[MUD-Dev2] genre vs creativity [was: Rant against Vanguard]

[Damion Schubert]

On 2/27/07, cruise <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:
>
> Thus spake Mike Rozak...
>
> > I think that as one of the brand-new features, (as opposed to combat,
> > which is a well-known feature) diplomacy should have been introduced and
> > emphasized early on. Again, the genre says that combat is the
> > meat-and-potatoes of MMORPGs and that your first quest should be to kill
> > 10 rats, on a dark and stormy night.


I'm not sure that introducing an abstracted minigame that isn't necessarily
intuitive first-thing out of the gate was the way to go.  Especially since,
much
like Mike Sellers, I think that calling something a 'diplomacy' minigame in
an
massively multiplayer game, and not having that game involve other players,
feels very wierd.

> IMHO, part of the reason to give players the option of race and clothing
> > is that race and clothing say something about the player's personality.
> > In the MMORPG genre definition, however, race and clothing (aka: armor)
> > is about abilities and numbers.
>
> Many of these have been discussed here before - making your players feel
> heroic right from the start (LotRO and CoH both do a good job of this);
> reducing the emphasis on or necessity for combat; taking away the
> reliance on phat loot for player progression.
>
> All of these have been recognised as areas ripe for change and
> variation. Why are current mainstream MMO's carrying on with the same
> cliches?
>

I agree with the heroic at the start part.

The emphasis on combat is basically because it is the easiest way to
provide players with an interesting, tactical challenge that can fill the
number of hours players want to play these games.  I've actually talked
about this topic at AGC: http://www.zenofdesign.com/?p=713

If you want to remove or decentralize combat, you need to come up with
an alternative activity or activities that can provide hours of gameplay,
has
a 'heroic arc' where the game gets more interesting, demos well, and
is, hopefully, not a content black hole, easy to QA, and a host of other
issues.  And even then, you're facing the fact that most people log onto
games with an expectation that they're going to kill things, hopefully in
an interesting and visceral fashion.

Star Trek Online has an interesting problem - the license is about diplomacy
more than gankity ganking.  But how do you turn the Picard experience
into something that provides about 500 hours of fun to a thousand people
playing on the same server at a time.  If they don't end up using combat
as their central mechanism (which, to be clear, I don't think they
necessarily should), they have to enter unexplored design space, providing
all-new, untested game mechanisms in hopes that those mechanisms
are ones that can entertain players nigh endlessly.  This is, ultimately, a
very scary thing.

As for item-centricity -- we give 'em because people like 'em.  They satisfy
all of the player types: They provide far-reaching goals to Achievers,
additional
power to Killers, new character building options to Explorers, and unique
visual appearances for Socializers.  In fact, few other features cover as
many bases as items do.

I wouldn't expect games to get less item-centric at all for another reason,
though -- as micropayment games come into the fore, items are usually
hot on the list of the things suits want to sell.  This isn't something that
thrills me personally, but its probably inevitable.

--d