MMO Development Lesson #30
A “required feature” for your game’s genre may not be required for your game. Sometimes new features appear in almost every new game of the same genre. Mounts, for example, seem to be required as a baseline feature for a traditional MMO. Are they? Of course not. Not all burgers need cheese to be delicious, and not all MMO games need mounts to be great. An example in the FPS genre is BioShock — it doesn’t have all of the features of an FPS (or any other genre), but it’s still an amazing game. Never include a feature in a game because you think it’s a core feature to the genre; always include a feature in a game because it’s a core feature of your game.
“Not all burgers need cheese to be delicious…”
Heresy!
So where does the habit of copying the successful features from earlier titles come from?
I agree that its not something that needs to be done, but it is generally done by many of the big studios. Bioshock also does feel a little bit as a game which only belongs in the FPS genre by interface, but plays like something else.
It’s not actually a terrible habit. The more options you can offer at a high quality level, the better. If someone loved their flying mount in WoW and is encouraged to try a new game because they have even better flying mounts, then that can be beneficial. If a new game has everything that WoW has and more, and all of it is relatively mediocre because there was no time to implement it all, then it is detrimental.
Players do do form opinions (as do developers) about what the core requirements of a game in a particular genre are. This lesson is that you can ignore those core requirements if you know what you’re doing, and if you do it well enough.
The point here is really not to blindly copy features from other games in the genre but to see what goals they meet and see if they can be met in an even better way.
Do you think this lesson is often violated by spreadsheet decisions? i.e. “Our competitor, “Supergame” has these 300 features for $50 and $19.95 a month. If we’re going to charge the same (or more), we’ve got to have at least as many features. Cram them in!”
So features aren’t there to meet a need? I always assumed that a feature, such as a mount, was included to meet a need, such as getting from A to B faster than travelling on foot.
Features for feature sake is not good design. Every one of your features should be well thought out and developed within the scope of your game.
I’m pretty sure you just used mounts as an example, since all games with large open areas require some some sort of traveling aspect.
And I’m lactose intolerant, so burgers are better WITHOUT cheese.
Yep, just an example. You should never include a feature in a game because you feel like it’s a core feature to the genre; you should always include a feature in a game because you feel like it’s a core feature of your game.
Im usually more concerned with core features from a standpoint of what you are trying to sell (ie what marketing is buzzing) vs what you can actually bring to the table in a coherent and polished form. I’d rather have a few really polished selling points that make my game unique or fun, then dozens of half baked concepts that were rushed at the last minute.]
Nice post
wait, are we talking about Vanguard again?
Each part of the game should add value to the experience. Maybe even work to support “fun” but thats a detail. Since games are such strange things it might sometimes be better to remove things than add them. Mounts are fun, flying mouts are even better. Teleportation is a bit less fun but more practical. Having a house full of runes in UO was also fun. Maybe the real trick is to distill the ideas into even more iconic versions which represent the functionality rather than enhance the level of detail. But I guess that is to some degree what Runescape has been doing with some standard features?
The game feature that I always revolt against is bag-based inventory. Bags make inventory management a royal pain, and they lost their “roleplaying” quality a long time ago. In Vanguard, I was running around with 738 logs, 800 housing bricks, a camel, a sloop, a horse, and a caravel. Not. very. realistic.
In EQ2, my bags are constantly full with item drops, quest drops, collectibles, potions, resist gear, harvestables, summoned rez and power items, and of course, scrying stones. (I KNOW I’ll get something useful from scrying someday, I just know it!) My bank is so cluttered that I avoid visiting it these days. Bigger bags and bank slots don’t really help, it just prolongs the search time for whatever it is you need to find.
I’d love to see a game move away from bags completely and just use a drop down menu in the UI, which allows you to sort and search it several different ways.
Hmmm…I remember reading somewhere about how MMO designers include features and gameplay mechanics without thinking, simply because the “mmo model” demands it. “WoW has feature X and WoW made buckets of money, therefore feature X must be worthwhile.” The article also applied that logic to the big picture of MMO gameplay (mmo-style combat, persistent worlds, grouping, etc.), not just small features like mounts.
Found it: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070326/sorens_01.shtml. Such an awesome article. Wonder why this guy hasn’t worked on any MMOs yet? Has 38 studios tried to hire him? He’s got better ideas than 99% of the people who do work on MMOs.
Identifying a problem without identifying an appropriate solution is the easiest step in game design analysis (technically, the easiest part is figuring out that there is a problem, then finding the actual problem can be difficult). It is a little weird that someone who has only worked on sports games wrote an article on MMOs, but I guess that’s within his area of interest. Why hasn’t he worked on a massively multiplayer game? Probably because it’s hard.
Back to the original point: His solutions aren’t actually solutions, they are random ideas about how to address a perceived problem. For example, saying “create interesting challenges” and actually creating interesting challenges are worlds upon worlds different.
No offense to you or the writer of that article, but nothing in there is even remotely revolutionary. I’ve seen ideas just as well thought out on forums from players. Would I hire them? Maybe, it depends on how hardworking they’d be, their personality, their willingness to learn, etc. But I wouldn’t be much more likely to hire someone who has been a game designer on one sports project.
As for the comment that he has better ideas than 99% of the people who do work on MMOs… it would be hard to comment much on that without getting offended and ranting. But, I will say that 99% of all ideas, good or bad, don’t ever get implemented (they’d take too long to implement, they would impact too many other systems, they don’t follow the vision of the game, there are too many trade-offs, etc.).
And, again, there are very few implementable ideas in that article, and many of the others are already in games. The varied difficulty of 5 weak goblins vs. 1 strong goblin does already exist, and part of the reason it isn’t too prevalent is because not all characters can handle multiple enemies effectively (some have control abilities like mez, dome have big AoE spells, some have neither).
Finally, if any of these solutions really did enumerate what exactly would be done, they would have to include all the trade-offs for doing so. Making instant-travel portals all over the world reduces the depth of the game, harms immersion, reduces the sense of accomplishment you gain from getting somewhere in the first place, changes the economy, and has a number of other trade-offs associated with it. You can’t just solve one problem and disregard all of the problems that solution creates.
The hardest part of game design for me is probably accurately identifying those trade-offs, then weighing the options against each other in the context of a particular game and making a decision without regard to my personal preferences coming into play. For example, I absolutely love skill systems, but are they worth it, or are class systems overall better for the vision of the game you are making? Generally for accessibility purposes, you’re going to always end up deciding that classes are better than skills. If you still want players to be able to customize their character heavily, you can, but this won’t start until a little later in the game.
It sounds to me like you’re just offended that someone called out MMO designers for their lack of creativity and obsession with D&D style gameplay. Even the ideas he just throws out randomly (Dungeon Keeper-style content creation, Total War and X-Com MMOs) are far better than the constant stream of me-too EQ clones. Makes me wonder if he’s got some other ideas he’s keeping closer to the vest or working on in the meantime.
I dunno about working on an MMO being harder than working on any other kind of game. I mean, it seems like you’ve got a good head for design and all, but until you’ve shipped something that reflects that, it’s all hot air, like Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun, which SWG violated horribly. Not sure why you put on airs of being this great designer coming down from the mountain to share your wisdom when your game will probably just be another game that totally relies on its “treat dispenser” (to steal a term from the article) instead of gameplay that’s actually fun by itself. And at least this guy has made some good games and apparently makes a living as a game design consultant, which seems like it would be hard to do if your advice were impractical or redundant.
Anyway, sorry to be blunt but it just makes no sense to me why people keep making different flavors of Everquest and then insist that their work is the pinnacle of what is even possible with current tech. The reason I like the article is because it elevates the MMO design discussion to a place where skills vs. classes and such are just insignificant details instead of the main differentiating factor between games. It makes me think that much more is possible, but the frustrating thing is that the people who make these games are not interested in . Not that you have any say in the overall game concept and direction, but I would at least hope that you could see the potential in other kinds of games and acknowledge that the genre’s evolution is stunted.
Hi,
I got an email with a link to this particular blog entry, I assume from Mayhem here.
While I appreciate the kind words about my article, I don’t see the need to put anyone down because they don’t agree with it. Yes, I think the current popularity of MMORPGs will eventually fade, but there’s nothing wrong with making that kind of game if that’s what you like to make, especially if someone’s giving you your first real opportunity to do game design on an original product. Plus, there are plenty of people still willing to play these games.
Now, the comments about Ryan’s experience really irritate me. There are plenty of fantastic designers who have to work their butts off in tester/assistant producer hell for a long time just to get a shot at designing something. (I got started as a tester, too, no shame in that.) On the flip side of things, you have designers with a lot of experience who seemingly can’t hack it nowadays, like Richard Garriott, Brad McQuaid, and plenty of others. Enthusiasm, intuition, and forward thinking are all just as important as experience, if not more so. Confidence and self-promotion don’t hurt, either, in an industry where swagger is what opens most doors.
As far as my ideas go, I’m happy with what I am working on. It’s a game that gives each player control of their own ecosystem (in the figurative sense) that they shape and influence. There are various ways for players to interact with each other, but each player essentially retains control of who is allowed to affect that ecosystem. This kind of game is all about changing a persistent game world–possible because it was designed around that concept–but one where you are the gatekeeper. Since you don’t have hordes of players trampling through it unless you invite them to, it doesn’t have to spring back into its original shape with 10-minute respawns and the like. It’s probably not something that people here would be interested in because progress is harder to quantify and there’s no incentive to form guilds and that kind of thing, but I think there will still be a market for it. By the way , my second article for Gamasutra (”Stories From the Sandbox”) also reflects my work on this game.
I think it would be a mistake to try to apply stuff from my article to the “MMORPG” genre willy-nilly. Like Ryan said, you have to make your feature set and design approach cohesive. The article was about designing new games from the ground up, and why you would want to do that given that the current model is what’s making money. It’s not about trying to bend MMORPGs into something they aren’t.
Thanks for stopping by. Hopefully I didn’t get too ranty about your article in my replies. I can get defensive when I’m called uncreative, even indirectly.