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Name your MMO dream team: eepJuly 31st, 2008 |
So Massively asks for people to list IPs & developers for “dream teams.”
My dream team would be to purchase the MMO rights to MechWarrior, have FunCom develop it under the excellent command of Raph Koster! And use Valve to distribute over steam.
I’d like to see Raph Koster’s vision applied to the GI Joe world. A GI Joe Online similar to the original vision of PreCU SWG would be great, and without a mythos-engrained alpha class, I think it could work.
I think my brain broke.
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I regularly cite SWG as the way MMOs should be going. Actually, I’d appreciate people’s comments on this rant, relating to how MMORPGs should be MORE sandbox-like these days, instead of going in the opposite direction:
http://www.mmocrunch.com/2008/08/06/return-of-the-sandbox/
Oh, and my list:
Raph, for his insight in “worldly”
Derek Licciardi, for the same reason
Richard Bartle, for his depth in AI (and with phasers set on stun)
And I guess Scott Jennings, just to save his soul.
This is an interesting statement. I think it’s wrong though. First of all, I don’t think buying something from another player is really interaction, it’s just like buying from an NPC. If there’s a problem with finding the item, assuming it’s a common item, then that’s a problem with the game’s design.
One thing here. WoW has all those items in all those levels. It’s easy to see how an item can be very hard to find. It’s the levels vs. quest/drop/manufacture that makes it this way. In a worldly game, it’s different. A knife is a knife, and only when you get into rare things such as magical knives that you run into problems in availability. So if you’re looking for a Magical Knife of Hair Splitting, that may be hard to find (and in truth I’ve yet to find one anywhere
). But that’s a separate thing from a knife to cut up leathers with.
What I’m saying is that in my idea of a worldly game, you shouldn’t have WoW like levels that separate things like in EQ clones. And they separate many things, like this and in social aspects of steering and dividing players to areas and associations.
In worldly games, always look to real life for answers. If something is hard to find, there should be some communication system to spread word around. Bulletin boards, town cryers/agents, letters, etc. And organizations to communicate with, guilds.
Also, even in a worldly game, solo play should certainly be possible. That doesn’t mean that a single player can solo the worlds mightiest dragon, but that he should be able to hunt and fight things of his ability range, or manufacture things and sell them to NPCs or players, or whatever.
You could solo in UO, if not for the rampant PK problems back then. What was amazing was that you could actually play with other players without having to group up. Griefers looting your kills or players getting out of hand had a risk to it. Add a justice system to keep players from using force to take, and it’s a good way to go. Much more fluid and easy to work with than “grouping” or trying to maintain guilds while players out-level others.
Finally, if when you create a character he is automatically in a city (guild like structure), that doesn’t mean you have to play like that. Buying things from merchant players, hunting and bringing in assets to the city economy, etc., it all makes a player an asset to the community. And a good worldly game should have design that enhances that.
Derek Licciardi’s game theories (over at Ages of Athiria) state that new players will be sought by the city and guild associations because they can contribute too. This is how I always looked at the way “it should be”. Whether it’s through taxes, or just simple economic interactions, any player should be an asset just by doing what they choose to do.
But I understand you reasoning and agree in the numbers thing.
Eorlin…
Warhammer Online is a obvious gamey MMO and have territory control and is a game about a war aka grief other players and conquer their territory xD
In many “gamey” MMOs interdependecy is required, you can’t solo the best contents or do PvP, in these MMOs I spend many hours waiting for gruping for a instance, markets and auctiog house are interdependency mechanics, etc… A MMO without some interdependency is a solo game with other people around, and in the end not a MMO.
RTS and FPS can have a game world attached in the future, and currently have a strong modder comunitys, a persistent world can provide to all these people a structurated enviroment for things that they currently do, and in the end create a worldy MMO. Some FPS are walk the first steps in that direction.
With your definition worldy MMOs are only for the hardcore crow, the casual gameplay is anti-barriers for nature.
A specific tailored gameplay experience can create a breathing and living game world, period.
Direct interactions don’t are mandatoty for do a worldy MMO, many minigames interacting can create the sensation what you are in some place. Players can interact throught minigames -tailored gameplay experiences-, some people play to create cities, other play to manage guilds or shops, other play their combat role or crafting profession, and other people can play to create quest.
I doubt that only interdependecy makes a MMO less accesible, I can have interdependency without be forced to play the game gruped or direct interactions, asincronic gameplay is possible in a persistent world, the interdependency can be IA based in their most part, a player can enter ten minutes to the game world from any place from his phone and change something and that changue have a influence in the gameplay of other player inclusive when the first player is offline. A wordly MMO is a game where the most casual average MMO player -that only play for fast fun and inmmediate reward- have the sensation that enters in a changing and living world, not in a static theme park. Player made content is the key for that, not some essentialist and narrow concept.
Taking your theory to the extreme every MMORPG is inviable because other people cause troubles, then, why we need do MMORPGs or online games in the first place? Is a bussines without future, any small interdependece can remove players for the world, if Blizzard cut the auction house and player trades perhaps they can win a million players more, go Blizzard go! Cut the auction house and trade, that will do your playerbase very happy… Oh, wait, talk with strangers is a barreir, remove the chat window, now!
I not believe in essentialist concepts, if you want that for making my worldy MMO proyect viable call these MMO a gamey world I can do that, in the end is the same game. Yes, I repeat, wordly MMOs are games, not military or aerospatial simulations, not virtual worlds. Worldy MMOs and gamey MMOs are compatible because both are GAMES and are developed how GAMES.
Many things in the MMOs that we’ve already seen have are undeveloped or cutted or not implemented for the most MMOs currently in the market. If the first wave of MMORPG have the most of their ideas without development, we must changue the rules? Many old MMOs ideas will be see how innovative for many people that only played WoW, we can’t put all our effort in radical innovation without develop correctly these things to their full potential.
Oh, and as a corollary to my statement to Derek, I don’t think WoW is the be all end all of gamey design either, I think gamey design can go a lot further than it has.
But I think that the best of the gamey will have bigger numbers than the best of the worldy, no matter what the state of either is. On the other hand, UO is still around after 10 years (almost 11, no?), and EVE can only be considered a successful product. Considering that EVE is pretty broken in many respects, I’d say that there’s an awful lot of room to grow there too. You can get very good numbers, just not WoW or Club Penguin numbers. Both of which are really gamey MMOGs at the core, which just goes to show how “gamey” is an immensely broad categorization for MMOGs. (I’d include Habbo Hotel, but that one’s actually hard to classify, it doesn’t seem to have enough game or world-like elements to make it more than a nifty chatroom, kinda like Facebook but with spatial representation and graphics)
@Ingrod,
FFA PVP isn’t the issue. It’s the concept that players are in control of their environments. Even in a non-ffa game, but one with territory control, I can come up with a ton of ways to grief my fellow players just using that single mechanic. I might have a hard time pulling them all off by my lonesome, but a group of players is bound to do so just because they can… if the population gets big enough.
RTS and FPS games are a poor example, especially because there’s no comparible world component. But also, player generated content is not inherently a worldy game feature. Having such a feature doesn’t speak to the worldy-ness or the gamey-ness of the game. It only speaks to whether the dev team is leveraging player creativity.
Because, as you yourself say:
There answer is that there isn’t any, which is why it has no bearing on the discussion of what makes a game worldy or gamey. If WoW implemented a system for players to create new quests, it’d still be a gamey game.
Being appealing to hardcores and casuals isn’t inherently worldy or gamey either, and if anything I’d say that the gamey games have a much easier time of it. WoW, as an example, manages to cater to both the hardcore raid and the more casual non-raid players, and it does it very well.
It doesn’t have to have forced dedication to a guild, but it does need to have forced interdepence on other players. If it doesn’t, if it’s completely soloable, then you don’t really have a worldy game. You can make the interdependence more or less of an impact on play, but you can’t remove it. Buying an item from a player run shop is an action that requires interdepence. If you cannot buy that item from an NPC merchant, and you need the item, then you have to, in some way, interact with players. This does eventually cause problems; even in a game like WoW, you can still end up at a place where you cannot easily get an item that you absolutely need because the other players aren’t offering it to you via the low impact systems like the auction house. Directly interfacing with strangers is a barrier to entry. A game that’s designed to function around these sorts of direct interactions, or even one that simply makes them occur more often, will bounce a certain number of people off.
Worldy and Gamey aren’t terms I invented to create a division, they’re terms that have been being used loosely for a very long time. Worldy games are rooted from a fundamental assumption, Gamey games are rooted from a different, incompatible, one. Everything else that people have been talking about are implementation issues, but the core elements of what makes a worldy game worldy and a gamey game gamey, are fairly defined. Worldy games start by defining the world that players will exist in, the end point you’re getting is one of simulation; you want to create that world so that it’s as if people are really living in it. Gamey games start from the other end; they’re attempting to create a specific tailored gameplay experience, rather than set up a system for players to generate their own gameplay. Worldy games by their very nature require the interaction of the playerbase in order to generate gameplay on a deeper level; they’re trying to simulate a real world, not a pattern of behavior. That’s why there’s all the levels of interdependence, and the tendency for open pvp systems.
In a worldy game, the actions you can take that have been hardcoded are not the point; it’s in the way that you interact with the other players and the world. In a gamey game, the things you can do that go beyond the hardcoded actions are only icing on the cake, not the cake itself.
These lines are lines you can’t cross when you’re doing high level concept, at least not without ending up with a hopelessly hydra like entity, constantly fighting with it’s own heads. You need to start from one end or the other, and then work out how to temper the downsides.
Yes, they are. They don’t require interdependce and they don’t rely on the playerbase to derive a sense of purpose. That makes them inherently more accessible. Everything else you’ve mentioned is an implementation issue, but it has nothing to do with what makes the game gamey or worldy. You can shrug off the concept of a multiplayer game that makes “grouping” bad, but that’s one of the strengths of the pre-raid game in WoW, and part of what’s helped it become such a huge success. You can solo. That was something of a first.
And none of the things you go on to mention really have to do with the problem or the divide. It’s got nothing to do with grind, it’s got nothing to do with mob squashing, or questing. Hell, I could make a gamey MMOG that’s entirely about crafting, in which there is absolutely zero combat. But it’d still be a gamey MMOG if it lacked certain worldy concepts. This isn’t about the feature set, but the starting assumption behind such games.
@Derek,
You’re reading me wrong. I never said that.
I, in fact, said that a good worldy game could be very successful, at least in terms of things like profit. But it’s never going to be comparable in terms of sheer numbers. That’s the core difference. Whether the reduced numbers are successful depends on your criteria for success. Blockbuster on the other hand, has a different connotation, namely one of absolutely massive numbers, and I don’t think you’ll see that, at least in comparsion to gamey games. And that’s the only point of contention I had in the earlier discussion.
You’ve managed to miss what I’m actually saying, and I think you all have really; it isn’t that you can’t make these games, but that you should never expect WoW like numbers from them. A simple thing, but that lack of understanding is part of why SWG’s producers got so angsty over the relatively low subs, even though the game wasn’t exactly bleeding cash.
I’ve actually made a number of on-paper worldy designs, and I’d love to try implementing some of them once Metaplace hits (where’s our Beta Raph?
), but I’m under no illusions that even with a large sum of money and a big team that I’d be able to achieve a multi-million user base with them. They’re deliberately niche, and while I think they could be profitable or even successful under certain criteria, that’s different from being “zomg, so many users!”
@Michael Chui,
UO.
Relatively small pk population, but a large population bleed off that stablized and reversed the second Trammel was offered. Even the potential of being PKed, despite the fact that the reputation system severely curtailed the ability for the PK to function, was enough to keep people away. Removing just that possibility but keeping the rest of the game pretty much exactly the same resulted in a population resurgence.
Define “large group”. I saw about 15 people stop playing World of Warcraft because one person typed in all capital letters, once. The guild broke into two groups, and the smaller group had everyone quit with in a month.
On lighter news, I do have an idea for a worldly MMO with permadeath and PvP, and I think they can work together just fine. The real trick is to bring danger to combat. You’ll see a lot less ganking if the attacker though he could die, or lose a limb.
Please name one example of a single individual causing a large group of players to stop playing.
In other news,
It’s nice to see that everyone has decided that worldy games will cannot have permadeath, no matter how radically different the design may be. Actually, it’s nice to see people are considering that the designs of future games will definitely follow all the same rules of the games we’ve already seen. Go innovation!
I think the PK problem here contains two assumptions everyone seems to hold about how to penalize them. It seems that most people think of one of two things, or both together -
1. The other players will provide the policing and retribution to limit destructive behavior.
2. The penalty for the PK will be predictable and deterministic.
Why don’t we violate both these assumptions?
Instead of the PK having a good, hard limit of 3, or 5, or 500, or even 1 kill before he enters stat loss or becomes freely attackable, or whatever, how about he doesn’t know when it’s going to happen? Let that limit be assigned randomly. Keep him guessing so he can’t toe the line.
However, more importantly, there is the age-old problem of player policing and that is that the good guys have to be everywhere and the bad guys can be anywhere. Why not use the NPCs in a more creative and less predictable way too? Some games were made such that criminal behavior or being of the enemy faction made you unable to enter town, but that was the extent of it. Why not randomly and inexplicably spawn guards and bounty hunters on top of or near the PK no matter where he is? Let there be no safe haven for him in the game world anywhere. Harass him so much all the time with these random guard spawns chasing him that he has to carefully consider whether it’s worth it. These random attacks should be escapable with effort and luck but should not provide rewards for defeating them. The idea is to inflict a loss of time and inconvenience on him as great and as unpredictable as that which he dishes out.
Ingrod, that makes sense and I too can picture a worldly MMO that doesn’t have FFA PvP. However, I think it makes for a more worldly game with it. I think you can get extra in the politics, trades, and probably every area of game play.
I really like the way you define a worldly MMO. Seriously.
Derek, once again I agree with you. New players have come into the MMO scene, and they’ve found the wonderfully smooth and varied WoW. And they seem to me to be looking for more now. I think it’s a common thought now that players, being new to it all and never having played P+P games for the most part, don’t quite grasp what it is they are searching for in the word “more”. It’s called “worldly”, I am absolutely convinced of this as you are.
Eolirin, my thinking is that there should be a limit of 3 PK instances allowed per week before heavy penalties kick in. This allows players to kill a jerk or two, and may even force the player to “choose wisely” on this, and save the opportunities for when really needed. But it keeps players from going into PKing unless they are willing to suffer the consequences.
@Eolirin I’m not ready to admit that the entire science of MMO design has come down to your hardcoded assumptions. Sure they ring true today given the design parameters that surround existing WoW clones and such, but your assertions sound very much like you’ve given up on the idea of anything successful that isn’t a WoW clone.
I’m challenging everyone in the industry to step outside the copse of trees and see the forest that remains unexplored. If you consider every last ounce of MUD history and recent MMO history as gospel that can’t be avoided then I understand how you’ve arrived at the conclusions you have. However, if you’re willing to challenge those ideals, no matter how crazy it might seem, then I think there’s a better design out there.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a student of sociology as much as you are. I know that there will be people that will play a game with the sole self interest motivated idea of causing havok. We’ll never have anything more than a WoW clone if all designers think the way you propose here. Essentially a worldy game is a niche game lucky to get a hundred K subs and Eve is the beginning and the end of that line of MMOs. I don’t buy it. The next WoW killer will have to be both deep and casual and the only way to achieve that in a way that scales is to develop a more worldy MMO that allows players to control the creation of the more casual content in the world.
I’m disagree with you affirmation Eorlin, mainly because you do many assumptions based in the few “wordly” MMOs currently in the market, none great company is working now for perfectionate “wordly” MMOs mechanics, a yes in perfectionate combat, leveling and looting. Three or four wordly MMOs are very few for extract “rules” of then.
First
Why a wordly MMO must have a FFA enviroment in all the places of the game world and allow for wild griefing? I can imagine a wordly MMO without the need of have FFA combat neccesarialy.
For me a wordly MMOs is one where no combat activities can have a place, economics, politics, build cities and states, housing, a PvP with territories and resources control component and defined objetives for strategic gameplay and not only kill, kill, kill, where music, dance and other social activities are rewarded and crafted items have a value, or players and guild can craft their own content and quest. All the things needed for a living RPG world.
Also a wordly MMO is a place where casual and hardcore players can live together. Other games how RTS and FPS can be played in a core or casual manner, but some hardcore player have the commitment for do their own mods, game maps and campaings with tools provided by the developers, and other more casual players can install these mods and play few hours in a raining day. With a MMORPG you have the possibility for have these tools ingame, provided by devs in a easy and self-explanatory interface with an RPG meaning, with elements carefully designated for craft content integrated with the context and history of the game world without have a code background or create 3D grafics, and without the need for install. In any wordly MMO the “mod” type crow always will be a minority, but the content created by then can provided fun and replayability for a very much larger crow of more casual players.
If a solo player complete a quest created by other player or guild, in example harvest some resources the guild (the classic “kill ten rats for their ears” quest), what is the difference with solo play a quest created by devs?
Second
Why a worldy MMO must have forced dedication with a guild? Perhaps people managing cities or larger guild have a more great dedication to the game, but the average player with a combat class doing missions or PvP don’t need have a great dedication for play in a wordly MMO correctly designated.
Third
Why that docotomy wordly vs. gamey MMOs? In the end wordly MMOs are games too, not simulations how some people have in mind, they dont need ultrarealistic situations or flight simulator physics, only apply the logic and don’t open the door for bad practices how in example power-leveling: devs working for moths in content for every level range and the players ending killing mobs with friends in the high end game areas for fast leveling, for me that is bad broken content. What is the solution for that? Reducing the xp obtained in group, forcing players to not have the need for grouping with high level friends… in a massive multiplayer game? OK for a game approach, but what is the logic for that? grouping “bad” in a multiplayer game, WTF? Levels divide the player base and is a bad solution, if a MMO need a great player base for be viable, what is the logic behind divide the player base in level ranges?
Gamey MMOs more accesible? Where are the accesibility when a newbie need leveling for moths only for play with his high end friends or do PvP? Where are the accesibility when people need farming for countless hours killing mobs for epic items? In the current “gamey MMOs” where are the accesibility for players that hate leveling and farming for xp, game gold or items. Gamey MMOs have their mechanics seriously limited, and players are “forced” to leveling and farming. If a player is boring of the mandatory kill, kill, kill -if you want crafting kill for resoruces, if you want socialice kill in dungeons and group PvP, if you want exploring kill the mobs first for clean that area- he or she can’t do other things except leave the game.
That “gamey” worlds only are very incomplete worldy MMO games, they add easy and self-explanatory content, quest, dungeons, combat, leveling, kill mobs for rewards, but cut all the other things.
Game developer companys can retain players only making then addicted to grinding and leveling for many moths, that is the base, with some cosmetics, for the current “gamey” MMOs for the masses, less developing cost = more benefits, period. They dont need desing a good crafting system, player cities, housing, politics, replayable content, etc… only need spend money in some new levels and 100 more repetitive quest. A good MMORPG desing? oh noes, that is a inviable idea!
For me the accesibilty is determined for simple and self-explanatory mechanics for every game activity and a good and complete interfaz, not for the design approach.
Amaranthar… no, he won’t kill as many as he possibly could. Because he’ll make sure that he won’t suffer the stat penalty *EVER*, staying just below the limits of kicking the penalty on. That’s because long term he can cause more damage by staying just under your limits than he can by going all out and then dying and being unable to continue. And if you make it so that the limits are extremely minimal you end up negating the entire point of having the open pvp system to begin with; only people willing to lose their characters will attack people that are being disruptive outside the boundaries of the hard coded rules. There is exactly zero legitimate reason for open pvp without that benefit.
And “most players” isn’t the problem. It’s the anti-socials that are the problem. You can’t control their behavior, because they only thing they get out of the game is in causing havoc. They don’t act in their best interests, they act to cause as much havoc as humanly possible within the limits of the rules. You’re underestimating the problem. These are your 4% of the population that are psycopaths. They *really* mess up your game.
And you’re underestimating people’s tolerance for having their play time disrupted. In this context, the knowledge that the PKer will suffer badly when someone finally kills them doesn’t mean anything at all to the average player; the only thing that matters is that they just lost a bunch of time because some jerk jumped them. An awful lot of people will bounce off the first time this happens unless they’ve got a much more signficant reason to stick around then “I want to try this new game out”. There are plenty of MMOGs at this point, there’s no reason why someone who doesn’t play into the idea of getting griefed will ever bother with a game that allows it, no matter what sort of protections are in place. The mere possibility that people will be able to do these sorts of things is enough to bounce a lot of potential players before they even play the game, and the number of people that you attract on the strength of the open pvp system generally doesn’t compensate. Anyone more interested in a “casual” or “light” experience isn’t going to be interested, and that’s where the bulk of the numbers are.
You just plain can’t get the same numbers.
Eolirin,
No, a PKer would be able to kill 50 a day, or 100, or whatever he can manage. The point is, once he suffers the penalty, he won’t be killing anyone for a while. Most players won’t risk this. And on top of that, each one of his victims knows that he’ll pay the price for it. And there will be plenty of other players looking to do this deed to the PKers, including the victim’s alts.
No, if the game is really good, players for the most part won’t quit. And those who do would probably quit over something else anyways.
“Engrained”?
Actually, that was inaccurate of me, murder counts decayed only if you were logged in, but that was easily fixed by running a macro program as a ghost till the counts decayed. No matter what you do system wise there’s a way to abuse it.
@Michael, nope, but you need to have proper expectations. You’re not going to have a blockbuster run away success (by today’s standards anyway), which is all that I was responding to. You will have a very successful product if you do it right, but if you’re after WoW like numbers you’re better off looking elsewhere.
@Derek, I disagree that that’s actually possible to pull off successfully. It smacks of ideal conditions that are impossible to achieve. The larger your playerbase becomes, the less accessible a worldy game design becomes, simply because the number of anti-social players increases and they have a disproportionately negative impact on the overall playerbase. It doesn’t matter how well you build your justice systems, you either have to prevent people from being able to impact other players, in which case you lose all your worldy benefits, or you have to understand that you will suffer from sufficient griefing to bounce a non-trivial number of people off almost instantly. It’s okay that this happens though, as long as you’re keeping more than you lose, but you should never assume you’ll ever keep as many as a gamey game will, even if you do keep them longer.
Also, forcing players to interact with other players is inherently less accessible than having the option to solo. Greater requirements of commitment are less accessible than light experiences. Worldy games strive for deeper connections between players, and thus deeper gameplay experiences. You don’t get to remain as accessible no matter what you do. But that’s okay, because worldy games are about being sticky first and accessible second. This is not a bad thing, it just limits your population size. Sure you can make them more accessible than they have been, by a lot even, but that’s not the same as making them just as accessible as their gamey counterparts. And again, you can still get a decent sized pop and a good revenue stream despite all that.
And your response to that second quote missed the point. I was trying to say that you can’t merge the high concept of the two game types. They’re inherently incompatible. You can use system mechanics that cross over from one type to the other, which is what you seem to be suggesting, and I already said you could do, but the high concepts are not compatible, and the high concept of “let the players have importance” is not going to work as well in terms of being accessible, period. You cannot control the playerbase and keep to worldy design, you can at best prod them into the directions you want them to go, but you can’t force them into them. So to a degree you must trust that the community does not become degenerate, and that never happens once the player base exceeds a certain size; you always get players that act specific to break the system no matter how much of a negative consequence it has on their characters, and if you really have given the players control, you can’t avoid those situations.
Beyond it being hard to build a system that’ll attract that many players you really don’t even want WoW like numbers in a worldy game. One jerk in the newbie zone does more damage to the game than 70 levels of boring grind. When you get several million players in the game, you end up with tens of thousands of jerks. No matter how your systems are coded, you end up having to cede far too much control to reduce that problem sufficiently.
@Amaranthar,
That’s actually less effective and workable than you’d think. All it does is slow the problem down; instead of killing fifty people in a row, now the griefer can kill 5 a day. Those five players can still bounce if they’re killed at the wrong time. It slows the bleed but it can’t stop it. The only way to make such a system work is to make it so that you can’t kill any one branded an “innocent” at all without becoming perma-flagged as a criminal and suffering from that stat loss. Otherwise the system gets gamed so that the highest number of players are killed before the penalties kick in and then the griefer waits for the timers to count down before he does it again. And the problem with the, “you get to kill one person before you are declared a murderer forever” concept is of course, that there’s no longer a point in having the system when you do that. The more open pvp systems are designed so that you can deal with problem players that the system can’t recognize. People that are doing things that can’t be understood by the server but can be seen as problematic by the players. You don’t want to remove that ability, it’s part of the strength of the system, and that means you can’t remove the potential for severe abuse.
UO had stat loss for reds after about a year or two. This went down exactly the same way. They’d get their murder counts to just below the point that they’d go red, then they logged off till their counts went back down before they killed another person. It helped, but it didn’t remove the problem.
Yes, exactly. This is just an example, but consider that players need to be in a guild in games like old UO, or Shadowbane, or PvP servers, to be able to “survive”.
Now, if players enter the game the first time already in a guild (and substitute city here), then it becomes automatic, provided that the game has made city social structure tailored for this.
Now also consider that this city/guild structure has the ability to build mines or lumbering areas, where players with these PvP challenged characters can do their work in numbers, offering some greater protection. Now lets allow the city to place guards there too, for added protection, as well as set up player quests to guard the area, for even more protection.
Add onto that a justice system that really works, and you have a pretty safe situation.
Another thing to keep in mind. You don’t have to punish the player in a game like this. You can punish the character. If the characters are knocked down in ability for their crimes, they aren’t going to be very successful at it in the next go-around.
So, now we can blame the avatar for “acting out” instead of the player. Hehe (This is actually a more serious comment than it first sounds. What this does is make the griefer, under the normal “criminal” actions in griefing, part of the game experience. You can hunt them down, and you know they will be punished later if not sooner. And they’d have to be very good at it, “infamous” as it were, to last for long. And that in itself becomes a point of interest for the worldliness.)
@Eolirin,
I get what you’re saying and I definately agree with you assertions on the idea of gamey versus worldy games but I have to beg to differ on a few accounts.
I don’t agree that worldy mmo’s are less accessible. All that means is that the designer did not do a good job connecting the newbie experience to the veteran experience. Incentives are not in the right place. I’m actually of the mind that because player actions matter in a worldy environment, you would tend to have less separation of newbie and veteran if you put the mechanics in place to facilitate the relationship. In today’s games newbies bring absolutely nothing to the table for a veteran character. Change that dynamic and newbies become more valuable.
Add in a decent justice system where the players can control how justice is handed out and you’ve not only made newbies valuable to veterans but you’ve given veterans a way to protect them. Griefing goes down or becomes less likely in the newbie experience. The key is to allow the playerbase to have enough control over the world to build a safe environment for play. The developer only has to make sure that there are incentives for veterans to value a non-griefing environment and then that there are player-controlled ways to deal with griefing when it arises. Players don’t like unpredictable chaos. They don’t liek the traditional answer to the situation which has always been make friends. They’ll be griefed a thousand times before the long process of making friends happens. The result of making friends has to be readily in the worldy game from the first minute they log on and that’s what I’m getting at facilitating here by connecting the newbie and veteran experience.
I don’t agree with this. A good worldy MMO is going to require a different approach to design. Once you commit to the players running the vast majority of your world, then you have to put things in place that allow the development team to respond quickly to the happenings in the world. The end result is that a worldy MMO requires a different game design approach to the game than that of a gamey MMO. Put incentives in place for the leaders of your worldy MMO to “create content” and it’s conceivable that the entire shallow gameplay of a gamey MMO could be player provided within the context of a worldy MMO.
Tricky, yes. More complex to design, yup. Impossible, no.
@Eolirin, so what? Is the only reason to build these things to make money? Is the only measure of “height” how many eyeballs you manage to stab out and line on your wall of fame?
If an MMO does not do this, it’s not an MMO. It’s a multiplayer or single-player game or simulation. The definition of an MMO intrinsically requires large numbers of players.
Who cares about approachability? If your game relies on a continual churn of players, then so be it. Viva la assembly line. You have made the SPAM of games. If your world relies on significant investment and the capacity to derive meaning from play, then I would offer the damn thing free.
My dreamteam would be the KoTOR I team at BioWare doing KoTOR III, I’m not that keen on the MMORPG spinoff, however if there will still be a single player KoTOR III I’m ok with it I guess.
I’d rather see a Star Wars Universe MMORPG (where each “server” could be it’s own place and time in space.) Allowing covering the SW universe in past present future. SWG is tied to a particular place in time, so is KoTOR MMORPG. Imagine one “server” being in the past (KoTOR?) another being during SWG timeline etc. A account/player having a character(s) on the first server would be given the option of making their new character on the second “server” a decendant of one of the characters on the first server.
Yeah, sounds a bit confusing, but hey, in my defense I just came up with it right now so…
@Amaranthar, no, it won’t. Because no matter how you work it, a justice system can only be reactive, and since a player can create any number of accounts, or any number of characters, you’ll still end up with a non-trivial amount of “game breaking” griefing, and that *will* cause people to bounce off. It’s not that those things don’t help, because they do, but you can never eliminate the problem to the point that you won’t have a sizable number of people bounce off very quickly (maybe before they even try it out).
@Michael Chui, yes, you have succeeded in building a good worldy MMOG, but the problem lies in that the threshold of “gets more out of the game than they lose” slides around a *lot* depending on the individual player. I can’t prove this, but it seems to hold out thus far; it seems like fewer people are interested in strong virtual communities than they are in mindless entertainment, at least when it comes to time and money commitments. The biggest internet communities are low impact ones: the myspaces, facebooks and youtubes; the biggest successes in terms of selling boxes or subs are all games. In fact, the few MMOGs that we do have that have out done WoW in terms of total userbase, the Habblo Hotels and Club Penguins, are all very low impact games. Worldy MMOGs tend to be very sticky, high commitment games; they break down if there isn’t a sizable active playerbase, even to the point of becoming non-functional under a certain number of players.
There’s a reason for the size differences; even if the gamey games aren’t half as sticky, they’re ten times as approachable (numbers pulled out my behind, and the truth of it is, the two types are probably closer to each other than that, but the point still stands). You can make a *very* good worldy MMOG, and it’ll do really well for a really long time, but it’ll never do as well as the current “best” gamey mmog. It might last longer, but it’ll never have the same heights.
If people get more out of your game than they lose from being around griefers, then you’ve succeeded in building a good worldy MMO.
I think a good justice system that actually punishes griefers, coupled with a good social system, will take care of that.
@Ingrod, that’s the thing; worldy mmog’s are inherently less accessible, and building around that defeats the purpose of even having a worldy game to begin with.
One of EVE’s core strengths is that player action *matters* but that’s both a blessing and a curse. Even if you took away all of the other problems with the game, the bad design decisions, balance issues, UI problems, and lack of decent pve, you’d still have a system, which out of necessity, would allow for griefing, anti-social behavoir, being stuck in a posistion that you cannot recover from, and that all reduces your potential player base. You can’t design around this all that well either, because you start to lose most of the benefits of the system; player actions no longer matter. (Note: I’m not saying you need griefing for player action to matter, but that griefing is an unfortunate side effect of the systems thah do allow for it, and apparently unavoidably so.)
Gamey and worldy are almost impossible to merge as well, you can have gamey or worldy features in either type, but the core assumption of the game has to take from one or the other: and that is the definition of who is in charge of the game; the content creators on the dev team or the player themselves. Having the players be in charge, i.e. starting with the worldy assumption, will, imo, reduce the potential size of the player base for anything that requires (note, that doesn’t mean allows for, it has to force it) any sort of time or monetary commitment.
Ok… The Tripod books (juvenile fiction), team and lead TBD, but they all have to go ,”oh my god THOSE books!”
I disagree with you Eorlin, if a wordly MMO put the effort in built best and easy initial access mechanics that can broke that barrier, a good interface and IA, training minigames and quest, linear paths of advancenment throught features, NPC helpers, etc… EVE is EVE, not the example for every world MMO possible, what about a casual friendly or less complex worldy MMO?
None main company or developer is curentely work in some how that, they consider that MMO type inviable for a bussines point of view, bacause they only have the example of EVE, an out of the limit complex MMO, or disasters how SWG (sorry Raph), we cant put the fails in desing of some of the first MMOs how a rule for wordly MMOs.
Also EVE had a bunch of good ideas that can have a good profit applicated to much more casual MMOs, a “gamey worldy” MMO for me is possible, only is question that somebody do the effort, a this is the problem, nobody do that. This is the reason the makes me pessimistic too…
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@Derek, actually, my out look on that is much less optimistic in terms of how well a worldy game can do period. I think gamey games will always outsell worldy games, so I don’t think anything like EVE will ever compare to whatever the best gamey game at the time is. Bariers to entry will always be higher, so population will always be smaller. We can maybe get more than we see now, but we’re certainly not going to see huge numbers or blockbuster successes.
But that’s not a bad thing. Worldy games are much more sticky, so the population numbers do not need to be as high. You can be quite profitable with a relatively small number of players. You actually don’t want rampant growth in worldy games, it leads to a degenerate community base. Problems are exponental as the player base increases, not linear, and not having tighter communities defeats the purpose.
classy response on SWG. typical raph. this is why you’ve reached “will buy any game with his name on it” status with a few of us. just dont screw that up like Richard Garriot did
I’m of the mind that there’s no way to truly see a “worldy” MMO while also constrained by licensed IP. Afterall, Darth Vader can never win in the Star Wars universe. IP licenses come with the truisms that cannot be destroyed such as good always being good and evil always being evil. It’s the price one pays for the installed fan base of any given IP license.
Looking at the real world, history was written by the victors. Rome eventually fell and changed. The victors are not necessarily good or evil and there isn’t one side that lasts for all time. Leadership, story lines and culture all ebb and flow with the population and that’s where the restrictions of licensed IP break down. In order to achieve the “worldy” feel an MMO is capable of, I think it has to be done in a way where the players and the developer can co-develop the IP. The Empire would need to be allowed to win if it could accomplish the task. Eve is the closest thing we have to that today. If Eve could ever figure out how to make the game newbie friendly and not the brutal die a thousand deaths newbie initiation that it is today, they could put a model together for all other worldy games to follow. As such, the only improvement Eve brings over UO (pre-Trammel) is that the server is a non-sharded server; it’s PvP engine is largely the same unrestricted mess that UO was. Tens of thousands of players in the same economy enables the mega corporations (think governments) to exist and all that comes from it.
If we could get an elves in tights fantasy world that is as robust as Eve, with PvP that has consequences, then I think that team would have a hit on their hands. We all live in the real world where any random stranger could pull out a gun and kill one of us. Despite that unrestricted PvP, we feel safe because this action doesn’t happen often and generally there are severe repercussions for the assailant. Government has been given the power to police the people it governs. Ownership over the resources, culture and events of our world are ours to be part of in real life and until we allow the same to happen in a worldy MMO, licensed IP or Eve is about the best we’re going to get.
@Raph, And as my second post was trying to imply, I get that it was a complicated thing. But the attention wasn’t balanced properly as you say. I don’t want to come across as sounding like I don’t think you’re a wonderful designer, because I do, one of the best in the field right now. It just wasn’t a good match.
I’m actually looking forward to Kotor Online a lot, but I do expect a lot of people will probably go “This is what SWG should’ve been!” without realizing that Kotor has almost none of the design constraints that a Galactic Civil War era SW MMOG did. Honestly, my first response to hearing that there was going to be a SW MMORPG was, “There’s no way that’ll work.” You guys did a lot considering what you had to work with in terms of setting, and how hard certain fictional limitations were to deal with, and I don’t want to minimize that really.
I just think it needed someone less worldy at the helm, because Star Wars just doesn’t strike me as a setting that plays to the strengths of worldy game design. As I said, bad match. I’m very much looking forward to what you put out next though. And I did have fun with early SWG, and the points where it started to break down badly were invariably areas where the beta crew never got to explore.
But there’s never enough money to delay a game over and over till you get it *just* right is there? Well… unless you’re Nintendo or Blizzard anyway.
Reminds me of the movie “Barb Wire”, the idea of a remake of “Casablanca” in a SciFi environment with Pamela Anderson playing Humphrey Bogard sounded similar
(NO, I’m not comparing Raph with Anderson, maybe with Bogard 
)
If I could choose an IP for Raph’s next MMORPG, how about “A Song of Ice and Fire”? Sounds to me like an IP yelling for someone like Raph
But as you started on the topic ;p If anyone had (probably they have, I don’t know) asked you to join Bioware on The Old Republic, would you actually have thought about it for a second? (before Areae of course)
You know, back in the console days, my friends and I had a rule:
Games based on movies suck.
There were exceptions, of course, but that was the rule. Star Wars was usually an exception, but not always. I imagine that even the most fertile movie IP carries with it things that just run counter to developing an interactive game.
I played SWG a bit in the beta and a bit after launch, and the impression I took away from it was that it was the best engine there was, in terms of features found once the executable was run, but that the game was just… broken. Not fully operational. Being a n00b who’s usually pretty shy meant having a really, really hard time figuring out how to be effective at accomplishing things, and it was not a case of just picking what sounded fun and running with it (Ranger, in my case).
But, see, it had a whole *ton* of features I would have loved to see elsewhere. I *loved* being able to set my mood, and have the speech, the posture and the animations reflect it (seriously, that was a huge, huge deal for me). It had a built in full e-mail system ahead of today’s Big Names (which still only have minimal mail features, for the most part), and even built a dating/matchup system on top of that (which I laughed at at the time, but you know…). Etc., etc., I could go on and on, and it’s not saying anything you all don’t know.
So, yeah, nowadays I can’t help but wonder what else could be built out of all those parts. I’d like to claim I was surprised that it foundered, but it eventually succumbed to the Rule, a cursed star to be born under.
P.S. There is a corrolary rule that “Movies based on games suck”, with exceptions. The proof of both these rules is “Street Fighter: The Movie” the fighting game.
Given what I liked about SWG at launch, I’d love to see you brought on to Ryzom in some capacity. I only played the game briefly (I’m going to dive into it much more once it returns), but I think it’d be a property that benefit from your work.
Hi Raph,
I wrote up that GI Joe idea on Massively today. You might remember me from some conovos over at RLMMO.com.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t envisioning a dancer/musician filled GI Joe Online, haha. But, the interdependency needed to maintain a crack squad of fighters would work great with your game designs I think. Crafters to make weapons and armor would be required. Perhaps specialty shops where these could be bought and sold, even to Cobra on the black market. I’m not sure how entertainers could be worked into that, hehe. Medics of course, and crafters to make the meds.
Who knows, an 80s child raised on GI Joe vs Cobra can dream, can’t he?
I don’t think most people have any idea how many high-level designs I have done for licensed properties. It was a huge part of what I did as CCO at SOE — pitch IP-related MMOs. I have done high-level vision stuff for multiple movie-based, TV-show based, toy-based, and book-based MMOs. None of them ever saw the light of day. So I am a bit sick of working on licensed IP!
Pern or Buffy would rock though.
Mike Weldon wrote:
Marketing games based on movies — heck, marketing any franchise — requires a delicate touch, internally and externally. It’s not “easy.”
Not only do you have to navigate the shark-infested waters of Hollywood, where knowing that games cannot be as easily developed as movies is not quite there yet, but you also have to be careful not to piss off the fans.
You have a lot more restrictions on what you can do, an extremely tight deadline for launching with the release of a movie, and a limited budget because the game is just one extension of many.
In addition, the top 20 bestselling game franchises doesn’t even include games based on movies. Games based on movies tend not to do well in terms of sales, and well, they’re not supposed to either. They’re intended as extensions, to perform their role in a “parts-of-the-whole” blitz strategy, where the idea is to envelop consumers with everything possible about the franchise. Heroes is a good example here.
In my experience, the traditional games “industry” is more oriented toward making life easier with “easy” marketing, if that makes sense.
As one of my colleagues once said, “game developers are allergic to marketing.” If they could get away with just developing great products, they would; unfortunately for that fantasy, even great products don’t sell themselves.
Marketing is seen as a necessary evil. (Fans just see marketing as pure evil.) The practice of marketing really isn’t thoroughly understood by many people. Developers and consumers both have vague ideas about what marketing does, and because of this, marketing is black magic in this business. Easy for marketing? I wish.
You know how they say “if you have to ask yourself whether to post it, don’t?” I’m there.
There was no shortage of people assigned — way more folks worked on quests and content and combat in a sustained manner than ever worked on dancing. Perhaps the right way to say it is to take the blame and say they didn’t get MY attention enough.
So let me answer with praise where praise is due, rather than in any controversial way — the fact that music, or dancing, or pets, or crafting sticks out as having been more polished has more to do with the people who did a great job with limited resources, than it does with tons of resources being put on those features.
Still my failing, overall, since I should have balanced resources better, to make sure core priorities were nailed — likely, at the expense of pets & music, etc.
I will next readdress SWG in 2010.
Shouldn’t have brought it up (I dread a KOTOR Online just because it means all this gets dredged up yet again…)
Gah, and I should probably have included that having been part of Beta 2, I am pretty well aware of the difficulties that probably forced your hand there to a degree. Scope was too large and there were a lot of techincal issues (it took wayyyy too long before we even had a stable chat server ><). Crafting and the Entertainer/Medical stuff was necessary for the game to function at all, so it needed the most attention, obviously. There was a kernel of a really interesting combat system hidden under the half-broken mess that we ended up with, but you guys never quite got it working right (design wise I mean, it needed another iteration or 3). Dynamic POIs ended up being horribly broken (for whatever reason) and you had to yank them, so all we had left were misson terminals and theme parks, and neither was particularly compelling.
So if everything had come out the way that it was in your head, it probably would’ve worked, since both the social and combat elements would’ve had closer parity in terms of interesting mechanics. But it didn’t, obviously.
No no Raph, I was being snarky.
I did a lot of combat pre-CU too, and it was actually kinda fun before everyone discovered huge buffs that negated the armor penalties and destroyed PvE balance completely… But the problem was that the combat was simple and relatively uninspired, and the dancing/music and crafting systems were much better designed than the mission/combat systems. I did a lot of exploring and fighting, yeah. But it wasn’t very exciting once the newness factor wore off. The dancing and medical stuff was more entertaining long term, before we ended up with buff bots at least. (And I ended up spending 90% of *my* playtime in the hospital or crafting meds after a certain point, so memories will obviously differ
)
And that’d be cool enough it it wasn’t Star Wars… but it was. And the systems with the least design attention were the iconic ones; shooting stuff, playing as a rebel/imperial, working with heros of both sides. You took something that really didn’t lend itself to the whole world sim concept and turned it into a world sim.
And in the process you took everything that was in the background in the Star Wars universe – cantina dancing and music, marketplace vendors selling stuff, crafting – and thrust it into the foreground, while all the stuff that was previously in the foreground – jedi, epic battles between the Empire and Rebels, the dynamic heros of the saga – and pushed them into the background. We got a grind to jedi, semi-wonky pvp set up that didn’t even let us be stormtroopers till later on in the game’s life, and heros that were basically quest vendors that never moved around. Yeah, there were improvements made later on in all of those areas, but it was too little too late at that point.
So the gameplay wasn’t harmonious with the setting material, but that doesn’t mean it was bad. Honestly, I think the game would’ve done much better had it not been bound to that particular license. Many of the concepts were really good ones. But it was bloody STAR WARS. Fambaas? Corellian Butterflies? That’s definitely what I think of when I think Epic Star Wars battles.
I can sort of see this, really. Think of all those episodes that begin with the GI Joes sitting around their base waiting for something to happen. Then they go out, get into a fight with Cobra that largely involves everyone failing to hit eachother, and return to their base for untold hours of healing mental wounds.
On a slow day, Lady Jane might hold a dance number.
Yes, it all comes together nicely… in a fanboy’s head.
Is it just me or is anyone else getting tired of licensed MMO’s. I mean it was cool at first to play around in Conan’s world, but after about a day of play (if not sooner) it’s just another MMO with different rules and content. The license is quickly forgotten. After the first time I killed Ragnaros, it was no longer about the lore, it was about whether or not I get my drop. I didn’t feel like I was in the Warcraft world at all. I don’t think I want to play LOTRO because I don’t want to think of Middle Earth as a place where I grinded a bunch of trash to level up.
It’s not going to change anytime soon though. The big IP is what brings in the up-front sales, and want makes marketing’s job easy. The game industry is all about making life easy for marketing.
I’m with KevinMC – whatever is different is what sticks in the mind and becomes the defining characteristic of the game. There was probably a lot more combat than dancing, but everybody has combat, and nobody had the entertainer-as-healer mechanic.
What is your reaction to being cited for these dream team projects? Do they sound like they would be fun to do in an alternate universe where you had the time to do such things? Do you think “Bleh, thank God these ideas don’t come from people who employ me?” Or something else entirely?
When I think of MechWarrior, I always imagine it as “EVE on the ground”, a game where the character advances but not in such a way that completely obliterates “lower level” characters, and what really matters is the Mech rig you are in and what things you install in the rig.
[...] (probably awesome, but I’m not a personal fan). My favorite suggestion is definitely that Raph develop GI Joe. Picturing that makes me [...]
I think the reason people still go back to the dancing is that it’s one of the things SWG did that was very different. Lots of games have combat. But it’s the features which set a game apart which linger in peoples’ memories.
GI Joe sounds iffy, but I think Mechwarrior would actually be a pretty interesting IP to make a game around.
You just had to bring back my memories of having to admit to my in-game friends that I had just gotten killed by a butterfly, didn’t you Raph? :p
I find it funny that everyone’s memory of pre-CU SWG is all about dancers, when it was 90% combat.
My memories of pre-CU involve a huge amount of exploring the wilderness, trying to sneak up on fambaas, getting killed by those Corellian butterflies, and the occasional visit to the cantina.
Mine too. GI Joe Pre-CU SWG? What? Singing, Dancing… soldiers? Did GI Joe turn into a musical when I wasn’t watching?
(Not to be mean Raph, the dancers and musicians were awesome, but I think there was a very large cognative disconnect between what SWG was, and what people wanted out of a Star Wars game. If anything, GI Joe done that way would have even worse of a gap between expectations of the license and implementation of gameplay systems.)