One thing that frequently annoys me about discussion on the internet is that people tend to avoid arguing the real question, but instead conjure up the horrors of some secondary evil. Talk about drugs, and people will tell you about people committing crimes to feed their drug habit. Talk about prostitution, and people will tell you about "white slavery". Talk about RMT, and people will tell you about account hacking. Talk about always-on DRM, and people will tell you about server outages.

I am not saying that these secondary evils don't exist. But if they were the core of the problem, it would be sufficient to solve those secondary problems and still have the primary feature.

The latest story here is that the next XBox will probably have always-on DRM, that is you won't be able to play anything on that console while not connected to the internet. And of course everybody talks about server outages or people without internet. Or uses the inherent lack of data to claim that DRM never works. And nobody addresses the real question:

Once all technical problems are resolved, should a company be allowed to put restrictions on the use of their game hardware / software to prevent piracy?

Again, this is assuming a working technical solution, and not discussing company double-speak that tries to sell you a restriction as a feature. I really *only* want to discuss the question whether a company has the right to put certain restrictions on their regular users in order to prevent some people playing illegal pirated copies of games.

For me the answer to this question has always been yes, a company making game hardware and/or software has the right to put in restrictions that limit piracy, even if those restrictions inconvenience legit users. Just like a supermarket has the right to impose certain restrictions on their customers that prevent theft. And from that point, everything else becomes just a technico-economic problem: What sort of technical solution can the company find which causes a minimum of inconvenience to paying customers while having a maximum effect on pirates? It is easy to demonstrate that there must be a break-even point somewhere, where the added income from people "forced" to pay for the product exceeds the lost income from people prevented from buying the hard- or software due to the restrictions. It is basically a business decision, and companies have the right to make those business decisions.

That is not to say that things can't go wrong. I am pretty sure that in the specific case of SimCity the overall net effect on EA was negative, with more damage done to the company by their non-working DRM solution than piracy damage prevented. "Always Off" is not a feature you can sell to anybody. But ultimately that isn't different from any company releasing a flawed product and having to deal with the consequences, whether the flaw is non-working servers or horse meat in "beef" burgers.

The important thing is that there is no such thing as a "right to piracy". You cannot go to a court of human rights and claim that Microsoft or EA has an obligation to let you copy their games for free, or that the always-on internet requirement is a breach of your human rights. Saying that Microsoft should be obliged to provide an XBox that works without internet is like saying that Wikipedia should be obliged to provide their product without internet, or any other provider of some service over the internet (including me, you can't read my blog without internet either).

If Microsoft really decides to make the next XBox work only while connected to the internet, I fully support them in as far as they have the right to do so. And I fully support the right of everybody to not buy such an XBox because of those restrictions. How much money Microsoft is effectively gaining or losing due to that business decision will depend on how well the technical implementation is working. And unless you have a parallel universe at hand in which the restriction-free XBox is a reality, it will be impossible to know the real numbers. Everybody will just claim completely spurious estimates depending on whether he is for or against piracy.

My newsreader is full of blog posts complaining about LFR in World of Warcraft, and a lack of healers. Meanwhile Pete from Dragonchasers writes about Defiance saying: "In theory you could set yourself up as a kind of healer but I’m not sure there’s enough there to make that a rewarding career path.". To me the two cases look like two sides of the same coin, with the same core problem. And it is a problem all collaborative multiplayer games with different roles have, even pen & paper ones.

Basically people have favorite classes and play-styles. Thus if you take any population and let everybody play whatever he wants, you get a "natural" distribution of everybody playing their favorite role. But in a group of a given size there is a mathematical optimum for maximum efficiency of the group that depends on the role distribution. That mathematical solution will differ not only for different group sizes, but also for different games, because it depends on factors like how much damage do players deal, how much can they withstand, and how much can they heal. The fundamental problem is that the mathematical optimum is rarely a fit with the natural distribution of everybody playing their favorite role.

The overall effect is that if you take one group of hippies with ultimate freedom, allowing each member to play whatever he wants, and compare them to one military group in which who plays what role is determined by a tyrannic leadership, the military group will always be more efficient. If you pursue maximum efficiency, the needs of the collective beat individual freedom. Which is a somewhat weird concept if you consider that you started out by joining a game to have fun, and not the military to fight for your countries survival.

I haven't played Defiance, and wasn't planning to after reading the first reviews. So I can't say exactly how efficient a healer is in that game. But there is always an optimum solution for efficiency, which could be zero healers, but also could be something higher, depending on group size. Whether that is a "rewarding career path" only matters as long as you let every player decide for himself what he wants to play. As soon as you get some sort of guild structure or similar organization, and players find out that having X healers around is improving their win chance over not having them around, somebody will be "forced" to play a healer. Or inversely, if zero healers is the optimum, somebody choosing a healing spec for fun will be looked down upon.

This is pretty much why I don't play in any guild structure in any game any more. I value my personal freedom very much, especially in a game that I choose to play for fun. I already submit to the greater good of the collective when for example I am at work, or with my family. I find the choice of either playing what the collective needs or spoiling everybody's fun by being selfish to be an unpleasant one.

What is the difference between a game and a toy? The dictionary definition will tell you something about a game being "structured playing", but basically it comes down to there being rules and win conditions. You can "beat" a game, there is a challenge to overcome; but to achieve that you have to live with the downside that there are rules that limit what you can do. Roleplaying games are very much an attempt to achieve the best of both worlds, having both game elements and unlimited freedom. But that can never work 100%: If you have unlimited freedom, you end up with a toy, not a game, and you lose the advantages of games, there being a challenge and a win.

When you read discussions about pen & paper roleplaying, this fundamental conflict pops up everywhere. The D&D edition wars are very much about the fact that 4th edition is more solidly on the game side than previous or next editions. People fight about the use of battle maps with grids on them, and miniatures, because some find those "too game-y". And there are endless discussions on the subject in how far a DM should fudge dice rolls to achieve a desirable outcome instead of a random one.

My personal observation on this is that games work better for a group of people than toys do. In a game, or a game-y roleplaying session, the rules are agreed upon in advance, and the players can rely on them. When you move towards "there are no rules, DM decides all" systems, the balance of power shifts towards the DM. And like all tyrannies that is more likely than not to end badly. Players lose motivation, attendance drops, campaigns crumble to dust.

On the one side the DM is always the ultimate power, the least replaceable person at the table, the one doing most of the work, and the referee. On the other side the role-playing game is only a part of the social relationship between the group of players, and if viewed as a group of friends there is a clear social need for a more egalitarian structure. Having the DM visibly bound by the same rules and the same randomness of dice rolls as the players are create a feeling for fairness, which is necessary for this social construct to work. If whether the enemy is in range of your attack is clearly visible on the table, there is no argument; but if the DM has to decide that question the suspicion can sneak up that the DM treats one or the other player unfairly, and that creates a tension which is bad.

The same egalitarian considerations of fairness make me prefer rules systems which are more balanced over rule systems in which certain classes are clearly better than others. This is why I play 4th edition, the only edition of Dungeons & Dragons where there is a reasonable balance of power between high-level wizards and high-level fighters.

In the heated discussions on the subject of how much power a DM should have, or how much balance a rules system needs, I observe that those shouting most loudly for imbalanced systems are those who then want the position with the most power. It isn't the players who demand that the DM is bound less by rules, nor is it the fighters who demand more power for the wizards. I find that somewhat short-sighted. In the long run the best system is the one which maximizes fun for everybody. If you disadvantage part of the people at the table, the table might well end up empty in the long run. Fairness and balance is more important to the long-term health of a pen & paper campaign than the power trip of some individuals.

I have always argued that subscription numbers of a MMORPG six months after release do allow us to say something about the quality of a game. If people are still playing then, they must be having fun. It is very hard to argue that they got lured into the game by false advertising and haven't found out about it half a year later. But that is subscription MMORPGs, a dying species. If we look at single-player games, it is a lot easier to imagine that people bought a game they ended up not wanting, and thus the sales numbers that state which games people buy aren't necessarily an expression of which games they want.

Case in point: SimCity. It apparently sold over 1.1 million copies over its first two weeks. How many of these 1.1 million players regretted that purchase? How many got the game on pre-order, or bought it based on hyped previews, before the significant flaws of the game became apparent?

The perverse consequence is that probably the *next* EA Maxis game will sell less well, regardless of quality. But somebody who tries to find out "what gamers want" based on sales numbers would think that SimCity was an excellent game to emulate. Even if you don't look at the game itself, but only at the server issues, somebody looking at the sales numbers will conclude that people don't mind buying games with always-on DRM. Because the SimCity server debacle is more likely to hurt the *next* games sales.

Although I am not a big fan of Kickstarter from a customer protection point of view, I would say that Kickstarter might actually better at measuring "what gamers want" than sales of triple-A games. There is less influence of hugely expensive advertising campaigns or lobbying to game journalists on Kickstarter numbers, and more of an explicit expression of desire for a certain type of game.

I find it quite likely that in the case of single-player games the usual economic consideration of the "homo economicus" who buys what is of use to him isn't true. People buy what they *think* might be a great game, lured in by pre-order bonuses, advertising, and hype from game journalism. Quite often they want to buy the game on release, to be playing the game everybody is talking about, to be with the in crowd. By the time they notice that the game they bought isn't the game they wanted, it is already too late. Sales numbers are in, there are no refunds, and beyond not buying the next game(s) from that company there isn't much they can do.

One of my favorite quotes is Sid Meier's "A [good] game is a series of interesting choices", because I very much agree with that definition. I am currently playing Mass Effect 3, which I got for free from EA as compensation for having wasted my money on SimCity. And when I write that phrase, I wonder if "playing" is actually the right verb. I'd need something which is half "playing" and half "watching", because a lot of the time I am either just watching some events, or I am technically in control of my character but whatever choices I make still end up with the same result. Maybe "experience" is the verb I'm looking for.

Now many people will protest and say that Mass Effect 3 is the game that has the biggest number of choices to make during the game, and one of the few games where those choices have an influence on how the story evolves. Which is true, but only to the degree how much you actually care about the details of the story. Do you care whether Ashley lives or dies? Do you care whether the genophage is cured and the Krogan can repopulate and potentially overrun the galaxy some centuries later? If you do care, Mass Effect 3 is the game for you, because you can make decisions that determine those outcomes.

But if you don't care about the details of the story, and just want to play and win the game, you quickly realize that your decisions don't matter. Many, many dialogue choices come down to "Either say something nice, get paragon points, and something happens; or say something intimidating, get renegade points, and exactly the same thing happens". Then of course anybody who ever played any game with an alignment point system knows that it doesn't matter whether you are good or evil, as long as you are consistent and always choose good or always choose evil to maximize the effect of the accumulated good or evil alignment points.

A much smaller number of choices actually effect winning or losing the game. And that ultimately comes down to a single number, your effective military strength, which determines how exactly the game ends. The higher your score, the nicer the end. And so curing the genophage is not just a moral decisions, but also affects that score, because it makes a difference whether you get the support of the Krogans or the Salarians. While the effect on effective military strength is complex (as it depends on what you did in Mass Effect 2, as well as some decisions later), you can "minmax" all your decisions in Mass Effect 3 to get the highest possible score at the end.

Ultimately all dialogue decisions in Mass Effect 3 basically just determine what cut scenes you will get to watch. They don't effect gameplay in the way that the decision "should I wield a shotgun or a sniper rifle?" does. Which ends up being the most interesting choice you can make in Mass Effect 3. The rest of the game plays a lot like Dragon's Lair, you press a button and see what happens in a limited tree of possible outcomes. Overall the course of the main story doesn't change, whatever choices you make, you only get to influence some details and the score for the ending. And doing a lot of side-quests consisting of picking up stuff in missions or doing a boring mini-game of planetary scanning is ultimately having a much bigger effect on your final score than any decisions you can make in this game.

I'll try to "experience" Mass Effect 3 to the end, because it is mildly entertaining, but I'm not a huge fan. Too much passive watching of events, combined with the annoying inability to skip scenes or to save the game when they are running. Not enough interesting choices.

My blog is in its 10th year, which as an unpaid effort is only sustainable by me writing about whatever interests me, and putting any potential audience second. Nevertheless I am aware of my readers, the feedback they give in comments and mails, and the blogosphere community discussions that occasionally evolve. If I write about MMORPGs that is. Whenever I write about pen & paper roleplaying, the echo is very notably weaker. There is less of a community for pen & paper games.

One reason for that is that there are less people interested in pen & paper games. Nobody knows the exact number, as you can play a pen & paper RPG with a photocopy of a book from 10 years ago, and not everybody at the table needs to actually buy anything. Estimates of the number of people playing D&D range from 5 million to 20 million. But even if you believe the higher number, you need to consider that on average people play a pen & paper RPG much less often than a MMORPG. You'd expect a MMORPG player to play his favorite game most days of the week, while an average pen & paper campaign happens maybe once per week.

A second factor is that the people who are interested in pen & paper RPGs tend to be more splintered into sub-groups than players of MMORPGs. There is more discussion between lets say somebody playing WoW and somebody playing EVE than there is discussion between somebody playing D&D 3.5 and somebody playing D&D 4th edition. And that is just the edition wars of Dungeons & Dragons, the splintering gets worse when you consider all the other pen & paper RPG systems out there. There is very little search for common denominators, and very much "if you play something else, you are doing it wrong" attitude, even more so than for computer games. Even the biggest community sites like rpg.net or EN World have relatively few activity compared to MMORPG.com or any official forum for a single game.

But the ultimate reason for the lack of community is that there is no common experience. Two groups of players playing the same adventure with the same set of rules will end up having two very different experiences. On the one side that is the force of pen & paper roleplaying, the infinite variety and freedom. The most linear pen & paper adventure has more freedom than the most sandboxy MMORPG. On the other side that is a weakness, because without a common experience there is not much of a community. The community in a pen & paper game is limited to the people sitting around the table, who *do* have a common experience of the game. But anything you can write about that is only of very limited relevance to anybody who wasn't there.

That might be bad for blogging, but the more artisanal game experience is in many ways superior to the mass-market experience of a MMORPG. It is a lot easier to tailor-make a game for a group of around 6 people than it is for hundreds of thousands, or even millions of players. A lot of the things that are constantly being decried as lacking in MMORPGs are very much present in pen & paper games. While the wider community might be lacking, the smaller community of the game table is a lot tighter. Blogging about my game table is more of an archive, a way to preserve a journal, than a publication of common interest.

In the previous session the players had arrived in Barovia, a domain in the grim parallel world of Shadowfell. This session starts with the players in the house of the recently murdered burgomaster Kolyan Indirovich, with his son Ismark Kolyanovich and daughter Ireena Kolyana, as well as the village priest Donavich. Donavich is just leaving down the path towards the gate, with Ismark watching him from the porch, when giant bats arrive. Ismark tells the players to guard his sister, while he runs after the priest to protect him. But the bats, and two vampires that also arrive appear to be after Ireena and leave the priest and Ismark alone. So battle begins, centered around the porch and the main entrance.

In the second round of combat the players get attacked from behind by a vampire lord, Count Strahd von Zarovich, the master of the domain of Barovia and Castle Ravenloft, trying to kidnap Ireena. The group's cleric succeeds in a religion-based monster knowledge check with a hard difficulty, and thus I get to tell the players the complete impressive list of Strahd's powers. Strahd is a rather fearsome enemy, with lots of regenerative powers making him nearly impossible to beat. So the heroes pull out all stops and manage to kill the two minor vampires and the bats. Strahd dominates the rogue and deals some serious damage, but then transforms into a mist and flees when all his allies are dead. Although they won the fight, the group is visibly impressed by Strahd, which is how it should be.

During the night there are no further attacks, but the characters have nightmares that leave them with psychological after-effects: I am using the despair deck from the Shadowfell boxed set for added atmosphere. After each extended rest each player draws a card with a despair effect giving him some penalty. Those can be transformed into boons with a saving throw after each milestone (two combat encounters).

The next morning there is the burial of the burgomaster, and the group leaves Ismark and Ireena with the priest Donavich. Then they set out to visit the Vistani camp at Tser Pool. The Vistani are travelers, and the only ones able to cross the mist in and out of Barovia, but they explain that this power only works for themselves, and they can't take anybody with them. But because the group helped some other Vistani in Harkenwold, the Vistani leader Madam Eva is willing to help with advice and a tarot card reading (I bought a deck of tarot cards for that and performed a "reading"). The players learn that they need to kill Strahd to escape from Barovia. The are advised that the way how to beat him can be found in a book in the castle. And they hear of a woman at the heart of the story, who in spite of being dead might be able to help them. Finally they get the hint that once they know how to beat Strahd, they can find him under the sky, behind fire.

They proceed towards the castle, and at the crossing before the castle a black carriage is waiting for them, which takes them through the castle gate and to the main entrance of the central keep. There Igor the butler opens the door for them, wielding a huge spoon like a master of ceremonies baton. Igor tells them that they can find the master and his guests in the dinner hall (from where organ music can be heard, Toccata and Fugue in D minor playing on my iPad), but then rushes off to "stir the goulash" in the kitchen down the stairs from the dinner hall. The players find themselves alone in the hallway of Castle Ravenloft, ready to explore, which we then left for the next session.

While the events leading up to the castle were more or less linear (due to the geography of Barovia), the players now have complete freedom to explore Castle Ravenloft in any order they want. They have some hints from the Tarot reading (wonderful tool for DMs), but only the most basic knowledge of the layout of the castle. And no, they asked, there are no signs above the doors telling them which door leads where. :) The main "risk" of open exploration is that I as DM have no control over the sequence, and thus can't mix combat encounters with roleplaying encounters; they could have sessions with only fights or only roleplaying. We will see how that goes next time.

I got a mail today from EA about my Star Wars: The Old Republic login:

Beginning today, April 2, 2013, you are only able to log in to the Star Wars: The Old Republic game or web site with your Display Name – Your email address will no longer be accepted from this point forward. ... These changes increase the security of our game authentication system, which helps to keep the game protected from many security threats including account takeovers.

Which was somewhat funny, because I just recently got another mail from Ubisoft:

The login process for Ubisoft’s Uplay service will undergo a few modifications on April 3rd. Past this date, if you connect to a Uplay Account, you will need to log in using your email address. Using the Uplay account name to login to your game will no longer be possible.

Of course Ubisoft is also claiming that this change will help account security. EA thinks that a display name is safer for login, reversing a previous decision to have people login with their email address. Ubisoft does the reverse, changing from login with a display name to login with an email address.

That pretty much tells me that there is no agreement on which method is safer. And frankly, I believe neither is any good. Both you displayed name and your email address are easy enough to find out, so potential hackers only ever need to guess your password. What would be safer would be a UserID and password for the account, with the UserID being *different* from both you displayed name and your email address.

It turns out that some people miss my April Fool's Day posts when I don't write them. My apologies, with the first of April falling on Easter Monday this year I was busy with family and in addition had a pen & paper roleplaying session in the evening. And I didn't have any brilliant idea for a nearly plausible piece of news anyway.

I finished Ni No Kuni last night, killing the final boss after 55 hours of overall play time. After the end credits you get a chance to save your game and play on in the "post-game". There are a few additional side-quests, and the post-game gives you the opportunity to complete anything you didn't finish before beating the White Witch. But essentially the story is over, you've already beaten the hardest fight in the game, and leveling your characters up any further is rather pointless. The game has come to a natural end. You could start over, but as the game is story-heavy and has about 10 hours of gameplay before you can freely choose your familiars and thus really play the game differently than during the first go, Ni No Kuni isn't ideal for replayability.

I was thinking that such a natural end occurs in every game which has some sort of power progression and some sort of story. At some point inevitably the story is over, and your power is at a point where it is either capped, or you are already able to beat anything. Even Dungeons & Dragons has a level cap at 30 (although I'm not sure I want to play my campaign that far, most power progression games develop flaws at the end of the power curve).

I paid 49 Euros for Ni No Kuni, thus ended up paying less than 1 Euro per hour of entertainment for it. That business model works well for this sort of game: At the natural end of the game I feel as if I got my value for money, and the developers are also happy with their one-time payment from me. But if we take a game which should have a natural end and use a different business model, like a monthly subscription or some Free2Play model, the match is less perfect. The devs don't want me to stop playing a MMORPG just because I hit the level cap and finished the story. But at the same time they can't produce new story and new power progression content fast enough to satisfy everybody. So they want you to wait for the next expansion, while continuing to play and pay for the game.

But as the game is already past its natural end, what you keep playing is some sort of zombie version: You get to grind 9,999 dinosaur bones, do the same daily quests over and over, or get to play some sort of elder game, with some illusion of progress that will be shattered when the next expansion comes out and you replace your purples with greens. You do that for a while, and for a few different games, and you start seeing it for what it is: Essentially a money-grab by the devs, and the part of the game which offers less and less fun for the money.

So unsurprisingly many people now play MMORPGs like a single-player game: They start, they play until the game comes to some sort of natural end for them, and they stop playing. Of course if the developer had counted on them paying subscriptions for years, or even made the start of the game available for free in some sort of Free2Play model, this behavior is likely to break their business model. Which I think is why the genre is in some sort of crisis now.

I am currently reading D&D adventure modules in preparation for my campaign after the current adventure. And I noticed something curious: Many of the descriptions appear to be addressed to the DM reading the adventure, but not to the players. For example there are descriptions of what happened in some place long ago which explains why the place is now inhabited by some monster. But what the players will see is just the monster (which they will then presumably slaughter), with no way of finding out those historic events that were so carefully explained to the DM.

Example of a description for the DM from H1 Keep on Shadowfell:

Water Cave History

When Shadowfell Keep was first built, the pool inside this small cave served as the castle cistern. On a normal day, several keep residents, mostly cooks and servants, visited the cave regularly. The passage leading to the pool was open until the fateful day when two children wandered into the area and drowned when they stepped off the edge into water that was too deep for them to wade in. After their bodies were discovered and removed from the pool, the area was sealed off to prevent further accidents. Subsequently, after Sir Keegan went mad and engaged in his killing spree, the keep was abandoned and the cistern stagnated. Over the decades since that time, creatures have used the cave as a source of water.

A few months ago, two hobgoblins came to the keep and requested an audience with Kalarel. They said they were messengers from the Bloodreavers, a group of hobgoblin slavers. Kalarel listened to their offer of payment for the captured slaves, but he dismissed it. In fact, he was so irritated that the hobgoblins had disturbed his research with such petty motives that he ordered his own hobgoblins to drown them in the cistern. Within minutes after the messengers died, something vile crawled forth from the water. A morass of hunger without shape or mind, the form had only an insatiable appetite. The hobgoblins that brought the messengers to the cistern were quickly overcome by the amorphous creature. After several more goblins and hobgoblins died trying to remove this pestilence from the water, Kalarel gave up. The affair disquieted him, and he prohibited any of his followers from entering the area.

 Compare that to what the players will see:

When the adventurers reach the doors, read: These bronze double doors are green with age and stained blue and purple with a thick layer of fungus. Scratched into the fungus in the Common script is this message: “Stay Out. Really.” 

When the adventurers open the doors, read: Fungus-coated stairs lead down into a natural cavern. Much of the chamber is filled with a stagnant pool of brackish water. A patch of land rises from the foul water at the pool’s center. On this little island, bones, spilled coins, and other small objects are visible among the carpet of fungus.

When the blue slime surfaces and attacks, read: The dank water suddenly disgorges a blob of blue slime. The amorphous mass pours forward, extruding long pseudopods that end in appendages of dripping goo.

In all likelihood this room will appear to the players as being some random dungeon room with some random monster. They have no way to find out the history of the water cave, nor will they even care about it, as it isn't central to the adventure in that dungeon.

Now I totally like the concept of having a logical explanation of why a certain monster is at a certain location. But such an encounter always has to be designed with the point of view of the players in mind. The "final product" of a session of pen & paper roleplaying is an interactive story, and that story is only as good as the part that has been understood by everybody around the table. To players a description that behind a door is a room with an ogre is just that. A sidebar explaining in detail how that ogre got there is only as useful as whatever is included in the encounter description that enables the players to learn that history.

All the data I have, from subscription numbers to XFire activity reports, point towards an ongoing decline of the MMORPG market in general that has been going on for over a year. There are blips of renewed interest when a new big game comes out, but those quickly fade. A reader wanted to bet me last year that after three months Guild Wars 2 would have more XFire activity than World of Warcraft, and lost that bet. And I have two different theories to explain this general decline.

One is based on the fact that MMORPGs tend to be rather similar to each other. Yes, the fans can argue for hours about the fine details in the difference of the combat system of World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 or Star Wars: The Old Republic. But basically these are all just coats of paint on the same old hotkey-based combat system. You have levels, quests, a level-cap, dungeons, gear-collecting, crafting, zones, and a whole range of other features in each of these games. Write a general enough description of one MMORPG, and it'll cover a dozen different games. Thus the decline of the genre can be explained by people burning out of the same old, same old.

The other theory is based on the fact that there are differences in the details between games. Some games have player housing, others don't. Some games have auto-targeting, others have a more action-oriented manual targeting and slightly faster combat. The way you gain new powers with level, and the talent trees vary between games (and sometimes even between patch versions of the same game). Thus when you create a complete feature list of a MMORPG, there are millions of possible combinations if you consider each presence or absence of a feature, and each possible variety of a feature. In this theory the decline of the genre would be caused by us having evolved certain preferences for certain features, and no game offering EXACTLY the right mix. So maybe you like the graphics style and setting of Neverwinter, but hate that it has action combat. Or you love Wildstar housing, but can't stand the WoW-like graphics. You'd love a game that has the trading of EVE, but would want it to be fantasy instead of sci-fi.

How about you? How do you see the upcoming MMORPGs, like Neverwinter or Wildstar? Do they bore you with being not much different from all the games we already have? Or do you love certain features and hate certain others?

Syl, who by the way stopped being a Raging Monkey and is now apparently a MMO Gypsy, is writing an excellent post about MMO housing. His key point is that housing in a MMORPG needs to be significant, that is have some sort of function. But while everybody is excited about player housing being shown in the Wildstar trailer, I still haven't found anybody who even had a concept of how to make player housing significant without causing trouble for other players.

In Ultima Online housing was significant. You needed your house to store your stuff, and you could use it to sell your crafted items to customers passing by. But because there were a lot less housing spots than players, and the location mattered a lot for the houses significance as sales spot, housing in UO was also a source of constant annoyance. Star Wars Galaxies did somewhat better, because it had much more territory, and thus sufficient space for everybody to build his house on. But in the long run I wouldn't say housing was a success in SWG, because people tend to leave MMORPGs sooner or later, and thus people found themselves in dying neighborhoods. When player houses are created in the open game world, they always negatively affect other players, either by "taking their spots", or by the negative effect of neglect on a neighborhood. This is also a typical problem in A Tale in the Desert, albeit less so because that game regularly resets.

Since then most games I've seen used instanced housing, or the LotRO hybrid of instanced neighborhoods. In EQ2 you could craft in your house. But I haven't seen any good social activity implemented for player housing in any game. There are more or less good systems to decorate, but most players would balk at the idea of inviting their friends over to show them how they decorated their virtual home. And even if they did, it isn't something you can do regularly as a group activity.

So I was wondering why everybody is always so excited about the idea of player housing. What exactly do you want to *do* with that house? Do you want your house in the open world, or do you want it instanced? And apart from solo crafting or the like, what *group* activity do you think MMO houses could be good for? What would make player housing significant for you?

Some people believe that Earth is only a few thousand years old, and that God created a kind of fake history by sprinkling dinosaur bones everywhere. Creators of lesser worlds, like the Dungeon Masters of their own D&D campaign, frequently do the same: Creating a fake history for a virtual world for their campaign to play in. Just recently Chris Perkins from WotC presented his historical campaign notes. But every time I read such campaign outlines, I ask myself "why bother?"

For me the main problem is how my players come into contact with all that history. I'm sure not going to start the campaign with a 4-hour history lesson, my players would be bored to death. A far more likely scenario is something like "Seeing the ruin, you succeed your history check and know that it is a remnant from the Nerathian Empire which fell over a century ago". For that I don't need a complete list of all the battles, emperors, and major events of the Nerathian Empire.

A secondary problem is that I don't plan my campaigns for 30 levels ahead. My current campaign is just over one year old, and the players are level 5. And I know what adventures I want to play for about the next year, up to level 10, but not beyond that. After all, D&D is interactive story-telling, and you never know how things evolve. So by making up my campaign as we go, I prefer to have a maximum of freedom. I create history when I need it for the adventure, instead of creating history at the start of the campaign and then running into conflicts between the history I told in advance and the history I need for a specific adventure.

Ultimately all this is a question of scale. My campaigns tend to work bottom-up, being created in mind with what the players see from their perspective. Given that this is medieval fantasy, it is only logical that this perspective is limited. Apart from some sages, people tend to know only local and recent history, and not be aware of the rise and fall of empires centuries ago. A top-down approach, where you spend hours creating a huge world and its history, most of which the players will never see, often leads to a waste of time. And risks forgetting the parts that the players actually care about. It is easy to create a fantastic world at a high level and end up lacking the detail that the players actually encounter.

So personally I don't even bother creating worlds. I take pre-made campaign worlds like the Forgotten Realms, and then fill them with my campaign. Sometimes I use the history of the Forgotten Realms if it fits, sometimes I modify stuff to fit my campaign. For example my campaign early on had the players encounter an avatar of Selune, an event which gave the campaign its name "The Favorites of Selune". So in consequence I turned the evil twin sister of Selune, Shar, into a major adversary for the campaign. Lore and created history has to serve the campaign, not the other way around.

Being German it is somewhat scary to see German flags burned in several countries on the TV news. There are numerous references to Hitler, with Angela Merkel regularly being shown with a Hitler mustache. So for my American readers, who might be baffled by the events, maybe some explanations are in order. For the full historic overview you might want to read The New Statesman. But here is the shorter version.

So, are German armies about to overrun several countries of southern Europe? No, not at all. What is rolling southwards aren't German tanks, but German money. And the German "crime" against which everybody is protesting is that the Germans insist on certain guarantees for their loans, just like any bank would. For example in Cyprus the condition was that Cyprus should come up with 7 billion Euros on their own as condition for receiving 10 billion Euros from Europe, largely financed by Germany. That is a bit as if you want a mortgage on a $170,000 house, and the bank asks you to come up with $70,000 on your own as condition for receiving a $100,000 mortgage.

Protesters in Cyprus claim that having to come up with 7 billion Euro is ruinous for the country, and they want Germany to give them the whole 17 billion without conditions and preferably without interest. But maybe the realization that they can't even afford 7 billion should have come before enacting policies which required a 17 billion bailout package. What the critics are saying is that Germany will earn money from lending money. Just like a bank does. But the fact that you have to pay an interest on a bank loan doesn't result in a moral obligation for the bank to give you a loan under any conditions. In fact a bank has a moral obligation to only lend money responsibly, because giving out loans that have little chance of getting repaid would be a disservice to those who paid money into the bank, in this case the German taxpayer.

The "threat" from Germany is not German bombers, but simply the Germans withholding loans. Which would be no threat at all if the countries in question would run their economies in a way where they could get loans from regular investors. The money that is flowing from Germany via Europe to these countries is in fact cheap compared to the prohibitive interest rate they would have to pay on the free market, in addition to the fact that there aren't enough free market loans available for these countries due to their existing debts and deficit.

In the end, if somebody has large debts and still spends more than he earns, that doesn't give him the moral right to protest against the evil banks who at some point refuse to lend him even more money. People do understand what a "credit rating" is in their personal finances, and that their loan application can be denied by a bank. We just need to get to the point in Europe where countries understand that same concept.

Of all the games in the world, on which one did you spend the most money overall? (Not counting indirect costs like buying a new PC to play a game)

Now for some people the answer to this question will be World of Warcraft, which costs about $200 per year including expansions. But for me the answer would be Magic the Gathering, because I spent around $1,000 per year for a decade on that game. And I didn't even play competitively, except for a few sealed deck tournaments (some of which I even won). My main contact with competitive MtG was being a level I DCI certified judge, which translated for those of you who weren't into tournament Magic means that I knew the rules of the game extremely well. I even judged during a World Championship, albeit not the main event. Anyway, I was fascinated by the myriad of options of deckbuilding, and thus bought thousands of cards, hence the high cost.

Due to that experience I have already repeatedly mentioned in the past that I think that MMORPGs missed out on the optimal business model. To get a maximum amount of money out of their players, they should have used the business model of trading card games, selling character powers in the form of sealed boosters with random rares, uncommon, and common "cards" to build a personalized "deck" from them. While nobody has followed that advice of mine, Blizzard now at least is looking into trading card games, and announced the online card game Hearthstone at PAX East. Actually "trading card game" is the wrong expression, as there won't be any trading in this game. Which is just as well, because the Magic Online experience has shown that online trading of cards is a sharks' game, and quickly degenerates into something ugly.

But even just as a collectible online card game, Hearthstone should be interesting. I think we can count on Blizzard to make the rules of the game more accessible, because having studied the Magic the Gathering rules I can attest to them being too complicated. Which didn't matter very much for a physical card game, as people just happily played the game "wrong" or with house rules (but a nightmare for judges when these players turned up at their first tournament). The complete MtG rules I had to study for the DCI exam was a 200-page document. The interrupt rules were also a headache for all computer implementations of the game, as the game needed to constantly stop and ask you whether you wanted to cast an interrupt spell. Hearthstone is more likely to be designed as an online computer game from the ground up, and not a computer implementation of a physical card game.

The biggest worry of some people regarding collectible card games is in how far they are "pay to win". In my experience that depends very much at what percentage level of the optimum you are willing to play. That is a bit like World of Warcraft: If you want best-in-slot items, you need a huge effort; if you can live with 90% of the BiS power, the effort is a fraction of that. Magic the Gathering is quite a fun game if played only with commons, and I've won games with a commons deck against decks stacked with rares. But any additional card in a collectible card game always increases your options, and thus to have all the options you need all the cards, which comes at a high cost.

On the other hand what I like about that business model is that your level of engagement with the game determines the cost. Playing casually is very cheap, playing at the highest competitive level is very expensive, with everything in between being possible. That appeals to my sense of fairness, and is much better than a game like World of Warcraft, where the casual players subsidize the heaviest users.

I find myself in the curious situation that I have a vast library of video games I bought, but sometimes find myself bored and unsure what to play. And if anything, this is getting worse with time, as cheap iOS games and Steam sales make me impulse-buy more games than I can play. But ultimately the problem is one of two psychological effects: A barrier to entry into a new game, and a barrier to exit from an old game.

The barrier to exit from a video game is well described here, as the Zeigarnik Effect: The human mind is programmed to remember tasks we started but didn't finish. Not finishing a video game thus leaves a nagging feeling in our mind, even if we are already past the "are you still having fun?" point. Although it is known that most people do not finish video games, it is a long way from just stopping to play to actually deciding that you are finished with that game and uninstalling it from your hard drive. Sometimes you install a game, play for some hours, and in spite of the game not grabbing you very much, you somehow feel that you will continue playing it. Only then you never actually do.

The barrier to entry into a new game is a different story, one which also in part explains why we have so many sequels on the market. If you start a completely new game, at first by definition you are a n00b. There is a certain effort required to learn how the game works, and how to play it well. Sequels and clone games help, because if you played some games from FIFA 95 to FIFA 12, chances are you don't have to learn much to play FIFA 13. But if you never played let's say a Paradox game and then start a game from the Europa Universalis series, you're likely to be put off by a steep learning curve for a very complex game. The more you switch between platforms and genres, the more you need to readjust every time, because the conventions on how a strategy game is controlled are different from an RPG or a shooter, and they are different on a PC, a console, and a tablet.

Syp has a project currently running in which he plays 10 games in 10 days. The games all being PC MMORPG, and Syp being an expert of that genre, lowers the barrier to entry. But still I am not sure if such an exercise is psychologically satisfying, or whether it leaves you with a lot of regrets of not having explored each game more. Plus constant problems because keybinds are different in each game, or similar issues of adjustment to a new game every day.

Me, I ended up not playing any new game this weekend. I played a bit of Anno Online, which is a game with a slow rhythm, one you log into a few times a day to play 10 minutes each time. And I played many hours of Ni No Kuni, which is a huge game in which sometimes you just hunt Pokemon familiars for several hours and grind levels in the process, and still have fun. But as I also bought some games in last week's Steam sale, and an iOS game or two, my list of un-played games is getting ever larger. How about you?

There are quite a lot of people, Keen among them, upset about The Elder Scrolls Online's PvP zone Cyrodiil. The problem, as stated by the people who complain, is that TESO only has one mega-server, and thus Cyrodiil will exist in several mirrored copies. Thus if you are losing badly on Cyrodiil copy number 4, you can just switch over to Cyrodiil copy number 7, where your side is winning. Some people live under the illusion that PvP somehow "matters", and thus see TESO "ruining" 3-faction PvP.

The harsh truth is that playing only ever on the winning side has been possible in every PvP MMORPG ever made. It just used to be more complicated, requiring you to make several characters or other hoops to jump through. But by design territorial PvP, whatever the number of factions, is always and has always been an un-winnable war. Permanent territorial gains for any faction are impossible. With rewards usually being handed out for conquering, while defending is under-rewarded and boring, battles are in eternal flux.

Furthermore in large scale PvP the actions and performance of any single player matter very little. Thus the prevalent tactic in most of these games is the Zerg rush, where most of the players of one side form an unruly mob rushing towards some position of the enemy, while many other parts of the battlefield are completely deserted. Frequently you get silly merry-go-rounds, where each side has a zerg rush mob on the battlefield, all carefully avoiding to meet each other, but each attacking undefended targets.

In short: PvP as designed for MMORPGs never really matters. If it wasn't for fortresses where door hold up the attacking zerg for a bit, while a few defenders pointlessly shoot at them from the battlements, there wouldn't even be any combat in a battle-zone.

And that is not just due to bad design or anything, but due to some inherent unsolvable problems: Players get to choose on which side they play, they play only some hours during the day, and they prefer winning over losing. None of these core problems are likely to ever change. And thus PvP combat will never matter, because you can't force people to lose. As the losing side just logs off or switches server, they leave the winning side with a hollow victory against a fortress door or an undefended flag. TESO maybe makes this easier than other games, but the core problem has always been there.

The announced closing of Google's Reader caused a lot of people to jump to alternative solutions, for example Feedly reported gaining half a million new users. I'd love to tell you which alternative I find the best, but up to now Feedly is the only one I actually got working. Both Netvibes and The Old Reader were down at some point, and when they were working later this week, they hung up on trying to import my Google Reader subscription.xml file. I hear similar stories of other services, being overrun by new users that end up bringing their servers down.

What has your experience with alternative RSS readers been? Did you get any to work? Which one did you prefer?

The I6 Ravenloft D&D module from 1983 is a classic. It figures in pretty much every "top D&D adventures" list, and not only had several sequels, but also a complete campaign setting and a board game made from it. So how can one dare to touch such an iconic adventure and modify it? Well, you know how I feel about nostalgia: Often our selective memory gets into the way and makes us overlook the bad side of the "good old days". Just because the module is 30 years old doesn't make it perfect, and it is rather obvious that the game of D&D as well as we as players have changed since.

The main reason I wouldn't play I6 Ravenloft as written today, under my personal circumstances, is that the Castle Ravenloft has 88 rooms, one of which has 40 sub-divisions. My campaign is only played twice per month, with 3-4 hour sessions. I don't want my players to explore the same castle for a year!

Related to that is that I6 Ravenloft is AD&D 1st edition, while we are playing D&D 4th edition. 1st edition was still very much a game about crawling through huge dungeons with lots of trash mob fights. Ravenloft is a classic because it has far stronger story elements than the average adventure of the time, but kept the gameplay mode with lots of fights. D&D 4th edition moved away from lots of small fights, and rather does fewer, but grander fights. Overall time spent fighting per adventure remains the same, but the fights are somewhat more memorable. And Ravenloft very much lends itself to a transformation in that direction. In fact at the time critics remarked that the gothic horror theme of Ravenloft didn't mix well with the hack'n'slash dungeon crawling. Modifying the adventure to have less, but more epic fights ends up working rather well.

One iconic feature of I6 Ravenloft are the isometric maps of the castle. Everybody who played the module as a DM will remember them, they looked a lot better than the usual dungeon maps, and turned the castle into a true 3D experience. But I am not so sure how the people who played that module as players remember those maps. Probably they never saw them, because they weren't designed to be suitable as player handouts, showing lots of secret doors and connections. And the players who had to then to redraw those maps on regular graph paper presumably had a rather hard time of it.

4th edition maps in general look different than maps of earlier editions. They are designed to be used not just for showing how rooms are connected to each other, but also as battle maps. So unlike earlier editions, on 4E maps you are likely to find furniture and other terrain features marked, because they can play a role in the combat. Rooms tend to be a bit larger, some 1st edition dungeons tended to be rather cramped with small rooms full of lots of monsters. And unlike earlier editions, a 4E map says where exactly those monsters are standing in the room.

Now obviously I could have kept the I6 Ravenloft isometric maps, and just created battle maps of the relevant locations. But as I didn't want to play through 88 rooms and 40 crypts anyway, I did the unspeakable: I completely redesigned Castle Ravenloft, creating my own version from the bottom up. Not isometric, and just a quarter or so of the number of rooms of the original. That not only fits my campaign circumstances much better. It also avoids problems with the player who had DM'd the original years ago, or players who might be tempted to cheat and look things up on the internet.

In the end one has to realize that every group who played through I6 Ravenloft experienced it somewhat differently. Not just because the adventure is designed like that, with some random factors to the story, but also because every DM and every group of player interact with the adventure module in a different way, and end up telling a different interactive story. The iconoclastic rebuilding of Castle Ravenloft for my campaign will just be another different experience of that same adventure, hopefully true to the core of it, but different in the details.

The CEO of EA, John Riccitiello "stepped down" (company-speak for "got fired") this week. And pretty much every gamer with a grievance against EA pointed at his pet peeve with that company and declared that this was why the CEO had to go. Be it always-on DRM, SimCity server outages, excessive use of DLC and item shops, the ending of Mass Effect 3, or the whole Star Wars: The Old Republic, somebody cited it or all of them as reasons for John Riccitiello leaving.

In a way that is both true and not true. On the one side, CEOs don't leave because they made a decision some of their most vocal customers dislike, nor because a single new product among many didn't meet expectations. On the other side a long string of bad press sooner or later depresses earnings. And ultimately a CEO is judged on how profitable his company is. EA isn't doing so well, with the share price depressed since the financial crisis and the latest quarterly earnings down. That is what the CEO took responsibility for and stepped down.

What gamers dislike about EA is that it lost touch with traditional PC and console gaming. Or as John Riccitiello said in his farewell letter to EA employees: "You are number one in the fastest growing segment, mobile, with incredible games like The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Real Racing 3, Bejeweled, SCRABBLE and Plants v. Zombies.". Of the PC/console games he only mentions Battlefield and FIFA, while many of the other game brands have been run into the ground. Maybe being voted the worst company in America really doesn't matter, but what does matter to shareholders is that their CEO has a winning strategy. And ultimately EA's strategy was not a financial success. Mobile gaming might be "the future", but it doesn't look like a very profitable one for big companies. Not if small developers can make mobile games which are as good or better on those mobile platforms.

If any single game is the main culprit of the downfall, it must be Star Wars: The Old Republic. Not because it was the game with the biggest outcry from unsatisfied customers, far from that. But SWTOR was probably EA's most expensive failure. You need to sell a *lot* of cheap mobile games to make up for a flop like that. At some point a company is simply too big to rely on Bejeweled and Plants v. Zombies for their daily bread.

The previous session of my D&D campaign ended with the players being sucked through a rift between worlds in the Keep on Shadowfell. Given the known history of that rift, it isn't much of a surprise that the players now find themselves on the parallel world of Shadowfell. After what seemed like an endless fall, they tumble down on a forest path, surrounded by a grim and lifeless pine forest. A stone arc with an iron gate, rusted open, spans one end of the path, leading into a swirling mist. The other direction is unremarkable. The priest's mace, which usually can detect undead, flares up and stops working, as if from overload. Meanwhile the warrior's artifact, the axe Aecris, is lauding him for taking the fight to the enemy, making a frontal assault on the undead in their own world.

While the stone arc looks more interesting than the other direction, the players mistrust the mist, and after a short examination and long discussion decide to go the other way. It isn't long before they come across two burly men in foreign peasants' garb, carrying shepherd's canes and being accompanied by two large dogs. Although their greeting isn't very friendly, the players are eager to find out where they are, and start talking to the shepherds. The men tell them that they are in the domain of Barovia, not far from the village of Barovia, and even draw them a crude map with their canes on the ground.

While the players study that map, the men suddenly transform: They are werewolves, in shepherd's clothing :), and their dogs are in fact wolves. A rather tactical fight ensues, with the combatants circling each other to get flanking advantage. The werewolves are eager to bite as many of the players as possible, and manage to bite four of them. The wolves actually deal more serious damage, and are quicker in their movements. But in the end the fight isn't overly hard, and the heroes win. But now the four of them who got bitten feel somewhat feverish, and a heal check reveals that they got in fact infected by a moon frenzy disease.

The players continue towards the village of Barovia, which turns out to be a not very welcoming place. Nobody is on the street, and shutters and doors get closed when the players approach. Through the silence a desperate sobbing is heard, coming from a house whose door is open. So the players investigate, and find the source of the crying upstairs: An old woman sits in the middle of a curious room, decorated all in pink, painted in bright colors, with castles, knights, and princesses painted on the walls, and lots of toys around. Approached gently the old woman, Mad Mary, tells the players of her daughter Gertruda, who was kept in this room for all her life to protect her from the harsh world outside. But now she is gone, and her mother fears the worse, babbling about the master of the castle, and besieging the players to bring her daughter back to her. Not being able to get more information out of Mad Mary, the players continue towards the center of the village.

There they find life in a tavern, whose sign has been changed from the original "Blood of the Vine" to say "Blood on the Vine". When they enter, the peasants in the inn stop talking, and only three Vistani keep on talking while playing cards. A young man with better clothing sits alone in a corner. The players ask the innkeeper Arik for a room, but Arik refuses to rent them one, and only sells them food and drink. The players being upset about this, and starting to become threatening towards Arik, the young man in the corner rises and welcomes them to Barovia. He introduces himself as Ismark Kolyanovich, son the later burgomaster Kolyan Indirovich, and says that in spite of his house being in mourning, he would be glad to offer them his hospitality for the night. The Vistani are also leaving, passing close to the players. The warrior, mistrustful of the gypsies, checks his purse. To his surprise not only is his money still there, but he also finds a message from the Vistani: "We know you! Come to meet Madam Eva at the Tser Pool!".

The priest of the group is asking for the church of the village, and learns that the village priest, Donavich, is at the house of the burgomaster. Thus they accompany Ismark there, and find Donavich and Ismark's sister Ireena Kolyana praying before the bier on which the burgomaster lies in state in a coffin. Donavich agrees to cure the infected players of their disease, for the cost of the components, and even gives the group a book with the Cure Disease and Create Holy Water rituals. The players learn that the domain of Barovia is ruled by Count Strahd von Zarovich from his Castle Ravenloft, overlooking the village from a cliff above. Count Strahd had send a letter to the burgomaster, asking that his daughter Ireena Kolyana was to be sent to the castle on her 18th birthday. The burgomaster refused, and three days later he was found dead on his doorstep with a crossbow bolt between his shoulders. The Holy Symbol of Ravenkind, usually warding off evil from the house, was stolen.

On this, we ended the session, as it was getting late. Readers knowing Dungeons & Dragons well will have identified this adventure as being my take on a classic D&D module: I6 Castle Ravenloft. One of may players even DM'd that adventure a long time ago. But no worry, I've changed the adventure a lot, trying to keep its spirit while adapting it to 4th edition and the time constraints of my campaign. Playing such a classic is always a challenge, but the first session went well, and everybody appeared to be having fun.

As I suspected, the free game EA promised as compensation for all the SimCity problems isn't much. You only get the choice between the following games:

Battlefield 3 (Standard Edition)

Bejeweled 3

Dead Space 3 (Standard Edition)

Mass Effect 3 (Standard Edition)

MOHW (Standard Edition)

NFS Most Wanted (Standard Edition)

Plants vs. Zombies

SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition

As I said earlier, I don't really like the story of Ni No Kuni, which is too childish and morally simplistic for my taste. But I spent most of the weekend playing this game on my PS3, because other than the story this is really an excellent game. And as art is in the eye of the beholder, some people probably even like the story. I think one big lesson from the SimCity debacle is that ultimately the most important thing about a game is that it just works perfectly. Ni No Kuni has that excellence of execution in spades, and is simply a great game to play, even if you can't identify with the characters.

Of course it helps if you like the Japanese style of RPGs, like Final Fantasy. Ni No Kuni is a huge game, with many different depth levels of gameplay, which are all introduced slowly over the course of the game. By the time a typical PC game would already be over, Ni No Kuni just opened up its Pokemon-like familiar catching and training feature. You can spend endless time trying to "catch them all", or you can look up recommendations on the internet which familiars are best in the long run, and concentrate on those. Even if you do the latter, you'll spend a lot of time optimizing your familiars, metamorphosing them into stronger forms which means they restart at level 1, while you keep playing with another familiar as your frontline fighter. You'll optimize the treats you feed them to increase their stats, their gear, and their abilities. It is a wonderfully complex system that motivates for many hours.

Besides being simplistic, the story unfortunately is also rather linear. Even if later you can travel to places the story or sidequests aren't asking you to, that is rarely a good idea. The power curve of enemies is steep, so that if you veer off the beaten path, you'll either meet monsters that are far too easy (and thus don't get you enough xp), or so hard that they one-shot you. On the other hand you are encouraged to not just rush after the main story, because the various errands and bounty hunts are a good way to become strong enough to beat the boss monsters of the story. There are also various treasures to hunt, from chests to crafting ingredients, and familiars to chase, so that the linearity of the story doesn't become all that evident.

Combat is a fun mix of tactical choices and moments where you have to time your moves right. In boss battles one of the most important things is to go into defensive mode when the boss unleashes a power move, but there is much more to combat than that. You can't use any given familiar for very long, and so you keep switching between them, and your main character to cast his spells, trying to adapt to the situation of the combat. That can get quite challenging, but if you fail you can either try again or just make a few more rounds to gain some levels, or switch around your equipment (I really shouldn't have wielded that fire sword on my main familiar when climbing the volcano, it should have been obvious that I'd get in trouble when that boss fight turned out to be against a lava elemental.)

In addition to combat and story, Ni No Kuni also has an interesting world, which is presented in bits and pieces via pages of your wizard compendium you find. There are also riddles and puzzles, and a few easy jump-and-run like sequences. And there are lots of weird places to discover, from typical fantasy places to inside the stomach of the fairy godmother.

Overall Ni No Kuni is quite a good game, and offers a huge amount of entertainment time for the money. Recommended!