Justin Achilli

Tag: MMOs

10 January 2011

Katabasis

You know what MMO I want? I want a very specific MMO with three things.

I'm all up in ur phalanx, killing ur hoplites.

I want a game that takes place in Late Antiquity, after the death of Alexander the Great, when his generals were stealing his corpse and propping it up at their camps to show that they were the favored military/ political leader in the absence of a legitimate heir and that everyone else could go chase themselves — until someone else stole the corpse and became the hotshot general. But I don’t want to have to know piles upon piles of historical minutiae. I just want the period in broad strokes, and to be able to play it from there. I want to hurl an Iron Age javelin at a dude and wear a clunky breastplate and maybe stab a guy with a spathe, but I don’t want it to be in a generic Middle Ages environment.

My game also needs freeform unit composition, but with awesome matchmaking. That is, I want to make whatever kind of soldier I feel like at character creation, and then I want to be able to join any “guild” I feel like, and I want the game’s socialization tools to help me find the sort of army for my specific playstyle. That way, the individual player groupings can decide if they want to be focused groups specialized toward one specific tactic, or if they want to be generalists, who take all of the playable character types and adapt their own unique approaches.

Finally, I want persistence. I want character advancement, sure, but I also want to be able to acquire territory and win battles that affect the world and that actually mean something after I log out and log back on. We seized Bactria, you sons of bitches! Now, in gameplay, you have to take it away from us, and we have to defend it. But while we own it, we gain a benefit from it, or we have access to an asset otherwise not available, or we even get a special item available in shops. Whatever. But the point is that we took it, we own it, and it means something.

There. There’s my completely rational, totally doable, niche-market list of terms. Please create a game for me, or please point me toward a game like this that already exists.

2 comments
11 October 2010

Poveglia Unveiled

Unclebear.com sent a link to a travel journal on Poveglia into the Twitters this morning and I absolutely fell in love with it. There’s something edifying about the real world being a font of astoundingness even more fascinating than the flights of fancy of professional fantasists. So, instead of once again lamenting the garbage state of modern fantasy, I propagate the link.

As presented, Poveglia as a game resource could make for a great modern location, a haunting echo of what was lost to a post-holocaust game, or a foray into lost civilzations for a fantasy or scifi game. It’s also a great example of being able to fill in the details, much like my favorite authors allow, as the relics found there offer no context themselves. Imagination and the imcomplete story is what makes the sparse details here so captivating.

8 comments
4 October 2010

Ambient Awareness

In social media, there’s a concept known as “ambient awareness” that describes the peripheral contact a user keeps with his contacts. It’s obviously not face-to-face contact, and the contact itself isn’t as substantial as in-person interaction, but it’s enough information and it’s of sufficent frequency for your contacts to passively let you know, “Hey, I’m still out here, and he’s a morsel of what I’ve been up to.” It’s friends lite, to be sure, but it’s far more functional than not being in contact with your contacts at all.


The WoW Armory similarly allows you a limited degree of game interaction while you’re outside the game.ArenaNet recently revealed a few upcoming features for Guild Wars 2 that allow players to keep an “ambient awareness” of the game when they’re not playing it traditionally, at the computer desktop. While the feature set is by definition smaller than the whole of GW2, the plan is to allow players to maintain an up-to-date information set even when they’re not in the game. Most importantly, communication between players in-game and using a mobile device are possible. While you’re at work, while you’re on the train or traveling out of town, you can still be a part of the experience. As well, note that it’s not something suggested by the world itself. Guild Wars is, of course, a fantasy game, without any in-setting equivalents of the mobile devices being used to keep those lines of communication. Is there a metaphor? Is your mobile device a crystal ball or some such magic-as-technology supposition? Or is it completely abstracted or not explained at all?

(That said, ambient awareness does have a limit to its usefulness and breadth. In most humans, the “Dunbar number” is 150. That is, the number of relationships a person can distinguish and maintain separate recognizance of is approximately 150. As to game application, that number becomes even more significant, as the ambient relationship with the game seems to suggest that it will occupy some proportion of that Dunbar number, which also has to be shared with the other players with whom the player relationships have been established. But that’s separate and, I suspect, extremely theoretical at this stage of massively multiplayer gaming.)

13 comments
1 October 2010

Kindred and Computers, Revisited

As a followup to the other day’s technology and Kindred post, in the context of a video game, the relationship of vampires to technology can affect not only your gameplay, but also its presentation. While Vampire: The Masquerade has typically eschewed what Swede and I call “science vampires,” the vampires in the source material themselves have never actively shied away from science and technology, except when doing do has served as a thematic element. (And by “science vampires,” we mean vampires whose origins can be explained scientifically, as with the vampires from the BBC Ultraviolet series or the we-don’t-really-drink-blood-we-drink-this-chemical-fluid-so-there’s-no-moral-ambiguity-to-liking-us vampires from Underworld. The Kindred of the Masquerade have always traced their origins, at least in the West, to the Biblical Caine, who murdered his brother Abel as an offering to God and was cast into the Land of Nod by way of punishment.)


If I told you this was a vampire, would you believe me? It’d be a hard sell, because the focus here is on the technology.That digression aside, gameplay using technology as set dressing is really a slider — how much is just right and how much takes the attention away from the vampires and puts it on the gadgetry. Weirdly, even using technology that’s available now can skew that feel a little much toward a “science vampires” or even cyberpunk feel. Vampires using social media? Sure, no problem. Everyone has a computer. Vampires using firearms? Sure, no problem. Vampires using Large Hadron Colliders or controlling his prey’s mind with biopharmaceuticals? Now you’re starting to get a bit squirrelly. A vampire firing a railgun with a fragmenting ogive warhead? Get out of here.

Even here, part of the slider is the scale. Maybe a Ventrue is the controlling owner of a multinational that’s developing biopharmaceuticals or manufacturing railguns. That’s fine — most of that stuff is happening offstage, and gives the vampire an explanation for why he’s crazy rich. But when the focus shifts to that technology, that’s where the “vampire” part becomes tangential to the tech specs.

Beyond gameplay, once you’ve got vampires, that dictates a certain amount of look and feel for your game as well as the content. Naturally, you’re going to be overcoming challenges appropriate to vampires, whether that means your challenges are other vampires, werewolves, zombies, mortal monster hunters, whatever, in a modern setting. In sophisticated parlance, you want your vampires doing vampire shit in a vampire setting, otherwise why would you have bothered making your game about vampires?


The EVE UI does a great job of suggesting an elite capsuleer, who has command talents and information-sorting abilities at a far greater potential than normal people. But it would be completely wrong as a vampire UI.That look and feel also extends to UI, too, which is often taken for granted during the gameplay experience. But the technological aspect is appropriate here, too. You wouldn’t want the same, equally “modern” UI that the espionage technothriller Splinter Cell games have, even though they both take place “now.” As we’ve said before, implicit to vampires is a sense of history, but too much historical affectation can push the UI into a more “fantasy” look, as if everything is on a wizard’s scrolls. It’s a difficult balance to achieve, because you want that implied sense of vampires being timeless in addition to the idea that their timelessness culminates in the here and now.

And then there’s the part you can’t account for, the question of taste. In the previous technology topic, check out the responses from Valamyr, Russell, Lyte, and Peter. Personal preference is also a slider, but it’s the only one in this context that the designer can’t control.

I’m also leaving out a key element of UI  and gameplay visuals in a game like this. What is it?

17 comments
29 September 2010

Kindred and Computers

One of the questions that came up at the Grand Masquerade (in conjunction with tabletop RPGs, and Vampire: The Masquerade in particular) is how the feel of that original Vampire setting would have changed over the course of its almost 20 years, with regard to personal technology. It’s a great question, and one fraught with significance, given that one of Vampire‘s core themes was neonates versus elders, the modern young versus the hoary old.


I think Caine had one of these in the first city.Part of what makes it even more interesting are recent changes in personal computing. Back when Vampire was young, the emergent technological scene was the Internet, which was powered on the user side by file-driven applications and the Web being a destination of its own. Now, with the look and feel of Web 2.0 development being a very different thing than the AOL portals and rough dial-up gateways of the mid-1990s. Now, with many (if not most) Web use being driven by custom applications (of which browsers are now a subset), those static elders are even more behind — but are 10 years ago’s ancillae equally as out of date with their PDAs? Imagine how out of touch, how downright comical, it is to imagine a bigshot Ventrue using one of those old toaster-sized cellular phones. Or seeing a limousine with one of those old boomerang-shaped car-phone antennas. Could you take someone seriously if he called in his Brujah backup using a Nokia 9000 tonight?

On a surface level, “vampires using Twitter” is kind of a silly idea, and I said as much at the Grand Masquerade. But realistically, like I followed up at the Grand Masquerade, what young vampire wouldn’t use Twitter? What tech-savvy group of fledglings wouldn’t use a social networking tool — one alien to the very mindset of elders and even Kindred as comparatively young as their own sires — as a way to outmaneuver the more powerful but less technologically proficient old Draculas whose domains they want to undermine and usurp?

Years ago, I remember having many discussions on how the ready availability of cell phones radically changes the dynamic and pace of a Vampire game. Well, guess what? That technology shift is happening again, and it has an amazing impact on the way the undead — not to mention the other World of Darkness critters — communicate.


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27 September 2010

After the Grand Masquerade

So, with the Grand Masquerade at its conclusion and the debut of some news and an art-driven animatic, word is now out that the WoD MMO is going to be based on the Masquerade, built on three spheres of playstyle (cofeeshop, sandbox, and themepark), and highlight the ideals of Danger, Power, Romance, and Mystery. One of the panels at the Grand Masquerade offered players a chance to tell the devs what they wanted to see. I took notes like a diligent designer should, and here’s the summary:

 

  • Not a lot of quests. Org versus org. Player-driven faction content and conflict.
  • Not a WOW clone. Repetitive quests are boring and unfulfilling.
  • Concerns over how mental or social influence powers are handled. How to do this well and meaningfully? Players uncomfortable with a loss of control over avatar.
  • Players want to control other characters, however.
  • Territory control. An adult-only play space. Roleplayers want a space where the integrity of the setting colors the conversation. Don’t want to suffer through Chuck Norris jokes and other immersion-breaking chatter.
  • Content that reinforces themes that are the cornerstones of the WoD. “Shivers up the spine.”
  • An exploration of who a new character is, so that he’s not just dropped tabula rasa into the world. Random backgrounds, connections to the world, hooks into world participation.
  • Powers that cleave closely to the powers that exist in the game, but also expand into new directions for appropriate Disciplines. Making them work in tandem with the system, so that they make sense in the world.
  • Finite numbers of the supernatural critter types.
  • Permadeath. Server type preference?
  • Allow social powers to be socially versatile. A character can be successful socially; not all advancement is tied to combat or traditional “leveling.”
  • Factional control of regions or assets. Benefits to controlling key areas or establishments.
  • Live team events built upon a foundation of existing world lore. Real-time events, historical Masquerade characters, GM NPCs who can be interacted with or pull players into stories.
  • Influences, boons,  hallmarks of the social origins of vampires.
  • Accessible to casual players. Low-intensity tasks to just pick up and do so players don’t have to sit there idly.
  • Playable Sabbat.
  • Creation, building visible things that can be added to game. Ex. Toreador art, Nosferatu caverns. Some kind of crafting system.
  • One big world with a dynamic power system that allows different factions to thrive.
  • Stay true to the adult content. Blood, gore, darkness, tits.
  • Present the themes of the World of Darkness as playable elements. Let the players participate in the things that make Vampire what it is.
  • Allow players to participate meaningfully as casual and part-time players.
  • Image and customization consultation — players helping other players create their looks.
  • Playable neonate-ancilla-elder model with meaningful play, all with impact on the in-world vitae economy.
  • Status system — how to represent and elder concept. Players that can participate as setting, a piece of the environment.
  • Unique and empowering via rarity.
  • Rarity of combat unless it’s a character’s focus.
  • Severity and fearsomeness of combat.
  • World that responds to the actions of the characters. Dynamic, changing, adapting to how players use the world.
  • A system to allow players to form groups of their own design as opposed to just sharing commonalities like clan and Disciplines.
  • GLBT friendly content.
  • Rewards for advancement tied to tiered mastery of ability or chance rolls.
  • Final Death.
  • Bloodline characters. Seeing the effects of actions the players have taken in character selection.
  • Use relationships with fan organizations to allow players to play their LARP characters and vice versa.
  • Crafting +1 but not materials farming.
  • Immersion as a priority. Reward the long-time player who’s been into Vampire as opposed to the sillier players who are aggravating elements in other MMOs. Jumping goofball players break the mood.
  • Non-unique names as a matter of character identity.
  • Other WoD critters. The whole panoply of supernatural creature types.
  • Cherry pick the strong parts of Requiem.
  • Mortals, participate in the Embrace, etc. X2 X3
  • Embrace. X2
  • Diablerie.
  • Ability to flag self for PvP allowability.
  • Communication needs. Make communication happen in a way that’s not as as intrusive as “global chat UI”.
  • Politics outside clan and sect. City politics, for example. Domains and territories?
  • A sense of history imparted to elder characters. Flashback sequences, historical instances, etc.
  • Narrative that’s not wholly reliant on players to facilitate the content.
  • Control the rate of character progression and provide content so that casual and time-constrained players can still participate meaningfully.
  • Personal spaces like havens. Ability to damage or conspire against havens. Or help cultivate them.
  • Torpor as a clone-type mechanic as a backup.
  • Casual player rewards and impetus. 

 

It was a pretty exciting panel to be on, especially given that the goals of the players represented here are very much in accordance with the things we’ve been designing and iterating. But what about you? What do you think?


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20 September 2010

Grand Masquerade Programming

Hey, sweethearts. Here’s a little bit of a sneak peek at the upcoming events for the Grand Masquerade. The panels were already listed at the Grand Masquerade website, but here are the scheduled attendees for each of the panels. There’s definitely going to be more programming on hand, but these are the anchor presentations, all booked for the Crescent City Ballroom.

Please note that these are just what’s scheduled, and no promise of attendance is express or implied. This lineup may change under unforeseen circumstances, so please don’t consider this writ in stone. They make me say that, you know.

Note also that although we’re three hotels into the event, we won’t be turning anyone away from attending the show. If you find yourself wandering around NOLA and think, “Dang, I wonder what some vampires and werewolves are doing,” we’ll be there for you.

Anyway, here’s the roster.

The Art of Darkness

Crescent City Ballroom

Thursday 4:00pm – 5:00pm

White Wolf and guests will showcase some of the signature pieces of art that have helped define the World of Darkness.

  • Rich Thomas
  • Craig Grant
  • Matt Milberger
  • Brian Glass
  • Tim Bradstreet
  • Ken Meyer Jr.

Vampire: the Requiem Retrospective

Crescent City Ballroom

Thursday 6:00pm – 7:00pm

The White Wolf staff will present a retrospective on the new World of Darkness property, Vampire: The Requiem. 

  • Rich Thomas
  • Justin Achilli
  • Craig Grant
  • Chris McDonough 

Mage Retrospective

Crescent City Ballroom

Thursday 5:00pm – 6:00pm

The White Wolf staff will present a retrospective on all things Mage, from both the Mage: The Awakening and Mage: The Ascension settings.

  • Bill Bridges
  • Rich Thomas
  • Eddy Webb

Vampire: The Masquerade Retrospective

Crescent City Ballroom

Friday 11:00am – Noon

 The White Wolf staff and guests present a retrospective on the game that started it all – Vampire: The Masquerade!

  • Justin Achilli
  • Rich Thomas
  • Chris McDonough
  • Tim Bradstreet 

Werewolf Retrospective

Crescent City Ballroom

Friday 3:00pm – 4:00pm

The White Wolf staff will present a retrospective on all things Werewolf, from both the Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Werewolf: The Forsaken settings.

  • Bill Bridges
  • Rich Thomas
  • Ethan Skemp

The World of Darkness MMO Team’s Favorite Moments

Crescent City Ballroom

Saturday Noon – 1:00pm

The development team from the upcoming World of Darkness MMO describe their favorite moments from the World of Darkness, giving you a sneak peek behind the inspiration for the game.

  • Jeremy Albert
  • Rich Thomas
  • Greg Fountain
  • Justin Achilli
  • Teemu Vilen
  • Jon “Swede” Selin
  • S. Reynir Harðarson 

Tell the Developers What You Want in the World of Darkness MMO

Crescent City Ballroom

Saturday 2:00pm – 3:00pm

This is a rare opportunity to voice your feedback directly to the development team of the upcoming World of Darkness MMO. Step up and tell them what you want to see in the World of Darkness game – an exclusive opportunity for all Grand Masquerade attendees!

  • Rich Thomas
  • Justin Achilli
  • Teemu Vilen
  • Jon “Swede” Selin
  • S. Reynir Harðarson
  • Greg Fountain


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30 August 2010

Subtractive Design

I remain an enthusiastic observer of the ongoing Guild Wars 2 development. In particular, I like that they’re challenging the MMO trinity of DPS-healer-tank. And of course, whenever I find myself liking something, I get all upset and manage to find some aspect of it that gets me all bent out of shape. Clinically, I’m not sure that’s neurosis, but, hey, shake what yer mama gave ya.


Depicted: legitimate trinities.My primary point of contention is one of fundamentals. First off, who’s the authority who claimed that DPS-healer-tank is a “trinity”? Who imparted divine status on this mode of content consumption? It’s not a holy trinity. It’s a default. Many games have proven that you can deliver a steady, spooled, subscribed-to stream of content by rolling with the proven model. Forgive me for getting all fired up oevr semantics, but I don’t see anything divine in doing the same thing over and over, especially when it’s what most of the medium already does.

And that brings me to my second quibble. Don’t start your design with a negative. Don’t build your premise on what your game isn’t. The Halo franchise wasn’t established when a Bungie guy ran into a room and shouted, “I’ve got it! Let’s not build an RTS!”

Of course, all this is a bombastic way of saying that in design, you need to know what you want your player to experience. It’s not enough to break an existing model. It’s not enough to cast your design in terms of what it’s not. The pivotal piece of your game… is what it is.

Over at RPG.net, the term “fantasy heartbreaker” often arises. (Russell and Ben have even adopted it as an eye-winking moniker for their own journal.) The “fantasy heartbreaker” is a title that casts itself in terms of another game — D&D — and distinguishes itself only in the differences. “My game is like D&D, only the elves are dinosaurs.” “It’s like D&D but the combat is way more realistic.” “It’s like D&D with a much better magic system.” The “heartbreaker” comes in terms of the idea being, well, really not good enough to support its own weight, despite the doomed, loving myopia of the designer. “It’s like Vampire, but you’re a Highlander instead.” “It’s like Changeling, only it exchanges folkloric themes for gratuitous SCA fan service.”

Now, I don’t say of any of this to cast the stink-eye on ArenaNet. They’re smart, skilled developers and they know what they’re doing. I can guarantee you they had this whole conversation and decided what they wanted to do with GW2, even if it started with a critical look at other games in the market and their own initial title and a list of ways in which they wanted to depart from that experience. That’s fine, so long as it results in a definitive statement of what their design is and doesn’t languish in what their design isn’t.

Subtractive design is a productive method of game design. In subtractive design, you pare away what didn’t work in a previous design, trim the excess, shear off the experience that’s not central. It leaves behind an integral core. It’s valid. Negative design, however — choosing your direction as a derivative of where you know you don’t want to go — well, that’s a disastrous and all too often well-traveled path.


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24 August 2010

Vampires and History (and My Amateur Psychology)

Implicit to vampires is a sense of history. Whether your flavor of vampires is damned to suffer the vagaries of the world for all time (as White Wolf’s vampires have been) or bears a less florid immortality, the idea is often that a given vampire might well have been around a lot longer than your modern mortal era, which is when a mortal discovers them and learns about this ancient (or at least annuated) evil.

In fiction, that’s easy as pie. Throw in some kind of historical flashback as a prelude, fast-forward to you anachronistic blood-drinker lamenting about how it was easier to be a vampire before information traveled so quickly, and boo-yah, you’re done. 


Suggested lapses in history need not be comical. They can be a point of conflict or a source of understanding.It’s harder to accomplish in a game, however. In a traditional tabletop environment, coteries often have pretty tenuous relationships keeping their individual vampires together. Here’s my Nosferatu vagrant, for some reason rubbing elbows with your Gangrel hell-raiser, and we’re hanging out in the back of the Ventrue character’s Maibach as his driver shuttles us to some damned charade the Prince demanded we attend. Now add to that some of the implied history that’s available to us — I’m a Roman plebe, you’re a WWI doughboy Embraced in the trenches, and the Ventrue is a young turk from the heyday of American Psycho. With nothing in common, from clans to history, what’s supposed to unite us when we go about robbing banks, attending Princely demands, or doing whatever it is that we vampires do every night? 

I think of that as a challenge, not a problem. It’s an opportunity to make something completely unique. Our coterie, with our weird and disparate historical backgrounds, is now unique. It’s more than a stock completion of the MMO trinity of tank-healer-DPS. It’s more than just a from-the-book assembly of clan archetypes. Heck, the way we built the rules, our hypothetical coterie doesn’t even have to be any different in power level. We can all be neonates with no experience affecting our Traits, with a few allowances made for our histories. My plebe starved into torpor when his patrician sire sealed us both into his crypt to wait out the Vandals. Your doughboy’s last memory is of the machine-guns mowing him down before waking in the 21st century with a powerful thirst. Patrick Bateman over there has never known torpor or the fog of ages. And we’re good to go. We can skip the anachronisms, if we want, by assuming we’ve all had a few weeks or months to come to grips with this modern world, or we can take advantage of our implied historical gap and do the stranger in a strange land thing. It all depends on how we want to play it and how deeply. 


A modern perspective contrasted with history or speculation equals content.On a level other than the narrative, as players, we enjoy the ability to create something called a theory of mind. We can understand the factors that make other people’s outlooks different than our own. While this has an obvious applicability to game narrative — different roles are important to a roleplaying game — where this really takes shape is in the realm of community. Your vampire and my vampire might not get along, but at least we understand that each other is there and we can potentially project a hypothetical response that each other might have to a given situation. If those don’t mesh well, fine; we avoid each other. If they’re somewhat in accordance, that’s a gold mine. That’s a point of commonality. That’s a thing we want to do… potentially together, so, hey, next time you’ve got an evening free or you’re online, let me know. We can play a game of vampire together. And maybe your doughboy, my plebe, and Joe’s yuppie can finally give that glittering 100-year-old sissy Kindred who dates high school girls what he deserves.


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19 August 2010

Meaningful Choices: Covenants and Sects

The last time we talked about Vampire, we talked about clans. The interesting aspect of clans is that they hit a very important note in Vampire: the idea of the sins of the father being visited upon the child, the very gothic (and Biblical) concept that you may well be damned by a decision you didn’t even make. Your sire belonged to organization X, and now so do you.

That’s great, and it makes for a nice blog entry, but let’s move on to another concept. Let’s talk about the social aspect of himself that a vampire can choose. 


Let me put this up front. I thought covenants were one of the great breakthroughs in Requiem. I know people disagree, and some people find the covenants as presented a bit bland. FWIW, YMMV and all that, but what they provided that was somewhat absent from Masquerade was the ability to, well, choose one’s social network. The covenants provided a great dynamism that the Camarilla vs. Sabbat conflict in Masquerade lacked.

That last bit is important. Even though social structures in the form of sects existed in Masquerade, often the choice of clan made the decision of sect for you. Sure, you could be a Camarilla Lasombra, but the setting implied that you’d be spending a lot of time explaining or getting your ass kicked. You could, if you wanted, stretch some definitions and some player expectations and portray a Ravnos antitribu who upheld Camarilla doctrine, or you could be a Sabbat Ventrue without buying into the ideas that supposedly shaped the antitribu of that clan. 


But, come on. Who ever did this? In most cases, you picked your clan partially because of the sect connotations that came prepackaged with it. And that’s what I think the covenants fixed. They established another axis on which to make a meaningful choice for gameplay.

Now, I’m certainly not going to leak any untimely secrets, but this sort of meaningful choice is at the center of MMO gameplay. Given that “MM” means “massively multiplayer,” the sorts of present options that put players in contact with one another and build relationships, well, those are central to the multiplayer experience. 

Choosing your affiliations has value to both PvE and P2P avenues of gameplay. From the PvE perspective, I could choose, say, to affiliate myself with a police faction, a church faction, a gang faction, a league of occultists, “the goblins,” some group of space aliens – whatever the context of the game is, I can find a group with which to align myself and thus procure new content. Similarly, for player-to-player to interactions, “covenants” are similar to guilds and other persistent entities. They’re the groups of common interest, playstyle, viewpoint, and activity.

That’s the key, “meaningful choice.” Requiem provides a diversity of choice, while Masquerade arguably makes the gravity of that choice greater, but the setting makes your decision for you. Thoughts?


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