The Thousand-Hour Sim, Part 1

One of the ideas I mentioned yesterday was that there's only a few genres where a large number of players (10,000 or more) will be willing to spend multiple hundreds of hours playing the game. There's a lot of games were a good chunk of the audience will spend around 100 hours. Many single-player RPGs have that much content, and a lot of multiplayer games will keep players busy for 100 hours.

But take a game like WoW - there are millions of people that put in hundreds of hours every year, and probably millions that have put in over a thousand hours over the six years since the game has come out. Some of the friends that I worked with averaged six hours a day - usually spending a dozen hours on the weekends and a few during the week. That works out over 2000 hours a year. Even if they burned out in six months, that's a thousand hours right there.

Competitive games, like Starcraft and Counter-Strike, are another genre where thousands of people might spend thousands of hours.

What would you have to do to make a sim that could keep at least tens of thousands of players occupied for a thousand hours?

Summary of the FMMORPG Argument

There were eight factors I mentioned when I described Fantasy MMORPGs as the ultimate genre. They are:

1. environment variety
2. tangible, human-scale environment
3. non-trivial gameplay
4. opponent complexity
5. opponent personality
6. solo and group gameplay
7. inspiration
8. open end-game

The first factor means having a wide range of environments. The second suggests using an environment that can be rich. Gameplay needs to be complex, and getting to a really rich complexity means not just having a complex puzzle but introducing AI units into the game that introduce complexity, keeping the game fresh. The fifth factor, opponent personality, is like the second: it puts a face to the game world that players can relate to; an environment that produces stories. The sixth factor is about allowing players to play whenever they want, while also giving them team goals, where they can work towards goals larger than one player. Inspiration (and something I didn't mention, commitment) are ways of giving players long-term goals to keep them coming back. The final factor says that the game can't end after a hundred hours; allowing players to stay in the same game world for the entire duration of their play-time can keep them there.

The factors can be broken down into a few threads. I'll probably redo this list at some point. Obviously, this list isn't definitive; I'm building a model for game design and there are surely many other models just as suitable. Anyway, the points I'll cover today will be:

• Gameplay needs to be rich
• The game world needs to be rich
• The game has to enable stories and emotional moments
• It should allow the player to play, and make progress, whenever they want
• The game should provide large goals, requiring time and/or teamwork
• The game should have an anchor that commits players to the game

Some of these feel essential to me, others feel like caveats.

Positive Attributes

I think some of the attributes should influence the core game design. The game should be built around these principles. These are the things you should be trying to do when you design the game. The negative attributes, which I mention later, are a list of things you link at and think, is there something in this design that will drive away players? I think the negative attributes can be tweaked - that once the core game mechanics are nailed down, the next step is to go through a list of "gotchas" and make sure there's nothing there that would piss off players.

First I'll tackle the attributes core to game design.

Gameplay needs to be rich. This is the single most important attribute. Without rich gameplay, the game becomes rote quickly, and play-time becomes boring. I've talked about the essence of fun before, and my theses on boredom is that it happens when the player doesn't have to think about gameplay; if the time the player spends thinking about decisions is too small. As complex as the game might be, if the player has mastered the game rules then there's nothing more for him to learn.

Take a game like Halo. They introduce new mechanics throughout the game and, by the end, you've explored all of those mechanics. Once you've beaten a level, there's no reason to go back and play it again, except maybe to find a few hidden secrets or complete it faster. New sequels really just introduce a larger game world; they don't add new gameplay elements. Players spend 20-40 hours playing through the game, and then wait two years for the sequel, then spend another 20-40 hours.

Compare this to Grand Theft Auto. The worlds are about as large, but there's a richer variety of things to do. As a result, players can spend 100 hours in the world. There's only about 100 hours of "quests" in the game, though. If they added more quests, would you keep playing? Probably not, because without more mechanics, execution of those quests becomes easier and easier. As you play through the game, you pick up new weapons and learn new game skills - but you exhaust those skills by the time the game's done. That's what I mean by new mechanics: there'd have to not just be a new place to play (ie a larger world, such as in the expansion packs) but new ways to play.

The game world needs to be rich. I touched on this above. The world shouldn't just be large, but provide new environments. There are over sixty different zones in the world, and each one has many different sub-areas. Plus well over 100 different dungeons. The starter zones can be plowed through in under an hour, but by level 50, there's at least five hours of quests in each zone. The dungeons provide a couple hours of gameplay but can be replayed, too. Each of those zones and dungeons has its own creatures; usually dozens in each zone, and each creature type (like, say, furbolg) has several variants (such as warrior and shaman).

That means a lot of art assets, of course, but that's what "rich world" means! Players can easily spend ten hours in Stranglethorn Vale. Although the whole zone is jungle, the land ranges from the beach, to the river, to hills, to villages, to caves. Creatures include pirates, goblins, trolls, panthers, tigers, raptors, basilisks, and ... much more. Each little area has its own story (told through the quests) and there's a few greater storylines that take players through the zone.

Worlds are rich because of the variety of their assets and they stories they tell. Speaking of which...

The game has to enable strong emotional moments. Stories are a player retelling of emotional moments. The strongest emotions are fear, anger, and love. WoW doesn't really want to anger its playerbase, but anger does have a greater place competition-driven games (and therefore in the PvP aspect of WoW). Fear is the most common, but it's not often remembered as such. The most memorable moments for me in WoW were when I was running in fear from high-level enemy players, or in instances when our tank died and I was panicking trying to keep the group alive (I played a healer!), or close calls when I got attacked by several creatures and was running for my life. When these encounters ended well, that fear turned to extreme relief. I wanted to tell everyone I knew about what just happened, and the story got retold the next day at work, too.

Strong emotional moments make the game into a larger part of the players' lives. When we take those stories to work the next day, to the pub, into our dreams, its more than just a way to pass the time. Am I going to tell stories about that one time in FarmVille when I planted some corn? Ugh. We hate the boring coworkers that tell that kind of dumb story. NO. Yeah, sometimes those WoW stories are the same - but not always.

Players can feel love, or something similar, in these games, too. Probably a bit more common is respect, and dedication. Players in guilds might feel commitment to their guildmates, and want to show up on raid night not just because the raid will be fun but because they want to help their guild out. It's really cool to have a good tank in the group, or to have a great healer behind you, or an awesome DPS guy that is super-great about handling adds. I really respect those players and their skill with the game, and that generates stories that I want to tell, too. (But god I hope that raid is fun, too. See section one: gameplay should be rich.)

Curiosity can also be a strong motivator. Curiosity drives suspense novels and thriller flicks. It's usually not something that the designer would want to drag out for dozens of hours, but there are a lot of cases where a bit of curiosity keeps me playing for an hour, or to keep coming back to a quest line for an hour of play every so often. Some quest text can introduce a mystery, and either dole out new bits of story in each quest or give the player a chance to go exploring and find out the solution for themselves. This is a kind of meta-game; the game proper is combat, but if you've got a player hooked on a mystery they'll play through the combat to find out who done it! Yet another way of making gameplay richer, and in this case it works because of the emotions that the game makes players feel.

The final "core principal" is: The game should provide large goals. One of the things I've bitched about with browser games is that they don't feel like there's a larger goal. Travian actually has one, and it's a very appealing goal to me, but they did a crappy job of advertising that long goal. I played Lord of Ultima for about a week but quit mostly because I felt like I had no goals. Sure I can sit there building my city up, but who cares? Compare that to Nile Online, which I'm still playing: the goal is to get to a high enough level that you can "retire". When you do, you get a pyramid built and named after you! At that point, the game is "over" and one can leave the game, but at least it's a motivation to keep playing.

MMOs provide many large goals. To get to max level, to get into a raiding guild, to get to the hardest raid instance, to get awesome gear. Even just to complete the easiest end-game raid instances is a large goal, taking weeks of play to prepare and attempt. Single boss fights used to last a half hour or more though these days they tend to be 10-15 minutes. Each fight might take a few attempts to master, and there's around ten bosses in each raid. Throw in trash encounters (which can be tricky to master as well) and "raid night" is several hours of gameplay each week.

Accomplishing large goals tends to drive other gameplay. Preparing for raid night might mean running dailies to get cash to buy a new piece of armor, or to get enough faction to be allowed to buy a new piece of armor. Hopefully those dailies are fun and don't get too repetitive, one of the few places where I think WoW falls down. But consider this like curiosity: players will engage in hours of gameplay (hopefully fun by itself!) in order to achieve a meta-goal. They're not in combat to kill the creature, they're not killing the creature to gain rep, they're not gaining rep to buy new armor -- they're buying armor to make more progress on raid night. And they're doing that for bragging rights and to support their friends.

Non-Essential (Negative) Attributes

One can probably come up with a huge list of  rules saying "don't fuck up your game by doing X". I happened to extract two from my previous post; there's dozens more that I've thought of since (another post?) but I'll cover these two in some detail to explain what I mean.

Players should be allowed to play whenever they want. If your basic game mechanic is combat, then what would keep them from playing when they want? I heard EQ basically couldn't be played solo - which meant, if you wanted to play, you've got to wait around to find a group to join. One of the things that I think made WoW wildly successful is that it doesn't have this restriction. If you log in and want to play, there's always, always some solo task you could do. You can hop into a PvP battleground, go on a solo quest, do a daily, farm some crafting resources, or find a PUG instance to run.

This principle is better expressed in the negative: don't add anything to your game that would prevent players from playing when they want to. Not being able to play is frustrating, and one of the things in browser games that piss me off. I'd enjoy them a lot more if I could play at my own leisure. Having the game say "sorry, go away, we don't want you" makes me feel bad things towards the game and that's a great way to lose players before they hit the 1000 hour mark. And it kind of means that they can't hit 1000 hours. It's basically admitting that you don't even have 1000 hours of stuff for them to do!

I'm probably going to play Nile Online til I get into the top 100 (and then retire), but there's no way I'll put 1000 hours into it - it just won't let me. It would take me years of play to get that far, and I'm far more likely to find something else to do. If I can retire after six months, what's to keep me coming back again and again? Hence:

Players should feel committed to the game. One thing that kept many players subscribed to Ultima Online was their houses. They had a lot invested in their house, and they didn't want to give it up. This is a great example because a lot of those subscribed players didn't even play! They'd log in once or twice a week to prevent their house from falling apart, but they wouldn't actually play. Imagine how many more players they could have kept around if there was something else to do?


But really my point is that commitment itself is strong enough to keep players subscribed.


Summary


So I didn't even talk about sims at all in this post, and I've been hacking away at this post for hours. In part two, I'll explore how to apply these rules to the sim genre and see what I come up with.


Meanwhile, I'm gonna go pass out... zzzz

Gameplay Complexity and Opponents

Yesterday in my praise of the fantasy MMORPG as the ultimate genre, I touched on the notion that a game that involves human-like opponents has a lot of natural potential for rich gameplay. Today I want to expand on that a bit.

Game genres range from racing to shooters to RPGs to slot-machines to sims to platformers and on. Multiplayer games obviously pit you against other humans. Some of them have single-player variants, where the part of the enemy is played by AI that tries to act as close to human; ie, the opponents have the same range of actions and strategies as humans do. Others pit you against a puzzle, or simplified enemies with very constrained actions.

Puzzles - No Opponent

I'll start with the last. Puzzle games like Tetris don't have "opponents". It's just you against the puzzle. Simulations, including games like SimCity and Roller Coaster Tycoon, pit you against a complex puzzle. Simple puzzle games have simple mechanics; the complexity of the game is how the rules fit together. Some such games are like skill games - gameplay at the higher levels of Tetris require the player to have internalized the gameplay rules effectively to the point that it's like a sport, and where reflexes and the ability to think a few moves ahead are important.

Skill games are rarely complex. Coding their game rules is simple. Design can be difficult, however; the process of coming up with rules that are amenable to skill is tricky. Back during the golden decade of the FPS (the 1990s), many game companies tried to make competition-worthy FPS games, but most fared poorly. For a single-player game, something that's going to provide 15-40 hours of gameplay, the game mechanics don't need to be very rich. Elements that would lend themselves to longevity as a skill-based competition are hard to design in, and the economics of the game industry often mean that the people that would have experience with competition-style gameplay aren't the ones that are chosen to lead game design. It's one thing to say "we want a lively online community" and another to actually spend money and effort finding a designer that can do that well. There's a rich discussion there but I'll skip it for now.

Because my point is: the complexity of these games is usually the intricate ways in which a small set of game rules combine.

Could you turn a sim into something players would spend a thousand hours playing? How long could you play Roller Coaster Tycoon before you exhausted the whole game? Do you think you could convince a million players to each put a thousand hours into it? These games (on the PC) are lucky to sell a million copies. Most of those players might put less than a dozen hours in.

What would it take to make a sim or puzzle game that players spend that much time on? It feels silly to even think it's possible, since one hundred hours is a stretch for these games. Maybe there's some diehard fanatics that put that much time in (the Transport Tycoon community is one such example), but that's a tiny community. That's maybe a thousand players - not a million. I'd like to explore this idea further... and indeed I do in this followup post on the thousand-hour sim.

Platformers - Fake Opponents

Platformers have opponents, but they aren't anything like human players. Enemies such as the goombas in Mario follow very rigid rules. They don't even try to behave like human players. That's not the point; these are effectively puzzle games where part of the puzzle is an AI-controlled "humanoid" character with simplistic, predictable rules.

Usually there's not a lot of richness to these games. They're exploration and achievement games, with a little bit of skill thrown in. Gameplay is fun, but that's driven in part by the environments, not the opponents. The human (or sentient) appearance of the opponents just fills out the game world; makes it seem like a real place and less like an abstraction.

Recent Mario games (such as Mario Galaxy) do wind up being somewhat rich, but not too much. Most of the richness is in carefully timed execution of special moves. In other words, they are skill games. Puzzles are straightforward, the interactions of gameplay elements are rare, and the focus of the game is more on exploration than anything else.


Head-to-Head Action and Strategy Games

Whereas there's no real "opponent" in puzzle or sim games, and simplified opponents in platformers, other action games have real humans as the opponent. RTS games like Starcraft and FPS games like Counter-Strike fit this model. Even when you're playing against the AI, that AI is trying to act as human as possible.

Both you and your opponent have the same range of abilities. Chess is a simplified version of this model, where both players have exactly the same units at their disposal. FPS games are similar; often skill games (see above), but the richness in the game comes from the fact that the opponent is truly human and so not only has a huge bag of tricks but can also learn new tricks as time goes on.

RTS games rely heavily on the humanness of your opponent, but they often twist gameplay by allowing players to choose different "races." Starcraft is the standout in this model. Most Starcraft games are played by players of different races; Terran, Zerg, or Protoss. They are all basically doing the same thing - placing buildings, recruiting soldiers and ships, and sending them off to attack. Yet the units that they have are different, and their overall approach to winning is different as well.

The richness in FPS games comes primarily from the human opponent. The fine balance of rules can make the game more or less balanced; more or less random. Yet it's the humans that make them great.

RTS games, however, add much more. There's a lot more strategy to RTS games. Choices made early - not just single actions, but choices to develop in one way or another - define the game. Do you try to tech up? Rush? Expand early? Press to aerial units? Fake one build but go another way? Where FPS games often have rich tactical fights, RTS games also have strategic fights.

RPGs

RPGs are a bit like RTS games, in that you are facing human-like opponents with skills and actions similar to your own, but with a different strategic twist. In Starcraft you have Protoss vs Zerg, in WoW you'll have a Rogue against a Warlock.

Humans provide the richest opponents. Some are better than others; in RPGs, you might face someone that doesn't know their class very well at all. But most of those that engage in PvP know what they're doing. Competition ladders help great players find similar opponents, while allowing the crappy players a chance to win every know and again against other new (or... well, crappy) players.

RPGs add more to the single-player experience, however, by having a much longer stretch of new abilities. In an RTS, you'll become familiar with all of the units and buildings at your disposal over the 30 hours or so in the single-player campaign. In an MMORPG, there can be hundreds of hours of advancement before you've gotten to the top of the ability tree, learning new spells or abilities every few levels.

Instead of giving you a small set of tools with rich interactions, like chess, RPGs have a much larger set of tools, each with its own special purpose. The trick isn't to learn how the abilities interact, but usually which ability to use when; how to fight against certain types of opponents. The huge array of possible opponents is what makes the RPG rich.

Human-like Opponents with Different Tactical and Strategic Choices

My goal here was to explore the game design choices that produce a game that players could enjoy for hundreds of hours. Leaving aside the diehard fanatics that might stick to their favorite title long past when the majority of the market has gotten bored, we're left with three major avenues.

The first approach is to build a game that requires player skill, whether solo or competitive. Players spend their time getting better at those skills. Games like Counter-Strike and Tetris are the best examples, but even then they point out the weakness: although both have audiences larger than (say) Transport Tycoon, these are still relatively niche titles. Lots of people love them and (relatively) lots put in over a hundred hours playing the game, but there are bigger genres out there.

The second approach is to create simple mechanics with extremely complex interactions. Chess is the canonical example. Players have a chance to learn ever more complex interactions. Every time they play, they probably learn another new trick. The success of this genre depends on the size of the market, however. There can't be hundred of Chess-like games, because the complexity of interaction depends on the size of the market. Not everyone has the talent to be a grandmaster, and in order to even get grandmasters, you need enough people to push the curve that far.

The third approach is pitting player versus player. Whether you've got a skill-based game, one with simple rules but complex interactions, or complex rules, pitting humans against each other means that rich gameplay will evolve. You'll either need to do a whole lot of playtesting and balancing or be willing to tune the game after it ships, but with PvP, humans will figure out complex strategies.

Personally, I think the two richest game genres are the RTS and the RPG. The best, longest-lived games in both genres have PvP (sometimes simulated), complex gameplay interactions, and a measure of player skill. If you want to create a game that pulls in players for hundreds of paid hours, you'll need more than one of the approaches.

Most Awesomest Game Genre Ever

WoW is tremendously popular, and it's easy to see why. One can play solo, so you don't have to wait for your friends to show up or get online. Your accomplishments can be witnessed by a wide variety of players, so the game's achievements are very rewarding. Team encounters give players a chance to show their team spirit & coordination. It has a ton of content and actually has an end-game, so you can play forever. It's very approachable, unlike many other MMOs.

But it's also the most awesomest game genre ever.

A friend an I were brainstorming game ideas for the iPhone, and I spent some time after that going through a bunch of game ideas, fleshing them out, and thinking about how to make the game more appealing. At the pinnacle of game development is something like an MMORGP, which requires complex technology, precision game design, and tons of content. But more than that, there are elements to the design of WoW that place, in my mind, the fantasy MMO as the ideal genre.

I tried to think of ways to design a game that was smaller than an MMO that had many of the same benefits. In the process, I came up with a whole bunch of factors that make the fantasy MMORPG genre appealing.

Environment Variety

Games like Tetris take place in one screen. It's a skill game, like many sports and first-person-shooters, and so that doesn't matter that much - but it's just one screen. Achievement and exploration games tend to have a lot of environment variety, and it's one of the driving forces behind platformer design (as I love to mention). Give the player a new environment every 15 minutes!

A Tale in the Desert (ATITD) is an interesting game for many reasons. It's an MMO but the environment is very dry. It's 99% desert. 99% boring, flat, monochromatic fucking desert. It's a great exercise to play the game and see how one can take one environment type (hint: desert) and make landmarks and environments that feel different. Yet the exercise reminds me of the pointless toy problems and artificial domains I studied in school. It might be an interesting exercise but it has little practical value.

Take a look at WoW: every zone isn't just yet another area using the same brown and desaturated green color palette; they're very different. It's not just forest, mountain, plain. The forests are hugely varied -- from the dark, Halloween-ish Darkshore to the mystical Ashenvale Forest to diseased Felwood and Plaguelands. Feralas feels kind of generic - but I had to hunt around for an exception. Elwynn Forest is an ideal example - a larger-than-life fantasy setting. You can't mistake Grizzly Hills for any of these other areas, and Silverpine, although sharing the same kind of haunted feel as Darkshore, is obviously distinct too.

Coming up with different environments is easy; making them look good is hard. Getting the art assets is expensive. But it adds a huge amount to the game. Where ATITD is able to take "desert" and vary it, WoW does the same thing -- within each zone. But then it adds another 50 zone types! Like console platformers, there's always some neat new zone to go explore.

First-person shooters like Doom have a hard time coming up with different environments; they're all variations on the "near-future industrial/research building" theme. But put people outdoors and the variety explodes.

I guess it doesn't need to be that way. You could make an FPS that takes place all indoors and still has the variety that WoW does, but you'd have to try for it. That's kind of my point with this post - I think games are better when they have these qualities. Half Life, as fun and varied as it was, was stuck with being realistic. Which means that there's not much variation between levels. City Level 1 looks just like City Level 2. You could throw Viking Village and Alien City and Native American Pueblo in there, but it loses its believability. Fantasy games like WoW have a huge variety in environments that's enabled by the willingness to say "forget realism, we want cool environments." Like Mario platformers, WoW throws away foolish adherence to realism in the name of fun.

Tangible Environment

But zones aren't just different - they're also meaningful to humans. What's space but a bunch of rocks, stars, and the occasional planet? You can make varied star backgrounds and different-looking planets, but they feel like meaningless decoration. Earth means something to us. Running around on the ground is meaningful. Even the abstract game world of 1980s arcade games took to this: Donkey Kong takes place in a factory (and/or construction site) - it feels like a place. It's not just naked gameplay, it's a part of a world.

I was thinking of bringing up games like chess here, but then I thought: Abstract games tend to be skill games. Either your game is about the gameplay mechanisms themselves, like chess or first-person shooters or sports, or it's a game that puts the player into an avatar and says, "go play in this world!" In that case, the world itself is one of your characters and it needs to be interesting!

I think that's one of the reasons why "space" and "sci-fi" are considered niche genres for games. You can make starfields and tetris blocks look different and varied, but they don't mean anything human to us. They don't resonate with everyday experience. We can perceive the subtlest changes in human faces because that's how we evolved; give us a bunch of subtly-different alien faces and the distinctions aren't noticed. The work that you put into it is wasted. They all look the same to us.

Lesson: Familiar environments can be rich. Novel, alien environments are cool because they're new, but you can't take that very far. Because they're just new; they don't make sense to us.

Gameplay

Same games have rich gameplay, some are like slot machines. I bitched a few days ago about browser games (especially the popular Facebook games) and how they're basically slot machines. What gameplay? Click click click, win a random prize! Compared to RPGs, there's no mechanism, no learning, to strategy. Strategy makes for a richer game.

Some people have addictive personalities. Give them a slot machine and sell them rolls of tokens and you can keep them occupied and make a lot of money. I don't think you're really making those sorts of people happy; you're just feeding off of their addiction. Encouraging that addiction. I think many people hate their addictions - but they're still addicted. Intellectually, they want to quit smoking, stop gambling, but they feel compelled.

To me the more interesting challenge, and the more rewarding pursuit, is making compelling games, not compelling slot machines.

If you want rich gameplay, WoW has it. The core gameplay element is combat but each class has its own take on it, and that take changes as the character levels up and specializes. The addition of mechanics like fleeing, rooting, rage, and combos add to MMORPG staples like aggro, pets, and mana burn. I'm not sure if there's any novel mechanic in WoW (one could take the Lorite approach here) but it does have the kitchen sink. Action games - including platformers - work with a far smaller set of gameplay mechanics. An MMO means hundreds (or thousands) of hours of gameplay, and that means an extremely rich set of mechanics.

Opponent Complexity

One of the things that started me thinking about this post was, how can I make a crafting-based MMO like ATITD? Crafting in WoW is "click a button and wait 20 seconds," but ATITD and Puzzle Pirates are two games that turn "crafting" into much more.

But there's no "opponent" in these games. The combat mechanism of RPGs is rich not just because of the variety of options that the player has, but because you pit those mechanisms against a parallel set - everything that the enemy can do. WoW players have to worry about enemy casters, archers, and fighters; melee opponents with quick attacks (hard to cast long spells!) and those with big, slow attacks; abilities like fleeing and calling for help; healers and high-DPS dudes. Multiple opponents. Not knowing what "class" an opponent is until you're in combat.

How do you make a crafting game like that? WoW combat isn't just a minigame - it's huge. And part of that is that it's set up like a competition; it's not just X choices versus a random-number-generator; it's your X against his X. This is definitely something I'd like to explore more, but for now I just want to throw out there:

• Whereas most games have X options, RPGs are X squared.

Opponent Personality

Not only does your opponent have a range of actions he can choose, but he also has personality. Who here hates murlocs? Raise your hands!

There's casters and healers, crocs and raptors, those pesky crocolisks and the goofy owlbeasts. Evil trolls and neutral zhevras that will be happy to ignore you if you ignore them. They each have their own attacks, idle animations, and deaths. It's not "simple combat opponents 1 through 47", they have shapes & sounds & animations. They have personality.

How can you do that with, say, a blacksmithing minigame?

Many other game genres do have opponents with personality, though. Action games from platformers to first-person shooters give you different opponents. Even shoot-em-ups like Galaga give you varied opponents. So this trait - opponent personality - isn't exclusive to Fantasy MMORPGs, but it is one thing that makes it a richer game genre.

Solo & Group Gameplay

I think good browser games are team games. Travian, for example, has a good bit of solo gameplay, but it's really a team game, and I think it's all the richer for that.

Skill games have both. One typically works on their own skills but measures themself against other players, either playing directly against other players or in parallel with them. FPS games tend to be against human or human-like opponents, including team variants like Counter Strike and Rainbow Six. I think those team variants are the richest.

And that's one thing that makes Fantasy MMORPGs a great genre - solo gameplay, so players can play whenever they want, but also rich, team-based objectives that they pursue with their friends.


Inspiration

I talked about inspiration a few days ago. Many games have it, and I think it's an important component. MMOs, though, have a great built-in mechanism for adding it. They don't all do a good job of it, but the opportunity is there; a low-hanging fruit.

Open End-Game

I've talked about how good games are entertainment that's powerful enough that players are willing to pay for it. I think there's a 1:1 correlation between profit and fun. (Addiction games would be an exception to this rule.)

Open-ended games are a huge profit center. Once you get a player to try your game, you can continue drawing revenue from them for years. Any game or sport that players enjoy going back to means a huge potential revenue stream. There's tons of tennis racquets, climbing shoes, skis, and other sports gear available and tons sell each year. WoW pulls in 9 figures every month.

Compare this to a console platformer. The player spends $60 and gets fifteen hours of gameplay. Kind of expensive (hence the huge aftermarket for used games), but cheaper than going out to the movies. It definitely keeps a lot of game development studios alive.

But with a long gameplay curve and a chance for play to continue for hundreds of hours, MMOs are like sports - in that players continue investing money in playing, year after year. A customer isn't a one-of-thing; you aren't selling a one-size-fits-all product. Some players pay their $60 and leave, others pay $15 a month for years. With microtransactions, some MMOs pull in over $1000 a year from certain players. That's the sort of market depth that sporting-goods retailers have: the people that really love your game can give you more than just $5 in profit! And they're paying all that extra money because they love your product; because you have an end-game, and one that's constantly being extended and improved.

Summary

WoW is the most lucrative computer game of all time. I think a lot of that has to do with the type of game it is - a fantasy MMORPG.

Stick an MMORPG in space and the opponents and environments get dull. Sure, Eve is doing well, but it's not doing 9 figures monthly. A game like Eve has, I think, a better opportunity of pulling in more revenue via microtransaction-like addons, but ... well, space is boring.

An MMO means team gameplay, inspiration from elder players, and socialization. You don't get a community for a game like Tetris.

And RPGs bring huge amounts of possible gameplay. I didn't even get into various metagames, like loot and set collections.

I think we, as game designers, can learn to make our non-FMMORPG games richer by looking at games like this, and seeing what richness we can pull from it to put into our own projects.

Loot and New Content

Back in the Olden Days, when we had to walk to school in the snow, uphill both ways, the only way to get awesome loot in WoW was to run Molten Core. If you didn't have 36+ friends that were all well-geared, attentive, and competent, your only chance at purples was world drops and auction housing. You could run UBRS or Strat or Scholo if you wanted to, but there wasn't really much reason; there were some nice pieces in there but gear in MC was far better. Yet you couldn't progress in MC but once a week, and you needed to be well-geared, attentive, and competent yourself.

Nowadays, loot is cake. All you need in 9 friends, and there's no trash to fight through so you don't even need a multi-hour commitment.

Better

Is the current system better? Well, what does 'better' mean? It's easier to get loot. You don't need the social structure now that was needed then. 10-mans are easier to organize than 40-mans, it's harder for a player to go AFK, it's easier to get into a guild that has 10 people that can raid on the same night at the same time, and more. The barrier to loot is lower, in that more people will be able to get this group together. Is that better?

You don't need to progress through MC then BWL then AQ20 to get to AQ40; now, run some heroics, build up some purples, then jump into a 10-man ToC group. Or, heck, some heroic 5-mans drop competitive purples. A new 10-man guild can move on to 10-man ToC fairly quickly, and then find a 25-man PUG. The time between hitting end-level and raiding the final dungeon is much lower. Is that better?

One of the reasons that initiation rituals remain in fraternities is that it makes admission to the group that much harder and stressful. We value that which was difficult to obtain. Downing Ragnaros was a serious effin task, especially before BWL was released. It was a badge of honor.

Where is that badge now? Is that relevant? Compared to 2005, nowadays many more people are seeing more content and improving their gear, without getting frustrated by organizational hurdles. Because more people get there, it's less exclusive.

Who Cares?

It doesn't seem to matter. If more people are getting more phat lewt, they're happier and having more fun. I might complain about more people reaching the "elite" end-game ranks -- but there's still a time factor. What distinguishes the top elite from the next group is when they achieved the rank, not if they got to that final boss.

I've talked to players doing 10-man normal ToC and they consider themselves up in the elite. They're very happy with their progression. They know they're not doing hard-mode, much less the 25-man version, but that doesn't seem to be a big deal. At least they're not stuck!

There were tons of players back in the first year of WoW that wanted to do MC, but couldn't, because they weren't in "the right guild." Even in that guild some players got left on the sidelines because their gear wasn't good enough. Now, those guys have somewhere to go. They're not stuck pugging MC and wiping on the first giant; they can do 5-man and 10-man content that continues to give them better loot.

Bias

I want to sit and bitch about how easy kids have it these days, but that just biases me against the current model. What makes a game fun is perceived mastery, and WoW has that.

The WoW end-game is loot acquisition, and as long as players are getting better loot, they are mastering the game.

Lessons

Progression is important. Really, that's it. Players like challenge but not because of the cost of failure. They want to succeed, and look back, and say "I overcame that." As long as players continue to progress, they'll have fun, be happy, and continue to pay.

Reusing End-Game Content

I read a post on end-game content over at Player Vs Developer and was reminded of a suggestion I made to Blizzard long ago.

There are basically three problems that I'll address in this post: players want new content, they want a variety of content, and devolpers don't want to throw away old effort or see great content go unused.

Quake and CTF

One issue I had with Warsong Gulch (a 10-vs-10 Capture the Flag PvP zone) was that the map got boring. This is one issue with FPS games -- many players like having different maps.

Back when I played Quake, there were a handful of maps that everyone played on, and it was interesting to continue playing on the same map, over and over. I was actually learning new things about the maps after a year of play; specifically, I was learning player behavior. Learning where things are on the map is the first step; then one develops patterns; then one learns what patterns the enemy has; and then a metagame starts where players start trying to deceive their foe about what pattern they are running, etc etc. In Quake, I was learning very specific timing patterns, and how to juke out other players and make them think I was somewhere else. I was counting on my opponent knowing the map so well that I could play against that knowledge.

This is like tennis, or basketball, etc. Everyone plays tennis on the same court, don't they get bored of the same layout game after game? The answer is obviously no; the game isn't about the court, the game is about the other player.

Not so with online games like Quake or Warcraft because most players (especially new or casual players) don't want to become PvP pros. And many other players resent having to learn a map well, and instead just want to win without putting in effort. Don't underestimate your players' arrogance. Many players that suck don't believe it; they blame their losses on bad map balance, or the fact that their opponent knows the map 'too well', or some other lame excuse. Players suck. People suck.

When I played Quake on the LAN at work, I would learn the maps quickly (I'm good like that), or I'd remember the map from online play. I'd grab the rocket launcher and red armor and then start tearing people up -- in part because I also played a lot and was a good player. They'd get frustrated or bored, because to them the interesting bit was the new map, not the game mechanics themselves. They wanted a slot machine, where sometimes they won. They wanted to win; they didn't want to earn the win.

My point is that a great majority of people that will pay for your product want variety, not challenge. Don't force them to play competetive tennis; they want wacky new rules and a roll of the dice.

So am I now just bitching about WSG because I want to see new maps? Not exactly. Quake was played on a handful of maps; WSG only takes place on one map. Every time you want to play Capture-the-Flag (CTF) in WoW, you have to go to WSG. The other PvP maps have different gameplay -- Arathi Basin and Eye of the Storm both have a Battlefield/Team Fortress-like base capture mechanic; Alterac Valley is a back-and-forth push to the enemy's base.

My PvP Suggestion

My suggestion to Blizzard was to make more CTF maps, then change the queue mechanism to be somewhat like Arena, so that when someone queued for "WSG", they'd really be queueing for CTF, and sometimes they'd play in Warsong Gulch, sometimes in Netherstorm Gulch, sometimes in Grizzly Gulch, etc.

The major problem with just adding those as separate queues is that it's hard to find players. Now, even with queues spread across an entire battlegroup, sometimes it's hard to find people to play in Alterac Valley. Imagine if there were three times as many PvP queues -- some of those games would never get started! Hence: group several WSG-type maps into one queue. You get more players funnelling into the same queue, and players get to experience a wider variety in online maps. (This is why most Counter-Strike and Team Fortress servers rotate through maps!)

Players Want More Content.

This issue with finding players is also a problem (now that a new expansion has come out) for old end-game content. Who wants to run Scholomance or Kharazan? Those instances are lame! There's level 80 content to do! As much as players want variety, they don't want to do irrelevant content.

Scholomance is old. It takes too long to do all those quests. Once you hit level 61, the content starts becoming trivial, and the rewards for the grind too small. The problem is the same for level 70 instances -- it was hard then to find a group that wanted to do Mechanar, or Arcatraz, or Botanica. There were too many places to go for there to be many people that want to do one specific instance.

One way to fix this is to rebalance Scholomance so that level 80s can do it. They did that with Naxx; it's a fun challenge for 80s and the rewards are appropriate. Yet if they did this to every 60 and 70 instance, it'd be a pain to find a group to do anything. It'd be the problem with Mechanar but far bigger. Especially with the way itemization works -- one person wants to get his hat from here, the next guy needs a pair of pants that drops off a boss there, and once they got their drops they'd never want to do the instance again. It'd be nearly impossible to find someone to do any one specific instance, just because there'd be so few people that want anything that drops from there!

One way to solve that is the token system used at the end of the 60 lifecycle and was fairly widespread in the Burning Crusade world: kill a boss, get a token that can be used by a handful of classes for a number of different armor slots.

Now imagine if you needed Keeper of Time rep for some level 80 gear that you could only get from the Keepers, but that you could get the rep from any of a half-dozen old instances (rebalanced for level 80) and that it also didn't matter at all which one you did. Now you could say "I want to do one of the Caverns of Time", and anyone that wanted Keeper rep could do it. It used to be that people wanted (say) Durnholde specifically because that's where their item dropped. What if their item dropped from all of those instances instead of just one boss in just one instance?

Now everyone could do Caverns of Time again. The developers could re-use end-game content, and players would have a wider variety of options for where to go. The developers could add in one or two new CoT instances, and maybe redo one of the old ones, and everyone (new and old players alike, ancient characters and brand new alts) would have a much wider variety of content to choose from. A group of five players could choose which instance they enjoy rather than which instance that itemization forces them to pick. Players would be far more likely to be able to play a new instance, instead of feeling forced to go do the same instance over again.

The downside to this, of course, is that maybe players are bored of the Caverns -- especially those that were playing before BC came out and have been playing since. I have a hard time believing that Bliz couldn't just redo each of those levels. Seriously. They're making billions of dollars a year on the game. And they could reset KoT rep to Revered, or maybe add something past Exalted, or add a new faction that automatically becomes Revered 0/21000 if the were Exalted before, etc etc, so players would have a reason to go back.

Players want new content. Players want varied content. Developers don't want to develop content, and then effectively throw it away because no-one is doing it any more.

The easiest thing to fix, really, is throwing away content. They removed Old Naxx from the game. They could remove Old Scholomance and who would know or care? Spending the money to develop New Scholomance would be trivial to them, it would be new content even to old players, and (with sufficient itemization eg through tokens) would give players a broader set of dungeons to explore, instead of hitting Kara week after week after week after week after zzzz....

Noobs and Information

Many games have large noob populations, and they suck. Dealing with noobs is a pain. They don't know what they're doing, they don't know what to ask, and they're asking all the wrong people in the wrong places.

I think the same thing happens in many domains, not just in online games.

The problem is that the noobs have no information. Games with strong documentation and community features reduce their noob load; games where information is spread out among third-party sources and where game mechanics are not explained by the developer have much higher noob loads.

Warcraft has extensive online documentation, but they still have a high noob load. 'Preventing' noobs requires addressing the needs of the noobs, not the needs of the marketing department. Keeping players interested, getting them to come back, giving them something to look forward to -- these are all great. But it's not what noobs need.

Travian has crappy documentation. There's a lot of different info sites, but many of them are paltry. They focus on a few of the major concepts in the game, and although often broad and deep, are broad and deep in the wrong places.

Single-player games tend to not have noobs. Single-player games tend to require that they explain themselves to new players or else players just stop playing. I've played a number of 'innovative' single-player console and PC games that just didn't make sense. Although these games hint at depth and complexity and something fun, they hide it. And if I can't find it, the game gets returned and I don't recommend it. And I expect they get bad reviews, too.

What noobs need is direction. They need to know how the game scores them. They want to know the roles that they are expected to take. They want to know the consquences of their actions, before they take them. They want a place to go for this information, plus a forum lively enough where they can ask obscure questions.

Direction

Single-player games tend to have scores or mission directives that communicate to players what it is that they're trying to accomplish. Warcraft is fairly open, yet there are a few major goals: get to the level cap (80), accumulate gear, and work through the hardest dungeons. A more subtle point is the things that they should look out for along the way; some guidance on which goals are worthwhile. Many mid-level players worry about gear, spending hours and days getting just the right piece. Then they out-level it a few days later.

Travian takes pride in its opaqueness, supposedly because it gives players 'freedom' to choose their own path. Yet there are a few paths that are extremely useful to the over-arching goal of winning the game. Winning the game is something that's done by an alliance, not by a solo player, or one player that happens to be in an alliance with some friends. It requires the cooperation of dozens, if not hundreds, of players. There are a few strong roles that players can take, as well as some rules for how to be most effective. Yet the publishers don't do any of that; they leave it up to players to discover all of that on their own.

The discovery process can be fun, but there's two important concepts that limit where a game designer should put discovery: consequence (see below) and direction. If a player first has to figure out where he's going, then he's not discovering the game world, or developing strategy; he's figuring out what the user manual would look like, if the user manual had something more constructive than a simple list of all the units in the game and their cost.

Roles

Role is related to Direction. Whereas Direction shows the player what they have to do to win (what obstacles they have to overcome), Role is the set of tools that the player has available to do it.

A Priest in World of Warcraft knows about the spells that he can cast, but a good role is a bit more than "cast these three spells over and over." In a raid, a healer can stay focused on one target, heal several targets, look over a whole bunch of people and top them off -- or stick to some of the utility spells that they have.

Over a career levelling a priest, that player might go Holy (and heal in groups), Shadow (and focus on damage and mana generation), or Discipline (for... PvP?). Ignoring the accuracy of those descriptions, these are ways of telling new players: if you choose this class, you will have these roles that you fit into.

In Travian, roles could be as a Defender, Hammer, or Feeder; one might work solo or in a group. There's an infinite variety of combinations, obviously -- yet there are no general guidelines. Travian noobs wonder what they should be focused on. They try to do all things, without picking a role. They want to be offensive, but don't know how that plays out over a year. It's very frustrating to spend a lot of time on a game building a character (as in WoW) or a bunch of villages (as in Travian) to find out that you made fundamental mistakes early on, and that your current effectiveness is gimped because of it.

Giving new players guidance on the Role that they'll play can help players get started on the road to contributing during a game, rather than observing. Links to discussions will help them understand how other players feel about that role, letting new players find their sweet spot that much faster.

Score

Score defines direction. Score tells players how they win. It gives them feedback, and it's through feedback that players learn to play better. I don't like mashing buttons; winning for random reasons is not an achievement. Score tells me if I mashed the right buttons, so that I can see patterns in the game, start developing a strategy, start discovering the game world, meeting new people, and then killing them.

Open games sometimes have visible 'score' charts that measure inconsequential things. Statistics can be fun to browse; some people like that. I often do. But if you give everybody a useless metric (but one easy to manipulate), many will shoot to maximize that metric, even if it is a detriment to their play experience. If you put up a score-board but that score-board only applies to some players, or is completely irrelevant to the rest, you misdirect your players.

Travian shows village population for all the players. This is the major score rank in the game, since it's something that everyone has and it's relatively easy to see. Yet it, ultimately, isn't a strong measure of performance. But that's a problem with team games; how do you measure 'performance' when so much of the contribution one makes is building social networks, establishing trust, etc?

For vague, open games like travian, maybe the best way to communicate 'score' to players is to give them an overview of previous rounds. Show them the target, and how they measure progress, and then what last round's measuring stick looked like. They might choose a different metric, but at least with this kind of guidance they can make an informed assessment about how well they are proceeding.

Consquences

This was one big problem in many MMORPGs: players were 'free' to destroy their characters, spending hundreds of hours building a character that was sub-par. I remember putting points into Charisma in Dark Age of Camelot. As a Cleric. It did nothing for my character; they were wasted points. The 'freedom' to distribute points as I felt wasn't backed with enough information to make a good choice (unless I had been playing the game through to the end-game already, which didn't even exist when the game first shipped). Further, my choice was hard-locked; it could never be changed. This was a combination of asking players to make choices without sufficient information and then penalizing them, for the rest of their online career, for the wrong choices.