Raph's Website » Moore’s Wall

blog · games · writing · music · art · shop · about Raph · contact

Moore’s Wall

January 13th, 2006 (Visited 19710 times) Tags:

A while ago I did a webcast talk for an IBM “Games on Demand” conference. I have laboriously transcribed what I said, and put up the slides on the site.

Some sample quotes, to whet your appetite for reading the truly lengthy text:

“You cannot plan a fun factor.”

“In twelve years, budgets have gone up by a factor of 22. This is a figure that is already adjusted for inflation. And it is not a figure that includes marketing money.”

“The amount of data that we have to create for the games has risen somewhere between 40 and 150 times [in twelve years].”

“If you look at many of the top-selling genres, you can literally take a game from ten years ago, and set it down in front of someone, and they won’t need to read the manual.”

“By and large technology tends to curtail creativity rather than assisting it.”

“Creativity is enhanced by limitations.”

“For as long as I’ve been making online games, 40% of our CPU load has gone to doing path-finding.”

“Very few of the massively multiplayer games focus on having a high degree of persistence, even though that is our key unique selling proposition.”

“Not all players want to be the same sort of hero.”

“We don’t want to make worlds that change too much because it cost us so much to build the static world in the first place.”

“We should remember that 90% of the online game players out there are playing a game that was not developed by a professional: they’re playing CounterStrike, which was user-created.”

“Procedural content is an implicit part of the ‘filmic language’ of computer games.”

“Right now, the kind of procedural content we tend to make tends to be the output of a very boring algorithm that makes generic and unsatisfying content. Let’s not kid ourselves, a fractal terrain landscape that repeats endlessly is still just hills going out to the horizon. We’re not going to happen across the Grand Canyon until we get much smarter about how we design our procedural algorithms.”

“Game designers, it’s painful to admit it, we’re not omniscient, we don’t think of everything that there is that the players might want to do.”

“A lot of the best-selling games out there are really hybrids between films and games. The interactive movie is here right now, and its name is Jak and Daxter.”

“In order to increase the amount of good quality user content, we have to push the whole pyramid up, enable more people to make bad user content by giving them easier tools.”

“Let’s make the right choices about the capabilities that technology offers us. It isn’t just more pretty pictures. The future lies in more interesting games.”

Read the whole speech here. Then post and let me know what you think. Some of you probably actually sat through the video version way back when in the long ago. I assure you that transcribing it was incredibly painful, given that the stream kept cutting out…!

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

54 Responses to “Moore’s Wall”

Jump to reader comments » | Leave a reply »

Trackbacks & Pingbacks

Ramblings of a little Blue Gnoll wrote on February 6th, 2006 at 7:00 am:

Blogroll Joel on SoftwareRaph Koster Sunny Walker Thoughts for Now Sex, Lies and Advertising

eXtension IT » Blog Archive » Making the most of our wikis wrote on January 13th, 2006 at 3:51 am:

[...] Making the most of our wikis January 13th, 2006 I’ve been watching the way that some of our pioneering CoPs are approaching the “collection” of content in their wiki space. It’s been interesting to say the least. I’m of a mind that they should be encouraging people to put everything they have in the space. Why not? Instead, most are taking an approach that they are “building” a Web site, and are “a priori” deciding what it should contain. I came across this quote over at Ralph Koster’s blog and thought it had some relevance. He was talking about building better computer games, but I don’t see why it applies to just gaming software: In order to increase the amount of good quality user content, we have to push the whole pyramid up, enable more people to make bad user content by giving them easier tools. He’s arguing for an “a posteriri” approach. If you get more people involved, you will generate more content. True, a lot of it may not be the best quality, but somewhere in all that content, you will discover some real nuggets, and then the community can work to make it even better. [...]

Linklog — page 1 wrote on January 19th, 2006 at 6:14 pm:

[...] Raphael Koster: Moore’s Wall Some vaguely interesting comments about the computer games industry. [...]

Friends wrote on January 20th, 2006 at 6:29 am:

[...] http://www.raphkoster.com/?p=257Some vaguely interesting comments about the computer games industry. (Leave a comment) [...]

A Clockwork Mind : Bzzt! Rewind! I was wrong, Raph was right wrote on February 12th, 2006 at 11:27 pm:

[...] Bzzt! Rewind! I was wrong, Raph was right A while back, Raph Koster had an article going about Moore’s Law, which he referred to as Moore’s wall. In it he raised the opinion that games as a whole would not become more innovating (or rather, return to the days of innovation) until the medium was democratized with readily-available pro-quality tools at low (or zero) prices. I don’t know if i was just feeling particularly cynical that day, but i was using the argument that 100 million channels or a thousand brazillion do not make for better TV or better websites and to the casual obserber, the converse is actually true. I’ll stand by that sentiment, actually, but i was wrong to think that therefore nothing would improve. Although the situation is changing slowly, we currently have game designers who cannot write code. In the beginning, all game designers were coders. It becomes clear when you look at some of the technologies that gaming currently works with that the bar is too high for the creative individual who has not spent his life learning about those subsystems to write and release a game. I was going over my netwroking model for Faith and thinking about recovering from timeouts and linedrops (these happen a lot more over ADSL than you’d think, but the reconnect is so quick that most users don’t notice) and i also spent a while talking game theory with some people who do not write code and would not know an IP packet if it made them breakfast. But they have ideas, they kow narrative, they think in ways that i – with my codetrained brain – cannot. Unless they suddenly get a place like Warren Spector’s and have other people to take care of that for them, they’ll never write a game. And we all know how unlikely it is that they should. A pity. And i apologize, Raph. You were right. I was wrong. Put this on your calendar, it’s not a common occurrence Published Monday, February 13, 2006 7:15 AM by Cael [...]

Reader Comments

RodeoClown said on January 13th, 2006 at 1:05 am:
I think that Nintendo is responding exactly to what you’ve described (so far… I’m only half-way through – just saw Far Cry).
The DS is nowhere near as ‘powerful’ as the PSP, but the innovation on it is driving it like crazy (See the bottom of this article). 600,000(!) DS’s sold LAST WEEK in Japan… that’s insane, espescially for a ‘weak’ handheld. Anyway, good transcribing so far, looks like it would have been a good talk to see.
(off-topic completely – what plugin are you using for the comments here?)
Raph said on January 13th, 2006 at 1:12 am:
I use Live Comment Preview for the preview and LMB^Box Comment Quicktags for the formatting buttons.
I also have Spoiler Tags on the posts — unsure if they work in the comments. test! If they do, I’ll add them to the quicktags…
RodeoClown said on January 13th, 2006 at 1:20 am:
Thanks for that.
Very interesting read. Looks like leveraging (that is really a terrible word – should be levering) users to create content is where things are heading.
Jorn Barger said on January 13th, 2006 at 2:33 am:
Great stuff, but for ‘Altair’ I think you mean ‘Alto’, and Kay’s Dynabook in the 70s was never more than a cardboard prototype.
Cael said on January 13th, 2006 at 4:26 am:
“In order to increase the amount of good quality user content, we have to push the whole pyramid up, enable more people to make bad user content by giving them easier tools.”
Are you positive about that one, Raph? It hasn’t worked with, for example, TV or publishing. We haven’t got another Shakespeare simply because we created better tools for word-processing, let alone anything better.
More TV means worse TV. Sometimes i think about Elite, Nethack, Streetfighter, Ep1 Racer and others and i wonder if the mass-production of games that we already see is a reason why the quality and the attention-span usually given to them seems to have actually declined.
In the UK (which is the only TV area i can speak of with any authority), 4 channels used to mean usually at least 2 shows worth watching at any time. Now we have over 200 channels. And most of the time, nothing’s on.
Carol MacGillivray said on January 13th, 2006 at 5:51 am:
“Game designers, it’s painful to admit it, we’re not omniscient, we don’t think of everything that there is that the players might want to do.”
Do you think that maybe this is in part because gamedeigners themselves are drawn from such a narrow field? If they all are white men with beards who worship Star Wars, there is little chance of them getting into the head of, say, a twenty year old West-Indian girl. The varied sandbox invention of The Sims is surely a testament to the diverse demographic of the designers.
If, as you say:
“In order to increase the amount of good quality user content, we have to push the whole pyramid up, enable more people to make bad user content by giving them easier tools.”
then surely we should be working at creating a more diversity in MMO game design than pursuing combat in ever more realistic looking environments?
Amberyl said on January 13th, 2006 at 6:30 am:
Actually, opening the tools up to more people has certainly mattered in publishing (not just the tools to write, but also the tools to distribute one’s writing). We don’t have another Shakespeare, sure, but we do have any number of other literary giants, as well as an enormous number of authors who produce stuff of varying levels of quality, most of which is worthwhile and entertaining. And the Web enabled everyone on the planet with Internet access to publish to the world — this blog is a perfect example of something that’s not the works of Shakespeare but is nonetheless a valuable contribution to human discourse.
Television still hasn’t been opened up to the masses, for obvious reasons.
Amberyl said on January 13th, 2006 at 6:37 am:
Shadows of the Colossus, Katamari Damacy, Guitar Hero… innovative concepts are still out there.
In your nostalgia for the past, don’t forget that we endured a bazillion Pac-Man and Space Invaders psuedo-clones, too. And Scorpia (CGW’s RPG reviewer) has been griping about Fedex Courier, Kill Foozle Edition RPGs for the last dozen years.
Tess said on January 13th, 2006 at 7:29 am:
Oh boy… so much to comment on!
“In twelve years, budgets have gone up by a factor of 22. This is a figure that is already adjusted for inflation. And it is not a figure that includes marketing money.”
Every time I hear people talk about current game budget inflation, I can’t help but think that A.) there’s something going horribly wrong, B.) that kind of spending isn’t sustainable, and C.) I’m all for opting the hell out. I think there’s an entirely viable market out there for games that don’t cost 22-fold more than the games from twelve years ago. Let somebody else go bankrupt.
“Creativity is enhanced by limitations.”
And that’s one more reason!
“For as long as I’ve been making online games, 40% of our CPU load has gone to doing path-finding.”
Maybe Ageia should’ve skipped physics processing, and made pathing processing units, instead.
“Right now, the kind of procedural content we tend to make tends to be the output of a very boring algorithm that makes generic and unsatisfying content.”
Boy, you can say that again. I’d love to just take a year off, and play with procedural world building algorithms. But to do that, I’d probably have to go into academia.
“In order to increase the amount of good quality user content, we have to push the whole pyramid up, enable more people to make bad user content by giving them easier tools.”
Yes, yes, and yes. I made almost exactly the same argument to the machinima community, when people fretted over the teeming masses of humanity that would be making machinima when Lionhead’s “The Movies” came out. The ratio of Sturgeon’s Law does not shift when you increase the amount of people creating things. Sure, you’re guaranteed to get more crap, but you’re guaranteed to get more good stuff, too.
Anyway, the overall speech reminds me of a rant I got into earlier today. A friend of mine is working on an application for a job with a company working on an RPG. She was required to write a sample mission, as part of her application. She complained to me that her villains didn’t drop much loot.
I asked her why they have to drop any loot at all. Did it make sense for the player characters to loot people in this world? I then pointed out that the whole concept of looting is absolutely ridiculous, in many contexts. Even in a fantasy context, you don’t see the heroes in Lord of the Rings looting the corpses of fallen orcs. Really, who wants to wear smelly orc gear? And where on earth would they sell it? MEBay?
But people don’t just follow these conventions because they lack creativity. We are still learning how to satisfy the needs of the playerbase. We know that looting, for example, is well liked by many players. It’s satisfying a need of some sort. I think that as we come to better understand that need, we will find that we can dream up more options for satisfying it.
StGabe said on January 13th, 2006 at 10:54 am:
I’m all for better tools for people to make actual games. Stuff like GarageGames is great and is helping us get in the right direction.
I used to be sold on player content embedded in games. I no longer am. NWN came and went, more or less. S&L is doing … just ok. Player content in SW was interesting but often the meatier aspects of it were simply ignored because they didn’t have gameplay value. Maybe there is some critical component of making this stuff more accessible that will suddenly break it open. But I just don’t think so anymore. I think that RP players and builder players are too much of a niche and player content has to be tied in to the core game at an unmanageable level before players will take it seriously. I.e. the player content has to involve real “uber” loot (or other things that players care about and are willing to spend time on) and actual gameplay before any mainstream players will get into it. And allowing that to happen requires too much management overhead.
As I’ve been graffiti’ing all over the walls of cyberspace: I think that narratives in MMO’s need to be pushed through game-generated, player-controlled, narrative-spawning gameplay. The “player content” that I think sort of worked in SWG was the player created market. And it worked because it was just a deep game that players played but from which narratives were spawned. This fits into the comment that creativity is fostered through limitations. I don’t think that allowing players to draw electronic penises (or create their own cantinas, or create their own “quest” npc’s) will overcome WoW’s massive buget of static content. But I think that better, deeper game systems with emergent stories might. It’s just so hard for that to happen when, getting to the evolutionary discussion, that’s such a long jump from where we are at right now. But with more emphasis on player-driven economies and other massive, dynamic gameplay I think we might be able to slowly move that way.
Ladnar said on January 13th, 2006 at 10:58 am:
Interesting reading Raph.
What stage do you think we are at in the MMO genre lifecycle? I think we are starting to see niches form already. My perspective would be that we are at the mature stage heading toward the decline.
That’s not to say that there still isn’t plenty left to do of course.
It seems some of the more popular games let the player take the persona of a criminal instead of that of a hero. I haven’t seen an MMO that embraces that as the norm yet. Then I haven’t seen everything I’m sure.
Raph said on January 13th, 2006 at 11:51 am:
Great stuff, but for ‘Altair’ I think you mean ‘Alto’, and Kay’s Dynabook in the 70s was never more than a cardboard prototype.
See, that’s what I get for prepping my talk from memory. The Altair was the kit computer in the 70s.
I used to be sold on player content embedded in games. I no longer am. NWN came and went, more or less.
Last I heard, NWN had an active community of 800,000 people. Granted, that was a while ago, but it was still well after launch. I tend to think that the tools they made are still too hard to use (ditto for the tools Bethesda made for Morrowind).
To me, the stuff happening around the Net with blogging, podcasts, and so on, is evidence that it’s all about the barrier to content creation.
this blog is a perfect example of something that’s not the works of Shakespeare but is nonetheless a valuable contribution to human discourse.
Hmm, must up literary level of blog. Forsooth, The Tempest, here we come!
Do you think that maybe this is in part because gamedeigners themselves are drawn from such a narrow field?… surely we should be working at creating a more diversity in MMO game design than pursuing combat in ever more realistic looking environments?
Hmm, you new to the blog? In short, yes, I most definitely agree with you!
Are you positive about that one, Raph? It hasn’t worked with, for example, TV or publishing. We haven’t got another Shakespeare simply because we created better tools for word-processing, let alone anything better.
Not only do I very much disagree with you on the publishing front, I actually think we’re in a bit of a golden age of TV. As much as we might not be interested, stuff like the Food Network is actually fulfilling a lot of the great educational promise of TV (I quite enjoy “Handmade Music” on the DIY channel, for example). And I also think that you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the overall fairly stellar work being done in the TV drama.
StGabe said on January 13th, 2006 at 2:49 pm:
I find 800,000 NWN community members very hard to believe. Which brings us back to the age-old question: what counts as a user or community member? I of course only have anecdotal evidence to go by but I know that I meet EQ1, EQ2, WoW and Guildwars players IRL all the time and online I constantly meet players of all sorts of older online worlds and yet I haven’t talked to anyone playing or actively interested in NWN. Post-release mostly i heard from people who tried really hard to make NWN be what they wanted it to and failed.
I think that suggesting that blogs and podcasts are good evidence of the viability of creating player content for games is a huge leap that I am not prepared to make. All you need to blog effectively is the ability to fill in text boxes. All you need to podcast is the ability to stream audio. And even these relatively incredibly simple mediums have taken quite some time to evolve. And I haven’t seen evidence that these simple mediums suffice for players of online worlds. They want not only a more directed experience but a legitimized experience. Having some central, trusted source create standards of challenges legitimizes them. And tying gameplay to such content is crucial which is where most player content falls into meaninglessness.
I think we will continue to see interesting, mostly free, non-game worlds that allow people to chat, discuss, and create personalized spaces. A.K.A. Myspace .. and blogs and podcasts. But putting games into these worlds is a completely different matter and I’m not sure what reason we have to make the leap into thinking it will happen.
StGabe said on January 13th, 2006 at 2:51 pm:
*haven’t talked to anyone playing or actively interested in NWN in years
…that should read.
blindedcyclops said on January 13th, 2006 at 4:02 pm:
NWN has had the ability to maintain a cultish existence due to its providing users tools for creating content that appeals directly to them and their peers. Sure many peoples ambitions were beyond the budget or design of the game itself, but quality gaming experiences were still being created that appeal to many different gaming styles. Different servers have different rules and players are free to find the right fit in a community of people interested in the same gameplay as them. It satisfies more of the niches than any one homogenous game/world is capable of. Despite the limitations of the scripting and overall system, the builder tools scale really well for allowing different levels of skill in content creation.
I avidly support user created, managed, and policed content and hope to someday soon see it on a better game engine than NWN 1 provides. I have yet to have, create, or run more personalized experiences in a video game as I have been able to in NWN, and all those experiences involved interaction with others in fun and meaningful ways.
Darniaq said on January 13th, 2006 at 4:06 pm:
To me, the stuff happening around the Net with blogging, podcasts, and so on, is evidence that it’s all about the barrier to content creation
Like StGabe, I’m not sure this implies only simpler tools would enable new game creation. Blogging is to books what podcasts are to self-made video. What’s limited them, and general dictation-style self-expression, isn’t the tools of creation but rather those of distribution. If not for things like Blogspot (or Blogger) and the iTunes service (as supported the cultural-icon that is the iPod), people would still be just as capable of writing or videoing. They’d just have less people to expose it to.
Conversely, games are more of a two-way relationship. And gamers have the tools. I agree they’re more difficult to use (whether NWN or Flash), but games are harder to create. Letting people drop NPCs wherever they want with libraries of behaviors doesn’t automatically result in compelling objectives to interact with them.
Blogging comes in all shapes of sizes, just as customer-created games do. But a well-written blog piece (relatively speaking) doesn’t take near the time a well-crafted game does.
And I don’t think it’s because of the tools. Rather, I think it’s because of the complexity of game design at all.
StGabe said on January 13th, 2006 at 5:09 pm:
NWN has had the ability to maintain a cultish existence due to its providing users tools for creating content that appeals directly to them and their peers.
The keyword to the above description of NWN is “cultish”. NWN is a very cool tool. Just one that won’t fulfill the needs of most of the audience.
What’s limited them, and general dictation-style self-expression, isn’t the tools of creation but rather those of distribution.
Well said.
The distribution improvements that have enabled podcasts and blogs won’t suddenly make player-drawn penises into good MMO content but may (God I hope) allow smaller, independent and niche titles to become viable. And then these games can explore game design space that isn’t viable in the broader market. We’ll have better stories in our MMO’s when the market is ready to support dozens of Achaea/ATitD style, heavily-niched but risk-taking worlds with creators that make enough money to live off of much smaller, but “cultish” playerbases who really dig their specific style of world-building. The growth here, IMO, will just happen at the level of development tools and distribution models, i.e. external to the games themselves and not internally with embedded player-created content.
Getting back to our evolutionary metaphors, this better distribution and creation tools are the environmental shift that may open avenues for new genotypes to thrive.
Raph said on January 13th, 2006 at 5:32 pm:
I tend to believe that good content creation tools and good distribution are extremely intertwined. For example, HTML is both a content creation tool and fundamental to its own distribution method. There are many examples like that… a good content creation tool design will take its distribution channels very much into account.
StGabe said on January 13th, 2006 at 5:44 pm:
Ignoring the large differences between HTML and game design I think that HTML is better used as analogy to Torque/GarageGames than as anology to embedded player content. An HTML-like language for world creation would be a language that developers could use to create independent worlds and that browsers could read to view/play those worlds — not a world itself.
Darniaq said on January 13th, 2006 at 6:06 pm:
a good content creation tool design will take its distribution channels very much into account.
We could perhaps draw a parallel to the FPS scene here. The tools aren’t awesome, but the players are dedicated enough to give it a go quite frequently. And the distribution of new content is exactly the same as it is for the content that comes bundled with the game: installed with the client and players who host do so from their own computers. P2P within a controlled environment, after a fashion.
Overly simplistic, but if Bioware offered to host space for player-created persistent-world mods within a tiered pricing plan ($4.99/mo for 6 peak concurrency, $9.99 for 20, $19.99 for 40 and so on), creators would have a much easier time distributing their quilt-world experiences.
And just to clarify, I do actually agree better tools make for easier game creation. We’ve seen the long trending already, from pure code to the map creation in Sun Tzu Art of War or Penultima for the Apple //e, through FPS mods, and robust middleware.
I just think being able to create games does not automatically enable people to do so. Time is as much a limiting factor in playing certain hardcore ones as it is in creating even the simplest ones.
Antheus said on January 13th, 2006 at 7:10 pm:
Just some thoughts from a player, rather than creator.
It seems to me, that there’s two key types of playes, those that want to be led (quests and storyline), and those that want to lead (craft, construct, contribute).
Even WoW, as popular as it is, is often quoted by players as having no end-game content.
In most games, pvp is the end-game. But isn’t pvp just a form of player created content within the confines of game mechanics. It seems that while it is true, most people do not want to meet too many decisions while playing games, its more of a single-player game precedence that has steered them towards that. Too many, games are about leveling up, then saying i’m done. The rest is just the obligatory eye-candy that needs to be upgraded for every new release.
This is also the cause of increasing budgets. Adding bells-and-whistles that simply need to be present is what drastically increases the initial investment.
From user’s perspective, i’d say that greatest fear of developers is the abuse of any player created aspect, since it can and will be abused. Radical factions making their presence in games, abusive insulting behaviour and actions excercised through game mechanisms, griefing through player placed objects can all lead to serious, even punishable by law actions.
Another difference i see, is what player content is. Before mentioned examples would indicate its player created maps (world, buildings). But what about player economy (just about every game has given up on it)? Or meta-game, that is often closely related to pvp, the “forum drama”. To many more socialy aware players, that is significant, if not vital aspect of game.
Factions could also represent important player-driven aspect. Instead of defining dark and light stereotype, provide ability to create an entity above guilds – factions. Players and guilds may choose to belong to any, where faction rules are defined by game mechanics. Military oriented ones require pvp, economically oriented ones provide monetary/resource bonuses, political factions allow easier control of territories/fees/money sinks.
The more i compare existing and upcoming online games, the less differentiation there seems to be. All of them seem to be just renamed/rehashed level based/guild oriented/pvp end-game providers. And all end up displaying fancy graphics as their key selling point.
I do believe, there is room for inovation, there are two very aclaimed and successful games out there right now (GuildWars, EvE online), which provide completely different approach to more or less classical concepts. Guildwars goes as far as organizing live competitions, with real money rewards.
What i do hope for (from players perspective), is that more people will step up, and find business models for different approaches to MMO games, rather than just settle for a small share of the pie, by selling same old concept in different packaging.
Just as many before, i have done my grind, ding just doesn’t cut it for me anymore, even if its in 7-1 dolby surround sound, with photorealistic HD movie quality graphics.
MikeRozak said on January 13th, 2006 at 8:56 pm:
Here’s a thought related to Nathan Myhrvold’s, “Software is like a gas…” as well as the inverse of the Mythical Man Month….
Given a software title that costs $N to make for $M of statistically-likely profit… If twice as much development money ($2N) would result in more than twice as much in profit (> $2M), then development costs are bound to go up because doing so results in a better ROI.
Star Wars (the original) showed this to be the case for FX movies in 1977(?), and FX movies got incrementally more expensive. I’m not sure if the trend has stopped. I suspect it slowed with Kevin Costner’s Water World and a few other failures. It may have started up again with LOTR. Was LOTR was more expensive than Star Wars (per movie) given inflation?
WoW, for example, has proven this statement for MMORPGs, implying that MMORPGs will get incrementally more expensive. If WoW had not been so successful and EQII had still only gotten 400K users, then the industry would apply the breaks and try to spend less, which would ultimately require more innovation (as Raph points out).
To seal our fates, WoW wasn’t particularly innovative. It was well executed, lots of nice artwork, and lots of well-done content. This means that MMORPGs for the next 2-3 years will spend lots of money trying to be well executed, with nice art, and lots of content.
Novels, on the other hand, don’t follow this rule. If one author writes a good novel, two authors working on the same novel don’t write one that’s twice as good. Usually, two people produce an inferior novel.
To harp on evolution: If large animals are more likely to survive, their descendents will just get larger. It’s only when getting larger (or smaller) doesn’t imply success that variations occur. By the way, getting larger/smaller is very easy evolutionary wise, changing limb/beak size is also, but getting more intelligent or growing new limbs is very difficult.
This implies: For game companies to stop throwing more money at the problem and merely growing larger (more eye candy), there will need to be 2-3 years of big-budget games that fail miserably before management decides to take another tactic.
Evangolis said on January 14th, 2006 at 4:07 am:
I don’t know much about terrain generation algorithms, but I know a bit about geology, and I think what you need to create a Grand Canyon is something that persistent games are generally lacking in, history.
The formation of the Grand Canyon involved hundreds of millions of years of history that formed and eroded various strata. These strata were faulted, intruded, further eroded, then buried. On top of this package, a drainage network formed, and then was incised into the underlying rock when the whole region was uplifted. The result is that when you look at the Grand Canyon, you don’t just see a big hole in the ground, you see a three dimensional representation of the history of the Earth in that place, and even if you lack the tools to decipher that history, the depth and complexity still strikes your brain, like a powerful dramatic presentation in an unknown language.
Until terrain generation recognizes that it is working in four dimensions, and that time is the largest of those dimensions, the results will always be inadequate.
To segue to one of my current hobbyhorses, I would suggest that one path to reducing (or perhaps just deferring) development costs, resisting content obsolescence, and giving players more satisfaction is to give history more of a role in worldbuilding. Specifically, I think that if you could establish a mediated path from the runtime database to the static database, so that runtime events could be memorialized in the static database, the result could be a sense of history and accomplishment that players now lack.
Cael said on January 14th, 2006 at 6:11 am:
But….
This is the same issue again. The accessibility of the Web as a means of publication has NOT improved the overall quality of entertainment/information disseminated via that Web.
Instead, it’s led to tools like Google to allow users to try to find something relevant in the morass of, well, it’s the best word, crap out there.
Don’t get me wrong, i’m not AGAINST having more accessible game design/creation tools, far from it.
But i doubt that having them would be any kind of panacea.
Brask Mumei said on January 14th, 2006 at 9:11 am:
Creating another Shakespeare has more to do with marketing than it does with quality of prose.
I personally think an honest appraisal of Shakespeares works would lead an unbiassed observer to conclude that many modern writers exceed his quality. Of course, since “Shakespeare is the best writer ev3r!” is a fundamental cultural myth, good luck trying to get said unbiassed comparison!
It is interesting to see Nethack listed as a historical example considering that it is still under active development.
moo said on January 14th, 2006 at 10:05 am:
I am also not sold on the idea of player-created content. Most players don’t want to create content! What they want to do is *express themselves* (for example, dyeing your armor and weapons the color of your choice in DAoC).
The game is entertainment to them. It’s escapism. Only a small percentage of players will be interested enough or motivated enough to try to create content which meshes well with the static content provided by the developer. I bet for every person who added something non-trivial to Morrowind with the TES Construction Set, there are hundreds of people (at least!) who just played the game.
However, its clear that with the ever-increasing budgets and calcifying of genres, something will have to give.
Personally I think the most promising avenues are (1) re-introducing some of the limitations of years gone by, (2) procedural content generation. We also need better tools, but that will happen once we stop completely reinventing the technology every year or two.
Developers have been striving towards photo-realism, and finding that increasingly expensive on the content side, partly because of the level of detail required in the art, and partly because we have to keep throwing it away and creating it from scratch.
Why not try to develop a “stylized look and feel” with the specific goal of lowering art costs? I’m thinking of something like the Zelda series, or cel-shaded games. I think of the introduction to the PS2 game “Rise of the Kasai”, and how stylized the art was. For a while you would still be developing all the art from scratch, but you want to get to a point where you can re-use assets in different games with only minor tweaks and additions. We will never get to that point when we’re trying to make photorealistic assets. Even better, would be to have “configurable” assets (such as standard “goblin” models which could be adjusted for height, weight, girth, thickness of limbs, gait, etc. or have body parts swapped in from a library of similar heads, etc).
In the not-too-distant past, art assets were things like 48×64 sprites of 256 colors. What is the 3D equivalent of that? We need cheap-and-easy assets, and then use modern shader technology (or whatever) to present them in an appealing way to players.
As far as procedural content goes, I’ve had the idea for at least 10 years now to make an adventure game where the generated world was randomly created using a large number of static “building blocks”. The closest thing I can think of was Diablo and Diablo 2, and those generated rather predictable worlds.
The cool thing about procedural generation is that if you do it right, it scales. We’ve seen some use of it in toolchains (generated land masses, placing trees and shrubs and whatever, scattering NPCs, etc). But where is the game that generates all this stuff on-the-fly for me as I explore that area of the world for the first time?
I want a modern 3D adventure game where ALL of the content is generated procedurally using building-blocks that understand their relationships to each other. Not just land masses, but also cities, roads, points of interest, quests, individual NPCs, and maybe even monsters (hey, it works for Spore!). In order to do that we need to come up with good algorithms for laying out parts of a city. Good algorithms for placing roads. Good algorithms for generating interesting, varied quests from a large set of standard building blocks. Good algorithms for choosing the characteristics of NPCs. And above all, algorithms for balancing all these things and ensuring that there isn’t too much or too little of it in various places.
You could use the same random seed for every player so they all experience the same game (the first time, at least!). But with a procedurally-generated game there is the potential for more replayability!
Even if its impractical to do it ALL procedurally, where are the hybrid games? Everything in sight is static from top to bottom these days. That may be easier, but its probably not cheaper anymore.
Regarding tools, yes existing tools mostly suck and require way too much expertise to use correctly. This will be difficult to fix until we “lock down” the technology platform as Raph suggested. The problem is the moving target of cutting-edge engine technology, and game technology in general. It would be nice to select a set of standards/technology and say, “this is good enough” and then clean that up to the point where we can spend the next 10 years making better and better tools for it.
I’ve often wondered, if it costs so bloody much to create content, why don’t studios put more effort into creating streamlined tools that allow artists to get 20% or 50% more work done in a day? The constantly-changing technology is probably the real barrier here. What we need is stuff that Just Works(tm), and that is really easy for artists to use productively. They shouldn’t have to futz about with the toolchain in order to see if an asset really looks in the game like what it looks in the editor. We need technology that allows us to make changes to any asset and see them–INSTANTLY–in the game world. Faster turnaround taken to the extreme! Fast turnaround makes a huge difference in programming or scripting, and presumably in art too.
Anyway, enough rambling I guess.
moo said on January 14th, 2006 at 10:17 am:
I forgot to mention the biggest untapped resource that game companies have at their disposal in creating this new generation of games: the imagination of the players.
I still pull out the emulators and play games like Legend of Zelda and Super Metroid. You don’t need big shiny graphics to make a great game. The game industry has been focused on improving the visual quality of games–supplying all the *details* visually to players. Why not constrain them less, and let their imaginations fill in the details?
Think of the shadow-creatures in ICO for example. There are few details involved with those. They come in about 4 basic flavors, all of which are entirely black, jiggly smoky things that walk or fly like gargoyles. Yorda was shining white (pure/good) and the shadow things were obviously evil. The *presentation* was minimalist though. The designer of ICO systematically stripped out everything that didn’t support the core emotional experience of the game; in this case, that included the textures on the bad guys! Even the Shadow Queen only has a texture for her face and hands, leaving the rest of her entirely to the player’s imagination. I’m not quite sure what it is, but there’s a lesson in there somewhere. Constrain the players less, because less is more.
Evangolis said on January 14th, 2006 at 10:39 am:
I don’t agree that web presentation hasn’t improved with tools. That simply does not represent the experience I have had since the Web first began.
As to Shakespeare, and toss in the Greek plays as well, and Homer, there are advantages to going first.
And while the Web hasn’t produced a new new classic drama, that isn’t really where it’s power lies. The Web has produced many powerful things of both social and literary import, many of which would not be as effective, or prehaps even possible, without the Web.
I will suggest that while Word hasn’t improved itself all that much over time, it certainly has improved my writing over typing or longhand. I don’t expect it to be the last thing in writing, but it is a measureable improvement over what came before.
Sorry for not providing links to demonstrate my points, but I have to go play games with friends.
Raguel said on January 14th, 2006 at 1:55 pm:
So even though $10m is what is going into the game, well over half — ¾ of it, perhaps, is going towards the development of art, sound, and music
IMO this should be added to the sample quotes. I really wanted to add something noteworthy here, but at this point it’ll just be redundant.
Cael said on January 14th, 2006 at 3:04 pm:
I don’t agree that web presentation hasn’t improved with tools. That simply does not represent the experience I have had since the Web first began.
Oh, presentation has improved. Quality has not. Accesibility of content has actually decreased.
I actually strongly support the creation of better game-realisation tools. I’m not arguing that the process should be exclusive by any means.
But i really don’t think we’ll see quality of content improve if and when (because it’s inevitable) cheap/free professional quality tools become available. Quantity will go through the roof of course. Quality won’t, though. A bigger statistical sample does not necesary raise the median, mean or even zenith point of the quality curve.
naum said on January 14th, 2006 at 3:05 pm:
Raph, you got some ink “Moore’s Wall” over at WorldChanging
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003992.html#more
Raph said on January 14th, 2006 at 3:22 pm:
Well, that’s gotta rank up there with one of the most off-topic trackbacks ever. Very cool, though!
Am I really that controversial?
Back on topic, I have to say that having watched the Web since before it had pictures, there’s no doubt in my mind that the quantity of quality content has gone up, and that the quality of the best content has also gone up.
So we have higher quality content, but not more of the best of it; and we have more quality content, but not as a proportion of the total.
For those who know where to look, that’s still definitely a net win.
moo, I think a lot of folks have indeed been chasing the stylization idea. Cel shading was the big buzzword a few years back, and today we have gorgeous stuff like Dragon Quest VIII.
Ellis said on January 14th, 2006 at 3:58 pm:
Game designers often fail to realize that an online game heavily differs from an FPS.
It’s not that you can’t plan a fun factor. You sure can. Just make something that you think is fun, and there’s a fun factor. However, where designers often fail is in forcing the fun factor. Telling players “You HAVE to find this fun! I demand you think of it as fun! I’m the pro game designer and I know what fun is!”
I don’t think that technology stifles creativity, at all. It’s just that you can’t force a hit. You can make a Star Wars MMO, and it won’t be good for several reasons. The idea of forcing the fun, and the forgetting that when you have a tight story like that, the player can never be a part of it.
So there’s more to it than your slides.
Raph said on January 14th, 2006 at 4:05 pm:
Oof, from to WorldChanging to Metafilter . If it weren’t a weekend, I bet that would cause a lot of traffic.
Anyway, some interesting discussion over there, there’s 14 comments now. It’s interesting to see what the reaction is among folks who are less steeped in the constant game chatter than those of us here.
I think my favorite remark is the “very well-written” one though — that’s a word-for-word transcript of how I talk in lectures. Hence all the “you knows,” “ands,” and “so’s”…
Guenthar said on January 15th, 2006 at 3:27 am:
When it comes to procedural terrain creation The next tes game Oblivion is using procedural creation for the landscape using erotion data to proceduraly create realistic landscapes.
El Guapo said on January 15th, 2006 at 6:44 am:
Most people say that the game money is spent on technical features. There by limiting the creativity of the game it self. I for one blame the current culture in the industry. For instance most designers can’t be creative because they don’t have the basic understanding of what can be accomplish technical, or artistically, etc. So they are left with evolutive techniques. Also publishers are not wheeling to take a chance with creative content. (How do I market this game?) Publishers should be looking and nurturing the starts of the industry rather than throwing bodies at the problem. Most truly original content comes from Japan now at days. USA has become a fat boring salchicha factory.
naum said on January 15th, 2006 at 4:45 pm:
WWW continues to evolve, I see traditional search engines and blogs being usurped by social bookmarking and more collaborative like tools (i.e., del.icio.us, digg.com, reddit, etc.…).
While for blockbuster games the production cost has risen dramatically, there still is a mushrooming of amateur efforts, and the big stumbling block IMV is the lack of tools or dearth of easy to use tools to create with. Still, look at even just the free online multiplayer games available today. Or garage type efforts like Dominions 2 in the realm of strategy gaming…
Back on topic, I have to say that having watched the Web since before it had pictures, there’s no doubt in my mind that the quantity of quality content has gone up, and that the quality of the best content has also gone up.
So we have higher quality content, but not more of the best of it; and we have more quality content, but not as a proportion of the total.
For those who know where to look, that’s still definitely a net win.
Akim said on January 15th, 2006 at 5:12 pm:
Dear Mr Koster,
I read you blog regularly, though I usually avoid reading blogs, because most are so personal they are not really interesting unless you know the person in RL.
You articles, and especially this last, was very interesting for me. I play computer games now for about 20 years and I play a lot of time, so it is very interesting to see why things are as they are now. It often came to me that while abhorrend amounts of resources were put into better graphics, content and gameplay stayed the same, or to me often seemed to be less then 10 years ago.
The high money demand seems like a trap to me, because if games really cost that much, it will be hard to impossible to make games for a smaller public. I was shocked to read it is assumed many players only play solo games 8-12 hours! I was always a great fan of huge games, like Morrowind, with months of things to do and I avoid games with are played through in one weekend.
For me games need more content in number (hours of play-value) and also in matters of creativity. Many games tend to be so stereotype in story-telling and world design, to alter this would hardly be a matter of money. Many world settings and character designs are VERY conservative and compare mor e to the movies of 40ies and 50ies of the 20th century than movies of our days. Just take any list of heros, companions or villains from games, and you see a legion of unintersting, non-complex stereotypes, whose dialgoes are poor and whose motivations don’t compare even to the cheapest movie of 2005.
I really would like to see the world and character and story complexity rise more than the mere “who has the most awesome graphics” contest. I love old games like Ultima VII, Fallout or Day of the Tentacle becaus they had something original, an esprit I lack in so many games of our days.
I spend losta time on MMO’s these days, but why is 80% of all things to do uninteresting stuff like “kill 50 beasts” and collect 25 organs or paws or whatever? Most quests and adventures in MMOs today are so incomplex, compared to any D&D tabletop group I had years ago. Get a good story-telling would be my cent of advise. Just take 2-3 people in your company who have nothing else to do than to think of cool plots and interesting characters.
yours,
Akim
Josh Ritter said on January 15th, 2006 at 9:35 pm:
It’s already happening at least on a small scale.
Minions of Mirth was created by one programmer in 11 months on 2 platforms (Windows and OSX):
http://www.prairiegames.com
Players can run and mod their own persietent worlds. We also roll some player created content into the official build. It’s all very much a 3d mud system.
Amberyl said on January 16th, 2006 at 4:42 am:
It’s not only the content costs that need to come down — it’s the length of the production cycles.
A lot of the newer MMORPGs look like they’re going to have a four-year production cycle, three years has been common, and two years becoming “er, we’ll release it when we’re done” is practically a cliche. Almost nobody wants to fund grand experiments that occupy an entire presidential term of office, and might or might not be commercially successful.
We really need tools that dramatically shorten the amount of time it takes artists to build, texture, and animate models.
We really need tools that allow MMOs to be rapidly prototyped, so that designers can iterate through many options early on in the process.
I predict that whether or not the Multiverse toolset, for instance, turns out to be any good, that the number of people who complete a project on that platform is going to be very, very small. The number of people who actually successfully launched non-stock MUDs got smaller and smaller the more powerful and comprehensive the toolsets got, ironically, and Multiverse takes all that complexity and adds the additional problem of a 3D space that needs art, sound, and music assets in addition to design and programming love.
Kressilac said on January 16th, 2006 at 11:01 am:
We continue to think about user created content in the same context as developer created content. I’m of the mind that the drama that politically unfolds in Eve Online and Shadowbane is just as much “content” as is a dungeon created by a developer and released in a patch. The idea that people generally like to express themselves instead of making content holds water but lets not use the dye example because the dye example is extremely limiting and implies that expression can only be through simple mechanics of the game.
User created content is the way to go, though I am being biased because I favor that sort of design view. The key for me has been to design a system that captures, assimilates and organizes all of the instances of expression that happen in a game so that others that were not there at the exact moment of expression can enjoy its effects. Provide tools to the community that help report player news.(Weddings, funerals,changes of political structures…) Provide in-game businesses better ways to tell people why they are in business and what they have to offer. Let your in-game businesses do some real marketing. Provide for community hierarchies that are more flexible than the monarch-centric guild interfaces. Opening these systems and more to increased interaction on the players part and you’ll see lots of “social” content being created that does not require the time investment of a game studio production pipeline. I’d be willing to bet that this content is every bit as immersive as the developer create professional content.
Broaden your view of content to include social content, economic content, world content, story content and its easier to see how the power of creating it can be given to the players in lots of places with minimal investment on their part.
Amberyl said on January 16th, 2006 at 2:16 pm:
I think most people already recognize the broader definition of ‘content’, but the costs of producing the sandbox for user activity to take place in are sizable in a 3D graphical game.
EVE, for instance, was not an inexpensive game to produce, despite having very little in the way of traditional notions of ‘handcrafted content’.
These kinds of games are less expensive than games on the WoW model, of course, and arguably the content production hours in them scale much better (rather than purely linearly and worse with mudflation), but they still cost nontrivial amounts of time and money to develop.
We’re not lacking in innovative ideas — nobody’s gotten close to using up the innovative ideas that already existed in the MUD world, much less new ideas that have been dreamt up since. Implementation, in a reasonable time and schedule and budget (both for development and ongoing operations), is another matter entirely — thus Moore’s Wall.
Kressilac said on January 16th, 2006 at 3:03 pm:
I also believe most designers understand the broader view of content. Eve is a great example. I’d be very interested in knowing the fallout of the recent coup in Eve that was reported by PC-Gamer. By the article’s account of the tale, a years worth of “content” was built by the players and executed in one night. The story was pretty amazing and made me want to play Eve after I read it. None of it was facilitated by the developer other than the core game mechanics that made the expression possible. Is it high time for PC-Gamer and other magazines to have free reporting accounts on MMO games? Are we at a point where the happenings of a world are reported in magazines? There’s nothing better than shortening the production cycle a developer needs to get through to nothing as was the case here.
That said, WoW’s 140 servers somewhat get in the way of this. Eve has fewer servers so happenings between guilds/corporations have more meaning on the average. If I remember correctly Shadowbane has a fair amount of this political/social content as well.
But… As you said, its non trivial to develop. So how do we carve the typical budget? What do we shave for tool building in hopes that we can release a viable product at the beginning that has potential to scale beyond the bounds of Moore’s Wall? There’s got to be some part of these complex designs that we can drop in favor of a tool or three that can give players more freedom to entertain themselves.
How about developing a sport of some fashion? With minimal effort WoW could create a leader board for Naked Gnome Racing and give a small event planning tool to the players to hold leagues and such. That would have to scale infinitely longer than the next 40 man raid dungeon that takes 10 hours to complete by the players. It also happens to be far more accessible, level independent and just as “fun”.
To me its get the base world out there, watch what your players do and find fun and then implement tools to help them do it more frequently and with more involvement. We see weddings, funerals, raffles, races and a host of other mini-games in MMOs all the time, yet very few if any of them implement any kind of interface to help the player organize these events. Sure, you still need your core content that’s developer created but if you want it to last you have to facilitate players following their distractions.
Amberyl said on January 16th, 2006 at 4:47 pm:
One interesting side effect of WoW’s generous amounts of accessible solo content is that there seems to be comparatively little in the way of user-generated content. (Although there are some deeply entertaining videos and such.)
Indeed, some of the more interesting spontaneous events — the incursions of level 1 gnomes, for instance — have been direct reactions to the denial of content (server crashes and the like).
Bored players generate things to do. WoW players very rarely seem to lack something to do — it might not be thrilling to faction grind, let’s say, but WoW’s type of boredom is usually not the type that leads players to organize their own entertainment.
On a shoestring budget: Theoretically, one might be able to build an innovative MMOG on a pre-crafted platform like Multiverse or Kaneva, using a really creative design that utilizes minimal art and other handcrafted content assets. This may, in fact, be a good venue for future games that follow the kind of path that A Tale in the Desert has chosen.
Akim said on January 18th, 2006 at 12:49 am:
Riders of the Lost Online Hype: A settlement
A long player’s anwer to a long developers view.
I am playing Online Games now for 2 ½ years. It was great fun for a very long time, but strangely I find myself now in a situation I have installed FOUR online games and I am still bored to death. The bottom line is, I find nothing interesting to do, and I wondered why this is so. So I tried to settle with myself and see where I or the games went the wrong turn. The overall feeling of logging into an online game for me now is like chores, like doing work.
When you start an online game (MMO), usually everything is new and interesting. The best time to start a new online game is, when the game launches. From trying out several already long running MMOs I can assure you, it feels… well somehow wrong. You feel like coming to the autumn of a place. Old veterans telling of “how it once was”, telling how lively now deserted places once were. You meet players with high levels, owning manors and titles and you are not one noob, you are THE noob. My personal opinion is, never join any online game running longer than about 18 months. Today MMOs age so fast, you can almost feel the chill of age in such games, and that’s a very depressing feeling. I experienced that when I started Lineage II several weeks ago, just to try it out. 70-80% of the lands where EMPTY, and all crowded in the remaining 20% high-level area. I have never walked through such a vast distance of empty lands than travelling from the human starter area to the elven starter area. Two hours jogg through deserted, bare lands. It was disheartening. The only 3-5 people around the newbie areas where veterans being bored and starting something new. Once I realized the level and money income was about 5 times slower than in Everquest II, and my level 12 Wizard levelled as slow and my WoW Druid level 35, I saw I would never catch up in this game without risking my sanity, so I quit.
My love for MMOs started with Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). Me being a huge Star Wars fan and having the luck of finding a very nice and active guild (Mystic Alliance) I was happy to hunt with them over a year. Then something happened. As it happened to me the first time then, I wasn’t really aware of what was going on. Now, reflecting, I have words for it. I realize what happened. I had seen enough of the world. I had the feeling of “having seen all”. Naturally I didn’t see ALL, virtually, but I had delved into most of the regions, done a lot of quests, and like an empty bottle of wine there wasn’t much left to do. I know now, no matter how much new content a company produces, players can explore things MUCH faster than companies can create new lands and quests. The matter with SWG has become worse. Within the last 12 months Sony was so busy with bugs and technical issues, they practically had no man-power left to make new content, new worlds and new quests. It is strange. If you are new to Online Gaming and WOW was your first MMO, then trying out SWG likely will feel like a catastrophe to you. There are SO many features modern MMOs have which SWG and most older online games lack, you would wonder how ANYONE could ever enjoy them. Well, in old days, we the players made a lot of things ourselves. We did not need many quest and still enjoyed ourselves, strangely. SWG was more like a sandbox of possibilities with the many, many things the game offers. I won’t bore you with the many details, but it was a living world, driven by the community in a way I haven’t seen ever since. If you didn’t play SWG in 2003, you don’t the heck know what online world cane be like, how… ALIVE.
Quite the contrary was Everquest II (EQ2). Like the name says, it was doing quests. EQ2 has MANY quests, and I must give Sony the credit that I haven’t ever seen a crew working so dedicated on a game yet, adding new quests, places and things. Still there is a twist in the game, a certain breaking point which looking back I see now much more clearly than before. I experience this most clear in EQ2, but I guess it is the case more or less in all current MMO’s.
The point is, I am now more a casual gamer. Sometimes I don’t log in for a few days. Sometimes I play day by day some hours, then I have breaks again. I am no grinder. Now from a power player’s view one might ask “why bother”? You level slower playing less, so what? The thing is, that this is a far too simplified view. The problem is getting more serious the higher your level is. Once you are beyond lv 35 or so you start to feel it, and above lv 45 you seriously have a problem if you are casual.
The problem is a kind of negative synergy. If you are casual, even if you are in a very active and big guild, you don’t get so close to people. They share their everyday hunt and get rather close together, and you are always a relative outsider, because you are in a distance resulting of the comparison: they hunt every day, you don’t, and you will always have more a guest status than the daily players. When I was playing daily 4-6 hours it never was a problem for me to make something. Because you play often and long you automatically have a circle of people you know more or less. There is always someone on who is doing something you can join in, or someone just ready to join your quests. And the fact is, strangers who never heard of you are MUCH less likely to join your quests. They way how people support each other is in circles of friends, and if you are casual, you are a rare appearance compared to the regular players. It is this “distance resulting compared to regular players” which makes you as a casual an outsider. There is that thin but important barrier you always face. They have their many stories together, and you are not part of most of them. Anonymous shouting is quite a futile business in every game. If you have no people how know you, you will be alone a lot of times.
That was okay for me a long time. I soloed sometimes, other times I joined small groups. I soloed when no one was there to join me, and I had my small groups once and then. I am still not sure if they changed EQ2 or if the high-level content always was so. There was a time, when you could pick very hard quests with very high levelled elite mobs. You could either do it in a big group soon, OR you could make levels and at some points do the quest solo, when you were about 8 or 10 levels higher than the quest suggest. Now this is no longer an option. The elite mobs and the heroic quests can’t ever be soloed. Now while I don’t want to solo all the time, often I have no group and I find no group. So I would like to do more than hunt another 200 skeletons or do the mini quests soloers usually get, with the crappy loot and the crappy quest rewards. I haven’t gotten a single useful item of a soloable quest since I became 40, being 52 now. ALL items I wear are bought, because ALL quest items since half a year where useless to me. Not quite the motivation. For all the EQ2 player I cite “Beetle Herding” as example. It’s a typical solo quest. You get an entire set of armour pieces from that quest, but the pieces are worse than anything anyone wears when he comes to that area! I haven’t ever seen anyone actually wearing any of these pieces. This is a typical thing in solo and small group quests. The higher level you come, the greater is the gap between full group and small group quest items. Not to speak of the XP! The XP I get solo or small group is, compared to full group, abysmal! Well, the thing is, I don’t solo because I decided, but mainly because as a casual gamer I lack a group most time.
If you are casual, you are not a known face. I know this well from the other side when I was a power-gamer. If you log in daily many hours, you are a known face and people will join you because they know you. This is a matter of fact. Many join you then, even if you have a quest they do not have. They rely you are there tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and every other day so you can join their quests any time. If you are casual, there is no such chance. If they need one, you may be online or not. This lowers the will of people to join you selflessly quite lot.
Now many quests above lv 35 do not only need a full group, but also they are often VERY complex. Many quests have so many intertwined steps and sub-quests it is very difficult to find people on the same step. Since most of the steps alone are so long and complicated they fill easily an entire evening, so if you are casual, you make one step and can hope to make the next in half a year. This is no joke. Scanning my EQ2 journal I find 70% of my quests I carry for more than half a year now, and I have no hope of finishing them anytime soon.
The bottom line is, if you are casual, you are lost. There is an anti-social synergy which cuts you off of everything. A power gamer will rarely have a problem. He has his circle and can ask a few “hey I need this quest done, can ya help me?” I know this worked well for me when I was a power player. Now that I am only casual, I don’t have any circle to help me. I am lucky if I get one or two at VERY few occasions, only to find out the quest needs a FULL group, not just a ragtag band of three.
The point is, once all quests were doable solo or small group when you levelled up a bit. Now they are not. Just try the scions. They are lv 26 epic, but even my lv 52 pally could not solo them. You STILL need a big group, even if you are 26 levels above the target.
Being casual means, you play about 2 hours, about every 2nd day or so. That’s what I regard casual. If you play only 90 mins to 2 hours you simply and basically don’t have time for a group. Not in EQ2, and not in WOW either. The time to call all the people together is so long you don’t have enough time left to actually make the quest itself! Many people who solo, like I do, don’t solo because we decide, but because of the said reasons casual players hardly can do anything but solo. We solo our chars up to be ready for the few occasions for groups or even raids. I would be quite satisfied with less powerful items and slower levelling, but recently the items for soloers and small groups above a certain level are CRAP and the XP is not slow, it’s damn microscopic! I admit a MMO is not to be measured by soloers needs. But any game should not only be there for power gamers in the upper levels. For soloers the level cap in EQ2 and WOW isn’t 60, it is 35. Above that it become a pain. If you are casual, you usually make a lot of time management to have those 2 hour time windows for your MMO, it is a big sacrifice if you have a job and a relationship and if you are not a 16 yo single going to school who still has endless time. Many adult people simply don’t have more time, and if your 2 hours every second day are already quite difficult to defend, you need the max outcome of these 2 hours play. And honestly above level 35 or so it isn’t. Most of the time you log is then finding the fun, organizing things to start the fun. That still costs most of the time.
As a casual, I simply don’t have time to seek the fun. In SWG nowadays I run all over to find something to do. Sometimes I have spent an entire week only to gather one or two quest I can do. In EQ2 and WOW it is easy to find the quest, but it is difficult to find the needed people to do it. What WOW did very right was reducing the complexity of quests, but even there many quests need you to do so and so many other quests before you can do them. That quests have many complicated steps (EQ2) or have many other quests as need to start them (as in WOW), both shuts out the casual player, once you get above the middle levels.
The problem is, that the developers of MMOs are not aware of the social synergies online games have. They just think of the quests in certain terms, how complicated a mob is, how far the travel, they think of them in technical terms. The current game companies are totally unaware of the results of their design. I will make an example I witnessed in EQ2.
Right outside the city of Qeynos is a field of Scarecrows. Once all these Scarecrows were heroic ^^ (that would be elite in WOW). You could only do them in a group. Since they were not aggro unless attacked they were no hindrance for the soloers running around doing the solo mobs, the beetles running around the scarecrows. Since the scarecrows gave much more XP, when I was running with my new character there, it was easy to find a group, because ever so often I was asked by strangers if we would do scarecrows. At some points the dev’s thought to make the game more solo friendly, and as a result the scarecrows are now no longer heroic (elite), but normal. You don’t get any special XP anymore. When I made a new character 2 months ago, going to that place, I wasn’t invited ever. It is no longer necessary. The bad result is, you don’t find a group and you don’t get together with people. Everyone can do his scarecrows alone. While the IDEA of the devs making the scarecrows easier is nice, the social synergy result is BAD. This is just a simple example, and the higher levelled a game area is and the more complicated quests are, the more devastation even small imbalances and mis-design results. In a way an MMO is like an ecosphere. If you change but a little thing at some point, the results can cause so much chaos it can never be repaired. Now if you are a giant-power player, having the vast social resources at hand you don’t realize how hard such mismanaged “areas” hit the casual gamer. A casual just lack the social resource to counter bad managed high level areas. I can only sketch out a few points I find central to support casual gamer.
1) It should not take more than 10 minutes to find a quest giver if you are in a civilized area. WOW has made this quite good, leading people in areas and to new quest givers, creating outposts and villages in all areas.
2) It is also necessary to somehow sort the levels of the mobs, like this is common in WOW and EQ2. If you have a certain level, you should always know in what place you find mobs for you. This is the bane of SWG, where you can meet lv 70 and lv 5 mobs and everything between mixed up. That’s a catastrophe for hunting alone or in small group!
3) If there is really a desire for slow levelling like in lineage 2, make for gods sake servers for power and for casual players. I guess DAoC has now made this, and I find the idea is OVERDUE. Just make one or two servers where XP is double and more valuable creature drops for casual.
4) I found it was always a good idea making pathways through all areas which can travelled in “relative” safety. I take WOW as a good example. In the first level areas you can go quite far even through much higher level areas as long as you follow the roads. As casual player, often if I find a group the time to reach them would take too long in games without safe roads.
5) Travel: a lot of time is often consumed by travelling. It is very cool to fly with the griffon for the first times. But I assure you, you WILL reach the point when you groan waiting again. Just make some “instant travel” systems for those who have used the slow animated way say 20 times or so. And a game needs fast transport EVERYWHERE, like in WOW or SWG.
6) Casual players need instant fun starting in a short time. A good idea WOW has implemented are stones you can click and automatically find a group. Also good is the worldwide list of groups seeking members Lineage II has. The mere channels with people “lfg” is far too passive. Devs should think of a lot of very simple and easy quests for casual. They don’t need to be overly clever and ingenious, but nice and easy to start. (Like the calling stones for the Death Mines in WOW). As I said, casual waste too much time seeking the fun.
7) 70% of mobs must be soloable and still give XP at SOME point. If mobs always stay aggro, as in WOW (unlike in EQ2, when mobs don’t attack you once they don’t give XP anymore), they always must give reasonable XP. Sometimes mobs are grey, 15 levels below you and STILL difficult, but give no XP. That’s just stupid. If things give no XP they should be dead in one swing.
Maybe introduce hirelings to MMO’s, NPCs which join your so you have a party even if you are alone. Just let them pick loot, like in Guild Wars. Sometimes a casual just does not have the time to call a real group, because often it takes a lot of time, and that would be a nice way to keep quests and mobs difficult and still not excluding casual players. This is one of the best things Guild Wars had.
9) Downtime is the bane of the casual gamer. The solution of EQ2 is quite nice, where you use drink and food, which itself is crafted, thus giving crafters a market. If you drink and eat, mana and health replentishes fast enough you usually don’t have to sit and wait, like in WOW or Linage II so often.
Well I could go on, but I guess you get the picture. Now that my life only allows casual play, I find myself locked out of MMO fun, and I think that could be changed with just a few simple adjustments, which do not lower the difficulties for power players, but just add things to do which are worth doing for the casual gamer. As ex-power gamer I know you power gamers may not realize HOW difficult casual gaming is. Above a mid-level range casual has grown far too complicated IMVHO.
Don said on February 2nd, 2006 at 6:15 am:
Akim, that’s a very large post but echoes a lot of my own feelings about MMORPGs of late.
Hippogryph travel was one of the key reasons I stopped playing WoW, and the ‘chore’ of logging in was why I stopped playing SWG (pre-CU and all). I’ve picked up SWG again lately to see what all the fuss is about – but I’ll stop talking SWG now because I’m sure Raph is sick of seeing it on his blogsite.
The issue of content creation / development time versus the content you can provide is one that stretches outside of the MMO market. All games are suffering from that. As a developer of ‘next generation console’ content, I can safely say I hate next gen. It’s the same old thing only with more, more, more.
The single-player marketplace has things a bit easier with regard to content, but the shelves are littered with games that could have benefitted from paying attention to the above comments. The illusion of dynamism is a powerful tool – letting the player experience their own game, their own story and at their own pace is a hallmark of a good game, regardless of whether it’s designed for 10,000 players or 1.
IQpierce said on February 2nd, 2006 at 6:24 am:
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/moore.shtml
It seems like there should be images showing up on this page – there are large square interrupts in the text flow on the left and right, and my browser status bar tells me that it’s downloading “Slide15.jpg” or somesuch when I first visit the page – but these images don’t actually appear.
I’m using IE 6.0, which seems like it must be a pretty common browser for your visitors, so you might want to look into why the article doesn’t appear right. Maybe I’m the only one though.
I’ve seen this happen in a couple of your other articles and, naturally, it’s really hard to follow some of them when the text refers to slides that I can’t see…
Kim Pallister said on February 2nd, 2006 at 11:26 pm:
Hey Raph,
Greate writeup and thanks for posting it. Two comments:
1- Not sure how it compares to your numbers, but while at Intel I did an analysis of 4 genereations(ish) of FPS games and came up with a rule of thumb(tongue in cheekingly called Pallisters Law) that stated that the PC ‘game tech generation’ was about 3 years, and that every 3 years, game triangle counts would increase by an order of magnitude, and memory footprint would double. NOte shure how that compares to your 22 year span slide…
2- Your point about “if cpu speeds froze today, developers would innovate elsewhere”. Isn’t that kind of self-evident? I get your point, that they can’t keep up, but I just thought it was stated funny.
K
Raph said on February 2nd, 2006 at 11:36 pm:
On 1, well, the slide was based on asking a whole bunch of devs for their estimates, and kind of ballparking the resultant figures to arrive at an average. Very scientific.
On #2, I suppose it’s self-evident, but when you look at the games we tend to make — I dunno, seems like we don’t do it even if it is obvious.
Jadelink said on February 22nd, 2006 at 2:37 am:
NWN still seems to provide the most widely used toolset to make ‘minni morpg’s’. Its still has a significant fanbase that are still starting new Permanant Worlds, a few months before the sheduled release of NWN2. It still has new patches released, gradually making PW building easier and more flexible.
UO ‘clone’ worlds always had that dubious quasi-legal status that stopped them advertising as much as they might have. The current crop of free-to-play 2d mmporgs with better graphics will likely finish off any still left.
There are certainly masses of ‘fanmade’ 2d and 3d mmporgs, most of which die in the process of being made (as do most commercial ventures it seems).
If the NWN2 toolset is as improved as we are told
http://www.shacknews.com/extras/2006/020806_nwn2_1.x
http://nwn2forums.bioware.com/forums/viewforum.html?forum=100
(at least they are taking feedback from current builders whilest making it), then fans might not need a C++ programmer to script a viable online world. Given a flexible and ‘no harder to use than it has to be’ toolset, then it might become a popular platfrom to start mini-mmorpging from.
I suspect the end of ‘budget inflation’ and consequential ‘hollywoodisation’ of video games won’t come with the ending of moores law, but at the point where we simply cant get graphics any finer and flashier than the human eye can discern.
Until then, we await decent toolsets for mass making of fanmade games.
Jadelink

Page optimized by WP Minify WordPress Plugin

Recent Trackbacks

Twitter @raphkoster

At the Genius Bar getting daughter's iPhone fixed. Good thing it was the back and not the front! http://t.co/RKo9YcJs 16 hrs ago
ARRRGGGHH I feel very inadequate RT: @s_bura: http://t.co/jo76KjUp A flying castle in about 400 moves #TripleTown 1 day ago
Huh. http://t.co/RJwQRmPK just told me my song hit their homepage. I haven't gone there in 2 yrs. FWIW, album here: http://t.co/FYXvw6CV 1 day ago
More updates...