GDC 2004

[Morfiend]

[*]He was disturbed once to find that one of the developers/testers had gone into the local school and slaughtered all the children in particularly nasty and gruesome ways.  Really sick and twisted stuff.  While the townspeople didn't like this one bit, he felt perhaps that such actions were simply too extreme to be allowed in a game.
[*]One option you can have in the game is to add cool-looking tattoos to your body.  However, a tattoo also makes the NPCs initially slightly afraid of you.  A lot of tattoos and you'll look like a mean character whom they should probably be wary of.  In any case, they ran into a bug during testing where a tester had wooed a local NPC, married her, and then when they went home to enjoy their honeymoon, the character naturally took off his shirt for the first time -- and the new wife promptly ran screaming from the house in terror because she discovered he was covered with all those frightening tattoos.
[*]Perhaps most interesting involved a tester who wooed and then married the daughter of the Mayor of the town.  Peter said he thought, aha, finally someone was playing the game nicely as he had intended.  However, he became distraught as he watched this player proceed to slip out after the honeymoon and go to the Mayor (her father) and got the Mayor to follow him out into the wilderness away from the other villagers, where he promptly murdered him in cold blood.  Then he went back to his new wife, got her to follow him out to the same place, and proceeded to murder her as well.  It turned out the tester reasoned that the Mayor of the town was quite rich, and if he married his only child, killed the Mayor, and then killed the daughter, he would inherit all the money.  It worked, too.
[/list:u]

If this really works like this, damn, this is the RPG I have been waiting for. I am sad they decided to drop multiplayer, I think if they could have implmented it, a coop multiplayer would be really killer.

[Alluvian]

Remember in the three examples above: one is called a bug, one was removed because it was too gruesome, and the third was also an indication of someone 'not playing the game how he wanted it played'.  I don't think you can randomly kill people anymore for one.

[SirBruce]

Sounds to me like Peter Molyneaux should never EVER work on the design for an MMOG, or if he does, he should NEVER be charged with control over anyone who maintains an MMOG after release. All of those scenarios you mentioned about Fable really show that some designers just can't handle the way many gamers play their games.

I think you're being a little hard on him.  While he did seem a bit perplexed and annoyed WHY gamers would play the game in the "wrong" way, he nevertheless used it as a learning experience to improve his design.  And the point is at least the testers and so on are uncovering these issues, and the designer is fixing them, long before release.

And I don't think Will Wright is to be blamed for most of the bad aspects of TSO.

If not the lead designer, than who?

My information has always been that much of the design was Chris Trottier's than Will Wrights, and that EA put the team under extreme schedule pressure to get TSO out the door, and Will Wright and Gordon Walton never really had a good working relationship to make TSO a good MMOG.  There was tension between the innovative aspects and the more traditional "MMOGs should have this" aspects that made the ultimate product a broken hybrid worse than either of two extremes.  Ultimately I don't think Will Wright made the game (TSO) that he wanted to make.  Whether or not his desired game would have been better or worse could be debated.

Bruce

[SirBruce]

If this really works like this, damn, this is the RPG I have been waiting for. I am sad they decided to drop multiplayer, I think if they could have implmented it, a coop multiplayer would be really killer.

The other thing they dropped is the ability to play as a female character.  I believe he said the game has something like 175,000+ lines of spoke dialog and having to redo many of these for a female character, not to mention redoing all the art assets and such, would have taken too much time/money/effort.

Bruce

[HaemishM]

IMO, if Wright couldn't swing a big enough dick to fix the design he started with, or make sure it was released reasonably close, it is both his fault, and EA's fault. Yes, it's probably more EA's fault because they are after all, the biggest dick in the whorehouse, but still. You take on Lead Designer title, you take on the blame if the game sucks monkey ass.

As for Molyneaux, I actually think taking out the random slaughter of civilians not to be a bug-fixed, but a bad limitation of the design. I thought the whole point was you could be a good OR evil character. It sounds to me like he's trying to channel "evil" into "not quite homicidal maniac evil." Unless the conditions you talked about resulting in the game-crashing or being unfinishable, at which point, I see what you mean. Otherwise, it's that emergent gameplay that gives games like Deus Ex the sweet spot.

[SirBruce]

Unless I missed it, he never said they were taking out your ability to kill the vast majority of villagers... just perhaps not the children.  And that he had to add a strong police presence to catch and punish murderers.

I think you're right, though, in stating that he wants you to be able to be evil, but not quite a homicidal psychopath.  The tattoo thing is still in; it just has to be toned down for your wife.  The killing the daughter and mayor thing is still in, but inheritance might have to be modified to prevent abuse... or make it so that you are easily caught doing it... or whatever.  He didn't actually talk much about the solutions to these problems; simply indicating that these problems arose from the game complexity.

Bruce

[koboshi]

This is interesting; it seems rather obvious to me that most people in a game environment at some time or another have decided just to start killing random people.  Not because there homicidal or anything, but if you take away accountability people go peculiar.  The only thing in Deus Ex that stopped me from killing Max Chen was that it was impossible, 'course I had already wasted the entire club before I got to him.  The point is, why shouldn't I have killed him... I realized in the game it was because I needed him for future encounters and because of that I broke out of the emersion.  It would have been better if I was able to play the game out and then find out like in some Shakespearian drama that I killed a man, without whom I could not complete my quest.

I've thought about it more in conjunction with MMOGs because it’s so easy to just be a griefing bastard, sometimes easier than playing the game or sometimes just more interesting.  Playing MMOGs is like being stuck that island in lord of the Flies.  No one wants to make an operational civilization, and if they do they're hunted by the Jack types.  This is more and more true the closer you get to true player controlled worlds, such as those with PvP, reactive economies, or destructible property.  Most games try to fix these problems by simply removing the abilities, Exa: no killing kids, no PvP...  

In reality we have similar problems, right? So why hasn’t our civilization fallen apart.  Why hasn’t every person who killed indiscriminately in a game done so in life?  The answer is we have too much to loose.  Law and order works because we know that if we kill we loose our life, if we destroy or steal we pay for it with our time and money.  Yes, there is crime and yes in war the rules blur but even in the worst case scenario a criminal knows that some where their judgment is lurking waiting for the right moment to strike, and if or when it does their life as they know it is over.  There is no such repercussion in games, and those games which do include it also have save functions so people can simply get a do over.

There are two options that I think would help in this situation, severe repercussions, and iron man save structures. For the first one I’ll point to the fact that in SWG on most servers (when I last checked) the rebels had more people than the imperials.  What the hell.  The empire never stood for that kind of crap rebels running around without a care in the world.  If some guy walked into a bar in DC and announced death to the great Satan and long live Al Qaeda he'd be arrested on the spot or worse, and yet a rebel in SWG could walk into any imperial bar in the galaxy with no fear as long as no one else was declared imperial.  No in reality criminals and antiestablishment types hide, bide there time, and work until the day when they can walk into a bar and yell there name proudly because they are more powerful than the defensive forces weather they be security, police or military.  What make criminals interesting is that they are the underdogs; too often programmers forget this in their race to balance a game.  If I shoot a cop I shouldn’t plan to live another day unless I’ve got a damn good plan.  Don’t make the characters invincible make the players accountable.

The other feature that should be added is the iron man model of saving. This is inherent in the MMO field so this section is more applicable to offline games.  In a game, if I want to kill someone all I have to do is save the game and kill them then when the shitstorm comes down I just revert.  If I could do this in real life I would be the best damn criminal in the world.  No, in the real world the decisions I make stick, why not in the game world?  If I kill someone I live with the consequences but in game I don’t.  For many that is the reason they play, I confess I too just want to blow off steam sometimes, and I play UT or Diablo.  But if what the developer has in mind is a different type of game, they must hold people accountable.  In the iron man setup in the Civ games one may only save on exit.  Why not in other games, yes some balancing must be done, but if all the decisions stick the game takes on a different feel, those taboos which we shed when we leave reality and go into games reemerge.  We begin to play as the devs wanted, with the rules set out in society as a base.  Besides that in another thread on this forum people are talking about the hardest games they have played, many of which had no save functions.  These are no doubt hard games to play but it is also agreed (sans ET) that these are some of the players favorite games.  Why not add only the ability to bookmark your spot instead of letting the player fuck with causality to there own end.


Hum, that was a little much. You’d never know I was dysgraphic.

[daveNYC]

In reality we have similar problems, right? So why hasn’t our civilization fallen apart.  Why hasn’t every person who killed indiscriminately in a game done so in life?

Because so far only one person has been able to respawn at their bind stone, and even that took three days.

[Dark Vengeance]

In reality we have similar problems, right? So why hasn’t our civilization fallen apart.  Why hasn’t every person who killed indiscriminately in a game done so in life?

Because so far only one person has been able to respawn at their bind stone, and even that took three days.

Well, technically, it'd be 2 if you count the time that Jesus guy cast res on Lazarus. Although that one was also 3 days after the fact.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

[Morfiend]

In reality we have similar problems, right? So why hasn’t our civilization fallen apart.

I agree with a lot of the stuff you said, but I think what it really comes down to, it, do we want games to mirror reality so closely? I mean, most of us are playing games as a short escape from reality. Yeah, its nice to have some of the same building blocks, and things. But if I get bored, I would like the option to kill a bunch of people then reload so I dont waiste all the time invested. I like being able to save and try new stuff.

The point is, I live that reality every day. I dont necesaraly want to play by the exact same rules.

[Snowspinner]

Well, technically, it'd be 2 if you count the time that Jesus guy cast res on Lazarus. Although that one was also 3 days after the fact.

Yeah, but it wasn't as though that rez took three days - that's more a sign that the corpse timer lasts at least three days.

[SirBruce]

Some pictures from the Annual AI dinner can be found here:
http://www.gameai.com/aidinner2004.html

Some good articles reporting on various presentations at the conference are up at gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php?category=view_all

Bruce

[koboshi]

 But if I get bored, I would like the option to kill a bunch of people then reload so I dont waiste all the time invested. I like being able to save and try new stuff.

The point is, I live that reality every day. I dont necesaraly want to play by the exact same rules.

I'm not talking about all games, I'm just talking about this new type of fantasim Molyneaux has in mind, his idea is, as I understand it, to make another reality.  One where you are in ancient times with your life on the line, where magic and monsters abound, not too much like your life I would venture to guess.  Yes this isn't a Doom shoot-em-up but neither is Tetris and people played that game too, just not when they were looking to do some killing.

When you want to make emergent games you have to know what things you can, and can't, do, for example, can you break in through windows, can you hang-on/climb ledges, do you need sleep, food, water, money, and the more of these questions that are answered logically (not, children are invincible) the more interesting the game will be and the more emergent.  I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to kill the kids, what I'm saying is you should be on The Shire's Most Wanted that night and the authorities should be hunting your ass... but hey if the game is made right that could be a fascinating way to play it.  All I want to see is that the game makes it difficult for the player to do it, really difficult, like setting the game on hard mode.  It simply shouldn't be entered into lightly.

  As for the saving, when I play sim games I don't save like crazy the way I do in many other types of games, I let the game go where it will and if I die before the endgame I start a new game with the knowledge that it will be totally different.  The point is not to stop you from going out on the road less traveled it's just to make you walk it to where it goes.  "If you're going to get wet, why not go swimming"?

[SirBruce]

Some more links:
http://archive.gamespy.com/gdc2004/
http://www.gamespot.com/features/gdc2004/index.html
http://www.1up.com/article2/0,2053,1554615,00.asp

Bruce

[Tyrant]

My information has always been that much of the design was Chris Trottier's than Will Wrights, and that EA put the team under extreme schedule pressure to get TSO out the door, and Will Wright and Gordon Walton never really had a good working relationship to make TSO a good MMOG.  There was tension between the innovative aspects and the more traditional "MMOGs should have this" aspects that made the ultimate product a broken hybrid worse than either of two extremes.  Ultimately I don't think Will Wright made the game (TSO) that he wanted to make.  Whether or not his desired game would have been better or worse could be debated.

Bruce

Makes for good drama but not really true.  Will and I had a minimum feature set for TSO that we agreed on that was also not what we shipped.

Lead Designers (even gaming gods), and Exec Producers don't always get to say when a game will ship.

It's really a damned shame, since now many people are convinced this type of game would never work.  I still believe that if we had shipped what we intended we had a better than even chance of taking the online medium to a much larger audience.

[SirBruce]

Ahh, so it's even worse than I heard. :)

WWII Online had the same problem... it shipped without all the features we had intended originally.  And yet, it was also over schedule and over budget.  At that stage you are just trying to make tradeoffs and get something out that has some quality, even if it's not the game you wanted to make.

So yeah, I think designers should be cut some slack for that.  But there's plenty of blame to go around.  One could argue (not specific to TSO, just in general) that in such a case the original design was too overreaching.  Or one could argue the production staff or coders didn't meet what were otherwise reasonable goals.  Or one could argue that the people supplying the money weren't flexible enough and willing enough to put more money and time into a project when it needed it.  Or one could argue that the corporate structure or the pressures of the industry are at blame for expecting such a hard date for deliverables.

A lot of things make a great game great, not just design.  Conversely, even a good design (or an intended good design) can result in a bad game as a result of other factors, especially if not all of the design is implemented.

Bruce

[squirrel]

Some interesting stuff - keep it coming. I'm drunk and just failed a financial accounting exam so i think i'm incoherent but i do think some interesting insights come out of the brief notes/posts:

Content. Carmack is 100% right and it shows in the fact that even a project as well funded and backed as SWG is significantly short on content. The issue to a large degree is games suck at telling stories, really telling them, because of the authorial voice issue. MMORPG's are orders of magnitude worse. So we need massive amounts of consumable fully developed content. And that shits expensive and slow to make.

In terms of failure, i find it interesting that the two MMOG's i had the 'best' times in were both horribly broken when i started and stayed that way for a very long time. Both WWIIOL and Shadowbane got a lot of it right, including how to deal with 'bad' people and player justice. Unfortunately they were playable 30% of the time. Part of the reason i'll stay the hell away from Lineage II (besides nauseating treadmills and item dependency) is the 'contrived' pvp. If you're going to limit me, do it the way DAoC did. Anyway, WWIIOL or SB with SWG's dev team and budget = customer for life in me. Pity that.

More reading tomorrow...apoligies in advance for stating teh obvious.

ps. TSO wasn't fun. Even when it worked. WWIOL was. Even when it didn't.

[Comstar]

Anyway, WWIIOL or SB with SWG's dev team and budget = customer for life in me. Pity that..

But to get that level of budget means youi HAVE to work for EA or Sony, which brings in the negatives. The best examples would surly be MCO and EAB.

Only small nitch studios like Wolfpack or CRS (or for that matter, Aces High and Warbirds and the various paid for MUD's) CAN survive because the're small and don't have people over them (Though I'm not sure about SB anymore. I guess we'll find out in a year or two?).



Fable sounds like you can't play Chaotic Evil. Lawful Evil perhaps (Netruel Eveil is just "pay me for saving you're daughter" as oppsed to "I'm a Paladin, I *always* rescue girls in distress), but it's a staple of crime shows, that the guy who just married the rich daughter of the richest guy in town and they suddenly die...gee I wounder whp's sword fits the wound profiles? Mabye Fable just needs the fantasy version of CSI where you have plan the perfect murder to get away with it. Sounds like you need to generate alibis).

Didn'ty KOTOR make it so you CAN play evil and STILL win the game? I don't recall Morrowind ever carering. I'm playing BGII right now and it's tuff to be evil, cause being eveil rarly gets you good stuff AND most quests result in good repuations too boot.

Game designers need to take Dark Helmut to heart. Evil will always win because good is DUMB.

[daveNYC]

KOTOR let you play evil, but only during scripted conversations.  You couldn't just run around killing everyone.  Which was sad, I really wanted to pile up the bodies on that first planet.

I noticed that the first tester didn't just kill the children, he "...slaughtered all the children in particularly nasty and gruesome ways."  I'm wondering if that's just hyperbole, or if the system allows(ed?) that much freedom of movement.

[SirBruce]

We did see some combat, but nothing that would suggest you could dismember bodies after death or impale them on swords or whatnot, which is I think is what he was implying with the children.  Perhaps they just took out that level of body object manipulation.

Bruce

[Alluvian]

Perhaps they just took out that level of body object manipulation.

Polearm rape is no longer supported in the feature set I guess.

[daveNYC]

Perhaps they just took out that level of body object manipulation.

Polearm rape is no longer supported in the feature set I guess.

Maybe they'll have it available as an optional download.

Hell, I can't wait for the hue and cry if anything like this level of freedom is realized in the finished game.  Maybe they should release it when Lieberman is on vacation.