Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

uilding monotonous and tiresome gameplay tasks. Personally, I don’t want to
spend hundreds of hours achieving the simplest of tasks or climbing a never-ending
ranking ladder with my character. As MMOGs continue to attract more mainstream
players with busy and hurried lives, the demands for visible game progress in shorter
time periods is bound to increase. If you are willing to commit 40–60 hours playing
an MMOG per week, that’s fine, but many players want the MMOG experience
without the 40–60 hour weekly commitment. The MMOG design that caters to this
reality will probably find a large audience.
Player Dropout/Lost Connections
Player dropout due to lost physical connections between a player’s PC and the game
server must be considered. Sudden exits from the game, caused perhaps by the player
suddenly turning off the PC or a local power outage, affect character data and de
pendencies between players within the MMOG world. If you were playing a significant
role in collaborating with other players performing some deed or action and suddenly
drop out, play is obviously going to be affected adversely both for you and your peers.
Your design and technical team will have to tackle the following questions:
� What will your game do if a packet is dropped?
� What will your game do if packets are received out of sequence?
� What will your game do if a player’s computer suddenly loses power?
� What will your game do if one of the game servers goes down during play?
� How will your game verify that players are running the official game client,
and not a hacked client that gives them perfect aim or some other unfair
advantage?
Network protocols for MMOGs frequently use UDP rather than TCP. In short,
your design must account for these potentialities with rapid and exhaustive saves of
character information and careful analysis of in-game player-to-player dependencies.
Notice that most successful MMOGs account for this fact by limiting extreme
player-to-player dependencies. If a player drops out while banding together to kill a
monster horde, it has some negative impact to be sure, but if a player drops out in an
MMOG sports title, it can be devastating to the play experience (for example, the
pitcher in a baseball game drops out mid-inning, mid-pitch).
MMOG Play Mechanics
C H A P T E R 8
When it comes down to building play mechanics for the MMOG, designers have to
constantly weigh an intended play effect with “big” problems like latency. You can’t
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Design Considerations for Massively Multiplayer Multiplayer Online Games