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Assumption is the Mother of all Foul-Ups.
Tumbleworld
Member Posts: 6
There’s a whole set of assumptions that most current MMO designers seem to be building into games without really thinking about possible alternatives. It sets all sorts of really frustrating game elements in place, and it drives me mad. Quite a lot of them are EQ-era devices, and the time has come for them to quietly exit, stage left.
(Full disclosure – I’m a professional author and TRPG designer, and yes, most TRPGs do too much of this stuff too.)
So you know what I’m on about, I’m going to explain what I mean, before trying to imagine how a game without them might look. Here’s my particularly Dirty Dozen:
* The Doctrine of Incompetence. The single most horrible assumption there is, that everyone has to start out useless and fight their way up to being good.
* The Maxim of Heroism. The player has to be the sole focus of an epic, world-changing story. Great for books, kinda insane when there’s 20,000 of you running around a server.
* One Mob, One Challenge. The idea that one monster should always provide a meaningful challenge to one or more players.
* The THUD Protocol. The only strategic option is to divide players into Tank / Healer / Utility / DPS.
* P-NPC Syndrome. Paraplegic NPC Syndrome is where otherwise perfectly sensible and highly-powered NPCs are unable to do even the smallest, most menial nonsense for themselves.
* Dangerous Lands. Every inch of the world has to be bristling with threat.
* Levelled Lands. Different game areas should be suitable only for a narrow band of player levels.
* Rational Sociality. That every person interacts in the same basic manner, and thus enjoys the interactions of every other player.
* LoreShame. Lore is nerdy, pointless and a bit embarrassing, and it should never get in the way of gamers taking a mathematical approach to the game.
* Look What’s in my Pouch! Mobs will happily carry awesome equipment and never try to use it.
* Guilds Militant. The main function of a guild is to give you a group of people to band with for self-defence.
* Don’t Think, Shoot. Any game component that requires a degree of intelligent thought and analysis is going to put players off.
So how could a game work without all these things?
Well, to begin with, you would start your character fully-skilled and equipped with kit of your own choosing (from a selection). No level grind, no skill grind, you’re an ass-kicker from the word go, geared and specced the way you want.
Instead of fighting through content because you need to advance, you can fight through content to earn equipment that increases your options rather than power -- or that looks much cooler, or that lets you do a range of useful but non-essential stuff. Or for honour, out-of-game rankings, name-badge titles, having military NPCs salute you as you go past, or a hundred other possible genuinely rewarding things to aim for.
If you provide the world with a complex set of damage types, resistances, world-effects and so on, gearing options could become a fascinating pursuit in their own right, and a good reason to aim to build up a big locker of different interesting stuff. Maybe hydro-spec lets you walk on water. Maybe there’s a dozen different monster resistance bands, and mixing and matching your gear makes a big difference depending on where you want to go and what you want to do.
Most importantly, you’d never have a problem grouping or fighting with other players. They may look a LOT cooler than you, but you could take part in all the fun right out of the box. PVP, similarly, would be nicely balanced. Make the combat a bit more skilled and entertaining than just pushing ‘1’ when your cooldown is up, and actual player ability could be a factor.
Get rid of One Mob, One Challenge, and suddenly all sorts of tactical situations open up that can provide a whole range of different challenges rather than just the deathly THUD protocol. What about six monsters, working the environment like a pack of dogs would? Or a horde of little nibbling irritations that are immune to AOE? Or… well, look at any decent military game for a huge range of options. Sure, THUD is a fine strategic approach. It’s just that there’s hundreds of them. There’s also nothing wrong with having some easy areas. Sometimes, it can be really nice just to go somewhere and kick total ass for a while. It’s a game, remember? It’s supposed to be fun?
Why not have the whole world open for exploration right from the start? Even a pacifist-tourist mode that made you entirely combat/reward-exempt, and could only be entered/exited at certain points, would be nice. But why does everywhere have to be lethal? This ties into LoreShame and Don’t Think, Shoot. Combat is the only real point of most games. Why? Why not exploration, or having your character gain real benefits from learning lore, or some puzzle areas, or gaining political power (and with it actual influence), or, heck, any of the many, many sorts of things that TRPGs get up to. Why not have other PC languages you can learn? Why not have genuine mysteries in the Lore that you can explore, and even get temporary or permanent benefits from? Whilst we’re at it, let’s have some atmospherics – how about some extra non-visual info from time to time. A drip in a cavern, or a cold wind. Whispered stories of the horrors of a certain place.
Let’s have some stories to play through. Murder mysteries. Moral quandries. Scavenger hunts. Intrigues. Bethesda’s Oblivion made some great strides in that direction. Quest doesn’t have to mean “kill 20 pigs.” It can easily become an engrossing story, with or without combat.
If there are lore challenges, and political systems, and meaningful game-world choices, and puzzles, then guilds can all tie into that. Why not give guilds actual home bases. Raidable home bases, even. Let guild standing influence game standing, both on a personal and guild level. Have the game environment react to that standing, and suddenly its interesting. If you want a gold sink, why not have a Potlach? The King of the entire server that week is the person who sacrificed the greatest value of goods/gold/reputation/&c to the Gods during that week.
Levelled PCs are traditionally segregated into level ghettoes. I say do away with levels all together anyway, but there’s no need for segregation. If you must have levels, make some mobs/puzzles/whatever only responsive to certain levels bands, and some gatherables ditto, and then you can easily have one area useful to lots of different people. Much more fun.
You won’t get totally persistent world-play until you have an AI running the game (Ender, anyone?) but you can make much better steps in that direction. P-NPCs and Look What’s in my Pouch are both just plain lazy. A frog shouldn’t be carrying a flaming broadsword, and if an Orc is, damn it, he should be using it in combat against you. All games have a wonderful mail system where the PC can transport not just letters but items and money across the world instantly to the right person. Are you really saying NPCs can’t use that? It’s stupid and lazy, and breaks immersion. Think things through, and the game will make more sense. Give NPCs moods, based on world events, hell even on weather, and have those influence their interactions -- and even their utility.
Oh and talking of game systems, we have to accept that with varied player-bases come communication issues. Heurstics are good enough now to analyse player interaction styles. Someone who insists on talking like a school teacher and someone who relies on leetspeak are going to have trouble getting on together regardless, and hardcore/casual players will also always have gulfs. There are no rights or wrongs, but analysing play styles, comparing this to other players, and letting your character get a match %age for other PCs -- and then using these for PUGging -- could make everyone’s social aspect more fun.
I could keep going, but I think you get the picture. There’s an utterly awesome game waiting out there to be made, with existing technology and existing computation loads. No WoW-clone is going to beat WoW; it has sector recognition. The trick is not to out-WoW it. It’s to make it obsolete.
All the studios have to do is give up the assumptions that they don’t know they even have.
Tumbleworld.
PS: Yes, I know many of the things I’m saying can be found in one game or another. That’s the point. They’re found in isolation though, not together.
Comments
Good post, interesting read.
This is the direction the genre needs to head, but it would require more work than your common developer is going to put forward to come up with something completely different. Plus, there's the risk factor that since games that are WoW-esque are the mainstream thing right now, would this title catch on? And it's sure to be expensive with all of the original features put in, and the monotonous and old removed.
I keep hoping one of these titles that keep getting announced is going to be something like this; maybe soon. Let's hope.
Parts of that sound a lot like the dream game that exists only in my head. Other parts of it I'm not so sure about but it's hard to get a clear picture of a complex idea from a reletively short post.
You should make an mmo.
this post gave me a stiffy.
Great post! You've said so many things that I agree with wonderfully.
MMOs can be so much more than what they currently are! We've seen glimpses of this greatness in the past, and I am confident that some developer will understand this someday.
______________________
Give a man some fun and you entertain him for a day. Teach a man to make fun and you entertain him for a lifetime.
I agree.
Assumptions made by the creator, or whomever is deciding how the game will play out, are just utter garbage. Maybe they really do want to make a dream game like this, but aren't allowed to by some executive refusing to stray from the beaten path?
Who knows. But if a MMO wants to make money, they've really gotta change the mechanics of the genre itsself. Hell, maybe even a switch of the control scheme or favorable use of a joystick with a combination of smooth gameplay could make a game that much more fun.
I mean I'd play a game with no combat, no levels, no nothing, but was based of exploring ancient temples with really nice treasure to sell and show off. Temples could be riddled with traps and puzzles and may require more than one to navigate. No maps, you have to make them yourself... stuff like that.
That's one of my dream MMO's.
Hopefully a game like this will be created.
TBH
I just ran a poll on this very idea and only 18 ppl even bothered to respond. I doubt this is really going to work as I doubt there are enough ppl that would actually play it.
You want to make a MMO? I'll sell you the entire document, the site and all the completed work.
Neanderthal, you're absolutely right. I wish I had the resources to make up a proper design document!
I think we're just going to have to hope that some developer clues in to the fact that trying to compete with WoW on its own terms is now extremely dangerous, and that they're better off being a bit more innovative.
I also _really_ wish that game developers would actually hire some fiction professionals once in a while. Epic games are about stories as much as graphics or gameplay. One thing all writers quickly learn is that everyone thinks that they can write. We get together sometimes and swap bemused horror stories about being cornered at parties by the person who says "Oh, yes, I've been thinking about writing a book myself." The average doctor would be horrified if you replied "Really? I've been thinking of taking up some surgery in my spare time." *
Of course, everyone can write -- in the same sense that everyone can draw. The literary equivalent of stick figures, in other words. But because it's not as immediately obvious, an awful lot of really bad fiction design goes on, particularly in games. Creative directors are notorious for thinking that they're "creative enough" to take care of all the fiction aspects of a game, and one of the designers "can handle the dialogue". That's just smug nonsense. Believable, immersive fiction is a complex craft, and the cost of hiring a fiction pro into a game team would be absolutely minimal. It's just arrogance that makes so many games so fictionally retarded.
And then when someone puts the effort in, and gets some people on board, you get a Half Life 2 or a Fallout 3, and the world goes crazy. Like, DUH!
Anyway. MMOs. Moar Writ3rz!
Tumbleworld.
* It's almost as bad as the inevitable "You write? Cool! I've got an amazing idea. I'll tell it to you, you just write it, and we can split the profits." Ideas are EASY. I've got hundreds, far more than I could ever use in a lifetime, and I get more every day. At the risk of sounding obvious, the part of writing that takes the work is, well, the _work_!
Nowadays, I usually tell people I'm meeting casually that I do something far less shameful -- like being a pornographer, or dealing hash.
Hell yeah!
I love the idea OP. Same thing i have been thinking for years. And the same reason why i cant play the PvE MMOs we have today : (
I sympathise. I do play WoW at the moment, but mainly as a social space where I can roam around and thwack things from time to time. The actual gameplay -- particularly at LevCap -- is just painful. Near-compulsory Daily Quests? It's like doing the washing up, making your bed and vacuuming the living room!
The extension of this is people who come up with ideas and even write decent stories but assume that turning them into video games is trivial. No matter how neat the idea or how great the writting actually creating a working game framework around them can be a daunting task.
eg. People love the idea of guilds/clans having cities/castles/keeps that other guilds/clans can conquer. However, implementing it in a way that is fair to all players is impossible.
Absolutely. Ideas are the easy bit, in any creative endeavour. It's frustrating that more people don't get that. Books are a one-person project, so there's no give and take, but in any game project (paper or computer), you've got a whole bunch of concerns from different angles, and they all really ought to be subservient to the end player experience. Look at unskippable repeat cutscenes, for example *shudder*. A textbook example of something thinking story is more important than player fun...
As for the guild raiding thing, if you haven't already, have a look at Kingdom of Loathing -- they've got the basis of a pretty clever (and totally fair) system. In essence, guilds raid other guild bases for status and comparative ranking. IIRC correctly, they can also win gold (well, meat in KoL *grin*) as a %age of the raided guild's stash, but without depleting the victim's actual balance, and they can nick duplicate items as well. Guild members count towards overall guild power.
KoL doesn't worry too much about balance, but if you wanted a gold-sink to counterbalance that, it would be easy to assign costed guild defences on a daily basis. Heck, you could just have the looted currency be its own unique circuit, and use it to pay for Guild Base upgrades. It wouldn't be too tricky to weight different guild combat metrics on member abilities, individually-selected member priorities, and even which members were online at the time of the raid. So long as the loss to the loser is only status (and the missed chance to get some goodies), it'll always be perfectly fair.
Absolutely. Ideas are the easy bit, in any creative endeavour. It's frustrating that more people don't get that. Books are a one-person project, so there's no give and take, but in any game project (paper or computer), you've got a whole bunch of concerns from different angles, and they all really ought to be subservient to the end player experience. Look at unskippable repeat cutscenes, for example *shudder*. A textbook example of something thinking story is more important than player fun...
As for the guild raiding thing, if you haven't already, have a look at Kingdom of Loathing -- they've got the basis of a pretty clever (and totally fair) system. In essence, guilds raid other guild bases for status and comparative ranking. IIRC correctly, they can also win gold (well, meat in KoL *grin*) as a %age of the raided guild's stash, but without depleting the victim's actual balance, and they can nick duplicate items as well. Guild members count towards overall guild power.
KoL doesn't worry too much about balance, but if you wanted a gold-sink to counterbalance that, it would be easy to assign costed guild defences on a daily basis. Heck, you could just have the looted currency be its own unique circuit, and use it to pay for Guild Base upgrades. It wouldn't be too tricky to weight different guild combat metrics on member abilities, individually-selected member priorities, and even which members were online at the time of the raid. So long as the loss to the loser is only status (and the missed chance to get some goodies), it'll always be perfectly fair.
That's pretty much how I would design a guild city raiding system. It is however a compromise from the grandiose ideas many players have of how such a system should work. It is essentially a no-loss system which means the idea of "'conquer your enemies' cities and burn them to the ground" cannot be implemented. In many ways it is an arena system and is not what many people who are championing a guild warfare system want. Of course the primary roadblock for a full fledged player vs player city raid system is that players do not actually live in the game and thus cannot respond to attacks when they happen.
*GRIN* Well, yes, absolutely. It's funny how few people actually agree that the cool idea they like the sound of is still fun when they're on the recieving end of it!