Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Dec. 23, 04)

Remove all ads!

Here are today's Dungeons & Dragons Online forum highlights, collected from Dungeons & Dragons Online forums. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Xundau, Community Relations

DDO twitch

I'm glad that you all seem excited about our combat system. The main reason we're going with real-time combat is that we believe that combat in most MMORPGs is kind of boring, and that a real-time system can make combat more engaging and fun.

Just for the record, we're not going all-out twitch with our combat -- this game isn't going to play like a first-person shooter. (To be honest, we're not too crazy about the term "twitch combat" in the first place.) Instead, what we're creating is a combat system that emphasizes both player skill and D&D rules. To give you a basic example, let's look at a simple melee combat -- a fighter attacking an ogre:

In most MMORPGs, you target the ogre, get reasonably close to it, and press an attack button. Your character starts swinging his sword every 2 seconds, and the ogre starts swinging its club every 3 seconds. Your character's sword won't necessarily be passing through the ogre (and vice versa), but the server will make an attack roll for each animation and report the info back to you. This will keep happening until one of you drops dead, with no additional input required on your part. This is a bit of a simplification, since you might have some special items or abilities, or the ogre's AI might decide to run away or something, but this is the heart of a typical MMORPG combat system.

Now consider a fighter vs. an ogre in DDO. You spot the ogre, and move in to attack. You click your mouse button, and your avatar swings his sword. We're pretty forgiving with tracking -- if you're close, but not quite in melee range, your character will leap forward a bit as he swings his sword, but the sword needs to physically connect with the ogre if you're going to do any damage. If your sword did connect, the server performs a to-hit roll, comparing the roll + any attack bonuses you have to the ogre's armor class. If you hit, the system rolls damage. If not, you failed do any damage, and you'll have to hope for better luck with your next swing.

When the ogre attacks, the same formula applies. If you're fast enough (and your character's fast enough) to get away from the ogre before it swings, the ogre's not going to hit you. If you can't or don't want to move away, you can choose to block, which will give you a temporary increase to your AC. Either way, if the ogre's club connects with you when it swings, it'll make its own to-hit roll against your modified AC, and if the roll indicates a hit, you take damage. You and the ogre can trade blows in this manner until one of you is defeated or runs away.

Obviously, our combat will be a little bit deeper than this, once you factor in the environment, magic, feats, and special abilities; as well as the fact that you will usually have allies at your side, and will often be fighting multiple opponents at once.

I should also note that this is how things are spec'd and working right now, but since combat is such an integral part of our game, we won't hesitate to make changes if this system doesn't work for us in beta.

DDO twitch

On the other hand, if you take the perspective that the character is more skilled and quicker than I am, and let him swing and/or block without me, doesn't it take it back to the "boring" combat you've said you don't like?

Nothing happens automatically -- in our current setup, you click your mouse to swing, and hold down the shift key to block. You can't do both at the same time, obviously.

Well first of all, we're not that fast -- the sequence you described would take more than one second. More generally, it really just depends on your definition of "twitch" -- if you take it to mean an active system, where position matters and nothing happens automatically, then you could call it twitch combat.

If you define it as combat where little else matters other than player skill, and the person with the fastest reflexes and best aim has a decidedly upper hand, then no, we're not twitch.

Jason Booth, DDO Dev Team

Large game world: Can it be TOO much?

World size is all an illusion. It really can't be measured based on traditional means, such as distance, because all of those messurements are dependant on other factors (faster run speed = "smaller world").

That said, I think much of the current approaches used by MMPs fall out of tools and technology factors rather than pure design decisions. The tools we created for AC1/AC2 allowed us to quickly build massive outdoor areas, and stock them with basic decorations (tree's, bushes, rocks) and basic gameplay (monsters, monster "collections"). The fall out from this, of course, is that many of these areas show thier procedural and parametric roots; they feel alike, play alike, and lack the feel of a designers touch.

Other games have had very manual toolsets, which required lots of designer attention to create area. This usually results in far less total area, but a higher degree of customization in each area.

Then, of course, there are servers, which have a entire host of issues regarding how performance is affected by density of content. Too many players in one area and you start to strain network performance; players spread out too thin, and you start to blow out memory.

All of these factors often conflict with the desire of a specific design goal. You can attempt to adjust the technology to your design goals, but this is often a fools battle. Radical new ways of approaching the technology can only be delt with in the early stages of development; the later it gets, the more the design must bend to the tech.

Then, of course, there is the market factors; people demand "big" without realizing it's consequences. They demand "more" at the cost of "better". And when your audience expects to play for 10 to 40 hours a week, it's not surprising to see the trade off being made. The most logical solution to provide "more" hours of game play on the same budget is to slow down the amount of content someone can cansume in a given hour; this has the unfortunate consequence of reducing the quality of experience.

For DDo, we made a concious choice to focus on the quality of the moment to moment experience. We've placed a high priority on having interesting combat, extremely varied quests and goal structures, and a wealth of game dynamics to keep the experience interesting. We've focused our toolset around making it easier to create both quantity of actual content, and allow our designers to customize that content so it doesn't all feel the same.

I think these were the right decisions to make because I don't believe the current MMP model, as it's envisioned now, is going to remain interesting to those who've played through them. How many times will you kill 1000 rats to level before you simply won't do it ever again? I'm way past that point; and I don't think I'm alone. The experience must get richer to hold my interest.

Will this work? Well, no one can tell at this point. No matter how successful we are internally, market expectations may snipe us in unexpected ways. How will the average MMP player react to not having a standard mouse selection model? How will the D&D crowd take to real-time combat? Will the absense of large boring land masses be viewed as a strength or weakness? Will not having a system which requires you to make 10,000 widgets so you can make widget+1 be seen as a positive or a negative? Will people be able to see and understand the tradeoff's being made between "more" and "good"?

There's no reason that you cannot play in a group without having to sit in the tavern and actually find one. If you and I both take the same boat across a sea, and we defend that boat from pirates, are we in a group? We're certainly sharing an experience. When I jump onto a BF1942 server, do I have to find a group to play? Certainly, there is room for bluring the line on what constitutes a group, and what actions put you in such situations. MMP's need to start the process of bluring those lines, because the traditional grouping model is as discouraging to community as it is encouraging.

Large game world: Can it be TOO much?

We're experimenting with different ways to use both instancing and grouping to make the experience less frustrating. Instancing does not always mean a private copy for me and my group, and a group does not necissarily need to be defined explicitly by the player. Instancing is really just the ability to duplicate an "instance" of a location, be it private, public, FIFO, or instant, or some other construct. Grouping is really just a way to look at a collection of players, however the collection is created. When you start thinking about it in those terms, posibilities start to arrise which differ drastically from the normal MMP experience. We're currently playing with some of those possibilities, and I expect us to continue to play with them through beta as we learn exactly where to draw those lines.

Is the ship instanced? From our perspective it is, because we are spawning and instance of a "boat module". Again, it's all in how you define those terms; they have been defined for most people in the context of how other games have used the technology; but that doesn't mean it's the only way to do things.

The bigger question is why would you want to. A real world is too large of a scale to notice. Yes, we could write cellular automata routines to grow the plants and run the ecollogy, but I'm not sure it leads to a better play experience. People are working on such things, and I'm interested to see the results, but I personally fear the scale will be too large for the average user to notice. Sim games, which feature these types of simulations, are played from the view of being able to see the interactions of all the elements. From the more localized player view, walking around the world, it will be difficult to observe such simulations. I think a lot of people are wrapped up in the idea that these games should be simulated worlds, but I'm not really buying it; I want to observe and affect things at a much more noticable level than I do in real life.

Your still thinking about it in traditional terms, as some kind of perminant or declaired group; we're not going to slap you into some collection of people when you log on and say "Play with these guys". But if you and I take the same ferry, are we not sharing an experience? If we both take a quest to defend a town from attack, are we not sharing the same experience? Must we form an explicit pickup group for each quest? Effectively, we're both working for our own personal goals (defend the town), and we can both be rewarded on our personal achievements. But we are effectively a group; just not in traditional terms.

Now, some elements of D&D rub against this; obviously things like level ranges prevent anyone and everyone from playing with each other all the time. But within specific senerios and parameters, this type of blending can potentially allow for a more 'solo' feeling game within a group/instanced based concept.

It's important for us to begin to blur these lines.

 

Isn't that how Dodge AC works?