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The Ultimate MMORPG
MMORPG.com has up an editorial looking at one man's vision of the perfect Massively Multiplayer Game. From the article: "I have read about the new games on the horizon, and they seem to all have one thing in common: They focus on a few key features, and leave out brilliant concepts that have already made it in to modern games. That means that in order for the players to get all the features they enjoy in a game, they would have to play more than one MMORPG, if not many MMORPGs. I do not know about you, but I struggle with playing one at a time."
Why dont you concentrate on things that make all mmorpgs suck?
SomethingAwful has a hilarious yet very insightful look at your typical mmorpg.
There is truth in humor.
I personally completely disagree with the article. The articles argument is basically that in order to build the ultimate MMORPG, you just need to combine all the best points of the current MMORPGs. This is complete and utter crap.
MMORPGs are currently suffering from unoriginality. No, I am not talking about the setting. I am talking about core game play. MMORPGs boil down to one thing. If you don't think watching your levels go up and collecting better equipment is awesome, you are going to hate any MMORPG, even a combination of them all, in a few months, if not weeks. What MMORPGs need are some fresh ideas. The sad truth is that to this day UO has a monopoly on originality. How can a game nearly a decade old have more originality then all the current crop of MMORPGs combined?
What MMORPGs need are some real changes. I suggest the following.
Kill the exponential power curve: What kills 99% of most MMORPG content? The power curve. The fact that a level 50 could go to sleep and a level 5 couldn't even land a hit destroys the ability to produce content, slaughters the enjoyment of casual players, renders PvP impossible for anyone not at the cap, and results in a content being completely inaccessible to most players. Further, the exponential power curve really is just a substitute for content. You drive players forward to mindlessly kill NPCs because they think they are working their way up the curve. Kill the curve and find another way to entertain your players.
Dynamic Worlds:
No, I do NOT mean monthly or even weekly events. I don't mean GM run stories. I mean true living and breathing worlds. Start an undead army in the artic of your world and have it march south into inhabited regions. Have it physically march. Have it set up camp at dawn, and march at night. If it comes to a city, have it lay siege. If it runs across a corpse, have it raise the corpse into another soldier. The army might not be completely running on auto polite. A GM might lay out way points for it follow each week. From that point on though, the army moves on its own. Make it a long term event. So, at any point, you could ride out from your city, kill some forward scouts, then run off. If someone tries to 'camp' the army, make it behave realistically and swarm. If people in small groups are only willing to do hit and runs, then you did something right.
Build the world to be as dynamic as possible. This should be priority number one. Build it so that GMs can jump in and tweak things, but the real goal is build a world that naturally constantly changes. This in it of itself should do a lot of content building for you.
Let Us Lose:
You know the worst thing about MMORPGs? The absolute inability to lose. If you play for a month in any MMORPG, at the end of the month, you will be better and more powerful then you were the month before. This translates into two things. First, you degrade any sense of accomplishment. Second, you condition the player to go absolutely nuts whenever he does lose. Imagine the army of undead scenario again. What if the army kept marching and took over city after city? What if it boiled down to just a few cities left and they were forced to pool their resources to make a last ditch stand? What if they could actually lose and have the entire world taken over and the force the game to reset? That would surely suck, but I bet most people would kill themselves to be apart of the final battle to save the world, and I bet they would feel pretty damn good if they actually won. Any real sense of accomplishment is lost in MMORPGs due to the inability to actually lose. Let people lose.
Politics, Wars, Survival, Wealth - Dear God, Anything But Grinding:
Build a game with TRUE content. Arenas for PvP, politics for socialites, trade empires for merchants, and some mundane hunting to fill in the niches. If people run off to go kill stuff to get exp and l00t, something is deeply wrong with your game. Bui
Kill the exponential power curve: What kills 99% of most MMORPG content? The power curve.
Can't agree more with this one. Interestingly enough, it's also true of pen & paper RPG's.
One of the reasons I always preferred games like Shadowrun over D&D (ignoring genre differences) was the combat/leveling system. Shadowrun wasn't unique - other games had similar systems.
In D&D, your hit points just keep increasing as you level up. A level 1 warrior didn't stand a chance against a level 20 warrior, no matter how many lucky rolls you got. When you only have 10 hit points and a 1d6 short sword, a gentle breeze can kill you; what chance do you have against an opponent with 200 hit points, 3 attacks per round, with a weapon that does 1d12+5?
Shadowrun acknowledges that this is not how the world is. Every human is pretty much the same - hit them on the leg with a sword, and the leg will be damaged. Hit it hard enough, and it will fall off. What makes the difference is experience - an experienced warrior will know how to use a sword to make sure that the sword hits well (or conversely, to deflect the blow). Therefore, everyone had a set, small number of hit points. Lose 1, and you are lightly wounded. Lose 3, and you have a bad injury that is probably affecting your ability to fight. Lose 5 and you're in a come. 7 and you're dead. (might be off with the exact numbers here; it's been a while). And two minor wounds don't equal a major wound - none of this 'pecked to death by ducks' stuff that D&D promotes.
Development of experience became extremely important. Experience (plus a little luck) was what determined whether your attack defeated their defence. Experience could become very specific - you could develop experience in the use of a class of weapon, or skill in a specific type of weapon, or in the use of a particular instance of weapon; the more specific your experience, the better the bonuses, but the harder it is to get the experience, and the greater the penalties at using a different weapon. You could get a bonus if you aimed your weapon, at the cost of the time it took to aim.
As a result, a level 1 player could reasonably attack a level 20 player with expectation of victory if they were feeling lucky, or if they were clever about their attack (eg sneaking, sniping, etc). One hit can be fatal, if applied correctly and not defended.
This approach to hit points/power also helps to encourage non-combat alternatives to gaming. When you have a hundred hit points, going into battle becomes 'just one of those things'. If you lose a few hit points, who cares. If things start looking bad, then you run away. And since you have so many hit points, you have plenty of time to make that decision. However, if a single lucky/experienced shot can kill you, you start looking at alternatives to battle, unless you are certain you can win, or you are certain you are much better than your opponent.
The simple 'level up, get hit points, become invincible' rules of D&D seem to be adhered to by all the MMORPGs that I have seen. I can't wait until game developers learn from the lessons that old pen & paper guys learned years ago.
Russ %-)
... and never, ever play leapfrog with a unicorn.
Let me explain why online RPGs aren't so easy to develop. In essence, players don't know what they really want. I know this is going to piss off a lot of people, but let me explain.
Let Us Lose
See, you say you want to be able to lose. The problem is most players don't want to lose. In my own game, Meridian 59, you can lose. If you die you drop your inventory and lose a percent in a variety of your skills. This means that if you die repeatedly, you can actually go backwards in character progression. Luckily, the game isn't quite as equipment-focused as other games are, so losing your inventory isn't as bad as it might be in other games. Plus, the monsters are dumb and it's fairly easy to get out of a bad situation if you are smart about playing, so multiple deaths isn't all that common.
Yet, when people look at this they cringe. They don't want to be "punished" by the game. Many will complain that they don't want to "lose" the "work" they put into their character. They want to gain power then enforce that power on other people without consequence. I have to admit, this is a compelling argument. It sucks to have a limited amount of time to play these types of games and it kinda sucks to have to spend a lot of your limited time rebuilding from your previous losses. It doesn't feel "fun" to rebuild, even though it is part of the a game that is fun because there's the risk of meaningful loss.
And this is just one issue like this. There are multiple other issues like this that keep developers from experimenting too much. Frankly, people are used to the way the games currently are, and until people are willing to pay for other types of games we'll see more and more clones made.
And, this is what it really boils down to: what will the market support? We already have people trying cool and innovative games, but they fall to the wayside. Meridian 59 has a very well-balanced and unique character development system in an original world. But, I suspect that most people clamoring for "innovation" won't be able to look past the outdated graphics long enough to see the cool PvP system at the core. It's all well and good to hope that one of the high-budget games will do something innovative, but let me put it this way: If I were given a budget of $30 million and told to make an online game, I would do the safest game possible. I would take almost no real risks, because it's my job and reputation on the line if the game doesn't make back its investment.
And, frankly, this is the smart thing to do. World of Warcraft followed the usual Blizzard technique of synthesizing the good parts of other games, polishing the gameplay and presentation to an amazing degree (ignoring issues like stability for now), and releasing a fun but hardly original game. World of Warcraft now boasts 3.5 million players worldwide (1.5 million of those Chinese), and is the most successful western online RPG ever. They followed the safe road and were rewarded for it. Unlike half a dozen other games I could mention that offered more innovation and have essentially faded into oblivion.
Once again, the developers do what the market tells them to do. They will provide the type of games that people will pay for and that will make a profit. Until the people who want innovation show themselves to be a large enough force with enough money to make a difference, we'll continue to see the types of games we have previously.
Listen, personally I agree with you, but people haven't been falling over themselves to financially reward my company for running a game that tries to buck the trend. And, if you're not supporting my current title with a bit of innovation, I'm not going to have the resources to do any other titles with more innovation. Hell, I'd love to do a game full of politics and set in something but a medieval fantasy setting, but I don't have the resources to do that anytime soon. And if you're waiting for one of those $30 million budget games to do something innovative so you can have your pretty graphics, too, you're going to be waiting a long, LONG time.
My thoughts,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog