20,097
edits
Changes
m
[I'm still working ''This Blog Post was part of the Elder Game blog. It was posted by Citan on bugsFebruary 1, polish, and a bit more content for the next playable pre2012.''' : Previous Post: [[Elder Game: Easy Player-Made Content]]: Next Post: [[Elder Game: Sign Up For Pre-alpha. I just got the camera controls fixed! I also added sliders and settings so people Alpha/Alpha/Beta]]'''Additional Blog entries can tweak be found on the camera behavior. Next up[[Developers]] page or in [[:Category: redoing the Quest and Crafting GUIs so you can tell whatGame Blogs]] '''s going on.
But while I work on mundane stuff, I’ve talked about death penalties before — let's look far aheadme bring back an infographic from one of those blog posts.This correlates an MMO’s death penalty with other aspects of the MMO.. way ahead by like six months or so... and look at some features I want to add eventually.]
Player-Made DungeonsMy death penalty is lenient. My game is first and foremost about exploration, so I need a penalty that makes it easy to explore. Actually, my death penalty may be the most lenient in the MMO universe, because there’s actually benefits to death: Mehyou earn Death XP, which is useful for many things, like necromancy.
I I’ll have mixed feelings about playera minor money-generated content in traditional MMOssink, too, but nothing very painful. GenerallyI really want people to be able to wander the world, players aren’t very good at making contenttry things out, so you have lots of trouble sorting wheat from chaffand figure out how the game works. This The game is really complex, and the fun is very difficult because players don’t grade based on in figuring all these little systems all out. If you felt compelled to read the internet to learn how awesome content iseverything works, rather than exploring for yourself, they grade based on you’d miss the difficulty-to-reward ratio most important part of the contentgame. You’d be left with the stupid grinding part that every MMO has. I would have failed.
And when MMO developers think about this ideaSo yes, what they usually come up with is Project Gorgon has a full suite of dungeon-creation tools that let players remix existing dungeons very lenient death penalty. But at the same time, I sometimes want games to challenge me, especially when I’m working in new waysa small group to accomplish something hard. This is a ton I like the feeling of work, overcoming tall odds — and getting that feeling of accomplishment is generally pretty dullmuch easier if the stakes are high. After a few years of updates, MMO developers have usually already attempted all A high death penalty does make the obvious things that can be done with these dungeon pieces. So usually all you’re getting is a custom story scriptgame feel more epic. That’s not worthless — Can’t I like quests with good stories — but it’s also not worth all have the effort it takes to make a dungeon-creation tool!best of both worlds?
But let’s leave aside the creation : - How much time is lost before your character is “back to normal” again: - How much of entire custom dungeons. There your resources are still some great simple ways lost to let users create content for other usersdeath (items, money, etc.): - How far you have to travel to resume playing
In fact, these features will It turns out that even a lenient death penalty can be very easy to add to almost any MMOpretty painful in particular circumstances. They play “within the rules” of the game, and require only minimal new GUI interfaces and database tables. If you’re reading this and you’re an MMO developer, feel free The trick is to use fiddle all these ideasvariables just right so that you get more nuanced behavior. I can at least give it a shot!
Treasure MapsI’ve played with lots of ideas, and I’m still working on it. Not every idea pans out. I thought for sure I could build upon the unusual fact that my game knows how you die: Geoit knows if you were arrowed to death, or burned alive, or poisoned by a snake, or whatever. Every kind of damage has a “cause-Caching for MMOsof-death ID” attached to it. So I figured if you died by the same cause too many times in a row, or too often, the penalty would go up. That would fix zerging. But that was dumb because… fuck zerging, that’s not even a real problem. It’s a PvE game, and important PvE monsters can’t be zerged like that — they heal too fast.
First up is the easiest one So I had to code: treasure maps. All you do is go to a certain spot in the world, “bury” an item in the ground, and receive stretch a “treasure map” for that itemlittle further. You can now give that treasure map to a friend, What exactly should my death penalty accomplish and they can go hunt for the treasure you placed.what should it avoid?
How do they find it? Well first, you can write a message on the map to give them clues. (It’s a tweet-length message, maybe a riddle or some general info about where it’s hidden.) Second, whenever they activate the map, it will tell them if they are getting “hotter” or “colder” compared to the last time they used the map. Tada! A very simple way to give your friends something to do.The Death Penalty Traps
I can implement this in There are a couple hours. The way it works is of well-understood “death penalty trap” scenarios that the map actually stores the info about the “treasure” it contains. So internally, the map itself has the treasure “inside” itself all the time, but only gives you the treasure if you’re I must avoid in the right spotorder to be successful. That way it doesn’t require any special world-state variables… just a couple of extra IDs stored in (These are the item. Easyreasons that games have been gravitating to lesser and lesser death penalties for years! They hurt business.)
Legendary TreasureThe Death Penalty Benefits
If we’re willing to spend more The biggest benefit of a high death penalty is when grouping. You’re working as a team, you’re greater than a couple hours on the tasksum of your parts, we you’re kicking ass and overcoming tall odds! The death penalty can help make it a lot more interesting. Legendary Treasure works basically the same way: you go some place in the world and “bury” one or more itemsodds feel taller. But this time you I still don’t get a treasure mapwant an EQ1-esque “lose all your items” death penalty, because that makes people too afraid to try new things. Instead, you write But I want the danger of death to give your successes a “legend” (a tweet-length message)little bit more shine.
These legends automatically show up in taverns and message boards around The other good thing that death can do is bring scariness into the worldgame. Players In most MMOs, there’s a definite lack of scariness, because anything that can read your legend kill you is about the same. A 50-foot dragon and see an 8-foot ogre represent the reward item they’ll get if they exact same stakes: “either we win or we die.” There’s nowhere else to go there, along with how many rewards are left in the treasure hoard. When all the treasure has been given out, the legend disappears from the message boards.
Now players can propose simple riddles Death penalties are a somewhat unorthodox way to the entire server shard, make some creatures scarier. I want to play with an automatically-given reward. And againthat idea, this is very easy to implement. Maybe two or three days of work for the basicstoo.
Lady of the LakeTravel Time: The Classic Casual Death Penalty
Here’s a different riff on the same ideaMy main death penalty is travel time. The Lady of the Lake is an NPC When you die you reappear in a special locationcentral area in the zone. High-level players can give her items to give If you were just out to others if a certain key item exploring, this is shownno biggie — you can go explore somewhere else. For instance, “if a player presents If you were trying to complete a red rubyparticular quest, give them this hypno-gem.” (The guessing player doesn’t lose their itemthough, so there’s no penalty you’ll have to guessing wronghoof it back. This is pretty typical for MMOs.)
You can also create “legends” for theseBut in dungeons and other difficult-to-reach spots, as abovethis penalty is more painful. That’s because my dungeons aren’t instanced — they’re like EQ1/EQ2 dungeons: shared areas. Each one is a large labyrinthine place that’s big enough to support several groups of people exploring at the same time, which gives hints with monsters respawning over time. (This design has many great social benefits that I’ll talk about what item is needed and see how many rewards are leftlater, but also, my server tech just doesn’t do instancing well.)
And I So if you die deep in a difficult dungeon and have a half-dozen other mechanics in to work your way back down to the same vein (pseudo-programmable “golems”bottom, “bounties” you that can place on specific boss monsters, etcbe a big time penalty.) By combining these simple systems togetherIf you’re lucky, you can create some really interesting content, like multi-step scavenger hunts, or guided tours other group will have cleared the path recently. Otherwise the rest of rarely-visited dungeons, or complex ciphers for players your group will have to return to decodethe surface and then fight back down again.
Paying To make this penalty stick, I have to be very stingy with resurrection abilities. Otherwise I lose the Pricepenalty! (This is what happens in most games that try to use travel time as a penalty — the designers are so desperate to give out useful abilities to healers that resurrection becomes dirt cheap… they end up throwing the penalty out, almost by mistake.) So my resurrection powers have long reset timers, and resurrection items are rare.
All these systems require generosity: You may still quit over something like this — “we were almost at the person creating the content has bottom and then Andy died and we had to pony up the rewardstart all over, wasting another hour! This way there’s never ” But your tolerance for it will be higher. You came into a problem with balancegroup-combat area, so you knew the stakes were going up. It also means the content is always temporary: even And if you bury 1000 items in the ground, only 1000 players will ever be able want to experience your contentgive up and go do something else, you always can. But that’s It’s not such a bad thinglike you ever lose levels or items from dying. It means you get to create a new better version laterSo the penalty is still very lenient and casual-friendly.
Does requiring generosity sound like a deal-breaker? But I doubt it will be. I remember when I was a high-level AC1 player, creating “quests” for newbies was have one of the most fun things I did. (“Bring me Tibri’s Fire Spear and I will give you a Peerless Atlan Claw!”). And if the game helped to manage these quests, I bet there would be a whole lot of high-level people who enjoyed giving away items creatively like this. And think of the guild events!last trick up my sleeve…
Bottom line is that players already do this. They just don’t get any support from the game to let them take it to the next level. And there’s no good reason why not.Death Curses: Making Bosses Scary
Easy The most powerful bosses in the game are supposed to Code… be scary and Maybe Even Better Overallhorrible. These are the stuff of legends, after all, so you should know what you’re doing before you fight these monsters — and the game is happy to teach you how. There’ll always be in-game lore or explanations of how to best defeat them. Unlike most of the game, the big bosses aren’t about “keep trying until you learn how things work”; they’re about “figure it out before you go.” One way I make this work is with curses. They selectively bring back a harsh death penalty.
These systems will need A curse is just a bit of polish and fleshing out: profanity-reporting, debuff… one that lasts a rating system (for content creatorslong time, so you can sort legends by most-popular creators)possibly even permanently, and a doesn’t go away if you die. The main way to give feedback get rid of a curse is to kill the creatorthing that cursed you. But this is all pretty easy stuffAs long as you win the fight, no biggie. If you lose, that’s a problem. Hopefully the group can finish it off for you. If not, you’re going to have to work your way back and most of it can be added incrementally over timetry again.
Most importantly, because of These curses range from losing 20 from your max health for the transitory and un-abusable next 10 game mechanics involved, I won’t need administrators hours to examine content and see if it’s “fair”. It’s always going to be fair: it’s just players giving each other items. Admin intervention will only be needed in cases being stuck as a giant bee for the rest of profanity and similar abuse — which I already have to handle for profane chatyour life.
And the crazy thing is that I suspect these simple tools will give us more interesting content than Yet Another Player Made Dungeon Where Every Room Has Bosses In It And The Monsters All Quote My Little PonyBut don’t worry too much about being stuck as a giant bee.Hey, bees can slow-fall! Of course, bees can’t talk to NPCs or use weapons… but you’ll never have to worry about dying from falling off of tall places!
[Also: thanks Heh, but seriously, there are always at least two ways to MMO Melting Pot for giving me remove a curse. You can kill the 2011 Piggie Award for Most Charming Games Company Employee! Though thing that cursed you, or you can find an alternative cure. If you’re stuck as a bee, there is a rare loot-item from insects that can cure you, if it’s made into a potion by a high-level alchemist. (I do think admit that category this part is rigged against bigtricky to get right… these back-company employees who have up solutions need to filter everything they sayalways be rare, and often have to announce commandments from on high which but never be so rare that they don't agree withseem dishearteningly impossible. And sometimes, they just have It’s hard to be make the bad guy. When I was working on AC2economy work out that way, but I’ll see if I was always the Bad Cop so that the rest can pull it off eventually. Or maybe it’s just one of those “medicine is almost as bad as the team could be the Good Cops. Hmm for Gorgoncure” things: you stop being a giant bee, I need to remember to hire but that curse is replaced by a Bad Cop. I ain't doing more mild curse that thankless job again.lasts many days.Dunno, still poking at it.])
[Sandra says: Not These scary curses are just for the big bads — the ultimate bosses of the game universe, which take a long time to build up to. But much weaker curses are fun for occasional changes of pace when soloing, too. A few trash monsters have curses, but these aren’t too scary, because you can just kill any creature of the same type to remove your curse. If a Goblin Necromancer hits you with Fragile Skull Disorder, causing you to lose 20 from your max health and power, you can fix it!]by killing any Goblin Necromancer anywhere in the world. And even if you don’t bother, those curses only last an hour or two — long enough to notice its effects and be annoyed, but hopefully not long enough to really piss you off.
no edit summary
I have lots of ideas about how to make player-made dungeons more excitingthink I can, yes. But… that’s for The trick is that my graph up there represents a different game. Project Gorgon isn’t going to be able to support user-made dungeons. Maybe the next MMO…death penalty as a single axis, but actually death penalties have many factors, such as:
: - You log in to just chat with some friends and end up getting killed while running from town to town, and lose something valuable that is hard to get back. Odds are you’ll rage-quit over this: you weren’t expecting to be punished.: - You are soloing monsters and having a good time, but then you have some bad luck and get killed a few times too many, and now your character is too weak to keep fighting these monsters. Now you have to go to some earlier place and get strong again. Chances are dangerously high that you’ll just give up instead, and may not come back to the game.I need to avoid these and similar scenarios. Hence the very lenient penalty when you’re exploring. But we can I still want to get a feeling of accomplishment when people do better…hard things.
Death Penalties Are An Art
I think that most games don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about what they want their death penalty to accomplish. I know this because I’ve worked with lots of MMO developers, and they just… don’t really think too hard about it. They rightly assume that the game needs to have a casual-friendly death penalty, so they copy an existing MMO and call it a day.
They don’t consider the down sides of those existing death penalties. I mean, how often have you been about to die, and had a super-healing potion ready to drink, but thought, “nah… my life is worth less than this super-healing potion, I’ll just die instead.” My bank vaults are often full of powerful survival tools because it never feels worth using them. If death never has a sting, you shouldn’t bother giving out save-your-bacon items, because nobody will use them.
That isn’t to say we need entirely new death-penalty systems, because I don’t think we do. But MMO designers need to think about death a lot more instead of just slapping something in and calling it a day.
That’s one of the joys of making my own MMO, because I’m more than happy to try new twists on things and see if I can improve upon the problems of what’s come before.
If you don’t even try new stuff, it won’t ever get better.
[[Category:Game Blogs]][[Category:Elder Game Blog]]