Current mood:	awake
Current music:	Utah Saints - Souloution
Entry tags:	gaming

On the topic of Massively Multiplayer Online Games
This is a great write up of a recent games conference for MMOGs, specifically the last panel which was more like a rant. The moderator of the rant, Gordon Walton, had this to say about balance in MMOGs, “This whole balance thing is a retarded idea. Balance is a theory. There’s fun in the imbalance quite often. There’s gameplay and fun in the inbalance.” This is such a true statement it's not even funny, I know of one MMO which became shitty at launch because of last minute balances that fucked up alot of fun that was had in beta.

The MMO I'm refering to is the only MMO I've ever played, Planetside. Planetside had an ingenius idea, an MMO First Person Shooter with some RPG elements thrown in. In beta it was awesome, the weapons were huge and powerful and you killed a shitload of people. You had to team up in squads just so you could find a ride to the battle, atleast at first until you could get your own ride. Due to this battles were huge and by huge I mean thousands of people in one battle alone. Imagine that, imagine Unreal Tournament with thousands of people, half of them defending a fort, the other half laying siege. The most exhilerating thing was getting into the dropship and dropping inside a base right on top of it with your squad and being completely surrounded blowing people away on the drop down. It was straight out of Starship Troopers and you could play for hours.

Then they fucked it up by listening to the whiners. The whiners complained the shotgun was too powerful at close range, HELLO IT'S A FUCKING SHOTGUN, so they nerfed it and made it pretty much useless. Then the whiners complained about one of the battlesuits being too powerful because it mowed down infantry too well with it's dual cycling chain guns, do I even need to comment on how stupid that is to whine about not being able to stand up to a mech with dual chain guns completely alone? Imagine if the Taliban came to the US to complain to our military, "Hey, you guys have certain weapons one of our guys can't face off equally against, nerf them please." I blame the stupid RPG players who were expecting more dice rolling. Then they destroyed the whole squad feeling, one of the great things about the game was that you had to meet people so you could be of use and get to the fight, like in a real military but oh no, this wasn't good for the loners, no they had to ruin it by bitching and convincing the devs to keep a sky launch function which allowed them to drop from base to anywhere on the planet. Hey again, you want a quick fight and don't want to have to travel to a fight and get your team strategy together, great, go play fucking Unreal Tournament.

Ultimately I stopped playing after a few months, the changes were too many and too shitty. They started out with the best aspects of an FPS and an RPG and within three months flipped it and adopted the worst aspects. So here are the truths I've noticed that you need to make a great and fun MMOFPS.

First up, all weapons will be as powerful as they should be. If there's a battle suit with two chainguns it had better act like it and it had better take an entire squad to take it down, not one fucker with a few grenades. Likewise, a shotgun should be great for close range action, and by great I mean if I shoot you in the fucking head with one shot from it, you're fucking dead, end of story. Instead of making completely balanced weapons, make imbalanced weapons and imbalanced combat areas! Make weapons like they are in the real world, each one is better for a specific purpose! The battle field shotgun was designed for trench warfare, you make it across, jump in the German trench, and start unloading in a very narrow area getting maximum kill effect, that is how it should be! Likewise that shotgun should be practically worthless in an open field because you're picked off by the guy with an assault rifle before you can get close enough to use it. That is how you balance weapons, you give them a purpose. Yes I know some people just love a particular type of gun, but make them deal with it or specialize in the area where their gun is most effective.

Second, no ring of fucking fire! Yes I know that's supposed to give weaker players, in other words RPG players, a chance but how can they get better if they're coddled? If my reticule is center on a dude I don't want to see my bullets fly past him entirely, period. I had better miss my shot because my mouse slipped. Now a reticule that gets larger because it's simulating kickback, that's fine, I have no problem with that, that's legit and forces people to fire in bursts rather than full auto like the real world, something like in the Battlefield games. However again, that doesn't mean my first shot should miss entirely due to a ring of fire. If you're going to be an MMOFPS, then be an MMOFPS, let the RPG kiddies get used to it or quit, we don't need them.

Third, make squad combat necessary. If the weapons are done right this shouldn't be much of an issue because going off on your own would quickly become a suicide mission unless you're doing some deep in enemy territory type shit, as it should be. There's no such thing as Rambo in real life, it's cool for a stand alone FPS, but in an MMO that's supposed to simulate huge battles across a huge planet, Rambo just doesn't cut it, sorry. Now if dude wants to get his own vehicle and drive off on his own, fine, who cares, but don't facilitate him by giving him a way to jump right into combat. I say this because it becomes almost impossible to get a squad together when there's no one in base because they've all just teleported to battle. Also vehicles become practically useless except for the heavy battle vehicles. Support vehicles get left in the dust though, this shouldn't be the case! Remember that awesome tactic I mentioned about Planetside where you'd drop into a base from the air? The only people you saw using it by the time the first expansion came out were vets from the beta who were still around because all the n00bs just warped straight to the fight. Remember this, squad tactics make cool tactics, zerging is not cool.

Fourth, there has to be an end game. Yeah slugging it out day after day is fun... for awhile. Then it just becomes old because it doesn't serve a purpose. Thus you have one server which is strictly for continually slugging it out, all the rest have an end game. Using Planetside as an example, you have a set time when you start the next game, say 8PM EST, the game keeps going until one side remains and has taken over the entire planet. Once this happens the game resets and will be a slug it out server until the next time 8PM EST comes around and it resets starting the game over. At the end of the month you have a score card which announces which team won the most revolutions in the month, thus giving them another end game/purpose. Same thing for the year. You also give the winning side a bonus, like a new weapon, character class, vehicle, what have you. Not something that's completely uber but something that's worth fighting for. This also creates a cool way of introducing new content to keep the game fresh. Just keep it in mind, gamers are normal people, they like to fight, if there's a reason to fight, give them one.

Fifth, if you add new areas in an expansion, give them a purpose. Yes, people who have the expansion are going to have an advantage, all the more reason for those who don't have it to get it! Planetside's first expansion introduced caves that had pretty much no purpose so hardly anyone got the expansion, don't make this same mistake! There needs to be a tactical reason for the new areas and a purpose to the end game, otherwise they go unused! The expansion for Planetside had one great quality and that was the Flail, an artillery vehicle which could shoot huge shells from far off and kill lots of people who were clumped together, as artillery should, but then, like the other weapons, they nerfed it and killed any reason to go down into the caves.

So in closing what you need is realism, strategy, and a point, these three things make an MMOFPS fun, if you have the opposite, fantasy, zerging, and pointless, you get an annoying game which becomes boring quickly. Also don't misunderstand what I mean by realism, fantasy is ok when you're dealing with the story and such but it should also be realistic, read the first point to see what I mean. Hopefully someone will see this and make it a reality, Planetside would've been awesome had they followed these three truths. *crosses fingers*