MMO Development Lesson #15
Make a great game first. One of the fallacies in MMO design is that you need to start with all the other games in the genre as a baseline, then work your way from there. This is not true. You need to first try to make a great game. Make sure the game is fun. Would the game be fun if there were no persistence or multiplayer aspect to the game? If not, is that okay? Take advantage of the benefits of the massively multiplayer genre, don’t use them as a crutch for poor game design. There are definitely many reasons MMOs are the way they are, but don’t put features in them just because you think they are supposed to be there, put them in because they should be there. Which leads to another lesson about why things are the way they are in many MMOs…
I personally dont see the point in starting out with other games in the Genre as your benchmark.
If I have played my current game for 12 months, I am not going to change for just more of the same. It will need to be something different to have me change.
I suspect I am not all that different to many (if not most) MMO players.
I remember Raph saying somewhere that the mmorpg industry is selling rat-killing to some types of people who like it. (Cant find a link to it, sadly.)
Skipping a standard mechanic seems risky, mostly since the mmorpg audience consist of genre addicts who are willing to try new games as long as they dont differ too much. If you do stray far from the norm and avoid a significant volume of standard mechanics who is your audience, and how do you avoid the zone of mediocrity? Or as Danc writes about innovating halfway:
http://lostgarden.com/2006/03/never-innovate-halfway.html
The phraze MMO has taken on genre defining proerties, at least the way I read it. Not much different from how RTS carries a lot of strict genre defining rules, people who wants to avoid it are saying VW instead, but that one will also become a strict genre eventually. Well, maybe its just best to make a fun game and attract your own audience rather than selling straight to hardcore mmorpg fan communities.
I do concur with the post, but have a few things to ramble off that come to mind.
…”put them in because they should be there”…
… which of course means to approach your game with a vision. Not just a vision of the scenery, the creatures, or the types of spells and what not, but about what’s going to make your game fun! Everything from the inter-relationship amongst all of the games characters (NPC and PC alike) down to the audio/visual feedback you get from a button or key-press. While much of this can/will change throughout the course of development, the point is to have your primary goals defined up front and to use them to go back to when deciding “sure, this is pretty neat, but does it make sense in the scope of the game? does it add to the game? take away from?” etc.
Make sure every little piece is fun individually, but just as importantly if not more so, help to ensure the logical sense… cohesiveness of the world, enabling immersion and adding to “fun” of the game as a whole.
Yeah, not including a standard mechanic is risky and generally a bad idea IF you analyze that mechanic and realize why it’s there, and that it should be in your game. As I alluded to in the post, there are reasons things are the way they are, but sometimes we you take a hard look at everything in MMOs, certain things don’t need to be there (like, in my opinion, quest items taking up inventory space, or inventory management in general).
Why is this Lesson 15?
Because the previous lesson was 14. I believe (I’ll have to ask my daughter on this one … ) that 15 follow 14 … :p
Inventory management in AO was way more fun than in WoW. Both were roughly equally time consuming but having the almost infinite bag space of AO turned the problem into something that felt productive. Arranging a lot of data in a reasonable structure is enjoyable while deleting things you fear you will regret is sucky.
The last time I had to delete files to make room on my hard drive felt disgustingly similar to the last time I had to drop/sell/rearrange the gear in my inventory. The realistic challenge is good, but it could be better. An inventory mini-game would be cool, where a certain configuration gives you a boon.
When the name of the game is “get stuff”, dropping stuff is always going to feel like losing.
Ryan, this is a hard one for many of us to argue against, I mean this just make too much sense. But the question is, why isn’t it being done?
There are a lot of reasons one could point out… the most common you will hear from developers most likely will be… ‘The game is not build or designed for you’ which is fine, as long as you market to your target audience and not every Joe Schmo out there in video game land. But know the audience you want and market the game to them… might just get a bit more ‘good’ press about your title.
The mention of ‘you’ is not a direct reference to Ryan, but the industry marketing firms and teams hired on to push this game off the shelf.
There are many great games out there that would make other great games and often do spawn other great games off of them. MUD’s spawning Meridian 59, Ultima Online, and EverQuest for example, than on to World of Warcraft. But each generation is putting in less and less of what made those games great and putting in more and more of what is easy to mass produce (kill x collect y, return and get z) ring a bell in today’s games.
We are getting less and less of storylines or reasons to be in the world, other than loot collections and website stats to brag about.
I don’t ask for much innovation, but I do ask for something to be done with existing systems. Combat needs a great deal of work in my eyes to get back to being a very addiction part of the MMO experience. I feel like a monkey trained on watching hot bars instead of watching the action on the screen before me. Quest are rather dull in most games and I find the above mentioned quest example a big put off when I cross them. Crafting has been making the most strides to innovate, but again, we are watching hot bars or other icons to pop up instead of watching the world we live in or interacting with it more.
We’ve removed the first person view, for ease of seeing our enemies and removing a lot of the ‘immersion’ feel in the games world. I understand the need to ‘see’ my avatar, but do we really have to do it 24/7 in the game and loose a great tool for immersion. Is immersion that much of a turn off in these games, that we no longer look for it as a hook.
While not an overly huge fan of Conan’s single player mode design aspect in a MMO title. Shouldn’t the game be fun to be played ‘offline’ (design wise) to be a great game in a multiplayer setting? Do we need so much emphasis on solo play that we destroy real community building tools and reasons for players to group, make friends, and have a more enjoyable experience in these worlds.
Games that allow solo’ing to max level, I find have very poor LFG (looking for group tools), they have very poor community building aspects to them, and they really lack a great feel of being an MMO. There is also the ‘blind’ invite to group / guild muck that really ticks me off *cough* WoW *cough*. People always complain about pick up groups and how they suck, well if the game promoted more grouping maybe our newer players would be at playing in groups.
I understand the need of providing content for 1 – 2 hour chunks… but I don’t feel a game needs to cater to 30 minute chunks of time to play. When we started doing that they put the quest givers very near to the location of the quested items (loot or mobs) that needed to be obtained. We started to much more running around…
I will never forget the EQII quest that had you walk run 10 paces from the quest give to the person you needed to collect the item from and then run back those 10 paces to get the quest exp and the rewarded item. Are NPC really that lazy… well I guess they are, almost every one of them stands in the same exact spot all day / all night dispensing quests and loot / exp.
I would like to see a ‘great’ game make it in to the MMO genre, but if we follow the games already made as benchmarks, I feel we are doomed and I will need to go back to other genres.