First of all I must say I got the idea of this article by reading a recent interview of Ragnar Tornquist on Eurogamer. Ragnar is the lead designer of Funcom's next MMO : The Secret World. At a point in the interview Eurogamer asked him if he thinks it has become riskier not to take risks when developping a new MMO game. In other words : giving players the same old thing that already exists elsewhere without trying to be too much innovative. Ragnar said he definitely thinks so, he also explained that they started to work on their next game as something close to WoW, mechanics wise, but on a different setting and universe. Then later they drastically changed their way, going for a game without levels for example, trying to be more original and different.
I can already see some of you with radar warnings flashing on : 'Funcom', 'Age of Conan', 'Alert' ! I know several people who played the Age of Conan release, were utterly disappointed and felt like they've been ripped off. And they're certainly right in some way. I tend to think however that those guys are professionnals, and have certainly learnt from their mistakes. Actually if I had to bet money, I would rather put it on Funcom's next game, than on a totally unknown new company. By the way the article is quite interesting, and the game's lore and universe look appealing. Of course, we'll have to play the game before being able to say anything for sure, and this one will probably need a few more years of development.
Back on our topic : has it become riskier not to take risks ? What would mean precisely 'to take risks'. If you have read my previous article about Richard Bartle's theory, you know what I call a 'weak feature' in a MMOG. It's a feature which tends to restrain an aspect of the game in a very definite and controllable corridor. That is actually a slightly different definition to the one I gave previously, which was Richard Bartle's definiton, but I need also to keep you guys interested with new ideas and concepts sometimes, not repeating always the same things ;)
One way to evaluate and understand a MMO is its inner dualism between freedom versus control. On one hand you need to make your players free: they're not watching a movie, they want to feel they achieve something on their own, they may take decisions that affect their future in the game, as well as the future of others. On the other hand, as a developper, you can't let everyone totally free and everything be done. You need to keep things working as intended in one way or another, and you can't let your game being spoiled because you have let players exploit it too easily.
Richard Bartle defined 'weak features' as being introduced by MMO companies under the pressure they have to necessarily attract newbies in order to succeed. He says they make the game easier and more appealing on the short-term, but remove alot of depth and possibilities on the longer term. Some examples of weak features : a death without penalty, an instanced PvE end game, items bind on pick up, a linear leveling quest system. All those features make your game less exploitable, in other words more controllable. If for example you could loose xp, stats or items by dying in your game, you would be likely to see some griefing and player killing going around, therefore players complaining about it, casuals feeling they cannot defend themselves fairly against hardcore... etc. On the other hand, if there is no penalty for death, and you can't drop any of your items, you make sure nothing of that can happen. In one way or another all those weak features tend to compartmentalize the game : they make sure nothing really bad can happen. On the other hand, they make less likely that anything really exciting can happen too.
Have you read the recent news in EVE Online ? The biggest player made bank in the game having to freeze all the accounts after its CEO stole a big part of their fundings. Or several others in the same vein recently. This is the kind of news you will never see in World of Warcraft : it would be more about how the last hardcore guild killed all the new expansion bosses even before it was released, or about some random guild drama, but that's nothing so exciting anyway. That's the difference between a game which has chose freedom over control, as opposed to one which went the opposite way.
What I call taking risks in a MMO game is definitely giving players more freedom, more possibilities than what they have been accustomed to. This freedom can be used for the best, and sometime also for the worse as we said: it's definitely risky from a game developper perspective. I don't call taking risks on the other hand, putting blue exclamation and question marks above NPC heads instead of yellow ones. The last sentence is ironic of course, but you certainly see what I mean there. In other words I don't call taking risks making a new shiny MMO, with great graphics like Age of Conan or Aion, but with already very well-known gameplays and game mechanics. Let's be clear : those guys take risks of course, there are millions of dollars on the table, their game may be a success or not ! But on the innovation side, and as an answer to what is really an MMORP game, they definitely chose to take as fewer risks as they could.
1. Developpers have become too cautious, want to keep almost everything under control in their game, and therefore keep players in very narrow grinding corridors.
2. Taking risks, on the contrary, would be to allow players to do things they couldnt do in their previous games, not the opposite.
3. That is more freedom, less control.
I often take World of Warcraft as a reference of the 'weak features' aggregation model and 'control freak' it is in my articles. Still I have to say I have nothing against WoW. I really think it's a great game. You may enjoy it or not, but at least from a commercial point of view, you have to recognize they must have done something right to get their 10M+ subscribers. They took what already existed before, fashioned it in a new and more accessible way and made a very well polished, simple, and addicting game. Let them enjoy their success for years and years.
However when every other game being released tries to be 'another WoW', instead of going their own original path they should have gone in the first place, that starts to be annoying. Especially when you have already played WoW for a few years, and have become bored of it. Too bad for you if it's your case, you've got spoiled for ninety percent of the recent MMO games on the market. Copying WoW has unfortunately been the trend of those last 3 years, without any success we may say, and it seems developpers start to understand it may have not been a good idea. I might be wrong. but I really hope they do. We as players already have WoW if we want to play it anyway. If we want to play another game, we'd better get something different. And that's not really what we got those 3 last years for sure.
What would mean 'riskier not to take risks' ? That would be game developpers thinking they have to be truly innovative to succeed today. That they can't just release another game with the same exact mechanics as what has been already done dozens of times and hope to get their share of the pie : because being unoriginal in your core game mechanics would mean to be more likely to fail than to succeed.
As I said in a previous article, I think we are witnessing a growing maturity of the playerbase, more and more players not wanting the same old thing again, and developpers might have spotted that. But I'm not sure actually they got the whole freedom vs control concept. Innovation can also be done inside the over-controlled scheme, that is still with instanced PvE, instanced PvP, bind on pickup items... and everything else on the list. It's still better than no innovation at all of course. But you can remove levels and experience for a skill based game for example while keeping everything very linear and under close control, that's possible. And I really think the key point is the freedom you give to your players. You have to accept at some point that things may go wrong in your game, you just can't control everything and on the contrary should be pleased for the initiatives your players take. Because great things may happen in your game too, those that make you proud you gave to your players the possibility to make those things happen.
And I tend to think that nowadays every good new MMO game should try to be more of a 'sandbox' than a 'themepark' if compared to what has been done those last years (two other words to represent the freedom vs control opposition). Remember more than ten years ago, when we had Ultima Online. We were just at what we thought was the very beginning of an exciting adventure full of promises. But when the next games being realeased actually allowed you to do less and less than the previous ones, there was definitely something wrong going on. They tried to compensate by giving you more to watch, and make it more polished and shiny. But that's just an illusion, at the end you're still not the one taking the decisions, not the one fashioning your game experience and surroundings to your own image. You're only the one watching a pre-thought and pre-calculated movie of your character following very narrow paths and grinding corridors.
Sandbox doesn't necessarily mean hardcore PvP, and random PKs as some people may fear, you could also make great sandbox PvE games, why not. It's all about giving you, the player, some choices, some meaningful decisions affecting your game, affecting the lore, which are not only 'should I go for elf or human for my character ?'. And I have a feeling that those paths have not been enough explored yet, if some of them have ever been explored at all. We're definitely playing one of the most exciting gaming genre that has ever been invented since chess and poker. Please game developpers and designers, please don't close the chapter... not yet. There must be much more to experience before we can say the genre is closed, if we may ever say that.
sry,, was gonna bump it, (its late so i burid it instead) sry
Wed Sep 16 2009 5:38PM ReportNo problem :)
I can bump it once myself to make up for it. Not sure it's that important though^^
Wed Sep 16 2009 6:35PM ReportMMORPG.com writes:
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