BBB wrote a great post that deftly touches on a number of aspects to the modern world of WoW, and how it has changed from the Burning Crusade days. I’d suggest a quick read over here:
I love physics. Quantum physics are especially interesting, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle drives a lot of weirdness. One of the most interesting thought experiments based on the theory is the plight of Schrodinger’s Cat. More than once, I’ve wondered what application this might have to games. Much of it comes back to the concept of predictability, and just how much of it we actually want.
BBB mentions the random recipe drops that categorized high end crafting in preWrath WoW. High end crafters would have to root around in endgame raids, hoping for rare recipes in the loot that would allow them to grind their crafting skill to a higher level where they could search for even rarer recipes in even meaner raid zones. These days high end recipes are apparently available via a token interface, so acquisition is less a function of hitting the recipe jackpot and more a function of putting in your time. I actually like the change, since it makes the game less frustrating. (At the cost of underlining the grind a bit more… jackpot mechanisms actually tend to be more grindy than pure work=reward mechanics, but they appear to be less so because of the occasions where the jackpot puts people ahead of the average.)
Short story long, I like the predictability inherent in such a scheme. I don’t like the idea of raid reruns for recipes, especially when the drop rate is abysmally low. Sure, it can feel “special” to be one of the blessed few who has the coveted recipe (since everyone else is still grinding for it, pulling the arm of the slot machine), but the WoW paradigm is already “time=progress”, so the new method is not only more consistent with the existing design but also less frustrating for players. That’s a good thing.
But… what of all the fuss for unpredictability and change that we see on occasion? I’ve argued for some malleability in the game world before, and I still think that it would be a good thing… but not all the time.
There are two ends to my theoretical spectrum of game predictability: On the one end, we have the perfectly predictable game, one that GameFAQs, Brady and Prima can map out to the second. Insert coin, get reward. Play through to the cutscenes, see the scripted story, live out a happy little pellet-eating life, Dinging away our conditioned reflexes.
On the other end is Schrodinger’s Cat. The game is a black box finite state machine, extraordinarily influenced by player actions. It’s not really random, as we are dealing with finite resources and the need to channel players through certain mechanical or narrative chokepoints to make it a game rather than a sandbox (a toy). Still, to the player, the state of the game is unknown at the beginning, and the play and story change depending on choices the player makes. The only way to predict what will happen is to do the same thing every playthrough. If there are sufficient branching opportunities and even some bounded random elements, even choosing the same obvious things (like conversation states) can lead to different game experiences. A theoretical FAQ for a game like this would resemble this sort of thing:
Alternate reality lines
from Star Trek Voyager’s “Year of Hell”, and would be a matrix of possibilities, rather than a gaming equivalent of a script.
Players would be uncertain of what would come next in the game, outside of some very general predictions like “that monster will eat me if I don’t kill it”. In other words, the game would be a bit more like real life.
The designer in me relishes this sort of design, as it could boost the replay value significantly, and it would make for very personalized experiences. Games would once again be something to talk about and share experiences about, because there would be a shared framework, but potentially radically different details. It would be a challenge to make the game interesting but functional, with great storylines but a sense of control and consequence. Making such a game unbreakable would also be interesting; I would never want the player to get to a point where their choices would make the game unplayable. Difficult, I don’t mind, but literally unplayable would be troublesome. (Which might mean redundancies and wheels within wheels to keep the narrative train from derailing, but still, it’s doable.)
The gamer in me is… ambivalent. On the one hand, games like this would approach the sort of crazy unpredictability that can make life interesting, like the Fable games famously aimed for. On the other hand, I play games to get away from the unpredictability that makes life annoying.
I suppose that there’s a market for both, ultimately. Still, in a world of WoWHead and GameFAQs, a freeform game that actually offers consequences for choices and no “golden path” to success would be a very different animal. Too different to be more than a niche title, perhaps, but at the same time, maybe a harbinger of things to come. In the end, it seems as though players want just enough unpredictability to be interesting, but enough predictability to avoid frustration. Finding that sweet spot can be difficult. I do think there is design space and market space for a game that is closer to the Heisenberg quantum storytelling idea than what we currently have available, though.
Interesting idea, Tesh. But I have no clue how a game could be done this way, especially a MMO with many players.
I share Bigbearbutt’s ideas and maybe also his disappointment. He did not mention it at all, but I think he feels bored and regrets that old content is so totally obsolete by now.
I think getting rid of 10-1000 levels as a means of character advancement is key. Adding valueable rewards and new dungeons and stuff to “old” areas would be also a nice idea. They could still do it so that you require certain keys or access thingies that demand that you buy the expansions. :>
I have no idea how one could implement your fascinating idea, for now I would say designers should try to expand and work on the “Guild Wars 1″ formula. They need to find a better way to mix PvE and PvP however, both are even more totally different games than in WoW.
Aye, I’m not certain a Shrodinger’s MMO would really work. MMOs are static because they have to be to keep people playing. Players want “Cheers” for their MMO, a place they can call home because everyone knows their name and everything is pretty much the same every time. A highly variable MMO would by definition give power to the players, and the world would be very malleable. It would be different from the outset, and the GMs would have to keep a handle on it or let it devolve into anarchy. It could work, but it would be so different from existing MMOs that it would have a hard time finding an audience. The possibility matrix would also be orders of magnitude larger, and may bring the tech to its knees, even with a large amount of procedural content.
Offline solo games would be an easier place to explore the technology and the customer interest. If things worked there, and there was a market for it, expansion to MMOs would be a logical, if hugely experimental, next step.
I completely agree with the idea of getting rid of levels. Perhaps a Schrodinger’s MMO would be a great place to do so, basing character progress on some metric of how they affected the world, rather than how they tuned their build or gear.
I don’t mind PvE and PvP being segregated in GW, since I’m no fan of PvP. That said, in a game world where players could affect the world, the two would definitely be more integrated. There would be the ever-present danger of griefing, but with some limiting and retribution mechanics, as well as a very light death penalty (or the ability to regrief griefers as a ghost), it could work.
I can’t see how trying this would be any bigger of a failure than any other million dollar budget flop the last few years. Well worth the old college try, right?
I love the idea – and while I agree the implementation could be nightmarish – perhaps there are ways to contain some of the obvious issues that arise.
1) Mirror worlds – My favorite book series is the Amber series (by Roger Zelazny). The basic premise of the book is that shadow worlds exist, and certain people can move between them. So where the world starts at point A, point B could be aliens taking over and running the show, while point C could be a Utopian version. Some worlds different tech works, etc. Formulating the game along those lines, and giving the players to move between worlds (if they are stuck in one they hate) as part of the core gamplay mechanic would fit in nicely with the chaos. Every “world” would be it’s own experience and players gravitate to ones that fit their “style”. Talk about endless possibilities.
2) Small pieces – instead of the whole world being a variable, how about just the NPC and towns to start? That would be an innovation in itself. One shadow world may have a friendly town smack dab in the center of the lake. On another, because they have been raided so often by players, a bunker of a fortress that kills anyone who get into range. Again, the opportunities are endless.
3) Tiny pieces. Let’s put this into WoW perspective. Onyxia has captured the king of Stormwind. You must defeat her. Your server has so much time to do so (think of AQ gates opening campaign) and if you do, Stormwind goes back to normal. If you don’t – next time you go to Stormwind the guards are all dragon types, and they changed the appearance, and unless you are of evil alignment, you can’t get in. Now, a different server succeeds, and Stormwind goes back to normal. If you prefer the evil stormwind, you can slide to the other shadow world. Etc.
4) Part and parcel in the above is continually resetting the world on a new shadow world. So new people can experience the old content and shape things as they can. Old, abandoned worlds (I am sure some will get so terrible none will want to go there) can get reset – or stay as a reminder that the player choices can create complete doom. Players can also go back and revisit their prior choices and make new ones to see what would happen.
This is all very “sandbox”, but I think if done with the correct checks and balances could be a key innovation for intelligent players.
Interesting thoughts, Chris. Me likey.
I’ve written somewhere that that sort of “multiple worlds” mentality would be a great thing for player-affected worlds. Each “world” would be a server, and while each would start with the same initial conditions, they would evolve along different paths depending on player actions. I think I initially framed it in Star Trek terms, with one universe being totally dominated by the Klingons, and another being a Cardassian Gulag, and yet another being a giant war zone. I love the idea of “shadow worlds” that have different histories, seeing where they diverged and why.
Players would definitely be allowed to jump between worlds/universes (perhaps with a cost or a timer, though, to avoid abuse), and yes, ones that devolve too much into chaos would be subject to wipes. (I like the idea of leaving them in ruin, though, as a history lesson. They might even wind up being ruled by despotic guilds who have to learn that there are consequences for power trips. Interesting psychological analysis potential…)
A cyclical setting would be good, too, as you hint at; after so long, the world resets, and everyone starts over. There could even be things that persist through resets, creating some interesting lore or seeding new cracks in the spacetime continuum to make the “new” universe a different place, even if the players do the same thing every time. (Not that such is likely, but still…)
I’d love to design such a game, digging knee deep into the weirdness of making it all work, providing interesting things for the players. In the absence of funding, though, I’ll keep theorizing.
Just to clarify the entire world shouldn’t reset – but a fresh, new “shadow world” should be periodically available. I yearn for an MMO that is truely a persistant world, instead of so static.
Using our above thought process it could truely be that. Then once a month or so (depending on the game growth) you start a fresh shadow world free from corruption and player change that can be jumped to. This would allow a replayability value of sorts.
Forgot to add –
You can have my starbucks card to start your funding! I want 5% though!
=)
So… would each new shadow world have the same initial state, or would we rotate through a handful of different ones? Using the same initial state would allow for more precise testing, players wouldn’t feel left out if they missed the first opening, and it would be cheaper (no new asset creation). At the same time, using the same initial state could be boring for longtime players, and would be more prone to abuse as players learn the world, and the creative guys might really want to do those other worlds.
I sort of like a rotation concept, and it could be worked to be a part of the overall lore. Say, four worlds for the four seasons, or five worlds for five squabbling sibling gods who fractured reality, or six worlds based on the six most common carbon compounds. It could be pretty flexible.
Wait, did you sell that card to the collector, then? And howzabout 5% up front… that compound interest is sneaky and expensive.
Hi,
I like your blog, do you want to trade links? send me email.
Kind Regards
Hmm… spambot or something more innocent? Anyone?
freemmogamer.com is indeed a valid website, and I’m all for letting people know there are free MMOs out there… but I don’t see any of those free MMOs doing anything even remotely close to the game design we’re talking about here. *shrug*
Spambot illusion. Site that is driven by advertising revenue. I get a few of them a week, all leading to generic MMO blogs. Beware! I said yes to one, and promptly received 40+ spam inquiries the next day.
Capn had the Starbucks card for the collector, I just rode his coattails =)
My thought for the world would be the same one. Would introduce the element of “if I had done this instead of this..” whereas currently no need to visit old lands in any MMO unless you are alt’ing it up. I do think your rotational worlds has merit thought. Stick it in the design document and we’ll flesh it out in future production meetings…
=P
Just noticed someone left the exact same comment over at Brendan’s blog. I think they want you to EMAIL them to get you on the big spam list. Just a warning.
Yeah, I saw the comment on Openedge1′s blog, too. I didn’t consider emailing them back, and now I’m going to leave the comment as a red flag, sort of like how I left up a spammer’s comment months ago on my first interest rant. It’s not hurting anything as it is… as far as I can tell. Thanks for the heads up!
*facepalm* Right, that was Capn’s Starbucks card. Man, I’m slow today.
*gets to work on a design document… or rather, another design document… since this is about the fourth game design that I’ve been working on in my free time that I think could actually be commercially viable *
Just some random thoughts, increasingly tangential:
To my untrained ear, it seems that the major problem with the “shadow world” idea is that you might potentially wind up with mostly unpopulated shadow worlds. MMOs are appealing because they offer a chance to interact with other players, so it can be expected that players want to gravitate to a common world, if only because that’s where everyone else is. New players are going to want to start in environments that already have players, though as your incoming player rate increases distribution across persistent worlds becomes viable.
So, given initial low population, it seems (intuitively) that players would gravitate toward the same server and you don’t really gain anything over a mutable persistent world (except, if you go with the period shadow-cloning bit, periodic “backup” abandoned shadow-copies). Given high population, that might change, sure, but you’re still just at multiple persistent worlds with potential character transfer.
Now, it might be true that a small group of players wouldn’t mind establishing ownership of otherwise empty shadow-worlds, but personally if I wanted to be ruler of a vast digital landscape that was devoid of other players I would just use Maya.
So I guess it seems to me that there has to be some incentive for players to expand across possible worlds beyond “you can have your own thing”. Perhaps the answer can lie in the economy of an online world: make every resource finite – and only the cyclic new-worlds have fresh resources. However, these resources must be processed by facilities that are expensive to build.
Random thoughts:
I’m picturing a sort of gritty steampunk setting where crude oil (or native/metallic ores, wood, whatever) is always in short supply. Resources must be refined before they are used (gasoline, refined minerals/metal, timber), and more efficient refineries cost the building player more resources to build. So, you’ll probably end up with a small set (or just one) “old” world where the community has been industrializing for a long time, and a larger set of harvesting worlds that players journey to to get resources from.
It might be interesting to gauge the results of imposing some kind of tax on inter-world journeys based the resources carried by the player (I.E. you can only take 75% of your crude oil, the other 25% is sunk), as such an element would give incentive to industrialize harvest worlds.
There might be promise in allowing player-owned refineries to be either public or private: public refineries are open to all, naturally, but perhaps charge a wee percentage of the metal ore (economically, they could only charge as much as they save the player by being more efficient than the refinery down the road). Private refineries would only be open to a small set of players, and perhaps used to make weapons for the guild only.
Given that PvP elements already exist, it might be interesting if there was some sort of player control on how possible shadow-world-hopping is. Then, establishing control over a “harvest world” becomes a tactical objective.
On the artistic side, when alternate-reality-hopping, I feel it would be much more interesting from a player’s perspective if it immediately clear to the player that they are somewhere else that was vastly different. Not just somewhere with a different history or with different political boundaries: someplace with a completely different atmosphere. For example, perhaps in our industrialized worlds, there’s thick smog everywhere as a result of player activity. Not only should a player feel like he or she can change the world, but the community as a whole should feel its own manifest effects on the world.
I actually don’t mind ghost servers. That’s the sort of thing that I’m happy to leave up to the population. If nothing else, they can be museums, or demonstrations of what not to do. (This assumes, of course, that a successful shadow world wouldn’t be abandoned.) Post-apocalyptic worlds can be just as interesting as happy shining functional ones. If we were to use your idea of smog and such, and model some sort of rough real-time entropy in all worlds, even an abandoned world would still be “alive”… it would just be populated by critters and plants. (Which would then make it ripe for certain types of farming, or certain GM-created NPC lairs, etc.)
The idea of finite resources is a great one. It does mean that world hopping would be something more integral to the gameplay, rather than just something as simple as a server switch. Introducing a multiworld economy, complete with farming, industry, ecological concerns and such would indeed make for an interesting experience, albeit a different one than what I was originally thinking. As you note, it makes world-hopping a mechanic in itself, which opens up tactical and strategic concerns.
I like it. Of course, a consortium who abuses worlds for resources might find nature itself fighting back, or NPC ecoguerillas in their bases, killing their guys.
A group that masters shadow world hopping might find that they can influence the multiverse in sufficient ways to substantially alter new shadow world generation (or discovery, whatever). That might draw the attention of certain pandimensional entities…
I like the idea of different visuals, but I also would want worlds that are more subtly different. Things that are familiar but different can have more profound psychological effects on players. We would have to be careful not to present the appearance of a bait and switch, but think about it: a character hops to a new world, everything looks the same, except… there’s a bit more grime around the alleys. There are things scuttling in their peripheral vision. The sky is just a bit darker, a bit more opaque. The chatter of birds has been replaced by occasional shuffling sounds. Upon closer inspection, there is a thick layer of dust in most places, and cracks in the walls. It’s not the heavy handed Fallout approach, but something has made the city all but deserted. Why? Did other players make the place uninhabitable, or was it something NPCs did, or even something natural?
Admittedly, that would require players who appreciate subtlety and intrigue, and such may be rare in an ADHD world of hamfisted storytelling. It would also probably be pointless in the GameFAQs world, where mysteries are solved by a quick Google search. It would mean lower overhead, though, since creating all new worlds would be more time and budget consuming. Altering a few existing things and writing around them would make for quicker turnaround and reusable art assets.
*shrug* Perhaps the blunt method is best, and then let players alter the worlds. If they have sufficient power, things could change enough to be interesting. I’m probably looking in the wrong genre to tell subtle and interesting stories. Everything needs a gold exclamation mark. *sigh*