In yesterday's instalment, the trio discussed the influences behind World of Warcraft and how the design process has changed to cope with the emergent activities of the players. Today, we cover the evolution of the game and the future of the MMORPG genre.
I've heard balancing an MMOG being compared to the beat of a butterfly's wings in chaos theory – you tweak one tiny stat somewhere and suddenly there are ramifications across the game
Greg Street: Yes, it really does feel like an ecosystem sometimes. A slight perturbation in one slot can have unintended consequences. And then things evolve over time and you have players trying out things you never would have thought of, or thought they could do, and suddenly they make it work. It's fun, you learn a lot and it surprises sometimes. WoW is very hard to control, it's often running off on its own. We try to influence it, but I don't pretend for a moment that we have it captured!
And there's also a sort of Darwinian element to how game aspects change over time
GS: Yeah, it very much works like natural selection: good ideas will expand, and things we don't give a lot of attention to will whither away and die. For example, rogues being able to unlock chests is something we've neglected for so long that it's just not a major part of the game any more.
So do you find yourself rediscovering game elements that you'd forgotten about?
GS: Oh, all the time! We'll be messing with a class spell balance or something like that and then we'll go, "ah wait, people are using that spell, they've rediscovered it! It's really important!" They'll also find old items that we've forgotten about. It'll be like, "hey this item has a chance on hit to cause a stun". And the item stats alone aren't worth it, but the stun is so powerful they'll continue to use this level 40 item when they're level 80.
There was the notorious sword that caused magic damage rather than physical damage, which we didn't think would be a big problem, but then when you think more about it, you realise how powerful that might be because it bypasses armour, and breaks all of our rules. That was enormous. It's hard, especially as I'm the person who's expected to know more about the class part of the game than, not only any one player, but also the entire community combined. It's impossible. It's easy to forget stuff. And then they're merciless when you publicly display your lack of knowledge.
Do you think people tend to choose classes or races that fit with their own personalities? Is there a psychological angle to these choices?
GS: Absolutely. There are definitely certain types of players who gravitate toward certain types of character. The guy who wants to be the hero, to come in and save the day, that's often a paladin; the guy who wants to cause grief to other players, they'll be a rogue, they'll hide and get someone as they go pass; the mage wants to be a loner, but still very useful. Also, when presenting bad news you need to do it in different ways – for a rogue you can present it very mathematically, because they like to number crunch a lot. Paladins have often felt oppressed, very defensive, so they want you to take their feelings into consideration. You go through a lot of, well, I feel your pain, I know what it's like to get nerfed! It's huge generalisation, but those archetypes often come out.
So back to Cataclysm specifically, what will veteran WoW players get out of it?
Cory Stockton: I think the biggest thing overall will be the guild advancement system, the idea that you'll be able to do new things with the guild that advance you as a group. That's a big new thing for WoW. It's always been, "well, we're going to work together on this raid to kill this boss" and then just five people get the loot out of those 25. Now, you're going to see something like, we're all going to work together to get our guild to level, and then every single person gets the reward for the achievement. You'll see everyone helping each other out. In terms of the game experience, I think that's going to have the biggest impact.
Do you think you will keep supporting WoW with new expansion packs while there's still a reasonable audience, or do you see a definite narrative end to the series?
Tom Chilton: That's a very good question and I don't really know the answer. At some point there probably will be an end to WoW, but I think we're far away enough from it, that I don't have a clear vision of what that will be like. For the time being we think more in terms of 'what would make the game fun to keep playing?' or even to start playing.
So it's not like Lost? You didn't have a last scene written form the outset?
TC: No!
How about expanding WoW beyond the PC? There's a lot of talk about cross platform games that take in PC, mobile and console – is that part of your future?
CS: That's something we're really interested in – and you can see the beginnings of that with the Remote Auction House on iPhone, which just came out. We've been beta testing that for six months in the office and I love that concept. I'd like to see us go further – I'd like to be able to talk to my guild mates, or what if I could check my bank? And we have a dedicated mobile division here at Blizzard that's working on stuff like that. That's definitely a direction we're moving in.
Will we ever have an MMOG that presents players with a single open world and which allows all participants to live and play in that same environment together?
TC: Partly, that's a technological question – what happens when we have a server that can support 10,000 people or 50,000 or 100,000 people simultaneously? And then there are the gameplay implications. The game world that we create for WoW can only support a certain number of people in the same place before the gameplay experience becomes degraded. If you're all competing against the same quest monsters, it isn't a lot of fun when there are 1,000 players standing around waiting to whack every single one. So there's only so much that the actual content can support.
So if you were to build a game to be the way you're describing, you'd have to design the content in a way that would expect that – and that can have a lot of weird implications for how you make the game. It's also very difficult to make predications about how many people are going to play a game. So if you set out to create a world that could support a million players, how does that world feel when only 100,000 people show up to play? The experience they have might not be as good as you were expecting because you thought there were going to be a million.
But are these things that you're looking into?
TC: Yes.
Are they areas you're thinking about for your next generation MMOG?
TC: These are absolutely areas that we're thinking about, and the difference we're talking about here, is that sometimes when people refer to that type of game they're actually talking about sandbox games, where it's more that the player's impact on the world is what's creating the content for everybody else versus us creating the content on a first hand basis and entertaining the players. Those are two very different approaches to styling the game design. From a Blizzard philosophical perspective, we've found that, generally speaking, with the sandbox games, they're very interesting from a study standpoint, but when it's the masses of players that are creating the content and creating the fun for other people, the quality that you're getting, the predictability of how good it is, goes way down, because it's just a lot of people doing random stuff you can't control.
So what ARE you looking at for the next era?
TC: It's too early to make any announcement about that, but sandbox gaming is something we look at and explore and think about a lot. There are good elements of these styles of games that we'd like to integrate.
