The folks on various Star Trek fansites are not pleased with my previous post, and I can’t say I’m surprised. :)

Sorry guys. Here’s the bad news:

• MMO’s are incredibly hard to make, much harder than you think. Perpetual didn’t spend thousands of man-months and fail because they’re total retards. It’s really really hard to make an MMO.
• Star Trek is extra super hard. I know nobody believes these things, and I’m okay with taking the heat for that, but it’s true.
• The developers should stay away from the fan sites early on because you guys are not fans of the upcoming Star Trek MMO. You are fans of the Star Trek MMO you each see in your heads. In 18 months, when there’s a game to actually be a fan of, then you can add to the discussion meaningfully. In the meantime, you’re just trying to inject random features into an already impossibly-complex game.
• You also are just not a good representative sample of Star Trek fans. There’s no good way to say that, and I know how insulting it sounds, but… your voice does not represent Star Trek fandom.
• Perpetual did do a fair amount of research. Real research, not internet polls. And remember how they suddenly went extra-casual? Did you suppose they suddenly lost their minds? No. Research. There’s a whole lot more Star Trek fans who are older and can only play for 20-30 minutes at a time, or who aren’t gamers and can’t deal with realistic space physics or the tedium of exploring space for 6 hours on a manned crew.
• Research shows that it would be financial suicide to make a fast-paced action game, or a realistic space game, as a AAA Star Trek MMO. There’s not a big enough fan base to support it.
• You don’t believe that last statement to be true, and that is why the devs need to ignore you for a while!
• Interacting with the fan base comes at a price. Feeding the fan PR “beast” takes a lot of time and effort, and ultimately slows down development. I think STO started building its fanbase up about a year too early, and it hurt our productivity and strained the fans. I don’t want to see that same mistake made again.

Guys, I don’t really want to play a WoW-esque Star Trek MMO either. I want to play a game where I’m Picard-esque (I even look kinda like him… well, I’m bald anyway!) and I talk my way out of problems, and I have adventures every hour on the hour. But the game I want to play costs about $600 million to make. It’s like WoW plus EVE Online plus a few dozen adventure games worth of really deep and clever content.

It’s not going to happen.

I will settle for an MMO where I can do Starfleet-esque things, where I can explore brave new worlds, and where I can see the cool places I’ve always wanted to explore. I will settle for a WoW clone with Star Trek theming. I will buy it, and if it’s decent I might even stick with it while they get the next chunk of the game done as an expansion, and then the next, and then the next.

And here’s the thing: so will you. If you’re a big enough Star Trek and MMO fan that you’ve been following this game from way back when, I already know that you will settle for this approach, because I can completely empathize. You sure won’t like it, but it’ll work.

In the mean time, the devs will be able to pick up some of the WoW player crowd, and some of the casual gamer crowd too. There’s lots of latent Star Trek fans in their 40s who would love to play occasionally, maybe a few hours a week. But it’s got to be really accessible for them to be able to play.

A few other misunderstandings I wanted to correct:

• They should absolutely listen to their core audience. It’s just that the few thousand folks on Star Trek fan sites are not a big enough core audience to be worth spending this much money on.
• I love Star Trek, and it gets really old to hear “has he even seen such-and-such?” Of course I’ve seen it. Hell, I bet I can out-Trek-trivia most of you! That’s a challenge, and I’d love to have a trivia duel if we meet up at a con or something. But the thing is, I realize that I’m in the incredibly tiny minority of people who know, say, how many symbionts are released per year from Trill.
• If I had infinite money, I would make a very different game. But I don’t, and neither does Cryptic.

Well, the writing was on the wall, and now the wall has blown up. Perpetual’s spin-off company P2 is basically dead. They no longer have a game team; there’s just some web-developers remaining now. My condolences to the devs who lost their jobs in this mess. I hope you bounce back, and I hope your new job is better than your last!

Rumor has it that Cryptic has picked up the Star Trek IP. If true, that’s great news for the franchise, as they’re a seasoned company with talented people. Good luck, guys! But as I talked about earlier, Star Trek is an extremely difficult IP to work with. I want to give the new team some advice gleaned from my time working on STO. What’s better than free advice from the internet? Nothing!

Advice #1: Don’t try to be too true to the license

You’re going to need to watch every hour of Star Trek television and movies ever made. That’s a given. You won’t like about half of them, because only insane people actually like all of Star Trek. But as you take notes, you’ll find yourself trying to nudge things into the nooks and crannies of Trek, so that your game fits just perfectly. It makes us designers feel so clever when we make a design fit existing canon. But you have to watch out: that can easily become a straight jacket.

You’re gonna need loot. Now I know, we never saw a Starfleet officer rifling through the pockets of people he shot. And at Perpetual we were struggling hard to find an “IP friendly” way to deal with this problem. There are some solutions, but honestly? Just make the loot appear on the damn ground and people can pick it up. It’ll be fine. You just don’t have time to make every aspect of your game ultra-canon-friendly. You have to pick your battles very carefully.

You’re gonna need interesting races. Only a few of the Star Trek races are any good for MMO’s. Vulcans, Trill, and Klingons are great choices. You can easily come up with a half-dozen racial advantages for these classes. For the rest of the universe, you’re going to have to scrounge around, and make stuff up. I mean, Bolians, Ferengi, Cardassians, Andorians: these are all basically humans with back-stories and funny make-up. What you need is racial features that enhance the game’s core gameplay. So embellish!

For instance, the TV shows told us that Bolians have extremely acidic digestive systems. So embellish this; give Bolians an acid bite or something. A few hardcore fans will cry foul, but trust me: when Vulcans get nerve pinching and mind-melding while Bolians get a +5 bonus to barbering, you’re not gonna see a lot of Bolians in the world. Don’t be limited to what we’ve seen on TV. Think of it this way: there’s no way to prove that Bolians don’t have an acid bite. They just haven’t gotten around to using it on TV just yet.

Advice #2: Make a fun game loop first

You’re in uncharted waters. You have a really tough IP to work with. Things like killing, looting, and inventory all feel a little awkward to fit into the world of Starfleet. What’s your first order of business? Figure out your core game loop.

In WoW, the game loop is:

• Talk to NPC, get quest
• Run to location
• Kill monsters, collect loot and XP
• Run back to NPC, get reward

In Star Trek, the game loop might be exactly the same, if you’re okay with stretching things a bit. But you might also add “surveying the area” as a core loop element, or add a fun negotiation mini-game. (Good luck! That’s a hard one to do, but totally worth it if you can.)

The point is this: you’re going to make 1,000 quests and 900 of them are going to be very similar. Figure out why those 900 quests are fun. That’s your game loop. (The other 100 can use unusual game loops, much like WoW’s fetch-and-gather missions or escort quests.)

Advice #3: Don’t try to make the ground and space games at the same time

I suspect this one will be pretty obvious, if you’ve been watching all the other attempts at doing both games at once. But just in case you haven’t gotten the memo: do the ground game first, and get the space game out the door 18 months later. It’ll feel really strange without space, and some people will call you nasty names. But you’ll have a source of friggin’ income and you might not go broke. It’s the only way to get through this massive IP.

Advice #4: Ignore the fans

Now I don’t mean you shouldn’t try to make a game that is fan-pleasing. And you should absolutely do market research (with a reputable research firm, not some dumb internet poll). But you need to ignore the fan sites. Two reasons why:

• they all want very different things from Star Trek, so you won’t be able to please even a decent portion of them,
• the people who bother to post on Star Trek MMO fan sites are already going to buy your game. They may bitch about it at the top of their lungs, but they will buy it and play it.

Make a game for WoW players who kinda liked Star Trek. That should be your target audience. Trust me, it’ll be fine.

Advice #5: Don’t go public too soon

You’re going to need about 3 years to get this game out the door. Down deep you know this to be true. You aren’t going to say that publicly, of course, because that isn’t what your money guys want to hear. Officially, you’re going to say that you’ll leverage your core competencies, reuse existing infrastructure, and rely on some of the most brilliant people in the industry yadda yadda. I just hope you don’t believe that. It’s a nasty trap to fall into, because it leads to disappointment.

No, what will happen is that you’ll say it’ll be out in 18-24 months, and then you’ll delay it two times and it’ll ship in 30 to 36 months. That’s okay. It’s a hard game. And if you didn’t have core competencies and all that, I’d predict that you couldn’t do the game at all, ever. So you’re still way ahead of the curve.

But you don’t want to be talking about this MMO for 36 months. That’s 36 news blurbs your community guy needs to write. That’s 36 clever screen shots or mock ups. That’s 1095 days of fans screaming why isn’t it here yet I want it now. These are people who’ve already been waiting for years, too. They’ll wear themselves out.

Be smart. Start talking about the game 18 months from now. At that point, there’ll still be time to make modest changes to the direction based on player feedback, but you’ll have already gotten the core of your game plan underway. You’ll be able to use the feedback to improve the game, rather than being bombarded with too many details too early on.

And good luck, guys! I’m counting on you to break the curse and actually ship a Star Trek MMO. (I promise to buy a copy.) But I do hope you have a healthy respect for the difficulty of what you’re undertaking. As Worf once said, “Only fools have no fear.”

PS - Now I’m seeing rumors that it’s not Cryptic after all. If that’s the case, and some inexperienced team has picked up the IP, well, I hate to say it, but you’re pretty much doomed. But hey, maybe I can help you plan something achievable. My consultation fees are very reasonable. :)

I’m not anti-social; I spend most of my time interacting with
others. (Even soloing, I’m chatting and roleplaying.)

Ethic at Kill Ten Rats recently wrote a post called Where Did the Social Go? that laments the increasing focus on solo play in MMO games. In particular, he seems to feel that supporting solo play reduces the socialization in these games.This is unfortunately an attitude that I’ve run into all too often. As a player who prefers to solo almost exclusively, I vehemently disagree. The simple fact is that I don’t like to group — but I do like to:

• Chat with other players both in-game and out (via blogs, websites, and forums).
• Share game knowledge and help other players.
• Be part of a guild of friendly, helpful people.
• Hang out in town admiring other characters’ armor, pets, and wit.
• Participate in world events side-by-side with other players.
• Roleplay.
• Participate in the economy, both as a wheeler and dealer and as your friendly neighborhood crafter.
• Start new characters on new realms and race against others to level 20.

So tell me again how I’m anti-social? All of these activities involve engagement with other players and none of them necessarily involve grouping.

Shared Worlds, Shared Play

However, Ethic is not entirely wrong. The fact is that, outside of guilds and the economy, there are limited game-supported venues for massive persistent social play. At the beginning of his article, Ethic says:

” … games should be focusing on ways to take advantage of the fact that a large number of people are playing the same game at the same time.”

And he is absolutely correct — we should be taking advantage of our most unique feature. But why on earth would people assume that this means grouping? Grouping involves only a tiny handful of people. It hardly takes advantage of our massive nature at all! It irks me when people say, “Soloers should stick to their solo games,” because the counter-argument is just as (in)valid: Groupers should stick to their group games. I don’t go around demanding solo gameplay out of Team Fortress, do I? Face it: grouping is just one of many gameplay types that can thrive in a massive world, and it has absolutely nothing to do with how many people are sharing the same world as you.

Shared worlds are exciting and addictive because of their persistent and shared nature. There’s a very strong psychological draw that we get from these games because our characters exist somewhere else, somewhere that other people can see us and interact with us. The fact that we’re doing our own thing instead of being chummy 24/7 doesn’t detract from that at all, as we can see from WoW’s success.

Exploiting The Real Power of MMOs

So if neither grouping nor soloing really takes advantage of our key features, what can we do to further the “massiveness” of the game? Let’s brainstorm for a few minutes:

• Let players work together in a casual, no stress setting. How about a drum circle where anyone can walk up and start drumming; when enough characters are drumming, everyone in the zone gets a small buff for the next hour or two. Activate the drum circle on a set cycle (every three hours on the hour, for instance) and you have an optional but purposeful social gathering.
• Let players be creative together. How about an ongoing in-game haiku contest? Characters submit a haiku and then other players vote on it. Participants get points that can eventually be redeemed for cool hats. Once a month, the most popular entries go into an arena-style runoff vote; the winning haiku is performed by an NPC once a day in a main town.
• Let players network. Allow characters to hold membership in multiple guilds, or alternatively to form non-guild player associations for other purposes (roleplaying, crafting associations, class knowledge banks). And we could even map out the connections … You think a map of which faction owns which territory is cool? How about a live map of the network of player associations?
• Let players flaunt their success. Players are most excited about the persistent aspect of the world when their actions persist even when they are offline. KvK games where players can “own” castles and whatnot are a good example. Other examples are shops in town that players can own or rent, NPC’s that brag about how they met so-and-so high level player, etc. Maybe some towns let players “name” important locations. For 60,000 gold, the Ironforge Gate could be renamed “Joebob’s Ironforge Gate” for a month.
• Encourage small-scale competition. Another way for players to have a minor, modestly persistent role in the world is to compete. But if you do this on a massive scale, most players aren’t competitive. To make competition work in an MMO, you break it down to smaller groups. Perhaps each town has a leaderboard for a local game. One town has a sign that lists the top twenty players who have collected the most murloc heads in 10 minutes. Another town has a sign that lists the twenty players who have fallen from the highest points in the world and lived. These signs might reset each week or month.

These are just some off-the-cuff ideas, but as you can see, there are lots of ways to build on MMO’s core strengths. The unique character of MMO games is built on shared experience in a shared world. No matter what some old-school designers think, solo play does not violate that character, nor is grouping the only valid way to emphasize it. There is so much more we could be doing with this medium.

It can be frustrating for players who like grouping to think that there are millions of players out there who want to play MMO’s without grouping. As Eric wrote earlier in “Learning the Wrong Lessons from WoW“, this is a common misconception among game designers as well. But if you look at the vast possibilities in a shared persistent world, you’ll see that there are way more choices than just “playing by yourself” or “playing with 2 to 5 other individuals”. This isn’t some Xbox Live FPS. This is a shared persistent world. Think massive. Think long-lasting.

Okay, so 2D isn’t state of the art. But two-dimensional characters are. How many indistinguishable NPC’s have you run into in your travels through Azeroth or Norrath or wherever? More than you can count. I’ll let you in on a secret: quest text really is fodder. There’s nobody behind the scenes writing up the bios and storylines for these shmuck NPCs. A quest implementor writes that text as quickly as possible and goes on to the next one. And usually, the task of writing filler quests is given to the junior quest implementors, to boot. Quest text like this:

This text is nearly the first thing you read in WoW, if you start as a Tauren. You’d expect this to be some of the best quest text in the game. But no. Why is this terrible? Just for starters:

• It makes you read things that turn out to be irrelevant
• It’s boring
• It tells you nothing — zip, nada, zilch — about the NPC
• It teaches you that reading quest text is a waste of time

Sometimes quests are unglamorous. That’s just a fact of MMO life. But when a quest is unglamorous, you have to work extra hard to make the NPC interesting.

Or how about this quest excerpt?

Notice the line I highlighted? That’s the line that says, “Everything you just read was a waste of your time. Ha ha, you’re stupid for still reading quest text. Haven’t you learned by now?

There’s a reason that players never read quest text, and it’s because MMO’s teach them not to. I’m picking on WoW here but rest assured that I could find similar NPC’s in every MMO. And I admit that I’ve written some stinkers myself. Making interesting NPC quest text is hard, and you need a ton of text, and I don’t have an easy solution.

Okay, actually I do. Have you noticed that occasionally an NPC is memorable? To use WoW again, there’s this one guard in a nondescript inn who asks you to collect the heads of nearby murlocs. And when you get back, he asks you to do it again because his boss didn’t believe he did the work himself. And then he asks you to deliver all the heads to his boss, because they’re gross and slimy. He’s somewhat memorable because he’s a jerk. Now, he’s not REALLY memorable, obviously, because I don’t remember his name. But he’s a start. If everyone in WoW was at least this memorable, players would be raving about the “story” in WoW. Alas, 99% of the NPC’s are utterly indistinguishable.

That guy’s character can be summed up trivially: a lazy oaf who wants to pawn his work off on other people. He’s a two-dimensional character at best. But compared to the zero-dimensional characters all around him, he’s deep like Hamlet. So, this is where quest writers should start. It’s a trick that tabletop game masters have been using for decades: give every NPC some memorable aspect. Nothing fancy, just a simple detail. You can brainstorm a list very easily, but I’ll get it started.

How about an NPC that…

• Hates clouds
• Adores his puppy, which is actually a full-grown wolf
• Keeps trying to get you to try his cooking
• Speaks in rhyme
• Keeps laughing at very inappropriate times
• Has a giant purple hat, of which she is very proud
• Believes the local store owner is actually Santa Claus
• Wants to quit his job at the inn and become a lion tamer
• Runs a failing steamed-rutabaga vendor stall

You can still make really boring quest text, even if you have a quirk like this. We’ve all seen that happen. You have to take the time to write something interesting; there’s no magic bullet. But this is magic gunpowder, which is the next best thing.

Now take it a tiny step further. Give each town something memorable. What if this town…

• Is full of mimes
• Is having a feud with the town across the river
• Is full of aristocrats who despise common adventurers… but need their help
• Has a strictly-enforced dress code
• Has a very unusual religious belief
• Has just been terribly conned by a snake-oil salesman

Not everyone in town should fit this two-dimensional profile. Say, perhaps two-thirds should fit it in one way or another, though.

It all sounds lame, doesn’t it? Cheesy. Stupid. But yet… look at the quest text we have now: it’s so banal that nobody anywhere actually reads it. These “cheap tricks” will help us take NPC’s to the next level, which is admittedly level 2. Some day we might be ready for NPC’s with actual depth. But let’s do one dimension at a time.

I saw a post over on Warcry about a new “Vampire MMO”, apparently called Darkeden. Feeling especially bored, I tried to follow the link to the game’s page so I could sign up, but the site is down — looks like they got too much traffic. Oof. That’s devastating. They likely missed their opportunity to get a large number of people involved in their beta.

But thinking about it, I realized that I don’t try a lot of downloadable MMO’s (or open betas) because the investment is too high. I have to go sign up for some stupid company account. I have to download a large file. Install it. Run it. Probably do some email verification thing, too. Too many steps! As my available gaming time has become smaller, my willingness to jump through hoops has shrunk tremendously.

As a designer, I’ve seen first-hand that most game companies don’t pay enough attention to how their new-player sign-up/download process works. They’re busy making the game. The website is an afterthought. This is a deadly mistake.

This is one reason why I think the long-term future of MMO’s is in web-based games that can be started within 30 seconds — there’s less crap to get in the way. But if you want a 3D game, web-based designs aren’t really viable yet. So what can you do? To make the best of players’ tiny attention spans, follow these rules:

• Your landing page should show me a screenshot, tell me three REALLY DAMNED COOL things about the game, and have a huge TRY IT NOW button. Make sure the page loads fast, too. The goal is to get me to click TRY IT NOW before 10 seconds elapse and I get bored.
• Once I try it, get the downloaded started immediately. Don’t screw around, get it started fast. Once the download starts, AND ONLY ONCE IT’S GOING, I will be willing to spend a tiny amount of time signing up for your service.
• The sign up page should have not more than Name, Password, and Email Address. If you ask for more info up front I’ll probably wander off. You don’t need more info in order to let me try the game for a bit.
• If you need to provide email verification, make it trivial.
• You can ask me for my credit card info when I’ve decided to make a sale — not before that!
• Don’t make me sign up for forums and company accounts and newsletters and all that other crap. All that stuff makes you lose potential customers.

There’s a common excuse for requiring the credit card up front: it helps keep abusive people out of the system. If a player acts inappropriately, you can ban their credit card, thus keeping them from signing up for any more accounts. Very clean!  And it worked great ten years ago, but times change. Nowadays, you’ll just have to design your game more carefully, so that your game doesn’t give free-trial customers any ways to abuse others.

Remember, you need to get people playing your game before they get bored or distracted. Streamline the entire experience with this in mind. Don’t assign this task to interns, either. This is a job for savvy web designers. In fact, the sign-up experience should be at the top of the list to be polished. It needs to be 100% perfect in order to get as many people trying out your game as possible.

I find it very interesting that WoW’s death penalty is much harsher than the death penalty in EQ2, which goes against our preconceived notions of these two games. Let’s look at the facts:

World of Warcraft Death Penalty:

• Death causes damage to your equipment.
• You are expected to run a long way to your corpse and then reappear in a dangerous area, taking time and risking a second death.
• Your other option is to resurrect at a graveyard, whereupon your equipment suffers serious damage (likely requiring you to trek back to a repair NPC immediately), and you are unable to fight for ten minutes.

Everquest 2 Death Penalty:

• Death causes damage to your equipment.
• You accrue a very small penalty to future earned XP.
• You respawn at a safe spot.

WoW’s “travel back to your corpse or sit for ten minutes” mechanism, combined with the danger of dying again when you reach your corpse, makes it more of a nuisance than EQ2’s penalty. But here’s the real kicker, the reason that puts WoW’s penalty high above EQ2’s: WoW’s graveyard spots are not particularly safe. I remember my first trip to Scarlet Monastery: I got very lost and ended up in extremely dangerous territory, and died. And then I died again and again. Finally I respawned at the graveyard, only to discover to my horror that horrible monsters found me in the graveyard, too! I was instantly killed AGAIN. In WoW, when you’re in an area that’s much too high-level for you, monsters will come for you from miles around, and they are nearly impossible to escape.

In fact, I would have been stuck at that graveyard forever, except for a glitch in WoW that they’ve never bothered to fix: if you log out and log back in, your ghost can then travel to a different graveyard spot and respawn there instead. But you have to log out and log back in first, and you have to know about this trick. This is well-known among a certain part of WoW’s audience, but is certainly not known to everybody playing WoW. And when a game’s death penalty can result in effective perma-death of your character (unless you know how to exploit a bug), it’s hard to call your death penalty “casual”.

Compare it to EQ2, where death is a mild nuisance and then you get on with your evening. It’s much more casual friendly. You don’t have to run out into the same horribly dangerous spot and risk your life a second time. On the other hand, I’ve heard people complain that death in EQ2 is so tame that many people become careless, which gets groups killed.

Just to be clear: I’m not complaining about this. I don’t mind that WoW is more aggressive in punishing death than EQ2 is. (Neither of them are anywhere near as tough as, say, EQ1’s death penalty, which was so punitive that it regularly made people quit the game forever.) But it does go against our stereotyped assumption that EQ2 is more “hardcore” than WoW.

The Purpose of Death Penalties

But what should the death penalty be? What’s the point of a death penalty?

Some games don’t have much of any death penalty at all, such as Dungeon Runners. These games are aimed at players who are looking for a game that engages and entertains them, but doesn’t particularly challenge them.

Most MMO’s, however, have relatively punitive death penalties because they are designed for players that want to be challenged, not just engaged. The theory goes that if a game doesn’t punish you for playing poorly, then your rewards for playing well will be hollow and without much significance. That’s true to an extent … but of course, that’s only true if “playing well” is your motivation for playing the game.

But the death penalty has other side-effects, too. If the penalty is lenient, players find themselves experimenting with more tactics, exploring the landscape more, and poking into nooks and crannies of the game. If the penalty is harsh, they tend to stick with the strategies they know. Good survival strategies become more valuable, and in many games, players find that grouping together makes for a better survival strategy. So we often find that strong death penalties correlate with more grouping.

Correlation of death penalty to other aspects of MMO gameplay.

The exact death penalty should be based on the target audience you want to reach. This is a gross simplification, of course, but it helps point out some of the ramifications of a particular death penalty. There are many other correlations, too, such as Time Expenditure, Opportunities to Zerg, and Rewarding In-Game Knowledge. None of these are hard and fast rules, and will vary depending on the exact details of the death penalty, but I think they hold up pretty well for a large number of penalties and games.

I think both WoW and EQ2 are towards the “lenient” end of the spectrum. But is WoW’s death penalty too harsh or too mild? Well, the current death penalty is obviously not a deal-breaker for 9 million people — then again, we don’t know how many more people they would have if it was harsher or more lenient! If I were making a new game, I’d make it more lenient. EQ2’s more-lenient death penalty was more enjoyable to me than WoW’s, and I’m not exactly casual, so I think going lenient is the safer bet for modern MMO audiences.

I love Star Trek. I worked as the systems designer on Star Trek Online during its early preproduction period, and I was (and am) excited about the design we had come up with for the game. But that said, it seems that Perpetual is dying more all the time, and it looks like Perpetual will succumb to its mortal wounds before STO gets out the door.

That’d be a shame, but it wouldn’t be the first such tragedy to befall people who attempted a Star Trek MMO. There were two MMO attempts before this one, both by other companies which eventually collapsed.

At first glance, Star Trek seems like a perfect setting for an MMO. It ranks up with Star Wars, D&D, and Lord of the Rings as one of the top four nerd IPs that cross over into mainstream acceptance. But appearances can be deceiving. It’s actually a huge landmine of problems.

The Double Game

In order to do Star Trek right, you need to make two games in one. You need to make a space game and a ground game. This means Star Trek is a “double game.” What’s Star Trek without space battles? What’s Star Trek without away teams exploring strange new worlds? You need both. This is almost impossible to pull off, especially by a team that doesn’t have a stable engine to work from. Even SOE couldn’t pull this off for Star Wars Galaxies — they launched with only a ground game and added the space game later (to which most people cried “too little, too late”).

Space Is Hard To Do (Well)

Space MMO’s are actually relatively easy to code, but that doesn’t automatically make them fun. Space is inherently boring. This is a psychological problem: on Earth we have waterfalls, spooky forests, pits of magma, rivers, and on and on. We have hundreds of instantly-recognizable terrain features to use on the ground, and each of them comes with preconceived notions of how we should feel. (Dark forest = spooky, rickety bridge = tension, idyllic plain with butterflies = relaxing, etc.) We have a huge vocabulary of concepts that can act as shortcuts in world design.

However, in space, it’s hard to come up with more than a dozen easy-to-name features, and they don’t carry much emotional impact anyway. So even if you make up lots of space phenomena, players don’t feel differently about them. In the end, space tends to feel homogeneous. In order to overcome that, you have to work very very hard.

For Star Trek, this is compounded by many additional factors that make it even harder! For instance, there are insane size disparities. Players want to pilot capital ships like the Enterprise-D. But these ships are so ridiculously massive that they dwarf smaller ships that should also be pilotable, like Deep Space 9’s “Defiant”. Allowing both sizes of player ship would be like having playable races of tiny hobbits and 100-foot-tall giants in the same game. It’s not easy to make content that makes sense for both large and small, so you have to compromise. Everybody gets a big ship, or everybody gets a small ship. Or you split your content between big-ship content and small-ship content. Or you cheat on the sizes and all the purists complain.

Another big problem is that 3D space combat is actually very hard to comprehend by many people. It’s one of those “you get it or you don’t” things. So a space MMO needs to work out a compelling combat solution that’s fun for people even if they have a hard time telling north from south, let alone up from down.

Any of these problems can be solved, but it’s the compounding of problems that makes it tough. And we haven’t even talked about the fan expectations yet.

Fan Expectations Are Impossible To Meet

The hardcore fans want an MMO that is far different from a typical MMO, and I don’t just mean the difference between a space game and a fantasy game. Let’s just name a few places where the hardcore fan base’s expectations cause tension in the design:

• There’s tension about economy. Captain Picard famously said in “First Contact” that there is no money in the Federation and human beings no longer concern themselves with the acquisition of wealth. Purists want a game that meets this requirement, but your average WoW player would be pretty disappointed by a game without loot, money, trading, and auction houses.
• There’s tension about the setting. Star Trek is a Utopian future. It is in fact pretty much the only popular Utopian future — most sci fi worlds are pretty grim. MMO’s need conflict to drive them, but when you add permanent conflict to the Star Trek world, you damage that “Utopian” feel. In Star Trek, problems generally get solved within an hour and the world returns to a happy place once again. This puts extra requirements on MMO content creators.
• There’s tension about what you’re supposed to be doing in the game. A hardcore fan might want to be in a crew with 20 other people working together aboard the USS Enterprise, taking shifts in real-time, climbing through Jeffries Tubes repairing minor problems, and doing survey missions. A more casual fan just wants to be a Captain Kirk figure with their own ship, gallivanting across the sky killing bad guys and hitting on green chicks.

Okay, so you can find workable compromises for all of these with enough effort. But it gets worse when you realize that even the hardcore fans all have different takes on Star Trek. See, most fans like one series but not others — for instance, they may love Deep Space Nine but hate Voyager. However, the universe works pretty differently in each show, and you can only understand the big picture of Star Trek by taking every show into account. But they don’t want you to do that. (e.g., “Don’t use Voyager episodes as canon, that show ruined Star Trek!”) In other words, it’s basically impossible to make all Star Trek fans happy, or even a majority of them.

And should you even try? The active Star Trek fanbase has been plummeting for years, ever since Voyager ended. (”Enterprise” did not provide a noticeable boost in fans.) The next movie(s) may strengthen it, but that’s just a “maybe” for now. Right now, even if you could make all Star Trek fans happy somehow, you wouldn’t have a successful MMO. An MMO that costs 50 million to make simply must reach a larger audience. This means doing things like adding player economies and letting everybody be a ship captain — moves that piss off the hardcore Star Trek fans.

Star Trek MMO is a Kobayashi Maru

Making a fun and successful Star Trek MMO is incredibly hard. It will take brilliance, experience, patience, and lots of money to pull it off. Even if Perpetual had the game-shipping experience and monetary backing of a company like Blizzard or Turbine or SOE, the Star Trek IP would still be a tough nut to crack.

Although Perpetual has made some clever choices and has brilliant art, I suspect that their fiscal situation dooms them. This makes me very sad, for obvious reasons.

If Perpetual doesn’t make it to the finish line, that’ll make three failed attempts. Will we ever see a Star Trek MMO? I suspect it can only happen when there are cheap commercial MMO engines, so that making a “double game” isn’t such an insanely difficult undertaking, and so that the game can be monetarily successful even if it doesn’t go after the broadest-possible market. Some day…

EDIT: to clear up some misconceptions I’ve been seeing, I no longer work for Perpetual, although I wish them the best of luck. I wasn’t fired from Perpetual; I left when my wife was offered the position of Producer for EQ2. It was a difficult choice and not one I made lightly — I still have friends at Perpetual and I hope they make a great game. I just have a hard time being optimistic these days. :)

Cameron Sorden on Random Battle asked a very good question recently in his post How Raiding Hurts WoW More Than It Helps:

So why does Blizzard make a community with a majority of non-raiding players raid, given all the problems it causes? Why do they spend so much time and effort on designing, developing, and tuning zones that only 1-6% of their subscribers ever use?

But Blizzard has answered this question themselves. I’ll paraphrase from the AGC talk I attended a couple of years back: Their audience is a donut with the hardcore in the center and the larger, fluffier casual crowd in a ring around that. The hardcore is especially important because they are the ones who convince other players to try the game out. These people are, in the language of The Tipping Point, mavens and connectors. They know the game inside and out and they sit at the hubs of the largest guilds, eager to recruit others into their world.

So to answer Cameron’s question, Blizzard builds content for a tiny fraction of their subscribers because those particular subscribers are directly responsible for recruiting and maintaining the other 94-99% of subscribers. So it’s not a waste — it’s actually quite economical!

Except, of course, that the theory is wrong.

Hardcore players are not universally recruiters. They don’t have a monopoly on knowledge or social networking. Mavens and connectors exist within the hardcore population, sure, but they exist outside this population as well, and in greater numbers. Nor are casual players always the passive recipients of this game evangleism. Players recruit other players who value the same kinds of gameplay — hardcore raiders recruit other hardcore raiders; PvPers recruit PvPers (aka victims); roleplayers recruit roleplayers.

In the past — say, before WoW — it may have been true that the raiders had the most organized social connections and spent the most time talking about their obsessive hobby, and that their efforts caused a ripple effect through the interested-but-slightly-less-hardcore that was the rest of the smallish gaming world. But it’s simply not the case any more. We’re seeing the same shift in focus in the gaming press, and for the same reasons: Look at the growth of the narrow niche fan site, or the widespread growth of personal gaming blogs as compared to the slow but steady demise of print magazines and gaming megasites.

So yes, I believe in Blizzard’s donut model — I just think they’ve mis-labeled the rings. And given that, I also am puzzled as to why they keep pouring so much time and money into creating content that only the tiniest fraction of players will ever see — or care to see. I suspect it’s because life on a live team is often too fast-paced to let you step back and really think about what you are doing.

(And for the record, I swear we’re not picking on Cameron on purpose. It’s just that he keeps writing interesting posts! And commenting on this post of his, inspired as it was by one of Eric’s posts, gets points for being pleasingly circular as well.)

Cameron Sorden recently opined that the word “epic” is overused. He doesn’t remember the last time he felt “epic” in an MMORPG, so he feels it’s false advertising. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really give any good suggestions on when to use it, and I don’t have a lot, either.

For me, “epic” means “overcoming impossible odds”, and that is in direct conflict with the usual pace of MMO’s: the plodding advancement of your character; the calculating choice of skills and equipment; the avoidance of any battle you are likely to lose. Not that I dislike those things — I like them a lot. But they aren’t epic.

To me, “epic” means I got an adrenaline rush! It means I didn’t think I was going to win, but I somehow did — I overcame impossible odds and succeeded. I can remember the last time this happened; it happens a lot when I try to tackle boss monsters that are way too dangerous for me, but I somehow make it work through judicious use of potions and buffs and cleverness. It’s more epic if I do it on the first try, but it’s still epic if it takes a few attempts.

Good luck artificially manufacturing that in your MMO, though. It’s found gameplay, not something that can be planned for very well.

That said, I don’t mind when developers use “epic” to describe their game. It’s just another word for “really really fun”, because it’s hard to get really accurate about your goals in a quick interview or magazine article.

I do mind when designers try to make “epic” quests that are little more than really long fetch-and-stab quests. These designers are working under the misguided notion that just making me work a long time will make the quest feel epic. This is a fallacy.

There’s certainly a place for long quests — but they had better be damned interesting all the way through!

Most MMO developers are worried about seeming “money-grubbing.” Whenever they introduce a new pay feature, they are stung by people who say the company is nickel-and-diming them. But in general, this is just another case of MMO developers paying too much attention to a tiny percentage of their audience. The general audience of WoW or EQ2, for instance, would pay good money for certain luxury services. But you need to know how to present these services in order to make them happiest, and in many cases this can be surprising: more expensive is better.

Let’s take in-game weddings, for example. One company I was close to planned to add in-game weddings for a small fee, say $20. Doing a simple $20 version isn’t where the real payoff is, though. Perhaps that makes it nice and accessible to roleplayers who want to have a half-dozen “marriages” in their character’s career, but it isn’t particularly appealing to people who are actually getting married. Diamonds aren’t the traditional wedding ring because they’re prettier than other rings. It’s because they’re also really expensive, and they make good tokens of tribute. At times of celebration or gathering, many people want to spend top dollar in order to have top-dollar accommodations. The $20 marriage package comes off as cheap.

Not that you shouldn’t have a $20 wedding package if you feel strongly about it. But have better versions, too. If the $20 version gets you a room, cake, and costumes, then the $50 version should get all that plus an NPC band, catering NPCs, a fountain that buffs everyone in the room for a week, etc. But that’s small potatoes. Go further. Let people have really special events. The $500 version has a customer service rep on-hand for two hours, providing services such as crowd control (keeping rowdy players off the stage), creating custom effects as desired (perhaps the bride and groom want to ceremonially kill a monster together?), and to perform any other wedding roles desired, such as the emcee, DJ, whatever else you can make work in your game. Make it special. Put some time into it.

Then go further. The $2500 version has all of that, plus it’s attended by two game developers who will make short remarks at the in-game reception. This version also includes a real-life framed photo from the wedding, signed by the entire game team. Maybe a unique in-game trinket, too. Add whatever else you can think of to make it feel worthwhile and special.

It’s not really about making money. Even at $2500, the development investment combined with the disruption to your dev team means that your ROI (return on investment) is probably pretty low compared to other things you could do. But man, will it make people feel special! In a game with 100,000 players, I’d expect you’d get 10 or so $2500 weddings a year. Those will be events that participants talk about for many years to come. Plus, you have a good chance of turning those people into lifers — dedicated fans that will stick with the game through thick and thin, and who keep other people playing, too. You should always work hard to create lifers. And the best way to create lifers is to give people personal attention.

Anyway, I got a bit distracted. But the point is this: make your luxury services luxurious! Services in this vein can include weddings, bar mitzvahs, company meetings, funeral services, memorials, sweet 16 parties, and so on. Don’t skimp, and don’t worry about people saying you’re nickel-and-diming them to death. Those people weren’t going to buy your luxury services anyway.

 PS - a tip: start by designing and implementing the most elaborate version first, then create the stripped-down versions second. Don’t try it the other way, it’ll be much harder and a lot more frustrating for everyone involved.