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

[Damion Schubert]

On 3/2/07, Richard A. Bartle <richard at mud.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 28 February 2007, John Buehler wrote:
> >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.
>         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.


[ deletia ]

>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.


See, I've always disagreed with this definition of 'depth' in a world's
design.  UO had,
in my opinion, a shallow crafting system (compared to, say, ATITD), a
shallow
combat system (compared to, well, anyone), and very shallow world content
(esp. compared to EQ).  They did a whole bunch of things, but did none of
them
very deeply.  Grand Theft Auto is totally in the same camp.  These are
examples
of BROAD games to me.

By comparison, take a look at the list of raid content that kicks off in
Burning Crusade -
that effectively STARTS with the players getting level 70.

http://images.slashdot.org/articles/07/02/bcraids.jpg

WoW and Everquest are deep in just a couple of areas - combat and high level
raiding.
Some of the WoW classes are very deep (see Rogues) and others are not.  They
chose
not to pursue even a UO level of depth on other features (see crafting), and
chose not
to have any depth at all on other features that disappoint a lot of us (see
player housing,
advanced physics, etc), but make no mistake about it, WoW provided a ton of
depth
that was aimed directly at those they thought would dig deep to go find it:
those people
who raid 3 times a week and were decked out in purple gear a year before
Burning
Crusade went live.  Tobold's most excellent article on 'metalevel' talks
about where
the depth is in WoW.

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2006/01/meta-level.html

This doesn't address the original complaint, though.  To rephrase using my
terminology,
the questions can probably be summed up as follows:

1) Why aren't we seeing more broad games like UO?
2) Why are we only seeing depth in features that have been done before, like
combat and raiding?

#2 is astonishingly easy to answer: because we haven't proven we can do it
with any
other system yet in a way that will get 200K+ subscribers, and asking the
guys who
sign checks to do so is bound to scare people off.  For as much as I rant
about Second Life,
the great hope that comes out of it is that it might allow Mr. Producer to
let designers think
more laterally.

As for #1, well... I'd like to see more broad games.  Unfortunately, the
more systems that
you have interacting, the more likely something incredibly broken will
happen (UO is the
Murphy in Murphy's Law here).  In a single player game like Grand Theft
Auto, that's okay,
you can only ruin your own game experience.  But in a massively multiplayer
game, the
complexity explodes, the CS calls magnify, and the next thing you know,
you're actually
getting sued for releasing your game.


--d