My "Vision" of future MMOs.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
If you are reading my blog and have not gotten the chance to check out Tobold’s discussion of what the “vision” is within MMOs and how it must change to accommodate the masses, you should do so here. It’s a great read.
So this post for today will show my views on this topic as inspired by the many sources across the net. In advance, thanks for bringing this up Tobold.
The current generation of MMO’s currently all have flavor of the “vision.” You create a character, that character completes task of varying difficulty level which in turn raises his character level through either experience or gear. As we see with WoW, EQ, LotRO, and many other games on the market, this is the normal formula. This formula also leads to an end game which leaves very little to do other than try to advance your character.
I will use WoW as an example as it is the most recent game I have had end-game experience. In WoW, as described by a poster within another blog I read, the end game is broken into 3 distinct areas; Raiding, Dungeons, and PvP. I will take from another poster and state that the end game is Raiding and “2 bastard step children.” While Blizzard made strides forward to make dungeons and PvP a little more entertaining they are not nearly as polished as Raiding. Heroic dungeons, in my opinion, are just a rehash of old content. I went through each of them and simply had the view of “oh same boss, one new ability and hits insanely hard” or “wow this is hard, but your average casual (read this as a lot of my friends) wouldn’t be able to do it.” World PvP turned out to be a joke and other than reputation doubling items (honor hold) and spirit shards or whatever they are called, there was very little point in doing it.
WoW never really touched on crafting or economy to the point where it was viable to do only that. WoW has always been an adventure-centric game. Everything would revolve around adventuring (my term for questing, raiding, or doing dungeons). While some of adventuring could be profitable (doing quests after hitting the level cap), much of it could be a complete money sink. At the epitome of my raiding career as a healer, I was dropping close to 100-150 gold a night to finance the need for consumables, repairs, and other necessities for raiding. Once I became a tank (I played a druid), I spent close to 100 gold a night. All of my other time was spent gathering or enchanting to fund these raid nights.
Throughout WoW, one of my enjoyable activities was always crafting. I loved making gear for friends and for myself or even to sell. But the problem here was justifying spending the gold on crafting as opposed to adventuring. WoW made simply no way to make money in crafting (not gathering but true crafting) and if a true money making source was found they would squelch it. Crafting was never meant to be an occupation in WoW. You were forced into the role of adventurer.
Now my views are these. What if a game took 3 distinct areas and allowed a player to do truly what they wanted to do? In my “vision,” they are adventuring, crafting-based jobs, and economy-based jobs. Make this virtual world work just as the real world does.
Crafters make goods, whether they are needed for adventuring, used for fun leisure activities, used for storage of other goods (building guild halls or houses for example), or be completely aesthetic and mundane. These crafters can then take on the role of “seller” or sell the goods to a retailer (someone who would take the goods and resell them) an economy based “career path”. Another possible economy based position could be that of a lender or banker to help fund those who spend their time raiding. Much of this is seen in the game “Second Life” and could easily be applied to MMORPG.
Now let’s explain my diagram here. Each of these areas of the game would have tasks, quests, deeds, whatever you want to call them. At lower levels, each of these tasks looks at helping the “main” profession of adventuring. Each of these tasks, whether they be for crafting, adventuring, or economy provide experience to that player. Just as monster kills give the player experience so should crafting, doing lending transactions, or selling a good. At some point in the game, the end game possibly, the tracks become interdependent, but a key facet to this is not making them interdependent too soon. This is one of the major gripes I have heard from many players in LotRO as the crafting professions are far too interdependent at lower levels. Also, somewhere, further down the line comes a “convergence point” where a player who has been a crafter his whole “life” decides he wants to become an adventurer. Now this does not necessarily need to occur after a player masters any one of the tracks (which is somewhat implied in the drawing). After a player has accomplished what he wants in each track you come up with your final state which may be ever evolving.
Now let’s take that end state, that final character someone has created and drop them into a persistent world. Where actions have consequences, monsters stay defeated (at least for awhile) and the player has a real affect on the world, but make it forgiving enough to handle situations brought on when you appeal to the masses. On top of that, let’s add a persistent PvP environment that resets maybe once a month or so. Have it so the reigning PvP “lord” or main PvP guild has access to the “PvP castle in the special PvP land.” You see where I am going with this. Throw on top of that, a true global economy across however many factions you add into the game. Let the factions interact in ways other than burying an axe into the forehead of the other faction. Hell let them speak to one another (if they have the proper language skill of course). Let the player base form alliances, treaties, or wars. As Tobold states in the virtual world there should be “…lots of challenges to overcome, things to achieve, but these aren’t so linear from easiest to hardest any more. There is no more defined ‘top’ to reach no more ‘end-game’…”
There should be “levels” of difficulty, but difficult in different ways and the player base should have some type of input onto how these rank. The world should be an evolving one where the storyline, events caused by or with players, and the over all experience drives the game as opposed to pre-determined outcomes. The player base must have some type of input in order to appeal for long periods of time to the masses and not just to the hardcore MMO raiders out there. Make the game less of “you must accomplish this to be considered an accomplished player” to “you CAN accomplish this to be considered an accomplished player, but you can do it a hundred different ways.” Give the player CHOICE. Make the player make real decisions that can affect the virtual world because if the choice has no real consequence it’s not really a choice, but again it must be forgiving to a point
So now you have seen my input on the “Vision”. What is yours?
Until we speak again, happy adventuring,
NewBreed
PS. If you would like to use any of my graphics, you are more than welcome to, just please send me an email telling that you are and a link to your blog or site.
Labels: Gaming, LOTRO, MMO, rants, World of Warcraft, WoW
wow, you must be a professional presenter or something heh, j/k
nice graphics, I never analyzed it like that before.
Oh my vision is something more open ended, close to what you are talking about, but basically there is no end game to speak of really, no level cap to reach, I don't know, an ever-evolving game where you are always changing, interacting, etc...
Close sean...close. I am a consultant lol. I do agree with a more open ended game though I still think there needs to be some type of end state. Somewhere your character hits a big brick wall and can't go further until they accomplish something.
Interesting concepts. Obviously needs a lot of fleshing out, and the world has to be able to cope if there isn't adequate representation in any area.
Example: Maybe very few people want to be bakers in the game world, but baked bread is a relevant item in the game (for other crafting, or healing like food is in WoW, or something). The game has to keep functioning without very many player bakers.
So it’s the inverse of you CAN do these things, but no body HAS to do these things.
The other point I would make is that while what you point out has a very high cool factor, it is extremely complex. These interactions and alternate trees (diverging and remerging, etc.) increase the complexity by several orders of magnitude.
Blizzard has enough problems with developing their fairly straight forward game system (look at how many bugs and exploits are always present, balance issues, and features they want to have but don't). This game would be a bear to develop.
In short, it would be really expensive to make. And with no guarantee of successful development, or even financial success when done.
Thus I'm not surprised that SOE, Blizzard, etc. tend to take the 'easy' roads.
But it would be really cool if someone could do it.
Hmm, although interesting, is there even one remotely new idea here? I have been reading the exact same thing since we were playing TrekMUSH -- the only difference being that the players DID influence the world in that game of course. I can tell you what our industry suffers the most from -- designers and pundits whose only real gaming experience has been some PS2 and WoW. Clearly WoW is the 800 lb Gorilla in the room, but it's quite clear that games that are as realistic as you've described are really expensive to make, and usually just aren't fun. Most players would rather play real life than simulate it. Otherwise wouldn't WoW be behind games with real crafting and such, like EQ2 and Vanguard, LOTRO, AO, etc.
For better or worse, I think the future is either Free to Play games, integrating online games with our phones and tv, or some combination of the two.
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