The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (PUBLIC) The Pub From the Austin Game Developers Conference

I don't know if any of you have been reading any of the stuff coming out of the AGD. Here's transcript of a talk given by Damien Schubert, one of the the designers of Shadowbane, not at BioWare Austin.

http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/09/08/agc-damion-schubert-moving-beyond-men-in-tights/

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AGC: Damion Schubert, “Moving Beyond Men in Tights”

Damion Schubert, Lead Combat Designer for Bioware Austin
The question to answer, why do we keep making grindtastic class-based combat oriented men in tights gamey games?

I’m not going to answer “because it sells” because it’s a circular argument and a copout. We won’t get anywhere if we only do what was done before.

Instead, I’ll ask why do we need a grind, why do games appear to be winning, why are classes good, and so on.

The reason to tackle this is because whenever people decide to make a new game, these are often the first five things people choose to innovate on. But there’s a lot of bad innovation from people trying to solve these five problems. So here is explanations for the status quo. My dirty secret is that I like these games — getting loot, killing monsters, and in the game vs world debate, I am on the game side.

So I am here to explain the status quo, so that we can innovate smarter. We get very myopic as an industry about what people are actually looking for in innovation. This plagues every industry. Take the mobile phone — for years the companies have been trying to attach ridiculous stuff to the phones, despite the fact that research shows that nobody cares about anything except size, battery life, and that you didn’t call someone when you sat down on it. Then came RAZR and it’s small, long battery life and a clamshell. Best selling phone in years. Actually listening to the customers and understanding their needs is a core function of game design.

Smart innovation is important because there’s the 600 lb gorilla called WoW. WoW is Coke — they are stomping everyone. Getting 1% of WoW is hard. By the time you finish your game, they will be 3-5 years richer. Unless you have Pepsi money, you can’t go head to head. You have to be Red Bull. Or Snapple, although Coke bought Snapple…

Responses to WoW:
- Crazy innovation, stuff that isn’t cost effective or that people don’t actually want. “Ant farming” — system design that is more interesting to watch than to play.
- the producer who says WWWoWD? What would WoW do. We all hate that guy.
- Smart innovation. Which is what WoW did. The first game not to release in a shameful state. But more importantly, WoW was soloable. After years of all of us saying “but you need grouping.” That was their core innovation that gave them the 10x multiplier.

1. Combat-oriented

This question comes from outside the industry. Why is everything about fighting, killing orcs? The easy answer is because it sells. Another answer is that’s all our industry knows how to make — 25 year worth of practice. But also because videogames are a good medium for a visceral experience. The game shelf is a lot like going to a movie rental place where every movie is Die Hard.

Combat presents a tactical problem that you are solving in real time. Combat is not the only solution. Take Puzzle Pirates, which replaced combat with puzzles. Compare this to crafting in most games — the actual act of crafting is not very interesting. You don’[t need combat, but you need the tactical problem.

You also need to have a game challenge that is repeatable. People WANT to play these games for hours and hours a month because this is where they spend their social time. Combat doesn’t need to be the only activity. Consider Civas a repeatable game, versus Myst which isn’t. You don’t need combat, but you do need a repeatable experience.

If you are making a multiplayer game you need co-op. People talk about PvP first, but the future is co-op play. We talked about solo in WoW, but co-op is still what differentiates us from a single-player game. Crafting you really have to splint to get co-op working on a tactical level. You don’t need combat, but you need group play.

Combat is scalable. You can go from solo up to raids, with the same experience. It also escalates in complexity. Lots of folks say that MMO combat is easy but they have never walked away from a WoW rogue for a year and then tried to play again and remember how to play the damn thing. Our games teach you how to play gradually and you forget how much you have learned. Combat scales very gracefully. You don’t need combat but you do need the escalation and the scalability.

2. Classes

Must all MMOs have classes to be successful? No, but classes do have advantages. I have seen a lot of bad RPGs that do not take into account some of these good qualities:

You don’t need classes, but you do need player roles that are easy to balance, maintain, and expand. If you add a class to WoW, you only need to check against 8 other classes. Adding a new role to a skill-based system is a combinatorial problem. You can structure your skill system around this, but you still have to take it into account. And players do want change and additions.

You don t need classes, but you do need to allow making character choices without fear. Has anyone ever watched a focus group at character creation? People will spend all day customizing their appearance with no fear. People like that. But people agonize over choices that matter. Players have been trained that choices are irrevocable. There was a study not long ago about choice in supermarket aisles, and they found that expanding the jam choices makes it harder to pick one to buy.

You don’t need classes, but you need players to easily find each other. Classes are one way to do that. They are wonderful shorthand. This is much easier than saying “I need 90% healing, 90% resurrection and 85% cure poison.”

You don’t need classes, but you need tactical transparency for PvP. A lot of fans think that it is cool when you don’t know what abilities the opponent has. This is of course wrong. Chess is a game with perfect tactical transparency. A more interesting example is poker. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, if you watched a movie with poker, you saw five card draw. For my entire life until 3 years ago, that was poker. But then texas Hold ‘Em came along, tactical transparency appears, and poker hits the mainstream. For an MMO in PvP, you need to be able to see the tactics the other can use, or else you push the game away from tactical choices and towards twitch. In Shadowbane we had the ability to summon other players. This was powerful because it was all about bringing reinforcements from their death spawn back to the front. So you had to disrupt the logistics. Then we created a discipline that like a class but there was no way to tell who had it, and it set everything higgley-piggledy.

You don’t ned classes, but you do need roles with strongly different experiences. Stealth and summon in Shadowbane turned out to be the most powerful abilities, to get groups behind enemy lines. With classes, we were able to keep those in separate classes easily. In WoW they can push rogues to the limit as a type because they know there is no overlap with others.

3. Grindtastic.

Do we really have to keep coming back to experience points and levels? The experience point is the most maligned tool, and yet it works great, and is the hardest thing to replace.

You don’t need levels and XP, but you do need to allow players to quickly know where they are int he pecking order in PvE and in PvP. You need to be able to tell whether something is tough. There are players who advocate “run in and die” as a superior solution. These players are not the majority.

You don’t have to use levels and XP, but the game needs to reward devotion more than skill. Our business model as it stands right now depends on devotion. If the business model changes, this becomes much less of an issue. Even if you believe Raph is right and we need lifestyle games, you will still need devotion. Also, the problem with skill is that not a lot of players have it.

You don’t need levels and XP, but you need a reason not to cancel. I will torpedo my own argument a bit by showing a UO house. EQ used levels, and created this horrible grind. But the more MMOs you play, the more inoculated to these tools. Everyone has no cancelled at least one high level character and at least one house. My fiancee has played each successive MMO half as long as the previous one. These tricks stop working on you. They also don’t always encourage healthy behavior. But you still need to give these reasons.

You don’t need levels and XP, but big thresholds work better than small ones. One of the best experiences in an RPG is going back to a monster that beat the tar out of you in the past and beating the snot out of them. If advancement curve is too slow you won’t notice the ding. Threshold advancement is even better when they are not levels –getting your last name in EQ at 20, getting your mount in WoW at level 40.

Yo don’t need levels or XP, but your advancement system should not create unrealistic behaviors if you want realism. I hate use-based systems, and I’ve built one. In EQ people jamming keys to run off a cliff to build up falling skill. You build use based systems to be more realistic, but if they cause spastic behavior, then… like the dark assassin in Oblivion who skips through fields of flowers because he needs both jumping and the flowers for his poison. Happy sunshine assassin.

You don’t need levels and XP, but players want continual rewards for their play style. There is a huge amount of people in WoW who are pissed because they got to 60 and they cannot play their solo game anymore. They want their current play style track to be never ending. You may have to come up with alternate schemes to give that, like alternate advancement points in EQ.

Most importantly, you don’t need levels and XP, but don’t confuse the delivery mechanism with the reward. The problem is not the levels, it’s the grind. WoW’s hidden innovation is actually the pacing and reward structure of quests. What’s important in what they do that quests are rewarding enough that you do them (which is already different from many mmoS) and that send you all over the world rather than letting you sit in one place. The result levelling doesn’t feel like grinding (though gathering cloth in WoW does!)

4. Men in tights.

Are we doomed to always make fantasy tights? There are good reasons why we keep making fantasy and it’s not because we don’t try other things.

You don’t need fantasy but you do need a fiction with resonance. Compare Civ to Alpha Centauri. How many of you played Alpha Centauri, and then after 15 minutes said, “I feel like playing some Civ”? I think this is why EQ beat AC. People logged in and they didn’t know how to pronounce the names.

You don’t need fantasy, but you do need a setting that is doublecoded. Two different meanings carried n the same content. Bugs Bunny has jokes kids will never understand, but the kids still laugh at the rest. Animaniacs is another. Compare that watching Blue’s Clues with your kids — as a parent it’s like killing yourself slowly. This is Rob pardo’s donut concept. You need both codings for a successful game. Shadowbane was all hardcore. AC2 was all casual, and pissed off a lot of the hardcore that loved AC1. A good franchise appeals to both markets. A lot of folks say that fantasy is all pimplenosed geeks in the basement, and there is that, but that’s the hardcore fantasy market.But don’ forget that LOTR is one of the highest grossing movies of all time. And if you go to craft store, you will find a huge number of wizards, unicorns, fairies, and dragons all over.

You don’t need fantasy but you need an inviting world. People want to spend their spare time here. This is their corner bar. Even the bad guys in WoW are cute and funny. It’s still inviting. I’ve seen numerous games say they want to make post-apocalyptic games. Who wants to live there? You may want to visit, but who wants to spend 200 hours a month in a grim and dirty place? Shadowbane was a depressing place.

You don’t need fantasy, but you need a world where the player starts out larger than life. City of heroes does this better than anyone. Even though it’s a multiplayer game, players want to be better than normal. Fantasy has this meme built into it. Even the crafters have this — they don’t want to be just another crafter, they want to be the best crafter in britain.

You don’t need fantasy, but you need content that elevates with the character advancement. Fantasy has challenges that go along with the advancement, helping you feel like a badass. Orcs then ogres then zombies. Compare to a Western game — level 1 you kill a guy in black hat, level two, it’s a guy with a bigger black hat, level ten it’s two guys with black hats…? But fantasy has this naturally.

It doesn’t have to be fantasy, but you need a wide variety to content. Right after EQ came out, two games said they would make Viking worlds, and I knew they would fail, because EQ had a Viking MMO in their world already, and an Aztec one, and an Oriental one… Fantasy encompasses lots. CoH has a variety of content problem — at low levels everyone you fight is a humanoid. A sense of sameness starts to grind on you. Sometimes it even feels like you get less powerful, because you kill more humanoids, but less of them.

It doesn’t have to be fantasy, but group play needs constant involving activities for everyone. What’s up with Aquaman? With the Superfriends, he has to wait for someone to fall in a fish tank to be useful. But fantasy has tropes for a wide array of roles that are always needed. You always need all the roles to be contributing to the core activity. And

You don’t need to deliver fantasy, but you do need to have a vision and deliver it. When I was at EA they flirted with a Harry Potter MMO, and I asked them what the play was, and they said “yeah, you’ll kill rats and stuff.” How much fighting is there in Harry Potter?

Licenses have these tropes built in. Consider Stargate, because Stargate is a license about instanced squad-based combat. But there is one problem — both the TV show as well as the movie have an archaeologist who can’t do anything. He gets captured a lot and hides behind rocks. Chris Klug described it as one o the core challenges. Highlander is one of my favorite licenses, and it has massive appeal. Great geek appeal, doublecoded, surprising mass market awareness. The problem with Highlander is permadeath. The only rule in the franchise that cannot b broken is “there can be only one.” Does that mean you can’t do Highlander? n, but you have to solve that problem. And Star Trek — Star Trek is about NOT fighting. It’s about diplomacy., There’s a sense that the crew has failed if you resort to a fight. But how do you make a repeatable experience out of that? I am really interested to see how they address this problem.

5. Gamey games.

Are the worlds dead? I am a gamey guy, but I noticed that it is a dichotomy set up by the world guys to make themselves feel important. Not that I am bitter. A funny thing happened along the way, and the games won. EQ, WoW. Management teams for UO and SWG have backtracked and put in more gamey stuff. So here’s advice for the worldy games:

Make a world, but protect your young. Don’t kick ‘em out with a nickel and a bus pass. The gamey games are fanatical about protecting newbies.

Make a world, but don’t depend on players finding their own fun. Some enjoy it, but most don’t. In the Sims online, there was a way to find the stuff tat was good — you don’t want users to wade through crap.

Make a world, but obsess over fairness. Players say they value freedom above all, but that ends the day the game ships. Then they become obsessed with whether it is fair and whether it is balanced. Is your role valued, is your experience impeded by someone else.

Make a world, because they aren’t as dead as they look. The demise of worlds has been exaggerated. Second life, Eve, Runescape all came out. They are the ones that have done well, compared to the gamey games in the wake Wow, they are doing better than Auto Assault, Matrix Online, etc. Eve freely ignores my whole talk, pretty much. And it is doing great.

Conclusion

So if you really want to make worlds, do it. I’m not saying don’t innovate. I feel like I have to say this since I defended the status quo for an hour. Don’t over innovate, but be sure you improve the player experience. Provide innovations worth the bang for the buck. And when in doubt, be true to the Vision. The Vision has a bad rep after EverQuest, but IMHO the Vision is what EQ did right — they stuck to it through hell and high water. WoW had a vision, this soloable game. The stuff that WoW cut is the stuff that we would have thought as sacrosanct a few years ago. Boats, housing, good guild support…

Survivor, American idol, Lost, and Desperate Housewives. Some of the biggest hits of the last five years in TV. All four of these almost never saw the light of day. Survivor — they had so little faith they made the production company pay the ads themselves. American Idol even got pitched to the WB. And there was already a megahit in Britain. The only reason it made it to the air is because Rupert Murdoch’s daughter loved it in the UK and told her daddy to put it on the air. Desperate Housewives was on the market for a year. And Lost — the guy who came up with the idea was FIRED six months before the pilot aired, and the only reason it made it to air was because it was too expensive NOT to show it.

We talk about how we’re a young industry — bu TV is still struggling with this problem with 60-70 years. Identifying innovation is hard.

Always b true to yourself. This is the important thing. Eve and Earth and Beyond came out at the same time.If you were a betting man, you would have been an idiot to bet on EvE. E&B had a great team , money, marketing. Eve had a dedication to a vision, and E&B tried to make Everquest in space. And you know what? It turns out that everquest doesn’t work that well in space. Eve kept to their mantra, and they won.

Thanks.

Questions:

- Is the world a subset of the game, or the reverse, what are the attributes of a world versus a game?

How guided the experience is… Worlds focus more on realism than games do. The best games are not of either strain, and tend to be very focused. (referencing the Schubert Triangle).

- I’m a former LARPer. Given that we need to expand the market to justify budgets, how can you suggest sticking to fantasy, when mass market doesn’t want to be nerds and think that night elves with boobs falling out of chain mail is ludicrous and creepy?

I think a lot of people lose sight of the fact that almost any genre can be mass market with the proper treatment. Consider Lost again — they tell good stories and strong characters. Similarly, five years ago you would have thought that fantasy games would never get out of 300k, 350k. Everyone remember looking for the million? But WoW touched those themes and is still mass market. Lord of the Rings is very very mass market. It’s about keeping both audiences in mind.

- a comment, making games for nerds. Martha Stewart is a nerdy franchise, just a different sort of nerd. There are a lot of topics we obsess about.

We can lose sight of what casual and hardcore mean, Just about anything has casual and hardcore. My fiancee is a hardcore knitter. You would not believe the contraptions and yarn she has. And there are lots of casual knitters. Everyone says that Sims is casual, but there are some freaky hardcore Sims players making furniture and diaries. It’s not about whether the license is hardcore and casual, it is whether it has a hardcore and a casual component. Idol has both too — message board folks and dinnertime watchers.

- A lot of folks like science fantasy and SF. But swords and sorcery is way more popular than rayguns. There’s way more scifi movies. And the tropes are similar.

I think that there are a couple of reasons. Fantasy is about characters, and SF as a genre is about ideas, which translate to movies well, but don’t translate to “creating an alter ego and going into a virtual space.” And sci fi has a million flavors that are all incredibly different from each other — Star Wars and Star Trek are radically different, and there’s a ton of other variants. Whereas fantasy has kind of congealed, for better or for worse, so you can relate easily.

- I don’t think ranged combat works as well in our traditional model of MMO combat.

Absolutely. That goes back to feeling like the fantasy — if you don’t feel like you are a combat marine with a laser…

- can’t help but wonder if they had mad World of Starcraft, would we be sitting here saying ‘fantasy is the problem.”

It only takes one person to come along and change the rules. A lot of times people confuse bad execution with concluding something is a bad idea. Consider WW2 Online. A lot of people wrote off the idea, even though it was the execution. hen comes Battlefield 1942. I am thankful that WoW had PvP because otherwise, Shadowbane could have killed it, as people took the lesson that PvP would never work. And now Wow has more PvP servers than PvE.

- Success confers virtue. When EQ was out, it was grind, group. Now it’s woW and it’s solo and so on. When things are successful, we say that there must be something about that.

And if you are trying to steal their customer, there’s nothing wrong with going with what is familiar. You can’t beat Coke with RC Cola, but you can differentiate while still not alienating folk coming from Coke. Make your innovation marketing bullet points. Shadowbane got city sieges, and it had more Google hits than SWG on th day it shipped… of course, it turned out that you couldn’t join a siege until you were 50, which caused problems.

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Good article! Glad to see that he mentioned Eve, well a couple times at least.

good read

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You don’t have to use levels and XP, but the game needs to reward devotion more than skill. Our business model as it stands right now depends on devotion. If the business model changes, this becomes much less of an issue. Even if you believe Raph is right and we need lifestyle games, you will still need devotion. Also, the problem with skill is that not a lot of players have it.

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So true

The interesting thing about the Eve references is that Eve runs counter to so much of the conventional wisdom. Free for all PvP (at least in 0.0 space). Skills, not levels. Science fiction, not fantasy.

Goes to show that defining a 'good' game is very difficult, at best.

yea really I have no skill, bishop needs to learn me some more !!~

He definitely writes a good article, I like how he keeps you reading with starting each paragraph with
"You don’t need fantasy but..."
"You don’t need levels but..."

It's almost like he's going against his own idea yet once you finish reading the sentence you see the point he's making.

But like Owain said, for all the wisdom he's seemingly spilling out to us, it's mostly/sorta shot down by successful examples like Eve or early UO. Not that he doesn't have great ideas, but it shows even he doesn't understand it all and the perfect game is still lost someplace out there.

That's because there is no perfect game for everyone. Only the potential to have the perfect game for each individual.

Yeah the guy was just saying that this is the general formula for a good game, but EVE and UO broke those rules, had their own vision they stuck to (like DF !) and succeeded, so even though "there is" a formula... at the same time there isn't.

Damien is dead on. There are FAR too many design teams trying to recreate the wheel.

I want to pull what's left of my hair out sometimes listening to new pitches about "Oh, WE'RE going to do MMOs right!" and give this terrible concept like DnL had about 40,000 square miles of territory that would take hours to find a mob.

That's not innovative. Or fun. Just stupid.

The worst though are all of those teams out there that don't employ sound procedures and technique because they are an "organic team".

In my experience "organic" means "soon to be out of business".