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I like complexity and depth in RPG combat systems. Usually, this comes across in having lots of things to do and multiple strategic options for a single battle. If the game can be mastered by rolling my face over the keyboard, then I’m really not interested in playing.

Some games seem to believe that combat is a simple equation - the more you click, the more engaging and fun the system. That’s not even remotely close to being true. You can make me hit a button every second, but if I never have to think about that button then I’m going to be so “engaged” that I’ll probably be watching a movie.

It’s a question of the number of button clicks versus the number of things you have to manage. In other words, high motor activity versus high brain activity. In Guild Wars, there were often times when it’d appear that I’m doing almost nothing if you just looked at what skills I activated, but I was highly engaged. Even though there were only 8 skills and many builds didn’t use them frequently, the GvG was quite engaging due to how much stuff I had to monitor and the impact of each skill. Relative positions, movement, opportune targets, vulnerable allies, interruptible casters, overall tactical situation… there’s a lot to manage.

Having buttons to hit is important and the individual actions should have an easily observed impact in the game, but it doesn’t make the combat interesting on its own. Requiring too many button clicks often leads to a button-mashing mess. Conversely, too few buttons is extraordinarily dull (bash/kick/taunt, Mr. EQ Warrior). What matters is why I’m hitting a button, whether the buttons I hit will ever change and whether they open up new options.

Chess offers a limited set of moves that are possible. The abilities of the individual pieces don’t change, but your options are determined by the spacial relationships between your pieces and your enemies. This happens organically, and it makes for a deeply strategic game. Chess is full of valuable lessons for combat systems, even if you don’t want your combat to be anything like chess.

Happiness and the human brain are great subjects for game designers to research. Whenever I spend time on the subjects, I inevitably end up reading about altruism and how it affects people. So I’m going to briefly talk about happiness, altruism, intrinsic motivations and MMOs.

Altruistic actions leads to a variety of positive feelings, all of which contribute to general happiness. Doing things for people feels good, but it wouldn’t be an interesting subject if it was that simple and there weren’t any points of contention!

In the context of an MMO, things that “help me” directly benefit one player. When players help each other, it indirectly benefits at least two players. One of the cool things about altruism is a simple elementary school lesson - it spreads, thereby hitting even more players. MMO altruism typically involves complete strangers, such as a high level player buffing/healing players in low level zones. Although altruism is uplifting, it isn’t driven by intrinsic motivations. Even if it’s human nature to take a degree of satisfaction from altruistic actions, looking out for yourself is a much more prevalent drive. It’s easy to motivate players to do something for themselves, because there’s already such a strong intrinsic force. It’s not easy to motivate them to do something for other people, especially strangers. Generally, altruism involves strangers.

MMOs don’t reward players for altruistic actions. We don’t do anything to encourage it, so the action itself is the only reward. Since it’s not a typical intrinsic motivations. We could encourage it if we wanted. Should we? Would altruism have the same effect if it had a quantifiable in game benefit? Would it work at all? If we tried to encourage it, we’d have to be very careful because you can’t force altruism. That creates an entirely different feeling, such as resentment. Everquest made me feel resentment on numerous occasions because I felt “forced” to do things for people due to poor mechanics.

I’m going to share two very simple stories. Neither story is exceptional, and I’ve experienced/witnessed these repeatedly across many different games with slight variations in the details. Both stories involve being vulnerable to PvP while not particularly wanting to PvP (due to PvE quests that flag you PvP, PvP zones or world PvP zones).

Story 1: Near the end of a tough escort quest, I’m doing a tough escort quest when I end up in a fight before I’m fully healed. Then I get an add, then the escort triggers an ambush. It’s tough, but I’m going to live… until I get killed in one hit by someone higher level who sees me PvP flagged, wounded and outnumbered.

Story 2: I do something that requires a PvP flag, then forget to turn it off. I fight a boss that’s a stretch of my abilities, and a higher level player shows up who can kill me. Instead, he helps me just enough to ensure the boss doesn’t kill me and lets me go.

We don’t spend enough time designing social interactions. Story #1 sucked, while Story #2 was awesome. The second is a positive interaction that makes me amicable towards the game. The first makes me frustrated at the game, even if it doesn’t initially appear to be the game’s fault.

Sidestepping the whole PvP issue, it’s our job to take all the necessary steps to deliver a good experience. It’d be amiss to ignore social interactions as a part of the game that needs design attention to ensure the best experience we can provide. We can’t completely control player behavior, but we can funnel it in the direction we want it to go.

I’ve always been intrigued by the concept of an MMO in the vein of Disgaea, a PS2 strategy RPG. There are two key points interest me as Disgaea pertains to MMOs: exploits and advancement scaling. For now, I’m just going to touch on the issue of exploits.

Exploits

MMOs are very structured and try to keep players playing fair. How many times have you heard, “We can’t do X, because players will do abuse Y.” I’ve certainly said it a few times. At that point, you either need to solve Y or scrap X. If you’re on a strict schedule or find Y live, then the fix may involve duct tape. Solve Y that way too many times and you get a mess.

Disgaea is all about mastering the game mechanics in crazy and abusive ways. Things that are typically “exploits” are more like hidden nuggets in Disgaea that you’re encouraged to discover and abuse. Even once you figured out a way to take advantage of the mechanics, there was still a challenge in pulling it off.

It’s interesting because it was like a built-in layer of exploits in the game mechanics. For example, it was perfectly reasonable to find a situation where you were invulnerable and you could kill a massive monster that you created by throwing a bunch of monsters on top of each other so they merge. Or you could find combos on the tiles that clear out the whole map and give you insane bonuses. And you might even decide to permanently kill some of your party members to buff other characters. Or deliberately damage yourself as much as possible so that you could spend money at the hospital to unlock bonuses.

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What’s interesting is how the game was designed to encourage players to break the systems, and the algorithmic advancement supports long-term challenges.

I wouldn’t want to try any of this in a PvP game, because it’d create too much frustration if players are abusing these mechanics against each other. Indirect competition would be fine, such as leaderboards.

Obviously, doing this would be Really Hard in the context of an MMO and there are so many arguments about where it’d be flawed that I’m not even going to try to list them. It’s an interesting thought experiment. It has to be completely different than the typical MMORPG. Has anyone seen an online game take this approach?

While there’s a wide range of appealing elements to MMOs, there’s one that they all have in common that’s more important than the others: the ability to play with other people. (I’d also rank persistence quite high)

In light of that, I see the inability to play with friends as the biggest problem in current MMOs. When it comes down to it, MMOs are social experiences, even if you solo. A brief look at some the MMOs I’ve played:

• I played Meridian 59 because of friends.
• I played Ultima Online because of friends.
• I played Everquest because of friends.
• I played Anarchy Online because of friends.
• I quit City of Heroes because my friends left.
• I didn’t play World of Warcraft at launch because of friends (more on this later)
• I play WoW now because of friends.
• Etc. etc.

To add some context to this, I’m someone who’s commonly described at being anti-social. I like MMOs, but I really play them because of other people. I solo a ton, but I won’t stick around long if I’m alone in the game.

Let’s look at some of the common barriers:

• Irrevocable character decisions (typically faction/race)
• Technical restrictions (shard server architecture)
• Statistical gaps (levels, equipment, etc.)
• Logistical limitations (travel time to meet up, disincentives to group, etc.)

These are all things we can address, although some of the problems are quite challenging. Players can surmount some of these by spending sufficient amounts of time. Forcing players to work around those barriers offends my user-centered design sensibilities. It’s understandable, yet disturbing.

EVE circumvents the hard barriers, as it has a single server and the faction selection does not prevent playing with anyone. Of course, EVE’s setting and gameplay makes it much easier to do the single world. Since it’s more fleet-based instead of level-based, players who haven’t invested a lot of time into the game can contribute if they get in a good guild.

Every time I thought about playing WoW for over a year after launch, I didn’t because I knew too many people playing on different servers. I didn’t want to pick a server. WoW allows high levels to group with low levels and get them experience / run them through instances, but there’s no cooperative play with a level gap.

City of Heroes landed a conceptual success with sidekicks, but I consider it to be an implementation failure. I tried sidekicking/mentoring extensively, and I was never able to get into a situation where it allowed cooperative play, particularly when the sidekick didn’t have SOs. It was good for powerleveling, and not much else.

Pirates does a poor job of letting low level players group with high level players, but it’s much easier for a high level to group with a low level.

Most the other MMOs I played didn’t even take a stab at the issue.

At last year’s ION, there was a lecture about third places. I didn’t see the lecture, but I bet it was this one. It goes like this: we have different social spaces where we spend our time. The first place is the home, while the second is the workplace. Third places are where we have our community lives. The TV series Cheers is entirely about a third place - the bar where those people hang out after work. MMOs are third places. They’re our extended social networks.

Outside of MMOs, there are no barriers if I want to do an activity with a friend. I might be better/worse than someone else at tennis, but we can still play and have fun. Imagine that traditional third places treated you the way MMOs do. “Sorry, Bob - you weren’t here last week so you can’t join us when we go out tonight. You’re not experienced enough for this bar.” The progression systems and combat math cause this in many MMOs (although removing level from the math creates new problems to solve). Clubs may have exclusive access, but members can generally get other people access. If a friend can go somewhere and do something, I can join them.

This all goes back to user centered design and barriers to entry. We take the critical element of MMOs and make it hard or time consuming to access. Players shouldn’t have to earn the right to team up with their friends. Removing barriers helps maximize the advantages we drawn from the key strengths in our genre; but that doesn’t mean we should haphazardly attempt to remove these barriers in a game that was designed with them in place. I’d like to see more MMOs designed from the start to allow people to play with anyone, anytime.

This is another one of those posts that I started an eternity around and just never got around to wrapping it up. More specifically: I wrote this back in 2007, so it might be disjointed.

Although I like both, I’m more of a game guy than a world guy, and the setting isn’t one of my priorities in game design (partially because I’m not senior enough to have a say in the setting). Even though I’m not overly concerned with the setting of the projects I work on, it’s a huge piece of any game. As a customer, it’s often going to determine whether I have any interest in the game, and that does translate to a degree of excitement for designing the game. When I write up various crazy-game concepts for fun, sometimes I leave the setting rather vague. That doesn’t work well if anyone else reads the concept, because the setting is one of the most visible elements and it’s easy to grasp. So, I’ve been thinking about various elements of a setting and how they relate to Pirates, my concepts and various other games. This isn’t intended to be a complete overview of the features of settings. Also, this is only about the setting’s impact on the game, and is not the sole determinant for any of these factors.

• Recognition: What degree of recognition do players have when they see a brief glimpse of the setting?

If you see a fantasy game, you immediately recognize the setting and the implications. If you see Pirates of the Burning Sea, you immediately understand the setting… it’s the Caribbean. High degrees of recognition make something more accessible.

• Instant Appeal: How strong is the immediate appeal of the setting?

Once the player recognizes a setting, is it going to appeal as a place they want to visit? High degrees of instant appeal attract new players.

• Long-term Appeal: How strong is the appeal of the setting once you’ve broken the surface and delved into the depths?

Someone took the leap and visited the setting, but do they want to live there? A post-apocalyptic setting might work great for a game like Fallout, but it sure didn’t do any favors for Auto Assault. It’s important to make the distinction between a place where you want to visit and a place where you want to live. WoW’s world is a very appealing place to live overall, but there are numerous places within the world where you would only want to visit. That’s important. High degrees of long-term appeal keep players interested in the game.

• Curiosity: How much curiosity does the setting evoke?

You want an element of mystery and the unknown, places to explore and things to discover. High degrees of curiosity translate into long-term appeal.

• Historical: How historical is the setting?

Historical and realistic settings are a double edged sword. High degrees of historical accuracy means increased recognition and instant appeal with decreased design freedom.

• Freedom: How much design freedom is there in the setting?

When it comes to determining if I want to work on a project, this is the big one for me. Pirates certainly has a lot more flexibility now than it did in the past, as a result of our development history. When you are deciding on a setting, it’s critical to consider how much freedom it offers. The more something is based on an existing premise, the less freedom. This is true for both historical/realistic games and licensed games. If you’re set in the real world at a real place in history, then the users are going to expect things to be a certain way. They’re going to complain when you deviate from their expectations, and they are going to want justification for everything from skills to art. This funnels energy towards recreating the known instead of creating the unknown. Also, there are always going to be users who know more than most of the development team does (before the game launches) if you aren’t using your own setting.

Here’s my point of contention: complete setting recognition is a Bad Thing. If players know everything about the setting before they begin playing, then it doesn’t create a spark of curiosity. They may feel a strong instant appeal, but there’s less long-term appeal. It’s harder to surprise people if they know everything about the setting before they play the game. This is another place where WoW succeeds, because it has a highly recognizable setting that still offers plenty of new experiences and rewards for curiosity. There’s a fine line to cross here, because it’s very common for people to want to live in a world they know.

However, it’s crucial to provide the element of discovery in familiar settings. Otherwise, too many players will quickly reach a point where they realize they’ve seen it all. Just because you’re in a known IP doesn’t mean that there can’t be any sense of discovery. Think about how similar this is to art history. Paintings gradually became more and more realistic until they reached a point where they had to take it in other directions. They reached a point where reality no longer held the same appeal.