A modern text MMO?
I know I said last time I was going to look at areas where graphical games could learn from text MUDs, but I don’t think that’s a very interesting topic. I think it’s far more useful for those of us working in text to look at what we can learn from the big budget modern graphical MMORPGs. Here are a couple of design themes from modern MMORPGs that I’d like to see more of in text games.
Quest driven advancement
It was World of Warcraft that first made questing viable as the sole means of character advancement. At the time of WoW’s release I remember the quest system was one of things that everyone was talking about, and to me it really seemed like a genuine ‘but what if we slice the bread?’ kind of moment for MMO design. Like all great ideas it is very simple and is really not much more than a thin veneer over the same old mob grinding advancement, except that the player is directed exactly where to go and what to kill. This progression through different areas is designed to spread the playerbase across content as opposed to have everyone try and grind the same handful of optimal areas. Moving the player around like this also helps to reduce the feeling of ‘grinding’. This mechanic has been refined in later games such as Warhammer Online where the quests require even less grinding. Unlike in WoW you do not need to kill an indeterminate number of rhinos to get those ten rhino horns that you need, instead it’s just ten rhinos with each mob assumed to have the required drop.
So does anyone do this in text? Not that I’ve really seen. Sure, MUDs have always had quests ranging from the simple to the elaborate, as well as ‘auto quests’ where the player can get random quests vending machine style from a ‘questmaster’ mob. What you don’t see is the kind of directed advancement through questing that WoW pioneered.
I wrote a very simple quest framework for Maiden Desmodus that has allowed us to produce a distinct advancement path for players, should they wish to follow it. We’ve got an initial sequence of 20 unique quests (we call them tasks) that each character can play through a single time, and we plan to add more after opening. While the mechanics of the quests can be reduced to a few core types such as kill a particular mob, go to a location, find an object, deliver an object, etc. these can be combined to create varied multiple stage quests. In addition, because the sequence of quests is fixed we can use them to tell a story as the player progresses, for example in an early task players must escort a diplomat into enemy territory and then in a later task they find he has been taken hostage and must rescue him.
Minor character death penalties
In modern MMORPGs you can barely call it character death any more. Gone are the days when hours and hours of character advancement could be wiped out in seconds. In WoW you can take a small gold hit or do a corpse run then continue on exactly where you left off. Warhammer has moved further and removed XP loss and corpse runs in favour of a 10 minute stat debuff, while Age of Conan has corpse runs and a stat debuff but otherwise no XP penalty for character death.
Most MUDs, including those which focus on PvP combat, still have quite harsh death penalties such as major XP loss or even permanent death. Reading Bartle’s “Designing Virtual Worlds” the importance he gives to the issue of PD seems a little incongruous in the context of today’s MMOs and I think it’s a rather old fashioned idea that may always have appealed more to designers than to players.
I haven’t finalised the death penalty for Maiden Desmodus yet, but as the game will feature a lot of PvP combat I believe it’s important that any penalty does not discourage players from taking part in PvP. I’d rather reward players for victory than punish them for defeat. Currently when a player is defeated (we don’t actually call it ‘death’) they respawn back in their home city at a clinic. There is no XP loss, instead characters have a 10 minute debuff which increases damage taken by 20%. This is designed to discourage players from rushing back into battle after defeat. For the duration of this timer anyone who defeats the character will get 50% less XP in order to discourage players from killing the same character repeatedly.
17th April 2009 at 23:33
I agree. I think the big thing about WoW quests what that they gave players a very clear idea of where they should go next. This just doesn’t happen in muds (very often). Quests are very good at doing this in ways that maps and help files are not.
On my first pass, I attempted to make my mud quest *only*. Well, that failed miserably, especially when I tried to get creative with quests and add puzzles or secrets. The problem was that it was too easy to make quests all-or-nothing advancement. You got it or you didn’t. When players didn’t get it, they got frustrated and quit. You don’t run into the same problems with incremental advancement, like what grinding offers.
Since then, I’ve made changes to my quest design and I am very happy. I still use the basic components (collect, kill, give, find), but I link quests together incrementally. For instance, part 1 you might have to go find cheese for a little boy. He’s hunting rats, and he’s learned that they won’t run away if they have cheese. Part 5, you have to go clean all the rats out of a tavern. But, every time you attack them, they run away. I still use the same basic components, but the “real” quest is learning to apply the knowledge of part 1 to complete part 5. The end result is a very different feel to the quests. As a bonus, I have more space for exploration of ideas. The set of relations between events is bigger than the set of events themselves. I’m not stuck to the same boring models of quests (well, I am, but I’m not). The space is bigger, but it’s still limited… and I am sure this fact will shine through in time. However, it does feel different and I do feel like It’s a step forward. I feel as if I’ve moved from the basement to a one bedroom apartment with a nice view.
On the topic of PvP… I’m a little worried about the 10 minute debuff! What you’re teaching is “when you lose, go cool off, and then come back later to try again”. But when people wander off… say, go make a sammich, or turn on the TV, it decreases the likelihood that they will come back after 10 mins. You’re pushing people away from the game when they lose (see: resurrection sickness on WoW).
This all probably has to be taken in the greater context of how often you expect PvP to occur, and the specifics of how your combat system works. The other thing I’m thinking is, that 20% is going to be game-breaking. Again, it depends on your particular combat mechanics, but just an example from my game… in an evenly matched fight between two people (2:1 odds for each), the winner will come out with less than 20% health, about 95% of the time. So giving a 20% damage penalty to the loser means next fight his odds are going to go from 2:1 to about 40:1, or about a 2.5% chance in winning. Basically, it’s a gaunrateed loss… and that’s a pretty big discourager for engaging in anything (for the next 10 minutes). Damage (reduction/penalty) doesn’t scale linearly with success. There’s usually a power law relating the two.
18th April 2009 at 00:40
I’m not sure that 20% is game breaking as our combat system is much faster paced, but yes it’s a significant disadvantage. I don’t want to drive players away, or make them log off in frustration, however I definitely don’t want them hurling themselves back into the fight immediately, particularly in group fights.
I also forgot to mention that there are ways to mitigate the penalty, for example the physician class have a skill to completely restore a character which removes the penalty altogether. I’ll have to see how it plays out, it may be that I reduce the penalty or the duration once we go live and get some feedback.