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Rant warning.

Quest chains drive me mad. I almost talked about them at ION, but I cut that part because it was superfluous. So, now I’m going to complain about them here!

Kevin recently convinced me to return to WoW, and I’m working on leveling up a new character. As a level 28 shaman, I tried to group with my brother’s level 31 warrior to do some quests. Yes, grouping to level in WoW is generally a mistake, but it shouldn’t be maddening. Three levels really shouldn’t be a problem. Anyways, I ran into the same problem I always end up having when I try to group in MMOs with quest chains that reward the individual quest holders.

There were two acceptable areas for us that we could both easily access. I had done some quests in one, and he had done some in the other. That meant our attempts to get any shared quests were futile, because we weren’t eligible due to the chains. That meant we needed to grind if we wanted to make reasonable progress. (It’s off topic, but that failed too - I did virtually no damage to mobs a couple levels above him, which were the only ones worth decent xp)

So, we’re left with a choice. One of us must make a sacrifice in order to group. Do I need to emphasize how bad that is in an MMO? Whoever is getting quests completed is going to be making faster progress. The other person’s way better off playing alone, even though it’s not as fun.

In a loose quest structure, we would have had plenty of tasks in common. With the damned chains, there wasn’t anything we could do and we just wasted our time trying to sync up some quests. And it only gets exponentially worse as the groups grow larger.

I understand why we keep using quest chains. Need chains to tell the story? Fine, but that should never impede someone’s ability ability to play with their friends. It’s not like it’s a hard problem to solve, but it seems like we’re reluctant to take the necessary steps.

This one’s long. Want the take away but scared by the wall of text? Read the last sentence.

Damion Schubert caught me off guard me with a tough question after my lecture at ION. In rather broad terms, he asked me what my thoughts were on high-end advancement in relation to the things I discussed in my presentation. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about the subject, but rather it’s trying to put together a coherent and as-close-to-comprehensive answer as possible in a few seconds. It’s really a subject that deserves its own lecture (perhaps not from me). I hastily threw together an answer, but it’s something I want to talk about in more depth (although this is still quite brief).

Warning: This is going to be chock full of generalizations, and of course there will be exceptions. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume the trappings of a traditional MMO.

One of the odd dichotomies in our industry is the stark contrast between pre-max and level-cap gameplay. It’s common to have several types of groups. Some examples:

• Solo
• Duo/Small Group
• Full Group
• Multi Group

Then, there different types of combat:

• Grinding a location
• Exploration Killing
• Questing
• Instances
• Raiding

These all appeal to different players, and any given player is likely to be interested in different activities on any given day. The problem is that we don’t allow players to pursue the activity of their choice.

Want to solo/duo at the level cap? Hope you picked the right classes, and even then you’re going to be seriously limited. Want to raid at low levels for anything other than a goofy experience? Not supported. Want to keep the same playstyle throughout the entirety of the game? Yeah, right.

We expect our high-end gameplay to keep players engaged and playing the game for months (or years) to come, so why do we act like we have so little faith in these systems? If we expect it to be good enough to keep players late in the game, then why can’t we introduce it to them early?

Of course, we do need a tutorial period, and that’s often what leveling becomes. But it’s so damned long. Should it be necessary to spend a couple hundred hours playing a character to find out if you like what it becomes, or to discover the gameplay changed drastically and you can no longer play the way you want?

There are many barriers to entry for endgame systems. With raiding, there’s the leveling, learning the character, finding a stable guild, gearing up to the same level as that guild, etc. For designers, the social barriers are the biggest obstacles. We can reduce the social obstacles (provide them with tools to find guilds and like-minded players), but they’re hard to remove. The other obstacles are under our control.

So, here’s my argument: The core gameplay options should not be gated based on the stage of the game. If you think raiding’s a good part of the game, open it up to everyone. If solo’ing important, then don’t stop providing it at the high levels. The specifics of what each element entails will evolve and change as players get more experience, but it shouldn’t be governed by ingame on/off switches. This relates to the unrestricted flow of movement I discussed in the section about system triangles (which I need to explain better - apparently I lost over 90% of the audience with my marble maze analogy).

— — —

That part’s simple. The bigger question: how? I’ll take a theoretical stab at that question. First, the goals mentioned earlier:

1. Allow players to pursue their activity of choice
2. The core gameplay options should be available throughout all stages of the game

Typical MMO character progression impedes both of these goals. I’m going to approach that as the underlying problem to address.

For those who know me, you probably won’t be surprised that I threw out Vagrant Story (VS) as part of my answer to Damion’s question. I experienced something in Vagrant Story that I haven’t seen in any other RPG, and I’ll share my disjointed memories of that experience.

When you finish VS, you can choose to start a new game with the same character. I did so, and hopped into the same difficulty just for kicks… and I found out the game wasn’t trivially easy. The trash mobs filling corridors were pretty easy, but bosses still had some kick. It was still an enjoyable difficulty level. I got my brother to give the game a shot on my new game + character, and he had a normal game experience. The game was still quite challenging for him.

That’s not so abnormal on its own, but the real kicker comes from the character advancement. When I was playing VS, I felt just as rewarded by my character’s statistical growth as I did in any other RPG. I increased my stats, built up weapons, learned skills, etc. They built the game in a way that I had a great sense of progression, but that growth did not trivialize all the game’s content.

In order for this to work:

• Vagrant Story is a very challenging game, perhaps one of the most satisfyingly challenging games I’ve ever played.
• Vagrant Story starts you off as a badass. IIRC, I started with around 250 hitpoints and ended with 450.
• Vagrant Story’s character development is spread out across multiple axes. You build up your ability to fight against the games 7-8 different types of enemies (humans, phantoms, beasts, etc.).
• Vagrant Story’s combat requires quite a bit of skill and strategy, such as precisely timing your attacks, hitting specific body locations and discovering enemy weaknesses. It uses a mixed real-time/turn-based system.

Now, let’s look at the goals in light of what I’ve just described from VS. Content is a huge part of the problem. We provide different kinds of content for acquiring items versus advancing through the leveling curve, which leads to the split in gameplay. This upsets the people who want to raid because they have to spend so much time leveling, and it upsets the people who want to solo because they lose the ability to progress through solo gameplay at the level cap. Additionally, it’s expense to fully build out all the different types of content.

Part of the problem comes from the rate at which content becomes obsolete. Another part of the problem is that the meaning of character advancement changes drastically.

Although the experience changed, the content in VS didn’t become completely obsolete. The content near the start of the game was still relevant to an end game character. Of course, VS is a single player game. The time investment and advancement scale barely has any resemblance to an MMO, but there are still lessons to learn.

One way that VS creates the feeling of advancement without overpowering the character is through weapon customization. There are several different archetypes of mobs, and weapons attune themselves to specific monsters as you fight them. They also grow weaker against the opposing monsters. This means you are constantly working on building up a set of weapons to be strong against all types of monsters, then you want weapons with different properties too. As you progress through the game, you shape new weapons out of the old ones to keep the same properties.

I believe this gives us one possible solution to the general issue of high-end advancement.

The theoretical plan:

1. Shallow out the leveling curve. Create a newbie island that is similar to the one in Guild Wars Factions, where you hit level cap by the end of the tutorial. This helps players experience the core of what they will be doing in the game. We want players to start “strong.
2. Change the advancement scale so that you aren’t increasing hitpoints by orders of magnitude. It’s the relative values that matter (250hp to 450hp instead of 250hp to 10k hp).
3. Provide sustainable/repeatable content, such as PvE arena battles that are automatically generated.
4. Create content with tiers of difficulty. Nightmare/Hard/Heroic/etc.
5. Layer multiple axes of advancement that are not 100% cumulative. Allow advancement of all types to occur for players with any playstyle (you can get loot solo, you can gain new skills in raids, et cetera).
6. Create a very broad range of content that gradually scales up in difficulty, but with the expectation that the bulk of the player base will be able to access that content and will be repeating it.

This poses some pretty big challenges. Mudflation is a huge concern. A dragon should feel like a dragon - massive, powerful, intimidating. You don’t want to flatten out the content to the point where there’s no distinguishable difficulty or tiers of accomplishment. Players will still progress through stages of content, but it’s more open and doesn’t trivialize content quite as fast. But the bigger issue lies in the advancement. Players respond to big rewards better than small rewards. The challenge lies in setting up the progression to feel just as rewarding as any other system, but doing so without cranking up hitpoints to absurd ranges. The rewards must be fulfilling. Fail to make the micro rewards fulfilling and the entire setup is a failure. The newbie island is also problematic, because it gives players a taste of a type of gameplay that ultimately goes away. It’s essentially a crutch.a

How can we create that sense of progression in an MMO with such a different curve? I think it’s possible, but it’s risky, time consuming and complicated. If it was achieved, it would mean I can use more bullet points:

• High-end advancement is the core game - we introduce it much earlier.
• Playing with friends is much easier due to the different statistical scale.
• Each piece of content will see more use because it’s not obsolete so fast. I have no reason to quest in the Barrens if I already did Ghostlands.
• We get players into the content they prefer as quick as possible, including the parts of the game that are “massive.”
• It’s possible to make progress regardless of the preferred playstyle.
• Players are always getting rewards as they work on several different advancement axes.

There’s a lot more to discuss on this subject and I haven’t even talked about dealing with high-end achievement in a traditional progression structure. But this post is getting too long, so I’m going to cut it off here. This isn’t “the way” - it’s simply one of many.

In summary: Make the end game the whole game.

Here are the slides for my presentation (Powerpoint 2003 format) that I said I’d be posting, although apparently I missed that whole “after the conference” part and I kept getting questions on where to find the slides.

They include some brief presenters notes. They’re generally cryptic, but I added a few words to make it so there’s at least a chance to cypher them.

It’s about time for ION. I’m spending the weekend incorporating the advice other FLS staffers gave me on my presentation.

We also just released a major skill update to Pirates testbed, including a new career. My schedule’s going to be incredibly hectic once I get back into the office. I wonder how many times we’ll get accused of ignoring feedback and not interacting with the community due to a week without  when I don’t post on our forums for a week.

I finally picked up Portal a week ago. It’s lived up to the hype so far, but it’ll probably be another week or two before I finish it.

When it comes to doing my job, there are really two things that I want. These are more logistical concerns, as opposed to the things I want in order for my job to be fulfilling.

#1: Iteration

Every design task should include a degree of iteration. Code shouldn’t get released without thorough testing and debugging. Design shouldn’t be any different, it just requires a different kind of testing. In some ways, design is like trying to predict the future, but with far fewer variables. While designers try to account for everything that’s going to happen with a system, it’s simply unfeasible to expect to get it perfect the first time. And that’s assuming that the system design can be implemented to the letter of the design - in reality, the design is likely to change as it gets implemented and it’ll need adjustments as a result.

#2: Tools

Given enough time, a skilled carpenter could build a house without any of his specialized tools. The finished product might be acceptable, but it’d be inferior to the alternative - and it’d cost more to build. Tools are a vital part of most game development jobs, and design is no exception. There should always be a robust process for creating and maintaining tools. While it’s possible to designers to build many of the tools they need on their own (albeit typically slower than with developer support), that requires allotting extra time for the creation of said tools. I’ve done some crazy stuff in Excel - Kevin teases me for building an artificial file diff in Excel, although that wasn’t very complex. Still, there are tons of cool things I could do with the resources that are already at my fingertips - Excel, SQL, etc - with sufficient staging time and no developer support. Most of my spreadsheets are hastily created to be functional, but not elegant. Tools should be elegant.

There was a time when I would have been willing to do that all in my free time. That time died a gruesome death after I got tired of working myself into the ground (~80hrs/wk avg for 3 years) and decided that had to stop. While I still spend a lot of my spare time researching design-related topics, I consider that more of a general-purpose study that’s pertinent to my career. Perhaps it’s a fine line, but the same doesn’t apply to learning how to do a particularly awkward function combination in Excel to target a specific math problem.

It’s all the same

It’s easy to succinctly summarize the preceding paragraphs: I want the time to do things right. Really, that’s all that my mini-list needs. And what’s the one thing you don’t have in game development? Sufficient time. This isn’t a knock against my employer or any of the companies I know, it’s just something that I consider to be an unpleasant reality in the games industry.

My lecture, Retention Mechanisms in MMORPGs, is scheduled for 9:00am - 10:00am on Tuesday, May 13.

That’s probably the first time slot of the conference. Will anyone be awake?

I recently finished Shadowgrounds: Survivor, the follow up to Shadowgrounds (a good $10 game). While I happily recommend Shadowgrounds to people who like shooters, I wasn’t impressed with Survivor. It had a feature set that sounded like it was aimed at me, but none of those features worked out well in practice.

Character development was foremost among the features that just didn’t work. In the original, you have an arsenal of guns and you earn a variety of upgrades throughout the game. They retained that in Shadowgrounds, but they split the weapons between three separate characters. That means the arsenal was cut into small, unsatisfying chunks that forced a specific style of gameplay. The addition of some minor stat improvement for the individual characters didn’t even come close to making up for the loss of guns.

Difficulty is one of the things that really made Shadowgrounds fun. It was challenging and I frequently teetered on the edge of death, but I rarely died. Often, it felt like a scene from Aliens, where I was desperately fighting against an overwhelming and dangerous foe. That’s gone in Survivor. The game was trivially easy, even starting on the highest difficulty. I was never in danger of dying, and it was rare to even take damage.

So, I recommend trying Shadowgrounds but not the sequel. You can find it (or the demo) on Steam or Totalgaming.net, although the demo doesn’t deliver any pitched fights.

This is the third post in my mini-series on controls.

Recently, I started playing an interesting game called Avencast. It’s essentially Diablo’s hack ‘n’ slash gameplay with an extra layer of depth in the controls. Avencast has a steep learning curve because it’s controls are quite unusual for an action RPG. It handles more like a top-down shooter where the keyboard controls your movement, and the mouse controls where you’re looking/shooting. Double tapping a directional key triggers a roll, then you can change the direction of the roll by changing your view with the mouse. You can side-step by hitting space+directional key.

As you can probably tell from that rough description, there’s a lot more dodging and quick movement in Avencast than in the typical Diablo-style action RPG. I’m going to focus on something that’s much more unique - combos. Every spell in the game is mapped to a specific key combo, similar to Street Fighter. Typical combos are three keystrokes: up left, up right, left up and so forth followed by a mouse click. Left click on the mouse triggers a blood (melee) spell, and right click triggers a spirit (range) spell.

This control system has some interesting implications, and there are two that I consider the most important for my experiences in Avencast. By having all the spells mapped to combos that use movement keys + mouse clicks, it means I never have to move my hands from where they belong - resting on the main controls. I don’t have to reach out to try to hit 9, or ALT+9 or whatever other out-of-the-way control I have bound to a specific, rarely used spell. That helps make the gameplay more fluid because I maintain a state of readiness for dodging enemy attacks. The other important element is the sense of empowerment it provides from having all the controls and spells right at my fingertips. It definitely feels like a fighting game, and in those games mastering the range of controls and attacks is part of the experience. Controlling my character this way makes the game feel more involved.

The previous paragraph comes dangerously close to contradicting my earlier post about the impact of difficult controls and how they ruin games. There’s no question that the controls in Avencast will be a huge stumbling block for many players, but they do allow you to setup simple one-click hot keys that are useful for spamming the same spell. We’ve seen better examples of this in games that use unique interfaces, such as Dance Dance Revolution. In DDR, the control system makes the game way harder than it would be otherwise - but that’s also what makes the game fun. It’s a delicate balance between using difficult controls to provide gameplay versus being difficult for no good reason. Avencast treads way too close to this line, but it does an admirable job for first title from a small developer.

All of the moves in Avencast are easily executed, so it doesn’t need the same degree of mastery as a fighting game. However, it still carries some of the same problems. There’s a short ramp-up time whenever I play after several days as I re-familiarize myself with the controls. I experienced the same thing in fighting games, and it usually took about a minute or two to get back up to full speed. Interestingly enough, I find the combos to be most useful for the rarely used spells as opposed to the common ones. This is strange, because it’s harder to remember a combo for something you don’t use as often. It works for me because the rarely used spells really aren’t that rare (every couple minutes), and it makes me feel like I’m doing something major. If I want to quickly spam a spell I can use a regular hotkey.

I’m enjoying Avencast enough that I expect to finish the game, which is something that’s becoming increasingly rare for me lately. Numerous nights of Street Fighter and Soul Calibur made it easy for me to adapt to the new control scheme. Avencast’s controls enable gameplay, while Gothic’s blocked gameplay - that’s the key difference. This first outing is far from perfect though, and there are a number of areas where the controls are clunkier than they should be. For some people, I expect Avencast’s controls will be just like Gothic’s were for me, and that’s a bad thing.

Still, I find the controls in games to be an interesting subject, as you can tell from this rambling stream-of-thought post. Maybe someday I’ll collect my thoughts on the subject in a more coherent and complete manner… but that would require a distinct lack of laziness.

As a designer, I feel like it’s my job to panic. Designers are in a unique position where they possess all the right knowledge about the game to evaluate a problem and how severely it will impact the game. During beta in Pirates, I ran across a handful of issues that were believed to be minor until I laid my eyes on them and my head exploded. Many of the issues MMORPGs face are minor quirks and oddities, but sometimes those open up huge potential holes if you know about the related systems. That’s why I say that it’s part of my job. With that, I present you the Design Panic Meter:

I blatantly stole this idea from a Feature Commitment Index that I see posted around the office. Originally, I started this as a joke but I’ve found that it’s actually quite useful. It’s a clear, concise way to communicate to everyone on the “live issues” team exactly how design regards a specific problem, especially when it comes to exploits. It also saved me from having to say, “This Is Really Bad” whenever something came up and no one knows exactly what I mean.

In no way am I trying to say that people in other positions don’t understand games well enough to judge the severity of a problem… but designers are aptly suited to running around and flailing our arms in panic.

We just presented our first really challenging, non-PvP group content to the public and it was received quite favorably. It’s almost like group problem solving is a fun activity in MMORPGs. Shocking.