What To Do?
My biggest stumbling block with turning my game design into an MMO (originally it was going to be an RTS, but it’s kind of moved away from that) is coming up with enough player-oriented stuff to do… having not played traditional MMOs much at all, I’m not sure what all is possible. I know mining is usually a big draw (if such a monotonous task can really be called a “draw”; “unfortunately necessary chore” seems more appropriate), but beyond that, I don’t really know what could be included in a space-based MMO as player “jobs.” EVE - the only space-based MMO I’ve even bothered with - really doesn’t give me any clues, because you’re stuck in your ship 24/7… one of the things I consider dull, and only slightly ridiculous (not being able to land on a planet is another biggie). I’ve never even seriously investigated Star Wars Galaxies, which seems like it would be my only other source of insight. I’d pick the brain of my cohort in crime, but he’s out of town right now trying to whip another theatre’s projection booth into shape (yes, my “criminal” companion is my manager), and these conversations are hell on wireless minutes.
I get the feeling this is one of those warning signs you’re supposed to see, as a developer, and say “hey, I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing… maybe I should re-think this.” However, nobody ever said I was all that bright when it came to knowing when to quit while I was ahead (or even just barely breaking even), so I’m likely to continue plowing through this idea with the grim determination that can only come from either sheer genius or overwhelming stupidity. Hopefully, more of the genius will stick than the stupidity.
To continue, then, I think the difficulty in moving the game world from a single planet into interplanetary (and eventually, interstellar) space is that you increase the mount of potential game space more than exponentially (would “factorially” be a good word to use here?), without actually being able to dump content into much of that space. It’s great to have derelicts and space stations and asteroid belts and the like dotting the map, but there’s still, by necessity, going to be large tracts of vast nothingness between them. This is, I’ve found, an issue that land-based games don’t tend to have. Single-player games tend to break a planet off into small, distinct levels with lots to do, but which cannot be accessed in other missions, while MMOs break the world into zones, all of which can be explored at any time - you just have to wait for them to load - and all of which have something of at least minor interest in them. Again, in this regard, I feel like I need to sit down and have a good long chat with someone who plays WoW incessantly, just to get a feel for how transportation, communication, and city planning works in these kinds of games.
The biggest trick, for me, is that I don’t want everyone in the game to have to own a spaceship. It just strikes me as highly improbable that an entire population would be made up exclusively of spaceship pilots and their crews. Obviously, one could simply shift the planet-side duties to NPC-only characters, but that seems to be pre-emptively limiting my options as far as what players can do. Admittedly, it would be simpler if everyone just started out with a spaceship and to hell with the planet-side jobs, but I don’t think that would offer as much variety in things to do (it would also make landing on planets and such rather pointless, which brings us back to EVE). Since this is the space age, though, what sorts of things can your average PC do without a ship? Mining is an option only because spaceships are still made of the stuff… a lot of the craftsman jobs in medieval-fantasy MMOs are probably not going to exist because you don’t need shields and weaponry basic enough for your average metalworker to create. Farming is a possibility, but what sort of short-term results can you get out of that kind of job? I guess you could shift the burden to retail, so people buy finished or nearly-finished products from an NPC distributor and then assemble/sell them, but that’s not much fun (of course, to me, neither is incessantly making swords with your mouse… whatever).
Possibilities increase if you own a ship (or at least, they differ greatly), but if you don’t start out with a ship, how long will it take you to get one? Would you be able to buy one on credit? If so, could you default on your loan and have your ship impounded? If so, could you evade impoundment by keeping to the edge settlements and staying on the run? If not, why? Could you elect to start your character out with a ship at the expense of other things, like more money, clothing, etc? If so, how good would the ship actually be?
If you have a ship, what can you do with it? Run passengers? Run cargo? Do salvage ops? Go on rescue missions? Mine asteroids? Could you do these things with illicit cargo / fugitives? Could you engage in piracy against NPC and PC ships? If so, what counts as acceptable piracy and what counts as griefing? Would there be pirate-friendly zones outside of which piracy is frowned upon (and if so, would these be established in advance, or by players as trade routes developed), or would it basically be “fly at your own risk”?
There’s also options to join the military… armies and space-based naval forces (possibly even actual marine navies if the player count gets high enough) that would carry out operations against enemies, or in defense of allies. Though, initially, I don’t think there’s going to be a big sign-up rush for the Fleet, because initially, I don’t actually intend for there to be any other races… just us humans. That will change in time, though. It’s part of the story :).
Of course, you can take missions and get paid for doing them, but it’s freelance work, and I don’t know if I could drive enough content to make freelancing viable at the start of the game (perhaps I may even have to take advantage of instanced missions for less dramatic stuff, like recovery of cargo from a drop point and various other shady dealings). As things take off and more space opens up (as well as new races), the number of jobs to take on would go up dramatically, but initially, one may be hard-pressed to make a living on the “raggedy edge”. Of course, this is the difficulty with creating a strongly story-driven MMO… you can’t release ALL of your content at once, because some (most?) of it has to come in with story elements down the road. The result is a fairly small initial game world that could potentially be burned through in a couple of weeks by people with no lives, as opposed to games like World of Warcraft (or EVE… ye gods), where it could take you two weeks just to get to the other side of the map.
A lot of “what to do” is also compounded by “where can you go”… unlike EVE, I intend for you to be able to look around inside your ship at any time (in space or on the “ground” [space stations count as ground]), as well as get out of your ship when you’re on a planet or docked at a space-based facility and look around. This creates problems when you intend to let people roam around a human spaceport metropolis, because you kind of have to make the city explorable; locking folks inside the spaceport complex is just dumb. And unlike Uru, where they had a perfectly good in-character reason why you couldn’t go everywhere the moment the game opened, I really don’t have such an excuse for why certain areas would be off-limits, while others are open. The added difficulty here is actually creating a living city, not just a static bunch of locked buildings with shiny storefronts. Again, I think I need to have a chat with someone who plays WoW and see what the Blizzard guys have done for city development.
Anyone who wonders why it took Cyan six years to get Uru release-ready should spend a couple of weeks really trying hard to come up with an equivalent concept… it’s a lot harder than it looks :P. More to come, as always, when I get some more time to ramble ;).
October 27th, 2005 at 2:24 am
I suggest you study Battlecruiser 3000AD As long as you promise to not follow in the developer’s steps and release the most buggy game in history (though it was later stabilized through patches).
There are terrible (Derek Smart working pretty much alone on the title, sucky graphics, buggy release.) and wonderful (amazing concept, large scope) things that have been said about this game. Though I myself have yet to play this. Despite it being freeware.
Just some “suggested reading”.
From what I’ve heard, this game has both FPS and Space-Sim elements to it. Not sure if it has any Space Trading elements to it.
If you want to grill me on SW:G go ahead, I used a year of my life on that game. Though I never bought the space expansion pack.
I’d also suggest you take a look at Freelancer, or X2: The Threat to see how modern space-trading sims work. Vegastrike Might be good to look at.
As for my input. I wish you best of luck. Sounds like you’re planning to make some kind of MMO Spore.
October 27th, 2005 at 4:36 am
I will have to take great interest in this VegaStrike game, and see what it can do when I have more time to devote to actual research versus random babbling for paragraphs on end ;). Very intriguing stuff… will definitely have to investigate that.
Thanks nommie!
October 27th, 2005 at 10:33 am
Hmm… the more I think about it, the more interesting your idea becomes…
As a limiting thing, say, have battling spaceships rather expensive. That way not everyone will be a pilot because it requires a rather large capital investment.
One possible job you can do is as a crew cook/cleaner of another ship. You get paid to clean it and look after it as best you can, but obviously if it’s a huge ship you will only be able to do a small part of the work. Perhaps have it so the insides of the engine ‘decay’ due to some rather potent fuel source, so you have to constantly spend your time walking around the ship, into various hatches and corridors cleaning spots - basically getting from point A to point B in as quick a time as you can. After you’ve done so many jobs on low-levelled engines, you gain the skill to maintain higher and higher levelled engines.
But for other skills, things can be split up. WoW works by everyone’s allowed two skills, but whatever skills you pick you can’t complete any full process - skin animals, create leather from the skin, tailor some clothing. Mine raw gems, fix up gems, embed gems into weapons/armour. Mine ore, refine/mix ores to create metals, create weapons/armour. Then there’s some cross ones, like disenchanting spells already cast on weaker weapons/armour and using that to enchant higher-levelled weapons/armour. Basically, you could give everyone a maximum number of professions and things would eventually become correctly priced by themselves - be a planet earth miner, gas cloud miner or asteroid miner. The higher-quality ores can be rarer, and because of their higher quality that will drive up the demand - but it’ll take more time to collect them as they’ll be rarer. And it doesn’t have to be rocks - it could be mining a gas cloud in space, it could be mining trees for wood, plants for their rubber, animals for skin/fur/wool/produce/food, anything. Once it’s collected, someone’s got to get that stuff to a settlement with a refinery to turn it from a bare-bones product into a usable form - people running transport ships? Once it’s refined, it has to be crafted into something - who does the crafting to make the hull plates, or tools, or weapons, or cooking food, or preparing chemicals, or manufacturing fuzzy dice to hang over the rear-view mirror in your space ship? What about the energy demands - anything in space is going to require a source of energy. Energy gets used up, someone has to collect energy in some form - whether that be geothermal from a lava-flowing continent on a planetoid, liquids from an ocean of acid on another planet, gases from a sun, or even the deadly task of sucking up gravitational energy from a black hole, someone has to do that. The energy has to be converted on the ship and stored in one form - you might harvest the heat from the lava place and store that in a chemical battery form, or you might store it in nuclear battery form, or neutrino form, or antimatter form, or whatever, but each one has their own capacity specs. And thems higher-quality engines that you have to get top-notch maintenance crew to fix up? They need the more expensive-and-dangerous fuel sources directly in the ships. Someone could have their whole skill as being able to pilot a ship through hyperspace instead of having to use normal impulse engines, and using slingshot effects to speed up the maximum speed of your craft. The higher the level, the faster the hyperspace/the longer the distances, to the point where that person has enough skill dealing with it all that they are allowed to use a nearby black hole to effectively teleport from one black hole to another. Someone’s skill could be they’re good in space dogfights. Anything and everything could be done, and if you have enough interdependence on everything then people will /have/ to work with other people to get anywhere significantly… you could do it on your own, by starting out as a desk job on a station to learn how to do something/cleaning the station/looking after the produce/refining it/whatever else needs doign at a settlement, then move on to getting your own rickety ship that you pay a NPC to fix up for you when you reach a port and using that to transport things, upgrading your ship’s components so you don’t have to repair as much or so you can make the trips quicker until you have a fantastic ship with weapons and armour you got by yourself and you pay NPCs to staff the roles you can’t. Paying another player costs less, and NPCs aren’t always available/aren’t the best at their jobs. There’d be a point where you can’t earn enough with a large ship to cover for paying X many NPCs manning it, though, and you’d have to get other players as otherwise you couldn’t keep making money.
And the maps in WoW are… well, they’re a convoluted mess. Partly on purpose, I think
There’s no one place that’s the ultimate hub for everywhere, you can’t go from one place to all others, you almost always have to make a few hops around the place. The larger cities are sectioned such that all of one type of store/trainers/NPCs/resources are in one section while others are in other sections, but for the smaller cities that don’t have everything, they’re just mostly wherever’s convenient for the town. I play it not too much, but you can pick my brains as much as you need… and I know about a few other MMOs too that I played for a while.
…gah, I can’t believe I wrote this much o.o I’m going to stop now… I had thought about just deleting this all, but you might find it interesting, soo, I’ll post it anyway… You might find some value in it. Sorry if I’m weird in the above writing or if it’s incomprehensible or stupid ideas, it’s been too long since I last slept :p
October 27th, 2005 at 3:15 pm
As for what they could do without a ship, perhaps run a shop, find and trade items for people, on a planet…
Then, once they had enough money, they could take a class to become a mechanic, or a pilot, and be hired by someone that owned a ship…
November 6th, 2005 at 12:34 pm
I suugest you look at a game called “Elite”. it was made in England during the late eighties and it inferres a lot of things you may wish to study on.