Marou_'s page

I've thought this for a few months now. There needs to be some alternative to Kickstarter where we aren't just pre-purchasing a game, but actually pooling a bunch of smaller investments ($100, $1000, $5000, etc) that will actually show a return on investment. Almost like selling "stock" in a product instead of a company. So that say 50% of real profit will come back to the product *shareholders* based upon the size of their investment relative to the total pool until they have a 200% ROI.

For example, if I *invested* $1000 in the Pathfinder project, out of a total pool of $10,000,000 investment capital raised during the crowd source investment period, I'd get 0.0001% of the final (after expense) profit that came in every month, or if the product made 2M profit in a month, I'd get $200 back. Eg, the investment would pay itself off in 10 months.

Ordinarily investor relations are much more skewed, in that the investor claims a larger chunk of profits and has much stronger input into what's being made, but often they also don't really know what the hell they are investing in.

I think such a model might work, but I don't think it exists in any form at the moment. Is this just me having a goofball moment? Or would other people throw far more money at game projects they believed in if it was an *investment* instead of essentially a pre-purchase?

Does this sort of /anyone can now do it/ integration of real time combat into MMO middleware complete with provided reference game code make it more likely Goblinworks will go for a more active combat model than the WoW standard tab-target timer-based hotkey pressing? Eg, might we get some active aiming and blocking mechanics going on?

HEROENGINE ADVANTAGES

Reference Worlds — Access to reference worlds of typical online games (social, FPS ect), complete with example code.

http://www.heroengine.com/spotlights/sand-in-the-gears/

"There are actually 2 worlds -- a world with a blade you can download to get references and check how things work, and a player client for a different world where you can actually play. There is not a great deal of “gameplay” other than shooting other robots in the face. But there are kill streaks and leader boards, etc. There’s a standard rifle, and a melee axe, and limbs can get blown off."

Art Direction and UI are extremely important factors that determine how much immersion a game has. If the user interface is full of 30 hotbars, a mini-map, a guild chat panel, inventory bags, and archaic /slash commands it becomes much harder to *forget* you are playing a game and get drawn into the world.

By the same token art direction has the same effect. If a game looks like a cartoon and/or has poor animation quality, it's not only hard to take it seriously, it can be hard to get engaged in the combat and content, even if it's of a high quality. The engagement is on a "game" level, and not on the *epic movie/book* level that a more realistic game art style can offer.

Personally, I'd love to see *highly playable* first person perspective in Pathfinder, although the cynic in me says it'll be all third person. I'd also love to see a less obtrusive UI, but most attempts to deviate from standards have met with failure.

So, what do you guys think? Would you prefer a more realistic or "cartoon" style in Pathfinder? How important is animation quality and art direction to your level of immersion?

/edit: Lagged while posting this and ended up with 4 copies, I deleted the dupes. As an aside I want to thank Goblinworks for making a sandbox fantasy MMO to begin with. With the recent extraordinarily disappointing announcement that TES online would be another "me-too" theme park this game has moved to #1 on my anticipated fantasy games list.

Curiosity inspires me to ask these questions.

1) What is the "sweet spot" for you all when someone can fully participate in the game (competitively engage in all available activities) with 1 subscription/character? Never? (eg, 10+ years), 5 years? 7.5 years? (How long WoW has been out so far...), 9 years (how long Eve has been out?)

2) What is the LONGEST you have ever played a single MMO. Subscribing without playing doesn't count, nor does a game you went back to several times with big subscription lapses.

3) Why did you stop playing the game you played the longest, if you played in spurts, why did you stop going back?

4) If PFO mechanically copies the following systems but strings them together into a believable economy and world, how long will you play it before becoming bored?

-WoW Combat
-Eve Manufacturing
-Eve Skill Training
-SWG Harvesting
-Shadowbane settlement construction

One thing that has always bothered me in games, even Theme Park ones, is that my characters learn many simple things many orders of magnitude slower than a real human does.

The normal person learns how to function at 80% efficiency in a non-knowledge based activity very quickly, and then gains less and less proficiency after that so that it could potentially take years to fully "master" something.

Allow me to elaborate:

1) My sister had never fired a gun until February or so. She went to the firing range 3 times, I went with her the third. She rarely missed the target's vital areas and could proficiently take the gun apart, clean it, and reload. Now, she's no Roland of Gilead, but she took to the activity naturally and she's good at it.

2) If you have never rode horses before, you could go out today and ride horses, with about 10 minutes of instruction. Now, you probably couldn't handle the situation well if the horse spooked, and you'll probably end up with raw thighs; but you can do it.

3) If you are willing to do back-breaking labor you can go help farmers in your area during harvest season. It takes about 10 minutes of instruction for each crop type. It's unskilled labor. After about a day of doing it, if you're not a slacker, you are just as fast as someone who spent 30 years doing it every day.

4) Most all mining of gold and diamonds is done in Africa. Look it up, it's completely unskilled labor. There may be some engineering skill that goes into digging a hole in the ground and making sure it doesn't collapse, but actually using a pickaxe to dig ore out of the wall takes a bunch of sweat and labor, not "skill".

5) If I grab a botany book, I can go out to the woods and harvest anything I see. If I had an instructor on how to best get at and find what I was looking for, within a matter of hours I will be 80% as efficient as the instructor at harvesting plants. Even without knowing anything, no magical force exists in the wild that would keep me from picking a rare or distinctive looking flower.

6) As a teen I did construction work one summer. While the architect and foreman may have been skilled labor, I wasn't.

It makes sense that an archetype could take 30 months to master, yeah? That's about how long Navy Seals get training in reality. That training turns a regular guy into an elite soldier.

It also makes sense that it might take 30 months to become a master swordsmith (if not even longer if we're being realistic).

However, it doesn't make sense that it would take even a week to become an extremely proficient farmhand, or berry picker, or medieval style miner, or rider.

-----------------------------------

One of the things I expressed concern about in another thread is a lack of activities for characters to do because of specialization time sinks.

Well, lets go back to a low-tech world and ask what "skills" do every non-aristocrat already have just by virtue of having grown up? They know how to ride a horse, operate a plow, drive a wagon, barter for goods (not as well as a merchant), etc.

I guess the point of this thread is to brainstorm about no-brainers. If an activity in the real world takes less than a day or hour of training to efficiently engage in it should not be a skill handled by the skill system. It should just be something any player can do by figuring out what to do.

Rationalizing the skill system in such a way would allow developers to maintain tight control over character progression without making characters feel very limited as they do in Eve.

Unskilled labor in a world without mass production is very economically viable. Incorporating it into a game would also allow newer players to quickly become involved in sandbox activities because the unskilled labor needs of settlements would always exceed their skilled population.

So, what are your thoughts? What should be unskilled labor? What types of activities would you like to see in a game that can be economically viable but require no "training time".

/edit: As a side note, as the game matured the economics of unskilled labor would automatically make it more valuable since all the "mature" characters would be inclined to be doing more profitable things, easing the entry for new players who can immediately jump in and make money and a difference in the game world.

Aberrant life states and magical afflictions, they add spice to single player games. Whether it is being the Slayer in Baldur's gate and accidentally exploding Minsc because you got low HP, or struggling with every single NPC hating you rapidly burning to death in Morrowind because you didn't treat the precursor to vampirism quick enough.

I'd love to see such things incorporated in an MMO, with the associated huge drawbacks.

Ideally in an MMO such as this building would be similar to how it's done in the Sims 3. Unfortunately that's too much data to send on the fly to people.

The workaround prior MMO's have used is that you can place pre-designed structures which visibly show construction phases and are about as exciting for players to work on as a building in an RTS is for your peon/drone to work on. Crafting in most games is the same way.

If structure creation and placement is going to operate in the tried and true fashion I'd suggest all building be done by NPC's supplied with materials, because it's not fun.

If you are going to try something new I'd humbly suggest you spend almost all of your time on this, crafting, combat, and social/trading systems. Not having to script 8972394 quests and encounters would go a long way towards having far less content designers and far more actual programmers.

If you look at World of Warcraft which started from scratch on an engine they had 15 programmers. Most of the resources and time went to content designers, scripters, animators, etc. Buying something that gives you a solid code base and then sticking the brunt of your budget towards programming new game systems is how a sandbox MMO actually gets created instead of falling into a money crunch/budget hell and never seeing the light of day.

Most games and I would assume almost all engines are based on the assumption of client side resource files defining what gets rendered in the environment. The Sims can get away with crazy constructions because the resource and layout files are stored on the local hard drive (these files get big) and don't need to be sent over a network.

Skyrim with it's clutter of a million objects can't be made multiplayer, precisely because of it's clutter of a million objects. Too much data to keep in sync.

Games like Minecraft and Terraria get around this by simplifying the environment and object locations down to "tiles" or "blocks" in 3d space. I've often wondered if someone could lay a really clever blending algorithm on top of a block based environment layout to create the illusion of curved surfaces while allowing the freedom of block based manipulation.

The downside of purchased MMO specific engines is that they would fundamentally lack this capability from the get go.

I can't help it. I want to focus my guild on running services for:

1) Fractional Reserve Banking, insured interest bearing accounts with representatives in every major settlement.
2) Loans to settlements and/or credit worthy guilds.
3) Insurance service on properties with reasonable rates.

Sounds exciting, right? It kinda does to me, although much of the viability of any of those business models will depend on the design of the playable game... I bet there is room for at least some of it.