My death penalty is lenient. My game is first and foremost about exploration, so I need a penalty that makes it easy to explore. Actually, my death penalty may be the most lenient in the MMO universe, because there’s actually benefits to death: you earn Death XP, which is useful for many things, like necromancy.

I’ll have a minor money-sink, too, but nothing very painful. I really want people to be able to wander the world, try things out, and figure out how the game works. The game is really complex, and the fun is in figuring all these little systems all out. If you felt compelled to read the internet to learn how everything works, rather than exploring for yourself, you’d miss the most important part of the game. You’d be left with the stupid grinding part that every MMO has. I would have failed.

So yes, Project Gorgon has a very lenient death penalty. But at the same time, I sometimes want games to challenge me, especially when I’m working in a small group to accomplish something hard. I like the feeling of overcoming tall odds — and getting that feeling of accomplishment is much easier if the stakes are high. A high death penalty does make the game feel more epic. Can’t I have the best of both worlds?

I think I can, yes. The trick is that my graph up there represents a death penalty as a single axis, but actually death penalties have many factors, such as:

• How much time is lost before your character is “back to normal” again
• How much of your resources are lost to death (items, money, etc.)
• How far you have to travel to resume playing

It turns out that even a lenient death penalty can be pretty painful in particular circumstances. The trick is to fiddle all these variables just right so that you get more nuanced behavior. I can at least give it a shot!

I’ve played with lots of ideas, and I’m still working on it. Not every idea pans out. I thought for sure I could build upon the unusual fact that my game knows how you die: it knows if you were arrowed to death, or burned alive, or poisoned by a snake, or whatever. Every kind of damage has a “cause-of-death ID” attached to it. So I figured if you died by the same cause too many times in a row, or too often, the penalty would go up. That would fix zerging. But that was dumb because… fuck zerging, that’s not even a real problem. It’s a PvE game, and important PvE monsters can’t be zerged like that — they heal too fast.

So I had to stretch a little further. What exactly should my death penalty accomplish and what should it avoid?

The Death Penalty Traps

There are a couple of well-understood “death penalty trap” scenarios that I must avoid in order to be successful. (These are the reasons that games have been gravitating to lesser and lesser death penalties for years! They hurt business.)

• You log in to just chat with some friends and end up getting killed while running from town to town, and lose something valuable that is hard to get back. Odds are you’ll rage-quit over this: you weren’t expecting to be punished.
• You are soloing monsters and having a good time, but then you have some bad luck and get killed a few times too many, and now your character is too weak to keep fighting these monsters. Now you have to go to some earlier place and get strong again. Chances are dangerously high that you’ll just give up instead, and may not come back to the game.

I need to avoid these and similar scenarios. Hence the very lenient penalty when you’re exploring. But I still want to get a feeling of accomplishment when people do hard things.

The Death Penalty Benefits

The biggest benefit of a high death penalty is when grouping. You’re working as a team, you’re greater than the sum of your parts, you’re kicking ass and overcoming tall odds! The death penalty can help make the odds feel taller. I still don’t want an EQ1-esque “lose all your items” death penalty, because that makes people too afraid to try new things. But I want the danger of death to give your successes a little bit more shine.

The other good thing that death can do is bring scariness into the game. In most MMOs, there’s a definite lack of scariness, because anything that can kill you is about the same. A 50-foot dragon and an 8-foot ogre represent the exact same stakes: “either we win or we die.” There’s nowhere else to go.

Death penalties are a somewhat unorthodox way to make some creatures scarier. I want to play with that idea, too.

Travel Time: The Classic Casual Death Penalty

My main death penalty is travel time. When you die you reappear in a central area in the zone. If you were just out exploring, this is no biggie — you can go explore somewhere else. If you were trying to complete a particular quest, though, you’ll have to hoof it back. This is pretty typical for MMOs.

But in dungeons and other difficult-to-reach spots, this penalty is more painful. That’s because my dungeons aren’t instanced — they’re like EQ1/EQ2 dungeons: shared areas. Each one is a large labyrinthine place that’s big enough to support several groups of people exploring at the same time, with monsters respawning over time. (This design has many great social benefits that I’ll talk about later, but also, my server tech just doesn’t do instancing well.)

So if you die deep in a difficult dungeon and have to work your way back down to the bottom, that can be a big time penalty. If you’re lucky, some other group will have cleared the path recently. Otherwise the rest of your group will have to return to the surface and then fight back down again.

To make this penalty stick, I have to be very stingy with resurrection abilities. Otherwise I lose the penalty! (This is what happens in most games that try to use travel time as a penalty — the designers are so desperate to give out useful abilities to healers that resurrection becomes dirt cheap… they end up throwing the penalty out, almost by mistake.) So my resurrection powers have long reset timers, and resurrection items are rare.

You may still quit over something like this — “we were almost at the bottom and then Andy died and we had to start all over, wasting another hour!” But your tolerance for it will be higher. You came into a group-combat area, so you knew the stakes were going up. And if you ever want to give up and go do something else, you always can. It’s not like you ever lose levels or items from dying. So the penalty is still very lenient and casual-friendly.

But I have one last trick up my sleeve…

Death Curses: Making Bosses Scary

The most powerful bosses in the game are supposed to be scary and horrible. These are the stuff of legends, after all, so you should know what you’re doing before you fight these monsters — and the game is happy to teach you how. There’ll always be in-game lore or explanations of how to best defeat them. Unlike most of the game, the big bosses aren’t about “keep trying until you learn how things work”; they’re about “figure it out before you go.” One way I make this work is with curses. They selectively bring back a harsh death penalty.

A curse is just a debuff… one that lasts a long time, possibly even permanently, and doesn’t go away if you die. The main way to get rid of a curse is to kill the thing that cursed you. As long as you win the fight, no biggie. If you lose, that’s a problem. Hopefully the group can finish it off for you. If not, you’re going to have to work your way back and try again.

These curses range from losing 20 from your max health for the next 10 game hours to being stuck as a giant bee for the rest of your life.

But don’t worry too much about being stuck as a giant bee. Hey, bees can slow-fall! Of course, bees can’t talk to NPCs or use weapons… but you’ll never have to worry about dying from falling off of tall places!

Heh, but seriously, there are always at least two ways to remove a curse. You can kill the thing that cursed you, or you can find an alternative cure. If you’re stuck as a bee, there is a rare loot-item from insects that can cure you, if it’s made into a potion by a high-level alchemist. (I admit that this part is tricky to get right… these back-up solutions need to always be rare, but never be so rare that they seem dishearteningly impossible. It’s hard to make the economy work out that way, but I’ll see if I can pull it off eventually. Or maybe it’s just one of those “medicine is almost as bad as the cure” things: you stop being a giant bee, but that curse is replaced by a more mild curse that lasts many days. Dunno, still poking at it.)

These scary curses are just for the big bads — the ultimate bosses of the game universe, which take a long time to build up to. But much weaker curses are fun for occasional changes of pace when soloing, too. A few trash monsters have curses, but these aren’t too scary, because you can just kill any creature of the same type to remove your curse. If a Goblin Necromancer hits you with Fragile Skull Disorder, causing you to lose 20 from your max health and power, you can fix it by killing any Goblin Necromancer anywhere in the world. And even if you don’t bother, those curses only last an hour or two — long enough to notice its effects and be annoyed, but hopefully not long enough to really piss you off.

Death Penalties Are An Art

I think that most games don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about what they want their death penalty to accomplish. I know this because I’ve worked with lots of MMO developers, and they just… don’t really think too hard about it. They rightly assume that the game needs to have a casual-friendly death penalty, so they copy an existing MMO and call it a day.

They don’t consider the down sides of those existing death penalties. I mean, how often have you been about to die, and had a super-healing potion ready to drink, but thought, “nah… my life is worth less than this super-healing potion, I’ll just die instead.” My bank vaults are often full of powerful survival tools because it never feels worth using them. If death never has a sting, you shouldn’t bother giving out save-your-bacon items, because nobody will use them.

That isn’t to say we need entirely new death-penalty systems, because I don’t think we do. But MMO designers need to think about death a lot more instead of just slapping something in and calling it a day.

That’s one of the joys of making my own MMO, because I’m more than happy to try new twists on things and see if I can improve upon the problems of what’s come before.

If you don’t even try new stuff, it won’t ever get better.

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But while I work on mundane stuff, let's look far ahead... way ahead by like six months or so... and look at some features I want to add eventually.]

Player-Made Dungeons: Meh

I have mixed feelings about player-generated content in traditional MMOs. Generally, players aren’t very good at making content, so you have lots of trouble sorting wheat from chaff. This is very difficult because players don’t grade based on how awesome content is, they grade based on the difficulty-to-reward ratio of the content.

And when MMO developers think about this idea, what they usually come up with is a full suite of dungeon-creation tools that let players remix existing dungeons in new ways. This is a ton of work, and is generally pretty dull. After a few years of updates, MMO developers have usually already attempted all the obvious things that can be done with these dungeon pieces. So usually all you’re getting is a custom story script. That’s not worthless — I like quests with good stories — but it’s also not worth all the effort it takes to make a dungeon-creation tool!

I have lots of ideas about how to make player-made dungeons more exciting. But… that’s for a different game. Project Gorgon isn’t going to be able to support user-made dungeons. Maybe the next MMO…

But let’s leave aside the creation of entire custom dungeons. There are still some great simple ways to let users create content for other users.

In fact, these features will be very easy to add to almost any MMO. They play “within the rules” of the game, and require only minimal new GUI interfaces and database tables. If you’re reading this and you’re an MMO developer, feel free to use these ideas!

Treasure Maps: Geo-Caching for MMOs

First up is the easiest one to code: treasure maps. All you do is go to a certain spot in the world, “bury” an item in the ground, and receive a “treasure map” for that item. You can now give that treasure map to a friend, and they can go hunt for the treasure you placed.

How do they find it? Well first, you can write a message on the map to give them clues. (It’s a tweet-length message, maybe a riddle or some general info about where it’s hidden.) Second, whenever they activate the map, it will tell them if they are getting “hotter” or “colder” compared to the last time they used the map. Tada! A very simple way to give your friends something to do.

I can implement this in a couple hours. The way it works is that the map actually stores the info about the “treasure” it contains. So internally, the map itself has the treasure “inside” itself all the time, but only gives you the treasure if you’re in the right spot. That way it doesn’t require any special world-state variables… just a couple of extra IDs stored in the item. Easy.

But we can do better…

Legendary Treasure

If we’re willing to spend more than a couple hours on the task, we can make it a lot more interesting. Legendary Treasure works basically the same way: you go some place in the world and “bury” one or more items. But this time you don’t get a treasure map. Instead, you write a “legend” (a tweet-length message).

These legends automatically show up in taverns and message boards around the world.  Players can read your legend and see the reward item they’ll get if they go there, along with how many rewards are left in the treasure hoard. When all the treasure has been given out, the legend disappears from the message boards.

Now players can propose simple riddles to the entire server shard, with an automatically-given reward. And again, this is very easy to implement. Maybe two or three days of work for the basics.

Lady of the Lake

Here’s a different riff on the same idea. The Lady of the Lake is an NPC in a special location. High-level players can give her items to give out to others if a certain key item is shown. For instance, “if a player presents a red ruby, give them this hypno-gem.” (The guessing player doesn’t lose their item, so there’s no penalty to guessing wrong.)

You can also create “legends” for these, as above, which gives hints about what item is needed and see how many rewards are left.

And I have a half-dozen other mechanics in the same vein (pseudo-programmable “golems”, “bounties” you can place on specific boss monsters, etc.) By combining these simple systems together, you can create some really interesting content, like multi-step scavenger hunts, or guided tours of rarely-visited dungeons, or complex ciphers for players to decode.

Paying the Price

All these systems require generosity: the person creating the content has to pony up the reward! This way there’s never a problem with balance. It also means the content is always temporary: even if you bury 1000 items in the ground, only 1000 players will ever be able to experience your content. But that’s not such a bad thing. It means you get to create a new better version later.

Does requiring generosity sound like a deal-breaker? I doubt it will be. I remember when I was a high-level AC1 player, creating “quests” for newbies was one of the most fun things I did. (“Bring me Tibri’s Fire Spear and I will give you a Peerless Atlan Claw!”). And if the game helped to manage these quests, I bet there would be a whole lot of high-level people who enjoyed giving away items creatively like this. And think of the guild events!

Bottom line is that players already do this. They just don’t get any support from the game to let them take it to the next level. And there’s no good reason why not.

Easy to Code… and Maybe Even Better Overall

These systems will need a bit of polish and fleshing out: profanity-reporting, a rating system (for content creators, so you can sort legends by most-popular creators), and a way to give feedback to the creator. But this is all pretty easy stuff, and most of it can be added incrementally over time.

Most importantly, because of the transitory and un-abusable game mechanics involved, I won’t need administrators to examine content and see if it’s “fair”. It’s always going to be fair: it’s just players giving each other items. Admin intervention will only be needed in cases of profanity and similar abuse — which I already have to handle for profane chat.

And the crazy thing is that I suspect these simple tools will give us more interesting content than Yet Another Player Made Dungeon Where Every Room Has Bosses In It And The Monsters All Quote My Little Pony.

[Also: thanks to MMO Melting Pot for giving me the 2011 Piggie Award for Most Charming Games Company Employee! Though I do think that category is rigged against big-company employees who have to filter everything they say, and often have to announce commandments from on high which they don't agree with. And sometimes, they just have to be the bad guy. When I was working on AC2, I was always the Bad Cop so that the rest of the team could be the Good Cops. Hmm for Gorgon, I need to remember to hire a Bad Cop. I ain't doing that thankless job again...]

[Sandra says: Not it!]

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I remember it being so damned impressive when the game started. Obviously many choices were crap. Obviously there would be a few “correct” builds and most other setups would be rendered moot. But it still made me feel invested in my character as I leveled, even after we knew the “correct” choice. Now all those choices are gone. Except every 15 levels, when you will pick the one correct choice (as soon as min-maxers figure out what it is for you). This is a total misstep and the wrong thing to be working on.

They just couldn’t get it perfect. They redid it and redid it, making the choices smaller each time, until ultimately the only way to perfect it was to remove it.

Sometimes I’ve worried that I’ve been too hard on Ghostcrawler and company. Turns out I wasn’t. Can you imagine how many cool new game mechanics WoW could have by now if they didn’t feel the need to incessantly rewrite the combat systems? How many rewrites does it take before they accept that there’s no such thing as perfect? What is this, six total rewrites now? But don’t worry, I’m sure they have it right this time.

I post this here not as commentary on WoW, which I don’t play anymore. I post this as a reminder to myself not to get caught up in trying to perfectly balance things. I am a balance-aholic, I admit it. And I don’t know how I’m going to avoid this fate on my own MMO.

I mean, nerfing stuff is one thing — especially during the first year that’s gonna happen as you try to get the game within some semblance of balance. And buffing underwhelming abilities is almost always a good thing, not a bad one.

But rewriting the entire advancement system from scratch? Okay, sometimes a design is a total flop, so maybe a rewrite is necessary one time… maybe. But at this point, it just feels like a cry for help. So if I get to that point, somebody please help me. For now, go help Ghostcrawler, because by God he actually thinks his latest efforts make the game better. No, for real, he does. That’s the saddest part.

EDIT: some more nuance:

There are two topics here. First of all, is the new design better than the old? I obviously don’t like the new advancement mechanics, but that’s not my big gripe.

The second, more important, topic is this: having just rewritten the talent system from scratch in the last expansion, and having finally worked out the major kinks over the past year, does it make sense to erase everything yet again in order to try something new yet again? The answer is no. There are better things for the systems designers to be doing. After each rewrite, the return on investment is rapidly shrinking.

Players aren’t quitting because they made bad choices in the talent tree. (Not anymore, that is.) The number of players clamoring for skill rewrites is at low ebb. And talent tree rewrites aren’t even particularly grabby anymore: Blizzard has played that card with every expansion pack, and a few times in between. This is no longer a good use of developer resources.

So the reason I say that Ghostcrawler is wrong is his priorities. They seem to be focused on making the existing game perfect instead of adding more stuff. With Blizzard’s manpower, it would be easy to add all sorts of new stuff to WoW: deeper and more interesting craft systems, new combat mechanics that require you to use your skills in different but familiar ways, new monsters with more diversity. Entire new classes designed to deal with the new monsters in new ways. You know, game design.

But they add very few new mechanics. Instead,they rewrite the core combat mechanics over and over. Their actions speak a lot louder than words: to Ghostcrawler and team, perfecting the existing game is more important than adding new stuff. The trouble is that nothing is ever perfect, so revisions will never end. And in the meantime, there’s no cool new stuff.

In short, I don’t believe Ghostcrawler’s priorities are smart for the long-term health of WoW at this time.

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A couple weeks back I talked about how you can pick two combat roles at once in my MMO, and switch them out in town. A comment from David Grundy:

Interesting on the role switching. But, why only “whenever they’re in town”?

Why create an artificial barrier to a player doing something that you as a designer want them to do? I think the question to ask yourself is; do you want players to switch roles pretty easily so that they can contribute in different situations; the answer you’ve put above sounds pretty much like an emphatic yes. Next question, do you want to create an un-fun, time-consuming and ultimately pointless mechanic for the player to be able to do this?

That’s a fair question. Who on earth will enjoy running back to town to switch classes? Nobody. So why make them do it?

The reason I make it hard for players to switch classes is so that players can’t super-min-max every scenario. I don’t want players switching classes every few seconds between each fight. It would be tedious and time consuming, and you’d have to carry tons of extra equipment around to make it work.

Sometimes “Less Structure” Actually Means “More Tedious”

But it would work: you’d level faster by switching classes constantly. So people would feel competitive pressure to do it. And since I expect to have a fair number of WoW-gamers who have been weaned on achievement-minded gameplay, they will fall right into this trap. They’ll min-max the game until it’s not fun to play, and then they’ll complain bitterly about how tedious the game is. And at the same time, the person who plays the “right” way, not changing classes constantly, will compare themselves to the people doing the tedious thing and will feel dumb for not doing that too.

This design pitfall is called “balancing through tedium.” It happens when the designer goes “nah, we don’t have to worry about that scenario, it’s so tedious nobody would do it!” That kind of thinking works in board games sometimes. It works in children’s games sometimes. But it doesn’t work in traditional MMOs.

Calculating the Price of Tedium

Of course, I wouldn’t let that happen. I’ve seen firsthand how damaging it is to let tedium be the limiter of your game design. So instead, I’d homogenize and simplify my skill designs, watering down each one so that you could switch classes constantly and it wouldn’t mean as much.

Let me give you a really simple example of what I mean by watered down skills. Each combat skill has an “emergency ability” on a 5- to 10-minute cooldown. Normally you’d have access to two of these powers. But if you can switch classes constantly, you’d eventually have easy access to dozens of them! And whenever you used an emergency power, you’d switch to a new class in the next fight, so you’d always have one ready to go.

Assuming these emergency abilities are powerful (they are), this would do bad things to the difficulty of the game. People who had mastered dozens of combat skills would be able to clear dungeons far faster than people who only had two combat skills mastered. So in time it would be seen as “mandatory” to know twelve combat skills and switch between them constantly. And then I’ve failed and everybody hates the design.

Of course, I wouldn’t let that happen since it’s so easy to predict the problems with it. Instead, I just wouldn’t give out abilities with long cooldown timers. Or else I’d create some complex system of shared timers. This would require me to homogenize the skills: they’d need to be on the same timer, so different skills couldn’t have different cooldowns.

In the end, what did I do? I lowered the overall fun level to avoid some (very occasional) tedium. It’s a net loss in fun.

Minimizing Overall Tedium

The above example is actually one of the easiest ones to fix, but it’s also the easiest to explain, so I went with that one. There are actually a bunch of places where switching classes too easily would suck the fun out of the game.

I want to reiterate that I’m not being punitive for the sake of being punitive. I don’t think that mentality has much place in modern games. I’m actually doing the opposite: I’m saving players from being “forced” (through competitive pressure) to min-max their characters in tedious fashion. And to a lesser extent, I’m saving players from having boring homogenized classes.

It’s kind of a lose/lose for me, of course: players will say I’m being a dick, even though I’m doing it specifically to be nice to players in the long term.

Feeling Clever Is Good… But Don’t Overdo It Or It Dies

It’s also important to let players feel clever while they play. And I admit that if you could switch classes constantly, you would feel pretty clever for a while, switching to just the right situation for each battle… but you’d only feel clever for a while, because it would be more-or-less mandatory (due to the social pressure to keep up with your friends). Then it stops being “clever” and starts being “work.”

I want players to feel clever. I also want them to min-max, if that’s what they like doing. Remember that there’s a third set of abilities in the game, along with the two sets of class abilities you get. These abilities can be cherry-picked at any time, and doing so will let you min-max boss fights (and regular fights too, but not so much). I think it’s fun to carefully plan out your boss fights. I just don’t think it’s fun to have to plan out every fight.

And as another commenter ‘Expert Novice’ mentioned, maybe I should have special items that let you switch classes in mid-dungeon, but have a price attached. Or maybe there are “class-switch stations” outside of dungeons. That sort of stuff is easy to add later, if it turns out not to be a problem. When everything is up and running, I can go back and minimize the pain to just the amount that’s beneficial.

And I’ve Got Nothing Against Pointless Mechanics

Going back to David’s earlier question, do I want to create an “un-fun, time-consuming and ultimately pointless mechanic?”… well, even though this mechanic isn’t pointless, I do have a lot of other pointless mechanics in the game. (Even more so than a typical MMO.)

This week while doing skill designs, I added a completely pointless prerequisite for the high-level skill Necromancy. Necromancy is mastery of death, so naturally, the prerequisite should include Dying. So now Dying is a new skill you get by… dying. Ideally in new or epic ways.

“Why!?” If you have to ask why, then I don’t think I can explain it in a way that would convince you. But I’ll try: I want to add a lot of pointless details to my game even though they don’t enhance the minute-to-minute experience of the game. In the big picture, I think they do enhance the game, and perhaps even define it in a way.

The biggest reason they matter is that they are the gears that make emergent behavior possible. But another important reason is that they’re memorable. Interesting. Quirky.

Nobody talks about how tight the reward-loop is in their favorite MMO. What captures imaginations is the fringe stuff. The details. The crazy bits. At least that’s true for me. And it’s my ridiculous fringe project, so there!

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I had been hired at Turbine to work on the sequel to Asheron’s Call. I was an engineer through and through; I’d been coding (non-games) for nearly a decade and I was pretty good at it. I was hired as a senior engineer, and I got right to work on coding the game engine.

But the game had a troubled development cycle with lots of changes of direction. As the vision of the game changed, the team got less excited. “This isn’t a sequel to Asheron’s Call at all!” became a quiet undercurrent. It was around this time that one of the producers grabbed me at random as I was coming back from lunch one day and asked me to preview his presentation. He was working on a pitch that explained what Asheron’s Call 2 was all about, and he needed to refine it by getting feedback from people like me. I was happy to oblige, so I followed him into his office.

He then closed the door and began his impassioned pitch about why the new game direction was fun. I was a bit of a hard sell: I had specifically come to Turbine to work on the sequel to the game I loved, not to just “make a good game.” But I was willing to hear him out.

At one point, he mentioned that they were removing the Stamina bar. “In Asheron’s Call 1, you have three bars: Health, Stamina, and Mana. That’s dumb. You just end up using spells to convert stamina to mana to health to stamina to health and so on. We’re simplifying…”

I interrupted there, and said, “but that’s fun!”

He looked a little taken aback. “No it isn’t! Why is it fun?”

And… I couldn’t explain why it was fun. I was an engineer, not a game designer, and I hadn’t spent years thinking about why things are fun. I just knew that it was fun.

He figured it was because Asheron’s Call 1 was my first MMO. “People always get stuck on what their first MMO did.” But no, I corrected him: Asheron’s Call was my third MMO. I’d played a little bit of UO and a ton of EverQuest. I knew what else was out there, and I knew that Asheron’s Call 1 was fun in different ways. I just couldn’t explain why.

That was an important day for me. I don’t believe I could have changed the course of the game at that point — it made no difference what I said or didn’t say. (All I did was cause him to focus on other design elements for his presentation.) But it was important because I realized I wasn’t a game designer, despite thinking I was. I’d played tons of games, I knew all the mechanics they used. But here I was, unable to defend the simplest concept. It was frustrating.

It changed how I played games forever, and not necessarily for the better — when you study everything to see “why is this fun”, you sap some of the fun out of it — but I think it’s the critical skill that game designers must develop. Just that. The rest of the job is details, but you have to be able to articulate why something is fun… or at least why it could be fun.

Nothing is fun for everybody, and nothing is fun in every game. A lot of times I can only recognize fun by watching others: there’s plenty of genres I don’t enjoy, so I can only hypothesize about why they’re fun. And I may often be wrong. But the act of thinking about it is what’s important. If you don’t even think about it, all you can do is unconsciously mirror what you’ve seen before. You can’t put disparate elements together (let alone try brand new things) with much hope of them being fun.

I think I can now defend why Asheron’s Call 1′s three separate energy bars were fun, but I’m not going to bother doing so. It’s beside the point. The point is… screw that producer. My MMO’s going to have three bars. No — four bars. No. Five.

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But there’s a lot of different things you can do with NPCs depending on your goals. I want NPCs that are memorable and that tie into the rest of the game’s mechanics elegantly. And in fact by dropping a lot of the extraneous stuff, it’s become a lot easier to see how to do that.

Every game has to figure out where NPCs fit for them. For a pure-action MMO like World of Warcraft, NPCs don’t have much role to play. But my game has lots of non-combat skills, and NPCs need to be a big part of how those work.

Examining (and Skipping) the Classic Answers

I started out by looking at some of the traditional computer game NPC systems. A classic one is schedules — giving every person a “life” beyond just waiting for you to show up and buy their crap.

Coding it? Not so bad. But it needs a whole lot of content work. (“Okay, so the town has 33 NPCs. I need to make sure there’s 33 beds, or at least that they can sleep in shifts…”) But more than that, it’s not very fun in an MMO.

In a single-player game, you can just push a button to “advance the clock two hours” when you’re waiting for a shop to open. In an MMO, you might be waiting several real-time minutes for a shop to reopen. Ugh.

I’m interested to see what the Storybricks system comes up with to avoid the annoyances of NPC schedules. But this isn’t a problem I want to try to solve for my game.

Another classic mechanic is talk trees. I do have talk trees, but they aren’t a major aspect of the game, because they are incredibly expensive to write. (They have to be interesting enough to read, or else you end up with boring talk trees like EverQuest 2 had when it first started… and that’s worse than no talk trees at all.)

In the end, I decided the best way to interact with NPCs in my game is to use verbs on them. For instance, you can use the Show Item verb to show something to an NPC and see how they react. Or you can Give Gift, or Shop, or so on. You unlock verbs by mastering skills, so eventually you will have Psychoanalyze, Entertain, Flirt, Control Mind, and others. These all affect the NPC game systems in simple ways.

Interaction Mechanics: Friendliness, Favors, Gifts

In my mind, NPCs and the skill system have a symbiotic relationship. The skill system gets a big jolt of entertainment from interacting with NPCs. And NPCs are fun specifically because of how you can use skills on them.

But in order to make NPCs fun to interact with, they need some custom mechanics.

First off, every NPC has a hidden number that represents how much they like or hate you. If you do nice things for them, this number goes up. What are “nice things”? Well, if you save the town from certain doom, it goes up for everybody in the town. But you can also give gifts to people. (You’d need to use social skills to figure out the perfect gift.)

Of course, you can’t give gifts to strangers, that’s just creepy. You need a certain amount of Friendliness before the NPC will be willing to accept a gift. And of course, when you’re friends, the NPC will sometimes offer you gifts in return.

You can increase friendliness even more by doing Favors. These are just simple quests. (They may still be very difficult in some cases, but in terms of mechanics, they’re just get-me-some-item(s) quests.) Every single NPC in the game has at least three Favor quests that you can unlock by making friends with them.

Favors, of course, don’t come with direct material rewards… they’re favors! But there are many benefits to friendship. NPCs who are skilled in certain things can help you in lots of ways, such as by teaching you new things, giving/selling raw materials or recipes, or even just buying your junk items that nobody else is interested in.

There’s also the romance angle, a la Harvest Moon: some NPCs can be “married”, wherein they appear in your house. (Of course, it’s possible for lots of players to be married to the same NPC! But who cares?)

Although Friendliness is a hidden number, the game does give you a general idea of their friendliness level at all times. I want to make it easy to “game” the mechanic. It’s not like real life, where people can be impenetrable and illogical. Game mechanics are only fun if you can see what you’re doing and how you’re affecting things.

Friendliness Rating is very simple, as you can see — that’s true of all these systems. But it can still have far-reaching implications, and when combined with a few other mechanics it can get interesting. For instance, I’ve been experimenting with “happiness factor.”

Happiness Factor

If an NPC shopkeeper is making a lot of sales and piling up a good income, they’ll be happier than if they’ve been standing around bored all day. But if a player with a good Barter skill gets an NPC to pay too much for some loot items, the NPC might get buyer’s remorse, becoming less happy for a while.

An unhappy NPC is less likely to do favors for friends, give good deals on items, and so on. However, you can increase their happiness by doing things like dancing for them, using social skills to cheer them up, or even using mental magic to force them to be happier (but watch out if the NPC realizes you’re doing that!)

Is this a fun mechanic? Eh, it’s okay, but its real purpose is to be part of the gestalt. Emergent gameplay comes from the combination of systems. Without other systems around it, this system would just be odd. But it combines with other mechanics to tie into skills, quests, combat, and crafting.

I have to admit that the main reason I like this mechanic is that it gives players ways to affect each other, indirectly — an NPC’s happiness level is global, so you can go around pissing people off or making them happy. (It’s a lot easier to make an NPC “happy” than to make them “sad”, so that griefing potential is low… but the effect is still noticeable.)

With a few more of these simple mechanics tied together, we get a nice meaty base for skills to interact with.

But Are They Memorable?

If NPCs are just sets of numbers, that can still be fun to interact with. But if the NPCs are memorable, the impact of manipulating their numbers is greatly enhanced. Ideally players will remember the names of many of them, might be willing to do favors for them, and would even care if they got kidnapped by frog men or smote dead by an evil curse.

My plan actually calls for a lot of text — probably about 60 lines per NPC — but they’re mostly terse reaction statements based on what skill you’re using on them and their current game state. So the volume of text is high, but it’s not anything like having to write compelling talk trees.

But this text gives me room to give them simple personalities. As I’ve said before, I think we should all be striving for two-dimensional personalities for our NPCs. Practically speaking, this usually translates into “quirks”. The pirate that hates rum and secretly drinks apple juice. The matronly older lady who runs a tailor shop, and secretly also runs a brothel. The troll under the bridge who likes candy. You shouldn’t always discover their quirks right away, either: they should have enough surprises that there’s some meat for players to discover via interactions.

I don’t expect the NPCs’ personalities to be so compelling that you remember them right off the bat, though. Remember that the game systems push you toward visiting the same NPCs repeatedly, so that I can take advantage of face time.

The Magic of Being There a Lot

Remember Final Fantasy 7, when Aeris died? This character’s personality was wilting, boring, and cliched. The reason we were shocked and saddened is because Aeris had been a foil in the story for hours and hours.

If the game had introduced Aeris just a few hours before she was killed off, even an incredibly interesting personality wouldn’t have made the death matter as much. I didn’t cry when Aeris died (I felt manipulated by the author, so I was pissed off more than anything else) but for a lot of gamers, this was an extremely important moment.

Yet if you asked them to write a paragraph about Aeris’s personality, I don’t think many people could. She wasn’t memorable because she was that interesting. She wasn’t memorable because of her story or the logic of the world, either. (Hell, given the laws of the Final Fantasy universe, a $100 item should have fixed her right up.) She mattered because of face time.

Now Aeris did have some personality, or otherwise the few dozen hours of face-time she got wouldn’t have been enough.

I think you can always use face-time to make someone memorable, even if they are lacking any trace of personality… but it might take a lot more time. If you watched enough Stargate SG-1, you’ll remember the guy who called out “Chevron 6 is locked!” whenever the Stargate opened. But you probably don’t even know his name. However, if he’d gotten murdered by a Villain of the Week, longtime fans would have been quite upset. Not because he was important, but because he was… well, on screen for literally hundreds of episodes of TV. But a bit of personality definitely helps speed up this process.

So my game systems increase the face time for NPCs, which helps give them importance to players, which in turn increases the importance of the game systems they’re being interacted with. That’s the plan, at least.

Keeping It Simple and Focused

All in all, the systems are very game-able — it is a game, after all. I want it to be fun. Players should be able to figure out how it works, and even if it’s a bit of a puzzle how to approach some NPCs, players should ultimately be successful, given enough time and effort. One trap that’s easy to fall into is opacity: it’s easy to make NPC systems that players can’t understand. When that happens, players aren’t having as much fun as if they understood what was going on.

I also realize that not every player will be excited about befriending NPCs. It’s not very heroic, at least in the classic “dragon murdering” vein. That’s okay; there’s enough things to do in the game that you don’t need to chat up every NPC to have fun. But even if you’re purely combat-focused, you’ll find that some combat skills also give you interesting NPC interactions, and then you may find you’re enjoying it more than you expected…

Next Week

I’m trying to maximize impact with only low-cost game systems — systems that are easy to code, balance, and create content for. Hopefully I can achieve that for NPCs (there’s some worry about the text needed for NPCs, but I think it’ll be okay… I just need to write some more of them to see if I can really sustain that efficiently). If it doesn’t work, I’ll change it until it does.

Next week I’ll talk about how I’m using this idea of “low-cost, high-impact” in the combat system. It has different bottlenecks and problems, but I’m excited about how it’s turning out.

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PvP: Hard to Do Well

PvP is a great example: if you’re going to have PvP in your game, it’s going to suck unless you Go Big. You need to invest a lot of time and thought and effort into it. If you don’t, you shouldn’t even bother: the PvP will be unappealing and it will hurt the rest of the game in the attempt.

That’s why my MMO “Gorgon” has no PvP. I can’t afford to “Go Big” on PvP. It’s not something I have any expertise in creating, it’s not something I particularly enjoy in an MMO… so it ended up being cut out of the schedule entirely. This will limit my audience, but that’s okay. I can’t make a game for everyone.

(Hey, I guess cutting features isn’t that hard after all! As long as they aren’t features you’re personally excited about…)

Item Systems: Hard to Do Well

In the discussion about item decay, it was pointed out that item decay is hard to do well. This is very true. I’d go so far as to say treasure systems in general are hard to do well. Most MMOs, including WoW, have rather boring item systems that don’t try very hard. They aren’t the heart of the game. A game like Diablo 2, on the other hand, where the item system is a large part of the game itself, tries very hard indeed.

A great item system requires random loot in many varieties, interesting trade-offs that are nonetheless easy to understand, the ability to customize and enhance your items, and a built in reason to keep looking for more loot. This is a very tall order. It’s easy to say you’re gonna do that, but it takes an incredibly long time to get the details right.

My current feeling is that I have to “Go Big” on my item/treasure system because the game has so many non-combat mechanics. All my systems need to feed into each other in intricate ways. Mushroom farmers, animal skinners, herbalists, necromancers, geologists — they’re all collecting or generating “stuff”, and it’s not always going to be directly useful to the skill they got it from.

At the moment, I think the item system ties the game mechanics together, so it needs to be deep… really deep. But I know firsthand how long that will really take to make happen, and I know it will be quite difficult to pull off.

Trade-Offs: Short-term vs. Long-term

Whenever I spend a day designing a system, that’s a day that I didn’t code a game mechanic or create a new quest or write a new NPC’s dialog. Being just one guy means no delegation of responsibilities. So can I really afford to “go big” on my item system? Well, not nearly as big as I want to.

But I also really hate the idea of launching the game without a robust item system — because that’s not something you can patch in later. I could launch with very little content and patch content in later (assuming the lack of content doesn’t kill the game outright). But the big-ticket game systems, like PvP or complex item systems, don’t get to change that much later, especially if your game is centered around emergent gameplay like mine is. Changing something so fundamental will alter everything, and players don’t generally enjoy this, because it destroys everybody’s game knowledge and treats them like paying beta-testers.

what I’m really deciding is: how good can my game ultimately be? When I examine each game system, I ask myself: “If the game is successful and gets thousands of paying players, am I going to hate myself for not having implemented this before the game launched?”

Go Big or Go Inevitably Sad But What Can You Do

Unfortunately, that doesn’t narrow it down enough. In my game, I want to focus on the skill system, the item system, the combat mechanics, and the NPC interaction system. If I short-change any one of these areas, I’ll be sad later. But I can’t give all four of these areas the attention they deserve.

This is a place where having a producer would be helpful: someone who could see the forest for the trees and help me decide how to spend my resources best.

I’ve talked about this problem many times on the blog: designers can’t make the best choices for the long-term when they get too invested in their game. And I’m just as susceptible to this as anyone else.

My natural inclination is to say “all four of those systems are critical. I just have to do them all to 100% perfection!” But were I to succumb to that, the game would fail. I don’t have time to implement all of those, and even if I did, it would mean the game lacked content or critical infrastructure. Something precious to me has to get cut. Many things, actually.

Seek External Help

At least I realize that I’m not able to make the best decisions in this case. So I’m not going to work on any of these systems this week: I’m going to code some other things to get my mind to switch gears. Then I’ll sit down with Sandra and pitch the problems in detail, discuss the exact plan, and get her to help me figure out what to cut.

I may have a slight advantage over the average indie developer here… but even if your wife isn’t an experienced MMO producer, I bet you can still find someone to pitch your problem to and get feedback from. It needs to be someone whose opinion you respect, and someone who can take the time to fully understand the problem. And you need to be detached enough from the problem to be able to deal with the feedback.

Not Just For Indies

I just want to reiterate that every MMO team I’ve ever seen has fallen victim to this, and sometimes they pull themselves together… and sometimes they can’t. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you’ve seen me ranting about WoW going off the rails: biting off more than they can chew, overpromising and underdelivering. If a game with the size and success of WoW can succumb to this problem, it’s not about money or team size.

Nobody wants to make the painful cuts, the ones that make your game less perfect than what you had in your head. This is true in any MMO, be it a AAA box title, a web game, or anywhere in between.

Sometimes ignoring the resource-allocation problem works out fine. Sometimes you get lucky. But lest we forget, only one in four MMOs gets from start to completion. And that’s announced MMOs. Who knows how many MMOs die before they even make a whimper? The odds are stacked heavily against you, and part of the problem is how hard it is to allocate resources.

If you think you’re immune, you’re probably wrong. (In my experience, the sort of personalities who are immune to this problem are not the sort of people who become game designers.)

If you think it doesn’t apply to your game, you’re probably wrong, too: you just don’t realize what you’re trading off yet!

Next Week: Can Talking About Engineering Ever Be Interesting?

So I’m currently working on low-level stuff that has to get done, like chat and persistence and generators and GUI. Join me next week when I desperately attempt to make networking code sound interesting!

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• The “rune” metaphor to explain item decay: it’s a lot more elegant than “sharpening swords” and it allows for infinite diversity of power-ups. Because sharpening a sword just makes it sharp. But a rune is maaagggicccc so it could do anything at all.
• The idea that items can be “melted down” somehow to provide temporary power-ups for other items. More directly, raw items may even be prerequisites for creating certain runes.
• The need to use different weapons for different problems (already a part of the combat design)
• Legendary items that are permanent and require no repair/allow no runes to be installed/etc. They’re very powerful but very specialized — so for instance you might find the epic sword of frog-man stabbing which is the best frog-man stabber that could ever be… it doesn’t ever need repairing. But it’s also not ver good against anything but frog-men.

And several others. I think a lot of people described what I already had pictured in my head, which means I didn’t explain what was in my head very well!

This all brings us around to the elephant in the room, though: given such finite resources, can I make this system as exciting as it should be? If I can’t do it really well, it should probably not be done: a half-assed item-decay system is far worse than no item-decay system at all. This is one of those mechanics where you need to “go big or go home.” Which I’ll talk about in another post shortly…

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One of the many design elements I haven’t fully figured out yet is item decay. This is a tough one.

Item decay is when your weapons and armor and tools can get “used up” and disappear after some amount of use. It’s very different from “item damage”, where the items can be completely repaired. Decay is permanent, and is thus a much more complex topic.

The Case for Item Decay

Why would you have item decay in your game? There are lots of reasons to use this mechanic:

• It gives crafters more to do. If people need to buy new swords regularly, then blacksmiths have more to do. If swords don’t wear out, then blacksmiths obviously don’t need to make as many.
• It reduces twinking. A big problem in games with random loot systems is “hand-me-down weapons.” In these games, players tend to find more weapons than they personally need. They hoard these weapons and hand them down to other players. This doesn’t hurt much of anything if it’s done for an “alt” character, but when a brand new player is given a bunch of top-tier gear, it can really hurt their enjoyment of the game, and hence their retention. What seems like a nice gesture from players can really hurt the game overall. But if weapons decay, there will be fewer top-end weapons to give to others, and anyway, the twinked player won’t be permanently overpowered.
• It lets you keep your power escalation low. In most games you want players to experience the thrill of finding new equipment often. In a game with a steep level curve (like WoW for instance), you’ll get new weapons all the time as you level up. But in a game like mine where people don’t get a ton more powerful as they level up, higher-level weapons can’t get much more powerful than lower-level weapons, so what’s the point of switching weapons? Well, if your weapons keep decaying, you’re forced to switch weapons. Problem solved!

The Case Against Item Decay

The case against item decay is really simple, and really damning: human beings are ridiculously averse to loss. There’s more psychological studies about this than you can shake a library at, but for me it can be summed up in this one principle: Human beings fear loss, even more than they should. They predict that the loss of an item will hurt more than it actually does, and they go out of their way to avoid it.

In a game with item loss, there are two ways humans deal with this fear: either they refuse to use amazing items because they don’t want them to go away, or they become clinically detached from all items.

Probably the most common thing is that they just refuse to use items. You see this in any MMO that has one-use super items. I don’t know about you, but when I get a “Potion of Being Amazing For 3 Minutes”, I hoard that sucker forever. In most games, I won’t even use it to save myself from dying, because the death penalty is less painful than losing the item! (In WoW or EQ2, I wouldn’t use rare irreplaceable items unless I was in a really good group/raid and we were going to wipe… and even then, I’d have to think about it pretty hard.)

But this isn’t a big deal — who cares if people hoard their one-use quest rewards? I don’t. It gets to be a bigger deal when all items in your game can decay. Suddenly you never want to use any high-quality item ever!

Let’s unpack that idea of “high-quality items” for a moment, because it’s important. An item is not high-quality if it’s “just good enough to get the job done.” You’ll be happy to have such an item (especially if you were struggling with dangerously underpowered equipment prior to that) but you won’t think of it as particularly super-powered.

By definition, a top-tier item has to be more powerful than is strictly necessary to survive. And that means it’s never actually needed. And if it’s not needed, and is going to decay when used, that means it’s going to get hoarded.

And if you try make top-tier items mandatory in order to survive, what you’re really doing is making all lower-tier items into junk, and you’re back to square one: nobody’s excited about loot because everybody has to use the very best items already.

(I’m oversimplifying here, because it’s actually possible to create items that are “kinda crappy” without being suicidally underpowered. But I also know from experience how really hard it is to find that sweet spot for consumable items, and how hard it is to maintain that balance over a long period of game updates. It almost always falls down into items either being “junk”, “the thing we have to use”, or “the thing that’s too good to ever bother using”.)

Clinical Detachment

I said there were two scenarios that happen when you have item decay. One is that people hoard the best stuff because it’s too valuable to use. The other is even worse, though: emotional detachment from loot.

You see this in games with particularly heavy item turnover. Nobody gets too excited about even the most amazing items. “It’s nice, sure, <yawn>, but it’ll be gone soon enough.”

This means you (the designer) have a much harder time getting players excited. The game also tends to feel more like a treadmill: players can see more easily that they’re just collecting money in order to buy the same old stuff so they can collect money to buy the same old stuff so they can…

(Not that there’s not actually any more “treadmill” than any other MMO design. It’s just that item decay makes it a little easier to see.)

So once again we’re back to the same problem: we can’t have nice things, because there’s no things in the universe that are nice enough to get excited about.

If players aren’t going to be excited about loot, why bother having it? You’re better off leaving it out and focusing on something else. If you’re gonna have a complex item system, players need to be excited about items!

Gorgon Needs a Different Approach

So from a logical perspective, item decay is a great mechanic. Those problems I mentioned at the beginning are real problems, and very much worth fixing. But the psychology of loss is just too painful to me to want to do an item-decay game.

But since my main complaint is the psychology of it, maybe I can find a replacement design that fits psychology better.

And really, isn’t that what every game does? The reason your sword’s damage keeps going up and up in WoW is to force you to keep getting new weapons. It isn’t really much different than if your sword just decayed every few levels, forcing you to get a new weapon. But it feels so much less painful!

And WoW solves the problem of “hand me down items” with the trick of literally making it impossible to give great items to other people. The items become attuned to you as soon as you pick them up, and voila! No more hand me down items. It’s ham-fisted but it sure works.

But all hybrid solutions seem to have their own problems. In the WoW model, the power level has to keep escalating up and up and up forever, and at a pretty fast pace, too. If you ever get the very best set of items in the whole game, the treadmill breaks. There’s no reason to care about items anymore.

Hybrid Solution: “Permanent Plus Temporary”

I’ve been looking at different hybrid solutions for Project Gorgon. I’m calling my current plan “Permanent Plus Temporary.”

It’s a two-stage approach. Weapons, armors, and tools are permanent. So you can quest for the very best items in the game, and get excited when you find them. Hooray, you’re permanently better than before!

But by itself, the sword is kind of crap. It has to be magically sharpened (or maybe “enchanted”, or “have a new hilt put on”, or whatever — something has to be done to the item. I’m just using “sharpened” as an example).

So sharpening is not optional. An unsharp sword does so little damage that you won’t survive if you try to use it. You have to get your item sharpened, either from a professional sharpener or with a one-use do-it-yourself sharpening kit. And the sharpening “wears off” over time, requiring you to sharpen it again and again.

That solved one of the three problems I mentioned at the outset: it makes sure crafters always have enough to do. And I can fix the hand-me-down problem the same way WoW does it: for the very best items, you simply can never give them away. That’s not a particularly immersive or elegant solution, but it works.

But I still have problems with power escalation. Once you have the best item, you don’t need to look for loot anymore!

Lower Power-Escalation From Randomized Loot

In order to keep my items’ power levels from cranking through the roof, I’m using randomly-generated treasure. The idea behind randomly-generated treasure is that it uses a different reward schedule than fixed-design treasure. You have to look at every sword you get because one of them is going to be amazing. And when you find an amazing sword, there’s still a chance that you’ll find an even more amazing random item later.

So with random items, players rapidly reach a “sweet spot” of power (a little higher than the average quality level for items of that type), and then very slowly (on average) find better and better items. They have to keep looking because who knows when the randomly-better item will show up?

Lots of games have random treasure (and a few have random crafted items), but often the results are not amazing. Making a fun random loot system is a lot harder than it sounds! I remember that we struggled mightily to make Asheron’s Call 2′s treasure system the equal of AC1′s. In the end it was very cool… but it sure took a ton of time and tweaking, and it never quite had the elegance of AC1′s system.

The problem is that you can’t just graft a random treasure system onto a game; it has to be designed around it very heavily, and with a lot of subtlety. I’ll talk about random treasure another time, though, since this post seems never-ending…

(Random loot still doesn’t actually “solve” the power progression problem. It just slows the progression down a bit so it doesn’t have to keep going up and up and up every damned day.)

Better Plan Forthcoming?

I don’t feel like I’ve necessarily got the best plan yet. I’m still a ways away from actually implementing a treasure system (beyond the static loot that I have now for testing purposes), so I still have time to bat ideas around.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the pros and cons. There are a lot of different angles you can look at this problem from — the trick is figuring out what angles are the most important.

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A lot of the art in my game needs to be cheap prefabricated stuff. The monsters and animals and houses and so on are getting bought from websites like this one. The quality is usually very good, but no company has enough art to meet all my requirements, so there ends up being a bit of “art style clash” when using prefab art from multiple sources. I don’t like this, but I can’t really do anything about it. I’m trying to minimize it the best I can, and hope it isn’t too noticeable.

I do have a budget for custom 3D art, but it’s almost entirely allocated for the player characters. No prefab art seems even remotely usable for player characters. This is very frustrating. But I’m not buying custom art until after I get feedback from the first alpha version, so I know exactly what I need. In the mean time, I need a placeholder race!

The ideal player-character race meets these requirements:

• Comes with lots of useful animations (like stabbing and sitting and picking up items)
• Has both male and female models (and roughly identical animations for both)
• Has different possible appearances (so I can code & optimize dynamically-streamed appearance skins)
• Has detachable weapons and armor (so I can code all of that)

I never found anything that met all these requirements. The best I found were these male and female elf warriors. Here they are in my prototype character-generation screen:

Male Hero

Female hero

They meet all the requirements except one: they don’t have detachable armor. Their entire appearance is on one texture, so you pick the skin and clothes at the same time, and you can never change either. A pity.

However, the weapons are detachable. And they meet all my other requirements — I’ve found nothing else that meets more than two of the four requirements above.  So apparently this is what I’m using for my alpha version! (Unless somebody can point me to something better…)

Yes: this means that players who help me pre-test the game will have to be an elf in tacky battle gear, 24/7. That wasn’t precisely the vibe I had in mind for my game. I didn’t even have elves in my game’s back story, actually.

But being an indie means rolling with the punches. And sure… okay, yeah, I can work with this. And maybe they’ll even be a permanent part of the game. If my custom artwork turns out to have a roughly similar style, maybe these elves will stay in the game as an NPC race.

It’s actually pretty fun to work around art limitations — they create barriers to work around. So my back story changed quite dramatically and now includes elves… all because of this temporary artwork.

Sexy Sexy Elves

So all is good, right? Aside from never being able to see any difference when you switch armor, this meets all the expectations of a playable race. They can have different heights, weights, genders, skin tones, different weapons. That’s more than adequate for now.

But I do dislike that every single PC and NPC lives their entire life in armor. And even worse, apparently nobody told the females how to actually dress for combat. They only put armor on their arms. We have to call this what it is: classic old-school video game sexism.

It bugs me a lot. (It bugs me in WoW too, for the record, but I’m not making WoW. I’m making this game, and I want it to not suck.) But I can’t fix it, so I used lampshade hanging. Then I decided that maybe they don’t need armor: they’re elves, so magical jewelry is what protects them. In that case, the males’ armor is really just ceremonial, and probably made of some super lightweight material. There, problem solved. At least for alpha.

I knew I’d have to deal with the oversexed elves before I even bought the models. But when I got them into the game, I noticed something else about the females:

Oh come on, high heels?

They’re all wearing high heels. Come on! That’s a step too far for me. I can’t imagine a woman sitting down to play my game, creating a female elf character, and then getting in and realizing that she has to live her entire virtual life in high heels. This is why we can’t have nice players.

Argh!

Okay, okay. Sigh. I can’t change the art, and I don’t have better art that meets my requirements, so I have to just deal for now.

But it’s distracting. I’m making a city for the elves to live in, and over time this ridiculous sexualization has seeped into its culture. Whenever I create a female shopkeeper or a quest giver or anybody else, they’re hypersexualized. I know I should have ignored their appearance, but when writing dialog for a woman in a slut suit, it’s really hard not to write them as being really kinky.

So I finally decided to run with it. I decided the elven race as a whole is just really sex-addled. They constantly talk about sex. They have inappropriate conversations about it everywhere. They obsess about it. That’s why they never stop being sexy, even when cooking, even when fighting, even when sleeping.

While it’s instantly clear that females are walking sex symbols, the males might be able to go about their lives without having to feel too oversexed. So I fixed that with NPC dialog. Turns out male elves all have very long penises. Two of them. Oh, you can’t see it in the model because their clothes are on, but everybody talks about it (and about how odd those humans are, with their one-penis anatomy). Tada!

Yes, that’s real content. I made it mostly out of frustration. I kind of doubt it will stay in the game, because of how conservative the US culture is about this sort of thing. Heh… but weirder things have happened.

I guess the point of this pointless post is that it’s actually very hard for indies to not be sexist in a gaming culture that assumes sexism is mandatory. I’ve seen dozens of female models for sale; the number of those with appropriate clothes on can be counted on one hand. This obligatory sexualisation of women is not easy to fight as an indie.

The other point is that if you know of any art that meets the above requirements, I would love to hear about it. Even if it’s just temporary art for the alpha. Please drop me a line.

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