Monthly Archives: July 2006

What I’d do if I was Bioware

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Nothing about mmorpgs, I just wanted to dream about something that I know will never happen. You’ll have to let me wish impossible things.

Put together a small/medium sized team, but with all the key roles covered (artists, programmers, writers, designers etc..), take the 2D Infinity Engine and give it another round of polish, make sure it is up to date and compatible with the latest hardware, add support for a couple of new features and nifty effects, then take the whole pack (the original Baldur’s Gate + expansion and BG2 + expansion) and work to streamline and unify it into a single, seamless game, add to the mix David Gaider’s Ascension (here), Tactics Mod and Baldurdash fixes (odd coincidence: Kevin Dorner seems still alive and updated his site just yesterday after a LONG time with the release of the “unofficial” Oblivion patch), add an handful of new monsters, revise and enhance all AI scripts, polish the whole content throughout the two games and expansions, making sure the flow is good, add some new rooms and locations here and there, some new dialogues, fun bits, some spice, a few new items, and a brand new charismatic NPC with related side-stories and content, to fit with the whole storyline, from BG1 to the very end.

Then let this team work full time on this project for about a year, a year and half and then repackage the whole thing as a remastered edition to be sold for $30-$40.

I wonder if it would be possible even if they wanted to, since the rights of those games may be spread between Interplay, Bioware, Black Isle, Atari and WoTC. I guess it isn’t so simple as I imagine.

And yeah, I know that various mod teams have already tried to hack something like this together in a playable state, but it just cannot be compared with something done by a professional team working full time on it.

The point here is that I bet it would be a HUGE commercial success with a very good cost/profit ratio. It could be a very interesting experiment and I truly believe that it would outplay most of recently released games.

Note: While digging the recent developments of the mod community I found out that there has been a significant progress. It looks like what I pictured is now possible and is supposed to work well enough. Project’s name is Baldur’s Gate Trilogy or BGT in short (forum here). Since BGT is now WeiDU-based I guess it can be easily integrated with Ascension. There’s also another named BP+BGT which not only unifies the two BG and expansions, but also incorporates all the major community mods that were completed along these years. The installation process is looking crazier that the “Falcon 4 dance” and I suppose you cannot expect the same quality of Bioware in the art assets and content, but it’s still quite amazing what these communities have accomplished.

Again, game companies should take notes.

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Trapped in a cubicle with transparent walls

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More things to say. In the previous post I underlined the other perspective. The fact that a “dialogue” can be a necessity of the developer with a priority over a need of the community.

Another important assumption is that the dialogue is collaborative, two-ways. For example in this case Lum wrote something, but it’s *me* who started a dialogue and it’s Lum that will kill it by not replying (a reasonable assumption).

You know? I really do HATE these latest trends with the “blogs”. It’s not a case that I’m still quite active in the forums. I dread a scenario where everyone has a place where to write and is entitled his own opinions. Everyone with his own ideas and beliefs, his protected, secluded space. Blogging is a danger.

Where the fuck is the dialogue if there is no real confrontation? If there isn’t a conflict, an exchange of opinions, a challenge? Where is the synthesis? The dialectic?

It’s like if we have all these blogs, but we all ignore each other. Like if we live trapped, each in his own cubicle with transparent walls, but you cannot move to reach out and actually have a confrontation. Everything passive, convoluted and, in the end, absolutely useless, meaningless.

This past week I’ve seen an amusing Argentinean movie hypothesizing a society where people don’t cook anymore. They simply order food from “Tiffany’s”. The food will arrive in record time, delivered directly to your home, still hot. They don’t make food, they fulfill your dreams. They can prepare every kind of food you can imagine, the exact way you desire it. In this kind of society noone eats together anymore. Every single person has his own particualr favourite food that is different from everyone else. In this society there aren’t anymore any kind of relationships because everyone is on his own, with his own personal desires, promptly delivered and fulfilled. No need anymore to deal with others, confrontate, find compromises. To the point that the only normal relationship will be the result of a mistake: two orders are accidentally swapped and the wrong food delivered to the wrong person, which will lead to two people meeting and then rediscover a kind of relationship that didn’t exist anymore (basically they make sex).

That’s pretty much the awful trend I’m noticing. We have all these blogs but it’s like a new way to completely ignore each other. Everyone just has his own personal space. Instead of creating a community or a culture, instead of participating together, we are just sailing toward isolation. We are losing identity, belonging to a group. Building something together.

And you know the trend. We are moving toward a future where each player will be able to create his own, personal mmorpg. What a FRIGHTENING NIGHTMARE!

If we don’t meet together anymore, if we don’t confrontate, if we don’t work together, well… we are going to lose everything.

Everything.

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Too scared to move steps

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This is in reply to what Lum wrote about community managment. I couldn’t disagree more.

Picture the guy who’s been plucked from the community of gamers and is LIVING HIS DREAM! He gets to WORK ON GAMES! WOOOH! And MMOS! HOOAH! It’s the big show, and every day… every FREAKING DAY he’s sitting in on a meeting planning out incredibly cool stuff that is going to ROCK YOUR WORLD OFF, and he just has to tell SOMEONE… and then the producer gets to deal with the community seeing yesterday’s brainstormed three bagger as a promise with the weight of Holy Writ.

I just cannot picture a situation in which a significant portion of the players are playing a game because of devs promises. That only works for beta hype, and not so well even in that case.

Players choose their games and get deeply involved in them when they like them. When they are caught in. And when they are caught in, as it happens with every activity you dedicate to, they develop their own ideas, perception and expertise. The dialogue here can be good for a very simple reason: it could lead to a better game.

It’s the “better game” that the players judge and react to, in the end. Nothing else. If one of the devs goes to explain and discuss an idea in detail this just means that he is analyzing a potential, opening a confrontation, a research. It just means that he considers that idea potentially interesting for the game and he is examining all the different faces it presents.

It can be then implemented or not. In stages or all at once. It’s mostly a matter of prioritizing what needs to go in sooner than later. Have a good grasp of the overall structure, define a good long term plan and “vision” for the game.

All these things are possible and useful again for a precise goal: make the game a better game.

And at the end the players will decide to play if the game is good enough. And not because of devs promises.

If they rant, let them rant. The problem isn’t about keeping them quiet. The problem is about interpreting what they are saying. And search a dialogue in the measure you find it useful. It’s a need that should come spontaneously and not imposed. What is important is to remove the self-censorship, the discouragement. Which is what Lum actively promotes, instead.

It has been my whole point for all these years: there’s nothing to be scared about. No reason for damage-control. What matters in the end is the game. The dialogue is useful only in the case where the necessity of it comes directly from the developer.

From a pragmatic point of view: NEVER force the developers to talk with players. But instead let them absolutely free to establish the kind of relationship they find more useful. Without any form of self-censorship, control, inhibition or whatever. There isn’t really anything to worry about, if not the potential loss of one of the most useful resources that a mmorpg has: the community.

Is this too naive? Or maybe just free of unfounded fears.

A note: CCP is *contantly* promising and failing to deliver. This becomes a delusion for a lot of players, me included. But it doesn’t change the fact that they are keeping pushing the game, set interesting goals, trying to make the game a better game. And people are there for the ride because they recognize themselves in those objectives. Both in contemporaneity (what the game is today), and future (what the game will be tomorrow). The journey between those two states will be always filled with mistakes and misunderstandings. The points is about deciding whether the community can hinder or help that process.

Another example: the Honor system in WoW was firstly implemented around April of the last year (If I remember correctly). I, along with others, started to rant heavily against it in January, when the first details were disclosed. More than one year later Blizzard recognizes that the system didn’t work as they expected. There was no dialogue to be had.

Maybe even with a dialogue the Honor system would have been implemented exactly as it is now, maybe the dialogue could have lead to a better acknowledgement and a better solution. At the end the dialogue or lack of it wouldn’t have created a greater discontent or a dissatisfaction. The game did.

While the endless efforts from the community managers to justify the system, doing damage-control, trying to convince how the system was going to be open to casual players just because casuals are the majority and so on. All superfluous for a very simple reason: it was a fake dialogue with a puppet.

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Young and naive

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It is really surprising how FoH’s fans had their mind warped after playing so much EverQuest. It’s like brainwashing. They can just rinse, repeat and desire what they’ve been taught, without any hope to recover.

There’s a real masochistic nature, here. From a comment I spotted:

UO had no level system, and very little progression in their skill system. There was thus little barrier to consuming content, making UO a short term game.

Levels (or a good substitute) add a great deal to any game. The key points being the limiting of consumption of content and the game world as a dynamic place through the change of the player.

I mean, for some experienced players who actually understand game mechanics these claims are rather ridiculous and shouldn’t even deserve to be discussed since they are so obviously wrong. But what amazes me (and the reason why I’m writing about this) is the way a game “shaped the perceptions”. EverQuest somewhat damaged the mmorpg space, pretty much as Diablo was able to kill a true “RPG spirit”.

This kind of process is both negative and positive, I think. It can be positive because I see a demonstration of the fact that the players are like “believers without beliefs”. Waiting to be seduced. A good game doesn’t really build on top of previous values, instead it creates them from the void. Those values weren’t there before, but then they exist and they become tangible for so many players. It’s an active power of influence.

About that quote here above, what about publishing books written so small that you get an headache after a couple of pages? This, obviously, in the interest of the writer, the publisher and the reader. Let’s make thing harder just for the sake of it. It’s really a completely warped perception of value and worth. And it’s obviously masochistic from every point of view.

You could argue that the process is positive because it leads to a stronger community (harsh environment, social ties needed) but then it’s kind of obvious that you do not encourage community-building through barriers or processes of selection. While it can work better if you remove those barriers and go for processes of inclusion. Instead of actively going against them.

The point is quite simple. There just isn’t any concrete relationship between a satisfying “progression” and barriers between players and content. That was just a blunt system that stupidified the progression in a simplistic, elementary scheme that was just the bare minimum of an idea that was supposed to develop and evolve from there. It’s like taking the “progression” term and apply it literally, losing completely the idea of what it really meant.

Then it is obvious why EverQuest is considered a game for obsessive-compulsive players. It’s like being a “marine”, you are taught all you need to know and do. From there onward you are supposed to shutdown your brain and just execute instrutions. It’s the obliteration of the “roleplay”, or better: the free will. EverQuest is like the industrial age. People are taught to be cogs and be functional to the system. Do not take initiative, no questions, no doubts, no consciousness. Just an hypnotic repetition that slowly brainwashes you till your mind is shaped to understand and be functional only to those elementary structures.

Where’s the “progress” in this? Where’s the progress in the absolute repetition? In the total absence of the new?

Isn’t “progress” all about creating new dynamics? And where are the new dynamics if the world is so precisely defined and structured that nothing within it can change. Where is the progress if nothing can be learnt or discovered? What a wicked idea of progress is this if it doesn’t include any kind of choice?

This is what amazes me. Not that a game like EverQuest imposed a model that could have been perfectioned, but that it convinced the players to believe in values that are the EXACT OPPOSITE of the truth. A “negative” of the real world. And this is again why I find this process wrong and good at the same time. Wrong because it’s teaching people wrong things and having a strong, negative influence that seem to contaminate and spread more and more, uncontrollably. Good because it’s a demonstration that NOTHING is set and you can easily overthrow this stupid, wicked system if you only try.

It’s an open door. A game can easily build its system of values and shouldn’t worry at all about offering something that the players aren’t used to. Because those values and beliefs are volatile. It’s a kind of space where the strongest founding rule can be blown away in a second. Insects with an inch-sized perspective. I believe that players are ready for “something new”. Just because the traditions we can see and analyze now are so weak and temporary. There’s really little of what we see now that is solid enough to be able to resist for years.

And that’s again the point. What is missing in the mmorpg space is an “opportunity”. The opportunity to try something new that is based on more solid principles and that can work better. The “audience” is irrelevant because right now the public is used to a system so broken that just exists and is strong because… there are no worthwhile alternatives. No other perspectives. A narrow sight that is persisting just because noone is standing up to go open the window.

I mean, the games we have today are a demonstration of a complete lack of faith in the intelligence and perception of the people. As if we believe that the players out there really only understand “progression” as a linear, numeric one shaped as a treadmill and that their brains cannot grasp anything slightly more complex or dynamic. Brainless games because we believe that people don’t have a conscience or the possibility to think with their head, the possibility to learn and discover new things, but just execute the commands they’ve been passed and repeat them endlessly.

If you start with that mindset then, obviously, you can just ruin things with your own hands. Nothing good will came out of that.

I cannot believe there’s so much lack of faith. There isn’t really any reason or motivation to create games if we are doomed like that, if a game is just a way to waste some time.

I don’t see all this as “progression”. In fact that’s the absolute absence of it. And one day I’m sure we’ll all laugh at those silly ideas as we do today when thinking to when people believed that it was the sun to move around the earth.

A matter of perspectives. So young and naive we were.