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"the grind is dead" Dean Hall - Developer Session EGX 2014
plaztikman64
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Very interesting though, wonder what STO devs would say to some of the statements he's made :rolleyes:
Very interesting though, wonder what STO devs would say to some of the statements he's made :rolleyes:
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They won't be able to hear it over the sound of all those virtual cash registers going "Ching ching"
Free Tibet!
Anyone care to sum up what this guy is saying that's so different then what everyone else has already said a thousand times?
He doesn't like Open Access or kickstarter either, and is also looking for something different... Ahem.
His idea how to make a game "non-grind" also seem to be mostly about player interaction driving the game ("creating context", as he put it). But how exactly? The example he mentions is I believe a survival game where he (as designer) bascially put carebears in killers* in a game and have them go at each other, e.g. the carebears working together to fend of killers or something like that? Not sure, I don't know his mod or any other game he did, and I didn'T recognize the names. Might be due to his accent.
EDIT:
*) Sorry, not "killers", "griefers". Because we all want griefers in our games to make them better.
I like the way he reflecting the situation and is sort of trying to come up with ideas against the "common mainstream methods", like grinding, DLC ect. without actually attacking them as such, knowing exactly that some things simple can't be changed now or at any point soon.
Yeah, but knowing it was in London ruins the joke...
He's basically the same FPS twit from over a decade ago saying that MMOs are doing it wrong.
Different people like different kinds of games...he's in the position where he could try to make his MMOFPS sandbox and if folks want to play it, that's great - wish him the best with that. His preference for things does not mean anybody else is doing it wrong...just that they've been doing it wrong for what he wants.
I guess you've missed the point where he actually said that there are a few MMO's out there that are doing it right... I actually find him rather innovative & constructive but yeah... that's just my opinion.
It's not about him trying to tell others what and what not to do, it's about keeping an open mind and consider different approaches, risky or not, with the ultimate goal, to satisfy the player. At least that's how I've perceived this presentation though.
"we don't have to push players into the grind" is a strong message and should tell you something about his intentions. Some grinding is fun and maybe even necessary for some things at some point, but does the entire game has to be build upon this one and only method in order to break down profit? I think recent trends in STO, especially the feedback from the playerbase has shown that is is not wanted in that extent...
And that's all his thing is...an opinion. It's like taking some random post off from a FPS player of MMORPG.com from a decade ago and having somebody read it in front of the camera.
His premise is the grind is dead...yet it's not long before he refers to the interaction being the grind.
He's not even looking to kill off grind, he's just looking to replace a grind he does not like with a grind he does like.
How about we take a look at some history too, eh?
Back with UO when it first came out...myself and everybody I ran with, we were PKKs. We hunted the PKs that hunted the players that weren't really interested in PvP. The PKs created their content. We created our content off of the content they created. Player created content. Felucca/Trammel...enough players didn't want to be a part of anybody else's content.
EQ...corpse runs...XP loss? Some folks didn't want to deal with it. They didn't stay or they wouldn't touch it.
My favorite game...Shadowbane...was never going to get a big playerbase, because folks just didn't and don't want that risk. Me? I loved setting the alarm in the middle of the night on a work night knowing that's when the time had been set for the big fight.
In general, MMOs are where they are today - not because they haven't tried these new things that some "I've got an idea" guy comes up with from time to time...but because those ideas were not what the majority of the players wanted.
Sandbox vs. Themepark discussions have raged forever...it's nothing new.
Like I said, if he's in a position where he can try to go back (and again, it is going back - it's nothing new) and make a decent game for folks that want that...more power to him...it would be awesome.
But that his opinion is anything more than his opinion or that he's actually saying anything new...meh.
Agreed.
He does not even define grind the same way I personally would.
Grind=Repeating the same exact patrol 10x in a row.
Farm=Running three or four different queues to max out my purple rocks.
One I hate. The other I love. I really think there is a huge difference between the two that many do not recognize.
Games are 'extra' expenses.
I would rather grind physical money, so I can go out and buy a house or car.
The number of times that I wished STO was more like EVE was during those first few years...oh man...but it's not. And /facepalm...EVE's becoming more like STO...did I mention /facepalm? Cause yeah.../facepalm.
Because despite what he says...what he prefers...the masses out there want their hats.
So again, I apologize...it was like pulling off a scab.
Perhaps, moddable co-op experiences.
"BioShock: Infinite" meets "Skyrim".
If you ever wondered what happend to music or to movies, how is it getting weaker when technology and knowledge is going up?
Well, then you have the answer to the gaming industry going fubar.
That also means it's going to get worse continously with no end, in all games and in STO.
But what is best? For a game industry, best is where they can earn the most money. But apparently, that's different from what is "best" for players. But... how can that be?
How can the best product for the player not be the best product for the game companies?
Or are we always excluding one component of the "product" here? The price tag component? If the best game that a player could want costs 500 $ per month to support for each player interested on it, but he's only willing to spend 5 $ a month?
I suppose that's the appeal of kickstarters and backer projects like Star Citizen, and even F2P? Players can play as much as they want - if someone is willing to spend 20,000 $ to support SC, he can do it - but if he wants to spend only 5 $, he can do that, too.
Of course, there is a gray zone - how much money is actually made by concealing cost and tricking the player's psyche? But why can we be tricked that easily, damn it?
He isn't talking so much about what to do, and more what he thinks you shouldn't do vis-a-vis designing and implementing games. He seems to think the problem is a lack of innovation to eliminate these don't-do's, but I'm not sure he isn't looking for odd numbers that are divisible by two.
For example, when it comes to funding development, he doesn't like:
a. One time purchase (hard to fund continuous development)
b. Subscriptions (just because)
c. Free-to-play with cosmetic purchases (if you sell important stuff its not free to play, if you sell cosmetic stuff its frivolous is what I get)
d. Pre-release funding campaigns ala Kickstarter (players should have a guaranteed deliverable which isn't possible before release)
That seems to leave car washes, billionaire patrons, and miracles.
Incidentally, although its true he thinks "the grind is dead" its really more than that: he thinks structured gaming itself, with or without the grind, is intrinsically bad. The grind is just a side effect. He thinks "gamers" want problems to solve, which may not even be solvable. Specifically, he thinks predesigning problems with predesigned solutions railroads players and makes the content boring, and guaranteed success makes gaming pointless.
The problem I think is that while some players want that kind of content some of the time, I think the vast majority don't, even if they say they do.
I'm not critical of the talk because this is a developer brainstorming out loud: he's not specifically preaching (too much) per se and this kind of thinking is good from the people making games. I just think however much he wants it to be true, a game that is massively multiplayer, with a magically optional but sustainable funding source, with completely open rules unstructured content, that has individually customized persistence and consequence, and has no specific metric for success but lots of ways to fail, isn't really possible.
The problem as I see it is when non-developer players see that talk, point to it, say "see, he gets it, now make that" and expect there exists any human being on Earth capable of even articulating it, much less making it. Even Hall admits most of the things he perceives as problems are things he has no current solution for, or even a hint of a solution for, at least not yet.
He's a developer, and probably rich (by normal people standards) and can afford to spend lots of time thinking about these problems. That's great: I hope he finds solutions to them. But I think he may be thinking about them for a very long time.
But that's kind of the thing, that's another opinion...and what's the reality behind that opinion? That those smallish co-op games led to co-op games with more and more players...until we got the terms MMORTS and MMOFPS.
Cause although some folks preferred that co-op play at a certain level...the masses took it elsewhere.
I remember back in the early 2000's with Neverwinter's Aurora Toolset thinking that was going to be the future...that we'd get that for other genres at some point - etc, etc, etc. Nah, it ended up being a hobbyist thing. It never went mainstream. We didn't just play through scripted modules...we had live DMs giving us new stuff as we played, dropping stuff out, it was epic. But it never went mainstream.
Star Trek cries out for a co-op game to me...where folks are members of the crew out doing stuff...not a themepark third person shooter where Fleet Admirals are a 2 EC a dozen.
But that's life...that's gaming...
I'm glad you mentioned that...because in my experience, it's not even just solvable vs. non-solvable; it's the difficulty of the solvable content that's at hand as well. The Secret World, during the beta...there were all sorts of puzzles. It wasn't just grab the book off the desk, it wasn't just go kill ten of these buggers, and so forth...there were puzzles.
I thought it was freaking awesome...er...
There were a bunch of folks that hated it. There were a bunch of folks that just spammed chat looking for answers. It just wasn't the game for everybody...
...meh, if I wasn't playing on a toaster - I would have grabbed that game in a heartbeat, cause I thought that it was epic. I could exercise my mind as well as blow stuff up...was the best of both worlds...oh well.
I think we're different. I can like puzzles, to some extent. But often I find them frustrating. Especially riddles often require you to make one particular leap of understanding that ... you either get or don't, and if you don't, you're sitting there, and not getting any ideas, and it's terrible. It's like waiting for some magic to happen, but you're running in circles. I'd rather blow up some Kazon (or the occasional Malon or Hirogen)...
It's not like I am averse in general to problem solving. I am a software developer in real life, that's pretty much all I do. Maybe that's why I need a diversion. Or maybe some puzzles pose a kind of problem I don't have the right methods to address. There can be frustrating software "puzzles", too - bugs that are hard to reproduce. And those I hate, too. But, of course... when you fix them, it's great.
That's okay mate. I respect you for that and your opinion.
Way I see it.. there are people (most of the playerbase of any game I've played so far) who just go with the flow and don't really care about what's happening to a game, good or bad, as long as they're having fun. Most people don't stand up and form an opinion but just quit and move along. There has been a breaking point for most of the games out there, for most sooner than expected and vise versa. I just hope that STO is not going down for the wrong reasons, because actually, everything is awesome, or should be though... :P
I love diversity and innovations, especially when they're so strange or not out of the box and are very successful because of that, even though nobody would've guessed so in the first place. This is what this presentation, what Dean Hall stands for, and DayZ is underlining that.
+1 Couldn't have put it into words any better myself really
player interactions as endgame or as the entire game. BSGO is entirely player interaction based, quest for epic loot, another heavily reliant on players providing the content for other players. the grind is only dead so far as constant RNG generated rewards with low chances to acquire anything and no counter or other mechanic to eventually give you what you're after.
that kind of rng grind needs to go and has needed to go for a long time. where you could get it the first attempt...or never. that kind of roll of the dice grinding was never popular except among lazy devs. it could be mitigated however by having multiple mission/quest types where the item(s) could be acquired. (variety)
then there's the guaranteed grind, where the player may receive tokens or there's an incremental counter for how many times they've ran it where they (if unlucky at rng) eventually get what they seek as an end reward pick or by turning in those tokens.
grinds are useful and can be if not fun at least tolerable if given variety, more than one way to acquire what a player seeks.
all in all this guy already has one of the most important qualifications for a developer...ego. much of what he says is wrong. it's funny when developers try to say they know what gamers want...how can they? they aren't gamers. gamer and developer are 2 totally different perspectives.
it is possible to have both perspectives in one person...but that is rare and he isn't one of those. once you have a fixed idea of what you think will work you've already lost the plot.
flexibility, adaptation, and the willingness to listen to your players as well as entertain new concepts rather than fixate on old ideas or ideas that have proven to be failures even though they worked at one time that ability to give them up to find a new way is required.
gamers change, nearly on a month by month basis. sure, you can have demographics...that are only useful for about 6 months. why is that demographic information useless past a certain point? why do gamers change so rapidly?
because by the time they reach your game you have no idea what they've played before. if mechanics of your game are similar to the ones they've played before they aren't going to stay long. if they've been in games with high grinds they aren't going to be too thrilled in another game with the same kind of grind.
that's why wow clones tend not to do well. why sequels for standalones or further clones that mostly copy the previous/other games successful points don't do as well as the first.
boredom, humans are good at finding patterns, games are patterns, how many times is anyone willing to repeat a pattern? you might as well do factory line work. something sto players are familiar with >.>
Donate Brains, zombies in Washington DC are starving.
They do that because its safe. They know they can get x people to play and pay for the game. There are not a lot of risk takers in this industry or others because if you loose.. you loose big. In the corporate world of AAA games this is expensive.
You will notice that large companies watch indy companies and often pull from them (heck even hire them to do the work and purchase their software etc) there is a reason for that lol.
Anyhow I watched his video or about half of it. He expresses an opinion which I sort of agree with however he is also saying that games have to be partly unpleasant for people to play them. I dont agree with that because I know if its not pleasant i dont play and there are many out there like that. As one ages one likes often less drama and angst and stress in their entertainment time.
Some companies are trying to do things similar to what this guy is doing and those things are starting to enter beta phases etc. This stuff he speaks of is ending because its very expensive to produce and has limited playability. Companies are slowly swinging the other direction with their game design and in the future I think we will find more open ended games and less treadmill type stuff. I like both types though there is not one "good" type of game and one "bad" type of game. People are more complex then that and his game type will cater to one type of like and those are the customers he will draw.
ON a side note although I enjoy open ended games I hate DayZ so obviously he did not manage to build a game I will play
Most players want structure, most people aren't that creative and most don't want to think too hard about what they can do, they want someone to tell them what they can do, and make the choice from there.
Grinding should be dead though, but his version of grinding doesn't have to be a grind, its just really really easy for devs to reuse the same ideas over and over when on a production timeline. Atari was well known for this, they'd tell the devs they need to add 3000 quests in the game, because the box is going to say thats whats in it, no discussion.. so the devs start their own grind, they hate it, and you get the kill, collect, go to quests that are bugged and broken. You wonder why Atari went bankrupt.
Too bad creating puzzles, original and insightful quests is expensive. They also never reward well, and take too long to complete and always end up rewarding something boring or formulaic just like the grind missions.
He doesn't like buy and play, subs or f2p.. he may or may not like something he may or may not invent. If he has this much expertise on the subject..
Subs are tough, unless you go with a tiered sub version, so even casual players can join in, kind of like your internet service.
F2Ps are rarely done right, and its just so easy to cross that line and sell power which then just makes the game a business of metrics instead of fun.
Buy and play games, pretty tough model, you'll see more open world games with them, their costs are low because they aren't developing a whole lot of content. You need to invalidate your game at some point to go and sell your new one, because the funds from the box sales will run out sooner or later.
Completed Starbase, Embassy, Mine, Spire and No Win Scenario
Nothing to do anymore.
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Make a subscription based game to make sure your customer base is invested and discourage giefers and spammers.
Make it an immersive single player game with multiplayer capability using cloud based resources.
Don't make any one type of play more beneficial in some way IE: Fleeties and Starbases having better stuff.
The benefit of multiplayer should be spending time with friends, nothing more.
Don't worry about how an MMO should be, make something unique and profit.
This is the major mistake all game designers make, don't pick one playstyle over another, support both.