Bad Design: Making Your Own Content Obsolete
Content creation is widely considered the most time consuming and costly area of MMO/MUD development. I agree with this. In graphical MUDs, you have animations, mob AI, scripting, zone design, and all the additional graphics and visual effects that go along with zones, powers, items, etc. These are very expensive. In text MUDs, you have to craft a story, you have tons of writing to do, and all of it has to weave together in a legible, clear, enjoyable way. The creative aspects of all that writing take a lot of time. Then on top of that, you have the minutiae of making all the rooms, linking them, describing the tiny details so they don’t seem ignored or drab, and all that.
So bearing this in mind, why do so many developers deliberately make their own content obsolete? And why do they often do it at such a rapid clip? The trend these days is for games to encourage you to race to the cap and then sit. Then they want you to make alts, or farm gear. Soon enough, the population is top heavy at the level cap, and nobody visits 90% of the game. If someone makes a “real newbie” character, everywhere they go is vacant.
Tish Tosh wrote a long and very good blog post about this over on Tish Tosh Tesh . I read it and commented there, so if you want even more commentary of this sort please read his post and check the comments.
As I noted in response to his post:
The way you preserve your old world is you make it so your entire game is fun and always relevant. You do not put the entire emphasis of your game on being cap level and then raiding till you die. You create fun things to do in the game that are not even connected to level.
This seems so obvious to me. I do not believe I am the wisest and most brilliant game designer out there. There have to be many other developers who understand this as well. Some readers might say, “Well, that’s easier said than done. What exactly do you recommend?” Well, here come some standard recommendations that not only help here, but help with a million other MUD/MMO problems:
1) Player Housing. Once you let people customize their own part of the world, they will invest hundreds upon hundreds of hours on it. It will be a constant project. If you give them things they can find and use from all over the world inside their house, they’ll make use of every inch of your game world. And when they want to change something, or decorate a friend’s house, they’ll be right back again scouring the world for this or that little nick nack.
2) Mini Games. Make them! People will play them with other friends and have a blast. I’ll name a few from Threshold : Trial Arcanus, Quail Hunting, Saber Dueling, Fishing (and make it an actual mini game – not just click a button and then click another button), Chess, Poker, 5 Card Draw, Rock-Paper-Scissors. I am just one guy, not a huge development team. If I can crank out tons of mini games for my MUDs/MMOs, why can’t Blizzard or other big MMO companies?
3) Admin/GM Run Events. As the developer, you have incredible power and tools at your command. Use them! Create fun storyline events that happen all over the world. When you do, you’ll lure people to various locations in your world. You will make people interested in them. Even when the event is over, people might come back and check things out.
Again, those are just a few examples. Yes, it takes a little effort, but it is less effort than the effort wasted when you let 90% of your world rot and die.
Back in the early 90s, I gm’d on one of the first pay-to-play text MUDS, and then spent several years working with various game design teams on projects that never got off the ground. One of the biggest reasons that these games died an early death was an overwhelming need for control over every aspect of the game – right down to player descriptions – by the designers. Your point about player housing is a HUGE one, in my experience, and it’s the tip of the iceberg. The more control you allow players to have over the built environment, the more compelling and involving it becomes to them. It gives players a sense of ownership of and loyalty to the game that you just can’t get in any other way.
That is a great point about developers and players. Many developers have a lot of trouble letting go and allowing players to move the world in the direction that interests them. There is far too much making sure people “play the game right” and not enough focus on letting people “have fun.” Abuses, exploits, and such need to be fixed of course, but if people are having fun and playing within the game’s rules: let them!
And regarding players: when players feel like they have a stake in the world, and can affect the world, the world feels more real to them. That connects them to it in a very visceral way, and it dramatically increases the likelihood they will stay around.
Thanks for your comment, chameleon!
Mike Darga has a great article up about how “players don’t just give you money”. It’s a bit tangential, but touches on the same sort of philosophy that we’ve been bandying about.
http://mikedarga.blogspot.com/2009/02/players-dont-just-give-you-money.html
Thanks. He has a great blog. I just checked it out and read a few posts.
Hi there,
This is definitely a big problem. I think it’s bad that the content is being wasted, but it’s even worse to have abandoned players, especially in games that emphasize grouping or pvp. As with all the best design problems, there are 2 very strong and completely opposing considerations to try and meet.
I think Blizzard has been doing a better job than other developers at noticing and solving the abandoned player problem, through leveling curve changes, the recruit a friend program, etc. But each of their solutions for the abandoned player problem actually makes the wasted content problem worse, because now people level so quickly that they can’t even finish their quests or find any gear in time.
People keep suggesting that phasing will solve these problems, but I don’t think that answer is as tidy as it seems. Phasing has the opposite problem from faster leveling: improves the wasted content problem, but makes the abandoned player problem even worse. And really, since they’d repopulate most of the zones and create all new content, all they’d really manage to reuse is the world geometry and some npcs, which is nothing to sniff at but not really reuse in the sense you’re looking for.
I’ve been meaning to write something up with some other possible solutions, but since my blog is only a few months old I still have a long backlog of posts rattling around in my head.
Thanks for the feedback you two, and thanks again Tesh for helping get the word out. I’m up to about ten readers now, heh.
Mike
Can you explain the whole phasing thing? I keep hearing rumbling about it, but other than it meaning NPCs only showing up for certain people – depending on their point in a quest chain – I don’t know anything about it.
And if that is all there is to the idea, I think it is a terrible concept. Standing next to Morgrim the Paladin NPC and having your friend say he doesn’t see anyone there strikes me as an opportunity for ENORMOUS confusion and hugely jarring immersion breaking.
Phasing is done differently. Basically, there are two kinds of phasing:
1. You see different NPCs and objects than your friend.
He sees a Death Knight basis, for you the territory is empty
2. You see people dissappear in front of you. E.g. if they fly in a phased zone that you are not part of.
This happens if people have the quest to destroy the “Ocular” in WOTLK. They fight with a Sauron style eye on a tower, while you will only see the empty tower. Note that the difference is that this time you do not see the NPCs and you do not see your friend either.
3. Started by talking to a NPC, you are teleported/loaded into your own “instance”. Note that players who have this quest, too, will pop up in this instance if they start it at the same time, too.
The “Battle for Undercity” brings every player in the area of the Undead Capital, but with Siege Engines and you will enter the city and have a scripted storyline fight sequence there.
There are many quests where you can enter a flying machine, like a bomber, to bomb massive amounts of undead creatures. Gargoyles attack you in flight, you need to use your machine gun to gun them down. You do this in the SAME area as all other people playing in Ice Crown, and a friend could see you on the map/radar. But he will neither see you nor any of the creatures that you are attacking as long as you are doing the quest. It is basically a NPC-started kind of private instance that does not require loading. So actually type 3.
Phasing is difficult to do. It basically creates multiple versions of an area, you leave and enter the subzones that are different seamlessly.
I once exploited a flaw of phasing in scholazar Basin. I did not do a certain quest there and somehow was in a totally empty phase with my friend. The funny thing was, this phase had a full load of Saronite Ore nodes. In the days after release, people on my snob elite pro (whatever…^^) server paid incredible amounts for it. We mined for hours without end and made a considerable fortune, probably due to bug in phasing and stopped only because we got the idea that something is wrong and that we might be exploiting something. It was just too good to be true.
The key idea of phasing is that you can tell stories much better and dynamically. The discovery of the Death Knight base for example. Step 1: Destroy the Ocular. Step 2: Kill 3 special creatures running around the tower where the Ocular is located. Step 3: Destroy the boss guy who now appears below the tower. Step 4: Voila, now you have an allied Death Knight base there.
I was once totally confused as people were doing a quest that I had, too. But I never got credit for it. It was near the “Tower of Light” of the Argent Dawn. I was not in the right phase for the quest and so did not see the NPC I had to protect and which gave you the quest reward after you defeated the undead attackers. Basically, I killed the army over and over and wondered together with someone else why we did not finish the quest, too.
OK, pretty negative comment about phasing. It actually works better than this, despite some drawbacks. I see the problem that you cannot make use of it everywhere and too often, otherwise you have people stranded in different phases with little common ground. It is more useful for the repeated daily bomber quest or one-time storyline content that people finish sooner or later.
The famous Wrath Gate event is a fine example of phasing. People who did the quest see ruins and two dragons at the place of the Wrathgate, the guys who did not do the quest see a terrain with different texture and objects like catapults and soldiers placed differently.
There’s also been some suggestion that high level players could reuse phased versions of low level zones, which was what I was saying would improve zone reuse but really alienate lowbies, as they’d never seen high level characters except under certain circumstances or in town etc.
One of the best things in Guild Wars was the introduction of HARD MODE. Basically, the vast low level areas of Prophecies were re-tuned for level 20 players.
In the end it turned out as two difficulty settings: normal mode became easy mode, hard mode the only thing worthwhile to level 20 players due to increased rewards, chests, loot, the vanquishing achievement, whatever.
GW had the old content obsolete problem almost exclusively in the first chapter, Prophecies. All later chapters had very short starter areas and everything else was balanced for level 20 parties.
Due to the fact that late game level 20 players had a better and stronger selection of skills and better equipped heroes and general knowledge, the early areas of any campaign were still too easy for them.
Hard Mode remedied that – and Eye of the North, the final expansion, was aimed at veterans. It had about the right difficulty in normal mode and was hard in hard mode – as it should be.
Getting back to Mike Darga’s comment, the complete phasing of a zone would basically be a new instanced zone. Very much like in GW. Persistant worlds with seamless zones like WoW could not do that, it would cause a lot of trouble as he already mentioned. So far they only phased subzones or made zones special event zones, like the Undercity quest phasing.
I have to say, while some aspects of the phasing concept sounds neat (the fact that you can participate in your own version of the story), the core of the concept is anathema to the idea of a virtual world.
Woe be it for me to tell Blizzard they are doing something wrong, but this is a pretty elaborate way of turning an MMO into a glorified single player game.
What is the point of playing in a virtual world is everywhere you do people are living in their own Matrix-like dream world? How are you supposed to help people with things, have shared experiences (sometimes positive, sometimes negative), and the like?
And why in the hell would they spend enormous development time on this concept, when there are things like player housing still WOEFULLY lacking from WOW? This makes no sense. This sounds like the brain child of some technie who moved up too far and had too much power to be told “no!”
Yes, they are trying to add the usually deeper storyline of a singleplayer RPG to a MMO. Housing is indeed a more interesting feature, but it would not make me play it again either. I am tired of the formula/system behind WoW, and I guess many other players are, too. They just still get enough young/new customers that easily get addicted to the Evercrack formula.
Tesh has an interesting idea of a world of cycles, I have a similar idea: A world of permanent progression.
There would be some fixed dungeons, but the world would be dynamic. Dungeons would change every other major patch, some would get removed, some remodeled. The world map would change. Depending on the actions of players, Atlantis will sink or not…
This gives players the power to change an ongoing, developing story. Shape the history of their world.
The current mindset is to keep everything static: But the exciting moments of the Ahn-Qiraji opening event are gone, never to be repeated. Dire Maul and Maraudon are obsolete dungeons. Rotten old content.
I can imagine a world were levels do not make content obsolete, basically a world without levels. A world with changing dungeons, environment.
Every half year a new campaign, that can take place in old areas of the world, not just the continent added with the latest expansion. Half a year of fighting back a plague, half a year to fight against the undead, half a year of civil war between two major cities.
The drawback would be that players can miss out, who joined later cannot participate in events that happened long ago, sure. But I like the dynamic world aspect a lot.
Btw, Muckbeast:
http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/03/has-healing-changed.html
Basically, about making your own gameplay mechanics obsolete. One more reasons why I pray for salvation, WoW is at the point where they did it right and enticed millions of people, now they are living from their reputation and produce a pile of dung.
Long, your idea of a dynamic, GM/dev-altered world sounds good. Monetizing “chapters” could allow for those who want to stay in the PreSearing (or whatever “age) to play there forever, but those who want to keep pace with the world can actually have an effect on it.
I remember when I first learned of MMOs, thinking that a living, breathing world would be absolutely brilliant. The current reality of a DIKU loot treadmill is basically just a giant multiplayer JRPG. That’s OK, but it’s nowhere near what I was hoping for the genre.
While we’re writing about story in MMOs, I can’t help but think that Bioware’s entry into the field is absolutely idiotic. They excel at telling great stories, but the MMO genre isn’t the right place for that. They should be spending their time and money making more great single player games, not trying to shoehorn their talents into the tired old MMO field.
My crystal ball may be cloudy and grumpy, but I just can’t see them doing more than pulling a FunCom or EA in the field (hopefully not a Tabula Rasa). Another expensive mistake borne of the MMO addiction, rather than focusing on core competency and appropriately designing for the audience.
Thanks for that link to Tobold’s post about healing. Wow…… just wow. Someone even said in the discussion that letting a holy priest heal the main tank is stupid. WTF? The holy priest is supposed to be the main healer. That’s all they do.
The big problem with the ever changing world is it takes enormous money to generate all that content. I think the better way to go is create as many organizations, groups, and systems that players can run, control, and change. The social structures can be very interesting and they can change radically without needing huge art and animation investments.
World changes are great too, but they have to come along at the pace they can be afforded.
Player run events also died with World of Warcraft. Except a few RPG servers you will never experience a player run event.
I do not blame the players, I again blame the system that is based on pure individual loot/level/reputation grind.
I totally support your idea to give players system where they can participate and influence things. The dynamic world that I imagined would not work for WoW and its hundreds of servers. Even in an environment with only one world/servercluster, basically Guild Wars or EVE, there would be problems. I think it would be worthwhile for companies that could probably afford it to think about ways how they could make their world more dynamic, add more unique fun events and all that.
A very basic example of a yearly event, nice idea but flawed in the end:
Guild Wars has the Wintersday events. You can vote for the God of Ice/Winter, Grenth, or the Goddess of Life/Spring, Dwayna. They fight each other in different districts, and different rewards spawn depending on which deity won this district.
After the end of the event they simply count the number of districts Grenth won versus the ones that favored Dwayna, and either winter gets extended by one week or it becomes spring.
A very nice idea, but in the end nobody cares who wins. Guild Wars is full of interesting ideas, but their implementation is quite often rather clumsy.
Maybe Blizzard is already copying and testing ideas of all other MMOs in the making to polish them up and reap the rewards in their very own next generation MMO?
BTW, the guy is right, Holy Priests are no longer no.1 choice as single target/main tank healers, as Paladins and Discipline Priests are definitely better at that.
Tobold has more problems with healing becoming mindless area healing spam, something that bored my DPSing warlock, as the most effective spell was the AoE Rain of Fire for every group with more than 1 mob… so basically everything…^^
The lack of player run events in MMOs these days is a damn shame. This is due to the “me me me loot” attitude you mention, and also because of the woeful lack of tools given to players.
You need to give players functional items, locations with a lot of character to attract people (grand waterfalls in front of glistening pools of water, that do NOT have aggro mobs all over it), and role play oriented commands so they can actually do events. The role play crowd has begged for things for years and they are rarely ever thrown a bone.
Worst of all, the complete disregard for any kind of player run content (other than PvP) barely even gets mentioned.
Someone smart is going to put a lot of effort into this sort of thing and score themselves a huge, fiercely loyal player base.
Muckbeast: “The big problem with the ever changing world is it takes enormous money to generate all that content. I think the better way to go is create as many organizations, groups, and systems that players can run, control, and change. The social structures can be very interesting and they can change radically without needing huge art and animation investments.”
I have a dream. You’re reminding me of it, and the most important part of it is the notion that players running everything would be far more exciting. Guilds have long been the subject of many of my gaming woes. They don’t serve the same function as their historical counterparts, and they tend to be very small- even raiding guilds tend to be fairly small -If you know of many guilds that have 50+ active members at the level cap lemme know. There’s lots of room for improvement in guild organization.
Leveling up by its very nature makes content obsolete. To get away from the “you’re at level 60 now. everything beneath you is trivial and worthless” I think that we would have to go so far as to step away from a leveling system. EVE does this (albeit without conserving the amount of content that I suggest needs conserving), but also has a disturbingly high amount of social stratification- and, in fact, no upwards mobility for the new guy. We want to avoid that too.
I don’t know that there’s an easy answer. Will people play a game where more time spent does not equal more power for themselves? In MMOs players will often do nothing that does not benefit them in some way. A truly dynamic reputation system (instead of “player ratings” (think pvp) and levels/personal wealth) that rewards teamwork could potentially turn things around for the genre and keep us from wasting even more virtual space.
Well, the answer is all in the game design. Threshold RPG lets players run almost everything in the game. Guilds, clans, governments, cities, religions, businesses, government agencies, museums, etc. There are TONS of player run organizations – some official and codified, some completely player designed. We are able to have this because we have a commitment to this type of gameplay.
Until other developers learn that turning over control of such things to your players creates a type of limitless gameplay, we won’t see many other (or any other) games go this way.
Our next game, Primordiax, has the same philosophy. So stay tuned!