State of the Game - Part 6

by Scott Lewis

Welcome to the last bit of our look at progression and customer management in the modern online game.

We started by examining the basis for competition in the market, finding it in experience and the contrast between an established game fighting to keep its' player base and a new game fighting to lure them away with the promise of shiny new technology and more evolved design.

We then exampled money as a limbic state and the role of economics in keeping in-game markets stable and accessible for the majority of players. From there, we moved to the mathematics of equipment progression and how new equipment drives out old, greatly reducing the ability of new gear to prolong actual playtimes. Similarly, we looked at the effects of increasing the level cap on total playtime, concluding that while it is more effective than better equipment it still runs into many of the same pitfalls when its effect on total playtime of all players is considered.

Lastly, we discussed actual content. New experiences, extensions to game mechanics, wholly different ways to play. In the end, these are the only things that can keep players coming back after they've exhausted existing content. Equipment with bigger numbers, extensions to existing abilities and blurring class distinctions (another soapbox moment, but one for another day) all fail where content succeeds.

What we have, then, is a competitive landscape where games compete to keep their player bases based on continual or periodic releases of additional content. Quality design up front, paying attention to economics, the mathematics of progression and the balance between various classes and playstyles can go a long way toward making good content extension possible. It cannot, however, do everything. There will eventually come a time in the life of most, if not all, games when the content possibilities have been exhausted and it becomes successively less possible to turn out the sort of material that will keep players. Many games continue trying far beyond this point, pouring money into trying to stop a wave of inertia that has gotten far out of hand.

We have the notion in our heads right now that mmorpgs are essentially infinite and delivered mostly on a download basis, in contrast to single box rpgs which are finite and generally bought in stores. I propose that this concept is a bit of a simplistic approach to the marketplace. There exists a space between the two.

Consider a game that was designed to have a discrete number of expansions. Say, for example, four. Such a game could be designed as a whole, free from the difficulties inherent in adding content to an established system. It would also be free from the need to design systems to be open ended. Designers would be able to see the entire progression of economic and statistical elements of the game at the beginning and thus better able to tune mechanics to work within the context of the game. Such a game could still reap many of the benefits of an online game, including the enhanced revenue over single box games.

As the basic server systems become more standardized, many of the first level development costs for mmorpgs will greatly diminish, particularly for companies that have already developed one or more successful entries into the genre. In this environment, development costs would be linear with respect to the cost of developing a single box game. Charging a monthly fee for access and a small amount for additional expansions would allow a multiple of income that could easily exceed the multiple of costs involved in development. Additionally, such games will have some subset of their playerbase that remains devoted beyond reason, continuing to play after they have exhausted content. These outliers represent essentially free revenue.

In designing such a mid-range game we should plan the game's lifecycle in much the same way as we would budget a capital project. (Which most modern games effectively are anyway.) We plan our server needs around a diamond shaped structure, expanding as the game grows in popularity from its inception and then contracting as more and more players effectively finish the game. This calls into question the traditional servers as copies of game with discrete playerbases model, possibly in favor of a sort of dynamic system such as the one implemented in City of Heroes. The advantages of such games from a storytelling standpoint are undeniable. With a planned discrete lifestyle, developers are free to tell an actual story, rather than the sort of small scale progress that is reset when you look away that is found in current mmorpgs. You might even conceivably make events in such a game that can only occur once, with such events serving as the catalyst for the release of additional content.

We begin to get very theoretical here, but consider a four stage fantasy mmorpg in which each stage represented some significant victory against the evil overlord of the day. A week after such a victory (requiring the efforts of a significant section of the player base) a new content drop could occur consisting of higher level areas and realms relevant to the next step in said overlord's plan. The game would then take steps to flatten out player abilities on that server, giving everyone playing a chance to participate in the next phase. A balance would have to be struck between rewarding effort and managing accessibility, but that could easily be managed in the planning phase. Individual servers of such a game could progress at different rates which, if clearly explained to the players, would allow new participants to get in on the ground floor. To solve the problem of people wanting to play with their friends the game could use some variant on the invitation system pioneered by Final Fantasy Online.

Conversely, a game could have the same phased structure with stable servers and moving players. Some number of phase 1 servers could feed players into a phase 2 server, with players who have finished the final encounter given the option to move on after some amount of time had passed (to allow for more than one raid encounter worth of players in the phase 2 servers.)

I'll stop here before spiraling off too far into speculation. The point is that there is a third model for game design between the two current camps, one which mixes some of the benefits of both while allowing for better capital budgeting and more immersive storytelling.