Mob Placement
In some MMOs, mob placement sucks. Most of the time, it’s one of those things you don’t actively notice, but you feel that it’s wrong. They don’t seem like they are actually leading lives where they are. They don’t seem like they belong in the climate or topography. They seem like they’re just fodder thrown in because “players need stuff to kill.” But there’s a lot more to mob placement than that.
To begin with, they need to seem like they belong where they are. Mountain goats shouldn’t be wandering the plains. Creatures of the night shouldn’t be basking in the sun. If something seems like it might be out of place, it probably is.
Mobs should also look like they lead lives. Would wolves prowl forests with no prey in them? Certainly not. Would mobs hang out on the edges of camps, or would they keep warm by the campfire in a cold climate? Are all members of a chaotic tribe actually chaotic, or do they have a more organized leader who surrounds himself with warlocks? Which feels right?
There should also be rests and climaxes throughout a zone. Sure, you don’t want many areas to be devoid of life, but you also don’t want players to be wading through enemies all day long. Points of interest like camps or giant trees should have concentrated numbers of mobs in them, while open spaces should be thinner. There should also be areas where a player can find refuge to rest (or take a bio break).
Players also shouldn’t be running into the same mobs throughout an entire zone. They should be paced such that players are regularly running into new mobs (both visuals and combat variants on existing mobs… e.g. a “blood serpent” in one place and a “fire serpent” in the other, even if they only use a few different abilities). Novelty wears off quick, but it’s important to maintain.
So many games miss the mark on mob placement. They might get that mobs should be cool and fun to fight, but unless they look like they belong and care is taken when determining where the mobs are, players will notice, even if it’s only subconsciously.
I think you begin with step 2, not step 1…if a mountain goat wandering the plains is bad think about a mountain goat standing on its head on top of a bush [SWG launch] or [the Vanguard launch] walking backwards across the landscape.
Definitely agreeing with you on this. One of the things that annoyed me about WoW was how many zones were just littered with mobs. Desolace and Tanaris especially come to mind. If you plan to run anywhere you’re basically wading through hundreds of scorpids and vultures and whatever else is out there. Feels a bit silly, honestly, and it gets old after awhile.
Anyway, I think subtle things like what you’re talking about can add a lot to a game world. For most people, it would only be subconscious like you said, but I think it remains significant in creating that immersion many of us want.
Seeing the wolf actually take down the prey once in a while would give the region a lot of credibility too (and look pretty cool).
The mobs that just stand in one place, spaced out, doing nothing bug me. And when you fight one within sight of another and they just ignore you.
Jade Dynasty is a prime example of everything that can be wrong with mob placement – if there actually were an ambition beyond killable items for players. In JDs case I do not think there were any such ambition at all – running your characters as a bot is part of the regular gameplay and densly packed and quick respawning mobs that does not really do anything suits that grind quite well.
@Ethic – Funny that you mention the mobs stainding within plain sight of a fight. Sociologists would beg to differ with your assertion. Most people, when they see a fight between two strangers will actively avoid the situation so as to not get entangled in it. (the safety reflex) Mobs within eye sight would be right to run away or merely change facing to watch the spectacle. Only when there is a personal tie between the one watching and one of the participants in the fight, would you be correct in asserting that the watcher would come to the other’s aid. In some societies, the reaction will change based on the assailants age or gender in that a man beating up a child will see complete strangers come to the rescue of the child while a woman beating up a grown man will engender no such reaction from the watcher.
It would be cool if, once in a while, you could actually see the mobs interacting in realistic ways (e.g. the wolf attacking its prey, tribes stalking a larger beast, members from different tribes interacting, etc.) This would reinforce each mob’s role in its territory.
Excellent post! I totally agree… and it’s more than just “does this creature make sense here” in a natural/scientific sense. It has to make gameplay and story sense as well.
I’ve seen far too many MMO design docs where someone has drawn a couple of random shapes, written a zone name, and the name of a mob that matches.
“Okay… draw a couple of squiggly lines, then write Shatterface mountains… and, uh, we’ll fill it with mountain goats… done” — nothing done to explain why we, as players, as heroes(!), care about the fact that there are goats there.
This is why too many MMOs end up with quests like “help me collect goat bladders, so I can make goat bladder pie!” If you have a zone filled with goats, and you have 5 days to make 30 quests. You tend make a lot of pie quests.
The quests could be much better written if the guy who drew the squiggly lines on the map already knew that the player was going there to collect relics of the ancient gods, so they can summon the corrupted soul of the Sightless One, and use it to infuse their weapons and kill the God of Winter.
I would much rather have a cool story reason to fight Sightless Assassins, and Champions of the Ancient Ones, and Servants of Winter than slaughter a family of mountain goats because it’s a mountain, and mountains have goats, and we already spent six weeks making goats, and the map says goats, so just make quests to kill the goats already!
But to do that (and still ship a game on time and on budget), you need to get that story in there asap.
Critters, on the other hand – cosmetic mobs you can one-shot for fun – It’s cool to have them match the environment – but when it comes to full on Mobs that I am encouraged to fight and kill, I much prefer fighting “evil servants of evilness with evil plans that must be stopped” over “innocent wildlife.”
It’s all about creating a proper setting. I’ve seen some games with mobs that do attack each other and I enjoyed that. It makes sense that not all mobs just get along. Seeing a mountain lion walking alongside an elk while a tribal hunter standing ten feet away just doesn’t happen. Also, I do like that some games have level one animals hanging around end game zones. I don’t think that you need to have every creature in the zone to be a challenge.
Another problem with unrealistic placement…how often would you realistically see 15 blood bears wandering around each other, much less the 25 teal wolves in the same area? Most large predators are solitary for a reason, and should be rare to encounter (Even pack predators are one pack to several square miles at a min) except in rare cases where food is so utterly abundant it doesn’t matter (And that should be specific, like salmon runs.) Magic animals might alter that sort of thing, but ecology really does matter.
Also, mobs should interact with their environment, even if its mostly scripted, have all the orcs do a patrol, then head back to camp and sleep, then emerge and walk the patrol again…add some (semi-random) environment encounters for the patrol, and it suddenly becomes a lot more interesting…now the player might find something the orcs leave behind (The dog they kill, if inspected soon enough, has a collar that leads to a quest/treasure), or by timing the patrols can move past a more powerful group safely. It all adds to the feel of the game.
You have to suspend your disbelief to some extent with things like 15 blood bears wandering around an area. If you don’t have a high population of stuff to kill, it’s boring. If you populate a world realistically (even in the context of fantasy), it will be boring as hell.
-> I think this could be easily addressed/implemented
(to Derek: it seems intuitive that if you engage a fight with a farmer because he caught you stealing apples, his wife comes along to help him) -> this also means rethinking some game mechanics. While you could kill one werewolf one against one, what about one against ten? But this could be interesting: depending on the number of werewolves in sight, you bring more or less friends along. Seems logical … but … definitely against solo-quests
-> But you don’t have level-20 animals in level-60 zones. The reason is no level-20 avatar should be able to survive in this zone if you want players to clean each zone after another and not be bored in new zones.
-> I agree. But there should be realistic reasons for so many monsters to be together. If you put yourself inside a monster’s mind (think you are Lord Kazzak invading Stormwind), why are there so many players only inside cities and not lost in the middle of a lost forest?
Anyway, having smart mob AI his means having a much bigger AI module inside the game than what exists now. I do not think current MMOs have really big AI-scripting teams. WoW dungeon trash mobs have a simple patrol script, but this script existed already in Warcraft II. More complex bosses have more complex AI, but that still could be easily improved. But to my mind, the main question is what has the priority: 3 extra guys in the AI team, or 3 extra guys in the cinematic team? I think the AAA-MMO industry answer might often be “cinematic team”, because players’ imagination does all the work. And for most people, what matters is to kill Arthas, not to camp the stupid static respawn of the mobs dropping an item used to craft the key that might open the door leading to Arthas …
I remember in the DAOC SI expansion that mobs actually attacked each other. I remember wolves attacking stags, and you would actually see the health of the mobs go down.
It was pretty cool, but I have never seen it happen in any other MMO’s I have played.
That can be true (The boring as hell part) but the use of pack creatures might alleviate that a bit. Still, it is a bit of a erf to see all the bears wandering around in parts of Antonica.
Actually, EQ2 has this happen in a number of places.
(M)Age of Conan also had NPC vs NPC fights, some scripted, some semi-random. Best example would be the caravan that leaves the Stygian town of Bubshur and wanders around the zone. The mercenary guards are usually whittled away by lions and hyenas before they hit the bandit-infested areas.
Bah. AoC did so many things right (collision detection, “living” NPCs, healer classes that were actually fun to play) that it always irks me how badly Funcom managed to screw things up with their glacial pace of development and utter disregard for the most basic principles of marketing….