MMO Rant #2: WYSIWYGn’t Loot
WTF happened to WYSIWYG loot? Has it been relegated to being a thing of the past? You know, WYSIWYG–that wonderful acronym first popularized by now-ancient web design programs. What you see is what you get. Except in today’s MMOs, what you see is not what you get, and it cheeses me off.
Remember back in the good ole days when you saw a creature wearing ringmail armor, an orc helm, and a two-handed axe, then you killed it, and it dropped ringmail armor, an orc helm, and a two-handed axe? Some of you are probably shaking your heads, because you’ve not played MMOs that let you do that. Well, I’m here to tell you that getting whatever you see on a creature as loot is not only rewarding, it’s fun.
Oh, there are a number of reasons why WYSIWYG loot tends not to exist in games anymore (and by anymore, I mean games released since around ‘99). It generally comes down to itemcentricity, but I’m not here to offer up explanations, excuses, or even solutions; I’m here to rant.
When I see a mob wielding a big broadsword and platemail armor, I want to kill him and receive a big broadsword and platemail armor. I don’t even care if I can’t wear it. You know what, go ahead and break those items so I surely can’t wear them, but at least I know that the mob dropped what he was wielding, rather than all the items poofing into oblivion. The void doesn’t care about that loot, but I do.
If adding WYSIWYG loot to your game means you can’t give mobs really cool looking armor because it’s not animated or fitted to player characters, so be it. You shouldn’t be giving mobs cooler looking stuff than players can obtain anyway, because it’s bloody disheartening to know you can never get a cool looking item no matter how hard you try.
You know what else is disheartening? Not getting items you see a mob using as loot. Also, it’s completely illogical, and everyone knows I hate artificial restrictions (or rather, illogical restrictions, as “artificial” has implications beyond that of simple logic).
You may say–if you are a designer–that you want to avoid a couple of issues with WYSIWYG loot. Namely, you don’t want to overburden players with junk item loot, and you don’t want to make items of a particular type or look overly common. Call the effing wahmbulance. You’re creative, so come up with ways around the problem.
For example, make the armor essentially worthless unless it’s a decent drop (so players won’t loot it all the time), and don’t equip mobs with cooler looking gear than players can get (because it shouldn’t be common on mobs if it’s not common on players). But come up with something on your own, because I’ll probably use that idea in a game at some point.
In summary, I want to get the items I see a mob equipped with as loot. Any kind of loot. Broken loot, worthless loot, and the occasional worthwhile loot. No more of the magical poofing of gear just because you aren’t intelligent enough to design around the feature, which I feel is fun enough to implement and work with (i.e. deal with the negatives).
Titan Quest (a diablo 2 “clone”) did this unfortunately. Enemies would drop junk and worthless items that everyone would accidently click on and fill up your inventory space. Overall, the playerbase didn’t really care for it. Not to say this problem couldn’t have been fixed but in its current state it should have been removed or optionally disabled.
right on!
i’ve got a bone to pick with artificial, illogical restrictions.
I completely agree with you. It doesn’t make sense to have a knight in plate armor with an ornate longsword drop anything less than exactly what you see.
The only exceptions would be for size and fit. Some armor, after all, is custom-made for an individual. This is a perfect opportulity for money/resource sinks in your economy. You might be able to wear your looted armor, but it doesn’t fit right, so it gives -1 to hit or slows you down. If you took it to an armorsmith, though, you could have it custom-fitted for a fee. If the armor is your size, custom-fitting may be inexpensive, but if the armor is a size or two off, the price could grow exponentially. That also gives an incentive for not looting armor that wouldn’t fit. Why carry it around if it’s going to encumber you and cost a ton to get fitted?
This, of course, means that you’ll have to implement encumberance and a system of sizes. So what? If you want to do it, do it right. The problem with alot of the MMOs today is that they take the mini-golf approach. They only implement the base rules. They may have the most polished implementation in the world, but mini-golf is mini-golf no matter how you slice it (no pun intended). You’ll never have the epic scale of playing at Pebble Beach or Carnoustie. You’ll always be playing on artificial turf, trying to get past that damned windmill, and they always collect your balls at 18.
Lootwindow ala WoW, two tabs, first(default) tab contains the cool stuff, second one has all the broken or whatever WYSIWYG loot, easy to do nobody has to loot the junk but everyone can if he pleases to.
Here ended the lesson. Amen.
My main beef with WYSIWYG loot is them damned item gathering quests, you know, the get 200 pig feet and come back to me for a reward, apparently there’s a pickled feet shortage somewhere.
Well, pigs have four feet right? So why do I have to bloody well kill 20 of the buggers just to get 1? And the occasional mutant pig suddenly drops six.
I completely agree.. and I also think that it’s perfectly OK if the mob drops essentially useless stuff. It gives you the feeling of actually rustling through your victim’s belongings and would make even sweeter when say.. you see a faint glimmer from behind the tattered leather armor to discover a +9 Ring of Awesome!
Sure, that’s alot of extra loot to keep track of, but MMOs already do corpse cleanup anyways.. this would just be an extra table to deal with… perhaps just having variations from a default mob loot template (one mob has a leather helmet, tunic, pants, and a dagger… another has the same but adds shoes and a club instead.. in which case the DB would just know “default mob template, -1 dagger, +1 shoes, +1 club”..
Anyways, I rather like the idea myself.. UO actually had (or possibly still has) hints of such a system, at least to the sense of when you kill an animal, you get MEAT.. and similar loot that makes sense in context with the mob you killed. This is scaling that up further, but I think it could be done technically..
Ezin: TQ lets you hold the ALT button to only show white or better con items that have been dropped. I’m surprised that you didn’t notice, considering you mentioned it was a Diablo II clone (and not just “Diablo”), which makes me think you probably played that game.
Reminds me of earlier games such as Doom and then those which followed it.
Every time I killed an entity which had a firearm I lacked, I was vigoursly aggravated.
Even moreso in Crusader : No Regret.
Design issues aside, from a player’s PoV, seeing as how you’ve just defeated this entity, there be little to stop you from picking up the firearm it has used (unless it was damaged beyond use) and use it yourself (unless it be beyond your intelligence to operate- a point to ponder over for RPG/attributted-character Shooters or ones involving alien technology - as demonstrated well in X-Com).
Anything to the contrary, without a satisfaction explanation ==in-game== (such this item has been destroyed by multiple hits, most likely to have inccured in the firefight), and I cannot stress enough that it need to be done in-game and in accordance to/with the theme, to argue to the contrary.
(opsie forgot to close sentence)…merely serves to aggravate the player and plant doubt in him for the validity of the designer’s cognitive capacity and as well search for further flaws which seem to not make sense (gameplay MUST be logical! Otherwise players don’t know what to expect, become frustrated, irritated and confused. If Chewbacca makes no sense you must acquit).
I know TQ lets me hold down ALT to filter out the loot. In fact, I remapped it to only show the better than white items. It still doesn’t stop me from picking up junk loot though. Just moving around the map I’ll sometimes accidently click a junk item and pick it up. Granted I don’t pick up all that much but after filling up my inventory I have to go through and remove the few junk items I accidently pick up.
I really just don’t like the idea because its fluff. Who cares about it since it doesn’t serve any practical use. It doesn’t make an interesting choice. It just gets in the way of the things I want to do and doesn’t contribute to the gameplay.
Small Bag of Compost ftw.
Who the hell nerfs a Small Bag of Shit? Explain that to me. If you can’t make it fun, why not at least keep it funny? Or add a Large Bag Of Shit to compensate.But no, for a small fee equivalent to a high-end graphics card, or almost exactly 700,000 small bags of shit, your choice, you too can be leet like the big kids. But only 2 items, the rest you have to work for. Well, you can get a 3rd item but that will cost you the equivalent of a decent PC, or roughly 2.1 million small bags of shit, again, your choice.
While you’re at it, take the Signet Capture of Elite skills for boss mob kills of your class. That one is fun, fun, fun. No joke.
could you sound more dry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5_I9jEdrbY
This cuts both ways though - if we’re going Realism on the loot, I don’t want to see a potentially life-saving Major Healing Potion, or potentially fight winning Scroll of Heroslaying in the dead orc’s personal effects!
Hand of Ragnaros, Molten Core’s final fiend and hated blob of shit, weilded a big ass hammer that players( if they were lucky) could wield a gigantic hammer half the size of your character. Not only did it show off that you killed the guy, but also made players fear you in duels and pvp. There have also been numerous occasions where Blizzard has managed to do this with World of Warcraft, so your statement post 1999 isn’t excatly correct.
But I agree that adding WYSIWYG loot is missing from many mmo’s and it stinks. I mean come on, if you beat something to death, why not rob it too.
I’d agree with that… potions should be used, unless you kill it fast enough (in which case you are obviously not challenged and should receive little or no experience), and the scroll should be used unless its on a monster that can’t use scrolls. Potions and scrolls should be the kind of thing you obtain through trade from other players (yay crafting!).
I’m also a bit tired in games of fighting something that is clearly a warrior, platemail, big sword, only attacks melee, and then having him drop only cloth wearing caster loot. What the heck is an ass kicking warrior doing with a robe, a monacle and a wand?
You know, WYSIWYG?that wonderful acronym first popularized by now-ancient web design programs.
Oh you must be a wee lad. WYSYWYG was popularized in reference to word processing. Talkin’ back in the day when MS-Word was struggling to gain a foothold against WordPerfect, for DOS. Bold, italics, etc. were represented in terms of different colored fonts, and you’d have to type some and then hit print-preview to take a gander at what the doc might resemble when printed.
What the heck is an ass kicking warrior doing with a robe, a monacle and a wand?
‘Same thing you’re doing with it.
Van H: Do you use all of your potions in an attempt to survive every time you die? I know I don’t. If I’m getting my ass beat by something, I decide whether using such a consumable would be worth my while, then don’t bother if I’m dying too quick. What’s to say a mob wouldn’t do the same thing, seeing as it will respawn just as you will when it dies?
Jeff: Yep, I’m a wee lad. I don’t think I even used a word processor until the early 90s, so the first time I heard of WYSIWYG was with a piece of web authoring software for the Mac. Up until the early 90s, computers were just a playground for me and I used consoles more than computers.
I love the throw back to UO. UO had (yes HAD) a lot going for it. The loot system and craft system is the best ever thought up.
These days people care less about realistic games and more about being better than everyone else.
I blame parents….we ignored our kids and played UO…
I think many of us would like steal all the loot from our enemies leaving nothing but a naked corpse but as someone else pointed out, what would be the point? WYSIWYG loot would useful if the crafting professions were able to extract the basic materials from vendor trash items: if an orc drops a trashed leather vest, the leatherworker can still harvest a few scraps of usable leather; plate mail drops, blacksmith can smelt the piece to get a small amount of usable iron, steel, ect.
Until there is a reason to have enemies drop what they are wearing, it doesn’t make much sense to me for developers to throw in unnecessary items just for visual effects as players are just going to say “ugghh another severely damaged pair of mail leggings”. Also, imagine running into a level 10 orc when you are level 10, only this time the orc is brandishing a +10strength sword. Realistically speaking, the player would have no chance against the orc, and if you give potions to the orc, it becomes even more difficult.
As much as I would love for mobs to wear what they drop, until game developers come up with a way to make trash items useful, I’m almost glad that loot simply disappears. I like the idea that Steve came up with about sizing rules, but I think that MMO developers just want to churn out the games as fast as possible, and adding more variables would mean more time. Steves vision may be realized on a single player RPG one day but I doubt very much whether any MMO will have that many options.
Taking another spin: Give WYSIWYG loot, then give realistic carrying capacities here. How many people can haul about three or four suits of armor, after all.
This adds an “item management” game to the experience, which many hate, love, or hate to love. Make them CHOOSE what to take.
Better yet, with so many weapons dropped on the battlefied, remove itemcentric achievement altogether, make player weapons wear, bend, & break. When your sword gets bent or stuck in a corpse, you grab the one at your feet and keep swinging…
Wolfgangdom, for the sake of balance, I think it could be considered a fair trade off to simply have the visual representation of an item on an NPC and not have the same impact on stats for the encounter. Not to say you’d want to maintain two tables of item data, one for NPCs and one for PCs, as they would be tedious and annoying at best and most likely simply impossible. I’m thinking more along the lines of having one set of statistics for each NPC template and of course again, allow for any variations in a particular instance of that NPC via another table. Items equipped would not have an impact on the encounter. It would be vastly easier to tune in this fashion I would think.
Now, potentially if you wanted to allow an NPC to use potions or something for various reasons, that could be made possible as well, adding a flag on the item as NPC_usable or something of that nature, then having the AI handle the rest.
In regards to the “another pair of damaged leggings” bit.. I absolutely and totally agree that integration with crafting would be a very important must to make this really useful. Not to say that adventurer usable / non-broken items shouldn’t drop as well. =)
I think it would be neat to allow these types of “trash” items to be refined or used for scrap for tradeskilling. Each item could have a unit equivalent, metal weapons and armor could be melted down, bows, wooden shields recycled, leather reshaped, etc. Either that or give the stuff a small value to vendors and have it drop in lieu of coin.
Also, for monsters that have no pockets or wear no gear, having them “drop” a “partially digested” piece of armor makes a lot more sense than a handful of coins.
perhaps you’d better not view this, as it is some more stuff that you cannot get your hands on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMaTZFCLbq0
I don’t know… they might very well have consumed a few coin as well along with that armor… hmmm.. Also as I was referring back to UO earlier with that, NPCs like you mention James, with no gear or pockets, should drop meat if they’re made of meat, or random parts if they’re mechanical, that sort of thing.. Clearly the point is that whatever drops after a kill, it should make sense at least somewhat.
In UO, one of the characters I played was a PK. Every kill I made, I would chop up the body and take the head. When I quit PKing, I had nothing in my bags and bank but heads. The best part of that were the pick pockets… I used the bag inside a bag inside a bag… method, but if a pick pocket dug long enough they’d open the bag of heads. If they reacted, I killed them too.
I’m surprised no one has brought up Oblivion. I realize it’s a single person RPG, but, for the most part, it seems to do this. All NPCs have the clothes they were wearing, their weapons, often housekeys and lunches as well. Even though most of the time I leave it, sometimes it is nice to steal a jaunty velvet vest.
WYSIWYG blog, WYSIWYG loot.
What would this guy drop, were he to be punted? Fear Monger’s belt of Snarking?
Damn, it didn’t work. Oh wll, so much for that idea. Guess we go back to loothocentricity after all, eh?
The thing that always bothered me was the idea that animals had coins or swords on them. You’d kill a wolf, and BAM - 30 gold coins and a new Rusty Poleaxe are now yours.
What!? So apparantly this wolf enjoyed the taste of a good doubloon or ducat, but where was he hiding the poleaxe?
If we have a crafting system, why do we need monster drops? Especially the unrealistic monster drops that we have currently? If we want to make the crafting skills more important, why not make them the primary way to get gear?
WYSIWYG loot is a key part of that. Instead of mining nodes for metal, if you want iron or mithril or whatever, you go and kill monsters who use iron or mithril armor, and then have their gear melted down into bars. The raw materials for player crafting should for the most part come from realistic monster drops and harvesting the corpses for body parts. Epic monsters can have equipment or body parts harvested for epic ingrediants for epic enchantments on gear.
A much simpler system than the monster drop lottery that we have in current games. A player wanting a specific item with specific enchantments can plan out in advance exactly what creatures they have to kill in order to get the raw materials for that item. No hoping for a lucky drop or camping in the Auction House hoping said item shows up.
You know… a whole game could be built around this concept.. I’m definitely with you on Mutant for Hire.. You’d still need “drops” but they’d have to be what you’d expect from the mob you’re dealing with.
Useless features…
Ryan Shwayder wrote a bit on his blog about WYSIWYGn’t Loot (http://www.nerfbat.com/?p=163). He argues that if you see it on a monster, it should drop in the loot when the monster dies. It makes sense, after all.
Of course, he realizes that there ar…
Cast your vote on a related subject in the MMO Round Table forums. The question basically asks if you feel bears should drop swords, or if they should drop more realistic loot. It’s a spinoff of WYSIWYG, but it has everything to do with it.
[...] The exchange between Blackguard and? Psychochild also caused me to titter. What can I say? [...]
It’s been a while since I did a straight-up design topic, and both Sara Jensen (at her new blog!) and Brian Green jumped in to reply to Ryan Shwayder’s original post on the subject, so why not perpetuate it? Basically, the issue is this: when you kill some dude standing around in pink tights, a floppy hat, and elfin chain mail, do you get the pink tights, floppy hat, and chain mail? Or do you get something else,
Psychochild is a failed developer. He tried to update Meridian 59, Doom like engine to direct 3D but the direct 3D version sucked so bad everybody reverted back to Doom like engine. I dont know how you can cause so much load time and lag just by updating the engine to Direct 3D. Oh yeah, his friend Q is no help either. Sometimes this guy would be log on for days at a time without logging off. And his other friend Help, who doesn’t really help anybody. He acts like he’s God or something. He cant even answer a simple question like, “hello, how are you?” Some people got banned for that. Assholes.
…so you type, “get ye flask” and the game says “you can’t get ye flask” and you have to wonder why on EARTH you can’t get ye flask!
[...] As those of you who follow the blogging scene have noticed, WYSIWYG Loot is the newest hot topic in our space. It all started when Ryan Shwayder wrote his ?MMO Rant #2: WYSIWYGn?t Loot?, which has gained the attention of some other developers to also post their reprisals and to show why and how come this type of thinking is not being put in to our games. Brian Green, the same developer that I will take on his challenges to provide ?new ideals? posts his ?Useless features? article. Sara Jensen then replies to the article written by Biran Green with her ?Why Mobs Shouldn?t Drop Their Equipment? and finally Raph Koster then puts in his thoughts over at his site with an article titled ?WYSIWYG loot?. [...]
MMO Rant #2: WYSIWYGn?t Loot
I somewhat agree with this…. Why do dryads and other female mobs get to wear super sexy gear to fight in, and it doesn’t seem to hurt their chance at survival, and I have to wear a freaking bath robe….
There are other interesting ideas you can do with WYSIWG loot. One of them is something I really loved in the original Neverwinter Nights: at one point, to get into a tavern which has been taken over by pirates, you have to go kill a pirate and get their outfit to wear into the tavern. Why don’t we have quests where one way to solve them (or the only way) is to disguise yourself as one of them? It’s one of the classic staples of fiction (”Aren’t you a little short for a Stormtrooper?”) and yet it so rarely happens in games.
Mutant for Hire, that is brilliant! I can definitely see clothing with varying levels of hate reduction or perhaps standard invisibility and all having the chance of one or more NPCs “recognizing” that you’re an imposter which could be quite hairy depending on the situation. Certain types of clothing impacting certain factions or certain mob-types, with some given innate ability to see through the facade, some of which could be designated randomly on spawn to generate varying levels of difficulty for an encounter or dungeon crawl, or at the very least requiring a change in tactics. I’ve got to write that one down when I get home.. Good call! =)
[...] The MMO-dev blog topic of the moment is WYSIWYG loot.? This one started at Nerfbat, and spread over time to Psychochild, Raph, Sara Jensen, Darniaq, and probably a dozen other places I haven’t found yet. [...]
this post on Nerfbat about ‘WYSIWYG’ Loot. This refers to the concept that when you kill a mob wearing chain mail andwielding a sword, you’re likely to find chain mail and a sword on the corpse. I’ve always called this idea ‘Logical Loot’ and it’s one of my
Uh, what’s wrong with vendor junk? And what’s wrong with having to pick and choose what is looted? Add to this the ability to salvage it for raw materials for crafting and I don’t see how it would change much, except mobs would be carrying logical items of junk as opposed to random crap. When you loot the bunny you could take it’s skin, meat, feet, teeth… Maybe it’s damaged, sullied or even pristine (wouldn’t it be nice to have that based on how I killed it!), but bunnies would drop bunny stuff and orcs should drop orc stuff! You want bunny skins: kill bunnies! You want steel ore: you’re an idiot, steel ain’t an ore, but you can kill miners and refine the iron or even kill guys carrying steel weapons to salvage for crafting. And you could leave some or all of it for someone else to come along and loot. The bunny’s cute, little, mutilated corpse could become a harvest node for someone with more time and carrying capacity.
There’s a trend in MMOs that is anti realistic. Realism, like realistic looting, harvesting, encumberance… becomes an obstacle to becoming uber. Good forbid that we have to interrupt our l33t raid to run to a merchant to sell loot or even ~shudders~ leave it for someone else!
My memory is failing (if it ever worked at all) but I recall killing skellies in EQ1 and finding the weapon/shield they were carrying, and sometimes even those bone chips I needed for my newbie armor!
Rant on brother!
To an extent, I think it’s silly to talk about realism in a Fantasy / Sci-Fi RPG. If you want realism, then let’s just have a game where all you do is find a sword and some armor and commence to pound the shit out of as many people as you can. No mages, no dragons, no monsters. Carrying around 6 boxes full of different types of gear is completely out of the question since you are having a hard enough time fighting off Conan while carrying around your bag of roots. Sure, that could be fun, but only for so long. You want realism? How about not just having to run to the vendor to sell or repair your armor, but now you have to DROP whatever extra junk you are carrying besides armor and weapon so you can fight without your Pristine Rosewood Boxes colliding with you every time you leap about trying to avoid the enemy. Come on. It’s a FANTASY! Reality has little to do with it other than to provide a BASE for us to be able to relate to it enough that it SEEMS plausible. If you tell me that my “backpack” is actually a Bag of Holding and that my 350 Strength allows me to carry 1650 gwu, then I would say, “ok, now I believe that my imaginary toon that lives in onlinetown can really carry all those boxes while he’s poopslapping some level 50 epic mob.”
I too wish WYSIWYG loot was more important to devs. It seems that they attempted this in most of the original EQ1 mobs (e.g. you knew you were getting the FBSS if the Frenzied Ghoul pwned your 50 tank), but since then it’s become unimportant. I would like to see the mobs actually wearing and using what they will most likely drop. Obviously rendering a version of every item for every mob that might drop it would be absurdly time consuming, but things like armor and weapons would be worth the time imo and would be appreciated by the gaming community as a whole.
[...] http://www.nerfbat.com/2006/10/20/mmo-rant-2-wysiwygnt-loot/ [...]
[...] came across a good article about WYISWYG Loot or what I prefer to call, “Logical Loot”. If you adore Sandbox games like me then also [...]