Chapter 3: The Melding of Single Player and Multiplayer

The treatment of the MMORPG as a genre separate from other genres is a delicate balance and one that is becoming both increasingly difficult to justify and increasingly important to consider.

In the end massively multiplayer online games are just that. They are games. And while there are some inherent differences, as with any genre, many of the things that worked in other games will work in MMORPGs. As the genre grows it will diversify and you'll see sub-genres within it that will, by and large, tend to reflect the major genres of smaller scale games.

The crux is that there are only a few differences between the two types of games. However, thus far, those few differences have driven a rather large wedge between game styles. However, as the genre evolves we will see a further integration of what is successful traveling both ways as mechanics and techniques will be lifted from the single player world and transported to multiplayer and vice versa.

Chris Strasz brought up a solid point about developers as a whole:

"I think one of the interesting things is that a lot of the examples we've been using are in single player games…. I've heard a lot of people say 'Oh, I want to bring the single player element into massively-multiplayer games.' When you look at some of the very high production quality single player games where content is shorter it's a little bit more possible to get in things like cutscenes and full-screen cinematics and we're to the point where some of the developers might look at bringing some of these things into the Multiplayer games."

This sentiment has often been stated as a goal of many developers of "Second Generation" titles. Primarily that seems to be a reaction to things such as content barriers, network/latency issues, player retention measures, and the like that are all things which have created a very distinct experience in the First Generation. This is one thing which will tend to resolve the differences between single and multiplayer gaming as the hurdles are conquered. There's a remarkable dichotomy that must be overcome to reach this convergence however.

Jeremy Gaffney explains the dilemma well in this quote:

"Also I think the bar's higher for us too in many ways. I played Max Payne. I bought it for fifty bucks. I literally finished it on one plane fight to Europe. I played through the entire game and I loved it. You know I didn't feel like I'd wasted my fifty bucks. Money well spent. I loved the game.

If we shipped a game that had ten times that much content, say it only had a hundred hours of gameplay in it, we'd be reamed! Like there's no way that people would play. They'd blaze through it in two weeks and say "Why should I give you fifteen more bucks?"

And so the bar is just higher in terms of content between online and off. And it ought to be, it's not an unfair thing, we want their money every month while the single player games only want it once."

So we have a situation where the term "massive" means more than just a massive number of players. It also means a massive amount of content. But as companies bridge that divide and start finding better and better ways of providing large amounts of compelling content we'll see the gap lessen.

This is already happening in many of the games that have released in the last year or two. The cinematic experience is being drawn on by companies like Square-Enix, SOE, and Blizzard. World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 are good examples because they're both big worlds, like previous games, but they're also surrounded by a framework that attempts to aid the player in finding a direction from which to experience the world through the use of lore, storyline, and quests. It remains to be seen how successful they will be but their success, both short-term (which seems high at this point) and long term, will have to be evaluated by games coming into the market further down the road.

The true danger, in fact, is not in believing that single player and massively multiplayer are too similar but rather that they are not similar enough. The Sims Online is a virtual case-study of this sort of failure. Everyone expected it to bring in a flood of new players and revolutionize the genre. Why it didn't is what Paul Sage refers to as "the corruption factor":

"There's a corruption factor. I don't mean to denigrate any of our competition, but take a game like The Sims Online, which I think we can all agree didn't work as well as they'd hoped, and you look at it and you look at why it didn't work and one of the things they did is they did a lot of research into the other games. And they took it too literally.

They took something from these other games, an avatar that's you and you move around and everything else, and they took away what was fun out of the Sims to get to that point because they had this idea of what Massively Multiplayer Online games were and thought that it had to fit that rather than naturally extending The Sims which would have been a lot more fun I think for a lot of people so there's a trap there."

It is this trap that this chapter is here to parable. As the MMOG developers overcome hurdles they are refining gameplay and the two sub-types are drawing closer and closer together. This is a natural occurrence. After all, single player games have been refining the experience as a whole for forty some years. As a developer, it's important to understand the differences, the challenges, and the traps of designing a game intended for the Massively Multiplayer space but not to over think the proposition. To believe that the Massively Multiplayer space is truly separate is to throw out decades of game development that is tried and true.

Chapter 4: The Stratification of Online Gaming

The "triple A" MMORPG titles are currently engaged in a feature war. Budgets are driving ever higher and higher as scopes soar to larger and larger heights. With that we are seeing a diversification of the genre. This move towards bigger and bigger games is leaving a window of opportunity. And within the window whole new types of games are being developed.

Long, Gaffney, and Sage explained the situation in detail:

Long: "I think there's going to be - and we're already seeing it - a large stratification between the big and the small, the generalized and the specialized. Where we're going to see companies like ourselves (and that's not to say we're not going to dabble in some specialist, smaller, niche products, who knows?) and Vivendi, and Sony making big blockbusters; we're going to spend 10-30 million dollars, whatever it takes cause we're in this sort of feature race now and it's kind of what happened to simulation games; if you look at flight sims, they ended up in this sort of escalating feature war. I have 40 kinds of planes and every plane can have 10 different kinds of load outs and then you can modify, blah, blah, blah. And we're kind of getting into that realm now with online games where you have to have pets, and you have to have guilds, and you have to have parties, and you have to have some sort of social system, and you have to have housing, and you have to have multiple races and if you don't have that minimum feature set your perceived as a lower end product even though, if you look at like regular games, there isn't anything like that except in simulation.

And so I think that's already stratified itself into this layer of like you gotta spend three years and 20 million dollars or you're not going to be able to compete in that realm. But then I think there's going to be the smaller games like Tale in the Desert, Puzzle Pirates, and World War II Online where you spend hopefully not very much money because if you spend a lot of money on one of those products you're doomed. But hopefully you spend a very little amount of money and you attract a smaller, much smaller audience, you're going for an audience that's a few thousand versus a few hundred thousand. And you're going to make money off it and it's going to be like cable TV, hopefully, where there's generalized channels but you go get digital cable where there's not only the Discovery channel but there's also the Discovery Health channel so if you only want to see science shows about health topics you can and you know there's this ever increasing specialization for smaller and smaller niches of our populous so I think that's what we're going to see."

Gaffney: "And I think we'll see too those smaller games are going to have smaller budgets and I think there's a chance some of those will hit. I don't think a ton of those have hit in the last generation but I don't think that's endemic. I think we'll actually see more of those hit. And as an example take Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike has thousands and thousands of people logging in every day; they're playing the same damn twelve maps they've played since the game came out, especially now that Counter-Strike Source is out. And so there's a lot of the attributes you'd want out of an MMP right there but people are willing to accept very, very little content as part of that mechanism and that's our major cost. So I think PvP's going to be an example of that, because PvP games you can make cheaper than you can make player verses environment games, but it's only an example. It won't surprise me at all to see one of those small games take off in the next few years and make a lot of the big boys rethink where they're going."

Sage: "I think the first game that succeeds that is not a leveling based, kill the monster based game will bring in a completely new influx of players. And that's what we want to see. I think everybody in the room will get suddenly giddy by that."

There exists an interesting window of opportunity. It's easy, in all genres, to overlook the very small titles and keep focused on the blockbusters. But despite the major hurdles of entry it's possible to create small titles and survive. There are games doing it right now and as the bigger games continue their war and continue to grow this window of opportunity is only going to widen. There are pitfalls however and special considerations. Weil laid out one of the biggest unanswered questions:

"I definitely agree with Starr about the specialization and the proliferation of many smaller games. I mean you certainly have a lot of small target groups. You know you have people who like World War II stuff, you have people who like flying, you have people who like bass fishing, or riding horses and there have been fun games about all that stuff. And my only concern about that is the mindset of, Ok, so you get the game together on a shoestring budget and you launch it and you're making your bills and being able to make a little bit of money on top of that and that's fine. But three or four years down the road, where are you getting the money to do the kind of upgrades, either software or hardware, that your going to need to do? Is it going to be just a constant turn over of those little ones or are they going to find a way to actually be persistent?"

We won't see the answer to this for a few more years, although the most likely result will be a mixture of the two. Of the small games a very few will "hit" and become so successful that upgrades aren't an issue. Others will survive for a few years only to eventually fade away as they are outpaced by the growth of technology and innovation.

But don't make the mistake, with all of this talk about smaller games, of thinking that the big games are going away. Peter Freese explains:

"So several people have mentioned that the problem is the amount of content that's required for these games and that one way of solving that is to create games that don't require as much content. But I think there will still be a demand for games that are huge content beasts and the amount of content that's expected in those is going to increase and therefore the challenge for development teams is to find ways of innovating creating that content faster.

That's particularly true for the US development because the interesting phenomena we're seeing now is that a lot of these games are being developed in Asia and some of those are going to be westernized. And it's much cheaper to develop a huge amount of content in Asia than it is here because, literally, you can hire a small army of artists and designers for what we could pay a small team here. And that's going to be challenging."

And so we will see a war of innovation and diversification over the next few years mostly fought among the small titles. Meanwhile the large titles will continue to grow and grow while facing their largest challenges and making their largest innovations not necessarily in the content itself (although this will happen) but rather behind the scenes in the very ways in which MMO games are created.

Chapter 5: Innovation, evolving the genre

Time and again, we've come back to the term "innovation". It's a challenge that gaming faces over most other forms of entertainment. Few tout how their latest movie or novel innovates their respective industry. When a movie does come along and innovate it's huge; it gives us our Star Wars and our Matrix. It's a very defining moment to their entire industry.

Conversely games are expected to innovate. Even sequels are expected to bring something new to the table. Some of the most successful series of all time, the Ultimas, the Final Fantasys, the Grand Theft Autos, have gone back to the drawing board, sometimes radically, with every installment. Because games offer so many more entertainment hours than other products we need to provide a reason to play a new game. Few would wonder why you'd go see a new movie. You saw the last one. It's done. But games are many, many times longer and are often designed to be very repeatable experiences so they, inherently, are more challenging to get into people's hands. Why, after all, would a consumer pay for the same experience they already have? This is why innovation is one of the cornerstones of the industry.

MMORPGs, by extension, have an even greater challenge in this area. MMOGs are designed to support weeks, months, even years of gameplay. This greatly increases the investment of the player in a particular MMOG and makes innovation even more important as the enticements needed to convince a player to change games face an even higher bar than single player games.

While we've established that innovation is important there is another piece of the puzzle. It's easy to say, "Go forth, and innovate!" but it's also important to understand where innovation is available. Starr Long elaborates:

"It's interesting because, technologically and even game design-wise, you can argue that we lag somewhat behind offline gaming or regular multiplayer gaming in visual technology or physics or whatever it is and so that perceived lack of innovation is also symptomatic of the fact that we're just executing things that have already been done. Like if you look at the movement from Ultima Online to Everquest that was a big jump technologically from 2D to 3D but that had happened like, you know, 10 years before in regular gaming but it was perceived as a huge leap because it had already happened elsewhere."

If the "standard" features of innovation are unavailable where should developers be looking to bring something new to the table? Jeremy Gaffney responds:

"I think you're going to see your innovation be in feature sets beyond 'Hey, I'm an avatar. I'm walking on terrain.' You're not going to see a lot of innovation in those basic things. What you're going to see is better social systems. You know people haven't explored social systems very well right now. Things like the 'side-kicking' in City of Heroes where you can group with people outside of your level range, I think people are going to do more things like that and take that type of thing to the next level. Guilds are a pretty basic grouping mechanic and I don't think anyone's done anything truly innovative with that in a while. You see that infrequently but not that often that people are really tweaking that stuff. I think there's a lot of growth there because that's an area, as mentioned before, that's never been explored in offline games. That's where you can innovate really in the online games because no one has done anything like that before."

This is our target. Gameplay and social systems. Because, as Long said, there will always be technological hurdles and the genre will always lag behind smaller scale games so it's a simple mater of defining what's unique. And what is unique about Massively Multiplayer Online games? Well, the massively multiplayer part. This is the target of innovation. How do people interact? How will gameplay assist, impede, or challenge their interactions. How can we overcome issues which frustrate interaction? These are the type of questions whose answers will lead to the future of online gaming.

But is there anything a developer should be aware of when looking for these innovations? Long and Gaffney offered up a number of things which developers often overlook:

Long: "It's important to be aware of gaming as a whole. And not just computer games but just games period. Because one of the things I'm always excited about is if someone can come to me, whether they're on my team or pitching a product, and say "Hey, you know Parcheesi? Guess what? We have this really cool mechanism that works just like Parcheesi." And I'm like, ok, I understand Parcheesi and I see how you're going to leverage that to make something cool happen in an online game. Or you know the real-time strategy thing where you can control where spawn points are? Well imagine we add that to an MMP game. I'd be like, oh, I totally get that. That's a mechanic in another type of game that hasn't been explored in online gaming and if you're bringing something like that to the table that would be one of those 'Oh! Well that's interesting.' And it's been successful in other types of games. No one's doing it in online-space but if its proven elsewhere then that's a cool thing."

Gaffney: "But there's a trap there because it's kind of a cliché in the movie industry and, to an extent in our industry, when you're pitching a game you take two top sellers, you say 'It's going to be just like Myst plus Grand Theft Auto. Both of these games sold eight million units, we're going to sell sixteen!' So make sure you're innovating as well as stealing."

Long: "It's important that you're not just giving those platitudes. You have to say here's the specific feature of Grand Theft Auto: we're going to let you steal cars. Right. And here's the specific feature of Myst: once you get in the car you're going to have to solve an elaborate puzzle, that'll take twenty minutes to complete, to get it started."

Gaffney: "I don't think there are any magic bullets. Things that will scare me away pretty quick though is that a lot of people try to innovate by bringing up stuff that has been tried a hundred times, it's been tried in MUDs or MUSHes…

Long: "*cough* Perma-death *cough*"

Gaffney: "You stole my next sentence! People say "perma-death". We know what the implications are. There are really good arguments about why that has not succeeded in the market to date and people think that they're innovating by bringing up the stuff that hasn't worked. Now it's possible that there are takes on those things that are new and innovative but I never hear them. I always hear the same old stuff about 'We're going to have aging in the game and perma-death and blah, blah, blah.'

If it's not fun don't do it. It's not fun to spend five months on a character and then lose them due to a net bubble of lag that pops up. It's not fun to watch your cool hero turn into a decrepit old guy who can't even swing a sword anymore. And so why do I want to pay money to have this happen to me? I don't.

There's a whole bunch of, 'If it's been tried before and failed in the MUD-space we're probably going to point to fourteen ways,' 'Hey, Medivia tried that and it didn't work.' or whatever."

Gaffney concluded with this thought, and I will end the chapter on it:

"One thing that's probably worth bringing up now is that all generalities have exceptions, including this one. One of the great things about the MMP-space is that it's a really young genre and it's staying young since its so freaking hard to make 'em that the genre is proceeding very slowly. Everquest II is coming out a long time after Everquest. And there aren't a lot of teams that have done two of these ever. There aren't even a lot of people who have done two MMPs ever, from start to stern. So everybody has ideas on what's going to make the genre work, everybody has ideas about "Oh, this is the way you make MMPs", this is the way it happens, and I haven't heard a single law yet, including the ones I spout out myself, that there aren't at least four exceptions for.

I can tell you forty-eight reasons why Lineage never would have succeeded, or would have been awful game design, and guess what: if I were the guy signing up that game then I would have turned down a hundred and fifty million dollar a year business.

So it's really easy to get cocky and be all "Oh we know all about this." But there's still room in this industry to surprise all of us. There has been in the last ten years and will be in the next ten."

Chapters 6-8