Levelling the playing field

So, I was playing Rift the other day, and I got onto this mission thread where you summon a Titan, lose control over it, it runs amok, and you have to perform a bunch of other tasks which enable you to craft a weapon which is capable of destroying it.

Well, that's the idea.

Except in my case (and I suspect myriad other players too), I summoned the Titan, lost control over it, then promptly killed it (in an admittedly) close battle.

But the point is, I killed it ahead of the story arc.  Obviously, as is another one of my major bugbears with MMOs, the thing respawned moments later, allowing me to complete the right quests and kill it 'properly' at the right time.

Now this should never really of happened.  Don't get me started on the whole respawning thing at this juncture - that's enough for a mega-post all its own.  But sticking with, for a moment, the classic old skool way of handling quests in MMOs, I should never have been able to kill the beast at that level, at that point.  I'd go so far as to say, even with a group of players, we shouldn't be able to slay such a beast.

Firstly, if you're going to make your enemies sound (and for the sake of the story) tough / threatening / awe-inspiring... then actually make them that.  Make them 10 levels higher than you.  Make it nigh on impossible to complete that quest outside of gaining a few levels and coming back to it later.  Keep the quest line going until you're tough enough, and let the players come back to such a challenging enemy when they are capable of slaying it.

Secondly, it got me to thinking about the distribution of level-specific entities across the MMO landscape.  Typically speaking, MMO worlds are set up in such a way that players move from region to region as they advance thru the levels.  They know they start out in the Beleaguered Isles, where everything is a convenient level 1-4, and then they move to the Dead Coast, where everything is levels 5-8 and they move inland to the Forest of Doom, where everything is 9-12 and so forth.  Quite frankly, and not to put too fine a point on it, that's a load of crap.  Yes I understand the reasons for it, but the genre has been around for quite a few years now, time to get a little more sophisticated.

When you see Kings and Generals and other leader types, I think they should all be pretty high level.  Even if it means that a lower levels you have no way of defeating them.  I'd like to see quest lines that take you back to regions you left long ago, to finish someone off that was previously too high a level to defeat.  I'd also like to see combat compressed a bit, so lower levels do have more of a chance to kill higher levels.  I know this may seem a little counter-intuitive when slated up alongside what I've mentioned above, but the two can work in harmony, and provide for situations where a high level King enemy can effectively get mobbed by a mass of low level characters (not without killing quite a few in the process, mind) which would be (for me at least) a welcome nod toward realism without taking things too far.

Technology in Fantasy

This is a huge bugbear of mine.  Many Fantasy settings do the whole mechanical / technological thing.  Two notable examples being WoW's goblin mechanics and again in Rift we see the whole of the Defiant nation's prowess, hinged upon technology.

It just always strikes me as incongruous, how a world filled with magick, where so many feats can be achieved from the mundane to the marvelous, through spells, why would serious technology even exist?  Okay, I can see the humble villager requiring a cart.  Simple technologies, blacksmithing, cartwrighting and so on, these are reasonable developments one would expect in any pseudo-medieval setting.  But engines which power great striding machines and technologies which head toward robotics in their application and intricacy seems extremely unlikely when the wielders of magick can do the job, probably more easily.

Moreover, I'd say that it is reasonable to presume that in a world that exhibits magick and a nation that producers sorcerers, a magicracy is bound to arise sooner rather than later, and that mages will attempt to maintain their power by quashing any serious displays of technology as ultimately only technology is a true threat to magick, and those who wield it.

This is why in my P&P game world, by the 3rd Age, sorcerers have seized control of the state (after a brief and violent uprising against the nobility) and fairly shortly thereafter, with mages in control, the world becomes a better place.... Well, the closer to the centre's of mage-influence you are, the better, with their weather controlling, disease-stifling, crop-rearing capabilities.  The average peasant's life is made significantly easier under the aegis of the sorcerers.

I even see a magically influenced pseudo-technological advancement.  With mages warping stone to quickly raise secure structures.  And warping animals to perform their tasks more ably.

In my P&P game-world, travel between major cities, and in some cases by private individuals is performed by giant insects, warped by magick, and large enough to carry a small basket beneath for half a dozen passengers or so.  It is essentially a living airship created by magick and tended to by commonfolk.  And something that can actually breed.  Thus we see a highly specialised form of magick which becomes a useful, self-propagating tool.

It is the uses of magick considered in this way I'd like to see in a AAA MMO.  Not the same old, hackneyed, over-used and ultimately incongruous notion of sophisticated technology in a magickal-fantasy setting.

There, I said it!  :-)

Green fingers - improving the concept of foraging

Just a warning.  This post is more notes to myself than any particular statement about the popular MMO profession (and less popular P&P skill).

When WoW came along (sorry, limited by my own experience there may have been other games that did it sooner) - people thought, wow! (please excuse pun) - I can pick plants and those plants can be used to make potions!  How amazing!  This is now commonplace.  Time for the concept to evolve.

In the vast majority of instances (although this has generally improved a little over the evolution of the genre) foraging typically involves the collection of naturally occurring botanicals.  Quite often these botanicals are stand-alone plants growing out in the planes, but I think the skill would benefit from being a little more complex.

Firstly, what should the botanicals be?  Well, just a plant is not good enough, we should talk in terms of flowers, stems, roots and thorns.  And then we should also have mosses, bark and fungi.  In this way a single specimen may yield a variety of different components which can be used as the ingredients of different apothecary recipes.

Secondly, where these botanicals grow is important, as it can add a dimension of realism to the proceedings.  Rather than every plant be stand-alone, some should have more interesting locations.  A certain type of creeper could grow on trees for example (may be even high up, and require a decent climb skill to reach).  Bark, grows on trees, obviously, and some mosses and fungi could also grow on trees, cliffs, down the inside of wells and even on some buildings.  Essentially what I'm saying is lets make the distribution of these botanicals a little more interesting than a rather obvious shrub out on its own somewhere.

The next element to consider is the region / type of terrain the botanicals are bested suited to.  Thus we should also consider, woodland plants, desert shrubs, mountain creepers, etc. So that these essential botanicals appear in the correct location.  What I mean by this is, on the same continent at least, and in some cases spanning continents, a woodland plant can be found in virtually any woodland environment.  This allows players to develop a realistic botanical sense of distribution across environments.  This concept should also go toward defeating that unrealistic notion of supplying increasingly harder to forage plants at higher levels.  Why one plant requires a forage skill of 300 and another of 1 makes very little sense.  Yes you can argue in some cases that a delicate flower requires a higher skill to successfully forage - I'm willing to go with that - on occassion - but I'd rather see different plant elements (roots, stalks etc.) become available at differing skills - and higher skill allows for faster foraging, and reaps more quantity and more variety.

I'd also like to see seasonal botanicals.  Like the Wilderberry is only available in the height of summer.  Luna's Tears only available under the full moon.  This way we not only encourage players to play longer (have to wait till summer till they can harvest that crop, and make that potion (or poison) it also makes for some interesting marketplace dynamics - where the guy that harvested a ton of Wilderberries last summer, releases his stock onto the Auction House the subsequent mid-winter at a higher price.

And finally, herb gardens.  Allow players to ultimately seed and grow their own herb gardens, probably as an advanced feature of a guild.  And this is where real forage skill comes in - its relatively easy to pick your own botanicals.  But growing your own, is a different matter.  And a well-funded, well-stocked and well-maintained herb garden would be an invaluable feature to many guilds.

One could still restrict the growth of very special plants which require very special climates.

And one could even provide basic herb gardens in major cities which players may use, for a price, within a certain time limit.  i.e. 10 gold gets you 1 minute in the garden - pick what you can.

Thanks good night, I'm just sewing seeds here - you do what you can.

The green-fingered pilch.

Addendum: O yes, and I just thought of it.  Subtle variants of the same botanicals.  So you could have Coastal Glory, a standard ingredient in healing based potions... but if you get the rarer Mountain Glory, your recipes are twice as effective!

Plus, you can also have, in some cases, plants that do a little something sans apothecary.  i.e. you can chew the stalks of Coastal Glory for an instant 10% of your health back over 6 seconds.  But boil up them stems and distil 'em, and that makes a minor healing tonic - 20% back.  Mix it with a little Mountain Dew (40% back) use Moutain Glory instead in the recipe - 80% back.  Use it with Cactus Jack the principle accelerant, and thats 80% over 3 seconds.  This is how apothecary stuff should work.  This means that Coastal Glory will always be useful, but it creates a situation where the more experienced forager / apothecary can make more useful products and thus gain a deeper satisfaction from their skill - and the game.

Guild Quests

I think I've spoken before about how much more can be made of guilds, and I know some games have caught wind of this notion and now allow such activities as levelling up your guild, guild abilities, extended guild features, the design of the interior of the guild hall, and so on and so forth - and this is all great.  Still more could be done, and this is one way in how you do it:

Allow the guild leader (and optionally officers too) the ability to create guild quests (or duties?) for the lower ranks to perform.  This could well support the ongoing development of the guild.  Say the guild needs 100 units of wood in order to extend the guild hall - or gain access to a certain specific interior design.  All the guild leader need do is create the generic guild quest (available to all guild members) and then members can go off and do their part toward obtaining enough wood.  Consider this notion when applied to virtually every facet of guild development and the game could provide a robust, automated system for guild development.

Incidental locations and random treasures

Another thing on the MMO front is that I amazed at the lack of out-of-the-way locations independent from the main quest lines.  With so much land (and sea... and other realms) for adventurers to explore one would think that designers should be spending more effort on making such exploration exciting.  What I'm talking about here are things like random cave complexes (i.e. not ones quests lead you to, where you have to do something) but just a little place off the beaten track, perhaps populated, perhaps not.  Perhaps one will reward you with a long forgotten treasure, perhaps one is long ago abandoned.  Perhaps one has subsequently become the lair of some horrendous beast (not one you are sent to destroy) but one you stumble upon through your wanderings.  An underwater cave full of the bones of some massive long since dead, prehistoric beast.

During my days playing WoW I did spend some unrewarding (in terms of the actual game, but strangely rewarding in terms of the atmosphere my imagination lent it) time journeying around the areas way of the beaten track, where no quest-giver will ever send you.  In all those travels I found two strange locations.  One was a little cottage out by the sea, which appeared lived in, but was vacant when I got there.  I hung around for awhile but nothing ever showed up.

Another location was a deep cave system, quite spooky to wander around, which appeared utterly vacant but was still quite haunting and actually gave me the spooks a little bit.  When I later researched these locales online it transpired that both were intended to be quest locations but the quests never got written - or at least for some reason were not included.

In an MMO I'd like to see far more of this stuff.  Far more sidelines and off-the-beaten-track areas to explore.  Exploration is a huge fun factor in these games and yet the games themselves often do little to provide for it.  And things like quest helper utterly kill the sense of exploration, reducing the game to a simple matter of following waypoints on the map.  Pretty much ensuring that the vast majority of players simply won't bother going off the beaten waypoint.

Instead, fill the sea with underwater sea-caves and islands with strange totems, or other peculiar locales.  With clever modular design of things like cave systems, it should not be too hard to do.  I'd even think about employing talented beta-testers to provide them with a simple dev kit for the creation of such places, leveraging User Generated Content where possible to cut down on the man-hours and costs associated with populating the world with dozens if not hundreds of peculiar little out-of-the-way locations.

I'd like to present a world to the player in which no matter which way they travelled, there'd always be something interesting to see, and somethings to interact with.  Reward players for their explorations, with not just items but also a sense of adventure.

Talking of items, another thing that most games fail at is random treasure.  Stuff you find just lying about the place.  With so much history and so much activity, you think there'd be all sorts of hidden caches and dropped items laying about the place, and so there should be!  With varying degrees of difficulty in terms of how hard they are to find.

Again this will reward people for exploring, and leaving no stone unturned.  Random treasures could range from:

• Items dropped by slain adventurers / monsters.
• Hidden caches of treasure left behind by those long since-dead, or died before they could recover them.
• Ancient artefacts unearthed by recent war, catastrophe or construction.
• Pirates' treasure.
• Thieves' stashes.
• Buried treasure.
• Grave-robbed treasure.

And if one thinks about it for more than 2 minutes I'm sure several other types of treasure will emerge.

Between incidental locations and random treasures just wandering around a fantasy MMO world should be fun.

A plus to whatever...

And so yes, in another of my rambling, I'm on a cocktail of painkillers and don't you know it, hikes through the valley of my MMO gripes - item bonuses.

If you've been following my lastest posts on crafting, run-speeds, and that other why I may have done, or may merely have imagined - I wanted to spend a cutler-three paras talking about magick items.

In my P&P games I pride myself on the creation of exquisite magick items.  My rationale behind this - because there should ALWAYS be a rationale - is that if you were capable of creating a magick item, would you churn out just yet another production line Skoda with the same stats as a thousand other items?  Or would you approach the project with some artistry?

In my P&P games actually both happens.  The rationale (always with the rationale!) behind this is that in some circumstances - i.e. when preparing for a war - an enchanter might be asked to create a batch of swords with specific bonuses with which to equip, for example, the royal guard.  Hence you get the Royal Falchion - of which two dozen were made, and they are all identical.  And this goes for many other types of enchanted items created in batches for a specific purpose.

But then there should also be a bunch of one-offs, and with these all manner of interesting and quirky magickal effects should be available.  Essentially, the thinking behind it is in mechanics terms, if the game provides a stat for something, then that stat should be able to be tweaked by magick.  And more, in fact.

Have weapons that deliver especial effects but only at midnight.  Have items with an intelligence all their own. Have equipment that activates only in the hands of certain people / races / conditions.  Basically, if it adds to the story, and can be measured by data, let the game provide it.

The bottom line is: it WILL make the game more interesting.  And thus it will provide more player satisfaction.

Run, Forrest, run!

Following on conceptually - or at least via a sideways firing synapse - from my post on crafting is yet another moan about yet another frustration I have about run-speeds in MMOs.

Tweak these mothers!

Christ, is it such a difficult thing to grasp?

Caveat:  I'm on a cocktail of painkillers due to an infected wisdom tooth (does that mean I'm suffering from a penalty to my wis score?) and so I'm in a bitchy, grouchy mood!  You have been warned!

Yes, run-speeds.  Why, o why does every type of player race/class combo always run the same?  Yes I get the over-simplified reasons behind them.  But if it works in P&P games, it can be made to work in online games too.

Have races that run faster.
Have dexterity/agility bonuses apply too.
Have stride (height) also factor in.

And then we can have magick items which provide bonuses to run speed.  It'd be great!

Granted it certain situations a player might have to think differently in pvp - when faced with a horde of Whatever Race known for their swift movement, the player knows he can't out-run them.  And he may die.  But this disadvantage will be offset by a dozen other things if they learn to play to their character's strengths, and in this respect is really no different from a mage getting caught short going toe-to-toe with a rogue, rather than standing back and crippling/excluding them from a distance.

Conjoining (like a weird twin) back to my earlier post of crafting - this again underpins the reason why magick items in general (not just crafted ones) should have some really interesting spell-like effects and not just a raw bonus on stats.  In fact, that subject deserves a post of its own....

Thanks for listening, good night Chicago.

I hate crafting!

There!  I said it!

Of all the MMOs I've played, of all the levels of various characters I've journeyed through, I have spent very, very little time crafting anything.  And this is primarily because a) its boring, and b) I fundamentally disagree with how most of it is handled.

Before I go on, I'll wave my get out of jail free disclaimer and state once again that all this is IMHO and there may indeed be a game or games out there that do things differently, and do things well.

But first up on my list of criticisms is: I do not believe leatherworkers should make magickal items.  Or indeed armour smiths, or swordsmiths, or basket weavers or the knitters of novelty tea cosies.  I don't care what your chosen material is.  You should not be able to natively produce a magickal something, just by stitching a few bits of leather together - for example.  Provide magick with the mystery it deserves and provide a particular crafting profession with the ability to imbue magick into physical items.  You could even have such 'workers of magick' specialise in imbuing specific types of magick into items.

The next thing you do is, make creating a complex item the work of several people.  If you want to make a magick sword, have it require a swordsmith to make the blade, a leatherworker to make the grip, a gemcutter to help in the creation of the pommel and a runecrafter (or whatever you want to call those 'workers of magick') to imbue the blade with spells.

On his own, the swordsmith might be able to make a very good sword.  And this is where my notion of non-magickal bonuses come from.  I like the concept that in a fantastical world certain materials provide innately some degree of non-magickal effects.  i..e for want of an example - a sword made with silver provides a non-magickal bonus when used against werewolves (due to some kind of allergy lycanthropes have to silver).

In crafting several different aspects combine to create a masterpiece.  Firstly we have quality.  This is a basic description of how skilled the crafter was at producing that particular item.  And for something like a sword we can say that a high quality sword is durable and well-balanced and can provide the wielder with some non-magickal bonus in using it.

Secondly we could have an aspect of ornamentation.  How exquisite an item is, i.e  a measure of the artistic aesthetic that has gone into the item's creation, including the use of exotic materials and / or ornate workmanship.  Ornamentation could in some cases actually go against the effective use of the item.  i.e. in the case of a ceremonial sword - but greatly increase its value.

And thirdly we can include the arcane contribution.  What magickal powers has the item been imbued with.

Thus a complex or intricate item might require four or five craftsmen collaborating to create it.

But this is only one side of crafting.  The aspect that really bores me is the yawn-inducing acquisition of the raw components followed by the soporific assembly of watching a typically painfully slow progress bar whilst your avatar twitches their hands next to a forge like they're fiddling with a rubix cube.

Take this stuff offline I say.  Take a page out of Eve's book and reduce the amount of progress bars your players have to watch by letting characters perform some of these more passive actions offline. This also makes a bit more sense to me, and kind of provides characters with a sense that their professions are like a hobby to them, and whilst they're not out adventuring (i.e whilst you're not online actually questing and killing stuff) the character is sat by a fireside somewhere, working on some impressive new piece of equipment.

The next thing that should be said of crafting is that the items made should be better than the majority of items found at that level.  If people are going to go to the trouble of sourcing a bunch of materials and collaborating with a bunch of other players in order to craft some especial item, it better be worth it.

I'd then go as far as creating a specialised form of marketplace, a la Auction Houses, to provide players with a simple interface for finding other crafters with whom they can collaborate.  This 'crafting house' should also provide an interface for the actual creation of items.

What do I mean by this?  Well, instead of having standard recipes that produce dozens of the exactly the same type of item, allow some room for creativity, and allow players to craft items they actually need / want.  In the creation of a sword for example have the swordsmith craftsmen choose from a selection of blade types / styles in order to get the form of the sword they desire.  This can be little more than an aesthetic decision in most cases, but that is still very important to many players.  The graphics of the game should allow for many different blade/hilt/pommel combinations and the swordsmith should be able to choose the design they are about to smith.  Of course we may restrict the working of rare or difficult materials to higher level craftsmen, but have a rationale behind it.  Gold is soft and easy to work, but a gold sword will not keep its edge and should be nothing more than ceremonial... for example.  Apply restrictions to fantastic materials with innate bonuses, they're generally easier to apply a rationale to anyway.

Allow crafters to imbue items with spell-like capabilities, not just stat bonuses.

Another thing that really annoys me is when the majority of items in MMOs provide just simple stat bonuses to the wielder.  Now whilst useful, it lacks imagination.  Yes provide for stat bonuses, but also provide for spell effects.  Flaming swords which cause additional heat damage, or staves which slightly reduce global casting time, or any other kind of item which provides bonuses to spell effects... i.e. a witch-skin pouch which doubles the casters warlock armour value.  That kind of thing.  But providing players with this kind of freedom we allow players to tweak virtually every aspect of their character.

I'll skin you alive!

Well, that got your attention.

The thing that annoys me about skinning / butchery in MMOs is this: the type of skin you get off your beast is based on the level of the beast, not what the beast is.  Which is quite frankly preposterous.  I've posted before (I think) about how beasts / critters should be handled, so I won't dwell on that aspect here, but what I will do is spend a moment talking about skinning.

Essentially, skinning should be based on the type of beast being skun. :-) NOT the level.  Shark skin is different to bear skin is different to cow skin is different to the delicate leather obtained from elven children.

Most MMOs take the route they take for the sake of simplicity.  They don't want low level characters getting access to high-level skins and leathers required for making high level recipes.  But quite frankly its all a lot of overly simplified nonsense, and we the sophisticated gamer - or I the self-proclaimed voice of the sophisticated gamer demand more!  Even if it means I have to make the damn game myself.

In the Mother of all (fantasy) MMOs skinning will be handled more like this:

Different skins will be required for different recipes.  And different skins will also apply a slight magickal bonus (with the right recipe) to enable different crafters to make subtley different variants of their recipes.

For example:  A backpack which warps space so that it looks like a small bag on the outside, but provides the player with 32 slots - or vast amounts of storage space, or whatever unit of measurement takes your fancy - requires the skin of a particular demon.  By hooking the recipe to such a specific creature, we as game designers can restrict who can make the item, to a certain extent.  The demon itself might be rare, may only spawn in certain locations, or may require someone to summon it, and will be of sufficient level to ensure that not many people can easily slay them, making the bags quite rare.

We can also make standard item creation a little more interesting by providing certain skins with the capability of imbuing small bonuses to the items they go toward making.  Make a cloak from wolfksin and gain a non-magickal  +1 to armour, endurance and charisma.  That kind of thing.  But provide some rationale behind it.  Something which is all too often missing.

Delicate leather (that obtained from humans or elves or something similar) may confer a small magickal bonus when used in the creation of spellbooks for certain types of dark spellcraft (demonology / necromancy, for example).

Basically ensure some cognisance goes into skinning.  Heavier leathers are obtained from heavier beasts.  More than one 'piece' of leather is obtained from larger beasts.  Certain beasts convey certain bonuses, and so on and so forth.

All this dovetails very nicely with my post on crafting... which I'm just about to write...

Now!