The sky has not fallen (yet)

[Ingmar]

Story is great, it adds flavor to the gameplay... but the error SWTOR made was thinking watching a cinematic is gameplay.

There are hardly any 'cinematics' in SWTOR. There are lots of Bioware-style dialogue scenes, where the player is a participant.

EDIT: Contrast this to something like Uldum in WoW, which is full of actual, non-participatory cinematics.

Funny, the youtube videos I watched had long scenes of models talking through and animating a scene which went on for quite a while. That's a cinematic approach to story telling done through the game engine. The fact you get to make a choice at certain points doesn't make it less a cinematic.

...you still haven't actually played the game, have you. Would you care to share your opinion on any books you haven't read or movies you haven't seen as well?

EDIT: I would say by definition a cinematic has no interaction. /shrug

[Kageru]

If it's something you sit and watch, it's a cinematic. A choice ever X minutes doesn't change that. That's been the case since Dragon's Lair.

[Kageru]

Some population calculations on the official forums. Basically a guy went and did a /who scan when the server changed population status in order to work out what the numbers were for the various reported states. The outcome being:

Light is up to about 500
Standard is up to about 1,500
Heavy is up to about 2,250-2,500(?) (Let's call this 2375 for now...)
Very Heavy is up to about 3,000
Full is greater than about 3,000

most of the servers are light. Using the census data over a two week period the average logins for all servers is ~72k people (with a significant margin of error). Though of course there's no way to work out how many people are paying but not playing. Even so that puts the games activity at roughly the same as Eve but spread over way too many servers.

The difference in heavy is apparently because the launch servers, and those opened after launch, have a different value for what constitutes a heavy server.

[Surlyboi]

If it's something you sit and watch, it's a cinematic. A choice ever X minutes doesn't change that. That's been the case since Dragon's Lair.

Doubling down on the wrong doesn't make you right.

[Reg]

Why would I be interested in the uninformed opinions of someone who has never played the game?

[Margalis]

Dragon's Lair is not a cinematic. There isn't much there in terms of mechanics or in making periodic dialog choices but there's at least something.

My comment about cutscenes (which I think periodic dialog choices do fall under) was aimed at the fact that in an MMO you need a world, locations, NPCs, etc, and you can say a lot in their design. You absolutely have to have that stuff so might as well use it to deliver ambient story. Cutscenes you have to create individually and are not part of the core gameplay, they are an extra burden with extremely limited use. Single player games like Bioshock generally do a better job of environmental storytelling than MMOs, which is kind of backwards.

[caladein]

What's the bar at which dialogue stuff becomes "core gameplay" and not an "extra burden" though?

Does it need to involve some button fiddling, and therefore the Sakura Taisen games and Fahrenheit count?  Or does there need to be no proper/traditional combat system in the game at all (because that's how we categorize games)?

I just don't think you can call a major selling point and game system of a title not "core gameplay" just because it doesn't involve punching people.  That said, I agree that SWTOR (and many other MMOs not called LotRO) could do a lot more to make their environments a key part of the storytelling process.

[Kageru]

Why would I be interested in the uninformed opinions of someone who has never played the game?

I've never set myself on fire either because I used analysis to predict that shit would hurt.

Just as SWTOR believing "story was the 4th pillar of the MMO" was clearly flawed long before the game released. Besides, by the time they released it in my region the writing was already on the wall. But if you want to actually argue that SWTOR's investment in narrative and cut-scene was a good use of their budget I'd be very interested to read it.

[Margalis]

What's the bar at which dialogue stuff becomes "core gameplay" and not an "extra burden" though?

In theory I agree that dialog stuff can be the core gameplay. But SWTOR is mechanically WoW with some story stuff on top, in part because the nature of an MMO is to try to get people to play for hundreds of hours and story stuff just can't last that long.

[Reg]

I've never set myself on fire either because I used analysis to predict that shit would hurt.

There's only one way for you to be sure... I suggest you get to it ASAP.

[Surlyboi]

Build a man fire and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

[shiznitz]

The one real thing a MMO could deliver that a single-player game cannot is radical change to the world in which we play.  Last night, while you decided to watch Archer, the town of Brandelweis was destroyed by the nearby volcano.  When you log in the next time, the map is new.  There is a new dungeon.  New mobs have appeared.  All the cheat sites laying out the quests and maps are obsolete.

Ideally, those kinds of changes could happen as players are actually playing.  NPCs could be shouting that "Abandon the city!" and players who can teleport start ferrying PCs and NPCs alike to other parts of the world.  This is how the game would create stories for its players.

Can this model be done cost-effectively?  What if one keeps the world small and the playerbase limited?  If the devs know that the game can only support 3,000 players, how can they design efficiently for that? 

[Draegan]

RIFT apparently had the tech to do that but their primary tests showed that players like familiarity with the world.  If one guys tells another "hey I did this cool thing here last night" and the second person goes to see it and it's gone, he had a frustrating play experience.

But RIFT said they had the tech of towns being over run, destroyed and changed.

I think they really fucked up on that end if that tech was there.  Maybe we'll see it with an expansion or with Defiance.

[luckton]

The one real thing a MMO could deliver that a single-player game cannot is radical change to the world in which we play.  Last night, while you decided to watch Archer, the town of Brandelweis was destroyed by the nearby volcano.  When you log in the next time, the map is new.  There is a new dungeon.  New mobs have appeared.  All the cheat sites laying out the quests and maps are obsolete.

Ideally, those kinds of changes could happen as players are actually playing.  NPCs could be shouting that "Abandon the city!" and players who can teleport start ferrying PCs and NPCs alike to other parts of the world.  This is how the game would create stories for its players.

Can this model be done cost-effectively?  What if one keeps the world small and the playerbase limited?  If the devs know that the game can only support 3,000 players, how can they design efficiently for that? 

I'm probably wrong because I haven't played it myself, but this sounds like how GW2 is handling shit in PvE areas, you know, with dynamic/public questing and shit.  Or something.

[Ingmar]

Even in GW2 it all resets back to normal at some point I am pretty sure.

[luckton]

Even in GW2 it all resets back to normal at some point I am pretty sure.

I don't see why it has to.  You establish sanctuary areas, sure; safe places that people logged off will get respawned to if the area they were parked at gets retaken by the bad, but what's wrong with the bad having a little fun while I'm away or something?

[Nevermore]

It resets to normal pretty quickly, usually with another dynamic event that reverses the first one.  Because having something happen only once that only a few lucky people who happened to be there at the time can experience would be stupid.

[Ingmar]

Even in GW2 it all resets back to normal at some point I am pretty sure.

I don't see why it has to.  You establish sanctuary areas, sure; safe places that people logged off will get respawned to if the area they were parked at gets retaken by the bad, but what's wrong with the bad having a little fun while I'm away or something?

Because the 'event' is the part that matters gameplay-wise. If it never resets, nobody gets to see the event.

[luckton]

But that's what we're talking about, isn't it?  Environmental/gameplay changing events that have lasting effects on the world.  If you weren't around to see it happen, too bad.  It happened.  Are you going to use your character to explore/fight back the changes, or just /ragequit because the game isn't the same way you remembered it from yesterday?

[Ingmar]

I spent months retaking empty keeps in the Midgard frontier every night. It was not what I would call compelling gameplay. So yes, I will probably choose to play a game that actually lets me participate in the interesting parts on my own play schedule. GW2 to its credit sounds like it will do this.

"Lasting effects" are not a plus or a minus in any kind of inherent way. What matters is having interesting things to do.

[luckton]

But there's a difference between PvP and PvE actions (and I'm pretty sure you know that, unless by your choice of example you think there isn't),.  PvP has you at the will(s) of the opposing players, while PvE has you at the will of the AI.  I'm right there with you in getting burned out on DAoC keep-hopping, if that you could only do it if you were fortunate enough to have the numbers online to do so, and also lucky enough to strike before the opposing force is either not there or is delayed in responding to your attack.

With PvE though, that stuff can easily get auto-scaled in difficulty and magnitude depending on who's in the area at any given time.  Like Draegon mentioned, RIFT could have done this with more gusto, but chose not to.  I don't think it was a failure-point for them not to have, but it certainly would have made the game more interesting, for me at least. :P

[Draegan]

GW2 events, from what I've seen, are all static scripted events with different branches.  They all can eventually reset or changed back easily enough.  It's pretty fun, but most of it is apparently cyclical and doesn't really give a sense of major change.  But most of this was observations of lower level areas though so it might get more complex in later areas.

Essentially they are dynamic Public Quests as in sometimes they spawn, sometimes they don't.  Sometimes they work up to a huge event, sometimes they don't.  They are often extremely repeatable as they go back and forth depending on player interaction.

What is lacking are events that happen randomly and have a large scope of change.  Again, only low level observations though.

[shiznitz]

I spent months retaking empty keeps in the Midgard frontier every night. It was not what I would call compelling gameplay.

No one would argue with you.  But what if  one night those keeps were gone and a new river was there?  Or a huge hole in the ground with new nasties coming out?  I would love a game with dramatic geographic changes several times a year.  Think about how the economy could change if a new vein of iron ore suddenly appeared while that old vein of cobalt that everyone was mining like crazy vanished?  How about if bridges got washed out and the players had to gather resources for an NPC to get it rebuilt? 

I am not talking about canned shit-ass stuff that occasionally happened but really just became a quest node. I am talking about dramatic events that introduce mayhem and chaos into the game world every few weeks.

[Kageru]

There have been a few games that did do something like that. The Sleeper in EQ was a "once only" mob and pretty much supported the idea that players don't like "missing" content, WoW did it with some of the the expansions in having an event leading up to a world change and Horizons had "server craftable" permanent changes to the map which was a cool idea trapped in a bad game. They're still all scripted though so you are spending developer effort for a very limited return.

I Like what GW2 is doing. They're going harder on dynamic events and with chaining them into a sequence you get some interesting but controlled dynamics. I think, if it works, you'll see other games pushing that idea further.

[Lantyssa]

GW2 events, from what I've seen, are all static scripted events with different branches.  They all can eventually reset or changed back easily enough.  It's pretty fun, but most of it is apparently cyclical and doesn't really give a sense of major change.  But most of this was observations of lower level areas though so it might get more complex in later areas.

Yes.  It's interesting because it seems to be highly variable, but even they aren't to World-Changing Event levels yet from what we've been shown.  That's not something you want to do in newbie areas anyways.

All of their events are more or less scripted.  To do one-offs with regularity, you would need a system which can move about mobs and NPCs and dynamically alter terrain a great deal.  If RIFT can do such things, they should add a couple of zones which use it.  There's nothing wrong with have safe areas where players can feel comfortable, but why not use that tech somewhere?

[Jherad]

I know people have ... 'mixed' feelings about SWG here, but I thought the idea of different crafting materials changing their quality over time in different areas was inspired, at least as a member of a reasonable size guild. Finding what materials were good where in any given week, and having the guild go out to plonk down harvesters or kill birds so that the doctors could make the best meds was great.

[UnSub]

Dynamic worlds sound good in theory, but the reality is that it is a lot of work for only a very small pay-off. You've got to make a big enough impact on the world for it to be noticed by players, but that can make it hard to keep repeating that approach. Plus players get annoyed when the area they knew they could go to for RESOURCE1 is over-run by grelmins and they are stuck being unable to do what they logged in to do.

Plus unintended consequences always pop up. CoH/V had a Zombie Apocalypse that would pop up that certain vocal players came to hate because it caused the mobs they were actually looking for to all run away and hide.

And at the end of the day it doesn't seem to retain players. Fallen Earth blew up a starter town and tried to go the live events angle; it's down to three full-time developers right now. The Matrix Online tried to have an evolving story that kept players involved and altered the world; it didn't do that well either.

[Ingmar]

Maybe Pathfinder Online will be the savior for people who desperately want that feature. 

[Paelos]

Dynamic worlds sound good in theory, but the reality is that it is a lot of work for only a very small pay-off. You've got to make a big enough impact on the world for it to be noticed by players, but that can make it hard to keep repeating that approach. Plus players get annoyed when the area they knew they could go to for RESOURCE1 is over-run by grelmins and they are stuck being unable to do what they logged in to do.

Well that's sort of a chicken and egg problem. If you designed the game to be about gathering resource1, but threw a monkey wrench into their daily grind, then yes I agree. If, however, you designed the game based on dynamic changes bring the biggest rewards?

One place the MMO industry at large has been reluctant to take development is towards the explorer mentality. They've covered achiever very well, killer sorta well, social very well, but never really tapped explorer well at all. And yet, I can point to games where people mine things for fun, always searching for the next great section of land or resources, as extremely fun.

[Maledict]

I don't think MMOs ever can tap into the explorer archetype very well to be honest due to the nature of the design. The fact is you are sharing the world with a LOT of other people, which totally breaks exploration  for me. For example Skyrim was fantastic for exploring, but add more than a few other people into that world and it would lose that aspect. To explore you need wilderness and emptiness, and MMOs don't do that anymore.

EQ only really managed it due to the very small population numbers for each server and the insane number of zones as each expansion rapidly increased the size of the game world.

(plus, once you making exploring out of the way places give a reward you find they don't stay out of the way for very long!).

One thing MMOs don't do very well anymore is a sense of danger in a zone. Even Icecrown felt totally safe as a player when adventuring in it. I would really like a return, in some small way, to the idea that there are areas of the game  that are never safe to go to.

[Draegan]

Dynamic worlds sound good in theory, but the reality is that it is a lot of work for only a very small pay-off. You've got to make a big enough impact on the world for it to be noticed by players, but that can make it hard to keep repeating that approach. Plus players get annoyed when the area they knew they could go to for RESOURCE1 is over-run by grelmins and they are stuck being unable to do what they logged in to do.

I agree that this is the case if you put a system like that into current MMORPG design.  I think if you make it so that the dynamic stuff small enough, but used in quantity, goes a long way.  Lots of little things with the occasional HUGE EVENT.  It would take an incredible design team to do that though, and a lot of time.

You shouldn't have to log into a game and find Town A has been taking over... again.  But you should be able to log into a game and find that there are seasons, city traffic, new farms, a town slowly building new buildings.

The key is SLOW change, and not immediate change.  The only time you should log on and find that you can't do what you were doing before is that if you took a 1-2 week break. 

[caladein]

RIFT apparently had the tech to do that but their primary tests showed that players like familiarity with the world.  If one guys tells another "hey I did this cool thing here last night" and the second person goes to see it and it's gone, he had a frustrating play experience.

But RIFT said they had the tech of towns being over run, destroyed and changed.

I think they really fucked up on that end if that tech was there.  Maybe we'll see it with an expansion or with Defiance.

I disagree completely.  The largest-scale systems they had when I was playing, Invasions I think, were still a massive pain in the ass.  When I ran into one when I was leveling and the zone had like four people in it, my options were to trek over to some other zone in my level range and work my way up to doing something productive or just logging out.

I just logged out after the first time.

GW2's structure is also susceptible to this, just because its quests are backwards doesn't mean there isn't X amount per level range.  The implementation is a little more civilized though as at least when I was playing they were relatively minor in area and duration (and never touched anything important).

[Draegan]

RIFT apparently had the tech to do that but their primary tests showed that players like familiarity with the world.  If one guys tells another "hey I did this cool thing here last night" and the second person goes to see it and it's gone, he had a frustrating play experience.

But RIFT said they had the tech of towns being over run, destroyed and changed.

I think they really fucked up on that end if that tech was there.  Maybe we'll see it with an expansion or with Defiance.

I disagree completely.  The largest-scale systems they had when I was playing, Invasions I think, were still a massive pain in the ass.  When I ran into one when I was leveling and the zone had like four people in it, my options were to trek over to some other zone in my level range and work my way up to doing something productive or just logging out.

I just logged out after the first time.

GW2's structure is also susceptible to this, just because its quests are backwards doesn't mean there isn't X amount per level range.  The implementation is a little more civilized though as at least when I was playing they were relatively minor in area and duration (and never touched anything important).

Well that's where design issues come into play.  They tried to shoe horn a invasion system on top of an old and boring questhub -> breadcrumb system.  If they designed a system similar to GW2s where your main advancement was participating in these events, you would of had a better time.

The fail here is on Trion.  Your main gameplay and leveling experience was via quests.  You logged on to do quests.  You didn't log in to do invasions.  If an invasion was rampant, then you were pissed.

Take out the quests, add more invasions, or whatever, and put your sole gameplay focus on invasions and you'd have a better time.  If you kicked an invasion out of a local area and got rewarded the same amount of xp as completing 4-5 quests, how would you of reacted then?  (Assuming kicking out an invasion was compelling gameplay.)

edit:

Wanted to add:

If the game taught you from the get-go that your main gameplay mechanic was fighting off invasions or attacks enemy encampments this would be a more entertaining situation.  For some reason, in the newbie areas, you had rift invader and you also had faction invaders.  Then they completely got rid of this mechanic.  Imagine if the game always had invasions of Defiants vs. Guardians going back and forth between towns in each zone.  Then when a major rift invasion happened, both Defiant and Guardian NPCs essentially forgot each other and banded together to kill Rift creatures.  You, as a player, then joined up along side of them to do various activities.

This would of done wonders for creating a sense of world and lore of the fight between G vs D.  As soon as you left the newbie zone, you never got this feel in the game anymore.

[caladein]

I'm simply not in favor of systems that, for the sake of worldiness, keep me from playing the game I enjoy and sat down to play.  GW2 events at a low level with a fuckton of people around, like Minor Rifts and those stronghold thingies, are similar to what I sat down to do that they're a fun bit of dynamism.  I really enjoyed them, as they never got in the way but were "there" if I felt like doing them.

How GW2 events will work at the edge case of a very low pop zone and higher complexity, I don't know.

[Paelos]

The point is that if you design it correctly, you advance by heading to the place where the invasion is happening, not a predetermined static quest hub.

Therefore you wouldn't have a system that kept you from playing the game you intended to play. It would be the actual game.