[Game Dev] What do you want?

[legat0]

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Originally Posted by legat0

Hiram, I'm not here saying 'design my game.' I'm here to see what kind of steps people would like the industry to take. It's like you said, most people here know exactly what is good or bad about a given game, but what about the game that hasn't come out yet? What makes that game good or bad, or maybe a better question is what COULD make that game good, or great? Someone had to stand up and say 'what about a game that uses a guitar for a controller.' That is innovation, and that is what I am talking about.

[Alamando]

Communicate honestly.

That is all~

[Dahlrek]

Zehn-Vhex's right. There is no shortage of good ideas. You might be able to come up with some on your own (or expand upon the ideas found in throughout MMO history). Ideas aren't the hard part. Implementation is.

Step 1: Hire people that don't suck balls
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

Step 1 is harder than it looks. Ask your boss.

[Hachima]

I agree with Kodylan in that the design process WoW used played a large part in its success. I played both alpha and beta in WoW and Vanguard. They had different approaches to the development.

Wow focused on polishing one aspect of the game and only moving on until that part was polished. For example Horde level 1-10 was the focos for a while. The quests and content for that aspect of the game were polished and then they moved on to 10-20. Then 20-30.

Vanguard however was working on a broader range of content. Enough 1-10 content to get by, enough 20-30 content to get by etc. It seemed like developers worked on whatever they felt like for the time and jumped back and forth. This left a crappy 1-10 game, a crappy 10-20 game etc for a long time.

Polish out the 1-10 learning phase of the game then the 10-20 model which includes a transition into group play. Once you have the formula down for what players enjoy, then finish the rest of the phases.

If you have to change the scope of your game (IE core character mechanics/combat pace) when you already have designed many levels of content, you have that much more content to re-tune and fix.

Another key mentality to WoWs development was that they constantly asked themselves at any given time "Am I having fun? If not why?"

There are many things that can trigger a no here. Travel time, wanting to play but forced to have a group and there are no groups around etc.

[vouskaine]

hey guys. im a game dev. fucking recognize.

[legat0]

Hachima, exactly, and that process is really lacking, honestly I personally feel like a lot of more recent games are being rushed out the door to make their quick buck because producer so-and-so wants their return. A lot of it comes down to your time frame, having enough people to get through that process in a reasonable amount of time, and also having the right testers to help you find out when that point is reached. The fun factor is another thing that, as common sense as you'd think it should be, it seems so many people fail to ask themselves that... and it kills them.

[Mist]

Originally Posted by legat0

Mist, while I completely agree that fantasy feels overdone, I think what is really turning a lot of studios off to the sci-fi setting is the past success (or rather, lack thereof) of the MMOs that have been made with that setting. I'm not saying that's the reason for sure, but I believe it has a lot to do with it. I think a lot of it comes from the real desire that a lot of us have to play games in the first place, most people do it just for the opportunity to be someone they aren't, or do things they can't do in real life (which I'm sure you're aware of). And with that in mind, there IS a lot of people who instead of swinging a sword around want to be flying through space shooting everything with lasers, but the real challenge is making gameplay more fun than shooting lasers for 3 years of your life, cause as fun as it is in the beginning, the novelty usually wears off.

They did not succeed because they were bad. Earth and Beyond was really bad. Jumpgate was pretty damn bad. AO and Tabula Rasa are just fantasy games reskinned at sci-fi games for the most part, and don't even count, and were moderately successful anyway, just because they were different. Heck, EVE is monetarily successful despite being bad, well, the whole game isn't bad, but the combat sure is boring, and that's 90% of the fun of most MMOs. EVE should not be seen as a failure by anyone in the dev community. It should be seen as a game with remarkable successes despite completely failing in its delivery of the core gameplay: combat.

It doesn't matter what I say though. Blizzard is going to make a sci-fi MMO eventually, and it's going to get 10mil customers and people are going to be like 'whoa, maybe a sci-fi game would have worked if it wasn't a pile of steaming dogshit.'

[legat0]

Mist, I completely see where you're coming from, the problem is with the cost of production to make an MMO that would compete with say EVE (which is probably the most successful one with that setting right now), it would cost entirely too much to risk. I agree that a lot of the attempts at games in that setting were executed poorly but during development they didn't see that as the case, clearly. The setting is just really too unexplored for someone to lock in on something that is a for sure formula, whereas like you said, a powerhouse like Blizzard, or now Activision-Blizzard, can stand to devote the time to it and try different things to see what works while still having a comfortable footing, most -regular- companies work from project to project to stay afloat, and they really can't risk a failure.

[Mist]

They're going to fail anyway when their XgenericfantasygameX sucks and no one plays it. If either Age of Conan or Warhammer ends up succeeding, the market will be truly saturated with fantasy MMOs when you add either of those + WoW, and anyone building another fantasy MMO right now is risking facing a completely crowded market on the fantasy end.

[Believe]

I'd like to see a successful MMO use a skill tree/class hybrid like Asheron's Call 2 did.

Everyone starts out with just melee, ranged, or magic skills. Then at a certain level can specialize in a class tree. Could make some cool combinations, like Melee with magic pets, Archer/Paladin, etc.

I still think Tacticians were one of the coolest 'classes' in any MMO ever.

Too bad the rest of the game was severely lacking.

[Malvesti]

At this point in life, the only thing that will get my money is a game that lets me advance (at max level) with small chunks of playtime (1h or less). At any given time of day or week, I don't have the predictability to commit to a 2 or 3 hour instance/heroic, even, much less a 10 or 25-person raid.

[legat0]

Mist, in that same light though you can look at a game like Puzzle Pirates, one of the higher-ups, I don't quite recall a name or position at the moment (you could probably find the video easily by googling, although it's an hour long), gave a speech at last years GDC (Game Developers Conference) about the game and how their 'small' customer base generates them the money to keep it going (I think somewhere in the tune of 400,000.00 on an average month, and upwards of 700-800,000.00 on a month where they run a month long special on an item in their online item mall). The games you're considering to be 'failures' because they don't have a million+ players, are providing a smaller community a game they enjoy and serving the smaller studios very well. Of course of large company released a game like that it would be considered by their standards a 'failure', but for those little guys it's a temendous success.

[Ebalin]

A couple things off the top of my head.

There needs to be something that's achievable past max level.... I don't really want my option to get 1-2 upgrades max a month from raiding (I do like raiding frequently) ... I don't know if AA is the answer, but something.

Alright now for my dumb comment... When I play games now, and ideas are considered original I always think wow this existed in UO in 1998... There's alot of basic things that existed in UO as far as housing/tradeskills that I haven't seen in mmo's ( I have not played all mmo's )

More frequent world events even if they were monthly or weekly (random) big zone events

Edit:
PS since when do developers listen to end users

[Hachima]

I would say another hurdle is figuring out what users actually want. In development how often does the client even know what they want?

A few months ago marketing came to my team and wanted us to do some research for a new project. We presented them some ideas on what should be done after doing some research. They wanted stuff that was "cool". Not a lot of help but we came up with some things. They then picked a few of those things that they wanted us to focus on. Having completed their requirements, I had the freedom of developing and presenting something they didn't specifically ask for that didn't even come up in our initial presentation. It turned out it fit into what they were looking for and we exceeded their expectations. The client here didn't know what they really wanted, they just knew they wanted something in a general area.

I know people at work that play EVE and WoW. None of them post on boards, none of them fit the type of player that posts on boards. They are content on all their level 20 characters in WoW, people that mine 500kisk/hr in eve (I can make that much ISK in under 2 min) How do you figure out what these type of players want?

Or even myself in EVE. I don't really fall under any mainstream type of player. I live in deep 0.0 space away from my corp that is also in 00 space and has pvp ops going non stop. I don't pvp but I like to go blow stuff up now and then and look forward to officer spawns now and then. My posts about EVE or what I want from the game are minimal.

So depending on what your target audience is, a method of getting good feedback on what you are developing. Its one of the hardest things to accomplish I think. A few surveys like Vanguard sent out doesn't cut it. Vanguard gave little direction on what they wanted feedback on.

GuildWars did an excellent job at this. As it was lead by the the VP of R&D from blizzard and other people involved with Blizzard its no surprise that they took good developments practices and carried them over. I also had the opportunity of playing the alpha of GuildWars and also on their development server after release. Multiple times each week the testers were given very specific things to test. They gathered detailed feedback on these tests each time they were held. It may be for a specific map, a specific class etc. They had something in mind. Too often testers are just given a forum for each class, each aspect of the game but are never given any real direction on what the developers need help with.

Both WoW and GuildWars had focused tests and gathered specific feedback on specific things from their testers. As a result I think both games are well polished and fun games.

[Ravensign]

MMO's are like diets. Pick one and fucking do it properly. People hem and haw over all these fad diets, and they all would work if you just do them.

Pick something and execute. Nothing anyone says here is going to matter a shit if the execution is poor.

Oh and put fun first. When people treat mmo mechanics like a religion everyone suffers.

Also, if you could somehow be Scott Hartsman that would help.