Category: MMO Design (Page 28 of 36)

What Motivates a Crafter?

July 7, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Crafting minigames is one of them whackamole ideas that pops up incessantly in various player communities, and it wasn’t a total surprise to see it show up on Mud-Dev recently. I was somewhat surprised to see the idea didn’t make much of an appearance in this week’s crafting thread. There are those who believe firmly that the act of crafting is boring, and games like Puzzle Pirates and A Tale In The Desert have experimented with alternate ways to make the process more interesting.

So let’s play Devil’s Advocate. One thing that definitely rings true while reading comments to the previous thread is that crafting is ultimately a social game — a game of gathering resources, advertising wares and haggling prices. If you want to improve crafting, making it easier or more interesting to do all of the above will have more impact, and bring more of a sense that you’re really a merchant, than making the actual act of crafting more complicated. Continue reading

WoW Will Age Like a Fine Wine

June 17, 2005 / Damion Schubert

One of the things that we talk about at work when we talk about the remarkable success that World of Warcraft has had is that it is going to age well. The reason why? It’s not ‘realistic’, and so it sidesteps that entire arms race of everyone else trying to figure out how to draw elves with more polys in each pointy ear.

Ultima Online had this advantage, too. Yeah, the art is old, but since few MMOs share that perspective in the US marketplace, their art style has managed to survive better. 3D games inherently have it rougher – my old game, Meridian 59 looked old when Everquest came out. Everquest looked obsolete when EQ2 came out. One can expect this trend to continue for future realistic games as well. Meridian takes some very interesting and innovative design risks, and Everquest has something like 6 years more content than EQ2 does, but that’s not what you think when you glance at screenshots on the back of the box. Continue reading

A Contrast of Results

June 16, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Two bits of notable pieces of news this week, most of which have been reported elsewhere. The first is that World of Warcraft has surpassed 2 million subscribers. I guess the honor system didn’t slow them down. (link via Gamasutra). Can we now stop talking about the ‘million sub MMO’ game as if it wasn’t a great white whale?

On the flip side, Corpnews was the first to report the rumor that the Matrix Online has been sold to Sony. A surprising amount of commentary seems to be stuck on the notion that Sony and Warner Bros are arch enemies, and Sony getting their hands on WB money is blasphemy of the highest kind. News flash: that sort of stuff happens all the time if there’s a buck to be made. All the same, my condolences and best of luck to the guys in the trenches. Continue reading

How Players Bore Themselves To Tears

June 8, 2005 / Damion Schubert

This has come up a lot, but it bears its own discussion point: a lot of the time, MMO players simply bore themselves to the edge of frustration.

In a single player game, this doesn’t happen. A huge part of the reason why is that the designer has total control over the player’s skills and difficulties at any given time. In fact, most sophisticated teams will draw power graphs and emotional response graphs for their single player game, in order to draw the players through a riveting experience.

MMOs, by contrast, are an open landscape, where players can go anywhere and do anything that they want. The ability to go anywhere, including back to newbietown, hang with your friends, show off to the newbs and squash the monsters that gave you hell at level 10 in one shot is, in fact, one of the great selling points of the MMO experience. But it also introduces problems. Continue reading

The Combat Rut

June 1, 2005 / Damion Schubert

The AI discussion that Jamie started has started to spread, and its leading some interesting places. One of my own random synapse firings: I think the need to provide a group puzzle is a huge reason why we’re stuck in the Combat Rut. Whether it be EQ’s AI model or another, it’s not that difficult to come up with an interesting Combat model that follows the following parameters:

It differs (albeit mildly) from experience to experience.
It is very social play, requiring cooperation
It provides very clearly different roles between other players that must work in unison.

Morpheus Gets Pwned

May 27, 2005 / Damion Schubert

In a plot device supposedly written by the Wachowskis themselves, Morpheus was killed in the Matrix Online yesterday. MTV has the best account. Here’s about their future plans:

The next task for Morpheus’ followers, however, will be to figure out whodunit. Chadwick promised that the murder mystery will unfold every few weeks through the course of “The Matrix Online”’s first year. Players will be encouraged to figure out not just who the assassin is, but what Morpheus was really all about. That means, in fact, that thanks to the wonders of flashback scenes, “Matrix” users haven’t heard the last of Laurence Fishburne’s voiceover work in the game. “We’re going to milk Morpheus as long as we can,” Chadwick said. “He’s a great character.”

The Value of Attentiveness

May 22, 2005 / Damion Schubert

Dr. Cat is one of the lesser-known pioneers of the industry. He launched Furcadia, an MMO which went live before UO, and which has been tidily profitable for quite some time. A social game that caters to a unique audience, Furcadia has none of the grind-y elements of today’s EQ clones, and it has offered some unique lessons to those running the game. One of the things the esteemed Doctor said he’s learned from his experience running Furcadia is “Attention is the currency of the future“. As it turns out, that’s not just true for MMOs.

Television has long simply used the Nielson Ratings to determine the popularity of television shows, and set advertising prices. But now, television executives are discovering that not all viewers are created equal, and this discovery has the potential to transform the entertainment industry. Continue reading

The Grind Claims Another Victim

May 20, 2005 / Damion Schubert

One of my favorite guys in the industry, Jason Booth, has finally updated his blog. Unfortunately, it’s with the news that he’s left the MMO arena. His reason? The grind.

Instead, the MMP industry is boiling the formula down to a very destructive set of lesson for our society. These lessons appear to be:

Achievement is far more important in life than enjoyment, family, friends, etc.

We should all be equal, regardless of our given talents. Time and devotion to achievement is all that matters, skill and smarts are worthless.

Don’t think, just grind.

If you grind harder, you will be “more cool” than others.

The problem is that none of these really lead to a happy or compelling life. Play is supposed to be an enjoyable learning function which helps you to understand some aspect of life, not a time waster, or worse, something which literally drives you to neglect your life.

XBox 360

May 16, 2005 / Damion Schubert

I won’t be going to E3 this year. Judging from the blogs out there and the tomb-like silence at my own studio, it feels like I’m in a rather exclusive club. All the same, last year’s E3 felt functionally identical to the one before it, so I thought taking a year off would help me appreciate it more next year.

The one thing that I’m sorry I’ll miss is getting a chance to see the XBox 360 in person. I haven’t commented on the XBox 360 yet for the simple reason of not having anything other than rumors with the substance of vapor. Microsoft finally decided to help by putting up a website where you can rotate a model of a XBox 360 controller. Thanks, Microsoft! That clears things up! Continue reading

Breaking Stealth

May 14, 2005 / Damion Schubert

On the heels of my throwaway comment that backstab is often a basic fairness problem, Terranova has started an interesting thread pretty much on the same subject, namely are stealth classes balanceable in an MMO?

In my mind, the largest advantage that stealthers have is simple: they can pick fights that they know they will win. This gives their existence a certain level of certainty that pretty much no one else can have. Many games respond by giving discrete, distinctive classes counter-stealth abilities. In Shadowbane, for example, Scouts can detect thieves. Scouts can pwn thieves if they run across one, but thieves ultimately have the upper hand – they can pick the fight, simply avoiding attacking groups if they can tell the other person has a scout. Continue reading