I know I said last time I was going to look at areas where graphical games could learn from text MUDs, but I don’t think that’s a very interesting topic. I think it’s far more useful for those of us working in text to look at what we can learn from the big budget modern graphical MMORPGs. Here are a couple of design themes from modern MMORPGs that I’d like to see more of in text games.
Quest driven advancement
It was World of Warcraft that first made questing viable as the sole means of character advancement. At the time of WoW’s release I remember the quest system was one of the things that everyone was talking about, and to me it really seemed like a genuine ‘but what if we slice the bread?’ kind of moment for MMO design. Like all great ideas it is very simple and is really not much more than a thin veneer over the same old mob grinding advancement, except that the player is directed exactly where to go and what to kill.
This progression through different areas is designed to spread the playerbase across content as opposed to have everyone try and grind the same handful of optimal areas. Moving the player around like this also helps to reduce the feeling of ‘grinding’. This mechanic has been refined in later games such as Warhammer Online where the quests require even less grinding. Unlike in WoW you do not need to kill an indeterminate number of rhinos to get those ten rhino horns that you need, instead it’s just ten rhinos with each mob assumed to have the required drop.
So does anyone do this in text? Not that I’ve really seen. Sure, MUDs have always had quests ranging from the simple to the elaborate, as well as ‘auto quests’ where the player can get random quests vending machine style from a ‘questmaster’ mob. What you don’t see is the kind of directed advancement through questing that WoW pioneered.
I wrote a very simple quest framework for Maiden Desmodus that has allowed us to produce a distinct advancement path for players, should they wish to follow it. We’ve got an initial sequence of 20 unique quests (we call them tasks) that each character can play through a single time, and we plan to add more after opening. While the mechanics of the quests can be reduced to a few core types such as kill a particular mob, go to a location, find an object, deliver an object, etc. these can be combined to create varied multiple stage quests. In addition, because the sequence of quests is fixed we can use them to tell a story as the player progresses, for example in an early task players must escort a diplomat into enemy territory and then in a later task they find he has been taken hostage and must rescue him.
Minor character death penalties
In modern MMORPGs you can barely call it character death any more. Gone are the days when hours and hours of character advancement could be wiped out in seconds. In WoW you can take a small gold hit or do a corpse run then continue on exactly where you left off. Warhammer has moved further and removed XP loss and corpse runs in favour of a 10 minute stat debuff, while Age of Conan has corpse runs and a stat debuff but otherwise no XP penalty for character death.
Most MUDs, including those which focus on PvP combat, still have quite harsh death penalties such as major XP loss or even permanent death. Reading Bartle’s “Designing Virtual Worlds” the importance he gives to the issue of PD seems a little incongruous in the context of today’s MMOs and I think it’s a rather old fashioned idea that may always have appealed more to designers than to players.
I haven’t finalised the death penalty for Maiden Desmodus yet, but as the game will feature a lot of PvP combat I believe it’s important that any penalty does not discourage players from taking part in PvP. I’d rather reward players for victory than punish them for defeat. Currently when a player is defeated (we don’t actually call it ‘death’) they respawn back in their home city at a clinic. There is no XP loss, instead characters have a 10 minute debuff which increases damage taken by 20%. This is designed to discourage players from rushing back into battle after defeat. For the duration of this timer anyone who defeats the character will get 50% less XP in order to discourage players from killing the same character repeatedly.
bcdev.design.blog 