I've always approached games from more of an artist's perspective and this sort of crass commercialism was borderline offensive as far as I was concerned, but the presenter brings up an interesting problem: How do you forge an emotional connection with your audience (which requires some sort of familiar territory to operate in) while still bringing something fresh and original to the marketplace. I think there are a lot of ways to approach this puzzle and obviously creative people have solved this problem successfully in the past. Usually they seem to get the most milage out of recombining unfamiliar or surprising elements and finding inspiration from genres that are underused or long out of fashion.
I'd like to take a look at a specific genre/game and see if I can breathe some new life into it while still being true to the core ideas driving that particular category.
World of Warcraft (WOW) is an immensely popular online game in the "fantasy" genre. It features wizards, knights, magic, and all sorts of outrageous supernatural creatures. It's deeply rooted in the same family of story telling given to us by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons. Between books, games, and movies there must be millions of opportunities for fans of this stuff to get their fantasy fix. WOW has delivered a vibrant and exciting take on the sword and socery genre, but Ive noticed a few things since it's release that are starting to bore me.
1) I like WOW and the world they created (which - in terms of visual style at least - owes a tremendous debt to Warhammer), but in many ways it's fairly generic. I suspect that it gets by on charm and scale more than anything else. In terms of art style there has got to be another way to scratch that Elvish Itch.
2) I know that WOW wasn't the first to come up with this, but I'm gonna call it the "WOW system" anyway. It's the mechanic that encourages and creates cooperative game play between the very different types of classes available to the players. It's sort of a system of dependancies between character types that ensure that the greatest challenges can only be bested by a full party of diverse classes. It's a great system but is it perfect? Is that the only way to encourage cooperation? Is it the best way?
Let's talk about this system first. Here's the basic idea: you basically have characters who are offensive (damage dealers), defensive (damage takers) and support characters (healers or characters that enhance the other player's strengths). So here's chart below...
The Warrior is up front, keeping the enemy busy and absorbing most of the damage. Close to him is a short range damage dealer, but one who is typically harder to detect like the Rogue. At long range are the damage dealers like the Mage (who specializes in area effect attacks) and the Hunter (more focused attacks). Supporting all these characters is the priest who's main job is keeping everyone alive.
A couple things stand out to me when i examine this model. First of all I have a hard time believing that all these characters would actually hang out together. Since when to the football players (Warrior) and physics majors (Mage) spend time together? This level of coordination between highly specialized combat units doesn't remind me of the "historical" period typically represented by this genre. It reminds me more of a modern "combined arms" doctrine of warfare:
The armor leads the way along with infantry in close support. Far behind the main fighting is the artillery, and far above are the long range bombers. All the while, logisitics (represented here by a field medic) keep all parties supplied and supported.
So my first instinct is to really look at medieval combat and see if i can draw inspiration from their, but it turns out that those pro game designers are employed for a reason. This more modern approach really does lend itself to more interesting gameplay. Which is probably why you see it everywhere. Pretty much every class based game (from shooters to rpgs and even some board games) follows this model, I'd like to find a way to break out of the system, but looking backwards might not be the answer this time. Besides this is fantasy we are talking about, not history.
(side note: my research into medieval warfare is by no means extensive so there may be some gold there to mine. I did read some stuff about the "lance" which is a sort of mllitray organization that is appropriate to the period, but in the end it didn't seem to offer enough to supplant the more familiar WOW system. )
The real strength of the Combined Arms style of game play is that it allows highly specialized (and therefore unique) character-types to play on the same battlefield together. The side effect to this approach is that the more specialized the class, the more focused it tends to become on one particular task. This is true pretty much everyewhere. Look at something like a small, family run buisness versus a large complex corporation. When you have 3 employees, each person in the business is goind to be responsible for a fairly wide variety of tasks. When you have 3000 employees each small cog in the machine tends to have one particular task that they have to excel at.
When i look at WoW from the perspective of the player's experience it reminds me very much of this sort of "assembly line" approach to solving in-game challenges. Every player (while possibly mindful of their surroundings and fellow players), basically looks in one direction, pulls their lever and presses their button till the encounter ends. Damage dealers attack, healers heal, tanks manage the aggro (meaning they make sure the monsters are focused on them rather then their team members). Usually the interesting part of an encounter in WoW is before it actually takes place (when players decide how best to handle the threat given their specific roles and abilities) or if somethihing goes wrong and your forced to act outside your standard duties.
In fact...when the healer dies, or the tank gets possesed or something else awful happens...thats when the game truly gets intesting and the experience goes from repetitive button pressing to some sort of jazz-like improv session.
The question than becomes, how do you inject that sort of excitement into the standard game play and make it the norm rather than the exception? Here's a half-baked solution I've been tossing around in my head.
First I'd do what any respectable game designer does when faced with a sequel, or expansion, or some task that involves taking an old product and repackaging it: I will add a new resource. We already have "health", "ammo" (or mana), and the invisible "aggro". For lack of a better term lets call the new resource "morale". The primary purpose of morale is to force players to change their focus once in a while from their specialized tasks. Each player's morale is affected by the actions and status of others. The fighter, for example, might get a morale boost by being in close proximity to his teammates. The more fragile members of the party will have to weigh the benefits of boosting the fighter's morale to the consequences of moving closer to where the danger most likely is. High and low morale can trigger events both good and bad respectively. A healer's low morale may result in all players taking more damage from enemy attacks, while high morale might do something like trigger my second idea for enhancing the WoW system: The Chain.
The chain is a mechanic that is baiscally lifted from fighting games like Street Fighter and re-worked into a co-op format. Certain circumstances (like a character's morale being lifted to it's maximum level) unlocks the opportunity to initiate a "Chain". When a chain is intiated, a character's normal actions might change slightly, but only if performed in the proper sequence. That sequence triggers a larger more dramatic effect. Of course the sequence must be acted out amongst multiple characters in the party.
So let's say, the fighter's morale maxes out and as a result, chains are now possible. Any character can initiate the chain. A priest might do it by casting a specific healing spell. A mage might initiate it by casting a simple fireball, etc. Once the chain begins, it requires that the next action performed by anyone in the party conforms to the chain's requirements. Otherwise the opportunity is wasted, (and maybe something awful happens to eveyone). The point is, if the players are just banging away at their buttons and focusing only on their own "buisness", they will likely trigger the chain on accident, and/or break the chain. On the other hand, players who are truly cooperating and are aware of their commrades, will execute the chain and recieve its glorious benefits.
As I have never tested these ideas out, I have no idea how practical or workable it is. One obvious flaw is that there is nothing here that improves the game for a player who is venturing out alone. This is probably not a huge problem with the whole "chain" idea (you just can't use chains while playing solo) but the morale system as I've laid it out could actually be a detriment to a solo player.
Still, the point of this little exercise was to explore ways to improve the multi-player co-op experience and I think stuff like "morale" and "chains" are at least a good start.
Next time I'll look less at the mechanical side of WoW and focus more on the look and feel of fantasy worlds like the ones in World of Warcraft. I'll be trying to find a way to breathe some new life into this very familiar genre while still keeping true to an engaging "sword and sorcery" experience.
