My MMO Blog

Back in August I wrote a fairly short little post about the business sense of straying too far from what is “normal” when designing an MMOG. Just a few days ago I got an e-mail about that post from someone who disagreed. His stance was a game could be both innovative and intuitive to play. His example was Katamari Damacy.

I freely and openly admit to not having played the game so I’m going to go ahead and take his word for it that it has a quick and easy tutorial that gets you off and rolling around having fun in very little time. That got me thinking. Assuming that what he says is true, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, how can this game, a game which has a pretty different twist on what you are doing and how to play it accomplish what many other games can’t?

Since this is an MMOG blog let’s take a look at the MMOGs I’m talking about to start. First up I’ll tear down a game I personally enjoy and am playing, Tabula Rasa. It wanted to do things in a new way, change up some fundamental aspects of how we play in our MMOGs…at least as much as was reasonable for them. They knew this would be new to a great many MMOG players, so they do have a tutorial.

The tutorial in Tabula Rasa is a lot of fun to play through, but does it really teach you all you need to know about how to be running and gunning in no time? I can’t say for certain. I’m used to playing shooters as well as MMOs so the combination of the two wasn’t such a big shock to my senses. For a great many people the tutorial probably got them in and started in no time. But what about those people who were like me when I wrote the post back in August. Those who had a game to go back to so they weren’t willing to stick out and wait for their fun when they could get it immediately? If a handful of posts from the beta boards are truthful, they probably left and never came back.

Now, that isn’t to say this is such a horrible thing. Chances are those people were never going to stick with the game long term, or possibly even buy it on release. It just wasn’t there cup of tea, and that’s perfectly fine. Still, that is a hurdle the MMOG designer needs to overcome. That’s an obstacle in the road. These games require investments of time and money larger than most others. People only really play one or two MMOGs at a time, and even then one is usually played more than the other, even if which game that is may switch from week to week or month to month.

Example two, City of Heroes tutorial. CoX is not a huge change from the standard MMOG. It has, as every game has, it’s own set of quirks and differences but on the whole coming from EQ or WoW, you know what you are going into with CoX. That said, they still have a tutorial. This tutorial teaches you the basics of their systems that don’t appear in other games, specifically inspirations and enhancements and how they work, as well as giving out a general introduction on normal playing and beating up the bad guys. It also happens to be a free level of experience for those that do it.

How good is it though, really? It will certainly get you started and will teach you pretty much all you need to know about the how the game works but it lacks something rather small, something that is easily overlooked and by all rights is not a problem inherent to the actual tutorial at all. You can, and many do, skip it after they have played the game for a while. They skip it because in all honesty it isn’t that much fun to play through and it is probably just as quick to get that level after the tutorial than during it.

This isn’t a huge gripe of course, that’s the basic premise behind the tutorial, teach you to play and then set you off into the wide open world. But looking at Tabula Rasa, I can’t help but think, for all the things that tutorial might not do right, it actually is quite a bit of fun to play and replay, which is good, because you may need to a few times.

The point of all this is that the game that innovated suffers from people who need the tutorial not wanting to bother with it, and the game that is fairly similar to the “standard” MMO gets people out and playing immediately, but they could just skip it entirely and still be okay. Essentially what I’m saying trying to show here is the game that actually needs a tutorial is losing their players before the game that doesn’t.

Assume for the moment that the statement above is true, even if you disagree with it. What does that mean when it comes to design and creation of MMOGs? How does that compare to the gold standard of the MMOG, World of Warcraft? I’ll be looking into that in the next article.

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, innovation, game design, tabula rasa, city of heroes

I found this sitting here in my drafts, mostly finished. I don’t know when I started writing it, a while ago it would seem, judging by the timeline I set up in the post. I also don’t know why I didn’t finish off the last bit of it much sooner and post it. These are questions I will probably never be able to answer. That having been said, I figured now is as good a time as any to finish it off so here we go. A post from the deepest pits of GamingMMO.com’s long-forgotten drafts page.

Enjoy!

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The year is quickly coming to an end. Normally I wouldn’t write anything in particular, since I already had my personal first year wrap up months ago, but everyone else is doing it, and hey, I’m a follower. Also, I haven’t posted much at all this month and I feel if I don’t post today then I will not start posting again regularly tomorrow, which would cause all sorts of problems.

Though certainly not the best year for MMOs there were definitely more interesting happenings than in many years prior. To highlight some of these goings on I decided to create a best (and worst) of list for whatever categories happened to pop into my head. If you’ve got your own “Best…” or “Worst…” post it in the comments; I’d love to hear.

Best Game Update/Patch

EVE Online: Trinity - Though it could be argued that this is more an expansion than a patch I’ll consider it, for the sake of having two separate categories (and winners) a patch, rather than an expansion. I’d say an expansion would be something you buy extra.

Now then, what makes “Trinity” so great? In case you didn’t hear, this is the patch where they completely overhauled the graphics, showing off some incredibly shiny new ships. There was other stuff too, of course, but that takes a back seat to the graphics, it’s the real reason people were so eager for it.

Pics via CrazyKinux

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There is a large break in the design process between PvE and PvP. There is little, if any crossover. Designing a game for one of these things doesn’t really work. Just ask Auran. People expect both from their MMO and when they get only one they feel cheated.

The problem, of course, from a purely developmental standpoint is that this requires (close to) twice the amount of work to be done. First you design one area of your game, and then the other and you have features for each. This wastes a lot of time and usually means the game is still heavily focused to one over the other (most likely PvE over PvP.) Essentially it becomes a matter of progressing through PvE content to advance (gain levels) and then, in the end, using those abilities to PvP.

But why? Why design a feature set for each and then have them be (for the most part) mutually exclusive? Why not mix them together a bit? Make PvP, entirely, a worthwhile (or hell, even doable) form of advancement. Design one set of features, reuse them between your PvE and PvP.

Don’t create battlegrounds for PvP and dungeons for PvE content. That is a waste of perfectly good development time. Make an instance which can do both. Mix them together. Allow them to be separate also, of course, you should still be able to choose one or the other just don’t design two different areas for what amounts to the same basic thing.

That’s not to say such an approach is not an investment of time, it certainly is, in designing the ability and tools to do this correctly in the first place, but, after having been implemented it allows much greater freedom to design really great areas. If your designers spend time on less areas they can make those areas really great. They can nail down the look, the sights, the sounds, the feel, they can get it all where it needs to be at.

And, speaking of double-dipping, why do we separate our genre’s so harshly in games? There is another waste if I’ve ever seen one. I think that will have to wait for another time though.

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, game design, pve, pvp