Jeff ‘Dundee’ Freeman and Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green are having a discussion about breadth vs depth in game design. Brian gets the ball rolling.

Broad content is content that is spread out and is measured in raw numbers. For example, large continents are broad content, because you have to spend time traveling around in the area to see it all. More races, more areas, more items, more monsters, anything that can be measured by counting.

Deep content is content that is concentrated and tends to be a bit more abstract. Puzzles, secrets, emergent behavior, anything that can’t just be measured by numbers.

Jeff offers his response:

Although, when I think about breadth vs. depth in games, I tend to think about it in terms of activities: A game that offers you lots of different things to do, I’d describe as a broad game (of which, any single activity – or even all of them – might also be deep). Whereas a single activity that is complex, I’d consider to be adding depth to a game.

I’m closer to Jeff on this one. Press ‘more’ to see my thoughts, as well as my leet graphing skills.

In the way that we’ve talked about game design on the various design teams, broad and deep are both valid tactics to take when designing an MMO. However, when we talk about Broad vs Deep, we tend to talk about systems not content, and so its obvious that there’s going to be some dissonance with Brian’s viewpoint, who was centering his discussion on content.

A ‘broad’ game is a game that has a lot to do, but doesn’t do them all particularly well. A lot of the reason why is because the development team only has a limited amount of time to develop the features, but there’s also the problem that the more systems you have, the more you have to worry about them interacting. Below, you’ll see a graph of a ‘broad’ game – each bar represents a feature, and the height of the bar represents how well that feature was done.

Good examples of broad games: Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, the Sims and GTA. Since I’ve bashed my fellow MMO teams enough lately, let’s look at GTA: it’s driving sim is nowhere near as good as a pure driving sim, it’s shooter aspects are downright clumsy compared to Halo, and it’s fighting mechanics are pretty wretched. But, DAMN if you can’t do pretty much anything you want to.

By comparison, a Deep game chooses one game mechanic and bends everything to support it. It may have other systems, but they may just be done for show, and they will always bend to support the primary game mechanic. Here’s a graph for a Deep game.

 
Doom and EverQuest are examples of deep games. In EQ, for example, it primarily centers on combat and advancement, and all other systems are underemphasized. WoW is also a deep game. “That’s wrong!” some may cry. “WoW is a great game, but it has no depth whatsoever!” Wrong, I’d counter. What it lacks is breadth.

Where the disagreement would come with Brian would be that, in this model, depth games are the ones that are content heavy. Everquest and WoW are the ones that add more and more content to one system that they center almost everything around. Shadowbane and Meridian 59 are more breadth-based games: we have and depend on more systems, largely because we can’t afford to depend on an endless sea of content the way the big boys do.

The savvy will note that MMOs with breadth tend to fall in the ‘virtual world’ camp, whereas MMOs with depth tend to fall in the ‘gameplay first’ camp. I really don’t want to get into the world vs game debate …. at least not today. But the worlds, the games with breadth, are also the ones that, as Raph and Gordon would say, have more verbs – i.e. potential actions to take.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out what players REALLY want, which is a game with both breadth and depth:

Unfortunately, this is pretty impossible. For one, even spending 25 million as EQ or WoW has, it’s nigh impossible to be all things to all people and to do it well. For another, the more systems you have, the more you have to worry about them interacting. But the real problem is that, especially in online gaming, there are a whole bunch of features we have to code on TOP of the features you see. For example, a real breadth-based MMO’s graph looks something like this:

Original comments thread is here.