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Showing posts with label Gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gaming. Show all posts

Sunday, January 28, 2018

The User Experience of Lootboxes


I hope you like GIF’s. I brought GIF’s.

Disclaimer: In real life, when I’m not pretending I know how to write, I work for a gambling company here in Australia. This means that lootboxes — gambling — in video games is a unique point of interest for me. I’m not a gambler in any sense, but I deal with the industry on a daily basis. I think this gives me a unique perspective on the topic, and I want to be up front about where I’m coming from when I talk about it.
I believe gambling is much like drinking or smoking — it’s harmful to millions of people, and requires a significant effort by both gambling corporations and governments to regulate the medium effectively. I also, however, believe that just like drinking and smoking, it is an adults choice to participate in any form of gambling.
In gaming, gambling takes a different tone. There are very, very few barriers in most games for minors to participate in lootboxes, which absolutely are gambling. I believe there is an inherent ethical responsibility on any developer or publisher to put safeguards in place to protect kids. I also believe that it is the governments responsibility to enforce strict regulations on developers on how, and when, they institute gambling systems in games.
The views expressed in this article do not reflect the views of Tabcorp in any way. These are my own personal opinions.

I hope you like GIF’s. This article has a few.
Lootboxes were the number one gaming story of 2017. More specifically, games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 — a relatively good game in it’s own right that was significantly hampered by it’s extremely heavy-handed micro-transaction system.
I don’t want to dwell on the ethics or merits of these systems (I’ve done that enough in the disclaimer), but what I do want to talk about is how — from a UX perspective — these systems work and affect players.
I will say, however, that I unequivocally do not support games that put gameplay upgrades (especially those that grant power in a competitive setting) behind a paywall — commonly referred to as pay-to-win. I’m talking about games like FIFA Ultimate Team, Star Wars Battlefront 2, and to a lesser extent, Fortnite. Players shouldn’t have to pay money to have a better experience than other players.
There’s some key techniques successful lootboxes use to create an exciting opening experience — let’s see what they are:

Artificial Scarcity

Rarity is a massive driver in games. As soon as something is rare, it becomes intrinsically valuable to a player. This makes sense in the real world — there’s not much gold, so that which exists has value. In the digital world, everything is only as rare as a developer makes it.
Lootboxes often use thematic visual changes to represent time gates on certain boxes. Card packs or crates that are only available for certain periods have a unique style, so you feel as though you need to get it now, or you’ll miss out. This combines a sense of urgency and rarity — something that can powerfully influence a players’ decision to purchase.
Hearthstone’s extra touch — mousing over an unrevealed card gives you a glimpse of it’s rarity.
‘The Old Gods’ expansion features Lovecraftian-style packs.
Hearthstone is a good example of this. Each new expansion has it’s own card-pack style. It makes them feel special, and also gives that message that they’re new, or limited.
‘Knights of the Frozen Throne’ took a frostier route.
Hearthstone doesn’t remove these card packs for purchase, so there is technically no urgency (other than the need to have the best cards to stay competitive, of course), but the visual styling still motivates purchases.
EA Sports FIFA series actually does this a bit better. Their Ultimate Team mode has card packs that players can purchase (more on that later) that award football players for your teams.
This is an extreme example, but many players will genuinely have 6–8 versions in the game, most of which are time-sensitive rewards.
EA releases new, upgraded versions of players every week, alongside with regular events throughout the season. If you don’t buy packs that week/event, you can’t get that version of the player.
It’s very, very effective when your favourite player has a special edition card that you want. I may or may not have been brainwashed by this trick. More than once. Like, a lot, actually.

The Drumroll

Early lootboxes were simple — purchase me and get some loot. A few years ago, though, things got a little complex. Lootboxes started opening with some fancy graphics and cool effects. A big shift was what I call the drumroll. It’s that moment between clicking ‘Open’ and finding out what you’ve got, where often the box will reveal something about your rewards.
I’ve opened hundreds of these, but only just noticed that the box has disappeared when the camera comes back down…
This Overwatch box is a great example. There’s a moment where the rewards are spinning through the air and you catch a glimpse of the rarity of what you’re getting. When you see the orange glow of a legendary skin, it’s exciting and builds anticipation. Likewise, if you open 20 boxes and don’t get to see that orange hue, there’s tangible disappointment.
FIFA does this well, also. When you open a pack, the animation changes depending on the best player you recieve. Take a look at the three animations below:
A pack with a gold-ranked, non-rare player.
A pack with a gold-ranked, rare player.
A pack with a gold-ranked, rare, high-rated player.
The first two are relatively subtle, but even from the first moment of opening there’s some additional gold effects and a slightly different split effect for the rare opening.
The third opening is referred to as a ‘Walkout’ in the community — it’s reserved for highly rated players, and the player animation is personalised to one that player is known for in real life. When the billboards pop out of the pack, you immediately know you’re up for a good player. If that player jumps on screen, you’ve got one of the best in the game.
The excitement in these effects don’t start at the reveal, however. The excitement builds from the moment the pack starts to split and you recognise the unique effect that tells the player they’re in for something good.

The Big Reveal

As you might expect, the grand reveal is the most important part of any lootbox. This is where the player experiences limitless euphoria or bitter disappointment.
Ironically, there’s not too much to say about this. The boxes we’ve looked at so far are great examples of fun reveal moments; Hearthstone’s slow card-turn, FIFA’s staggered reveal of country, then position, then team, and finally the player’s name and portrait.
So, to change things up, let’s look at a few that I think are bad at this:
The infamous lootbox of Star Wars Battlefront 2
Star Wars Battlefront 2 drew so much ire in 2017 for offering powerful player upgrades in their lootboxes. They got slammed for this choice and, in turn, made some changes. It didn’t mean much though. What’s staggering is that despite this huge focus on a microtransaction model, the animation sucks. The holographic reveal has no impact, the color codes aren’t vibrant or exciting, and most packs came with intangible junk anyway. Boring.
I don’t remember this scene from Saving Private Ryan.
Call of Duty WWII had you call in ‘Supply Drops’ in a player populated hubspace between matches. This was a pretty transparent mechanism to show players who weren’t buying boxes just how much fun everyone else was having with their loot. The card flip lacks impact for me, and there’s no real drumroll beyond waiting for the cards to turn. Not great.
No Llamas were harmed in the making of Fortnite. Or so I’m told.
Aesthetically, I actually really like Fortnite’s loot-llamas. It’s also a relatively generous loot model, although it loses any possible browny points by having tangible upgrades locked behind purchasable lootboxes. Overall, it’s a creative execution that lacks any punch. The loot slows down the rarer it is, which actually feels more tedious than it does exciting.
That’s a big box for a little gun, Sergeant.
Battlefield 1’s crates are a prerendered animation followed by a static image of the weapon skin you get. It’s kind of cool the first two or three times, but once that delight wears off it feels more like an afterthought. Snore.

The Power of Choice

Something that’s come up relatively recently is giving players choices in their loot. There isn’t too many examples of this, but I did want to showcase a few games that use this technique. I think it’s a fun, pro-player way to create additional engagement in these sort of random drop systems.
Using the card backs to display rarity and type is a nice twist on a drumroll mechanic.
When you get a ‘Keg’ in Gwent, the fifth card in the pack is one you choose from a set of three. This is a great way to solve an ongoing problem with TCG games, where players rarely have the ability to purchase specific cards ad-hoc.
In Fortnite, at a certain tier of loot, the rarest item in a lootbox will be given to the player as a choice of two equally rare items. This is often between two weapon types, or two new heroes. It’s a nice way to make the loot more meaningful to the player, as they can choose something relevant to them.

In closing, I’d just like to say that lootboxes, for the most part, are completely evil.
I actually really like microtransactions as a concept. I think it’s a good way for developers to generate ongoing revenue and can be done in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the game, or the playerbase.
I also acknowledge that this concept has existed pretty much since Magic: The Gathering got big. Trading Card Games are almost exclusively built around a random-pack model (although the ability to trade cards mitigates this by creating a secondary market).
Furthermore, I admit that lootboxes when done right can be really fun. I quite like Overwatch’s interpretation — you earn them through standard gameplay, they only contain cosmetics, and you are rarely encouraged to make a purchase. There’s even a recovery mechanic in place so that you can outright purchase items you haven’t been lucky enough to recieve (Although this could be better).
But lootboxes, like booster packs, are gambling. They just are. And it’s a shame that such a large part of the industry (Including our two biggest publishers, EA and Activision Blizzard) are not so deeply entrenched in these systems as a way to sustain their games.
If you’re going to do lootboxes, please, fill them only with cosmetics. Having upgrades that affect gameplay in a randomised system compromises the integrity of your game, and forces players to choose between investing or being at a disadvantage.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to make systems like these work. There’s also a fun way. I don’t think lootboxes are going anywhere, but hopefully they’re going to get better.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Nintendo’s Extra Lives


I’ve been wrong about Nintendo. So far. Happily.

Over the past few years, I’ve been pretty bearish when it comes to Nintendo’s long-term prospects as a standalone company. Okay, that’s probably putting it mildly. Yes, I’ve said Nintendo shouldn’t be running Nintendo and called the rumors of their death greatly under-exaggerated.
Then I sit down with my Nintendo Switch to play Super Mario Odyssey and I feel foolish. The game is that good. So is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.¹ And I honestly haven’t even played Mario Kart 8 yet because I’ve been too busy with these two pieces of brilliance. And so on.
So, is Nintendo back?
The numbers suggest as much. The company just announced that the Switch is now the fastest selling console in the U.S. — ever:
The Switch has broken the US record for the fastest selling console ever, with 4.8 million units sold in just 10 months, Nintendo says. That shatters the previous record of 4 million US sales in the same time, also held by Nintendo with the Wii. Switch sales first opened on March 3rd, 2017, and it looks like strong holiday sales pushed the Switch over the top.
The story is similar worldwide, as the company’s profits have been boosted by strong demand for both the console and its games.
The company also managed to launch the SNES (Super Nintendo) Classic without the same disastrous results as they had with the NES Classic a year prior. Yes, it was still hard to get one throughout the holidays. But I was able to get one last week at regular, retail cost. So that’s another win, in my book.
It’s not all sunshine in the land of Mario. The company had to push back the roll-out of its 64GB cards — vital for large, third-party games — until next year. The reason why seems curious, at best. But it’s also unclear how much it will matter with their first-party titles being as good as they are right now. Nintendo should be able to continue surging for a while on those titles alone.
But it is still a hits-driven business. And the hits need to keep coming. And that’s why both the Zelda and Mario titles were so key last year: after the disastrous Wii U and the NES Classic fiasco, Nintendo needed to prove they still had it. And they did. And so I was wrong, for now. Something which I could not be happier about, honestly!
But what’s next? Seemingly a good pipeline of games for the Switch, both from a first and third party perspective. This should allow the console to ride out a successful run for a few years, at least. But the reality of our world is that Nintendo still needs to think about doing things slightly differently than they have in the past.
Super Mario Run was a good step in this direction from a pure gameplay perspective — but they got the business model wrong. With the Switch firing on all cylinders, Nintendo has time to figure this out. And it seems like they’re taking steps to make that happen.
It’s unclear where the online/subscription component of the Switch is, but at least they’re saying the right things in terms of why it’s taking so long:
The reason we’ve delayed the full paid subscription, is we want to make sure that as we get all of our learnings, and we build all of the elements, that we launch something that is robust for the consumer. And as they consider a $20 price point, they say ‘This is a no-brainer. This is something that I absolutely need to participate in given the full range of features that it provides.’
That’s why we’re delaying it, and it really is consistent with the overall Nintendo development philosophy. We want, when we launch it, for it to be great for the consumer. And not to be something that isn’t fully-featured and fully-capable. That’s why we delayed Breath of the Wild — and look at what we were able to finally launch.’
Of course, that was in June. So yeah, I still have some logistics/execution concerns with the company, to say the least…
My only other thought that I’ll continue to harp on: don’t discount the power of retro gaming. The company has now seen firsthand just how passionate fans will be with systems like the NES and SNES Classics.² They’re going to attempt to re-do the NES Classic screw-up, which is the right call.
I still think they should take this a step further, and make these consoles more than just one-off promotional gimmicks. I’d put resources into creating new games for these devices. One of the coolest aspects of the SNES Classic is that it comes with StarFox 2 — a game which had never been released before. More of this, please.
Better yet, open these systems up to third-party and indie game developers to turn them into retro gaming powerhouses. This may seem somewhat counterintuitive, but that’s the space in which Nintendo has always thrived. That, and their fantastic IP.
There is so much low-hanging fruit here. That’s why I made those calls for others to step in and save Nintendo. Could you imagine what Apple could do with such IP?! But such paths always run the risk of the new body rejecting the organ. Then again, have you seen what Disney has done with Lucasfilm?
Anyway, let’s all just hope this isn’t leading up to anagnorisis

¹ At the risk of blasphemy, I must admit that I’m enjoying the Mario game far more than the Zelda one. And I’m definitely Team Zelda (as opposed to Team Mario). Don’t get me wrong, Zelda is a beautiful game. But it’s complex. Mario is robust but pretty simple. It’s simply fun to play.
² We’ll see where Atari lands with their forthcoming “Ataribox” — I think the core concept is right, but at $249 or $299, I’m worried they’re shooting themselves in the foot…

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