Richard Bartle (read more on him at Wiki) has drawn a lot of ire lately for comments he made re: the current state of MMOs, specifically one grossly misinterpreted statement that WoW = WHO, or vice versa. I'm not jumping on that bandwagon because so many people already have.
Now either Richard, or someone doing a darn good job of posing as him, is also responding to these threads, and reading what he had to say has opened my eyes a little more to the current state of WoW.
If you recall the screen caps on my earlier post where my video card died, WoW can look amazing if you turn on/up all the graphical options.
But that's just the frosting on the cake. How does it taste?
For a game where I've determined you do little more than a variant of 5 common tasks (Kill 10 Rats; Collect 10 Rat Skulls; Escort someone passed the Rats; Kill the Rat King; or deliver a letter/run an errand) WoW can really suck you in.
As a player, you and I you look around the World of Warcraft and we're blown away by the visuals, by how good the game looks.
As a designer, Richard Bartle can also appreciate the work that went into making the game look as good as it does, but, as a designer, he can also spot the shortcomings.
It's like if we went to a magic show with David Copperfield. I don't mean we went to watch DC perform, I mean we went with him; he sat in the audience with us. Now while we're mesmerized by the on-stage magician's tricks and left wondering how he did what he did, DC is watching and enjoying (or not) the magician's performance for how well he did his job. DC will notice the sleight-of-hand tricks that misdirect the rest of us. He'll see the magician palm the object that to us magically disappeared. If the magician does his job well, DC might even enjoy the show. But if the magician performs poorly, well, I'm not even a professionally trained singer, but I can carry a tune and when someone sings a little off key or misses a note or they do something that's a little off, I can tell, and it interferes with my enjoyment of their performance. So imagine DC watching an alleged professional magician totally balls up his performance. I'm not saying Blizzard screwed up WoW, what I am saying is that they did a fantastic job, but they could have done even better.
When RB and I both did the same thing in-game, that being swim around the entire Eastern Kingdoms continent, we noticed different things. While I was blown away by the coral reefs, the ship wrecks, etc. RB noticed other things, like the absence of fish in some areas. If you swim along a desolate coastline in WoW, such as around the Eastern Kingdoms, in some areas there are absolutely no fish at all. This is because the designers didn't see the need to develop that particular stretch of coastline so they didn't put any fish there, but real fish would have swam there anyway. That they didn't swim there tells RB that every single fish in WoW is placed by hand. Ok, by computer, but their placement is not a random occurrence. The program has spots where fish are meant to be, and if you go outside those areas you won't see any fish because the program was not told to put any there. And RB notices that.
His mention of this has opened my eyes to other, similar, immersion-breaking inconsistencies within WoW.
WoW's local fauna consists of predators and critters. Critters are level 1 passive Mobs such as rats, rabbits, sheep, cows, deer, etc. Predators are your more aggressive Mobs, and are the ones you usually get asked to kill for quests. In WoW, a casual observer will notice a predator leave its path to kill a small critter, such as a rabbit, then return to its path. RB and other designers see this, and see something more. What reason does the predator have to kill the critter? It doesn't eat the critter and it shouldn't feel threatened by it, so why attack it and kill it? The reason is WoW's designers put that particular sequence in there in order to increase the feeling of playing in a real world. But they left out the consumption of the critter and there are very few non-human predators on this planet which kill for reasons other than food.
There are many, similar inconsistencies to this in other areas, such as the Horde's Warsong Lumber Camp in Ashenvale. When you enter the camp you will see armed guards protecting the workers, but from what? It's surely not the Wolves and Spiders wandering around, because in some cases a wolf will wander right past a guard or a worker, and everyone just continues on with their business. Then you enter the scene. The guards and workers ignore you, for as a member of the Horde you're just like them, but as you walk through the camp you get attacked by a Wolf, the very same wolf that just brushed up against a worker! This makes absolutely no sense from an immersion point of view. This is supposed to be a wild animal, it was walking right passed a worker that it had no interest in, but it was more than willing to attack you. If it's going to attack you it should attack the workers and guards. You could argue that when the Horde moved in the guards beat the wolves into submission, but in that case they should either be tame beasts and not attack a member of the same faction, or they should be wild but timid animals afraid to go near the Lumber Mill and its aggressive guards. And why when the Wolf attacks you do the guards not rush to your defense?
In Stranglethorn Vale a Troll Mob can safely walk alongside the crocolisk-filled river, but when you try the same thing the crocs attack. This is the exact same situation as in the Warsong Lumber Mill. Two completely unrelated Mobs ignoring each other but either, or both, is more than willing to attack the player. If the Crocolisk is feeling threatened by the player, or is supposed to be protecting its territory, it should likewise feel threatened by the Troll Mob, but it does not. If it's supposed to be hungry (the primary reason predators attack) then why didn't it attack the Troll Mob, who at a lower level should appear much easier prey to the Croc than yourself.
This is certainly not game breaking for me, in fact for me these things now add even more to the game. Now I'm paying more attention and trying to spot these inconsistencies. Sort of like Easter Eggs in your DVDs, or goofs or glitches, like seeing an actor take a big swig from his beer just before the shot changes, and when the camera returns to him his beer glass is still full. We all find our fun somewhere.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
I agree that the areas mentioned are minor inconstencies, and WOW seems to have less and less of them with every patch. The sunwell area is inundated with mobs performing menial tasks, and for the most part, blizz did a good job scripting the events imo.
WoW catches a lot of criticism for their cartoony graphics, but after playing AOC for a month, I now understand why they did it; you can pack a lot more action into a scene when you don't have to worry about photo realistic graphics slowing down framerates. Could you imagine the sunwell daily bombing quest on AOC? I couldn't... It would suck....
Word is that blizz is working on another MMO to replace WOW and if that is true, I hope they decide to add more random mob action to the game as it does help with immersion, but for all the areas that aren't high traffic, I don't really see the need for them to add things like fish or shipwrecks as it would be disappointing to see that much work put into what essentially is a backdrop. Now snow weather effects on the other hand :D
Wolfgang, imagine if WoW's program allowed the fish to reproduce, as long as they don't number too high. I don't mean the pools of fish that we fish from to raise our Fishing Skill, I mean the fish we see swimming around if we jump into the water and go for a swim ourselves.
Just put in a simple check every hour or two (or every 12 hours, 24 hours, etc) to determine if the area is over or under-populated. Is T, the number of fish inside the Y-cubic yard sample area, greater than X? Yes, then have R (where R = a Random number between 1 & T/10) fish die. No, then spawn R (same as above) fish within the sample area.
The big deal is every fish has a random path it follows, not a prescribed path within a certain distance of its spawning point, but a fish could feasibly swim from Booty Bat to Southshore, given the correct sequence of random movement decisions. In this way there could very well be fish off the west coast of Dun Morogh, and the program wouldn't need to be told "spawn R fish here at (X,Y)".
And yes, I know Dun Morogh is a landlocked zone; I meant the coastline that you only get to see if you swim from Westfall to Menethil Harbor.
That would certainly be cool imo, but I can see it now: hundreds of fish hovering through the land because the random command caused them to raid stormwind ;).Another question a blizz developer would probably ask is what would be the point? If there was a carpentry profession that allowed players to make fishing boats- or any boats for that matter- your idea would be sweet, even if it was just for aesthetics.
I dont know how much that would tax WoW's programming, but it would be very cool, even if it did turn into more of a Virtual Aquarium® than an ocean.
Obviously the random move command would need to check whether the fish is about to become a fish out of water ;) and prevent it if so.
It would be neat, too, if some fish gravitated towards others to form natural schools. Again, a simple check to see if there's fish in the area, and rather than doing a random move the single fish would then move towards the most densely populated area. Once it gets within D-yards of the school it becomes part of the school, and now each 'random move' for each fish is averaged out, so the school would move as one, based on the most 'popular' decision.
Again, Virtual Aquarium® of sorts and something that would probably take away too much processing power from the rest of the game. Aah, so many great ideas, so little time (& money, and connections, and influence) to implement them.
I remember there was an idea for a (now defunct) version of Warhammer Online where large groups of mobs that hadn't been culled by players would generate a "chieftain" mob, that would spawn in the area. With the Chieftain would be some bodyguards and a Shaman/Healer mob.
If more than 3 Chieftains spawned within a certain area, an "Overkeeper" mob would spawn with a specific retinue. If more than 3 Overkeepers spawned... and so on, all the way up to a Battle Lord. And when that Battle Lord spawned, the entire horde would set forth towards a player city to attack it, thus pushing for the players to try and defend it or lose the city for an unspecified random time.
One of the major inconsistances I've spotted is to do with mining. I can mine for metals but if I want coal, I buy it from a vendor.
And why can't I fashion gold ore into gold coins?
Ultima Online had a very complex system for their ecology. It kept track of the wild life, the timber supply, mining, ect. It was supposed to work where if the local wild life population dropped to low, one of the bigger monsters would attack the cities looking for food. Unfortunately they didn't account for what unruly, environmentally unfriendly, cretins the players were. They stripped the country side bare the first day and broke the system. The designers learned that its easier and better to fake the system than actually try and model it. Just have a random chance that a monster attacks the city and say its because the food supply ran low. In the end its just as fun, a lot less work, and the players can't tell the difference.
But regarding Bartle, I am just glad to see him actually playing games again instead of just talking about them. For years he had been doing all his theorizing and such without actually playing any of the games. He was getting further and further out of touch.
I meet him back in '04 and had him sign his book. Nice guy and I like his expanded Bartle type diagram. I do think he is being overly picky with regard to WoW though. Okay, so the wolf doesn't eat the rabbit... but at least it goes through the motions and you imagination does the rest. Good enough. Quite frankly I'd rather they did what ever they did with the time it would have taken to code and animate the wolf eating the rabbit because its just background fluff.
Post a Comment