Character Generation
In any MMORPG or persistent world, characters are king. They are the root of the gaming experience. Through their characters, players express themselves in the world we have developed for them. Sometimes they are able to explore alternate sides of their personality, sometimes they create reflections of themselves, and other times they create portraits of who they wish they could be.
Regardless of their reasons for creating a character or their choice in the character they make, these avatars take on a life and personality all of their own. The time investment on the part of the player is not insignificant, and it is not unusual for them to develope attachments to their characters. How important, then, is it that we as developers ensure that players have every tool and resource available that they need to make their charcter their own?
Characters from Realm Crafter
As designers, it is not only important that we look at how the individual character is created, but how those characters interact with each other. MMO's are by their nature a social game, so barriers to socialization are contrary to the fundamental premise of the genre. From the standpoint of character design, these things bring to major glaring artifacts of game design into our sights as targets for innovation. The first is classes, followed closely by levels. These two artifacts, more than anything else, present major barriers to player interaction with the world and each other, as well as creating an inherent disconnect between the player and their avatar.
Level Up - Single Player Design in a Multi-player World
Most of us are familiar with levels. We've been advancing through game levels as long as we have been playing video games, and even before that when table top RPG's were the staple diet of geeks across the globe. Why, then, would I say that levels are bad in an MMORPG? The issue is that levels produce barriers between the player and their environment, their avatar, and other players. A slightly less understood issue is that levels are unnatural in the human experience.
As barriers to the environment, players are prevented from exploring areas that are beyond their 'level' either by some gating mechanic that prevents their entry, such as is seen in Everquest 2 when attempting to enter certain zones, or by virtue of what value the area offers the player. In the first case, the player simply can not enter the area at all. How odd it would seem that a completely unrelated change in your character would magically open doors that were closed only moments before. Kill a mob, gain a level, and *poof* the door opens. In the second case, the areas simply are not worth revisiting because they have nothing to offer the player anymore. Either the player no longer receives experience for fighting there, the items dropped are no longer relevant to the player, or another area offers significantly better rewards for the same or less effort.
The human experience tells us a different story. It tells us that we CAN get in over our heads by pushing to far, and that we will either fail or learn and rise above triumphantly. It also tells us that we can still learn from doing tasks that are incredibly simple to us. Even a master musician will still practice fundamentals and rudiments for just that reason. These basic elements, though trivial in execution, not only provide a means to maintain our skills, they also provide a way to increase our skill by creating a more solid foundation which we can build off of.
More importantly, there is no stairstep progression to the way we learn. We learn incrementally, in small, barely noticable steps that gradually and cumulatively build us into more capable people.
Classes - All you are, and nothing more
Like levels, classes have been used in game design since the days of D&D, and even before. For example, in the game of chess, 'Pawn' is a type of class, and this class defines everything that the piece is capable of doing. The Bishop can never be a pawn, and can never move as a pawn.
While this method makes it easier to balance a game, it pigeon holes the player into a role crafted by the designer. In short, the player does not create the character, the designer does. In a level based game that also implements classes, this has the net effect of making virtually every character of the same level and same class practically identical with the exception of their equipment. While this in turn creates even more problems, we will discuss them elsewhere.
Classes, like levels, are antithetical to the human experience and to the basic concept of a role playing game. All class distinctions in the 'real world' are constructs created by people to create divisions between people. They set one group above another, limit the abilities of a group, or are used as stereotypes to say that all people of a type are exactly the same. In a genre that values character, choice, expression, and freedom, this type of divisive framework does not belong.
Since when can a person ONLY swing a sword, or ONLY sing, or ONLY sneak around? In ancient times, it was said that if a warrior could not dance, he could not fight. Modern football players similarly learn ballet in order to gain the physical benefits of grace and agility that the art engenders. In school, you are taught multiple disciplines ranging from the arts, to sciences, to maths, to the practical economics. Why?
The reason is because we intuitively understand that no knowledge is wasted, and almost all skills have a crossover affect in other disciplines. A seamstress's knowledge of sewing was frequently used in post-war times to suture up wounded soldiers. Mathematics allows for the blending of science and construction under the name engineering. Language arts are woven into practically every aspect of human knowledge. But what does any of this have to do with game design?
Changing Perspectives
In order to change the way we look at persistent worlds, we need refer back to our experience as humans. We need to reference the way that we learn and grow as individuals, and model that back into the systems that we create for our characters to learn and grow.
"Concepts are triggered from the realization of other concepts. Humans learn theassociations between concepts through experience. Quite simply, at the neural level, in Hebbian-based learning, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” The co-occurrence of activation potentials in a cluster of neurons leads them to “bundle,” such that in the future, if one neurons fires, there is a high probability that the others will fire as well. Given this rule, humans associate lions with danger and danger with running." (Rodriguez, 2011) (emphasis mine)
This model is the primary focus of this SIP project. We need to remove, or at least obscure, these artificial constructs to the extent possible to keep them from interfering with the player experience. Instead of approching characters creation from a plateu based stair-stepped progression with little if any logical connection between the things learned, we want to replicate the human growth experience by creating a network of associated skills and abilities.
In order to facilitate that, we will be developing a new framework for character creation that completely does away with classes and levels as such, moving towards character development in a manner that contains both breadth and depth. The player will progress through the game by accumulating various skills through different methods. Their choice of skills will not only directly impact their abilities within the game, but they will also act as the gating mechanism for being able to acquire new skills.
To further innovate on this model, there will be a direct relationship between skills and stats as well as a bi-directional relationship between multiple skills. Unlike traditional development methodogies, we will not be limiting these relationships to positive reinforcement only. Sometimes focusing on something will have a negative impact on the character in one aspect, but a net benefit in other ways.
For example, suppose a player created a character called Terra. The player wants to be a basic fighter at first, so they learn some weapon skills. As they train their skills, their strength & constitution slowly begin to grow, while thier intelligence and wisdom slowly begin to atrophe. Over time, they could potentially turn into the dumb brute that is strong as an ox, however, the player realizes this and determines that is not what they want. So, they think that perhaps they can balance themselves out some with a little magic.
Taking the time to build up their magic slowly builds their intelligence and wisdom, but because they are skipping their physical training, their strength and constitution begin to slowly deteriorate. Eventually, they reach a point where they are managing to build all four stats, albeit slower than if they only focused on one or two. Somewhere down the line, the learn that they find a cross-over skill that allows them to channel magic through their weapons, and off they go down another path of discovery. Should they decide to quit and become a healer, it is a simple case of going to learn a new skill. Of course, choosing where to spend your time always has consequences.
By integrating the concepts of a skill based approach with both positive and negative reinforcements, we aim to create a system that inherrently maintains balance without limiting player options. After all, life is all about choices, having the freedom to make them, and the pleasure or pain of consequence.