The perils and pitfalls of 'Player-centric Deisgn'
By smokemare 3 Comments
A bit of an expansion on a theme this.
Recently I've been looking at the rise and fall of Star Wars Galaxies and discussing:-
- Why it didn't work
- What could have been done differently to make it work
This in turn, I believe led to the downfall of the game. Some of the problems marring SWG's development were a lack of cohesion in the community and a lack of transparency with the development team. I often jokingly call SWG 'Star Wars Galaxies : A Community Divided' a play on the original name 'Empire Divided' but actually a very perceptive criticism ont he game of the time. I suppose you can't blame the developers really, if you stick a Star Wars label on anything, then all manner of people are going to buy it.
What I think the original design principle for SWG was, was for it to be a more serious MMORPG, suited more to casual, older players and people who wanted something akin to a roleplaying experience. I mean, the crafting professions, were.... How can I put it? If you wanted to be a serious Crafter in the game you had to give up your combat professions. If you wanted to compete at the top end of combat you had to forego any crafting abilities. Yet, there were a lot of people exclusively crafting and selling their wares? That's not the sort of thing you expect a power gaming, 1337 speaking, 10 year old, spoiled brat setting out to do?
I think of another example, in this case an example of successful player-centric design. The term really comes from user-centric design which tends to be used as a design principle for user interfaces - a design that is centered on the user. In this case it's the player, but the principles still apply. The other game I'd like to quote is Valve's 'Left 4 Dead' and it's sequel. Now here is a game that was seen as innovative, was very popular and won awards. The developers followed a strict regime of player-centric design, forcing some radical changes in the gameplay. Originally you were going to be able to choose multiple routes out of the city, for example, but player-feedback got this changed. Every aspect of the game as fine tune based on player feedback.
So why didn't this work in Star Wars Galaxies : A Community Divided ?
I think the difference is, Valve had a clear idea of who they were making the game for and what the game was supposed to be. The concept was to build on the success of Team Fortress by providing a similar game, which was focused on co-operative play. The next part of the concept ran along the lines of 'killing hordes of zombies is fun!' and that's where the game came from. There was never any ambiguity, it was clear what it was supposed to be and who it was supposed to be for.
Now I think things were a bit more complicated for SWG. The intention was clear at the start, but with a well loved licence attached, and the far-reaching scope of the game being massively multiplayer - meant it was probably harder to stay on the tracks. You are bound to have different people demanding different things. I think sometimes SWG would have benefitted from launching with less than the 30 professions, some of them were seldom played outside of the hologrind and were never really working properly anyway.
So how could this have been solved? They could have stuck rigidly to the original design concept and ignored the cries of the power gaming part of the community, but then would that mean lost subscriptions? Or they could have shrugged their shoulders, said 'Meh!' and made it into a fully fledged power-gaming whore, 'Jedi Wars' don't expect to compete until you've been grinding your professions for seven years 24/7...
As it was, I think part of the problem was trying to please everyone.
Abraham Lincoln said, "You can please some of the people, some of the time."
And to try to do risks ruining everything for everyone.
You see it with cars, when a car manufacturer tries to make a car that pleases two conflicing groups - neither group likes it. An example: The Vauxhall Zafira VXR 2.0 Turbo.
- People who need an MPV don't like it because it drinks petrol and is too firm and uncomfortable to ride in.
- People who like performance cars don't like it because it looks llike an MPV and isn't very fast because it's so damn heavy
It simply doesn't work, you have to decide who the product is aimed at and design it for that demographic, then fine-tune it according to the wishes of THAT demographic. Then build another product for another demographic if there are enough people who want it.
To this end, I think they should have focused on sorting out SWG as it was, never released Holocrons, never got rid of Jedi Perma death or Sabre TEF and made it so that people would only play their Jedi on rare occasions and focused on the actual game. Then fixed the problems and added content. Then if subscribers maxed out - and there seemed to be a demand for a more power gamer friendly version, modify it and setup seperate servers for those people to play on, or build a new game.
So many MMORPG have care-bear, PVP and RP servers... It doesn't take a genius to figure out - different servers for different players is sometimes a good idea....