GDC07 - Raphing It Up #2

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GDC07 - Raphing It Up #2

Long before the recent Vanguard scandal, f13.net sat down with Raph Koster to chat about a wide variety of topics relating, at least tangentially, to the gaming industry. Earlier this week, we released the first installment in a short series of transcripts from the resulting brain-dump.

Today, instead of beating a dead horse, we bring you Part Deux, including some of Raph's thoughts on journalism, the handling of scandals from both press and industry points of view, the future direction of MMOs, and the relevance of independent and Korean games to the market.

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[Ironwood]

Good Interview.  Real Interesting stuff;  and probably the first one that Raph's done that's made me perk up my ears and wonder about what he's got in the pipeline.

[Signe]

I liked that interview.  It seemed relaxed, and yet not drunk. But... Flif?  Do you mean Flyff?

[Vinadil]

Most likely he did... and I enjoyed the interview as well.  I think that the gaming market is opening up to the "non-hardcore", which traditionally seem to be people between 18 and 25ish.  Games like WoW reach further into the teen market and then also further into the "older" gamer market where they have to compete with things like jobs and families.

I know that these free games or browser games are making money... but the fact is they just don't interest ME.  Maybe they would if I were still 9.  I enjoyed Lego's when I was 9.  I can still enjoy them with my son, but I don't sit in my game room and build Lego's spaceships at night... I play a nice RTS or MMO.  In the same way you won't find me playing 4-square if I go to the local park; I would choose some pick-up basketball or soccer.

I think that there are things to be learned from other genres/platforms/etc.  But, there is a reason that those games have not caught on with the WoW market... and it is not because we don't "know" about them... it is because they don't Hit the Spot.  I wonder if that is due to the nature of their existence or just because nobody has figured out how to create a free/web-based game that Does hit the spot for the current WoW type market.

[Slayerik]

Where's the scandal?  :)

Kinda gets me thinking about my current MMO, Freestyle Basketball. Free download, free trial. I've noticed advertising on Myspace (nice way of hitting the demographic I believe they are looking for). Treat it like crack. The first one is free.

Their idea seems to be, free trial account with limited levels. $20 to upgrade to full account. Can purchase in game cash with RL money. Are they the first decently sized MMO to really give microtransactions a go with Westerners in mind? I don't follow that kinda stuff all that closely.

Seems like a solid business plan...sure is interesting to watch the MMO industry try to evolve. I hope Raph can help it evolve in his own way, and while he's at it not make a pile of suck. Raph and Brad are both looking at 1-1 records (UO and SWG, EQ and VG)), I think Raph has a much better shot of going 2-1 than Brad.

[Raph]

I spelled Flyff correctly when I spoke it. ;) No typos in my speech!

[Yegolev]

I agree with Vinadil, having tried some games like MapleStory and, personally, I'm pretty meh on that.  If I were nine, I'd probably be all over it, but I'm 34.  There is some common ground you can get, such as how I can see the appeal in building a character in MapleStory but I seem to always think "I could be rolling the odometer in Dead Rising instead", or insert any other game a 34-year-old life-gamer might like.  I just started a new game of Final Fantasy Tactics, and it hits the spot for me right now.  My son is three and he is just now getting the controls down for We <3 Katamari, so he's got a few years to go before he is going to appreciate something complex.

[Bandit]

Interesting discussiion for sure.  Raph, I am interested if you got any presentation notes or summaries on the Three Rings presentation and microtransactions? - I am very curious how the doubloons has worked out for Puzzle Pirates.  I used to avidly play PP, and the game is simply brilliant.  It would also be interesting to see how fringe games like Kingdom of Loathing do with their monthly pet and item microtransactions - I would have thought they would be done by now, but KoL seems to roll along just nicely being a free game with optional micortransactions.

[Yoru]

I spelled Flyff correctly when I spoke it. ;) No typos in my speech!

Fixed. I knew I missed something when I was doing the name-checking on this one.

[sam, an eggplant]

How could someone that writes for f13 not know about GM darwin? Even if the writer was too young to be playing games all of 8 years ago and (ideally) a LtM reader, he really should read up about the more public MMO scandals, people, memes, and events, like Darwin, Mystere, Abashi, Blacksnow suing mythic, wtfman, precasting beeyotch/necromancy/etc, fansy the bard, Milo Cooper's $10 ferrari upgrades, speedhacking in AC, etc.

[Yoru]

How could someone that writes for f13 not know about GM darwin? Even if the writer was too young to be playing games all of 8 years ago and (ideally) a LtM reader, he really should read up about the more public MMO scandals, people, memes, and events, like Darwin, Mystere, Abashi, Blacksnow suing mythic, wtfman, precasting beeyotch/necromancy/etc, fansy the bard, Milo Cooper's $10 ferrari upgrades, speedhacking in AC, etc.

That would be me. I was a UO player (briefly) and LTM lurker (off and on), but here's the answer: I had other things to do with my life, and continue to. I remember a good deal of that stuff, but seriously, I'm not a walking encyclopedia of MMO Lore.

[schild]

How could someone that writes for f13 not know about GM darwin? Even if the writer was too young to be playing games all of 8 years ago and (ideally) a LtM reader, he really should read up about the more public MMO scandals, people, memes, and events, like Darwin, Mystere, Abashi, Blacksnow suing mythic, wtfman, precasting beeyotch/necromancy/etc, fansy the bard, Milo Cooper's $10 ferrari upgrades, speedhacking in AC, etc.

I'm not a walking encyclopedia of MMO Lore.

You mean, you aren't HRose and don't give a shit about the in-jokes. It's cool, I'm in the same boat.

[sam, an eggplant]

HRose wasn't around back then either. Just saying, I found it surprising.

[damijin]

I'm in the niche of Korean-MMO playing westerners, and we're tired of getting beat up on the playground for grinding our levels instead of grinding our gear.

:(

[Vinadil]

Yea... that is why in the real world we let the professionals play on one court while the casual guys play on another.  Back in college there were the pick-up games folks like me just did not even try to get into... because some of the college team played at that court.

EVE is the best comparison I can make to a game that "gets" this idea right now, and lets people kind of Choose their level of competition.  In most MMOs (especially any Eastern thing I have touched) you are at the mercy of the "professional" who makes the game his life and is some sort of demi-god due to the time/money he has spent.  I don't mind those people playing the game... but given a choice I would not play with them anymore than I would try to play a game of pick-up ball with a pro basketball player.  And, I am not a big fan of Forcing players to Have to play with people of their same skillset... because then it is the Dev choosing who you can and cannot play with instead of the Player.  But, there must be a way to provide natural incentives that allow people to make risk/reward assessments and will also naturally draw your more committed/hardcore players into the same realm of play allowing the more casual to choose other areas to play in.

[Terrorantula]

Just wonder Raph Koster what are your favourite mmorpgs? Cause for me personally the only ones on the market i liked was EVE and SWG but when they added Jedi into SWG the game became all about them in every patch and i finally quit after JTLS came out like most people. With EVE Online the game became too popular on that one server for me :\ I liked having 5000-8000 people on it at peak because back then it felt like you were alone in space, now however it's laggy and too overpopulated.

So all these WOW clones coming out now and "fantasy" are really starting p*ss me off because whats there for me to play anymore? I want a game like SWG pre Jedi or more EVE Online servers. Why arn't companies making mmorpgs for this part of the market? Cause i know that every person who played WOW and gotten bored of it or people who have been playing mmorpgs since EQ or another one, just wants something new now.......... I know i'm tired of the same old "level up" "grind" "raid" etc etc... It just doesn't encourage socializing like SWG did :(

So if i could get a game just like SWG but with it getting better and not worse every patch then i'd be happy.

[schild]

Stuff.

Nobody likes a stalker.

[Signe]

I am also interested in knowing why companies are not making MMORPGs for the part of the market who want their own personal servers.  After all, it worked for pizza.

[Typhon]

[...] that these kids play the Flyffs, the Silk Roads, the whatever, because they can't afford to play WoW. Until the day that they graduate to WoW, I think there's a lot of that going on.

This shit fills me with dread.  Here's why:

I don't watch T.V.  Not because all the programming is sub-par, but because the commercial format fucks up the programming, and commercial content has gotten to be nearly 50% of the of the content streaming to me on the box.  I just say no.

When I see "free" games, my brain says, "low-level immersion + advertising".  Low-level immersion - because free games can't afford the server infrastructure to support high-level immersion (like EQ, WOW, etc).  In other words, crappy flash games.  Advertising because nothing is free, something must be making up the difference (and I don't see toy merchandising as being all that significantly different then advertising).  Overtime, anything with advertising as part of it's revenue base becomes watered-down feel-good crap (cause you can't piss off the advertisers) - think about old Loony Toons versus loony toons of the 80s, 90s and 00s... new Loony Toons blows.  You just know that guys that made that stuff in the 40s/50s/60s were laughing their asses off the entire time they were working.  That's the magic.

I hope I'm wrong, but the more you talk about what the future of gaming is the more I become afraid that you are paying too much attention to numbers of people rather then producing something you'd like to play.  Not that you shouldn't listen to your audience, but there has got to be a core idea that excites the shit out of you, that you then refine based upon what most people like. 

Getting excited about a study of what emotions a player feels while playing a game says to me (maybe unfairly) that you are losing touch with the gamer that is you.  If you've lost touch with what makes a game fun to you, and the only thing that is fun for you anymore is making a game that people like, then I think you are going to have a hard time making a game that has magic.  No one ever found magic by having a creative plan that started with 1) look at marketing numbers.

[sam, an eggplant]

I couldn't agree more. Your primary focus should be creating a fun game, not what a committee feels would appeal to the most players. That leads to "Poochie syndrome" and mediocrity.

This was always a problem with Raph's game design. He focuses overmuch on arcane balance mathematics and virtual world creation which support his (admittedly quite interesting) academic theories and too little on actual gameplay. He spends tons of development time forcing player dependence and supporting alternative play styles with stuff like dancing wookies in cantinas and too little on what players want, to be the archetypical Hero. And his games suffer for it.

Don't try to cater to all sensibilities. Don't make games to support academic theories. Focus on core gameplay and then polish until blinding.

[Raph]

So, these last two posts seem to be about three different things to me.

Starting with the easy one -- yes, focus on core gameplay and polish until blinding, and focus on fun. Yes, yes, yes.

Of course, I happen to think that can be done with a Flash game just as much as with a big DX10 MMO.

The second, slightly tougher to answer point -- getting excited about studies. Theory and experience go hand in hand, IMHO. When you divorce them, you run into trouble -- on BOTH sides. The theory helps explain the experience, and at its bets helps create new fun experiences. But if you only have theory, you odn't have fun. And on the flip side, experience without theory all too often gives you derivative repetitive games. It's chocolate and peanut butter -- they are not mutually exclusive at all.

The third one -- I've never worked on a game without being passionate about it. I'm not the sort of throw away years of my life working on something I don't care about.

[sam, an eggplant]

Of course you can make a great flash game. That's just scale, and I don't think anyone debates it. Same deal with theory. Create fresh new gameplay, but games aren't art films, and invention has to come second to focus and fun. Emergent mechanics and virtual world sandboxes and player dependence and community portal integration, all those buzzwords are great bullet points for gamespy previews but development effort should be directed upon what players are actually doing minute to minute, and playtest and polish that, and cut everything that doesn't directly improve that core experience.

That core gameplay doesn't have to be killing monsters for lewt. It could be racing hoverboards, or flirting with boys, or running a wild west saloon, or recruiting assets for the CIA in the soviet union during the cold war. But it should be focused, playtested, and polished.

[Samwise]

Of course you can make a great flash game. That's just scale, and I don't think anyone debates it.

When I see "free" games, my brain says, "low-level immersion + advertising".  Low-level immersion - because free games can't afford the server infrastructure to support high-level immersion (like EQ, WOW, etc).  In other words, crappy flash games.

FIGHT!


(I don't have much else to contribute other than that I'm more curious than ever what Areae is going to crank out.)

[Terrorantula]

Tbh whocares... companies are just going to create the same old crap an do it because it makes money and they don't want to take any risk, specially when they pay like 50 million towards development. Thing that hurts a mmorpg tho is releasing a buggy unfinished game because people wont give it another chance in 2 years when it's polished, take EQ2 for example. For me the Artwork is probally one of the most important features as i just can't stand playing a Bland Generic game. I played EQ2 and Vanguard and i just couldn't get into it cause all the races were bland and ugly and all the classes were just the same and wern't fun. I actually loved WOW for this because it had such great artwork and every race and class was fun and unique.

Or just release SWG pre Jedi servers and i'd be happy for the next 10 years.

[Ironwood]

Which only proves you are batshit insane.

[Bunk]

I couldn't agree more. Your primary focus should be creating a fun game, not what a committee feels would appeal to the most players. That leads to "Poochie syndrome" and mediocrity.

This was always a problem with Raph's game design. He focuses overmuch on arcane balance mathematics and virtual world creation which support his (admittedly quite interesting) academic theories and too little on actual gameplay. He spends tons of development time forcing player dependence and supporting alternative play styles with stuff like dancing wookies in cantinas and too little on what players want, to be the archetypical Hero. And his games suffer for it.

Don't try to cater to all sensibilities. Don't make games to support academic theories. Focus on core gameplay and then polish until blinding.

The danger here is that you get what Brad was accused of - making a game that he though was fun, rather than something lots of people considered fun.

There is no miracle answer. Personally, I've found much of Raph's insane systems to be fun, but I recognise that I'm not the average consumer. While I've always appreciated that most of his games seemed to target players like me, I think that is also been recognised as the biggest faults in his games.

I don't want games designed for the masses to enjoy - but the masses do.

[sam, an eggplant]

Brad was just as attached to theory as Raph. The difference is that rather than being rooted in academia his theories were based on the ratio of mold to curd in a rather elderly wedge of blue cheese.

[cmlancas]

Is there any MMO theory detailing a no hard level cap approach? It would be almost like AAs but with much more meaning.
I've played a MUD where this is the case:

You level as a mortal from 1-50, gaining new skills, abilities, spells, and stats.

You attain a new status at 51. Then you get to play the new tier for 999 sublevels. This tier is like a pseudo-endgame, except that it isn't the end. It's just a different playstyle. Multiclassing could enter at this phase if needbe, but characters still receive stats and a few new skills at meaningful sublevels. Meaningful quests as well would be implemented at intervals within the sublevels.

You progress to 51(999). You advance to a completely different tier, with a completely different playstyle. Let's call it 101(x). Again, the characters have reached another pseudo-endgame. Perhaps they don't even like this incarnation of their character -- they could always go back to being 51(999) if they so chose.

Long story short, it takes too long in the time of the game for people to realistically hit 101(999), but people still enjoy playing at the 51/101 tiers because the content is engaging enough that people aren't pulling their hair out on the grind.

Could this work if there were engaging questlines and interesting gameplay? I think a lot more people would continue to play World of Warcraft if progressing through epic tier gear wasn't like bashing your genitals on a razor blade for four hours straight -- I know I would. I'm by no means the expert MMO player, having only delved into a few MUDs, EQ1, EQ2, WoW, and VG, but I'm curious to know what other people think. My personal opinion is that people play game for content moreso than to reach the maximum level. I would go so far to even conjecture that the majority of people who care only to reach the highest level in a game are going to do so no matter how terrible the content is.

[Yoru]

That sounds like an almost exact duplicate of AvatarMUD's hero/lord system. If you ask me, MUD communities tend to be more tight-knit and will hang together very well through content deployment "dry spells", similar to a good guild. That MUD in particular has the advantage of an enormous number of zones, classes and abilities, which most commercial MMOs haven't had - especially when you toss multiclassing into the mix.

When it comes to zones, in particular, it's far far harder to come up with a comparable amount of content proportionate to the size of the concurrent userbase, as so much more needs to get done: level design, creature design, textures, models, animations, coding/scripting for special abilities, etc., etc.

Also, didn't Shadowbane have a soft-cap? It's been a while, but I believe it soft-capped up in the 50s. However, there was no analogue to a MUD's remorting system there.

[cmlancas]

You're exactly correct. I grew up on that MUD since I was ten. I do agree with the guild mentality, but there is something to be said about a game that has been around since 1994 and is still going decently strong. The MUDs have to be doing something right -- all the MMOs are really comprised of is a MUD with pictures when it's in its most raw form (imo).

[CharlieMopps]

I think Moores law will prove you wrong regarding "Free games" not being able to afford server infrastructure. How long will it be before I have a 20MB connection in my house for $30/month and 20TB hard drives are under $200? That's an EQ server right there... I work for a phone company and I can tell you, its' right arround the corner. I think there will be kind of a cap on the ammount of space and bandwidth required by MMOs. Yea, they are still growing now and Im sure there will be super fancy ones in the future... But i can see the free market really getting bigger.

As far as game mechanics go... and the no level cap thing... I really do think UO had something going. I'm not sure why no other producers went with it. Rather than levels, you have skills. The skills could go up or down depending on practice. At any point you could just say "I dont want to sword fight anymore, I want to cast spells" and your spell casting ability would start to go up (because you were using it more) and your sword fighting skill would go down. It made perfect sense. You could be a Warrior for a few months, then switch to Thief... or Necro... or whatever.  You character would never cap out...

Obviously UO's system is horribly out of date... but a modern game based in the same principles would be really interesting.

[Furiously]

Like uhmmm - SWG before the NGE?

[CharlieMopps]

Sorry, never played that one... I'm startrek... and they haven't made that MMO yet.

[Vinadil]

If you are looking at the mass market of "gamers" then I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on the number of Sports (real life... baseball, football, basketball etc.) gamers of a certain age-group vs the number of computer gamers.  I would guess that there is a huge cross over, and that is why games like Madden still sell every year.  But the point is that there are a LOT of people in this country who play or enjoy watching others play any number of sports.  We are a competitive group.

The thing that I see missing from so many games today is that issue of Competition.  Yes I would love to be the hero in a story where I make decisions that alter entire universes... but I would be satisfied with so much less until someone manages to come up with a way to let me and my closest 1,000,000 friends be That hero in the same "world".  I am almost completely a MMO player these days mostly because I enjoy competing in some way against other humans even when playing computer games... but so few of them offer meaningful ways to compete.  Arenas and Battlegrounds on WoW are, admittedly, designed for just this thing... and I probably could have stuck around to play them if not for the pre-requisite 200 hour+ progression through dungeons in order to get the gear I need to actually Compete and not just play "cannon-fodder".  But, what about things like Poker in an inn where 5 guys sit down at a table(most games now let you do that... but it leads nowhere except to a stupid graphic of your character in the "sit" position) and one offers to start a group.  INstead of a Combat group UI you have a Texas Hold'em UI pop up.  8 guys are standing around outside an inn... one guy grabs a ball out of his pack, another drops a set of cones on the ground... and a pick up game of whatever-ball starts.  Things like items/money/whatever could be agreed upon beforehand, or you could just play for bragging rights.

Competition does not have to mean, "2 men enter, 1 man leaves" in a combat arena.  Nor should it just be "Wooohooo we got to the 15th tier boss on the 11th dungeon before YOU did!"

I guess this is one area where I see the free, web-based games excelling... as they are really just mini-games.  The old-school RPGs had those (I am thinking of FF2, Might and Magic, etc) and I wonder why they have not crossed over more to the MMO market.

[bhodi]

Come on. Where's our thunderdome video game.