SR Pillars Part 2: Easy Surface, Much Depth

Yup, another week so I wrote another long post about the design pillars we are using for designing Stars Reach. (If you missed last week’s, it’s here, and I expanded on it on the blog here.)

This week, it’s all about the second set:

The Ease of Nintendo Meets the Depth of the Sandbox MMO

• The game will be deep: a set of proven game mechanics brought together in one universe.
• Controls and interfaces will be intuitive and simple and familiar.
• We will support varied clients so that players can play on whatever device they choose.

I go into details on each of those over in the article on the Stars Reach website.

Something that I meant to dig into in that article, but totally forgot to, is that all this talk of forms of accessibility really needs to include a factor that has hugely affected the development of MMOs over the years: the time commitment.

MMOs are infamously time consuming. Twenty or so hours a week — who has that kind of time, in today’s interruptible, constantly busy world? Especially if you’re older now, as so many MMO fans are these days? Kids, jobs, other hobbies… Participating in an MMO really ought to be something available to everyone.

Because of this, one of the implications of these pillars is our attempt to make an MMO that you can play in sessions as short as five minutes. One where there are a lot of asynchronous ways to play and feel like you matter to the community, even if you can’t devote the continuous hours to it.

I’ve mentioned before how the addition of means of play like this to Star Wars Galaxies had an interesting series of effects:

• Sessions were shorter! People could squeeze in play sessions in smaller open blocks of time. This helps make the game more accessible to people with demands on their time.
• The peak concurrency actually fell some as a result.
  • This can seem bad, because a lot of people like to measure a game’s popularity based on peak concurrency. But if you walk through the thought experiment, it’s easy to see that session length drives peak concurrency. (If you have 100 people play a five minute game in a day, you will probably have a peak concurrency of 1. If you the play session lasts 24 hours, you will have a peak concurrency of 100).
  • Lower concurrency might seem worrisome for social reasons too… but a lot depends on whether players are participating in the game even while logged off. Which in a game with a robust player economy, offline crafting, and so on, they can be. (I talked about this somewhere in the middle of the talk on Small Worlds, long ago).
• The aggregated amount of time played over long time periods actually added up to more time than the games with longer sessions. Taking advantage of smaller blocks of time lets more blocks pile up.

 Even the research we did on the Trust Spectrum showed that players tended to prefer session lengths in the ten to thirty minute range, though longer sessions were considered to be fine.

A huge part of the explosion of mobile and casual gaming has just been that you can play the games in small snatches of time. If sandboxy play, as mentioned in the article, actually is something of broader appeal than people think, then that also suggests we should enable short sessions.

None of this says that the game can’t be deep at the same time. We’ve tried to build in a lot of things to make it easy to have a fun session in a short amount of time, but they all still tie into the deep systems we want from a game that can hold us for years. Stuff like being able to teleport to your friends for a session, but not being able to transport goods with you (so we don’t break the local economies). The way our combat works, or the way our crafting works, also play into this. And so on.

Really should have talked about this more in the article. Oh well!