Interview: Dave Rickey

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Interview: Dave Rickey

While some other hooligans were sitting down with Raph, I sat down with Dave Rickey for a compelling conversation about the state of the industry, his work at Orbis games, Wish, the female gamer, where things are going, and his own life. After a long period of silence - mostly due to Eve and his day job (you know, that Game Designer Thing) - he's decided to start talking again.

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[Signe]

I enjoyed that interview.  Most interviews with games guys make me roll my eyes and snort... this one made me want to cuddle.  I  like the point made about how women are considered light gamers because of the sorts of games we play and the things we enjoy doing in games... crafting, mini-games, customising characters, etc, even though we may also enjoy the usual MMORPG PvE/P fare.  We're a big market.   If you want to make lots of money and get mucho kudos,  accommodate us.   And try to be clever, too.

Why do I still play CoX now and then?  Well, sure, I enjoy the combat but a lot of it has to do with the dressing up.  I loved all the puzzles and crafting in ATITD, but I want the combat, too.  The only thing that kept me playing Horizons for months was the promise that the armour and weapon customisation was going to get really broad and complex and that you could craft without playing the rest of the game... because, God knows, the rest of the game royally sucked.  An MMO that pays attention to the more social and non-combat aspects of the game will definitely attract more women. 

One of the things I enjoy about f13 is the fact that most of the "macho" men I played SB with here,  also dream of having a house with a front porch and a vegetable garden in a WoW setting.  Righ can make lunch while I knit him a new sword!   

[stray]

I'm in touch with my feminine side.

[stray]

Oh yeah, good interview too. :)

I agree with a lot, if not all, of it.

[Morfiend]

Nice read. Good job Schild and Dave.

[tazelbain]

Which brings me to one of my personal big talking points. Thirty minutes of walking or riding some animal? Why aren't we allowed to have fun? Not fun in the Munchkin D&D sense or Diablo - but the vast ocean that separates instead arcade style fun of yore and today’s modern MMOG?

Travel time is an more relevant to content heavy games.  If zone A has quests 1-9 and zone B has quests 10-18, then the 1 hour to travel between them feels like a huge waste of time.  If your game was a dynamic/sandbox type game,  there is no need to travel to zone B when you are happy playing in the sandbox in Zone A. And when you do travel the 60 minutes to go to zone B, it feel like an adventure because system/players have created interesting stuff experience on your travels.  While in the content type game, it's usually a dead zone between patches of content.  Like how DAoC had the best high-level hunting zone furthest away from the frontier.

[bhodi]

I want to skullfuck developers who refuse to put quick and convienient travel in their game. WoW is about the limit of sanity for me, and, judging by people who won't do specific far-away instances, there are many who share my view.

If I can't log in and get to the fun in under 15m, than the game is not worth playing. I would not play WoW without a hearthstone, I would have unsubscribed a long time ago. I think warlocks (summon friends) and mages (teleport to major cities) are the absoloute bare minimum bone tossed out to fun gameplay.

I pretty much like UO's mark/recall system. Fuck 'reducing the size of the gameworld' arguements. Who really wants to sail for 20m, watching ocean tiles go past? You can go back to your master and commander simulations.

[Sky]

The thing about a game like UO was that you /could/ sail if you wanted to. It was cool, it could be an adventure. And many of us pioneer types had to physically travel to each location to mark that rune (in fact, rune marking was an art form). I guess later on that got trivialized a bit, but at leaast you still had the option of fast travel, fast group travel (gates), fast static travel (moongates) or the good ol' shoe leather express.

Making me wait around for the boat in EQ didn't make the world immersive, it was a form of player harassment. Even when I did have time in the day to sit doing nothing for a half hour stretch, it's just not good gaming, and I guess I'm in the game (vs world) camp because they should be fun first, worldy second (and UO was one of the best worldy games I've played...).

[WayAbvPar]

The thing about a game like UO was that you /could/ sail if you wanted to. It was cool, it could be an adventure. And many of us pioneer types had to physically travel to each location to mark that rune (in fact, rune marking was an art form). I guess later on that got trivialized a bit, but at leaast you still had the option of fast travel, fast group travel (gates), fast static travel (moongates) or the good ol' shoe leather express.

That was one of my favorite parts of UO. It really felt like I was exploring the world when I set off in some random direction to see what was out there. If I found someplace interesting, I marked a rune (when my magery was high enough!). I liked that everyone had their own 'secret' spots to hunt/travel/shop, etc.

OTOH, I think cockblocking options like having to visit both ends of a travel line before being able to use the fast travel option is fucking retarded. I have never been to Kansas City, but I bet I could go down to Greyhound and get a ticket without having to walk there first.

Ideally a game would have 'public' transportation (moongates/horses/stagecoaches/monorails etc), along with teleportation and the ability to mark special spots for each character.

[Slyfeind]

If the player has to go on a long journey, you make them do it once in their whole virtual lives. The next time they have to make the same journey, you let them teleport if they want to. This, I think, was the point of the bird routes in WoW. This is also the effect of Mark-n-Recall in UO.

While the player is making that journey, you give him or her lots of fun things to do. This is why I liked delivering the mail in EQ, and also why I've never gotten past level 20 in that game. In WoW, we meet someone halfway there that says "Deliver this message to the magister of the next town." But once you've done that several times, it gets old. More fun things to do, plz.

Devil's Advocate says, when you make the player wait for the boat, or stare at the screen during autorun, and make them do that for several minutes of valuable playtime, you get them talking to other players. You give them a chance to appreciate the scenery, or to play with trade skills. Chatter happens, friendships are formed, players go fishing while watching the virtual sunset...neat things can happen while the player waits for the boat at the Freeport Docks.

But if the player doesn't want to do these things, do we force them? Is it necessary for every player to develop social ties, in order to keep them from quitting? In ATITD, we might have to wait an hour for the chariot to take us across the world. (Not really, but I use an hour to make the math easier.) If we don't want to wait an hour, we can use accumulated time spent offline. If you've ever spent eight hours offline, you can teleport eight times across that chariot route.

And finally...a world is only as big as its content. In WoW, there's stuff crammed into the corners and under the ground, because there's too much content to fit in each zone. In EVE, there's a whole lot of empty space. Players can groove on the immensity of a virtual world, but they get over it the first time they've seen it. Then it's time to shrink the world, or move them to a new environment they can marvel at.

[Margalis]

I loved sailing in Wind Waker, it was so relaxing, and I did like the exploring. However it did get old. I'm all for optional content that requires some time to sail/trudge over, or having players walk around a zone for the first time. Once it becomes old hat you need more options though.

If you have never gone from point A to point B before, having to travel by foot might be a blast. If it's a trip you make constantly it should be instant. FFXI was horrible about this, the main newb levelling zone (the Dunes) was far away from every main city, so each time your inventory got full or you needed gear updates you had to travel all the way back by foot, which could literally be an hour round trip.

---

Anyway great interview.


Edit:

Devil's Advocate says, when you make the player wait for the boat, or stare at the screen during autorun, and make them do that for several minutes of valuable playtime, you get them talking to other players.

I think the explanation is very different. People have a tendancy to backfit value onto things that are a pain in the ass. If you have to wait 10 minutes for a boat instead of getting on instantly, your brain rationalizes that by convincing you that the boat ride is really awesome and valuable.

This is the same theory used to train soldiers. Make their lives a living hell and they will come to value the experience and their buddies more. The harder the work the better the reward tastes - even when there is no reward. Because that is what we want to believe. It's another example of cognitive dissonance and rationalization. Why did I waste 3 months of my life grinding for a digital sword? Because that sword must be SUPER AWESOME. That's the only way it makes sense.

[Sky]

If I want to talk to players, I'll talk to players. Forced downtime will only work on a 'special' breed of players. See: Vanguard.

[Margalis]

MMORPGs already have forced downtime.

"AFK"

"BRB BB" (bathroom break)

"Back in 5, heating dinner."

Looking for replacement party members.

Etc etc. Downtime is inevitable whether you force it or not.

[stray]

Lots of downtime with me.  :-D

"AFK 2 mins" (cig break)

"BRB bio" (cig break)

"Back in 5, heating dinner" (cig break)

"BRB getting drink" (hotboxing cig break)

[Sky]

Bathroom breaks, sure. But dinner? Log the fuck off and go eat dinner.

I really dislike grouping online, and sitting around with that particular forced downtime is one reason. Also, though I don't smoke, I do play guitar at whim, so I don't like to group and afk on them like that. It's a respect thing. But sitting around because we don't have a healer and the game forces us to have one?

Fuck that noise. MMO is apparently for people with nothing better to do.

[MahrinSkel]

Reading through it, then re-reading the Scratchware Manifesto, makes me feel that saying "Guys like me and Greg Costikyan" was a presumptious, almost farcical.  Although I think Greg and I feel the same way about the course the industry has taken and have similar visions about where it *can* go, I'm not nearly as qualified as a "visionary" as he is.  I think I owe him an apology.

--Dave

[WindupAtheist]

The thing about a game like UO was that you /could/ sail if you wanted to. It was cool, it could be an adventure. And many of us pioneer types had to physically travel to each location to mark that rune (in fact, rune marking was an art form). I guess later on that got trivialized a bit, but at leaast you still had the option of fast travel, fast group travel (gates), fast static travel (moongates) or the good ol' shoe leather express.

Last year my guild had a bumper crop of genuine new-to-UO players, and I was one of several primary noob-wranglers.  You know, give them some gear, teach them how to cast their spells, how to make a macro, where to hunt, and so forth.  So one night I'm doing my thing, when in Ventrilo I hear this kid from Puerto Rico...

"Fuck, I just died!  Can someone come fix me?"
"Sure, where are you?"
"Uh... I don't really know..."
"Well can you give us a clue?"

It took a search party of over a dozen people combing the general area, but we managed to rez him and get him back to his corpse before it decayed.  But it did raise a point, namely that newbies who had been given runebooks on day one couldn't tell their ass from a hole in the ground when they were anywhere besides one of those pre-marked points of interest.  So we started having what were called walkabouts.

I would get six or eight newbies, plus a couple other vets, and we would just start walking.  One night we might start at Skara Brae and walk to Yew, then Minoc, then Britain, then take the Brit moongate to the Compassion gate in Ilshenar.  Once we were in Ilshenar we would walk to the Justice moongate and take it to the Moonglow moongate.  Then we would use the recsu-recdu portal in Moonglow to reach Papua, and from there hike across the jungle to Delucia.

It would take a couple hours.  We would stop to kill all the brigands and ogres and shit that crossed our path.  Newbs would tame pigs and chickens and cows and have them follow us down the road, then make them attack the brigands.  Someone would invariably get lost, forcing us all to fan out and look for him.  Or someone would wander into the wrong part of Ilshenar and get owned by a paragon, and we'd have to go kill it.

Nobody ever made any serious money on these little walkabouts, but I had no trouble rounding up participants one or twice a week.  And it did cut down on newbie "I don't know where I am!" moments.

[Yegolev]

Bah.  I guess I should have interrogated you before I loaded up UO last year.  That actually sounds like fun.  Being dropped into an animated GIF with no clue how to do anything is bad.

[Slyfeind]

Dammit WUA, you're making me want to resubscribe to UO again. Stop it!

[WindupAtheist]

I really need to find another guild like my old one used to be.  We had a peak concurrency of maybe two dozen people, which isn't bad for a completely solo-friendly game where no one had any reason to be there except that they enjoyed hanging out together.  Almost everyone was an adult, with only a few "guild baby mascot" teenagers.  A lot of people had gotten real life friends and family into the game/guild, and a number of people played with their spouses.  If so-and-so wasn't on, there was a good chance you would still hear them yelling in someone else's background over Ventrilo.  Yelling drunkenly, half the time.

It was just a really nice casual guild for grown-ups.

[Sky]

We had a peak concurrency of maybe two dozen people, which isn't bad for a completely solo-friendly game where no one had any reason to be there except that they enjoyed hanging out together.

As God intended!  :-D