Foundational Principle #13 – Chaos Goes Boing!

It’s time for another Andrew post! One of the things I remember about the earliest days of MMORPGs was that any time you got a bunch of UO or EQ players together in a room, the conversation would inevitably take a turn towards, “Oh really? Well let me tell you about this crazy thing that happened to MY character…”

Every player’s character had their own story, and that’s something we’ve largely lost in the most recent crop of MMOs. Don’t get me wrong; the last MMO I spent much time playing had a great storyline. It had a meaningful plot. It had villains and heroes. It had moving characters with their own histories and lives, and I cared about them. But that story wasn’t really my story. It was the story the designers were telling me, and they were telling the same story to every character of my class/race/tribe/whatever. I loved their story, but once I got to the end of it I drifted away from the game the same way you’d put a book or movie back on the shelf after finishing it.

When I talk to other people who’ve played that same game, the conversation is more like, “Hey, you should go back and try this other class; it’s got some cool things in it.” There’s not much more to say, other than maybe, “Hey, remember that thing that we all saw? That was pretty cool. Yeah…cool.”

If there’s one overarching goal that I hope we achieve with this game, guiding all the other principles we’ve talked about, it’s to move very firmly back to a place where every character has their own story. For me that’s the appeal of RvR and a player-driven economy — your interactions with other players aren’t going to be the same as everyone else’s. It’s the motivation for the way we’re designing our crafting system — we want players to be able to craft items that we didn’t exactly and precisely plan out in advance, that aren’t exactly what someone else would make. It’s one of the motivations for player housing — given a chance to make your own home, you won’t express yourself the way anyone else would.

That’s the high concept stuff. But there’s another side to this philosophy that happens at a smaller level, in your minute-to-minute interactions with the world. Mark’s talked about randomness in his Foundational Principle #8, and that’s a big part of this, but you can only take that randomness so far before you risk giving players the feeling that they were beaten by invisible dice rather than their opponent. You never want someone to feel like, because of blind luck, they’re playing a harder game than someone else. And that’s where other systems have to take over — systems that are chaotic, but still completely deterministic. Systems that interact with each other in interesting ways to produce results you couldn’t have predicted, even though they’re following strict, consistent, and predictable and rules. It’s Conway’s Game of Life. It’s the aggregate intelligence of a colony of mindless ants. It’s getting saved from a giant by a really angry mudcrab.

And that brings us to physics. As soon as you make physics part of your gameplay, you open up the possibility for things to happen beyond just the simplistic model of pen-and-paper combat.  That castle wall didn’t just “become destroyed”. The chunk you took out landed someplace, and maybe on someone. That fireball didn’t just “miss”. It had a location in the world, and if it didn’t hit what the target then it had to go someplace else. If someone else jumps in the way they’re going to get a nasty surprise — or heroically save their friend! And either way, it’s a story. It’s something that happened to you that didn’t happen to someone else. It’s the stuff YouTube videos are made of.

Over a decade ago I had the good fortune to work on one of the Myth series of games. Those games absolutely nailed what I’m talking about here. I can’t take credit for the way they did, because I didn’t come in until the sequel to the sequel, but I can say I learned a lot from it. Here’s just onerandomly selected video of a multiplayer game. The important part (and there are parts like this in almost any video of the series) is from 2:49 to 3:20, when one of the players accidentally takes out a good chunk of his own troops. Everyone laughs. The guy who did it isn’t exactly happy, but he doesn’t feel cheated either. It wasn’t something the game did to him, and it wasn’t random. It was the chaotic yet completely predictable consequence of his actions. And moreover, the “Error of Tiny’s Ways” has created a tiny story. It’s something that can be retold over a beer. It’s fun and meaningful to those particular players in a way that no voice-acted cutscene can be.

Physics aren’t an end in themselves. We’re going to try to hit the right balance. As just one obvious example, you won’t be able to use physics to crush or blow up your own side. (Because of griefers and traitors, that’s why!) But by allowing that element of chaos into the world, we allow every player’s experience to be different. It’s less control for us as developers, but we’re not afraid to embrace that.

-Andrew

Clear as Mudd – Part Deux

Today’s pieces on Massively and MMORPG have caused some confusion about our Kickstarter tiers. While I have been posting on both fine sites; as per a suggestion from one of the posters (in truth, multiple posters) I thought I’d post here to clear up the confusion.

First, like most game-based Kickstarter projects we will have both “physical” and “digital” tiers. MMORPG covered a sampling of digital tiers while Massively covered a sampling of the physical tiers.

Secondly, as of now we have over two dozen different pledge tiers for our Kickstarter with “two for one tiers”, “guild tiers” and some crazy tiers. The tiers on MMORPG and Massively only cover ½ of the total tiers.

Thirdly, the tiers that include a copy of the game start at $25 and go up from there. All those tiers come with access to different stages of beta and some include alpha (more on this later). Over the next few days we will be answering questions from both sites and from their posters. Once we do that, we will post all the tiers for additional feedback.

Finally, there has also been some concern about our “Alpha Access” tier. Unfortunately, we were thinking of Alpha Access as “our code isn’t a game yet, help us break it, beat it to a pulp” tier where the more common interpretation these days is for a tier that is more polished, feature-filled, content-filled than how I viewed alpha (old school, sorry). As such, I’ll be modifying some of the wording and access dates around to be more in line with current MMORPG standards. We will still have a very early access tier but it won’t be called Alpha Access any more.

Here’s the current combined list of all the tiers that we have talked about so far.

Pledge Tier $25(Digital) – Comes with access to private forums, official “Thank You” email/letter, Bronze forum badge, 5 FPs, 1 digital copy of the game, 1 month free subscription, digital manual, special in-game title, an additional 5 FPs if you bought March on Oz, an additional 5 FPs if you are a subscriber to our newsletter, access to our Founder’s Store and Beta 5 Access to the game.

Pledge Tier $50(Digital) – Comes with everything above plus a special founder’s gravestone marker, founder’s app, ringtones and wallpapers, digital strategy guide, special thanks in the credits, founder’s crafting icon, extra beta invites (# TBD), realm-locked founder’s chat, Beta 4 access, 25 FPs and an additional 1 month of subscription.

Pledge Tier $110(Digital) – Comes with everything above plus special starter armor (cosmetic difference only), special starter weapon (cosmetic difference only), founder’s wall plaque, unique trophies, unique dyes, digital copy of the art book, special in-game thanks, extra character slots (# TBD), discounted sub rate ($ TDB), Gold forum badge, Beta 2 access, 40 total FPs and a total of 3 months of free subscription.

Pledge Tier $120(Physical) – Comes with access to private forums, official “Thank You” email/letter, Silver forum badge, 30 FPs, 1 DVD copy of the game for PC, 1 month free subscription, digital manual, special in-game title, an additional 5 FPs if you bought March on Oz, an additional 5 FPs if you are a subscriber to our newsletter, access to our Founder’s Store, special founder’s death marker, founder’s app, ringtones and wallpapers, digital strategy guide, digital high resolution map, special thanks in the credits, founder’s crafting icon, extra beta invites (# TBD), realm-locked founder’s chat, cloth map, printed manual, and Beta 3 access.

Pledge Tier $150(Digital) (a two for one tier) – Comes with 2 digital copies of the game, everything in the $50 tier, special starter armor (cosmetic), special starter weapon (cosmetic), wall plaque and an additional free month of subscription for each copy of the game, 40 FPs for each account, discounted sub rate ($ TBD), Beta 3 access and Gold forum badge.

Pledge Tier $200(Digital) (This is our “pure” alpha access tier) – Comes with everything in the $50 tier, alpha testing wall plaque, alpha access trophy, discounted sub rate ($ TBD), Platinum Forum Badge, Alpha testing access and 25 FPs.

Pledge Tier $250(Digital) – Comes with everything in the $50 tier plus special starter armor (cosmetic), special starter weapon (cosmetic), wall plaque, 3 year subscription renewable for $1 per year (Kickstarter has asked us not to have a lifetime subscription but a shorter one that renews for a small amount and well, $1 is pretty small), extra character slots (# TBD), Beta 2 access, Platinum forum badge and 60 FPs.

Pledge Tier $250(Physical) – Comes with everything above plus special starter armor (cosmetic difference only), special starter weapon (cosmetic difference only), founder’s wall plaque, unique trophies, unique dyes, digital copy of the art book, special in-game thanks, extra character slots (# TBD), discounted sub rate ($ TDB), Platinum forum badge, Beta 2 access, 40 total FPs, founder’s statue for display outside of your house, a total of 6 months free subscription, CU mouse pad and printed art book.

Pledge Tier $450(Physical) – Comes with everything above plus a total of 50 FPs, an additional digital copy of the game (30 days subscription on the second copy), additional exclusive cosmetic housing items, 3D character model of your choice (1), CU poster signed by the development team, cloth map signed by Mark Jacobs, special backer credits, 12 month subscription and Beta 1 access.

Pledge Tier $500(Digital) – Comes with everything in the $250 tier and also includes 2 additional digital copies of the game (these do not include the renewable subscription), the art book, special thanks in-game, extra character slots (# TBD), in-game founder’s statue for display outside your home, exclusive cosmetic housing items, statue in Founder’s Row, Alpha testing access, Mithril forum badge and 150 FPs.

Pledge Tier $750(Physical) – Comes with everything above plus 150 FPs, 18 month subscription for main account, two digital copies of the game with 3 months subscription each, Platinum forum badge, printed copy of our Rejected Art, 3D model from your favorite realm, statue in Founder’s Row, one hand signed piece of concept art from the game and Alpha access.

Pledge Tier $1,250(Physical) – (BSC edition, non-repeatable) – Comes with everything above plus a total of 250 FPs, three-year subscription (renewable at $1 per year as per Kickstarter’s ask when it comes to anytime “lifetime”), Mithril forum badge, one additional piece of unique hand- signed concept art (two total), and one hand-painted miniature from your favorite realm.

As you can see I’ve only listed only 12 tiers, there are more than a dozen more to go.

Sorry about the confusion, both MMORPG and Massively have been kind enough to cover this project from day one and I didn’t want to give all the coverage to one or the other site so please accept my apologies for any confusion that this caused.

In other words, Mea Culpa. 

Mark

Foundational Principle #12 – Speed Matters

We interrupt your normal Mark-a-thon for a post from Andrew. I’m the technical director and co-founder of City State Entertainment, and while I normally prefer writing in C++ (and HLSL, and C#, and JavaScript, and three dialects of assembly language, and occasionally some F#…), Mark’s lured me out into the sunlight to write about Camelot Unchained. Let’s hope I don’t burst into flames.

Today I want to talk about graphics, and gameplay, and performance. They’re all connected, so it’s hard to talk about any one of them in isolation — and if you do, you’ll end up rendering yourself into a corner. Everyone wants all three, all the time, but what happens when you have to choose?

It all starts with gameplay, but what does “gameplay” really mean? For some games, the graphics are the core of the gameplay. For those games, the thrill is exploring a gorgeously rendered, immersive new world. You may compromise on performance to create that, but for some people, tuning their system for the best possible experience becomes its own meta-game. You may compromise on certain aspects of gameplay — precomputing the world’s lighting gives you a prettier world and better performance, but to lock down the world’s lighting you have to lock down all the objects in the world. But if the main hook of a game is how pretty it looks, that’s all fine. I’ve played games for how beautiful they were, and I’ve enjoyed every perfect hand-crafted scene around every new corner. There’s not a tradeoff between graphics and gameplay when the graphics are the gameplay.

On the other hand, for technology purposes Camelot Unchained’s gameplay pitch is simple: a whole lot of player-controlled characters, interacting together in a world that they affect dynamically. Performance is the primary pillar supporting that — but rather than going for the highest frame rate, our benchmark is the number of players on-screen while running smoothly at our target frame rate. Gameplay and Performance are the two top-level goals of the engineering team, and if we achieve them, we’re good.

But unlike a Big-Publisher game, we don’t have pressure to look good in order to be good. It’s the other way around. That’s not to say we want to look bad! We’ve got a great art team here at City State, and triangle for triangle they can pack more style and personality into a model than just about anyone. But when it comes down to the sheer number of those triangles, any time we have to choose between that and delivering on our core gameplay, we’re going to choose the gameplay. That requires certain sacrifices. Every scene has to support the possibility that a few hundred of your friends might show up there, even if they usually won’t. We know that we’re building a world for characters to live in, not a theme park for tourists to visit.

We may not get as many tourists on opening day if we’re not the shiniest park around. The trouble with tourists, though, is that when they’re done with their tour they go home — or on to the next shiny thing. We want to create something here that lasts, and that means we’re catering to the kind of players who’ll stick around. No matter how good a game’s graphics are, after you’ve seen them a hundred times you get used to them. The thing that matters after that is whether you’re having a fun experience. For us, a good experience means running really, really well with a lot of players in a battle. It also means allowing the world to change in ways we didn’t exactly plan, as players homestead on the frontier or open shops in a capital city.

There’s one advantage we get from our small size, too. Because we’re not starting with a fully-staffed MMO-size art team, we don’t have to find a use for a dozens of artists from day one. That’s happened to me before; the end result was a game that had environments built before we knew exactly what our gameplay was or what the performance requirements of that gameplay were. Here we’re building gameplay first. If you’re in one of our Alpha-access Kickstarter tiers, the very first technology demo/preview release is going to have some seriously sparse environments. Depending on how early we open it up, it may even take place on a flat grass-colored plane. At that stage, we (and hopefully you) will be concentrating on perfecting our combat mechanics first. Once we let artists loose to build out the world, we’ll have that gameplay as a baseline. We’ll know how much headroom is left, and what lines we need to stay inside to preserve that gameplay — always. It’s easier to win the race when you’re starting ahead instead of behind.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing more about the tech plans for Camelot Unchained, both the things we’re bringing in from outside and the special bits we’re going to make in-house. But the one thing that’ll remain constant is the focus on what players need to turn the world we made into a home for themselves.

-Andrew