FLOWG

Discussing such games as Lost Odyssey, Oblivion, Fable 2, and even Saints Row 2 with Navan Daughn and other friends of mine, I struck upon an idea of something that would really appeal to me.

One of the problems with these kinds of games is that they are such a huge time sink, but what makes this especially bad for me is that they are also almost completely solo experiences. Now this gives many advantages in their design for story potential, pacing, and the fact you shape the pace & initiation of the game events entirely; “you are the hero” as the catchphrase says, the illusion of roleplaying can be much stronger. However in general, I’d much prefer the multi-player aspects of an MMO. But an MMO of course brings with it all kinds of other issues. How do you have some kind of major player initiated world-impacting story or event, when 1000’s of players will all want to repeat that task. It’s why most of the storyline in such game worlds, is essentially a waste of time (outside of some of the meta-drama created in ‘true’ player worlds, such as Eve Online) as even in the best MMO virtual worlds ones you only really roleplay an immortal peon for the vast majority of players.

Which got me thinking, what about  a hybrid? What about a video game with a virtual world of some kind, but a virtual world limited in extent of the players involved in it. In fact, limited to the extent that you choose. To coin my own acronym: A FLOWG: A “Friends List Only World Game”.

To explain the concept further, imagine a game with some kind of free-roaming world, like Fable 2 or World of Warcraft, but one that had many player initiated features & effects, such as permanent housing for example. But rather than the world be overwhelmed with 1000s of players’ worth of houses, you’d only see the houses and effects of say, the 4-5, or even 100 people you’d invited to play the game with you.

Even things like certain unique quests could only be completed once in your ’shared’ virtual world. Of course the exact demarcations of how all these things played out would be down to the design of the game itself, exactly what crossover you had between the worlds and players. Adammk responded to this with “It would be a bit like a D&D party”… and yep that would be precisely my hope for this kind of thing when it came to an ‘c-RPG’ style game. Now of course one player could run off and “do all the quests” so no-one else could.. but the point is, why would you want to? The whole concept is one of mutual play with your friends. In the same manner I’ve not played a single level of Gears of War 2 on my own, why also would I want to play a hypothetical FLOWG on my own.

Of course there are technical issues I can foresee especially around adding/deleting friends as you go along, and scalability based around how many people was the limit or the average for most players. But I really think the benefits and advantages of this kind of game design could be enormous, so much so that I am amazed that no-one’s really done anything like it yet.

“Nanan da, Anta?”

…is a taunt & win quote from Remy in Street Fighter III Third Strike. It means literally: “What are you trying to do/Why are you doing this?”. And the same thought went through my mind very late last night after spending a huge amount of time gaming. One game in particular I’d played stood out that spurred this thought: Ninja Gaiden 2. It’s a game I’d been put off even getting due to the reviews, in particular the Eurogamer review, written as it was so clearly by someone with a near-identical viewpoint to my own on the first Ninja Gaiden game. But I’d been lent the game by a friend.. so.. why not give it a try?

But last night, during the evening I had stopped playing the game in frustration and switched to playing other games instead. This has been a frequent occurance with NG2. Usually I start playing it full of enthusiasm, but I’ve invariably ended up turning it off with a huge feeling of annoyance, and either stopping play or moving onto something different. Last night when stopped, I put the game back in its case and back onto the shelf and thought to myself “I won’t play this again. I’ll give it back to my friend next week”. However, instead, I woke up today after thinking about it wanting to play it again.

I just =had= to steal this image

According to one model, International Hobo’s DGD1 model I came out as a majority “Conqueror” type player. Now whilst I have other types of gamer in me, I recognise that ‘hard fun’, agon, is certainly my #1 driving force, as you can probably guess from the name of this blog . It’s definitely a large part of it. I simply want to beat this game. But is it just the drive of fiero calling me?

Is it perhaps the lure of those XBox Achievements? I don’t believe so. Such carrots tend not to affect me, as I seem to able to simply choose not to let them. For example a game like World of Warcraft that is fiendishly addictive for those who enjoy that “level up” feeling simply does not addict me. I got frustrated playing that too, and there were certainly some potential fiero-inducing challenges, but even so I did just walk away from playing it easily.

There is another possible strong factor that is “outside the game” as such and so isn’t ever really mentioned in most player models, and that’s the investment of time and money. Simple really, but so often overlooked – once you’ve spent a large amount of time, money and effort on something, you often want to believe it is good and ‘fun’ and you actually start to find more ‘fun’ out of it because of your investment. Talk to anyone with an especially blinkered “fanboy” attitude to any piece of software or hardware and its really obvious this is the case. Again, its part of the factor in a game like WoW, also part of the reason I believe many people ‘happily’ play agon-based challenge games even though they aren’t really predisposed to this kind of play and would be much happier playing something else – although I think there’s a lot more at work there I could go into at another post. I don’t think its possible to be un-affected by this really, I’m likely been as “guilty” as this as anyone, but also personally I’ve found this is as actually likely to swing both ways. Many of the games that I find particulary annoying and I generally consider the “worst games ever made” (such as Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, and a number of FPS shooters), I am aware that a huge part of my loathing for them comes from the fact I wasted so much money, but far moreso I wasted my precious free time on playing them, yet gained little or no enjoyment ‘reward’. But in any case, in this particular situation it really does not apply, since I have not spent a really large amount of time or effort (yet) on NG2, and I have only borrowed the game anyway.

So if it’s not just the fiero (or lack thereof), it’s not just the investment factor…  so what’s the difference with Ninja “Where’s Me” Gaiden 2 where I seem to keep wanting to go back to it, to something like WoW which I was able to drop on a whim and never ever felt like playing again? I feel that is down to what I consider the core gameplay in the game – at least for me; I understand different people will even get different ‘core’ experiences from a game. With NG2, I can see that the basics of the game really do appeal to me. A fighting game engine where I pit my skills against a good AI with beautiful fluid controls, feedback and graphics all heightening the excitement and engagement feeling (more on this in a future post) – sign me up now! It is exactly like my kind of thing.

But of course the tradeoff with NG2 is how this underlying gameplay that I would really enjoy is so obsfuscated by the game. The “levels”, the story, the “non melee”/puzzle-like boss fights, the logistic play of the items and save points.. almost all of this stuff actually serves to hide the part I really like about the game. The first Ninja Gaiden also did this to a great extent which was why I was so surprised I really enjoyed it, possibly because it straddled a line for me, yet never crossed it. But NG2 does seem to cross it at times. Especially, as reviews have said with way it challenges you. Its not so much that it’s hard to beat, its how & why it is hard. It’s hard in a way that feels to be almost random and .. well, you can read all about this in a good review like the EG one linked earlier. What is especially frustrating me is how this spoils the logistical play for me, because I could really enjoy that, but it feels especially annoying to me to ensure a full stock of health items, or to not “waste” a full-heal save point, only to lose all my items, or worse my life only due to what feels like bad luck or an unforeseeable event. I also keep wanting to believe their is a higher level of play possible where you are not affected by these things, but I suspect more and more that is only the case once you have experienced the game multiple times through. But that’s not a challenge that usually interests me with this style of game. Even at all the sections that I became “stuck at” so far in NG2, I knew I could have made them all “easy” simply by spending all of cash on healing items. But if I get to the point where I am just bludgeoning my way through the game with health items, thats when I’ll know I really ought to stop playing it. Then again, the fiero and investment factors may just make me pigheadedly fight to finish it anyway, I’ll have to wait and see how I react.

So. Ninja Gaiden 2, an exceedingly flawed game it appears to me; although part of my judgement is always reserved when I feel I haven’t yet played a game enough as is the case here. I am perhaps guilty of wanting to see the good in it too much – a charge that could be levelled at me in other walks of life incidently, so it is perhaps a personality trait of mine. But I think I know why I will persist with it to a point, even though I don’t for other games, although it is perilously close to the line for me still. I know I’d probably be far better off playing a more ‘pure’ experience of what I enjoy, something like Street Fighter perhaps, which is exactly what I ended up doing last night.

Ultimate Online

Here’s my biggest beef with today’s MMOs:
I’m still not able to do half the stuff I did years and years ago in Ultima Online.

& the biggest culprit for this gameplay ineptitude on the part of developers, appears to be none other than my old enemy; 3d graphics. Another genre successfully killed! Cheers Sony, you w**kers.

Now don’t get me wrong, UO had some enormous flaws. But at least my character had no godd@mn LEVELS. I could easily group with anyone I wanted. I could customise my characters look a huge amount. Players could own real pieces of in-game permanence, such as houses and eventually whole towns…

The best things in UO experience were our guild meets, where they had EVERYTHING customised in guild colours – flags, carpets.. food & drink for all… it was just hilarious. I was a mere ‘follower/lackey/noob’ in terms of the overall guild. But it was still fun to be there and be part of something bigger and be able to do my bit even though I couldn’t play much. Monster bashing, collecting shiney things, and skill grinding was much more fun with a bigger purpose to it. But on their own, they still don’t do much for me.

Looking forward to how I’d like to see MMOs develop, well it’s a lot about adding actual skill and depth to the gameplay. And also, a system so that as you (or your ‘faction’) get better, it actually gets harder. Yep I’m back to handicapping again. But I feel this is a key idea that is missing from so many games.

I have a bunch of ideas about MMO handicapping. The main one would be on a realm v realm level – like Horde vs Alliance in WoW. But actually allow one side to ‘win’ and take towns/land/NPCs etc. whatever the game ‘resources’ are. But the side with less resources (or even less actual players!) then gets handicapped more & more to help them out… so it would probably impossible for one side to ever ‘win’ the whole world… if the balance was right it could be really dynamic. Perhaps random server events could swing it about too. Expand this to many multiple realms rather than just two, strictly only allow 1 game character per real player who can only be on one realm’s ’side’.. balance sides by numbers of players / levels / time those players actually play as much as possible – a new player starting would automatically be put in the ‘weakest’ realm for example to help them…

Its kind of like forcing a ‘guild’ structure on players, but making it an in-built part of the game so it can actually influence the game world in real terms (but not too much as to destroy the world), and you can’t ‘win’ just by being the biggest guild either. Perhaps at some point you could allow a whole faction to really get beaten – and have to ‘respawn’ somehow.

There are lots of flaws here (like somehow allowing you to team up with your friends), but at least this starts to make something of a real =game= of the world aspect. Which is exactly what I want from an MMORPG. Also the ‘combat’ however it may be done (economic or whatever) would have to be, above all, FUN and skill based or strategic. Not just silly point&click-fests or just based on how many monsters you’ve bashed or how much time you’d spent ‘mining’ or ‘crafting’. Maybe everytime you ‘fight’ another player, you actually have a strategic turn-based map battle with them – like a mini game of Civ 4 .. or the battle system in HOMMV, or the older Final Fantasy games (6 and earlier!).. or you have to play a few rounds of a highly skilled game like Street Fighter 2 – and whoever comes out on top wins the battle. Perhaps for trade routes you’d have some kind of stealth based missions where you could win lots of money for your faction by managing to get a trade based character right across to an enemy city – but this would need teamwork or cunning to do…

This is very much a brain dump of ideas for now & I know this doesn’t sound much like a traditional MMO at all, or even necessarily still be seen as a computer ‘rpg’, but I do think this is what would suit me in gameplay terms.

Then again, perhaps oddly, I am a huge fan of actual roleplaying too.