I and my immediate gaming buddies spend an exorbitant amount of time discussing game design so I thought it might be beneficial to take a moment to write it all down. I’d also like to note that wishlists are not static entities and neither will this page be as I intend to update it now and again with new revelations of good or bad game design.
My first, and most likely most profound, revelation was that as gamers we really have no clue what we want. Or, more accurately, that what we want is originality in design. Since I cannot give much advice on the probable efficacy of game mechanics I’ve never seen before, I am instead going to comment upon previous games mechanics and highlight the various pitfalls some companies have fallen into. The hope would be that this would somehow at least give future developers a general road-map towards success highlighting the potholes they will need to pass on the way.
I am going to list the separate issues / mechanics numerically though this is by no means an indication of importance, it is merely the order in which they happened to come up in conversation.
So here we go, the mega list of issues most MMO games fail to address:
There is no greater sin in this industry than releasing with a hodgepodge client expecting to have the time to patch it up later. Most companies that have fallen into this category were obviously having funding issues and had little to no other choice. I would however point out that even if the VC committee is breathing down your neck you can at least make the very sensible argument that they can either be patient and have the possibility of returns or be impatient and have none. Once you’ve alienated a player-base for an already very niche market, your virtually doomed. On top of that, after release your going to be too busy fixing the unforeseen problems to bother with the ones you already knew about. So to reiterate, polish at release is money in the bank.
2. Level / class based systems
I could go on about this for days but to summarize game design has to leave the D&D cradle for it’s own good. Leveling has become the game in many aspects rather then a game mechanic which it was always intended to be. You should level as a consequence of playing the game not as a reason for playing. Class based systems also hamper originality. It has turned into a sort of development shortcut to pigeonhole gamers into choreographed play-styles instead of letting the player develop their own. Look to Eve Online for inspiration on both of these issues. There’s a reason why the game has been around for as long as it has.
As a designer to be successful it will be important not to pick an extreme when deciding where on the theme park vs. sandbox spectrum you intend to land. Each has their benefits and their downsides and if you do not come up with the correct mix you’ll end up alienating a good portion of your player-base. Theme park style content is always the most enjoyable kind that the developer can give to the player. This is one of the major reasons why World of Warcraft is such a huge success, they simply have the largest online theme park around. The problem with such a system is that eventually the player runs out of roller coasters to ride and then usually quits playing the game. The problem with sandboxes is that while, given the proper tools, players can create an infinite amount of content to keep themselves amused without an overall reason to do so most find themselves getting literally “lost” in the sandbox and inevitably quitting. So there is a real art in the balance between the two. Sandbox content is required to keep players interest between content patches but it needs to be given purpose and direction and new theme park content needs to be released at regular intervals or the player-base will find greener grass to feast upon.
This is one issue that has plagued MMO’s since its earliest days. Players have a tendency to mass together in situations of conflict with a herd mentality that “more is better”. Unfortunately it usually is, and this results in the factoring out of individual players contribution and reduces the conflict down into a simple calculation of which Zerg horde is larger. This is not very fun for the players, and neither is it for your servers which usually don’t fair well when 60% of the player-base is crammed into 1% of the world. Many games attempt to solve this issue by instancing all possible points of conflict between groups of players limiting the maximum number of participants. While in theory this is a good thing, all it does is take sandbox style conflict and put it into theme park style battlegrounds that quickly get boring. By doing this you are essentially neutering the random encounters that give MMOs the majority of their allure in the first place. A suggestion of mine for getting around this would be to instance not only battlegrounds and such but also the world at large, but then also seed those instances with both friends and foes allowing for random encounters while still retaining a limit on how many can participate. A good example of a “frontier” conflict system with a good answer to the Zerg problem is shattered galaxies. While it is not an MMORPG it is still a good, if dated, MMO concept design that allows for greater theaters of conflict but at its most basic unit is still instanced combat.
No one likes to lose but when you are pitting players against each other, there does eventually have to be a victor. The real trick of it is making the conflict fun enough that the loss does not detour the player from trying again. This is a lot easier said then done but there are a few basic things to avoid with such systems. Firstly is the rewards for participation should be 90%+ of the total rewards awarded to the players. That meaning that the winners are already going to get an ego boost for being victorious, a small bonus is in order but a victor take all scenario quickly leads to a loser taking his ball and going home scenario. Second thing to avoid is rewarding the victor with anything that will give them even greater advantage in the rematch. The arena system in WoW is a perfect example of how not to go about assigning rewards. I already went on about that, at length, in another post. Hit the link if you want to hear me rant a bit more on the subject.
6. Realism at the cost of enjoyment
So you’ve got an MMO set in a mid-evil-esque time period and being such you decided that the fastest way a player should travel is by horse. The consequence of this being that if player A on one side of the world wants to group with player B on the other, it is going to take 15 minutes of real time in game travel to group up. People who make decisions like this have absolutely no business in a game development company. If your primary goal is to entertain the players then you shouldn’t balk at momentary breaks in realism to do so.
I’ve already stated that class based systems are a no-no but even in skill based systems balance issues are still prevalent. To start off you really need to have a system in place to be able to objectively compare abilities so that when (not if) changes need to be made you are able to do so without relying on “gut” impressions which will be categorically incorrect. Remember that the maximum potential your employees can pull out of a character will be dwarfed by the hardcore masses making personal “but I always get beat by an x” stories essentially worthless. I am sure there are better ways to go about solving this problem but the only suggestion I could come up with was to attempt to identify users that are the “best of” each particular class/skill and then pit them against each other enough times to have an objective look at what can really be accomplished by people who know what they are doing.
There are a lot of users that want nothing to do what so ever with PvP. While I can’t really understand that viewpoint I would say “whatever floats your boat” and allow for at least some part of the game world to be conflict free. The problem is listening to these fans to the exclusion of people that want their play spiced with PvP. It’s my firm belief that people that dislike PvP are that way because they have not experienced it in the correct manner. Having the distinct risk of being attacked makes every action, previously mundane, now new and exciting. This being said you can’t really create an environment that caters to griefers so it is a real fine line between spicing the game experience with conflict and curbing abuse. I don’t really have any practical advice for how to solve this problem other then getting polarized in either direction will result in loss of players.
Players thrive on rewards for time spent. It is part of the compulsive like allure of online gaming. If those rewards get devalued due to bloat in the game economy it can be really devastating to some of the motivational factors people have for playing the game. You really need to ensure that there is always a bigger carrot just out of financial reach to ensure that the virtual currency never loses its draw.
10. Does this make the game more fun rule.
It’s amazing how many changes development crews make to games that fail this test. It’s very simple, just ask yourself “Does this make the game more fun?” (DTMGMF) before you finalize a mechanics change. A perfect example of this was in WoW when they removed the ability for people to use the “drop group” bug in the Orgrimmar instance to get a free port back to their bound inn. Sure, what everyone was doing was technically an exploit, but everyone was using it because doing so made the game more fun. In removing that ability the devs while technically “fixing the bug” also failed the DTMGMF test. Now if they had say, put a portal stone in the middle of town that you could use to return to your bound inn at the same time as fixing the “bug” it would have been fine. That didn’t happen and the developers intelligence got questioned in hundreds of different ventrillo chat rooms for the majority of a month.
If you ask most gamers, they will tell you that they don’t mind dying in a fair manner. Meaning if they get focus fired by 5 enemies then yes, it’s more then reasonable to expect death from such a situation. However, if you throw a stun, or any other CC that makes the player unable to “play” then the situation goes from acceptable to frustrating as hell instantly. Use of CC in games should be tightly controlled and avoided if at all possible. If Stuns, Roots, Mez’s etc. must be used then, at the very least, provide some back-door mechanism for escape so that the player never gets a sense of helplessness with the situation.
