For the armchair game designers among you..

[Deleted]

As someone involved in designing and building an MMO though, I am interested to know - what do the members of this community look for in an MMO? What would make an MMO a "killer app" for people that might read this and care to respond? I'm interested in hearing anything and everything people might want to see in an MMO released within the next 5 years or so... if you were hired as a designer for a game studio tomorrow, what would you make?

Alright. If I could, I would make a sci-fi MMO with the following:

I would make a game that really tries to give a satisfying teamplay experience. A focused game that isn't afraid of being unappealing to solo players. That gives it a lot more freedom to make the teamplay part BETTER than other games. Gameplay should revolve around small groups of players working as a team, with the game guiding them towards common objectives. The goal is to make the player feel like an integral part of his team by designing combat around specialized roles (but not the usual dps/tank/healer trinity. More roles, especially different roles than what we're used to see. A sci-fi setting has lots of room for new roles). Great care should be taken to streamline the teamplay experience basically - I personally think that modern MMO's do a surprisingly bad job at this (healing = staring at bars and other such sins).

On a larger scale, the game type would be faction vs faction vs faction. Two factions is too static, three is dynamic and leaves room for self-regulation. Outdoor zones plus instanced areas.

I would also take great care to give sandbox elements their firm place in the game. They empower the player and everybody wants to express himself in the game in some way. Let players build and combine things in whatever way they wish. In a sci-fi setting, modular ships similar to EVE online's T3 ships are a nice idea. At the very top there should modular stations and carrier ships that players can aspire to build, or destroy. Their number should be artificially limited to make sure they stay special and to avoid the endgame becoming all about getting more stations or carriers (or similar economical arms races).

The skill system should be fluid and open. Players gain skillpoints and can spend them on skills. There is a limit to how many skills a player can have. The skills broadly define the role of the player. Skills can be gradually re-assigned over time. Equipment narrowly defines the role of the player and how he gets things does. Equipment can be changed without limitation when docked, but some equipment requires certain skills.

Randomization, in particular randomizing enemies, their abilities and so on, is a tool that hasn't been used much in MMO's. I think there's a lot of potential to do interesting stuff with it.

[Deleted]

1. Non grindy questing. Questing is supposed to be fun and engaging, and most of all it should be story driven - and obviously the story has to be good. This is something Blizzard has never been able to pull of, and even now when they tried in Cataclysm they didn't get all the way through.
2. Gameplay that could be called "next-gen". Guild Wars 2 looks like it can pull that of pretty well not because it is entirely different but because the changes they have made are big enough to give you a knew kind of experience. This is my pet-peeve about SW:ToR for example, as the combat is practically going to be identical to other hot-key mmos like WoW or RIFT. GW2 goes in a different direction and I love that.
3. Player versus Player has to be balanced and consistent. You can't have sweeping changes every patch, you can't have such large swings in potency for classes so that one patch they are great and the next they are somehow punished for having been powerful before and get the "To the ground!"-treatment. Again, Blizzard has had a major fail in this regard, they always changed things even when things were okay as if they only did it in order to say "look at me I AM working". Consistency is key, if you have been attached to a class (and thus a character) for a long time and suddenly said class is almost changed entirely over night then you will feel alienated - ex-Paladin talking here.

[sephrael]

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I didn't really need to know the implementation details or design philosophies that some people offered up as well - I've known not to listen to the playerbase since I was 14 and playing around with MUDs - but I appreciate it anyways. Some of the things my team and I have been messing around with..

Sandboxing / Player-created content: I think a lot of the suggestions about sandbox-related play is spot on, and someone specifically mentioned things like Minecraft and whatnot are where things are going in the future and is the reason those games are so popular, and I agree with that completely. My team has been working on a more "living world" setting for an MMO; namely, there's things like trade caravans and whatnot passing between towns and cities that affect the prices of goods, and players can get into things like banditry or guarding said caravans, or running their own stores and whatnot.. the biggest problem we've been running into as far as that goes is trying not to make the world too big. Right now it takes a few hours to traverse the world by foot, and thinking about tightening that up because there's lots of empty spaces. Maybe at some point we can add procedural content for that, but maybe post-launch.

The big thing that my team put together was essentially giving guilds and later houses (groups of guilds) the ability to actually develop their own city-states in unclaimed territories or acquire control of a territory from the empire that owns it, and that gives them a bunch of bonuses and resources to play around with. The idea was shamelessly borrowed from Eve Online-style alliances and nullsec space but in an RPG scope, and more importantly it interacts with the NPC empires and isn't just a static space open for conquest.

We also played with the idea of player-generated content but we feel there's a fine line between things like.. SWG-style villages and EQ2-style houses with collections and whatnot versus Second Life-style content generation which is something we don't really want to get into.. for obvious reasons.

Skills / Levels: When we were doing the design work for this we never really hammered out a solid idea of what we want and now we're paying for it. Someone mentioned level-less design and I kind of liked that idea, but it has some problems like being able to quickly differentiate if someone can beat the shit out of you or not. A lot of people are used to to the level dynamic. That being said, it'd be interesting. As of right now we're sort of going with a hybrid. There are levels, but then there's a second set of skills that work similar to AA in Everquest (for those that remember it). At this point we haven't decided if those skills are going to be time-based (developing based on the age of the character) or if they are going to be experience or some other kind of point basis. Either way, they affect things more like stats, where we used talents to specifically modify abilities. We're also toying with the idea of putting the more powerful crafting recipes in the "AA" advancement system, but yeah. Right now, this is the most fluid part of the game in the design phase.

Story / PvE: As someone that hates mindless questing but enjoys story, I agree with everyone that a coherent story and quests that are not excessively dull are an important thing. Also, we're trying pretty hard to figure out a way to make players' progress relevant to the game world - it always annoyed me that after fighting off demons and Illidan and Ragnaros and saving Garrosh and whatnot that I got bossed around like a chump in Icecrown. We'd like to move away from that, but finding ways to integrate into the game world without making it really easy for someone to dominate it is hard. On the other hand though, most of my team is of the mind that if you put enough work into it, you deserve the recognition. One thing I really liked was the conversations and interactive speech that TOR offers, and we're contemplating doing something like that towards the end of the project as time allows - we're actually using the same MMO engine as TOR uses, so it's certainly plausible. But somewhat low on the priority list.

PvP: I liked the idea of Team Leads that DAoC had and I agree, that game was probably one of the most balanced for PvP I've ever seen. Ideally I would like to get players involved with PvP balancing because developers tend to be biased towards their creations - by the same token though, I've seen things go poorly with player representation, like the CSM in Eve Online, and I wouldn't want to get myself hamstrung by my own playerbase. Probably at some point I'm going to have to beg, borrow or steal someone that's good with PvP theorycraft to help us with the initial balancing, but we are trying to aim more towards a semi-restricted world pvp model with a few battlegrounds as opposed to a complete PvE solution. We'll see when we get there I guess.

And someone mentioned controls and character design: YES. It completely blows my mind how often some studios forget that your character is going to be the number one object in the game a player will interact with the most, so making sure that the character moves fluidly and doesn't feel kludgy or looks like a clown or whatnot is critical and I stressed that point to our team very early on. As for art style, well, the setting is more of a science fantasy thing so you see things like steampunk, or magitek-ish, stuff like that.

Anyways.

The ideas put forth by you guys have been pretty awesome so far and has confirmed for me at least somewhat that my team is on the right track. Feel free to continue to contribute, or if someone wants to know more about my larval project I'm more than happy to talk about it some more.

[Deleted]

I can't really think of anything else to add but would like to emphasise the point about the controls and character design, the reason i stopped playing rift and warhammer was simply because of how clunky and jittery it feels, it's really the make or break for a lot of people.

[xxAkirhaxx]

You're asking something to broadly. What audience do you want?

Do you want the uber nerd like me? Make Skyrim an MMO. Add more steam punk. Make it ball bustingly difficult and complex.

Do you want the stay at home moms who play Farmville all day? Make it simple and make it accessible. Add in achievements, points, and pretty colors for good measure.

No matter what you do, polish it. The simplest little things make games much more fun. Do the characters run in proportion to there footsteps? Do they make sounds when they run? Does jumping feel intuitive? Can the character even jump? Does the shadow of a tree take into account the position of a real sun above the sky? It's the very small things that make a game stand out from the crowd.

[Durandro]

- Skill curve has to be progressive (WoW isn't anymore since 4.0).
- Balance is important at all levels (yet again, WoW isn't since 4.0).

WoW has always been this way. Sorry to burst your bubble.

[sephrael]

You're asking something to broadly.

I realize, but it's intentional. I've asked this question in other communities as well, knowing that in general the MMO-C community tends to favor things like.. more hardcore play, or at least nerdier play, as opposed to casual Facebook style social games.

I'm not really interested in making a casual Facebook style social game. IMHO, that's an arena that seems a lot more dangerous to develop in because not only do you have to contend with games that are entirely based and funded off MTs but you deal with privacy issues and having to be popular or whatnot.. it's just not my own personal interest.

At some point once we get closer to testing I would probably look around for a group of people that are more in line with the target audience and drill down and make sure my features are what they want. Here and now, my interest was more to see in general what people want because having this discussion in places like GDnet yields a whole lot of "well, my project is super secret and I don't want anyone to steal my ideas" and people on MMO-C are if nothing else outspoken :P

EDIT: And in general, seeing/participating/starting a game design conversation on MMO-C that's not about how WoW sucks or something along those lines feels refreshing to me.

[Arteous]

I have a feeling a partial sandbox with themepark elements would be extremely popular. First off you're going to have to decide on a target audience, and how you want them to interact with each other.

First off character customization. While today's standards SWG doesn't have the best graphics it probably had the best customizatoin ever for the looks of your character. not 3 basic body types but alot more than that. arm length leg weight shoulder span eye angle eye height eye width same with mouth ect.

Content. SWG had a trinity that kept 3 groups of people playing a long time.

Crafters- They take pride in good they make and make a name for themselves for making the best consumeables in the game (armor/buffs/weapons) (includes gathering)
I'm sure world of warcraft would have pure chefs and alchemists only that would hit max level so they can gather materials and spend the enitre day making that perfect food or other item buff that gave the most stats than anyone ealse could make.

Socialites - It is an MMO people tend as an example in wow to stand arround in cities talking and using it as a 3d chat room. in swg entertainers had a function while they did this all day they also provided needed buffs and heals to the people in the next class. even the crafters could seek out these to buff themselves somehow to make the best goods possible

Combatants. while they depend on the first two they also are depended on. Who is going to go out and take the best gear they can and hunt down the toughest challenges to get something to use to so they can get a crafter to make them uber item x or uber buff y. at the same time they also rely on buffs from socialites. Look at EQ rangers that barely did anything but sell ranger buffs. SWG there were Doctors (stat buffers) that crafted the best possible buffs they could (hybird social/crafter) and sat arround all day selling these buffs the combatants needed. Crafters and socialites paid combatants for items they would want that will make them better at what they do. (imagine in Wow if you could get an special item from a boss that made an uber item crafted by a waponsmith/armor smith? or even alchemist? or an extra engrident that could double the effectivness of an enchant)

skill sytem some kind of templates need to be in place but with ability to leech skills or have optinal vocation skills tht others might not mix/match. it's kind of hard to explain now but i could go over it later. (tired)

Combat sytem must be sowmhat simple but not too simple. I think the traditional mmo sticky targeting with cooldowns should be fine. 3rd person shooters are still to niche if people want to play an fps they can do that without paying a montly fee.

This kind of trinity will keep any game that can balance all 3 with a long term subscriber base.

Now for the sandbox portion. SWG player housing. unfortunatly too much abuse to shut down spawn points ect were abound so some kind of static area where housing can be done. Even if just a "guild housing" both would be warranted. Alot of people take pride of things they achieve. Weather it's some uber buff or item from a boss or outfit a socialite has. public and private versoins would work for showing off such. Again imagine if in WoW there was an instance hall where i could walk in and see the trophies of every boss that guild has killed lined up on walls. The guild officers could decorate it with tier armors members donate to show off. uber weapons crafted and used. Same applies to the armor/weapon crafters where they can setup displays of items they have made even showcase their best ever crafted items.

Personally i think i'd say something like a Cyberpunk type setting is due for a good mmo. No not that pos matrix. combined with the trinity and sandbox features above with raid instances and 5 mans and finally player v.s. player you can make for a great game.

Wait you said pvp and pve both making a great game but one will imba th other?? By putting the best gear in the hands of the crafters the PVPers can purchase these items from them. now they will become gatherers of sorts to maintain their pvp habbit but again this is something the crafters need. pvpers get in good with crafters to get their needed items and the pver's also get in good with the crafters to get their armor. Both sets share same stats no division that can cause pvp armor be better than pve ect it's all the same. all protects the same relative. tank type armor pve and tank type armor pvp protect the same.

Visuals. Armor customization. What your character wears has to be somewhat customizeable. nothing can piss off a player more if they look like crap for 6 months to a year in their opinion. see transmorg and other visual sytems used in mmo's. But mainly color customization of gear even weapons is very important this goes a long way. I would of loved to been able to have black and bronze Dragonstalker armor instead of purple.

those would be my first base concepts for an mmo the base skeleton idea. i swear i wish i knew how to program and had the resources to make something like this happen.

[Thoelle]

Yesterday i read a really well wrote wall of text about wow and its current state. Within alot of good reading, it was argued that the players knew all to much about the whole game: Databases like Wowhead which includes almost everything in the game from Dungeons, BGs, loot, Lore, quest and loads of other stuff. The whole thing about not knowing what to expect and what to do is llong lost. its something that I really really miss.

So basicly if u want a strong Mmo game in the future i really believe u need to make lots of 1-time world events that cannot be listed in databases. The whole Idea about player owned territory is a part of this but I think alot more is needed to keep the exploring and "questing" players interrested. A mayor aspect of this is the possibility to update the game and the game world without the need of client patches/update. this way the player has to discover and show it to the community, rather than 700 guilds waiting outside ICC instance for a patch. Also with alot of different events happening all the time with unique rewards will really ensure each player is unique. A game like wow where 1000 players has the exact same archievements and loot/whatever character progression u use, is very dull and dissappointing. And the events dosnt have to be big or anything. Maybe just an old man on the roadside yelling for help because he is getting robbed by thiefs and maybe only active for 30 mins, but at the same time have maybe 100 of these active at the same time across the server. Keyword here is to be unpredictable, both in timing and location. Alot of work for sure, worth it? Definetly!

Again in Short: Create a living world not Static, then u will have my interest for sure.

My guess is that u probably are a small team with not that large budget. however u could solve this by having editers available for the players, and let the player be a part of the creation of the game, and reward those players that create content or just ideas that u use. Fun and rewarding for the player, cheap and rewarding for u.

[xxAkirhaxx]

At some point once we get closer to testing I would probably look around for a group of people that are more in line with the target audience and drill down and make sure my features are what they want. Here and now, my interest was more to see in general what people want because having this discussion in places like GDnet yields a whole lot of "well, my project is super secret and I don't want anyone to steal my ideas" and people on MMO-C are if nothing else outspoken :P

Well then, in that case allow me to out speak a little. :P

Dynamic Environments: Buildings/Trees/Rocks/Towers All of these things could easily be placed in your game engine and be completely interchangable. Imagine if you had a vast forest, and in that forest a goblin spawns. An hour goes by and 5 have spawned in a cluster. Due to 5 goblins being in the area a building is spawned for the 5 goblins, and a goblin captain spawns. More goblins begin spawning, more buildings spawn, a heirchy is created. NPCs spawn in towns giving quests to kill goblins/buildings in that area. They dissapear when the mobs are gone. If this was a feature and the way all or most mobs worked in the game. Given a large enough world it would create a fiercely dynamic world.

Questing - Just because there's a dynamic world doesn't mean skimp on the open world story environment. Take a page from WoW though. Create a quest line that is linear that takes you from 1-50, but along the way throw in those really fun class/guild/race quests like in Morrowind. Make it so that it's almost required. Pretend you've made a Wizard and you've been specing into Ice and leveling up. When you reach 20 you hear about the Ice Lords guild so you go join them and they have quests for you to do. Doing these quests offers little in experience but gives you key spells that will greatly benefit your leveling experience. Do make ultimate weapon quests, those are great. Armor quests are fun, but not as much as weapons. If your game does focus on PvP create quests that cause fighting in an open world. You said you'll have trade caravans? Give rewards for sacking those caravans, and give rewards for protecting them.

Environment - Go out there with your environment. Final Fantasy may have died before it even launched, but it wasn't because the environment was boring. The more imaginative you can make your world, the better. Get your artistic ideas from everything, steam punk, thundercats (sand seas?) , Howl's Flying Castle, Princess Mononoke, look up anything involving high fantasy on deviant art. The resources are so vast but most developers limit themselves to the recognizable elf and orc.

Combat - Make combat active. If you have a new engine to work with please. It doesn't need to be complex, but make it active. The player needs to be able to dodge attacks and attack back in any method he/she likes. It can be as simple as Zelda, or make it ball busting like DMC3. The key is make it fun. While you're at it, stop limiting yourself to fighting on the ground. Make it so players can jump into trees, onto roof tops, let them climb walls, use grappling hooks, hell fly if they want to(or you can fit it in as an ability). Make combat mobile.

Player Housing - Do it, but not guild halls. Player housing has a similar effect to achievements, but guild halls just draw your population into seclusion, you need hubs for the populace to mingle.

I can't think of anything else at the moment, but if I do I'll post more here.

[Deleted]

Make it so only the good players get the full potential of their class... Everyone should be able to play the classes, but only some should master them. When I was introduced to WoW, there was these god-like players just everyone had heard of before

Depending on the zones/places in the game... Make the spells/abilities change. I *love* how GW2 plans on doing this (ex. firespells under water doesnt make much sence! See this Guild wars 2 elementalist gameplay -about halfway through). That has bothered me a bit in Vashj'ir in WoW

[Deleted]

Personally, the one feature that could make me overlook all others if done well is balance. If a good player of any class can beat a good player of any other class then you have succeeded and the riches are yours.

[glowzone]

As a gamedesigner myself, make it feel dangerous, but not the entire time, make tranquil area's that put you at ease, make area's that keep you on your toes.
The sence of accomplishment,yes even if it comes from grinding.
Secrects, remember the time you were in a game and found a cave and were like "wow this place is huge, can't belief I didn't find it uptill now?"

[sephrael]

I have a feeling a partial sandbox with themepark elements would be extremely popular. First off you're going to have to decide on a target audience, and how you want them to interact with each other.

If it makes matters simpler for anyone else reading, we are basically eyeballing a core playerbase of people that will spend at least 10 hours a week in the game, and then casuals can fit in wherever. The reason we're hesitant to try attracting the ultra-hardcore gamers (30+ hours a week) is that they are very demanding, hence my initial question earlier of "how much would you be willing to pay for...". A lot of my team favor gameplay that rewards research and experimentation, and in general favor Achiever, Explorer and Social Bartle types. Hence my asking around to see what various communities enjoy where I have some suppositions about the type of gameplay they want. Most of my team enjoy challenging gameplay, so that will inevitably figure in somewhere.

Personally i think i'd say something like a Cyberpunk type setting is due for a good mmo. No not that pos matrix. combined with the trinity and sandbox features above with raid instances and 5 mans and finally player v.s. player you can make for a great game.

Funnily enough for the first 8 months or so we were favoring a Cyberpunk setting and had started some of the art assets. It basically followed the idea of a dystopian grimy world run by megacorps and you had your character there, and then you ended up having a second character you would switch into in cyberspace to do all your hacking and whatnot. If you had ever played the TRON fps it was aiming for that sort of representation of the computer world to do things like.. unlock doors and whatnot in meatspace. So you'd have dungeons where part of your party was just doing stuff in the computer 90% of the time while the other part was going through places and shooting stuff up and whatever. Anyways - as we were working on that we heard more and more about Titan and how rumors point to a sort of dual-existence and it being possibly an MMOFPS, and we're aiming for a launch window in mid-2014 so we didn't really want to compete with Titan.. so went with something more traditional.

those would be my first base concepts for an mmo the base skeleton idea. i swear i wish i knew how to program and had the resources to make something like this happen.

For my part, I do know how to program but I also know how to do 3d modelling, so I took up that role in addition to project management and some design with my team, it helped a lot because it seems like there's a lot more programmers willing to work in teams than there are 3d artists overall.

Yesterday i read a really well wrote wall of text about wow and its current state. Within alot of good reading, it was argued that the players knew all to much about the whole game: Databases like Wowhead which includes almost everything in the game from Dungeons, BGs, loot, Lore, quest and loads of other stuff. The whole thing about not knowing what to expect and what to do is llong lost. its something that I really really miss.

In this regard, I think WoW is sort of a victim of its own success.. I mean, I can't really imagine my game having nearly that many people, and thus there being less drive to have those sorts of databases. We had Thottbot and whatnot in the early days of WoW but it wasn't nearly as useful as DBs and wikis and sites are currently pretty fleshed out. I can't imagine our game hitting like.. 1 million players. That'd be ridiculous and huge. If we had 10 million like WoW I would probably be upset to be honest, because at that point you really have loud annoying groups on all sides. I would be ecstatic if I had like 300k at the most, but if I have even a fraction of that I'm satisfied as long as someone's enjoying it - we're not in it for the money.

A mayor aspect of this is the possibility to update the game and the game world without the need of client patches/update.

Oh, we got that working already

[WaitingforSWTOR]

I've been seeing a lot of posts here and elsewhere about how WoW "sucks" now, about how TOR is "going to suck", and various things along these lines in regards to MMOs. I'm not really interested in discussing the details of why people think these games are poor as I have come to suspect that now gaming too is being affected by hipsterism.

There will always be people who dislike things, no matter how good they are. Your efforts are futile

[nfkk]

If you finish a BG or a random instance you should be able to que up with a random person from that last run. So if youre doing BGs and theres some one in the last BG and you both want to que again together, you should be able to reque with just that person!

[sephrael]

There will always be people who dislike things, no matter how good they are. Your efforts are futile

Err.. just for clarity, there's no way I'm so idealistic that I can make a game that will appeal to everyone and be immune to the "hipster" mentality. I just didn't want to have this discussion thread turn into a bitchfest about what WoW did wrong because I can throw a stone and hit 50 of those topics on this board already.

[shijian]

A well made sandbox.

[Migey]

To the OP

Everyone wants something different. It is impossible to please everyone. So don't try. WoW tries and is failing - you need to know what your game is, and why. WoW is trying to be everything - PvE, PvP, casual, hardcore, and it's failing at pretty much all of that.

A good model i'd say is Trion at the moment - they release patches very fast and don't fuck over thier customers - Blizzard is lazy - it is pretty obvious they don't release patches as fast as they could, and that they don't put a whole lot of thought and effort into them. Give your players content. Alot of it. Give them new things to play with reguarly. People may respond with that Trion's patches are buggy, and that will happen, but that's what hotfixes are for - if there any serious bugs, you will hear about them, and it shouldn't take more then a few hours or a day before they can be fixed (which Trion usually does. Also, please don't get the impression i'm a Rift fanboy - i don't even play the game, but i do look at Trion quite alot, because i'm impressed with thier work, and plan to play Rift once the world gets bigger, which it looks like it will in a few months).

An example of fucking over the customer is Blizzard charging a ton of money for server transfers and subscriptions - Trion has shown us that charging so much money for server transfers is completely unnecessary. Also, while nobody will begrudge a game requiring a subscription, you do need to put a lot of thought into the buisiness model. Depends what you want really - money, or a great game.

And most importantly, LISTEN to your customers - a very underused idea in todays gaming community is to actually ask players what they want - try polls on forums, asking what would satisfy players, etc. Listen to thier comments about balance. You can't run around trying to implement every single suggestion - but don't dismiss them out of hand. Listen to what the playerbase wants, and give every suggestion serious consideration - never reject it if you don't have a solid reason.

And after that, it really comes down to what type of game is being made. About the game itself, well, i leave that to the guys designing it.

[WaitingforSWTOR]

Ok, to stay ontopic ill give my contribution:

No factions. Everbody should be FFA targets... The best way to keep players respectful to each other is making them learn not to fuck with somebody able to PK them... that keeps griefers, ninjas and the average asshole at bay. I played MMOs with this model and works perfectly.