Where is the massive?

May 25, 2006 on 8:03 pm | In MMO (Live), Playstyles

Every year the same conversations come up: where's the innovation? People far and wide descend on E3 like a pack of creativity-starved wolves, looking for a spark of invention, a moment of newness, anything that isn't just some derivative game experience with "next generation" graphics.

No more poignant is this search than within the massive online game genre. I credit this interest to the sheer amount of required investment of time. People spend years playing these games, at a time when even the most beloved and hyped titles are merely rated "Game of the Month".

But after a string of derivative titles hitting the mainstream, they want to know: where's the innovation (as I have)?

Meanwhile, I want to know: where's the massive?

(Update: This got Slashdot'd from the Grimwell cross-post. But I haven't finished upgrading this site to host a better comments system yet. If you'd like to rip me a new one for posting such stupidity, please do so either in the Comments thread at Slashdot or over at Grimwell. Or my forums too, but they are a bit harder to get into (until the upgrade)

Clearly and unarguably, one title dominates the genre, at least in the West. It grew so fast and so high to this position of dominance that most of 2005 was rife with reports of that speed and height, muting conversation about many other games. Yet, as many, including myself, point out, WoW is little more than a highly polished and more casual version of the venerable Everquest (until the endgame that is, but that's a problem with these sorts of games in general).

So of course people are wondering if this is it. Has the genre been capped? Has Blizzard so successfully dominated the old formula that there's no current room for new ones?

Maybe. But I still think there's room to actually deliver a true massively-multiplayer experience.

WoW is a fine game. But to me, like EQ and every derivation before and since, WoW feels like an oversized CRPG with a fee. Believe me, I know people feel it is much deeper than that. But I can't get past the mechanic of the experience, the one wherein there are very few choices and ways to define oneself in a virtual setting. Players are mostly fighting AI, and most times in groups no larger than one would find in a "normal" multiplayer game and using pre-programmed tools they unlock along a contrived path laid out for them beforehand. Even Raiding, which requires dozens of people, is still against AI, with the specific goal of getting stuff from that AI to improve one's future chances at getting stuff from it again. Battlegrounds are a bit different, but the requirements to get into them and then to be successful within are so steep, most people don't get there.

This isn't, at all, to diminish the fun so many people are having of course. I too had a lot of fun in WoW, having put more time into that game than most others. It's fast, it's fun, and a good percentage of all the people I've ever met in these games are playing it. WoW contains a great convergence of many factors.

But I believe there's still a lot of room left for games that are more than just RPGs. Alternatives exist, but as anyone can see, none have really hit anywhere near the level of success that the straight linear games have. I have, and will, continue to argue that success is very specific to each company, because everyone's got different revenue needs, and some are better at scaling their businesses than others. In the total analysis though, less players is less players, and at the macro level that generally means simply less interest.

This doesn't mean we can't continue to look for new attempts though. Just because SWG has been everyone's favorite target dummy, or Eve only just recently broke a "mere" 125k subscribers, does that mean player economies are a failure? Does the demise of AC2 mean players don't want to be part of rebuilding a war-torn world? Does the comparatively lackluster success of EQ2 mean players don't want Heroic Opportunities, or that players shouldn't be allowed to fly in a game because CoH has mostly declined since launch?

No. There's a lot of variables to consider when assessing the viability of a feature. That's an entire discussion unto itself. The big variables to consider though, to me, are: setting appropriateness and execution. SWG is a good example, as usual: the setting was mostly not appropriate for a crafter-dominated player economy and the game has always been plagued by execution issues. Yet the ideas are still sound. But I don't just want a focus on resurrecting old features. I want paradigm shift in thinking. Because in the end, I don't want smarter AI. I want a focus on actual players.

Be about Players

This sounds like "PvP", but it's more than that. PvP is often integrated into a system designed to have players fighting AI. That's a contradiction in my mind, because the objectives are diametrically opposed. PvE is often about maximizing one's acquisition of stuff and occasionally, maybe, reading some quest text along the way. PvP meanwhile is often about the fun of competing against other poeple. Few games integrate both such that PvP can be used to prevent the acquisition of stuff on the PvE side of things. And rightly so. Because the systems are opposed, using PvP to stop people from being successful in PvE just pisses them off. So games sub-divide players even further by penning them into special-rules environments. All because the entire goal is about getting stuff.

And even within the PvP sections, advancement to that section is through the PvE mechanic. Shadowbane, Dark Age of Camelot, the Lineages and WoW all share this requirement. This is because the PvP depends on some of the same components, like equipment and levels, as it has been thought that letting players get XP and equipment from other players is something they could too easily abuse.

And that's where I want the shift.

Actions Matter

It's not about re-integrating PvP. It's about removing the requirements of XP and equipment. This shifts the focus away from first growing ones power and then going to use it, allowing people to get into the action faster. That sounds like Planetside, but that's where we get into the next need:

Purpose. XP and equipment give players something to strive for, but it's up to them to be motivated to bother. While nobody in these games will ever get every piece of equipment ever introduced into the game world, simply having stuff out there to get only motivates some people for so long. So having systems where the only real motivation is to get stuff means risking an eventual migration to new systems that do that better, like what happened to Everquest 1 when WoW came out.

Narrative. Again.

I have long felt that narrative could play a strong part in MMOs. This is the cornerstone to the successes of games like Oblivion and Knights of the Old Republic, yet is often an afterthought in this genre, something used as flavor text to describe the grind. And this leads to the next need:

Player Narrative, that is.

This shouldn't be about AI narrative, but rather player stories. In the old days, a byline on the hard-to-find MMO box would include something like "choose your place in the world". Except for the even harder to find MMOs, this usually meant simply choosing what role you wanted to play in the endless combat of that world. That works quite well of course, but has lead to something of a stagnation of creativity. Companies are focusing more on smarter AI and better gear in a more casual setting. Where's the focus on justifying players inhabit the world at all? When the overriding goal of the dedicated player is to maximize the raw acquisition of stuff, the "game" has ended for them. These folks would of course seek ways to automate all activities, as they have, because it's no longer about having fun playing a game. Now it's just the single-minded obsession of greed.

Preventing players from bot'ing does nothing for actually solving the core issue, the very issue that drives away the other players, dare I say the majority of players. The issue is that repeating the same content ad nauseum has very limited appeal in general, an issue when added to just how limiting these games are.

Emergent Behavior and Relevance

Isn't it a shame that the core element of a virtual lifestyle is that thing most stamped down by developers trying to maintain the rules? What's the point of living a virtual life to do things you can't do in real life only to be told your actual virtual life is on rails in subservience to programmed linearity?

I was reminded of this when I saw Pirates of the Burning Sea and Age of Conan at E3. Both of these titles are attempting, well, what I consider to be the core concept behind SWG but within a setting carrying less baggage and expectation. One could also make the comparison to Eve. The concept of the total player economy, the resources-to-destruction cycle of goods and the player accountability of a rules-based PvP system are all great ideas and Eve does these things well.

Eve also has a feature still fairly unique in the genre: the single-server system. Unlike all other games that break down players into manageable chunks of the low thousands at peak time, Eve puts everyone in the same universe all of the time. The population seems to go from 15k to 25k online throughout the day, with the peak being somewhere around GMT. That's a lot of people to affect and be affected by, way much more so than the few dozen one might find affect the prices on the AH. Space battles in systems can involve hundreds of people. I've seen 100-person battles in Planetside and was part of a few 100+ battles in Shadowbane.

That's massive and impactful, particularly because in both cases, and in Eve, the scale of these battles has a meaningful impact on the world (temporary though it is in PS, at least you're fighting wars for the time-honored reason rather than going all sociopathic on a bunch of AI).

Aside from the raw quantity of interaction and player narrative potential, there's also the intrinsic balancing that occurs. Every economy in WoW is based on the few thousand of that server. Eve's is based on everyone, with many more inputs and outputs across a very non-linear system. I don't know whether this is truly self-balancing, but with at least four to five times as many people involved, it at least is much much harder to corner.

And, PotBS and Conan are attempting something similar, but with more approachable settings and user experiences.

Yet it's also part of the inspiration for this post, like ATITD, like SL, like any game that isn't about rehashing a theme within a rehashed game mechanic. I see people like Daniel James (of Puzzle Pirates) railing against the inequities of MMOs. I understand where they're coming from. But while he has a valid critique of the genre, I think he's also too focused on the mainstream offerings. That's not where the innovations come from. I expect invention from Blizzard as I much as I would from the local Top 40 radio station. I'd hate to think that the entire breadth of MMOs is measured by the playing of a few of the hot selling titles. It's great what WoW has done for the genre, but man I hope people don't give up on the genre just because they hit 60 and realized they didn't want to spend 3 hours a night in Molten Core. But again, I understand where he's coming from.

We've all talked about mixing and matching the highlights of different games. I long for a day when the foundation starts not on what players can do to the game, but truly what they can do in the world. This would include such things as:

• Removing Power based on level. Any system like this comes with fundamental inbalances built in such that PvP will be dominated by those with the most time-in or the greatest dedication. PvP is currently not open to casual players in most games like this. Instead of power depth based on level, focus on power breadth.
• Adding truly dynamic worlds. Instead of one-time scripted events or repeated content just standing around ready to be beat, the worlds should have temporal linearity. It should change. Things should move around. Mobs, NPCs, boundaries, settlements, all of it. Players should affect this. This is hard in old static-content worlds. It's getting a bit easier with procedural content, but games in development for awhile cannot really take advantage of it without a complete redesign.
• Every mob in a system should be tied to an objective, tied to other people. If a player shows up at a town that needs defending, they can choose to watch as the mobs do it, join the mobs in fighting, bring other fans to enhance the mob force, and so on. And the opposing team should be the same way.
• Objectives. Levels and linearity to 60 provide a nice simple message for consumers. But it doesn't have to be levels and linearity. Use narrative to drive the player through an early, middle, late and endgame, with that endgame being political power over the world and how it changes. You know, like Oblivion

Mostly, I'd like to see a day when a game doesn't need to be predictable because players aren't focused on getting their predictable foozles from the predictable mobs. Then we'll see some truly massively multiplayer games, where the players drive the outcome.  

Right now, the outcome is pre-ordained in the successful ones, and this hides the true creativity possible

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