Overview of Gameplay – One character with one NPC. 3 Stat and basic level advancement system. Preliminary inventory and encounter system planned out on paper.

Character Creation – The entire new character section consists of a paragraph to put things in context and a character creation system comprised of two questions – Picking a dominant stat and entering a name.

The Game World – I repurposed the world rendering system from Ghostball and changed the movement system to a basic Cell x Cell WASD system.

The next steps…

I’m going to spend some time during the week figuring out how to set up the trigger system so that I can use one routine to handle traps, narrative items, encounter, etc. My plans for next weekend are to get a working encounter system created and in place for both static and random encounters. I am fighting the temptation to drop the 3D environment and go rogue/nethack-style with basic ASCII graphics, as creating objects and textures can be a really time consuming process. Also, I suck at art.

Much like my FPS endeavor a couple years ago, I’m going to prioritize the checklist so that the needed stuff gets done and so that Feature Creep doesn’t weed its way in and cause delays.

I’m going to give myself until March 3rd for this one. That gives me three full weekends (starting right now) to tackle… The Valiant Villager – An RPG.

• Second Life
• Star Wars Galaxies (SWG)
• A Tale in the Desert (ATITD)
• There
• Puzzle Pirates
• EVE Online
• Project Entropia (now Entropia Universe)
• Shadowbane
• Horizons (now Istaria)
• ToonTown

Most of those titles still exist today, and quite a few still have healthy, active communities. Some of today’s MMO enthusiasts would probably call it the “Age of Sandbox,” as many of these titles offered more social tools, more open-ended gameplay and more player-driven content than most modern titles. To a good degree, I agree. Some may also say that some of those games only have a few thousand or so players. In my opinion, an MMO that entertains 5-30k players and makes a profit for eight years straight is a better path than building for 300k, hemorrhaging at 50k and closing up shop after a year.

I think the success of many of these titles is the result of several factors, the three biggest being no predispositions on the part of MMO gamers, a more audience-specific design, and an appropriate balance of the Forgotten Trinity that makes up a virtual world.

No Predisposition as to What an MMO ‘Should Be’ – Asheron’s Call, Ultima Online, Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot paved the initial road for persistent state worlds with rather varied approaches to advancement, game design and community structure. There was no One True Path yet as each was exploring new approaches to creating these incredible new online worlds. An MMO at the time was not measured by the restrictive and unrealistic standard that MMOs today are held to. I want to stress that I’m not speaking about quality, stability and polish as those should be expectations regardless of when or how the product is released.

Over the past 6-8 years, most MMOs have become so similar and followed the same high fantasy, class-restricted, level-based, gear-dependent design and the surrounding common mechanics, that when an MMO deviates from that, the developers have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sell the new direction or mechanic and why the path was chosen over the tried and true method.

A More Defined Target Audience – These MMOs were not trying to be everything to everyone. Their core audience was obvious to everyone from the start. From ToonTown’s publisher and artwork to Shadowbane’s Play to Crush mantra, the games were clearly being made for specific groups and the advertisement made it clear which groups they were for. They weren’t trying to mix and match unlike playstyles and conflicting communities within a single game world. This allowed the developers to attract a strong core group for their game and to focus current and future development for that audience.

The Forgotten Trinity – MMOs are made up of scripted content (themepark), player-driven content (sandbox) and social content (coffee house). Each exists as part of the virtual world to one degree or another. Most modern MMOs weigh heavily toward one or the other of the first two. Also, most modern MMOs seem to relegate the last one to an IRC-style chat box and a system or need for grouping with other players to kill stuff. In many cases there is more functionality to support social interaction on a modern MMOs forums than there are in or around the game itself.

It seems that an MMO developer that wants to break from the standard design and improve chance at success and longevity would benefit from addressing those three points directly.

1) Don’t call it an MMO. Use any other term but that. In this day and age, simply calling it an online game is definitive enough without pigeon-holing the project.

2) Target your audience. Make sure your players know what they are getting into ahead of time. Build a strong core community that you will be able to cater to. The Kitchen Sink hasn’t really been a successful approach to MMOs, especially when it comes to the whole PvE/PvP thing.

3) Design the social aspect to emulate the ways that people normally interact. Allow the players to create and choose social circles based on something other than chasing rare drops. Mirror how people communicate in real life so they are more comfortable communicating with each other in your online community.

The early pioneers (The Realm, M59, UO, EQ, AC, DAoC) set the stage, but it seems there was a golden age that shortly followed that never really gets the recognition it deserves. The MMOs of 2003 offered a level of diversity and a gamer acceptance of such diverse design that has been absent ever since.  I’m curious to see if history repeats itself on the mobile platform or if there is a wide enough audience that One True Path takes longer to rear its head.

Aha... type THAT, user!

The reason I ask is because the main arguments against most RMT are:

• A player should get all the content for their 15 dollars
• Existing programmers, artists and other resources are diverted to create the content
• People who pay extra have an advantage over the people who are just paying their 15 dollars.

We have already seen from most F2P MMOs that regular content updates and expansions can be released for free. Even among the subscription games you have titles like Asheron’s Call with an extensive history of ongoing content updates on almost a monthly basis for about a decade.

We have also seen among the subscription games with titles such as Lineage 2 and EVE Online that expansions can be released for free.

With all that in place, and with the current ardent resistance to additional paid content, if today – or even as far back as 2009, for that matter – an MMO first introduced the idea of a paid expansion, how do you feel it would it be received by modern MMO gamers?

Dear Zhinga,

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Whoa! PotBS Connexion is still up? Woot! Spent some time reading some journal entries and checking out images (newest seemed to be a year and a half old). Thinking of firing up PotBS this weekend. If nothing else, I’m going to copy my Zhinga stuff to a local page before I ‘misplace’ it again.

Link: Zhinga Ngola: The Jaga Queen Legacy

Nicola Formichetti — CCP Games Collaboration from CCP Games on Vimeo.

Cheers!

One way to kill PvP servers is to introduce PvE servers. What are you going to prey on if all the lambs are gone? Wolfs hunting wolfs…

That quote is from a poster named Quirhid in a recent thread entitled ‘Six Ways to Destroy a PVP Server‘ on MMORPG.com.

To a certain degree I feel he is right, and it’s because there seems to be some thinking on the part of both players and devs, completely contrary to history and experience, that a good PVP server has to be solely PVP. It is the current all or nothing approach that makes the statement very valid in today’s MMO market.

For a shooter or a game like GW where people are jumping into PVP from Day One, I’d say that’s doable. However, if there is going to be PVE content, especially PvE content that works in conjunction with the PVP content in any way, it seems the best way to design  the PVP server is to offer some level of insulation to from the PVP for those that want to enjoy the PvE.

While a lot of Old School PKs may disagree, the introduction of Trammel was a leap forward from the guard zones of the cities. I’d venture to say that if the original UO had more guarded hunting grounds, housing areas and dungeons, then Trammel would never have been necessary and UO would have done even better from the very start. This is because the PVPers need resources and crafted materials in UO to riase skilss or fight better. Now, each person has a certain aspect of a game that they like to focus on. The more the PvPer can enjoy PVPing and not doing activities he needs to do rather than wants to do, the more he is a happy camper. The best way to facilitate that is to create an environment such that the gatherer and the baker and the tailor can all provide those things. Well, What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and if someone really enjoys sewing up badass armor sets, they want to spend their time doing that and not spend it running from axe-wielding fireball-casting maniacs at every corner. By building the worldspace so that each playstyle can go about their thing with more DO WANT game time and less NEED TO game time, the more fun it is for everyone.

The games that have successfully done that in one server while maintaining a certain level of world PVP (examples: UO, EVE, Runescape, Puzzle Pirates) have done so by creating a world where the 20% or so of the playerbase that wants to frag each other to death has plenty of space to do that while the 80% of the player base that wants to enjoy the 80% of the content that doesn’t involve homicidal wilding can do that with minimal or greatly reduced fear of an unpleasant experience.

Now, some may feel that I am advocating a softer world and not truly in favor of a ‘real’ PVP server. My contention is the opposite – in my dream MMO, the PVPers are killing each other, not killing tailors. They throw the spoils of war at the tailor and say “Sew me armor, bitch,” and the tailor gladly does it… at 400% markup. Such a scenario can’t happen if your PVPers are ganking dressmakers for months until the dressmakers flee the game in horror.

IMO, a good world PVP server offers reasonable protection (not necessarily complete protection) in the majority of the worldspace from PVP in order to allow the other playstyles to flourish unmolested. Not only does this go a long way toward making the PvE content more enjoyable, but it makes the PVP gameplay more enjoyable as well, by allowing the presence of a deeper and more varied gameplay experience surrounding the PVP.

Ever since UO, I’ve had an affinity for writing about (in character or otherwise) some of the MMOs I’ve played. My interest in either the pages or the game usually lasted only a few months, so most are rather short and limited in content.

There’s a little something for everyone from character tales to server history timelines. There’s even a video with an in-character song about frogs. Love on it.

My Fansites and FanFic stuff >>