A Few Dead Horses

[pxib]

I'm not lookin' stuff anyones pockets full of unearned money, least of all MMOG developers! However, I really believe that if we send a strong unambiguous message to the development community that we would be willing to pay more for a MMOG IF: a) it has high quality real time rendered graphics (not just technically high quality as in 1600x1200 etc., but artistically high quality as well); b) it fully implements believable Newtonian physics and supports the relevant hardware (PPU); c) Introduces new innovations that give players the ability to communicate with each other much more effectively...in other words get rid of the keyboard (almost) and give us the ability to talk through our avatars (not that teamspeak junk but VoIP w/voice synthesizer so that a 200lb. man can sound like a delicate little girl, if that's his thing!), lips moving, facial expressions, the whole 9 yards!; d) high quality content and plenty of it! f) virtually bug free 64-bit code . etc., etc., you get the idea. The operative word here is IF!

It's easy to dismiss and make fun of Technocrat, but as much as he's fundamentally wrong, he's fundamentally wrong in ways I've heard before. These sort of requests get made all the time, so I'm honestly not sure that the majority of gamers realize why they'd be stifling for designers, frustrating for developers, and ultimately ho-hum on the receiving end.

a) High-quality, real-time rendered graphics are a reality. Just about every game on the market today has got them in spades. Artistic quality is about as high as it's going to get. We've had some of the best artists in the world working on games for at least a decade.  Much "art" is sacrificed in order to keep the world navigable, comprehensible, and enclosed. Ultimately, players care more about how easy it is to walk through a door than whether it's modeled to scale.

b) The "believable" physics most gamers demand today are simply more elaborate collisions and explosions. It's a lot of fun to destroy high-quality, real-time rendered art. In an online game, there will be little art left after the fiftieth person, much less the fifty-thousandth. Even subtle combat physics, from the bounce of a grenade to Half-Life 2's infamous gravity gun, become exponentially bandwidth intensive as the number of simultaneous players increases. Simulated physics is an excellent way to produce toys; there are simpler and more elegant ways to make games.

c) Speech is not the Holy Grail. Firstly, anybody who has experienced Teamspeak knows that merely leaving somebody's hands free won't make them communicate effectively. As awkward as typing while gaming can be, our eyes can better skim a page of chatter (with convenient scrollback buffer) than our ears can follow six separate conversations. Facial expressions? Computers that accurately discern and play back emotional information from voice alone are still science-fiction. More to the point, as much as players want to see smiles and lip movement, they're more interested in the big picture. It's difficult to show both the essentials (where am I standing? how many people are here?) and the details (did he wink at me? is she being sarcastic?) on the same computer screen. This is probably a discussion topic all by itself.

d) High-quality content is job one. Here Technocrat and I agree.

e)

f) "Virtually bug-free 64-bit code." How many people who throw this sort of phrase around know exactly what it means? "Bug-free" is an easy concept but functionally unattainable. "64-bit code" sounds fancy, but all it means is that you'll probably need a new CPU. I'd rather play a brilliantly designed 8-bit gem than a flawlessly coded but uninspired  64-bit dud. It is time and resource intensive to push the technical envelope. I'd rather those precious commodities went towards high-quality content.

[Numtini]

On facial expressions, SWG had a lot of these in simple form. Changing your mood to happy or whatever. Almost nobody I knew used them, even in the RP communities.

[Kageru]

well 64 bit code is *obviously* and *exactly* twice as good as the old fashioned 32 bit code.

... or he honestly thinks the client is going to need more than 4Gb of ram! His points are also a bit garbled, WoW is a "real time rendered" game that can be played at high resolution, but I don't think it's quite what he has in mind. I also think "deep and varied content" could have got more of a mention.

[Engels]

I think you may misunderstand what people mean when they ask for 'believable physics'. I think most people I've talked about this simply want some baseline realism. EQ has it, SWG did not. CoH and WoW have this 'believable physics', but it is filtered through some form of cartoon physics so it doesn't feel as punishing as RL and has a rubber-bandish feel to it, as opposed to EQ's wysiwyg.

Its a matter of immerson. By immerson I don't mean some star-eyed wonder at the pretties, I'm talking about a form of mental displacement from chair to character to such an extent that your brain reacts, at a near instinctual level, to the approaching physics on screen. The more you achieve this, the easier it is for a player to slip into the role you want him to play.

[Margalis]

How many people can tell the difference between 64 bit code and 32 bit code by running something? The answer is nobody.

Personally I don't give a shit about Newtonian physics at all. That's just nerd-speak. I had fun running in jumping in super-mario and that sure isn't Newtonian.

How are physics in themselves fun? How is high resolution fun? How is bug free code fun? None of those really impact my day at all.

[Engels]

Well, I think we're talking about different kinds of games than Mario Bros. One has limited expectations when playing that game, and within that context, the physics are just dandy. RPGs require, as the term implies, a sense of immersion into the role of the character, and if your physics aren't close enough to a unquantifiable immersive realism, then you have Mario Bros, not an RPG.

You may not give a rat's ass about immersion in an RPG, but I think I'm not alone in saying that its important to many gamers here.

[Lantyssa]

b) The "believable" physics most gamers demand today are simply more elaborate collisions and explosions. It's a lot of fun to destroy high-quality, real-time rendered art. In an online game, there will be little art left after the fiftieth person, much less the fifty-thousandth. Even subtle combat physics, from the bounce of a grenade to Half-Life 2's infamous gravity gun, become exponentially bandwidth intensive as the number of simultaneous players increases. Simulated physics is an excellent way to produce toys; there are simpler and more elegant ways to make games.

The other problem with believable physics... real objects are heavy.  They don't fly around as in Hollywood movies, much less HL2.  There has to be some sort of exaggeration to produce a dramatic effect.  At best we want believable cloth, hair and maybe a background fluff layer for leaves, bits of paper or tumbleweeds.

[Yoru]

How is bug free code fun?

SB.EXE

[Murgos]

Bug free code isn't fun in and of itself but I think fun is probably bounded by a relationship to the number and severity of the bugs in the code.

If x is the amount of fun then there is some function bugs that acts on x to deliver y fun.

Bugs(x) = y.  Y is the amount of fun the player percieves where x is the amount of fun the game was designed to deliver.

This all discounts that fun can be had from the bugs themselves, just ask any griefer or 'sploiter and they will tell you that the fun is in the bugs themselves.

[Roac]

How many people can tell the difference between 64 bit code and 32 bit code by running something? The answer is nobody.

Personally I don't give a shit about Newtonian physics at all. That's just nerd-speak. I had fun running in jumping in super-mario and that sure isn't Newtonian.

How are physics in themselves fun? How is high resolution fun? How is bug free code fun? None of those really impact my day at all.

I think one of the coolest use of physics was in Mercenaries - and it was certainly not a textbook application of Newton's laws.  Everything was far, far lighter than it should have been, and bodies were way too flexible / rag doll-ish.  Cars blew up in a very unrealistic Hollywood way, and concussion blasts that could knock you off your feet never seemed to hurt. 

But it was fun.

Now, in some games, more realistic physics might matter.  WWII sims, air combat sims, and so forth are all trying to hit a mark of realism.  For games like that, realism is extremely important.  For games like Mercenaries, and even more so for oddball games like Mario, reality is not an issue.  The lesson is that realism is always secondary, and merely a tool for, fun.  Use or discard as the situation warrants.

[jason]

I always find it funny that people say they demand "believable physics" and yet have no problem with the fact that they are carrying around 5 backpacks loaded with gear, or the ability to hold 7 or more guns and lots of ammo.

It makes me think of that scene in the game Space Quest, where Roger Wilco picks up the ladder and then slides it into the front pocket of his pants...

Be careful when demanding reality, because they might give it to you.