(enjoy the proverbial “wall of text”)

I comment this because most of the points Babylona proposed touch my “dream mmorpg” I was planning. Some of the ideas are now almost 7-8 years old, coming from when I was working on a MUD that never got actualized. So it’s all stuff I’m carrying along from a *very long time*.

To begin with I have to say that Babylona’s starting point is already half-broken. The “I wonder how that kind of thing might be done in games” doesn’t work because we are talking of completely different genres, with different goals and principles, going toward diametrically opposite directions. In fact that discussion is more relevant if applied to MUDs and the other “roleplay” variations like MUSH and MUCK. In those types of game the roleplay depth of a character has a meaning and a purpose. It can be the focus. This doesn’t work on the common commercial mmorpgs because they are completely focused on the function. Raph isolated this brilliantly in those few slides I linked some time ago. He talks about the ethical problems but he also describes how we fundamentally perceive these games:

We’re very good at seeing past fiction.

This is why gamers are dismissive of the ethical implications of games -They don’t see “get a blowjobfrom a hooker, then run her over.”

They see a power-up.

We see past fiction. If there’s a roleplay value, we go past it. We dig an hole a go through it. The “roleplay” gets in the way. It’s like a barrier, or a lens. (Babylona calls this the “magic curtain”)

In general it’s good to give (roleplay) depth to a game but this doesn’t work if you revert the model, trying to make the “roleplay” lead the rest. It doesn’t work because you break the basic principle of one genre opposed to another. A good roleplay game is the one with “less rules as possible”. The more freedom you have the more the roleplay can flourish. Rules and roleplay are inversely proportional. You don’t even need the “design” because the players are already writers of themselves. They narrate themselves and the surrounding space and they don’t need anything else if not a matchmaking service (like friendship and common interests) that allows them to gather and set a list of implicit rules (a “setting” would be one). Online, this works best as “text” and guys like Matt Mihaly know rather well why.

Designing this in a fixed form (read as: building gameplay rules) doesn’t work because it forces a model where this model is inappropriate or conflicting. The post she quoted at the origin of her thoughts began with:

I can’t teach you anything useful about RPG design if you persist in thinking that mechanical character creation or the character sheet have anything to do with the character at all.

Well, I think it is evident how this MAY be applied to a PnP game session or a MUSH, but it simply wouldn’t work on a game that focuses on functional gameplay. In WoW, DAoC, Everquest, FFXI or whatever else, you definitely ARE the character sheet and the numeric stats. This simply because you are involved in a simulated world (by programmed algorithms). You play with and along the “machine”. And not exclusively with other players shaping the world like in a “full roleplay” environment (besides, it would be interesting to figure out why “full roleplay” environments often drift toward SEX – see the latest discussions about Second Life). In the classic mmorpgs we know, the world is already shaped and defined, it’s not a blank page where you draw your wishes (and this is why I often say that “authorship” is fundamental in mmorpgs).

But lets go past this “wall” because there’s interesting stuff after it. There are a few “whynots” that I thought about while reading:
– Game mechanics based on “time” usually aren’t that fun or exciting
– Lack of individuality (uniqueness bound to persistence)
– Balancing nightmare (not on diversity but on viability)(lack of templates)(OOC research required)

The first point started off as an alarm. As I read that the skill system she was proposing was regulated on “time”, the alarm went off. Time is usually not the best element of which to found “fun” gameplay. Time is never fun. Even when it doesn’t discriminate between the players, it’s felt as a limit or a barrier. There may be a number of different practical implementations for the system she is suggesting but none of them seems particularly attractive. They suggest a pretty annoying and boring “maintenance mode” where you are forced to constantly grind chosen skills in order to maximize them and then “refresh” them before they decay.

If this is based on “time” it means that the system tells you what to do “today”. The system sets your schedule and it becomes one of the most unfun mechanics you can impose on the players. As much awful as the PvP rank system on WoW. You are always at loss and always running here and there to keep your current skill set. Yes, maybe it makes more sense for the roleplay perspective but as Raph said, the players look past the fiction and will HAVE TO play with the math below. Hence make choices that aren’t based on the roleplay itself but on the function.

Instead if it is based on a capped, finite number of “skill points” that you have to distribute and use (and then lock), you just repeat a rather well known and reused system that everyone probably remembers in Ultima Online. With the only difference that some skills would be precluded through the use of specific equipment. Which would help to encourage standard templates within the system (or at least to have them defined already in the planning stage).

I believe that Babylona bundled together contrasting needs. The needs themselves aren’t “bad”, but she doesn’t go straight to the point (because she started from the broken principle above, which makes her “miss”) and so she doesn’t address properly those problems that should have founded those considerations. She suggests a skill system completely open and free. The goal, from what I understand, is to let the players be creative with it and instill in their characters that depth and uniqueness that is lacking in other games. Plus, letting them develop different competences that do not stack with each other but that add different purposes and roles to the same character.

Since I’ve also considered these points I can offer my thoughts on the problems to deliver such system. The first problem is the “lack of individuality”. It may sound odd since the goal is exactly the opposite: allow the players to build unique characters. But this is the consequence of allowing the characters to develop competencies in different roles. You cannot go down both paths. Or you cap the skills and force the templates, or you remove the barriers and allow everyone to fill every different “role”. It’s in this second case that you “lack individuality”. Yes, you can still prevent the skills from stacking and generate insane unbalances, but you still remove the uniqueness of the character from the persistence point of view. Just think to WoW and its talent system, it would be like giving free respecs at no loss. Maybe we can wonder “why not?” but the fact is that many players had a strong, opposite reaction to that. My guess it’s because it would remove again the “choice” from the game. You can do everything, cover every possibility. The resulting characters would become more or less “complete”, but all moving on the exact same chart and with the same exact starting point and end.

So we add boundaries to the skills or not? We allow the characters to fill different roles or not? This brings to the third point I listed above. It’s true that we like better the freeform skill systems but it’s also true that the more freedom you give the more the balancing process will be hard, if not impossible. Defining strict classes allows the developers to anticipate safely what the character can or cannot do, while freeform skill systems will be directly exploited by being used OUTSIDE the intended purpose. The players will have lot of fun to break the preexistent patterns while the developers have nightmares trying to fill all the holes in the system and FIGHT against the creativity of the players. That’s the direct consequence of a freeform system. The players will exploit the functions because that’s what the game is about. Strict classes may be bad from a perspective but they allow the devs to anticipate and regulate the behaviourts of the classes more easily. We can see how many problems these games have *already* with the balance (in WoW some of the planned skills given to hunters and rogues were already considered as “exploits” thanks to their “creative use”, someone remembers?), now think to what could happen with a truly “freeform” skill system.

This is also not the only problem because freeform systems also put strains on the players. It takes knowledge to find viable possibilities that aren’t badly gimped. Most of the times the game doesn’t offer enough feedback to lead new players and the result is that they will have to read guides and tutorials OOCly just in order to start moving the character toward a viable direction. Not doing so would be equal to a lot of frustration and hitting on walls that are felt as impassable. The shorter path leading to a canceled account. Of course the possibility to adjust the skills along the way prevents a direct failure but it still forces the players to see beyond the “magic curtain” to understand a system that is overly complicated and that ultimately doesn’t add a real freedom, but just the same old templates made more obfuscate and probably with more FOTM than ever thanks to the frequent, unavoidable nerfs as consequence of a nearly impossible balance process.

The final outline doesn’t look so exciting from my point of view. These ideas would bring more problems than solutions.

I left out two points because I find them more interesting and because I recycled them in my own dream mmorpg:
– Switching roles (multi purpose)
– no caps to skills (endless progression)

The first is interesting because I started to think about it when trying to solve the “healer problem”. We always have problems in every single games about finding healers for the group. Noone wants to play healers. The first direct fix is to make them fun and give them different functionalities instead of just forcing them to watch health bars all the time. The other fix is to allow the characters to step out of their roles and filling spots to an extent. Like a temporary class switch that would allow the group to still be able to play in the case they cannot find a proper healer.

This is one of those points I find valuable because they are aimed straight at solving one problem we all know. So aimed to make the game more directly enjoyable and reduce the downtimes due to the search for specific classes. The goal is set. Once the goal is set we can explore different solutions and see which one works better. During my tinkering I’ve defined a few. But without filling another page with all the examples and considerations I’ll just make one example that is coherent with the arguments I wrote here.

One of my ideas was to define each class (or template) in *all* the different roles. I basically detached the concept of “class” from the concept of “role”. The class was just used to define the form on which the role was executed. But all the roles were accessible. Not stacking, but accessible. This means that a “cleric” would be a class defined into multiple roles. A “tank” cleric that goes in melee with a blunt weapon and uses specific styles and melee skills, an “healer” cleric that casts heals from range and keeps some buffs up (its standard role), a “smite” cleric that has powerful offensive range attacks, dispells and other specific skills. Till to define unique roles, like the possibility to raise or dispell undeads, call the help of the gods for limited power-ups, set up shileds and barriers and so on. ALL of these “roles” would be absolutely open and accessible to EACH cleric in the game. But not stacking. This means that, before an encounter, you could flag and equip yourself as a “tank” cleric and do your duty at best as every other tank. But without the possibility to be a tank, a caster and an healer all at the same time.

This idea actualizes one of the purposes chased by Babylona. She wants the skills to be open so that the player can explore all the possibilities without limits but not by shaping too powerful hybrids. I’ve already explained the problems of open skill systems and the problems of the uniqueness. My idea was a way to set a precise goal (the problem of finding proper classes to build an efficient group, healers in partcular). Solve it and at the same time avoid the other problems. In my system a cleric would always be a cleric and would always be different from a warrior. It would retain the uniqueness of the class. But at the same time it would be designed as an all around class that can switch freely between different roles, depeding on the situation.

My idea was the result of needs and obstacles. A compromise that was still able to produce a viable result (from my point of view).

(btw, my proposed PvP system was also based on ranks and roles on the battlefield that can be unblocked and then flagged active under specific conditions. Exactly to not make the characters exponentially more powerful with each rank, in order to not open gaps between experienced and casual player. But actively reducing them and encourage them to play *together* toward shared, truly communal goals)

Now the other point, the uncapped skills. I used to have overly complicated ideas that were just insane, but what I’ve learnt along these years is how to shatter those ideas into “atoms” and analyze them for what they are at their core. Simplifying them and looking at the essential. See why they work or why they don’t work, see of what they are made.

In this case, what are the negatives of uncapped skills? The traits I was able to isolate are:
– In PvE: gaps between the players, favor elitism and closed communities, difficulties to group and catch up with friends
– In PvP: unbalance

Both, in their relative case, are game-breaking. What are the positives? I found just one: feeling of achievement lasting on the long term. Actually this positive trait is minimized in Babylona’s proposal. The uncapped skills are possible in her model because the cap is set before. Or the cap is based on “time”, or the cap is based on a fixed pool of points to spend on the different skill. A skill going over it’s “standard” value would bring to an highly specialized character, while the points spent more uniformly would bring to more all around classes but with less specialization and effectiveness, which reminds again the Talent system in WoW, or the specializations in DAoC.

This is again a balance nightmare. Unavoidable. A single specialized character would always be FELT as insanely overpowered. If he invests all its resources in ONE skill he would be able to one-shot almost all classes. Of course he would do just that and nothing else but the other players will perceive only the overpowered trait and the fact that this character, even if with many weaknesses, is able to push the “I win” button. The devs will have to work endlessly to balance the specialized characters with the multi-purpose ones. In general this never worked and the final result is the freedom removed from the system instead of added. It would be hard even to keep the game in a playable state. The “fun” being far from it, and the newbies thrown in an endless confusion trying to plan their character in the less worst way.

Again my point is, what’s the actual goal? The positive trait I isolated above is the feeling of achievement in the long term. Babylona’s system doesn’t take advantage of it because a skill beyond its cap is just a result of a character that does that and just that. Not the result of a character that played for longer and in the long term. Again my dream mmorpg uses uncapped skills but in a way so that the negative traits I listed above are reduced and those positive valorized. The system is based on percent skills. A value above the cap is useful because of the penalties. If you have a 105% on a skill and the action you are trying to perform has a -5% of penalty, the 5% overcap would be useful. At the same time, under normal conditions, there isn’t sensible difference between a 95% and a 130%. In a fight 1vs1 the huge gap in numbers between the two characters would be barely noticeable in the practice. This is how I prevent negative gaps of power between the players. The merit of skill based systems opposed to level based systems is that the gaps between the players are reduced, hence making them ideal for PvP games. Adding uncapped skills in the way Babylona planned would reintroduce the gaps in the game, making it unbalanced and gaining almost nothing from the “achiever” persepective.

In my idea the skills can go beyond the cap and never really stop. But every small +0.1% comes just an an increasingly hard chance. This means that the character always progresses, it NEVER really stops. You can play ten years and still gain something. But at the same time this process isn’t strongly functional. It does’t add a sensible advantage and grinding it would be just an unrewarding practice. It wields no sensible and worth benefits and it’s just there as an added mechanic to further improve your character without making this improvement THE REASON why you play. Just a side-effect.

That’s my way to shape the system in a way that, once again, tries to maximize the benefits and minimize the problems. Percent based skills and actions are easy to parse for every player, this makes the ruleset more transparent for everyone, both experienced and new players.

The mechanics about how these skills are designed and improved are explained with more details here. The system needs a revision but the goals and the base mechanics of the skill system I imagine are still mostly unchanged.

Babylona doesn’t invent anything, she just mix together various ideas coming from other games. Which I don’t criticize, because all my ideas are also coming from what I saw before and a re-digestion of all that.

I commented (and archive here) an article that Ubiq wrote on The Escapist about the next generation of Guild Design. Loved it.

—
To begin with you should have referenced DAoC when you made examples of games trying to take guilds to the next level, but then I don’t know how you could wrap it up in a line.

Summarizing your points:
1- Help players find the proper guild for themselves (information and accessibility)
2- Help *new* players integrate themselves within the game and old guilds to still remain open (accessibility again)
3- Do not neglect the UI and proper guild management tools
4- Keep the guilds integrated (in contact) with the rest of the community (?)
5- Give these games some ambition :) Massive crowds and persistence

This is one of those design topics I really care about and where I have many ideas on how to do it “better” (my point of view). After my guild project I can say that the major difficulty I found from the player perspective was about your first point (and the third, to an extent). But then there are problems outside the game itself.

The guilds are almost always something independent from the game. They grow by association but they usually start from the outside. You have consolidate groups of players existing outside the game and then putting the premises for good guilds inside the game. A small group of RL friends has already hundred more possibilities to survive and consolidate in the game than a guild starting from zero.

It’s somewhat easier to build a guild during the first days the game launched, it becomes then really hard to do the same on a brand new server in an already released game and it’s nigh impossible within a consolidated community on a old server.

Everyone is *already* in a guild, in most cases even BEFORE creating the character. You just cannot do anything about this if not inviting level 1 to 10 characters that you probably won’t see for more than a week and, in the case they stick, will ultimately jump on to a more efficient and already productive guild as they need to.

Guilds are like light sources and players like swarms of flies. Everyone is attracted by a few consolidates points and these points are almost always independent from the actual game. The reasons why long lasting guilds are created and survive is almost always something completely external from the game that then shapeshifts in something different. But the origin is always elsewhere. The tribes aren’t native, they are portable.

This from the point of view of the player. From the point of view of the designer I wrote long ago a (half obsolete) guild system that still addressed many important points.

For example I structured the game so that beside the hardcoded PvP factions, the players have the possibility to detach themselves and build player-made organizations that have the same “dignity”, gameplay-wise, of those hardcoded. The goal was to give the players a type of “tool” to just show and model what they want, so that the game is completely malleable to their needs and ambitions. Even the actual guilds are structured to be rebuilt from the inside. Basically I belive they should be designed (from the outside, as developers) as scripted languages, as customizable “objects” that can then be rebuilt and recombined directly by the guildmaster as he wants. So that the final organization of the guild is completely subjective to THAT guild and its needs.

Then my project meets your last point, the most relevant. It’s the *gameplay* that needs to shape up the role and function of the guild. I had recently some heated discussions about the guild system in WoW and one of my strongest points and critiques is that the guilds in WoW just have NO FUNCTION. The game itself isn’t aware of the fact that a guild exists, there gameplay is completely isolated from a guild.

I strongly believe that this is a major weak point and if you follow that link you can see how I completely share your points. That’s the very special trait of these games that we AREN’T USING. Raph would say:

Does your game NEED it? No. But given that it is one of the axes of gameplay that makes use of persistence, and persistence is one of the key things these games offer that other games cannot, well, leaving it out may be considered to be at least underutilizing the genre.

Massive crowds and persistence. That’s exactly the same type of mmorpg I dream about and that I blandly plan from a couple of years. This is why the importance of a guild goes way beyond the actual organization to finish right in the gameplay. To become the CENTER of your game instead of something on the background. Which brings to that sort of slogan that I built: “Give back the world to the players”

Meaning that the players need to finally live within the world and shape it. Conquer cities and castles, conquer and administrate territory, build farms and the resource system at the RTS-level. Finally arriving at the commerce (that is completely detached from the personal power treadmill so that you can only trade and craft resources that have a weight in the conquest system -communal level- and not your personal loot).

The actual goal is to remove the idea of a guild as mostly like an OOC system and give it an active role within the game. Make it the backbone of the game structure. And this works better in a PvP game and in a truly massive environment where you share a persistent space (competition, the land is a finite space).

So, what I believe is that your points must be creatively exploited as paradoxes. They shouldn’t be directly addressed. But I also can see how all this is a distant, unrealistic dream.

DAoC tried to weakly address some of your points. They added a clunky LFGuild command noone uses (point 1), they added merit points to spend on bonuses and encourage old guilds to accept new members (point 2) and the RvR does better than every other game when it comes to the fourth point (and fifth), despite things are going downhill quickly and the communities are now completely closed and with an elitist attitude to focus exclusively on arranged 8vs8 encounters. Screaming like mad cows when someone else in the game passes by to distrurb their limited toy.

What DAoC did badly is point three. As of today I just cannot know who the fuck is in my guild. People going /anon not only disappear from the /who command but they disappear from the goddamn guild chart. And I AM THE GUILDMASTER. I just cannot know who the hell is in the guild and who can hear what I say and I cannot perform actions (like promoting or demoting and even kicking out) on those who aren’t currently logged in. There’s a clunky “/gc autoremove playername” that sends a request that is then processed someday in the future if you need someone out of the guild. This just to say that we can dream all we want but almost always these games are broken at the very basic level and they don’t really need fancy designers. Just common sense.

Between you and Dave Rickey that’s all I’m looking forward in the near-mid future because I can share the direction where you are going and those principle. Just remember to deliver and not build a game that works wonderfully on the paper but that then has an half done implementation that ruins the original design in all the most foundamental and trivial elements (controls, UI, client performance, lag, stability, graphic attractiveness etc..). Because we have already enough products on the shelves with those features.

It seems that today the key for the success is at 99% about making things work as they were originally designed, and 1% about having also good ideas to actualize.

And to conclude, most of the times the *players* do not share your principles. They want to be full time /anon and block group invites, they close general chat channels and feel the head exploding as they enter in contact with someone they do not know in a range of 100 miles. Some players just don’t want to be part of larger communities and have their guild open and integrated with the other “tribes”.

From a side I believe that the design should promote and teach more “positive” (and fun) forms of gameplay, from the other I also believe that it’s good to give a proper role to everyone with a different attitude and have an overall enriching and varied community.

Follow-up to a previous disquisition. Bringing it to more general terms. I was also thinking about building a page with the most brilliant quotes from blogs and forums, considering how I always need to spend time to track the old links and how I keep reusing wonderfully written (by others, like this one from Lum) passages.

—
Look, my point is rather simple. This is a wonderful piece from Lum that I already discussed here among many other occasions:

And now we come back to MMOs, where their particular form of pattern involves other people being involved. If you ask any dozen MMO enthusiasts which MMO they prefer the most (or, depending on how jaded, despise the least) and you will get a dozen different answers. Because the dirty little secret that designers don’t want to admit is that the actual game is completely irrelevant! No one cares, really, how well the pattern is crafted. Because what brings people back to MMOs isn’t the game, but the people within. No computer can come up with AI unpredictable enough to emulate your average bazaar shopper. Which is why, if you ask those dozen people which MMO they prefer, you get a dozen different answers. Because it’s where they are from.

So what does all this have to do with anything? Well, reading the links I started with, I read a great deal about the minutae of design theory. Gamers want their games to be hard! No, they want them to be easier! More casual friendly! More aimed at the core!

No, gamers are going to be bored. Because these things run on computers, and no matter how many pixels you cram into the pixel people, they’re still just pixels. Now, the community behind the games – they’re not quite as pixilated. And maybe perhaps that’s where we should be focusing.

I believe we can ALL agree that these games are more about the community than the content itself. The content is just an excuse, an hook so we can play together and have fun together.

It’s the accomplishment as a group that makes these games successful and not the solo quest you take from an NPC, go kill 10 mobs and come back for your sword+1. Then rinse and repeat.

So the point is: how can we focus the development on what matters and *support* the community so that it becomes the *center* of the game?

This is the reason why the mechanics should be aware that a guild exists and should involve it directly with dedicated content that is truly communal. I say this because I believe it’s the BEST way to support the community and let it thrive in a positive way. My idea is just an attempt to give the community more tools to have impact on the gameplay and make each member more involved into something that affects everyone and not just the single.

Why build mechanics to affect everyone and not just the single? Because if we agree that the community is what drives these game further and in the long term, we also agree that the game should put that community at the center and focus on it.

I don’t believe that WoW is an horrible game to trash and forget. But I do believe that on this aspect it is weak and lacking. So it’s a part of the game that has still a huge potential completely untapped.

I join the discussion late since I got this masterpiece only today. After the hype about Prey I find myself looking more and more outside the mmorpg genre and the reason is again because I feel rather bored and frustrated about the potential wasted. While there’s always a lot to discuss, many of the topics are recurring (which is good since it means a progression is needed and possible) and I have already my own opinions. I know that now I’d like the possibility to experiment them concretely because you can only go that far by just thinking and analyzing them over and over and over.

Instead outside this genre the creativity is flourishing in all its forms, from interesting design to inspired graphic. I believe it’s useful to put mmorpgs aside for a moment and observe what is happening outside because it helps to think outside the box, outside the boundaries and the “shapes” of gameplay we all know and that after so much time seem everything a game can ultimately offer. It’s like if the more you focus on something and grasp it, the more you get blind to what is around and to those possibilities that are still not strictly codified and overused. You are only able to think to what is already under your eyes, unable to see or grasp something even slightly different.

It can happen to me as a player or to a dev that has to deal with the same stuff for many hours a day without the possibility to “relax” and let the imagination enlighten those corners that became completely dark and invisible with the time. This is an old comment from J.:

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.

I really cannot help the fact that even when I play a totally different game I keep analyzing it and trying to reduce it to the essential patterns followed by the design. It’s like a natural tendence to a form of reverse engineering, just applied to the design. While “God of War” belongs to a genre that hasn’t much to share with the average mmorpg I think it still offers interesting ideas. It can be useful to understand what exactly makes this game shine and, even more, understand how the developers were able to isolate those important elements. So that it could be possible not only understand the success of this game, but also understand the process that brought to discover those qualities in the first place.

I believe that games, as every other cultural form, have strongly evolved over time and not just because of the technical possibilities. These represent just the evidence at a superficial glance but the essential is elsewhere. “God of War” isn’t that different from Pac-Man, this is the crucial point. I’m not sure if a player that was proficent at playing it would be able to relate today to a complex game like “God of War”. The complexity of the form of the expression has risen exponentially and it’s definitely true that we develop more and more new competencies as the time passes. The games we play today are infinitely more complex than games we played ten years ago, but at the same time some of the basic structures are still there. The roots are there, just evolved toward more complex and intricate patterns.

In Pac-Man there’s a symbolic representation of a 2D space. The space is strictly codified since the movement is enforced in precise directions and paths. The gameplay is basically the essential concept of a “game”. Recognize and compare patterns to make choices and progressively optimize the outcome. Till a progression. In “God of War” the basic pattern is similar. We drive an avatar within a space with precise boundaries. There are monsters that move toward you and the gameplay is about playing with the space. The relative position of your avatar compared to the position of the monsters. We are still within the same scheme but in a freeform environment that allows the player to be more “creative” in the interaction and approach. This means that each player can interpret the perception of the space personally and tryout specific personal patterns. The experience gets personalized, the player invents his own solutions to a problem instead of just trying to figure out (“trial-and-error”) what was planned ahead by the developer himself. It’s again the problem of OOC design. The player and the game/environment. In this case without an interface or interpolated stages. As opposed to a player that needs to figure out what a dev was thinking instead of just what the situation is presenting.

To understand the essential I think it’s important to read the opinions of the players and see if there’s something recursive or in common (I plan to post tomorrow a compilation of comments I found interesting). From the comments I’ve read (and confirmed by my direct experience) the best qualities of the game are about a combat system felt “fluid and visceral”. Fluid and visceral are two important points of view and I think they should get splitted and considered separately since I believe they have two different origins.

This game doesn’t really “innovate”. There aren’t outstanding new elements or new approaches. Instead it’s a game that refines a process and isolates what was fun in other games to consolidate and focus on them. From my point of view the “smoothness” of the combat isn’t the result of a design lesson to learn but just a matter of practice. It’s about devs mastering their skills. Smooth camera movements, precise controls, polish, timed animations and so on. These are all parts that aren’t about sudden innovative solutions never realized before but about a process of refinement and skills that develop with the time. At the basic level the combat and the controls of the game aren’t different from those in games like “Medievil”. There’s just a slow and progressive process of refinement behind. The fact that the avatar can jump and perform actions while on the air helps to add a new layer to the complex representation of the space. It’s a way for the player to go through a “backdoor” and jump out of a context. It’s a creative solution to a paradox (something similar will happen on Prey through the “spirit walk”, breaking the reality to open up a creative solution). The paradox puts you in a situation that you cannot escape, because maybe you are surrounded. But then the game allows you to jump and break the paradox by putting on it a creative solution. A new perspective. So we are still dealing with representation of spaces like in Pac-Man, but then we have different layers we can “break”, adding a complexity. A pattern has never one solution and never punishes you for a single mistake (in general, the game has also “Dragon’s Lair” parts). Instead it puts you in a context and gives you a good number of tools to allow you to alter and use the space.

The insane amount of different attacks and combos goes along those lines. The game is ultimately fun because it doesn’t enforce a single pattern. In the case you fail you feel already the motivation to go back and try a completely different strategy. There are so many tools to make the game open to the experimentation and keep away the frustration of feeling captured in a corner you cannot escape. I already discussed in the past how combat systems that progressively open up possibilities can be more fun than codified patterns you cannot escape or reinterpret personally. In “God of War” there is space for creative solutions because the game offers many different tools that may even generate a specific play style that is unique to a specific player. This happens only in the best games, when the players discover and master completely different approaches to the same situation, developing their own preferred tactics. Of course I’m stretching now the concept to the extreme but this is the direction where it goes, this is why it’s felt fun. It even bring the discussion to the concept of “skill”, which is becoming increasingly popular in mmorpgs. It’s about offering the possibility to reinterpret creatively your character and its codified skills. It’s the possibility to play with those tools to develop an unique, personal strategy.

This is important from the perspective of a mmorpg because we know these creative patterns in just one form: exploits. We punish directly and cannot afford to design a game that is open to a creative gameplay. We fear this because in a mmorpg nothing can be “out of control”. But it should be also evident how this damages the potential of a game and makes directly the gameplay dull and repetitive. It’s again about a “fear” that is just leading to wrong solutions that ruin directly the gameplay. It gets progressively simplified, codified and diluted. Compared to the “rich” offering of a combat system like the one in “God of War”.

This was about the “smoothness” part of the combat. Then there’s the “visceral” part. This brings the discussion back to the OOC design. “Visceral” is a cultural value and not the result of a formal system. This is again what I criticize in Raph’s ideas. A formal system will never get defined as “visceral” because it misses the cultural myth that is unique. The culture is never formal, it is never about numbers. It is about shared myths. Some interesting comments are:

I had to stop playing at 1:30am. My yelling “you cheap motherfuckers!!” at the Gorgons was keeping people awake.

As an aside, prior to GoW, it’s been forever since I’ve played a game with so many “how the hell am I going to deal with THAT thing….oh wait, I’m insanely badass, bring it on!” type moments.

Every single time I’m force-feeding the Blades of Chaos to some scumfuck minotaur, I’m all like, “TAKE IT! TAKE IT YOU FUCK!”

Mashing the circle button has never been more satisfying.

Remember that part where Kratos has the attitude-off with the giant minotaur guarding Pandora’s Temple? Dude, I was like totally cheering at the TV at that point, shaking my PS2 controller at the big bad wolf (bull, whatever) and telling him that if that was all he’s got, I was going to totally kick his ass. And I did! And it was great!

Please, Kratos makes Dante look like Don Knots. In the first level of Devil May Cry, Dante uses guns to shoot across the room at puppets. In the first level of God of War, Kratos rips undead pirates in half with his bare hands, then impales a humongous hydra on the crow’s nest of their ship, then fucks two hot chicks. At the same time. Advantage: Kratos.

You know it’s good when it makes you feel like all other great action games will be downright lethargic now. I mean, are you kidding, right off the bat (well, the 2nd battle) you’re fighting this monster that would typically be a boss in other games. And you don’t just stab them with your sword or poke them with a staff. Hell no, that’s not the Kratos way. You pick that mofo on up and tear him in two.

See? All these comments are about a rare magic: “immersion”. The game is considered visceral because it is directly immersive. There isn’t a complex interface between the player and the representation of the action, there aren’t complex statistics and rules as filters. It’s all downright to feeling there, within the situation and as a badass character that is utterly satisfying to play. The combat is “visceral” because it isn’t parsed, iconified or re-represented. It’s direct in both the gameplay and the visual representation.

All these elements aren’t formal patterns, they do not matter in the gameplay and they do not belong to the mechanics of the game. They are completely irrelevant from the perspective of the formal system. Still, they are essential for the success of this game. The combat is visceral because it has a tribal nature. It comes from a cultural and natural background that we all share. It allows the player to express that aggressiveness and recall the feeling of the blood and flesh. It is visceral because it comes from cultural patterns we all have in common and that we feel strongly. This help us to make ties between the representation we see on the screen and the imagination in our heads. The result is an “immersive” game because we can relate to it. Because we understand and feel directly those values it evocates, because it comes from a background we know already.

Those are “shared myths” and they are as important as the formal system (the gameplay) itself. This game is successful because it “gets” both parts. The fun gameplay and the strong, visceral myths that we will carry along even when the game is over.

There are even other elements that build the success of the game but that aren’t essential to what I wanted to underline here. For example the game is kept always varied and dynamic, a strategy used in “Metal Gear Solid” and other games. There aren’t repetitive scenes and the players is continuously put in new conditions that can even onsidered as mini-games on their own. This allows to keep the game always fun, always offering something new to discover and master, avoiding to just throw at the player mindlessly droves of monsters over and over and over. Ultimately it’s all about the balance of the parts. This is again a matter of “practice” and not a design lesson that can be isolated and then reapplied. There isn’t any magical recipe to point out the correct balance since it’s mostly a matter of points of view. Some players could like more some parts and dislike others, there isn’t a single solution perfect for everyone and this is where the game, even when flawlessly designed, will always be exposed to criticism.

I believe there are interesting points to consider even for the mmorpg genre. The combat system is definitely not useable since it has a strong physical impact. This isn’t possible with the current technological limits of the mmorpgs. We cannot support fast and furious combat systems where the character can throw monsters in the air, jump around and perform air-attacks. We can dream about this but it’s not where the strength of the genre is.

This is why I believe that the mmorpgs have their own path to follow but at the same time it’s always useful to keep an eye open to other genres that are way more dynamic and innovative at the moment and can still offer interesting points of view on what could be done in the near and far future.

I had a moment of smartness. It’s rare these days.

This is a comment I wrote on Ubiq’s blog. And it touches many core concepts about which I’m blathering these days. So it’s something dear to me. Another of those elements that I try to push so that they get acknowledged. It’s again the two opposite process of development, the “mudflated” games and the “world” games. Typical examples of the first process are EverQuest or World of Warcraft, where there is a constant demand of content that puts a strain on the devs and progressively builds negative gaps and accessibility issues between the players, typical examples of the second are Eve-Online (the best on this aspect) and Ultima Online, where the development has the players as the focus and aims to give them more and more control over the world and their relationships.

(and you can see already how WoW is suffering this conflict. It became successful thanks to its accessibility, but now the mudflation at the endgame is building wider and wider gaps between the players, making a lot of them crash against a wall. This night I should be able to finish the comment to a wonderful quote from Darniaq that explain perfectly all this and more)

—

Ubiq:
I don’t understand why expansions ruin the potential of these games whereas continued development does not. Expansions are, after all, merely continued development in larger chunks.

Because that’s part of a *very* long debate on the forums between me and the “occasional” Scott Hartsman and Brad McQuaid.

It was spawning from the debate about “worlds”. These types of games that are diametrally opposite to mudflated games (which develop horizontally) need a completely different development process.

An expansion must be, by definition, optional. So it must contain features that cannot directly tie with the rest of the game at a low level. This brings to a development process that moves “around the borders” where more stuff can be added without messing the rest of the game (new graphic engines are often just reskin, for example).

As an example take one of the “expansions” of Eve-Online. Considering how they are developed and added they can be directly considered expansions. But they are included in the monthly fee not only as a marketing decision but also because it would be impossible to transform the world at a basic level without strongly affecting everyone.

You cannot break the players between “have” and “not have” because a “world” game is a system where everything is strictly connected (the definition of “system”). A world as a “whole” and not as an amass of optional pieces that have to mudflate and erase previous parts in order to become appealing.

DAoC’s PvP is the “world” part of the game. In fact Mythic CANNOT make an expansion about it. It’s strictly tied with the experience. Instead they make expansions about the PvE, which is naturally “mudflated” and so adapt to become an expansion.

I simply revert these considerations and say that the choice to develop expansions means accepting and performing a type of development that will ultimately hurt the potential of the game as a “world”.

There are workarounds. For example when you use the excuse of the expansion to pass some features over to the basic game. But it’s still a straining. So I say that this process isn’t optimal and in ideal conditions (so without considering the market) the process should be different.

I like to bring the example of Eve-Online because they were able to do wonderful things with it. They rewrote consistently many parts of the game, at a low level. Everything is maintained uniformly and this has the result of a cohesive world that is now rivaling with Ultima Online in complexity and ambition.

At this stage you can see how the game *really* progresses and is maintained young. You don’t need anymore to squeeze the creativity to figure out more interesting PvE content because the game itself will present directly what it needs. That’s the consequence of a real “world” game where the development isn’t destined to only work marginally on the tweak and fixes or spend all the resources (and beyond) to push out content that will then “exit” concretely the game six months later due to the mudflation.

Imho this is just crazy. It’s a total waste of resources to develop stuff that is systematically “eaten” and forgotten and erased even for the new players that will chase the newer paths. The “world” approach to the development is an answer to this, because it’s about developing what matters and keep building on the *premises* of what you did the day before.

The mudflation is a way to continuously create, burn and replace (no ecological sensibility). Always on the same place and with no real progress. The other, better path is a way to capitalize the development and always build on what you did before. So the first moves horizontally, expanding like a stain or a fire (along the borders and toward the outside, creating a dispersion inside). The second moves vertically, adding a depth and, from my point of view, producing more interesting and productive results.