SOE to Publish Vanguard

[Lantyssa]

How to make lore important to gameplay:

A book describing a battle with Foozles tells of the defenders using magical cold to some useful effect.   It then goes on to tell of lighting fire to those afflicted by the cold subsequently taking grevious wounds from weapons that they shrugged off before.

In game terms the Foozles have a special that when hit with ice magic, there is a decrease in the chances to hit however they get a little more defense due to the way their skin hardens. Following it with fire increases the damage they take, however they now do a little more damage from a blind rage the pain drives them into.  Effects could stack or be more like states.

Make some of the changes hard to notice initially, but beneficial if you know the pattern, which can be learned from the lore.  There could be types of attacks that cancel out the bonuses if used, making it good to know your lore.  Yes many will just pattern match, but if there are lots of creatures and variations amongst similar types it would help to read up occassionally.  This is just a quick example, there are likely more creative ways to do this, and it doesn't have to just be combat.  Maybe a book talks about standing in a certain location and performing an action.  What if it is a randomized variable and each player gets a different action?  I doubt an entire game could be made using this, but it could certainly flesh out the world somewhat.

[Kail]

How to make lore important to gameplay:

A book describing a battle with Foozles tells of the defenders using magical cold to some useful effect.   It then goes on to tell of lighting fire to those afflicted by the cold subsequently taking grevious wounds from weapons that they shrugged off before.

I'd assume that this would just lead to spoiler sites, rather than increased interest in the lore.  Even if you managed to randomly generate the mobs, you'd just get people skimming the text looking for any relevant weaknesses and forgetting the rest, because everything else in there is just going to be meaningless padding.

You want to tell me (hypothetically) that fifty years ago, the Great King Frankensalad rode out to rescue the Queen from zombieland?  Bullshit.  That never happened.  The King is an NPC, he doesn't do anything, just stands around.  And even if he did, none of that stuff is possible.  Heck, just a week ago, Trolls raided the capital and killed the Queen.  She respawned five minutes later and the King never noticed.

If you want to make lore imporatnt to the game, make the lore about the game.  If yours is a world in which everyone returns from the dead five minutes after they're killed, your tales of epic battles between great armies had better boil down to one side getting bored and leaving first, or else this "lore" is describing a world that doesn't exist.  If I'm playing an MMO, I've already got my hands full with one imaginary world, I don't need another one.  Lore that does take place in the game world tends to be more interesting to a lot of players.  A lot of players can recount long stories about grudges between guilds and ninja looters and what Maintank said to Guildleader that got him kicked from the guild, but they can't remember the name of the king of their capital city.  Players pay attention to events in the games they're playing, but they don't care about the lore, because it has no connection to the world they're playing in.  It has no effect on the world they're playing on (tensions are rising between Humans and Orcs, eh?  But I bet they'll be exactly as tense if I come back a week, a month, a year later...), and in many cases, it flat out contradicts it.

[Venkman]

This comes up now and again, and is always a good discussion. For me, you'd need procedurally-generated content, a procedural story engine and dynamic spawns. SWG Mission Terminals could do this after a fashion, but they were all one-off missions. Imagine linke SWG mission terminals missions in a large system of decision trees. That would be a good foundation.

Unfortunately, like a whole bunch of awesome features out there, unless its been tied to a successful game, it won't get emulated. But to be fair, making an entirely procedural system like above requires an entire virtual world built for it. Most game worlds are not designed to just pop content anywhere in it like SWG (and to a lesser extent UO) were.

Eve could do it too.

But that's the key: UO, SWG, Eve, games that are awesome but don't have the numbers to make people say "yea, let's copy that method for our next WoW killer"

[Nija]

But that's the key: UO, SWG, Eve, games that are awesome but don't have the numbers to make people say "yea, let's copy that method for our next WoW killer"

Whoa whoa whoa, slow down. You got ahead of yourself and made a colossal typo.

[Sky]

So what if it leads to spoiler sites? So what if the best technology (and compromise) can do is relatively static npcs? Static npcs with a backstory trump simple mobs to camp. Sure, some people will always take the lazy and boring way of checking spoiler sites and ignoring ingame lore. Does that mean we just stoop to the LCD? Well, it is the trend in mmo, apparently.

Another gem of UO: books. It really allowed a lot of creativity for the players. I used to leave a book in a house I'd robbed (via legal means, stealing the key after doing my research of where people lived, but sometimes they made it easy by keeping a rune to their house right with their key, heh (hey this is a pretty long parenthetical aside, no?)) detailing how I pulled off the job, what I took (usually just a couple choice items, I wasn't a 'house cleaner'), how to prevent thefts in the future, and the fact that I was leaving the key behind without having made any copies.

But yeah, most thieves were bank thieves who would sploitclean your house given the chance. People are broken, it's why we can't have good things.

[shiznitz]

There should be some lore when a game starts but the devs should watch the players play and write lore about the players into the game over time.

[Nebu]

People are broken, it's why we can't have good things.

I saw this quote on the ATitD boards. 

Actually my upbringing was strangely absent of any kind of education about manners and conduct in virtual worlds. Hopefully in a generation or two that will no longer be the case.

Apparently anonymity isn't reason enough to be an asshole to other people in an online game. Now, it's their parents' fault.

[Lantyssa]

The book was just an example, Kail.  Yes, spoiler sites will come up.  What if the pattern is different for each character?

What if the books are also a part of procedurally generated content like Darniaq suggests?  You read about this lore and a quest is generated around it.  You manage to complete a task the hero of the book was unable to.  A randomly generated dungeon/instance ala Diablo forms just for the owner of the book (it could act as a key).  There are tons of things which could be done with a little creativity.

What if shiznitz's idea is added as well, where the players and current events are written into the lore.  Make NPCs that move about, can die, have ambitions, or go adventuring.  Let them team up with or against players in some cases.  Have them react to players based on their motives and what you have accomplished or are known for.  Basically, give them a tweaked version of Oblivion's Radiant AI and let them lose.

This may not all work, but why not try?  Do we just want another clone of existing games?

[Slyfeind]

Actually my upbringing was strangely absent of any kind of education about manners and conduct in virtual worlds. Hopefully in a generation or two that will no longer be the case.

Haha, was that Quizzical or Richter by any chance?

To the topic at hand...do most players want to read through lore in order to succeed? Would WoW be a better game if we had to actually read all those books scattered around?

Personally, I like those books. If I'm bored, I'll check them out. If I'm in a hurry, I'll take screenshots and read them later. But sometimes I am in a hurry, and just want to get on with the fighting and the looting and the whatnot and the whosits. I loved Asheron's Call for this. They created a world without orcs or elves, and in order to really understand why everything looked like a Dr. Seuss nightmare, you had to read pages and pages of stuff. But you didn't have to.

[Nebu]

If I beg you, will you please remove my name from that quote?  It demonstrates a level of ignorance I'd rather not be associated with.

[Sky]

If I beg you, will you please remove my name from that quote.  It demonstrates a level of ignorance I'd rather not be associated with.

Sigworthy :P

[Slyfeind]

roofles

[Trouble]

I'd peg that as Quizzical though I haven't been in deep contact with the atitd social club in over a year.

[Lantyssa]

To the topic at hand...do most players want to read through lore in order to succeed? Would WoW be a better game if we had to actually read all those books scattered around?

Personally, I like those books. If I'm bored, I'll check them out. If I'm in a hurry, I'll take screenshots and read them later. But sometimes I am in a hurry, and just want to get on with the fighting and the looting and the whatnot and the whosits. I loved Asheron's Call for this. They created a world without orcs or elves, and in order to really understand why everything looked like a Dr. Seuss nightmare, you had to read pages and pages of stuff. But you didn't have to.

First, do not make everything in the world depend upon reading books.  Else instead of a neat way to integrate some of the lore with the gameplay you end up with a new and annoying form of quest NPC with a bang over their head.  Second, do not make the knowledge from other books vital to success.  Allow it to make things easier, but only rarely should it be required reading.

For it to really have an impact there needs to be many ways to get quests, to find out lore, and to interact with the NPCs.  Dynamically generated content, which we are touching on in another thread, could possibly help here.

[Venkman]

Not to beat a dead horse here, but players would be interested in Lore if that Lore was critical to the game mechanic. Right now, Lore is just in the way of games about acquisition.

[Engels]

Everyone's gonna hate me for this, but I liked the way EQ did this for the epic quests. If you just went through the checklist of 'things to do', you could technically complete the quests, but the tasks were so non-sensical in some instances that out of sheer curiosity you went ahead and read the lore behind the quest. Case in point, the ghost of Sathir for various classes; it was very confusing what the heck was going on Karnors and Chardok, so eventually, simply due to the long drawn out process the epic quests were, you ended up reading the backstory. Turned out it was a pretty cool backstory, so it added to the game.

The same thing goes for the aparently byzantine faction system for Evils in Kunark; why one 'evil' faction actually hated the other 'evil' faction to various degrees, and why the Overthere outpost was such an odd factional cul-de-sac. You couldn't quite run into Kunark without actually making some types of decisions as to your alliances, so you had to read up on the story at least a little bit to grasp what you were getting into.

If you actually dug the story, there was lots more to delve into further, including the backstory to City of Mist, and Dalnir.

[Trouble]

Anyone have the backstory to the Xipe Totec device in Earth and Beyond? That was very cool but I can barely remember any of the details. I recall that there was a lot of clues and mysteries involved in it and it took a few intrepid explorers/investigators a month or two to figure it out.

[Margalis]

Not to beat a dead horse here, but players would be interested in Lore if that Lore was critical to the game mechanic. Right now, Lore is just in the way of games about acquisition.

Or, if the Lore wasn't awful generic tripe.

How about some neat characters? Some good dialog? Some nice cutscenes?

A lot of people get into the story of a lot of games where the story doesn't really affect the mechanics. I love the dialog in and characters in Fire Emblem but in the end they make no difference. A lot of people get into games like KOTOR and Final Fantasy but most of that "lore" (God, I hate that term) doesn't make any real difference.

Most MMORPGs are very much tell, don't show, and they don't tell very well.

I've seen a lot of people say very nice things about the Chains of Promethea expansion for FFXI in terms of plot/story. Because the story was interesting and rendered in an interesting way.

The Lore in most MMORPGs amounts to picking up some crusty book and scrolling through generic fantasy text.

[stray]

Lore needs to be presented through action. Not through reading the website's "Backstory" page, or some book lying around.

And what lore you do get in quests is still only told by a Quest NPC before and after you embark on a quest: You never get much of anything while you're doing the quest. There should be moments when a monster's dying words or taunts contribute to lore, revealing moments when you find clues in a dungeon (perhaps from an object found in a chest, or strange inscriptions written on a wall), etc., etc..

[Venkman]

Exactly. Lore integrated into the core game mechanic, not just something that neatly packages diku.

[Falconeer]

Maybe I am late on this, but word that Sigil "lent" some SOE artists and devs reached the VG's official board, so Brad had to jump in and clarify.

Originally Posted by erentil0
Just heard that SOE has lent Sigil several of its devs from the EQ2 team for a 6-8 month assignment. Wondering what everyone thinks about this and whether it bodes good or bad for Vanguard.

SOE, at our request, has sent some designers and artists up our way to make Vanguard even better.  That's it.  We appreciate it very much, and they are working just like Sigil people are working under Sigil's schedule and management.  I hope there are no conspiracy theories about this.  It's as simple as that.

We also hired a beta tester too.  The more help the better.

thanks all,

Brad McQuaid
CEO, Sigil Games Online, Inc.
Exec. Producer, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.

Seriously.

[Margalis]

Well...the middle of "beta" is a great time to be adding new designers and artists.

I eagerly await the even better Vanguard!

The only way more designers and artists are going to help is if they come with shotguns.

[Simond]

Someone needs to send Brad a copy of "The Mythical Man-Month".

[Azazel]

I'm already doing that. It's called World of Warcraft

Minus a shitload of annoying stuff. Like horrible corpse runs, and forced downtime, and spawn camping.

No, you are playing EQ1 without the more obvious bits of soul-crushing stupid.

As a point of clarification, I mean all of those things when I say (or reference) "prettier".

Which is why, despite having debatably "better" graphics than WoW, I have no interest in VG. If I wanted original-flavour EQ1, well, it's still there, along with my characters and old, good guild...

[Trippy]

Someone needs to send Brad a copy of "The Mythical Man-Month".

I'm sure there are areas that would benefit from adding people to them. It's easy enough to compartmentalize game production work. Adding people to a task that already have a group of people working on it can actually slow down the completion of the task (the point of the book) because of, among other things, communcation issues but there's nothing wrong with, say, bringing on somebody to write quests for a zone that doesn't have any quests yet.

[Azazel]

Everyone's gonna hate me for this, but I liked the way EQ did this for the epic quests. If you just went through the checklist of 'things to do', you could technically complete the quests, but the tasks were so non-sensical in some instances that out of sheer curiosity you went ahead and read the lore behind the quest. Case in point, the ghost of Sathir for various classes; it was very confusing what the heck was going on Karnors and Chardok, so eventually, simply due to the long drawn out process the epic quests were, you ended up reading the backstory. Turned out it was a pretty cool backstory, so it added to the game.

The same thing goes for the aparently byzantine faction system for Evils in Kunark; why one 'evil' faction actually hated the other 'evil' faction to various degrees, and why the Overthere outpost was such an odd factional cul-de-sac. You couldn't quite run into Kunark without actually making some types of decisions as to your alliances, so you had to read up on the story at least a little bit to grasp what you were getting into.

If you actually dug the story, there was lots more to delve into further, including the backstory to City of Mist, and Dalnir.

The problem was trying to find all that stuff if you were interested in it... There's a lot of lore stuff in EQ I was interested in finding out, but never could..

[Endie]

Someone needs to send Brad a copy of "The Mythical Man-Month".

I'm sure there are areas that would benefit from adding people to them. It's easy enough to compartmentalize game production work.

QFT.  We occasionally hire in contractors when work schedules change, and if your software is designed well then a good programmer can pick up some of the more black-boxy stuff the same day.  I know I did when I was contracting.

[Venkman]

I love this stuff. People keep thinking VG is some sort of completely vertical experience, where everything is just about VG, from design to project management. It is very much not. Think about SOE. Their core competency is their infrastructure. That's there business model. Game development is what they do to package that infrastructure.

So lending VG some assets isn't just about fixing whatever is wrong. It's about helping it better integrate into the larger SOE family of goods and services.

We may mock EQ2, but SOE is almost wholly unique in the service they offer when you look across the industry.

[Trippy]

I love this stuff. People keep thinking VG is some sort of completely vertical experience, where everything is just about VG, from design to project management. It is very much not. Think about SOE. Their core competency is their infrastructure. That's there business model. Game development is what they do to package that infrastructure.

So lending VG some assets isn't just about fixing whatever is wrong. It's about helping it better integrate into the larger SOE family of goods and services.

We may mock EQ2, but SOE is almost wholly unique in the service they offer when you look across the industry.

I don't understand. Are you saying SOE is an MMO operator? If so, that's the model for a number of companies in Asia, and I thought Codemasters was doing a similar thing.

[Venkman]

SOE is much more than just an operator of disparate MMO titles like NC, Nexon, or what Codemasters and Acclaim want to become. They're an infrastructure provider. To me, that means people can more easily launch an MMO through SOE infrastructure than they could almost anywhere else. Publishing is just one part of launching. I have no idea whether this is what SOE actually wants to be or not, but it seems to me that their entire business could be just providing this service. We may mock their integrated forums, CSR, development practices, billing system and Station Exchange system. But as far as I know, outside of two or three Korean operators, that level of integration is pretty much unheard of.

[Trippy]

SOE is much more than just an operator of disparate MMO titles like NC, Nexon, or what Codemasters and Acclaim want to become. They're an infrastructure provider. To me, that means people can more easily launch an MMO through SOE infrastructure than they could almost anywhere else. Publishing is just one part of launching. I have no idea whether this is what SOE actually wants to be or not, but it seems to me that their entire business could be just providing this service. We may mock their integrated forums, CSR, development practices, billing system and Station Exchange system. But as far as I know, outside of two or three Korean operators, that level of integration is pretty much unheard of.

This is what operators do. This is nothing new or special. There are literally dozens of companies in China that do this sort of thing, The9 with WoW being the most notable.

[Nija]

Someone needs to send Brad a copy of "The Mythical Man-Month".

The second system an engineer designs is the most dangerous system he will ever design, since it will be disastrously overdesigned. Thus, when embarking upon a new project, a project manager should ask for a chief architect who has designed at least two systems.

[Simond]

The second system an engineer designs is the most dangerous system he will ever design, since it will be disastrously overdesigned. Thus, when embarking upon a new project, a project manager should ask for a chief architect who has designed at least two systems.

I've mentioned that before in this thread (I think :)) so I wasn't going to explicitly repeat myself but yes, that fits as well.

Also: Fun from the Vanguard boards (via FoH)

A brief snippet as a preview -

actually guys just face the facts Vanguard isnt turning out to be what it was supposed to be is boring as hell and personally id rather go have an enema than log on to vanguard "AT THIS STAGE"

[Nija]

I've mentioned that before in this thread (I think :)) so I wasn't going to explicitly repeat myself but yes, that fits as well.

If you think about it, that quote explains SWG too. Raph's next game will be decent, if the theory holds true.

[Venkman]

SOE is much more than just an operator of disparate MMO titles like NC, Nexon, or what Codemasters and Acclaim want to become. They're an infrastructure provider. To me, that means people can more easily launch an MMO through SOE infrastructure than they could almost anywhere else. Publishing is just one part of launching. I have no idea whether this is what SOE actually wants to be or not, but it seems to me that their entire business could be just providing this service. We may mock their integrated forums, CSR, development practices, billing system and Station Exchange system. But as far as I know, outside of two or three Korean operators, that level of integration is pretty much unheard of.

This is what operators do. This is nothing new or special. There are literally dozens of companies in China that do this sort of thing, The9 with WoW being the most notable.

Ok, so then we're talking about the relative strength of operators. To me, as it applies to the West, SOE is pretty unique. That they emulate conventions from the East is important, given the maturity of those markets. For example, it seemed to me that SOE > NC in their infrastructure, though admittedly, NC is mostly West-based games (beyond Lineage 1/2). If you're talking CJ or Shanda or the like, yea, "operator" is the apt term.