Player Limitations in MMORPGs

I've been playing a lot of Albion Online. It's... not very good. That's not to say that it's bad, really, but it's just not a particularly compelling game. I'm never caught up in thinking about the next thing I should do in the game while I'm not playing it, or trying (and failing) to convince myself to stop playing and do something more productive. Unlike addictive drugs and better made games, where you tell yourself (and everyone else) that you can stop whenever you want, man, I swear- I actually can stop playing whenever I want, because it's just not very engaging. I described it to a friend as "slightly more fun than doing nothing at all", which about sums up the entire experience, I think.

I do spend a lot of time thinking about how it could be made better, and for a while I had a document where I was listing all of the things that could be done to make the game more compelling. Some of those changes are listed below (if you don't know anything about MMOs in general, or Albion Online in particular, feel free to skip the following list).

• Random monsters are scattered about the map, and they attack you when you're travelling or gathering nearby. I would group them into camps and thin out the random individual monsters. It would make both travelling and gathering less annoying and would look much more natural.

• Monsters attack you when you get too close, but in Albion, you have to get very close before they attack. It looks silly, but happens accidentally all the time because there are so many of them standing around. After I grouped them into camps, I would increase aggro distance to make camps more dangerous.

• When monsters attack you, their attacks always land. This is never more noticeable and aggravating than when you're just running by and a golem takes a shambling swipe at you that lands when you're already fifty feet away. For bonus annoyance, it also removes the speed buff that you get from riding. I would make attacks fail if you're out of range.

• Recalling to town in Albion costs money based on weight and distance to town, and takes you back to the last town you were in, rather than your home city. I would do away with this and add craftable recall scrolls that take you home (or maybe to a particular city).

There were were more notes, but you get the idea. The recall problem, in particular, was grating to me- nothing about the game is improved by forcing players to pay increasingly large amounts to recall based on distance or weight carried. The only real reason it would be designed that way is to force players with no money to spend fifteen minutes running back to town, and allow players with money to avoid that annoyance. Maybe as a bid to push players toward paying real money for in-game gold? I don't know. And because recalling takes you back to the last city you were in, not your home city, if you make the mistake of walking into a strange city a long way from home, your recall now takes you there instead of home.

On the other hand, recall scrolls immediately make the game more interesting. If you're poor, you can still avoid that run back to town with a little planning, but you have to invest some time in crafting scrolls, which could be interesting in it's own right. If you're rich, of course, you can just buy the scrolls from the auction house. If the scrolls are locked to a particular town instead of to the home city of the player who uses them, then things get even more interesting. Players would be able to buy scrolls for a particular city and transport them to another city to be sold for a profit, creating a niche market in fast-travel. You could even travel to dangerous and exotic locations to create recall scrolls and then sell them for a large profit in the main cities.

Of course, Albion already has fast travel, and it's provided by an NPC in each city who charges you based on weight. Presumably another attempt to push players toward purchasing in-game gold with real money.

All of this got me thinking about creative constraints, and how they might drive interesting gameplay in an MMORPG.

One good example of this are maps. In most MMORPGs, there's a world map that the player can use to get an idea of where they are in the game, and where everything else is. It might be simplified or highly detailed, but it's the same level of detail for all of the players at all times. You're using the same map at max level as you are when you start the game. Imagine if, instead of being a constant part of the game, the map had to be crafted. Now you have a bunch of new, interesting ways that the players can interact with the game-

• New players only have the sketchiest of ideas where they are and what else is out there, which makes the world seem big and mysterious.
• Players with the appropriate skills (scouts, cartographers and the like) would become valuable as party members because they could guide the group to dungeons or points of interest in the world.
• Players who can create maps have a reliable source of income that doesn't rely on combat ability, and a good reason to go out and explore the world.
• The game has a new secondary market in maps of varying levels of detail, or with different features (think enchanted maps with resource locations).
• Acquiring rare or highly detailed maps would give players goals to work toward that are more nuanced and interesting than "kill ten rats, XP number goes up"

This one small constraint on the players opens up a world of options for interesting gameplay. This could become even more elaborate if the game designers really leaned into these new features. Players with pets could scout an area quickly and make highly detailed maps more easily. Players with particular skills might be able to create enchanted maps that not only show where buildings are, but have detailed information about resources and monsters. Maps could be bought piecemeal for different regions, making the world seem mysterious and large even to experienced players, when they venture outside of the areas where they normally play.

The possiblities are endless.

Of course, all of these features take time and effort on the part of the game developers, but even the simplest, most easily implemented version of this makes the game vastly more interesting. This general approach can be applied to any number of other cases in MMORPG game development, so much so that I feel that it's almost a general rule, some sort of fundamental law of game design. I would be surprised if it's not, and I suspect this is one of those things where an experienced and knowledgeable game designer would roll their eyes at me and say "yeah, we know". I think it just strikes me like a revelation because I'm not an experienced and knowledgeable game designer.

Limiting the information that a player has, then providing a way to get that information through gameplay, makes the game more fun.

I recently started working on a design document for an MMORPG that I'd like to make at some point, and this rule features prominently in that design. While I don't think I have the technical chops to make an MMO from scratch (in any reasonable amount of time), I needed some way to scratch the itch that I get in the back of my head when I'm playing games that are only slightly more interesting than doing nothing at all.

The other major component of the MMORPG design (which is codenamed "Tinker" because, well, it's just me tinkering) is to build a system where the world itself is slowly but constantly changing. I think this is something that MMORPGs in particular struggle with. World of Warcraft tries to do this by releasing new content at regular intervals, with repeatable quests and new regions. Other games try to do this by adding in some sort of faction warfare system where areas change hands between different (artificial, game-enforced) groups of players. Neither of these approaches really feels right to me, and I think some more drastic and organic system could be created that makes the game world seem more real. Vital. Flexible. Players should actually be able to affect the world in a way that makes a good story

They should be able to point to a place in the world and tell their friends "see that overgrown hill there? That's the skeleton of a dragon that someone accidentally unleashed. Fifty players banded together and took it down after it destroyed two small villages."

Making that possible is the real trick, and I think I'll be following up with another post where I describe an approach that I think would work.

The next post is available here