Justin Achilli

I remain an enthusiastic observer of the ongoing Guild Wars 2 development. In particular, I like that they're challenging the MMO trinity of DPS-healer-tank. And of course, whenever I find myself liking something, I get all upset and manage to find some aspect of it that gets me all bent out of shape. Clinically, I'm not sure that's neurosis, but, hey, shake what yer mama gave ya.

Depicted: legitimate trinities.My primary point of contention is one of fundamentals. First off, who's the authority who claimed that DPS-healer-tank is a "trinity"? Who imparted divine status on this mode of content consumption? It's not a holy trinity. It's a default. Many games have proven that you can deliver a steady, spooled, subscribed-to stream of content by rolling with the proven model. Forgive me for getting all fired up oevr semantics, but I don't see anything divine in doing the same thing over and over, especially when it's what most of the medium already does.

And that brings me to my second quibble. Don't start your design with a negative. Don't build your premise on what your game isn't. The Halo franchise wasn't established when a Bungie guy ran into a room and shouted, "I've got it! Let's not build an RTS!"

Of course, all this is a bombastic way of saying that in design, you need to know what you want your player to experience. It's not enough to break an existing model. It's not enough to cast your design in terms of what it's not. The pivotal piece of your game... is what it is.

Over at RPG.net, the term "fantasy heartbreaker" often arises. (Russell and Ben have even adopted it as an eye-winking moniker for their own journal.) The "fantasy heartbreaker" is a title that casts itself in terms of another game -- D&D -- and distinguishes itself only in the differences. "My game is like D&D, only the elves are dinosaurs." "It's like D&D but the combat is way more realistic." "It's like D&D with a much better magic system." The "heartbreaker" comes in terms of the idea being, well, really not good enough to support its own weight, despite the doomed, loving myopia of the designer. "It's like Vampire, but you're a Highlander instead." "It's like Changeling, only it exchanges folkloric themes for gratuitous SCA fan service."

Now, I don't say of any of this to cast the stink-eye on ArenaNet. They're smart, skilled developers and they know what they're doing. I can guarantee you they had this whole conversation and decided what they wanted to do with GW2, even if it started with a critical look at other games in the market and their own initial title and a list of ways in which they wanted to depart from that experience. That's fine, so long as it results in a definitive statement of what their design is and doesn't languish in what their design isn't.

Subtractive design is a productive method of game design. In subtractive design, you pare away what didn't work in a previous design, trim the excess, shear off the experience that's not central. It leaves behind an integral core. It's valid. Negative design, however -- choosing your direction as a derivative of where you know you don't want to go -- well, that's a disastrous and all too often well-traveled path.

The last time we talked about Vampire, we talked about clans. The interesting aspect of clans is that they hit a very important note in Vampire: the idea of the sins of the father being visited upon the child, the very gothic (and Biblical) concept that you may well be damned by a decision you didn't even make. Your sire belonged to organization X, and now so do you.

That's great, and it makes for a nice blog entry, but let's move on to another concept. Let's talk about the social aspect of himself that a vampire can choose. 

Let me put this up front. I thought covenants were one of the great breakthroughs in Requiem. I know people disagree, and some people find the covenants as presented a bit bland. FWIW, YMMV and all that, but what they provided that was somewhat absent from Masquerade was the ability to, well, choose one's social network. The covenants provided a great dynamism that the Camarilla vs. Sabbat conflict in Masquerade lacked.

That last bit is important. Even though social structures in the form of sects existed in Masquerade, often the choice of clan made the decision of sect for you. Sure, you could be a Camarilla Lasombra, but the setting implied that you'd be spending a lot of time explaining or getting your ass kicked. You could, if you wanted, stretch some definitions and some player expectations and portray a Ravnos antitribu who upheld Camarilla doctrine, or you could be a Sabbat Ventrue without buying into the ideas that supposedly shaped the antitribu of that clan. 

But, come on. Who ever did this? In most cases, you picked your clan partially because of the sect connotations that came prepackaged with it. And that’s what I think the covenants fixed. They established another axis on which to make a meaningful choice for gameplay.

Now, I’m certainly not going to leak any untimely secrets, but this sort of meaningful choice is at the center of MMO gameplay. Given that “MM” means “massively multiplayer,” the sorts of present options that put players in contact with one another and build relationships, well, those are central to the multiplayer experience. 

Choosing your affiliations has value to both PvE and P2P avenues of gameplay. From the PvE perspective, I could choose, say, to affiliate myself with a police faction, a church faction, a gang faction, a league of occultists, “the goblins,” some group of space aliens – whatever the context of the game is, I can find a group with which to align myself and thus procure new content. Similarly, for player-to-player to interactions, “covenants” are similar to guilds and other persistent entities. They’re the groups of common interest, playstyle, viewpoint, and activity.

That’s the key, “meaningful choice.” Requiem provides a diversity of choice, while Masquerade arguably makes the gravity of that choice greater, but the setting makes your decision for you. Thoughts?