Carbine Studios' "Wildstar"

[apocrypha]

Sorry, I've always taken 'a couple' to mean two, but looking it up 'indefinitely small' is a common usage, so my bad there :)

However I think it's fair to say that the video games industry is around 40 years old and there's plenty of other industries as young, or younger, that don't seem to fall into the same pitfalls over and over again the way that video games do.

Mind you, while I was typing that sentence I started thinking that it was a load of bollocks. If video game developers learned nothing from other games then we'd still be playing Zork, and actually disconnected development of ideas is a direct and unavoidable consequence of competitive capitalism. I think I need more coffee.

[Kageru]

The MMO industry is somewhat younger. It only really dates back to affordable and acceptably fast internet connections. It also suffers from the expectation that all modern games must provide luscious graphics and immersive / cinematic story telling which is  deadly to the long lifetimes expected of an MMO. GW2 makes me sad because they seemed to understand that but managed to cripple themselves after launch.

On the positive side we've learnt not to give Brad McQuaid money.. so there's something.

[Paelos]

The last thing that MMOs really concretely "learned" was that users don't want to whack-a-mole endlessly. I don't think you'll ever see that type of gameplay across the board again.

There are people out there who played WoW as their first concept of an MMO, and have zero idea what I'm talking about when I say something like that. If you tell them that the way you used to level was to wander out into the desert and beat on shit for hours and hours, they'd look at you like you had two heads.

[Malakili]

The last thing that MMOs really concretely "learned" was that users don't want to whack-a-mole endlessly. I don't think you'll ever see that type of gameplay across the board again.

There are people out there who played WoW as their first concept of an MMO, and have zero idea what I'm talking about when I say something like that. If you tell them that the way you used to level was to wander out into the desert and beat on shit for hours and hours, they'd look at you like you had two heads.

Having played both, quests did a great job at the beginning of masking the whack a mole.  But now when I play these games I just feel like it's directed whack a mole.   Both are yawn fests.

And I think even people that only played WoW and onward are starting to feel that way about "grinding" quests too.  Whoever figures out the solution to this design problem is going to make some real money.

[Paelos]

SWTOR did the best job of masking it in the inital gameplay, but when you got to their new content on Makeb, it was an awful slog of Kill 10 Imps.

The answer in my mind is to make combat interesting enough so that the fetch quests are just a goal. That you really enjoy killing mobs on the way to getting something along with a sharp story that's told and shown, not read. Borderlands strikes me as a good model for something like this. Where you enjoy the game for what it is, even though the quests can be repetitious.

Improving combat and integrating story are the real places that MMOs can improve dramatically.

[Falconeer]

Improving combat and integrating story are the real places that MMOs can improve dramatically.

That, and having LOTS of side activities. The sandbox element is coming back to stay, mostly because if you build some tools right (on top of the two previously mentioned elements), you get players to entertain themselves with very little handcrafted content creation or upkeep.

[Paelos]

Yes, being able to have an impact on the actual world is going to be a huge part as well. People can entertain themselves for years if you give them the means to dig, build, change, and indulge their artistic sides.

[Malakili]

I honestly wonder if great combat is really possible with the network issues an MMO is going to face.  I guess something like Planetside 2 is the best example of an MMO with fun combat right now.  But even that relies quite a bit on the fact that you are fighting other people.

[Nija]

SWTOR did the best job of masking it in the inital gameplay, but when you got to their new content on Makeb, it was an awful slog of Kill 10 Imps.

Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. I've logged less than 10 minutes in SWTOR. That involved taking a speeder/wow-bird-clone-thing from one village to another and then doing a quest to right click on gear icons to display progress bars as I 'rescued 10 slaves' or some horse shit.

I performed those two very specific actions and fucked right off. I'd rather scrub calluses off my feet than play That Game again - in any incarnation.

[Merusk]

"Game doesn't start until your max level" is the human condition in any long-term game. Sandbox games are going to get slagged for the same reason, long-term. Folks macroed the early portions of UO because of this. They'll do the same in anything where you're gating the content.

If your system of player power is based on incrementing anything at all, all it's ever going to be seen as is wack-a-mole.  In the end that's the gameplay of all MMO because they don't tell a story in any meaningful way and you can't effect long-term change.  Even in a sandbox.

[Draegan]

SWTOR did the best job of masking it in the inital gameplay, but when you got to their new content on Makeb, it was an awful slog of Kill 10 Imps.

Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. I've logged less than 10 minutes in SWTOR. That involved taking a speeder/wow-bird-clone-thing from one village to another and then doing a quest to right click on gear icons to display progress bars as I 'rescued 10 slaves' or some horse shit.

I performed those two very specific actions and fucked right off. I'd rather scrub calluses off my feet than play That Game again - in any incarnation.

SWTOR was and still is a shit game from a design perspective. HOWEVER when you increase experience gain and JUST do the story line quests it's actually really fun because you can ignore the stupid game mechanics and enjoy the story for what it's worth. It's actually quite enjoyable.

What should a dev learn from this?

Design your game to tell a story, whether it is all single player or has multi player elements, and use this as the "leveling" experience. Then spend the bulk of your time design the "end game" content. Or the content people spend 90% of their time doing that actually stick with the game.

People are used to spending 20-60 bucks on a video game that has 4-8 hours of gameplay. You don't need 50+ hours of leveling experience to gain a box sale. You need 50+ hours of "post story" or "endgame" content to get people to sub to your game or spend money in your F2P cash shop.

[Fabricated]

One game I think I've seen do the leveling thing right is TSW where you start out focused and building your character towards specific ends, but rather than just *ding* you're done and stuck in a class archetype at cap if you wanted to you could just continue to level and get whatever the hell else you wanted until eventually you can do anything.

[Merusk]

While TSW was nice in that manner, it was terrible in the same manner as all skill-pool games: Its too damn easy to gimp yourself.  Even if you follow their archtype templates, some just were just flat-out miserable because buffing them would make late-game far too broken. There's no way as a developer you can fix that and still care about "balance."

This would be why classes have been a fixture of games that enjoy mass popularity for several decades.  Too many devs care about balance vs. just letting their players do whatever.  "Bad Dungeonmaster" syndrome is a staple of MMO developer psyche.

Learned before? Yeah right. None of these idiots learn a damn thing.

I didn't mean the crop of senior devs out there. They're a lost cause as they're our age or older and old dogs don't learn new tricks easy. Young devs and kids starting out would benefit greatly, however.  Hell, so many of the points and terms we've covered in the last page should be a part of any Game Design curriculum.

I smell an idea for a new online college. F13 U.  Who's with me. 

[Rendakor]

BCU: Bat Country University

[HaemishM]

Community Management 101: Riding Herd on a Pack of Gibbering Mongoloid Shitgoblins - Taught by Professor Emeritus Eric Schild
Advanced Crotchpheasantry 401
Class Balancing Through Excel Spreadsheets 203
Nickel and Diming Your Playerbase 305

[Paelos]

I can certainly teach the last two. 

[Venkman]

I read an iteration I liked of an oft-abused statement:

Those who learn from history generally end up watching everyone else ignore the lessons learned by history.

The larger an industry gets, the more it's populated by uncreative hacks relying on precedent because it's safe. Most people don't want to stick their neck out on faith, because the few that have proved to be wrong either because their vision was impossible to execute or was a bad idea in the first place. That's why in a world of over 7 billion people there's, what, a few dozen on top of everyone's list of "innovative thought leaders" or whatever? It's super fucking rare to have that unique combination of genius and either charisma or ego to push through a new vision that is also successful.

Everyone else... and statistically speaking it might as well literally mean everyone else... wants the annualized sequel with the incremental improvement. This is why every new piece of hardware that ever launches goes through the exact same cycle of first hackers knocking off established games then the first few breakout hits that become synonymous with the platform then the big companies throwing gobs of cash at lackluster shit that looks great then complaints that nobody can break into the market then some new platform. Next up is Occulus Rift. Yay a bunch of rollercoast sims and then probably 1 or 2 successful space sims as long as you have a joystick or haptic glove, and Netlflix and oh man I wish something new would come along because I'm some special generation of gamer that needs something.

History repeats itself because most people are uncreative and they rely on an ignorant market.

I'll be alive when this is no longer the case, and vigorously hope I'm aware enough to witness it

[lamaros]

Sorry, I've always taken 'a couple' to mean two, but looking it up 'indefinitely small' is a common usage, so my bad there :)

However I think it's fair to say that the video games industry is around 40 years old and there's plenty of other industries as young, or younger, that don't seem to fall into the same pitfalls over and over again the way that video games do.

Mind you, while I was typing that sentence I started thinking that it was a load of bollocks. If video game developers learned nothing from other games then we'd still be playing Zork, and actually disconnected development of ideas is a direct and unavoidable consequence of competitive capitalism. I think I need more coffee.

Depends what you mean by industry.

And a lot has been learned. There seems to be a bit of 'but it hasn't changed how I expected/wanted, therefore it hasn't really changed' going on in this thread.

I completely disagree with all this nonsense. Things can be learned without every second year ushering in a revolution.

[HaemishM]

I'd settle for most of the new MMOG's not repeating some of the same disasterfuck launch mistakes.

[Maven]

Launch is hard. It isn't just a designer thing, there's a technical side too. Designers have to take the right lessons away, the REAL ones, and not the "I would never do that!" egotism trap.

Don't get me started on what it takes to educate a designer in today's climate. There's some complaints about egos in designers, but I almost think it's a requirement from the self-initiative to study and create the games to display your design chops to others.

[HaemishM]

that the industry even values a Game Design degree.

Pretty sure they do not. They value the ability to work 16/7 for months on end and to gratefully accept shit pay and post-release layoffs.

[Maven]

Apologies for wiping the old post, I didn't think anyone would want to read a rant on what it takes to educate a designer.

Games Industry is a special little bee when it comes to qualifications. Now Accounting, that's an industry I can get behind.

[Daeven]

Community Management 101: Riding Herd on a Pack of Gibbering Mongoloid Shitgoblins - Taught by Professor Emeritus Eric Schild
Advanced Crotchpheasantry 401
Class Balancing Through Excel Spreadsheets 203
Nickel and Diming Your Playerbase 305

Class Balancing 101: Every time someone asks a question or begins a debate about how to 'balance' 'classes' the professor will scream NO! BAD DEV! NO COOKIE! BALANCE IS A LIE! while hitting the student in the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

4 credit hours.

[Lantyssa]

GW2 is a real innovator, doing its own thing. Neverwinter does F2P right. SWTOR launched poorly, but successfully transitioned to F2P. Archeage is a promising mix of sandbox and (admittedly poor) diku.

GW2 was a superb innovator at launch.  Now they're making the same damn mistakes as everyone else at a breath-taking pace and taking the game backwards.

Neverwinter was more than a blip on the radar as far as players were concerned?

SWTOR transitioned very successfully from a business perspective (to be fair, going from money sucking pit to a 100 million a year is a good turn around).  From a player's perspective it's still a poor game overall.

[Margalis]

Apologies for wiping the old post, I didn't think anyone would want to read a rant on what it takes to educate a designer.

Games Industry is a special little bee when it comes to qualifications. Now Accounting, that's an industry I can get behind.

Aw...I'm curious about what it said. Personally I don't even like the term "game designer." That's probably the programmer in me talking.

[Malakili]

Personally I don't even like the term "game designer." That's probably the programmer in me talking.

You realize not all games are computer/video games right?

[Venkman]

Yea but how many game designers just get to do the design side of the games in any of the games industries

[Maven]

Aw...I'm curious about what it said. Personally I don't even like the term "game designer." That's probably the programmer in me talking.

The gist is that I think going to school to be a 'game designer' is backwards, and the title itself is misleading as you state. It's a naive pursuit and puts too much emphasis on luck to succeed.

The ideal candidate for any design position goes to college and completes a 4-year, doesn't matter what so long as it isn't games, and works on game projects on the side, tinkering, learning and, critically, building. They have something to say about design and aren't afraid to stand up for those beliefs. It's fun and interesting even before they pursue a job.

The degree shows ambition, perseverance on a long-term project, also implies teamwork, critical thinking skills, and a broader perspective. Spending your free time on game projects shows passion, independent motivation, and technical capability. You could get away with focusing completely on building games, but I think that's too narrow a focus and ripe for burnout. The Indie path is also viable if you can cut it, but complimenting your skill set with business management and people skills would be smart, especially if it doesn't come naturally.

Unless it's a Bachelor's, the industry ignores your education. If you've got nothing to show off your skills with, you are wasting their and your time, and are likely insane with idealism. The dream of 'designer' as a career path rather than actually being interested in design (this could be said of more than just design) has been the folly of many.

I think that's most of it reconstructed.

[lamaros]

Yeah nah.

[Maven]

I keep forgetting who the trolls are and who I should actually consider responding in good faith.  Could we just, like, tag them and release them back into the wild?

[lamaros]

I keep forgetting you're not allowed to disagree with someone without providing a thesis, otherwise they get offended and call you names.

[Maven]

I'm genuinely curious what you think your response adds to the conversation.

Do you believe agreement and disagreement on someone's post should be done Straw Poll style? Let's hear it for all the Yays.

[Malakili]

I'm genuinely curious what you think your response adds to the conversation.

Do you believe agreement and disagreement on someone's post should be done Straw Poll style? Let's hear it for all the Yays.

I'm pretty sure fair conversation just isn't part of the deal on the internet.

[lamaros]

I'm genuinely curious what you think your response adds to the conversation.

Do you believe agreement and disagreement on someone's post should be done Straw Poll style? Let's hear it for all the Yays.

It adds the indicator that I disagree. Nothing more or less.

Not every communication needs to be drawn out. People can post in movies threads saying "this movie was great" or "this was/is/looks shit" and it's fine. It's also fine to just say "I disagree".

I just wanted to say I disagree with what you said. I don't really want to go in to it in detail. If I knew you would react like this I just wouldn't have bothered. But now that I have bothered, I guess I should just say

The dream of 'designer' as a career path rather than actually being interested in design

You need to use words to convey meaning, rather than to just try and sound meaningful.

[rk47]