Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Well if that"s the case then you wouldn"t mind giving a few of us early beta invites then huh?

Moorgard Mobhunter said:

If you want to discuss design philosophy and frame conversations based on what you have experienced in other games, then it has the potential to be extremely useful and informative.

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I"d suggest one of the foundational reasons for EQ2 being such a poor game was that central to their development philosophy was they tried to make everything in EQ2 to be as different from EQ1 as was possible. That and its shifting focus from expansion to expansion from solo, group to raid content, and back again, so that as you progress through levels and content its clear it never had a long term vision (don"t you hate how such a valid word is forever tainted, almost beyond use) or identity.

I"d suggest across the industry one of the great failings is that each company adopts that attitude towards what has gone before, from other companies.


I find 38S approach to "borrowing" game elements, as you"ve discussed (quote : question assumptions about what has gone before but don"t feel the need to reinvent the wheel just for the sake of being different.) to be extremely exciting, as befits the quality of staff you"ve recruited - my statement certainly wasn"t aimed at 38S, but the industry that has made us endure one failure after another, with about as much fun between all of them as you"ll get in one Blizzard game (I"m not a WoW fanboi, btw - I think they are dropping the ball in pursuit of better sub numbers).



As far as the FFXI job system, its convoluted by the fact there are two aspects to it :

i) the ability to raise all jobs on one character, though all must be leveled separately;

ii) you select a main job and a sub-job at all times, with the sub-job acting at half the level of the main job.


I"m advocating i) without ii). The ability to raise all - or a limited number - of classes on one character and the ability to play a single one of those classes at a time.

I can see drawbacks to ii), but hardly any to i). When discussions arise about features players want to see in future MMOs i) is always near the top of the list, yet no major MMO has yet implemented it. I have never seen a single person who has played the game express anything other than glowing praise for it. It gives a whole new arena to the concept of character attachment ( though the power gamer in me always made me reroll each job as a different character, to take advantage of racial benefits ) and the amount of replayability it generates - at no additional development cost - is huge.

There"s just something about playing the same character through the same areas multiple times, but as different classes/jobs, that negates how dreary the grind can get. Though that might also have something to do with how fun many of the classes are in FFXI, compared to most other MMOs.

Lets triple underline here - the group game and level grind in FFXI is right up there with the very worst any MMO has to offer and on top of that it has a UI that makes you want to poke out your own eye with a hot needle. Yet people play it over and over, go back to playing it, time and again - largely because of the job system. And by that I mean i) and not necessarily ii). Although FFX??? Online will have both, probably, and launch around the same time as Copernicus.......





/endSalesPitch


edit : There seems to be a tendency for you guys to take thing I/we say personally; that"s almost certainly aided by my/our inadequate abilities with regard to communication. I hope you can see that we believe in you - most of us anyways (to the extent it hurts that we aren"t involved) and what we are doing is egging you on to better whats gone on before, not commenting on what we think you are doing - WoW should be the baseline for this industry, not the pinnacle. I"m showing my age by saying I"ve loved Todds work since Spidey #298, so its a dream team, but more than anything I believe in the quality of the team you"ve recruited and your company ethos. Now I"ll get stick on here for ass kissing, but I will personally bare my own ass in the local department store and post pictures of it here if you fail us in any way - thats how much I believe in you guys. And, trust me - it wouldn"t be pretty

If you"re going to have BoP loot be the standard, then not having a job systemsucks.No matter how many hours I spend in the raid zone, I will never be able to pick up healing loot as a Warrior, but a Druid can fill all four major roles on one character. If I could send real loot to an alt it wouldn"t sting so badly. But now they"ve compounded it with the achievement system, and..just...

/frothing spittle

Learn from this.

Moorgard fucked up and mentioned Job System.

Here we go again.

When people say "job system" they don"t mean "clone FFXI"s system exactly".

When I think of applying the job system to, say, WoW, I think of levelling to 80 then being offered a quest by a prominent member of another class to go on an epic quest of self enlightenment that will allow me to learn the ways of their class. Once that quest is complete, I can hit a button and turn into a level 1 of that class, complete with a new starting area that"s easy to enter/exit so I can go back to my other class"s trainer and then revert back to my original class.

A lot of revamps would have to happen to the inventory, equipment, and questing mechanics, but the gist of the idea is to not need to roll alts.

It"s not going to happen in WoW, but my ideal game would have it. It"s a nice combination, to me, of the greatly added additional character advancement of AA"s and the functionality you bring to groups with dual specs.

Personally, I"m glad that as a shaman, my dual specing will allow me to fill 2 different roles in a group. Pure DPS classes don"t have that option, which to me makes just a dual spec type system inelegant.

MrGraham said:

When people say "job system" they don"t mean "clone FFXI"s system exactly".

When I think of applying the job system to, say, WoW, I think of levelling to 80 then being offered a quest by a prominent member of another class to go on an epic quest of self enlightenment that will allow me to learn the ways of their class. Once that quest is complete, I can hit a button and turn into a level 1 of that class, complete with a new starting area that"s easy to enter/exit so I can go back to my other class"s trainer and then revert back to my original class.

A lot of revamps would have to happen to the inventory, equipment, and questing mechanics, but the gist of the idea is to not need to roll alts.

It"s not going to happen in WoW, but my ideal game would have it. It"s a nice combination, to me, of the greatly added additional character advancement of AA"s and the functionality you bring to groups with dual specs.

Personally, I"m glad that as a shaman, my dual specing will allow me to fill 2 different roles in a group. Pure DPS classes don"t have that option, which to me makes just a dual spec type system inelegant.

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Job/skill systems from FF,UO, whatever fit into certain types of games. But he was right in saying that effects other aspects of the game.

Is progression loot based, skill based or level based? Job/skill systems work well with level based, and very much skill based, but not loot based progression.

PvP doesn"t work well with a job/skill based game. Its ridiculously hard to balance skills and abilities when the dev team doesn"t know exactly what skills any given player might have. Certainly not impossible. But what you would end up with is certain "builds" being vastly superior to others. Cookie cutters reign supreme and no one really is happy.


If I was going to build a game, I would certainly start with a template of a game I thought was good, and try to improve on aspects of it that I thought could be. Being different for difference sake is terrible.

I can imagine 2 mmos really. one, is WoW with D2 loot and dungeons. Fast paced gameplay, highly repeatable dungeons with no timers, strong pvp fully itemized with rewards, world control. Loot drops like water, but is randomized like D2 so you can always get better versions of the same gear.
A second mmo is more like UO+nwn+Fallout3+sims+civilization... Job based, economy based, merchants, theives, etc. A simulated world, where their are a few npcs, but mostly its just competing or cooperating with each other.

Having a "job system" doesn"t necessarily mean sub-jobbing/multi-classing/whatever.

Yeah but sometimes it can be detrimental to game play.

Not really.

Caliane said:

Job/skill systems from FF,UO, whatever fit into certain types of games. But he was right in saying that effects other aspects of the game.

Is progression loot based, skill based or level based? Job/skill systems work well with level based, and very much skill based, but not loot based progression.

PvP doesn"t work well with a job/skill based game. Its ridiculously hard to balance skills and abilities when the dev team doesn"t know exactly what skills any given player might have. Certainly not impossible. But what you would end up with is certain "builds" being vastly superior to others. Cookie cutters reign supreme and no one really is happy.

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You might be right about PvP, but then again this seems to be a problem in one class per character games as well. Cookie cutters exist in any game like this. SWG skill trees. CoH powers. WoW specs. EQ spell rotations. Probably EQ2 in some way, I don"t know. Certainly FFXI subjobbing. You can"t get away from it, the players are going to data mine shit to death and find out down to decimals what is "best".

I don"t understand why a job system or limited multiclassing can"t work in a loot heavy game. It gives you the same thing that a job system grants you in the first place. Choices. Choices for the player that stick with your character rather than requiring rerolling. The talent switching that is imminent in WoW is pretty close to a job system in many ways. FFXI was pretty loot centric at every level, for min/maxing especially. There was plenty of drama and greed involved in loot that often centered around people"s "other jobs". But I don"t see that as a negative. I think that this can help keep the game alive and dynamic for the players. It also is a nice little gear rot check in many ways.

In a job system game, your job and skills define your character and its role.
In a gear based game, you have set roles, and the gear defines how well you do it.
If both gear and skill/job level are variable, then you have a very large amount of variables. Thus tuning and balance is hard to achieve.
A few examples of job/skill games are UO and D20 games. Skill or character level define how effective you are in a role. Gear itself is quite basic. A sword in dnd being 1-6 damage if you are level 1 or level 20, for example.

Who said more choices is a good thing? Choice in the world of retail is not a good thing. People rarely know what they want. Give people too much choice and they just get confused, bored and scared. Its far better to give a tight, well constructed game, thats enjoyable, then a broad meandering game that no one understands.

This is the whole point of level caps, and gear progression past it. Level caps remove one of the variables. At some point everyone hits that max level and then is on a level playing field.

Caliane said:

In a job system game...

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And a job system changes this...how?

I think you haven"t been paying attention.

While I never played a game with a multi-classing style job system, in theory it seems like a great way to keep community alive. Rather than trying to keep up with everybody"s alts, everybody can stay on with their main and just start plowing through content as a different class. They can swap back and forth to fill different needs, helping to make grouping more viable, and the constant replaying for advancement can keep the older content populated enough to make it fun for new players. It might be vaguely like SWG when everybody was leveling their asses off to unlock a Jedi; the game was alive and invigorated and felt almost like it had at launch, where people were more immersed into the game due to the goal they were after. And players who weren"t engaged in the powergrind had lots of people to play with and lots of people to run into as they went to wherever they were going to do whatever they were doing.

Caliane said:

In a job system game, your job and skills define your character and its role.
In a gear based game, you have set roles, and the gear defines how well you do it.

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I don"t see how these are at all mutually exclusive. In WoW you have a class, talents, and then gear. You still have a role based on your class and talents. Your gear defines how well you do that job in terms of what the numbers on your skills are.

Caliane said:

Who said more choices is a good thing? Choice in the world of retail is not a good thing. People rarely know what they want. Give people too much choice and they just get confused, bored and scared. Its far better to give a tight, well constructed game, thats enjoyable, then a broad meandering game that no one understands.

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The choices are a choice of what role to fill at any given time. Its not a choice from moment to moment about how to react. You don"t have everything you character could potentially do all at the same time. You make the choice on what role to fill on a revolving basis. This has worked fine in many games, through job switching, gear switching and talent switching.

Caliane said:

This is the whole point of level caps, and gear progression past it. Level caps remove one of the variables. At some point everyone hits that max level and then is on a level playing field.

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Once again, you are capped at max level for one job at a time. This exists right now. People collect off spec gear. They respec. They can come to raids as an 80 healer instead of an 80 DPS/tank. I don"t see where the game breaking aspect lies. I"m not going to go around in circles, maybe you can explain what you mean better than I understand it so far.

Flight said:

edit : There seems to be a tendency for you guys to take thing I/we say personally; that"s almost certainly aided by my/our inadequate abilities with regard to communication. I hope you can see that we believe in you - most of us anyways (to the extent it hurts that we aren"t involved) and what we are doing is egging you on to better whats gone on before, not commenting on what we think you are doing - WoW should be the baseline for this industry, not the pinnacle. I"m showing my age by saying I"ve loved Todds work since Spidey #298, so its a dream team, but more than anything I believe in the quality of the team you"ve recruited and your company ethos. Now I"ll get stick on here for ass kissing, but I will personally bare my own ass in the local department store and post pictures of it here if you fail us in any way - thats how much I believe in you guys. And, trust me - it wouldn"t be pretty

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Just wanted to point out that I know this is how I take pretty much all of this, even the posts including F bombs. Players that care about their games, and that care about games being made they WANT to play.

We"re a pretty even keeled bunch of guys, though I get very hot under the collar when people make disparaging comments about members of the 38 family, and likely always will.

We"re just not that different from anyone here when you are looking at our gamer DNA. We want to play fun, kick ass, totally immersive games, with our friends.

Ngruk said:

We"re just not that different from anyone here when you are looking at our gamer DNA. We want to play fun, kick ass, totally immersive games, with our friends.

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I find surnames to be very immersive. Please include them. To this day, I still lament WoW"s lack of surnames.

I have to say that it does gall me from time to time, as I conceived the majority of my characters with surnames, but it doesn"t detract from gameplay in the least. I"d rather have one, but it has no impact on my decision to play the game.

how about gold names for playing to much?

There are a few things that should be top priority, that really have little to nothing to do with gameplay - but still have a huge effect on someone"s opinion of a game.

In no particular order...

-UI
-Graphics/How well game runs on computer
-Character animations

Personally, if any of these 3 are jacked up, I have a REALLY hard time getting into the game at all, to the point that I won"t even give it a fair shake. I assume many people share my view when it comes to one or more of those.

I think animations are a big one, and I don"t understand why this genre struggles with them so much.