We need a developer who actually likes magic.

[Qhue]

The one persistent theme with massively multiplayer RPGs is that most of them are either traditional high fantasy or are traditional high fantasy total conversion.

Of course Everquest, Vanguard, and World of Warcraft are tolkienien in nature, but so too are Anarchy Online, The Matrix Online and even Star Wars Galaxies. Sure people have mohawks and walk around with machine pistols instead of battleaxes in some of these games but you can't tell me that the nanite-control abilities of a psychomancer in AO isnt just magic wrapped in a layer of technobabble.

The problem with so many games being based around high fantasy concepts is that not a one of them is staffed by so much as a single developer who actually LIKES magic. In fact in talking to several developers at different companies its pretty clear that the number one qualification to develop the skills/magic system for a MMORPG is to genuinely despise the concept.


Given that the thing which really seperates Fantasy from non-fantasy IS the magic itself and that there are quite a few people (like myself) who seem inexorably drawn to the spellcaster archetype this leads to really big problems with almost all such games. I'll take a moment here to give examples:

1) Wizards vs. Muggles - This is the Harry Potter dilema. If you have one person who has the ability to turn your aunt into a hot air baloon at will or toss huge balls of fire from their fingertips and someone else who DOESNT have that ability then the magic person is always going to be better than the non magic one. In a book this is often dealt with by extenuating circumstances usually involving the personality or internal character of the wizard that does not translate into an RPG setting.

2) AK-97 and bandaids with particle effects - Lacking any real sense of finesse and wanting to simply make life easier magic is treated as generic ranged damage or generic healing effect accompanied with razzle-dazzle from the art department. This is the most commonly employed tactic from people who acknowledge that they need magic in their game but who really REALLY hate the concept.

3) Quirky special abilities with unintended uses - These are the "oooh ahhh" powers added into games that oftentimes find their primary utility in uses that were wholly unintended by the original creator and thus cause problems. Oftentimes we hear about these in terms of the abilities that become grossly overpowered, but they are also found in abilities that sound really nifty in concept but which lie there like a dead fish in actual implementation (every version of "Detect magic" ever implemented in a game)


So as a result we often see games where magic is grossly overpowered or completely worthless with not alot of variety between those two extremes. In the event that something is grossly overpowered and is magical it almost always gets "nerfed" into uselessness because trying to deal with it just isnt very intuitive and often is dealt with by wholly different means than other persons than deal with gross imbalances in other parts of gameplay. In the event that something is just plain useless it almost always just gets left there and is used as a statistic to extole the virtues of the game through numerics (over 7000 different spells!, just please ignore the fact that no one ever uses 6950 of them and of the remaining 50 37 are the same spell with different art)

So what is to be done?

Well first of all we need someone, ANYONE involved with MMORPG design who actually likes magic as a concept. With that milestone achieved the next step is to come up with a coherant metaphysics that governs how everything in the world works.

"Metaphysics? Why bother?!?" you ask.

Because the physics of a game is one of those inherant things that is necessary to make a game work and yet is one of the most overlooked aspects of a game design. It is ALWAYS include, it is just often not consciously considered as part of the game design because nearly all games are grounded in the shared and largely intuitive physics of the real world.

Consider a World War II era shooting game. Everyone has an intuitive feel about how the basic actions of the game works. Its hard to hit a moving target with a gun, guns give recoil, big guns are heavy and arent very portable, damage done scales well with callibur of the bullet etc. With sufficient research you can include all sorts of historically accurate information about rates of fire, overheating, radio operation, weather conditions and how they effect airborne missions, heck even particular details about how much light a WWII era hand flashlight produces or what risk there is of ammunition being ruined by water can be included. If you make some gross missteps with the basic assumptions of the game and its internal consistency (allowing a tank to run across large bodies of water or letting a solider wield a howitzer at close range like a rifle with unlimited ammo) then things are obviously wrong and the game suffers.

Now consider a game like Paper Mario. Here we have a basic concept (that the main characters are paper cutouts and exist on a 2D background) that is pretty simple and yet when fully developed includes the ability to fold the characters into new shapes, a primal fear of scissors fire and water, and the ability to rework the world around you by introducing drawn or cutout elements that arent necessarily to the proper scale. Paper Mario works because it is internally consistent and the developers of the game took care to keep true to the basic premise of the game in most areas of the gameplay.

So why do MMORPGS fail to handle "magic" properly? Because they never sat down to truly define the rules by which "magic" works in their games and to pursue a complete and self-consistent treatment of it in their game world. You end up with someone implementing "magic" who is either too ground in real world physics to imagine the logical and necessary possibilities or who is charged with the task of implementing "Arcane Missiles" when really they'd rather be working on the world war II simulator.


Find ONE person who starts out on a development team with a true love of "magic" and who helps design the entire game world in a self-consistent manner in the same way that the design team of Paper Mario embraced the paper cut-out reality and things will get markedly better.

Until then you will have storylines where people are afraid of sickness and death despite a few hundred people in a small village that are capable of casting massive healing spells on a daily basis. You'll have grand armies of orcish warriors that terrify kingdoms despite having several dozen people who seem to be capable of calling down large comets of glowing ice from the sky and enemies who face more lethal threats from a short person with a paring knife than the guy who just caused an entre family to willingly jump into a chasm of molten lava that erupted from the earth.

[Goofy]

clap. Again i like your style. Please post more.

[Kolle]

I would also like to see magic get more attention and tlc. I'd love to see Blizzard get rid of mana for starters.

[Froofy-D]

Hell, I'd settle for a game where caster effectiveness scales with gear just like melee effectiveness. BTW, have you read about the VG Psionicist class? Sounds like they are touching on some of the issues you mention. Let's hope the rest of the classes are as innovative.

I'd love to see Blizzard get rid of mana for starters.

Why? Wouldnt that kinda of dumb the game down? No management of mana pool. No aquisition of gear to increase mana regen or amount. Besides melee cant just infinitely spam abilities. They have to manage pools as well to use their skills.

[Fammaden]

Originally posted by Kolle
I would also like to see magic get more attention and tlc. I'd love to see Blizzard get rid of mana for starters.

From reading the DDO site and running across this it seems that they were going with a limited use spell system like the P&P D&D style until they actually started in house alpha and realized what it did to the game's pacing and playability for a spell caster. From what I can tell they are switching over to a mana pool type system instead now. It’s kind of a shame, but I certainly understand the reasons for the shift. At least it sounds like they are staying with a limit on the number of spells you can memorize for the day. I think that is at least a strategic concept that has some merit and one that we have lost track of to a large degree along the way. Being able to mem all your spells with the only limit being your UI like in WoW is just over the top silly to me.

I agree that physics are probably the next great hope for advancement in this genre in general and in magic in particular.

Incidentally, that is a pretty nicely detailed and explanatory dev log IMO.

[nadime]

I ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY agree. When my roommate and I used to fuck around doing game design in college, this was one of the CENTERPIECES of our stuff -- the idea that we need a ruleset for magic that allows it to be something beyond stupidass spell that get upgraded. Some sort of much more flexible system.

[beepbeepbeep]

Spell points in DDO . I was kind of looking forward to it... this doesn't bode well for the game.

[Kolle]

Ah yeah I've been looking at DDO off and on. I was wondering how they were gonna pull that off without having casters stand around half the time doing nothing.


I'd like to see all spells mana-free and simply have a cooldown. Give each magic user a type of 'Mental Meter' thing that they can monitor. The more and more they use spells, the more the meter fills up. Over time it empties.

The lower the meter, the more potent spells are. Not by an insane degree, but let's say minimum would give 10-15% boost (healing, damage, low resist check on status effects) and max meter would give like a 5-10% subtraction. Also, the higher the meter the longer your spell cooldowns. Not a ton, but some.

Also there could be bonus effects depending on where your meter is. If you're meter is empty-quarter filled, then maybe your fireball would carry a school silence or your mind blast could reduce healing effects.

If you're meter was 3/4-full then along with the reduced potency, you could get an interesting little bonus like life drain. So if you cast a 500 dmg fireball normally then it would be reduced to something like 450ish or whatever. But, it could give you a slight tap based on your current max hps. Something like 1-5%.

[Lenardo]

beepbeep,

in internal testing using the traditional memorize and cast once method they found that in a typical ddo encounter...a spell caster lasted all of 2 or 3 fights- if he was Careful.

he then had to stop and "rest" to rememorize his spells.

which created an immense amount of downtime.

their goal if i rmemeber the article correctly, is to be able to go 20 fights before having to rest.

[beepbeepbeep]

Yeah, I know, I read the article. Still don't like it.

Rather than memorizing 20 spells, they could have simply kept it low and allowed multiple castings of those spells or something.

[Awanka]

Fantasy doesn't necessarily mean magic. I'd rather see a fantasy MMORPG come out with no magic at all, but that would require too much creativity and originality on the part of the developers. Even in magic-oriented fantasy, I like it to be toned down. As in, there are very few magic-users in the world, and not every other person knows how to throw fireballs.

[beepbeepbeep]

Originally posted by Awanka
Fantasy doesn't necessarily mean magic. I'd rather see a fantasy MMORPG come out with no magic at all, but that would require too much creativity and originality on the part of the developers. Even in magic-oriented fantasy, I like it to be toned down. As in, there are very few magic-users in the world, and not every other person knows how to throw fireballs.

Kind of like the world in the Song of Ice and Fire trilogy by Martin?

...or hell, even LOTR.

[Ronne]

Conan MMO?

[Itzena]

Yes?

[qxx]

You lost me at "technobabble".