Saturday, May 20, 2006
MMORPG Applications: The Evolution of the Fighting Genre
(Originally written: 02/21/04)
(Anyone involved in creative thinking has had that experience of pondering some new and fantastic innovation, forgetting about it, then actually seeing it in the marketplace years later. Every kid that played early console games in the late '80s, including me, had the passing thought of "why can't I play my friends down the street?" And of course, thanks to X-Box Live and others, you can. I originally wrote this essay in early 2004. And I'm amazed in just two years how much of this is actually happening. The X-Box Live team should get an award for the work they are doing. And "arcade game memory cards?" Look no further than Tekken 5 and the new Super Mario Kart Arcade game. With that preface out of the way... now we can get on with this now notably dated essay...)
To many, MMORPGs represent the forefront of gaming. From the online medium, to design, to even the unique pricing structure... the game industry will be heavily influenced by the successes and failures of this unique genre of gaming.
The Fighting Game:
Sadly, I was born too late for Bruce Lee and the martial arts movies of the late 70s. For my generation, our martial arts fix came on a smaller screen via the local arcade. We grew up on Street Fighter, Mortal Combat, Primal Rage, and Killer Instinct. Our heroes had names like Guile, Kung Lao, and Terry Bogart.
Over time console games brought the action home, as each release allowed for better graphics and gameplay. Today, gamers are hard pressed to find any real differences between the arcade version of Soul Caliber and the home editions (itself a sequel to Soul Edge, which was the Namco rip-off to the earlier Sega Genesis title Eternal Champions).
For a time, the future of fighting games had seemed to be rather linear. Every year brought advances in graphics which allowed each new release to display more beautiful backgrounds, more detailed characters, and more fluid and lifelike animation. It seemed this would continue to be the trend of advancement as the fighting game is, in itself, a pretty basic concept. That was until the MMORPGs. Now all types of gaming genres can grow and evolve by utilizing some of the basic building blocks that make MMORPGs among the most played and profitable titles today.
Ownership:
Online game developers have known for years that ownership is a key factor in keeping players interested to their titles. The more ownership players have over their experience, in general the more loyal they are to the product. It also brings a sense of pride to the player to know that they are playing with something of their own creation, built by their own effort and dedication. In my view, there are three different factors of ownership in online games. One of them, social bonds, can not easily be produced in a fighting game. It can, but in reality, when you add social features to a pure fighting game, it then starts to become more of a RPG-fighting hybrid. With a bit of imagination, the remaining two factors of ownership can be integrated into fighting games to provide a truly unique experience.
A Fighter from your Own Corner:
Fighting games aren't known for outstanding stories. So when the story is lacking, players tend to align themselves with the true focus of any fighting game: the characters. Players new to the game tend to try a few characters with some successes and some failures. Then, driven by the need to be considered skilled by their peers, they tend to pick one character with which to train and advance.
It's entertaining to watch how obsessive some fans are with their favorite fighter. They'll tell you why Siegfried is the most well rounded character in one breath, while explaining detailed reasons why Ryu is better than Ken in the next. All this excitement for characters from someone else's imagination. That in itself is both powerful and significant.
MMORPGs have shown us how much the simple task of character creation can enhance the player experience. We've seen this in its early stages in some console fighting games. But no where to the level achieved in even current online games. Character creation in Star Wars Galaxies is an event in itself, as many players spend a great deal of time choosing between the countless customization options for their characters. City of Heroes boasts a character creation system capable of generating over a million distinctly different characters. In the future, the capacity of character creation systems will only improve. Integrating this one feature into fighting games will do wonders to stimulate player enjoyment and improve replayability.
But we won't just stop with customizing faces, creating fancy fighting costumes, and giving them names. The entire RPG-like creation process should be brought into the fighting arena. After designing a new character, the player can then make choices about statistics and attributes. A simple method would be to use a sliding scale. For example, a player is given 200 points to divide between power, speed, and stamina. This could vary from title to title. One game might have a statistic for energy used in fireballs, another might have a score for how many "power moves" a character can use during a round. Of course, depending on the realism of the title, all this should be somewhat tied to the character model choices made earlier. A giant wrestler shouldn't be able to be really weak, nor should he have the speed of smaller more agile characters.
Next, we bring over another standard stable of online games: professions. Professions in a fighting game are basically a standardized set of special moves. Wrestler, karate-ka, ninja... the possibilities are legion. The more profession choices are included, the more incentive for a player to replay, experiment, and make new characters.
This is a great start. Players can design their own characters from scratch, set parameters, and assign special moves. But that's not all. Like MMORPGs, these choices made at character creation won't be static, the characters themselves will grow and evolve.
Time + Achievement = Addiction
That's an old joke me and my friends used to use where we said that online game developers were in reality evil mad scientists who locked players into their games. The more time a player put into the game, the more their characters advanced. The more their characters advanced, the least willing they were to delete their characters and give up the results of all that effort. Thus, the players were locked into an endless cycle, falling deeper and deeper into the evil grip of the developers.
Of course this isn't true (for the most part anyway), but no one can disagree that advancement and achievement are very powerful forces in online games today.
Our next step is to bring this sense of advancement to the fighting arena. It's not anything new, advancement has always been there. Literally becoming more skilled at playing a character is advancement. Older fighting games even kept score (in a true arcade-like sense), newer games usually keep scores of win totals, etc. These are forms of advancement too.
I dislike the use of levels in MMORPGs for a variety of reasons, but for our purposes, they would work just fine for a fighting game. After character creation, a new level 1 fighter might have access to only a few special moves. Fighting computer opponents in a story-mode or participating in side-games could provide experience points that could be used to increase a character's level. Achieving a new level could provide new special moves or the chance to increase statistics (power, speed, agility, etc.). In this system, instead of overwhelming the player with the complete list of special moves (most of which they'll never be able to do right off), we present them slowly as both the character advances in ability combined with the player's advance in skill.
To obtain true rewards; however, the player would have to bring his carefully crafted fighter onto a higher stage. Emulators have done it for years, but now is the time for mainstream fighting games to enter the online arena. It's not something terribly difficult to do. You could model the entire enterprise after Blizzard's highly successful Battle.net system. Characters would advance and fall in rank based on the who they battle and how much success they have. Frequent tournaments could be held between the best players. It also could become very strategic when good players have more than one skilled character and opponents would have to guess which of their characters might match up the best.
Playing online should also reward players with experience. I call this online experience type, battle points, to differentiate it from regular experience points. They are different simply because it's usually more challenging to play actual live opponents and that difficulty should provide different rewards. Players could spent their accumulated battle points to purchase special enhancements for their characters. Things like the option to create multiple costumes, items that signify rank, level or achievement, as well as the ability to mask character information from others. For a rare treat, players could even purchase entrance to secondary professions for their character, giving them access to special moves originally alien to them.
And the rest...
A few closing notes. Lots of people ask me, how do you balance something like this? My quick answer? You don't. If too many people gravitate to a single combination of professions/special moves, there will be an equal movement of players dedicated to breaking that superiority. It's worked in fighting games of the past and will in the future. Character development should also be left as open as possible. It should be possible to create characters some would consider gimped or ineffective. Some people like challenges, and the only thing more impressive than a skilled player with a well crafted player, is a skilled player finding success with a sub par character.
The basis of this idea is from years ago, long before I came to MMORPGs. I envisioned it as a sort of arcade system. Players would have to purchase memory cards to store their characters. They would play on futuristic arcade cabinets, each connected to each other and the internet, allowing players to challenge the most skilled players anywhere. Don't think players would pay to buy memory cards and then pay to play the game. They already do. Unlike in America, Japan is a mecca for advanced arcade development. Sega's four player Japanese RPG "The Key to Avalon", comes immediately to mind as a arcade title that requires players to first purchase a deck a cards as a prerequisite for play.
However, recent years have seen tremendous console development, the like I could not have imagined in the early 90s. Today, with console internet connections and console hard drives advancing, the ideas presented here are much more likely to happen in a console environment. And this will happen, it's only a matter of time. MMORPGs have not only given fighting games a unique new path for growth, it's given them their only logical path for growth.
(Anyone involved in creative thinking has had that experience of pondering some new and fantastic innovation, forgetting about it, then actually seeing it in the marketplace years later. Every kid that played early console games in the late '80s, including me, had the passing thought of "why can't I play my friends down the street?" And of course, thanks to X-Box Live and others, you can. I originally wrote this essay in early 2004. And I'm amazed in just two years how much of this is actually happening. The X-Box Live team should get an award for the work they are doing. And "arcade game memory cards?" Look no further than Tekken 5 and the new Super Mario Kart Arcade game. With that preface out of the way... now we can get on with this now notably dated essay...)
To many, MMORPGs represent the forefront of gaming. From the online medium, to design, to even the unique pricing structure... the game industry will be heavily influenced by the successes and failures of this unique genre of gaming.
The Fighting Game:
Sadly, I was born too late for Bruce Lee and the martial arts movies of the late 70s. For my generation, our martial arts fix came on a smaller screen via the local arcade. We grew up on Street Fighter, Mortal Combat, Primal Rage, and Killer Instinct. Our heroes had names like Guile, Kung Lao, and Terry Bogart.
Over time console games brought the action home, as each release allowed for better graphics and gameplay. Today, gamers are hard pressed to find any real differences between the arcade version of Soul Caliber and the home editions (itself a sequel to Soul Edge, which was the Namco rip-off to the earlier Sega Genesis title Eternal Champions).
For a time, the future of fighting games had seemed to be rather linear. Every year brought advances in graphics which allowed each new release to display more beautiful backgrounds, more detailed characters, and more fluid and lifelike animation. It seemed this would continue to be the trend of advancement as the fighting game is, in itself, a pretty basic concept. That was until the MMORPGs. Now all types of gaming genres can grow and evolve by utilizing some of the basic building blocks that make MMORPGs among the most played and profitable titles today.
Ownership:
Online game developers have known for years that ownership is a key factor in keeping players interested to their titles. The more ownership players have over their experience, in general the more loyal they are to the product. It also brings a sense of pride to the player to know that they are playing with something of their own creation, built by their own effort and dedication. In my view, there are three different factors of ownership in online games. One of them, social bonds, can not easily be produced in a fighting game. It can, but in reality, when you add social features to a pure fighting game, it then starts to become more of a RPG-fighting hybrid. With a bit of imagination, the remaining two factors of ownership can be integrated into fighting games to provide a truly unique experience.
A Fighter from your Own Corner:
Fighting games aren't known for outstanding stories. So when the story is lacking, players tend to align themselves with the true focus of any fighting game: the characters. Players new to the game tend to try a few characters with some successes and some failures. Then, driven by the need to be considered skilled by their peers, they tend to pick one character with which to train and advance.
It's entertaining to watch how obsessive some fans are with their favorite fighter. They'll tell you why Siegfried is the most well rounded character in one breath, while explaining detailed reasons why Ryu is better than Ken in the next. All this excitement for characters from someone else's imagination. That in itself is both powerful and significant.
MMORPGs have shown us how much the simple task of character creation can enhance the player experience. We've seen this in its early stages in some console fighting games. But no where to the level achieved in even current online games. Character creation in Star Wars Galaxies is an event in itself, as many players spend a great deal of time choosing between the countless customization options for their characters. City of Heroes boasts a character creation system capable of generating over a million distinctly different characters. In the future, the capacity of character creation systems will only improve. Integrating this one feature into fighting games will do wonders to stimulate player enjoyment and improve replayability.
But we won't just stop with customizing faces, creating fancy fighting costumes, and giving them names. The entire RPG-like creation process should be brought into the fighting arena. After designing a new character, the player can then make choices about statistics and attributes. A simple method would be to use a sliding scale. For example, a player is given 200 points to divide between power, speed, and stamina. This could vary from title to title. One game might have a statistic for energy used in fireballs, another might have a score for how many "power moves" a character can use during a round. Of course, depending on the realism of the title, all this should be somewhat tied to the character model choices made earlier. A giant wrestler shouldn't be able to be really weak, nor should he have the speed of smaller more agile characters.
Next, we bring over another standard stable of online games: professions. Professions in a fighting game are basically a standardized set of special moves. Wrestler, karate-ka, ninja... the possibilities are legion. The more profession choices are included, the more incentive for a player to replay, experiment, and make new characters.
This is a great start. Players can design their own characters from scratch, set parameters, and assign special moves. But that's not all. Like MMORPGs, these choices made at character creation won't be static, the characters themselves will grow and evolve.
Time + Achievement = Addiction
That's an old joke me and my friends used to use where we said that online game developers were in reality evil mad scientists who locked players into their games. The more time a player put into the game, the more their characters advanced. The more their characters advanced, the least willing they were to delete their characters and give up the results of all that effort. Thus, the players were locked into an endless cycle, falling deeper and deeper into the evil grip of the developers.
Of course this isn't true (for the most part anyway), but no one can disagree that advancement and achievement are very powerful forces in online games today.
Our next step is to bring this sense of advancement to the fighting arena. It's not anything new, advancement has always been there. Literally becoming more skilled at playing a character is advancement. Older fighting games even kept score (in a true arcade-like sense), newer games usually keep scores of win totals, etc. These are forms of advancement too.
I dislike the use of levels in MMORPGs for a variety of reasons, but for our purposes, they would work just fine for a fighting game. After character creation, a new level 1 fighter might have access to only a few special moves. Fighting computer opponents in a story-mode or participating in side-games could provide experience points that could be used to increase a character's level. Achieving a new level could provide new special moves or the chance to increase statistics (power, speed, agility, etc.). In this system, instead of overwhelming the player with the complete list of special moves (most of which they'll never be able to do right off), we present them slowly as both the character advances in ability combined with the player's advance in skill.
To obtain true rewards; however, the player would have to bring his carefully crafted fighter onto a higher stage. Emulators have done it for years, but now is the time for mainstream fighting games to enter the online arena. It's not something terribly difficult to do. You could model the entire enterprise after Blizzard's highly successful Battle.net system. Characters would advance and fall in rank based on the who they battle and how much success they have. Frequent tournaments could be held between the best players. It also could become very strategic when good players have more than one skilled character and opponents would have to guess which of their characters might match up the best.
Playing online should also reward players with experience. I call this online experience type, battle points, to differentiate it from regular experience points. They are different simply because it's usually more challenging to play actual live opponents and that difficulty should provide different rewards. Players could spent their accumulated battle points to purchase special enhancements for their characters. Things like the option to create multiple costumes, items that signify rank, level or achievement, as well as the ability to mask character information from others. For a rare treat, players could even purchase entrance to secondary professions for their character, giving them access to special moves originally alien to them.
And the rest...
A few closing notes. Lots of people ask me, how do you balance something like this? My quick answer? You don't. If too many people gravitate to a single combination of professions/special moves, there will be an equal movement of players dedicated to breaking that superiority. It's worked in fighting games of the past and will in the future. Character development should also be left as open as possible. It should be possible to create characters some would consider gimped or ineffective. Some people like challenges, and the only thing more impressive than a skilled player with a well crafted player, is a skilled player finding success with a sub par character.
The basis of this idea is from years ago, long before I came to MMORPGs. I envisioned it as a sort of arcade system. Players would have to purchase memory cards to store their characters. They would play on futuristic arcade cabinets, each connected to each other and the internet, allowing players to challenge the most skilled players anywhere. Don't think players would pay to buy memory cards and then pay to play the game. They already do. Unlike in America, Japan is a mecca for advanced arcade development. Sega's four player Japanese RPG "The Key to Avalon", comes immediately to mind as a arcade title that requires players to first purchase a deck a cards as a prerequisite for play.
However, recent years have seen tremendous console development, the like I could not have imagined in the early 90s. Today, with console internet connections and console hard drives advancing, the ideas presented here are much more likely to happen in a console environment. And this will happen, it's only a matter of time. MMORPGs have not only given fighting games a unique new path for growth, it's given them their only logical path for growth.
