Communications

One of the goals of Shattered World is to make a far more omnipresent communications structure. The hope is to allow the community to express itself and maintain in-game communications out of game.

Technologies like PlayXPert certainly seem tempting, but there are a few major concerns for working them in as part of the game. For instance we need a ‘lite’ version of the UI which is ever present during our game, which would be our effective chat widget. That widget also needs to work as the in-game chat works, knowing zones and channels. Basically there is, as yet, no plug and play solution for how I intend it to work.

Vivox on the other hand is an easy enough choice. While most likely more expensive it is a developer API at it’s core. This allows it to easily integrate into whatever system or core engine we eventually decide on. While the game can’t run purely on voice, building in voip with Vivox is just good business.

Management

Managing friend lists, guilds, and ignore lists is made both easy and powerful with the graphical tier system. The exact features of the page are slightly different from page to page, but in it’s most basic form, the page is simply a group of containers. There are individual containers which contain a link to a player, these will show headshots of thier avatar and name. You then have tier containers, which are overall groups of players, and then subgroups, which represent players bound together as a group. You can finally add labels to tiers, groups or players, allowing you to easily identify important roles or information.

For guild management, the screen shows a set of tiers, the top being the founder teir which can only be altered by the founder, and the bottom being the members tier which is where all guild mates are automatically dumped. As a founder you then drag up an empty tier, you grab the authority arrow tool and click on a tier with more authority than it, and then drag down to it. It will automatically move it to the line below that particular tier. You may then use the authority arrow tool and drag from it to any other tier on par or below it. This sets it’s seniority to be above the other tier, which also allows it to automatically gain authority over any group that the lesser seniority group is in authority over.

You can also right click on any tier besides founder or members and set them to be electable and set the times for elections, as well as the number of votes per player. When players log on during election times, there will be a stack of election tokens, they simply drag the election token onto the player they choose to elect. Groups can be added to any tier, including the founders tier, though only by the founder. Groups may have lateral authority over other members of their tier. For instance you may make a group on the founders tier with six month election rotations, then draw an authority arrow to the founder, this makes the new leaders of the guild a democratically elected council.

Your friends screen begins as only three tiers and is entirely void of authority lines. The beginning tiers are friends, and group, anyone in a group you are in may be easily dragged upwards into your friend tiers for more permanent bonds. The third tier is the search tier, it has a small text box allowing you to search for the name of a player, and returns the player links for any players matching your search filter. You may drag up new tiers, but when you do you will be asked to name them. These named tiers will now work as channels, allowing you to simply type /t to send a message to everyone on that tier. You may also drag tiers into chat, and drag tiers out of chat to import or export entire tier setups, allowing you to easily share tier channels.

Finally you have your ignore list, which has four tiers. The bottom is the search tier, and the top is the highest ignore tier. Typing /ignore player automatically adds the player to the top tier, you will ignore their yells, their says, any chat of any sort, and any private tells. The level below it will block any tells, says and regular chat, but not shouts nor grouped chat, you will be warned when joining a group if a member in it is in any of your ignore lists. The final ignore is a soft ignore, allowing you to block tells and tells only.

At any point, simply picking up any object you have authority over and dropping it on the trash container will remove it.

The tier system should be accessable from outside of the game as well through the chat program.

This will be a short one in comparison, and it actually makes me a bit sad to think about it.

Given our current level of technology, I don’t think I’ll be getting to the scale I want. I haven’t gotten any comments on this, but I imagine when I showed the first photo of the island, your mind automatically did something like this.

But strangely enough, I actually like having continents larger than a small island in the Bahamas. In fact my island is much larger.

I was thinking closer to Ireland.

There are a few things that this brings to the table.

Travel Forms and Mounts

Unlike games like WoW, you won’t be working your ass off saving every penny hoping that you might some day be able to travel faster than a snail’s toe, just as soon as you get well over halfway to the level cap. No, you should have a travel form of some sort by the time you exit the starting city, assuming you ever exit the starting city. You may have the appearance upgrade of wings, though you will need to put more points into it to counteract enough weight to stay afloat, or you can upgrade for quadrupedal, equine or insectoid. Or you can buy things like roller blades, add to kicking attack as they are literal blades, motorcycles, or ATV like things. Also guilds with their own towns can open portals.

Society and Gameplay

Imagine, if you will, that a bunch of friends are sitting around in a player owned tavern, playing Texas Hold ‘em for kicks, shooting the shit up in the mountains north of Matre’s Mind. One of their friends who is on a shared channel with the group is running around helping newbies back at the main city. Finally this friend goes on a long tirade about all these f*ing gankers interrupting their helping the newbies. One of them types half jokingly, “why not just move South?”
Someone else pulls out the map that came with their box, “Aren’t there supposed to be Angel mobs down there?”
“Yeah have you seen the screens that one guy put up of them, totally weird crap…”
“Hey, if we all chipped in, we could start a city down there. I mean how many gankers are going to play for six hours of travel just to get their asses kicked by town guards.”
They all laugh.

Three days later…
“Hey Krimper, can you go buy a field transport kit.”
“A what? Where the hell are you?”
“I’m sitting in our brand new Town hall!”
“Where the hell is that?”
“Well, I can’t tell for sure, I just kind of walked around exploring for a few days until I found the Northern Angel Fortress… Great view of it from here!”
“Holy crap… give me a second, I’ll go pick one up.”

A year later.
The same group of friends plus about eighty other players sit on some hills watching Angels and Demons duke it out over the “don’t effin build here you twats” zone. It wasn’t that they hadn’t seen it before, only five or six of the players were new enough to the South to be seeing it for the first time.
“You see the way the Heavy Defenders hit the ground first, they do the same thing in fortress seiges, but not in town attacks. In town attacks they’ll usually drop in around the town hall, try to dps the crap out of it before you can retaliate.”
“So we all group around the town hall?”
“Nah… what you do is…”
It been a long time since they had been learning that the hard way. The early days of loosing town halls and farms, about every week had been tough. Now though, they were pretty successful at keeping their little alliances’ territory. The “Southerners” as they thought of themselves had even built their own forums site, they were just too far removed from the politics up north for it to matter. The Northerners were going to be taking a keep sometime this week, supposedly. It wasn’t something the Southerners were going to succeed at any time soon, the Angels had at least twice as many troops as the demons, and so much time was spent fighting them off there really wasn’t time to try and push it back to them.
The battle below was starting to look more certain, the demons were getting pushed back hard. Finally the leader stands and all the others stand up right along with him.
“What do you say we make this a wee bit more even guys?”
“Lets roll!”

PvP

After making the last post, I had some time to think, and some questions to answer. It seemed to me that I had missed a few important details in Character progression. First, though I want to go into a bit about PvP and how it’s connected to what I posted last time.

First off, biomass. Biomass can be aquired through the killing of NPCs (level 300+ only) the killing of players or from farming. If you die, no matter how you die, you loose biomass and all equipped weapons that are not appearance upgrades. The lost biomass will come out of your floating pool first, then out of appearance upgrades starting at your highest level upgrade.

While I’ll go into it more, the way pvp and character progression connect most directly is that you are only allowed to attack people +/- 5 levels. This is important because every ten levels your biomass doubles, this means you’ll be fighting people within 75-150% of your current level. Enough to allow some ganking, but not enough to ever make it honestly easy. Now why would I limit you in such a way when the levels are theoretically infinite? Because it means that all players of all levels are needed by a good guild. So you’ve only made it to level 10? Great! You can walk right past an entire guild and start attacking the buildings that aren’t inside the town proper. You can get low level gangs together to run around ganking or destroying unprotected buildings in the middle of nowhere, or you can run medium level, testing different builds until you find the one that works for you and then polishing it to a perfect shine.

There are a few important exceptions, though. The first is within the limits of a town belonging to your guild. Inside those limits you may attack any player, no matter their level, that is not a member of your guild or alliance. Second is declared guild wars, these will allow you to attack within fifteen levels, and finally Alliance wars, which raise the limit to 30.

But enough of that for now…

Character Progression Part II – Abilities

Now last time I said something I live by, abilities are fun! Clicking things and watching something happen is by far and away one of the funnest things in games. The problem with staying out on the macro as often as I do is that sometimes you loose sight of the little things. Like, the fun and what not. I really hope that this isn’t the case with my system.

You’ll begin with the standard row of action buttons, 1-10, this is your general action bar. The first three are the basis of all future combat, these are punch, block and kick, arguably the basis of all martial arts. While unarmed punching is your basic damaging attack, blocking will reduce the damage of the next incoming hit and kicking will do some damage and cause knockback. All players have those basic abilities, and if you open the skill window, will show up in the ‘unarmed’ skill cloud.

You see, each weapon type has it’s own “ability cloud” they aren’t trees, as such, rather groupings of abilities which can be preformed while carrying that type of weapon. Each one has a minimum statistical requirement unlocking for you to use as soon as you meet it’s minimum requirements. Each picture will also have a set of small pictures you can zoom in on to it’s left connected to it with lines pointing to it, and on it’s right with lines pointing away from it. During battle, if you use the ability to it’s left, then it, it’s effectiveness will be increased, the effectiveness of an ability on it’s right will be likewise increased if it’s used first.

Combat

Combat itself isn’t too terribly different from what you’ve played before. There will be an auto-attack, but very minor global cooldown and significantly more powerful active abilities so no real reason to use it as a crutch. I wish I could say combat would be new and innovative, but it’s something I’ve seen done right enough times to not want to re-invent the wheel with it.

I do have a few minor additions though. The weight of a weapon or shield will counter your speed, increasing the cool down time of abilities using it. Also, a shield does not effect your damage mitigation what so ever. That is why you have a block ability, when you have a shield equipped, it will take the physical damage of the next attack straight to it’s own HP when you block. Damage it too much and it breaks, permanently gone. Of course people with high enough channeling statistics, I haven’t decided on the appearance for that one just yet, can channel biomass into a shield healing it. Actually, all weapons have HP,which is why they are destroyed when you die, this comes into play when you parry or block with a weapon instead of a shield.

It’s comparatively boring. However, it’s the secondary anchor, opposite character creation, so it needs to be stable and remain intuitive and relatively fun for years to come.

First off, props to Rayne and his Making the MMO series of posts for inspiring me to do this in the first place.

The Process

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that when some of you read the words, “classless skilless” in my last post it made you tip your head a little. Now if you can bear with me, I’m going to go into why I made the system I did, and what process I went through to come to it, before actually going into the details of how the system works.

After spending months hanging out over on the multiverse developers forums, I learned alot about actual game design. What I also saw was that certain ideas really tended to resonate with people, but few could actually explain why, or point out why they were so superior. Personally, I internalized much of the information, took part in various debates, discussed it with some level headed individuals, then after weighing all sides, began working on this.

What I had found was that, by and large, very few people liked the idea of having straight up levels. Killing rabbits to kill rabbits better can be fun, but more often than not isn’t terribly rewarding in the long run. So people began to harp on skills, you would use them, and they would go up, but just as you used them! Genius, right!? While I do think it’s a solid system, it has a few general issues. For instance, skill decay is almost a necessity, since you can’t have everyone skilled at everything. Which drew you into either creating systems where every character has a static number of skill points and moves them around, such as what Caab posted though I have seen examples of similar systems before, or player demoralizing systems where they could conceivably sit there and watch their skills drop. Lastly, a significant section of people really wanted a system free of statistical analysis where they just watched their character to know things rather than checking the UI.

At the end of the day though, all of these come back to one basic point. Representing the underlying statistics. After playing some more games, including WoW I decided that we could pretty well group the systems that are used to effect your underlying statistics into 4 groups.

Levels
Skills
Abilities
Appearance

Each one is already in use to effect statistics in triple A games right now, since I count Race as a part of appearance. But let’s go through each one a little.

Levels are an excellent system for reporting the rough strength and level of progress a character has attained. The problem is, they have been done to death, and are often used where they are weakest, as a system of progress in and of themselves.

Skills are more representative of the actual level of skill a player would have, which makes them both simple to understand and very direct. My problem with them is that they seem to be a second level of abstraction, abstracting things out too many times away from the real core is almost always messy and bad.

Abilities are things players click or press a button and use. THESE ARE FUN! In all seriousness, there is nothing in an MMO that contributes as much to the sheer fun factor as Abilities. The cons are, they suffer terribly from lag, since activating them too late is often fatal. However, we have ways of dealing with that.

Appearance is probably the most underused of them all. People like to look at their pretty new armor, and like to look at their character as they grow and progress, but it’s an incredible amount of work to add new armors and what not to the models.

So what did I do? I simplified, cut and rolled them all up into a single category, Appearance. I then connected that one category to the base statistics which make up the computer’s concept of your character. Much like in the game of go, the removal of the more complex systems actually opens up an incredible number of options and possibilities. It adds depth, while simplifying initial game play.

Character Progression

In the Shattered World system, all players start off essentially the same, with the same starting statistics. As they perform early training quests they earn biomass, that’s where the game of character creation really starts.

Players are allowed to spend biomass on appearance upgrades, these upgrades range from spikes to changing an entire body part to be bestial or insectoid rather than humanoid. Each upgrade group adds to certain skills, and opens or closes some abilities. For instance, your basic strength and toughness are increased when you increase your size, allowing you to wield heavier and bigger weapons or armor, and denser muscles will increase strength and speed, allowing you to move faster, hit harder and wield heavier, though not bigger, equipment.

These changes are immediately reflected in your character, you look stronger, bigger, scarier, or meaner immediately upon purchasing the upgrade. When your overall stats increase, your level increases, reporting the change in your character. When you equip armor or weapons that increase total damage mitigation or damage output, it will also effect your level. If there will ever be a cap on levels, it will be imposed simply to prevent values from becoming so large as to cause bugs in the game engine.

Now, since I mentioned it earlier, some of you might be asking, how can all this asset modeling be accomplished? Simple, procedural changes. If you only had to model every upgrade twice, very young and very mature, you could then create procedures to automatically generate the in-between stages. Tweening basically. Armor models can be built to accommodate all upgrades at very young and very mature stages, then tween and blend to allow for it to dynamically choose the correct armor. These can be pre-generated and stored in a data file to save client run-time, or be run by the client at run time to save disk space.

Original Go Raise Your Game Post

So there it is on Go Raise your game, the line breaks are now back in, btw.

A game without skills or classes, but still maintaining character progression built around mostly open ended PvP, player built cities, powerful guild management and communication tools. Shattered world also attacks the problems of PvE and end game raiding head on, allowing players to observe real change in their environment that they initiate. Crafting will also be meaningful and challenging.

Characters begin in Shattered World, not looking much different from a typical humanoid. However, when you collect Biomass, the basis of all in-game crafting and creation, you can absorb it and devote it to a mutation. These can be anything from denser muscles to growing two percent larger. What mutations you select will change the appropriate character statistics, your level is the average of all your statistics.

PvP is allowed for anyone within five levels of you, without setting any flags or doing anything at all other than walking up and attacking them. You may select from two factions to begin with, Purist and Carnalist. While aligned with the Purists, you will be fined both scrip(currency) and biomass when you kill a player without a bounty. When aligned with Carnalist, you will not be fined for killing a player, however the bounty placed on your head for pking will be doubled. While in the starting city, guards will defend players without bounties when they come under attack.

Players may build their own cities in the wild. Though any building may be placed anywhere, if you find a wide enough space of open ground you can build a Town Hall which will give your guild the ability act as planning and zoning within the effected area. You may set certain areas to be marked as road, residential, or commercial only, and/or require the appropriate guild officers signatures on any potential building sites. Buildings are destructible, and will need to be guarded, as such the Town Hall also creates an area in which members of your guild may PK any non-guildmate player without acquiring a bounty. Towns also leverage taxes, taking a percentage of all sales and trades involving scrip or biomass in the area.

The Chat System in Shattered World is actually a separate client that is automatically started anytime you run Shattered World, if it is not already running. After exiting the game, the chat will minimize to your quickbar, but can be opened to chat with guild mates, friends or any other player just as you would were the game running. The hope is this will free you from feeling the need to be at all times, since you can easily find out if you are really needed. It’s powerful guild/player relations tools, should also allow you to contact your in game friends without needing the game running and manage guild functions, friends, and ignore lists without having to enter the game world.

The player versus environment dynamic is turned on it’s head by giving the enemies strategically located spawn in points, and a real time strategy level AI. This means that the AI will intelligently attack player owned towns as well as the starting town. The friendly AI will give quests that work towards it’s goals of defeating the enemy nations. You may see an increase in fetch style quests as they prepare to repel an attack or launch one of their own. During the actual attacks and defenses you will be given kill quests and raid targets based on what will actually help your side’s agenda most.

The environment on Shattered World is, well shattered. You can take on the roles of farming, gardening, foresting, breeding, and a host of others to attempt to repair to the broken landscape and turn the barren desert into a flourishing paradise. Farming and Herding can greatly increase the aggregate Biomass in the world as well, making your guild more powerful and allowing your craftspeople to build heavier arms and equipment.

Crafting is not a matter of merely gathering components, you must also combine them in the correct proportions. Beyond a few simple recipes all others are found through trial and error. The properties of the various metals in the world will have a direct effect on the final product depending on how they are combined. For instance, when creating a sword, you will need to balance the blade and pommel to increase damage dealt, but using too dense of a material for the blade and to light of a material for the hilt will still result in a product that is overly heavy for the amount of damage it deals.