Sep 03 2008
Bad Design: Making Your Own Content Obsolete
Content creation is widely considered the most time consuming and costly area of MMO/MUD development. I agree with this. In graphical MUDs, you have animations, mob AI, scripting, zone design, and all the additional graphics and visual effects that go along with zones, powers, items, etc. These are very expensive. In text MUDs, you have to craft a story, you have tons of writing to do, and all of it has to weave together in a legible, clear, enjoyable way. The creative aspects of all that writing take a lot of time. Then on top of that, you have the minutiae of making all the rooms, linking them, describing the tiny details so they don’t seem ignored or drab, and all that.
So bearing this in mind, why do so many developers deliberately make their own content obsolete? And why do they often do it at such a rapid clip? The trend these days is for games to encourage you to race to the cap and then sit. Then they want you to make alts, or farm gear. Soon enough, the population is top heavy at the level cap, and nobody visits 90% of the game. If someone makes a “real newbie” character, everywhere they go is vacant.
Tish Tosh wrote a long and very good blog post about this over on Tish Tosh Tesh . I read it and commented there, so if you want even more commentary of this sort please read his post and check the comments.
As I noted in response to his post:
The way you preserve your old world is you make it so your entire game is fun and always relevant. You do not put the entire emphasis of your game on being cap level and then raiding till you die. You create fun things to do in the game that are not even connected to level.
This seems so obvious to me. I do not believe I am the wisest and most brilliant game designer out there. There have to be many other developers who understand this as well. Some readers might say, “Well, that’s easier said than done. What exactly do you recommend?” Well, here come some standard recommendations that not only help here, but help with a million other MUD/MMO problems:
1) Player Housing. Once you let people customize their own part of the world, they will invest hundreds upon hundreds of hours on it. It will be a constant project. If you give them things they can find and use from all over the world inside their house, they’ll make use of every inch of your game world. And when they want to change something, or decorate a friend’s house, they’ll be right back again scouring the world for this or that little nick nack.
2) Mini Games. Make them! People will play them with other friends and have a blast. I’ll name a few from Threshold : Trial Arcanus, Quail Hunting, Saber Dueling, Fishing (and make it an actual mini game - not just click a button and then click another button), Chess, Poker, 5 Card Draw, Rock-Paper-Scissors. I am just one guy, not a huge development team. If I can crank out tons of mini games for my MUDs/MMOs, why can’t Blizzard or other big MMO companies?
3) Admin/GM Run Events. As the developer, you have incredible power and tools at your command. Use them! Create fun storyline events that happen all over the world. When you do, you’ll lure people to various locations in your world. You will make people interested in them. Even when the event is over, people might come back and check things out.
Again, those are just a few examples. Yes, it takes a little effort, but it is less effort than the effort wasted when you let 90% of your world rot and die.
I can think of several instances where mini-games prolonged the main game and have turned what should have been a one-shot into a repeatable classic:
Police Quest 2 had two occasions in the story where you had to play 5-card draw poker to advance. I kept save points at the beginning of those episodes so I could play poker when I wanted.
Final Fantasy X had Blitzball. I know you needed to play to unlock certain main-game items, but after my brother did what was necessary to get the items, he kept playing Blitzball. I believe he spent more time playing Blitzball than the actual game, and when he pops FFX back into his console, it’s because he wants to play another season.
Warcraft III had an unlockable game where you built a gauntlet of turrets to prevent creatures from destroying your escape portal. When I discovered it, I spent days (!) playing that game. It’s still one of my favorites.
You’d let me flame them first, right?
It’s the customer, man. Bartle nailed it, the game is designed by newbies.
I Threshed over ten years ago for about six months, and I never forgot about that game, and even started playing again a couple months back with full memory of game quirks, locations and area layouts. Threshold is a great game, so was Faerun MUD (RIP), and a few others that I still remember well. From the time of Text based MUDs being *it* for multi-player, to WoW today, the PC became much more common, internet access became much more common, and as a result millions of people became online gamers. These people (in my unschooled opinion) were mostly non-gamers before. Not pen&paper types, and definitely not MUDders. Nevertheless they poured cash into the maw of the beast, and became the target demographic of the big companies. That leaves people with an eye for content, a love for fantasy and a very rich gaming background at the kids table, out of sight and out of mind.
It’s been figured out, guys. The boardroom has influenced the developers, and their goal has been realized: Maximum gain from minimum investment. I don’t have any reference to cite, but I’ve read here and there over the years how these graphical MMO development teams fire the majority of their crew at launch. That practice alone should broadcast their values quite well.
My hope for the future of online RPGs is in smaller player bases. For example, I love Warhammer and Warhammer 40K, it’s been a part of my life since I was ten. Because of that love; I hope that Warhammer: Age of Reckoning doesn’t become hugely popular. I hope it stays tight and exciting with a fanbase that is attracted by the RvR and Warhammer IP in the game. I would lament for forty days if that game falls prey to massive bitching, and gets tinkered into another dull, tired and stagnant time-sink.
Great article, I’m looking forward to reading the viewpoints of others.
“Maximum gain from minimum investment.”
Nailed. It’s the mantra for business these days, coupled with “greed is good” from Wall Street. Leveling treadmills are very cheap to construct, and as Cam rightly notes, if the “forward looking” mentality can be fostered, you can squeeze a lot of mileage out of it.
So… what baffles me still is why people don’t look to find ways to reuse existing content. Big Bear Butt’s “dragonflight” parallel questlines in the old world is a fantastic one, and would require far less work than what we’ve seen in TBC and WotLK. The ROI should far outstrip those two expansions, primarily because most of the groundwork is laid already. Yes, it would require some creative writing and clever incentives, but the returns could be well worth it.
Heck, that’s one of the points of a persistent online world; a large portion of the world can stay more or less static. Change is ideal, sure, but both devs and players benefit from some consistent content.
I agree quite a lot about the money / greed aspect as well as the point that so many of the players of EverQuest and WoW were never gamers before flooding on to the internet so they have little experience or perspective on virtual worlds. They’re often into it via the game mechanics to “beat” the game and be “better” than other players.
I do also wonder if the WoW folks haven’t been able to figure out HOW to run a more roleplaying-centric game. As Witchkiller pointed out, the best MUDS and other online games are made that way not only by the game creators / administrators but also by the players. How exactly do you get millions of players to play cooperatively? None of the current big MMO games rely upon cooperative play, they enforce everything via code to make things “fair” for everyone.
Even on some MUDs where many players usually know better, I can roleplay my character as having baked cookies and go around posing/emoting giving them out to folks and there are STILL some who would act like, “You didn’t give me anything.” because there was no code to back it up. This is a fairly mild example, but I think it’d be even worse with millions of non-roleplaying-centric players.
In some ways, It feels as though the more innovative of Blizzard’s employee’s might be working on another project. It seems like they would be wise enough to know that the money in the future lies not with WoW, but whatever is next. Even after 1 year of WoW, I would imagine they were already starting their new MMO, if just in a design phase. Perhaps they’ve hit a wall in what can be done with thier current code. Expansions add features, but mostly they refine what already exists. If you played Pre-BC and then started a new Dranaei / BE you noticed a much better starting area that dropped / rewarded more quest items and kept you geared and in a 20 level arching storyline. It was actually a huge improvement on the original 1-20.
I think Blizzard is locked into “end-game” at this point. They’ve set up a gear chase / max level game that most playing will now expect. They’ve made it more accessible with each expansion to the point where I believe at least 50% of players wil experience it come Wrath. I’m starting to firmly believe that the 10% rule is misinformed recently. The numbers of raiders and Kara goers has gone up considerably. They used to say “You can’t PuG Kara” but there are Kara pug almost every day, and they have some success. In the end, I can’t blame Blizzard for keeping the game going as is, because that’s what people want that have subs.
I am firmly against arena; I hate it and find it to be an affront to the game. But as long as it doesn’t affect my gameplay I don’t care. The problem is that it DOES affect my gameplay by forcing me to get gear from it, and buffs/nerfs as a side effect of it. WoW was meant to be PvE and I believe that Arena will, ultimately, be it’s downfall. It’ll take a couple more years, but other MMOs will get more and more WoW players to try them.
My point is this: WoW exists largely the way it was implemented. The point is to level to max, then start a raid progression. Before, it was based more on EQ, in that it required 40 people. They’ve since realized that it ain’t gonna happen. They went down to 25 man, and will soon have a 10 man progression. But, the game hasn’t drastically changed from the founding formula, if nothing else, that’s admirable. There have been many tweaks, but nothing I would consider an overhaul to the game in that respect. There’s a lot about it that drew in so many players who had no idea about raiding, but there are certainly a lot more raiders than there ever were. I believe a good portion of players are finding raiding to work for them. Even if it’s just at the Kara level. There is a lot of fun to be had with defeating content, and even a couple months afterward on farming it as you see your friends get better stuff.
What we should be focusing on, is how to make the next MMO better. WoW is ancient in terms of the technology world. Talking about how to make it better with large overhauls is just unrealistic. And by doing so, you are encouraging the next MMOs to be wow with a few changes. We need to talk about how to add sweeping changes to the genre, not as it relates to WoW, but all games. Adding guild halls, if even technically possible, is a see-through band-aid on a bullet hole. That has to be brought in on the ground level with ways to customize it. Adding it in 4 years later is just not going to work right. They could have GM run events, and I don’t know why they don’t.
Also, levelling WAS a fun and awesome experience. I played for a few months while levelling and pursued gear with my guild. I had a blast going through each levelling area and hitting many dungeons. But once you’ve hit cap and have seen what’s there, it’s hard to go back. And when you convince your friends to play, your not talking about those first levels, you are experiencing the raiding at that point. That’s why there is a level rush. And frankly, it’s hard to argue with it; this is a 4 year old game, most people have capped. You have to join a new MMO to get that awesome levelling experience (the way they are now). The only way to recapture it is to start with a group of friends, not by yourself. The major problem with WoW is its age, and nothing more. There are fewer and fewer new players. These games, as of now, do have a lifespan, they aren’t meant to go on forever. If they are designed from the get go to last forever, potentially, we will see more things to do than just kill and gear. I think it just comes down to the design phase; add all of these ideas at the beginning, and lay the foundation even if you can’t visit it before launch. All this comes down to bad design, but it’s bad design at the beginning, and now it bites you in the arse. This was their first game with little experience and it’s successful in so many ways. Let’s just see what they’ve truly learned from it with their new mmo. I don’t believe they are perfect, or faultless, but they do work hard on their games. It’s pointless to bitch about what’s wrong with the game now fundamentaly, other than to fix it in a new game. Try to give feedback to them on what’s wrong with WoW, but not to fix WoW, it’s too late. And frankly I don’t want to play WoW forever. It’s actually nice to switch games every couple of years ;).
In my opinion Blizzard is doing a great job, both with providing new content and with listening to its customers. They implement most things that people ask for, if they are fun, make sense and fit into the game. But this process takes time, and people tend to forget that it takes a long time to design, implement, test, tweak things until they are in a finished and presentable state.
Also people forget that there are 10 million people playing the game, so a few hundred demanding something on the forums aren’t the majority of players, as they often like to think. You want player housing and guild halls, Blizzard hasn’t implemented this, and your logical thinking is that Blizzard doesn’t listen to its customers. I don’t agree with that train of thought.
Talking about player housing and guild halls, to me neither of these has a place in a game like WoW. Because that’s what it is, a game, and not a second life. My guild had a guild hall in SWG, I’ve never been there, what would I do there? Guild chat is WoW’s guild hall. And player housing, how would that ever make sense? In UO the “wilderness” was full with player’s houses, I don’t think there’s a real possibility to implement player housing into a MMO in a fun way.
I’m certainly looking forward to wotlk and trying to tackle 10man raids with the nice people I’ve met in the game. What I don’t want to do is content that I have already done too many times, so I’m quite happy that old content is just that, old content and thus obsolete to end game. I don’t see how that is bad design, to me it is excellent design. Of course they will bring back Naxxramas, which I am not entirely happy about, but apparently they are hereby doing just what you are suggesting with this post.
From the perspective of having designed pen & paper and live action games, I have to say, designing out of your own content is ridiculous. If you have mobs that are higher level than others, and they are pretty much cookie cutter to lower level mobs in other earlier instances…
…why not make it so you can play the dungeon again, but at a higher difficulty?
Wailing Caverns was a blast, and you could go into it to explore only part of it, or to get a particular boss you needed, or you could go into it to clear the whole darn thing and defeat the very last boss in there, and then the one that needed to be summoned.
Or, you could go in with a higher level character or two and try soloing, duoing, or so on, the dungeon, depending on how much higher level you were.
I mean, how hard is it to do things based on a percentage of health/mana?
And, if there’s some balancing issues… well, just don’t let it break a precious end-game loot plan, and let people have fun playing through the level.
The Druids of the Fang set, can’t remember the name off-hand, was a favorite of more than a few druids just for it’s look. You know, having a set of casually obtainable gear that actually looked like a cohesive set rather than a mish mash of scraps. And if the equipment does something nifty, like summon a special little pet, you might even be able to find a few otherwise hard-core folks to join you on your endeavor.
And on a sideier note, something that I think set City of Heroes apart from every other MMO out there has got to be the Side-Kick/Paragon system, and probably warrants a whole ‘nother post just about that. Being able to play with your buddy even though he’s not playing with you as often, or letting your buddy experience the high-end awesome content even though he’s low level so he decides to stick with the game… those are good ideas not just from a player’s view, but from the company’s perspective of the bottom line as well.
And let’s hard-core and casual gamers actually have fun together, while still rewarding the one who’s put in more time.
I would play WoW if it were a single player game. Apart from the dungeons, the VAST majority of the game can be played completely sans-players. And hell, set some NPC mercenaries and every non-raid instance can be done completely without the benefit of other players.
Why would you make an MMO like that? I mean, I understand the flipside, for those who can’t play during peak hours or the aforementioned lowbie drought it’s good that it’s a level or two before you can solo something anyway… But we come right back to cambios’s problem.
Why would they make such a GLUT of obsolete content that people can walk through an entire ‘city’ without so much as seeing one ‘real person’?
And as far as timezones go, it’s not like a midnight wow-er in the states can’t log onto an oceania server.
No excuse. Blizzard’s losing players because so much of their game is merely a single player RPG with an attatched chat window.
Which is NOT worth the subscription.
Where you want to put your emphasis really depends on the type of player you are catering to. For a game like WOW, I agree they have a ton to gain by adding in level-independent mini-games. Likewise by encouraging people to experience content slowly…hell they should add in a feature that lets you drop your level to group and do say level 40 dungeons with your level 70.
Situation really becomes different if a game’s focus is RvR/PVP/Competitive or role playing based. In that case, you really are better off doing what shadowbane for example did which is minimizing the amount of “levelling/PVE” content and focusing on battle/endgame content. Players aren’t going to stop and appreciate a long or content heavy leveling curve if they need to hit max level to compete. And really unless you severely reduce the importance of levels, there’s no way NOT to make a competitive game not be about getting to maximum.
Speaking with regards to Threshold in particular, I enjoyed it back in the day but with the long leveling curve it’s probably not something I”d play again. Role playing your way slowly to power and influence can be fun the first time around. I find after you’ve played a great number of RP games, especially if you gained a great measure of power in many of those games, low levels are something to be plowed through as soon as possible.
Making the leveling curve optional or eliminating it might seem heretical in the RPG world. But when you’re looking at people who have played the “green squire” a hundred times and really want to concentrate on influence/power RP and PVP…why put them through that? Said people are often major political drivers in any world they play on, why encourage them to stay on a possibly dying game because of a huge leveling curve to reach the same point in a new world?
Cambios wrote: “It is imporant to keep in mind that while Blizzard boasts millions of players, each server is really no bigger than a single server on previous general MMOs. Most servers still peak at about 4000 people online. They just have a crapton of servers.”
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No doubt! But, you still have to get those 4,000ish people on each server to play cooperatively and that could a whole lot of admins to accomplish across all the servers.
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Tesh wrote: “…you can jump in and fire up a max level player and just go to town, or you can play through the leveling content, either mode right out of the box.”
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I think where the end game *is* the “real” game, then this would work. It wouldn’t work well in games where actually earning your way into the top levels means something.
Tesh wrote: “It also underlines the treadmill nature of the bulk of “content”, since it’s just something to be leveled through in an attempt to justify spending inordinate amounts of time in the game. To me, an online world should be celebrating skill and creativity, not mindless grinding and time investment.”
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Tesh, I have to agree with this one hundred percent.
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With the ease of leveling in MMOs they have to make the grid last a long time to keep people playing even though the “real game” doesn’t start until the end game kicks in. Even with some MUDs you can sail through level 100, remort 4 times, and move on to level 200+ all in a month so you can start to play the “real game”. What’s the point in having those levels if they don’t mean anything?
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On the flip side, if you have to kill 300 of MobX (or the equivalent of it) to get to the next level, well that sounds very boring as well.
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Rewarding creativity is pretty hard to do via code, especially with the large number of walk-thrus available on the internet. Is part of the future going to be smaller games with more admins who can watch what’s going on and reward creative folks for what their characters do that can’t possibly be monitored by code?
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On some MUDs there are characters that are fairly famous for things they’ve done very well, but suck on the level-o-meter because they don’t spend much time griding away to earn that next level.
I am extremely perplexed by the nature of this topic. Frankly, the only setting in which content does not become obsolete is a leveless roleplaying system. And even then, given previous mentions of players being “content,” previous story arcs become obsolete. *ALL* games with any progressive gameplay system will suffer from content becoming obsolete. Even Threshold RPG has this (you don’t see Hegemons returning to the Tower of Alignment to interact with first floor NPCs for any reason, for example).
In the end, a very large portion of the issue with regards to content becoming obsolete so quickly is player attitudes and culture. More and more people have friends or higher level characters power level them through content. Do they have to? No. But they do anyway.
As for the suggestions to make current MMO’s better:
1. Player Housing: Player customizeable housing is a great idea in a small game, generally with a roleplaying nature. It is not feasible in a large, graphical MMO. SWG is a great example of placing this in a game. Abandoned house after abandoned house littered the game. SWG? Dead. There are great games that already have house building feature. They are called the Sims and Animal Crossing.
From my experience, this is not a feature that is wanted by the majority of gamers who play MMOs, but rather a very, very, very vocal minority of players.
2. Mini-games: I have yet to play a game with mini-games in which mini-games became more than a passing activity. If I was in the area with the mini-game and sufficiently bored, I’d do it. Especially if there was zero reward. At least in WoW, “Daily Quests” can be viewed as mini-games, with bombing missions, timed events, etc. And you are rewarded in each one.
Again, if my focus was mini-games or I derived more entertainment from them with little reward, I would play Mario Party or Raving Rabids( or whatever the heck that Ray-Man spin-off was called.)
3. GM/Admin Run Events: As I said with player housing, this is a fantastic idea, in a small game, generally with a roleplaying nature. In a game where you have more than a handful of servers, the issue becomes what to do with so many potential plot-lines. Which player ideas get support? Do you support all of them or do you have to whittle down to a small number? Is that fair? Then, what happens when you decide on a plot-line to run and half your servers go one way, and the other goes another. Then, you have players who ended up on the “losing” side of an idea, switching servers to go to where their idea won out.
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I am not against these ideas, (except for mini-games, yuck) I just do not believe they are feasible in a game larger than a few thousand people where admin/developer/GM attention is not overwhelmed and quality drops. There are some great examples of smaller games in which this was successful. Asheron’s Call and Eve Online come to mind, both with variations of housing and gm/admin events.