Capturing the Magic of an Old School Game
Yesterday I posted about how old game mechanics often don’t translate to new games in a post called Up Your Butt and Around the Corner. I mentioned that I would talk a little bit more about capturing the magic of a game and replicating it, and this is me fulfilling that promise.
There are really two steps, both of which are extremely nebulous and require more than a little voodoo and luck to accomplish correctly. The first step is identifying what made a game so great. Was it the mechanics, or was it something else? If it was something else, or a combination of the two, you can probably find and reproduce that magic. If it was the mechanics, you can still probably identify what made them so great and reproduce them in some way.
We’ll briefly examine a couple of old school massively multiplayer games.
What made Ultima Online so wonderful? It was a world of limitless possibilities. Players were given dozens of seemingly benign tools that could be used in unexpected ways. They could put houses in the world and really take ownership of the lands. They could form micro-communities all over the map of only dozens of people rather than dealing with hundreds or more at a time.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Can you take anything from even that short list and put it in a modern massively multiplayer game? Certainly. You can give players tools for emergent gameplay, you can put some form of player housing physically in the world, and you can even work to keep players concentrated in more specific areas to help them develop micro-communities.
What made EverQuest so wonderful? It was a world full of rich history and lore. Each race had a very distinct identity and piece of the puzzle all its own. The world itself was varied and rich and wonderful, with environments from dark forests to icy mountains to underwater dungeons. And you could get lots and lots of really cool items.
Again, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Can you take anything from even that short list and put it in a modern massively multiplayer game? Certainly. You can give races their own starting areas and cities, give them unique visuals, and fill them out with deep histories of their own. You can create a world of varied and distinct environments. And, you can give players a lot of unique item looks (and stats) that they can earn.
So, there’s quite a bit you can do to reproduce elements of the magic of old school MMOs. But, the truth is, there is that nostalgia element there still that is impossible to reproduce for people who have played other massively multiplayer games. After they’ve played one, they are no longer an MMO virgin, and you’ll never make an MMO the same as their first love. What you can do is make your MMO their great love; the one they will marry.
When it comes down to it, it’s more important to elicit the same kinds of emotions and responses to your game, not to duplicate anything from an old MMO precisely. And, as I mentioned in my last post, it may very well be a bad idea to clone mechanics from older games rather than evolving them to something better (and more current).
In the end, identifying and replicating the magic of an old school game is probably more about magic and luck than it is about applying the right process.
I think you just described some of the differences between the creative process and a mechanical one. You are challenged as a designer with creating something familiar enough to evoke those memories and different enough to hold the user’s interest. That sounds kind of like dancing on the head of a pin to me.
I definitely believe that you need to give players a lot of the sandbox elements from UO (player housing, community building) and some of the amusement park elements from WoW (Serial quests, quest lines, somewhat linear progression) in order to appeal to any significant portion of the market. If one of them has to go, it’s the sandbox stuff, as WoW has proven. If you can provide BOTH, then you have just done something WoW hasn’t done yet.
Now go make a great MMO.
While I agree with the belief that you might never have that first love MMO feeling with any new game, I do think that you can improve on aged mechanics and bring them back into the fold.
Player housing has been so under-developed that it’s scary. With FFXI, you could decorate your house and even invite people inside, but you didn’t have a sense of ownership that you get from a UO home. It’s equivalent to having a really nice apartment vs. buying a home for the first time. It’s an irreplaceable experience.
My favorite mechanic from both FFXI and UO is not feeling limited to the strictures of my class. Aside from the fact that WoW is Candy Land and you can solo all the way up to level 70, the thing I hated the most was thinking how much crap I would have to put up with to get another class up. It’s very hard to get excited about starting over with a new race/class and doing all the noob stuff over and over again. Granted, when you switch jobs in FFXI or weapons in UO, you are required to spend some time building them up, but it feels more like an experience in getting used to your character than rehashing the game in order to squeeze money out of your pockets.
I think the bigger concern for modern gaming (and to a certain extent, movies, television, and even some literature) is that people are THRILLED to redo the same crap instead of creating a new and varied mechanic world. How many derivations of old games get remade? Does the world need a Call of Duty 9? Even more surprising is when companies move away from their tried and true methods whilst creating sequels and end up losing a customer base because it’s “not the same.” I think this is a flaw of the modern player and not a reflection of poor planning on the part of developers. It certainly explains how people will continue to play WoW while maxed out. It’s safe, it’s known, and the average player can expect to stay a “pro” at it.
I think that the rise of MMO’s is as much to blame as anything else. As the player base grew, so to did the player base get (hope this doesn’t offend anybody) a little bit dumber. Much like CounterStrike and other games, the more people you have playing the more likely it is to make people willing to take challenges or play harder games and make us a majority force. Much like sequel crazy Hollywood and the advent of reality television, new ideas are almost seen with revulsion.
In the end, I am a selfish MMO player. I want a company to create a game for players like myself; players with the ability to deal with difficulty and a sense of adventure. But I realize as a minority player that my particular sector is too small to be profitable and while a company may want to create a game for hardcore gamers, inevitably they have to make money.
Flame away XD
I wonder if it is possible to create that game, the one game that will be THE GREAT game. I suppose that one can get hooked again, although not in that same way. SWG was my first MMO, and I have never gotten the same sense of satisfaction from any game sense. Although I did fall in love with EQ2, and have played it since release, but was it becasue it brought those same feelings? Or because it was some of the same feelings mixed with a greater game? No.
SWG was Sci-fi and Fantasy, and although I love the Star Wars universe, it is nothing compared to my love for fantasy. The idea being able to be an Elf or a Dwarf, and to choose to be a ranger or a wizard was something that I hungered for from within. It was a part of my personal fantasy world. The game gave me a way to bring all the fantasy books I played to life, but with me in the story. So no, EQ2 was not greater than SWG as far as my feelings for the game. The feelings were just different.
I have played other fantasy MMOs since then, but none of them have been able to quench an inner thirst that would keep me around and playing in that world. I think a lot of it has to do with immersion. How real will the MMO world feel? Will I feel as if I am truly a part of it? Will my actions change what happens within the world, and not just for me, but for everyone? Will the world be so realistic that I can socialize and make good friends among others, and will the game support those friendships? Is the world immersve enough and attention grabbing enough for me to consider it a home away from home?
You absolutely can update a lot of old mechanics. That’s why WoW is the way it is. And, you shouldn’t be afraid to go back further and evolve a mechanic from something even older than that.
Meaning, though WoW may have adapted its class mechanics (arbitrarily picked) from something like EverQuest, there’s no reason you have to take WoW as a starting point and evolve class mechanics from there. You can look at EQ or D&D, or look elsewhere entirely and evolve those mechanics.
Or, probably the better way, you can be aware of and informed by all those other mechanics and make your own entirely. Meaning, you aren’t intentionally evolving them, you’re putting together the best class mechanics you possibly can without trying to be similar to or dissimilar to any existing class mechanics.
Yes, that does kinda mean you’re evolving old mechanics by the very nature of the approach, because you should know about all versions of that mechanic in existing MMOs (or similar games you can draw from), but it still makes them more your own. Interestingly, you’ll sometimes find when you either evolve a really old mechanic or try to just be informed by many, you end up almost identical to that mechanic in an existing MMO.
I actually like it when this happens, because you know that method is solid for sure. You took a different path–your own path–and arrived at the same conclusion. So, if you do “clone” the mechanics from an existing game, it is much wiser to do so only if you know the reasons for those mechanics being the way they are.
My opinion about the older games is it’s more about who was playing them. The current people playing games are much less friendly and helpful. Try to tell people today they have to sit in a corner of a zone for 3 hours with a group to gain half a level. I didn’t really like grinding, but the right group would make for a fun time.