Saturday, July 18, 2009

comment response - breaking the mold

I slept for 11 hours last night. I'm thinking it must be my body fighting the immune shots I had because I haven't slept like that in ages. I haven't had time to read any more of the book yet, but I think my last post was one of my better ones. It's my belief that reading makes us better writers, and writing makes us better readers. When you write, you learn the labor of the art, which cannot but give enhanced insight into what others are trying to convey. When you read, you absorb new styles with which to express your own thoughts. The two activities produce a positive feedback loop that to me seems undeniable.

I just received an anonymous comment, and since I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to put into today's entry, I thought that a response to it would make for a good one. It didn't hurt that the comment was articulate and well reasoned. I'm only going to quote the latter part, since it sets up the question well enough:

"When you create an MMOG, you're not really creating a world that naturally evolves over time (and is naturally enjoyable), you're actually just writing one perpetuating "section of time" - a world that exists only in the past and continually loops after a certain point. Only the first wave of players actually get to experience what you intended.

So we add more content in monthly mini-expansions.

Well, adding new content as fast as we can only goes so far since that's a race against the players we cannot hope to win...

In the end, the only saving grace for our industry may be new technology in 'constantly (and consistently) generating new content procedurally.'

What are your thoughts on this procedural content generation?"


This is a perfect description of today's class-based skill-less MMOs. This comment reminds me of the article Will Armstrong showed me that can be found here: http://www.buzzcut.com/archive/article.php~story=20060303211856230.html

The fact is that this is the sad state of main-stream MMORPGs. As long as lore is one-dimensional, quests are nothing but treasure hunts with arrows pointing the way to the next clue, players are pigeonholed into one of several class-based roles, and combat is about who put the most time in grinding, this will never change.

The only way to fix the state of MMORPGs is to do several things:

First, make the players the content. By this I mean make the players create the content by virtue of what they do. This would require some really brilliant minds to put their heads together, but I'm convinced that it can be done. First of all, the world needs to be 100% player vs player. I am absolutely convinced that this is the only way to free up honest tendencies of social interaction enough so that real, believable player interaction can take place, and believable societies and factions can form. Being a moron must have consequences, which will also serve to teach players real world social skills. Tact goes a long way in a complete PvP world where death means loss. I say this because I’ve played it.

In addition, creating quests needs to be a skill that players can learn. Players must be able to obtain in-game tools for creating their own content, with a very sophisticated and open content-generating system. The system will work by allowing players to take external variables within the world and produce unique, individual quests with them. Such quests will involve members of one society killing members of another, and returning a degree of proof, they may involve theft, they may involve intelligence gathering, they may involve crafting a needed item, or going to a distant place and acquiring an item and returning without dying, it could be a chess tournament, destroying an amazing monster somewhere, or combinations of these and many other things.

The way to look at it is this way: What is a "quest" in a real-world sense? It is nothing more than a demand. If I want you to go get something for me, or do something for me, then I am demanding certain goods or services. If the player does these things, then he is supplying the goods or services, for a fee, which is the reward in the gaming sense. The goal should be to set up a world that has the potential to be vibrant enough to where the supply of certain goods and services is so difficult for some players to obtain, easy enough for others, that there is a real market for these quests for both parties. Another important aspect is that both the creation of quests must be fun and exciting (sort a quest all by itself), as well as the quest that is generated by it. The more difficult the quest is to generate, the more rewarding it is for both parties when it is concluded. The quest creator must invest in their quest in some manner (obviously it all boils down to time), but their investment should be returned and then some when the quest is completed. It seems reasonable to me that the quest generator might not even know every aspect of the quest they create, which serves to keep everyone honest (some variables are outside their control).

An idea I am tossing around is something like this: First, there is your standard open world where most of the MMORPG world takes place. This is where the cities are, the land has its mobs, whatever NPCs are needed, bind stones, etc. The standard infrastructure that the game requires.

Then, there is a kind of "basement" of the MMO. This basement is the potential dungeon land that the quest-generators of the game are able to utilize for quest-building. It will be the clay with which dungeon quests can be created. These quests will not be instanced, they will be standing dungeons that players will war over and war inside of. In all likelihood, you enter such a quest by entering some sort of “portal,” which is located perhaps based on where the quest creator places it, or perhaps where the game deems is appropriate based on its estimated difficulty. Now, not everyone will be able to just build wonderful dungeons with tough mobs. To the contrary, quest creators will have to actually acquire a library of possible monsters, items, and dungeon size and architecture over a long period of time. The number of such dungeons that they can have built at once will be extremely limited, which means they will be rebuilding quests as they become better at their craft - both literally and in the gaming sense. You may ask: "Why in the hell would someone waste time creating content like this?" The answer is because everyone has an innate desire to create experiences for other people. Everyone wants to be a designer. I say let them have at it. These dungeon quests would also interplay with the surface world, creating quests much more complex than a simple dungeon crawl. They may require several visits to the same dungeon, visits to multiple smaller ones, visits to multiple towns across the surface map, or may even incorporate other quest-creator’s items, quests, and dungeons.

You could even set the system of as a sort of quest-generating guild. In this system, aspiring quest-creators would form guilds that would enhance their overall power. Top members in the guild require a certain number of followers before they can move up in their tier of content generation (surface world quests, to complex surface worlds quests, to basic dungeons, and so forth). The lesser members of the guild could serve lesser roles within those same quests, i.e. maintain items for it (in the case of they not generating automatically), obtaining mobs, generating small content features, and just generally maintaining the most complex and difficult quest aspects. These guilds may be some of the most lucrative in the game, and may hold huge political sway (putting up hits on players, giving secrets about their ever-changing quests, etc.). They may require the protection of other, combat-oriented clans. For example, perhaps members of the guild must have an expensive item on their person in order for content to stay intact, and killing them causes them to drop said item. Perhaps they must be online a certain amount of time/week for their quests to stay active, and other quest guilds can put hits on them to set back their competitors. The possibilities are really endless.

On top of this dungeon layer of quest creation, surface quests would be made as well. As I said, these quests would generally revolve around players hunting other players (but not limited by it).

In addition, by also having quests that involve players hunting one another, quests become more complex as players continue to learn, evolve, become stronger, more loyal to one another, and more protective of each other. Players gradually become the epic mobs. This adds an entirely new element to questing and the role-play aspect of the game. Ensuring that this system is not abused would require careful thought, but it is doable.

The second major change that must come to MMOs is that the combat system must become skill-based. By this I do not mean that there should be no levels, in fact, I believe levels to be the best possible system. However, the fights themselves must be based on player skill, and not simply who is more geared out or has higher skills. Let me explain my idea of the best system:

First, the progression system should be very similar to that of Asheron's Call. I do not say this simply because I liked the game. I actually sat down to think up what I felt was the best progression system from the ground up, and as I formed it, I suddenly realized that it was extremely similar to the system AC used. For this reason, there is no doubt in my mind that AC's skill system was thought up from the ground up. The way it works is this: Players have one experience pool, and all the experience they acquire goes into that pool. In addition, at character creation, players are allowed to "train" and "specialize" in 50 skill points’ worth of skills. Each skill requires a unqiue number of skill points based on its overall power within the game - lockpick required far less than war magic, for example. Specializing a skill takes twice as many skill points as training it, but requires a somewhat less exponential curve to increase when dumping experience into it. Once trained, you are then able to dump experienced into any such trained skill you want. Every time you level, you get a skill point, up to a certain level, then its every 3 levels, then ever 5 levels, etc. Thus, as you progress, you save these up to obtain new skills, and your skills get better as you allocate experience in each. There is no "class" in the game, everyone can create their character however they want to. The player also puts experience points into each of their secondary attributes (strength, coordination, quickness, etc) and primary attributes (health, stamina, mana). In this manner each player becomes totally unique.

However, the next generation of MMO must go farther than this. First off, the game must be collision detection (as AC was). Dodging spells/ranged attacks must be possible. Next, the game must employ multiple melee stances, and multiple attacks within each stance. Think Jedi Knight II. Each stance is learned as a new "skill," and when points are put into the stance, the attacks gain the potential of dealing more damage (depending on weapon quality). New special attacks within stances also sometimes require a skill to be a certain level in various magics or acrobatics as well as said stance, may require specific items be on the player's person, may require base level attributes, and many many other things that would take too long to explain in detail. I'm typing very quickly right now, there is a great deal to say about the way this system works and putting it all here would take quite a bit of time. Suffice it to say that the combat mechanic seen in Jedi Knight II is a good example of the general sort of combat that the game would have: fast-paced melee-oriented combat, with crowd control spells that can be used during melee combat, as well as ranged weaponry that is deflectable with both sword and spells. There would, of course, also be offensive spells, but due to balancing issues they would only be castable with a wand equipped. I've also designed an additional mana pool I call "essence"...ok I'm rambling a bit. You get the picture. The player gets more powerful by gaining new tools of combat, not by gaining more powerful ones, per se. Although old tools do get stronger, it is not to an extreme degree. A player that is high in level has the primary advantage of more stances, more attacks within each stance, more and stronger spells, more acrobatics, etc. But a low level player with good enough timing will still win, even with his more limited toolset.

The overall point here is that the game must be skill-based. This is not the same thing as "twitch-based." Twitch combat mean who gets their reticule on the opponent's head first and pulls the trigger. Again, look at Jedi Knight II. The game is kind of twitch, but it is much more a game of chess: if your opponent pulls a gun, pull it out of his hands and into yours, or deflect the shots with your saber, or throw your saber and jump towards him, or push him away for distance, or pull him towards you and close on him. If you are the one pulling the gun, then you can attempt to hit your opponent low where he can't block, you can keep him at a distance by pushing him, you can pull your saber just as he closes on you and surprise him. Once the melee battle has started, it becomes a complete chess-match, each move having different reaches, different commitment times (times until you are reset back to stance and can block or attack again), different coverage areas, etc. Add the acrobatics of back flips, wall flips, wall running, high-jumps, kicks, etc. and, constant spells thrown in, and the melee is far more chess than twitch. I know this because I bothered to get extremely good at the game, as I haven't found as intricate an FPS/TPS melee game yet. This sort of combat, in my opinion, must be the game's overall core mechanic. Content generation would be a close runner-up, since both would have to be conceived and balanced brilliantly.

Finally, there should be no limit to player level. Even though the game is level-based, the max level should be so high that it is either never reached, or takes years to get to. Again, Asheron's Call had this progression system, and it took two years for anyone to hit max level. If it weren't for experience chains in that game, I don't think it would have ever happened. XP was passed up from followers, with increasing gains, all the way up to monarchs, which allowed them to amass unimaginable amounts of xp over time. It took monarchs with thousands of followers two years to hit max level, and that was when max level was only 126, it was later increased to 275.

I've done a lot of rambling in this post about a lot of specifics that I have only half-explained. MMO's are complex, intricate things to discuss, and it is hard to convey the mechanics of one without writing many, many pages. I'm sure much of what I just wrote was not written well enough to convey what I mean, and for that I apologize and hope to clarify things in coming entries.

Thanks for the question! Let me know what you think.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I got my panties in a bunch when I read this:

"First, make the players the content. By this I mean make the players create the content by virtue of what they do. This would require some really brilliant minds to put their heads together, but I'm convinced that it can be done."

Argh! This problem has been haunting me since the beginning of my career! Nobody that I've met in person fits this "brilliant mind" description!!

We need a wizard of technology to help us out here, maybe Will Wright's SPORE team? Haha, sure, like I know any of them. They're also probably afraid of MMORPGs, what with the failure of The Sims Online and all...

Then again, from what I see, it's inevitable that all games will become MMORPGs in the future: if the only recyclable content is other players, then that's the only way this industry can continue to make money. Maybe they'll see the logic in that eventually...

Zenodotus said...

I actually tried to describe a system that I felt would work. Did you read it? Perhaps I'll describe one in more detail.

Will Armstrong IV said...

This is quite a long entry, so forgive me if this runs a little long.

First, thanks for the shout-out.

Second, in regards to players-as-content, I actually have an article I have been working on for a while that you have inspired me to work on a bit more and try to wrap up.

I do disagree with you on levels being the best system for MMO development. That's another article I should probably wrap up; I tend to spend most of my time on my private blog, but I'll have to start going public soon.

Your statement "The player gets more powerful by gaining new tools of combat, not by gaining more powerful ones, per se." is something I myself have said and represents a core of my philosophy.

As I put it, Instead of giving players a bigger hammer, give them a better toolbox.

I'll have to get to work; there are two articles I've been meaning to write that would work as nice responses to your post here.

Zenodotus said...

Whenever you publish them I'd like to see them so let me know.

I also used to think levels were not the way to go. I was actually very much in the skill-system boat. Then I played Darkfall. Skilling up as opposed to leveling up just generates too much macro'ing. It's not macro'ing itself I can't stand, its the kind of macro'ing.

Both leveling up and skilling up result in macros, but I find leveling macros more sophisticated and difficult to protect, especially in a full pvp world.

Also, my form of "leveling" only incorporates leveling in order to accumulate skill points which are used to unlock new skills. Other than that, levels mean nothing but are a mere measure of the total experience you've put into your experience pool. You could assign the same number to a player who had skilled up a lot of skills, it would be equally meaningless.

Will Armstrong IV said...

Zenodotus,

I've posted one of the articles I mentioned in my comment, it can be found by following the link in my name to my blog. I hope you enjoy.

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