Green Monster Games (Curt Schilling)

[Maxxius]

Originally Posted by gnomad

I agree with you also Maxxius, what is being discussed though is how to get rid of the suck and if MMORPG companies keep on the same course that they have for the last decade or so (with few exceptions) then suckage will be the standard.

Well my hope with studio38 is that they do have a quality author in RA to at least help create a good story. With VG you basically had Brad and Jeff creating a story that, I am sorry, they simply were never qualified to make. So in the end, true talent imo proves important, regardless of production models. And while I would agree that having a solid production model is important, it will always remain secondary to the actual product being produced.

[CylusSoulreaver]

Originally Posted by Maxxius

With VG you basically had Brad and Jeff creating a story that, I am sorry, they simply were never qualified to make.

Brad and Jeff's realization never came to fruition because Brad was never around and Jeff was too busy playing WoW in his office. The only time that I ever found Jeff outside of his office and not playing WoW was when he got pissed off and would roam around yelling at people.

Now, I like Jeff and I respect him much moreso than others. But seriously, put down the gdamn mic and ignore that WoW instance in exchange for the attention of one of your designers, please?

[Maxxius]

Oh give me a break. You know damn well neither Brad nor Jeff has ever written anything of serious quality. And don't give me some lame meaningless Eq expansion as an example. True talent wins out in the long run and neither had it, aside from ego.

[Zarcath]

I find it ironic that VG's demise could be attributed to a case of WoW addiction (among other addictions).

[Ukerric]

Originally Posted by Pancreas

1.) Hide stats as much as possible (sounds horrible but wait!) Replace lists of numbers with as much visual and aural information as possible. The more information a player gets from observing their environment the more "immersed" they become. (that word gets way too much)

Doesn't work. If your MMORPG is popular and achievement-oriented, those numbers WILL be derived, with a relative degree of precision, by the people interested in numbers.

If your clues are imprecise or irrelevant to the results, people will complain that they have no idea how well they're doing. If they're relatively precise and well-correlated to your results, the numbers will be derived, and then other people will complain that they need to go to this-and-that website to get "real info".

This creates a small mini-game, that of deriving the underlying equations and numbers. But don't kid yourself, hiding numbers make theorycraft a game that only a smaller percentage of population creates because it's harder, it doesn't erase it. Ask any veteran of MUD-DEV about it.

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Tropics

The single most serious issue MMORPG's seem to face IMO is the sustainability of the early leveling and growth focus that these games have, of..........The expansions as they have been done in these games to date offer a small term temporary return to such a play style with a level increase, but by the time they do this those that yearn for the advancement playstyle are either playing an alt or have quit the game altogether.

It is no secret that the maxxing out playerbase is a large reason these games slowly lose their charm to a huge portion of players, the low level areas turning into ghost towns, the inability to find groups for the few new players starting at the low levels, and the only people able to play at the high level in the raid focused end game needing a whole lot of spare time.

Practically everyone who has played FFXI agrees their answer to this is phenomenal. Allow all characters to level all classes, though you can only have one class active at a time.

Allow races to have significant bonuses to different stats, so each has classes they are the best at, and the min/maxers and power games will still have an incentive to reroll.


The list of ideas developers should adopt from FFXI is extensive; its all about fun, which translates to 'hooks' to keep interest. Square Enix really took the class and combat system to the next level - no-one else has come close.

It shows how good they are when so much of the rest of the game sucks, but we will play it because these aspects are truly innovative and fun.

[Dymus]

I don't post on message boards very often but Flight, you've drawn me out of the woodwork with some of the comments about the MMO industry which I'd like to elaborate on.

QA vs. QC vs. Testing

Many of the comments about QA (Quality Assurance) seem to try and blend QC / Testing (Quality Control) in with them for a lot of the suggestions about what is wrong with the MMO industry. There is a difference between Quality Assurance, which is an advisory role: "Hey Bob, you know that feature you added? Yeah, it's not winding up so good, I know you wanted the button to turn the screen blue, but what you've got is more of a purple, is that what you intended?"

And Quality Control / Testing which is more of the "Hey Bob, the specification says the blue should be hue values 0.243, 0.112, 0.981 using our system, what you have there is not that, please fix it." QA and Testing both get used interchangeably which is often incorrect in context. The aims for the two are different even if it may be the same department or person who is doing both. Knowing the difference is very important.

Applying a waterfall / whatever other process to game development.

A process is a process, it is neither good, nor bad on its own. What you need to do often is pick or develop the processes and methods which work best for what you're trying to accomplish. The waterfall method works very well in a system or product where failure rate needs to be very low and you're iterating a lot. It works well for things such as microprocessors since you have your core product and you're making little modifications and need to make sure those modifications don't break your core. The same holds true for just about every other process, you pick the one that is best suited to your environment, goals, and product and run with it. Falling into the trap of "this method works for X" is dangerous when it could be very inefficient for what you're specifically trying to accomplish.

Lack of Skills / Hire outside of the Industry

Please try to avoid broad generalizations. In the time I've been in the game industry I've worked with folks who were project managers from NASA, Chemical Engineers from DOW and DuPont, Engineers from IBM, Xerox, the medical industry, IT from fortune 500 companies, Designers from investment banking, radiology labs, and animal behaviorists. Before the game industry I was an ISO 9000 QA Engineer working on microprocessors and firmware. The industry does hire outside of itself, however, there is nothing quite like making an MMO and so while you can have a lot of parallel skills there is always something to be said for that specific experience and learning from doing it once.

Subjectivity

Having come from a hardware background where things either worked or they didn't, it was very chaotic to move into an industry where there were shades of gray. "Well Bob that didn't quite work out the way we planned it, but that sure is neat anyway. That's not a bug, that's a feature!"

That chaos is required though for one very specific reason: Creativity. Inability to learn how to focus that chaos and creativity is the prime reason many MMO's don't live up to expectations. Above all Focus on what you're making and be realistic about your expectations. Lack of focus is where the industry has had problems in the past.


And of course, Fun
Maxxius had the best quote: "But despite all this buzz word discussing on how to set up a MMO production "model" it all still means nothing if the game just plumb sucks. And to be honest that is all I as a consumer really care about."

People only care if thier nuclear boats don't sink, or their taxes get filed correctly, or their medical equipment does exactly what it's supposed to. For a game, they also care what color the hull is, how efficiently their taxes get filed so they can calculate their MPS (Money per second), and that the medical equipment isn't somehow nerfing their lifespan from errant radiation.

Subjectivity is the hard part. You can't learn that from other industries in the same way. The development methodologies you can, but you do need to adapt them to work in the MMO environment. There is no "right" answer just ones with different tradeoffs. There is always a tradeoff.

[Tropics]

Originally Posted by Flight

Practically everyone who has played FFXI agrees their answer to this is phenomenal. Allow all characters to level all classes, though you can only have one class active at a time.

That is one MMORPG I have never played. So what you are saying is is you start as a druid, level to 20, get bored for a while you can switch to a warrior, which reverts you to a level 1 warrior but otherwise the same character (what happens to the gear?) and you can play like that for abit before switching back to the 20 druid or something else starting as a level 1? Definately unique, it smacks abit of a skill based system letting you build up different skill sets within the different class of the same character.

If you do this are quests redoable for the character? What I mean is if I do a level 5 quest with the druid, level on to 20, then revert to a warrior and begin leveling that can you redo a quest as the warrior version of yourself now? If so it seems kind of odd, but if not it makes starting an alt alot more practical since you have more quests to do that the druid already did.

One thing about this system is it may help the game last a while longer in the short term but much as alt building tends to wane later in the game so would playing a different class on that same character instead of sticking to the high level class. With remortation as a system to add character advancement in expansions, a diffiuclt and time consuming quest that a necromancer for example could do at the maximum level and at the end of that quest they become a lich, weakened greatly by the change to this new form to a low level, but with some new spells and abilities that they did not have as a necromancer and a higher level cap as a lich then existed as a necromancer. Done well this would be a real fix, many of those capped when an expansion is released would do a remortation quest to become the more powerful form, re-populatiing low level content and new low level content in the expansion. This would give each expansion a significant lifespan before people are maxxing out again en masse since people are making a trip from the low levels all the way to the top again instead of just tacking on 5 or 10 levels that many paste off in a week or two from the release of an expansion. Given the varying speeds of leveling that a game like this has in it's playerbase a system done like this right would assure that each level range would have numerous people working through it and allow for grouping for both those older players going through a remort stage and a newer player starting out late in the game seeing a well populated world.

I agree totally that the various races should have large differences in stats. A ogre should be alot more powerful then a gnome, and alot less intelligent. One issue games have is while you can make this difference somewhat meaningful in the early game the gear tends to add bulk amounts to the characters and a difference of 140 strength and 70 strength for a ogre an in the beginning which is 2/1 becomes 540/470 at high levels. The bulk stats from gear nullifies the differences in the classes to a large degree. On the VG forum we had a large discussion about this and the best answer I heard was to make gear have percentage increases from the original stats instead of bulk stat amounts (AKA: instead of a helm giving +20 strength it gives +15% of original strength, so if you have 100 strength as a naked human you get 15 more strength with that helm, as a gnome with 50 strength naked you would get 7.5 strength from that same helm). What that would do is keep the exact same ratio of strength that existed at the start of the game. A well geared gnome could be more powerful then a poorly geared ogre, but when equally geared the ogre would be stronger by a large margin, which makes sense.

Just some brainstorming from back in the day.

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Dymus

I don't post on message boards very often but Flight, you've drawn me out of the woodwork with some of the comments about the MMO industry which I'd like to elaborate on.

QA vs. QC vs. Testing

Many of the comments about QA (Quality Assurance) seem to try and blend QC / Testing (Quality Control) in with them for a lot of the suggestions about what is wrong with the MMO industry. There is a difference between Quality Assurance, which is an advisory role: "Hey Bob, you know that feature you added? Yeah, it's not winding up so good, I know you wanted the button to turn the screen blue, but what you've got is more of a purple, is that what you intended?"

And Quality Control / Testing which is more of the "Hey Bob, the specification says the blue should be hue values 0.243, 0.112, 0.981 using our system, what you have there is not that, please fix it." QA and Testing both get used interchangeably which is often incorrect in context. The aims for the two are different even if it may be the same department or person who is doing both. Knowing the difference is very important.

Applying a waterfall / whatever other process to game development.

A process is a process, it is neither good, nor bad on its own. What you need to do often is pick or develop the processes and methods which work best for what you're trying to accomplish. The waterfall method works very well in a system or product where failure rate needs to be very low and you're iterating a lot. It works well for things such as microprocessors since you have your core product and you're making little modifications and need to make sure those modifications don't break your core. The same holds true for just about every other process, you pick the one that is best suited to your environment, goals, and product and run with it. Falling into the trap of "this method works for X" is dangerous when it could be very inefficient for what you're specifically trying to accomplish.

Lack of Skills / Hire outside of the Industry

Please try to avoid broad generalizations. In the time I've been in the game industry I've worked with folks who were project managers from NASA, Chemical Engineers from DOW and DuPont, Engineers from IBM, Xerox, the medical industry, IT from fortune 500 companies, Designers from investment banking, radiology labs, and animal behaviorists. Before the game industry I was an ISO 9000 QA Engineer working on microprocessors and firmware. The industry does hire outside of itself, however, there is nothing quite like making an MMO and so while you can have a lot of parallel skills there is always something to be said for that specific experience and learning from doing it once.

Subjectivity

Having come from a hardware background where things either worked or they didn't, it was very chaotic to move into an industry where there were shades of gray. "Well Bob that didn't quite work out the way we planned it, but that sure is neat anyway. That's not a bug, that's a feature!"

That chaos is required though for one very specific reason: Creativity. Inability to learn how to focus that chaos and creativity is the prime reason many MMO's don't live up to expectations. Above all Focus on what you're making and be realistic about your expectations. Lack of focus is where the industry has had problems in the past.


And of course, Fun
Maxxius had the best quote: "But despite all this buzz word discussing on how to set up a MMO production "model" it all still means nothing if the game just plumb sucks. And to be honest that is all I as a consumer really care about."

People only care if thier nuclear boats don't sink, or their taxes get filed correctly, or their medical equipment does exactly what it's supposed to. For a game, they also care what color the hull is, how efficiently their taxes get filed so they can calculate their MPS (Money per second), and that the medical equipment isn't somehow nerfing their lifespan from errant radiation.

Subjectivity is the hard part. You can't learn that from other industries in the same way. The development methodologies you can, but you do need to adapt them to work in the MMO environment. There is no "right" answer just ones with different tradeoffs. There is always a tradeoff.

Jason, I think this is a fantastic post and I'm going to spend more than a little time re-reading it and thinking it through (hey, I'm mining in Eve, what else is there to do. ). I have to say, again, that I believe we have similar views on a lot of the subject material, but we are approaching it from different angles.

I'm trying to promote a discussion among the folk who can feed into it, to :

i) find common ground and belief on what can be improved; and,

ii) discuss how we make those improvements a reality.


I'd really appreciate your feedback on those issues.




I also have to ask, in light of how extensive your experience is in non-MMO games prior to your Sony experience, how different are the issues you encounter in the two genres ?

[Pancreas]

Originally Posted by Ukerric

Doesn't work. If your MMORPG is popular and achievement-oriented, those numbers WILL be derived, with a relative degree of precision, by the people interested in numbers.

If your clues are imprecise or irrelevant to the results, people will complain that they have no idea how well they're doing. If they're relatively precise and well-correlated to your results, the numbers will be derived, and then other people will complain that they need to go to this-and-that website to get "real info".

This creates a small mini-game, that of deriving the underlying equations and numbers. But don't kid yourself, hiding numbers make theorycraft a game that only a smaller percentage of population creates because it's harder, it doesn't erase it. Ask any veteran of MUD-DEV about it.

I understand that there will always be those who want to open something up to see how it ticks. However, giant numerical values representing different variables is the result of limited technology or poor implementation or habit.

If you are going to make a calculation a critical part of any game,it needs some sort of accurate representation, period.
Threat in WoW is completely invisible without 3rd party mods. And yet it will cripple any raid if it is not completely understood. This is really inexcusable in my opinion.

What players need is accurate feedback for every calculation they are subject to. How this feedback is delivered is something to be considered though.
People are always compiling data about real world systems to better understand them. These systems invariably get broken down into numerical values so that they might be more readily examined and understood. We use these numbers and calculations to see patterns and ratios with better focus.

However, the original data was not in numerical format. My point is that in order for a game world to seem more like a world and not a spread-sheet these values need to be displayed in as much a natural way as possible.

I have played countless versions of statistics-quest over the years and have always thought that numbers were big trade-offs. They give information quickly but in very simplified format. There is a lot of story telling that has yet to take place in place of those numbers.

The box scores for baseball games give you all the information to accurately recite how the game was played and yet they are still a poor substitute for going to the park.

[CylusSoulreaver]

Originally Posted by Zarcath

I find it ironic that VG's demise could be attributed to a case of WoW addiction (among other addictions).

Well, keep in mind that my experience is/was limited to what I saw. I'm sure that there were plenty of meetings that I wasn't privy to and that they were much more hands-on in the early stages of the project, just not at the end.

Ultimately, it comes down to visibility. I currently sit two chairs down from my lead designer, three from the lead programmer and a short ways from the lead artist. They're all out there on the floor, visibly working along side the rest of us. The fact that they aren't closeting themselves up in an office like some CEO is quite a boon to the pipeline as well as general morale.

[Dymus]

Originally Posted by Flight

I'm trying to promote a discussion among the folk who can feed into it, to :

i) find common ground and belief on what can be improved; and,

ii) discuss how we make those improvements a reality.

I'd really appreciate your feedback on those issues.

I also have to ask, in light of how extensive your experience is in non-MMO games prior to your Sony experience, how different are the issues you encounter in the two genres ?

1. There are things to be improved in any industry. If there was nothing to be improved then people would stop trying. If I had a list of the the top three things of what could be improved it would be the following:
- Foster Communication within and between development teams for what works and what doesn't.
- Focus on what the product is, not what it could be. Narrow things down to what are realistic goals, develop that core, then if time allows expand it but always maintain the core focus, never ever lose sight of it.
- Learn (and teach) not only from your own mistakes but those of others. Continuously re-evaluate against your goals. Success can teach a lot, failure can teach more. This is why post-mortems are always so valuable.

2. The only way to make them a reality is to actually put some ideas into practice. Prove that your method works and then explain to other people how you accomplished it. Blizzard does an excellent job of this. They have a method of development that works very well for them and they go to great lengths to explain those methods to others. The more studios who do this kind of thing the more those ideas can be combined, refined, and it pushes the whole thing forward.

They biggest differences between an MMO and any non-MMO games are these (sorry if this is obvious).

Scope - MMO's are big, really big, they are often literally like making 5 (or more) other games at once. A "system" in an MMO can often be larger than other whole games. That inherently makes focus and polish exceptionally difficult. And as has been pointed out already, you need to be aware of scalability, at all times, in everything. "Sure Bob, that runs well with 5 avatars here, but what happens when we have 500?"

Time - It takes longer to develop things which are larger in scope. Also, another thing which has been pointed out in this discussion a couple times: Long term planning. Yes, you do have to plan ahead for 10 years. All systems should be geared for that and allow for growth, adaptation, and addition. This is really really hard because you have to play oracle and look way ahead into the future in an environment which completely flips itself around every four years or so.

Frontier - MMO's by their very existence are new. They are a frontier of game development which is what makes it interesting and exciting... and unpredictable. It's like going on Safari in the 1800's. You might see things you've never seen before and come back with incredible stories... or you might get eaten by lions.

[Monsoon]

Originally Posted by Ngruk

... Allow them to do what you pay them to do, while creating passion and energy in the team for the products, and each other.

I would highly advise against inciting intra-company lust. In-office romance almost never turns out good. Especially if they're caught doing it in the paper supply room. Unless, of course, both of them are female. Hot ones. Then management should definitely let it fly under the radar. Especially at company parties after a few bottles of wine.

[Tyen]

Originally Posted by CylusSoulreaver

Ultimately, it comes down to visibility. I currently sit two chairs down from my lead designer, three from the lead programmer and a short ways from the lead artist. They're all out there on the floor, visibly working along side the rest of us. The fact that they aren't closeting themselves up in an office like some CEO is quite a boon to the pipeline as well as general morale.

Cylus is just mad that I can't sit on his lap.

[Fog]

Originally Posted by Pancreas

If you are going to make a calculation a critical part of any game,it needs some sort of accurate representation, period.
Threat in WoW is completely invisible without 3rd party mods. And yet it will cripple any raid if it is not completely understood. This is really inexcusable in my opinion.

What players need is accurate feedback for every calculation they are subject to. How this feedback is delivered is something to be considered though.

I strongly disagree. In many games of all sorts, limited information adds a layer of skill and decision-making to the game that isn't present otherwise.

You could say the same thing about poker; your opponent's cards aren't visible unless you cheat. However, your opponents' cards are a hugely important unknown, and if you don't consider what they might be, you will lose consistently. Is that "inexcusable?" It certainly doesn't make poker less interesting.

At the same time, you need to incorporate the information you're giving to (and withholding from) the player into your game design. Example: Before BWL, WoW threat was important, but less demanding of precision. Most fights just required you to keep a tank at the top of the threat list, so the tank had to try his best to keep threat and the DPS and healing classes needed to try to estimate where they were on the threat list so as not to draw aggro.

However, they changed the game, and started creating fights which were reliant on a more precise understanding of threat, like Vael in BWL, where a threat meter made things a lot easier. Soon after, threat continued to become more important to the point where players and Blizzard agreed (by the creation of threat meters) that accurate threat information should be given to the player.

Neither concealing or revealing threat (or mob HP, or player attributes, or hundreds of other things) by itself is a good or bad idea. What counts is how you adapt your game to the mechanics and rules you've set in place.