Tag: MMO

Zombies: An MMO Idea

Gaming

If I could design an MMO, completely from the ground up and I had full control, what would I do? Easy. Zombies.

First off, there would be only one world, and the world, in effect, would be as large as the real world. It would not be a zoneless game, but for most people it would feel like it. When you log in for the first time, you create a character, no classes, just a person (using the obligatory super cool character creator with eleventy billion combinations of body parts and textures and clothes), and you choose where you are going to be from (a nice world map with glowy red dots for player populations, so you could decide to be where there are lots of people, or where there are no people, or somewhere in between). You would also choose a “player type”. This “type” would decide if you are issued a house or if you are given a list of dwellings of appropriate survivor capacities that are currently open to new members (if you pick a type for a size of group to which none is available, a new one will be created for you and new players will begin joining you shortly). In game a player can always choose to change their “type” by simply leaving their current group and joining a group of another type (or if you have decided to abandon people and go it solo, you have to clean out a house and bar the doors for safety).

Welcome to a world populated by endless zombies. You and your group (or just you) need to implement and maintain defences as well as gather survival supplies, food, fresh water, broken pipe replacements, clothes for the winter, a way to stay cool in the summer, weapons, etc etc. And of course the zombies need to be killed, because zombies tend to bunch, and if you don’t keep an eye out you’ll be surrounded and starve to death before you know it. Zombies tend to walk, but some will run when they see food. Rarely do they think, but once in a while they’ll be accidentally crafty. Log in, survive, log out… but don’t forget to make sure you’ve got food before you leave, you might starve while you are gone (working in groups helps, if your mall has 24 residents you can afford to not log in for a month as long as the rest of your group keeps you fed, but be careful, if you don’t pull your weight, they might feed you to the ghouls).

When you are logged out, your character is an NPC in defence mode. Unless other members of your group are online to manage the perimeter, its assumed you will warn people trying to break in and kill them before they succeed.

If a place gets too overpopulated by players, not only will you run out of zombies, but you’ll run out of food, unless you start farming, but farming (unlike your home) isn’t safe and you might get robbed. Get enough people working together and you might rebuild a city, at least until people stop logging in… dead players becomes zombies, and your city might be destroyed from within.

And what about player death? Well, a player can only have one character at a time. If they find out friends or coworkers play, they can always travel to them… if they can survive the trip that is. Death is death, and you have to roll up a new character, but without levels in the game, the only thing you’ll really have lost is your home and your possessions (given to your groupmates if you had any, left for scavengers if you didn’t).

What can you do besides fight zombies and survive? Well, anything you want to really, as long as you are also fighting zombies and surviving. Rebuild a PC and get a working satellite dish and some power and you can hook up to the remains of the internet and communicate with others, even play games… or play games with your group mates or other neighbors when you have them over for tea (or they get cut off while scavenging and needed a place to hide until daybreak). Depending on bandwidth and licensing issues, run your own TV station or radio station… publish a newspaper. Rebuild a car and go for a drive (be sure to lock the doors).

Essentially, Second Life… but with zombies!

The Whole Wide World

Gaming

If you have played any MMO, you have likely run into a quest that needed you to circumnavigate the world to finish it. Visit some guru in a far off place or take a note to an officer in some city’s army, whatever. You have also likely found a time when you wanted to group with someone who you grouped with yesterday, but today find them to be on another continent. If the game had no travel assistance, like run speed enhancements or teleports or griffin mounts, you probably got a bit annoyed at the twenty or thirty or sixty minutes all this running around was going to take you.

And, if you are like most people out there, you probably wanted them to fix the travel issue with instant travel teleports so that you only had to travel a couple minutes to a portal, port, then a couple minutes to your destination, at most.

In my opinion, though, the problem here has been misidentified and the solution is completely ass backward. The problem is not the travel time, the problem is that you have to travel.

Travel should, to me, be a non-trivial task, like it is in the real world. If you need to run errands in your life, don’t you try to get a few of them together and make one travel loop getting them all done and returning home at the end? I know I do, and that’s because I don’t want to go out and come back for each item, especially if those items are far away. To that end, I try to do things near home if I can, or if I find I’m always going far away for stuff to move my home closers to my interests.

This is the problem with most games: not enough content close to “home” for the player. There should be content for solo, groups, raids, PvE, PvP, every level, every class, whatever boundaries exist in the game within a reasonable distance from “home”. Now, what is a reasonable distance is another argument altogether, but for now we’ll just vaguely say that reasonable is “a travel time for which the majority of players feel no disappointment in making both there and back”.

A long while back, I started down the road in my design thought processes of what I refer to as a “town-centric” design. (If you are so inclided, you can go read the thread and my posts over at the MMO Round Table.) And I still hold that, in my opinion, this is the best way to design a game: start with the player’s home and radiate content out from there. At some point if a player tires of one town, they can move to another town, at which point they will have all the content they need around the new town, all within a reasonable distance from the new town.

I love travel in games, and sometimes just for travel’s sake, but I hate when travel becomes a barrier to fun.

The Illusion of Virtual Reality

Gaming

Over at the MMO Round Table boards, we’ve got a lovely little thread going about what people hate about MMOs in general or one MMO in specific. One of the points brought up by Kendricke is the lack of NPCs on boats, which reminded me of the one and only time I ever got to speak with an MMO game developer (read the thread to see my post).

This has lead me down a train of thought about illusion is games. World of Warcraft has admitted to doing it, and spectacularly I might add. Ever flown the griffon? Some of what you see isn’t really… real. That’s why there will be no flying mounts available in the original game, only in the new expansion lands. Because if you could fly in the old world, you’d be able to fly right up to those matte paintings that make you think you are really seeing what you aren’t seeing.

Other games inexplicably, haven’t used it in places I would consider pretty obvious… like the boats. In just about every game I know that has boats, the boats have no crew. The reasons are simple enough, crew = NPCs, and NPCs can’t do things like zones, and boats, being objects themselves, can’t have pathing lines on them. Essentially, the boat itself is an NPC (usually just not targettable or fightable), and the game doesn’t support having NPCs ride other NPCs. But it doesn’t have to. The boat is a model. The model has moving parts (sails, rudders, oars, whatever). So why not fake the crew by making them part of the model. We are talking advanced stuff here, just tiny things like putting a captain at the wheel, a guy in the crow’s nest, a couple of guys in the rigging, maybe a cook down in the mess/hold area, perhaps a swab scrubbing the deck. Why not? Would it really be that hard?

Once you start down this road, it opens up so many new ideas… like, you know those buildings in town that are there just for effect? The ones you can’t go into? What if, instead of being just dark and lifeless, during much of the day and early night, have an NPC “spawn” in front of the window of another window, only this one with an animated texture that occasionally shows a person walk by, or flickering light… or if the normal window texture is a closed shuttered window, the new window NPC could be a matte painting of an open window that shows the interior of the room.

So many things, so many little touches, could be added to a game to make them feel more alive instead of the rigid merchant filled ghost towns they usually are.

The Pitfalls of Design

Gaming

As a gamer, I have often found myself uttering things that begin with “It can’t be that hard to…” followed by something that logically it can’t be that hard to design. For example, in many MMO games, friend lists usually have a hard cap, some games go high to start with while other games begin at 10 or 20. Later on, people will want more friends on their list and will say “It can’t be that hard to increase the size from 10 to 20.” And logically, they are right. In a perfect world, you’d just go into the code where the MaxFriendListSize variable is and change it from 10 to 20, or 50, or 200.

As a programmer, I have often found myself nearly exploding in a fiery ball of hate when a boss or customer says things that begin with “It can’t be that hard to…”, because honestly, if it wasn’t hard, we wouldn’t even be having the conversation we were having for them to be able to say that, I would have just done it. The problem is, that when designing a program, you literally can’t think of everything. You know, yes it wouldn’t be hard at all if there was in fact a MaxFriendListSize variable, but we didn’t think of that when writing the program because that number, 10, was only supposed to appear in one place, however, over time it ended up in 22 modules and one lazy coder even used that number to hack some other part of the program and when we changed it from 10 to 20 on one of our internal test servers the character models all doubled in size… grrr…

Seriously… This is exactly how programming works sometimes. You sit down and design out 500 features of your program, then, 18 months later, you realize that you need feature 501, but the best way to do number 501 involves redesigning 47 other features because 501 needs outputs or to share variables with some of those features, or 501 just kicked off an idea of a much more efficient design template that would make a number of other features work better.

Nothing, and I mean nothing in programming is ever easy. Its like getting to the end of writing a novel and deciding that “well, I don’t think the brother should be the killer, it should be the police officer” and now you have to rewrite half to book to make it all make sense.

Stuff on the Net XIV

Stuff on the Net

Its been a while since I put up links…

The problem with Superman, it turns out, is that he landed in Kansas 10,000 years ago.

My issue with this story is that I got out a ruler and measured my head… 6 inches just wouldn’t be large enough.

Amber Night blurts out probably the single best mangling of Colonel Jessep ever.

Scriptapalooza, a contest for television script writing, has had its deadline extended. I didn’t partake of it this year, but assuming nothing Earth-shattering happens to me in the next year, I probably will in 2007.

I am horribly addicted to Line Rider, even though I totally suck at it.

Someone who does not suck at Line Rider. Search around YouTube for more… some of these are just incredible.

Fun threads over at the MMO Round Table: Variable Death Penalty, the Death Mechanic, Making Self-consistant worlds fun, Your Ultimate MMO in 10 Bullet Points, Roleplaying in Games, and Rewarding Longterm Players.

And that’s enough for now…

Playing God

Gaming

It has been so long I had forgotten how much fun it is to be God.

For years I have been spending my time in online games, MMOs, and as a creative individual it has taken over my thoughts on gaming. Inside I have been designing an MMO of my own… but its never going to work. What I really want in an MMO just can’t happen. Maybe someday someone will figure out a way, but I really doubt it.

But what is it I want?

The personal touch. And what does this have to do with being God? Have you ever tried to seriously design an RPG game and have it service a hundred people? two hundred? a thousand? five thousand? If you have, have you ever taken that step back and looked at what you have done with new eyes? As rich and inviting as the World of Warcraft appears on the surface, if you spend any time there the trappings fall away, and the game is… well… bland. Pretty much all games are. They can be boiled down into a half dozen quest types, and if you pay attention to the game mechanics at all, 99% of all fights are a foregone conclusion, you either know you are going to win or you know you are over your head. Rarely do you really go into the unknown, rarely are you truly surprised at the outcome, and if you are its likely because you don’t really understand as much as you thought, it was your miscalculation, not the game’s.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been pen and paper gaming with some friends. We started doing an old school AD&D (1st edition) campaign, but eventually we converted over to 3.5 because it works better and flows easier, less looking up stuff in tables. Then we started interweaving two campaigns. In the first, we’ve all hit 10th level and things have been getting easier, but I suspect only because the DM has been a little hesitant to throw hard things at us since the behir encounter back when we were level 5. We lost nearly half the party in those tunnels, and unlike MMOs the dead are dead and the players roll up new characters. The second game is going along swimmingly, I think we’re all teetering around level 6, maybe 7, and the real story is beginning to unfold. Both of these games have been far more engaging than any MMO and even any single player RPG. Computer canned responses just feel flat, but a DM who can roll with another one of your crazy schemes… oh yeah.

So back to the God bit… a couple of our group has asked me if I wanted to start running a campaign. And I do. So I’ve been digging out my old notes and pulling together a world I originally created fifteen years or so ago, and filling in the gaps, and expanding. I am molding the world, shaping the societies, and setting up what could be a legendary adventure and hopefully will be. I am God.

Does this mean I’m giving up on MMOs? Not likely, but hey, with my aging PC and my mortgage, I’m probably not going to be playing any of the graphics card busting, memory and processor hogs that are coming down the pike. I’m also not likely to stop thinking about game design… I’m a programmer by trade, so that’ll never change.

A Game Design Tangent

Gaming

I was reading a post over at Broken Toys… here… and the topic is interesting, but something in one of the comments caught in my brain, and its been knocking around all day, so I decided to poor it out.

Wanderer said:
A lot of people play golf.

Yes, alot of people play golf. And it stands to reason that someone who has played golf for three years is going to be better at it than someone who just picked up his clubs (barring natural talent and people who never learn). MMOs with level disparities can’t be compared to golf unless you segregate golf courses so that only people with certain handicaps, lifetime averages, or particular sets of clubs can play on them. If that were true, then a guy who just bought clubs won’t be able to play on the same courses his new friends who’ve been playing for three years can play on.

Golf isn’t like an MMO because it is inherantly designed on different fundamentals, and in most (if not all) MMOs, there are time consuming or otherwise daunting barriers between people who have invested time and people who have not. Even “casual” MMO players will eventually achieve a position where the barriers between them and new players is too big for them to comfortably ignore (I don’t care how nice and giving a person you are, if you are level 60, sitting around “helping” a level 10 eventually gets mind numbingly boring). Unfortunately, most (if not all) of these barriers are the rewards of playing the game… so the game is designed to divide players. Sure, it may encourage them to work together in small groups (anywhere from 2 to 200), but overall the rewards of them game serve to divide those that succeed from those who fail or have not yet tried.

Back to golf… yes, a lot of people play golf. But on the flipside, a lot more people don’t play golf. The rules of golf do not change to try to lure in more players (club regulations maybe, but I haven’t seen a golf course set all its holes to par 15s just to make people feel better about their golf game). Game designers need to take that approach. You are designing a game for a certain group of people, the people who enjoy the kind of game you design. That group might be huge, or it might be tiny. The goal of funding a game is to only spend money in proportion to the size of your intended audience. You don’t spend $300 million to build a game that 5,000 people are going to play, and if you manage to spend $4 million and 6 million people show up… well… you win. But more important than the money is to define your audience, design for them, and release a game.

Once the game is out there, you have to observe what people do with the game you made. Some of them are going to silently enjoy the game. Some will loudly complain that it sucks. Some will find ways to “break” the game. Some will loudly praise it as the second coming. Overall though, to some degree, you have to ignore the people who are angry and playing your game wrong, but don’t ignore the people who are having fun and playing your game wrong because even if its not what you intended, they like what you did and it may be time to learn from them instead of trying to tell them how to play. But above all else, don’t try to make everyone happy. You will fail. Just accept the fact that some people will play your game, and some people will play golf.

Non-MMO Gaming

Gaming

A while back, some friends and I started up some old fashioned pen & paper gaming. It started out with an AD&D (original rules) campaign, and has since turned into a rotating two campaign (two different DMs) 3.5 ruleset playday.

I had forgotten how fun face-to-face gaming can be.

Its refreshing to know that content won’t be broken (or “working as intended”), and there will be no farming or camping, unless we want to grow some crops or tell stories around the camp fire. There will be no lists, no looking for a group, no raid attendance or DKP. There will be no spam of Chuck Norris jokes (though jokes and puns are numerous around the gaming table), and one begging people to join his guild that plans to do end game raiding and be the most uber guild ever in under a month if people will just join he’s offering a gold for every person to sign his guild charter come on!

The feats of our characters are limited only by our imaginations, the will of the DM, and the luck of the dice. Death is a real threat and not a feature of the game mechanics. Losing is losing, not thirty seconds of downtime.

Currently, in the first of our games, I play a fighter. The band of adventurers I’ve fallen in with consist of a ranger, a paladin, a cleric, and two scouts *cough*rogues*cough*. Well, one scout. Last session, one of the scouts was turned into pasty goo by a giant. In the land we find ourselves in, I have taken over a garrison outpost of the local lord. We reclaimed it from the evil that had infested it and have now restocked and restaffed it to help hold against the wilds of the forest. Unlike most MMO games, or even single player games, here I feel like a hero. While trying to retake the outpost, we’d gotten inside and an army came to take it back from us. Suddenly the tables had turned, and while we had stealthily fought our way inside, now we had to repell invaders. Most armies of foot soldier are made up of level 0, or at best level 1, fighters. I was level 5. I also had a potion we’d recovered on an earlier adventure that could make me invulnerable to non-magic weapons for a short time. Long enough though to drop to the outside and wade into the army while my friends supported from the walls with bow and crossbow. Damn, that felt good.

In our second game, well, we haven’t gone too far, but I’m a mage this time, a sorcerer of dragon blood. I expect no less joy from these adventures.

I suppose one of the better parts is the limited nature of the game. Everyone who plays honestly wants to play. There is roleplay, not sissy “thee” and “thou” garbage, but people actually playing roles… the rogues are sneaky, I command armies, the paladin does the right thing even when it may not be the best thing. The game has no end, so there is no end game. There is no level rush, or gear to get. The game just is.

Oh yeah… I had forgotten how much fun this could be.

They ARE out to get you!

Gaming

One big topic of discussion when it comes to any MMO game is its “death penalty”. Mostly this is because people want to know, up front, what’s going to happen when they are too stupid to live, but the other side of this is that most MMOs are specifically designed to kill you.

Its the one thing I find lacking in online games as oppose to the pen and paper games I enjoy with my friends. Yeah, Brian is actually out to kill us too, but he’s generally nicer about it so that at least in part its our own damn fault. But in online games, there are so many encounters that get designed to be killers, to the point where playing a game is more of an exercise in triage than an adventure. You can hear it in the uber guilds as they lay out their tactics in which they are actually calculating losses. “When the first tank goes down…” Not IF the tank goes down, WHEN.

To a degree, this is acceptable, when you are leading an army against a god, you should have some fatalities, but this attitude leaks over into groups as well, and sometimes you can even see that it leaks into the developers as they design expansions. Of course, the developers may just be reacting to player tactics.

But, is introducing permanent death and encouraging player fear of death the answer?

Well, yes. But not alone. The best thing about real life is that not everything kills you, even muggers. Sometimes you just get hurt, incapacitated and left alone. This should happen more in games. Why is everything not only out to get me, but wants to kill me and lick my bones clean? Why can’t some of them be happy with knocking me unconsious, stealing my money and leaving me pantsless in the woods?

I think designers really need to get more creative with defeat. Death shouldn’t be the only answer.

Survey: Question Number Three

Gaming

In most MMO games today, your character has lots of hit points and you get hit a few dozen times before you go down. In pen & paper systems, your character tends to have lower hit points and depends largely on misses, blocking and resists to survive; getting hit a couple or three times can put you in the dirt. So the question is, which system would you prefer to play in, one where you have hundreds or thousands of hit points and get hit for small amounts often and large amounts infrequently, or one where you have dozens of hit points and get missed mostly and hits are more critical in nature?

To a degree, playing in a large number system is more… calming. I get hit and I shrug it off. I have 5,000 hit points and the monster I’m fighting only hits for 50, so I can get hit 100 times before I fall. Mathematically, it allows for a steady, normalized, progression of damage that leads to character death. With the occasional spike of spell damage to keep you on your toes. However, like other things, I’m a bit tired of this system because it is so prevalent.

The other method is more tense. Miss, miss, miss, block, dodge, miss, dodge, miss, block, HIT! Crap! I just lost half my hit points! Miss, miss, block, miss, block, block, dodge, miss, miss, dodge, HIT! Almost dead! Not gonna make it! Block, block, dodge, miss, dodge, miss, miss, miss, miss, dodge, block, enemy falls over dead. Whew! I made it!

I don’t know. It just seems to me that if it worked that second way, I’d care more, I’d be less tempted to do some AFK fighting. What do you think?