The Once and Future MMO

From Zen of Design comes an essay ("End of the ‘World’ as we know it?") that serves a good reflection on recent blogsphere discussions on Ultima Online (incl. Terra Nova's "Ultima Online R.I.P.").  UO becomes  a lens with which to view the larger question about the  future of the  MMO...  Let's start with this premise from Broken Toys' "THE UNBEARABLE DARKNESS OF ULTIMA ONLINE": 

Ultima Online - it won’t happen again. Ever. That moment in time was unique - and it’s gone. Because there will never again be a time where there is only one MMO... there will always be choices... The days of UO’s One World where many mutually exclusive play styles are forced to interact, on the terms of the more socially maladroit, are over. The market has fragmented, and cannot be put back together. People, when forced to play the role of “sheep” or “stupid newbie", will simply leave.

Though the specifics speak to PvP, the general point is with respect to places with co-existing play styles.  Damion (Zen of Design) seems right to suggest the one consequence of this loss is  the rise of a competing vision of the MMO as a *Game*, a place other than a *World* :

If you believe in the ‘world/game’ split of online world design, and are a fan of the ‘world’ camp, now must seem like a pretty grim time. The grand-daddy of ‘world’ design is suddenly having people talk about it in the past tense (prematurely, I should reiterate). Furthermore, new additions to the ‘world’ side of things such as Star Wars Galaxies, Shadowbane and the Sims Online have all gotten disappointing reviews, whereas on the ‘game’ side of things, we’ve had endless praise for City of Heroes, followed by reviewers arguing, out of EverQuest 2 and Worlds of Warcraft, which game can cure the most lepers. The future doesn’t look too bright - Tabula Rasa and Vanguard, obviously on the front lines of the next wave, both appear to be ‘game-y’ games.

Then Damion  proceeds to build an argument as to why he is optimistic about a *Worlds* victory:

...(I)t makes business sense... (T)he world games haven’t been as good as they could... Virtual worlds capture the hearts and imaginations better...

However, the challenge  to the *World* vision still  lies within the gaze of recent history, e.g. City of Heroes and World of Warcraft, to name a prominent few  (Damion):

I’ve seen some go so far as to say that Worlds of Warcraft will end up being the nail in the coffin of MMO design. After all, who would want to make a do-anything game after WoW hit half a million users with a pure gamer game?

The hope for the *Worlds*  future  lies with those who wish to differentiate themselves from the current market fare,  according to Damion...

I guess I am on the *Worlds* cheerleading team - if for no other reason than for a tiny faith in that only in big messy sprawling places can one find redeeming value in effort and relationships.  Perhaps too a  faith built upon  a belief that the mechanics of such places  would prove to be more interesting than "hero wheels" and instanced battles with no echo...   Yet, we are always reminded of a dark side to *Worlds* that needs to be tamed somehow  (Scott, Broken Toys):

...Remember that economic simulation? It extends to the dark side as well. The game’s developers, again, for whatever reason, allowed both for a pretty decent system of player housing - that could be stolen. That’s right, if you are careless and leave a key on you in a dangerous place, your killer could not only take your items (did I mention full item loot of victims on death? Sorry, forgot that detail - a fairly extreme PvP variant you don’t see much of any more) but could repossess your house. Think that one over for a while.

How viable do you think this game would be in today’s MMO marketplace? How many times do you think today’s MMO customer would meekly accept being killed and looted by someone whom they had no chance in fighting against. Losing their house. Abused after being killed verbally for being "carebear" (although that term came into vogue later, when choices began to appear in the market and said "carebears" opted out) and not part of the hard core elite. Entire skill trees devoted to allowing players to steal from each other.

How long do you think someone would pay a monthly fee to be a target?

So perhaps it comes to this:  a  little darkness is inevitable to contrast the light?    Thoughts?

Comments

[Damion Schubert]

1.

The scary thing is that Scott and I don't really disagree, we're just presenting optimistic and pessimistic sides of the same coin. UO had problems largely because the designers ended up creating a wide open game that was nigh impossible to run as a service. This wasn't stupidity - not all of it - but they didn't understand the importance of some things we take for granted now.

The world model's largest risk is when the designers start to antfarm. When you design games based upon 'this would be an interesting player interaction' or 'some fascinating social dynamics would happen if we did this'. That's when you end up designing features for the player's own good, and they can suck it. Part of the reason that UO got away with it - the players had nowhere else to go. Now, players have other options, including playing Worlds of Warcraft in which every step you take is a candy-coated dream.

Still, there's a lot that's vivid about the harsh world reality. When we asked the UO2 community if they wanted player-killing, they mostly said "hell no", but when we asked them what their favorite moment from UO was, almost every single one was a moment of PvP empowerment, usually a revenge killing against a particularly repugnant griefer.

[Scott Jennings]

2.

...except for every player who had one of those moments, probably ten didn't, and gave up.

Scott, the eternal pessimist, who really does want to see games as worlds, honest.

[Matt Mihaly]

3.

There will always be both types around. What does it matter if one is more popular than the other?

--matt

[Dave Rickey]

4.

And on the gripping hand, the market is growing. WoW is not a half-million player game because it's morally superior, but because the same market forces that made DAoC a 250,000 player game have more than doubled in magnitude.

Look at the size of the market: 2.5 million subscriptions in the US, Europe, and Japan. That means that 50,000 subs is 2% of the market. That means that a game that costs 5 million to make only needs to capture 1 player in 50 to earn out in less than 2 years. 2-3 years down the road, the market will be 5 million, and 2% will be 100K.

A growing market forgives many sins, and this one is growing so fast that the same old gameplay in a shiny new wrapper is the most effective way to build a big subscriber base, since it's all new to 2 out of 3 of the players. But that's a temporary state of affairs, not a law of nature. Meanwhile, the acceptable price tag of radical projects will continue to climb, simply because of the sheer volume of the market.

--Dave

[Raph]

5.

Popularity drives budgets. Budgets drive feature sets. Many of the world elements need features and budgets. It isn't about whether the audience will be small--it's about whether world-style design will get investment.

I am, obviously, an unabashed worlder. The current runs against me all the time. Right now it is running particularly strongly, because some of the recent gamey games have been very fun.

Gamey games are, however, money pits voraciously demanding content. It's not a sustainable arms race; it's not even sustainable for the big companies that did it this past generation. I shudder to think how much WoW cost, but I am pretty sure that it's well over double what SWG cost. I'm also pretty sure that a world game done to that level of polish will crush.

But it's also worth pointing out how many of the world features have been co-opted by gamey games. Scott, over on Waterthread/f13.net, cited fishing on WoW as an example of how much expense and care they went to. It's worth pointing out that a gamey game would never come up with fishing as a feature--that's left to the worlds to invent.

[Raph]

6.

PS, worth reading this kind of dream:

http://www.grimwell.com/index.php?action=fullnews&id=221

Some players still want the worlds, they just despair of ever getting them.

[yitz]

7.

I have a lot of difficulty understanding why any pro-worlds people would really want a world that is owned and developed by a single company/owner. A "'gamey'-game" makes sense coming from a single source.

IMHO, Any really interesting world would be like the 'blogosphere' or the WWW, a set of over-all guidelines and rules, and freedom to design and publish within those technical limitations. (All law being communally regulated rather than enforced by an overseer.) I don't think VRML ever really did that. There was no built in concept of a user or avatar, no semi-standardised physics, no scale limitations or concept of currency. (the last two might not be entirely necesary)

What I feel might fit the bill: A Standard system with: 1. a set of rules for handling user-interaction. (basically some kind of generic user-centric event model) 2. extensible and publishable rules for sub-communities to specify more specific interactions, like commerce, physics, scale, (and many more things I can't immediately foresee) 3. an open source reference browser. (from which any other more specialized/ more feature-rich browsers might be based. Including reference browsers for specific rule extensions etc.)

I think that these 3 requirements really illustrate what was missing back in the days when VRML was designed: (Something TN and other similar blogs/forums have helped me to better understand) That worlds have more to do with user interaction than they do with representation of three-dimensional objects. As i see it, any specifications regarding representations of 3d objects, or animation, might exist in a standardised rules subset that communities/worlds/publishers would opt-in to. In other words, this same system could describe any text-based or 2d world as easily as it could a 3d one.

I guess what I'm saying can be boiled down to: Why should a worlds-person need to worry about a publisher-consumer framework when what a worlds-person really wants is consumers that can publish. A worlds-person prefers organic to rigid, at least thats what I prefer. Maybe thats because I'm an organic-chaos person, rather than a rigid-order person. Maybe I'm not a worlds-person at all.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

8.

Organic-chaos-worlds... I like the taste of the term ;-)

Anyway, why is UO seen as the mother of commercial worlds? It was predated by systems like Alphaworld (now Active Worlds).

[Betsy Book]

9.

yitz wrote: Any really interesting world would be like the 'blogosphere' or the WWW, a set of over-all guidelines and rules, and freedom to design and publish within those technical limitations.

Sounds an awful lot like oldies but goodies like The Palace, Blaxxun, and the aforementioned Active Worlds. This has proven to be a difficult business model (RIP Adobe Atmosphere - a more recent attempt). The latest trend for worldy worlds seems to be more of a compromise in which a single giant world sells customizable in-world "islands" for buyers to use as blank slates for a variety of creative or business related projects, e.g. Second Life and Project Entropia. Since the user-developed islands are still firmly located within the bounds of the greater world's borders this doesn't go a long way towards an open-source metaverse concept but perhaps it's the best that can be done for now while the worlds market is still in its infancy.

[Jeff Freeman]

10.

Now, players have other options, including playing Worlds of Warcraft in which every step you take is a candy-coated dream.

WoW is a PvP game. That's pretty remarkable, dontcha think? You've got to remember when PvP in MMOs was dead...that was just a few weeks ago.

Not only does WoW have a crazy number of PvP servers, but - and this is significant - it doesn't have *any* non-PvP servers. If you play WoW, you *will* PvP.

You can get 'regular' or 'strong', but 'decaf' isn't in stock.

OK, so, the way that UO implemented PvP made people think that PvP was dead and buried forever. It made people say things like, "UO tried PvP and it didn't work, so everything ought to just be PvE from here on out." and "EQ has more subs than UO so that proves people don't like PvP."

Meh.

The world vs. game debate sounds like a lot of the same sort of logic.

But these waters are also getting muddied with the PvP vs. nonPvP discussion. 'World' doesn't mean you have to make Lord-of-the-flies-online, and 'game' doesn't even mean consensual-PvP only. WoW is pretty gamey and you gotta know there are "I don't ever want to PvP ever ever ever"-types playing it, and they *will* engage in PvP at some point. SWG is "worldy", but there's nary a drop of non-consensual PvP in it.

Personally, I want worlds full of games. I think it ought to be pretty clear though: That doesn't say anything about the degree of PvP in the game/world though.

That's a *completely* separate discussion.

[Raph]

11.

Ola, short form of the reason is because not that many people ever participated in those others. :(

That said, there is a big difference between the "collaborative user-building worlds" that Betsy, Ola, and Yitz are talking about and the "world-like fantasy worlds" that Scott and Damion are talking about. If I had to characterize the difference, I'd say that the "worldy" games are more simulationist, have more possible activities, are not centered solely around combat and loot, and are less directed.

I tend to think the split is artificial, as I've mentioned before. The gamey worlds are acquiring more worldy qualities over time...

[Jeff Freeman]

12.

The gamey worlds are acquiring more worldy qualities over time...

...and vice versa, seems like.

[Gordon Calleja]

13.

Excuse my ignorance, but what are the salient characteristics of a 'gamey' world and a 'worldy' world. where would Anarchy Online and Matrix Online sit in this dichotomy, just as an example.

[Zonk]

14.

I wrote on MMORPGDot a column a while back wondering out loud about this worlds vs. games argument. Aren't the terms that we use to discuss the genre sort of giveaways as to our mindset in looking at design? We "play" mmoGs with our fellow "players", etc..

While some people have the time and inclination to create a virtual society, vote in a ruling council, patrol the hinterlands and dispense honorable justice, I personally don't. Even if I did, given the choice between that and making my character make choo-choo noises in World of Warcraft, I'll take the choo-choo any day of the week.

[Jeff Freeman]

15.

If there's nothing to do, it's a 'world'.

Heh.

[Jeff Freeman]

16.

Uh, that snarky reply was for Gordon.

[Zonk]

17.

Oops.

I wouldn't have been so glib if I'd read Raph's response to my question from earlier this week. :)

To elaborate on what I was really trying to say, I think the way that we talk about Massive space hampers our thinking. We say "Massive Games" when we mean "Virtual Worlds", and vice versa. Do we want content handed to us on a platter, or do we want to interact with a living breathing world?

Part of my problem with this is that, while it's easy to imagine a single player game scaling up to a Massive Game it's hard to imagine an entire world scaling down to a Massive Game. The one I think about, in 3d space at least, is Second Life. A feature of reality that 2L gets right is the possibility for the addition of content to the world by every person participating.

I find reality endlessly fascinating because the totality of the "playspace" isn't already defined. I don't have to wait for a monthly patch to find out if the Brewers lost (heh). That kind of constant content generation is a hard act for a VW to follow. As Raph said, the split is largely artificial, but it's a gap that's going to be hard to fill. (esp. given dev resistence to the idea ;)

[Raph]

18.

I tend to believe that our thinking is hampered most by calling them games, because it's clear that they are a platform for much more than just games.

I also tend to think, given the spatial metaphor that they employ, that there's no reason whatsoever why gamey experiences that give Zonk his choo-choo noises can't co-exist with player governments or whatever else. I don't understand why those have to be in conflict.

I suspect that the supposed conflict between the supposed styles is really preference in emphasis. What seems most important to the developers, what clearly took a backseat?

I've commented before that one reason to design broad is because adding features to an intentionally narrowly designed world can be flat-out impossible. At the very least, it's likely that the new features will not interact. The way I tend to think of these things is as spaces first, with games embedded in them. By those lights, the gamey worlds are merely worlds with few games in them, and the worldy ones are ones with lots of them. The fact that we execute better when we do fewer things is, uh, unsurprising. :)

[Gordon Calleja]

19.

Raph posted: "The way I tend to think of these things is as spaces first, with games embedded in them. By those lights, the gamey worlds are merely worlds with few games in them, and the worldy ones are ones with lots of them. The fact that we execute better when we do fewer things is, uh, unsurprising."

I cannot agree more. The reason I asked the above question was out of fear that more labels are created which in turn create a taxonomy that conditions thought about the ways worlds could develop.

Certainly, most worlds have a game element to them, but that doesnt make them only games. I believe that the underlying drive for virtual world interaction is fueled by the fact that these spaces have a close affinity with what we view as a geographical and social world.

A profitable analogy one can make is between intersting, well managed table-top RPGs and fixed hack and slash RPGs. In the former the players are given a rich world to explore and interact with and are given a free hand to go wherever they like and do whatever they like. In the latter the DM erects invisible barriers for players if they go off the path of his designed quest which involves killing masses of creatures, loot and moving to the next room doing more of the same.

[Mark Asher]

20.

If WoW cost a prince's ransom and is just a gamey game, how is anyone going to do a world game with a gamey game as good as WoW built in? I have trouble imagining anyone even doing a gamey game and spending as much as Blizzard. I think the next company to do it might be Blizzard again with a World of Starcraft game.

I also think the pricing model gets in the way of a world game being successful. Fifteen dollars a month is a brick wall to entry for a lot of folks. A lot of people will simply refuse to pay that kind of fee once you get outside of gamers as your playerbase.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

21.

Gordon> Excuse my ignorance, but what are the salient characteristics of a 'gamey' world and a 'worldy' world. where would Anarchy Online and Matrix Online sit in this dichotomy, just as an example.

A gamey world would be one in which there is a shared understanding of what "a better character/player" is. Basically, there is one scale to be judged by. In a worldy world you choose your own path... ideally.

Anarchy Online is a gamey world with at worldy fictional universe and landscape. The Notum Wars expansion made it more worldy, the Shadowlands expansion made it more gamey. Easypeasy.

[Gordon Calleja]

22.

Ola: "Anarchy Online is a gamey world with at worldy fictional universe and landscape. The Notum Wars expansion made it more worldy, the Shadowlands expansion made it more gamey. Easypeasy."

And the Alien expansion, albeit a let down for most players, tried to introduce guild cities. An opportunity for guilds/corps to build their own cities and have city wars and so on, thus adding content to the world. The reality of the matter was that corp cities, although at times containing pretty buildings, amounted to ghost towns.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

23.

Ghost towns for visitors, yes, but not for guild members.

[Bruce Baugh]

24.

If I understand the world/game distinction people are using here - and I may not - then my experience in tabletop RPG design leads me to immediately recognize a problem with "world"-type ventures: increasing cost of start-up. I personally love a dynamic history, both to create and to play in. But the more history there is, the more both creators and players must assimilate if they're to be effective. In tabletop RPGs, White Wolf's World of Darkness was (to the best of my knowledge) the most thorough example of this, with 13 years' of allegedly continuous world-building and hundreds of volumes. New players in the last few years often felt that there was a huge burden of knowledge to even get started. Now, in practice the core volumes were in fact quite well self-contained. But it was very much true that longer-time players could and did derive a competitive advantage from their prior immersion that newcomers could never make up.

The live-action gaming network, the Camarilla, had the same problem only worse in some ways, and in ways that seem relevant to massive spaces in online venues. Over time, more and more people will tire of being perpetual underdogs, or decide not to get started because they know that's all they can ever be.

There are solutions to various parts of this problem, I'm sure, starting with the obvious one of opening up new spaces - new game lines within a published continuity that draw on the general principles of the world but not any other lines' details, in tabletop gaming. One could presumably open up new spaces in a virtual world and give low-ranking characters the shot, in the moral equivalent of real-world frontier colonization. But it's still very much a real problem, for everyone but the earliest adopters.

[Raph]

25.

If WoW cost a prince's ransom and is just a gamey game, how is anyone going to do a world game with a gamey game as good as WoW built in?

Very good question. :) That's the single biggest reason why some of us have been chasing after things like procedural world generation and similar techniques. The "gamey" market is horribly expensive. Pretty soon it is going to close out all but those with pockets as deep as Blizzard's.

We need to find ways of making good (I emphasize good here) content much faster and easier. We also need to find ways of making it deeper and more permissive of emergent behavior.

An open question (and I do think it is open) is whether players will keep coming back for gamey games that don't offer new gameplay. It's hard to say--in different genres, it has gone different ways.

I have trouble imagining anyone even doing a gamey game and spending as much as Blizzard. I think the next company to do it might be Blizzard again with a World of Starcraft game.

EA tried twice. (To the best of my knowledge, Earth & Beyond actually cost well over what SWG did, and around what EQ2 did, believe it or not. TSO cost more--I am unsure how much Blizzard spent for WoW). The point is, however, that you may well end up in the long run as an industry with few companies with extremely pricey development projects that net you highly polished versions of the treadmill you already played once. Awesome content can ameliorate that, but not forever, I suspect.

I also think the pricing model gets in the way of a world game being successful. Fifteen dollars a month is a brick wall to entry for a lot of folks. A lot of people will simply refuse to pay that kind of fee once you get outside of gamers as your playerbase.

A very large part of the future of the medium is in lower fees and no fees and alternate business models.

[Bruce Baugh]

26.

The other challenge that I have professional experience with for world-building is accepting the legitimacy of casual play. In every community of creators I've dealt with, the people who are serious about their art and craft often have a real struggle with the idea that there is nothing wrong with wishing to dabble. It's good to have demanding entertaining. But it's also good to have something that one can pick up and play with for a bit and set it down again. And the challenge of making good art and good craft include points of accessibility is a very tough but rewarding one.

[Adam Miller]

27.

No disrespect meant to Raph, but I get the distinct impression that WoW was a better managed project. Perhaps the actual creative folks ran the show, or maybe they spec'ed what they wanted to do better, or avoided being distracted by shiny object along the way better, I'm not sure. But as a player I can clearly see there is an incredible difference in the level of quality and attention to detail between WoW and SWG.

If you show me that WoW had twice the budget as SWG, I would gladly take my comments back. But admittedly I am skeptical. I detect a greater level of efficiency was at play here.

By the way, what's up with this "gamey world" talk? As if that is the lower-class of virtual worlds! I propose it takes twice the talent and dedication to make a fun world as opposed to just a world. So pardon me if I look more favorably upon the "gamey worlds". Folks, I hate to spoil your dinner, but it's ALL games...

[Raph]

28.

I'm almost positive that WoW had MORE than twice the budget. I've heard figures as high as 100 people on WoW for content alone. That's more people on content for WoW than SWG had in its entire team. WoW also ran in development a lot longer, I believe (SWG development does not date from what people think). I sure hope WoW ends up being profitable for Blizzard, but I am sure it will be given its success.

I don't think anyone said that gamey worlds were lower-class. They do come with a set of problems, though, problems that rising budgets are exacerbating.

As far as it being all games, no, it's not, but that's a whole other discussion. ;)

[Gordon Calleja]

29.

Ola> Ghost towns for visitors, yes, but not for guild members.

No i meant ghsot towns in general. at least for the guild i was in elite operations, and the others i visited. the only time there was anyone on the outskirts of the "cities" was when people decided to invite aliens over (by switching off shields and thus causing an alien attack)for a bash and funky alien items.

Simply adding a feature like this guild city building thing without weaving it cogently into the structure of the game it leaves the whole attempt feeling rather limp.

[Petrus]

30.

Jeff,
>Not only does WoW have a crazy number of PvP servers,
>but - and this is significant - it doesn't have *any*
>non-PvP servers. If you play WoW, you *will* PvP.
>You can get 'regular' or 'strong', but 'decaf' isn't in
>stock.

Thank you for letting me know, then...WoW is on sale in a local games place here, and I'd been toying with the idea of getting it because I'd been told that timecards were available. If PvP is mandatory however, I'm definitely not interested.

I am not a griefer. In terms of play style, I consider myself living proof that Richard Bartle's mythical "Explorer" player type *does* exist. In UO, this was the archetypical model I ascribed to. If anyone can tell me of another game where I can play that type of character, I'd be very interested...I'm assuming in SWG a variant of it (in terms of the smuggler/Han Solo type) would be possible...but the actual mage/travel agent thing would be ideal. Does EQ/EQ2 support this character type?

[Damion Schubert]

31.

First off, PvP in WoW is fairly avoidable, on the 'regular' servers. Secondly, I don't think that correlating PvP with 'griefers' is necessary at all. Griefing brings in a concept of fairness that is ignored - well designed PVP feels fair and can be a lot of fun. PvP is the core activity of Shadowbane, but little of it is considered griefing - a lot of it is about setting your expectations as you log in. UO, as Scott pointed out on his blogs, had problems because the PvP was hard to avoid, and as such, people who just wanted to sell runes in peace had little means to play their way.

As to your final comment, I don't know of any games that allow the free 'teleport anywhere' selling that UO did - on UO2 we considered it a fairly broken mechanic that seriously hurt the game. EQ does have specific classes that can open portals for other people, and when I played years ago, some did make money standing in town doing that.

[Damion Schubert]

32.

A very large part of the future of the medium is in lower fees and no fees and alternate business models.

I'd definitely agree with this. One of the things I noted about my own play habits - I kept my EQ account for years, but cancelled my SWG account as soon as I was done with it (throwing away a shop with one of the few Master Armorsmiths on my server). I think that crossing the $10 a month line drastically affected that decision, and cost Sony a lot of money.

[Abalieno]

33.

And on the gripping hand, the market is growing. WoW is not a half-million player game because it's morally superior, but because the same market forces that made DAoC a 250,000 player game have more than doubled in magnitude.

This doesn't make sense. So why DAoC hasn't gained a lot more subscribers if the games are equal in quality and appeal?

I think that WoW, out two years ago, would have about the same success.

[Dave Rickey]

34.

If you sat down a year ago and plotted out the market growth rate, you'd get a very smooth historical curve. If you compared the growth rate of 2001 to that of 2004, and naively used the popularity of a game relesed in late 2001 to predict the combined subscriber base of 2 games released in late 2004, you'd get almost exactly the apparent results of EQ2 and WoW.

WoW, out two years ago, would have had about half the success. Blizzard's excellent execution and their high branding power are why they are taking the lion's share of the available growth for this period, but that growth was not built by their efforts.

--Dave

[Damion Schubert]

35.

I don't know if I'd agree with that. Even going beyond the fact that WoW is exemplary in its execution, just being Blizzard changes the rules. Their sales figures for RTSes wrecked the curve, and it's strongly possible the same could be happening now in the MMO space.

[Dave Rickey]

36.

It's possible, but we won't know for a while. Everything I can see so far indicates just a continuation of the historical trend, with a little more cannibalization of other games than usual.

--Dave

[yitz]

37.

Have there been any attempts to engineer small MMOGs as Quake (I/II/III) or Unreal (Tournament) mods ? All of the non-vendor attempts at Worlds have always been laggy and ugly. (Correct me if I'm wrong)

Also, can anyone point me @ MMMORPGs with really creative or intuitive construction/creation interfaces? Whether they be in-game 3d interfaces or out-of-game 2d interfaces.
[My other problem with most Worlds attempts was how frustratingly long it took to create anything interesting.]

[Petrus]

38.

>As to your final comment, I don't know of any games
>that allow the free 'teleport anywhere' selling that UO
>did - on UO2 we considered it a fairly broken mechanic
>that seriously hurt the game.

That is a real shame. In my mind the only real scenario where runes could possibly hurt a game is if it's considered bad for the game challenge wise for a player to be able to recall out of a dungeon when they're about to get killed. I've also used them to avoid being PKed before, it's true...but to me that isn't a bad thing because being PKed really isn't something *I* want. I again understand that some people might think that that is me illegitimately avoiding part of the challenge of the game...but what I really don't understand is why being attacked by some sociopathic adolescent is any more legitimate than recalling.

I guess that's a "game" vs "world" issue. Because I think of UO as a "world", runes just provide a convenient way of being able to traverse the large distances inherent to a world. It can also fit with the fiction if we remember Arthur C Clarke's (I think it was his) science-as-magic philosophy, i.e., that runes are the medieval *magical* equivalent of someone taking a flight on a Boeing 747 to cross continents these days.

I also find that reducing the risk factor is only objectionable if again, we're thinking of an MMOG as a game rather than as an environment. In offline society, people try and avoid danger...they don't go into bad areas, they lock up their houses, and so on. I understand what people say about an MMOG allowing someone to experience danger in a scenario where it doesn't really matter if your character dies...The only problem there is that for some of us it *does* matter.

From what I've read on Broken Toys and in other places, come to think of it, I'm the type of player that many refer to as a "carebear." The term sounds contemptuous, but when I think about the level of contempt I've often felt myself for the PvP crowd, I can forgive them for feeling the same way about my perspective. What I'd love to see though...is if WoW is a game where PvP is somewhat unavoidable and has PvP servers...is a medieval game where aside from PvM, there was no violence at all. The PvP crowd have talked a lot about UO wanting to go back to being without Trammel...but I find myself wondering what it'd be like without Felucca. Most people would say it'd probably be very dull and lifeless, but I disagree. I've played single player and multiplayer Diablo 2 and UO before that was PvM only...no griefing, no tourneys, no guild wars...none of it...and I and the other people involved had a great time. So it is possible.

[Petrus]

39.

A question for Mr Bartle...

Have you known many Explorers yourself? I wrote to Nick Yee about them...he said his greatest source of frustration where they are concerned is that he's never been able to come up with questions for detecting their type in particular. We seem to be a particularly fickle and elusive group...apparently the MMOG's answer to the Abominable Snowman. ;-)

One other quick question...I noted what you said in the rant about newbies in terms of newbies always wanting features that their first MMOG had, whether they were good features or not. My first MMOG was Ultima Online, and as noted above, it has runes, which I really like. Is it possible in your view that the reason why I like the idea of them (or something analogous) being in another game because they are in fact something worth keeping, or do you think it more likely that I'm experiencing that element of newbie syndrome which you documented?

[Charles]

40.

This is mainly a response to Petrus, so it's probably getting off topic. I've been working on a "multiplayer medieval-fantasy world construction kit" and I've done a lot of thinking about the "to recall or not recall" question.

I played UO heavily from 1998 until 2002, and increasingly less since then to the point that while I still have an active account, I can't remember the last time I logged on. I didn't experience the really bad old days, but I got close enough. I too am what would be considered a carebear, having focused primarily on the merchant/craftsman aspects of the game.

In my opinion, Recalls did hurt UO. It wasn't the ability to escape from a dire situation or to get to some truly remote area that hurt, but that Recall became the defacto universal method of travel. This had the effect of making 90% of the UO world uninhabited, untraversed, and utterly devoid of Players.

At least in my opinion, the vibrancy of a VW/MMOG comes from interaction. Players interacting with the VW itself, and Players interacting with each other. The depth of a world is a function of the number of interactions required to "progress" through the world. In practical terms, this means interactions we wouldn't necessarily choose or call fun. To my mind, universal travel from point A to point B without the points inbetween robs a world of a very fundamental level of depth.

I also played EQ for a couple years. It just so happened, more by chance than design I chose to play one of the two 'porting' classes - a druid. Until recently, the only way to instantly travel across zones in EQ was to have either a wizard or a druid take you there (not counting the gate spell, which most casters had, but was self only, to a predetermined point). While you could port from (most) anywhere, you couldn't port TO anywhere - only predefined Portals (for wizards) or Rings (for Druids). After that you had to walk or more accurately, run (preferably with SoW). This system led to Rings and Portals becoming gathering places, required a certain amount of interaction, and also exposed players to risks not entirely of their choosing: To get from the zone with the ring to the zone you wanted to be in, required magical camoflage and speed and/or friends and/or a working knowledge of the area you were traveling through. Granted, if you were recovering a corpse and making the run in the buff it wasn't much fun, but in general, it gave you a sense of the world, rewarded knowledge of the world, and frequently led to a bit of excitement in the form of unplanned encounters.

Now of course, with the advent of the Plane of Knowledge and adventure camps, any player, regardless of class or level, can port themselves just about anywhere (plus or minus a zone), the rings are abandoned, whole continents are pretty much abandoned, and EQ is reduced to a series of 'hot' zones and not much else.

Streamlined content might be good for "games" and leveling treadmills, but it kills worlds.

[Hellinar]

41.

Mark>I also think the pricing model gets in the way of a world game being successful. Fifteen dollars a month is a brick wall to entry for a lot of folks. A lot of people will simply refuse to pay that kind of fee once you get outside of gamers as your playerbase.<

I’m trying to imagine what demographic would find $180 a year a big chunk of their entertainment budget? High school students maybe? Most working single adults I know spend orders of magnitude more than that on entertainment. I’d invert your statement and say the economic limitation is because you are looking at gamers as your economic base. “Gamey” VWs are perceived as being in a similar space as video games, which are seen as being in a similar space to TV. And TV is perceived to be “free”. (I would say its costs are well over $180 a year, but payment is distributed and delayed, leading to the illusion of “free”. But that’s another argument).

On the other hand, if you could market a VW as a “destination”, then you are tapping into a much larger chunk of people entertainment budget. Looking at a “Worldly” VW from that angle, current VWs put in the kind of entertainment that appeals only to a small segment. That derived from RPG and FPS games. A better bet might be importing code from golf games, snowboarding games etc. Also, a VW with 80 server instances could have the same five live actors appearing in a play in 80 theatres simultaneously. Thus getting a large enough audience to hire professional players without an overwhelming crowd in any one theatre. Perhaps There and SL are portents of the mass market VW of the future, rather than WoW. Like email, it might be a while before VWs pass the “would my mother go there?” test, but it could happen quicker than some think.

I’m mostly interested in VWs myself as places rather than for the games they support. So I have a bias here. I just cancelled my WoW account having had a fun time exploring the lower level zones of Azeroth. Now I am faced with grinding up my character to see further zones, and I am not going to do that. But if someone were to put up a VW where my avatar could go mountain climbing, surfing, skiing and other things hard to access from my current location, I would be likely prepared to pay for the destination.

[Damion Schubert]

42.

I guess that's a "game" vs "world" issue. Because I think of UO as a "world", runes just provide a convenient way of being able to traverse the large distances inherent to a world.

The rune system was probably one of the most 'gamey' things about UO, being born of convenience and allow players to easily bypass parts of world travel.

In my opinion, Recalls did hurt UO. It wasn't the ability to escape from a dire situation or to get to some truly remote area that hurt, but that Recall became the defacto universal method of travel. This had the effect of making 90% of the UO world uninhabited, untraversed, and utterly devoid of Players.

This is pretty much what I was getting at. It also made it very hard to make a 'tailored' experience, such as a linear dungeon (or other admittedly game-y experience). Runes were also homes of tons of bugs and exploits, due to their 'mark anywhere' approach.

[Xilren]

43.

I've commented before that one reason to design broad is because adding features to an intentionally narrowly designed world can be flat-out impossible. At the very least, it's likely that the new features will not interact. The way I tend to think of these things is as spaces first, with games embedded in them. By those lights, the gamey worlds are merely worlds with few games in them, and the worldy ones are ones with lots of them. The fact that we execute better when we do fewer things is, uh, unsurprising. :)

And we're right back to "gamey=do few things but do them well" and "worlds=throw in everything and the kitchen sink and hope the player created interactions overcome the shallowness of the built in game systems". I understand you might prefer designig broad b/c doing it narrow precludes adding some things after release, but I would rather not have lots of bad to mediocre game system; give me instead a few excellent ones and add more excellent ones over time as you can. I.e. Compare CoH's combat system to SWG's combat system, the later which is still waiting on a massive revamp...

As people's free time for gaming continues to get squeezed by life, and at the same time they will have more and more entertainment choices available (from games, to movies, to consoles etc etc), I predict the future growth for the bulk of the market is in tightly focused games that have new systems imbedded on over time rather than the reverse. Ironically, the closest example would be SWG adding the JtL expansion for an entirely new game systems where as the SWG was definately a more worldy VW..

[Abalieno]

44.

If you sat down a year ago and plotted out the market growth rate, you'd get a very smooth historical curve. If you compared the growth rate of 2001 to that of 2004, and naively used the popularity of a game relesed in late 2001 to predict the combined subscriber base of 2 games released in late 2004, you'd get almost exactly the apparent results of EQ2 and WoW.

I'm sure there are elements with relevance about the market growth rate, like the availability of good connections, credit cards, more peoples playing online etc... But I don't think this is the main element.

I think the market growth is driven by the offer. Hence I say that the market would have "answered" to Wow's launch in the same way two years ago.

[Nathan Combs]

45.

As people's free time for gaming continues to get squeezed by life, and at the same time they will have more and more entertainment choices available (from games, to movies, to consoles etc etc), I predict the future growth for the bulk of the market is in tightly focused games that have new systems imbedded on over time rather than the reverse.

This seems an easy prediction to make - and its one which the industry appears to be betting on now. However, as some have commented above, there may be a niche for a more worldsy fare. Then the question is how big a niche? By why stop there, why a niche? Couldn't this distiction be a red herring?

Is the whole worldsy prescription (as for example outlined above) simply too timid. In other words, why should worldsy approaches try to ape game-y approaches by cannibalizing features and approaches under some loose fictional umbrella.

Let me approach this via an anecdote. The other week-end I was feeling particularily "retro" and was playing an old CG (X-Com, UFO Defender) that is basically a good "bug hunt" (aliens).

My 6 year old son was watching on - and at one particularly tense juncture (for me), he commented, "ya know dad - why not send all your guys over there"

"but the bad guys are all here."

"yea, but I want to explore there. Thats a cool looking house."

"but the goal is to zing all the aliens, and if I pull all my guys to that house..."

etc.

And herein is suggested the distiction between a game and a world...

It seems to me the first order test for worlds is something like this: first-class subgames that are not independent... some folks hunt bugs, other folks explore there, but they are related.

By "first-class" I mean:

- you're not a 2nd class citizen for engaging in 'em

By "not independent" i mean:

- impacts each other in some meaningful fashion.

thoughts?

[Raph]

46.

And we're right back to "gamey=do few things but do them well" and "worlds=throw in everything and the kitchen sink and hope the player created interactions overcome the shallowness of the built in game systems". I understand you might prefer designig broad b/c doing it narrow precludes adding some things after release, but I would rather not have lots of bad to mediocre game system; give me instead a few excellent ones and add more excellent ones over time as you can

Ironically, that's only possible if you design broad enough to account for the possibility of that addition later on. It's very hard to do it to a system that has been designed very narrowly with no thought of later expansion. In other words, there'd be no JTL unless it was planned for from the beginning.

[magicback]

47.

Abstractly, the worldy & gamey can also be viewed at a platform layer, a world layer, and game layer. Raph already have commented elsewhere where a game and a world can hang off of a MMO platform.

WOW have a great game layer with good world and platform layer. How would you rate other MMORPG/VW/etc?

This leads to my agreement with Abalieno that growth and market share is largely driven by the offer and a value judgement made by each subscriber.

WOW is offering a great online game. UO, during it's "golden age" was also a great online game. Hmm, I'm starting to use Civilization (III, the game) jargon.

So which will built the next Great Wonder and accumulate sufficient cultural points to get surrounding cities to revolt and change affiliations?

[magicback]

48.

Nathan,

I think you to insert a layer qualifying whether the world is focused on accumulation or not.

In a persistent world that focuses on accumulation (through items, levels, etc.) by design will force any other activity as second-class activity.

[Raph]

49.

WOW have a great game layer with good world and platform layer. How would you rate other MMORPG/VW/etc?

You know, this is an excellent question. I'm not going to propose to answer it, but I'll offer up some criteria.

To support worlds well, the platform needs to support a degree of dynamicism in things like

- where resources appear
- changing map layout (adding or removing buildings would be an important part)
- game economy (static pricing would be undesirable)
- spawning methods (not necessarily random, but also not tied to specific locations via an immutable table)

For a game to support worldness well, it probably needs to

- not make combat advancement be the only rewarded advancement path
- not have the whole game focus on advancement either
- support PvP competition (not necessarily via combat--could be economic, for example)

[Petrus]

50.

Charles,

>This [recalls] had the effect of making 90% of the UO >world uninhabited, untraversed, and utterly devoid of
>Players.

Yes and no. It's true that a lot of highways/inbetween areas would have become deserted...but the thing is, that's the reason *why* people wouldn't have marked runes to those places...because they were regions that only really existed "on the way to" somewhere else. In a lot of cases, the stretches of wilderness between towns in UO only really consist of vegetation and wild animals...Because the vegetation is so dense, you can't build there, and nobody is going to fight the animals there because there are greater challenges in dungeons elsewhere. Players mark runes to places where they want to go. It might be true that as you say, that means there are large portions of the world where players don't go...but I think removing the mode of transportation because of that is taking the easier way out...it's also doing something which is contrary to what probably the majority of players would want. To me from a design point of view, what would be a better way of making sure that travel exists in all parts of the world, is to make sure that a larger proportion of the world actually has interesting places in it. The reality is that in UO anyway, there are relatively few places of real interest, seperated by vast stretches of nothing. Players aren't going want to exist in a vacuum...and I don't think they should be blamed for that. Make the forests a bit more sparse in some areas...populate the regions with interesting npcs...put some mysterious ruins in here and there that "nobody knows the origins of." If you do that, both players and designers can be happy...because even though players might still have runes, if those in-between places have *some* content in them, runes would get marked with them as a destination, players would go there, and interaction would still occur. As an Explorer myself, I'd be quite happy to have books full of runes marked to locations that were only 10 meters or so apart from each other, if all of said runes went to a location that was interesting, and that increased my knowledge of the gameworld.

So yeah...to me, the answer to that question at least in terms of UO, would be not to remove runes, but make it so that even if there are not more towns as such, that the areas between the towns actually have something in them...not just empty forests with a few animals...because players don't have any incentive to go into those.

BTW the design kit you mentioned sounds interesting...any idea on what you'll be charging for that yet?

[Raguel]

51.

"For a game to support worldness well, it probably needs to

- not make combat advancement be the only rewarded advancement path
- not have the whole game focus on advancement either"

Every time I think about what I hate about mmogs, and then think about what I'd like them to be, these two statements just become more obvious. It's not just because I hate leveling, it's that the whole advancement system depends so much on repetition, and there's no adventure in repetition.

[Raguel]

52.

err, and there's no repetition in an adventure either :p

Happy Holidays ;)

[magicback]

53.

Ralp,

Haven't read your book yet, so hope the following doesn't raise an issue you already addressed.

In regards to platform capabilities, it is interesting for me to see how D&D rules transformed over the last few years and how the transformation could be compare & contrasted with the development of MMORPG rulesets from Diku (or equivalent) to EQ2 (and equivalent).

One fascinating development was the move from abstraction to specification of generally everything: item hardness, size/damage for smaller/larger weapons, materials. The second fascinating development was their detailing the 5W’s & 1H of their evolution, starting with the Monster Ecology in the Dragon magazines (if I am not mistakened). The current version of D&D rules & supplements account for where resources are located, what creatures have done to change the environment in order to harness the resources, and what form of society/economy was formed out of the resource harnessing.

As for games supporting worldness, I rather look from the perspective that a “world” support different form gameplay in a less amusement park and a more nature preserve environment.

[magicback]

54.

Oh, would a Jerassic Park created in RL and virtually ends up like it occured in the movie? Would an ecological simulating design like the early UO end up in the state that early UO reached?

[Mark Asher]

55.

Mark>I also think the pricing model gets in the way of a world game being successful. Fifteen dollars a month is a brick wall to entry for a lot of folks. A lot of people will simply refuse to pay that kind of fee once you get outside of gamers as your playerbase.<

I’m trying to imagine what demographic would find $180 a year a big chunk of their entertainment budget? High school students maybe? Most working single adults I know spend orders of magnitude more than that on entertainment. I’d invert your statement and say the economic limitation is because you are looking at gamers as your economic base. “Gamey” VWs are perceived as being in a similar space as video games, which are seen as being in a similar space to TV. And TV is perceived to be “free”. (I would say its costs are well over $180 a year, but payment is distributed and delayed, leading to the illusion of “free”. But that’s another argument).

People balk at a monthly fee because it's a monthly fee. HBO is $12/month but I don't want to pay it. I spend thousands on food each year, but I can't remember the last time I bought a t-bone at the grocery store. I just don't want to pay the extra money for a good steak. I'll make do with hamburger instead, or pork chops, etc. It's a mental barrier, not a lack of funds.

Once you get outside the core market, gamers, you're going to get a lot of resistence to the idea of a monthly fee to play a game. Even in the core market I think you get a lot of resistence because gamers are used to playing online for free.

To really reach out to the mass market, MMO publishers need to lower fees, not raise them like they've been doing. I'm not sure that a game that would be popular with the mass market would be popular with gamers, and vice versa. That's another problem. You probably need a contemporary setting like GTA uses to get the mass market to buy in. Space land and elf land probably won't make that jump.

[Mark Asher]

56.

About WoW and PvP, you won't be forced to PvP on the PvE servers. I think the following are how you could PvP on those servers:

1. Manually flip your PvP flag and fight another player who's flagged is flipped.

2. Attack an enemy NPC. This flags you for PvP.

3. Not sure, but I think if you go into a low level enemy area you get your flag flipped automatically.

You have no reason other than curiosity to go into a low level starter area for the enemy side. I doubt you ever have to attack an enemy NPC, although there may be a few quests that have you do it. And you certainly don't have to flip your flag manually.

If you want to avoid PvP in WoW, playing on a PvE server makes it easy to do.

[Mark Asher]

57.

If you sat down a year ago and plotted out the market growth rate, you'd get a very smooth historical curve. If you compared the growth rate of 2001 to that of 2004, and naively used the popularity of a game relesed in late 2001 to predict the combined subscriber base of 2 games released in late 2004, you'd get almost exactly the apparent results of EQ2 and WoW.

I'm a bit dubious about this. I don't think curve takes into account players with more than one account. It's well-known that in DAoC, for example, a lot of players have a bot account.

There are also a lot of players with accounts in more than one game.

So what's the real size of the market in terms of players? That's hard to figure.

I do think WoW is the first game to come along in years that will shake the trees of the older games. At some point players are going to let go of their UO, EQ, DAoC, and AC accounts. I think WoW will be the game that finally puts a significant dent into the player populations of these games.

[Lisa Galarneau]

58.

One of the reasons City of Heroes works so well is that it gives people who may not be inherently social (or may feel awkward in social situations) a reason to be social. Grouping is fundamental and almost entirely unavoidable. This gives CoH a sense of direction that is lacking in some of the VW's. Grouping is so important that it's also incredibly easy to join groups - no social pleasantries are really required and certainly no begging. A player broadcasts his or her availability and other players invite, purely based on clsss and level. What could be easier?

I also think the appeal of games (with certain objectives and rather fixed game mecahnics) vs. open-ended virtual worlds is about the paradox of choice: limited choice vs. unlimited choice. Many people just aren't comfortable with the unlimited choices offered by virtual worlds. They like picking from four: see a contact, do a quest/mission, hunt a bit, or find a group. Much easier. Too many options and decisions to make in RL after all.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

59.

Lisa> A player broadcasts his or her availability and other players invite, purely based on clsss and level. What could be easier?

This is easy when a system is new and players operate on the same level. Mature players get picky about who they team with (they expect productive groups without annoyances).

[guido]

60.

lisa, you would probably be surprised at how picky hardcore players can get.
i know for sure that in DAOC some guilds keep logs of their rvr battles, to see if someone made mistakes, so that in the future they won't invite him/her to their parties.

[Nathan Combs]

61.

guido>

in DAOC some guilds keep logs of their rvr battles, to see if someone made mistakes, so that in the future they won't invite him/her to their parties.

Any idea what sort of "mistakes" they can/try to infer from the logs?

[Flatfingers]

62.

Raph> [i]For a game to support worldness well, it probably needs to
...
- support PvP competition (not necessarily via combat--could be economic, for example)[\i]

Interesting -- I'd have thought that features supporting player [i]cooperation[\i] would be a better marker of "worldness."

--Flatfingers

[Flatfingers]

63.

(sigh... sorry -- let's try that once more for clarity's sake...)

Raph> For a game to support worldness well, it probably needs to
...
- support PvP competition (not necessarily via combat--could be economic, for example)

Interesting -- I'd have thought that features supporting player cooperation would be a better marker of "worldness."

--Flatfingers

[Raph]

64.

It's hard NOT to support cooperation. Be an interesting design exercise to try. :)

[guido]

65.

nathan >
Any idea what sort of "mistakes" they can/try to infer from the logs?

the range is probably quite broad. let me point out that i'm not a daoc player, so i only have a tiny knowledge about it, mostly from hearing people talk about it (being curious, i often ask them to explain me the game mechanics, even if i don't play myself).
anyway
i think mistake in such context is defined by an action or choice that might somehow turn the tides of the battle in favor of the opposing group/faction.
for example, i assume that having bad timing while casting a spell could be considered a mistake (like, casting an AOE and only hitting a few enemies), or sleeping/rooting an enemy too late when he has already managed to strike a few hits, or not tanking a weak party-mate, or not healing party-members properly.

[Justin Sanders]

66.

No one has faith in the actuall power of these games. Never think of MMO's as templates. World of Warcraft has not even begun to set the standard. (I'm sure Blizzard has not even thought about in game product placement to generate even more profit.)

When people think of MMO games today they think of click to attack, massive worlds, a bunch of roleplayers etc. The problem is, they have been thinking so for far to long. The D&D style gameplay is far out dated. Technology has opened doors to tactile control, skill based combat systems instead of dice rolling, and more concepts in connecting to that virtual world that would make any MMO more of an immersive experience. MMO games today deliver persistant universes that change in only the slightest ways. Rocks never erode, and the cliche surrounding evil never strikes. There are no suprises and almost everything is predictable. The concept of event risk is the key to a dramatic, exciting, and addictive experience. Let the world change before the player's eyes.

None of these MMO games now have scratched this surface. And many companies seem to be painfully over looking it, though it is common sense.

The entire philosophy of these games is the fact that they never have an end. And they strive to keep the player interested. Thier goal in mind is exactly where they fail. People do get bored of these games. The idea is to make an experience stunning, and constantly new. No one is watching the community, no one has the power to make an impact. Everyone does the same thing, over and over again. The same story is allways there.

[Nathan Combs]

67.

MMO games today deliver persistant universes that change in only the slightest ways. Rocks never erode

One might argue that Eve-Online LIGHTLY does a bit of this with their daily (at server reset) growth of the asteriod belts. The belts are depleted by Miners and they grow back some tiny increment each day - or so I'm lead to believe. Seriously overmined belts may take a long time (weeks?) to replenish. Lightly mined fields might reach a sort of steady state.

While on the one hand this may not appear all that conceptually different than any other spawning system. I think the key difference is that it occurs a much longer time-scale - somehow feels more "organic". One could see real value in knowing the different states of the belts, and how they were likely to evolve based on historical knowlege about how/who mined them.

Mine-belt replenishment has an advantage over other kinds of "ecosystems" in that the life-cycle is on such a time-scale, and the changes are continuous, that it doesn't appear chaotic to the players, or worse, irritate them on some level: "when are the XXX rabbits going to pop!"