[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Where massive?

[Aurel Mihai]

On 9/16/07, Damion Schubert <dschubert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/13/07, John Buehler <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > The bottom line to all this is the question of how much of an MMO really
> > needs to be designed to be massive.  The background world wants to
> be.  In
> > that background world are the lightweight actions and experiences that
> the
> > technology can support for thousands of simultaneous players.  But when
> a
> > group of players desires to get together to have some fun, that
> background
> > world can fade away and more weight can be brought to bear to entertain
> > that
> > group.  If we assume that they are like-minded, the game design can also
> > leverage the trust that those players share.
>
>
> As an interesting data point, Guild Wars shipped with a highly instanced
> world view, which they took great advantage of in many of the ways you
> describe: fragile experiences in full control of the story writers and
> game
> designers to create carefully balanced and controlled instances.  Guild
> Wars was quite successful, selling in the low millions.
>
> All this being said, in developing Guild Wars 2, one of the major changes
> that they have talked about making is moving away from instanced content
> in many cases, and towards more traditional MMO-style shared servers.
> A quote:
>
> "One of the major new additions to *Guild Wars
> 2<http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/guild-wars-2/>
> * is persistent world areas. The original game was entirely instanced
> which,
> according to the ArenaNet team, did wonders for their ability to tell a
> story (there's a major event in the middle of the original game that
> completely alters the world forever). "What you lose in an entirely
> instanced game is a lot of social opportunities," Mike O'Brian said.
> "There's a lot to be said for running into the same people over and over
> again. If you run with a pick-up group and you never meet them again, it
> can
> make a completely instanced game a very lonely experience." While *Guild
> Wars 2* will contain a lot of instanced mission content, it will also
> sport
> a lot of shared landscape and will also be divided up into different
> servers
> filled with smaller groups of people in the manner of traditional MMOs"
>                 --  http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/guild-wars-2/784302p2.html
>
> Instancing is an incredibly powerful design tool, but overuse has a
> real danger to it - a danger of reducing the most powerful and intriguing
> consumer promise of 'massively multiplayer' gameplay - the massively
> multiplayer part.

Imagine a game that's free to play once you buy the box, very nice
graphically, and is not instanced. Now imagine the people populating
that world. Scary thought, huh? MUDs are fun because they're free and
not instanced, but the population of immature griefers is kept at bay by
the fact that they don't do text. MMOs tend to keep griefers at bay
because they're not free so griefers tend not to want to pay money just
to bother others. Guild Wars managed the griefers by giving players an
opportunity to group with whoever they wanted and allowing them to
ignore all the other obnoxious people in the game. Griefers aren't just
PKers, they're the people that ruin the game for everyone by ruining the
atmosphere. Guild Wars 2 going non-instanced is a mistake because there
will be no escape from that portion of the population, so eventually
they will be the only ones left playing it.