I'm vaguely aware that as an MMO Blogger, I probably ought to do more in the 'Armchair Theorist' category. It's not that I don't think about these ideas and concepts, you understand; of course I do, far more than is healthy and pretty much all of the time.
It's just that in this age of Entitlement, Guaranteed Success and the Easier Grind Getting The Subscription, I no longer trust my own opinions on what constitutes a good idea or a bad one in the broader gaming evolution going on around us all today. As a gamer, I know what I want (To win, easily, quickly and often), but possibly not what I need. (To probably lose quite often and have to work for my wins a bit).
All this makes me a bit hesitant when it comes to the popular blog-based business of Banging Out A Manifesto For Online Gaming Design, Prototyping The WoW-Slayer or Offering Unsolicited Advice On What [MMO Company] Really Ought To Do, and such like. Best leave that to the professionals, I think, and in general, I like to think of myself as an MMO Field Researcher, rather than an MMO Academic.
Saying all that, my OCD does like a good serial feature, and I don't seem to have very many of those on the go just now, so it's time for a new sidebar category; 'Nifty!' This is where I trawl back through the shattered detritus of a decade of online gaming memories, and for your delectation, pick out very specific MMO features, ideas and concepts which I thought were quite..er...Nifty!
A very subjective list, of course, and it may include things I liked at the time, which no-one else did, or indeed, things I now no longer like myself. The common theme here, is basically things that I saw for the first time and thought 'Ohh...that's clever!' A kind of reverse 'Room 101' of MMOs. Innovation, and suchlike!
Feel free to dispute my opinions, suggest similar or better concepts, or simply correct my sometimes flawed memory about the actual facts of each piece. Perhaps between us all, by plucking out these gems from past and present MMOs, we can imagine for ourselves, a perfect MMO of the future...
On to the first then:
Nifty! #1: Star Wars: Galaxies' Crafting Resource Map
This was not long after the original release of the game, in the heady days of Pre-NGE, and from the first, I'd always loved the crafting system of the game, one of the most advanced systems I'd seen anywhere, possibly second only to Second Life, where crafting is the game, such that that is.
Hundreds of manufacturable items, and an economy where there was only token and negligible loot and quest rewards. Crafting mattered here. But to make all these items, you needed the resources - metals, petrochemicals, foodstuffs, radioactive, and so on, and unlike most games of it's time - where those materials came from monster corpses, NPC vendors or convenient and inexplicable sprouting 'nodes' of fish, brass, whatever - most of the resources in SWG came and went like weather.
To stock up with materials, one first had to find them, and this was done with various survey tools, and these formed the basis of an entire minigame which in many ways, for me, supplanted the usual 'Hit The Monsters With A Stick' "main" game entirely.
The Mineral Survey Tool Interface
It worked like this; You fired up the tool and it would give you a list of what minerals were present on the planet. You could then use the tool to dig up a handful of each, and by inspecting the stuff, decide which one you wanted. Each had a large variety of stats which in some cases, would affect the stats of items made from it, so having a 'good' material did actually matter a lot.
Once you'd picked a mineral, (Dururehiris, a kind of Cubirian Steel, in the above example), you hit Survey. It would then return a little surroundings map, with mineral concentrations on it. Typically, one direction would have a higher amount than the others (The 31%, above), and the tool would also make a new waypoint where that was. You then went over to the waypoint, moving the centre of the grid view, and pinged the tool again. If lucky, the new minimap would have a new, higher corner, and you'd move again, and repeat the process until you found yourself on a high percentage, surrounded by lower ones...the 'peak' of the mineral density. Usually at this point, you moved on to harvesting - placing out player-owned automated structures that would then get on and mine a load of steel for you, and a little later, crafting could ensue, which was a whole other thing, and beyond what I'm talking about here.
But the basic business of tracking down that perfect Copper or abundant Solar Energy provided hours of entertainment, as I'd gallop about the plains and hills of Naboo, Tatooine and Correllia, startling herds, surprising bandits and generally making a nuisance of myself, ever in pursuit of those few extra percent of hardwood or similar. It meant I saw places I'd never have bothered going to otherwise, and often the best Copper was underneath someone's house, which allowed me to meet all sorts of new people too! Dropping a Medium Mineral Harvester up against the back wall of their remote mountain-top retreat will do that. Surprisingly noisy, yer average mineral harvester!
Often, when out and about in the wilderness anyway, upon seeing a harvester working away in isolation, I'd use the tools to see what they were digging, and if any good, I'd pop one of my own out too.
Sometimes, others had got there first, and in numbers, and the place would be camped out with harvesters, but the beauty, and the downfall, of the system was that the stuff moved.
I'm not sure of the Geological Accuracy of it all, but give it 48, or 72 hours, and the mineral distribution map for that copper would look entirely different, and require the harvesters to be taken down, and a new Copper 'high' to be located.
This was a good thing, in that it gave everyone a fair crack at the minerals. If they never moved, a select cartel of players would have all the 80%+ camped out with deployables forever, and no-one else would be able to get within three miles of the place. This may be a good and intended state of affairs in a PvP kind of game (EVE Online), but would never work in a largely PvE title, where blowing up other player's mining machinery is not allowed.
But it was also a bad thing, in that the constant nomadic nature of the materials I need for my profession, Architect, really did start to wear me out in the end, and having to spend an hour a night, every other night, moving the harvesters about, eventually drove me out of the game in exhaustion. That's probably a failing in my own perseverance than one of game design though.
On balance though, I liked it a lot, compared to the resource gathering in most other, less complex titles, and although I'm sure it's possible, I'd imagine it's a quite difficult system to 'bot' or otherwise farm in an automated manner. I believe Ultima Online may have had something similar, if less formalised and mathematical, involved with the distribution of it's metals for mining, but for me, the elegant and involved design and implementation of Star Wars: Galaxies resource system left a profound impression on me, and is something many games could learn from.
(This was all before the NGE reinvented the game - I have no idea how it works nowadays. I expect it's just randomly spawning 'Copper Veins' outside Mos Eisley Auction House now. I must actually try Modern SWG one of these days...I hope the 'Trader' can still do the above Treasure Hunting.)
So, Pre-NGE SWG Surveying...Nifty!
Look out for more soon, or suggest your own below for future consideration...