Showing posts with label worldiness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worldiness. Show all posts
Thursday, May 27, 2010
The Hero No One Recognizes
There's a design question that's been nagging at me for a few years now that I recalled today. Maybe this is a good time to drag it out into the light for a good review.
Although generally an enjoyable game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had a few quirks. (Not unexpectedly for such a large gameworld with so many non-player characters and quests for the player to follow.) One of these quirks had to do with the various factions that your character could join.
In Oblivion as it originally shipped, there were two public factions -- the Fighters Guild (physical combat) and the Mages Guild (magical combat), two secret factions -- the Thieves Guild (stealing stuff) and the Dark Brotherhood (assassination), and the Imperial Arena (gladiatorial-style combat). Your character was able to join each of these organizations and, by successfully completing various quests for the members and leader of each organization, rise in rank within each organization.
What I found exceedingly peculiar when I stopped to think about it was that the separate plotlines for rising in rank in these organizations allowed your character to take over as leader or undisputed champion in each one.
In other words, your one character could, by completing every factional plotline, be simultaneously the Archmage of the Mages Guild, the Master of the Fighters Guild, the Gray Fox of the Thieves Guild, Listener of the Dark Brotherhood of assassins, and the Grand Champion of the Imperial Arena.
I didn't play Morrowind, the predecessor game to Oblivion, but I understand that there were some restrictions in the prior game on what you could do in one faction based on your relationship with some other faction. I assume those restrictions were excluded in Oblivion simply to allow the player to experience all the factional content, and I understand that from a business perspective... but it just doesn't make any sense from a world-y perspective that a single person (your character or anyone else) would be permitted to control all the resources and personnel of these incredibly powerful organizations.
And this becomes even more problematic if you completed the main questline in the Shivering Isles expansion. Not only do you retain all your factional leadership roles, you become the incarnation of the Daedric god Sheogorath!
This is just too much to swallow. I understand it wouldn't have been much fun to make the reward for mastering a faction to become smothered by bureaucracy, constant second-guessing by underlings, and a never-ending stream of tedious management decisions to make. Even so, why didn't anyone even seem to notice my remarkable public accomplishments? It remains terribly strange to me that no NPC of any station ever expressed a single word of concern, wonder, admiration, fear, or anything else while speaking to someone (my character) who controlled so many of the threads of power in the Empire. How could one person be allowed to be head of all those groups, rivaling or even exceeding the Emperor of Cyrodiil in power, without anyone caring or even noticing?
I should add this didn't "ruin" the game for me. It was just a bit of dialogue programming that Bethesda didn't have time to do.
Even so, it did make the otherwise well-defined gameworld of Oblivion feel less like a plausible world.
Addressing this objection takes us into two related subjects: (NPC) knowledge representation and knowledge application. In other words, how can we define what characters in the gameworld know, and how can we enable them to act in plausible ways on that knowledge?
I'll take that up in a future blog post.
Friday, November 27, 2009
The Melancholy of Lost Civilizations in RPGs
Gamasutra recently reported on a presentation by veteran RPG designer Ken Rolston, in which he noted that world-building often means creating objects and settings from days gone by:
Often, that melancholy comes when exploring the remains of long-dead civilizations, seemingly something of a preoccupation of Rolston, and one that frequently makes its way into his games by way of in-game artifacts.That aspect of RPGs never struck me before... but how appropriate that a sense of melancholy is consciously integrated into the design of most RPGs!
"Melancholy, I think, is the underlying tone in most of the role-playing games I've done," Rolston said, adding, "I know games are all about fun, but there's an underlying tone I'm always trying to speak to."
By its nature, the typical RPG conventionally contains several things, among which are a relatively well-developed world and characters roaming that world killing each other. Well, what does it say about these worlds that it's considered normal for people to go around killing each other without being clapped in irons immediately as a danger to society?
As worlds in which the player character can run around killing people, that naturally suggests some kind of breakdown of order. This makes it almost inevitable that the created history of the world of a computer-based roleplaying game must include lost civilizations, in which a Golden Age of the past was more civilized than the Hobbesian present.
It's virtually commonplace to see cultural and architectural fragments of former civilizations in a fantasy milieu. Michael Moorcock's Elric, last emperor of languid Melniboné, is regularly described as melancholic. In computer RPGs, there were the Ayleid Empire of The Elder Scrolls and the Tevinter Imperium of BioWare's new Dragon Age. But a more aesthetically advanced past is almost always part of other well-developed RPG settings as well -- the mythically idyllic pre-invasion past of the Fallout series, for example, or the Republic before Palpatine corrupted it, or the pre-catastrophe world before The Computer took over Alpha Complex in Paranoia (another game Ken Rolston worked on).
In such worlds, where you can't swing a sword or fire a bullet without hitting some burnt-out ruin, any character capable of thinking beyond moment-to-moment survival must feel some sense of melancholy for a life that might have been. It's a natural way of lending some emotional depth to what otherwise could have been a simple action-oriented killfest.
Consider the choices and placement of objects in Bethesda's Fallout 3. The use of artifacts in Fallout 3 are a graduate-level course in how the objects placed in a gameworld can define the narrative of that world.
Fallout 3 was filled with what might be called "microstories." Open a door to a bathroom and see a skeleton in a bathtub, surrounded by empty bottles of booze and a pistol. Look into a small bedroom and find an array of children's toys, seemingly abandoned in the moment of play. Peer into a closet in a tunnel and discover a rat's-nest of useful items guarded by a lone teddy bear. (And let's not forget the "plunger room" or the Rube Goldberg-style trapped grocery store....)
In every place where people lived, there are artifacts posed in ways that tell a small story of the moments just before The Big One... or the grim and hopeless days after. I can't imagine even the most hardcore gamer, who cares only for how many Super Mutants he can kill, being insensitive to the pathos of the little stories and the overall sense of lives meaninglessly snuffed out that they tell.
Is that "fun" in and of itself? I suppose not. "Experience feelings of loss!" will probably never be part of the advertising materials for a game. But did the care that went into telling those sad microstories make Fallout 3 more memorable -- more fun -- for me?
Absolutely yes. More generally, I would say they contributed to making Fallout 3 a more satisfying game for many gamers.
But should that sense of melancholy be a part of every RPG with aspirations of worldiness?
The question for RPG designers is, do they want to continue to create worlds in which emotional heft is supplied by an elegiac regret over the remnants of lost civilizations?
Or is it possible to build a deep RPG world that includes all the lethal conflict that gamers seem to want, but that takes its emotional depth from some place other than comparison to "a more civilized age?"
Monday, March 2, 2009
This Is How the World Ends
In his gaming blog today, Brian "Psychochild" Green offers a thoughtful discussion of the difference in "feel" between how the lights went out for earlier games versus today's games, prompted by the termination on Saturday of Tabula Rasa.
In considering Brian's reflections, I can't help but see this difference in feel as yet another expression of the difference between the "play in" and "live in" preferences of gamers.
I've described this theory here before, but to put it another way: some people naturally look to MMOGs for their rules-based gameplay. Their focus is on the mechanics of play in a MMOG; their rallying cry is "it's just a game!" To the extent that they see a MMOG as a place, it's just a location to "play in."
Others see a MMOG for its worldy qualities. They talk about "immersion"; they like having houses and emotes and complex systems to discover over time. The rules-based play of a MMOG is less important to these gamers than that it feel plausible as a place they can pretend to "live in."
Where this intersects with shutting down gameworlds is that the latter kind of gamer, who tend to form the deeper and longer-lasting communities within one particular world, were more prominent in the dawn of MMOGs than in today's gameworlds. More of the few MMOGs there were catered more to the interests of "live in" players than today's games do.
Maybe there were always more people who wanted "play in" than live in, and game developers just got better at satisfying the former group. Or maybe game developers started making more "play in" games, creating more of those gamers as kids get old enough to start playing. (I suspect that both processes occurred.)
Either way, MMOGs shifted from being about "live in" to focusing more on "play in." Thus, when earlier "live in" games shut down, their players wanted to come together as a community to say goodbye to the world in which they'd lived. Later "play in" games, which focused less on supporting that type of emotional investment in a sense of place, saw a different kind of send-off. For the "play in" gamer, gameplay is gameplay; if one game shuts down, you just find a new game.
I think this theory not only explains the different feel of turning off a M59 versus a TR, it also puts the "New Gameplay Experience" of Star Wars Galaxies in perspective. If the goodbye for M59 felt like a wake, the NGE seems to have felt to the "live in" players of SWG like a doctor pulling the plug without giving the family members a chance to say their farewells. For the "live in" gamers, the worldiness of pre-NGE SWG has become a Paradise Lost -- it was the last, best expression of a theory of MMOG design that says "live in" is as important as "play in." Losing that unique place for scratching the "live in" itch generated intensely emotional reactions that some players are still expressing to this day.
Perhaps if they'd been given a chance to say goodbye -- "closure" as we call it today -- the gamers who most enjoy the feeling of "living in" a secondary reality would have been able to let go with less drama. They'd have felt more free to look for some new gameworld in which they could put down roots.
... Come, my friends,SWG's dispossessed have never found their Happy Isles, since the MMOG developer gods in our age have elected not to create anything like pre-NGE SWG's worldiness. But that's another topic. :)
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
The point here is that MMOG sendoffs today may feel different than they once did because games -- and the majority gamer type these games attract -- have shifted from "live in" to "play in."
Monday, February 9, 2009
Player Ship Interiors and Star Trek Online... Again
Well, here we go again.
Cryptic, the current developer of the Star Trek Online MMORPG, has mentioned in an interview that player ship interiors would probably be viewable only as instances during certain missions. The potential feature of letting characters walk around and interact with key locations of starships, such as the Bridge and Engineering, is now being described as unlikely to be included in Star Trek Online when it launches.
From the interview with Craig Zinkievich conducted by Irdnova on behalf of Hailing Frequency:
HF: We know from the Vegas trailer and from discussion on the STO Forums that ship interiors are going to be available, however we still do not have many details on these, so can you tell us how much freedom will players be allowed in their ships – are we just going to see key areas like the bridge and engineering available, or will corridors and turbolifts and all of the other locations that are typically on a ship, be available?Over on Cryptic's official Star Trek Online forum, this comment has already spawned the same responses and counter-responses and failures to listen to what anyone else says that went on for months when Perpetual, the former developer of Star Trek Online, made its similar announcement.
CZ: At launch, we are probably only going to have ship interiors available during mission instances, however we hope to add the ability to players to freely walk around their ship and host gatherings in an expansion pack.
These responses come in a few distinct forms:
1. This feature was absolutely critical for me. The developers are a bunch of liars; they obviously don't understand Star Trek or value Star Trek fans. They're just rushing a WoW-clone to market to make a quick buck. If the game that ships doesn't implement key locations of our personal starships that we can walk around in whenever we want, I'm not going to play it, period.I'm probably around a 2.5 in my reaction. I understand that things get cut when making a game; I just don't think it should always be the features that make the gameworld more interesting and that are iconic to a licensed IP that lose that contest.
2. This feature was very important to me personally, and its loss is a severe disappointment to me. I don't mind rules-based gameplay, but I really wanted a Star Trek MMORPG that created the world of Star Trek for me to "live in." For me, a richly detailed (and graphically semi-realistic) world isn't an alternative to gameplay, it is gameplay -- it's just not the arbitrary following of formal win/lose rules that other people enjoy. I was really hoping to get to do things like perform sensor sweeps and align phasers and have detailed diplomatic negotiations with alien races, so a ship that's just a "mount" is pretty upsetting. Without being able to walk around as my character through the key locations of the starship I command, this game just won't feel enough like the world of Star Trek. I'm considerably less likely to play it now as a result of this design decision.
3. This feature was important for a Star Trek MMORPG and for the MMORPG industry as a whole. Starships were virtually starring characters in Star Trek. So cutting both the player crew feature and player ship interiors (outside of some mission instances) is a failure to understand that this is one of the most iconic elements of the entire Star Trek IP. Not richly rendering starships is a failure to take advantage of what's probably the last major opportunity to create a richly realized IP as a major MMORPG. I'm somewhat less likely to play this game now.
4. This would have been nice to have, and I wish they'd included it, but I figure the developers know what they're doing. Maybe not implementing key locations on player ships makes sense given their previous design decision (such as Cryptic's decision not to allow players to work together as crew on one ship). Without that capability, there's probably not enough value in letting individual players walk around key locations of their own ship. So I suppose cutting this feature is just the developer being realistic. I guess I'll probably still play it as long as they don't cut anything else.
5. Huh? I don't care about walking around on some ship, I just want to start shooting stuff. What's all the complaining about? Where can I download this game? Can I be in the beta, like, right now?
6. The developer is going to give us interiors as instances for missions. So for you few oddballs who claim to like that kind of thing, you can do all the walking around and staring at consoles you want -- you'll just have to do it as part of a developer-provided mission. I'll definitely buy this game, and I'll probably play it for at least a year or so while I level up my main character and alts.
7. All you people who say you want interiors are just a bunch of whiners. IT'S NOT GOING TO BE A SIMULATOR! SHUT UP! The only valid definition of "gameplay" is flying places and shooting people and taking their stuff. All that other stuff like stories and sandboxes and how long a day lasts is just a distraction from real gameplay content. The devs aren't going to spend a single minute making that crap that only a few weirdos want, and I'm glad. SHUT UP! Go back to your mommy's basement, you retard trekkie losers! This is MY game! MINE! MINE! I'll buy this game, but I want to play for free forever, or at least until I beat it in a couple of months and quit.
8. Everything this developer does is wonderful! Anyone saying anything negative about this or any other decision they make about Star Trek Online's design should go away. We should only talk about the things we're all happy to see announced. The only way I would not buy the Collector's Edition of this game is if it gets cancelled.
The Star Trek IP would have been a terrific basis for a major AAA-quality MMORPG that deliberately gives equal weight to story and world and rules-based play.
It's too bad Cryptic aren't going to be the ones who profit by making that balanced gameworld.
Who will?
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
"Living World" Massively Single-Player Games
I've been thinking lately about what a massively single-player computer roleplaying game -- a Living World -- might look like.
The idea here would be to create a very world-y game like Oblivion or Two Worlds, but which is so large that it would take a player years -- in real time -- to explore it all, even if he plays the game a few hours every day. The play experience of a Living World game would be that it becomes a sort of alternate reality that the player could return to over and over again for years.
And the point of this is to offer an alternative to the "played it, beat it, sold it" experience of games today. Instead of being like cotton candy, insubstantial and quickly forgotten, an extremely world-y single player game would be a highly memorable place that the gamer could return to at any time, whether for new adventures or for a sense of coming home to something familiar.
I first started really thinking about this Living World concept after playing Oblivion. (Certainly Spore has been on my mind since I first heard about it as well, but while it has some of the qualities of a Living World game that I discuss below, it's not quite the RPG I'm thinking of.)
The world of Tamriel in Oblivion was large (relative to other games), seamless (while aboveground and outside of cities), well-populated with locations and quest-giving NPCs, and full of creature encounters. There was even regional weather. All of these things combined to produce a game environment that felt like a place. Being able to keep playing after the main quest line had been completed helped as well.
But there were still limits. Although the game world of Oblivion felt large in the early stages of the first time playing through it, it could be completely explored over a few weeks of play. And once the main quest and all the side quests had been completed, the only novel content remaining was the eventual respawning of previously cleared dungeons with random enemies (as opposed to "named" NPCs with unique goals and dialogue). While there were small user mods, those tended to be GUI tweaks, not full-scale new content. And although Bethesda supplied a couple of expansions (including the significantly large "Shivering Isle" expansion), they clearly indicated that they didn't want to spend any more time providing such content. These things aren't flaws, exactly -- they're simply limits to a game that was designed with finite content.
So what if that design choice could be challenged? What if it were possible to build a game whose various forms of content would take even a dedicated player years to fully explore? What features, if blended properly, would add up to a single-player Living World RPG that could be not just played in but lived in for years?
Let's consider some of the design possibilities of a single-player game intended to last for years.
Enormous area
Not counting dungeon areas, Oblivion offered a large amount of land to explore. Once the player character was leveled up, however, it was possible to run from one side of the world to the other in less than an hour. Two Worlds was considerably larger, but even it could be traversed in an evening and fully mapped in a month of evening and weekend play.
The kind of Living World game I imagine would -- relative to the player character -- be about the size of Europe (or perhaps a bit larger). Alternately, if we were talking about a science fiction setting rather than the usual medieval-era fantasy setting, I'd look for something on the order of hundreds of thousands of planets.
The point of this kind of scale would be to insure that the game contains unknown places for a long time. Having a total area that's very large allows the possibility of multiple political entities controlling meaningfully large territories, which opens up opportunities for epic storylines. Rather than the entire gameworld sharing a single culture (and language), in a huge gameworld there could be places where the player character simply would not be able to go (at least for a while) due to limitations on travel speed, cultural biases ("you can't come in; our country is at war with your country") or simply not knowing the local language. This allows for a very extended process of world exploration, giving the player a reason to keep coming back to the gameworld over a long time.
Passage of time
As in a MMORPG, time in the Living World CRPG would continue to pass even when the player is not actively playing.
This has pros and cons. On the plus side, it supports the feeling that the game world is a real place whose existence is independent of the player. It also provides a mechanism for refreshing content -- as the player explores the game world, changing it by his actions then moving on, explored content can be repopulated or even replaced.
Most interestingly, the game world could change over the long term. As years pass in the game world, NPC behaviors in the aggregate could alter some parts of the game environment:
There are a couple of possible downsides to this continuous passage of time. One is that long-term changes in creature and NPC populations could bother gamers who prefer a gameworld to be a stable place. For example, allowing named NPCs to die could make the game less fun for narrative- and roleplay-focused gamers who form emotional connections with some strongly-realized NPCs. Providing in-game tools for discovering and understanding change, such as genealogy charts and "newspapers," could help players whose enjoyment of a gameworld comes from feeling connected with the characters in it.
Another potential negative is that it will probably be necessary to impose a creative stasis on a Living World CRPG. It might be possible to allow for a very, very small number of NPC-generated inventions (political, social, and economic as well as technological), but allowing NPCs to be creative would probably wind up changing the game world too much. At some point there will have been so much progress that the game would have to end. A medieval-era fantasy Living World, for example, should probably not be allowed to invent itself into a Renaissance -- instead, the cultural tools available to NPCs at the start of the game should be what subsequent NPCs can use regardless of how much time passes.
(Having said this, the possibility of implementing subsequent eras, with their modifications to code, art, sound and other assets, as major expansion packs to the original game might be worth considering.)
While this restriction on NPC creativity is likely to make the game less satisfying to Simulationists, it's necessary in order to avoid having to develop assets at launch time that players might not see for years, and to prevent the game from ending by reaching the end of time!
Environmental, ecological and social simulation
A Living World game probably needs to have extensive simulation capabilities, both to provide dynamic content for exploring while the player is in the game and to allow the gameworld to appear to persist (and change) when the player isn't in the game.
Environmental simulation means modeling macro-level physical phenomena such as day/night cycles, topography, temperature, and geographically appropriate weather.
Ecological simulation will reflect the effects and movement over time of groups of living things as they live, reproduce and die in large numbers. On a planet, this will include both plants and animals -- for example, given environmental conditions in a particular area a forest might over many years become a prairie or a desert, and vice versa. The elimination of predators in an area might lead to overpopulations of their normal prey species. Humanoid habitations would move to follow more attractive conditions and better food supplies -- a player who is out of the game for a while might return to find that a village they once visited had been abandoned. (There might need to be some places that would be exempt from such changes in order to insure that a player has a secure place to store valuable items.)
Social simulations would model high-level cultural changes. These would include changes in the opinions of NPC factions toward each other, and possibly even the automated extinction, merging, and creation of factions as small as towns and as large as nations. Social simulation would also model large-scale economic, military and cultural behaviors. This level of simulation would be extremely useful in creating a dynamic gameworld that can change enough to be interesting over the long (real-world) term.
Constantly refreshing content
This is probably the single hardest problem that would have to be solved to make a Living World game. While it's nice to think that the game would ship with so much content that no player could explore it all in two years, some players would race to see everything at a very shallow level. They aren't necessarily the kind of player a Living World game is meant for, but there's no reason not to provide some content they can enjoy as long as it's made clear what kind of game this is.
So it would probably make sense to provide some mechanism for refreshing the existing content in a Living World game. The three most plausible approaches to accomplishing that goal are:
Allowing users to easily generate their own content, or allowing users to generate content that can be easily shared, is another possible approach to providing continuously refreshed content for a Living World CRPG. Nothing makes this approach impossible, as the success of mods for Doom, Half-Life, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind have demonstrated. A more recent game, Spore, is actually built on the premise that user-generated content will be used to populate the individual player's gameworld. It's possible that a Living World game could be designed to allow some combination of the world-building tools available for games like Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind and the content-rating system of Spore to refresh some game content with high-quality replacements.
But developer-generated content may be the best way for a Living World game developer to go. As with MMORPGs, perhaps providing a Living World game with a steady stream of new content and enhancements long after the core game is purchased and installed would be a successful business model for a developer. Players would be assured of getting high-quality new content (including professional voice acting), while the developer would gain the long-term revenue stream that would help to pay back the high cost of developing a Living World game.
Content adapts to player's playstyle
To enable a Living World game to be attractive to more than just a few hardcore Explorer-types, consideration should be given to finding ways to populate the gameworld with forms of content preferred by different kinds of players.
How this is achieved will depend on the content generation method (as described above). If content is dynamically generated, the generation system could either automatically create new high-level content (which gets broken down into specific tasks to perform or other opportunities for player action) based on the kinds of things the player has chosen to do. A player who, when given the choice, typically solves game problems by killing and destruction could find that the gameworld over time becomes more warlike, presenting more opportunities for that player to be rewarded for doing what he enjoys. Similarly, a player who usually solves problems through listening and negotiating with NPCs might tend to receive content that emphasizes and rewards diplomacy and understanding of emotional/story ideas. Players who approach problem-solving through economic power or system redesign could likewise find their gameworld adapting to generate new content that tends to be most rewarding to those styles.
If new content is mostly user-generated and downloaded, then it would be useful to tag that content to define what kinds of gameplay rewards are available. A user-generated mission to locate and destroy a large, dangerous pirate vessel, if written primarly to reward direct combat action, should be marked to indicate to potential downloaders what kind of gameplay to expect. This would allow users of a clearinghouse for content to select the new content they find most enjoyable. (I would hope, however, that any system allowing users to generate their own content would allow for multiple solutions. To reuse the pirate ship example, maybe players could negotiate with NPCs to gang up on the pirates, or could pay mercenaries to take out the threat, or could study intel to identify a flaw in the vessel's design that could allow a small strike team with the appropriate technology to destroy the ship.)
And if new content is created by the game's developers? This will depend on the granularity of that content. If the developers can create lots of small bits of content, then the clearinghouse approach of tagging content by type might still be effective. If however content tends to be produced more like that found in MMORPGs, where it tends to be big, detailed, polished, and rare, then players will simply have to take what they get. In this case, it will be up to the developer to try to insure that multiple playstyles are respected. Even in this case, however, it could be pretty amazing if the gameworld did adapt in some ways to the preferred playstyle of the player.
PC based
The size and scope of a Living World game, as well as the likely need to continually refresh content, make the PC platform a natural choice. While some consoles are moving toward online components, the PC is already there. The architecture of the PC also allows for much larger spans of world-space, as opposed to having to break up the world into pieces to fit into the memory of a console. While games like Oblivion demonstrate that this can be done with a minimum of interruption to the player, scaling a Living World game to the PC platform by design eliminates the need to have hundreds or even thousands of small areas at all.
With regard to the question of piracy that supposedly is rampant on the PC platform, designing a Living World game to benefit (like online games) from regular downloads of new content shifts the revenue stream to a long-term model. While not eliminating all losses due to piracy, the downloadable content design reduces the need to earn back all money purely from sales of the base game.
Maintain consistent and appropriate challenge level over years of play
One problem that open-world RPGs like Oblivion and Two Worlds have is that players, by taking the many side quests offered, can effectively level up their characters to the point that subsequent challenges are too easy. This is a problem that would be particularly acute in a Living World game that could be played for years after a character has effectively hit the game's level cap.
The usual solution in these games (as well as in Dungeons & Dragons, the prototype for class/level-based RPGs) is simply to retire the old character and start a new character. While that might be workable in a Living World game, it might be preferable to consider alternatives. How could a long-term game be designed so that players want to keep playing for years with a single familiar character?
One approach (used by the original Star Wars Galaxies) would be to use a skill-based system rather than a class/level model, and permit characters to "forget" known skills in order to learn new skills. Depending on how this is implemented, players could tailor their characters for different styles of play depending on their preference. For example, Sony is designing The Agency to allow players to effectively "change classes" by simply swapping their outfits. Something like this could help to keep a Living World game fresh for a longer period of time.
Another possibility is to design the game to have less emphasis on character abilities that can be leveled up. This could be accomplished in many ways:
[EDIT: 2010/03/27] Gameplay by "inhabiting" non-player characters (NPCs)
Yet another option, and perhaps the most interesting, would be to eliminate level-based character advancement entirely. Rather than the standard RPG model of creating a particular character and then leveling up that character through progressively more difficult challenges, something like a Living World might not need to adopt that standard high-level approach to gameplay.
Instead, I've been thinking it might be more appropriate for the primary gameplay system to be designed to highlight the distinctiveness of the Living World. And what comes most strongly to mind is not giving the player a character at all, but instead making gameplay about "jumping into" existing NPCs.
In this model (which, yes, now that I think about it does somewhat resemble the notion behind "Quantum Leap"), players would first experience the gameworld from a disembodied perspective. They would be shown the Living World from a great distance; the camera would then zoom in to various regions and then to individual NPCs going about their lives. The player would be shown how to take control of two different NPCs as a tutorial. After returning to the big picture view of the world (to impress on the player the scope of the Living World), they would then be free to begin exploring the world by inhabiting the NPCs of their choice.
This is where the core gameplay of the Living World would be found. Every NPC would be defined to have a particular role. (Role definition would be part of the toolset for building the content of the Living World.) Players would be able to observe or inspect an NPC to see the role he or she has, and then choose whether or not to inhabit that NPC.
Inhabiting an NPC immediately gives the player access to all the skills -- defined as gameplay activities -- that are associated with the role to which that NPC was assigned. So if you want to fight monsters, inhabit a Ranger; if you want to chase thieves, jump into a City Guard NPC; if you want to practice crafting, inhabit a Blacksmith or Baker; if you're looking for economic gameplay, inhabit a Merchant; and if you feel like trying your hand at the very difficult game of city or kingdom management, you would be able to inhabit a town's Mayor or even the King of an entire nation.
As noted above, in each case the kinds of gameplay available to you would depend on the role of the character you choose to inhabit. These gameplay activities would need to be predefined by the developer as selectable actions which use and/or affect objects inside the gameworld. The "Ranger" role, for example, might be defined to optimize skills (gameplay actions) such as Shortbow, Shortsword, Tracking, Herbal Medicine, and Stealth. Meanwhile, the "City Guard" role could be defined as having special training in Shortsword, Tracking, Negotiation, Perception, and the Guard badge which allows that character to summon other Guards. Other roles would have their own appropriate skill optimizations.
In addition to roles having particular skill optimizations, roles would also be keyed to preconstructed gameplay content. In other words, the role of the NPC you choose determines the kind of prescripted gameplay content offered to you. If you choose to inhabit a Ranger, you would not only be free to explore the gameworld while doing Ranger-y things, the act of inhabiting that NPC would also activate any number of world events (either automatically or at the player's discretion) in which Ranger skills could be particularly useful -- say, a monster invasion, or finding a lost child for some villagers. The same would be true for every role. Even highly mundane roles such as Baker would have gameplay events (e.g., baking challenges) scripted for them that would be fun for someone who voluntarily chose to be a Baker. (Note that this design integrates into the "epic storylines" discussed in the next section.)
The assignment of NPCs to particular roles would need to be integrated into the social dynamics of the gameworld. Because the Living World models the birth, growth, and death of individual NPCs (possibly only at a statistical level except where the player has traveled or currently exists), the mechanism of children maturing into adults would need to be fitted into the role system. For example, a village experiencing dynamic growth would encourage children to fill high-priority roles as openings (due to death, injury, retirement, or possession by the player) occur, then useful roles, then expansion-oriented or support roles as the group's resources and rules permit. A village or social group that can't or doesn't care to continue, on the other hand, would probably find most of its children emigrating to cities or taking on "solo/loner" roles. In other words, the Living World needs to be designed so that role assignments to juveniles are made dynamically based on a determination of whether to maintain/enhance the existing social group or to break it up in favor of forming new groups elsewhere.
One other note on the gameplay design approach of "inhabiting" NPCs: Because the Living World would simulate not just large-scale social movements but personal social structures as well, in many cases the NPC whom the player chooses to inhabit would be part of a social group -- a member of the city guards, or the blacksmith for a village, or a husband or wife who is the parent to some children. This raises the question: should those NPCs realize when someone who is part of their social group is "inhabited" by an entity with the unique power of possessing people's bodies and minds?
I very much like the idea that these NPCs would definitely know when someone in their group is inhabited by the player, and that they would be able to react toward the player according to their beliefs and fears. It seems reasonable that stories of this kind of possession, occurring for thousands of years, would be part of the legends and histories of all the peoples of the Living World. Would you be considered a god? or a demon? or perhaps just a very talented sorceror? If you choose to inhabit an NPC who, in addition to her gameplay role, is a wife and mother, how might her husband and children react to you when they realize that she no longer exists as herself and that you might do anything at all to her, from taking her across the wilderness to getting her killed? These relationships, I think, would also be an excellent opportunity for prescripted gameplay activities to be activated, with the twist that they could have more than the usual amount of emotional resonance -- would you choose to risk the life of an NPC whose children are begging you not to take her away?
Finally, regardless of which approach to gameplay is taken, it will be crucial to very clearly market a game like this as a long-term game, as a world to be lived in. A Living World game needs to take advantage of its unique features by marketing those features. It must not be described to prospective players as a typical shooter or RPG with a developer-defined story that players should expect to "beat" in a few hours.
Truly epic storylines
An opportunity afforded by a Living World game would be the chance to tell significantly larger and more complex stories than those found in other kinds of games. Because the action can take place over several years, the story doesn't have to unfold quickly. And because a Living World game is extremely large, both in terms of geography and NPC cultures, stories can truly be epic in scope.
An interesting possibility here would be to provide players with several outlines of epic stories. Once an epic is selected, large-scale world-changing events are set into motion, and before long the player will be impacted in some way. Epics could be story-based (the princess is in love with a prince of the neighboring enemy country and needs your help), action-oriented (barbarian/alien invasion), or adventure-driven (find a way to appease the angry god who's disrupting the world with volcanos). But in all cases, starting an epic will reshape the physical and/or social structures of the game world in some way that affects (and can be affected by) the player's character.
Customizable rules
As noted above, some players might prefer a world in which NPCs don't die. Other players, however, might enjoy seeing NPCs who die be replaced. Players might wish for more or less aggressive NPC cultures, more or less environmental variation, and so on.
It might be interesting to consider whether a Living World game that's intended to run as a highly simulationist single-player experience could allow for these aspects and others to be optional. Another question would be whether some or all such customizible rules can only be set at the start of a new gameworld, or if they can be changed while a game is running.
...
I'm just getting warmed up in thinking about these possibilities, but so far I'm feeling that there might be something here, that this could be a novel form of computer-based entertainment that some number of gamers would embrace enthusiastically.
Obviously there's a lot of work to be done to put some real meat on these bones of an idea. In particular, the business case needs to be addressed -- how could any publisher be persuaded to bankroll an idea like this?
I'll try to speak to some of those questions in future blog posts.
The idea here would be to create a very world-y game like Oblivion or Two Worlds, but which is so large that it would take a player years -- in real time -- to explore it all, even if he plays the game a few hours every day. The play experience of a Living World game would be that it becomes a sort of alternate reality that the player could return to over and over again for years.
And the point of this is to offer an alternative to the "played it, beat it, sold it" experience of games today. Instead of being like cotton candy, insubstantial and quickly forgotten, an extremely world-y single player game would be a highly memorable place that the gamer could return to at any time, whether for new adventures or for a sense of coming home to something familiar.
I first started really thinking about this Living World concept after playing Oblivion. (Certainly Spore has been on my mind since I first heard about it as well, but while it has some of the qualities of a Living World game that I discuss below, it's not quite the RPG I'm thinking of.)
The world of Tamriel in Oblivion was large (relative to other games), seamless (while aboveground and outside of cities), well-populated with locations and quest-giving NPCs, and full of creature encounters. There was even regional weather. All of these things combined to produce a game environment that felt like a place. Being able to keep playing after the main quest line had been completed helped as well.
But there were still limits. Although the game world of Oblivion felt large in the early stages of the first time playing through it, it could be completely explored over a few weeks of play. And once the main quest and all the side quests had been completed, the only novel content remaining was the eventual respawning of previously cleared dungeons with random enemies (as opposed to "named" NPCs with unique goals and dialogue). While there were small user mods, those tended to be GUI tweaks, not full-scale new content. And although Bethesda supplied a couple of expansions (including the significantly large "Shivering Isle" expansion), they clearly indicated that they didn't want to spend any more time providing such content. These things aren't flaws, exactly -- they're simply limits to a game that was designed with finite content.
So what if that design choice could be challenged? What if it were possible to build a game whose various forms of content would take even a dedicated player years to fully explore? What features, if blended properly, would add up to a single-player Living World RPG that could be not just played in but lived in for years?
Let's consider some of the design possibilities of a single-player game intended to last for years.
Enormous area
Not counting dungeon areas, Oblivion offered a large amount of land to explore. Once the player character was leveled up, however, it was possible to run from one side of the world to the other in less than an hour. Two Worlds was considerably larger, but even it could be traversed in an evening and fully mapped in a month of evening and weekend play.
The kind of Living World game I imagine would -- relative to the player character -- be about the size of Europe (or perhaps a bit larger). Alternately, if we were talking about a science fiction setting rather than the usual medieval-era fantasy setting, I'd look for something on the order of hundreds of thousands of planets.
The point of this kind of scale would be to insure that the game contains unknown places for a long time. Having a total area that's very large allows the possibility of multiple political entities controlling meaningfully large territories, which opens up opportunities for epic storylines. Rather than the entire gameworld sharing a single culture (and language), in a huge gameworld there could be places where the player character simply would not be able to go (at least for a while) due to limitations on travel speed, cultural biases ("you can't come in; our country is at war with your country") or simply not knowing the local language. This allows for a very extended process of world exploration, giving the player a reason to keep coming back to the gameworld over a long time.
Passage of time
As in a MMORPG, time in the Living World CRPG would continue to pass even when the player is not actively playing.
This has pros and cons. On the plus side, it supports the feeling that the game world is a real place whose existence is independent of the player. It also provides a mechanism for refreshing content -- as the player explores the game world, changing it by his actions then moving on, explored content can be repopulated or even replaced.
Most interestingly, the game world could change over the long term. As years pass in the game world, NPC behaviors in the aggregate could alter some parts of the game environment:
- in prosperous areas, some villages would grow into towns and new villages could be created
- forest areas would be cleared for farming
- in poor areas, or as a result of famine/disease/war, some settlements could be abandoned
- abandoned places could be occupied by barbaric NPCs or reclaimed by forest
- NPCs could die of old age and be replaced in their roles (perhaps by their descendants)
- over the long term, large-scale social changes -- especially invasions -- could change the political map of the world
- over the very long term, natural environmental changes -- temperature, rainfall -- could reshape creature and NPC populations
There are a couple of possible downsides to this continuous passage of time. One is that long-term changes in creature and NPC populations could bother gamers who prefer a gameworld to be a stable place. For example, allowing named NPCs to die could make the game less fun for narrative- and roleplay-focused gamers who form emotional connections with some strongly-realized NPCs. Providing in-game tools for discovering and understanding change, such as genealogy charts and "newspapers," could help players whose enjoyment of a gameworld comes from feeling connected with the characters in it.
Another potential negative is that it will probably be necessary to impose a creative stasis on a Living World CRPG. It might be possible to allow for a very, very small number of NPC-generated inventions (political, social, and economic as well as technological), but allowing NPCs to be creative would probably wind up changing the game world too much. At some point there will have been so much progress that the game would have to end. A medieval-era fantasy Living World, for example, should probably not be allowed to invent itself into a Renaissance -- instead, the cultural tools available to NPCs at the start of the game should be what subsequent NPCs can use regardless of how much time passes.
(Having said this, the possibility of implementing subsequent eras, with their modifications to code, art, sound and other assets, as major expansion packs to the original game might be worth considering.)
While this restriction on NPC creativity is likely to make the game less satisfying to Simulationists, it's necessary in order to avoid having to develop assets at launch time that players might not see for years, and to prevent the game from ending by reaching the end of time!
Environmental, ecological and social simulation
A Living World game probably needs to have extensive simulation capabilities, both to provide dynamic content for exploring while the player is in the game and to allow the gameworld to appear to persist (and change) when the player isn't in the game.
Environmental simulation means modeling macro-level physical phenomena such as day/night cycles, topography, temperature, and geographically appropriate weather.
Ecological simulation will reflect the effects and movement over time of groups of living things as they live, reproduce and die in large numbers. On a planet, this will include both plants and animals -- for example, given environmental conditions in a particular area a forest might over many years become a prairie or a desert, and vice versa. The elimination of predators in an area might lead to overpopulations of their normal prey species. Humanoid habitations would move to follow more attractive conditions and better food supplies -- a player who is out of the game for a while might return to find that a village they once visited had been abandoned. (There might need to be some places that would be exempt from such changes in order to insure that a player has a secure place to store valuable items.)
Social simulations would model high-level cultural changes. These would include changes in the opinions of NPC factions toward each other, and possibly even the automated extinction, merging, and creation of factions as small as towns and as large as nations. Social simulation would also model large-scale economic, military and cultural behaviors. This level of simulation would be extremely useful in creating a dynamic gameworld that can change enough to be interesting over the long (real-world) term.
Constantly refreshing content
This is probably the single hardest problem that would have to be solved to make a Living World game. While it's nice to think that the game would ship with so much content that no player could explore it all in two years, some players would race to see everything at a very shallow level. They aren't necessarily the kind of player a Living World game is meant for, but there's no reason not to provide some content they can enjoy as long as it's made clear what kind of game this is.
So it would probably make sense to provide some mechanism for refreshing the existing content in a Living World game. The three most plausible approaches to accomplishing that goal are:
- dynamically-generated content
- user-generated content
- developer-generated content
Allowing users to easily generate their own content, or allowing users to generate content that can be easily shared, is another possible approach to providing continuously refreshed content for a Living World CRPG. Nothing makes this approach impossible, as the success of mods for Doom, Half-Life, Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind have demonstrated. A more recent game, Spore, is actually built on the premise that user-generated content will be used to populate the individual player's gameworld. It's possible that a Living World game could be designed to allow some combination of the world-building tools available for games like Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind and the content-rating system of Spore to refresh some game content with high-quality replacements.
But developer-generated content may be the best way for a Living World game developer to go. As with MMORPGs, perhaps providing a Living World game with a steady stream of new content and enhancements long after the core game is purchased and installed would be a successful business model for a developer. Players would be assured of getting high-quality new content (including professional voice acting), while the developer would gain the long-term revenue stream that would help to pay back the high cost of developing a Living World game.
Content adapts to player's playstyle
To enable a Living World game to be attractive to more than just a few hardcore Explorer-types, consideration should be given to finding ways to populate the gameworld with forms of content preferred by different kinds of players.
How this is achieved will depend on the content generation method (as described above). If content is dynamically generated, the generation system could either automatically create new high-level content (which gets broken down into specific tasks to perform or other opportunities for player action) based on the kinds of things the player has chosen to do. A player who, when given the choice, typically solves game problems by killing and destruction could find that the gameworld over time becomes more warlike, presenting more opportunities for that player to be rewarded for doing what he enjoys. Similarly, a player who usually solves problems through listening and negotiating with NPCs might tend to receive content that emphasizes and rewards diplomacy and understanding of emotional/story ideas. Players who approach problem-solving through economic power or system redesign could likewise find their gameworld adapting to generate new content that tends to be most rewarding to those styles.
If new content is mostly user-generated and downloaded, then it would be useful to tag that content to define what kinds of gameplay rewards are available. A user-generated mission to locate and destroy a large, dangerous pirate vessel, if written primarly to reward direct combat action, should be marked to indicate to potential downloaders what kind of gameplay to expect. This would allow users of a clearinghouse for content to select the new content they find most enjoyable. (I would hope, however, that any system allowing users to generate their own content would allow for multiple solutions. To reuse the pirate ship example, maybe players could negotiate with NPCs to gang up on the pirates, or could pay mercenaries to take out the threat, or could study intel to identify a flaw in the vessel's design that could allow a small strike team with the appropriate technology to destroy the ship.)
And if new content is created by the game's developers? This will depend on the granularity of that content. If the developers can create lots of small bits of content, then the clearinghouse approach of tagging content by type might still be effective. If however content tends to be produced more like that found in MMORPGs, where it tends to be big, detailed, polished, and rare, then players will simply have to take what they get. In this case, it will be up to the developer to try to insure that multiple playstyles are respected. Even in this case, however, it could be pretty amazing if the gameworld did adapt in some ways to the preferred playstyle of the player.
PC based
The size and scope of a Living World game, as well as the likely need to continually refresh content, make the PC platform a natural choice. While some consoles are moving toward online components, the PC is already there. The architecture of the PC also allows for much larger spans of world-space, as opposed to having to break up the world into pieces to fit into the memory of a console. While games like Oblivion demonstrate that this can be done with a minimum of interruption to the player, scaling a Living World game to the PC platform by design eliminates the need to have hundreds or even thousands of small areas at all.
With regard to the question of piracy that supposedly is rampant on the PC platform, designing a Living World game to benefit (like online games) from regular downloads of new content shifts the revenue stream to a long-term model. While not eliminating all losses due to piracy, the downloadable content design reduces the need to earn back all money purely from sales of the base game.
Maintain consistent and appropriate challenge level over years of play
One problem that open-world RPGs like Oblivion and Two Worlds have is that players, by taking the many side quests offered, can effectively level up their characters to the point that subsequent challenges are too easy. This is a problem that would be particularly acute in a Living World game that could be played for years after a character has effectively hit the game's level cap.
The usual solution in these games (as well as in Dungeons & Dragons, the prototype for class/level-based RPGs) is simply to retire the old character and start a new character. While that might be workable in a Living World game, it might be preferable to consider alternatives. How could a long-term game be designed so that players want to keep playing for years with a single familiar character?
One approach (used by the original Star Wars Galaxies) would be to use a skill-based system rather than a class/level model, and permit characters to "forget" known skills in order to learn new skills. Depending on how this is implemented, players could tailor their characters for different styles of play depending on their preference. For example, Sony is designing The Agency to allow players to effectively "change classes" by simply swapping their outfits. Something like this could help to keep a Living World game fresh for a longer period of time.
Another possibility is to design the game to have less emphasis on character abilities that can be leveled up. This could be accomplished in many ways:
- slow down skill progression
- substitute player skill (reflexes, puzzle-solving, etc.) for character skills
- minimize the "game" aspect in favor of exploring a vast and complex world
[EDIT: 2010/03/27] Gameplay by "inhabiting" non-player characters (NPCs)
Yet another option, and perhaps the most interesting, would be to eliminate level-based character advancement entirely. Rather than the standard RPG model of creating a particular character and then leveling up that character through progressively more difficult challenges, something like a Living World might not need to adopt that standard high-level approach to gameplay.
Instead, I've been thinking it might be more appropriate for the primary gameplay system to be designed to highlight the distinctiveness of the Living World. And what comes most strongly to mind is not giving the player a character at all, but instead making gameplay about "jumping into" existing NPCs.
In this model (which, yes, now that I think about it does somewhat resemble the notion behind "Quantum Leap"), players would first experience the gameworld from a disembodied perspective. They would be shown the Living World from a great distance; the camera would then zoom in to various regions and then to individual NPCs going about their lives. The player would be shown how to take control of two different NPCs as a tutorial. After returning to the big picture view of the world (to impress on the player the scope of the Living World), they would then be free to begin exploring the world by inhabiting the NPCs of their choice.
This is where the core gameplay of the Living World would be found. Every NPC would be defined to have a particular role. (Role definition would be part of the toolset for building the content of the Living World.) Players would be able to observe or inspect an NPC to see the role he or she has, and then choose whether or not to inhabit that NPC.
Inhabiting an NPC immediately gives the player access to all the skills -- defined as gameplay activities -- that are associated with the role to which that NPC was assigned. So if you want to fight monsters, inhabit a Ranger; if you want to chase thieves, jump into a City Guard NPC; if you want to practice crafting, inhabit a Blacksmith or Baker; if you're looking for economic gameplay, inhabit a Merchant; and if you feel like trying your hand at the very difficult game of city or kingdom management, you would be able to inhabit a town's Mayor or even the King of an entire nation.
As noted above, in each case the kinds of gameplay available to you would depend on the role of the character you choose to inhabit. These gameplay activities would need to be predefined by the developer as selectable actions which use and/or affect objects inside the gameworld. The "Ranger" role, for example, might be defined to optimize skills (gameplay actions) such as Shortbow, Shortsword, Tracking, Herbal Medicine, and Stealth. Meanwhile, the "City Guard" role could be defined as having special training in Shortsword, Tracking, Negotiation, Perception, and the Guard badge which allows that character to summon other Guards. Other roles would have their own appropriate skill optimizations.
In addition to roles having particular skill optimizations, roles would also be keyed to preconstructed gameplay content. In other words, the role of the NPC you choose determines the kind of prescripted gameplay content offered to you. If you choose to inhabit a Ranger, you would not only be free to explore the gameworld while doing Ranger-y things, the act of inhabiting that NPC would also activate any number of world events (either automatically or at the player's discretion) in which Ranger skills could be particularly useful -- say, a monster invasion, or finding a lost child for some villagers. The same would be true for every role. Even highly mundane roles such as Baker would have gameplay events (e.g., baking challenges) scripted for them that would be fun for someone who voluntarily chose to be a Baker. (Note that this design integrates into the "epic storylines" discussed in the next section.)
The assignment of NPCs to particular roles would need to be integrated into the social dynamics of the gameworld. Because the Living World models the birth, growth, and death of individual NPCs (possibly only at a statistical level except where the player has traveled or currently exists), the mechanism of children maturing into adults would need to be fitted into the role system. For example, a village experiencing dynamic growth would encourage children to fill high-priority roles as openings (due to death, injury, retirement, or possession by the player) occur, then useful roles, then expansion-oriented or support roles as the group's resources and rules permit. A village or social group that can't or doesn't care to continue, on the other hand, would probably find most of its children emigrating to cities or taking on "solo/loner" roles. In other words, the Living World needs to be designed so that role assignments to juveniles are made dynamically based on a determination of whether to maintain/enhance the existing social group or to break it up in favor of forming new groups elsewhere.
One other note on the gameplay design approach of "inhabiting" NPCs: Because the Living World would simulate not just large-scale social movements but personal social structures as well, in many cases the NPC whom the player chooses to inhabit would be part of a social group -- a member of the city guards, or the blacksmith for a village, or a husband or wife who is the parent to some children. This raises the question: should those NPCs realize when someone who is part of their social group is "inhabited" by an entity with the unique power of possessing people's bodies and minds?
I very much like the idea that these NPCs would definitely know when someone in their group is inhabited by the player, and that they would be able to react toward the player according to their beliefs and fears. It seems reasonable that stories of this kind of possession, occurring for thousands of years, would be part of the legends and histories of all the peoples of the Living World. Would you be considered a god? or a demon? or perhaps just a very talented sorceror? If you choose to inhabit an NPC who, in addition to her gameplay role, is a wife and mother, how might her husband and children react to you when they realize that she no longer exists as herself and that you might do anything at all to her, from taking her across the wilderness to getting her killed? These relationships, I think, would also be an excellent opportunity for prescripted gameplay activities to be activated, with the twist that they could have more than the usual amount of emotional resonance -- would you choose to risk the life of an NPC whose children are begging you not to take her away?
Finally, regardless of which approach to gameplay is taken, it will be crucial to very clearly market a game like this as a long-term game, as a world to be lived in. A Living World game needs to take advantage of its unique features by marketing those features. It must not be described to prospective players as a typical shooter or RPG with a developer-defined story that players should expect to "beat" in a few hours.
Truly epic storylines
An opportunity afforded by a Living World game would be the chance to tell significantly larger and more complex stories than those found in other kinds of games. Because the action can take place over several years, the story doesn't have to unfold quickly. And because a Living World game is extremely large, both in terms of geography and NPC cultures, stories can truly be epic in scope.
An interesting possibility here would be to provide players with several outlines of epic stories. Once an epic is selected, large-scale world-changing events are set into motion, and before long the player will be impacted in some way. Epics could be story-based (the princess is in love with a prince of the neighboring enemy country and needs your help), action-oriented (barbarian/alien invasion), or adventure-driven (find a way to appease the angry god who's disrupting the world with volcanos). But in all cases, starting an epic will reshape the physical and/or social structures of the game world in some way that affects (and can be affected by) the player's character.
Customizable rules
As noted above, some players might prefer a world in which NPCs don't die. Other players, however, might enjoy seeing NPCs who die be replaced. Players might wish for more or less aggressive NPC cultures, more or less environmental variation, and so on.
It might be interesting to consider whether a Living World game that's intended to run as a highly simulationist single-player experience could allow for these aspects and others to be optional. Another question would be whether some or all such customizible rules can only be set at the start of a new gameworld, or if they can be changed while a game is running.
...
I'm just getting warmed up in thinking about these possibilities, but so far I'm feeling that there might be something here, that this could be a novel form of computer-based entertainment that some number of gamers would embrace enthusiastically.
Obviously there's a lot of work to be done to put some real meat on these bones of an idea. In particular, the business case needs to be addressed -- how could any publisher be persuaded to bankroll an idea like this?
I'll try to speak to some of those questions in future blog posts.
Friday, June 23, 2006
The Passage of Time in MMORPGs
Let's consider the question of how time passes (or not) in online worlds. It takes us into multiple game systems, and winds up having some deep connections to how different people experience a game world.
The first question that has to be asked is, should time pass at all?
It's not a requirement for a game. You could simply make time in the game an eternal "now," and eliminate all questions related to the passage of time.
For some game worlds, that might be desirable. Social worlds, for example, probably don't need to create their own local time format. It's also possible to imagine game worlds that are more like tone poems; they're not about gameplay so much as experiencing a particular feeling or event.
It's when we consider larger and more complex game worlds in which players can, to some degree, tell their own stories that marking time in the game world becomes useful. For these worlds that try to balance gameplay and immersiveness, the next question is whether time should pass with reference to physical or social phenomena (or both).
Examples of physical phenomena related to time are things like the day/night cycle, circadian rhythms, tides, seasons (temperature, weather), erosion, plant and animal responses to long-term temperature changes (as during the "Little Ice Age"), and continental drift.
And examples of social phenomena related to time are interest on loans, labor organization, traffic patterns, housing styles, city growth, and migration routes.
To explore these possibilities for features in a gameworld, let's look at the most common ways in which time is measured.
Seconds
The measurement of seconds only gains importance when you can measure them accurately. That means you need the ability to build clocks/watches. So does the technology in your game (whether mechanical or magical) support that?
And from a game perspective, do players need to know exactly what second something happened or will happen?
Minutes
See "seconds."
Hours
Hours are primarily a social measure of time. As civilizations become more complex, they tend to develop labor specializations. To support people of different professions working together, it's useful to be able to coordinate times at which exchanges can be made.
Is this really necessary in your game? Is there gameplay value in players knowing exactly what hour (within some larger measure of time, usually a day) it is?
Days
Is your game set in a location on a planet that rotates near a star, revolves around that star, and whose rotation period does not match its revolution period? If so, then logically it would have a day/night cycle. (Some orbital bodies are what's called "tidally-locked" -- from the perspective of someone on the body they revolve around, such a satellite always presents basically the same face. Our Moon is like that.)
And do you want to spend time developing the graphics and code to dynamically change both the ambient lighting and the sky textures?
If both of these conditions are true, if you implement a day/night cycle, then you'll probably want to define the "day" of your game to be shorter than a real-world day. All of the MMORPGs I know of with day/night cycles do this; it just seems to be perceived as more fun by most players -- probably a function of variety/novelty.
Weeks
Another socially-generated measure of time that your game probably doesn't need.
Months
Yet another primarily social measure of time. Because months are usually named, they're potentially interesting as lore flavoring if your game also implements days and years.
Seasons
Seasons -- cyclically recurring periods of global temperature and weather variation -- are sometimes thought to be caused by a planet's orbit being elliptical, but that's not correct... at least not for Earth, whose orbit is not very elliptical. (A planet in a more elliptical orbit, such as Mars, does have orbitally-induced seasons.)
Earth's seasons are caused by its axis being tilted (rather than perpendicular) with respect to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. Because of its tilt and average distance from the Sun, both of the northern and southern hemispheres get roughly four seasons. (Except for Minnesota, which has only two seasons: Winter and Construction.)
So if you set your game world on a planet, is that planet tilted on its axis? And will you implement weather in your game?
If so, then it's conceivable that weather patterns could change over the year according to seasons. Knowing when a season was about to start was incredibly important when survival depended on predicting when the local delta would flood. That permitted sufficient crops to be irrigated to feed a growing city. But as technology improved, and agriculture became less critical, seasons became mostly a mildly interesting way to break up the passage of a year -- basically they allow some variation in the local weather.
So are seasons worth the development time?
To put it another way: If weather is implemented at all in your game, will it have any practical effect? Or will it just be pretty?
If it has some actual effect, then seasons might be worthwhile. Otherwise, probably not.
Years
The period of a planetary body's revolution around a star is its year. It's a good measure of the passage of time compared to a human's lifespan.
If characters in your game are effectively immortal, years might not be worth implementing.
On the other hand, if nothing else ever changes cyclically in the game, then there's no real downside to implementing years as an accumulation of some number of days (other than the time to write and maintain the code). If players can know that they started playing in the year 3371 and it's now the year 3402, what are the benefits of that, and do they outweigh the cost in terms of the time it took to code that capability?
What about if instead of numbering years, you named them (as in the "Year of the Fruit Bat")?
Decades and Longer Periods
It would be fascinating to see an online game world that tried to deepen its immersiveness by reflecting some of the phenomena related to multi-year spans of time. These could be physical, such as changes in tree types or animal migrations; or they could be social, as in organizing periods of years according to who's in charge politically ("the 12th year of the glorious reign of Planodigitus Maximus").
Perhaps someone will give this kind of thing a shot someday.
Friday, May 19, 2006
Game Worlds Should Be Internally Consistent
I'm perfectly fine with imaginary worlds that don't share the same physical laws as this Real World of ours, but I do expect that at a high enough level there's some consistency to the laws of any world.
I qualify that with "at a high enough level" because I'd even be good with an imagined world in which different parts of the universe operate under different physical laws... as long as there's some plausible high-level explanation for that effect. Maybe (as in more than one fantasy novel) there was a horrific magical disaster that shattered the universe into multiple planes of existence, each with its own slightly different physical constants but all interconnected in the same universe. Or maybe -- and it's conceivable that this is the case even for our own universe -- the physical constants at the extreme edge of the expanding universe aren't the same as those at the "center" (wherever that may be).
I've read science fiction and fantasy my entire life; I have no problem wrapping my head around alternate modes of reality. What I expect from a literary creation of an alternate reality is that it will be internally self-consistent so as to be effective at telling a good story. And as a form of literary creation (albeit one with extra constraints), MMORPGs are not exempt from this expectation. If they have any interest in telling a good story, a reasonable attention to internal consistency is mandatory.
Where this gets a little funny is that caveat about "extra constraints." That being, these MMORPG things aren't just literary creations -- they also need to succeed as games. (I think perhaps people don't appreciate just how hard it is to do one thing well, like make a fun game or tell a good story, much less do both at the same time.) If you see MMORPGs primarily or exclusively as "just a game," then sure, you probably think that caring about consistency is just a waste of developer time that would be better spent adding new kinds of loot drops.
But I can, have, and will argue that to think of MMORPGs as "only" games is to miss a rare opportunity to get in on the ground floor of defining a new art form. MMORPGs are sometimes compared to theme parks because both are about creating a massively shared entertainment experience. What sets MMORPGs apart from theme parks is that a MMORPG can do more; because it's just code and data it's easy to change, giving developers the power to tell a coherent story by defining the world and its inhabitants at will.
So for a developer to pass up that opportunity, for them to always rule in favor of game over world whenever there's a conflict, is to choose not to participate in exploring the possibilities of a new kind of art. Being a part of that process means taking the time to make the world literarily consistent -- there must be reasons why things are the way they are, and those reasons must be consciously organized in order to most effectively tell a good story.
I qualify that with "at a high enough level" because I'd even be good with an imagined world in which different parts of the universe operate under different physical laws... as long as there's some plausible high-level explanation for that effect. Maybe (as in more than one fantasy novel) there was a horrific magical disaster that shattered the universe into multiple planes of existence, each with its own slightly different physical constants but all interconnected in the same universe. Or maybe -- and it's conceivable that this is the case even for our own universe -- the physical constants at the extreme edge of the expanding universe aren't the same as those at the "center" (wherever that may be).
I've read science fiction and fantasy my entire life; I have no problem wrapping my head around alternate modes of reality. What I expect from a literary creation of an alternate reality is that it will be internally self-consistent so as to be effective at telling a good story. And as a form of literary creation (albeit one with extra constraints), MMORPGs are not exempt from this expectation. If they have any interest in telling a good story, a reasonable attention to internal consistency is mandatory.
Where this gets a little funny is that caveat about "extra constraints." That being, these MMORPG things aren't just literary creations -- they also need to succeed as games. (I think perhaps people don't appreciate just how hard it is to do one thing well, like make a fun game or tell a good story, much less do both at the same time.) If you see MMORPGs primarily or exclusively as "just a game," then sure, you probably think that caring about consistency is just a waste of developer time that would be better spent adding new kinds of loot drops.
But I can, have, and will argue that to think of MMORPGs as "only" games is to miss a rare opportunity to get in on the ground floor of defining a new art form. MMORPGs are sometimes compared to theme parks because both are about creating a massively shared entertainment experience. What sets MMORPGs apart from theme parks is that a MMORPG can do more; because it's just code and data it's easy to change, giving developers the power to tell a coherent story by defining the world and its inhabitants at will.
So for a developer to pass up that opportunity, for them to always rule in favor of game over world whenever there's a conflict, is to choose not to participate in exploring the possibilities of a new kind of art. Being a part of that process means taking the time to make the world literarily consistent -- there must be reasons why things are the way they are, and those reasons must be consciously organized in order to most effectively tell a good story.
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
Planetary Environmental Features
Why don't planetary physical phenomena play more of a role in online gameworlds, especially in games with science fiction settings?
There are several physical characteristics that would be fun to see implemented in an online game. I’ll use the various planets from the Star Wars movies as examples, but these ideas could be applied to any science fictional setting:
I've left some things out, but you get the idea: There are a lot more ways in which planets in a science fiction-based game could (and possibly should) be more "realistic." (I put the word realistic in quotes because we're just guessing what planets other than Earth and the few others in our solar system might actually look like. Still, they're the best guesses we can make currently.)
A few of these things are implemented in the Star Wars movies. The twin suns of Tatooine, the water world Kamino, and Yavin IV as a habitable satellite of a gas giant world are good examples of what might be possible. But although moviemaking has a tough time (for various reasons) with showing planets with different gravities or day/night cycle lengths or variable-length seasons, a persistent-world MMORPG could bring these effects to life though judicious programming.
Of course, the standard response is, "This isn't intended to be hardcore science fiction -- it's a game, not a simulation. All that science stuff has to take a back seat to other needs, such as story, action, etc." As someone who's been a programmer and project manager, I understand the need to distinguish between core features and chrome.
Even so, it still strikes me as kind of a cop-out for a science fiction MMORPG. Without the science -- in other words, without simulating some aspects of physical reality -- you lose a significant opportunity to give your online world a life beyond being just another button-masher game. To be blunt, "It's not gonna be a simulation!" is a poor excuse for a design philosophy for an online persistent-world game with a science fiction setting. When we have a pretty good idea how planets can vary, and -- importantly -- when those variations can increase the player's feeling of being part of a space-faring civilization, then why not implement those planetary effects?
In particular, why not add such a distinctive feature when doing so can give a game a competitive advantage in the increasingly crowded marketplace of MMORPGs?
There are several physical characteristics that would be fun to see implemented in an online game. I’ll use the various planets from the Star Wars movies as examples, but these ideas could be applied to any science fictional setting:
- variation in stellar systems:
- system has just one star
- system has two or more stars
- variation in stellar revolution times:
- even-length seasons (low eccentricity)
- varied-length seasons (high eccentricity)
- variation in planetary rotation speeds:
- different lengths of the day/night cycle
- different wind speeds (Coriolis effect)
- different tidal heights
- variation in planetary mass:
- different gravities
- different resource mixes:
- predominance of metals/gases on younger/more massive planets
- predominance of chemicals/foods on older/less massive planets
- variation in planetary crust motion:
- no formation = "waterworld" (Kamino)
- low formation rate = one huge, flat continent (Pangaea)
- moderate formation rate = several large, varied-height continents
- high formation rate = many small volcanic islands ("Hawaiiworld")
- variation in planetary ecospheres:
- desert:
- dry (Tatooine)
- frozen (Hoth)
- swamp (Agrilat, Corellia; Lianorm, Naboo)
- tundra
- grassland/veldt/steppe (Naboo)
- forest:
- boreal (Endor)
- temperate (Kashyyyk)
- jungle (Yavin IV)
- sargasso
- world-city (Coruscant)
- variation in moons
- different lunar revolution rates
- different apparent sizes
- different lunar appearances:
- Moon-like (cratered)
- Earth-like (moon is big enough to have gravity/atmosphere/water/life)
- gas giant occupies most of sky (moon and planet reversed, actually)
- different rotation rates:
- moon rotates to show different faces
- moon always shows same face (due to tidal locking)
- variation in nighttime starfield
- "normal" number and type of stars
- many stars (interior of globular cluster)
- no stars but bright night due to being inside an emission/reflection nebula
- no stars due to being within a "dark" absorption nebula
A few of these things are implemented in the Star Wars movies. The twin suns of Tatooine, the water world Kamino, and Yavin IV as a habitable satellite of a gas giant world are good examples of what might be possible. But although moviemaking has a tough time (for various reasons) with showing planets with different gravities or day/night cycle lengths or variable-length seasons, a persistent-world MMORPG could bring these effects to life though judicious programming.
Of course, the standard response is, "This isn't intended to be hardcore science fiction -- it's a game, not a simulation. All that science stuff has to take a back seat to other needs, such as story, action, etc." As someone who's been a programmer and project manager, I understand the need to distinguish between core features and chrome.
Even so, it still strikes me as kind of a cop-out for a science fiction MMORPG. Without the science -- in other words, without simulating some aspects of physical reality -- you lose a significant opportunity to give your online world a life beyond being just another button-masher game. To be blunt, "It's not gonna be a simulation!" is a poor excuse for a design philosophy for an online persistent-world game with a science fiction setting. When we have a pretty good idea how planets can vary, and -- importantly -- when those variations can increase the player's feeling of being part of a space-faring civilization, then why not implement those planetary effects?
In particular, why not add such a distinctive feature when doing so can give a game a competitive advantage in the increasingly crowded marketplace of MMORPGs?
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