"Field Research" Options

[GageEndal]

Hey there guys. I know I've been gone for the last month or so, but there was good reason. I have been doing a lot of "field research" out there by playing pretty much all of the games out there. These are the features that I found to be the most pleasing.



Customizable Characters
This doesn't mean being able to have more than just a few faces to choose from. After playing all of the games I could I found that Dungeons and Dragons Online and City of Heroes / Villains have this feature and none of the others do. City of Heroes / Villains has it to the strongest point so I will use them as an example.

With the City of Heroes character creation scheme you get to pick every detail that goes onto your character. Everything from their starting clothes to a pair of sunglasses that they can wear. Every possible aspect is thought of and given more than just ten options (some up to 140 options) that the players can choose from. Giving players a few different heads and hair options is nice, but giving them freedom to define their faces, hair, eyes, eye color, body size, height, weight and even starting clothes is a huge factor that I found to be their biggest boost. I even have heard of people who just play the game (paying 14 dollars a month) just so they can play with the costume editor. My wife is one of them.

Good Examples: City of Heroes / Villains, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Star Wars Galaxies

Bad Examples: Ultima Online, Everquest, Everquest II, Liniage II, World of Warcraft


Extensive Quests
Quests in the game can do anything from teach a new player how the game works to giving them adventures that will grant them skills. World of Warcraft (which I will mention many times later in this posting) is the prime example of this.

The first thing you see is a man who is signaling that you have a quest with a giant ! over his head. He explains what that means when you click on him (and tutorial hints pop up as well) to let you know what's going on. They explain how the basics work and send you off to find someone else using landmark directions. You get to the guy and he gives you directions and a task (kill some bad guys usually). You set off and do the quest. It's very basic but it gets the players interacting with the game and getting focused on how they can earn most of their Experiance Points in the game.

While hunting and gathering quests can become VERY tedious, they are the easiest of the quests to find. There are other types to find though. Messenger quests are very helpful and they will guide you to find how to travel. While WoW is full of quests that are mostly just hunt and destroy or gather items, I find that it is the best example because of the extent of the quests they have put in. There are also quests that will go on for several levels. The first series of quests will last you until around level seven when they send you to a guy who gives you another series, who continues this trend and so-on.

The use of instance quests also gives players the chance to run a set series of events without interfearance from outside sources.

Good Examples: World of Warcraft, City of Heroes / Villains, Dark age of Camalot, Star Wars Galaxies, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Liniage II, Everquest II

Bad Examples: Ultima Online, Everquest




Skill Systems
Skill systems are generally the hardest thing to put together. The prime example I want to use for this is Star Wars Galaxies because of their alteration to their skill system from one style to another.

The first skill system was a levelless system where you would learn skills based on how well you knew other skills. Every player could purchase basic skills from merchants who would help them get started and then build up from there. As time went on they would become true masters of their trades and some would even be able to make it to the status of Jedi through the learning of an exact skill structure. The game thrived and the masses were in deep love of it.

The second skill system happened after some leadership transfers. It went from the very difficult style they had previously to an extremely simple four tiered system that was based solely on levels. As you gained levels you would be given certain skills. After playing the game for only six days I was able to reach the highest level of the Jedi Masters and I had all of the skills with the best gear. The game was generally over as I had no futher tasks to do. It is for this reason mostly (and the loss of work) that Star Wars Galaxies had lost more than 80% of it's players with only a 10% gain from an advertising scheme run just after the switch.

Good Examples: Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies (Pre-2005), Everquest

Bad Examples: Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies (Post-2005), City of Heroes / Villains, Lineage II




Equipment
The gear that players create and earn for themselves is a difficult balance. Some say that you should imbue powerful attatchments to them and then restrict them to a characters level. That means that the best weapon in the game can only be wielded by a true master. This is not very realistic. Novices can wield a weapon of great power, as seen from the tale of the Sword in the Stone and some of our other most popular tales of the underdog wielding the weapon that is blessed by the gods and triumphing against their enemies. I will show a good example and a bad example for this series since I think it should be pointed out the flaws of this type of system. I will use Ultima Online and World of Warcraft.

Ultima Online allows anyone to wield a weapon, that means that you can give your level one (figuratively speaking) character the most powerful weapon in the game and they can use it. They use it to their current potential though. They do not get stat bonuses because they do not have high stats. While they can take down an ogre without batting an eyelash, they would not be able to even think of a drake or a dragon since they just don't have the stats to go against one while a well trained player could take a dragon with a kitchen knife. It is not the weapons that cause power, but the wielder of the weapon.

In World of Warcraft everything is based off of levels and it is the weapon, not the wielder, who has the skill. A player who is wielding the mace of enlightenment is casting spells better, able to ignore stunning blows, they do twice the damage and a few other fun little tricks. But if they switch to a normal mace, their attacks are lower and they can't cast as fast. It is also shown that levels and allowance of skill are the sole factors involved in equipment. A mage can not wear leather armour dispite the fact that they probrobly can. I believe Gandalf himself wore leathers under his wool cloak to protect himself. Most mages in books will wear leather (if not chainmail) to help themselves. I also noticed this with the paladin class since paladins are incapable of learning to wield a Dwarven gun or any ranged weapon for that matter. Not because a paladin couldn't figure the mechanisim out, but because he just can't learn it.

This system shown with World of Warcraft means that a new player has only a few items they can buy. When they gain a few levels they must buy new gear to replace the old and they continue to do this constantly. Most players will replace their armour before they repair it. There are also no affects that you can cast on your gear to make them stronger in battle if you can't afford the uber gear. While this may help the economy, it hurts new players who do not have a super-rich alt/guild to back them up.

Good Games: Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies

Bad Games: World of Warcraft, Everquest II, Dungeons and Dragons Online






Please remember, these are just my opinions on these things. I have noticed that several other people seem to share them but I do not have any set numbers in these things. Each game has its pros and cons that are shown on this list and if you have any other features you would like to see evaluated I would be more than happy to check through them to find something about it. I just posted these four because they were the ones that I felt should be noted due to their importance in early game development.

[Matlush]

Well... Character customization... I didn't check City of Heroes, but what you say reminds me Project Entropia (now Entropia Universe). You could alter your nose shape, size, placement; eye color, placement, and "rotation", and some more. Tho' there you started up with basic orange jumpers, but.. hmm... Well, it's a pretty different kind of game

Quest.. as a NPC hater, I hate quests given by NPCs also Probably because of their dullness, and that these quests are for masses. Well, you mention that they're a good way to get into the world for new players. Well, I bet they're, but at least for me they're too easy, and a bit too unnatural. Dunno how I can explain it, but I've always preferred asking people about directions to a city (Wurm) or running thro' teleporters (Entropia) for my own bussines, than doing a quest of some sort... Played Linage II for awhile, but, damn, I've deleted it after 20 minutes because of these hack'n'slash thingy.

Skill system... Well, I should mention here Wurm and Entropia again While Entropia's skill system has very little affect to gameplay, then Wurm's... Wurm's skill system is somehow good, but now kind of unbalanced. And also, that this is alpha like version, bugs happen, and then some people can grind skills fast. One thing to mention here - skill gaining shouldn't be a priority for a player, nor the gear race. One thing I hate about Wurm is that, after the stand alone noob days, you usually play to get your skills higher, or to build or create something "uber". Example ? My friend: "Look, this guy has 70 digging skills and has a shovel of 60 quality level affected with Wind of Ages and Circle of Cunning!". And worse, what he says is mostly like this.

Equipment. Very important in Project Entropia, in Wurm important as skills. Well, in Wurm, skills are important, but the items you use should have same quality level as your skill level for best effect. You can however achive more with good skills and bad equipment than with bad skills and good equipment. IMO it's kind of balanced there... kind of.

That would be my opinion now Anyway... for me now, after the Wurm, these aren't the "most pleasing" features for me. There are just good combinations, not stand alones. Wurm is a great example - good concpets, some niice features, but the game mechanics are terrible, based on right clicking, resulting in a game fun for newcomers, unfun for those who can't stand doing one thing for some time.

Anyway, I'd like to mention that I've never found one type of fun from MMORPGs. Fun like that is in pen and paper RPGs, but it's not from playing your character... Rather like sensing the teamwork, also fun from doing something, hm, not fitting in human's mind ? Some kind of quest like fun ? Not that kind of quest that is done by masses, that doesn't affect the real world... well, something like that :/ Dunno how can i describe it.

[Jerky]

Good news to report. Everything you mentioned was already on the radar for PW. Almost exactly. It is good to have a list like this, so as we start to finalize our game design in the design doc, we have a specific list to reference.

Well done Gage.

[Dwilf]

Not to pick hairs but 3.5 DnD (and by extension DDO) is one of the more open class based systems. You can take feats to use any weapon or armour you choose but things like spell casting will suffer or monks can't do their crazy acrobatic stuff in armour. DDO also had multi classing when I played it.

I agree that SWG was a pretty ace game before the combat revamp and jedi free-for-all. Dispite the grind of how tedious and repetative skilling up was I had loads of fun with a rifle weilding tailor who loved to camp out in the wilds.

[Hankellin]

I liked WISH's mode of Character custimization. You could chanage just about all the facial features with its "morphing" ability. stratch the nose move the eyes closer together adjust the height of the character... custimisable coloring(I think this was there)

[Tanner]

City of Heroes/Villian had one of the most organized and well made face/body customizer I've seen.
It gave you enough options to make your own face and head shape, without going overboard and making it just confusing.

[RicoSuave]

Well done, Gage. Though I haven't played all the games to which you've referred, UO I have played extensively (and dabbled in WoW from time to time).

I agree with just about everything in that starter-post. 98% was exactly how I feel. But my opinion differs slightly on the point of the Skill System. You mentioned that UO did it right in your opinion. I always found that to be the worse part of UO. Not that *how* it was implemented was wrong... that was good. I'm talking about the need to grind away for a month straight to just be able to become semi-competent in your task.

For example, mining was tedious. If you didn't start your character out already at 50.0, you had to work his way up slowly, slowly, bit-by-everlovingly-slow-bit, until you reached 65.0 (the point when things only started becoming interesting). At 65.0 you could finally mine Dull Copper (2nd worse metal only to Iron in the game). By now, skill gains are few and far in between.

This is not my definition of character development.

This is one of those "Jerky Moments" where we need to think Outside-the-Box to develop a system where players aren't über at creation, but can avoid the dreaded Grind as well.


I think, Gage, you brought up a terrific point about having the character gain skills through learning via quests; and I'd love to talk to you a bit later on a few of my and your ideas. Perhaps we might even be able to start a new development team: Quest Development