Side Note: Turbine Games Still Need More Polish

What’s Turbine been doing the past year? Nothing too exciting, it seems… even though DDO went free-to-play and is apparently making lots of cash, it still has only a skeleton crew working it. But Turbine did just launch a new Lord of the Rings expansion — Siege of Mirkwood. It’s supposed to be really good, too. “Okay cool, it’s probably time I check in on Lotro,” I thought, early this morning. As of 1:30 am the following day, I am still not finished downloading.

I went and got the “Play in Under An Hour” download package. It started off downloading really fast, faster than my regular torrents, even. Then it stopped. I mean, it completely stopped downloading at all, for an hour. I shut it down and restarted it and it went for a while longer and then stopped. Repeat ad nauseum and finally it was finished! I logged in to the character-select screen, and … hey, that’s not what my old character was supposed to look like! He’s only wearing underwear!

Ha ha, of course, the quick downloader hasn’t downloaded my old avatar’s clothes. That’s fine. I’ll just look naked or whatever until it downloads. I click Log In. No, actually I will sit at the “loading” screen for HOURS without any feedback, while it downloads the needed art in tiny scrips and scraps. After hours of waiting, I gave up. (EDIT: apparently I should have shown up as red with a note that my character wasn’t available. But he was in the newbie town of Bree so I guess it figured he was available. I dunno.)

Eventually I uninstalled and tried to get smarter about this. “I do own the original disks, I’ll just install from disk and then patch.” As of this writing, the CD install is still patching. It’s been patching for 10 hours, with an average 200 KB/s download speed. So that’s like 8 gigs of downloaded data and I’m still at -700% complete.

No, really, I’m at -700% complete.

Is that good? Am I almost done? I don’t know. It went to 100% and then kept right on going, all the way up to 800% or so, and then flipped. Now it’s a negative number, but it’s slowly getting smaller. Maybe when it reaches 100% again it will be done.

I don’t know. All I know is they need to work harder to make this game accessible to returning players, because this is the second time in recent memory that I’ve tried to play Lotro and the second time I’ve failed to manage to play at all. Turbine could spend some time on this. I think that would be okay. I mean, they would make their money back for the time spent.

Okay, I’m done with the vitriol now.

I read Scott Jenning’s blog post about how terrible the year was for MMOs, and I had to agree that it wasn’t a fun year for MMO companies. “But still,” I thought to myself, “If I had my own blog, I would have a couple of counter-points to make.” That’s when Sandra reminded me I have something called Elder Care, or Elder Scrolls, or something like that. I finally remembered my password, and here I am! Um, I have some counter-points to make. (Put your vitriol helmets on now.)

Fate Was Not Kind To You, WAR, Because You Were Developed By Morons

Some readers have asked me why I didn’t pick on Warhammer Online. The fact is that I did write about how doomed they were… but those posts never left the “drafts” section of the blog, because it was too easy a target. It’s like making fun of the mentally challenged kid: you don’t get points for showing them up. Anybody in the industry could have predicted what happened to WAR with 100% accuracy.

Gee, was WAR created by somebody who thinks people who disagree with him should be “burned at the stake”? Wait, and did that same article point out that WAR was developed primarily by inexperienced developers because they were easier to cow into obedience? Yes? Wait, literally? That wasn’t even exaggerated? Huh. And they said they hate playing other MMO’s because it “gives them ideas”? Weird. Maybe… maybe… could any of that have had something to do with the tons of newb mistakes they made? Nah. It was probably just the economic downturn.

In case you are confused by sarcasm, what I mean is the company deserved to fail due to their incompetence and they did, and anybody surprised by this is probably surprised by other predictable things, like the sun rising. They made a DAoC clone that wasn’t as compelling as the original, with a weaker IP (sorry, Warhammer tabletop fan(s), but it’s true: your IP is not even as big a draw as the free “Vaguely Camelot” IP), and they spent an amazing amount of time and money making the game, yet launched it with a pittance of content. And then they did all sorts of crazy things, like opting not to open forums, even for support. This made many players’ initial experience, including my own, pretty miserable. I had originally predicted they would have only 100k by their first-year mark, and I don’t know what exact number they have now, but I’d be a little surprised if they have that many playing customers.

Champions Online Falls On Face

I just canceled my Champions Online account yesterday. The place is a ghost town; I’d be confused and amazed if they have more than 50k subscribers (because, if so, where the heck are they?). Frankly, the game was launched way too soon, and they did the dumbest thing you can possibly do to a fragile game: they made a launch-day patch that made the game tons harder. After months of beta-testing, they threw ALL their data out the door, jacked all the monster difficulties way up, and shipped it. What kind of an idiot would do that? Actually, every newb team makes this mistake. It’s caused by thinking, “Holy SHIT, players will reach level 50 in a month of play! We have to fix it!” And so they fix it, all right. They make the game so un-fun that nobody bothers to get to 50 at all. Ta-da!

The thinking is really just that simple, and it’s always this stupid knee-jerk last minute reaction among the team. MMO’s need players to survive, and a traditional boxed game gets 90% of its players from its initial launch. So MMO companies are really keen to keep all those players paying for at least three months… ideally six months. But they realize they’re out of time, so they just flip some knobs, twiddle some monster skills, and hope for the best. Inevitably, they would have been better off letting people level quickly. Some might get bored, but they are likely to come back later when more stuff is added. If you make the game into an unbalanced muckball, everybody’s experience will be terrible and they won’t come back.

Sandra and my newbie experience was pretty amusingly bad. Our level 13 characters got stuck, unable to continue playing because we picked the wrong skills — we could no longer defeat monsters anywhere near our level. We had to roll new characters! That was basically when Sandra quit. I kept going a while longer, but the imbalances were pretty dramatic (both too easy and too hard, randomly, in every aspect of the game), and it sapped the fun out of being a superhero.

It’s better now, actually. It’s kind of fun now. If you like playing in a ghost town. Because there’s almost nobody left. If you want to play, I recommend you do it now! It’s getting hard to find PvP arena groups as it is… soon it may be impossible. I don’t know what they’re gonna do… well, if Cryptic can hold on until the Xbox 360 version launches, I’ll be happy to give the game another shot on the console.

“Of course Cryptic will stay alive!” you say. “They have Star Trek Online coming out in a couple months!” Uh, hrm. Well, here’s where I don’t pick on Star Trek Online because it’d be like making fun of the mentally handicapped again. Sorry, guys. I love the IP, and I know Cryptic is working hard, and I’d love to be proven wrong, but I can’t see it happening. STO won’t be substantially more polished than Champions was at launch. Why? Because it’s a significantly more complicated game, and it’s launching much too soon to be good enough. It will be lucky to retain 100k subscribers a year after launch. That number would be fine, except they probably need a lot more money than that to keep the lights on at Cryptic HQ, let alone repay their debts.

Aion Core Gameplay Involves Grinding and Being Murdered Repeatedly

Oh god Aion is a beautiful game. I don’t just mean the inhumanly pretty avatars. I mean the whole world has great art direction. It feels like Asian Disneyland From Hell. It’s wonderful. Cute kangaroos hop up to you and box you to death. Mole people squeal and fall over in mid-combat, too excited to keep fighting. One of the first surprise encounters comes from cute animated stalks of evil corn. There are beautiful lakes full of loons calling, fish swimming, adorable lobsters nipping at your feet. This game has serious atmosphere.

But it has the biggest grind EVAR. I had lots of friends who started it and were excited by it, and they have all left, except for one. The invariable reason? “This game is grindy as hell.” It’s got serious pacing problems, and for a PvP game it takes WAY too long to get to the PvP part.

And then when you get to the PvP part, turns out it’s full of these bird men who are 20 levels higher than you who continuously kill you, for fun, just for the hell of it. I had read that there were, like, these elaborate tiers of combat, so I could occasionally fight people somewhere near my level. That has yet to ever happen. Well, sometimes I can sneak up on an enemy while they’re fighting in PvE, and gank ‘em. That makes me feel like a big dickhead.

I’m still paying for Aion, but… I can’t see myself staying in it for much longer. And I lasted longer than almost everyone I know. The worlds are still relatively populated, though not nearly as much as two months ago. But it’s a beautiful game, and the US maintainers are desperately trying to fix things — they’ve gone to double-XP weekends every weekend in order to try to get people up to higher level so they can PvP. Will they succeed? Search me.

Aion is still a big hit in its homeland. But it’s a just modest success in the US. And the sad thing is, it’s the biggest US hit of the year by a long shot. (Ignoring WoW, which is on its own scale.)

Big-Ticket MMO’s Still Sucking, Facebook Games Growing More Fun

Another thing Scott’s blog pokes fun at are the terrible Facebook games that seem to be soul-sucking leeches, designed to hook players like crack and then spam their friends list for more suckers. Those games really are pretty terrible. But why is everybody focusing on these leech games? They are the dying breed on Facebook.

I was just working on a Facebook game with a lot of actual gameplay. It’s in Flash and it’s actually got a real virtual world and avatars and everything. And content and gameplay and so on! This is the future of Facebook games: actual games that happen to be integrated closely with Facebook.

Smart devs should get in on this while they can — there’s still time to make one of these second-gen Facebook games… that is to say, games with actual content. But I understand if you want to just make fun of Farmville some more instead. It is definitely easier.

Games Are Nickel And Diming Me, But I Am Still Not Angry

Another thing Scott’s blog pokes fun at is how games are charging for more stuff now. He listed off a lot of examples, but none of them were at all upsetting to me, with one exception: charging for rerolls in Champions, because Champions was designed to need lots of rerolls in order to play well. So charging for it is exceptionally mercenary for a subscription-based game.

But the other stuff? Charging for world transfers, race changes, character renames, whatever? Yeah, go ahead. In fact, please do more of it. I like these sort of options and I don’t mind paying a few bucks for them. You are not losing customers by adding a for-pay race-changing option. You just aren’t. It’s not a problem. I don’t know what Scott is smoking.

Conclusion: It’s The Business Model, Stupid

It’s tempting to say that these big-league MMOs are suffering primarily due to the economic downturn. But I have a hard time buying it. The Flash casual game market has really heated up this year; our FlashGameLicense.com brokerage site is showing huge monetary growth in terms of online games of all sorts: casual, hardcore, whatever. I’ll admit that no Flash product is as hardcore as “go to the store and buy a $50 box to play this game”. But DDO is apparently breathing new life into Turbine as a “freemium” downloadable game. Champions and Warhammer could be doing this, too. Why aren’t they?

The reason they don’t is that small MMO companies are venture-capital collection machines. They seem to exist to get venture capital. They do not exist to eke out a modest profit off of their games; they need to show HUGE (500%) return on investment in order to keep getting more venture capital. So what happens when their game isn’t a 500% ROI game? They don’t try to salvage it and turn a nice sum. They immediately go about desperately making another game, another gambit, another roll of the dice, maybe we can keep this boat afloat before the VCs shut us down, maybe they won’t strip us for parts if this next game/expansion/repackaging/acquisition is a hit!

VC’s are used to most of their bets not paying off. That’s why they demand such huge rewards from the ones that do. Would it be possible to take 5 million and make a game that returns 15 million in ten years? Yes, that’s not even that hard. But good luck getting only 5 mil in venture capital. You’ll need to set your sites bigger. You’ll need to go for the mega-game that jousts with WoW’s popularity in order to get venture capitalists excited.

It’s a dead-end dream for most companies. The thing Sandra and I have always wanted to do in the MMO world is take one of these modest games, these Champions or Warhammers or Asheron’s Calls or whatever, and run them, and turn a tidy profit for many years. That dream is hard to realize because these companies aren’t interested in turning a minor profit on a game. (With the very notable exception of SOE, who is happy to keep a game going as long as it’s in the black. Good on ‘em. Note that they aren’t a venture-capital company, though.) For most game companies, when a game goes out the door and flops on its face, it’s not time to repurpose the game and figure out how to make a profit — it’s time for a hail-mary pass with the entire company.

In other words, yeah, these 2009 MMOs sucked. But not really. If the stakes weren’t so high, these would all be little success stories. They “suck” because they threw millions and millions at a product, scrambled as hard as they could for a few years, and then rolled the dice to see if they got rich instantly. They didn’t. So, bam. They suck by fiat.

I think we’re seeing that infusing game companies with fifty million in venture capital is not a reliable way to make or run a game. But we’re at a dead spot right now, where MMO’s are still too hard for a small privately-funded team to make, but not profitable enough for a VC firm to get rich off of. So the games keep imploding, the same sad story over and over. And yes, there will be more of the same for 2010, but we’re going to start seeing more of the small companies making names for themselves, showing reasonable profits and carving into the mainstream gaming audience. 2011 is when the flood-gates will finally burst.

Conclusion Part 2:

To be clear: I don’t mean to be picking on Scott Jennings. It does seem like I am, but this is just what happens when you single-source your vitriol-post. Scott’s a good guy who knows what he’s talking about, he won’t mind.

So, yeah, this is why I try not to share my random game opinions on the blog unless there’s something constructive to add. But I guess I’m averaging one hate-post a year, which isn’t too bad.

So yeah… I’ll see you later, when I finally manage to get the next of those Psychology for Designers articles completed!

“Learn to think like a designer, not a player.”

You’ll hear this a lot from game developers giving advice to would-be designers. And it’s not wrong … but taken at face value, it leads to being a sub-par designer. There’s no value in mimicing what you think a stereotypical designer would do.

Better advice: “Learn to understand how different types of players (including you!) experience your game, and analyze that like a designer.”

Not nearly as memorable, but way more accurate.

All game designers should take a few courses in psychology. This will help a lot more than you think, especially if you’re aiming to be a systems designer (as opposed to a level or content designer). Game design is an application of psychology: the goal of a game is typically to entertain and/or engage the human being playing the game, and studying psychology helps explain how we entertain and engage people.

Don’t believe me? Let’s just peek into our Psych 101 course book for some examples. Let’s talk about positive and negative reinforcement! Then we’ll follow up with the role of tedium in behavior management.

Positive Reinforcement versus Negative Reinforcement

Positive reinforcement is when you reward good behavior with a cookie. Negative reinforcement is when you reward good behavior by making the pain stop.

These can be mathematically equivalent, but they have psychological ramifications you need to consider.

Suppose you’re designing the food system for a new MMO, and you decide that characters become physically weaker if  they don’t eat a piece of food every few hours. (Eating food is thus a negative reinforcement because it removes the weakness that comes from being hungry.) Another way to design the same system is to give players a buff when they eat food. This is a positive reinforcement.

Mathematically they look like the same system, because you’re going to balance the game based on the “fed state” — in other words, when you figure out how tough monsters should be, you’ll assume the player is properly fed. It matters not to the spreadsheet whether food is a buff or just the absence of a debuff.

But it matters to the player! Modern gamers expect all punishment to cease when they are playing your game the right way. You can take advantage of this to train players to play your game the right way.

In this example game, since players NEED to eat in order to play correctly, you should use negative reinforcement. You’d put an “I’m Hungry!” icon on the screen whenever they needed to eat, and you’d remind them that they are weaker due to lack of food. When they eat, these indicators go away and the character pats her stomach like she’s happy to have finally eaten. This helps teach players when they aren’t playing optimally. Even if players don’t get the hint right away, it will sink in eventyally. If they’re dying a lot, they’re likely to think “I should really eat something. That will help!”

On the other hand, if eating provides only tiny effects (and you didn’t balance encounters assuming that players were fully satiated all the time), then you would present eating as a “buff” instead. This teaches players that eating is a good thing, but not something mandatory.

Now, if you secretly decided that players should always be eating food or else they are sub-par statistically (and unable to complete quests for their level), you’d really confuse them by making food a buff instead of debuff. Players intuit that a buff is an optional power benefit. They do not expect you to have factored this optional benefit into every combat encounter… if you did that, it wouldn’t be optional! Be wary of sending mixed signals like that. It’s pretty common, but then again it’s also pretty common for MMO’s to be unintuitive.

Both positive and negative reinforcement are very useful in every MMO — you just have to decide which to use in each situation. ”But I don’t want negative reinforcement in my game!” you say. It’s got that word negative in there. That can’t be positive! Actually, when used in moderation, negative reinforcement is fine. For instance, World of Warcraft treats armor repair as a negative reinforcement, and it works great. You only get into trouble when you overdo it. When a game has too many negative reinforcements, the player can feel like they’re having to do too much “work” to play the game.

The Role of Tedium

Punishment and negative reinforcement often go hand in hand, because usually you can’t negatively reinforce unless you do something unpleasant first, which the player will perceive as punishment. In WoW, you’re punished for letting your armor break: you take a lot more damage in combat. Repairing your armor is negatively reinforced by removing that punishment.

So normally they are directly related. But there’s one major case where this isn’t true: players don’t generally perceive being bored as a punishment per se. This means that developers can inject tedium into their game, and then negatively reinforce behaviors in order to remove the tedium. Brilliant! Well, sort of.

Walking from city to city in World of Warcraft is torturously boring. Using a gryphon is moderately less tedious, and having your own flying mount is less tedious still. WoW uses tedium — and the slow removal of it — as a balance and reward mechanism.

Balancing through tedium works! But it won’t keep working forever: its acceptance among gamers is quickly disappearing. Tedium is the last bastion of the old punishing mechanisms from the early days of computer games. Remember those games? Man, they were punishing.

Back in the day, if you died, you were severely punished. In Ultima Online, you lost every item you had, and you could even lose the deed to your house and all your belongings. Holy shit that was punishing. This worked great, though, because the fun of the game outweighed the punishment. No, that’s not it… let’s see… what was it? Oh yeah: players didn’t know of any other game they could go to.

Since then, punishments have mostly disappeared from games. Why? Because all other things being equal, players tend to go to the less-punitive game. From a designer standpoint this is actually a little frustrating. One of our most potent psychological tools — punishment — is slowly dwindling away! This actually makes it harder to train players to find the fun in our games. But we are never going back to the time when mainstream MMO’s punish you heavily for making mistakes. That time is over. As a designer, this is a tiny bit saddening. But as a player, this is a much happier time to be playing MMOs.

However, there’s one major kind of punishment still in the toolbox. Tedium is the last type of punishment in MMO games. It’s survived because it’s so insidious that players don’t really think of it as a punishment. Nevertheless, tedium was actually on its way out when WoW came along. WoW revived tedium for its travel system (and, to a lesser extent, for its food/drink system), and it got away with it because the rest of the game was so damned good. (In comparison to the other games available.)

The designers didn’t arbitrarily add tedium to travel. They had clear goals in mind. They believed that slow travel was the key to making the world seem “large” and immersive. With instantaneous travel, they reasoned, every place in the world would just be a hop, skip, and a jump away, and this would reduce the immersiveness of the world, which they believed was key to making the game fun over the long term. As an added bonus, having this tedium in the game meant they could remove the tedium over time as a reward mechanism.

They pulled it off, but don’t count on being able to follow their lead. Unless your game is so good in other ways that you can get away with an annoyance like tedious travel, you’re better off having instant travel mechanisms. Your world might be less immersive, and you will definitely have fewer rewards to give out because you can’t remove the tedium that isn’t there. But your game doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so you really have no choice. Heck, even WoW is busy removing tedium over time. The game gets less tedious practically every month. (Today’s Penny-Arcade is coincidentally about this very thing.)

I’m not saying all tedium must go. Like other types of punishment, it’s a great way to get players to think the way you want them to. Unforced tedium is not in any danger of going away. Suppose a player wants to keep stabbing low-level orcs in the newbie zone for as long as possible. It’s okay if this is a tedious way to play… assuming the player knows full well that they have made the choice to do something tedious. But tedium that can’t be avoided (such as a quest that makes players run for 15 minutes from the newbie city to a capital city) is not something players respect anymore.

Tedium is on its way out in games. Use tedium if you think you can get away with it, but … well, you probably can’t. Heck,  I personally prefer a jolt of explicit punishment over a jolt of tedium. That’s the ADHD crowd for you — tedium is worse than pain.

Punishment and tedium will never completely go away, but they have clearly waned in their influence. Keep that in mind when you design your game. If you go heavy on negative reinforcement, your game is likely to be perceived as “old-school”, and that may be exactly what you’re going for, if you want a niche title. If you want a broad-spectrum game, use sparingly.

Negative Reinforcement = Potent Spice

I want to reiterate that you shouldn’t plan to remove all negative reinforcement! Just treat it like you would a potent spice when cooking: a little goes a long way. Decide the handful of places where negative reinforcement will give your game a big benefit, and use it there. Remove it from all the places where it’s less important.

I really think psychology is a useful field for designers to study. I wanted to go into reinforcement schedules a bit, but that’ll be another time, I guess. Anyway, if you’re wondering “what should I study in college to learn to be a systems designer?”, a dozen credits in well-chosen psych courses are a good investment.

If you don’t work in the MMO industry, you probably have a skewed opinion of how live teams operate. On this blog, I often say that I’d much prefer to manage a live game than to create a new game from scratch, and you may be thinking, “Yeah, like you deserve that!”

You might be thinking my request sounds like one of the lazy animals from the story of the Little Red Hen:

“Who will help me code the MMO?” asked the little red hen (… I mean the MMO company).

“Not me,” said the independent MMO contractor. “I’m too busy doing fun easy things!”

“Fine, I will do it myself! Ah, but now who will help me run the MMO?”

“Ooh ooh I will!” said the contractor.

“No no, you didn’t help me make the MMO, so you don’t get to do the fun part! I will run it myself!”

If this is the story that runs through your head, you are definitely not from any of the major MMO companies. For the likes of Turbine, SOE, or Blizzard, making the MMO is the fun part. Working on the MMO afterwards is the terrible part.

You might expect that the people who spent five years making the game would be excited to run it after it ships. Turns out, not really. After five years of working on the same project, they’re so sick of it they never want to work on it again. They want it to be in good hands, certainly. And they want to have some oversight to keep people from damaging their vision of how the game should run. But they sure as hell don’t want to have to do that tedious maintenance stuff themselves. So companies tend to pull the experienced staff off of the live game pretty quickly, leaving behind junior people.

Live Teams Are Not Glamorous

I like the “tedious maintenance stuff.” I actually prefer working on the live team. This makes me very unusual in the MMO industry. I am also a pretty good engineer with a lot of experience, which means I don’t often end up on live teams — too experienced. At Turbine, I had a hard time getting onto the Asheron Call 2’s Live Team, because I was expected to help develop their next generation MMO engine instead. I wanted to work on AC2 after it ships?! None of my managers could understand why I wanted to be demoted like that!

But to people who enjoy the live team, well … there is nothing as good as it. The power you have! The instant feedback! The ability to literally make hundreds of thousands of people happy with just a few weeks of work. It’s very gratifying. There’s also the tedium and frustration and lack of resources and constant fire-fighting and oh my god I can’t keep up with everything… but that’s the price of the deal.

Of course, it doesn’t just happen that you hop onto the Live Team and suddenly you’re making game-design changes. At first there are a lot of smart and talented people at the helm, helping you learn the ropes, making the hard decisions for you, keeping you from doing stupid things. But inevitably they are pulled off to other projects, and somebody relatively junior gets the helm. That’s how I got to be in charge of balancing AC2’s classes.

Fortunately, I had a decade of engineering experience and understood how to tune complex systems. I wrote analyzers, modeled usage patterns, and made corrections.

Unfortunately, my approach did not take the “human equation” into consideration very well.

Learning to Balance the Human Equation

I found that the Feral Intendant class was 30% overpowered, and that’s why so many people were playing a Feral Intendant. Yet somehow, reducing the power of the Feral Intendant to the correct level did not suddenly make the game more fun… thousands of players were complaining and nobody was telling me they were happy about the change. Weird! I double checked my calculations. They were correct. So what had gone wrong?

Turns out that the people who played the other classes available to that race had taken on an “underdog” mentality. The people who played Claw Bearers liked that they were woefully underpowered compared to Feral Intendants. It was like playing the game on Hard Mode. And the people playing Feral Intendants liked playing on Easy Mode. In balancing the game I had failed to understand the needs of the people playing it. I just ham-handedly fixed the equations, instead of solving the problem with the finesse it needed. It was one of my more serious missteps. (And it’s a great example because I think it’s pretty obvious in hindsight. Most mistakes were much more subtle.)

But man, what a fast way to learn! After just a couple years of that, I became a good game balancer. The constant feedback loop helped me learn from my mistakes in a matter of weeks! Compare that to developers on traditional games, who must wait until the sequel ships before they get to try their hand at balance again. That’s why working on a live team is such a fast way to learn your craft: the feedback is so much faster than any other gaming platform, that it accelerates learning by dozens of times.

But AC2 cost millions of dollars to create. Turbine didn’t create it as a tool to help me hone my design skills, that’s for damned sure! How did I get to do it? Simple: the designers who would have done it were burned out of working on AC2, and were called away to work on the important New Project. AC2 wasn’t a blockbuster hit, so it didn’t make sense to use the rock star designers on it. Better to let the B team step in.

The Steady Hand Has Left The Rudder

But here’s the weird thing: WoW is exhibiting the same symptoms as AC2 did when I was doing the designing. The B team is in charge.

In February, we learned that lead designer (and part-time producer?) Jeff Kaplan had stepped away from WoW, off to work on the next big Blizzard game. However, if you were watching the game before that, it was obvious that major leadership changes had already happened months earlier. My guess is that Jeff Kaplan started moonlighting on the new project long before February. And many of the other key WoW live team people have also switched over, or are working on WoW only part-time.

Now, I am not being alarmist. The ship is still in intelligent, capable hands… but clearly not as experienced ones. Just as I did when I took over AC2, WoW is making newbie design mistakes that seem like a benefit on the surface, but are really not good decisions. There have been scores of examples… I’ll pick just a few.

“It’s always been stupid, and we just need to fix it!”

A few months back, the powers that be decided that Hunter ammunition didn’t work right. Hunters have to carry an arrow for every single shot they take, and in order to get the full benefits from them, they have to carry them in a special quiver — which doesn’t let you store other items in it, only ammo. All that ammo costs money, too.  Plus, it leaves the designers unable to give out awesome “raid arrows” because you’d just shoot them all and then where would you be? Even though ammo had been a fine and fun distinguishing quirk of Hunters for years, it was time to Fix It.

The first plan was announced: WoW would no longer have consumable ammo. Instead, you would just need a single “infinite arrow” that you stuck in your ammo slot, and this would let you shoot your bow forever. Problem solved! No more quivers, no more pack space wasted, no more costs. And now raids could drop “loot arrows” that wouldn’t get used up! Perfect!

Whoops, turns out that plan would be hard. So they announced their backup plan: now ammo just stacks to very high numbers. Instead of having stacks of 200, now you can have stacks of 1000. This at least addresses the “pack space” issue. Call it a win! And they removed the magical benefits from quivers, so you no longer needed to use them. So they fixed the immediate emergency, and they’ll get to the “correct fix” later.

The thing is, there was no emergency. Sure, Hunters were happy to have a few extra pack slots. But the change threw all sorts of other things out of whack: magic quivers are still given out as quest rewards… they just aren’t magical anymore. And leathercrafters can still make them! They just can’t sell them to any sane Hunter. And so on… the game wasn’t really cleaned up after this change.

But I’m sure it felt so pressing, so urgent. So they had to address the issue, side-effects be damned.

Without somebody experienced at the helm, the voice of the myopic designer tends to be the loudest. “WE HAVE TO FIX THE HUNTER” they said. Maybe they said, “Hunters have to spend 65% more on bare essentials than any other class. I will never be able to balance class expenditures like this!” Or maybe they said, “Hunters have to waste more inventory slots than any other class. It damages quest completion rates!” Or maybe they just said, “It’s SO STUPID. It’s always been stupid, and we just need to fix it! Do it now!” Obviously, nobody thought very hard about the ramifications, and nobody spent any time easing players into the idea. And nobody stopped to make sure they did a good job.

So some tiny little mistakes crept into the game. Nothing huge. Nothing that will sink the Titanic. But mistakes nonetheless… “magical” crafted quivers that aren’t magical and can’t be sold are clearly a mistake. These little bugs accumulate, like lint on a hardwood floor.

The Lint Accumulates

When we say that WoW is “polished”, what we mean is that it is surprisingly clean of linty little bugs like these. But that’s changing.

More and more little mistakes have crept into the game recently — changes that are positive on the surface, but have not been implemented with the finesse that makes them worthwhile. Mana expenditure rates have changed, rules for dungeons have been tweaked, the cost of items has fluctuated. It all seems useful. But it’s usually full of little side effects. Worse, it doesn’t take the human equation into account: it doesn’t counter-balance for the actual needs of the players very well. There are ways to meet both goals, but you have to try a lot harder at it than WoW is.

Remember when WoW class balance happened every six to eight months? Players were actually excited when their classes’ turn came around. I remember being so astonished to see players that were actually happy to have their classes redesigned. But now, every class is fiddled with every few weeks. It’s not exciting anymore. Instead of sitting on the changes and carefully honing them, the designers are just firing out every new idea they have, willy nilly, until they get it right. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if you get it right. It matters if players are excited and having fun. Balance changes are happening too fast, and for too little benefit overall.

Back in the day, QA held the game to a higher standard. Consider that there never used to be skill changes that would invalidate the client tooltips about a skill (unless it was an emergency exploit-fix). If the designer wanted to tweak a skill, they had to wait until the client could be updated. But the QA bigwigs are off doing something else now, so it’s easy for the designers to slip this stuff in. And they do. All the time. Skills are routinely incorrectly displayed now, as the designers’ need for perfect balance far outpaces the ability to do client updates.

Who’s In Charge Again?

You would never let your lead artist drive decisions for your game. Chances are, they would say “This dungeon is too brightly lit! We need to hotfix it now or the mood will be ruined forever!”

But unlike artists, designers get a free ride. They’re supposed to know what’s best for the game. If the producers are busy, they trust the designers will do good things. But designers, especially young ones, get myopic. They tune into little issues — like perfect class balance – and turn them into epic quests. If the designer could just fix this balance problem, people on the boards would stop complaining, and the game would be perfect!

No. It will not happen. Perfection will not be achieved, ever. But there’s nobody around to rein them in anymore, so they try and try and try. And leave little messes everywhere they go.

Suddenly Communications Are Open

Another surefire way to tell that upper management has left the building? The systems designer “Ghostcrawler” has suddenly started posting a lot, even about… well, nothing. For years developers were nowhere to be seen, which was a shame. And then suddenly the lead systems designer has time to play the forum game? Yeah, whoever was making employee policies just doesn’t have time for WoW anymore. Not a bad thing, in this case, but certainly a dramatic shift of policies.

Nowadays it’s common for WoW to tell people to “check the forums for game updates.” This is a total newb mistake. Only your loudest and most annoying users will check your forums for updates. So every “update” is met with derision because only assholes post on game forums. (Statistically speaking, anyway.) Game updates are specifically what the launcher’s update screen is for. If you’re outpacing the ability to update the update screen, chances are you’re changing too much too fast. Slow down and get it right the first time.

It’s likely that Ghostcrawler started posting shortly after the upper management started wandering off to other projects. Ghostcrawler’s a good guy… in fact, his posts remind me a lot of what I sounded like when I was posting about AC2’s skill balance. He knows how to balance things. But he is completely unable to see the big picture. Every tiny imperfection seems like a ruinous problem. He feels assaulted on all sides by problems, too, and doesn’t think there’s time to do things the right way. But this is an illusion that happens to Live Teams because they get so close to the product. He needs someone checking over his decisions and making sure they’re worthwhile. He doesn’t have that.

WoW: No Longer Big Kahuna at Blizzard

Ghostcrawler and the rest of the team will learn their craft soon enough. WoW will survive the experience. But what’s interesting is that it tells us quite clearly that WoW is no longer the most important thing at Blizzard… in fact, it might be third or fourth place. It’s really interesting that this happened so soon. I didn’t expect it to happen to WoW while it still had 10+ million players or more still paying. But a company has only so many top-notch people, and you always want your most-experienced people on the new thing, so it makes sense.

To be clear, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When the game stops being in the spotlight, the live team suddenly gets a lot more flexibility to make the game fun, instead of being forced to stick to now-outdated “design visions”. The dramatic increase in WoW’s mobility options is certainly due to the lack of oversight. But without that safety-net of supervision, they need to exercise a lot of willpower and a lot of wisdom.

Ghostcrawler, and anybody else on the design team of WoW right now, I have a little unsolicited advice from somebody who’s been there: convince your bosses to let you play a different MMO for two weeks. On the clock. Don’t touch WoW. I know it feels like there’s a disaster every day and you can’t possibly stop focusing on WoW, but you can. After you get back, play WoW with a different class than you normally play. You’ll see so many new things! Your priorities will do a 180. I guarantee you it will help your perception.

Do you remember this part from the Wizard of Oz movie? It’s my favorite part:

				GLINDA
		You don't need to be helped any longer.
		You've always had the power to go back to
		Kansas.

				DOROTHY
		I have?

				SCARECROW
		Then why didn't you tell her before?

				GLINDA
		Because she wouldn't have believed me. She
		had to learn it for herself.

It turns out that Dorothy could have gone home at any time during the movie! But if Glinda had just told her that clicking her ruby slippers together would teleport her home, Dorothy would have been unable to believe it. She had to learn it for herself or she could never learn it.

We’ve all been there plenty of times, right? The Ruby Slippers Phenomenon is part of human nature. Of course I had to date that girl even though everyone told me it would end badly. Of course I had to make an indie casual game even though everyone said it would be a flop. No amount of talking would ever convince me.

In my professional life, I’ve made conscious effort to avoid this problem — that is, I’ve tried very hard to learn from the experiences of others. And I’ve had, eh… sub-par results. It’s really hard to believe in the slippers if you didn’t figure it out for yourself. So I’m not pointing fingers at other people who have the same issue. But we do need to try to avoid learning every lesson the hard way.

The #1 reason we dismiss other people’s lessons is by pretending that they “aren’t applicable here.” User-created quests are a great example. No achievement-oriented MMORPG has ever had user-created quests before, so there’s “no possible way anybody could know if it would work”. (Let’s pretend that Anarchy Online didn’t have a simple custom mission generator … remember, most game developers burn out within 5 years, so very few working designers were around for AO!)

When designers would bring up this feature (and yes, it’s been brought up on every game I’ve worked on), the veteran designers would tell them, “That’s going to backfire tremendously. People will exploit it to make the easiest possible missions, and you won’t like the results.” This is always countered by some variety of “you can’t possibly know that for sure!” But actually, working on a live team teaches that lesson very quickly. From AC2, I learned:

• Players subconsciously calculate the cost-to-benefit ratio of content when deciding if it’s fun. For most MMO players, more reward = more fun. (This is a bitch of a lesson to learn, too. “My custom-scripted quest was so incredibly cool! Why aren’t players doing the quest? Well, yes, the reward was a little sub-par, but so what? You’re telling me they aren’t playing it because of THAT? Players can’t be THAT shallow!” Ha ha, newb.)
• Players aren’t objective reviewers. If you ask them to grade content, they will grade more rewarding content higher than other content even if it isn’t as good by other metrics (like plot, writing, annoyance factor, or originality).
• Many players spend incredible amounts of time finding ways to min-max the system so they can get more power for less effort. That’s part of the fun for many players. So there are tens of thousands of people actively looking for mistakes, loopholes, and gray areas in your game. All the time.

“Yes yes,” the other designers would say, “those lessons from the live team are interesting, but that isn’t exactly the same situation as user-created content, is it? Nobody can say for sure if user-created quests are problematic.” Maybe, just maybe, users could be convinced to grade content fairly. Maybe they would discover how fun it is to run really well-plotted quests instead of just trying to level up as fast as possible. Maybe players can change their stripes. Nope. MMORPG players are as predictable as the sunrise.

When City of Heroes released its user-created mission generator, it was mere hours before highly exploitative missions existed. Players quickly found the way to min-max the system, and started making quests that gave huge rewards for little effort. These are by far the most popular missions. Actually, from what I can tell, they are nearly the only missions that get used. Aside from a few “developer’s favorite” quests, it’s very hard to find the “fun but not exploitative” missions, because they get rated poorly by users and disappear into the miasma of mediocrity.

This was not what the designers hoped for. Somehow they had convinced themselves that the number of exploiters would be relatively low — certainly not the vast majority of the users. But they were wrong, and now they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. They feel they must counteract these abusive quests, “for the sake of balance”. But how? Well the first step is to ban people who make cheaty content. But what’s cheaty? Do they explicitly list every possible exploit condition? What if they miss one? Nah, then the problem would start all over again. Instead, how about if they just issue blanket threats that they’ll ban missions that seem “exploitative”, without actually explaining what is and isn’t “exploitative”? They went with the latter.

So now, any user-created mission that is “exploitative” will get deleted, and users who played it will get their XP retroactively lowered, or even lose their character. So what counts as exploitative? One or two of the “exploits” are pretty obvious, but it’s really unclear where the line is drawn. Their forums are struggling with this very problem:

Are all-boss maps ok? Are all-AV maps ok? Are custom enemy groups with only one mob ok? Two mobs? Three? Five, but with no minions?

Or do we not get to know before they sack us?

Bingo. You don’t know if you’re breaking the rules until you get punished. So the developers are creating a chilling effect on their own content generator. Now it’s risky for players to even use user-created quests. What if some customer service rep decides the quest is exploitative? You’d retroactively lose your XP. It’s best to just to stick to the old dev-made quests, the ones you know won’t get you punished.

They made the wrong call here. Without some guidelines about what’s legit and what isn’t, I would certainly keep away from most user missions. Their lead designer reinforced that they won’t be giving useful guidelines out, saying:

I would say that a good interpretation of abuse is “Disregard for the risk and/or time to reward ratio”.

This is startlingly unhelpful to people trying to figure out how to make ban-safe, but fun, content. To keep this fiasco from chilling the buzz, they need to publish guidelines about what is and isn’t “fair”, or better yet, code this fairness into their tools. As I write this, pick-up groups are running user-generated quests consisting of nothing but max-level boss monsters, so that doesn’t seem to be “unfair”… of course, since there’s no guidelines, who knows if those quests are about to get banned? Since deletion only happens after an “abusive” quest is reported to customer service, it could just be a matter of time before any quest you play gets banned and your hard work gets reversed. Worse yet, since the rules are secret and enforced by numerous people, it is very likely that they will be enforced semi-arbitrarily, and will tend to become more aggressive over time.

But the thing is, even if they make the rules explicit, it’s not going to help the “power-leveling problem” which is ostensibly the reason for all of this grief. Unless they remove all difficulty options from the system, there will always be easier and harder ways to level. And remember what I said above: users tend to prefer easier content with better rewards. This isn’t limited to user-created content — it’s true for designer-made content, also. But designer-made quests don’t get graded by the players. Player-voted content like this will always gravitate towards easy. And pick-up groups will always be picking the most rewarding content with the least annoyance. And the game devs will keep being unhappy about it.

I hope they can find a compromise that makes this all worthwhile, but even when they do, the costs will be huge. All the tweaking, pleading, balancing, and customer service time involved is hard to imagine. Man, the customer service costs alone are tremendous! Think about it: CoH now has customer service personnel evaluating tons of content and deciding if it’s “fair” or not. Plus they have to deal with “incorrectly flagged” content, plus handling the thousands of additional complaint calls … unless they make clever decisions quickly, the labor and maintenance costs of their system will be in the millions of dollars over the next few years. This is not what game owners like to hear. And to add insult to injury, what started out as a PR win seems to be turning into a PR failure almost overnight. Personally, I think the most tragic cost is that their developers will have to continue to tweak this system for months or years to come. They could be adding other features, but instead, they have to try to bandage this system over and over again. Even if they win the battle, they may lose the resource war.

I’m not saying CoH is doomed — this won’t kill them or anything, even if their user-content tools aren’t a success in the long run. I’m not even saying they were dumb for trying this. Every game has “proven the ruby slippers” about a few things. These are missteps that seem really obvious in hindsight, and were pretty obvious beforehand, too, but somebody had to try them… because they couldn’t quite believe it if they didn’t learn it for themselves. So I’m really happy that CoH added this. They’re proving the ruby slippers by showing that this sort of system takes tremendous effort — Herculean effort — to be successful. And I’m pretty sure the CoH team will never be happy with the level of “exploitation” that happens with the system.

Now maybe we won’t have to debate whether user-created quests in an achievement-oriented game are a good idea or not. Oh, who am I kidding? In just a few years all the designers will be new again and nobody will remember CoH’s hard-earned lessons. Sigh…

The Need To Make An MMO

Sandra and I worked in the mainstream MMO industry for a long time, but a couple years ago, we stopped. We stopped because we better understood what we wanted: neither of us was real happy making MMOs. What we wanted most of all is to run MMOs. Unfortunately for us, running an MMO tends to require you to make one first. This is tricky, because the traditional AAA MMO takes three or four years and 50 people, and has a 50% chance of success at best. These are not odds we like.

So we’ve done other things — consulted on MMOs, web games, and all sorts of other things, and it’s actually been a lot of fun. But in the back of the mind there is still The Calling. So we tried to make our own indie MMO on the cheap. These were 2D or text-based, and we just couldn’t get into them. We needed our MMO to be 3D. We’re spoiled like that. And for practical reasons, we needed it to be web-based, because we can’t imagine being able to get a boxed product on the shelves.

But making an MMO is a huge undertaking. It’s not just a fancy 3D client; it’s also a scalable server, tools to develop and maintain it, and infrastructure to run it. But Sandra and I are experienced server engineers; we believe we can use off-the-shelf tools and some cleverness to make a reasonable little game server. And we are becoming more comfortable with various infrastructure approaches. But how do we get a 3D game on top of it? One that’s web based, too, and one with powerful development tools already made for us?

We tried various client applications, but they sucked. However, there’s a new contender.

Enter Unity 2.5

I’ve been watching Unity for a year or so now. It’s been frustrating to watch, because the numbskull developers created their first versions only for the Mac! (The resulting applications could run on any platform, but the development tools required a Mac.) When you’re an indie, it’s hard to justify doling out a few grand for a Mac in order to test-drive a piece of software you’ve never used before. This restriction didn’t stop Cartoon Network’s Fusion Fall from using the Mac-based version of Unity, but it kept most small developers, including us, on the sidelines.

However, two weeks ago they finally got around to making an accessible version of their program, one that runs on Windows or Macs. Finally! Sandra and I reorganized our schedules so that we would have a full week to experiment with Unity and a simple off-the-shelf server product called SmartFoxServer. Basically, we spent a week prototyping an MMO. Successfully.

What makes Unity special? Three things, in order of importance:

1. An enviably powerful tools pipeline, 
2. A rendering engine that works on any platform (and can run on web pages), 
3. And a very reasonable price tag. 

Let’s go over each one.

1. The Development Pipeline

“Development pipeline?” you may be thinking. “Who cares! How many polygons can it push? How many draw calls does it take to render things? Where are the technical stats?!” That’s basically irrelevant for us. We can design our game to run well under whatever conditions the engine allows. This is fortunate, because tech-wise, the engine just doesn’t seem that amazing. If you’ve played Fusion Fall, you may have noticed the low framerate for relatively simple scenes. It’s just something that has to be worked around.

There are lots of free or cheap 3D engines out there, and many of them are far more powerful than Unity in terms of rendering. But those were completely useless to us because they had no tools pipeline. A real MMO needs a client program, sure, but it also needs dozens of man-years worth of tools to build the content for the client. Indies don’t have the resources for that.

This is where Unity 2.5 shines. The Unity development environment integrates directly with Maya, Max, or various other 3D clients, plus code editors, sounds, and Photoshop files, to make a really compelling development environment. Import your 3D characters and drop them right into the scene, then start scripting them to respond to animations. Create terrain in Maya or directly from within Unity. Configure the built-in physics engine, position lights in real time, and then run everything together, watch it work, and fiddle with things on the fly. This is a great way to prototype stuff. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s … pretty alien to most programmers. If you’ve learned to develop in Flash, it’s sort of that mindset: it’s more resource oriented than scripting oriented.

Placing an asset on some terrain I just made

This can take some time to get used to, but it’s plenty powerful and elegant when you do master it, and it’s sufficiently versatile that you can use it for a whole lot of games.

On the other hand, this complex development environment makes it harder for programmers to manage lots of code. For instance, scripts are attached to assets and then the script’s variables are individually configured. This is done automagically and makes for a very cool customization experience. But if you decide that you need to change the values of a variable, you may not be able to find all the uses of that variable with a text-editor search: the user may have overridden those variables in the project itself, leaving you with no way to find the values programmatically.

It also presents some co-authoring issues: you’re all working on the same assets, after all. Unity did a decent job of letting you merge projects together, but that’s only if each developer is working on completely separate parts of the client. If you’re each fiddling with the same prefabricated object, you’re screwed. You can’t merge the binary assets: somebody’s work is going to get lost.

So this pipeline is ideal for small teams, or for larger teams who have spent some serious planning time figuring out how each person is going to avoid stepping on other people’s toes.

But let me just quantify this toolset’s value: Sandra and I were able to download the demo version, learn how to use it, and then create a 3D zone with mobile, animated avatars that talked, punched things, exploded, lit on fire, and so on — in a week. We also had to learn how to use the server library we picked, too. Fortunately for us, SmartFoxServer actually comes with a demo that shows you how to synch up multiple Unity clients. We achieved pretty amazing results in a week, but we took advantage of a lot of demos and free assets to make it happen.

Still… this is an unsurpassed prototyping tool. Even if you don’t use it for the final client, just imagine that you could get your next prototype up and running in a week, then iterate on the design every day after that. Now you can. I wish we’d had this when we were trying to prototype Star Trek’s space combat.

2. Web Based 3D Out of the Box

Another important advantage is its flexible runtime environment. It runs on Macs and Windows. It can be a stand-alone program or embedded in a browser. And it isn’t hampered by the “you must support the lowest common denominator” mentality that Flash has. For instance, your game can support multi-button mice, even though Macs may not have them. Conversely, you can program for that weird meta-key (the Command key, I guess?) even though its analog on PCs is the Windows key — and when you press the Windows key in a web page, the web page loses focus. But I’m very happy that they just gave us all the obvious capabilities and left us to figure out how to sanely use them, rather than oversimplifying.

The compiled files are nice and small, for what they are. I was able to get a pretty complex scene, complete with lots of scripts, animations, and networking, into an 8mb file. (Of course, users also have to download and install the Unity plug in for their browser; that’s where the “engine” code lives.)

It also has some complex tools for data streaming, which we didn’t get around to testing out yet, but they seem pretty robust. They also require a lot of planning, but that’s still a whole lot easier than coding it ourselves from scratch.

3. Cheap Price Tag

The price is very reasonable. It’s a couple grand for Sandra and I to each get professional licenses. That’s it; no percentage cut or anything scandalous like that. You even get free minor version upgrades added in (which is good, because that’s the only way they do bug fixes).

It’s not dirt cheap, but let’s be realistic: 3D games are still expensive. Sandra and I made an off-the-cuff budget that cost $40k for 3d artwork. That’s peanuts compared to a mainstream MMO, but puts it well out of the reach of the very smallest of indies. If you can’t afford a couple grand for an engine, you can’t afford to make a 3D game just yet. Maybe in five more years it’ll be at the cheapness level that 2D games are… but it’s just not there yet.

(There is also a cheap “indie” license that costs $200. This is a good way to get started with development, but the restrictions mean it’s not too practical for developing a complete commercial MMO. It should work okay for other 3D games though.)

What’s the Down Side?

So the good news is that this is a realistic way for a small team to cheaply make an MMO. Fusion Fall already exists: it proves that it’s possible. But Unity is not without it’s painful side. Once again there are three main issues:

1. Bugs
2. Language Issues
3. Documentation Flaws

1. Bugs

The primary down side is that Unity 2.5 crashes a whole lot. It’s essentially version 1.0 of the Windows line of Unity, and it shows this in its lack of stability. As the military would say, its “mean time between failure” is about one hour. This is not good. You’ll have to get used to saving every few minutes. But worse still is that two of our crashes caused the project to become corrupted. Maybe if we’d been more advanced with Unity we could have repaired and moved on, but as newbies, this was devastating. We lost many hours of work when this happened. We eventually instigated a “back up to a new folder every few hours” policy.

Obviously this needs to get fixed. Unity 2.5 has only been out a few weeks, so I am reasonably hopeful that they won’t leave us hanging for too long.

2. Language Issues

Unity has a schitzophrenic relationship with programming languages. Officially, it supports three languages: C#, JavaScript, and a variety of Python called “Boo”. But this is basically a lie.

It supports C# because it’s written in C#. This is the language you should probably use if you’re a team of experienced developers. However, none of the examples show how to use the code in C#. You will have to muddle with it for many hours to get the nuances.

It supports “JavaScript”, and this is the preferred language. The demos are all in JavaScript, and the code examples are in it, too. However, this isn’t really JavaScript. It’s an upgraded version that takes a bunch of ECMAScript features that aren’t in JavaScript. Then it tosses in some special functionality specifically for Unity. And then… it doesn’t document any of it. There is no language reference for their made-up version of JavaScript.

The support for “boo” is entirely mythical. I’ve seen no code for it ever, nobody on their forums uses it, and it goes without saying that there is not a lick of reference to it in their help. You’d be really stupid to decide to use boo for your project.

More annoying still? The languages are poorly interoperable. We were pulling in code from lots of different demos, and needed to use both JavaScript and C# code in the same project. It turns out that when you have two languages in use, there are dependency issues that can only be worked out by sticking your code in special “load me first” directories. Very kludgey. At least it can be done. 

3. Documentation Flaws

The “Unity Manual” is a tiny wisp of a thing. There are no real docs on how this stuff works. What there is, is a massive step-by-step tutorial that teaches you how to make a platform game in Unity. This is awesome… if you’re the sort of person who learns by doing. I am the sort of person who prefers to absorb all the data available and then start exploring. I simply can’t do that with Unity. Those docs don’t exist. For a commercial product they are significantly under-documented.

Expect to spend days just screwing around with the demos in order to have any clue what’s going on. Expect to search frantically through their forums in the hopes of understanding the syntax for their scripting languages and complex GUIs. Expect a few sudden jarring inconsistencies in what is otherwise a smooth and orthogonal interface.

The docs looked especially paltry when compared to SmartFoxServer’s luxurious documentation. Yes, SmartFoxServer is a much simpler piece of software than Unity. I don’t care though. Fickle that way. Need docs.

The Bottom Line

If the question is “can Unity be a viable MMO client?”, then it’s been answered by Fusion Fall: “yes”.  But the neat thing about Unity is that after spending a week with it, you would easily come to that conclusion on your own.

It’s not for everyone, of course. If you can’t deal with the relatively paltry graphics level allowed, or if you need your tools to conform to your existing pipeline, then you’re not going to like Unity. You have to be agile enough to work with it instead of against it.

But after a week of using it, I’d have to say that Unity feels pretty good. Maybe this program is the missing piece in our indie MMO plans.

Learning Is Fun …

Have you read Raph Koster’s book, Theory of Fun for Game Design? It’s one of those books that people are always telling game designers to read. But I hate it.

I hate Raph Koster’s book because it teaches such a shallow and non-universal lesson: that the core of fun is learning, and that a good game is one that teaches you everything it has to teach you before you get bored. This is a convenient definition for a lot of game designers, because it fits them. They like games that they constantly learn from. It’s almost like some sort of pre-requisite for being a game designer.

There are also apparently studies that show that learning new things releases endorphins in the brain, and I have no doubt this is true. So does eating chocolate, and acting out violence, and reacting to outside stimuli that you’ve come to associate with rewards, and sex, and… on and on.

To suggest that learning alone is the core of fun is a really … well, arrogant … thing to do. It reeks of the forced-grouping hypothesis that held sway over the industry for half a decade — made popular by designers who got into the industry after playing lots of EverQuest. Maybe you remember it: “MMO’s are all about interacting with other people. That’s what makes them different than single-player games! So we need to force people to group, even if they say they don’t want to, because they just don’t know what they’re missing.”

It’s crap. These bogus theories of motivation are a dime a dozen because:

1. Designers tend to create hypotheses that allow them to create games they like to play. (Duh!)
2. Designers aren’t typically scientifically minded. It’s not our strong suit. Like stone-age philosophers, we simply correlate what we see with the most obvious possible explanation. This is how superstitions get started, too: the mind loves to correlate things at the drop of a pin, even if they shouldn’t be correlated.

You can probably tell that this pushes my buttons. It’s fine for Raph to hypothesize, but the real problem is that his thin little treatise is used by a lot of other designers, many of whom should really know better, as a way to rationalize their personal style of game development. Entire systems of game design are now based around the idea that ”learning is why games are fun”.

It’s not a bad model for making certain types of games. Miyamoto’s incredibly fun action games fit this model well … up to a point. But learning is hardly the only way to have fun with games.

… But Other Stuff is Fun Too

The thing is, for most professional game designers, learning really is the most fun part of a game. We tend to instantly strip away the context, the art, the story, and indulge in the mechanics. “Ooh, here’s something new! This is great!” We subconsciously assume that other people are like us. (“I’m sooooo bored of traditional MMO mechanics, and everybody else is too!” Not so. You are projecting, wishing it to be true.)

But this interest in mechanics and learning is hardly universal — even for designers. What struck me when reading the “learning = fun” theory is how bad it is at explaining my MMO behavior. For months after I stopped regularly playing EverQuest 1, I kept logging in occasionally just to fish. I wasn’t learning crap, and I didn’t even care what I caught or what my skill was. I was immersed in a fantasy world and I enjoyed the simple escapism provided by watching the virtual sun set.

Escapism is fun for me sometimes, but so is the feeling of being a part of a well-oiled team. And sometimes I like to just beat the snot out of things weaker than me. And so is … huh, I guess I have a lot of reasons for playing MMOs. So do you.

So how do we unify all these motivations into a theory of fun? We don’t. That’s stupid. As H. L. Mencken once wrote, “Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.” Just because you can unify every source of fun into one simple theory doesn’t mean it has any hope of being right. Our brains are chaotic, confusing, complex creations. A lot of different things trigger pleasure in our heads.

So how do we tell why people play games? Well, we can start by doing some empirical research.

…Wait, really? Empirical research? In the gaming industry?

Yes. It is true. Nick Yee’s Daedalus Project is based on surveys of real MMO players instead of empty theorizing. This is why it’s more valuable than your pet theory or my pet theory. It’s probably fairly flawed, but it makes theories like “learning is the core of fun” look like sun-god-worshiping prehistoric nonsense in comparison.

Here, let’s look at the Model of Player Motivations Nick Yee uncovered. Because I know you didn’t bother to click that link above, I’m just going to steal some of the important charts from his website. (Sorry, Mr. Yee. Hope ya don’t mind.)

Nick Yee's Motivations

Another common source of “motivations” is Bartle’s famous player types. After many studies, Nick found that several of Bartle’s types don’t really map up very well. For instance, Bartle hypothesized that Explorers love finding new places in the world, as well as unraveling game mechanics. In reality, these two motivations don’t tend to appear in the same players too often.

Most players do have multiple different motivations from this chart, though — and that’s one of the most important takeaways from Nick’s work: most of us have many reasons for playing games, which vary from day to day and game to game. You probably have motivations in many of these categories. (You can even take a little quiz to see which ones.)

It’s true that many of these motivations can be mapped to “learning” — especially if you’re willing to make really tenuous connections like “competition is just a form of learning about other people!” and silly stuff like that. But many of them are just simple human needs, like being dominant, being liked, being part of a group, or escaping from reality for a while.

Pick What Your Game Is Good At

Every MMO in the “virtual world” vein supports a large number of gamer motivations; this is part of the secret to MMOs’ success. But no MMO can be great at all of them. I suggest you pick several motivations from Nick Yee’s chart (three or four at most) and be really good at them, then let the others happen as best they can happen.

It’s tempting to conflate motivations with demographics, but that’s a mistake. For instance, it’s true that slightly more females than males prefer “socialization” motivations in MMOs, but the gender difference is pretty small. Similarly, you may be tempted to assume that any game aimed at 18-24 males should be all about achievement. But that demographic’s motivations are all over the place, and older demographics are strongly motivated by achievement as well.

One method of getting a handle on your target audience is to create personalities to represent them. This is an old marketer’s technique: create a handful of personal stories and backgrounds, and then tailor a game to what those people would like. If you have a well-established IP, you can pull from the demographic data of your IP to help you figure out what personalities to use; otherwise, you’re going to have to do some research on the sort of people you envision playing your game. If you’re planning to reach out to existing MMO players, maybe you can start by picking some bios of traditional MMO gamers.

It boils down to the First Question: who is this game for, and why? In theory, you should know this before picking motivations. But on the other hand, if you don’t have a clue who your game is for, choosing several key motivations will at least narrow down your choices!

If I had to guess, I’d say that WoW’s three most powerful motivations are advancement, competition, and teamwork. EQ2’s strengths, on the other hand, might be mechanics, teamwork, and discovery. Asheron’s Call could be mechanics, discovery, and competition. All of these games are considered “hard core” MMOs. They just don’t focus on quite the same motivations to quite the same degrees.

Unfortunately you can’t safely pick, say, your three personal favorite motivations and run with it, because there may not be a large enough audience to support that mix. So when you have your polling contractor research your target demographic, make sure they include some questions that can highlight their motivations.

And please don’t tell me that your $20,000,000 game can’t afford to use a professional pollster, because if you think that, you obviously haven’t even looked into the prices. Hey, wait, you were just going to make a game without even deciding who it’s for, weren’t you? Shame on you! You’re not a novelist who can just write anything you want and hope somebody likes it; you’re spending a ton of money to create a service. You need to know who your service is for.

Thanks, Daedalus Project

I’d like to thank Nick Yee for his many years of researching MMO players. He recently put the Daedalus Project into hibernation, which makes me sad, because this is impossibly valuable data for any MMO developer. If you haven’t perused his data collection, you should go do that now.

His stuff isn’t perfect: there are some motivational categories that aren’t as strongly tied together as others, and his polling subjects were largely self-selected, which no doubt influenced the results. It’s also highly biased towards Western culture in general and EQ1 (early on) and WoW (later) players specifically.

But it’s a lot better than what you had before, because before you were just making stuff up and pretending it was universal. I know you were. Yes, I saw you doing it. Cut it out!

You still haven’t clicked the link above, have you? Fine, I’ll leave you with another Daedalus Project chart, stolen for your amusement. This one breaks down how various stereotypical statements relate to player motivations.

Nick Yee's Motivations - Breakdown

Tobold, my favorite MMO-player everyman, recently posted a short piece on the value of combat targeting. He seems pleased that the developers of both Darkfall and Age of Conan tried to do something new with combat, but notes that the lack of targeting in Darkfall especially doesn’t do the game any real favors because it is too easy to exploit.

But here’s what interested me: if you happened to still have the boxed version of the original Asheron’s Call 2 game published by Microsoft, it includes a keyboard shortcut sheet. Look at the bottom left of the key map and you may see that the left Ctrl key maps to “Wild Swing”. That was an untargeted attack that could hit multiple enemies.

AC2 had a complete physics engine that made this feature easy to implement, but AC2 didn’t launch with this feature. It was cut, albeit too late to change the first batch of  box inserts, because — just as Tobold notes — it created too many exploitable scenarios.

But now that Age of Conan and Darkfall are doing it, untargeted combat is considered “innovation”. If you want some more innovative features, maybe your next MMO will have one of these crazy ideas:

• Real physical projectiles that can be dodged by strafing from side to side (both AC1 and AC2)
• A constantly evolving storyline that alters the face of the game world, adding and destroying stories, quests, cities, even landmasses on a monthly basis (both AC1 and AC2)
• A variable-length jumping system, where holding down the space bar longer makes you jump further (AC1, complete with puzzles that require you to use it well)
• The ability to travel quickly around the world, while still providing a sense of grandeur and rewarding player knowledge, by mastering an elaborate network of teleport portals and spells (both ACs)
• The ability to improve skills by spending your XP on them (both ACs)
• A “trickle down” guild system where new players automatically feed XP to higher-level members of the guild, thereby encouraging guilds to grow large, and to take care of their lower-level members (both ACs)
• The ability to inscribe your name and a paragraph of text onto every item you own (both ACs)

And on and on… I could list dozens more. AC1 and AC2 had tons of features, large and small, which differed dramatically from other MMOs at the time — while still remaining recognizably MMOs. Were all these innovations successful? Hell no. Many of them were design failures. But they were innovations.

The point here is not that AC1 and AC2 were more innovative than other MMOs. Every big-league MMO in existence has had scores of unique features. Sometimes they don’t get noticed because the designers don’t do a good job explaining why the feature is awesome. (Often they aren’t really that awesome anyway.) Sometimes the company’s PR department fails to trumpet the feature, usually because they don’t understand it or why it’s a cool innovation. Sometimes the game sucks in so many other ways that the flaws outweigh any new features.

So here’s my point: any twist on an existing mechanic you can come up with, any obvious combination of MMOs and other genres, I can pretty much guarantee you that many MMO designers have already considered it. They may have already implemented it in some game you’ve never heard of. Hell, they may have implemented it in a game you have heard of — do you really keep up with all the game systems in all the new games and new expansions?

But unfortunately, innovations and new features don’t automatically make MMOs successful. Being “new” doesn’t make a feature good.

Innovation isn’t the key to fun. Fun is the key to fun.

The past few days I’ve been helping prepare a pitch for a roleplaying game based on a kid’s cartoon. I can’t say the cartoon is my favorite, but I really have enjoyed diving into the IP — watching the episodes, reading the story notes the writers sent over, figuring out how things work, and trying to form a cohesive game experience around it all. I love this part — making a design fit into an existing universe — and it turns out it doesn’t really matter what the IP is. It’s always fun! The extra restrictions force you to focus on the goal of your project and keep you from meandering into random territories, plus the IP gives you a clearer view of your audience.

There are some things to keep in mind, though.

Games Are Not Mainstream Media

Remember, games are not a mainstream media like TV shows and movies are. (At least not yet! We’re getting closer… maybe in a decade we will be.) We have to keep our “semi-niche” status in mind.

A movie might take a tiny IP based on a book and literally reinvent it for a completely new audience. A video game cannot do that. Video games must take an already-mainstream IP and play off of it to make something that appeals to existing fans of the IP. Don’t ever forget that, because it means two things:

1. You must use an already-successful IP or you aren’t getting much out of using an IP, and
2. You cannot reinvent the IP to suit a different audience; you must work with the IP’s existing audience.

The IP Defines The Audience

One of the key reasons to work with an IP is that it helps to solve the most important design question: “who’s the target audience of this game?” The audience is: people who play games and also enjoy the IP you’re using. With that in mind, you can much more quickly figure out what sort of game to make.

For example, the average Star Trek fan is older (25 to 65) and typically middle class with decent incomes. The fact that these are older individuals means that a reflex-intensive game like a first-person shooter won’t be super appealing. (There have been some fun Star Trek FPSes, but they weren’t particularly monetarily successful because they didn’t take the audience into account.)

It doesn’t make sense to homogenize your audience too much, though — Star Trek fans enjoy the show for very different reasons. Some fans love the notion of exploring space; others are enchanted by the Utopian universe where mankind has overcome its petty problems. Still others watched Voyager primarily because Seven of Nine was hot.

When we polled the broader Star Trek audience we found that the average Star Trek fan that also plays video games tends to be male, skew a bit younger (late 20s), and enjoy certain elements of Star Trek more than other parts. They like the over-the-top races, starship battles, and the sexy aliens. The Utopian universe wasn’t that important, and most of them would only play the game if they got to be a ship captain (as opposed to a crew member). That helped define what sort of game to make.

So an IP isn’t a magic solution to defining your audience. You still need to poll your audience to find out what they want in a game. (Remember, polling consultants are your friend, and will pay for themselves many times over!) But your IP will narrow the problem down dramatically. Use this advantage. Don’t fight to escape your IP! Work with the IP to deliver something the target audience wants. 

Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online is a great example of a game that didn’t let itself be defined by its IP, and suffered as a result. It’s a fun game on its own merit, but it was not inherently attractive to D&D players. Turbine would have been better off inventing their own IP for this game, and they would have saved money, too.

Your Game Isn’t Canon

As I mentioned, games aren’t mainstream media. But there’s an up side to this: for most IPs, the things that happen in your game are not going to be part of the IP’s canon.  That means you can take modest liberties with the universe in order to make the game more fun. Do this.

People will tell you that some IPs can’t be altered in any way or the fans will get angry. That’s not true. Well, it’s true that most IPs have some very hardcore fans that will resent any deviation, but unless you’re creating a very niche game, they are only a tiny part of your audience.

Star Trek’s most hardcore fans would be unhappy with a game that took any liberties with the IP — even something as simple as letting every player have their own ship makes them angry — but that’s irrelevant, because you can’t make a AAA game just for Star Trek’s most hardcore fanbase; it’s much too small. When you extend your reach to the entire spectrum of people who like Star Trek and also like games, you find that the audience is okay with some pretty dramatic liberties. And here’s the surprising bit: even the hardcore fanbase can become pretty understanding, if you explain and justify why you need to take liberties to make the game more fun.

On the other hand, sometimes the least maleable party is the IP holder. The Tolkein estate famously screws over game designers by forcing them to stick too close to the original IP. They don’t understand the point or audience of video games, and that’s their loss. You should think twice about working with an IP if you have to slavishly follow the canon.

There’s a Game For Every IP, But…

Technically, every IP can be turned into a fun game. It’s an entertaining design exercise: start with a tricky IP (let’s take, I dunno… “Night Court”). Inject action or intrigue elements (how about a post-apocalyptic setting?) and voila… you have a game. You’ve made Nightmare Court, a simulation game set in the year 2130 AD, where only the tough-as-nails (yet very funny) judge can keep the peace, all the while managing the courthouse’s food and electricity levels. Sell guilty criminals into slavery in exchange for water and grain. Make sure your bailiffs can subdue the laser-cannon-wielding mad men who break into court to rescue their friends … okay, that’s terrible, and I’m sure you can do a better job turning Night Court into a game, but the point is that most game approaches are going to ruin this IP, even if the resulting game is fun.

I remember a pitch session for an MMO based on HBO’s “Deadwood”. That would have been a hard IP to make into an MMO, so they pitched a secret ingredient: zombies. “Deadwood with Zombies will make an amazingly fun MMO.” And you know what? It’s true. A zombie game set in the grim, gritty world of Deadwood would be atmospheric, intense, innovative, and fun.

But HBO didn’t buy it, and they made the right choice. If you’re going to make a game based on a TV show, you need to be able to sell the game to people who watch the TV show. Deadwood plus Zombies worked for only a limited subset of the Deadwood-watching audience, so the IP wouldn’t have helped much at all.

Just for the record, though, you often can make an IP better by adding complementary gameplay elements. The Travel Channel’s “Lonely Planet”  TV show chronicled adventurers who explored remote countries. This could make a great game for the explorer crowd (which fits the TV show’s demographic pretty well) with just a few additions. Add some ancient treasures for the explorers to find, maybe a gang of bandits or two, and you’ve got yourself a fun exploration game. (However, Lonely Planet fails the “is it mainstream enough?” test, so it’s not much use.)

If you have the luxury of picking an IP to work with, make sure it’s one that can actually be turned into a fun game without breaking the soul of the IP.  Tweaks and adjustments are okay, but over-the-top alterations sap the IP’s strength and make it useless.

Designing For IPs Is Fun

Although a few types of designers will chafe against an IP, most designers find the restrictions liberating. That may sound weird, but it’s not. If you use someone else’s IP, they’ve already answered a bunch of hard questions for you, and now all you have to do is make a fun game within those restrictions.

Picking the right IP is obviously pretty crucial, but it’s just as crucial to work with the IP, allowing its natural boundaries to define your game, rather than hacking the IP to bits.