Whither Online?
This was an editorial that appeared in Game Informer in 2005. I am supposed to be on a plane. It’s already posted on the site, but I figured I’d make a blog post out of it anyway.
Whither online?
Anyone remember what cyberspace looked like a decade ago? There we were, all fresh arrivals in the Metaverse, dreaming of Snow Crash’s virtual bars and William Gibson’s skies like televisions on dead channels. We wondered if the Holodeck would require one of those newfangled 3d hardware video cards or not. If we were really old-school sci-fi fans, maybe we thought about Bradbury’s Veldt or Vernor Vinge’s “True Names.”
Back then, we dreamed about dynamic worlds that we could morph on the fly with a thought (or at least a twitch of a mouse). We had a lot of grand visions about really realistic NPCs that would move about the world like the ones in Ultima VII did. We thought maybe the orcs would be invading virtual towns because they wanted to, not because there were spawn points set up by the city gates.
These days, after suffering through Lawnmower Man and Disclosure, maybe our dreams are a bit less lofty. Heck, these days, a lot of kids don’t even know what static on a dead channel looks like. As gamers, we’re all a bit more familiar with how online worlds and virtual realities work.
We know about NPC schedules, and we’ve sunk enough hours into the games to see exactly where Maid Marian walks every day on her predefined path, until we wish she’d trip and fall head-first into her milk bucket. We know how spawn points work, and (thanks to strategy websites) exactly how often the watery floozy will raise her hand and offer us Excalibur — it’s a rare drop, right?
Even worse, we’re all starting to wonder where exactly the stories are.
After all, there was a plot in those novels and on those TV shows. Yes, even in VR5 (if a plot falls in the forest and nobody is there to watch it, does it make a sound? What about if it makes no sense?). These stories were full of a sense of purpose, and we look around our adventures in Norrath, Vanadiel, Dereth, Rubi-Ka, Britannia, Paragon City, and sometimes wonder if phat lewt is really what it’s all about.
MMO fans will, of course, tell you in a heartbeat that it’s the friendships they make online that make the difference, that they have experienced epic sagas and incredible gripping stories. But even they will probably admit that we’re not quite at the dream of cyberspace yet.
Online worlds offer us more than just a game-they offer a virtual space into which many games can be placed. The problem, really, is that it’s a bit too broad a canvas for us game devs. The issues facing the genre today are mostly still a matter of learning curve on the part of developers. The curious thing about online worlds is that the first ones (text muds) got going in the late 70s and early 80s, but we still have a lot to learn.
Let me tell you where I think we’re going. I think we’re heading for a time and place where Maid Marian sometimes does trip. She might even cuss a bit sometimes. Where the orcs invade the town because there’s something there they want, and where players fight them off because the town is too important to lose. I think that the grass will die where players trample it too much, and enterprising players might divert a river to grow their crops. I think we’re heading for a game where purpose arises organically out of the game, because Evil Overlords dwelling in the Misty Mountains who try to bring about the Worldending Winter are just part of how the game world works.
These aren’t unsolvable problems. They’re hard, don’t get me wrong, but they can be dealt with. It’s more a matter of having the will than not being able to find a way. And, of course, it needs to make commercial sense, and it needs to be fun in the end. Too often, the simulations built into games make them less fun, rather than more so. But that, too, is something we can solve, I think.
A bigger question is whether the game industry will be willing to be patient while we work on licking these problems. There’s going to be a lot of false starts and mistakes made along the way. We’re already seeing a lot of announced MMORPGs fail to make it to market because publishers are seeing the costs skyrocket and the development challenges rise. But there’s encouraging signs all over the world-the rate of growth of MMORPGs as a whole is exceeding the rate of growth of the Internet, and in some countries, it’s the accepted normal way of gaming. Try picking up a console in China. Xbox? What’s that?
We’re also seeing the single-player gaming world start to converge towards a lot of the basic premises of online worlds-shared profiles, online items, regularly updated content… I think we’re going to see a lot more of this in the coming years. Right now a lot of folks get hung up on the business model-paying subscription fees — but I have to tell you, business models change in response to the market. The way the money flows may change over time, but I’m betting that online gaming is not only here to stay, but that it is going to absorb a pretty large portion of the games market as a whole.
Just a few years ago, that last sentence would have seemed not radical, but loopy crazy. And in the end, that’s why I have faith that online worlds will eventually reach that wacky impossible cyberspace dream.
We’ve come a long way from
> North.
You see an orc here.
So I’ll meet ya in the virtual bar, and maybe we can take a whack at stopping the Worldending Winter. I’ll introduce ya to Marian. Heck, even the invading orcs are kinda nice guys once you get to know them. Just don’t forget to bring your sword, and if you can conjure one with a thought, even better.
21 Responses to “Whither Online?”
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That description does more to describe what virtual world is (for me, and many others) than your previous very technical (and not so helpful) definition. Goodonya!
This all sounds very expensive.
Of course, Lord knows if I had $500 million to blow on doing this, I would. I just wonder when someone will.
Of course, when they do – I just desperately hope that they hire Raph. We don’t need EQ with 250 dungeons and so much polish that it burns thy eyes. We need something like this.
In a sweet place like this my wife will be playing with me. How about you play us a song; we’ll buy a round…
> They’re hard, don’t get me wrong, but they can be dealt with.
Who exactly is working on this problem. All I see is static worlds with mounds of canned content with development going to refining the ways of delivering of content. Everyone says they want a dynamic worlds, but no one is doing a thing to make it happen.
[…] Great article by Raph today on where he sees MMO’s going (as I understand it, written 2 years ago). […]
It doesn’t have to cost $500 million. It doesn’t even have to cost $50 million or even $5. 500k, ok, I can’t see it happening for less than 500k. 🙂
The point is, its about interesting processes that create diverse patterns by their interactions. Marketing and massive content production are becoming more and more optional, and perhaps even non-economical. People not only provide cotent, the ARE content.
Looks like Infamous Dragon Example 🙂 Great read.
“Everyone says they want a dynamic worlds, but no one is doing a thing to make it happen.”
A dynamic world is more a set of features. Some worlds are more dynamic than others and a gamer beamed forward in time from the ’80s might even judge some of today’s games as dynamic. It’s a bar that constantly moves. Keeping ahead of players with content is always a challenge, so systems are put in place to let designers “crank” out quests based on a predefined set of standard quest types- just one example of many things in MMOs that rely on systems. “Be creative, but keep the content inside the systems.” One of’s just don’t deliver a bang for the buck.
One of the reasons Ralph’s challenge is daunting is that to leave a player with a feeling of awe, you can’t cherry pick dynamic world elements – you pretty much need to do all of them. Otherwise players will look at the things you didn’t do as examples of why your game still falls short of that utopian ideal. And it’s hard to boil down a utopian ideal into a feature list.
I certainly agree that NPC’s could be more interesting in MMO’s, however your world is already filled with live players. Making an NPC that is as dynamic and interesting as a player is so difficult that it often makes more sense to create gameplay that centers around interaction with other players rather than NPCs. Less time spent in development and a more satisfying final experience.
(The Maid Marian in Sherwood Dungeon stands around the dungeon entrance handing out quests all day – so guilty as charged.)
Do we actually want that? Does the majority of game-players want that? That just makes a game more like real life, and I have my own lawn to mow without taking care of a virtual one, thanks.
“More immersive” doesn’t mean that it has to be more like real life. I mean, I know that kind of thing interests some, but isn’t necessary to interest all. I’d rather there remain a healthy separation between the games we try to create, MMO or otherwise, and reality.
People are the content in a lot of ways, but you need content to attract those people. You might have fun spending 500k to watch a stick figure of maid marian drop a badly modeled bucket from turbosquid, but I’m not sure I would. 😛
How much would it run you to fill out the world with content attracting content? Yeah, massive amounts of art aren’t totally necessary. But how much is, and how much is it going to run you? Do you want it to look good? How much more will that cost? Etc.
Oh, if only artists worked for free.
Amen
I had this conversation with a guildmate yesterday. He was upset because he didn’t have more gameplay options for accomplishing quests. “I have to fight my way in and kill the evil prince to rescue the princess,” he said. “Why can’t I sneak into the castle and spirit her away in the night? Why can’t I make friends with the evil prince and gain his trust, and get to the princess that way? Heck, why can’t I off the evil guy, marry the princess, and become king of the land?”
I explained to my friend that in the beginning, the person who wrote the quest probably could have dreamed up 8 different ways of solving the quest, each which would have relied on different mechanics and systems within the game. But therein lies the problem. It might take a designer say 2 days to come up with a nice spec for a system design. But the coder who has to implement that spec might take 2 weeks. That’s not bad, you say, but now suppose your game has specs for a few hundred systems like that. And each one interrelates with the others, which means the design of each is affected by the design of the others. That coding time grows exponentially.
So what do you do? You’ve got a great game on paper, but it’ll be 20 years to get it to market without skimping somewhere or hiring 500 programmers. The answer is you start cutting. So out of all those options for “rescuing” the princess, you end up with one or two making it into the game if you’re lucky. Thus, you’re killing the prince instead of sneaking into the castle.
I think one of the things that MUDs have/had going for them, and that commercial MMORPGs haven’t really been able to approach yet, is the whole UCC/distributed authoring model. Most MUDs allowed players to become builders after fulfilling some requirements. These builders then worked in-world (although often in a seperate copy of the world so that theyw ere subject to a content approval process) to create new content using a robust set of creation tools. And it didn’t matter where the builders were, as long as they could connect to the MUD’s server they could build. I think that if a commercial MMORPG can find a way to do that, then it will be much easier to get closer to that dream of cyberspace.
Sad to see a good argument weakened with poor research:
Ah, take a walk on Gulou Dajie in Beijing — you’ll see Xboxes and PS2s moving out half a hundred doors so fast it will make your head spin.
Of course, they’re all chipped, and they are all used exclusively to play pirated games, so no they’re not used to get online and play the latest MMO.
But still — it’s sad to see a good argument weakened by truthiness for any reason.
I couldn’t find any Xboxes in the street markets in Shanghai in 2004-5 (remember, this article came out in 2005). Lots and lots of GBA stuff though. Maybe times have changed. 🙂
OK I think you guys are missing the point of the article. It’s not about content. It’s not about graphics. It’s about gameplay. We don’t want to see a gorgeous, beautifully rendered Maid Marian stub her toe on a rock every time we walk by. We want to pass her somewhere we’ve never seen her, and when she turns to look at us, she trips over a dog. When we go to kill Lord Archmage, we don’t want to fight him in the same part of the same dungeon with the same spawn leading up to him for the same loot. We want him to send troops after something we like, and we want to have a real reason to go after him- not just because we want his phat lewtz and the quest told us to.
It’s like, remember UO’s resource system? Where NPCs wanted stuff, and would seek it out? Like a dragon coming towards town for food, but if a player left a shitload of ribs sitting in it’s path, it would probably be placated and wander back to it’s cave? We want a world that wants things for itself. Combat isn’t always the only way to resolve an issue. Except in MMO’s.
“Ralph’s challenge ” – I meant Raph’s challenge – rude error – sorry.
Getting off topic here, but even in 2004 I could have taken you to a certain Shanghai district where you could have purchased, from any one of three dozen shops, a chipped Xbox and more pirated games than you could carry… street markets are for brand-fake clothes, pirated DVDs, and tourist kitsch.
To come back to the topic, MMO games that don’t have full Chinese interfaces (including great double-byte and emote support) AND a ubiquitous way to pre-pay will fail in China. Amazingly, every day irl I see “China” biz plans overlooking the simple fact that very few people have credit cards here.
I guess I’d like to see in the general “Whither Online?” discussion a “can we please get beyond the monthly subscription hit idea?” mini-discussion.
Do we actually want that? Does the majority of game-players want that? That just makes a game more like real life, and I have my own lawn to mow without taking care of a virtual one, thanks.
The goal isn’t “more immersive”, in this case. There’s a hard limit to immersion that is trumped by gamer intelligence. Practically speaking, immersion is just a line that the culture has agreed not to cross; it’s a magic circle, not a suspension of disbelief.
The goal is to have infinite choice. Right now, the only thing that can provide infinite choice is player dynamics. The fact that your buddy Steve might backstab you tomorrow in order to take your Sword of a Thousand Truths. Or maybe he has it and you backstab him. That’s player dynamicism.
The problem with this is that there’s a steep barrier to entry. It takes three steps: imagine the story, map the story to game elements, perform the story. You can’t steal someone else’s weapon when you kill them in any MMO I’ve heard of. So, in steps 2 and 3, you implicitly agree that, when he’s got less than 10 hit points, he’ll just give you his weapon and then you’ll strike the final blow.
Now you turn this from PC-PC to PC-NPC. You get David (Talaen)’s comment #11 above: choices are limited because you kind have to trick the game into doing what you want. The hack around this, at the moment, is to have a nice long chat with a GM about what you need done and if you’re lucky, they can make it happen. Which kinda sucks. (It only really happens in text-based environments; it’s just too expensive to do it graphically. But it does happen; I once sculpted a tree into a cavern wall by emoting a lot and sending the transcript to the CEO and he changed the room description.)
So, high barrier to entry. What’s Raph talking about? World dynamicism.
No one may have thought that you’d try to scale the tower wall to rescue the princess. The designers think that’s insane. But if you go to the tower wall, you’ll discover that combining some mountain gear equipment with the Spider Climb spell and the Strength of Hercules spell and suddenly you can do it. Completely unanticipated, but what’s happened is that Step 2 is gone. You don’t have to conform your story or trick the system. It just works. You don’t have to beg a GM to convince the GMs in charge of Caemlyn to alter the course of a river; you just start digging and earthmoving and damming.
You have choice. And the choice isn’t, “Gee, should I fight them or stealth and go past?” It’s “Given all the assets I have available to me, how can I deal with this obstacle?”
Long response and related thoughts on my blog
[…] Koster just posted a reprint of Whither Online (circa 2005), where he […]