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Massively Multiplayer Games Quickified
It's the last day of the first month of 2006, and already there are plenty of new things brewing on the Massive front. World of Warcraft's community is abuzz with news of the Raid content Jeff Kaplan mentioned over the weekend, and details on the 1.10 patch, which is to feature priest updates and weather cycles. City of Villains has big changes a-coming as well, with content for levels 40 to 50 going in, as well as new zones and a new mission type. The Mayhem missions sound like they're finally living up to the promise of 'being a villain'. The EQ2 server combines are the least of the changes occurring at SOE. Chris Kramer did an interview with GamerGod about some of the sweeping changes inc, touching on the free Planetside scheme and mentioning the Sony Station blog, which so far just has an intro from John Smedley. More romantically, FFXI is rolling out information on its Valentine's Day event. Valentione's day is the chocolate and hearts holiday as only Moogles could imagine it. It's fun to play for love, but also fun to play to crush. Guild War's world championships are taking place in about two weeks, with the first place purse weighing in at $50,000. Vanguard's own brand of hardcore lost a little bit of mystery this week with the release of a features list. Finally. Even though you can't win big bucks for playing them, Eve and Ultima Online continue to please their players with updates and releases. Eve's Creative Director spoke with OGaming about plans for outer space in 2006, and UO will see a new player tour and seasonal spring items. It's a good spring for Massive gaming. Update: 01/31 20:30 GMT by Z : I knew I would miss one. A reader wrote in to mention that Anarchy Online is gearing up for some great new stuff in the 16.2 patch, as well as in the upcoming expansion Lost Eden.
Sorry, I didn't hear you. I was too busy talking to an unassuming cheese shop owner in Stormwind about assasinating a government official. Why he seems to have connections to SI:7 I'm not entirely sure, but he seems to know more than he lets on. Could it be its because he has closer ties to Edwin VanCleef than he wants to admit? Time will tell. Now if you'll excuse me I have to find some gnome named Tyrion if I want to stop the Defias Brotherhood from tearing the power structure of Stormwind, and by extension the Alliance, apart.
Above plot copyright of Blizzard Entertainment.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
And will anything you do or don't do on this quest affect the game world in any persistant way?
Even in single-player games, it's amazing how seldom your actions affect the world. Sure, there's backstory claiming it's all very epic and important, but it rarely shows up in the game at all.
With MMORPGs I've yet to see a game where ordinary quests by ordinary player had any persistant effect on the game world at all. Occasionally you'll see an "event" with two possible outcomes in which the entire server population participates, but that's not really the same.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm happy that the new patch is including things that will please almost ALL players...namely, weather effects and an upgrade to the blue sets which casuals can obtain. I don't play anymore, but when I did I was a priest, so I hope that whatever changes they make to the class are decent enough to make me want to come back to the game. However, Naxxramas is stupid and a waste of resources. I am so sick of the 40 man raid content. There are now 3 zones for the hardcores, which are maybe 5-10% of the server population. 5 man stuff is absolutely the most fun for me...the 10 man places are OK, but anything more than that quickly becomes a pain in the ass. I know SOME people like the huge raids, but I would have thought the current content would have placated that crowd for a long time. Give us more 5 man dungeons!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
umm, the parent comment is strictly in regards to the grandparents comment on plot.
Your logic implies that no book (except those choose your own adventure books), movies or tv shows have plot - since the viewer has no say on outcome or cannot make a persistant change to the Universe.
A plot does not in any way indicate that the user has the ability to change the story.
Now, maybe you weren't replying at all about plot. In that case you probably should have started a new discussion, or made it clear that "ok sure, they do have a plot, but I don't want just a plot, I want to make a permanent, measurable change in the story's arc - unlike almost any other genre of entertainment. I'll hold this MMORPG to a higher level of standard then any other entertainment medium I have - and then complain about it!"
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
Is pretty damn obvious to anyone who has had a priest for a long time.
They nerfed the class entirely too hard pre-release(particularly disc and holy, shadow is fine it just falls into the same pitfalls all other casters do), and now they're hopefully rectifying it.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
The problem is making a mutable game world that can withstand the mutilations of hundreds of users. When the game designers make content, they want everyone to be able to experience it, not just the first 10 people to finish the quest. They can only really do small things. Examples:
FFXI: They had a territorial system where grinding your ass off and doing quests could change territorial control to your faction.
WoW: Although not permanent, there are two dragon bosses that when killed will have their head displayed prominently in the capital city for a time.
WoW(again): This one time, as I passed some NPC's, they started chatting with each other about my gnome, praising him and such. Although not huge, it was very uplifting.
WoW(last time): Although you seem to be against huge singleton population-wide efforts, Blizzard is currently in the middle of the one time war effort. You really get the sense that your contribution matters and that it is a huge team game of everyone working together to complete a massive quest with a long lasting impact on the world.
The best way game designers portray a sense of cause and effect is with quest chains. They have you follow a story line and refer to your previous actions as you follow the chain. I'd be intrested to hear though if any one has a solution for a mutable MMO feature that he or she thinks could work. I can't come up with anything good right now.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
"Eve and Ultima Online continue to please their players with updates and releases."
This sounds like uninformed marketroid speak to me. CCP, creators of Eve, released a patch in late December, which was pretty disastrous. Many basic elements like buddy lists, some basic agent services, and other things were broken and some still remain broken. Furthermore, lag remains very bad in central areas, often to the point of not being playable or characters getting 'stuck'. It is true that CCP has announced an upgrade to better hardware in February, but so far that is a future promise, not current reality, and the lag problems have been going on for months.
Most concerning is that significant gameplay problems continue to be ignored, making the player versus player experience very difficult (especially in the finding and pursuing) and exposing most non-expert characters to totally arbitrary destruction at blind gate ambushes (transitions between solar systems - you must 'jump' blindly through a gate and if there is a fleet on the other side in the next solar system, you just die unless a pro with properly designed ship), an issue that has never been satisfactorily dealt with. Also, there is a serious problem with the use of instant bookmarks, allowing people to jump directly to gates and avoid any fleet defending the gate, which feeds into this blind ambush problem as defenders must then go to the other side and hope for a blind ambush. The side effect of the need for bookmarks is that everyone wants to carry thousands of them for safe and shorter travel (travel times have soared with one of the patches), and this is apparently saturating servers and performance.
Finally, a most pressing problem that has the player community in an uproar is the advent of ISK (the currency of Eve) farmers, some using bots, that are mining continuously in the safe areas and in NPC corporations not subject to player attack. Many of the ISK farmers are suspected of selling their ISK for real life currencies in violation of the EULA, and many are thought to operate from Asian 'sweatshop' outfits. These players are routinely reported to CCP, who apparently does little about them since the same players are seen doing the same thing week after week, nor does CCP seem to be taking the problem seriously. In fact, groups of vigilante players started taking it upon themselves to engage in 'suicide' attacks to destroy farming ships.
CCP has furthermore somewhat legitamized the transfer of real life currency into ISK by allowing the sale of time cards, bought from CCP, for ISK. The buyer lengthens their subscription, the seller gets ISK. Since it is allowed by the EULA to sell characters for ISK, this means that anyone who wants to get a quick edge up in Eve can simply sell time cards, buy a well-trained character, and buy all the ships and equipment they want. Now, people have different opinions of whether this is a good thing or not, but it underscores the fact that CCP is exercising an inconsistent principle, on one hand claiming that ISK sales are not allowed on the principle of fairness of in-game competition, but on the other allowing out of game actions to affect in game rewards when there is a profit motive.
Eve has its good points as well, but I cannot let that uninformed platitude fly. As for what's the worst problem of all, well, all of them, but buddy lists not working and not being fixed for over a month is pretty much up there as it was broken in the December patch and its dysfunction compromises the social fabric of the game (are your friends online or not?) and player versus player fighting (are your enemies on or not?).
It's not quite the same thing as being able to chop down a tree and have the whole game world see that you did it, but that kind of permeranent change would require almost as many devs and players.
This gets repeated often on game design forums, but it's simply not true. Many MMORPGs now have fully automated mission generation: a simple premise and an instanced adventure area are randomly genererated (from templates). Instant quest.
Everyone is just scared to put the same automatic world generation logic into play in the shared areas, or they're just so used to very small worlds they can't imagine it otherwise.
There are no longer any technological limts preventing the shared world from constantly changing and evolving in response to player actions. If I don't like that orc encampment outside of town, I should be able to take a party and kill all the orcs and torch their campp and build a lemonade stand where it used to be. The game can create a new orc encampment somewhere no one is looking at right now. As time passes in the game, large areas my become "civilized" in this fashion, but that's just a matter of either making the world big, or occasionally setting up an orc invasion (or if your artists have had a few months to add a new creature type, an invasion of new content).
If you can randomely generate an instanced dungeon, you can randomely generate a shared dungeon which is discovered somewhere and lasts until someone figures out how to make it go away. Very little development work required.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Treasures of Aht Urhgan just got its worldwide April 18th release date along with the second of the new jobs being announced (Corsair, a pirate/gambler mix that uses a special gun to support and buff party members based on luck) along with the reveal that ToAU will have another "Jueno" like main city hub added that will also somehow involve enemy raids into the hub city.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Zonk, it would be much easier on the eyes and brain if you broke this into several stories. I know that some people might complain about the lower content density, but 16 links in one paragraph does not entice me to see what that content is.
Automatically generate world content from templates.
See, that wasn't so hard. Choose the theme for a new area from a list of the kinds of areas you have templates made for. Bandit camp, visiting caravan, newly discovered underground area, whatever. Choose the race of bad guys who live there. Populate the area based on the spawn table for that race.
The plotline in current MMORPGs are drawn from a small pool of ideas, so just make a list of plot elements for the game genre, and have nearby NPCs generate random quests for that area, for basic content to get started with. This will gove adventurers an in-character reason to explore the new area.
Then choose a goal for the bad guys from a list for that kind of new area. Sacking a town, finding the Dingus of Great Power, whatever. Set a time limit. If some adventurer discovers what's going on in time to stop it, and defeats the enemy leaders, the world changes and the area goes away, becomes ruins, whatever's appropriate. If no one discovers the plot in time, the bad guys *succeed* and the nearby town is destroyed, the Dingus of Great Power is used to summon a demon that ravages the landscape, whatever. There are only 20 or so fantasy adventure plots anyhow, it's easy enough to automate.
Because it's all auto-generated from templates, you can make your world big enough that you don't have thousands of adventurers sumbling across every square inch of landscape every day, so you can have enough content that new areas last a while. Also, when it's trivial to add randomly generated world content, it's pretty easy to turn a writer's ideas into world content. No more "3 days to write a good idea, 3 months for world design and artwork".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
A book is not interactive. The plot involves events that happen to the author's characters. Other events may be going on in the story, but if the characters aren't involved it's just backstory, not really plot. A minimum of continuity is also required for a book - if the heros kill the Evil One chapter 3, and he's back in chapter 5, the author has some explaining to do.
An MMORPG is interactive. The plopt involves events that happen to *my* character. Other events may be narrated by NPCs, but if *my* character is not involved it's just backstory. MMORPGs seem to just through continuity out the window. If I'm following some alleged story arc and kill the Evil One, and he respawns 15 minutes later, and the same NPC is offereing me the same quest again, WTF?
So perhaps it's continuity that's lacking, if you want to define it that narrowly, but it's hard to find any immersion in a plot (in a book, movie, MMORPG, or whatever) where the characters' actions have no consequences.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You mentioned in passing a very immersive and very easy way to make your actions affect the world: have NPCs know about you. City of Heroes did this as well. Defeat a menace to a town? Have the guards salute you, and shopkeepers hold the door for you, and random NPCs point you out to passers by. For a while, anyway, until the next guy is famous.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
* Priests and Paladins have been removed to keep in line with our policy about not bringing religious/political/sexual mentionings into the game. I imagine this would actually be a thing players would appreciate, since Blizzard can't balance classes anyways.
There's a bug. I tried that code with a few modifications:
while(1) {
time++;
money++;
}
PlayMMO(time, money);
The problem is, I never got around to the PlayMMO part.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
I agree with you here - this has always bugged me. Its a single player game with friends - nothing changes. You raid the same place over, and over and over, and kill the same boss over and over. But all games have some level of this. The closest to "totaly free form" is the player vs. player side in EVE, where players wage wars against other plays to conquer territory and stations. Its what also drives the whole economy forward, since once you get blown up, your ship is no longer there (you may get an insurance payout up to a certain amount, but for the fancy Tech 2 stuff it never even gets to 50% of the value, and it never covers the modules).
EVE does have the mission and complex (dungeon) aspect too, but you generaly don't play the game soley for those.