A Chance to Play in the Sandbox

Thanks (yet again) to Syp, I had an easy way to find recordings of the great Everquest Next Reveal videos aired yesterday over TwitchTV. At the time, I was at work with access only to Twitter, reading people's reactions as they watched the show. I did get to read a couple articles from Massively and MMORPG.com that revealed some awesome stuff.

Part 1 covers various people's EQ Stories, tales of how playing EverQuest has changed their lives. Of course, SOE chose stories that had a maximum emotional impact. But watch them, think about how different games you have played have impacted your life. The friends and memories you've made. Lives have literally been created because of MMOs. Did Tetris ever do that? These are way more than just games.

Another thing shown in Part 1 is the amazing sandtable performance art "The Founding of Qeynos" created by Joe Castillo. Excellent highlighting of the importance of the lore as well as the "sandbox" nature of the game.

Part 2 gets more into the design of the game; wherein Dave Georgeson, Director of Development, discusses what he calls the Holy Grails of MMOs. Obviously, he makes all of SOE's design ideas seem original; and yes, there's nothing else out there exactly like them. But multi-classing looks a lot like TSW's Ability Wheel to me. Not that SOE won't have an awesome spin on it, and the idea that I might need to go out into the world and hunt for new classes/abilities is certainly appealing. The Permanent Change idea might be like the Living Story of GW2, but it sounds more organic to me. It's not a bunch of mini-games and activities that come and go. There will be things that need to be done to bring about the change intended (like building a city), and there may be unintended consequences.

A couple things have some together that have really piqued my interest in this game, though. The first is that I (belatedly) found out that Storybricks, the "emergent AI" developed by Stéphane Bura and Brian 'Psychochild' Green. I've written about Storybricks before; I think it's a great idea and am delighted that a AAA enterprise like SOE picked up on its potential. In EQN, NPCs will have preferences and wants rather than set scripts that dictate where they'll be when, giving you a quest or waiting to bash your skull in.

The other thing has gotten me excited has to do with the ability to create things in the world. My recent posts on the Dimensions of Rift may have given you impression that I like to build. That is true. I have liked creating ever since I was a kid playing with Legos. I am fascinated by model railroads and other miniatures. Given the money and the time, I'd love to have a woodshop. The voxels and tools of EQN—and particularly Landmark—are right up my alley.

Honestly, having played neither EQ nor EQII, I was not that interested in the upcoming game—before hearing about these design "Grails." Now, I am definitely looking forward to this winter and seeing some of them in action.

Of Dungeon Masters and Quest Givers

Please don't fall over in shock, Dear Reader. I know it is strange to see two posts in as many days. And I know it'll be late when I post this, but it is still today and not tomorrow. Hopefully, this will become more commonplace. I did promise more thoughts on the subject of StoryBricks, as partially inspired by Spinks' post about NPC realism and interactivity.

In the old days--of the 1970s and 80s--young people would gather around a table with dice and stat sheets and weave a tale of adventure with an element of chance. Each player would assume a role and pretend to be that character. The key to this adventure was the player known as the Dungeon Master. I say player, because I believe the DM was as big a player as anyone else, in addition to being the chief storyteller and referee. Sometimes the scenarios were taken from "canned" adventure books; other times DMs made it up themselves. I never actually got to play D&D or other PnP RPGs when I was younger--or older for that matter--so my knowledge of them is limited to having read several AD&D sourcebooks and novels, as well as conversations with PnP gamers. As I understand it, the DM was responsible for planning the scenario that the other players would participate in, as well as controlling the Non-Player Characters, both friendly and hostile. The friendly NPCs (and occasionally the hostiles) helped round out the story of the players' adventure, providing the motivation to go out on epic quests, or just letting folks know about the treasure to be had in yon dungeon.

Multi-User Dungeons were designed soon after D&D came out, and became popular among college students and others with network access in the 80s and early 90s. Many of these followed the emphasis on Hack and Slash violence that tended to occur in D&D. Because of its similarity in gameplay to D&D the DikuMUD became a popular flavor of MUD and was the main influence of Graphical RPGs such as Ultima Online, Everquest, and World of Warcraft.

Omigosh, I just totally digressed. My point was that with the advent of computerized RPGs, the Dungeon Master no longer had to be actively engaged in the moment-to-moment play of the game. Through a script, the DM could describe the setting and action for the player or players. At first this was textual, but eventually much of the environment and action could be visualized instead of described. Now the DM was a group of video game developers. So how were they going to convey the impetus for going on adventures? To potentially millions of players across the planet? At once?

Most current MMOs have dialogue boxes where the the player can read the necessary information before heading out to kill the ten rats. As Spinks mentions, NPCs are just "person shaped lumps" that players can interact with to get quests or goods. There are many who decry this method of interactivity as non-immersive. Is this any less immersive than a live DM sitting at the table voicing 10 different characters? I think maybe some people just don't like to read.

My point is that the Dungeon Master duties have been taken over by computer software, not that this is a bad thing. It means that I--who have never had a chance to sit around a table and roleplay with friends--can sit at my computer and roleplay with friends from halfway around the world, all from the comfort of my bedroom or living room. Or hotel room. If you've read this blog for any length of time, you've probably figured out that I don't put much stock in the assertion of some gamers that "themepark" MMOs are inferior to "sandbox" games. They each have their place, I suppose. But, at least one other blog I read a while back pointed out that, oftentimes, if you could do absolutely anything in a game, you end up not doing anything. You have no direction. Questing and other related content give structure and goals to a game, just as the PnP games that are the ancestors of modern MMOs had structure provided by the DM.

OK, so BioWare announces that the quests or missions in Star Wars: The Old Republic will be fully voiced, something that to my knowledge has never been done. So the quest givers will tell you verbally what you need to do. Start Trek Online has a few Featured Episodes that are at least partially voiced, but they still have the readable dialogue boxes. I hope SWTOR still has a quest log where I can read what I need to be doing. Otherwise I will forget everything I am supposed to be doing.

But even full audio interactivity is not good enough for some who want even more "immersion." "SWTOR will be more of the same old "on-rails" questing we see in WoW," they say (which I think is exaggerated). Maybe the new StoryBricks concept will catch on, where NPCs will have "motivations" and "desires" that PCs will able to satisfy. I can see how the system will make it easier to design content, but I am not sure how it will change the actual gameplay. I am looking forward to seeing that in action. But I don't know if the detractors of the current crop of MMOs will be satisfied.

StoryBricks and the Monkeysphere

Man! I have got to get more posts on here. My readership has probably dried up. I was reading a post from Spinks the other day about Namaste and their new system of NPC "motivation" called StoryBricks that seems pretty innovative from a game development perspective. Spinks' words inspired me to write a post, because I have been thinking about realism/immersion in MMOs. This post may be a bit scattered as it represents the convergences of two lines of thought I've had over a few months actually.

I grew up in Southern California, in Ventura County. On several occasions, I had the opportunity to drive through the San Fernando Valley (the home of Valley Girls) on my way to Los Angeles. It didn't matter what my destination was, it was usually not the Valley itself. The 101 freeway  (US 101) winds through the south end of the Valley past towns like Encino and Van Nuys. When I did stop in the Valley, it was at a mall or other commercial enterprise. I never thought much about the million or so people I drove past on those trips into L.A. Several years after moving away from SoCal, my then-wife and I took our toddler to visit my mother-in-law in Encino for Christmas. While at a park one afternoon during our stay, I looked around in amazement at all the people who lived their lives in this city that I had driven past all those years.

Now, did their lives affect mine? Possibly remotely. Maybe some of them manufactured things I used. Maybe some of them drove alongside me on the 101 Freeway. But they didn't ever really affect me, though I lived only a few miles away. Heck, even most of the people who lived in my hometown of 120,000 only affected me peripherally, if at all. Why is that? A humorous analysis of a theory called the Monkeysphere can be found on Cracked. The TL:DR version is that we humans only have the capacity to develop reciprocal relationships with--to care about--a maximum of about 150 other Homo sapiens. Wait, that number may include our friends from Felis catus and Canis lupus familiaris, as well. Hmm. I wonder if it includes fictitious characters, too. That would explain why I cried when Spock sacrificed himself to save the ship.

You know that nice cashier at the store? You remember her because you are in there every week. She won't remember you at all from the hundreds of people she serves, unless you come in just about every day, and talk to her a bit. But you still won't be friends. To your life, it doesn't matter if she takes your money for that loaf of bread, or someone else does. It doesn't matter if she is a single mother with three kids, or a college student with a lousy boyfriend. You're just a customer and she's just a shopkeeper.

"What has this to do with my MMOs?" you may be saying, Dear Reader.  Referring back to Spinks' article, I don't care if the NPC shopkeepers wander around and "have lives" independent of my game playing. Actually, I'd prefer that they be there when I need to sell my junk or buy some mana juice, not off making digital dinner for their virtual children. I don't need much interaction with them. The interface with them needs to be simple and efficient.

To be honest, most of the other player characters in an MMO are also outside our Monkeysphere. Those decrying the horrible state of communities in WoW, for example, need only walk out their door and drive to the mall or some other venue where crowds of people gather. You'll find that you care very little for any of them. Is this bad? Not necessarily, as long as you're courteous to them and they are to you. Unfortunately, we tend to fall outside the Monkeysphere of other players, just as they fall outside our sphere. This explains the behavior you find in many modern MMOs, and indeed, most of the Internet. You simply are not a real person to most monkey brains.

This is not to say we can't form friendships and even fall in love through online games. I know people who have, and I myself consider many people friends whom I have only ever met online.

It may seem cold, but the reality of our lives is that most of the people around us are merely peripheral shadows, barely registering. We interact personally with a few people at work or school, our friends and family. Strangers may as well be “window decorations” for all we care. Most NPCs serve the same function in our games.

I have decided to discuss the other line of thought in another post. Part two coming tomorrow . . . I promise.