Caldenfor: Who does this guy think he is? General Inquisition and Offering of Self

News & General Discussion
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Part 1: Offering of Self; Finding a place to be of value.
My first time coming to the Unity forums for more than just reading. Apologies in advance to those whom suffer cranial pain for taking the time out of their day to read this. Please, constructive criticism only.

Being what I term an analyst and to a lesser extent a designer I have been trying to find my place in this mad mad mad world. I see many projects started, many projects canceled, and some just postponed. I don’t intend to be a leader, but I fully expect those in leadership positions to listen to the team around them. There is a term which some people have vehemently made synonymous with the likes of devil worship, serious illnesses, and other dastardly things; MMO. I am not an idiot, at least not all the time, so I already know that I myself cannot create an MMO. Whew! Now that that is out of the way I must say this; I want to assist in the creation of a Multiplayer Online RPG. I left off the Massive portion hoping for a more palatable discussion.

I have searched around and I have not found any current teams recruiting so I have been left in my own dark little corner of the various development forums scheming about how to find a place for myself. I am not a technical guru, unfortunately, but I have an understanding of the various positions and how they function together. I have a small amount of programming experience, most recently C#, which I plan to expand upon and I am not artistic in a pleasant sense. I have a basic understanding of Unity and how to use it. I am probably quite capable of expanding into scripting and the like, but that would be supplemental rather than a primary objective.

So what value do I possibly possess? An understanding of MMOs, the players and the developers and an inclination towards knowing what would work and what wouldn’t work. I keep track of various attempts towards making MMO games and, though I can’t play the games, I take the time to analyze what people aim to do and, well, generally figure out why they won’t work. What this has allowed me to do is find out, through my research and understanding, what would work.

“Go work on singleplayer RPGs!” you say. Well, sure, fine. I could do that, but then I wouldn’t be able to use most what I deem to be valuable knowledge. I am open to working on non-online games, but that would be like a chef cooking dinner for two, which would be easier to do, rather than cooking in a restaurant feeding many more people. It would be great food all around, but why only allow two to experience what many more could enjoy? I am open to assisting on non-multiplayer projects, but generally there is less need for what I could potentially provide to the team.

What I cannot coincide with is Free for All PvP; It just isn’t functional so please don’t try and sell it to me. Is it possible to make work in a game? Probably, but it there are better paths to take to make the game more accessible and enjoyable for the many rather than the few.

I am not looking for personal gains at this point in time. Money is a necessity in this world, but I know that I can’t expect to earn anything without providing a service that earns money. If I am of assistance in earning you money down the line, you can always pay it forward then. If you have a project that I could help out on please send me a message. If you just have some ideas you want to bounce off someone, with privacy maintained, I am open to that as well. I just want to help make attempts at creating games more successful. If you aren’t going to make a game that is fun and enjoyable to the players, what is the point?

Part 2: General Inquisition
Removed for sake of shorter post. One topic at a time, apologies.

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If you want to sell your abilities successfully, I think you need to give people a taste of the valuable knowledge that you think you can bring to a team.

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That was something I was having trouble trying to put into words. Is it as simple as what I think would make a good game?

When I started this post it wasn’t anything like what it ended up being and I feel bad about that. My original post was in regards to developing an open world RPG with the prospects of it eventually becoming multiplayer online and the various stages. The questions I was asking were ones that I feel I already know the answers to. The way it came across was more of a concept proposal and that isn’t something I really wanted to put out there as a first post so it got bastardized into something even worse… something about me as an individual. Not necessarily a “looking for work”, but more of a looking for a place to serve a purpose. I keep telling myself to get out, run, but it just keeps sucking me back in. It is just what I like to think about.

My personal beliefs when creating an MMO at this time would be that an extensive power curve is not something that should be aimed for. Removing artificial barriers that prevent players from playing together is key and having a vast difference in starting power from endgame power is a barrier. Another obstacle towards players playing together is the Gear Factor. It needs to be lessened as well. There are games that are gear grinds, I accept that, but I don’t feel that it provides a quality environment for a more true to the term RPG. If your gear determines whether or not you can actually fill a role, what does that leave for the player to believe in? Most games are losing their “roles” by homogenizing the individuals so they can’t even stand out. People want to be noticed.

As mentioned prior, Free for All PvP should be avoided. There is a percentage of the population that finds joy in bothering other players and it should be avoided when possible. I don’t feel that player interaction, in a negative way, should be removed entirely. We can’t all be happy all the time being nice playing with bunnies and ponies and being peaceful forever. There needs to be some risk towards an existence or you lose out on having “the edge”.

There are so many forms of MMOs and each one is unique in it’s own way. I can’t just jump in and say, change this, do that or you will fail. It isn’t always that simple and clear and no one has absolute truth especially when it comes to something as complicated as an MMO. Determining why something won’t work I feel is as essential as trying to figure out why something will work. If you can find it’s flaws before it’s implementation you can work to implement it properly or find a system to use in it’s place. Most designers seem to have the “I want this” so that is what they work with without usually sitting down and taking the time to see if what they want would actually work. Trial and error is one thing, but what if you can determine the outcome of the experiment before you actually perform it?

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There’s a lot of game design theory but imho its really a load of old bollocks, and I’ll explain why:

no matter how much fancy food there is, most people will want more pizza.

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And from someone that makes fantastic pizza; Not all pizza is good pizza.

Ingredients are a key factor, but design and implementation are also big parts of the outcome.

Too much cheese and you get a greasy ball of goo, which some people enjoy.

Too much sauce and you get a soggy crust, which some people may enjoy.

Too much meat, wait… is there such a thing? Sadly, yes.

Proper cooking temperatures, elevation of the pizza in the oven, and other factors are also key.

There is a balance to everything and even the smartest person in the world can mess up making pizza. You have to have an understanding of pizza, how to make pizza, and also know the target audience of the pizza you are creating.

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There’s another saying. Pizza is like sex, even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good…or maybe it’s the other way around…but it still makes the point! :smile:

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9 out of 10 people just bang a pizza in the oven for instant gratification. It’s usually a frozen on or one from a supermarket. It’s like hollywood: they don’t keep making terminator movies because people want something elevated to art form. They want more of what they enjoyed before.

My point here is that while there is a place for art and elevated game design, it shouldn’t be so far removed that people go “wtf is this?”

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I wasn’t intending to elevate it, if that is what I did please forgive me. What I intended to bring forth was that I feel there is room in almost all designs for improvement. Generally I have been met with stubbornness and refusal to see that perhaps their initial design isn’t as good as they think it to be. Most “teams” seem to have one “lead designer” and that is it. One person doesn’t generally have all of the answers, especially not on something so vast as an MORPG. To those who refuse to try and see why something may be flawed I try a few times to express the concern that I see and if they do not wish to heed the advice I let them go on with what they see fit.

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The problem though isn’t that they can’t improve it, it is that they will not improve it, in the sense that you see it as an improvement. They have employees that are better than you and I by far, by a long shot. But they don’t do it. Why they don’t is down to the following factors in no specific order:

  1. longer development times
  2. deadlines
  3. teams

Now when you go AAA you go team based. In some cases this is a very large team of 100+ people. The ui designer may well have fantastic ideas about how it could be improved, or perhaps someone else does. But will they change it? usually not, because of points 1, 2 and 3 above.

Lets say my minimap idea is much better. It would tilt as well and really suit this style of game. But to get my idea approved in a team environment I need to go to the project manager. The project manager agrees it’s a great idea but has a deadline to enforce and feels there are higher priority tasks for the team to take on and it will take too long, and is untested.

Points 1, 2 and 3 are the bane of larger development teams and the real reason why great improvements rarely happen in the AAA space. They have a design sorted out really early on (no choice with teams), and real hard deadlines to do it in.

Some smaller more agile teams, especially indies aren’t noted for innovation and better games because they’re better, but because they’re smaller.

Simian² is a tiny company with 2 employees. If we want something changed, it gets changed really fast. In fact I only have to listen to it and say “lets do it” or “nope no time”. Its black and white, and usually I suffer issues with development times due to R&D for a new concept as well. So in a way, even smaller teams suffer from it.

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In addition to my points above, unity suffers from it as well, which is why they were doing “anything goes fridays” where developers on fridays could work on something of their choice, and if it was really cool, it’d make it into unity some day. I don’t know if they still do it, but it’s a very cool idea that can combat this to some degree.

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I don’t necessarily aim for innovation, or the next big thing, but ease of implementation, whether or not it improves the game, and lastly and most importantly whether or not it would be fun. I don’t try to add to development time, if anything, I try to lessen the time.

Most things have already been done before, but there are ways to improve upon them to make them better than their original.

Ultima Online for example: It was a full open world, fantastic. Not something usually seen in games as of late. Darkfall attempted to have an open world, but just like with Ultima Online, they failed to grasp that Free for All PvP detracts from the enjoyment of the game. I can’t fault UO as it was the first MMORPG that I played that even had FFA PvP. UOs solution was adding the trammel facet. Darkfall’s? Well, I don’t really know if 2.0 will aim to remedy the detrimental mechanic. One way, which I feel is easy to implement, is to alter the way the criminal system functions.

Blue, Red, Gray; Innocent, Murderer, Criminal. Remove the murderer and have the criminals become the evil of the player base. They can still be a thief, they can still rob players’ corpses, and even steal the loot off of a monster killed by another player. Commit a crime and you become flagged a criminal, do it enough and you become permanently flagged a criminal. Nothing much new there, is there? The change would be that players cannot be attacked by other players unless they are flagged a criminal, thus only consensual PvP. Innocent players are safe from all aggression outside of people trying to steal from them resulting in some permanent feeling of wariness of your surroundings.

If a thief is successful and becomes flagged a criminal, the innocent player is able to attack the thief. Upon attacking the thief the innocent player loses his innocence. He would be flagged as a “peace keeper”. Thus the innocent player needs to weigh the risks of attacking a criminal out of retribution. Any “peace keeper” can be attacked by any criminal so it becomes more of a game of cops and robbers which is all determined by the actions of the players rather than the sociopathic behavior of PKers which is uncontrollable. I find this much easier to implement than to add all sorts of added mechanics to try and control people that PK.

Criminals that kill peace keepers receive additional hits to their honor/fame/standing while peace keepers that kill criminals would gain honor/fame/standing.

In addition to the criminal system you would still have access to a Faction based PvP system. Rather than UO’s Order vs Chaos, a third faction would need to come into existence. Faction members stealing or looting opposing faction members are not subject to the criminal system as all is fair in faction vs faction encounters.

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With that username and coming from Massachusetts, you should be quoting Robert B Parker :stuck_out_tongue:

(writing for Spenser)

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No offense, but the concept of an “idea guy” that gets paid to come up with gameplay mechanics and ideas without actually having to do nitty gritty programming or art is a myth unless you are:

a) bankrolling the project
b) did the nitty-gritty stuff in the past, and have a proven track record of creating successful games

Guys like Cliff Blesinski, Peter Molyneux, Richard Garriott, Shigeru Miyamoto, Tim Schaefer, etc. etc. were all at one time programmers on incredibly successful products, and earned the position of “idea guy”. I don’t think there’s any game studio out there paying somebody for their ideas or advice on game design that does not have some serious credentials and has been in the trenches.

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I don’t expect to get paid unless what I do is worth being paid for. Stipulated that previously.

I am not aiming to create the next WoW, Rift, or the like. I don’t think those are actually a good targets any ways.

The ideal ORPG game to be aiming to design, currently, would be an open world without FFA PvP or a more structured RVR based game both breaking away from the stratification the inflated leveling systems and over developed gear based systems that have become more common. Anything else is in direct competition with big whig studios and would be a harder market to sell to.

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Ahhhh, fair enough then :slight_smile:

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:slight_smile: I see many individuals trying to start their own teams to try and create their vision, but that isn’t always the best way to create a quality game. Sometimes the inspired person isn’t capable of seeing the faults. I feel a collaborated effort with the ability to see beyond personal beliefs towards making a better game is the way to go, the game should come first, not the ego. Just having a breakdown of intended designs can result in avoiding a lot of unnecessary wasted time. Think you have a great idea? Bounce it off and see if I can find fault, a test of sorts would be expected. Ideas are retained by the originator.

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Do you mean you have never played an MMO?

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I am trying to understand what do you want from this thread and i am still confused. Can you put that down in a sentence with less than 10 words, so people less intelligent like me understand you?

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That’s all very well thought out and fine if you’re designing accounting software but the fun factor of that idea lies around zero. See, people whine for balance but when given it, find they are bored silly. Take shaman vs paladin in wow. The very fact classes weren’t balanced and were not equal and did not all have CC and similar abilities, meant wow used to be an incredibly unpredictable but exciting experience. These days, wow is a balanced nightmare with everyone just about having some form of equal ability, equal class and so on. The result is that wow is losing customers in droves, they aren’t gaining customers. People are thinking “whats the point?”

Blizzard and so forth don’t want people to not be unfairly killed. They themselves recognise it might be too late for wow to go back, but at least recognise that unfairness is sometimes a good thing.

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FYI, Thats my new signature quote. I absolutely agree and love that. haha