Monthly Archives: March 2006

Take this, Raph

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This is a direct answer to Raph. I was going to just post it in the comments of his page, then it grew slightly beyond the original intention and I got scruples about posting it there. I guess he is probably going to find it even here. It has an heated tone not because I’m against Raph, but because this is a theme I feel strongly.

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Why not make this game?

BECAUSE IT SUCKS!

This is the extreme exaltation of the meta-game I hate. It’s the total abstraction of the formal system from its context. Think of game mechanics and slap them in whaterver context.

It’s like the monetization of game design. Reducing it to a point where it’s so devoid of any quality and inspiration that you can recombine it the way you like. Like the T-1000. A game designer delirium of omnipotence.

The “healing game” could be a very interesting concept. But NOT. Repeat, NOT on a game that is based on a fantasy world.

When I’m in a fantasy world I think of Tolkien and I think to all those myths that have been part of my early years (I read LOTR at 12). I DON’T THINK of a trauma center. I think of adventurers in armors, spellcasters, dragons, menacing castles, orcs, goblins. Histories about foreign and harsh lands. Magnificent sights. The struggle to survive away from your home. The nostalgy. The need to preserve your world from an invasion, the fight against the corruption. Men of valor and charisma. And this is what I want to PLAY. What I would like the game to reenact and evocate. Drag me in. This is what I want the game to make me FEEL. And the current game mechanics, that silly mata-game of colored bars and buttons, doesn’t make me feel that way AT ALL.

It’s exactly that meta-game level to be totally innappropriate, ineffective and that I was criticizing.

I’m sure there is a space of possibilities for a good “healing” game that could even appeal a decent number of players. Something like “Behind the enemy lines”, or even the simulation of the emergency rooms. There are Tv series extremely successful as “ER” (I hate these, but that’s another matter). I would start from THERE to design a good “healing” game. I would start to study what makes these successful series “tick” to discover what are those narrative structures that are strong and could be translated in a game. What draws the interest, what could be fun to simulate. And I’m pretty sure that more than the “healing” theme what is strong is the relationships between the characters, the human level, what goes on beyond the facade of the role (the “doctors”) and the suspense of the sudden emergencies. The need to make CRUCIAL choices quickly, the need to cope with your limits. A fight against time. And the HOPE.

THESE are the parts that may be strong and may have a valuable impact. This is what engages the public on an emotional level. THESE are the myths and ideals. Not another fucking games of colored bars and buttons to press, for god’s sake.

Again we LIVE myths. We live in a symbolic space. We are MADE OF SYMBOLS. But not symbols as math as formal systems. Symbols as cultura myths, ideas, influences. In the exact same way you close your eyes and start to dream by images that you cannot understand on a rational level. It’s all about the emotional level. We watch, love and read from “Aliens” to “Nightmare” to “Lord of the Rings” because of the emotional level. Because of what they evocate. Because they go to “touch” particular feelings you cannot control.

NOT because they are formal systems.

People want to feel the THRILL, the suspense. Be frightened, be comforted. Feel betrayed, defeated and then revolt to it till a liberation. Cry and scream. Be there. What’s “art” if not the revelation and communication of all this?

You called for it:
SWG sucked exactly because it betrayed its myth. Because it was incapable to evocate what the players expected. Because it was a formal system and a meta-game inappropriate, alien to the “call” that you should have answered being the lead designer. Because it was a patchwork of influences coming from UO slapped on a SW theme. And it sucked.

And it sucked in the exact same way it would suck to design an healing game with the same mechanics of the current mmorpg combat.

You can take a fucking pinball and theme it after LOTR, or Star Wars, or an hospital, or a church or a driving game. But that’s not how you communicate effectively the myths attached to each. A pinball doesn’t communicate anything if not the fact that it is a pinball.

And a game of colored bars and buttons doesn’t communicate ANYTHING but itself. Deaf and mute. As I said: autoreferential.

When you moved to do SWG you brought with you your experience with UO, but you weren’t able to adapt that experience to find a different, new approach to a different genre and “shared myth”.

Take Stanley Kubrick. He was a genius. He was able to make the best sci-fi movie, the best horror movie, the best war movie. Were these looking or feeling the same? Not at all. This genius had the sensibility to approach each genre in an UNIQUE way. Take George Lucas, he is able to do just one movie and nothing else and he keeps redoing it over and over.

I’m not saying that you are like George Lucas and able to do just one thing. But this is what you made everyone think with SWG. You fell on your ass there not because the game wasn’t fun enough and those ideas wrong. But because the approach was inappropriate.

And if you say what you say you make me believe you learnt nothing from it.

The “healer” role as a byproduct of the meta-game we played till today

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(short version)

I want to get a couple of points out of the way to conclude the brainstorming session of the last days and the ideas I’m incubating from a long time.

The first is again about the role of the “healer” and why I think it is superfluous to the point that I wouldn’t miss it if completely removed and replaced with something different.

If you follow what I wrote about “no math in games” you can see how I’m on the exact same line of thoughts.

Richard Bartle continuously repeats how the text muds are much more advanced compared to the graphical mmorpgs. Well, I’d say that the pen&paper games we had way before the textual muds were MUCH more complex and realistic than both those muds and the graphical mmorgps of today. But wait: NOT because the DM could manipolate the situation the way he liked. I’m speaking strictly of game mechanics here and the situations that they are able to “portray” or simulate.

On the mechanical, functional level of the “cold” rules, the pen&paper games were already MUCH more complex and advanced than every mmorpg we have today. This is the claim and heresy.

Many of my ideas are about observing and recuperating that level. Of what we lost in the transition to the graphical mmorpg and that I believe is highly valuable. A loss that CAN be recovered.

Now, if you ask the players their opinion about the complete removal of the healer classes (in a concrete definition: those that push the health bar up instead of down), they’ll look at you like an alien. The idea is just not credible. My belief is that this is the result of a consolidated stereotype. We are so used to a type of game that we cannot imagine anything different, if not slightly different permutations of the same.

J. once said:

The more experienced players are in existing MMOGs, the more they can’t help but think about the whole genre in terms of what they already know.

This is true, it even applies to me but I always try hard to escape that trap and remember what I like. I always try to think outside the box and remember what’s the real destination.

I remember to have roleplayed a lot of combat situations in pen&paper games, but they were rich. We didn’t just “play the rules” but we simulated the whole thing. It was not just a bunch of dice rolls, but the dice rolls were just used when appropriate. The combat was as deep as you wanted it to be. Definitely not just “I attack” or “I cast magic missle”. So, at least when it comes to what I loved to play, the rules weren’t the real fun, it’s what you could do beside them. The immersion in the setting, your character and the choices you had available. The fun of the roleplay. Of the simulation. Of the myth you are evocating and identifying with. The simbolic value.

Today the mmorpgs don’t simulate anything anymore. We just have embedded mini-games, as Raph says. They get more and more refined, polished. But this is not what I’m personally searching in this genre. It doesn’t represent anything anymore. It is completely autoreferential. It doesn’t point and suggest anymore “elsewhere”. You are just there. Sitting on a chair. Not anymore transported in the other world (think to the introductions of the early Ultima games). There’s not anymore that transition, we don’t move past lines of realities, but we are just trapped in a self-conscious computer game that can deliver just mathematical, redundant puzzles. Recursively. Game design here becomes just a practice. There isn’t anymore any “dream” or “wish” left.

The truth, to go back at the main topic, is that the healer classes don’t exist because they are indispensable and valuable in the situations we are trying to reproduce. The healer classes don’t exist because it was required to make a fight work. They exists because till today we played the meta-game of “buttons and colored bars”: a parody of combat.

It’s that meta-game that I despise and that forbids the immersion. It’s a dream-killer. It’s the reduction of everything on the functional, cold level of the “formal system”. Like if we are staring a chessboard instead of watching and reenacting “Lord of the Rings”. Instead of “feeling there”.

This is why I say that I’d like to recuperate the level of the immersion and “adventure”. This is why I say these games are about symbolic myths, culture. And not math. This is why I say that “game design” should be about the recovery of those lost elements. Of the recovery of the “sense of wonder”. A puzzle game doesn’t have any sense of wonder, I’m sorry. This is why I have a passion on the genre about the original idea of “simulating worlds”, watch the myths come alive. Be part of them. And not create embedded puzzle games.

I’m on a personal crusade to demonstrate that formal systems aren’t fun.

Have you ever seen a movie about a chessboard? No, of course. That’s not fun. We love these games NOT because they are formal systems. We love these games, in particular fantasy settings, because they are SYMBOLIC. They are myths. Part of our culture.

What you expect people to like more to go see in a movie theatre, a movie with a chessboard in the middle or “Lord of the Rings”?

That’s the point. We want back the immersion, the direct feel. People don’t like anymore to learn abstract, mathematical rules and puzzle games. We want emotions and myths. Symbols.

Not math.

I’m not saying that “chess” cannot be fun. I’m not saying that the “formal system” and puzzle games need to be banished and those who like them are idiots. I’m just saying that the proportions should be recalibrated, because right now the weight is ALL on the meta-game.

My belief is that if you go back at the roots of the genre, back to the aspirations of the pen&paper games and the realism and complexity of their rules, many of the elements of the current, consolidated mechanics would become suddenly obsolete and superfluous.

The “healers” are just a byproduct of the meta-game we played till today. Watching colored bars move up and down.

If you remove the meta-game mechanics, you also don’t need anymore the meta-game GUI since one goes along with the other. It’s simply another, different paradigm that would be founded on completely different elements.

At the point I’ve described, the UI becomes just superfluous.

Advanced aggro routines

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The recent ideas about the “dream mmorpg” (here below) were, as I wrote, mostly a provocation. I know that a game like that wouldn’t be possible right now for technical issues, but I wasn’t trying to portray something doable. I was instead pointing out an “aspiration”. I portrayed a destination, an ideal.

Those ideas came from a thread on FoH’s forums where again the issue of UI-intensive gameplay was brought up. It ties back with what I said about the healer problem and the valuable effort to move “past the interface”. Which is also what Tobold wrote in that article I linked.

I was trying to imagine and portray combat mechanics that could look realistic and feel more immersive. Evocate a particular “feel”. To do this the interface needs to go and the next step is about the “heresy” of removing healing classes. No health bars, so no possibility to toy with those bar, watching them jumping up and down. Aspiring to create classes that are all directly involved in the fight, in a realistic war. Not a puzzle game with different shapes and colors.

This is also what Raph’s laments suggest me (not only of course). Not completely different games, but the rediscovery of THIS genre and what it COULD suggest and evocate. The recovery of that immersiveness that seems completely lost and forgotten. Because there’s still endless potential in THIS genre without the need to invent dancing games and other batshit crazy social simulations. That’s not what I would like to see. That’s not where I expect and would like to see the innovation.

I don’t want the innovation “elsewhere”. I want it here. In the things I already love.

The point was:
– Is the interface needed as an aid for the players or to comply to some technical limitations?

As an answer to that question I tried to imagine a scenario free from those technical limitations. The fact that those ideas weren’t much practical and realistic doesn’t mean that there isn’t the possibility to already start to move in that direction. There are many possible ways to “translate” the majority of those rules into something realistically possible with the current technology and then move from there. What is important is to set a goal, to which we can aspire. An ideal to follow and to strive for. That was the purpose. That’s why I called it a “destination”. We aren’t there yet. Far from it. But that’s the direction where we should start moving to.

That said, Darniaq is ranting on his site about another recurring topic of this genre that again represents a barrier to the immersion and realism. It’s part of those consolidated stereotypes that seem impossible to eradicate: the respawns.

These are my ideas on the “respawns” and their implications. Ideas that in this case ARE possible with the technology currently available. Trying to demonstrating that we don’t need brand new *genres* to innovate, there’s still plenty to do here. These worlds have still a huge potential that the current, superficial implementations are making us forget.

“Design” here doesn’t mean anymore the “invention” of something brand new, never seen before (and it rarely means this, almost never). Design here becomes just a rediscovery of what is already there. Trying to scratch beyond the superficial level to have a glimpse of the abyss below.

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Advanced “aggro” routines

I believe that with an intelligent use of scripting and a regulation of the spawn points the great majority of the issues could easily go. So I don’t find this a limit of the technology.

Think for example about the skeletons. It wouldn’t be so hard to make them “emerge” from the ground realistically.

But I believe you are only looking at the lesser problem and not at the whole picture: aggro routines. Think for example to the example above. Yes, it would be cool to see those skeletons rising realistically from the terrain, with one hand coming out all at the sudden, then the arm, the shoulders and all the rest. But think if the hand comes out all at the sudden and GRABS YOUR FOOT.

What hasn’t been done and that would be TRULY immersive is a realistic behaviour of the aggro routines. We are used to see monster just standing still or waiting to be “pulled”. We are worried for the immersion if they “respawn”, but the immersion pretends a lot more than that.

My idea is not about the players ambushing the monster. My idea is about the monsters ambushing the players. The rule is: if you can see them, they can see you. How’s that? And not only. Some of my ideas are about the mobs noticing the players and start reacting BEFORE the players are aware of them, like the case of the skeleton grabbing all at the sudden your foot, or creatures lurking in the dark and preparing their attack before you are even aware of their presence.

Think about “Aliens”, if you are going to fight in their hive you aren’t going to have the headstart.

Realistic behaviors. It would mean a COMPLETELY different way to play. If you go fight near an orc camp and aren’t working actively to lurk away them one by one, they can call for help and bring on you the whole camp. If you fight on sight, they see you and charge. You would REALLY have to sneak around the place and be on your toes.

In general, I’d like to see a game where the players become preys and not exclusively hunters. And where the exploration and the adventure is enriched by a different approach that puts a value where now there’s just nothing.

The “dream mmorpg”

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This is mostly a provocation after the few details that emerged from Mythic’s Warhammer.

Warhammer is a SETTING. And it can be rendered in many different *styles*. We have PLENTY of examples of Warhammer in the cartoonish look, as we have about the much more “violent” and realistic look.

The point is NOT about who invented a cartoonish look before. The point is:
1- People would appreciate MUCH more a game looking realistic and that is completely different from WoW, exactly to DISTANCE Warhammer from it instead of looking like a bleached copy. This is what would MAKE SENSE even from a commercial point of view.
2- Mythic doesn’t handle this style well. It’s a lost battle fighting Blizzard right in their house.

That said, Tobold has a great piece pointing out some huge problems and limitations in all the current combat systems, without exceptions. I completely agree. I always liked ideas that try to go toward more realism and a more immersive experience. Remember those ideas he wrote while reading the wishes I’m going to add next.

If a MMORPG combat doesn’t *look* real, chances are that it isn’t much fun in the first place.

The “dream mmorpg”

Think to a PvP game only for now.

Erase completely the possibity to “target”. No targeting. No UI whatsoever. Nothing at all.

Add collision detection. Create a system with a “tactical combat”, without the frenetical button-mashing but where you swing your weapon directly and hit what is in front of you. Ranged weapons that behave like in reality, with realistic arcs and no “target-lock”, with the shields only protecting what’s directly behind them and letting exposed the other parts of the body. Add spell effects with a similar target system, where you aim for a location and then throw a fireball that continues to fly till it doesn’t hit something and then “explodes”, shaking the ground and dealing area damage to all the enemies near the impact, setting them on fire.

Forbid completely the possibility to target an opponent and receive informations about it through the UI. You can just see your hitpoints and your mana, the number of arrows and the possibility to quickly access your spellbook and inventory, but nothing else. You cannot see the effects on your enemies (if not graphically, like the effect of a DoT spell active or an arrow stuck on their bodies) as you cannot see them on your friends.

No healing classes or abilities if not bandages and medications that can be applied ONLY out of combat and that require time to start their effect.

Add spellcaster classes with spells that affect the spatial environment: like the possibility to create protective force fields, allowing those within to be protected from ranged attacks to an extent, or the possibilty to drop “walls of fire” that damage those crossing them, or freeze a zone of grass that will make people running on it slip and tumble around (bwahahah! This would be amazing), fireballs exploding and flinging people around on fire, magical walls of stone rising and preventing the players to pass and that need to be circumvent or demolished through “blunt” attacks or counterspells.

Healers? Who the hell needs them.

Give them the possibility to set people on FIRE, and then give them the possibility to invoke clouds and rain around the player to extinguish that fire.

Think about HUGE ogre characters, three times as big as a normal player but much, much slower. Give them wheeled carts and transform them into “music” classes playing huge, tribal drums (with real sounds coming out of them, that will be heard from miles away on the battlefield) triggering temporary bursts of positive effects like speed boosts or haste effects during a charge. And then let those ogres “wield” those drums with two hands and use them directly to smash other players in melee. With extremely slow attacks but SWEEPING whatever happens to be in a 60 degree arc in front of them, hurling people in the air if they happen to get hit.

Add charging horses, mounted, armored combat boars, war machines, ridable flying dragons. The possibility to break a dam and flood a whole area for defense. Quick, smallish goblin and slow, bigger orcs with blunt, rudimental weapons. Elf races that “dance” on the battlefield, hard to get hit, with quick, sharp attacks chained together and teaming up with other players for special attacks, but extremely vulnerable to a charge or an attack that smashes and pins them down. And what about the proficency with ranged weapons (rate of fire and precision) since we have a sistem absolutely perfect to support these racial traits?

Ritual spells chained by one of more spellcaster that, if not broken or countered, would trigger fearsome effects, like meteor swarms or opening chasms in the ground, devouring those who get caught within. The possibility to call storms and thunders.

Create completely different styles of combat for each race and class, with a completely different feel and impact, different rates of attack, movement speed, types of weapons, different mechanics. Add situational, external elements to the character like the war machines, transports, mounts. Sieges on castles with realistic ladders on the walls that can be pushed out to make the players fall on the ground, boiling oils melting those who pass below between the screams, crumbling walls that crush those nearby.

I said “PvP only” because that’s where these concepts work better. But what about replacing the loss of the health bars and icons with the creature behaving differently depending on the damage received and its health and morale?

How’s that? Would it be… “fun”?