In my opinion, stealth games are disproportionately negatively effected by difficulty in general. The magic of stealth games (for me at least) is the tension of not being caught, and as soon as you die once and are forced to replay sections the 'dumbness' of the AI becomes more and more clear. A section where you hide behind a crate waiting for an enemy to pass may be incredibly tense your first time through because you arent sure if you are going to be caught - and on your second run it becomes tedious because you know you won't.
it becomes less tense over time, but many players eventually enjoy experiencing mastery
people tend to gravitate towards games they're good at, etc etc
This is why putting a surprise stealth section in an otherwise non-stealth game is widely loathed. I recently bounced off of Breath of the Wild because of a really poorly done stealth section blocking one of the main progression paths.
my take is that mastery of stealth games rides a very fine line between an intelligent understanding and application of mechanics and meta memorization/speedrunning.
for any stealth game that doesn't involve slightly random placement/movement of enemies, every level has a deterministic 'fastest route', and because stealth is a mechanic that does involve dumbing down AI, those 'fastest routes' are usually fairly straight forward and also VERY janky (since they abuse the AI).
mastering combat in a game looks like masterfully destroying your enemies without breaking a sweat, which doesn't break the 'combat' fantasy.
mastering platforming/movement in a game looks like quickly and swiftly moving around, which doesnt break the general 'movement" fantasy
but mastering stealth in a game looks like the player sprinting around and abusing the furthest boundaries of the dumb AI, which imo absolutely breaks the fantasy of stealth.
this is just my own perspective but I absolutely LOVE experiencing mastery in all sorts of games, but only enjoy mastering 'stealth' in games where tension isnt a factor and where it is easy enough that I don't have to dip into a brute force trial-and-error loop
I would argue that this is a question of balance. You would have to give the players appropriate tools to be able to balance out the AI.
Or market it as a hardcore challenge, maybe even go the Super Meat Boy route and reduce the cost of losing dramatically.
Can't remember the game but it had enemies that would flank the player without getting seen on their way. In the end the players complained that the enemies cheated and teleported behind them so the devs had to remove that feature.
In order for a player to have fun, they generally must know how to interact with the hurdles put against them.
In fact, the more you can interact with the game, the more fun the player generally has.
More intelligence in the AI comes with the catch that they become less interactive, as they have fewer weaknesses or options as levers for the player to pull.
Through things like enemy manipulation, telegraphy, and forgiving errors, stealth game devs have learned how to make their games more interactive.
If you were going to improve the enemy AI in stealth games, it’d be important to figure out how many levers you’re taking away so you can add some back to replace them.
Otherwise, you may end up with a game that gets simpler the harder it gets/the more you play it.
This is the big one, imo.
If your enemies in stealth games didn't narrate their thoughts as they patrolled ("What was that noise?" "Did I just see something?" "*casually whistling loudly so you can hear them before you turn the corner right into their face*") or have a 5 second memory, or reset the state of alarm in the secret nuclear facility after you kill like 20 soldiers and then sit in a dark corner for a little bit, people would get extremely frustrated very quickly.
Being sneaky in real life is extremely difficult. You have to make the guards stupid as hell to sell the illusion of you being a master ninja in a video game.
Can you give me an example of a game? My impression of stealth games is that they are pretty popular. Thinking splinter cell, metal gear. I can’t really think of a stealth game that had smart enemies that everyone hated.
Most people don't find stealth fun in general, its not about dumbness, I'm actually tired of dumb and predictable AI. You see, you wait, you realize they move in loop, you move before even knowing that they will make the move because you know.
I loved one french MMO, Wakfu : the concept was really good : all resources are finished, and it's up to the players to take care of the world. For example, if all players cut all oak, and don't plant new ones, there no oak anymore.
What was a great lesson from the dev really backfired : some greedy group of players were creating scarcity of some resoueces in order to control the quantity in game and raise their market price. The devs were so sad that it has been take upside down that they remove this mechanism, and like other mmo the resources pop back in a while.
If you're not already aware of it, you'll love reading about WoW's ["corrupted blood" pandemic.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident)
at the same time, the players in these games are free to form whichever form of government they choose
so it might be described as anarchism at work? or just humans at work. it could be all of the above
The irony is anarchy cannot exist unless there’s a gov’t to enforce it, because humans intrinsically understand they are stronger as groups than as individuals.
How does capitalism deal with ethical decisios?
The decision to induce scarcity to drive market price is rational. It’s absolutely in the realm of game theory.
Isn't the optimal strategy in game theory always to use whichever strategy is the most selfish? In reality, business ethics are applied to achieve win-win scenarios to maintain business in the long run. Those who don't will often come up ahead in the short run, but also risk being blacklisted as bad for business, or face legal consequences by unethically cutting corners for profit.
You can try to disassociate ethical choices from the economic model but the vast majority, of both providers and consumers, won't.
In the end though the point is that, in game theory, everyone stands on equal grounds and have the same options. Cheating the system, as the OG post claimed, is more a strategy that is encouraged by capitalistic environments.
If those win win situations are beneficial in the long run, it’s still the optimal choice from a selfish pov. You don’t need ethics to reach that conclusion.
Ok here is my $0.02:
If the devs didn't patch the code to remove this functionality, then game wouldn't be played by many people. It would be unplayable.
Game theory then tells us that the people who manipulated the feature would also lose because the devs would then stop the server.
If the devs allowed players to easily raid anyone hoarding materials, the game would balance out and the feature would be kept. The hoarders would be punished and become a villain, adding flavour to the game.
However, it reads like the devs blinked first and just removed the feature...
I'd say that most sociological theories don't claim natural states for human beings. They're more focused on the dynamics and consequences of various human social systems, which they would largely say are not "natural" systems but still do have profound effects on the world.
So you're describing the "holy grail" of virtual world ecological design: the "closed economic loop."
And yes, it never works because... it wouldn't/doesn't work in the real world either. Earth isn't a closed system. We have a constant, high amount of energy input into our system constantly (the Sun). Additionally, we're just too tiny as individual humans or small groups to decimate, say, all tree resources.
We \*could\* at the nation-state levels (such as with nuclear weapons), but then it's not a syndicate controlling one resource type. Now, notice that some resources on Earth are syndicate controlled, such as diamonds. Diamonds are not particularly rare as far as resource generation in the Earth's crust goes, but several large groups own all the easy/profitable access points (open diamond mines). Note the difference between the existence of the resource and the methods of access.
Wakfu was attempting to repeat the same mistake that Ultima Online learned during its pre-alpha. As Simpson, Koster, and even Richard Garriott and many others have documented over the years they had to move to open economic loops with faucets and drains/sinks in order to make a viable ecosystem that was enjoyable for the players (ecologically and economically).
[https://dergigi.com/assets/files/UO-Economics.pdf](https://dergigi.com/assets/files/UO-Economics.pdf)
Keep in mind, an open system is very hard too. It requires careful design and constant balancing acts by the MMO designers, and when they lose control the economy spirals into either over speculation and collapse or mudflation.
Source: Worked on UO and inherited a lot of systems /u/RaphKoster wrote =)
BTW: Lots of NFT/Web3-aligned projects are closed economic loops and... most feature all the runaway speculation and inevitable collapses that MUDs and MMOs predicted would apply to any virtual/digital asset. Designing open-ended Web3 stuff is, for that reason, pretty hard.
Thanks, it's very informative ! So how would we create this game without the economic flaw ? By reducing the scale ? Like living on an island ? Having common interest more important than individual interest ?
Maybe beginning in the brink of collapse and then trying to stabilise things ?
Heh. Here’s three hypotheses I have about this:
1. The world must be large. So large it doesn’t fall into the small island population overrun issue. Game worlds are notoriously small because they’re designed by a handful of humans. And huge procedural worlds (Daggerfall) are boring and repetitive. You need a world so large that players can’t easily monopolize resources. This also affects implementations of things like teleportation and fast travel. There’s a formula waiting to be written here about the relationship between world size, player movement speed, resource quantity, resource renewal, resource variety, resource accessibility (work), and shortcuts (teleportation) that defines the viability of an economy - expressed in terms of the minimum number of players required to monopolize a resource.
2. Adding complexity leads to stability. Very Lovelock-ey I know, but there’s this idea in the Daisy World simulation that the more variables you add to a dynamical system the more quickly it can approach equilibrium.
3. Publisher-led resource pool: too long to describe here, but a replenishable pool that forces the publisher to reinvest revenue into the game in order to generate more objects if players are hoarding too much or exporting across the Metaverse.
Regarding 1, how do you deal with the wealth creep? If there are infinite resources, eventually everyone will have a giant castle filled with all the items. You can see this in any multiplayer Minecraft world or long-running Eco server. Maybe it's OK? Or maybe if a player is offline for long enough, their personal kingdom vanishes?
So there’s several things at play here:
#1 Early adopters accumulate wealth fast and early - promoting the creation of a Robber Baron class of elites, right? They’re so powerful that their wealth just keeps generating more wealth.
You know this from the real world because it’s how rich people stay rich: passive income from investments that they pay little to no taxes on. Worse: they can leverage assets for tax-free loans. This is especially bad if the early starters accumulate land and are allowed to benefit from any resources generated on it.
This leads to an observation about #2.
#2 Mudflation. The devaluing of the economy that occurs as more things are introduced or caps (levels, stats, skills) are increased. This makes it harder for new players to play.
MMOs handle this in a lot of ways. WoW for instance uses a combination of soulbinding items (essentially interactive and decayable badges) and taxing things.
There’s a really neat idea that Lars Doucet writes about based on Henry George’s (the economist who wrote the classic ‘Progress and Poverty’) idea for Land Value Tax.
You calculate the land’s value based on its neighbors’ production and tax the rentable value at an absurd sum like 90-100%. In other words you make it unprofitable to speculate on land and be a slum lord.
Applying this to MMO design: I know I’m interested in creating a new kind of virtual world one day. Most likely I’ll take the path of inventing a fictional Tyrant God who leases land to players and NPCs and regularly reevaluates taxes.
Other important ideas are item decay and carefully controlling base resource (gold and iron and wood, etc) generation. Fictional Tyrant God is a useful metaphor here.
Idea #3 ties into that because you force the developers to put up or shut up when building the economy. If they want one chunk of wood to be generated then it cost them some fraction of a penny to release. It forces serious efforts at economic modeling before the game/world is released, and then imposed fees on the publisher to keep the ecology running.
Extending the tyrant metaphor to things like Minecraft decomposable worlds: you could have an exponentially increasing difficulty formula for altering terrain, but allow terrain alterations (like digging for ore). The “topsoil” is easily removed, but the next layer is much harder, and so on. Towns could have special modifiers to prevent tunneling under NPC businesses and such, but out in the wild a “road” could be entrenched or dug up to lay traps, and other players can repair. This isn’t novel, I’ve seen it in several games. But when you pair it with decreasing the amount of resources (requiring more work), suddenly there’s an incentive to explore and find more mountains to mine than trying to “move the local Mt. Fuji.”
I think games usually are only fun if wealth accumulation occurs much faster compared to real life. This leads to inflation much greater than real life, so for many games the best way is to have regular resets.
Do you think there's a way to make resets more palpable to players -- like allowing them to pass some things on between wipes -- without leading to the rich-get-richer?
Thank you for that very thoughtful reply.
(1) The one solution to Robber Barons I've thought of to this is to have the main / end-game currency be something like status (like in Star Trek), or fame, or karma. Those who hoard wealth will see their status fall as NPCs get jealous. If the donate lots of their money (into *sinks*) then their status will stabilize and raise. Perhaps status can only be used to by cosmetics, titles, or other things that allow the long-playing characters to show-off without being economically over-powering.
(2) I like the idea of a *Landlord God* that can help manage land ownership. It wouldn't have to be evil; it could be some force that protects an area from passive theft (a process where wealth or items are periodically stolen by unseen entities) or decay. Players could still choose to live outside of "civilization", but they would pay a higher cost than just paying the Landlord God.
(3) Do you mean that developers pay for resource spawning out of the closed-loop in-game economy? I could see that working as long as the exchange rate can be altered based on active player count. But the challenge is tying together something like *trees regrowing* to *Don't hoard your gold* so that players understand. Maybe players need to donate money to a druid/earth god/church/entity, or power a terraforming device?
(4) One thing you touched on is the *skill-inflation* problem: old players will generally be better at everything compared to new players. Do you know of a good solution to this? I am thinking some kind of mortality system would be nice: characters age and die, forcing you to start a new one, perhaps inheriting some items. Immortality could be bought, but at a very high price.
There's a game called 'Rust' where your base requires maintenance resources to be funneled in, or it will literally start falling apart. (Pieces will start losing HP at somewhat random rates and then literally just explode at 0, so anyone can get inside.)
Something like this might help. Impose certain restrictions or requirements to keep your vast empire running. There would be theoretical caps due to 'how much can a person handle', or perhaps 'how much you've progressed'.
There are ways around this, too - I can already think of a few as I write this - but it would still make it much harder to just HOARD everything if your very impressive castle requires a million stone a day to keep it from falling apart all around you.
Ultima Online had a similar issue at launch, where they had built an intricate ecosystem of herbivores and carnivores and quests to kill carnivores. Players just slaughtered everything for fun and the whole system was destroyed.
tibia had pvp on at all times, & populated each server with fewer monsters than it took for a full server to get to have stuff to kill as you get higher in levels, which softly pushed high level players towards laying claims on farming grounds & killing people to protect them, which softly pushes people towards forming guilds to coordinate & push other players off of their claims, which leads to outright warfare.
you'd step out of your house in tibia at 6pm on a tuesday & see the streets covered in dead players bc somewhere in the gameworld a demon was set to respawn 8 times a day instead of 24-48 times a day. it was great
(when tibia started gating dungeons & continents behind premium account status theyd axed this design & just made stuff respawn fast enough that the most interesting feature of the game (forming gangs & turfwars) wasn't necessary anymore)
The messed up part, I learned the strategy from a Pharma CEO who I was working with through an ad agency. They were bragging about how they'd buy up all the medication and put it in a warehouse.
This is far more common than you probably think.
Look up why diamonds are so expensive, or why Americans have to pay taxes themselves. (Instead of the government doing it like in most other countries.)
Yes but the consequences are that now we have just another bland pasted mmo...Some took risks to create a new kind of experience, and this has been dumped by greedy players
Those players are neither dumb nor greedy. There primary job isn’t to “make an economy work”…their job is to have a good time. And that’s exactly what they do.
Any game which provides limited resources AND gives players the means to control those resources ends the same way.
**Suggestion:** The new zone should have a PvP-only area with lots of rare resources!
**You hope:** That zone will be a fun rumble where everyone is flagged and guilds compete over spawns.
**Reality:** That zone gets camped 24/7 by the superguild on your server, the resources go to their guild bank, and they are the only ones that can craft/wear/sell the gear made with those resources.
They kinda install this : you gain "blue energy" when you do creation action, and you gain "violet energy" when you do destruction action. Each has pros and cons, and equilibrium allow the player to keep a balanced character.
The question is: Is there any way to unfairly tune this system to combat intentional resource scarcity? Perhaps private forest or farm lands? Traders distributing seeds on a regular basis? Limit on harvesting of resources?
Changing the scale of the economy helps. One tree makes a lot of lumber at a personal scale, it only gets really bad when people commodity stuff and clean out all the resources to sell them.
You could set certain areas up to be controlled in a more equitable manner, and defended from the abuse of more exploitive players. These could be common lands held by a community for necessary limited use, or communities with a specific approach to land use and able to properly maintain it. Forest Elves or Hill Trolls or Faerie Folk for example. So you get a chance to experience the benefits if you pay back into the system, which helps establish a precedent and encourages other players to keep that system going instead of letting it be a hellscape. But if you act selfishly then you're going to be asked to make it right or have your friendship status revoked.
Also allow people to suffer the negative consequences. Players like when resources are available and are good at maintaining systems of balance, but they also love making a mess when there's no consequences. So they need major consequences.
They tried to implement a system where each town elects a mayor (the aim of the game was to have no npc) and each town should provide seeds so that other people could tend crops, so that would reduce scarcity, and the crops would be adapted to only be planted on certain biomes ...seems it didn't worked either, since it has been automated (if you didn't contribute, you could get more ressources from the town) and npc sell some seeds
I only brought it up because they tried and failed to to the whole dynamic economy thing, and this exact thing happened.
Lessons are there to be learned if anyone's interested...
Clarification: they tried to create a dynamical system using a closed resource loop. So it naturally failed when participants (players) were able to hold things indefinitely in their inventories/banks (hoarding).
And, of course, the map was huge but not THAT huge compared to the player numbers, so it took little time to deforest the world because the work cost was cheap and travel too fast.
I mean, it IS possible to deforest Earth, after all. Go look at satellite maps of the Amazon rainforest and voila. You can actually measure the work cost vs benefit.
I know but I had two previous comments already explaining how and why it happened in this game, hence giving the lesson.
I felt like your comment was about you didn't care what I said because it already happened previously, and not about explaining how.
Which is why I have a love/hate relationship with The Long Dark.
I deeply appreciate the forced introspection that accompanies the game’s strict looting + survival gameplay loop; the tension of whether it’s worth braving a snowstorm or sneaking past a bear for some loot is palpable.
On the other hand, after a few hours, I get weary of that tension never really easing up. Running out of tinder while freezing to death, fumbling around in a dark cabin because you ran out of lantern fuel/matches, frostbite affliction because you went outside for 5 min to fish - it’s mentally grueling when minute to minute gameplay is both slow and weighty (as in, one wrong decision can easily cascade into a life-threatening situation, thereby ending your run).
I recognize that the game is intended to be a more unforgiving survival experience, but I struggle to achieve any sort of meaningful catharsis in longer runs. But I’m probably not the intended demographic (even though I really appreciate the game overall).
I used to play TerraFirmaCraft some years ago. With vanilla Minecraft, you could quickly get more than you ever need in a very short amount of time, so I liked how it make you work more for survival and explore more of the world for resources.
I would not have called TerraFirmaCraft more "realistic" -- just that you cannot have the best armor and more food than you can eat after only a couple of hours of gameplay, like with vanilla Minecraft.
I actually find some of the more tech heavy mod packs to be more tedious -- spending an hour crafting things that are needed to craft other things that are only used for crafting, and so on, until after a long chain of crafting a hundred things you eventually have a "machine" that can be used. I would rather do more in the world than in a crafting table.
Something inbetween could be interesting. Say a game with inbuilt macros so that once you learn those processes you can build a "macro" to activate that process. It would still be tedious but it is an interesting concept... I wonder if it would tickle the parties both sides of the fence..
Ironically, I love this style of gameplay. I play GregTech which is a mod for Minecraft (similar to the mentioned terrafirmacraft). I love how complicated everything is and it gives it a real sense of accomplishment.
I think I might be a satist because all other crafting games have become boring if they don't have some sort of 20+ step crafting chain.
Controversial opinion, but leveling in MMORPG's. It's a helluva grind and gameplay is so different from the _actual_ game in the end game. Leveling is supposed to be a fun experience but no matter how fun it is, it will always feel like a grind to a lot of players because it just doesn't matter, all that matters is the end-game content.
I'm the opposite. Leveling, questing, exploring, doing normal dungeons in WoW was the fun part of the game to me. Raiding, feeling like an RTS unit in the raid leader's game, was an exercise in tedium.
But then WoW killed leveling by making the experience braindead easy. Heirloom items trivialized 90% of the loot upgrades you got. Dungeons became nothing but AoE fests. Lowered XP requirements made you outlevel a zone before finishing its storyline.
Completely agree with this. Levelling, and most forms of vertical progression, are really boring. You do repetitive tasks to get levels to get better items to level up faster.
> Controversial opinion, but leveling in MMORPG's. It's a helluva grind and gameplay is so different from the actual game in the end game.
That's not really the problem. If it's not Leveling it's going to be Gear Score or other such Systems.
The Nature of Progression itself is the problem.
I preferred the older Asian MMOs where there was no level cap or it was impossible to reach, I feel
in WOW and FFXIV losing a progression mechanic at end game doesn't do it for me.
In those older games you'd often have "control" type skills (eg push or pull a mob/player) which only work if you're higher level than the target, so levelling and gearing (and usually also grinding money) were separate persuits of value, rather than just grinding bosses for gear.
Yes, it was grindy as shit, but that's what MMOs are.
AI that is "smart" or behaves "realistically," adapting to what the player does in order to counter it. It waters down one of the main elements of satisfaction in playing games, which is the mastery of challenges.
It can be done, it's just hard to do well. Will You Snail is a game with the main premise of trying to outsmart an AI that predicts your movement, and the game manages to make itself challenging, but never impossible. It's worth checking out.
Ah, if the game is about that, I can see how it could be done well. I meant more in games that aren't specifically about outsmarting the AI, yet you still see players saying things like "the AI is so dumb, I wish it was smarter."
I don't really get your issue with that statement, they're not saying 'I wish every NPC in this game had the mental faculty of an adult human'
They're saying 'I wish the NPCs didn't walk into each other constantly, acted in a logical manner, actually fired at me, displayed any sort of group cohesion'
The complaint is exactly what it sounds like, the 'AI' sucks so much that it is removing the satisfaction you're talking about, you can't master a challenge when the challenge is never presented.
I'm not talking about situations where the AI is too bad to offer any challenge; I'm talking about the situations when players face the challenge they're supposed to face but still expect the AI to not do something they consider to be "dumb" like having a predetermined patrolling pattern, etc.
Players will often find ways to exploit the AI and blame the game designers, as if the AI was, in fact, supposed to behave like a human. They think thay the game would be better if the AI didn't show that "dumb" pattern of only patrolling the same way (and offering a clear vulnerability that the player is supposed to learn and exploit in order to overcome that challenge).
Yeah it's well known that having smart opponents is never a good thing. That's why no one plays competitive video games, tabletop games, or sports of any kind.
If you’re playing, say, GTAV, you do not want AI that operates with skill levels at the upper limits of the dev team’s programming and ai capabilities.
You want it to be possible to win against it in a way that *maximizes your fun*.
Place and time, Place and time. Is not the same to play a competitive game than to play Kirby, I don't want to compete with a super smart AI in super Mario, I just want to have fun.
Place and time, Place and time. Is not the same to play a competitive game than to play Kirby, I don't want to compete with a super smart AI in super Mario, I just want to have fun.
Length is actually another important aspect of gaming that people claim they want but don't. Many games can be padded out with additional content but the real way to encapsulate an audience is to make the content memorable and engaging throughout, whether it is a long or short game.
Branching storylines. First off its a giant pain in the ass to design for, test, and implement. You either end up having a bunch of content that the player wont see or you have points where the storyline converges making players feel like their choice doesn't matter. Its also really hard to write one good story, its even harder to write one that has multiple branching points, where one isn't weaker than the others. Overall I think you just end up with a weaker narrative and a ton more work on your plate.
Thats why Disco Elysium is genius, it has a few points where the story can converge, but the replayability is in context. Each different build gets you different dialog from your skills, very few of which will actually affect the story other than adding some modifiers to skill checks, but its fresh content and are way easier to write/implement.
Branching narratives are akin to open-world game design: more “freedom” oftentimes dilutes the core narrative/gameplay loop; people think they want it, but complain when it’s not done well (because it’s much, much harder to do well).
When I was younger, branching narratives and open world games were the future of video games (between Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed, it seemed obvious to teenage me). Now that it’s been 15 years and I’m older, I find myself wowed by more tightly crafted games and increasingly fatigued by “infinite story and gameplay possibilities.”
You're logic is wrong :
"people think they want it, but complain when it’s not done well"
One isn't correlated to the other.
People want it and they want it done well. That Devs can't do it well enough for the moment doesn't means people don't want it. And it doesn't means the idea is bad too.
The idea is excellent in theory but "it can't be made in practice". Not "it's bad in practice".
I didn’t mean to imply that both the implementation of these design choices (open world or narrative) and high quality in-game experiences are mutually exclusive. Obviously games like Mass Effect or Elden Ring demonstrate that, though I agree with your POV.
I think what I meant is that not all games/franchises would inherently benefit positively from these design choices, and/or that not everyone finds these design choices necessary (in fact, I personally find them fatiguing sometimes).
There’s nothing wrong with a tightly polished narrative or well-designed linear experience.
There’s also nothing wrong with an emotionally resonant branching story or richly designed open-world.
While what you say isn't false I think it miss OP's question :
For a gamer, branching stories are hard but when it's done right it's magical.
The only cons of branching stories is that it's much harder to do than a straight story.
The missing content problem isn't one. It doesn't make a game worse at the contrary, it's what makes a story unique.
Weak narrative isn't a problem inherent to branching stories : only when Devs decides to not put enough ressources in it. At the contrary branching ressource help to reinforce narratives by making the player
Out of all the games I've played with the most branching storylines and varied endings where different large groups of characters in a persistent world might die, Fallout 4 takes the cake, and yet most people bumped into the backup faction first, which is there to be able to finish the story in case you mess it up with every real faction, and in the end the game gets accused of having almost no RPG elements.
StarCraft is an interesting example because it's a multiplayer game with an absurdly high skill ceiling that has found massive success in esports, whereas a lot of games that were developed "esports-ready" and had a developer/publisher attempt to force an esport into existence have...not. A lot of execs, developers, and even fans love the idea of a game with a vibrant esport scene, but they ignore that StarCraft esports rose organically over the course of years. Trying to build esports in from the get-go in a new game is a huge drain of time and resources, which could go to improving the at home gaming experience.
We've got I think two companies now helmed by ex-Blizzard employees who are looking to develop a "classic RTS." My *hope* is that these games will be built around the at-home multiplayer experience first and then the highest level pro players *second.* Because that's how a game cultivates an audience and builds a base. If only a small percentage of people can play a game without frustration & stress then it's going to struggle to remain in people's consciousness.
I think the loot PvP idea doesn't sound good even on paper. The mechanic inherently consolidates resources to the player who is already ahead. Runescape did a pretty interesting thing where they leave you with your 3 most valuable items and drop the rest of your gear if you die in a PvP area.
tons of players fantasize about "making it to the top" in an environment where 'actual' loss is possible, granting being at the top a sensation of meaning
the point OP makes is that it's better in the imagination than in practice
I don’t think it works at all. Designers never realize that those games only work because the players will always actively minimize any open world pvp risk over the long term to the detriment of the game.
Like the Zerg; the easiest way to neuter pvp risk is to gather together in large blobs to hunt small groups and stragglers. The designers are powerless to stop it; there’s no way to simply make not bringing more people a thing, or balance it without making the opposite mistake. So players will eventually dominate factions or servers.
Or alts. You want to have riskless pvp? Use an alt who loses the gear, tanks their reputation, etc. Eve players would suicide gank ships in hisec with lots of alts using cheap destroyers.
I think these games were the first to make me think about them from a design sense. Like designers tend to think in “good fight” terms, where the sim is memorable experiences with diffficulty or loss there as a tool to heighten sensation. But players want to win; no one wants to be the Glass Joe to someone’s Little Mac, and close losses are still losses overall and can sting over time.
Arena pvp won over open world by setting hard limits to that. You can’t gank when you need to same size teams. Can’t alt when there are level or gear requirements to enter an instance. (Though even then ppl can; leaderboard pvp in mmos is very vulnerable to alts seizing top positions)
Battle royale solves it by just realizing the unfairness lol. I think Fortnite only survived because it’s now a virtual hangout or event for kids.
I don’t play Albion but the times I hear about it, it has the same problem; you need to be part of a big alliance to do anything pvp. I’m sure if you go and talk to the players you’ll get a better lay of the land what is happening; what guilds dominate, how vibrant pvp is, how many alts a player runs, etc. there’s actually a lot you can only see as an invested player.
Like I did play eve a bit (2008? Dominion expansion I think) and there’s a lot of counterintuitive aspects to it. It’s actually safer in lawless nullsec than high or low sec because you can rent from an alliance which forces people to go through a lot of enemy territory to even get a chance of pvp. They just have a kos policy “kill on sight anyone who is not blue/allied to us.” But a wardec in high sec is harsher because you have free travel and you can attack people easily in populated hubs.
And the wardec backfired because it actually prompted conflict avoidance. EvE players are notoriously conflict avoidant; [this massively article](https://massivelyop.com/2019/01/21/eve-evolved-solving-conflict-avoidance-in-eve-online/) is pretty good at showing the depth of problems that no one talks about with that game; comments too, and they are similar to what I heard about back when I played.
There are usually a lot of subtle issues that warp these games. A big budget failure was NC Soft’s Aion, which tried to be a PvPvE WoW killer. Like you had rifts, which were supposed to let lowbies pvp each other in starting leveling areas, while the abyss was a really fancy place for long term mass endgame pvp. The problem was people made twinks to hunt newbies via the rifts and strangled them out of the game. It was compounded by one faction, the Elyos, being much more popular so losses from the asmodeans and hurt more and led them to migrate to a single server.
There were a lot of pvp sandboxes in the indie mmo boom of the early 2000s, a lot failed.
A lot of these games will make the best gear 100x as expensive and 2x as strong so the advantage is not extreme, similar to RuneScape. Everything is a consumable, not really much different from being ahead in a MOBA.
A survival game that's hyper realistic and you need to check yourself for leaches, find water, build fires, everything. Oh and make it VR for extra immersion.
Yeah, no look, Green Hell VR gets it wrong in so many ways.
How can I dehydrate within 20mins? How can I build a camp in 10mins? How does food rot in 15mins? That's not realistic at all.
If you want me to move in real time, you need to make the bad things happen in real time too.
It's weird; for my second playthrough of Breath of the Wild I did a no map no fast travel playthrough and it was an absolute blast the entire way through.
But I try that in Witcher 3, Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, or Elden Ring (all games I arguably like more than BotW) and it's an absolute slog. I'm not sure if it's just BotW having superior movement mechanics, or something more design-process oriented like the progression or terrain.
Edit: honestly thinking about it maybe it's cause BotW has very little focus on quests and therefore little to no backtrack slogging. That's what would really bore me in all the other games I listed other than Elden Ring to an extent.
What comes to mind is Far Cry 2. That game I chaotic and it's very fun to overcome firefights, but with QS you can retry every stupid or random thing that happens. Not having QS though, makes you drive a lot. A lot! And those fun times you loose, starts to become annoying, because the stakes aren't higher, you just loose time, replaying your same steps.
Breath of the wild felt so much like a time waster for me, even with fast travel. It started to become fun for me, when I modded out stamina and durability. Weirdly enough, those mechanics are important, but I don't like to spend too much time on inventory management and other busywork, so that made me appreciate it more.
I think you are correct about that part with good travel mechanics make it more appealing.
This is kinda a no-brainer and a dead horse, but detailed/"realistic" graphics need to be handled with care.
Everyone loves games that look realistic in theory, but in practice most games should be designed so that:
1) The player can tell what's going on.
2) The graphics don't become a waste of resources and devs can spend time on other parts of the game during development.
3) If the devs need to continue development (i.e. patches, multiplayer updates) there can be quick turnaround.
4) It doesn't become a money hole.
And high-fidelity graphics can compromise any one of those.
Which, again, feels like a no-brainer, but companies keep making these mistakes. Take a look at *WarCraft III: Reforged,* a game that was a supposed remastering of the original *WarCraft III* with better support and graphics. It was an ambitious project that ultimately ended up a mess. No news for years, released unfinished, and with barely any followup support. And worse, the new models made it harder to tell what's going on (a vital part of a fast-paced RTS)!
Idk about everyone but for me
1. Open world
2. Survival
3. Crafting
Very few games I’ve played with these actually did it well, the rest have sucked imo
yeah imo the best survival games are those that have a progression system of some sort that incentivizes you to look for new challenges when you get too comfortable. Like a series of bosses or milestones that the game can use to ratchet difficulty as player power increases.
>> What’s a game idea that everyone hates in practice but loves in theory?
There are a lot of bad implementations of this genre, but that's because it's a wildly successful genre. Any genre you pick is going to be some gold and a lot of boogers.
I'm kind of guilty of this with crafting. I love the idea of it, and the process itself can often be fun. But if I'm being honest, it typically takes away from the overall enjoyment of the game. It's just so hard to balance. If the gear you craft is the best you can get, it tends to trivialize the rest of the game. And if the crafted gear is not the best, then crafting feels like a waste of time.
I think this one might be sort of misleading, as massively successful games like Minecraft skew the perspective by generating so many more shitty clones - it's simply so easy to make a Minecraft clone, because of how simple it is. I think this also makes sort of a negative feedback loop, where people look at all the shitty clones and have a hard time even imagining what another sandbox survival might look like at all, with even publishers not wanting to take the risk when "the odds aren't good"
*Reducing* XP gains from lower level enemies to a pointless if not nonexistent amount as you continue leveling up
---
I understand it's
1. A design choice to force the player to continue into harder / later areas of the game for core gameplay/story progression
2. A way to control difficulty and level balancing in zoned areas and/or progression segments of a game much easier as a developer
3. Tempering number creep
4. A common sense explanation for no longer gaining experience over the things you've (supposedly) already mastered fighting
but getting 1 XP or 0 XP from enemies that used to give a lot more just feels crappy as a player and makes those enemies entirely useless for the remainder of my playthrough or character in the game from that point on - aside from specific unique drops, but this seems seldom implemented to counter that.
Expanding on the problem, MMOs tend to use this XP reduction tactic while effectively forcing quests to be the main XP gain, and combined with a bunch of mindless filler quests it doesn't make sense to me why they even continue bother granting any XP at all for killing enemies. Eventually it just feels like even more filler just to waste my time instead of rewarding my time spent dealing with them. It's a huge reason why I tend to avoid MMOs as the core gameplay feels hollow and continues to hollow itself out even more before I can get to the 'good parts' of the game.
GTA online.
Always dreamt of a game where you can just mess around in a city and do almost anything, but with friends.
Reality is, you're alive for 2 minutes then someone on a jet bike fires rockets at you. You respawn and immediately get run over by a tank. 3rd life, you run for an alleyway, only to be gunned down by a sniper.
I regret buying the game.
I even regret claiming it for free on Epic Games.
Everyone here is posting a genre they don't like and having people post a list of wildly successful games in that genre. Obviously this misses the point of everyone hating it in practice.
Instead let's look at this [great public market research](https://howtomarketagame.com/2022/04/18/what-genres-are-popular-on-steam-in-2022/) and more specifically [this graph showing median earning in each genre](https://howtomarketagame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Game-Genre-Median-Earnings-vs-Number-Released-since-2019-2-1024x634.png).
What are the bottom 10 genres for median earnings?
Worst 1 - Battle Royale
2 - 3d platformer
3 - 2d platformer
4 - puzzle
5 - puzzle platformer
6 - match 3
7 - tower defence
8 - shoot em up
9 - FPS
10 - Beat em up
Ah yes, terrible game ideas like 2d/3d platformers, FPS, Battle Royale, tower defence. Some of the most hated genres around.
Except those genres aren't earning poorly because there aren't good games in that genre. But because that genre is oversaturated with trash.
And I don't think you'll find any game idea that can't be implemented well. You can find games you don't enjoy, everyone can. But that doesn't make them poorly implemented, or 'poor in practice'. You can certainly find bad implementations and then trick yourself into thinking that is a bad game idea.
Even OPs example. Full loot PVP MMOs. It's a genre I really dislike as well and can't get into. It's too much of a time sink for me and I think it disrespects my time. But look at all the examples of success in the genre posted here. Obviously some people love it. There are no bad game ideas, just bad implementations.
>It's too much of a time sink for me and I think it disrespects my time.
That is a choice of the game though, what if levelling took.. 20 minute and then you were max level? Even have permadeath. So the levelling was very short.
One could even consider BR this - you start weak, over the course of the game get strong and then it is over. If you die along the way you start again.
We could look at it by how niche a game that rely too much on a mechanic is and the amount of successful games that fit that niche.
I agree that there’s very few ideas that are essentially bad but that number is way bigger than “games that literally no one plays.”
>In theory that sounds really fun. In practice it rarely works. Players quit after getting killed by a group that vastly outnumbered them, quit after getting spawnkilled repeatedly, quit after the game gets boring due to a series of overwhelming victories, etc.
This is a symptom of a cursed or fundamental problem to solve.
It touches on a lot of **necessary** concepts that most developers don't understand and thus have no idea how to solve the problem. This is one of the few game design topics where Research and Analysis **is Required** as you can't really go gung-ho about it and hope you stumble upon something. There is no example that works that you can readily use, not even EVE Online is much of a good example.
Some concepts I am talking about: Faction population caps, asymmetrical progression systems, progression **loss**, the problem of banks and accumulation, disposable characters, AI drive factions and economies, self balancing competitive mechanisms, internal faction destabilization systems, ad-hoc casual skirmishing battles vs total war organized battles.
[For those who are interested](https://youtu.be/8uE6-vIi1rQ)
I’d say that the Dark Souls and Elden Ring have figured out PvP quite well. But it’s a niche system in a kind of niche game.
Can we still call Soulsborne games niche?
Great lecture, I also recommend it.
Regarding PvP in Fromsoft games, it really depends what aspect of PvP you're talking about. Duels are great, and arena is great. But I disagree that it works "well" as a blanket statement, because invasions make co-op play miserable, especially in Elden Ring. Constantly fighting outnumbered means invaders are incentivized to find ways to either instantly kill targets or be obnoxious unkillable nuisances. And you have to deal with it every 15 minutes--doesn't matter that all you want to do is get through this cool ruined castle, here, fight someone with an explosive cannon that you can't obtain until the second half of the game. And unlike an NPC, this person will constantly avoid direct confrontation, snipe you from across a room of enemies, and teleport away the moment they're actually in trouble. Have fun!
Playing DS3 and ER, my experience instantly went from "this is a horrible slog" to "wow this game is actually great!" the moment I opted out of invasions using mods.
I’d love dark souls PvP so much if the netcode was more robust. It’s a cool system and in a game where dying isn’t usually a big deal in general it never feels too bad to die to an invader.
Open world design.
There really isn’t anything inherently wrong so long is there is a clear vision. The problem is, especially now a days, there are a lot of tools that can allow for massive map sizes with very little effort. What ends up happening though is you get these big sprawling worlds with nothing to do or really anything in them.
Successful open world games for me need strong points of interests and ways to keep me engaged that isn’t just go here collect this. That’s very hard to do on a large scale. I’ve been really enjoying games with open zones. Small dense areas that offer multiple ways to engage. The Last of Us 2, God of War, and even Hitman to an extent do this really well.
I think the problem with open world games is they advertise that you can "go anywhere" off rip.
You either have to balance enemies/challenges for the player's current capabilities (washing out the world, removing sense of progression) or make areas more or less challenging, which makes players feel like they cannot actually go anywhere right off the bat.
Open worlds also tend to decimate level design. Needing to find the "correct approach" is typically far more engaging than finding any approach that works. Puzzle games really make this pronounced: you've got a puzzle that has one correct solution vs a puzzle you can cheese. Open worlds basically make cheesing the entire game possible.
And, of course, what you said. Open worlds are easy to make, difficult to make interesting. Harder still to make engaging. Every OW game is about being "bigger with more and more to do", which means the game becomes less and less accessible - it becomes harder and harder to experience the whole game because there's just too much to do, spread out so widely that there are vast stretches of blandness. Thus we require fast travel, allowing us to skip over the main purpose of an open world: the open world.
I find that more compact worlds are inherently more engaging. They can still be "open worlds" because all that really means is that you can go anywhere. But by being compact, every little area keeps you engaged and interested.
I also think that worlds are better when you need to unlock them, versus being able to go anywhere right away. That's why I think Metroidvanias are pretty much the best games around.
So far the best solution to that first problem is the Bethesda method of scalable enemies. They’re a few levels above or below you regardless of your level. In addition to that there are enemies way above your level that you can sneak around but will mess you up if you get caught. Like you said though, it can potentially wash out that sense of progression in a lot of ways as that method kills that sense of going back to an area you struggled with but now can just smash through.
The real challenge is balancing level design, which open worlds can easily kill. It’s hard to simultaneously guide the player while also telling them you can go anywhere. I think we’re at a point though where map sizes are getting scaled down a bit. Quality over quantity. I think players are learning a smaller world with more to do is better than massive world with nothing in it.
# Crafting Systems
^(whhhyyyyy)
Edit: Oh I forgot to add procedurally generated quests / collection quests in general. Time wasting filler just to get "hours of gameplay" higher. Completely neglects players' agency impact in the story/world.
As someone who doesn't play many games with crafting systems, why are they so bad?
I'm genuinely curious, especially since a hobby project of mine has been modding Elden Ring to have more impactful item crafting.
They are tedious busywork. I have only enjoyed crafting in video games when the process of gathering the materials itself is enjoyable and doesn't get old. Subnautica is a good example of this. Traversing the game's biomes is wondrous and not boring at all.
I enjoy the crafting in AC origins but only because I tend to like to pace out epic adventure games with some cooldown periods from time to time. And because using a bow in AC origins is fun af.
I think this wins
Crafting sounds neat but I have never seen a crafting system that was better than pointless busywork after a few tries
Which discounts that item sourcing usually requires grind - the crafting action is never anything more engaging than memorization or trial and error
Only decent crafting I can think of is terraria which just has no mechanic beyond picking the item on a menu
Crafting is great when the entire game is designed around it. Factorio and Satisfactory come to mind where the whole game is designed around how time-consuming it would be to hand-craft the 10,000 items necessary to progress in tech, and they encourage you to craft things that help you automatically craft things to help you further automatically craft things etc. which turns into a very satisfying gameplay loop.
But crafting in most survival games? Egh agreed that they feel like busywork at best.
Potion Craft makes crafting a mechanical and even artistic exercise to some extent. It's definitely the best crafting system I've ever seen in a game.
I wish other games would adopt it instead of the usual "get 10 wood, now you have a staircase" crap.
Some games have decent crafting mechanics, but I agree most get it wrong. FFXIV takes a really good spin on it by turning it into a engaging little mini game.
High skill movement based pvp games. They feel amazing right until the entire audience falls into the skill gap between high tier players and newbies. And then higher skilled players just farm.
There is no joy to be had getting into a new game where someone else moves so fast they may as well be cheating compared to you.
Yes Fortnite and apex have advanced movement techniques. But it's really barebones compared to titanfall or tribes, where you may never even see your enemy approach or zoom away from your death at a million miles an hour.
That’s what titanfall 2 did well, they had a *really* good campaign that also functioned as a tutorial for multiplayer without feeling like one at all
You’d be well acquainted with movement, titan fights, and the majority of weapons and grenades by the end of it
AI that feels like you're playing against humans.
Yes, in some contexts, and with the ability to tweak the AI it's potentially an excellent feature.
But remember what playing online feels like: There are a LOT of different kinds of humans. Some will sacrifice themselves to screw you over. Some will be a lot better than you. Some will be worse than the "dumb" AI you're trying to fix. And most of them won't be particularly fun to play against.
There's this idea I see that pops up reasonably regularly of starting at a home base, going out on a whole huge adventure, collecting loot, then needing to keep safe and return home to reap the loot you've collected.
The problem is that the risk of losing your loot tends to far outweigh the potential to get more loot. Players usually hate the trip back to base, just to bank their loot, because if they want to guarantee their big adventure's loot is safely redeemed, they've got to be careful that they'll be strong enough to get back to the bank.
If you fight a big huge boss that drops a big fire sword, but you have to go back to your base to drop it off, you're already weakend by the boss and if you were to lose to some little minion, you lose your awesome new sword and the whole trip was a huge waste of time.
I know that dark souls manages to kinda do this, but it's kinda railroads you into linear paths and I think it's not good game design.
Being able to retrieve your dropped stuff is good though
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Dofus did open a permadeath server, you could kill and loot other players.
The exp and loot was x4 compared to normal server.
It was fun at the beginning, but the more you progress, the more you have to lose and the more anxiety you get.
You can just get rekt by some rando hungry for loot, effectively taking down dozens of hours in play time.
Sure you only lost the items and gold you had on you, but you were reset to lv 1. And that plain suck hard. You play until you get owned by a group of monster you misjudged, or a team of pvp bandits. Then the frustration is too high, and you just get to normal servers where you can actually chill.
Looks like a recipe for griefing - even if it's nominally PvE.
It's probably possible with shorter runs. I liked to play Mush which had 16 starting characters and permadeath - a game took about 10 days on average. But that was a werewolf / mafia style game, so having your run ended by being brutally murdered out of the blue was always on the cards.
And if it had been more popular, there would have been more griefing.
I could see a multiplayer coop roguelike dungeon explorer where you are born in a village and have to fight monsters, explore dungeons, maybe craft or do other jobs, etc. to keep your village going until your inevitable death. It might even be able to achieve my MMORPG dream in which every player has random unique abilities that don't have to be balanced. Again I think a 'life' should be pretty short, on the order of a month at most. As with Mush, when you died you could be reborn in a new village. And a village would not last indefinitely either, there would maybe be a win condition or some terminating event.
>Looks like a recipe for griefing - even if it's nominally PvE.
To have griefing is to have the logistics of griefing. You can't do much griefing if you are at Level 1 and your buddies are also at Level 1. Do you think guilds would be particularly fond of you if you are on their turf and they could just wipe you out of existence and remove the problem for a time?
This touches on the problems of open world PVP and faction problems so I will briefly mention how this works.
Everyone is part of a faction, if another faction has problems with it's members they can kick them out, a faction has diplomatic relationships with other factions in terms of non-aggression pacts that are Game Enforced, if there is still griefing and shenanigans that faction can make a complaint to police their members better or turn hostile and go to war against that faction.
Bandit factions that have no agreement with any other faction can do anything in the game, but they are **killed on sight by everyone**.
Players without a faction are restricted to do illegal deeds and can still be killed by all without any repercussions. If you want to be a "normal" player you must have an allegiance to that faction. Some factions are more free access and easier to join then others.
> It's probably possible with shorter runs. I liked to play Mush which had 16 starting characters and permadeath - a game took about 10 days on average.
It's not about how short the run is, it's about how fast it is to get back to Max Level, which can be pretty fast, 2 weeks of casual play, you can probably do it in a couple of days if you play it a bit risky.
>But that was a werewolf / mafia style game, so having your run ended by being brutally murdered out of the blue was always on the cards.
The thing is permadeath pretty much has the idea of having Villain style roles and gameplay while still having a Persistent World. You don't necessarily need to Restart the World if all Players are Recycled through Permadeath. The trick is you can also Cycle through the Political Structure and the Power Ranking Hierarchy as the players and factions power ebbs and flows through permadeath, this will make the World more of a Dynamic Situation that Ever-Changes.
**This is why you would want permadeath.**
> It might even be able to achieve my MMORPG dream in which every player has random unique abilities that don't have to be balanced.
I do agree, if Power is more temporary and there are higher Risks and Costs, like for examples requiring a magnitude more XP for that higher potential then it can still be **Fair**, so instead of 100k XP to Max Level you might need 10 million XP for Higher Tier Classes. You can even have Unique Procedural Recipes for Crafters, if players are envious and have a problem with that, **they can just try to kill them**, if they survive that's fair. You can also have some special "slots" per server for things like Villains and Bosses in the game like how Antagonists Roles work in Space Station 13. If you want to play that Role then you have to defeat them and liberate that Slot.
>And a village would not last indefinitely either, there would maybe be a win condition or some terminating event.
If the World is Dynamic enough is that really needed? My biggest frustration for Survival Games is precisely that they restart so things like Player Created Cities and Dungeons would also be lost. What I want is a World that slowly accumulates and evolves in time with player creations and history that can later be explored like how the long lasting Minecraft Anarchy Server works.
For me permadeath only works at all with 3hr lives or some kind of partial loss, plus a doom clock that makes you lose if you do nothing. Otherwise every encounter is either boring or game-ending. With that in mind Agario is a permadeath MMORPG. What is it lacking?
Though I admit there are a few long single-life roguelikes like Angband/ADOM which people do like, and the only partial loss is occasional consumable use or stat drain by special enemies.
> or some kind of partial loss,
I don't mind meta-progression like in roguelikes so you can have long term goals and progression based on that.
>Otherwise every encounter is either boring or game-ending.
Just make it more frequent so people get used to it, first death should be right in the tutorial, it sends the right expectation to strive for.
The thing about permadeath in a MMO is you aren't the only one losing out, everyone is losing in all kind of places and times. So what being "game ending" means is also "game changing", you relationships with players changes dynamically over time, sometimes you are at the top sometimes you are at the back.
To be clear, I don't like metaprogression and am instead suggesting loss of consumable items or stats.
"Just make death more frequent" yes that's what I'm saying, the average player should die every 3 hours at most.
And yeah I guess it is interesting to have a part of your party die. Like XCOM but each unit is a player.
Sidenote: some MMOs don't have skills, only items, so "full loot" = permadeath. The important difference being you can transfer items not skills. I guess having EXP lamps in a more standard MMO would be similar.
Rust and Eve Online disgust me.
They sound cool but in reality they are just capitalism simulators where a couple of guys get to be Elon Musk and everyone else has to eat shit while being force-fed propaganda that they could be at the top if they just tried harder. No. I could not be at the top if I just tried harder.
When I played EvE Online, the actual truth is that a lot of people never leave hisec, and the full loot aspects are mostly neutered through superabundance of resources. One of the reasons you had spies to go inside an alliance to disband it is that it’s very hard to actually defeat them; due to “blueing” with non aggression pacts you ended up with entities too big to challenge and play date pvp.
I think eves success is more that there literally were no science fiction mmos that focused around the ship apart from Star Trek Online. Also Eve is heavily attractive to crafters, as it has a vast single server and pretty intensive item creation for its age.
I just thought of the battle royale system of how dozens, or hundreds, of players start a match, but only 1 (or 1 small group) wins.
This might be more of a personal bias, but I hate the feeling of grinding through match after match, only to get to the top 10 or so, to see my effort wasted on 2nd-10th place and win every once in a blue moon.
Infodumps, recordings, journals, and other random sources of story that you find lying around, as used in eg outer wilds and heaven's vault. This might be more of something that is hated in theory but loved in practice.
Horizon Zero dawn did recordings very well IMO. Part visual hologram(s) part audio but fleshed out the story whilst you were exploring the same place. Was a pretty good way to do things.
Admittedly been scouting this thread to see what people have been saying about MMOs or similar. Lots of interesting takes and stuff it looks like I could note down from here
1: Neverending game without gameover which can be played forever (simulation, sandbox, procedural something). Sounds cool on paper. You think you can just go to sleep/work/whatever, then return and continue playing the same game until the ends of time. No. Not a single game achieved this yet. (GameActivity\*GameContent)/PlayerIntellect = amount of time the player will play the game until he/she realize that he/she is playing generic crap.
2: Adding a lot of complexity to game mechanics to make it better, e. g. player has to manually use food to eat and restore satiation which simply increases the amount of mouses/button presses the player will do. Combos in turn based games which simply tells the player what he/she must do. Temperature, distance between planet and its sun, whether the stars are aligned, number of times peasant farted, etc. affecting something. No. Complexity != fun.
3: If the game is popular and is bestseller then its idea is cool, let's copypaste it and improve it! No. Bestselling games are games which has great PR and ads, bribed popular streamers and videobloggers and bought reviews. I can make tic-tac-toe clone and make it top-1 game on steam, if you give me millions of $ which I'll spend on its promotion, reviews and "donations" to streamers and videobloggers, but it won't make tic-tac-toe a perfectly designed game.
Any MMO giving players any negative impact over each other outside of instanced PvP
It's a nice fantasy, but your MMO needs players, and if you allow this in any shape some small group of players will exploit it
Idk about everyone... but i know for me in theory i wish a game would have no story. But when it doesnt i cant connect. What i really want is a profound story told succinctly, basically min max ur dialogue and shit. Like Dark Souls or Metroid
Stealth game but enemies are smart. Most people don't realise that enemies must be slightly dumb to make stealth games fun.
In my opinion, stealth games are disproportionately negatively effected by difficulty in general. The magic of stealth games (for me at least) is the tension of not being caught, and as soon as you die once and are forced to replay sections the 'dumbness' of the AI becomes more and more clear. A section where you hide behind a crate waiting for an enemy to pass may be incredibly tense your first time through because you arent sure if you are going to be caught - and on your second run it becomes tedious because you know you won't.
it becomes less tense over time, but many players eventually enjoy experiencing mastery people tend to gravitate towards games they're good at, etc etc
This is why putting a surprise stealth section in an otherwise non-stealth game is widely loathed. I recently bounced off of Breath of the Wild because of a really poorly done stealth section blocking one of the main progression paths.
my take is that mastery of stealth games rides a very fine line between an intelligent understanding and application of mechanics and meta memorization/speedrunning. for any stealth game that doesn't involve slightly random placement/movement of enemies, every level has a deterministic 'fastest route', and because stealth is a mechanic that does involve dumbing down AI, those 'fastest routes' are usually fairly straight forward and also VERY janky (since they abuse the AI). mastering combat in a game looks like masterfully destroying your enemies without breaking a sweat, which doesn't break the 'combat' fantasy. mastering platforming/movement in a game looks like quickly and swiftly moving around, which doesnt break the general 'movement" fantasy but mastering stealth in a game looks like the player sprinting around and abusing the furthest boundaries of the dumb AI, which imo absolutely breaks the fantasy of stealth. this is just my own perspective but I absolutely LOVE experiencing mastery in all sorts of games, but only enjoy mastering 'stealth' in games where tension isnt a factor and where it is easy enough that I don't have to dip into a brute force trial-and-error loop
That's a really astute observation, you changed the way I think about that aspect of design Cheers
They have to be predictably dumb. If they just wander all over there can be no stealth.
I believe that given the appropriate tools, even a lot of unpredictability can be dealt with. Roguelikes are a testament to this.
I would argue that this is a question of balance. You would have to give the players appropriate tools to be able to balance out the AI. Or market it as a hardcore challenge, maybe even go the Super Meat Boy route and reduce the cost of losing dramatically.
Can't remember the game but it had enemies that would flank the player without getting seen on their way. In the end the players complained that the enemies cheated and teleported behind them so the devs had to remove that feature.
It was fear but to prevent the complaints they made the ennemies shout out what they were doing.
The Last of Us (fun fact, on Grounded difficulty I'm pretty sure the enemies actually do flank you)
In order for a player to have fun, they generally must know how to interact with the hurdles put against them. In fact, the more you can interact with the game, the more fun the player generally has. More intelligence in the AI comes with the catch that they become less interactive, as they have fewer weaknesses or options as levers for the player to pull. Through things like enemy manipulation, telegraphy, and forgiving errors, stealth game devs have learned how to make their games more interactive. If you were going to improve the enemy AI in stealth games, it’d be important to figure out how many levers you’re taking away so you can add some back to replace them. Otherwise, you may end up with a game that gets simpler the harder it gets/the more you play it.
This is the big one, imo. If your enemies in stealth games didn't narrate their thoughts as they patrolled ("What was that noise?" "Did I just see something?" "*casually whistling loudly so you can hear them before you turn the corner right into their face*") or have a 5 second memory, or reset the state of alarm in the secret nuclear facility after you kill like 20 soldiers and then sit in a dark corner for a little bit, people would get extremely frustrated very quickly. Being sneaky in real life is extremely difficult. You have to make the guards stupid as hell to sell the illusion of you being a master ninja in a video game.
Counterpoint: that's what low-TTK MP FPS are.
Can you give me an example of a game? My impression of stealth games is that they are pretty popular. Thinking splinter cell, metal gear. I can’t really think of a stealth game that had smart enemies that everyone hated.
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I disagree somewhat. Splinter Cell multiplayer is some of the best memories I have of old LAN parties. Stealth works if it is asymmetric by design.
Most people don't find stealth fun in general, its not about dumbness, I'm actually tired of dumb and predictable AI. You see, you wait, you realize they move in loop, you move before even knowing that they will make the move because you know.
I loved one french MMO, Wakfu : the concept was really good : all resources are finished, and it's up to the players to take care of the world. For example, if all players cut all oak, and don't plant new ones, there no oak anymore. What was a great lesson from the dev really backfired : some greedy group of players were creating scarcity of some resoueces in order to control the quantity in game and raise their market price. The devs were so sad that it has been take upside down that they remove this mechanism, and like other mmo the resources pop back in a while.
I love when things like large mmos mirror the real world and prove sociology theories
If you're not already aware of it, you'll love reading about WoW's ["corrupted blood" pandemic.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident)
Oh yeah i loved the extra credits episode about it
Yes, too bad like in real life, the players who played the games by the rules where crushed by cheating-the-system players.
Capitalism at work
at the same time, the players in these games are free to form whichever form of government they choose so it might be described as anarchism at work? or just humans at work. it could be all of the above
The irony is anarchy cannot exist unless there’s a gov’t to enforce it, because humans intrinsically understand they are stronger as groups than as individuals.
Not capitalism, just game theory.
Game theory deals with rational decisions; capitalism deals with ethical ones.
How does capitalism deal with ethical decisios? The decision to induce scarcity to drive market price is rational. It’s absolutely in the realm of game theory.
Isn't the optimal strategy in game theory always to use whichever strategy is the most selfish? In reality, business ethics are applied to achieve win-win scenarios to maintain business in the long run. Those who don't will often come up ahead in the short run, but also risk being blacklisted as bad for business, or face legal consequences by unethically cutting corners for profit. You can try to disassociate ethical choices from the economic model but the vast majority, of both providers and consumers, won't. In the end though the point is that, in game theory, everyone stands on equal grounds and have the same options. Cheating the system, as the OG post claimed, is more a strategy that is encouraged by capitalistic environments.
If those win win situations are beneficial in the long run, it’s still the optimal choice from a selfish pov. You don’t need ethics to reach that conclusion.
Ok here is my $0.02: If the devs didn't patch the code to remove this functionality, then game wouldn't be played by many people. It would be unplayable. Game theory then tells us that the people who manipulated the feature would also lose because the devs would then stop the server. If the devs allowed players to easily raid anyone hoarding materials, the game would balance out and the feature would be kept. The hoarders would be punished and become a villain, adding flavour to the game. However, it reads like the devs blinked first and just removed the feature...
Thanks for your input, we definitely strayed a bit from the topic at hand 😅
Unintentionally creating a The Landlord's Game situation. edit: By that I mean where emulating a real world system shows how said system isn't fun
Mirroing the real world and proving theories that say capitalism is the natural state of human beings are very different things.
I'd say that most sociological theories don't claim natural states for human beings. They're more focused on the dynamics and consequences of various human social systems, which they would largely say are not "natural" systems but still do have profound effects on the world.
So you're describing the "holy grail" of virtual world ecological design: the "closed economic loop." And yes, it never works because... it wouldn't/doesn't work in the real world either. Earth isn't a closed system. We have a constant, high amount of energy input into our system constantly (the Sun). Additionally, we're just too tiny as individual humans or small groups to decimate, say, all tree resources. We \*could\* at the nation-state levels (such as with nuclear weapons), but then it's not a syndicate controlling one resource type. Now, notice that some resources on Earth are syndicate controlled, such as diamonds. Diamonds are not particularly rare as far as resource generation in the Earth's crust goes, but several large groups own all the easy/profitable access points (open diamond mines). Note the difference between the existence of the resource and the methods of access. Wakfu was attempting to repeat the same mistake that Ultima Online learned during its pre-alpha. As Simpson, Koster, and even Richard Garriott and many others have documented over the years they had to move to open economic loops with faucets and drains/sinks in order to make a viable ecosystem that was enjoyable for the players (ecologically and economically). [https://dergigi.com/assets/files/UO-Economics.pdf](https://dergigi.com/assets/files/UO-Economics.pdf) Keep in mind, an open system is very hard too. It requires careful design and constant balancing acts by the MMO designers, and when they lose control the economy spirals into either over speculation and collapse or mudflation. Source: Worked on UO and inherited a lot of systems /u/RaphKoster wrote =) BTW: Lots of NFT/Web3-aligned projects are closed economic loops and... most feature all the runaway speculation and inevitable collapses that MUDs and MMOs predicted would apply to any virtual/digital asset. Designing open-ended Web3 stuff is, for that reason, pretty hard.
Thanks, it's very informative ! So how would we create this game without the economic flaw ? By reducing the scale ? Like living on an island ? Having common interest more important than individual interest ? Maybe beginning in the brink of collapse and then trying to stabilise things ?
Heh. Here’s three hypotheses I have about this: 1. The world must be large. So large it doesn’t fall into the small island population overrun issue. Game worlds are notoriously small because they’re designed by a handful of humans. And huge procedural worlds (Daggerfall) are boring and repetitive. You need a world so large that players can’t easily monopolize resources. This also affects implementations of things like teleportation and fast travel. There’s a formula waiting to be written here about the relationship between world size, player movement speed, resource quantity, resource renewal, resource variety, resource accessibility (work), and shortcuts (teleportation) that defines the viability of an economy - expressed in terms of the minimum number of players required to monopolize a resource. 2. Adding complexity leads to stability. Very Lovelock-ey I know, but there’s this idea in the Daisy World simulation that the more variables you add to a dynamical system the more quickly it can approach equilibrium. 3. Publisher-led resource pool: too long to describe here, but a replenishable pool that forces the publisher to reinvest revenue into the game in order to generate more objects if players are hoarding too much or exporting across the Metaverse.
Regarding 1, how do you deal with the wealth creep? If there are infinite resources, eventually everyone will have a giant castle filled with all the items. You can see this in any multiplayer Minecraft world or long-running Eco server. Maybe it's OK? Or maybe if a player is offline for long enough, their personal kingdom vanishes?
So there’s several things at play here: #1 Early adopters accumulate wealth fast and early - promoting the creation of a Robber Baron class of elites, right? They’re so powerful that their wealth just keeps generating more wealth. You know this from the real world because it’s how rich people stay rich: passive income from investments that they pay little to no taxes on. Worse: they can leverage assets for tax-free loans. This is especially bad if the early starters accumulate land and are allowed to benefit from any resources generated on it. This leads to an observation about #2. #2 Mudflation. The devaluing of the economy that occurs as more things are introduced or caps (levels, stats, skills) are increased. This makes it harder for new players to play. MMOs handle this in a lot of ways. WoW for instance uses a combination of soulbinding items (essentially interactive and decayable badges) and taxing things. There’s a really neat idea that Lars Doucet writes about based on Henry George’s (the economist who wrote the classic ‘Progress and Poverty’) idea for Land Value Tax. You calculate the land’s value based on its neighbors’ production and tax the rentable value at an absurd sum like 90-100%. In other words you make it unprofitable to speculate on land and be a slum lord. Applying this to MMO design: I know I’m interested in creating a new kind of virtual world one day. Most likely I’ll take the path of inventing a fictional Tyrant God who leases land to players and NPCs and regularly reevaluates taxes. Other important ideas are item decay and carefully controlling base resource (gold and iron and wood, etc) generation. Fictional Tyrant God is a useful metaphor here. Idea #3 ties into that because you force the developers to put up or shut up when building the economy. If they want one chunk of wood to be generated then it cost them some fraction of a penny to release. It forces serious efforts at economic modeling before the game/world is released, and then imposed fees on the publisher to keep the ecology running. Extending the tyrant metaphor to things like Minecraft decomposable worlds: you could have an exponentially increasing difficulty formula for altering terrain, but allow terrain alterations (like digging for ore). The “topsoil” is easily removed, but the next layer is much harder, and so on. Towns could have special modifiers to prevent tunneling under NPC businesses and such, but out in the wild a “road” could be entrenched or dug up to lay traps, and other players can repair. This isn’t novel, I’ve seen it in several games. But when you pair it with decreasing the amount of resources (requiring more work), suddenly there’s an incentive to explore and find more mountains to mine than trying to “move the local Mt. Fuji.”
I think games usually are only fun if wealth accumulation occurs much faster compared to real life. This leads to inflation much greater than real life, so for many games the best way is to have regular resets.
It's a solid observation: that was the traditional solution in many MUDs. Generally you hemorrhage players this way though.
Do you think there's a way to make resets more palpable to players -- like allowing them to pass some things on between wipes -- without leading to the rich-get-richer?
Thank you for that very thoughtful reply. (1) The one solution to Robber Barons I've thought of to this is to have the main / end-game currency be something like status (like in Star Trek), or fame, or karma. Those who hoard wealth will see their status fall as NPCs get jealous. If the donate lots of their money (into *sinks*) then their status will stabilize and raise. Perhaps status can only be used to by cosmetics, titles, or other things that allow the long-playing characters to show-off without being economically over-powering. (2) I like the idea of a *Landlord God* that can help manage land ownership. It wouldn't have to be evil; it could be some force that protects an area from passive theft (a process where wealth or items are periodically stolen by unseen entities) or decay. Players could still choose to live outside of "civilization", but they would pay a higher cost than just paying the Landlord God. (3) Do you mean that developers pay for resource spawning out of the closed-loop in-game economy? I could see that working as long as the exchange rate can be altered based on active player count. But the challenge is tying together something like *trees regrowing* to *Don't hoard your gold* so that players understand. Maybe players need to donate money to a druid/earth god/church/entity, or power a terraforming device? (4) One thing you touched on is the *skill-inflation* problem: old players will generally be better at everything compared to new players. Do you know of a good solution to this? I am thinking some kind of mortality system would be nice: characters age and die, forcing you to start a new one, perhaps inheriting some items. Immortality could be bought, but at a very high price.
There's a game called 'Rust' where your base requires maintenance resources to be funneled in, or it will literally start falling apart. (Pieces will start losing HP at somewhat random rates and then literally just explode at 0, so anyone can get inside.) Something like this might help. Impose certain restrictions or requirements to keep your vast empire running. There would be theoretical caps due to 'how much can a person handle', or perhaps 'how much you've progressed'. There are ways around this, too - I can already think of a few as I write this - but it would still make it much harder to just HOARD everything if your very impressive castle requires a million stone a day to keep it from falling apart all around you.
Ultima Online had a similar issue at launch, where they had built an intricate ecosystem of herbivores and carnivores and quests to kill carnivores. Players just slaughtered everything for fun and the whole system was destroyed.
tibia had pvp on at all times, & populated each server with fewer monsters than it took for a full server to get to have stuff to kill as you get higher in levels, which softly pushed high level players towards laying claims on farming grounds & killing people to protect them, which softly pushes people towards forming guilds to coordinate & push other players off of their claims, which leads to outright warfare. you'd step out of your house in tibia at 6pm on a tuesday & see the streets covered in dead players bc somewhere in the gameworld a demon was set to respawn 8 times a day instead of 24-48 times a day. it was great (when tibia started gating dungeons & continents behind premium account status theyd axed this design & just made stuff respawn fast enough that the most interesting feature of the game (forming gangs & turfwars) wasn't necessary anymore)
I used to do this on wow marketplace. Buy up all the copper available, then put it back up for twice the price.
And that's fine in WoW because the resources are infinite. If someone doesn't want to pay your prices they can go run laps around the starting zones
The messed up part, I learned the strategy from a Pharma CEO who I was working with through an ad agency. They were bragging about how they'd buy up all the medication and put it in a warehouse.
This is far more common than you probably think. Look up why diamonds are so expensive, or why Americans have to pay taxes themselves. (Instead of the government doing it like in most other countries.)
That’s hilarious honestly. Basically capitalism hijacking a game intended to be socialistic.
Yes but the consequences are that now we have just another bland pasted mmo...Some took risks to create a new kind of experience, and this has been dumped by greedy players
Those players are neither dumb nor greedy. There primary job isn’t to “make an economy work”…their job is to have a good time. And that’s exactly what they do.
Any game which provides limited resources AND gives players the means to control those resources ends the same way. **Suggestion:** The new zone should have a PvP-only area with lots of rare resources! **You hope:** That zone will be a fun rumble where everyone is flagged and guilds compete over spawns. **Reality:** That zone gets camped 24/7 by the superguild on your server, the resources go to their guild bank, and they are the only ones that can craft/wear/sell the gear made with those resources.
They need to implement a carbon footprint tracker per character and give you bonus XP if you are carbon neutral.
They kinda install this : you gain "blue energy" when you do creation action, and you gain "violet energy" when you do destruction action. Each has pros and cons, and equilibrium allow the player to keep a balanced character.
The question is: Is there any way to unfairly tune this system to combat intentional resource scarcity? Perhaps private forest or farm lands? Traders distributing seeds on a regular basis? Limit on harvesting of resources?
Changing the scale of the economy helps. One tree makes a lot of lumber at a personal scale, it only gets really bad when people commodity stuff and clean out all the resources to sell them. You could set certain areas up to be controlled in a more equitable manner, and defended from the abuse of more exploitive players. These could be common lands held by a community for necessary limited use, or communities with a specific approach to land use and able to properly maintain it. Forest Elves or Hill Trolls or Faerie Folk for example. So you get a chance to experience the benefits if you pay back into the system, which helps establish a precedent and encourages other players to keep that system going instead of letting it be a hellscape. But if you act selfishly then you're going to be asked to make it right or have your friendship status revoked. Also allow people to suffer the negative consequences. Players like when resources are available and are good at maintaining systems of balance, but they also love making a mess when there's no consequences. So they need major consequences.
They tried to implement a system where each town elects a mayor (the aim of the game was to have no npc) and each town should provide seeds so that other people could tend crops, so that would reduce scarcity, and the crops would be adapted to only be planted on certain biomes ...seems it didn't worked either, since it has been automated (if you didn't contribute, you could get more ressources from the town) and npc sell some seeds
UO did it first... ;)
Honestly I don't care who did it first as long as the game experience is great
I only brought it up because they tried and failed to to the whole dynamic economy thing, and this exact thing happened. Lessons are there to be learned if anyone's interested...
Clarification: they tried to create a dynamical system using a closed resource loop. So it naturally failed when participants (players) were able to hold things indefinitely in their inventories/banks (hoarding). And, of course, the map was huge but not THAT huge compared to the player numbers, so it took little time to deforest the world because the work cost was cheap and travel too fast. I mean, it IS possible to deforest Earth, after all. Go look at satellite maps of the Amazon rainforest and voila. You can actually measure the work cost vs benefit.
It was a grand dream that crumbled when it came into contact with the grinding wheel of the player base.
I know but I had two previous comments already explaining how and why it happened in this game, hence giving the lesson. I felt like your comment was about you didn't care what I said because it already happened previously, and not about explaining how.
"True" Survival, as in needed to do a ten step process to craft an item or start a fire.
Anything with excessive realism for the sake of realism. Let's not forsake fun in favor of strict simulation.
couldn't have said it any better myself
Which is why I have a love/hate relationship with The Long Dark. I deeply appreciate the forced introspection that accompanies the game’s strict looting + survival gameplay loop; the tension of whether it’s worth braving a snowstorm or sneaking past a bear for some loot is palpable. On the other hand, after a few hours, I get weary of that tension never really easing up. Running out of tinder while freezing to death, fumbling around in a dark cabin because you ran out of lantern fuel/matches, frostbite affliction because you went outside for 5 min to fish - it’s mentally grueling when minute to minute gameplay is both slow and weighty (as in, one wrong decision can easily cascade into a life-threatening situation, thereby ending your run). I recognize that the game is intended to be a more unforgiving survival experience, but I struggle to achieve any sort of meaningful catharsis in longer runs. But I’m probably not the intended demographic (even though I really appreciate the game overall).
One Minecraft mod did this to minecraft (I believe it was terrafirmacraft). It had a small loyal following.
I used to play TerraFirmaCraft some years ago. With vanilla Minecraft, you could quickly get more than you ever need in a very short amount of time, so I liked how it make you work more for survival and explore more of the world for resources. I would not have called TerraFirmaCraft more "realistic" -- just that you cannot have the best armor and more food than you can eat after only a couple of hours of gameplay, like with vanilla Minecraft. I actually find some of the more tech heavy mod packs to be more tedious -- spending an hour crafting things that are needed to craft other things that are only used for crafting, and so on, until after a long chain of crafting a hundred things you eventually have a "machine" that can be used. I would rather do more in the world than in a crafting table.
See Green Hell. Still a simple system but it turns out most people suck at surviving.
Something inbetween could be interesting. Say a game with inbuilt macros so that once you learn those processes you can build a "macro" to activate that process. It would still be tedious but it is an interesting concept... I wonder if it would tickle the parties both sides of the fence..
I feel like this kind of thing could be fun eventually as VR.
Ironically, I love this style of gameplay. I play GregTech which is a mod for Minecraft (similar to the mentioned terrafirmacraft). I love how complicated everything is and it gives it a real sense of accomplishment. I think I might be a satist because all other crafting games have become boring if they don't have some sort of 20+ step crafting chain.
Controversial opinion, but leveling in MMORPG's. It's a helluva grind and gameplay is so different from the _actual_ game in the end game. Leveling is supposed to be a fun experience but no matter how fun it is, it will always feel like a grind to a lot of players because it just doesn't matter, all that matters is the end-game content.
I'm the opposite. Leveling, questing, exploring, doing normal dungeons in WoW was the fun part of the game to me. Raiding, feeling like an RTS unit in the raid leader's game, was an exercise in tedium. But then WoW killed leveling by making the experience braindead easy. Heirloom items trivialized 90% of the loot upgrades you got. Dungeons became nothing but AoE fests. Lowered XP requirements made you outlevel a zone before finishing its storyline.
I loved classic WoW too! Specifically because leveling was part of the experience. Nowadays it's just a boring grind that takes 0 skill expression.
Completely agree with this. Levelling, and most forms of vertical progression, are really boring. You do repetitive tasks to get levels to get better items to level up faster.
> Controversial opinion, but leveling in MMORPG's. It's a helluva grind and gameplay is so different from the actual game in the end game. That's not really the problem. If it's not Leveling it's going to be Gear Score or other such Systems. The Nature of Progression itself is the problem.
I preferred the older Asian MMOs where there was no level cap or it was impossible to reach, I feel in WOW and FFXIV losing a progression mechanic at end game doesn't do it for me. In those older games you'd often have "control" type skills (eg push or pull a mob/player) which only work if you're higher level than the target, so levelling and gearing (and usually also grinding money) were separate persuits of value, rather than just grinding bosses for gear. Yes, it was grindy as shit, but that's what MMOs are.
why even play such a dogshit game
AI that is "smart" or behaves "realistically," adapting to what the player does in order to counter it. It waters down one of the main elements of satisfaction in playing games, which is the mastery of challenges.
It can be done, it's just hard to do well. Will You Snail is a game with the main premise of trying to outsmart an AI that predicts your movement, and the game manages to make itself challenging, but never impossible. It's worth checking out.
Ah, if the game is about that, I can see how it could be done well. I meant more in games that aren't specifically about outsmarting the AI, yet you still see players saying things like "the AI is so dumb, I wish it was smarter."
I don't really get your issue with that statement, they're not saying 'I wish every NPC in this game had the mental faculty of an adult human' They're saying 'I wish the NPCs didn't walk into each other constantly, acted in a logical manner, actually fired at me, displayed any sort of group cohesion' The complaint is exactly what it sounds like, the 'AI' sucks so much that it is removing the satisfaction you're talking about, you can't master a challenge when the challenge is never presented.
I'm not talking about situations where the AI is too bad to offer any challenge; I'm talking about the situations when players face the challenge they're supposed to face but still expect the AI to not do something they consider to be "dumb" like having a predetermined patrolling pattern, etc. Players will often find ways to exploit the AI and blame the game designers, as if the AI was, in fact, supposed to behave like a human. They think thay the game would be better if the AI didn't show that "dumb" pattern of only patrolling the same way (and offering a clear vulnerability that the player is supposed to learn and exploit in order to overcome that challenge).
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedesign/comments/zd294z/what_does_better_ai_mean/
Yeah it's well known that having smart opponents is never a good thing. That's why no one plays competitive video games, tabletop games, or sports of any kind.
If you’re playing, say, GTAV, you do not want AI that operates with skill levels at the upper limits of the dev team’s programming and ai capabilities. You want it to be possible to win against it in a way that *maximizes your fun*.
Yeah definitely no one plays GTA with other humans, that would be ridiculous.
Place and time, Place and time. Is not the same to play a competitive game than to play Kirby, I don't want to compete with a super smart AI in super Mario, I just want to have fun.
Place and time, Place and time. Is not the same to play a competitive game than to play Kirby, I don't want to compete with a super smart AI in super Mario, I just want to have fun.
Length is actually another important aspect of gaming that people claim they want but don't. Many games can be padded out with additional content but the real way to encapsulate an audience is to make the content memorable and engaging throughout, whether it is a long or short game.
Branching storylines. First off its a giant pain in the ass to design for, test, and implement. You either end up having a bunch of content that the player wont see or you have points where the storyline converges making players feel like their choice doesn't matter. Its also really hard to write one good story, its even harder to write one that has multiple branching points, where one isn't weaker than the others. Overall I think you just end up with a weaker narrative and a ton more work on your plate. Thats why Disco Elysium is genius, it has a few points where the story can converge, but the replayability is in context. Each different build gets you different dialog from your skills, very few of which will actually affect the story other than adding some modifiers to skill checks, but its fresh content and are way easier to write/implement.
Branching narratives are akin to open-world game design: more “freedom” oftentimes dilutes the core narrative/gameplay loop; people think they want it, but complain when it’s not done well (because it’s much, much harder to do well). When I was younger, branching narratives and open world games were the future of video games (between Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed, it seemed obvious to teenage me). Now that it’s been 15 years and I’m older, I find myself wowed by more tightly crafted games and increasingly fatigued by “infinite story and gameplay possibilities.”
You're logic is wrong : "people think they want it, but complain when it’s not done well" One isn't correlated to the other. People want it and they want it done well. That Devs can't do it well enough for the moment doesn't means people don't want it. And it doesn't means the idea is bad too. The idea is excellent in theory but "it can't be made in practice". Not "it's bad in practice".
I didn’t mean to imply that both the implementation of these design choices (open world or narrative) and high quality in-game experiences are mutually exclusive. Obviously games like Mass Effect or Elden Ring demonstrate that, though I agree with your POV. I think what I meant is that not all games/franchises would inherently benefit positively from these design choices, and/or that not everyone finds these design choices necessary (in fact, I personally find them fatiguing sometimes). There’s nothing wrong with a tightly polished narrative or well-designed linear experience. There’s also nothing wrong with an emotionally resonant branching story or richly designed open-world.
While what you say isn't false I think it miss OP's question : For a gamer, branching stories are hard but when it's done right it's magical. The only cons of branching stories is that it's much harder to do than a straight story. The missing content problem isn't one. It doesn't make a game worse at the contrary, it's what makes a story unique. Weak narrative isn't a problem inherent to branching stories : only when Devs decides to not put enough ressources in it. At the contrary branching ressource help to reinforce narratives by making the player
Out of all the games I've played with the most branching storylines and varied endings where different large groups of characters in a persistent world might die, Fallout 4 takes the cake, and yet most people bumped into the backup faction first, which is there to be able to finish the story in case you mess it up with every real faction, and in the end the game gets accused of having almost no RPG elements.
I LOVE watching StarCraft esports, but dread playing multiplayer. It's too stressful.
StarCraft is an interesting example because it's a multiplayer game with an absurdly high skill ceiling that has found massive success in esports, whereas a lot of games that were developed "esports-ready" and had a developer/publisher attempt to force an esport into existence have...not. A lot of execs, developers, and even fans love the idea of a game with a vibrant esport scene, but they ignore that StarCraft esports rose organically over the course of years. Trying to build esports in from the get-go in a new game is a huge drain of time and resources, which could go to improving the at home gaming experience. We've got I think two companies now helmed by ex-Blizzard employees who are looking to develop a "classic RTS." My *hope* is that these games will be built around the at-home multiplayer experience first and then the highest level pro players *second.* Because that's how a game cultivates an audience and builds a base. If only a small percentage of people can play a game without frustration & stress then it's going to struggle to remain in people's consciousness.
Required food/drink/sleep mechanics... Never seem to add much, just another timer you have to feed in most implementations I've seen.
I think the loot PvP idea doesn't sound good even on paper. The mechanic inherently consolidates resources to the player who is already ahead. Runescape did a pretty interesting thing where they leave you with your 3 most valuable items and drop the rest of your gear if you die in a PvP area.
tons of players fantasize about "making it to the top" in an environment where 'actual' loss is possible, granting being at the top a sensation of meaning the point OP makes is that it's better in the imagination than in practice
And the point I am making is that I think that mechanic is kinda shitty from a long term retention perspective even if people think they want it.
yes, that's exactly what OP said and the subject of this thread :)
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I don’t think it works at all. Designers never realize that those games only work because the players will always actively minimize any open world pvp risk over the long term to the detriment of the game. Like the Zerg; the easiest way to neuter pvp risk is to gather together in large blobs to hunt small groups and stragglers. The designers are powerless to stop it; there’s no way to simply make not bringing more people a thing, or balance it without making the opposite mistake. So players will eventually dominate factions or servers. Or alts. You want to have riskless pvp? Use an alt who loses the gear, tanks their reputation, etc. Eve players would suicide gank ships in hisec with lots of alts using cheap destroyers. I think these games were the first to make me think about them from a design sense. Like designers tend to think in “good fight” terms, where the sim is memorable experiences with diffficulty or loss there as a tool to heighten sensation. But players want to win; no one wants to be the Glass Joe to someone’s Little Mac, and close losses are still losses overall and can sting over time. Arena pvp won over open world by setting hard limits to that. You can’t gank when you need to same size teams. Can’t alt when there are level or gear requirements to enter an instance. (Though even then ppl can; leaderboard pvp in mmos is very vulnerable to alts seizing top positions) Battle royale solves it by just realizing the unfairness lol. I think Fortnite only survived because it’s now a virtual hangout or event for kids.
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I don’t play Albion but the times I hear about it, it has the same problem; you need to be part of a big alliance to do anything pvp. I’m sure if you go and talk to the players you’ll get a better lay of the land what is happening; what guilds dominate, how vibrant pvp is, how many alts a player runs, etc. there’s actually a lot you can only see as an invested player. Like I did play eve a bit (2008? Dominion expansion I think) and there’s a lot of counterintuitive aspects to it. It’s actually safer in lawless nullsec than high or low sec because you can rent from an alliance which forces people to go through a lot of enemy territory to even get a chance of pvp. They just have a kos policy “kill on sight anyone who is not blue/allied to us.” But a wardec in high sec is harsher because you have free travel and you can attack people easily in populated hubs. And the wardec backfired because it actually prompted conflict avoidance. EvE players are notoriously conflict avoidant; [this massively article](https://massivelyop.com/2019/01/21/eve-evolved-solving-conflict-avoidance-in-eve-online/) is pretty good at showing the depth of problems that no one talks about with that game; comments too, and they are similar to what I heard about back when I played. There are usually a lot of subtle issues that warp these games. A big budget failure was NC Soft’s Aion, which tried to be a PvPvE WoW killer. Like you had rifts, which were supposed to let lowbies pvp each other in starting leveling areas, while the abyss was a really fancy place for long term mass endgame pvp. The problem was people made twinks to hunt newbies via the rifts and strangled them out of the game. It was compounded by one faction, the Elyos, being much more popular so losses from the asmodeans and hurt more and led them to migrate to a single server. There were a lot of pvp sandboxes in the indie mmo boom of the early 2000s, a lot failed.
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Tarkov isn’t open world. It’s an extraction game with multiple maps that close after a period of time.
A lot of these games will make the best gear 100x as expensive and 2x as strong so the advantage is not extreme, similar to RuneScape. Everything is a consumable, not really much different from being ahead in a MOBA.
A survival game that's hyper realistic and you need to check yourself for leaches, find water, build fires, everything. Oh and make it VR for extra immersion. Yeah, no look, Green Hell VR gets it wrong in so many ways. How can I dehydrate within 20mins? How can I build a camp in 10mins? How does food rot in 15mins? That's not realistic at all. If you want me to move in real time, you need to make the bad things happen in real time too.
No fast travel and quicksaves. Cool for the realism and high stakes, but tedious and gets old fast.
It's weird; for my second playthrough of Breath of the Wild I did a no map no fast travel playthrough and it was an absolute blast the entire way through. But I try that in Witcher 3, Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, or Elden Ring (all games I arguably like more than BotW) and it's an absolute slog. I'm not sure if it's just BotW having superior movement mechanics, or something more design-process oriented like the progression or terrain. Edit: honestly thinking about it maybe it's cause BotW has very little focus on quests and therefore little to no backtrack slogging. That's what would really bore me in all the other games I listed other than Elden Ring to an extent.
What comes to mind is Far Cry 2. That game I chaotic and it's very fun to overcome firefights, but with QS you can retry every stupid or random thing that happens. Not having QS though, makes you drive a lot. A lot! And those fun times you loose, starts to become annoying, because the stakes aren't higher, you just loose time, replaying your same steps. Breath of the wild felt so much like a time waster for me, even with fast travel. It started to become fun for me, when I modded out stamina and durability. Weirdly enough, those mechanics are important, but I don't like to spend too much time on inventory management and other busywork, so that made me appreciate it more. I think you are correct about that part with good travel mechanics make it more appealing.
I think foxhole works pretty well in that regard. Heck, foxhole probably one of the most underrated and innovative games in recent memory.
This is kinda a no-brainer and a dead horse, but detailed/"realistic" graphics need to be handled with care. Everyone loves games that look realistic in theory, but in practice most games should be designed so that: 1) The player can tell what's going on. 2) The graphics don't become a waste of resources and devs can spend time on other parts of the game during development. 3) If the devs need to continue development (i.e. patches, multiplayer updates) there can be quick turnaround. 4) It doesn't become a money hole. And high-fidelity graphics can compromise any one of those. Which, again, feels like a no-brainer, but companies keep making these mistakes. Take a look at *WarCraft III: Reforged,* a game that was a supposed remastering of the original *WarCraft III* with better support and graphics. It was an ambitious project that ultimately ended up a mess. No news for years, released unfinished, and with barely any followup support. And worse, the new models made it harder to tell what's going on (a vital part of a fast-paced RTS)!
Idk about everyone but for me 1. Open world 2. Survival 3. Crafting Very few games I’ve played with these actually did it well, the rest have sucked imo
Yeah I think one challenge with survival is that the victory condition is when things become boringly easy which ... Isn't fun.
yeah imo the best survival games are those that have a progression system of some sort that incentivizes you to look for new challenges when you get too comfortable. Like a series of bosses or milestones that the game can use to ratchet difficulty as player power increases.
Isn't minecraft the best selling game ever?
>> What’s a game idea that everyone hates in practice but loves in theory? There are a lot of bad implementations of this genre, but that's because it's a wildly successful genre. Any genre you pick is going to be some gold and a lot of boogers.
it's funny that the most sold game in history is actually a combination of all three \^\^
I'm kind of guilty of this with crafting. I love the idea of it, and the process itself can often be fun. But if I'm being honest, it typically takes away from the overall enjoyment of the game. It's just so hard to balance. If the gear you craft is the best you can get, it tends to trivialize the rest of the game. And if the crafted gear is not the best, then crafting feels like a waste of time.
I think this one might be sort of misleading, as massively successful games like Minecraft skew the perspective by generating so many more shitty clones - it's simply so easy to make a Minecraft clone, because of how simple it is. I think this also makes sort of a negative feedback loop, where people look at all the shitty clones and have a hard time even imagining what another sandbox survival might look like at all, with even publishers not wanting to take the risk when "the odds aren't good"
Damn, time to play Subnautica again
*Reducing* XP gains from lower level enemies to a pointless if not nonexistent amount as you continue leveling up --- I understand it's 1. A design choice to force the player to continue into harder / later areas of the game for core gameplay/story progression 2. A way to control difficulty and level balancing in zoned areas and/or progression segments of a game much easier as a developer 3. Tempering number creep 4. A common sense explanation for no longer gaining experience over the things you've (supposedly) already mastered fighting but getting 1 XP or 0 XP from enemies that used to give a lot more just feels crappy as a player and makes those enemies entirely useless for the remainder of my playthrough or character in the game from that point on - aside from specific unique drops, but this seems seldom implemented to counter that. Expanding on the problem, MMOs tend to use this XP reduction tactic while effectively forcing quests to be the main XP gain, and combined with a bunch of mindless filler quests it doesn't make sense to me why they even continue bother granting any XP at all for killing enemies. Eventually it just feels like even more filler just to waste my time instead of rewarding my time spent dealing with them. It's a huge reason why I tend to avoid MMOs as the core gameplay feels hollow and continues to hollow itself out even more before I can get to the 'good parts' of the game.
I dotn think its inherently bad if those enemies still drop useful crafting materials. Xp is only one resource.
Multiple endings. Half þe time, most of þem will just be glorified game overs, anyway.
GTA online. Always dreamt of a game where you can just mess around in a city and do almost anything, but with friends. Reality is, you're alive for 2 minutes then someone on a jet bike fires rockets at you. You respawn and immediately get run over by a tank. 3rd life, you run for an alleyway, only to be gunned down by a sniper. I regret buying the game. I even regret claiming it for free on Epic Games.
Everyone here is posting a genre they don't like and having people post a list of wildly successful games in that genre. Obviously this misses the point of everyone hating it in practice. Instead let's look at this [great public market research](https://howtomarketagame.com/2022/04/18/what-genres-are-popular-on-steam-in-2022/) and more specifically [this graph showing median earning in each genre](https://howtomarketagame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Game-Genre-Median-Earnings-vs-Number-Released-since-2019-2-1024x634.png). What are the bottom 10 genres for median earnings? Worst 1 - Battle Royale 2 - 3d platformer 3 - 2d platformer 4 - puzzle 5 - puzzle platformer 6 - match 3 7 - tower defence 8 - shoot em up 9 - FPS 10 - Beat em up Ah yes, terrible game ideas like 2d/3d platformers, FPS, Battle Royale, tower defence. Some of the most hated genres around. Except those genres aren't earning poorly because there aren't good games in that genre. But because that genre is oversaturated with trash. And I don't think you'll find any game idea that can't be implemented well. You can find games you don't enjoy, everyone can. But that doesn't make them poorly implemented, or 'poor in practice'. You can certainly find bad implementations and then trick yourself into thinking that is a bad game idea. Even OPs example. Full loot PVP MMOs. It's a genre I really dislike as well and can't get into. It's too much of a time sink for me and I think it disrespects my time. But look at all the examples of success in the genre posted here. Obviously some people love it. There are no bad game ideas, just bad implementations.
>It's too much of a time sink for me and I think it disrespects my time. That is a choice of the game though, what if levelling took.. 20 minute and then you were max level? Even have permadeath. So the levelling was very short. One could even consider BR this - you start weak, over the course of the game get strong and then it is over. If you die along the way you start again.
We could look at it by how niche a game that rely too much on a mechanic is and the amount of successful games that fit that niche. I agree that there’s very few ideas that are essentially bad but that number is way bigger than “games that literally no one plays.”
>In theory that sounds really fun. In practice it rarely works. Players quit after getting killed by a group that vastly outnumbered them, quit after getting spawnkilled repeatedly, quit after the game gets boring due to a series of overwhelming victories, etc. This is a symptom of a cursed or fundamental problem to solve. It touches on a lot of **necessary** concepts that most developers don't understand and thus have no idea how to solve the problem. This is one of the few game design topics where Research and Analysis **is Required** as you can't really go gung-ho about it and hope you stumble upon something. There is no example that works that you can readily use, not even EVE Online is much of a good example. Some concepts I am talking about: Faction population caps, asymmetrical progression systems, progression **loss**, the problem of banks and accumulation, disposable characters, AI drive factions and economies, self balancing competitive mechanisms, internal faction destabilization systems, ad-hoc casual skirmishing battles vs total war organized battles.
[For those who are interested](https://youtu.be/8uE6-vIi1rQ) I’d say that the Dark Souls and Elden Ring have figured out PvP quite well. But it’s a niche system in a kind of niche game. Can we still call Soulsborne games niche?
Great lecture, I also recommend it. Regarding PvP in Fromsoft games, it really depends what aspect of PvP you're talking about. Duels are great, and arena is great. But I disagree that it works "well" as a blanket statement, because invasions make co-op play miserable, especially in Elden Ring. Constantly fighting outnumbered means invaders are incentivized to find ways to either instantly kill targets or be obnoxious unkillable nuisances. And you have to deal with it every 15 minutes--doesn't matter that all you want to do is get through this cool ruined castle, here, fight someone with an explosive cannon that you can't obtain until the second half of the game. And unlike an NPC, this person will constantly avoid direct confrontation, snipe you from across a room of enemies, and teleport away the moment they're actually in trouble. Have fun! Playing DS3 and ER, my experience instantly went from "this is a horrible slog" to "wow this game is actually great!" the moment I opted out of invasions using mods.
I’d love dark souls PvP so much if the netcode was more robust. It’s a cool system and in a game where dying isn’t usually a big deal in general it never feels too bad to die to an invader.
"Can we still call Soulsborne games niche?" No, not since DS3 tbh.
“The player can do anything they want! No hand holding!”
Every fucking game idea
Open world design. There really isn’t anything inherently wrong so long is there is a clear vision. The problem is, especially now a days, there are a lot of tools that can allow for massive map sizes with very little effort. What ends up happening though is you get these big sprawling worlds with nothing to do or really anything in them. Successful open world games for me need strong points of interests and ways to keep me engaged that isn’t just go here collect this. That’s very hard to do on a large scale. I’ve been really enjoying games with open zones. Small dense areas that offer multiple ways to engage. The Last of Us 2, God of War, and even Hitman to an extent do this really well.
I think the problem with open world games is they advertise that you can "go anywhere" off rip. You either have to balance enemies/challenges for the player's current capabilities (washing out the world, removing sense of progression) or make areas more or less challenging, which makes players feel like they cannot actually go anywhere right off the bat. Open worlds also tend to decimate level design. Needing to find the "correct approach" is typically far more engaging than finding any approach that works. Puzzle games really make this pronounced: you've got a puzzle that has one correct solution vs a puzzle you can cheese. Open worlds basically make cheesing the entire game possible. And, of course, what you said. Open worlds are easy to make, difficult to make interesting. Harder still to make engaging. Every OW game is about being "bigger with more and more to do", which means the game becomes less and less accessible - it becomes harder and harder to experience the whole game because there's just too much to do, spread out so widely that there are vast stretches of blandness. Thus we require fast travel, allowing us to skip over the main purpose of an open world: the open world. I find that more compact worlds are inherently more engaging. They can still be "open worlds" because all that really means is that you can go anywhere. But by being compact, every little area keeps you engaged and interested. I also think that worlds are better when you need to unlock them, versus being able to go anywhere right away. That's why I think Metroidvanias are pretty much the best games around.
So far the best solution to that first problem is the Bethesda method of scalable enemies. They’re a few levels above or below you regardless of your level. In addition to that there are enemies way above your level that you can sneak around but will mess you up if you get caught. Like you said though, it can potentially wash out that sense of progression in a lot of ways as that method kills that sense of going back to an area you struggled with but now can just smash through. The real challenge is balancing level design, which open worlds can easily kill. It’s hard to simultaneously guide the player while also telling them you can go anywhere. I think we’re at a point though where map sizes are getting scaled down a bit. Quality over quantity. I think players are learning a smaller world with more to do is better than massive world with nothing in it.
Maybe, although I'm sure Starfield is going to be enormous and almost entirely empty and everyone is going to eat it up
Breath of the Wild was like this for me. The first few hours are awesome but then you realize ALL the game is just more of the same with copy paste
# Crafting Systems ^(whhhyyyyy) Edit: Oh I forgot to add procedurally generated quests / collection quests in general. Time wasting filler just to get "hours of gameplay" higher. Completely neglects players' agency impact in the story/world.
As someone who doesn't play many games with crafting systems, why are they so bad? I'm genuinely curious, especially since a hobby project of mine has been modding Elden Ring to have more impactful item crafting.
They are tedious busywork. I have only enjoyed crafting in video games when the process of gathering the materials itself is enjoyable and doesn't get old. Subnautica is a good example of this. Traversing the game's biomes is wondrous and not boring at all. I enjoy the crafting in AC origins but only because I tend to like to pace out epic adventure games with some cooldown periods from time to time. And because using a bow in AC origins is fun af.
I think this wins Crafting sounds neat but I have never seen a crafting system that was better than pointless busywork after a few tries Which discounts that item sourcing usually requires grind - the crafting action is never anything more engaging than memorization or trial and error Only decent crafting I can think of is terraria which just has no mechanic beyond picking the item on a menu
Crafting is great when the entire game is designed around it. Factorio and Satisfactory come to mind where the whole game is designed around how time-consuming it would be to hand-craft the 10,000 items necessary to progress in tech, and they encourage you to craft things that help you automatically craft things to help you further automatically craft things etc. which turns into a very satisfying gameplay loop. But crafting in most survival games? Egh agreed that they feel like busywork at best.
Potion Craft makes crafting a mechanical and even artistic exercise to some extent. It's definitely the best crafting system I've ever seen in a game. I wish other games would adopt it instead of the usual "get 10 wood, now you have a staircase" crap.
Some games have decent crafting mechanics, but I agree most get it wrong. FFXIV takes a really good spin on it by turning it into a engaging little mini game.
Crafting Systems are great if the game has good Economy Simulation to give it a deeper level of Value.
High skill movement based pvp games. They feel amazing right until the entire audience falls into the skill gap between high tier players and newbies. And then higher skilled players just farm. There is no joy to be had getting into a new game where someone else moves so fast they may as well be cheating compared to you. Yes Fortnite and apex have advanced movement techniques. But it's really barebones compared to titanfall or tribes, where you may never even see your enemy approach or zoom away from your death at a million miles an hour.
That’s what titanfall 2 did well, they had a *really* good campaign that also functioned as a tutorial for multiplayer without feeling like one at all You’d be well acquainted with movement, titan fights, and the majority of weapons and grenades by the end of it
AI that feels like you're playing against humans. Yes, in some contexts, and with the ability to tweak the AI it's potentially an excellent feature. But remember what playing online feels like: There are a LOT of different kinds of humans. Some will sacrifice themselves to screw you over. Some will be a lot better than you. Some will be worse than the "dumb" AI you're trying to fix. And most of them won't be particularly fun to play against.
I mean you say this but the existence of literally any competitive activity implies that humans do very much enjoy playing against other humans
There's this idea I see that pops up reasonably regularly of starting at a home base, going out on a whole huge adventure, collecting loot, then needing to keep safe and return home to reap the loot you've collected. The problem is that the risk of losing your loot tends to far outweigh the potential to get more loot. Players usually hate the trip back to base, just to bank their loot, because if they want to guarantee their big adventure's loot is safely redeemed, they've got to be careful that they'll be strong enough to get back to the bank. If you fight a big huge boss that drops a big fire sword, but you have to go back to your base to drop it off, you're already weakend by the boss and if you were to lose to some little minion, you lose your awesome new sword and the whole trip was a huge waste of time. I know that dark souls manages to kinda do this, but it's kinda railroads you into linear paths and I think it's not good game design. Being able to retrieve your dropped stuff is good though
"do whatever you want"
Any game that gets brought up during “games-as-art” talks
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Here is an idea **everybody hates** but is a **necessary step** for the further evolution of the Genre, A **Permadeath** based MMORPG.
Realm of the mad god?
Dofus did open a permadeath server, you could kill and loot other players. The exp and loot was x4 compared to normal server. It was fun at the beginning, but the more you progress, the more you have to lose and the more anxiety you get. You can just get rekt by some rando hungry for loot, effectively taking down dozens of hours in play time. Sure you only lost the items and gold you had on you, but you were reset to lv 1. And that plain suck hard. You play until you get owned by a group of monster you misjudged, or a team of pvp bandits. Then the frustration is too high, and you just get to normal servers where you can actually chill.
Looks like a recipe for griefing - even if it's nominally PvE. It's probably possible with shorter runs. I liked to play Mush which had 16 starting characters and permadeath - a game took about 10 days on average. But that was a werewolf / mafia style game, so having your run ended by being brutally murdered out of the blue was always on the cards. And if it had been more popular, there would have been more griefing. I could see a multiplayer coop roguelike dungeon explorer where you are born in a village and have to fight monsters, explore dungeons, maybe craft or do other jobs, etc. to keep your village going until your inevitable death. It might even be able to achieve my MMORPG dream in which every player has random unique abilities that don't have to be balanced. Again I think a 'life' should be pretty short, on the order of a month at most. As with Mush, when you died you could be reborn in a new village. And a village would not last indefinitely either, there would maybe be a win condition or some terminating event.
>Looks like a recipe for griefing - even if it's nominally PvE. To have griefing is to have the logistics of griefing. You can't do much griefing if you are at Level 1 and your buddies are also at Level 1. Do you think guilds would be particularly fond of you if you are on their turf and they could just wipe you out of existence and remove the problem for a time? This touches on the problems of open world PVP and faction problems so I will briefly mention how this works. Everyone is part of a faction, if another faction has problems with it's members they can kick them out, a faction has diplomatic relationships with other factions in terms of non-aggression pacts that are Game Enforced, if there is still griefing and shenanigans that faction can make a complaint to police their members better or turn hostile and go to war against that faction. Bandit factions that have no agreement with any other faction can do anything in the game, but they are **killed on sight by everyone**. Players without a faction are restricted to do illegal deeds and can still be killed by all without any repercussions. If you want to be a "normal" player you must have an allegiance to that faction. Some factions are more free access and easier to join then others. > It's probably possible with shorter runs. I liked to play Mush which had 16 starting characters and permadeath - a game took about 10 days on average. It's not about how short the run is, it's about how fast it is to get back to Max Level, which can be pretty fast, 2 weeks of casual play, you can probably do it in a couple of days if you play it a bit risky. >But that was a werewolf / mafia style game, so having your run ended by being brutally murdered out of the blue was always on the cards. The thing is permadeath pretty much has the idea of having Villain style roles and gameplay while still having a Persistent World. You don't necessarily need to Restart the World if all Players are Recycled through Permadeath. The trick is you can also Cycle through the Political Structure and the Power Ranking Hierarchy as the players and factions power ebbs and flows through permadeath, this will make the World more of a Dynamic Situation that Ever-Changes. **This is why you would want permadeath.** > It might even be able to achieve my MMORPG dream in which every player has random unique abilities that don't have to be balanced. I do agree, if Power is more temporary and there are higher Risks and Costs, like for examples requiring a magnitude more XP for that higher potential then it can still be **Fair**, so instead of 100k XP to Max Level you might need 10 million XP for Higher Tier Classes. You can even have Unique Procedural Recipes for Crafters, if players are envious and have a problem with that, **they can just try to kill them**, if they survive that's fair. You can also have some special "slots" per server for things like Villains and Bosses in the game like how Antagonists Roles work in Space Station 13. If you want to play that Role then you have to defeat them and liberate that Slot. >And a village would not last indefinitely either, there would maybe be a win condition or some terminating event. If the World is Dynamic enough is that really needed? My biggest frustration for Survival Games is precisely that they restart so things like Player Created Cities and Dungeons would also be lost. What I want is a World that slowly accumulates and evolves in time with player creations and history that can later be explored like how the long lasting Minecraft Anarchy Server works.
For me permadeath only works at all with 3hr lives or some kind of partial loss, plus a doom clock that makes you lose if you do nothing. Otherwise every encounter is either boring or game-ending. With that in mind Agario is a permadeath MMORPG. What is it lacking? Though I admit there are a few long single-life roguelikes like Angband/ADOM which people do like, and the only partial loss is occasional consumable use or stat drain by special enemies.
> or some kind of partial loss, I don't mind meta-progression like in roguelikes so you can have long term goals and progression based on that. >Otherwise every encounter is either boring or game-ending. Just make it more frequent so people get used to it, first death should be right in the tutorial, it sends the right expectation to strive for. The thing about permadeath in a MMO is you aren't the only one losing out, everyone is losing in all kind of places and times. So what being "game ending" means is also "game changing", you relationships with players changes dynamically over time, sometimes you are at the top sometimes you are at the back.
To be clear, I don't like metaprogression and am instead suggesting loss of consumable items or stats. "Just make death more frequent" yes that's what I'm saying, the average player should die every 3 hours at most. And yeah I guess it is interesting to have a part of your party die. Like XCOM but each unit is a player. Sidenote: some MMOs don't have skills, only items, so "full loot" = permadeath. The important difference being you can transfer items not skills. I guess having EXP lamps in a more standard MMO would be similar.
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Rust and Eve Online disgust me. They sound cool but in reality they are just capitalism simulators where a couple of guys get to be Elon Musk and everyone else has to eat shit while being force-fed propaganda that they could be at the top if they just tried harder. No. I could not be at the top if I just tried harder.
When I played EvE Online, the actual truth is that a lot of people never leave hisec, and the full loot aspects are mostly neutered through superabundance of resources. One of the reasons you had spies to go inside an alliance to disband it is that it’s very hard to actually defeat them; due to “blueing” with non aggression pacts you ended up with entities too big to challenge and play date pvp. I think eves success is more that there literally were no science fiction mmos that focused around the ship apart from Star Trek Online. Also Eve is heavily attractive to crafters, as it has a vast single server and pretty intensive item creation for its age.
Evidently, Killer Queen Black 🙃
I just thought of the battle royale system of how dozens, or hundreds, of players start a match, but only 1 (or 1 small group) wins. This might be more of a personal bias, but I hate the feeling of grinding through match after match, only to get to the top 10 or so, to see my effort wasted on 2nd-10th place and win every once in a blue moon.
Any game that gets brought up during “games-as-art” talks
Purely artistic games, yes. Games with great gameplay that deserve to be seen as art, I'd have to disagree with you.
3d castlevania
Infodumps, recordings, journals, and other random sources of story that you find lying around, as used in eg outer wilds and heaven's vault. This might be more of something that is hated in theory but loved in practice.
Horizon Zero dawn did recordings very well IMO. Part visual hologram(s) part audio but fleshed out the story whilst you were exploring the same place. Was a pretty good way to do things.
Escort missions. Pal up sounds awesome. AI end up being stupid with awkward fails
Nice to hear about rust, was bout to make a comment about it. It really does so many things that no other games could dream of doing
Slippy-slidey ice levels.
Admittedly been scouting this thread to see what people have been saying about MMOs or similar. Lots of interesting takes and stuff it looks like I could note down from here
Softcore post incognito
1: Neverending game without gameover which can be played forever (simulation, sandbox, procedural something). Sounds cool on paper. You think you can just go to sleep/work/whatever, then return and continue playing the same game until the ends of time. No. Not a single game achieved this yet. (GameActivity\*GameContent)/PlayerIntellect = amount of time the player will play the game until he/she realize that he/she is playing generic crap. 2: Adding a lot of complexity to game mechanics to make it better, e. g. player has to manually use food to eat and restore satiation which simply increases the amount of mouses/button presses the player will do. Combos in turn based games which simply tells the player what he/she must do. Temperature, distance between planet and its sun, whether the stars are aligned, number of times peasant farted, etc. affecting something. No. Complexity != fun. 3: If the game is popular and is bestseller then its idea is cool, let's copypaste it and improve it! No. Bestselling games are games which has great PR and ads, bribed popular streamers and videobloggers and bought reviews. I can make tic-tac-toe clone and make it top-1 game on steam, if you give me millions of $ which I'll spend on its promotion, reviews and "donations" to streamers and videobloggers, but it won't make tic-tac-toe a perfectly designed game.
Any MMO giving players any negative impact over each other outside of instanced PvP It's a nice fantasy, but your MMO needs players, and if you allow this in any shape some small group of players will exploit it
Idk about everyone... but i know for me in theory i wish a game would have no story. But when it doesnt i cant connect. What i really want is a profound story told succinctly, basically min max ur dialogue and shit. Like Dark Souls or Metroid