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Recently while on the toilet (where I do my most profound thinking) I thought to myself, “Why is killing such a common component in modern video games?”

The answer didn’t jump out at me right away, but upon further contemplation, how many different win conditions can there be? Killing is a natural extension of score keeping. In many games meeting the lose condition also means removal from the game. In cards losing hands don’t get played again, checkers and chess pieces are discarded when captured, and it isn’t such a stretch for a game that includes simulated violence to introduce death as a lose condition.

All entertainment offers us the unique opportunity to tentatively explore situations that otherwise would be too serious to toy with. Topics like violence, sexuality, politics, and religion are common themes, but video games have the distinction of allowing the audience to engage in these taboo activities virtually. This quality has drawn and will continue to draw the attention of outsiders to the medium, especially in the case of simulated killing and sexuality.

Funcom’s claim to fame is the release of aptly named Anarchy Online - a game that was unplayable for months after it went gold. I suppose drawing upon their vast experience in the MMO industry led them to conclude that AoC needed a couple more months in the oven.

Another player claims to be breaking NDA to warn us all of the impending doom of AoC and it’s loyal followers every day, citing such evidence as gear based combat and grind oriented game play. Really at this point I don’t think anybody would really be surprised if these accusations were true. Historically the PvP community that push non-gear based combat and no-grind agendas are great for drumming up hype for your game, but bad for letting customers that like a sub par game and read its forums continue to be satisfied with second rate in peace. So really, I think it’s in an MMO company’s best interest to draw our attention until release and tell everybody including us exactly what we want to hear and then release Forever Quest - a game based on the principals of sucking money out of people that don’t have high standards.

Funcom is taking another two months to polish the game we were expecting. I hope.

Video game technology can’t expand fast enough to meet the demands of players’ imaginations. MMOs are prone to try and please the highest number of players possible, and this is not only leading to poor quality games; it’s leading to disappointed players.

Take one of my favorite examples Guild Wars: they don’t have player housing, they don’t have raids, they don’t have a free range world, they don’t have a lot of PvE content, they have a lot of underused skills, they don’t have swimming or sailing, they don’t have tree climbing, they don’t have jumping. The ONLY thing ArenaNet tried to do was make balanced PvP coexist with fun PvE, and that resulted in PvPrs complaining ArenaNet was catering to PvErs and PvErs complaining ArenaNet was catering to PvPrs.

Player can’t expect games to spring up with all of these systems fully balanced and relevant to the game play. The more bells and whistles you add the harder the balancing act becomes. Guild Wars is still struggling to keep their skill library relevant and balanced. We can’t realistically expect huge lists of features to work out as well as their skill library did, but we should DEMAND that games be released with excellent marks in one or two of these categories.

Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill for the PlayStation are excellent examples of what developers can do with textures, audio, lighting, and story. When playing these games it’s like you’re on another planet, breathing a designer atmosphere.

After Ultima Online many iterations of the MMO concept found that the community the game was designed to put you into contact with was undesirable. The rules governing how players should interact with one another became more and more constrictive until the closest thing to PvP was partying with somebody else and seeing who could grind faster. Even then, I believe players were slowly realizing that interacting with other players is cumbersome. The answer to this was solo content so rich that you could play without speaking to another player indefinitely. With MMOs increasingly going the way of what I would term a collaborative single player experience - the genre is slowly morphing into a single player game without the component critical in heightening your desire to continue the game: ambiance.

So far this works reasonably well. I’m sure there are plenty of WoW players who have never before visited a fantasy RPG world and find the bland and recycled art, sound, level design, etc more than adequate. Unfortunately for developers that would rather rest on their fantasy laurels, eventually the consumer will grow tired of the same generic fantasy mold from which every mainstream MMO seems to be cast.

Really… somebody had to create the Star Wars Universe, the Warcraft universe, somebody wrote the book on Elves and Orcs and Gnomes, Paladins and Rangers and Rogues didn’t write themselves into your D&D rulebooks. Why can’t video game developers man up and create something they and their players can call their own?

I’ll answer my own question: back in the good ol’ days when there was a gold rush nobody bothered to lift a finger to mine gold until they were sure they couldn’t pick it up off the ground or pan for it in the stream.

When your character dies in modern MMOs usually some meager death penalty is applied to prevent you from continuing the game at full effectiveness until you relax for a bit. This has evolved from UO, where player death meant losing all of the items you were carrying and having to travel somewhere safer to be ressurrected, and EQ, where player death meant losing a large amount of experience points and then having to travel BACK into danger to retrieve your corpse. Both of these systems met some pretty heavy consumer opposition for obvious reasons. However, there exists a minority of hardcore players that believe that once a character dies, that player should be removed from the game world.

The path of current MMOs towards massive time investments into experience point and wealth pools and the path of permadeath of permanently removing these pools from the game world will never collide. Most significantly the types of players that flock to these respective gamestyles play different games. You won’t find somebody on EVE online where maxing all of a characters skills would take decades asking for permadeath (unless they are mentally unstable or haven’t considered my following paragraph).

Permadeath itself has a number of problems other than being incompatible with grind games. Firstly, if the death of a character is a significant setback, then there will be a segment of the community that plays in the most defensive way possible in order to survive the longest. This segment will (in a grind game setting) eventually vastly overpower everybody else feeding a positive feedback loop with no end short of game moderator intervention. The problems leading up to this rise of this group of overpowered players is twice as annoying as the group itself and can be found in games even without permadeath. In Diablo2 for example, third party programs made it nearly impossible to die through a variety of means including killing the program or logging out all before the players health can reach zero. Even in oldschool Ultima Online when players had relatively worthless amounts of items they were risking in PvP, often they would only engage (read: not speedhack away from) players who were significantly less prepared than they were.

My conclusion is that until player creation and death can be completely reworked to even be PLEASANT relative to today’s games, permadeath won’t happen.

Consider a game where a player could be 99.9% effective within only 3 or 4 hours of creating a new character. If that player dies and the character is deleted, then the morale hit wouldn’t be nearly as hard as on WoW where getting individual items (that AREN’T the best) can take longer than a day’s play.

I experienced firsthand Auran’s failure of epic proportions: Fury. Check out this interview with Adam Carpenter wherein Adam explains just what was sucking the life force out of this game during its development, and also theorizes that PvE will melt Fury’s problems away. Fat chance.

Since release Auran has been focusing on damage control and sustaining a playerbase. Unfortunately most of the people who tried their (much too early) beta or their (much too early) free trials will never consider coming back to try Fury again. Their only hope is to attract the few that would come back and also catch the few stragglers that didn’t get wind of the hype and try the game when it was still garbage. How do they plan to do this? Why, PvE of course! They intend to use NPC killing instances to allow people a slower-paced training ground. To me this is just another attempt to dodge the real problem at hand: the item and skillset imbalances between new and experienced players. If every player started with the ability to use the max equipment and use all of the skills, at least in PvP he would have a larger HP buffer to allow him some time to try his skills out.

After reading Adam Carpenters interview I realize I may have been wrong about Auran when I said they were all in it for the money. Adam Carpenter seems to sincerely believe that EverQuest-esque items and skill-unlock grinding aren’t impeding Fury’s progress toward becoming a legitimately competitive PvP game. He’s wrong.

I wish the Auran team members that survived the layoffs luck with their PvE instances.

Designing games for the ‘casual gamer’ has been very much in vogue for the past couple of years at least. If you look at the back of any PC game box in your local store most likely you will see this pair of words used in such choice phrases as “for the casual gamer” or “with the casual gamer in mind”.

The Marketing Department’s concept of a casual gamer is somebody who doesn’t devote large quantities of time to a video game in one sitting. The idea is to expand the video game consumer base to include people with daily responsibilities or hectic lives that just won’t allow 36 hour Counter Strike marathons.

My point of contention is that any game can be played casually. Yes. Any game. Any game can be divided into packets an hour or less long and played incrementally as slowly as anyone might choose to. The exception is, not enough ‘casual gamers’ are buying video games, so Phil from Marketing writes “Hey pal, we made this just for you,” right on the box.

In an MMO the more time you spend playing the better you are with virtually no exceptions. How “for casual gamers” makes it onto any of these boxes is anyone’s guess, but the problem is when designing games, is it acceptable to sacrifice depth and complexity for a game that is more accessible? Does an accessible game make a game for casual gamers? I think not on both counts.

Age of Conan could be poised to be the next in a long line of games to break its promises on skill based PvP. Somehow these games always get pushed in the direction of adding large, intentionally imbalanced item libraries to promote addictive behavior — searching for the next best item. I suppose it’s easier than making a game addictive by sheer entertainment value.

Slate reports:

“Airline executives should rush to the Haunted Mansion in the Magic Kingdom. Our heads sank when we approached and saw the sign advertising a 15-minute wait. Despair turned to elation when we were ushered into the spooky entry hall in just a few minutes. This experience was repeated time and again—at rides and restaurants—where promised delays of 20 minutes miraculously shrank in half. After a few days, it became apparent that this might be a conscious strategy of underpromising and overdelivering. Which is precisely the opposite of the tack airlines have taken lo these many years. The carriers continually promise that planes will leave or arrive at a specific time, when they know the probability of an on-time departure is only slightly greater than the probability of your suitcase being the first item to hit the luggage carousel.”

It’s also precisely the opposite of what MMO developers deliver. MMOs love to promise optimistic feature lists and launch times and pretty consistently fall short — very short. Producers demanding deadlines be met and hype be created, musings by staff members who contribute nothing to the development of the games they represent, and the assumption that it’s alright for an online game to ship buggy since it can be patched later all accumulate into games that leave ugly wakes upon their release. Sometimes these games never recover from under-delivering (Anarchy Online, Horizons, possibly with the addition of Fury) and simply vanish with their only hope of surviving being a tiny loyal fanbase simply sticking it out until things stop sucking or launching a significant publicity campaign once the game is playable.

UGO.com reports:

“Tabula Rasa does do something very new in the MMO genre with the cloning feature. As you progress in levels, you are given the opportunity to clone your character so you don’t have to re-roll your character. In other words, you clone a level 15 or 25 or whatever so you can try two different classes. No starting completely over.”

That’s very interesting considering Guild Wars players have never been troubled with re-rolling characters. If that is what Tabula Rasa has to offer in the way of innovation maybe we really are doomed.