I’m pretty easy on innovation.  I love Gears’ cover system innovation, even if other games had worked out most of the quirks.  I agree with Brandon Reinhart that Warhammer isn’t getting enough credit.

This post on WoW Insider, however, is where I draw the line.  Emphasis added:

In short, the way Blizzard has traditionally made tanking work – made sure the tanks are causing more threat than everyone else, so the mobs will attack them – is by keeping their damage low, but raising their threat with threat-increasing auras and threat-boosted abilities. This is not the tack they’re taking in LK, based on some trends that have been emerging in blue posts over the last month or two….

Instead of focusing on adding extra threat to various abilities, they seem to just be boosting tank damage. This is pretty brilliant.

“Taunting” is, essentially, an AI exploit that has been “designed” into a staggering number of games.  Moving very slightly away from that exploit is not brilliant.  Making the decision to take the system that you copied 100% from previous games, and pull a little harder on lever A than lever B, is not innovation.  It’s just playing around with the mechanisms you’ve already got in place– something gamers do every day.

Warhammer Online is the most schizophrenic game in recent memory.  I’ve had a couple two hour sessions with it so far, and they’re almost different games entirely.

In one session, I got a Shaman up to level 5.  I only saw a couple other players the whole time.  Around level 3, I entered a queue for a “scenario” (think WoW battleground: big 10v10 or XvX fight, capture and hold).  I stumbled across several areas which notified me they were “public quests”.   These areas were just as desolate as the others, in terms of players, but contained giant monsters that squashed me flat.  I learned to steer clear.  I stopped playing about halfway through level five, over an hour after joining the battleground queue– which still hadn’t started.

In short, the whole experience was a bit of a letdown.  Warhammer has so many small improvements over low-level WoW, that there isn’t room to go into them here.  WoW can learn a lot.  But at heart, I’m done with the PvE grinding experience, no matter how easy your quests are or how exciting your environments look.  I’m not going to pay $15 a month to collect 5 stunty beards.

I also leveled a Bright Wizard to 6, on a different night, different server, and different faction.  Over the course of the evening, I completed a pair of public quests with lively groups of players, and was rewarded for my efforts with lots of experience, loot, and other increasing numbers of unknown purpose.  I cranked through a quick level or two with a couple runs through a battleground, which was fantastic 10v10 fun: my suicidal wizard set dozens of foes afire, using maxed-out spells that would frequently backfire.  Solo PvE quests worked to create a structure around all of this, moving me from place to place, and enjoyably passing the time between battlegrounds and public quests.

When Warhammer is “on”, it’s a truly fantastic game.  There’s simply no contest between the new character experiences in WAR and WoW: Warhammer has set totally new expectations for the MMO experience.  It should be– shockingly– fun from the beginning.  It should also be social from the beginning, not in some tacked-on endgame that appears after 100 hours of social play.  WoW, take notes.

On the flip side, all of the problems I encountered with my Shaman are self-evident design problems that I’m sure their designers saw three years ago.   Were the solutions too intractable?  Were the fixes worse than the problems?  Or simply beyond their capabilities?  Unless they pull something out of their hats, the problem of poorly populated or balanced lower level zones will only get worse over time.

My in-development web game is pretty board gamey, so I decided to save myself some time and money and prototype it on paper.  The past couple nights, I’ve been playing the first pass.  The testing is pretty fun, even though I can tell the game is far from it.

The good news: the core concept feels compelling.  Some of the mechanics feel really great and intuitive, and they leave a lot of room for thematic development.  I think players will really feel ownership of their pieces and their creations.

On the mechanics side, however, things are quite a mess.  The game takes way too long to ramp up: I was aiming for sub-hour games, and it takes an hour just to get to the interesting bits.  There are a couple of resources in the game, but one is totally dwarfed in importance by the other.  One “key” mechanic didn’t even get used in the several hours of testing!

I’m hard at work on the mechanics again, and pretty happy about things.  You can throw together all the concepts, themes, and mechanics you like, you can try to satisfy the Koster theory of fun, you can just include the most bad-ass (yet not too foreign!) stuff you can think of, but there’s still a big concern if any of it will actually feel fun.  Maybe it goes away with a few more games, but I go through peaks and valleys of excitement and despair about any new game idea.  Now that I’ve gotten past the first real prototype, though, I’m confident in the core.  Now I just have to fix a few minor things, like totally broken gameplay.

From the essential “Theory of Fun” approach, CC’s combat gives your brain plenty to munch on.  In short: there’s absolutely no way a game like Double Dragon or Golden Axe would do well with today’s gamers.  Castle Crashers has developed a far deeper combat system, that puts it closer perhaps to Devil May Cry (especially in being juggle-centric) than the older titles that ostensibly inspired it.

Of course, a major draw of Castle Crashers is the co-op play.  I don’t even know if I would have purchased CC without online co-op.  I can’t think of a single other time that’s been true: co-op is often treated as an early, easy feature cut, and for good reason.  Does that equation change for XBLA titles?  You know your players are online.  But plenty of other titles have assumed their players are online– it’s just usually used for competitive play.  (In my post title, I have a bit of fun with qualifiers.  MMOs are co-op successes.  Golden Axe was a co-op success.  Still, I find Castle Crashers to be a surprising outlier, given today’s console game environment.)

On a side note, while everyone accepts that people enjoy playing games together, I haven’t heard an analysis of this to nearly the extent that Theory of Fun tackles mechanics.  This is probably well-trodden territory by psychologists, but how many developers read psych journals?  It sounds like the “massively solo” success of WoW caught even its creators by surprise.