In the last post I pointed out that developers of MMORPG virtual words should try to create gameplay mechanics that make use of immersion. I also discussed the example of travel. In this post I will venture deeper into travel and how to make it 'right'.
This is basically a long list of bullet points which I hope to make even longer with the help of commenters ;).
- To make travel more fun it must feel natural. I wrote about that before. The player must not ask why he must travel, because it should be obvious to them that to get from A to B one has to travel.
- Travel can be made meaningful by trade. Especially long-range trade. If you can carry with you some goods to sell at your destination, the travel time does not feel 'wasted'. There have been whole games in the past that did nothing but allow you to become rich by travel.
- The game must not send you from one corner of the world to the other for some irrelevant task, like a standard-quest. Instead, the game must respect the distance as it exspects you to respect it. For example NPCs can point out that city X is really very far away and they know nothing about it. No guy in old Cairo would have send somebody to Rome without exspecting an epic and maybe dangerous journey. No guy should do it in your game.
- If traveling on a ship the game could allow you to fish for fish that are not available otherwise. The fish shouldn't be too valuable, though. You don't want people to travel so they can fish.
- The way you travel could change. For example there could be some avalanche blocking your way or some routes be impassable (or too risky) during winter/summer. The developers could sporadically, without mentioning it, change the map in a credible way.
- A less immersive idea with a lot of gameplay potential, though, is to make every travel individual by randomizing the map you have to travel.
- There should be fast and dangerous, and slow and secure routes. Thus, enableing you to make an interesting decision.
- The game could encourage grouping, but not enforce it for travel. Moreover, the game could help players to organize a caravan. This would then be a rather safe, but slow way to travel, that allows you to transport more goods.
- The game could sometimes encourage players to transport good X to city Y to make a lot of profit. But only if they are fast enough.
- PvP can be be used to 'spice it up' .. but this is really, really tricky. You certainly don't want people to not travel, because playing bandit is so much more rewarding and thus so many more people do it!
- Rivial city states could hire you to fight for them for money. Part of that 'quest' is to go to where their war takes place.
- A very important point is that players still need something to do whenever they log in. You cannot have a game like WoW just scrap teleports. A '15min battleground' doesn't make sense if the travel there takes 30min. This is actually a topic for another post: Any game needs to offer things that can be done right now, later, in the far furture, etc.
- Some travel routes can be used to allow the player relax. The original WoW travel was like that. If you do this, allow the player to see whether he is now safe or not. Don't try to spice relaxing travel up with some PvE/PvP attack that requires the player to be in front of his computer.
- ...
What else can you think of ?
Interesting ideas you throwing out there. Though I do wonder the goals.
ReplyDeleteDo you want the travel to be adventure in itself? You have to be careful not to make it a chore, when all people want to get from point a to point b ,and everything else in between they might consider a hassle
Like ask yourself is travel all that fun? Travel typically means (yes and in RL too) pretty boring stretches of repetive activity. Sometimes redemeed at the end of the journey of with a few spots in between ( I mean imagine you take transcontinental flight -its exciting first time, because you go to the other side of the globe, something u never been, now imagine you do it every week. 12 hours every week in a frigging plane. again and again and again. -all magick is lost )
Travel all by itself can not be adventure every time. But if you making a game every activity should be fun ( not to everyone but to some segment of your players). If travel becomes non optional many players would detest it
I think the travel as long option should be available and every player should be exposed to it (as a quest) to decide whether he likes it or not .
But at the end of the day player should have a choice whether they want get places fast or get "scenic road". The latter option perhaps being rewarded in some way or even made legitimate play-style choice . But not being the only option for each and everyone .
In my opinion the player shouldn't travel very far very often. Thus it does not become a chore.
ReplyDeleteIf you offer enough activities at every major location, you wouldn't need players to travel to the other edge of the world. But, and that is the important point, that other city that takes 5 hours to get to exists. You can go there, if you want.
The basic question whether travel can be fun: Not if done too often. But if done voluntarily, it can be a lot of fun. Even if you never actually do travel, the world feels big, because you have the option.
The reason it is the norm to offer fast travel in todays' games is that MMORPGs are still too much like a single player game. Long travel times in a single player game are absurd, because you want the player to see all the content.
But you don't necessarily want each individual MMORPG player to see all the content. If he sees enough content to be busy for years it is enough. Because the content, even if not seen, is still there and has an influence: Earth feels big, even though, or rather, because, you haven't seen everything yet.
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ReplyDeleteBut you don't necessarily want each individual MMORPG player to see all the content. If he sees enough content to be busy for years it is enough. Because the content, even if not seen, is still there and has an influence: Earth feels big, even though, or rather, because, you haven't seen everything yet.
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Well content is expensive you cant really afford to have any significant chunks of content not seen by anyone (unless you are a blizzard and then you can obsolete 99% of all your previous content every expansion)
So to make world big you have to have large empty spaces in between, as you cant afford to fill all big world with content.
You get something like eve (which is legitimately huge) but really not interesting ,as most of it is same static space backdrops over and over and over
Question is really can you make big interesting world not filled with repetitive junk? Asheron'scall was a notable example from the past . But it was different time -time where players were ok with grinding (so the "content" was simply putting high level mobs in area)
I seen a couple of games which seemed to have potential relatively recently . One was failed mmo project (dark and light) . Another was single player game Just Cause 2.
Both games had extensive travel options including flight, which did cut down overall travel time significantly despite world being very large.
But I frankly do not think we are the point yet when we can have large interesting worlds not filled with empty spaces
Albeit I would absolutely love to see JustCause2 engine in a MMO. Hard problem is come up with the interesting non repetitive activities . Crafting, trade and pvp comes to mind as good options, But there is large segment of pve players and you gotta have something for them too, which is hard to fit in very large world at present imho
Well content is expensive you cant really afford to have any significant chunks of content not seen by anyone (unless you are a blizzard and then you can obsolete 99% of all your previous content every expansion)
ReplyDeleteThis example shows perfectly that every MMO that manages to get more then a few million subs can absolutely afford to not show every player all the content. We might never see a WoW killer. But I am certain the evolution of MMORPGs won't stop either. We will see other MMORPGs with a few million subs.
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So to make world big you have to have large empty spaces in between, as you cant afford to fill all big world with content.
You get something like eve (which is legitimately huge) but really not interesting ,as most of it is same static space backdrops over and over and over
Yes. Actually, I always found it very unimmersive that every piece of land in WoW was part of some quest. You can absolutely put some random spawns into the landscape. You just must not force players to walk around in the boring landscape. You know, I'd love to explore the lands west of Orgrimmar. What is wrong about exploring a really big forrest that is filled with random spawn? You earn EP while you do it, you do it only if you like to explore (important) and the designer can even put a few things in there to find. (But make it impossible to document these things in internet sources!).
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Question is really can you make big interesting world not filled with repetitive junk? Asheron'scall was a notable example from the past . But it was different time -time where players were ok with grinding (so the "content" was simply putting high level mobs in area)
But I frankly do not think we are the point yet when we can have large interesting worlds not filled with empty spaces
I don't think we need to fill it with anything else, but mostly random spawn and some points of interest every few miles. Also, I'd love to actually be able to venture into the wilds and fight challenging monsters! Make them occasionally drop a bit more gold. The important point is that you shouldn't force or even encourage such activities too much. But to simply have the feature for explorers to have fun with: What's wrong about that?
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I seen a couple of games which seemed to have potential relatively recently . One was failed mmo project (dark and light) . Another was single player game Just Cause 2.
Both games had extensive travel options including flight, which did cut down overall travel time significantly despite world being very large.
I consider flying mounts which you can use everywhere a big mistake. As much fun as it is to levitate into the air for the first time: It destroys so much more than it creates! Moreover, flying is so boring that WoW actually requires teleports in addition to it! Even though you already fly at a speed that is at the limit of the considerable technical capabilities of Blizzard.
Albeit I would absolutely love to see JustCause2 engine in a MMO. Hard problem is come up with the interesting non repetitive activities . Crafting, trade and pvp comes to mind as good options, But there is large segment of pve players and you gotta have something for them too, which is hard to fit in very large world at present imho
ReplyDeleteYes. The biggest challenge for the game designer is to come up with things to do when people just log in for 30 minutes or even one hour. Some ideas:
- Arena style games against PvE mobs inside the city for some money.
- Arena style PvP games against other people for money and reputation. But please don't make it too competetive; otherwise you run into WoW's balance problems. Arena just for fun and gold: Blizzard tries to do it in Diablo3.
- Playing the local market
- Using professions to create stuff
- Maybe some kind of mission that randomly spawn in the (large) countryside outside the city. Think of EVE Online missions.
- Buy some stuff cheap that you can transport to some other city as soon as you have more time available.
- Organise a travel with a group of other players for friday night.
Right now WoW has LFG dungeons, PvP Battles, PvP Arenas for short term fun. Most of this can be translated without the immersion reducing aspects of teleports and anonymity.
- players shouldn't feel obliged to travel simply because the next tier of content is at the other end of the world.
ReplyDelete- corollary, they shouldn't be forced to constantly travel the four corners of the compass because the six dungeons of the current tier are thusly scattered.
Yes, those two points contradict. I would suggest a game design philosophy of horizontal expansion. This is easier if the next point also applies.
- if a player chooses to home themselves in some location, then there should be some impact/effect which gradually gives them advantages in that location, advantages which are not available in other locations.
Bonus idea:
- if long distance travel does take an actual long time (hours!), then allow the player to book themselves onto a transport (ship, zepp, camel caravan, etc) and then log off ... and have the travel continue while logged off.
Garumoo, I think I already pointed it outk, but it probably doesn't hurt to repeat it. So thanks! Long travel cannot be fun if you have to do it all the time. Just scrapping teleports from WoW would make it much, much worse.
ReplyDelete---
- if a player chooses to home themselves in some location, then there should be some impact/effect which gradually gives them advantages in that location, advantages which are not available in other locations.
difficult. You don't want to give people too much incentive to never leave their home. On the other hand 'home' should mean something.
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- if long distance travel does take an actual long time (hours!), then allow the player to book themselves onto a transport (ship, zepp, camel caravan, etc) and then log off ... and have the travel continue while logged off.
An interesting idea. I'm not really a fan of it, though. This tells your playerbase that you consider travel to be boring (and exspect them to consider it boring). Just like increasing EP gain tells players that you consider leveling to be boring. This effect should not be underestimated.
I, also, fail to see the gameplay value, as well as the immersion value. From a gameplay PoV it is a cumbersome restriction that forces players to log off. From an immersion PoV it doesn't really add anything, because the time spent traveling is experinced in real life.
In short: It feels like one of those compromises between two positions in the development team.
have the travel continue while logged off
ReplyDeleteWell, it's a bit like how skill training continues while logged off in EvE, and how crops grow in Farmville.
The idea to this design is to make it possible to uproot and change your home location, but doing so requires planning and preparation. To tell the players that long distance travel is possible, but also that is not required (ie. no porting to the other side of the world to run a quick instance).
Its available as an option, purely for players to discount it as viable for regular gameplay. In contrast, staying in the one location and making the most of it now looks so much better.
The design idea is intended to be considered in the same category as doing a server transfer: you have to log off, it will take some time, it happens without your continued attention, and tomorrow you wake up in a new place (only this time, the place has entirely different geography etc, not just different people in the same place).