That didn't last long

Dungeon discovery prerequisite removed — There is no requirement to have discovered the dungeon entrance in order to queue for that dungeon in the random dungeon finder tool.
-- patch notes for 4.06

Sheesh.

Make it impossible to document these locations?

What is wrong about exploring a really big forest that is filled with random spawns? You earn EP while you do it, you do it only if you like to explore (important) and the designer can even put a few things in there to find. (But make it impossible to document these things in internet sources!)
-- Nils

OK, how do you make a MMO where the locations of things are not trivial to document (saying "impossible" might just be a bit much).

My first strike would be to eliminate x,y coordinates entirely. Don't show them on the map, and don't let them be available thru any in-game API/scripting. Of course, if you have a map, then you've got a de facto coordinate system: the pixels of the image of the map are arranged into a regular grid.

What next then? OK, have the map you see be different from the map I see (thus not a standard shared image). I've written before about mapping as interactive game activity.

You'd still want it possible to find your way back to the thing you found. It might need to be a case of "head up the mountain path until you see a rock shaped like a dog, then climb down the slope until [yada yada landmark landmark] and there you have it! The lost treasure of Sierra Madre!"

What about you ... how would you tackle this design challenge?

Supporting explorers

Bartle defines explorers as players that seek out information about their world, and share it with others. Part of the reward for explorers is the private delight in discovery, but often an equally important reward is being able to pass on your knowledge to others, or even to share it together.

How to support explorers in an MMOG?

First, obviously, you need lots of content for them to explore. Start with adding quirks to your terrain, to reward the player for pushing through the bushes and exploring an otherwise unimportant gully. Simple things like setting up a picnic blanket and basket, but with skeletons scattered about and nothing more – an unusual sight with an unexplained story.

You could also add hidden mechanisms to your world, like ley lines that affect magical powers. Let the explorers figure out where they run, and what effects they have on the game.

Map making and documentation.

Another neat thing you could do is build into your game UI a means of taking and sharing photos of the world. That way you could not only boast about this tragic picnic in the wilds but show proof to others. I don't just mean allow the player to take a screen shot and upload it to a website, I mean collect and share photos in the game itself. They could share individual photos the same way items are shared in chat or trade, they could pay an NPC or a crafter to take their photo and mount it in their home or guild house, and they could publish collections of images with annotations in guide books.

Designing for exploration - how not to do it

It's the Midsummer Festival, and the moo is back in The Slave Pens.

On a whim, once Ahune has been readily dispatched, I decide to explore the place a little bit more. Turns out that there's a hidden underwater tunnel!

Unfortunately, to get to it you have to get past two trash packs of hard mobs. And not regular sized trash packs either, these are trash packs of six mobs each.

Compare this to the more obvious and direct route where while there are three packs of trash, they are only four mobs in each, and furthermore they are placed in such a manner that it is actually possible to skirt around them completely.

Way to go Blizzard, make the obvious and direct route the simplest, and punish the explorer for going off the beaten path.

Measuring progress thru the story

If asked "how far are you into the story and lore of [some expansion]", most players wouldn't be capable of giving a concise and succinct answer. Apart from not knowing how much more there might yet to be encountered (fair enough), they'd also not have a strong grasp on just what they have accomplished.

If asked "how far are you into getting to the level cap", most players would be able to give an exacting answer. Some would even be able to tell you their XP/hour rates and projected play times. All the numbers are there.

When I look at a few of the top MMOs, the reason why is pretty plain: the latter is measured in game, while the former is presented only ephemerally. Once you've completed various quests, they are wiped from your in-game quest log UI. There is no built in mechanism for remembering whether you've met various NPCs or not. A cursory exploration of a zone unlocks and reveals all of a map, and deeper and more thorough exploration is not rewarded beyond that.

There's an untapped opportunity to take a future game design in a new direction.

Warp travel & navigation - another take

Reading Down with Star Trek: Sector Space over at Bio Break and the bulk of solutions to the un-fun Sector Space navigation mechanic in STO is to simply present a list of destinations and then you'd warp there. The further away the longer it will take. And apparently without risk of plotting a warp through the centre of a star.

So, while the clumsy non-fun mechanics of Sector Space have been removed, nothing fun is suggested instead. It simply becomes a time-sink.

Here's my idea:

OK, start by selecting a destination from a list (squinting at a map to find a particular destination is one of Syp's complaints), and then asking your navigation officer to lay in a course. He will then select a heading, a speed, and a duration. You can adjust those settings if you want.

If your warp gets too close to any gravity well (stars, planets, massive comets, black holes, mysterious anomalies) you either fall out of warp or your heading gets a bit messed up (which could either deliver you well off course at the end of the warp or put you at greater risk of running too close to a subsequent gravity well).

The game now is to shoot the gaps, to adroitly navigate.

There is scope for RPG advancement too:

• Your starter ship doesn't have a compass and gymbal which are accurate to 27 decimal places, so until you upgrade your equipment you'll have a greater chance of not heading exactly where you wanted (and risking warp drops or unwanted slingshots).
• Your starter crew are not the greatest navigators, so of course they mess up too: if you ask them to auto-plot a multi-jump route they either don't find the most efficient route (like taking one small jump in the opposite direction to set up a long straight jump, vs many small hops dodging the mess directly ahead), or misjudge the safe radius for systems and risk a warp drop, or are overly conservative and keep a wide berth around gravity wells (and thus less efficient routings).
• Your early maps would of course have all the major star systems plotted, and sufficient info on their planets to avoid their general orbits - but better maps would include precise orbital timings so you'd be able to skirt close to one side of a system because you know all the planets are on the other side.
• The early maps might also be missing some black space gravity wells - rogue planets or comets or black holes, floating in the inky interstellar voids. Not all bad news of course - stumbling across stuff like that is all part of exploration.

All these provide scope for upgrades and advancement, and if the personality of your chief navigation officer is randomly selected everyone's experience could be different too (which impacts the usual gaming strategy of look up the optimal grinding pattern to upgrade and then whine endlessly about the boredom of grinding).

Of course, with this navigation system a player could instead forgo all the upgrades and do all the steering themselves - like I said, it's a game of shooting the gaps. Start the game with most players having better skills at navigating than the Navigation Officer to kick start this learning curve. Some players won't like doing the navigating and will spend their resources on upgrading their officers, ships, and maps; others won't mind and maybe even find it fun, and would prefer to spend hard earned credits on weapons systems instead.

To make it more fun, to make it more of a game, it would be necessary to provide feedback and scoring to players: have the game system report their best travel times across maps, and the shortest routes, even have it score the time it takes a player to lay in a course before hitting the warp button, and keep a leader-board for players to compete against (will anyone beat Han Solo's Kessel run record of 12 parsecs? [yes, different game, different universe, bite me])

Design Challenge: mapping as a game?

Ryan Shwayder has posted a poll on his Nerfbat forums

How much quest direction do you want on the map? None? A perfect "X" every location? Something in-between?

The discussion is very interesting too, turning towards how mapping could be made into more of a game.

So, a design challenge: how would you make making maps in a game into an interesting activity in itself?

More kill 10 wolves please?

I'm levelling an alt, and thus am revisiting many zones.

In my travels I wandered into the Warsong Labour Camp in Ashenvale and saw no quests here at all. Lots of orcs, busily labouring away, but not a single quest.

Fair enough that creating interesting quests with rich backstory and characters and polish and quality checks and all that is a lot of work, but c'mon .. not even a simple request to go kill some wolves because their howling keeps them up at night, or they'd like some warm furs? Heck, a simple fedex quest back to the Mor'shan Rampart would be better than nothing. Even if the quest was grey and I could happily ignore it, it would add a bit of life to this camp.

Which gets me thinking - would adding more trivial and banal quests into a world make the epic quests stand out more? What if the trivial quests were added as daily quests, to further differentiate them?

new quests found

So, I'm flitting through Zul'Drak gathering some herbs and I notice a shiny quest marker. I'm at a main quest hub, I'm 100% certain I've done all obvious quests here ages ago, and yet .. a new quest?

OK, I accept [Tails Up] from Chronicler To'kini at Zim'Torga. The quest doesn't show any hints or any info in my quest helper mod, and a quick check at Wowhead finds nothing. I do a quick google .. same thing. Look on wowwiki .. same thing.

The quest is a simple job: take a blow dart and zap some leopards and bears and find 3 females of each. Easy, done and dusted.

I travel on, and then find another new quest out at Dubra'Jin - [Eggs for Dubra'Jin], being handed out by an NPC named Ha'wana. Again, no mention on wowhead, wowwiki, etc etc - not even the NPC is listed (she's standing next to Chronicler Bah'Kini). Again, a simple collection quest: they want eggs. They can be found on the ground nearby, or carried by the raptors. Simple, done, dusted.

So ... patch 3.0.8 wasn't all bad news then =)

Alternative to quest texts

A comment on Kill Ten Rats caught my eye:

But I think there’s more to the problem of quest text than just that people are too lazy to read it and too stupid to understand it. Yes, that’s the basic problem for a lot of people, but quest text seems to me to also be a very awkward game mechanic.

What other ways could it be done? Back in EQ (or was it UO?) you'd interact with the NPC via typed dialog - you'd type something, he'd reply, you'd hope you used the correct keywords, and on it goes.

So here's an idea, inspired by the flavour responses that WoW NPCs have when you just click on them (a sequence of greetings deteriorating into annoyance) ... click the NPC and he mentions he wants help, click again to find out more, and so on. Mix it up a little bit so players don't just spamclick - have the NPC ask a question at some point, to which the player could /agree or /disagree or some other /emote as appropriate. The responses would probably be via text, not voice effects, simply because of the massive volume of content required.

The NPC might react differently depending on if you are mounted or not, right in front of them or not, and so on. Not mysterioius-different, but flavour-different. Some might insist you sit down before they talk, rather than flapping away

Levelling speed and zone sizes

I realised today while flitting the length and breadth of Zul'Drak that I completely skipped the Grizzly Hills zone. I'm now level 78, nearly 79, and the content of Grizzly Hills is more suited for 73-75. I also missed out on seeing various instances at an appropriate level, thus missing out on a decent challenge.

I first landed in the Borean Tundra and worked my way through all that. I didn't leave until I got the Nothing Boring about Borean achievement. I then spent many hours exploring as much of northrend as possible, a challenging task for being only lvl 72. I then completed the I've Toured the Fjord achievement and dinged a bit more. Then the Might of the Dragonblight fell too, I got my winter flying, finished exploring the rest of Northrend, and headed to Zul'Drak to continue levelling.

It's taking about one night per level, which is awfully fast, and I'm not alone in this. I'm out-levelling zones before I've fully explored them. I'm glad there's more than enough quests per zone to level and I don't have to mindlessly grind mobs before I'm ready to go to the next zone ... but the zones are still too quick.

One downside of this rapid levelling is that my guild is widely scattered across the levels and the zones, which means we don't get to play together much at all. Another downside is I'm missing out on hitting the various instances at the appropriate levels, meaning they present no challenge to me. It feels like I'm just boosting others, blech. Also, all the zones have great terrain and features and hidden nooks .. but I'm missing out on immersing myself into them - a dozen quick quests here, a dozen quick quests there, and I've moved on. There's also a huge number of stories going on in each zone, many with an underlying theme or greater story arc, but with the speed of levelling they're just not sinking in. More the pity.

Hmmm...

Flying over content, such a waste

The Moo got his winter woolies on the weekend and then proceeded to explore the rest of Northrend. Flying over Storm Peaks was fun, but when I started flying over Icecrown I was struck by the magnificent desolation there, that and the legions of undead arrayed about. The geography of the place is very much linear, with huge elites guarding gates from one subzone to the next. Ominous and spooky added to the scene.

It looks like one huge outdoor raid zone, I can easily imagine a guild or two of raids carefully slogging their way through the zone, capturing safe bases along the way, establishing a tenuous foothold before waves of zombies come in the night and overwhelm what few defenders haven't logged out yet.

Such a pity then that players will simply fly over all that beautiful zone design.

I would design the zone such that there was progressive zone unlocking like the Isle of Quel'danas: fill the air with nasty flying mobs which get cleared in limited flightpaths by establishing a series of ground bases. These ground bases would have ground gunners and magnificent magics keeping the air clear around them, as well as launching powerful NPC patrols back to the prior base.

I can imagine that some of the quests could be escorting caravans of NPCs to forward bases. As each wagon arrives an additional NPC resource gets unloaded. This way, even if you're not on the quest it's in your best interest to help them get through.

Progressive unlocking of the zone, but with a temporary nature - after midnight the zombies, ghouls, wraiths, and stitched horrors come out in greater force, easily overwhelming the NPC defenders, and even overwhelming the lesser numbers of players on at that time of night. Not a good place to log out in, obviously. Don't have any inns where players could set there hearthstone to (not a good idea from the players' perspective anyway .. who wants to hearth into a zombie infested burning ruin?)

Throw in some lower tier rewards for participating in the ground assault, something requiring sustained effort (not just a quest or two). Make it such that the top tier raiding guild would still be overwhelmed by the enormity of it all - sure, they could easily capture successive staging objectives, but they wouldn't be able to do that while simultaneously defending the previously captured bases, and anyway the long slog would be an enormous time-consuming grind before they even get to the raid instance. The top raiding guilds would require the assistance of the rest of the player population, who would already be participating for the ground assault rewards anyway.

Plonk in a few smaller dungeons along the way, some on the main path of the ground assault, some down divergent gullies. Thus: don't have just the one possible path which gets unlocked - this design opens the possibility of a guild rallying the general population to go unlock a side path one weekend, and another side path some other day. This keeps the zone interesting long after the top tier blazes the main trail.

I'd love to play in that world. Much better than the static theme park of raids where you must be "this high" to ride.

Innkeeper Norman has a secret

No, not that secret.

He's currently selling Honey-Spiced Lichen and Pungent Seal Whey, two WotLK common foods with very impressive health/mana restorations. I've checked with a few other innkeepers but it seems they don't have the same connections as good old Norman.

Achievements for Hunters?

With WotLK there will come achievements. There are no class based achievements though, which is a sad omission.

I'd like to see class based achievements - it might actually be a mechanism to teach players about their class some more. How many hunters know how to double-trap, for example?

Apart from that, there could be some fun class-based achievements. While I see an achievement for killing various rare spawns, for hunters I'd want to see an achievement for taming rare spawns - Humar etc.

Another hunter achievement I'd go for would be kiting some mob half way across the world. What class based acheivements would you go for?

More than terrain in the territory

Fantasy lore often has reference to magical ley lines, shifting rivers of hidden energy. Knowing where these ley lines are, especially where they cross or join, is of strategic import.

Yet how many games include effects from ley lines in the actual game play? I don't mean simply in the lore itself, providing colour to NPC chatter or at most serving as an excuse for a quest or two. The closest I've seen in WoW is in Netherstorm, where you can stumble into patches of invisible free flowing mana which replenish you - it's a pity these don't exist in the Eye of the Storm battleground though, that could shake things up in interesting ways.

Imagine a game world where the ley lines start out as unknown, where building your guild fortress on a ley line provides benefits equivalent to building on tactically advantageous terrain, where different ley lines are associated with different forms of magic (shadow, nature, demonic, spirit, fire, etc) which buff or debuff your spell casting. To make it even more of a game these ley lines shouldn't be blindingly obvious to passerbys, not even in their effects (adjust the random numbers, don't apply a buff). Let players wonder why they seem to get more crits in one place than another, watch the stats junkies pile on saying it's just superstitious interpretation of blind luck.

Later on, introduce quests or capabilities to map these ley lines. The full extent of these ley lines would remain incomplete because they occasionally flow through inhospitable territory. The capability for the mapping of a ley line could be dependent on the type of ley line, and the capability limited to those classes that can use that type of magic. Holy ley lines would remain a mystery to warlocks, demonic leylines a mystery to crusaders.

Later still, let players discover for themselves that these ley lines move about - gradual shifts usually, sometimes sudden re-wiring jumps. Be prepared for the whining from the early adventurers that built their power base on a nexus which has shifted. Introduce some means, expensive grand projects like cathedrals, where the flow of these ley lines can be influenced. The flow could influence not just their path across the map, but also in their strength - let there be wars of strategic interference, damming the flows to cut off the enemy further down the flow, etc.

As much as maps are not the territory, neither is physical terrain the final story.

teaching situational adaptation

Syncaine describes a common quest chain pattern: (a) kill 10 boars, (b) find some boar relic, (c) kill the boar boss.

Consider instead if the first quest you got was to eliminate the threat of some monstrous ogre. You head off to do so, but discover that he's no dummy and has surrounded himself with dozens of guards and so on. Not only that, he's a full 5 levels higher and is an elite. The pig-headed adventurer would grimace, and plow right in. The smart adventurer would return to the quest giver and explain the situation .. at which point the quest giver would then offer some intermediary style quest - perhaps raid an outpost to draw off some reinforcements, maybe a quest to gather some special herb or stink bomb or other aid for the coming showdown. The quest to deal with the ogre boss would remain in your quest log the whole time.

The point being there could be a game mechanism in place to reward thoughtful situational adaptation by players, a design approach which transcends the “kill 10 x” and “kill x for y” grinding pattern of quests.

Note too that so far I haven't said the quest is to "kill the ogre boss" - instead I said "eliminate the threat". You could complete the objective by killing the ogre boss, but you could also uncover some additional quests which leads to you holding some object which causes the ogre boss to react differently, be friendly even. There could be an alternative quest line which results in you eliminating the threat by convincing the ogre to swap sides, to enter into a trade arrangement, or even eliminate the threat by convincing some other NPC group to lead the attack and kill the ogre boss or force him to flee.

exploring maps

Some quick thoughts on an exploration/expansion themed world game:

• No "you are here" cursor .. if you lose your way, you can't just take a quick look to see where the cursor representing you is located on the map. You need to look around for a landmark.
• The player map doesn't auto-fill .. the player has to stop and perform a "scribe map" function for a short while.
  
• If you "scribe map" from a location not adjacent to an existing map space, then the map scribed is a free floating fragment which you have to shift into position (like a jigsaw puzzle).
• Distant landmarks, if visible, would be added to the map when scribing. The area around those distant points wouldn't be.
  
• The quantity of space which gets added to the map is small, quite small. It should be a major effort to exhaustively map out an entire zone, not a quick jaunt around the zone.
• The map, as scribed by each player, will have errors, omissions, and distortions which makes each player's maps different.
  
• Players can control just how much area they want to scribe on each attempt. The greater the area, the greater the inaccuracies.
  
• Players will have opportunities to improve their map making skills.
• Players can acquire items which improve their map making skills. Some might be rare or difficult to find.
  
• Landmarks and such can be added to maps by the player, but won't be automatically added.
  
• Names of zones/areas won't magically appear.
• Maps describe the territory as at the time of scribing, thus if the territory changes later then maps become outdated (eg. a new village is founded, a road established, a mine opened, a forest felled, etc).
• Maps or fragments of maps can be shared, sold, traded.
• It should be possible to craft false maps (for whatever devious reason you can imagine).
  

places above, below, between

I dream of a zone which is a vast forest, where you could not only travel about on the ground, but also climb into the arbosphere and follow an intricate maze of skyway paths. The tree level wouldn't simply be another flat level overlaid on the ground level, but a 3 dimensional space, one where paths criss-cross above and below each other, where shortcuts are available by carefully jumping down in just the right spot, where apparent dead ends reveal ladders that open up whole new opportunities. Mix into that the occasional high protuberance from the ground level such as a hill or building to further complicate the potentials.

Floating above the tree level there could also be a cloud level, where gas leviathans lazily drift from place to place, and you'd need to now take into account the fourth dimension: time. Once all that is happening, build in an underground level too. Tunnels, caverns, precarious paths along cliffs. Some tunnels would wind upwards, exiting on cliffs overlooking the tree level.

The underdeep evokes memories of Wailing Caverns, with it's interesting possibilities of different paths, of having to leap across a gap to get to the next area ... which is most unlike Karazhan - while that place has used the vertical dimension you can't do a whole lot with it. There are no short cuts I know of available, and unless you have a parachute cloak or some magic skill a wrong step would usually be fatal.

Different sub-zones or gateways would be controlled by different factions, necessitating careful balancing of reputations. Certain paths should be mutually exclusive, determined by which rivalrous faction you have reputation with.

An explorer's paradise.

a wild west of magic

Are most fantasy MMOs set in ancient worlds, places where the extent of the lands have not only been explored at some time, not only been settled at some time, but are even littered with the ruins of ancient civilisations? Sure, there might be pockets of wilderness, but they are like national parks, preserved, carefully delineated on the maps, and nonetheless likely to contain the aforementioned ruins of ancient civilisations.

Are there any fantasy MMOs which are instead set in an "new world" environment, one where the frontier beckons, vast and unmapped? I wonder if a fantasy "new world" setting could be developed to include wild west themes. I don't mean steam punk elements like guns and trains and such, but instead sociological themes such as dirt poor pioneers scratching out the beginnings of empires, boom towns under constant threat from wild natives, a constantly moving and expanding frontier.

At least you wouldn't have to go write up a few millenias of lore with fanciful creation stories involving doomed immortals and such. Well, not until some intrepid adventurer stumbles across an ancient monument in the jungle or a hidden valley of ruins.

hidden ways

Neat. I just discovered the back passage from the Wayfarer's Rest in Silvermoon city. It affords a shortcut from the Walk of the Elders through to the Bazaar. There's another one through Silvermoon City Inn, connecting the two main throughfares.