I like the idea of virtual worlds, but I have yet to find one I actually enjoy playing. Maybe I'm just not a player. I sure seem to enjoy thinking about it though.
One thing I notice about non-fps games is that they all seem to clone the old D&D character sheet games. I certainly didn't enjoy these when they were on paper, and continue to be unimpressed by them in their digital, shade rendered excess. It just seem superfluous to me.
Also, semi-anonymity is a big draw for me as a form of realism. I don't see the point of having my name float over my head unless I hand it out. It gives me something to do to introduce two people. It makes the consequences of social faux-pas more significant when you know you can lose access to a vital social network.
Boundaries to player conflict are also a problem. Not because I want to grief everyone everywhere, but because it affects people's social habits. PvP is often a relatively "innexpensive" (sociologically, time, fauxcurrency, standing, morally, etc.) action, even a teleologically vaunted one in most games. In reality, bullets really do cost 5000 dollars when you count medical and lawyer fees. But seriously, when people know they are in potential danger from people who have put forth minimal effort to create conflict scenarios, they change their behavior. If they expect constant danger, they group up. This forms civil socieities, and those lead to complex layers of interaction that the players themselves develop and implement. The weak flock to the strong and social hierarchy or interdependence forms. The trick is making the strong dependent upon the influx of the weak.
If you provide places where people can relax and not do anything, many of them will keep doing it over and over. Downtime emerges for some, and the need to compensate often leads to development that favors the occasional gank so the adrenaline junkies don't quite bail. If you play EVE-Online, you know this already. Everyone eventually gravitates towards maximizing their advantages and minimizing their vulnerabilities which makes for a very dull game most of the time until people get so bored they become flippant about their fate. Again, if you play EVE-Online, you know about this already.
Nathan's "future MMORPGs" points were, in nearly every case, dead on correct.
We should note that he's not going to change the minds of any developers. Those who aren't doing what he suggests have a vested interest in defending their (bad) decisions, while those who do agree with him are already (I hope!) designing the kind of game he describes.
That said, I can't resist adding a couple comments to his points, mostly because although I'm not a pro game designer, I've spent the past several months working out a design that does many of the things Nathan calls for. So writing this message lets me defend my own (possibly bad) decisions.
Immersion - Yes, please. This can't be dismissed as merely "oh, that's just stuff a few roleplayers want." Immersiveness is what makes a game world feel like it's a living place -- without it, the world feels like nothing more than a bagfull of static, one-shot quests that you do before leaving to check out a new game. A dynamic game world always leaves you wondering what will happen next.
FPS Controls - Yes again. Isometric was the past. Do first-person and you (the developer) don't have to spend time banging your head against the keyboard trying to figure out how to make a third-person camera not do stupid things. Plus there's that "little bit of extra immersiveness" thing.
Hidden Math - Yes and no. Some numbers make sense, like "how many bullets are left in this clip?" But being able to see numeric ability ratings (of PCs or mobs) doesn't make sense; it turns what ought to be an emphasis on action in the game world into Numbers Quest. It doesn't matter how much lipstick you put on grinding to level up or get some new piece of gear with fractionally better stats, it's still grinding.
Stealth - Don't even get me started on stealth gameplay in MMORPGs. They don't need to be turned into tactical simulators, but the environment (and the ability of PCs and mobs to interact with that environment) is vastly underdeveloped in most games. Spamming special actions until the other guy falls over is not "tactics." Taking advantage of cover and weather and camouflage and the whole range of electromagnetic masking and detection gear -- that, along with seriously improved mob AI, is what will really allow tactical gameplay to happen. But it'll never happen until developers take the time to think about how to instantiate the game world and all actors in it in terms of their physical properties.
PvP - Yes and no. Yes, with the emphasis that PvP is much more than whacking somebody over the head with a stick -- there are all kinds of competitive gameplay that MMORPGs ought to facilitate. But also no, in that there are also all kinds of cooperative gameplay that MMORPGs ought to facilitate. Deeper PvP isn't a problem as long as it comes with deeper cooperative gameplay as well.
Player-based economy - Absolutely. The only problem here is that you have to know that you're going to have a certain number of players. If you don't wind up with a critical mass of players, there'll be some production needs that go unmet, and the game could get a bad name that prevents it from ever attracting enough players for a fully player-based economy to work. Assuming that you can guarantee enough players, a player-based economy is unquestionably better for any game with pretensions to being a place that welcomes all kinds of players because, being an economic thing, it weasels its way into every player-to-player interaction. A working economy delivers myriad social benefits to everyone who plays the game. (Adam Smith's invisible hand strikes again!)
Voice chat - No. As noted by others, this damages immersiveness. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done. And yet, developers must address this capability somehow -- if they don't offer it in their game or implement a deliberately crippled version of it, players will just go to a third-party system. I don't have an answer to this one, so I'm listening to what other people can suggest here.
No Character Classes/Levels - 100% agreement. Where is it written that "people will only play games in which their characters can become more powerful"? Who said that? Too many developers (perhaps salivating over the $75 million/month that Vivendi/Blizzard are said to be netting from WoW) are wasting their time copying games that copied D&D's figher/cleric/wizard/thief paradigm. Enough, already! Having character levels leads inexorably to grinding. Instead of jumping right into the game and playing it, we grind, and we grind, and we grind, and for no other reason than so that someday we can start playing the game -- how nuts is that? When characters don't have levels, there's no reason to grind. You don't have to level up; you're already there and good to go. Getting rid of classes would also be good, but it's not nearly as important as letting players build complete characters from the very start.
Permanent Death - Yes... if you created a game without character levels. The reason people hate the idea of permadeath is because they've spent vast amounts of time building up a character in power (through levelling up), and they have no intention of letting all that effort go to waste. Well -- if your character doesn't have levels, and if you implement something like a "living will" system so that you don't lose all your gear when you die, then you can have permadeath. Your character goes out in a blaze of glory? Take a moment to salute, then just roll up a new character and jump right back into the action.
Finally, although it wasn't mentioned in Nathan's article, something that's been pushing me to try to create a MMORPG design of my own is the belief that too many games start with some developer's idea of necessary character roles into which actual human beings (players) must then be stuffed. I think that's backwards -- I propose looking at what people actually want to do in these games, then building game systems around those interests.
From my point of view, and guided somewhat by Richard Bartle's original four-player-types model (and David Keirsey's four-temperament model of which I believe Bartle's model is a subset), I'm designing systems that support the four main kinds of gameplay I see people trying to engage in:
Combat
Commerce
Socialization
Exploration
Combat and commerce support competitive gameplay, socialization and exploration promote cooperative gameplay, and all four modes are balanced -- no one style will be allowed to dominate the others because all four are (in my opinion) necessary to have a game that's both fun and enduring. But if someone else can come up with three or four or seven or twenty-three specific things that players really want to do and then design a game around those things, good for them -- virtually any such approach is better than cranking out Yet Another game that copies-and-pastes D&D classes.
Overall, I'm looking forward to seeing some enterprising developer running with the ideas that Nathan spelled out in his article. Alternately, someone can lob a few million dollars in my direction and I'll do it myself. Either way, it's long past time MMORPG designers got out of the design rut they're in and tried some crazy things, because not doing so risks turning this industry into merely another fad that had its day and then disappeared.
The next generation of MMORPGs is going to need to focus on every aspect of PvP, not just combat. Theyre going to need to include systems for player vs. player politics, economics, and even recreation.
I agree. PvP should definetly be more than killing each other. We should be able to develop working relationships and partnerships with other players. Depend on each other for supplies and for sales just like we do in the real world everyday. In real life I cannot make everything I need but have to buy or trade with others who can make the item or they know where to buy from. Such player interactions and dependency would do much to stimulate immersion.
Add me to the list of those opting to NOT use voice chat in game. The keyboard is fine along with a few emotes.
Very interesting few posts - On the topic of voice chat, I really think that this could enhance gameplay if implemented correctly, that is to day only in a party, in which everyone consents. True this could tip the balance in terms of those who employ it, in terms of reaction times and group co-ordination, but not IMO to the extent that those who don't want to will feel at a disadvantage. Just my thoughts. And yes I agree having someone in the party who instists on calling everyone "Dude" would do my head in...(im not American). But voice chat is also definitely a few rungs down on my list of priorites, there's plenty of room for improvement in other areas that need addressing more urgently for my particular tastes in gaming.
www.shadowpool.com or www.trialsofascension.com/ (Both go to the same website :P) Almost exactly what is described in this article, Immersion, no con's, full-pvp, perma-death, settlement building, weather effects, seasonal effects, players effect enviroment and so on! Skill based, no swords with 20dps but just knowing its a copper sword or a steel sword!
What the article describes is what a lot of peoples started thinking even when Ultima Online started 8 years ago. This article talks more about "virtual worlds" (=>immersion and liberty) than a game (clear objectives with time being the most important factor).
Games is what every mmo is aiming at today, the sad truth is that that commercial virtual worlds will never EVER exist. I've been wanting these kind of concepts to be implemented for 8 years, here is a chronological list of games were these concepts existed:
I am so sad, but the concepts described in this article will never exist, the mainstream players don't want them at all. The fundings will always lack for those "virtual worlds" and they will always all be made by small teams delaying their game forever (vaporware) or will be ugly and laggy as hell. Don't ever expect to see those concepts in a nice game, EVER.
(if you want to say I'm wrong, just name ONE game that seems beautiful, not laggy, has not been delayed lots of time and implements some of these concepts)
Originally posted by blackmoore I've been wanting these kind of concepts to be implemented for 8 years, here is a chronological list of games were these concepts existed:The awakening project CANCELED Atriarch VAPORWARE Shadowbane UGLY, LAGGY Mourning UGLY, LAGGY THEN CANCELED, NOW VAPORWARE AGAIN Wish CANCELED Trials Of Ascension VAPORWARE Irth Online UGLY, LAGGY Dark and Light VAPORWARE Darkfall VAPORWARE The chronicles VAPORWAREI am so sad, but the concepts described in this article will never exist, the mainstream players don't want them at all. The fundings will always lack for those "virtual worlds" and they will always all be made by small teams delaying their game forever (vaporware) or will be ugly and laggy as hell. Don't ever expect to see those concepts in a nice game, EVER. (if you want to say I'm wrong, just name ONE game that seems beautiful, not laggy, has not been delayed lots of time and implements some of these concepts)
I don't know where you got your information from... you've obviously been misinformed. The Chronicle is not vaporware. Nathan Knaack used to be the community manager for Rapid Reality (the makers of The Chronicle) and it seems as though he used the ideas of The Chronicle in this article he wrote.
Just a quick note on "vaporware". They all are untill they get proper funding, and that can change with the stroke of a pen.
Perma-death. This is a troubling concept. While I'd love it in a game, at the same time it can hurt the overall game to the point of almost killing it. It has to be handled right. Let me explain. If you rate player styles 1-10, with 1 being pure PvP and 10 being pure "carebear", the a game with total perma-death is going to see all but the 1's and 2's drop out. It would start with the fact that the 9's and 10's wouldn't even buy, and then the higher numbers would drop out one after another untill all you have left in the game is the really heavy PvPers. They would of course dominate all message board activity, and before you know it, the game wouldn't even support any other play styles. The social diversity drives MMORPGs, and this would be very bad for the game in question.
Perma-death for all in a game would mean that PK guilds would dominate through the act of beating down others. Imagine you have a guild, and an enemy guild keeps attacking you to keep you down skill/level wise. You might escape for a while, but eventually they are going to get each and every one of you. It's a constant "start over" scenario. It's no fun being dominated and having no hope.
There's also the lag deaths, another reason to avoid perma-death.
But perma-death can be implemented in a way that works to support the idea of risking it all to be a true hero, elite type. That's in the high end game. If Dragons are the ultra MOB they should be (and not the tamed down version so players can play them or own them), then imagine them also being able to perm-kill your character. Risk it all, and if you win you truelly have heroism. Even in losing, that character name could go down in game lore as something special.
Voice speak, I've gone from being nuetral on it to being against it, after reaing above about having to turn it off due to foul language. It's not only that, but I can see heavy combat situations where people get really excited, and the loudness would be disruptive in my own home. On top of that, there would be those players who would spam over their mic to hamper their enemies from getting commands out, and that would leave it useless in PvP as well as just annoying.
Finally, I'll stick with my previous post about 1st person views. I don't like feeling like I have blinders on. It's great for a FPS, but not for a MMORPG.
Glad to see allot of you on the same page. And were not a verbal minority, most players just dont want to bother writing down their thoughts, but when they are in the game they complain profusely. Maybe theyre just lazy.
My linear thought process:
1) In MMOG's you control one character, when you control only 1 character you improve by leveling. PvP in current MMOG's will always remain fundamentally flawed because you have level 40's, level 100's, and level 15's mingling and the power difference between each is so incredibly massive only Ganking occurs in PvP. Developers will try to solve ganking by putting in extraneous rules like PvP limitations or penalties for Ganking, but it detracts never adds to PvP.
2) Removing levels wont work, whats the point of playing a game when you never improve your character.
3) Real Time Strategy games lets you control hundreds of NPC warrios and NPC hunter/gatherers.
4) Whallah, the character you play is the Heroe (like Thrall in Warcraft 3, and Alexander The Great in Empire Earth), and you can have many NPC hirelings doing your bidding. No more manually mining, no more manually doing the fighting unless you really want to.
5) You improve your status not by leveling and gaining leet gear, you improve by empire building, on a somewhat smaller scale then regular RTS games because servers couldnt handle 10 million buildings, and 50 million NPC soldiers running around.
Originally posted by blackmoore What the article describes is what a lot of peoples started thinking even when Ultima Online started 8 years ago. This article talks more about "virtual worlds" (=>immersion and liberty) than a game (clear objectives with time being the most important factor). Games is what every mmo is aiming at today, the sad truth is that that commercial virtual worlds will never EVER exist. I've been wanting these kind of concepts to be implemented for 8 years, here is a chronological list of games were these concepts existed:The awakening project CANCELED Atriarch VAPORWARE Shadowbane UGLY, LAGGY Mourning UGLY, LAGGY THEN CANCELED, NOW VAPORWARE AGAIN Wish CANCELED Trials Of Ascension VAPORWARE Irth Online UGLY, LAGGY Dark and Light VAPORWARE Darkfall VAPORWARE The chronicles VAPORWAREI am so sad, but the concepts described in this article will never exist, the mainstream players don't want them at all. The fundings will always lack for those "virtual worlds" and they will always all be made by small teams delaying their game forever (vaporware) or will be ugly and laggy as hell. Don't ever expect to see those concepts in a nice game, EVER. (if you want to say I'm wrong, just name ONE game that seems beautiful, not laggy, has not been delayed lots of time and implements some of these concepts)
How id darkfallonline vaporware when it is almost going public beta. And Trials of Ascension, meh, chances are there but knowing these i sincerely doubt they'd waste 5 year of their life like that =p
Excellent article! I enjoyed it so much I emailed it to many of my friends. The only point I have a slight hesitation to accept is permadeath but I agree that a Death Penalty should be more significant than it is now. I really miss the adrenaline from many of my FPS that would force me to take a break from the game cause I was so intense:) If that made an entrance into the game genre that would be a wonderful thing!
I am going to be lazy and just repost what I wrote on my site when pointing my readers over to Nathan's column so forgive me if some of it reads a little different:
Recently MMORPG.com released their next installment of Nathan Knaack's weekly "Outside the Box" column. Here's a snippet:
If you ever read MMORPG forums, youll immediately notice people lamenting the loss of role-playing from current titles. Why dont people ever gather in the tavern to share stories, setup dramatic confrontations between heroes and villains, or go on espionage missions to infiltrate enemy territory? To answer the last part first, espionage isnt possible in any game where your characters name is tacked above his head in bright, glowing letters that glare through underbrush, brighten every shadow, and appear handily on a list of players in the local area. Why do MMORPG players rarely experience dramatic role-playing encounters? That ones simple: because theyre too busy grinding levels so they can keep up with everyone else. If you spend an hour developing a friendship with another online player, all of the buddies you already had are now two or three levels higher than you and hanging out in a zone youre not strong enough to visit. Eve Online offered half of an answer to this dilemma with its time-based advancement, but what the system offers in terms of allowing people to experience the game however they like instead of having to focus on grinding, it almost completely negates by alienating potential players who feel slighted that all of their conscious efforts at certain skills improve them no faster than someone who set their skill training, then logged off and went to bed. Other problems arise with such a system as well, like the fact that a new player in Eve Online will never, ever catch up to an existing player thats still active. That mathematical impossibility is perhaps the games greatest turn-off outside of most people not enjoying the you are a ship, not a person visual gameplay style. All of these negative things to say about Eve Online, and the funny part is that I consider it by far the best MMORPG on the market today. That, in essence, clearly illustrates the core problem with the industry.
Now, I won't lie (or I try not to... I am a Community Manager, too, you know!), I'm not really sure who Nathan Knaack is. Doing some websearches I can see him linked to Eve and some freelance writing but that's about it. I will say, I do agree with a lot he has written in his latest column, though.
His first point out of the gate has to do with immersion and I competely agree with his assessment there. One of the things I love about Shadowbane (and originally drew me to the game) was how the players could actually change the face of the game world. Almost all of the cities there were placed by players and many of them were also torn down by players. Players need to have more of a hand in shaping the world, not just in placing structures but determining the outcome of not only PvP situations but PvE. How many times have you wandered by Orc Camp X to see the exact same guards out there, standing in the exact same spot, in the middle of a forest? You can go there any time of the day, any time of the year, and know those Orcs will be there, ready to feed you experience. Wouldn't it be more entertaining that if you destroyed that Orc Camp, it would disappear? Perhaps it would appear later... maybe a week or more later... but what if that forest had a variety of points in it and later that night some Orcs venture back in and start a little campfire with only a few Orcs there. No one bothers them so the camp fire becomes a few hunts and the Orcs triple. But another day goes by and it becomes a full camp, and so on and so forth until players go there and stop those Orcs. To me, while I know the Orcs may be back someday, it would feel like I accomplished something. I didn't stand around Camp X and just continue killing them and then wait for them to respawn. I killed them and they are gone. At least for now.
And there are a variety of other things you could do to add "immersion". Just off the top of my head, what if you were in the snowy lands and you might take cold damage over and over again until you put on some armor that protects you from the cold or someone puts a spell on you? What if it was raining and it actually limited your range of sight and reduced the effectiveness of fire-based spells? What if running up a hill is slower than running down one? What if shopkeepers and the sort went to bed or had different responses based on the time of day? The environment can go a long way in immersing a player to make them think they are in a game world.
FPS controls are a great idea, too. That said, as a player, I would also like to keep my 3rd Person camera. I First Person Cam cannot truly duplicate pheriferal vision and things of that nature at this point and, when in a large-scale combat, it's nice to see what is going on just around you. I'd disagree on the part of MMO players just sitting there while the FPS crowd is all over the place (in their chairs). I know many times I have been PvPing in a variety of MMOs and found myself doing the same thing when I play a FPS. The difference is you tend to get surprised more when fighting against other players than AI in MMOs (many FPS games seem to get away with AI that has more depth).
Now, I know some players would cry if we took away some of the numbers they see when fighting. I mean, how can I pick a sword if I don't know that my Katana has a DPS of 23.7 while that longsword only has 23.1. I mean, come on now! But, truth be told, there is a lot of that information I would like to take away. The hardcore players who want to know this information will figure it out themselves. I remember in Ultima Online when players had spreadsheets of information they gathered on various weapons they would use and what their skill levels would be.
Does the grind kill MMOs? That is a highly debated point. I'm not quite on the fence but can see the necessary evil behind it. With that said, I sit more in the Skill-Based camp but I would rather do a hybrid system between the two. I would like players to have the ability to learn a skill and maximize it no matter what "Level" they are. I also hate the idea of friends of different Levels not being able to successfully level together. There are easy designs to fix this problem but since the release of Everquest (or you could argue various MUDs), many have not wanted to go against the grain.
I cannot agree more on the fact that next generation MMOs will have to focus more on every aspect of PvP. Some games won't, especially those that are not based in PvP and there will be games like that since there is a segment of players who enjoy strictly PvE. But those that do go the route of PvP will have to go deeper. And, in my opinoin, deeper definitely means a political system as well as territorial control.
Voice Chat; I disagree that it needs to be implemented in MMOs. If you are talking about "immersion", the moment that "Lady Morte" sounds like a 30-year old male truck driver will break that immersion. That said, I think there needs to be definite plugins or mods to support these. Wouldn't it be nice of games like WoW or Shadowbane or Guild Wars had an interface that worked with Teamspeak, Ventrillo, and Xfire? Give me the option to use the voice chat programs my guild uses but I doubt my wanting to hear people I am in a pick-up group with.
Permadeath, not really something I want to touch with a ten-foot pole. Do I think it would make an interesting bullet point for the marketers to use? Yes. Do I think there is probably design implementations around the harshness usually associated with the term? Yes. Of course, I also believe that many of the people claiming to want such a feature would be the first to hate it once they experience it. I'd just have to see someone do it right to see if it could be done right.
All in all, the MMO market is a fairly new one. There is a lot of growth still to be done in this industry. Some of us have found the candy that others have made and added a chocolate cover shell around it. But it is time for some innovation. Not every MMO needs to fulfill every niche. It would be nice if a game game out saying "This is what we are and this is what we're sticking to". Developers can make a much more solid game sticking to 10 or so keypoints instead of trying to be the Jack of all Trades.
Like most people I agree with everything except for "global teamspeak" - i think that teamspeak can work, but...
* You can only hear people who are talking who are near you. The technology is already there... when i play my single player RPGS and i turn left, my right speaker stays the same but my left speaker gets quieter...why not as i move away from someone using teamspeak their volume (to me) goes down?
Permadeath - Hehehe, the chronicle NAILED this. Two character types : Main : You can achieve the highest level of stats ( not a level based game ) You can start guilds, build cities, and pretty much all that other stuff. BUT IF YOU GET KILLED BY ANOTHER MAIN, or A MOB, you are gone for good 90% ish of the time. They talk about a second chance system ( very logical : if you get killed by wolves, they eat you. but if goblins knock you out and take you back to their camp, you can talk your way out, fight your way out, or just sit there until they cook you.)
Regular : You can never be permenently killed. You can never STATISTICALLY advance to the same level as mains, but you can kill them. you aren't "gimped" because most of the combat relies on FPS-like twitch combat.
See ? permadeath is a risk you can take. and if you're feeling like a pathetic regular who can never be as good as a main, take one on at no risk
The biggest problem with permadeath is this: Other players. The moment a player finds a "tactic" or exploit that lets them permanently kill another player, the CSR Team will really know what the bottom of the pit looks like. Think of the complaints players have had when they lose a single item due to a bug or exploit. Then think of that but losing an entire character.
Until a game is completely hack-proof and every single angle has been covered, permadeath will become a griefing tactic and, while the company will probably fix the issue, innovate players will find another way and cause more and more CSR nightmares.
I'd love to see it done right and perhaps The Chronicle has it right. We will only have to wait and see. But it is a dangerous bed to make.
I thought I'd have more reactions to my previous post, I guess everyone thought I was a troll but I was being serious.
The question I was asking basically was: since the dawn of mmorpgs, why does traditional everquest-likes games can get nice graphics, minimal lag and a huge player base while games with innovative ideas such as the ones posted in this articles are always done by small teams, with low fundings, and end up being ugly, laggy, have a small player base, and see delays after delays during their development?
I don't see why the writer of this article consider his ideas as new: they were all debated on the Ultima Online forums 8 years ago...and they haven't been implemented in any major game yet. I don't think they ever will.
edit: I'm particularely talking about getting rid of the class-level-grind system, seeing no math on the screen, and changing the environement here.
Originally posted by blackmoore The question I was asking basically was: since the dawn of mmorpgs, why does traditional everquest-likes games can get nice graphics, minimal lag and a huge player base while games with innovative ideas such as the ones posted in this articles are always done by small teams, with low fundings, and end up being ugly, laggy, have a small player base, and see delays after delays during their development?
EverQuest was a huge success when it came out. Since then, people mainly tried to follow the same formula, but adding their own twists and changing things that people didn't like about EQ. In my opinion, WoW has created close to the ultimate-version of that EQ-esque game, so hopefully it will cause people to start trying new things.
I wouldn't be suprised if the next fairly-successful, yet different than the EQ-esque games, becomes the new EQ. Where games copy off of it for a while until one company (probably Blizzard ) makes the ultimate-version of that.
I don't think developers are agianst creating great, new games, but the publishers (the guys paying the millions for it to be made) want something with the least risk of failure, so they've been going the tried-and-true route.
On a similar topic to the article - I'm curious, what sort of death system (besides perma-death) would you guys like for a fairly-realistic RP-focused game? I've been thinking about how to go about such a game but can't come up with a death system that 'fits'.
I was thinking like you miber, I thought new games would be forced to be completely different from The Everquest-likes because Wow is the ultimate version of this type of games....then I tried the two next mmorpg that are going to be released: DD Online and Auto Assault, and they are the exact same leveling grind as the games before them. I don't believe Wow will change the market anymore, WoW IS the market, and until the end of its life cycle (5 years or more) every other game will only try to copy it.
Originally posted by miber On a similar topic to the article - I'm curious, what sort of death system (besides perma-death) would you guys like for a fairly-realistic RP-focused game? I've been thinking about how to go about such a game but can't come up with a death system that 'fits'.
I personally would like players to die A LOT less in mmorpg. Death should be something extreme that happens very scarcely. Most of the time, players should just be knocked out just enough time for other players or mobs to loot them and go away. When they die, something should happen to ensure that they don't come back to the battlefield for a looong time (preferably not until the battle is over).
Debuff is not the right way to do it, I believe something were death players are more active should be better. For example being in a death realm and having to find your way out (some kind of maze were the exits randomly change position). Friendly players could resurrect you or bring your corpse to a temple to be resurrected to bring you back from the death realm immediately.
I still believe that to make death something important, permadeath should happen. I really like Trials Of Ascension's idea of permadeath happening after a fixed number of death (something like a 100), and the fact that an artifact can be kept from your character to have something left of him.
I think there are a couple forces at work that keep many games in the same grain as others. Granted, some publishers will push developers to emulate the latest "hot", which makes sense in their world. Many publishers look at it from a busines standpoint and not a "cool game" standpoint. They see games like Everquest and World or Warcraft with their large subscription numbers and basically owning their own money printing machines and wonder how they can get that for their company.
But, it's not just the publishers. Every game developer I have met is a gamer too. And the thing is that while the publishers may be looking at the numbers of the latest "hawt", the developers are playing it. If it is a game they like, which it probably is if they are playing it, ideas and concepts will get stuck in their head and they will consciously or subconsciously emulate those designs and ideas in their very own projects. I've been guilty of the same and have made it a point to try and look at what I'm doing and see if it's original or just a rehash.
And sometimes a rehash of certain systems is not a bad thing. If the wheel isn't broken, you don't necessarily have to reinvent it. The thing is to find a few key points in your game that make it different from other games and concentrate on that. Your entire game doesn't have to be completely different game, it just has to have a good idea of what it is and concentrate on that.
Two comments I have seen recently seem like they should be addressed.
It has been said that: Developers keep doing the same copy-cat games cuz that's what sells
AND
It has been said : Most of the players want this type of game and don't want any of these new ideas.
Well IF that is true (though I suspect at least some of those players want something different) then FORGET about those players. There are PLENTY of games with leveling and grinding and classes and contrived quests and no immersion and no death penalty and no dynamics. The market is saturated with them.......or IS IT? The current market caters to them because the design and those that like it are more or less reciprocal.
What about all those in these forums that are dissillusioned with the current trend? What about all those people who would never even THINK of playing an MMORPG because it sounds SO boring to just click and click and click to watch some numbers go up. There are people who don't play games at all because they have other interests or would rather just talk to people.
If a game in the genre departed from the mainstream I think it would have the potential to reach a vastly wider consumer base beyond the current saturated market. There are tons of people that don't want to play a game where you invest tons of time clicking to get 'better' for no apparant purpose. What about a game where you could just log in and start playing. You could go fishing in the woods, stalking elusive deer in the woods, run a little farm, kill orcs BECAUSE the farmers need you to keep them from killing the sheep. Sell the fish, sell the sheep, sell the deer-meat in the towns that some people designed and built so that these goods could support the armies that some people manage and command so that certain areas of the map are safe so that certain people can feel good about hunting/fishing/farming in peace. It's called a dynamic world and without levels people just get in there and set a goal on something they would find fun, and DO it. The most valuable resource is the PEOPLE. The more you can get to function within the diverse interactive society to furthur it the better. Sure there will be conflict in areas but there will also be stability. You have to get together and find people that have goals that contribute something and also convince others to join in and help with the management for the benefits they see. If no one works together there are no towns, no access to lots of items, no safety from the monsters. Working towards certain goals create gameplay and content automatically and support different styles of gameplay.
Just imagine logging in and finding so many things going on that you can join in on. Leave the boring work to the NPCs that some people like to manage and set players off on interesting and meaningful tasks. It would have something for everyone and has the potential to draw in many different people. I mean, the 10 year olds will still have fun receiving rewards for bashing on the goblins, but they don't have the patience to manage large towns and balance economic resources. Some people like to do that however and the 10 year olds won't even have to stop and think that the town their sell their loot in is meticulously managed by ten 30 year olds who weigh decisions and set prices and debate about policy and vote on proposals and put in effect campaigns to gather intel, establish new trade partners when political climates shift, etc. The 10 year old just knows it's a place they can buy and sell and log off in safety. That's all they care about.
Of course there will be conflicting goals but make it so that there are TONS of goals, many of which are cooperative. Most games make your goal beating everyone else. Why not make it so that one goal builds on another and makes 10 more goals possible. I want to run a town, I want to be a merchant, I want to be a crafter, I want to be a farmer. Why not build a town where farmers sell their goods to merchants who sell them elsewhere to crafters that use those items to craft in order to sell to merchants to sell to farmers so they can continue to produce items and food that supports armies tha protect towns that facillitate trade and crafting and so on and so forth. Tons of other roles that need filling are created as well.
I think THIS is the kind of world that would benefit from the suggestions in the original article and this is what we NEED to see. The market is saturated, create a NEW one says I.
The biz/marketing side does seem to exercise a lot of control over game design at large shops.
When you have to go a couple rounds with investors to attract $30-60 million for three years of development (with no return during that time), and you can see another game grossing maybe $75 million per MONTH, the pressure to "do what those guys did" has to be absolutely enormous.
So expecting seriously innovative game play from any developer funded through a major publisher is probably asking too much. The risk/reward calculation is just too large to ignore.
Unfortunately, there's also the question of "second-mover advantage" to consider. The first guy to come up with some brilliant concept often loses out to the person who watches a new industry forming, sees what the first people in the industry are doing that looks popular, and then combines the most popular features. They're not doing anything truly new; they're just doing old things in a consistent and convenient way. And that's usually the product that catches fire.
WoW did that. Now everybody want to be like WoW... except that there's no such thing as a "third-mover advantage." Doing it first gets you respect; doing it right gets you money; doing it next gets you... not much. Experience before moving on, maybe.
So even though there's financial pressure to copy WoW, the business case for doing so is not completely one-sided. I'd like to see the major publishers recognize this and start funding more innovative concepts, but it's probably not likely.
Which leaves us hoping that the indies can deliver. Attempts like Infinity are encouraging. Even so, the days of the lone programmer in a garage seem to be over. Creating a competitive MMORPG, given the difficulty of producing good server-side code, art and sound assets, and the vast amount of gameplay logic required, boosts the cost to produce way up. (And that's not even getting into the operational costs.) Not everyone can afford to quit his day job to work full-time on a homebrewed game.
The future may be in the "build-your-own-MMORPG" systems. Systems like RealmCrafter, Kaneva, or Multiverse that offer the MMORPG version of DIY kits might enable indies to compete (to some reasonable degree) with the big dogs. Or maybe not.
Maybe we just have to wait for the WoW copycats to flame out, burning away all interest in the industry for five to ten years until new developers with truly innovative concepts can rise from the ashes. Kind of a depressing thought, but it's better than the possibility that people get so sick of level-grinding games that the industry dies off entirely.
Until somebody figures out how to create a holodeck, that is.
The FP perspective is available in the vast majority of MMOPRGs, and nobody uses it becasue it sucks compared to 3rd person. But by all means, if that's the next big thing, feel free to use it in the game of your choice and have no idea what's going on around you outside of the narrow veiw feild in front of your character.
Harsh death penalties, and permadeath in particular, discourage exploration. No, it's not particularly realistic for my character to explore some cave just to see if he can get to the end without getting butchered, but it's damn fun. There is in fact a free MMORPG with permadeath:
It comleptely sucks, but if permadeath is your thing there it is. Enjoy.
If voice chat for everyone = the crap you have to put up with on X-box live, then no thanks. I much prefer the current model where you only have it with a select few that you know and trust in most games.
EVE the best game on the market? That explains why our opinions seem to differ on so many points
Still, a thought provoking read at least. I look forward to the next one
I don't want to write this, and you don't want to read it. But now it's too late for both of us.
The only guy who is more clueless than this guy is Johny Smedley, the ultimate Teddy bear of doom!
The guy want to HIDE stats. I think he don't get it. Peoples play MMO to see the evolution of their character. If you approximate your sword skill, you are not sure if you progress or not and if the devs are SoE, you are going to paranoid and think they nerf you to hell while they never change anything.
Seeing stats is a vital aspect of EVERY successfull MMO. Think of any MMO which succeed by hiding stats. None.
He brings the immersion...yes immersion CAN be a nice edge, but again it is secondary. What bring peoples back is that PROGRESSION, the stats he want to hide! If progression was not so much of a deal, than "End Game" would not be such a big deal in any game.
But no matter the game, there is always a large number of peoples who complains/ask/hope about the End Game. Heck, I think Brad McQuaid must be tired to hear me talk about raiding nonsense that should not be applied on everyone. I also believe that part of his team and SoE team understand what I say and believe like I do, that the future belong in the progression of a GROUPING or SOLOING end game.
A real time feeling is a bonus, an action setting(FPS-like) is a flaw. Game based turn would be possible if well though and not waiting on others, GalCiv II overwhelming release is a proof that GBT is far from dead, and if DDO turn away from it origin, the fanbase only grow stronger and want it more badly than ever.
As to be able to affect your environment, within acceptable limits I agree.
I am sorry for the author of this article that I disagree so badly with him, sorry if I sound brash, I figure it was better to just go out fast.
A HARD game is definitely something the majority of players want (it can have many soft spots, levels caps and so on to protect the casuals, no hardcore will care that everyone is level 10 in Crushbone, it is even funny to think to be level 10 and might bring me back there for the fun of it). Brad McQuaid got that part right. However, poor little Brad think he can put anything that is hard...that is not the case, the players want to PLAY and make FUN. Which means that raiding, boat and 45 minutes artificial travels are not acceptables for the majority of players. But that is something I don't think anyone would make him understand, which is a pity. This guy is bright and he could do masterwork...instead we would have to settle for less talented designers who can understand that and than work hard from the right roots. Brad is trying to build a Castle without having strong foundations. GROUPING and SOLOING in PvE are the center of the future of MMOs, check WoW lose all it front teeth when they release their raiding expension, and figure just how badly I will .
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren
Comments
I like the idea of virtual worlds, but I have yet to find one I actually enjoy playing. Maybe I'm just not a player. I sure seem to enjoy thinking about it though.
One thing I notice about non-fps games is that they all seem to clone the old D&D character sheet games. I certainly didn't enjoy these when they were on paper, and continue to be unimpressed by them in their digital, shade rendered excess. It just seem superfluous to me.
Also, semi-anonymity is a big draw for me as a form of realism. I don't see the point of having my name float over my head unless I hand it out. It gives me something to do to introduce two people. It makes the consequences of social faux-pas more significant when you know you can lose access to a vital social network.
Boundaries to player conflict are also a problem. Not because I want to grief everyone everywhere, but because it affects people's social habits. PvP is often a relatively "innexpensive" (sociologically, time, fauxcurrency, standing, morally, etc.) action, even a teleologically vaunted one in most games. In reality, bullets really do cost 5000 dollars when you count medical and lawyer fees. But seriously, when people know they are in potential danger from people who have put forth minimal effort to create conflict scenarios, they change their behavior. If they expect constant danger, they group up. This forms civil socieities, and those lead to complex layers of interaction that the players themselves develop and implement. The weak flock to the strong and social hierarchy or interdependence forms. The trick is making the strong dependent upon the influx of the weak.
If you provide places where people can relax and not do anything, many of them will keep doing it over and over. Downtime emerges for some, and the need to compensate often leads to development that favors the occasional gank so the adrenaline junkies don't quite bail. If you play EVE-Online, you know this already. Everyone eventually gravitates towards maximizing their advantages and minimizing their vulnerabilities which makes for a very dull game most of the time until people get so bored they become flippant about their fate. Again, if you play EVE-Online, you know about this already.
No more rant. Time to change skills.
Nathan's "future MMORPGs" points were, in nearly every case, dead on correct.
We should note that he's not going to change the minds of any developers. Those who aren't doing what he suggests have a vested interest in defending their (bad) decisions, while those who do agree with him are already (I hope!) designing the kind of game he describes.
That said, I can't resist adding a couple comments to his points, mostly because although I'm not a pro game designer, I've spent the past several months working out a design that does many of the things Nathan calls for. So writing this message lets me defend my own (possibly bad) decisions.
Immersion - Yes, please. This can't be dismissed as merely "oh, that's just stuff a few roleplayers want." Immersiveness is what makes a game world feel like it's a living place -- without it, the world feels like nothing more than a bagfull of static, one-shot quests that you do before leaving to check out a new game. A dynamic game world always leaves you wondering what will happen next.
FPS Controls - Yes again. Isometric was the past. Do first-person and you (the developer) don't have to spend time banging your head against the keyboard trying to figure out how to make a third-person camera not do stupid things. Plus there's that "little bit of extra immersiveness" thing.
Hidden Math - Yes and no. Some numbers make sense, like "how many bullets are left in this clip?" But being able to see numeric ability ratings (of PCs or mobs) doesn't make sense; it turns what ought to be an emphasis on action in the game world into Numbers Quest. It doesn't matter how much lipstick you put on grinding to level up or get some new piece of gear with fractionally better stats, it's still grinding.
Stealth - Don't even get me started on stealth gameplay in MMORPGs. They don't need to be turned into tactical simulators, but the environment (and the ability of PCs and mobs to interact with that environment) is vastly underdeveloped in most games. Spamming special actions until the other guy falls over is not "tactics." Taking advantage of cover and weather and camouflage and the whole range of electromagnetic masking and detection gear -- that, along with seriously improved mob AI, is what will really allow tactical gameplay to happen. But it'll never happen until developers take the time to think about how to instantiate the game world and all actors in it in terms of their physical properties.
PvP - Yes and no. Yes, with the emphasis that PvP is much more than whacking somebody over the head with a stick -- there are all kinds of competitive gameplay that MMORPGs ought to facilitate. But also no, in that there are also all kinds of cooperative gameplay that MMORPGs ought to facilitate. Deeper PvP isn't a problem as long as it comes with deeper cooperative gameplay as well.
Player-based economy - Absolutely. The only problem here is that you have to know that you're going to have a certain number of players. If you don't wind up with a critical mass of players, there'll be some production needs that go unmet, and the game could get a bad name that prevents it from ever attracting enough players for a fully player-based economy to work. Assuming that you can guarantee enough players, a player-based economy is unquestionably better for any game with pretensions to being a place that welcomes all kinds of players because, being an economic thing, it weasels its way into every player-to-player interaction. A working economy delivers myriad social benefits to everyone who plays the game. (Adam Smith's invisible hand strikes again!)
Voice chat - No. As noted by others, this damages immersiveness. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done. And yet, developers must address this capability somehow -- if they don't offer it in their game or implement a deliberately crippled version of it, players will just go to a third-party system. I don't have an answer to this one, so I'm listening to what other people can suggest here.
No Character Classes/Levels - 100% agreement. Where is it written that "people will only play games in which their characters can become more powerful"? Who said that? Too many developers (perhaps salivating over the $75 million/month that Vivendi/Blizzard are said to be netting from WoW) are wasting their time copying games that copied D&D's figher/cleric/wizard/thief paradigm. Enough, already! Having character levels leads inexorably to grinding. Instead of jumping right into the game and playing it, we grind, and we grind, and we grind, and for no other reason than so that someday we can start playing the game -- how nuts is that? When characters don't have levels, there's no reason to grind. You don't have to level up; you're already there and good to go. Getting rid of classes would also be good, but it's not nearly as important as letting players build complete characters from the very start.
Permanent Death - Yes... if you created a game without character levels. The reason people hate the idea of permadeath is because they've spent vast amounts of time building up a character in power (through levelling up), and they have no intention of letting all that effort go to waste. Well -- if your character doesn't have levels, and if you implement something like a "living will" system so that you don't lose all your gear when you die, then you can have permadeath. Your character goes out in a blaze of glory? Take a moment to salute, then just roll up a new character and jump right back into the action.
Finally, although it wasn't mentioned in Nathan's article, something that's been pushing me to try to create a MMORPG design of my own is the belief that too many games start with some developer's idea of necessary character roles into which actual human beings (players) must then be stuffed. I think that's backwards -- I propose looking at what people actually want to do in these games, then building game systems around those interests.
From my point of view, and guided somewhat by Richard Bartle's original four-player-types model (and David Keirsey's four-temperament model of which I believe Bartle's model is a subset), I'm designing systems that support the four main kinds of gameplay I see people trying to engage in:
Combat and commerce support competitive gameplay, socialization and exploration promote cooperative gameplay, and all four modes are balanced -- no one style will be allowed to dominate the others because all four are (in my opinion) necessary to have a game that's both fun and enduring. But if someone else can come up with three or four or seven or twenty-three specific things that players really want to do and then design a game around those things, good for them -- virtually any such approach is better than cranking out Yet Another game that copies-and-pastes D&D classes.
Overall, I'm looking forward to seeing some enterprising developer running with the ideas that Nathan spelled out in his article. Alternately, someone can lob a few million dollars in my direction and I'll do it myself.
Either way, it's long past time MMORPG designers got out of the design rut they're in and tried some crazy things, because not doing so risks turning this industry into merely another fad that had its day and then disappeared.
And that would be a shame.
--Flatfingers
Nathan wrote:
I agree. PvP should definetly be more than killing each other. We should be able to develop working relationships and partnerships with other players. Depend on each other for supplies and for sales just like we do in the real world everyday. In real life I cannot make everything I need but have to buy or trade with others who can make the item or they know where to buy from. Such player interactions and dependency would do much to stimulate immersion.
Add me to the list of those opting to NOT use voice chat in game. The keyboard is fine along with a few emotes.
Enjoyed the article.
www.shadowpool.com or www.trialsofascension.com/ (Both go to the same website :P)
Almost exactly what is described in this article,
Immersion, no con's, full-pvp, perma-death, settlement building, weather effects, seasonal effects, players effect enviroment and so on! Skill based, no swords with 20dps but just knowing its a copper sword or a steel sword!
And more!
What the article describes is what a lot of peoples started thinking even when Ultima Online started 8 years ago. This article talks more about "virtual worlds" (=>immersion and liberty) than a game (clear objectives with time being the most important factor).
Games is what every mmo is aiming at today, the sad truth is that that commercial virtual worlds will never EVER exist. I've been wanting these kind of concepts to be implemented for 8 years, here is a chronological list of games were these concepts existed:
The awakening project CANCELED
Atriarch VAPORWARE
Shadowbane UGLY, LAGGY
Mourning UGLY, LAGGY THEN CANCELED, NOW VAPORWARE AGAIN
Wish CANCELED
Trials Of Ascension VAPORWARE
Irth Online UGLY, LAGGY
Dark and Light VAPORWARE
Darkfall VAPORWARE
The chronicles VAPORWARE
I am so sad, but the concepts described in this article will never exist, the mainstream players don't want them at all. The fundings will always lack for those "virtual worlds" and they will always all be made by small teams delaying their game forever (vaporware) or will be ugly and laggy as hell. Don't ever expect to see those concepts in a nice game, EVER.
(if you want to say I'm wrong, just name ONE game that seems beautiful, not laggy, has not been delayed lots of time and implements some of these concepts)
GET A SHAVE!
I agree. I think the answer is implimenting RTS aspects into current or future games. Its possible, SOE did it, the wrong way, but they did it.
I don't know where you got your information from... you've obviously been misinformed. The Chronicle is not vaporware. Nathan Knaack used to be the community manager for Rapid Reality (the makers of The Chronicle) and it seems as though he used the ideas of The Chronicle in this article he wrote.
Just a quick note on "vaporware". They all are untill they get proper funding, and that can change with the stroke of a pen.
Perma-death. This is a troubling concept. While I'd love it in a game, at the same time it can hurt the overall game to the point of almost killing it. It has to be handled right. Let me explain. If you rate player styles 1-10, with 1 being pure PvP and 10 being pure "carebear", the a game with total perma-death is going to see all but the 1's and 2's drop out. It would start with the fact that the 9's and 10's wouldn't even buy, and then the higher numbers would drop out one after another untill all you have left in the game is the really heavy PvPers. They would of course dominate all message board activity, and before you know it, the game wouldn't even support any other play styles. The social diversity drives MMORPGs, and this would be very bad for the game in question.
Perma-death for all in a game would mean that PK guilds would dominate through the act of beating down others. Imagine you have a guild, and an enemy guild keeps attacking you to keep you down skill/level wise. You might escape for a while, but eventually they are going to get each and every one of you. It's a constant "start over" scenario. It's no fun being dominated and having no hope.
There's also the lag deaths, another reason to avoid perma-death.
But perma-death can be implemented in a way that works to support the idea of risking it all to be a true hero, elite type. That's in the high end game. If Dragons are the ultra MOB they should be (and not the tamed down version so players can play them or own them), then imagine them also being able to perm-kill your character. Risk it all, and if you win you truelly have heroism. Even in losing, that character name could go down in game lore as something special.
Voice speak, I've gone from being nuetral on it to being against it, after reaing above about having to turn it off due to foul language. It's not only that, but I can see heavy combat situations where people get really excited, and the loudness would be disruptive in my own home. On top of that, there would be those players who would spam over their mic to hamper their enemies from getting commands out, and that would leave it useless in PvP as well as just annoying.
Finally, I'll stick with my previous post about 1st person views. I don't like feeling like I have blinders on. It's great for a FPS, but not for a MMORPG.
Once upon a time....
Glad to see allot of you on the same page. And were not a verbal minority, most players just dont want to bother writing down their thoughts, but when they are in the game they complain profusely. Maybe theyre just lazy.
My linear thought process:
1) In MMOG's you control one character, when you control only 1 character you improve by leveling. PvP in current MMOG's will always remain fundamentally flawed because you have level 40's, level 100's, and level 15's mingling and the power difference between each is so incredibly massive only Ganking occurs in PvP. Developers will try to solve ganking by putting in extraneous rules like PvP limitations or penalties for Ganking, but it detracts never adds to PvP.
2) Removing levels wont work, whats the point of playing a game when you never improve your character.
3) Real Time Strategy games lets you control hundreds of NPC warrios and NPC hunter/gatherers.
4) Whallah, the character you play is the Heroe (like Thrall in Warcraft 3, and Alexander The Great in Empire Earth), and you can have many NPC hirelings doing your bidding. No more manually mining, no more manually doing the fighting unless you really want to.
5) You improve your status not by leveling and gaining leet gear, you improve by empire building, on a somewhat smaller scale then regular RTS games because servers couldnt handle 10 million buildings, and 50 million NPC soldiers running around.
How id darkfallonline vaporware when it is almost going public beta.
And Trials of Ascension, meh, chances are there but knowing these i sincerely doubt they'd waste 5 year of their life like that =p
Excellent article! I enjoyed it so much I emailed it to many of my friends. The only point I have a slight hesitation to accept is permadeath but I agree that a Death Penalty should be more significant than it is now. I really miss the adrenaline from many of my FPS that would force me to take a break from the game cause I was so intense:) If that made an entrance into the game genre that would be a wonderful thing!
I am going to be lazy and just repost what I wrote on my site when pointing my readers over to Nathan's column so forgive me if some of it reads a little different:
Recently MMORPG.com released their next installment of Nathan Knaack's weekly "Outside the Box" column. Here's a snippet:
Now, I won't lie (or I try not to... I am a Community Manager, too, you know!), I'm not really sure who Nathan Knaack is. Doing some websearches I can see him linked to Eve and some freelance writing but that's about it. I will say, I do agree with a lot he has written in his latest column, though.
His first point out of the gate has to do with immersion and I competely agree with his assessment there. One of the things I love about Shadowbane (and originally drew me to the game) was how the players could actually change the face of the game world. Almost all of the cities there were placed by players and many of them were also torn down by players. Players need to have more of a hand in shaping the world, not just in placing structures but determining the outcome of not only PvP situations but PvE. How many times have you wandered by Orc Camp X to see the exact same guards out there, standing in the exact same spot, in the middle of a forest? You can go there any time of the day, any time of the year, and know those Orcs will be there, ready to feed you experience. Wouldn't it be more entertaining that if you destroyed that Orc Camp, it would disappear? Perhaps it would appear later... maybe a week or more later... but what if that forest had a variety of points in it and later that night some Orcs venture back in and start a little campfire with only a few Orcs there. No one bothers them so the camp fire becomes a few hunts and the Orcs triple. But another day goes by and it becomes a full camp, and so on and so forth until players go there and stop those Orcs. To me, while I know the Orcs may be back someday, it would feel like I accomplished something. I didn't stand around Camp X and just continue killing them and then wait for them to respawn. I killed them and they are gone. At least for now.
And there are a variety of other things you could do to add "immersion". Just off the top of my head, what if you were in the snowy lands and you might take cold damage over and over again until you put on some armor that protects you from the cold or someone puts a spell on you? What if it was raining and it actually limited your range of sight and reduced the effectiveness of fire-based spells? What if running up a hill is slower than running down one? What if shopkeepers and the sort went to bed or had different responses based on the time of day? The environment can go a long way in immersing a player to make them think they are in a game world.
FPS controls are a great idea, too. That said, as a player, I would also like to keep my 3rd Person camera. I First Person Cam cannot truly duplicate pheriferal vision and things of that nature at this point and, when in a large-scale combat, it's nice to see what is going on just around you. I'd disagree on the part of MMO players just sitting there while the FPS crowd is all over the place (in their chairs). I know many times I have been PvPing in a variety of MMOs and found myself doing the same thing when I play a FPS. The difference is you tend to get surprised more when fighting against other players than AI in MMOs (many FPS games seem to get away with AI that has more depth).
Now, I know some players would cry if we took away some of the numbers they see when fighting. I mean, how can I pick a sword if I don't know that my Katana has a DPS of 23.7 while that longsword only has 23.1. I mean, come on now! But, truth be told, there is a lot of that information I would like to take away. The hardcore players who want to know this information will figure it out themselves. I remember in Ultima Online when players had spreadsheets of information they gathered on various weapons they would use and what their skill levels would be.
Does the grind kill MMOs? That is a highly debated point. I'm not quite on the fence but can see the necessary evil behind it. With that said, I sit more in the Skill-Based camp but I would rather do a hybrid system between the two. I would like players to have the ability to learn a skill and maximize it no matter what "Level" they are. I also hate the idea of friends of different Levels not being able to successfully level together. There are easy designs to fix this problem but since the release of Everquest (or you could argue various MUDs), many have not wanted to go against the grain.
I cannot agree more on the fact that next generation MMOs will have to focus more on every aspect of PvP. Some games won't, especially those that are not based in PvP and there will be games like that since there is a segment of players who enjoy strictly PvE. But those that do go the route of PvP will have to go deeper. And, in my opinoin, deeper definitely means a political system as well as territorial control.
Voice Chat; I disagree that it needs to be implemented in MMOs. If you are talking about "immersion", the moment that "Lady Morte" sounds like a 30-year old male truck driver will break that immersion. That said, I think there needs to be definite plugins or mods to support these. Wouldn't it be nice of games like WoW or Shadowbane or Guild Wars had an interface that worked with Teamspeak, Ventrillo, and Xfire? Give me the option to use the voice chat programs my guild uses but I doubt my wanting to hear people I am in a pick-up group with.
Permadeath, not really something I want to touch with a ten-foot pole. Do I think it would make an interesting bullet point for the marketers to use? Yes. Do I think there is probably design implementations around the harshness usually associated with the term? Yes. Of course, I also believe that many of the people claiming to want such a feature would be the first to hate it once they experience it. I'd just have to see someone do it right to see if it could be done right.
All in all, the MMO market is a fairly new one. There is a lot of growth still to be done in this industry. Some of us have found the candy that others have made and added a chocolate cover shell around it. But it is time for some innovation. Not every MMO needs to fulfill every niche. It would be nice if a game game out saying "This is what we are and this is what we're sticking to". Developers can make a much more solid game sticking to 10 or so keypoints instead of trying to be the Jack of all Trades.
Anyhow, those are my thoughts. Definitely check out the article, though: The Future of MMORPGs: From tomorrow on All bets are off
Sean "Ashen Temper" Dahlberg
http://www.seandahlberg.com/
Like most people I agree with everything except for "global teamspeak" - i think that teamspeak can work, but...
* You can only hear people who are talking who are near you. The technology is already there... when i play my single player RPGS and i turn left, my right speaker stays the same but my left speaker gets quieter...why not as i move away from someone using teamspeak their volume (to me) goes down?
Permadeath - Hehehe, the chronicle NAILED this. Two character types :
Main : You can achieve the highest level of stats ( not a level based game ) You can start guilds, build cities, and pretty much all that other stuff. BUT IF YOU GET KILLED BY ANOTHER MAIN, or A MOB, you are gone for good 90% ish of the time. They talk about a second chance system ( very logical : if you get killed by wolves, they eat you. but if goblins knock you out and take you back to their camp, you can talk your way out, fight your way out, or just sit there until they cook you.)
Regular : You can never be permenently killed. You can never STATISTICALLY advance to the same level as mains, but you can kill them. you aren't "gimped" because most of the combat relies on FPS-like twitch combat.
See ? permadeath is a risk you can take. and if you're feeling like a pathetic regular who can never be as good as a main, take one on at no risk
The biggest problem with permadeath is this: Other players. The moment a player finds a "tactic" or exploit that lets them permanently kill another player, the CSR Team will really know what the bottom of the pit looks like. Think of the complaints players have had when they lose a single item due to a bug or exploit. Then think of that but losing an entire character.
Until a game is completely hack-proof and every single angle has been covered, permadeath will become a griefing tactic and, while the company will probably fix the issue, innovate players will find another way and cause more and more CSR nightmares.
I'd love to see it done right and perhaps The Chronicle has it right. We will only have to wait and see. But it is a dangerous bed to make.
Sean "Ashen Temper" Dahlberg
http://www.seandahlberg.com/
hi
man i made a awsome post last nigth but guess it nevrr posted, but in a nutshell I said:
all the concepts you speak of, but the FPS issue , and global teamspeak are in a game allready, its EVE ONLINE.
over 20 years of mmorpg's and counting...
great article. agreed with the vast majority of your thoughts.
Guild Wars 2 is my religion
I thought I'd have more reactions to my previous post, I guess everyone thought I was a troll but I was being serious.
The question I was asking basically was: since the dawn of mmorpgs, why does traditional everquest-likes games can get nice graphics, minimal lag and a huge player base while games with innovative ideas such as the ones posted in this articles are always done by small teams, with low fundings, and end up being ugly, laggy, have a small player base, and see delays after delays during their development?
I don't see why the writer of this article consider his ideas as new: they were all debated on the Ultima Online forums 8 years ago...and they haven't been implemented in any major game yet. I don't think they ever will.
edit: I'm particularely talking about getting rid of the class-level-grind system, seeing no math on the screen, and changing the environement here.
I wouldn't be suprised if the next fairly-successful, yet different than the EQ-esque games, becomes the new EQ. Where games copy off of it for a while until one company (probably Blizzard
) makes the ultimate-version of that.
I don't think developers are agianst creating great, new games, but the publishers (the guys paying the millions for it to be made) want something with the least risk of failure, so they've been going the tried-and-true route.
On a similar topic to the article - I'm curious, what sort of death system (besides perma-death) would you guys like for a fairly-realistic RP-focused game? I've been thinking about how to go about such a game but can't come up with a death system that 'fits'.
I was thinking like you miber, I thought new games would be forced to be completely different from The Everquest-likes because Wow is the ultimate version of this type of games....then I tried the two next mmorpg that are going to be released: DD Online and Auto Assault, and they are the exact same leveling grind as the games before them. I don't believe Wow will change the market anymore, WoW IS the market, and until the end of its life cycle (5 years or more) every other game will only try to copy it.
I personally would like players to die A LOT less in mmorpg. Death should be something extreme that happens very scarcely. Most of the time, players should just be knocked out just enough time for other players or mobs to loot them and go away. When they die, something should happen to ensure that they don't come back to the battlefield for a looong time (preferably not until the battle is over).Debuff is not the right way to do it, I believe something were death players are more active should be better. For example being in a death realm and having to find your way out (some kind of maze were the exits randomly change position). Friendly players could resurrect you or bring your corpse to a temple to be resurrected to bring you back from the death realm immediately.
I still believe that to make death something important, permadeath should happen. I really like Trials Of Ascension's idea of permadeath happening after a fixed number of death (something like a 100), and the fact that an artifact can be kept from your character to have something left of him.
I think there are a couple forces at work that keep many games in the same grain as others. Granted, some publishers will push developers to emulate the latest "hot", which makes sense in their world. Many publishers look at it from a busines standpoint and not a "cool game" standpoint. They see games like Everquest and World or Warcraft with their large subscription numbers and basically owning their own money printing machines and wonder how they can get that for their company.
But, it's not just the publishers. Every game developer I have met is a gamer too. And the thing is that while the publishers may be looking at the numbers of the latest "hawt", the developers are playing it. If it is a game they like, which it probably is if they are playing it, ideas and concepts will get stuck in their head and they will consciously or subconsciously emulate those designs and ideas in their very own projects. I've been guilty of the same and have made it a point to try and look at what I'm doing and see if it's original or just a rehash.
And sometimes a rehash of certain systems is not a bad thing. If the wheel isn't broken, you don't necessarily have to reinvent it. The thing is to find a few key points in your game that make it different from other games and concentrate on that. Your entire game doesn't have to be completely different game, it just has to have a good idea of what it is and concentrate on that.
Of course, this is all just my opinion
Sean "Ashen Temper" Dahlberg
http://www.seandahlberg.com/
Two comments I have seen recently seem like they should be addressed.
It has been said that: Developers keep doing the same copy-cat games cuz that's what sells
AND
It has been said : Most of the players want this type of game and don't want any of these new ideas.
Well IF that is true (though I suspect at least some of those players want something different) then FORGET about those players. There are PLENTY of games with leveling and grinding and classes and contrived quests and no immersion and no death penalty and no dynamics. The market is saturated with them.......or IS IT? The current market caters to them because the design and those that like it are more or less reciprocal.
What about all those in these forums that are dissillusioned with the current trend? What about all those people who would never even THINK of playing an MMORPG because it sounds SO boring to just click and click and click to watch some numbers go up. There are people who don't play games at all because they have other interests or would rather just talk to people.
If a game in the genre departed from the mainstream I think it would have the potential to reach a vastly wider consumer base beyond the current saturated market. There are tons of people that don't want to play a game where you invest tons of time clicking to get 'better' for no apparant purpose. What about a game where you could just log in and start playing. You could go fishing in the woods, stalking elusive deer in the woods, run a little farm, kill orcs BECAUSE the farmers need you to keep them from killing the sheep. Sell the fish, sell the sheep, sell the deer-meat in the towns that some people designed and built so that these goods could support the armies that some people manage and command so that certain areas of the map are safe so that certain people can feel good about hunting/fishing/farming in peace. It's called a dynamic world and without levels people just get in there and set a goal on something they would find fun, and DO it. The most valuable resource is the PEOPLE. The more you can get to function within the diverse interactive society to furthur it the better. Sure there will be conflict in areas but there will also be stability. You have to get together and find people that have goals that contribute something and also convince others to join in and help with the management for the benefits they see. If no one works together there are no towns, no access to lots of items, no safety from the monsters. Working towards certain goals create gameplay and content automatically and support different styles of gameplay.
Just imagine logging in and finding so many things going on that you can join in on. Leave the boring work to the NPCs that some people like to manage and set players off on interesting and meaningful tasks. It would have something for everyone and has the potential to draw in many different people. I mean, the 10 year olds will still have fun receiving rewards for bashing on the goblins, but they don't have the patience to manage large towns and balance economic resources. Some people like to do that however and the 10 year olds won't even have to stop and think that the town their sell their loot in is meticulously managed by ten 30 year olds who weigh decisions and set prices and debate about policy and vote on proposals and put in effect campaigns to gather intel, establish new trade partners when political climates shift, etc. The 10 year old just knows it's a place they can buy and sell and log off in safety. That's all they care about.
Of course there will be conflicting goals but make it so that there are TONS of goals, many of which are cooperative. Most games make your goal beating everyone else. Why not make it so that one goal builds on another and makes 10 more goals possible. I want to run a town, I want to be a merchant, I want to be a crafter, I want to be a farmer. Why not build a town where farmers sell their goods to merchants who sell them elsewhere to crafters that use those items to craft in order to sell to merchants to sell to farmers so they can continue to produce items and food that supports armies tha protect towns that facillitate trade and crafting and so on and so forth. Tons of other roles that need filling are created as well.
I think THIS is the kind of world that would benefit from the suggestions in the original article and this is what we NEED to see. The market is saturated, create a NEW one says I.
IronOre - Forging the Future
The biz/marketing side does seem to exercise a lot of control over game design at large shops.
When you have to go a couple rounds with investors to attract $30-60 million for three years of development (with no return during that time), and you can see another game grossing maybe $75 million per MONTH, the pressure to "do what those guys did" has to be absolutely enormous.
So expecting seriously innovative game play from any developer funded through a major publisher is probably asking too much. The risk/reward calculation is just too large to ignore.
Unfortunately, there's also the question of "second-mover advantage" to consider. The first guy to come up with some brilliant concept often loses out to the person who watches a new industry forming, sees what the first people in the industry are doing that looks popular, and then combines the most popular features. They're not doing anything truly new; they're just doing old things in a consistent and convenient way. And that's usually the product that catches fire.
WoW did that. Now everybody want to be like WoW... except that there's no such thing as a "third-mover advantage." Doing it first gets you respect; doing it right gets you money; doing it next gets you... not much. Experience before moving on, maybe.
So even though there's financial pressure to copy WoW, the business case for doing so is not completely one-sided. I'd like to see the major publishers recognize this and start funding more innovative concepts, but it's probably not likely.
Which leaves us hoping that the indies can deliver. Attempts like Infinity are encouraging. Even so, the days of the lone programmer in a garage seem to be over. Creating a competitive MMORPG, given the difficulty of producing good server-side code, art and sound assets, and the vast amount of gameplay logic required, boosts the cost to produce way up. (And that's not even getting into the operational costs.) Not everyone can afford to quit his day job to work full-time on a homebrewed game.
The future may be in the "build-your-own-MMORPG" systems. Systems like RealmCrafter, Kaneva, or Multiverse that offer the MMORPG version of DIY kits might enable indies to compete (to some reasonable degree) with the big dogs. Or maybe not.
Maybe we just have to wait for the WoW copycats to flame out, burning away all interest in the industry for five to ten years until new developers with truly innovative concepts can rise from the ashes. Kind of a depressing thought, but it's better than the possibility that people get so sick of level-grinding games that the industry dies off entirely.
Until somebody figures out how to create a holodeck, that is.
--Flatfingers
The FP perspective is available in the vast majority of MMOPRGs, and nobody uses it becasue it sucks compared to 3rd person. But by all means, if that's the next big thing, feel free to use it in the game of your choice and have no idea what's going on around you outside of the narrow veiw feild in front of your character.
Harsh death penalties, and permadeath in particular, discourage exploration. No, it's not particularly realistic for my character to explore some cave just to see if he can get to the end without getting butchered, but it's damn fun. There is in fact a free MMORPG with permadeath:
MANGBAND
It comleptely sucks, but if permadeath is your thing there it is. Enjoy.
If voice chat for everyone = the crap you have to put up with on X-box live, then no thanks. I much prefer the current model where you only have it with a select few that you know and trust in most games.
EVE the best game on the market? That explains why our opinions seem to differ on so many points
Still, a thought provoking read at least. I look forward to the next one
I don't want to write this, and you don't want to read it. But now it's too late for both of us.
I am sorry to say that but...
The only guy who is more clueless than this guy is Johny Smedley, the ultimate Teddy bear of doom!
The guy want to HIDE stats. I think he don't get it. Peoples play MMO to see the evolution of their character. If you approximate your sword skill, you are not sure if you progress or not and if the devs are SoE, you are going to paranoid and think they nerf you to hell while they never change anything.
Seeing stats is a vital aspect of EVERY successfull MMO. Think of any MMO which succeed by hiding stats. None.
He brings the immersion...yes immersion CAN be a nice edge, but again it is secondary. What bring peoples back is that PROGRESSION, the stats he want to hide! If progression was not so much of a deal, than "End Game" would not be such a big deal in any game.
But no matter the game, there is always a large number of peoples who complains/ask/hope about the End Game. Heck, I think Brad McQuaid must be tired to hear me talk about raiding nonsense that should not be applied on everyone. I also believe that part of his team and SoE team understand what I say and believe like I do, that the future belong in the progression of a GROUPING or SOLOING end game.
A real time feeling is a bonus, an action setting(FPS-like) is a flaw. Game based turn would be possible if well though and not waiting on others, GalCiv II overwhelming release is a proof that GBT is far from dead, and if DDO turn away from it origin, the fanbase only grow stronger and want it more badly than ever.
As to be able to affect your environment, within acceptable limits I agree.
I am sorry for the author of this article that I disagree so badly with him, sorry if I sound brash, I figure it was better to just go out fast.
A HARD game is definitely something the majority of players want (it can have many soft spots, levels caps and so on to protect the casuals, no hardcore will care that everyone is level 10 in Crushbone, it is even funny to think to be level 10 and might bring me back there for the fun of it). Brad McQuaid got that part right. However, poor little Brad think he can put anything that is hard...that is not the case, the players want to PLAY and make FUN. Which means that raiding, boat and 45 minutes artificial travels are not acceptables for the majority of players. But that is something I don't think anyone would make him understand, which is a pity. This guy is bright and he could do masterwork...instead we would have to settle for less talented designers who can understand that and than work hard from the right roots. Brad is trying to build a Castle without having strong foundations. GROUPING and SOLOING in PvE are the center of the future of MMOs, check WoW lose all it front teeth when they release their raiding expension, and figure just how badly I will
.
- "If I understand you well, you are telling me until next time. " - Ren