Instancing again..

Hey, so remember those long winded rants on instancing I wrote a while back? Well, apparently Brad took the time to respond to the first one, and I completely missed it until I stumbled upon it tonight. So I thought I’d take a moment to address a few things just in case he’s still listening out there somewhere. I'll get back to the regular stuff again soon:

“Not enough competition and people don’t value what they obtain nearly as much. Too much and, yeah, they could end up hating you.”

I don’t disagree with this; and the same thing can be said of anything which is rare in a virtual world. Jonathan Baron gave an amazing speech a long time ago at GDC on how all community is built through overcoming shared challenges, and how it’s just as important to architect the reasons people come together as the reasons they separate from each other. Tension and release, light and shadow, it’s all the same balance, and everyone seems to have their own point of comfort between the extremes.

“Ok. Battlefield = EQ in your opinion. Persistence, connected zones, long term character development, player driven economy, etc. may not matter to you – that’s fine. But I have a feeling most people aren’t going to see it your way – they’re not going to equate BF with EQ or any MMOG. Let’s wait and read and see.”

I was clearly not implying that EQ and BF2 are the same type of game or that people would think BF2 was a MMOG; only that the metrics of how many people play within close proximity of each other are very similar; and the massiveness of one game over the other is more of an illusion than actual numbers. None of the features you list imply massive by themselves, and there is no reason you couldn’t have a BF2 type game with all of those features. The line between what you consider to be a MMOG and what an online game is will continue to be blurred in the future; BF2 offers some small notion of persistence, while MMOGs are using instancing to add some notion of what traditional games provide. For the most part, we’re seeing convergence, not divergence. Instancing is just one aspect of that convergence.

"But a lot of people do and did. A lot of people thought they were getting a shared experience that would last and have community. I read the posts. So did you. It was sold as an MMOG. And do people feel, regardless of how good a game it is (and I think it is), that it was an MMOG? That they were playing something akin to EQ or WoW? Again, let’s let the people tell us. "

Actually, it was clearly stated in their faq that they did not consider themselves an MMOG. I think the spin was created more by the community than it was by the developer. They were very clear and upfront about what to expect, and you should know as well as anyone that no matter how clear you are with the community, they will often inject their own views and wishes onto their expectations. Not to mention what can happen in marketing if they think they can get more buzz by touting your product as something it is not.

"You sound like you’ve given up on the model and accuse those of trying to ‘fix’ it by having to hack things in, usually to some negative affect. If you’ve given up, that’s fine. But let me assure you that we and many others haven’t. "

Brad, I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement within the traditional model; that it’s a dead end; just that it’s perfectly valid to change the model’s core as well. I talk about hacks because I’ve watched them happen, as you slowly try to fix a broken design with patch after patch, hoping the rules gently fall over against one another forming a teepee you can hide under. In many ways, I’ve always considered AC1 to be a game where exactly that happened; a bunch of either broken or un-integrated designs sort of fell over on themselves and made something kind of interesting. XP per monster has some particularly nasty side effects, and changing that paradigm (while not for every game) produces changes through the entire structure and culture of your game.

As for my personal taste, I’m kind of over MMPs. At least until something interesting happens again. Back in 97, or whenever it was that we all sort of discovered each other at E3, it was this great social experiment; something we all believed in as a positive force to make the world a better place. Or at least I think we did. Raph had his whole economy/crafting thing going in UO, AC had the allegiance system and magic economy (though the story and monthly updates turned out to be the real hook); it was all pretty exciting, and new despite its lineage. But now the team sizes are huge, the money is large, and the risk adverse pressure from above is excruciating. The genre is heavily defined and deviation from the norm is punished. For me, it’s just not a fun play or development environment anymore. The last MMP to capture my interest was Puzzle Pirates, simply because it offered a rewarding moment to moment experience, and for me that was an MMP first. I have no desire to climb the ladder unless the act of climbing it is fun. That was why I spent two years writing the code for things like stealth, traps, puzzles, and other forms of moment to moment game play in DDO.

When the industry starts breaking the traditional mold, I’ll be paying attention. I’m having a blast working on music games right now (Guitar Hero for the win!), and learning a lot about design issues which are too small of scope to notice in MMPs. I have a feeling this type of innovation is not going to come from large, experienced MMP teams, but instead from people encroaching on the space from other styles of games or from young, idealistic teams not trying to make the best Diku Mud ever. Not that there’s anything wrong with making WoW++ or EQ++, but it’s not really for me; especially with the 4 year development marches those types of projects turn into. Combine that with the politics a large company can produce, and I just loose the energy for it.

“Cool idea. Not an MMOG, IMHO, but a neat idea. I hope it gets funding and succeeds.”

I’d be interested to know exactly what about that idea makes it not an MMOG? The basic idea is to lay out space through the social network instead of a 3d landscape; are you not implying that you have to have a continuous 3d landscape for it to be a MMOG? The space is persistent, as are the players, economy, etc. So I just don’t see what requirements it’s not fulfilling.

The bottom line is that yes, you can make your world feel terrible by overusing instancing; Both GW and DDO suffer from areas in which instancing is horribly abused, and if you’re a fan of the world model, you practically gag when encountering those areas. I personally hate the ‘city hub’ model with a passion, and hate it even more when copies of it are instantiated. But there are models which rely on instancing which are both very compelling and very MMOG. In fact, to date, I believe Eve is the only MMP which has not used some form of instancing (because, after all, servers are just instances). So unless Sigil is going down the one giant server route, you’re instancing as well, and your issue is really just with the size of the instances.