Digital Initiative

This week: deep, brutal cuts at SoE, that bastion of the traditional MMO-as-virtual-world. No one knows what’s happening over there, but it seems bad, and it doesn’t bode well for Landmark.

WoW got a shot in the arm with Warlords of Draenor, continuing the status quo. This is not dissimilar to pretty much all of the last few expansions they’ve released.

FFXIV continues unabated, quietly continuing to up their game and content catering to their existing fanbase.

Every other notable MMO has faltered in some way or another, and the ones that have seen success have been, shall we say, outside of the “traditional” norm.

A slight aside: when I talk about “success” in video game terms, I’m not talking about units sold, or dollars made, or Metacritic scores, or any of the data that people like to trot out when the topic of game success comes up. I’m talking about the one thing that matters to the devs on the inside: “Do I have a job X months from now?” where X is a number from 3-12+, depending on how optimistic you’re feeling. That is the omnipresent question, that is the nagging, pit-of-the-stomach feeling that prevents a dev, any dev, from ever feeling really comfortable.

MMOs should be good at success. They’re not supposed to be one-and-done, there’s supposed to be a continuing trickle of content, that drip feed that justifies the subscription fee. That is, after all, what the subscription fee is supposed to be PAYING for, and for a goodly number of games, that’s what you’re getting.

Don’t believe me? Feel like the subscription is fleecing you? Blame WoW. No, seriously. Take a look at the last year’s worth of content patches– not all patches, just the ones that add new non-trivial things for you to play. I’m using the official site as my reference. It’s currently February 12. The last content patch was November 13, the expansion launch. The patch before that was early September… of 2013. Before that, May 2013, then March 2013, then November 2012, then late August, 2012. Six content patches in two years. This is why you don’t trust subscriptions.

As a point of reference, I’ll use a game I feel like I get my money’s worth out of: FFXIV. Last patch was January 19th. Before that was late October 2014, then July 2014, then March 2014, then December 2013, and before that was the relaunch of the game in late August 2013. As another reference point, I was only just barely caught up with the last content patch by the time this current content patch hit, and that’s mostly because there are a lot of things I don’t bother doing in the game. In some things, like crafting, I’m four or five patches behind, and there are entire questlines introduced in the March patch that I haven’t even gotten to.

I don’t say any of this to compare MMOs, or make some claim about which games are worth subscription fees and which aren’t– that’s entirely a choice people decide to make for themselves; if a game’s content isn’t fun for you, it’s not going to be worth your money no matter how much of it gets made. What I’m more concerned with is what this all means for the future of MMOs.

Massively, now also defunct, posted an article about the “Best MMOs of 2014″, which quite pointedly commented that it was “nothing”. Aside from being an wholly unnecessary potshot at the hard work of a great number of developers across at least seven studios in the US alone, it speaks volumes about the current state of the industry. The tone of MMO reporting now seems to come in one of two flavors: bitterness about the current underwhelming options on offer, or continued gushing about the minutiae of a particular specific game. This, too, speaks volumes about the current state of the industry.

MMOs are stuck in a rut. They’ve been stuck there for years, and the only reason it’s lasted so long is because the MMO industry moves much, much slower than most of the other genres of video games. We haven’t had a quantum leap since WoW, and that’s ten years old. Also coming out at the time of WoW (in the same month, even!) was Half-Life 2. Call of Duty, the original, back when WW2 shooters were new, that was 2003, a mere year before WoW. We have had an entire console generation, one many people agreed was far too long, in less time than it’s been since a major quantum leap in MMOs.

You might be silently (?) railing at me, now, about some feature that really changed everything. Maybe it’s LOTRO’s housing and crafting (Ultima Online, 1997). Maybe it’s microtransactions (Project Entropia, 2003). Maybe it’s Rift’s spawned events (Everquest, 1999). Maybe it’s TERA’s action combat. You’d have a point on that last one, it’s within the last ten years that we’ve had the technology to pull something like that off.

Here’s the point I’m getting at: MMOs are stuck, badly, and the most recent highly successful model (WoW) is the last quantum leap that MMOs have had (in WoW’s case, making MMOs accessible to the mainstream) and is anchoring both the community and the development of new MMOs. There’s a nasty duality to MMO development right now– make it too much like WoW and people will complain that it’s a clone, diverge too much from WoW and players won’t find your game familiar– they can’t settle into it like a well-worn chair. Ask Bel what frustrated him the most about Elder Scrolls Online: I can tell you he went months being frustrated that he couldn’t set the game up just like WoW, like he’s used to.

There’s not a lot of MMO on the horizon. Eastern MMOs continue development, but are brutally cutthroat and rarely make it West (and are catering to a somewhat incompatible audience when they do arrive West), and Western MMOs are being pretty quiet or slowly fading into the ether. I only see a couple of paths out from here. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to engage in a little MMO futurism.

One of three things is going to have to happen for us to see new, successful (see above definition of success) MMOs:

1) One possibility is that people could start embracing new releases for what they are and start sticking with them for more than a month or so at a time. Seems unlikely.

2) Another possibility is that one new quantum leap — a breakout hit — could usurp the current status quo and usher in a new era of MMOs. I think this is what a huge portion of the MMO-playing community has been hoping will happen for years, and it’s why the trend of MMO-hopping became big in the last five or so years. It also hasn’t happened in more than a decade, and attempts at making it happen have fallen harder and harder as the expectation of quality rises and the games get more expensive up-front to create.

3) MMOs change significantly, alienating a significant portion of the community and catering to a different audience, shifting focus. We’re already seeing this in games like Borderlands, Destiny, Diablo 3, and others. They’ve taken all the key features of MMOs and removed all the rest, and many of them are excellent games, but they don’t satisfy that MMO itch for many.

I think #1 isn’t going to happen, not on a broad enough scale to help anyone. #2 might possibly still happen, but is a really dim hope. #3 is already happening, and it’s mostly games pulling from the MMO genre and adapting features and concepts to fit a different type of game.

Here’s the thing. MMOs were founded on the concept that it was really cool to be able to explore a really big, open world with your friends, and playing with your friends was as easy as logging into a central server, you didn’t need to set up your own server, invite only people you knew, or any of that. You could log in, meet new people, fight monsters, and when you got back the world had moved on without you so you wanted to catch up.

Nearly 20 years since the first major MMOs, it’s no longer special to have a game you can easily play with your friends. That’s a pretty basic requirement of every video game now, to the point where single-player-only games on major platforms are a novelty. Exploring really big, open worlds is old hat, we’ve long ago decided that the quality of content is worth more than the quantity, and filling up big spaces means lowering the fidelity of content from sweeping The Last Of Us masterpieces to “kill ten rats”. We’ve even found that, in an MMO, making content more complicated than “kill ten rats” comes with a whole slew of complex interactions that put a brutal quality cap on the content– something like The Last Of Us just isn’t possible when a thousand other people are doing the same thing in the same space as you.

It’s that last part that we’ve lost. MMOs have spent a decade chasing the single player, and after years of the occasionally dissonant approach of catering to players who want to play in a massively multiplayer world by themselves, some games have just gotten more honest– here’s the MMO experience distilled into something you can play exclusively with people you know, none of those pesky strangers clogging up your game. MMOs themselves have turned the idea of “more players” into a detriment rather than a benefit. If you’re in a space in an MMO and see another player, you’re not happy, because instead of being a potential ally, that person is competition. You don’t need them to succeed, so if they’re in the same space as you they’re taking your stuff. We no longer like forced grouping.

I’ve ranted enough for tonight about what’s wrong with MMOs right now. Tomorrow (hopefully!) I’ll talk about what’s right, and what a new, modern persistent-world MMO might look like.

Source: Digital Initiative
MMO Futurism (Part 1)

I recently loaded up Elite: Dangerous and have heavily backed Star Citizen. It’s been an interesting ride on E:D, and it makes me think of the game I really want to play.

I love Firefly. I love Star Wars. I badly, badly want a game that lets me play out the fantasy of cruising through the stars with my friends, getting into fights and blasting our way out of them. I want to be navigating an asteroid field while Bel and Kodra fight off a boarding party, Rae is keeping my ship running, and Ash is shooting down fighters who are chasing us. I want to be the aerial support while my friends go treasure hunting on a hostile planet, chased by bounty hunters. I want to fly under a catwalk and catch my team as they flee an overwhelmingly powerful boss.

Elite: Dangerous gives me the flight part of this. I really enjoy the flying, and the space combat is really enjoyable. I also grew up with flight sims, so I’m familiar with flight controls. I want to play it with my friends, but I want something for them to do while I’m flying the ship that’s just as interesting.

The closest I’ve been able to come to this sort of experience is games like Battlefield or certain Halo maps, where you can be the pilot for a vehicle and race for mission objectives. I want that experience in a co-op PvE game.

One thing that I think MMOs have missed the boat on (so to speak) is the idea of travel as a skill, like combat. Getting from point A to point B is rarely interesting or exciting. At best it’s uneventful, and at worst you’re actively annoyed because something attacked you on your way to somewhere. I’d love to see an MMO with a suite of travel skills, allowing you to get from place to place in various ways and making the travel itself an adventure. Having travel be an adventure unto itself is one of the really big advantages of a persistent world, and a great way to meet new people and be glad there are other players in this giant game you’re in, and I think we’ve lost sight of that.

Long story short: starship pilot, LFG.

Source: Digital Initiative
Elite: Dangerous and The Game I Want To Play

Previous entries, for a refresher:

Part 1: Worldbuilding

Part 2: The Chapter

Part 3: The Moment

Part 4: The Medium

Part 5: The Message

I’ve put together all the pieces of the scene, our player finally tracking down a rogue mage in Atlanta, working through mage gangs to do it. I want to talk briefly about the pieces of this sequence in-game, and then go piece by piece to talk about how I’d build it.

It might be a bit cliché to talk about the three-act structure, but it’s really important here. It’s a really solid, really familiar framework for pacing, and when we lack it in our entertainment, it makes that entertainment feel badly paced (often, it is!). We normally think of the three-act structure in terms of the overall story, but it scales to a variety of sizes, from the overall story itself to an individual scene, or level, in a game. Here’s how I’d apply the structure to the scene we’re setting up:

–Act 1: Exposition–

We don’t have a lot of exposition here, because we’ve (theoretically) set it up in the previous few hours of gameplay. We’ve communicated a lot up to this point, and this scene is the climax of the story arc. There are two types of exposition in a game: explicit and implicit. Explicit exposition is text you read, or spoken dialogue, or cutscenes, or mission briefs. It’s the moment where the player is aware that the game is telling them something. Implicit exposition is how we subtly suggest how the player should play, either how they should move through the space, what they should pay attention to, or how to defeat their enemies, using visual or nonverbal audio cues. When the music slowly ramps up before a major boss fight, that’s implicit exposition. When you see a skeleton on a strange-looking floor panel and realize there’s a trap there, that’s also implicit exposition. When you follow lights through a dark area to find where to go, that’s another form.

We don’t have a lot to set up here as far as explicit exposition goes, but we will have to set up the area. We’re going to want to establish the play space. Notably, I want there to be some dialogue with the rogue mage character, and I don’t want the player distracted by the space. A nearly-abandoned building at night in a bad part of town works really well here– I can have the player move deeper and deeper into this building as part of the setup, and then have to fight their way out with the rogue mage at their side. This gives me some time to work on the first impression for this character, and having her help out the player in a tense situation is a good way to establish that early.

Act 1 will be moving through the (relatively quiet) space, getting a feel for the layout and looking for the rogue mage. I want it to be tense but not actually dangerous– in fact, I’m really likely to have few if any enemies in the building proper, and the only things that might exist are environmental traps. The whole of Act 1 should take relatively little time– 5 minutes or so, because it’s going to be very low-action and dragging that out isn’t interesting.

I set up this segment last. All of the rest of it has to work first, so that I know what I’m setting up. The biggest part of this is planning out Acts 2 and 3 with my art team, then coming back to it. For me, a lot of this is running through the space over and over again, working out little details and planning out how long it takes to get from place to place. I’ll return to how I set this up once the other two acts are crystallized.

–Act 2: The Spark–

Act 2 is where things really get rolling. The transition from Act 1 to Act 2 should be the moment of weightlessness as the roller coaster crests the very first rise.

That transition moment is the first really touchy, really difficult segment of the sequence. If I’m working with cutscenes, that’s where I’m building one of them, and if I’m not, it’s where I’m setting up a heavily scripted sequence. The player isn’t getting out of this sequence without a fight, and I’m not interested in setting up the rogue mage as the boss of this area, because I need the player to like her for the next part of the game. We also need to wrap up her situation with the rival gang boss, which we can neatly do here– he’ll be our final encounter.

The transition moment is the moment where the player’s conversation with the rogue mage is cut off by the hideout being attacked– in this case by the rival gang boss. To play up her reputation and set up a more interesting scene, we’ll have the gang boss’ main ploy be burning down the building with you and her in it. If we want to be tricky, and depending on the tone of the game, we can have the main gang member that the player’s been dealing with have been the rival gang boss all along, but we run the risk of things being a little too pat when we do that. In a choice-heavy game, where the player might side against the rogue mage and take the gang boss as an ally instead, this might work.

Either way, our transition to Act 2 is the first shattering molotov cocktail against the building, or the activating sprinklers. I want a beat, for the player to realize along with the characters that everything is about to go very wrong, and then action ramps up quickly– “We have to get out of here!”

I want this transition scene to be easily triggerable on the backend so that I can tweak the timing. I should be able to paste a single command and have it run so that I can see it and make tweaks, because it’ll need a LOT of work.

What we’re going to have here is the player moving in reverse through the space they just walked through, only with some noticable changes. I want the path back to be recognizable but blatantly different (in this case, largely on fire) and we can use environmental changes to alter the path– big patches of fire, collapsing hallways and stairwells, etc. A lot of this will get planned out with the level designer and artist(s), if they’re someone other than me, to figure out which rooms have the key encounters and where there will be slightly longer run-time segments to squeeze in a few lines of dialogue (hallways are good for this).

This is also where I want to plan out the enemies. I need the building to transition very quickly from quiet to burning down, and I want to play up the enemies a bit– cowardly is a theme. Fire elementals work well for this, syncing nicely with the environment and making a lot more sense than a bunch of gang members running into a burning building to make sure the occupants are dead.

This also gives us a lever to extend the sequence if it turns out we need more gameplay– if the fire elementals are coming from some sort of summoning apparatus hastily set up throughout the building, we can then have a secondary objective of disabling the summoning. If necessary, this also gives us a good way to characterize our rogue mage– she either doesn’t want to risk innocents or she thinks wasting time disabling summoning circles is a bad idea; we can communicate this in one or two lines of dialogue and, because it’s delivered in a high intensity situation, it will stick with the player a bit more.

The other technical detail that’s important here is how well the game engine supports active AI companions– this is often a nasty sticking point, and the way the sequence plays out relies on this bit of tech. It’s really important to know the limitations before going into something like this– we can spend days or weeks trying to get a sequence where the rogue mage follows along and fights with you to feel good and still fall short, or we can have a fantastic sequence where the mage is watching you on security cameras, having sent you to stop the attackers while she performs some other useful off-camera task. That last bit is important– we need the player to believe in the competence of the rogue mage for later on, and to make this whole story arc seem worthwhile, so we want her doing something valuable if she’s not fighting alongside the player, and if she *is* fighting alongside the player, the player should be glad to have her along. Getting this wrong is how you get a lot of famously terrible game characters, and having an experience shoehorned in that the game doesn’t support well sours the experience.

This is the most action-intensive sequence and will require the most playtesting. I HIGHLY recommend a checkpoint immediately as the action part of Act 2 starts, with possible extra checkpoints scattered after major encounters in the section (if it proves to be long). I personally spend quite a lot of time running around the space and visualizing combat to set up these sorts of sequences, so that I don’t find myself surprised when I go to set up fights in the space. I also like to plan for about 20-50% more combat space for discrete separate encounters than I think I need. Movement doesn’t take long and if there’s nothing doing in a given room I can use it for a dialogue line, and if I suddenly need to cram more combat into a full space, it makes the sequence feel long and tedious, because there isn’t constant forward motion.

–Act 3: Finale and Denoument–

At the end of the sequence, we drop the player off in a boss arena, where they’ll face off against the opposing gang leader and possibly henchmen. We’ve set up this characters specifically to be a throwaway boss, so fighting him here is payoff. He’s the representation of all of the frustrations the player has developed up to this point, and if we’ve delivered our story properly, we blame him for the rogue mage’s reticence to join our cause, rather than the rogue mage herself.

First off, if we haven’t already found something else for our rogue mage companion to do while we fight the boss, now’s a really good time. Unless we have truly top-notch companion AI, the complexity of a satisfying boss fight is going to clash badly with our rogue mage friend. However, one of the “alternative” things she can do is play a support role throughout the fight, either setting up traps for the boss or helping sustain the player through the fight. It’s a great way to showcase her abilities but not rely on the standard AI packages to control her. It adds a lot of complexity to the fight, though, as you’re now working to set up two entities (or more, if there are gang members) in sync. This will be the other major endeavor of the sequence, and will require a lot of fine-tuning to get right.

This is where testers are your best friends. You need people who aren’t you playing your boss fights, so that you can tell if they can figure them out and win. It’s trivially easy to make a boss fight players can’t win– it’s much harder to make one that they think they can’t win at first but actually can and do. It’s similar for me to GMing a tabletop game– you can kill your players easily in a tabletop RPG (“rocks fall, everyone dies”); the greater challenge is pushing them right to the brink but not quite over, unless they themselves slip and fall.

The specifics of scripting this sort of boss fight will differ with every game engine, but essentially I find it useful to script the boss in phases, getting each section of the fight working independently, whether that’s individual abilities or entire JRPG-style boss phases (or both, for sufficiently complicated bosses).

Having defeated the boss, there’s almost certainly going to be a brief payoff victory scene, which may wind up being expensive on the animation/FX/audio side, but is going to be fairly simple (or, at least, simpler than the previous poignant transition scene) on the design side.

After this scene, there’s a temptation to drop the players somewhere more useful than “right over the boss’ body”. I tend to think this isn’t a good idea unless there’s a really good story reason for it (at which point, the aforementioned post-boss scene is going to be a lot more complicated). I find that it makes the whole sequence feel better if you can run around in the area you just conquered to get a last look at it on your own terms before shuttling off to the next area. Sometimes this isn’t possible, and that’s fine, but whenever you can I think it’s a good idea to offer that in-world breather in a space where the player isn’t taking in new, potentially dangerous surroundings. If you do shuttle players off immediately, it’s a good idea to return them to a hub, or some familiar location: that moment of in-control calm to let your mind catch up with your reflexes is a very useful add.

With a few moments to look over the burned building, the defeated opponent, and our new rogue mage ally, we then take our own action to move forward and onto the next part of the story, like actively turning the page.

This whole sequence has a few notable Moments. The transition from Act 1 to Act 2, fleeing the burning building, the boss fight, and the final denoument are all Moments. This whole sequence probably takes about 20-30 minutes, depending on the size and complexity of the encounters, and has roughly four Moments, sections that players will remember.

A shorthand for it is this: Will players either put the scene on youtube or talk about it with their friends? If so, that’s a Moment, and you should make sure you’re pacing them appropriately. I mention the Act structure because it’s a very good fallback when you’re juggling a large number of things; it’s easy to lose your sense of pacing when you’re in the nuts and bolts of why an NPC won’t stand quite right during her dramatic monologue.

I hope this series has been fun or interesting to read. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments, I’ll see what I can do about answering them.

Source: Digital Initiative
How I Design: Returning to the Moment (Finale)

Sorry for the extended delay. It turns out getting settled from moving cross-country takes longer than anticipated.

More updates incoming!

Source: Digital Initiative
And we’re back!