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General: Sanya Weathers: Immersion
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
Sanya Weathers lets off a bit of steam this week as she runs through some of the ways MMOs totally rain on her immersion factor.
Take for example a quest requiring me to talk to a monster that only spawns at night. Every MMO has to have at least one of these quests. It must be in the secret handbook you get issued when you’re hired as a writer. Anyway, as a player, I always seem to get the quest five or ten minutes before “dusk.” Not quite enough time to go do anything else, but plenty of time to sit there at the spawn point and get my nose rubbed in the fact that the “local color” scripts run on a precise 45 second schedule.
“Meow.”
“Good evening to you!”
“And to you, ma’am.”
(distant bell rings)
“Meow.”
“Good evening to you!”
“And to you, ma’am.”
(distant bell rings)
“Meow.”
Read her full column here.
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
Before anyone else says it... yes, I'm having some cheese with this wine.
Sanya M. Weathers
Director of Community
Undead Labs
Great article this week Sanya a good whine but also a good insight.
A couple of excellent points that are oh so true especially the play testing is the first to go.
Sadly that shouldnt be the case as dev should always have a grasp on their own game and community but it just never works out that way and as soon as those overtime figures are in it gets pulled.
Might I suggest some Sangiovese. I know Malbec is pretty trendy nowadays, but some Santa Cristina is a very tasty treat.
Seriously though, I love your articles. Honesty, but maintaining professionalism, especially when there is so much you probably want to say about things you've seen, experience, or heard about on the inside but cannot. I do not envy you, but I appreciate the glimpses you give us.
Realistic elements do not necessarily = greater immersion in a virtual world?
That at some point, what a player has "worked for" should have some noticeable effect, even if it is in the form of reducing mouse clicks...
Nice read.
In a rush, so thanks for that article is the best I can give.
Say hello, To the things you've left behind. They are more a part of your life now that you can't touch them.
I have to admit that there is a lot to this article that I agree with. I especially agree with the play testing idea. I've come to the conclusion that there are devs who just don't play their games.
Sometimes I wonder "how in the world did they think this would be fun?"
I'm not so sure I agree with the night time quest mob example because I believe there are better ways to handle quests like these.
Either make waiting in a particular area novel and interesting or one can even go as far as to allow the player a talisman that will warm to them (in a role play way of course) when the time for the apparition to appear happens.
heck, they can even allow the player to summon the aparition but it can only be done at night. This way the control is more in the player's hands.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Watch the video on the front page of this game company's site. It addresses the "flow" of a game that creates immersion.
www.siliconknights.com/
realistic elements at some points can be tiresome, frustrating, which leaves you with a feeling that is anything but immersive.
Immersion is a wonderful thing. However from my own crafting experience was the realization that I have been in fact spacing out on occasions. Yes, my body and mind pulls a perfectly executed space-out operation while I pleasantly mistaken it for immersion.
I am not sure if others might have experienced this, but as I was drowning in my workaholic streak, I completely lost track of both time and surrounding. To this date, I do not know if it was also a form of immersion or if I was simply one ticket away from obsessive-compulsive land.
It was a fun read.
Another well-venting article -- thanks!
And I thought I was the only one resorting to PBAoE's to attempt killing those cats. I *do* draw the line at virtual fishing tho!
Paul Barnett said that immersion is: "playing Halflife while your house burns down and your wife leaves you."
I think he said its more important for him to make the issue about imagination.
I will not listen to another word Paul Barnett says again due to that craptacular game called Warhammer. He also said he would not let people who hadn't bought in 100% to company/design vision and would take less talent designers because of this. (paraphrasing) I wonder if that had anything to do with al the bugs/issues/ design flaws of Warhamer?
Don't get me wrong, he's highly entertaining and he's probably one of the best pitchmen I"ve seen. Hell, he may even be a nice guy, but his mantra's ruined a great IP and helped tarnish a company's name even further. I do not ever see me purchasing a game that he's lead anything on.
This is precisely what I dislike about developers " they think their superwonderful, innnovative, and imaginative idea = fun.
I will not listen to another word Paul Barnett says again due to that craptacular game called Warhammer. He also said he would not let people who hadn't bought in 100% to company/design vision and would take less talent designers because of this. (paraphrasing) I wonder if that had anything to do with al the bugs/issues/ design flaws of Warhamer?
Don't get me wrong, he's highly entertaining and he's probably one of the best pitchmen I"ve seen. Hell, he may even be a nice guy, but his mantra's ruined a great IP and helped tarnish a company's name even further. I do not ever see me purchasing a game that he's lead anything on.
This is precisely what I dislike about developers " they think their superwonderful, innnovative, and imaginative idea = fun.
The problem is leads can NEVER be wrong, they are like a parent to the worlds ugliest baby looking upon their child as if it's the worlds bonniest baby even though 100s of thousands of people are telling them it's a butt ugly child they just can't themselves see it.
Unless you then have money men who have the balls to say look mate your child's ugly take it for plastic surgery then nothing generally happen's.
I have an objective method of measuring immersion. Pure timelessness in play is a perfect ten, "omg please let me get back to camp so I can turn this thing off" is a zero. Quantifying between the two is quite easy.
I'm a nutcase when it comes to a game providing immersion. Route my work calls to voicemail, 3 xl pizzas in the fridge, and its game time! Scr*w reality, I'll deal with it later.
Ken
www.ActionMMORPG.com
One man, a small pile of money, and the screwball idea of a DIY Indie MMORPG? Yep, that's him. ~sigh~
You brought up a couple of great points...such as the "critical failure" for master <pick your favorite crafting profession or hobby> that really irritates the hell out of me some days. Your rant about it, however, was far more hilarious than any of my rants on th same subject: I laughed so hard while reading this that my brother was like, "WTF are you reading?!"
Firebrand Art
"You are obviously confusing a mature rating with actual maturity." -Asherman
Maybe MMO is not your genre, go play Modern Warfare...or something you can be all twitchy...and rank up all night. This is seriously getting tired. -Ranyr
I enjoy the wine to your article, actually. It took me right back to catching gazillions and gazillions of rusty buckets/armor pieces in FFXI when pulling up the 10k moat carps required for "Lu Shang's Fishing Rod".... which, of course, was an item that could break (ARGH!)... and it could possibly wind up "destroyed"/lost during interrupted repairs. Glad I never experienced something as awful as that, though people would break them on purpose to help LS-mates lvl carpentry. I never had the stomach to do so after catching so many freaking moat carps though. (;-_-)
Fishing always blows me away though, and I think you've captured one of the shortcomings of MMOs perfectly. I guess we are choosing to do these activities in game, and I'm an avid crafter too (though the grind wears on me like anybody else). Still, there's a point where you have to wonder if the dev was simply time-crunched and lazy (like you describe), or are utterly sadistic people with no regard for moral decency... =D
There should be fish in the water (even if you aren't fishing) that are hungry (or not) and when you put your line in they should take a bite or swim away. Obviously its all just a bunch of numbers and scripts but it is far too obvious in MMO's I agree, maybe in a few years we will have the technological ability to have these details in a virtual world.
Neatly put and made me smile at memories of "metal bits" immobility.
As Neosai mentioned there's also an OCD trance state in certain game activities which is different from immersion - although it can be equally relaxing sometimes - but I'm definitely an immersion junkie given the chance. For me it's like when you're squashed like a sardine on the train to work after being soaked in a downpour and you couldn't be more fed up but then you open a good book and almost immediately you forget everything and start enjoying yourself. Immersion is just a great way to relax when it works. A lot of players don't care about immersion obviously and often the things immersionists like are the exact same things other people hate the most so it's a tricky business.
But you put your finger on the other aspect of the problem where attempts at creating immersion aren't thought out properly and I'd imagine your suggested solution is probably correct - also completely agree about crafting and certain thresholds where you stop failing low skill activities. If you do a skilled manual trade and your failure rate was 5% you'd never keep a job.
Edit: Also I don't think immersion is about trying to create realism - I think it's about creating an impression of realism. I think the best analogy is the kind of painting where with a few brushstrokes the artist suggests a shape and your imagination fills in the gaps.
Oh, I don't know, I can see experienced crafters having critical failures.
Take Stargate Worlds for example. Look at how many years of combined experience all that talent had, and yet, they went to craft a journeyman game and came up with a critical failure. All the time that was spend accumulating all those items with portraits of various dead Presidents on them gone to waste.
Vanguard is another example, as is Tabula Rasa. .
I mean, like who'd have ever thunk it that Brad McQuade and Richard Garriott could have had a critical failure in crafting?
But they did.........
Isn't that why designers build it into their game, just to remind themselves.......?.
“So you’re taking the parts of life that suck and making them… the game?”
What a classic quote. I was truely rolling on the floor laughing with that one. I wonder if that unnamed guy ever realized what a piece of crap he constructed in DAoC. One of the worst crafting designs I have seen.
Just curious Sanya, what are the QA people doing in these shops? How do they let such obvious flaws stay in the code? Is QA just superfulous?
In a business environment, if QA says no, it means no, you go fix it or else. Is Blizzard the only shop that actually tries to run their game development like a business, is that why they are so successful?
Devs playing the game is good but focus testing is better. For instance take the devs of swg. They are by far the most clueless devs I have seen. Why would you create an mmo with space combat content and then have nothing to do at max lvl accept mine or grind on npcs for loot. You need a pvp objective that gives a reward of some kind! But they give us new houses? What the hell are they thinking? Crafting is great in swg although vanguard crafting is better I think, but crafting is not the most important part of the game. If you don't have fun combat you don't have a good game.
SWG could be easily fixed with focus testing and lots of it. Actually they need a new engine for the ground game and then focus test the piss out of it like ND is doing for Jumpgate evolution.
Fixed
I've played since EQ1 as well, and we share these pet peeves. So thank you for pointing out how incredibly obvious and counterproductive these failures are to someone who is actually playing the game. Trying to increase immersion with contrived events is just guaranteeing that the immersion feels contrived. No mystery, no masters degree necessary to figure that out, yet this junk gets approved, coded and rolled out, even though virtually every player over the age of 10 just shakes their head at the stupidity of it all and tries to move beyond it.
I've often thought that game design must be taken away from large companies because of one simple fact - the "fun stuff" that is guaranteed to be approved by big company management to go into the game is the exact same kind of "fun stuff" that is approved to go into corporate parties planned by your Activities department.
And we all know just how fun and immersive those events are lol. Can you see them designing an MMO? It'd be like Zombie Sims with party hats lol.
I hate to break it to you, but if QA ran the show, Vista would have been a success. What you need to remember is that MMOs and any other specialty business is by nature totally dependent upon specialists to create ROI. QA (and I btw, albeit on a different level) is in the business of telling programmers, upon whom the entire investment rides, where they are wrong and have to change their ways.
This does not go over well. Ever. So, business makes a choice. Do we keep the people who are our only hope for ROI happy, or do we make them unhappy to please the doomcloud who's concerns have no basis in fact save for his or her claim to represent our as-yet imaginary customers? Even if Mr. or Ms. Doomcloud is absolutely right, the effects of that will be felt after launch, while the effects of the recommended change will be felt right now in the production schedule. Guess where the fuzzy warm security-blanket feeling is for the business side?
Per my previous post, I really believe game design needs to be freed from cubicle world. It's no secret that the most player-pleasing designs come from small shops who are directly connected with their customers, and the biggest abortions come from huge shops who are workingaup in ivory-tower cubicle land.
The absurdity of some in-game abstractions has become the butt of an ongoing household contest. In general, when a game fails to entertain, we (wife and I) entertain ourselves at the game's expense. We're locked in a cycle of one-upsmanship in the ridiculous descriptions we concoct for our in-game actions, and no aspect of game design has provided as rich support for this as crafting.
Blacksmithing failed? Understandable, lots of things can go wrong. Alchemy? Likewise. Sewing? We're starting to inch towards comedic territory, but nothing approaches the surreality of coming up with an explanation for how you failed to pick a flower and put it in your bag.
"After I grab the flower, I'm supposed to jam it in my eye, right? Am I supposed to do that before, or after, I set it on fire?"
<Attempt failed>
Lol I read the title as "weather immersion" and I thought, yea games should have more realistic weather to help players feel immersed in the game.
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Fanbois = Carebears
The only posts I read in threads are my own.