Digital Initiative

A conversation I had yesterday really stuck in my mind. One of my raid team was talking about how he enjoyed the task of “marking”, because it made him feel useful, and let him be a raid hero for that section of the fight.

A bit of an aside: “marking”, in general, means calling attention to a particular enemy or point on the ground that will be important for handling some upcoming mechanic. Sometimes you mark the next target, sometimes you mark a target that everyone needs to stay close to, sometimes you mark a point on the ground that someone (or everyone) needs to run to. This generally needs to happen while the rest of the fight is happening, so your attention is split– you need to be fast and accurate, and still be contributing in the usual way while doing so. It’s a difficult job, and generally your efforts aren’t noticed if the fight is going smoothly– it’s only if you miss the marks or forget to mark that things go downhill and people notice.

Our discussion went on to talk a bit more about how FFXIV does a good job at providing moments for players to be heroes in group content. A few things contribute to this. Really impressive spell effects, especially for big hits or potent cooldowns, call attention to someone’s efforts. This culminates in the Limit Break button, which charges up slowly for an entire group and can be used by a single person to execute a massive protective barrier, a powerful group heal, or, most commonly, a devastating, highly visible attack. It’s a single button, but you get to press it pretty rarely and it’s a ton of fun when you do.

FFXIV also doesn’t revel in killing you. Other MMOs I’ve played have boss encounters where a single hit from the boss will outright kill any single player who isn’t a tank. In FFXIV, this is very rarely the case. Non-tanks won’t necessarily survive very long against a boss’s direct attention, but there’s enough time to regain control of the situation. This means that, in a pinch, it’s possible for someone to stand in and take a bit of punishment to allow time for a tank to recover (or, in extreme cases, get Raised) and return to the fight. These sorts of clutch saves are thrilling, and are a lot more possible in FFXIV than in many other games.

It’s incredibly satisfying to have a heroic moment in a raid situation, and what really makes it work is the sense that it isn’t artificial. The game isn’t blatantly setting you up to look like a hero and get fanfare without you doing work, your act of heroism is a legitimate act borne of your skill and your presence of mind. It’s a satisfaction that’s hard to manufacture, and it’s gotten me thinking about how we’ve lost our way a bit when it comes to making players feel heroic.

There’s an adage in game design that drives a lot of design work: “Show, don’t tell.” It shows up in a variety of media, from writing to film to theatre, and the same concept holds in games. Put simply, having an NPC tell you about the dragon that attacked the city is much less interesting than actually seeing the dragon attacking the city. Turned around the other way, having an NPC tell you how awesome you are is a lot less satisfying than genuinely feeling awesome in your own right.

In World of Warcraft, I completed thousands of quests. To hear the NPCs tell it, I saved tens of thousands of lives and was responsible for the livelihoods of countless unseen people, all of whom (I was assured) owed me a great debt. You get numb to it pretty quickly, but what I do remember is learning how to solo elites, back in Vanilla. Elite mobs, at the dawn of WoW, were intended to require a group to fight, two or more people, and were generally pretty deadly. Being able to take on elite mobs on your own, especially ones that were at or above your current level, was a mark of accomplishment and pride. It meant that you could easily beat quests that other people struggled with, and you could traverse parts of the map that other people avoided. I would occasionally fight an elite that I knew other people couldn’t handle, and would occasionally see players stop, try to determine if I needed help, and be impressed when I’d win on my own.

In Everquest, I remember cowering at the edge of the Kithicor Forest, which was an idyllic green forest during the day and a haunted nightmare hellscape by night. If you were travelling through the area, you quickly learned to wait at the edges of the forest for dawn, because the monsters within would tear you to bits. Occasionally, you’d see a group of players head into the forest at night, armed and armored to the teeth, after some rare item or another, and when I eventually became one of those players and did it myself, it felt significant, because I not only knew how dangerous it was but also knew that I could handle it.

I’ve played games in which I’ve stopped world-ending plots over and over again, sometimes twice before dinner and again after a bite to eat. We’ve raised the stakes in our narratives to the point where they strain credibility; every quest is an earthshattering dilemma and without our intervention, all will be lost. It’s not simply that the presence of other players breaks the illusion, it’s that we just finished saving the world over the last rise. It feels manufactured and artificial.

The alternative is to save the really big stuff until it’s more appropriate, and fill the game up with smaller, more down-to-earth tasks. It’s how “kill ten rats” became a thing, and our collective design solution for the KTR problem was to make the rats into giant slavering werewolves, until there was a deadly threat lurking behind every corner and under every bush. In some cases, this is absolutely literal– there are zones that are simply full of deadly enemies packed so tightly you have little hope of navigating without bumping into one or ten. Why anyone would live in a place like that is beyond me, but there they are, and they really need you to go collect slavering werewolf meat so that the town can avoid starving to death.

I think we solved the wrong problem. It’s not that killing ten rats is an inherently boring quest, it’s that we’re limited in the verbs we can use to approach it. We have ten rats, we have our weapon, and we apply axe to (rat) face until there are zero rats, except there are never zero rats, because there are a bunch of other players all doing the same thing.

Imagine instead that you walk into a blacksmith’s shop to get your gear repaired, and the following dialogue shows up:

“I’d love to repair your gear, but I’ve got a bit of a problem. Rats are infesting my workshop, and the traps I ordered haven’t come in. I won’t be able to fix anything until I can do something about these rats.”

Now, going in there sword swinging is a choice. You can also go and see where the traps are, or possibly you’re good at crafting your own traps and can simply make some for the beleaguered blacksmith. Maybe you’re an accomplished beast tamer and can coax the rats out, pied piper-style, or you’re a ridiculously powerful mage and can set magic wards around the workshop to keep the rats away. Instead of the blacksmith setting you to a task, he’s set up a problem and you can come up with a solution. When you do, he’s appropriately thankful that you bothered to intervene (you didn’t have to!) and is happy to repair your gear (a sensible, meaningful reward). Furthermore, that’s a quest that is appropriate for anyone of any level– being more advanced simply means you have more interesting, more efficient options at your disposal.

Quests have become an exp treadmill– go here, click on this, return, go there, kill these things, return. Sometimes they’re a bit more involved than that, but the verbs are always very simple and are almost always entirely explicit. They HAVE to be, because that’s the main method of progression. The questing system in EQ is positively archaic compared to what we can do now, but quests in EQ felt meaningful because they weren’t the main thing you were doing to progress.

Why do you feel like a hero in FFXIV when you save your raid with a sudden moment of clarity and action? It’s because you’re doing something outside of the norm, something unique to that moment that you alone are in a position to do. You’ve broken out of the usual set of verbs and are doing something a little different, just for a moment, that makes all the difference.

We’ve become so afraid of our MMOs feeling grindy that we’ve filled them with quests and stories, and in our haste to distance ourselves from the days of mob camping and aimless wandering, we turned the stories themselves into a grind. When every story makes you a hero, and you’re told constantly what a hero you are, no matter how finely crafted the storytelling might be, it’ll ring hollow.

Source: Digital Initiative
Heroism in a World Full of Heroes

Took a break on Friday to clear my head after all of the MMO nostalgia and get caught up on a backlog of work.

We had our Game of the Month podcast on Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and I want to talk a little bit more about that game. I’ll rehash some of the stuff I talked about in the podcast, so I apologize in advance for any redundancy.

One of the tangents we (I) got on while talking about Shadowrun was how difficult it is to make a game centered around old nostalgia and make it good. I have a litmus test for this sort of thing, that Ash mentioned in the podcast. A game needs to be good on its own, absent any context outside of its series. The further along a series gets, the more impenetrable it becomes, generally speaking, which is why the third or fourth game in a given series is often a significant reboot. To wit: Grand Theft Auto 3, Bioshock: Infinite, Assassin’s Creed IV, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the new Thief, Fallout 3, Jedi Outcast AND Jedi Academy– just a short list of games as I scroll down my Steam Library that are the third or fourth game in their series and a significant reboot, sometimes changing the game’s genre entirely.

Shadowrun is a good game in its own right– you can enjoy it without having a decades-long background in the kinds of games it’s inspired by. It’s perhaps why I’ve had so much trouble getting into Pillars of Eternity. There are awkward parts of the gameplay and the user interface that are borne of the game trying very hard to stay close to its roots, without necessarily evaluating if those roots make for a modern-feeling, up-to-date game.

Games are experiences that are meant to evoke certain feelings; they create a particular scenario in which your brain lights up in a certain way. Unfortunately, the key there isn’t the game itself, but the way the brain lights up, and that changes over time, ESPECIALLY with new experiences. I can play Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, one of my favorite steampunk games, and it lights up my brain in much the same way it did when I played it more than a decade ago. It’s also a deeply flawed game, with a lot of break points and issues. I’ve played similar games since, and they don’t evoke the same feelings. I dearly loved JRPGs growing up, but now it takes a truly spectacular one that approaches the genre differently to get me engaged.

Even if we like the same sorts of games over time, our standards will rise as we get better and better games. The bar goes up, and fewer and fewer games will meet it as time goes on. If we’re not careful, we’ll find that no new games meet our criteria anymore, and nothing new will light our brains up the way the older games do.

It’s why I harp so much on trying games you don’t necessarily think you’ll like, in genres you don’t always play. I mentioned Fallout 3 as an example in the podcast– the old Fallout games with isometric turn-based RPGs, and lent a strong sense of wandering through a vast world on your own and having many options for dealing with whatever problems or opportunities came up. The new Fallout games are first-person shooters, but importantly they’re still pursuing that sense of wandering through a vast world. Our bar for that sort of experience has risen, and for the most part an isometric game makes you feel detached and makes the world feel constrained to what you can see on screen. In a first-person shooter, you can pull out binoculars or a scope and look out over a vast landscape, which contributes to that sense of detachment and tunnelvision when playing an isometric RPG when put in direct comparison.

As games get better, the kinds of things we can express in them as a medium get broader, and certain genres will lend themselves to certain types of games more readily. This will change over time, as genres mature and the gaming landscape changes. The point-and-click adventure game that gave you chills as a child (7th Guest anyone?) has become a first-person thriller (Call of Cthulu/Amnesia) and eventually morphed into an MMO (The Secret World), all focusing on a very similar set of experiences and lighting your brain up in similar ways, but coming at it from very different angles.

With a game that’s about nostalgia, about triggering those old feelings, it’s important to pay attention not just to what those games did, but how the medium has evolved in the meantime. Slavishly recreating an old game isn’t going to have the same impact as a brand new game that evokes those same feelings in a newer, tighter package. This can even transcend IP– Shadowrun Returns and Dragonfall have little to nothing in common with older Shadowrun games, but it expertly pulls in references to older Shadowrun content as well as evoking the feel of old Black Isle and similar games, all without becoming inaccessible to a player unfamiliar with any of those things.

Coming off of the MMO nostalgia train of the last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I haven’t felt like an MMO has captured the feeling of the old games. For me, it’s because a lot of those memories are inextricably tied to the joy of discovering a new technology– the Internet, and the idea that I could play games with real people in a huge world without the constraints of a team vs team match was thrilling. That same earthshaking, intoxicating excitement isn’t likely to happen again until another major technological breakthrough that not only changes the way I play my games, but also changes the way I live my life. That confluence of events is what gave those older MMOs the spark that seared into my brain, and is (I think) why the genre has stumbled once internet multiplayer became a core feature of every video game. Certain games are trying to mine that nostalgia for older MMOs, but they’re missing the key factor; recreating the games and their features, not recreating the experience.

I hope that in my lifetime I see another technological leap that makes me sit forward, jump into a game, meet a new person in that game, and have us both get excited because, holy shit, we live in the future and we can’t believe playing this game in this way is an actual thing we can do. That’s how I’ll get my MMO nostalgia, and that’s why I’m excited about the new Shadowrun– it’ll make me remember all of the good times I had with old isometric RPGs without also reminding me that they now feel old.

Source: Digital Initiative
Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Mining Nostalgia

I talked a bit before about a different kind of MMO system, with only two roles: Frontline and Flanking. Actual abilities while in these roles would vary based on player choices, but the core concept revolves around the idea of a front-and-center player and up to two flanking players, who aren’t in the direct line of fire.

A structure like this would have a number of ramifications on encounter design and group content. I’ll split things up by working my way up in encounter size.

Solo Encounters

A player playing solo is going to still have a Frontline and a Flanking setup, and is mostly going to be using these to change up their tactics mid-combat. The enemy is going to be attacking them no matter which they’re using, so it’ll be more akin to stances than role-swapping. There’s a lot of possibility here for creative solo builds, though it’ll be instantly familiar to a lot of players because it’ll look like the games where you can weapon-swap easily, like Guild Wars 2, WoW’s stance-swapping, and similar.

Design of solo encounters isn’t going to change much, although the variance in how effective players are at fighting enemies on their own should even out a bit. What’s most likely is that players will build a particular ‘stance’ to be their primary, and then put utility and other functions on the secondary, to fill in gaps and reduce downtime.

Duo and Trio Encounters

Players playing in pairs will start to see the system take shape (yes, that sentence was fun to write). It’s at this point that the Switch mechanic will enter play, and in theory combo chains can start rolling, giving two players large benefits for playing together as soon as they have a duo. Mostly, it won’t require anyone to change their solo builds much, although some players may set up Switch combos and start to fall into preferred roles at this point.

With a third person added into the mix, we’ll start to see group dynamics form. There may be two players who switch frequently, and a third who spends most of their time flanking and supporting, or all three players may switch frequently. It’d be important to playtest various ways of Switching in a trio, whether a player calls a specific other player to Switch or if they simply call for a Switch and the first player to respond is the one who switches. Normally I’d be against that kind of imprecise design, but with a small number of players it can stay organized pretty easily.

‘Standard’ Groups (4-9 players)

At this size group, we’re looking at dungeons, the kind of everyday delves that you get into with a group, do some exploring, fight a few bosses, collect loot. For standard dungeons, I would tune them for 6 or so players, but allow players to enter with as few as 4 or as many as 9 players. Keep the rewards static, but split them among the party, so the fewer players you bring, the more rewarding the dungeon is for each individual.

In this sort of setup, you’re looking at 2-3 trios, and I think the trio would be the basic group unit of the game, because that’s where the Switch mechanic works best. As a result, encounters are going to need to think more about supporting multiple groups and splitting groups up, with fewer single large bosses and more “controlled chaos” fights. I generally think this will be fine, especially because it allows us to introduce tank-swapping mechanics (in which a boss will overwhelm a single tank, so two or more tanks take turns, usually a much more advanced skill) at a very early stage.

Groups will quickly learn to work together in both their trios and in the party as a whole, which makes the overall transition to larger-sized groups a lot smoother and more natural.

‘Large’ Groups (12-24 players)

This size of group fits solidly in the “raid” encounter size, and it’s here where the difficulty comes in, because these fights are going to need to scale to the player number for them to make any sense. One possibility here is to have a “vanguard” group that gets further bonuses based on the players’ choices and can Switch with other whole groups, a sort of second-tier advanced mechanic that sets one team as the ‘heroes’ of the encounter until swapping out for another group.

There’s a certain amount of appeal to this structure, just because it adds an extra layer of strategy to fights based around juggling Vanguard bonuses, but also because it creates a situation in which different groups can play to different strengths. A group with a very strong core group can focus skilled members in one group and have them be the Vanguard, whereas a group where skill is spread out a lot more might perform Vanguard Switches more often, spreading the punishment (and heroism!) around. A particularly skilled and coordinated group might set up a strong combo, in which they perform rotating Switches in their group to chain combos, while also Vanguard Switching to the next group for them to continue the chain, until everyone in the entire raid has participated.

It wouldn’t be unreasonable to have the Vanguard buff scale based on the number of group members, though I wouldn’t make that the only scaling mechanic for encounters.

Encounter Design

One of the things that would go away fairly quickly is the idea of the basic tank-and-spank fight, where one tank holds a boss in place while a healer keeps them alive and the rest of the party burns it down. When even a ‘basic’ group is likely to have two tanks, there’s going to need to be a lot more variety in encounter design.

I’d likely move away from single large bosses as the exclusive “major” encounters in a dungeon, and would quite likely change the way dungeons worked in general. With scaling in place, I’d consider freezing most resource regeneration, so players would need to be much more careful about how they played– being less wanton with their health and more careful about throwing around big spells. With that kind of design, every encounter becomes interesting, because it stops being about blowing everything to win, then recovering, then moving on– efficiency of combat becomes a significant factor. A dungeon might have a number of rest points, acting as checkpoints and letting players restore resources once per run, but keeping even minor encounters relevant.

It would also naturally make it valuable to bring more players into a dungeon, to swap in as resources dwindled. A smaller party might get more rewards, but would be much less likely to be able to complete the dungeon. It would also encourage Switching, particularly if Switching could be used to restore some resources. This would conflict with the idea of having resource regeneration be a core boost to slot, but could be used as a “switching restores more”. If Switch was only usable in combat, with the first party member to gain aggro being the default Frontline player, it would prevent spamming Switch out of combat to restore skills, but potentially open up interesting group dynamics wherein combat is prolonged as a resource faucet.

Source: Digital Initiative
Interlude: Breaking the MMO Paradigm, Part 2

I left WoW in late spring of 2007, burned out from the stress of trying to hold together a fragmenting group. A lot of the raid had left to join other friends on other servers for the expansion, and others were taking the expansion slow. Some of the core group had pushed quickly to the new level cap and were raring to get raids in, causing tension. They wanted deadlines set for people to hit max level, something I staunchly opposed. When it became clear I wouldn’t push people faster than they wanted to go, most of the gung-ho raiders left.

What remained was disorganized and, in many cases, bitter from the infighting that had characterized the last few months of raids pre-expansion and the post-expansion disagreements. The heart and soul of the group was gone, so I did what I could to make sure people would land on their feet elsewhere and, burned out myself, moved on.

A few months later, I was pulled back into WoW by a new group of friends. I’d moved across the country for my job and while they’d all played WoW before, they’d never raided and in some cases had never reached max level. It seemed like a nice way to relax, and I missed the game, so I came back, fully expecting that I could avoid my old haunts. This was easier, because we rerolled on the opposite faction, so I had a lot of content I’d never seen and could leisurely play through.

Old habits die hard. Without even trying, I was experimenting and optimizing, and had a newly max-level character in appreciable gear in a couple of months. I’d passed by people who had 60-level head starts on me and gotten the attention of the leader of the guild I was in, who’d already heard stories about me and saw me as a way to get to see top-end raid content that he’d never seen before.

It’s worth noting at this point that the guild’s leader was, to put it politely, incompetent. Capricious and thoughtless, he would demand that the guild come together to do some activity or another, most of which he wanted to brand with his own ‘creative’ twist. It wasn’t enough simply to run a dungeon, we would run it without a tank, or without DPS, “for an element of fun”. Prior to my joining, these efforts were doomed to failure– because I was geared and familiar with playing the game at high levels, I could often push through these nonsense restrictions, which only fueled more.

It got bad enough that several of us created our own channel to get away from the guild leader, calling it “element of fun” as a jab at his scattered whims. It was through this back-channel communication line that we started having fun with the game again, free to talk and have fun without worrying about the constant reactions of the guild leader, who was insecure enough to feel threatened whenever anyone had an idea other than him. It was here that we started talking about raiding again, and where I started building a new team.

I’d had some friends who I’d left behind when I played WoW previously, particularly from college, who I’d kept in touch with but had never played with. I rolled a new character, different from my rogue, and offered to level up with them, and we could all be a group. None of them had formed any particular ties to where they were before, and so were happy to level up something new and different.

We also pulled in people from elsewhere on the server that we’d met, slowly forming a core. A few of my former LNR raiding buddies had left and missed having contact, so I pulled them in as well. We had a motley crew of players of vastly differing skill levels, but I had a good handle on how to run a group, and the 10 or so of us were a lot easier to manage than the 80 or so I’d been managing before.

The biggest issue I had was timidity. Most of these players had never played the game at a high tier before, so there was a tendency to wait, heal up to full, wait for full mana, ask three or four times if everyone was ready, and so on before a pull would happen. It was polite and thoughtful, which I appreciated, but it wasn’t conducive to exciting runs or holding everyone’s attention. A dungeon run that could be completed in 25 minutes could take more than an hour, and people who could only be on for 30-45 minutes were twitchy about committing to something that might take that long.

I gently encouraged faster pulling, but it didn’t take. I had flashbacks to old LNR days, when a hunter would pull mobs well before people were ready and we’d all come together once danger was imminent. I had a pack of throwing knives on my rogue, and could easily pull the next pack and force the tanks and healers to react lest we all die. Stealing a comment from our old raiding days, I’d throw a knife at some nearby idle enemies, declare “hlep!” as they attacked, and see how the group handled it.

As it turned out, the group figured it out pretty damn quick, and we went from slow progress to aggressive powerpulling in short order. Our tanks would start pulling on their own, just to stop me from creating chaos, and one of our healers started being able to heal through truly ridiculous situations largely, I think, from not realizing that he shouldn’t have been able to do so. I’d started with a group of timid, inexperienced players and quickly had a successful crew. We never raided in Burning Crusade, but by the time Wrath hit, we were a well-organized, high-functioning group, working our way through all of the content in Wrath from start to finish, very close to keeping pace with content releases.

This group has stuck with me for more than half a decade at this point, and while the precise makeup of the group has changed a bit over time, it’s been these folks that have jumped games with me for years. Even when we’re not playing the same games, we’re in communication and we’re talking about what we like and don’t like. It’s this group that fumbled our way through Karazhan once or twice and it’s this group that will be working at and taking down Turn 9 this weekend.

I could tell more MMO stories, but they’d all center around this group, so this is about the point at which I leave off on the game progression. Since they’re probably reading this: Thanks for sticking around, y’all. It’s been awesome, and I wouldn’t be looking forward to Heavensward (and every other game we play) anywhere near as much were it not for this crew.

Source: Digital Initiative
Teambuilding from Scratch