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Champions Online News - Words on Going Solo
Posted by Keith Cross on Jun 09, 2008 | 30 comments in our forums
Cryptic Studios has published a dev diary which details the level of solo content in Champions Online, revealing that the game will not only be solo friendly, but will also feature end game content specifically designed for the solo player.
Just a few years ago, Everquest was held up as the paragon of MMORPGs. Though several games had come out subsequent to it, none had ever reached its level of subscribers. As a result, many of the Everquest game mechanics became almost canonical. Central to this near holy set of testaments was that players must be forced to team. The philosophy is simple and effective. People play longer if they are playing with friends. If a player is forced to team up with other players, he or she will at some point make friends. I think Anarchy Online and Dark Age of Camelot chipped away at this foundational truth by introducing some levels of soloing, but large swathes of each game focused on teaming.
To be honest, I thought the same when working on City of Heroes. We actually created missions that we intended a player to get help with before finishing. Some foes were intended to be too tough for a single player to defeat. We assumed a player would get the mission, go into the instance, realize that he was facing a "boss," leave the mission, find a friend, and then tackle the "boss" together. I was pretty darn naïve back then.
Read more here.
And so a single monkey glances up from its typewriter as it realizes a single design concept it had embraced was wrong.
And yet that single monkey still can not manage to fathom the simple correct course, on that single issue.
And around that single monkey, all its brethren continue to embrace mulitudes of equally wrong design concepts,with even less of a clue.
And together,they continue to prove that an endless amount of monkeys,spending an endless amount of time,will still only turn out an endless amount of waste product.
The wrong people, in the wrong industry,at the wrong time,turning out the wrong type of product.And no end in sight.
How do you guess what exactly are they going to do? How do you know its the wrong way about it?
Everquest had the most subscribers?
I thought WoW had had the most subs from a western game, or am I mistaken? I did not realise that Everquest had had as many as 10 million subscribers.
As long as they have both solo and group content I don't see a problem. More options for more playstyles.
Sounds like the game is geared to the casual gamer, which is not necessarily a bad thing considering that casual gamers outnumber hardcore gamers.
Best thing they could do is simply launch a stable product that is relatively polished with advertised features implemented and intact. Probably should aim for middle of the road pc's assuming the target audience. They can always add more group or solo content if players are hungering for more of either.
I'm not into the hero thing, but I'll give it a shot.
Its not hard to see what bad design choice they are going to follow (at this point),in a failed attempt to fix another they now finally see as wrong.
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[quote]The Champions Online end game isn't just about large teams, raids and guilds. If you don't want to do that, there's still content for you. I'll admit that we haven't put the finishing touches on the Omega System, but I can tell you that we are designing and developing with the solo player in mind.[/quote].
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Its the standard bandaid approach.They keep the insanely wrong terms and philosphies of raid and content access limited by participant size,and throw in some "busy work" to hopefully keep the "soloers" pacified.
What they need to do, is scrap the entire dinosaur design.Get rid of designs based on failed concepts like forced grouping,raids,etc..
They need to make ALL content experienceable by all players at all times regardless of the amount of OTHER people with them at a given time.
Take the standard monkey raid content design.
Make the same map and same mobs accesible by everyone by scaling the encounter and the goal.So, your standard 40 followers killing a single mob can be done that way if so chosen,AND that the soloer can defeat the same mob thru a different mechanism and even a different goal if chosen.
The soloers access to the area can be defined goal wise differently.Instead of rounding up 40 people to help him gang up on a single foe,he could instead have a goal that allows access to the area that asks him to posion (eqaulizer)said mob,or steal something from its treasure,or arrange a deal,or any myriad of different possible reasons and ways to "get the best of"/defeat the mob,allowing acces to content.
it isnt that people havent told the dev teams for years now that the designs they cling to are wrong,or that the solutions havent been given.
Its that the monkeys are unwilling and unable to accept they are wrong, and even more so to accept the fixs.
Im hard pressed to think of a single product in the known history of man, that the customers have tried and worked so hard,gone so far out of their way, FOR FREE no less,to help the product makers get their product right.
And still the monkeys do almost everything in their power to blow off the imput and cling to throwing the same waste product out the door each time.
You're not mistaken, but you might have missed the first sentence
"Just a few years ago, Everquest was held up as the paragon of MMORPGs. Though several games had come out subsequent to it, none had ever reached its level of subscribers."
WoW never had 10 million subscribers at one time either. Like all MMOs when they put numbers out there like that they include all accounts, past, present and even Beta, active or not. Even Linden Labs of Secondlife fame boasts, 9-10 million on their website and yet there probably seldom more than 55-70k online. Those numbers are meaningless as such. Not debating that atm WoW might have the largest active subscriber base, paying fees for this month, but it is no where even close to 10 million and thinking otherwise is just deluding yourself.
And as for what Cryptic is doing, I think it is a nice change for a company to enable solo content for the larger component of the game, up to and including end-game content. Not everyone wants or cares to do those 40-70 person clusterf*** raids or even wants to group everytime they play a game. This is just an extra choice for those who dont want to raid or group all the time and as such should be commended, they are not saying you cant group or such, but recognizing the growing segment of gamers, the casual, "I have an hour or two to kill and want to play not LFG for an hour only to get a pick up group full of morons" type player.
LOL at people who still don't believe WoW has 10 million.
As for Champs, I very much hope that Mr. Emmert understands the difference between "solo-friendly" and "group-unfriendly." WoW definitely leans toward the latter, and I will be very sad if Champions follows that model too closely.
The more group-unfriendly MMOs become, the less interest I have in them. If I want solo play, I will play my single-player console games. In fact, I've been on my console games a lot lately because the MMOG genre is no longer able to fulfill my desire for team-oriented play.
CoH gave me a lot of great, UNFORCED, team-oriented gameplay for several years. If Jack is looking back on that as a mistake, then I have grave misgivings about the direction of Champions Online.
KUDOS to Cryptic! I am very much looking forward to this game, and have been an avid solo player of MMOs since UO. This is great news.
Agreed..
Forcing players to group=bad
Having no need to group=bad
I really hate when games force me to group. Sometimes I just want to do something in peace and get my own loot/finish my quest in peace. I don't mind grouping, but I don't want to be in a group everytime I log on.
On the other hand, having no need to group can really leave someone lonely. I would rather play my Oblivion than have no point in meeting people in an MMO.
I suppose it is all about balance. Having the option to either group or solo is a key thing to have.
I don't understand the.."if i want to play solo i'll play a console game" argument. I like mmos...i don't like to group all the time...In reality I have a few good friends...don't mind crowds once and a while but mostly go it alone. The same for mmos..but even in solo play i like the semblance of a living world..and it provides a different feeling and atmosphere of realism to a game ...when you see another toon that isn't simply acting out some programmers algorithm. Maybe when a.i. becomes so brilliant that one can not tell a mob from a toon...then i might buy the "console game" retort....until then.
If ChampO is as soloable as WoW, then my beloved CoX is going to have serious huge problems...
Suddenly, I'm eager for it's release...
Well, I got as much as I could out of your text there, after I stumbled over, around, and through the various spelling, grammar, and punctuation issues in your breathless prose, and I think I have another hypothesis:
The developers have to be able to finish programming the thing in finite time. What you're suggesting veers in the direction of NP-complete. I'm sure that the customer-monkeys have spent nigh-infinite hours telling the developers this and that and the other thing--and none of what they are saying can be programmed into any sort of game that will be remotely playable from a technical standpoint. Translating one's whims and whimsy into manageable and performant computer code isn't as easy as the customer-monkeys believe it is. (I've been writing software for over 27 years now, man and boy, and I currently manage a team of developers at a rather large corporation you might have heard of--but I'm not going to drag their name into this.)
Your palpable arrogance (if I may be so bold) doesn't really help matters any, because at the end of the day, you have no idea what you're talking about. You just want what you want because you want it, and everybody else is wrong. (When everybody else is wrong, that's a sure sign you're wrong.) Let's face it, if you had the chops, you'd be producing your "perfect game" right now.
Instead, you're sniping way on a forum somewhere, in barely-readable fashion.
Dude, dig yourself. Get real. Please--if only to save yourself further embarrassment.
Very well said, couldn't agree more!
Yeah, WoW definitely had too many quests and too much content in general that you just didn't want to do in a group, let alone need to. I'm all for there being plenty of things to do solo in an MMO, however, for me at least, the main reason I play MMOs is to play with friends.
As for a solution, I don't think just scaling encounters would work. I mean, why mess around getting a big group together if I can go and kill a boss and get his sword of uberness solo, or with a friend, right now. I know this is not exactly what tkobo is suggesting, but he/she need to realise that doing all that extra stuff (like being able to sneak in and poison a boss and all that) while quite possible, would take a lot of time do, especially correctly (i.e. Making it fun, not exploitable, etc.) and time = money.
Also, like it or not, all that mucking around finding groups and bosses only dropping 3-5 bits of loot for 10-40 people is a necessary time sink for most games. There is no way devs can produce quality content faster than players can complete it without it being some sort of massive time sink, although making it a well disguised (read: fun and meaningful) massive time sink is appreciated.
I think the best solution is to build content that doesn't require a pre-arranged group of X size, that way you can go out solo, with a buddy, with a small team, or with an army, and always be able to do something fun and useful provided there are enough other people doing it at the time.
I don't mean to 'advertise' another MMO in a Champions Online thread, but I think WAR is going to get it pretty right (for me at least) with its public quests / world PvP and RvR system in general. It means you can go out with whatever size group and do something fun, be that a quest, a scenario, capping world PvP objectives, or even siegeing/defending a keep, and everything you do is always useful as it contributes at least in some small way to your realms overall war effort, which in time allows you to sack the enemy capital, which again, you don't need a group for (as long as there are enough other players also doing it) but you can, and it's probably advised to, bring an army.
re-read the article. if you'll notice, there's a timeline in there. it speaks of everquest, and then games that came after.
two words -- jack emmert.
what are you talking about? wow and group-unfriendly?
raids... instances...
Three more words - isn't the devil.
He's not even the lead designer on ChampO - he's looking after other Cryptic projects as their Chief Creative Officer.
I'm pretty sure Everquest didn't even reach a million subscribers.
Well said. Furthermore, simply scaling the difficulty of an encounter to allow more players to join in would severely reduce the amount of creativity that can be put into raids. In CoX, for example, many group encounters involved different roles for different players, different tasks, etc. If it was as simple as multiplying the "boss" enemy's health by how many players were in the instance at the time, that'd make for some incredibly dull raids and the no one would want a large number of players to be involved.
There was life before WoW.
He said "none had ever reached its level of subscribers" speaking of Everquest. Which at the time, there wasn't another MMO in North America that could even touch Everquest's numbers. This was *before* warcraft.
How many of you are there on these forums?
"none had ever reached it's level of suscribers" - not sure what you mean by that, but EQ1 at max had about 600-700k suscribers. Of course there were less MMO players out there at the time and very little choice, you had UO, AC1 and EQ1. Still it has never even come close to approaching the popularity of Wow, either in any of the world markets. Wow has 10 times the numbers of it's closest competition while EQ at it's best would have had twice the number.
What is with arguing semantics here? Clearly he was referring to the world of MMOs before WoW was released. EQ never had as many subscribers as WoW has now. He's not talking about now.
I never said EQ was bigger, close to, or even competition for WoW. I said, WoW was not around during the period the OP is talking about.
Not true. Your logic is flawed.
You're implying that since someone has a long financially successful career in commercial game design, then the design choices they make must be inherently correct and 'best' and most innovative simply because they've been doing it for so long, and that someone who's outside the industry doesn't know what they're talking about because they're not 'in the biz'.
Hogwash.
Like everything else in the world, commercial game design dances to the almighty dollar and panders to mass market taste. Some of the best and freshest new ideas come from outside the established studios, from minds who haven't been beaten down and contaminated by the demands of Corporate sales and marketing.
Just because a Big Company churns out the same drek year after year and makes money doing so doesn't mean that the producers, designers, programmers, artists and sound guys they employ somehow have any insight or even a clue as to what the "perfect game" might be.
This is a common argument of pro-groupers I do not understand. You advocate grouping yet you sound as if getting a big group together to go kill a boss is a hassle. I thought the reason you'd want to get a group together to kill a certain boss is because that way is more fun to you. How would you achieve having a group-encounter without getting a group together? Maybe you could just check a group box and be auto-teamed with others?
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Someone else said (sorry, not sure how to put multiple quotes in)
"Forcing players to group=bad
Having no need to group=bad"
These two sound at opposites to me. Forced grouping means you need a group to accomplish mission X. And yet you say you want the game to have a need to group?
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Anyway, this is precisely the reason I prefer soloing. Teaming can certainly be fun. But there aren't words enough to describe how much I despise when a quest-giver says "You'll have to gather x number of companions to attempt/complete this mission...".
My suggestion: Offer huuuuge bonuses for grouping. Massive incentives; to loot, exp, whatever. But deny no content to the soloer. I think this can work. D2 certainly had no need to group, and yet people grouped all the time.
I solo most of the time, but i don't mind grouping. However the idea that i have to group for this or for that annoys me.
I would like to see a system like AO has, the mission terminals. If i'm soloing i get a solo mission to do, if i'm in a team we get a team mission to do. Why has this system never appeared in another mmo?
it would at least be useful when you don't want to/don't have time to group up.
I definately wont being playing this game as I really hate games that cater to the soloer. It waters down the entire game. AoC is a good example of what that is like, taken the fact the content is not complete... if you look at just the complete content all you have to ask is that playstyle fun for you? For me it was fun for about 2 to 3 weeks then I was finished with the game. No promise of more content along the exact same lines excited me at all and thus I cancelled my sub.
As to everquest - it peaked at 500k concurrent subs on at the exact same time. After that it slowly began to fall and then took a big loss in subs with release of eq2 and WoW and has basically been at its current level since then. Then again they spent about 5 million dollars to make it and have made probably 20 times that since its release. Wow cost about 80 Million to make and who knows how much they have made since its release...definately that plus some.
And for those who are thinking everquest what? EQ opened the door for WoW's existence just as UO opened the doors for EQ's existance. Each proved a market that convinced investors it was worth the money to make the next game. Just as Wow has kept the market open for all these current games one of which is bound to be good sooner or later.