[MUD-Dev2] High Intensity [was: Meaningful Conseqences]

[Mikael Andersson]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Damion Schubert <dschubert at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:58 PM, cruise <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:
>
>> Damion Schubert wrote:
> A lot goes into creating a high intensity piece of gameplay.  MUD and MMO
> designers
> tend too much to worry about persistent consequences to create high
> intensity gameplay.
> This is all too often a mistake - as game designers, we want our players to
> take risks,
> to try unusual strategies, and to occasionally have to learn by doing.
> Being overly
> punitive (permadeath) nudges players towards avoiding those challenges,
> instead
> focusing on lesser risk, lesser reward activities.  Bam, you have a grind.

This is an overly narrow definition. Meaningful consequences - of
which persistent consequences is only one subset - is a much broader
set than a few common punitive actions like permadeath.

A meaningful consequence might arise from having to choose between
rescuing a maiden and retrieving a golden idol. The maiden may not be
persistent whatsoever past the boundaries of the quest (or she might),
but the choice does create a meaningful consequence particularly when
considering how players tend towards ascribing personalities and
histories to their MUD/MMO avatars.

That example was from the excellent Spelunky, which despite being a
game I'd consider quite casual has provided some very high-intensity
moments. Another great point that game taught me is that permadeath is
at worst just a minor annoyance, if I can get back in the action
quickly and without a great deal of repetition. Spelunky handles this
through randomized, procedural content generation, a degree of control
of your game environment through the ability to selectively deform the
level design using bombs and ropes, and the ability to acquire
shortcuts through accumulation of achievements.

Players will only choose grind over high adventure if losing is
considerably un-fun. Find out how to make losing fun. Add persistent
consequences to losing which makes the challenge more interesting the
second time around, or which changes the state of the game in some way
- rather than being killed, rezzing, and losing half your carried gold
when you fail to infiltrate the goblin encampment, the goblins chase
you away and are now extra cautious / have more guards posted for the
next day.

Not to get into a definition war, but persistent consequences is what
defines an MMORPG for me, and I imagine that's a rather widespread
assumption. The term POW, persistent online world, was bandied about
some years ago on this list as an alternate definition and it still
captures, for me, the about-ness of this thing we're discussing. Thus
why Diablo II never really seemed to qualify as an MMO to me, and thus
why I feel the urge to scream and shout every time an MMO developer
gets the idea that in the MMOs of the future, the "persistent world"
aspect will be nothing but a glorified lobby where people meet up and
launch into mini-multiplayer games full of vertex shading and Flow.