Category: MMO Design (Page 9 of 36)

Repeatability, and What Do You Do All Day?

November 28, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Edward Castronova has posted that work on Arden, his students’ Shakespeare-themed world, will cease, and they will start looking ahead to the next game. He discusses some of the reasoning for this in his post, and I had a talk with him about when I was in Indiana last month. One persistent problem they had was answering the question: what do you actually DO all day?

‘What do you do all day’ is a surprisingly persistent problem, whenever the design powers-that-be considers exploring either new genres or gameplay paradigms. The answer that most MMOs have come to, combat and quests, is the chosen answer for a lot of good reasons, but it’s not the only solution. Still, it merits examination of why combat succeeds, and what any other activity needs to do to surplant it. Continue reading

Design Musings: The Questclamation Mark

November 26, 2007 / Damion Schubert

One of my random and frequent overstatements, “The yellow exclamation mark is the greatest invention in the history of MMO design.” Now, I don’t really think that (the real greatest invention would be, of course, clickable hyperlinks for items in chat), but I still think it’s way up there.

Of course, WoW didn’t invent the ‘hey! there’s a quest here!’ signifier – several games, including some non-MMOs, had it at some point. Other games have made their own interpretations of it – I believe LotRO’s looks like a one ring, for example. There’s clear indication why this idea has persisted – it does good things for your game. Of note: Continue reading

Raids: Asynchronous Gameplay and the Great Race

November 16, 2007 / Damion Schubert

On a personal level, I just wanted to note that last night, my guild finally dropped Lady Vashj (one of the more insanely complicated fights in WoW), after well over a month of trying two nights a week to get her down. Somehow, last night, everything just clicked, and on our third attempt, we beat her down with 20 people standing at the end.

This cements our status as the #1 guild on our server, according to WoWJutsu, which to our guild, is the really important thing. See, at the top end of the raiding game, there exists fierce competition on each server to be the best raiding guild, where ‘best’ is defined primarily by number of boss kills, with extra weight given to first kills. I like to call this competition the ‘Great Race’ – largely because it sounds pretentious. Anyway, WoWJutsu has codified this into a score for each guild (by scraping the Armory, which is admittedly imperfect at best), and is now considered by many raids to be the definitive WoW scoreboard. Continue reading

Synchronicity and the Promise of ‘Massively Multiplayer’

November 15, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Raph has a thought-provoking post today. At its core is a question about synchronous vs. unsynchronous gameplay, and the expectation of exclusivity that most MMOs seem to want.

His general gist: MMOs appear to be the only social space that want your time exclusively. Bars don’t build their businesses, hoping that everyone is locked into that business model. He argues we’re closer to theme parks, once you’ve paid your entrance fee. He asks, “Why are we more like theme parks than the neighborhood bar?” Continue reading

How Game Economies Can Fail to Incentivize Fun

November 11, 2007 / Damion Schubert

When WoW announced that you could buy a flying epic mount in the Burning Crusades for 5K gold (up from 100g to get your original mount at level 40), a lot of people predicted that WoW’s economy would have some significant problems. But it was the opposite problem that you might expect – it turns out that there wasn’t ENOUGH gold in the system.

The problem is that the primary way for new gold to enter the system in a fun and interesting way was via questing. Once you are level 70, quests can give 10-25 gold on completion of the quest (once you’re 70, experience you would have earned if not maxed out is converted to gold). The problem, of course, is that quests are a finite resource. You run out of them. Continue reading

Cryptic Sells City of Heroes to NCSoft

November 11, 2007 / Damion Schubert

This was, perhaps, inevitable, but I’m still surprised at the lack of discussion of Cryptic selling the rights of City of Heroes to NCSoft, including handing them a shake and bake live team of Cryptic employees.

This is an interesting next (final?) chapter in the Cryptic-NCSoft history, which includes the launch of a tight, successful (if a little niche) MMO, which drew the interest of the major hitters in the comics industry, namely DC and Marvel. Marvel tried to sue Cryptic, and NCSoft helped provide a legal defense. The matter was settled quietly eventually, but then Marvel attempted the ‘can’t beat em, join ‘em’ strategy, handing Cryptic the keys to the elusive Marvel ghost ship. Continue reading

Fansy the Bard Interview

October 23, 2007 / Damion Schubert

The Escapist has tracked down Fansy, who was famous for breaking EverQuest’s original no-rules PvP server with a level 5 kiter, and interviewed him. The overly grandiouse headline: “How One Player Ruined Everquest”.

Of course, Fansy wasn’t just a Bard; he was a level five Bard. According to the hard-coded game mechanics, he wasn’t yet eligible for PvP combat, but monsters didn’t care about player level. In fact, the tactic of training monsters worked even better than even Fansy could have imagined. “I thought up the invulnerable exploit and planned to train low-level monsters. I didn’t know I’d be able to train a sand giant [a particularly high-level monster], until I tried it! It was glorious. I was invulnerable and could kill anyone. It was a great feeling. I giggled the entire time and rolled around in my underwear. That’s how God must feel when he kills people.”

Triage and Extrapolation

October 22, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Ryan has a bold statement, a new rule of MMO development. Like many of his rules, I don’t fully agree with it:

A game is only as strong as its weakest feature. Games are more often judged by their weaknesses than their strengths, just like anything else. Any incomplete feature or complete but crappy feature will leave a bad taste in players’ mouths. Reviewers will dwell on anything that isn’t up to par in your game far more than they will dwell on all the positives. Do not be afraid to get rid of features, even if you’ve already implemented them. This goes for more than just features: If a quest sucks, fix it or get rid of it. If a zone sucks, fix it or get rid of it. If anything sucks, fix it or get rid of it. It may make you shed a tear for all that lost work, but it’s better than leaving it in.

Well, for a single-player game, sure. A reviewer will certainly see the whole game in his review experience. Continue reading

Nine Ways To Misuse Bartle’s Four

October 11, 2007 / Damion Schubert

There are a whole bunch of people who reach for the Bartle’s Four when discussing MMO concepts. Frequently, they are talking about it as if it is gospel and all design should respond to it, whereas others believe that the whole thing is old and busted, and we should move on.

That being said, I see both advocates and detractors often use Richard’s paper in ways that conflicts with my own experience. Here are some of the ways I would suggest reconsidering how you use this important paper (and note, this is solely my point of view, and even Richard’s may vary). Continue reading