Tag Archives: Game Design

I believe that many if not the majority of the woes in this industry are imputable to people sitting on the wrong chairs

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A stab at Raph, part 2 :)

This time less flaming but still strong and provoking (I hope). And again a direct reply.

By the way, I throw in another heresy: I believe that in a company everyone should be paid equally. From the president to the tools programmer there shouldn’t be distinctions of merit. “Game designer” shouldn’t be a promotion from another level, it’s just a different duty, equally important and fundamental. Hierarchies within a company are a big mistake from my point of view and the first reason that brings to my accusation in the title. People should strive to do in their life what they do better, not what is defined and then perceived as more qualifying of the personal value.

Problems start from there and bleed all over the place.

Actually go and reward more those duties that are always disqualified and noone wants to do.

Invert the ladder.

—
Hmm.. Hmm..

I’ll have to think more later about this. I read it as if those four steps work in a hierarchy, where you are free to choose one and put it at the top, dominating the others.

I’m not convinced by the last two because you bring the example of your “healing game” for the metaphoric level which instead I consider JUST mechanical. And I also think the narrative level blends with it. I find hard to separate the two.

The point is that I see those levels much more dependent one from the other. Your “healing game” instead was a metaphor completely independent from the mechanical layer (spurious). So, that example started from the metaphor or from the mechanic?

I see the whole discussion like this: if it started as a pure mechanic it would hardly translate in that type of metaphor. I mean, If I have that mechanic I’m probably going to present it in a different flavor when I go to choose which metaphor is more appropriate. If instead it started from the metaphor, well, again I would design the mechanic to be MUCH different and more appropriate to the metaphor. To achieve better the communication of that metaphor.

Which also means: despite I recognize the hierarchy, sometimes the result is the same whether you start from the end or the beginning (as things are connected).

So, from my point of view, you can take it either way and that example is still something that doesn’t make sense.

– Were I to do a game “about healing” I would be starting with the metaphor.

If this is true, it means that the mechanical level would STRONGLY depend on the metaphor. Again following the model as a hierarchy where you decide to start from the metaphor and, from there, figure out the other parts. Tabula rasa. You start from a blank paper, set a point wherever you want, and then start to draw the first lines. The rest will be progressively derived accordingly to what is on top of the hierarchy. So everything is connected.

If you see them as hierarchies, I agree that those level exist and they are always ALL present in every game. I also agree that you can freely reorder the hierarchy as you want. We have concrete examples for every possibility.

That said, I believe there’s a “bias” and we are definitely, unavoidably going in a precise direction that is the one of the metaphor (the one I’d say should be higher on the hierarchy). Even the cinema started with the technical experiments to then move to bring up the emotions. I see a definite progression where the mechanical level will be progressively overshadowed and enslaved by the other levels. For example there are “narrative techniques” to obtain certain effects, but these techniques are bent to be functional to the narrative.

Games in general have always been more tightly connected to the mechanical level, also because they started from the *interaction*. But I think that, whether we like it or not, we are going toward the emotional, symbolic level where the mechanics will become progressively hidden. As with the use of computer graphic in a movie, the best case is the one where you don’t see it, where this technical level becomes completely functional to the narrative needs. As I wrote in the post you linked, we are made of symbols.

Let me rephrase: games in general has always been more tightly connected to the mechanical levels, because there’s a definite predominance of programmers and because “game design” has always been considered superfluous.

I believe that many if not the majority of the woes in this industry are imputable to people sitting on the wrong chairs.

The more we’ll see genuine game designers and not programmers-recycled-designers (through the social treadmill called “promotion”), the more the games will start to shapeshift into something else. And the technical constraints will loosen up.

When this will happen games will finally truly become a “medium”. Hopefully shying away from becoming completely autoreferential as 99% of the garbage that arrives on TV and instead telling us something valuable about ourselves and the world outside.

This breakdown is, perhaps, why game designers must be multidisciplinary.

I continue to disagree on this point. Game designers “may” be multidisciplinary. It’s surely useful and helpful. But not “obligatory”. That’s just blindness from my point of view.

Knowledge can help but it isn’t everything, nor what is truly important. As you don’t need to go to a writing school if you want to become a writer. I just refuse to codify this, there are many different approaches and the game designer with the most knowledge isn’t going to be the one univocally making the best games.

He’ll have an advantage, but I wouldn’t give that advantage a fundamental role.

Actually I’d say that designers should know the less possible about programming, if not the general ropes to be able to comminicate with the actual programmers and share the same language. But they should retain a very high-level approach to it. Another person should have the duty to connect the two and define the systems more suitable to reach the goals set.

Not because knowing the programming would be useless, of course, but because it becomes also a danger. It strictly codifies the way you approach a problem. It becomes a cage that isn’t always easy to escape. Having different points of view is important, but you risk to get trapped into one.

Technical bits about the “automated NPCs”

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This is a follow-up to my idea to use NPCs as a “work force” to do the boring chores for the players whenever they don’t want to bother. Again, please notice that there is a CHOICE. I *want* the sandbox. I want the focus on multiple activities beside combat. I want these to MATTER and be interesting and hopefully FUN. But I still want the players to have a choice and the possibility to unload what THEY consider a boring duty on a automated process.

I know that the idea is technically hard to implement, because I cannot just blink and have a complex system of AI and world pathing automatically implemented. So I know it wasn’t realistic. But to arrive to it I had built a project that worked on top of what I considered feasible, using the same functionalities that I can find in other games, just mingled together to obtain the result I desired.

I didn’t add these technical details because the post was already too long on its own. So here some details not about the design theory behind, but about the implementation itself.

The user-programming of the NPC schedules isn’t complex at all and works as a “connect-the-dots” game. You have a screen with the detailed map of a zone, you select one of the NPCs under your control and then start “plotting” the schedule on the map. The dots/waypoints aren’t put there by the players. All the waypoints and actions available for selection are HARDCODED. Each zone will have all the possible dots, junctions and actions “greyed-out” and available for selection. You can recombine these elements the way you like, connect the waypoints the way you like (if you see they can be possibly connected) and select the actions that are available in that point. But all these possible dots, junctions and actions are set by the developers as the map is created.

A basic, readable scripted language made of “chunks” that the players can recombine by interacting with it through a braindead interface.

Interface:
Left mouse button – Selects and “connects-the-dots”, adding waypoints and linking them together
Right mouse button – Opens a contextual menu for each waypoint, listing all the possible actions/logics for the NPC on that point

All the schedule-programming of the NPC is supposed to work through the mouse. As you connect these dots and select the actions, you’ll see the NPC schedule as a scripted language in a window below the map. You can use the mouse interface to plot everything on the map as you can just type the commands yourself if you so choose. With the possibility to save these “programs” and reuse them as “quick templates” for other NPCs.

The language could then include “advanced” functions like waiting times, time checks and other simple logic operators with basic “if..then” conditions and loops. If some players need them but still have difficulties using them, there are still the message boards where I’m sure you would find plenty of templates to reuse.

And please notice that this would form a strategic, embedded game that could be already terribly fun and addicting on its own.

If this idea is STILL too complex, well… Let’s just stop to complain about innovation and settle with what we have available right now.

Sandboxes and “moisture farmers” simulations are DAMN boring

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Haemish:
Not to mention the fact that sandbox games often become very time-intensive games, by the very nature of being a world instead of easily digestible chunks of entertainment. Most people just don’t have the time to devote, or don’t want to spend the time to devote to a game like that. That’s why I claim sandbox and PVP-heavy world games will always be niche products.

As has been said a billion times over in a billion galaxies far far away, Star Wars fans didn’t want to a moisture farmer, they wanted to be a Stormtrooper going PEW PEW with blasters, or they wanted to a Jedi with a ZEOW ZEOW or a starpilot with a VOOM VOOM. All that other shit was fine (or would have been if not wrapped in a shitburger bun of bugginess), but it wasn’t mass market and never will be.

That quote summarizes effectively the common complains against “sandbox” games. This isn’t intended as another attack to Raph, but just a digression on some ideas I have about these sandboxes that seem to have the innate flaw of being filled with boring activities that no one wants to deal with or has time to.

All those complaints are true. We can take a semi-successful game like Eve-Online, the best sandbox and PvP game out there at the moment, and the very first complaint we’ll hear is that it is boring. In fact it HAS boring activities. Grinding missions is boring, travel is boring, hauling stuff and trade is boring, mining is boring. And so on. All these are boring activities that we suffer in this game because there’s something in the background that starts to “emerge”. The control of territories, the tensions between the alliances and all the other forms of emergent gameplay that make this game unique compared to more directed and caged games where the players have very little control over what they can do and the direction that the game can take. It’s like saying that the qualities of a sandbox come with a price.

It seems as if, to achieve the latter (the emergence), you are obliged to make the game boring and force the players to invest incredible amounts of time in their “simulated life”. So we get comments like, “I already have a job, I don’t need another”.

Okay. If you ask Raph about these problems he will say that the “embedded mini-games” that are part of a sandbox should be all equally fun. Crafting, harvesting resources, dancing… All these activities shouldn’t be sidelines, but fun games on their own. Equally significant possibilities that need to be reiterated and polished till they are all fun and entertaining.

My idea on these problems is instead rather simple and straightforward and something I already explained here and there writing about my “dream mmorpg”. If you go see the tripartite model on which this ideal game is based, you’d notice that the first level is dedicated to the sandbox, the PvP/conquest game where the players fight each other, conquer and manage territories. There isn’t just the combat, but the full simulation of a world, in as many “realistic” aspects as possible. The war is just the context that motivates the rest. Alike to Eve-Online there are also a bunch of boring activities included with the package. As an example there is no “mail” system. Objects (some of them) cannot be teleported around at will. The conquest game relies on a resources system that is used to pay the upkeep costs if you want to maintain the control over a zone and manage it, and they exist persistently in the game-world. To gather and use these resources you’d have to harvest and collect them and then haul them to different zones, opening up the level of the commerce since not all the resources should be uniformly available everywhere.

This description is similar to what happens in Eve-Online. To conquer territories and build player-controlled stations the players need to engage in a bunch of boring and semi-boring activities that can go from mining asteroids, haul the mineral and goods around the universe, patrol zones, escort important cargos and so on. Again, the whole game is in the hands of the players, so are the players to manage and use every element at their will. They could try to avoid what they don’t find entertaining, but it’s just not possible if you want to participate in the game since all those parts have a strong role to play in the greater context and cannot be easily dismissed and forgotten.

My idea revolves around the role of NPCs. These NPCs would serve two purpose in a player-driven world:
1- Provide a minimal level of defense to the territories when the players aren’t around
2- Automate the boring activities

If there’s something boring in the game but that still needs to be done to make the game “work”, why not pass the burden on the NPCs and automate the process while the players can engage in something more fun? Crafting, gathering resources, patrol zones, transport goods etc… All these activities could be easily “offloaded” on the NPCs. The players could still do everything by themselves. They could still organize a convoy to transport some resources to a different zone, go patrol a territory on their own. But only if they choose so. It’s not obligatory. You can either do it yourself, or offload tasks you deem boring to an NPC.

Conquering and “managing” a territory would mean being able to spawn NPCs. Like in a RTS where you create “peons” units and send them to mine gold or cut down trees for the wood.

The paradigm is capsized: not anymore the players are working for the NPCs, but are the NPCs to work for the player. The kings in this world won’t be static NPCs sitting in the throne room, but the players who lead the armies and control the territories. The players becoming the pivot of the game.

So you would have the possibility and the duty to spawn NPC units by using the resources available, equip them, keep them well fed (as long maintenance is required) and give them simple tasks they will perform. Same to what happens in a RTS.

Of course there’s always a risk. Let’s take an example scenario:
You need to transport a batch of important goods from a region to another. These goods are heavy and you calculate that you’ll need about three wagons to be able to transfer them all at once. The region where they need to be delivered is distant but the route to it looks relatively safe. Now you have a choice. The wagons are very slow and they only move on roads. You can decide to escort the caravan personally, maybe with the help of some of your friends to be able to fight back if the caravan is spotted by a group of enemy players that is camping a bridge or a crossroad. Or you could just assign a number of “NPC guards” to the caravan and hope that they will be sufficient to safely escort it to destination. During this travel three “odds” could happen, the first is that the caravan is attacked by a roaming group of creatures, the second is that it is attacked by enemy players and the third is that a cart breaks and needs to be repaired (so a time loss).

Studying the route you see that only the last possibility is actually risky so you decide to send the convoy on its own and then go meet it later to escort it only for the last part. While plotting the route you’ll get precise approximation about when the convoy will reach a specific point. Let’s say that you want to meet the convoy before it reaches the last bridge, that you believe may be camped by enemy players. The travel till that point is estimated to last three hours. Tomorrow you’ll be online at 10PM and you should be able to organize a group with your guild to escort personally the convoy, so you schedule the convoy to start at 8PM, thinking that you’ll be able to reach it at the meeting point with your group around 11PM or before.

There’s still the risk. The convoy could be assaulted by a group of enemy players infiltrated in your territory or get slowed down by problems (the carts breaking and requiring time to repair) or attacked by roaming creatures. This last possibility is the less worrying since you know the territory and know how many guards you need to assign to the caravan for it to be safe. But to reduce the risks you could always ask a friend to go meet the convoy at a point to check if everything is okay, if it is on time and if the guards are still all alive. If they aren’t your friend could spawn some more to reassign them. Or maybe stop the convoy at the nearby village or re-plot the route because a battle started not far away, on the road that the convoy is supposed to follow.

Once a convoy (or any other NPC under your direct control) is out of sight, you don’t receive anymore information from it, if not after a one-hour delay. If some of them die you’ll only know an hour later. Plus, you don’t have detailed information about their positions, to find them you would need to use another system that will be pricey, so not always convenient. This opens up to the possibilities of the enemy players.

Enemy players can attack convoys for many reasons, they can damage the carts and slow down the convoy, or even steal the goods and capture your NPCs (which will swap faction after a set amount of time after being captured). Plus they can behead the dead NPCs and impale their heads to leave “landmarks” in the location of the battle. As a sign and dare to the enemy realm, a sort of gruesome “we were here”. Why this? Because while you can know if an NPC dies through the UI, you still cannot know how it died or where. If the convoy is attacked by creatures it is possible that the cart is sitting there with most of the goods intact, so recoverable. It makes a sense for the players to try to find out what happened and for the enemy players the choice to “clean” the area to not leave any trace or decide leave a sign of their passage as a challenge.

This was just an example but it works to explain how different elements can add to the gameplay. The possibility to take the NPCs as prisoners instead of killing them, impale their heads, destroy the convoy completely or steal the goods (only in the case they also have something to transport them, of course, being slowed down themselves too). These aren’t just combat mechanics, but a richer context that creates a “world” under the full control of the players. With the possibility to automate (at a risk) all the tasks that are felt too boring or repetitive. The game doesn’t force anymore the players toward something they don’t like. We have the NPCs and it make sense to leave the boring work to them.

Then you can even continue to add depth, like adding an experience system even for the NPCs that survive their task, so that they “level up”, gain perks and so on… They would become like secondary characters, with their generated name (that the player could manually override, of course) and rank, maybe developing situational skills and competencies (think to the specialization system of the units used in Civ 4).

The real purpose of this idea is to kill the “grind”. You schedule the NPCs to do their work and continue to play what you consider fun while automating what you consider boring. Hey, there may be even players that like to harvest, craft, patrol and escort instead of going to fight the battles. And they would have the possibility to do so without using NPCs, and with the advantage of being able to perform those activities with an increased efficiency. The system gives you just a choice. The choice to choose that part of the gameplay you find interesting, focusing on it completely or do a bit of everything in the measure you choose. Without FORCING obligatory chores on you.

In Eve-Online all these ideas could easily fit. You could have the possibility to set up NPCs miners, equip them and give them simple schedules so that they could go mining for you while you are involved into something you consider more fun or even while offline. The same for transporting commodities to another part of the galaxy. Giving the side to the risk that the convoys could be attacked by enemy corporations.

Automating tasks doesn’t mean that these tasks happen out of the game, of course. This idea wouldn’t work on an instanced game space or one exclusively PvE where everything is protected and predictable. But it becomes valuable on a full, persistent world. Where the automated NPCs are “real” entities that perform the tasks in the same way a player would, while remaining vulnerable.

The perfect “sandbox”.

There isn’t anymore the need to struggle to make boring activities fun even when they obviously cannot become so, no matter how hard you try. A level of realism is needed so that the game has a decent scope, or we would have just a big, superficial arcade that isn’t going to make anything interesting (no dynamism, no emergent gameplay, no choices. Just the same treadmill and linear direction). So we are back at the original quote up there. These sandboxes aren’t doomed to have boring, unavoidable parts. We don’t even need to transform every little chore that is needed to support the emergent level into something fun. Because there’s always the possibility to automate those activities that the players don’t want to deal with.

Requiring two obligatory premises that already exist in EvE and in my original idea:
1) The world must be persistent
2) The world must support full PvP

This is the sandbox: the players as the center of the world, with the NPCs at their service.

(follow-up)

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.

—

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”?

Eve-Online: still niche?

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This last Sunday Eve set a new record of active users online at the same time: 23.811

That number beats even City of Heroes highest daily peak, with the difference that those are also spread between fifteen servers. So, still niche?

The subscription numbers are the highest between the mmorpgs not coming from the major, consolidated companies and, probably, already above some major licences. The gap between other medium-sized games (but with zero growth) like DAoC is quickly growing thinner.

Eve launched nearly three years ago (5 May 03) and is picking up just now, again demolishing the assumptions about product life cycles, players chasing the “new shiney” and the predominance of the fantasy settings. This despite the game has a very, very bad accessibility and a type of gameplay that most players don’t feel effective.

A week ago the whole server cluster running the game has been replaced with 64bit hardware to buy some space for the growing playerbase:

tranquility returned at 0019 gmt, eve is reborn
reported by kieron | 2006.02.22 19:11:27

The Hardware Upgrade has been completed, Tranquility has returned with 70 dual-core, dual-CPU AMD Opteron LS20 Blades in 5 new IBM Blade Center Chassis.

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reported by Oveur | 2006.02.22 20:40:36

Well, this upgrade went according to plan. Ok, not according to plan, it went a lot better than planned and for a while we were wondering if we were really CCP anymore, delivering before the schedule. We’re at least grateful that this upgrade was the one Mr. Murphy took a vacation from and we think you’ll agree.

It hasn’t been a completely smooth road though. Our websites (which also moved to the new hosting center) have had dns problems, the load balancing protocols has been acting up causing three days of intermittent availability and our download service didn’t propagate the mini-patch which told the client to connect to the new Tranquility IP address.

Next, we intend to upgrade our database layer to 64-bit 4-processor monsters allowing us to cram in a “couple” of Gigabytes of RAM. Does 64 Gig worth sound ok to you? It does to me! We’re also looking into more RAMSAN solid state disk storage in that upgrade. Nothing but the best for EVE! ;)

There’s a new patch nicknamed “Blood” scheduled to go live this Thursday (2 March) with more server-side optimizations and (finally) the addition of the four new asian-themed bloodlines. Plus a bunch of other minor tweaks and fixes. The patch notes are available here (but you need a valid account).

And this is just the beginning before the next major update (Kali), scheduled for June. Even if you can safely bet it will be delayed.

The game is alive and kicking. It seems things are starting just now.

Beside the elements of success already underlined in the past, I think that a big role is being played by the business model. We discussed in the last months about removing the barriers between the players and work on a game world more consistent and coesive. Where all the elements are connected together. But the very first step to achieve these goals is about approaching the development so that those solutions are made possible.

Eve-Online doesn’t have a fragmented dev team between the expansions and live content, they don’t shift the developers from a position to another and from a project to another. The development process itself is built as something coesive and consistent. The major content patches aren’t limited to improve the “margins” of the game, adding more zones and content at the perimeter of a mudflated, arid model that isn’t advanced in any way (and that the developers are actually SCARED to even look at). Instead there are core progressions on all levels. The game is taken, observed and maintained as a unit. The players aren’t selected and divided by the expansions, instead these expansions are IMPOSED on everyone. They aren’t optional, they are mandatory because they are part of the game at all levels. Without lines of division. Truly delivering the myth of “ongoing development” that isn’t just limited to maintain and stretch the life cycle of a dead-end.

A “sandbox” game also needs a whole new approach to the development. Eve has it and is demonstrating its validity. Even if its accessibility barriers are still chocking its full potential:

The average EVE player only stays for 7 months.

Every single game that aims to move away from the linear model (from point A -> to point B), needs also to steer away from the standard development process. This is an obligatory requirement. Not anymore an option.

Hoax:
In the Diku clones, different play-styles can barely interact with each other. If one friend is playing his first MMO and catass’ing to the extreme he will leave the other guys in his dust and they will not be able to do content he can. Meanwhile your saying he’s a shitty friend if he doesn’t want to go repeat content he already repeated 100 times to get where he is now?

Bullshit.

The system sucks, it stops people from playing with the people they want to play with.

Sure, f13’ers are starting to reach a level of MMO-maturity that they know how to avoid this, look at the EQ2 guys. The people who play tons spread their playtime over 2-5 characters while those who are ultra casual just level one. Meanwhile there is the whole sidekick/exemplar/whatever system so that they can make more efforts to play together.

In EvE, we dont have as many of these stupid problems.

a) offline training means there is no required /played to access content.
b) EvE lends itself well to solo + chat play.
c) The different playstyles fit together nicely, in WoW a crafter is off in stupid zones hitting up resource nodes and a pvper will never see him. In EvE the crafter wants the combat characters around to cover them while they mine. The industrial players are the ones that make the corp strong, combat characters provide BPO’s (when we can afford them) for items we repeatedly need for war.

But for people who are just getting into MMO’s they almost invariably will have a hard time playing with the people they originally set out to play with, just too many things that are setup to divide the population into sub-groups. Raiding is not the only culprit but it is by far and away the worst.

Simply put: in a “systemic” game world all elements are tied together, the dots are connected. Each element has a “weight” in the system that affects everyone else.

In a systemic model:
– The players are brought together. The model is represented as a circumference, where the players/dots create groups or “cells” and move within while bouncing one against the other (creating alliances, conflicts, politics etc..). The space belongs to them (known) and is “managed”.

In a linear model:
– The players are spread apart. The model is represented as a segment, where the players are pointed toward an obligatory direction and have a set position that “qualifies” them toward the other players. The space is external, alien (unknown) and only conquered and progressively consumed.

By delving some more it is possible to transform those two into cultural models but I won’t do that here. Which one is more appropriate for an online game? You choose.

And yes, mmorpgs work as living bodies.

Quick note on death systems

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This ties back to some thoughts about death penalties, permdeath and all the other silly ideas that recursively come up in the discussions. It come up in a thread about Vanguard but my comments are in general.

Shorter and straight to the point.

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Simply put, harsh death penalties make you aim lower and lower (and grind more and more), bland death penalties make you aim higher and higher (and retry and challenge).

In two words: risk mitigation.

The process described is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of creating tension. It is about removing it in potential. It’s about encouraging the boredom and repetition.

What you didn’t “get” is that harsh death penalties (and harsh environments in particular) create “community”.

Also. Don’t confuse again journey with destination. “Risk” and “tension” are good in the *journey* (WoW has plenty of these). If we reduce the risk and tension to just a penalty on the experience points, we only continue to put the focus on the wrong element.

So yes, there’s good tension and bad tension.