[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Alternatives To Advancement Systems (was Food in MMOs)

[Caliban Darklock]

On 5/18/07, Steve Bloo Daniels <bloo at kriegergames.com> wrote:
>
> But what if the world wasn't just about killing things of greater
> threat to you over time?

No matter what your game is, there are people who are good at it, and
people who are not good at it. There needs to be a place where the
people who are not good at it can become good at it, and join the ranks
on the other side of the skill wall.

(Note that while I will speak largely in terms of a WoW style
high-fantasy game here, this is not intended to be dismissive or
exclusionary; the ideas here ought to translate into any genre simply by
altering a few vocabulkary terms.)

That skill wall is largely representable by the ubiquitous bell curve.
On one side, you have people who are new and not very good. On the other
side, you have the hardcore OG players who "pwn" the game. And both
sides are essential.

There are some interesting ideas I've tossed around in an effort to
figure out how this might be handled. One of the more interesting ones,
to me, is the "flOw" style where adjacent levels of game are visible at
varying levels of transparency. So you might be a newbie wandering
around the forest, and you see a largely-transparent dragon. You can
walk right past it, or indeed, right through it; the dragon, being far
above your level, simply does not exist for you. As you gain power and
experience, the dragon becomes more opaque, serving as a warning that
sometime in the near future you're going to have to either fight that
dragon or find a new route. Likewise, the little squirrels in the forest
that you used to kill for experience are becoming more transparent, and
eventually disappear altogether. If you're set to PK, perhaps there's a
color overlay that appears over your character, so you can see at a
glance whether someone else is legal for you to kill.

I like the idea, but there's this whole question of system performance,
and then there's the question of whether it really does make the game
better. It's a neat theoretical idea, but it's debatable whether it has
value on a large scale.

I think a large part of continued play is about getting from what you
can do now to what you can see is available to do. Once you hit the
maximum level, what's left? Where do you go? What do you do?

I like the idea of systems where there is no advancement. You simply
outfit your avatar with what supports your play style, and you go play.
Changing your play style is a simple matter of equipping yourself with a
different inventory; a sword is a sword is a sword, and whether you've
been playing a year or an hour, it's going to do the same thing. You're
not looking for the biggest baddest sword; a sword is just a sword. You
get better not by finding things and buying things and hacking your way
through hordes of foes, but by thinking about the game and how to do
things better. It's not "what is the best armor" but "what armor is
best" - should I wear something that protects from piercing, or from
bludgeoning? The answer clearly depends on what you expect to face, and
may change if you make a left turn instead of a right.

I liken this idea to the color wheel. You have red, yellow, and blue
styles of play. If you outfit for red, then you can play all of the red
area, some of the purple, and some of the orange. If you start adding
blue equipment, you have to put down some red, and you lose
progressively more of the orange and red as you gradually gain all of
the purple and some of the blue. At any given time, you can see that
there's twice as much to do over there as there is over here, so you
shuffle back and forth between the styles constantly to get things done.
If you get bored, there's still more stuff over there, and all you have
to do is change your kit. Combined with procedural content, this could
produce a truly infinite world.