I have been playing Skyrim for the last couple of weeks. It is undoubtedly the best single player RPG I have ever played. The wonderful thing about the Elder Scrolls series is not just their level of craftsmanship, but the lessons we can learn for the video game industry as a whole.
Skyrim, as other games in the Elder Scrolls series before it, is a theme-park game with sandbox elements. There is a main storyline, but you as the player are free to diverge from it and happily spend your days crafting bits of armor and rearranging the books in your little home if that is what you desire.
The books found in-game are an ongoing feature of the series, and Skyrim is no exception. Some of you may be aware of a study based on information in the books which breaks the fourth wall. If you aren’t then I urge you to read it. The parts to this are here:
In this analysis, the writer explores the idea that the player in the game has an effect on the game-world that goes beyond merely playing through the content. The effect is metaphysical, in such that through the texts found in game it is revealed, for example, that the inhabitants of the world are affected each time the player reboots the game to avoid an unwelcome end. The inhabitants cannot articulate their concerns, but their historians have an inkling that someone or something is “playing” with them. They know that time is being altered and lost in some way.
This is taken a step further when the player meets the character of Vivec in Morrowind. Vivec is an NPC who is aware that he is merely a character in a game, and because of his awareness he is able to free himself from the bonds of his in-game limitations. This he communicates to the player through a series of books to be found in the game, the thirty six lessons of Vivec. Thus he also knows of the player, and their god-like role and effect on the game world. In effect there is no wrong way to play the game. If the player wishes to min/max their abilities, to save and reload when things don’t go their way, to limit themselves to have more of a challenge, to modify the game code itself, all is acceptable. To quote Kateri from her final post in that series:
“… A game is a created reality, and TES invites the player to invest their imagination in that reality, and to interact with it. To shape it as they see fit. They release tools to mod it, so any player can make themselves an all-powerful god. Cheating? Wrong word. It’s part of the game. It is allowing the player to change their world.
And so it makes sense that Bethesda create ingame lore that plays with these ideas of so-called cheating, of power and agency, of warping the world around you. If the devs are the Godhead, then each player is immersed in their own god-dream. But the good player, the ruling king, is a lucid dreamer. If they can master the dream-game, if they can gain enough power, or cheat, or create their own reality in the Construction Set – this player has not just beaten the game, they have *become* part of the Godhead. Of the creative process. CHIM…”
Fascinating stuff. But if a player is a god, if there is no wrong way to play a single player RPG, where does that leave an MMO based on the same criteria? Let us now imagine the Elder Scrolls series as an MMO. While it makes sense for one player to be a God playing within his own lucid dream, it makes no sense at all when multiple Gods appear in the same dream. Now we move from there being no wrong way to play the game to there being no right way. Skyrim only works when there are an infinite number of alternate universes extrapolating on the same idea. Place a second player within the same game, make it multiplayer, and the whole thing comes tumbling down. The game no longer works as intended. Having thousands of Gods or ‘heros’ in the same world only serves to invalidate the reason for them being heros. Even more when you realize that you leaving the game, after all of your world changing hero status, will leave no effect at all. There can be many worthy characters within a game world, but there can only be one God overlooking the entire dynamic, if the God itself is bound in some way by the limits of the game universe, (ie the devs are the Godhead and each player is in their own unique God-dream.)
The starting area of Tortage in Age of Conan is routinely held up as an excellent example of a starting zone in an MMO, but it is merely a good example of a single player RPG which happens to be set in an MMO universe. Apart from multi-player quest lines, there is no need to interact with another player in Tortage, and it could be cynically said that these quest lines were made multi-player to satisfy some sort of semblance of an MMO. Once the player left the starting zone and ventured into the world of Conan, the game fell down, precisely because there was no more content on a scale that was found in the opening 20 levels. Age of Conan is two games in one: a well-designed single player RPG in Tortage, and an ill thought-out MMO for the rest, where the devs unwisely assumed that the players themselves would somehow generate content in a theme-park world. Likewise, the only conceivable reason for the new Star Wars game to be an MMO is that this is the only way for the company designing the game to recoup their development costs and show a profit.
Placing a theme-park RPG in an MMO environment merely defeats the purpose of the game itself. In an MMO you populate the world with players and bring it to life. But if every player is a God or a hero involved in their own ‘unique’ storyline of saving the world from this and that monster then the whole thing loses any sense of validity and you are reduced to mindless quests and repetitive tasks.
December 14, 2011 at 11:20 am
I agree with your analyzis of Skyrim. I think what you mention here is also one big dilemma of MMOs in a nutshell; to have thousands of heroes defies all purpose – but on the other hand many players dislike feeling like a ‘nobody’.
Funny enough I had a similar discussion on Skyrim two days ago, where I explained to another player that this was exactly what I liked about the game – to feel tiny in a vast world and still feel like I have accomplished very little in all this time, knowing I have a ton more quests to go and things to do. he was more of the opinion that things started feeling pointless, since he made so little impact on the world as a whole (he is however not nearly through the main questline either).
December 14, 2011 at 11:05 pm
It’s a valid point, and why I feel that Pathfinders initial limited space offering might be a good idea.
December 14, 2011 at 8:14 pm
Instead of dumping everybody into the same game world, what if players were in alternate universes that connected in controlled ways so that you were still the prime agent in your own setting but, like the NPC villagers, you could see evidence of other players’ activity? The obvious idea here is multiplayer marketplaces but it could extend to monsters, structures, weather, rare spawns, NPC locations, craft materials and more. Add in the idea of nearness and maybe some players affect your world more than others. Have instanced content where players can collaborate to affect their own worlds. Or if you are able to invite people to your world, you get a multiplayer environment with 2 or 10 or 200 people where the god-dreamer decides who’s in and who is expelled.
Something like this might be an interesting way to combine the single-player experience with the unpredictability of an anonymous multiplayer game.
December 14, 2011 at 11:08 pm
It’s very interesting but I’m not sure if it would work due to the innocuous nature of the effect from other players. How would you know if it’s an effect from a player or if it’s just the game world as designed? It might be a very small niche game though.
December 15, 2011 at 12:42 am
I think it’s fine if you don’t always know for sure and maybe they wouldn’t all be innocuous effects. If I complete a particular quest chain in my world, it might (have a chance to?) spawn a pirate blockade of your port in your world until you can break through.
Everything would depend on how it’s implemented of course but I don’t know of a better way to let god-like players play together than this idea of loosely connected parallel worlds.
December 14, 2011 at 9:31 pm
Interesting extension of the ideas! 🙂
December 14, 2011 at 11:08 pm
Many thanks, and I tip my hat to you for your wonderfully written posts.
December 16, 2011 at 2:03 pm
good read. nice seeing you back again.
December 24, 2011 at 4:28 am
A game which is often overlooked in the MMO scene is EVE online. At the upstart you are just another pilot, same as literally everyone else in the universe. Only though extreme dedication can you become a true hero in your field.
In EVE, heroes are made, not born.
January 11, 2012 at 2:06 pm
+1 to Bleadr’s comment. There is no need for everybody in an MMO to start off as a hero, and in fact some of the extravagant praise lavished on players in both Skyrim and WoW is a bit embarrassing, since we know exactly how heroic we’ve (not) been. At least in Skyrim, a single player RPG, we understand why we are the hero. And I was pleased to see that Rift made an attempt to explain why we players, as the Ascended,were different to NPCs.
However in MMOs it is sufficient for heroes to emerge. For that to happen, there must be opportunites to be heroic. PvP allows heroes to emerge. PvE also, to a certain extent. In WoW, killing the Lich King was one such heroic moment. But the trouble is that you feel heroic the first time you kill him; after that, no. Not even when you kill him on “Heroic” difficulty. Similarly, nobody feels heroic on killing Deathwing, since the first time you did it was in an LFR group that just stumbled through the fight.
And its certainly unpleasant to be treated like a hero by NPCs when you haven’t been heroic.
January 11, 2012 at 11:24 pm
It’s also difficult to feel heroic when everyone else has done the same things. Kind of makes it the opposite of heroic.