The traditional D&D/Lord of the Rings/Fantasy genre used as the setting for MMOs have been giving up market share to new genres; space/SciFi, Comics, and even sim soap opera/cartoon worlds have had successful MMO releases. Do you think that setting has any bearing on how future MMO games will be perceived by the gaming community?
I think this question boils down to “Where are MMOs going?” I think that setting will definitely affect it, but I don’t think it will effect it any more than in the single player arena. Over time we are going to see as much diversity in the online games market as we see in the single player market in terms of genre, setting, design and game mechanics.
We are seeing the hint now with games like City of Heroes, Planetside, SWG [Star Wars Galaxies] and others where we are moving beyond the “Tolkien” settings and expanding, slightly, into other genres. I think we will continue to see more of that. There’s even World War II Online set in a historical combat setting and A Tale in the Desert, set in Ancient Egypt, so I think that is going to expand as more products come to market.
I’m glad to see it. I think that online games are going to start to cater to even more specific interests. Just like magazines, where you can have a smaller hardcore audience, I think there are games that can be successful that aren’t targeting a large group of people, but their audience is very loyal to the game.
That’s a big thing that David James, developer of Puzzle Pirates, says; where you don’t have to spend $20 million dollars on a project, you can do something that’s smaller and simpler like Puzzle Pirates that has a smaller audience and still be successful.
In the most recent publish of City of Heroes outdoor instances were introduced. What are the difficulties involved with designing an outdoor instance compared with an indoor instance?
I think that difference comes from a suspension of disbelief standpoint. The easier thing about doing inside instances, solved very elegantly in City of Heroes, is that you can be running around inside a building or area that you can’t normally go into because the door is locked, so there is a fictional device there that aids in the suspension of disbelief that makes it work. Because there is a physical barrier, there is non-continuity to the space that helps enforce the mental separation between each space.
The difficulty with an outdoor instance is that you have to at least provide the illusion of a continuity that is not there. Theoretically there is no physical barrier between you and the space you are about to go into unless you do something clever: an “S”-turn in a narrow canyon for example, where you go around the bend and enter an instanced space in a seamless kind of way.
As long as you have some kind of fictional device that separates the spaces. Things we’re talking about for Tabula Rasa are tunnels that go underneath a mountain, or rubble caved in over an entrance to a base, or maybe a drop ship, anything that creates a sort of barrier.
Making a very broad generalization, there are 4 types of MMO gamers: Hardcore PvE players, Hardcore PvP players (with griefers being a subset), Casual PvE players and casual PvP players. How does a game that uses instancing benefit each type of player?
That’s an interesting question. It depends on how they are implemented. One thing that’s nice about an instanced space versus a public space is that you can set up each instance space with its own rule set without messing up what is happening in the consistent/public space. Obviously having each space with completely different rules would get confusing for the player, but theoretically, and no one has quite done this yet and it is something we are striving for with Tabula Rasa, you can have elements that make everyone happy, theoretically.
Having instanced spaces that allow PvP even while your persistent spaces are always PvE will please one group of people. For PvP players, they can go into an instanced space for a war game, or gauntlet or something like that.
What it could do though, is if the PvP player gets their joy at being able to attack anybody, at any time, where their enjoyment comes at the expense of other players, if you devise a rule set where people have a choice on whether to go into the space or not, then you may lessen their experience because they won’t have enough victims to keep them satisfied.
For casual players, it would depend on how the rule sets are designed. You have the model that we are going for in Tabula Rasa, where the shared persistent spaces are mostly PvE but where for the instanced spaces some are PvP, and some are PvE. Some are indirectly PvP where even though the players aren’t fighting each other they might be competing for the same goal, like a race or something like that.
I think that griefers would probably lose out in a heavily instanced MMO environment, but it seems across the board every other type of player will benefit.
That’s what we think. That’s actually an ideal because the hard core griefer who gets fun at the expense of others is not necessarily a great target market. They tend to scare off other people. They are very smart players, clever and determined, and I think that even in that space they could find ways to lure people into a PvP instance. Then it becomes a question of game mechanics where maybe death from another player doesn’t cause XP loss or item loss. You can set up ways so that it is not nearly as painful as it has been in the past.
Most games have their design centered on the players’ immersion into the character/world. However, chatting and real-world relationships are integral components to any successful MMO. In recent and upcoming MMOs with built-in player factions have limited the capability of enemy players to communicate with each other. Do you think the chatting options of a player should be limited based on game lore/content?
Well, there are a lot of valid reasons to do that. The most obvious one is to prevent exploits related to spying. That’s probably the #1 reason why in a game like Dark Age of Camelot, players of different factions can’t talk to each other. People will still be able to find ways; IRC, 3rd party chat rooms, voice chat, etc. So people will find a way, but you don’t want to make it that easy. Another reason you want to limit it is, again, because of the griefer type player. There’s a limit to how much trash talk you will allow. It can go out of bounds really easily.
There are compromises that you can do. For example, you can have a quick-chat system, where in addition to the standard chat system, there would be a menu of standard things to say. That is becoming a standard feature in the next generation MMO games. I think Toontown might have been the first to have that in a robust way.
In some ways, what I keep looking for is an online game where you have completely different clients playing different aspects of the same game in the same space. Way back, UO: Monsters was proposed by Carly Staehlin where it would be a completely different game that still played in the UO [Ultima Online] universe. You would play a monster, starting off as a rat and progressing to snake, spider, etc., but you couldn’t talk to other players. In fact you probably wouldn’t have been able to talk to other monsters too.
One of the most popular online multiplayer games for the PC has been Counter Strike. A fast-action FPS game that allows players to jump on, get into the action, and earn money to improve their avatar. Do you see parallels to the success of this style of play to the current and next generation MMO games?
Generally yeah. I think there are 2 reasons for that. One is the whole game addiction sort of moral/ethical place that designers are in where ongoing experiences like MMOs have a quality in that people will spend a lot of time at it. I don’t buy that they are more/less addictive than any other kind of game, or frankly anything else. If someone has an addictive personality, they will be addicted to something, whether it is talking on the telephone or eating salt. I think at least some segment of the MMO market is moving more towards faster play cycles. We’re trying to expand the market beyond people who spend 10 hours a day playing a game. That segment is a very viable market, so you want to have some parts of products and entire products in some cases, made for those players. There is a much larger audience of people who only want to play 30 minutes to an hour and still want to feel like they got something done. That’s the beauty of games like CS or console games whereas in some online games it’s, “I’ve played for 8 hours and maybe I felt like I got somewhere,” especially at the higher levels.
So we’re definitely moving towards a faster pace. That’s one of the things that NCsoft as a whole believes. CoH was the first example where you can get in and play quickly and accomplish missions during 45 minute time frames. Auto Assault, Guild Wars, and Tabula Rasa will all be the same way. Still, even in those games there will be extended game mechanics, like the Task Force missions in CoH, similar to planar raids in Everquest. So there will still be game mechanics that cater to longer play-time. Personally, I like to play a lot of different games. And I also work. And I have a social life. So my windows of opportunity for gaming are much narrower than they were in the past. I’m trying to appeal to people like me who want to play, but only have a few hours per week and don’t want to feel left behind.
It seems like it’s a question of what the goal of the players’ time is. In CoH it seems that there is a lot more emphasis on completing missions as being the goal of a play session, compared with gaining experience. Gaining experience is still the end-goal in most MMOs, with quests/missions being a method of accomplishing that goal, but in CoH it seems that they are changing the perception of that. While there is this overriding goal of gaining experience, the play session might be more focused on something else.
I think that is one of the big things you are seeing in World of Warcraft, with a very quest-driven structure to it. Guild Wars is going to have the same kind of idea, where you explore the spaces and go on missions and you will gain XP. But that is part of the play experience and not the goal of the play experience.
Do you think that having instanced areas will be beneficial for PvP in MMOs by allowing PvP players a path to fight other people to gain xp/levels?
Advancement via PvP is a very tricky question because it can be easily exploited. You can begin to design game mechanics to try to prevent that, but it very quickly becomes very complex. I think it is possible. You might also have some other reward for PvP where your character doesn’t advance in skill or levels, but there is a ranking system or bragging rights.
Like titles.
Yeah, so it doesn’t affect the mechanics but it does give you some reward. This is if you don’t give them control of who they get to fight. It would be very difficult for them to match themselves up with say a dummy character.
How much does cheating/exploiting affect the systems you design for MMO games? Does it start in the initial design, or is it something that you consider later in the process?
Well, in our first attempts at this type of game (UO), it was definitely not thought about enough. Now, everyone working in this space that has any experience will think about it constantly. From day one, every single system, feature and aspect of the game that comes up, before we implement them, we’ll talk about how someone can cheat or exploit. We go to a lot of trouble to set up systems that we hope will make it hard to cheat. There is no way to make it impossible – people will always figure out a way – but we spend time on it for everything we implement. If you don’t, you’re in trouble.
One of the biggest complaints of MMO players are time sinks. At the same time, people want to feel a sense of accomplishment that usually comes at the end of a long adventure. How difficult is it for you to balance these two seemingly at-odds desires?
I think that the question for players is, “Am I always doing something entertaining?” …and “entertaining” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always fun. There can be points where it is frustrating or hard…where you say “I’ve died 3 times in a row now!” but it is still entertaining. If you’re putting in time sinks or other devices that artificially inflate the amount of time a player has to spend doing something, or if it is boring, or repetitive, then that’s a real problem. It’s not that things take X amount of time, it’s what are those things? Are they fun?
Travel time is the one I always pick on. An example would be having to travel for 30 minutes, or any significant amount of time before you can begin your play session. Imagine if you were playing Counter Strike and you had to travel for 30 minutes before you got to begin the encounter. That would be crazy! But that’s been standard in most MMOs. The whole, “I have to run for x minutes” or “I have to take all these things to get…” What?! So that’s the one I always pick on. Oh and resting, also. Where you’re asking the player to pay you to do nothing.
Finally, what is your favorite design element in Tabula Rasa?
Well, we haven’t released a lot of details of it yet, but I think the way we’re going to be mixing the persistent and instanced spaces is a little different than how we’ve talked about it in the past. Hopefully it is going to include some really dynamic mechanics/systems that are different than what players are used to. So, I think my favorite thing right now is the way we’re going to mix persistent/instanced spaces and how they will effect each other in interesting ways. That’s what I’m most excited about.
I’d like to thank Starr for taking the time to talk with us, and special thanks to Pann, the community relations diva for all her help in setting this up and for a wonderful tour of the Wonka factory that is NCsoft.
Be sure to check the Tabula Rasa website for more information on the game.
Discuss: An Instanced Thread.
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