BioWare Austin's Damion Schubert explains his endgame philosophy
We had the pleasure of sitting down with Damion Schubert at AGDC 2008 earlier this month. A longtime commentator and respected developer, Schubert is currently the lead combat designer on BioWare Austin's un-named MMO. While discussion of that still somewhat secretive project was verboten, Schubert kindly gave us a chance to follow up on his talk at this year's conference about the MMO endgame.
We chatted with the designer about a number of issues, including the role of the endgame for new or casual players, the dangers of guild drama, and the overall problems with the endgames of today. Schubert was very careful in his discussion of that last question ... "I think that if somebody could find a way to create a good 25-man PvE experience that could be done ad-hoc, that could be less about "We need these people here at this time" and more about "Hey, show up if you can and we'll try to get this done." I think that's something that players would find a lot less scary."
Read on for our full interview, with insights on the MMO endgame from an industry icon.
Thank you for your time, sir. We were hoping to follow up on your discussion about the endgame of MMOs. Last year in your talk you spoke on the subject of casual vs. hardcore gaming. This year you focused on what is generally thought of as the 'hardcore', the endgame. Why that focus?
Damion Schubert: From my point of view, the best kinds of talks at conferences are the ones that actually talk about concrete, mechanical stuff. Last year I talked about the level grind, things like that. This year I wanted to do an analytical talk, explore why these things work. A lot of people rag on the time and commitment to do the WoW endgame or the Dark Age of Camelot endgame. What they fail to recognize there is that these game systems resonate with a bunch of people. More people than most designers give credit to. As a designer, that means "hey there is something here."
As an industry I think that means we should be looking at these experiences, identifying what works, identify what's fun, get rid of the things that suck, and make these systems and games better. The goal is to appeal to broader and broader markets, right? There might be a version of raiding or city sieging or territorial control that can work in a kids' game! If so, there are going to be some principals that are universal, that really stand out in the systems that are out there now.
That would seem to tie into statements you made last year about the value of the 'hardcore player'. How do you see the genre addressing that kind of player right now, in the games that are out there?
Damion: I think right now we're actually seeing a lot of focus on the opposite; we're seeing too much focus on the casual player, on the quick, fast, light, easy experience. I think that is better than before, when we focused on hardcore guys and screwed the casual guys that didn't want to do long, intense, 100-hour games. For games to really take off, they need to reach both audiences. Really what you want is for the hardcore players to feel like they can evangelize this game to the casual players.
This is especially true in the MMO space, which is a wired audience by definition. One of the reasons that World of Warcraft is successful is, it has this hardcore game. The raiding game, the arenas, the high-end battleground stuff. The people playing the hardcore game are not ashamed to say, "Hey, my wife, you might want to play this." Their family and friends may only ever play the leveling game, but it's something they can find fun too. Most of the top-notch AAA games are doublecoded in that way. They have something very casual and easy to do, and they have something very difficult and challenging to do.
That's probably one of the reasons that the music games resonate as well. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are successful because it's incredibly competitive and difficult to play on expert, but it's still fun and approachable when you're playing as a casual gamer ... when you're playing drunk at a party ...
In your talk you briefly mentioned the reality that endgame content often requires external aids; you can't fight many of the World of Warcraft bosses without an aggro meter, for example. Is it a good thing that developers are assuming you have external tools for these fights?
Damion: I don't think it's a good thing. If you look at any game with PvP, the force multiplier of being on voice chat with teammates is a 10x multiplayer. Communicating as fast as speech is critical, much better than typed communication. In WoW, as you said, Blizzard doesn't provide a threat meter. Players have to provide their own, taking advantage of the little information the company chooses to expose. And that's imperfect as a result – sometimes threat meters have been known to be wrong.
The other issue is that anytime the company screws with those fundamentals, it can break the threatmeter. Until the community fixes that addon you're left trying to do these encounters with the proper tools. It can turn fights that are normally trivial into fights that are near-impossible.
That being said, even if you were to integrate these tools into the game in a good way ... the reason there isn't a threat meter in a lot of these base games is because you don't want to add another core UI element to confuse new players. Even if you were to integrate this into the game players with the ability to mod or players with the ability to run apps on another machine will always be able to bring a competitive advantage to the system.
As a designer you're always left with the question, "Do I balance assuming that players have these tools or balance assuming they don't?" In those two spaces in particular, voice chat and threat meters, designers have assumed that "everybody has them". Otherwise you make the fights ridiculously easy.
How do you think this sort of discussion fits into upcoming changes to World of Warcraft, with the addition of an in-game threat meter and an arguably more casual endgame experience?
Damion: Having spoken with some of the people that work there, I know that Blizzard has a culture of playing their own game. They play it a lot, and in my opinion that's one of the most important philosophy components an MMO team can have. You're getting firsthand information about what's going on inside your spaces instead of just divining, guessing, based on what message boards are telling you. I think they are probably extremely aware of issues inside their space.
To get away from Blizzard into a more general sense one of the thing about designing a territorial control game, about designing a raid game, is considering what the philosophy of expansions will be like. You do concept work on it, and throw it out there, but until the game lives for a while you don't know if that philosophy will work. We've seen a lot of debates about the schedule of releasing content. "Too much raid content too soon? Is the curve too steep, are there too many attunements?" In Shadowbane, territorial control was the basis for the endgame. We had to consider if people were losing too often, was it too fast? Dark Age of Camelot had similar issues with their Realm vs. Realm system.
The issue with this stuff is that there's no way to QA it in its natural state. Talking about a raid game , or city siege game, or RvR game, you're talking about games that are played over the course of six months to a year and a half. All you can do is take your best guess on how things will unfold, and then based on what you've learned through practical experience readjust future content, hope you get things right.
