WoW, like many other MMORPGs, is stupid

[seebs]

I would kill for, or at least maim for, a Morrowind mod that made combat more RPG-style; you pick a target and click, and your character's skills determine whether or not you hit the target, rather than you having to click just right or aim above your target, or whatever. Same for Oblivion. I'd love those games, but as is I can't really get into them.

[Farren]

Originally Posted by seebs

I could never get into either Morrowind or Oblivion, for one simple reason:

They make ME be the one to swing swords, aim bows, and so on. I should not have to take gravity into account when my character shoots a bow. That's up to his skill set, not mine. I should pick a target, and the game should resolve my character's skill results for me. If I have to be the one to decide how or whether to swing a sword to hit the target I want, I am no longer playing a roleplaying game, and I can't get into a First Person Sword game nearly as much.

seebs we are so at opposite ends of the spectrum. I absolutely abhor the concept of the character doing all the work. I want minigames for every other skill, especially combat.

In fact the stated dislike for levelling systems earlier incorporates that. I'd much rather play a game that simply increased your options as time passed, without making anything more powerful. So, say, a martial arts expert character able to engage in Tekken-like combat would simply gain more and more moves, which the player must learn to use, rather than endlessly climbing XP and damage. Another idea I like is that the stuff you do more gets better, but you actually diminish in ability in things you don't do a lot any more.

And of course that comes back to my liking for PvP. Just like the card game Magic the Gathering a large option-set in the hands of an incompetent veteran would be useless. I like the idea that a highly skilled newbie could walk into the game and kick an useless veteran's ass by playing his limited set of "cards" right, no matter how much time the veteran's been on the server. No need for level match-ups and so on.

Different strokes, I suppose

[Adam]

I think the discussion about sightseeing and home decorating in Morrowind is a good illustration of the distinction between games and toys that I brought up earlier. Although I haven't played, it sounds like the game takes place in a world that has a high toy value. FWIW, this kind of ties into one of the reasons Star Wars Galaxies never worked for me. The game/toy ratio is very low. One of the major in-game activities appeared to be collecting and crafting objects d'art with which to decorate player housing. Fun, but I was looking for a game, not a toy.

Originally Posted by Adam

I think the discussion about sightseeing and home decorating in Morrowind is a good illustration of the distinction between games and toys that I brought up earlier. Although I haven't played, it sounds like the game takes place in a world that has a high toy value. FWIW, this kind of ties into one of the reasons Star Wars Galaxies never worked for me. The game/toy ratio is very low. One of the major in-game activities appeared to be collecting and crafting objects d'art with which to decorate player housing. Fun, but I was looking for a game, not a toy.

Even though I'm primarily a sandbox/explorer type, I prefer a balance. Right now MMOG's are too game-heavy for my liking. WoW is especially bad about this, and that probably accounts for my severe case of altitis. By the same token, The Sims in its various incarnations has failed to hold my attention for too long because it's so toy-heavy.

[Farren]

Adam when you spoke earlier about straddling the two I picked up the implication that it was a compromise, not a union that is complementary. Toys can be made into games in a very complementary fashion.

Take "charm", a horrible little stat on a sheet in many games that has always annoyed the hell out of me. There are far more elegant ways that a charm score and a random dice roll to determine how people react to you.

Imagine, instead, that you had custom clothing (possibly user-rated) that was ranked, by stylishness and classified, by appropriateness (for military situations, formal events, casual wear and so on). Imagine that even poorly ranked clothing had inverse benefits. Not looking like Little Lord Fauntleroy in a sailor's bar, for instance. Imagine that people actually had a motive (how NPC's react to them etc) to dress appropriately instead of stomping around town in full battle dress scaring the children. Imagine game mechanics that actually made people more suspicious of you when you strode into their shop, hooded, with your face covered.

Similarly, imagine that having a fine house in a good part of town increased your status among some people and earned the hostility of others. And so on and so forth. Imagine expensive material possessions decreased actual game variables like humility and piety, with negative consequences elsewhere in the game.

Every "toy" I can think of can be intimately integrated into a "game" in such a way that you choice of toys, when to wear them, where to put them and whether to even have them is strategy in itself. It seems to me that what you're describing is toys simply superimposed on a passive landscape, acting only as ornamentation.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Farren

I want minigames for every other skill, especially combat.

Ekk! Minigames bad! My feeling is that, if I want to play a different game, I'll turn off the game I'm playing and, ya know, go play a different game.

In fact the stated dislike for levelling systems earlier incorporates that. I'd much rather play a game that simply increased your options as time passed, without making anything more powerful. So, say, a martial arts expert character able to engage in Tekken-like combat would simply gain more and more moves, which the player must learn to use, not become more robust and do more damage.

There's a middle ground, I think. What if the player still has to play out combat, but character abilities affect the outcome of various moves? For example, raising Strength causes a successful punch to do more damage, raising Agility widens the time window in which the player can successfully use a move, etc.

FWIW, though, there are a lot of people in seebs' boat, who really don't want to play any game that requires twitch reflexes, and are perfectly happy with telling their character to fight and letting the RNG resolve the outcome.

[Farren]

Originally Posted by Adam

Ekk! Minigames bad! My feeling is that, if I want to play a different game, I'll turn off the game I'm playing and, ya know, go play a different game.

There's a middle ground, I think. What if the player still has to play out combat, but character abilities affect the outcome of various moves? For example, raising Strength causes a successful punch to do more damage, raising Agility widens the time window in which the player can successfully use a move, etc.

FWIW, though, there are a lot of people in seebs' boat, who really don't want to play any game that requires twitch reflexes, and are perfectly happy with telling their character to fight and letting the RNG resolve the outcome.

Just the twitch part? What about lock-picking, trap detection, hacking, and a host of other in-world skills that could be minigames? The part that really annoys me is "Oh wait, can't pick this lock, not the right level". I'd far rather pay a game where I can go "By god I'm going to pick this lock if it takes me all night" - and do it - unless, of course I was arrested for loitering around doors all night with suspicious intent.

Originally Posted by Farren

...looking like Little Lord Fauntleroy in a sailor's bar...

Every "toy" I can think of can be intimately integrated into a "game" in such a way that you choice of toys is strategy in itself. It seems to me that what you're describing is toys simply superimposed on a passive landscape, acting only as ornamentation.

Greater goals than "are my Sims happy and successful?" are required for me to really maintain interest in toy-heavy environments. As long as I had measurable, larger-scale goals (silly eg, raise a Sim to be Damien, Bane Of Humanity) in place, I'd be appeased.

[seebs]

Originally Posted by Farren

Just the twitch part? What about lock-picking, trap detection, hacking, and a host of other in-world skills that could be minigames? The part that really annoys me is "Oh wait, can't pick this lock, not the right level". I'd far rather pay a game where I can go "By god I'm going to pick this lock if it takes me all night" - and do it.

That would be an interesting game, but it's not an RPG.

In an RPG, it is the character's skills which determine success.

I dislike minigame mechanics in general; they can be okay with some adaptation, but they tend to frustrate me, because it's no longer enough for me to skill up my character; I have to skill up my me, and sometimes I can't manage a given minigame.

Oblivion's lockpicking minigame is interesting, but I found it frustrating. So far as I could tell, levels of training produced major shifts in the minigame mechanics, but merely skilling up didn't have other effects except at the cutoffs. I'd rather have a game where character skill had more impact.

I'm fine with something a little more involved than WoW's "requires lockpicking 225". However, fundamentally, I want to play a character whose skills are not necessarily identical to mine. I have a lot of problems with games requiring twitch or control precision. I have to use a trackball (mice kill me), and the range of easy/hard pointer-guestures is different for that than it is for a mouse. Similarly, I have different physical attributes; I have a very hard time with some things on traditional consoles that require more thumb-dexterity than I have.

It's something of an accessibility question. A game that's involving and immersive for you may be simply unplayable to me, or vice versa. I'd like to see games that provide a sandbox, but honor RPG conventions more; as an RPG, I thought Fallout was infinitely superior to Morrowind.

[Farren]

I know where you're coming from, Seebs. I bought GTA San Andreas and thought it rocked, but put it down after an hour's play because I suck so badly at driving games.

Its a bit of an intractable problem catering to both sides of that issue. People that are good at something, like twitch, generally want the game to incorporate that element. People who aren't, don't. I wouldn't be too pleased with a modern-themed game that demanded driving skills, but if I was any good at driving games, that would make it far more immersive for me. Hmmm....

[seebs]

Star Control II offered a solution of sorts, as some other games have -- let you resolve manually OR automatically. If you go with automatic, it gives you fairly-good results, as though you were fairly competent at the minigame; if you go with manual, you get to do it yourself.

SCII was really easy for me, because my brother-in-law is insanely good at space shooters, so I ran the strategy game, and handed fights off to him. Worked great!

You could probably do similar things with combat systems. Oblivion drove me nuts because there was an early fight in which a "friendly" NPC kept walking in front of me while my sword was already moving... ANNOYING! NOT FUN!

WoW's fishing minigame is a decent example; it's a fairly good oversimplified sim, but it gives you SOMETHING to do with success -- but skill makes a huge difference. High skill makes it easy, low skill makes it hard.

[Farren]

Although....

what bothers me about your objection to, say, lock picking games is that they don't necessarily require realtime skills, just strategic thinking. And that makes me think, could someone complain about even click-based boss fights that require strategic thinking, couldn't someone complain that they "just want the game to figure out what combination of moves kills the boss for them. I don't want to have to puzzle it out" because, say, they can't figure out that they should whack the phoenix eggs whenever they get dropped, and keep getting killed? Which raises the issue of how much "game" you want in your game.

You said earlier "that's not an RPG". Having thought about it, I definitely disagree with that. A game that facilitates the player playing a fictional role is as much an RPG as a game that plays the role for the player. The only requirement is that the player, ultimately, feels like they are in that role.

[seebs]

Originally Posted by Farren

Although....

what bothers me about your objection to, say, lock picking games is that they don't necessarily require realtime skills, just strategic thinking. And that makes me think, could someone complain about even click-based boss fights that require strategic thinking, couldn't someone complain that they "just want the game to figure out what combination of moves kills the boss for them. I don't want to have to puzzle it out"? Which raises the issue of how much "game" you want in your game.

A purely thinking lockpicking game would bother me much less; my problem with Oblivion's was that is required a bit of twitch.

And yes, some people might want a less thinking-based fight. I tend to view the cognitive engagement as the essence of the game -- but I would, of course, being good at it. I know many people dislike puzzle games, and don't like having to solve puzzles to win fights or whatever; there are lots of people who loathe boss fights which can't be resolved by jumping and dodging.

It makes for something of a tradeoff. You could probably resolve it by having an option for, say, replacing a boss's "weak spot" with 2x or 3x as many hit points, so people who don't want to figure the boss out can just beat on it for a long time.

[S.Vashti]

Would be interesting to grid this discussion out, pros/cons/variable vs type of interactions: puzzle/shoot-em/social interaction vs expected types of interaction: non-scripted, twitch, auto-complete and the like.

[Adam]

Man: How many of you kids would like Itchy & Scratchy to deal with real-life problems, like the ones you face every day?
Kids: [clamoring] Oh, yeah! I would! Great idea! Yeah, that's it!
Man: And who would like to see them do just the opposite -- getting into far-out situations involving robots and magic powers?
Kids: [clamoring] Me! Yeah! Oh, cool! Yeah, that's what I want!
Man: So, you want a realistic, down-to-earth show... that's completely off-the-wall and swarming with magic robots?
Kids: [all agreeing, quieter this time] That's right. Oh yeah, good.
Milhouse: And also, you should win things by watching.

Opinion seems pretty much split on mini-games, as on much else. Personally,there are two reasons I don't care for them.

First, I play electronic RPG's primarily because I enjoy using the core skill set they require, making intelligent advancement and tactical decisions for my character(s),and want to play a game that uses that particular skill. I don't like being asked to exercise a different skill set that I may not enjoy using in the middle of that. If, for example, there's a lockpicking mini game that requires me to solve a puzzle or whatever, I get irritated because, if I wanted to play a puzzle game (and sometimes I do want to play a puzzle game), I'd go play a puzzle game, bringing me to the second reason I dislike mini-games. They're very rarely fun on their own merits. If I want to play a puzzle game, as I said, I'll go play Tetris, and it will be a more entertaining puzzle game than whatever half-baked lockpicking puzzle has been embedded in my RPG.

[S.Vashti]

Seems to me this would be a unique roll-playing world instance in that if it solved for everyone's dislikes, there will be parts of the game you (as a player) won't investigate, because you isn't interested. So, you go off to gather a hoard, run across a lock puzzle, and give up the hoard, and there's no penalty for that, other than what you may have wanted from the hoard. Now, that may be a bit too much like the obstacles put in place in real life, where you have to do unhappy stuff to get to the happy stuff.

That may something to investigate: make puzzles become not-puzzles, for those that wouldn't want them? Like an old text game, where you can either use a key to a chest, or bash the chest open.

[Nightson]

Originally Posted by Farren

Couple of ideas around death.

One that appeals is changing what happens before death in a particular way. If you shift over to the japanese single player style of one person controlling a party of characters, it softens the blow of losing one character. If, over time, players can maintain small parties with shifting populations, there is still a level of player-character identification (as anyone who has played Anachronox or the Final Fantasy series will testify) and you don't have to introduce contrived mechanics for constant ressurection. Also it makes death a possible game motivater (vengeance quests etc).

One final dimension to small parties rather than individual characters is the fact that you can introduce temporal elements not normally possible in MMORPGs. Characters can be jailed for a time or require sleep, since the player can continue playing other characters while that is happening. This introduces a whole world of possiblities. Real jail time alone makes enforcement, outlawhood (with all the fun of jailbreaks and so on) a possible sub-game. I thought about this a lot while playing Morrowind and Oblivion, where "jail" is really just a fade out, fade in, time passing instantly and some penalties.

Another, related concept is the idea of having companions that are out of the player's control but essential to their game and engineered sufficiently to create sympathy. The idea being that when you die, are jailed for a time, etc, you can transform into one of your companions.

But I'm not hostile to the idea of simple resurrection-with-penalties, I just think alternatives yield some obvious benefits and introduce a tension which isn't there in the dungeon crawling go for it and oh well I can always try again model.

You really should have nothing approaching harsh death penalties when you've got a game that allows PvP like yours would in my opinion.

Basically, people stay in Somalia where it sucks and they can get killed all the time because this is real life and they can't leave even though getting killed really sucks. But if it's a game then they people are likely to log off and never come back.

[Ymir's blood]

Originally Posted by Uthgar the Brazen

Too late and I was probably thinking the same thing.

[Adam]

Stumbled across an article that's relevant to this thread:

The Escapist : The Open Source Canon

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

Do you think it would be possible, in an online community such as this one, to play a pen and paper game, like maybe in a thread or somesuch?

Ms. drusus has pointed out to me that, in the event that we should want to try again with the D&D thing, we now have a shiny new chat room, with a special Colosseum channel even, where such a game could take place. It even rolls dice for us.

Anyone interested in trying to set aside some time for a test game?

ETA: new thread

[Adam]

Relevent article!

I never played Guild Wars, but I'm sort of interested to try out the sequel, based on this article.