2018-03-30 08:59
#0
Okay so there's one big flaw this game is dealing with from a mechanical perspective, and it's one that's been baked into the very core of the design. That is, the lack of a level cap and periodic soft gear resets. Just so everyone knows what I'm talking about, take the example of World of Warcraft.
You play the game, you level up to the cap of 60, you do dungeons and raids and PVP to get better and better equipment, and eventually you find yourself decked out in the most powerful stuff you're willing to put in the time to get. At that point you pretty much just roll around doing PVP or farming gold or collecting pets or something, until you eventually get bored and start thinking about unsubscribing.
But wait, here comes an expansion pack. Now the level cap is 70 instead of 60, there's a whole new continent to visit, and routine quests there hand out equipment more powerful than your hard-earned raid gear or whatever. Your character technically isn't any weaker than it ever was, you haven't actually lost anything, but in practical terms you've been reduced to some newbie 10 levels below the cap wearing gear weaker than quest rewards. So you play the game, you level up to the new cap of 70, you do dungeons and raids and PVP to get better and better equipment, so on and so forth, repeat every couple years.
Ultima Online was built on a completely different philosophy. Levels didn't exist in the classic sense and the power difference between a newbie and a developed character was relatively low, compared to games like Warcraft where a high-level character might have hundreds or thousands of times higher stats than a low-level character. More importantly, gear wasn't as overwhelmingly important as in those later games. Vanquishing weapons and Invulnerability armor were stronger than plain GM crafted items, but they wouldn't let you just crush things effortlessly.
Most importantly, items could be lost if a corpse wasn't recovered, and items wore out over time with use. This made it much harder to ever hit a point where you didn't need gear anymore, since you were never more than one unlucky unrecoverable death from losing everything you were wearing. At the same time that possibility didn't represent complete catastrophe, since even ordinary GM crafted gear would allow you to reasonably return to action.
Then Age of Shadows came out in early 2003 or so, and fundamentally broke the entire system.
Now suddenly there's powder of fortification, meaning items never really need to wear out. Now there's insurance, so that nothing important decays with a corpse anymore. Now all you can do is keep adding slightly more powerful items as time goes by. Artifacts once considered powerful and valuable slowly become inexpensive newbie junk as more and more of them are farmed, and more desirable items are introduced over time. The content systems rewarding those artifacts fall into disuse.
That's about where we've been ever since. Various developers over the years have tried to tackle this problem in different ways, but nothing has fundamentally changed the equation. Draconi had an idea for a "diminishing returns" system whereby one would need much more of a given equipment stat in order to get the most return from it, but the whole thing was just too counterintuitive. If having 30 energy resistance and adding an item with 20 energy resistance ended in a value of 43 or something, people were going to give up on understanding their stats. Other developers have tried adding various cursed, brittle, ephemeral, and otherwise temporary items, but those things have never been more than a sideshow.
So the question is, assuming we don't want to just shrug and keep piling on stronger items until everyone hits the caps in everything, where do we go from here? Despite all the talking I'm doing, I don't have a single magical answer at the ready. I do, however, have a few suggestions for the team.
Put up a special TC shard for the explicit purpose of testing fundamental changes to the game, with a pop-up upon login informing players that the changes in question are experimental only and won't necessarily ever come to the rest of the game. Then you start doing some crazy stuff. Maybe you remove all item property caps and let people build insane suits. Maybe you raise the skill cap just to see what happens. Maybe you flat double everyone's HP and damage. You let people really stretch out the engine, while you show up on weekends to host PVP fights and spawn monsters for people to kill while you observe. Offer some simple but unique custom items on players home shards as prizes in order to encourage people to optimize as much as possible.
Then you sit back and watch, you look for changes that create the greatest amount of new optimization possibilty space, and then you ask yourself if that space can be preserved in a way that allows for decent game balance. You make real observations of things we would otherwise just take for granted. Like we know that unlimited skill and property caps would probably unbalance the game horribly, but in what ways, and just how high can those things go exactly before it starts getting out of hand? What if skill-boosting items stopped letting you go over your skill cap, but the skill cap was 900 or something? Look, maybe that's a terrible idea, but I wouldn't mind seeing it put to the test.
This isn't the kind of game where a developer can just boost Paladin damage 5% in a spreadsheet and call it good, we need to see how questionable changes play out in real practice but in a way that leaves room to go "Never mind, that was stupid!" without making a big deal out of it.
You play the game, you level up to the cap of 60, you do dungeons and raids and PVP to get better and better equipment, and eventually you find yourself decked out in the most powerful stuff you're willing to put in the time to get. At that point you pretty much just roll around doing PVP or farming gold or collecting pets or something, until you eventually get bored and start thinking about unsubscribing.
But wait, here comes an expansion pack. Now the level cap is 70 instead of 60, there's a whole new continent to visit, and routine quests there hand out equipment more powerful than your hard-earned raid gear or whatever. Your character technically isn't any weaker than it ever was, you haven't actually lost anything, but in practical terms you've been reduced to some newbie 10 levels below the cap wearing gear weaker than quest rewards. So you play the game, you level up to the new cap of 70, you do dungeons and raids and PVP to get better and better equipment, so on and so forth, repeat every couple years.
Ultima Online was built on a completely different philosophy. Levels didn't exist in the classic sense and the power difference between a newbie and a developed character was relatively low, compared to games like Warcraft where a high-level character might have hundreds or thousands of times higher stats than a low-level character. More importantly, gear wasn't as overwhelmingly important as in those later games. Vanquishing weapons and Invulnerability armor were stronger than plain GM crafted items, but they wouldn't let you just crush things effortlessly.
Most importantly, items could be lost if a corpse wasn't recovered, and items wore out over time with use. This made it much harder to ever hit a point where you didn't need gear anymore, since you were never more than one unlucky unrecoverable death from losing everything you were wearing. At the same time that possibility didn't represent complete catastrophe, since even ordinary GM crafted gear would allow you to reasonably return to action.
Then Age of Shadows came out in early 2003 or so, and fundamentally broke the entire system.
Now suddenly there's powder of fortification, meaning items never really need to wear out. Now there's insurance, so that nothing important decays with a corpse anymore. Now all you can do is keep adding slightly more powerful items as time goes by. Artifacts once considered powerful and valuable slowly become inexpensive newbie junk as more and more of them are farmed, and more desirable items are introduced over time. The content systems rewarding those artifacts fall into disuse.
That's about where we've been ever since. Various developers over the years have tried to tackle this problem in different ways, but nothing has fundamentally changed the equation. Draconi had an idea for a "diminishing returns" system whereby one would need much more of a given equipment stat in order to get the most return from it, but the whole thing was just too counterintuitive. If having 30 energy resistance and adding an item with 20 energy resistance ended in a value of 43 or something, people were going to give up on understanding their stats. Other developers have tried adding various cursed, brittle, ephemeral, and otherwise temporary items, but those things have never been more than a sideshow.
So the question is, assuming we don't want to just shrug and keep piling on stronger items until everyone hits the caps in everything, where do we go from here? Despite all the talking I'm doing, I don't have a single magical answer at the ready. I do, however, have a few suggestions for the team.
Put up a special TC shard for the explicit purpose of testing fundamental changes to the game, with a pop-up upon login informing players that the changes in question are experimental only and won't necessarily ever come to the rest of the game. Then you start doing some crazy stuff. Maybe you remove all item property caps and let people build insane suits. Maybe you raise the skill cap just to see what happens. Maybe you flat double everyone's HP and damage. You let people really stretch out the engine, while you show up on weekends to host PVP fights and spawn monsters for people to kill while you observe. Offer some simple but unique custom items on players home shards as prizes in order to encourage people to optimize as much as possible.
Then you sit back and watch, you look for changes that create the greatest amount of new optimization possibilty space, and then you ask yourself if that space can be preserved in a way that allows for decent game balance. You make real observations of things we would otherwise just take for granted. Like we know that unlimited skill and property caps would probably unbalance the game horribly, but in what ways, and just how high can those things go exactly before it starts getting out of hand? What if skill-boosting items stopped letting you go over your skill cap, but the skill cap was 900 or something? Look, maybe that's a terrible idea, but I wouldn't mind seeing it put to the test.
This isn't the kind of game where a developer can just boost Paladin damage 5% in a spreadsheet and call it good, we need to see how questionable changes play out in real practice but in a way that leaves room to go "Never mind, that was stupid!" without making a big deal out of it.