This is an idea I articulated some time ago in a previous iteration of this blog. However, this summer a panel at Penny Arcade Expo reminded me of it and it has festered in my brain ever since.
It was a panel regarding the future of MMO’s, the panelists included creative leads for a nother of MMO studios including Flying Lab Studios, Red 5, NCSoft / ArenaSoft and a designer from CCP (of EvE Online fame). It was presided over by a former WoW developer.
The consensus from all the developers was that the future of MMOs was player created content. It was interesting that although the panelists tried to make a semantic distinction between MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games for those incoming martians amongst you) as defined by Ultima Online, popularized by Everquest and “refined” by World of Warcraft and MMOs as a general family of games, the audience members seem to have difficulties divorcing the two.
The recurring question raised by both panelists and audience members was “how can other MMO’s compete with World of Warcraft?” and the unspoken but still addressed question was “why should they try?”
The response from the developers was pretty universally - content is king for MMOs and the cost of including new content in games is a function of interaction complexity, graphical complexity and quantity of simultaneously interacting content. Creating a rich game world gets exponentially more costly the more content you introduce - so to compete with the Blizzards of this world you have to be able to create a richer, experience so that customers get more value for their time rather than more value for their money.
There are several ways of addressing this. CCP figured out early that procedurally generated content within a well designed gamespace can enable that nearly infinite scalability whilst minimizing development overhead - EvE Online is inarguably the largest MMO to date, and probably therefore the largest virtual gaming world ever conceived short of the fictional realms of tabletop RPGs.
The issue is dodged however; we’re not talking about the length of breadth of experience - the selling point will be the density of gaming opportunity. The feeling of being “productive” by engaging in several different activities simultaneously will be a defining feature, I believe, of successful MMOs. Getting more for each minute of gameplay in character advancement.
This content density is simply outside the realm of feasibility for most gaming studios (despite MMO studios generally being smaller than other AAA developers). The solution? Open it up.
How would you do this?
One concept would to to create a supply chain system using NPC inputs and outputs with player characters providing the processing abilities. A less abstract example using World of Warcraft-esque playspace would be along the lines of:
NPC named Habbard Kane offers a quest to a player, the player will get 100 XP and 3 gold leafed goblets of trustiness. After some convincing explanation Habbard Kane tells the player he needs 20 hens teeth and he’s willing to trade these gold leaf goblets.
So, the player heads off to the woods, slays some unsuspecting were-chickens to retrieve the hens teeth (whilst also gathering some rooster combs) and comes back to Kane and exchanges it for the Goblets.
These Goblets are part of this players greater quest for a rare piece of armour, but the grocery list of items for it is quite long.
Another player gets into the game and wants to create some new content.
They decide to create a character, they want him to be some doddery old craftsman. The name him Haggard Kane, customize his in game avatar using some of the built in tools. After that they specify some of his behaviour. He spends his days making gold leafed items, he purchases items at the market, takes them back to his workshop and godleafs them with magical goldleaf he makes from materials he collects or purchases. He’s a universally friendly NPC, so they give him some quests to offer to players of different levels. One of those quests is the Goblets for hen’s teeth quests (hens teeth are a material component in his magical gold leaf that he can’t collect since he’s a frail old man unable to slay beasts).
A different player notices that there aren’t a lot of creatures that give out hen’s teeth in the area of the game around Haggard. So he decided to create werechickens, so using the games tools for creating enemy creatures he defines the spawning areas and basic behaviour for the werechickens and what kind of things they drop.
Some earlier player created the item class “hensteeth” as a very rare, difficult to obtain, magical component which provides some basic luck enhancements to the possessor of the item but is more valuable as a material component in other combinations.
The system keeps track of the quantity of all items, xp consumed and produced in the processes within the game. Based on qualifiers for the item (such as “rare”, “super rare”, “unique”, “rumoured to not actually exist”, “pure fiction” etc) it will increase or decrease the drop-rates and other probabilities to keep the market non-exploited but flowing. The system “director” would also adjust the level of XP handouts for question completion, and enemy killing. It would also adjust the level of the creatures appropriately.
This would all encourage exploration, specialization, cooperation and market deviation from the players by having a diminishing return on certain quests based on ease of completion. Ease of completion is inferred by the frequency of quest completion, average level at completion, and host of other variables.
Again, the qualitative nature of item, enemy, NPC and player interaction would be defined by player-generated content but the exact quantitative effects of all these elements would be arbitrated by a combination human operator and automated system given a specific ruleset.
That’s my concept for an Open Source MMO.