Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Ngruk said:

If you had a player base of 1mm players, does it make sense that more players are going to play and enjoy content made for 2,3, 4 players as opposed to 5-6 or 10 person groups?

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Isn"t the logical conclusion of that line of thinking, "We should only make single player games!"? Sure, if everything is incredibly accessible and soloable, the potential market is much bigger. The potential market is also much bigger if your product is web based and freeish. Maximizing the potential market is maybe a good idea financially, but that doesn"t necessarily make it a game that a community like this would want to play.

Additionally, I think limiting too much content to solo/small group has the potential to hurt retention. The less players are compelled to make friends and form communities, the worse retention will be imo. It"s really easy to get frustrated with a single player game and never touch it again. I"m sure we"ve all been there, but if you have friends/connections to the game, then it"s not so easy to discard it. Sticking to very small groups also can hurt retention because when one member of that duo or trio quits, its much more of a blow to the group cohesion than in bigger groups. Duos and trios are much more likely to be the exact same people all the time, which can be great and certainly has a lot of advantages, but if that"s as far as your content goes, there"s little reason to build ties outside of your little group, making it much more likely that people will quit in 3"s instead of in 1"s (and maybe less likely to recruit new players into the game as well).

Another concern, at least for myself and I would think anyone reading this, is that even if you don"t have the time, motivation, skill, whatever to tackle the more difficult content in a game, it"s inspiring to know that it"s there. It"s that ultimate carrot dangling in front of you. Maybe that has little effect on many players, but it certainly works on me.

Edit: After re-reading, I didn"t intend to sound like I was against small groups, far from it. I just don"t think that the content should be capped that low. Ideally, I think that there should be content appropriate and useful for groups of as many possible sizes as possible, with at least solo, 2-3, 5-6, 10-12 covered for pretty much the entire leveling curve. It doesn"t necessarily have to be different content either. As you increase in power (whether by increasing level, gear, skill, whatever), I think it"s viable to consider this level"s 10 man content next level"s 5 man content. That already happens of course, but the key is itemizing it properly to keep it useful. Sure, MC is probably 3-4 man content right now, but it"s not like anyone is going to wear the gear they get from it.

Caliane said:

A VERY large part of this is the stupid tank/dps/healer design of nearly all current mmos. Because the archetypes of certain classes are so required, the individual power of each person becomes that much more important.

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I was looking at this from a design standpoint as well awhile back, and rather than break and remove those roles, I decided a possible solution was to makeeveryclass a hybrid.

Tank/Healer/CC/DPS would be the main roles in this case, so you"d have to make CC matter in dungeons. Classes designated as part CC would also have the best buffs, making them more desirable.

So take a class that was never overly needed, let"s say the Necromancer, and instead of just a DPS class you make it a DPS/Healer hybrid. Keep all the cool Necro stuff but then pull from VG"s Blood Mage and WoW"s Shadow Priest and give them group healing based on the damage they deal. Make it good enough that they could heal most group encounters.

Combine this with specs that could amplify the possible roles (like a spec based on healing for the necro) along with easy talent-swapping and it would create a large amount of viable group setups and make it easier overall for people to find groups.

splok said:

Isn"t the logical conclusion of that line of thinking, "We should only make single player games!"?

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No, because single player RPGs rarely afford you the option of meeting other people, undertaking optional challenges with other people, or just experiencing a game with other people. Just because someone wants to solo doesn"t mean they want to play offline. This line of logic holds no water.

Twobit Whore said:

No, because single player RPGs rarely afford you the option of meeting other people, undertaking optional challenges with other people, or just experiencing a game with other people. Just because someone wants to solo doesn"t mean they want to play offline. This line of logic holds no water.

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The statement that I was responding to was basically saying "fewer people required = larger potential audience" by means of excluding the fewest number of people. I realize that this statement wasn"t made in a vacuum, but if you only consider this, it leads to pure solo content. And sorry, but if you have pure solo content, you essentially have a single player game, maybe a single player game with a glorified lobby and chat room, but a single player game nonetheless. At that point, you might as well be playing a single player game with some nifty xbox live features.

Grave said:

I was looking at this from a design standpoint as well awhile back, and rather than break and remove those roles, I decided a possible solution was to makeeveryclass a hybrid.

Tank/Healer/CC/DPS would be the main roles in this case, so you"d have to make CC matter in dungeons. Classes designated as part CC would also have the best buffs, making them more desirable.

So take a class that was never overly needed, let"s say the Necromancer, and instead of just a DPS class you make it a DPS/Healer hybrid. Keep all the cool Necro stuff but then pull from VG"s Blood Mage and WoW"s Shadow Priest and give them group healing based on the damage they deal. Make it good enough that they could heal most group encounters.

Combine this with specs that could amplify the possible roles (like a spec based on healing for the necro) along with easy talent-swapping and it would create a large amount of viable group setups and make it easier overall for people to find groups.

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The potential is there, but as long as the content itself is designed for the triad, classes will be forced to meet the mold regardless of their design intent.

Take wow for instance. Nearly all the classes in wow ARE hybrids really. Warriors can be dps or tanks, etc. Yet warriors are almost always forced into a tanking position in a any group content, becuase no other class is remotely as good at it. druids are clearly hybrids, yet again, forced into the healer spot unless a priest is around. Because even in a world of hybrids, one will inherently be better at a certain role then another.
If the content itself requires a pure tank, pure healer, etc, the classes will be forced to accommodate. It"s less a question of changing how the classes are made, and more how the dungeons,etc are.

Or you could not make a game at all and instead make a TV show and then you"d have an even BIGGER audience!

What is the point of your post?

splok said:

The statement that I was responding to was basically saying "fewer people required = larger potential audience" by means of excluding the fewest number of people. I realize that this statement wasn"t made in a vacuum, but if you only consider this, it leads to pure solo content. And sorry, but if you have pure solo content, you essentially have a single player game, maybe a single player game with a glorified lobby and chat room, but a single player game nonetheless. At that point, you might as well be playing a single player game with some nifty xbox live features.

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Like Diablo 2? one of the most loved, and most successful games of all time?

Caliane said:

Like Diablo 2? one of the most loved, and most successful games of all time?

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splok said:

...is maybe a good idea financially, but that doesn"t necessarily make it a game that a community like this would want to play.

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Exactly!

Only I don"t consider Diablo 2 a quality MMO experience, and I doubt you do either.

splok said:

Exactly!

Only I don"t consider Diablo 2 a quality MMO experience, and I doubt you do either.

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Actually I consider D2 potentially a huge inspiration and source for a mmo experience.

The only thing lacking is the persistent world.


One of the largest crafting and trading communities in a game. Larger then most MMOs actually.

Great party interaction, and character leveling.
Long term character growth.
re-playability.

"Trash npc and itemization design"- aka fast, easy to kill, tons of loot, can be skipped.

Pvp could be improved greatly.
Bosses could be made more interactive/challenging of course. Without resorting to random 1 hit-kills.

Gnome Eater said:

The flipside Ngruk is that developing a shitload of content that is for 1 person only is incredibly expensive and time consuming unless you make an insanely harsh levelling curve.

I remember talking to a few ex-everquest developers who were working on vanguard right when wow came out and they were astonished at how quickly wow content got "used up". As in, a beatiful zone like lakeridge might only last ~5 hours for a player who does all the quests, and might take months to develop.

Take even WOTLK - if you do all the quest lines/see everything/check out all the lore, dragonblight sans naxx might take 10 hours or so, but the amount of time that developers put into creating it is probably in the several thousands of man hour.

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Good post with points that need considering. But there are answers to this, some of which Zehn and others have discussed.

Another is the Anarchy Online system, which I am a MASSIVE fan of. I"ve never pushed it hard because I"m not sure how much of it is my personal taste and how much it really is a superb system. In my opinion, it is as innovative and has as much and more lasting benefit than FFXIs job system (withoutsub jobs).


For those unfamiliar with it, the game has "Mission terminals" in the cities and hubs (you can get an idea of it from . You set a series of sliders with a range of mission parameters and it generates a list of instanced missions with an objective from a pool (eg assassinate a named NPC, retrieve an item) and a specified item reward, which can be a piece of armour, a weapon or a skill.

The missions scale according to the number of people in the party and their levels, so its good for anything from 1-6 party members. This system has been easily catered for in expansion after expansion, with increasing level caps, in AO.


If you combined this with the ability to raise all classes on your main character, the longevity and replayability of the two systems would increase exponentially. I can"t stress just how much I love this mission system. It perfectly combines the pure MMO experience, with the D2 experience, that Caliane is discussing above.

I really am beginning to think that levels and exp are really not needed in future games but a difference form of metric for character progression is needed. Rather than hard numbers, visual or responsive forms of progression. Figure that carrot out and you might have something.

I"m thinking in the lines of Fable and how their characters from as a visual form of character maturation combined with swinging weapons faster, moving quicker, become more agile, cast faster, shoot faster, dodge, parry etc more often. Skill checks of a new character vs. a vet. The numbers behind the action are always there.

I"m not going further in armchair development since I"m not sure there is enough in that idea to flesh out what would be 1-X level grind.

Oh well, maybe I"m getting old.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Yet the solo leveling content is what -everybody- experiences. It"s what you first experience in the game. It"s the majority of what you uniquely experience. You can use that experience to craft an unforgettable memory, tell an amazing story.

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The heartbreak of being a content designer is that the nature of your job is to expend tremendous effort crafting the experience in such a way that it has the potential to be memorable for the player, with the understanding that, regardless of the quality of work or amount of effort you put into it, you can"t control whether it actually will be. (Boo-hoo! I know, what a tough life.)

To be frank, the odds that a player will look at the majority of stories told by solo content as memorable are really, really,reallysmall. How many moments from EQ, WoW, or any other game that you experienced completely on your own are memorable? With the exception of a few heavily scripted moments, I"d say not many. You will remember your overall experience as fun or unfun, but not so much the individual bits.

If you add even one other player to that mix--just one--you dramatically increase the odds that something memorable will happen. I don"t really have any funny stories from time spent totally isolated in Stranglethorn Vale, but I have a bunch from when a friend came to help me with quests and we got into some kind of silly mischief.

The solo aspect of MMOGs is here to stay, and any team aiming for mass market success needs to understand that. However, implementing your content in such a way that it encourages and rewards you for joining together with even just one more person--just one!--arguably increases your retention far more effectively than adding more layers of pure solo content will.

No matter how great the content experienced by a player in isolation is, it doesn"t compare to memorable encounters with other players. And as with anything else in life, there is a point of diminishing returns where adding more players to the mix will not dramatically increase the odds that an experience will be memorable.

Flight said:

Good post with points that need considering. But there are answers to this, some of which Zehn and others have discussed.

Another is the Anarchy Online system, which I am a MASSIVE fan of. I"ve never pushed it hard because I"m not sure how much of it is my personal taste and how much it really is a superb system. In my opinion, it is as innovative and has as much and more lasting benefit than FFXIs job system (withoutsub jobs).


For those unfamiliar with it, the game has "Mission terminals" in the cities and hubs (you can get an idea of it from . You set a series of sliders with a range of mission parameters and it generates a list of instanced missions with an objective from a pool (eg assassinate a named NPC, retrieve an item) and a specified item reward, which can be a piece of armour, a weapon or a skill.

The missions scale according to the number of people in the party and their levels, so its good for anything from 1-6 party members. This system has been easily catered for in expansion after expansion, with increasing level caps, in AO.


If you combined this with the ability to raise all classes on your main character, the longevity and replayability of the two systems would increase exponentially. I can"t stress just how much I love this mission system. It perfectly combines the pure MMO experience, with the D2 experience, that Caliane is discussing above.

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That does sound interesting.

One of the things I miss, or would like to see investigated is the old school UO, or D&D, non-combat oriented characters/skills. Generating quests that are trade skill based, having a stealth based quest for rogues, etc. Things of that nature. I find the idea of my rogue, you know, sneaking around mugging people, breaking into houses and stealing things, assasinating people, etc, much more interesting then killing boars.

A quest generating system like that could make quests based on your character class, or the classes present in your party. That could be potentially really cool.

Moorgard Mobhunter said:

The solo aspect of MMOGs is here to stay, and any team aiming for mass market success needs to understand that. However, implementing your content in such a way that it encourages and rewards you for joining together with even just one more person--just one!--arguably increases your retention far more effectively than adding more layers of pure solo content will.

No matter how great the content experienced by a player in isolation is, it doesn"t compare to memorable encounters with other players. And as with anything else in life, there is a point of diminishing returns where adding more players to the mix will not dramatically increase the odds that an experience will be memorable.

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The trick is to make teaming up as painless as possible. No one wants to group for stuff they can solo because usually, when all factors are considered, it"s 1) faster, 2) easier, and 3) more profitable to just crank it out yourself and move on.

Moorgard Mobhunter said:

The heartbreak of being a content designer is that the nature of your job is to expend tremendous effort crafting the experience in such a way that it has the potential to be memorable for the player, with the understanding that, regardless of the quality of work or amount of effort you put into it, you can"t control whether it actually will be. (Boo-hoo! I know, what a tough life.)

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Yeah. From a comic point of view on this, people over-look this alot. I often hear about how comics are dying, and games are partly the reason. Something I think isn"t true, and is completely missing the point.
Time and time again, I"ll hear people talk about the time price paid and compare to the time spent reading, or playing. $4 for a comic that you spend 15minutes reading, or $50 for a game you play for 20 hours. Times vary of course, but point is that people look at it as some hard number of time actually spent in the action. But the time spent is irrelevant in relation to the impact on the reader/gamer. The first time I read Watchmen I spent maybe 5 hours. But the impact on me is WAY more then 5 hours worth of time. The same of course could be said for many games, comics, movies.
And in the end, you can"t please everyone all the time.

Caliane said:

Actually I consider D2 potentially a huge inspiration and source for a mmo experience.

The only thing lacking is the persistent world.


One of the largest crafting and trading communities in a game. Larger then most MMOs actually.

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OMG.Hellno. This is a terrible idea. D2 is the antithesis of what I would consider a good MMO experience. You hate the diku-type class system: dps/tank/healer/cc. You postulate a D2 system - which basically means everyone is dps -- how is having everyone be dps >>> the current hybrid/pure-class system we"ve got in WoW/EQ/etc?


Note I"m not asking about multi-classing/job-system -- I"m with the gang that thinks you should be able to be any class (screw race/class combos) and that you should be able to multi-class (whether it"s an FF type job/sub-job multiclassing or just single-class-at-a-time multiclassing system).

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Re: 3-man content. LOTRO has 3-man instances. They seem to be quite popular haven"t tried them yet myself. VG retuned a bunch of dungeons to small-group (i.e. 2-4). They were okay.

I think it"s fine to cater to solo, 3-man, 5/6-man & raiding (defined as anything more than 1-groupable: 10,12,15,18,24 or what have you) if you"ve got the resources. The days of 72 man raids are probably gone for good. Hell, maybe the days of 40-man PvE only raids are gone for good -- I don"t know.

I do think there"s a lot of content that is both soloable or groupable - take a drop quest. X,Y and Z mobs have a small chance of dropping quest_itemsA-E. Combinations of quest_itemsA-E can be turned in at outpost Q for various class specific items. You can solo mobs X,Y and Z at whatever rate your class solos or you can group with a group and kill the mobs a lot faster.

I like splok"s comment above too -- properly designed content will result in content that was starts out as 10/12 manable before the planned level increase and becomes 5/6 manable (or less) post-level cap increase. The key is make items that are useful post-level cap increase. Obviously one way to do this is with items that level themselves.

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One thing that I think should be looked at with respect to 2,3,4,5,6X-manning is the effect that instancing has had on grouping vs. camping and some ways that instancing needs to change for the next-gen MMO.

It is my belief, that one reason grouping with random strangers to camp was easier in EQ than grouping with random strangers to run an instance WoW, is greed. With the camp, as noted above, if you stuck it out at an EQ camp you"d get what you came for (e.g. fbss example above). With instances -- assuming you"re reasonably geared -- you run the whole fucking thing for those one or two drops from boss X or Y that you want -- and of course if something else drops (90% of the time it seems), so you"ve got to do the whole run all over again (if you weren"t locked out).

One solution is trade-in drops. But that has its own problems (e.g. trade-ins are just not epic).

Moorgard Mobhunter said:

To be frank, the odds that a player will look at the majority of stories told by solo content as memorable are really, really,reallysmall. How many moments from EQ, WoW, or any other game that you experienced completely on your own are memorable? With the exception of a few heavily scripted moments, I"d say not many. You will remember your overall experience as fun or unfun, but not so much the individual bits.

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This quote makes me want to ask the following question: how many of your level designers have played the really great CRPGS of the past: Planescape, Fallout1/2, Ultima VII, Baldur"s Gate. I"d say all of those games (and in particular the first) we"re extremely memorable and yes I can remember many of the individual bits (and in the case of Planescape -- which I still rate as the best CRPG ever produced -- pretty much the entire game).

Caliane said:

Take wow for instance. Nearly all the classes in wow ARE hybrids really. Warriors can be dps or tanks, etc. Yet warriors are almost always forced into a tanking position in a any group content, becuase no other class is remotely as good at it. druids are clearly hybrids, yet again, forced into the healer spot unless a priest is around. Because even in a world of hybrids, one will inherently be better at a certain role then another.
If the content itself requires a pure tank, pure healer, etc, the classes will be forced to accommodate. It"s less a question of changing how the classes are made, and more how the dungeons,etc are.

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When I say hybrids though, I mean literally doing both roles at one time. Not just that they"re capable of doing both if they spec that way, as you see in WoW.

Druid, for example would be healing and dps. I designed the class with a Seed of Life mechanic where they cast Seed spells that are either damaging dots or beneficial hots. Other spells then cause these Seeds to either Burst (damage) or Bloom (direct heal), doing more damage or healing depending on how many seeds were sewn beforehand. This makes them a true hybrid, as they are constantly dpsing and healing at the same time. Rather than completely defining how the class plays, talents would then simply amplify the side of the class the player enjoys the most. Healing, damage or a mix of the two.

Not only are classes like that more fun and interesting to play, but it helps group-forming a great deal as mentioned earlier.

You"re right that eventually players are going to figure out the best tank or the best healer or whatever, but that"s unavoidable and you just have to try to strike the best balance possible without removing the fun of the class.

Grave said:

When I say hybrids though, I mean literally doing both roles at one time. Not just that they"re capable of doing both if they spec that way, as you see in WoW.

Druid, for example would be healing and dps. I designed the class with a Seed of Life mechanic where they cast Seed spells that are either damaging dots or beneficial hots. Other spells then cause these Seeds to either Burst (damage) or Bloom (direct heal), doing more damage or healing depending on how many seeds were sewn beforehand. This makes them a true hybrid, as they are constantly dpsing and healing at the same time. Rather than completely defining how the class plays, talents would then simply amplify the side of the class the player enjoys the most. Healing, damage or a mix of the two.

Not only are classes like that more fun and interesting to play, but it helps group-forming a great deal as mentioned earlier.

You"re right that eventually players are going to figure out the best tank or the best healer or whatever, but that"s unavoidable and you just have to try to strike the best balance possible without removing the fun of the class.

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Yeah, this is true.
And to combine it with the person saying D2 wouldn"t be a good mmo, as the classes are all dps.
Are they? and what if they are?
Is the zoomancer dps? Charge paladin?
Sure all classes do dps. Frankly, have you played a holy priest, paladin in wow? All classes NEED to be able do to dps.

It"s how they do it that matters. Hyrbrid tank/dps, debuff/dps, dps/dps.
Even in D2 where everyone is dps, ww/frenzy barbs are tanks. Shouts are buffers, paladins are dps/buffers, necros are potentially tanks, dps and debuffers, sorcs are pretty much pure dps. When everyone is dps, everyone is potentially useful. Creating content that is built for everyone being a form of dps isn"t that hard to imagine either.

Gnome Eater said:

The flipside Ngruk is that developing a shitload of content that is for 1 person only is incredibly expensive and time consuming unless you make an insanely harsh levelling curve.

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But I would argue WoW proved how important it was to have the ability to level 1-Max, solo. That"s the ONLY reason I stayed with the game, the only reason.