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