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[MMO Theory] Simulating a sense of place
TurnpikeLad
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've been feeling dissatisfied with what's available in the MMO market for years. While I've had a lot of fun in a few different games, it's fallen short of the kind of imaginative experience that these kind of games should be able to provide. I think a different kind game is not just possible but potentially profitable.
This is a picture of a forest in Virginia.
In elementary school, I used to spend afternoons with my friends in the forest. We would tear up patches of nettles, build forts, eat berries, have mock battles with sticks, hide and spy on each other. Our play was based on imaginative interaction with the environment. We played in the forest because the forest itself contained opportunities for a lot of interconnected structured activities.
Look at this picture again. Imagine hiking down that path. You would experience the place not simply by walking down the path, but by feeling the ferns brush against your legs; hearing the soft sound of your footsteps; noticing a lone flower down in the ditch to your left; feeling the texture of the bark on the trees. You could reach down and pick a fern or a blade of grass; you could pick up a rock and throw it. Every interaction or possible interaction with a place enhances the sense that you are where you are.
Basically, I feel that current games lack this sense of place. Exploring a new area in LotRO or WoW is fun, but the world feels _thin_. There are not that many objects in the environment (trees, rocks, plants) and there are no possible interactions with any of them. In contrast, the world in the picture feels _dense_ - it's filled with different species and you can interact with every object in multiple ways. In addition, if you pull up a plant it's no longer there; if you chop down a tree, there will be one less tree, until a new one grows to take its place.
Another thing that reduces the sense of place in current MMOs is the blatantly artificial way that the wildlife behaves. Mobs stand around statically every 100 feet, waiting for somebody to come by and attack them. In an actual wilderness, of course, animals live life cycles of their own and must find food and reproduce. If you approach them they are more likely to run away than to attack. The possible interactions with a creature following its own schedule and priorities are much more interesting and numerous than with a mob that sits in its place until aggroed.
Finally, environments in MMOs feel limited because they are usually much smaller than corresponding places in the real world. In an MMO, five minutes of walking down that path is likely to take you to a new biome; certainly not more than ten. But if you were actually on that path, you could walk for hours without leaving the forest. There is a point of critical mass when the size of a place makes that place feel significant, and the interactions you can potentially have with that place become more than you can count. There have been games with giant landscapes, it's true - but usually these games are empty and static, and the number of possible interactions is still small.
It will always be impossible to mimic completely the density of the real world in an online game. Each extra object you add increases the load on the client and the traffic between the client and the server. Plus, designing a world by hand gets harder and harder as the number of things in the world increases. Simulating a world that feels as full as the real world will have to wait until we have highly realistic procedural algorithms, and can run the entire game on a cluster of supercomputers and simply stream video to each client. But it's definitely possible to go far beyond the thin place-ness of most MMOs.
I know it's a single-player game, but check out the landscape in Deer Hunter Tournament. (Sorry for the low quality.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDebHkSd2D8
Even within the limitations of the kind of game this is, the landscape is absolutely epic. It's realistic and filled with objects. The draw distance is insane. When you see that lake shore through the binocs, you know that you can go there, and maybe find some game. Imagine how much more potential there would be in a game where you knew you could set up camp, go fishing, harvest plants, make a raft, etc. etc.
With the goal of nurturing a sense of place that feels real, here are a few features that I think would be possible in a fantasy game using cutting-edge technology.
I don't know if I would even call this game an RPG. But it's a beginning on the path to realizing the kind of experience that should be possible in MMORPGs, and the kind of stories that we should be able to tell.
This is a picture of a forest in Virginia.
In elementary school, I used to spend afternoons with my friends in the forest. We would tear up patches of nettles, build forts, eat berries, have mock battles with sticks, hide and spy on each other. Our play was based on imaginative interaction with the environment. We played in the forest because the forest itself contained opportunities for a lot of interconnected structured activities.
Look at this picture again. Imagine hiking down that path. You would experience the place not simply by walking down the path, but by feeling the ferns brush against your legs; hearing the soft sound of your footsteps; noticing a lone flower down in the ditch to your left; feeling the texture of the bark on the trees. You could reach down and pick a fern or a blade of grass; you could pick up a rock and throw it. Every interaction or possible interaction with a place enhances the sense that you are where you are.
Basically, I feel that current games lack this sense of place. Exploring a new area in LotRO or WoW is fun, but the world feels _thin_. There are not that many objects in the environment (trees, rocks, plants) and there are no possible interactions with any of them. In contrast, the world in the picture feels _dense_ - it's filled with different species and you can interact with every object in multiple ways. In addition, if you pull up a plant it's no longer there; if you chop down a tree, there will be one less tree, until a new one grows to take its place.
Another thing that reduces the sense of place in current MMOs is the blatantly artificial way that the wildlife behaves. Mobs stand around statically every 100 feet, waiting for somebody to come by and attack them. In an actual wilderness, of course, animals live life cycles of their own and must find food and reproduce. If you approach them they are more likely to run away than to attack. The possible interactions with a creature following its own schedule and priorities are much more interesting and numerous than with a mob that sits in its place until aggroed.
Finally, environments in MMOs feel limited because they are usually much smaller than corresponding places in the real world. In an MMO, five minutes of walking down that path is likely to take you to a new biome; certainly not more than ten. But if you were actually on that path, you could walk for hours without leaving the forest. There is a point of critical mass when the size of a place makes that place feel significant, and the interactions you can potentially have with that place become more than you can count. There have been games with giant landscapes, it's true - but usually these games are empty and static, and the number of possible interactions is still small.
It will always be impossible to mimic completely the density of the real world in an online game. Each extra object you add increases the load on the client and the traffic between the client and the server. Plus, designing a world by hand gets harder and harder as the number of things in the world increases. Simulating a world that feels as full as the real world will have to wait until we have highly realistic procedural algorithms, and can run the entire game on a cluster of supercomputers and simply stream video to each client. But it's definitely possible to go far beyond the thin place-ness of most MMOs.
I know it's a single-player game, but check out the landscape in Deer Hunter Tournament. (Sorry for the low quality.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDebHkSd2D8
Even within the limitations of the kind of game this is, the landscape is absolutely epic. It's realistic and filled with objects. The draw distance is insane. When you see that lake shore through the binocs, you know that you can go there, and maybe find some game. Imagine how much more potential there would be in a game where you knew you could set up camp, go fishing, harvest plants, make a raft, etc. etc.
With the goal of nurturing a sense of place that feels real, here are a few features that I think would be possible in a fantasy game using cutting-edge technology.
- Many interacting species of plants and animals in each biome, each with their own life-cycles (born/sprouted, migrate, reproduce, hunt each other, die) that persist in simulation even when the players aren't around. A place should feel _full_ of living things.
- Multiple ways to use many of these creatures and plants. For example, you could try to eat a plant, or boil it to make a dye, or try to make a rope out of it.
- In order for the increased number of ways to interact with the environment to have actual gameplay effects, characters should have more needs than is customary in RPGs - warmth, food, water - with consequences for not meeting them. Also fun would be poison effects that you might get if you eat the wrong thing, and disease effects that you can remedy with the right medicine.
- Interactions with the environment need to be entertaining - not just click and wait. Free Realms and other casual games are making interesting steps in this direction, turning crafting and gathering into enjoyable minigames in their own right. It should actually be fun to spend the day gathering berries, and you should feel after you're done that your player skill helped you to be more effective at game activities.
- Players should be able to make at least some semi-permanent impact on their environment. This ranges from simply cutting down trees to making roads and paths to building structures and modifying terrain. (This is a feature in Wurm, a game written by one guy.)
- It should not be so easy to just go through a place. Players should have to deal with traversing a mountain range or making a path through a jungle if they want to pass through those areas, and should have options (cut down trees, climbing gear) that allow them to engage with the place in order to do so. This would make the place feel more real.
- The game should not require you to go everywhere in the world in order to succeed. Because each individual place holds more interest and potential interaction, you should be able to have a rewarding play experience simply remaining in one area, or migrating once or twice over the course of the game. Think Harvest Moon, or the Unreal World.
- The game should ideally restrict communication ingame to local /say, /shout, and /whisper, each with limiting ranges. This might not be feasible, but would definitely force players to inhabit the place they are in more thoroughly - perhaps going to a tavern to find adventurers instead of simply spamming a channel.
I don't know if I would even call this game an RPG. But it's a beginning on the path to realizing the kind of experience that should be possible in MMORPGs, and the kind of stories that we should be able to tell.
TurnpikeLad on
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This is exactly the kind of thing games don't need. Arbitrary "hunger" gauges aren't fun.
edit:
Yeah, you could make it so that your character can cast spells, but those spells require something called "mana" and the only way to replenish this "mana" is by sitting down to drink water. Sounds exciting and innovative already.
Not sure if there's a market for that considering what a failure APB was.
Which brings us back on-topic: the reason there isn't a realistic nature exploration MMO is because there isn't a market for that. People want to kill orcs and dragons in their video games, not cut wood and eat berries. The ones who do want to cut wood and eat berries can go outside to do that, they don't need a video game for it.
Fuck the MMO, just blackjack and hookers.
I'm all for more in depth and environmentally dense MMO design with all these bells and whistles, but it's not going to happen for a while because of technological, economical and design problems. A massive game like this MMO would need to be would murder your average computer, and even if you could get it running, a lot of people would be at a loss as to what to do with the environment without some kind of guidance to help them ease into it. Bandwidth and servers, design and development costs, and payment types and god knows what else factors into this as well. It's just not practical at this time. It wouldn't be fun.
And no, arbitrary meter filling mechanics are a throwback and in a game as you describe, although realistic, are annoying. I appreciate the thought that went into this post though, and it's something MMO game designers should consider, at least in part, as best they can. And in a way, a few of the newer titles such as TOR and GW2 will be innovating on level design and quantity as well as quality, perhaps they will have better environments for us to plume in the future which will be vaster then WoW. TOR's planets already have rumoured sizes rivalling an entire WoW old world continent like Kalimdor. The possibility is there.
The expectations need to be lowered but should remain, because MMOs should be better then what they are now.
It's been a long time since I played WoW but I believe this was how it worked there, and it could apply to any of the systems you might come up with (rest, warmth, etc).
I spent years in Asheron's Call and the cooking system there, while fun, was less useful except in a few situations. My melee warrior kept cooking as a skill just for the creation of stamina rations while out in the wild; they were easy to make & carry and did a better job than potions.
A "living world" MMO is understandably hard to pull off but something I'd love to see accomplished. A game where you and others have to carve out your existence in the wild could be a success but I don't even know where you'd begin on doing it "right" (meaning a commercial success).
I learned from my time in AC that a sense of community is an important factor that makes a game worth playing. People spent a lot of time analyzing the gradual downfall of the AC population, blaming any number of things from combat-macro'd bots to experience exploits, but for me things took a sharp downward turn when player housing was introduced.
Before, individuals and groups would gather in the various towns scattered across the map, and it did create a sense of "life" knowing that you could travel to certain places and almost always be assured that someone was there.
But after housing was implemented, people scattered. Instead of gathering at towns, people would either go to their own home or hang out at the guild mansion. The towns became barren and lifeless, save for a portal or trade bot here and there. A lot of people I knew began to lose interest at that point. Sure, the entire population was still there, but seeing a population number on a login page is a lot different than seeing those people in the game, and it contributed to a sense that things were on a decline.
A sense of place is a great idea but the social aspect can't be ignored: the game won't feel "alive" if you're out in that wilderness alone.
Now, if a game came along where people were able to build villages, towns, cities, etc...and had to rely on those places for their "needs"...then it could serve to bring people together. Wurm is an example that comes really close, but it's lacking a lot and there's a ton of grind involved (not that civilization building should be a two or three click process, mind you).
Resource management makes sense when resources like they are scarce. It's kind of interesting in single player games that are designed with it in mind. So you'd have to make food and water scarce, else getting them just becomes another timesink without being compelling.
And making food and water scarce just doesn't seem like a very good idea in an MMO, since you'd wind up with people operating water cartels in games with markets, or just camping whatever mob dropped water.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Best phrase I could think of to describe it. :P
Making a food system entertaining when it's a small part of a larger game is difficult. Making it compulsory makes it anything but fun.
The trick is to find a way to make it worth someone's time. One of the things AC did right that I think WoW did wrong was allowing you to experiment to discover recipes rather than being required to buy the recipe on paper first.
Basic foods were easy to figure out (flour + water = dough, dough + baking pan = bread) but the more complex ones required time and experimentation...and cooking itself is a creative process that is most enjoyable when you are working on your own rather than from a cookbook.
Having the cooking skill for the stamina rations as mentioned before was a good utility skill, but I will also admit that I held onto any food items I found during my adventures for use in cooking later. Sure, the items I produced might not have had a lot of use, but it was still a good way to pass the time.
And I think that's what stops MMO developers from really putting more into crafting systems than "gather items, click recipe, done". How exactly do you make a system like "cooking" in a video game have depth? How do you make it something a player can enjoy and at the same time feel like they're doing something useful?
Maybe I've been playing/pretending to play EVE for too long but I fail to see the problem here.
Down with Big Water!
The only bullet point it doesn't hit is the interactions one. You can do some really really awesome stuff but it takes a long time and it kind of too faithfully recreates the feeling of hard labour. Once you spend half an hour digging a hole and moving the dirt and you barely made a dent it kind of loses the charm.
As of a result of this shift MMOs started designing new areas as content and not as part of the world. The map was broken up into 1-10, 10-20 etc and you basically traverse the whole area while questing. This is why I am not playing EQ2. It moved into this mindset. The names of the areas are familiar but the zones themselves are not so in the least. There is no exploration anymore. The MMO world revolves around filling up your quest log at a hub and going to a point marked on your map and moving on to the next. It is almost as if the MMORPG has been dropped and replaced with MMOCSPAG (Console Single Player Action Game).
Sadly the population for game designed as stated in the OP would be small and as others have said the development costs would be large so we will not see a game like this.
I don't mind the "make a permanent mark" stuff, but there are already games that fill this niche (EVE being the one I play). There are several games in the last few years that have tried this ultra-realistic, everything is a struggle, and the world is huge and unapproachable, game play....they've all been abject failures. It's not what the market as a whole wants.
Part of the fun of video games is the escapism aspect of them. If I come home form a hard days work to login to Realistic MMO, only to have to struggle to feed myself by hunting bears and picking berries, I'm going to go find another game to play where I can login and slice orc heads off instead.
To me there is no earned feeling with my 80s or with the gear they have. It is was all done with just a matter of time and I look like everyone else.
WoW is not a game meant for the skill hardcore players, that niche is filled elsewhere. It's a game for people who want to escape in to a fantasy world and slice up orcs. Again, the dollars and wallets have spoken, and the vast majority of gamers want THAT game, not EVE or Mortal Online or Darkfall or whatever. There is obviously a niche place for those games (and again, I play one of them), but they are just that...a niche.
Well duh. Doesnt mean I have to like it.
Because I am lazy too
What Wurm demonstrates is that a rich environment need not be a prohibitive development cost. Also there are ways to design a gigantic world without making the whole thing by hand; procedural algorithms are great for populating a world, and were used to great effect in Oblivion.
The other issue, whether anybody would actually want to play such a game, depends totally on how the game is made. Most games that try to be a living world (and there are very few) have this kind of hardcore mentality that says, basically, you're going to suffer and you're going to like it. I don't think that's necessary at all. The whole point of a dynamic environment is that there are more ways to have fun; ideally the game doesn't say "You have to go out and do X and X and X every day or else you're at a disadvantage," it says "You have the option of doing X, or X, or X, each with their own rewards."
The hunger and thirst thing works into this. Players shouldn't have to jump through arbitrary hoops, and if that's what a hunger and thirst system is, then it's worthless. But without some very useful benefit from eating and drinking, then there just isn't any reward to tasks involving finding or making food, which make up such a large portion of the ways we interact with the environment in the real world. You shouldn't die if you don't eat; punishing the player is the opposite of what I want to achieve. There are many ways to make a hunger system make sense and not just be another bar to fill. Some suggestions off the top of my head are:
1)perhaps basic food items are ubiquitous and easy to find, but other higher-quality foods give more benefit and are harder to make;
2)perhaps food tasks create large stacks of items that take a long time to go through, so you can feed yourself at a baseline level with just minimal effort once in a while;
3)perhaps food isn't necessary just to live from day to day but instead helps you complete tasks, so chopping a tree for example would yield better wood if you were well fed;
4)perhaps there are reasons to be hungry and reasons to be full; for example, MP recovery could be boosted when you're fasting, and HP recovery could be boosted when you're eating.
5)perhaps like in Harvest Moon, there's an increased chance of getting sick if you don't eat. Harvest moon is a fun, casual game with a hunger system that's a natural extension of its gameplay.
Just because a system can be implemented in a stupid way, doesn't mean that any implementation of that system is a hindrance.
Finally, if all you want to do in an RPG is fight mobs and complete quests, then I think you've got a problem of compressed horizons. The reason why we all are attracted to the traditional kind of fantasy gameplay is that other ways of interacting with the world have always been done rather crappily. Imagine if combat consisted just of clicking on a mob and waiting for ten seconds. Then it would seem pretty much like work too, right? Combat is what people want because combat is what every game spends most of their resources on. You get dozens of abilities (with pretty visuals) to apply strategically in different ways, you get a rush from completing something that was actually kind of a challenge to you as a player, you feel a sense of character advancement and progress in the game. These are all things that can be incorporated into non-combat activities.
What it comes down to is that the more alive and place-y the world feels, the more significant your actions in it become, both in how you feel as a player and actually in the effect your character has on the world. Virtual world games have been maligned both because they're usually attempted by first-time developers who have limited experience and resources, and thus turn out crappy; and because they're all trying to be some kind of UO pre-Trammel paradise, where a small core of hardcore PvPers end up driving everyone else out of the game. But in actuality the trend in MMOs toward static, homogeneous zones filled with patrolling mobs with aggro radii, toward a level treadmill where the real point of the game is to win the item roulette in endgame raids, is the result of excessive caution and groupthink among game developers, not any inherent limitation on technology. There's potential there for a competent studio to go in the other direction and make a truly great game.
Ten years ago, I remember marketing campaigns for Asheron's Call that emphasized how huge the game was. Specifically, they mentioned how it was about the size of Rhode Island -- massive for an MMO at that time. Back then, MMOs were supposed to feel like virtual worlds with emergent, persistent, player-driven gameplay. I think most of us think of those MMOs as "sandbox" games.
But then World of Warcraft came out. And suddenly, the game wasn't so much about being a emergent, virtual world, it became more like a theme park. As WoW continues to evolve, it's become more and more like a theme park. Obviously, WoW's model has been very successful -- but because of that success, I think other MMOs have tried to follow suit.
Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online, the new Star Wars: The Old Republic, and other big name MMOs have all gone down the pure theme park route, moving away from the original idea of MMOs as virtual, emergent worlds.
The curious thing, though, is that I'm not convinced this dichotomy between sandbox and theme park MMOs needs to exist. I don't understand why someone couldn't create a game that combines the essence of a theme park with the essence of a sandbox.
Why can't someone make another WoW clone, but creatures have realistic life cycles? Why couldn't enemy NPCs actually go about their daily routine? Why can't interactions with the environment be more complex and interesting? Why can't crafting be much more interesting?
Those are not difficult things to implement, and just those things would make a massive impact on the "sense of place" in the game.
Some of the other suggestions might be more difficult, like players being able to make a semi-permanent impact on their world. That might need to be restricted to specific places in the world away from the carefully-designed "theme park" side of the game. In a game like Star Wars: The Old Republic, I see no reason why they couldn't designate a few special planets as totally player-malleable, while the rest of the worlds stay static.
But my point is that it still can be done without compromising on what made WoW a really great game.