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It’s All About The Rabbits
Raph Koster weighs in with a fascinating discussion of what went into UO’s gloriously failed ecology design. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
The last big element, however, was that there were a fair amount of team members who saw the whole system as a boondoggle, and not worth pursuing. Alas, one of them also ended up in charge of implementing it in beta.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing drives how and why things in MMOs are implemented more than you’d think. Or about the same, if you share my distressing lack of faith in human nature.
Regardless, Raph is far too modest (as usual). Ultima Online still has one of the most advanced economy models for a virtual world, years on. Only Eve currently comes close, mainly because it clearly read the playbook for both UO and its “successor state” SWG. Suffice to say I’m also stealing like a bandit taking notes.
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about 4 years ago
I always thought the idea of UO’s ecology system was one of the coolest-things-ever (TM), I’ve still got the old strat guide I got for free with my copy (I guess 8-9 years ago) of UO that describes it and lists out all the critter’s desires and whatnot.
about 4 years ago
I reallly loved the crafting system in UO. I pray once Tabula Rasa becomes a game (instead of an artistic vision) it has a system like it.
about 4 years ago
There were so many little things about UO that wouldn’t work in any other game.
Sigh.
about 4 years ago
So what loot will the uber killer rabbits drop?
about 4 years ago
So what loot will the uber killer rabbits drop?
Vorpal teeth.
about 4 years ago
I continue to think that automated ecology/AI systems are utterly stupid to waste time on.
But that’s just me.
about 4 years ago
Part 3 is now posted.
Abalieno, I’d say that handcrafting is the utterly stupid waste of time. It’s so clearly an interim solution. Are we someday going to be hand specifying every splinter in how the door breaks when you charge it with a battering ram? Of course not, we’ll rely on simulation. As we keep making more robust interaction with virtual worlds, we’ll drive towards this sort of system pretty much inevitably.
about 4 years ago
So I’m about to RTFA, but I gotta ask. Do you think we’ll ever see anything like it again in any other game? I loved the concept in beta.. Though I’m not sure the early UO architecture could have taken the strain with initial surge in customer base.
Man I miss UO the game, if not UO the culture wars.
about 4 years ago
It’d be kind of funny if the ultimate outcome of all this resulted in the elimination of artists in the video game industry.
Either way, facinating read.
about 4 years ago
For all the problems that the reagents system caused in Meridian59, it did stimulate a fairly healthy economy. Money is still valuable, and player prices are in the same ballpark as vendor prices.
about 4 years ago
Abalieno, I\’e2\’80\’99d say that handcrafting is the utterly stupid waste of time.
I didn’t intend that as “automated Vs handcrafted”.
As HL2 ep1 demonstrated the carefully handcrafted content can be truly amazing. Even if it’s just about a few hours of gameplay.
In the other case my personal choice would be about players’ interaction and “structures”. So PvP systems and rules more than artificial worlds responding to mathematical, sophisticated algorithms.
The point against ecologic systems is that they are cool ideas\’e2\’84\’a2. But they serve very little purpose if not as an academic experiement. What’s their role in the game? It looks like design experimentation just for the sake of it and not because it answers to a real need of a game.
In the past I also imagined quite complex herbalism systems. But just to “fake” an ecology with those patterns that I think are fun to play and help the immersion, not to build an autonomous system following obscure routines hidden to the player.
Even “Spore” focuses on those mechanics, but disclosing them to the players completely, because that’s what you are going to play. It’s not to generate the world, it’s to generate gameplay. You are god and play the god game as it happened with Popolous or the Sim series. You manipulate the rules, but you aren’t going to play GTA in a Sim City-generated town.
In UO you aren’t god, and, if I understand it correctly, that mechanic wasn’t meant to be really “used” by the players, but just to populate and balance the world. So the players were supposed to play with its consequences, and not with its causes (as in a god simulation).
I just don’t think that that type of sophistication brings something useful to the game. It could be for a designer and those who read the design notes. But a player?
about 4 years ago
No, you have it wrong, I think. A system like this also means that the PvP dynamics can be much much richer, and the PvP conflicts can be over actual limited resources and territory in a way that isn’t artificial.
For example, say you have to player towns, both of whom want the same copper mine for weaponsmaking. But one of them is dependent on the water from a single river, so the other players find a way to taint it… I don’t know, there’s all sorts of interesting things that can happen when you have a sim behind things.
about 4 years ago
I think what always appealed most to me about an ecology system, potentially, was the idea that I could actually enter a world and hunt. Not just go to an area known to spawn orcs or whatever and kill them, but explore and use what I knew about a creature and it’s desires and track them in that way. Just as in the example in part one, wolves would be attracted to rabbits, so if you entered an area with rabbits, started noticing the occasional dead rabbit, you’d be able to say “Hey, there might be wolves near by”. It would potentially allow for a world that was constantly changing without dev/gm intervention. Players could drive creatures from an area and they’d end up lairing somewhere else.
Atleast that’s always what I invisioned when I was reading the original UO strat guide while I spent a week waiting for my internet connection to be fixed so I could play UO for the first time.
about 4 years ago
Yes, but all that can be done without an automated system ruling the behaviour of the elements.
It’s the system that plays behind that I see as a sophistication. Where the player isn’t a player but just a spectator. Like watching a game of “Life”.
Your example about PvP would work if you started to design each tactical element carefully. So it would be more about enabling those patterns and faking them more than “automating” them.
It’s like “chess”, you can have some sort of emergent situations coming out of the game, but the elements into play must be known and strictly defined. So in a PvP game you need a strict control on what comes into play, then you can let the players move the pieces and create situations.
But the “control” is always in the hands of the designer, sometimes passed to the players, but never directly to the system itself.
The idea I criticize in the ecologic system is that it wants to be closed and autonomous. Whether the players are there or not, it continues to move on following its rules. This specific pattern, in a game, can work only if the players are the manipulators (god game) and not the manipulated. It’s a matter of “awareness”.
At the end in a simulation (and I’m pro simulations since they help the immersion) you are forced to choose the elements that are useful and that you are going to add, and those that are superfluous. I see this argument from this perspective.
In my herbalism system I imagined growth cycles, seasons and climates, but I didn’t think about critters coming and eating the plants to start a food chain. The reason is that the few elements I added were used by the players and contributed with some concrete complexity, while a food chain would be not anymore about the player playing, but about the system playing itself. With the player as a spectator.
It reminds me that article about the simulated world in Second Life. That’s a place you visit. It’s not a place where you stay and play.
Which you also defined as “cool\’e2\’84\’a2″ right in the title.
Concluding, what I criticize is not the strive for simulations, realism and immersion. But considering that approach as a better way to generate worlds passively.
And in PvP you need immobility. You can have unexpected situations coming out of a proper use of the pieces, but you cannot have new pieces showing up and coming into play.
So let’s revert the design approach: let’s imagine what are the patterns that are interesting and then think how implement them, instead of implementing an automated system and then think which interesting patterns it could provide.
about 4 years ago
I’m willing to accept Raph’s assertion that this could be a good way to construct a dynamic game system, but my concern is with Plan B. What happens when you hit the unexpected CPU hurdle, or whatever glitch that will prevent you from fully realizing the vision? Can you justify the component elements as design blocks even if the whole system fails to congeal?
about 4 years ago
I find it disappointing that the articles talked about wanting to abstract beyond the list a + list b = list c, but didn’t really go far. A semi-automated list matcher is only a mild step up from putting in all the list matching yourself. Great for saving work time, at least.
I also found the wolf’s aversion to carnivoremeat hilarious. I imagine the wolf, if it knew it was made of carnivoremeat, would probably commit suicide trying to gnaw away his flesh. Worse, if it knew other wolves were made of carnivoremeat but desired to be in a pack, their purpose would center around meeting eachother simply to take eachother apart. But then, I think wolves would’ve killed themselves extinct before getting together.
about 4 years ago
I wish I had the time to write the paragraphs this discussion deserves having written about it.
To be blunt… This very discussion. This very line of thought is why games like SWG and UO ultimately suck and are mass market failures.
Seriously as insulting as it may sound, Raph is a niche player. These ideas and wonderful points of discussion are a waste of time and money and in the end belong in Academia not the business world.
This stuff belongs in college not in a business.
about 4 years ago
It is a poor kind of PvP that demands immobility. PvP with fixed, immobile, well understood rules and playgrounds is merely a sport.
I’m not much of simulationist anymore, but I think the detractors aren’t paying enough attention to Raph’s takeaway points. Simulation must be visible to the players. To the extent that it is visible, it is useful.
about 4 years ago
D-0ne, by that logic Half-Life2, Civ, and the Sims series are niche and cannot be mass market successes.
about 4 years ago
In response to D-One:
Can you back up your claims of “mass market failure”? Ultima Online was a pretty successful game, and Star Wars Galaxies wasnt unsuccessful, either – 250k players (or 400k as claimed shortly after release by LucasArts) is still an achievement. Judge the games while keeping an eye at the time they were created in.
Maybe a good start would be to define the market youre talking about – I have no problems coming up with a definition in which World of Warcraft is a mass market failure and only a niche game. In fact, the current consensus seems to be that the MMO genre itself is still a niche market.
Show me where exactly the design ideas behind UO and SWG failed – I dont think any game so far has shown that the virtual world / sandbox design idea itself is flawed.
On another note, trying to develop a game system framework which automatically creates dynamic content is far from being a waste of money – frameworks are a good way to save money.
Game world designers only having to introduce new entities into a framework, which in turn will populate the game world with them, along with providing believeable behaviour for them, is a major cut into content generation costs. In all current MMOs that emphasize on handcrafted directed content the players get bored when they reach the “end of content”, because player content consumption is always faster than developer content generation.
about 4 years ago
The transition that needs to be made is basically the same thing that goes on when developing a strategy game. You start with a complex real-world system and abstract it in such a way that it can be interacted with meaningfully.
I think the next step in procedurally generated quests is to define NPCs in terms of games that they’re playing. The farmer with the rabbit problem is a pretty good example of this, but I think it’s probably possible to compartmentalize things a bit more, building a world out of NPCs (or PCs) engaged in a variety of different well-defined mini strategy games. Done well, that gives most of the advantages of simulation while ensuring that every piece of the system is meaningful in terms of gameplay.
about 4 years ago
I had no idea that UO went through such a dramatic paradigm shift between alpha and beta versions. Going from mostly procedural to mostly static would have killed most projects (or a minimum led to Duke Nukem levels of delay).
In response to VPellen: Art, quest scripting, etc. are all still needed. Just not in the form currently used in games. How do you make the difference between the n3wb mongbat and the vorpal mongbat immediatly obvious to the player? I think it can be done with carefully developed critter art. Creating procedural quests that make sense would require intensive involvement of very good quest developers. All of the skills required to make a game are still needed, just at a higher level.
As for the third part, I kept thinking “oh, just like Spore”. Its a shame that localization issues basically forbid this sort of system from ever making it into a MMORPG. Unless we can abstract the language too… hrm… hey… maybe…. *starts to frantically scribble on a spare sheet of paper*
about 4 years ago
I’m all for the Raph’s of the world. We need vision beyond “get quest A, which wants you to collect X amount of items, to turn into npc B”.
Why any gamer would shun innovation, or the people that strive for it is beyond me. People like him are the only reason I’m at all interested in participating in the future of this genre.
I loved the vision behind the original UO. Sure, it had a lot of flaws, but it was, to this date, the only online game I’ve played that made me feel apart of the world, and felt that I could influence it, for better or worse.
No other game has come close. Online games of today are just chat rooms with nice interfaces and something to do in between lulls in conversation.
Keep it up Raph. I couldn’t stand SWG for a lot of reasons, but I’m most definitely interested in whatever you’ll be working on next.
about 4 years ago
Hey – when Oblivion does it, it’s a great idea, but when Raph suggests that INTERESTING AI gets implemented in an MMO, it’s a bad idea?
I want to play a game like this, but only if actually playing it is fun. Auto-attack + special attack buttons doesn’t cut it. If Mount and Blade can do it with a two person dev team…
about 4 years ago
1. Advertisers define mass market as do most media companies and mass market is a % of a possible market. How many people on this planet have Internet access? What percentages are you appealing to/selling to?
2. There’s nothing wrong with being a niche player. There have been many throughout history. No one remembers them because in the end their ideas and efforts were meaningless compared to those who knew how to market the bare bones of thier efforts.
3. See George Baldwin Selden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Baldwin_Selden and Henry Ford http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_ford …
4. Eventually someone is going to invent an MMOG that replaces TV shows and will steal a prime time slot. That person will not be Raph.
about 4 years ago
1. If you insist on trying to make a video game that will sell to everyone on the planet, even the ones living in hovels in the far reaches of the Sarah, I think you’ll find it an unrealistic goal.
Market share is based on % of an established market, not some theoretical construct. In the case of this discussion, it is fair to assume that the customers must already have a computer and internet access to be a potential customer and part of the potential market. Just as it’s usually assumed that people that don’t own televisions aren’t counted when calculating network market shares.
2. Every mass market started as a niche market. Every mass market success was derived from niche market successes. To say that niche market success is meaningless is very shortsighted indeed.
3. I don’t understand the point of #3. By your points #1 & #2, since they didn’t sell one to every person alive on the entire planet at that time, they were part of a niche market and therefor their efforts were completely wasted.
4. Maybe not, but I promise you they will be very much familiar with his work, and whatever they come up with will have derivitive elements that can be traced back to UO, and probably Spore if it’s as big a success as I think it will be.
about 4 years ago
I’m not a big fan of Raphian Simulations ™ personally. My general experience is that algorithmically generated content will almost always be inferior to well-constructed content by an expert. Spore, for example, uses human guidance to create the aliens, helping ensure that the players are more likely to see the benefits of algorithmically created monsters. Even then, Spore works largely because it’s all about aliens, so freaky is okay.
That being said, no one’s really talking about the depressing subtext of Scott’s post, which is how some people on UO actively seemed to be subverting Raph’s vision because they didn’t believe in it. Being a professional means doing things you don’t necessarily agree with, and finding ways to use your inherent criticisms to challenge the visions in hopes of making it stronger. Put short, if you don’t like ecology games and you work on one, you owe it to everyone involved to suck it up and make it work.
Unfortunately, the experiences that both Scott and Raph allude to tend to be more common.
about 4 years ago
Damion:
You don’t have to actively subvert a system to break it if you don’t believe in it. Lack of understanding or acceptance of a concept almost always leads to poor implementation of that concept simply because, however the good the spec, you have to actually “get it” to “get it right”.
Malice is not a requirement. Although it does help
about 4 years ago
SWG was a marginal success at best and then only relative to other MMOs. When one considers the “talent” behind it, the PR effort, and the not inconsequential factor of being a part of the biggest and baddest franchise available, that’s a game that you shouldn’t be able to play on your “Station Pass”. If the last Star Wars movie had done $150 million in box office some accountant would probably say it was a success but everyone in the real world would know that it was a massive disappointment. SWG is no different.
I enjoy reading Raph’s stuff and have a lot of respect for his ideas. He’s way smarter than I am. Still, IMO you can tell a lot about him just from how this thing starts: “Recently, some readers asked for posts that were more game-design centered.” But from there he doesn’t really talk about “gaming” (at least as I define it). He talks about world-design, not about fun. I remember on SWG’s dev boards when Raph admitted that he didn’t actually, you know, *play* the game. He promised to start logging more hours after some of the posters called him out on it and maybe he did, but it still reveals that Raph is more of a world builder than a games designer. (It’s just that the market for world builders independent of games design doesn’t pay all that well.) And while all this is interesting and intellectually stimulating, it’s still not about games and fun and all that stuff. Whoever designs the most fun way to kill a wolf is going to have the biggest and best game, regardless of what the wolf was thinking about before it died.
about 4 years ago
I’m fascinated by the type of resource allocation Raph describes. I never played UO, but I almost want to (except I don’t want to play a 2d game). Any game that has a simulated ecology/environment is going to get my dollars, for a while, at least.
about 4 years ago
No, Raph has it exactly right on this issue.
You CANNOT afford to individually create worldy content by hand anymore. Given that players now want and expect worldy content (see also Oblivion, the new Might and Magic etc etc), this is the optimal to generate it.
Although obviously the database aspect needs serious rework and i’d have those animals inheriting from predator and base bases.
about 4 years ago
predator and prey bases, apologies.
about 4 years ago
Simulations are wonderful things, and can certainly do alot to address the shortcomings of current MMOG’s; however, when your project goals are:
1) Simulation
2) Game
Instead of:
1) Game
2) Simulation
Then you have a big damn problem. I played SWG. SWG had little if anything to do with the aesthetic of the Star Wars franchise. I never played UO myself, but I can extrapolate that UO had little to do with the actual Ultima franchise. When people tell me of their experiences in the single-player Ultima games, they always tell me about stories of their adventures in Britannia. When I hear about experiences in UO, all I ever get are crafting, gathering, exploiting, or ganking tales. I don’t believe turning Ultima into Lord of the Flies can rightly be considered a success, no matter how much money the actual game may make.
Sterile simulations certainly serve their purpose in academia and the business world, but using popular franchises to masquerade such things as entertainment is tantamount to a shuck-and-jive.
about 4 years ago
I see a few people in here calling out Raph on his desire to build a “world” as opposed to a “game”.
You may be right. I mean, after all he does call them virtual worlds instead of games for a reason. I think though, that this stems from the fact that none of our MMOs evolved from “games”, they evolved from worlds where people played make-believe with text or sitting around a table with a bunch of dice. It wasn’t until recently that the game-like systematic elements became so involved and over-bearing.
No one played MUDs for the systems behind them. They played for the people who were there. MMOs retain this quality to some degree, but are lessening the need for other people and slowly becoming… well.. games. Raph is still from the school of alternate worlds. A second dimension that you can call home. While that may be a niche market, it’s still the core of where WoW came from. You could argue pretty successfully that there is no sense in continuing this line of world building, because the mass market has proved that they seek a more game-world hybrid structure. But you can’t really damn Raph for designing what we call the first “MMO” as though it were a MUD + graphics.
about 4 years ago
KilljoyX said:
“And while all this is interesting and intellectually stimulating, it\’e2\’80\’99s still not about games and fun and all that stuff. Whoever designs the most fun way to kill a wolf is going to have the biggest and best game, regardless of what the wolf was thinking about before it died.”
I dissagree totally with you, KilljoyX. It doesn’t matter how entertaining killing the wolf is, it soon gets to be old. Repetition is like that.
-However, if killing the wolf leads to an unhappy dragon, and it ends up dead too, now there’s more to the game in several respects.
Did the dragon have a hoard stashed somewhere? Where?
-Now that it’s dead as well as most of the wolves, presuming this is a player built city area, can the immediate lands be considered safer by trade skills types of players? Will they move here, build here, and thrive here?
-Dragons aren’t the only things that eat meat. What about other things like trolls and ogre’s? Tigers and bears? And what about those pesky tribes of orcs and lizardmen? Were wars fought and the humans the victors? Can lumberjacks collect their supplies more safely now because of the recent events?
-If human hunters keep the rabit and deer populations down, assuming meat actually means something to players too, and wolves don’t show up and neither do other critters very often for lack of food, does this now mean that the area will stay relatively safe? Can we now call these lands “civilized”?
-And as we, the players, look out from out safe homes across our conquered valley, onto the mountains peaks and imagine the lands beyond, do we consider what terrors and threats may lie beyond?
Just have fun killing the wolf? May the deities and deamons alike develop a desire to find fun ways to kill you too, good sir!
Seriously, can’t you see the benefits of a dynamic world like this? This kind of gaming can’t be hand built, not without going in again later and changing it, per “event”. In a system built like this, it takes care of itself, no further investment by the developers….unless they have something really cool they want to do with their spare time.
about 4 years ago
ZombieS said:
“I never played UO myself, but I can extrapolate that UO had little to do with the actual Ultima franchise. When people tell me of their experiences in the single-player Ultima games, they always tell me about stories of their adventures in Britannia. When I hear about experiences in UO, all I ever get are crafting, gathering, exploiting, or ganking tales. I don\’e2\’80\’99t believe turning Ultima into Lord of the Flies can rightly be considered a success, no matter how much money the actual game may make.”
You’re right as it’s turned out (at least so far), but let me clue you in a bit from the early UO game…..
[url=http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/arcpub/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=711532&page=7&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1]Lookie[/url]
UO at the beginning was alive with Ultima stuff. Whether I was right or wrong with that news article, the mere fact that it looked plausible was a testament to what they had going. And they threw it all away to be more like other games! It still ticks me off royally what UO as well as the industry as a whole has done to MMORPGing. They, as a whole, couldn’t see their arse from a whole in the ground. All in my opinion of course, which gets taken as the grain of salt that it is far too often.
about 4 years ago
Errr, Lookie here instead
about 4 years ago
“However, if killing the wolf leads to an unhappy dragon, and it ends up dead too, now there\’e2\’80\’99s more to the game in several respects.
Did the dragon have a hoard stashed somewhere? Where?”
That’s pretty much what happened in “The Hobbit” and it turned out pretty doggone interesting–a thief steals a cup, ticks the dragon off, Smaug burns the town, Bard hits him with a +8 arrow of slaying with auto-return, and a battle of five armies ensues over the treasure. I suppose occassionally that kind of dynamic thing happens in real life, like when some archduke gets killed in Sarajevo.
Still, most of the time, killing a wolf just results in a dead wolf. What’s important in a game is how fun was it to find the wolf (this is something MMOs are very bad at), how fun was it to combat it, was there anything fun about looting it, and what fun things can be done with the loot?
There’s nothing wrong with another, more fantastic result, but it’s better delivered through a quest. Random dragons coming after me because some noobs are slaughtering rabbits isn’t much more interesting to me than having a Sand Giant spawn on type of my head when I’m trying to zone through Ro. It will truly be a dynamic world where all sorts of interesting things are happening randomly all the time; it’d be so dynamic as to be absurdly random. This type of content is better generated through created content, even if a million other players got there first. (Smaug attacking Dale was really cool for Bilbo, Thorin, and the rest of the dwarves, but my guess is the residents of Dale who saw their city nearly leveled thought it was lame as hell.)
Raph can talk about MUDs all he wants but again, that just goes to show his perspective and how different or (as D-One called it) how “niche” it is from the rest of us. We don’t look at MMOs as the evolution of MUDs, we look at them as the evolution of D&D, and D&D had a dungeonmaster, dammit.
Again, I’m not saying that it might not be cool if it actually worked. But it ain’t game design, and compared to interesting missions, creative dialogue trees, and a compelling backstory that exists beyond filler for the manual, I’d say it comes in second as world-building.
about 4 years ago
Is it possible that the problem here is that we’re associating Virtual Worlds and MMORPGs too closely? They have similar aspects, but they’re really not the same thing.
about 4 years ago
Perhaps. Raph famously has said:
“Is it a game?
It’s a SERVICE. Not a game. It’s a WORLD. Not a game. It’s a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says, “it’s just a game” is missing the point.”
But I still think it is a game, or at the very least, it is a game first. And whether anyone wants to believe it or not, Raph and nearly every other person working on these things is primarily in the games business, not the virtual world business.
about 4 years ago
\’e2\’80\’9cIs it a game? It\’e2\’80\’99s a SERVICE. Not a game. It\’e2\’80\’99s a WORLD. Not a game. It\’e2\’80\’99s a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says, \’e2\’80\’9cit\’e2\’80\’99s just a game\’e2\’80\’9d is missing the point.\’e2\’80\’9d
That is EXACTLY why WoW ended up eating 50+% of the industry in only a year. Because they treat their service as a GAME first and foremost, they don’t conduct social experiments and complicated virtual economies or player governments, they just make a game.
And unless Raph starts to get a clue that his dreams of simulation and virtual world systems are not fun, he will continue to be responsible for massive failures like SWG.
about 4 years ago
First off, I can attest that simulations and virtual worlds ARE fun, for just about everyone, at least some of the time. Because all the games you play now are both simulations and virtual worlds already, they’re just cruder simulations.
When I say virtual worlds are not games, it’s to broaden the horizons of people like you who think that they are somehow categorically different. They aren’t. Games are just one purpose virtual worlds are put to, and the fact is that statistically speaking, I’d bet 25 to 50% of the time any of you spend in WoW is not spent “playing” (I say that because those are the stats I got when I ran similar tests on EQ).
The assumption that therefore I am less interested in games is completely false. I am interested in the simulations because they can lead to MORE FUN games. The current game of MMO combat and quests sucks; if you did it in a single-player game, you’d find it pathetic. Even the simplest hack n slash RPGs tend to do better.
FWIW, SWG wasn’t particularly much of a simulation, it was gamey in just about all of its backend systems. The failings in content there were outright failures to make bog-standard classic quest and spawn content, mostly for lack of time.
about 4 years ago
It is a poor kind of PvP that demands immobility. PvP with fixed, immobile, well understood rules and playgrounds is merely a sport.
In my idea even Eve-Online or Shadowbane are static.
The point is: any other possibility would be simply an exploit. Just the players racing to find the I-Win button and the devs chasing them to patch the holes.
If PvP isn’t “static” then your game will be doomed and completely inaccessible for new players that don’t know how to defend themselves from the “legitimate” exploits.
about 4 years ago
“That is EXACTLY why WoW ended up eating 50+% of the industry in only a year. Because they treat their service as a GAME first and foremost, they don\’e2\’80\’99t conduct social experiments and complicated virtual economies or player governments, they just make a game.”
And that’s exactly why I couldn’t play WoW for more than 2 weeks on 3 different attempts whereas I played UO for 5 years. Games like WoW cease to be fun once you realize that the entire game is the same, from start to finish, except your armor gets pointier and your weapons get more absurd. Games where you can build communities and make a place for yourself remain fun longer than games that are just games. There was a 6 month stretch in UO where I rarely left the Yew bank area because there was always something going on that didn’t involve going out and “leveling up”. Anyone that spent any time in Yew pre-UO:R on Great Lakes will most likely remember YRA and the havok we wrought. WoW guilds will be at best remembered as “yeah, those guys spent a lot of time running instances”. I can’t count the number of people that I’ve talked to that have said repeatedly “I don’t know why I still play WoW, it’s not fun, but I keep logging in and running the same instances.”
Also, WoW succeeded because apparently Blizzard has brainwashed millions of people, they’ve been forgiven things that other companies would have been crucified for, I’ve never understood that.
about 4 years ago
I find myself largely in agreement with KilljoyX, and said as much on Raph’s blog. I think dynamic simulation is REALLY COOL, but unless you get it right it interferes too much with gameplay, and getting it right has proven notoriously difficult in the MMO space. Even the rarely-fallible Will Wright couldn’t make The Sims Online work right. My biggest concern with Spore is that it has to hit that sweet spot, where it’s not so open-ended that there’s no game, but not so on rails that it’s no fun.
Sure, you can layer static content over the dynamic, so people who want to kill the dragon can go kill the dragon and not want to go kill bunnies to get the dragon. But in that case, how often will that dragon attack caused by bunnies actually happen? Pretty rarely, and playes may not even be able to tell it was caused by low bunny population — with so many complex moving parts, it may look essentially random to them. So then you have to question whether spending all that time and effort tuning the dynamic system was actually worth it.
Bruce
about 4 years ago
“And that\’e2\’80\’99s exactly why I couldn\’e2\’80\’99t play WoW for more than 2 weeks on 3 different attempts whereas I played UO for 5 years.”
And you still seem to think in terms of a niche gaming market. Who cares what you think or even what 200k of you think.
WoW has millions of players. And WoW designers still haven’t gotten the mass market RPG right. What kind of person want’s to appeal to the mass market? The kind of person that wants the luxury of making niche games in the future with their own money, not with someone elses.
What you and what others like you want will soon be marginalized (which is what you deserve and have deserved for years, again not a personal insult just business) and a game will eventually come along that caters to 30 million subscribers…
“That’d be terrible!” Really? A brief observation of what companies are literally spending tens of millions of dollars on right now.
Lets spend millions making a game called Vanguard that has 2 hour long corpse recoveries and 30 minute travel times and let’s argue about why we should keep these things past beta… When that 2 hour corpse recovery happened to me I laughed and deleted the game from my hard drive. Talk about niche market! Mandatory suffering? Optional suffering? What? No one would do that if it weren’t mandatory! Not even the people who want it mandatory? No shit Sherlock?
This is where these kinds of discussions lead and they have no place in business.
WoW failed, in that for some stupid reason the designers are still listening to the niche 200k rather than other common 5 million.
I remember when I posted that a good MMORPG would come along and that a good game would have over a million subscribers and some one brilliantly pointed out that there weren’t that many MMORPG players…
30 million subscribers world wide is not a pipe dream it’s reality. Now stop all the acedemic nonsense and build the fucking game already.
about 4 years ago
Well, I would say that if you have a few tens of millions and a compelling product differentiator, like a particular IP or specific genre, there’s nothing wrong with going after 200K subscribers — you can still make money at that, and serve a market niche with little competition. But you certainly shouldn’t delude yourself into thinking you’ll get millions like WoW, and if you DO want to get millions like WoW, you need to come up with a product that’s both innovative and that builds on the lessons WoW has to teach.
Bruce
about 4 years ago
I still disagree that this fantasy 30 million subscriber game is going to be some static world treadmill like WoW, not if you want 30 million concurrent. The only reason WoW has reached that high is because Blizzard has managed to successfully leverage its extreme goodwill among gamers. WoW will likely hit 30 million subscribers ever, but people aren’t going to stick around. I would really like to see what the turnover has been like for them, I’d wager it’s been growing larger and I think once the expansion comes out and people realize it’s the same shit all over again, you’re going to see a mass exodus within 6 months of its release. Scripted quests are only interesting as long as they’re new. If game is truely going to come along that will replace TV it’s going to have to be a lot more free form, it’s going to have to resemble a world instead of a colorful well rendered chessboard. For people to stick around long term they’re going to have to believe they can affect and change the world and that the world changes around them, essentially becoming a new game every day. How much fun would a TV show be if nothing ever changed?
about 4 years ago
If there’s one thing UO taught me that’s always remained true to this day, it’s that you can’t build any system into any online game that people won’t try to exploit/manipulate in a way you never could have imagined. Build it, and they will come…. to screw it up any way possible. (share’s lum’s pessimism)
about 4 years ago
“How much fun would a TV show be if nothing ever changed?”
You’ve obviously never watched a sitcom, or don’t think they’re fun.
about 4 years ago
“For people to stick around long term they\’e2\’80\’99re going to have to believe they can affect and change the world and that the world changes around them, essentially becoming a new game every day. How much fun would a TV show be if nothing ever changed?”
A TV show may change, but the people watching the show are not the ones who cause that change – it’s the writers and producers of the show who drive the change. (Reality TV could be considered an exception I guess, but even then the producers have a really heavy hand in controlling things from behind the scenes.)
Likewise in an MMORPG, why shouldn’t the development team be the ones driving the change and adding new content to the game? This is certainly the approach Blizzard is taking with WoW, since they won’t allow anything to detract from the high level of polish which is the trademark of all their games. They want to ensure every part of their game has a level of quality and consistency (in terms of rules, appearance, etc) that your average player-created stuff generally can’t match. Sure, players can generate an awful lot of very cool content, but for every 1 cool thing that’s created you’ll also get 100 awful things cluttering up your world, and detracting from the game.
Procedural content creation and player-created content can have a huge positive impact, but it’s got to be really easy to filter and control what gets into the game, or you just end up with a big mess. That’s the problem that nobody’s really solved yet (although we’ll see how well Spore does on that front…)