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I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with ARGs, so I'll explain. ARGs tend to be huge storylines full of mysteries that are setup by a third party, they require thousands of people to work together to uncover or advance the storyline and it requires lots of reading, exploration, research. They usually start up through a website and players discover more and more webpages, some have them calling phone numbers, others visiting pay phones to answer a call at a certain time of day, and in the end the reward is the story/solved mysteries. In 2001 when the internet wasn't as popular as it is today there was an ARG called The Beast which had over 3 million players. At the time, the most popular MMORPG was Lineage with approximately 2 million subscribers. I don't think Lineage was too popular in the US though, below that was Everquest at around 250,000 subscribers.
That's a pretty huge demographic. Consider if this kind of content were implemented in MMORPGs. Rather than a focus on killing the most monsters and wasting the most time to become powerful, the player uses his brain and works together with all the other players in the game trying to unlock the mysteries of the world. I mean just imagine an MMORPG world where the lore tells about things that actually exist in the game, where a dungeon is more than a place to kill a boss monster or farm gold, but a place full of traps, mystery, history, a place where you have to use your brain to get through it, or even find clues from other lore text to make your way through it. The potential is there to offer a much greater gaming experience where the players can be rewarded as a whole with changes to the world for their collective actions.
I'll provide an example of ARG style content in an MMORPG, keep in mind this is pretty shallow, there is a major capacity for it to be much deeper. Let's say in the game world somewhere, there's a massive desert, and in the middle, a huge dead forest bleached white by the sun, and in the center, a massive hole. The hole is deep enough that you can't see the bottom, so players might be worried about jumping in and dieing, due to travel times or some sort of death penalty. The brave player who jumps in will fall into a pool of water at the bottom and find a massive set of doors, and an alcove on each side of the door. Maybe players in another dungeon have discovered a book which tells about this place and how the doors were adorned with two large emeralds, so a player places the emeralds there which causes the doors to open, and they enter the temple, players would need to collaborate to figure this out, maybe someone finds it by luck, but it's unlikely.
Once inside, the players are met with traps, but ultimately it's impossible to get passed them. I'm talking like crusher rooms, spikes coming out of the floor, pits of doom , etc. Maybe another note or book found elsewhere in the world by another player will tell of a secret passage to the side which goes around, or a pressure plate that can be hit with a certain spell to disable them.
Obviously there could be many stages which require the players to get to the end. In the end, there is a library detailing the history of the place, what it used to be, and the downfall of it. Maybe the downfall was that some evil guy built a machine to control the weather, and used it to turn the place into a desert because he's a dick like that. So let's say this weather machine exists somewhere in the world, and it's kind of dilapidated, maybe other players have heard of it, they'll collaborate and try to find this place. Once they do find it, let's say it's a huge tower, and at the top there's a platform with a hole in the center of it going deep down. If a player summons a portal on it, the weather machine changes the weather in the area, players learn that they can determine what kinds of weather it creates by shooting certain spells or dropping certain substances into a pool of mana inside.
So let's say the players decide to summon a portal to this desert place, it begins to restore to its natural state. Life returns, it becomes green again. it doesn't need to be instantaneous, it can be implemented by the devs with monthly patches. It can be an ugly instant change too, just having models take on different textures, or switching to a different animation. This is entirely possible with current technology.
Some of you might say, "oh but you can't repeat that content?" or "it's too expensive/difficult to develop". For the first one, yes maybe some of the content won't be repeatable, but it can certainly be developed in a way where it's repeatable. I quite liked how Asheron's Call had unique stuff like that where the first people to do it would get a unique reward, and everyone after would get a lesser but ultimately still usable reward. The second is pure bullshit. What exactly are you paying a monthly fee for? Do you really think it takes a month to add a scripted instance with a big boss monster? You can create a lot of new locations, write a lot of new story, and create a fair number of assets in a month. Consider that WoW brings in 165 million a month, most of that money is used for Blizzard to work on other projects, they don't even put most of it back into their own game. It's highly unlikely that it costs more than 20 million dollars a month to run blizzards WoW servers and pay all the developers.
Consider that these ARGs do not have people paying monthly fees for them, and yet they're still able to develop them. All the website domains and clues and everything they plant in the real world must be pretty expensive. It seems this kind of content would be pretty easy to develop if you have lots of money coming in every month. I think the ARG does a better job at bringing large amounts of people together and getting them to work together than the MMORPG, and that MMORPGs should try to be more like them. Consider that in 2001 if you had 3 million people playing an ARG, how many would you have now in 2010 when many more people are using the internet? I think these ARG players would be attracted to such a game, and I think a lot of existing players who are tired of the current state of the MMO industry would be intrigued by it as well.
Thoughts?
Comments
What are some examples of ARGs? I've looked around and don't know which are good or bad. Maybe I'd have a better opinion if I tried one.
However, ARGs are also developed mostly by a third party, as you said, and require a much smaller budget simply off of fewer art assets and much less programming.
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I don't know which are good or bad either, they all tend to focus on people learning a story or solving some mysteries. Here are some wiki pages for some ARGs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_(game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Experience
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees
I Love Bees was a really popular one that was created for the release of Halo 2.
quote: the player uses his brain
And that's why it won't work/sell. It's one thing for someone to do this sort of thing on their own and release it for free, but no company right now is even interested in creating/selling something that isn't lowest common denominator friendly.
Mind you, I LOVE the idea.
Yeah, it's a real shame isn't it? Considering 3 million players got involved in one of these in 2001, I would say the market is pretty large for MMOs with intelligent content.
This is would be amazing! A world were it would actually be cool to find a book with lore info instead of boring and a waste of time as the useless dropped books in wow.
Actually I always thought, before playing a MMO game, that you paid every month so you would actually get extra content on regular basis. Someone told me a about WoW years ago and when I thought it was weird that he paid for it every month, he replied that there were new dungeons and items almost every month. Which I thought was a fair deal. But when you look at it now, the sub you pay is actually nothing more than a license to play the game after buying the box. Sure there is a bit new content now and then, but the profits they make out of the subs are disproportional to the effort they put in the game. Now any company wants to make as much profit possible ofcourse, but it is a bit weird that we as consumers actually accept this.
Its the same thing with upcoming market of DLC content. Some of this content is actually on the retail disc of games, only to be "unlocked" with a code that u get when you pay an extra €10 over the €60 you already paid. Its like magic how the developers manage to do this eventhough a lot of people are aware of it.
I really can’t imagine how 3 million players shall work together on the same plot with everyone contributing something. Maybe the game had 3 mil. registered users, but that is something completely different. I believe that the number of players that really do contribute something would be much closer to 300. There will be a small extremely dedicated group of players that do all the research and will always be ahead of the others. Remember, only one guy amongst 3 million ca be the first to solve it. So the vast majority are just left with watching how they proceed and eventually redo their steps.
The problem is that riddles do only keep interesting as long as someone posts a how-to-do site because people are lazy and the motivation to twist ones mind will decrease rapidly if the solution is only a click away.
The point is that you scatter the clues all over the world so that a tiny group of people couldn't possibly do it without the assistance of the rest of the server population. It's the fact that the player actually has a chance to get involved in something incredible. I'm amazed you have the gall to dismiss it because a small group of players might be the only ones who touch it. The fact that the world has changed at all due to players actions will have an impressive effect on even players who were not involved in it. I speak from experience on this, Asheron's Call there were many world changing events that I had no part in that I still have nostalgia for and remember vividly. Not to mention, the fact that such content would requiring reading and analysis of texts found in the game and solving puzzles and riddles and interpreting metaphors and allusions would require a brain, it would require exploration. This is not the kind of thing that appeals to power gamers who want to be the very best, and it would likely avoid that awful portion of the gaming community.
Going to bump this now and once more some time tomorrow, hate to have a wall of delicious text go to waste.
Once again.
I don't want to play in a "story"!
I want to play in a "free range" world and make my own story.
I would question the cost difference between developing something like The Beast (which seems to only have 4 people credited) and an MMORPG (which often have 150-300 people credited.) Perhaps significantly more than those 4 people were paid, but that still leaves a pretty dramatic difference.
I sat and thought about this a while and decided the primary point of failure is thinking of the game as a big persistent world MMORPG.
There was a PC game maybe 8 years back which called your cell phone and emailed you as clues that led you down a path towards solving a mystery. Sadly I don't remember the name (never ended up buying it.) I think it was basically singleplayer, although I could very much see light multiplayer elements being added without much trouble.
Design focus is what's needed to make this happen. If creating the content requires a 150+ man team, the project would probably fail. It wouldn't surprise me if that old game I remembered was created with a team smaller than 10 people. So making this idea work is about focusing on the core elements (like the mystery) that make the idea compelling, and eliminating everything else. This might include the expensive MMORPG graphics engine, and all the typical game assets you'd expect from a persistent world game -- because those things cost considerable money but aren't really contributing to the core concept.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Last time I'm sending this thread to the front page without any content.
I've worked in the industry 7 years. You really need to do a lot more research before making these ridiculous guesses of department composition and salaries.
Your understanding of product tie-ins giving these games more purpose to exist (and thus justification for costs) also seems shaky.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Exactly. An ARG is an advertisement, and an expensive one at that.
Scottc, what you describe is an elaborate quest about a hole. There is no ARG component to it. ARGs take the player out of the digital medium and into the real world and vice versa.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Instead of telling me I'm wrong, how about you put up some numbers? Also, not all ARGs are advertising campaigns, and even if they are, they provide far more depth than MMORPGs do.
The point of this thread was that ARGs do what MMORPGs are supposed to do far better than MMORPGs. ARGs have huge storylines that require a lot of searching and thinking to get through with many different components to them. MMORPGs have dull quests where you kill big boss monsters by doing a synchronized dance routine. I'm advocating the implementation of quest content that is similar to that of ARG storylines where there are many different parts and a lot of depth to the point where players will have to work together to advance through the quests.
And while I might have written an elaborate story about a hole, it would certainly be much more enjoyable to figure out what had happened to that forest and eventually restore it with the help of thousands of other players as opposed to repeatedly killing big boss monsters over and over again in hopes that you'll get a shiny bigger sword as a reward.
Scott,I'm not trying to shoot you down here, but you're taking a very roundabout way to say "MMOs need quests that engage the entire community." If you just start there, you can see this is not a new conversation at all. What you're describing in your post is a quest that hinges completely on the discovery factor. The hive behavior of the playerbase figures out the puzzles and discovers what's necessary to move the event forward. This works in ARGs because you are doing it once.
Now, are you suggesting that developers create massive discovery quests regularly? If so, then let's fast forward the conversation to the actual issues which are:
Those are some of the known hurdles for what you are looking to do. Now, I am not saying this can't be done, as it has been done with varying results in several MMOs. Some examples are:
The problem is that doing this with any level of regularity, especially in multi-shard MMOs can get unwieldy at best and very likely will not offer returns that justify the efforts and resources put into the events.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?