f13.net

No leveling up required before you can compete, and no treadmill you have to endure before you get to the good parts!   

In typical MMOs, players often become quite attached to their character as an individual. In single-player RPGs, players often become attached to a central character, while developing relationships with the other characters who join them. How do you believe the “group character” so to speak, of Tactica Online will impact player’s personal attachment to their characters and socialization within the game world?

Luke Carruthers:   

We do expect that players will treat most of their characters more like chess pieces than avatars though. They won’t form the same attachment to them, and it’s likely that it’s the external aspects of their persona – their rating, their titles, their impact upon the world around them – that will be important to them.

Players do have something of a central character though, which embodies them when they move around the shared areas of the game. They can customize this character to their hearts content, so their interaction with other players, and their participation in the game’s community, will be very similar to other online games, with the addition that there are lots of features – such as being able to teleport instantly to friends, wherever they are – specifically designed to enable you to play with the people you want to, when you want to.

Attachment to an avatar is often quoted as a reason players stay with a game long past the time they’ve ceased to enjoy it. We’d much rather they stayed around because they were still enjoying the game.

MMORPG.com reader Cridus wanted to know more about how terrain, formation and other factors will impact combat, as well as the level of technology present in your world. Will things like gunpowder be a part of Tactica Online?

Luke Carruthers:   

Muskets and black powder pistols are a component of every modern knight’s armory, and with the help of the alchemical sciences most guns can use much more than simple gunpowder to fire their bullets. A knight must be prepared for arcane mixtures that enable shot to explode on impact, or bullets that seek their targets like vengeful ghosts.

Similarly, while a simple soldier might not be expected to understand the use of terrain in warfare, the skilled tactician will make good use of factors such as water, cover, flanking, and fields of fire.

Don’t forget too, Tactica Online’s combat is all about skirmishes between small groups, and that rather than rough control of a group of units, you have total control over a unique group of individuals. There’s no “I should position my archers on the hillside so they have a longer range,” but instead “Johann, with his musket, should stick to the trees where he can take advantage of the cover to snipe at the enemy without being seen.”

Missions take place in darkened dungeons as often as open wilderness, city streets, the decks of a ship, or the hidden temples of a heretical sect, so there are different tactics suitable to different types of terrain, and different ways that one character might best be used on different maps.

My question is related to 'meaningful PvP', by that I mean, will we have player ran / controlled cities or capture points? Will their be quests that each of the factions come at from opposing angles? Such as perhaps the followers of faith wishing to protect a 'holy' relic, those of the magic path wish to use it as a spell focus, while those of the science wish to discover what makes it tick, etc. In short, will there be more to PvP than a simple 'because-you-can' mentality?

Luke Carruthers:   

Absolutely, the conflict between magic, science, and faith drives every level of the game, from individual missions to the overall story. Most missions have at least two angles to them – assassinate or protect the inventor, destroy the blasphemous tome or revel in the knowledge of the ancients – and in Tournaments an individual’s efforts make a direct difference on a major level to the game’s story.

The real meaning to PvP comes in the way that every single one of your victories contributes to the balance between the factions, though. The more successful you are, the more that the ongoing story will favor the faction your deeds support.

Being at the squad level, players don’t control cities, instead affecting the world in wider and more specific ways – enabling or preventing scientific discoveries, opening new lands for colonization or sinking ships before they leave the harbor. The path of history often hinges on the actions of a small group, and it is these actions that Tactica Online focuses on.

You often mention the need to re-educate fans about what Tactica is and how it is not simply another “MMORPG”, but almost a genre unto itself. Besides the obvious marketing hurdle, how do you intend to approach the dilema of this “re-education” so to speak and how it will impact new players when the game is live? Are you worried about the game being too foreign?

Luke Carruthers:   

We’re not so much concerned about the game being too foreign, as players thinking the game is one thing when it’s really another. That’s why we’re so adamant about not using the “MMO” label, it just conjures up assumptions that don’t apply.

While we combine different aspects of various genres, each individual piece of Tactica Online is already a well-respected gameplay mechanic in its own genre. Entrepreneurs often advocate innovating in only one direction at a time, and in that spirit we’ve taken the gameplay familiar from the squad-level turn-based games of the past, added the persistent world, story-driven missions, and constant updates from today’s traditional online RPG’s, and fueled it with the sort of combo system used in collectible card games. When combined they make something no one’s seen before, but each individual element is instantly recognizable to those familiar with the sort of game that inspired it.

Of course, it’s no small thing to try something that the market has a hard time classifying. The market is so crowded these days that unless you can get your message across simply, it’s hard for players to understand at a glance what sort of experience you can provide.

This is almost entirely a marketing issue. As soon as you sit down in front of the game, you get it, it’s easy to pick up – it’s just that it’s hard to describe in ten words or less. What do you do about this? You educate champions who in turn educate others, you encourage word of mouth, you put copious amounts of information on your web site, and you talk about it in interviews :)

You're able to compete with everyone else from the beginning, and there's no need to level up your characters just so you can see new content.

That doesn't mean characters don't grow or change, but that this change is focused more on flexibility and the clever mixing of skills and equipment to produce new and powerful combinations, rather than increasing your stats.

Every character in Tactica has a Point Value, and you can only take teams of characters totaling the Point Value of a particular mission or battle into that combat - if a mission has a limit of 400 points, you can only take 400 points worth of characters on it.

Hi guys,

Great to see the interest! Insofar as I can, I'm happy to answer questions and expand on what we're trying to do. Much of our thinking accords with views that people have expressed here in the past - this is a game for 50,000 players, not 500,000, for example; it's intended to provide a focused experience for a niche audience; it's aimed specifically at one of the weaknesses of existing online games, the repetitiveness of combat - and I'd be interested to hear what you all think about our approach.


Luke

My squad is currently a 400 point squad, and I'd like to keep it that way (you can only take a squad to a battle if it is at or below the battle's point total). I'm happy to trade one of my two 100 point melee fighters for a new support character, so I remove one of them from the squad (they aren't deleted, and I could always put them into another squad, or back into this one if the changes don't work out). Now to create the new character.

Calling up the character screen, I select the "Create New Character" button, and note that I have 14,000 experience available to spend.

Creating a new character takes 5,000 of that experience. It's worth a basic 20 points initially, prior to adding any skills or altering its statistics.

One of the things I'd like this character to do is increase the damage the other characters in my squad do, so I start with the Enflame Weapon skill, which will increase the effectiveness of my melee fighters by adding magic damage to their attacks. Deciding on the maximum expertise of 5, I add it to the character's skill list, increasing its cost by 30 points to a total of 50 points.

Continuing with the same theme, I next select the Rust skill, which reduces the effectiveness of an opponent's armor, as long as it's made of metal. With an expertise of 5 again, this adds 25 more points to the character's value, making the total 75 points now.

I'm not sure I buy into that "no leveling required" thing. That's like saying in Guild Wars you don't need to PvE to PvP since doing the PvE stuff just gives you more flexibility which while technically true is not true if you want to compete with everybody else who has done the PvE.

Point systems are extremely vulnerable to the min-maxers and balancing is very difficult. Fortunately this is an online game so changes can be made easily, at least, whereas in games like table-top minatures you are stuck with things until the next revision/edition is printed.

Curious question: There seems to be a number of SRPG fans here, which I find odd since they are so diametrically opposite freeroaming, almost action-RPG like MMOs that we also play. What are your favorite SRPGs and MMOs?  How did you come up with the idea for combining the two?

Do you mean because you won't have the skills available to your characters, or because you won't know the game as well? If you mean the former, I can't argue with your example, but what if you started at level 20, with most of the skills available to you? This is the equivalent of what we start you out with (in a small concession to the RPG label we do have some skills you must earn through doing missions, and respeccing your characters costs experience, though perhaps three hours play a week will give you enough experience to change every skill in a six character team. I don't think of that as a grind, partly because it's so minimal, partly because you're not doing the same thing over and over again to accomplish it).

Well yes, except I'd use the word amenable rather than vulnerable. Designing a better team (or building a better deck, or constructing a better army) is half of what these games are about, and min-maxing is just good team design's ugly cousin. Designing a team, like in MtG, is all about combos, not about whether 20pts into Earthquake is worth more than 20pts into Smite. That's going to be immaterial, within limits. It's whether Smite goes better with Consecrate and Indulgence to create an engine for your Wrath of Heaven, or whether Diffusion and Necromancy work better (Diffusion and Necromancy might work better if you had some good melee damage dealers, in case you were wondering. Well, except that Consecrate when combined with Indulgence will give you better defensive capabilities, unless your opponent is geared to deliver heavy magic damage . . .). In an average team, perhaps half your capability will come from the base skills you choose (such as being able to wield two guns, or use a two-handed axe), while the other half will come from the interaction of those skills (such as being able to make your enemies cluster, create a weakness to magic, and so give your Cloud of Fire a greater effect). That said, balance is obviously key to making this work, in more ways than one. Balancing the cost of abilities, balancing the various ways to achieve objectives, and balancing the rewards for good team design against the requirement that a game should be won when it's played, not beforehand.

Looks quite interesting. They're using the Gamebryo engine (formerly NetImmerse) which is the same that DAoC uses. Ironically, they are also using the SpeedTree engine for their foliage (DAoC among others also uses this technology).

I'm less concerned about whether there will be a grind, because there has to be at least some grind.  The point is, if the grinding involves player vrs player and your not just fodder till you get ub3r skills/units/items/whatevers its all good.  No matter what in any game that bears the rpg tag you WILL be improving your abilities.  Therefore you must start with less abilities.  The problem lies in the fact that in order to improve them you have to whack Ai around for a month + before you get to the part most gamers actually care about.

Winner of the quest gets 5000 exp.  The loser gets 2500.

Yes I meant the former. If you are already starting out new characters with a bunch of skills (which sounds better than the way Guild Wars does it currently) why still have missions? The exping sounds minimal which cool but that goes back to my previous question which is why do you need to do it at all?

plz2notfuckupthegame

For those who haven't gone through the web site, there is no PvE at all. Every mission, campaign, tournament, or casual duel is a battle against another person, no AI in sight. Not even pirates, sorry. This is partly because people just make that much better opponents in strategy games, and partly because, as several people noted, there are enough PvE games out there, and we want to provide a different experience.

I think the things that most guilds want to know is how the turn based system is going to work, why its more fun for us to use turn based, what can we achieve in the world, and why do those achievements matter to us or any other guild.

Although D&D online is also coming out during the last half of 2005, we will certainly be watching Tactica to see if its something we'd want to try.

Yes, there should be achievables in the world. And yes, achievables should have SOME effect. But please, for the love of all that's holy in this world, if the winners just get stronger and stronger, you will have Shadowbane all over again. If the achievables are so much more important than just e-peen waving, the game will spiral into uselessness, because only the hardcore will ever play for long. What you will hear from these hardcore is "We want our victories to MEAN something," without ever realizing what it will mean is that only the wolves will play after a while.

At least I feel like why make a MMO if your not going to allow the world to change based on player actions and I haven't seen that concept driven into anything.

...the conflict between magic, science, and faith drives every level of the game, from individual missions to the overall story. Most missions have at least two angles to them – assassinate or protect the inventor, destroy the blasphemous tome or revel in the knowledge of the ancients – and in Tournaments an individual’s efforts make a direct difference on a major level to the game’s story.

The real meaning to PvP comes in the way that every single one of your victories contributes to the balance between the factions, though. The more successful you are, the more that the ongoing story will favor the faction your deeds support.

Being at the squad level, players don’t control cities, instead affecting the world in wider and more specific ways – enabling or preventing scientific discoveries, opening new lands for colonization or sinking ships before they leave the harbor. The path of history often hinges on the actions of a small group, and it is these actions that Tactica Online focuses on.

...If players using Lore skills heavily are more successful than players using other skillsets, then the balance of the world will tip in favor of magic. The cause of logic and experimentation will be set back, the armies of faith will waver, and the supporters of the Old Sciences are more likely to be successful in their ventures, whatever they may be...

Emphasis mine.

Please do not let this drive your design theory.

Yes, there should be achievables in the world. And yes, achievables should have SOME effect. But please, for the love of all that's holy in this world, if the winners just get stronger and stronger, you will have Shadowbane all over again. If the achievables are so much more important than just e-peen waving, the game will spiral into uselessness, because only the hardcore will ever play for long. What you will hear from these hardcore is "We want our victories to MEAN something," without ever realizing what it will mean is that only the wolves will play after a while.

Achievement has driven (into the ground) every MMOG we have. I'm not saying it should be ignored, I'm saying it should be VERY CONTROLLED so that the winners get more flexible, not more powerful.

Tactica should find some middle ground between the two.

We are starving for good turn-based rpg's out here. Any chance of a single player or offline version of Tactica or some sort of campaign mode?

Anything is possible. Let us get this version out of the way, and we’ll see what happens. I have to say, though, why do you want a single player version? It won’t cost any less, there won’t be much difference in your control over your play experience, and your opponents will get a lot less interesting.

How much luck is involved in the combat?

Good question, not a lot. Originally we had a large variance in the amount of damage done by attacks, for example, but in testing we found that this detracted from the experience. This goes back to Tactica Online’s roots as a strategy game – you want your success or failure to be the result of the strategy you choose, not the result of some bad random numbers.

This approach is reflected throughout the game – if your attack misses your enemy, it’s likely it was because they put some defenses in place, rather than because that they just got unlucky. If you win, it’s because you played better, not because everything just went your way today.

What your team refers to as a class and level in Tactica Online may not be what the average MMORPG fan expects. Can you explain these concepts as they exist in Tactica Online?

Class in most games is a restriction on what you can do. Not so in Tactica Online. In fact, you don’t get to choose your class, it’s chosen for you according to the skills you know, and the equipment you wear. Lots of melee skills, you might be a Knight. Put on an eyepatch, and you might become a Pirate. Add a few healing skills, you might become a Paladin. Remove the melee skills, you might become a Priest. Class thus becomes more of an indicator to your opponents of what you might be capable of, rather than a restriction on the skills you can learn.

Similarly, level isn’t an indication of progress, but a reflection of the Point Value of a character. If your Point Value goes down – let’s say you remove some of those melee skills – your level will go down too. Again, level becomes an indicator to your opponents of what you might be capable of.

This is a very different conception of level and class than most people are familiar with, and we may end up changing the words we use because of that, but testing so far seems to indicate people are comfortable with the new usage.

Folks have been curious about the concept of a leader or “King” in the party. As the RPG elements of the game feature a single avatar, rather than a party, that serves as your identity in the game – will this then translate into some kind of effect on the combat aspects of gameplay?

While you’re represented by a single avatar in the shared areas of the game, this is purely a matter of convenience. None of your characters have any greater significance than any other. Think of yourself as the guiding hand behind all your characters, not as any particular one of them.

There is no middle ground. Either the defeated can or can't get back on their feet.

Now, resetting could be, wipe, everyone starts the same world again, or if you wanted to structure a story line around it, you could design each world reset to having changes that makes each run through unique.  Like what if this world season has magic cost twice as much as last season, or gunpowder stop working.  Shake things up and keep the game fluid.

I have to say, though, why do you want a single player version? It won’t cost any less, there won’t be much difference in your control over your play experience, and your opponents will get a lot less interesting.

Because some people suck at some games, but still enjoy playing them.  For example, I love FPS games, but I suck, suck suck suck suck SUCK at them.  As a result I never play them online because it's no fun knowing you're just a roaming target whose total kills are 0 every single round.

(This is also why I've never bought an Unreal game.  All I ever hear is how multiplayer is, nothing about the SP segment, so it must not be that great.)

I was thinking the same thing. You could even run multipule worlds at a time, so that when the top tiers of players have shaken out on World A, let them continue to battle for top slots but start World B to let all the new players and people who dropped out of World A play on a fresh slate. Though that'd have to mean there was a 'finish' for each World, that the players would shoot for.

Maybe you should try some of the objective-based team MP FPS games.

See, the problem with that, and with all games where Teamwork is the emphasis of MP play, is that I don't have the time or desire to devote to it.   I played America's Army when it came out, and I had a blast as both Deathmatch suicide runs and when the random folks in a match would actually work towards goals.    Then, as teams started to form and online clans came into the game it got progressivly less fun since random folks will always get pwned by clans.

  I *could* have joined a clan, and done all the requisite practices and training and all that other BS, but it becomes like an Uberguild in an MMO at that point.  You're doing more work than you are fun, and you're devoting large portions of your free time to a GAME so you can compete at the game.  No thanks, I'm just looking for some fun when I want it and on my terms.  This is why Singleplayer games should never go away, and questioning, "why would you want to play singleplayer against 'only' the AI?" is in and of itself, somewhat silly.   It's also another reason I didn't bother with Guild Wars.

See, the problem with that, and with all games where Teamwork is the emphasis of MP play, is that I don't have the time or desire to devote to it.   I played America's Army when it came out, and I had a blast as both Deathmatch suicide runs and when the random folks in a match would actually work towards goals.    Then, as teams started to form and online clans came into the game it got progressivly less fun since random folks will always get pwned by clans.

  I *could* have joined a clan, and done all the requisite practices and training and all that other BS, but it becomes like an Uberguild in an MMO at that point.  You're doing more work than you are fun, and you're devoting large portions of your free time to a GAME so you can compete at the game.  No thanks, I'm just looking for some fun when I want it and on my terms.  This is why Singleplayer games should never go away, and questioning, "why would you want to play singleplayer against 'only' the AI?" is in and of itself, somewhat silly.   It's also another reason I didn't bother with Guild Wars.

Lastly, allowing all individuals an opportunity to meaningfully affect the storyline. Tactica Online is a competitive game. As such, you need to compete to be able to have such an effect upon the world. In any competition, not everyone's going to be able to win, but everyone needs a chance at the prize in order to feel like they're really in the game. The way most sports do this - have representative teams that you can cheer for - doesn't really work in a game like this, but the same reality applies. Most people just aren't able to compete at the top level, and there still needs to be a way to stop them from feeling like they're shut out. The solution we chose is to have tiered events, for players with different ranges of rating - one event open to players with a rating from 1500-1600, one for those 1600-1700, and so on. This gives everyone the chance to compete within their division, as it were, with their own area of impact upon the story that no one outside that division can affect.


Luke

Many good things

Yes, yes and triple yes.  This is the problem I have with most PvP, and despite its charm and polish, Guild Wars fails here too in that the only PvP with significant high quality rewards is the Tomb of Ancient Kings (for gold weapons and sigils), and you have to be some of the best players in the game (and a bit lucky too) just to make it through the preliminary maps which give exactly zero reward.

Put on an eyepatch, and you might become a Pirate.

If you want rewards, let the top X players waive the next months subscription fee.

The only reward in M:TGO is that if you do well enough you get more packs without paying for them - essentially you get money.

[....]

This impact upon the storyline has, in turn, an effect on what new skills and equipment introduced in the next expansion. These skills and equipment do have a huge effect on gameplay, though it's more about which skills become available and which don't, than anything related to the relative power of the different ideologies. For example, if a particular part of the storyline was focused around a scientist's attempts to create a telescope (realize I'm trying to stay away from actual storylines), and player's ensured that this attempt was successful via an event during the culmination of that expansion set, then there might be a few new vision-related skills and pieces of equipment in the Research skill line next expansion. If they were unsuccessful, there would instead be an unrelated set of new abilities, neither more nor less powerful. The reward for you as a player is getting to steer the development of each faction, rather than getting to affect their relative capabilities.

[....]

In events, whether Tournaments or Campaigns, you get a bit more of a direct involvement. Upon winning the event you get to make a choice on that event's particular issue (does the city fall or not, do the missionaries reach Kyoto). Rather than the events for each ratings group all dealing with part of a single issue, there are separate issues for each event. A lesser-ranked event might deal with the research into lenses and telescopes mentioned earlier, while a higher-ranked event might deal with the mounting of an expedition to cross the crystal spheres and breach heaven itself. The former will determine whether a particular set of skills make it into the next expansion set, and the outcome of a subplot in the ongoing storyline, while the latter will determine one of the major plot points for the upcoming story arc (it's very likely that the largest events will be open, rather than restricted to particular ranks).

Thanks for that.  Now I'm going to waste time this weekend trying to get X-COM to run on WinXP.

xcomutil works like a charm for me.

If you like FFT I strongly suggest your try Tactics Ogre. I should start doing classic reviews of that style of game, I've got a number of pretty good ones that most people haven't played. (Tactics Ogre, Feda, Earthlight, etc) Tactics Ogre is similar to FFT in some way, but you can have a lot more characters on a map at once. Overall I think it is a much better game.

I liked the tactical combats in Master of Magic, which had both kinds of units... some were a single figure, who was fully effective until dead.  Many others were multiple figure units, which had figures die off as the unit took damage, and the unit was less effective with less than its full complement of figures.

Alkiera

Work experience
   

August 2004-April 2006, Imaginary Numbers, Sydney, Australia

Lead Artist

§         Project: Tactica Online (cancelled April 2006)

Well, there's always Vanguard to look forward to.

On their forums, there is the classic comment to this news:


Indeed.

The last fading scrap of hope I had for my gaming life has now been added to the pile of charred and broken dreams.