Piercing the Veil On Bioware's MMOG

Ziff Davis' newly rebranded computer-games magazines, Games for Windows, is showing off some of its new content on the 1up hub site. They've got a fantastic interview with James Ohlen, the creative director at Bioware Austin, Rich Vogel, and Gordon Walton, co-studio directors. For the first time, they reveal some new details on Bioware's upcoming Massively Multiplayer Online Game. They don't talk about the game's setting, unsurprisingly, but they do go into some depth on the thinking behind their game. From the article: "GFW: One of the big problems with MMO gameplay is repeating the same content, or same instance if you're specifically talking about WoW, over and over again ... JO: That's something we don't want to encourage. We want to encourage players to continue to make progress in their story, to do new quests, consume new content, constantly move forward. The grind is not attractive in any way. Going and killing the same dragon over and over again is not something I want to do. There are lots of different ways to encourage players to move forward. Simply putting more weight on storytelling experience points is a good way to do that."

Comments

Necessary Evil

[Reason58]

The grind is not attractive in any way. Going and killing the same dragon over and over again is not something I want to do. There are lots of different ways to encourage players to move forward. Simply putting more weight on storytelling experience points is a good way to do that.
As much gamers complain about "the grind", you can't have a successful MMO without one grind or another. It is unrealistic to expect developers to design, implement, test, and release fresh new content at anywhere near the rate that players can and will consume it. That means you need to have players repeating the same actions ad nauseam to progress, otherwise they will reach the "top" and have nothing left to do. Bored players quit the game, and that will hardly bring the business any money, now will it?
You can put me on record as saying there is absolutely no way to design an MMO without some form of mindless repetition.

Dynamic quests system for a MMORPG

[sgant]

When playing EQ or EQ2 or World of Warcraft...you get quests. But these quests do NOTHING to change the world around you. You're doing the exact same quests that everyone else is doing and the talk on the channels is like "did anyone do the "Orc Chief" quest yet? I still need two more hammers before I'm done". That's not really RPG is it?

What about dynamic quest generations? Think about this. You start out, you make your character. And that's it. You don't go up to the "quest giving NPC" to get your first quest. You just start out with basic equipment and that's it. Along your travels, perhaps the very first NPC you meet, or perhaps not, THEY may come up to YOU and say something like "my little boy hasn't come home in almost 3 days! I'm really worried about him, he was playing down by the Cave that's just South of here, can you please help?" And WHAM you have a quest. You're ONLY quest by the way. No stacking of quests.

Now, YOU are the only one with that quest. No one else has the "little boy lost quest". You move out and perhaps see another player along the road or off to the side and you ask him if he can help you out...there-by sharing your quest with him. The cave itself can be an instanced cave that is generated for you and in there the quest gets longer and longer and longer, talking to different NPC's that continue on with the generated story, generating more to the story. Perhaps the boy WAS in the the cave, you find a Troll in there that you think ate him...but no, the Troll is really a nice guy that actually saw the little boy being taken away through the caves by a group of soldiers to another area beyond the cave. WHAM, you have more to follow. This quest can go on and on and on and actually span the world as you move through it! And only you and your party have this quest. At any point you can choose to bow out and let the other player or players you've picked up along the way continue it and you go along your merry way. Perhaps to pick back up with it days later with a group STILL on the SAME quest that started with you. Or you go somewhere else.

I know, a story generation engine would have to be built and tested beyond belief. But couldn't something like this actually work? So you feel that you're really part of the world? Sure, there can be quests that are static that everyone of a certain class has to complete. Like a Fighter's quest...more like a "test" to gain rank. That can always be the same because it's the standard test that all fighters must go through. But for a living, breathing world, wouldn't a dynamic quest/story system be much more immersive?

Is something like this do-able? Otherwise, the world never really changes. Maybe big, server wide changes can happen due to a first-time quest like opening a gate to a new expansion or something. But little things that change the world here and there are non-existent. In MMORPG's now, that guy that lost his hammer at the beginning of the Horde newbie area in WoW is ALWAYS lost. You create a new character, BAM he's got a lost hammer in the exact same spot that you go and fetch for him. 3 or 4 people are also there to pick up that same hammer...even though there is only one there, they all pick up a hammer and deliver it to the guy...but the hammer is still lost and the next person now goes to find it. Nothing changes. It's all the same. Wouldn't it be better if a player were to have killed an NPC and now someone has to track down that player?

Or worse, "quests" are given by the same people over and over with the "collect twelve beetle eyes" kind of thing. Or just "kill 10 wild dogs". Doesn't anyone else find this boring? How about a farmer wants you to kill this pack of dogs that's been killing his sheep. You don't know how many there are, but you go out, find the dogs (track them perhaps?) kill them and see that one has a collar on it with a name. These are not wild dogs you find out, but they actually belong to someone. You tell this to the farmer and he tells you that it's a notorious Thief that lives nearby that's

Re:Call me a pessimist, I guess

[dircha]

It is possible to control the rate of advancement of players. This usually amounts to daily or weekly experience caps. I think a curve-based cap, where one is capped in power relative to other players might be workable. But these systems tend to be arbitrary and unfair. Who's to say the person who is most advanced isn't also a great player who happens to have a lot of freetime?

However, bigger issues in my mind are "twinking" and farming, particularly "boss-farming". These activities can ruin the atmosphere for other players, as well as ruin the economy.

My experience is particularly in Neverwinter Nights community persistent worlds.

There are two very effective measures to controlling these excesses:
1. Make content tied to quests and one-time only. If you defeat a boss once on a character, you don't - can't - defeat it again. Create sufficient content so that players can reach maximum level with minimal replay. You'd think this would drive players away; it doesn't. Most of these players will start new characters and play through the world again, until eventually they have experienced all the content and leave once they become bored like any other player.
2. Prevent players from transferring gold and powerful items to the new characters you create. This keeps everyone on a reasonably even playing field, and it prevents the world economy from spiraling out of control or otherwise disrupting the original vision for the world. A low magic world where every new player has a +2 weapon is suddenly no longer low magic.

Reinforce these steps with content and quests that focus on choice and character development in order to provide greater replay value.

I will never go back to playing a game like WoW where the "end game" is fighting through the same 2-3 dungeons to kill the same bosses, week after week after week for months. On top of this, outside of PvP WoW has next to no replay value in terms of character development and dynamic content, making it that much worse. And even PvP amounts to little more than a grind. Anything but the top rank is primarily about finding a group of people with as much free time as you and playing more than everyone else in the same 3 battlegrounds, over and over and over for 40+ hours a week.

Feh

[Renraku]

There's no easy way to do this.

World of Warcraft is the best yet. Its a mix of quests and grinding. You can grind if you want, or quest if you want. Grinding gets you loot, more money, etc. Questing is a little slower, but full of content and things to read, see, do, etc.

Instance running over and over is kind of dumb in my opinion, but with the game based around equipment so much..it leaves people little choice.

People that dedicate more time to the game should be more powerful than people that play less. A better idea, for WoW, is to make world drops truly drop off of anything in the game. For example, that Glowing Brighwood Staff might drop off of a level 20 enemy and make you rich, or give you a nice staff to look forward to.

The problem is that the best equipment is ONLY accessible to people that put hours and hours and hours and hours of play into the game. Its impossible to get most of the stuff if you aren't in an excellent guild. They could fix this by leaving the current loot tables, but giving more common enemies chances to drop rare equipment. For example if all level 60 creatures had a slight chance of dropping some rare dragon drop. Granted the chance may be pretty low...

Re:Ultima Online?

[Nasarius]

I know more than a few people who have played a lot of MMORPGs and still think that UO was the best...myself included. What happened to player housing? Clothing? Skill-based systems? The holiday gifts (Guild Wars does this very well)? Player-owned NPC vendors? And a thousand other things that fostered a great social environment. Almost every MMORPG released, especially WoW, has been little more than "EverQuest Improved". People obviously loved being able to own and decorate a house/castle. The only problem was the urban sprawl, which is easy to fix if you only sell certain plots of land.

I just want another game where the CRPC, that huge group of roleplayers on Catskills, could live again. Horizons was going to be something great before internal politics killed it. It's been six years; MMORPGs should be so much more by now.