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

[John Buehler]

cruise writes:

> Thus spake Adam Martin...
> > FWVLIW, I've found Oblivion has displaced a substantial chunk of my
> > online play, simply because it was *better* in so many qualitative
> > ways. Obviously, after a while, you get bored by the loneliness, but
> > when it comes to pure immersion, the experience is often exceptional
> > (and often not - the problems with O's design and presentation are
> > legion, everything from a poor outdoors 3D engine to iffy decisions
> > about the nature and effects of time).
>
> I'm becoming more convinced that the "Massive" section of MMOG's is a
> very bad idea.

I'm becoming convinced of the same thing.

> Other players have a tendency to lower immersion, as above.

Indeed.

I've assumed for years that a high NPC:PC ratio is a good way to ensure
immersion.  Single player games clearly do that.  They can get away with it
because of the player only being at one location in the server.  All the
NPCs in other areas are inactive.  In a massively multiplayer game, all the
content has to be running all the time.  Smart NPCs are just too draining of
resources.  The same is true of world physics.

But make a game that takes a group of 10 people and you're potentially
talking about trusted clients that can be relied upon to do some extra
computes to make the experience more immersive, in the pattern of single
player games.

> Additionally, in any game where it is possible to measure success, any
> such success is diluted proportionally to the number of players
> involved; either because your chances of "winning" or "completing"
> something become less, or the uniqueness of your achievement is removed.

The "group server" approach is essentially the "instance" approach as used,
for example, in World of Warcraft.  I'm sure they went to the use of
instances for the very reasons you're talking about.  But uniqueness of
achievements won't be improved by "instances" or "group servers".  Unless
the environment changes permanently as a result of your character's actions,
uniqueness is out the window.

Letting players permanently change an environment is fraught with its own
problems, of course.

> There is no way to socially interact with the numbers of people on any
> even vaguely popular MMOG, and so the gameworld becomes little more than
> a glorified lobby system for finding a team, or in which you play with
> your friends. Either way, you're rarely interacting socially with more
> than ten or twenty people at a time.

Again, agreed.  Guilds are probably the social backbone of any massively
multiplayer game.

> I can't help but think that BioWare's system for NWN, or something like
> it, is the way forward - lots of small, self-contained areas where you
> can play with a limited number of individuals. The game simply provides
> a coherent framework and orginisational system for connecting these
> mini-gameworlds.

Yep.  I think that the organization system needs to be very prominent for
that to work.  It may be that all that is needed is a virtual city that all
players start in.  There are things to do there that are common to all
players, such as buying and selling items, learning systems, owning
property, finding teams - and finding interesting instances.  Once an
instance is found, an in-game mechanism such as a ship, horses, a doorway,
or whatever, then takes you to the specific game instance.  (Inspired by
Frederik Pohl's "Gateway" series).

Relying on web pages and discussion forums doesn't seem to have the same
binding influence that seeing other avatars in a virtual setting can have.
There's also the practical aspect of time.  If I see someone in virtual
city, I know that there's a good chance that they play at the same time that
I do.  If I bump into somebody on a message board, they may not share play
time with me.

This happens to tie nicely into my desire for small shops building game
experiences that are outside the current EverQuest-esque experience,
permitting some depth to sneak into the games.  Perhaps even permanent
changes and other things that players would like to see more of.  The "group
server" approach would seem to bring the competitive forces of capitalism to
bear on any number of game styles that people have postulated working or not
working.  Build 'em all and see what people play.

JB