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Simulation game mechanics
sunandshadow
Member RarePosts: 1,985
Like many people, I think the ideal MMO (or for that matter single player RPG) would be a combination of sandbox and themepark elements. The role of the themepark elements is fairly well explored: they exist to provide the player with a story that makes the player's actions meaningful in context, enables roleplaying, they provide surrogate socialization through NPCs, and they motivate players by suggesting specific goals and offering rewards. But what should the role of the sandbox, or simulation, be in this sandpark game?
Single-player simulation games traditionally exist as three separate genres: vehicle and sports sims, farming and crafting sims, and dating sims (and I'm going to roll detective games in with these).
In vehicle and sports sims the focus is on physics of movement and interaction between objects; something most games are terrible at, even high-budget, big-name games like Skyrim and games with a big focus on acrobatics like the Assassin's Creed series. The real universe is made out of an awful lot of math, and there is no standardized solution for simulating a world, so you have to find developers who actually understand that math. Aside from the difficulty of comprehending physics to simulate it, It is a LOT of work to implement physics in a way broad enough for an RPG. And it can't be done in expansions either; if your initial vision is insufficiently broad you often can't fix it without a complete redesign later. The recurrent problems with flying mounts in WoW are a clear example of this. A lot of indie MMOs hesitate to even include jumping in their design, much less swimming, climbing, flying, destructible structures, and other things that are necessary for any natural-feeling simulation of moving around the world in a human body. But a really good sandpark or sandbox MMO would have all of these and more.
Farming and crafting sims have been somewhat explored in games from Minecraft to ArcheAge and Ark, but a lot of them flinch away from the costly step of designing good minigame content to represent the actual in-game activities of crafting, gathering, farming, training animals, etc. And a lot of the more traditional RPGs don't make good use of allowing the player to customize the colors or textures of items; they often fail even to establish a standard color palette for the game, or a standard use of transparent layered textures controlling color placement on models. The outdated mindset of "one model, one texture" is something that really needs to be educated out of young game artists and game art system designers.
Dating and detective sims are combined here because they about the player interacting with NPCs and other complex interactive items within the game world. In fact we could probably include lock-picking, stealth/field of view mechanics, and a variety of adventure game puzzle mechanics here, like sliding and rotating tile puzzles, sokoban puzzles, entering numerical codes, and of course dialogue puzzles. This entire field of simulation is either ignored by sandboxes, or you get a game like A Tale In The Desert which had the "design is not broad enough" problem and invented several incompatible systems which couldn't share any code or be improved as a group. Similarly, faction-reputation-related code in WoW was quite piecemeal, while NPCs in games like Terraria, Minecraft, and Fable are unified in design but robotic and quite difficult to add content to make them individual and more human-like.
I can't really blame older games for not having broad flexible designs, because this kind of design really requires experience to create. But current game designers should really be able to learn from the vast array of previous games. The fact that they aren't could be a result of poor and piecemeal education of game designers, or it could be a result of the fact that designers apparently hate to cooperate with each other and rarely collaborate to improve each others' work, or it could be a result of economic pressure not to "waste time" researching or laying down a good design before beginning to develop content (as well as economic pressure to minimize the number or designers and numbers of man-hours spent on design per game). Not to mention the fact that it's generally impossible to look at the code of older games, due to intellectual property issues.
So, you all can discuss whatever you like about "what's good MMO simulation", but personally I'm wondering, "Is there any way we can create an environment that helps designers to design good simulation gameplay?"
(Also, it's depressing that design isn't even a tag.)
Single-player simulation games traditionally exist as three separate genres: vehicle and sports sims, farming and crafting sims, and dating sims (and I'm going to roll detective games in with these).
In vehicle and sports sims the focus is on physics of movement and interaction between objects; something most games are terrible at, even high-budget, big-name games like Skyrim and games with a big focus on acrobatics like the Assassin's Creed series. The real universe is made out of an awful lot of math, and there is no standardized solution for simulating a world, so you have to find developers who actually understand that math. Aside from the difficulty of comprehending physics to simulate it, It is a LOT of work to implement physics in a way broad enough for an RPG. And it can't be done in expansions either; if your initial vision is insufficiently broad you often can't fix it without a complete redesign later. The recurrent problems with flying mounts in WoW are a clear example of this. A lot of indie MMOs hesitate to even include jumping in their design, much less swimming, climbing, flying, destructible structures, and other things that are necessary for any natural-feeling simulation of moving around the world in a human body. But a really good sandpark or sandbox MMO would have all of these and more.
Farming and crafting sims have been somewhat explored in games from Minecraft to ArcheAge and Ark, but a lot of them flinch away from the costly step of designing good minigame content to represent the actual in-game activities of crafting, gathering, farming, training animals, etc. And a lot of the more traditional RPGs don't make good use of allowing the player to customize the colors or textures of items; they often fail even to establish a standard color palette for the game, or a standard use of transparent layered textures controlling color placement on models. The outdated mindset of "one model, one texture" is something that really needs to be educated out of young game artists and game art system designers.
Dating and detective sims are combined here because they about the player interacting with NPCs and other complex interactive items within the game world. In fact we could probably include lock-picking, stealth/field of view mechanics, and a variety of adventure game puzzle mechanics here, like sliding and rotating tile puzzles, sokoban puzzles, entering numerical codes, and of course dialogue puzzles. This entire field of simulation is either ignored by sandboxes, or you get a game like A Tale In The Desert which had the "design is not broad enough" problem and invented several incompatible systems which couldn't share any code or be improved as a group. Similarly, faction-reputation-related code in WoW was quite piecemeal, while NPCs in games like Terraria, Minecraft, and Fable are unified in design but robotic and quite difficult to add content to make them individual and more human-like.
I can't really blame older games for not having broad flexible designs, because this kind of design really requires experience to create. But current game designers should really be able to learn from the vast array of previous games. The fact that they aren't could be a result of poor and piecemeal education of game designers, or it could be a result of the fact that designers apparently hate to cooperate with each other and rarely collaborate to improve each others' work, or it could be a result of economic pressure not to "waste time" researching or laying down a good design before beginning to develop content (as well as economic pressure to minimize the number or designers and numbers of man-hours spent on design per game). Not to mention the fact that it's generally impossible to look at the code of older games, due to intellectual property issues.
So, you all can discuss whatever you like about "what's good MMO simulation", but personally I'm wondering, "Is there any way we can create an environment that helps designers to design good simulation gameplay?"
(Also, it's depressing that design isn't even a tag.)
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
Comments
It boils down to a programmer who likes to play games and wants to build his/her/their own. I've rarely seen people hire writers, or game designers where the focus/duties weren't on programming.
All of them seem too eager to jump into the 1's and 0's before sorting out what their game will actually be. Some get lucky and their vision turns out to be a game others like, most just fail. Almost no one hires or seeks out marketing/PR staff to really get feedback from the customer base to see what kind or if a game will succeed or not.
I would prefer to see a person with only limited programming knowledge, flesh out the design of an MMO and then hire staff, rather than a programmer rush off to code an incomplete game with no real goal in mind and try to piece the virtual parts together with some weak Elmer's-glue-style story telling and game design.
Personally i'm wondering, is there an audience to spend $$$ to create such an environment?
When Overwatch, Hearthstone, LoL and PUBG are ruling online games, why bother?
Sandbox and simulation are extremely different concepts and are not interchangeable. They may well be used together, so something can be a sandbox and a simulation, but that is not a rule.
Sandbox describes a design philosophy in which the player is unguided. They chose what they want to do, when they want to do it, within the sandpit that the developer has given us.
Simulations are an attempt to take a specific thing (event, object, world, society etc) and recreate it separately. Some, some racing games simulate real world physics, combined with real world cars and tracks. Games like Cities: Skylines try to simulate theories of how cities grow. Some shooters try to simulate physics along with weather.
Whilst I agree with your opening statement that the perfect MMO would be a mixture of sandbox and themepark (lets be honest though, most already are, even if they are 99% themepark), I don't really care all that much about simulations. In fact, as I'm a big fan of high fantasy, simulations don't really work for me as you cannot simulate magic, or fantasy creatures like dragons. So, whatever you were trying to simulate (like physics) may well be at odds with some of the fantasy elements.
A simulation really needs to represent the fundamental elements that operate within the world. For a fantasy situation, that starts with the primary actors, the characters. How the characters interact with each other and the world. The development of a simulated world / environment can't really begin until the developer knows what elements are being simulated and what are being abstracted.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
are you maybe over complicating things?
1. any activity ever done now, in the past and by any object from humans to rocks can be made into a 'simulation'. Simply because some dont exist doesnt mean its not possible.
2, Many games are a mixture of simulation and game. COD is basically a simulation made easier to master. Elite Dangerous is a game in which the simulation side is not easy to master. There can be variables in between.
3. Lineral approach just guide a player thru to an end. Its completely possible to have both in a game. SubNautica is an example of something that has both.
there it is...the entire universe of Simulations
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
I do think it's entirely possible to simulate magic and fantasy creatures; there's no reality to check the simulation against, but that's not required for simulations, instead the great thing about fantasy is that the dev team works together to flesh out their vision of "magical physics" or "dragon biology" and portray it to the player.
Well, personally I'm only here to play and theorize about games - so I actually think it's a problem if a simulation isn't thoroughly game-ified. That's the reason I think minigames are such an essential but underdeveloped part of simulating crafting, gathering, and similar activities. Minigames such as races and agility courses or 'dance challenges' would be a similar way to minigame-ify vehicle and sports sim content.
As for why games still rely on simpler analog models, I'd say that it's an important part of a fantasy mindset that human bodies work a little differently than they do in reality - like that character's don't age or get maimed or even scarred, and usually they can jump way higher than real humans, not to mention that they have some kind of biological ability to use magic. Secondarily, RPGs are all about a player developing and customizing their character's body and abilities, and in order to customize something you have to be able to understand the stats which describe what you have vs. what you want to change to.
Sandbox is the opposite to themepark, themepark being defined as a guided experience - you pick the rides you want to do then sit tight. Sandbox is the opposite philosophy, you are completely unguided and must create your own rides.
Open world is just a description of the game world, generally used as the opposite of linear.
An example: A Tale In The Desert has a system of tests, which are basically large-scale quests a player can do to improve their basic stats and rank up at one of the game's professions. For example, pretty much everyone in the game does the task of becoming an Initiate of Architecture by building their first tiny house and then expanding it to a more useful size. Single-player sandbox games like The Sims series offer randomized challenges or missions, and online games like Second Life and Minecraft offer a variety of player-created challenges in the form of mods. One thing I haven't seen, but could also be a possibility, is optional quests that start from mob drops or as a random spawn when interacting with the terrain. These could be like trade offers from 'the gods' - craft X and sacrifice it to instead get Y.
Themepark = you get on the rides = guided content
Sandbox = you create the rides = unguided content.
Themepark = there are rides
Linear = Tutorials/Quests/Level Progression/Story = guided content
Sandbox = there are parts you can build rides out of
Openworld = lack of gating/pacing/goals = unguided content
So you can mix and match these things. You can have an openworld themepark if it has NPC towns but not levels or long quest chains. In fact the last single-player game project I worked on was this type of game, and as inspired by Skyrim, which is more or less an openworld themepark. You also can have a linear sandbox if you can only unlock the crafting tree one specific step at a time and the requirements for those steps are pretty rigid. Pretty much every singleplayer RTS campaign and every time management game is a linear sandbox, where you have freedom within missions, but a strictly linear campaign of missions.
But the part where I agree with you is that themeparks are usually more linear than sandboxes. Historically, linear themeparks are the JRPG paradigm, openworld themeparks are the western RPG paradigm, while sandboxes of both kinds are the western sim paradigm. The reason themeparks are archetypally thought of as linear is really simple: sandboxes usually don't have NPCs. No NPCs, no story. And robotic humanoid characters in The Sims, Fable, Minecraft, and Terraria don't count as NPCs for the purposes of story or quests.
Now, sandparks are still a theoretical area. But as a hybrid of themepark and sandbox as defined above, a sandpark must have both pre-created rides and parts for players to build more rides. The term sandpark does not specify whether the game should be linear, openworld, or a hybrid. I'd say that usually sandparks would have geographically separated themepark areas where NPCs live in pre-created towns, quest locations, and/or dungeons and sandbox areas where players can build freely. And usually a player would find a more linear experience in the themepare areas, and a more openworld experience in the sandbox areas.
"In themeparks the game tells you what to do while in a sandbox game you decide it yourself."
In any case many games mixes things up, often uses themepark as standard but with some open world content as well. The advantage is that you don't run out of unguided content in the same way.
Personally do I think a fantasy simulator is rather hard to make since there is so much they want to include. Just a dungeon simulator is way easier but MMOs generally also add a skirmish simulator, an open world PvE simulator, a crafting simulator and so on. The companies usually trying to make those tend to bite of more then they can chew on their budget and limited number of devs.
Maybe a good fantasy simulator should start with getting one of those things perfect instead and get that perfect.