Ariad

I’ll get to part 2 of Ugly Truths in Gaming at some point, but I recently got into a discussion with some friends about the kinds of things they want to see in MMOs.

Top of the list, as always, was player housing. I have such a love-hate relationship with the concept. On the one hand, some people LOVE it. It’s their own personal in-game space that they can make their own and get that little extra bit of immersion going. People love it, and get super invested, goes the argument, so why not put it in? Everyone loves it, right?

Why Not Every Game Has Houses

Player housing is hard. Yes, I know other games have done it, yes I know it’s possible, but honestly no one has done it *right*, and it’s incredibly resource-intensive. I’ll get to the part of that sentence that makes most people angry in a moment. First, a little bit of tech:

In order to implement even the most basic player housing, you need a few things. First, you need the ability to create instances. Sure, Star Wars Galaxies, Shadowbane, and Ultima Online didn’t do this. I would point to the vast amounts of empty space (or ridiculous overcrowding) in both of those games, and comment that city planners exist for a reason, and players simply slam houses down wherever if given the opportunity, which is not something you actually want. Instancing, in this day and age, is not that difficult, except that for player housing you need to have a very specific instance saved per player. Not terrible, but it’s notable that that kind of data (i.e. saved instance data) doesn’t generally hang around more than a day or a week in most games, for things like raid lockouts.

You also need a complete in-game interface for placing the stuff that goes in the house. This is an entirely separate interface from any other part of the game, requires you to be able to dynamically generate collision and pathing information (so that your pet doesn’t walk through the chair you just placed, and neither can you), and needs an entire items database for things that you can display, how they work, how to orient them, and how they behave once they’re placed.

Then you need art, visuals for all of the stuff that goes in the house, that has to be tested with all of the other things that could go in the house to make sure there aren’t any unintended things that happen when they’re placed (like, for example, a little seam that makes you fall through the world). This usually involves thousands of objects, many of which are custom-made just for the player houses.

What Do I Get For All Of This?

The above is not an insurmountable amount of resources. A development team dedicated to putting in player housing can reasonably implement it, if they so desire. Unfortunately, one of the big things that comes up in design discussions when picking what things to add is “what are we giving up to get this?”

In the case of player housing, it can be something like “large group (raid) content”, or “PvP”, or “four to six full zones”, or “three player classes” or “crafting”. None of these are small things, so if you’re going to give one of them up for player housing, you’d better make sure that your return is more awesome than whatever you’re giving up.

I mentioned above that no one has done player housing right. What I mean by that is that no one has designed a model for player housing that makes it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s worth the trade-off. The pitfalls are as numerous as the benefits; player housing splits people up into little private instances, making cities feel empty, they’re huge resource hogs, only some percentage of players even care, and that number is smaller than feature X that would otherwise be removed.

The biggest one, and the one that I have the hardest time with, is that there’s no actual gameplay involved with player housing. You have this extra system for houses that is only used there, only used for decoration, and then you look around it or show it off to other people.

Housing That Matters

I don’t think it’s a hopeless cause, though. The system just needs to be designed to be more than just a dollhouse to show off one’s fancy décor. A house should be something that adds tangible value to your character, rather than simply a money and time sink. Imagine a game where part of it is colonizing new, uncharted lands. You need to forge out into the wilderness and make your home there. The instanced neighborhoods in LOTRO would be great for this, either little pockets in a larger landmass or little islands or both, but instead of simply a row of houses, there would be hostile mobs, resource nodes, everything a “real” zone has.

You could get hooks into the crafting, raiding, and questing systems as well, as you actually build your house and clear out hostile mobs from your territory. As you develop your land, you worry less and less about mobs coming and wrecking shop and more about the most efficient means with which to harvest valuable materials from your area. If you’re working collaboratively with several different players, you can clear an area faster and develop more quickly. Possibly, if you’re a devoted crafter, you hire other players to help you clear out the baddies while you craft what you need for the house. Dragon inhabiting your island? Get some raiders to take it down for you, and in return they get a nice place to hang out.

In The End

I think the biggest issue with player housing is that it needs serious evaluation from the design side. There simply hasn’t been a compelling design that’s been more than a little added bonus to the game rather than a fully-featured system, and it’s incredibly difficult to justify that kind of resource expense without a solid design plan and without appeal to a wide range of players.

Hopefully we’ll see a design that simply blows everyone away, for the industry as a whole to latch onto and build upon.

David Sirlin has an oft-mentioned book called Playing to Win, available in its entirety for free online. It’s a fascinating read from the perspective of a highly competitive gamer. His disclaimer at the beginning is entirely apt—most people who don’t already have a handle on playing competitively probably won’t believe that he’s right, or will get angry at his writing. Some of it seems calculated to enrage; he doesn’t really pull any punches, and throws a few that may not be strictly necessary.

I was initially enraged upon reading it. Sirlin starts by calling any player who doesn’t play to win a “scrub”, a choice of term that seems hyper-elitist and calculated to alienate, and I’m still not convinced that it isn’t. The fact that he’s largely not wrong in the rest of the book only furthered my anger, because I was left without a lot to rail against.

In retrospect, some time later, Playing to Win put me in mind of one of my college professors, who taught game design and was absolutely crucial in me getting into the games industry. His first lecture was brutal, especially for a roomful of aspiring game developers who were still wide-eyed and optimistic. It went something like this:

“Alright, let’s get started. Who here has a game idea that they want to share, or better yet, make?”

<Pretty much everyone emphatically raises a hand.>

“Good. Forget that idea; it’s worthless. Come up with a new one. You have until the end of the class period.”

A Punch in the Face

It’s almost like a physical blow to deal with that sort of thing. I was reeling after his comment and I could tell that a lot of other people were as well, with different reactions. A lot of people got defensive, others looked like they might cry, other people were clearly gearing up to drop the course. It didn’t help that the crux of the first lecture was about implementation over theory, with quotes like “Ideas are a dime a dozen; they don’t mean anything unless you can build them,” and other things that make a budding designer’s stomach tighten with emotion.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I started to get perspective. We were introduced to the “tyrannosaurus in our minds”, described as a construct that attacks any new ideas that enter the mind, and destroys ones that are too weak to survive. It became part of a larger lesson about being your own harshest critic and not getting too attached to an idea. At the time, I’d spent several years on a lengthy game design doc, a sprawling magnum opus that I’d put almost three hundred pages of text into. I had been convinced that I was going to one day make it into a full-fledged game. The professor’s tyrannosaurus analogy had an interesting embedded lesson:

“I often have people describe their game ideas to me, and I can separate the good designers from the bad almost immediately, just by how well-fed their tyrannosaurus is. A bad designer’s tyrannosaurus will be lazy, or too weak to feed, and ideas that would never see the light of day end up in their mind, wasting their time. A lot of really bad ideas get made because someone’s tyrannosaurus wasn’t trained well enough to cull it before hundreds or thousands of hours had been spent on development, and by the time someone realized the idea really was simply terrible, too much money had been spent to abandon the project.”

“The first thing any responsible producer or publisher is going to do is try to poke holes in an idea. It has to be done, because when millions of dollars are on the line you need to nip bad ideas in the bud quickly. Good designers will have thought of this already, and have answers ready.”

Picking up the Pieces

A lot of people will rail against things like the above, saying things like “this is why games are all clones of one another nowadays” and “that kind of mentality means that there’s no innovation!”

It’s not true. The very best games are a product of this kind of mentality. It’s easy to lose sight of it, but there are shining examples all over the place. Team Fortress 2 is a game that really looked deeply at other games and culled even the best of those. Team-based shooters used to release with tons of guns and as many maps as they could build. Team Fortress 2 had a bare handful of weapons by comparison and released with only two maps, but those two maps had been extensively play-tested and polished until they shone.

Pokémon has an incredibly straightforward system, one that’s gone pretty much unchanged through fifteen years of releases, and is still incredibly popular. Worth noting is that nearly every mechanical addition they’ve made to the game has felt tacked-on and extraneous, from odd baking games to playing dress-up.

Building a Better Designer

The very first thing I was tasked with doing when I started working in the games industry was building a small section of map. I was excited and inspired and, even though I’d been given a week to do it, I turned it around in a day and a half. My lead looked at it and told me it was too complicated and that I should rebuild it from scratch. Around the third or fourth iteration it finally passed muster, and I’d taken the whole week doing it. It would have been devastating, except I quickly realized that I wasn’t culling ideas as well as I should. The end result was a tight, fun experience, something that the original, heavily-overdesigned version was not.

The whole thing has stuck with me, and I’m always on the lookout for how games implement their ideas, and which ideas shouldn’t have passed by the tyrannosaurus somewhere along the way.

I still have the two-hundred-and-eighty page game design concept I’d been working on, and I was too attached to it for a long time to turn the dinosaur on it. I finally did, and mentally shredded 99% of it.

Those three pages that are left, though? There’s a solid core for a game there, one that I might make eventually.

Next: What Players Want (Ugly Truths in Gaming, Part 2)

This has been stuck in my head for the past few days.

I actually haven’t been playing very much in the way of video games for the past couple of weeks, other than the occasional Mortal Kombat match and a couple of iPhone/iPad games. Normally I’d get really introspective about this, but honestly the main reason is because the weather’s been nice the last few weeks and I’m enjoying it.

That being said, one thing I HAVE been doing a lot more lately is tabletop gaming of various kinds (RPGs, wargames, etc). I’m involved in… four different tabletop games currently, play another sporadically, and am thinking of running my own. It’s interesting, because the experiences are completely unlike what I can get in video games.

Storytelling and Theatre

It really amazes me that, for all of the advances we’ve made as a culture, and all of the amazing forms of entertainment we’ve been able to come up with, it’s still very, very hard to beat someone simply telling a story aloud. It’s a form of theatre, but the most intimate kind there is, where the storyteller and the audience are working together. The storyteller sets the stage, and the audience steers the story through what they want to hear about.

It makes me think of a parent or grandparent telling a story, while the excitable kids interrupt with questions and comments. There’s the fun of interacting with the story for all the players, and something eminently satisfying about making all the players happy as the GM.

Short post this time, just commenting on what I’ve been thinking about lately.

It’s starting to feel like we’re gearing up for a post-Warcraft MMO scene, where the current powerhouse has settled into its paradigm and has made it clear what it’s doing (and, perhaps more importantly, NOT doing). For anyone who was surfing games during the end of the Everquest era, more and more people are starting to look for something different, or something to play “on the side”, or what have you. The last time this happened, we started to get a lot of competition, slowly eroding the base of the current leader (Everquest, at the time) and usually all trying something a little different from the norm.

It’s been interesting to see history repeat itself, or at least start to show hints that it’s going to. It’s taken a lot longer this time around; WoW has managed to stay on top for a lot longer than Everquest did, and there’s still no definitive successor to the throne.

The Last Big Thing

In 2001, Everquest had been on top for two years, having largely usurped Ultima Online and staying reasonably ahead of its competition: Asheron’s Call. That year saw the first shots across EQ’s bow, in Dark Age of Camelot and Anarchy Online. Dark Age of Camelot took the Everquest model and shaped a strong PvP environment out of it. There was a goodly amount of PvE in the game, but everything at the end came down to its Realm-vs-Realm model, in which three player factions fought over contested territory, especially Keeps. Anarchy Online took a different route, hitting the sci-fi angle rather than the fantasy angle, but keeping much of the gameplay the same. These managed to be different enough that they coexisted with EQ quite solidly, unlike a large number of the similar fantasy-style MMOs that came before and after.

Two years later, in 2003, the experimental phase was in full force. The games released four years into Everquest’s reign deviated hugely from EQ’s model, all trying new things to see what the next success would be. The foray into sci-fi games continued with EvE Online and Star Wars Galaxies, both extremely innovative games that presented the MMORPG in a new way. Shadowbane released as a massive foray into the concept of player housing and player-run content, with its player-made cities and siege-focused PvP, and A Tale In The Desert was a game unlike any other that had been released before, with an entire gameworld shaped by its players.

As with all innovation, not all of these experiments proved to have long-standing appeal, but a lot of the concepts introduced in them made their way into the big release the following year. In these games we saw the introduction of dungeon instancing, the player auction house, mounts, significantly improved chat functionality, and the beginning of quest-oriented gameplay, all of which appear in 2004’s World of Warcraft.

Today’s Big Thing

Just prior to World of Warcraft’s release in late 2004, two other games made their appearance: City of Heroes and Guild Wars. These games both moved back towards the EQ model, albeit with some notable differences. City of Heroes managed to capture the superhero genre in a game the way nothing else really had, and Guild Wars moved heavily into a quest-centric model and gathered quite a large following with its no-subscription-fee model, circumventing something that is still a sticking point for players even now.

World of Warcraft dropped in late 2004, alongside Everquest 2. The surge of popularity for WoW launched the new era of MMORPGs, and set the standard for everything that came next.

Toppling the Giant

The same cycles that we saw with Everquest are starting to make the rounds again. The process has been slower, as the bar set by World of Warcraft has made is significantly harder to make a strong showing in the market, especially for something as difficult to make as an MMO. Player tolerance for instability, lag, or a dearth of content is close to nil, and over the years WoW has made the average player much, much more skilled than they were prior to its release, as well as bringing millions of new players to the genre. It’s no longer acceptable to have punitive, “hardcore” penalties in games, and the feeling of power WoW’s PvE progression brings has proved intoxicating, leaving few players to want to go back to the harsh, unforgiving environments of previous games.

As a result, the scope of innovation has been tightened, as wild, unproven designs are simply too expensive to take the risk on, especially considering the various elements that *must* be excellent for a new MMO to compete. Games have tried and failed to release at the level of polish required of the previous generation, The Matrix Online being a notable example of this, and games like Warhammer Online struggling to compete against the WoW juggernaut. Games like Mortal Online and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes made it clear that while a certain subset of players sought the hardcore environments of the previous generation, they wouldn’t capture the kinds of players they used to. Lord of the Rings Online proved a strong contender by staying close to the WoW model, but presenting itself in subtle but numerous different ways.

Iteration, Not Innovation

We’re starting to see the next generation of MMOs start to surface– games that expand incrementally on the existing template, rather than spiralling into completely new ground. Video games are an iterative process, and while occasionally a shining success in the industry is borne of something completely out of left field (hello, Katamari Damacy), by and large the big hits in the industry are based on what has come before, but with some carefully added features and a couple of new designs, rather than a completely blank slate.

We’re starting to see those games now. Rift is the first, introducing the concept of dynamic content in a way that makes sense and actually works within the MMO framework, as well as honing the idea of character customization to a much greater degree than previous games. Star Wars: The Old Republic looks to be following suit, only emphasizing storytelling and characterization in new ways, something that WoW now struggles with. Guild Wars 2 also seeks to subtly alter the mold, by presenting content and quests to players in a different way, and building on the idea of dynamic content.

The Next Big Thing

There’s no telling what game will topple the current reign of WoW, but by looking at what WoW is and is not doing, and what its competition is focused on, it’s not difficult to get a picture of what that game will look like. Dynamic content sits high on the list of things that WoW simply cannot elegantly do (and doesn’t seem interested in doing), but the difficulties of execution present a high bar, with the best implementation to date appearing in Rift. A new quest model is almost certainly in the cards, as both Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic seem to be pushing. Expect that up-and-coming MMOs will eschew the “quest text, accept/decline” boxes in the future. Storytelling will also be big– as technology allows the fidelity of our games and the ability to present an MMO the same way a single-player game is presented, we’re going to see the same leaps in storytelling in MMOs as we did when games like Half-Life proved that first-person shooters could tell excellent stories.

I personally hope for a game that changes the way we approach MMO endgames, and while I still think it’s a ways off, an MMO that eschews levels entirely for a whole new model of progression would be very interesting to see. As usual, though, I expect that the next game to really capture me is going to be one I’m not prepared for and that does things I don’t expect. We’ll see what that looks like when the time comes.