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Monday, May 17, 2021
Lightforge - Not getting my hopes up yet
A new games development studios called Lightforge Games has been announced, by developers that previously worked at Blizzard and Epic Games. The goal is to create "a new cross-platform, social videogame where players have the power to create worlds and tell stories in unprecedented freedom.". They say "We are looking to combine elements from Minecraft or Roblox with tabletop RPGs to form a new way to play roleplaying games.". That A) sound like the game I've been waiting for, for the last 20 years. And B) sounds like the game that everybody tried to make in the last 20 years and failed.
When MMORPGs were young, this was the promise: Create massively multiplayer online role-playing games in which you were the hero, but you were also an inhabitant of a living, breathing world. Fast forward 20+ years, and the reality of things is that you can have either one or the other. The MMORPG genre mostly has games that concentrate on you being the hero, slaying monsters, doing quests, leveling up, raiding dungeons. And then there is a completely separate set of games like Minecraft or Valheim which concentrate on you building a world, gathering resources, crafting, building a base.
The fundamental reason why virtual worlds in MMORPGs never really felt like living, breathing worlds is that most of the inhabitants aren't there most of the time. We live in the real world 24 hours a day, 365 days per year, for up to a hundred years or so. We live in virtual worlds for the few hours per day that we have the time for them, maybe not every day, and a lot of players inhabit a virtual world just for a few months before moving on to the next game. Games that have allowed players to build bases visible to everybody ended up with ghost towns; games that tried to solve that problem with instanced housing never ended up never feeling inhabited at all.
In the real world we have come to terms with the idea that there is no universal measure of success. Virtual worlds never managed to introduce a system in which your "level" could be advanced by either adventuring or building, without forcing you to do both. Players follow incentives. If there is a level which is advanced by adventuring, people mostly adventure and consider crafting a side activity. If the power of your character is determined only by the gear he can craft for himself, people concentrate on crafting, and monster slaying becomes a secondary activity.
I wish the guys from Lightforge Games the best of luck with their endevour. There is a reasonable chance that they might produce a decent game in time. But I am not holding my breath that they will actually deliver on spanning the bridge between RPGs and world building games.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:04 AM Permanent Link
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The trend over the last decade in MMORPGs is to eliminate inter-player interaction, if anything. In the 00s it mattered if you had friends and a good rep on a WoW server - that probably still matters a bit but they made it less and less relevant. If they achieve their goal they will have to make something very different, given that conventional MMORPGs evolved in the opposite direction.
You could argue that Eve Online has created a living world MMORPG that feel both alive and where some people can be the heroes. But the time investment is humonguous !
I would love to see a 'conquest of the West" type of MMO, where the players collectively colonise the world, creating train line, town, defense, respawn point and supply line while heading to the 'West'. Advancing the 'civilisation' to the West would decrease difficulty level of the region from insurmountable ( top 1%), then difficult (top 10%) to easy (even newcomer would be able to survive). THe weapon/armor level would be gated by access to ressource ( higher level ressource available in the west), meaning the march to the West would naturally render high level ressource more and more available. [...] Two years ago I took far too many time building this game in my mind for no use. ;-)
On a totally different topic, I would like to thank you, as you are part of the people motivating me to organise my first RPG campaign, and I was the GM. It was a great success, but we played 'Quest' from 'Adventure Game' a game on the total opposite of D&D 4th edition, where rule are really really simplified, and the focus is on the storytelling. With my improv past, it makes a really good game for beginner with few available time, as the whole team was.
I would love to see a 'conquest of the West" type of MMO, where the players collectively colonise the world, creating train line, town, defense, respawn point and supply line while heading to the 'West'. Advancing the 'civilisation' to the West would decrease difficulty level of the region from insurmountable ( top 1%), then difficult (top 10%) to easy (even newcomer would be able to survive). THe weapon/armor level would be gated by access to ressource ( higher level ressource available in the west), meaning the march to the West would naturally render high level ressource more and more available. [...] Two years ago I took far too many time building this game in my mind for no use. ;-)
On a totally different topic, I would like to thank you, as you are part of the people motivating me to organise my first RPG campaign, and I was the GM. It was a great success, but we played 'Quest' from 'Adventure Game' a game on the total opposite of D&D 4th edition, where rule are really really simplified, and the focus is on the storytelling. With my improv past, it makes a really good game for beginner with few available time, as the whole team was.
MMOs had a (more) living-breathing environment when their community met ingame only. Aside from few people who used external tools like TeamSpeak, the vast majority of us met in the global/guild/trade chat to get all the required info. Trading items was more social too, although more prone to scamming and waste of time.
Nowadays you can complete a game without typing or speaking a single word. Youtube tutorials, streamers, guides, interactive maps, mods, addons, ... The choice is nearly infinite. You don't really need to ask anything, you can find all the answers online. You don't even need "friends" anymore, most MMOs can be played as "online single player" games where you basically play on your own and group with randoms when strictly required. Trading is often replaced by auction houses / markets where you can post your items without interaction.
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Nowadays you can complete a game without typing or speaking a single word. Youtube tutorials, streamers, guides, interactive maps, mods, addons, ... The choice is nearly infinite. You don't really need to ask anything, you can find all the answers online. You don't even need "friends" anymore, most MMOs can be played as "online single player" games where you basically play on your own and group with randoms when strictly required. Trading is often replaced by auction houses / markets where you can post your items without interaction.
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