MMO Development Lesson #32
Players should be making informed decisions. If a player is asked to make a meaningful choice, such as selecting their class or race, they must be informed. Give them all the information they need to ensure they’re making a “good” choice (in their perception), or they’ll be anxious about making it in the first place. This applies at every step along the way, particularly if the choices are permanent, and it can be quite tough to do effectively at character creation. But, whenever a player is making a decision, they need to know what the consequences and possible outcomes are before they are asked to make it.
Absolutely! In fact, I know of several games where this sort of decision anxiety has actually stopped me from playing a game all together. I’d rather make the choice to stop playing than to make a permanent decision about something in a game without knowing enough about the possible outcomes to determine which is the “best” choice for me. It’s related to being a min/maxer at the core but I hate not knowing what to choose. I would also say that if you cannot provide enough information to a player then you have make it so that the choice is not permanent. If I can try out something and see if I like it then I’m much less likely to actually stop playing (and paying).
I agree in principle. In practice I’ve seen the truth of ‘experience may change during gameplay’ in too many games. The consequences of my choices can [and probably will] change at any time. Once Nerfbats are issued there seems to be a compulsion to use them
I liked EvE’s character creation screen. While the game does have an open skill system, making the wrong choices at character creation can severely worsen that critical initial experience. Not only did the character creation screen give me a generic idea of the meaning of the choices (I.E. “pick this if you want to focus on combat”), it also showed me specific bonuses I got from each choice. In the end, I got a summary of the bonuses and could go back and tweak my choices. Lo and behold, I got just the character I wanted.
I agree wholeheartedly. What’s worse though is when some vague blurb about the character class is revealed either in the game manual or during character creation which during gameplay turns out to be absolutely false. My favorite is any kind of character selection overview text which includes the phrase “masters of”. That’s almost always guaranteed to be false.
I’d love to have character creation spit out a kind of report which says: Based on your choices here is the type of gameplay you can expect.
It doesn’t need to be exactly that blunt, but I think you get my meaning. Most recently I have been playing WoW the longest (as I think we probably all have been since it’s the 800lb gorilla on the market) and one of the most frustrating things for me is how some of the classes slowly change over time… so that there’s a good chance that if you have a toon you’ve been playing from day 1 (3? years ago) you’re probably playing it totally differently than you thought you would.
TR has turned out to be a huge dissapointment (aside from the truly epic feeling massive battles here and there) but it did have some good ideas… like the idea of clone credits. Oh how I wish I had a few WoW clone credits.
Heh - Shalkis I had the exact opposite reaction to Eve’s character creation process. I loved how I could customize my appearance, but I saw the sheer depth of the choices for race, school, family, side of the street I grew up on (I kid but you get the idea) as being ridiculous. It’s like…
The most important choice for a lot of people is the choice or serries of choices that leads them to be able to contribute and to be wanted in end game content / raids.
In this matter I am a big fan of enabling players to respect choices they made along the way and this includes:
Gender
Race
Class
Achievement
Traits
Feats
Etc.
There should also be some significant cost… but less than “We have too many tanks not enough healers… guess I will spend 3-6 months on an alt before I can play the end game with my friends”