[MUD-Dev2] Meaningful Conseqences

[Damion Schubert]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Christopher Lloyd <llocr at btinternet.com>wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: John Buehler
> >
> > I'd say that there's a need to add to the available options.  Consider
> > a nomadic MMO.
>

I once pitched exactly this game idea to a studio (now defunct).  The
general gist
was a space-exploration themed game, where the playerbase travelled en masse
from planet to planet in order to colonize them.  In order to nudge them
along, we
added a Scourge-like enemy, who devoured old planets.  The game,
effectively,
was to strip-mine the old world before doomsday came.  It was rather a nifty

design - at least on paper.

Bad point of the nomadic model include:
>
> 1. Players need a "base". They also definitely like houses and guild
> headquarters. They want places to store their stuff, meet with other
> players
> to chat, practice fighting, have cybersex, etc. The nomadic model might
> have
> difficulties maintaining a community.
>

We had the 'mothership' for just that purpose.


> 2. Good memories are likely to stick around longer. I.e. "Remember last
> year
> when we passed that dragon lair and all went and killed it? That was
> awesome... and we got great loot too!" New players are likely to feel
> isolated or even somehow cheated that they can't go back and explore that
> area, have similar experiences to those that the others had and get the
> loot
> they did. Of course, there's bigger and meaner monsters with even better
> loot down the road, but players have a habit of wanting things NOW, dammit!
>

We were aiming for something that was experience-driven rather than
content-driven.  The planets were mostly randomly generated with little
hand-crafted content, and the players had to use their skills in order to
conquer their planet.  Consider, for example, the pattern matching in a
game of Civilization.  We also were hoping that people would talk about
high-intensity events that were automatically generated.  Consider how
people can talk about high intensity Left 4 Dead games.

We chose generated worlds because we knew every bit of content was
throwaway content.  We actually didn't WANT content to be so special
that people missed it.

Static worlds have an expectation that other people will get to come along
and do the content later.  This is something a lot of people frown on, but
I think it's a good thing.  Shared experiences are powerful, and when people
in WoW say that they've killed Illidan, other people know what that means.

In generated worlds, the emphasis is different.  I remember beating
Civilization
on Expert for the first time, as well as Age of Empires on its hardest
setting.
In both times, the content was randomly generated, and there was also a
sense that I had gotten somewhat of a 'lucky draw' on resource placement and
enemy AI decisions.  This is actually somewhat healthy.  You want those
shared experiences, but you also want the experiences to be transparent
enough that other people can recognize the magnitude of what you've done.

But this is all academic, of course.  Someone would have to build it to
see if this conjecture would have turned into something.

3. It could be hard to explain to players what their goal is. I can see this
> environment definitely appealing to roleplayers, but not to the more
> achievement-driven participants. There's no maximum level to achieve, no
> uber-boss to defeat, no ultimate artifact to loot and there isn't even a
> mountaintop that only advanced players can get to for the sake of getting
> there (at least, not a consistent one).
>

MMO designers overthink this, I think.  The more genuinely fun your
core, day-to-day activity is, the less need to have long-term goals.
Again, Left 4 Dead servers are full every night.

The real trick is to find personal goals, because you want your nomadic
tribe to
not stop, but you might want the player to be able to declare personal
victory.
Put another way, imagine your design limitation was that you were making
a Battlestar Galactica game that could never find Earth, by design.  Could
you
find goals for the player, and keep him looking for Earth, all the while
having
a tacit agreement with him that he'd probably never find it?  Probably.


> > For example, coming out of the mountains and finding a set of villages
> > that will make horses available.  Now everyone has access to
> > horses and starts playing the mounted game.  New skills can be
> > introduced, as can things like new consumables, etc.
>
> SO what happens when the horse village is passed by? Do horses stay, or are
> the designers obliged to conveniently write in a similar horse village just
> over the next horizon.
>

Civilization advances, of course.  Whoever logs in will find horses at the
horse trainer.  Old timers will talk about how they had to use to walk
everywhere.
It's an idea I've considered many times.  It'd be one hell of a compelling
design document, but it also would likely be a content nightmare, and a
beast to balance and maintain.

--d