Stacking boxes

Imagine you buy a car. Imagine it comes in a box, with a nice bow on it. You open the box and find your car in it. It's really great, but you soon realize that you have been chipped a little, as all other cars can also drive backwards. So you buy another box, with the feature of driving backwards. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.

Then you realize all other cars also have a horn. So you buy another box with a horn feature. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.

Happy with your car you find out that everyone else is able to personalize their car's appearance, while yours is dwindling around somewhere in the dirt brown. So you buy a box with custom paints in it. You know, you can live without it, it's just not as much fun.

And then you realize you have missed [insert something else ridiculous here]. You stand in front of box number four. And now you are just pissed off. And you have every right to be.

This is exactly the situation on many large MMO's today. It makes as much sense as the car example above though.

Looks of limbs

L.A. Noire demonstrates a wonderful technology that makes faces almost perfect. Yes almost, we still aren't there yet. Making faces look good in 3D stuff is incredibly hard. Skin in general isn't an easy task, but the face, that's the holy grail. If you could make faces in games that are indistinguishable from real ones, that would be awesome. With sauce.

Looking at the rest though, we pretty much are good on metals, cloth, wood, hair and in general the human anatomy. There are some 3D renders where you have to do a double take to see it's not real. I seen a picture where the modeler cleverly added a mask, that looks fake, so you couldn't even see the face and the rest looked just perfect. I was thinking of trying to find out who the model was, before I read in detail how it was all just 3D trickery.

So why do the characters in games still look like they either have a rather bad case of caustic armpit sweat or like a marionette with the strings coated in sticky glue? I'm not talking cut scenes, where carefully animated and motion captured movies are presented to you, but the normal game play, where the problem compounds on an MMO scale.

The fall of standing

There is an absolutely fantastic way to screw with your player base. This first part ain't it, but it's the basis on which you can go on and really make them suffer.

Have factions, more than two though. A dozen or so would work just great. Have each one occupy a physical location, with the major ones being in most of the interesting spaces. Create now standing, a value to indicate your relationship with them. You can call it fame, notoriety, reputation, whatever you feel like, I call it standing for the sake of this post. These things by themselves are not bad. They can be implemented horrible but I come to that a bit later. It takes a lot of very special incompetence to screw up this part. There are consequences, like being shot on sight with bad standing and so on, but I don't even have to go into that here.

The next part already gets tricky. Now you could opt to add a co-dependence between the factions. If you gain standing with Faction A, then Faction B will lose standing, because they hate A. Maybe if you gain 10 points in standing, you loose 4 points in the other faction. Tricky but not impossible. Now to really make players go bonkers.

Update? Update!

Updating. If you have a digital device, you probably have experienced this by now. The voodoo of said process escapes the general public in most cases. Something is downloaded, a bar goes left to right and done. And then reboot, more often than not.

This process is wildly different from one manufacturer of the device to the next. Even within the same device (i.e. a Windows machine) it's often different from each single bit of code to the next. The experiences range from pretty much not noticing it except that small unobtrusive note saying it has been updated, to a gargantuan task, ending in you reinstalling the entire machine. Depending on what you are updating, you want to know it happens, and what happened, and in very many cases, you don't really care.

So what is the current MMO developer to do?

Players are the story

Welcome to the amusement park. Sit down and enjoy the ride. Oh you already were on this one? Well it's still the same one, but maybe you'd like to enjoy it again? No, you want new things? Things changing? Well maybe we could rig a few puppets to look another way, make the cart stop suddenly once or twice, would that be good enough? Not at all, you say, well then I'm lost on what to do.

So, or very similar I expect many current MMO designers to feel like. It's a trap of their own doing. When I saw the Star Wars MMO, I felt like we are back to where we were with the first Diablo, just with prettier graphics. Even calling that an MMO felt a bit like a stretch. What has happened is the developers suddenly think that story is the overall guiding principle. Oh boy, how wrong they are.

This means huge production costs. As a player you should be interested in this as well, as that money goes to story instead of, say the bugs or other features you would actually enjoy. The even more important factor is that they run out, get boring, repetitive and that very quickly. And they lack something very important: Humans.