Archive for the ‘Game Design’ Category

Virtual Worlds for Real Life People – Part 2

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

SOCIAL TOOLS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY PLAYER

2010 is the year for social interaction to regain focus in MMOs. I make proclamations like that as frequent as NEVER but I am completely confident that is right on the money.

There doesn’t seem to be enough emphasis on tools to encourage or facilitate social interaction in most of the current MMOs. Does WOW have in-game guild calendars yet? I figured they’d be the first to offer that. I think Fallen Earth had some decent tools but I haven’t fired that up in a while so I don’t really remember. Turbine’s MyLOTRO, SOE’s VGPlayers and EQ2Players and Universal Chat, CCP’s upcoming New Eden… these are the start of something bigger. Once these ‘Web 2.0? and ‘SNS’ pages get adopted as in-game features, or at least integrated with the game worlds they are supposed to be part of, we’ll see a lot more interaction.

In 2010, I really think developers will start releasing MMOs and expansions that focus on allowing the 21st Century human being to interact the way he is accustomed to interacting. In their everyday life, players of MMOs are on their iPhones and Blackberries, with a bluetooth in their ear and instantaneous information in the form of Facebook updates and Twitter tweets popping up on their screens. Comparatively, MMO communication and social interaction tools are one step above petroglyphs. Unable to send a tell when someone is offline? Can’t mail something unless you are near a mailbox, and can’t receive it unless you traipse to a mailbox to get it? Honestly, is that any more advanced than having to find a big enough blank cave wall to draw your message on and have the other person come to that cave in order to read what you wrote?

I’ll cut it short here, but I plan to return to this topic in a few months. I wholly expect to be able to add a list of ways that MMOs have added or started development on tools that work towards this goal.

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Virtual Worlds for Real Life People – Part 1

Monday, October 12th, 2009

ME AND MY 140 BEST BUDDIES

When designing the social and interactive gameplay of a virtual world, a lot of developers seem to be putting a lot of effort into creating tools and mechanics that bring everyone together. As a result, we end up with forced grouping mechanics and other nonsense. Utopia is called such for a reason. To create communities that work in a large scale environment, the goal should be to create tools that allow people to divide.

lolwut?

Yes, divide. We already know, from multiple studies and research projects, that people function best in communities of 150 or less. That being the case, mechanics that facilitate the separation of players into recognizable subgroups allows for people with common interests to gather and bond. My suggestion is to expand the ‘guild’ to a ‘community’ focus that allows like-minded individuals to pile into groups of 500 or even even a thousand. Of that lot, you’d probably have a few dozen to maybe 100 on at any one time. People get to know the members of their particular community that play during their timeslot (a subset of the community subgroup). That guy next to you very quickly becomes “Danny who just bought a new Mazda yesterday” or “Amy who always dyes her armor green” or… well, you get the drift.

Once someone becomes a familiar entity to another person, it is much harder to be a complete fudgewad to them. More importantly, it is more likely they will extend a certain level of extra courtesy and respect. The best example I can think of right now is if you are walking down a block in NYC and you see someone off to the side with a sad look on their face. The level of attention you pay to it is, for most people, directly related to your level of familiarity with them. If they are someone you recognize from the office you might do a double take and keep going. If they are someone who you have spoken with a few times or more at the office, you’re going to be more inclined to go over and ask if they are ok or if they need any help.

One concern people present regarding this is that the communities will show signs of elitism or display animosity towards each other communities. GOOD. It means that the people in your game are functioning like they would in the real world.

Game developers should remember that they are game developers, not God or Ghandi. They should create realistic tools that foster community for real world people and not for some utopian vision of how they want people to be. It’s silly to try to devise the solution to world peace through looting rules and raid mechanics in a video game.

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Single-Shard Universe – EVE Online

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
EVE Online

EVE Online

Title: EVE Online
Developer: CCP Games
Publisher: CCP Games (originally SSI)
Release Date: 06 May 2003

Single-Shard Universe

One of the problems that seems to be regularly faced by MMO developers is that of how many servers to have at release. This is difficult to assess and, from what we’ve seen with many releases, very difficult to get right even by a team of veterans in the industry. The biggest hurdle seems to be that first few months when the flood of new players come in. In that group, you have a percentage that bought the game and, for a range of reasons, aren’t going to be playing past that first free month. This seems to be a consistently large number, and I’d venture to guess it’s at least 20-30% of the people that buy the box who do not play past the first month. You also have the majority of the players ingame for play sessions that are more frequent and much longer than normal. After that initial period, most MMOs start to see a sharp drop in concurrent users. The players begin to notice this and usually results in the Doom-n-Gloom prophecies on message boards about the game dying a premature death. This is sometimes exacerbated by the noticeable (but not necessarily steep) reduction in new players coming in, resulting in the earlier towns/areas appearing to be relative ghost towns.

Compounding the problem in many MMOs is the ‘big world’ design. Players ask for big worlds to explore and the devs go out of their way to accommodate that. The problem, however, is that it’s not enough to just have vast expanses. They need to be filled with something substantive and that is very hard to do. That, however, is a topic for another article. :)

One direction to go is the single-shard universe. While this design can create some major technical hurdles for the developers, it seems to present a solution to several of the major issues MMO devs face throughout the lifespan of their game. It is most beneficial to virtual worlds that have a focus on community, and several MMOs have taken this approach. One of the most notable ones being EVE Online by CCP Games.

It definitely resolves the issue of ‘dead’ servers. Unless your game completely sucks, you’re not going to have a dead server. Everyone in one game world means that people are not spread out across multiple shards. Even if  you have 500 people ingame on one server, the game is more alive than if you have 500 people spread out across five servers. Currently EVE Online has daily concurrent user counts of over 38,000 players but in it’s first few months, 5,000 was a lot more common. Had that 5,000 been spread across several servers, especially with the massive size of the EVE universe, the game would have certainly lost players to the ‘dead’ server perception.

It allows for more flexibility in controlling and shifting the story arc. With multiple servers, offering players a choice of options is very hard to do when it comes to major quests and plot events unless you are looking to have very divergent paths for the servers. The best that can be done there is either offer the appearance of a choice  or offer meaningless choices – neither one is really all that fun for the players. With a single  server, the option to present meaningful choices to the player is there. You still are following one path on one server, as opposed to the possibility of multiple story paths across several servers. For example, if the Evil Foo is guarding the Crystal of Safety, and the players need to kill him to get the crystal, what happens if a server decides not to kill him. Do you halt the story arc and leave him standing there forever on that server until he does? That doesn’t seem fair to the servers that killed him. Do you create a separate path for that server based on their decision? If so, then two or three major quests down the line and you will have your hands full managing divergent plots. Do you go in and use a character to kill the Evil Foo so that server moves to the next step of the arc? If so, then you have told the players their choice is meaningless.

There’s also a better chance of player notoriety. While only a select few ever rise to any significant level of fame, in a single server game world, a famous (or infamous, for that matter) player becomes known universally. With multiple game worlds, it is uncommon to gain notice beyond your specific server. Say ‘Chribba‘ ‘Winterblink‘ or ‘Goonswarm‘ to any of the quarter million EVE players, and it is very likely they will not only know the name, but will be able to relay a personal anecdote or two related to it.

If you’re building a sandbox, a single-shard universe seems the best way to go. The community builds stronger since it is not divided. Emergent behavior, fashion, ingame culture, and trends have a more widespread effect because the viral nature of them do not have to work against the hurdle of a divided (by servers) community.

The Council of Stellar Management, a commitee comprised of  player elected members of the EVE Online community, is much more effective because of the single-shard universe. Had EVE players been spread out among several servers, each with its own cultures and issues, addressing any one issue to any reasonable degree would have had a lot more hurdles.

This has been more of a ramble than anything else, but the overall point is this: A single-shard universe seems to offer several benefits to both players and developers alike. It helps prevent the ‘dead’ server issue, strengthens the overall game community, and offers developers more leeway to offer players meaningful choices ingame.

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Improving Travel – Various MMOs

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

While I’m a fan of UO’s on-the-spot recall system, there’s just a ton of resistance to that from players and devs so I won’t even go there. I revisited a few MMOs to take a look at the various ways that they have given players faster and more convenient travel mechanics, and I found some really great ideas across the board.

Asheron’s Call

The three basic methods of quick travel in Asheron’s Call are portals, spells, and slash-commands.  Portals are tied to set destinations and teleport the player immediately there. They are often color coded to indicate the level range/restriction of the destination. Spells are mana-consuming spells that players can purchase from vendors or obtain from quests. The spells allow players to tie to lifestones (post death spawn locations) and most portals. There are spells for both recalling to that location and opening a one-way portal to that location. Slash-commands exist as well. These archaic “we couldn’t be arsed to make a spell or a button” commands allow for players to recall to miscellaneous locations – allegiance mansion, personal home, marketplace, etc.  The combination of all of these allow players to gather faster, thus providing more time for actually doing the quests and ingame functions instead of wasting time getting everyone to the same location.

Another travel feature is that running in Asheron’s Call is a skill. This skill, like all others in the game, can be buffed or debuffed by players and mobs. The more points you put into it, the faster you run. By about level 60 or so, most players are pretty much rockets.

Horizons

Oh noez! He’s going to say something good about Horizons! Actually, there’s a lot of good to be said about Horizons and I wish more people would focus on those aspects than the dev drama. In a recent run through the dragon-infested realm of Istaria, I noticed that when I was on the road I traveled much faster than on unpaved terrain. This allowed for normal speed while adventuring, but when you were simply trying to get somewhere, the game automatically gives you a boost. While there is that MMO-standard ‘Sprint’ ability – you know, the one that you can use in an MMO for a few seconds at a time with the cooldown of several minutes -  it isn’t your only shot-in-the-arm for travel. The speed buff gained when on roads is a great way to aid players in getting to their destination faster with minimal impact on speed balance during the rest of gameplay.

Dungeon Runners

The gameplay is humorous but the game design is definitely no joke. The Dungeon Runners team took a look at what aspects of hack-n-slash RPGs players liked and what they didn’t. They amplified the former to extreme and hilarious levels while reducing both reducing travel time in some ways and eliminating it altogether in others. Great big pillars in towns can be clicked on to allow you to instantly recall to places that you have been to. It’s done on the premise that you trekked there once already, so why make you shlepp out there again when you can just zap there and return to enjoying the fun. Scrolls are available to allow players to recall right back to town from where they are in the dungeon – no need to make a player search the maze again to find the exit if all he wants to do is quickly get out of the dungeon, be it for getting an ingame task done or for finding out why the lights in the next room over flickered or why the kids are now screaming… sometimes very related and equally urgent scenarios. They took this one step further and actually eliminated undesirable trips to town with the Bling Gnome. This entertaining little creature is a bonus item for those that purchase the retail box of Dungeon Runners. What does it do? Well, in short, it eats your loot and craps out gold. Srsly. Owners of a Bling Gnome can adventure longer since they do not have to pause the action because their bags are full. The trip to town to resell and return is completely eliminated through the use of the Bling Gnome’s odd but efficient ‘ability.’

Travel is a big concern for both devs and players. The contention is that the faster travel is and the more readily places are accessible to players, the smaller the world gets. Personally, I think travel should be faster in most MMOs. MMOs that have PvP or Exploration as the core of their gameplay probably aren’t going to benefit from more expeditious travel, but the majority of MMOs don’t go that route. They are about hack-n-slash grinding and farming. There’s no reason to hinder the players from getting to where they feel they need to be. There’s no reason to have to break the action for schlepping around areas of the world that the players have seen a thousand times already. As an MMO matures, more and more methods or avenues of travel should be added to facilitate gathering and getting into the action, which are the two tasks most MMO gamers are looking to accomplish.

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Engaging Missions – Auto Assault

Monday, October 20th, 2008
Auto Assault

Auto Assault

Title: Auto Assault
Developer: NetDevil
Publisher: NCSoft
Release Date: 13 April 2006

Done Right: Engaging Mission Content

It wasn’t that Auto Assault had some magnificent depth to its missions that made them entertaining, rather it was the game environment itself combined with little tweaks that really made for some memorable adventures. A very good example would be the level 20 mission, Backfire! The object of the mission is to hunt down a certain named NPC and blow up his vehicle before he can reach his destination.

  • Getting you to the action – The mission tells you the general area he will be in and, once near enough, the named NPC shows up as a dot on your map. The player’s hand isn’t held, but the directions and indicators are clear enough that getting to the fun isn’t confusing or frustrating.
  • The Thrill of the Chase – the NPC isn’t locked into one spot. He isn’t an over-sized lumbering superdamage variant of what you’ve already killed a thousand of. He’s a man on a mission, racing to his destination and you actually have to chase him down, run him off the road, and blast him to bits. The chase is an aspect of PvE that is normally annoying in the few MMOs that offer it, but it works very well in Auto Assault. It’s a cool Mad Max style experience.
  • Something to do if there is a wait – If the named NPC hasn’t spawned/appeared/popped/etc yet, the destructible environment gives you something to do while waiting. Instead of sitting around staring at the ’spawn point’, you have an entire town around you just begging to be reduced to rubble. It’s no longer a situation of ‘ho-hum, let’s do this to kill 10 minutes’ but an entertaining race to see how much of the city you can completely destroy before the boss mob shows up. Smashing stuff never gets old.
  • Missions are rewarding to complete – When you complete this or any other mission, there’s a triumphant sound played and a big “MISSION COMPLETED!” text across the center of your screen to accompany the trinket and cash you got for a job well done. Even the most mundane “bring me 10 [mob] parts” quest becomes a lot more rewarding when you’ve got bells and whistles going off at turn-in.

A lot of the newer MMOs are making their missions more engaging and making quest turn-in more rewarding, and I’m looking forward to writing about those as time goes on. I wanted to start with Auto Assault because it’s one of the MMOs where the combination of a few little things here and there real added to the questing experience, turning an otherwise mundane and repetitive game aspect into something refreshingly entertaining.

Below is a video of the Backfire! mission from start to finish. Enjoy!

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