Champions Online: Big Changes and How they are made

ThomasN7

Dave Murray is in charge of user experience, and the User Interface on Champions Online. In the first in a series of very interesting interviews, he talks about some of the big changes made recently in the game’s design, mostly at the behest of gamers, rather than the internal designers.

He talks about recent changes made to the powers tray, to crafting and to character design. He explains why the changes were made, and the problems posed in altering gameplay and screen design. Murray is a former UI designer at Google (he worked on Gmail) so he’s got a pretty good fix on this stuff. Here’s what he had to say…

One of the biggest mistakes made by folks who don’t understand UI, is they iterate based on internal feedback and not based on the feedback from people who have actually used the product.

That’s an incredibly biased position to be in, because all your information is going to be tailored towards you and your needs as the designer.

One of the main platforms of good UI design is soliciting feedback from users early and often, in order to iterate. We just finished a one way mirror room session – watching gamers play live, giving them a set of tasks, watching them either complete or fail at those tasks and then iterate on the UI accordingly. That’s always fascinating, but just as useful, if not more so, is the Beta.

Case Study 1 – The Seven Powers Limit

Take the 7-power limit. We didn’t have to set up a one-mirror room to understand that it was something that needed changing. Everybody had been complained about it on the boards.

So we have this build system that has powers, it has roles like offense, defense supports and a costume and you just press a button on the UI and you switch builds. When you do that you can also switch all of the powers in your power tray.

The feedback we got was that people want to be able to have access to more than seven powers at once, when they’re actually playing the game, which was the limit we’d imposed.

Without the ability to access more of their powers at the same time, players didn’t feel like they were as super as they could have been. We were forcing them to make tradeoffs that they didn’t want to make.

We wanted simplicity, but we also know that people grow as they play the game. They are learning al the time, and so allowing the extra powers to be available at a point in the game where players would have a lot of experience made sense.

If you compare it to WoW, some people have 50 buttons on their screen. We’re definitely not taking it to that extreme but we’ve acknowledged that 7 powers is not enough so we’ve expanding it to 14. In addition, they have device slots where they can put potion equivalents and equipment.

It’s a design and UI challenge. We’re talking about another fifty pixels gone from the bottom of the screen so it’s less real estate for people to see the screen. There are a lot of tradeoffs when you make this in production.

The balance for us is making sure we don’t wind up with a screen that just looks too scary for novices. So we’re starting the game with just 7 slots - because we don’t want to fill the entire screen with empty slots - and then, as folks get more powers, as they get closer to that 7-power limit we automatically expand the set so that it grows out and people can put more in.

So that’s one example of where we know player feedback is going to highlight a problem and we anticipate and react.

Case Study 2 – Crafting

An example of where we got player feedback that we didn’t really expect was with crafting. We originally had three different ways to do crafting. One was just making stuff. The other was deconstructing, taking stuff and breaking it out into components, and reconstructing. And then the third one is something we call experimentation - you put a bunch of items in and then you get something magical out.

What we learned from player feedback was that people weren’t understanding what was going on. They thought it was the most complicated system in the game, and they didn’t enjoy it. It was too much.

People were having a lot of problems with actual interaction. So then we reiterated and made the UI better and we put in all the features that people said that they wanted and all the features that we thought that they needed. But the user experience still sucked.

People just weren’t getting excited about experimentation because it never felt like a real exciting experience.

We thought it would be really exciting. There’s this spontaneous positive reinforcement thing in psychology where you randomly give people great rewards and you expect them to keep coming back. But the reality is they weren’t going in at all because there was just too much there. So we merged the deconstruction and the experimentation. Now you just put items into one place and then you always get back something and once in a while you get back something amazing.

So that was a piece of feedback that we weren’t expecting but when we got it we had to roll with it.

Case Study 3 – Character Creation

Another huge decision that we’ve made is completely redoing the character creation flow. This is a huge deal, especially this late in the game. Something that we learned from feedback is that there were so many options, that people had a lot of trouble just getting basic stuff done.

So as well as having twenty different sliders to change every little thing you want in your face we’ve added some presets so people can choose an old face, a young face, whatever.

Now we default to those presets and then have a little button at the bottom called Advanced so people can play with all the sliders.

We’re trying to simplify as much as we can of the UI without eliminating the features. These are lessons that I’ve learned from UI on non-games software like web browsers and, say, Microsoft Word. It’s my job to find the right balance between offering the user simplicity and offering options.

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Paul Jones

As for me and this is only my prefrains, an i never did get a bata key. i really like how COX do’s their power slots now. I can have just the basic 10 slots or have up to 30 as i gain more powers. even more still. WOW was ok but it was just too bulky and a pain to increas or decrease the number. wheir COX its just a click away.

posted on 07.27.09 at 11:27

 

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Andy Sims

A Game Designer must have some faith in their design and understand what is important to their game over the wants of a few BETA testers. What game are they making and how does this game play? Not how can I make this game like every other game out there? which is what you get when you listen to beta testers.

Beta testers comprise a very small number of the folks you hope to have as players, which means if you listen to them you are changing your game for a very small percentage of your player base, a very small percentage with very specific play styles- not the average player and normally not near as unbiased as the average player.

For example- look at what happened to WAR- they made a great game about scenario based pvp but their beta testers wanted DAoC2- so before release they worked on building up their “open world” pvp by adding keep taking- when the game released it was very schitzophrenic- and through change after change they have tried to force players into these RvR lakes and away from their original design- the game is failing because they are trying to change the entire game postlaunch- they should have had more faith and conviction in their design- they are pleasing a small minority of players and ending up with a small player base.

 

Source: championsonlinedailynews.com/big-changes-and-how-they%E2%80%99re-made/