Whatever happened to immersive gameplay?

dekken · April 2008

As an old fart, I remember the days of MUDs and other primitive, eye-candy-deficient games. In particular, I used to love games like Gemstone III and IV. It wasn't so much the roleplaying aspect, although that was definitely a plus -- it was the feeling that you were in a dynamic environment where your actions mattered. There was more than one path to "success" in the game (e.g., a healer could stay in a safe area and heal for tips, or could go out into the field; a rogue could be a pure thief or an assassin, not just a lightly armored warrior class). There were painful consequences for bad decisions (the possibility of "real" death if your character died under certain circumstances, jail time for attacking players in cities, etc.). There was also unique player-designed weaponry and fluff, invasions on cities by vast swarms of high-level critters, and other diverse ways of interacting with the world and the other players in it.

All that seems to be gone now. If you're into PvE, it's just a race for end game and bragging rights on progression. PvP is reduced to a bunch of people with the highest level of gear playing roshambo with each other. Players with names like Roflcopter or DarthMaul666 swarm everywhere, clogging chat and generally cheapening the experience.

I don't really know what I'm asking for here... I guess I want a sense of vastness, of mystery. I want my actions to have consequence beyond a 30 second resurrection timer or corpserun (EVE gets this right, or at least as right as any game I've played lately). The graphics/hardware arms race is never-ending -- who cares what's big right now, it'll be outdated within 365 days. What matters is that feeling that you've actually logged out of RL and into another universe.

WoW had that x factor in the first year or so, even up to the opening of AQ. Unfortunately, it's gone now. Will AoC get it right? I preordered the CE on a hunch. I might regret it later, but you gotta keep hope alive.

I'm pretty sure no one under 30 (or maybe no one at all) knows wtf I'm blathering on about.

zazz · April 2008

OMW to bed so this gona be short , but bud i know how you feel, its been 3 yrs since i left EQ1 and im still looking, & my hopes are high for Conan.

oman99 · April 2008

You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded

front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php

The good old days!

Wuushu · April 2008

OP, great post.

DeaconX · April 2008

I hear ya... it seems like creativity and depth has been sucked right out of our beloved MMORPG genre. I'm hoping the 'WoW' clone era will DIE soon or at least die off enough to allow for much deeper and more creative, interactive MMMORPG games to flourish.

Kien · April 2008

Ah, Zork. Ah, MUDs.

I'm not sure it's fair to compare MUDs to MMO*s. MUDs were (mostly) free. They were run by volunteers. The city invasion you mentioned probably didn't even need a code rewrite; mobs were likely just dropped in by the gods. Even if code rewrite was necessary, a gifted college student would certainly be up to the task. MMO*s are considerably more complex, and they have to pay people to run special events, and that hurts the bottom line. The largest MUDs have a few hundred players active at one time. WoW has hundreds of thousands. It's easier to foster a sense of community in a small game than a large game.

I disagree with you about PvP in MUDs. PvP was all about levels, at least on the PvP games I played (Duris, Rites of Passage).

AmazingAvery · April 2008

Immersive gameplay will be there with AoC.

One form is the type of quests you can pick up in the game. These can range from, chain quests ~ linking smaller stories within one big one, ethical quests, moral quests and plenty where the onus is on you to decide resulting in different rewards or paths to take, even the behaviour of the NPC towards you in the future.

Here are some questions about quests I co-asked to the Lore guy and Quest designer dev Joel Bylos:

Can players meet the gods of Hyboria in the game?

Joel Bylos: This is one for the lore people. If they've ever read "Conan Antics" by, I believe, Don Henley, there's a very in-depth argument that he presents that the gods in Conan's world are as hard to prove that they exist as the gods in our world. A lot of the other writers beyond Howard took liberties with his original text to make the gods more palpable and to give them a bigger presence in their books. Howard never had the gods really present, and Henley argues that the gods are really spiritual entities rather than physical beings.

So you won't actually be meeting the gods in the game, but that's also because we don't want to go against Howard's wishes.

Will there be any quests where you have to pray or show your religion in any way?

Joel: During one part of the game you actually get a quest to go to the Speaker's Corner in Old Tarantia, which is actually mentioned in The Hour of the Dragon, and a priest of Set is actually preaching to a bunch of people. He talks about how great Set is and how Mitra and Conan are terrible for the world. As a player, you basically can get up and debate this guy. There's actually a priest of Mitra in the crowd that asks you to get up and debate this guy. This is one of the places in our game where the quests are unique, because you can roleplay these quests however you'd like.

If you're a Priest of Mitra, you're obviously going to defend Mitra and Conan, and if you're neutral, you can just choose the middle ground between the two. If you're a worshipper of Set, you're more than welcome to join the guy and start saying bad things about Mitra. Based on the three options, you get a different reward.

It's a branching quest then?

Joel: Exactly. It's hard to do in MMOGs, but we can do it on a character level.

That's one religious quest, but there are obviously other ones where priests are dealing with issues and things, but they're not too confrontational. We want people to play different ways if they want to.

Are there other examples of branching questlines or quest rewards that you can think of?

Joel: It's not in the beta yet, but in the Black Dragon Barracks there are three people that have been sentenced to death. Essentially the barracks commander is very busy and he basically sentenced those three individuals to death because they were captured sneaking into the safe area at night. You argue with him a bit about whether he truly considers that justice, and he basically tells you to go talk to the prisoners and determine whether they should be put to death or not.

It's going to be a fairly black and white option between the three characters [live or die], even though the dialogue with the characters is a bit more interesting. Essentially there are some characters that do evil things, but they've tried to sneak into the area for noble purposes.

Once you've decided how many of the characters you're going to kill, your quest reward will be different based on how many you've executed. If you kill all three you will get something different in line with your choice and named differently too.

That sort of quest really seems to put the power back into the hands of the player rather than having them always following orders from a random NPC...

Joel: Exactly! Every MMOG has kill quests of some sort, but you never really consider who you're killing when your tasked with those options.

Will there be seasonal quests?

Joel: Not that I know of.

Will there be different dialogue options for your class, race, and gender?

Joel: Definitely! For example, there are certainly some quests where being a female will allow you to open up different avenues of completing a quest that may not be available to male characters in the game. At least one that I know of features the female character getting rid of a male NPC by soliciting him.

How do you make the quests in the game really interesting and fun, even if they may not be the most "dynamic" quests?

Joel: I try to link every quest that I write into the overall story and playfield so that it all makes sense to the player. While things aren't as dynamic in MMOGs as say in a single player game, you are allowed to do things on a character level to spice things up and you can make the static portions of the world as exciting as possible.

Are there lots of solo quests in the game?

Joel: You played through the Sanctum of the Burning Souls correct? (did at the community event, yes.) We have a parallel solo dungeon to that that should take players around three hours to complete. For the most part, the game will be very solo friendly until around level 30, then we'll begin incorporating more and more group quests and that sort of thing into the game while still allowing players to solo if they wish.

Will the earlier dungeons in the game be developed for six-man groups?

Joel: What our gameplay designer does is that he tries to make it so that if you do go in there on your own, it can be completed. However, if you go in there with a few friends it's much faster and easier to achieve. There are dungeons that will almost require six-man groups to complete, but there are many that you can do without so many. Most of the group stuff we purposely set to a higher level to make it a bit more challenging for the players.

Will there be quests that flow into the PvP or Sieging systems or areas?

Joel: No. We've decided to keep those systems separate from each other.

Will NPCs remember how you treated them during your dialogue encounters with them?

Joel: Within certain quest lines, yes they will. But it's not like a faction system; it's not an alignment system. They may respond differently if you have been treating them poorly throughout the quest line, but it won't be something that they'll remember every time you talk to them.

We actually have some quests where your decisions actually cause you to go down one side or the other of a branching quest. There's one particular quest where there is this set of mantis people that have been enslaved by an evil Necromancer and he's using them to search the desert for an artifact. However, this Necromancer has gotten so busy that he's kicked his apprentice out of castle. You meet the apprentice on the road as you explore. He's a bitter man; he basically calls you a donkey's ass at one point in the dialogue. When you talk to him, he gives you a certain quest to go kill the Necromancer so he can take over the castle and enslave the mantis people for his own goals.

Later on you find a mantis person in the desert who tells you to talk with the chieftain. They want you to help free them from the evil Necromancer. Both of them ask you to do the same quest - kill the Necromancer - so you get to make that choice and picking one means excluding you from the other. The rewards are different as well.

While this may seem "limiting" to the players, I think people will go onto the internet and look at the items before proceeding upon this quest to see which piece of equipment they want. This also gives roleplayers the option to really flesh out their characters, even if the reward may not be optimal for their class.

That's always something I've wanted to see come out in MMOGs; this idea that making decisions has a consequence. While single player games can show changes based on your decisions, MMOGs can at least have some of this sort of consequence on a character level. It may not be 90% of the quests in the game, but these branching quests are there.

And those are the quests that players will probably remember....

Joel: If they realize it's even branched. They may not even realize it until they look up the quest later.

What's one of your favorite quests in the game?

Joel: There's this one quest in Stygia where you go and there's all these chickens running around a village that you can kill. If you start killing the chickens there's this guy called the "Chicken Handler" that comes out and shouts "LEAVE MY CHICKENS ALONE!" If you keep doing it, he'll eventually come out and kill you. However, there's another NPC in the next town over called the "Cock Handler." Don't laugh....

*laughter ensues*

We're mature people and this is a serious game. *laughs* And he's a rival of the Chicken Handler. He gives you a quest to go kill the Chicken Handler, but you need a group to actually kill the Chicken Handler because he's so tough. He's no pushover. When you kill the Chicken Handler and go back to the Cock Handler he gives you a two-handed sledgehammer type weapon called the Vanquisher of Poultry

Continuing on for this with the Destiny Quests there are obviously plans to support the game in different area's after launch. This area is being looked at so there is going to be extra scope after you have reached max level. With AoC it might come across as a race to level cap, but the story doesn't end there, the lore as i'm sure your aware has plenty behind it and the dev's will be adding things all the time, including more RP type quests. It isn't a race really in crafting either, its not experience based, you quest to actually learn something to be able to make it, they dont make you do the same thing over and over to progress to the next level, its not an online job. Same with the quests, Funcom are known for telling great stories. They want you to feel immersed and the world design, along with the way quests are handled in this game, set a good premise up for this to really happen and be different in ways to the norm. I'm most interested in the quests that will give me an affinity for what im actually doing and I know they will make me feel more apart of the world.

Im looking forward to the quest dialogues and the choices that we can make as players whilst pursuing them. Reminds me of the Steve Jackson books from the 80's.

jsw40 · April 2008

Perhaps you should pick up MUD playing again?

I know when I get the urge to play in a dynamic universe, I play MUDs.

You will NEVER get the same experience from an MMO that you get from a MUD. They're like apples and oranges.

Lobotomist · April 2008

Originally posted by oman99

You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded

front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php

The good old days!

You are in comfortable tunnel like hall

> LOOK

+

Arcken · April 2008

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

Immersive gameplay will be there with AoC.
One form is the type of quests you can pick up in the game. These can range from, chain quests ~ linking smaller stories within one big one, ethical quests, moral quests and plenty where the onus is on you to decide resulting in different rewards or paths to take, even the behaviour of the NPC towards you in the future.
Here are some questions about quests I co-asked to the Lore guy and Quest designer dev Joel Bylos:

Can players meet the gods of Hyboria in the game?

Joel Bylos: This is one for the lore people. If they've ever read "Conan Antics" by, I believe, Don Henley, there's a very in-depth argument that he presents that the gods in Conan's world are as hard to prove that they exist as the gods in our world. A lot of the other writers beyond Howard took liberties with his original text to make the gods more palpable and to give them a bigger presence in their books. Howard never had the gods really present, and Henley argues that the gods are really spiritual entities rather than physical beings.

So you won't actually be meeting the gods in the game, but that's also because we don't want to go against Howard's wishes.

Will there be any quests where you have to pray or show your religion in any way?

Joel: During one part of the game you actually get a quest to go to the Speaker's Corner in Old Tarantia, which is actually mentioned in The Hour of the Dragon, and a priest of Set is actually preaching to a bunch of people. He talks about how great Set is and how Mitra and Conan are terrible for the world. As a player, you basically can get up and debate this guy. There's actually a priest of Mitra in the crowd that asks you to get up and debate this guy. This is one of the places in our game where the quests are unique, because you can roleplay these quests however you'd like.

If you're a Priest of Mitra, you're obviously going to defend Mitra and Conan, and if you're neutral, you can just choose the middle ground between the two. If you're a worshipper of Set, you're more than welcome to join the guy and start saying bad things about Mitra. Based on the three options, you get a different reward.

It's a branching quest then?

Joel: Exactly. It's hard to do in MMOGs, but we can do it on a character level.

That's one religious quest, but there are obviously other ones where priests are dealing with issues and things, but they're not too confrontational. We want people to play different ways if they want to.

Are there other examples of branching questlines or quest rewards that you can think of?

Joel: It's not in the beta yet, but in the Black Dragon Barracks there are three people that have been sentenced to death. Essentially the barracks commander is very busy and he basically sentenced those three individuals to death because they were captured sneaking into the safe area at night. You argue with him a bit about whether he truly considers that justice, and he basically tells you to go talk to the prisoners and determine whether they should be put to death or not.

It's going to be a fairly black and white option between the three characters [live or die], even though the dialogue with the characters is a bit more interesting. Essentially there are some characters that do evil things, but they've tried to sneak into the area for noble purposes.

Once you've decided how many of the characters you're going to kill, your quest reward will be different based on how many you've executed. If you kill all three you will get something different in line with your choice and named differently too.

That sort of quest really seems to put the power back into the hands of the player rather than having them always following orders from a random NPC...

Joel: Exactly! Every MMOG has kill quests of some sort, but you never really consider who you're killing when your tasked with those options.

Will there be seasonal quests?

Joel: Not that I know of.

Will there be different dialogue options for your class, race, and gender?

Joel: Definitely! For example, there are certainly some quests where being a female will allow you to open up different avenues of completing a quest that may not be available to male characters in the game. At least one that I know of features the female character getting rid of a male NPC by soliciting him.

How do you make the quests in the game really interesting and fun, even if they may not be the most "dynamic" quests?

Joel: I try to link every quest that I write into the overall story and playfield so that it all makes sense to the player. While things aren't as dynamic in MMOGs as say in a single player game, you are allowed to do things on a character level to spice things up and you can make the static portions of the world as exciting as possible.

Are there lots of solo quests in the game?

Joel: You played through the Sanctum of the Burning Souls correct? (did at the community event, yes.) We have a parallel solo dungeon to that that should take players around three hours to complete. For the most part, the game will be very solo friendly until around level 30, then we'll begin incorporating more and more group quests and that sort of thing into the game while still allowing players to solo if they wish.

Will the earlier dungeons in the game be developed for six-man groups?

Joel: What our gameplay designer does is that he tries to make it so that if you do go in there on your own, it can be completed. However, if you go in there with a few friends it's much faster and easier to achieve. There are dungeons that will almost require six-man groups to complete, but there are many that you can do without so many. Most of the group stuff we purposely set to a higher level to make it a bit more challenging for the players.

Will there be quests that flow into the PvP or Sieging systems or areas?

Joel: No. We've decided to keep those systems separate from each other.

Will NPCs remember how you treated them during your dialogue encounters with them?

Joel: Within certain quest lines, yes they will. But it's not like a faction system; it's not an alignment system. They may respond differently if you have been treating them poorly throughout the quest line, but it won't be something that they'll remember every time you talk to them.

We actually have some quests where your decisions actually cause you to go down one side or the other of a branching quest. There's one particular quest where there is this set of mantis people that have been enslaved by an evil Necromancer and he's using them to search the desert for an artifact. However, this Necromancer has gotten so busy that he's kicked his apprentice out of castle. You meet the apprentice on the road as you explore. He's a bitter man; he basically calls you a donkey's ass at one point in the dialogue. When you talk to him, he gives you a certain quest to go kill the Necromancer so he can take over the castle and enslave the mantis people for his own goals.

Later on you find a mantis person in the desert who tells you to talk with the chieftain. They want you to help free them from the evil Necromancer. Both of them ask you to do the same quest - kill the Necromancer - so you get to make that choice and picking one means excluding you from the other. The rewards are different as well.

While this may seem "limiting" to the players, I think people will go onto the internet and look at the items before proceeding upon this quest to see which piece of equipment they want. This also gives roleplayers the option to really flesh out their characters, even if the reward may not be optimal for their class.

That's always something I've wanted to see come out in MMOGs; this idea that making decisions has a consequence. While single player games can show changes based on your decisions, MMOGs can at least have some of this sort of consequence on a character level. It may not be 90% of the quests in the game, but these branching quests are there.

And those are the quests that players will probably remember....

Joel: If they realize it's even branched. They may not even realize it until they look up the quest later.

What's one of your favorite quests in the game?

Joel: There's this one quest in Stygia where you go and there's all these chickens running around a village that you can kill. If you start killing the chickens there's this guy called the "Chicken Handler" that comes out and shouts "LEAVE MY CHICKENS ALONE!" If you keep doing it, he'll eventually come out and kill you. However, there's another NPC in the next town over called the "Cock Handler." Don't laugh....

*laughter ensues*

We're mature people and this is a serious game. *laughs* And he's a rival of the Chicken Handler. He gives you a quest to go kill the Chicken Handler, but you need a group to actually kill the Chicken Handler because he's so tough. He's no pushover. When you kill the Chicken Handler and go back to the Cock Handler he gives you a two-handed sledgehammer type weapon called the Vanquisher of Poultry

Continuing on for this with the Destiny Quests there are obviously plans to support the game in different area's after launch. This area is being looked at so there is going to be extra scope after you have reached max level. With AoC it might come across as a race to level cap, but the story doesn't end there, the lore as i'm sure your aware has plenty behind it and the dev's will be adding things all the time, including more RP type quests. It isn't a race really in crafting either, its not experience based, you quest to actually learn something to be able to make it, they dont make you do the same thing over and over to progress to the next level, its not an online job. Same with the quests, Funcom are known for telling great stories. They want you to feel immersed and the world design, along with the way quests are handled in this game, set a good premise up for this to really happen and be different in ways to the norm. I'm most interested in the quests that will give me an affinity for what im actually doing and I know they will make me feel more apart of the world.
Im looking forward to the quest dialogues and the choices that we can make as players whilst pursuing them. Reminds me of the Steve Jackson books from the 80's.

AoC will not be immersive, its not graphics, or quests, and what not, its the people you play with. Being a former player of GS3 myself, I can say that one of the main reasons it was immersive is that it was forced role playing. No one talks out of character, other players will ignore you, and most likely as Ive seen if kept up the person gets removed from the game. And there are definately no UBER1337 names in GS3.

MMOs dont require the imagination that MuDs did, MMOs are to Muds what TVs are to books.

Khalathwyr · April 2008

Lobo, you rule man.

OP, I hear you loud and clear my friend. I miss those days too. Many game devs have got it in their heads that some demographic wants it faster and easier so we're seeing the deathknell of long and detailed (detailed now usually refers to graphics) RPGs and lengthy Turn-Based Strategy titles. Now it's FPS, RTS a shot of expresso and to the end game we go!

Kind of like movies. Back then they made epic titles like Ben Hur, movies that lasted 2:30 to 3 hours long. Now we have 90 minute wonders like Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But that society is going to hell rant is for another time and place.

dekken · April 2008

You guys are right on all counts. The thing I miss is how the community used to come together and play. There was mass buy-in of the game world and it was heavily self-regulated. Realistically there's no chance to make that happen again on a large scale, is there? I wonder what it would take for FunCom to hire a battalion of GMs devoted to keeping the world "real" or at least trying to herd the 11-year-olds and e-ballers into some semblance of order? Maybe a "hardcore" RP server that's heavily moderated? Meh.

I logged in to my GS account last night (I forgot I had started a new character last summer and put it away -- don't want to count how much I've been paying Simutronics for nothing over the last year). There were 586 people online -- about half of what I remember from the last time I played regularly -- and it was pretty dead. I couldn't remember any of the commands either I guess you can't go back again.

If AoC delivers what it looks like it might, it'll still be a jolly good time for all. I don't want to come off as snobby -- I love all kinds of games, and have more days /played in WoW than I want to admit. I also communicate in lol's and O_o from time to time. But it's good to see you guys know where I'm coming from on this.

Kvaser · April 2008

To AmazingAvery

You know Devs can make stuf sound so great sometimes. I have learned through past experiences that it's better to wait and get your own opinion and take the words of the Devs with a pinch of salt ( don't know if that Swedish saying translated right hehe), not that they lie, they are just good at selling the game. Many games looks good on paper but after release it can sometimes be a bit disappointing not experiencing all the cool things the devs were talking about. It's one thing describing all neat stuff in the game and a whole other managing to implement them in a way that players really notice them.

Shannia · April 2008

Sad, but true. Immersive game play has been replaced with need for PvP 24/7. It is a lot cheaper for devs to create PvP mini games and call it endgame, then focus on mini adventures every so after to keep the game fresh. Too many players power-level to endgame and beotch like no other because there is nothing to do. Community has been replaced with ladders and rankings so people can get their epeen on.

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