Raph is no longer taunting us (Metaplace)

[Yoru]

I fall along the simulationist-gamist axis, primarily. From a thousand-yard perspective, I'd like success to be more a measure of utilizing wit, cunning, resourcefulness, inventiveness, analysis and memory to a significantly greater degree than Dinggratz Diku gameplay. To paraphrase Schild, I don't want to make 5,000 chicken fajitas. Internally-consistent, dynamic game systems - preferably simulationally-based - that are interesting to interact with, pick apart and master. I hesitate to use the phrase "worldy game" because invoking virtual worlds brings rather too much baggage with it.

Want to take a stab at your Fajitas comment.. one thing I liked about the original structure of Alterac Valley was the mechanism for collecting ram pelts to get the wolf riders (been a while, but I think that is right).  I would not mind having to craft x iron swords if part of the turn in would be to see the next set of npc guards walk out with those swords.  Hell, have it so no guards would spawn unless the PC community got all the peices in play.  I would love to see the "contested" areas with deformable terrain and the ability to build towns and boarder posts.  The staticness of the world is something that kills my sense of immersion.  The biggest pain in the butt about most of the crafting is no real game impact.  What, maybe 5% of what is crafted is viable?  I want character progression, but I don't want levels.  Is it possible to build a model that allows you to enter the game with a veteran level character instead of a babe fresh from the tit?

There's plenty of ways to represent progression without levels, and there's ways to make newbie characters much closer to veterans. Eve does this somewhat by offering easy breadth advancement vs. hard depth advancement with a steep increase in time investment and a small number of actual skill levels. Pretty much every game designer with a blog has gone over this several times.

Deformable terrain in a non-instanced area in a mass-market game will pose serious asshattery issues. There's things you simply can't allow because it lets 1% of the population screw over the 99% who are just trying to have fun. Deformable terrain + building outposts/forts = Wurm Online at the moment.

Adding more dynamicism based on player interaction is always good, as is automation of tedious jobs, such as standing guard.

[El Gallo]

Which OMG EVIL SUIT OPPRESSING THE POOR LITTLE JESUS DEVELOPER MAN said, "you know what would be a great idea for this game.  HAM.  You know, if it takes 10 shots of a rifle to kill something, and it takes 10 shots of a pistol to kill something, why not make it take 10 shots of the rifle AND 10 shots of the pistol to kill it if a rifleman and a pistoleer group up!  Because, as everyone knows, the real problem with getting shot by a laser rifle is that you can't do calculus as quickly, and the problem with getting shot by a pistol is that you gradually lose your ability to perform ballet.  So they are really hitting totally different pools!."

I need to reiterate my earlier point, only because it rankles me when discussions about one concept can't be disassociated from another concept if there's any whatsoever overlap.

Once again this is an evaluation of the execution of a concept, not the vision behind it. We don't know if a HAM type system could have worked because the only thing we have to evaluate is the one we played. That's certainly a valid reference. After all, it is "proof in seeing". It's also bad science.

It's difficult to distinguish concepts from execution, but I think you are drawing it at a very unreasonable spot.  One could define the HAM concept as "three bars full of fun" and then do your trick of saying evidence doesn't matter because we can never know whether or not "three bars full of fun" would have been fun or not, because everything else is mere execution.

I demand a bit more meat on my concepts.  It wasn't a bug that made some weapons do H damage and others do M damage.  It wasn't coder telephone.  It wasn't evil suits.  It wasn't rushed deadlines.  It is a core aspect of the HAM concept.  It's also completely asinine, because it makes it utterly worthless for people who use different weapons to cooperate (at least when combined with another core aspect of the HAM system, the idea that things fall over and vomit up xp and loot when any of their three bars hits 0).

Sure, you could say you could have "HAM" without weapons hitting different pools and all pools causing death, but you could also say that I'm eating a ham sandwich with no ham in it.  It was just a stupid idea, one that never should have been seriously considered.  It also is an example people like to come back to all the time because it exemplifies many of the perceived weaknesses of Koster's design: it's an unwieldy, counter-intuitive "fix" to a system (health/mana or health/mana/stamina) that isn't broken for no apparent purpose aside from solving the "not created here" problem.

As I said, I have hopes for his next game too, but it's absurd to wave off all of his faults by claiming they were mere errors of execution.  Some of these ideas are just bad.  That's not an insurmountable problem, but the "none of the ideas were ever wrong" responses to them might be.

[Venkman]

We know how broken the HAM execution was. We don't know how HAM was supposed to work, both by itself and including every weapon stat, armor stat, the decay on both, Battle Fatigue (ugh) and player skill in the game. There is no HAM by itself. In my opinion, this was SWG in microcosm: a system of features so integrated any one of them could break the entire thing. It'll never be fixed there. It can only ever be completely rebuilt in a new system. And repackaged so people don't call it HAM 2.0 :)

I'm trying to piece together from Raph's comments how the HAM should have played if it was just as he wanted, and that's where I end up.

You probably read this:

The giant buffs were not part of the original design. In fact, the whole system was premised on the notion that no player got to exceed a certain amount of H, A, or M. All the creatures and content were supposed to be balanced off this. The buffs ended up changing this max by 300%, which is a huge part of why everything in the game became trivial.

I've said this before, but you were never supposed to die from getting hit in HAM. In the original design, you were supposed to die only from a deathblow while incapacitated, and that was supposed to happen because of the accumulation of wounds. HAM was supposed to regen fast -- really fast. When you got hit, it would be a momentary issue -- heck, you'd expect to get incapped often, too, but not necessarily die. One of these days, I should build a little HAM simulator the way I wanted it to work...

You would attack different pools in a group because that curtailed what the target could do TO you. If you saw they were a rifleman who needed mind for careful aims, you disrupted that capability by attacking his Mind. But he'd probably be more vulnerable to incap via a different pool (which might vary depending on his specific stats). The real goal would be to stack up wounds on him, which would then cause more and more frequent incaps until you could execute a deathblow. This is why deathblows were so limited in range

The range on weapons was not how it was designed. We ended up there because of technical limits that were imposed late in the process (pretty much the same limits that greatly curtailed the AI behaviors -- a limit on the range of "awake" world surrounding a player). It's important to realize that SWG did NOT intend to follow the basic tank/nuker/healer model, but instead drew its inspiration for ranged combat more from small arms tactics: close fighters, ranged covering fire, snipers, and so

That's an example of design not surviving first contact with code, but provides insight into the original concept. Maybe done right in a game capable of supporting it the thing would still not work. But it not having been done right that time doesn't mean it should never be tried again. That's really my entire point. Anyone sees "HAM" and they think "failure". It's really "HAM as delivered in SWG under X and Y constraints" that failed.

[Akkori]

Isn't HAM just a "client-side" version of rock, paper, scissors? Instead of whole classes (ugh, I hate them, liked skill system better) becoming "weak" against another class and "strong" against a third, the balance was in the weapon/armor you chose? Maybe I'm just not as smart as you guys (think you are, lol), but I liked it, and think if it could be programmed right, it would work...

[stray]

One could get caught up in too many details about HAM.

It should be enough to say that all wounds are made equal. The flesh is weak. There is no such thing as a mindpool. This isn't Scanners.

[CmdrSlack]

There is no such thing as a mindpool. This isn't Scanners.

I hear the exploding heads will be for teh awesome when they get collision detection working.

[Sir Fodder]

From a thousand-yard perspective, I'd like success to be more a measure of utilizing wit, cunning, resourcefulness, inventiveness, analysis and memory to a significantly greater degree than Dinggratz Diku gameplay.

I hate jumping in just to say "yeah" but in this case I'll make an exception, yeah me too.

Back in '95, when my brother mentioned the possibility of a UO I scoffed at the notion, until he mentioned the phrase "client-server architecture" and my head exploded thinking about the tremendous possibilities of such a thing. This was to some extent confirmed by beta/early UO, I was full of hope. I cannot express the depth of my disgust at how things have worked out in the MMO world since then.

[stray]

[EDIT] Eh, nevermind. Sorry. 

[Cheddar]

The main thing is this... Congratulations Raph.  You sucked the corporate... message enough... to get funds for your own venture.  Congratulations and happy holidays.

No one here should berate this man; as much as we complain, bitch, and moan, at least he has tried (unsuccessfully) to do things different.  Fucking peanut gallery around here.

[stray]

The anger and criticism you're reading here is that of disgruntled customers and gamers. It's a hat that must be worn from time to time. What they think personally about Raph is not part of the equation.

[geldonyetich]

HAM may have looked good on paper, but end in the end it was just three health bars.  Where SWG's combat needed improvement is with what it did with those health bars.

[Raph]

There weren't originally supposed to be unhealable pools, either. :P I love how we're still discussing HAM all these years later...!

OK, so let's take a step back. Health and mana are indeed not broken. But they aren't entirely suitable for a sci-fi game either. After all, in a sci-fi game, you are hopefully having a variety of activities, some based on brawn and some based on intelligence, and some based on agility, and so on. Spending mana for a thief move, or rage for a mage ability, would be equally silly. Especially when we have abilities we want to have that range from hacking to breaking doors to walking balance beams (yeah, none of these showed up. But that's what you want the system for).

In WoW, they solve this by having special bars for different classes, which is a great idea. It only works well in a class-based system, though.

The basic idea here, as in mana, is to have a pool of power to be spent. If you get hit on it, it reduces your offensive power -- like a mana drain. And like any other resource, you can choose to use great gobs of it in one go, or you can spend it slowly.

In the original design, there were broadly speaking three sorts of activities. Brawny ones, which rely on exercises of strength; challenges of dexterity and agility; and mental challenges. So three sorts of mana. Hence three bars. Given the classless system, we couldn't really hide any of them. This is also the single biggest weakness of the HAM system -- not that pools were attackable or spendable (which is again, just a mana drain sort of effect, or a "weaken your shields when you fire" sort of effect) but rather that there's just too many numbers involved.

Now, different enemies would have different sorts of attacks they might want to do on you. You probably want to drain the sorts of mana they use, and not pay as much attention to the sorts of mana they don't. And you, of course, might have moves or attacks that drain sorts of mana that you have lots of, or sorts of mana that you have little of. And that can be dangerous, because any individual could end up losing because they are weak, or dizzy, no matter how agile they remain -- in other words, you have to husband all three resources.

And you would want to be careful too, knowing what they can do to you. If you are a type with a move that burns mana type 1, you may have piled on that sort of mana -- leaving you extra-vulnerable on another side.

The stats play a level below this, allowing you to say "I want to be strong in mana type I" in several different ways. You could choose to have a large bar, to have a fast regen on it, or to have lower costs per use, basically. That's all the stats meant: size of pool, size of faucet, size of drain. (Hence the term "pool" btw).

Now, what does this do to group dynamics? It means that you CANNOT be a solo tank -- a tank strong against one sort of attack probably sucks against another. An attack great against one config is weak against another.

Now, some premises that this requires in order to work:

- these really do have to work like mana. They gotta recharge FAST. Otherwise, it's not management, and extended fights cannot happen.
- you need to have the ability to tell what the opponent is using on you, and it needs to make a difference. They need to use specials from pools, so you can adjust strategy based on it.
- you need the ability to draw fire, so that when one groupmate is getting vulnerable, you can take the fire from them
- you need the ability to try to force the opponent into spending certain types of mana rather than others -- either as a defense (keep them from using the attacks that hurt you most) or as offense (push them into burning lots of something, so that you can then attack that weak point).
- you need to be able to attack any pool, and you need to be able to choose which pool to burn, regardless of who you are, so you can manage your resources effectively. Not much of a management subgame if you can only fire from one of them.

Obviously, a lot of these didn't manifest. But that's where things like head shot, body shot, and so on come from -- they are mappings to the mana pools.

If I were doing it today, given all the critiques, I probably would have maintained the idea of three manas, but split off the health on top of them. I believe one of the combat revisions proposed this. The health bar would be the only one you would show all the time. The mana bars would still be there, but be invisible most of the time. I bet you could cue people with a bar that shows only when you are using your special -- say you "load up" a mind-based ability, like sniping. THEN a focus meter shows up on your screen. And damage to your focus or your strength could be indicated ojnly as it happened, or only when you are at critical level, or something. Then a lot of the confusion might die off.

But bottom line, the system is probably overcomplex, period. Just the idea of having three mana bars in place of one, on every character, is complicated. And that's before we get to wounds. Wounds being separate on all three bars (think concussion, broken limb, blood loss) is almost certainly overkill.

The underlying math on it, though, is elegant, which in design is usually a GOOD sign. I suspect that were we only talking one pool, people would dig the pool/faucet/drain thing on the stats, for example.

[Raph]

I write all that, and then Geldon nails it. :P

[Slyfeind]

lolz

Honestly, that sounds like a fun system. I understood bits of it in principle while I was playing, but I never bothered with it at the time. I just randomly did maneuvers because they sounded cool. So I sucked at fights, and then the system was gone. Whee!

I'm sure something can be salvaged from that mad mess of math.

[geldonyetich]

Personally, I like an over complex MMORPG game mechanic.  I figure if you're going to spend 200+ hours playing a game, it might as well be tough enough to be worth learning.  So, looking at what Raph's suggesting above, I'm like, "Yeah, that would have been a pretty hearty meal... but what about the second course?"

Yet, I know that your average casual Star Wars fan would probably be turned off by having to learn to perform quantum physics to prevail in combat.  Hrmph!  The necessity of popularity gets me every time.  There's something to be said for catering to the hardcore niche, where hardcore is not defined as "no-life catassery" and instead "players bored with just yet another casual offering".

[stray]

Using a mind pool to fire off rifles makes some sense for an rpg. Using a rifle to target the mind pool is just flat out stupid. It's a poor attempt at trying to be "cute". Calling it complex is insulting. Complex would have been including actual rifle and targeting mechanics.

[Strazos]

How is it flat-out stupid? Shooting the target in helmet would leave the target fairly dazed after 1 or more shots.

[stray]

Helmets: Includes an armor bar then. And then when that goes, make the fucker's head explode (i.e. health pool).

That's how guns work.

[EDIT]

Besides, sharpshooters and snipers generally do not target heads anyways.

[Xilren's Twin]

There weren't originally supposed to be unhealable pools, either. :P I love how we're still discussing HAM all these years later...!

The reason HAM still gets discussed is it was probably the #1 reason for unfulfilled expectations in SWG.  A complex combat system such as the concept for HAM would have worked much better in a game without the expectations set by the SW license.  People just wanted to blast away at each other and swing energy swords around.  It was such a giant disconnect between expectations and reality that it is very memorable.

I suspect it's one of those things that obvious in retrospect but the HAM system was one of things I was shocked got through the sanity checking stage the same way not having space battles in at launch did.

Failure to understand the market expectations of the license?

[WayAbvPar]

Besides, sharpshooters and snipers generally do not target heads anyways.

You don't play a lot of FPSs, do you? 

[Akkori]

I would *love* to play an MMOrpg that was a little less fantastical in how it handles the effects of combat. One of the biggest problems I had with D&D, and why I liked Shadowrun so much, was that in the standard rules (and all MMOrpg's that I know of, btw) you fight at 100% effectiveness until that last little digit turns to 0, and then, OH NO! You are dead/incapped.

Careful planning and strategies used to avoid getting HIT BY A BULLET don't exist in MMO games. Yeah, I know, "it's a game"... blah blah... It just bugs me sometimes to see people zerging in a game that is supposed to be RPG-simulation-strategy based. If I manage to shoot you, you die. Don't get shot!

[Raph]

Personally, I like an over complex MMORPG game mechanic.  I figure if you're going to spend 200+ hours playing a game, it might as well be tough enough to be worth learning.  So, looking at what Raph's suggesting above, I'm like, "Yeah, that would have been a pretty hearty meal... but what about the second course?"

Well, second course was stances, of course, which were another layer on top of the above. Each stance had its own strengths and weaknesses as regards which pools it benefited and which it hurt; forcing opponents into stances to limit mobility or skill execution, whilst also taking advantage of their changes to relative cover and skill execution for you.

Third course would have been the actual skills above and beyond that, where what I wanted was something that mimicked military combat a bit more -- snipers/riflemen, entrenched positions, etc. (Yes, cover was supposed to work).

the HAM system was one of things I was shocked got through the sanity checking stage the same way not having space battles in at launch did.

There was never any chance of space making it in by launch. It took an extra year to make it, after all. Everyone knew that space was needed -- that's part of why Austin got put on the title, because the team had space game experience.

[Sairon]

Hehe, should've dugged out X-wing vs Tiefighter and added multiplayer 

[geldonyetich]

Mm, second course and third course might have just been enough aspects to satisfy.  Throw in vehicle and creature support, and we've got a detail.  Now all that's left to do is to polish the balance of all those aspects to optimal fun. 

It's a pity SWG never got that far.  I probably could've told ya it was a rushed launch, if the investors cared.

[stray]

Lol, creature support.

[geldonyetich]

Seems kinda silly to mention it now, but back when there were actual creature handlers and bio engineers it'd be silly to leave em out.

[Sky]

So areola is going to be mmofpsrpg?

[Daeven]

Speaking of Combat implementations.... The Matrix Online, while and overwhelmingly meh game did have really interesting combat. Different attack styles, different defense styles, specializations in different combat types (Karate, dual pistol, stealth monkey, etc). Its skill trees coupled with combat flexibility made for an interesting tactical game.

Unfortunately the rest of it was annoyingly silly. Why didn't they go for a Cyberpunk game instead of tying it to those movies?

ah well.

[stray]

So areola is going to be mmofpsrpg?

Who? What?

We don't know.

But I'll just say no.

What gave you that idea anyways?

[Sky]

I'm the miniature devil on Raph's right shoulder.

[stray]

Even devils can't sway a man with a Vision^TM.

[Sky]

That's quite some ™ you've got there.

[Nonentity]

Complete with AreolaRender™ technology - a suite of proprietary bump and normal mapping software for the most advanced nipples ever seen in a game ever.

[Ironwood]

Now we're getting silly.

[Akkori]

Nipples are never silly.