I, personally, think of instanced dungeons much like butter on popcorn – a tasty addition, but easy to overdo if you’re not careful. With that mentality, I went to listen to Raph Koster, Anthony Castoro (Producer of UO), Marc Jacobs (DAoC) and Jack Emmert (of CoH fame) debated instantiated spaces vs persistent ones at GDC.
There seemed to be an odd belief that WoW is a victory for the instantiated space model. Personally, I think quite the opposite – I’ve played WoW substantially, and yet probably spent fewer than 5% of that time has been spent in instances. Instances are the cherry on top of their persistent world, but by no means does the experience center on them. This works well. It also stands in stark contrast to the ‘mostly instantiated’ philosophy that seems to drive the next generation of titles such as City of Heroes, Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa.
Surprisingly, three of the four speakers were far more favorable towards moving to a mostly instantiated world. They correctly pointed out that instantiated spaces make it easier to provide a highly tailored experience to your player base, and they make it easier for you to avoid general asshattery. On the flip side, they make it harder to find gold farmers. Still, one got the sense that all but Raph would instantiate every mission in the game if they could get enough art resources to do so.
Raph’s counter-argument seemed to fall on deaf ears, but I think it’s crucially important. His stance could be summed up as follows: Persistence and Other People are what we’re selling. They are, in fact, part of what makes the idea of MMOs so inspiring. If you abandon the former to allow players to avoid the latter, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. If you go too far, you’re making Diablo with a 3D chat lobby. Will players want to pay $15 bucks a month for it?
For example, Jack is very proud of the number of missions and quests in City of Heroes – I’ve heard him quoted as saying there are 400+ hours of quests. But you know, they all kind of play the same (and it’s not helped that they all have the same coke machine in the same office lobby). The magical part of CoH is standing around town square looking at costumes. Which is to say, the magical part of CoH is other people.
And you can write tight, cohesive stories that center on these instanced spaces and provide gripping gameplay, but you know what the best stories are? Who’s cybering the guildmaster’s girlfriend. Once you get to real player interactions, our stories are doomed to feel trite and cliched. We need to find ways to elevate stories based on player interactions, not try to bury them.
Think of every best story you have out of an MMO. Most of the ones you remember the most involve griefing in some way, be it breaking into a tower in UO with a staircase made of spoons or figuring out how to teleport a city to the bottom of the ocean. Now, obviously you don’t want to create a world where such exploits are rampant and out of control, but the flip side is that such events create news, and news is something that an online world desperately needs to maintain player interest as their Hours Played crosses into the hundreds and thousands of hours mark. Remember: Bartle says that Killers are effectively necessary in maintaining long-term interest in your game, simply because they give people something to talk about. And while that can obviously be taken too far, there’s no question that protecting people too much from each other kind of loses track of what the point of Massively is supposed to be.
Someone once said that great humor pretty much requires someone’s feelings to be hurt. You could argue that great multiplayer gameplay does as well.
Recent Comments