Schilling's Green Monster Games

[chargerrich]

You remind me of the old cliché of the buzz-kill high school coach who tells the kid he'll never make the big leagues.

You don't innovate by assuming the situation is impossible and hoping somebody else/some new miracle technology will come along and solve the problem for you.

Its only impossible until its not...

[Nebu]

I have to confess that I'm interested in what Curt thinks about gaming.  He's the only one here with the resources to really do much about the current MMO situation.  I hope that he will continue to engage in discussion, but like Schild, hope that he does it without using these forums as a place to hype vaporware. 

[chargerrich]

What's wrong with armored players being harder to knock off? It's not like he's talking about WoW PvP + mounted combat and just adding an armor-based buff to the knockOffChance stat or something

Yeah, it's a choice between getting continually stabbed in the cock every time you travel, or not. To use an analogy it's like making your wizard class so mana-hungry they have to sit down after every second fight, and then give them optional trait at level X that makes their mana supply permanently full

Replace "wizard" with "magician" and "optional trait" with "KEI" and you just described a good portion of my EQ1 experience. From seven years ago. Thankfully we're well beyond that now.

It's a catch-up mechanism. (in regards to offline something-gain)

Not really. The people who put in the time to achieve are going to be far ahead no matter how you slice it. Player A plays 6 hours a night and Player B plays 10 hours a week. Even with auto-skill/xp/money, Player A has 60 hours of active play against Player B's 10 plus whatever meager buff the developer decided to apply in the form of skill/xp/money salary.

The only way to enforce parity between powergamers and not is to retread the nonsense like power-hour and whatever time span existed between implementation and someone figuring out 8x8 in UO. Even Eve doesn't close this gap completely because your powergamer is going to train their skills up on the clone with all the implants.

That's what's different from your board games analogy. Those actually do affect the person out in front.

The idea here is never to completely balance or cause complete parity between casual and power gamers. Powergamers should be rewarded for poopsocking their way to maximum whatever but rest xp and other "offline catchup" mechanisms provide great incentive (the proverbial carrot) to progress forward (especially with alts for example). I for one love the idea of rest experience and would love to see it expanded into other areas.

[Nebu]

Powergamers should be rewarded for poopsocking their way to maximum whatever but rest xp and other "offline catchup" mechanisms provide great incentive (the proverbial carrot) to progress forward (especially with alts for example). I for one love the idea of rest experience and would love to see it expanded into other areas.

Why should they be rewarded?  They consume more resources, complain the loudest, and cause the most conflict in games.  I think that game design that rewards the casual player more than the powergamer would be a positive change for MMOs.  Everything in MMOs falls on a log scale.  Why not make xp gains vs time online be on some sort of a similar treadmill.  Playing after 8 consecutive hours on a non-weekend, for example, could reduce xp gains by a factor of 10.  Would be a nice twist.

[chargerrich]

My money is on him making a story-driven WoW clone.  It's a disaster of a different type.

God I hope not...

I do not claim to have any supporting data other than my little 300 person guild and my RL friends who play, but I have to think that the VAST majority of players do not care about story, only read the quests to know where to go and just want to level > achieve > get better loot > progress to end game.

I know by having R.A. Salvatore on the team you are probably right, but IMO the more resources that are spent on a "rich backstory and narrative" just take away from what could be better actual game play mechanics.

[Nebu]

We did get some hope with the comment on story being in real time and not some cut scene or wall-o-text.  Still... seeing is believing.

[tmp]

Cut scenes piss me off.  I want to play your game.  Not watch a movie of your game.  The story element of gameplay should happen in real time. 

Well, the exposition to game settings/story has to happen somehow lest the player is left in complete darkness about what they have to do. This can be generally done only through interaction with other entities who talk (so either text or audio) or in-game presentations/letters/diaries/etc (so again either text or audio, optionally souped up with visuals)  In both cases the player has to spend some time paying attention to that exposition and this is mostly passive activity -- may as well make it a cutscene.

"Story element should happen in real time" -- that feels meaningless, somehow. If Gordon Freeman meets NPC and the NPC is all like "zomg it's Dr Freeman! now go and fetch me 10 rats Combine liver or the world as we know it is doomed" then that NPC is babbling "in real time", no? No matter if that's presented as cutscene or if the player is left free to run off in the meantime, miss half of that text and then go all "fuck, what do i do now?"

[Nebu]

Well, the exposition to game settings/story has to happen somehow lest the player is left in complete darkness about what they have to do. This can be generally done only through interaction with other entities who talk (so either text or audio) or in-game presentations/letters/diaries/etc (so again either text or audio, optionally souped up with visuals)  In both cases the player has to spend some time paying attention to that exposition and this is mostly passive activity -- may as well make it a cutscene.

"Story element should happen in real time" -- that feels meaningless, somehow. If Gordon Freeman meets NPC and the NPC is all like "zomg it's Dr Freeman! now go and fetch me 10 rats Combine liver or the world as we know it is doomed" then that NPC is babbling "in real time", no? No matter if that's presented as cutscene or if the player is left free to run off in the meantime, miss half of that text and then go all "fuck, what do i do now?"

I see your point.  Guild Wars did a reasonable job doing this with their cut scenes, but you still end up with the group yelling at you to skip them so that you can progress faster.  I think that while cut scenes do serve a function in storytelling, they are better left in solo games.   

[Gutboy Barrelhouse]

"but I have to think that the VAST majority of players do not care about story,"


Bioware hopes this is not true.

[WindupAtheist]

...a little too close to advertising - and you've been doing that for a while.

Dude his name isn't Curt Discussing.

 

[Lantyssa]

I have to confess that I'm interested in what Curt thinks about gaming.  He's the only one here with the resources to really do much about the current MMO situation.  I hope that he will continue to engage in discussion, but like Schild, hope that he does it without using these forums as a place to hype vaporware. 

I'm as interested in what he has to say as any developer, or anyone with the power to influence a game or with good ideas really, but the problem I see is he can't talk about his game yet.

It would probably be far more helpful for us to get an understanding of Curt's view of gaming if he was active in threads outside this one and actually left this one alone unless there was something to reveal.  (Of course there's downsides to a lead dev commenting on other games as well, if it's not kept at a very high academic level.)  So we might not know exactly what someone would come up with, but we then at least do have a reasonable idea of where their ideas are focused.

[Pennilenko]

I predict that we all will buy his game and try it. Then we will all quit shortly there after and march back to here to pick it apart for the next 3 months. Then Schild will move the section to the graveyard where only the crazies that still play bother to keep track of it.

[UnSub]

Veteran MMO companies have never had RA in the fold to help make it happen, nor Todd. They have both brought some pretty cool things to the table, minus ego, to add to a great team of designers. It's happening, our playtests are validating that it is. Sucks we can't show it yet, but when we can, we will. Lord knows if it was up to me to show it, it'd be shown already!

That you've got Rod* and Todd is great. But we've seen these kind of promises before.

If you deliver, great: sunshines and rainbows. However, take a look at Mark Jacobs for someone who talked a similar game and then failed to deliver. You'll be hung by your own rope.

*Yeah, his name is Rob, but this was funnier to me.

[Musashi]

The sad truth is that most gamers could care less about story. I've said this before, but I'd wager over 80% of MMO gamers never even bother with quest text beyond the directions to complete the quest and the comment on the reward.

And I've said this before; gamers have a terrible tendency to conflate "story" with "writing." I thought that Portal and BioShock would have done more to combat this fallacy.

Story is what you do. Writing just provides context. I've worked on a bunch of levels in Mass Effect 2, but the one I feel is strongest has the least amount of writing -- one short conversation to explain what's happened, then a bunch of ambient comments and recorded logs to provide context for what you see and do.

An MMO with no story is kill ten rats quests. Which is fine; K10Rs are mac & cheese gaming. Players gravitate to them because they're quick, easy, soloable, and familiar. Based on my limited experience with raids, I've found them among the most story-intensive quests in MMO -- but most people don't want to eat one every night.

A whole lot of this has to do with quest text/dialog trees.  Nobody likes that.  Well, not anybody worth marketing a game to.  Reading in a game isn't fun.  It's a chore.  I don't play games for chores.  If 99% of the story in games was integrated into voice, then stories in games could be a lot more rich.  I think that's kind of what you're talking about, but I really think it has as much to do with players lack of want to be forced into reading as it does providing players with an immersive context (which I agree is also important).  Text in games is a relic mechanic that somehow has survived from the days when you had to fit a game on to a 5 1/4" floppy.  We have hard drives now.  Stop making games I have to read.

Of course with all that said, nobody wants to sit and listen to Deckard Cain ramble on for 45 minutes either.

[tmp]

I see your point.  Guild Wars did a reasonable job doing this with their cut scenes, but you still end up with the group yelling at you to skip them so that you can progress faster.  I think that while cut scenes do serve a function in storytelling, they are better left in solo games.   

I wonder if they could lift some movie techniques for that since it's something they have more experience with, having to work around the time limitations and whatnot. Things like split-screen approach with action going in one part and exposition dialogue scene playing out in the other, flashback/interjection put in background etc. I remember this kind of 'picture in picture' view used in submarine simulator where they'd let the player track cinematic stuff like torpedoes going towards the target but without taking away the control of actual game meantime ... it worked very decent there, imo. Might be plausible in other genres too.

[Mrbloodworth]

I'm curious to know what the WoW and EQ2 folks here think about mounts. Mounts as rewards, mounts as quest rewards, mounts as RMT items. Did WoW do as great a job as I thought it did early on with mounts?

Fuck mounts at mid game. Sorry. Mounts early, specialty mounts should mid-game and on achievements.

[CadetUmfer]

If 99% of the story in games was integrated into voice the game, then stories in games could be a lot more rich.

Fixed.

[tmp]

Reading in a game isn't fun.  It's a chore.

Ehh, one page of this thread has more text than your average game. Reading is a pretty natural ability once you're 10 year old or so and as much a chore as listening to something is. It's like being an illiterate is a new black and it's embarassing to admit reading a sentence doesn't actually make one's few remaining brain cells implode, or what?

[CadetUmfer]

Reading in a game isn't fun.  It's a chore.

Ehh, one page of this thread has more text than your average game. Reading is a pretty natural ability once you're 10 year old or so and as much a chore as listening to something is. It's like being an illiterate is a new black and it's embarrassing to admit reading a sentence doesn't actually make one's few remaining brain cells implode, or what?

Erm, no.  It's because it doesn't fit with the medium well at all.  Sooner or later, "quest text" as it exists today will be like intertitles of silent movies.

There are a multitude of better ways to tell story in movies than text between scenes (eg. narration, dialogue, music).  I seriously hope we can do better in MMOs.

[Falconeer]

What I really dislike of Schilling's beahviour so far is that he only talks about his game. Which he can't talk about.
If he's a gamer, and I am sure he is, why doesn't he talk with us about games?

If you only post to "mention" (bump) your product, that sounds like marketing to me. I would be definitely interested in his views about gaming in general, not just the distant future of (his own) MMORPG.

[Rendakor]

I'm one who doesn't mind reading quest text. Cut scenes, however, generally bore me, and nothing annoys me like having to listen to some terribad voice over that goes slower than I can read it. It's even more annoying when these voice overs don't have subs and aren't skippable.

The other problem with the "WAH FUCK QUEST TEXT REEDIN IZ HRD" crowd is, what happens when you forget your quest objective? Do you have to watch the 15m video again just to find out where the rats you have to kill are?

[tmp]

Erm, no.  It's because it doesn't fit with the medium well at all.

I'm not arguing if it fits the medium, i'm just not buying the "it's a chore" argument because then listening to things is a "chore" too -- both require conscious effort on part of the brain to interpret the incoming signals. For that matter personally i often find it harder to interpret spoken text that's mangled by accent i'm not familiar with, than the same thing written down.

edit: btw i'm not so sure text "doesn't fit with the medium" either. Games use text a plenty to convey all kinds of information, and in particular MMOs out of all things are probably one of worst offenders when it comes to it. All those item descriptions, tooltips etc. and none of it voiced...

[Tmon]

...Curt. I think it's cool that you're here and talking about your stuff, however I also agree with Schild that the vague marketeering isn't really what we're here for. It's interesting to hear your thoughts on games design and mostly we understand that there's a lot you can't tell us - so don't. Don't allude to it, don't dangle the Tantalean grapes as it just smacks of hyperbole. No need to reference Copernicus at all if there's nothing you can tell us about it yet.

This

If you can't do more than play I've got a secret then shut up.  I realize you are jazzed about your game and really want to spread the word but right now you don't have anything to spread.  People here try most anything vaguely mmo like and report on it, they also trawl mmo websites compulsively  and report what they find here, it's not a place you have to hype your game.  A quick "Hey I'm building a game." post with a link to the official site probably would have been sufficient to get people interested and looking for information.

[CadetUmfer]

Games use text a plenty to convey all kinds of information, and in particular MMOs out of all things are probably one of worst offenders when it comes to it. All those item descriptions, tooltips etc. and none of it voiced...

This is true.  Text is the most efficient method to convey information...which MMOs have a lot of.  It's great for details you can't convey enough visually, audibly, or through gameplay.

I just hate seeing is as the main driver of plot and character motivations.  Slot machines when we could have poker tables.

Bring on the zero-text art MMOs!

[HaemishM]

Mounts should be a money sink and an attraction to the collector types.  If you can't incorporate them into combat mechanics, they shouldn't be anything more. 

Mounts should also be available at level 1.  Running for hours sucks.  Ask anyone that played early ATitD. 

Yeah, that.

[Soln]

Or you could stop marketing. (You don't even have anything to market!)

The first rule of marketing is to know your audience. This far before release, your audience is the Vault and MMORPG.com, not f13.net.

This is one of those cases where no one, not even yourself, the bearer of zee money, should be talking.

This is me being nice.

Well said.   FWIW he also trolls FoH regularly and who knows where else.  Sadly, we're all grown up now.  It's not sexy anymore.


Yes I'm interested in his game, but No I don't want to be convinced without evidence.  I'm interested in seeing the evidence of the game.  Not its vision.  Anything without evidence is bad self-promotion.

[UnSub]

Bring on the zero-text art MMOs!

If you ask for it...



(Actually, I've got no idea if there is text in that thing or not, but I really wanted to use the pic somewhere)

EDIT: Text works because it gives the player more control over their information absorption (plus: it's cheap). Cut scenes aren't always easy to understand - voices can get distorted, they might lag, they might just be badly executed.

BioShock and HL2 are nice examples of where the player didn't lose control of the character to view the story (generally) but that also runs the risk of players not looking in the right direction at the right time, which also means your level designers have to design key focal points (a visual bottleneck) to ensure that there is the best chance of players actually seeing what you want them to see. This requires a linear style of play through a particular level (to guarantee everyone ends up at the same place) OR designing the same event to be viewable from multiple vantage points OR designing different events for every key place a player might end up within a level.

And then there is the issue of the player who races ahead of the team, or blocks the view of another player, plus the fact you'll still probably need a text objective so players know what to do next.

At the end of the day, text is so much simpler.

[Senses]

I think text in an MMO is great and 100percent neccessary when it comes to directions and tooltips and just about anything that makes the game run. But, when it comes to telling the story, it often gets in the way of the visually spectacular world that the designer has tried so hard to create. 

Too often, quest designers work away from the world designers and rather than artfully include their work into the world, they just shove their lore and storytelling into long blank bubbles that the average person simply does not read.  I am the first to admit that the only reason I ever learn any of the backstory or lore in any game is through a) experiencing it first hand in interesting encounters within the game. i.e. phase 1 of some tough boss encounter, or b) being told it by a friend or guild member who happens to have taken the time to read and understand it.  I'm willing to bet the vast majority of players are the same way.  With this in mind, perhaps the storytellers (quest designers) can think of new ways to actually tell a story, rather than just write one and hope someone reads it.

[dusematic]

Am I the only one who sees Salvatore's involvement as a complete negative until proven otherwise?  I read one of his novellas one time to see what all the fuss was about and I came away feeling like I had just freebased Young Adult Literature.  It's on the level of the Twilight books.  Adults who read Salvatore are sad.

[Margalis]

Why are text and full-blown cutscenes the only two possible options? That's one of the weakest false dichotomies I've seen.

[dusematic]

Well, it's story.  And any story of any complexity will have to be written or spoken.

[Margalis]

First that's false and second why would spoken imply cutscene?

If you think of the "story" in an MMO as a data dump of exposition that the players must be periodically subjected to then text or a boring voice droning on about dark wizards is pretty much the only way to go about it, but then again that story will be crap so who cares? Data dump is failure, even in good writing let alone horrid MMO writing.

I'm not one of those crazy people who rant about how the gameplay is the story or how players can make there own story (let me tell you about the time I went from level 45 to 46...) but it's certainly possible to integrate the story into the game. One problem is that in many games the story is actually the backstory and there is no real story unfolding. In MMOs nearly everything is backstory.

Although KOTOR bored me to tears I would point to the opening sequence as an example of doing story in a game. Instead of reading a text block about how your ship was attacked and you had to bail to some planet you instead are on the ship, fight the attackers then bail out youself. You play the story. (Which is different from you make the story I would note) Sure there is some text and a few animated bits that you could very loosely call "cutscenes" but these are a small facet of the overall presentation.

[Stormwaltz]

I'm not one of those crazy people who rant about how the gameplay is the story

Oi, I resemble that remark.

When you stand around the water cooler talking about what you did last night, do you talk about the childhood trauma of the evil wizard, or do you talk about how his tower began to crumble around your group as you whittled him down, and then that damn Leeroy pulled aggro from one of the patrols and you nearly wiped, but the tank and healer managed to keep them occupied, and the main DPS got in the killing blow with less than 100 hp left?

IMO the best story I was responsible for in AC1 was the 24/7 vigil people organized on Thistledown to prevent Bael'Zharon's release.

In MMOs nearly everything is backstory.

In the public world, yeah. That's why I want to explore more creative and dramatic use of instancing and client-side trickery.

[Triforcer]

In the public world, yeah. That's why I want to explore more creative and dramatic use of
instancing and client-side trickery.

I find it increasingly amusing that the next step in the evolution of MMOs is turning them into singleplayer games. 

[ahoythematey]

IMO the best story I was responsible for in AC1 was the 24/7 vigil people organized on Thistledown to prevent Bael'Zharon's release.

It's a shame there weren't the resources to have branching paths for situations like that where one server pulls it off; that was one of the more interesting occurances in AC.  Rivers turning blood-red, the destruction of d00dwic, the Shadow Invasion, and so forth: those should happen more often in games.  The whole zombie-invasion in WoW was probably the best experience I've had with actual MMO lore, so more of things like that please.