Ariad

Been a long while since Bel or I have posted. Call it the mid-late summer doldrums. I’ve also been extremely busy for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, which has left me kind of sapped. My apologies.

Lately, though, it’s been summer convention season, with a lot of exciting things being shown off. If you haven’t seen the trailer for Wild Star, you should watch it. Here:

It’s every cliché trope wrapped up in awesome foil and made to look GREAT. There’s nothing new here, we’ve seen these characters before, we’ve seen things done this way, but it doesn’t matter because the trailer looks great, the world looks compelling, and there’s something here for everyone. I want to keep watching this, and see what happens next.

Sci-fi not your thing? Here, have some fantasy, Guild Wars 2 style:

Like It Always Was, But Different

I love the way these games are shaping up. I don’t have a good trailer handy, but Star Wars: The Old Republic has a similar level of polish and fun on display. These aren’t sandbox MMOs, no, not even Guild Wars. You play them and you know – you can feel – the WoW influence, the EQ influence, the this-is-an-MMO sense that permeates, well, every game in this genre.

I look at those games and I get excited to play them. They’re not what blew me away, though. What blew me away were these:

First person shooter? But Ariad, all of those are the same, it looks just like Medal Call of Honor Duty! And Guild Wars 2 looks just like WoW. There’re subtle differences, and it makes for a surprisingly deep game. This will be incredibly fun with friends, and notably it’ll be a pop-in-and-out experience, something I can play for fun without a huge time commitment. For a different spin on the same concept, here’s Tribes:

Another shooter, only future instead of military. Easy to dismiss as “another FPS, yawn”, except that the feel of this one is so different from other games that it’s worthy of mention. I’m not a huge shooter player, but I played the old Tribes, and reports from PAX Prime are that the new one plays a LOT like the old ones. For anyone who remembers the old, this is a very, very good thing. Looking for a bit more story? Have a dose of Nathan Drake:

The Uncharted series are some of the best games released in the past few years. I would happily put Uncharted 2 and Portal head to head for fun factor. It’s basically Indiana Jones, the video game, done RIGHT. The fact that they’re PS3 exclusives makes it hard to casually get into them if you don’t own the console, but they’re brilliant examples of what’s available on console that you just can’t get on PC (I’m trolling Bel here).

The main thing that excites me is the variety. I haven’t even talked about Skyrim (and I’m out of video slots here, so I can’t post a video), but in terms of available games to play, we’re looking at some really, really awesome opportunities (and great things that have already come out—I’m looking at you, Bastion and Deus Ex).

Everything Under the Sun

I used to avoid entire genres of games. I skipped over Halo (and all console shooters) entirely, because I fervently believed that “it was better on PC”. It wasn’t until I’d been working on a console shooter for about a year before I really broke that bias, and shortly thereafter I discovered some really fun experience (and was prepared for the awesomeness that was Bioshock).

I refused to play platformers that didn’t have Mario in the title for ages, figuring that none of them would be any good. I nearly missed out on Prince of Persia, and I completely missed out on Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank, both awesome games that I wasn’t in the right place at the right time to fully enjoy.

I’ve been amazed at how much fun there is to be had even in games I expect to hate. It’s also made me a lot better at seeing what games are, rather than what I want them to be. It’s a hard thing to apply to MMOs—I really want to see an MMO with real, true open-world and deep character customization, complete with well-implemented player housing and a sense of ownership… but SWTOR is not that game. Guild Wars 2 is not that game.

They’re gonna be fun, though. LOTS of fun, if I can enjoy them for what they are, rather than obsessing over what they’re not.

Today I read Tobold (http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2011/06/syncaine-on-accessibility.html) and Syncaine (http://syncaine.com/2011/06/16/accessibility-killed-rift/) talking about accessibility in MMOs. It’s a neat series of reads on both sides of the issue, and I feel like they’re both touching on a big issue in MMO development that’s been going on basically since WoW brought in a massive influx of new players (thanks to being highly accessible, even in Vanilla) – not enough content.

It has nothing to do with how ‘casual’ or ‘hardcore’ or ‘accessible’ the content is, and everything to do with whether or not the existing content in the game satisfies the demands of the various players. WoW only has one content path. You level, you do dungeons, you do heroic dungeons, you do raids, you do heroic raids. These five experiences are different in a lot of ways; the number of players you have being the most obvious one, but the approach to playing and the kind of players each pursuit attracts is quite different. However, it’s a linear path. Syncaine hits the nail on the head in his post when it mentions that players are satisfied and at their best when they have content to play that challenges them and can look forward to more content ahead of them. It’s an idea spread out across quite a bit of the argument, but to me it’s the underlying thread that separates him from the usual “games should be harder” hardcore crowd.

Something for Everyone

In most of the major MMO releases, including both the successful and the unsuccessful, there’s a single, brutally defined and linear path of content. You level until you can do small-group content, you do small group content and level until you reach max level, you do max-level dungeons, and then you raid. When you have exhausted one of the pre-raid forms of content, you’re done with it; you will rarely if ever see more of that content that’s meaningful to you.

I have a theory about MMO content: If you, as a development studio, had an infinite amount of time and resources to create an endless stream of content for every type of player, you would see a few paths that were highly favored. You’d see solo content, small group (4-6 players), small raid (10-15 players), and massive raid (50-100+ players) standing far and away ahead of the rest as favored types of content. WoW proved that 25-man content was more popular than 40-man content, and furthermore that 10 was at least as popular if not more popular than 25-man. The inevitable argument is that it’s easier to put together the smaller groups, so they’re naturally more popular, which I absolutely agree with. People are more inclined to play when playing is less onerous, and more inclined to do content when the barrier to entry is low. Accessibility is one thing—but accessibility need not mean “easy”, which is the mistake both Tobold and Syncaine point out in their articles.

Imagine if an MMO devotedly created endgame content for the solo player, the small group player, and the raider simultaneously, where you could realistically progress your character via any of those means without being forced to do the others. “Yeah, that’d be great, Ariad, but it’s totally unreasonable—WoW can barely keep up with player progression through content NOW, much less if they supported three or more different paths.” I can hear you thinking it.

Doing the Impossible

Looking at the way WoW and Rift and other MMOs are built, it’s really easy to scoff at the idea of continual content for everyone. Let’s look at the accessibility issue from a fresh slate, though, throw out everything we know about MMO progression, and break the problem down into parts.

1.) We should have enough content for the solo player, the small group player, and the raider to feel satisfied.

2.) We need to be able to expand all of those lines of content in a way that makes sense.

3.) We want content that is challenging to people at various skill levels, without artificial-feeling “modes”.

4.) We need to be able to build all of this without breaking the bank in terms of time or resources.

One of the things that takes a massive amount of time in the production of an MMO is the leveling process. It takes more time than any other form of content, arguably all other forms of content combined. Given this, it should come as no surprise that things suddenly change when players are finished with the leveling process—it’s basically impossible to keep up, especially because players are trained to burn through “leveling” as fast as possible.

So, let’s remove it.

An MMO Without Levels

Defining what content is available by levels causes a number of problems. For players who enjoy the soloing game, when they hit max level the game is functionally over for them—they have no reason to keep playing because the content that they enjoy is now over. They can roll a new character, but a lot of times, the new character is going to be playing through the same content. Not exactly ideal. For players who enjoy raiding, nothing before hitting max level is meaningful in the slightest—they care about raiding and are forced to slog through content for quite some time (days? weeks? months?) before getting to the content they want to play.

Why not cut out the concept of levels entirely, and let people do what they like best immediately upon playing? A short tutorial area may be helpful, but from a development standpoint you’re creating content that’s relevant for every player in your game, theoretically, and this content can be tuned to be quite difficult, because there are *always* alternatives (because you’ve spent the entire leveling-process budget on content that people find useful at max level). Without the artificial constraints of level, advancement becomes a question of resources (money), gear, and unlocked skills and abilities, all of which can be safely unhooked from something like levels. An established raiding guild can start the game and immediately start raiding, with content that’s meaningful to them and worth their while, without any of the intermediate content that they have no interest in.

The nice thing about a setup like this is that you can tune your content to be as difficult as you like—players are always accomplishing something meaningful so making your leveling content easy (so that raiders can get to raid content) or your raiding content easy (so that players who have finished leveling and need something to do don’t get crushed by hard raid content that they aren’t interested in) is entirely unnecessary—players can find the challenges best suited to their skills, without an artificial enforced hierarchy determining what they can and can’t do, and without a need to homogenize difficulty so that people with differing interests can all play.

You don’t need to make raid content for non-raiders, or leveling content for people who hate leveling. Instead, you just have content, and players play what they like.

I talk about a lot of stuff without really filtering it. I kind of rely on Belghast to yell at me if a post devolves into jargon, but he’s been listening to me blather for so long that I think he’s developed an immunity. Someone commented recently that I didn’t consider most of the implementations of player housing to involve “gameplay”, and seemed quite upset about it. I thought I might share some of how I view games from a building-them perspective.

Gameplay and Feedback Loops

The word “gameplay” means a lot of things to a lot of people, but it has a fairly specific and reasonably well-defined meaning. Like a lot of things within the industry, it isn’t universally agreed on, so any attempt I make at pinning down a definition is tricky. I’ll need to draw the camera out a little bit.

To define gameplay, I need to touch on something called a “feedback loop”. Simply put, a feedback loop is what you, the player, are doing in any given three-to-ten-second window of time while in the game. It’s the smallest amount of time in which action can occur and you both experience the primary mechanics of the game and make decisions on how to use said mechanics.

In Mario, your feedback loops are jumping between platforms, or onto enemies. In Street Fighter, it’s an exchange of blows, or a combo, or a special move. In racing games, it’s the various inputs that make up actually driving the car. You can boil a game down to the most basic concepts, stuff like “when at edge of platform, press A to jump”, and that’s a feedback loop. Feedback loops are the building blocks of game design; and in almost every game they involve either movement or combat, because they’re the easiest things to abstract into button presses and build upon from there. Oversimplified, feedback loops are “when you are pressing buttons”.

Gameplay, then, is feedback loops strung together. It is the time when the player is actively involved in the game using the most developed mechanics available within the system (usually movement or combat or both).

What About The Rest of the Game?

My definition of gameplay above is pretty restrictive. Depending on the game, it excludes huge swathes of the overall time you spend, and often there’s overlap between gameplay and things that aren’t. Designers have a term for that: “experience”. The experience of a game is everything from the art, the music, sitting around roleplaying in chat, taking screenshots, watching cutscenes, fighting enemies, wandering around… everything. The term “player experience” is bandied about a lot, and there’s a lot of back and forth about how certain things things are presented, how the game communicates what the player is supposed to do (“messaging”), how the UI helps or hinders, and how that all interacts with gameplay.

When I mentioned that player housing didn’t involve gameplay, what I meant was that few player housing systems to date have involved the basic feedback loops that exist in the game. They are, without a doubt, a core (and dearly loved) part of the experience, but they aren’t gameplay.

To draw a bit of contrast, compare Minecraft to EQ2, in terms of housing. Minecraft has its basic feedback loops built around obtaining and processing material, as well as placing it in the world to fit your whims. Housing in Minecraft is centered around these feedback loops; it is gameplay. Belghast’s immediate excitement about a player housing system used a Minecraft reference, and the spark that came through when he mentioned it is precisely what I’m talking about when I say that player housing should involve gameplay.

Gameplay versus Experience

The sad reality of game design is that on every project, on every game that gets released, some features are cut, and some content doesn’t make it, and some things that might have been awesome die before seeing the light of day. It’s called “scoping”, and it’s insanely difficult to do. Sometimes these decisions are easy and popular. “Oh, we don’t have the art budget to have 30 player races, and so we’ll only have 8? Okay.” Somteimes they’re easy but unpopular. “Designing and balancing 25 unique classes is completely infeasible, so we’re cutting down to 10, and of the 15 that got cut were the favorites of half the staff? Ouch, but it has to be done.”

Mostly, though, the decisions are hard. Do you ship with 10 classes, or 6 well-balanced ones? Do you ship with 30 zones, some of which might not be complete or even have much if any content in them, or do you ship with 15 and try to make sure that every single one is fully complete? Do you craft a lot of side content for explorer-type players, or do you include less content but put more development time into it so that the experience is richer?

Almost always, these decisions will have gameplay as the dividing line. If it involves gameplay, it’s a lot less likely to get cut than something that doesn’t. The reason for this is that gameplay is the thing that absorbs the most programming time, the most tech, the most art, animation, worldbuilding, etc, and it’s the thing that engages players.

In the case of player housing, in order for it to justify its massive resource expense, it’s going to need to be inextricably linked to gameplay, so that the housing system doesn’t end up on the “easy and (un)popular” chopping block, when push comes to shove.

You know, kind of like Minecraft.