|
Player-Controlled Content: The Shape of the Future - Jess Mulligan
Outside, Looking In
By Jessica Mulligan, Volume 1, Number 4, February 5, 2006
Player-Controlled Content: The Shape of the Future
I'm going to do something I rarely do: discuss a project on which I've recently worked. It is generally considered declasse to do that, but I think some important things could be happening here, with implications for the industry as a whole, so I sought out permission from the publisher/developer, Nevrax, to discuss it openly.
Thus, consider yourself warned: some of the following will look like an advertisement for one of my clients. In a sense, it is, because I think they are doing something that can change the face of our industry and I'd like to get people thinking about it.
And just what is "it"? For years, players of massively-multiplayer online games (MMOs) in the US and Europe have been asking - nay, begging - for the ability to actually affect the story and landscape of an MMO world. They want to make a difference by building and running quests, populating new maps with buildings and NPCs and missions, build out Guild spaces with more than just a pre-fab house and have a chance at having their stories integrated into the world's overall story arc. In short, players want to have some control of, to truly contribute to, how their virtual world grows and changes. We can already see some of this attitude in casual game in both Asia and the US; it is only a matter of time before Asian hardcore MMO players want the same thing.
What players have been stuck with for the last twenty years is an endless series of mostly static worlds, where the most dramatic change they can effect is usually to place a house on the terrain somewhere. Sometimes the developers will make changes to the world, occasionally even drastic changes, such as when the Live Team for Asheron's Call replaced every creature in the game with a massive invasion of Olthoi, the game's signature evil. For the most part, however, these changes are temporary and transitory. Heck, as developers, we spend most our time trying to create enough content to keep players busy, but no matter how much content we create, players eat it up in days.
But...what if things were different? What if a player could actually use an MMO's world-building and mission-building tools to add lands and contribute to the story, as well as have dungeon master commands to lead those quests and adventures? What if players didn't have to depend on developers for all content? The collective intelligence and creativity of thousands of players is an order of magnitude greater than that of one small team of developers; what might we see if the players have a chance to collaborate with the designers?
Hold on to your hats; we're about to find out.
For the past nine months, I've been a consultant to Nevrax SARL in France for their MMO Saga of Ryzom. During that time, an expansion pack team was building, and is now currently testing, the Ryzom-Ring, which contains the first phase of these player content tools. With the help of Saga of Ryzom players, the developers are fine-tuning a basic feature set of point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools. When launched in this Spring, the tools will allow players to do much of what I described earlier in this article, including having access to the game libraries, owning a piece of the game map and populating it how they see fit. Any of those features that are not included at launch will be added via regular updates and patches throughout 2006, in consultation with Ryzom player base.
Figure 1: Placing creatures on the Ring Alpha test scenario map and then grouping them to move and fight together.
Anyone wanting more detailed information on the design and game mastering capabilities of the Ring is urged to check out the articles at http://www.ryzom-ring.com/ What I want to concentrate on is this:
Just what happens to the industry if we allow player-generated content? Will player-driven content tools, such as those Nevrax is making available, significantly change MMOs as an industry and, if so, how?
I think the tools will change the industry, but it will be an uphill battle:
1. OPENING A CAN OF WORMS
As I noted at the beginning of this article, MMO players have been asking for these tools for a long while. Now that they are going to get them for one modest-sized game, what will be the response from other publishers?
I mean, think about it: The lid has been lifted and the worms are crawling out. Will other MMOs follow suit or will they continue to leave their heads in the sand?
2. PLAYING OSTRICH
History suggests that player-content tools are going to be ignored by the big MMO publishers for a while, maybe years.
Currently, many other publishers are trying desperately to make their own MMOs more like Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Sure, that game is quite successful, but is that we really want, to make all our games look and feel like one game simply because it is successful right now? What about five years from now? What about innovation and new ideas? Who do we imitate tomorrow?
Is copying the current flavor of the month really the path we want to follow for long term success? I mean, it hasn't worked particularly well for us so far, has it? If it was working, then one new game couldn't eat everyone else's lunch in a short period of time, as WoW has done. If there was innovation and diversity in our online RPGs, Blizzard's job in gaining subscribers would have been a vicious war, instead of the cakewalk that it has been.
Unless other developers/publishers get started now, indications are that the field is going to be left to Nevrax for a while.
3. SHORT-SIGHTED
That tendency to play "follow the leader" is sad and short-sighted. The next great leap for MMOs, if we're ever going to get them out of the hard-core rut we've been in for, well, forever, is to open them up and let the players have some control. Teams of fifteen to sixty or more developers may be a big box of ideas, but it is still a box. In that kind of closed ecosystem, inbreeding of ideas - and lack of innovation - is assured.
And that goes double for online role-playing games. All you have to do is look at the current massive online RPGs to understand that point; we keep imitating each other and calling it 'new.' For all that it is a terrific game, even WoW isn't particularly innovative, if at all; it simply exercises great craftsmanship.
In other words, with our current model, we're locked into a death spiral with our current customer base, with MMOs doomed to remain a niche. Sure, it is a pretty big niche compared to five years ago, but consider this: Out of about 600 or 700 million people using the Internet regularly today, only about 10% are even trying MMOs. As WoW has shown, that group can tend to be fickle and mobile.
4. THE DIFFERENCE
And that is why introducing player-content tools is important.
We need to break that mold that says "only developers may make content" and create one that says it is OK for players to have access to the game libraries of creatures, NPCs, buildings and objects to build something new, different...heck, maybe something wildly different. Rather than be scared about it, we should be awed by the coolness of it.
Maybe some of those player scenarios and maps won't be something we recognize as part of the worlds we design; big deal. As Raph Koster noted to a whiny Hollywood writer at the Game Developers Conference several years ago: "Get over yourselves; the rest of the world is coming."
The important thing is: For the first time, players will finally have a meaningful choice in this matter.
5. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!
These kinds of tools also help developers create more content.
For most MMOs today, a content designer usually has to know some scripting and engineering to be able to do the job. While I'm all for content designers knowing how to code and script, it does cut into the available pool of candidates; not every coder makes a good designer and not every designer can easily learn how to code. And a good designer already has to be on speaking terms with a number of disciplines, from anthropology to zoology and everything in between; how many great pieces of content have we lost because a designer doesn't yet code or script?
Limiting the number of design candidates limits the amount of content you can generate, and players still want a certain amount of professionally-design content in their MMOs. As discussed above, though, players eat through that content at a great clip, not the least because so little of it can be done in a given period. And the testing time and requirements for new code and scripts can be...painful.
But with the tools made to help players to create content, you can also free up your own design professionals to concentrate on developing more content sooner, rather than having to fiddle with debugging scripts or getting engineer help with code. As an example, Nevrax's Ring tools are going to reduce the creation time of an epic quest from ten days and three to five people to about one day and one person (two, if new art is required). And that one person includes the capability of adding new land and instances to the game.
Think about that for a moment. Where before a team of ten or twenty people could add one or two pieces of epic content to a game, those same people will be able to add ten to twenty pieces of epic content in the same time frame.
Almost stunning, isn't it? In an industry where the ability to add content is a key competitive factor, why wouldn't you want to have these tools?
So, there you are: Why player content tools make a difference, possibly a huge difference, in how online RPGs are going to be played, and how they are going to evolve, over the next few years. If the industry as a whole sees the advantages and gets cracking, what Nevrax is doing today may well be the standard in three years.
I only wish it was this date in 2010, so I'd already know how all this plays out, :D.
Copyright 2006 by Jessica Mulligan. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.
About Jessica
Jessica Mulligan is an online game professional with twenty years of industry experience at all levels of management. Currently a consultant to executives worldwide and acting as Executive Producer for Nevrax's Saga of Ryzom, she was recently an Executive Producer and Creative Director at Turbine Entertainment Software on the Asheron's Call franchise. Her past positions include President of Themis Corporation, Director of Operations for MM3D Inc on the Middle Earth Online game, and positions with Interplay Productions, Electronic Arts and GEnie, among others, in various roles and responsibilities.
A respected author and commentator on online games, Jessica is the co-author of "Developing Online Games: An Insider's Guide" with Bridgette Patrovsky, which was published worldwide in several languages, including Chinese and Korean. She was the author of the influential bi-weekly industry opinion column, Biting the Hand, between 1997 and 2003.
Jess is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences and universities worldwide, including the International Game Developer's Conference, Electronic Entertainment Exhibition (2002-2005), State of Play (2005), The Austin Game Developer's Conference (2003-2005) Keynote Speaker - The Korean Game Developer's Association Conference (2004), and several others. She can be contacted at jessmull@ureach.com or jessica@mm3d.com
|
