I attended the Game Developer Conference a few weeks ago — a huge, annual meet-up where 27,000 developers from around the world come together to talk about game design, production, marketing, and anything else related to game development. As usual, most of the sessions were fascinating, and you’ll probably see ideas from those sessions popping up in more blog entries here in the future.
One of the most interesting sessions was by Nick Yee, a game researcher at Quantic Foundry, which conducted a massive survey (over 250,000 respondents) about gamer motivation. (Help them out by taking their survey! and see the presentation slides.) I’m a sucker for this kind of research, and their results didn’t disappoint. One of the most striking insights was, in terms of player motivations, that competition isn’t the opposite of community, as you might think, and as earlier models of player motivation (like Bartle’s classic typology of Player Types) had said. In reality, they’re two aspects of the “Social” motivation and often (as in World of Warcraft]) are prominent features within a game.
How will we apply this research to Episode 3? The game currently focuses on intra-pack cooperation, with inter-pack competition limited to glancing encounters in Slough Creek. But wolves do live in a competitive world. Wolf fights are the most common cause of death for a Yellowstone wolf, typically occurring when pack come into conflict over territory. So, to bring more accuracy and realism to the game, we’ve been sketching out a new two-pack multiplayer mode, and this research gives us encouragement and guidance as we design it. In this mode, players will form two packs, occupying the northern and southern halves of the Tower Fall map, and must communicate and cooperate within the pack while competing with the other pack. We’re expanding the Emotes palette to give players more wolf-like ways to communicate within their pack. And we’re designing new fighting mechanics that will allow players to engage in fierce territorial struggles with other packs.
A critical challenge is designing these new features so they expand and enhance the social aspects of WolfQuest rather than damaging them. While both competition and community are part of the larger “social” motivation, Quantic Foundry’s research found that some players do strongly prefer one or the other — and we know that many WolfQuest players like the non-competitive nature of the game. So PvP will be available only in a new, additional multiplayer mode. Players who don’t like competition can choose the standard “player-pack vs NPC pack” modes, and then engage in PvC fighting to whatever extent they like.
Of course, we also see plenty of anti-social behavior in abuse reports, so we want to ensure that the new fighting mechanics don’t simply give new tools to obnoxious players. Any fighting within a pack will automatically be play-fighting, with no damage taken, and we expect to add more options for dealing with such players in-game.
We know that people play WolfQuest with many different playing styles and goals. We hope that players will welcome this new gameplay and the increased realism it brings — but there will still be options for low-key, cooperative pack play for players who favor that style. WolfQuest will continue to be a game about wolf ecology, always striving to balance realism with fun gameplay. We hope Episode 3 brings us a big step closer to achieving those goals.