Lurking on Brenda Brathwaite’s game design blog for quite sometime, I somehow missed she was writing a book! Apparently, her and Ian Schreiber’s book, Challenges for Game Designers, is now available on Amazon for a mere $16. Having over 300 game design challenges, I think this will definitely be worth investing in, as I crack out the dice and pencils and get back into some design roots. This also sounds like a fun party idea, or maybe my friends are just backseat-designer nerds awesome!
So, the World of Warcraft trailer for the expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, was released a few days ago. I promptly downloaded and began to feel worthless about my skills as a 3D artist in my puddle of awe and drool.
Currently in the middle of WoW and Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR), I’ve been leaning towards WAR lately after playing the open beta. But after watching the WOTLK trailer, it had me second-guessing my decision.
But wait. I always drool over Blizzard cinematics. But the feel of the game isn’t the same as these trailers; if I pick up WOTLK, it would NOT feel the same as this trailer, and neither did The Burning Crusade feel like the trailer (complete with Illidan screaming at me). Why the disconnect? For me, the Warcraft III game felt the same as the cinematics. WHY? The WAR cinematics FEEL like the Warhammer (beta). WHY? I’m just listing and brainstorming some possible reasons why there’s a disconnect between WoW trailers and game, but not Blizzard’s other games, such as WC3, and some comparisons to another high-fantasy MMO, Warhammer.
Graphics
Maybe the disconnect is with the difference in visual quality. We’ve all seen beautiful trailers that look nothing like the terrible game they’re portraying. Both WC3 and WoW have high-poly and extreme special effects, and while WoW cinematics are of “higher quality” the difference between the two for this purpose is neglible (imo), while the difference between actual in-game graphics are more significant. World of Warcraft is a much prettier game, while both using the new Blizzard style of milking the hell out of textures and particle effects for a system-cheap way of creating great in-game visuals.
So the difference between Warcraft 3’s gameplay and cinematics is greater than World of Warcraft’s gameplay and cinematics. Why is there less of a gap in how the game FEELS, though? This leads me to believe that even if the cinematics are beautiful, and significantly better than in-game visuals, it does not mean anything, really. Even having real-time gameplay that looked like a Blizzard cinematic would not promise a similar gaming experience.
Scratch off graphics.
Genre
I’ve been comparing WC3, a real-time strategy game, with World of Warcraft, the powerhouse MMO of the last four years. Maybe transfering the feelings of a cinematic into an MMO is just harder; it’s the ultimate dilemma for MMO game designers. How do you make a character feel important and allow them to change the world? How do you allow this ability for ALL players? Whereas, take WC3, and the player is in command of their entire army. The power of the entire Orcish force at your fingertips!
Above is a trailer from Warcraft III, when the fallen prince, Arthas, returns from being corrupted by the Lich King and takes the throne of Lordaeron from his father. Same guy from WOTLK trailer, actually. Both of these cinematics feature the same character, same feel, same style, and both freaking awesome. When I play WC3, I feel the same tingly, goosebumped feeling as watching this, and while goosebumped by the WOTLK trailer, playing WoW leaves me feeling something different. I WANT TO KNOW WHY.
Both of these cinematics are focusing on the player. The player feels like they’re important; I feel like I’m spying on Arthas going insane in the Northrend, or someone in the court watching the murder of King Tyrannus. I feel important and if this cinematic is made FOR me. As mentioned above, this importance can be conveyed in a RTS setting, but much harder in an MMO one. Maybe this is a reason for the disconnect?
But wait, take Mythic’s Warhammer MMO. They conveyed the same feeling, but how?
They did not take the “personal” approach that Blizzard does. While I do feel like I’m there, in the middle of this battlefield, observing and even participating in the carnage, I do not feel like this is “for” me. But this is okay; while it’s not a personal importance, it’s a team game, and I do feel like I’m rooting for my side (Chaos, obviously) in this cinematic. And, from what I gathered from my short time playing the beta, this feeling is conveyed in gameplay as well. And the whole focus of WAR is the guild. I do not feel individual importance, but I do want to wave my guild’s standard in both the cinematic and gameplay.
I conclude the genre of the game, while does need a cinematic tailored for that specific style of game, whether RTS, MMO, or team PVP oriented MMO, does not confirm a disconnect. You CAN make a cinematic for a game like World of Warcraft that conveys the gameplay, but you cannot “individualize” a cinematic while not doing it in game.
Storytelling
Storytelling in MMOs is much harder than in an RTS. Strategy games are most of the time linear, single-player narratives where the storyteller has full control over what the player experiences, and the gameplay in MMOs are most often disconnected from actual storytelling. When Illidan was screaming at me in The Burning Crusade cinematic, why do I care? I never raided enough to get to Black Temple to see him, as most players never saw him either. Sure, there’s an overarching storyline going on in WoW, but the things non-hardcore players do is neglible compared to the effect of the single-player experiencing all the story in a RTS.
I think this is the same conclusion as the genre; The cinematics have to be tailored for the gameplay.
Gameplay?
World of Warcraft feels like too much of a game. When playing Warcraft III or other MMOs such as Everquest, I never really thought I was playing a game. I was too engrossed in the virtual world, becoming my character and just be completely enveloped by the experience. I was wizard, droppin’ Ice Comets on monsters threatening Neriak. WoW, with all the add-ons, and messages popping up, telling me, “FROST NOVA COMING IN 5 SECONDS, BACK OUT”, makes me realize I’m playing a game. Everquest, on the other hand, told me nothing. I didn’t even know what half the buffs did because they hid things from me. Now I’m starting to miss it.
Maybe immersion also has an affect on this disconnect.
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This has been something I’ve been thinking about for awhile, and this post is pretty disjointed, but I think there are some points in there somewhere. Maybe I’ll clean it up a bit sometime; I think this has potential to be a good paper, maybe, if I was a better writer.
My point is why does a company such as Blizzard create cinematics that are so removed from the actual game? Keep the cinematics, make World of Warcraft FEEL like those cinematics! While focusing on mainly World of Warcraft’s failure in this disconnect, this can be applied to other games. Game developers, when a player watches your cinematics and trailers, transfer that same emotional response INTO the game!
I came across a game design blog I haven’t seen before, Lost Garden, with the latest post being a game design challenge. Sweet! I need more stuff to do (or an excuse to not do the stuff I already am doing). I looked through a few posts and liked what I saw; gotta read more, but until then, it’s now on my blogroll. —>
So what really caught my eye was this challenge. I may do it for a nice prototype on my portfolio, as well as proof that I can code stuff. So the basic idea of the game this: Mushrooms are planted on the 2D board and if they’re in the sun for longer than a second, they wither and die. Once the player contacts a mushroom, it uproots and follows the “rugged mushroom farmer”. Over 15 minutes, the day progresses, and thus, the shadows change. The goal is to collect as many mushrooms as you can and return it to the safe spot by the end of the day.
The author of the blog, Danc, is a game designer and he came up with this idea for Shade and sent out this challenge to anyone willing to make a prototype to see if this design concept will stick. Maybe I’ll give it a go in Blade3D, shouldn’t be that bad, mostly coding, since the art is all relatively simple. Who knows?
Dr. Richard Bartle, Granddaddy of the MUD, was recently interviewed by Massively, criticizing on the state of MMO’s, namely what he’d change about World of Warcraft.
Steve Danuser, designer from 38 Studios, noted on the generation gap now existant in the MMO genre, giving it props for being old enough to have this gap, and acknowledging the differences between the two camps of MMO players:
What this boils down to is that you have the Old Guard protecting their sacred cows, and the New Guard (many of whom have World of Warcraft as their primary or sole point of reference) questioning their elders. This pattern should sound familiar, because it happens in every generational shift around pretty much every art form. Congratulations to the MMO industry for finally being old enough to have a generational gap!
Bartle, representing the MUD camp, and being one of the ten-million World of Warcraft players, had a lot of criticisms for Blizzard’s MMO, in the realm of things he would change about the game. While his ideas are solid from a design stand-point, not all are necessarily the best way to go about implementing “better” functionality in an MMO.
One change he’d make is the ability to Buy things on the Auction House. You can put up 10 Bolts of Cloth on the AH for 10 gold, but the ability to put up the request to buy 10 Bolts of Cloth for X gold should also be available. Several other games have implemented this feature (Everquest comes to mind), and Bartle demands a reason for not having this available. Maybe it’s to force players to interact with each other in trade channels? Who knows, but I wouldn’t consider it an abomination in design that Bartle seems to present it as.
He next goes on to criticize WoW’s first expansion’s introduction raid zone, Karazhan.
There was absolutely no need for Kharazan to have that kind of hardcore raid attendance thing. There was no need for it. Why can’t you PUG it? It’s got five different sections. There could have been five separate instances. Why?
I’m not sure I even understand this. Blizzard claimed this to be one of their finer achievements in terms of The Burning Crusade, a 10-man intro raid zone, and Bartle would rather it be split into five different single-group zones? Single-group zones already exist at this point in the level 70 game.
Blizzard has done an awesome thing from my now-casual-MMO-gamer perspective; as the age of a raid zone increases, so does the ease of entry. This means the hardcore raiders will always be at the newest zone, draining it for all it’s worth, and the casual raiders will be raiding zones that were once cutting edge. During The Burning Crusade’s launch, Karazhan was exclusive to the hardcore for a few months, but as they moved on to harder zones, the casual raiders were easily able to organize and even PUG Karazhan. What does Bartle have against entry-level raid zones for the casual gamer? There is nothing hardcore about Karazhan, ask any WoW player from any playstyle.
I never played any MUDs, that was before my time, so the generational gap I most feel is from the Everquest era to the World of Warcraft era. The unforgiving slaughter machine that is Everquest made many players hardended and gave them a form of entitlement to everything they earned, and subsequently, felt that if they had to go through something hard at one point for item X, everyone else has to as well. World of Warcraft eased up on this, and felt that it was useless to restrict raiding to hardcore players only, and lowered the entry-requirements to the entry-level raid zones as the hardcore players progressed beyond it, something hardcore players and players from the Everquest era sometimes strongly disagree with.
While World of Warcraft isn’t the perfect game for me, they have made some strong design decisions, and to criticize against an entry-level raid zone for not being split into several single-group instances, essentially taking away the ability for casual players to raid, seems kinda silly.
