MMO Development Lesson #31
Too many options are too many. A lot of us experienced players love having options. We like to choose our skills, increase our stats manually, and micromanage every little detail of our character and play because it’s part of the fun for us. For most people, that isn’t the case. Even for the people like me, there’s a point that there are just too many options, and I become gun-shy about making bad choices. Too much of anything is simply too much, and if you want an accessible game, avoid giving players too many options.
Or perhaps, avoid giving players too many options too soon.
Allow options to build on options, perhaps like a tech tree where one choice gives a few new options but removes the other branches. That way, the player has lots of options for character development as the game progresses, but it never becomes unmanageable.
The downside is from the developer perspective. It would be a mongrel to balance.
“…I become gun-shy about making bad choices”
So the real problem is not being able to change choices. Is that a baby I hear in the bathwater?
This is actually a fairly common design principle, also known as being “Paralyzed by Choice” (I went looking for an appropriate link, couldn’t find one). The problem isn’t the ability to undo something, its that there’s so many options it becomes almost impossible to find the “perfect” option, that gives the optimal result. As a result it usually leads directly to Min-Maxing and theorycrafting, and even with a wide array of options, generally a few “sets” end up dominating.
That’s why it makes sense to segregate options into “classes” or “trees”. You still end up having lots of variation, but as a designer you can package (and balance) an “experience” that doesn’t require an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game and system.
I always find myself waiting to distribute attribute points or whatever until I hit the level cap so I know how I’ll use my character and can make the most educated decision. So I get this, maybe not the way you intended, but I agree. Kind of off topic, but options you can’t change also bug me.
This link may do in the short term
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis
Segregating options into trees/classes etc is fine….that just organizes choices, it doesn’t reduce them. Unless you restrict choices so that only an X can do Y….
Why is difficulty finding the “perfect profile” a problem and why is reducing choices a good solution?
If it takes too much time and money to have lots of choices, fine just say say so. But the ‘it’s too haaarrd to make up my mind’ justification doesn’t seem persuasive to me. Case in point: when is the last time you heard someone criticize City of Heros for having too many character creation choices?
“I always find myself waiting to distribute attribute points or whatever until I hit the level cap so I know how I’ll use my character and can make the most educated decision”
If it were fairly simple to re-spec your points as you went through the game and learned how you wanted to play would you still keep them in your pocket till the end?
I appear to have not submitted my comment. I have at least two more lessons to piggyback off this one related to choice. One deals with players making informed choices, the other deals with allowing them to change their decisions.
Here’s a better link to support the “too many choices is bad” side.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun04/toomany.html
Makes me think of EVE Online. The character creation process is just hugely daunting to me. Too many choices that have no clear reason for making them. You have to decide on your race and all kinds of other issues when you don’t even know really what you are going to do or how the whole system works.
I would turn this reasoning from something to avoid to something to do, and that would be:
- Make sure to design chunkable game mechanics.
Too many options becomes a failure in this regard. Becomes “Kosterian Noise”…
Could it be that the game has a poor design if there are choices that can be made that are seen as worthless to the players class? You’ll also have to look at the fact that the ‘game’ might be trying to give multiple choices to better fit the different play styles of gamers they are trying to attract.
But I do feel that a fundamental design philosophy should be that of making sure each skill / attribute / spell in a game has multiplayer instances of need in the game.
For me, it’s not so much that it’s hard to make the “perfect” choice because of too many options, it’s because I have NO idea where to even start! When you’re completely overwhelmed by all kinds of crap you’ve hardly even begun to understand the significance of, problems come up. Basically, the problem is the learning curve is way the @#$% too steep. A great example is teaching a new player all of the D&D mechanics. Seriously, give someone who’s never played D&D a copy of Neverwinter Nights and see how absolutely horrible their character is in terms of strength because they really don’t know the value or significance of the stats they’re picking, skills, etc etc.
Basically, keep it simple and gradually introduce your player into the more complex aspects of the game. Good: Having a low-level pet-based class have a few damage abilities, a pet heal, maybe a couple buffs/debuffs. As they get higher in level give them more utility and abilities, maybe adding some crowd control abilities like stuns and roots, different AE abilities, new ways to customize their pet. Bad: Giving them all of that from that get-go. People need to be eased into the system. WoW does a good job of this IMHO, but partly because they’ve managed to keep choices meaningful without overloading the system with tons of random crap.
And for the love of god, don’t ask for important decisions to be made at character creation that a newbie won’t understand the consequences of until 50 levels and 70+ hours of gameplay in.
People turn to web guides to help them with character progression choices. Perhaps make these guides part of the game - offer those power templates as a package choice, and let experienced players tinker with individual parts of them if they choose. Of course, few designers recognize the power templates until people have been screaming for months on the forums, so maybe that’s not such a good idea.
I’ve never heard any players complain that character classes weren’t cookie-cutter enough (unless you count demands for “respec” as a symptom of that problem), but the lack of freedom in determining character progression is a common complaint.
I don’t have an issue with providing basic templates for progression choices, particularly if there are a lot of choices for a player to make. In a game like WoW, I could see them giving 3 basic talent templates (one for each tree) that players could use as a starting point. Games like Neverwinter Nights do this and it makes it really easy just to coast through knowing that you aren’t making “bad” decisions.
As i player, I wouldn’t use those suggested templates at all, but I’m an experienced gamer. Newer gamers would definitely benefit from the templates. It’s a little touchy, though, because it seems like these are the recommended specs from the designers, and any other choices could be inferior. I think most players are intelligent enough to recognize that they probably aren’t the optimal template for any given playstyle, though.
Anyway, offering default templates for players would also allow designers to give more options without them being overwhelming, which is a good thing (it doesn’t eliminate that it makes it more difficult to balance, but it still fixes one issue).