Outline

[Dustie]

Design Goals and Focus
The One Rule "Let me play the game with my friends." -- (Isn't that why we play MMOs?)
The Ideal Purge Game

Outline

I. World

• A. Living World vs Wargame
  B. Best Setting
  C. NPCs and AI
  D. Player Content
  E. "Safe Zones"
  F. Instancing
  G. Massiveness
  H. Weather
  • 1. X hundred people in the same area?
    2. Limitations

II. Teams, Guilds, and Groups

• A. Guild based vs Faction based
  B. Fixed teams
  C. Dynamic Teams
  D. Balance
  E. Group Play
  • 1. Supporting the group gamer
    2. Supporting the solo gamer
    3. Supporting different sized groups (2 people? 6 people? 48 people?)
  F. Teams
  G. Heroes
  

III. Locomotion

• A. Player transportation
  B. Player
  C. Mounts
  D. Vehicles
  E. Balance different movement capabilities
  F. Speed and Kiting
  G. Snares, Roots, Freezes
  H. Mezzes
  I. Balance
  J. Teleporting
  K. Flying
  

IV. Combat and Restoration

• A. To Heal or not to Heal
  B. Balance and Balance (i.e. shields or POBS style balance)
  C. AoE
  D. Friendly fire as a game pitfall.

V. Economy

• A. Tied to PvP
  B. Balanced
  C. Dynamic

VI. Progression

• A. Skills
  B. Levels
  C. Abilities
  D. Range of choices

VII. Death

• A. Bind Rushing Zerging
  B. Bind Points
  C. Penalty
  D. Value of Kill vs Rate of Killing

VIII. Gear

IX. Accessibility

• A. High price of admission to end game
  B. Accessibility for the non hard core folk
  • 1. Supporting the 8-hour-a-day gamer
    2. Supporting the 30-minutes-per-sitting gamer.
  C. Grind Control

X. Pitfalls from past games

• A. Speed imbalances ala POBS
  B. Massive modifiers ala SWG commandos, doctors
  C. Chain mez, roots, etc
  D. Empty Player Cities ala SWG
  E. Pin hole sized warping ala EVE
  F. Repetitive Grind ala POBS port grinding, WoW faction grind
  G. Handle Instancing Well (if any)
  H. Non-meaningful or extended Downtime
  I.Lack of friendly fire.
  J.Classes
  K. Gear overload
  L. Getting the Death Penalty Right
  

XI. Best features of past games

• A. SWG Player Built Stuctures
  B. WoW UI
  C. Guild Vaults and Customizable Guild Controls
  D. Planetside Griefing System
  E. AoE Handling
  F. Public Quests
  G. Play Control
  H. Z axis EQish
  I. Gear with unique properties
  J. Strategy
  K. Skill and gear based abilities rather then set classes (don't let the game fall apart since you can't find a healer)
  L. Cross Realm/Team Comms
  M. Community
  N. Item Loot and heart pounding
  O. Battle Length (this could be contentious)
  P. Being scared/horror, EQ zones where you waited until day break to run through

XII. Variety of things to do

XIII Misc (come up with a name)

• A. Marketing
  • 1. Reason for buying this game vs. the game next to it
    2. We've all been fooled before!
  B. Life Cycle
  • 1. Rate of Expansion release
    2. Addition of new content
    3. Irrelevancy of old content. (can we keep old content relavant?)
  C. MMO accountability
  

[Hoofhurr]

-I. Reason for buying this game vs. the game next to it.

[Jakensama]

We're talking MMO?

Accessability for the non hard core folk.

[Dustie]

We're talking MMO?

Accessability for the non hard core folk.

Yes, MMO.

I'll add that Accessibility to my line for "High price of admission"

In other words, I don't want to play for 2 years and 6 months just to join one port battle, or play in the best Battle ground etc. Is that what you mean?

[Slamz]

Yeah, I'd put "accessibility" in there as a high level topic.

Basically it would outline things like:

Supporting the 8-hour-a-day gamer.
Supporting the 30-minutes-per-sitting gamer.
Supporting the solo gamer.
Supporting the group gamer.
Supporting different sized groups (2 people? 6 people? 48 people?)

[Dustie]

Yeah, I'd put "accessibility" in there as a high level topic.

Basically it would outline things like:

Supporting the 8-hour-a-day gamer.
Supporting the 30-minutes-per-sitting gamer.
Supporting the solo gamer.
Supporting the group gamer.
Supporting different sized groups (2 people? 6 people? 48 people?)

How about breaking that up into a Grouping category and accessibility? See above.

[Hoofhurr]

Theme?
-Life Cycle - i.e. Rate of Expansion release, addition of new content, irrelevancy of old content. Do we want people playing the same game for years? Or should a game be allowed to die to make place for new ideas?
Most importantly, how do you keep people's interest in the game after a character achieves max level aside from having them level yet another character? Or should that be the goal?

[Dustie]

Theme?

We can add that, but I'd like to think that most of these headings could apply to a game of different themes, from futuristic combat to pirates to medieval RPGs.

?

[Dustie]

Theme?
-Life Cycle - i.e. Rate of Expansion release, addition of new content, irrelevancy of old content. Do we want people playing the same game for years? Or should a game be allowed to die to make place for new ideas?
Most importantly, how do you keep people's interest in the game after a character achieves max level aside from having them level yet another character? Or should that be the goal?

added

[Slamz]

I think I would remove "balance" from the outline.

I don't know how you could discuss that in a high level way. Obviously you would want to have balance but you wouldn't be able to discuss it until you started getting into the nitty-gritty details.


I would also think that "Econ tied to PvP" would simply be part of the "Economy" outline. When you talk about the economy, I would think that how players do it and fight over it would be part of that discussion.

[Slamz]

Oh, maybe you could just replace "Balance" with "Pitfalls to avoid". A section of the discussion where you talk about a few specific items NOT to do.


For example, I would start that discussion with "Be very very careful when playing with movement speeds. Minor difference in movement speed has a huge impact on PvP gameplay."

One thing WAR did exactly right was not to largely play hands off with movement speed. It's also one of the main places where POTBS went wrong.

[Dustie]

I think I would remove "balance" from the outline.

I don't know how you could discuss that in a high level way. Obviously you would want to have balance but you wouldn't be able to discuss it until you started getting into the nitty-gritty details.


I would also think that "Econ tied to PvP" would simply be part of the "Economy" outline. When you talk about the economy, I would think that how players do it and fight over it would be part of that discussion.

Agreed. I was just brainstorming at first. I'll start organizing it as we go.

Balance would kind of be a sub heading under each different topic. Balance in the economy, in the players abilities, etc etc.

[Dustie]

Oh, maybe you could just replace "Balance" with "Pitfalls to avoid". A section of the discussion where you talk about a few specific items NOT to do.


For example, I would start that discussion with "Be very very careful when playing with movement speeds. Minor difference in movement speed has a huge impact on PvP gameplay."

One thing WAR did exactly right was not to largely play hands off with movement speed. It's also one of the main places where POTBS went wrong.

Sounds good. See the latest change.

Also, if we're past brain storming, we could also start grouping the topics into different categories. For example, economy, combat, etc. (I think we should brainstorm a little longer thought)

[Dustie]

Reorganized in no particular order of importance (yet).

[Slamz]

I think I would try to rank them by order of "things that need to be talked about first", as if you were going down a list of things to discuss/write up when designing a game.


e.g., before you talk about locomotion you'd want to talk about the world and game environment. In fact, talking about the world would probably be first.

[Dustie]

Ok, I'll take a crack at it, then we can re-org from there (since it's in absolutely no order now).

[Dustie]

updated

[Dustie]

I think I would try to rank them by order of "things that need to be talked about first", as if you were going down a list of things to discuss/write up when designing a game.


e.g., before you talk about locomotion you'd want to talk about the world and game environment. In fact, talking about the world would probably be first.

Ok, you can re-order it now. I tried to separate things out and re-order them somewhat more in line with importance.

[Snowreap]

game design and game engineering are two different, but related things.

it does you no good to design a game that's impossible to engineer (meaning, not implementable given the available budget). but on the flip side, just because it's possible to engineer something doesn't mean you necessarily want it as part of your design. you can find plenty of examples of bad game design where a feature was included just because the underlying engine was capable of it, but the feature doesn't actually add to the game -- in fact it detracts from it.

so engineering considerations always need to be taken into consideration, because they might veto your design.

all that is a given, and I assume everyone here was already aware of it. the reason for my post then, is to pose this question: how do you want to address it? as a part of each design item, or as a separate "Game Engineering" category, distinct from "Game Design"?

splitting things up makes the design elements more self-contained (since the engineering considerations are right there). but splitting things up also introduces the very real danger of thinking that just because any particular design feature is possible, all of them are. when in fact, you might find that only 3 out of 20 design features can be included as designed (although which 3 you choose doesn't matter from an engineering perspective).

-ken

[Slamz]

I would say that engineering limitations are something to bear in mind when we are discussing any design element.

For example, "I want to have a battle between 5000 people, like in the assault on Gondor in Lord of the Rings". Well, we can't do that, although MAYBE we could come up with some interesting engineering solutions that could let you sort of feel that scope, like BFME2 did with "squads".

As long as there's a feasible-sounding engineering solution to a problem, we can consider it valid. Although I doubt any of us have been programmers for Blizzard, we probably have enough general programming experience to make guesses about what's doable.

[Dustie]

so engineering considerations always need to be taken into consideration, because they might veto your design.

all that is a given, and I assume everyone here was already aware of it. the reason for my post then, is to pose this question: how do you want to address it? as a part of each design item, or as a separate "Game Engineering" category, distinct from "Game Design"?
-ken

Very good points. We're a little bit lucky here since very little of what we've discussed so far requires any advances in new technology beyond what's already been achieved in other games. We're basically building the 24th word processor. We know certain things like spell check, copy-paste etc can work. Most of our design choices do not go beyond those bounds. Some certainly might, for example having massive numbers of people in one place pushes the limits of even the latest games. That, I'm afraid will always be with us in some form (once we can handle 500 people in one spot of our game world, we'll want to handle 5000, 10,000, 1 million). Also, if our Orcs are free to wonder the entire game world, that might introduce some challenges, but I think most of us are aware of that.

We're also lucky in the fact that many of us are software developers who have been involved in lots of different size projects. While we are certainly not getting awards here for following good project practices (market analysis, kick off, req analysis, requirements, design, implementation, iteration, maintenance etc) most of us are familiar with project life cycle, and more importantly, iterative development which is probably the only way to do a project like this with a bunch of crazy people throwing it together.

Back to your question, I would tie feasibility to each item as opposed to having a system wide category for it. That's just my 2 cents.

PS Remember that this section has "Theory" in the title so technically we don't need to worry about reality or ever building this game. =)

[Hoofhurr]

Well I don't actually like having 100s of people in one place. I think warhammer battles are a little over the top and you have a hard time being emotionally invested in a battle against 100s of people you never met or saw before.

[Dustie]

Well I don't actually like having 100s of people in one place. I think warhammer battles are a little over the top and you have a hard time being emotionally invested in a battle against 100s of people you never met or saw before.

I would have felt more invested in those 200 vs 200 fights if I had control of my character during the altercation (but I know what you mean).

[Slamz]

Well I don't actually like having 100s of people in one place. I think warhammer battles are a little over the top and you have a hard time being emotionally invested in a battle against 100s of people you never met or saw before.

Warhammer's problem is that the battles are largely inconsequential, which mostly happens because their world is too damn small.

I was actually playing again just recently. Snuck in and made an orc on an open PvP server. I'm almost immediately disgruntled again, though. These scenario battles are just so unfulfilling. If we beat the scenario and this resulted in the Orcs claiming a new camp and now I can set up shop there and become friends with the blacksmith and get discounts on armor and so forth, then I could start to feel like we're accomplishing something.

But moving some bar a little tic and then going back to fight the same fight again...meh. I need to feel like my side is accomplishing something.


Whether it's 100s or a handful fighting doesn't matter to me, I don't think -- I just want to know that there's something at stake.

[Hoofhurr]

I agree with that point. When I was first theorycrafting about warhammer I thought that the scenarios would be tied directly into battlefield objects in whatever zone you were playing. I thought fighting for the bridge or the tower in a scenario would result in you owning that tower or bridge on the strategic map. I was disappointed to find out it was just a percentage of zone control.