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Torchlight shouldn’t just be a blip on your radar, it should be a massive unidentified mass that will grab hold of you and never let go. I realize those unidentified radar targets are usually Godzilla, or a Russian submarine. In this case, it’s Torchlight.

Do the names Max and Erich Schaefer mean anything to you? They should. While Jay Wilson and the rest of Blizzard North continued onward to glory after the release of Diablo II, the Schaefer brothers departed to follow their vision for what an action-RPG game could be.
 
Did I mention they were Diablo’s original designers? They were into Diablo before Diablo was cool, man. Imagine if Diablo’s addictive mechanics were refined for a decade and the distracting fat was stripped away. What are you left with? No, not Diablo 3; Torchlight.
 
Runic Games will finally release Torchlight on October 27th. Its budget price and low profile will likely result in the game being criminally underplayed, but I’m here to do a few of you a favor and convince you to give it a shot.

Summary for those who appreciate brevity:

Runic is brutally honest about this game. They’re not trying to spin it as anything but a Diablo clone with minor improvements. They specifically say ‘if you know Diablo, you know our game.’ If you don’t want more Diablo, look elsewhere, but if, like me, Diablo III inspires substantial enthusiasm, Torchlight is worth a look. It’s cheap, it is refined and most importantly, it’s out on Tuesday and not in 2020.
 
Think of it this way: worst case scenario you waste $20 on Torchlight instead of $60 for a full priced game, and you still have $40 left over for drugs. Play your cards right, and you still may get those 10-20 hours of entertainment.    

Wrote up a little post on why Wow is still growing and what if anything can bring it down - read with pictures etc. if you want otherwise check out thoughts below! 
 

Subscriber graphs that compare World of Warcrft to other MMORPGs are comical. Without separate scales it’s difficult to even see the competition clustered way down there by zero. Companies keep claiming they’ve developed the ‘WoW killer,’ but we should start coming to terms with the fact that bringing down WoW from the outside is no longer possible.

World of Warcraft now has 13.1 million subscribers if unofficial reports are to be believed, and that number can only go higher when Wrath of the Lich King is finally approved for release in China. Not only is it unrealistic to expect a developer to make a game that significantly diverges from WoW’s mechanics, but even if they did it wouldn’t matter.

World of Warcraft has built up such a large community and so much of the potential MMORPG player base has invested themselves into WoW that any subscriber erosion from competition would barely register compared to the natural ascent and decline of the game.

What does the competition look like?

I’m going to define the competition as MMORPGs that could potentially thrive in western markets. This is not because the Asian MMORPG player base or interest is not significant; quite the opposite. It’s merely because Eastern developed games have much smaller budgets and less complicated play styles vs. an archetypal MMO style such as WoW.

This also excludes social networking games such as Mafia Wars and Farmville. I don’t consider these to be in the same category despite their popularity, and it’s not a competing user base.

I believe these to be fair constraints given the different fee structures paid in the east and west. Every $1 by a US MMORPG subscriber equates to 6c paid in Asia given the game minutes based system. It is only natural to assume that since the vast majority of revenues come from Western markets, that the largest budget and therefore most likely to globally dominate games are going to come from Western developers.

I’m going to go one step further and use AION as my ‘competition proxy’ for simplicity. While most will immediately jump to bickering over whether WoW or AION is better, I’m just going to assume that AION takes everything WoW does and improves upon it slightly. Despite this generous assumption, AION has zero chance of displacing WoW at the top of the pecking order.     
 
Continues if you want at link above otherwise you probably aren't interested by this point :)

Wrote up some thoughts on elegant gameplay mechanics that everybody should rip off to make better games - if you'd rather read with the pictures feel free otherwise see below!  
 
Summary if you don't like wall of text: these 10 mechanics are simple solutions that work within the game world, some of which have been around for a while and yet we constantly see games that fail to utilize them.
 

With the increasing pervasiveness of big budget franchises in recent years, videogames are increasingly building off what worked from their predecessors rather than reinventing the wheel. Although new game mechanics are constantly introduced, only a few of them become ‘canon’ for future game development.

Rechargeable health, simulation racing line and radial menus are innovative solutions to gameplay problems, and they are all now the de facto standard in their genres. These succeeded because they solved an issue with what I’m going to refer to as integrated design. Developers should endeavor to streamline their games as much as possible, with all lessons integrated into the actual gameplay. Players shouldn’t have to grind levels to become powerful enough to access content; if the point of the game is to access content, you should be accessing content at all times. Get to the point.

Following is an examination of a few gameplay mechanics that excel through integrated design and should serve as lessons for future games.

Positive reinforcement

Games should encourage you to play ‘correctly.’ Many games choose to punish the player if they don’t do what the developer intended. It’s easier but far less creative to use negative reinforcement in all situations. If an action game wants you to be stealthy, they should make it the best way to play. Don’t arbitrarily ‘end’ the game if the player is spotted; make it very difficult but possible to recover.

Games should promote the style the developer intended through mechanics as it’s far more rewarding to the player. Let’s take a look at four games that exemplify this model.

Red Faction Guerilla: Red Faction is a fairly mundane and generic action game with one exception: blowing shit up. Blowing shit up is usually fun, but Red Faction takes it to the next level. Never has wanton destruction been so satisfying. The developers sensibly realized that unless the player was encouraged to blow shit up all the time their game was going to fail. So what do they do? They tie the upgrade resource (salvage) to building destruction. Well played, Volition.  

Shadow Complex: This is a Metroidvania RPG with exploration as its core mechanic. It seems so simple now, but many games give experience from defeating enemies, or grinding repetitive tasks despite that not being the focus of the game. Shadow Complex gives you experience primarily from exploration. Nice synergies between what is best about the game and what the player is encouraged to do; it’s not rocket surgery.

Company of Heroes: Relic Entertainment wanted to encourage a fast, expansionary style of play and discourage turtling. Instead of simply forcing the player to expand, or penalizing them for not behaving in the desired manner, the developer simply tied resources directly to expansion. These mechanics all seem simple in hindsight. So does the wheel but I’m pretty sure the inventor of that got minted. 

Planescape Torment: This is not a game about combat; it’s about dialogue and exploration. It’s also an RPG, a game type where experience is traditionally gained through combat. Here’s a novel idea: tie the greatest experience gains to having interesting conversations. It sounds simple now, but many ‘story heavy’ games still refuse to adopt this mechanic.

Immersion

‘Immersive experience’ is a buzzword I’ve been hearing a lot of lately. Many developers claim to be immersive and then repeatedly introduce elements that scream to the gamer ‘you’re playing a game.’ If I’m playing Metal Gear Solid, and a giant exclamation mark appears over the head of an enemy, I’m no longer thinking ‘my god this is so true to life.’

Gamers will argue this is a requirement as it’s difficult to tell through physical cues when a foe becomes aware of you. Let’s take a look at a few games that came up with a more creative solution.

Left4Dead: You are a survivor of the zombie apocalypse. You are struggling with three friends to escape to safety in a terrifying world. When zombies are approaching, announcing ‘zOMG zombies are coming!’ in a garish pop-up on screen screams ‘this isn’t real.’ Valve went a different direction: subtle instrumental cues that signify the onset of certain events along with distinguishing sounds for each special infected type. You become aware of your surroundings by listening to the environment, much as you might in real life. (I suppose they ran out of instruments to signify ‘Tank is approaching!’ You can’t win them all)

Uncharted 2: While this is primarily an action game, there are a few stealth sequences. The ‘awareness distance’ of guards in most stealth games is arbitrary and difficult to identify. Another interesting fact: guards have flashlights. How can we integrate these two concepts to create additional immersion? Have the flashlight distance be equal to the awareness radius of the guard. Goodbye, exclamation marks.

Portal: Valve created an entirely new gameplay mechanic for Portal. Imagine playing an FPS for the first time. You would need extensive tutorials just to navigate the environment. Gameplay advances such as Portal require the same level of instruction, but cliché ‘tutorial stages’ are not immersive. Portal shaped the entire game around a research lab, making it perfectly natural for the game to begin slowly and progress through instructions. Now gamers understand the portal mechanic and Portal 2 can jump right into sophisticated environments.

Sophisticated Solutions

Sometimes you have a problem in a game where it’s not merely difficult to integrate cues into the gameplay, or encourage the player to act in a desired manner. There are some problems that are just difficult to solve, period. Let’s take a look at a few of those and how the games in question came up with an elegant fix.

World of Warcraft: Blizzard wanted to kickstart an economy for basic trading goods without allowing the trading of powerful raid items. To encourage players to auction goods such as skins or ore, they made them sell to vendors for far less than their worth to other players. The financial incentive to auction off resources from professions overcomes the inconvenience of auctioning a good. Likewise, arbitrarily preventing certain items in your inventory from being auctioned is an unrealistic situation, so Blizzard chose the Bind on Pickup mechanic. It’s a far smaller jump to associate magical properties to magical items than it is to believe you just can’t auction certain items.

Mario Kart: Mario Kart wanted to make an accessible kart racing game. How do you keep the people losing involved, however, without merely speeding up their kart arbitrarily as they fall behind (an inelegant solution). Enter: power-ups. Give the people in the back better items that cause them to catch up! Of course, they also just made their karts go faster. Nicely done, Nintendo.

Batman Arkham Asylum: To make a true Batman simulator, you have to pick off enemies from the shadows. Unfortunately, when you’re out of sight or hiding in ventilation shafts and around the corner, it’s pretty tough to actually play the game. Detective Mode allows you to see enemies through the walls, so you can confidently traverse around the level without being concerned the enemies are out-maneuvering you.

Game mechanics are constantly being crafted and refined. Many of the initial problems seen in games have been ironed out, and you’d never see a game with limited continues anymore despite their universality in the early days of gaming. It is disappointing that many games still have awkward or artificial gameplay mechanics when an elegant solution has already been invented. You just have to dig a little deeper, to the gooey core. Delicious