Post by Morreion on Jan 30, 2015 18:29:28 GMT -5
The Soapbox: Better models for MMO endgame progression, part one (Massively)
So for this new series, let's consider models that don't rely upon raiding as an endgame progression model. Some of these are close cousins to endgame models found in games currently on the market, some of them are not, and none of them has been designed with fine details or lore or what-not in mind. They're drag-and-drop, as it were. The point here is explaining the multitude of options available for an MMO's endgame that don't rely upon raiding for their focus. Today's article will cover the first two of six I have in mind.
All tokens, many lines, no waiting
Let's start with something pretty familiar; let's borrow from Final Fantasy XIV. When you hit the level cap in this model, you have three obvious routes of progression available to you: solo content, group content, and large-group content. Ideally, you'd want all of this content to scale to group sizes, but just for giggles let's assume that it can't for one technical reason or another. Each piece of content has three difficulty levels: Story, Advanced, and Extreme.
Story mode is... well, the story. You want to know why you're delving into a given location; that'll tell you why. Advanced is designed so that a reasonably kitted-out group can clear the content reliably without too much concern over time limits or the like. Extreme, meanwhile, is the challenging content, the sort of thing where the first few times you may very well not clear it before the time limit expires.
Clearing content awards tokens. You don't get many tokens for Story clears because those can be accomplished with absurd ease. Advanced and Extreme both award the same number of tokens; Extreme also rewards you with achievements. All forms of content can drop bits of purely cosmetic equipment here and there, but the actual upgrades to your equipment are earned by spending tokens, which can have a weekly cap if the designers want to limit progress past a certain point.
The key here is that no mode of content is favored over any other. Large-group content and solo content award the same number of tokens to an individual player assuming that they're both being run on the same difficulty setting. Different cosmetic pieces can be found in different content, of course, but the same cosmetics are available regardless of difficulty. So if you want to really challenge yourself while solo but like the cosmetics available in large-group content, focus on solo content at Extreme for tokens while running Story modes for large-group content.
Extreme mode in large-group content is hard, but it also takes some of the pressure off of each individual player. It's the trade-off you accept for spending the time organizing a group capable of taking it down. None of this precludes a PvP progression track, either; there's a similar reward structure if you choose to play in unranked or ranked matches. Just as in Extreme difficulty, your goal is bragging rights rather than progressing beyond unranked players. The challenge is there; it's just not a gating mechanism.
Straightforward, right? And the sort of thing that could be dropped in any game that currently does use raiding as its endgame focus with very few technical challenges. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
The Soapbox: Better models for MMO endgame progression, part two (Massively)
Assembly of crafts
Saying that a game is going to have a crafting-focused endgame is one thing. Technically, that's what EVE Online has on the occasions that PvP isn't solely based around hating the other faction's collective faces. It's a model that can work, too, with players shooting stuff for material, selling that material, then buying finished products off of a given marketplace.
In this sort of model, the king of content is the crafting materials and the crafting interface. So let's start off by just eliminating the concept of NPC-made gear. (Not gear vendors; that's different. But we'll get there.) Everything is reliant on the crafting efforts of players, absolutely everything. And this is a more involved process than simply clicking on a button and moving forward on a bar.
Let's start by taking something that has shades of Ryzom without some of the insane fussiness of its material science. Materials are roughly split into tiers based on how potent they are overall; a sword made from tier 1 metals isn't going to be as good as one made from tier 5 metals, at least not when you start out crafting. Different metals also have different properties, though, even within a given tier. The same goes for all the resources that can be gathered and used. There are reasons to use silk in an item's setup and reasons to use wool instead. Both offer different fine touches.
But who's to say that iron blade could never be as good as one made from a high-tier metal? As you become more skilled, using larger amounts of metal, you can make those lower-tier items with their unique properties perform up to snuff with the higher-tier minerals. It's all a matter of crafting skill, adding enhancements to basic recipes here and there, filtering out impurities as you refine materials.
Crafting itself is a bit of a minigame; players juggle various traits that'll show up on the finished product while keeping an eye on overall item durability; think Final Fantasy XIV's minigame, but in an expanded form and with more variables to track. Once you have the finished version, you can bring it over to a vendor... and start selling it to other players.
There are still gear vendors scattered throughout the world, after all. The difference is that they sell items that players have created and customized, letting you personalize the stats and then distribute them through NPC networks. Only so many players can be up on a given vendor at once, so it's a bidding war that hinges on still making a profit. The game also stocks material exchange vendors as in Guild Wars, thus allowing you to quickly ascertain if your mass-produced sword copies are going to make you a profit at $10 a sale while iron goes for $1 per chunk.
Obviously, this model is focused far more on the crafting than it is on the PvE or PvP side of things. But that's part of the beauty of it; you can drag and drop the majority of this into any setup of PvE content and it would still work. My personal preference for this sort of game is to eliminate drops and other gear sources altogether, followed by giving players PvE content that's more focused around achievements and cosmetic pieces or housing items, but there are a lot of options here. The important bit is what you do with the materials once you have them.
The Soapbox: Better models for MMO endgame progression, part three (Massively)
Affinity bargains
Let's step completely outside of game systems for a bit, shall we? If you look at fictional weapons or armor, you probably notice that games sort of have the setup backward. Oh, sure, you hear a lot about how items get forged with exceptional materials, but what makes them noteworthy is what they do. Heck, that's even true to life. Your brand-new car is nice, but it's only when you start taking it down some dirt roads and driving cross-state or whatever that it really develops some character. The good cars get better with time; the bad ones fall by the wayside.
So why not work with that? Why not have your arsenal be pegged entirely at a power level based on how much you've done with them, not where you got them?
Every item dropped or crafted has a hard limit of how strong it can be. There are cosmetic differences, sure, in colors and the like, but not in terms of raw power. When you find them, even in the highest bits of content, they can't pass a certain fairly low threshold.
What they do have is plenty of space for improvement. And you unlock those improvements through your deeds. At the top of the game, you are still fundamentally leveling, it's just that you're leveling your items rather than leveling your character. This wouldn't be a straight process of leveling; it'd require specific tasks in order to take your item to the next level instead of tossing points into a bucket and waiting until they pass a marker line (like legendary items in LotRO).
Of course, in a game like that, the content should by its very nature spend less time emphasizing what you're getting and more time emphasizing what you're actually doing at any given moment. Arena-style boss fights a la Final Fantasy XIV would fit in wonderfully, pitting a group of players against a difficult opponent to unlock an improvement as the end goal. Rather than full-on dungeons, scaling instances would work better, along the lines of the various Star Trek Online missions -- completing these deeds is a step along the path to improving your items.
You can also keep progression horizontal by allowing only a limited number of enhancements on a given item and making them choices to stick by. So for one sword, you want plenty of fire damage and Strength, but another sword has no elemental damage and a whole lot of magical abilities. Each one requires a different customization path; each one gives you plenty of reasons to venture out and hunt great beasts or undertake difficult tasks.
Best of all, this system can help solve one of the obvious problems raising the vertical limit: Allow it, but then also up the power limit of crafted or dropped items. So your sword can now become 10 levels more powerful, but a new player coming in can buy a sword that starts out 10 levels above the old baseline. Instead of making an ever-higher mountain to scale, you reset the starting point while still giving players something to work toward and accomplish.
So for this new series, let's consider models that don't rely upon raiding as an endgame progression model. Some of these are close cousins to endgame models found in games currently on the market, some of them are not, and none of them has been designed with fine details or lore or what-not in mind. They're drag-and-drop, as it were. The point here is explaining the multitude of options available for an MMO's endgame that don't rely upon raiding for their focus. Today's article will cover the first two of six I have in mind.
All tokens, many lines, no waiting
Let's start with something pretty familiar; let's borrow from Final Fantasy XIV. When you hit the level cap in this model, you have three obvious routes of progression available to you: solo content, group content, and large-group content. Ideally, you'd want all of this content to scale to group sizes, but just for giggles let's assume that it can't for one technical reason or another. Each piece of content has three difficulty levels: Story, Advanced, and Extreme.
Story mode is... well, the story. You want to know why you're delving into a given location; that'll tell you why. Advanced is designed so that a reasonably kitted-out group can clear the content reliably without too much concern over time limits or the like. Extreme, meanwhile, is the challenging content, the sort of thing where the first few times you may very well not clear it before the time limit expires.
Clearing content awards tokens. You don't get many tokens for Story clears because those can be accomplished with absurd ease. Advanced and Extreme both award the same number of tokens; Extreme also rewards you with achievements. All forms of content can drop bits of purely cosmetic equipment here and there, but the actual upgrades to your equipment are earned by spending tokens, which can have a weekly cap if the designers want to limit progress past a certain point.
The key here is that no mode of content is favored over any other. Large-group content and solo content award the same number of tokens to an individual player assuming that they're both being run on the same difficulty setting. Different cosmetic pieces can be found in different content, of course, but the same cosmetics are available regardless of difficulty. So if you want to really challenge yourself while solo but like the cosmetics available in large-group content, focus on solo content at Extreme for tokens while running Story modes for large-group content.
Extreme mode in large-group content is hard, but it also takes some of the pressure off of each individual player. It's the trade-off you accept for spending the time organizing a group capable of taking it down. None of this precludes a PvP progression track, either; there's a similar reward structure if you choose to play in unranked or ranked matches. Just as in Extreme difficulty, your goal is bragging rights rather than progressing beyond unranked players. The challenge is there; it's just not a gating mechanism.
Straightforward, right? And the sort of thing that could be dropped in any game that currently does use raiding as its endgame focus with very few technical challenges. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
The Soapbox: Better models for MMO endgame progression, part two (Massively)
Assembly of crafts
Saying that a game is going to have a crafting-focused endgame is one thing. Technically, that's what EVE Online has on the occasions that PvP isn't solely based around hating the other faction's collective faces. It's a model that can work, too, with players shooting stuff for material, selling that material, then buying finished products off of a given marketplace.
In this sort of model, the king of content is the crafting materials and the crafting interface. So let's start off by just eliminating the concept of NPC-made gear. (Not gear vendors; that's different. But we'll get there.) Everything is reliant on the crafting efforts of players, absolutely everything. And this is a more involved process than simply clicking on a button and moving forward on a bar.
Let's start by taking something that has shades of Ryzom without some of the insane fussiness of its material science. Materials are roughly split into tiers based on how potent they are overall; a sword made from tier 1 metals isn't going to be as good as one made from tier 5 metals, at least not when you start out crafting. Different metals also have different properties, though, even within a given tier. The same goes for all the resources that can be gathered and used. There are reasons to use silk in an item's setup and reasons to use wool instead. Both offer different fine touches.
But who's to say that iron blade could never be as good as one made from a high-tier metal? As you become more skilled, using larger amounts of metal, you can make those lower-tier items with their unique properties perform up to snuff with the higher-tier minerals. It's all a matter of crafting skill, adding enhancements to basic recipes here and there, filtering out impurities as you refine materials.
Crafting itself is a bit of a minigame; players juggle various traits that'll show up on the finished product while keeping an eye on overall item durability; think Final Fantasy XIV's minigame, but in an expanded form and with more variables to track. Once you have the finished version, you can bring it over to a vendor... and start selling it to other players.
There are still gear vendors scattered throughout the world, after all. The difference is that they sell items that players have created and customized, letting you personalize the stats and then distribute them through NPC networks. Only so many players can be up on a given vendor at once, so it's a bidding war that hinges on still making a profit. The game also stocks material exchange vendors as in Guild Wars, thus allowing you to quickly ascertain if your mass-produced sword copies are going to make you a profit at $10 a sale while iron goes for $1 per chunk.
Obviously, this model is focused far more on the crafting than it is on the PvE or PvP side of things. But that's part of the beauty of it; you can drag and drop the majority of this into any setup of PvE content and it would still work. My personal preference for this sort of game is to eliminate drops and other gear sources altogether, followed by giving players PvE content that's more focused around achievements and cosmetic pieces or housing items, but there are a lot of options here. The important bit is what you do with the materials once you have them.
The Soapbox: Better models for MMO endgame progression, part three (Massively)
Affinity bargains
Let's step completely outside of game systems for a bit, shall we? If you look at fictional weapons or armor, you probably notice that games sort of have the setup backward. Oh, sure, you hear a lot about how items get forged with exceptional materials, but what makes them noteworthy is what they do. Heck, that's even true to life. Your brand-new car is nice, but it's only when you start taking it down some dirt roads and driving cross-state or whatever that it really develops some character. The good cars get better with time; the bad ones fall by the wayside.
So why not work with that? Why not have your arsenal be pegged entirely at a power level based on how much you've done with them, not where you got them?
Every item dropped or crafted has a hard limit of how strong it can be. There are cosmetic differences, sure, in colors and the like, but not in terms of raw power. When you find them, even in the highest bits of content, they can't pass a certain fairly low threshold.
What they do have is plenty of space for improvement. And you unlock those improvements through your deeds. At the top of the game, you are still fundamentally leveling, it's just that you're leveling your items rather than leveling your character. This wouldn't be a straight process of leveling; it'd require specific tasks in order to take your item to the next level instead of tossing points into a bucket and waiting until they pass a marker line (like legendary items in LotRO).
Of course, in a game like that, the content should by its very nature spend less time emphasizing what you're getting and more time emphasizing what you're actually doing at any given moment. Arena-style boss fights a la Final Fantasy XIV would fit in wonderfully, pitting a group of players against a difficult opponent to unlock an improvement as the end goal. Rather than full-on dungeons, scaling instances would work better, along the lines of the various Star Trek Online missions -- completing these deeds is a step along the path to improving your items.
You can also keep progression horizontal by allowing only a limited number of enhancements on a given item and making them choices to stick by. So for one sword, you want plenty of fire damage and Strength, but another sword has no elemental damage and a whole lot of magical abilities. Each one requires a different customization path; each one gives you plenty of reasons to venture out and hunt great beasts or undertake difficult tasks.
Best of all, this system can help solve one of the obvious problems raising the vertical limit: Allow it, but then also up the power limit of crafted or dropped items. So your sword can now become 10 levels more powerful, but a new player coming in can buy a sword that starts out 10 levels above the old baseline. Instead of making an ever-higher mountain to scale, you reset the starting point while still giving players something to work toward and accomplish.
