CHIEF CHAT BRIEF SUMMARY FROM THURSDAY MAY 13, 2021
==== MAIN POINTS ====
► On today’s stream, Grummz reacted to AsmongoldTV’s reaction video about “The Absolute State of the MMORPG Genre…” a video by The Lazy Peon. If you would like to check any of the videos out, please see below:
Watch Twitch VOD here with Grummz reactions!
https://www.twitch.tv/grummz_em8er/video/10213541561
Watch AsmongoldTV’s reactions video here!
Watch the original video by TheLazyPeon here!
► A NEW DEMO DROPPED TODAY!
Eligible backers visit your Downloads page and look for “[LATEST] Glider Tuning!” which features phase 1 of glider tuning!
^ Link to Downloads page: https://my.em8er.com/downloads
^ Link to Glider Tuning Phase 1 Forum Feedback thread:
https://forums.em8er.com/threads/glider-tuning-build-phase-1-feedback-thread.1965
==== GENERAL POINTS ====
► What MMO’s are you guys looking forward to and why do you want to play them? Let us know in this form thread! https://forums.em8er.com/threads/what-mmos-are-you-looking-forward-to.1966
► The Dev Team is aiming to have Phase 2 Developer Test Build ready on next Tuesday!
► Grummz: “Gacha made money but, it felt wrong.” Now games are designed to monetize players.
► MMO’s for Grummz are about providing entertainment for the players. The reason he went into game developing was because: “I had a creative idea, I wanted to get it out there, and I want it to be appreciated and enjoyed by people. The best messages I get about World of Warcraft is how much it literally saved their lives in a time of depression or illness. Also how they met their loved ones in there, started families, how they made these human connections; and how entertained they were. Even how much they enjoyed the game, all of the games I’ve worked on: Firefall Beta, World of Warcraft, Diablo 2, and Starcraft.”
► AsmongoldTV’s says selling visual skins in the game is detracting from the whole aspect of MMOs.
► Grummz: “We need to have achievements. You can’t buy a skin until you’ve reached a certain point in the game. I think that would create incentives.”
► Grummz: “AsmongoldTV’s making a joke but, I LOVE the chain mail bikini armor and so does my wife. You don’t have to go out of your way to have unfeminine characters in your game. You want that as an option? That’s great. That’s why people like Genshin Impact or backed Subverse to the tune of $2 millions; I mean that’s a porn game right? But it’s an under served market because Triple A games have gotten so far away from making characters feminine. I think that is a disservice to gamers and to women who want to play that. I know many women want to play games like that. My wife wants to play that and I know many women who follow me on Twitter who ask me about things like breast sliders.
While we’re not going as far as chain mail bikini’s or anything like that. We’re comfortable in Em-8er with showing attractive females. And we’re an equal opportunity, there’s attractive males too.”
► Grummz: “Game developers don’t support emergent game play enough. In one of my own games, in Firefall, we saw emergent game play with XP Valley and a couple of other things; and we nerfed it. We got rid of it. That’s the exact opposite of what you SHOULD do. If you see gamers doing something FUN IN YOUR GAME F-ING SUPPORT IT!”
► Grummz: “Players having an impact on the world is hugely important.
What the players do collectively in-game needs to effect the next expansion, the next DLC, or next phase of the game. That was always the plan for Firefall and we never got around to it. But for Em-8er, that’s what we want to do. We want to bring that concept back – the concept of the dynamic changing world.”
► We’ve talked about:
- Social aspect
- Emergent game play
- Players collectively impacting the next phase of the game.
► Grummz: “You have to change the meta of the entire game genre itself. AND you have to capitalize on the fact that it is a social medium.”
► Grummz: “MMOs as they are now are inherently static.
In order to for you to have an interesting character, you know the character has to go through a transformation. When you write your characters into your quest, from the beginning of the quest to the end, that character has to change in the story. They have to have some kind of an epiphany, a change of heart, or something actually happens to them. In an MMO, they don’t really change. The story is largely static. And if they do change, if it’s a major character, it’s not YOUR character. You had no influence over that change.”
► Grummz: “What’s one thing an MMO could do to make this interesting? What if you could influence Thrall’s story arc; or any new character? What if you could influence the character arc of a major character in the game, through the actions of what you do, collectively as players. I think that’s interesting. That should be explored. Do I know exactly how to do it? No. But, it’s one area that fascinates me that I definitely want to pay attention to.
► Grummz: “MMOs as they are now are a very static medium so you don’t get that opportunity and it’s vastly under-explored.”
► Grummz: “The more you get away from static content, and the more you get to dynamic content and player content, the more engagement you’re going to have and the richer the experiences you’re going to have; and the more players will stick around.
There’s a rule in my head: I think the more your game is social and rewards emergent game play, the less content you have to make. The more solo friendly your game is, and the more that player interaction doesn’t matter, the more you’re going to fall into the “content trap”.
If you really put the Research & Development into dynamic events, and the social aspect of the game. If watch what your players are doing and they find some emergent game play that is nascent and cool, go in there and SUPPORT IT! The social aspect is what makes MMOs “sticky”. It’s the social connections!
► Grummz: “I am tired of going out and killing ten rats. And I helped invent that sh-t. PvE needs to be more meaningful.”
► Grummz: Every MMO that’s tried to do PvE and PvP at the same time has realized it doesn’t work.
► Grummz: After the game launch for Em-8er, we’ll have another crowdfunding for the next step of that DLC. The story of which will be influenced by the current launch of the game.
► Grummz: When you’re crowdfunding a game, you have to have a certain amount of visual appeal. For Em-8er, it’s mechs vs kaiju; an Attack on Titan vibe. Oh and we’ve got some waifus thrown in too.
► Grummz: There is problem right now that we haven’t had before with graphics. That is the absolute drought of PC hardware. We are in the lost generation of GPUs and it’s not going to end any time soon. It’s not going to clear up until sometime next year. People can NOT get GPUs; they can’t upgrade their systems.
► Grummz: Stop looking for the “next savior” for MMOs.
I’m not saying lower your standards, I’m saying it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of one MMO to rule them all, I’d like to see 2 or 3 different types because right now we only have 1 type. Maybe 2 or 3 but they’re niche.
I think there’s room for multiple types. And why do I say that? Because WoW only picked one type. Before we made WoW, there were literally all these experiments being done in MMOs. You had Star Wars Galaxies, Ever Quest, Planetside, and Eve Online. There are different ways to make a Massive Multiplayer game! Just because we happened to pick one type, the D&D archetype, the Ever Quest archetype and make it the dominant one, doesn’t mean that’s the ONLY one that works!
Stop chasing WoW as the “Gold Standard” of what you should do for an MMO! In the Golden Age of MMOs, they weren’t selling a lot of games but, they were trying a lot of new ideas! Go back to that!
► Grummz: Star Wars Galaxies crafting system. We borrowed from that for Firefall. It was a hugely popular aspect of that game. It was a little overly complex. We’re solving that in Em-8er by having a simple and an advanced version of crafting but, it’s a GOOD idea!
The Planetside massive battles. Also a very cool idea. It was the most popular thing in Firefall during beta when our servers would come up, and the Chosen were just invading everywhere. They dominate the zone and the whole zone was red; and you had to push them back. Players told us that was the most fun they had. Did we capitalize on that emergent game play behavior? No. That was a mistake. So now we’re going back. We’re saying: You know what? Those invasions were AWESOME! Let’s bring them back and make them a focal point.
► Grummz: I think part of the reason these games disappoint is because they promise the world up front at launch. The a feature set for an MMO is vast. It’s like combining 50 other games together. It’s exponentially harder to make an MMO than any other type of game.
On the other hand, you have to promise a vision that is vast or there’s not a lot of interest. I think you have to say, especially if you’re pitching an MMO, that you DO have a grand vision for how this will come together. But I think you have to be realistic and say, here’s what we can deliver first and then here’s what we plan to deliver next, as long as we continue the momentum. And that let’s you polish the feature set you have. It’s better to do less at launch, get it really super polished, and add to it over time than to promise you’re going to have the entire world vision ready at launch. Then everything is kind of like Helter Skelter because the developer team is so busy trying to accomplish this vast feature set, they don’t have time to polish individual aspects of it.
► Grummz: So that’s why I think the layered approach – I’ll call it “The Onion Approach” is better. Let’s build the onion in layers and ship it in layers to people. I think that’s the better way to do it. But you also have to lay the vision out front, right? Because if you don’t show what the plan is, people wouldn’t get very excited about your game. But under promise and over deliver and full transparency. You have to show people exactly what you’re working on. We ship builds every week now. And you get to see it warts and all. And I think that’s the level of transparency you need to run a successful long term crowdfunding system.
► Grummz: You guys have been settling too long, right? And it’s not your fault. It’s the fact that nobody’s been making anything that breaks the meta. I mean the MMO meta. You gotta break the MMO meta. You gotta embrace the massive part of it. You gotta experiment and take risks. And then you gotta really be able to execute. Do a really good job on a solid core, paint the future and then build up to that.
► Grummz: Investors kill games. Firefall fans know this. Firefall fans know that Firefall was pushing for something completely different in beta. And the investors wanted WoW with Guns and so they changed it all. They went away from dynamic events, thumping, no leveling, and be anywhere in the world. They chopped up the world into little tiny traditional based zones that were too small to be full zones and they took away all the stuff players found fun and tried to create a bunch of static content instead of dynamic content. The only thing they did that I thought was really cool is when they had the developers come in and play the enemies. That was cool. Not very sustainable; you can’t have your developer team playing the game as real live enemies the whole time. But that was cool. That’s something I’d like to explore. It can’t be the developers though. Developers have to develop, right? Sometimes it could be the developers but not all the time. There was something there. A seed of an idea. But that was cool.
Ronyn: "So you’re saying we should build an entire team of player killers?"
Grummz: Uh yeah... exactly! [laughs] “Big Kaiju Gank Players” will be the recruitment advertisement. We can recruit every MMO troll out there, they’d sign up immediately.
► Grummz: But there was a book by Neil Stevenson. He wrote, “Snow Crash”, which was a cyberpunk genre book. He wrote another book called “Diamond Age”. In Diamond Age, I guess it was an online virtual world but the NPCs were all played by hired actors? You know, there’s something to that.
So what if, in Em-8er, during these invasions, what if sometimes there was an actual dev or cast of players behind the kaiju? The question is, how to scale that.
► Grummz: I actually played a text MUD that did that, Gemstone. I just love MUDs and these games so much. That’s why I pushed so hard to re-launch Classic WoW. I just love the genre.
=== GRUMMZ STORY TIME ON THE TEXT MUD CALLED GEMSTONE! ===
What I love was, there was a player event. They saw we elected leaders for the different classes and we had a political structure around them. They did an invasion – they did demons invading the world and it was played by the GMs, the staff. It was only one server, so they could do this. For a month there would be attacks on the main town, attacks on the fields, and all this stuff. And it was played by the GMs.
Ultimately what they did was they kidnapped “Luxelle”, who was the MUCH beloved guild leader of the cleric’s guild. Everybody loved her. Of course she was in on it because it was all role play. So they kidnapped her. Then they said that they were going to kill her. And that when they do, it would unleash the final invasion upon the land. You can’t find her because she’s in our hidden fortress which you will never ever find (wink wink). And we were like “Oh shit!” They kidnapped Luxelle, what are we going to do? So we had to go find the castle. So we were pouring through the map (and this is all text based right?). So we’re pouring through text descriptions of the map. And I found a foot path that’s never been seen before. And I was the thieves’ guild leader. I went stealth, I went down this foot path, and there it was… the demon castle that was about to unleash this invasion upon the land.
Do you see some similarities with Em-8er here?
Because I just realized as I’m telling this story that I’m channeling a huge inspiration for Em-8er’s NPC invasion system.
This was it. This was the demon invasion of the world. And it was on a bigger, more epic scale than Legion or WoW ever was. That’s like mouse droppings compared to what it could be. So I went up to this castle, I found the demons, and they said: We will spare your world and Luxelle’s life for a ransom (some exorbitant fee). So I took the news back and I said: I found the fortress but we got a problem. It’s heavily guarded, heavily fortified. And it was all GM run. It was all live players. I could talk to the players, I could talk to the demons, etc.
And instead of paying the ransom, the players decided to band together to assault the castle. That was cool. They all planned it out for weeks and picked a date. Gaming was so primitive at the time, classes didn’t really work together. This was the first time we had to work together to overcome the invasion. So we went to invade the castle. The DMs are talking in chat and throwing taunts. They’re doing unexpected things because they’re real players not NPCs. Everyone is trying to batter down the doors to the castle and they can’t. Every time someone would get close enough to climb up the walls, the GMs were pouring boiling oil down the walls and killing the people who were climbing up the walls.
Solo play vs. Awesome inter-class interaction.
Now you have to remember, this was actually a multiplayer game but people played it like a solo game. I turned to a mage and I said hey, don’t you have an invisibility spell? He said, yeah. I said, do you think it would work if you cast it on me? Everyone laughing because it was like “Well DUH!” The mage said: Well, what do you mean? I said no no, don’t ask questions, just cast it. People are dying. So he cast invisibility on me and then I tried to scale the wall where they were pouring the boiling oil. And they didn’t see me. And I was able to scale the wall, get in there, and unlock the fortress gates from the inside. And in poured the entire player army. There was this massive battle in the courtyard and we fought our way into the dungeons, we found Luxelle and rescued her.
I was so pleased (I was in college at the time) because I had this pivotal role. It was really a dynamic encounter because there were live players and live GMs on the other end of it. Then it was written up. The players had a gazette (a newsletter); so I could see my name in the newsletter.
Talk about the PvE competition, how important that is... Highlighting players who do cool shit in your MMO is an absolute MUST. Why don’t we do more of that?
When a guild downs a boss for the first time in WoW? There should be something that happens. There should be heralding throughout the realm. There should be more than just a chat message. That’s an opportunity to really play that up.
Coming back to modern times…PvE competition and dynamic events like that and that sort of massive invasion system, those are really cool. That is one aspect that we should explore more as MMO developers. And that’s what we’re doing with Em-8er.
==== GENERAL POINTS (CONTINUED) ====
► Grummz: We do have a herald for Ark Liege Backers. However, you can turn that off. But it doesn’t have to be that way. One thing we talked about in Firefall was celebrating these player emergent events. Really shining a spotlight on them. So we wanted there to be a news broadcast in the world, on the log in screen. You know how games have launchers? Imagine there is a show that’s produced that’s like a broadcast or a news broadcast, that tells you all the cool shit that players did in the game in the last week. Celebrate the emergent game play. MMOs are a unique opportunity to do something with that.
► Grummz: I came back after years of not paying attention to MMOs and I was disappointed. Nothing has changed!
► Grummz: It means leveraging the main part of your genre name. MMOs need to find something to do with HUNDREDS OF PLAYERS TOGETHER!
► Grummz: For Em-8er, there is a casual crafting system but also, if you want to really get into the nitty gritty of it, and tune things, you can. The people who DO that (again bringing in that social aspect), master that advanced system, can offer their services to the players who aren’t as much into the crafting system. You can go commission your ideal crafted frame, weapon, or whatever it is with an advanced crafter… another human being in the world. And have an interaction with them.
► Grummz: I hope this shows you some of the philosophy I was going for. These are not new ideas for me. I’ve had these ideas since Firefall Beta but, no one has ever delivered on them. No one has ever really pushed on them. So with Em-8er, you guys asked me to make a spiritual successor to Firefall as it was meant to be. This is what it’s meant to be; everything I’ve talked about in this stream and all my comments on this. I hope this paints a picture of how I want to change, not the combat system, not the crafting system, not all this… Where is the innovation going to come from? The innovation is going to come from the meta. The innovation is going to come from embracing the strengths of the genre, the massively part. And also to build upon the emergent player game play, dynamic worlds, and emergent game play.
► Grummz: I hope you got a sense of WHY we’re making Em-8er; of WHAT we’re trying to achieve in MMOs; of HOW we plan to break the meta of MMOs, which is the fundamental problem. And to embrace the advantage of the medium which is the Massively Multiplayer part.
==== FUN STUFF ====
► FAI's thanks raffle winner! ` ♦ DeadGad ♦ `
==== MAIN POINTS ====
► On today’s stream, Grummz reacted to AsmongoldTV’s reaction video about “The Absolute State of the MMORPG Genre…” a video by The Lazy Peon. If you would like to check any of the videos out, please see below:
Watch Twitch VOD here with Grummz reactions!
https://www.twitch.tv/grummz_em8er/video/10213541561
Watch AsmongoldTV’s reactions video here!
Watch the original video by TheLazyPeon here!
► A NEW DEMO DROPPED TODAY!
Eligible backers visit your Downloads page and look for “[LATEST] Glider Tuning!” which features phase 1 of glider tuning!
^ Link to Downloads page: https://my.em8er.com/downloads
^ Link to Glider Tuning Phase 1 Forum Feedback thread:
https://forums.em8er.com/threads/glider-tuning-build-phase-1-feedback-thread.1965
==== GENERAL POINTS ====
► What MMO’s are you guys looking forward to and why do you want to play them? Let us know in this form thread! https://forums.em8er.com/threads/what-mmos-are-you-looking-forward-to.1966
► The Dev Team is aiming to have Phase 2 Developer Test Build ready on next Tuesday!
► Grummz: “Gacha made money but, it felt wrong.” Now games are designed to monetize players.
► MMO’s for Grummz are about providing entertainment for the players. The reason he went into game developing was because: “I had a creative idea, I wanted to get it out there, and I want it to be appreciated and enjoyed by people. The best messages I get about World of Warcraft is how much it literally saved their lives in a time of depression or illness. Also how they met their loved ones in there, started families, how they made these human connections; and how entertained they were. Even how much they enjoyed the game, all of the games I’ve worked on: Firefall Beta, World of Warcraft, Diablo 2, and Starcraft.”
► AsmongoldTV’s says selling visual skins in the game is detracting from the whole aspect of MMOs.
► Grummz: “We need to have achievements. You can’t buy a skin until you’ve reached a certain point in the game. I think that would create incentives.”
► Grummz: “AsmongoldTV’s making a joke but, I LOVE the chain mail bikini armor and so does my wife. You don’t have to go out of your way to have unfeminine characters in your game. You want that as an option? That’s great. That’s why people like Genshin Impact or backed Subverse to the tune of $2 millions; I mean that’s a porn game right? But it’s an under served market because Triple A games have gotten so far away from making characters feminine. I think that is a disservice to gamers and to women who want to play that. I know many women want to play games like that. My wife wants to play that and I know many women who follow me on Twitter who ask me about things like breast sliders.
While we’re not going as far as chain mail bikini’s or anything like that. We’re comfortable in Em-8er with showing attractive females. And we’re an equal opportunity, there’s attractive males too.”
► Grummz: “Game developers don’t support emergent game play enough. In one of my own games, in Firefall, we saw emergent game play with XP Valley and a couple of other things; and we nerfed it. We got rid of it. That’s the exact opposite of what you SHOULD do. If you see gamers doing something FUN IN YOUR GAME F-ING SUPPORT IT!”
► Grummz: “Players having an impact on the world is hugely important.
What the players do collectively in-game needs to effect the next expansion, the next DLC, or next phase of the game. That was always the plan for Firefall and we never got around to it. But for Em-8er, that’s what we want to do. We want to bring that concept back – the concept of the dynamic changing world.”
► We’ve talked about:
- Social aspect
- Emergent game play
- Players collectively impacting the next phase of the game.
► Grummz: “You have to change the meta of the entire game genre itself. AND you have to capitalize on the fact that it is a social medium.”
► Grummz: “MMOs as they are now are inherently static.
In order to for you to have an interesting character, you know the character has to go through a transformation. When you write your characters into your quest, from the beginning of the quest to the end, that character has to change in the story. They have to have some kind of an epiphany, a change of heart, or something actually happens to them. In an MMO, they don’t really change. The story is largely static. And if they do change, if it’s a major character, it’s not YOUR character. You had no influence over that change.”
► Grummz: “What’s one thing an MMO could do to make this interesting? What if you could influence Thrall’s story arc; or any new character? What if you could influence the character arc of a major character in the game, through the actions of what you do, collectively as players. I think that’s interesting. That should be explored. Do I know exactly how to do it? No. But, it’s one area that fascinates me that I definitely want to pay attention to.
► Grummz: “MMOs as they are now are a very static medium so you don’t get that opportunity and it’s vastly under-explored.”
► Grummz: “The more you get away from static content, and the more you get to dynamic content and player content, the more engagement you’re going to have and the richer the experiences you’re going to have; and the more players will stick around.
There’s a rule in my head: I think the more your game is social and rewards emergent game play, the less content you have to make. The more solo friendly your game is, and the more that player interaction doesn’t matter, the more you’re going to fall into the “content trap”.
If you really put the Research & Development into dynamic events, and the social aspect of the game. If watch what your players are doing and they find some emergent game play that is nascent and cool, go in there and SUPPORT IT! The social aspect is what makes MMOs “sticky”. It’s the social connections!
► Grummz: “I am tired of going out and killing ten rats. And I helped invent that sh-t. PvE needs to be more meaningful.”
► Grummz: Every MMO that’s tried to do PvE and PvP at the same time has realized it doesn’t work.
► Grummz: After the game launch for Em-8er, we’ll have another crowdfunding for the next step of that DLC. The story of which will be influenced by the current launch of the game.
► Grummz: When you’re crowdfunding a game, you have to have a certain amount of visual appeal. For Em-8er, it’s mechs vs kaiju; an Attack on Titan vibe. Oh and we’ve got some waifus thrown in too.
► Grummz: There is problem right now that we haven’t had before with graphics. That is the absolute drought of PC hardware. We are in the lost generation of GPUs and it’s not going to end any time soon. It’s not going to clear up until sometime next year. People can NOT get GPUs; they can’t upgrade their systems.
► Grummz: Stop looking for the “next savior” for MMOs.
I’m not saying lower your standards, I’m saying it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of one MMO to rule them all, I’d like to see 2 or 3 different types because right now we only have 1 type. Maybe 2 or 3 but they’re niche.
I think there’s room for multiple types. And why do I say that? Because WoW only picked one type. Before we made WoW, there were literally all these experiments being done in MMOs. You had Star Wars Galaxies, Ever Quest, Planetside, and Eve Online. There are different ways to make a Massive Multiplayer game! Just because we happened to pick one type, the D&D archetype, the Ever Quest archetype and make it the dominant one, doesn’t mean that’s the ONLY one that works!
Stop chasing WoW as the “Gold Standard” of what you should do for an MMO! In the Golden Age of MMOs, they weren’t selling a lot of games but, they were trying a lot of new ideas! Go back to that!
► Grummz: Star Wars Galaxies crafting system. We borrowed from that for Firefall. It was a hugely popular aspect of that game. It was a little overly complex. We’re solving that in Em-8er by having a simple and an advanced version of crafting but, it’s a GOOD idea!
The Planetside massive battles. Also a very cool idea. It was the most popular thing in Firefall during beta when our servers would come up, and the Chosen were just invading everywhere. They dominate the zone and the whole zone was red; and you had to push them back. Players told us that was the most fun they had. Did we capitalize on that emergent game play behavior? No. That was a mistake. So now we’re going back. We’re saying: You know what? Those invasions were AWESOME! Let’s bring them back and make them a focal point.
► Grummz: I think part of the reason these games disappoint is because they promise the world up front at launch. The a feature set for an MMO is vast. It’s like combining 50 other games together. It’s exponentially harder to make an MMO than any other type of game.
On the other hand, you have to promise a vision that is vast or there’s not a lot of interest. I think you have to say, especially if you’re pitching an MMO, that you DO have a grand vision for how this will come together. But I think you have to be realistic and say, here’s what we can deliver first and then here’s what we plan to deliver next, as long as we continue the momentum. And that let’s you polish the feature set you have. It’s better to do less at launch, get it really super polished, and add to it over time than to promise you’re going to have the entire world vision ready at launch. Then everything is kind of like Helter Skelter because the developer team is so busy trying to accomplish this vast feature set, they don’t have time to polish individual aspects of it.
► Grummz: So that’s why I think the layered approach – I’ll call it “The Onion Approach” is better. Let’s build the onion in layers and ship it in layers to people. I think that’s the better way to do it. But you also have to lay the vision out front, right? Because if you don’t show what the plan is, people wouldn’t get very excited about your game. But under promise and over deliver and full transparency. You have to show people exactly what you’re working on. We ship builds every week now. And you get to see it warts and all. And I think that’s the level of transparency you need to run a successful long term crowdfunding system.
► Grummz: You guys have been settling too long, right? And it’s not your fault. It’s the fact that nobody’s been making anything that breaks the meta. I mean the MMO meta. You gotta break the MMO meta. You gotta embrace the massive part of it. You gotta experiment and take risks. And then you gotta really be able to execute. Do a really good job on a solid core, paint the future and then build up to that.
► Grummz: Investors kill games. Firefall fans know this. Firefall fans know that Firefall was pushing for something completely different in beta. And the investors wanted WoW with Guns and so they changed it all. They went away from dynamic events, thumping, no leveling, and be anywhere in the world. They chopped up the world into little tiny traditional based zones that were too small to be full zones and they took away all the stuff players found fun and tried to create a bunch of static content instead of dynamic content. The only thing they did that I thought was really cool is when they had the developers come in and play the enemies. That was cool. Not very sustainable; you can’t have your developer team playing the game as real live enemies the whole time. But that was cool. That’s something I’d like to explore. It can’t be the developers though. Developers have to develop, right? Sometimes it could be the developers but not all the time. There was something there. A seed of an idea. But that was cool.
Ronyn: "So you’re saying we should build an entire team of player killers?"
Grummz: Uh yeah... exactly! [laughs] “Big Kaiju Gank Players” will be the recruitment advertisement. We can recruit every MMO troll out there, they’d sign up immediately.
► Grummz: But there was a book by Neil Stevenson. He wrote, “Snow Crash”, which was a cyberpunk genre book. He wrote another book called “Diamond Age”. In Diamond Age, I guess it was an online virtual world but the NPCs were all played by hired actors? You know, there’s something to that.
So what if, in Em-8er, during these invasions, what if sometimes there was an actual dev or cast of players behind the kaiju? The question is, how to scale that.
► Grummz: I actually played a text MUD that did that, Gemstone. I just love MUDs and these games so much. That’s why I pushed so hard to re-launch Classic WoW. I just love the genre.
=== GRUMMZ STORY TIME ON THE TEXT MUD CALLED GEMSTONE! ===
What I love was, there was a player event. They saw we elected leaders for the different classes and we had a political structure around them. They did an invasion – they did demons invading the world and it was played by the GMs, the staff. It was only one server, so they could do this. For a month there would be attacks on the main town, attacks on the fields, and all this stuff. And it was played by the GMs.
Ultimately what they did was they kidnapped “Luxelle”, who was the MUCH beloved guild leader of the cleric’s guild. Everybody loved her. Of course she was in on it because it was all role play. So they kidnapped her. Then they said that they were going to kill her. And that when they do, it would unleash the final invasion upon the land. You can’t find her because she’s in our hidden fortress which you will never ever find (wink wink). And we were like “Oh shit!” They kidnapped Luxelle, what are we going to do? So we had to go find the castle. So we were pouring through the map (and this is all text based right?). So we’re pouring through text descriptions of the map. And I found a foot path that’s never been seen before. And I was the thieves’ guild leader. I went stealth, I went down this foot path, and there it was… the demon castle that was about to unleash this invasion upon the land.
Do you see some similarities with Em-8er here?
Because I just realized as I’m telling this story that I’m channeling a huge inspiration for Em-8er’s NPC invasion system.
This was it. This was the demon invasion of the world. And it was on a bigger, more epic scale than Legion or WoW ever was. That’s like mouse droppings compared to what it could be. So I went up to this castle, I found the demons, and they said: We will spare your world and Luxelle’s life for a ransom (some exorbitant fee). So I took the news back and I said: I found the fortress but we got a problem. It’s heavily guarded, heavily fortified. And it was all GM run. It was all live players. I could talk to the players, I could talk to the demons, etc.
And instead of paying the ransom, the players decided to band together to assault the castle. That was cool. They all planned it out for weeks and picked a date. Gaming was so primitive at the time, classes didn’t really work together. This was the first time we had to work together to overcome the invasion. So we went to invade the castle. The DMs are talking in chat and throwing taunts. They’re doing unexpected things because they’re real players not NPCs. Everyone is trying to batter down the doors to the castle and they can’t. Every time someone would get close enough to climb up the walls, the GMs were pouring boiling oil down the walls and killing the people who were climbing up the walls.
Solo play vs. Awesome inter-class interaction.
Now you have to remember, this was actually a multiplayer game but people played it like a solo game. I turned to a mage and I said hey, don’t you have an invisibility spell? He said, yeah. I said, do you think it would work if you cast it on me? Everyone laughing because it was like “Well DUH!” The mage said: Well, what do you mean? I said no no, don’t ask questions, just cast it. People are dying. So he cast invisibility on me and then I tried to scale the wall where they were pouring the boiling oil. And they didn’t see me. And I was able to scale the wall, get in there, and unlock the fortress gates from the inside. And in poured the entire player army. There was this massive battle in the courtyard and we fought our way into the dungeons, we found Luxelle and rescued her.
I was so pleased (I was in college at the time) because I had this pivotal role. It was really a dynamic encounter because there were live players and live GMs on the other end of it. Then it was written up. The players had a gazette (a newsletter); so I could see my name in the newsletter.
Talk about the PvE competition, how important that is... Highlighting players who do cool shit in your MMO is an absolute MUST. Why don’t we do more of that?
When a guild downs a boss for the first time in WoW? There should be something that happens. There should be heralding throughout the realm. There should be more than just a chat message. That’s an opportunity to really play that up.
Coming back to modern times…PvE competition and dynamic events like that and that sort of massive invasion system, those are really cool. That is one aspect that we should explore more as MMO developers. And that’s what we’re doing with Em-8er.
==== GENERAL POINTS (CONTINUED) ====
► Grummz: We do have a herald for Ark Liege Backers. However, you can turn that off. But it doesn’t have to be that way. One thing we talked about in Firefall was celebrating these player emergent events. Really shining a spotlight on them. So we wanted there to be a news broadcast in the world, on the log in screen. You know how games have launchers? Imagine there is a show that’s produced that’s like a broadcast or a news broadcast, that tells you all the cool shit that players did in the game in the last week. Celebrate the emergent game play. MMOs are a unique opportunity to do something with that.
► Grummz: I came back after years of not paying attention to MMOs and I was disappointed. Nothing has changed!
► Grummz: It means leveraging the main part of your genre name. MMOs need to find something to do with HUNDREDS OF PLAYERS TOGETHER!
► Grummz: For Em-8er, there is a casual crafting system but also, if you want to really get into the nitty gritty of it, and tune things, you can. The people who DO that (again bringing in that social aspect), master that advanced system, can offer their services to the players who aren’t as much into the crafting system. You can go commission your ideal crafted frame, weapon, or whatever it is with an advanced crafter… another human being in the world. And have an interaction with them.
► Grummz: I hope this shows you some of the philosophy I was going for. These are not new ideas for me. I’ve had these ideas since Firefall Beta but, no one has ever delivered on them. No one has ever really pushed on them. So with Em-8er, you guys asked me to make a spiritual successor to Firefall as it was meant to be. This is what it’s meant to be; everything I’ve talked about in this stream and all my comments on this. I hope this paints a picture of how I want to change, not the combat system, not the crafting system, not all this… Where is the innovation going to come from? The innovation is going to come from the meta. The innovation is going to come from embracing the strengths of the genre, the massively part. And also to build upon the emergent player game play, dynamic worlds, and emergent game play.
► Grummz: I hope you got a sense of WHY we’re making Em-8er; of WHAT we’re trying to achieve in MMOs; of HOW we plan to break the meta of MMOs, which is the fundamental problem. And to embrace the advantage of the medium which is the Massively Multiplayer part.
==== FUN STUFF ====
► FAI's thanks raffle winner! ` ♦ DeadGad ♦ `
