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'Easy to Learn, Hard to Master', Raph Koster Talks Stars Reach's Design Pillars as Approachable, But
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'Easy to Learn, Hard to Master', Raph Koster Talks Stars Reach's Design Pillars as Approachable, But Deep | MMORPG.com
Raph Koster is sharing more development pillars of Playable Worlds' upcoming MMORPG Stars Reach. This time, he focuses on the fun they're looking to build and provide as part of the experience.
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Ideas like these are suitable for medium-size Minecraft map. Where every tree reacts to your actions, every mud block remembers your footstep. And like any Minecraft, you have "easy to get, hard to master".
In reality it seems almost impossible for a online game. Make rich worlds, make things react...that's already quadrillions of options!
Imagine this game. We have only 100 planets. On each planet we have only 50 types of trees (grass does not exist). We have only 20 types of land (like - mud, stone, diamond, lava...). So, we can have interaction "tree x tree" (like "oak + oak -->nothing", "oak+palm-->oak extinct"). That's 2500 interaction. Then we have tree interaction with each terrain (like "tree+lava-->tree extinct", "tree+water-->alive tree"), that's some 1000 interactions. To make things more fun, we have "terrain+terrain" interaction, example: lava close to grass -->fire, "lava+lava-->nothing". That's another 400 combinations, which may transform into much more. So, for any tree we must have ~3500 easy interactions. Then, we have Mother nature interfering: good/bad weather, animals behaving (eating, leaving poo, running....). Then, we have human interfering (almost unlimited possibilities, most of them destructive). So, we can get up to, say, 1 million possible interactions for one type of tree. In short: oak grows on mud, so nothign happens, it just grows; dinosaur eats oak leaves, so oak starves, then come 25 human beings, who run, fight, chop, remove and add blocks, shoot at dinosaur, make fire, extinguish fire, then run on top of oak.
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I wish Koster made some more realistic goals, like creating better Minecraft...
http://www.mmoblogg.wordpress.com
He has a clear understanding of what has happened to MMORPG gameplay and how it has diversified into the "children" of today like MOBA. He understands that the end destination of the way current MMORPGs are developed is nothing like Old School MMOs, in fact it is to be as close as possible to those various "children" like MMOFPS. I am not sure he recognises how far along that path the genre has already gone, but likely he does.
He mentions the ease of the UI as being part of that "easy to learn" but also he talks about taking the game to "many devices", he even makes what I will describe as excuses to have the ambition of eventually putting the game on mobile. We have all seen how PC games get dumbed down UI wise to suit console and even worse mobile. So I reserve judgment on why he wants to do the UI in a simplistic if "layered" fashion.
I have no doubt that something that looks simple can be deep but its down to the implementation of that, as I said its not easy.
"So much of what has gone wrong with game services has been the trend towards trying to maximize revenue."
How often have we had to argue that point on here and elsewhere? Posters going on about how every new way studios can think of taking money is actually needed "or the game won't get made". He also recognises an old maxim that Larian recently talked about, if you make a game that's good enough the money will come in. That used to be the way you ensured your game was a financial success, not revenue strategy!
Hard Pass
As for the topic, my conclusion is people will find something to complain about and the trick is listening to the right people. I do not like how developers listen to the people who are clearly just complaining for self gain. Like in SWG when decay and death penalties were always toned down or the waits for Starports were toned down. These aren't good things for the world and have knock on effects like making the world feel empty as everyone can instant travel.
Easy to learn, hard to master only has merit if that is actually true. What always ends up happening is the game becomes bloated over time with too many features and people stop caring to master. Like Classic vs Retail WoW and why people prefer Classic WoW despite it actually being more punishing in the early levels. It was harder to learn but easier to master than retail WoW which is easy to learn and hard to master. At a certain point the game tries to do too much and it all devalues everything as things start feeling arbitrary.
Like when too much loot is added into a game, at a certain point I cannot keep up and I stop caring about any of it. Then they start selling it on a store for real money and then not only is there too much, but it all becomes worthless as loot used to be a reflection on skill or time put into the game. Why I'm such a big fan of things changing in the world like Cataclysm, rather than constantly adding. Worlds never feel like they evolve, they just keep being added on to and it kills them.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
This is the lesson that so many developers need to (re-)learn.
If your game is enjoyable, you don't have to resort to psychological manipulation like daily quests and battle passes to get people to keep coming back.
If your game is enjoyable, players will be all too happy to spend some money on it.
If your game is enjoyable (including being technologically well-executed), you will never have to worry about getting review-bombed.
If you don't know how to make a game enjoyable, please stick to churning out mobile trash and stay out of the PC space.
Stylized, but not cartoony. In the direction of Breath of the Wild and Genshin's environments (obviously not Genshin's avatars). Do for sci-fantasy what WoW did for fantasy: be welcoming, not all shades of brown and green.
We have a long way to go still. Work to come on unifying style, lighting, fx, and much more.
You're hugely overstating what we are actually doing.
First, the number of "a reacts to b" scenarios we need to have for the *entire game* is well under 100. And they tend to fall into really broad swaths of types, so we only needed to make around a half dozen of those.
Next, it's all data driven already, so those are just entries in a table. It is all run off abstract properties. We do not need to define how oak responds to fire, everything made of wood reacts the same way. We *can* do things like more or less speed in burning, but that's just a number field, and it's optional.
We don't need to make every cell remember your footstep. We just need to make any cell able to respond to a footstep based on what's in the cell.
Basically, it's all very generic rules. So generic, in fact, that the forest burning, the river flowing, and rock eroding to sand all work in the exact same way.
The only people who can afford to make a game without talking about it are the AAA studios, and they will never innovate, because that is not what they do.
In the modern games business, everyone else has to build community in advance, because getting people to even hear you exist is the biggest hurdle.
I can tell you that what we have is *already* enjoyable, but of course, you shouldn't take my word for it until you get to make that determination for yourself. We've been working on this for years already. There's quite a lot of gameplay already done.
Of course.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
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Raph will never stop huffing his own fartz. Get used to it! It is the Modality of the TImes.
The AAA is dead, just collapsing now because they used to just rely on better graphics and a complete domination of the publishing process. However now people aren't impressed by graphics, we hit a point of diminishing returns. Also the publishing side has been democratized, there is no more stranglehold.