Harnessing Familiarity to Breed Excitement

I enjoyed playing Lord of the Rings Online for the three months I played. I didn’t get a character to max level, but I did bring a Captain and a Minstrel to around level 40. I found that once I had chosen a character class and set out into the game world, playing the character was fun and the content was good enough that I had little problem soloing my way through most of the character advancement I saw and engaging in limited group play when it became appropriate. The standard MMO leveling process that LotRO leads its players through is familiar to me, so playing the game was a comfortable fit.

Where LotRO failed: Never did I fully grasp the capabilities and intended roles of each class. It seemed to me that the classes had a diversity of abilities to fill different roles to varying—mostly quite small—degrees. Every class can solo effectively and every class has some usefulness in a group scenario—probably more so than in WoW—but I did not find myself getting excited about potentially playing any other class. Never did I look at their abilities and think that such a class would be able to fill the role I’d like to fill in a group while being fun to play solo.

Why did I feel this way? Because the classes in LotRO do not feel familiar to me. If they do not feel familiar, my expectations don’t match up with reality. The Minstrel class is an instructive case of this. Minstrels (or Bards) in Dungeons and Dragons and in most RPGs are utility characters that use their song to buff friends and use their guile to manipulate NPCs. Bards have a small cadre of arcane magic they can use, but those incantations are usually tricks to help them with their previously stated roles. In LotRO, Minstrels are basically clerics. This dissonance forced me to throw out my knowledge about the roles and goals that a Bard or Minstrel should have—I cannot be excited about the potentiality of playing a class of which I have no ground-level understanding. Excitement occurs only when you can project an interesting and vital future for the decisions you make—if you can’t perform this projection, the dissonance that results saps excitement and, in my case, my motivation to roll a different character. I find myself in a similar situation with every class in LotRO.

I should be able to answer this question: “What is this class designed to do well and how will it do that?” If I can’t, my motivation to play the game suffers significantly. If I can’t answer that question even after playing the game for two months, there must be a problem there.

It doesn’t matter how well-designed and balanced a game’s classes are: if I can’t get excited about starting a new character, I will not care.

Life After Death: Permadeath in MMORPGs

I have not played any MMORPGs that have implemented an important, game affecting perma-death mechanic.

MMORPGs have focused on players cultivating single characters throughout some predefined progression scheme. The effect of the character reaching zero hitpoints is some kind of baffling reset of location and arbitrary penalty that isn’t particularly related to being dead. Sure, corpse runs in all forms make some sense—but they’re still quite ridiculous if given an iota of thought. Bob dies, so Bob gets a brand new body and has to run back to his old one? We’ve succeeded in violating conservation of mass and energy, though I guess magic borks that from the onset. We’ve also instituted an intensely arbitrary time penalty by making the character’s new form physically run back to the old one’s lifeless remains.

Lord of the Rings Online sidesteps this oddity by claiming that when a character has no life points left (called “morale” in LotRO), he is demoralized and must retreat to some nearby rally point. This makes a little more sense, but I think it’s a little more than demoralizing to be whacked by weapons and consumed by magical flames. It’s also odd that the demoralized character would return to a graveyard. I thought being around the decaying corpses of deceased heroes and commoners would be more demoralizing than not?

In order to make death a meaningful occurrence in MMORPGs, we need to broaden the scope of the game to not just one character. Progression needs to be extended to cover multiple characters in some kind of lineage, and individual character progression needs to be more horizontal and much less vertical. Characters that live longer and do more in their lives make more bonuses of higher value available to their children. Bonuses are passed down in a diluted form from grandfathers and mothers and so on. A deceased character’s assets can be passed down to its children, as well, though they might not be immediately usable. Characters can also have an actual lifetime in in-game time. Aging can turn into an important mechanic that ensures players don’t get too attached to individual characters. The emphasis will shift from playing most often to maximizing your characters action while he has the ability to act.

The larger design I’m working on as an exercise uses a more involved form of what I just set out. I will lay that out in future posts here.

There’s an article on MMORPG.com by Nathan Knaack where he reviews several ways to make permadeath a plausible mechanic beyond what I’ve mentioned here, you should check it out. It’s well written and has some great ideas.