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User-Defined Content - Why isn't it present in modern MMOs?
Desral
Member UncommonPosts: 31
Like many players on this forum, I've hit a slump of boredom when it comes to MMOs lately. It's led me to try various titles, but sadly, none of them have been what I'm looking for. Still, these recent games - particulary the (awful) backstories that came with them - put a question forth into my mind.
Why are so many developers set upon structuring the content of their games in a static, concrete plan rather than letting the actions of the players influence the development process? What happened to progressive worlds that were defined by the players themselves?
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I imagine that I need to elaborate on the topic in order to clarify what I mean, so I'll give my definition of user-defined content first.
To me, user-defined content means a component of the game world - whether it be a dungeon, event, quest, etc. - that, through player interaction, significantly affects the game world and its population as a whole. Usually, these are one-time occurences, but repeatable components - albeit with a less prominent overall effect - are possible as well.
As an example, I'll tell of an experience with a lesser-known French MMO named Dofus. There was an area inside this game known as the Dark Treechnid Forest - a quite dangerous area with aggressive mob packs that, at the time, could prove fatal for even high-leveled players should they be alone. Inside this vast area - at a certain point in a seemingly normal part of the forest, free from any markings on the mini-map and camoflauged by the terrain itself - was a secret entrance to a sub-boss monster below. For challenge purposes, it could only be soloed, and would only spawn once or twice a day. It would drop a certain array of rare items at a high rate - items that, through attainment using other methods, could take days to acquire.
The point of this story comes with this. In all my time playing this MMO, the developers never once made any mention that this secret area even existed. The Dark Treechnid Forest was simply added in, and the players lucky enough to stumble upon this area had the knowledge for themselves. It was a well-kept secret between a few rival guilds on the server, and existence of this place only passed through word-of-mouth. Many people that caught wind of the rumor simply dismissed it as a myth. Only after years of playing - close to the time I quit - had it become common knowledge and added into the wiki.
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Now... What if we examined a concept such as this - a hidden game mechanic that the players had to discover for themselves - and took it a step further? What if experiences such as these could have a drastic effect on the game world?
Let's say we have a MMO that, as part of its inherent design, has faction PvP complete with player ranking roles. In a new update, the developers add in the standard fare of new areas, monsters, equipment - and a secret underground dungeon stealthily hidden somewhere in the game world that they only mention in cryptic passages in the game's lore. This dungeon would be a greater challenge than any others 'officially' mentioned - so much so that only a group of the most skilled players could reach the end. At the very bottom lies the seal to the god of a new faction.
Breaking this seal would trigger a server-wide event that affects every player in the game world.
The skies would darken and unique monsters - minions of this new god - would spawn among packs of regular mobs in the field areas. Faction cities and settlements would experience adversaries other than rival players - waves of these minions would be spawned and stage periodic attacks against these areas for a 24-hour period. Finally, the players who broke the seal experience the highlight of the event - a choice to either serve the god and automatically attain leadership roles in the newly created faction, or engage in a one-time boss battle against him with the reward of unique equipment belonging only to them - that is, if they should happen to win.
And in addition, no matter the outcome, the players would receive direct recognition from the developers themselves - a record of their actions written into the event update, or even better, the game lore itself.
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The possibilities for an event such as this are endless. It could be applied to the spawning of a new resource or monster, the opening of a new dungeon, the addition of a mode of play (such as a Capture the Flag PvP area), an entirely new class, and countless other things. It would be the answer to many commonly-discussed problems, ranging from a lost sense of exploration in modern MMOs (mostly from fanguides and wikis) to a direct influence upon the game world by the players themselves. Why write a backstory to your world that players have little to no in-game connection to, when you could include the players themselves in the lore through events such as these?
But the real question is... Why don't developers do this?
Is it a question of money and being afraid to break the mold and risking failure? Technological limits? Conflicts with new updates should the event not be triggered? Lack of GM and administrative prescence to ensure these events work as planned and are not prone to exploits? Or are they cautious about letting a small number of players experience events that the rest of the population might never see, thereby leading to a sense of "inequality" among the playerbase?
Let me know your thoughts about a system like this, and whether you think it would work in the MMOs of today.
Comments
Err... do you actually trust your fellow gamers to make MMO content?
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
One of the problems I see, is the amount of work included. I think (almost) all MMOs want to do this, but it's hard to implement. But there are games out there which utilize this kind of thing.
It's also harder to affect an entire world, when there's a huge number of worlds (some mmo's excluded). And it's harder to affect a world the same was as, say, a single-player RPG. Mostly because it is also resource expensive, both on the dev side, as well as the database-side.
Edit:
Also, there's the fact that it might never be discovered.
A lot of people don't pay attention to lore anymore, because they're just going for the endgame - where all the fun starts (for whatever reason). Lore is, for some, fluff that just gets in the way.
"Roleplaying" isn't roleplaying as much anymore, and those few "true" roleplayers who are interested in lore.. Might think it's just an awesome story, but nothing game-wise, since there are so few games out there which "hide" things that are implemented in their lore.
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This.
Actually they could put content into the game. Would it be good and interesting? I highly doubt it.
As I read it, he doesn't want gamers to make content, he wants the devs to make some content, that changes the rest of the world based on the gamers (users) actions.
A progressive world.
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Elikal hit the nail on the head.
If I am going to play a MMO, I wont the content constucted by the experienced guys. You know....the ones I am paying money to for a subscription.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
I agree with Kattehus regarding the assessment of OP's post, and to answer the question- to be honest it's about money. Something like what you're talking about would be more time consuming/costly then turning out the same run-of-the-mill content we already see in MMOs. On top of that, having "secret" content takes away from continual hype from patches which (having so many players these days that will go from happy to OMG there's nothing to do I need new content on a day to day basis) wouldn't appease the dumber, oblivious players.
Basically, it's easier, faster, and cheaper to give us dumbed down content, so they do and the players accept it.
Developers are trying to implement new things into MMORPG's to combat this.
GW2 with the dynmaic event system.
SWTOR with the choices you make within the story to how NPCS and players interact with you.
It is very hard to make a good system for user created content. CCP is working on one right now for WoDO and CoX kinda have a broken one, but I guess since no one have made a good one ('Cept Bioware in NWN) I don't think most publishers are interesting in taking a chance like that.
Few studios try out that many new things for a MMO, most just do the same as the rest. Many of the few that really try out new things do other stuff.
If CCP/White wolf makes a great system more MMOs will have them, but things that are more or less untried doesn't get copied. That is just how things work here.
Only game i am currently aware of that allows user defined content.. is Starwars Galaxies... but thats more in the form of creating quests to share with your friends, (storytelling feature) and as SWG really isnt that popular a game.. i dont think its something thats really going to catch on any time soon. .. so yeah.. its been done before.. creativity isnt that common (rarer still than common sense!) and ... it does seem like gamers tend to be fairly lazy at those kinds of things.. which is also i think, why sandbox games, tend to be less popular than theme parks...
It can be good and it can be terrible. Nowhere Else and Beyond has user created content ("islands"), some of which are really cool but many of which are incomplete or poorly designed and left to become ghost towns. It would be nice if there were ways to provide for user created content which was filtered through a GM, so that only the 1/10th of user created content that was actually worth playing would make it to the public.
I explained it in another thread.
Games can only be great if they have a fixed and clear set of rules. Imagine football where everyone invents his own ball or extra rules on the fly...
User created content can only be admitted if they serve within a predefined set of game rules.
Or otherwise you have garbage, everyone would create the "I win" mechanism.
To let players create their own content in an MMO you would need a gigantic set of predefined rules.
MMO makers can hardly create open worlds, let alone they would let players create them.
It would be a disaster for a gaming point of view.
UO had many of these scenario's , secret areas , passwords that had to be found and repeated at the right spot. The lichlord with the rumoured secret room. I had couple maps and password id dug up but never did crack that code. Or there is the Jedi's in SWG which were only ever ment to be played by the hardcore ( permadeath). What happened with the Jove race in Eve? When in beta , rumour was Jove would be playable if you could crack the code. What if there are other games out there that have this very content you speak of, but wish for you to find it yourself!!
In 2010 "MMO secrets" are kept for about 0.5 seconds: just in time to open the web browser.
Within 15 seconds 5% of your population knows it. After 1 hour everyone is in it.
Within 2 days everyone is bored by the secret content.
Never used it becasue I don't play the game but SWG has player created content.
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The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
Because most of the time when you let players generate content.... you get flying penises.
This goes back well to UO... i've seen roofs tiled in a manner that produces a penis on the minimap more that once or twice :
- Quality control as mentioned
- MMOs are expensive and so innovation is difficult to factor in
- Coding/Designing this stuff is harder and requires more dev time!
- Current engines are designed to have flashy graphics but the plastic content is lagging behind.
Would like to see an MMO with more of this too, but some atm "Key" features of MMOs would need changing, which would be a very left-field choice.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Now now lets look at what city of heroes did with AE.
What happened? Well everyone made farms to level extremely fast ofc! Theres no way you can make it work unless there are some penalties for using it (like a lot less exp,etc) because everyone would just make farm content.
There should be a lot of anti farm measures and difficulty control,etc.
It could work for something actioney at end game or something like that. But definitely not good for the levelling process (unless they do it objective style where you get exp for completing objectives and the amount of exp you get per objective depends on the things you do)
*Edit* I replied on an iphone so I didnt bother. As for what youre looking for, I think its Dynamic content...not user defined o.o
So after reading it throuhg you mean content made because of the players actions. Right so this would pose a problem. If you want the development cycle to begin when they actually finish (kill the lich guy take the scroll and use it to spread evil/ take the scroll and burn it, etc) That means the effects wont happen for months if you want the story to be handcrafted by the devs.
Now if they were to make the outcomes before and just hcoose which to patch depending on the players actions then it will be a huge money sink. Unused content is worthless and a waste of devs time.
Now if it were to dynamically add the content and what happens,etc. Then it could work. But then what happens to the tower after that boss is beaten? Will someone replace it? would townspeople take over it and turn it into a little tower house? What happens to the content that was once there? Will another tower sprout up out of nowhere? or the tower stays and monsters come out of somewhere inside it and take over the tower again as aform of repeatable content? Will it be instanced? If so, how do you measure who gets what, etc?
If its open world will there be a way of limiting how many people wil be able to go there? Will there be anything stopping a ninja team to take the boss kill? Will ninja boss kills have any effect on the outcome and players who do get the scroll or w/e?
How many people is the tower balanced for? and all those questions. Remember that it takes months for content to be built by devs so it will take around 6 or so months from the players actions till the devs finish the 2nd part.
Or it can be guild wars 2-like where its all generated already and itll just keep rolling around and sometimes youll see the same event but for the most part it probably wont repeat often.
Edit #2
I dont like this idea much at all because it seems like only a handful of players move the game. I think it should be more...more people should be required to move the game. Say guilds or something. Basically... I dont like this idea o.o like say...a player being leader of a new faction that pops up. Why not just make guilds as the factions. You can be friendly with npc x but enemies with npc y. What do the non heroic people get to do? repeatable missions? random grinding/fighting in a battlefield and not get their names put up because some group of people decide to go for the enemy leader while the rest of the enemies were distracted? o.O
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lol.
Most of the replies in this thread should have just put "tldr" as it's obvious you didn't read past the title and made an assumption about what the post was about!
He's not talking about user-generated content like CoH's AE or STO's upcoming Foundry, he's talking about player actions have an effect on the larger game world.
One example I can think of:
There's a high end Task Force in CoH where completing it triggers random invasions to bother players in other zones.
I love this stuff, OP is correct there should be more.
Elikal's response was the one I was going to make, but honestly reading the OP he's not quite talking about "user-defined content" in his actual post.
The idea that players are recognized (WAR statues) or that a special event unlocks something big (WOW's Gates of An-qiraj) are already done in MMORPGs though, so the OP's feature request is a little odd.
The only difference is that typically, since these features cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce (in dev manhours), the developer rightly puts them at the forefront of gameplay instead of hiding them -- because otherwise the game would be pretty dull to the majority of players.
Imagine your favorite game releases big beefy content patches -- except this one effectively released nothing, due to the content being unavailabe/hidden to 99% of the playerbase.
Still, despite Elikal's post ringing true, I must admit there are strong reasons to allow players to express themselves through world manipulation (or Spore-like monster construction that propogates to something that other players see.) It just can't be the bulk of the content, is usually really expensive in terms of tools development (which isn't a bad thing if the developers themselves frequently utilize the same tool), and requires a lot of enforcement vigilance (ie penis creatures in Spore.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
how should player-made-content work, if the todays devs are even not able to create open virtual worlds?
the main issue of today MMOs are quests imho. you just follow them or you are even enforced to follow them to face perfectly refined encounters. this is not living in a virtual world, this is like beeing an actor in a virtual movie. the player is acting along the devs storybook. story makes sense in offline-RPGs but should never become a dominant feature in MMOs.
i would like to see a well designed sandbox with a well thought skill- and combat-system and challenging encounters. there is a dungeon with goblins? i dont need a quest to find it. lets go in and see, if there is a boss at the end and some goodies for us. now give these goblins a superior AI, perhaps trigger some scripts around the boss. thats it. no quest needed. a lot of hidden stuff makes it even more exciting. take all the money you wasted on quests and put it into AI!
i dont need quests, aside from a tutorial for newbs to learn the game. some epic questlines would not hurt, but all these grindquests are fully worthless. perhaps the dynamic-event-model will bring us a step further here, but i am not sure. dont get me wrong, there should be lore. you will find out over time, how all this stuff fits together and lore will give you hints, where to look for more adventures. but again, no quests needed. just intelligent design and setting.
now in such an open environment you may think about introducing player-content. you need a good ruleset and quality insurance. but in these story-driven fully controlled mainstream MMOs of today, there is no chance for this.
played: Everquest I (6 years), EVE (3 years)
months: EQII, Vanguard, Siedler Online, SWTOR, Guild Wars 2
weeks: WoW, Shaiya, Darkfall, Florensia, Entropia, Aion, Lotro, Fallen Earth, Uncharted Waters
days: DDO, RoM, FFXIV, STO, Atlantica, PotBS, Maestia, WAR, AoC, Gods&Heroes, Cultures, RIFT, Forsaken World, Allodds
Cryptic has also been working on such a system for STO.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
Same problem.
99% of the player base probably will make the world unbearable. I would much rather have well designed content.
I seem to have confused many readers in the OP. I'm not talking about user-created content - that would be, in itself, an entirely new feature in the game that every user could access. Rather, I'm drawing more of a middle ground - a balance between content designed entirely by the devs and content made by players using an inherit game system.
It's more like...
Devs design content and update game
Players find content and meet preconditions
Game world changes as a result
Those preconditions could be anything - they could involve one player's choice or even a server-wide effort. Take another example, for instance:
Let's say the developers of your standard-fare MMO decide to add two things in a latest patch: a new dungeon and a mining skill. One catch: Instead of opening the dungeon free for anyone to waltz right into after the patch, it's buried under yards of stone. If anyone wants in, the server's going to have to work together to uncover the entrance, using all sorts of tools - pickaxes, pullies, explosives - and blast their way down there to open it for everyone.
Something like this would be a one-time event, and could easily be made into a contest. Maybe it could be guild versus guild, with the few that make the most overall progress receiving awards. There could be recognition for players that did the best jobs in certain fields, such as using certain tools, and for the person or persons that finally uncover the entrance. All of this could be recorded into the game's lore through history.
And most important of all, it's a unique occurrence that lets players actually have an impact upon the world.
I agree with you. In my opinion, there are two reasons why most players simply don't care about lore anymore.
It's awfully written and/or awfully boring.
It has no real impact on the game that they're playing.
The Lord of Generic Darkness may be the evil mastermind that's terrorizing the game world and the enemy of the entire population, but does anyone really care about him? Of course not. Everyone has the same quest to knock him off his throne, everyone will fight through his tower and meet him in battle at the top, and everyone will be doing this same dungeon 100 times afterwards in order to grind him for phat lootz. There's absolutely nothing special about it.
Now let's change that scenario to having the first band of parties who scale the tower fight a version that's 5x as hard, has unique attacks and tactics, and drops a full set of his sprite's armor that can't be obtained anywhere else. That event will last for 24 hours after he is successfully defeated for the first time, and the party that does so has a passage of the lore written about them - not just on the site, but in future content _inside_ the game.
And going back to my previous example detailing the mining event - let's say there's a group of players that need large shipments of ore as materials for their crafting. Who are they most likely to turn to first - random miners in town they've never heard of, or the players that pioneered the skill and became well-known thanks to the event?
I'm of the view that a truly immersive world has a much stronger chance to take route when _actual players_ are part of the lore rather than a NPC/enemy that you may not even encounter again after a quest is done. Granted, there's a very good chance that these players won't be roleplayers, but there's a big difference between fighting a storyline boss and seeing the player whose feats you just read about walk past you in town.
And herein lies the problem. The content doesn't necessarily _need_ to be secret, but both my examples in the OP used this quality as a means to an end. But, there's one key point missing:
What if it's beneficial to the player who discovers this secret content to keep the information to himself? Or we could take it one step further - what if the first person or group of people who discover this content are the only ones who can trigger it?
The types of occurences I'm talking about are practically designed to be one-time events, and almost certainly added in with major patches. Granted, they don't have to be - it's perfectly possible to have content that is only accessible every so often, as in an event that occurs alongside a change in a game's seasons. What it isn't about, however, is finding a secret hole that leads to Orge Boss A, who will always be there for other players to kill (which, granted, is the same as my first example, but that was a stepping stone to a greater end). Rather, it's an effort at giving players lucky enough to experience the content a real chance to shape the game world.
Think of all the changes added into your favorite MMO over the years - all the new areas, items, spells, and anything else that defines it. Now instead of having the developers simply patch them in, what if they added them in with events that allowed the first person who completed said events to unlock the content for everyone? That's the type of thing I'm getting at.
I mean, imagine it - a MMO that had the capability of completely surprising their players out of the blue with something they never would have expected. If you're playing one day and find a peaceful fortified castle settlement filled with NPCs, only to log in the next day and find it turned into a pseudo-dungeon area - a wrecked ghost town where the possessed residents become the enemies - just because a certain player happened to find an artifact that the devs hid underground... Doesn't that sound interesting? It's the type of thing that keeps people playing, because after all, who knows what could happen next?
Many people on this site like to refer to MMOs as either "themeparks" or "sandboxes"; as riding a roller coaster upon a predetermined path or forging your own through creativity and imagination. I want to set MMO-players inside said roller coaster cart, have it stop at the very top of the highest hill, and see what happens.
A good example: CoX: Mission Architect. Where players create missions. The players then rate the missions based on a 5 star system. Seems foolproof, right?
The highest rated missions are not the most clever ones story or build-wise. They're the ones that deal the most XPS(experience per second). For CoX, that means loading the mission with mobs that resurrect themselves, which yeilds you roughly double XP for each one. Then you litter the landscape with items that end the mission, so you can go in, farm, and quit whenever you want. I tried about 5 or 6 MA missions, and pretty much all of them were set up this way.
THIS is why you see very little player made content in MMO's, particularly in an open world. It's very risky to put that much control into the hands of the players. In the above case, players will flock to these sorts of missions and grind them, making the game less enjoyable. They then get bored, move on, and come to forums like these to complain about how the game is so shallow(more shallow than it is, anyway).
you mean make content for 0.1% of the population?
I don't think that's a good idea. I just don't like all this secreat quest/area where only 0.1% of the populcation can do.