Game Design

My inspiration for this RPG project is Ultima IV, so I've spent some time hunting around reading what others have said about the game.

Looking at all the Ultimas, what seems most striking to me is (1) world interactivity, (2) open-endedness, and (3) consequences.

[1] Most 3D games have woefully static worlds. Simple things, like moving chairs around a room, are cake in a tile-based 2D game but become nightmares in 3D, where the designers probably want a physics engine to handle it. The thing is, we (humans) have a lot of flexibility when interacting with objects, whereas in a game the UI usually limits us to uni-directional pressure. We have not just 'pushing' but variable pressure and torque.

But then there's simple things like turning candles on and off, flipping switches, or even lowering drawbridges. I think all of these things add greatly to immersion, and thereby to enjoyment and fun. They're what I want to do in a 2D environment.

[2] I have a harder-time accepting open-endedness. I think many people don't know why they enjoy something. Many times when I've asked people what they liked about a game, I get one memorable instance. Memorable is very different from fun. Memorable moments happen rarely, but fun games have dozens of hours that aren't very memorable. Good combat is intense and non-trivial, but ultimately good intensity means that it isn't memorable. If everything is memorable ... uh, I don't think that's possible. I think we would be overwhelmed with that much emotion. Memorable events are memorable because they're so exceptional!

I don't think making every waking moment exceptional is even really possible, for more than maybe an hour. The time to create content is dwarfed by the time to consume it. Nowadays, those $5M single-player console games are consumed in a couple dozen hours or less. That's something like a five-thousand-to-one ratio. Every hour of amusement takes five thousand hours for the creators to develop. Maybe I can improve that ratio a lot, but then I wind up entertaining a niche market only.

My point: I'm not sure how important open-endedness is. I think linearity, especially when it becomes grossly apparent, is frustrating. When the player wants to do X but is prevent to by the structures of the plot, that sucks. But is all linearity necessarily bad? It definitely makes it easier to make a single plot. Highly narrated games require that linearity.

Hmm, I guess my point is really: what is it about "open-endedness" that is attractive, if anything? I'm not going to believe it just because people say so -- in part because it's difficult to reach a decision on how much open-endedness to add if I don't understand why. I think this is a big enough issue that I'll write about it later.

[3] Consequences. A good linear game might convince the player that his choices were meaningful if the player was satisfied with his choices. If the player feels forced in his decisions, he'll be unhappy. But if his decision was effectively irrelevant but the player feels like he had a meaningful decision to make, then he'll be happy with those consequences.

But saying "consequences make the game fun" really means that it is possible, upon play-through, to change the way the game comes out. Does it matter what class you choose? All the way down to -- does it matter what spells you use in combat? It seems to me that early Ultimas suffered from pointless combat, because no matter what spells or weapons you had, all that really mattered was your net damage output. It seems that you have to almost cheat at these games -- using ships cannons, or grossly over-powered weapons, or invisibility rings, or letting party members die and adventuring solo thru the whole thing -- to make any meaningful difference in combat. In other words, no combat decisions were meaningful. Cast spell A or B? Who cares? Whichever one gets the combat over with faster.

Modern MMOs are combat games at their heart, which means players spend hundreds
of hours in combat. The combat system is intricate enough to make those hundreds of hours different. What spell you use in combat matters, at least in terms of whether you win a fight quickly or slowly. What's strange, to me, is the huge amount of variance in player skill -- some players suck at their classes, and ... god, it amazes me. I can't think that they don't want to get better, but... ! I think they get stuck on "total damage" and fail to realize things like damage-per-second and stuns are also useful.

Anyway. Consequence. Yeah. So, combat choices should be meaningful. Dungeons should give loot relative to their difficulty and/or time to completion.

I went to see some panel discussion in Austin once and I remember Garriot making the point that MMOs had lost the "fun". I want to say that a long, challenge-free dungeon (or trek) should have a reward matching the time investment, but I'm reminded of David Sirlin's comments about WoW rewarding time spent, which he considers the wrong thing to reward. I agree with his point. I think the answer, really, is that you shouldn't have a long, challenge-free dungeon. There's not really much point in making a really long, empty hallway in a single-player game. If the game needs to be longer, adding boring parts isn't really what you want to do.

Combat choices need to have consequences. Time spent in a dungeon or on a quest should have consequences. Game-wide choices, such as for character class, or whether you help the Empire or the Rebellion, should (at least appear to) have an impact on the game.

The thing is, again, content takes time to develop. Say, halfway thru a game, the player shifts a war to one side or the other. And the game is open-ended (cuz, well, we'll just take this on faith atm). So every character and environment in the game needs to be rendered one way or the other: either that city has been destroyed and is populated by dispirited survivors and the enemy oppressors, or it's still intact and populated by cheerful victors. The environment is different, the quests are different, heck, it's two different worlds.

So, ah, no. I also think making content that half of your playerbase won't see is a poor investment. (It adds some replayability though.) There's plusses and minuses here, but I don't want to let open-endedness spiral out of control.

I'm much happier giving characters different dialog. Different quests, fine. But I think art resources take a lot more time than design resources.