s hard to say the same. Lex Luthor working together with Circe and The Joker, and all their minions playing nicely with each other? Indefinitely? That’s… a little harder to believe. And somebody built a Hall of Doom (because the villains have to have an equivalent of the heroes’ Watchtower) and just donated it to all the bad guys? Riiiiight. Comic book villains just don’t play well with others – at least, not in the long term. There’s the odd band of bad guys who share a goal (like Marvel’s Brotherhood of Mutants, for instance), there are friendships (like Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy) and romances (like Harley Quinn and the Joker), and any good villain has a collection of subservient minions — but it’s almost impossible to imagine a long-term large-scale collaboration between a big group of disparate villains. They simply don’t have the shared values and priorities that (most) heroes do – nor the willingness to sublimate their needs for the good of a shared culture.

That’s why they’re bad guys, after all.

So developing an overtly ‘evil’ faction takes some careful writing – you have to give the players a reason to accept that this large group of selfish, amoral individuals will work as a faction in the long term as well as the short term. You have to give the players a reason to believe that the factional leaders won’t destroy each other and their entire faction with internecine squabbling, and that the minions won’t destroy each other trying to rise to the top.

There are ways to do it, of course. You can drop the idea of making the bad guys an equal-and-opposite mirror of the good guys, which means you can give them whatever social structure and goals make sense – LotRO does it this way, where Monster characters are only available to play as PvP antagonists for normal PCs. You can give the evil faction an all-powerful übervillain who stamps out internal discord before it can do too much damage. (LotRO again.) You can give the bad guys a culture that values social order, like the Sith Empire in Star Wars’ Old Republic era – who, to borrow terms from tabletop gaming, are generally Lawful Evil, not Chaotic Evil. You can give the bad guys a (convincingly-explained) reason to put aside their differences and work together. But you just can’t stick a bunch of chaotic evil villains into a clubhouse without doing your narrative homework and then expect it to be a viable long-term faction – not without stretching credibility past its breaking point.

We bloggers might still be limited by the NDA, but there’s some crunchier content appearing on various press sites now that the press embargo has been lifted. I’ll update this post as I see useful guides.

• Massively’s Hyperspace Beacon column: Crew Skills preview (which is fairly meaty, and mostly correct)
• IGN’s companions & crew skills coverage (more shallow, and focusing more on companion gameplay)

Aussies, Kiwis and others in the MMO backwater known as the Oceanic zone have long been bemoaning BioWare’s decision to exclude us from the December SWTOR launch, but I’m wondering if things might not be about to change. Engage Optimism Mode!

Fact 1: The Euro launch of SWTOR was originally scheduled for the 22nd of December, and has recently been moved up to the 20th, now scheduled to launch at the same time as North America.

This demonstrates that they’re still willing to make adjustments to their launch schedule; it’s not set in stone.

Fact 2: On October 11th BioWare sent out invites for a beta weekend to testers from North America, Australia and New Zealand “to inform decisions about the launch of the game in Oceanic regions”.

This demonstrates that they’re currently actively engaged in testing the game’s performance quality for Oceanic gamers on North American servers.

Fact 3: There is already a contingent of Australian and New Zealand gamers who have preordered the game from American and European retailers with the intention of playing at American launch on North American servers (mostly in the US Pacific time zone). BioWare are aware of this, and have confirmed that they’re okay with it.

My hypothesis – and this is optimism mode firmly engaged here – is that they were testing to see whether we Oceanic types could play on North American servers with acceptable connection quality and latency, or whether we’d need our own physically-local servers. Given that they could have used eager Oceanic players who’d pre-ordered from Amazon as their guinea pigs, post launch, and instead went to the effort of spending valuable testing time on us, that suggests it has some bearing on the launch.

So, I’m wondering if, perhaps, they were deciding between a delayed Oceanic launch with our own local servers, vs rolling us into the “Worldwide” December 20th date but expecting us to play on North American servers. Depending on the conclusions they drew from the beta, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an announcement within the next few weeks about Australia & New Zealand being added to the list of countries launching the game on December 20th. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I expect it, exactly, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it happens.

I’ve already pre-ordered from Amazon, so whatever happens, I’ll be playing this year. Whether that’s on North American servers or Australian ones is another matter, though I’m expecting the former. As someone who’s not terribly invested in uber-competitive PvP, this doesn’t really bother me – in fact, the biggest downside of North American servers, for me, has been the server maintenance, restarts, and general downtime during our peak play times. And this is certainly annoying, and probably will continue to be so in SWTOR – but I’ve put up with it for eight years now, in game after game; I can tolerate it for a few more years yet if I have to.

How about you? Think I’m way off base with my hypothesis? Desperately keen for a physically local server? Am I hopelessly out of touch? I’m interested to hear what you think.

(Also, apologies for posting this at a weird time; I was going to wait, but I’d hate to get scooped before going on the record with my theory!)

Alostrael, a friend and guildmate of mine who blogs over at Han Shot First, has posted an interesting summary of today’s press reports, including links to many of them.

He also makes the point that:

[there] are a wide variety of opinions, each of which seems to be coloured by the hopes and wishes (ie baggage) that the reviewer entered with. One reviewer will praise the story whilst another will say that it is awkward and doesnt fit in an MMO environment. One reviewer will quip “this is not the MMO you are looking for”, whilst another will sings songs of praise. The only general themes that everyone agrees on is that there is a metric shit load of story, and that at its core there is nothing else new that has been brought to the genre.

To me, “metric shit load of story” is something new that’s been brought to the genre. It’s all too easy in most MMOs to click through the quest text to the “Accept” button, and you have to make a specific decision to stop and actively read the story. In SWTOR, the story is presented to you – not inescapably, but certainly immersively. As Charles Onyett says in his IGN review:

“Many quest goals are still pretty standard for the genre, but at the same time the narrative wrapped around each quest is so well presented with voice-acting, detailed character animations and dialogue choices that it’s easy to get swept up in the fiction and forget about the menial kill and collect quest goals.”

And John Walker at Rock Paper Shotgun says:

“It’s impossible not to appreciate the difference voicing a game makes. It’s extraordinary to appreciate the difference being able to answer back makes.”

I absolutely agree with Alostrael that overall the game is “more evolutionary than revolutionary”, but I think the voiced NPC interactions (and multiple response choices) are a very important evolution for the genre to have made. World of Warcraft, the behemoth in the field, was evolutionary rather than revolutionary too, and look what it did for us. SWTOR is just evolving MMOs to the next step, not changing the face of them – but, as it is for Alostrael, that’s more than enough for me.

Dear readers, I have something of a dilemma. You see, I was a very fortunate gamer this weekend; I had the chance to play in the most recent beta weekend, and let me tell you, I played the hell out of it.

Now, the beta is covered with a strict – very strict – NDA and I don’t particularly want to jeopardise my account, or my chances of getting into the beta in future, so I won’t be posting anything I did or saw in the beta until the NDA is lifted.

However, I don’t want to have to stop blogging entirely until December – and the last thing the world needs is yet another SWTOR blog just mindlessly reposting all the dev diaries, Friday updates and video walkthroughs from the official site. So I won’t be leaking anything I saw in the beta, but I’ll still be keeping my eyes peeled for interesting revelations in publicly-released material.

And in the meantime, I’ll be prepping and polishing all the screenshots and videos I took – both pretty scenery and guides to gameplay. Did I take lots of screenshots of the crafting interface and videos of the mechanics? You bet.

So, watch this space. I’ll be purposely forgetting everything I saw in the beta until December, and hoping beyond hope for another beta weekend invite. And when the NDA’s lifted, I’ll share everything I can.

A week since last update? Bad blogger, no biscuit! In truth, it’s because all my spare time has been occupied with getting my brand new gaming computer up and running. Just in time for the next round of beta weekends! she says optimistically. Hope springs eternal, and all that.

I’d been pondering computer specs for a few weeks; eventually I settled on an i5 2500 3.3GHz S1155 CPU, with 16 GB of RAM, a 1GB GTX560 video card, and an SSD boot drive to supplement the HDD. I am so, so glad I went for the SSD; the difference is really noticeable. It’s in an Antec Lanboy Air blue case, which is a far cry from the elegance of the Mac Pro sitting next to it – but it’s far from the ugliest PC case out there, and it’s light. And has handles. Given that SW:TOR will be turning up right when I’m visiting family for Christmas, there’s no way I’m not taking my PC with me, so it has to be as luggable as possible… and surprisingly it’s quite easy to move. Overall I’m super happy with it; it’s been a long time since I’ve had a computer so well-suited for gaming.

Anyway, on with the show! I originally started this post – before getting derailed by my new shiny – to link to Southern Wardens‘ (i.e. my guild’s) guild recruitment video. Otherwise known as “my spot on the latest bandwagon”. It seems videos are the new wave of guild recruitment tools – this is certainly not something I’ve seen in the WoW guild community, for instance, but I’ve seen a number pop up in the SWTOR community already. (Something of a feat, given how little video footage has escaped the NDA; one doesn’t have much to work with.) Nonetheless, as video editing is something of a hobby of mine, I couldn’t help but put one together.

(This isn’t a full-on recruitment post, but I did want to show off the pretty.)

Amusingly, I’m now completely spoilt for anyone else’s guild recruitment videos; I just look at every clip and think “oh yes, that’s that bit from the Jedi Consular class video, that’s from the Companions dev diary, that’s from the Esseles walkthrough with the UI cropped out of it…” – I can’t wait until they lift the NDA.

You can find a list of SWTOR’s crafting skills anywhere, from SWTOR’s official site to my own crafting skills overview, and a hundred other blogs and fan sites in between. What’s harder to find is a description of how the skills actually work; how you make items, how you increase your skill, what kind of items you can make, and what level of detail the system will give you.

This is all the information I’ve been able to find so far. If you find anything in here confusing, feel free to refer to my Crafting Skills Glossary & Primer which explains common terms and concepts in the crafting skills world. I’ll also do a companion post for “What We Know About Gathering & Mission Skills” soon.

Caveat: as with all pre-release information, this is subject to change! Also please note that the devs have repeatedly made it very clear that there are parts of the crafting system they have not yet released, so the absence of “yes this mechanic definitely exists” doesn’t mean “no it definitely doesn’t exist”.

Once SWTOR goes live, and/or the NDA is lifted so beta information is readily available, I’ll create a new version of this guide with less speculation and more facts. As always, watch this space.

And now, on to the meat of the issue: what do we know about the item crafting system?

[…]

Imagine you could create your ideal, perfect, play-this-forever MMORPG, but it had to be constructed out of elements from pre-existing MMO games. So you could take, say, the player economy from EVE and the setting from LotRO and the graphics from EQ2 and the PvP from Warhammer Online. Or what have you.

What would you pick? What would be your ideal MMO, within these caveats?

I’ve been thinking about mine, and I’d probably try to bolt the following together. Bear in mind that I know very little of WAR, GW, AoC, Aion, STO, CoH, etc, and I’ve picked up knowledge of other games like EVE and RIFT by osmosis. And other than UO and SWG, I didn’t play anything pre-EQ2/WoW.

[…]

Now the release date for Star Wars: The Old Republic has been announced (best Christmas present ever!), I know a lot of people are looking for more information on SWTOR’s mechanics and fundamental game systems. Whether you’re coming fresh to the game or you’re an MMO veteran, there will be something of a learning curve involved as SWTOR’s crafting system has quite a few unique features.

So, let’s look at how the system works!

Companion NPCs Work For You

Those of you familiar with BioWare’s single-player MMOs will recall an array of memorable ‘companion’ NPCs who’d join you on your adventures. Bioware’s carrying this concept forwards into SWTOR, giving each class five unique NPCs who’ll join up with your character as a friend, apprentice, assistant, quest hook… and crafting minion.

(And for those of you who are worried about a horde of identical NPCs running around if everyone uses the most popular companions, fear not – you’ll be able to customise your companions’ looks and behaviour.

As well as enhancing immersion, adding story and helping solo players, companions will have another important function: they’ll actually do your tradeskills for you. In the words of lead writer Daniel Erickson, “The part that is not terribly exciting is standing in one spot and watching a progress bar over and over and over again. And that’s literally all that we removed.”

Your Crew Skills

Crew Skills – and now you see where my blog title comes from! – are BioWare’s take on tradeskills, crafting skills, professions, whatever you want to call them. Your character learns their crew skills, and your companions actually perform the skills for you.

Crew Skills are divided into three types: Gathering Skills (collecting raw materials), Crafting Skills (turning raw materials into useful items), and Mission Skills (performing ‘activities’ that give you gear and other rewards).

You can have a total of three Crew Skills, only one of which can be a Crafting skill (although it doesn’t have to be). Without knowing the ins and outs of the system it’s hard to judge why that limitation exists; I suspect it’s to make sure crafters interact by making them interdependent. As you’ll see in the list below, Gathering Skills and Crafting Skills are tightly tied, and Crafting Skills are also separated by whether their products are useful to Force users or non-Force users. Mission skills are another, very interesting, kettle of fish.

[…]

Before I get started on dishing up actual crafting info, I wanted to take a moment to talk about why I care about crafting systems; why it’s a part of the game that I think is important enough to blog about.

I’ve rambled about this at friends quite a lot over the years, in one way or another, and most recently I had to get my thoughts in order to explain to Dee at Azeroth.me exactly why I liked crafting.

My enthusiasm for this aspect of game systems has often baffled friends whose experience with MMOs has been limited to games like WoW and RIFT with their extremely linear, uncompelling tradeskills systems. My first MMO was Star Wars Galaxies; SWG alumni can be found all over the MMO-gaming landscape mourning the loss of its brilliant crafting system.

(Okay, my first MMO was technically Ultima Online; however, that was many years before SWG, and I barely remember anything about it. Lord knows how I managed to miss the EQ bandwagon when my UO guild migrated there.)

I won’t fill this post with hundreds of words about what made SWG’s crafting system so unique (as I already did to poor Dee’s comments); instead I’ll summarise:

SWG’s system:

• produced crafted items of better quality when the raw materials were of higher quality;
• produced items of better quality when the crafter had put more effort into maximising their character’s crafting skills;
• allowed the crafter to vary the item’s stats or other attributes (like colour and name), creating customised products;
• required the crafter to sacrifice other parts of gameplay to be a crafter (ie. spending skill points on crafting meant you couldn’t spend them on combat skills), so the market was never glutted;
• allowed the grindy part of producing items in bulk to be automated in ‘factory’ facilities while the player went off to do something fun;
• was complex enough that player skill played a significant part in the outcome of the process (eg in selecting the best raw materials or making intelligent customisation choices); and
• had a meaningful chance of failure (raw materials used, end product failed or useless)

The important part is not SWG’s specific game mechanics or how they implemented these principles; it’s the principles themselves. In a well-designed crafting system, a dedicated crafter can set themselves apart with a higher-quality or rarer finished product because they know the system better and have dedicated the time to master it, in the same way that an expert raider or PvPer can distinguish themselves by their skill.

And that’s what I like about crafting – or, more accurately, about good crafting systems. Implemented properly, they’re not just a grindy break from killing people or monsters, they’re an interesting part of gameplay in their own right.

How will dedicated crafters find SW:TOR? Well… we don’t know yet. Most information is still locked up tight under NDA; we know what the crafting skills are (and I’ll be presenting a guide about that soon), but we don’t know much yet about how they’ll be pursued. However, Game Director James Ohlen went on the record at Pax Prime as saying that if you want to be a level 1 crafter, you can. This does suggest that the devs are aware that some people play to craft and enjoy a meaningful crafting-centric game style, so we can only hope that this translates into an enjoyable, complex, satisfying tradeskills system in-game.

—
Image credit: The image of SWG’s crafting interface was taken from a post on the Sony SWG forums which may disappear when the game finally goes dark in mid-December 2011. The image of the experimentation interface was taken from a post on The Chosen Ones’ guild forum.