Tobold has an interesting post up wondering about what might happen if the WoW database were visited by gremlins and all player data was wiped. The predictable comments range from “yeah, I’d start over, it’s fun to play” to “dood, that sucks, my toon is leet”. I suspect there are some Bartle pigeonholes that might correlate to some of those answers.
I’d take that thought experiment in two different directions, though, and while I could drop those tangents on Tobold, I figure it’s better to bring them over here. Mine is a smaller bully pulpit, but I do try to avoid extreme hijacking.
First, since it’s directly relevant to my game designs, how would people react with periodic server wipes? When you know it’s coming, how does that change your attitude? Also, if you know there may be ways to keep some stuff or abilities through the wipes, how far do you go to make that a reality? What would make a game fun enough to play after a wipe, and more, to keep playing through several wipes? (I see this as an extension of the Counterstrike “round” mechanic. People keep playing that, so how can we take that inertia and extend it to a quarterly wipe?)
Second, specific to WoW, what if the tectonic event weren’t a character data wipe, but the floodgates being opened and the game being made free to play with ads in loading screens, with the condition that everyone would have to start on new servers, and there would be no character migrations? Keep the old servers in the sub model, but open new servers for the F2P ad-driven crowd. No microtransactions (MT), no RMT, since that’s a bridge too far for most (though it would be a logical next step after the ad servers).
Who would play? Who would stay on their old servers and keep subbing? Would the ads drive enough revenue? Would they be able to go further and set up a MT server? Most importantly, would it make Blizzard more money?
It’s not unprecedented. Puzzle Pirates started as a sub game. They still maintain those sub servers, which still have vibrant communities. They added a microtransaction server, and it was successful. They still haven’t added another sub server, but they have added 5 more MT servers. (One German, one Japanese, three English.) They did introduce a dual currency and a blind currency exchange, as well as a handful of other changes to make the MT system work, but by and large, it’s been very profitable for Three Rings.
Yes, PP and WoW are different games, but conceptually, it’s not impossible to see Blizzard branching out, and profiting even more from doing so, especially in price conscious times. Then again, perhaps that’s what BlizzardMMO#2 will do. I guess we’ll see.
In the meantime, I’ll keep imagining what could be, and keep trying to find ways to leverage the demand that Blizzard isn’t meeting, and to find ways to take the money they are leaving on the table.
I can imagine two scenarios. Either the NextGen MMO is the direct successor to an old and dated WoW, featuring a subscription payment model, or it it is a “free to play” MMO with different payment options for some more or less “not so” optional gear/advantages. Maybe including the dreaded Item Mall, who knows.
Maybe it is a mix of both, a new kind of MMO with new payment methods as well.
Two games I play occasionally on the 360 have a persistent war in the background if played online. I think each war lasts 2 months or so (unless one side wins before that). But in those games, everyone knows about the reset. One thing that actually threw me off with EndWar is that only the war is reset, not the armies you’ve built up. So even if I wait until the first day of the next war, I’m still a brand new recruit fighting against maximum rank units with all their bonuses and special abilities.
In WoW specifically, resets wouldn’t jive at all. It’s too gear-centric and too much time is put into getting that gear. Unlike EndWar, there is no “war” or anything else happening in the background of WoW to reset. Wiping everyone’s characters would backfire horribly *with WoW’s gear-centric design.* If another game came along with an entirely different design and focus and stated openly and honestly that part of that design involved periodic resets… maybe it could work.
I’m still curious what is so “dreaded” about the Item Mall other than everyone who dreads it so much has never actually seen an Item Mall and makes assumptions…
Scott, I think the concern is that those with a bigger pocketbook will somehow gain an advantage over those who merely have a surplus of time. Never mind that in the sub system, those with time have a heavy advantage over those who merely have more money.
I think it’s a lot of whining about something that really should be balanced in the first place.
Beside that, though, as you’ve noted, many Item Shops don’t even work that way.
I only throw a “do RMT/MT later” into my theories there to give time for the psychology to shift. I’d be perfectly happy jumping right into a MT model like Puzzle Pirates did. (Though they did have their share of whining, too, people got over it. It might help that it’s possible to buy sub time for the sub servers with doubloons, the MT currency, from the MT servers. Doubs are account wide, and can be used anywhere, but the game currency stays on the server it was earned in.)
Oh, and yes, the gear centric design is the wrench in the works for making WoW use periodic resets. That’s why I frame the WoW tangent in a “here are new servers” light where everyone would expect to start from scratch. The different business model for those adservers is why I’d say no transfers. (Though, really, I’d not mind allowing them; again, that’s a concession to the inevitable backlash.)
A game would have to be designed around a reset. I think it would work but not not for a gear centric level and loot based game (why erase all that work?)
But a more story driven game which progressed episodically and wiped the slate clean to give new players a chance to join in on any new episode on relatively even turf would be a great idea.
I think the problem with a reset in a game like WoW is that there would be a frantic amount of activity immediately after the reset every time. People would feel pressured to level quicker and quicker each time to keep up with the mass of the population.
I wonder if it might work better with a less level focussed game.
In Diablo II, you could choose for your character to be ‘ladder’ or ‘non-ladder’. Ladder characters were obviously ranked, and were completely separated from non-ladder characters.
When a ladder season ended, ladder characters were converted into non-ladder characters, leaving people to either keep playing their toons in non-ladder form, or to roll new toons if they wanted to compete on the ladder.
There were also ladder-only items, which meant that the people who chose to convert over to non-ladder could spend the weeks leading up to the reset farming/buying ladder-only items, to take with them into the next life and sell at inflated rates to all the non-ladder characters, thereby becoming very rich.
It was fun either way you went
I think what would be required in a game where regular resets are part of the design is a way to keep a player’s social network intact beyond the cataclysm the world is going through, as we already discussed a bit over a past post.
Assuming for instance that in storytelling mode, all characters are reborn in the wipe, I could imagine for instance the player selecting what wiped character he will create a new descendant / reincarnation of.
One of the keys to that would be to regain the guild memberships of the previous generation / incarnation.
The potential design pitfalls I could see would be the following:
- players will want a way to identify their fellow guild members with their previous incarnations, having to redo introductions all over again every time can probably grow old after two or three wipes
- the question of how the guild itself transitions into the new cycle would also require some attention. In a RP setting, there’s no clear reason saying that if the world is wrought anew a guild would retain its name for instance. For practical reasons it would be simpler to transition its old structures / hierarchical organization, but that in turn hinges upon the fact that the old guild leader reclaims control with a new incarnation. What happens if he just quits or incarnates another toon, being tired of guild leadership? Conversely, if the post-wipe leadership can be claimed by any or some specific members, how do you prevent the kind of social mayhem EVE is mostly known for (assuming this is not something you want to include in the game)?
Just a couple of questions arising out of the discussion of course. Or to answer one of your first questions directly, as far as I’m concerned, I’m quite high on Bartle’s Socializer type, and to keep me playing through a wipe I’d need a simple way to reconnect with the pre-wipe friends which also doesn’t break IC immersion too much if there’s RP to be had.
Gwaendar, some time ago I mentioned some methods how players could stay in contact.
#1 A constant surname. Does not need to be displayed all the time, but your char would always show up as X,Y,Z SURNAME in the contact/friends list
#2 The Guild Wars method: No matter which char I was playing, people saw me in their friends list as “Firstname Surname (Name of the char they originally added to the friends list)” in brackets. So for example, the fat Warrior-Monk “Sir Longasc” is now online as the lean and mean mesmer “Gemma Cantoggi”, they would see my name this way: Gemma Cantoggi (Sir Longasc). I am a bit sad that Guild Wars does not allow one word names, I always hated the “Sir” and “Lady” that many people had to attach to their names because of lack of ideas.
I’d imagine it would be interesting/fun for each guild to be put into ‘hybernation’. Scattered across the land could be some lost fragments of lore that, when united, would form the ‘guildstone’ that unlocks the portal to the ‘nether guild hall’ which has lain dormant all this time. Once activated, it provides a beacon to draw the spirits of any descendants of the previous guild-ites. Or something.
The quest to rebuild the guild in this way would appear in the quest log of each character flagged as a descendant of the original guild, either through appearing in a dream or being passed down via word of mouth over the hundreds of years since the cataclysm.
By the way, I hate player-linked guild/friends list systems, and much prefer account-wide. Sure it breaks RP, but I find it retarded to keep track of everyone’s alts and have to add all my friends and rejoin my guild every time I make a new character. Just saying.
You’d never be able to do a reset with WoW. SO many whiners (and we all know the whiners get their way in WoW, good changes or not), so it wouldn’t be worth it to them.
I agree though, as I’ve stated before, that periodic resets, if incorporated to the design structure of the game from the get-go, can work and work well, even for a game LIKE WoW.
Oh and Tesh, I set my theme back on iMMOvation to light background, dark text
Heh, nice, Wiqd.
I wonder if perhaps I’m being misunderstood here. Tobold is talking about a system wide reset, but I took that in a different direction. Yes, there’s the direction of “a system built for resets” that I’d really like to explore, but my WoW example is a bit different.
There, I’m talking about opening new servers, effectively an “opt-in reset” for new servers with new business models. Keeping the server models separate like PP does means no character transfers, so rebuilding from scratch.
I know well that a server wipe in the current WoW would be… sticky. I’m talking about something a bit different.
Oh, and the rest of you? Yes, I agree, thanks for some great points. Melf, I really like the “hibernation” angle. Must… ruminate… further…
Oh so you mean like what PP did and open new servers with these new rules to see if people will reroll to accept the new payment rules, etc?
That would work. SOE did it when they released their Exchange servers, which are still going strong I believe.
SOE also did it when they released the RP server FV in EQ1. No character transfers, nothing. You start a new character, following certain rules (only knowing your race’s language, for example) and level from 1-whatever-was-the-cap-at-the-time). Worked out well because all the people who wanted that went there and they had no reason to complain about it anymore.
I’ve been playing Fable:The Lost Chapters these past few days, and while I haven’t invested a lot of time in my toon I’ve still been playing him for about 6 hours, and it’s interesting to note how much he’s aged in that time.
Not only does his wrinkled & scarred face show signs of age and the battles he’s fought, but his once black hair has become silver. I’d never noticed until well into the game, because he always had on a helm which obscured his face and hair, but when I took it off to see my new haircut (with which to woo a couple of the ladies
I was shocked! WTF happened to my avatar? OMG! He got OLD!
Imagine if an MMO company let you play your Toon for 240 hours (average of 20 hours per month for a year) and at the end of that “year” your Toon retired from his life of adventuring. You could still play him but any attempts to leave his home zone or even wander off the path in those zones would be blocked by the game. So a WoW Dwarf, for example, would be restricted to wandering Ironforge and the roads of Dun Murogh.
What fun would that be?
For one, 240 hours gives even the most casual of player more than enough time to hit Cap, if they only enjoy the solo-leveling game that is.
The casual player who likes playing the Auction House could do so, long after their 240 hours are up. But they’d have to receive items from Alts (or Buy-Lo, Sell-Hi) because they could no longer do any Farming of their own.
And the Raiders, who usually level as fast as they can (and would probably hit Cap with well over 100 hours left to play), now have a time frame with which to “beat” the game, before retirement is forced upon them.
Likewise the PvP fiends who dominate the BGs would also be forced to retire when their 240 hour reign of terror comes to an end. There’d probably be more low level Twinking occuring, but regardless, with a limit of 240 hours to play, even the 19 & 29 Twinks would come with expiration dates.
This is certainly an interesting concept, Tesh. And like most interesting concepts, would probably not be met with a lot of enthusiasm.
Exactly, Wiqd. Tobold is talking about an accidental wipe, I’m talking about expansion which would be a “new start wipe”, and purely voluntary. I’m wondering what that would do to WoW’s numbers, especially given the pricing discussions we’ve had recently.
Capn’, that’s a wild tangent. That’s not quite what I was getting at… but I like it. Quite a bit. As long as the players know up front what they are dealing with, I think it could be sold properly. (You could even monetize per “lifetime” rather than by month.)
Must… ponder… further…
On a slight tangent, the PS2 game Disgaea: Hour of Darkness had a mechanism where characters could be reincarnated (they call that transmigration) into either a stronger version of the same class or even to a different class altogether. In the process, the character’s level would be reset and skill points reallocated, but provided the character was strong enough before transmigration, small bonuses were added to the skill points.
Transmigration thus is used to evolve within a class, migrate to another class and / or min-maxing.
While the concept is tailored to a level + skill based game, it harbors some interesting potential in the sense that the Strongarm family may become better and better blacksmiths at each generation if they keep transmitting their acquired knowledge to their descendants… more food for thought, in short
One more reason to get around to playing Disgaea, it looks like. I’m running out of excuses, especially since it’s on the DS now. Thanks!
Opening new ‘start-fresh’ servers seems pretty similar to the changing of a ladder season in Diablo, come to think of it. Both ways give you an option to start with a clean slate, or you can continue to play your old character with everyone else.
I’m not sure how I’d feel about a time limit for character life Capn’, but then again in any game that I am armchair-designing, the level of power you have would not be driven by how much time you’d invested.
However, in a more, shall we say, loot-whorish system like with most current MMO’s, an interesting take on your idea might be to have an ‘epic quest’ whereby you acquire yourself a wife and some kids. Your kids could spawn with random traits that would be based on your skills/stats, but be less powerful they’re just at the beginning of their life. Anyway, when you retire/die, you’d pick a kid that you’re happy with and go forge a new adventuring life
That way you wouldn’t lose ALL your power in one hit.
Touching on what Capn John was saying, I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to having my character age and perhaps even get scarred from the more epic battles. However, do we then allow N/PC’s to provide cosmetic surgery for a fee to fix the scars or even provide slight age reversal? (Queue the in-game advertisements from Revlon, et al…)
Another aspect sorta-kinda along those lines was I really, REALLY enjoyed the attribute advancement in Crackdown. Every time my Strength “leveled” my character would give a graphical “ding” and his arms, chest, etc. would actually grow bigger, plus the obvious being able to lift heavier object and throw them further. New level of Agility and he could visibly jump higher, etc. Rather than just increasing the numbers like we do in a straight-up RPG the increase was visual and became part of the character’s behavior.
*marks up yet another successful tangent* =D
Yay for tangent running!
The Ludological blog author (I can’t remember his name, shame on me) has written about a sort of system where player action does have a visible and tangible effect like that, just in MMO terms, and write larger than a single avatar. Say, if a locale is especially good at routing kobolds, the local kobold tribe moves out or calls for big brother trolls, whatever. It’s not so much increasing bicep size (though that’s cool), it’s really affecting your world, just as an aggregate rather than a “Uuber is the Hero of the Valley, worship him!” sort of thing.
I like that. Very much.
Aging for avatars would be interesting on the customization front, and it could provide for some good game mechanics. That said, the units in Atlantica Online age and can die/retire, and considering that any such unit would be replaced with a low level unit and training low level units is a pain… the mechanic would have to be implemented carefully. Single avatar MMOs like a generational DIKU would dodge some of that because of the resets that hit everyone at the same time. Still, the reset couldn’t just plop new “reborn” avatars into the same old situations, or else it’s just a treadmill writ large, with a rewind button. There has to be a good reason to reset, and compelling content/mechanics that make a reset sufficiently interesting to mollify those who would complain about the power wipe.
That’s why I toy with the idea of letting some things persist through a wipe (especially if players have some control over what persists), as hooks for the lore and teasers to keep people interested in playing. If there’s a way to “push” through a wipe, or maybe just send a “message in a bottle” to the future cycle, I’m hoping that would stimulate interest in exploring ways to do so, meaning potentially fun and frantic activity in the waning days of a cycle, and a mad scramble at the start of a new one to try to find the forwarded content. There’s also great role playing potential in “writing a letter to the future” and trying to set up machinations to give your successors things that may offer unique play for their cycle.
If there ever was a complete character wipe there would be a mass revolution in the ranks of WoW subscribers such that Blizzard would never be able to recover. As Scott and many others before have said, WoW is a MMO all about putting in your time to earn your status via gear.
What I’d like to see is more fluidity and dynamics that challenge the sense of complacency, safety and predictability that players feel now.We used to think that virtual worlds had tremendous potential for massive events such as plagues, famines, disasters, etc. None of that potential has ever been realized by Blizzard. It would go a long way into freshening up the MMO genre and making it vital and immediate.
Clearly, there’s not enough risk and far too much reward in a MMO like WoW. Subscribers have been spoon fed and coddled to the point of absurdity that events such as I described would cause mass panic and frustration.
I think MMOs and virtual worlds could do with some mass panic in order to keep it healthy and alive. Just as in nature we see periodic forest fires so too we need more random events to keep players on their toes and to bring a sense of fear and immediacy back into the genre.
A really, really easy way to do this reset thing would be in the upcoming Wheel of Time MMO. You’ve got reincarnation and a never-ending cycle of life/death/armageddon typed events built right into the lore.
As you approached the end of a given age, people would run around trying to blow up the world so that they can leave their mark on the future ages…
“If there ever was a complete character wipe there would be a mass revolution in the ranks of WoW subscribers such that Blizzard would never be able to recover.”
Y’know, Wolf, that’s what I’d reflexively expect, too, but I really do have to wonder. How many people are actually playing to have fun? Tobold’s got a few in his comment section.
Yes, absolutely, the core *game design* of WoW is the loot lust treadmill that I’ve blasted my fair share of times, but how many of those customers are cruising on social connections and actually just having fun puttering around? I do think that it may decimate the current population, but I’ve also got to think that there are still those who like just *playing* WoW.
That’s where I was going by suggesting a fresh new server; what part of the population could be captured with the lure of just playing the game, especially if it’s divorced from the subscription model? More specifically, would those who would have left because of the sub, but would like to maintain the social ties, or who just like playing the game, keep playing if the sub was supplanted, and one of the costs was a completely new character for that server, with no transfers possible? Would they play if the ante were upped, and periodic wipes or only vanilla WoW were offered on adservers? What about those who clamor for “classic WoW”? Could an adserver roll back the game to Patch 1.5 or whatever and find a sufficient audience to make the ads pay off? It’s all about maintaining interest and capturing other spots on the demand curve.
There’s been talk of “building your game culture” lately… is it worth trying to hang on to those customers who *do* exhibit brand loyalty and culture interest, just not at the $15 flatline? One of the things that Puzzle Pirates has demonstrated to me is that a strong community is built from offering choices to players, and there are those who prowl the forums and maintain a very good relationship with the community, even though they don’t actively sub or even necessarily still play at all. As Mike Darga argues eloquently, citing Daniel James, head of PP, those players still contribute to the game, even if they aren’t paying the $15/month. If they feel welcome and loved despite not being subbers, it goes a long way to building a relationship of trust that will pay off in various other ways.
…moving on, but still thinking about it…
The idea of a more dynamic world is definitely one of the driving forces behind the cyclic design I keep bringing up, and it’s something that I’d love to see. While I do like my little static Cheers MMO space (like a well loved pair of fluffy slippers), I’m all for pushing into the potential of the genre much more than has been done thus far.
Oh, and Melf? Good call on the Wheel of Time. I really do have to wonder if they are realizing the sort of potential that they have, and if they will wind up exploring some of the same design space that we’ve bandied about… or if they will be just another DIKU romp.
I think a regular “wipe” could work, but it definitely needs to be designed into the game from the start; you also still need something to tie one character to the next. Just wiping the game and having people start from square 1 (or square 0 if you’re a programmer) is a recipe for disaster, I think.
One concept I posted on my blog a while ago was the concept of character generations (http://www.psychochild.org/?p=198). Basically, each expansion would advance the world’s timeline forward at least one generation. Players would manage families of characters instead of just one (or a bunch of alts), and future characters would be descendants of previous characters. The overall goal is to build your family up over time. Instead of just going for better loot for one character, you might do quests to get your family reputation which would have certain gameplay effects. As an example, perhaps a mage guild requires that mages be trained from birth. So, your current character does a bunch of quests to get a future character in at birth; the gameplay effect is that now you can create a character that has access to this guild’s magic.
If you read the comments, you’ll see a lot of people are very wary bout this type of setup. A lot of people still cling to the single cumulative character concept. As someone undergoing a bout of altaholism in a game, I’d love to have the ability to work toward some common goals between all my characters. You also see a bit of this in WoW with their new bound to account items.
This is one impetus for my new writing project at http://www.restlessdeep.com/. This was a fantasy setting I thought would be interesting to try this concept. Since making games is expensive, I figured I could try out the concept in a series of short stories.
Atlantica sounds like its units are similar to EndWar — they rank up but if you lose one you have to start with noob units and re-rank them up. In the EndWar online persistent war (which I am still not skilled enough to bother trying yet) however, your units are taken out of commission and send up a rescue flare to be taken off the battlefield by a rescue chopper. The enemy has to manually target your defeated units (or even the rescue chopper) and order his units to kill them, which isn’t done very often unless someone is being a jerk (or if he killed your units then you kill his, snowball, name-calling…) because the majority of players respect the time it takes to get those top-ranked units.
I think some games have used the new server idea and encourage new players and even veterans who want an honest fresh start to move there. I’m a bit torn on rollback servers. Making a WoW 1.x server for the people who just can’t let go of the original (and now obsolete) content is still making WoW with all its loot lust and gear grinding, you’re just losing 66% of the current content by doing so. The disgruntled SWG players who just won’t move on and keep calling for a pre-CU server are at least calling for an entirely different game. But that isn’t quite the same as your “server wipes by design for a reason” idea, either. I should really stop replying before I’ve had my coffee…
This disgruntled SWG player HAS moved on, but if they rolled back the game to resemble what it did at launch i’d be playing it again in a heartbeat. WoW doesn’t, as I think you were getting at Scott, have any kind of rollback point that would help to rejuvinate the game. Yes there are different stages of end-game that you could revisit, but SWG and EQ would have an audience for a rollback to version 1.x because the games now are almost unrecognizable, while WoW is still identical, and you would be just losing content.
Cyclical worlds is definitely something worth looking into, although you’d have to break the mould of loot-centric gaming to make it worthwhile; who would want to get tons of great loot and lose it every two months?
Tesh it’s great that you brought this up, “building your game culture” is a concept that I fervently believe in. Dynamic worlds especially (because they’re much closer to real life), but anywhere that people spend a lot of time together in general, develop a culture whether the game designers intend it or not. There is a definite culture of on-line first person shooters, and MMO’s are no different.
A lot of times people talk about the “community” in a game, but culture goes further than that. I live in the US but my town has its own community. I am under the influences of both mainstream US culture and the culture of my community. In this same way we see an MMO culture and specific game cultures combining into the development of game communities.
We have to be careful in who we target for our games now, because if we make an MMO it’s generally implied that we’re targeting all MMO gamers. Hopefully this is not so because if you find a way to satisfy every WoW player with your new game then you will, I think, simply made a “better” WoW and will still have the same problems.
The culture of MMOs is generally happy with the DIKU format and constant cloning of games, otherwise there would be no audience. The games aren’t going to change until developers take big chances, or gamers decide that they wont be satisfied with the current games while waiting for “better” ones. There are some innovations on the horizon, but nowhere near the huge gameplay overhaul some of us are hoping to see.
“A persistantly satisfying life does not lead a man to adventure, but rather convinces him of adventure’s folly.”
Mmm… more Psychochild input. Thanks for the link! I wish I’d read that earlier. Thanks for the new input as well as that older article, it’s some great food for thought. I’d definitely be angling to find ways to tie cycles together, both in the narrative and the mechanics. Basically, I want people to have a good reason to play through a wipe, but also take the opportunity to knock the pins over for a new setup. I’m not too worried about DIKU fans being wary; I’m not building a game for them in the first place. Call it the Stardock mentality; build for your target audience.
Scott, I guess I need to check out EndWar, but that does sound similar. AO characters can’t be “killed off”, they just age and eventually die or retire, so it’s a little different (less annoying, maybe, since it’s not controlled by other players), but still bothersome compensating.
You and Jedi are right, perhaps SGW is the better game to look at for a rollback. I’m just throwing ideas out there, and that was just another tangent.
Thanks for the comment, Jedi, and the great quote. I’ll likely spin the community discussion into a new post, since I think it deserves its own treatment. I mention it here because of what I’ve seen in PP and how the different servers maintain distinct communities, yet all operate as part of a greater whole. Most people are caught up in playing the game, rather than arguing about the payment model or inter-server ego contests. There’s a shared experience *playing the game* rather than preening about gear… but that’s just another facet of their player skill heavy non-gear centric design.
I may spin this off into a full article on my blog if I find the motivation to do so but (WARNING: Incoming Tangent Alert!) since I’ve been heavy into non-RPGs lately, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a market for a straight-up MMOG. No RP in the acronym whatsoever. Take GTA4 for example, my latest addiction. Look at the size of Liberty City alone. Rockstar could make an even bigger game with a persistent world, either with a subscription model or just charge for extra DLC like they’re doing now (the GW model). Keep the level of NPC AI detail (though perhaps dynamically scale the number of NPCs in an area based on the number of players also in that area) and just give out plenty of directed content as well as sandbox content. Unlike APB which is sounding more and more like a Red vs. Blue shooter disguised as a GTA clone, leave all the normal GTA game aspects alone but give players the option of being a cop, a criminal, a mafioso… whatever. The Friends in GTA4 could act like a faction system. PvE and PvP is all there, you’re just losing any reliance on stats and gear.
In fact, I’m drooling over the Never in a Million Years idea of BioWare using Rockstar’s engine (or something that can duplicate it) for a seamless and truly immersive Mass Effect Online. But again, quite frankly I wouldn’t mind just dropping the whole RPG bit.
Aye, Scott, that’s certainly one valid direction to take it. I think there’s an audience for it, though it may not be the same size as the WoW niche. I’m not really a fan of the GTA IP, but it’s one that could easily serve as the backbone of a well crafted MMOG.
How would you give players a sense of progress and investment?
Anyway, spin away, and run all the tangents that could help; there have been some really great comments in here. I like how these things can cross pollinate.
Must we give players a sense of progress and investment? Well, progress could easily be done through playing the content, creating friends and enemies and being part of the world rather than RPG progress.
Rewarding investment though? Why? Especially if we’re envisioning the GW model, why attempt to lock players into only your game? Hell, even a Blizzard dev (?) recently encouraged players to check out other games.
Now if that “investment” could mean eventually becoming say, a Mob Godfather type figure, or Chief of Police or whatever where not only you’ve become a major figurehead in the game world (kinda like EVE’s major corps?) you’re allowing players to not only create content but also be content because they’d have targets on their backs.
Aye, I’m probably misusing the term “investment”. I mean “give players value for their money” and perhaps that sense of being important to the world. Technically, progression and the “investment” that the gear grind induce are just one way to satisfy that, and yes, with a GW model, it’s not necessary to design around keeping players in your game. It’s just necessary to give them a good time, so that they feel their money and time are well spent.
Scott, I’m interested in how you would keep people playing your game. Not locking them into it, just continuing to play it. People play games because they enjoy them, yes, but there’s ALWAYS some sort of progression, whether it is through a storyline, leveling, or acquiring gear.
What is an MMO? Basically a game that can only be played online where you are playing in the same world as many other people simultaneously. If you want to avoid any kind of RPG elements then I’m not sure you’ll be able to keep anyone playing your game at all.
The general RPG formula is that you invest time and your character advances: in level, through the storyline, in wealth (etc.). To motivate people to play an online game that is devoid of any RPG elements we’re going to have to look at successful online games from other genres.
After thinking about it for a while every online game i’ve played has some kind of ranking system which usually translates into a “player level” of some kind and ranks among all the other players that I can improve by continuing to play.
Left 4 Dead seems to be the exception to this, but they have Achievements that you’re constantly working towards completing. Without those I would play the game far far less, perhaps not at all, because while it IS fun it’s not different enough to stay interesting. I’m very glad I can play a friends copy, I would hate to spend more than 20 bucks for that game.
(Ignore your assuredly deteriorating health in this example please) Eating chocolate cake as every meal might be fun for a day, but after a while you’re going to want at least a different kind of cake, if not other types of food altogether.
RPGs offer an ascending change in “food” or types of fun. You level up and things at least LOOK different because the number on your character sheet has changed. An identically tasting chocolate cake will be more appealing if it looks completely different. By changing the game via adding skills, being able to access new content, etc, the game stays fresh and fun.
Assassin’s Creed had this problem for the people I knew that played it. The general consensus was that replay value was pretty close to absolute zero. The game was insanely fun all the way through your first time but at the end it was… the end.
The easiest way to keep things interesting is to not let players reach the end. Always keeping another piece of gear, another level, another unlockable zone, and another story arc just one more step away. That’s basically the defenition of an RPG. If you don’t put RPG elements into an MMO then I don’t think you will have a viable game for very long. If I never achieve anything, If things don’t change as I continue to play, if there is no progression, then my enjoyment of the game will be severely limited in terms of duration.
What ways could you keep an MMOG (not an MMORPG) interesting while avoiding RPG elements?
The other issue with taking the ‘RP’ out of ‘MMORPG’ is that the replacement combat system often is designed heavily on requiring some aribtrary physical skill, eg
- aiming with the mouse
- reflexes
- remembering a bunch of ‘moves’
- having crazy micro skills
etc
This is not a bad thing if you like those kind of tasks. Better though is the games that reduce reliance on whatever physical tasks are required to play them, and instead promote the use of strategy or even plain old common sense.
Examples I can think of include Halo and Left 4 Dead. I can’t aim for peanuts in most FPS games, yet I seem to do very well at both of these regardless. And both games have been immensely popular in a general sense, not just to fans of the FPS genre. I imagine future highly successful games to continue in the same vein, but branching out into another genres – RTS games that don’t require a ton of micro, fighter games that require little to know knowledge of aribtrary ‘move’ combinations, etc.
Hmm… we’re running into terminology issues, methinketh. “RP” was originally “role playing”, but it’s mutated over the years. If we’re sticking to the original acronym, role playing is possible in pretty much any system. If we’re talking about the JRPG/D&D sort of linear character/avatar progression, it’s another thing entirely, and yes, you’d need some gameplay mechanic to take its place.
I’ll point again to Puzzle Pirates where player puzzle performance is key, and avatars are merely representations of players. The minigame suite MMO is particularly well suited to this sort of progression (which is another reason Gatheryn looks interesting to me).
That said, yes, I’d like there to be elements of the game world that don’t rely on reflexes or superfast internet connections. Some good old strategy and tactical acumen are high on the list.
Yeah, “RPG” has a different context in computer games. “Role playing” as in playing a role is not something you need a fantasy setting, levels, classes, swords and sorcery for.
But, computer RPGs (or CRPGs as us old timers used to call them) are a different beasts. Some people suggested the name “kill thngs and take their stuff” games, but KTaTTS wasn’t quite so catchy.
Usually you don’t have much real playing of a role in the single-player versions.
Once we get to the massively multiplayer version, you see some playing of roles coming back because you have other people to interact with. However, this isn’t very common. How many WoW Paladins have you met that were trying to uphold the ideal of “goodness”? Or were they playing the class because they liked the mechanics (and, if you want to be snarky, the “easy button” aspects) of the class? Or, if you want to include the Blood Elf abominations, how many of them played up the corruption of the Light aspect of the class? In my experiences on a “normal” server, not many. Then again, my Druid practices fauna genocide to be rewarded baubles and more power (not to mention lovely, lovely skins…)
So, I think when people say they want to take out the “RP” part of MMOs, they’re talking about the levels, classes, fantasy trappings, etc. But, yeah, the terminology becomes confusing.