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Richard Garriot Argues Against Stagnant MMOG Design
The creator of Ultima Online and Tabula Rasa and well-known designer Richard Garriot spoke at the Develop Conference in Brighton, England on the subjects of stagnating MMOG design and the NCSoft deal with Sony. His commentary on Massive game design is fairly direct: "If you look at the vast majority of MMOs that has come out since Ultima Online and Everquest, you can look at the features and they are almost exactly the same. Even though the graphics have got better and the interface is much slicker, fundamentally the gameplay is unchanged. Worse yet, there are many things that have become standard that I look at and even though they are powerful enough to encourage the behavior of people obsessed with playing these games, I don't think they are the right way of building the future."
Truly a British icon
Actually, he did die once:
http://www.aschulze.net/ultima/stories9/beta.htm
No data, no cry
I think (and I could be wrong here) that that is exactly what he is trying to do with Tabula Rasa, innit?
Oh, I get it... this is the obligatory Richard-Garriot-Sucks thread. I would think it would be further down. My bad.
From the sounds of the article, Rasa feels that grinding is dominating MMO gameplay and that it's time to innovate. Having never played UO, but spending plenty of time in EQ and Warcraft, I can't say that all MMOs are dependent on grinding. I can understand a want to innovate and create a something completely new for MMOs, but in order for characters to advance, they need to be given waypoints to show completion. I agree that grinding doesn't have to be the only way, it's just the easiest way, and easily understandable to any MMO gamer out there.
"The only constant in the universe is change." - Unknown author
He is building a better game. Garriot gave up a comfy job and huge salary at EA to go and develop a better game. That's one of the big point of TFA.
MMORPGs need more interactive elements and less static content. I would love to see a game where you could start a merchant empire, overthrow a king, or build a village, as well as delving in dungeons and hacking monsters. Everything outside of combat skills is relatively useless in most MMORPGs. With elements of simulation included, skills such as diplomacy, leadership, and acting would become important. Every server would develop differently. Developers wouldn't write static content, but would instead script dynamic content that would draw from the present game world instead of shoe-horning new plots into every instance. For instance, rather than making quests that use the same NPCs, existing NPCs with the right characteristics would be used every time the quest was given. Rather than use the same locations, generic locations such as "any lower class bar" could be specified, and the quest might be activated any time the PC went into such a location.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The truth of the matter is that it's a lot easier to add complexity into a text based game, because the player's imagination will fill in so many of the details for you. Adding graphics, particularly ones that are trying to look photo-realistic, allows the player to shut off that part of their imagination, and so then you've got to fill it all in, which is a hell of a lot of work.
When I read "You throw the rock through the nearby window, which shatters into hundreds of razor sharp pieces. The shards fly into the store, catching the many shoppers by surprise. Panic breaks out amongst them.", In my mind I can picture all of that happening without very little effort. But for a game developer to create a scene like that in a game, they'd have to do an incredible amount of work if they wanted it to look good. Things like physics to have the glass shatter realistically. Some sort of AI(or at least scripting) to have the people react appropriately. Not to mention wrapping it all up in some pretty graphics with high-rez textures on detailed and well animated models.
All the computing power in the world isn't going to make designing photo-realistic gameplay anywhere near as easy as it is to do it text based (that's not to say that good text based games are a piece of cake though).
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Eve and DOAC are good departures from the MMO standard. Still are I think. Whats also great about those 2 games is you don't have to spend 8 hours a day on them to do well.
He's totally right and he doesn't need to offer suggestions -- he's just stating the obvious because that's apparently what all the MMOG developers have forgotten since the UO/EQ days. Now, it's mostly about keeping players on the hamster wheel (grind) and paying the monthly fee to make your parent company/publisher happy.
For example: WoW is a terrible GRIND when you compare it to a game like UO, which had a much more robust setting to play in. Uo had crafting, gathering, hunting, quests, treasure hunting, boating in the seas, dungeons, role playing, houses, player cities and PVP (and that's just from 1996 to 2000 when I played) Those were all *MAJOR* aspects of the game. In WOW, the only major aspects are: PVP and Gear Grinding.
BOOORRRINNNGGG
Games like UO were designed to be open ended and non-linear, unlike WoW (which I played for 2 years, BTW). The UO developers might not have thought players would create an innovative city (such as Oasis on the Sonoma server) or build Fish Tanks in their towers using scraps of cloth left over from crafting and the fish you could catch from the sea... but due to the open ended design of the game, you COULD do creative things like this -- ALL over the place in UO.
That's what he is saying and I agree with him.
PVP with clear cut goals and accomplishments? The description sounds _exactly_ like Dark Age Of Camelot. How will this game be different? Does it remove the insane grind as the chief gameplay mechanic? The fedex quest as the great innovation in improved gameplay? The constant repetition? The unbalanced-rock-paper-scissors design/constant nerf/constant whining cycle? The pick-a-"shard" dice roll that will have a huge impact on your game experience that you have to make up front with nearly zero info to base it on and can't really change later, so you better do homework before signing up to play?
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
I played UO for years and years, it still has a fond place in my heart. But you're complaining about an excess of grinding in WoW, and then lauding UO for its gathering and crafting systems? They were nothing but a grind, and even less engaging in general due to the extremely repetitive nature of the activity and general lack of threat (barring random PvP encounters if you chose to do it in Felucca, obviously). Similarly - hunting and treasure hunting form two of the primary quest archetypes of WoW also (and are, I would argue, better developed in the latter setting). "Dungeons" are much better developed in WoW (although the instancing does somewhat detract from the fun of that, from a certain point of view) and are the main setting of the gear grind in WoW.
In terms of actual game mechanics, I would suggest that WoW beats UO hands down - many of the concepts you laud in UO are not only present in WoW, but are refined and improved on. What's different is primarily the arrangement of the world, and the adjacent mechanics which aren't strictly related to "gameplay". WoW is very clearly a path from A to B, where A is level 1 and B is a pimped out level 70. You can take small diversions along the path (crafting, RP, etc), but basically they are all fitted in to support your primary profession of bashing creatures' faces in. UO, on the other hand, had a much broader scope: there was no fundamental need to go kill beasts of any sort (indeed, it was often not that profitable to do so) and you could build a skillset completely independent of your ability to smash faces and still have a complete, meaningful character. Coupled with the additional mechanics for interacting with the world (which rarely affected actual mechanics), you have a recipe for a much more broader, more realistic feeling world than that offered by the rather linear pathway in WoW and similar MMOs.
He's building a game. We don't know whether it will be better or not.
;)
Also, he left Origin in 2000 and ostensibly started conceptualizing Tabula Rasa shortly thereafter.
That's a 3D Realms-style dry spell, punctuated with his occassional 'massmogs are niche/stagnant/whatever' articles.
Granted, TR will almost certainly hit shelves before DNF, but 3DRealms already had a Vaporware Lifetime Achievement award after 7 years. Surely he's due some 'pipe down until you ship' sentiment.
The other sticking point is that anyone who's followed the genre for more than a couple years knows the popular games are stagnating to a degree. And anyone who has any appreciable knowledge of the genre knows they've been stuck for more than 10 years -- all the most popular games are still pretty much derivatives of Diku, itself not a very big step away from D&D. One would more accurately say that massmogs have been largely stagnant since the first bastard child of Gygax and Bartle.
And yet the subtle change between EQ's level grind and WoW's level grind had a much larger practical impact on Diku play than the 'moral choices' seen thus far in Tabula Rasa. Granted, TR's still beta, but the system itself looks like a more slight update to faction mechanics than WoW's update to quest mechanics. So calling everyone onto the carpet while your own contribution is still minor compared to theirs, is ill-advised.
However, I do grant Garriott any and all respect for whatever role he had in UO releasing as a Koster-land. Even if he merely hired the guy who actually had good ideas, that's worth some points. Unfortunately, TR's less ambitious design does make it look like he only green-lit such a bold design because he didn't know any different.
Also, the bonus points one gets for 'leaving a comfy job' are significantly diminished when you're already fabulously wealthy.
I think the rule is: first personal castle takes half and extraplanetary property takes the other half.
Any subsequent castles or russian rovers make him a valid target of scorn if he ever doesn't have his own company.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
SWG had a lot of potential, but SOE royally fucked that game up because they are imbeciles.
Can you say the same in WoW? Is there any reason for a high level player to go to a low level crafter? Or how about low level players helping on high level quests?
This is grind. Players feel the need to do monotonous dull tasks to level up because doing the riskier task will kill them and halt their progression, or slow it down(exp penalty). In UO the only reason to grind was if your impatient, or a powergamer. There was never a need for it. In WoW, it's gameplay design. This is what Garriot is angry about. Grind is now considered to be a gameplay aspect that players "expect", and grind isn't fun.
As someone who is currently in the Tabula Rising (TR) beta, I wouldn't come close to saying it is a better game.
/yawn.
I don't think the FPS MMO market is ever going to be a smashing success, because you can only shoot so many bad guys and have so many weapons before it gets old.
Anarcy Online in its current form is a better game than TR. It was a better game back when it was first released. The biggest problem with AO is the fact that so many losers think it is cool to create a female toon, strip down to nothing, and gyrate their ass in your character's face if you ever sit down.
TR's UI sucks, the quests are fairly lame, and unless Garriot listens to those beta testers that aren't still frothing over UO and think he is god (see, Brad McQuaid and the disaster that was Vanguard), this game is going to be a pile of bullhockeypucks.
I'll hope for improvement, but most games don't get radically better from their beta state.
But he put GRAPHICS on it...!
Oh, wait, Meridian 59... I mean, The Realm Online. I mean, Neverwinter Nights...
Obviously, to SOME extent grinding is necessary (not counting PvP which Guild Wars has down damned near perfectly) but when you start talking about hundreds of hours just to REACH the end game (let alone take part in end game activities), you've got massive barrier against casual gamers.
No-one said they weren't fun, just that the design is stagnant.
In general, you do have a great point: Why should anyway care that some crotchety bastards think the genre is stagnant, when more people than ever are paying $15/mo to play a Diku?
It's similar to the old:
If five hundred thousand people are happily playing EQ, why would you think anything's wrong with the design?
The answer to that, of course, is nine million people happily playing WoW.
When design stagnates, it doesn't mean no-one's having fun. It just means that if the next game is the same, it can't grow the market.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"