Trucolor World with a Four-Color Community

[Soukyan]

Milk2Crush

Sorry. I had to say it before someone beat me to it. ;)

Back on topic...

So what way IS there to try out something new like that?

Exactly. Early implementations may not always be the best, but they are at least attempting to break the mold and integrate more of these sorts of activities into the worlds, even if these activities don't appeal to the "standard" MMOG player of old. They are tasked with drawing a more diverse audience into these games. Greater diversity in the playerbase can certainly make for a more robust and interesting world at least as far as the social aspects are concerned. Greater diversity of playerbase also makes it more difficult to please everyone all the time, but that could never be done anyhow, so there's no problem there. From my narrow field of view through my MMOG avatars, it seems that UO, DAoC, SWG and a few others managed to garner a rather diverse population of players. But I've gone on a digression way past my original point. The way to try out those new things is to put them into the current and future games and keep at them until you get them right.

[SirBruce]

Anyway, I think that what some customers feel are that some game designers have gone so far into trying to make a "world" that the games within the world were not very fun or well thought out.  And I think, Raph, even you would agree that in SWG, a lot of the extra "world" type stuff -- the economy, the entertainers and doctors, players cities, etc. -- came out pretty well, and that the systems that were really flawed were more the "core" "game" systems like combat, skills, Jedi, etc.  Of course, too much of the reverse and the world can feel "empty" and "lifeless", like AC2 or City of Heroes.

Still, I still do not think it is THAT much harder to add "world" elements to a "game" like City of Heroes.  Yes, they have constraints, but there are constraints if you follow the opposite path as well.

Anyway, I think ideally what you need to do is to come up with a way to have the "world" design approach, but to limit the scope sufficiently at first so that you can really concentrate on the core gameplay so the "game" is fun.  Then later you can expand on the existing "world" infrastructure code and design.

Bruce

[geldonyetich]

Haemish says that it's a different of what point you design from, the inside out or the outside in, and I think that's a very good analogy.

<stamp little foot> That was my post, dammit.

What I was saying to SirBruce is that once you make some decisions from the inside out, you preclude huge swaths of possible design choices. CoH is a very good game that will have a devil of a time implementing a player economy, should they ever want to. They may not ever want to, but they made some choices that make it very hard to do so. Not technically impossible, but very hard to the point where it may be pragmatically infeasible.

This is a pretty good point.    Ever try to design a scenario in Neverwinter Nights without first laying down the story?  Unless your name is Douglas Adams, that's sure to create an unsellable mess.    

Another nice thing about designing with the big picture in mind is you can leave pleanty of room to add things later.   An excellent way of conducting a MMORPG, which is expected to grow.   Excellent, or so it would seem...

The main issue I have with this is, as a player, I've often experienced that the result of this "think big" design approach is that you run out of development time before your core game mechanics are very well refined.    This is probably because as you're designing from the outside in, you've deliberately put off a good deal of this inside until later.    You end up with this nice big environment to expand in, but not many worthwhile activities at release.

All dressed up, places to go, but nothing worth doing.   How often have our would-be adventurers found themselves in this situation when embarking in a newly released MMORPG?    How many players do you think are genuinely interested in hanging around immediately after release, waiting for the fun to be added in later?

Maybe this is the standard MMORPG life cycle.   I can name several MMORPGs which have managed to survive a feature incomplete release, such as Anarchy Online and Everquest.   Yet, I can name others that didn't, such as Earth and Beyond and Asheron's Call 2.    

There must be a line of minimum features neccessary to retain sufficient player population interest to keep a game going.    It likely varies from game to game based on several factors.   For example, I could see Star Wars Galaxies getting quite a bit of leeway with the internationally popular Star Wars licence.

It's not all that mysterious, I suppose, it basically comes down to if you can financially survive having a feature incomplete game.

That's your problem as a developer.  As a player, I face a far more serious problem: it isn't really much of a game to the majority of us while we're waiting for you to "patch in the fun".

For a contrasting view on whether or not appealing to a larger audience even makes sense, you can check out Dave Rickey's latest column:

http://www.skotos.net/articles/engines21.phtml

Hmm, should read Skotos more often - interesting articles indeed.

Different subject though.  Though the goal may be to point out the difficulty in attracting the mainstream, I think he's basically talking about establishing a hook based off if niches.   I say, so far as a MMORPG concerns, the hook is only half the battle.  

Yes, it gets people to buy the boxes because OMG it's <insert popular pop culture reference here>.   However, it has nothing to do in terms of designing the game itself.    

A crappy game will drive people away before you get your first subscription, even you secured licence to make Christianity Online (although the few billion box sales will likely be nice to have).    A good game will actually overcome a bad licence - it may have a little more difficulty getting advertised, but word of mouth will spread like wildfire if it's incredibly good.

So, here's a thought: You want the mainstream to play your game, don't worry about attracting this or that "geek" niche, or any niches at all.   Instead, just make your game so good that a great deal of players would be genuinely interested in it (, I said, as if this were an easy matter, which it's obviously not ;)).    If you're successful in making an orgasmically good game, word of mouth with perhaps an initial minor advertisement booster should cover you.   If you build it, they will come, so to speak.

Switching back to the idea of designing the inside again... I still think the key to creating a truly good game has a lot to do with creating activities a high level of meaningful involvement with the player.   Not just a high level of activity.   Not just a high level of involvement.    However, a high level of meaningful involvement.    Tough call, but I wager you could get it with practice.

[re: New features]
Now, yes, you could leave it out, but then no progress will be made on it. Or we could try the dancing-only game--but if it's a feature like dancing that is unlikely to sustain a game all by itself, that's not likely to happen either.

So what way IS there to try out something new like that?

I like to think I have a really good answer for this.  That answer is:

"Think it through all the way before implementing a new feature."

BS?  Well, I will agreethat this doesn't guarentee that you'll come up with a bulletproof feature, but it does improve your odds considerably.  

Easier said than done?  Well, it would involve taking things quite a few steps further than you have proof to back up.  That's does risk jumping to false conclusions, which could be catastrophic.    However, I'm wagering that if you had thought it through, bounced it off those people you're supposed to be paying for consultation, and were able to take the time (assuming you have it) to consider the consiquences, your odds improve greatly that a proposed feature could be a success.

Worse case scenario, you may find a reason why this new feature idea is going to be an absolute dud.    This sucks because it means you'll feel you just wasted a lot of time.    

At this point, I say either find a way to work around it, or scrap it.     This is because choosing to go ahead and do something you know isn't thought out all the way is choosing to perform an experment.    Most players won't thank you for the guinea pig treatment.   If you want to experiment that badly, use the test server or your beta test: that's where the sworn guinea pigs live.

[Margalis]

The solution is to design from the inside out while considering possible areas of expansion. The world in most MMORPGs is basically the same. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what doors should be left open.

I would also point out that it is a lot easier to add stuff to a smaller, solid core than to a big mess. Expanding around the edges is usually a lot easier than filling stuff in the cracks.

The problem with a lot of project management, especially programming projects, is they go for the big picture and "down the road" style features and leave themselves places to fill in, but it turns out the places to fill in just don't make sense. (And you find out too late) Nothing quite fits in the way it was planned.

It's good to solve a specific problem in a way that *can* be generalized, rather than try to solve a general problem.

I think a big issue with some of these games is that they aren't fun until the very end, and if in the very end they still aren't fun it's just too late. MOO3 was a lot like that. The game had been worked on for years and had tons of stuff but the fun wasn't in yet...and it never made it.

If you can get the core of the game going and fun, you KNOW you are in good shape. If you keep delaying the fun by design, you have no idea where you stand until it's too late to adjust.

I see a lot of MMORPGs that adopt the "it's not fun now in beta 2, but just wait until beta 3!" attitude. It should be fun in pre-alpha.

[HaemishM]

I think the biggest failing of the world design philosophy is that it really doesn't concentrate enough on the fact that you are making a game that is meant to be fun. World's require things that may or may not be fun.

I think the ideal approach would be to take your design doc, read it and think about it for a few days before you ever program a damn thing. Sit back and think, then write up a wholly separate document. This document should be a step-by-step description of exactly what a player will do on a typical night after they login. Read it back to yourself and to the design group once you're done.

If it doesn't sound fun, start over.

I'm much more in favor of building from the inside out... sort of. Take the feature/features you KNOW everyone who is interested in your setting (or your target audience) will want to do. In most MMOG's, especially fantasy-based MMOG's, that's combat. You can talk about crafting, housing, flaxing all you want, but if the majority of people want to kill orcs, build that shit first. Make that fun and un-buggy. When that works, then you can think about adding other things.

In City of Heroes, if they were to add some kind of crafting system, I'm wholly convinced they could put it in and make it more interesting than all the crafting that's come before in MMOG-land. It's not faith in the dev team. It's the fact that they can devote more resources to the problem than say SWG because they don't really have to fix anything in the core model. Combat is fun. The activities people do day in and day out are already so well-developed, they don't need constant rethinks. A tweak for balance here and there, but that's it.

It's similar to the SWG model of adding space combat as a separate update/expansion. Space combat SHOULD be a completely separate and different game, with new mechanics. However, had SWG taken the concept of each component being more of a separate game, I think combat would be more fun, crafting would be more fun, etc. etc. etc. The original scope of SWG was too ambitious for the time-frame. I think SWG would have been better served releasing the combat/PVP model game first, with some baseline crafting, then in 6 months, release the full-blown crafting deal. Then release the dancing wookie game. Then the space combat game.

But again, I think a bit of the old corporate hubris came into the design and construction of SWG. I think from the top executive level on down to the littlest programmer on SWG thought that they had enough money to tackle any of the problems that such an ambitious design would face, never admitting that the timetables for such ambition were undoable no matter how much money you threw at the problem. After all, EQ had released with crafting in such a shitty state, and people still paid for that through all the craziness.

What I'm trying to say is, I'd rather you release with 1 feature working and update when other features are working, then release with 6 feature sets all of which are half-assed and broken.

[WayAbvPar]

What I'm trying to say is, I'd rather you release with 1 feature working and update when other features are working, then release with 6 feature sets all of which are half-assed and broken.

This will get more subscription time and expansion money out of a player like me for sure; I don't have enough time to blaze through the content like many folks do; I have a lot of other irons in the fire that demand my time. When I DO have time to play, I want to be entertained, not frustrated.

Take CoH for example- I still enjoy logging on for my 5-10 hours a week and playing; the character advancement and combat system is still interesting to me. If an expansion (or a free update) adds depth into the game with the same quality as these features, it is a certainty that I will keep my subscription active and buy new SKUs.

I would rather see one or two deep, well-constructed game systems rather than a dozen shallow, buggy or incomplete systems. The former gives me something to do while other systems come online; the latter just exposes me to more good ideas with terrible implementation (a definite turn off).

[Dundee]

But CoH does have some "worldsy" elements.  e.g. the thugs aren't usually just standing around waiting to be beaten-up.  They're breaking into cars, vandalizing bus stops, stealing purses, etc.

The reason they do these things (as opposed to, say, just standing there waiting to be beaten up by spandexman, or appearing out of thin air when you click the 'dispense enemies' button), is to provide the illusion that 'it's a world'.

You're taking the 'world' argument to a ridiculous extreme by suggesting that a 'online world' would implement a 'thug ecology', etc. and that if they don't, then they aren't virtual worlds.

The opposite end of the spectrum would be to argue that they ought to remove those thugs' various activities - just have them stand around waiting to be beaten.  And take the cars off the streets too, because they aren't contributing anything to gameplay, etc.  Why even have zone maps if you aren't trying to make a 'virtual world' to at least some degree?  Just click a button and be thrown into an instanced box with some badguys to fight.

I think what you're arguing here is that MMORPGs ought to be minimalist in terms of world elements (certainly you're not suggesting ALL world elements be removed?) and gameplay options, so that development time is spent to ensure that what little there is to do, is fun.

I'll agree that some MMORPGs ought to be that way, but all of them?  Nagh.

[schild]

NEG.

All we've ever, EVER asked for is a game that's fun at the core. Once the core game is fun and near flawless and not based on someone's badass spreadsheets, you can experiment all you want. Until the core elements (combat and guilding, or whatever your game may be) are complete, adding things like, hmmm, I don't know, different races for your merchant vendors, shouldn't happen.

Are merchants in SWG still broken? (I mention this because I liked to roleplay my master merchant/master smuggler - but since both classes were horribly crippled, I didn't get to do either).

[Soukyan]

But CoH does have some "worldsy" elements.  e.g. the thugs aren't usually just standing around waiting to be beaten-up.  They're breaking into cars, vandalizing bus stops, stealing purses, etc.

The reason they do these things (as opposed to, say, just standing there waiting to be beaten up by spandexman, or appearing out of thin air when you click the 'dispense enemies' button), is to provide the illusion that 'it's a world'.

You're taking the 'world' argument to a ridiculous extreme by suggesting that a 'online world' would implement a 'thug ecology', etc. and that if they don't, then they aren't virtual worlds.

The opposite end of the spectrum would be to argue that they ought to remove those thugs' various activities - just have them stand around waiting to be beaten.  And take the cars off the streets too, because they aren't contributing anything to gameplay, etc.  Why even have zone maps if you aren't trying to make a 'virtual world' to at least some degree?  Just click a button and be thrown into an instanced box with some badguys to fight.

I think what you're arguing here is that MMORPGs ought to be minimalist in terms of world elements (certainly you're not suggesting ALL world elements be removed?) and gameplay options, so that development time is spent to ensure that what little there is to do, is fun.

I'll agree that some MMORPGs ought to be that way, but all of them?  Nagh.

No. Virtual worlds are a noble pursuit and I like to see attempts at creating them. Saga of Ryzom is doing some interesting things with the animal AI in that certain species exhibit herding tendencies and have migratory patterns that vary based on seasons, food supply, local predators, etc. They have a hell of a well done weather/season (meteorological?) system although it can use even more fleshing out. The problem they have is that despite those neat things, the gameplay itself is not terribly fun. It's standard MMOG fare. Auto-attack with specials mixed in, etc.

CoH makes the thugs do those things to bring the world alive. Ryzom has the animal AI to give the world a living feel. Both succeed at that. CoH has fun combat gameplay. Ryzom does not. The saving grace to SoR is that it is still in beta, but I don't see the combat system changing drastically at this point.

Looking to SWG as an example of a well-made virtual world. The biggest complaint I've seen is that the combat is not fun. I don't think that the game should not be the beautiful virtual world that it is, but rather the combat gameplay should have been made fun first, perhaps before some other game features were even bothered with. I think that's what some folks are trying to suggest. You can make a great virtual world with games in it, but make sure that each of those games is fun and solid before boasting about and putting in more games that are tedious or incomplete or both.

[Sky]

Hey, virtual worlds are a great goal. And in a perfect world, they would be the ultimate in video gaming and social experimentation.

But unfortunately the vast majority of humans on this planet are too far back on the evolutionary scale to maturely interact in such a fashion.

Thus they make shitty games. And shitty vitual worlds, honestly.

While there's a lot of onus on the developers, you have to keep the playerbase in perspective, too. People are just horribly, horribly broken.

[geldonyetich]

But unfortunately the vast majority of humans on this planet are too far back on the evolutionary scale to maturely interact in such a fashion.
...
While there's a lot of onus on the developers, you have to keep the playerbase in perspective, too. People are just horribly, horribly broken.

I wouldn't take in-game behavior and find it neccessarily a reflection of out-of-game behavior.   Like I said, a lot of people play games to blow off steam.   That's why virtual worlds are challenged, because a good portion of the playerbase is simply there to have fun - not work hard building a virtual society.

The trick is to erect the right barriers that players can goof off without ruining things for everyone.   It's a knack that most MMORPG developers are pretty good at these days.    Shadowbane focused on accountability.   Everquest simply doesn't allow grief behavior.    Star Wars Galaxies is as varied as Ultima Online itself, but restricts putting yourself or buildings at risk to PvP as a strictly voluntary action.    Haven't played ATITD, but sounds like they've got this down a science.

[Soukyan]

Haven't played ATITD, but sounds like they've got this down a science.

Yeah. They kick out the unsavories. Of course, they also don't allow PvP combat, etc. There are a lot of things you cannot do in ATITD. In a true virtual world where anything is possible and where there is no societal precedent, with the exception of perhaps some fictional lore, it will be a bit more difficult to control people. Of course, we have yet to let players run with a game because there's profit margin involved. Even SB won't let the players go totally grief-tastic, and I'm not saying they should. However, things have to be allowed to get much worse to determine if they will get better or not. I have a hunch that in virtual worlds, no good virtual society can be built in a virtual world with no "hard-coded" preventions because if people get tired of something, they can simply logoff and quit and find something else to do. Logging off in real life is essentially suicide. Sure people do it, but most of us prefer to enact change on our society when we want to change something that affects our world and our lives. Until such a time as a community in a virtual world reaches a level of concern for that world, we won't see a community that is not dysfunctional. And on that point, you are correct that ATITD is damn close, albeit with the necessity of preventing some activities from ever occurring in the first place.

[HaemishM]

But see, ATITD does allow not only PVP, but also the creation of the society that fosters a "peaceful" community. It allows the community to vote on changes, including getting rid of the unsavory. And by PVP, it allows politicking to the point where votes can be made to remove enemies. No, it isn't the direct PVP of Shadowbane, but it is an interesting experiment.

But why does ATITD succeed, both financially (I'll smack the first motherfucker tries to say ATITD has not been a financial success) and artistically? Because it tries to do what it wants to do well. Sure, they could have added a combat system, so people could have duels, but that would have diluted the design vision as well as programming resources. From the outside, ATITD seems to work better at creating an interesting virtual world that the players enjoy than SWG does. You haven't seen a great big main feature rewrite to rival SWG's combat revamp in the entire time it's been online.

It was aimed at a niche; it had a limited time frame for competitive gameplay; it let the players create the kind of community they wanted to. And it succeeded on both levels far better than anything that has come from the major studios with major money.

[Sky]

They didn't aim too high, and I'm guessing they didn't have some slavering board of directors with giant dollar signs in their eyes to answer to.

All mmogs are niche products, those that capitalize on it succeed, those that don't are forced into a niche or fail.

But I was being a bit vague by just using the example of broken toys (tm). It's also incompatible playstyles thrust into the same arena. Maybe this is a good idea from an ivory tower, but it sucks in execution.

In UO you had people with a diablo mentality that just wanted to run around goofing off, and also folks with an ultima mentality that wanted to enhance the world and goof off in an entirely different way that had nothing to do with some pigsucker in a death robe and purple potions. Too ambitious, even though it was a great game for both playstyles (originally). And the compromise pretty much screwed both playstyles.

[Raph]

Oof, I can't think of any good way to reply to some of these things without sounding like I am picking on individual games.

Growing outwards can be very hard or even impossible. Could SWG have been made without a player-driven economy? Yes, but try adding it later. Could you add a player-driven economy to EQ? No, not really. Some decisions simply preclude others. CoH lacks items altogether. A large part of the roles items traditionally fulfill are instead filled by buffs. Adding items and all the infrastructure for commerce is feasible, but then you have left the question of what the items DO for you, and that's a tough problem. This doesn't mean that CoH made a mistake, just that they made choices. Arguably, going to Felucca and Trammel in UO was a "growing outward." Was it truly growth, or did it basically kill off one playstyle?

ATITD is an interesting case. I've said many times that I admire the game a lot. But it's also trying to do something very very specific. Specific enough that the audience for it is pretty small. It is successful on its terms, but it is not successful in terms of market penetration. Argualy, it's just successful enough to be stuck at the size it is now, rather than growing to the size it deserves. This connects with the point made (incorrectly, imho) by geldonyetich (I think I attributed it correctly this time!):

If you're successful in making an orgasmically good game, word of mouth with perhaps an initial minor advertisement booster should cover you. If you build it, they will come, so to speak.

This is simply untrue. ATITD, Puzzle Pirates, Ico, Beyond Good & Evil, even MULE. Believe me, I WISH it were true, but we have all seen it not be true countless times over. :(

I think the ideal approach would be to take your design doc, read it and think about it for a few days before you ever program a damn thing. Sit back and think, then write up a wholly separate document. This document should be a step-by-step description of exactly what a player will do on a typical night after they login. Read it back to yourself and to the design group once you're done.

If it doesn't sound fun, start over.

What Haemish proposes as a process is something that we always hammer on. It's also one of the most difficult skills for designers to learn. It can be very very hard to put yourself in the player's position--as evidenced by the difficulty some folks here have in putting themselves in each others' position on debates like the one on PvP, for example. So even though we had exactly what you describe as part of the design process on SWG (it was a required section in the design docs, in fact) it's damnably hard to follow through on. Everybody seems to think we did combat last in SWG--in fact, combat work started darn close to the beginning, and kept being worked on throughout.

The world in most MMORPGs is basically the same. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what doors should be left open.

Really? Then why are so many doors closed? A lot of the history of online world design is one of retreating away from difficult problems ("let's not allow dropping of items" for example). I agree with the point that Margalis makes here that often in dev we worry too much about possible down the road things and not enough about the here and now, but there's also the opposite, which is not worrying about the future at all, and thereby creating barriers to it ever coming to pass.

I can think of lots of things that got left out of SWG that IMHO should have been there to make what is there more fun. I can also think of something things that are there that because they are not FULLY there, probably could be removed. And I can think of things that are there that should be removed because they plain don't work. It's a ragged line, basically.

[geldonyetich]

In UO you had people with a diablo mentality that just wanted to run around goofing off, and also folks with an ultima mentality that wanted to enhance the world and goof off in an entirely different way that had nothing to do with some pigsucker in a death robe and purple potions. Too ambitious, even though it was a great game for both playstyles (originally). And the compromise pretty much screwed both playstyles.

One of the big points I'm pushing for on this thread is there will *always* be a higher than real life ratio of the "Diablo Mentality" players in a MMORPG.   Reason being that it is rightfully classified as a leisure activity, and so many people aren't going to take it seriously.  

We've retreaded this point a few times, back when it was in vogue following the fall of early UO.   A couple of proposed solutions I've heard is 1. Go for the soft sell, and make enhancing the world a thoroughly more enjoyable or profitable activity than griefing, or 2. You could simply block off access to harmful activities altogether.  

Unfortunately, it seems #2 is the easier to implement solution.

[re: If you build it, they will come]
This is simply untrue. ATITD, Puzzle Pirates, Ico, Beyond Good & Evil, even MULE. Believe me, I WISH it were true, but we have all seen it not be true countless times over. :(

Curse you, reality!

Though out of the titles you mentioned, only Beyond Good & Evil really stands out for me.   ATITD and Puzzle Pirates were niche products with minimal advertising.   Never liked ICO, the artistic style was good but the puzzles were every bit as frustrating as an early Sierra adventure game.   M.U.L.E. was way back in the day when home gaming was extremely young, in a vastly different atmosphere than a game today - considering how many people know about it today I figure it should have done relatively well regardless of what sales figures may indicate.

[Rasix]

What Haemish proposes as a process is something that we always hammer on. It's also one of the most difficult skills for designers to learn. It can be very very hard to put yourself in the player's position--as evidenced by the difficulty some folks here have in putting themselves in each others' position on debates like the one on PvP, for example. So even though we had exactly what you describe as part of the design process on SWG (it was a required section in the design docs, in fact) it's damnably hard to follow through on. Everybody seems to think we did combat last in SWG--in fact, combat work started darn close to the beginning, and kept being worked on throughout.

If I'm inadvertantly trolling here, feel free to ignore.

How then, did the TEF system ever make it into the player's hands? Or the HAM system for that matter?  There's two basic questions that could have derailed both of those systems right out of the gate.  Can this complicated piece of garbage possibly be fun and not incredibly exploitable (TEF) and will players enjoy killing themselves performing special moves (HAM)?  I just struggle to see how either system made it off the design floor.   They, at their core, make the combat portion of the game needlessly complicated, hard to balance, exploit ridden (well, this is hard to predict at times), and just generally unfun.  

To me, it doesn't seem like you did combat last.  It seems like you did combat as you invisioned it from the very start.  Along the way the design of other portions of the game grew and complexity upon complexity heaped upon the system until quite frankly it broke and only a complete rewrite would fix it.  The game either had the biggest, broadest scope of any game in history or suffered from the worst case of scope creep I've ever witnessed.

[Rasix]

But see, ATITD does allow not only PVP, but also the creation of the society that fosters a "peaceful" community. It allows the community to vote on changes, including getting rid of the unsavory. And by PVP, it allows politicking to the point where votes can be made to remove enemies. No, it isn't the direct PVP of Shadowbane, but it is an interesting experiment.

Actually, ATITD does have direct PVP but through the school of conflict which allows the players to compete against one another through direct competition in mini-games.  These games are often based on strategic bluffing.  Winning these games often gives the victor a tangible advantage in the world, some even being resource or crafting advantages.  

This to me is one aspect, where in attempting to introduce direct player confict, that the game creates a barrier for those not wishing to participate.  In order to prospect for marble, you need to have a certain rank in a strategic bluffing game called tug.  This is almost as nonsensical as burning mounds of leeks for ash and is somewhat of a turn off for the more casual, non social player.

A lot of what drives people away from ATITD, I believe is being addressed in the second telling of the game.  Will reducing some of the time sinks and barriers that gave the game a high initial churn rate make the game less of a success? Will it bring in more people or drive the diehards away?  I suppose the game gets to continue being one of the more interesting experiments in the industry.

[Raph]

What Haemish proposes as a process is something that we always hammer on. It's also one of the most difficult skills for designers to learn. It can be very very hard to put yourself in the player's position--as evidenced by the difficulty some folks here have in putting themselves in each others' position on debates like the one on PvP, for example. So even though we had exactly what you describe as part of the design process on SWG (it was a required section in the design docs, in fact) it's damnably hard to follow through on. Everybody seems to think we did combat last in SWG--in fact, combat work started darn close to the beginning, and kept being worked on throughout.

If I'm inadvertantly trolling here, feel free to ignore.

How then, did the TEF system ever make it into the player's hands? Or the HAM system for that matter?  There's two basic questions that could have derailed both of those systems right out of the gate.  Can this complicated piece of garbage possibly be fun and not incredibly exploitable (TEF) and will players enjoy killing themselves performing special moves (HAM)?  I just struggle to see how either system made it off the design floor.   They, at their core, make the combat portion of the game needlessly complicated, hard to balance, exploit ridden (well, this is hard to predict at times), and just generally unfun.  

The issue with TEFs is almost all issues with how it interacts with grouping, not with TEFs in general. That said, your alternative is the same PvP flag stuff you've seen before. At some point, you have to try doing something different. TEFs were driven by the desire to have more people try out the GCW. It's pretty well established that if the choice is signing up for PvP 24/7, people won't do it.

HAM is simply badly balanced right now, which is why it is getting fixed. The original conception of it isn't quite what's there right now. "Will players enjoy killing themselves doing special moves?" Sure. It's just spending resources on offense versus defense. That's not exactly a radical idea, and many other games have done it. But it does have to be balanced to work.

[schild]

HAM is simply badly balanced right now, which is why it is getting fixed. The original conception of it isn't quite what's there right now. "Will players enjoy killing themselves doing special moves?" Sure. It's just spending resources on offense versus defense. That's not exactly a radical idea, and many other games have done it. But it does have to be balanced to work.

Excuse me for momentarily pretending this is the SWG forums - but this is one of the reasons I quit the game, horrible imbalance all around that went completely unattended to by your PR people on the boards.

What was so hard about coming out and saying what you've just said? You could have saved a lot of players by just coming out and saying (and I mean you, not some face) - "Hey, there are many things in SWG right now that are BAD, I'd list them but it's unnecessary, we are working on it." I know I might still be subscribed if this had happened.

[Rasix]

HAM is simply badly balanced right now, which is why it is getting fixed. The original conception of it isn't quite what's there right now. "Will players enjoy killing themselves doing special moves?" Sure. It's just spending resources on offense versus defense. That's not exactly a radical idea, and many other games have done it. But it does have to be balanced to work.

Excuse me for momentarily pretending this is the SWG forums - but this is one of the reasons I quit the game, horrible imbalance all around that went completely unattended to by your PR people on the boards.

What was so hard about coming out and saying what you've just said? You could have saved a lot of players by just coming out and saying (and I mean you, not some face) - "Hey, there are many things in SWG right now that are BAD, I'd list them but it's unnecessary, we are working on it." I know I might still be subscribed if this had happened.

You must have quit at a much earlier time.  At my point there had made the admissions and mea culpas but there were still no fixes in sight.  I think a combat revamp was promised over 6 months ago.  

To address Raph, I just nitpicked on one aspect of HAM, but there are several which make it a bad system.  It seems tailor made for 1 on 1 PVP/PVE, but falls apart in group PVP and PVE.   For group PVP you have one pool that's basically unhealable and you have the problem of people hitting different pools while all trying for the same goal, to kill the other person.  This gets even worse in PvE where everyone is just trying to take down the beastie, but due to the HAM system, their overall effectiveness is hampered.

It seems like it was built on a solid idea from your explanation.  But as the complexities of the surrounding systems were brought in, the concept just falls apart and renders itself useless. I just fail to see how this wasn't caught in the design phase.  I do realize you actually had to release this game in a reasonable time frame, so wholesale design changes once you've actually started implementation is costly, but did at any point were you on the verge of just scrapping the system and starting over?

[Sky]

I wish I could assemble a proper reply for Raph.

I can't. I get too apoplectic.

[AOFanboi]

The problem, though, is that the more you widen the scope of what you want to create, the more you dilute the quality of the "games", because your available resources will always be finite.

Absolutely. I got the impression (back when the flamewars were raging) that the biggest problem with Serek Dmart's BattleCruiser games was that they tried to encompass too many gameplay elements (read: "big scope"). This in turn led to a bugfest with few actually fun things to do because development effort was too thinly spread to ensure any one element was properly completed.

This was as opposed to successful games that took parts of what BC tried to be, and perfected those parts and ignored others.

This is also why focused MMORPGs like EVE, CoH and ATiTD aquire a following, while more complex games tend to alienate players (with cries of "nerf!") because there are too many things for the devs to balance, e.g. crafting vs. player-driven economy like in FFXI, SWG and Horizons.

Simpler game = more focused gameplay = easier to balance = less development intensive = more resources available to create content. MMOG developers need to realize they are in the entertainment industry, not the mathematical world simulation industry. Make the world look real, but plz. put a game in there too.

[Xilren's Twin]

HAM is simply badly balanced right now, which is why it is getting fixed. The original conception of it isn't quite what's there right now. "Will players enjoy killing themselves doing special moves?" Sure. It's just spending resources on offense versus defense. That's not exactly a radical idea, and many other games have done it. But it does have to be balanced to work.

IMHO it's not a balance issue at all; it wouldn't be a fun system even if it was perfectly balanced.  I think what Rasix was pointing out is it appears that it was a great idea on paper that when actually implemented has shown itself to be completely unenjoyable.  Having players damage different HAM bar's makes grouping up for combat much less desirable then if you have a single health bar.  Having certain specials do unhealable damage to yourself just doesn't sound fun to even a casual gamer.  If the damage was easily recoverable, that would be a tradeoff people could deal with.

When you say balance, I read that as "adjusting the numbers in the system to make it equitable across all combat types and styles"; I don't think that what most want.  I think people would actually prefer a change to the core combat system itself...

Xilren

[Raph]

HAM is simply badly balanced right now, which is why it is getting fixed. The original conception of it isn't quite what's there right now. "Will players enjoy killing themselves doing special moves?" Sure. It's just spending resources on offense versus defense. That's not exactly a radical idea, and many other games have done it. But it does have to be balanced to work.

IMHO it's not a balance issue at all; it wouldn't be a fun system even if it was perfectly balanced.  I think what Rasix was pointing out is it appears that it was a great idea on paper that when actually implemented has shown itself to be completely unenjoyable.  Having players damage different HAM bar's makes grouping up for combat much less desirable then if you have a single health bar.  Having certain specials do unhealable damage to yourself just doesn't sound fun to even a casual gamer.  If the damage was easily recoverable, that would be a tradeoff people could deal with.

When you say balance, I read that as "adjusting the numbers in the system to make it equitable across all combat types and styles"; I don't think that what most want.  I think people would actually prefer a change to the core combat system itself...

Xilren

On the one hand, you say that the system is impossible to make fun. Then you list two problems that are not inherent to the system as being big barriers to it being fun. There's nothing in the system that says that players have to damage different HAM bars by nature, and there's nothing that says that specials need to do unhealable damage to the player, and there's nothing that says that the damage has to be difficult to recover.

At this point, yes, I think most people want a change in the system, and the changes that the team is working on do in fact change the system. But the biggest problems are not systemic in that sense, IMHO. At this point, however, it is easier to change the system than change all the other things that have built up around the system.

[Miscreant]

The first time a boss called me out by name in CoH, holy crap that was immersive.  You know that was like three lines of code.  The first time I got ambushed in Atlas Park, I jumped out of my seat.   Several dozen lines, probably.  I wonder if an MMO can increase its world feel by steadily adding small stuff.  First the citizens comment on deeds of heroes in their area, then a little weather maybe, then small events, then bigger ones, then plaques commemorating the events, etc, etc, etc, all the while more and more zones steadily get added.  

Would a steady stream of small, incremental improvements work, or will it require really big changes like a vast thug ecology systems to really get the feels-like-a-world job done?

[geldonyetich]

I have to admit, there are good parts of the HAM system.  Self-inflicted damage from special moves creates a serious tactical consideration: will it hurt you more to attack than it would to damage the target?    

That said, I'd have to say what annoys me the most about the HAM system is the self-inflicted down time.   Wether the mob damages you or you damage yourself, the thing is that the damage is there and you'll have to rest it off post-combat (or else blow a bunch of med kits.)

Also I would like a few more really influential choices in combat.  Right now, it's prone if you're fighting at range, standing if you're close up and personal.   Then just focus on whatever HAM bar your profession is best at taking down.   Apply debuffs to improve your odds at cost to your HAM bars or through use of items on hand.    

This is your entire combat exercise, and although there is something to be said for pre-combat prep work, it's the same thing every fight.    Just about the only thing that changes about the combat I've run into in SWG is the monster AI, which is pretty cool in that it's highly varied and somewhat what you would expect from a wild animal.   (Except they tend to confront you rather than immediately run away.)  

Course', I haven't tried the PvP yet.  I wager players could create a bit of unpredictability to battle.   However, will the abilities I have at my disposal really be used any differently?    Prone at range, standing close up, focus on whatever part of the HAM bar you're best at, debuff.   Nope, pretty much the same.

But I see you're aware of most of this already.   Self-inflicted HAM damage shortly regenerating?   Stronger combat tactics?   Back and forth attacks and counterattacks?  Profession specific (such as a Pistoleer vrs Rifleman) roles in combat?  That'd would be a whole lot more like it.

[daveNYC]

Just on the whole "this'll hurt me as much as it'll hurt you" bit, CoH does have special moves that hurt the player, however the moves are usually very high level and involve turning the character into some sort of raving death machine, at the end of which time, the damage is applied.

[Glazius]

The first time a boss called me out by name in CoH, holy crap that was immersive.  You know that was like three lines of code.  The first time I got ambushed in Atlas Park, I jumped out of my seat.   Several dozen lines, probably.

Geheheh. Oh, the ambushes are great. I mean, there you are, thinking the mission is actually _done_, and then you're like "Huh, something's coming over the wall. ...wait a minute. That's not a normal mob!"

And then the grenade explodes underneath you.

OMG NAZI RUSH heilheilheilheilheilheil ^_____^

--GF

[Xilren's Twin]

On the one hand, you say that the system is impossible to make fun. Then you list two problems that are not inherent to the system as being big barriers to it being fun. There's nothing in the system that says that players have to damage different HAM bars by nature, and there's nothing that says that specials need to do unhealable damage to the player, and there's nothing that says that the damage has to be difficult to recover.

I don't think I went into enough detail.  Yes, the examples I gave I consider balance issues, not systemic.  BUT, even if those resovled, IMHO I don't believe the core combat model would be engaging and enjoyable b/c it seems designed primarily to mesh withing the rest of the "world' of swg and a distant second to be fun.  That whole outside-in design theme (or world first, game second).  It seems to me that it would be much harder to create a wide diversity of fun things to do in a cohesive world setting b/c you have to start with so many prerequistes in palce to make the "combat module" or "crafting module" fit within the framework of the rest of the world that you automatically limit what can be done right off the bat.  i.e. "Here's the parameters the combat module has to fit within, now go design something fun".

At least, that's my take on it.

At this point, yes, I think most people want a change in the system, and the changes that the team is working on do in fact change the system. But the biggest problems are not systemic in that sense, IMHO. At this point, however, it is easier to change the system than change all the other things that have built up around the system.

Which is fine and all, but it begs the question, how did the original system make it out the door is the current concensus is it need to changed?

Xilren

[HaemishM]

The first time a boss called me out by name in CoH, holy crap that was immersive.  You know that was like three lines of code.  The first time I got ambushed in Atlas Park, I jumped out of my seat.   Several dozen lines, probably.  I wonder if an MMO can increase its world feel by steadily adding small stuff.  First the citizens comment on deeds of heroes in their area, then a little weather maybe, then small events, then bigger ones, then plaques commemorating the events, etc, etc, etc, all the while more and more zones steadily get added.  

See, here's where the rubber hits the road, and the world divides from the game.

All of that you just mentioned isn't REALLY you affecting the world, because every player will get the same response so long as he follows the same steps. If the boss you speak of is in an instanced mission, anyone can get that instanced mission and see that, and if you group with someone who does that mission after you've already done it, well, you'll see the other person get that response. It's a scripted response.

Now, to the people who who are more world proponents, this irritates them to no end. All you really have is the ILLUSION that your character has affected the world. It's the same complaint some have about not being able to go into buildings where you don't have a mission. There is the illusion of immersiveness, but it isn't truly immersive.

Whereas the game proponents will be too busy enjoying the goddamn game to worry about whether or not someone else has seen or heard that little scripted response before. I think CoH does a very good job of making that illusion work so long as you don't look too closely behind the curtain. People expecting a world CANNOT stop themselves from looking behind the curtain.

Maybe it's the fact that the game is a superhero comic book game that makes me (normally a world-man) ignore the curtain entirely. Maybe it's the fact that I'm just enjoying the interactive gameplay so much I have no time to see the curtain. It could even be that since the setting is so "new" in MMOG terms, I'm ignoring it; whereas in fantasy settings, I've seen them in MMOG's so much, I tend to look beyond the setting simply due to over-familiarity with it.

And Raph, I have to ask. If you actually wrote the "what does a player do" doc, how closely did the beta gameplay follow that doc? And if it didn't, why not? Or more importantly, why did creation of the game continue on the same lines if the reality didn't mesh with the doc?

[kaid]

I am really hoping the combat revamp and ham revamp helps swg out. My biggest gripe about combat in swg though has always been lack of tactical diversity. In most games things break down where everybody has their unique skills they add to make a group more powerful than solo and more diverse.

In swg in general you could group with 10 people and for all intents and purposes they all do the exact same thing and fill the exact same role in a group. It tends to make most groups I have been in feel like a zerg rush. This I think is an artifact of a skill based and not a class based system and there is probably not anything that can be really done about it.

Its one reason I like COH so much each person has their job and in a big group there is trust and diversity in everybody performing their skills to allow the group to win. Swg groups are kinda like full groups of wizards or blasters lots of offense not a whole lot else going on.


kaid

[Xilren's Twin]

All of that you just mentioned isn't REALLY you affecting the world, because every player will get the same response so long as he follows the same steps. If the boss you speak of is in an instanced mission, anyone can get that instanced mission and see that, and if you group with someone who does that mission after you've already done it, well, you'll see the other person get that response. It's a scripted response.

Now, to the people who who are more world proponents, this irritates them to no end. All you really have is the ILLUSION that your character has affected the world. It's the same complaint some have about not being able to go into buildings where you don't have a mission. There is the illusion of immersiveness, but it isn't truly immersive.

To expand on the immersiveness, it's the illusion that the game is making you the focus.  Having citizen npc's spout lines about you when you click on them, overhearding enemies discussing you or calling you out in battle, having ambush parties track you down, having mission areas for you only, collecting souveniers which tell your story.  All that puts the individual player back in the primary seat which makes the illusion much easier to buy into.  Yes, I know objectively that there is nothing I am doing in game that hasn't been done my hundreds of other players before and will be done by hundreds after, but viscerally, I don't care because it's fun so I'll suspend my disbelief and enjoy it, much like getting in a good rpg session and "into" your character so that the die rolls and such don't matter, the story does.  Doesn't matter if EQ has 100x times the content in terms of quests, I never felt that way about any of it b/c I was never the focus.

Xilren

[Soukyan]

I am really hoping the combat revamp and ham revamp helps swg out. My biggest gripe about combat in swg though has always been lack of tactical diversity. In most games things break down where everybody has their unique skills they add to make a group more powerful than solo and more diverse.

In swg in general you could group with 10 people and for all intents and purposes they all do the exact same thing and fill the exact same role in a group. It tends to make most groups I have been in feel like a zerg rush. This I think is an artifact of a skill based and not a class based system and there is probably not anything that can be really done about it.

Its one reason I like COH so much each person has their job and in a big group there is trust and diversity in everybody performing their skills to allow the group to win. Swg groups are kinda like full groups of wizards or blasters lots of offense not a whole lot else going on.


kaid

I'm not knocking on this because I agree with your post, but if we assume that only guns are available in SWG and neglect melee weapons, then yes, of course everyone can essentially do the same thing. If you went to New York and gave everyone a gun, they would all be capable of killing a deer (or each other) and would not need a group of ten people to do so. So yes, it is really a problem that arises because it is a skill based system and tries to mimic reality such that anyone can do anything, but their level of expertise will vary depending on how often they do it and how much experience they devote to honing a particular skill. It helps to make SWG more of a world, but as you pointed out, it diminishes multiplayer gameplay mechanics to a point of unneccessary or unfun.

[Raph]

Let me take a step backwards from this, maybe, and see if I can shift the way we're looking at this a bit.

Another way to look at what we're discussing is depth versus breadth, or "how many ways are there to play the game?"

Most games have a given mechanic, and then ring changes on it as you advance. Particularly classic arcade games work this way. Some of the changes may be a matter of memorization (as in topdown shooters, for example) and some may be a matter of mastering tactical variation (as in single player FPS gaming). They're basically about improving skill at one particular challenge.

The best of these often have the challenge evolve over time--early on you get some tools and challenges, and think you are doing everything the game offers. It's not until well further into the game that you realize that the stuff you learned in level 1 was merely the tiop of the iceberg, and success now calls for you using dozens of tools out of a toolbox to solve the larger problem. Civ was like this.

Then there's games where there is more than one challenge to them. A lot of puzzle games and platformers work this way--you have alternate challenge modes, like time trials, or secret-hunting, or puzzle mode versus time attack.

An important thing to realize here is that immersion is completely orthogonal to this. This is all about the challenge. A game can be highly immersive, and fail to meet the necessary challenge levels.

Here's the rub though--some people, of which I am one, don't need to ring the changes on a mechanic to feel like they "get it" and don't need to play any further. To a degree this a philosophical thing--some folks will say you're not a gamer if you don't beat games--but it's there nonetheless.

There are people who powergame Minesweeper. They are not much different, in that sense, than the people who powergame EQ. Then there's people who look at it and say "I get the basics, and I'm not interested in ringing the changes."

The question then becomes, who's a given game for? For "butterflies" who drift from mechanic to mechanic, for people who powergame one aspect? And how deep can you make any given mechanic? If you make it too shallow, the powergamers will finish quickly, but the butterflies may have other things to move on to instead. If it's all one thing, and deep, the powergamers will be happy, but those looking for more exit quickly...

This all ties into "designeritis." There's really only one sort of designeritis, I think, and it's the act of continually overcomplicating the designs. Why does it happen? Well, because designers are trying to create systems that continue to challenge them. They're powergaming design, basically. A designer who is happy ringing changes on a known system is probably not going to be bringing much new to the table. This often leads designers to be butterflies ("kitchen sink design") or to try tackling intractable design problems (like PvP, or virtual worlds)...  designers are looking for something new, that's why they are designers.

And this can mean they close out all but the connoisseurs, of course.

Mechanics are (for better or worse) a much narrower palette right now than say, writing, or music, or other creative activities are. So I would expect content designers to take much longer to reach this point.

Anyway, long ramble. If you're interested in ringing changes (and there's nothing wrong with that, it's completely natural and normal), then you will be very happy with a slick, well-done game that does established things really well. It may even trim out a lot of things that other games do, and there will be no detriment to its fun factor. If you're not interested in that, you'll probably grow more tired of it over time.

Eventually, I think people get tired of ringing changes. But that may be my bias. I think people migrate from powergamer to butterfly over time (actually, over experience.) This is speaking broadly, mind you--an individual game may offer the right mix that pulls them back--but over time, they become jaded to the ringing of changes, and that's when they start calling it a treadmill.