PC LOAD LETTER (Yes, This Is About Game Design)
Watching one of my favorite modern comedies, “Office Space,” inspired me. What does “PC LOAD LETTER” mean? Well, that’s kinda the point. What DOES it mean? It’s ambiguous and uses a common acronym to mean something other than the accepted and understood meaning. How would I interpret it? “Go back to your personal computer and resend your document to the printer.” Naturally, I would be entirely wrong.
What does it actually mean? Well, literally, “Paper Cassette Load Letter.” Which translates to, “put some A4 size paper in the printer.” Could they have said LOAD A4 PAPER or something similarly clear? Sure, but then we wouldn’t have something so fun to criticize in nerd/office culture. (Note: If you want to read up on the meaning and origin of PC LOAD LETTER, go to Wikipedia.)
A few lessons here:
#1: Never use a commonly-known term for something completely different. PC means “personal computer,” thank you. “Letter” doesn’t translate to “A4 paper” in some countries. MMO means “Massively Multiplayer Online (Game).” Zooming out one level: Don’t play with people’s expectations. If you’ve set a precedent, don’t violate that precedent.
#2: Ambiguity is bad. Something as unclear as “PC LOAD LETTER” is synonymous with, say, “go find the way to start your epic weapon quest.” Sorry for the potshot, EQII, but it’s still a bad idea.
#3: Don’t arbitrarily invent acronyms. It instantly alienates people and makes understanding the game that much more difficult. Let players invent their own lexicon, don’t try to invent it for them.
The one I’m going to focus on is #2: Ambiguity is bad. Clarity is good. Ambiguous quest text and lack of direction do not translate to difficulty, they translate to frustration. Aimlessly wandering is never fun, at least not for normal human beings. The most recent example I have is with the new EverQuest II epic weapon quests. Apparently, part of the fun was discovering how in the hell to get your epic weapon. Players weren’t given any direction apart from “epic weapons exist now.” This was said well by Amana on the EQII forums:
Wonder what others feelings are atm about them trying to find their epics. For me i’m quite disheartened atm that we were not given a direction to follow. It would have been nice to see some kind of direction to be pointed in with patch notes, or allow us to return to our trainers to be guided by them. With epics I understand there comes a level of difficulty, however imho it should not come with just trying to start the quest or find the starter itself.
S/he hit the nail on the head. I didn’t even know about that post until after I first wrote this, but that is exactly the reaction I expected, because it’s the right reaction to have.
This applies to many aspects of game design, not just quests. Players should know where they can go to gain levels, they should know where to go to get new spells, how to embark on a crafting career, where to actually do a quest they’ve already obtained.
Really, it can apply everywhere. Ambiguity doesn’t lead to fun and it isn’t difficulty, the fun and difficulty should be in what the player is actually doing (not discovering how they can attempt to do it).
I’m not talking about raid mobs (or anything similar) either–the mystery involved in discovering the tactics to kill a raid mob are great, and ARE part of the fun. Ambiguity that wouldn’t be fun: that same raid mob lives in some impossibly obscure location that you can’t even get to unless you type “I challenge thee” in front of some rock in the middle of nowhere, and there are 0 hints about it anywhere.
A quick tangent before I close things out: In point #1, I zoomed out and noted that you shouldn’t set precedents and violate them yourself. You also shouldn’t violate common precedents either. For example, if someone has a floating yellow exclamation point over their head, they should have a quest, not be an aggro mob. That precedent is set. If all of your quests tell players where to go to perform them, don’t throw a few in there without any direction. A violated precedent is a worthless precedent.
The main points to take away are:
- Clarity is key. Ambiguousness is not fun. Give clear direction to players.
- Don’t play with people’s expectations. If you set a precedent, don’t violate it or its not a worthwhile precedent.
Don’t go the way of old-school HP laser printers; avoid a PC LOAD LETTER of your own.
You make some excellent points.
Major, major quests that have such fantastic awards should have some direction. I’m all for quests you can obtain by exploring and discovering stuff, but a quest of this magnitude should have a person point you on the beginning path and then the player left to follow the clues.
Yep, hiding things away from people is fine as long as it’s completely unimportant in the scheme of things. Giving cookies to players who explore and thoroughly pay attention to their surroundings and NPC text is great. An example we’ve tossed around in the forums is:
Words are scratched on the walls within a hidden cave that you must swim underwater to get to. If you decipher the meaning of the clues, it leads you to go ask a certain NPC about something specific (by typing in chat, as the NPC must “overhear these words”).
That is great, assuming it’s not some major quest. It rewards people for exploring. Not to mention, that apparently gives more clues than the new EQII epics.
Part of the trouble is – they’ve change something about the world – and given you no reason to know it. You expect, in a MMORPG, the world to stay the same. Who the hell checks every NPC and location of the off chance they’ve changed….. nobody….. because the world does not change. And that’s another precident they’ve set and are breaking…..
In addition to giving some direction, back it up with story. In-game, why can a character now make a powerful item that they couldn’t make a week earlier? This knowledge didn’t come out of thin air. Maybe a Rosetta stone-type artifact is unearthed, news of it is spread, and the character can make a pilgrimage to see the stone, and gleen the epic crafting knowledge from it. There you go: direction and plot springboard all in one. Whatever curtain you put up in front of the developer wizards, make it a thick and luxurious one, not a clear plastic shower curtain.
Players should know where they can go to gain levels, they should know where to go to get new spells, how to embark on a crafting career, where to actually do a quest they’ve already obtained.
Yet players incessantly ask where to go next. Do we want to lead players by the nose like WoW and LOTRO have, funneling their game experiences through the same narrow tunnel? Do we have enough faith in players to allow them the freedom to explore on their own? (Apparently not?) Most of the quest-based games will at least give a quest to briefly enter a new zone so the player should be able to say “aha! A new area to adventure in, and it’s higher level content than I currently use, I’ll keep this in mind.”
Much of this comes down to visual cues, such as how to know where to start crafting. Vanguard did a cool thing recently, rather than relying on the single icon signifying an available quest, they now have three quest icons, one for each sphere of the game. So we know immediately if that NPC has an adventuring quest, a crafting quest, or a diplomacy quest. Taking that simple idea just might solve some of the confusion if a new player sees all these NPC’s with a yellow ! then one single NPC has something different and it turns out to be the “introduction to crafting professions” quest.
Writing can also help with much confusion. I don’t know how much hand-holding we really *need* in these games. A certain amount is nice, but it was quite the culture shock when I started Vanguard with it’s dramatic lack of hand-holding even in areas I’d never realized that I was being hand-held. Ya don’t know what ya got til it’s gone, indeed. But, WoW and Vanguard both have fairly terrible writing in their quest dialogue. Every designer could take note of the great strides LOTRO took with their quests. Nearly every MMO I’ve ever played, I just skip to the end and click ‘accept’ because, let’s be honest, who cares what the NPC is saying, just get to the point: how many murloc heads do you need so I can get this garbage over with? LOTRO’s quests are entertaining to read, they breathe some life into NPC’s and they have just enough cues with directions, mentioning prominent landmarks, etc. that players can find what they’re looking for without undue effort but also not tugging too hard on a leash and leading them directly to it.
In mild defense of Sony… they actually are following a precident. Epics 1 and 1.5 in the original EQ. Each was announced with “Epics are in! Good luck!” It took a couple months before a monk had the balls enough to hand in a nice item (Robe of the Whistling Fists) to an NPC, back when NPCs used to just say “Thanks!” and eat items they didn’t need, to discover that the guys in Erudin and Timerous Deep and their rare books were the beginning of the Celestial Fists quest.
It doesn’t have to be a narrow tunnel. If there are 4 zones for their level range, they should be generally aware of each of them. If they get a (short) quest from Hub A, it should be closer to Hub A than Hub B. If they’ve completed a quest, the NPC who gave it to them should be marked on the map.
Unless something involves exploration as part of the challenge, ambiguity about the location is bad game design.
A lot of it, particularly for quests, doesn’t need to come down to outright hand-holding. It’s more about good content design than anything, really. While adventuring in a level-appropriate area, maybe there is an evil looking cliff to the north with a narrow path leading up and tougher mobs on the path than below.
As I mentioned before, quests should generally deal with only the areas within a particular radius of the quest hub–more specifically, it should be closer to the quest hub you got the quest than to the next one. The next hub should be in an area where there are higher level mobs, and so on.
It’s more about naturally leading players to their (hopefully) many options, not forcing them to go to them or giving them a “go to next place I need to go” button.
And yeah, the general directions and POI references in quest text are always good (“the bandit camp to the north, in the shadow of the great tree”).
Just point me in the right direction. I don’t need to be walked over there, but I should see affirmation that I chose correctly when I get there (i.e. lots of quest givers, harvestables, etc.)
Just please don’t make me ask my friends where I should be going next.
Entirely valid points; don’t expect players to know every little detail or no details at all. A good balance, possibly not even a map cursor~ instead land marks or a little check list to go through to discover quests. I can see that as being a fun little design, especially for quests designed for newer players; objectives leading them from the giant clock tower mid town, to the market corner, and finally to their destination in a dark alley way just south of the wizard’s tower.
Though I have to admit I’ve got absolutely nothing against the whole ‘map tells you where to go’ method of quest finding but exploration is just so much more fun. Whats the point of building a huge, beautiful immersing world if you’re just going to have us do a quick run by the map before moving onto the next?
World of Warcraft’s breadcrumb design for quests, in my opinion, penalizes exploration. Since quests are the best way (outside of buying gold or twinking) to level up and equip a character, stepping off the rails leading you from quest hub to quest hub to explore the world without defined goals actually drags your character progression to a comparative halt. Sure it makes the game easy… but easy isn’t always best. Players being introduced to MMOs with WoW are start with such a gaming on rails experience, that they may never discover they prefer to play the game in other ways.
Pretty much, Jason. If you explore, especially if later you get a quest for that area, you’ve basically been penalized for doing so. Bad. There are solutions, but some of those that I’ve come up with are too secret sauce to talk about on my blog.
To me, the difference between the “find the way to beat the Epic boss” and “find the obscure path to get to the Epic boss” is that the former entails a finite and well-understood set of options for action, only a few of which will lead to eventual success, while the latter encompasses unlimited possible options with no precedent or prompting to guide a player to an eventual solution. Ambiguity within a defined and universally understood (and good luck with that) set of options might be workable; ambiguity in a limitless set of options is frustrating and largely pointless.
… and identifying which of those two situations you are actually dealing with is often, I suspect, the crux of the design problem.
Oh god. There was a EQ2 quest, I’ve forgotten which one, but it involved finding whatzits (runes? skeletons? something like that) in a whole bunch of zones. Took me ages, and then I was down to the last one, and I’d scanned the zone I knew it was in inch by inch by inch by everloving inch. Eventually I broke down and begged one of my guildmates to lead me to the whatzit I couldn’t find on my own, only to have him lead me to a room I’d carefully searched a dozen times before, where I discovered that the whatzit wasn’t rendering on my computer.
If you’re going to have uberlong quests that require me to track down mystery whatzits all over the world without any hints, make the whatzits big and simple enough that even your minimum system is going to render it. Having to get someone to tell me “click two feet to the right of the post over there, where the tiles on the shelf intersect” is Not Fun, and a good way to lose an income stream.
I just recently started playing EQ2. On the initial zone there is a quest, the second in a line of six or seven, that requires you to find evidence of some missing soldiers. After finding nothing, I finally got fed up and went to a spoiler site. It said I needed to find the body of a dead soldier on the ground, which would trigger a defiled soldier, killing him would get the evidence I need to complete the quest. Only… there is no dead soldier. There are, however, anywhere from three to eighteen players standing there in the newbie zone waiting for it to show up. Several of us petitioned, only one of us got a reply, which was something along the lines of “You don’t need to complete that quest line, just move on.”