[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[John Buehler]

Richard A. Bartle writes:

> On 28 February 2007, John Buehler wrote:
>
> >1. Professionalism
> >This is kindergarden stuff.  Everyone should be learning of the need to
> work
> >hard, work smart, produce quality and take pride in what was produced.
> 	I'm sure they do. WoW was polished until it shone. There's a pride
> in the craft there. However, the craft is being used to make things which
> are not as deep as they were in the past.

Understood.

> >2. Fidelty of the fiction
> >I find that depth
> >becomes mandatory after the first impressions are taken in.  The
> absence of
> >that depth is a glaring void, like sitting down to a meal only
> to find that
> >the food is plastic.
> 	Those lessons of depth will have to be re-learned eventually.

As I go through the thought process on this, I'm not sure that it's a
question of relearning so much as exploring a particular niche.  The big
graphical games don't need depth.  Because most of the players don't care
about it very much.  Their focus lies elsewhere.

> >I assume that the reason behind the lack of depth is that it's more
> >difficult to do, and that products can be sold and be financially very
> >successful without it.
> 	It is more difficult, but not THAT much more difficult. If you're
> going to employ 50 artists to make the world look pretty, then adding
> an extra designer and a programmer to make it a richer world doesn't
> seem excessive.

I might take exception there.  I once helped built a flight simulator that
contained lots of little features, do-dads and what-nots.  Each time we
added a feature, it had to be cleaned up, polished, documented and
supported.  A couple extra bodies on a team can certainly make a richer
world, but I'm not sure how far that's going to get you.  I've assumed that
it would take an engineering team of a half dozen to really tackle putting
depth into the game experience.

By the way, does anyone know the distribution of talent in the product team
for something like a World of Warcraft?

> 	Although not needing to do it because people will play it anyway is
> a fair enough position to take, it won't always hold true. I suspect a lot
> of the reason we don't see greater depth is because the designers haven't
> actually looked at making their worlds deeper. When they do, they may well
> end up making mistakes they didn't have to make while reinventing
> the wheel, simply because they don't care to believe that any of the olde
> texte worldes could conceivably be relevant to today's great new shinies.
> 	Not all designers will neglect to look at what went
> earlier, of course, but plenty will.
>
> >Text MUDs are really the province of true zealots.
> 	These days, you're largely correct. There are some newbies coming to
> the scene, so it's not all doom and gloom (the Internet is large, and
> even minority interests can find enough people for a critical mass).
> We're not talking hundreds of thousands per textual world, though...

Designers may have blinders on when it comes to the idea of adding depth.
I'd say that they're just exploring the features that are selling for them
right now.  Detroit thought that big iron was the way to sell cars.  And
they were able to operate that way for a long time.  Other feature sets just
weren't on their radar until they were forced to look at them through
changes in their environment.  Part of that change was the arrival of new
products from the Japanese.

The changes that may cause designers to include greater depth may be the
advent of physics coprocessors and their use in single player games.  If
gamers get used to markedly increased depth of experience in single player
games, they may come to expect it in multiplayer games.

So I don't think that it's a case of "lessons missed" so much as
"inconsequential features".  They have a winning horse, and they're running
it until it stumbles.

> >Graphical games lack the precedent of quality and depth because the first
> >ones stood on the novelty of their graphics.  And that trend is
> continuing to this day.
> 	I'm not so sure about this. Ultima Online had very good depth, for
> example.

Yes, it did.  But it wasn't 3D.  EverQuest exploded onto the marketplace.
The eye candy was what sold it, combined with loot, levels and power.  If
Ultima Online had been fully 3D and had the depth, it may have set a
standard for gaming that would be with us to this day.  Unfortunately, I'm
fairly certain that doing a 3D treatment of an environment back then was so
demanding of development resources that depth was simply not possible.  So
Ultima Online had depth, while EverQuest had 3D.  EverQuest won.  People
wanted eye candy more than depth.  Now, that's the precedent that we live
with.

> >They exist by their eye candy.  The voices of those demanding
> >depth of experience are drowned out by those who want loot, levels and
> >power.  There are millions in the latter camp.  Precious few in
> the former.
> 	The thing is, the two aren't mutually incompatible. You can have
> loot, levels and power AND depth. Furthermore, the more that people are
> exposed to the depth, the more they are likely to appreciate it.

The introduction of depth in that case would have to be aligned with the
loot, levels and power, meaning that certain areas would have to be
excluded.  Done wrong and you've got the equivalent of one player creating a
china shop and another player running bulls through it.

Would they appreciate it?  Only if it is done correctly.  Depth might well
slow down the pace of advancement, and lootlevelpower players often don't
like that.  Lots of the silly inconsistencies in games are probably there
because addressing them would interfere with the existing vision of
gameplay.  Some is pure sloppiness, of course.

> >To break out of this pattern, it's going to take things like inexpensive
> >graphics engines that will let every Tom, Dick and Harry Developer take a
> >shot at the graphical genre the same way that printf permitted
> the parents
> >of those developers to take a shot at the textual genre.  That's when the
> >zealots for depth will be able to step up to the plate and build
> something
> >that will put World of Warcraft to shame.
> 	Well, it might at least give the developers with megabucks something
> they're willing to look at for experimentation and ideas. I doubt a couple
> of guys working in a garage could create something that would beat WoW on
> volume of content anytime soon.

They don't need to.  If they can create something the size of a text MUD,
they may have a winner.  It can be scaled up by those with money.  A Tale in
the Desert exists because of an angel investor.  There's no reason that some
garage duo wouldn't have similar backing.  Or that the garage duo wasn't a
pair of old fogies trying to build a 3D-with-depth game because they were
fed up with the eye candy batch.  :)

JB