[MUD-Dev] Re: MUD-Dev Digest, Vol 20, Issue 16

[Dread Quixadhal]

"Mike Rozak" <Mike at mxac.com.au> wrote:

> In player-rant sites, WoW players often claim that its quests and
> content are much better than other MMORPGs, especially in
> comparsion with EQ2. (I havent tried EQ2 yet.) I don't understand
> why WoW players think its quests/content are so superior. (See
> below). Does anyone have any opinions about why players think
> WoW's quests are better than other MMORPGs?

Having played my fair share of these games, none of them have really
involved quests of the style or complexity that interactive fiction
(IE: Infocom) presented.  For many MUD designers, the Infocom
standard is the holy grail of environment, puzzle/quest immersion,
and intelligent parsing.  There was even a ZorkMUD that served as
the test-bed development site of what would later become the LIMA
LpMUD library. :)

Having said that, the current crop of MMORPG's is getting a little
closer to where MUD's have been for about 10 years.  WoW quests are
(so far) not much different than any other game, as Mike noted.

The types of quests tend to break down like this:

  Kill N type-X mobs and return to me (sometimes bringing proof)

  Gather N things and bring them to me

  Deliver X to mob Y

  Explore area X and report back to me (sometimes with a cutscene)

  Escort mob X to area Y (this one is unique to WoW I think, has
  been in MUD's and desktops forever)

The big problem all MMORPG's have right now is graphics.  In a text
game, I can come up with all kinds of elaborate things for people to
do, because it can all be crafted with a handful of good writers and
one or two programmers to do the mechanics.  Having mobs talk about
things that pertain to your quest is easier when the players are
used to reading everything on the screen.. doing that kind of
background prompting in a graphical game is hard.  Will the players
move slowly enough to listen?  Will they go that way at all?  Will
they kill the mobs before they get to talk (sometimes with a pet or
ranged weapons?)  If you do it via a textbox that pops up when you
get close, it breaks the immersion.

Another staple of text games is the maze.  When have you ever seen a
maze done properly in a graphical game?  Most gamers insist on
having a mini-map since these are all real-time games now, hence the
days of Bard's Tale and drawing maps on graph paper are pretty much
gone.  If you have a map, you can't really make a maze.  If you
disable the map, they at least realize they ARE in a maze.

Finally, because of the real-time nature of the games, and the fact
that players are expected to log in, do part of their quest, log
out, log back in hours or days later and be able to resume -- that
means all quest details can't have any real impact on the world as a
whole or quests would become impossible to finish over multiple
sittings.  By that I mean a quest may have lots of parts all over
the world, and you may keep status on all of them... but if any
changes are perceivable by anyone not doing the quest, it has to be
done all at once to avoid
leaving things in intermediate states.

> My observations about content, in this case exampled by an
> instanced dungeon I just went through:

>  - Nice use verticality in the tunnels, as opposed to many flat
>  levels.

Yes, I agree.  They are finally getting level designers who are used
to games like Descent, Unreal and such that use 3D space.

>  - The lighting/mood was uninspiring. In my opinion, dungeons
>  should be dark and scary. This was light and chearful.

That kindof depends on the quest itself.  In general, I agree... but
the motif gets boring if it is never varied.  In fact, in a few of
these games, the overall "darkness" of night and every single
"dungeon" just means players turn up their gamma levels so they can
see something.

>  - The dungeon had a few special monsters/NPCs to kill. The rest
>  were selected from a palette of 4-5 basic "types", such as
>  raptors, slimes, pythons, and druids. Each type had several
>  varieties (small raptors, invisible raptors, big raptors, red
>  raptors with blue spots, etc.). (As an aside, whomever decided to
>  call the snakes "pythons" has obviously never dealt with
>  pythons. Pythons are constricters that like climbing
>  trees. Snakes that rear up and bite (like cobras) come from a
>  different family.)

While that's a valid complaint, it's also one to look at from both
sides.  While the players who pay attention to details will notice
things like that, there are also lots of players who "power-game"
and could care less if the mobs were simply big walking
experience-point digits.  Blizzard has a game that takes up 4G of
hard drive space, most of which is graphical data.  They have a huge
number of mobs in their world, and making mobs that fit the setting
is no easy job even with a big art department.  You might note the
wolves from the snow-covered mountain area also work in the forests
and plains of the human lands, but are nowhere to be seen in the red
deserts of the orcs.  Reuse of art is vital to getting a project
like this out the door and working.  The extra work (either
programming to generate textures -- slow on many customers machines
-- or tons of extra textures to download/store) has to be weighed
against how much it breaks immersion.

Along the same lines, games are now expected to run in 1024x768 or
higher resolution.  That means textures have to be bigger and more
details to avoid looking blocky to players using 1600x1200.  If you
have to make each texture with more detail, you can't have as many
of them without shooting your timeline in the foot.  Remember WoW
started production about 5 years ago, and some of the artwork was
already partially done from the original single-player game it was
going to be.

>  - A nicely done sub-quest to protect a friendly NPC as he
>  stupidly walks through the dungeon to a pre-programmed
>  destination.

Yes, I actually was hoping the escort missions would be chases.  I
found myself telling the mob to get the lead out since he's walking
along and I'm jogging at three times his pace.  It would have been
entertaining (but perhaps too hard for some) if the mob took off
running and you had to follow him to get credit.

>  - As far as I can tell, the only place that the instancing really
>  made a difference was the follow-the-NPC part.

Actually, try playing in non-instanced areas with a heavy server
load.  Trying to kill things without having the ranged people beat
you to it is quite a challenge.

WoW has achieved, for me, the same level of enjoyablitiy that most
of the bug-free (well, mostly) DikuMUD derivatives have.  Nothing
super complex or really astonishing, but a nice fast-paced game with
the occasional surprise and quite a bit of humor buried inside.  I
got a chuckle from the nurse mob named "Michelle Belle", which I'm
hoping is named for the Beatles song.  I laughed my a** off when I
encounterd the Fearbot 4000 mechanical harvester in the human
farmlands.  It's a good game, and at level 20/60 I have yet to hit
the boredom wall that most of these present (that's where your
experience gain slows to a crawl and most people call it a grind).
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