Genre Reset
What on Earth is genre reset? Quite simply, it is technology (or something else) resetting a genre to the point that it has to be partially reconstructed or even rebuilt from scratch. Oftentimes, this means that it becomes much more difficult to do what was considered normal in the genre previously with the new technology. I’m going to take a look at the traditional fantasy gaming realm rather briefly, starting from the present and diving toward the past.
Let’s first step back and take a look at traditional fantasy MMOs. Where did they come from? Current fantasy MMOs are 3D, and the last genre reset occurred when they shifted from 2D to 3D. The 2D graphical era of these games was the briefest of them, as far as online games are concerned, especially in North America.
When we shifted from 2D to 3D, we lost a lot. Player-controlled ships, mounts, player housing, among other things. Since that time, we’ve had to work hard to make them possible in 3D, and that’s a much greater task than making them work in 2D. Only now are we beginning to match the potential of 2D MMOs in the 3D realm, which will hopefully set us up to surpass the 2D potential in the near future.
Where did 2D graphical MMOs come from? You could really separate 2D isometric (Ultima Online) from its predecessor style, which hearkened not at all to dimensions, (The Realm Online) but I’ll leave them together because they had very similar capabilities. Really, where 2D graphical MMOs came from was a combination of 2D graphical RPGs and MUDs.
Not surprisingly, we lost a lot in that transition. From the single-player RPG we lost the sense of heroism, and from the MUD we lost the sense of vastness, of richness, and of near-infinite possibilities. MUDs were significantly more flexible because you didn’t really have to “make” everything–a part of the world was a text description creatively linked to the rest of the world, not something that had to be created by an artist and a designer together.
So, to the origins of MUDs and single-player RPGs both: Pen and Paper (or Paper and Pencil) games. What did we lose here? The infinite possibilities of the tabletop RPG. You could do literally anything that could be imagined, confined only by the game’s rules, and even then you could break them if you convinced your GM/DM to do so.
That’s at least 3 distinct technological genre resets. We’ve lost so much potential between the time of the P&P RPG and the 3D MMORPG that we’re still recovering 8 years after the first 3D MMO. 8 years. In 8 years we have just started to recover most of the 2D potential (and even then, things like clothing layers still can’t be done quite as well, or at least haven’t). How long will it be before we get to the point that 3D MMOs have as much potential as a P&P RPG?
It could be forever. There may come a time when, with the right skills, talent, and creativity, players will be able to do as much in a 3D world as they can in an imagined paper world, but it could be a while, and even then it will be much more cumbersome.
I hope to see traditional fantasy MMOs of today reaching with fervor to the olden days of Dungeons & Dragons and Earthdawn and other role-playing games. I want to see the infinite potential of P&P in modern MMOs. I want that same feeling that has long been absent in online games of possibilities and heroes and anti-heroes, of a world in which I can make a difference and be known throughout the world, and of a place that is so epically vast and so real that I lose myself within it blissfully.
“I want to see the infinite potential of P&P in modern MMOs.”
Player gen’d content works only to a point. There was a reason for the GM to overrule. Wasn’t there a reason for hearing his dice rolls a getting nervous?
In the ideal P&P to MMO system, I think that for a player created system to work in an mmo there has to not only be levels of attainment for the players of the game, but also the “most desired” world crafters.
Don’t get me wrong player made adventures would rock, but there MUST be a way to distinguish the good from the bad and the ability for those to grow virally.
I am a fairly casual player nowadays (ie 1-2 hours at most a night), I don’t want to wade through the infinite amount of mmo “adventures” any one can dream up and put down into some module for a P&P-like MMO. There must be a way to grade and judge them so that I know where to allocate my time.
P&P rocked, but for every 1 awesome GM, there were 10 bad ones (myself included sometimes). The same would go for an MMO built with an “open adventure interface” to allow P&P-ish type adventures crafted by a player.
check out:
The Cult of the Amateur By Anderw Keen
it touches on this topic in a roundabout way.
Yes yes yes yes yes.
An MMO where your actions actually matter, and you can do literally anything you want (yes, I’m a huge fan of skill-based a la UO/old SWG), and if the content/quest writers have plenty of PnP experience I could seriously see a crafted world that is both alive and fun.
Not that I would ever retire my dice, but that would make me happy as an MMOer.
There big problem is that P&P games were not massively multiplayer shared worlds. Something which is an electronic version of P&P is more likely to be a LAN version of Oblivion. That is, a game where time could flow unevenly, your actions had consequences, and you were making massive changes to the world until it was altered all out of recognition.
It’s one of the reasons that I think that singleplayer RPGs are never going to die. Everyone wants to play in a campaign world where they are the hero and everything will revolve around them and they can make lasting changes to the world and have a real sense of accomplishment.
Jessica Mulligan (http://www.gamesandstorytelling.net/Jessica-Mulligan.html) once wrote in a “Bitting the Hand” collumn that an increased volume of user content would almost necessarily reduce the quality of the experience. I don’t really want “the game” to be wide open. In fact, I pretty much want it to be fairly restrictive in order to maintain a cohesive vision. I don’t want X-Wings in my WoW. Unless I get to pick everybody I play with and I can coerce them into sticking to the theme.
On a not entirely unrelated note, I wanted to point out an example of how the “PnP Experience” may not be exactly what you want. At least not in the tangental way it was implemented. The game I speak of is the one where they decided it would more like PnP to pretend there was a GM saying things like “You hear footsteps in the distance.” With a voice over and text. Instead of a distant, EAX enhanced sound effect.
No, it didn’t really increase my immersion.
JP:
I don’t think he’s saying he wants to cross genres (with the x-wings in the WoW comment) but he wants you to be able to have more options in the genre the game is situated in.
Some of the most rewarding D&D games I’ve played included new players who didn’t understand the rules. They really played by their imagination. “I jump up on top of the table and crack my whip, attempting to yank the sword out of their hand!” they’d say instead of “Well, the book says the battle ax does the most damage. So I draw that and attack. {roll dice}”. It would be great to have the infinite possiblities of P&P in an MMO. The problem is, like Mutant said, that when you have thousands of people breaking things (to see if they can), burning things (to see if they can), cutting down forests (you get the point), then every fantasy city will look like a bombed-out crater. Now, if your genre is post-apocalyptic, this will actually work. Otherwise, the devs have to impose restraint just so that the feel of the world doesn’t disintegrate and everyone suffers a “tragedy of the commons”.
Ryan, I want the same things you express the desire to have in our games, but the problems stem from uniqueness of content and experience.
What give PnP adventures that feeling, in my opinion, is the uniqueness of your adventure. If you get the Golden Sword of Domination, its the only one that will ever ‘drop.’ You are the only hero’s who could kill the dragon terrorizing the town. Its the feeling of immersion in your world, and not your involvement in a virtual world with lots of other people.
Like the person above said, PnP is all about the experience and experimentation of impact on the game world. Burning things, trying creative moves and attacks, parlay vs. slaughter, etc., “You are faced with an anchient stone door, what do you do?” “I’ll cast Stone to Mud on it…”
If those emchanics aren’t a viable solution, it will never have the same feeling of power and immersion as the paper worlds do.
One of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had as a DM playing PnP was having a persistent world across groups. I had 3 groups of players. All playing within the same setting. All having the ability to “change” the world around them. All having to feel the effects of the actions of the other groups.
Every player seemed to enjoy themselves immensely. And it made things entirely unpredictable in how the stories were being told. Things would be going one way for one group, but another group does something that changes what the first is doing, and how they must do it.
IMO, an MMO should be fairly similar, but real time, of course.
I don’t expect MMOs to ever reach the dynamic potential of D&D in P&P format, but I think we can work toward harnessing a lot of the magic that is there and the feeling that you get while surpassing the potentail of P&P in other aspects.
We need to take a good hard look at a lot of things and find out why the tabletop can be so magical. Is it the carefully crafted content? Is it the ability to make choices? Is it the ability to truly impact the world? To feel heroic? Yes, to all of those, and those are all achievable in an MMO. There are some other aspects that we may never be able to get out of them (on-the-fly mechanics changes, for example).
But, we can leverage the advantages of the MMO world to surpass the tabletop in other ways. The social aspect is probably the big one. Player groupings (like guilds), more macro scale organizations (EVE does this well), and the feeling of being part of this big world with all these other people.
We lose a lot and gain a lot, but there’s definitely a bunch of crossover potential that has yet to be exploited fully in the MMO world that was done well on the tabletop.
I hate to get involved in a conversation without a truly fully formed idea on the subject, but the one thing that really has stuck out as the missing element when you go from P&P to MMO is the responsiveness of the DM.
Simply put, the player doesn’t change, its (as I believe Ryan is clearly stating), the responsibility of the designer(DM) to fulfill the needs of the player.
So what is it that a DM in a P&P game provides that current MMOs aren’t fulfilling? Lets make a list of the most important things.
1) A constantly responsive experience
A variable experience depending on the players involved, and how that want their experience to play out.
2) Rule breaking
Someone in charge who can change the rules of the game if the situation calls for it.
3) Tailored story telling
A story that uniquely revolves around the players involved, their characters, their strengths/weaknesses/foibles.
4) Accountability
Someone who is accountable for a poor experience (and complimented on a good experience).
5) A Relationship
To sum up all of the above, a DM that knows you, and wants to have a good time too, while keeping your good time close to their heart. (In our hearts, this is the designer ideal, but a little thing call large subscriber bases impedes this greatly)
So how do we provide these things? Well, we tailor our MMO experience to the user by paying devs at game companies to constantly create new content and serve as DMs for the user base. We construct a robust tool set that allows these virtual DMs to place NPCs, change dungeon layout, determine AI for mobs, add loot, communicate with players, change player statistics, kill off players, and many of the other things that real world DMs do….
Okay, so that is a little unreasonable. So we decide on what the best of these things are and we see how to incorporate them where we can. We continue to refine our scripting and AI to create for a more dynamic experience.
There is a whole other conversation here about how users actually EXPECT different things from MMO’s than they do from P&P. To name a few things: they expect consistency of game-play (loot drop tables, locations of dungeons, abilities of NPCs, etc.). They expect NPCs to behave in fair ways. In short, since there isn’t someone sitting in front of them moderating their game experience as they go, they expect a controlled environment that doesn’t surprise them.
Now I know Ryan is going to say “Well heck, that is exactly what we need to change, their expectations”. And I agree, but I also think we need to keep in mind, a fair experience is what gamers expect now, and if they encounter one that is often unfair, they will often not stick around (at least your more casual, non-achievement driven users..and once again, a whole other talk about your expected user base could be had).
Okay, I’ve rambled on for a bit without really making any great points, but I hope I’ve advanced the conversation a bit.
Players want to make choices thats what made PnP great. Why can’t we have quests with multiple paths and endings? Each offering a unique story/item etc. Random uber quest givers that can spawn anywhere in the realm. How cool would it be to be lvl 1 and have some random guy walking down a path give you a quest that you might not be able to start right away but when you finish you feel like a true hero with a possible unique item
I like Daven’s ideas of the long career quest, and the plot forks, and there’s even more that can be done to make the experience unique:
Instead of the mighty dragon dropping the Uber Sword every time, how about it drops the [named] [weapon] with [power] instead? The name is generated via a cabbage-patch-kid-name algorithm, the weapon is a single list, the power is a collection of 3-5 random buffs; and a random number generator spits out the result. Yes, the back end infrastructure that drives this won’t be easy, but it would be worthwhile.
And while not entirely practical with 1000+ players on-line simultaneously, having Improv GMs log in to dynamically push quests (ala Neverwinter Nights) and respond to player actions would also ensure more diverse, unique stories. Again, not a simple thing to implement; you’d probably need an entire CS department of improv actors, but it would enable players to explore outside the scripts, and spin the stories in ways the devs never imagined.
What I always wanted was, for example, someone who PVPs (stipulations would be involved with something like no PVP against people who are riduclously lower level, etc.) and “gets caught” by the local authorities. A bounty can be placed on their head so that other players can go after them.
Should a person have that “bounty” in their quest tab, they can fight em without any issues, if they don’t have the bounty quest and they PVP the person being hunted, they can get nailed as well.
I dunno. Difficult to explain without doing a full writeup. I just thought it would add a new twist to PVP and having players be on the bad end of quests.
Nice write up Ryan,
I would also like to add to Dan’s list if he wouldn’t mind. But another area lost in translation is goals and the speeds at which the player reaches them.
6) Levels are not give-me’s
In Dungeons & Dragons levels were not the carrots players were trying to obtain. Playing Dungeons & Dragons we knew there to be only 20 levels and trying to reach them a l i v e was the main carrot. Players had to move about the dungeons at a much slower pace, because there was not many, if any at all, instances where the players would be so over powering they could walk through them. I hear all this talk of dungeon crawling, but I still call it a fast jog when compared to the pen & paper days of table top gaming.
7) Presentation
Presentation of the games story or the quests story. Having gone back to EverQuest II to take another look at the voice over system and how it is able to present the quest to the player. I have to say that this is by far the best approach so far in terms of presentation, immersion, playability. While there are still other areas of the quest systems that just don’t gell well for me coming from a Dungeon Master Role (never did get to just play). You can see on my own blog that Quest Systems are a place where I try to delve in to, to try and get the most out of the story and the game. I still have a great deal more to write just on the quest systems.
I know there was talk about the AI and yes it is an area that needs help, but it also needs more help in just about every aspect of the computer industry, So I don’t try to be to critical of this area. But combat and its representation to the player is an area I know we can fix and should be taking a hard long look at why we are asking the players to basically become an EverQuest Bard with all the constant button mashing. And I know there will be cries from the masses about no auto-attack, and I agree we don’t need to go back to the EverQuest Warrior, but I know (and have seen it in Dungeons & Dragons Online) that there is a much greater and more enjoyable combat model we can employ.
Yes we can look at keeping the DPS if your heart is so set upon this mechanic, but if you want to bring pen & paper Dungeons & Dragons to the MMORPG, then your game manual will need to explain better what all the numbers are really doing and how they work. Reduce the numbers some, and make them meaningful to the game (each individual number). Systems like WoW, EQ, EQII, Vanguard all make the numbers meaningless, in that getting a breastplate with +2 more AC than what your currently wearing means little to the game or the games engine.
9) Mulitplayer or Single Player Design
Last but not least, stop creating single player games with massive people in them. This does little to ‘translate’ tabletop role-playing games in to today’s MMORPG. Today’s games are created with the ideal that if a player pays the monthly fee (should your game have this revenue model) that the world must always be ‘turned on’ for them. They are created as if your the only player in the world, at least the NPC’s sure think that way.
I mean how many times does farmer Jones need you to collect his chickens in a day, and why didn’t the rooster cage you got the parts for work? Will the game tell you this to try and help immerse you in the world – NOPE. They just spit out the same dialog to the next newbie who wanders by about needing his roosters caught, and then running to Smitty Ryan to get the parts that the Farmer ordered.
Then there is this new trend of making them more ’solo’ friendly, or ‘casual’ friendly and I would venture to say you can do this without making leveling your carrots. If your combat is fun and addictive, action packed, stratigical, and tactical, levels would be an afterthought. Think of Counter-Strike heart pounding action – mix in the combat arts and spells of Dungeons & Dragons – add some dynamics to the combat engine (like for example hits / misses) so that I don’t hit my encounter mob 90% of the time and bases on his armor is what kind of damage I do. DPS does little to equal fun in combat for me, the game becomes about min/maxing instead of using your classes true skills and talents (like Dungeons & Dragons poses).
10) Think of more than just Combat
Yes, I know that a majority of your players will be spending a majority of their time there and I didn’t say take away from the games central focus on combat. But give us more things to do beside kill, kill, kill, and log off. What happened to mini-games, why is there no games in the taverns or inns. I know EverQuest II has the gambling game, but its not quite what I am looking for. I am looking for something more that will draw players in to the games inns, taverns, feasthalls, and so forth. Lord of the Rings Online has the music you can play, but it is hardly seen that much (but I don’t spend a lot of time in the Inns) as I don’t see people playing with this cause there is no carrots.
I blame both the developers and the players, since many of us have tasted the end-game, and games are made with the ideal of letting players get there easier and easier, that is where the focus is when it should no be.
Boon’s point #6 is an interesting one, and alludes to an enhancement: permanent death. My P&P group had one character that kept getting killed: sword fights, fireballs, I think he was finally ripped apart by giant carnivorous frogs (in that mod where a spaceship crashed, and locals adopted the technology as high magic. There’s a wizard with a raygun on the cover). His Constitution had gotten so low, he finally failed the resurrection role.
Why not have the concept of ‘permanent death’ in an MMO, although on a more reasonable scale? You have 100 chances to die and come back. After time 100, that character is “forever” dead, and their portrait is hung in a hall of fallen heroes. Some other schmuck (e.g. your new 1st level character) can choose to take on a quest to bring the hero back, but with a much reduced death count (maybe 20 this time).
The intent would be to make death a true threat, and cause players to be a little less reckless.
[...] Nerfbat, at the end of the post titled Genre Reset: I hope to see traditional fantasy MMOs of today reaching with fervor to the olden days of Dungeons [...]
[...] Ryan Shwayder points out in a great article ‘Genre Rest’, I also wanted to take a little time to let you know where the Quests systems have not made the [...]
I’m not a big fan of permanent death because I don’t see many advantages to it, but there is at least one major drawback to it. The big issue I have is that if you destroy something someone has dedicated hundreds of hours (or more) to, they would be extremely pissed off. Even knowing what you’re in for (that is, you know you can permanently die) isn’t enough to prepare you for that.
Additionally, permanent death would immediately make the game niche. Knowing that your character can go away instantly makes the game significantly less accessible, and I’d wager that the population of the game would slowly disappear (it would get a good number of immediate players, but people would slowly start getting tired of making new characters and would stop playing).
Since I’m an old SWG-player, and took part in many a debate about Jedis, I’ve always wanted a death system where repeated death (or death of a prestige class) results in some sort of temporary stasis for the character. You will be dead and unable to ressurect, but you will be allowed to interact with other characters (in SWG you would have taken the form of a blue glowie and been able to speak to other force sensitives or even manifest for everyone in particularly force strong locations).
After a short time (let’s say fifteen minutes first time with increasing length upon reccuring death) you’d be back in the loop.
This way death will hamper you, and you will feel death, but by giving the players something to do (I strongly advocate a well developed afterlife with things to do and ghosts to talk to) it won’t be felt as much as a destructive force.
I could go on about this, but I need to think about possibilites myself first before going public with “what felt like a good idea at the time”.