MMOPW: Massively Multiplayer Online Persistent World
MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Role-playing Game
On August 9, 1997, one of gaming's most beloved characters was brutally
and publicly exterminated mid-speech in the early beta stages of Ultima
Online. The act heralded the dawning of a new era of PC gaming. The assassin,
a Minneapolis software consultant named Rainz, belonged to a guild dedicated
to maintaining the balance of power in Ultima Online
(UO) and could not resist the opportunity to immolate the "ultimate
wielder of tyrannical rule" in the series' fictional world:
"The servers had just been taken down to prepare for the huge influx
of players for the speech Lord British and Lord Blackthorne were giving
throughout Britannia. When the servers came back up, I strolled through
Britain with Helios, my fellow guild member. We headed to Blackthorne's
castle where the first speech was being given. LB [Lord British],
Blackthorne, and their jesters were up on a bridge orating to the masses.
Unfortunately I wasn't playing my mage character, so casting spells from
a spellbook was out of the question. Luckily my character was a good thief
who had high "stealing" skill. I desperately searched the backpacks
of those around me and eventually came upon a fire field scroll. After that
it was pretty simple, I just cast the scroll on the bridge and waited to
see what would happen. Either LB or Blackthorne made the comment "hehe
nice try", can't recall exactly who. It was a humorous sight and I
ex pected to be struck down by lightning or have some other evil fate befall
me. Instead I heard a loud death grunt as British slumped to his death.
After that it was just pure mayhem, Blackthorne or another force summoned
4 daemons into the castle and people were dying left and
Lord British, the alter-ego of famed Ultima creator Richard
Garriot, was easily resurrected moments after the catastrophe, but the
event served notice to the designers of a brand new generation of massively
multiplayer online games: thanks to one critical and unpredictable variable
-- human behavior -- the design rules and play mechanics for the next-generation
of MMORPGs would differ greatly from the insular, controllable mechanics
of single-player game design.
It would take years for game developers, even those steeped in MUD culture,
to begin to get their minds around this concept. Some gamers would argue
they still haven't.
Early Lessons From First Generation MMORPGs
Innovative, ground-breaking, and the model for countless MMORPGs, EverQuest
and Ultima Online built on the prior successes and
failures of the very first generation of massively multiplayer games. Not
coincidentally, MUD Imps (short for "Multi-User Dungeon" Implementers
after the original text-only multiplayer games) found themselves working
for companies like Origin, Verant (now Sony Online), and Turbine Games.
"You have to remember…these types of games go back 30 years,"
says Jessica Mulligan, Executive Producer at Turbine Software (maker of
Asheron's Call) and former author of Biting
The Hand, a pointed column about online gaming. Mulligan worked with
massively multiplayer RPGs and other games for AOL from 1987 to 1989, then
GEnie from 1989 to 1992. She remembers the days when text-only online adventures
such as Dragon's Gate and Gemstone 3 racked up hourly profits for their
distributors. After racking up hundreds of dollars of online fees, Mulligan
learned a critical lesson regarding pricing: flat-rates are far more appealing
than clock-watching fees.
Early online RPGs, including the very first text adventure designed by Richard
Bartle and Roy Trubshaw, named MUD -- short for Multi-User Dungeon -- were
met with a warm welcome by gamers clamoring for a Dungeons & Dragons
type of experience that transcended the solitary nature of single-player
gaming. "The community already existed. We just gave them a place to
congregate," Mulligan said.
Almost as soon as games like Gemstone 3, Avatar, and Dragon's Gate started
popping up, Mulligan discovered one of the fundamental truths of massively
multiplayer experiences. "In a successful game, people get attached
to their characters, and then to the game world." This principle remains
at the core of MMORPGs today.
Bill Roper, the former Blizzard ingénue who recently set off on his
own, agrees that player attachment is critical in online games, but feels
that players' initial experiences need to be much more accessible for MMORPGs
to appeal to broader audiences. "We build these highly complex models,
but there's not a lot of thought given to how we can introduce people to
them," he observes. "These games are still directed at a very
niche market. Every single game has a steep learning curve and tons of statistics.
I find myself getting frustrated, and I'm a core, core gamer. How is a casual
player going to feel?"
Sony Online president John Smedley couldn't agree more. "We'll fondly
remember games like EverQuest and Ultima Online
and Dark Ages of Camelot as the golden years of online
gaming, much like Ultima and Wizardry are the golden years of PC gaming."
But from this point on, he argues, the industry must make some major quantum
leaps to grow from two million North American MMORPG gamers to ten million.
"These games have to be much more impressive."
The Golden Rule: Humans Are Crazy!
Jessica Mulligan stumbled upon another fundamental principle of massively
multiplayer games late one night in the late 1990's when she was checking
up on GEnie's Dragon's
Gate, an online RPG she was administering. "I looked through the
logs to see what everyone was doing," Mulligan remembers, "And
I saw there were 18 players in the game, which made me happy because that
was a good total for four in the morning. But when I saw that all 18 players
were in one room, that didn't seem like a good sign." Mulligan turned
herself invisible and entered the room expecting the worst. "I found
eighteen players trading recipes for peanut butter cookies!"
Mulligan laughs at the hilarity of the moment, but she hasn't forgotten
the ramifications: community aspects of online games cannot be ignored.
Events like this also underscored what is perhaps the most critical truth
about MMORPG design, a truth that every single design team from Origin to
Sony has learned, quite often the hard way: you cannot anticipate or control
player behavior.
EverQuest: The New Model
Upon its release in February of 1999, EverQuest received rave reviews from
previously skeptical gaming journalists who found themselves hooked. Its
combination of sophisticated graphics (a 3D accelerator was required), action
elements, group questing, and community quickly became the standard for
nearly every single massively multiplayer role-playing game released in
its wake.
For Bill Trost, Lead Game Designer at Sony Online, EverQuest is a direct
descendant of the legacy left behind by the early MUDs and MMORPGs. "We
had a lot of guys with MUD experience, so we decided early on that we were
going with a cooperative model."
"The co-operative MUDs most appealed to us, games that were challenging
and fostered a strong sense of community by creating interdependence on
the players' behalf." Games like Toril Sojourner, Avatar,
Trubshaw and Bartle's original MUD.
Even though Verant (now Sony Online) President John Smedley was slightly
nervous when Ultima Online went live in 1998 and began making money in its
first month based on a Player-vs-Player model (PVP), the EQ designers, including
then-VP Brad McQuaid (who has since left Sony to start up his own online
gaming company: Sigil
Games Online) convinced him that their cooperative model would be even
more popular than the PvP model.
Smedley is glad the team stayed the course. EQ quickly became the most popular
online game in history and the template for all other online role-playing
games, success both he and Trost are quick to attribute to the early text-only
MMORPGs they were influenced by. "A lot of the EQ team were big MUDers,"
Smedley explains. "Over time that has evolved into a background for
the style of game we make."
Roper, who personally admits to falling head-first into Ultima
Online and EverQuest before getting completely
hooked on Dark Ages of Camelot, occasionally wonders why
game developers have consistently chosen EverQuest as
the model for their online games while ignoring Ultima Online.
"Maybe UO's early launch difficulties compared to EQ discouraged people,
but who knows? It's just one of those things. Why did VHS get chosen over
Beta?"
EverQuest's formula for success emphasizes player-initiated combat and action
against AI-driven monsters and enemies. But even today, Sony Online, like
all other MMORPG shops, finds itself experimenting to find the right level
of immersion for players. Balancing the emergent style and sandbox mentality
of the old-school MUDs, where gamers could leisurely explore and engage
their fellow travelers, with the more directed and scripted notions of modern
game design presents quite a challenge.
"I read the reviews of Star Wars Galaxies,"
John Smedley indicates by way of example. "The complaints I see indicate
that maybe we went too much in the sandbox direction. People don't just
want to be placed in a world and told to have fun. Some people want a little
bit of direction in terms of what they can do."
Time Has No Meaning ... Online
As EverQuest developed a wildly popular and occasionally
controversial following, lead designer Bill Trost and the designers found
themselves surprised by the speed with which players were solving quests
and accomplishing tasks the designers thought would take much longer. Notions
of time and the randomness of players' behaviors quickly became the most
unpredictable wild card in the early days of EverQuest.
"Gameplay-wise, we had this idea that time would deter different types
of behaviors. But what we found was that, for a small percentage of gamers,
time is essentially meaningless. So we saw the growth of camping and had
to work around that."
John Smedley remembers marveling at how fast players were getting through
the content EverQuest's numerous designers had meticulously crafted. "Gamers
were solving problems in ways we had never imagined," he chuckles.
"We had this dragon Nagafen … a real tough challenge that was
designed to be taken down by 20 people. But the first group that tackled
the dragon was 50 adventurers strong, and they destroyed Nagafen in five
minutes." This early deviation from the plan shook up EQ's design staff.
"Our designers' jaws were dropping -- they couldn't believe their baby
was being destroyed so easily!"
EQ's designers quickly fixed the problem by giving Nagafen more hit points,
but the ordeal quickly pointed out that the design and play mechanics of
these MMORPGs would have to take into account accelerated notions of time
and an unknown 'X' factor of regarding players' actions.
Part of this predicament is the fact that the very medium that created MMORPGs
-- the Internet -- has also created an environment where players can solve
a difficult quest and then immediately go online and post a full walkthrough
for other players.
"In retrospect," Trost admits, laughing at his own naiveté,
"It's like 'how did we not see this?'" Although EQ's design is
flexible enough to allow rapid changes based on player exploits, when players
exploit time via camping or move through quests in record time, their actions
can unbalance the game. Additionally, extra pressure gets placed on the
game's content designers.
One solution to this problem that the company is beginning to explore in
the most recent EQ add-on, Lost Dungeons of Norrath,
is the concept of randomization. By randomizing dungeons, monsters, and
rewards, Internet walkthroughs will be less effective at allowing gamers
to breeze through quests.
Turbine Games' tactic for handling players' accelerated behaviors is slightly
different. The company updates Asheron's Call 2 every
month rather than in a series of retail expansions. "We try to react
faster, which gives us a slight advantage." But it also means that
crafting epic content is difficult. Still though, at the end of September,
Turbine has scheduled the largest update -- a new island, 100 new levels,
and 50 new skills -- in AC2 history.
By the time EverQuest 2 is released, however, Trost hopes
that his design teams will have figured out a few ways to allow players
to control their time more effectively. "We're still figuring it out,
though," he admits.
Many Lessons Still To Be Learned
When asked what aspect is most lacking in today's massively multiplayer
games, Richard Bartle, who earns a living consulting with companies like
Sony Online on their virtual worlds, responds with a single-word answer:
humanity.
In his mind, so many MMORPGs have become so intently focused on automating
and artificially motivating players to engage in the game world that at
times, the experience feels a little too Disneyfied. "The world is
virtual, but the players are real," he explains. "The relationships
between the players should not be treated like they, too, were virtual."
Sony Online believes it can begin to address these problems by imbuing more
life and realism into its AI-driven NPCs. "Look at how pathetic NPCs
are in today's games, including ours own," John Smedley exclaims. "They're
retarded. We can do so much better."
Smedley and Trost believe that EverQuest 2 will begin
to address these shortcomings in a variety of ways. For starters, NPCs will
approach the player and speak to them or offer quests. And they'll have
long memories. "If you piss off a shopkeeper, they'll complain about
you to the authorities, and you'd better not come near that shop again."
Interestingly, Smedley indicates that Star Wars Galaxies incorporated more
human elements into its NPC behaviors, although few gamers have noticed
it. "If you go into a Cantina and chat, when you leave, the bartender
will start floating bits of your conversation to other people."
The impact players can have over time is gradually evolving. EQ2
will have player-driven cities (much like what is intended for Star
Wars Galaxies) that will complement a player-driven economy that
also borrows from the Galaxies model. Similarly, players
in both games will be able to be elected Mayor of a town, and even be elected
to a players' council that will advise and work with Sony Online during
the development of enhancements, add-ons, and monumental decisions.
Another example of player impact occurred in the original Asheron's Call,
and caught developers totally off-guard. A crystal held the soul of the
demon Bael' Zharon and the storyline was to evolve where the crystal would
be destroyed by evil players and the demon would be released, leading to
the next episode of the story. This happened as expected on all servers
except one. On the "Player vs. Player" server dubbed Darktide,
a band of good players rallied around the crystal, setting up 24-hour watches
to fight off all evil characters. The longer it lasted, the more acclaim
the defenders received. It got to the point that the new story line could
not continue. The developers finally had to intervene with high-level characters
to destroy the defenders so the crystal could be broken and the story could
continue. Even in defeat, though, the players showed they could have a strong
impact beyond what was ever envisioned by the developers.
User-Generated Content: The Next Frontier
What becomes increasingly clear from speaking to the likes of Smedley and
Mulligan is that the next frontier of online game development will focus
on an aspect of gaming that single-player games have embraced since DOOM,
and that the earliest MUDS heavily relied upon: user-generated content.
"It's impossible to be a hero if you can't have an impact on the world,"
Jessica Mulligan argues. "But in order to allow players to determine
the outcome of our stories, we have to get our craftsmanship down."
Bill Trost agrees with this goal, but because of the complexity of these
worlds, he wonders how long it will take. "Most MUDS were operated
by a small group of people, and the player community was a tight-knit group,
but when you're talking about something that's population dense...
"Everybody is thinking about it and trying to figure it out. I know
we're interested in trying to implement the aspects of users contributing
to the world by adding content or allowing actions that shape the world,
but it's not easy. One of the big differences is that we're charging people
for EQ, so we have a responsibility to deliver quality entertainment."
Still though, it's just a matter of time before gamers can begin to tailor
their own quests and environments in massively multiplayer games. Given
the competitiveness (and unpredictability!) of human nature, there's no
telling what'll come of that...
