Having played many of the early Mmo's like Ultima Online and EQ I remember the early days of gaming without instances. Dungeons were overcrowded and camped for items. Players often argued over loot ninja's. Many times I would log on at odd hours of the night just to be able to garnish a valuable item.
The open world was always very immersive, However, the lack of instances doesnt suit itself to a mainstream audience with the current designs we see in mmo's today. While I may have enjoyed farming a dungeon for hours on end, or waiting for a respawn in the middle of the night, that type of gameplay no longer fits into my current lifestyle.
I want to be able to get in, run a quest, and do a dungeon without having to wait for other's who beat me there to wrap up with their fun.
Instancing has provided this type of gameplay to now. But sometimes the instances take away from the feeling of an open world for many gamers.
So the question arises? How can we build a world where both gamers are satisfied. Group A wants a completely open world with alot of social interaction. While
Group B wants social interaction and a world that can be explored at their leisure.
So in order to come to a solution, we have to understand the problem. I have always felt that instancing is a solution to a game design flaw - lack of content. Lack of content for a certain area that does not coincide with the number of players in an area at any given time. This allows for overcrowding and unfulfilling dungeon gameplay.
I dont think that the lack of content is due to the size of any given mmo. I believe its due to the levels. I would recommend 20 levels max for an mmo. For example of wow was reduced to 20 levels instead of 70, you immediately open the number of quest areas in the game. With the level range being reduced the amount of content that players have immediate access to triples. Instead of having 1 or 2 zones for a certain level you now have 6 or 7. Instead of selecting one starting town per race, you would have access to 4 or 5 starting towns. This would have the trickle down affect of reducing camping of dungeons in certain non-instanced zones.
In order to keep dungeons static more explorable dungeon areas should be added to a game world. Reducing the level gap should help with making more dungeons available for each player level. However, I do believe double or triple the amount would be needed to keep overcrowding minimized.
Dungeon design should also be enhanced to be less linear. Different groups may need to explore or quest in different sections of a multi-branch dungeon. Perhaps even making the lower levels only accessible to higher level players, or a large well organized group of lower levels.
Another gameplay element that I would try to implement would be something I like to call a "wild dungeon". These would be random dungeons that spawn periodically at a random location in the game world. While I would use instancing technology to create these dungeons, there would not be a player limit to the number of groups that could enter. These "wild dungeons" would encourage open world exploration. Players would be encouraged to only share the location with their friends or guild in order to avoid overcrowding. These dungeons could be spawned from a day to a week, or until the dungeon boss is defeated.
Well, im gonna cut my thoughts a little short, due to the length of this post, But,In summary, I think mmo design will have to drastically change if an open world is ever going to be preferred over instancing. In order for an open world to appeal to a mainstream audience mmo games need to implement
Fewer Levels
More content per level
More Dungeons
Random Dungeons spawns
All are steps that could be taken to re-make the open worlds that mmo's are supposed to be. What do you think?
2 comments:
Hiya Northsun. I'm glad my post got you thinking, and I totally agree that I don't want to go back to the world of camp checks and totally overcrowded dungeons.
Going back to my premise that "Making MMO's is hard", I like your ideas on the one hand, but it got me thinking, too.
First, creating content is expensive, I think. Instancing is a much less expensive way for developers to give players more virtual room to play in.
Second, the more content you add, the less people will actually interact, just because they're spread out more. There's not as much chance for randomly encountering other people.
That doesn't mean I don't like your ideas. We'd just have to figure out A) how much content development we could afford, and B) how you get players to interact. Well, ok, not "we", I mean "them", the developers :)
I think Mythic is on to something good with public quests, and with the wide variety of gameplay available within a zone. You can do public quests, you can do instanced PvP, or you can hit open-world PvP, all within the same zone. And each activity helps decide which faction is in charge of which zone. I like it so far in beta.
It's tough, though! I'm impressed by how much MMO devs have to consider and solve.
Hey! thanks for the comments, I agree, it is a difficult balancing act. How to you keep the community engaged without spreading them too thin?
I am looking forward to the public quests as well, perhaps this could be incorporated into a dungeon setting.
I still think that games like wow have plenty of content, the only barriers to interaction is that there are so many levels from start to finish.
I will have to think about different ways to reward achievement without necessarily adding too many levels to a character.
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