Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

GuyJantica said:

On the subject of dungeons, I"ve always thought there should be more non-combat related activities/obstacles that certain classes bring solutions to. A cheesy example would be rogues finding traps and disarming them, but really there could be lots that are semi-unique to the different classes. I understand the basic diku-style game dynamic of healer/tank/dps to conquer content, but that really just leaves all classes being centered around combat in some way. I guess I just wish there were more to the core game. Something along these lines may have been brought up here before, but I couldn"t find it. If so, sorry for the redundancy.

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The problem with gimics has pretty much always been if they"re in, then you have to specifically design uses to them. IE: With traps, it"s fine if you"re the anti-trap class and enjoy that sort of thing, but it sucks for the other 4~39+ other guys who have to stand around and wait for you to figure that shit out.

Let"s roll with the traps example even more. You either make traps trivial and then fuck it, we"ll just trigger that shit and it"s more an annoyance then anything and why even have it in the first place, or you make them a hazard and then spread the ability to counter them such that you"re almost guaranteed to have someone who can counter traps...and then it"s just another facet of your game like being able to counterspell or dispel or etc...

Let"s not be Dumar and think there"s some magical game code out there where developers can just go "Voila!" and implement a bucket of paint and then whatever the players decide to use it for is somehow relevant. This is a thread Qhue started a long time ago, but the basic gist of it is, the ultimate evolution of game design is that if there is a bucket of paint on the floor I should be able to use it to do whatever the fuck I want like use the bucket as a helmet or some shit. Some examples would be...

1) Throw the paint in my enemies eyes, therefore blinding them.
2) Paint a picture of a giant cock on the wall and distract my enemies when I ambush them.
3) Splash it on the floor and have my enemies slip on it.
4) Use it for erotic body art on the parties thief and make mad slick love to her like a cheesy porno flick.

People like Dumar think developers have some secret magic code that accomplishes this but they"re too scared of players using it so they hold it back even though this is exactly what the single player RPG market has been trying to do for ages but still haven"t accomplished.

He doesn"t realize for every use that we conceieve of, developers would have to design a use for. In the first example, they"d have to code it so that any enemy that has something cover their eyes has to have a penalty to their hit and enable the "I"m blinded script" where they start thrashing widly.

#2 would require the game code to be evolved enough for the monsters to be able to recognize patterns and re-act accordingly. There would have to be a script for appreciating art or being reviled by it, or just generally confused. Etc...

3 would be pretty difficult as well since when you splash around the paint, it would have to apply to the creature wherever it touched them. Not so much a coding thing as a graphics engine thing. Liquids are still a pain in the ass to properly handle. It"s getting better though.

4 we won"t see until Virtual Reality becomes a reality, but the downfall of humanity is soon after so I"m not in any particular hurry.

Zehn - Vhex said:

He doesn"t realize for every use that we conceieve of, developers would have to design a use for.

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This really is the bottom line for all the "the game should do this" discussions. There"s no getting around it.

There is no sentient, HAL-9000, neural net self-aware computer consciousness that will be hammering out this code as players conjure new ways to employ paint buckets, pick leaves off bushes, or corpse hump the latest boss kill.

Gimmicks are cool so long as they don"t become a requirement, because then they aren"t gimmicky anymore. EQ1 GM events that gave the one time loot that was cool but not so OP that it put your toon in godmode were a great example of gimmicks that work, but note that such things were random human intervention into the game, not millions of lines of code written to anticipate human reactions.

That"s how a gimmick should be. Someone from the game designer jumps into the game and randomly does gimmicky crap. Doesn"t get better than that, and it can"t, because you cannot write code to mimic human randomness. There just aren"t enough lines of code to pull it off.

But I bet if you ask 100 MMO players about gimmicky randomness, most would tell you sure thing, so long as it doesn"t fuck up my grind/raid/leveling groove, or unbalance the game in any way.

I hear ya, Zehn. Those sorts of things would require something analogous to a physics engine... but for interpreting and simulating... everything.

The gimmicky nature of these abilities is (I think) because they are being added in as an afterthought rather than any sort of core mechanic. This is why I said I may be talking about a different sort of game (smaller scale multi-player).

Truly, having the 1 rogue in a group of up to 6 clear traps for 5 minutes would be boring for the others if there was nothing else going on. If the rogue is trying to clear traps while a rush of goblins is coming from behind, above, and sides they can then occupy themselves by holding the waves back and keeping the rogue alive (who is effectively out of combat). Going back to L4D, there are points in the campaigns where you are waiting for the way to be cleared (the crane and dumpster, the van in the airport, the mechanical door in the power plant) while killing hundreds of bad guys. Your party has 0 control over the flow here... you just shoot and wait. Make it so a character in the party is actively opening the door/clearing the way while the others hold off and you"re getting somewhere... especially if the activity is somewhat engaging since they are effectively out of combat. This wouldn"t require any magical code since it seems this already exists at Valve.

Well, just keep in mind when it comes to MMO"s you have to ask yourself the golden question.

"Yes, that"s very good and all, and seems interesting. But...will it be tolerable the 3rd, 10th and 25th time players are forced to do it?"

I"m talking about shit like the mandatory 6 minutes of trash clearing before you got your 90 second shot at M"uru. Or the 5 minutes of sitting around wanking off while you wait for Kel"Thuzad to go active. Maybe neat the 1st time. But by the 5th time we did it I wanted to kill some motherfucking developer who thought it was a good idea. And by the 20th time I wanted to kill their family.

And by the 100th m"uru attempt I wanted to firebomb all of California into the ocean just to make sure I got everybody that fucker cared about and all the people THEY cared about as well.

Keep in mind that clearing nigh-endless trash in an MMO isn"t fun and never will be. Even if it is zombies.

I know, I know, it"s a paradox. How can killing zombies not be fun? Well, MMO"s found a way.

Speak for yourself Zehn. As far as I"m concerned, "trash" is the most fun stuff to fight in Warcraft. The named are too annoying and gimmicky.

If you can"t tolerate a few pulls of trash, I submit that you don"t really likeplaying the gamein the first place.

Danth

So you actually enjoyed M"uru? 8/

I"m talking raid level by the by. Solo/group level dynamics are a completely different beast.

Fair enough. My view is that most forms of raiding inherently suck as gameplay and as such should be thrown in the trash heap. That said, with regards to Muru specifically, the problem lay in how tightly tuned the encounter was--thus requiring those couple hundred attempts--as opposed to a few minutes of trash. The irritation of clearing for the umpteenth time was a symptom of the greater problem.

(edit: less absolute)

Danth

Zehn - Vhex said:

Well, just keep in mind when it comes to MMO"s you have to ask yourself the golden question.

"Yes, that"s very good and all, and seems interesting. But...will it be tolerable the 3rd, 10th and 25th time players are forced to do it?"

I"m talking about shit like the mandatory 6 minutes of trash clearing before you got your 90 second shot at M"uru. Or the 5 minutes of sitting around wanking off while you wait for Kel"Thuzad to go active. Maybe neat the 1st time. But by the 5th time we did it I wanted to kill some motherfucking developer who thought it was a good idea. And by the 20th time I wanted to kill their family.

And by the 100th m"uru attempt I wanted to firebomb all of California into the ocean just to make sure I got everybody that fucker cared about and all the people THEY cared about as well.

Keep in mind that clearing nigh-endless trash in an MMO isn"t fun and never will be. Even if it is zombies.

I know, I know, it"s a paradox. How can killing zombies not be fun? Well, MMO"s found a way.

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Right, but if there were more to do than just kill the stupid mobs and each try was somewhat different you"d probably get tired of it much less quickly. Well I think I would anyhow.

Idea:

Have kel"thuzad drop little "landmines" that are bind on pickup and unique, and that do like a million damage when triggered, but only against the phase 1 mobs. That way, anyone who has killed KT before can then use those landmines if they are there again, once per person. If the entire raid has them, then you get 10. If only 3 people do, then you get 3, and have to kill the rest of the waves regularly.

BOP and Unique items could be used very creatively to reward players that have certifiably beat an encounter.

You still have to wait the time. It"s not difficult, it"s boring. I"d rather get a time warp that makes it go 2x as fast in half the duration (+epics!).

Zehn - Vhex said:

Let"s not be Dumar and think there"s some magical game code out there where developers can just go "Voila!" and implement a bucket of paint and then whatever the players decide to use it for is somehow relevant. This is a thread Qhue started a long time ago, but the basic gist of it is, the ultimate evolution of game design is that if there is a bucket of paint on the floor I should be able to use it to do whatever the fuck I want like use the bucket as a helmet or some shit. Some examples would be...

1) Throw the paint in my enemies eyes, therefore blinding them.
2) Paint a picture of a giant cock on the wall and distract my enemies when I ambush them.
3) Splash it on the floor and have my enemies slip on it.
4) Use it for erotic body art on the parties thief and make mad slick love to her like a cheesy porno flick.

Click to expand...

You do realize theres a game in Dev for the DS that does exactly that.
You draw "ANYTHING", and it creates it in game, and is used as such.

Basically, the game has a library, of a great many things. And properties are assigned.
A bucket is metal, can hold things, etc.
And then actions can be performed as those attributes have linked.

I"ll try to find a link.. Silly little DS game isnt the same as a mmo. but just saying..

Agraza said:

You still have to wait the time. It"s not difficult, it"s boring. I"d rather get a time warp that makes it go 2x as fast in half the duration (+epics!).

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I kept praying during Hyjal runs that Blizzard would implement an option to allow us to trigger 4+ waves at a time. Waiting 30 minutes through mind numbingly boring trash for our epix after the 10th+ run was just....god I have nightmares.

Anyways...

Right Caliane, but anything you tell it to do, the devs have to have programmed in. I"ll eat my words if I can draw a BFG9000, a scientist and some money and then pay the scientists to modify the BFG so I can paint a house with it.

Or more realistically, if I draw a bucket and let the game run for 15 years and come back, the bucket should have some rust on it. And the only way that would happen is if someone told the game, "Oh hey, metal rusts btw."

I mean as far as physics go you can have some pretty loose definitions. I can pile up barrels to make an impromptu staircase, but I can"t melt the barrels down to make bullets for a rifle.

No matter how long you leave Spore running, you will never come back to find that your creatures have developed time travel only to find that they have doomed themselves as a race because in their attempts to use time travel to avert any major future disasters in their species, they stopped evolving and 70 million years from now a race that never mastered time travel and had to deal with their own failures has evolved to a point where they can transcend time and space completely and destroy them.

Put simply, you can put A, B and C in the game and end up with all sorts of crazy combinations of AB and CBBA and ACCBA. But you"ll never end up with D.

Edit:

To use another game as an example...remember Oblivion and all the talk about how awesome the radiant AI was going to be because orcs could pick up shovels to use as weapons if they found a shovel laying around? That had to be programmed in. You couldn"t leave your game running only to find that some peasant you ran across is now suddenly the emporer because that was never scripted as an option.

Zehn - Vhex said:

1) Throw the paint in my enemies eyes, therefore blinding them.
2) Paint a picture of a giant cock on the wall and distract my enemies when I ambush them.
3) Splash it on the floor and have my enemies slip on it.
4) Use it for erotic body art on the parties thief and make mad slick love to her like a cheesy porno flick.

Click to expand...

Suppose this were technically possible. What would be the point? How is it a game anymore?

If it *were* a game, people would just catalog the optimal ways to use all the objects to accomplish whatever the game objective is, and then nobody would do very much other than that. (Except roleplayers, ha ha!)

Games have rules. Aren"t the rules part of what makes the game fun? I enjoy playing a game and using my knowledge of the rules to cook up some strategy and have some ideas about the game. If you took away the rules, I suspect I would get bored with it.

Venjenz said:

But I bet if you ask 100 MMO players about gimmicky randomness, most would tell you sure thing, so long as it doesn"t fuck up my grind/raid/leveling groove, or unbalance the game in any way.

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Not many games are about cool, emergent behavior, because cool, emergent behavior is enough of an idea for about one total game. Least of all MMORPGs.

Fog said:

If it *were* a game, people would just catalog the optimal ways to use all the objects to accomplish whatever the game objective is, and then nobody would do very much other than that. (Except roleplayers, ha ha!)

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Well...isn"t that how it is now? 20 attacks at my command yet all I seem to do is mash the shit out of Force Lightning because nothing else does nearly as much damage in KOTOR. Did anybody honestly use any attack other then flying swallow for the rest of Ninja Gaiden once they realized that an attack that renders you invulernable, nothing guards against, and has a good chance to do fatal damage on the first hit is slightly OP?

I was more or less just trying to demonstrate, although by using far more words then actually necessary because I enjoy being long winded and hopefully entertaining, that if developers create a square peg, they have to also create the square hole the peg fits in.

Combat in MMO"s will almost certainly always be strictly controlled, mostly because it"s handled like a game of chess. Although much more entertaining, it simply isn"t as good of a game if at any point I can just suddenly declare that my pawns come equipped with z-axis sploits and can stand on top of the bishop to instantly move across the board and flank attack the rook.

The ideal use of such a system were it to be created would be more for world building. In WoW, I could log in one day to find that the Tauna"Le village has been overrun by scourge and they"ve fallen back and set up a new base on the other side of the geyser fields due to the relative protection from the druid enclave and the dalaran outpost at amber ledge.

Then I could help them re-take their village and push back the scourge and even level En"Kilah to the ground.

The problem even then though is, even if you do manage to overcome the technical limitations of such a system, you could really only implement it in single player games.

Because while the above scenario sounds pretty cool to have completely at random, you also have to contend with this:



You could also log in one day to find that stormwind has been burned to the ground and in it"s place is a giant cock made out of the burning corpses of all the NPC"s that used to live there. While totally fucking awesome because everybody loves balls, it would get old pretty goddamn quick.

Caliane said:

You do realize theres a game in Dev for the DS that does exactly that.
You draw "ANYTHING", and it creates it in game, and is used as such.

Basically, the game has a library, of a great many things. And properties are assigned.
A bucket is metal, can hold things, etc.
And then actions can be performed as those attributes have linked.

I"ll try to find a link.. Silly little DS game isnt the same as a mmo. but just saying..

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The game you are referring to is "Drawn to Life."

It"s actually pretty amazing the things you can draw in that game, and the accurate characteristics that get applied to the objects.

Necrolyte said:

The game you are referring to is "Drawn to Life."

It"s actually pretty amazing the things you can draw in that game, and the accurate characteristics that get applied to the objects.

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I actually played that game if that"s what he"s talking about and basically all you do is draw art assets for objects that are pretty much pre-defined. Collision detection and all that is pre-determined. You can"t draw a gun that shoots swords for example.

It"s neat, don"t get me wrong. But it"s nowhere near the sandbox idealism we all hope and pray for.

Danth said:

As far as I"m concerned, "trash" is the most fun stuff to fight in Warcraft. The named are too annoying and gimmicky.

Danth

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Agree with this big time, even on raids.


They"ve taken the scripting too far (they always have, partly - only partly - because of how powerful the user app development tools are - they"ve had to compensate for various "auto" apps users have designed). A symptom of this is the dumbing down of the latest expansion.

It went something like this :

i) design most fun and engaging MMO yet seen;
ii) do everything the best we can - including as complex end boss encounters as we can design;
iii) pat ourselves on the back about how much our encounters are scripted, publicly laud ourselves and chuckle at EQs tank and spank "ho ho ho";
iv) realise the vast majority of the user base (read $$$$$) can"t manage to co-ordinate and beat the scripts;
v) take the difficulty level of the whole game down to compensate for iv).


As much as anything this triple underlines how much the foundations have to be right, before you build on them.

I suspect a large part of the problem is that they need new blood, particularly in strategic decision making. Instead, they are constantly doing interviews where they boast of their pride that they have all the same design team and key players. Good on them that they stand by their staff, but creative processes need a view from the outside and fresh blood now and again or the ideas and creation stagnates and falls in on itself.

There"s nothing wrong with heavily scripted boss fights. Ultimately, however, it needs to be:

1) Fun to learn
2) Challenging (complex issue, I know)
3) Still at least somewhat fun a few times in

You can"t expect much more than that.

Trash makes me die inside because TRASH is what I want to be tank-and spank (like MC) but instead it"s 4-12 mobs all doing random shit that is usually trivial to counter but makes people pay just enough attention to not be able to go on full drooling retard mode for the clear until the "fun" part (the "boss") is reached.