by Raph Koster
Hello everyone,
I’m back to talk more about our design pillars for Stars Reach. Last time I described an MMO as a virtual place that we put games in, rather than as a game. I also promised that today I would talk about principles that animate the games – the fun! – that we are hoping to provide.
Just like the last set, these are organized into a big statement, with three consequences of the statement. What I didn’t talk about last time was that even the three consequences break apart into a bunch of even smaller ones, which become more like design rules that we try to follow as we do our work.
This big one this week deserves a little bit of a preface.
Look, we all know that the audience feels like MMOs haven’t really progressed much. A lot of the action in online games has shifted over to looter-shooters, survival crafting, and the like. These genres are children of MMOs, streamlined down to make them more accessible in a bunch of ways.
MMOs were always big unwieldy beasts. Lots of game loops, lots of content, in a big sprawling world that could feel very unfriendly and hard to wrap your head around. This is why when World of Warcraft came along and held your hand every step of the way through the leveling process, it was such a revelation. It ended the days of total confusion, at the cost of total freedom.
That path continued to get refined, but its end destination isn’t a traditional world anymore. It’s more like a looter-shooter. Destiny 2, after all, is a lot like an MMO with the world part taken out.
Ironically, feeling more like a world has been flourishing in single-player games. Whether it’s Elden Ring or the recent Zelda titles, there is this trend towards open worlds that feel more alive. And Breath of the Wild, in particular, showed us all that you can have a very accessible sandbox world experience if you design the interface and the gameplay correctly.
This matters because I’ve always felt that sandbox play is more popular than orc-slaying, despite the conventional wisdom that sandbox games are more niche. Oh, it’s not to say that orc-slaying isn’t awesome and fun. Of course it is. But I think we all know that decorating a house, or running a business, or engaging in carpentry or cooking or other crafting, is just a more widespread human activity. Sandboxy gameplay by nature offers more than kill, kill, kill, and should broaden the audience. If only it weren’t so intimidating and confusing.
Which brings us to the core pillar:
The Ease of Nintendo Meets the Depth of the Sandbox MMO
The game will offer deep simulation and freedom for players to make their own choices about how to play. But the game will limit its interface complexity to what can be achieved with a game controller or a touchscreen. It will choose elegance over visual cruft and complexity, and it will utilize layered UIs so that players are never presented with too many choices at once. Given the desire for ease and accessibility, we will eventually strive to have clients on many devices.
A lot of gamers probably worry that having things be easy on the surface means that the depth won’t be there. But these ideas aren’t mutually incompatible. One of the oldest statements about games is that they should be “easy to learn, hard to master,” after all. Among some gamers, there’s even a point of pride in dealing with frankly overcomplex and intimidating controls, a sort of sunk cost fallacy of “well, I learned it so it must be good.”
But if we want to break MMOs out of the rut they have been in, we cannot look backwards to the interface conventions of the past, to the complexity that results in screens with more buttons on them than other people. We have to make MMOs be something that non-MMO players are willing to give a shot. All the goodness that veteran MMO players expect can still be there.
So if we think about this big core statement, we land at three bits it implies. Now, remember that we have to think of this in terms of not just what offers fun to the player, but also what makes for a sustainable business. Luckily, sustained fun equals a sustainable business!
“The game will be deep: a set of proven game mechanics brought together in one universe.”
The core premise is that we can marry ease of use to depth. Why? Because ease of use maximizes audience, and depth maximizes retention. We will make our money by holding people over the long run. We don’t need to be the most popular game in the world, we need to “maximize the area under the curve,” which means that retention wins over the long haul. If we can become a hobby for people, we can continue to drive revenue over years (and not just from the game, but from ancillary extensions of the IP as well).
So much of what has gone wrong with game services has been the trend towards trying to maximize revenue. We aren’t after that goal; we want to maximize how much players love the game instead. A great game can turn into a hobby that lasts many years! This is why Ultima Online is coming up on its 27th anniversary and has multiple generations of people playing it.
And if we can keep driving revenue, we can keep updating the game, keeping it current, and giving people joy. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
So what we do we mean by proven mechanics? Well, I mentioned that design rules emerge from these bullet points. Some of them that we have based on this pillar include
- Simple systems can support deep gameplay; think of Go or Chess.
- MMOs require depth, varied gameplay, a universe to explore and master.
- Our dev team “plays jazz”: We experiment, iterate, and find the fun.
- If something doesn’t sing, if a system isn’t fun — fix or or kill it.
We look back at other games, particularly MMOs, constantly, looking for the best version of a given system. We aren’t reinventing every wheel here; we picked our big battles like our living world simulation, and made those our core innovations. But there are so many great games out there that you can’t experience with others in an MMO. If we can bring those experiences into a shared setting, that changes how they feel pretty dramatically.
In other words, why not have the best building from games like The Sims and also more current things like Enshrouded? Why not look back at the most successful combat games and steal ideas? Game design is built on other games, after all.
The toughest part of this design is keeping it tight. Plenty of folks have commented that our vision seems super bold and ambitious in scope. The only way to build it is for the component parts to be small and elegant. They have to be rulesets more like Go. I often tell folks on the design team that they are going to have to talk me into any game system that uses more than three or four rules and three or four variables. You can have a lot of data in a system like that, without making the coding and balance a nightmare. (A deck of cards only has three variables: 13 numbers, 4 suits, and 2 colors. That’s it, and yet look at the depth of all the card games made with that small set!)
Probably the best example of that in what you have seen so far is the living world simulation itself, which is built out of surprisingly few rules (that’s a big part of how we can scale it to this size!). Stuff in the world knows how to flow and fall, stick, change state, and react to other stuff. That’s pretty much it. But from that we get a very large number of interactions and a ton of depth.
Controls and interfaces will be intuitive and simple and familiar.
Familiar is important because it means that users don’t have a huge barrier to entry when they first show up. Intuitive and simple is important because it means both users who are coming to us for the first time, and users who are returning after an absence, don’t have a huge learning curve and barrier to entry. It maximizes the possible audience. It also lets us go to multiple clients more easily.
I often try to make the distinction between complexity and complication. There is a lot of complexity available in that deck of cards mentioned above. But the basic shape of a deck of cards is not complicated. Chess has only six kinds of pieces. Go has one!
I worry, sometimes, that audiences won’t understand that something that looks simple might be deep. I’ve seen comments from folks in our (wonderful!) Discord community that “hey, I don’t see hotbars with a ton of buttons on the screen, so it doesn’t signal MMO to me.” But what makes an MMO is not the size of the hotbar. What makes an MMO is the activities you can do in a virtual place.
Now, you still want familiarity, of course. That’s what eases the player in. Some of the bullet points we have as design rules here include:
- Minimize the learning curve; make it easy for players to jump in and play.
- You have two hands, so you have a few tools at a time. That’s your current “class.”
- Less bars: use techniques like BOTW’s fatigue meter.
- Do as much as possible in-world; dialogs only when necessary.
- UI must be butter-smooth.
You might notice that the second one there speaks a little bit to how we handle player progression and skills… we let you learn all sorts of things in the game. But we have you use those skills through tools, and you can only have so many of them with you at a time. So you effectively build a hotbar out of the way you want to play in a given session. If you want to change that out, you basically just have to go home and change what tools you take in your loadout.
The last one is more of a long term goal, and something else that I worry a bit that core gamers will look down their noses at, honestly!
We will support varied clients so that players can play on whatever device they choose.
…and that matters because we see particularly younger folks moving readily across computing devices. Mobile devices dominate gaming time, and are the gateway computing device. We want to be there where users reach for us, and the thing most users most often reach for is their phone. This lets us have more frequent touch points, which keeps users in the orbit of the game. Regular engagement is the biggest predictor of both retention and revenue.
I know a lot of gamers look down on anything related to mobile, thinking that it must mean simplistic or designed to extract maximum dollars. But we think about this differently: if something is a beloved hobby, we want it to be within easy reach at any moment. And a phone is something you probably always have with you.
I think of devices as just windows to the world we are building up in the cloud for you all. They’re just windows of varying sizes and control schemes. And someday, I want you to be able to use whatever window you have handy. Oh, you may not be able to do everything that way. Some sorts of gameplay will always work better with one control scheme versus another, with a larger screen than a small one.
So we’re starting PC first, for sure. But already a pretty substantial chunk of PC gaming is happening on Steam Decks and similar devices, and the use of controllers for controlling PC games has gotten to be almost mandatory. So designing for a world like that makes sense if you want to be more futureproof.
All of these pillars end up being about the same things, really. Make it easy for players to participate, but have real depth and complexity inside what seems like a simpler wrapper. All too often surface complication tricks us into thinking there’s real depth in there, when really there’s a lot of stats that boil down to mostly the same thing. We want to build a game that has the true depth and complexity that comes from simple things combining in unexpected ways.
As to how we get that complexity, well… that will have to be next week’s post. In the meantime, I’d definitely enjoy it if you stopped by the Discord, where we have discussions with the SR community around these topics!