Ever since watching the Silence of the Lambs movie I’ve been somewhat fascinated by a particular scene in the film where the character of Hannibal Lecter quotes Roman Emporer Marcus Aurelius to FBI Agent Clarice Starling.
Lecter quizzes Clarice:
First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?
Lecter is a very compelling fictional character because despite being a psychopathic serial killer he is also a thoughtful man with a high intellect and obvious refinement. His advice to Starling in this scene is timeless.
Marcus Aurelius was an important stoic philosopher and considered to be the last of the 5 good emperors of Rome. His book of observations on life called Meditations is considered to be a classic. But lets examine that film quote a bit closer and see how it relates to MMO design.
For me the quote from Lecter is useful as a game designer because it forces you to consider the benefits of deconstructing complexity into simplicity. Really, it’s about getting to the heart of the matter. The basics. The fundamentals.
It is very valuable and rare skill to be able to evaluate and separate a complex thing into its component parts. One you do that, suddenly everything becomes clear as you can transform apparent chaos and confusion into some semblance of order which allows you to prioritize areas that need to be addressed.
So let’s apply this technique to designing a MMO…
First Things First: What Kind of MMO Are We Designing?
Designing a MMO is a massive task. There are so many component parts to a MMO and competing interests (the investors, the developers, and the target audience) that often the developers can lose sight of what is important and what needs attention.
The first question that we must ask ourselves is this: what is the main thing that you want your players to be doing in your MMO?
Of course, the answer depends on the intent of the people in charge.
Let’s say that for the purposes of discussion we just happen to have $50 million dollars lying around, we can design a MMO anyway that we want. We could design a MMO all around crafting and have no combat whatsoever. We could design a MMO entirely around socialization and the result would be Second Life.
If we are Trion then the answer is that our MMO is all about combat done in the tradition of EverQuest and WoW. Combat is what your players will be doing most of the time. Combat is the prime focus and everything revolves around it.
We could delve even deeper philosophically and say that character advancement via combat is the true prime focus but for the sake of simplicity let’s just stick to combat for now. In RIFT, combat is tied to the storyline and it’s also deeply connected to the other main features: rifts and classes. Combat is the vortex and RIFT will live or die by how well it is implemented.
Combat as Expression
So if combat will be the prime activity of RIFT it naturally follows that Trion needs to ensure that all the component parts of player combat are refined and polished.
Not only is combat essential for a MMO based on combat, is also integral to how players identify themselves in your MMO. Consider that fact that many players aren’t even that social anymore and many don’t even bother chatting, combat remains one of the last modes of player expression left.
Combat and how we play our classes has become MMO language all its own.
One of the fundamental design objectives when you produce a video game is that players need to be rewarded for pressing a button or hitting a keystroke. When a player does something in a video game they should always get instant feedback. It is the delight and satisfaction resulting from the visual and audio feedback we get from our interactions with our avatars that helps us bond with them and deepens our immersion in the game world around us.
Sadly this is not the always case with RIFT, as both combat animations and sound are not currently up to snuff. Combat feels rather restrained and muted. Imagine trying to play a guitar with no strings. This is what RIFT combat often feels like.
RIFT Combat Animations
Every race and class needs to have fluid animations that are visually rewarding to see your avatar perform during combat. This goes for both melee and spell casting combat including buffs.
In the course of a typical player’s avatar’s career they may see the same animations performed thousands if not millions of times. These animations need to be visually appealing, larger than life and graphically represent what your character is actually doing. Each class should also have a few unique animations and spell/ability particle effects as well.
The combat animations in RIFT are barely passable and even mediocre. Trion needs to stop what they are doing, create a strike team and polish combat animations immediately.
RIFT Combat Sounds
The same considerations should apply to combat sounds; they must be pleasing and rewarding for the player. They must also be distinctive and unique so the player can stand out in a crowd of other classes and afford their avatars some some semblance of personality.
To my knowledge RIFT has no combat sounds emanating from your character. If they are there, they are so low in volume to be unintelligible. There should be grunts, groans, moans, screams and battle cries of desperation and victory whilst your avatar is engaged in combat and being attacked by NPC characters.
Surprisingly enough, the character select screen has some great character voice audio when you click on each class. Audio of this caliber needs to be included directly in the MMO.
The actual audio of the weapons themselves such as the swords hitting mobs is less than spectacular. It seems that Trion’s sound designer has recycled the same metal clanging sword sound over and over. I could barely hear the sound of my ranger shooting an arrow with his bow. The gunshot sound effects were even worse and sounded more like a peashooter than a real shotgun going off.
I’d like to briefly mention the silly combat music that plays once you engage in battle; it masks the paucity of good combat sounds that should be coming from both the player and the NPCs. The combat audio that the player hears should be viscerally exciting and should stand up on its own without the need for external music to disguise its shortcomings.
The Copycat MMO Formula
If you copy WoW — which Trion has done for 80% of their MMO — then you had better do it well and you should strive surpass the original. But at least if you copy something you should know *why* you are doing so.
Too often, as Richard Bartle remarked in his recent GDC presentation, MMO developers copy things because they are successful in other MMOs without actually considering the actual existential reason for including such a feature. Much of what is in RIFT has been outright lifted directly from WoW and I suspect it was done so without vigorous examination of why.
Our entire entertainment industry is plagued with this kind of lazy attitude and the result is that everything looks and sound the same with very few originals because too often corporations want to play it safe and let someone else do all the dirty work of creating something new and innovative.
Concluding Thoughts
I still like RIFT very much and despite its faults it’s a MMO that is worth playing and supporting if the devs are willing to expend the resources to fixing some basic problems such as combat.
After playing in 3 betas I’ve noticed that combat in RIFT is anemic, unexciting and timid. For a MMO that is so focused on combat this is a big disappointment. One only has to play Blizzard’s WoW to see the level of attention to detail that they have put into combat as the animations and sound effects are masterful and are of unsurpassed quality — and RIFT has half of the total number of races to animate than WoW.
To the untrained eye and those fatigued by their favorite MMO, RIFT seems like a very polished game with its gorgeous landscapes and wonderfully rendered towns and cities. However, once the newness wears off I’m afraid RIFT may end up being a tedious and somewhat predictable experience for players due to the lack of polish in their core features. If the current course is not changed, RIFT could well end up in the MMO dustbin of history along with many other pretenders to the throne.
Too often we’ve seen new MMOs enjoy a burst of popularity only to end up in obscurity after a few months after the novelty is gone and the MMO tourists return home. The only way for Trion to avert disaster is to prioritize their resources on a few key features and polish them to perfection. This should be done in this order: combat, classes and dynamic content. All three of these things will either make or break this MMO. I hope they are humble enough to realize this and address these problems before RIFT goes live in March of this year.
-Wolfshead
Well done. now be prepared to be spammed by pre hype release fanboys
Far better them than the “GW2 is much better than this in every way, despite their being only very limited info” crowd. They annoy me immensely.
As far as Rift’s combat goes: I disagree about the animations and general feeling of it, but agree about the sounds. WAR is a brilliant example of how not to do combat, and since Rift and WAR use the same engine, I’d say it’s evidence of Trion’s workmanship that their combat is responsive. Responsive is the word here, not animation or sound. I press my button and my character attacks. *Straight away.* Far too often people overlook this, but it’s a simple fact that the vast majority of MMOs (WoW not included) do not respond well to keypresses. You can have brilliant animations, but if my character doesn’t attack when I want them to, it’s a disheartening experience, to say the least.
I wouldn’t be so keen to call WoW’s animations excellent, either. Yes, they are fluid; yes, they are instant and give that feeling of responsiveness, but then what? Watching my WoW characters do their melee attacks for 6 years now, I’ve always been struck by the fact that it appears on screen as if my avatar’s weapons have no weight at all. It always annoyed me on my Paladin that I was wielding a bloody huge axe, and yet I was still spinning around and jumping in the air as if it was a light quarterstaff.
Suffice to say, Rift’s animations have a real feeling of weight to them, especially two-handed axes. They’re slow, yes, but since I upgraded my PC (8GB RAM <3) they've been fluid and, yes, still responsive. I actually feel like I'm in combat with something in a quasi-realistic way, not just hitting a mob with leaps and twirls.
You're right about the audio though, and it seems to be a fairly general theme in Rift. The audio, even the music, is just uninspired. I can whistle WoW's themes all day long, hum along to EQ2's opening theme and really get into WAR's as well. Not Rift. The music simply doesn't move me, and that's a really bad sign, since I tend to be deeply affected by audio effects.
And, for the record, I've played every beta so far.
I’ve played a lot of MMOs and they all involve fighting, but looking at the character while it fights is just not something I do. I glance it once in a while, but mostly I am looking at the hotkeys, my keyboard or the chat box. Consequently, I don’t really notice, let alone care, what the animations look like.
I did play WoW for a few months last year and I can’t say I noticed anything much at all about animations or h0w combat looked. I know there wasn’t a whole lot of choice in what to do and I didn’t have to press many keys.
Sound, however, I do pay attention to and so does Mrs Bhagpuss. She’s made a point at least three times today alone of telling me how great she thinks the music in Rift is and how appropriate it is to what’s happening. I agree, and I also think that Rift has one of the best soundscapes of any MMO I have played. I was riding my two-tailed bearcat through Gloamwood this afternoon and at one point the sound was SO good I stopped and just sat there and listened; it made me feel I was actually outdoors, in a forest near running water.
I’m sure these things could be better, but they are already either good enough for my taste or above expectation. Most things in Rift are above expectation, actually, although that may say something about where the last few years of MMO releases have taken expectations…
Character animations in Rift are smooth enough to my personal tastes. On the flip side of contrasts, you have character animations like Warhammer which were jerky and sprite-like, and LOTRO’s animations that always felt “off” to me. Paper doll-like, almost. Very odd, since Guild Wars has similar ‘thinness’ of character model. Maybe better responsivity from GW whereas LOTRO utilizes a queued system.
Sound-wise, I’d have to agree that Rift is not as aurally exciting as City of Heroes or even Left 4 Dead, which have very characteristic sound effects for specific actions. I’d caution against appending sounds willy nilly everywhere though. Fighting as a female avatar or female bandits in LOTRO made folks come into the room wondering if you were watching porn, thanks to the frequent grunts, moans and exhalations of efforts of combat.
As for music and soundtrack, nobody’s beat Guild Wars and Jeremy Soule yet.
I’m quite new to Rift, only having played since headstart but I’ve been around the mmo block a long time.
The game is polished but only in so much as the physicality of the game/mechanics go. While that’s appreciated, with a 50 mill budget, I would have expected the game to be more polished in the “smaller” details. The details that people don’t generally notice or look at but absolutely affects enjoyment and delight; and you’ve touched on that here. One of those being combat animations and not just that but combat mechanics. Sure, it works, but it feels like there was no ambition.
Even WAR, to me, had lofty ambitions and Mythic’s game premise essentially boiled down to being a pure combat game. While their toons and animations lacked polish at the start, the combat and mechanics were much more thought out; more lofty. Animations & sound were unique to classes/races; there were combo animations, short animations, long animations, classes of animations; toons cried out, spat invectives. The combat was more immersive, more lofty, more ambitious. Where they lacked in combat was top level polish on animations (i.e. some animations weren’t synched properly).
WoW is less ambitious with their combat. Make everything big and flashy, overwhelm you with both sight and sound but focus on making it simple. Not as ambitious as WAR combat but overall a more complete package than WAR.
I started a Warrior in Rift and no matter what role I souled in, the combat lacks any kind of flair whatsoever. The sounds are loud; which I don’t mind but when the combat revolves around spamming buttons as quick as the gcd is completed, we get assaulted by what can only be desribed as cluster grenades exploding in monotonous tandem for 15 seconds.
-boom, boom, bumm, bumm, bumm, boom, boom boom-
Even my wife, who usually plays with her volume higher than mine told me yesterday, “Why is your paladin so damn noisy!?” And she’s right. I’m not a Bright Wizard, fire mage or what have you. I’m a warrior. There should be shouting, metal clanging, grinding, cracking. Instead, my warrior sounds like he’s got a grenade going off everytime he does anything; and that’s every 1.5 sec or however long the GCD is in this game.
Things like this break immersion. You don’t think about it or readily notice it but it matters very quickly; which is a shame since the world is so beautiful. The combat is simply not ambitious, at all!
Where it works (for melee) is for the Clerics simply because we generally don’t expect Cleric melee to be very elaborate. And it isn’t elaborate, but it works to a point. There are 2 combat animations + auto atk, but there are spells that you can supplement the combat. However this is incidental, accidental, rather than purposeful.
The Rift idea, while initially is going to be exciting (and it is) feels less thought out than it should have been (so far this hasn’t evolved much beyond what WAR created for public questing. Making it random, zone wide, it does not go nearly far enough. But that’s another topic.
I like the game, but it’s a highly unambitious game. It reminds me of an old Monster.com commercial where they had little kids saying what they wanted to be when they grew up. One little girl best desribes Rift:
“When I grow up, I want to be an under-achiever!”
Very well said!
It’s the lack of attention to the small things that RIFT falls short and the lacklustre animations and bad sound effects illustrate this.
I actually broke down and purchased the Collectors Edition and am currently playing a paladin and like you said, every combat action and ability produces the same “boom” sound. Even the finishing move is the same sound.
How they could spend $50 million and not even hire a competent sound designer is beyond me. If you want to play in the big leagues with Blizzard then you have to get every detail right. No excuses.
The thing is that Trion has known about this for a good 3 months or more prior to launch and very little has been done to remedy the problem. In a previous article I blasted Trion for the poor gun and bow sound and to their credit they at least fixed them.
Audio is one of those areas where a video game developer can get a lot of bang for their buck. How much does it cost to develop some unique weapon and combo sounds? There are many stock audio combat sounds available. There is no excuse whatsoever.
Oh and one more thing: ever wonder why they have that awful combat music in RIFT? It’s to disguise how bad the PC and NPC combat sounds are. 🙂
I like this post quite a bit. Here are some hilarious design hiccups from Blizzards end.
1. Grindy WoW and the Lecter’s Question.
WoW players have been whining about the grindy nature of WoW for a long time. If you ask yourself – what is WoW in itself? What are players looking for? The answer is simple. They need more engaging, dynamic and diverse combat experience, as WoW was shipped as an ARPG meets a raiding game with a tease of MMO elements to it.
Blizzard devs either failed to understand this, or just simply opted for the easy solution with total disregard of how it affects their game in the long run.
This “easy solution” was to replace combat with massing quests to the extreme. The next step down this slope was to add diversity to these quests, so that the quest grind would feel less monotonous. This is where the Vehicle system was introduced and all the “use this item” nonsense started invading the ARPG side of the game.
Now the cold truth is that the class/character has very little impact on the gameplay experience, as the quest design has you focus primarily on these minigames all the way to 85, and even after 85 this “quest for diversity” has forced Blizzard to include Vehicle designs into the endgame PvE and PvP.
2. Is Wow a true MMORPG?
If you follow Lecter’s question here – one can quickly conclude that it’s not. WoW in it self is a simple raiding game. The light MMORPG elements were put there specifically to play with players vanity and to push them towards the endgame raiding progression rollercoaster. It’s very akin to what D2 lobby/ladder system is. It just comes with better graphics.
How does it show in their design philosophy?
WoW developers use a very limited toolset to fix the game’s problems. If the casual players don’t find anything to do in the endgame, they will make raids more accessible by tweaking difficulty and adding interface features to ease the group formation. If the more invested players clear them too much and find themselves bored, they fix it by adding hardmodes for their raids. They’ve been tweaking raid difficulty back and forth between patches for few years to keep both sides “happy”.
If players are content with just playing the PvP side of the game, they go through these clever schemes of splitting the gear apart and then leaving PvP gear with inferior stats and no customization options, so that the players are somewhat “forced” to get invested in the raiding endgame to minmax their character properly.
If they wanted to treat the game as if it was a real MMORPG, none of these design hiccups would’ve ever happened. It’s either very conscious design choice, or a total lack of competent lead designers.
The funny thing is that most of the WoW players have WoW to be their first “MMORPG”. With no previous experience to compare to, they think the raiding endgame is the only real content for a MMORPG and their input on how to improve the game is very limited. It’s just a huge sham. {;
I’m hoping GW2 developers end up reading this blog post you have here, as their game has potential. Good stuff!