MMO Gaming

Why did no one tell me that my last post sounded like a half-drunken tirade? Did no one notice that my grammar was poor and my sentences barely intelligible? This is the kind of thing I need to be reminded. In the future, if I write a half-sentence like this, where my thought is not even finished, please let me know.

The post is not inaccurate in any particular way but because the very idea seems almost too possible.

I didn’t come on here just to humiliate myself though, I have a reason. I’ve been thinking. Much like my half-sentence above, I only wish I was a heavy drinker so that I could pass the blame onto something other than my own demented musings (often coming to me under the soft glow of the monitor while coding.)

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but maybe I haven’t. Maybe it is one of those ideas which I’ve had for so long that I can not remember whether I have ever uttered it to another human being or not. Like I said though, I think I have. I’ve just been thinking more about it recently.

Environments. Preferably destructible. I’m not talking fully destructible. I’m not asking for some sort of Red Faction-esque blowing through walls, just a little something to let me know that the environment is more than just some art stuck on the screen. Oh…I mean art with collision detection of course.

Look at the typical MMOG. Whatever form of “magic” they have (whether mystical or technological in nature) usually falls under the elemental kind, Fire, Water/Ice, Wind, etc. Everyone is pretty much familiar with this. My question is, why are environments, made out of many materials, just sitting there no matter what type of attack hits them.

Let me give an example. Let’s say we are talking about a boat made out of wooden planks. Why can’t the game determine a few things about the boat to make the environment more interactive. First, why doesn’t each “section” of said boat have some sort of “health” bar. In essence, rather than creating one model for “boat” why not create multiple pieces of the same model that fit together like puzzle pieces, to make up the boat (bow, stern, mast…um…that pretty much exhausts my knowledge of boats to be honest.) Then, depending on the material it is fashioned out of (in this case wood) it reacts differently to external player effects.

Shooting fire at the wood boat would make it light up, gradually damaging the hull and spreading, eventually hurting those on the boat if they were in the area of the fire. Or perhaps wind tears the wooden planks off the boat, making them act as projectiles which can hit and do damage not only to the rest of the structure of the boat, but to human and computer-controlled characters.

Perhaps you have a metal boat where “fire” damage caused the boat to become extremely hot and cause constant searing damage which gradually drains the HP of those in contact with it. Or maybe you use ice on the metal boat causing it to become very slick, increasing the chances of knockdown effects and causing slow to everyone in the affected area.

I’m not talking merely about AoE damaging moves, I’m talking about a really dynamic environment. No, it doesn’t have to be completely dynamic, but more than just a static world to look at would be nice. Not every little thing has to be a part of it, but some things certainly could be. When are we going to see it happen?

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, game design, mmo design, mmo environments, game environments, world design, game worlds

There was a post over on MMOCrunch.com that got me thinking. The post is not inaccurate in any particular way but because the very idea seems almost too possible.

To put it simply, if the single-player RPG experience is going to be dwindling and all we will be left with is everything coming out as an MMOG than there are some serious problems that need to be dealt with, all of which are well known.

First of all, story. MMOs are the only games I can think of that can literally get by on zero story. I know, someone is probably already yelling at their screens wishing to tell me all about quests and how there is more story in an MMO than in any other type of game. That’s bullshit. There, I said it. Killing 500 Wazzits because they are eating all the dingleberries is not a story. Let’s please try to keep our delusions of grandeur to a reasonable level here.

I play RPGs (of the non-MMO variety) mostly because of the story. It’s why I have sat, and continue to sit through hundreds of hours worth of turn-based or “active time battle” battle systems, not to mention random battles of the console RPG. These systems of combat aren’t particularly enjoying or exciting, but they get the job done and let me enjoy what I’m really there for, the story and how it unfolds. Until MMOs can come anywhere close to that I fear for the death of the single-player RPG.

Another thing that is seemingly overlooked is immersion. I know, I know, MMOs are constantly working on this, but in the single player RPG things are so much better defined. What I do matters, I really take part in the goings on in the world. The MMO has not been able to capture that same feeling.

Not to say, of course, that MMOs don’t have the ability to, or that they do not do many other things that the single-player experience can not (and does not try to) match, but these integral things, like story and immersion, must be taken care of. More on this tomorrow.

I mentioned this briefly before. Talked about only for a moment and in the more strict relation to newcomers to (MMO) gaming. Still, with recent talk of raid interfaces I am forced to re-look at where I stand on the issue.

For the record, I stand exactly where I did in that post. Too much information is given all the time that is unnecessary. And, in fact, this information may not be helping people raid better, it may in fact make it harder.

I am always appalled by most people’s raiding screenshots, even my own from my time spent in WoW. I’ve got crap all over the place. Don’t get me wrong, I believed that I needed all that crap to be effective, but the truth is, I probably didn’t. I’ve played both a healer and a tank in raids, as both I had every group open to me all the time so I could monitor health. Pretty much every raiding person does that. But why?

I mean, who actually needs to do that? Why does a hunter need to know the exact health of every raid member? What is he going to do with that information? Bandage? It seems silly. So much clutter for so little payoff. I’d argue a good fifty percent of the information we surround ourselves with is something we can’t help out with anyway. And, on the off chance there is something we could help with how often do we miss it because of the huge amount of information we try to show ourselves?

The real problem is no one has spent sufficient time developing an interface that is intuitive enough so that it presents information at the right time. There is only “all information” or “no information” and no in between really. The other problem is the current MMO design paradigm seems to be interface equals boxes on screen. I hate that most of all. The interface I am presented in a game should not be made up entirely of boxes on a screen. The world is my interface.

Don’t get me wrong, boxes on the screen have their place when they need to be there, but they don’t need to be available all the time so why detract from the beautiful world that was built? Use them when they are necessary but don’t just throw them up there in order to stick yet another box on the screen. This does no good for the player or the developer.

I’ll have to talk a bit more about this at a later point in the month, even now I’m noticing some activity in the back of my mind. This can only mean I’m getting an idea. Or my head is going to explode. I guess you’ll have to wait and see if I post tomorrow to find out which it actually is.

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, game interface, interface design, game design, raiding

At some point we seem to have entered into some episode right out of the twilight zone. I mean, when a post I make actually manages to then come true I think we can all agree something is decidedly wrong with the universe.

Now, of course, this has been a long time coming, and my own post has nothing to do with what they are going to be doing, per se, but it is rather odd. Perhaps even more odd because I actually ended up writing that post in late March and just set it to post for the April 2. In the spirit of finding out interesting news the day after I post about a similar topic I’d like to encourage whoever has news of the Shadowrun MMO (I repeat Shadowrun MMO, for the love of god let’s get this thing out) please come out and tell us about it. No, seriously. Why the hell isn’t this out yet. Am I going to have to write an entire post dedicated to how perfect the system and settings translate to the MMO space? Am I going to have to write down every design idea I’ve ever had for the game before I get some news?

Microsoft, get on that. Surely you can afford to waste a few million reviving one of the best intellectual property’s ever developed by the human mind. Oh yeah, and when you announce it (tomorrow perhaps?) don’t tell me it’s going to be a pile of shit FPS again. I’d personally come and strangle you all. Dead. Serious.

In game advertisements. Some people find the very notion sickening. Big companies paying out hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of dollars to get their ads stuck in our games. And the worst part is, we aren’t seeing any of the benefits. They still charge us fifty or more dollars for the game, and in the case of MMOs, usually a monthly fee of $14.99 as well, and still they stick in ads.

It feels kind of like a slap in the face to know that these companies are pulling in money from every direction possible. Then they have the gall to tell us that making games is expensive, and that extra money from advertising isn’t covering costs. As if it’s our problem that they are in the business of making games. A little hint, don’t bitch about something you choose to do.

If you make games for a living, don’t cry to me about how hard it is. It’s like those parents I hear whining to their own kids about how the kids don’t know how hard it is to be a parent. Well, you know what, the kid didn’t have a choice in it, you did, so suck it up and deal with it.

It’s something I’ve seen far too commonly. The defense by developers is almost always the same, some variation of “Making games is expensive, if you want to continue enjoying the game than we have to make some money off of it. That’s just the business.”

Yeah, we’re all crying because you do something that you enjoy. It really helps the rest of us working in jobs we may or may not like but that we perform anyway because it provides us the necessities. No, go ahead, tell us all about your money problems. We’ve never faced anything like it before. We are all completely business inept. Hold on, let me find a cat for this, he should hammer the point home.

(more…)

One day each year every jackass has the wonderful privilege of being given a free ride. Their asshattery is overlooked, perhaps even found amusing. This day is April 1st, perhaps better known as April Fool’s Day.

Coming off like that it probably sounds as if I am cynical about the whole thing. “He’s been fooled one to many times” you are no doubt thinking. You would be wrong. That assumption would be incorrect because on this day I choose to go about my normal schedule, read all the things I normally would, and then dismiss them, the realistic with the ridiculous, because the whole day is a sham.

“On the second,” I swear to myself each year, “I shall wade through the bullshit to pick out the nuggets of truth like so much unchewed corn.” I consider that my April Fool’s prank to myself. I never laugh at it.

It seems to be customary, apparently, to recap the events of the day tomorrow, pointing out to everyone, in case it was not abundantly clear already, just exactly what was a load of horseshit and what was not.

To spit on the spirit of the day I will now say something wholly truthful. In the month of April I will post at least one post every day. Of course, if for some reason this is not the case, will I just say that this was in fact my April Fool’s joke? Or perhaps it is, in fact, my April Fool’s joke and this lead up has all been about setting the proper tone? Unfortunately for both you and I, we shall only discover the answer to that mystery at the end of the month.