Live Forum Q&A with Raph Koster, 10/16
This Q&A took place on October 16th, 2013 and can be found in its original form here.
Live Forum Q&A with Raph Koster, 10/16
Hey there everyone! The Q&A doesn’t start for another hour, but I was told to open the thread in advance so that questions can start to pile up.
Feel free to Ask Me Anything. I do have NDA’s and whatnot that I can’t violate, but feel free to ask about muds, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Metaplace, Island Life, My Vineyard, Theory of Fun, game grammar, games in general, whatever, and I will do my best to answer.
Do you try to go into the future (aka modern sandbox games) instead of thinking past games (UO, SWG) are the best things since sliced bread? Because that’s what I got the impression of coming from your input here.
I’d kill for a modern UO, but it would definitely have to break bonds with the “pre-trammel” gank fest I was part of back then.
The question made more simple…. what would a modern sandbox MMO that would not be a PvP gank fest be for you?
I often tell people who write to me asking for a new SWG or UO style game that for me that was TEN YEARS AGO. I had to move on from those designs and ideas quite a long time ago. I wouldn’t build something like that today, in many ways.
For that matter, in 2006 I did Metaplace, which was already a huge huge departure from those games. It was a virtual world platform that allowed anyone to build virtual spaces and even games. Sort of a combo of Second Life, Minecraft, Sims, and Unity (if Unity were in 2d). That turned out to be TOO sandboxy, I think.
I do think a modern UO would not succeed with freeform PvP. It might well have PvP in it, but the whole gankfest thing is definitely a thing of the past. I never got to try the Outcasting concept that was proposed for SWG and never implemented, and would still love to see it tried (if you PK someone, they can report you to fellow players, along with a log of the event. If you are convicted, your right to PvP is permanently revoked). But even that, in these days of easy account creation on F2P games, maybe wouldn’t work. Bad guys would just make new accounts.
To me the essence of sandboxiness that was in UO and SWG is not about the PKing. It is about a simulated world, a functioning economy, a low power difference between high and low level players, and a system that doesn’t push you into combat as the only way to play the game (or even classes).
How does it make you feel when Sony Online Entertainment announces their “New innovative skill system that nobody has done before.” in EQ Next, when that system WAS done before in Star Wars Galaxies?
I haven’t actually looked at their skill system, so… I have no feelings about it. 🙂 That said, I do know Smed, and I know that he is actually a sandbox fan. Jeff Butler, also a huge sandbox fan. So…
Mr. Koster…Are you currently working on anything new?
/crosses fingers for another complex SWG style game
I am, but not an MMO right now. And let me explain why.
Metaplace, which we opened up in 2007, was the culmination of over a decade of dreaming about what virtual worlds could be. It was designed as the engine for Snow Crash, the engine for Rainbows End, the engine for Ready Player One (though that book wasn’t out yet), the engine for Otherland — basically, a way to make all sorts of worlds, that ran on a common platform, on any sort of client, could adapt to the changes in the web, could run on TVs or tablets or whatever.
A huge part of why we did it was because MMOs had gotten sooooooo big and sooo damn expensive that conservatism was inevitable. WoW was out and crushing it, and all anyone wanted was a clone of it, with dollar signs in their eyes.
And we built it, probably not well enough, but the proverbial “nobody came.” Oh, it was definitely still too hard to use, and lots of people couldn’t code, which you needed to do in order to really make something awesome.
That was pretty disappointing, and we ended up having to switch over to making Facebook games with the technology. So I spent the last three plus years in that world.
During that time, MMOs haven’t moved all that much, I don’t think. The reasons we built MP are still valid today.. Only maybe worse. I think to ante up to the table with an MMO right now costs tens of millions of dollars. Something like CityVille on Facebook has a larger budget and larger team that Ultima Online had.
Raising that kind of money isn’t trivial, and it’s not where a lot of the heat is in terms of investment. Most of the big publishers are interested in mobile stuff, for example.
So — it could be done, but it’s a big effort.
And then there’s the flip side, which is that MMOs have never been my only love. I used to do board games starting when I was thirteen. I used to do puzzle games and strategy games and arcade games. I haven’t gotten to do those things.
So right now, I’m an indie of one, as of about six months ago. I’ve got four or five games that I am working on, and they are all pretty small, things I can do by myself.
So I think I will stick to only that? No. The desire to get back to making an MMO is definitely rising. 🙂 But I do not currently have one in progress.
MetaPlace and Ultima Online were very different games with what seemed to be very different audiences. What were some of the similarities you saw in player behavior between the two? Do you attribute those similarities to the design of the games, the online environment, or human nature?
Both were fundamentally about user expression. Metaplace was very literally about it — like, you could build your world into an RPG, or an apartment, or a clone of an 80s arcade game. And people did. There was one guy (hi Crwth) who spent his entire time trying to build a clone of UO in it, actually.
UO was also about player expression. That is why I didn’t have a Virtue system in the original UO. I thought it was time for the training wheels to come off, for the Virtues to be put to the real test of real players dealing with real issues. And of course, players of UO did all sorts of truly amazing things that we did not foresee at all.
Way back on UO, I actually proposed that we release the server and a tools client and docs for the scripting and let people run their own shards, and connect them all up with red moongates. That was the genesis of the idea for Metaplace. 🙂
So yeah, there are many things that players of the two had in common.
Hi Raph and welcome to the Lion’s Den that is mmorpg.com forums.
What game design contribution are you most satisfied with so far?
There are many things I am happy with, but I would probably have to pick the work I’ve done in writing, more than the work in game design. Stuff like A Theory of Fun has ended up influencing thousands of game developers. I feel proud of that contribution to the art form, if you know what I mean. Helping games to be understood better and pushing them to develop and mature, that’s a big deal for me.
Within games, it’s unquestionably the communities that forms around the games. There are a variety of game design things we did there to encourage it — housing, economic things, even dancing — but in the end I am most satisfied with the fact that people still care about those friendships ten or fifteen years later.
Thank you for UO. Do you think it’s been to the genre’s detriment that this path of MMORPG design was not followed more and why do think so? EVE Online being the exception that proves the rule where player freedom seems to have been curtailed disproportionately to it’s potential.
I do think that more world simulation should have been explored. And more kinds of games in general. The current from EQ to WOW and so many other games is really more or less the DIKUmud game I started playing in 1992. With giant budgets, you get conservatism. Where’s the MMO political strategy game? The MMO 4X game? The MMO city builder? I could go on… so many genres underdeveloped.
What are you working on or if that is NDA, what are you most interested in currently in games or outside of games that inspires you to keep interest in designing even for a sometimes cynical and jaded audience as mmorpg players? Any upcoming mmorpgs that have design ideas that interest you? Thanks for taking the time to do an ama. ¡buena suerte!
I currently have a few games in development:
a) an analog tabletop card game. It feels pretty good, and I can see a digital version of it working, but the dream there is to get it into stores as a physical card game.
b) a tricky little puzzle game — it’s definitely a mobile sort of game, one where you try to solve a level as efficiently as you can.
c) a digital boardgame thing, that also has puzzle mode and a storybook mode. This one is the farthest along, and I have it going on iOS, Android, Win, Mac, and web.
d) an art game — a touch-friendly resurrection of my old “Andean Bird” game from ’06.
e) a strategy game. This one is the biggest project, and I am still nibbling around the edges of it. I need artists, i think. 🙂
As far as what inspires me — players, and most anything I read about how the world works.
Hey Raph – thanks for staying involved with the MMO community.. It’s always interesting hearing your thoughts, and hopefully we’ll see more of your work in an official capacity on MMOs in the future. A couple questions, if you don’t mind:
1. What name first comes to mind when you think of an active person the MMORPG industry, whom you particularly respect or admire? (ie: for example, if there was someone you’d like to see a Q&A from similar to this, who would you want to ask questions?)
Scott Hartsman, Jake Song, … but you have to understand, I consider these folks friends. I could rattle off more names. I can also just email most of them. 🙂
Do you think the success of GTA V will have any impact on the MMORPG development in the future? (ie: more realization that players care about having a living word to play in?)
No. The lessons from GTA have been there since GTA3. I think Minecraft is proving to be dramatically more influential.
I’m concerned about the shutdowns of MMOs. Even games that we thought were in good shape, like CoH, are getting closed down. It makes me skeptical at jumping into MMOs again. My bad experience with shutdowns (I’ve been through three already) makes me wonder if these games are a good buy, given that the continued enjoyment of these games is based on factors outside of my control. I don’t have this kind of misery with single player games or peer-to-peer multiplayer games.
What could designers and the industry do to provide greater protection for players, who might fear that their game and purchases will go “poof” at will, whenever the publisher decides it is no longer interested in maintaining the games?
It’s a cost thing. Opportunity cost. A company running a game has to say “do I spend money on keeping 10 players, or roll the dice on getting 20? I can only afford to do one.” As keeping players goes from keeping 10, to keeping 9, then 8,and so on, at some point, the answer is “move the support off and start something new.”
The only ways around it are to make the game basically free to operate, or at least way way cheaper (I think UO has probably benefited a LOT from better hardware over the years!) or to give it away to players.
I have to point out that the insistence on matching the production values of a SWTOR, the scope of a WoW, the etc, are all things that drive up costs tremendously. The glitzier and glossier the games get, the deeper we dig this hole.
What games are you going to make next, and why do you think that they will be successful?
I listed them above… though of course, any of them might go away as I keep working on them (all those are in prototype right now, or more, though).
I have no idea if they will be successful. These are, fundamentally, games I am making for me, this time. I hope they appeal. but I am working on them because *I* want to, and because I can afford to right now. There aren’t many times in a creative career in the games industry where you can do whatever the hell you want. Right now, for a little while, I have that, and frankly, I need it, mentally and emotionally. 🙂
That said, I think at least three of the things I rattled off are pretty mass market, at least based on the playtesting so far. SO I have my fingers crossed.
Some of the game design elements of SWG were outstanding, the aforementioned skill system, the organic economy, the player housing, the crafting and resource system. Why do you think that game developers have ignored these systems despite the cries from players to want to have these things in modern mmos?
I don’t think they have been ignored. The resource system in UO (much like the system in the original Thief, and in the original Sims) has been out there lon enough to go into the mix on a lot of things. I don’t know whether Notch knew anything about it or not, but the philosophy there is very similar. Second Life came by to talk to me very early in its history. Runescape is very much in the UO tradition. EVE also, and I know those guys were influenced by it. The housing has kind of set the bar that i think quite a lot of games try to reach. The GW2 guys, I know they were very inspired by UO and SWG. And of course, in Asia UO was WAY more influential than EQ. And of course, WoW has dancing. 😉
It’s not the mainstream current, partly because it’s alien to the way that devs have mostly worked, and because there hasn’t been a singular giant hit that fits.
But if you watch something like the anime Sword Art Online, it’s impossible not to see the way in which the dream of virtual worlds has a lot more in common with those design elements from UO and SWG than it does with simple hack n slashing. The pop culture conception of virtual worlds looks like a sandboxy world, not just a hack n slash.
On the changes and shutdown of SWG from vanilla to death: Did all of it just come down to a envy of what world of Warcraft had been able to achieve with normal “business” tenancies of trying to replicate that? Or was there a genuine desire to change the game for the better. (Albeit mostly ignoring the cries from Veterans)
I think it is important that people understand that it can be both at the same time. One can want the game to be better and also a bigger business success at the same time. And there are a lot of people involved in a decision like that, some with a mix of those feelings, some with one or the other.
What are your thoughts on ’emulators’ and would you ever consider assisting a non-profit emulator with sections of Coding that someone of your stature would have first-hand knowledge of?
I think emulators are ironically the only chance we have of preserving videogame history.
I also think I am bound by trade secret stuff and NDAs.
I also think my knowledge of the game I assume you mean (since I get asked if I can help SWGEmu about once a week) has mostly faded… it’s been ten years! I remember what I WANTED to do far better than what we actually DID.
Does it sadden you that MMOs unlike single player games are changed so much from their original designs or are taken offline now they no longer are playable as they were? It does me, a lot of them were work of arts.
Example: I still play Diablo 2 without an explansion once in a while and love it. I can’t do that with Everquest or World of Warcraft.
It’s funny, because I design worlds that are built to change. So if they didn’t change in response to players, that would actally be a failure. At the same time, I do miss what they were at certain times.
I guess the best analogy I can give is that it is like a kid. You miss what they were like at a certain age, but you want them to grow up and go out on their own. And there are phases of their growth where you kind of want to lock them in a room and not see them. 😉
There are so many questions I want to ask. I guess the most important is what are your priorities when creating an mmo? It seems that there are so many aspects that must be taken into consideration. Create various game systems. Provide permancence, creativity, collaboration and competition. Create an immersive, detailed world including the flora fauna, critters, weather, days nights etc. Create systems that support an economy or tune it for a more action oriented experience. Reward skill? Time? Both?
Sorry its a lot of questions I guess. DO you have an order you prioritize these aspects?
I am trying to think of how to put this in a way that doesn’t sound pretentious…
When I think about a game, to me in my head it feels like a lattice, or maybe a sphere made of lattices. Features and whatnot fit into this lattice, and I can “see” where a system can get deeper or shallower, and where a piece might make the shape fall apart if it is removed. (This is why cities and vehicles were delayed in SWG, compared to something that seemed trivial like dancing… dancing was a major “node” in the lattice and removing it would have meant the game broke; cities and vehicles were PAINFUL to delay, but the sphere didn’t fall apart).
How do I pick what the key nodes are? Well, I pick them based on function. I didn’t know that dancing and musicianship were going to be that important. But I did have a list of stuff that felt critical to represent from the movies and the EU. That stuff went into a “vision document” which was basically a 20 pager about the key elements of the game.
In the case of a sandboxy world, the top priority is actually always designing the sand. In UOs case that meant the resource system. In SWGs it meant the fractal terrain system and economy (those two are actually the same, in a sense, I’ll explain). Everything in each of those games started from those premises.
So in SWG, the fractal terrain was the thing that unlocked
– giant planets
– that could be built upon — in theory, even craters blown in it, terraformed, etc, though it never went quite that far.
– this unlocked stuff like politics (which were on my mind as Star Warsy bc of the prequel trilogy)
– and territory control (GCW!)
– the resource maps were ALSO based on the fractal tech, in a bunch of ways, including how they turned over
– which unlocked the shifting trade economy
Then we could stack the varied roles on top of that: Uncle Owens, Lukes, Hans, Oolas, Landos, etc.
The key in designing a sandbox is that simulation layer first, then layering the static content atop it. (We didn’t make enuf of that in SWG’s case, of course).
There were, I think, five key principles listed in the SWG doc… I posted them publicly during the beta period. I don’t remember them all, but thrilling adventure, the GCW, and community were among them.
From your responses so far, it sounds like you’d like to see a lot more online world creation kits than dev created online worlds. Am I reading you right?
Hurm. Not exactly. I want more diversity, more risks. I want to visit a world that doesn’t instantly feel familiar. I want to feel that thrill of “holy crap, this isn’t what I have played before!”
I think the way to get that is greater diversity. Tools is one way to accomplish that. It lowers costs, which encourages experimentation.
But the goal isn’t the tools, it’s what the tools enable… does that make sense?
I would like to know your thoughts on what Chris Roberts is currently doing with Star Citizen. Do you think that large amount of funds he has been able to achieve over this past year indicates a large playerbase that is wanting this type of sandbox world simulation gameplay, or is it a smaller “niche” with deep pockets?
Next, in regards to the world of Star Citizen, would this be the type of project you would be interested in working on at this time?
TBH, I have not paid that much attention to Star Citizen. That said, my impression is that a huge chunk of the money raised isn’t from crowdsourced funding but from regular investors?
I don’t know how much of the player attention on it is from the sandbox elements versus the wonderful memories of Wing Commander, either. When i think of the project, I think “space combat” first, not “sandbox world.” I could be wrong though, like I said, I haven’t paid that much attention.
Finally, what is your opinion on how F2 has affected the genre, and how long do you think (what seems to be) the current model of F2P WOW clones is sustainable?
Free to play is the present, and probably the future, for quite some time. I think there’s room for a mix of a la carte and tiered subs, but we shouldn’t expect “free, with upsells” to EVER go away. It widens the audience too much, and frankly, enables a much more accurate matchup between what a person is willing to pay and what they actually pay. With a flat sub, you miss out on all the people who were willing to pay, but less. You also miss out on GIANT amounts of money from people who want to make it their hobby and pay 100x the monthly sub. So it’s just a plain old better model for extracting dollars.
That said, of course it has distorting effects on the design. No question. I think you can design in an honorable fair way and take those into account. But in a world of clones, speed of extraction before your fickle playerbase vanishes is the top priority. You KNOW your game will not live long, so you maximize the drilling for dollars. And of course, maiximing it means the games lives even less time, as you piss of players.
A market glut of clones is NOT sustainable and never has been. Them ore similar the games in a market are, the less the market grows, and eventually contracts. That is where MMOs are right now. Worse, the idea of what the market is calcifies too. And players start to expect a more rococo version of what they have already played.
I actively worry that a truly creative innovative game brought to the market would get blown off by the MMO audience because it would be too different.
I don’t really have a question but I would like to say thank you for swg. It’s one of the best mmos ever made and probably the best crafting mmo ever. I, like many fans was sad with what the CE and NGE did to the game but while it lasted it was years ahead of it’s time. I’ve seen a lot of ppl giving you shit over your past mistakes but I hope you remember most people don’t tell you when you’re doing ( or have done ) great things. They just piss and moan about it once it’s time has past. Never let a few voices make you think they speak for everyone.
Keep up the good work!
Ok…i do have a questions….who did it. Who was really behind the change in swg. LA or smed 🙂
Thanks for the nice words.
Last year, I did get this lifetime achievement award thingy, so people have in fact said thank you in big ways, but it is always nice to hear!
As far as who drove the change… I wasn’t directly involved in it, but my sense is that it was not that simple. People were trying to find their way out of a tricky business situation, and collectively, that was the path that was chosen.
Have you seen/played either SWTOR or ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) and if so, what did/do you think of them (in a general non-critical sense of course) …?
I played SWTOR a little bit. A lot of good friends of mine were involved in making it. I didn’t think the narrative direction they were going was very fruitful — sort of the exact opposite of my personal aesthetic, so basically not really up my alley — but was eager to see how it worked out. I have not seen ESO, but that also has several good friends working on it.
IF say Disney came along, with the input of maybe Mr. Abrams or Blur Studios (or whomever you respect) and offered the opportunity to make SWG-2 , would you umm entertain the idea?
Nope. I was actually AT Disney, remember? 🙂 I am honestly rather burned out on Star Wars. Also, a lot of my creative juices these days are more about creating my own worlds and fictions rather than working in someone else’s. It is frustrating to me that I have never gotten to ship a game that was an original world. I’ve had at least a half dozen of those started and then shelved, ranging from wacky 50s scifi to New Weird giant cities to mythology-based stuff.
One of the games I am working on, the strategy one, is set in a new fantasy world I’ve been working on, with four cultures united in an uneasy Empire, always under threat from the strange peoples to the south… now at risk because the economic balance of the Empire is starting to shift. It’s been a lot of fun designing out stuff like the music styles for each of the cultures, the geography of the empire, and even what games they would play in a world like that. It’s not meant for an MMO (you’re supposed to play out the wars of succession) but I could easily see it being a setting for one.
I would like to write for games! I write; I play games; I play improv games on stage; I’ve read Theory of Fun; I have never designed my own game. I bet I should begin by writing interactive fiction, but I don’t know where to start brainstorming around to make for a good game and not just fiction that’s hard to page through. Thank you!
The most accessible way to start doing interactive fiction is probably Twine: http://www.gimcrackd.com/etc/src/
There is a very active Twine community making indie games now. Go find the forums where they hang out and start participating!
Okay so, you’re “burned out” on STAR WARS , eh? I find that notion impossible to fathom personally lol, but np i can respect that. So…..how about *Ultima* ?
Would you ever entertain the idea of ‘Ultima Online 2’ someday?
I suspect the name “UO2” is cursed. Call it something else? 😉
EA hasn’t called me up and asked. It’s really in their hands, right?
I do think that EA SHOULD be working on a renewed version of UO that captures the spirit of the original and makes use of modern tech. I’d definitely be more up for that than Star Wars. SWG was kind of an emotional rollercoaster experience on many levels, you know?
Lastly, looking ahead…far ahead into the future of ‘gaming’ : Could the “next level” (or “next next level” ) of MMORPG’s possibly become something like a more physical experience? Perhaps not to the extent of Neo in The Matrix ‘plugging-in’ , but perhaps to a greater extent than say using tangible peripheral ‘tools’ of Wii Tennis…?
As far as looking forward… I think MMOs on tablet hardware is coming on fast. After that, I think stuff like CastAR and Oculus Rift are clearly a place where MMOs will likely thrive.
WAY back at SOE, I had the wacky idea of why don’t we take an MMO engine on the PS2, attach a dance mat and the PS Move, and make an MMO you controlled that way. I mean, a ludicrously crude thing, but it might have been fun! But a game that requires TWO peripherals? Forget it, nobody would have the needed hardware…
I think that MMOs as we know them can’t go more casual realy, because the casual space has been filled up by very lightweight experiences. I wrote about that some in a blog post called “are virtual worlds over?” VR is the next big chance I see for a comeback. Imagine an MMO Skyrim in VR, right? And given that new tech like that will be adopted by core users first, it opens up the door for the deep immersive experiences again.
Venture capitalists starting pinging me about VR and AR ideas almost two years ago now. They always have an eye towards the future…
If benevolent gnomes came up with a development tool, database or inspirational book for the industry, what do you think would do the most good?
( or are there already more busy gnomes out there than a typical game designer can keep up with? )
If it were the RIGHT tool, maybe that.
Unity is the closest there is right now, but really, one of the biggest issues is that tools tend to have presumptions baked into them. Like, if I want to make a 3d game, Unity is great for them, but 2d games it has problems, because it was built with certain assumptions. People find a way, but it’s working a bit against the grain, if you know what I mean.
I also think the right book can make a big difference. I have been working on and off for almost ten years on this concept of game grammar, basically the idea that there are underlying rules underneath ALL games of ALL types, and if we can figure out what they are we can design better, communicate better, and experiment better. At this point a lot of people are working on that sort of problem, and if it gets solved, that can make a big difference.
Databases… enh. No, can’t think of what could be earth-shattering there. : 0
Back to current trends… Your last sentence is very interesting. (“I actively worry that a truly creative innovative game brought to the market would get blown off by the MMO audience because it would be too different.”) Do you believe that this is the current “feeling” with developers/publishers and why we keep getting the simple, shallow “disposable” games we keep seeing? Or, do you think it is just a greed factor of wanting to make quick “Fantasy Game #46” to cash in as fast as possible then toss it for the next?
Do you think that a success from some of the current indie projects will have any effect on the above mentioned feelings or mindset?
Well… you’d think there would be more games that spun off of The Sims, but there weren’t.
You’d think there would have been more games that spun off of Minecraft, but there aren’t. Mostly clones.
You’d think there would have been MMOs that tackled EVE’s market by now. Where are they?
How about Realm of the Mad God?
You get the idea.
I am probably a little cynical on this front because the MMO player community mostly ignored Metaplace because it wasn’t 3d, wasn’t a fantasy game, and “looked wrong.” I mean, even look at this thread: “can you help a SWG emu? Make SWg2? Make UO2?” The first question was about being forward looking, but most of you (sorry!) have asked about moving backwards, in a lot of ways.
That isn’t a knock on you… it’s just that I suspect the market is in a place where we have to take incremental steps. Like, say I had done Metaplace in 3d. Say it WAS a UO clone. And then say I had still had the building tools and scripting. THEN, I suspect you would have been into it. And we probably would have gotten MORE people who wanted to build out stuff, and maybe at some point we would have gotten the network of worlds we wanted. Instead, we got over 40,000 worlds made but pretty much nothing done on a big scale by anyone.
So… I do think the audience itself is in a conservative kind of place, conditioned to it by the huge budgets.
Back in the MUD days, when half of the muds on earth were Dikus, we used to moan about “stock mud syndrome.” You’d log into a new mud and find that all the areas were ones you could download off of FTP sites (gah, I almost typed “the Web,” but of course that wasn’t there yet!). What made them different from one another? More classes, more levels, more spells that were reskinned versions of the same spells as always. To me, MMOs kind of feel like that.
But the flip side is, when you go try something new, it’s almost like you are driving a car and the steering wheel is in the ceiling and the seats are bicycle seats. You start saying “why can’t this be more like WoW? I want WoW, but innovative.” Which is a bit of a trap…
I don’t have an answer. You tell me. If I got just a couple of million, would you actually play that game? It’s probably 2d, iso at best, you know? I suspect it wouldn’t matter if it was an awesome sandboxy world under it. You probably want GW2 graphics… which means I need $50m, not $2m.
And a Sandbox World does not start in the Stoneage – it has already a rich Lore (defined by the developers) as starting Point from where the Player go on playing.
Actually, one sandbox idea I have toyed with lately DOES start there.
What if instead of simulating physics, we simulated chemistry? We have enough knowledge to do it. We could have resources that were actually real world materials. We could use a combo of a resource chemistry system and an off the shelf physics system to do simulation that hasn’ t been seen before. Players would start with old tech, and could actually *replicate the invention process.* Find saltpeter, develop black powder…? There really isn’t anything stopping this but a failure of imagination.
Now THAT would be a skill tree. 🙂
Thanks for the last answer. But I want to ask you a question about demographics…
It seems to me that the MMORPG genre is designed for, and appeals to, a very narrow demographic these days: single, lower middle to middle class Caucasian and Asian males aged 16 to 40. But how do we make the game appeal to non-traditional demographics? Elderly people, or girls, or housewives, or professionals, or African-Americans? I don’t see many play today in the newer games….not like I did when I played SWG and CoH. What kind of features can MMORPGs offer to better attract a diverse playerbase?
Well, step one is get rid of the casual sexism and racism baked into the actual games. I’ve often said that the core narrative of MMOs is in many ways colonialist. See this article I wrote ages ago: https://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/30/the-evil-we-pretend-to-do/
Step two is likely reduce the emphasis on violence. Right now, it’s 90% of the games.
MMOs are more diverse than people think. Roblox is one of the biggest in the world right now. Lots of young girls play on Minecraft servers, which are basically being run as personal MMO worlds. Club Penguin has a very diverse set of kids playing it. There have been a TON of very successful MMOs or MMO-like things for the younger audience with huge female populations. Gaia, Meez, WeeWorld, etc. The fact is that the folks here are a minority — most people today play MMOs as kids and graduate from ever playing them again. I am pretty sure there are more people playing on the kids’ worlds than all the adult MMOs combined.
The next barrier is timesink. A lot of the qualities that MMOs offer can now be had in a very lightweight way through other forms of entertainment. A housewife can play an entire session of Candy Crush Saga, including chatting with friends, in less time than it takes to get through a single loading screen for a big MMO. So what does an MMO offer that is unique enough to overcome that obstacle? Everywhere offers the social connection. There’s games you can play together all over the place now.
The subject matter needs to get a lot broader. Make MMOs about the kind of worlds that marginalized communities want to see, and they will play. Where’s the MMO inspired by African culture? Latin American culture? And I don’t mean as simple acts of cultural appropriation to make a zone seem “exotic,” but really and truly inspired?
My first question is there a way to have F2P games that maintain the integrity of the game? To be more precise games that doesn’t essentially sell game play? I’ve always been some what of a purist and disliked even “cheesing” cheap plays in a game like John Madden football. I feel all items even cosmetics should be earnable in game without outrageous grinds. How do you balance game economy, profitable cash shops and game integrity?
Yes, of course you can make it so that everything can be earned even though it is sold. The question is whether you will make enough money. I think the answer is going to depend on cost structure, etc. Fundamentally, only two things work as virtual goods: short-circuiting time, and getting something impossible to get any other way. So eliminating all grind and all exclusivity means that most likely, no one will pay for anything you sell. Is there a sweet spot? Probably…
I think the world of CCGs has a lot of lessons on this front. They have managed to balance a microtransaction based model with an ever-expanding game and not piss everyone off.
Do you think it’s time for MMORPG’s to consider subscriptions more on par with Netflix/Hulu Plus price range or tiered subscriptions?
Consider what cable TV does. You pay a sub fee, but once there, there are packages for different levels of value. There’s also purchasing stuff on demand.
If a cable company worked like an f2p game, you’d get to watch some channels for free. You could pick up extra shows for one time fees. You would be able to pay $1000 to get all the seasons of Game of Thrones all the way to the end of the series delivered instantly On Demand.
If an f2p game worked like a cable system, you would ply mostly for free, and be able to unlock access to zones or classes or modes of play for an enhanced regular fee. And you’d be able to pay to get a specific epic instance adventure or storyline you wanted access to.
There’s room for finding creative ways to mix these business models, for sure.
Do you think that we will ever see true Dungeon Master’s in MMORPG’s? One that has tools to be able to create content on the fly and people working in a dedicated full time position.
As far as DMs… you DID see that, kinda. We had stuff like that happen in both UO and SWG. It was expensive to do, though, took a lot of effort. You also had Neverwinter Nights, which did the same on a smaller scale. Used to happen on muds all the time. It’s labor-intensive, is all. On SWG there was even eventually the Storyteller system, which started giving some powers to the players to do it themselves….
Anyways, i guess the point is: Mr. Koster…If You build it, they will come. Will they not?
Maybe…
I actually think that Richard & the Portalarium guys stole a fair amount of potential thunder there. As we have seen in some threads here, it takes a knowledgeable fan to know what I brought to UO… and the Ultima brand is way more powerful than mine. So Lord British can drown me out and suck up all those potential pledgers. 🙂
More power to ’em, of course, I have lots of friends there too, including Richard and now Starr, of course.
Permanently revoking pvp for a pk? As a person who has loved pve and loves pvp, I think that was a terrible idea. Further you seem to have no faith and or vision for making a working pvp system. Have you looked at Age of Wushu and what has been done there? How a risk/reward, crime and punishment system can create a civil FFA world?
You, and our other western developers can do so much more than tentative, “We don’t want anyone upset” approach we’ve been seeing the last few years. Heck WoW is starting to look hardcore compared to what’s been released recently.
I do believe in a crime/punishment system. But everything we tried did fall prey to new accounts and killers who just didn’t care. If they have no emotional attachment to losing (e.g., don’t give a shit) then there isn’t any in-game punishment you can offer up. I don’t know if you were around for it, but I tried for a LONG time to get that balance right in SWG. Bounty systems became high score tables. Rewards were claimed by dummy accounts. Most everything we tried became a tool for the bad guys. And the good guys literally had no way to win, because the bad guys could just come back the next day, over and over, and just wear your spirit down.
I should give a fuller description of Outcasting, though, because what i said only covers a fraction of the original idea.
The juries would have been players, and they would have been tied to territory. So players take a territory, then crimes within that territory would be reported to the local authorities IF the victim chose to. They would decide based on the logs whether to remove the “license to kill.”
From there, we talked about two ways of doing that… remove it globally, but allow local territories to re-enable it; or remove it locally only.
One would be a safe world with wild areas where the local governments liked it to be wild. The other would a wild world, with safe areas where the local governments liked it to be safe. And of course, if you PKed someone who was playing along and enjoyed it, you wouldn’t get reported in the first place.
Age of Wushu is a game from Asia. Audiences there are WAY more tolerant of PvP than here. Way way more. That is a business reality factor that has to be taken into account…
I actually think SWGs PvP system with TEFs worked pretty well. WoW’s system is basically TEFs layered onto geographical RvR.
When creating a virtual world, do you ever toy with the idea of non-heteronormative social structures? There is a queer gaming convention at berkley this month. As a feminist, I find video games cling to gender norms and discourse like their life depended on it. While simultaneously attempting to take us to another place. It always feels a little counter productive.
Penny for your thoughts on this?
Oh yeah. I even had in my book (Theory of Fun) the proposal that virtual worlds should randomize sex at character creation, or allow only two slots, one of each, that sort of thing. And it wasn’t a new idea even then, there had been discussion on MUD-Dev of other ways to force players to have a wider point of view.
Gender, of course, we don’t code in — the player can roleplay or express whatever they like, and there is a LONG tradition of that in muds. But as you say, the norming forces are VERY strong. Add in the casual use of homophobic slurs in the slang, and… ugh.
In many muds, we saw sexes beyond two, including asexual, hermaphroditic, third sex, ambiguous, etc. These were there in order to provide for a broader expression of gender. A lot of that has been completely lost in later virtual worlds, with of course stuff like Second Life or Furcadia to point at as supporting a diverse community.
I highly suggest tracking down the book MY TINY LIFE by Julian Dibbell for a glimpse into the crazy awesome stuff that was lost in the transition from muds to MMOs. I think you may even be able to get a free ebook download of it.
Well, even if such a game would come out it does not necessarily mean i would play it bcs that would depend on if my friends play it too and that is a Major Problem of any MMOrpg that comes out these days.
Social Bonds pull you back into the same old crap all the time after the “Honeymoon” is over…
In the end you have only time to play on MMOrpg at the time!
SWG had way shorter session lengths than EQ did at the time, and I counted that as a big success. It was because you could play aspects of the game while offline — checking in on harvesters, etc. Basically, you could play SWG sort of like Farmville, in small sips rather than big gulps.
The shorter session thing is what unlocks more casual play, and opens up that audience and also the problem you describe. As long as playing an MMO means getting married, you’re going to have trouble getting new stuff sampled and large groups moving over. It’s another reason why you need a big budget, to force market awareness and make something “a must-play experience!” Otherwise, yeah, the lock-in factor means you will have trouble building audience.
You made a great game with SWG, one of the best of all time. However, I don’t think a game like that would be successful in the present tense. You had an extremely hard core group of players that were weened on UO, DAOC and EQ. Today’s players aren’t used to that environment and would be hard pressed to wrap themselves in a total sandbox environment. I love rotary telephones but I doubt I could sell one today. We will always have fond memories of yesteryear, but in fact, that’s where they belong.
Then you’re stuck with the clones. 🙂
I think that you actually have BETTER odds, in this market, of aiming for a niche and deeply satisfying them in a way that makes them willing to pay, possibly more than they would elsewhere, in order to get the experience they want.
1. I would like to point out that your second point is not based on F2P it is based on Freemium which is not the same thing. A F2P game offers its entire game for free and makes its money off of cash shop fluff/buff and vanity items.
1) at least among developers, F2P and freemium mean the exact same thing. I have never heard the distinction you are making. Both mean “offer a large chunk for free, upsell additional stuff.” Unless you mean the distinction between having a sub tier and not having one? That’s really just an arbitrary convention. Lots of F2P models have “club membership” type things for periodic fees…
2. A very important question is brought up by this post of yours. Do you even look at the MMO industry as a whole or just on the western market? It appears that most if not all western designers and companies don’t know about the market as a whole. Right here on this site a recent article is being spoken about where it states that the F2P market is going to top 2.5 billion in 2013. That is massive, its far larger than the P2P market is. The idea that a F2P game may not make enough money seems almost like an insane thought if its coming from someone with a grasp on the market.
Furthermore, the Asian F2P market is larger and generates more money, so the next question would be why doesn’t the western market follow it with the same kind of micro-transactions?
2) Hang on, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that F2P doesn’t make money. I said it is MORE effective at making money. And that is why it is dominates, and will continue to…
I’ve been following the F2P market since LONG before people in the West had ever heard of it. 🙂 I am very aware of what you say, and don’t see anything I disagree with in what you said… so… what did I say above that sounded like I was disagreeing?
Another question I had goes into community hooks. We’ve seen the elimination of what made MMORPG’s social experiences even for someone like myself who’s not a heavy social gamer… downtime, interdependency, travel, challenging content, slower advancement, or just general inconveniences. Everquest was like a bit extreme but even SWG had battle fatigue to bring players back into town. Do you think these may return to a lesser degree or do you think we’re stuck with games that are cater more convenience and instant gratification because majority of gamers were introduced that way vs. some of older vets who are bit more tolerant?
How difficult was it to build a crafting system with the depth of SWG?
1) I argued in favor of downtime here: https://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/socialization.shtml
And of interdependence here: https://www.raphkoster.com/2008/04/22/interdependent-systems/
And of inconveniences here: https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/20/do-auction-houses-suck/
And of interaction here: https://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/09/forcing-interaction/
Basically, you’re stating a lot of stuff I have said for a LOOONG time.
These are important social architecture tools. In the name of making the games more accessible and more fun, we removed them, but in the process lose subtle social dynamics. It’s a line to walk. We want shorter sessions, why not have teleporting? Because travel is a chance to converse or bond. Overcoming obstacles together is what drives that bonding, and yeah, some of those obstacles are tedium.
I do think it’s hard for someone weaned on the quick gratification to get into a game that doesn’t offer it. They probably bounce off. Which is why I said above, it might be better to target a niche.
Assuming that even the niche hasn’t gotten spoiled by dessert before dinner, if you know what I mean.
As far as the difficulty of building a crafting system like that… the key challenge is learning to think in the right ways. If you start there, it’s not that hard. I mean, a tough balancing problem, but not like an insane complex thing.
SWG crafting started with the idea that we should extend UO’s resource concept. The first thing was, we should have turnover. Thenm let’s have resource types in an inheritance system instead of simple types. Then let’s add stats to them.
Once we had that set of concepts, it’s really a matter of data. Lots of speccing out pieces, effects, etc. The idea of blueprints fell out of the concept of use-based XP. That ended up not being in the final game, but the idea of it is why we did blueprints. Plus it dovetailed with the notion of offline play.
So these pieces all fit together based on initial vision items, and then the rest arose naturally.
And when I say naturally, what I mean is MONTHS of painstaking speccing, balancing, and scripting work by Reece Thornton. We kept coming to him worried it had gotten too big and complicated… maybe he’d added too many stats? Too many components? It came in late, but it came in very nicely 🙂 He deserves full credit for how the system ended up working.
Do NOT let yourself be fooled into thinking that a sandbox must be for a niche crowd. It doesn’t have to be. Just for gods sake realize the mistakes made with SWG and don’t repeat them, or come close to them.
Also, sandbox does not have to be 100% sandbox, it can have some themepark. These two ideas should not be mutually exclusive. One can have a roller-coaster without losing the freedom of a sandbox.
I actually think sandboxes are MORE mass market than Dikus. No question, and I have always said that.
BUT I also think the TRUE mass market found its satisfaction with much lighterweight games. Farmville is a highly simplified version of the same mechanic that was harvesting in SWG.
And I also think that the current MMO audience all expects stuff that plays like WoW, or at least has its production values.
So when I say odds of success, what I mean are, which way are you more likely to succeed? Trying to get a small amount of money, and making something that targets a known audience and doesn’t have to tick every box? Or getting a huge pile of money and trying to make something that competes with those expectations, while still being innovative?
The latter is just way harder to pull off. EQNext is trying, so is ArcheAge, etc. But I bet that something like Realm of the Mad God breaks even faster, You know?
As far as sandbox not needing to be 100% sandbox, of course not. SWG was SUPPOSED to have a lot of types of static content. We never got most any of it. For example see https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/04/30/dynamic-pois/
With crowd funding being a something newly available in the game development field, would you consider doing a crowd-funded MMO or other game?
And if so, how much would/does it take to do something “worth doing” and could it also be a factor in getting outside financing for a larger project (since people who crowd fund are neither stock/shareholders nor investors, and thus not “at the table” in terms of being an impediment to returns on outside investment)?
My main worry is that outside of Star Citizen, there hasn’t been any crowdfunding effort anywhere near large enough to make an MMO with, especially not to today’s graphics level. Shroud of the Avatar is doing some interesting endruns around that issue, I must say.
Successful crowdfunding does increase the ability to get cash from other sources, no question.
The other thing, for someone like me who is currently just me and not a team, is that crowdfunding pitches today have a lot sunk into them from the get-go. They are mostly for finishing things.
But sure, if the time was right, and it looked like it would succeed and enough money could be raised, I would totally do it. I HAVE thought about doing it. 🙂
As far as amount… Just the platform for Metaplace cost like $2.5m to make. The content for a full game… you need $10m maybe? Tooling has gotten cheaper, for sure. And there’s ways to reduce it. But yeah, it’s not cheap, you know?
What is the difference between a huge MMO and a smaller, boutique one? Budget can’t be the only limiting factor to an MMO’s success, and player count seems like a result more than an actual goal. Is it subject matter? Level of detail? I don’t think those are the only criteria, obviously. Or is it more a function of specifically targeting a (relatively) small segment of the market and designing THE game for them? If that’s the case, it sounds a lot like EVE is a wildly successful boutique game for people that like economically-driven PVP sandboxes, no?
All of those play into it. Appeal of the theme and concept. Accessibility of interface. Complexity of systems. All that.
Budget does matter too. A smaller budget would be wise to target smaller audience and consider themselves lucky if they hit it big (cf World of Tanks). A big budget chasing an inaccessible, complex, outre theme? Wasted money, right, you’ll fail to get enough users.
And yes, Eve is exactly a case of a small budget satisfying a niche, and growing over time. I think a huge part of Eve’s success arises out of it being targeted at an audience of highly aggressive young males who love to crush in guilds. 😉
It took a looong time for Eve to build up to that audience, though.That used to be a much smaller group of people, cf Shadowbane.
the term F2P is based off the original use, by Nexon back when you were making UO (I believe it was called Kingdom of the Winds), yes as you can see I have been following it for a long time as well. Freemium however is a recent invention by both Turbine and Sony when LoTRo and EQ2 ended their exclusive P2P model. In Asia, Freemium is near non-existent outside of Japan. You are either paying a sub, or the game is free with a cash shop. The market data has already shown that Freemium games make little compared to F2P.
Which makes sense. You have a game that is sub based, its losing players fast so the idea to save the game and get its popularity back is to cut the game into pieces offer parts of it for free and think you are going to somehow get people to want to sub again for the entire game…that was losing players because it wasn’t good enough to pay for? never made sense to me. went on a tangent there.
Nexon started going with free models big time with Kart Rider, not KotW, far as I know. The business model for the earlier MMOs such as Lineage, KotW and Dark Ages was something else again, because it was tied into licensing fees with PC baangs (internet cafes). Not the simple model we know today. For a while, subs were even subsidized by the apartment complexes in Seoul! It was a perk (“move in here, you get a swimming pool and all the Mabinogi you can play!”)
It seemed like you were saying that F2P only sold cosmetic items, and that is definitely not the case.
I agree that the idea of having a sub tier alone doesn’t work. That is not what I was referencing. I mean stuff like having an f2p game, full on — then have things like “join the elite club for $X a month, get a coin stipend and access to these N perks!” That model is alive and well and works fine. It isn’t as common as it could be, actually, mostly because you can usually upsell those perks directly for a much higher price. But it’s friendlier to consumers in some ways than going with a pure f2p.
Personally, I think there are enough fans of your work and virtual world design philosophy, that were you to announce involvement in a crowd-funded endeavor, the crowd-funding would do very well.
Especially in terms of a full-featured MMO, in the classic sense of the word, because the market space is there and more or less open. Plenty of light-weight games being put out these last few years as you mentioned, but not much for people that want more than that. (Usually, it is hard to identify a place in the market space to be successful, here, the market space is there, but none of the larger “players” want to put money behind it).
Well then, maybe I will have to look into it. Buy enough of my little games so I can spend time building an MMO prototype enough to crowdfund with. 🙂
Do you still keep track of anything going on in the MUD world? And if so, any recommendations on a game to check out?
I still play Armageddon MUD now and then – it’s actually the game where me and my wife met before getting married. I also remember chatting you up back on Legend MUD when you were Ptah, where we discussed the player conversation system (the one carried over to SWG). When I first saw the SWG conversation system, I was like.. hmmmm, finally someone managed to steal Legend MUD’s idea. Then I later found out you were the same guy from Legend MUD.
Haha! Wow, how awesome to see you here 🙂 Someone who played Legend! It’s still running, you know, you could go play it again. 🙂
I poke my nose in occasionally, but do not keep up with muds regularly. So I don’t have any other recommendations 🙁 There’s the Iron Realms stuff, still going, has always been good.
What are your feelings on the state of communication and expression between players in current MMOs? Early on, SWTOR didn’t even launch with chat bubbles. Are there other MMOs out there that you’re aware of, that have matched or exceeded the level of expression you were able to get out of a simple “say” in Legend MUD and SWG?
As far as I know, the only other VW that had something like LegendMUD and SWG was There.com. I lifted some elements of There’s system for SWG actually. 🙂
And we did have elements of that same stuff in Metaplace too… gone now, of course.
A lot of SWGs chat bubble implementation is now basically the default. We actually had a bit of a battle with some folks over chat bubbles on SWG, they fought against the way we did them…
But what I haven’t seen to that degree is stuff like the moods system affecting character idles, automatic parsing of the text and emoticons to play animations and tie in emotions (inspired by MS Comic Chat, but we went way farther), eye tracking (we got that piece from There), the depth of say alternates, all that stuff.
It makes a difference, and makes the place seem way more real and human. But of course, it’s seen as a frill compared to the combat system — or likely, never even considered at all.
Second Life has people able to extend the chat system in various ways, and there are “RP HUDs” you can put on your avatar.
What is your opinion horizontal progression vs. vertical progression? I have always believed that hard vertical levels have been a limiter on game play due to the nature of advancement dominating the game world and play time and style. Combined with streamlined game play your spend tons of money worlds and quest but being so easy you have players completing this content in days to weeks making most of your content throw away. In the design of quest hubbing majority of your world also thrown away because it’s out leveled.
I have always strongly favored horizontal.
https://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/16/do-levels-suck/
https://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/22/do-levels-suck-part-ii/
https://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/databasedeflation.shtml (this from 1999!)
The way I have expressed it is that power differentials between players cause a multitude of issues, and it’s largely from slavishly following the levelling model in D&D rather than the one that Bartle had originally.
I also disagree with quest hubbing, of course. I don’t think an MMO should be a series of themepark rides in a sequence. It’s nice to get on a ride, but the value of an MMO is in the place itself.
Did you ever think of a “character-engine” that emulates the reactions of NPCs in a game? Do you think, such a thing is possible?
If you mean, AI that has deeper and more plausible reactions, yes, of course. The big challenge there was, even going back to UO, whether we should invest effort in NPCs, or instead, shift the roles NPCs historically had over to players, to allow more roles for players to play in the game.
In other words, do you work on awesome blacksmith AI, or enable PC blacksmiths instead?
In UO we had 275 ways for an NPC to just say “hello.” They were broken out by level of intelligence, nice vs rude, and some other axis I don’t recall. There were component-based libraries of knowledge that could be attached and detached from a given NPC. And all NPCs had basic stuff like whether or not they showed respect to high level players, ability to give directions, likes and dislikes, and more. I wrote a lot about this here (sorry to keep pointing you all to old articles, but I am realizing how much people don’t know about the work I have done in documenting stuff like this!):
https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/
The underlying resource system, which I also wrote about a lot (google “uo resource system”) was meant to hook into AI, so that NPCs could be even smarter.
By the time we got to SWG, the emphasis was instead on having players take those roles. So NPCs were pretty barebones.
2. I believe that item-progression is a big problem in MMOs – some kind of a dead end. I don’t want to go into the whole casual vs hardcore debate, time sink, etc. What is your take on this?
I dislike an overemphasis on equipment in general. I super extra dislike all forms of binding. I prefer equipment to be disposable — still valuable, but not effectively a permanent buff or whatever. I have many reasons — I want players to engage in trade. I want to have narrow power differentials.
3. When you think of video games in the 80s and 90s and compare them to current games. Isn’t it a little disappointing, that there have been only very few new ideas?
I started making games back then. I am still a total neophiliac for new mechanics. Of course, everything was being invented back then. Now a new mechanic is actually a new genre.
I actually look at games in terms of mechanics that way, that’s what game grammar is about (for a jillion articles, see https://www.raphkoster.com/tag/game-grammar/)
All the new games I am doing are NEW mechanics. I am not making “a platformer” “a match three” “a shooter.” I am only interested in inventing NEW GAMES. So I have five of them going right now, and am pretty confident I can keep inventing them at a rapid rate 🙂
ug. *thousand-yard-stare of a burnt-out ex-mathematican who once had delusions of being the one who was going to invent such a grammar*
How did we get into a situation where video games in general have such sophisticated math behind the rendering of graphics, yet so little modeling/simulation of elements like motive and story? Is it as simple as graphics being judged more quickly/harshly by consumers than the dynamics of worlds? Is there a bias from other entertainment that stories and characters are passively observed rather than interacted with?
You’ll be glad to know that there has been significant progress made on game grammar. Not by me necessarily. See this site: http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/
I do think that as games started to tilt to story, the pursuit of emchanics fell way off. The pursuit of new systems and models fell off. As amazing an achievement as Half-Life was, it also set a template. The way in which Nintendo games control everything the player does, also set a template. And so on. And that template leads through FMV games and right to the heavily narrative experiences we see today.
There’s a FANTASTIC presentation by Matt Worch on this. If you are interested and have an hour to kill, I highly recommend it: http://www.worch.com/2013/04/24/talking-to-the-player-how-cultural-currents-shape-and-level-design/
Since playing EQ and SWG for years nothing has filled the void because i refuse to settle for mediocrity do you think the days of an Epic mmo are gone?
Kind of depends on the definition of epic. There’s certainly some stuff that looks epic to me. How possible do you think what I kind of call quest threading is possible? To explain in more detail questing that’s based on random pool of quest triggered by random NPC encounters and based on decisions made. For example you interact with a NPC and compatible for that NPC quest #2 out say 100 or so is an option. Taking this quest and depending on your success/failure + choices your limited to another random quest from another pool of compatible quest carrying the story. Sorry for the jargon but random quest that kind of thread your own story vs. going to an NPC and getting the same question as everyone else.
I actually implemented a quest system like that in UO. The data set SUCKED, but basically:
1st NPC wanted something. They would tell you to either
fetch it
kill someone
deliver something
You get to the target, and if it was a deliver or a fetch, they would have a chance of also asking for a fetch or deliver or kill, and so on. And these would chain.
The NPCs actually generated the stuff as you quested, so the quest was specific just to you (though other players could interfere and break it). So if they sent you to find a wizard to the north, I’d spawn the wizard just for you once you got there.
The problem was, I stuffed it with what I had… which was boring shit like shoes, pieces of wood, a chair. 🙂 So it was decidedly not epic. But it kinda worked. We yanked it when they just didn’t feel fun.
Do you believe that the MMORPG genre will grow beyond the path laid by World of Warcraft? I know MMO’s in general have grown a lot but it seems that we’re been stuck in 2004 when it comes to actual MMORPG’s.
Yes, of course the genre will grow. But it might need to die back first.
On that note, that seems like a good place to end this!
Thanks so much for all the questions, debate, and interest. I had a lot of fun, I miss talking to players. 🙂
If you are at all interested in what I am up to, I suggest you follow me on Twitter @raphkoster or follow my blog (https://raphkoster.com) or the mirror on Tumblr (http://raphkoster.tumblr.com/).
You’re defintely talking me into looking at MMOs again… hooboy. We’ll see. 🙂
