Content

When you browse the message boards of different MMORPGs on the market, you will often read about a game that it doesn't have enough "content". Now whats that? Content is the non-repetitive part of a game. The storyline, quests, named items, hand-created areas, and so on. And yes, most modern games don't have enough of it.

What all games have is game mechanisms that are repetitive. Combat for example. The actual sequence of clicks or keyboard commands in a combat tends to be repetitive, although lightened up with a bit of randomness. Same for the sequence of commands to produce an item with a tradeskill. In earlier games, ALL game areas used to be hand-designed. Modern games often have computer-designed landscapes. Those are often prettier, but as they are cheap to produce, there is a certain tendency to create huge areas in the same style, which are then both deserted and boring. Anarchy Online pioneered randomly created missions (taken up by Star Wars Galaxies) and even randomly generated dungeons. Those weren't very well received.

It is an illusion to believe that randomly generated things can replace real content. A hand-crafted mission to a hand-crafted dungeon is a LOT more interesting to the player than a random mission to a random dungeon. For the simple reason that the second mission and dungeon will resemble the first one too much if it is just computer generated.

So why do companies do that? Because of cost. Randomly generated landscapes, missions, and dungeons can be produced in any quantity at minimal cost, once the algorithm to create the first one is programmed. While putting a designer and a programmer together to create 100 different quests will keep them occupied for many expensive hours. And after one month you'll get the first customer complaining that he has solved all 100 of these different quests and wants another 100. A "mission terminal" that would simply create a new mission on the press of a button seemed a good idea to that problem. But now the same customers will say that they did 100 missions, they all looked the same, and they don't want to do another 100 like that.

A game also looses a lot of atmosphere if everything is just randomly generated. If a NPC (Non player character, looking like a game character but being computer controlled) tells you of how the princess was kidnapped and asks you to go and rescue her, the player feels he is part of a story. If a mission terminal tells you to go to location X1 and get back item Y1, and you know that if you press the button again it will ask you to go to X2 and get Y2, the mission becomes just a repetitive task, not an adventure. Same thing for landscape. New games like Asherons Call 2 or A Tale in the Desert have HUGE computer generated maps. You can run for hours and hours to cross them. But you can't look around and see immediately in which area you are, as you could in old Everquest. I already spoke about the importance of not making items totally random in yesterdays blog about loot.

A company running a MMORPG is obviously interested in keeping their customers playing for a very long time, due to the monthly fees. If after one or two month the player thinks he has "seen everything", he will become bored, and quit, generating no more income for the game company. But online players often play 100 hours or more per month. It is obviously impossible to fill all this time with really new stuff, like 100 hours of dialogue. So the art is to cleverly mix the new stuff, the content, with the repetitive stuff. The player gets a dialogue explaining his quest, but the dialogue only takes a minute or two. But then traveling to the target of the quest will take some time. There will be combat on the way and at the end, all being handled by the computer and not requiring much designer input. Then again a bit of creative stuff at the end, a reward that isn't just a random item, and the player will be happy.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:36 PM Permanent Link

 
Loot

I played Everquest for 19 months, if I remember correctly, the free month you get when buying the game and then 3 times 6 months, the monthly fee being cheaper when you paid for 6 months in advance. Since then I never staid more than 6 months in the same MMORPG. Why? My initial theory was that MMORPGs being similar, one gets bored faster with each additional MMORPG one plays. But after looking at the different games, I now came up with a different theory: It's all about loot.

Many games have totally boring loot. Loot is boring when you can't use it, and you could have gotten the same loot everywhere else. Both of these problems are solved when there are special magic items as loot for specific monsters at specific locations. To make getting that special loot not too easy, Everquest had a system where that specific monster only SOMETIMES had that special magic item. So you usually ended up killing the damn thing 20 times before you got what you wanted, which is called "camping" in Everquest. Now Everquest sometimes overdid that, and was called Evercamp by some people because of that. My longest camp was 16 hours, killing a monster that spawned every 23 minutes, until it finally dropped the magical cloak I wanted. But other camps took DAYS, which is more than silly.

So many other games, instead of improving the system, simply put in no special loot at all. And thats the trap. Yes, people didn't like camping for hours. But they DID like the magic items. And they DID like the idea that you were able to get the information that if you wanted the "shiny brass shield", you had to hunt a specific monster at a specific place. What was wrong with the system was that the place and mob was a bit TOO specific. Only the orc trainer on the top of the hill in Crushbone dropped the "shiny brass shield". So obviously the best tactic to get that shield was to sit on top of the hill right where he spawned and then wack him whenever he appeared, until after having killed him X times, you found the "shiny brass shield".

The much better system would have been if the orc trainer would spawn at a random location inside a specific area. Because then you have to run around and actually hunt him. And the "camp" becomes a "chase", which is obviously more exciting.

Why do we need those special monsters dropping special items? Because people need to be motivated to travel through these virtual worlds. If all monsters of the same level give the same loot, you just have to travel once to the closest place where a monster appropriate to your level is and start killing. You only need to move when you go up in level, which is not often enough. There are usually monsters appropriate to your level at many different locations. But only if you know that at location A you will get the magical helmet as loot, while at location B you get the magical sword, will you be willing to move from A to B.

The thing that Everquest got totally wrong with the loot (and they recognized that and will change it for EQ2), is that low level people could use magical items dropped from high level monsters. As there was no item decay, every time the high level player got an even better item, he had the previous item from that slot for sale. Or he gave it to a lower level character he created himself, which is called "twinking". Obviously, if you were level 20 and got a magical helmet that dropped from a level 40 monster either from your other high-level character, or from the market, you were not any more interested in killing that level 20 monster for its much inferior magical helmet.

But it is VERY important that players can find out what they have to do, to get an item for a specific equipment slot, usable by their class, race, and level. The worst example of what happens if you make that random is Anarchy Online. Anarchy Online had about 200 different weapons, and similar numbers for armor and other equipment. And each weapon existed in 200 different quality levels. So if you wanted ONE specific weapon of ONE specific quality level, that was just one out of 40,000 different possibilities. And all the possible sources for these weapons were random. They dropped as random loot. They were given out as random reward for missions. And they appeared randomly in stores. Stores were still your best bet, because every hour the store got its 50 sales spots filled with 50 new weapons. But 50 out of 40,000 still meant that after searching different shops for hours, you'd content yourself with NEARLY the weapon you wanted at NEARLY the good quality level. And once you got up some levels, the random hunt for equipment started all over.

In Everquest you had to get the information where to find what at external websites like Allakhazam. An ideal game would have IN GAME information, where you can ask a sage or library for a fee where to find a magical helmet fitting for you. And the program would figure out your level, class and race, and tell you "Rumors have it, that the goblin around bloody hill were seen carrying a magical helmet". Now THAT would have you traveling to bloody hill, even if it took you an hour, and start killing goblins there. Isn't that much more exciting than going out at random until you find a monster of your level and then just kill it for xp and a handful of gold pieces?
- posted by Tobold @ 4:51 PM Permanent Link

 
Money

Surprise, surprise, playing MMORPGs costs money. Which is the source of frequent complaints about them, especially the monthly fee. Nearly all MMORPG follow the same business model: You first buy the game for the usual price of a computer game, a bit below $50. Included is one free month of game play. After that, you pay a monthly fee. The industry standard for that monthly fee used to be $10, aeh, sorry, $9.95 :). But this went up with time, so the industry standard is now more like $13, with the latest game, Star Wars Galaxies, costing $15 per month. You can usually get a slight reduction on that by subscribing for 3, 6 or even 12 months.

Now imagine you buy Star Wars Galaxies for $45. Play your free month, like it, play another 11 months at $15. Total cost for one year of game play is $210. Is that expensive? For one year of playing, I don't think so. People usually spend a lot of time in this sort of game, 1000 hours per year or more. At that rate, the price per hour of entertainment is 21 cents. Going to the cinema, or even reading a book, is more expensive. You could theoretically buy an offline computer game and play it for 1000 hours in a year for $50. But experience shows that the normal life-span of an offline game is not much more than 100 hours. Online games are often better value for money, because during 1 year there will be a lot of content added to the game.

Some people have a highly exaggerated opinion about the value of their money. MMORPG servers, like all servers that are not military or life-supporting, occasionally have down-time. For server maintenance, for patches, or rarely even unexpected server crashes. And every time that happens, somebody will post on the message board "I paid $10 (or $13, or $15) per month for this game. Now the server is down. I want my money back!". I'm still waiting for a game company to declare that the month has 720 hours, there were 2 hours of down-time, and here are your 3 cents back for the 2 hours you couldn't play. :)

While the business model for all the "big" games of the MMORPG industry is the same, the smaller games from independant companies often slightly differ from that model. While Sony / Verant has no problem of getting boxed CDs of Everquest into the shelfs of computer games stores, smaller companies don't have access to these distribution channels. There are many games from smaller companies around, which you can't pick up at your local store. In that case it is often possible to download the game. Depending on the quality of the graphics a game client can be as small as 200 MB, or as large as 1.3 GB. Not something you'd want to download with a 56k modem, but if you, like me, have 3MBit ADSL that sort of download is quite feasible.

What makes these large downloads interesting? You usually get a "free trial" bundled with them. And the client is usually for free too. So you can play the game for a week or so, decide whether you like it, and then just pay the monthly fee afterwards. But of course the old saying that "you get what you pay for" is still true. These smaller games from smaller game companies that you can download and try for free are often less pretty in the graphics department than the big games. Which is okay, as long as the game play is good. Well, up to a certain point, I'm not downloading games with 2D graphics in good old Ultima Online style.

I just wished that the big games could be downloaded too. I'd even be willing to pay for the download, slightly less than I'd pay for the boxed CD. But usually the game company has some sort of exclusive contract with the distributing company, and downloads are not possible. That only changes if the game is a market flop. Games that first sold only in boxes, but are now struggling for survival, can now often be downloaded for free. Or you get a free CD glued into your PC game magazine. I just played Anarchy Online a week for free with a free CD like that (Anarchy Online still sucks, mainly because of the weapon and equipment system that has you hunting equipment in stores for longer than you are hunting monsters). And I still have a CD with a free month of Ultima Online on my desk.

Usually the only way to play a big game for free before you buy it, is to get a place in the beta test. But of course that only works for games that are currently in beta. And that plan totally failed for Star Wars Galaxies, because you had to BUY the CD to participate in the beta. And including shipping to Europe, participation in the beta would have cost me $37, so I declined. Because you can't use the beta client to then play the release game, you have still to buy the boxed CD. :( Now I'm waiting to get my hands on a copy of SWG, but the first 125,000 copies they made are sold out. Which causes me to think that I'd happily pay $40 to download 1 GB or so of SWG client and be able to play it now. Maybe at some point in the future, when more people have broadband, game companies will offer such a service. Would probably make distribution cheaper for them. But with Star Wars Galaxies it just might be that they deliberately limited the number of clients they sold, so that their servers wouldn't be totally overloaded during release. There are enough complaints about server difficulties as it is.

Very few companies have a very different business model from the "monthly fee" one. The only online game I'm playing that works on a very different model is Magic the Gathering Online, MtGO for short. Which is not a MMORPG, but an online trading card game. In MtGO you can play for free, without a monthly fee. But to play, you need virtual cards, and these cards cost money. Which is the same business model than for the paper trading cards, so you understand where it comes from. But I've heard of plans for MMORPG games that work that way. You get an avatar with an appartment for free, but the appartment is empty, and the virtual furniture costs real money. Don't know if that will work. The business model of MtGO works rather well. The game has a lot less players than a big MMORPG, but each player is spending hundreds of dollars on virtual cards. If you are interested in MtGO, I'm running a MtGO FAQ and Guide website, where you can find a lot more information about that game.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:27 AM Permanent Link

 
A Tale in the Desert

Of all the MMORPGs I played, A Tale in the Desert is probably the most unusual one. The game plays in ancient Egypt and you play one Egyptian citizen. The game is all about resources. The most simple resources you can collect: sand, grass, mud, and so on. Then there are buildings where you can transform those simple resources into more complicated ones. For example from sand, mud, and straw (dried grass) you can build bricks. Then you can use the bricks to build other buildings, which allow you other resource transformations, and so on.

There is no combat. There are no experience points or levels. But there are skills, which you can learn at schools. Learning those skills costs again resources. There are no quests, but there are "tests". These tests are rather varied. Some you have to do certain things in a certain time. Others you have to work together with your fellow players. Social interaction is very important in ATITD, several resources can only be reached when 3 to 5 people work together.

I stumbled upon this game by accident, a recommendation by somebody I knew from another game. The client is a free download. You can play a certain time for free. A very customer-friendly approach, try before you buy. If you then want to continue playing it costs the usual $13 per month like many other games, but you never have to pay the $50 for the box and CD like the other games force you to. Recommended.

Is it the perfect game? No, the perfect game doesn't exist. There are about 100 different buildings and a similar number of different resources right now. And there is a lot of variety, for example flax is planted differently than vegetables. Making charcoal is some sort of mini-game, where you try to balance heat, oxygen, and wood with the danger of the whole thing blowing up. But if you play ATITD for 2 or 3 months, you reach the limits of the game. Once you have built more or less every building, made more or less every resource, and tried you hand in different tests, there isn't anything interesting left to do.

Like many online games, ATITD isn't finished. Every new patch not only fixes bugs, but also modifies the game, and creates new content. Some people dislike that, but I think its an advantage. Especially in ATITD, where the players have an usually large influence over how the game is modified. One way for a player to do so is to write a petition in-game. He then has to get 40 people to sign that petition. And then the petition is voted upon for some days. If it receives 60% or more YES votes, the petition is passed to the developers. And while the developers can always veto a petition, either because it is too hard to program, or because it doesn't fit the concept of the game, there are a number of petitions that have passed and been implemented.

Yesterday I participated in an in-game developer chat (on the German server). The players discussed with the lead designer that it was difficult to meet other players, because the map is so huge. There is a teleportation system, but it was limited to teleporting to a few places you set a waypoint to, and this teleportation cost too much of a special resource "navigation time". So the lead designer (named Pharaoh) proposed several suggestions for improvement, let the players rate his proposals on a scale from 1 to 5, and then implemented the suggestion that got the highest score. And the impressing thing was that he implemented it DURING THE CHAT. Well, obviously he had already coded it in and just needed to release the code. But other game companies need to take down their servers for hours for such changes. Pharaoh added public waypoints and halved the navigation time cost while the game was running. Both his cooperation with the players and the speed of implementation is something you won't see in bigger games like Everquest.

Still, I'm cancelling my account next weekend. End of the month I'll be on holiday for three weeks, with no computer access. And then I want to start SWG. And as I said, after a couple of months I've run out of things to do in ATITD. But I will remember it fondly and recommend it.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:02 PM Permanent Link

 
What IS a MMORPG actually?

The MMO part is pretty accurate, it stands for massive multiplayer online. The G is also correct, these are games. MMORPGs are games that are played online with massive amounts of players. Massive meaning anything between 100 and 5000 on the same server. Of course a game can have lots of servers. The biggest MMORPG is Everquest, and it reputedly has 400,000 players. Each player is usually paying a monthly fee, between $10 and $15. Now multiply that by 400,000 and you can guess where the interest of the gaming industry in these games is coming from.

The RP part of the game is a bit misleading. Most players aren't really "role-playing" in MMORPGs. Its more a historical reference. It all started in the early 80's with pen & paper role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, where you played the role of a fighter or wizard in a medieval fantasy world. This sort of game was then adapted to computers, and kept the name RPG, role-playing game. But although you still had a fighter or a wizard character in these games, the part where you actually play a role got lost in the transition from paper to silicon.

So in computer game terms, a role-playing game now means a game where you are represented in the game by a computer character (sometimes called avatar). And this character has a set of statistics, how strong he is, how intelligent he is, what skills, and what experience he has. And one of the goals of the game is to increase these statistics. This is often achieved with the help of experience points (xp) and levels. You do something, you gain experience points for that, and when you have enough of those xp, you gain a level.

At the start of a MMORPG you usually create such a character. What characters there are available depends on the type of game. There are many medieval fantasy world MMORPGs, where you can create your fighter, wizard, cleric, thief or something, usually offering several races, like elf, dwarf, or human. There are science fiction MMORPG where you have other career choices, like interplanetary merchant, bounty hunter, or star fighter pilot, and other race choices depending on the sci-fi world. You can play a Wookie in Star Wars Galaxies if you want. Then there are historical games and real world simulations, where you are limited to more conservative choices, e.g. you are usually limited to playing humans.

At the start of the game you get a set of starting stats and skills (depending on your character choices), and sometimes some starting equipment. Now as I said, one goal is to "level up", to improve your stats and skills. Getting better equipment and virtual money is usually also a goal. So to make that idea more attractive to you, you usually start out with rather bad skills and equipment.

To advance, you usually have the choice between different activities. In most games, combat is one of the main activities. Then there are often some sort of missions or quests, usually either involving combat, or bring something from A to B. Then there are "trade skills", where you transform raw materials into equipment which is usable by players.

It is easy to get caught in a cycle. You start out weak. Then you kill something small, like a rat, with your rusty dagger. For the kill you get a few experience points, and some items like a rat hide which you can sell for a small amount of money. You repeat that until you have gained enough xp to gain a level, and enough money to buy better equipment. Then you go out again, and kill something slightly bigger, gaining more xp and more items. Until you gain another level and even better equipment. And so on, and so on, ad infinitum. There is a brilliant parody of this called Progressquest. This "level treadmill" is a source of frequent complaints from players. But actually it's a trap that the players dug themselves.

The real interest of MMORPGs is not this pseudo-RP part, where you level up a character. The interest is the massive multiplayer part, where you are on a world with hundreds or thousands of other players at the same time. So one big thing to do is chatting. Now you can chat on IRC or other places on the internet. But the MMORPG provides you with a graphical avatar to do so, AND gives you something to chat about, the game. The other big thing to do is playing either together or against each other. For example forming a group of adventurers to kill a dragon together, which would have been far too strong for each of the individual characters.

So while frankly the RP part of a MMORPG is usually worse than an offline computer RPG (due to the lack of a story line), the combination between game and social interaction with other players is pulling in so many people. Groups of players form associations like "guilds". There is a player-drive economy, which is often so interesting that people have written scientific papers about it, like this paper about the Everquest currency. Online friendships form. Sometimes there are even online marriages. Some games allow combat between players, where battles and wars break out. So a good part of the game in a MMORPG is driven by players. Making it a lot more unpredictable and interesting than an offline game with a fixed story line.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:40 PM Permanent Link

 
The Beginning

Do massive multiplayer online role playing games ( MMORPG ) interest you? If not, you're at the wrong place. :)

Playing computer games is my biggest hobby. And since a couple of years, MMORPGs occupy a large portion of my playing time. So they will occupy a large portion of my blogs as well. I write a lot on the forum of whatever game I'm currently playing, but forums are not a good place to keep your thoughts and find them back later. So I thought I'd store my thoughts on different games here, and if somebody passes by and is interested, he is welcome to read my opinions on different games.

At the time I am writing this, I'm about to quit A Tale in the Desert. Not that ATITD is a bad game. But I played it for two months now, had a lot of fun, but am now growing bored of it. That happened to me a LOT. I played a great many MMORPGs for different amounts of time between one month and two years, then got bored, and switched to the next game. Next game I will start (and then stop in a couple of months) will be Star Wars Galaxies ( SWG ).
- posted by Tobold @ 12:19 PM Permanent Link