If making an MMO keeps Ryan Dancey away from the tabletop gaming industry, great. That man has been poison to my favorite hobby for years.
The Theme Park MMO Is Dead, Enter the Sandbox
- Thread starter Greg Tito
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@ Ascon, Djinnfor: For your consideration, if you care to see some of the solutions for the problems you are raising: Development Blog [https://goblinworks.com/blog/]. And first, they're working with a well-known IP that comes from outside video games. The owners of the IP are a company called Paizo. Paizo makes table top RPGs. This would be like if twenty years ago, a company had tried to make a game called Baldur's Gate Online and had sat down right next to the old TSR staff that owned that IP. And, you know, TSR had not been a thoroughly mismanaged company.
I'll leave it to others to debate the merits of that IP, but it does mean there's some underlying assumptions from the IP as well.
I'll leave it to others to debate the merits of that IP, but it does mean there's some underlying assumptions from the IP as well.
So, Minecraft on super steroids? Sounds awesome, too bad creating that level of dynamics is nigh impossible to be done practically on the scale of an MMO. Impossible for an indie company to do it without taking probably 20 years, and too much dev time required for a AAA company to not end up shoving it out the door before its finished; ruining everyone's first impressions of it and dooming it from the get go.DjinnFor said:
We can dream though, maybe when our grandkids are cursing each other out over the Xbox Live immersive neural network.
A dungeon that is cleared stays cleared? I'm a little unsure about that; things need to 'respawn' unless the world is procedurally generated and slowly gets bigger and bigger as it becomes more and more 'tamed'. Other than that, it's something to look into imo.
The biggest challenge in creating a true persistent sandbox is how to stay welcoming to new players after a couple months.
Okay, so pathfinder online will have dungeons that "will be empty" when some player kills all the mobs, so for the newbies there's nothing left to do.
Players can create lasting structures that dot the landscape: all the land has been occupied by the old hands.
This sandbox MMO is a recipe for new players leaving immediately and for the oldest players to grow bored sooner or later.
Okay, so pathfinder online will have dungeons that "will be empty" when some player kills all the mobs, so for the newbies there's nothing left to do.
Players can create lasting structures that dot the landscape: all the land has been occupied by the old hands.
This sandbox MMO is a recipe for new players leaving immediately and for the oldest players to grow bored sooner or later.
This, but cranked up to 11. The whole thing is a massive game of 'king of the hill'. There'd be different factions, and territories held by them. Players could band together and go to war, enormous PvP battles for key areas. The best players would become kings, rulers of enormous empires. But would they be benevolent kings protecting their subjects? Or do they rule with an iron fist? All up to the players.Sylocat said:
For those stating Ultima Online and Everquest, I agree. They were fairly sandboxy and that was kinda interesting. But I think that there are plenty of modern innovations to the MMO genre that could be incorporated to make the overall formula better. Instead of being a one or the other sort of deal, we should take the advantages of both the sandbox and theme park style MMOs and consider how they could all be applied.
[DISCLAIMER]: This is all my personal opinions on the matter and not stated fact. Generally speaking this should always be assumed whenever anyone says anything ever, but that's difficult for some to understand. Thank you.
A couple examples,
Questing.
I don't think quests are a thing that -shouldn't- exist in this world. They give a good goal to work towards and it can be a good way for people to make money. Have a few NPCs that have (sensical) quests posted on say a central bounty board, but then also allow players to place a quest reward of money and items for recovering things that they want and attach an EXP reward based on the difficulty of whatever the task is. If they need 30 of some super-rare resource then reward accordingly.
Encourage group play but don't require it.
Guild Wars 2 did a cool thing with giving everybody their own individual money and loot for killing things whether they were grouped or not. It's not a perfect game, but that's something they have down. Life gets easier when groups of people work together and the mechanics of the game should aid in that. Allow people to all sign a "contract" when accepting a quest like the one mentioned before that will divide the monetary rewards and give them all full experience for the job.
On the other hand, make it so that if you are a bad enough dude to go out and take down a freaking dragon one on one that you can do that. Personally, I dislike the numbers game of MMOs where you "Must have this big a number to ride this ride". Most of the time it doesn't add anything other than a gear grind. There are some cases where being good enough lets you go in with slightly lower numbers but usually you want to wait until you have as much gear as you can.
Don't limit the exploration.
If you want a sandbox, make it like Skyrim or Morrowind. There are no zone barriers (and I'd remove the ones in front of dungeons and buildings) preventing you from walking from one end of the map to the other. Implement a climbing mechanic so that someone -could- struggle their way to the top of that mountain or to the bottom of that ravine. Maybe have a freaking parkour skill so that agile thiefy types can faff about Assassin's Creed style if they want.
Customization customization customization.
This is probably the hardest one to get right in my eyes, simply because of the planning and thought you need to put into it.
Have different layers of gear. Instead of the old class systems determining what gear you can use, have it all be accessible to everyone. Make it so you can have Light, then Medium, then Heavy gear all stacked up. Leathers under Chainmail under Platemail. Throw some robes and capes and things of the like. Make sure that the layers underneath don't clip through (that always bothers the crap out of me when it's super obvious). Make it so people can dye it whatever colors they want. If you want to micro-transaction some of this, that's a fine idea. Some people won't care about it, but those that do will be happy to support your game to bling out their character. Also, moving in big flowy wizard robes is a lot harder than moving in leather or chainmail (in my experience, at least).
Continuing on in this, player housing. Let people build their house. Maybe even go crazy and have it be a little Sims-esque. But let them have a home and let groups of player homes attract NPCs. Let towns steadily grow from the adventuring players clearing out havens in the world and settling there. Let players construct fortresses and battle each other for them.
tldr; Fight together, fight alone if you can, take jobs and earn money, explore EVERYTHING, be who you want and look the part, build what you want and live there, take what you want and suffer the consequences in a persistent world.
That ended up far more wordy than I'd originally intended. Hmm. Oh well!
[DISCLAIMER]: This is all my personal opinions on the matter and not stated fact. Generally speaking this should always be assumed whenever anyone says anything ever, but that's difficult for some to understand. Thank you.
A couple examples,
Questing.
I don't think quests are a thing that -shouldn't- exist in this world. They give a good goal to work towards and it can be a good way for people to make money. Have a few NPCs that have (sensical) quests posted on say a central bounty board, but then also allow players to place a quest reward of money and items for recovering things that they want and attach an EXP reward based on the difficulty of whatever the task is. If they need 30 of some super-rare resource then reward accordingly.
Encourage group play but don't require it.
Guild Wars 2 did a cool thing with giving everybody their own individual money and loot for killing things whether they were grouped or not. It's not a perfect game, but that's something they have down. Life gets easier when groups of people work together and the mechanics of the game should aid in that. Allow people to all sign a "contract" when accepting a quest like the one mentioned before that will divide the monetary rewards and give them all full experience for the job.
On the other hand, make it so that if you are a bad enough dude to go out and take down a freaking dragon one on one that you can do that. Personally, I dislike the numbers game of MMOs where you "Must have this big a number to ride this ride". Most of the time it doesn't add anything other than a gear grind. There are some cases where being good enough lets you go in with slightly lower numbers but usually you want to wait until you have as much gear as you can.
Don't limit the exploration.
If you want a sandbox, make it like Skyrim or Morrowind. There are no zone barriers (and I'd remove the ones in front of dungeons and buildings) preventing you from walking from one end of the map to the other. Implement a climbing mechanic so that someone -could- struggle their way to the top of that mountain or to the bottom of that ravine. Maybe have a freaking parkour skill so that agile thiefy types can faff about Assassin's Creed style if they want.
Customization customization customization.
This is probably the hardest one to get right in my eyes, simply because of the planning and thought you need to put into it.
Have different layers of gear. Instead of the old class systems determining what gear you can use, have it all be accessible to everyone. Make it so you can have Light, then Medium, then Heavy gear all stacked up. Leathers under Chainmail under Platemail. Throw some robes and capes and things of the like. Make sure that the layers underneath don't clip through (that always bothers the crap out of me when it's super obvious). Make it so people can dye it whatever colors they want. If you want to micro-transaction some of this, that's a fine idea. Some people won't care about it, but those that do will be happy to support your game to bling out their character. Also, moving in big flowy wizard robes is a lot harder than moving in leather or chainmail (in my experience, at least).
Continuing on in this, player housing. Let people build their house. Maybe even go crazy and have it be a little Sims-esque. But let them have a home and let groups of player homes attract NPCs. Let towns steadily grow from the adventuring players clearing out havens in the world and settling there. Let players construct fortresses and battle each other for them.
tldr; Fight together, fight alone if you can, take jobs and earn money, explore EVERYTHING, be who you want and look the part, build what you want and live there, take what you want and suffer the consequences in a persistent world.
That ended up far more wordy than I'd originally intended. Hmm. Oh well!
A sandbox MMO, huh? So like RuneScape and Eve have been doing for years... Get ready for this being grindtastic (and that's not a good kind of tastic).
Sandbox games can work if they are done right. With pathfinder online, if players can make their own holdings, they could just build a holding specifically for monsters to invade and allow newer players to get some fun in. It would be an interesting community project to build the equivalent of Under Mountain.
"When you build a structure or slay a big monster or clear out a dungeon in Pathfinder Online, that will have an impact that will be lasting, people will be able to see that structure that you built. And that dungeon will be empty and those monsters will stay dead."
So how is it going to work when there's no more dungeons, resources, and all the animals are extinct?
So how is it going to work when there's no more dungeons, resources, and all the animals are extinct?
I have to say I love Pathfinder as a Tabletop RPG but I'm a little concerned about how it will translate to an MMO Computer Game.
Make more dungeons, monsters, resources and animals I guess? Or maybe create new worlds to explore when the current one is staring to run dry. Dungeons and Dragons had multiple universes that stories took place in. Maybe Pathfinder will try to do the same.Nurb said:
While this is fascinating in concept, it seems to me that PvE latecomers would really get the shaft if the devs are serious about this persistent-events concept. Where's a noob supposed to go when all the starter dungeons have been cleaned out for months, if not years? I suppose your options then would be to set up shop in the tutorial town or just go back to WoW -- and of those, I know what I'd pick.
WoW didn't improve the theme-park. WoW invented the theme-park. Before WoW most MMOs just dropped your dumb ass in to a world and said "Figure it out."
I'm very curious about that to. For the game to stay accessible, the world would have to be constantly changing. And I don't just mean adding new content: the very geography of the world would need to be re-surfaced every few days in order to replace those dungeons that were cleared and mobs that were killed. That would require massive man-power and incur a huge expense. I'm curious to hear how they plan to pull this off.Nurb said:
Right. There's going to be dungeons, but any changes players make will be permanent. So, the first group of PCs that comes across a dungeon gets to clear it out and then it's empty forever?Sylveria said:
I honestly don't see how that's going to work. A world full of empty lairs doesn't sound much fun to me, no matter how many roleplaying tools they provide. I think they're going to have to have some instanced content or you'll have a bunch of bored players who cancel their subscriptions immediately after finding out that there really isn't game behind the game.
Don't get me wrong -- I love me some Pathfinder and the world of Golarion is very cool. But I just don't see how this is going to work.
Okay, before I say anything I will say that Ryan Dancey is a mental furball. If that sounds unusually personal, let me be clear: this is the guy who pretty much decimated TSR's old holdings. Back in the day I was on the old RPGA forums and ran into this goober who made a lot of promises about what D&D 3E was going to be like as far as compadibility and such. He even told me that I could create any 2E character, even breaking the rules as long as the mechanics were intact, and have it translated almost verbatim to 3E. Needless to say he failed and then tried to recant this publically. This is the guy who also gutted "Alternity" in favor of the D20 "Star Wars" liscence, claiming that the failure of the last couple of craptastic supplements which were rushed out due to personell transfers as the reason despite the moves apparently already having been made. He also claimed on these forums that if Planescape: Torment was a success there would not only be a sequel, but the Planescape world setting/product like would continue. Needless to say he took a giant crap on that too.
True stories here incidently, I pretty much dealt with him personally (well as far as the internet goes) and even had some pretty substantial threads going back in the day as a result of dealing with this guy. Simply put he's a liar and a complete blight on the RPG industry. The kind of corperate toad who really had no idea about games of any sort, and thrives on destruction as he takes an axe to everything around him in hopes of making a few pennies for the people above him.
As a result of this, you can pretty much ensure that whatever Ryan Dancey says about gaming is pretty much wrong, and any promises he makes aren't going to come to pass, much like Peter Molyneux, but without the good intentions.
What's more I'd point out that what this guy presents isn't exactly new, he's actually talking about bringing MMOs back to the old days of things like Ultima Online, or Star Wars Galaxies where games functioned very much like he mentions. This approach was abandoned because it's generally impractical for the reasons mentioned in other posts: what happens when you run out of space, everything is claimed, and resources dwindle to nothing? Ultima Online had to abandon it's "resource bank" early on, and demolish people's houses en-masse because almost literally every piece of land that could be built on, had been build on. SWG for all of the fond memories of the early days suffered similar problems where as soon as you'd leave the city limits you'd hit something akin to a barrio with player dwellings as far as the eye could see, and this caused problems with both spawns and resource scavenging when you literrally couldn't get to anything because chances are it would put you in another player's house.
The sandbox style of gaming is probably seeing more developer appeal right now, not because of any kind of "evolution" but because it's potentially one of the best ways to make money for a "free to play" model, the nature of the game puts no real expectations on the dev to deliver content, and things like building lots and such can then be sold piecemeal.
Player created content is a nice sounding idea in an MMO, but it's always going to be limited because in a FTP model publishers don't want players to be able to make anything worthwhile because that cuts them out of a sale. Looking at things like Star Trek Online's "Forge" you generally don't see any kind of decent rewards since players can't create and distribute items (for game balance reasons) and everything basically turns into a linear "kill this stuff with exposition explaining why your killing it" hack fest, recycling the same materials as everyone else because players for obvious reasons can't add anything to the game (new monsters, models, weapons, etc...).
The problem with the theme park MMO is the expectation of content, the games fail when players complete the content and then don't want to pay anything else until more content is created. Publishers don't want to have to meet these kinds of support requirements, and maintain an endgame. A sandbox is a potential solution to that problem from their perspective, going back to the dawn of MMOs, where it failed in the sense that they want to use it.
Now, don't get me wrong, ideally sandbox elements are good, but only when combined with a truckload of dev created content as well, and continuous updates and additions to the core content.
What's more to make sandbox elements work, your going to need to see a LOT of innovation to prevent the problems inherant in overdevelopment, while still retaining an open-world enviroment wheere players can find and interact with the developments of other players without having to enter a special seperate "building zone" (ala Age Of Conan).
Maybe Ryan Dancey will prove me wrong and redeem himself, but really, I suggest you interpet anything he says in the worst possible way. He was the face of burning (A)D&D fans, and with my experiences is totally untrustworthy. There are maybe two or three other people in the industry that invoke the level of ire from me that he does, and despite how it might seem, I'm actually pretty laid back. I can't see the nessicary innovation coming from any project that has him acting as the face.
Plus, as I said we've been here, without some massive innovation all you need to do is look back at Ultima Online (early on) for examples of how this all worked out.
True stories here incidently, I pretty much dealt with him personally (well as far as the internet goes) and even had some pretty substantial threads going back in the day as a result of dealing with this guy. Simply put he's a liar and a complete blight on the RPG industry. The kind of corperate toad who really had no idea about games of any sort, and thrives on destruction as he takes an axe to everything around him in hopes of making a few pennies for the people above him.
As a result of this, you can pretty much ensure that whatever Ryan Dancey says about gaming is pretty much wrong, and any promises he makes aren't going to come to pass, much like Peter Molyneux, but without the good intentions.
What's more I'd point out that what this guy presents isn't exactly new, he's actually talking about bringing MMOs back to the old days of things like Ultima Online, or Star Wars Galaxies where games functioned very much like he mentions. This approach was abandoned because it's generally impractical for the reasons mentioned in other posts: what happens when you run out of space, everything is claimed, and resources dwindle to nothing? Ultima Online had to abandon it's "resource bank" early on, and demolish people's houses en-masse because almost literally every piece of land that could be built on, had been build on. SWG for all of the fond memories of the early days suffered similar problems where as soon as you'd leave the city limits you'd hit something akin to a barrio with player dwellings as far as the eye could see, and this caused problems with both spawns and resource scavenging when you literrally couldn't get to anything because chances are it would put you in another player's house.
The sandbox style of gaming is probably seeing more developer appeal right now, not because of any kind of "evolution" but because it's potentially one of the best ways to make money for a "free to play" model, the nature of the game puts no real expectations on the dev to deliver content, and things like building lots and such can then be sold piecemeal.
Player created content is a nice sounding idea in an MMO, but it's always going to be limited because in a FTP model publishers don't want players to be able to make anything worthwhile because that cuts them out of a sale. Looking at things like Star Trek Online's "Forge" you generally don't see any kind of decent rewards since players can't create and distribute items (for game balance reasons) and everything basically turns into a linear "kill this stuff with exposition explaining why your killing it" hack fest, recycling the same materials as everyone else because players for obvious reasons can't add anything to the game (new monsters, models, weapons, etc...).
The problem with the theme park MMO is the expectation of content, the games fail when players complete the content and then don't want to pay anything else until more content is created. Publishers don't want to have to meet these kinds of support requirements, and maintain an endgame. A sandbox is a potential solution to that problem from their perspective, going back to the dawn of MMOs, where it failed in the sense that they want to use it.
Now, don't get me wrong, ideally sandbox elements are good, but only when combined with a truckload of dev created content as well, and continuous updates and additions to the core content.
What's more to make sandbox elements work, your going to need to see a LOT of innovation to prevent the problems inherant in overdevelopment, while still retaining an open-world enviroment wheere players can find and interact with the developments of other players without having to enter a special seperate "building zone" (ala Age Of Conan).
Maybe Ryan Dancey will prove me wrong and redeem himself, but really, I suggest you interpet anything he says in the worst possible way. He was the face of burning (A)D&D fans, and with my experiences is totally untrustworthy. There are maybe two or three other people in the industry that invoke the level of ire from me that he does, and despite how it might seem, I'm actually pretty laid back. I can't see the nessicary innovation coming from any project that has him acting as the face.
Plus, as I said we've been here, without some massive innovation all you need to do is look back at Ultima Online (early on) for examples of how this all worked out.
I find it amazing that people have been so indoctrinated by WoW and other theme parks that they seem to be stumped by the simplest issues. Dungeons and spawns empty forever indeed.
The usual way a sandbox wants to handle a dynamic spawn is that if you kill all the buffalo in one area (or most of them) they migrate elsewhere. So the local hunting area you had for leather has now been over-worked and you have to go elsewhere. OBVIOUSLY the spawn area won't be left empty.
But already this facilitates a "feel" that the world is not static. There is a reason to protect "your" hunting grounds.
Are people really that unwilling to deviate from the tripe they have been fed the last 10 years?
The greatest benefit of a sandbox should be that players (as a community) should be able to drive the story, create communities, laws, towns etc. Games like Darkfall and Mortal are mentioned often in but they are NOT sandboxes of the type that people generally think of; i.e. a world where many different play styles co-exist.
Darkfall tried to be a sandbox with unrestricted PvP. Now "unrestricted PvP" can work BUT you need to give the players the tools to build communities, i.e. protect non-PvPers. When violence does happen it needs to make sense inside some context. StarVault gave them none. PvPers could travel all over the huge world easily and no harvester was safe anywhere. Even if their clan was not at War you were still likely to be killed by every 2nd or 3rd player. The nature of the game made it that everyone was a bandit. So ultimately it was just a FPS-battleground. Unless you play it as that (i.e. constant War) you won't enjoy it.
Mortal... oh dear. I think their attempt at sandbox was genuine but the designer just doesn't understand the underlying dynamics that is at play. Slightly better design idea than Darkfall but terrible execution and ultimately they still do not give players the ability to enforce law and protect non-PvPers. You don't need to make static safe zones. You can make safe zones dynamic that are only created if a group of players, for example, create a kingdom which their PvPers have to defend. But inside the kingdom harvesters are safe. That is just a simple idea off the top of my head but hopefully it is enough to illustrate what I mean.
The usual way a sandbox wants to handle a dynamic spawn is that if you kill all the buffalo in one area (or most of them) they migrate elsewhere. So the local hunting area you had for leather has now been over-worked and you have to go elsewhere. OBVIOUSLY the spawn area won't be left empty.
But already this facilitates a "feel" that the world is not static. There is a reason to protect "your" hunting grounds.
Are people really that unwilling to deviate from the tripe they have been fed the last 10 years?
The greatest benefit of a sandbox should be that players (as a community) should be able to drive the story, create communities, laws, towns etc. Games like Darkfall and Mortal are mentioned often in but they are NOT sandboxes of the type that people generally think of; i.e. a world where many different play styles co-exist.
Darkfall tried to be a sandbox with unrestricted PvP. Now "unrestricted PvP" can work BUT you need to give the players the tools to build communities, i.e. protect non-PvPers. When violence does happen it needs to make sense inside some context. StarVault gave them none. PvPers could travel all over the huge world easily and no harvester was safe anywhere. Even if their clan was not at War you were still likely to be killed by every 2nd or 3rd player. The nature of the game made it that everyone was a bandit. So ultimately it was just a FPS-battleground. Unless you play it as that (i.e. constant War) you won't enjoy it.
Mortal... oh dear. I think their attempt at sandbox was genuine but the designer just doesn't understand the underlying dynamics that is at play. Slightly better design idea than Darkfall but terrible execution and ultimately they still do not give players the ability to enforce law and protect non-PvPers. You don't need to make static safe zones. You can make safe zones dynamic that are only created if a group of players, for example, create a kingdom which their PvPers have to defend. But inside the kingdom harvesters are safe. That is just a simple idea off the top of my head but hopefully it is enough to illustrate what I mean.