Diamonds in the Rough
The mmo design landscape is littered with mechanics that I like to think of as uncut gems. These are mechanics that, at first glance, appear to be plain ‘ol rocks – unwanted, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and for all intents and purposes best discarded without looking back. But the thing about uncut gems, is that once you look closer, and you try out some games without them, you come to realize these mechanics are actually very valuable. And that while a shorthand gain might be achieved by discarding them, over the long stretch you realize that the game is actually much better served, and players have more fun, by keeping them. Recognizing an uncut gem over a plain ‘ol stone is, of course, an inexact science. And there is much truth to the adage that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And to make things even more complex, players attitudes and perceptions change over time, so today’s uncut gem might end up being tomorrow’s worthless rock. Enough analogies, let’s talk examples.
I think WoW’s flight points serve as an excellent example. The time imposed upon you by forcing you to use an in-game time consuming mechanic to fly from one location to another is, to many players, a complete and utter waste of their valuable time. But, at least to the WoW designers, flight points are clearly an uncut gem. You may feel a little put out or inconvenienced by having to get on a bird to travel from Darkshire to Southsore, but the intangible benefits you receive, which may be less obvious, though no less real, are considered to be of far greater value. Intangibles such as giving you a sense of scope and scale of the land, of providing you with a safe preview of areas you perhaps have not seen before, incenting you to travel to them, or even just of witnessing actions going on below – keeping you connected with the world. I’ve played in plenty of games, where the designers provided plenty of means of circumventing travel times. In Horizons, you could teleport to any city you had been to before through a system of portals. In Guild Wars, you can bring up your map at any point in the game and instantly teleport yourself to any location in the known world that you’ve previously visited. And the thing is, there’s no mistake about it, you do feel less connected to the world. And a sense of time and scale and scope of the world is lost. On the other hand, there’s certainly no denying that, at least in the short term, you’re certainly happier about being to instantly get where you wanted to go. So it’s up to the designer to try to ascertain which is more important. Those short term satisfactions, or a longer term sense of connection to the world in which the player is playing.
And of course, as I’ve already mentioned, it’s a moving target. Before WoW, player downtime was considered by most mmo designers to be an uncut gem. The notion of having to periodically stop, replenish your mana and health reserves, provided an opportunity to socialize. To get to know a little bit about the pickup group you were traveling with. Nowadays though, that notion is considered by far and large to be a rock. It’s been tossed out in preference of giving players more immediate access to action, and less enforced situations where the players essentially have to sit around doing nothing, and come up with their own means to fill the time. Interestingly enough, in the five years since WoW has come out, I think the pendulum has begun to swing the other way somewhat. Downtime and reasons to stop the action have been optimized so much out of the gameplay that players form groups and rarely say anything. And you begin to ask yourself what’s the point of a multiplayer game if even when you do group the only time anyone talks is to tell someone not to stand there or that they need more heals. Yesterday’s uncut gem can be today’s rock, and might be tomorrow’s gem again.
Please proceed in an orderly fashion to the next crisis center..
So I’ve been playing quite a bit of Champions Online open beta lately. And because Champions Online is quite similar to its spiritual predecessor City of Heroes, in tends to throw a more dramatic light on the ways in which they’re different. And one of the ways these games are quite different is the way they handled contacts and quest givers (Missions, whatever you want to call them). Now, the original City of Heroes contact system was this convoluted, hard to understand and partially random distribution of contacts that may span many zones, and had you spending extraordinary amounts of time first running, and then eventually flying (or superspeeding, or whatever your travel power of choice was) all over hell’s half acre just to collect and eventually complete your missions. It was a system that I, and by far and large the vast majority of everyone I knew, considered to be a complete and utter rock. Terrible in every way imaginable.
Champion’s Online has discarded the old contacts system entirely and instead adopted the far more popular quest hub model that’s in use by most major MMO’s these days. Now this model of quest delivery has been iterated on, refined, honed, and iterated on some more to the point that delivery of quests through the quest hub model has become an extraordinarily polished and linear process. So much that you’re actually beginning to see a backlash amongst players at the extreme linearity of this model, and the feeling of being led by the nose from point A to point B to point C. In Warhammer Age of Reckoning I especially noticed this trend, but it’s seemed to be no less so in Aion and Champions Online.
And so I’ve started to think about the quest hub model that’s become so prevalent. I’ve been listening to some of the backlash complaints against the extensive linearity of many of today’s mmo’s, and I’ve been considering my own feelings of being led from quest hub to quest hub. And this has got me thinking that, perhaps, in the end, the City of Heroes’ crazy contact system might, indeed, be an uncut gem.
Taxibot 514 ready to teleport you to the contact of your choice. PST.
Now, in order for us to even consider the old contact system an uncut gem, we have to think about some of the things we gained by that old system. It’s easy enough to come up with all the reasons you thought it was terrible: contacts spread out helter skelter across the zone; being unable to turn in a mission without actually visiting the contact until you’d gained enough favor with her; difficulty for players playing together to get the same missions at the same time, due to the random nature of the way contacts dispensed missions; and of course, the pain involved in some cases where you had to cross particularly dangerous terrain populated by high level mobs, just to reach a contact.
But what did you gain, through the use of that contact system? Well, for one, the way in which contacts were spread out forced you to visit more of the zone than you probably would have. This allowed you to see more of the zone, and increased your sense of discovery. The memory of seeing the Ghost Ship for the first time in Talos Island while flying to a contact stays with me to this day. And you also gained a sense of satisfaction in finding the contacts, and learning the best routes to them. If you were anything but a flyer, that is teleporters, and super-jumpers, and super-speeders, you gained a sort of in-game meta knowledge you could take pride in in finding the best (and safest) routes to your contacts. Now sometimes the perils were too great – no one wants to relive the horrors of traversing the Hollows on foot to get to those hard-to-reach contacts on the far side of the gulch. But sometimes there was just the right amount of peril there to make visiting the contact exciting. You learned where the groups of purple mobs spawned, and you learned where to stand to avoid agro while picking up your next mission. And this sort of knowledge is the kind of in-game knowledge that doesn’t lend itself to easy dissemination over the web or through a quest guide. Sure, any online site will tell you exactly how to get to the goal of a quest. But you’d be hard pressed I think to find a guide that explained the best landing points for a super-leaper to use in traversing the hollows. It’s knowledge you learned without even knowing you learned it, and over time found yourself feeling satisfied in that knowledge. And yes, certainly another benefit was the cottage industry that sprang up in some zones where helpful players would offer assistance, for free, to teleport players into and out of hazardous areas. The sense of community and connection that sprang out of that is hard pressed to measure.
Go back to Vanguard, you old fogey.
Now, am I advocating returning to a harder game for the sense of satisfaction? Not really. Not much, anyway. But to a certain extent that is, in fact, the nature of all uncut gems. We can, as designers, always make the game easier. Some cases we go too far, and make the game too easy, and what is easily gained you soon place little value upon. But in some cases we make things too hard, and excitement and sense of discovery are replaced by frustration and annoyance, and then player’s just quit playing. Finding that right balance, of course is the key. And as I complete each carefully polished piece of quest-hub content in Champion’s Online and progress directly to the next pre-programmed location, because I have thus far not been given any indication there is anywhere else for me to go, I find myself strangely missing the days where I considered myself an expert in being able to superspeed across the Hollows without damage – and it was because those stupid contacts were never as close by as you wanted them to be.
Thoughts, comments? Please post them up! It’s what all the cool kids do!
Tags: Champions Online, City of Heroes, Contacts, Gems, Missions, mmo, quests
August 22nd, 2009 on 7:14 pm
One other thing about the CoH system is that it felt a bit more like a comic. The idea of visiting some out-of-the-way contact in the dangerous part of town who had some information about the bad guys you were going to fight is a common trope in superhero comics. It may not have been convenient from a gameplay purpose, but it fit well within the setting.
Compare this to the quest hub setup. Much more convenient, but did the Justice League all go to some guy sitting in the center of town to get needed information to defeat their nemesis of the month? Or, better, a bunch of people sitting around, giving information for half a dozen different enemies?
Another dimension to your argument to consider why it might be more a gem in the rough.
August 23rd, 2009 on 8:36 am
It’s sort of ironic that (considering how many things they brought along form CoH) they dumped the contact system while giving the player a travel power at level 5. My memory of CoH is pretty hazy but didn’t it come much later? So now you’ve got this nifty travel power and no good excuse to use it, short of the joy of travel (and there is joy in just flying around, or running really fast, or whatever).
Going back to you earlier point: flight paths and long distance travel. Games like Age of Conan or Champions Online feel a *lot* less immersive to me thanks to the disconnect between zones. Maybe I’m just a map nerd, but I really prefer to be able to walk from 1 end of the world to the other, if I choose to. It’s a little better in CO (due to the setting and the fact that I’m going to Canada or the SW desert…I know where those places are) but having to teleport from zone to zone in Age of Conan really took a lot away from the game (for me).
I’ll suggest EQ2 (as well as LOTRO and DAoC, for that matter) does the flight-path thing one better in that you can get off at any point (we’re talking horses in LOTRO and DAoC, mind you). So they’re also a bit more flexible than in WoW.
The problem with LOTRO and DAoC is that they *are* horse rides, so you don’t have that panoramic view that, as you say, connects you to the game. You might see someone fighting right next to the horse-path, but they’ll come and go so quickly you won’t get a sense of what is happening. Compare that to being overhead where you can see farther and earlier…
OK rambling now. It does feel to me like MMORPGs are drifting towards being a bit too easy and convenient in day-to-day gameplay though. These days, all the challenge seems to be packed into raids or instances, and the rest of the game is all instant-this and automatic-that. And still people complain that the games are time-sinks and grind-fests. Not sure what the answer there is…
August 24th, 2009 on 8:12 am
Regarding quest design, Jeff Kaplan held a great speech at the previous Blizzcon how to optimize quest-driven gameplay. I guess you know it.
The other side is that quest driven gameplay is also leading around players with a carrot, Muckbeast once commented about how western games became more and more quest heavy and about the disadvantages http://www.frogdice.com/muckbeast/game_design/quests-now-with-more-grind.html
Warhammer Online’s public quests and Guild Wars 2’s “Events” might be the solution. The use of instancing for “Missions” was quite good, “Events” seem to be the next step without instancing.
But well, back to some things that I feel could be so much better:
1. MASS TRANSPORT SYSTEMS
Goblin dirigibles/zeppelins are really cool means of transportation. I wish they would travel faster and not “jump” to other zones so much. They are social, players can meet on the Zeppelins. I even made a campfire once. You can leave them anytime you want, if you are a Paladin and have the “Bubble” ready. Why is there no rope that allows everyone to leave anytime? Ships are also great, with duty free shops and all that. There is even a slow turtle ship in Northend that both factions can use – it is really cool, but slow. And nobody uses it.
Because there is flight. Why have they given in to the cheap thrill of flight for everyone. Flying mounts make normal mounts very redundant, make harvesting a boring fly from A to B, drop down to mine/collect game. It also reduces the impact of terrain on the player. Sure, flight is cool but it also destroyed all means of transportation besides the fast travel portals. Land mounts and a well planned public transportation system would have allowed fast transport and the world would have stayed large. Imagine flight all over Azeroth and how it will change the way the game plays. Flight is a problem, Aion only allows it in the Abyss zones, WoW had to limit it in battlegrounds/Wintergraps. And no flight would also mean that their transport mounts like the Mammoth would be used for transport and not only for repairs.
Travel may not take too long, this puts players off. But too fast travel destroys the world. Public transport hubs and sticking to the ground might be a better solution for future MMOs than “flight”.
2. TREASURE HUNT vs RANDOM TREASURE CHESTS
Let players loot parts or whole treasure maps. Make them go back to old zones. Finding the right spot is fun, and if then 3-4 waves of mobs according to the level of the treasure chest spawn, it could be even more fun and some treasures might require a party. I once had a treasure hunt in Ultima Online where the treasure was located on a small island and the final mob to spawn was a Black Balrog, which caused half the population of the private shard to go there and help kill the beast. In times of the internet the treasure maps would have to be really random, otherwise a mod will locate all semi-random treasure spots like it already happened to quests and ore nodes. Treasures could be hidden under water, on top of mountains, directly besides roads, everywhere.
3. DAILY QUESTS
They are done once people maximized faction. Nobody will do them again. Except one. The Fishing Quest is a bit random, and offers some good random rewards.
Why not give people other random daily quests? Why must static NPCs trigger them, how about random quests given from mobs? There are alternative ways to progress in faction standing by now in WoW, so the quests become static and boring and all the effort put into them gets lost. Fewer daily quests but having players make a choice which one they want to do and giving them a choice of rewards or random items could also work. Quests “happened” to Arthurian Knights, unexpected. They did not walk to a certain dude in a tavern to ask him for the same quest every day. Questgivers could be moving around for limited periods. The question is if this not indicates that the event/mission model might be better than refining the questing system even more.
Daily quests could also be used to ignite faction warfare. Let the quest start at certain times and then make players collect artefacts in world areas. The more the player brings, the better the reward for him. The faction who “wins” and collects more artefacts gets a special bonus.
Right now there is only the daily battleground, and they wonder why there is no WAR in the World of Warcraft.
Pete is totally right with his last paragraph, the world nowadays becomes a total pushover and all content is placed into raid/dungeon instances. There are chances to reuse old areas for quests that dynamically spawn mobs and giving players a good reason to explore anything but the latest content, too.
August 25th, 2009 on 9:04 am
I find it funny that we find ourselves sometimes complaining about travel times in WoW. When I think back on EQ, if you didn’t have a druid friend you weren’t getting anywhere fast. I remember waiting an hour or more for someone to meet up with me even after people started reaching level 50.
The really great part of this, you felt like you were truly in a BIG world. The really bad part, waiting so long for someone meant at least one of you was doing nothing during all that time which doesn’t seem like good entertainment.
That’s why I like the summoning stone solution, since instances are the primary area for grouping you can still pull everyone together in a pinch with some moderate travel if you want to venture into a dungeon. At the same time, its not a ‘free’ teleport since two people have to be there.
Longasc – I played WAR in beta and after live for awhile and the public quests were awesome when they were working. When new people flocked to the server, you had this sense that you had just stormed the high elf beaches and you were really part of an army of dark elves completing these quests as you progressed into enemy territory. Unfortunately, I got ahead of the leveling curve very quickly and I found myself without any help and unable to complete the public quests my level. Likewise, I expect late-comers to the game would experience a similar problem. It occurs to me that this could leave alot of really cool content unused or not reused.
With Warcraft I think the main flaw was that they never committed to a PvP or RvR game at the start but kind of tried to slap it in later. IMO you either make a PvP game or you don’t. That’s why it never feels like a ‘War’. I think all of the content needs to take into consideration what you are trying to achieve. If you want a war, the zones need to create opportunity for conflict and the daily quests do as well. Also, all classes and specializations need to feel capable of fighting or defending themselves and in WoW some clearly stand out and some clearly lack.
As far as the daily quest system in WoW, Post 80 its less about faction and more about funds. This is how 80s make alot of their income in WoW. So they actually do continue to get reused which is probably worse since I’ve been freezing the same iron scraps and turning them in for months now.
I fear I’m writing too much, and I could keep writing.. I’m an armchair designer wannabe I think. =\
August 26th, 2009 on 1:33 am
You are right about dailies becoming money makers after max level 80. I somehow forgot that.
It also leads to something that made me pick two gathering professions deliberately: Some of my friends “needed” daily quests to continue maxing their crafting professions. I could buy a Tundra Traveller’s Mammoth the day WOTLK was released, I also could buy the fast flying skill right as I hit level 70 in Outland.
Quests as a way for “casuals to make some money” always sounded wrong to me; for what do they actually need all the money? If crafting costs them so much money, I would like to point out that there is something wrong with crafting.
August 26th, 2009 on 4:58 am
Hrm, regarding flightpoints being an uncut gem, I have to disagree.
I much prefer Guild Wars’ clicky to move from city to city system. The world still feels large because when you want to walk the areas, you can, and they do indeed, feel large.
Flight points weren’t ‘immersive’ for me. They just meant I clicked and went afk.
Epic flight WAS immersive though, because I was ‘driving’ and it was fastish. =) Maybe the point for me is that flight points took control away from me, and therefore made me uninterested in what was going on.