A double dose of Fallout 3 on CVG

[Elwro]

Tags: Bethesda Softworks; Fallout 3

<A HREF="http://www.computerandvideogames.com/">ComputerAndVideoGames</A> has a two-part (<A HREF="http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=175852">part 1</A>, <A HREF="http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=175989">part 2</A>) interview with Pete Hines. Here's a nice fragment about the differences between MMOs and singleplayer games:
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<strong>Do you see the rise in popularity of the MMO genre having negative impact on the popularity of single-player RPGs?</strong>
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Hines: Not really, because if you look at the kinds of things you can do in an MMO - and I've probably spent 250 or so hours in World of Warcraft - the kinds of things you can do in World of Warcraft are really very different than anything you can do in Oblivion.
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<strong>MMOs have a much more difficult time creating a sense of permanence.</strong> <em>(Emphasis mine - Elwro.)</em> You can't let one person do something that nobody else in the world can do. Every quest that you do... that thing 30 seconds later has to reset itself for the guy coming behind you who also has that quest.
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Whereas in Oblivion, whatever you do is done. The whole world is meant to focus around the experience of only one character, and everything in the world that happens revolves around that one character.
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Coincidentially, Oblivion was wonderful in delivering a yet another feeling of permanency. For example, if someone told you the city of Kvatch was under siege and something should be done about it, you could be confident that the assaulting forces would wait for you as long as it would take you to get there. In fact, the whole daedric invasion was patiently waiting for you to come near, and if you would concentrate on picking flowers instead, they wouldn't move an inch till the end of the world.
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Read the <A HREF="http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=175852">whole</A> <A HREF="http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=175989">text</A> to learn about how the game is going to be more focused (good!), have numerous endings and generally kick ass.
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Spotted at: <A HREF="http://rpgwatch.com">RPG Watch</A>

 

[Herbert West]

Well, his arguments about MMORPGs flaws are valid, although he should have said that there is NO sense of permanence whatsoever. Having played WoW myself for some time and getting bored to death [lootwhoring isn't my game] I can't say it had anything to do with RPG, except for stats [horribly convulted anyway]. Alas I haven't tried a roleplaying server, but I'm sure that there are enough 1337speaking deviated perverts there too.

 

[Elwro]

Yup, I agree his remark on permanency is spot on, too.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

I'm to lazy right now so please tell me did he reveal anything new about FO3? No, thank you.

 

[MasPingon]

We approached it the same way we approached Morrowind or Oblivion - we are doing the next game in the series,

Oh my God

 

[Lurkar]

Alas I haven't tried a roleplaying server, but I'm sure that there are enough 1337speaking deviated perverts there too.

There's little to no difference between RP and non-RP servers.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Out of context/cut-off quotes FTW, it seems. At least for MasPingon. Hines was referring to making the next game in the Fallout series, not Elder Scrolls. He used Morrowind and Oblivion as an example of how they want to make sequels to a particular series.

Hines says enough real bullshit you don't need to make up your own.

 

[bezimek]

You are right Matt but in opinions of many players Morrowind is far better game that Oblivion so ... :twisted:

 

[Xi]

Actually, I'm finding the Multiple different endings and choice/consequence ideas to be somewhat intriguing. It sounds good so far, but we'll have to wait and see if they pull it off. Hopefully they do, but Bethesda has a track record of Hype and Pete Hines is the Grandmaster of it.

On the MMO side, I'm also interested to see if they are going to copycat WoW, or actually try something different. There's plenty of room for improvement on the MMO front. Plenty!

 

[Herbert West]

On the MMO side, I'm also interested to see if they are going to copycat WoW, or actually try something different. There's plenty of room for improvement on the MMO front. Plenty!

If it aint broken, don't fix it, right? I wouldn't expect anything different :-/

 

[Xi]

If it aint broken, don't fix it, right? I wouldn't expect anything different :-/

That's what I'm afraid of. It's going to be a stat progression grind fest, with no end.

 

[Badesumofu]

Interesting. One of the main advantages SP RPGs have over MMOs, I would have said, is that their worlds can react to the player's actions and decisions. Oblivion fails miserably on this point. Every quest chain exists in a total vaccum. You can't affect the world around you. I'd have said that they took all the bad things about MMOs, and combined them with all the bad things about SP games, and combined them into a game that really has nothing to reccomend it.

Oblivion's world has nothing on WoW. There is a real sense of fascination as you explore the diverse and interesting World of Warcraft. You can't really affect it, though, and that's one of the big reasons to play an SP game. Anything Oblivion does, WoW does much, much better.

Also, saying you played WoW for 250 hours is like saying you played Oblivion for two and a half hours, or completed the first act of The Witcher. I'm not sure how it's possible for them to be in the game design industry and yet manage to completely miss the point.

 

[Dgaider]

Personally I happen to think the notion of "one guy can't do anything special in MMO's because the quest has to re-set 30 seconds later for the next guy" is so untrue. Everyone seems so wrapped up in the idea that the Everquest style of MMO is the only way it could ever possibly be done, and I just don't think that's so.

Right now, the entire industry seems to think an MMO can only be the equivalent of an amusement park ride. Everyone gets on and has the exact same experience from start to finish, with their level marking only the amount of time they've spent there. I actually like WoW and think it is probably pretty close to the epitome of that style of MMO -- but is it the only way to go?

Naturally it will probably take someone to make a breakthrough title that will show everyone how it's done to prove there's even a market waiting for that sort of game -- but that's simply the way the industry is.

Anyway. That's really the only comment I had to make about that. Personally I just hope there's a certain level of dark humour that's in Fallout 3 -- there's a particular quality that needs to be present in the world for me to believe it's really a Fallout title, a quality that most of you are probably familiar with. If that's in there, I can forgive a lot of other stuff.

 

[Texas Red]

A double dose of Fallout 3 on CVG

Todd is spelled with 2 ds for double dose of pimping?

 

[FrancoTAU]

Anyway. That's really the only comment I had to make about that. Personally I just hope there's a certain level of dark humour that's in Fallout 3 -- there's a particular quality that needs to be present in the world for me to believe it's really a Fallout title, a quality that most of you are probably familiar with. If that's in there, I can forgive a lot of other stuff.

Yeah, the thing is that Bethseda has never really had any decent writing in any of their games. I hope they hired some new writers because there hasn't been any cleverness in the past.

 

[Lurkar]

On the MMO side, I'm also interested to see if they are going to copycat WoW, or actually try something different. There's plenty of room for improvement on the MMO front. Plenty!

If it aint broken, don't fix it, right? I wouldn't expect anything different :-/

That's just it though - it IS broken. A few MMOs have come out after WoW, all trying to do the WoW/EQ model, and they've all failed miserably.

WoW is the best there is for the EQ model. Period. Trying to outdo it seems to only bring financial disaster. Unfortunately, it's not so much a case of "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" as it is "Monkey see, monkey do." Everyone sees WoW making profits that exceed their calculators, and they want a piece of the pie, without learning how the pie is made.

And before everyone jumps on the "Let's hate WoW" wagon, realize that the game HAS introduced things - good things, mind you - that are becoming basic nature for all other MMORPGs coming out.

 

[Badesumofu]

Naturally it will probably take someone to make a breakthrough title that will show everyone how it's done to prove there's even a market waiting for that sort of game -- but that's simply the way the industry is.

Well, Eve Online has, to an extent demonstrated that there can be another type of MMO. The 'story' of that game is driven, to a very large extent, by the players. WoW has moved slightly in this direction with things like 'outdoor PVP', towns or forts that are capturable by players, and not instanced. Guilds also drive a sort of meta-plot seperately on each server. I mean, you can affect the world around you by weidling power in a dominant guild.

I'd personally love ot see more MMOs try to be 'virtual worlds' rather than EQ/WoW style games. The World of Darkness MMO has been described as a virtual world, although it's too early in that game's development cycle to have any real idea what it'll be like. The NWOD has a collection of very distinct factions (they have an official name that isn't faction, but it escapes my memory right now... covenant maybe?) which will have to be present in that virtual world, but with those predefined factions be run by NPCs, or will they make them operate sort of like guilds, and allow players to actually be in control.

If you create a virtual world, and fill it full of real people, then idealy any one of those people should be able to affect tha world in a profound way. However, as in the real world, not every single person will be able to make much more than a fairly minor difference to the world. In a single player game, you are the focal point. In an MMO, in order for your character to be a focal point on his or her server, you have to spend more time playing than everyone else to the point where it becomes a job. If you slack off, even for a few days, you wont be #1 any more, and as we've seen, that's not fun. Take WoW's original PVP Honor system for example, attaining rank 14 was a pipe-dream for most, meant at least 13 weeks of being at the very top of your sever - playing around 20 hours a day, every day, for at least 3 months.

But how else do you manage it? How else does the game decide who the important players will be? player skill? maybe make it into a political meta-game of some kind.

My thanks to anyone who bothered to read all that.

 

[MasPingon]

Out of context/cut-off quotes FTW, it seems. At least for MasPingon.

Huh?

Hines was referring to making the next game in the Fallout series, not Elder Scrolls. He used Morrowind and Oblivion as an example of how they want to make sequels to a particular series.

Yes he does

 

[Herbert West]

Personally I happen to think the notion of "one guy can't do anything special in MMO's because the quest has to re-set 30 seconds later for the next guy" is so untrue. Everyone seems so wrapped up in the idea that the Everquest style of MMO is the only way it could ever possibly be done, and I just don't think that's so.

Indeed, I agree that it's by far not the only way, however publishers looking at the current mmo juggernaut won't have the incentive to publish something radically different. And mmos need something radically different, because they're braindead games now. But that style just works and makes shedloads of cash. It will take a developer who could think out of those frames paired with publisher willing to take risks to make a breaktrough.

 

[User was nabbed fit]

I totally misread this thread title as "A double dose of fail".

Appropriate.

 

[Hümmelgümpf]

Personally I happen to think the notion of "one guy can't do anything special in MMO's because the quest has to re-set 30 seconds later for the next guy" is so untrue. Everyone seems so wrapped up in the idea that the Everquest style of MMO is the only way it could ever possibly be done, and I just don't think that's so.

Right now, the entire industry seems to think an MMO can only be the equivalent of an amusement park ride. Everyone gets on and has the exact same experience from start to finish, with their level marking only the amount of time they've spent there. I actually like WoW and think it is probably pretty close to the epitome of that style of MMO -- but is it the only way to go?

Naturally it will probably take someone to make a breakthrough title that will show everyone how it's done to prove there's even a market waiting for that sort of game -- but that's simply the way the industry is.

Mr. Gaider, are you hinting at BioWare MMO project?

 

[ricolikesrice]

....

its not like nobody tried something different then WoW, its just that they failed mostly.

i used to play a half year of neocron which probably nobody here knows. (been a while though, 5 years ? )

MMORPG in a setting that could be best described as a mix of post-apocalypse and shadowrun where the focus wasnt on lootgrinding but rather PvP and player interaction.

people joined different fractions (various megacons, terrorists, mercenaries) and fought for the control of the world / balance. leveling to max level was pretty fast and good equipment was easily accesable for anyone .

it did plenty of things right but just as many things wrong but i think the biggest reason why the whole "players shape the world" thing failed in the end is that people in masses are stupid.

the game used to be a blast for the first few months because the players truly made the world great. clans fought each other, made alliances, broke them, infiltrated other clans with spies, bounty hunting, crafters/merchants actually beeing real crafters/merchants instead of just a name on an auction board etc etc etc.... i could go into many manywonderfull memories..... (best beeing the 2 hour+ long gang fights in the red light districts that happened basically every day)

....but then the whining began.....

-in the early days of neocron you could hunt down other players since a hacker (ingame, not as in cheating) could locate the "zone" another player was in (these zones were big though, so you didnt have a "quest compass" leading to some... plenty of room to hide still) and thus if someone pissed off the wrong people, he d be on the run for a while ^^

-when you died, you would lose your main weapon to the one who killed you. this could hurt a lot if you had one of the best guns, but mind you... neocron wasnt WoW and finding another of those best guns might be annoying, but nowhere near " raiding "months to get it.

the game was a challenge, you were forced to think and select your "friends" carefully.
somehow this + the small tight community made such a great roleplaying experience i never ever encountered again in any other MMORPG.

the hardcore rules made it so the annoying dumbfucks were easily filtered out and hunted to extincton easily.

but whiners first managed to convice the devs to remove the "finding out other players locations" and not much later there also was a "safespot" for your best item.

needless to say because beeing a dumbfuck no longer had penalties, they came in droves, and lamed their wayto world dominance.

players lived by their reputation (not only who s the most UBAR l33T duelist PWNZOR, but rather good merchants, good "connections", heck there was some full time diplomats RPing between different clans.... those werent the usual faggots who determine RPing by using emotes, cybering at dawn and "thou" speak, no... they were actually friggen acting like the role they supposed to play and mostly damn good at it)

fighting over an outpost became meaningless when the losing side wouldnt end up losing their resources and when the most annoying assholes no longer had to fear beeing hunted to death....... a absolutely great game ruined by morons whining ....

...then again, neocron never had a huge playerbase. if i remember right 4 servers with usually 500-800 people online during prime time.

so there wasnt enough money flowing for the devs and their support for the game aside from minor (mostly balance fucking...) patches was almost zero and with no new content flowing and moron-friendly rules beeing introduced people left more and more.


long text, short story: i dont think any player-action focused MMORPG can be really succesfull in terms of money. if you have too few players and a niche audience the roleplaying will be great but the devs wont get money.

if you get too many players you ll get tons of idiots who want another EQ/WoW in the first place and thus piss of your niche audience..... so whether you wanted another EQ/WOW in the first place doesnt matter - either you lose subscribers or you change the game like neocron did (for the worse, and failed as far as i know but i didnt follow its status after i left ... )

stilll, i played plenty of mmorpgs, years of EQ1, over a year of WoW, etc etc..... but the first 3 out of a total of 5-6 months spend in neocron were the closest thing to roleplaying done well that i experienced and i really miss the time.

 

[Dgaider]

Re: ....

long text, short story: i dont think any player-action focused MMORPG can be really succesfull in terms of money. if you have too few players and a niche audience the roleplaying will be great but the devs wont get money.

Perhaps. One has to think, however, that there has never really been an alternative MMORPG which has had a big push behind it, either. Most of them remain pretty far off the radar, by my perception.

I'm not sure that focussing on player-action is really the alternative I'm looking for, either. I don't want to get ganked by some guy who spends 100 hours more a week playing than I do any more than the next guy. I would try EVE Online except for the fact that it just seems so merciless-- I'm sure there are players that enjoy the freedom that allows, and thankfully they have a game where they get it, but I don't know that this is the only way to get something different when it comes to an MMO experience.

And it's funny how ingrained the thinking is, too. A group of us were chatting about whether or not it would ever be possible to integrate permanent death into an MMO-- and it was amusing that invariably the first reaction whenever we brought the idea up was a gasp of shock. "What? Have all the time I've spent building up my character just-- wasted?! I'd quit the game!"
And we'd have to say-- well obviously you couldn't just graft permanent death on top of the Everquest/WoW style of MMO. In those games, every single combat is designed to kill you. Every area is littered with small groups of opponents because all death does is slow you down. But does it have to be that way? I mean, what if a monster den wasn't full of monsters that would wait until you came within 10 feet to react, allowing you to systematically wipe out their entire tribe? What if they didn't respawn? What if regular combats with underlings couldn't kill you, sure, but if you went up against the chieftain you got a warning -- THIS COMBAT CAN RESULT IN DEATH -- but THAT combat was where the real rewards lay. What if you killed him and that actually drove the tribe out of the cave for good? What if doing so was an achievement that bards could sing about in the taverns? What if your character's children carried a legacy of their father's deeds? What if playing a bloodline instead of a single character was the idea?
Typical reaction: "Change the world? No, you could NEVER do that. It would be too hard to implement, everything would already be done by other characters. It would be no fun at all!" Would it really? There's no way to do it, whatsoever?

I guess, for me, is I'd like to see some element of risk without it being overwhelming. I'd rather have a level 5 character who died achieving something that resulted in him making a difference, getting a statue in the town square-- as opposed to a level 50 character who I must pretend hasn't done exactly the same things as everyone else in the game, my level being a mark only of my perseverence. I'd like to see a game where you didn't have to be an adventurer and take those risks if you didn't want to... heck, if there was anything I liked about Star Wars Galaxies it was the fact that you didn't have to go out and kill things unless you wanted to. If you could make that experience of being a citizen in the world more viable, even make it drive the adventuring side ("I need to hire some guards for my caravan coming from the mountains. Anyone interested?"), that would be even better. But if I do want to undertake the risks of adventuring, I should reap the rewards.

I don't know. I probably sound like I'm babbling a bit. I just dislike the idea that these concepts are so ingrained that they are taken by many as absolutes-- when I don't really think the potential in MMO's has been fully explored just yet. And I'm sure there are some MMO's out there that are trying different things, but are considered fringe elements with their low success ratio being used to reinforce the idea that only the Everquest/WoW model is financially viable.

Is it? I question that assumption, but maybe I'm the one who's wrong.

---

As it is, no-- I'm not referring to Bioware's project. Bioware's MMO is being developed at our Austin studio and I really don't know a lot about it. These are just my personal opinions on MMO's, after having played a number of them (and I do enjoy them in varying degrees-- I'd just like a real alternative. And if one came along, I'd switch. And I wonder how many of me are out there sometimes.)

Incidentally, sorry to go so off topic. This is just a hot button for me, I guess.

 

[Herbert West]

Re: ....

I don't know. I probably sound like I'm babbling a bit. I just dislike the idea that these concepts are so ingrained that they are taken by many as absolutes-- when I don't really think the potential in MMO's has been fully explored just yet. And I'm sure there are some MMO's out there that are trying different things, but are considered fringe elements with their low success ratio being used to reinforce the idea that only the Everquest/WoW model is financially viable.

Is it? I question that assumption, but maybe I'm the one who's wrong.

On the contrary, you're not babbling and I don't think you're wrong. Hugely succesful [not nececarily good] games that bring a lot of money to their creators will make an impact on the developer as well as player community- it's unavodiable.
Some devs out of pure lust for cash will copycat stuff. They may succed or fail. If many try, then we may end up with few decent but simmilar games that will further fuel this cycle.Players will invariably associate the dominant title with the whole gender.

Such huge fenomenons as world of warcraft just don't fit into the boundaries of the gendre- they actually SET those bundaries by themselves and raise a high wall arround, that imagination finds hard to breach.
This kind of mechanism permeats the whole society and concerns many different and not as mundane things as games.

It is very damaging to innovation however. Devs won't be willing to risk something brand new. Or they won't be able to come up with it, since they will be sitting squarely within those walls.
Players won't outright devour something radically different from their daily bread if they've been eating the same every day for years. One may say that they should be tired and craving something fresh, but mostly, people en masse are rather conservative and slow to react and change. But revolutions do happen sometimes, so who knows...

WoW's astonishing succes is both good and bad. Good in that it popularises MMORPGs- a gendre that has huge potential. And it will have that potential, untill we develop decent artificial intelligence that is able to really, trully think [yeah, that's not going to happen soon]- MMO is 90% about interacting with living people. Bad because it has become a virtual monopoly, also in consumers' minds. You all know that innovation doesn't follow in monopoly's footsteps, right?

Enough of the general stuff Playing WoW for over a year I must say that it's no the technology or lack of it that hold back MMORPGs evolution, but lack of ideas. Sure, it's harder to design than single-player games where you have total controll over how the player interacts with the content, and you can easily wrap the world arround "The One" and give him the means to shape it. But that explanation would be rather cheap too.

I found several of your ideas to be intriguing. Perma-death for one. Designing a gamble where on one hand you have huge fame and fortune, but on the other, you may loose a lot of time and effort is a good idea. It would certainly spice any game up. However there is potential danger here- only those bold enough to use that possibility would experience it, and I would bet that it would be a small minority. However connecting that with, say... a statue with dedication in the capital city, and the aforementioned bards would be interesting, since many gamers play simply to impress their virtual friends. I see that kind of va banque game as a very ambitious idea that would certainly be easy to implement even in wow/eq model.

Implementing an Ironman mode that could be chosen for a particular character during it's creation, giving in exchange some bonuses like titles, stat bonuses, loot, or special npc interaction and a possibility to influence the world to some degree could lead to interesting results. That would make some players celebs not because of 1337 loot but skills and wiligness to take risks. Still- that would appeal to a minority of hardcore players but it could be a change from the high level loot grind.

Playing as a bloodline would force a whole new approach to game mechanics- it would create a lot of problems that had to be solved in unconventional ways and that is good. Hell, that single thing would propably render most of current MMORPGs trends totally invalid. That is a very interesting idea and it could give the player at least an illusion of creating [personal] history

My take on perma-death and ironman is not the revolution Mr. Gaider was probably talking about, but I wanted to approach the problem from a more practical perspective. Or, it just proves that I'm also locked within the current MMORPG doctrine :wink:

P.S. Sorry for getting waaaaayyyy off-topic

 

[Nael]

Personally I happen to think the notion of "one guy can't do anything special in MMO's because the quest has to re-set 30 seconds later for the next guy" is so untrue. Everyone seems so wrapped up in the idea that the Everquest style of MMO is the only way it could ever possibly be done, and I just don't think that's so.

I swear my lips aren't puckering as I say this, but I think that the PWs of NWN 1/2 already showed the possibilities of something that isn't so abhorrently static that you need to have amnesia to dismiss the persistence of the world. I think perhaps the problem is that for the cashcow mentality of MMO development to proceed as according to planned (/emperor palpatine voice) kinda negates the option of having a payed staff that is on a monthly, weekly, or even daily schedule for the altering of ingame encounters.

A small amount of PWs have shown that it is a possiblilty to have a truely dynamic online world, but it takes alot of dedicated volunteers to achieve that effectively. Do you honestly think that there are any developers, or publishers for that matter out there that would accept that tied in cost to their monthly expenditures? I think I'll let you answer that question.

EDIT: And personally the only way I think a truely dynamic world would be possible would be to keep the development staff on a volunteer basis, and culling those volunteers from the user base. The problem with this though would be the endless cries of favoritism which would become a huge issue when it came to factional pvp. Trust me, I've seen it happen.

I dunno. This is why I am not a game developer.