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General: Blog Spotlight: We're All Orcs?
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
In this week's Community Blog Spotlight, Laura Genender takes a look at a blog that asks what ever happened to feeling special and different in an MMORPG?
This week while browsing the blog, user jesad’s newest entry in “In My Understanding” caught my eye. Titled We’re All Orcs, this post immediately aroused my attention. Last I checked, I’m a human cleric, and anyone calling me an orc is in for a bludgeoning!
Luckily, jesad wasn’t really calling me an orc, he was making a point: we’re all the same. The allure of fantasy and RPGs is in character progression – not just levels, but the ability for us to play the part of farm boy-turned-hero. We want to be The One mentioned in prophecy, the undiscovered blood of royalty, the savior of the universe. In online games though, we are confined by level caps, class restrictions, and competition. My cleric is no more a hero than the other 7 clerics in my guild, who all have (or want) the same gear, spells, and abilities. We’re no different than the Orcs we slaughter.
But as much as I’d love to be the hero of Lineage II or EVE Online, I’m just one subscriber out of hundreds of thousands. Giving players special advantages or events is actually somewhat possible in the MMO model: we want to be heroes, not supporting characters, and there can only be one hero. The modern solution to this is instances – developers are letting us affect the world around us and be the hero in our own private little scripted area. But honestly – we’re not stupid. We all know that everyone else is running that same instance and being told the same nonsense about being “the one” the world has been waiting for. We know that our effect on the world ends when we zone back out into shared areas. We don’t want NPCs to tell us how much we matter – we want it to be true.
Read it all here.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
This article made an excellent point and provided a nice cold dose of reality about MMORPGs. It reminds me of the hypocrisy that frequently can be seen from MMORPG players.
Many keep moaning about wanting to be resposible for world-changing events in a MMORPG, but what they never mention is that THEY want to be the ones to cause the world change events as though they were heroes in a single player RPG. People complaining for this kind of content never consider the idea that they may be the ones relegated to the role of a minor, faceless extra.
Developers have to consider that because they have to balance their resources and compare that to the value of what they produce as the article points out. Wasting time building a roller coaster for 70 people that can only be ridden ONE time is pretty much worthless when you have thousands of people coming into your amusement park expecting to get something worth their money.
The hypocrisy comes when developers do the only thing that can to satisfy these complainers and use Instancing. Then they complain that they're not in a MASSIVE multiplayer game anymore.
You can't have both. You can't be in a Massive Multiplayer game and still be a unique, precious snowflake who is the savior of the world. There are different games that provide for each of these kind of experiences, the OP's article points out nicely that MMORPGs should do what they do best and not try to be single player RPGs.
Asheron's Call did it...and they did it well. Every month a new content patch was downloaded and advanced a world spanning story line that most all players could become a part of in one way or another. Heck, they even changed the landscape to match the changing seasons in time with the real world (towns would be covered in snow in the winter, trees would change color in the fall).
I remember logging in one day and entering a town that had been completely burned down the night before. It was apart of some story arc involving elemental demons, but I was just so shocked that they had freaking smoked a whole town just to advance the story. It made me wonder, "What's gonna happen next?"
In most games, I know whats gonna happen next... well, at least till some yearly expansion comes out that I have to shell extra money out for. When I read a book, I don't know whats going to happen in the next chapter, and real life is never a for sure thing either, so I don't understand why developers will make games that have more predictablity then a 9-5 job and call them fun.
We need a sandbox, we need dynamic world-evolving content, we need a fresh new tack on fantasy-based fiction.
We need change.
.....................................
...but time flows like a river...
...and history repeats...
-Leader of "The Fighting Irish" in DAoC on Hib/Kay-
I'm not sure if the writer is familiar with real life or not, but in real life, more than one person can be a hero. What about the thousands of hero's that fight and die for our country? What about the hundreds of Fire Fighters and Policemen who died in 9/11. More than one person can be a hero, period.
In a MMORPG, hero's are born the same way as in real life. If you aren't heroic in real life, don't expect to magically become one in a game either. In a game, you may become a hero by leading a siege against the enemy and winning. Or you may become a hero by being reknown for your skill in battle, with your trade, or by your knowledge of the world around you.
There are true hero's in MMORPG's and everyone has an equal chance to become one, you just have to put forth the effort and have what it takes.
I will use DAoC for an example. A charasmatic person just showed up in the battlegrounds on battleground chat. He sees that we are getting are butts whipped, not because we don't have the numbers, but because we won't unite under one leader. He takes on the almost impossible task of getting people to listen to one man (himself), rallies the forces, and takes the center keep. That character just became a hero to all that was there that day. The next time he steps into any chat channel, people will remember him for that victory. Next time they are in the BG's or even RvR and they don't have a leader and they see him, he will be asked to lead or people will follow him without the grief he received the first time. I can come up with more examples in other games with PvE. There are people out there that do great things, who are self-less, and are known for it. You only have yourself to blame for not being one of them.
Sure, the developers can script a story with you at the center and script the mobs to be easy enough for you to succeed, but do you really feel like a hero beating something that was designed to lose to you?
MMORPG's w/ Max level characters: DAoC, SWG, & WoW
Currently Playing: WAR
Preferred Playstyle: Roleplay/adventurous, in a sandbox game.
The heroes of MMOs are not the ones that defeat the dragon that stands between them and the helpless virgin princess. The heroes are those players that organize and lead their fellow players to big accomplishment or world changing events. This takes dedication, social and organizational skills and a thorough understanding of the mechanics of the game. A quick browse through the forums will show the acknowledgement these players get for their achievements. Most of us will always be orcs (including me
), but some are or will become more than that. That’s for the players to accomplish and not for the devs to implement.
I think the biggest problem with todays MMORPG is that everyone does the same quests and grinds for the same items. There needs to be dynamic quests, where your choice in one quest affects the next quest you get. As you go through the game and complete hundreds of quests, there could be literaly thousands of different quest combos. However this would pose a huge task for the development team. If everyone is doing there own quests, how do you do group quests? You can make it so that group quests are independent of this quest system.
I also favor random item drop to stop item grinding. This would truly make your character unique as all items would be 100% random.
MMOCrunch
A very good article! It sums up nicely the predicament developers and subseqently gamers find themselves in and is one of the reasons new MMORPGs all seem so very "samey".
With budgets for AAA titles exploding and MMOs being even more expensive to produce and maintain, games have to be mass-marketable to be financially successful. In order to satisfy the more hardcore gamers, you must include heavy grinding and PvP. For the more care-bear oriented, RP-Servers, crafting and much social interaction is required. And of course, everything in between. The result is a potentially well executed and poilished, but essentially unremarkable game - another WoW clone, some might say.
This theme continues in the story line. It all comes down to spending the buck in the most efficient way. Sure you could devote many developer hours to one-time events, but only a few players actually get to experience it. I would even suggest that this creates more animosity among the players left out as it does goodwill among the participants.
I remember a very heated forum discussion when the Gates of AQ (WoW) were opened by a guild sometime after midnight. For those unfamiliar, this is a so-called world event and can only happen once per server. Prerequisites have to be met and plenty of farming is required to perform this feat. The players of this server were positively outraged that a guild had simply opened the gates without announcing it first, so that people could witness this event. I can see why.
I think however, that there a some simple things that can heighten the players sense of importance in a game. Visual recognition of a player's deeds perhaps, like medals, statues or titles. Maybe a special dye set for the player's armour or a street or landmark named after him or her. For sure, these things still won't reach every single player but there is a lot of reputable stuff to go around. Spellborn was (not sure if that's still in the cards) striving towards that by making the first time some goal was achieved a server wide event. Rewarding the guild or group involved with some - mostly cosmetic but very visible - server-wide recognition. It's amazing what players will do to distinguish themselves, even if these goodies do not confer skill boni or special powers.
To the MMODAD above me: I prefer my games to be just that: games. I don't need real life to dictate what should or should not be done in a game. However, i do appreciate your paragraph about the charismatic general. Having played Planetside for some time, this phenomenon was very visible with some faction leaders being able to coordinate a planetwide attack and being well liked and admired for it.
Maybe in the future, some sort of MMO 2.0 will also help. With user developed content becoming available all the time the world might become so huge that it's simply not possible to "do" every dungeon or quest. Thus, every hero's career would be slightly differnent with different achievements and a unique story to be told.
In Lineage II, there is a system that's actually called the Hero systems - players participate in a best-of-the-best style dueling match, and the best of each class is made a hero. There are over 30 classes. On each server, there are over 30 heroes. But there are still thousands of players, and that's limiting content to a very small group.
This article was dealing with gameplay and how developers create systems for us to be heroes; I do not deny that a player can become a hero through social interaction or their own creative use of the game systems.
Real life is also very different from the game world in terms of expectations and availability. If you don't like the game world you are in, you can leave it and find another with little cost besides time. If you don't like real life...well, there really aren't any settled alternatives
Real-life is a space we occupy by neccesity; games are a form of entertainment that we enter for the purpose of being a hero, being the best and interacting with the community. If games are not achieving an expectation, that expectation needs to change or the games do to succeed.
The problem with dynamic quest content is that, at our current stage of technology, you end up with quests like "Go kill fifteen bunnies and bring me their feet" followed by "Go kill seven boars and bring me their left eyes." In short, we get a machine that spews out different numbers, creatures and bodyparts. Creating a fully dynamic quest system is something that I believe will require more technology, more experience, and more gamestorming.
Ah - user generated content
the problem with that is: what if a user makes a super small dungeon and easy quest with a 10000 XP reward? Quests would need either to be prizeless or dev-approved; with the former option, we'd take the progression out of RPGs. With the latter, I'm sure SOME slick kid would sneak an exploit map past the developers 
Laura "Taera" Genender
Community Manager
MMORPG.com
Excellent write-up Laura,
Since I bitched about your previous blog spotlight, I should do the opposite when you get it right.. very well written piece
Thanks Net
I read your complaints and tried to adjust; good to see this is more well received.
Laura "Taera" Genender
Community Manager
MMORPG.com
Im right there with you. When I played the Shadow War was just begining the shadow towers floated across the land. Arwic was a crater in the ground an entire town in the desert suffered the same fate. In the after math though I did not get to fight in the nexus. I saw the fallen shadow towers in the ground. Long after the shadow war was over the remains of the event shaped the world that we played in.
Saddly you do not see anything nearly as good in any MMO today. Sure I might not stop the evil overlord but if my home town is razed to the ground, it lets me know that the world does change and that player do have an effect in the world. I don't mind supporting the heros as long as the world changes from thier success or failure.
Come on developers don't be lazy hange your worlds once in a while.
Asheron's Call, Champions Online, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE Online, EverQuest, Lineage 2, Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft.Waiting for SWTOR
Im right there with you. When I played the Shadow War was just begining the shadow towers floated across the land. Arwic was a crater in the ground an entire town in the desert suffered the same fate. In the after math though I did not get to fight in the nexus. I saw the fallen shadow towers in the ground. Long after the shadow war was over the remains of the event shaped the world that we played in.
Saddly you do not see anything nearly as good in any MMO today. Sure I might not stop the evil overlord but if my home town is razed to the ground, it lets me know that the world does change and that player do have an effect in the world. I don't mind supporting the heros as long as the world changes from thier success or failure.
Come on developers don't be lazy hange your worlds once in a while.
Think about the assets involved in a town, and razing that town, in Asheron's Call versus modern MMOs. How much more art, music, quests etc. would need to be fixed in EQII as opposed to AC?
Laura "Taera" Genender
Community Manager
MMORPG.com
Lets say they raze Ashtranar in WOW. Its important to night elves reaching lvl 20.
It would need to be an important event to raze a town. So they would pre plan the after math.
Quest NPCs could be replaced with new NPCs, or the old NPCs having returned after the towns destruction. Some old quests could be replaced with quests that would help in the reconstruction or the protection of the ruins of the town could be added and then linked back into existing quest chains.
This would give the feelin that things change in the world.
These events would not happen, willy nilly and, would need to be part of large story archs.
As for art and textures most games use template buildings and many of thier templates buildings have dupilicate destroyed versions of the same buildings that could be substitude in a weekly/ monthly patch.
Again this is not something you slap together it would be part of an ongoing story arc that would have consequences in the world. Those events even if not particapated by everyone will give the illusion that one is playing in a changing growing world.
That is what a MMO should be. Is it more work? YES.
Would it grab the immaginations of the players likely.
It can be done. It is the matter of the will of the developers ,and those who provide the money.
Asheron's Call, Champions Online, Dark Age of Camelot, EVE Online, EverQuest, Lineage 2, Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft.Waiting for SWTOR
This is why you shouldn't play PvE games, only thru skilful PvP in an mmorpg with a decent combat system will you be a hero. I still remember the best players several years ago, and who would win the PvP tournaments.
MMO enviroments => stupid and static
MMO PvP gods => clever and dynamic
Im right there with you. When I played the Shadow War was just begining the shadow towers floated across the land. Arwic was a crater in the ground an entire town in the desert suffered the same fate. In the after math though I did not get to fight in the nexus. I saw the fallen shadow towers in the ground. Long after the shadow war was over the remains of the event shaped the world that we played in.
Saddly you do not see anything nearly as good in any MMO today. Sure I might not stop the evil overlord but if my home town is razed to the ground, it lets me know that the world does change and that player do have an effect in the world. I don't mind supporting the heros as long as the world changes from thier success or failure.
Come on developers don't be lazy hange your worlds once in a while.
Think about the assets involved in a town, and razing that town, in Asheron's Call versus modern MMOs. How much more art, music, quests etc. would need to be fixed in EQII as opposed to AC?
If I am remembering correctly, they didn't actually "raze" the town. It only appeared to be razed. What they did was to make the town structures null statements on the servers and replaced them with the smoking hole textures.
Essentially it was what they did when they created the monument to the Shard of the Herald defenders on Thistledown after the devs had to step in to defeat them in order to progress the storyline, except with some minor alterations. The monument they created exists on every server, but is only visible and can only be interacted with on Thistledown.
So essentially, you lose zero assets in the process. All of the assets, their placement, textures, etc., still "exist" in the game world. You simply remove all of the coding that allows the player to see or interact with it by nulling that code block (so you don't even have to even remove the code for the city) and place a new texture.
You can even replicate the town being rebuilt by moving statements outside of the null to show one or two interactive buildings at a time. Add in some minor NPC population with dialog about returning to X town, and there you have it.
As far as adding art, music, models, etc., the vast majority of that content already exists. It would take relatively few tweaks to modify existing character models to pass information to the players. For quests, you just have to have the tools in place to script it and assign your actors, which are essential to any MMO regardless of how dynamic it is.
If the system is designed with that intent, it would be easy to implement. In the end, I think it really does boil down to how much work the developer is willing to invest. It requires maintaining a believable and evolving storyline and coordinating that storyline with all of the assets required to bring it about. Maintaining that kind of progression over the long-term life of a MMO can be a drain on everyone, particularly the writers involved. Which is why so many MMOs follow the expansion model. Trying to deliver that kind of content on a monthly basis is obviously difficult, although CoX manages to do something like that every three-five months.
From what I have seen and experienced, few studios actually develop robust tools to make accomplishing rapid content additions easy. They tend to focus completely on the development using whatever tools are available, without creating a toolset that allows rapid development and deployment. Take a look at the NeverWinter nights Aurora toolset; that is an example of what every studio should develop in-house first. The complexity of models and the game environment doesn't forego the ability to modify their appearance rapidly or to assign sounds, dialog and events to NPCs and locations. The developers simply need to create the tools that allow them to do that.
Abbatoir / Abbatoir Cinq
Adnihilo
Beorn Judge's Edge
Somnulus
Perfect Black
----------------------
Asheron's Call / Asheron's Call 2
Everquest / Everquest 2
Anarchy Online
Shadowbane
Dark Age of Camelot
Star Wars Galaxies
Matrix Online
World of Warcraft
Guild Wars
City of Heroes
Being the "hero" in MMOs is what you make of it. Since we all CAN get the same items, do the same raids, have the same build..it is what we do with that that will make us heroes.
To illustrate my point:
I have a lvl 70 shaman in World of Warcraft. I have played the game since the day it went live, I obtained the PvP rank of High Warlord (back when that was going on) done all the raids, have some great gear.
That is not what makes me a hero, because others have done the same. What makes me a hero is when I get a tell out of nowhere that says...Just wanted to thank you again for the help you gave me when I was lvl 10.
This comming for a lvl 70 mage. Or the time when the cross-roads is getting attacked all a cry goes out from the horde questing there for some help..and after my name is broadcast in that zone talking how I ran off the invaders.
Standing out in MMOs is all about what YOU make of it. For me it is that people remember me for being a Hero to them, for something I did to help them, not because I am carrying The Sword of Thousand Truths.
I was a pre-cu jedi in star wars galaxies. I unlocked my jedi during the hologrind a month or two before lightspeed came out. In real life I coach high school football so during the next few months play time was very limited. Then right after Christmas of that year I bought a new house and moved. It took four months to get cable internet so I could play galaxies and use my jedi. Once I got back to the game an was finally able to get a few skill boxes in jedi I realized that the class was special.
Sure by that time there were a lot of jedi. The village had openned and the path was some what easier as you no longer had to guess your next profession, I unlocked on my 29th profession mastered, but I was proud of the accomplishment. I was a decent jedi by the release of teh CU. I had managed to stay off teh bounty hunter terminals by grinding in remote areas. This was the price you payed to be something special.
I was a master lightsaber master defender with a few other skills a month or two in to the CU. Visibility had change and now jedi could group with other to grind. The moment that I knew that jedi was special came when i was helping a group of jedi. We were letting our force bars reginerate and talking. The question of why we wanted to be a jedi came up and a guy named Rysdad answered. "I was PvPing at the base in our player city," he said "a group of imperials were there to take our base. They were kicking our butt really bad and it looked like we were going to lose. Suddenly two purple dots appeared on the radar and two jedi came running over the hill. The jedi turned the battle from hopeless to a sound victory. That's when I knew, that's when I knew I wanted to be a jedi."
That's when I knew. I was not an orc. I was a jedi. And even if there were thousands of others I was a hero or at least I felt like one. The words of a player that I had only be aroud a couple of times have stayed with me for two and a half years.
There was a mmo out there where you could be a hero. We all had our own story we were our on character and we all got there in a different way. The game was not perfectly balanced but the lack of balance made things better. There were no cookie cutter classes. The bounty hunter you fought today was different then the one you fought yesterday. Players were unique and that made us feel special.
The sad ending of a hero: SWG was nged 11-15-05 five months after Rysdad's comments about why he bacame a jedi. Jedi became just another cookie cutter iconic profession. I left the game as did many others. I moved to World of Warcraft. Now I'm nothing more than an orc.
I don't claim to be right, I'm just posting.
So much content now is done with the implicit assumption that games should be a win-win proposition. We're all entitled to be a hero/heroine for our $15 a month or the game will fold. Everyone has to succeed, share the same experiences and world change is by definition only illusory. God forbid anyone should actually...... gasp..... LOSE????
Try tipping over the mental apple cart for a minute and go outside the box. Anyone here ever play the original Shadowbane? Separate the game from the gold duping, poor control system, horrible lag and other technical garbage and there really was something exciting there.
If you allow consequences in a game, and give players the power to over come them, then that game is going to have emotional impact. If players can actually build a town, grow a city and negotiate an empire, then seeing it destroyed or fighting to save it is going to mean a lot more than finishing a canned epic quest/event that every guild or individual on the server knows the ending to already.
I still remember the night I logged in, looked at the map, and saw that an entire guild empire was gone. I had to run past one of their old cities on the way to a mob camp and remember seeing the remains of the shattered city wall and still smoking ruins. Another lady I played with dated one of the guild leaders in RL and we commiserated. Even though I wasn't there participating that single event had huge emotional impact. Real events. Real consequences.
Real risks for a game company? Yeah but the pay off? Enormous if they can get it to work.
I remember The Sleeper being woken on my server. The guild that woke him did not have any hope of taking him down. It is a one off event, so no one else had the opportunity to attempt the encounter.
The guild woke him just to see him. Members of that guild were subject to the cold shoulder on that server for months. No one would group or have anything with members or former members of the guild.
Dare I call them anti-heroes?
You feel like a hero when:
You feel like an non-entity when:
The problem with trying to single out individual excellence is that most people are incapable of suppressing their own ego just long enough to say that someone deserves any merit for being better than them, or others, at anything. It is unlikely that this will ever change.
However... there are things that might could be done to at least give people the sense that they have some unique identity in the world. Small things, even.
1. Take housing to the next level. Allow guilds to establish small zones of their own, similar to how CoH/CoV does it now, but with a bit of outdoor area. This could be a small island, mountain valley, caverns, or other such place. Create some generic zone maps, with zone portals corresponding to the general area such maps might be found (i.e. portal for mountain_valley_1 is located in one area, while mountain_valley_2 is accessed in a different area). To earn these "guild only" zones, make the guilds accomplish a certain amount of work for their faction, or perform some other task. These tasks can be a combination of individual timesinks (collect X amount of certain mats like stone, kill X mods in the nearby area, etc.) and group efforts (enter zone portal as a raid and kill everything in there, including a good randomly-named boss of some kind).
Once the guild has its own zone, allow the guild a central area where they might quest or do other things to get the right to their own vendors and/or other special functions (similar to how Lineage 2 already does such things). The guild might also allow a certain amount of housing, setting up individual houses for the officers and certain other VIPs, and shared housing (barracks, apartments, etc.) for the rest of the guild.
This all would require some definite tweaking and coding to make work, but if guild zones reside on their own instance server, it might not be terribly difficult to get it to work without a lot of slowdown. Also, it would permit the kind of guild vs. guild PVP action you see in a lot of other games.
2. Change crafting so that the items themselves are infinitely customizable. Give crafting the ability to alter the exact look of finished goods (overall shape, color, etc.), and to change the stats according to the exact mats used. If they also get the choice of naming the finished goods, then you would very likely see guilds rewarding excellent effort in raids and PVP by gifting members with personalized gear.
3. Make questing rewards similarly dynamic, and even change the exact stats of bosses each time they are fought (so that players have to adjust tactics for the type of boss they are facing). Also,try a random name generator for certain bosses. Some bosses (gods, spirits, ghosts, etc.) could be argued to be immortal, but others (humanoid leaders, big game animals, etc.) should be replaced if only in name.
Sure, none of these things is amazingly innovative, but they do a good job of at least tricking folks into thinking that they are doing something other folks haven't done before. One group of players may get to the top of Doom Tower, and face the orc necromancer that calls in a bunch of adds to help him, finding certain items that allow a crafter to make them something they really need. The next group might face an orc warrior and have to do differently from the last group, and find different items for different kinds of gear. Both basically did the same thing, but might end up getting different results from the experience.
I think it would work at making things seem a little fresher all the time, though I'm sure someone would think it was all silly and pointless. To each their own, I guess.
There are only two real rules when playing any game:
1. Play in the way that is the most fun to you.
2. Your "most fun way" cannot detract from the fun way of another (griefing).
I have been gaming for 30 years and I have not and will not PvP even one time ever. No matter the rewards or accolades, I have zero interest in PvP. Just like I do not want to walk down my street and worry about being mugged, neither do I want to be gaming along and get ganked, ever. I always auto-decline every duel regardless of the level difference between me and the inviter.
If the only way to become a hero in a game is through PvP, I'll find another game. Fast.
This does not mean that PvP isn't fun or viable for some, but it doesn't and shouldn't be the only method to such for everyone.