Catcher:
Some of what you say makes sense, but there are still many points where Damion Schubert displays a rather blinkered view.
Damion Schubert said:
You don’t have to use levels and XP, but the game needs to reward devotion more than skill. Our business model as it stands right now depends on devotion.
What exactly does he mean by rewarding "devotion" here? In essense it means rewarding players in proportion to the time they've spent playing.
From a business perspective that might work well enough, but then so does selling addictive drugs. It's hardly something to aspire to.
I'd say that a good design shouldn't be rewarding (twitch) skill, or rewarding devotion. It should be rewarding play. The idea that it is necessary for player characters to become more and more powerful / influencial as they play is baseless.
Creating an atmosphere of constant dissatisfaction, and compulsive power increase, might make for a good business model. It sucks as game design.
Seems there are a lot of devoted fans here since they typically revere mostly games made in the 90's and earlier.
That's not the kind of devotion he's suggesting be rewarded.
There's no gameplay reward in the second game of Fallout for playing the first. People play a second time because they enjoyed the first. From one Fallout playthrough to the next, the player's only reward and incentive is his own enjoyment.
This is the kind of "devotion" that should be encouraged: make the game entertaining enough that players want to keep playing to be entertained.
"rewarding" devotion by constant power gain might keep players playing, but it won't necessarily keep them entertained. The very fact that the designer knows they'll keep playing to increase their power gives him an excuse not to entertain them. He knows many of them will keep climbing the slope of power gain, even if they go for relatively long periods without getting much out of the game.
Taking a look at the fantasy comments:
You don’t need fantasy but you do need a fiction with resonance.
The Civ to Alpha Centauri illustration is wholly about giving people what they're used to. It probably does make more money. It doesn't do anything for the games industry.
You don’t need fantasy, but you do need a setting that is doublecoded.
Artificially splitting game markets into "casual" and "hardcore" is pretty stupid. The market isn't even a spectrum with those (ill-defined) concepts at either end - it's a multidimensional mess.
Suggesting "a setting that is doublecoded" creates the idea that you can tick the "casual" box, tick the "hardcore" box, and be happy with your design. That's BS.
You don’t need fantasy but you need an inviting world.
That rather depends on what is meant by "inviting". Out of context, he might mean involving / compelling... - and I'd agree.
In context:
You don’t need fantasy but you need an inviting world. People want to spend their spare time here. This is their corner bar. Even the bad guys in WoW are cute and funny. It’s still inviting. I’ve seen numerous games say they want to make post-apocalyptic games. Who wants to live there? You may want to visit, but who wants to spend 200 hours a month in a grim and dirty place?
He's talking about "fun". Oh joy. What an open-minded fellow. "Cute and funny"
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Add to that the 200 hour deal. How is that the assumed aim?
Silly of me to forget: research shows that MMORPG players spend that kind of amount of time playing, so to succeed, they must spend that long playing our game
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Could it be that a game design that didn't reward people with power increase by the hour might actually mean people played for less time? Would it mean that they were more inclined to quit once they weren't being entertained to a high level, rather than continuing the grind for power?
Could it be that rewarding people for being entertained for a few hours every few days might actually please them more than rewarding them by the amount of their life they waste?
Over the long term, wouldn't it make sense to encourage people to view a MMOG as an occasional entertaining activity, rather than an endless grind which replaced their social life. Wouldn't giving the highest reward to occasional play, rather than sleep-deprived, days-at-the-keyboard play entertain a much wider market?
Silly of me.
Clearly the answer is to assume people will spend half their lives in the world, then fill it with candy-floss.
If the "casual" player doesn't spend much money on such games, it's clearly a universal truth, rather than a testiment to piss-poor design.
You don’t need fantasy, but you need a world where the player starts out larger than life.
Crap.
You need an involving world, and to give the player an interesting choice of roles to play in that world. The player needs to feel that his actions are important. That's very different from being some kind of super-hero.
"Larger than life" is just like "constant power increase": an excuse to impress the player with meaningless power, rather than to construct a world interesting and involving enough to keep him entertained.
Sure, if your world is uninspired crap, you need every crutch you can get. "Larger than life" is just such a crutch.
These aren't necessarily bad game elements (well in fact I'd say constant power increase is), but when used as hooks to grab the player without entertaining him, they are.
You don’t need fantasy, but you need content that elevates with the character advancement.
Blinkered crap again.
The assumption of continuous "character advancement" (i.e. power gain) is stupid.
The content needs to have interesting variety - not to elevate.
It doesn’t have to be fantasy, but you need a wide variety to content.
Agreed. Although emphasiing content variety over gameplay variety is stupid IMO. I don't care about "Viking", "Astec" and "Oriental" settings if each has the same substance with a new paintjob.
[aside: I just searched for "gameplay" in the article to check I hadn't missed the part where gameplay variety is emphasized. He didn't use the word once.]
It doesn’t have to be fantasy, but group play needs constant involving activities for everyone.
Agreed, but I'd say an overstatement. The world needs to be constantly involving for everyone, and to have frequent involving activities for everyone.
Aim for "constant involving activities", and the game turns into a constant assault on the senses, lest things pause enough to allow "involving activity" to cease.
I'd say it's much more important that players are involved in the medium/long term implications of their and their groups actions. That way you don't need to have them attacked by rabid chickens every few seconds to keep them involved.
You need both thought and action. Going exclusively for action makes things dull over the long term.
Oh, but I'm forgetting the medium/long term goal of continual, progressive power gain. Who needs power to be interesting, involving and important, when you have the promise of more power in the future.
You don’t need to deliver fantasy, but you do need to have a vision and deliver it.
Absolutely. Though this is rather at odds with the rest of the talk.
Nairy a pointed ear in sight.
But how narrow-minded is it that he didn't even introduce his notion of fantasy as e.g. "Stereo-typical medieval fantasy" the first time he said it.
Does he really think that fantasy means running around with elves, swords and bows, shooting at orcs and goblins? That's what comes across.
You don’'t need combat...
Sure, but he goes on to imply that you do - or at least that he can't see how things can work without it.
If his talk were focused on adaptations to current MMORPGs, that'd be fair enough - it is very difficult to think of something like WoW or EQ being done without the combat.
He isn't though - he's talking about new MMORPGs being developed in the future. Thinking that Harry Potter can't be done merely because some EA idiot can't think beyond "yeah, you’ll kill rats and stuff." is pathetic.
Harry Potter / Star Trek are hardly the most innovative of settings in any case.
Oh, and when discussing alternatives to combat, he uses examples like Puzzle Pirates, Civas, and Myst.
And goes on to ignore that possibility completely.
Here's the finale of the presentation that really makes this quip sound hollow.
Always be true to yourself... Eve kept to their mantra, and they won.
And yet the entire talk is (as he himself admits) "defending the status quo".
Spending the entire talk saying one thing, then sticking a "but you don't need to do things this way" at the end, doesn't change what the talk was about.
He doesn't seem closed off to other possibilities, but he does seem not to have spent very long thinking about them.
If he really does think this:
Always b[e] true to yourself. This is the important thing.
Why not spend some time talking about ways to do that in practice, rather than talking about all the less important stuff?
Another choice quote:
Provide innovations worth the bang for the buck.
Ah yes - innovation is about sprinkling features with new content into a tired existing design. Every innovation is a formulaic, optional extra with a price tag.
That's the spirit
There's plenty of things that Bioware can and will do wrong (at least in the eyes of the Codex), but it's poor form to pick them out of a parsed review without consulting the original source and even poorer form when the reaction ios based more on perception of a company as opposed to the individual and what was actually said. We can all do better.
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