This is something I definitely wasn’t planning. Just a derailed thread on Q23 that I resurrected only because I was curious about one of the board members getting involved with the game I manipulated to trigger my own reasonings. So here more reasonings. I was accused about not being coherent and then defended because what I wrote was a few months old. Come on. The basis of my ideas are *years* old now. with the time I delve deeper, expand and learn new things. But I’m coherent and not an hypocrite. You can say my ideas suck and that what I think is retared, but you cannot say that I contradict myself and there isn’t anything consistent behind what I babble about. The ideals I chase are strong, very strong and consolidated. They definitely aren’t volatile trends. I even think I’m awfully redundant most of the times.

(“the graphic is the game” reference is here)

Unrelated observation: there’s an increasing interest everywhere about games appealing to women (the last reference I read is from Raph). The believable commonplace (I simplify here) is that women seem to love in particular three parts: the social aspects, the character customization and personalization and kick-ass PvP. Have you noticed how these last two are merely subsets of the first? PvP is Socializer, not Killer. And women love to kick asses. In particular they love to find out and demonstrate they can.

The two, awesome screenshots that triggered everything can be found here.

These ideas are bland a superficial but they also distill the essential so that I remember from where I’m coming. The ideal. The actual valid “pitch” of those ideas.

—

Andrew Mayer:
Amazing. After all the scoldings you’ve given over the last year or so you’re seduced by a couple of pretty screenshots.

And what other parts of the gameplay are you referring to? Do you see the irony in the fact that in that very sentence you manage to totally avoid any specific details on the “other parts” but clearly define what you mean by combat wth specific examples?

I give no scolding, in fact I’m not between those ranting loosely about the lack of innovation and I believe more in the evolution. I also dislike commonplaces and I wrote in other occasions that I believe that “the graphic is the game”. Like if we could go to see a movie and say that the image isn’t important, only the story is.

My old comments about the screenshots were the result of my own awe and my own impressions that those screenshots simply suggested me. It’s just what I “saw” into them, not what the actual game will be. It doesn’t mean that the game will be like I imagined it by looking at the screenshots, in fact they have nothing to share. I just put them out of context to illustrate my own idea, even if that idea is completely ignored in the actual game.

That said, those two screenshots illustrate perfectly the two most important aspects I would like to see in a mmorpg: 1- The “virtual world” scope, not just limited to combat (first screenshot) 2- The large scale PvP and conquest system (second screenshots)

Now look at the first. There are farmers, animals (and not xp bags), caravans, big and small boats, a lighthouse and a general natural, countryside quiet mood, with warm colors which, already in the screenshot, look absolutely stunning and immersive. That first screenshot has a strong charming impact, imho. I started to think about that.

That’s what I see and all the rest is triggered from those stimuli. What if we start to design a (even graphically) believable, recognizable world opposed to one built as a set of squared boxes labelled as “level 1-5”, “level 5-10” that you have to follow linearly, without any pretense of cohesion and self-consistence. What if those animals, the farms, the caravans, the lighthouse and the boats all had even a gameplay relevance instead of just sit there as “pretty scenery”. What if a player could own that farms, sail those boats, lead along those caravans and build a believable commerce system between the countries that just doesn’t teleports all the items from “x” to “y” or regulated through an artificial UI named “Auction House”. What if all those abstract and alienating intrusion of game systems could go away to put again the actual players at the *center* and as focus of the game world, instead of just gliding on a fixed, rendered background. What if we could drop all these buttons, quickbars, health bars, text messages and generally clunky and counterintutive, heavy interfaces that are just a huge limit of accessibility for most of the players and an intrusive curtain between you and the actual game world that you can *see*. What if these games could finally emancipate from their MUDs heritage and leave behind that type of cumbersome geekdom to move toward a more natural, believable and even visceral (guess why sex and violence and even the tactile world of Katamari Damacy are successful nowadays?) type of gameplay that is directly fun and accessible for everyone. Because it draws hands down from our real experience and the most natural feelings?

All that is just a start. Because all the rest follows, like a chain. Once you trigger a line of thoughts and dream about a potential, all the rest will follow naturally. You are chasing an idea that links together all these parts. An idea that can be started just by one screenshot to then move on its own. When I think about mmorpgs in general, that’s what I see.

Then there’s the second screenshot. The ideas above, for me, melt with this second part. Because in that type of world I described I want also the conflict and the conquest. The PvP is the most fun, social and satisfying repetable content possible. It just needs better environments where the players are, once again, the focus. Where they OWN the world and not just move around in one ruled by NPCs.

In that second screenshot I see once again the luscious scenery, a town with various buildings, defensive walls, watchtowers and an army moving to war. There seem to be archers, soldiers and huge dinosaurs used like huge war machines to siege the town. The awe here comes from the *scale* of things and the idea of a conquest. Two elements that are severely lacking in the games of today where the focus is always the single player and where the scale never changes. That scenery suggests “breadth”. It suggests a battle that will start shortly after that may remind what we saw in the Peter Jackson movies (which also strongly exploited z-axis movement of the camera to underline the sense of scale and dizziness).

We are excited when we buy a mount in WoW. What if you could drive one of those huge dinosaurs? What if you could charge and pound against those defensive walls and breach them? What if you could sweep the place with the tail and tear both men and buildings with the jaws (and here we would need a true physics engine and not intangible character models)? And what if all these actions were possible with more natural controls instead of a bunch of quickbars cluttering the screen with fancy, retarded effects like DOTs, mezz, stuns, buffs, debuffs and other totally absurd abstractions?

Think to a truly epic battle and conquest suggested in the second screenshot, with smooth, fluid and intuitive controls and visceral combat like in “God of War” and all within a cohesive, believable and consistent virtual world with an unmatched breadth as suggested in the first screenshot.

That’s what I “see” :)