Skyrim is designed really badly. It's also designed really well.
For an RPG, Skyrim is hilariously bad. The characters are incredibly dull, the places are bland, the voice acting is generic to a hilarious extent, the graphics are uninteresting, the fighting is uninteresting.
Compared to non-open-world RPGs such as the Mass Effect series, Skyrim falls short on every measure.
Despite that, more people still play Skyrim than still play Mass Effect 3.
See, in that dry, generic, empty world, there is space for the player. Even in vanilla Skyrim, there is an endless variety of options. You can go in any direction, stumble across any number of little challenges, see any number of sights.
Yes, all the directions are boring. All the challenges are boring. All the sights are boring.
So why is it fun?
Something about a Role Playing Game that most people seem to forget is that the player gets out what they put in. Most RPGs have very generic protagonists. The game may offer you good and evil options, but even they are quite generic. Closed-world games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age supplement this with interesting characters: Shepard and, uh... Medieval Shepard... have no personality on their own. But you define a personality by surrounding them with characters that do. You build the personality of your hero by choosing their companions. Even if you just choose the companions you happen to like best, you are defining your Shepard as someone with a very similar personality to you.
If you offer enough secondary characters and constrain the number you can choose, you can allow a player some freedom to "put in" their personality and "get" role play out of it. Shepard has a character because you mentally justify why these party members are her favorite. You also get some characterization out of the choices you're presented with in the game, but I'd argue that the party member choice is the most compelling. At the very least, it's continuous and ongoing, rather than a one-off, so it wriggles in your brain and forces you to continually imagine how Shepard feels about how things are going.
In an open-world RPG, parties are rarer. Games like Fallout and Skyrim technically have a party mechanic, but it's very vague, and the characters you can add to your party have almost no impact, personality-wise. Is this a weakness?
No, not at all. In an open-world RPG, you "put in" actions rather than choices. Sure, there may still be choices. Maybe those choices are critical for planting the seed of personality.
But the continuous actions of play are where the character grows and blooms. Trying to sneak through a house or barracks. Deciding to shoot from afar. Deciding to rely on your dull party member to defend you. Looking for a secret inside the waterfall. Opening a creaking chest in the dark. Reacting to the sudden appearance of a pack of wolves.
Unlike a closed-world game, these events are all contiguous. Sometimes they move faster or slower, but they are almost never The Event You Should Be Having. Your avatar is living every second of this adventure, and it is developing in tandem with your actions. You are free to do anything and, in doing anything, you are free to be anyone.
Compound this with mods that change the world, and now you have even more options.
I think these ideas are important.
"Role play" requires the player to feel like the avatar exists. One way to do that is with pieces you painstakingly create for that purpose - a bitter choice, an amazing sight, an interesting companion. Another way to do that is to simply provide a world for the player to live in.
Anyway, I was going to go on and talk about the same "bad vs good" design in other kinds of games (comparing Space Engineers and Kerbal), but I think that's more than enough for today. Let me know what you think.
Showing posts with label role playing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label role playing. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Closed Combat
I was thinking about systems with open rules and closed rules. What is the difference?
Well, a closed rule is "you have a sword. If you hit someone with it, you deal 2d8 damage. Who will you hit?" An open rule is "which stats will you use to affect which things in the area, and which aspects will you use for an extra point, and which stats will the enemy use to defend?"
There's a lot of attraction to open rules. Open rules feel like you're empowering the player, and they are also a lot easier for the game designer to write. But it's not necessarily better game design.
A big part of playing any game is expressing yourself in how you play. Open rules initially seem like the best choice for that. However, a player can openly attempt to do random things whenever they like regardless of the rules. They don't need an open rule set to swing from a chandelier - they just need to pester the GM into allowing it.
On the other hand, a closed rule set narrows the focus. The player can now express herself through her performance within those well-understood confines. Not simply whether she prefers to be a magician or a warrior, but whether she chooses that +1 to hit on level-up or whether she goes for the free half-step.
Those are choices that have little or no merit from a narrative point of view. But they have a lot of merit from a "you're playing a game, not just making up a story together" point of view. Moreover, they offer three added advantages.
1) They are easy to get into. Whether or not a player can role play, long before there is any real narrative traction there are the rules. Long before the players have any emotional connection to their own characters, let alone a connection to the Demon Lord Bldhduhgu, they have a connection to whether they are performing well within the confines of the game. Every player can get drawn in, although some lose interest in fiddly balancing later on.
2) They are usually faster. A closed rule situation is built to execute smoothly and easily. They "front load" the most complex and creative decisions, offloading them to the part of the game that is open and largely rule-less.
3) They make exceptions mean more. In an open rule system, something unusual happening usually resolves to a simple +1 or +2 or whatever. In a closed rule system, something unusual usually resolves using a completely different and unexpected set of rules, or breaks the rules you normally rely on. This makes a lot bigger impact on the players.
EDIT: 4) They allow for much deeper tactical situations, as open rule sets are necessarily less rigid and structured as to how the battles progress.
Now, allowing the players to be as creative as possible can be good, especially if you can do it in a framework which doesn't instantly fly off the rails. I generally leave it to the "full open" sections of the game rather than the nitty-gritty rule resolution parts, but even in the nitty-gritty you can allow it or even promote it using a simple "window rule".
A window rule is any rule which allows the players to take any unusual action they can think of. For example, swinging on the chandelier rather than simply stabbing the enemy with the sword. There are a variety of window rules, some better thought out than others.
A bad window rule is "if you can come up with some piece of creative description, you get a +1!"
This rule is bad because it encourages the players to throw in random crap, and punishes the players who aren't as good at coming up with random crap.
A slightly better rule is "you can give an ally a +5 if you spend your turn doing something to help him."
Another decent rule is "the enemy's defenses can be reduced by 2 for the rest of the fight if you spend your turn doing something unusual."
But the basic truth is that if the players want to do cool stuff in combat, they will ask to do it. They don't need a special rule. The GM can encourage them to do cool stuff in combat by offering lavish rewards for anyone who comes up with a cool idea (assuming it isn't the same person over and over), as well as having the villains come up with cool ideas that work against the players.
Anyway, the core of it is that a closed rule system isn't necessarily bad. It really allows the players to jump in and express themselves, and it also allows the game designer to build up some fun and interesting exceptions that feel sharp and exciting.
Well, a closed rule is "you have a sword. If you hit someone with it, you deal 2d8 damage. Who will you hit?" An open rule is "which stats will you use to affect which things in the area, and which aspects will you use for an extra point, and which stats will the enemy use to defend?"
There's a lot of attraction to open rules. Open rules feel like you're empowering the player, and they are also a lot easier for the game designer to write. But it's not necessarily better game design.
A big part of playing any game is expressing yourself in how you play. Open rules initially seem like the best choice for that. However, a player can openly attempt to do random things whenever they like regardless of the rules. They don't need an open rule set to swing from a chandelier - they just need to pester the GM into allowing it.
On the other hand, a closed rule set narrows the focus. The player can now express herself through her performance within those well-understood confines. Not simply whether she prefers to be a magician or a warrior, but whether she chooses that +1 to hit on level-up or whether she goes for the free half-step.
Those are choices that have little or no merit from a narrative point of view. But they have a lot of merit from a "you're playing a game, not just making up a story together" point of view. Moreover, they offer three added advantages.
1) They are easy to get into. Whether or not a player can role play, long before there is any real narrative traction there are the rules. Long before the players have any emotional connection to their own characters, let alone a connection to the Demon Lord Bldhduhgu, they have a connection to whether they are performing well within the confines of the game. Every player can get drawn in, although some lose interest in fiddly balancing later on.
2) They are usually faster. A closed rule situation is built to execute smoothly and easily. They "front load" the most complex and creative decisions, offloading them to the part of the game that is open and largely rule-less.
3) They make exceptions mean more. In an open rule system, something unusual happening usually resolves to a simple +1 or +2 or whatever. In a closed rule system, something unusual usually resolves using a completely different and unexpected set of rules, or breaks the rules you normally rely on. This makes a lot bigger impact on the players.
EDIT: 4) They allow for much deeper tactical situations, as open rule sets are necessarily less rigid and structured as to how the battles progress.
Now, allowing the players to be as creative as possible can be good, especially if you can do it in a framework which doesn't instantly fly off the rails. I generally leave it to the "full open" sections of the game rather than the nitty-gritty rule resolution parts, but even in the nitty-gritty you can allow it or even promote it using a simple "window rule".
A window rule is any rule which allows the players to take any unusual action they can think of. For example, swinging on the chandelier rather than simply stabbing the enemy with the sword. There are a variety of window rules, some better thought out than others.
A bad window rule is "if you can come up with some piece of creative description, you get a +1!"
This rule is bad because it encourages the players to throw in random crap, and punishes the players who aren't as good at coming up with random crap.
A slightly better rule is "you can give an ally a +5 if you spend your turn doing something to help him."
Another decent rule is "the enemy's defenses can be reduced by 2 for the rest of the fight if you spend your turn doing something unusual."
But the basic truth is that if the players want to do cool stuff in combat, they will ask to do it. They don't need a special rule. The GM can encourage them to do cool stuff in combat by offering lavish rewards for anyone who comes up with a cool idea (assuming it isn't the same person over and over), as well as having the villains come up with cool ideas that work against the players.
Anyway, the core of it is that a closed rule system isn't necessarily bad. It really allows the players to jump in and express themselves, and it also allows the game designer to build up some fun and interesting exceptions that feel sharp and exciting.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Building Your Past
I thought I had posted about this, but I guess not.
Some time ago, I ran a Jedi game. This was not a polite "we buy the rules from the licensed sort of folks" Jedi game. This was one of my "Bastard Jedi" games, which generally share a few keywords with the Star Wars RPG and not much else.
My previous Bastard Jedi games were built on the words "Jedi", "Sith", "Force", and "Droid". Otherwise, they were made from whole cloth. This time I went the opposite direction, gathering in staggeringly huge amounts of canon and picking the lamest parts. To the point where the game could not be played without a laptop constantly connected to Wookieepedia. (Notice, it contains spoilers!...)
Still, the game mechanics were very, very unusual and interesting. It would take a long time to cover them all, so I'll simply cover the character creation system, which is really the only one that has any bearing on anything I've posted recently.
First, a note on setting: this was after "all" the Jedi were killed by Clone Troopers, but I varied the setting a bit as to exactly what had gone down with the whole Darth-Emperor-Mace Windu thing.
Now, the character creation.
I got myself a hundred blank index cards and split them into four vaguely equal piles, each of which was marked with a suit. The suits stood for real concepts: race, tendency, experience, and survival (all the Jedi are supposed to be dead, remember?). A character was made of one of each.
For example, your race might be Bith, your tendency might be that you've always been especially good with a saber, your experience might be that you spent several years on a diplomatic voyage, and you might have survived by having been cut up quite a bit by a dark Jedi and left for dead (but you recovered and now have some cybernetic bits).
That's not a terribly coherent character, but even with this kind of nonsense you can see that you could connect the dots. You could build a fairly interesting character by filling in the holes: maybe you were sent on the diplomatic mission by your master, who thought you were too physical. Maybe you were attacked by a dark Jedi while on that mission.
Anyway, all of the things on the cards were things that could be. There was no danger of someone going "off course" and inventing a backstory that didn't fit into the universe and, more importantly, no chance of players just staring blankly at an infinite canvas of options. If I wanted, I could have just as easily swapped out the deck for a non-Jedi deck set in the same universe, or a Sith deck, or even a lost-little-droid deck.
All of the cards were more or less balanced. Even the races, which I thought would be hard to balance, were easy. I mean, a Bith? The cantina guys? Who wants to be a Bith? They suck!
Except it turns out that they don't. They've got all sorts of wickedly advanced senses and technological aptitudes. They don't need sleep, either.
It seems that I could not find a race that hadn't been made cool at some point. Welcome to Star Wars.
Anyhow, picking four cards at random doesn't leave you with a whole lot of choice, does it? You end up with something like the character above. While he might grow on you, chances are good that he's not who you would pick for yourself if given the choice.
Even increasing the number of cards to choose from isn't ideal: I let people draw six cards (and spend a character point to draw more cards if they wanted). Even that wasn't going to be enough.
So the real solution was to get your players into a group - five, six people - and have them all draw cards. Then they can freely trade with each other.
This Bith guy would be happy to trade his diplomatic mission to someone in exchange for, say, advanced saber training or a mission to a doomed world. He's also probably happy to trade his race off for something a bit more combat-happy. Someone else might have the "forbidden love" experience card, and they might try to get that "maimed by a dark Jedi" card, so they can have their forbidden love fall and maim them...
This also lets the players fit their characters together interplayer. Not just in terms of "we should have a warrior, a healer..." but in terms of "oh, look, we both switched masters! What if we swapped masters?"
I had two teams of five, and until I moved to Seattle, the game was going pretty well. The characters were deeply interesting, their interactions very slick. More importantly for a Star Wars game, their detailed backstories gave me great hooks to tempt them towards the dark side.
Anyway, this is to show that this kind of partially-generative backstory system is perfectly plausible. Obviously, if you're going to do it on a computer, you need to change it a bit... but, fundamentally, this is not a difficult way to do things and it can serve to introduce your players to the setting in a completely painless way.
Some time ago, I ran a Jedi game. This was not a polite "we buy the rules from the licensed sort of folks" Jedi game. This was one of my "Bastard Jedi" games, which generally share a few keywords with the Star Wars RPG and not much else.
My previous Bastard Jedi games were built on the words "Jedi", "Sith", "Force", and "Droid". Otherwise, they were made from whole cloth. This time I went the opposite direction, gathering in staggeringly huge amounts of canon and picking the lamest parts. To the point where the game could not be played without a laptop constantly connected to Wookieepedia. (Notice, it contains spoilers!...)
Still, the game mechanics were very, very unusual and interesting. It would take a long time to cover them all, so I'll simply cover the character creation system, which is really the only one that has any bearing on anything I've posted recently.
First, a note on setting: this was after "all" the Jedi were killed by Clone Troopers, but I varied the setting a bit as to exactly what had gone down with the whole Darth-Emperor-Mace Windu thing.
Now, the character creation.
I got myself a hundred blank index cards and split them into four vaguely equal piles, each of which was marked with a suit. The suits stood for real concepts: race, tendency, experience, and survival (all the Jedi are supposed to be dead, remember?). A character was made of one of each.
For example, your race might be Bith, your tendency might be that you've always been especially good with a saber, your experience might be that you spent several years on a diplomatic voyage, and you might have survived by having been cut up quite a bit by a dark Jedi and left for dead (but you recovered and now have some cybernetic bits).
That's not a terribly coherent character, but even with this kind of nonsense you can see that you could connect the dots. You could build a fairly interesting character by filling in the holes: maybe you were sent on the diplomatic mission by your master, who thought you were too physical. Maybe you were attacked by a dark Jedi while on that mission.
Anyway, all of the things on the cards were things that could be. There was no danger of someone going "off course" and inventing a backstory that didn't fit into the universe and, more importantly, no chance of players just staring blankly at an infinite canvas of options. If I wanted, I could have just as easily swapped out the deck for a non-Jedi deck set in the same universe, or a Sith deck, or even a lost-little-droid deck.
All of the cards were more or less balanced. Even the races, which I thought would be hard to balance, were easy. I mean, a Bith? The cantina guys? Who wants to be a Bith? They suck!
Except it turns out that they don't. They've got all sorts of wickedly advanced senses and technological aptitudes. They don't need sleep, either.
It seems that I could not find a race that hadn't been made cool at some point. Welcome to Star Wars.
Anyhow, picking four cards at random doesn't leave you with a whole lot of choice, does it? You end up with something like the character above. While he might grow on you, chances are good that he's not who you would pick for yourself if given the choice.
Even increasing the number of cards to choose from isn't ideal: I let people draw six cards (and spend a character point to draw more cards if they wanted). Even that wasn't going to be enough.
So the real solution was to get your players into a group - five, six people - and have them all draw cards. Then they can freely trade with each other.
This Bith guy would be happy to trade his diplomatic mission to someone in exchange for, say, advanced saber training or a mission to a doomed world. He's also probably happy to trade his race off for something a bit more combat-happy. Someone else might have the "forbidden love" experience card, and they might try to get that "maimed by a dark Jedi" card, so they can have their forbidden love fall and maim them...
This also lets the players fit their characters together interplayer. Not just in terms of "we should have a warrior, a healer..." but in terms of "oh, look, we both switched masters! What if we swapped masters?"
I had two teams of five, and until I moved to Seattle, the game was going pretty well. The characters were deeply interesting, their interactions very slick. More importantly for a Star Wars game, their detailed backstories gave me great hooks to tempt them towards the dark side.
Anyway, this is to show that this kind of partially-generative backstory system is perfectly plausible. Obviously, if you're going to do it on a computer, you need to change it a bit... but, fundamentally, this is not a difficult way to do things and it can serve to introduce your players to the setting in a completely painless way.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
The Case for Boring Games...
I've been thinking about RPGs.
Everyone who plays them can point to an RPG and say, "That's one of my favorites". Whether you point to Planescape: Torment, FFVI, or something that's a bit of a stretch like System Shock II or FFVII, you don't have any problem pointing.
I've been thinking about the stuff I like in an RPG, and I've come to the conclusion that I like the boring stuff.
The primary gameplay of an RPG - killing monsters, exploring dungeons, leveling up - doesn't interest me much. I actually find those parts of the game very boring.
On the other hand, the boring parts of the game... I love. I love wandering around the village talking to everyone, I love mixing potions and enchanting weapons, I love building a character, I love flying around in my airship.
But I hate the same things in non-RPGs. I can't stand Animal Crossing or The Sims, even though they feature my favorite stuff.
Why?
As far as I can tell, the big reason is that the parts of the RPG that I like are set within a much larger framework. The point of the game isn't to enchant weapons or talk to peasants: it's to kill shit, explore, and level up. This means that when I spend time enchanting or chatting, I can measure it against an overall world, see it doing something.
Talking to peasants isn't the point of the game, but talking to peasants allows me to explore the world in more detail. Building a new spell isn't the point of the game, but doing so allows me to interact with the world (usually, kill shit) in a more personalized way.
In things like The Sims and Animal Crossing, these activities feel completely pointless. Sure, I can talk to everyone in town... but why bother? The world is a tiny, shallow place and exploring it is awfully pointless. Sure, I can build a classy house, but what does it matter? My sims are equally pleased by two rooms with a lot of corners. Having a nice house is actually bad, since it takes the sims twenty minutes to walk ten feet.
On the other side of the spectrum, I don't like these activities in MMORPGs, because they do not allow you to approach the world in more detail or from new perspectives. Exploring the world of the World of Warcraft is largely futile, because it's pretty well explored already. It's like "exploring" your local strip mall. There are no surprises, unless you count a 10% off sale on stuff you don't need.
Similarly, crafting weapons or potions is pointless because they have been carefully crippled down to a level of non-uniqueness that a fast food restaurant would be embarrassed about.
These all have the same problem: the creation doesn't let you interact with the world in a meaningful, seemingly unique way. Making potions doesn't give you any real new way of exploring the game, and building a house doesn't matter when there's really no world to explore with it.
Compare these to the examples I do like.
Evil Genius is about creating a house of a sort. I know a lot of people played The Sims like it was Evil Genius...
Evil Genius' house creation system was a lot weaker than The Sims, but to me it was a lot juicier. Every kind of room had a real purpose, every piece of furniture meant something. The layout wasn't just for kicks or to minimize travel time: it was continually tested by hapless tourists and not-so-hapless secret agents.
So, while Evil Genius didn't allow for many of the advanced options that The Sims allowed, it had a strong backbone that actually rewarded you for doing well.
Similarly, in Oblivion potion-making was generally quite rewarding. You could make potions of healing, sure. But it wasn't a matter of combining a rabbit foot and green herb: there were a lot of different ingredients you could use, a lot of side effects you needed to manage, and your skill played a huge part - not in simple pass/fail terms, but in what you could wring out of the ingredients.
Of course, potion making in Oblivion is well known for being one of the most broken systems on the face of the planet... that's something you have to manage, I suppose.
Evil Genius wasn't a spectacularly good game, but it's a great game to learn from. It was certainly the case that some players would be better at building bases than other players! It was definitely a long learning experience, each base slightly better as you learn the basics.
But it never came off as "unbalanced". (Actually, the unbalanced part of the game was personnel, not base construction.) The more successful you were, the more attention you drew.
This kind of adaptive feedback is the only thing I can think of that I predict will be in a lot more games. It allows you to play fast and loose with balance, favoring depth over fairness. And that's what I like.
...
A lot of people love The Sims, and I'm not saying it's bad. Instead, what I think is that these people impose their own world - their own value - onto the people and houses they create. Instead of having a feedback system like Oblivion's potions or Evil Genius' secret bases, the players substitute their own imagination and judgment. It seems to work well, but that's not something I need a game for.
On the other hand, the shallow 1+1=potion of MMORPGs is basically unforgivably bad...
What do you think? Do you like the "boring" parts? Can you think of a game design where crafting combines with massively multiplayer without being infuriating?
Everyone who plays them can point to an RPG and say, "That's one of my favorites". Whether you point to Planescape: Torment, FFVI, or something that's a bit of a stretch like System Shock II or FFVII, you don't have any problem pointing.
I've been thinking about the stuff I like in an RPG, and I've come to the conclusion that I like the boring stuff.
The primary gameplay of an RPG - killing monsters, exploring dungeons, leveling up - doesn't interest me much. I actually find those parts of the game very boring.
On the other hand, the boring parts of the game... I love. I love wandering around the village talking to everyone, I love mixing potions and enchanting weapons, I love building a character, I love flying around in my airship.
But I hate the same things in non-RPGs. I can't stand Animal Crossing or The Sims, even though they feature my favorite stuff.
Why?
As far as I can tell, the big reason is that the parts of the RPG that I like are set within a much larger framework. The point of the game isn't to enchant weapons or talk to peasants: it's to kill shit, explore, and level up. This means that when I spend time enchanting or chatting, I can measure it against an overall world, see it doing something.
Talking to peasants isn't the point of the game, but talking to peasants allows me to explore the world in more detail. Building a new spell isn't the point of the game, but doing so allows me to interact with the world (usually, kill shit) in a more personalized way.
In things like The Sims and Animal Crossing, these activities feel completely pointless. Sure, I can talk to everyone in town... but why bother? The world is a tiny, shallow place and exploring it is awfully pointless. Sure, I can build a classy house, but what does it matter? My sims are equally pleased by two rooms with a lot of corners. Having a nice house is actually bad, since it takes the sims twenty minutes to walk ten feet.
On the other side of the spectrum, I don't like these activities in MMORPGs, because they do not allow you to approach the world in more detail or from new perspectives. Exploring the world of the World of Warcraft is largely futile, because it's pretty well explored already. It's like "exploring" your local strip mall. There are no surprises, unless you count a 10% off sale on stuff you don't need.
Similarly, crafting weapons or potions is pointless because they have been carefully crippled down to a level of non-uniqueness that a fast food restaurant would be embarrassed about.
These all have the same problem: the creation doesn't let you interact with the world in a meaningful, seemingly unique way. Making potions doesn't give you any real new way of exploring the game, and building a house doesn't matter when there's really no world to explore with it.
Compare these to the examples I do like.
Evil Genius is about creating a house of a sort. I know a lot of people played The Sims like it was Evil Genius...
Evil Genius' house creation system was a lot weaker than The Sims, but to me it was a lot juicier. Every kind of room had a real purpose, every piece of furniture meant something. The layout wasn't just for kicks or to minimize travel time: it was continually tested by hapless tourists and not-so-hapless secret agents.
So, while Evil Genius didn't allow for many of the advanced options that The Sims allowed, it had a strong backbone that actually rewarded you for doing well.
Similarly, in Oblivion potion-making was generally quite rewarding. You could make potions of healing, sure. But it wasn't a matter of combining a rabbit foot and green herb: there were a lot of different ingredients you could use, a lot of side effects you needed to manage, and your skill played a huge part - not in simple pass/fail terms, but in what you could wring out of the ingredients.
Of course, potion making in Oblivion is well known for being one of the most broken systems on the face of the planet... that's something you have to manage, I suppose.
Evil Genius wasn't a spectacularly good game, but it's a great game to learn from. It was certainly the case that some players would be better at building bases than other players! It was definitely a long learning experience, each base slightly better as you learn the basics.
But it never came off as "unbalanced". (Actually, the unbalanced part of the game was personnel, not base construction.) The more successful you were, the more attention you drew.
This kind of adaptive feedback is the only thing I can think of that I predict will be in a lot more games. It allows you to play fast and loose with balance, favoring depth over fairness. And that's what I like.
...
A lot of people love The Sims, and I'm not saying it's bad. Instead, what I think is that these people impose their own world - their own value - onto the people and houses they create. Instead of having a feedback system like Oblivion's potions or Evil Genius' secret bases, the players substitute their own imagination and judgment. It seems to work well, but that's not something I need a game for.
On the other hand, the shallow 1+1=potion of MMORPGs is basically unforgivably bad...
What do you think? Do you like the "boring" parts? Can you think of a game design where crafting combines with massively multiplayer without being infuriating?
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Play Acting
Perhaps the biggest difference between computer games and real-world games is that in a computer game, the player doesn't usually feel compelled to play a certain role.
Thanks to a variety of issues - saves, no respect for NPCs, no ability to improvise or express yourself - computer game players don't really like to stick to their role. Real world games use competitive goals, time pressures, and social pressure to get people to stick to their roles, and even that is often fairly shaky. Some games use these methods (most notably competitive goals), but that frequently makes them unsuitable for the general public.
...
I guess that's really all I have to say on the subject.
Thanks to a variety of issues - saves, no respect for NPCs, no ability to improvise or express yourself - computer game players don't really like to stick to their role. Real world games use competitive goals, time pressures, and social pressure to get people to stick to their roles, and even that is often fairly shaky. Some games use these methods (most notably competitive goals), but that frequently makes them unsuitable for the general public.
...
I guess that's really all I have to say on the subject.
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