Grounded Design

First off, I'd like to just put forth something to consider about the trend of MMO games we've seen in the past few years. Mind you much of this is highly abridged for obvious reasons.

In the beginning, we had extremely expensive MUDs that were played only by the relatively wealthy - the technophiles. We then saw MUDs emerge as increasingly mainstream, which later gave way to similar games with 2D graphical interfaces. Meridian 59 came along as one the first more mainstream examples, followed by the ever-popular Ultima Online. After that came the next generation of MMOs, commonly knows as Immersive MMORPGs. In these games, the player was visually placed in the location and perspective of their alter-ego – or at least in a very near third-person approximation. These games made a player feel as though they were physically in a new world - so long as they could be lulled into forgetting about the limits of their monitor and all of those annoying distractions outside of it. It is at that point, the point when 2D MMOs gave way to 3D Immersive MMOs, that I believe the whole equation for what made an MMO successful should have changed. Allow me to explain.

Prior to this point, it was extremely beneficial for a designer to turn to Pen and Paper games when looking for design inspiration – it was easy to test, well proven, and had already been developed and improved upon over many years. Pen & Paper rules easily flowed into their text-based MUD incarnations, which flowed almost equally well into the rules of the 2D scrollers of Ultima Online's family of games. All of those games operate on grid-based movement decisions and dice-based action probabilities. In a world of text, not everything can be explained or the text would have to be a tome, so those unexplained gaps are well suited to be filled with random probabilities. For example: the probability of you hitting that monster is a 2d10+5 and you need at least a 14, or about %60 chance. That's all good and well when a player cannot control their physical swing, cannot alter their blow to counter the monster's movements, etc. It fills those gaps for us, because the player can control the probability by using different abilities, spells, enchantments, and so forth. Thus, the player has simulated control of destiny - but not total.

When immersive games began to emerge, the phrase: "a picture is worth a thousand words" never applied so literally. A player could then see his sword going through the monster, or his spell making impact. However, many of these games still utilized the same system of chance that was meant to fill in the gaps that now either no longer existed, or existed on a vastly diminished scale. Gaps such as whether one hit or missed their target, whether one’s enemy dodged him, etc., were still being superficially filled by chance. Thus, the player was receiving mixed signals: visually he would be told one thing, but textually something completely different. This reflected a failure of early immersive game designers to understand why chance was put into pen and paper in the first place. A LARP player (live action role-play) who is worth his salt can tell you that LARPing doesn't need to be played with a dice. If every role-play action is given values and consequences, then virtually all the chance can be taken out. So, if I threw an item at you that represents, say, a lightning bolt, and it impacted your arm, then as long as we have rules that dictate how much damage an arm-hit does to you from a lightning bolt, there is no more chance - the chance was replaced by the skill of my throw (or lack thereof).

You see, Pen and Paper games were a way of LARPing without requiring a whole lot of space to move, without needing to drive to a forest for the forest quest, without buying a whole bunch of props, and without needing to look like a bunch of nerds in general. But, in order to do all this, Pen and Paper games required the infusion of a great deal of chance - a great deal of things beyond the control of the player. This was achieved by leaving just enough things for the player to choose that he would still consider his actions ultimately important.

Once 3D immersive games began to emerge, technology had taken us full circle. We had come from LARP'ing, to pen and paper, to the MUDs that simulated them, to the 2D scrollers that showed them to us from above, back to LARP'ing again. Except that the developers missed it. Believing at that point that Pen & Paper fundamentals were in fact the core of RPG gaming, they looked back at history one technological generation too short: the pre-pen/paper generation, the one that was just a bunch of people running around with nothing but their imagination, and in fact the one that spawned Pen & Paper role-play in the first place. So what we got was a sort of mutant game - a game that never understood how it actually fit into to the whole RPG story. We ended up with a graphical LARP that was still a textual Pen & Paper. And that precedent has held the industry back ever sense.

Of the initial list of successful immersive 3D games released, however, there was one game in particular that appeared to break from the mold - at least somewhat. Indeed, there was one game that allowed whether or not a blow was landed to be determined not by chance, but by whether or not the hit graphically landed. It allowed for the damage done to be determined by more than just a chance dice-roll. That game, unknown by many of today’s MMO players, was in fact Asheron's Call.