[MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?

[Koster, Raph]

From: Oliver Smith
> Raph Koster:
>> From Oliver Smith:

>>> I doubt CoH will be a lasting success, but I hope it will be a
>>> basis for a move away from the McQuaid/Koster concept of "the
>>> customer wants to be beaten with a stick, needs to draw blood
>>> before they can

>>> have fun".

>> Er, I dare you to point out one single place where I have ever
>> said that or anything even close to it.

> Sorry, it wasn't intended as a literal quotation, or intended as
> attribution to yourself.

Heh, the phrasing certainly makes it sound that way.

> More an expression of the general tendency of leading developers
> towards greater control over and constraint of the player's
> experience that I find somewhat akin to buying the Hitchhiker's
> Guide DVD and finding it will only play me one episode a
> week. (And I thought putting McQuaid/Koster together would be
> indicative of my being vague :)

Given that Brad and I don't really approach these issues in quite
the same way, I did find it an interesting pairing given the
context.

I do find it curious that you are ascribing to me a position of
"greater control and constraint of the player experience"
though. Surely a brief glance over what I have done and what I have
advocated indicates a somewhat different attitude towards the player
experience? I'm usually tarred with the opposite brush!

> I'm certainly not praising the single-thing-to-do aspect of
> CoH. Rather I feel its merit is its approach to content delivery:
> pro-actively delivering the player a consistent choice of content
> through the contacts/missions system.

Isn't that "greater control and constraint of the player
experience"?  This is why I stated that in many ways it strikes me
as a the least mudlike of all the MMOs.

When we talk about shooters, we often regard the most constrained of
them as "shooters on rails." But when you look at it, most single
player games are on fairly tight rails. There's an order of events
that designers prescribe, and there's a very limited problem set for
players to solve. Generally, players cannot choose to tackle things
in a different order, bring different tools to the table, interact
significantly with or modify the environment, and so on. CRPG
cognoscenti speak fondly of the "non-linear RPG" where there are
some limited tools to do so, and the "Looking Glass philosophy" of
"string of pearls" narratives and so on is aimed at providing
greater illusion of choice while still dragging the player along a
fixed narrative.

>>From MUD1 onwards, players in muds have been able to choose the
order of their experiences, which challenges to take on, whether to
jump ahead to a challenge they should not be able to solve, where to
go and who to be and when to do what. It's unsurprising that
therefore most narrative experiences within muds have always to a
degree felt grafted on, in that they were essentially single-player
experiences that players could experience sequentially, puzzles and
narratives to walk along. Back on Legend, we used to say that each
area should be like making Zork, in terms of puzzles and quests.

The challenge has always been that these were self-contained
experiences that at best were designed to cycle between a few end
states--and even that was rare; more typically, they did not affect
the larger game or setting at all. They were also subject to
interference from third parties. Instancing is merely two birds with
one stone--it first segments off the experience so that greater
narrative power can be brought to bear and players cannot be
interfered with; and it secondly segments off the experience so that
it is impossible for it to have any impact whatsoever on the larger
world.

Now, you cite the contacts/missions system. This is not a new
innovation, of course--Anarchy Online was perhaps the first MMO to
really make heavy use of it, but it is bcoming a standard feature.
Having a selection of single- or limited-multiplayer experiences to
choose from, however, is still a choice between one directed,
constrained, controlled experience, and another.

> MMO subscribers have become more fickle in the last year or so, so
> CoH's subscriptions and retentions indicate it is providing
> something that some portion of the player-base see as missing, and
> its my speculation that it is the regular diet of activity.

Not so much a regular diet of activity (CoH has a smaller range of
activities and content than many of its competitors--I think any MMO
on the market can provide a good regular diet) as ease of access to
said activity and immediately fun activity. Most of the competition
takes too long to get you to the activity, and then the actual
engaging in it isn't quite as enjoyable.

Less work, more enjoyable, smaller menu, less variation. The classic
recipe of "do one thing, and do it well."

> There are countless things to do in EQ, DAoC, SWG, etc, but it
> isn't served up to you; more often than not it's a good google or
> two away. And then you have to compete with 50 other parties who
> got the same google result for an item that, if only you'd look,
> has a far better substitute a mere 3 zones away!

The question is whether the greater effort can lead to a richer,
more varied, or more rewarding experience. I think all the evidence
points to "yes," but it doesn't mean that existing games have
necessarily always executed on that promise.

And of course, there's the risk that undertaking something too
ambitious may result in across-the-board underdelivery.

-Raph
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